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NAIROBI, July 18, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Liu Xianfa (C) speaks during the 14th Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 77 and China in Kenyan capital Nairobi July 17, 2016. China said on Sunday it will help developing nations implement the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). (Xinhua/Li Baishun)

NAIROBI, July 17 (Xinhua) -- China said on Sunday it will help developing nations implement the UN's 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Liu Xianfa told a UN forum in Nairobi that SDGs have come at a right time as they will ensure an end to poverty by the year 2030.

"China stands ready to assist all developing nations for the mutual benefit of a new world economic order," Liu said during the 14th Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 77 and China taking place on the sidelines of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Liu noted that the world economy is currently undergoing a restructuring against a background of widening wealth gap between developed and developing countries.

"It is therefore important that we reinforce solidarity among the developing countries by building on the current momentum of economic growth in the developing nations," he said.

The envoy noted that global cooperation is possible despite the different national interests. "Peaceful co-existence calls for mutual cooperation in all spheres of human life," he noted.

The Chinese official urged developed countries to honor their Overseas Development Assistance commitments they have made to developing nations.

The Vice-Chair of the Group of 77 and China, Geneva Chapter John Mwijage said the global economic order should ensure that developing nations also benefit from globalization.

"The global economy remains unbalanced and this makes it difficult for the developing nations to lift its citizens out of poverty," he added.

Mwijage, who is also Tanzania's Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, said developing nations need to work together in order to secure larger policy in the global arena.

UNCTAD Deputy Secretary General Joakim Reiter said UNCTAD was established by developing countries for the developing countries.

"So UNCTAD must play a key role in addressing the challenges that developing nations face," he said.
Palestinian men take cover from a stun grenade thrown by Israeli security forces during clashes at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, as Israeli authorities banned men under 45 from accessing the Al-Aqsa mosque compound for Friday prayers. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

JERUSALEM, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Israeli police said Sunday they thwarted a bomb attack at Jerusalem's light rail by a Palestinian youth.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that the suspect was arrested while he was trying to board the rail in Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem after he raised suspicion of a security guard.

The guard said the suspect, identified as a 20-year-old resident of the West Bank, was standing near a rail stop, holding a bag in his hand. The guard ordered him to open his bag and saw it contains explosives, according to Samri.

Samri said that after police had arrested the youth, they found "several pipe bombs inside his bag."

The area was closed to traffic and pedestrians, and the rail was stopped for more than an hour, creating heavy congestions throughout the city.

A ten-month-long Palestinian uprising has seen the death of at least 216 Palestinians and 34 Israelis.
JUBA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Ugandans are fleeing the South Sudan's Juba in droves because of economic hardship amid fears of renewed fighting as Kampala started evacuating them given recent fighting.

More than 5,000 Ugandans have been relocated toward the Uganda-South Sudan border town of Elegu by the Ugandan army trucks.

Those waiting at Gumbo market in Juba to be transported to Uganda on Tuesday told Xinhua on Sunday that they feared for their security and economic hardship caused by the more than two years of civil conflict in the youngest nation.

Afan Nagodi, a business trader based at Malakia, told Xinhua that a number of Ugandans have been killed in the recent conflict in July that ended after President Salva Kiir and former rebel leader and First Vice President Riek Machar declared ceasefire.

"Some of us have been targeted by some South Sudanese armed groups who have robbed us of our merchandise. It's the reason our government ordered us to come here. So that we return home safely," Nagodi said.

Some of the Ugandans said they have given up on ever returning for business in South Sudan given the unending political turmoil in the oil-rich impoverished country.

South Sudan imports nearly everything from food, construction materials and fuel from East Africa and its economy is foreign owned with barely few South Sudanese engaged in business ownership and trade.

Nagodi added that he has found it hard to remit money home to feed his family because of economic turmoil in the war-torn country after it devalued its South Sudan pound by 84 percent in 2015.

South Sudan's only oil-revenue source has declined owing to halting of oil production from 350,000 barrels a day to less than 160,000 barrels after the outbreak of December 2013 conflict.

"The traders who have been bringing food to us have been killed in ambushes by armed groups since fighting broke out in July. I will return to South Sudan only after my government has advised so," Nagodi assured.

George Muyomba, a herbalist, said he was afraid of staying in Juba with his family, he worried that fresh fighting may break out between former rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army-in opposition (SPLA-IO) and the South Sudan army (SPLA).

"We don't know the security situation in Juba because everybody tells his own views on the situation. Also back home anyone can succeed if he or she works hard due to stable security," he said.

"We need to go back to our country and start life afresh than just remaining here to suffer at the hands of lawless groups," Nagodi added.

Lekuru Zaitun, a mother carrying her baby told Xinhua that the cost of living amid fighting has forced her to return home.

"There is high food prices and insecurity here. I have decided to return with my baby so that he can be able to feed well and live in a secured place," she said.

However, Annet Driwaru, a trader, said she will not be leaving Juba because there is still business potential in South Sudan.

She hoped that the situation will improve with time and enable her to recover her money from various clients she supplied with food.

Meanwhile, its not only foreigners fleeing the country but even South Sudanese have fled in big numbers and they are registered as refugees on arrival at Elegu town located about 125 km from Juba.

Joseph Mathiak, a South Sudanese, said he and his family were fleeing for safety due to fears of renewed outbreak of fighting.

He told Xinhua that his wife and children felt increasingly unsafe to stay in the country and they were heading to the refugee reception on the Ugandan side.

United Nations refugee agency UNHCR noted earlier on Friday that the overall planning figure had risen from 867,239 to 973,000.

UNHCR added that in the first four months of this year, countries like Sudan and Uganda received between 70 and 90 percent of their planned 2016 population.

They lauded these countries for keeping their borders open, noting that the number of countries hosting South Sudanese refugees has expanded to include the Central African Republic (10,454 refugees) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (11,966), in addition to Ethiopia (285,657), Kenya (103,104), Sudan (231,638) and Uganda (224,420).
ANKARA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece with a military helicopter in the failed coup attempt will face trial in Greek court, Anadolu Agency reported Sunday.

The coup supporters will face accusations of "illegal entry" and "damaging the friendly relation between Turkey and Greece," according to Lia Marinaki, a lawyer of the soldiers.

The lawyer said that the soldiers will be sent to the prosecutor and appear in court on Sunday.

The Black Hawk helicopter, the soldiers used in the escape, has been returned to Turkey, the report also said.

Early Saturday, the military helicopter landed at the Alexandroupoli airport near the Greek-Turkish border, and eight Turkish soldiers who asked for political asylum were arrested by Greek police.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey "requested the immediate surrender of the eight traitor soldiers who fled to Greece with a helicopter."

"They will expedite the extradition process," he added.
A Turkish army armed vehicle drives in Istanbul on July 16, 2016. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan battled to regain control over Turkey on July 16, 2016 after a coup that claimed more than 250 lives, bid by discontented soldiers, as signs grew that the most serious challenge to his 13 years of dominant rule was faltering. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

ANKARA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece with a military helicopter in the failed coup attempt will face trial in Greek court, Anadolu Agency reported Sunday.

The coup supporters will face accusations of "illegal entry" and "damaging the friendly relation between Turkey and Greece," according to Lia Marinaki, a lawyer of the soldiers.

The lawyer said that the soldiers will be sent to the prosecutor and appear in court on Sunday.

The Black Hawk helicopter, the soldiers used in the escape, has been returned to Turkey, the report also said.

Early Saturday, the military helicopter landed at the Alexandroupoli airport near the Greek-Turkish border, and eight Turkish soldiers who asked for political asylum were arrested by Greek police.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey "requested the immediate surrender of the eight traitor soldiers who fled to Greece with a helicopter."

"They will expedite the extradition process," he added.
ISTANBUL, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chinese representatives receive congratulations from foreign representatives after China's Hubei Shennongjia was added to the World Heritage List at the 40th session of World Heritage Committee held in Istanbul, Turkey, July 17, 2016. The 40th session of the World Heritage Committee held in Istanbul on Sunday decided to put China's Hubei Shennongjia on the prestigious World Heritage List as a natural site, bringing to 50 the number of listed Chinese properties. (Xinhua/He Canling)

ISTANBUL, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The 40th session of the World Heritage Committee held in Istanbul on Sunday decided to put China's Hubei Shennongjia on the prestigious World Heritage List as a natural site, bringing to 50 the number of listed Chinese sites.

Shennongjia is considered as a treasure of wildlife renowned with high plant diversity, said a report by the advisory body on China.

"Shennongjia has been a place of significant scientific interest particularly for botanists and the mountains have featured prominently in the history of botanical inquiry," part of the report was cited at the meeting.

The meeting was, however, drawn its attention to the potential tourism pressure on the site, as a new airport has been built there.

Li Faping, mayor of the Shennongjia Forestry District, while voicing his pleasure at the site's acceptance into the heritage list by a unanimous consensus, pledged a better conservation just like "caring for our own eyes."

China's Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape was placed on the list on Friday as a cultural site.

The World Heritage Committee, a panel under the UN cultural agency UNESCO, resumed its current session on Sunday following one-day suspension imposed after the outbreak of a coup attempt in Turkey Friday night.

Dominating Sunday's meeting is a review of the nominations of the remaining 18 sites to the World Heritage List, as it examined and decided on Friday to inscribe nine others nominated for this year.

Sunday morning saw four new sites placed on the World Heritage List, which are the architectural work of Le Corbusier in Argentina, Belgium, France, Germany, India, Japan and Switzerland, Antigua Naval Dockyard and related archaeological sites in Antigua and Barbuda, Pampulha Modern Ensemble in Brazil, and Khangchendzonga National Park in India.

The World Heritage Committee is set to end its 40th session on Sunday evening, cutting short its duration by three days.

The panel was formed in 1977 to enforce the World Heritage Convention and manage the heritage list created based on the convention.
HUANGMEI, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- The aerial photo taken on July 17, 2016 shows a breached dyke on Kaotian River in Dingzijie Village of Huangmei County, central China's Hubei Province. A dyke breach occured here around 3:00 a.m. on Sunday. The local government has transfered local villagers to safe areas while blocking the breach. (Xinhua/Xiong Qi)

WUHAN, July 17 (Xinhua) -- More than 8,000 residents were urgently evacuated after a dike breached early Sunday morning in central China's Hubei Province.

The breach has been widened to about 70 meters long as of 7 p.m., after the dike in Huangmei County collapsed around 3 a.m., the local flood control office said.

The rising flood waters have affected 10,000 mu (670 hectares) of arable land in eight villages, forcing 8,400 residents to be relocated.

Over 700 soldiers and 200 sets of equipment from neighboring three cities have been dispatched to close the breach overnight.

Besides, over 2,500 soldiers and residents have been organized to repair the lower flood control dam to ensure the safety of highways and railways.

Another dike in the provincial capital of Wuhan also breached in the afternoon, causing substantial flooding and resulting in the relocation of around 200 residents.

Power and natural gas supplies have been cut off in the area while preparations are being made to fill the breach.
BERLIN, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Arjen Robben will be out of action for six weeks after suffering a groin injury, the German giants confirmed in an official statement on Sunday.

The midfielder sustained the injury during Saturday's 4-3 victory over lower league side SV Lippstadt in a pre-season test match. Robben provided the second goal but limped off the pitch in the 35th minute.

After an extensive medical examination, the 32-year-old midfielder has been diagnosed with a muscle injury in his right adductors. According to the club's statement, the Dutchman will be out of action for at least six months.

However, it is another setback for injury-plagued Robben, who just made his first appearance after sitting four months at the sidelines with groin problems. He made thus, only 22 competitive outings for the German giants.

Bayern Munich face Werder Bremen for the curtain raiser of the Bundesliga season 2016-2016 on August 26.
BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The China COSCO Shipping Corporation, the world's largest maritime carrier, will send more cargo vessels on Arctic voyages through the Northeast Passage.

COSCO's freighter Yongsheng set out Saturday in northern port city of Tianjin for Britain, according to an online news release.

The ship will travel through the Arctic Ocean shipping route for the third time following voyages in 2015 and 2013, when it became China's first commercial vessel to explore the Northeast Passage.

At least two more huge freighters will travel on the route in August in separate voyages, said the company.

An Arctic trip can be shortened by one third of the conventional Malacca-Suez route. The COSCO said the Arctic shipping route will promote China-Europe trade.
ANKARA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in the first week of August, Anadolu Agency reported Sunday.

It will be the first face-to-face meeting between Erdogan and Putin since Turkish warplanes downed a Russian jet last November.

The move came after a telephone call from Putin, according to the report.

The Russian president said he stood by Turkey's elected government and offered his condolences over the victims of Friday night's coup attempt.

Putin stressed there should not be anti-constitutional acts of violence, while wishing for restoring stability in the country.

In the telephone conversation, he also urged Turkey to ensure the safety of Russian tourists in the country.

Erdogan asserted that Turkey would take all the necessary measures, reported Daily News.
BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sunday sent a congratulatory message to the 27th summit of the African Union (AU), which kicked off Sunday in the Rwandan capital of Kigali.

Xi noted that the AU has played an important role in promoting unity, self-improvement as well as integration of Africa.

The Chinese president wished for even more achievements in peace and development by African countries under the leadership of the AU.

Xi stressed that the Johannesburg summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in December 2015 had scored remarkable achievements and ushered in a new era of win-win cooperation and common development between China and Africa. At the summit, Chinese and African leaders discussed cooperation strategy and jointly drew a blueprint for future cooperation, said Xi.

He said that China attaches great importance to its relations with Africa and will push for the implementation of the 10 major cooperation plans announced at the Johannesburg summit, so as to lift the China-Africa comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership to a higher level for the benefits of the Chinese and African peoples.
WINDHOEK, July 17 (Xinhua) -- For the first time in a very long time, 55-year-old Wilhelmina Shilongo from Babylon location in Katutura, suburb of capital Windhoek in Namibia, enjoyed a good night's sleep last week.

Shilongo had received a food hamper, personally delivered by President Hage Geingob, as part of government's Food Bank initiative.

Shilongo is one of the 28,000 Tobias Hainyeko Constituency residents from 4,816 households, who have registered to receive monthly food parcels valued at 550 Namibian dollars (38 U.S. dollars).

She said her parcel, which comprised of mealie meal, sugar, cooking oil, tinned meat and soap, arrived at a very difficult time for her and her family.

It has been over a week since she received the food parcel, and she said that her heart is not heavy anymore, as she is no longer stressed about her food situation.

Life had become unbearable for Shilongo, her husband and two children, as the cost of living has been skyrocketing since the beginning of the year, amid price increases for the most basic of necessities, including maize.

"We would sometimes go to sleep hungry, which is the situation with almost everyone in this neighbourhood," Shilongo said.

The frail mother was sitting outside her corrugated iron shack, where she has a small table set up as a counter for her sweets and chips business.

To make a living, she sells these items to primary school learners, and makes a tiny profit.

Apart from her small business, she occasionally walks about 15km out of Windhoek to gather firewood in Brakwater, which she sells to her neighbours.

While reflecting on her struggle for survival, Shilongo related what it has been like to walk in her shoes for the past two decades.

"Our life has not been easy, as we struggle to get the most basic food items needed to survive," she said of her family's plight, amid the squalor that permeates her neighbourhood.

Her neighbour, who also received a food parcel, lives in a small dwelling with 14 family members.

For Shilongo, the food parcel she received was an answer to her prayers that was long overdue, as she had hit rock bottom.

"The day I got the food, I was busy planning to go to the shops to get a 1kg packet of mealie meal, for that day's pap," she said.

She lives with her unemployed husband and her two daughters, who are still at school.

Shilongo's husband depends on odd jobs for an income, but sometimes goes for a week without finding anything to do, which puts massive pressure on her, as she inevitably has to make a plan to feed the family.

Last year, Namibian president Geingob announced his war against poverty, which included establishing Food Banks across the country. It was later decided that the project would be piloted in the Khomas region.

Government has set aside 50 million Namibian dollars (3.5 million U.S. dollars) for the Food Bank initiative, but also lobbied the private sector to make donations.

Tobias Hainyeko Street Committee Coordinator Simon Muhepo, who is responsible for assessing and vetting needy applicants, said that most of the people in the location are security guards, domestic workers or are employed in the construction sector.

He said people were living in abject poverty.

A household has to have a monthly income of 400 Namibian dollars (27 U.S. dollars) or less to qualify for a food parcel.

The Ministry of Poverty Eradication and Social Welfare has formed a number of street committees to assist them in assessing who is most needy.

The food parcels are put together, taking into account the nutritional value of the contents.

According to Shilongo, the food provided may not be able to sustain her household until the end of the month, but it will at least ease their burden.

Muhepo said that the recipients will have to be trained how to ration the food, so it can actually sustain them until the end of the month.

Food Bank technical advisor and former Cuban Ambassador to Namibia Angel Dalmau Fernandez said that the Namibian government is identifying the poorest of the poor by using street committees, comprised of unemployed Namibians under the age of 35.

The diplomat was roped into the project for his expertise in organizing communities, which is a hallmark of Cuban society.

The street committee members undergo rigorous training.

According to Fernandez, the biggest challenge comes when they have to reject people, who do not qualify.

"If you go there you can see that people live in abject poverty, but not all of them qualify and they will have to understand that.

"It is very clear that when food starts going out, those who did not qualify will ask why, but they should understand that government is going for the poorer of the poor," he said.

Fernandez said they will start distributing food to 1,000 households every day under the pilot project next week, starting with the Tobias Hainyeko Constituency.

From there they will move on to the Samora Machel Constituency, followed by the Moses Garoeb, Katutura East, John Pandeni, Katutura Central and then Khomasdal North constituencies.

All this will happen in the space of five months.

It is estimated that over 20,000 beneficiary households would have been identified in the Khomas region by the end of November.
by Larry Neild

LONDON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Newly-appointed British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has told Gibraltar's chief minister the British government's commitment to Gibraltar, the Foreign Office in London said Sunday.

The former mayor of London met Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Fabian Picardo, in London for talks on Saturday evening, said a FCO statement released Sunday.

Following the meeting, Johnson said: "I was delighted to meet Chief Minister Picardo. I reassured him of both our steadfast commitment to Gibraltar, and our intention to fully involve Gibraltar in discussions on our future relationship with the EU."

"We will continue to take whatever action is necessary to safeguard Gibraltar, its people and its economy including maintaining a well-functioning Gibraltar-Spain border," he said.

In the June 23 referendum on British membership of the EU, Gibraltar became the first to declare an official result. It showed 19,322 voted in Gibraltar to stay and 823 voted to leave the EU, with around 84 percent of Gibraltar residents taking part in the poll.

The final nationwide result, of 52 voting to leave the EU against 48 of Britons wanting to stay, is leading to Britain starting the process of parting company with the EU.

Gibraltar, located on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean, was ceded to Britain as part of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Spain has persistently sought to regain the tiny southern territory.
The suspended Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff takes part in a demonstration in her support which is called "Women with Dilma in Defense for Democracy", in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on July 8, 2016. (Xinhua/Rahel Patrasso)

RIO DE JANEIRO, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's suspended President Dilma Rousseff on Saturday said the drive to impeach her was akin to Friday's failed military coup attempt in Turkey.

Both were attacks on democracy, she said.

"The attempted coup in Turkey is cause for concern. An elected government cannot be toppled by violence or legal tricks," Rousseff posted on Facebook.

Brazil's Senate voted to suspend Rousseff on May 12, pending an impeachment trial in August on charges of allegedly manipulating public-sector accounts.

She denies any wrongdoing, saying her impeachment was politically motivated by the right-wing opposition.

If two thirds of the 81 senators find her guilty, Rousseff will be stripped of the presidency, which is currently being held by her vice president, Michel Temer. Temer would then see through her term until Jan. 1, 2019.

"The impeachment should be repudiated in Brazil. Democracy means protecting the will of the people," said Rousseff.

On Friday, part of Turkey's army launched a failed coup to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leading to at least 161 deaths and the arrest of 2,839 members of the military.

In the wake of the coup, Brazil's interim government issued a communique urging all sides to refrain from violence and calling for "full respect for institutions and constitutional order" in Turkey.
KAMPALA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- UN has evacuated its non-essential staff from the conflict-hit South Sudan following the recent fighting in the capital, Juba, a UN official said here on Sunday.

Rosa Malango, UN Resident Coordinator in Uganda told Xinhua by telephone that the non-essential staffs of UN agencies operating in the troubled country have been evacuated to neighboring Uganda and Kenya for security and safety reasons.

Malango on Friday met and brief UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon who had briefly stopped in Uganda on his way to the Rwandan capital, Kigali for African Union Heads of State summit about the evacuation exercise and unfortunate events in South Sudan.

"We have temporary evacuated the non essential staff from South Sudan because of the fluid situation. We shall continue to closely monitor the situation and events in South Sudan," said Malango.

The UN evacuation, which kicked off on Friday following a recent fighting between government troops of President Salva Kiir and forces loyal to Vice President Riek Machar in Juba, is expected to conclude on Sunday.

"We shall be on standby to receive our colleagues. However, all critical staff for the UN will remain on the ground. These include humanitarian affairs, political affairs and security," said Malango.

Uganda's foreign affairs ministry last Wednesday announced that several government and organizations have evacuated their staff and citizens to the East African country for security and safety issues.

The Chinese government also on Saturday evacuated some of its embassy staff and some citizens trapped in the recent fighting in Juba. Enditem
KAMPALA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Ugandan military on Sunday announced that it has so far evacuated by road over 8,000 citizens trapped in the recent fighting between two rival army factions in the neighboring South Sudan.

Lt. Col. Paddy Ankunda, Uganda's military spokesperson, told Xinhua by telephone that 4,500 citizens, mainly business people were successfully evacuated on Sunday from the troubled country, bringing the number brought by road to over 7,500 people.

He said another 500 pregnant women, young children and the sick were due to be airlifted by helicopter to the East African country. The evacuation exercise started on Friday.

"The ongoing evacuation mission is rated highly successful. But the number is overwhelming. We have more than 10,000 Ugandans in South Sudan," said Ankunda.

Ankunda, who is also Uganda People's Defense Forces spokesperson, said another batch of people will be evacuated to the country on Tuesday still by road.

"We can't decide when to end the exercise. It will depend on the number of people who will be showing up," said Akunda

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni last Tuesday ordered the country's military to immediately evacuate citizens trapped in the fighting between government troops of President Salva Kiir and forces loyal to Vice President Riek Machar in the capital, Juba as measure to ensure their safety and security.

Henry Okello Oryem, the state minister for foreign affairs told Xinhua last Wednesday that 11 Ugandans were killed and over 10 others injured in the deadly clashes between the two rival army groups in Juba.

The country's military Thursday said three of its soldiers on evacuation mission were injured after a group of unknown armed gunmen attacked one of the trucks in the convoy at Pagiri, Magwi County South Sudan's Eastern Equatorial State.

A convoy of around 50 trucks, escorted by machine gun-mounted armoured vehicles on Thursday, crossed the border at Nimule, some 200 kilometers from Juba to help evacuate the citizens caught up in the fighting. Enditem
BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang on Sunday exchanged views by phone with U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew on economic relations between the two countries and economic issues related to the Group of 20 (G20).

This year's G20 summit is scheduled to be held in east China's Hangzhou city in September, the first time for China to host the event.
by Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The eight Turkish military officers who landed a Turkish military helicopter in Alexandroupolis in northern Greece on Saturday, requesting political asylum in Greece, fear for their safety, one of their Greek lawyers told Xinhua on Sunday.

The eight men were brought before a prosecutor on Sunday and will appear in a local court on Monday on charges of illegally entering Greece.

"They are terrified. They fear for their safety. They are afraid they will be maltreated if returned to Turkey. They are determined to exhaust all possibilities to avoid extradition," Lia Marinaki, a local lawyer who represents four of the eight officers told Xinhua during a telephone interview.

The Turkish officers reached Alexandroupolis in the wake of Friday's failed military coup, issuing a distress call and requesting a permission for emergency landing.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglou has requested their extradition during phone contacts with his Greek counterpart Nikos Kotzias on Saturday, calling them publicly "traitors."

Marinaki told Xinhua on Sunday that her clients, who are detained at the local police precinct, as well as the rest of the defendants, are denying any involvement in the coup attempt.

"They had no idea about it for several hours. They were executing orders of their superiors. They were told to transfer injured people. They realized something was wrong when they came under fire by police officers," she said.

They hid for hours near the borders with Greece and after receiving messages in their mobiles from relatives about the coup and the attacks on military officers by crowds, they decided to flee to Greece, they told Marinaki.

Alexandroupolis is located at about 40 km west of the borders with Turkey.

Law experts estimate that the procedure in Greece will last at least two weeks.

Marinaki told Xinhua that in case Greece rejects the asylum requests, her clients will submit a claim to other countries.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during his phone contact with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday night stressed that Greece will fully respect all provisions of the international law and conventions on the protection of human rights.

In their statements since Saturday, Greek cabinet ministers have also noted that Greece will take into serious consideration the fact that the eight men are facing serious charges of attempting to undermine democracy in their country. Enditem
CAIRO, July 18, 2016 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan's Ambassador in Cairo Anthony Kon speaks to media during a press conference at the Journalist Syndicate in Cairo, Egypt on July 17, 2016. South Sudan's Ambassador in Cairo Anthony Kon urged on Sunday Egypt and the Arab League to reject any foreign military intervention in the ongoing internal fighting in his country. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa)

CAIRO, July 17 (Xinhua) -- South Sudan's Ambassador in Cairo Anthony Kon urged on Sunday Egypt and the Arab League to reject any foreign military intervention in the ongoing internal fighting in his country.

"I remind Egypt of our mutual struggle against the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan... We ask Egypt to reject any military intervention in my country," Ambassador Kon told reporters in Cairo.

Recent armed clashes between government troops of President Salva Kiir and forces loyal to Vice President Riek Machar in Juba have left dozens dead.

Kiir and Machar signed a peace deal in August last year that paved way for the formation of the transitional unity government to end more than two years of civil conflict.

The unity government was formed in April to run the country until elections are held within 36 months.

He voiced out his government's full rejection of Machar's call to send foreign and United Nations troops to contain the fighting in the war-stricken African country which won independence on July 9, 2011 from Sudan after more than two decades of war.

"Any foreign intervention might affect the Arab and Egyptian national security," he warned, adding that "we want the Arab League to officially reject all calls to send foreign troops into South Sudan."
BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese crude soybean oil smuggler was repatriated from Peru on Sunday 18 years after he fled abroad, according to the General Administration of Customs.

The man, surnamed Huang, evaded taxes of over 700 million yuan (104.79 million U.S. dollars) from 1996 to 1998 through selling 107,000 tonnes of smuggled crude soybean oil.

Huang and his two associates fled to the United States in 1998.

In 2001, at the request of Chinese authorities, the Interpol issued a global arrest warrant for Huang. In 2008, Huang was caught by the Interpol in Peru and China started negotiation on repatriating Huang with Peruvian authorities.

Huang was the first criminal suspect that China successfully extradited from Latin American countries.
JERUSALEM, July 18, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Members of Israeli security forces examine debris of Patriot air defense missiles in Ayelet Hashahar, northern Israel, on July 17, 2016. Israel launched two missiles in a failed attempt to down a Syrian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) over the Israeli-held Golan Heights on Sunday, the Israeli army said. (Xinhua/Ayal Margolin/JINI)

JERUSALEM, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Israel launched two missiles in a failed attempt to down a Syrian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) over the Israeli-held Golan Heights on Sunday, the Israeli army said.

"Two Patriot air defense missiles were fired toward a drone which infiltrated Israeli airspace from Syria," the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson said in a statement Sunday.

The Israeli military said the missiles were fired after "a drone infiltrated Israeli airspace in the central Golan Heights." It added that the drone was not downed and had returned to Syria.

Two weeks ago, the Israeli army attacked two Syrian army posts after errant fire from the war-torn country hit the Israeli-Syrian border fence.

Israel occupied the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Mideast War and annexed them afterwards.

Israel has made it its policy not to interfere with the ongoing Syrian civil war, except for supplying medical assistance for wounded Syrians that reached the border.

Some cross-border fire incidents took place in recent years, mostly errant fire that trickled into Israeli territory. The Israeli military had responded on occasion with shelling and airstrikes following such incidents.

Israel had also carried out several air strikes in Syria in recent years, in an effort to thwart weapons transfer from Iran and Syria to the Lebanese Hezbollah militant organization.

The country remained quiet on these attacks up until two months ago, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted that Israel carried out "dozens" of attacks across the border.

Israeli leaders have repeatedly stated in recent years the military would "know how to act" in case Israel's security interests are compromised.
Law enforcement vehicles block access to Airline Highway near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S., July 17, 2016. (Reuters/Jonathan Bachman)

HOUSTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Three police officers were killed, and several others injured on Sunday in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the U.S. state of Louisiana.

One suspect was shot dead and two other suspects might still be on the run, according to the local police.

The injured police officers, who are with the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, have been rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center for treatment, said Kip Holden, mayor of Baton Rouge. He did not say how many officers were wounded and their conditions, according to the local English daily The Times-Picayune.

Holden said that he was still gathering details on the total number of officers who were injured by the shooting that broke out around 9:00 a.m. local time in the city, and was unable to provide any information on the gunman or gunmen. But there are reports that one suspect was killed and possibly two more others were being sought by the police.

Holden described the shooting as "a nightmare" all over again in the city as two police officers shot and killed a 37-year-old black man, triggering a wave of protests across the nation.

Louisiana Governer John Bel Edwards also condemned the shooting, saying in a statement that shooting was "an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing."

He promised to take measures to bring the shooters to justice.

This is the second serious shooting incident that killed police officers in the country in less than two weeks after a gunman killed five police officers and hurt seven others in Dallas, a city in the northern part of the U.S. state of Texas.
KIGALI, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC) Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma addresses the opening ceremony of the 27th ordinary session of the AU Heads of States in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on July 17, 2016. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)



By Peter Mutai and Zhu Shaobin

KIGALI, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Africa is faced with various emergencies that require new approaches in solving, Head of the African Union (AU) has said.

Idriss Deby, who is also Chad's president, observed on Sunday that security is a fundamental factor that requires special attention to enable the continent achieve its development agenda.

"The problems we face can no longer be solved with the old methods. We need to confront them with new approaches," Deby said during the opening of the 27th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union Kigali, Rwanda.

Deby observed that the rate of emergencies in the continent calls for a fully equipped organ within the union to adapt with the trend, adding that the latest violence in South Sudan, during which more than 300 people were killed and thousands displaced, reminded the continent of the need for constant adaptation to the AU.

"The African Heads of States are concerned about the ongoing conflicts in South Sudan and other countries including Somalia, Burundi and the Lake Chad Basin," he stressed.

He called on South Sudan President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar to obey the Addis Ababa, Ethiopian peace accord that they signed last year.

Deby said that cases of internal conflicts and the international terrorism now calls for an African standby force for rapid deployment.

Deby proposed the formation of a special fund to help deal with the upsurge of terrorism in the continent.

"It has come to a time that we must mobilize our own resources in order to deal with cases of terrorism, extremism and violence in the continent," he added.

He however said that the historical approval of a local funding mechanism by the members is expected to contribute immensely in restoring peace and security in the continent.

Deby noted that the union's ambitious programs are unlikely to succeed if there is lack of peace and security.

"Let all the member states pay up their due contributions to help us reduce dependency on foreign funding," he added.

The Chairperson of the AU Commission, the secretariat of the AU, Dr. Nkosazana Ndlamini-Zuma told the meeting that populations in Africa are busy working hard and looking forward for sustained peace in nation building.

She called on heads of state to ensure that freedom of the press and speech is maintained in the continent to help foster development.
The Turkish air force headquarters is seen in Ankara, Turkey, July 17, 2016. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday that at least 161 people, including 20 coup plotters, were killed and 1,440 others wounded in the coup attempt that swept mostly Istanbul and Ankara, the national capital. According to the Interior Ministry, at least 1,563 army personnel were detained across Turkey. (Xinhua/Zou Le)

by Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The eight Turkish military officers who landed a Turkish military helicopter in Alexandroupolis in northern Greece on Saturday, requesting political asylum in Greece, fear for their safety, one of their Greek lawyers told Xinhua on Sunday.

The eight men were brought before a prosecutor on Sunday and will appear in a local court on Monday on charges of illegally entering Greece.

"They are terrified. They fear for their safety. They are afraid they will be maltreated if returned to Turkey. They are determined to exhaust all possibilities to avoid extradition," Lia Marinaki, a local lawyer who represents four of the eight officers told Xinhua during a telephone interview.

The Turkish officers reached Alexandroupolis in the wake of Friday's failed military coup, issuing a distress call and requesting a permission for emergency landing.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglou has requested their extradition during phone contacts with his Greek counterpart Nikos Kotzias on Saturday, calling them publicly "traitors."

Marinaki told Xinhua on Sunday that her clients, who are detained at the local police precinct, as well as the rest of the defendants, are denying any involvement in the coup attempt.

"They had no idea about it for several hours. They were executing orders of their superiors. They were told to transfer injured people. They realized something was wrong when they came under fire by police officers," she said.

They hid for hours near the borders with Greece and after receiving messages in their mobiles from relatives about the coup and the attacks on military officers by crowds, they decided to flee to Greece, they told Marinaki.

Alexandroupolis is located at about 40 km west of the borders with Turkey.

Law experts estimate that the procedure in Greece will last at least two weeks.

Marinaki told Xinhua that in case Greece rejects the asylum requests, her clients will submit a claim to other countries.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during his phone contact with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday night stressed that Greece will fully respect all provisions of the international law and conventions on the protection of human rights.

In their statements since Saturday, Greek cabinet ministers have also noted that Greece will take into serious consideration the fact that the eight men are facing serious charges of attempting to undermine democracy in their country.
The building of Turkish general staff is seen in Ankara, Turkey, July 17, 2016. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday that at least 161 people, including 20 coup plotters, were killed and 1,440 others wounded in the coup attempt that swept mostly Istanbul and Ankara, the national capital. According to the Interior Ministry, at least 1,563 army personnel were detained across Turkey. The commanders of air staff, naval staff and the second chief of general staff were saved from the Akinci Base on Saturday. (Xinhua/Zou Le)

by Maria Spiliopoulou

ATHENS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The eight Turkish military officers who landed a Turkish military helicopter in Alexandroupolis in northern Greece on Saturday, requesting political asylum in Greece, fear for their safety, one of their Greek lawyers told Xinhua on Sunday.

The eight men were brought before a prosecutor on Sunday and will appear in a local court on Monday on charges of illegally entering Greece.

"They are terrified. They fear for their safety. They are afraid they will be maltreated if returned to Turkey. They are determined to exhaust all possibilities to avoid extradition," Lia Marinaki, a local lawyer who represents four of the eight officers told Xinhua during a telephone interview.

The Turkish officers reached Alexandroupolis in the wake of Friday's failed military coup, issuing a distress call and requesting a permission for emergency landing.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglou has requested their extradition during phone contacts with his Greek counterpart Nikos Kotzias on Saturday, calling them publicly "traitors."

Marinaki told Xinhua on Sunday that her clients, who are detained at the local police precinct, as well as the rest of the defendants, are denying any involvement in the coup attempt.

"They had no idea about it for several hours. They were executing orders of their superiors. They were told to transfer injured people. They realized something was wrong when they came under fire by police officers," she said.

They hid for hours near the borders with Greece and after receiving messages in their mobiles from relatives about the coup and the attacks on military officers by crowds, they decided to flee to Greece, they told Marinaki.

Alexandroupolis is located at about 40 km west of the borders with Turkey.

Law experts estimate that the procedure in Greece will last at least two weeks.

Marinaki told Xinhua that in case Greece rejects the asylum requests, her clients will submit a claim to other countries.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during his phone contact with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday night stressed that Greece will fully respect all provisions of the international law and conventions on the protection of human rights.

In their statements since Saturday, Greek cabinet ministers have also noted that Greece will take into serious consideration the fact that the eight men are facing serious charges of attempting to undermine democracy in their country.
by Sylvia B. Zarate and Cesar Marino

BOGOTA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Supporters of Colombia's peace process and resulting accords with leftist guerrillas launched a campaign over the weekend to promote a "Yes" to peace vote in an upcoming referendum.

After more than three years of negotiations between the government and leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), both sides agreed on a plebiscite vote to give the public a say on the agreements.

The exact date or mechanism for the poll has yet to be announced, but with the exception of Colombia's more conservative camps, average Colombians are expected to welcome a deal to end the fighting.

Colombians have generally backed the peace process and celebrated a recent bilateral ceasefire as the most important step yet to end Latin America's longest-running civil war.

Political parties, environmental movements, unions and associations of artists and intellectuals held daylong events on Saturday in the capital Bogota and cities such as Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla and Popayan, to promote the agreements.

In downtown Bogota, supporters played music and exhibited works of art in favor of a peace deal.

Alirio Uribe, a lawmaker with the left-leaning Democratic Pole party, believes the plebiscite will give Colombians a chance to express their weariness with the conflict.

"In Colombia we are putting an end to a conflict that has lasted more than 50 years and that's why we are making this effort," Uribe told Xinhua about the campaign.

"We are going to provide the social and political support so that peace will be the new path in Colombia, so no one else will again take up arms to do politics, neither the left, nor the center, nor the right," said Uribe.

"We want a normal country, a country where there is no FARC, no ELN (National Liberation Army), where there are no paramilitaries or criminal gangs, and where the army and police respect human rights," said the lawmaker.

Colombia's Patriotic March movement launched its "Yes" campaign on Friday, with the movement's leader, peace activist Piedad Cordoba, describing it as a nationwide celebration to show the "No" camp that they are in the minority.

Victor Manuel Batidez, leader of the Patriotic Unity Party, said he was confident most Colombians will back the peace process.

"We are convinced that this society will declare itself in favor of what is a right and a duty, a human being with self respect wants peace, everything else is barbaric," said Batidez.

"Voting 'No' means declaring yourself in favor of war. For someone who isn't going to go to war (and) who doesn't send his children to war, it's an absurd stance," Batidez said.

Colombia's government and the FARC announced a bilateral ceasefire on June 23 after reaching agreements on several key issues, including agrarian reform, allowing rebels to form a political party or movement after the FARC has disarmed, and reparations for victims of the fighting, among others.

The two sides are expected to sign a definitive peace deal by July 31, paving the way for a plebiscite on the agreements reached.

Colombia's conservative opposition Democratic Center party -- founded by former hardline president Alvaro Uribe -- heads the campaign to reject the peace process, claiming the agreements benefit the rebels, not society at large. Enditem
Distress after rains, floods

However, he assured plans were in place to address their circumstances in the shortest possible time.

Although the flood waters have subsided, there are some issues but we are trying our best, Cuffie told Sunday Newsday.

Persistent, heavy rainfall on Friday triggered extensive flooding in several parts of the constituency, including La Horquetta, Las Lomas, St Helena and other areas.

The flood waters, spawned by overflowing, drains, ravines, rivers and other watercourses, caused many persons to be marooned in their homes while others had to be speedily evacuated.

Cuffie, who yesterday toured the affected areas, said he learnt that during the heavy rains, water lines were disconnected at several homes in Chin Chin and Las Lomas.

Some of the connections were restored but water supplies in some homes have not been returned to normal, he said.

Cuffie said the occupants of a house in Mamoral also were fearful that land slippage would cause the structure to collapse.

The regional corporation (Couva/Tabaquite/Talparo) is addressing this matter and they are expected to visit today (yesterday) with officials from its Disaster Management Unit, he said.

Cuffie said electricity supplies in several homes also had been cut in parts of Brazil and Talparo.

In the aftermath of Thursdayss bad weather, two aldermen from the Couva/Tabaquite/Talparo Regional Corporation, Beeran Rambaran and Sunil Ramjitsingh, have alleged corruption and mismanagement contributed to the flooding.

In a statement, the men claimed the flooding which occurred in Cunupia, Chin Chin, Welcome, Las Lomas and other areas could have been averted since April last year, if the watercourse cleaning programmes approved by the corporations council were implemented.

The men had called on the Ministry of Rural and Local Development to investigate the situation.

Yesterday, Cuffie said he was contemplating whether the mens statements had merit given the extent of the deluge.

Those statements have to be taken into consideration, he said.

Meanwhile, the Trinidad and Tobago Meteorological Service yesterday maintained its riverine flood alert for Trinidad in the face of the heavy rainfall associated with the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

In a bulletin, meteorologist Nancoo Dickson said the ITCZ was being stimulated by an active tropical wave as opposed to street flash flooding. Dickson said riverine flooding was more prolonged and widespread.

Nancoo said improved weather conditions were expected yesterday while flood waters and water levels in the Caroni River also were expected to slowly recede.

The meteorologist said while forecasts and data from the numerical weather prediction models indicate that minimal rainfall activity was expected to occur yesterday, the possibility of landslides/ landslips still existed in areas prone to soil and land saturation.

Nancoo said persons living along the Caroni River Basin and other flood-prone communities, should be vigilant to the possibility of rising flood waters and must take all necessary measures to preserve life and property..
Rienzi serves eviction notice on UNC

UNC chairman Dr David Lee yesterday disclosed the party is currently looking for a new base, confirming the landlord for Rienzi Complex, the UNCs headquarters for the past 27 years, has served the party with an eviction notice.

The party was asked by the All Trinidad General Workers Trade Union to quit the Couva premises after agreement could not be reached on a new lease stemming from an increase in the rent from $12,000 to $25,000.

I can confirm that the party has been asked to vacate Rienzi Complex, Lee said in a release last evening.

The union served notice on the UNC that the rental fee for Rienzi Complex was being increased to 25,000.

To date the UNC has paid all rentals for the use of the premises including the increased rental. Lee said the union wanted a month to month agreement while the UNC sought a long-term lease to continue to occupy Rienzi Complex but negotiations proved to be unsuccessful.

The United National Congress has undertaken to look for a new home, Lee said, denying reports the Opposition party had been banned from holding meetings and events at Rienzi.

ATGWU president Narvan Maharaj, with whom Lee had previously held talks, confirmed an eviction notice was dispatched to the UNC giving the party until July 31 to quit the Couva complex.

Maharaj said he had written the UNC and outlined certain terms and conditions but could not disclose any more information about the matter.

A party source said yesterday the rent fee had been a burning issue since 2011. The source lamented the dynamics of the party has since changed with the loss of 10,000 members. Up until the year 2012, the rent was $12,000.

Rienzi Complex has traditionally housed the Opposition party as well as the union, which shared its ground floor and used the second storey to hold meetings and events. The party held its political meetings and other events such as the screening of candidates for its general elections there. Last Friday, the party held its screening for candidates of the Local Government Election at the Siparia Market auditorium in the Siparia constituency of former prime minister, now Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar.

In his release, Lee said the UNCs screening process is being conducted by regions, saying this was first done for last years general elections with the screening of candidates of the South region taking place at Parasio Complex.

I give the membership of the UNC as well as the national public the reassurance that this will in no way hamper nor deter our commitment to effectively representing and protecting the welfare and interests of all citizens of Trinidad and Tobago, Lee said.

The matter was brought into the national spotlight by former UNC chairman and MP Jack Warner who took to social media to offer sympathy to the party.

Warner stated Rienzi Complex provided the base for the birthing of the party under former prime minister Basdeo Panday in 1989. He claimed the UNC was unable to pay the new rent and had been prohibited from holding functions, meetings and other exercises at the headquarters.

How the mighty is falling, and how swiftly so! What a contrast to the magnificent days of the past! I wish them well in their return to glory, Warner remarked.
COP to iron out kinks

We need to fix our constitution which has slapped us in the face and required a Court Order to focus us on the deficiencies, Mahabir, 68, said last Friday.

I intend to find consensus and call a special national assembly as soon as possible to iron out the identified weaknesses. Mahabir was alluding, in part, to the ambiguities in the partys constitution highlighted in the wake of the executives decision to hold the election for political leader on April 24 after Prakash Ramadhar, the only COP member to retain his seat, St Augustine, after last Septembers general election, decided to step down.

Mahabir also said the early stages of his tenure as leader will be dedicated towards smoothening the rifts caused by such developments and to healing the wounds that have been obvious over the last few years. He said the COP, which was launched in 2006, must unite.

Many former ardent supporters left us, and I think that they are just parked aside waiting for the right time to return, Mahabir said.

I am inviting them all to rededicate themselves to moving us forward again. We will be approaching as many as we can but I invite them now to contact us. Mahabir, who last served as COP deputy leader, said the partys die-hard supporters also must be given an explanation as to why the ball was dropped. There will be a series of meetings where the leadership will meet and hear from our supporters to discuss ideas for a way forward. Committees have already been appointed to set up these activities and work has already begun, he told Sunday Newsday.

On whether the COP will contest the upcoming local government election, Mahabir was non-committal.

Whether we will participate or not will be determined by our supporters who will advise us. In anticipation of participation we are setting our house in order, he said.

Mahabir claimed the COPs current membership was an estimated 40,000 persons.

We are going on a drive to increase this number so we will be in a better place for the next general election, he said.

Elected unopposed as political leader, last Saturday, at a special national assembly of the COP, held at the partys Charlieville office, Mahabir replaced Ramadhar, who resigned as leader in April.

He will serve in the post until June 2017, at which time the position of political leader will again be up for consideration for a new term of office, from 2017 to 2020.

Under Ramadhars leadership, the COP had been accused of pandering to the United National Congress (UNC), the major entity in the former Peoples Partnership government.

Within the past five years, Ramadhar also had been accused of triggering an exodus of party members and supporters.

Mahabir defended Ramadhars often non-obstructionist stance, saying: My predecessor accepted a poisoned chalice when he accepted leadership of COP.

By that time we were on a downward trend and we had fallen into the disease of being in Government and neglecting our ground troops. He went on: Continued organising and buttressing the party organs were inadequate and we found that our supporters were floundering not being guided accordingly and not preparing for the inevitable next general election. Mahabir also claimed the barrage of criticisms against Ramadhars leadership was fuelled by a vocal minority with an obvious goal of destabilising the party. At the Fyzabad Accord, the COP signed to an agreement to form a Partnership and when we went into government we held on to our promise, he said.

To do otherwise would have caused the government to collapse leading to a period of darkness for Trinidad and Tobago.

We held together and within the walls of Cabinet we managed to influence many decisions. A San Fernando- based ophthalmologist in private practice, Mahabir was born in Debe and attended Naparima College before moving on to the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.

On his return to TT, he worked at San Fernando General Hospital from 1973 to 1977, before accepting a government scholarship to study ophthalmology in the United Kingdom.

He is the recipient of the Fellowship of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and a member of the American Academy of Ophthalmologists.

Despite talk in some quarters that the COP has fallen terribly short of its memberships expectations, the father of three, who lives in La Romaine, insisted the party was still relevant.

He said the Peoples National Movement (PNM) has not yet allowed the citizens to hear about their plans in the areas of the economy, health, foreign policy, education, infrastructure, local government reform and the countrys relationship with its Caricom partners.

The present ministers are not only silent but invisible and it seems that the few friends of the Prime Minister in the Cabinet are the ones to speak.

They control several portfolios each.

They do not address the concerns of the people thinking that silence will cause the problems to disappear, he said.

Mahabir said the electorate has rejected the UNC to the extent where it has not yet been reorganised and appears weak in Parliament. So, yes, the Congress of the People is relevant at this time.

As a matter of fact our presence in the political landscape is absolutely necessary to preserve democracy in Trinidad and Tobago, he said.

However, Mahabir said the COP, under his leadership, must be focussed in moving forward, now that we are not distracted by being in Government. There has been significant difficulties that have made it hard to move the party forward and the first one is considerable infighting, he said.

COP has many members who are very ardent in their support and strong in their views. They are highly intelligent and outspoken and as such feel that their opinion is the only way forward. Arguments at General Council and Executive meetings were due to impatience in most cases to move our agenda forward. Mahabir insisted the COP has never moved away from its founding principles but said the party will adapt our constitution and our politics in keeping with an evolving society.
Police: Help us find Tia, Ahkeiffah

And as the search for them intensifies, police are seeking the public helps in finding the missing girls.

In a press release yesterday, the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS), police officers appealed to the public for any information about the where the girls may be.

The girls left their homes at Toradale, St Clements San Fernando and Dhaloo Road, Gasparillo to go to a brain cooler fete at Gulf City Mall, La Romaine, last Saturday.

When the did not return, their families reported them missing to the police, triggering a probe which also involves the efforts of the Anti-Kidnapping Unit.

Bartlett was reported missing to the Gasparillo Police Station, last Monday, by her mother Cherlyn Bartlett, while Toussaints mother Michelle Brewster filed a report at the San Fernando Central Investigations Department. The missing persons report were also made at the Mon Repos Police Station.

Toussaint, who celebrated her 15th birthday last Wednesday, is expected to enter Form Three at Pleasantville Secondary School in September. Police officers also have in their possession a clip of a voice note attributed to Toussaint which was released via social media. The speaker, believed to be Toussaint, said she knows people are looking for her but insisted she is safe. The person said Toussaint could not deal with her mother and she wanted to take a break from her. Toussaints aunt Usha Ramoutar, 37, speaking to Sunday Newsday yesterday, on the familys behalf, said news of missing teen girls always leave persons anxious and fearing the worst.

Ramoutar said her niece had left home on several occasions but never stayed away this long.

She said the family continues to pray for the best and are leaving the matter in the hands of the police.

We have searched everywhere and been in contact with her friends and still nothing, but we will continue to pray and hope for the best. We just want her back home, appealed Ramoutar.

Police went to the home of a teenage boy who also attended the fete but he denied knowing where the girls are.

Anyone with information is asked to call at 555, 999, 911 or any police station. Investigations are continuing.
South lawyers give free legal advice

ASL president Imran Khan told reporters citizens may be unaware of the procedure involved in legal matters and were unsure of how to approach the legal system.

There are many citizens out there who at times would not be able to afford legal advice, and apart from the affordability issues, they may not know which way to turn, what would be their first step, how they should go about analysing or dealing with an issue, and so we thought this was one step in the right direction, Khan said, adding some of the issues addressed at the clinic were property, accident, criminal matters and traffic offences.

We as the assembly felt it was a way we could have given back to the citizenry, he added.

Cocoyea resident Maria Cooper commended the clinic saying although she had an attorney, the advice given yesterday enabled her to view her issue with a better perspective. I had to deal with a little land property issue. Got a lot of good advice on how to deal with it, Cooper said adding, I have a lawyer but things werent really working out with him, so when I heard about the legal aid clinic I decided to come down and get some better information. San Fernando Mayor Haji Kazim Hosein said the days activity was part of a volunteerism initiative by the SFCC to assist citizens of the southern city.

We are having a free legal aid clinic, as part of our voluntarism network, the Southern Assembly of lawyers headed by president, Imran Khan, came about a month ago to have discussions, consultations, on how he should have an input in the city concerning this legal aid and we didnt have the space available at the city corporation but we got the Convent, they volunteered this auditorium at no cost to us and also the president and his team of lawyers, he said. Hosein said the volunteer campaign was working in the citys interest and cited the Marabella roundabout which was being beautified by volunteers from Fens Mohamed group of companies.
Camille slams Kamla for backing Sat

The Womens League of the Peoples National Movement strongly condemns the most vitriolic and unsubstantiated attack on the late former Prime Minister Patrick Manning by Sat Maharaj of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha. What is even more disturbing in our view, is the support he has found in none other than a former Prime Minister and now Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar, thus evoking the timeless wisdom that declares the upholder to be worse than the thief, Robinson-Regis said in a statement yesterday.

Maharaj in a talk show programme on Radio Jaagriti cited the closure of Caroni (1975), the fact that a PNM supporter got a radio licence in a day while the Maha Sabha had to go through the courts and up to the Privy Council to get lawfully a radio licence, the attempt to have Sat Sharma removed as Chief Justice for misbehaviour in public office and having a limited state of emergency around the home of then House Speaker Occah Seapaul as evidence of Mannings racism.

Robinson-Regis, also Planning and Development Minister, said in the statement yesterday Sats wholly despicable and entirely unwarranted rant against Patrick Manning is not exactly surprising.

The Womens League understands the narrow parochialism in which Sat operates and his desperate need to cling to those he claims to represent, in the face of the rising tide of new and more vocal Hindu-based groupings which openly challenge his archaic views. We are convinced, as many other right thinking citizens are, that Sat does not speak for the entire Hindu population, she added.

Robinson-Regis, however, described as abhorrent the naked attempt by Kamla Persad-Bissessar to clothe her leaders comments with some degree of acceptability, trading on the notion that they were based in fact.

Facts are stubborn things which just wont go away, and despite their blatant attempts to rewrite the history of Trinidad and Tobago, the facts about Caroni (1975) Limited, Feroza Ramjohn, the granting of the licence to Radio i95.5 and the other matters raised by Sat Maharaj will remain as they are, for all to see.

Last week, Persad-Bissessar, speaking during the launch of United National Congress screening in Siparia, described Maharaj as a courageous fighter and a warrior and said he was entitled to freedom of speech as any citizen.

And in response to Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowleys defence of Manning she said the question he should be asking is whether Maharaj spoke the truth.

Robinson-Regis stressed that Persad-Bisse as a former prime minister and now Opposition Leader, cannot be held to the same standard as her leader Sat Maharaj.

Hers must be entirely different.

For one who was once responsible for leading this country, her role cannot be to pander to the likes of her leader and continue to divide this country along the lines of ethnicity and religion. For her to continue to draw strength from the race card is to demonstrate for all to see, how unsuited she was then and now, to be vested with any semblance of political power in this country, the group stated.

It has left us to wonder whether those were the thoughts she harboured, but was too weak to utter, when she led her partys tribute to Mr Manning in the Parliament. It leads us to question too, whether these were her thoughts when she sat in the Holy Trinity Cathedral for his funeral, the group questioned.
I eat wild meat

In 2013, then Environment Minister, Ganga Singh, had announced a two-year ban on hunting and cited data which h seemed to suggest that more than 140,000 wild animals had been hunted and killed in Trinidad and Tobago over a three-year period.

Addressing a public consultation on wildlife hunting at the Tableland Secondary School, Naparima Mayaro Road, Tableland yesterday, Rambharat said he had not supported the hunting ban due to economic reasons and had no intention of advocating a moratorium on hunting. I am not against hunting, but as I have said today, we have to strike the right balance between hunting and conservation, Rambharat said.

And asked whether he was a hunter, Rambharat said: No, no, no, never hunted. However speaking to reporters after the consultation he admitted to eating wild meat as it was part of the culture of Rio Claro and pointed out hunting was of significant economic value to rural communities.

Yes, I eat wild meat, it is part of the culture in Rio Claro, he said, adding, I am not opposed to hunters or hunting but I dont personally hunt but the economic value in the rural communities is too significant for us to interfere with it. And regarding the National Wildlife Survey results, he said the most striking thing on the survey was the absence of the indigenous red brocket deer in Tobago and its diminishing numbers in Trinidad.

The survey showed that the red brocket deer, there is no sign of it in Tobago, and its very scarce in Trinidad and that raises to me a significant concern, I dont think it is well known that the red brocket deer is unique to Trinidad, that is why I have asked the committee to pay particular attention to it, how we could reintroduce to Tobago and how we could focus on it in terms of co-conservation and increasing the numbers in Trinidad, Rambharat said.

He said the deer had once been abundant in Tobago, but had been gone for a while. Rambharat also addressed a concern from hunters about the absence of game wardens in the forests saying his Ministry was faced with an absence of other officers such as agriculture officers and joked that he had to make an appointment to speak to them.

He also revealed plans to relocate all senior ministry managers to its Chaguanas building so he would be able to directly interact with them on a daily basis on the operations of the ministry.

Some of the concerns raised by hunters was the need to protect the wildlife as well as its habitat in order to ensure the industrys survival. The third consultation is planned for Tobago.
A researcher at Arizona State University has discovered how to control multiple robotic drones using the human brain.

A controller wears a skull cap outfitted with 128 electrodes wired to a computer. The device records electrical brain activity. If the controller moves a hand or thinks of something, certain areas light up.

I can see that activity from outside, said Panagiotis Artemiadis (pictured above), director of the Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab and an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. Our goal is to decode that activity to control variables for the robots.

Panagiotis Artemiadis runs the universitys Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab, where researchers seek to understand and improve interactions between humans and robots. The lab was awarded grants totaling $860,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and U.S. Air Force in 2014 to build out the mind-control technology.

If the user is thinking about decreasing cohesion between the drones  spreading them out, in other words  we know what part of the brain controls that thought, Artemiadis said.

A wireless system sends the thought to the robots. We have a motion-capture system that knows where the quads are, and we change their distance, and thats it, he said.

Up to four small robots, some of which fly, can be controlled with brain interfaces. Joysticks dont work, because they can only control one craft at a time.

You cant do something collectively with a joystick, Artemiadis said. If you want to swarm around an area and guard that area, you cannot do that.

To make them move, the controller watches on a monitor and thinks and pictures the drones performing various tasks.

Artemiadis said controllers have to stay focused. If its close to lunch and all you can think about it is pizza, it doesnt work. Fatigue and stress also play a part. Artemiadis said he can tell when subjects are tired or need a break.

Each subject is different. The system has to be calibrated to individual controllers, and it has to be done every day, because brain signals change from day to day.

The next step in Artemiadis research is multiple people controlling multiple robots. He plans to move to a much larger experimental space to refine the proof of concept. In the future, he sees drone swarms performing complex operations, such as search-and-rescue missions.

NBF  It seems likely that Deep Learning artificial intelligence could be used to address the pattern matching and computer-brain calibration issues.

DARPA also working on drones swarms that are autonomously controlled

Officials of the air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, announced a $3.9 million contract Wednesday to the Composite Engineering Inc. Unmanned Systems Division in Sacramento Calif., for the first phase of the Gremlins program, which relies on relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in volley quantities to saturate enemy defenses.

The Air Force Research Lab awarded the contract on behalf of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va. Composite Engineering is part of Kratos Defense and Security Solutions Inc.

The DARPA Gremlins program seeks to launch swarms of small UAVs with C-130 utility aircraft, and then use other C-130 utility aircraft to recover as many of these drones as possible. The Gremlins approach would launch swarms of UAVs equipped with surveillance and electronic warfare (EW) payloads beyond enemy air defenses, and then recover surviving UAVs when they have completed their missions.

DARPA researchers want Composite Engineering to develop affordable UAVs that could be reused as many as 20 times for dangerous missions in contested air space like pre-attack reconnaissance and surveillance, as well as electronic attack to destroy or disable enemy communications, missile defenses, and battlefield networks.

These drones would be fitted with diverse payloads in volley quantities, and would have the attributes of small vehicle size, reusability, and limited vehicle design life, DARPA officials say.

Key enabling technologies for the Gremlins program include aerial launch and aerial recovery techniques, equipment, and aircraft integration concepts; low-cost, attritable airframe designs; design for limited life; automated waveoff strategy; precision digital flight control and navigation; aerial refueling techniques; efficient small turbine engines; automated fuel tank inerting and engine shutoff; small distributed payload integration; and precision station keeping.

DARPA is pursuing the Gremlins program in three phases: system and technology design; preliminary design; and prototype flight demonstration.

This first phase of the program is expected to involve several different contractors, and spend about $15.8 million, so there should be other contractors in addition to Composite Engineering.

Ultimately DARPA wants a Gremlins flight demonstration by early 2020 to show the feasibility and potential of air-launched, recoverable unmanned aircraft. Only phase-one contractors will be eligible to participate in the programs second and third phases.

The program seeks to make a fundamental shift in the notion of aerial attack. Instead of using conventional, monolithic systems to conduct missions in denied environments, DARPA wants to use several platforms with coordinated and distributed warfighting functions to saturate adversary defenses.

SOURCES  Arizona State University, DARPA, military aerospace, Air force research lab
Russias first fifth-generation fighter project, the MiG 1.44, produced a single prototype before cancellation. The advent of the F-22 Raptor, and the expectation that the United States would follow up with large numbers of F-35s, made the development of a fifth-generation fighter imperative for Russia.

Perception of this need resulted in the award of a new fighter contract to Sukhoi in 2002. Sukhoi promised to produce a high maneuverability stealth fighter with supercruise capabilities that could match or defeat Lockheed Martins F-22 Raptor in air-to-air combat.

The PAK FA will also have sophisticated avionic systems, including datalink and a variety of electronic warfare components. Altogether, the PAK FA appears to strongly resemble the F-22 in performance, with marginally less stealth and network capabilities, but potentially more room to grow.

PAK FA prototypes

Initial expectations projected the acquisition of 200 PAK FAs for Russia, 200 for India, and an unknown number for other countries.

However, the fighter continues to struggle with questions over cost and engine performance. In particular, the engines adopted for early aircraft do not provide sufficient thrust for the airframe, leaving the aircraft at a significant disadvantage compared to American fighters.

In part because of this, and in part because of Russias economic difficulties, the initial order has dropped to 12 (with more expected after the resolution of engine problems).

China has pushed the J-20 stealth fighter project to a stage competitive with the PAK FA

It remains unclear whether India will ever acquire a version of the PAK FA, or instead focus on indigenously developed aircraft (the distant AMCA project, which may result in a usable combat aircraft by 2030).

The PAK FA program costs about $10 billion and unit costs are about $50 million each. There would also be the operational and maintenance costs. Even at 50% of the unit cost of the F-35 and ten times few PAK-FA could cost $100 billion over four decades.

SOURCES- Wikipedia, National Interest
A Chinese environmentalist has an idea on how to stop his country from building military infrastructures in the Spratlys: Use the Green card.

I think we should approach [the dispute] from marine conservation because no government has the right to destroy the eco system, the endangered species, corals, sea turtles, tropical fish, and dolphins, Wen Bo told InterAksyon.com at the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Peoples Forum early July.

Wen, who helped start the Greenpeace office in Beijing and who is now with the Global Greengrants Fund, said: Those species need protection regardless of who the territory belongs to, or who claims sovereignty of the islands or marine territory.

Its wrong to build things that will destroy this eco system. This could be a good argument to stop continuous construction on these islands, he added.

It is a goofy idea and shows complete separation from reality to seriously say it. It also shows how pathetic some parts of the Philippines are for a TV station and website to publish it as anything like a serious proposal.

China situation with coal and hydro shows that the marine conservation idea is just goofy because China cares very little for the environment as a matter of policy

Outdoor air pollution contributes to the deaths of an estimated 1.6 million people in China every year

China uses over 4 billion tons of coal every year.

Environmentalists claim large dams have led to the extinction of many fish and other aquatic species, the disappearance of birds in floodplains, huge losses of forest, wetland and farmland, erosion of coastal deltas, and many other unmitigable impacts.

China is the worlds leader in the construction of large dams.

In 2015, an estimated 33.7 GW of hydropower capacity was put into operation, including pumped storage, bringing the worlds total installed capacity to 1,212 GW.

China once again dominated the market for new development, adding 19.4 GW of new capacity within its borders.

Chinas total installed hydropower capacity at the end of 2015 was an estimated 319,370 MW.

Hydropower is one of the main ways for the power sector to replace fossil fuels, save energy and reduce emissions, points out Zhang Boting, deputy secretary general of the China Society for Hydropower Engineering.

China is already the largest dam builder in the world, but its vast hydropower resources are underdeveloped compared with its potential, meaning the country is overwhelmingly reliant on coal, says Zhang. If China exploited its remaining hydropower resources it could meet a fifth of Chinas peak energy demand and displace about 1.3 billion tonnes of coal, he adds.

The most enthusiastic advocates of new dams in China say the country can almost double its current hydropower capacity to 540 GW by 2050.
The fall in oil prices has taken a toll on Algerias foreign exchange reserves, which are expected to decline to $116 billion, Algrias Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal said.

At a context of a long-term slump in oil prices, the Algerian government is planning further cuts to curb spending over the next few years after the declining revenues previously forced Algiers to suspend several infrastructure projects, thus decreasing its budget by 9% this year.

Last November, Algerias draft appropriation bill estimated the reserves to stand at $121 billion by the end of 2016. In a reassurance attempt, Sellal told journalists that whatever happens, Algeria will never let reserves go below $100 billion.

Hydrocarbons make up 95% of Algerias exports and 60% of state revenues. The fall in oil prices last year propelled a 41% decline in Algerias energy earnings. The slump in international oil prices bodes ill for Algeria which has a heavily subsidized economy with low diversification.

In the last five months of 2016, Algerias reserves dropped by $6.1 billion to $136.9 billion.
An East Baton Rouge Police officer patrols Airline Highway following the shooting. Photo: Sean Gardner/Getty Images

Two police officers and a sheriffs deputy are dead and another sheriffs deputy remains in critical condition after a confrontation with a masked gunman on Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Two other officers were wounded but did not sustain life-threatening injuries.

The incident began around 8:40 a.m., when the officers and deputies responded to a report of a suspicious man walking down Airline Highway, dressed all in black and holding an assault rifle. The suspect  identified as Gavin Long, a 29-year-old African-American who served in the Marines  then engaged in a gun battle with police and was killed at the scene. This is the second attack on U.S. law-enforcement officers in ten days.

The Latest

All three of the slain officers have been identified.

identified. The alleged shooter is Gavin Eugene Long, a black former Marine and Iraq War veteran. His motive remains unclear.

unclear. Donald Trump responded to the shooting by attacking President Obama, saying, Our country is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse!

Law-enforcement walk around the side of the business near the fatal police shootingsinBaton RougeSunday #BRshootings pic.twitter.com/BkopjPGOeJ  TravisSpradling (@TravSprad) July 17, 2016

A second round of shots was fired outside a nearby car wash. I was about to pull in at about 8:45, and we got caught in the crossfire, said Avery Hall, who works at the car wash. I heard a lot of gunshots  a lot. I saw police ducking and shooting. I stopped and pulled into the Dodge dealership. I got out and heard more gunshots. We ducked. Finally, the gunman was killed by police.

NEW: Video of alleged shots fired at officers in Baton Rouge https://t.co/gwv4VmRqse https://t.co/7HGD5AuECW  CBS News (@CBSNews) July 17, 2016

Tensions between police and the Baton Rouge community have been extremely high following the killing by police of a black man, Alton Sterling, on July 5. Baton Rouge has seen continued protests over the killing, often along Airline Highway, and the citys police have been concerned about credible threats against officers in the weeks since  especially following the deadly ambush of Dallas police officers protecting a Black Lives Matter protest on July 7. Members of Sterlings family condemned the shooting on Sunday and expressed their heartbreak for the families of the slain officers.

Alton Sterling's aunt gives emotional plea to end violence in wake of Sunday's shooting in Baton Rouge https://t.co/BSMe9uuFnq  CNN (@CNN) July 17, 2016

The Suspect

The gunman has been identified as Gavin Eugene Long, a black former Marine and Iraq War veteran from Kansas City, Missouri. Sunday was Longs 29th birthday. Authorities say he was wearing black clothing and a face mask at the time of the shooting. He was armed with an AR-15-style assault rifle and had extra ammunition. Nothing is known yet about the shooters motive, or whether he was specifically targeting police.

Two persons of interest were detained for questioning in the area on Sunday, but they were later released without charges being filed. Earlier on Sunday, law-enforcement officials said they believed there was a total of three suspects, but at an afternoon press conference, they said they now believed there was just one gunman. However, state police spokesperson Major Doug Cain said theyre not ready to say he acted alone, and authorities are still investigating whether Long received assistance indirectly, directly here, or at home.

Last week, Baton Rogue police said they were investigating a plot by four people to shoot police officers, claiming thats why there had been a heavy police presence at recent protests.

The Victims

All three of the slain officers have been identified. Montrell Jackson, 32, was a married, ten-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department. He was also a new father.

This is Officer Montrell Jackson & his baby boy. He was killed in #BatonRouge today. pic.twitter.com/xNdhF0JE2Y  Britni Danielle (@BritniDWrites) July 17, 2016

Three days after the shooting of Alton Sterling, Jackson wrote about the tensions in Baton Rouge on Facebook:

Checked, & this appears legit. Posted 10 days ago by Montrell Jackson, a #BatonRouge officer killed. Devastating. pic.twitter.com/6MUu9bfXtQ  Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) July 17, 2016

Matthew Gerald, who had a wife and two children, was a 41-year-old former Marine. He had been a member of the Baton Rouge Police Department for less than a year.

Matthew Gerald was married with two children. He had been working on his own for 12 days via @WAFB #BatonRouge pic.twitter.com/iVDkMPyW7Q  FOX 8 New Orleans (@FOX8NOLA) July 17, 2016

The third officer killed was 45-year-old Brad Garafola, a 24-year veteran of the East Baton Rouge Sheriffs Office. He was married with four children.

One Baton Rouge police officer and two sheriffs deputies were wounded, with one in critical condition.

At a guarded #OLOL where the EBR Coroners Office has arrived @theadvocatebr pic.twitter.com/77sjArrtKM  Hilary Scheinuk (@hscheinukphoto) July 17, 2016

The Political Response

President Obama released a statement condemning the shooting:

For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault. These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop  We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes. The officers in Baton Rouge; the officers in Dallas  they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now  all of us  to be at our best.

He later echoed those remarks in an afternoon press conference, saying the shooting was an attack on all of us.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump responded to the shooting on Facebook and Twitter, blaming it on a lack of leadership in the U.S., and stating that the country is divided and out of control:

Photo: Facebook

We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police. Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016

Our country is totally divided and our enemies are watching. We are not looking good, we are not looking smart, we are not looking tough!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016

President Obama just had a news conference, but he doesn't have a clue. Our country is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has also released a statement:

Todays devastating assault on police officers in Baton Rouge is an assault on all of us. There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities. We must not turn our backs on each other. We must not be indifferent to each other. We must all stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities. Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and families of the police officers who were killed and injured today.

And here is what Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards had to say:

#lagov on the shooting of law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge today: pic.twitter.com/BU3B4Iznbe  John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) July 17, 2016

Both of Louisianas Republican senators have responded as well:

Murderous attack in Baton Rouge just horrible. Praying for the officers and families. Blue lives matter. All lives matter.  David Vitter (@DavidVitter) July 17, 2016

Prominent Black Lives Matter leader DeRay Mckesson, who was recently arrested during a protest in Baton Rouge, responded to the shooting in an interview with the New York Times, insisting that, The [Black Lives Matter] movement began as a call to end violence. That call remains  My prayers are with the victims of all violence.

Also speaking with the Times, Judith Browne Dianis, a civil-rights organizer and the executive director of the Advancement Projects national office, lamented that the shooting was already being framed through the lens of Black Lives Matter:

It bothers me that people in the movement are being asked to denounce violence that has nothing to do with the movement. It is a false narrative that the violence had something to do with the movement for black lives. There is no one in the movement saying bring violence to anyone. In fact, were saying stop the violence against us.

One of the #altonsterling protest leaders is here ready to set up a grill to feed people at the media staging area pic.twitter.com/KB1ZsBrsRS  Kevin Litten (@kevinlitten) July 17, 2016

At request of store owner and many others, protesters leave out of respect for fallen officers pic.twitter.com/TGBC1CgiJK  Amy Wold (@awold10) July 17, 2016

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available. An earlier version of this story included reports that seven officers were injured in the shooting  that number has now been revised down to three.
It begins. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump formally introduced running mate and interlocking-logo partner Mike Pence on Saturday at a joint news conference, calling the Indiana governor a solid, solid person and a man of honor, character, and honesty who is the leader that will help us deliver a safe society and a prosperous, really prosperous, society for all Americans. But while Pence was the reason for Saturdays event, the social-conservative movementeer was only a fraction of the focus. Instead, Trump devoted most of his rambling 30-minute introduction to talking about himself and whatever else he had on his mind, before finally yielding 12 minutes of spotlight to his new running mate.

Trump also referred to Pence as his first choice, and had previously tweeted that he had been so from the start  though that doesnt seem to be remotely true, as multiple reports suggested he still hadnt totally made up his mind about Pence until as late as Thursday night, and that process itself was after several possible Republican VP picks had taken themselves out of the running for the job. The Pence pick has pleased much of the GOP establishment, however, and thats not something Trump has had much will to do in the past.

The event had already been delayed by one day because of what the Trump campaign said was deference to Thursday nights terrorist attacks in Nice, France, yet the news conference still seemed hastily organized. It was held at a hotel a few blocks from Trumps home in Manhattan, in a non-battleground state which only Trump perceives as winnable, and with no TrumpPence signage around  just a standard Trump sign on the podium. The event also did not appear to be coordinated with any fundraising appeal to supporters, nor does it seem that the new ticket-partners will be going on any kind of pre-convention swing-state tour, as most actual presidential campaigns would normally try to do. As CNN also points out, There was none of the stagecraft that such a moment would normally contain  for instance, an embrace or both candidates raising their clasped hands to the ceiling in a show of political vitality and unity.

See Trumps hand for proof that there was at least some kind of preparation done for the speech. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Pence was definitely not Trumps first choice when it came to speech topics on Saturday. Rather, the people Trump was most devoted to talking about at the event were himself and opponent Hillary Clinton, who he lambasted as a corrupt criminal as often as possible. He insisted that she got away with murder  in fact, I think it might be her greatest accomplishment, when referring to how Clinton had not been found criminally liable for having used a private email server during her time as Secretary of State. Trump also claimed that Clinton was responsible for the rise of ISIS and pretty much everything else thats gone wrong, foreign-policy-wise, during the Obama administration. Trump insisted that Clinton would pay the price for her supposed crimes come election day.

Another featured non-Pence topic during Trumps speech was his path to the GOP nomination, which he once again recapped and boasted about  including an additional celebration of what appears to be the recent complete and total defeat of the Republican Partys #NeverTrump faction, which is reportedly no longer going to pursue any last-ditch efforts to prevent Trumps nomination. As Nick Confessore suggested in the New York Times liveblog of the event, the emotional translation of the speech seemed to be Trump saying, I didnt need to unify the party, because I won, but okay, heres Mike Pence. Youre welcome, Republican Party. Indeed, Trump also admitted that, One of the big reasons I chose Mike is party unity, I have to be honest.

Going in for a unity shoulder pat. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

As some have noted, it seemed that Trump mostly remembered to somewhat-robotically mention Pence only after glancing down at his prepared notes. However, Pence did get a unique superlative from Trump, who called his endorsement of opponent Ted Cruz in the Indiana primary the single greatest non-endorsement Ive ever had in my life  a call-back to Trumps days as a Pence-endorsement truther.

Trump left the stage for Pences remarks. In that speech, the Indiana governor more conventionally referenced his upbringing and religious beliefs, and said that Trump was a good man as well as the leader that America needed, because: The stakes could not be higher. Americans can choose a leader who will fight to make America safe and prosperous again, and bring real change, or we can elect someone who literally personifies the failed establishment in Washington, D.C.

It seems Pence will get the whole spotlight to himself again when he gets home to Indiana for a last-minute welcome-home rally on Saturday  sans Trump, according to the press release.
Photo: Qandeel Baloch/Facebook

The brother of Pakistani social-media star, Qandeel Baloch, has confessed to her murder. He was arrested in Dera Ghazi Khan, Pakistan, on Saturday night.

Waseem, 25, is charged with an honor killing. During a press conference with police, he stated, She brought dishonor to the Baloch name, citing a recent incident when Qandeel had posed for selfies with Muslim cleric Mufti Qavi. Waseem drugged and strangled Qandeel while their parents were sleeping on the rooftop of their home in Multan. He claimed, She wasnt aware I was killing her.

According to The Express Tribune (via BuzzFeed), Waseem said,

I am a drug addict but I was in my senses when I murdered her and I accept it with pride. Now everybody will remember me with honor that I have provided relief to my parents and brothers who were suffering for the last two decades because of her. Girls are born only to stay at home and to bring honor to the family by following family traditions but Qandeel had never done that. My friends used to send me videos and pictures on my mobile and everyone in the mobile market was sharing pictures and videos of her with me. Murdering her was better than committing suicide so I went with the former plan.

Waseem also said, I am not ashamed. We are Baloch and as Baloch we cannot tolerate [this].

Their father, Muhammad Azeem, had said that Waseem was encouraged by his and Qandeels brother Mohammad Aslam Shaheen to commit the murder. The police are searching for two men who accompanied Waseem after he fled Multan.

Balochs funeral was held Sunday.

Update: This post has been updated with additional information from the press conference.
Wedding Crashers

My husband is hanging out with some friends, and an extremely attractive young woman walks in. Shes very blonde, very sexy, and very uninterested in giving him the time of day.

Until she overhears talk of how hes married.

The womans eyes light up a bit, she introduces herself, and so it begins: The reliable flirting dance of the single woman and the married guy.

Ive seen it a million times, and when I was single, I played a part in the dance myself.

Im curious, I finally ask my husband, why is it that you think you get hit on more now that you have that ring on your finger? Is the commitment itself just like catnip? I really dont get it.

He considers it for a few minutes and responds.

I think a happily married guy projects something like stability, he responds, and stabilitys attractive.

Earlier this week, sexpert Tracey Cox suggested eight different reasons single women are prone to be more interested in married men, and they all hit way too close to home.

Its animalistic.

Mate poaching or the less judge-y sounding mate-choice copying is when a mammal expresses preference for the male whos been seen with other females or even mated with them. As Miike Snow sings it, I change shapes just to hide in this place but Im still/ Im still an animal.

The freaking wedding-industrial complex, man.

A guy with a ring has proved he can take the leap. Thats appealing, especially to a woman who is sick of flakes, Peter Pans, and perpetual bachelors.

Women dig a happily married guy who dotes on his wife.

Cue the line Why are all the good ones taken?

Emotional affairs.

These are so easy to fall into, and so dangerous. A married guy talking to single women about all his marital woes is going to lead to a bunch of hurt feelings, and potentially physical affairs.

Its comforting to deal with a married guy who in theory isnt trying to close.

Thats pretty appealing, right? All that sexual and romantic heat, but with the deniability of the wedding ring.

Marriage is Adulting 101, and nothing makes a lady wetter than legally-binding patriarchal institutions of oppression.

Also: Think about the man-child epidemic of the last few decades. Anything that even remotely spells out this man is an actual grownup is so completely attractive.

If your single girlfriend sees that you are satisfied with your husband, she may envy that.

They think, Wow, that guy must be amazing.

And ultimately the single woman-married man dynamic comes down to pure science.

A 2009 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that mate poaching does skew more toward women than men. Single women presented with a man who was described as unattached registered interest at 59 percent. Once the man was described as being in a committed relationship? Interest skyrocketed to 90 percent.

[M]ost women who engage in mate poaching do not think the attached status of the target played a role in their poaching decision, but our study shows this belief to be false, the studys authors wrote.

Apparently, the married man demonstrates two key yes factors: There is social proof (he has the positive validation of having been chosen by a wife) and the scarcity (we want the unattainable).

Psychology Today offers a number of fairly sympathetic articles on how women are even engaging in unconscious repetitions of trauma when they flirt with married men  often trying to close their attachment theory issues on physically and emotionally unavailable men.

Oftentimes, the married man getting hit on is not even providing any breadcrumbs of interest. Ive seen my husband around hundreds of different kinds of women, and its always interesting to watch the ones who get nothing back from him, then try all that much harder.

I think women know when youre trying to fuck them, he responds, so obviously they detect when youre not trying to fuck them at all. Maybe a married guy who seems to be walking the walk can pose a challenge that some women will explore in a fleeting moment of boredom.

Its not just an internal challenge  theres even societal encouragement for it. Take YourTango, which ran the listicle of how to Bat an eye at a married guy without becoming a homewrecker.

Among the more charming reasons to get your flirt on with a man wearing a ring: It will make you feel good about yourself and then if he makes an unwitting move, you can always say, Youre married! I didnt think this was going anywhere! And, Entrapment. Save his wife the trouble of finding out later in life that hes a scoundrel. (Again, only for altruistic souls.)

Gross.

I find the whole phenomenon so depressing that sometimes I wonder what hope there is for anyone in the entire dysfunctional dance.

After 32 million users identities revealed in the Ashley Madison hack, sometimes I think about how the majority of those guys are still out there, skulking around, lapping up, encouraging and living for this kind of attention. In other words: This trend of single womens interest in married men, if you want to call it that, probably isnt going away  ever.

But maybe I shouldnt care. Because while I do notice more flirting being thrown my husbands way since he first put that ring on in November, I am also really impressed with how my husband conducts himself.

I try to tell myself that the sexy lady who had been chatting him up the other day is not actually a viable threat. And when I ask him for reassurance, he provides it.

You really think you can resist all the women? I ask. Even when they seem to come along in endless supply, forever blonder and sexier than the last?

Theres nothing blonder or sexier, he says. You are the last.

I see his appeal with an outsiders eyes. And I sympathize with it, in a way. There really is nothing more attractive than loyalty.
flop king

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Mmmm Jai

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daddy bogan looks so meaty and chiseled

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keep it but i do love kate mara

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I can't imagine Shia as a dad

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it's the army yadda yadda yadda whatever





even Genisys gave us that



ngl I wish he kept his curls in movies :(it's the army yadda yadda yadda whatevereven Genisys gave us that

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I wish he had his mutton chops tbh.



Edited at 2016-07-17 01:52 am (UTC)

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i love the army look but omg *____* this is his best look looove it

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he looks so hot here GOD rip me apart

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his hair is perf right now

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No to all of this

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How many flops will it take for Jai Courtney to stop being cast in things?

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The limit does not exist.

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i ask the same question about chris hemsworth, when will he retire and become a gay pornstar

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When they stop making Thor/Avengers movies

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Depends. How many shitty movies was Ryan Reynolds in before Deadpool?

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this flop-o-rams cast but you had me with "post-apocalyptic"



I'm a sucker

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Same. Although that plot sounds boring as fuck

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This aflopolypse survivor <3

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it takes a flop to know a flop lol jk i love u smellwheter <3 <3 <3

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Release on VOD, TBH!!

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Dat first pic.... Jai is so fine and delicious. Siiiiigh :/

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Here for Daddy Jai, ugh. The things we do for his flop career.

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i loathe the monarchy but this was a good idea.

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This is awesome.

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Laughing at "Facebool" sorry OP thanks for your post though :)

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Facebool

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It's a word used to denote lack of any disease, not just HIV/STI. eg - clean bill of health. My mom survived cancer so her screens have been coming back clean (thankfully).

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I agree

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Yea, idk I've always thought it was kind of ridiculous that catching an std was "dirty" when we catch shit all the time from other people lol, lbr it's because it's attached to sex and people still have really dated and fucked up attitudes in regards to sex.

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this

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Pretty low, yeah. One partner would have to have some sort of cut or open sore in your mouth and the other would have to have to have some kind of cut or open sore on their genitals, since normally it can't be passed through saliva. But it's possible that people could have small cuts they don't know about.

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Low but not zero. About 3% of the new HIV infections are due to oral sex.



Don't take my word for it though, ask your doctor.

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The risk is theoretical. As in theoretically a piano could fall on you when you're walking down the street, but in all likelihood that will never happen. Some doctors/people will tell you it's a risk because technically under extremely rare circumstances it could happen, but as far as I know there has never been a recorded instance of oral HIV transmission. Saliva kills HIV, so yeah you'd probably need like a gaping wound in your mouth to get it from oral.



Edited at 2016-07-17 07:55 pm (UTC)

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I didn't know rates were rising in the UK. Good on him for helping to normalize getting tested.

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Get tested even if you're in a relationship. It's always good practice.

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this. when i'm sexually active (whether in a relationship or not) i always get tested every 3-6mo (frequency changes with how active i am). it's just good sense. :) :)

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Honestly!!! I was with someone for 6 years and he confessed he had unprotected sex with someone during a trip months after it had happened.

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Yup. My best friend had been married for 5 years and was pregnant with their third child. Went for a prenatal appointment and found out she has chlamydia. Asshole husband was cheating so being in a relationship doesn't automatically mean you're safe.

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Pregnancy is a big deal but it's weird to me how many teen girls don't seem worried about using condoms. When I was growing up there were so many PSAs that were basically like, "use a condom or else you will get AIDS and die." It was extreme but the messaging worked on me.

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I've never understood that mentality, most guys seem more concerned about pregnancy as well. Like you said, you can do something about pregnancy, some stds are not curable.

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this dumbass 18 year old trump supporter didn't know how long sperm can stay mobile inside your vagina, nor did she realize that its possible to ovulate twice in a month. she wanted to use just an ovulation calendar and i was like, ummm... ya gonna get pregnant, just saying. she didn't bring up sti's/std's at all. gross tbh

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Slay Prince! Educate <3

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Good for him. Last time I got tested was 2/3 years ago :/

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if you have a need to get tested (ie you're regularly sexually active) it's always good to go. it's often low cost (or free) and just nice to be aware of your sexual health. you should go!



i haven't been tested in about 8mo but i've also not been sexually active since my last test. it's a good habit to develop!

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My gyno offers it as part of an annual blood panel. It's gonna kill me if I ever move too far away to make it out to this gyno, they're so fucking fab.

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I feel bad that I would let him smash :/

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Good. Raise that awareness!

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When search suggestions are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.
Since 1996, 22 hand-painted signs have gone up throughout Walker's Point and surrounding neighborhoods that promoted La Perla as well as Milwaukee's "Latin quarter." Some of the signs are painted on wood and mounted on the sides of Milwaukee buildings and others are painted directly on the Cream City bricks.

"The more people liked our signs, the more signs we wanted to put up, especially because they did what art is supposed to do, got people to talking, seeing things differently and even thinking this neighborhood is pretty cool," says JoAnne Anton, co-owner of La Perla, 734 S. 5th St.

Many of the signs were painted by Craig Pete, formerly a waiter at La Perla and several other Milwaukee restaurants, who has been showing his work in the Milwaukee art scene since the early '90s.

Several of the signs feature circus-art elements while others are more art deco. Anton says that some paintings are the painter's rendition of what La Perla is all about but all the early ones with Pete were collaboratively developed with a specific design in mind.

Anton attributes an "artistic eye" and the sign project generally to her husband, La Perla co-owner Nick Anton.

"He collects lots of samples with certain looks. Always different. Always bold. Craig helped refine and make the design our own take on the circus-art concept," says Anton.

Pete's art, which is often described as "circus side show" thematically, works well with folksy motifs from Mexican popular culture. In fact, Pete's other paintings include elements such as Dia de los Muertos-inspired skulls to portraits of the great masked wrestlers of the Mexican lucha libre professional wrestling tradition.

One of Pete's lucha libre paintings is in the Timo Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo St. (ground floor of the Marshall Building).

Timothy Meyerring, owner of Timo and of Pete's wrestler painting, says it's rumored that Pete has quit painting to focus on furniture making or restoration. Pete could not be reached to comment for this article.

"While he was a good waiter, his true calling and passion was art. The guy has enormous talent and spirit," says Anton.

After Pete, other people approached La Perla, both friends of the owners and customers who helped beautify and continue promoting the Walker's Point neighborhood with more signs. Of the original 22 signs there are roughly 10 remaining. But newer signs that promote La Perla more directly have appeared around the neighborhood.

These newer signs are on black backgrounds with the restaurant's name, address and a pepper or two. A double-pepper-shaped heart symbol also appears on billboards for La Perla.

Anton believes that building-art, like the La Perla signs, is more prominent in other cities and Milwaukee is missing out with its restrictive sign ordinances and permit processes for advertising.

The idea of seeing buildings as art, that the character of buildings individually and collectively accounts for how feelings of community get structured, even if the buildings themselves may sometimes need a facelift, registers with Anton.

"These buildings are such an important part of our neighborhood and frankly, a hugely underutilized marketing commodity for property owners and the city of Milwaukee, too. Optimizing off- and on-premise signs for revenue is just one component. Signs are also tools for neighborhood beautification, if not revitalization," says Anton.

The signs are part of the Antons' commitment to Milwaukee overall. "We've been around since 1995, firmly committed to Walker's Point and to the city of Milwaukee. We've rejected constant offers to open up out in the 'burbs," she says.

The building art has been and remains effective in getting the word out about La Perla. But, moreover, people have associated the signs with the neighborhood and this positive impact has not gone unnoticed nor has the creativity of its artists been unappreciated.

Yet, La Perla's advertising has shifted somewhat. From the aforementioned simpler signs with black backgrounds that line the walls around gas station pumps to the large billboard facing north off I-43 with its double-pepper heart, La Perla is more and more off the walls.

"We added one to two (hand-painted, building) signs each year, sometimes more, until we pretty much ran out of ideas, location and paint," says Anton. "So, La Perla doesn't just use buildings anymore, we have circus art canvas inside our restaurant and we have also gone digital, as in billboards."

La Perla, which expanded four times since opening in 1995, recently added fire pits to its cabanas and rooftop patio. La Perla also recently upgraded the tequila in its house margaritas and added more products from Milwaukee producers like Stone Creek Coffee and Purple Door Ice Cream.

"We're looking forward to soon being able to purchase cheeses made right down the street at the new Clock Shadow Creamery," says Anton.

Anton says that, to keep up with "growing ridership," La Perla added a second mechanical chili pepper "bull" in its tequila bar. (This is good news since, in this author's opinion, riding the pepper at La Perla is a Milwaukee rite of passage.)

"Our signs continue to welcome people to Walker's Point, some directly, others indirectly, but all of them tell passersby we care about our community. My new favorite sign isn't one for La Perla at all  it is our 'Heart of the Latin Quarter' sign that we hung on the corner of 5th and National. Nothing wrong with having this added identity and helping bring even more people down to our area," says Anton.
See original here

Just-released documents 'point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia,' but White House says its assessment has not changed



By Nadia Prupis, staff writer



The report will raise new concern that US officials attempted to cover up evidence that might have implicated the Saudis.

(Image by (Photo: Ivan Velazco/flickr/cc)) Details DMCA



The just-released 28 pages of a 2002 congressional report into Saudi Arabia's possible ties to the 9/11 hijackers have stirred speculation about the U.S. government's continued relationship with the Gulf kingdom.

Amnesty International criticized the White House's statement that the pages, hidden from public view for 13 years, have not changed the government's assessment that "there's no evidence that the Saudi government or senior Saudi individuals funded al-Qaeda."

"We stand with survivors of this crime against humanity: They deserve justice and the whole truth," the human rights group tweeted.

As Murtaza Hussein wrote for The Intercept, the 28 pages "redacted in parts, detail circumstantial evidence of ties among Saudi government officials, intelligence agents, and several of the hijackers," including by providing financial and housing assistance to those living in the U.S.

The report also offers new information about the connections between alleged 9/11 masterminds and members of the Saudi royal family, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former ambassador to the U.S. and close friend of the Bush family. The report details money transfers of at least $15,000 from Bandar's bank account in Washington to a suspected Saudi government spy, as well as phone logs between Bandar and suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who led the charge to publish the documents, said the findings "point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia," and Congressman Rick Nolan, who also pushed for the pages to be released, said they "confirm that much of the rhetoric preceding the U.S. attack on Iraq was terribly wrong."

Among the new revelations is the fact that Saudi officials apparently refused to cooperate with U.S. investigators seeking information about the attack.

Hussein wrote:

"As the report notes, 'In testimony and interviews, a number of FBI agents and CIA officers complained to the [inquiry] about a lack of Saudi cooperation in terrorism investigations both before and after the September 11th attacks.' "Referencing a May 1996 Director of Central Intelligence memo, the report cited agency beliefs that 'the Saudis had stopped providing background information or other assistance on Bin Ladin because Bin Ladin had 'too much information about official Saudi dealings with Islamic extremists in the 1980s for Riyadh to deliver him into U.S. hands.'"

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Reprinted from www.huffingtonpost.com

First and foremost, here is what you need to know when you listen to any member of our government state that the newly released 29 pages are no smoking gun -- THEY ARE LYING.



Our government's relationship to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is no different than an addict's relationship to heroin. Much like a heroin addict who will lie, cheat, and steal to feed their vice, certain members of our government will lie, cheat, and steal to continue their dysfunctional and deadly relationship with the KSA -- a relationship that is rotting this nation and its leaders from the inside out.





Do not let any person in our government deny the damning reality of the 29 pages.



And as you read the 29 pages remember that they were written during 2002 and 2003.



President Bush did not want the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia investigated. President Bush has deep ties to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its royal family and only wanted to protect the Kingdom. President Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq -- not Saudi Arabia. So, 29 full pages that said "Saudi" and "Bandar" instead of "Hussein" and "Iraq" was a huge problem for President Bush.



It is well documented that the Joint Inquiry received enormous push-back against its investigation into the Saudis. In fact, former FBI Director Mueller acknowledges that much of the information implicating the Saudis that the Inquiry investigators ultimately uncovered was unknown to him. Why does Mueller say this? Mostly because Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry's investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquiry's investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort.



Notwithstanding the lack of cooperation from the FBI and the pressure from the Bush Administration to thwart any investigation of the Saudis, the Joint Inquiry was still able to write 29 full pages regarding Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. No other nation is given such singular prominence in the Joint Inquiry's Final Report. Not Iraq. Not Iran. Not Syria. Not Sudan. Not even Afghanistan or Pakistan.



The 29 pages have been kept secret and suppressed from the American public for fifteen years -- not for matters of genuine national security -- but for matters of convenience, embarrassment, and cover-up. Executive Order 13526 makes that a crime. Neither James Clapper nor Barack Obama want to release a statement about that.



The only thing James Clapper and Barack Obama are willing to say about the delayed release of the 29 pages is that they stand by the investigation of the 9/11 Commission. This punt by President Barack Obama is repulsive. President Obama's deference to the 9/11 Commission -- who themselves admit that they were unable to fully investigate the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks -- depicts Obama's utter lack of interest, engagement, or support of the 9/11 families. Frankly, it re-victimizes the 9/11 families by not acknowledging the truth, blocking our path to justice, and the very vital assignment of accountability to those who should be held responsible. Most alarmingly, Obama's silence keeps us unsafe because instead of calling for an emergency session of Congress to immediately name the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, President Obama continues to downplay, belittle, and ignore the truth leaving us vulnerable to terrorist attacks that are still to this very day being funded by our "ally" the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.





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Peruse hundreds of New Mexico's finest food, farm, artisan and healing vendors, hear live musicians and learn from the educational and demonstration zones for kids and adults.

The Rail Yards Market of Albuquerque operates on Sundays from 10am-2pm during the months of May-October. We are a community organized market celebrating all things local and at the heart of New Mexican culture. We are so much more than your typical Farmer's or Grower's Market--every Sunday you can peruse 100's of New Mexico's finest food, farm, artisan, and healing vendors, hear live musicians, and come away enriched from our educational/demonstration zones for kids and adults! All this under one roof at the historic Blacksmith Shop at the heart of our City! For 2016 we are bigger and better than ever with more vendors, more space and outdoor patio being some of the improvements! Free for all, come alone or bring the family!

As we roll into our 3rd season, we have a bigger, better Rail Yards Market in store for you: More Vendors, Vendors Inside and Outside, Music on the Back Patio, more seating areas, and a petting zoo
Reprinted from RT



Tu-22 M3 missile-carriers seen delivering an air strike at recently-detected ISIL targets in the Palmyra environment.

(Image by informvest.net) Details DMCA



Nine months ago when Vladimir Putin ordered Russia's anti-terror intervention in Syria, Barack Obama scorned the move, predicting it would lead to a disastrous quagmire. Why then is the US president so keen now to team up with Russia?

From dire predictions of Russian military failure in Syria to this week's appeal by the Obama administration for cooperation "to defeat terrorists"in the Arab country, there is apparently a dramatic shift in US policy.

Gone is sanctimonious censure against Russia's military intervention and forebodings about a Soviet-Afghan style quagmire in Syria. The public attitude of the US administration is now tantamount to the plea: Can we join your winning team in Syria, please?

US Secretary of State John Kerry flew into Moscow late Thursday and proceeded to have three hours of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, lasting into the early hours Friday.

Radio Free Europe reported that "Kerry sought to find new agreement with Russia on military operations in Syria."

That's quite a turnaround, given the heaps of vilification Washington has thrown at the Russian military operations, accusing Moscow of everything from "propping up the tyrannical Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad,"to bombing hospitals and civilians, to wiping out "moderate rebels."



Throughout, despite the Western media disinformation campaign, the Kremlin has remained steadfast in its stated mission: To defend the sovereign state of Syria from an array of terror groups.

And quagmire this ain't. Russia's military forces, with relatively few losses, have transformed the five-year war in Syria, helping the Syrian army to put the illegally armed militants decisively on the defensive. Syrian state forces have recaptured huge swathes of territory, and the once seemingly formidable head-chopping jihadists and their so-called Caliphate are staring at defeat.

It may be too early to declare "mission accomplished" for Russia. But the situation on the ground certainly vindicates Putin's strategy.

US media reports quote US officials as saying that the al-Qaeda-linked jihadists are telling their cadres that the Caliphate is on the brink of collapse. Significantly, too, this is also the context in which Turkey has shifted to a conciliatory position towards Russia and is even proffering a normalization of relations with Syria.

Washington and its regional allies, including Turkey, appear to be tacitly admitting that the covert military operation that they have been fueling for regime change in Syria is all but lost.

This is the context by which to read the latest "offer" from the Obama administration to Russia for military cooperation in Syria. After months of deprecating Russia's intervention and stubbornly refusing to coordinate "anti-terror" efforts, Washington now appears to be reaching out to assist Russia.

Following the meeting between Putin and Kerry this week, the Kremlin said that "the topic of direct interaction between the Russian and US military in Syria was not discussed in detail."

"They discussed different cooperation formats" but questions remain," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. "We are not much closer to real cooperation in order to increase the effectiveness of efforts to combat terrorism in Syria."

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Reprinted from Robert Reich Facebook

Mike Pence -- Donald Trump's pick for vice president -- is one of the most extreme right-wing officials in America. Let us count the ways:

1. As governor of Indiana he signed the "license to discriminate" bill allowing Indiana businesses to deny service to gays.

2. He has tried to halt the settlement of Syrian refugees in the state.

3. His position on abortion is so extreme that, as a member of congress, he voted for legislation that would give "personhood" rights to embryos, and defund Planned Parenthood.

4. He also voted against measures aimed at preventing LGBT discrimination, and he supported federal legislation prohibiting same-sex marriage.

5. He also threatened to block Hurricane Katrina reconstruction unless the money needed was offset by cuts to Medicare and the national school lunch program.

6. He has compared Obamacare to the 9/11 attacks (although later apologized for the comment).

7. Pence is also a favorite of the Koch brothers.

Bumper-sticker nominees:

TRUMP-PENCE: YOU'LL BE SORRY



TRUMP-PENCE: NONSENSE



DUMP TRUMP, SUSPEND PENCE



Others?
The $25-billion Indian pharma industry is going through intense regulatory scrutiny. Foreign drug regulators such as the US Food and Drug Adminis-tration (FDA) and EU's European Medicines Agency have increased their inspections of Indian drug manufacturing plants that export medicines to those geographies. Individuals and civil society groups - both within the country and outside - are seeking better regulatory mechanism for Indian drugs manufacturers. In an exclusive interview with Business Today's Joe C. Mathew, Drugs Controller General of India G.N. Singh says that Indias drug regulatory mechanism is not as bad as it is often made out to be, though it may not mirror the systems that exist in the developed world. Edited excerpts:

A US citizen had recently approached Indian courts to re-draw the 'archaic' domestic drug regulatory rules. The complaint was that Indian regulatory system is in shambles. Do you agree?

It is true that the Drugs and Cosmetics Act was framed in 1940, but that does not mean that it is inadequate to take care of issues related to safety, effectiveness and quality of the drugs. The overall governance of drug regulation is based on the rules under the Act. The Drugs and Cosmetics Rules are dynamic in nature. So the over- arching framework may not have changed, but the rules are up to date. If you see our country in totality, and look at our regulatory system in an overall integrated fashion, you will find that our regulatory system is competent enough to meet the issues of quality, assess the overall effectiveness and overall patient safety. The issue, which people often flag, is the gap that exists between the USFDA and our drug regulatory system. It is a different issue. Depending on the social, economic and other factors, each country will have its own set of regulatory system. The fundamental thing that we need to look at is whether we compromise the safety and quality of medicines or not. We don't compromise.

The complaint is not only against the law. It is also against the level of enforcement?

Traditionally, the enforcement in this country has been weak. That was because our regulatory institutions were seen as licence giving institutions for a long time. Enforcements were there, but not in the manner it should have been. None of the stakeholders - be it industry, or the patient, were ready for that at that time. But now, things have improved. In the last decade or so, there has been a paradigm shift in this approach. Each state is strengthening its regulatory mechanism, so is the Centre. In 2011, we had only 33 people in the central drug administration system. Today we have more than 300 and we are planning to add another 200 shortly. So, that is the overall approach today. And it is need based. The industry has matured, and the regulator is becoming well equipped and knowledge-intensive. The focus now is on enforcement.

Indian companies are being accused of following double standards when it comes to quality. Is it true that the medicines they export to the US are far superior than what they make for India?

The US regulator inspects the services, practices (of USFDA approved Indian manufacturing facilities) from the lens of their regulatory perspective. We see it on the basis of our statute. But the fundamentals remain the same. Both of us look at it from the point of safety and efficacy. As I have already mentioned, we look at it from the affordability angle, too. In that sense, we ensure that all basic WHO (World Health Organization prescribed) quality requirements are followed. We want to pick up a number of good things that USFDA follows. But we don't want to follow it blindly. Our issues are different. This is the reason behind this complaint that Indian companies have double standards and they are giving good medicines to US and bad medicines to India. Obviously, the people who make such allegations have some vested interests.

But still, isn't it a valid question?

The question is, quality at what cost? As I said, there is no compromise on safety and efficacy. Quality is a dynamic thing for both products as well as services. Quality means different for different persons and locations. For medicines that are manufactured for consumption by Indian population, affordability is important. Someone might want the medicine in blister pack, someone might want it in a bottle. Someone would be very particular of its appearance, and they want it completely white. Someone will allow some colour variation if it meets all quality and safety specifications. As regulators we need to keep a balance, without compromising the quality, efficacy and safety.

Your recent decision to ban a significant number of fixed dose combinations (FDCs) has been criticised by the industry. They say that they were not consulted before banning time-tested drug combinations. Your comments.

When two or more drugs are mixed together, its overall pharmacological and therapeutic claim gets changed. It will have an impact on the overall effectiveness of the medicine. Four years ago, we started a massive exercise to weed out the combination drugs that have got no therapeutic impact or use on Indian population. In 2012 itself we had a meeting with the industry representatives in Mumbai where I sought their help to shortlist such FDCs. A government appointed high-powered committee (which recommended the list of FDCs that requires to be banned) had also sought industry views before giving its recommendations. So, I don't agree that industry was not consulted.

Is there a plan to strengthen the regulatory system for medical devices?

Medical device is an untapped area where we see huge potential. India has to take the lead here as most of the medical devices we use today are imported. How long, with such a huge population, will we depend on imports? The government is thinking to ease regulations in medical devices. Unfortunately, some of the medical devices were made part of drugs. And that created confusion within and outside the country. We are trying to sort this out. Government is going to classify medical devices as per the international practices soon. Globally, medical devices fall under the jurisdiction of drug regulators. Similar system will be in place here also.

Will it be governed by Drugs and Cosmetics Act, or will there be a separate Act?

That will be decided by the Parliament. We feel there should be separate verticals to handle medical devices, cosmetics and biologics in the regulatory department.

The government has come out with a draft biosimilar guideline. Will it be aligned with international best practices?

The future lies with biologics products and inventions. India is having huge skilled manpower that needs to be trained in this field. We need to recreate the success we had in chemical drugs in biologics also. Thats why we have come out with the draft biosimilar guidelines. They are guiding documents. They will guide us while we assess the fundamental issues of quality and safety and effectiveness of biosimilars. As in the case of our generics, in biosimilars also the regulation will keep in mind the overall safety and quality factor, and affordability. The guideline is India specific.

India had a booming clinical trial industry some years ago. The sector lost its sheen due to regulatory interventions. Is a revival possible?

The 2012 period and before was a very troublesome phase for the country as a whole in conducting clinical trials. The rights, safety and the well-being of the subjects of the clinical trials were denied at that time. We did not have a proper regulatory mechanism in place. That was the cause of all the problems. It took some time to build that expertise. I can tell you with certainty that India is ready to do extremely good work in clinical trials now. Our share in global clinical trials today is just 1.46 per cent. We have created a platform through which India will become a preferred destination for clinical trials. In the next eight to 10 years our contribution to the global clinical trial industry should be at least 10 per cent. That's the plan. That will create a huge job opportunity. It will also result in huge skilled manpower for drug discovery research, where exactly India's true strengths lie.

E-commerce has become a reality. What is wrong in allowing online medicine sales?

The existing statute does not permit online sales of drugs. A high-powered committee of experts is examining this issue. We are awaiting their recommendations. The issue is very complex. The Europe, the US and other countries are struggling with this. We want to use this technology, but only after complying with all regulatory requirements.






The debate over net neutrality refuses to die down. In the past one year, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has rolled out three consultation papers on net neutrality, inviting views from all stakeholders - telecom operators, Internet companies, over-the-top players, experts and the public.

In December 2015, TRAI had floated a consultation paper on 'differential pricing for data services'. Based on the responses, it had come out with guidelines prohibiting telecom operators and Internet companies from offering or charging discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of the content accessed by a consumer. In March, it had issued another consultation paper on 'regulatory framework for OTT services', but we are still to hear from the telecom watchdog on that front. In fact, the paper was not followed by an open house discussion, which is an established process.

Its most recent consultation paper, released in late May, explores whether giving away free data is possible without violating its earlier regulations on differential data pricing.

In what seems like a rather uncomplicated issue, TRAI's approach has created confusion. "What's left to be said now," says a telecom analyst. A few experts BT spoke with are of the opinion that instead of coming out with several consultations, a comprehensive policy is required. While most industry players chose to remain silent, some are critical of TRAI's flip-flop. "It is observed that the authority is issuing a series of consultation papers on subsets (differential pricing, free data, Internet telephony) of the larger subject. By adopting a piecemeal approach and not addressing the larger subject at one-go is only adding ambiguity and uncertainty to the regulatory framework. We request the authority to take a holistic view on the subject," says a Broadband Indian Forum note.

There is no doubt that net neutrality is a tricky issue and regulators across the world have been struggling to establish a standard definition. Take the case of EU, for instance. BEREC, the regulator, recently released draft net neutrality guidelines (for consultation) that would cover all countries in the EU. It is reported that these draft guidelines have left huge holes, allowing zero-rating and throttling traffic. The consultation process will likely take care of these concerns.

The nature and type of services that the regulatory framework is required to cover are huge and growing at a rapid pace. It is extremely difficult to reach a definition that can cover all aspects. But bringing out several consultation papers, and subsequent guidelines on various subsets of net neutrality, could complicate it further. It is advisable TRAI comes out with a comprehensive guideline, which can be modified as and when required.


Turkey govt got back the country

ANKARA: Turkish authorities wrested back control of the country Saturday, after crushing a military coup by discontented soldiers seeking to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that claimed more than 250 lives.



After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan urged his backers to stay on the streets to prevent a possible flare-up of Fridays chaos in the strategic NATO member of 80 million people.



The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric who is Erdogans arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement amid concerns of the extent of the retribution.



Turks woke up early Saturday to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.



The situation is completely under control, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkeys top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.



Describing the attempted coup as a black stain on Turkeys democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.



General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters have been killed. Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters hopes. During a night where power hung in the balance, large crowds of flag-waving supporters of Erdogans ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime. We should keep on owning the streets tonight no matter at what stage (the coup attempt is) because a new flare-up could take place at any moment, Erdogan warned on Twitter on Saturday. Fridays putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul.



Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets. Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd. Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories. As protesters poured onto the streets, an AFP photographer saw troops open fire on people gathered near one of the bridges, leaving dozens wounded.



Soldiers also shot at protesters angrily denouncing the coup bid at Istanbuls Taksim Square, injuring several. There was chaos in Istanbul as angry crowds jeered the passing tanks, with much smaller numbers welcoming the troops.



The people are afraid of a military government, a 38-year-old man who gave his name as Dogan told AFP. Most of them have been in military service, they know what a military government would mean.



Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the coup bid. Erdogan, who flew back from the holiday resort of Marmaris to a triumphant welcome from supporters at Ataturk Airport, said the plotters will pay a heavy price for this act of treason.



The presidents critics have long accused him of undermining modern Turkeys secular roots and of sliding into authoritarianism - but he was believed to have won control of the military after purging elements who opposed him. Turkeys once-powerful military has long considered itself the guardian of the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates delivers the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Pretoria, South Africa, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Gates said that his foundation will invest another $5 billion in Africa over the next five years. (AP Photo)

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates said Sunday his foundation will invest another $5 billion in Africa over the next five years.

Gates delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture ahead of Mandela Day, when South Africans are encouraged to donate 67 minutes of their time to help others.

Gates is also in South Africa to attend a global AIDS conference that starts Monday.

Gates said the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has already invested more than $9 billion in Africa. Health is a major focus.

Gates warned that if the world doesn't come up with more creative ways to make HIV treatment and prevention accessible, "the hard-earned gains made against HIV in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 15 years could actually be reversed" as high birth rates continue.

He said Africa is the world's youngest continent in terms of demographics. "By 2050, 40 percent of the world's children will live on this continent," he said.

Still, he said Africa had made notable progress in fighting AIDS, saying that the last time South Africa hosted the global conference 16 years ago, only a few thousand Africans were on HIV drugs. At the time, the drugs were too expensive for many in the region hardest hit by the epidemic.

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates delivers the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Pretoria, South Africa, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Gates said that his foundation will invest another $5 billion in Africa over the next five years. (AP Photo)

South Africa now says half of its infected population of 6.8 million people is on treatment.

Gates noted that Mandela fought stigma by announcing publicly the death of his son from AIDS in 2005.

Gates' speech focused largely on youth and on how to achieve ambitious global development goals endorsed by countries last year.

In the only sharp words of his address, he said: "I get angry when I see that Africa is suffering the worst effects of climate change, although Africans had almost nothing to do with causing it."

Explore further AIDS summit in S.Africa to warn of lagging effort

 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Assistant Professor Kasper Jensen in the Quantop research groups laboratories at the Niels Bohr Institute where the experiments are carried out. Credit: Ola Jakup Joensen

The human body is controlled by electrical impulses in, for example, the brain, the heart and nervous system. These electrical signals create tiny magnetic fields, which doctors could use to diagnose various diseases, for example diseases of the brain or heart problems in young foetuses. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have now succeeded in developing a method for extremely precise measurements of such ultra-small magnetic fields with an optical magnetic field sensor. The results are published in the scientific journal, Scientific Reports.

Small magnetic fields from the human body can usually only be picked up by very sensitive superconducting magnetic field sensors that have to be cooled by liquid helium to near absolute zero (which is minus 273 degrees Celsius). But now researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have developed a much cheaper and more practical optical magnetic field sensor that even works at room temperature or at body temperature.

"The optical magnetic field sensor is based on a gas of caesium atoms in a small glass container. Each caesium atom is equivalent to a small bar magnet, which is affected by external magnetic fields. The atoms and thus the magnetic field are picked up using laser light. The method is based on quantum optics and atomic physics and can be used to measure extremely small magnetic fields," explains Kasper Jensen, assistant professor in the Center for Quantum Optics, Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Ultra sensitive magnetic field sensor

Seen at the top is a sciatic nerve from a frog. On the bottom left is the glass container with caesium gas, which is used to measure the magnetic field from the nerve. On the bottom right is the measured magnetic field, which is generated by the magnetic fields from the electrical impulses that flow through the nerve. Credit: Kasper Jensen, NBI

The researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have been developing the sensitive magnetic field sensor for several years in the Quantum research group laboratories.

The magnetic field sensor itself consists of a glass container, which has a channel that is approximately 1cm long and 1 mm wide. At the bottom of the glass container is caesium metal. Caesium evaporates into gas at room temperature and the gas atoms rise up into the small channel in the sensor head. Each caesium atom rotates around itself and the axis is like a tiny bar magnet. Now the sensor is held close to a nerve, which emits an electrical nerve pulse. The electrical pulse has a magnetic field that causes a change in the tilt of the axes of the caesium atoms and by sending a laser beam through the gas, you can read the ultra-small magnetic fields of the nerve signals.

The laboratory tests, which were carried out in collaboration with researchers from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, have shown that you can use the magnetic field sensor to detect the magnetic fields from the electrical impulses from the nervous system. The tests were done on the sciatic nerve from a frog, which in many ways resemble the nerves in the human body. For practical reasons, the nerve was removed from the frog before the tests, but it is also possible to pick up electrical impulses from live frogs or from humans.

The magnetic field sensor is made up of a glass container embedded with caesium metal. The caesium evaporates into gas at room temperature and the gas atoms rise up into the small channel in the sensor head. Each caesium atom is like a tiny bar magnet. Now the sensor is held close to a nerve, which emits an electrical nerve pulse. The electrical pulse has a magnetic field that causes a change in the tilt of the axes of the caesium atoms and by sending a laser beam through the gas, you can read the ultra-small magnetic fields of the nerve signals. Credit: Kasper Jensen, NBI

Measures without contact

The advantage of the optical sensor is precisely that the magnetic fields and electrical impulses can be safely and easily picked up at a distance of a few millimetres or centimetres  without the sensor actually coming into contact with the body.

"We expect that the sensor will be used for special medical examinations, where it is important for the sensor not to be directly in contact with the body, for example, for diagnosing heart problems in tiny foetuses. Here the magnetic field sensor is placed on the mother's abdomen and you can easily and safely detect the heartbeat of the foetus and you will be able to diagnose any heart problems at an early stage so that the foetus can get the right treatment quickly," explains Eugene Polzik, professor and head of Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute.

Eugene Polzik explains that you can calculate the speed at which the nerve impulses are moving from the measured signals. There are a large number of diseases where the nerves are damaged, for example, multiple scleroses, where the nerve impulses move more slowly than in people who are not ill. Other issues could, for example, be a number of eye diseases where you will be able to make the diagnosis without having to put electrodes on the eye or Alzheimer's, where you will be able to measure the electrical signals in specific nerve pathways.

Explore further Super sensitive measurement of magnetic fields

More information: Kasper Jensen et al. Non-invasive detection of animal nerve impulses with an atomic magnetometer operating near quantum limited sensitivity, Scientific Reports (2016). Journal information: Scientific Reports Kasper Jensen et al. Non-invasive detection of animal nerve impulses with an atomic magnetometer operating near quantum limited sensitivity,(2016). DOI: 10.1038/srep29638
A pair of Peregrine Falcons in Uptown, Chicago. Credit: Photo by Stephanie Ware, The Field Museum

Peregrine Falcons, in their normal habitat on isolated cliffs, mate for life. But some 25 pairs now nest on Chicago skyscrapers and bridges, and city living has them in much closer quarters than they used before humans dominated the landscape. A group of Field Museum and University of Illinois, Chicago scientists investigated whether typical breeding patterns hold true for these new city-dwellers and, in a paper published in PLOS ONE, confirmed that even in the big city, the birds that prey together, stay together.

"Peregrine Falcons that now live in the Chicago region are living in very different conditions than you'd normally see for these birds, so we wondered if the falcons' mating habits had changed too. They're in much closer proximity to each other than they'd be in a more rural environment, and we thought they might be more promiscuous with more potential mates nearby," explains co-author John Bates, Associate Curator of Birds at The Field Museum. "Each spring this population also has migratory Peregrines passing through on their way to all parts of Canada, so we didn't know what we were going to find, but it turns out that almost all of the mated pairs in the city remain monogamous through the years."

Peregrine Falcons nearly went extinct in the US in the 1960s due to thinning of their eggshells caused by the pesticide DDT. However, historic egg collections at the Field and other museums provided evidence for the harm caused by DDT, and it was banned. In the decades since, reintroduction efforts have enabled Peregrine Falcons to make a comeback in the Midwest, with populations thriving in urban areas in twelve states. Ninety percent of the breeding pairs in the Midwest nest on buildings and bridges in the Chicago area.

To determine if these breeding pairs in Chicago remained faithful to each other, the scientists used a combination of field observations and DNA testing. The Chicago Peregrine Program, a group run by Field Museum scientist Mary Hennen, monitors the nesting falcons in the city and collects blood samples from the young each year when she measures and bands them. Many of the falcons they observe have ankle bands to identify them, enabling researchers to observe which falcons are nesting together. In addition to these observations, the scientists compared blood samples from falcon chicks and adults to determine parentageDNA testing revealed that of the 35 broods tested, only one showed that the parents "cheated." Even this case the researchers believe what happened was that a male lost his mate and then that same season, paired with a new female who laid eggs that were not his.

"Whenever you have animals living in habitats that have been influenced by human development, you have to wonder how the animals' life histories will be altered," says Bates. "It's important to do studies like this one to see how birds are adapting to living in human environments, so that we can monitor changes through time."

Explore further Technology helps to track the peregrinations of peregrines
Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
Greater Glens Falls Democracy for American Chapter on Friday announced its endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The group had previously endorsed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary process.

"Our Democracy itself is at stake in this election. ... We cannot take a chance," said Patricia Dudley, a group member, in a press release.

Group coordinator Larry Dudley said Clinton has agreed to support many of Sanders' positions.

"It's wrong to ask someone to change their positions and then refuse to take 'yes' for an answer," he said, in a press release.

Democracy for American is the political advocacy organization that former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean founded.
LAKE GEORGE, New York and SHELBURNE BAY, Vermont  Mary Elizabeth Winn died on July 4, 2016, at The Residence at Shelburne Bay, Vermont, after a full life of 94 years. She was surrounded by her children, as they held her hands while listening to the fireworks right outside her window.

She was born Dec. 24, 1921 in Galesburg, Illinois to Maude Elizabeth (Aldridge) Hedgcock and Charles Bolton Hedgcock.

Mary was raised in the upper peninsula in Marquette, Michigan with her younger brother, Robert Lee Hedgcock. At the age of 20, her education at University of Northern Michigan was interrupted when she said, Yes to Oliver H. Winns marriage proposal in order to begin their lives together in Schenectady.- I took the hand that was offered to me, and traveled on from Schenectady. As Oliver was promoted in management at General Electric, they moved to varying towns, mostly within upstate New York and New Jersey. She devoted her time and exceptional talents to turning one house after another into beautiful homes in Schenectady, Skaneateles, Whitesboro, Glens Falls, Cazenovia, and then later in Marlton, New Jersey, Corona del Mar, California  and the one enduring place that continues to feel most like home to her children and grandchildren, the beloved cottage on Lake George.

Mary, an artist and poet all of her life, knew from the age of three that what she most wanted was to someday be blessed with a home, a strong marriage, and children to love. Married for 70 years, she raised four children who brought her life profound joy and purpose. Whenever she spoke of her family, she would light up with great pride and enormous humor. She was always a curious, exploring kind of learner, a self-made scholar, a ravenous reader, an observer, a philosopher, an insightful and reflective documenter through words and drawings, a perennial well-rounded student. She was also an artist  a painter of art and of poems, a maker of clothing for herself, her children and grandchildren, as well as the meticulously and beautifully dressed dolls in her extensive antique doll collection. She was a prolific painter of acrylics and watercolors, and her paintings continue to fill the walls within homes of her family and many friends.

At the age of 20, Mary took World War II-era flying lessons, one of only two women allowed in a class of ten. At the age of 83, she finished the college degree that had been cut short by her 1942 train ride to Schenectady to begin her life with Oliver. The final project of her Skidmore College Fine Arts degree  a book titled, Pictures of the Pinelands, expresses a young girls experience of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey in joyful childlike poems and beautiful watercolors. Although she did not live long enough to see the final product, Mary was happy to know that her second book of poems, The Wave of the Day, was in its final draft and due to come out soon.

Anyone who knew Mary could see the remarkable and wonderful woman that she was. The very depth of her character was of absolute kindness, a woman who made a decision to see the goodness in people, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and having only nice things to say. It was a core value that emanated from her throughout her life and one that she taught over and over to her children. She was the most generous, accommodating, and flexible of women, whose spunky feistiness enabled her to stand her guard in protection of others and herself when needed. She will be missed by everyone who knew her enormous strength, loyalty, and wisdom and was lucky enough to be touched by her kindness and love. We remember the days when she would sit in the sun room at the Lake George cottage for hours talking to friends and family who came to visit. A favorite family gathering was the bass dinner she would fry up when Oliver brought in his catch of the day. And we loved the odd shapes of her banana fritters as everyone tried to put names to them.

Mary leaves a devoted family of four children, Michael Lee (Caroline) Winn, Diana Winn Levine, Charles Barry (Tamara) Winn, and Elizabeth Winn. She leaves three granddaughters; Laura Lee Winn Kane, Jennifer Jean Winn (Jeffrey Preischel) and Jessamine Elizabeth Levine; two nephews, Kirtley Winn and Curtis Hugh Winn (Paulette); and her beloved Stephen DelVecchio and his daughters, Emma and Hope, and Philip DelVecchio (Jennifer) and their children, Parker and Pierson.

The family held a private gathering to celebrate her life through stories and the reading of her poetry. They also extend heartfelt thanks to the staff at Shelburne Bay, Home Instead, and the VNA hospice program for their compassionate care. In lieu of flowers, the family would welcome memories that friends would like to share.

The Wave of the Day

The wave of the day laps gently

And shifts bits of sand at the shore

Designing a lace-like encounter with time

That with the next wave is no more.

Storms of the season had changed the lay

Of a land familiar and dear

Yet the lace that ripples at waters edge

And traces a delicate untamed thread

Holds a beauty with all that is near,

M.E. Winn- March 21, 1979
QUEENSBURY  A Glens Falls man who was arrested in March for selling heroin in Queensbury pleaded guilty Wednesday in Warren County Court to a felony charge.

Patrick A. Boyer, 29, pleaded guilty to third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance, a felony, in connection with an arrest by State Police. He sold heroin to an undercover police officer of informant.

Boyer is being held in Warren County Jail pending sentencing by Warren County Judge John Hall on Aug. 24. He has two prior felony convictions, and could face up to 7 years in prison.
Fort Ann High School graduate Lily Roberts recently took first place in the national career and technical education competition.

Roberts took top honors in the Action Skills event at SkillsUSAs 52nd annual National Leadership and Skills Conference. The event was held in Louisville, Kentucky, from June 20-24.

Roberts competed against 27 students and won for her demonstration Creating Art by Combing STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) Technology and Ice. She performed a five- to eight-minute demonstration of how STEM is used to sculpt ice and also how those skills are used in culinary arts, according to a news release.

Roberts won $500 in prizes.

In June, Roberts received a completion certificate from the Culinary Arts and Hospitality program with Chef Charlie Jones at the Southern Adirondack Education Center in Hudson Falls.

She is the second career and technical education student from the area to win the national competition. MacKenzie Baker of Warrensburg won first place in 2010 for the medical assisting category.

Students won top spots at local, regional and state competitions to qualify for nationals. Also competing from the region were: Connor Lavoie of Whitehall: CNC milling, machine tool technology; Allison Vrooman of Fort Ann: nurse assisting, health occupations; and cosmetology students Tyler Vaughn and Emily Fox, from Granville, who competed as a team in the promotional bulletin board category.

Saratoga High School senior Maygan Carpenter, who is a criminal justice student at the F. Donald Myers Education Center, was elected as a New York State Officer secretary for Skills USA.
FORT EDWARD  One of the only questions Rebecca Bicksler has left about her great-great-great-grandfather Solomon Northup is, where is he?

In one way or another, he was here, back home, on Saturday.

The Fort Edward Historical Association held its 18th annual Solomon Northup Day on Saturday at the Old Fort House Museum, where Northup once lived.

The day and its events commemorated Northup, an African-American who was born free and lived throughout the region during the 1830s and 1840s, but was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.

He escaped enslavement in 1853 with the help of Henry B. Northup  a white local lawyer and friend of Solomon who belonged to the family his father had served  and wrote an account of his ordeal, 12 Years a Slave, which was published that year and adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2014.

His fate later in life has never been settled, his burial site never found  hence Bickslers question.

The days events included a walking tour of the neighborhood where Northup lived, led by museum director Paul McCarty, and a rendition of Northups story by longtime local re-enactor Clifford Oliver, with McCarty playing the role of Henry B.

About 20 people joined the tour, and around double that watched Olivers performance, which many attendees praised afterward.

Event participants hoped Northups story would help dispel stereotypes about whites and blacks in the 19th century, bring to light a shared local history and inform current racial issues in the country.

Northups neighborhood

With the ring of a bell, McCarty called the crowd gathered to take the tour to order.

Soon after, he took the group of sunhat-wearing visitors to various locales in the neighborhood, all somehow tied to Northups story: the site of a canal he probably worked on; the schoolhouse he likely attended as a boy; a warehouse he wouldve seen on his way to school.

In between  and sometimes over  the sounds of traffic, McCarty explained the historical background of each spot, its connection to Northup and what it might have looked and functioned like in the 1800s.

In your mind, you have to get rid of most of the buildings, he said.

While perhaps not so enthusiastic about the walk itself, many guests showed streaks of curiosity, peppering McCarty with questions along the way.

As the crowd walked between stops, Fred Smith of Glens Falls said his interest in Northups story had brought him out that morning.

We have some very significant history, he said. Its good for people to take advantage of something thats so immediately available.

Tom Bahr of South Glens Falls fell into that boat.

He had passed the museum a million times but on Saturday had finally decided to drop in.

Ive lived here forever, and you never learn enough, he said. Plus, his sister, Connie Marchetti, who was on the tour with him, had woke him up early.

Its nice to be part of history, she said.

After the tour, Bicksler, who is from Rochester, said the tour was really nice, really informative. It had been her first time taking the walking tour, though she had visited the museum her ancestor lived in before.

Its nice to come up this way to make some kind of attachment to who he was and where he lived, she said of the experience. Its nice to get a feel for your roots.

She thinks its important for people to learn about the history in their backyards.

You have to know where you come from and keep history alive, she said.

Some members of the crowd were disappointed with the tour  not because of its content, but because no African-Americans had accompanied it.

Some white tourists seemed to believe that African-Americans needed to be told about their own history.

Are you going to talk about the fact that there are no black people on this tour? an older white man asked the Post-Star reporter on the scene.

As the tour concluded and McCarty led the group back to the museum, most filtered behind the building to join others already seated, waiting for Olivers performance to begin.

Live-action autobiography

After introducing a photography exhibit of an African-American family from 19th-century Whitehall, Oliver, dressed in white cloth, donned his rumpled wide-brimmed hat.

Im coming to you as Solomon Northup, he said, transformed. Its good to be home.

An animated actor, Oliver told his audience about Northups life prior to his enslavement, often punctuating his remarks with draws across a violin, his characters instrument of choice.

His performance touched upon themes of race, slavery, the culture of 19th-century Washington County and a deep autobiography of Northup, all in the voice of the freedman turned slave.

At one point, when recounting Northups drugged abduction in Washington, D.C., Oliver grimaced and fell to his knees, stammering about the painful sickness that had erupted in his stomach.

And when he spoke of the moment Northup came to, he mimed chains around his wrists.

As Oliver spoke, Janet Hanson of Hudson Falls, a volunteer with the Fort Edward Historical Association for more than 30 years, explained the importance of hearing Northups story.

Because we live in the North Country, we dont realize what went on in the South, and for many years it wasnt part of a curriculum in our schools, she said, adding later, I dont know that people would relate it to racial problems today but they probably should.

She said she wasnt sure how much young people who are in the riots and so forth understand about slavery.

After his performance, Oliver, an African-American, said he hopes Northups life speaks to the goodness of white people in upstate New York during the 1800s and dispels the idea that all black people then were enslaved.

While the rest of the country was acting so bad, we were acting so well, he said.

Thats why he is baffled every time he sees a Confederate flag flying here, explaining that New York provided more soldiers to the Union Army during the Civil War than any other state.

Race aside, he thinks Northups story is one everyone in Fort Edward can appreciate.

This is our history, he said. This isnt black history.

This is us. We walk on the ground he walked on.
Editor's Note: The list of supervisors who voted against the geothermal resolution was corrected.

Warren County Board of Supervisors, Friday

Top Story:

* The Warren County Board of Supervisors voted down a request to extend the contract of a lawyer who is negotiating with energy company Siemens over possible litigation related to energy projects the county has with Siemens.

Friday's vote focused on a request to allow lawyer Lawrence Paltrowitz to negotiate on the county's behalf relative to a "geothermal" energy project at the county Municipal Center in Queensbury. Independent engineer Travis Whitehead believes that the project has not brought the guaranteed savings, as he also concluded about a Siemens natural gas cogeneration project at the former county nursing home.

Paltrowitz has been negotiation with Siemens for two years on the cogeneration project as well, and Whitehead and some supervisors have questioned the progress in light of the tens of thousands of dollars paid to Paltrowitz.

"You will have a tough time figuring out what good that money has been spent for," Whitehead told supervisors.

County Attorney Brian Reichenbach acknowledged Friday that Paltrowitz has not made any recent "substantive progress" in efforts to negotiate a solution.

Friday's vote focused on allowing Paltrowitz to negotiate on a geothermal project where the county has yet to hire an independent engineer to review the matter.

Six supervisors, Rachel Seeber from Queensbury, Edna Frasier from Hague, Matt Simpson from Horicon, Doug Beaty and Ron Montesi from Queensbury, Evelyn Wood from Thurman and Peter McDevitt, Matthew McDonald and Claudia Braymer from Glens Falls, voted against the measure.

In other matters before the board on Friday:

* After a lengthy discussion, the board decided to change health insurance brokers for the first time in 12 years. Jaeger & Flynn Associates Inc. was chosen over Capital Financial. Some supervisors questioned why a change was being made when Capital Financial seemed to be doing a good job. Bolton Supervisor Ron Conover said all of the bidders made good proposals, but Jaeger & Flynn's was viewed as best.

* The board accepted the resignation of coroner Gary Scidmore, effective at the end of August. The Personnel and Finance Committee will look into finding a replacement. The county has three other coroners, who are elected officials.

* Queensbury Supervisor Rachel Seeber praised the efforts of new county attorney to assist supervisors with legal questions.

"You've done a fabulous job, hit the ground running and made a great impact," she said.

* Warrensburg Supervisor Kevin Geraghty, chairman of the county board, said he plans to convene a meeting in the coming months involving towns that want to work together to improve emergency medical services.

* Glens Falls Supervisor Peter McDevitt spoke out on behalf of the Council for Prevention, which has led the effort to combat opioid addiction but has not seen municipal funding increases despite the additional workload.

Next meeting: Various committees, Wednesday, beginning at 9:30 a.m.

-- Don Lehman
My brother called while I was at work Thursday evening.

I told him I was busy.

I told him there had been an attack in France and the front page needed to be changed.

What is going on in the world? he wondered aloud. Things were so much better when we were growing up.

I stopped him.

I reminded him of the race riots in the 1960s, of our cities burning, church bombings in the south, civil rights workers murdered by the KKK, out-of-control crime in New York City, the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., Vietnam, murders at the Munich Olympics and Watergate.

I told him I wasnt so sure the good old days were so good.

There has always been evil in this world.

There has always been terrorism.

But of course this feels different, more indiscriminate than ever before.

The carnage is so relentless, so random, we have to put it behind us if we want to live our lives.

Eighty-four dead in Nice.

Fifty dead in the Orlando nightclub shooting last month.

Thirty-five dead in Brussels airport bombings in March.

Sixteen dead in the San Bernardino attack in December 2015.

One-hundred thirty-seven dead in mass shootings in Paris in November 2015.

Nine dead in a Charleston church shooting.

Twelve killed in Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015.

Thirteen dead in a Washington Navy Yard shooting in 2013

And 20 children and six teachers massacred in Newtown, Connecticut.

No rhyme or reason to any of it. Each massacre a little different than the last and almost impossible to pin down a root cause for the insanity.

Its daily around the world in places like Pakistan, Kenya, Tunisia, Nigeria, Iraq and Afghanistan, where many of the horrors receive almost no media coverage.

So where do we go from here?

You know we are not going to make sense of it.

Not when there is a mad man trying to massacre families on vacation.

You know there is no political solution to root out all the hate in the world.

You know there is no way to be totally safe.

According to one study, there were 851 terrorist incidents worldwide in 1970. In 2015, there were 14,806 incidents causing 38,422 deaths.

I apologize, my dear brother. I guess you were right.

Ken Tingley is editor of The Post-Star and may be reached via email at tingley@poststar.com.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrands appearance in Hoosick Falls last week could very well be the turning point for the small town in Rensselaer County to get the help it needs.

It has been two years since it was discovered that the Hoosick Falls water supply had been contaminated with perfluorooctanoic acid, a chemical used in non-stick coatings, by the Saint-Gobain and Honeywell companies.

Residents made it clear in the town hall meeting hosted by Gillibrand that they remain frustrated about the states response and lack of concern about their health.

Sen. Gillibrand, wiping away tears at times, said she would like the state to pass new legislation that would allow residents affected by the contamination to receive monitoring in the long term, much in the way Ground Zero first-responders were monitored after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City.

At first glance, it seems like a good idea, but detailed studies of how much the contamination has impacted residents health could take decades. The long-term health effects of PFOA have not been studied to anywhere near the extent of something like lead.

In addition, the comparison to first responders at Ground Zero doesnt work. First responders experienced a far more intense initial exposure and the effects surfaced soon afterward.

Regardless, the visit by a sitting U.S. senator got Hoosick Falls residents attention and action from their state Legislature.

It was clear at the town hall meeting that many Hoosick Falls residents are at the end of their ropes with the foot-dragging at the state level.

The response has been so bungled that a congressional oversight committee rode to the rescue this past week and demanded documents from the Cuomo administration related to the water contamination.

You know you are in trouble when Congress is the cavalry.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, questioned why the state had told residents that their water was safe.

It is an excellent and overdue question that residents deserve to have answered.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has defended the actions of his administration on one hand, while wondering why the EPA has not done more. Congress is asking that question, too.

What we fear now is that every politician facing re-election in November  that would be the entire state Legislature  is now screaming to get answers for Hoosick Falls while making themselves look good.

Until the federal government got involved, the New York State Legislature didnt want to do anything.

While Hoosick Falls residents have been able to count on Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin to fight for hearings in the Assembly, their representative in the Senate  Sen. Kathy Marchione  has been asking for a task force instead. But nothing came of that either.

When your own elected representative shows little inclination to get to the bottom of a serious health crisis in her own district, you know you are in trouble.

To say Sen. Marchione has been indecisive would be kind. In June, she proposed legislation that would allow people harmed by contamination to bring a lawsuit against the polluters. But a day later, she amended the legislation, essentially gutting the bill.

Hoosick Falls residents called her a Benedict Arnold on social media and environmentalist/actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted her actions were disgusting.

Marchione didnt stick to her guns long, doing another about-face the next day and saying the original bill was her top priority.

With the outcry mounting at the federal level, our state political leaders did what they do best  they tried to save face.

Days before Gillibrands appearance, the state Assembly overcame its initial reluctance to hold hearings on the crisis in Hoosick Falls and moved forward.

Two days later, just minutes after Sen. Gillibrands town hall meeting ended, the state Senate announced it would hold hearings as well.

Better late than never.

What Hoosick Falls residents should especially fear is that the politicization of the water contamination issue will lead to lots of empty promises right up until the day after the election.

The question were asking, and we suspect the people of Hoosick Falls are asking, is not what took them so long, but whether any of this will get them the help they need.

Local editorials represent the opinion of The Post-Star editorial board, which consists of Publisher Terry Coomes, Controller/Operations Director Brian Corcoran, Editor Ken Tingley, Projects Editor Will Doolittle and citizen representative Tom Portuese.
Speaking at the launch on Friday, July 15, Minister of Food and Agriculture Alhaji Mohammed Muniru Limuna called on the private sector to partner government to invest in the sector.

Investing in agriculture is 11 times more efficient in reducing poverty than other sectors.

There is no doubt that increased agriculture production can save the country foreign exchange, generate employment and considerably improve food security in the country, the former Northern Regional minister said.

On her part, the Deputy Minister of Fisheries and Aquaculture Benita Sena Okity-Duah entreated the youth to venture into fishing as a result of the deficit the country suffers.

This means opportunities are sill wide for our teeming youth to enter into fish farming especially fish peak production, production of fish such as tilapia, catfish and shrimps, she said.

Speaking on how the best farmer will be awarded, Chairman of the Planning Committee, Dr Ahmed Alhassan Yakubu, who is also a Deputy Minister of Agriculture said We expect to award a particular farmer whose singular effort introduced a particular variety of yam into northern Ghana and is contributing significantly to the advancement of the crop in the region.
According to President of the Advertising Association of Ghana, Joel Nettey, the aim of the bill is to sanitize advertising practice in Ghana.

"It is our sincere believe that this bill will in no small way help bring sanity into our industry as a whole and we look forward to it.

"In the interim, we continue to self-regulate and I call on all members to live and practice the highest standards and ethics in our noble profession.

In his address to sector players at AGAs Annual General Meeting here in Accra, Mr. Nettey added that,

" The bill is the surest way to ensure that only true professionals remain within our industry and we effectively weed out the fly-by-night pretenders who give our profession a bad name."

2015/2016 appears to have been a productive here for the association as it hosted the world of advertising and marketing communications in Accra in a leadership conference under the theme: "Africa Rising - The New Consumer Generation."
"There is absolutely no reason to cut anybody, and it seemed to us that it is part of the gender imbalance that has always existed in these communities which are based on patriarchy. I think it's child abuse. It's gender-based violence, it's a human rights violation, and I think it's something all of us must collaborate, and work together to stop, he said.

While he said there was government legislation to ban the practice, there needed to be more done on the ground with sustainable campaigns.

The United Nations say more than 200 million women and girls around the world have undergone the procedure, where parts of the female genitals are removed, and estimate a further three million are at risk of being mutilated.

This is the first time the UN has called it child abuse, previously it has called it a human rights violation.

It is practiced in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

The UN has previously said in Ghana 1.5 percent of girls aged 15-19, and 6.5 percent of women aged 45-49 have been subjected to female genital mutilation between 2002 and 2013.

A report in Ghana in 2001, by the US Office of the Senior Coordinator for International Women's Issues said the extent of the practice in Ghana as a whole is limited, generally practiced among a few groups in northern Ghana. There are also some migrants from neighbouring countries who now practice it in southern Ghana.

It said it was most prevalent in the Upper East Region, and practiced regularly in remote parts of the Northern Region, Upper West Region and northern Volta Region.

In the southern part of Ghana it is practiced among migrants from the northeastern and northwestern parts of Ghana, from Mali, Togo, Niger, Burkina Faso and other neighboring countries. It crosses religious boundaries.

It is performed due to traditional tribal beliefs, the report found, as some believe it leads to cleanliness and fidelity of the woman. Others believe it will increase fertility and prevent the death of first-born babies. It is also seen as a way to suppress a womans sexual desires and make her less promiscuous.
He said many fire hydrants are dry, while unapproved structures have also been mounted on some of the hydrants.

He emphasized that the Fire Service looks at the specification of installing the hydrants and that every community is supposed to have one hundred meter interval hydrants along the roads and within communities.

However, there are a lot of communities that do not have one so fire fighters "get into these places and there are no water to fight, he lamented to pulse.com.gh.

He continued to reveal that because there are no hydrants readily available for the personnel to use, they are forced to use the water in the tenders which within about 15 minutes are exhausted.
The ministry through the minister, Hanna Tetteh in the advent of a failed coup attempt in Turkey, which left at least 265 people dead and more than 1,440 others injured said, "Wherever we have an Embassy the first point of call for our citizens in distress should be the Ghana Embassy in their country of residence."

In a tweet, she said although some Ghanaians have resorted to the media to make their plight known to attract help, that alone will not be enough to draw the attention of the appropriate authorities to come to their aid, hence the need to register with the embassies.

She said, "We also ask Ghanaians to register with the Embassy because in the event of any unfortunate incident, it makes it easier to reach you".

More here: 1

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the Turkish army must be cleansed after an act of treason".

"Calling a radio station in Ghana when an event happens may make for a great news headline, but is not the fastest way to get you help".
Lawyer Rudolf Nsowine polled 4337 votes to win the slot to contest for the seat in the upcoming general election on the NDC's ticket.

The incumbent Member of Parliament for the constituency Abuga Pele polled 4277 votes whilst the third contestant polled, Jonathan Nyaaba, had 825 votes.

Initially some delegates agitated for the creation of an extra polling station at the Kurugu electoral area to enable those commuting from long distance areas to cast their votes, which the executive complied with.
The two groups are Bawumia Youth for Change linked to the opposition New Patriotic Party and Zaadiaya Youth; associated with the governing National Democratic Congress and Abubakari Abdullah; the Regional Minister who doubles as Member of Parliament for the area.

The two groups faced off after they laughed their campaigns simultaneously and at venues close to each other. Unsurprisingly, the political parties have traded blame about who started the confrontations.

Some young men have sustained various degrees of injury.

According to the local police, patrol teams are moving through the town to identify and immediately quell any further outburst between the youth groups.

During elections, unofficial groups associated to political parties and candidates spring up. They are usually made of up young men who wield some form of influence in their communities. Political parties seeks to attract these groups with various favours in order to gain their allegiance and votes.
We are committed to running an inclusive government using the best men and women no matter where they come from, no matter what their religion is, no matter their part affiliation. We want the best for Ghana and only the best and selfless will serve in our administration.

To the PPP, competency matters. Being the best matters. Incorruptibility important and is paramount, Dr. Nduom said.

He asked Ghanaians not to waste their vote on people who promise and do little.

The business mogul believes that even though previous regimes have done their best, their best is not good enough.

And so, here we are in 2016, a nation divided; poverty in all its forms that still persists, preventable diseases like malaria, cholera, pneumococcal meningitis and so on and so forth, are still with us. Unemployment, high taxes, dumsor; they are still terrorising us.
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Ambode made the disclosure at a Youth Empowerment Programme organised by the `Eleniyancare Leadership Foundation in Epe, Lagos state featuring over 1,000 youths drawn from across the state.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the empowerment programme is entitled: "Unlocking the Potentials Within: Making your Ideas Work."

The governor, who was represented by Prince Babatunde Durosimi-Etti, said that the fund would soon be released to only deserving creative entrepreneurial youths as loan.

"His Excellency has said that the disbursement procedure of the fund would soon be out.

"I am aware the board had met with various institutions, they have completed their processes, and they are just putting finishing touches to it.

"There will be opportunity for start offs. There will be opportunity for existing artisans and entrepreneurs and in addition, there will be opportunity for small businesses.

"Ideas, creative and innovations are the prerequisites, opportunities are there, and if you look around your environment the opportunities are there.

"It is going to reach every Nigerian that is eligible; that is creative irrespective of the business area. You just need to be creative.

"Whether we like it or not, we live in a competitive environment.

"The opportunities are there for those that are willing to harness the opportunities, of course they will be able to take the advantages in it."

According to him, the fund only attracts three per cent interest from the beneficiaries.

He, therefore, called on youths to have creative mind and thinking to be able to contribute their quotas to the socio-economic growth and development of the society.

NAN recalls that the fund is part of the 2016 budgetary allocation of the state government to provide empowerment for the unemployed residents, including the youths.

In his address of welcome, Olulade said that youths were firebrands with numerous potentials and skills ready to positively affect the world.

He charged the participants to strive to be employers of labour rather than employment seekers.

"I am inspired by my humble background to start a youth-based foundation to bridge the gap between the youths and their aspirations. Youths should be seen as assets and not liabilities.

"This programme is one of the focal points of my foundation. The summit is one of the many opportunities that would come from Eleniyan Foundation for our youths.

"I charge you to be ready to hit the world. It is time for young people to shift from lack of job to creating something on their own," he said.

According to him, if the youths can look at their innate talents, they will discover that they have something to offer the world.

The discussion session featured personalities such as Chief Dele Momodu, Desmond Elliot, Chioma Chukwuma and Kate Henshaw, among others.
They called on the government to probe the ex-Chief of Army Staff and interior minister, Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazzau,Gen. Azubuike Ihejirika and Gen. Kenneth Minimah.

The group also alleged that the government is trying to cover up some information from the arms deal probe.

PWDI cited the minister of information, Lai Mohammeds statement where he said only the report of the audit on arms deals from 2011  2015 was released as proof of governments cover up.

They wondered why the arms deals from 2007  2010 has not been investigated, and the report released.

Daily Post reports that the groups spokesman, Danladi Abbas, issued a statement saying Questions that readily come with this addendum to his previous statement are: what manners of documentations are done in our Defence sector? Is it that hard or soft copies of procurement documents of 2007  2010 are not available one year after a panel was set up to look at and scrutinize them? What procedures were deployed to get the 2010  2015 documents that couldnt be applied for the preceding years?

How does it portray us to the world that Nigeria cannot keep and retrieve a seven-year old record in its defence system and still struggling to locate and collate them one year after it embarked on a search? Lai Mohammeds follow-up statement, apparently an afterthought and perhaps unknown to him, has dimmed the pride of our soldiers, portraying them as untidy, lackadaisical and careless. This is certainly not true of them.

General Abdulrahman Dambazzau took over from General Luka Yusuf in 2008 and left in September 2010. Are we saying that during his almost three years as Chief of Army Staff, documentations were neither properly done nor well preserved(when done)? Or that nothing was procured ? If things were bought, were they done verbally? That itself would be a malfeasance. Were they eaten up by Wharf rats or consumed by unrecorded inferno?

We are aware that the report presented to the President for approval was a summary distilled from an enlarged report. We challenge the Minister of Information to publish that volume and its appendix.

The irony is that Generals Azubuike Ihejirika and Kenneth Minimah have in between them over 30 items of misdemeanors slammed against them, ranging from alleged misappropriation, misapplication and negligence. What about all the petitions that were written, sent in and acknowledged about this 2008/2010 regime at the Army headquarters. We are aware there were about 26 petitions last year alone.

We are not talking about those preceding that period, those written against him immediately he left office. From this Interim Report on the Army seen so far, nobody is sticking his neck out stoutly defending the immediate past two Chiefs as they would have their days either with the post fact- finding investigators or possibly the court to defend themselves on these allegations.

Recall that in setting up the 13-member panel last year, the Presidents spokesman Femi Adesina listed among others that the committee will specifically investigate allegations of non-adherence to correct equipment procurement procedures and the exclusion of relevant logistics branches from arms procurement under past administrations, which, very often resulted in the acquisition of sub-standard and unserviceable equipment.

Accordingly, the latitude of this mandate is enough to catch the smallest fish in the water. The books and equipment are there. They should go back and look at them. Nobody is prompting them to manufacture sins but the sins of those three years are certainly there.

It is beginning to look like once one takes up an appointment, he acquires immunity from probe and prosecution. Some former governors who are now ministers were petitioned but they have not been known or seen to have been investigated. A sitting Service Chief was quickly cleared by the Defence Minister hours after an online publication ran a story on acquisition of property outside the country.

More bizarre was the clearance by the Code of Conduct Bureau, an agency that has never before now honoured any inquiry directly or through the Freedom of Information Act. And now this. Is this regime shielding its Army Chief, Interior Minister, and others from scrutiny on alleged corruption and other infractions?

The former National Security Adviser (NSA), Sambo Dasuki has been on trial allegedly for misappropriating funds meant for purchase of arms.
According to Punch, the EFCC has seized four duplexes reportedly belonging to the Governor at Plot 100 Tiamiyu Savage Street, Victoria Island, Lagos state worth N364m.

The anti-graft agency also took over two properties on 32 Yedseram Street and 44 Osun River Crescent, Maitama, Abuja.

The anti-graft agency said Fayose acquired the properties through two proxies, Abiodun Agbele, and his sister, Moji Ladeji.

The EFCC arrested Agbele for allegedly collecting funds from former Minister, Musiliu Obanikoro, which he gave to Fayose.

Daily Post reports that the anti-graft agency also revealed that the Ekiti Governor acquired the properties in just 180 days as Governor of Ekiti.

A source who reportedly spoke to The Nation said We have discovered that he paid for the houses through his associates company, De-Privateer Limited of Agbele.

De-Privateer remitted slush funds into three accounts including FCMB (0519693019), First Bank of Nigeria (1000070240) and Zenith Bank (1014016919).

The payments were made as follows: First BankN40m (29/1/15); N39.5m (30/1/15); N132.5 (30/1/ 15); N3.2m (4/2/15); N980, 000(4/2/15); N200m (17/2/15); N47m (13/2/15); N50m (13/2/15).

The lodgements in an account in Zenith Bank (1014016919) included N42.5m (9/4/15); N25m (23/4/15); and N229m (6/3/15).

About N200 million was paid into FCMB account 0519693019 on March 9, 2015.

Governor Ayo Fayose has however said he is not moved by EFCC's attempts to discredit him.
Fayose also alleged that anyone close to Buhari cannot be probed even if the person looted funds.

The Ekiti Governor in a statement issued by his New Media Aide, Lere Olayinka said There are many petitions relating to the defence from 2007 that are being discarded, the question is why? There are several petitions against APC leaders that are not being looked into, the question is why?

Fghting corruption and targeting only opponents of the president is in itself corruption.

Buharis Minister of Interior, Major General Abdulrahman Dambazau (rtd) was Chief of Army Staff between 2008 and 2010 and the current Chief Of Army Staff, Major General Tukur Buratai served as Director of Procurements, Defence Headquarters, from 2012 till May 2015."

Adding that It is a fact that the committee in its terms of reference said it queried all procurement from 2007 to 2015. Even the Press Release issued was titled; Third Interim Report of the Presidential Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement from 2007 to 2015.

First paragraph of the committee report also indicated that it used 2007-2015 as reference, stating that the committee analysed procurement contracts awarded by or for the Nigerian Army between 2007 and 2015.

Questions Nigerians must now begin to ask President Buhari and his government are: where is the report of Presidential Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement relating to 2007 to 2010? Who doctored the committee report and why?

Lai Mohammed said the Committee would commence the audit of procurement from 2007 to 2010 as soon as the necessary documents are available, it is necessary that Nigerians are told who the custodians of the documents are. Why were documents on procurement from 2011 and 2015 available and those of 2007 to 2010 not available?

Early this year, we were told that an ally of President Buhari and chieftain of the APC, Brig. General Jafaru Isa (rtd) refunded N100 million of the N170 million he allegedly received from ex-NSA, Sambo Dasuki."

The Ekiti Governor also said Jafaru Isa who was a member of the 19-man Buhari Transition Committee was released after he was allegedly assisted by the Presidency to refund N100 million to the anti-graft commission and since then, nothing has been heard about the case. He was not charged to court like others.

It took the Ministry of Defence and ths Code of Conduct Bureau only one week to clear Buratai but others from the opposition party would be languishing in prison while EFCC go about fishing for evidence against them.

Like I and other well-meaning Nigerians have maintained, fighting corruption is a good idea but the moment documents of probe panels and being doctored to shield those seen as the Presidents men, the entire purpose of the corruption fight has been defeated.

The international community must therefore prevail on President Buhari to stop acting like the grandfather of corruption in Nigeria by making the anti-corruption war all-inclusive instead of this clear persecution of his perceived political enemies, and the first step to demonstrate that will be the immediate release of report of the Presidential Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement covering 2007 to 2015.
The governors made the call at the end of the forums meeting held in Benin on Saturday.

Chairman of the forum and Imo Governor, Rochas Okorocha, who read the forums communique urged Nigerians to support President Muhammadu Buhari in the face of present difficulties and challenges in the country.

While saying the trying moments would soon be over, the forum said that members also deliberated on the forthcoming Ondo elections and the need for the party to field credible candidate.

The forum explained that while the party had constituted a committee for the Ondo election, it disclosed that a national election campaign council had been inaugurated for the Edo election.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that members of the forum also paid a courtesy visit on the Crowned Prince of Benin Kingdom, Eheneden Eradiauwa, the Edaiken N Uselu.

At the palace, Okorocha said that it was a truism that governance was continuous, hence the need for a successful governor to have a good a successor.

He noted that since the present administration in the state was about to end, hence the need to introduce the partys standard bearer to the palace.

The governor further said that they were in the palace for royal blessings for the candidate.

In his response, the Crowned Prince acknowledged and appreciated the performance of Oshiomhole.
Commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources in the state, Mr Tim Dichie, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lokoja.

He said that the administration of Gov. Yahaya Bello was fully ready to give necessary support to all farmers in the 21 local government areas of the state to facilitate massive food production.

"I can assure you that the governor is very committed to what we are doing in our ministry and he is always ready to give us his total support.

"We are going to use every platform to support farmers in terms of funding, seedling, processing, harvesting, storage and marketing to boost food production in Kogi and the nation.

"As a commissioner, I have contacted all the stakeholders involved for their cooperation in making agriculture a business hallmark in the state.

"We will ensure that all the past challenges facing farmers in the state are adequately addressed to ease access to funds and farm inputs," he restated.

He explained that the database would give equal opportunity to every registered farmer to easily access other government's programmes for farmers.

Agriculture is the life wire for development of any state or nation. We must be able to feed ourselves conveniently and also feed other states.
Babandede said this on Saturday in Abuja at an interactive session with newsmen in Abuja.

According to him, it takes more than goodwill to patrol our borders, we need equipment, we need training and we need the cooperation of our partners.

"I can assure you that we have already started the process of ensuring improved border patrols.

We have started specialised training for our officers and we are also equipping them with patrol vehicles and other gadgets needed for surveillance, he said.

He said that he was also studying the proposal on the use of the e-border system in the country, which entails the deployment of technology and surveillance across the borders.

"You cannot talk about some sophisticated surveillance equipment at the borders when you dont have the well trained personnel and patrol vehicles to even apprehend the culprits he said.

The Immigration boss said the NIS was also working with the Nigeria Police Force and INTERPOL, so as to have access to the International Police (INTERPOL) I-24/7 database portal.

According to him, this will facilitate success in the current war against terrorism and other organised crimes in the country.

To win the war against terrorism, insurgency and other organized crimes it has become imperative for the Nigeria Immigration Service to be granted access to the INTERPOL I-24/7 portal.

The INTERPOL I-24/7 network enables the 190 member countries to search and cross-check data of suspected criminals, wanted persons, stolen or lost travel documents within seconds, he said.

On the herdsmen/farmers clashes in the country and the possibility of non Nigerians perpetrating the violence, he said, that he was already working with relevant government agencies to ensure that all foreigners in the 774 LGAs are registered for proper monitoring.
18 Commissioners of Police were promoted to Assistant Inspectors-General of Police. others include 37 Commissioners of Police and nine Deputy Commissioners of Police.

The PSC chairman, Mike Okiro said the promotions was in line with the commissions resolve to promote professionalism and re-position the force.

According to Punch, Okiro congratulated the officers and demanded from them hard work and dedication to duty; He said the commission will hold any of them personally responsible for any failure in the discharge of their duties.

The Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris reportedly urged President Muhammadu Buhari to retire 30 senior officers of the force.
The EFCC grilled Okupe following revelations from their investigations, that undefinedbut was later allowed to go home on health grounds.

Punch reports that he said I was born with sinus bradycadia, a non-disease based slowness of the heart. It precluded me from vigorous exercise from childhood but I have by Gods grace been able to live a normal and active life.

With age the slowness grew worse and life threatening. I sought medical help and went through a procedure at the Arrhythmia Cardiac Research Centre in Atlanta, where this defect was corrected. It was just a year ago and I am still under satellite monitor from the USA. This is what I revealed to the EFCC and they made it a public issue.

Shedding more light on the funds he allegedly collected from the former NSA, Okupe said The initial N50m was approved by the President to be paid to me from his security vote. N10m was to furnish my rented living apartment and another N10m for my office. The balance N30m was approved as take-off grant.

The N10m I received from the ONSA monthly was to run my office, pay salaries of staff, including overheads, pay expenses for our numerous press conferences, pay for publications in newspapers, magazines, local and foreign, television programmes, bulletins, and media consultants who assist and facilitate our work. I had about 23 staff, 11 were graduates out of which five were masters degree holders.

The second N50m was approved again by Mr. President when I reported to him that the monthly allowance had been cut from N10m to N5m and that I was no longer in position to keep running a one-hour NTA network programme called INSIGHT which was aired 9-10am every Friday.

We paid NTA about N1.2m monthly for airtime. Two presenters were paid N600,000 monthly. We paid for tapes and editing per programme. Besides we also pay honorarium for guests either directly or in form of hotel bills for those outside Abuja, or transportation.

This cost averagely N500,000 weekly or about N2m monthly. All in all we spend about N4m monthly on the programme. Mr. President promised to help with the expenses. About a few months later when we had incurred some debts the NSA sent me this N50m which was to cover the cost of the programme for 12 months.

Adding that his company, Romix soilfix, also bidded for, and won a contract for the construction of rural roads in Niger State worth N76.5m.

He also said the job has not been completed due to lack of funds.

Okupe said The job is still ongoing. The relationship of this to my service as senior special assistant to President is still not clear.
Obasanjo made the call at the First Eminent Persons Business Lecture entitled: Agribusiness: Time to Act is now'.

The lecture was organised by the University of Ibadan, School of Business (UISB), in collaboration with International Institute of tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan.

"It is now time for the country to move into agriculture as there is decline in oil prices, inadequate food supply, need to create employment, raw material for industrialisation, among others.''

The former president said agribusiness was a good strategy for economic development, wealth creation, job creation and huge source of foreign exchange.

He also said that attention should be given to agriculture at the highest political level.

"Adequate infrastructure for transportation and storage must be provided; there should be stability in the price of agriculture commodities.

"Agriculture financing should be kept at single digit rate of interest, agri-business must be glamourised to make it attractive to youths.

"Attention should not be given to professional courses alone in universities, adequate support must be given to agricultural research; we should adopt best practices from within and outside Nigeria.

"There should be creation of agro-service centres within reasonable distance for the farmers, we should add value to our foods to maximize returns from our investment,'' he said.

Obasanjo, a farmer, said that the decline in oil might be a blessing in disguise to wake up Nigerians to the importance of agriculture,'' he said.

Gov. Abiola Ajimobi of Oyo state represented by the states Commissioner for Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development, Mr Oyewole Oyewumi, said that the government was focused on the transformation of the agriculture sector.

Ajimobi said the state had developed an agriculture initiative programme as agriculture was an important factor in the development of the state.
They also want the court to declare that 'by virtue of the provisions of Section 4 (a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2011, the Defendants are under a binding legal obligation to provide the Plaintiff with up to date information relating to the following:

'To widely disseminate, including on a dedicated website, information about the names of high ranking public officials from whom public funds were recovered since May 2015, and the circumstances under which stolen public funds were returned.'

Premium Times also reports that SERAP had earlier made a FREEDOM OF Information request to the minister of information, Lai Mohammed, asking for 'information about the names of high ranking public officials from whom public funds were recovered and the circumstances under which funds were recovered, as well as the exact amount of funds recovered from each public official.'

President Muhammadu Buhari, during his maiden media chat in December 2015, said that names of those who returned looted public funds would not be divulged, pending the determination of cases in courts.
Members of St. Philips Catholic Parish, Baki Iku, went to pray in the Church and the angry Muslims came to disrupt their prayers saying they were not supposed to pray on Friday.

They said Friday is their day of prayer, adding that Christians should stick to praying on Sunday alone.

Vanguard reports that the Vicar-General of the Diocese, Rev. Fr. Luka Sylvester Gopep, said Sometime around 2pm, some Muslim youths in their hundreds left their mosque after their Friday Jumat prayer and rushed to the church premises, climbed the wall and destroyed everything in the church: the windows, the altar, musical instruments, the chapel.

The security man in the church premises was beaten to pulp.

Some women who were holding a prayer meeting were chased away. The seminarian who is resident in the premises was also beaten up and chased away.

Francis Emmanuel, a 41-year-old carpenter, was stabbed by a group of Muslim youths in Kaduna state for eating during the Ramadan fast.
However, things seem to be getting worse, rather than better, especially in Nigeria.

According to the General Secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Rev. Musa Asake, this could be because there is a conspiracy to kill all non-Muslims.

In an interview with Bayo Akinloye of Punch, the reverend said the incessant killing of non-Muslims prove that the Buhari-led administration is not concerned with the increasing loss of Christian life.

"From the way I see things happening, there is a grand plan to wipe out Christians in this country but by the grace of God it will not come to pass. That is why I am saying if the government is not going to protect us, then we have no choice but to protect ourselves. We will not continue to fold our hands and accept being killed for no reason. These killings are going on as usual and we have got to a point to say enough is enough. Everybody has to defend themselves", he said.

ALSO READ: Muslim youths attack Catholic Church in Niger

Rev. Asake also referred to the recent killing of Redeemed Christian Church of God preacher, Eunice Elisha, allegedly killed by Muslim extremists.

"I dont why this is happening; we have security agencies in Nigeria. But when a Christian is killed, they (Muslims) either say its due to blasphemy or they dont give a reason at all. After the killings, we are often told some people were arrested  thats the best we hear. And, after the arrest, nothing happens again. As Christians were going through a difficult time. Therefore, my reaction to the killing of the RCCGs pastor is that it was an ugly incident. It ought not to have happened. Theres never been a situation where a Christian will go and kill somebody for no reason but Christians are being killed Muslims  let me say by extremists; because not all Muslims are involved. Then, we are also faced with Fulani herdsmen who are killing people and wiping out villages as if we dont have a government in the country. It is a very sad situation", he added.
The action of Currie, who works as a barista and bar tender at a restaurant located in Hibiscus Coast, Auckland, has caused quite a shock for everyone.

His father however thinks he always had the tendency to be famous in a text message to him.

Speaking to Newsbeat, he said, "When I resigned, I didn't tell my manager I was going out into the world to hunt Pokemon,"

"But after my story got picked up I gave him a courtesy call to update him just in case the media contacted him."

"I got an absolutely lovely response, 'Good on you Tom. It is really funny. I hope everything is OK. Have fun for your Pokemon trip',

"My dad sent through a text message saying he always knew I would be famous."

His decision to make such a sudden move has also paid off.

Currie mentioned that his status has been elevated since making the announcement.

"I have been approached by a few other Pokemon trainers who recognised me and wanted a chat,"

"I have had people asking for photos and one guy even called me his hero for doing what I'm doing."

"I have received messages on Facebook from around the world, messages of support from America, Ireland, Canada, India and Nepal."

"The story has gone global, so no doubt I'll be getting a bit more fan mail."
"The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State.

"He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State, the statement said.

French authorities and media have yet to produce any evidence that the killer, Mohamed Bouhlel, was radicalised.

However, the interior ministry said it has started checking the claim.

Authorities had been working to find out what his motives were.

Meanwhile, he was not known to French intelligence sources for radicalisation.

Police sources said that the arrests, which came on top of two others since the killing including the attacker's wife, concerned his ``close entourage.

They were made in two different areas of Nice.

A Reuters reporter saw about 40 elite police raid a small apartment near the central station, where one individual was arrested.

The attack plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.

The truck zig-zagged along the seafront Promenade des Anglais for two kilometres as a fireworks display marking the French national day ended.
Heres the general outline of a new crime thriller: Bryan Cranston stars as this guy whos really pretty decent but realizes he may need to become involved in some dangerous, illegal activities. So he wears two faces  one, a regular fellow with a family; the other, a criminal who consorts with some of the worlds most violent drug dealers.

Nope, this isnt Breaking Bad on the big screen. Its The Infiltrator. You want to see this movie if you enjoy true-crime stories, nice ensemble performances and/or Cranston. Simple as that.

Cranston plays Robert Mazur, a narcotics agent who, in the 1980s, follows the money behind the pipeline of cocaine coming into the United States. He draws closer and closer to drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar, leaving his worried wife to wonder just how close to danger he will get in his effort to engineer one of the biggest drug busts in American history. His partner (John Leguizamo) urges him to consider what he might have to do to prove himself to the criminals around him.

Mazur must engage all kinds of personalities, most of whom have incredibly violent tendencies and other vices  to wit, Yul Vazquez (Captain Phillips) as a perverse, flamboyant drunk who is more aware than he seems to be.

Mazur, who always looks dapper, carries a suitcase, which is understandable because hes a money launderer. The suitcase holds a secret: a tape recorder that Mazur can star with the flick of an outer switch on the case.

Youre bound to be reminded of the likes of other films such as Donnie Brasco and Casino. The more Mazur becomes involved in the personal lives of this sophisticated criminal element, the more he realizes he is risking not just his own life but also the lives of his loved ones. Cranstons character is always on edge, and we feel his anxiety at every moment.

To build up the tension even more, he is assigned a bride-to-be: Kathy (Diane Kruger, Inglourious Basterds) is a federal agent on her first undercover assignment. Juliet Aubrey is terrific as Mazur's real-life wife who finds herself feeling jealous of the relationship her real-life husband develops with his faux love interest Kathy. Olympia Dukakis has a breezy comic-relief role as Mazurs good-natured aunt.

Mostly, the show is a spotlight for Cranston, who was nominated for an Oscar for his role in last years Trumbo. He may have another shot at a gold statuette. And youll be entertained while you watch him earn it.
DES MOINES  Two potential running mates for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton were in Iowa on Saturday, but neither offered so much as a peep on the subject.

Tom Vilsack, the U.S. ag secretary and former Iowa governor, and John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado, were in Des Moines for the summer meeting of the National Governors Association. Both have been named in national reports as possible selections as Clintons running mate.

Vilsack has served as U.S. ag secretary for the entire tenure of President Barack Obama, and is a longtime friend and political ally of Clinton.

Hickenlooper was one of several high-profile Democratic officials who recently met with Clinton at her Washington, D.C., home, according to a CNN report.

Vilsack and Hickenlooper both declined to comment about being potential Clinton running mates when asked by reporters Saturday.

Vilsack referred such questions to the Clinton campaign, and said because his trip to the governors meeting was for official business, he is prohibited from commenting on campaign issues.

Hickenlooper declined to comment on a series of questions about Clintons choice of a running mate.

Vilsack and Hickenlooper have been mentioned in recent national coverage of Clintons campaign, joining high-profile running mate candidates like U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Time Kaine of Virignia, and U.S. Sec. of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro.

Vilsack is viewed by Democrats as a safe and solid pick as a vice presidential candidate, but not an exciting one.

Hes also seen as an extremely competent, policy-oriented public servant with a big heart and a deep concern for public education. Vilsack would come with barely any controversies and is essentially guaranteed to not make any of his own during a campaign, wrote Pat Rynard, a former Democratic campaign staffer on his political website Iowa Starting Line.

Hickenlooper has befriended and held fundraisers for Clinton at his Denver home. While Hickenlooper would not comment on being reported as a potential Clinton running mate, during a brief interview he commented on the presidential race and the upcoming Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

Hickenlooper said he thinks Clinton will rally Democrats  including many of Bernie Sanders supporters  behind her candidacy because of what he sees as one of Clintons greatest strengths: her ability to unify.

Secretary Clinton is one of those people; shes got great social skills in terms of reaching out to people and making them feel heard, assuring them that their points of view will not be forgotten, Hickenlooper said. Shes a very, very gifted person at finding compromise, bringing people together and figuring out how do you keep moving forward.
CLEVELAND  Iowa Republicans have held onto the state's coveted leadoff position in the presidential selection process for the time being, but they will have to convince a panel of 11 Republicans before the slot is secured for 2020.

Steve Scheffler, head of the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition and one of two GOP national committee members from Iowa, said state leaders did not protest the commission's formation, but he plans to work with the party's national chairperson to get Republicans among the 11-member panel who are favorable to keeping Iowas first-in-the-nation status for nominating a presidential candidate.

"I think we'll be OK, but we're going to have to make the case all over," Scheffler said in an interview Sunday in advance of the Republican national convention that officially gavels into session Monday. "It's a much better scenario than having Iowa axed. Anytime you can survive another day  that's a good day for Iowa."

Prospects for dealing with challenges to the leadoff positions of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada in the party's rules committee  where Scheffler is a member  were deferred in favor of the study after a separate effort to unbind convention delegates by a minority faction opposed to having Donald Trump as the party's presidential nominee failed to muster the needed support.

Iowa delegate David Oman, a former state party chair from Des Moines, called the outcome to create the 11-member commission to study the nominating calendar for 2020 and make recommendations in two years "a soft landing" versus the sentiment by some to revamp the system.

However, an organization called Delegates Unbound still was insisting Sunday to fight the rules committee "power grab" that bound delegates, saying "such action would not be necessary if the presumptive nominee had the widespread support of the delegates"  noting more than 54 percent of Republicans voted against Trump in the nominating process.

Scheffler called the effort to unbind delegates "a lot of noise" from people wanting to gain attention for themselves or who "would rather burn the house down" than elect Trump. He predicted their effort would fail and that Iowa will announce during Wednesday night's convention that all 30 delegate votes are cast for Trump  a necessary step in the process of keeping first-in-the-nation status.

"Every Iowan should know that the blessing that we have, the privilege, the responsibility of being first in the nation is sought after my many," said Republican National Committeewoman Tamara Scott of Ankeny, who was taking a "wait-and-see" stance toward the study commission. "We take it very seriously, and we need to continue to do so."

Jeff Kaufmann, Republican Party of Iowa chairman, said Iowa's leadoff status was bolstered by the decision to bring several RNC officials to Iowa last February to view the caucus process firsthand at some of the state's 1,681 precinct sites  helping to dispel some of the problems that arose four years earlier when Mitt Romney initially was declared a close winner, but later it was determined that Rick Santorum had garnered the most Iowa support.

"I was holding my breath that (Feb. 1) night hoping it would be like perfection because I knew if it wasn't that that would be another avenue by which people would take a shot at us, and they still do, but that certainly bolsters our argument," Scheffler said. "It was just a phenomenal effort. I've been around a long, long time and I've never seen anything close to this."

Most of Iowa's delegates arrived at their hotel in the Cleveland suburb of Beachwood, Ohio, about 25 miles from the downtown convention site. The highlight of their pre-convention evening was a "Make 'Em Squeal" barbecue hosted by Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and a reception with fireworks at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame near Lake Erie.
Close your eyes and get into the purr-fect zone.

While she taught her first kitten yoga class on Saturday, Michelle Ladwig couldnt help herself.

The cat jokes might keep coming today, she said, while she turned on her usual playlist of yoga tunes.

While kittens wandered around the room during the Saturday-morning session at Quad-City Animal Welfare Center in Milan, there were equal parts posing and petting for the 25 yogis in attendance.

Well, almost equal.

There might be more cuddling and squeezing than actual yoga going on, Amber Moritz, of Rock Island, said. But whats better zen than a bunch of kittens in the room?

Moritz, a yogi and animal-lover, said the class was the best of both worlds.

When it comes to raising money for animals, Ill do anything, she said. This is pure excitement and pure happiness in one.

That's the goal of the class, said Stacey Teager, community services director at the shelter. She hopes to hold more in future months.

Its not as serious as yoga usually is, but there are still some calm moments, she said. You get to strengthen your body and also let some laughs out.

The class served as a fundraiser for the animal welfare center, a full-service, no-kill shelter serving the Quad-City area. A second shelter location that will be used for more pet surgeries is set to open Aug. 8 on 1st Avenue in Milan.

For Katy Nelson, who sported an Im a cat person T-shirt, the $15 entry fee was money well spent.

The yoga part doesnt seem as intimidating because you get to play with cats, Nelson, who lives in Port Byron, said. Your day really cant go wrong after this.

The positive vibes stretched into Rock Island on Saturday as the inaugural Radish Magazine Yoga Festival was held at the Holiday Inn. The three-day fest is the first of its kind in the Quad-Cities, said organizer Chris Cashion.

We saw all the wonderful students, teachers and studios in the area, and we just thought it was time, she said.

Libby Weaver, 19, a yoga instructor and student at Western Illinois University, said she faced a tough decision  whether to attend the kitten yoga class or the yoga festival.

"When you have so many options, it has to be a sign of this growing and thriving yoga scene," she said. It's this well-established community, whether you want to do hot yoga or cold yoga or want to just stretch or want a real workout  yoga is all about doing your own thing."
Three law enforcement officers were killed and three others wounded Sunday morning in a shooting at a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here.
I am writing in response to two editorials by the Quad-City Times editorial board critical of an Illinois property tax exemption for Elliott Aviation. Although Elliott Aviation acknowledges the Quad-City Times right to express its opinion, these editorials contained numerous inaccuracies and omissions of important facts about Elliott Aviation -- a significant employer and a responsible corporate citizen of the Quad-City area for 80 years.

Elliott Aviations request for a property tax exemption from the state of Illinois was fully supported by the Quad-Cities Chamber of Commerce. The goal for the exemption legislation was simply to level the playing field (in our case, with Elliotts competitors in three neighboring states: Iowa, Nebraska and Michigan which all provide property tax exemptions for aviation companies like Elliott). When considering the comparable costs of workers compensation, property taxes, and unemployment insurance, Illinois is by far the most expensive state of the four in which to operate a business.

The editorials followed Illinois Appellate and Supreme Court decisions related to the Moline Airport Authoritys tax exemption legislation, and were titled: Time for Elliott to Pay Up, published last summer, and Schools, Taxes and Corporate Hand-outs, published on June 23. Both editorials contain the following factual misstatements and are contrary to long-established good economic development policy:

Times misstatement: Elliott Aviation threatened to leave the Quad Cities

Fact: Elliott made no such threat. The earlier editorial mischaracterized Elliott Aviations support of the legislation as threatening by stating: Elliott Aviation leaders were very clear: if they didnt get an extension of their exclusive property tax break, theyd consider moving the business and more than 200 employees from Molines Quad City International Airport. The most recent editorial stated that Elliott Aviation had again threatened to forego Moline for greener grass somewhere with lower taxes. In fact, Elliott never threatened to leave the Quad-Cities and close its operations here. It did indicate that it would consider other business options for its future expansion in more favorable business environments in other states, as any responsible business would for the benefit of its employees and its shareholders. For example, Elliott has made the business decision to expand its Des Moines facility and is in the process of constructing an additional 25,000 sq./ft. multi-use hangar and office space in Des Moines, Iowa.

Times misstatement: Elliott bullied the state for corporate welfare and state-sponsored charity

Fact: The Quad Cities business community supported this legislative initiative in order to promote economic development in the Quad Cities. It was part of an incentive package supported by the Chamber which was targeted at all similar aviation operators in all of the counties that border Iowa (which already provides a similar tax exemption). The legislature narrowed the exemption to include only Molines Metropolitan Airport Authority. As a result of the exemption which it was initially granted, Elliott Aviation added 46 net new jobs and invested an additional $1.9 Million in capital improvements. This initial expansion was only the first phase of a potential development which could create tremendous development opportunities for the Quad-Cities.

Times misstatement: Exemption was a special property tax break to keep Elliott happy

Fact: It was an economic development proposal to level the playing field in the Illinois Quad-Cities. Unfortunately, the tax incentives that neighboring states offer make it economically more attractive for Elliott to locate any enhanced aviation services to a location such as Des Moines, where Elliott currently has a facility. This situation is no different than the recent Kraft-Heinz development package where state and local incentives were offered in order to retain the operations of a Davenport employer (which actually will result in a reduction of its workforce). These types of incentives are essential to attract and retain quality employers. By way of example, the Quad-City Times was a recipient of a 20-year tax increment financing package to assist in the development of its state-of-the-art facility. Similarly, here, the economic development community requested the tax exemption incentive in order for Elliott to have level playing field to expand its operations in Moline, Illinois. Unlike the Quad-City Times, Elliott Aviation had to choose whether to locate these new facilities in the Illinois Quad Cities or Des Moines. Also, unlike the Quad-City Times facility, Elliott Aviation must lease the underlying real estate from the Metropolitan Airport Authority and therefore forfeit all building improvements at the end of the lease. The requested exemption for bordering county FBOs is good legislative policy which when properly written will be supported by the legislature, the governors office and the courts.

There are few differences between the tax legislation for Elliotts aviation expansion and the tax incentives that the Quad-City Times received for not relocating its facility outside of downtown Davenport. In fact, I recall from a meeting with the previous editorial board that your facility also received substantial economic benefits from the new site (due to reduced shipping rates because your new facility also had both rail and river access). The Quad-City Times also received over $1 Million in community contributions to supplement its 20-year tax increment financing package. None of this information was disclosed by the Quad-City Times in its editorials criticizing Elliott Aviation for accepting the very same type of government incentives which the Times sought and received to remain located in downtown Davenport. If thats not the pot calling the kettle black, please explain.

Times misstatement: The legislation was due to a support network of politically connected, campaign-funding lobbyist, lawyers and advocacy organizations.

Fact: The legislation was supported by the regional economic development team of the chamber who worked with legislators and the executive branch of the state to secure the exemption in order to foster long-term economic growth in the Quad Cities. Hopefully the business community will continue to actively support the proposed exemption legislation in the upcoming fall session. We hope the regional economic development team of the Chamber will continue to provide the necessary data to support the economic justification for such legislation. A copy of the Chambers Economic Impact Study referencing Elliotts expansion project was previously sent to you for your review.

Times misstatement: More workers means more students and someone has to pay for it.

Fact: Primary jobs such as those proposed in the Elliott expansion create a greater economic base and growth in real estate taxes, which help pay for schools and government programs. The recent editorial mischaracterizes these types of legislative initiatives as special deals which are the primary lure used by economic development agencies. Low tax, regulatory bereft locals benefit, while governments interested in education, environment and infrastructure lose out. This is not true. Primary jobs are the key to economic growth in the Quad-Cities region. The proposed exemption is good economic policy which is why it has been supported by local economic development experts and the business community.

Elliott Aviation will continue to work hard to run a good business in the Quad-Cities, contributing significantly to the community through the stable employment environment and a commitment to our 250 employees in Moline.

We are very proud of our long-standing history in this community and in the aviation community which, for most of our customers, reaches far beyond the state of Illinois. Our business contributes not only with employment but with the vast majority of our capital expenditures going to local businesses as well as bringing countless customers into the Quad-Cities every month from all over the world who are spending their money and time patronizing local hotels, restaurants and local attractions.
The Patriot Act is the festering sore on the roof of America's mouth. And it will never heal because Congress can't stop fiddling with it.

The House tried and failed earlier this month to again expand the post-9/11 knee-jerk that ushered in the modern subservience state. Democrats Dave Loebsack and Cheri Bustos supported it. So did Republicans David Young and Steve King. Rod Blum, also a Republican, joined 85 Republicans and 91 Democrats in opposition. The charitably titled Anti-Terrorism Information Sharing is Strength Act -- which would have opened the flood gates to even more government collection of Americans' financial data -- died for lack of a two-thirds majority.

Loebsack's GOP challenger, Dr. Chris Peters, hoped to make hay after the five-term Democrat's vote. Peters trails Loebsack in cash. He's a relative unknown. The GOP isn't flocking to his aid. Peters is looking to score desperately needed political points, while flaunting his libertarian chops.

Playing politics doesn't make him wrong.

Just look at the coalition that killed what should be called The Monitor Americans' Banking Act. Conservative Louisiana Republican John Fleming bedded down with leftists California Democrat Barbara Lee to defeat the bill. This wasn't a coalition of party or ideological unity. It came down to pure philosophy: Enough is enough, a sentiment shared by liberals and libertarians alike.

Not a single terrorist attack has been foiled by the National Security Administration's bulk collection of phone data, officials have testified. Due process has gone out the window as American citizens in foreign lands are labeled "enemy combatants" and gunned down by unmanned drones. Librarians must continually defend the privacy of those checking out books or using the facility's Internet. Nearly a million Americans show up on the "terrorist watch list," a program fraught with inaccuracies and without the basic tenets of due process.

Privacy and due process are under assault. Officials are constantly looking for ways to circumvent the need for a warrant. It has all been done for some false sense of security.

Yes, the recent terrorist attacks in Orlando and Nice, France are infuriating. But radical Islam poses a relatively minor threat to civilization in the grand scheme. The Islamic State isn't capable of running its own territory. It's certainly not equipped for a full-scale invasion of the East Coast. Perspective is important here. These aren't the Nazis. They're a bunch of murderers who use fear to manipulate Western societies into foregoing basic principles. The same goes for the 9/11 hijackers. The Patriot Act remains Exhibit A to their success.

Year after year, Congress tries to slide through "minor" tweaks, such as the Anti-Terrorism Information Sharing is Strength Act. It's no big deal, supporters say. It's a necessary step toward cutting off terrorists' funding streams, they plead. Too often, the combination of fear-mongering and whitewashing has worked.

This month, the region's congressional delegation fell in line. They avoided the dreaded "soft on terror" label. They, once again, supported the Patriot Act creep that, until last year's weakening of NSA's phone program, had gone unabated for more than a decade. Last week, Congress tried to further snoop into the lives of Americans, this time by tracking their cash.

This month, Loebsack, Bustos, Young and King again succumbed to irrational fear.
DES MOINES  Ready or not, Iowans, youre once again a focal point in a presidential election.

Experts and campaign workers of both political persuasions agree what early polls appear to suggest: Iowa will be a closely contested, high-profile battleground state as the nation decides whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be its next president.

That toss-up status will bring all the requisite attention: candidate visits, television ads, campaign staffers knocking on doors  its all coming, and in some cases, its already here.

Iowa is a battleground state, and this year, neither party will take a chance with Iowas six electoral votes. That could be the margin of victory, Steffen Schmidt, a political scientist at Iowa State University, wrote in an email interview with the Quad-City Times Des Moines Bureau.

Schmidts view of the presidential race nationally is more optimistic for Republicans than election forecasters, many of whom  at this early stage in the campaign, at least  project a decisive victory for Clinton.

But Schmidts assertion that Iowa will be a battleground state is widely held. Although Election Day is still four months away, the signs are clear and insiders agree.

Polls and prognosticators

Forecasters are nearly unanimous in thinking the race for Iowas six electoral votes will be close. ABC, NBC, the Washington Post and NPR all classify Iowa as a toss-up state. Only the Crystal Ball, a well-regarded project of Larry Sabato and the University of Virginia Center for Politics, lists Iowa as leaning Democratic.

One forecaster  Morning Consult  lists Iowa as the only pure toss-up state in the nation.

Theres a tendency to assume Iowa is a Democratic state because Obama carried it by 10 points in 2008 and six points in 2012, the Posts Chris Cillizza and Philip Bump wrote. "But, as of today, Iowa has a Republican governor, two Republican (U.S.) Senators and three (out of four) Republican members of Congress."

Most early polls have shown a close race in Iowa between Clinton and Trump. Two new polls published this past week showed Clinton ahead by a small margin in one and Trump ahead by a similarly small margin in the other.

The polls are showing that Iowa has been a toss-up for a month at least, state Republican Party chairman Jeff Kaufmann said. For the first time in a while, this may very well go down to the wire (in Iowa).

I really do (expect Iowa to be a battleground state), Kaufmann added. I expect it, and I know that the RNC and the DNC both expect it, just in terms of the resources that I already see pulling into the state.  Were seeing tens of thousands of dollars, and that will move to millions of dollars that will be coming into this state.

Follow the money to Iowa

While Trumps campaign is yet to show signs of investing in Iowa, the Clinton campaign, both state parties and the national Republican Party are putting their money here, providing a clear-cut signal that both parties have made winning the state a priority.

Clinton has had paid staff on the ground in Iowa for weeks, and the Iowa Democratic Party just this past weekend opened five new campaign offices across the state, including in Davenport, Sioux City and Cedar Rapids.

The Clinton campaign and state party will work to ensure those offices are filled with volunteers who make all those phone calls and knock on all those doors.

We have a great organizing team on the ground. We are talking to voters every day, said Tova Yampolsky, a regional organizing director for the Democrats in Des Moines. Iowas a big battleground state  we feel this is going to make a difference.

Clintons Iowa press secretary Kate Waters said in an email statement to the Des Moines Bureau that Clinton is committed to running hard in Iowa and talking with Iowans about her plans to build an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top.

Donald Trump is dangerous, divisive, unfit to be president, and our grassroots campaign is working from river to river to make sure we keep him out of the White House, Waters added.

Trumps campaign thus far has not matched Clintons staffing in Iowa. Even in placing second in the Iowa caucuses in February, Trump relied on drumming up support with big events and media coverage, successfully eschewing the traditional Iowa campaign staples of organizing and advertising.

Since becoming the Republican Partys presumptive nominee, Trump has enlisted the help of the state and national party structures in Iowa.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request seeking comment for this story.

Chris Carr, political director for the national Republican Party, said that partnership has been natural because Republicans have kept staff in Iowa for the past four years in an effort to build a long-term organization in consistently competitive states.

One reason why it really helped, the marriage of the RNC and the Trump campaign, is we were totally opposite, Carr said. "We were the organization with all the bodies."

Thats why Clintons early staffing edge is not a big deal, said Luke Martz, a Republican political consultant and Muscatine, Iowa, native who was Iowa field director for Mitt Romneys 2012 campaign and now works in Wisconsin.

Martz said the Republican Party organizations can make phone calls, knock on doors and garner absentee ballots for Trump and other Republicans for now, but eventually, the Trump campaign will need its own staff in the state to avoid overloading party workers.

The party cant be working on stuff like exclusively worrying about yard signs and putting on events when they have (other) important things to do, Martz said.

TV time

Another signal that Iowa is important to a candidate is television advertising, and Clinton already is on the airwaves here, as is at least one outside group supporting her.

In June, Clinton made an eight-figure, six-week ad buy in Iowa, which was part of an eight-state investment. The ads also ran in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, all of which are rated as toss-ups or lean Democratic by forecasters.

And Priorities USA, a pro-Clinton Super PAC, included Iowa markets in its recent $20 million ad buy.

The Trump campaign also is moving slower than Clinton on the TV advertising front. Trumps campaign has not paid for a television advertisement since early May, a few weeks before he became the partys presumptive nominee, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
Looking for a summer activity that has something for everyone? Join us for the second annual CHAOS Maker Festival from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 30 on 7th Street between the downtown library and The Dahl Arts Center. It is free and open to everyone. The Rapid City Public Library is again partnering with the Rapid City Arts Council to bring CHAOS to the community.

What is CHAOS? It stands for Creative Hands-on Artistic Original Space, which gives you an idea of the variety of activities we have in store for attendees. We have collected a diverse roster of artisans who will demonstrate their crafts and talents as well as sell their work. There will be paintings (including face painting), loom beading, stained glass, wire wrapping, jewelry, mosaics and more. You can also check out screen printing with local artist and Arts Education Engagement coordinator with RCAC, Tyler Read.

Kids will have fun at our Oobleck Station and Makey Makey Table. There will be 3-D Printing demonstrations, opportunities to craft foam gliders, learn how to cross stitch, make your own button, and build endless creations with KEVA planks. Participants can also learn how to tattoo a banana or assemble and design your own wooden toy car with the help of the Rapid City Woodworker Association. There will be a martial arts demonstration on our main stage and a human foosball table in the Youth area upstairs at the library.

As you learn, create, explore and shop, take in the music provided by local musicians throughout the day. Vendors with coffee, popcorn, lemonade, grilled cheese and hot dogs will be here to serve you. Well also get crazy with some cotton candy creations.

As we celebrate science, technology, engineering, art and math, we would like to hear from you. We have a new manager of our CHAOS Makerspace, Stephen Tafoya. He has recently relocated to the area from Colorado in order to spearhead the vision and full implementation of one of South Dakotas first makerspaces. We want to know what our community would like to see in this space. What kind of things would you like to learn or do? Are there certain tools or technologies you would like to see in the CHAOS Makerspace? Are there items besides books you would like to check out and take home with you (a shovel, Ukulele, GoPro camera, baking tools, etc)? They could be available at your library. Stop by and tell us what you would like to see, and we will have a gift for you for taking time to let us know what you are looking for from their library.

For more information about the 2016 CHAOS Maker Festival, visit thedahl.org/chaos.html.
Haley Carbajal has always believed in working hard to get the best out of every situation.

When she moved to small-town Belle Fourche, she worried she wouldn't have as many opportunities to do so.

But the Belle Fourche High School senior has learned that if she looks for opportunities, she'll find something to keep pushing herself forward academically.

Carbajal has completed two political camps and internships in the hopes of working toward a political future. She's even shook President Barack Obama's hand and heard the Pope speak within the last year.

Last summer she participated in a summer page program, where 30 students from across the United States were selected to serve as pages for their state representatives in Washington, D.C.

Carbajal lived in a small dorm with the other students, beginning her day at 6 a.m. with classes. From there she worked at the Capitol. The pages were split into democrats and republicans depending on each students senator. There were 16 republican pages and 14 democrat.

Carbajal completed basic page work, which included making copies for the party or anything else the party needed.

The high school accepted the credits she earned while also attending classes.

"What really got me interested was the school and trying to get the best out of my education," Carbajal said. "I really applied for the educational side of things, but it expanded my horizon with politics doing the page work."

Carbajal's plans include attending the University of Pennsylvania next year to study corporate communication to eventually end up back on the Hill.

She hopes to start a career in local politics and work her way up.

Her time spent at South Dakota Girls State may help starting locally. At the week-long camp earlier this summer, Carbajal not only learned about the ins and outs of local government, but she also brought home an important lesson.

"I had to learn that when one door closes, another opens," she said of her time at the mock government camp. "I ran for a lot of positions, but I didnt get a lot of them; but it allowed me to have a better overall experience and meet people I wouldnt have if I had gotten those positions."

Carbajal said hse also gained insight into the different things she and others can do around local communities.

Just last month, Carbajal joined about 1,700 other students from across the county in a trip to Washington, D.C., through the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA).

She applied for the opportunity through Butte County Electric. During that tour she met with South Dakota students and state representatives.

At the end of July, Carbajal will attend a leadership camp just outside of Rapid City. At that camp, students will create a mock congress, and throughout the year will travel to Pierre to work on leadership skills.
Hot enough for you? Several people asked me that while we were roasting in 100 degree heat at the Boss Cowman in Lemmon Saturday.

We only got .30 hundredths of rain this week, and the prairie is really dry. We didnt get a drop of rain Saturday when they got over an inch at Reva, but thankfully we didnt get any of that nasty hail either.

Are your firefighting units ready to go? Well most likely be fighting a lot of fires unless it starts raining soon.

Monday was the Fourth of July, and we spent Independence Day in Hettinger. Guy and Megan and boys came from Wyoming to spend a few days at the ranch with us and we all went to Hettinger for the parade and the picnic in the park. Sage and Alaina and their girls invited us to spend the afternoon at their house, along with several of Alainas family. Nathan, Kylee and Britton Stadheim and Carrie Stadheim and her kids came and Grandma Polly brought Josh and Brandy Stadheims two girls.

The kids spent the afternoon having water fights in the wading pool and we all pigged out on the delicious roast Sage cooked in his smoker. The kids shot off a bunch of fireworks at the house before we left for home. Guy and Megan picked up their dog at the ranch and drove back to Wyoming that night. It was a great Fourth of July.

Tuesday, Reub and I were back in Hettinger. He had his appointment with Mary Eggebo and I went up to the clinic to get the stitches taken out from the last surgery when they took the four pins out of my thumb.

I also started therapy, but I think my thumb is always going to be stiff. But hey, I can grab things with it now, so thats a big plus!

Tommy and Briana Fabris had their third baby girl Wednesday, July 6 in Hettinger. Little Ava Jane weighs 7 pounds, 7 ounces and is 19.5 inches long. Congratulations to the Fabris family.

There were four funerals of our friends this week.

Florence (Peck) Papka, 98, died away July 2 at Sturgis Regional Senior Care. Her memorial service was 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Fidler-Isburg Funeral Chapel in Spearfish. Florence will be inurned at the Rose Hill Cemetery with her husband Leland, her son Orval, and Orvals wife Mary.

I met Darlene Welch and Donald Krambeer in Buffalo and rode down to Florences funeral with them. Kent Wilkinson caught a ride home with us after the lunch in Evans Park, so he could do chores and I gave him a ride back to the ranch.

On the way to Florences funeral, I heard on the radio that Esther Blombergs funeral was in Belle Fourche at the same time as Florences service, and we hadnt even heard that Esther had died.

Esther Blomberg, 93, died June 28 at the David M. Dorsett Health Care Center in Spearfish. Esther married Hank Gibson and they had two boys, Dennis and Harold. Hank died in 1949. Later Esther married Dads cousin Jack Blomberg and they had two boys, Alan and Chad.

Her son, Dennis died of a tragic accident at the ranch that Esther and Jack owned. Her funeral services were at the St. James Lutheran Church in Belle Fourche with inurnment at the Pine Slope Cemetery in Belle Fourche.

The memorial service for our old friends Gary and Fielding Phillips was Thursday at Beslers Cadillac Ranch south of Belle Fourche.

Gary Phillips, 67, of Belle Fourche died December 10, 2015 at the Rapid City Regional Hospital. Fielding Phillips, 78, of Sturgis died at the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver on February 20 after a short illness.

The five Phillips brothers were raised in the Slim Buttes and Fielding and Gary were preceded in death by their parents, Chester and Leah (Vroman) Phillips. Leah was Ned Vromans daughter and they were neighbors of my fathers family.

Leah and Dad were in the same grade at the Rock Ranch School built by my great grandfather, Carl Hallan. All five of the Phillips boys also attended the Rock Ranch School across the road from Blair Hamiltons.

There were a lot of rodeo folks at the Phillips funeral and most of them had a story or two to tell about the brothers. Pete Buer had the memorial service and sang some really good songs before we all ate supper together.

The Boss Cowman parade was Saturday in Lemmon, and I rode along with Rep. Sam Marty to throw candy at little kids one last time. The parade was followed by the unveiling of John Lopezs sculpture of Ed Lemmon in front of the beautiful mural of cattle being driven up from the Grand River painted by Dotun Popoola and Imafidor Ayodeji Jonathan from Nigeria.

These artists are absolutely amazing. Nathan Sanderson was there to autograph copies of his new book about Ed Lemmon, Controlled Recklessness. I just finished reading Nathans book and highly recommend it! John was also autographing his book featuring his fabulous sculptures.

Ill leave you with these modern proverbs:

*For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.

*If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.

*Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.

*Eat well, stay fit, die anyway.

*Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.

*Junk is something youve kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it.

*There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.

*Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

*By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.

*Someone who thinks logically provides a nice contrast to the real world.

*Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.
Editor's note: As Pennington County moves ahead on a plan to expand and relocate its drug and alcohol detoxification center, the Rapid City Journal is publishing a two-part series on the center and questions about its operations. Part one appears today; the second part will run next Sunday, July 24.

Andrew Watts came to Rapid City's detox center needing help with an infected leg and a night's respite from the streets, but he ended up dead on a floor mat less than 24 hours later.

He was killed by complications from his leg infection, even though he was medically examined twice in the hours before he died.

Those details of the 46-year-old Watts death are being made public for the first time as the result of a Journal investigation. Since Watts died Jan. 14, neither the Pennington County Sheriffs Office, which oversees the detox center, nor the Rapid City Police Department, which conducted the official investigation, has publicly released any detailed information about the death.

But a death certificate filed in May following an autopsy showed that Watts death was primarily caused by sepsis, which was likely triggered by a skin infection known as intense cellulitis on his left leg.

In recent interviews with the Journal, Pennington County officials said Watts was examined for the leg problem twice after showing up at the detox center for help  once at the center, and once at Sioux San Hospital.

Yet, even after those examinations, Watts returned to the detox facilitys lightly monitored "safe-bed" wing, a room where chronically intoxicated people are allowed to sleep overnight on floor mats. He died there in his sleep sometime the following morning.

It's unclear whether Watts' fatal sepsis was missed by the medical professionals who examined him, or whether it set in afterward. What is clear, at least in hindsight, is that Watts' only chance at survival was to be admitted to a hospital and given intravenous fluids and antibiotics.

The public may never know exactly why that failed to happen, because a media representative for the U.S. Indian Health Service, which operates Sioux San Hospital, cited federal medical privacy laws in declining to answer any of the Journals questions about Watts.

Sheriff Kevin Thom said Watts was medically cleared by Sioux San, and he said county employees followed proper protocol when they sent Watts there for treatment and when they admitted him to the safe-bed wing afterward.

Had he not come back here that night and instead gone down and slept on the bike path, Thom said, referring to a path along Rapid Creek frequented by homeless people, they wouldve found him deceased down there the next day.

But Watts did not lie down to sleep alongside a bike path. He went to a publicly funded facility  though virtually unregulated, the Journal has learned  with safe in its name, where he was examined and referred to a publicly funded hospital.

That he died within hours of receiving medical attention at both places is a potential cause for concern, especially as Pennington County prepares to relocate its safe-bed program and expand its capacity from seven floor mats to as many as 40.

Safe beds explained

Watts' death was the first for Pennington Countys safe-bed program, which was established four years ago in a room partitioned from the rest of the surrounding detoxification center in the basement of the City/County Alcohol and Drug Programs building on North LaCrosse Street. The multifaceted facility is often described simply as "detox."

The word bed in the safe-bed programs name is a misnomer. Safe-bed clients sleep on floor mats, because raised beds have been deemed a safety risk to intoxicated people who might roll out of bed and fall onto the floor.

Besides floor mats and a water cooler, there is nothing else in the safe-bed area. It is a barren room with tile flooring, white walls and a giant window that faces the surrounding detox operation.

The safe-bed program is intended to provide temporary shelter for chronically intoxicated people, most of them homeless. They often have nowhere else to go but the streets, because many are not ready to commit to detoxification or addiction treatment, and because the local nonprofit homeless shelter prefers not to admit intoxicated clients. The safe-bed program also helps divert homeless people involved in low-level public disturbances away from jail.

Out on the streets, chronically intoxicated people often become suspects or victims in alcohol- or drug-fueled disturbances and crimes. Arresting officers sometimes have nowhere to take the offenders but jail  even for crimes as minor as public intoxication, public urination or disorderly conduct. Jail stays cost the county an average of $80 per inmate, per day.

Thom has estimated the cost of the safe-bed program as low as $30 per person, per day. Clients are allowed to sleep on a floor mat for a night, drink from the water cooler and get a sack lunch on their way out the door the next morning. They may be encouraged to enter detox and addiction treatment, but they're otherwise allowed to come and go freely. The safe-bed area gets an estimated 3,650 uses per year, or about 300 per month.

Poses as Native American

Thom, citing federal medical privacy laws, declined to release any documents related to Watts' stay in the safe-bed program, including the full autopsy report. The Rapid City Police Department, citing state laws that allow investigatory information to remain secret, also declined to release any documents produced by the investigation into Watts death. What the Journal knows about the death is therefore entirely based on the death certificate and interviews.

Thom told the Journal that Watts came into the lobby of the City/County Alcohol and Drug Programs building at 11:30 a.m. on Jan. 13 and was not feeling well. Watts was examined by an EMT, who noted the infection on Watts leg and also noted that Watts vital signs were out of protocol. Based on the results of that examination, the staff decided to send Watts to a hospital emergency department.

Thom said Watts had been to both Sioux San and Rapid City Regional Hospital in the preceding days for the same leg problem. On this particular day, according to Thom, Watts claimed to be a Native American tribal member and expressed a preference for Sioux San.

As it turned out, Watts was an African American born in Illinois with no apparent Native American heritage or tribal membership. He had been using a Native American alias since at least the previous month, in an apparent attempt to prevent or delay discovery of a multistate criminal record consisting mostly of misdemeanors.

The Journal found one item on Watts criminal record from 2008 in Wisconsin, 22 items from 1999 to 2010 in Minnesota, and 43 items from 2011 to 2015 in North Dakota. He was charged with robbery this past December in his alleged role in an incident at a North Rapid hotel. A breath test that day registered his blood-alcohol content at 0.269, more than three times the .08 legal limit for driving. A judge ultimately found there was insufficient evidence to support the robbery charge, and a dismissal was filed Jan. 6, eight days before Watts died.

The arresting officer in the December robbery case expressed skepticism about the Native American-sounding name that Watts provided and about Watts claim of being part Native American.

He appeared to me to look like he had very distinct features of being black and he would easily be mistaken for a black male, the officer wrote.

Safe-bed admission questioned

When Watts claimed Native American heritage at detox, he was taken at his word and sent to Sioux San for treatment of the leg infection.

Thom said its his understanding that Watts was treated at Sioux San. An Indian Health Service spokesman who corresponded with the Journal refused to speak about Watts specifically, but answered broader questions about policies pertaining to non-Native Americans who show up at the federally funded Indian Health Service facilities seeking medical care.

IHS hospitals with emergency departments will medically screen any individual who seeks treatment and provide stabilizing treatment or an appropriate transfer to any individual requiring emergency care, the spokesman wrote in an email to the Journal.

Watts returned to detox at 7 p.m. the same day with what Thom described as a medical clearance from Sioux San. Thom said the staff at detox consulted with Watts at that time and decided to place him, with his consent, in a safe bed instead of the more regimented detox program that has greater oversight.

Whether Watts placement in the safe-bed program was appropriate is an open question. The admission criteria posted in the facility stipulate, among other things, that a client of the program must not have diabetic issues or open wounds. Those prohibitions presumably exist to ensure that people in need of heightened medical care are sent to receive that care rather than allowed to lie down on a floor mat.

When the Journal asked Thom whether Watts diabetes or intense cellulitis should have precluded his admission, Thom declined to address either condition specifically and instead provided a blanket assessment.

If youre asking me was he appropriately in safe beds, Im going to say 'yes, he was,' Thom said.

Later, Thom added that the admission criteria posted in the facility have been replaced by other written policies and should have been taken down.

Another key question about Watts' admission is whether he possessed prescribed antibiotics to treat his infection. Brenda Wood, director of detox, alluded to a failure by Watts to take antibiotics when the Journal asked her if Watts received sufficient care. Thom, who was being jointly interviewed with Wood, steered her away from that topic because of his concern about violating medical privacy laws.

Antibiotics are among the treatments for both cellulitis and sepsis. Had Watts been admitted to detox, any prescribed medication he possessed would have been confiscated and doled out to him pursuant to a complex set of policies and protocols. The safe-bed program policies and protocols make no mention of medication.

Because of that difference in the level of supervision between the two programs, the Journal asked Thom if Watts fate might have been altered if he had been admitted to detox rather than the safe-bed program.

I dont think it would have made a difference, Thom said.

Sepsis proves fatal

The local policies of the safe-bed program require random visual checks to ensure the safety of clients. Thom said Watts was checked on, but Thom did not disclose the number of checks.

The lack of regularly scheduled checks, and the lack of repeat vital-sign checks, is another difference between the safe-bed and detox programs. In detox, state rules require client blood pressure, pulse and respiration to be checked at least three times in the first eight hours after admission and at least once every eight hours thereafter. No such rules apply to the safe beds.

Furthermore, the most recent state accreditation report for the detox program, filed in 2014, said none of 10 detox charts reviewed by inspectors contained the required documentation of appropriate and consistent time frames for vitals checks.

Besides Watts' initial vitals check and subsequent visual checks, he was seen to use the bathroom at least once during his overnight stay, Thom said.

At 9:46 in the morning, the detox staff discovered that Watts was dead. His death certificate later listed his possible time of death as between 5 a.m. and 9:30 a.m.

Andrew Watts timeline Here is a look at key dates in the life and final days of Andrew Watts:

Because the Sheriffs Office oversees the detox and safe-bed programs and cannot ethically investigate its own employees, the investigation into Watts death was turned over to the Rapid City Police Department. The police arguably have their own conflicts in the form of the funding that city government contributes to detox (about $475,000 is budgeted this year), and the headquarters building that the police share with the Sheriff's Office. Nevertheless, the police handled the matter.

The only document related to the investigation that is publicly available is Watts' death certificate, which was filed in May. Under the heading Cause of Death Part I, the certificate lists sepsis and intense cellulitis of the left lower extremity. Under Part II, the document lists type 2 diabetes.

A Journal call to the pathologist who performed the autopsy clarified that the sepsis was likely caused by the cellulitis, and diabetes was another possible contributing factor to the death.

The medical director for detox, Nathan Long, answered a Journal phone call and said the Watts case was reviewed and no wrongdoing was found, but he declined to answer further questions.

Some perspective on sepsis can be gleaned from the nonprofit Sepsis Alliance, which defines the condition as the bodys overwhelming and life-threatening response to infection which can lead to tissue damage, organ failure, and death.

Your bodys immune system, which is supposed to fight off the infection, goes into overdrive and begins to attack your body, the alliance further explains.

Cellulitis can trigger sepsis in some people, according to the alliance, and diabetes can subject its sufferers to a greater risk of the kinds of infected wounds and sores that lead to sepsis.

Sepsis should be treated as a medical emergency, the alliance advises, with rapid administration of antibiotics and fluids. The alliance cites a 2006 study that showed the risk of death from sepsis increases by 7.6 percent with every hour that passes before treatment begins.

Nearly all victims of severe sepsis require treatment in an intensive care unit for several days or weeks, the Sepsis Alliance says on its website.

Mike Taylor, a Cleveland surgeon and Sepsis Alliance board member, said sepsis can be difficult to spot and is often missed. Watts could have been septic when he was examined, Taylor said, or he could have developed the condition afterward.

"Its a really sad situation, and its very possible it couldnt be helped," Taylor said. "But it certainly raises legitimate questions about whether he got appropriate care when he was seen."

Nationwide lack of regulation

Beyond the investigation of Watts death by police and the internal review conducted by the Sheriffs Office, there will apparently be no regulatory review.

The safe-bed program is not subject to accreditation, a process in which experts investigate whether proper procedures are being followed, even though it is housed within and staffed by the countys detox program, which is subject to accreditation by the Community Behavioral Health program of the state Department of Social Services.

A lack of regulatory oversight is common among safe-bed programs, which are also called sobering centers or sleep-off centers. The concept arose in the 1970s and '80s but took years to catch on. It's now growing in popularity, and there are perhaps two dozen sobering centers operating in the United States, according to Shannon Smith-Bernardin, deputy director of the San Francisco Sobering Center and a doctoral candidate with a dissertation focusing on sobering-center issues.

She said the lack of regulation seems to stem from sobering centers' ineligibility for reimbursements from Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance.

"Thus, if you cant bill for it yet, people dont regulate it as much," Smith-Bernardin said.

Recently, Smith-Bernardin and other medical and academic experts founded the National Sobering Collaborative, in part to facilitate the study and publication of information about sobering centers and to formulate recommended minimum standards. An early report from the collaboration says sobering centers are operating across the country without uniform or standardized practices.

One such potential standard could address the checking of client vital signs. The San Francisco Sobering Center, for example, checks vitals at least once every two to four hours, while in Rapid City the local policy calls only for an initial set of vitals to be taken, followed by random visual checks.

Information gathered by the collaborative might also shed light on the number of nationwide deaths in sobering centers, which is not tracked. Smith-Bernardin said deaths are rare and cited supporting statistics from her own facility, which has suffered three client deaths among 48,000 total client encounters in 13 years of operation.

Concerns about deaths in sobering centers date to at least 1996-97, when three people died in the first 12 months of operation of the Dutch Shisler Sobering Support Center funded by King County in downtown Seattle.

King County convened a panel of health officials back then to investigate the third death, and the panel found no evidence of wrongdoing. But the investigation still prompted the county's officials to consider changes in the operation of the center.

Thom does not envision any significant changes to Pennington County's safe-bed program now or when it moves, along with the rest of detox and some other county functions, to the former National American University building across from the courthouse in eastern downtown Rapid City. That relocation, which could increase the safe-bed program's capacity as high as 40, could happen by late 2017.

I think its a good model, Thom said. Its worked other places, and I think it works here.
The City/County Alcohol Drug Program (CCADP) offers a wide array of drug and alcohol treatment services to thousands of individuals across the Black Hills region, and is poised to expand its operation into the former National American University building within the next few years.

Everythings just going to get bigger, said clinical supervisor Michele Macintosh. As a community were growing, and theres just a big need for addressing this. Right now we barely meet needs.

Referred locally as detox, it is one of the only programs of its kind in the state, drawing clients from Pennington, Lawrence, Butte, Meade, and Fall River Counties. Detox is funded by Rapid City and Pennington County, though oversight of the organization falls wholly under the umbrella of Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom.

According to a 2015 report from Sheriff Thoms office, the program sees about 7,400 client admissions for treatment every year.

We are the last resort for a lot of people, Macintosh said.

Funding comes from federal, state and local governments, as well as from private sources. Budgeted expenses for 2016 are $2.5 million. Of the budget, about $475,000 comes from Rapid City, with the county contributing the same amount. The remaining $1.6 million  or more than half of the budget  comes from outside the area. About $447,000 comes from federal funds, a little more than $1 million from the state, and $131,900 from private contributions and funds from other counties and sources.

Detox services are provided 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 725 N. LaCrosse St. The program also operates the Life Enrichment Center at 3505 Cambell St. Both facilities, according to the Sheriffs annual report, are accredited by the South Dakota Division of Behavioral Health through the Department of Social Services.

Detox's clientele come from a variety of backgrounds, ranging from homeless to affluent, according to Macintosh. Some are brought to the program off the streets by the police, involuntarily committed by local courts, or otherwise ordered by the judicial system to attend the program as a transition point from prison to civilian life. These clients are funded by the Bureau of Prisons.

Others come to the program of their own free will. The Criminal Justice Initiative also diverts some drug offenders from prison into the program in the hopes of rehabilitating them.

An intoxicated individual who finds their way to the detox program on North LaCrosse Street will be housed in one of three areas in the basement of the building: The safe beds, an isolation room, or the detox living area itself.

The seven available safe beds provide a temporary but secure place for an intoxicated individual to rest and sober up for a few hours before exiting the facility. The three isolation rooms are where the aggressive clients whose behavior represents a danger to themselves and others are kept. Clients undergoing extended substance abuse treatment are housed in the detox living area. When space runs out, clients can be turned away.

Individuals who come to detox usually get to decide where they want to be placed, unless they are overly belligerent, or are what's called an "emergency commitment" by law enforcement. The staff makes a judgment call based on the circumstances. Clients are usually expected to pay for a portion of their services  $17 per 24 hours  unless they meet low-income guidelines, in which case their bill will be picked up by the state. Longer-term treatment programs can cost up to $1,000 total, Macintosh said.

Once a person housed in detox sobers up, they are asked to speak with a counselor on the first floor of the building, where various offices and treatment program rooms are situated. If an individual agrees to seek longer-term treatment, they are then assessed to determine where they should be placed.

The program offers a variety of treatment options, according to Macintosh. They include:

 Intensive outpatient care, which requires the client to undergo nine or more hours of treatment a week. Whats referred to as the Slip/Slot program has the same requirements, but the clients live in the facility for six to eight weeks.

 A lower-intensity residential setting is also available, which requires five hours of treatment a week.

 A specialized methamphetamine/opiate treatment program, which is the highest level of residential care at detox. The longer term program has multiple phases, the totality of which can last as long as six to eight months.

All of these programs will be expanded once detox  along with Pennington Countys Health and Human Services Department  moves as planned to the larger NAU building across Kansas City Street from the courthouse in eastern downtown Rapid City.

The county bought the former NAU building last year for $3.92 million and has commissioned an architect to design a remodel. Thom said he hopes construction will begin late this year and be completed late next year. There is no official cost estimate for the remodeling project, but Thom said it will likely cost between $4 million and $5 million, with $900,000 of the funding coming from the city because of its joint responsibility for the detox and safe-bed programs.

The expanded safe-bed area would tentatively be called a sobering center and, unlike the current safe-bed program, could potentially serve women in addition to men.

According to Macintosh, the new facility would allow for the separation of different residential clientele. As it is now, all clients, whether they are receiving temporary or longer-term treatment, are housed in the same basement area of the North LaCrosse Street building.

The hope, she added, is that having a larger facility will mean more treatment for more people with substance abuse disorders. But those factors represent only only one part of an equation that relies heavily on the willing participation of detox clients seeking treatment.

"Bottom line: Someone has to want it," Macintosh said. "If they want it, theyll be successful wherever they go."
Editor's note: As Pennington County moves ahead on a plan to expand and relocate its drug and alcohol detoxification center, the Rapid City Journal is publishing a two-part series on the center and questions about its operations. Part one appears today; the second part will run next Sunday, July 24.

It is a Friday night in Rapid City, and somewhere someone is getting very drunk.

It is 8:30 p.m, July 1. Officers with the Rapid City Police Department show up at the brick detoxification center on North LaCrosse Street. With them is a man in a white T-shirt. His hands are cuffed behind his back, his eyes are squeezed shut, and he is shouting.

I understand no rules, he yells at the floor as the two officers escort him into detox. John Terry, an EMT Supervisor with the City County Alcohol and Drug Program, where the county-run detox program is housed, calmly moves from his station at a bank of computer monitors and readies one of the three isolation rooms where aggressive clients are housed.

Despite his loud entrance, the man is searched and situated without incident. Once the police leave, he settles down. Many of the clients at detox, Terry said, react badly in the presence of authority.

Knowing how to talk to someone who is intoxicated is key, he said. Its more of an art than a science.

Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the CCADP  typically known only as "detox"  provides substance abuse treatment and services for thousands of men and women every year. It is one of the only centers of its kind west of the Missouri river in South Dakota, drawing clients from Pennington, Lawrence, Butte, Meade, and Fall River counties. About 7,500 client visits were recorded last year, roughly 600 a month.

What happens inside detox goes mostly unseen, hidden away in a windowless basement. The men and women who end up there cut across all economic classes and walks of life, from the indigent to members of the professional world.

Theyre human beings, said detox supervisor Scott Brown. And they deserve to be treated like it.

A program in transition

The detox center is poised for a major upgrade, with plans in place to move the center into the former National American University building near the Pennington County courthouse in the near future. The planned expansion and two other recent incidents prompted the Rapid City Journal to examine what happens in the basement of the current facility at 725 N. LaCrosse St.

In January, the lifeless body of a 46-year-old man was found in one of the "safe beds" there, raising questions about the detox centers handling of persons with obvious medical afflictions.

A few days later, another former client filed a federal lawsuit against detox employees and administrators, alleging that they took her out of her drug treatment program and wrongfully turned her over to law enforcement when a syringe containing trace amounts of methamphetamine was found in her possession.

The detox center's record is not without blemishes, but the techs manning the central desk on the evening of July 1 are compassionate and thoughtful. They also have an intimate knowledge of how difficult their work can be, how a seemingly small decision can have consequences that reverberate into the future.

Kathy Jensen has worked as a tech at detox for three years.

It can sometimes be depressing, she said. You see the same people every day, coming back and forth.

She has seen clients who have been in and out of the facility more than 60 times in a single year. But things start slowly on the evening of July 1.

Ruddy-faced men wearing hospital scrubs and sweat on their brows amble down the halls in the mens unit. They trade friendly greetings and jokes with Jensen and the other techs as they pass. A Jack Black movie is playing on the TV in the day room, where the soft sound of laughter can be heard.

Its easy to get connected to the clients, said Art Dolor, one of the three employees on duty. And its hard to see them suffer. The man who died in the safe beds in January was an especially hard blow, he said.

Its sad to hear about someone getting beat up or dying outside, Dolor said. But what can you do?

He hopes things will be better when detox moves to its new home in the former NAU building in downtown Rapid City, where the safe bed program will be expanded to allow room for up to 40 intoxicated individuals. The current program only has enough room for seven.

Harboring the heavily intoxicated

Its 9:30 p.m. and the police are back with another client. A grainy video feed of the entrance vestibule reveals a middle-aged man swaying on his feet, as if the ground beneath him is rolling atop a turbulent sea. Throwing out his arm, he collapses on the bench.

Dolor decides to place him in an isolation room, a small tiled enclosure with a mat on the floor. Hes worried about mixing him in with the 30 or so other clients currently in the unit. The last time this man was here, Dolor said, he got into a fight with another man who is in the unit.

The intoxicated man stumbles into the facility with his pants unbuckled. Hes held up by Rapid City Police Officer Allen Nelson, who takes him to his room and offers some lighthearted banter as he helps him get undressed and into his overnight clothes.

Being friendly, you get a better result in the long run, Nelson said before he leaves. You come across as authoritative, thats all youll get in return.

Everyone who comes to detox gets their blood pressure checked and is asked to blow into a breathalyzer. Those who are admitted as custodial clients fill out a series of forms once theyre sober: medical questionnaire, emergency contacts, and a mental health assessment. They are then held for about 24 hours, after which they see a counselor in one of the many offices upstairs, where they are usually urged to enroll in longer term treatment.

Often times they dont want any, and they revolve in and out of here, said Michelle Macintosh, detox clinical supervisor. Some do it once and they learn.

About 50 percent of clients come to detox on their own, Terry said. The rest are brought in off the streets by the police. Many end up in the "safe beds" unit, a darkened room with several blue mats on the floor and a water cooler in the corner. The idea is to provide a secure place for clients who are uninterested in long-term treatment to sober up and rest for a few hours or overnight before they hit the streets again.

About 15 minutes after officer Nelson leaves, a new pair of officers is at the door with another man. This one is taken to the third and only remaining isolation room. In the last year alone, this man has been to detox more than 20 times. Dolor remains in the vestibule after the intoxicated man is gone. Moments later, Dolor is visible on the camera feed dropping a towel beneath the bench, where the client had left a puddle of urine.

This happens all the time, Jensen said. Earlier that morning, a client in one of the isolation rooms defecated and used his blanket to try shoving it under the door. Many of these clients, when viewing the footage later, express utter disbelief at what they had done while intoxicated, Jensen said.

The legal limit for blood alcohol content while operating a motor vehicle in most states, including South Dakota, is .08 percent. The man who urinated on himself blew .358 percent. The man before him blew .366 percent. The highest Jensen has seen was .5 percent, the level at which slipping into a coma or dying becomes a serious risk.

He just sat there and talked to me like it was nothing, Jensen said. Theres no way I would have been able to tell he was drunk. It was crazy.

Second shift at the center does not end quietly. Another puddle of urine has leaked from under the door of isolation room east, and the smell of feces hangs in the air. Dolor busies himself cleaning up the mess, while Terry does a head count, discovering that one of the clients from the Bureau of Prisons is missing.

Clients from the Bureau of Prisons are substance abusers who have recently exited incarceration. As part of their sentence, they are required to undergo transitional treatment at detox, checking in at regular intervals and required to meet several other benchmarks before they are fully released.

Terry calls the missing client's workplace, but they havent seen him. So he gets on the phone with the Bureau of Prisons to inform them that one of their transitional clients is "AWOL," or absent without leave.

By the time third shift takes over at 11 p.m., the client still has not been found. On the TV in the day room, Tommy Lee Jones is chasing Harrison Ford across the streets of Chicago. The film is The Fugitive.

Its going to be super slow tonight, said Brown, the EMT supervisor on third shift, who has worked at detox for almost four years.

The people that come here are really good people, Brown said. You build a rapport with them. You realize theyre just ordinary people who have an unfortunate addiction.

Rough clients, tough calls

Like Brown predicted, its slow again for the first hour or so. Then an officer and a man in a leather jacket appear on the vestibule video feed, and Brown goes out to meet them.

A dark glare furrows the intoxicated mans brow, and he refuses to sit on the bench. He swaggers around the room, throwing his arms up and pointing a pistol-like finger in the direction of the officer, who is talking to Brown. The sound is muffled, so it is difficult to hear what is said between them.

Then a second officer bursts into the room and shoves the intoxicated man hard, causing him to collapse onto the bench. There is shouting, and the intoxicated man staggers back to his feet, his leather jacket getting snagged on the rung of the bench as he rises. The shouting continues, and after a while the officers escort the man out the door, back into the dark.

Have a good night, one of the officers said to the back of the intoxicated man's head. Dont get hit by a car.

Brown returns to the central desk. Normally they would have admitted the man, Brown said, but the three isolation rooms are already full, so he had to turn him away.

You have to take into account the safety of the facility and the people in it, Brown said, And he wasnt giving off a real safe vibe. He would have just ended up creating problems or hurting somebody.

Tough calls like this are made all the time at detox. Trying to do what's best for the client with limited resources is one biggest challenges of the job, Brown said.

Trying to convince them that not drinking is the best thing for them, but they wont ever give it up, Brown said. You do what you can do.

By 1 a.m., there are 41 people in the facility, and only six more hours in the shift to go. The man who went AWOL is still missing.

Im glad youre watching over me, one of the good-natured clients said to the techs as he passes the desk. Youre like an angel sent from above.

From the sound of his voice, he is only half-joking.
SPEARFISH | They wanted to help boost the lives of their neighbors.

They also wanted their effort to last and not be a here today, gone tomorrow gesture.

So the longtime Spearfish couple, who wish to remain anonymous, pitched this idea about a week ago:

Lets help nonprofit groups working to lift the social and economic well-being of people in Spearfish. Rather than just donate, make it a community effort. Invite others to give. For every dollar contributed, we will match the gift up to $15,000. The overall $30,000 will be invested. The yearly revenues generated by those investments will be shared with local service groups.

Spearfish has been good to us. Hopefully, weve been good to Spearfish. We want to keep doing some things. If we can plant the seed money now, those funds will grow and continue to meet the growing needs of the community, the woman told the Journal on Friday.

To make all this happen, the couple turned to the Spearfish Community Foundation and its philanthropic partner, the South Dakota Community Foundation of Pierre.

Although Spearfish has other endowment funds, local foundation president Jon Pochop believes this is the communitys first challenge grant. He said planning is underway for events to invite other donors to participate.

He says the desired result is not about money alone.

We want others to witness how these funds are used in the community and affect the people in the community. Essentially, we want people to realize what we do touches lives, Pochop said.

The Spearfish Community Foundation in February distributed $65,000 to more than 20 local nonprofit organizations, including groups supporting the humane society and such outreach as drug and alcohol addiction counseling.

Raising funds for such work can happen quickly.

Last year, Philip, Miller and Lyman County, in separate campaigns to match challenges issued by individual donors, collectively raised more than $600,000 to support their respective communities for perpetuity.

Community Savings Accounts (CSA) are protected permanent endowments, meaning the gifts of donors are never used up. There are 72 CSAs across South Dakota. Eleven CSAs in the state have fundraisers underway, including challenges in Jones County and Wall.

Financial challenges offered by retired Huron bankers Paul and Donna Muffy Christen helped community accounts take root in Hot Springs, Custer, Belle Fourche, Sturgis and Wall, among others, Massa said.

The funds are pooled with the $232 million total funds managed by the statewide public, nonprofit foundation. Commingling more than 760 funds helps each to enjoy enhanced investment returns.

In 2015, SDCF returned more than $11.9 million to local nonprofit groups.

If you want to help Spearfish, you can send checks payable to the Spearfish Community Foundation, 646 East Colorado Blvd., Spearfish, SD 57783, or go to the website sdcommunityfoundation.org/Spearfish.

Depending on the response to their first try, the Spearfish couples community challenge could grow. We want to help others to continue to help the community. And even after were all gone, its the kind of gift that keeps giving.
The answer is obvious: The United States needs to unite. The question is whether we can. Frankly, it's not at all certain that we're even capable. In the wake of the sniper attack in Dallas, where a crazed gunman went on a homicidal rampage against cops, and still more killings by police of people of color, many are only talking a good game.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump made similar points. "Our country needs more love and kindness," Hillary told an AME church congregation. "I know it's not something presidential candidates usually say, but we have to find ways to repair these wounds and close these divides." Even Trump was temporarily subdued. "Our nation has become too divided," Trump said. "This is a time, perhaps more than ever, for strong leadership, love and compassion."

The delicate part is bridging the gaping divide between those who blame officers for brutalizing people of color and those who angrily defend law enforcement in spite of all the evidence. "I'd like all sides to listen to each other," said President Barack Obama. One of our go-to prominent police officials, Charles Ramsey, said our nation is "a powder keg."

Let's face it: We are not unified. Race relations are a raw wound that fleetingly seemed to be healing when we elected a black president. In fact, we sadly realize that the infection has gotten worse, particularly given the hatred from bigots who refuse to accept that Barack Obama is the country's leader. He speaks of coming together, but his enemies insist on slamming him for the slightest hint of even-handed talk about the antagonism between minorities and police. William Johnson, who heads the National Association of Police Organizations, went on Fox News to accuse the president of creating a deadly, dangerous climate. "It's a war on cops," he charged, "and the Obama administration is the Neville Chamberlain of this war." His remarks were typical of those who either have no interest in dialogue, as opposed to their angry monologues, or have decided that further whipping up a frenzy better serves their ambitions.

They have ample reason to believe that. America is bitterly divided. There are those who compare our fracture to the violent 1960s. But as dangerous as those times were, we didn't have the Internet back then. Now anybody has access to a worldwide audience. They can spew their ignorant hatred and fan the flames, which only encourages those who run for office to incite the mobs to fever pitch.

While it may seem obvious that we somehow need to come together, that would require everyone to step out from behind the barricades and constructively inspire a coming together. We'd all have to abandon our usual distrust.

The optimist might suggest that once we get past the nastiness of the election, the time for banding together may be ripe. The problem is, we have a never-ending campaign. Besides, things are going crazy so fast that November may be too late for rescuing our nation from its accumulated antagonisms and increasing violence.

Ramsey compared our situation to "handling nitroglycerin." It's imperative that we find some way defuse this highly explosive situation. Immediately.
A lone gunman kills five police officers and wounds several others in Dallas.

A Washington state restaurant owner says he no longer will serve police officers, citing customer complaints.

An anonymous caller threatens to shoot police officers at a car show, leading to the postponement of the event in downtown Rapid City.

The law enforcement community has again become a target for protesters and others in the wake of the police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a St. Paul, Minnesota, suburb.

Those actions, while certainly deserving of public scrutiny, should not, however, serve as a call to arms for those looking to blame someone for the current state of affairs in the United States.

We have become an angry country defined by our divisions  that is not the fault of law enforcement.

Democrats, Republicans; blue states, red states; social conservatives, LGBT advocates; gun owners, gun-control advocates; white, black, Native American, Hispanic and Muslim. The way we self-identify and our unwillingness to compromise is pushing us further and further apart.

The tension mounts every day as 24/7 cable news, the major networks, and countless websites and bloggers convert conflict and tragedy into a commodity that further fuels a society increasingly at odds with itself.

We see it every day in politics where the two major party presidential candidates have the highest unfavorable ratings in history; many people now say they will not vote for a particular candidate, but for the lesser of two evils.

We see it on the highways and streets where road rage, according to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, is at an all-time high with as many as 80 percent of drivers experiencing significant anger or aggression.

And we see it on social media sites where personal attacks, shaming, bullying, name-calling and vilifying dominate the dialogue.

It is against this backdrop, this rising tide of anger and hostility, where law enforcement officers find themselves. As Dallas Police Chief David Brown said this past week, we expect too much of law enforcement in these tumultuous times.

Instead, we need to look at ourselves and become part of the solution. You can, for example, decide to pursue a job in law enforcement rather than criticize our officers. Instead of organizing protests against the police, organize a rally to thank them, as a group did on Thursday in Sioux Falls.

Instead of complaining about them, talk to them. Rapid City Police Chief Karl Jegeris has encouraged the public to do just that and says he can be contacted through Facebook, Twitter or by email.

Jegeris also has taken steps to address our own racial divide that at times has heightened tensions. After he was appointed police chief in 2014, he created the community advisory committee that is led by a Native American in a bid to improve communication among our diverse groups. In addition, the citizens' group Community Conversations, led by a Cheyenne River tribal member, has emerged to help improve the relationship between police and Native Americans.

These are the types of efforts needed to bring this country together. History has shown that violence, anger and hatred just breed more of the same in a senseless cycle of destruction. It is a path we should avoid at all costs.

In the meantime, remember there has never been a more difficult time to protect and serve. Law enforcement deserves our support, especially now.
BELLE FOURCHE | Well, the wanderlust caught up with Dad. His new adventure began on July 14, 2016. We hope this trip is filled with fun as all the other trips he has had in his 95 years.

Dad came by his love of wandering honestly. From the time Dad was born on Jan. 18, 1921, on Rabbit Creek in Perkins County, he was taken by one parent or the other to one place or another.

From Dads meticulous records, I counted from 1921 to 1941, Dad lived at 21 different places and attended 12 different schools, six different high schools alone. He graduated from Faith High School in 1940.

Dads dad and mom were Bill Hennessy and Sadie Tanner Hennessy. Its worth noting here the spelling of Hennessy. Its not the way Dad spelled his name. Somewhere in the 1930s Dad changed the spelling from Hennessy to Hennessey. Why? Quien Sabe?

After high school, Dad headed for Portland, OR, and went to barber college. After graduation, he headed to Washington, DC, where he got a job working for U.S. News and World Report. That lasted until the war, where upon Dad joined the Navy and served six years. His war years were spent serving on sub hunting destroyers in the Atlantic.

Returning home, he met and married Hattie Colleen Hoffman on Aug. 31, 1949, at the Walter Hoffman ranch in Creighton. From this union came daughter, Dixie, and son, Bill.

Dad earned a teaching degree from Black Hills State University. In 1953, he up and moved his family to Los Angeles, CA, where he worked as a guard for Pinkertons Detective Agency. He also was a guard for RKO Studios.

Returning home to South Dakota in 1958, Dad began a 20-year teaching career in three different states and 11 different schools. On top of this, he was also a cafe owner, justice of the peace, bookmobile driver, and author.

Two of Dads greatest accomplishments were writing two books, Tipperary and Tin Horn Hank. He was proud of writing the books, but what he loved most was driving a five-state area trying to sell his books. He loved meeting people and visiting. There were times he bought more books than he sold, but he was just as pumped.

Dad eased into retirement. The transition between working and retirement was barely noticeable. In between walking his dog, Pickles, and taking care of his wife, Hattie, Dad filled his hours by writing limericks. If Dad knew you, and liked you, you probably wound up in one of his limericks. Dad wrote hundreds of them, and each and every one of them tickled him.

Dads world changed after Mom passed in 2002. Being alone, and the drumbeat of time caught up with him in 2008. With a broken hip, the nursing home in Belle Fourche became his new home. All the angels who worked there became his new family.

Dads last day was a good one, and the number of kisses he got his last night would have embarrassed him. Thank you girls at Belle Fourche Health Care.

Grateful in all this are his granddaughter, Callie Bowman (Matt); grandsons, Cole Hennessey (McKenzie), John Hausman (Mia), Rex (Diana), Max Hausman, Ben Hausman, and TJ Hausman; and his son, Bill Hennessey (Andrea). He was preceded in death by his parents; wife, Hattie; daughter, Dixie Lee Hausman; and sisters, Kay Gray and Wilma Winkler.

A sweet Papa went to Jesus on this warm summer day

Without a care in the world, he left on his way.

And though I sit back and think for awhile

All I can do is move forward and smile.

For this man was my Papa, I say.

 Limerick by Callie Hennessey Bowman

Private graveside services will be held at the Chance Cemetery in Chance, SD.

Arrangements are with Leverington Funeral Home of the Northern Hills in Belle Fourche.

Friends may leave written condolences at funeralhomeofthenorthernhills.com.
For several years the Montana State University Extension Office has offered free nitrate testing for cereal forage producers.

In the past this testing has only provided a qualitative result using a method called the Nitrate Quick Test, which indicates if nitrates are low, medium or high.

This year, producers interested in knowing nitrate levels in their oat, barley or wheat hay can bring their samples to the Extension Office in Hamilton and have their hay tested using a quantitative test offering a more precise result. This test is used by Oregon State University and is being trialed by Montana State University to confirm its accuracy for use by Montana Extension Agents.

Testing nitrates in cereal forages is important because nitrates effect the ability of blood to carry oxygen. When high nitrate forages are fed to livestock, this can lead to toxicity issues in animals. Pregnant livestock are at particularly high risk. Nitrate toxicity can result in abortions and death of livestock.

Nitrates accumulate in plants in the evening then are converted to proteins when they photosynthesize during the day. When plants are under stress, especially from drought, they do not convert proteins as quickly and nitrates can accumulate.

Typically the nitrates will accumulate in the bottom third of the plant, says Dr. Emily Glunk, MSU Forage Specialist. They also tend to be higher during the morning, so there are a few things we can do to reduce the risk of high nitrates at harvest, including cutting higher and in the afternoon.

The Extension office provides free nitrate testing to help inform harvest practices, however, baled hay can also be tested if harvest has already taken place.

The test indicates the presence of nitrates based on a color change. The color indicates the range of nitrates present in ppm nitrate (NO3). For accurate test results in a field that has not been harvested, a minimum of 20 plant samples should be taken from around the field to get a representative sample. The whole plant is needed including the root.

Samples are best taken in the morning prior to harvest.

If hay has been baled, samples should be taken using a hay corer from several bales randomly chosen within a lot. Samples should then be mixed to create a composite sample. A gallon ziplock bag of this composite sample can then be submitted for testing.

Forages can also be tested locally at the Stevensville Country Store for a $30 charge. This test gives results in ppm NO3 as well.

As with any forage, sending a sample to a certified lab for analysis is an important step both for selling hay and determining rations. The most common test is an in NIR1 test which includes moisture, dry matter, crude protein and several other factors to inform rations for the nutritional benefit of livestock. While this test is appropriate for both grass and cereal forages, an additional nitrate test should be requested for cereal forages.

These tests are not very expensive when one considers their benefit to informing decision making. They are also helpful in demonstrating the quality of your hay to customers if you are selling forages, says Glunk.

Hay production in Ravalli County is a symbol of pride for many. Those interested in demonstrating the quality of their hay should consider entering a sample of their forage in the Ravalli County Fair. Not only is it a great way to display a job well-done but it is an opportunity to educate the community about an important aspect of agriculture in the Bitterroot Valley. First prize winners are eligible for up to $75 in premiums, plus the benefit of sharing with their customers the proven value of their hay.

For more information on testing forages please contact the MSU Ravalli County Extension Office at 375-6611.
Simona Stan has a whole new view on the men and women who drop everything at a moments notice to help a stranger.

Unfortunately, it took a broken ankle and a rugged trip down the mountain for the University of Montana business professor to fully appreciate what they do.

Until you are actually the one in need, you dont realize just how important those people are, Stan said Friday.

Last Saturday, Stan went for a hike with her sister-in-law up to the falls on Mill Creek.

She was visiting from Romania, Stan said. I wanted to show her the valleyI very much enjoy hiking in the great outdoors of Montana. I wanted to share that with her.

The 51-year-old had never been injured before on her many journeys into the backcountry.

Apparently, I was ready to do it in style to make up for my missed opportunities, she said.

The hike back to the falls was 3 miles.

The two came to a plateau of rock that provided a good view of the falls.

It was kind of flat, Stan remembered. There wasnt too much too it. I checked out the falls and when I turned around, my left foot slipped on the wet rock.

She tumbled to the ground with her legs all twisted.

My left ankle was aching like theres no tomorrow, she said. I saw my ankle was moving left and right. It doesnt take a doctor to know that wasnt good.

Stan tried to get up and move. After hopping for 10 to 20 yards, she decided that wasnt going to be possible.

At first, she didnt have a signal on her cell phone. When she sat down, she saw a bar light up and she immediately called 911.

I had just enough time to tell them who I was, where I am and what was happening before I lost the signal, she said.

A little while later, she managed to call her husband to tell him what had happened.

Corvallis Volunteer Fire Department Captain Skyler Woods served as commander on the rescue mission.

A group of four or five volunteer firefighters from Corvallis and Pinesdale were the first to head up the trail. They packed a backboard with them.

Woods said they were paged at 2:41 p.m. That first group arrived on the scene at about 3:30 p.m.

It was T-shirt weather when they went in, Woods said. By the time they all came out, they were in a downpour.

Stan remembers being surprised to see her rescuers so quickly.

They were extremely fast, she said. I had braced myself for a wait of four or five hours. I think they were there in about an hour and a half.

Stan was initially placed on the backboard the first responders had carried to the site.

It was not an easy task for the volunteers to navigate the rough trail while keeping Stan as comfortable as possible on the backboard.

After a little bit, a group of Ravalli County Search and Rescue volunteers met those first responders. They had brought along a wheeled rescue carrying basket and Stan was transferred onto it.

That took a lot of stress off of everyone, Woods said.

An EMT had accompanied the search and rescue team. He attended to Stans ankle before they continued their journey down the mountainside.

It then started to rain, Stan said. It turned into a downpour. They were sloshing through the water on the trail. Im sure they got really coldIt was miserable and cold and they all put my comfort and warmth first.

I hope nobody caught a cold, she said.

It took about two hours to get to the trailhead where an ambulance waited to transport Stan to Marcus Daly Memorial Hospital.

You dont really think that it will ever be you in a situation like this, Stan said. I used to make fun of people who did stupid things to get in trouble and then needed to be rescued.

Now I know that things happen, she said. It changed my point of view quite a bit. I dont know what to do to show my appreciation. Its hard to find the words.

Her husband planned to make a trip to the Bitterroot Valley with some beer and chocolate for the men and women who helped his wife get home safe.

I want to say to thank you to the brave firefighters from Corvallis and Pinesdale and to the search and rescue, Stan said. They are amazing. I hope that people know how important it is to support these brave men and women who are so quick to help people in need.
Sitting just up the bench right off Quast Lane is probably the most diverse farm in Ravalli County, if not the state.

Thats something that Western Agricultural Research Center Supervisor Zach Miller likes people to know.

On its 29 acres grows 60 varieties of berries, a host of cold-hardy grape vines, plots of pulse crops like chickpeas and lentils, new and old varieties of apples and all sorts of other different vegetables, grasses and fruits.

Every crop is being studied with the hope that the information gathered here will help farmers across the state find ways to become more successful in feeding the masses.

On Thursday, July 28 from 4 to 8 p.m., Miller and others from the research center will share what theyve learned this past year and their plans to expand with a new faculty member and new projects later this fall.

The annual field day is free and open to everyone who wants to attend.

At a time when people are yearning to know that their food is produced locally and, even better, by people they know and trust, the research being conducted at the center southeast of Corvallis might just be the thing to open doors for both old and new producers.

For instance, Miller points to the rows of berries being cultivated as part of the centers Montana-grown super foods project as a potential for a new money-crop for the valley.

High in antioxidants, the centers berry crop includes varieties that are both well known and novel. The encouraging news is 95 percent of the bushes planted a year ago have survived and some even produced a small crop this summer.

A Fortune magazine article said fruit sales are the fastest growing food in grocery stores, Miller said. Berries are one of the crops that are driving that growth.

People are interested in their health benefits, Miller said. In the U.S., there is $3 billion a year spent just on berries.

With its mild climate and cold winters, Miller said the Bitterroot Valley offers a place where berries can grow without a lot of disease issues.

Our biggest challenge here is controlling wildlife  the deer and birds, he said.

There are challenges to creating a new berry field, orchard or vineyard. It takes money up front to get the plants in the ground, protected and watered.

And then it takes patience to let them mature to the point that they start to produce, Miller said.

Once the plants are mature, farmers can earn between $5,000 to $10,000 an acre off some of the varieties of fruit, he said.

There is a lot of up-front investments, but if you make the right choices in how you set it up, the returns will be there, he said.
A man wrapped in a Turkish flag stands next to military vehicles in front of Sabiha Airport, in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016. REUTERS/BAZ RATNER

The United States urged Turkey on Saturday to exercise restraint after a failed military coup sparked a government crackdown, and warned its NATO ally that public suggestions of a U.S. role in the plot were "utterly false" and harmful to relations.

President Barack Obama urged parties on all sides of the crisis to avoid destabilizing Turkey and follow the rule of law after the coup attempt against President Tayyip Erdogan.

The coup attempt complicated U.S.-led efforts to combat Islamic State. Turkey closed its airspace to military aircraft and power was cut off to Incirlik air base, which U.S. forces use to launch air attacks against the militant group.

U.S. officials were working with Turkish officials to resume air operations quickly, the Pentagon said.

Secretary of State John Kerry told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that authorities should respect the rule of law during their probe of the coup.

He also said "public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," the State Department said.

Turkey has long been a key U.S. ally but relations have been strained in recent years and Erdogan's government has accused U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen of being behind the coup attempt.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said any country that stands by Gulen will be considered at war with Turkey, and Erdogan urged Washington to deport the cleric.

Kerry said the United States was willing to help Turkey as it tries to identify those involved in the coup attempt, but made clear it would only act if there was evidence against Gulen.

"We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr Gulen, and obviously we invite the government of Turkey ... to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny and the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments appropriately," he said.

Gulen has condemned the coup attempt and denied any involvement in it.

Obama conferred with his national security and foreign policy advisers on Saturday morning and reiterated his support for the "democratically-elected, civilian" government of Turkey.

"While we have no indications as of yet that Americans were killed or injured in the violence, the president and his team lamented the loss of life and registered the vital need for all parties in Turkey to act within the rule of law and to avoid actions that would lead to further violence or instability," the White House said.

Obama noted the United States needed continued cooperation from Turkey in the fight against terrorism.

Forces loyal to Erdogan largely crushed the last remnants of the coup on Saturday as he launched a purge of the armed forces to tighten his grip on power.

Turkey scrambled jets throughout Friday night to resist the coup launched by a faction within Turkey's military that saw rebels piloting military aircraft.

The Incirlik air base near Adana in the southeast of the country was running on internal power sources after a loss of commercial power to the base, the Pentagon said.

"U.S. officials are working with the Turks to resume air operations there as soon as possible," said Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook. "In the meantime, U.S. Central Command is adjusting flight operations in the counter-ISIL campaign to minimize any effects on the campaign."

THREAT TO COALITION FIGHT

Erdogan has cooperated with Washington in the fight against Islamic State, but relations have been rocky with U.S. criticism of Erdogan's increasing authoritarianism, Turkey's support for Islamist opposition groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the slow pace in sealing Turkey's border with Syria to foreign fighters.

The closing of the airspace over Incirlik effectively grounded U.S. aircraft and drones that have been instrumental in the campaign to crush Islamic State in Syria, including supporting drives by Syrian Kurds and moderate Arabs, who are being advised by U.S. special forces, to seize the militant-held city of Manbij and Raqqa, the "capital" of the caliphate declared by Islamic State.

"Clearly the variable here is how long the closure will last," said Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If we're unable to fly from Incirlik, it will have a significant impact on the air campaign."

A Turkish presidency official in Istanbul said the move was temporary and aimed at preventing rogue aircraft from targeting civilians and government buildings.

"This is a short-term measure which won't have significant effect on coalition operations," the official said. "We have discussed this measure with our colleagues in Washington as well and they understand our concerns."

A prolonged closure of Incirlik's airspace could force the United States to divert aircraft based in the Persian Gulf to the Manbij and Raqqa offensives, constraining the air power available to support Iraqi and U.S. forces involved in operations against Islamic State.

It could also complicate the Pentagons ability to resupply and aid U.S. special forces inside Syria.
ANKARA, Turkey (AP)  Forces loyal to Turkey's president quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some 250 people dead and over 1,400 wounded Saturday. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed that those responsible "will pay a heavy price for their treason" as authorities arrested or dismissed thousands of troops and judges.

The chaos Friday night and Saturday came amid a period of political turmoil in Turkey  a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group  that critics blame on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. Staying in power by switching from being prime minister to president, Erdogan has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

The government has also come under pressure from hosting millions of refugees who have fled violence in neighboring Syria and Iraq, and from a series of bloody attacks blamed on Islamic State extremists and Kurdish rebels.

Erdogan was on a seaside vacation when tanks rolled into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul, blocking key bridges. From a cellphone, he delivered a televised address that called for huge crowds to come out and defend Turkey's democracy  which they did in Ankara, the capital, and in Istanbul, facing off against troops who had blocked key Bosporus bridges that link the city's Asian and European sides.

Erdogan flew home early Saturday and declared the coup a failure.

"They have pointed the people's guns against the people. The president, whom 52 percent of the people brought to power, is in charge. This government brought to power by the people is in charge," he told large crowds after landing at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim described the night as "a black mark on Turkish democracy" and said the perpetrators "will receive every punishment they deserve."

He also said July 15 will be remembered as "a festival for democracy," the day when those who carried out a coup against the people were hit by a coup themselves.

Late Saturday, Defense Minister Fikri Isik said state authorities were in full control of all areas in Turkey following the coup attempt but warned that authorities would remain vigilant.

The uprising appears not to have been backed by the most senior ranks of the military, and Turkey's main opposition parties quickly condemned the attempted overthrow. Gen. Umit Dundar said the plotters were mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and the armored units.

Turkey's four main political parties released a joint declaration during an extraordinary parliamentary meeting later Saturday, denouncing the coup attempt and claiming that any moves against the people or parliament will be met with the "with the iron will of the Turkish Grand National Assembly resisting them."

The statement praised the Turkish nation for its unwavering belief in democracy and lauded citizens for taking to the streets and resisting the coup.

The death toll appeared to be over 250 people. Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the process of putting down the coup attempt and 2,839 plotters were detained. A source at the office of the presidency, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government rules, said the toll of 161 "excludes assailants." Dundar said at least 104 "coup plotters" had died.

Turkey's NATO allies lined up to condemn the coup attempt. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged all sides to support Turkey's democratically elected government and Obama held a meeting with his national security advisers. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he spoke to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and urged the Turkish people to respect democracy.

U.S. airline regulators banned all flights between the U.S. and airports in Ankara and Istanbul, including flights to the U.S. via third countries.

There have long been tensions between the military  which sees itself as the protector of the secular Turkish state  and Erdogan's Islamic-influenced AKP party.

Government officials blamed the coup attempt on a U.S.-based moderate Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Gulen, however, said he condemned "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey" and sharply rejected any responsibility for it.

"Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force," he said. "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations."

Still, Erdogan's government pressed ahead Saturday with a purge of judicial officials, with 2,745 judges being dismissed across Turkey for alleged ties to Gulen, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency. It said 10 members of Turkey's highest administrative court were detained and arrest warrants were issued for 48 administrative court members and 140 members of Turkey's appeals court.

Among those detained for questioning were the commander of Turkey's second army, Gen. Adem Huduti, and a few other top aides in the eastern city of Malatya, Anadolu said.

The coup attempt began late Friday, with a military statement saying forces had seized control "to reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for law and order to be reinstated."

Fighter jets buzzed overhead, gunfire erupted outside military headquarters and vehicles blocked two major bridges in Istanbul. Soldiers backed by tanks blocked entry to Istanbul's airport for a couple of hours before being overtaken by pro-government crowds carrying Turkish flags.

Top military commanders went on television to condemn the action and order troops back to their barracks. By early Saturday, the putsch appeared to have fizzled.

CNN-Turk showed dozens of soldiers walking among tanks with their hands held up, surrendering to government forces. Discarded gear was strewn on the ground. Some flag-waving people climbed onto the tanks.

NTV television showed a Turkish colonel and other soldiers on their knees being searched and taken into custody at military headquarters. The Hurriyet newspaper, quoting investigators, said some privates had thought they were on military maneuvers, not a coup attempt.

A Blackhawk military helicopter with seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian landed in the Greek city of Alexandroupolis, where the passengers requested asylum. While Turkey demanded their extradition, Greece said it would hand back the helicopter and consider the men's asylum requests.

Fighting continued into the early morning, with the sounds of huge blasts echoing across Istanbul and Ankara, including at least one bomb that hit the parliament complex, scattering broken glass and other debris across a lobby.

CNN-Turk said two bombs hit near the presidential palace, killing five people and wounding others.

Turkey is a key partner in U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group, and has allowed American jets to use its Incirlik air base to fly missions against the extremists in nearby Syria and Iraq. A coup against the democratically elected government could have made it difficult for the United States to continue to cooperate with Turkey.

The Pentagon said U.S. warplanes stopped flying missions against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq from Incirlik after the Turkish government closed its airspace to military aircraft. U.S. officials were working with Turkish officials to get permission to resume air operations as soon as possible.

Erdogan's Islamist government has also been accused of playing an ambiguous  even double-sided  role in Syria. Turkey's renewed offensive against Kurdish militants  who seek more autonomy and are implacable foes of IS  has complicated the U.S.-led fight against IS.

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the Chatham House think tank in London, said the attempted coup appeared to have been "carried out by lower-ranking officers."

"Their main gripe seems to have been President Erdogan's attempt to transform his office into a powerful and centralized executive presidency," Hakura said. "In the short term, this failed coup plot will strengthen President Erdogan."

Turkey's military staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pressured Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, a pious mentor of Erdogan, out of power in 1997.
Prime Minister KP Oli

Kathmandu, Nepal: Prime Minister KP Oli has been consulting with legal and constitutional experts over the situation of the recent political situation and its possible solutions.

Prime Minister Oli is reluctant to resign despite being reduced to minority after not only the CPN Maoist Center withdrew its support to the government but also the no confidence motion is also registered in the parliament.

It is said that Prime Minister is seeking any constitutional basis to retain in the post until the new constitution is implemented by conducting the elections.

Earlier, the Nepali Congress and the CPN Maoist Center, which had registered their no confidence motion against Prime Minister Oli at the parliament, had consulted with the legal and constitutional experts.

The so-called legal and constitutional experts have also divided over the issue of formation of next government on the basis of the constitutional provisions.
The Express Tribune - July 16, 2016

by Minerwa Tahir

Qandeel Baloch is dead. Seems like the woman had earned the ire of way too many men. In Pakistan, the ire of one man is enough to claim your life or at least ruin your face forever with a splash of some acid. First, it was Maulana Abdul Qavi, followed by her husbandas revelations. Finally, her brother came for her life.

One woman against three mighty vicegerents of God?

Boy, she needed to be put back in her skin and reminded of her auqaat (place) as a woman.

Letas fragment her experiences with the mentioned three men.

Qavi

The then Ruet-e-Hilal Committee member got embroiled into controversy after Qandeel uploaded a video and some selfies with him of their meeting in a private hotel room. With her revelations of Qavias flirtations and inexcusable conduct considering that he is a religious cleric, Qandeel claimed to have exposed the true face of this mullah.

When the controversy around mufti Qavi surfaced, even I was a bit wary about Qandeelas version. But his recent statement,

aPeople can learn a lesson from the fate of this woman who had accused me falsely,a

Makes me wonder if all along Qandeel had been telling us the truth.

His statement came during his acondemnationa of the killing. It amazes me how shamelessly he is indirectly justifying the killing by referring to it as some form of punishment for Qandeelas alleged misdemeanour with him. He seems to be telling us that she has been served well. Makes one wonder if he has some role in ensuring that she is aserved well.a

Husband

While the husband claimed that it was a love marriage and he still had letters written by Qandeel with her blood to him, the social media starlet offered a different version. She claimed that it was an arranged marriage and she had been a victim of domestic abuse during the one year long relationship. As if accusations of abuse were not enough, Qandeel went on to announce that she will now fight for the custody of her son.

Brother

According to news reports, police have confirmed that Qandeel was killed for ahonour.a Family sources claimed that Qandeelas brothers had asked her to quit modelling and the one who killed her had been threatening her about uploading pictures and videos on social media.

Qandeel was famous for her suggestive videos that she uploaded on social media. While I respect her right to use her body as she pleases, I have had my reservations as a feminist over what I see as her own objectification of herself. In my opinion, women have better talents that merely looks. If you say that this is awhat she wants,a I still feel that she has been conditioned by our patriarchal society to want this.

It is just like we are made to believe that we, as labourers, are compensated for the amount of our labour, while in reality the capitalist enjoys the surplus that we create. The systems in place are basically exploitative and we are conditioned to serve these systems believing that we are doing good to our own selves. However, no opinion or morality brigade is superior to a humanas life.

Just this morning, my sister told me how a male friend of hers told her that itas good that Qandeel has been killed. When asked to elaborate, he claimed that with her death aso many young men have been saved from sina as there will be no asinfula videos any more.

It amazes me how helpless our ayoung mena are when it comes to saving themselves from asin.a To ensure their safety, their only solution is always the elimination of this sin a mind you, sin is just synonymous with woman a and never exercise of self-control.

In reality, it is Qandeelas honesty and defiance of patriarchal norms that actually points out how dishonourable our society really is. She was alone, powerful, influential. And she told all the haters out there that she refused to be suppressed under their patriarchal standards of morality. As Andaleeb Rizvi aptly puts it in her Facebook status,

aQandeel Balochas honour killing is a reminder that we are not an honourable people, and probably wonat be for another 100 years. She brought the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the mullah out for the public to view. She told of forced marriage and domestic violence she faced at the hands of her own family and husband. She told the society that she was the only owner of her body and self, and will not be dictated by men. She revealed how unhonourable this patriarchal society is, and so she was aput downa by a man.a

Pakistan likes to believe that it is a champion of ghairat (honour). After all, hum maaen, hum behnain, hum betiyaan, qaumon ki izzat hum se hai (We mothers, sisters and daughters, the honour of nations lies in us).

To someone who is not aware of how things work in this country, I bring to you a small definition of what honour really means to this country.

To be crude, it basically revolves around what happens between the legs of women. To be precise, this honour is the tool employed by our patriarchal society to ensure that no woman enjoys the freedom she wants.

Leaving Qandeel Baloch aside, pick up any instance of honour killing. It is no rocket science; all we see is a constant struggle on the part of the champions of the ghairat brigade to enforce the regualtions of morality a lest you forget, these rules are only for women, to make them subservient to the authority of men. Be it the case of Sumaira, the 17-year-old girl who was killed by her ghairatmand brother in Orangi Town, Karachi, this April, for speaking to a stranger man, or that of 16-year-old Zeenat Bibi who was torched to death by her family for marrying out of choice. These women are a few of the women who were reminded of the fate of exercising freewill. With them, women in general are reminded of the lesser status that society actually gives to them.

aIn case you are under the misperception that you can equal man, I will remind you of your status,a

Says society to each of us women.

While many of us will feel that not all women are deprived of freedoms, let me remind you of a harsh reality. Our freedom as women is restricted to what is allowed by the men who aowna us a our fathers, brothers, husbands, etc.

If I am an independent woman today who can work with freedom, it is only because my father is a progressive man whose values allowed me to attain independence. As much as it breaks my heart to say this, even our freedoms and the amount of them thereof depend on our men. Qandeel Baloch is dead because the freedom that she had been exercising all along had not been validated by her familyas men. The same will be the fate of any of us who dares to defy the parameters of freedom defined by the men of our families.

Letas sink back into our collective depressions.
Hindustan Times - July 17, 2016

When progressives turn reactionary

by Ramachandra Guha

CPI(M) party headquarters. It is puzzling to see the Indian Left oppose the push for a common civil code for all citizens (HT Photo)

In the conventional wisdom, the Right stands for Order, the Left for Change. The Right defends Hierarchy and Authority, the Left demands Justice and Equality. The Right is for and of the Establishment, the Left is for and of the Aaam Admi (and Aaam Aurat).

These stereotypes are not entirely without foundation. The abolition of aristocratic distinctions; the challenging of patriarchy; the defence of individual liberties against the arbitrary exercise of state or clerical power; voting rights for peasants, workers, and women; these were all the handiwork, largely, of what we call the Left.

Given these historical legacies, it is puzzling to see the Indian Left oppose the push for a common civil code for all citizens, which the Constitution had promised but which successive governments have failed to enact. Back in the 1940s and 50s, Ambedkar and Nehru thought it prudent to first change personal laws in favour of Hindu women, since there was a vigorous reform movement among Hindus (but not however among Muslims). However, they certainly hoped that, in the not too distant future, a gender-just code of personal and family law that applied to all citizens of the Republic, would come to be enacted.

From time to time, the demand for a common civil code is renewed. This happened 30 years ago, at the time of the Shah Bano case, and it is now happening again in response to the case of Shayara Bano, who appealed to the Supreme Court to have the pernicious practice of atriple talaqa abolished.

This fresh debate on a common civil code has brought forth a torrent of commentary in the liberal and left-wing press. Virtually all of it, to my surprise (not to say shock), has been against the idea that, in our Republic, the same laws must apply to all citizens regardless of caste, community, class or gender. There have been several articles attacking a common civil code in the widely read websites Scroll and The Wire, as well as in the staid and respected Economic and Political Weekly.

From reading this flood of articles, one can identify seven arguments that Indian leftists offer in opposition to a common civil code:

1) The reforms of Hindu personal law in the 1950s were not as progressive as they are made out to be, since they were tainted by Brahmanical rituals and prejudices;

2) The customary laws and practices of the Hindus today are often very reactionary, as for example in the khap panchayats;

3) The unreformed Muslim personal laws are not as reactionary as made out to be, and sometimes or often give women reasonable rights;

4) The customary practices of Muslims are also not as bad as claimed; thus Muslim polygamy does not discriminate against second or third wives in the manner that Hindu polygamy does or did;

5) The demand for a uniform civil code is motivated by the political agenda of the BJP (and by their desire to win the Uttar Pradesh assembly election, in particular);

6) Article 44 of the Constitution, asking for a Uniform Civil Code, clashes with Article 25, assuring the freedom to propagate religion;

7) There are many other Articles of the Constitution that remain unfulfilled; why then harp on this one?

Those making these claims would consider themselves liberals, if not leftists. What is striking in these apologias is the note of defensiveness. For instance, the personal law reforms of the 1950s gave Hindu women, for the first time, the right to choose their marriage partners (regardless of caste), to divorce a brutal husband, and to inherit ancestral property. If these laws remain imperfect, surely one must work to improve them further, rather than disparage them?

Likewise, even if Muslim personal law is not as awful as charged, surely both polygamy and triple talaq are repugnant practices, which must be abolished at once? And just because the RSS or the BJP supports a policy, does that make it wrong? I myself know Hindu patriarchs who support a uniform civil code purely out of spitefulness; they are angered by privileges that Muslim men still have (such as the taking of multiple wives), but which Ambedkar and Nehru took away from them.

The task, indeed duty, of progressive thinkers is to go beyond both political expediency and religious prejudice, and support a right policy for the right reasons. They must analyse, and articulate, the ethical principles behind the search for a civil code that does not discriminate between individual citizens on the basis of caste, community, religion, or gender.

No one has ever claimed that a common civil code is a magic wand that will make discrimination against women disappear overnight. But it is a necessary first step towards the creation of a Republic whose citizens are equal before the law. This common code must draw not on aHindua or aMuslima ideas, but on the fundamental principles of individual dignity and gender equality. Legal scholars beyond party lines a and of all religious affiliations or none a must be involved in its framing. And the law itself needs to be complemented by the steady, patient, work of grassroots social reform. For one can and must advocate a common civil code and work for the abolition of caste panchayats at the same time.

In my opinion, left-wing intellectuals who oppose a common civil code disavow the progressive heritage of socialist and feminist movements in India and across the world. They are a whether they sense it or not a apologists for the status quo, whose tortured and convoluted arguments only serve the interests of Muslim patriarchs and the Islamic clergy.

Ramachandra Guhaas most recent book is Gandhi Before India

Twitter: @Ram_Guha

The views expressed are personal
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Salina photographer brings exhibit to Kansas Wesleyan

The exhibit features Wichita War Dancer, a member of the Tohono Odham and Ponca nations who has been performing the war dance for several years.
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Being a big fan of horror movies in general, I understand that to fully enjoy them there has to be a suspension of disbelief. Most of the times with the genre this isnt a problem, but what if the horror movie you are watching comes with those dreaded words attached Based on a True Story. The cynic in me tells me that pretty much all the story will be bullshit, with only a modicum of truth. Most of the times this doesnt bother me, but how far can the true story be changed and stretched before it becomes a bare faced lie.

My favourite film of all time is still William Friedkins The Exorcist (1973). Although I am pretty much an atheist, the films atmosphere, storytelling and performances cant be faulted, and is still considered to be on the best horror films ever made. Based on the novel by William Peter Blatty, the film is a faithful adaptation, and still has the ability to shock the viewer 43 years later.

The Exorcist is also famously based on a real life exorcism that reportedly took place in Georgetown in 1949. In this case it was a young boy and not a girl that was reported to be possessed by the Devil. The true name of the boy this supposedly happened to has never been published, apparently to protect him. When the case was written about he was alternatively called Roland Doe or Robbie Manheim.

Inspired by this story, William Peter Blatty went on to write his famous novel, but by changing a lot of the facts of the reported case it is a heavily fictionalised telling of the story. This isnt a problem as Blatty has stated on a number of occasions that he only took the real life case as an inspiration and a basis for his novel.

Years later, author Thomas B Allen came to write his novel Possessed, published in 1993. The novel accounts the real life case of the possession of Roland Doe. His book was picked up and made into a Showtime Original Movie. Possessed (2000) stars Timothy Dalton as Father William Bowdern, a haunted man who has seen and been victim to atrocities in the Second World War. Having seen photos of the real Bowdern, and read a few interviews, he is quite removed from the sexy priest that Timothy Dalton plays in the movie. A priest, who swears like a trooper, beats up cops and reads comic books.

Author Allen had commented that the consensus regarding Roland Doe was that he could have just been a deeply disturbed boy, with nothing supernatural about him. In the movie, there is no doubt that there is demonic possession involved, with their being the usual chairs being thrown about the room, levitating beds, vomiting children, Ouija boards and the rest. Although the film is good for a made for cable movie, there are a number of inaccuracies, not only to Thomas B Allens book, but to the real life case.

Some of the facts that appear in the movie Possessed have been proven to be inaccurate. This may be down to being taken from the novel it is based. Author Mark Opsasnick has since questioned a lot of the facts that were included in Allens novel, which could account for some of the questionable content, but a lot of the more sensationalist parts come from the scriptwriter and director. Throughout the film, the family only ever contact the Church instead of having him psychologically assessed. In reality the boy had visited a number of psychiatrists who have since stated that Roland Doe suffered from mental illness. When Opsasnick tracked people down that knew the real Roland Doe, they overall conclusion Opsasnick got was that the boy was a trickster and this wasnt the first time he had done something like this.

Opsasnick had went on to state a number of facts that the book that the author had gotten wrong. One of these was the location of the exorcism. The others were where the boy lived, who was involved in the actual cases and the level of information that is actually documented. There isnt even any evidence or statements about the alleged possession. Father Walter Halloran is one of the last surviving witnesses to the real life exorcism, who wouldnt even go on record on if the boy was actually possessed, stating he wasnt qualified to make that assessment. Although his character is included in the movie, he doesnt play a large part in the main story. Perhaps using him would contradict the horror story the producers wanted to tell. Saying this, I would still advise people to watch Possessed as it does work as a horror story, just not as a document of the truth.

Due to the popularity of films like the Exorcist and the Omen (1976), Hollywood was looking for the next big thing in horror, which they were given with the DeFeo murders in 1974 and the subsequent Amityville haunting case. Made in 1979, The Amityville Haunting, receiving mainly poor reviews, went on to become a financial success becoming the second highest grossing film in the country of that year. It also went on to spawn a number of spinoffs and sequels, each one poorer than the last.

Probably one of the most well known and documented haunted house stories, the Amityville Horror has also been heavily criticised by investigators. The film, taking a lot of its plot from the novel by Jay Anson, but also taking dramatic licence when required, includes a number of scenes that have since been proven to be false. The part of George Lutz, as played in the movie by James Brolin, is shown as the film goes on, to be Falling Apart. This means him acting angry and sullen. His real life counterpart was apparently so upset with his portrayal in the film he took the producers to court, something he would do again with the remake.

Throughout the novel and the movie, there are a number of incidents that take place that have since been challenged. The plague of flies could be down to something as simple as there being six people killed in the house before, and the house being sealed. The sudden opening of windows was also explained, as the counter weights in the room werent set right and when you stood on a particular floorboard it would cause the window to open. The Lutzes also speak of their daughter speaking to Jodie the demonic pig. The simple answer to this, she was five at the time, and most children make things up such as imaginary friends or even demonic pigs. When just looking at the novel, there are a number of changes between the original hardback print and the paperback edition, due to the amount of information that had been challenged. This meant that a number of facts were changed to fit the narrative that they wished to create. From this, the information was further changed to make the film be more of a traditional horror movie.

The character of Father Delaney, played by Rod Steiger is also a fictional character, lessening again the plausibility of the supposed true story. Delaney loosely based on the real life Father Pecoraro who was documented to be heavily involved in the case. Perhaps the reason for a change to a fictional character was that Percoraro has been very inconsistent throughout the years with his story. At time he said a voice told him to get out, which proceeded to slap him. This scene is recreated quite well in the film. Percoraro has also stated that he had only spoken with the Lutzes once concerning the haunting, and this was over the telephone, contradicting his other claims.

Lawyer William Weber has in later years stated that he had concocted the story of the haunting along with the Lutzes over a number of bottles of wine. The Lutzes took him to court over this. The case was eventually thrown out; as the judge commented that he saw the book as largely a work of fiction.

For other information on the Amityville Haunting I would recommend the excellent documentary My Amityville Horror (2013), which focuses on Daniel Lutz, one of the children that lived through the haunting. It is interesting to see how this event has changed his life, and not exactly for the better. It is definitely more revealing than any of the movies made from the events.

I recently went to see The Conjuring 2 (2016), directed by James Wan. An extremely well made film with excellent performances; it is probably one of the better horror films I have seen in recent years, although still guilty of some cliches of the genre.

Like the first film, the Conjuring 2 is based on a supposedly true story. The first film dealt with a reported haunting that took place in Rhode Island in the 1971. During the movie, Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga are contacted by the Perron family due to the unexplained happening in their home. The second movie is based on the well documented Enfield Poltergeist case, which took place in the latter half of the 1970s. Again the Warrens are contacted to assist with exorcising these demons.

In both movies, the Warrens are shown to be Holy Saviours, working on behalf of the Church to rid these areas of supernatural activity. Anyone that reads into these cases in more depth will begin to realise the heavily fictionalised accounts of not only the events based around the hauntings, but the people that were involved. It has since been proven that both the Perron family haunting and the Enfield Haunting, which forms the basis of the Conjuring 2 were largely sensationalised, and went on to make most of the people involved a decent sum of money.

In the Conjuring (2013), the movie opens with a short prologue about a haunted doll called Annabelle. From the start of the movie, the Director has begun to bend the truth. The doll of Annabelle as used in the film is very creepy, with staring eyes and a cracked face. The real Annabelle unfortunately couldnt be any further from this, being an old traditional Raggedy Ann doll. I am also pretty sure that it isnt possessed by an ancient spirit, although I cant confirm this. I understand why the production would change this part, as they are more concerned with the horror aspects of the story than the actual truth.

After the prologue, we are introduced to the Perron family, who move to a new home in Harrisville, Rhode Island. Within days of moving in they are being terrorised by strange phenomena. They seek out the Warrens for help. This again is highly fictionalised, in order to portray the leads as heroic. In reality, the Perron family did not seek out the Warrens. The Warrens heard about this supposed haunting through the news, then just showed up at the Perrons door. Apparently Roger Perron was not happy about this situation, which culminated in him punching Ed Warren in the mouth. Of course none of this is included in the film, but would have made for some good dramatic scenes, and made the Conjuring a different type of horror movie. In the movie Roger and Ed become friends and the issue of Roger Perrons distrust of the Warrens never arises.

Dr Joe Nickell has stated on a number of occasions that the Warrens would usually visit a supposed haunted place, write a book about it then release it in time for the Halloween season.

Throughout the movie, there are a number of jump scares and creepy scenes, which are all well done. Chairs are thrown about the house, and children levitate. Most of the events in the film are not documented in original reports or even the books that have been written by Andrea Perron.

Towards the end of the movie, an exorcism has to be performed on Carolyn Perron, played by Lili Taylor. Taylor is excellent in the part, but I cant say how well she captured the character of Carolyn Perron, as I doubt Perron was ever possessed by a demon. In the end the Warrens save the day and everything is good in the world.

In reality there has never been any concrete proof of a haunting, other than recollections of Andrea Perron in her books. Even though she was 12 at the time, she does state that everything she remembers is exactly how it happened. Perhaps being a sceptic I find this extremely hard to believe, and the fact that she was 12 at the time but wrote the book nearly 40 years later doesnt make it any easier.

In the Conjuring 2, covering the already mentioned Enfield Haunting case, The Warrens are once again back in action. The prologue of this movie takes place in the famous house from the Amityville Haunting, another famous case the Warrens would have you believe they solved. In truth, the Warrens came in at the tail-end of the Amityville Haunting case, hence why Jay Anson, and not the Warrens wrote the book of the case.

During this prologue, Lorraine has a vision of a Demonic Nun, who she witnesses killing her husband. The nun recurs throughout the movie and is used to good effect, resembling Marilyn Manson in drag. Wan gave interviews before the release of the film, stating that he had filmed reshoots, as he had the idea of the nun figure and thought it was more effective than the demon figure he had originally used. When basing a film on truth, you theoretically shouldnt be able to go in after the fact and change a character to something else entirely, even if it does make for more effective scares.

Later on, Ed and Lorraine are shown to be taking part in a talk show alongside paranormal investigator Stephen Kaplan. During this scene Ed and Kaplan get into an argument, with Kaplan being made in the film to look like an idiot. My main issue with this is that I have seen the real version of this interview. Unlike the movie, the interview did not include Stephen Kaplan, but Dr Joe Nickell, a renowned sceptic. A lot of the dialogue they exchanged is used in the movie, but attributed to Kaplan instead of Nickell. Their reasoning for this must be that unlike Nickell, Kaplan can be ridiculed as whilst he was alive he advertised himself as a vampirologist. Kaplan can be viewed with scorn if anyone took it upon themselves to look him up. If they were to look up Nickell they would find he is an educated man with legitimate reasoning for his comments.

The film then moves on to London and follows the Hodgson family, who live in a run-down Council house. Like most haunted house films, the haunting begins with the usual noises in the attic etc. It then escalates from there. The Warrens are then called to London to assist in the case.

It is surprising that James Wan decided to base the second Conjuring movie on the Enfield case, as it has been heavily debunked in the ensuing years, and it was proven that the girls who lived in the house had staged incidents. Wan includes scenes in the movie for dramatic effect, when it shows one of the girls setting up such an incident to make the investigators think that they have faked everything, only for it to be revealed that this is the demons plan. In truth, it is more likely that they did stage these events. One of the famous photographs, which are used in the movie, is of the girl levitating off her bed. Looking at the photograph, it is quite laughable how people would base a theory of the existence of the supernatural on what is clearly a photograph of a child jumping off a bed.

Also roughly a year before the Conjuring 2, Sky Television produced a mini-series based on the same case. The Enfield Haunting (2015), is not as effective as The Conjuring 2, but seems to stick more closely to the facts than its Hollywood counterpart. Still highly fictionalised, it does at least include the original investigators that worked on the investigation, Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair played by Timothy Spall and Matthew McFadden. Surprisingly Playfair is absent from the Conjuring 2, not even being name checked. A lot of the activities that he was involved in during the investigation are attributed to Ed Warren in the film, such as the recording of Playfair having a conversation with Bill who was apparently speaking through Janet Hodgson.

It has also been documented that only Ed visited the house in England, with no appearance at all from Lorraine. When Ed couldnt convince Playfair to hand over the investigation to them, he ended up leaving. The Conjuring 2 would have you believe that Ed and Lorraine solved the whole case with a little assistance, but not much, from Maurice Gross. Now I am not saying that Playfairs claims are any more truthful than the Warrens, but it is strange that he is totally omitted from one of his most famous cases, considering he was one of the lead investigators and has written a book describing the investigation. Having not read Playfairs book, I am unsure how much, if any, made it into the movie, or even the min-series.

Unfortunately due to the success of these movies, this is a trend that will continue. I may sound that I dont enjoy these movies, but I do. Its just a problem when you know something to be false and you have to continually switch off so that it doesnt spoil the movie. Would it be so hard to say inspired by a true story, that way a viewer knows there will be changes to the known story.

In addition it is not only horror movies that this happens, as I cant count the number of recent films that I have seen stamped with the statement A True Story, only to wonder where huge chucks of the original story went. The only solution I can potentially see for this is for me to stop reading the news, looking at TV or going on the internet. That way I can go in with a clean slate.
Having learned a few tricks working on his fathers multi-award winning space thriller Gravity, Jonas Cuaron brings the action down to earth to craft a similarly intense tale of human survival.



The idea of putting up a wall between Mexico and The United States of America continues to surface, thanks in large part to one particularly notorious presidential-candidate. Beyond all the bluster and politics lies the very real issue of desperate people being forced to make a perilous journey into an unknown land. In Desierto, Jonas Cuaron gives voice to the men and women who risk that path, constructing a taught and brutal story of survival.



In Mexico, a rickety truck sputters across the desert before its engine inevitably gives out. Its occupants, immigrants being transported into the US, are forced to take an alternate and unknown route on foot. Crossing a border fence consisting of just three lines of barbed wire turns out to be the easiest part of their journey. For one man (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) this is a crime that cant go unpunished. Armed with a high-powered rifle and his well-trained dog, this patriot is going to take out the Mexican menace with extreme prejudice. Gael Garcia Bernal and a rapidly diminishing group of companions must scrabble for survival against their deadly assailant while navigating an unforgiving desert environment. Welcome to America.



No one plays a whisky-swilling, gun-toting, patriot loon quite like Jeffrey Dean Morgan. This is what The Walking Deads Negan may have been before the zombie apocalypse. Its what The Comedian could have been on return from Vietnam if a government job in a cape wasnt waiting. But this is no comic book villain. Morgan imbues his character with a level of barely concealed rage and pain that is only allowed to simmer to the surface in the brief moments of respite the film allows. Even so, its hard to care what his issues are once the bodies start dropping. Like his nemesis, Gael Garcia Bernals protagonist threatens two-dimensionality: hes handsome, heroic, waits around for the weaker members and carries a teddy bear for his son. Yet its the moments of panic, foolishness and rabbit-in-headlights fear that highlight his riveting performance and the minor exchanges that give his character weight.



Once the hunt begins, Desierto gets intense fast and never lets up. With a sniper's crosshair planted on their heads and a ferocious dog is on their trail the hunted few must scramble up cliff faces and down ravines, across jagged, rocky outcrops and through vicious spiked cactus patches with death hanging over them. Matching Gravity for pace and punctuated by moments of brutal violence Cuaron weaves a savage trail towards a truly heart-stopping finale.



While the director gives us a clear view of the killer and his motives, to the people fighting for the lives he remains at a faceless distance. Unknowable and seemingly unstoppable the man, and his monstrous dog, terrorise their powerless quarry. Tapping into basic human fears and ratcheting up the tension towards an agonising climax, Desierto delivers some of the most exciting cinema to be seen this year.
Dongju: The Portrait of a Poet, his third film since his break, Director Lee, and fellow NYAFF alum, screenwriter Shin Yeon-shick, talked with me about the films unflinching look at Japanese atrocities in Korea. For someone who claimed retirement during our interview back in 2011 , director Lee Joon-ik, has been one busy man. Returning to the New York Asian Film Festival with, his third film since his break, Director Lee, and fellow NYAFF alum, screenwriter Shin Yeon-shick, talked with me about the films unflinching look at Japanese atrocities in Korea.

The Lady Miz Diva: Director Lee, why did you make a biographical picture about the poet Yun Dong-ju, at this particular time?

Lee Joon-Ik: There was a film nominated for the foreign Academy Award called Son of Saul, and that was about Auschwitz. When you think about it, there are so many films that deal with the Holocaust and the Nazi reign during the 1930s, but there were basically no films that dealt with the colonisation of Korea by Japan, and the imperialism that Japan was going throughout the time. I didnt feel that there were any films that portrayed young people in that time period and the tragedy of that time period.

Even for the Korean audiences, because it happened such a long time ago, I think there was an effort to sort of just shove it under the rug and just not remember about those things. Because of that, that is what really sparked me to produce this film.

When you think about Germany, Germany has done its best to apologise for its past war crimes. But if you juxtapose that with Japan, they have tried and struggled to portray themselves as the victim of World War II. For instance, when President Obama visited Hiroshima, they were constantly trying to play the victim, but in essence, they are the perpetrator of war crimes in that time period. So, I feel that the film, Dongju, does a very clear job of explaining the historically accurate relation between victim and perpetrator.

LMD: I know Mr. Shin as a film director, as well as a screenwriter. With Dongju, you are writing about someone who existed recently; someone people still living may have known and remember. Does the writing process change when youre writing about someone who actually lived, that people can recall, versus a completely fictional creation?

Shin Yeon-shick: I think the process is completely different for those two types. I think we got a little lucky with Yun Dong-ju, because as you know, he lived a very short life. He died when he was about 28. And because he died a student and a very young person, I think he sort of preserved that sort of innocence that you have a young age.

So, in the process of researching a persons life when youre writing for film, you tend to see the not-so-great sides of the person, and also if you were interviewing descendants or loved ones, they can give you information that may not be in line with what you were thinking of. But in the case of Yun Dong-ju, because he had such a short life, he had that innocence inside him, so there was no need for us to glorify in any way; it was really just as it was. Also, when youre interviewing the descendants, some of them may respond very sensitively and sometimes as a writer, you find yourself self-censoring what youre writing in order to sort of balance that out. But in the case of Yun Dong-ju, there was none of that, so as a writer I could say was very lucky in that sense.

LMD: Were you able to contact people who knew him?

SYs: I was able to meet a distant relative of Yun Dong-ju. Most of the research came from his biography.

LJi: The person who wrote the biography was the cousin of the character, Song Mong-iyu, who was Yun Dong-jus cousin.

LMD: So everything that were seeing was real?

LJi: The story about the two cousins was 100% real. The two women who appear in the film, they are fictional, but all the other characters are real. There were hints about the character, Lee Yeo-Jin, in the biography, but it wasnt that specific that we could go off of, so we had some creative license with that.

LMD: Mong-gyus character is the more dynamic one through the film, whereas the main character, Dong-ju, was much more subtle and quiet. Both performances are excellent, but how did you strike the balance between the very forceful presentation of Mong-gyu and the gentler portrayal of Dong-ju?

LJi: I think the balance comes from, actually, I feel that when youre portraying two friends, that the friendship bond is stronger when they actually possess the opposite personalities. For example, Song Mong-gyu, hes a go-getter; hes quick to anger. On the other hand, Yun Dong-ju is introverted; you could say he is a bit feminine in a way. And because hes a poet, he has so much inner life inside him, but as a poet, his mode of expression comes through his writing, rather than outward action. So I think the juxtaposition of those two things works very well.

One interesting thing to note is that the actors, though, they have the opposite personalities of the ones they portrayed in the film. {Laughs} That is the actors job, but in the case of Kang Ha-neul, who played Yun Dong-ju, he is a very energetic and outgoing person, and Park Jung-min, who plays Song Mong-gyu, he is actually very considerate and quiet and he is very thoughtful. So they were different than the characters they portrayed.

LMD: How did you prepare the actors to play the cousins on screen? Their bond is so palpable in the film, I wondered if you gave them any exercises or instructions to help with that bond?

LJi: Park Jung-min is actually two years older than Kang Ha-neul, but they are in the same agency. Actually, the actor Hwang Jung-min, he is the person who picked them up and put the two of them in his own agency. So they knew each other before, but when on set, a lot of actors tend to feel competitive and not want to support each other, but these two, they did their best to support each other on set and help each other out. I feel like that sort of dynamic came through in the film, as well.

Actually, when they were on set, there was really no room for me to give adjustments or different type of direction, because they would sort of talk it out beforehand and they would come up with a perfect balance of what we needed for the film.

LMD: You have one more rising star in your film that Id like to ask about: Mr. Shin Yeon-shicks big cameo in the film.

{All burst out laughing}

LJi: Wow! Director Shin actually comes out in the film like five times, but when hes handing out the papers is the only time when his face is actually visible.

SYs: We were doing this because we wanted to reduce production costs. {Laughs}

LJi: Im doubly shocked, because especially Americans or westerners, they are not very aware of whos who, but you have a great eye! Youve got a hawk eye. Wow.

LMD: What would you like audiences to take away from DONGJU: THE PORTAIT OF A POET?

LJi: The first thing I would like western audiences to know is the accurate history between Japan and Korea, and the way that Japan was the perpetrator of imperialism and militarism. But I feel like the astounding thing and the really important thing to know from this film is that Yun Dong-ju, in a form of nonviolence, was able to say what he wanted to say through his own form of poetry. I know that with regard to nonviolent protest methods, Gandhi is one of the most representative people, but I feel that Yun Dong-ju, also, in his own quiet way, was exposing the injustices of what was happening at that time period.

SYs: I would say, especially in Korea right now, the zeitgeist that we would say, is pretty much in turmoil, especially for the younger generations. But when you think about it, Yun Dong-ju and Song Mong-gyu, they were like ordinary students when they were living their lives, and they only became famous after their deaths.

So, in that time period, even for ordinary people, the question facing that time period was, how do I find my place in this world? How do I make a decision? What is the decision for the time period Im living in? In the case of Song Mong-gyu, he decided to pick up his knife. In the case of Yun Dong-ju, he decided to pick up his pen. They were two very different decisions. But I hope that for Korean audiences and American audiences alike, that younger generations can watch this film and contemplate about what the zeitgeist is for todays world, and also be able to contemplate on their own values and their own passions, if you will, and so that this film will help them understand their own place in this world.
The famous Serenity Prayer of american theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is as follows: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Jay Cheel's beautifully rendered How To Build A Time Machine tells the stories of two men who are on the verge of that wisdom, and in the act of telling, examines line between our boundless imagination and the rigorous nuts and bolts of acquiring the knowledge required to achieve some measure of it.

Shot over five years, the film follows former Pee Wee's Playhouse animator Rob Niosi who has been building a replica prop of the time machine from George Pal's 1960 film adaptation of H.G. Well's The Time Machine. What started as a fun 3 month project has, through is own peculiar, yet charming, Sisyphean nature, has blown out to nearly a decade. This is a peak into the psyche of a stop-motion animator whose entire working day might yield only seconds of usuable film.

Rob's father took him (and his brother) to see The Time Machine when he was a little boy, where they both became fascinated with the central machine. His father was instrumental in his son moving toward a career in animation, providing tools and encouragement and advice along the way. Implicit in Niosi's recreationf of the time machine is to recapture the pure impression he had of that perfect day at the cinema with his family.

The film juxtaposes magnificent montages of Niosi meticulously crafting each brass or mahogany part for the prop replicate together with the academics of Dr. Ronald Mallett, a physicist at the University of Connecticut whose scientific career has been a pursuit of the hard science of time travel.

Significant is the muse that drives these men, completely different relationships with their respective fathers, which gives the movie a surprising emotional resonance. If father-son stuff affects you as much as it does me, you might want to pack some tissue. Mallett lost his father to a heart attack when he was about the same age that Niosi was in rapture watching Morlocks fighting the Eloi at the movies.

The core motivation of decades of complex theory and practical experimentation is the dream of the possibility to go back and warn his father of his weak heart, and the young boy, who idolized him, that would be left fatherless at such a young age. And yes, Mallett also idolized a comic book version of H.G. Well's science fiction story which he believes put him on the circuitous path to a doctorate degree.

In 2006, Mallett told his story with his autobiography, "The Time Traveler," which Spike Lee optioned to make as a film; Mallett is one of the only black PhD physicists in the United States in the early 1970s. The relationship of Mallett and his father as a boy, and his father's gaping absence as man, is a compelling one. Mallett directly address the camera and in his own words tells the story of his life and his life's work. For a film nerd like myself, who has read Mallett's book, it is notable that his theories of time travel form the basis of Shane Carruth's hard science fiction masterpiece, Primer. You (or, more realistically an isolated sub-atomic particle) can only go so far back in time as when you first turn the machine on, no further.

Masterfully stitching these two narratives together in a way that recalls Errol Morris' Fast Cheap And Out Of Control, Cheel's associations ask many of the big questions of time travel: the grand father paradox, the ethics and social consequences of making changes to (or even being present in) the past, and the desire to know the future. He also delves into the notion that cinema is the best time travel machine we have ever possessed, we can see actors and people that have been dead for decades, we can slow down or speed up time with our photography.

Case in point, we watch five years worth of Cheel's own documentary filmmaking condensed into 82 minutes. More importantly, the movies, book, and comics that we read often provide the fuel for the decades of hard, grinding work (in Niosi's case that is both literal and figurative) to achieve only a fraction of our dreams, and coming to grips the fact that while perfection is impossible, it is the pursuit of it that is the worthy thing.

My favourite scene in the film is Niosi singlehandedly rolling a 10 foot diameter copper-anodized dish up a large hill on his leafy upstate New York estate, so it can bleach a little in the sun to achieve the perfect shade in his mind. The story of Sisyphus and the pursuits of mankind in perfect miniature. A more subtle image of Ron in his teaching office has a small can of WD-40 lubricant just within reach; I like the idea that a theoretical physicist is only a short distance from getting the squeaky wheel into motion.

While Mallett's theories confirm the fact he will never be able, personally, to go back in time to warn his father (and possibly obliterate his own timeline -- again, go see Primer), his life experience yields the wisdom that somewhere out there if his father could witness the man Mallett became as the result, his dad would be beaming. There is a certain serenity in that.

[This review original ran during the films World Premiere at HotDocs 2016. It has been republished with the films Canadian theatrical engagement, current at Toronto's Royal Cinema.

Full Disclosure: I have 'acted' in one of Jay Cheel's previous films, Colore Non Vedenti, and have been good friends with the director for several years.]
When Maestro Sergio Leone invented the Western a la Italiana genre, late in 1960, He could not talk about Italy because no one would have taken seriously a story of outlaws not set in the USA. He and his crew went as far as changing their names to English pseudonyms in order to seem more credible. "I strongly believe that, were He alive, he would have probably recounted the story of The Grossi Gang and his leader Terenzio, one that had the courage to speak when everybody else was keeping their mouth shut", says Claudio Ripalti, the Director of the movie.

On Monday, 11th of July, the Kickstarter campaign for "The Grossi Gang" has started; a groundbreaking, independent feature film made in central Italy that will shed light on the story of Terenzio Grossi and his gang mates. A two hours western movie recounting the true story of the gang bound to change Italian history.

Less than 72 hours from the start, the campaign had already raised 10.000 Euros, and became a "Project We Love" after just two.



The crowdfunding campaign is meant to complete the production budget of the movie, directed by indie film-maker Claudio Ripalti and produced by Cinestudio Italy. A true story, almost forgotten, recounting the tales of Terenzio Grossi, who manages to form a gang composed of young rebels, his goal to try and revolt against the newly formed Piedmont State.

Disillusioned with politics, hungered by ever-increasing taxes and unwilling to participate to mandatory draft by the army, the gang will seize Central Italy with the help of a growingly restless and angry population. In two years of crimes, violences and murders at the expenses of the richest and noblest, the gang will rise to its fortune in spite of coward and unprepared local authorities.

Check out the trailer on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7uR6znXAgc&yt:cc=on and make sure to turn Subtitles on)



With the help of the Crowdfunding Community, The Grossi Gang will land in cinemas in 2017, breaking the rules of the movie industry just like maestro Sergio Leone did with his films in the sixties.
Seguin, TX (78155)

Today

Rain showers in the evening with thunderstorms developing overnight. Low around 65F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Rain showers in the evening with thunderstorms developing overnight. Low around 65F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
St. Lukes College  UnityPoint Health would like to invite prospective students and their families to its Sioux City campus as part of Iowa Private College Week August 1-5.

The annual event, sponsored by the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (IAICU), provides hundreds of college-seeking students and their families an opportunity to visit 25 non-profit private college campuses in Iowa. Colleges will offer campus tours and informational meetings specifically designed to assist students in evaluating their needs and goals for their higher education experience.

St. Lukes College will host information sessions beginning daily at 9 a.m. at its 2800 Pierce Street location. College staff will provide information on St. Lukes hospital-based educational programs, admissions and financial aid. Visitors can then explore the college campus and medical center on a guided tour.

St. Lukes College, a member of IAICU, has Bachelors Degree completion programs in Nursing and Health Sciences, Associate Degree programs in Nursing, Radiologic Technology, and Respiratory Care; certificate programs in Medical Laboratory Science and Phlebotomy; as well as advanced radiology specialty programs in Computerized Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Ultrasound, and Mammography.

Students can pre-register for Iowa Private College Week visits online at www.thinkindependently.com. For more information visit www.stlukescollege.edu or by contacting the Admissions Office at St. Lukes College: (712) 279-3149 or (800) 252-4660, ext. 3149.
LAWTON, Iowa | Just about everyone has a passion or hobby, whether it's sports, a collection or playing a musical instrument. Healey Werks owner Craig Hillingers veers a little from the ordinary: emergency response.

Its a brother and sisterhood, he said. Its a passion and it gets in your blood.

Hillinger joined the Lawton Volunteer Fire Department in 1997 when Healey Werks moved to the area. He became hooked.

He gradually worked in emergency vehicle services into the company's business model, offering repairs and updates on rigs of area fire departments.

In the years past, (we) had done various projects and jobs for local fire departments, service on various pieces of apparatus, because I was involved in the fire service, he said. Weve been doing projects actively for departments for about 10 years. It wasnt something we sought out, it just kind of found us.

Fast forward nearly a decade, to the first of the year when Hillinger decided to incorporate an Emergency Vehicle Center as one of Healey Werks services, dedicated solely to service on emergency response vehicles.

With a staff of many trained firefighters who have repaired emergency vehicles over the years, Hillinger said the standalone shop seemed like a natural fit.

Its an easy crossover if you will, he said. Weve done these types of projects before, so its not something theyre unaccustomed to.

Hillinger said the idea to create a separate shop developed from a need in the immediate area for a service station for rigs.

The biggest thing is apparatus downtime, he said. If a department locally has to travel 150 miles to take it to Omaha, Des Moines or Sioux Falls, their equipment is out of their hands and out of their district and (not) providing coverage way longer than theyd like to.

If need be, Healey Werks crews will travel to a department for same-day installations or repairs.

Theres not a set radius for which communities they service, and no quota for the number of rigs that need to be worked on. Hillinger said it exists simply to fill a need for those departments that cant afford to lose a vehicle.

Those pieces of equipment or vehicles, they need them right now, he said. Its the type of thing where we want to be able to accommodate those needs as quickly as possible.

The new service center is actually located in the old Healey Werks main shop. The spot came open when a new restoration shop was installed on the grounds. Seven staffers rotate between the main restoration building and the emergency vehicle shop.

Services range anywhere from a simple oil change, to lighting and radio installation, to repairs.

Adam Petty, electronic specialist for Healey Werks, handles the lighting and communication installations. As the assistant fire chief for the Correctionville Fire Department, Petty too has the desire to help local fire departments on any level possible.

You get out there and start working with the members of the community and you get a real feel for their need of service in the area, he said.

Hillingers passion for firefighting has admittedly taken on a life of its own. Aside from his service as a volunteer firefighter and his emergency vehicle service, Healey Werks also has its own fire and safety department, complete with an engine.

The department is certified, as are a handful of Healey Werks staff members who double as volunteer firefighters. With a team in one location, at the ready, Hillinger said Healey Werks Fire and Safety can quickly assemble and arrive on scene. This helps cut down the response time of other municipal fire companies who rely on volunteers all hours of the day.

At 2 p.m. in small-town Iowa, there may be a couple of guys, at best, that can respond, he said. Its hard to do anything safe or effective with a couple of guys, so mutual aid is a significant tool for small departments.

Sloan Volunteer Fire Department chief Clifford Ping said Healey Werks is a valuable asset to his department. Sloan and Healey Werks Fire and Safety have a mutual aid agreement.

Healey Werks also has done work on the department's vehicles, including the conversion of a forestry truck from California into a rescue vehicle.

"Sometimes in all these small towns, we dont have anyone around," Ping said. "He takes them off the job and theyll come and help any time."

Like Hillinger said, firefighting is his passion, which is why the ability to incorporate it into his job and help fill a need hardly seems like work.

We get excited about doing it and helping people and doing whatever we can to be an asset to the local community, he said.
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa | David Henreckson from Princeton, New Jersey, has been hired as the director of the Dordt College Andreas Center and assistant professor of theology.

In his position as director, Henreckson will coordinate faculty research, conferences and pedagogical training. Henreckson will also oversee inallthings.org, an online publication that hosts discussions.

Henreckson will join the Dordt community with his wife, Kate, and their three children in August. He completed his Ph.D. in religion, ethics, and politics from Princeton University.
WASHINGTON | Beer drinkers who can often find out details about the grain and hops that went into their beverage may get more information from major brewers  about calories, carbohydrates, protein and more.

A trade group that represents companies like Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors said it's pushing members to voluntarily reveal by the end of 2020 more details on labels, packaging and websites about what's in their beer. The Beer Institute is also encouraging brewers to show when a beer was brewed, to list ingredients, and to point to a website or include a code that can be scanned with a smartphone for more information.

Michael Jacobson, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, said the absence of calorie labeling on cans and bottles has helped obscure what a major source of calories alcohol can be, and the beer companies should go further.

"Brewers are allowed to artificially color, flavor, sweeten, and preserve their products, as well as use foam enhancers," he said in a statement. "If the industry takes pride in its ingredients it should list them on labels and not simply on the web."

Beer Institute members produce more than 80 percent of the volume of beer sold in the United States, the group said, and added that Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors and HeinekenUSA have already agreed to the new standards.

The more inclusive labels could prove more difficult for smaller brewers, however. The Brewers Association, a trade association of craft brewers, says it supports transparency in labeling. But it believes compliance might be difficult for microbrewers who, in addition to having fewer resources, sell more small-scale seasonal products with varying ingredients.

That would mean spending more money for the greater variety of beers those brewers make, stretching already tight profit margins.

The group says it has been working separately with the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture on a plan to be included in the USDA nutrient database by beer style rather than individual brands.

Nick Petrillo, a beverage industry analyst for IBISWorld, said he thinks the larger beer companies will use the new labels to their advantage, enabling them to back up claims of lower-carb or lower-calorie beer. But he doesn't foresee "Big Beer" using the new transparency to target microbrewers who aren't compliant.

"I think this is where the industry is heading," he said. "Consumers want to know what's in the products they use."
LOS ANGELES  Photographer Arthur Grace was on assignment for Newsweek when he met Robin Williams in 1986 at a Pittsburgh comedy club. As he traveled with Williams to various stand-up gigs, the two became friends.

In between assignments covering the Ronald Reagan White House and other news events, Grace would stay with the actor-comedian at his home and shoot family portraits and Christmas cards for him.

Grace remembers sitting with Williams  and snapping away  during his most private moments.

"He had a private room in his house in San Francisco  like a hidden room  that was his sanctuary, his space. And in that room he had computers, computer games, video games, scripts, some of his toy soldiers," Grace said. "That's where he'd stay for hours."

Now, some two years after Williams' death at age 63, Grace is releasing a book featuring 190 of his photographs of the famed entertainer that capture intimate moments both onstage and at home. Many have never been previously published.

Grace got to witness Williams close up, at the top of his game, with fellow comedians and regaling total strangers with his famous manic riffs.

"The entire time Robin and I worked together or knew each other, he never once said to me, 'That's enough, stop taking pictures.' Or 'No, you can't shoot this or you can't shoot that.' It was amazing," Grace said. "Nothing was off-limits."

Grace says he isn't sure when he took his last picture of Williams. But he remembers their last meeting, in late 2013 when Williams came to his house for dinner. By then, they were no longer photographer and subject.

"I didn't pull out the camera, even when my dog jumped him," said Grace. "We just talked about other stuff and he was funny as always, but no, the camera didn't have a place anymore.

"People have asked me: How did you happen to do this (book) now? And the answer is simple: I had always had this thought that when I was 84 and Robin was 80, that we would get together as old men, sit down somewhere for a weekend or a week in a nice place and he would reminisce," Grace said. "But that didn't happen."

Rocked by Williams' suicide, Grace initially felt paralyzed.

"Maybe six, eight months later, I started thinking about the photographs that I had, and that I can't sit on them."

That's when he began planning what he calls a "legacy book" for his friend.

Grace said he scanned old photos and hung prints from walls in his house while trying to decide which ones to include. And it wasn't an emotional process  until it was.

"All of a sudden, you remember he's gone, you remember the times you had together, what this picture reminded you of," Grace said. Then he breaks up. "And that's what continues to happen."

The book, published by Counterpoint Press, is titled "Robin Williams: A Singular Portrait, 1986-2002," and is set to be released next month.
NEW YORK  Just days after ending his campaign and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, Sen. Bernie Sanders is preparing to take his message to the printed page.

Thomas Dunne Books told The Associated Press it will publish Sanders' "Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In." The book is scheduled to come out Nov. 15, a week after election day. It will include both his policy ideas for the future and reflections on his surprisingly strong run in the primaries.

The 74-year-old Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate, attracted millions of voters with his blunt rhetoric and progressive agenda of raising taxes on the rich, overhauling campaign financing and providing universal health care and free college education.

"Bernie Sanders quickly became the leader of the progressive movement within the Democratic Party," Dunne said in a statement.

"Garnering over 13 million votes, winning 23 primaries and caucuses, and receiving more than 7 million individual donations to his cause, he energized the party as he fought for the average American with unrelenting energy and passion. (The book) will be an inside account of this extraordinary campaign, and will also provide a blueprint for future political action. Its message: the fight has just begun."

Financial details were not disclosed. Books on presidential campaigns are an established publishing genre, but it's unusual for a candidate to reach a deal so soon after the race and to have the book come out soon after the election.

In a statement to the AP, Thomas Dunne said a Sanders book was first suggested to him earlier this year by the Washington-based agent Ronald Goldfarb, with whom the senator has mutual friends. Sanders was initially too busy to consider the project, but decided "a book about his philosophy and ideas coming out after the election was a good idea."

The publisher said he and Sanders reached an agreement a few weeks ago.

"Throughout the year, both Bernie and his wife, Jane, kept records and notes. Sanders is using these as the basis for much of the text," Dunne said, adding that Sanders will write the book himself.

"He will write about his early life as well as the campaign and the issues he cares so passionately about. Moreover, the final section, presently called 'Where Do We Go From Here?' will outline a program of progressive activism for the coming years, a cause he is passionately committed to. "

The book could well offer a critical take on Clinton, as Sanders often challenged her on her ties to Wall Street and questioned her willingness to take on wealthy special interests. It's not uncommon for copies of a book to leak a week or more before the release date, raising the possibility that any negative comments on Clinton could be seen before Election Day.

Sanders is co-author of a previous book, "Outsider in the White House."
Theres no crying in hip-hop. Especially not at a concert.

But there I was, standing at the back of a cramped venue at this years South by Southwest festival, doing just that. I dont like crying in public, so it wasnt much solace that a good half of the room was doing the same thing.

Including the person on the stage.

Sammus, a rapper from Ithaca, New York, was performing 1080p, which was at that point her newest single. Id already watched the video about 10 times that morning.

And Id read the reviews  writers have called the song important, honest and powerful.

I agree. Its a great track. But I wasnt crying because its a powerful song. I was crying because I was angry.

1080p is about relationships, school and life, but its mostly about Sammus battle with depression, pills and thoughts of suicide.

For the past five years, Ive considered Sammus a friend. We shared a tightknit circle of friends at Cornell University, where we attended graduate school. We were in the same student organization. I even made a cameo appearance in one of her music videos.

So why was I first hearing about my friends pain via a performance in a roomful of strangers?

I imagine that even the hardcore fans of hers in the room were a little surprised. Sammus isnt really known for songs like this  shes most famous as a nerdcore rapper.

The nerdcore vibe

Nerdcore is as much a subgenre of hip-hop as it is a subgenre of nerd fandom. The definitions for it are pretty loose, but the music generally involves rapping about things like Star Wars, comic books or video-game characters.

Sammus work takes it a step further than most  shes done entire projects based on video game story lines and regularly samples old-school video game tunes into rap instrumentals.

She even wears an arm cannon at her shows, in homage to Samus Aran, the video game character who is also the source of her name.

The nerdcore label is a blessing and a curse for Sammus. Its a curse because a lot of nerdcore rappers arent actually very good. Theyre entertaining, but only in an ironic way. You could say that by associating herself with the nerdcore scene, Sammus (who can rap circles around a lot of artists and also produces her own music) is limiting her ability to appeal to mainstream audiences.

But the nerdcore blessings are bountiful for Sammus. In a landscape where indie hip-hop artists are lucky to find venues that will let them perform for exposure (that is, for free), Sammus has no problem booking paid gigs. This year alone, she appeared at game culture conventions like PAX East and Magfest, performing for crowds of a thousand people or more.

She pulls in extra dollars by selling CDs or posters after her shows. Unlike traditional hip-hop crowds, who seem to feel that a fist-bump is adequate payment for a free concert, nerdcore fans are generally more supportive and more willing to put money toward making sure that their favorite artists are able to continue to create.

And anyway, Sammus has no reason to distance herself from her nerdiness. Her room is adorned with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles posters, and one of our first conversations was an argument about whether blowing into Nintendo cartridges is a good idea (for the record: its not).

So where was all this pain coming from in 1080p? And why had she been hiding that pain from me?

After the concert ended, I called Sammus and asked her to tell me more about her song.

It turns out that throughout 2013 and 2014, Sammus was suffering from depression. A difficult relationship, health troubles and the isolation of being a black graduate student at an Ivy League institution were taking their toll on her. Then after surgery on her sinuses, she was prescribed painkillers. At first the pills were distracting because the numbing effects on her body made it hard for her to focus on her work.

But soon she found solace in the numbness.

I was a zombie for so much of my graduate school experience, she said.

Twice, she was hospitalized and had to lie to the doctors when they asked if she had been trying to hurt herself. The first time, the doctors believed her. The second time, they didnt.

Finding help

Eventually, she sought help. She is now seeing a therapist, who she even name-checks in the credits for her song.

After she shared much of this story, she asked me a question that wasnt easy to answer. She asked what I thought of the song. I told her the truth: I felt betrayed. And I felt angry.

She paused. She told me that she understood. She told me that she wasnt surprised.

Ive had a lot of people tell me they feel guilty for not realizing what was happening to me, she said.

But that just shows the lengths I took to insulate myself. I did a lot of work to make sure that nobody knew what I was struggling with. I knew you would never judge me. But I just wasnt ready to have those conversations. Not with you, not with anybody. I was very intentional about projecting myself as a very happy-go-lucky person.

Suddenly, my anger made sense.

Deeper emotions

Psychologists say that anger is a secondary emotion  something we use to cover up more vulnerable emotions that are harder to deal with, like guilt or fear.

I realized that the anger was just a mask for the guilt I was feeling. If I was a better friend, maybe she would have told me, I thought. If I wasnt so preoccupied with my own problems, maybe I would have noticed something. And deeper still, I realized the anger was a mask for fear: Do I have other friends who are struggling without my realizing it?

As hot a topic as mental health has been for the last few years, people of color are often left out of the conversation. Black people, for example, are 20 percent more likely to experience serious mental health problems than the general population.

A National Institutes of Health study found that black women between the ages of 49 and 55 are biologically 7 1/2 years older than white women in the same age group, an effect the study partially links to the stress of simply existing as a black woman in America.

Despite this, black people are much less likely than whites to seek professional help. This is sometimes linked to a need to appear strong or an aversion to seeking help. Alternatively, its also been linked to a lack of access to good health care or even a bias of doctors, who may misdiagnose black patients.

Fortunately, the stigma around mental health in the black community is changing. In an article for Buzz-feed, writer Terrell Jermaine Starr opened up about his own struggle with depression and how he was Googling suicide methods when a friend saved him. Another writer named Imade Nibokun has an entire site, Depressed While Black, devoted to sharing stories about depression in the black community.

And for all her quirks as a nerdcore rapper, Sammus is following a tradition. Depression has always been a central topic in hip-hop, even if the music media spotlight on that fact is a recent phenomenon.

Sammus says that she isnt comfortable being viewed as a spokesperson for mental health. I dont know if this is a distinction that needs to be made, she told me, but I was responding to my external environment and feeling like I had no control. Thats different from people who have been dealing with these issues throughout their lives.

But that doesnt take away from the fact that I seriously wanted to end things. I cry every time I perform 1080p because I remember that feeling.

Sammus may not want credit for bringing these issues to light, but that may be out of her hands. Theres a reason that she is invited to speak at technology conferences or teach online classes on structuring rhymes in hip-hop songs. She has a gift for getting a message across.

This is why her position as a nerdcore rapper is so unique. Some of her most ardent fans prefer her game-inspired tracks, like Cybernetic Armor. Others are more interested in songs like Three Fifths, in which she raps about racism and police brutality. Some are equally excited about both. This took her time to realize, she says.

For a while, I was hesitant to rap about my experiences as a woman, as a black woman, and thought I had to keep that in the background and just focus on games.

New awareness

But her experiences with depression have given her work a new immediacy and opened her eyes to the effect she is having on people who see her as a role model.

Someone pointed out to me that they noticed that most of the people coming up to buy merch were women, she said.

They wanted to support me. In hip-hop, women are usually framed as the competition. But I think women, especially black women, say that Shes speaking to and for me, so I want to support her. Its so cool.

Im not really doing this on purpose, but I guess just by being me, I can give different people different messages through my music.

Even if the message is just that its OK to cry at a rap show.
If you havent seen Casual youre missing one of the best comedies on television.

No kidding.

Like the best of HBO, it isnt afraid to embrace subtlety just to get a laugh. Now in its second season, the series follows two dysfunctional siblings, ones daughter and the world they try to create after divorce, heartache and job woes.

The plot: Alex (Tommy Dewey) takes in his sister Valerie (Michaela Watkins) and her daughter Laura (Tara Lynne Barr) when Valeries marriage falls apart. Hes not exactly the king of relationships, but he has enough money to salve his wounds.

In season two, the three decide they need to expand their circles. Valerie is approaching 40; Alex is having problems with his company Snooger and Laura has no desire to return to the school where her teacher had a thing with Alexs girlfriend.

Determined to break the family cycle, Valerie and Alex opt to enroll Laura in another school. (The teenager thinks a GED might be good. Alex resists: Thats for inmates and child actors.) When they visit a public school, the students there help them decide its not a real option.

Given his situation, Alex decides hell home school his niece. He throws himself into it with gusto but his choice of topics (mid-American post-punk musicians, anyone?) suggests theres no guarantee where this is headed.

Student and teacher kill at Trivial Pursuit but theres more to life than trivia night at a bar.

Valerie, meanwhile, has issues with a fellow therapist down the hall. Shes remodeling and doesnt seem to worry about the problems it causes others. Crawling over a near-vertical couch in the hallway gives Watkins plenty of opportunity for physical humor, which is right in her wheelhouse.

Shes such a fine, nuanced actress its a shame she isnt in the final five of any best actress competition.

Dewey, too, has a way with laughs thats unlike anything you get on traditional networks. Unlike a number of primetime actors, he doesnt go for the easy laugh. He lets the tension build, then zips in with a choice thats utterly surprising.

Barr keeps up with both of them.

All three wouldnt be as successful if creator Zander Lehmann hadnt crafted such a believable world.

The problems  though alien to most  resonate because the writers put the viewer in the center of the storms.

Jason Reitman, who directed several of this seasons early episodes, does a nice job of opening the door.

Even if you havent seen the first season, you can pick up in the second and immediately feel at home.

Casual may not mirror your home life  or even one youd admire  but its something you can definitely appreciate. Here, actors, writers and directors arent just doing a job, theyre creating a world.

Their relationships? Its complicated sums them up quite nicely.

New episodes of Casual are released weekly on Hulu. On Aug. 23, the final episode will air and all of season two will be available.
ALTON, Iowa | For many Siouxland residents, the corn and soybean harvest may rate as the prettiest time of year, what with the crisp colors of grains, husks and dried leaves churning through skies so blue it nearly burns the eyes.

Locals are not so accustomed to seeing a combine roar through a field in mid-July, chewing up those amber waves of grain.

But that's exactly how Gary Hansen of Alton, Iowa, spent a portion of his week, harvesting a hard red winter wheat crop he planted last fall.

"This was planted the last week of September or the first week of October," said Hansen, shortly after climbing down from his combine. "I've planted hard red winter wheat going on 20 years now."

Hansen said he counts himself among just a handful of area farmers who grow this crop, one that is trucked after harvest to Fremont, Nebraska, for eventual shipment to the East Coast.

"This will head on a train to the flour mills on the East Coast, for use in bread," Hansen said. "I think it's used more for a localized bread out there on the coast."

How did a Sioux County farmer get into raising hard red winter wheat? It came about because Hansen needed acres to apply manure from his hog confinement facility.

"I started doing this years ago when I needed acres to put manure on early in the fall, before corn or soybeans were being harvested," Hansen said. "I could apply the manure on these acres (because the wheat harvest takes place in summertime)."

Hansen got out of livestock several years ago. He didn't get out of the wheat business, though. He found he enjoyed raising a crop not seen much locally.

"Very few believe that this wheat can compete with corn for income," Hansen said. "It does, because you don't spray it. You basically put the crop there and let it go."

Hansen's savings on input costs are offset by a lower price for wheat. He said he ends up making as much or more on wheat than corn.

Hansen still raises corn and soybeans, in addition to his 100-acre hard red winter wheat crop that yields about 60 bushels per acre, similar to that of soybeans.

"This year's crop is very good," Hansen said, scanning a field east of Alton, not far south of Highway 10. "We had an abundant straw crop and better than normal yields for our area."

Once Hansen combines the wheat, the grain is baled into small, square units and then hauled to Fremont. Hansen will then return to this tract to apply manure, preparing for next year's corn crop.

"You have to rotate it," Hansen said. "Because of a certain fungus that develops in corn also affects wheat, this crop cannot go on corn ground. It must follow soybeans."

Thankfully, Hansen has had very few -- if any -- issues when it comes to disease in his hard red winter wheat. That might be due to the fact the crop is so rare around here.

"I've heard there is more disease pressure with winter wheat in South Dakota," Hansen said. "The disease pressure that's prevalent in South Dakota is there because there is so much wheat, it builds up year after year. In Northwest Iowa, there isn't enough pressure for it to build up."

Hansen looked over the field, examining rows of bright yellow grain that stacked neatly in his wake. A farmer is always happy at the conclusion of another growing season.

"This is a beautiful crop," he said. "It rises in the fall and then goes dormant. It looks great right now. I'm glad I got into wheat."
SIOUX CITY | As a murder trial got under way in Woodbury County Tuesday, Leesa McNeil couldn't help but think about what might happen if the trial were to run longer than the scheduled two weeks.

If District Judge Jeffrey Neary was still presiding over the trial, would there be another judge available to cover the hearings he'd be forced to miss?

Playing musical chairs, or perhaps musical benches is the correct term, every time a judge calls in sick or has any other last-minute, unexpected absence has become a frequent hassle for McNeil and her 3rd Judicial District court administration staff as the number of senior judges who often substitute for full-time district judges has dwindled. Often, there isn't a senior judge available anymore.

"In terms of just general availability of substitutes, we are hurting," said McNeil, 3rd Judicial District court administrator. "To have a judge out for anything other than a scheduled vacation, we have to scramble. It's a daily juggling act."

Senior judges, who are part-time retired district judges paid to work 13 weeks a year, frequently fill in for district judges, allowing court hearings to take place without delay when a district judge is absent.

As recent as four years ago, there were seven senior judges in the 3rd District, which includes 16 Northwest Iowa counties. There are now three, soon to be four when District Judge Mary Jane Sokolovske retires on July 28 and takes senior status. Four senior judges have retired in the past year.

With fewer senior judges to fill in, it's become a challenge to make sure hearings aren't delayed because there isn't a judge available.

"We have a court schedule set up to make maximum utilization of all of our court resources," McNeil said.

And having a new senior judge in Sokolovske available won't help immediately. The Iowa Judicial Branch has placed a six-month hiring freeze on all judge vacancies (12 months for other court personnel) to help make up a $5 million budget shortfall. Sokolovske's replacement won't be seated until January, at the earliest.

As a result, some trials and hearings are being scheduled out further in the future than normal. Lower-priority cases such as small claims or civil litigation may be pushed back for cases, such as mental health and criminal matters, that have more pressing time requirements. It means some people may have to wait longer for their cases to be heard.

"Moving them out is a delay," said District Judge Duane Hoffmeyer, 3rd District chief judge. "We'd like to have a policy of no continuances because of the lack of a judge. We've been very good at that, but we've been good at it because of the number of judges."

In 2015, one percent of 3rd District cases were rescheduled because there was no judge available. McNeil said that with the scheduling adjustments her staff has made, that number should not increase.

Other options to make up for the loss of senior judges have been considered. Hoffmeyer said the district is looking into having district associate judges, who hear mainly misdemeanor criminal cases and civil cases in which the amount in controversy is $10,000 or less, plus some juvenile cases, pick up more of the juvenile case load.

District associate judges also can, if approved by the Supreme Court, take on some additional duties, but that's rare, McNeil said. And doing so would just force her staff to juggle more cases to adjust the district associate judges' caseload.

"Our associate judges are busy enough," she said. "It would just create another problem for me."

In Iowa, district judges must retire at age 72, but many retire before then. After stepping down, they may be appointed as a senior judge by the Iowa Supreme Court. Senior judges serve two-year terms and must provide proof they're physically and mentally fit prior to each two-year term. They must retire at age 78. In some cases, they can get approval to serve until age 80.

Gary Wenell recently retired at age 70 after six years as a senior judge. It was time, he said, after 46 years of working as a lawyer, then a judge. He enjoyed the role of senior judge, he said, but it can be a tough adjustment after serving as a full-time district judge. Laws and procedures continue to change and it can be hard to keep up if you're not in the courthouse and the courtroom every day.

"You have a tendency not to keep up as much as you used to," Wenell said.

McNeil said most senior judges locally and in Iowa's other judicial districts now choose to retire before reaching the mandatory retirement age. She can't begrudge them for retiring at a younger age. She just wishes there were more of them.

"I would love to have more senior judges," she said.
SIOUX CITY | Donna M. Joseph, 80, of Sioux City died Wednesday, July 13, 2016, at a local care center.

Abiding by her wishes, cremation rites will be accorded and no services are planned. Arrangements are under the direction of Nelson-Berger Northside Chapel.

Donna, the daughter of Jack and Edwina (Flisher) Beazley, was born Aug. 22, 1935, at Washta, Iowa. She grew up in Washta and graduated from Washta High School. Following high school, she went to work at a local bank and then moved to Chicago and worked in a bank there for a few years.

Donna returned to Sioux City and worked at First National Bank. While working at the bank, she met her future husband, John Joseph, who was also employed there. They were married on Dec. 12, 1964, in South Sioux City. They made their home in Sioux City and Donna became a homemaker. John passed away on Nov. 29, 2001. After his passing, she moved to her current residence at the Fairmount Apartments, where she enjoyed the company of her neighbors.

Donna enjoyed word search puzzles and watching CNN. She was a member of Whitfield United Methodist Church.

She is survived by one brother, Edward Beazley and his wife, Lila of Correctionville, Iowa; several nieces and nephews; and other relatives and friends.

She was preceded in death by her parents; husband, John; two brothers, Paul and Donald; and two sisters, Julia Beazley and Goldi Butcher.
INWOOD, Iowa | An Inwood, Iowa, man was killed Friday after his car struck a semi head-on north of Inwood on Highway 182.

According to an Iowa State Patrol report, just before 3 p.m. Friday, Logan J. Kruse, of Inwood, was driving a 1999 Pontiac Grand Prix north on Highway 182 about half a mile north of 220th Street when his vehicle veered onto the east shoulder and then crossed left of the center line and into the southbound lane, where it struck a 2016 International semi head-on. Both vehicles came to rest in the west ditch.

Kruse was pronounced deceased at the scene, the report said. He was not wearing a seatbelt.

The driver of the semi, 55-year-old Dan L. Olson, of Marshall, Minnesota, was transported to a hospital in Canton, South Dakota, by Canton Rescue. He was wearing a seatbelt, the report said.

Authorities are continuing to investigate the cause of the collision. The Lyon County Sheriff's Office assisted at the scene.
SIOUX CITY | Sarah A. Lofgren, 88, of Sioux City passed away Wednesday, July 13, 2016, at Holy Spirit Retirement Home.

Services will be 10:30 a.m. Monday at Holy Spirit Catholic Chapel, with the Rev. Dennis Meinen as Celebrant. Interment will be Tuesday, July 19, in the Black Hills National Cemetery in rural Sturgis, S.D., along with her husband, Myron L. Jackrabbit Lofgren, who preceded her in death by only one week. Military graveside rites will be offered by the U.S. Army. Visitation will begin 6 p.m. today, with a vigil service to follow at 7 p.m., at Meyer Brothers Morningside Chapel. Online condolences may be offered to the family at www.meyerbroschapels.com.

Sarah A. Lofgren was born Aug. 15, 1927, to Fred and Gail (Crank) Carter in Isabel, S.D. As a young girl, the family moved to Firesteel, S.D., which was a small town close to Isabel. Sarah and her sister, Charlotte, attended grade school in Firesteel but had to travel to Isabel for high school, where they lived at a boarding house with five other girls during the school week. They would eagerly look forward to Friday when they would be excused early to catch the train called the Galloping Goose back to Firesteel for the weekend. Sarah very much enjoyed living in Firesteel, where she said everyone was friends and like one big family.

After high school, Sarah enrolled in Greens School of Cosmetology in Rapid City, S.D. Following graduation, she worked for one year as a beautician at the Style Beauty Shop in Lemmon, S.D., to obtain her beauticians license before returning to Isabel and opening Sarahs Beauty Salon, which she owned and operated for 46 years before retiring and moving to Sioux City. She also mentored her sister, Charlotte, and helped her become a licensed beautician.

It wasnt long after moving to Sioux City before Sarah decided she wasnt quite ready for retirement and missed her community involvement. She quickly took up volunteering at St. Lukes Hospital and also decided to work at the Hy-Vee grocery store where she could interact with customers. She was particularly well known by many customers for doing product samplings and seemed to have a knack for getting them to purchase whatever she was sampling. Sarah truly enjoyed her interactions with the customers and the opportunity to visit with them. She later worked for Midwest Alarm Company in Sioux City for a brief period before permanently retiring due to health reasons.

On Nov. 19, 1959, Sarah married the love of her life, Myron Lofgren, and together they raised four children in Isabel. Sarah was very active in the Isabel community, where she was extremely proud of helping start the Isabel High School Alumni Association and the Isabel medical clinic which brought much needed healthcare to the community. She was also active in St. Marys Catholic Church and a member of the ladies Guild, the American Legion Auxiliary and Better Homemakers Extension Club. In her spare time which wasnt much, Sarah enjoyed painting, cooking and helping her daughters with 4-H cooking competitions.

Sarah is survived by her daughters, Marva McMillen of Sioux Falls, S.D., and Maxine (Brock) Hutchinson of Dakota Dunes, S.D.; sons, Marlon (Laurie) Lofgren of Omaha, and Marty (Kathy) Lofgren of Edmond, Okla.; sister, Charlotte Carter of Sioux City; sister-in-law, Lavone Lofgren of Armour, S.D.; seven grandsons; and six granddaughters.

She was preceded in death by her husband; parents; a brother; a sister; three sisters-in-law; six brothers-in-law; a son-in-law; one infant son; and one grandson.

Memorial contributions may be directed to Holy Spirit Retirement Home.
SIOUX CITY | The options for people who want a less rustic camping experience have increased in Woodbury County parks.

The Woodbury County Conservation Board has opened two new rental cabins in Southwood Conservation Area two miles southwest of Smithland, Iowa. That adds to the cabins available in Little Sioux Park near Correctionville and in Snyder Bend Park near Salix, giving 10 total rentals in the three places.

The Southwood cabin rentals began Friday, and both units were taken for the weekend. They are one-bedroom units that can sleep up to six people.

"They are beautiful," said Woodbury County Supervisor Mark Monson, who attended an open house ceremony one week ago.

Conservation Board Director Rick Schneider is proud of a distinctive feature, as the furniture is custom made from red cedar trees by a local craftsman.

"We are pretty proud of that...Fabulous looking stuff, no two pieces are alike," Schneider said.

The two cabins cost $190,000, and a $75,000 grant from Missouri River Historical Development Inc. was a big financial boost to the project, Schneider said.

Southwood Conservation Area is located in the Loess Hills, with open grassland, timbered areas and two ponds. There are more than 30 electric and non-electric camp sites, picnic areas, fishing dock, hiking trails and equestrian trails.

Woodbury County in 2001 joined the trend of other counties offering cabins to go along with camping opportunities, much like state parks had done for years. Schneider said the four 300-square-foot cabins at Little Sioux Park were quickly embraced, and all construction costs were quickly earned back through renal revenues.

That success led the county in 2010 to build four cabins in Snyder Bend Park that are much more upscale than the Spartan versions at Little Sioux Park. Those cabins are sized at 816 square feet, with a full bathroom, shower and two separated bedrooms. They also have flat screen televisions.
DES MOINES -- Some of the nations governors worry federal lawmakers do not trust them enough to include wiggle room for states to tweak new federal laws and programs.

That was one of the messages governors conveyed to U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley during this weekends summer meeting of the National Governors Association.

Pelosi and Grassley, Iowas senior U.S. senator, appeared at the event to address state and federal government relationships.

The governors asked the Congressional representatives how they can better strike a balance between accountability and flexibility for states with new federal laws. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said sometimes governors get the feeling federal lawmakers do not trust states to properly implement federal programs.

I wouldnt back away from the word accountability, and you arent either, Grassley said during his appearance on Friday. I hope Im never one of those that says I dont trust the states.  You cant make policy in Washington, D.C., that fits New York like it does Des Moines.

Pelosi said the question of states flexibility is the one she has received most over the years from governors, and that she does not want governors to feel as though they are not trusted by federal lawmakers.

Its not even a question of trust. Its a question of the purpose of the (federal) funds that go out, Pelosi said during her appearance at the governors meetings on Saturday. If you think for a minute its about a lack of trust, then lets address that. 

That is the classic question.  Clearly we have not addressed it sufficiently because it continues to raise its head.

Grassley suggested part of the issue may be that governors and the impact to states rarely are considered when federal policy is being crafted.

Maybe not at all, but at least not very often does the impact on states get much attention (in Congress), Grassley said. You want me to give you advice. I dont have any. But be aware of it and be active.

When asked on what issues governors could work with and help federal lawmakers on a bipartisan basis, both Grassley and Pelosi mentioned infrastructure.

I always come back to infrastructure because no matter what we have done, and we have done some good things, we have to do more, Pelosi said. Science and technology are moving so quickly.

Grassley said governors would be well-served to urge federal lawmakers to approve federal infrastructure spending in a timely fashion.

Put the pressure on us to make sure thats fully funded, Grassley told the governors.
DES MOINES -- Two potential running mates for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton were in Iowa on Saturday, but neither offered so much as a peep on the subject.

Tom Vilsack, the U.S. ag secretary and former Iowa governor, and John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado, were in Des Moines for the summer meeting of the National Governors Association. Both have been named in national reports as possible selections as Clintons running mate.

Vilsack has served as U.S. ag secretary for the entire tenure of President Barack Obama, and is a longtime friend and political ally of Clinton.

Hickenlooper was one of several high-profile Democratic officials who recently met with Clinton at her Washington, D.C., home, according to a CNN report.

Vilsack and Hickenlooper both declined to comment about being potential Clinton running mates when asked by reporters Saturday.

Vilsack referred such questions to the Clinton campaign, and said because his trip to the governors meeting was for official business, he is prohibited from commenting on campaign issues.

Hickenlooper declined to comment on a series of questions about Clintons choice of a running mate.

Vilsacks and Hickenloopers names have emerged recently in national coverage of Clintons campaign, joining high-profile running mate candidates like U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Time Kaine of Virignia, and U.S. Sec. of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro.

Vilsack is viewed by Democrats as a safe and solid pick as a vice presidential candidate, but not an exciting one.

Hes also seen as an extremely competent, policy-oriented public servant with a big heart and a deep concern for public education. Vilsack would come with barely any controversies and is essentially guaranteed to not make any of his own during a campaign, wrote Pat Rynard, a former Democratic campaign staffer on his political website Iowa Starting Line.

Hickenlooper has befriended and held fundraisers for Clinton in his Denver home. While Hickenlooper would not comment on being reported as a potential Clinton running mate, during a brief interview he commented on the presidential race and the upcoming Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

Hickenlooper said he thinks Clinton will rally Democrats --- including many of Bernie Sanders supporters --- behind her candidacy because of what he sees as one of Clintons greatest strengths: her ability to unify.

Secretary Clinton is one of those people, shes got great social skills in terms of reaching out to people and making them feel heard, assuring them that their points of view will not be forgotten, Hickenlooper said. Shes a very, very gifted person at finding compromise, bringing people together and figuring out how do you keep moving forward.
SIOUX CITY | Ask Gene Leman how long plans have been in the works to bring an Ag Expo & Learning Center to Woodbury County, and you might elicit a good-natured chuckle.

In other words, its been a while.

About eight years ago, we were working on the project at the county fairgrounds in Moville, Leman said. Then we moved from Moville (to Sioux City), and the thing kept growing and developing.

Now, after nearly a decade of planning  and a few plan changes, the facility is as close to reality as it ever has been, with construction possible as early as spring 2017.

The proposed $16 million project now has $4.5 million in pledged funding from Sioux City, Woodbury County and the Missouri River Historical Development board. Later this year, it is expected to receive an additional $5.7 million in future tax credits from the state of Iowa as part of Sioux City's Reinvestment District.

Organizers are now in the midst of a push to build private sector contributions up to $5 million, and the Ag Expo & Learning Center's board of directors, which Leman heads, is feeling the excitement.

"This has, to me, become a project that has a lot of enthusiasm, and its time has come," Leman said. "I'm very enthused about how the project is coming."

Located at the former site of Sioux City's John Morrell plant, the anticipated facility will be one-of-a-kind in the tri-state area. According to current plans, the 130-by-200-foot main arena will be surrounded by a seating capacity of 3,000. The facility will also include 400 stalls, a warmup arena, an Ag Hall of Fame showcasing contributors to Siouxlands agricultural legacy, and space for hands-on agriculture and veterinary classes through Western Iowa Tech Community College.

Once completed, organizers envision the ag center will attract a variety of national and local events, including professional rodeos, barrel races, professional motorbike events, livestock shows and sales, equestrian events and local 4-H and FFA activities.

The facility has already caught the eye of USA BMX racing, which organizers say has offered to book a bicycle racing event there once the facility is finished.

'A celebration of ag'

Amy Webb, of Moville, has been with the project "almost from the get-go" and now serves as treasurer on the board of directors. Webb said her daughter, Robin Beck, and son-in-law, J.W., travel the rodeo circuit and that she would look forward to having those kind of events come to Sioux City.

"I think itll be fabulous not only for the city of Sioux City itself, ... but its also good for the rural community to be able to be spectators at these events," she said.

Webb, who grew up in Woodbury County and raises quarter horses and livestock on her family farm, said she hopes to see the center not only attract larger events, but also to provide a space for local agricultural events and groups.

Im hoping that this facility will also be utilized by the local area competitors for team roping, team sorting, barrel racing and 4-H groups, she said.

Leman agreed.

We hope to have a combination of it all, he said. It will be a celebration of ag, as well as those events that pay the bills.

The project will also benefit Western Iowa Technical Community College, which has pledged $250,000 to fund equipment to support future educational programing on the premises.

Funding

The project is now entering the final leg of the fundraising stage. Board of directors members launched a campaign last month to gather a total of $5 million from local and national private sector companies.

Organizers have already gathered more than $1 million in private sector funding, including a $500,000 naming gift from the Bomgaars family, owner of a Sioux City-based ag supply chain.

Leman said the board has been approaching local companies which might sponsor portions of the center, including 10 suites in the arena. Leman said the board will eventually approach national ag-related companies.

The project has so far received $2 million from the city plus the 12-acre plot of land, a $1 million pledge from the Missouri River Historical Development board, the nonprofit which holds the county's gaming license, and $1.5 million from Woodbury County.

"I've never seen a project in my 38 years of municipal government that got all the state, county and city elected officials together on anything of this level of magnitude and cooperation," said Dennis Gann, a member of the Ag Expo & Learning Centers board of directors. "It's great to see."

Crucial to the project will be an anticipated $5.7 million in state tax credits from the Iowa Economic Development Authority over the next 20 years. That amount will be a portion of $13.9 million that Sioux City has requested from the IEDA in order to fund three big-ticket projects: the Ag Expo & Learning Center, an upscale hotel next to the Sioux City Convention Center and redevelopment of three industrial buildings on Virginia Street by Ho-Chunk Inc.

Marty Dougherty, Sioux City's economic development director, said Sioux City's project has cleared the first two stages of approval from the state, and work has begun on finalizing this funding. He said the city could make its final presentation before the state board as soon as August, then receive final word as soon as September.

"Everything right now is very much in motion," Dougherty said. "There's no hard-and-fast deadline."

Once completed, the three reinvestment projects, combined with the completed Interstate 29, will revolutionize the entryway into the city, he said.

Were creating a new entryway into Sioux City, Dougherty said. Its a new era for Sioux City, really. Its going to change the image.

Day-to-day operations of the center will be handled by a person or management firm with experience and success in the Ag Expo business, Gann said. The manager has yet to be named. Plans are also in the works to bring a smaller hotel near the center for tourists to spend the night.

Projections

Gann said organizers plan to hold 50 to 70 events in its first year, totaling about 100 days. He hopes in future years that that number increases to 200 or 300 event-days annually. Gann said studies project more than 130,000 new attendees will come to Sioux City as a result of the project in its first year, generating approximately $24,000 in profit.

"Its projected, even by the most conservative estimates, assuming it does this level of business, to net to the economy $1.9 to $2.1 million a year," he said. "This is a whole market thats never been around before. I think its going to do well."

If the funding comes through, organizers say the project could go out for design and bidding as early as this fall, with construction beginning as early as spring of next year.
WASHINGTON -- "The most significant reinforcement of our collective defense any time since the Cold War," President Obama called it. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was still an achievement: Last week's NATO summit in Warsaw ordered the deployment of troops to Eastern Europe, the alliance's most serious response yet to Russia's aggression and provocations on its western frontier.

The post-Ukraine economic sanctions have been weak; the declamatory denunciations, a mere embarrassment. They've only encouraged further reckless Russian behavior -- the buzzing of U.S. ships, intrusions into European waters, threats to the Baltic States.

NATO will now deploy four battalions to front-line states. In Estonia, they will be led by Britain; in Lithuania, by Germany; in Latvia, by Canada; in Poland, by the United States. Not nearly enough, and not permanently based, but nonetheless significant.

In the unlikely event of a Russian invasion of any of those territories, these troops are to act as a tripwire, triggering a full-scale war with NATO. It's the kind of coldblooded deterrent that kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War and keeps it now along the DMZ in Korea.

In the more likely event of a "little green men" takeover attempt in, say, Estonia (about 25 percent ethnically Russian), the sort of disguised slow-motion invasion that Vladimir Putin pulled off in Crimea, the NATO deployments might be enough to thwart the aggression and call in reinforcements.

The message to Putin is clear: Yes, you've taken parts of Georgia and Ukraine. But they're not NATO. That territory is sacred -- or so we say.

This is a welcome development for the Balts, who are wondering whether they really did achieve irreversible independence when the West won the Cold War. Their apprehension is grounded in NATO's flaccid response to Putin's aggressive revanchism, particularly in Ukraine. Obama still won't provide Ukraine with even defensive weaponry. This follows years of American accommodation of Putin, from canceling a Polish-Czech missile defense system to, most recently, openly acquiescing to Russia's seizure of a dominant role in Syria.

And what are the East Europeans to think when they hear the presumptive presidential candidate of the party of Reagan speaking dismissively of NATO and suggesting a possible American exit?

The NATO action takes on even greater significance because of the timing, coming just two weeks after Brexit. Britain's withdrawal threatens the future of the other major pillar of Western integration and solidarity, the European Union. NATO shows that it is holding fast and that the vital instrument of Western cohesion and joint action will henceforth be almost entirely trans-Atlantic -- meaning, under American leadership.

The EU, even if it doesn't dissolve, will now inevitably turn inward as it spends years working out its new communal arrangements with and without Britain. Putin was Brexit's big winner. Any fracturing of the Western alliance presents opportunities to play one member against another. He can only be disappointed to see NATO step up and step in.

After the humiliating collapse of President Obama's cherished Russian "reset," instilling backbone in NATO and resisting Putin are significant strategic achievements. It leaves a marker for Obama's successor, reassures the East Europeans and will make Putin think twice about repeating Ukraine in the Baltics.

However, the Western order remains challenged by the other two members of the troika of authoritarian expansionists: China and Iran. Their provocations proceed unabated. Indeed, the next test for the United States is China's furious denunciation of the decision handed down Tuesday by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague -- a blistering, sweeping and unanimous rejection of China's territorial claims and military buildup in the South China Sea.

Without American action, however, The Hague's verdict is a dead letter. Lecturing other great powers about adherence to "international norms" is fine. But the Pacific Rim nations are anxious to see whether we will actually do something.

Regarding Iran, we certainly won't. Our abject appeasement continues, from ignoring Tehran's serial violations of the nuclear agreement (the latest: intensified efforts to obtain illegal nuclear technology in Germany) to the administration acting as a kind of Chamber of Commerce to facilitate the sale of about 100 Boeing jetliners to a regime that routinely uses civilian aircraft for military transport (particularly in Syria).

The troop deployments to Eastern Europe are a good first step in pushing back against the rising revisionist powers. But a first step, however welcome, seven and a half years into a presidency, is a melancholy reminder of what might have been.
Symbols mean different things to different people. For some, the U.S. flag invokes pride in America; for others, evil capitalism. For some, the holy cross symbolizes salvation; for others, intolerance. A rainbow symbolizes gay pride to some and, to others, a reminder that God promised never again to destroy the earth with a flood.

A Confederate flag reminds some of slavery and others of states' rights.

All of these examples show us why we must never demand that free expression in this country be held hostage by the thought police or we will end up losing all of our freedoms.

Steve King, keep your Confederate flag. It will remind us that we all have a right to be free, not just those chosen by the politically correct crowd. - Mike Hanlon, Sioux City
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If youre interested in starting a food service business, but dont want to spend the time and money to set up a dedicated location, a food truck may be the way to go. Heres a guide to help aspiring food truck owners get started.

Why You Should be Part of the Food Truck Industry

Food trucks offer plenty of exciting opportunities for entrepreneurs. Here are some benefits of choosing this niche:

Location independence: Your truck can go wherever potential customers are. If theres a big event or area with lots of foot traffic on any given night, you can set up there to reach more people.

Your truck can go wherever potential customers are. If theres a big event or area with lots of foot traffic on any given night, you can set up there to reach more people. Low startup costs: You dont need a dedicated location or a huge team to run a food truck. So it can be easier to break into the industry.

You dont need a dedicated location or a huge team to run a food truck. So it can be easier to break into the industry. Built-in advertising: When you set up at an event or drive across town, your truck gets seen. If you have a catchy logo or design, this automatically helps you build brand recognition without extra advertising.

When you set up at an event or drive across town, your truck gets seen. If you have a catchy logo or design, this automatically helps you build brand recognition without extra advertising. Multiple income streams: Food trucks dont have to only offer food at festivals and high-traffic areas. You can also offer catering to diversify your income streams.

How Much Does it Cost to Start a Food Truck Business?

Food truck startup costs vary by location, niche, and business plan. However, a truck, equipment, business supplies, and ingredients generally range from about $30,000 to $100,000.

Is Owning a Food Truck Profitable?

Yes, starting your own food truck can be profitable. Many food trucks make over $100,000 per year. Once startup costs and ongoing expenses are factored in, an annual profit of about $50,000 is usually possible. However, the exact amount you earn depends on your food truck concept, operating hours, menu, and locations. You can also look into food truck franchise options to cut your initial startup cost.

Starting a Food Truck Business in 21 Simple Steps

Every food truck may look and operate a bit different. But there are some common steps needed to get started. Heres a guide to starting a successful food truck business.

Read More: Food Truck Business Plan

1. Research Food Trucks Locally

If you want to be a successful food truck owner, you need to understand your competition. Research other food trucks in your area to find a unique niche and learn the hot spots and trends in your local food truck scene.

2. Choose a Niche and Know Your Target Market

Food truck customers often like unique menu items. Find something that sets your business apart, like interesting toppings on classics like burgers and tacos.

3. Name and Brand Your Business

A catchy name and brand will make your business more memorable. Choose consistent design elements that are easy to read and communicate a style that appeals to your target customers.

4. Write a Food Truck Business Plan

Every business needs a plan; here are some things to include in your food truck business plan:

Market analysis: Look at other food truck owners in your area and consider demand from local customers.

Look at other food truck owners in your area and consider demand from local customers. Product and service list: What types of food will you offer? Consider ingredient cost and what youll charge for items; include any extra revenue streams like private catering.

What types of food will you offer? Consider ingredient cost and what youll charge for items; include any extra revenue streams like private catering. Marketing strategies: How will you market your business? And what expenses might come with your strategy?

How will you market your business? And what expenses might come with your strategy? Financial projections: Based on your market and price list, what can you expect to earn? How does that compare to your projected expenses?

5. Look into Small Business Grants

Food truck owners may benefit from extra funds. Look for available grants for new businesses in your area for extra support.

6. Develop a Menu and Set Your Prices

Within your niche, create a short list of items you can make with limited ingredients. Price items based on demand and costs.

7. Secure a Truck

You need a truck thats large enough to prepare and serve food. So, you have to find where to buy a food truck. You can find old vans or trucks in local classified ads and have them furbished with equipment. Or buy an existing food truck from a business broker.

Read More: food truck ideas

8. Form a Legal Entity and Register Your Business

All businesses need a legal entity; here are some for food truck operators to consider:

Sole proprietor: This can work for those who operate individually, but it offers no liability protection.

This can work for those who operate individually, but it offers no liability protection. LLC: Offers liability and low startup costs; this is quite common for food truck operations.

Offers liability and low startup costs; this is quite common for food truck operations. Corporation: This offers liability protection and a different tax structure, but can be more complicated and costly to start.

9. Open a Business Bank Account

Keep your business and personal assets separate to simplify bookkeeping and build credit. Consider business credit cards for monthly purchases.

10. Get Business Insurance

Insurance can protect your assets if your business experiences any losses. Here are some common types for a mobile food business.

General liability

Commercial auto

Workers comp

Property coverage

Read More: food truck name ideas

11. Get the Necessary Food Truck Equipment

The exact equipment needed depends on your niche and how much food you work with, but here are some common categories:

Cooking equipment like a griddle or fryers

Refrigeration equipment

Shelves or cabinets to store ingredients

Food containers

Cleaning supplies

12. Get a POS System

A point of sale system helps successful food trucks manage transactions. Common options include TouchBistro, Toast, and Square.

See Also: 36 Food Truck Ideas

13. Source Your Ingredients

Find wholesale suppliers for all the items you need to create your menu. These are often the same food industry suppliers that work with restaurants with a brick and mortar location.

14. Apply for Permits and Food Truck Licenses

Food trucks often need business licenses, vehicle registration and commercial drivers license, parking permits for specific locations, and mobile food service permits. Check with your local health department to see what paperwork is required.

15. Prepare for Health Inspectors to Visit

Local officials will also likely visit to check for cleanliness and food safety.

Read More: food truck festival

16. Sort Out Your Taxes

Taxes vary by state. But many food truck owners must pay:

Business income taxes

Payroll taxes

State sales taxes

17. Create a Website and Market Your Business

Customers often research their local food truck community online. So create an online presence with your menu and social profiles to update your locations.

18. Decide Where to Park

Food truck vendors should seek out spots with lots of customers, like high foot traffic areas and special events. Make sure parking spots are approved through your local motor vehicle department.

19. Employ Staff

You may need a small team to make food and serve customers. Apply for a NIE number and meet other requirements of your state before interviewing and training.

20. Maintain Your Truck

Your food truck needs oil changes, tire rotations, and fluid flushes just like any vehicle.

21. Market Your Business and Expand

To bring in more customers, promote your brand on social media accounts, update your location on food truck finder apps, and set up at popular food truck festivals. Once you gain popularity, create a franchise to market your tasty food in new locations.

Read More: food truck finder
Petty Officer 2nd Class Rae Pona is a sonar technician aboard USS Shoup, currently operating out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

PEARL HARBOR

(July 17, 2016)A 2009 Leonardtown High School graduate and Hollywood, Maryland native is serving in the U.S. Navy and is participating in the world's largest international maritime warfare exercise, the Rim of the Pacific Exercise (RIMPAC).Petty Officer 2nd Class Rae Pona is a sonar technician aboard USS Shoup, currently operating out of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.A Navy sonar technician is responsible for assisting in the maintenance and readiness of the undersea warfare equipment."RIMPAC is an opportunity to increase my skills, to build a sense of diplomacy and to learn how foreign navies operate," said Pona.According to Navy officials, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity that helps participants foster and sustain cooperative relationships that are critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world's oceans. RIMPAC 2016 is the 25th exercise in the series that began in 1971.The theme of RIMPAC 2016 is "Capable, Adaptive, Partners," Navy officials explained. The participating nations and forces will exercise a wide range of capabilities and demonstrate the inherent flexibility of maritime forces. These capabilities range from disaster relief and maritime security operations to sea control and complex warfighting. The relevant, realistic training program includes amphibious operations, gunnery, missile, anti-submarine and air defense exercises, as well as counter-piracy, mine clearance operations, explosive ordnance disposal and diving and salvage operations.The Department of the Navy's Great Green Fleet yearlong initiative will also play a major role in RIMPAC. The initiative highlights global operations using energy conservation measures and alternative fuel blends to demonstrate how optimizing energy use increases resiliency and operational readiness. During RIMPAC, almost all participating units will operate using an approved alternate-fuel blend.26 nations, 45 surface ships, 5 submarines, more than 200 aircraft and 25,000 personnel will participate in the biennial Rim of the Pacific Exercise. This year's exercise includes forces from Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, People's Republic of China, Peru, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Tonga, the United Kingdom and the United States."Shoup sailors are taking part in RIMPAC 2016 and the missions they will be planning and executing are nothing short of awesome," said Cmdr. Jason E. Rogers, commanding officer of USS Shoup. "As captain, USS Shoup and the warfighting functions it is responsible for represent my domain. Fortunately, I am blessed with the talent and warrior spirit of 300 plus sailors who strive to exercise professional mastery and control over each and every one of those domains. Our sailors constantly challenge themselves and each other to know and do more.""This is an opportunity to engage in exercises that will better myself as a sonar technician, leader and mentor," said Pona.Challenging living conditions build strong fellowship among the crew, Pona explained. The crew is highly motivated, and quickly adapt to changing conditions. It is a busy life of specialized work, watches, and drills."While serving in the Navy, I've learned that I have the ability to work under pressure," said Pona. "I'm more detail oriented and can be a better leader."Additional information about Rim of the Pacific Exercise is available at http://www.cpf.navy.mil/rimpac/
NASA Briefing for the SpaceX CRS-9 Resupply Mission to the International Space Station. NASA

A press briefing was held on July 16 at NASAs Kennedy Space Center to provide a prelaunch status update on the next SpaceX resupply mission to the International Space Station.

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is targeting liftoff on the companys Falcon 9 rocket on July 18 at 12:45 a.m. from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) in Florida, carrying science research, crew supplies and hardware to the orbiting laboratory in support of the Expedition 48 and 49 crew members.
Tokyo has gone to great lengths under the Abe administration to squelch Chinas growing regional influence under Prime Minister Abe who has joined forces with the Obama administration on an unprecedented joint military arrangement that will see the two countries developing weapons for one another. Tokyo has also engaged in increasingly feverish rounds of provocations along Chinas eastern flank joined by the United States and Indian naval forces.

The case against China regarding the territorial dispute in the South China Sea was put forward by the Philippines, with the support of the United States, before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague which ruled that Beijing has no legal basis for its claims which are embodied in a nine-dash line from maps dating back to the 1940s and stretches close to other countrys coastal waters.

Japan viewed the decision as a boon for its own territorial dispute with Beijing in the East China Sea, but many legal scholars have already begun picking apart the logic of The Hague ruling pointing to the fact that China has long maintained physical control of the territory.

China boycotted the PCA hearings arguing that the court lacked jurisdiction and reacted furiously vowing to ignore the ruling and arguing that it grossly misinterprets the Law of the Sea Treaty.
The publication further mentioned that the above countries adopted a completely different attitude when they were involved in issues related with the international rule of law. Hence, such sharp contrast speaks for their hypocrisy and unpredictability.

They supported international judicial rules that they can benefit from, but trampled on that not in favor of them , the newspaper wrote.

The publication mentioned that the US has never been accused under UNCLOS because Washington never approved the law, an article on Foreign Affairs wrote in an ironic tone.

Back in the 1980s, Nicaragua charged the US with taking military and paramilitary actions in and against Nicaragua and violating the sovereignty of Nicaragua in the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The ICJ ruled in favor of Nicaragua and gave reparations to Nicaragua. But the US, with a tough attitude, declined participation in the events and overruled the verdict delivered by the ICJ.

The US later obstructed enforcement of the judgment by the UN Security Council and banned Nicaragua from obtaining any definite compensation.

The same goes for Australia, which always wants to follow the international police posture. When concluding maritime rights treaties with Timor-Leste, the Australian government unilaterally rejected such articles concerning maritime delimitation and third-party dispute settlement procedure. Without any other options, Timor-Leste had to file for arbitration to overrule the validity of the treaty, Peoples Daily reported.
For instance, the Boston Beer Company applied for permission to trademark the word "Brexit" as the name of a hard cider.

"We are not sure exactly how we would use the name yet, but it would likely be for a small batch of cider out of our Angry Orchard research and development orchard in Walden, NY," representative of the company said, cited by WSJ.

Other US companies also want to register the term as a trademark for certain products, such as clothes and food. Thus, US company from Colorado Quicksilver Scientific plans to use the name "Brexit" for its food additive.
At the same time, China does not have a well-developed school of civil aircraft making. Its aviation industry is a new-comer, with models mainly based on foreign achievements, particularly copying Soviet aircraft. But the plan to develop a 158-174-seat airliner is a signal that the MC-21 would not be able to hit the Chinese market. The C919 was unveiled on November 2, 2015. As for now, the manufacturer, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, has collected 517 orders.

Bombardiers CSeries includes two models, CS100 and CS300. They have 100-160 seats. For the company, the project is an experiment since Bombardier never built such large planes.

But the main competitors for the MC-21 are Boeing and Airbus.

Boeing is now producing the B37MAX, the fourth generation of the Boeing 737 medium-haul airliner. In May, the company reported it had collected 3,213 orders from over 50 airlines.

Airbus has the A320neo, the new version of its A320 launched in 1988. In May, the company had 4,568 orders from 65 airlines.

Politics creates additional difficulties for the Russian airliner. The MC-21 was presented at a difficult time. When the project was launched no one could predict sanctions. The MC-21 project has nearly 20 foreign companies, including Eaton, Honyewell, Goodrich, Pratt & Witney, Thales, and Meggitt. Russian companies are now trying to replace foreign-made components, but it will take time. Political tensions may also create difficulties for further promotion in the global market.

Furthermore, there are two commercial reasons why global airlines may not be very enthusiastic about the new plane, an article by the Carnegie Moscow Center think-tank.

First, airlines are interested in minimizing the costs per an operational hour. These costs depend not only on the planes technical specifications but also on the maintenance and repair infrastructure of the manufacturer of the plane.

Second, the main concern for an airline is safety and buying a new aircraft is always risky.

"Its too early to assess the MC-21 or compare it with the rivals. The aircraft will have to undergo flight tests and certification. The first result will appear only after the first shipment of 100 planes is delivered to the market," Borys Rybak, director of Infomost consulting company, said.

Potential Buyers

First of all, Russian airlines are now the main potential buyers for the MC-21. Currently, 175 orders have been collected for the aircraft, many of them from Russian airlines. For example, state-controlled Aeroflot (with its subsidiaries) has ordered 50 planes. UTair has ordered 10 aircraft.
On Friday, members of Turkey's armed forces tried to stage a military coup. They began with a statement saying they had seized control of the country "to reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for law and order to be reinstated."

On Saturday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the coup was foiled and the government had restored control over the country.

Over 260 people were killed and hundreds were injured during the events, while some 6,000 people have already been detained.

"Though quashed within hours, the failed takeover threatens to destabilize an economy that depends heavily on capital inflows to finance its current-account deficit. Erdogans increasingly authoritarian streak was already worrying investors as he pushed his top economic advisers one-by-one from office, stoking fears of policy mistakes and leading to a drop in foreign investment," Bloomberg analysts wrote.

On Friday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development called on the Turkish government to enact reform in order to avoid deepening economic crisis.
PARIS (Sputnik)  According to the Nice-Matin newspaper, police knocked out front door and a door to the bedroom early on Saturday to find terrified couple, an 80-year-old man and his 82-year-old wife.

Following the incident, officers managed to detain people they were searching for.

Late on Thursday night, a truck rammed into a large crowd that was celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing at least 84 people and injuring over 300.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The prime minister added that the investigation was yet to prove the fact, but French officials were certain of the terrorist's sudden turn into Islamism as he never had any "jihadist past."

"Saturday morning's claim by Islamic State [Daesh] and the fast radicalization of the killer confirm the nature of this attack," Valls told the French Le Journal du Dimanche weekly newspaper in an interview.

"I have always told the truth about terrorism: a war is underway, there will be more attacks. It's hard to say, but other lives will be lost," he stressed.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Only three in ten people out of those interviewed by the UK ComRes research company said they supported another nationwide vote, the survey conducted for Independent and the Sunday Mirror revealed late on Saturday.

A nationwide referendum was held in Britain in late June. A total of 51.9 percent of the voters said they were in favor of the United Kingdom leaving the bloc.

Labour party leadership candidate Owen Smith promised on Thursday to call a new referendum on EU membership if elected, as many of those who voted for the country to quit the European Union were misled by the Leave campaign.
We need to coordinate our actions with Europe. Europol and Eurojust must become federal structures to operate more efficiently. We need to work together with US security services and those in Maghreb and with Russian services.

He also praised Russias prominent role in the ongoing effort to weed out the scourge of terrorism in various parts of the world.

Russians are incredibly efficient in their fight against terrorists. This is our primary goal now and we can achieve it only by working together, he emphasized.

Responding to a pledge by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to his across-the-board support in the war on terror, Yves Pozzo di Borgo complained about the ECs refusal to finance military training and called for greater federalization and better financing of European security structures.

The European Commission says it is investing in security. Its a lie! the Senator added.

When asked about the European countries role in the ongoing war on terror, Yves Pozzo di Borgo said that individual countries should have more say in the work being done by organizations like Europol and Eurojust.

Europe should be more involved in this. The [European] countries are coordinating their actions, the French Interior Minister is doing a pretty good job here, but much, much more still needs to be done! the Senator emphasized.
On July 14, a truck rammed into a crowd of people watching Bastille Day fireworks in the southern French city of Nice. The investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origins Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

Earlier, police arrested four people who were close to Bouhlel. According to French news channel iTele citing sources close to the investigation of the Nice terrorist attack, four detainees said that his behavior had changed dramatically prior to the attack  he became unusually aggressive and started referring to Daesh in conversations.
Who were they? Kids? No! The Sisters of St. Faustina Order from Mysliborz in West Pomerania holding a flash mob in support of the World Youth Day festival slated to be held in Krakow from July 26 through 31!

World Youth Day is an international event focused on faith and youth and organized by the Catholic Church. Initiated by Polish-born Pope John-Paul II in 1985 it has already become a tradition readily endorsed by his successors  Popes Benedict XVI and Francis.

The 2016 World Youth Day in Krakow will mark 30 years since first official World Youth Day gathering.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The investigation found that the person behind the attack was 31-year-old resident of Nice of Tunisian origins Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

"Mohamed sent the family 240,000 Tunisian Dinars in the last few days. He used to send us small sums of money regularly like most Tunisians working abroad. But then he sent us all that money, it was fortune," Bouhlel's brother Jaber told The Daily Mail.

He also said that the money were sent illegally, Mohammed Bouhlel gave cash to people returning to Tunisia and asked them to transfer the money to his relatives.
Speaking about the French governments decision to extend the nationwide state of emergency by another three months, Alain Rodier said it was a way to go, but added that it still did not rule out a repetition of what happened in Nice.

He said that even in Israel, where a state of emergency is never called off, terrorist attacks do happen, albeit on a lesser scale.

We have this very same situation here in France. The state of emergency has played a role of course, but, unfortunately, terrorists still manage to do what they do, Rodier noted.

When asked whether the often criticized Operation Sentinelle, in which combat troops patrol streets and protect key sites, has been effective in preventing terrorist attacks, Alain Rodier said that it meant to show the people that the authorities are looking after them and making the right decisions.

Despite the purely psychological effect these patrols have on the people, we should not underestimate their actual importance. We have no idea just how many times the presence of army and police units has forced potential terrorists to back off.

Speaking about more radical means the state could resort to in its fight against terrorism, Alain Rodier said that there were no quick fixes he could think of.

We need long-term measures, we need to step up our intelligence work and have police doing a better job on the ground. Such things dont happen overnight though, he added.

Alain Rodier said the decision to dissolve the General Intelligence Service (Renseignements generaux) had dealt a severe blow to the countrys on-the-ground intelligence gathering effort and called to bring it back.


By late April 2015, the international expert mission had finished its work at the crash site. In early July 2015, a draft report on the crashs causes was finalized and submitted to countries involved in the investigation. Russias Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsia, noted that the document contained more questions than answers. Rosaviatsia Deputy Chief Oleg Storchevoy noted serious flaws in the documents arguments and technical data, and expressed hope that Russias additional remarks and comments would be reflected in the final version of the report. Dutch investigators received the results of an investigation conducted on the initiative of Russias Almaz-Antey Concern, which manufactures the Buk missile series.

The concerns experts believe that the Malaysian plane was downed by a missile that has not been manufactured in Russia for a long time but that is still operated by Ukraine. The missile was allegedly launched from near the Zaroshchenske village, which is controlled by Ukrainian military units. The Russian Defense Ministry mentioned this area a few days after the tragedy. In June 2015, while waiting for the final report on the causes of the crash, Dutch and Malaysian governments entered into talks on establishing an ad hoc international tribunal under the UN auspices that would assess the causes of the crash and punish the culprits.

On July 9, the Malaysian delegation at the United Nations circulated the relevant draft resolution, referring to the tragic crash as a threat to international peace and security.

On July 29, the UN Security Councils members discussed an initiative by several countries to establish an international tribunal to investigate the air crash in Ukraine. The Russian delegation vetoed the draft resolution. Earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the air crash the result of a criminal offense, rather than a threat to international peace and security, as stipulated by the draft resolution. He said the UN Security Council had never established tribunals in connection with air crashes, and that the idea of establishing this tribunal aimed to convict those branded as guilty by Washington.

He added that the Russian side still had many questions regarding the continued investigation.

After the UN Security Council failed to pass the draft resolution on establishing the international tribunal, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said his country would continue to demand justice in connection with the Boeing 777 crash in eastern Ukraine using a variety of legal options. In mid-September 2015, the Prosecutor-Generals office of the Donetsk Peoples Republic received 2,500 fragments of the Malaysian Boeing 777 that crashed in Donbas in July 2014, which were collected by local residents. The Republics Acting Prosecutor-General Andrei Spivak asked Dutch Chief Prosecutor Fred Westerbeke to take away the fragments found in Donbas.

On September 28, Dutch experts and members of the OSCE mission arrived at Hrabove in the Donetsk Region, where the Malaysian Boeing 777 had crashed in July 2014. They spoke with local authorities and also studied the territory.
On Saturday morning a Black Hawk military helicopter carrying the eight Turkish servicemen made an emergency landing at the airport of the northern Greek city of Alexandroupoli.

The arrivals  three Majors, three Captains and two Sergeant Majors  requested political asylum in Greece, which later returned the helicopter to Turkey.

We dont know anything about the coup. Our commanders played an active role there, but we didnt. We were ordered to land two helicopters outside Istanbul. We were transporting the wounded when they started firing at us from the ground. We feared for our lives because they would have executed us, so we decided to flee, they said.
On Thursday night, a truck rammed into a large crowd that was celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and dozens of others were injured.

Earlier in the day, media reported that Daesh terrorist group claimed responsibility for the attack.
LONDON (Sputnik)  In July, before becoming UK Prime Minister, Theresa May warned that a large number of EU migrants could arrive to the United Kingdom ahead of the country's official exit from the block.

"We may have to say that the 'right to indefinite leave to remain' protection only applies before a certain date. But you have to make those judgments on reality not speculation," Davis said in an interview with The Mail newspaper.

However, Davis noted that he would like to negotiate a generous settlement for EU migrants in United Kingdom and for Britons living in EU countries.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Scottish First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) Nicola Sturgeon said on Sunday she did not rule out Scotland remaining both part of the United Kingdom and the European Union.

"There might be [an opportunity]. We are in uncharted territory, and when you're in uncharted territory with effectively a blank sheet of paper in front of you then you have an opportunity to think things that might previously have been unthinkable and shape the future. So I think there are opportunities," Sturgeon told the BBC in an interview answering a question if it would be possible for Scotland to remain in the European Union as part of the United Kingdom.

On June 23, a referendum was held in the United Kingdom, in which 51.9 percent of voters supported a withdrawal from the European Union. The Scottish National Party, led by Sturgeon, is pressing for a deal that would see Scotland remain part of the EU after 62 percent of Scottish voters backed remaining in the bloc in the Brexit referendum.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Wednesday, UK Member of Parliament Davis has been appointed the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union in Prime Minister Theresa May's new cabinet.

"To keep tariff-free access <> I think yes, that is what we're aiming for <> I think in a year or two, we will see that the EU is changing away from the initial project fear stance, towards the stance <> "we must talk to the Brits to make sure free trade works in both directions." They know what we have always said, that they depend as much on us  more on us, actually  than we do on them," Davis told Sky News' Murnaghan Programme on Sunday.
In an interview with Radio Sputnik, Helmer pointed out certain inconsistencies within the Joint Investigation Team.

He recalled that the team was formed by Ukraine (where the plane crashed), Australia and the Netherlands (which had the largest number of passengers on board of the doomed plane). However, another country that has also been involved in the investigation is Belgium which Helmer considers a "peculiar member."

According to Helmer, it is unclear why Belgium is a member of the JIT at all, taking into account the fact that there were less Belgian citizens on board of MH17 than for example those from Indonesia and Great Britain.
He further said that this is a complete scandal for the French government and it should not have happened.

We are not on the right track and our president is worthless. He does not deserve to be president.

The man further said that he doesnt think it was just a matter of safety, according to him the government did not take proper precautions. The threat has been there for a long time.

Daesh has threatened us more than once, but now they are saying that it was a mentally ill person driving this truck?

Wait. It's too easy. Something terrible has happened and he is just sick and insane. It's too easy. For me, he was not sick and he knew what he was doing.

Another person spoke to Sputnik saying that everyone must pray for peace, for all those families and children who have died.

I want to say, all these people who kill other people, we know who they are, they must be watched constantly. We cannot let them kill children, whole families, this is outrageous!

Others expressed shock over how a man who has children himself could kill so many innocent children and people. A woman close to tears expressed her shock by saying that, I think it's just terrible. There are no appropriate words. There is nothing more dreadful, and painful.

Another woman said that she is feeling very emotional due to the attack. She said that she has lived in Nice for 40 years and she will continue to do so no matter what.

I came this morning, did not find the flowers but flowers are an important symbol. The Market far from my home has been closed for two days. But I brought a stuffed toy in the memory of the dead children. Then there are those children who have not found their parents, they are in Pasteur hospital and they are waiting for their parents.

She spoke about how everyone must show support and solidarity with the victims and their families now.
YEREVAN (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day, an armed group took six police officers hostage at a patrol police station in the capital's district of Erebuni, killing one officer and injuring three. The hostage takers are demanding the release of Jirair Sefilian, an opposition politician and the founder of the New Armenia Public Salvation Front. Sefilian, who took part in the 1988-1994 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan, is accused of the illegal acquisition and possession of arms.

"The meeting participants reported to the President about the situation following an armed incident that took place this morning, and on the details of measures taken by the law enforcement agencies," the press service said in a statement.

The press service added that "law enforcement officials are fully in control of the situation and are taking all the necessary measures to reach the solution."
NICE (Sputnik)  French police confirmed the death of a Russian citizen, Victoria Savchenko, while another Russian woman, Alina Bogdanova, is still missing after the truck attack in Nice, Russian Consul General in Marseille Sergey Molchanov said Sunday.

"Unfortunately, the sad news were confirmed. The identification procedure was very hard, but the parents confirmed the death of their daughter, Victoria Savchenko. French colleagues informed the Consulate General of her death. The fate of Alina Bogdanova remains unknown," Molchanov told RIA Novosti.

"As for our fellow citizens who remain in hospitals, Paulina Serebrennikova will return back home tomorrow, and in a few days the other Russian citizen [Galina Sokolova] will also fly home," Molchanov added.
After the demonstrators heard the news, they gradually started to leave the rally. However, the number of such demonstrations in Germany in itself raised security concerns within the country.

Experts in the field of security told German newspaper Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten that such a high level of mobilization could become a serious problem for Germany, especially given the fact that German authorities do not have sufficient information about the organizational structure of these protests organized by Turks.

"Especially with regard to domestic tensions  such as between Turks and Kurds in Turkey  there is a danger that violent clashes could also take place on German soil," the media source wrote.

Large demonstrations were also registered in Bremen, Munchen, Hannover, Stuttgart and several smaller cities in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The rallies also took place in other European cities, for instance in Vienna where around 4,000 Turks gathered to protest the coup.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The 40th session of the UNESCO committee, which kicked off in Istanbul on July 10 and was due to last through July 20, adjourned its work three days before schedule due to the UN security protocol put in place following the events that occurred in Turkey on July 15.

"The 41st session of the World Heritage Committee will be held in the city of Cracow in Poland, in July 2017," the UNESCO statement published on its website reads.
French President Francois Hollande faces stern criticism for his feckless response to the growing wave of Islamic migrants and the horrors of terrorism that have followed in their wake leading not only to a resurgence of the far-right nationalism within the country, but also leading members of his own cabinet to question whether he is overseeing the descent of France into a bloody civil war.

That was the warning provided by the nations top security official, Patrick Calvar, in the wake of the Nice terror attacks that left 84 people dead with over 300 others wounded when Tunisian born Daesh terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhel drove a 19-tonne cargo truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day  the countrys national holiday of independence and liberation marking the French Revolution.

Yet, this is not the first time that Calvar has made this dreary projection for the future of France. Rather the security official has turned out to be quite prescient providing the same warning to the French parliament on July 12, 2015  months after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, but long before horror descended upon the Bataclan Theater in Paris on November 13, 2015 and the city of Nice in the past week.
"The truth is that nothing of what had to be done over the past 18 months was done indeed," Sarkozy was cited by TF1 broadcaster as saying.

On July 14, France was rocked again by a deadly attack, as a truck rammed into a large crowd that was celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and over 300 people were injured.
The US State Department issued a warning on Saturday calling on citizens to refrain from travelling to the country in the wake of the failed coup attempt that left at least 265 dead and over 2000 individuals injured.

The State Department says that in the wake of the coup that US citizens are exposed to "increased threats from terrorist groups" and went on to say that "US tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations" that remain uncontained inside of Turkey.

Travel  State Dept (@TravelGov) July 17, 2016

US officials also reiterated that per a Federal Aviation Administration notice to airmen (NOTAM) dated July 15, 2015 all commercial airliners are prohibited from flying to or from Istanbul and Ankara indefinitely.
DAMASCUS (Sputnik)  Kinsabba was captured by the al-Nusra Front, outlawed in Russia, and allied terrorist groups on July 1.

"The operation to liberate Kinsabba is over. The army's forces and several militia groups gathered. In the beginning, there was a heavy fight, however, under the shelling of artillery and aviation, terrorists started to fall back in small groups," the source said.
"The Turkish society is split. Part of it supports President Erdogan who is carrying out a policy of Islamization. This is a neo-ottoman policy, a course of expansion to the regions that were part of the Ottoman Empire. For example, in Syria Erdogan supports Sunni groups fighting against Bashar Assad," Dolgov told Gazeta.ru.

However, many in Turkey oppose this course. Turkish opposition has repeatedly said that the government is mounting pressure on opposition activists and journalists. Many experts have said that Turkey is drifting from a republic towards an authoritarian presidency.

As for the Turkish armed forces, this institution was established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey.

"Ataturks idea was secular development for Turkey. The Turkish military still supports and promotes this tradition," the expert noted.

"I think that the recent attempted coup is part of this standoff within the Turkish society. Many in Turkey are not happy with Erdogans policy. However, the coup was quelled, and so far Erdogan supporters win," he added.
ANKARA (Sputnik)  On Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that the Constitutional Council and political parties in Turkey would discuss the feasibility of returning death penalty, following the military coup attempt in the country on Friday.

"In a democracy, the demand of people can not be ignored. It is your right. This [instituting of death penalty] will be evaluated within the frameworks of constitutional process by corresponding authorities, which will make the decision," Erdogan said in a speech broadcast by the local NTV TV channel.
The Daesh caliphate was declared two years ago when the brutal group that aptly calls itself the Islamic State seized almost all of eastern Syria, as well as large swathes of land in northern and western Iraq. The territory under Daesh control has been shrinking for month, thanks in large part to Russian and the US-led multinational campaigns aimed at degrading and destroying the terrorist organization.

Latest estimates by IHS Jane's show that Daesh-controlled territory shrank by 12 percent in the first six months of 2016 and this trend is unlikely to be reversed.

The terrorist group has already tried to offset its battlefield losses with major attacks in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Previously, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that 2,839 coup perpetrators have been detained. A large number of judges and prosecutors have also been arrested over charges of links to the Gulen movement, headed by exiled opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been reportedly linked to the coup attempt.

"The legal process will continue <> This will be the most extensive case ever seen in Turkeys history," Bozdag was quoted as saying by the Anadolu news agency.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim gave figures of over 180 killed and 1,440 injured. Later, a figure of over 260 victims emerged in media.

"Unfortunately, over 190 of our citizens died and over 1,400 have been injured," the ministry said in a statement.

The number excludes casualties suffered by coup supporters, which amounted to over 100 people dead, according to the ministry.
This appears to be a pointed threat against the United States with an implicit demand that Washington must extradite Gulen or face Ankaras wrath. The provocative comments came after Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu shocked the world by accusing the America of manufacturing the overthrow effort.

"The US is behind the coup attempt. A few journals that are published there [in the US] have been conducting activites for several months. For many months we have sent requests to the US concerning Fethullah Gulen. The US must extradite him," said the Labor Minister in a statement.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The negotiations with field commanders of the opposition groups are ongoing in the Arab country's provinces of Rif Dimashq, al-Quneitra, and al-Suwaida, the center added.

"Within last 24 hours, truce agreement with representatives of 1 inhabited area in the Aleppo province has been achieved. The total number of inhabited areas, the leaders of which had signed reconciliation agreements, has reached 188," the center said in a bulletin posted by the Russian Defense Ministry on its website.

Syria has been mired in a civil war since 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups.
Amid claims that the coup was organized by Fethullah Gulen , a Turkish cleric located in the US, relations between Ankara and Washington reached a milestone low, casting a shadow on the joint use of the Incirlik by both countries.

Meanwhile, the situation in Turkey, and at the Incirlik in particular, remains unstable with reports stating that 42 helicopters have gone missing from the base, causing concerns that the American nuclear arsenal is in danger.

On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry expressed hope that the recent events wont affect joint military operations in longer perspective. He also addressed the hurdles that US personnel experienced in the aftermath of the revolt, as there may have been some refueling that took place with the Turkish Air Force with planes that were flying in the coup itself.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook claimed that anti-Daesh operations had been resumed, adding that power outages dont affect the American part of the facility that is supplied with energy by its own generators.

Many experts speculate that the massive crackdown on military that is ongoing in Turkey at the moment would eventually lead to Ankaras fall out from the anti-Daesh struggle or NATO.
Japans ambitions for air superiority appear to be still-born with China announcing plans for the J-20 and J-31 stealth fighters to enter service in the coming decade with Chinese state media suggesting that the aircrafts will even be deployed on aircraft carriers.

Tokyo is now left with an aging fleet of F-2s and F-15s with the latter set to phase out by 2040.

Perhaps more concerning, rather than the F-22 that Japan so desperately hopes to acquire to combat the threat of an increasingly militaristic Chinese air force as Beijing, the United States has hooked Tokyo on the F-35 which may not become fully operational for another half-decade.

Notably, the Canadian Air Force rejected the idea of the F-35 out-of-hand in the face of repeated economic threats from Lockheed Martin to ship the companys operations overseas with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying that the fighter jet just doesnt work and it costs too much.
The S-400 complex will become a welcome addition to Crimea's multilayered air defense structure that contains among over things the S-300 (NATO reporting name SA-10 Grumble) long range surface-to-air missile system.

The S-400 will serve as a major deterrent for "air hooligans from NATO's air force," Balbek told RIA Novosti. "The sheer fact that the most advanced air defense missile system will be installed on [the peninsula] will keep all NATO air forces based in the Black Sea on the edge of their seats."

Balbek also mentioned that sending enemy aircraft to violate Crimean airspace would be essentially a suicide mission. "Without doubt, NATO has brave pilots, but there are no suicide pilots among them."
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Saturday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that Turkish airspace was closed due to the coup attempt in the country. US media reported that the Incirlik base in southern Turkey has been left without electricity and local authorities prevented movement to and from the base. Air operations from the base have also been suspended.

"UPDATE: After close coordination with our Turkish allies, counter-ISIL [Daesh] coalition air operations in Turkey have resumed," Peter Cook wrote in his official Twitter account.
The Baton Rouge Mayor confirmed that this was an ambush style attack with multiple shooters taking aim at police responding to a reported incident.

News This Second (@NewsThisSecond) July 17, 2016

Ambulances are now heading near a Wal-Mart in Port Allen where two individuals who eyewitnesses say were wearing all black went in to change their clothes. The ambulance driver is reportedly wearing a bullet-proof helmet reports WAFB Channel 9 News.

Kevin Frey (@KevinWAFB) July 17, 2016

Local news reporter Terry L. Jones reports that police stopped two black men wearing black t-shirts and camouflage pants, consistent with the attire worn by members of the New Black Panther Party, after they changed their clothes inside the Wal-Mart in Port Allen. The two individuals who were stopped by police were arrested and turned over to Louisiana State Police, but it remains unclear whether they are the other suspected shooters.

Terry L Jones (@tjonesreporter) July 17, 2016

Terry L Jones (@tjonesreporter) July 17, 2016

Terry L Jones (@tjonesreporter) July 17, 2016

The two individuals who were detained by officers and handed over to the Louisiana State Police after changing out of black t-shirts and camouflage pants at a local Walmart are now being questioned by the FBI in connection with the attack.

Baton Rouge officials confirm that seven officers have been shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana  3 have been killed and the other 3 are in critical condition at this time according to the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Department. Initial reports indicating that one attacker has been killed by police have been confirmed by local KTLA Channel 5 News. Reports from news affiliates confirm that police are still searching for a black male who they believe was involved in the shooting.

John Cardillo (@johncardillo) July 17, 2016

East Baton Rouge police were forced to use a stun gun on a man who approached officers in a menacing fashion at a barricade set up at Airline Highway. Witnesses say that the individual was yelling and pointing. It is unclear whether this individual is linked to the shooting.

The Mayor of East Baton Rouge cautioned that this is still an active shooter situation as there are some concerns that there is a second assailant still on the loose. The Mayor also said that they are still investigating the motive behind the attack.

Mikey Kay (@MikeyKayNYC) July 17, 2016

"Right now, we are trying to get our arms around everything," said Holden. "It's just been on thing after another."

The attacks come one week after the FBI issued a Situational Information Report (SIR) warning cops of a credible threat of a "police purge" in Baton Rouge. The advisory was dated for July 8 to 10, but additional warnings have been issued by the FBI that radical activists may be looking to target police with deadly force.

Baton Rouge has been ground zero for protests against police brutality by the activist group Black Lives Matter in the wake of the killing of Alton Sterling at the hands of local police. A bystander videotaped two cops holding Sterling down on the ground before one officer discharged his weapon several times at point blank range.

Less than 24-hours after the country was reeling from the unjust killing of Alton Sterling, a livestream video went viral on Facebook showing an innocent Philando Castile bleeding out after being shot by an officer while his girlfriend narrated the tape and his four year old daughter sat in the back seat of the car.

Over the last week peaceful protesters with Black Lives Matter have been pummeled by police in militarized riot gear who arrested individuals simply for filming the protests causing renewed outrage across the country.

The People's Summit (@pplsummit) July 10, 2016

The situation has begun to deteriorate as a group identifying itself as the New Black Panther Party has taken to the front lines of the protest with weapons in tow. The presence of the radical activists who have called for the use of force have greatly undermined public sentiment in favor of the cause of addressing police brutality with the social media punditry reverting to full-on racism in response to the attacks.

The New Black Panther Party has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a black Nationalist hate group and is considered much more radical than its peaceful counterpart Black Lives Matter.

Donald Trump wasted no time in politicizing the tragedy blasting Obama for his feckless leadership over the issue of police officers being targeted. "How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order," said Trump in a social media statement.
The Republican National Convention begins on Monday with law enforcement and security professionals throughout the country holding their breath. The City of Cleveland predicts that their will be widespread rioting near the RNC Convention and throughout the city as police are forced to divert their resources to ensure the safety of the event audience.

The New Black Panther Party, who some are claiming for the violence in Baton Rouge, has pledged to protest at the event against police brutality and against Donald Trump's statements regarding minorities. Separately, a group of radical skinheads from Sacramento known for bloody knife attacks has also pledged to attend in support of Trump. The real wild card, however, may be the 20,000 person strong Bikers for Trump group that has vowed to come armed to the teeth.
The Baton Rouge shooter has been identified as a 29-year-old black male by the name of Gavin Eugene Long who did not live in the area, but rather came into the city from Kansas City, Missouri. Police caution that the shooter's motive is unknown until a further investigation in conducted.

Colonel Mike Edmondson, the Superintendent of the Louisiana State Police began the press conference opening by saying that the office has received a lot of calls to provide support. He said, "we want and need your prayers. Baton Rouge is in need of your prayers."

"The Louisiana State Police is the lead agency in charge of the investigation," said Col. Edmondson. He informed the public that there is no longer an active shooter incident and that there was only one gunmen on the scene. The individual allegedly ambushed police officers responding to an incident shooting several police officers. At that time, EMS ambulances arrived at the scene and police engaged the suspect so that emergency personnel could provide life-saving aide to several of the officers.
He stressed that Serbia has proven to be a "reliable and true" partner of the EU and bemoaned the fact that despite Belgrade's strategic foreign policy orientation toward full EU membership, the process "has not had particularly live dynamics so far because in the last two years we opened only two negotiating chapters."

At the conference Dacic underscored that the time has come to reexamine what was done to Serbia back in 1999, and threw into question Kosovo's self-proclaimed sovereignty. He recalled that US Assistant Secretary of State told him that the US has been investing in Kosovo's independence for 20 years.

"Then I think the mistakes must be sought not only in our system," he stressed, as cited by B92.net.

He emphasized that neither Russia nor China recognize Kosovo's independence.

Later, commenting on the EU officials' remarks Dacic told Serbian daily newspaper Novosti, as cited by Balkan Insight: "It could not be expected from Serbia to introduce sanctions on its friends."

In his interview with Sputnik former Serbian diplomat Zoran Milivojevic noted that Serbia has its own national interests and the right to protect them.

"There are no reasons [for Serbia] to reconsider its relation with other nations, especially with United Nations Security Council permanent members and traditional friends of Serbia, Russia or China," Milivojevic told Sputnik.

The diplomat stressed that it is inappropriate for Brussels to set such conditions on the very early phases of Serbia-EU negotiations, referring to the fact that Belgrade and the EU are yet to discuss the 31st chapter of EU accession related to Serbia's foreign policy. Only when the chapter is opened the issue of the Russo-Serbian should be brought into the spotlight, he stressed.
According to the source, Tsipras noted that procedure of consideration of asylum seekers' applications would be short, but held in accordance with international law and agreements on human rights.

The source stressed that Erdogan expressed appreciation for Greek government's position on the military coup attempt in Turkey.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup took place in the country. The coup was suppressed several hours later.

"Israel and Turkey recently agreed on a reconciliation process It is our assumption that this process will continue regardless of the dramatic events in Turkey over the weekend," Netanyahu stated at the weekly cabinet meeting, as quoted by the Haaretz newspaper.

On June 28, Israel and Turkey signed an agreement to normalize relations, that deteriorated six years ago, when 9 Turkish civilians died during a raid by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza Strip.
Unlike George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Putin has not ignored the interests of US national security, making "incredibly poor decisions," Flynn said.

"He respects people who are selfish about their country. Putin is a guy who is very selfish about Russia and about the Russian federation, and he understands the history of his country. You can't say, I don't like you.' You've got to respect him. He's a world leader," Flynn told the magazine.
The ruling of the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration's on the South China Sea issue is by no means an end to the dispute, but "it could be the beginning to an end," managing editor for Veterans Today Jim W. Dean writes in his latest article for New Eastern Outlook online magazine.

The journalist believes that Beijing and its neighbors will find a mutually beneficial solution to their maritime dispute, adding that it is especially important in the light of the China-led New Silk Road initiative.

"I predict that China and its competing neighbors will eventually come up with some formula for sharing the South China Sea to varying degrees, and with many layers to it Energy resources could be shared on a proximity formula that also gives weight to the population size of the competing countries, a socialistic 'need' twist that would be hard for China to reject. The broad development of resources in the area would stimulate economic growth, and especially consumer earnings and spending, which are critical in supporting a solid middle class lifestyle for all of the ASEAN countries," Dean underscores.
It is impossible to forget those incidents just like that, stressed the expert. The tragic case with the downed Russian aircraft brought up other negative memories, which seemed a thing of the past.

The state can be compared to a ship. If the steering wheel is moved sharply, the worst case is that the ship can capsize and get wrecked. In the best case it will sustain an internal damage. The situation is similar to the relationship between the two countries, Laciner said.

The expert recalled that the Turkish authorities initially stated that, if a similar case took place once again, they would give the same order, boasting of their unyielding stance, however, after some time they changed their rhetoric, sent a letter of apology and expressed hope that relations can start over again."

But by then a lot of precious time had been lost, something has remained between the two countries, something, that can no longer be corrected, according to the expert.

Talking about Turkeys foreign policy, Laciner stressed that Turkey, starting from 2010, has set off on dubious ventures in its relations with countries such as Syria, Israel, Russia and Iran.

Historic and diplomatic experience of Turkey, its political culture and traditions were brought to nothing. Turkish foreign policy started to get defined by a team of politicians who have held previous positions in the Municipality of Istanbul (Erdogan in 1994-1998 served as mayor of Istanbul).
PARIS (Sputnik) Issues regarding the further fight against Daesh will be raised at the upcoming anti-terrorist coalition summit in the United States next week, he added.

"There are issues. On one hand, it is reliable, on the other hand, there are also suspicions, to be honest," Ayrault told the France 3 television channel.

Defense ministers from countries making up the US-led coalition are set to meet on Wednesday at Joint Base Andrews in the state Maryland on Wednesday. The coalition, which includes Turkey, has been carrying out strikes against Daesh since September 2014.
"We hope, we will make progress on this issue, especially after we have taken a significant number of measures to ensure airport security," the minister told journalist as quoted by Aswat Masriya portal.

Russia suspended all flights to and from Egypt last fall after a Russian A321 plane crashed in the Sinai desert on October 31 while flying from the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg following a terrorist attack claimed by the Daesh jihadist group, outlawed in Russia. All 224 people on board died in what has become the largest civil aviation disaster in Russian history.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The official condemned Friday's coup attempt in Turkey which claimed lives of over 260 people, saying that a violent change of government cannot bring anything good to the citizens.

"I am sure that the coup [in Turkey] has a lot of influences from the outside. It is now clear that the Russian plane was taken down by the pilot who belonged to the same group as those behind the coup, and now that Turkey renewed its ties with Russia, it clearly did not suit someone," Ivica Dacic said as quoted by b92 broadcaster.
In addition, the determination of the European Union to keep the sanctions in place is now challenged, especially after the US has focused on Syria and outsourced the Ukrainian settlement to Germany. Thus, Russia hopes that its participation in the Syrian settlement would sway Washington and Berlin toward a more accommodating line, the article read.

John Kerry was in Moscow when a terrorist attack in Frances Nice occurred.

Many experts stressed that the fight with terrorism requires global efforts, including cooperation between the US and Russia.

"Currently terrorism is global. Terrorist cells are not only in Syria, they are across the globe. In order to defeat terrorism we need global cooperation," political analyst Georgiy Fedorov told the Russian online newspaper Vzglyad.

According to him, the US applies double standards. On the one hand, Washington wants to cooperate against terrorists. On the other hand, it undermines Russias counterterrorism activities and imposes sanctions which only deepen tensions.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The dinner will serve as an introductory meeting between the two diplomats, according to the source.

"It is expected that they will meet during a working dinner," the source said.
Until September 12, 1980, Gulen was a preacher in a number of towns, up until there was a military coup in Turkey after which he went on a vacation. In 1981, Fethullah resigned from his position as a cleric.

Gulen, apart from being a cleric, was also a writer, a public figure and originator of the political movement Hizmet, which had many supporters in Turkey. People were attracted to the idea of developing education and intercultural dialogue.

In addition, Gulens movement was actively supported by Erdogan, when he held the post of Prime Minister of Turkey and his Justice and Development Party, which played a significant role in the elections.

In spite of this, Gulen was increasingly becoming critical of the Turkish government. In 1999, he left for treatment to the United States and no longer returned to his homeland, after which his relations with the authorities of Turkey deteriorated sharply.

In 2013, Gulen strongly criticized the harsh dispersal of police by protesters who were gathered campaigning against sealing off Istanbul's Gezi Park. Due to the law enforcement action of that day, several people were killed and rallies grew into mass demonstrations.

Erdogan then blamed the supporters of Gulens party Hizmet, saying that it was his people who were protesting in the park. Later on, a corruption scandal broke out in Turkey where dozens of high-ranking officials were arrested.
According to Rosiny, Moscow is interested in an agreement with the West to resolve the situation in Syria. For Russia, it is clear that "a military solution  is not a solution," however, the West has no clear position on this issue.

On the one hand, the West has always sought to overthrow the current Syrian President Bashar-al-Assad. On the other hand, it now understands that Assad's overthrow would only lead to the continuation of the civil war.

In Rosiny's opinion, the West could achieve progress on the resolution of the issue only through "realistic discussions" with Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

It is worth mentioning that Turkey as many other countries has always shown harsh rhetoric against the Syrian leadership. It repeatedly intervened in the internal situation in Syria and supported the radical armed groups inside the sovereign country.

"Such techniques have never been used in the political tradition of the Turkish Republic, this behavior is not befitting a serious self-sufficient state," influential political scientist and an expert in the field of security Sedat Laciner said.

Now, however, it seems that Turkey is aiming for a sharp turn heading for reconciliation with Syria. Ankara has decided to change its foreign policy approach to the Syrian conflict after Russia and Turkey recently restored their relations broken as result of the incident with the Russian Su-24 fighter jet.

"Ultimately there will have to be a political solution of interests. And, in my view, this is also an important step toward the resolution of the conflict that all sides recognize the interests of the other side. So far, no one has done it, it was just said: the Syrian people, whoever it should be, is free to decide what it wants. But there are no Syrian people as such. And that's why one can't back out, but one rather should ultimately have realistic negotiations with Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in order to come to a common solution," Rosiny said.

Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups. The West has long been focusing not on fighting terrorist groups but on overthrowing President Assad. However, gradually the US and other Western countries gave up their ultimate goal and gave priority to the fight against Daesh. In early 2016, Russia and the United States managed to negotiate the ceasefire in the country that took effect on February 27.
Despite the fact that Ankara sometimes has strategic differences with Washington and Brussels, the US and the EU could not support the coup against the legitimate government, he said.

At the same time, if Erdogan turns even more authoritarian after the coup there will be a dilemma, Hauser said.

"What is better  to support a non-democratic coup or to deal with an increasingly authoritarian leader? The same situation took place in Egypt in 2013 when Mohammed Morsi was toppled," he said.

Gulen is to Blame?

Hauser also emphasized that it is not clear whether cleric Fethullah Gulen residing in the US and accused by Erdogan of staging the coup was actually involved in the attempt.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that the country hiding the man linked to the coup is not Turkeys friend. In turn, Erdogan called on US President Barack Obama to extradite the cleric.
The program of import substitution was launched in Russia in 2014 after Western nations stopped selling important parts and other equipment to Russia over its alleged involvement in the Ukrainian crisis.

President Vladimir Putin then ordered the country's defense industry to speed up the development and production of a number of vitally important units and parts, while still allowing them to look for alternative Western suppliers.

Shortly before the famous showcase of Russias top-of-the-line tanks and armored vehicles based on the Armata and Kurganets platforms during last years Victory Day Parade on Red Square, the deputy head of the Military-Industrial Commission, Oleg Bochkarev, said that they were 100-percent developed and built in Russia.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the Washington Post/ABC News poll, only three in ten people said they were optimistic on the issue.

A total of 58 percent of those polled said they would rather trust Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton to handle race relations than her Republican rival Donald Trump, who was supported by 26 percent of the interviewed.

The pollster interviewed 1,003 US adults by phone between July 11 and July 14.
"At approximately 6:00 p.m. after previously being warned multiple times, numerous individuals ran onto the Jones Falls Expressway (I-83), locked arms, and blocked traffic Fifty-five adults and 10 juveniles, were arrested," police stated as quoted by the ABC broadcaster.

In the beginning of July, police arrested at least 100 people in the US state of Minnesota in the course of the protests in response to killing of African-American Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop. The same week, another African-American man Alton Sterling was fatally shot by two policemen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  On Saturday night, the police received a report of a shooting at the Parrish Medical center. The incident occurred on the third floor of the medical institution.

"On Parrish Medical shooting, Victims are an elderly female patient, & female hospital employee. unk [unknown] motive," Titusville Police wrote on Twitter.

Earlier in the day, the Municipal police department in Titusville reported that the attacker was detained. The identity of the shooter was not disclosed.
Less than 24-hour later, at least three cops have been killed and three others injured when they were ambushed responding to an emergency call. Police have killed at least one suspect, have barricaded at least one other shooter, and a third suspect is believed to be on the loose.

The three shooters, according to a police BOLO ("Be on the Lookout") to officers, appear to all be black men and are reported to be wearing all black  the East Baton Rouge Mayor cautions that the identities and physical descriptions of the individuals is not yet confirmed nor are the motives for the attack.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  A shooting reportedly involving three attackers occurred earlier on Sunday in Baton Rouge , Louisiana, in a location some five miles away from where police shot and killed African-American man Alton Sterling last week.

"POTUS [President of the United States] has been briefed on Baton Rouge shooting of police officers and asked to be updated throughout the day as more details become available. White House has been in contact with local officials in Baton Rouge and offered any assistance necessary," the White House said in a statement.

At least three police officers have been killed in the shooting, with several others injured, including one in critical condition, according to reports. One suspect shooter has been killed while another is barricaded in a building in an ongoing standoff with police. The third attacker is reportedly at large.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier on Sunday, at least three police officers have been killed and several others injured, including one in critical condition, in a shooting which reportedly involved three attackers. The shooting took place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

"I condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge. For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault," Obama said in a statement published on the government website.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  "Two tonnes of humanitarian aid, particularly flour, rice, canned meat and fish, were delivered to families in need in the city of Aleppo and Beshrati village in the Latakia province," the statement reads.

Syria has been mired in civil war since 2011, with government forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad fighting numerous opposition factions and extremist groups.

The ceasefire in Syria brokered by Russia and the United States, took effect on February 27 to facilitate humanitarian access to all besieged areas in the country, among other purposes.
According to the ERT broadcaster, another Turkish helicopter with two military crews on board arrived in Greece before midnight local time (around 20:30 GMT) on Saturday to return the hijacked aircraft and subsequently left for a military base near the Turkish northwestern city of Gelibolu.

The Greek authorities said they would consider the issue of returning the alleged rebels in accordance with international law, following an extradition request by the Turkish counterparts.
ALMATY (Sputnik)  On Thursday night, a truck rammed into a large crowd that was celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. At least 84 people, including children, were killed and dozens of others were injured.

"We announce with regret that citizens of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Lyubov Panchenko (1956), Marina Panchenko (1983), Silvia Panchenko (2013) and Natalia Otto (1959) were killed in the terrorist attack in Nice," the ministry said in its official Twitter account.

The ministry added that it would offer all necessary help to the victims' relatives.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Negotiations between a team of the families' lawyers and the Malaysia Airlines concluded exactly two years after the crash, the Dutch NOS public broadcaster reported, citing a lawyer involved in the case.

Details of the compensation deal have not been disclosed.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed with 298 people on board on July 17, 2014, in eastern Ukraine, while en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, leaving no survivors. Kiev and independence supporters in Ukraines southeast have blamed each other for the downing of the MH17 plane.
KIEV (Sputnik)  The countries also noted the investigation of the Dutch Safety Board published on 13 October 2015.

"The countries recalled their full commitment to take effective measures to bring to justice the persons who are responsible, noting the importance of accountability in preventing future attacks on civil aircraft," the statement published on the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry website read.
LONDON (Sputnik)  The meeting was attended by the representatives of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Defense, the Home Office and the Department for Transport, while the ambassador and embassy staff in Ankara joined by video link.

"They noted that the situation in Turkey continued to stabilise, but that we needed to maintain our focus on the situation and monitor any developments over the coming days and weeks, including close cooperation and dialogue with the Turkish government," the spokesperson said in a statement published on the UK government website.

The spokesperson added that the UK consular staff are making sure that the UK nationals currently in Turkey  especially those who are waiting for planes in Turkeys main airports  have the support they need.
Soon after the attempt, the airspace over the region of the Sea of Marmara in the north-western part of Turkey was closed for civil aviation and the Turkish Airlines company announced cancellation of all flights scheduled for Saturday. Russias Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsia also suspended air traffic to Turkey.

The stranded passengers were due to fly on Saturday's flights SU2137 and SU2135, as well as Sunday's flights SU2135 and SU2137.

Another plane will take passengers out of Turkey later on Monday, according to the company.

The United Kingdom's British Airways airline resumed limited flights to Turkey earlier on Sunday.

"Our flights to Turkey have resumed but we continue to keep our flights to the country under review and will update this content with the latest information," the company said on its website.

British Airways canceled all its flights to and from Turkey on Saturday, as well as one flight on Sunday due to the unstable situation in the country.

The Turkish coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday. Over 290 people have been killed and over 1,400 were injured during the events, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry. Around 6,000 people have been arrested, while Erdogan urged his supporters to remain in the streets.
MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Erdogan and other officials have blamed Gulen staying in self-imposed exile in the United States and his supporters for the coup attempt that took place on Friday in Turkey. Gulen condemned the coup attempt and denied any involvement in it.

"I'm not afraid that I would be extradited. If they decide so, let it be. And, let them build an international team to investigate the attempted military coup," Gulen said in an interview with Russias Rossiya 1 broadcaster.

The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life. Over 290 people were killed and hundreds were injured during the events, while nearly 6,000 people have already been detained.
YS Lotus shattered Red Shores Summerside's all-age track record with a 1:51.4 romp in the 48th edition of the $22,000 Governor's Plate, presented by Summerside Chrysler Dodge, on Saturday, July 16.

With Marc Campbell in the sulky, the favoured elimination winner YS Lotus blazed through a :26.4 opening quarter to establish the lead from post seven over insider Big Surf and began to extend his leading margin through middle fractions of :54.3 and 1:22.4 en route to the six-length triumph. His 1:51.4 winning time was one second and one-fifth faster than the former track record held by Big Surf and two-time Governor's Plate champion D Gs Camme, who advanced first over in this year's edition to finish second. Jeb finished third with Ok Galahad and Big Surf completing the top five finish order.

Once he got to the front, he kind of ran away and I just let him, first-time Governor's Plate winner Marc Campbell was quoted as saying after the race by the Journal Pioneer. I knew D Gs Camme was back there somewhere, and I wanted to open up some daylight on him.

A five-year-old gelded son of If I Can Dream, YS Lotus is trained by Rene Allard and owned by Yves Sarrazin of La Presentation, Que.

He shows 1:51 and 1:52 consistently on a half-mile track, said Campbell of the Yonkers Raceway regular. He had a good week here.

[Prince Edward Islander] Jordan MacKay did a terrific job with him. He had him swimming in French River, and let him run like a dog. Hes a really nice quiet horse, and Jordan deserves a lot of credit.

"My friend Jordan, we had talked back and forth about sending a horse over and I was looking through my barn trying to figure out which one was the right one," said Allard in a post-race interview. "Obviously, there's no Lasix program so I had to pick one that I know had no bleeding issue and that one I thought was the one."

YS Lotus proved Allard correct, winning his elimination in 1:53.4 after a long ship to P.E.I. due to a trucking issue and then following up that effort with Saturday's record performance. He paid $3.90 to win in the final.

Foxyhall Racing's Narragansett and trainer/driver Jason Hughes won the $5,000 consolation in 1:55 flat over favourite Forever Paradise.

In the $3,500 Governor's Plate Mares Open Pace, Shadows Mystery rallied wide off the cover of last week's distaff track record-setter All Chocolate and prevailed by half a length ahead of the oncoming favourite, Ramblinglily, in a career-best clocking of 1:54.1. Pacesetter Best Risque finished two lengths behind in third. Gilles Barrieau drove the winning five-year-old Shadow Play mare for trainer Jackie Matheson and owner Gordon Ford.

The Governor's Plate undercard also included the first leg of the Atlantic Sires Stakes for the three-year-old pacing colts and geldings, with sons of Brandon Cowboy sweeping all three $9,220 "A" divisions.

Magical Cowboy defeated the popular 2015 Atlantic Breeders Crown champion Jackson K Down in the first "A" division, winning in a career-best 1:56.4 with Corey MacPherson in the bike for owners Barry Martin and Stephen Gass. The win was part of a training triple on the card for Ronnie Gass.

In a battle of Brandon Cowboy sons, Offshore Cowboy and Hughes wore down Beaus Cowboy for the quarter-length victory in a new lifetime mark of 1:56.4. The Don Millgan trainee is owned by Kent Williams and Lyndon Hardy.

Trained and driven by Kenny Arsenault, Lukes Cowboy held off favourite Heart And Soul to win the third split by half a length in 1:56.3 for owners Philip Valley, Jeffery Ruch and Glenn Bechtel.

The $2,500 "B" division winners were Silverhill Storm and Hughes in 1:58.2, Keen Edge and Danny Romo in 1:59.2, and Rosewood and Arsenault in 1:59.1.

To view Saturday's harness racing results, click on the following link: Saturday Results - Summerside Raceway.
Not all of Curtis Harts stings are ending in success.

Hart, 36, of Kelso, has made a name for himself as a local vigilante, setting up his own version of To Catch a Predator to get people he suspects of being sex offenders arrested and charged. He calls the group the Punisher Squad. Hart, who studies criminal justice at Lower Columbia College, is running against incumbent County Commissioner Mike Karnofski for his District 1 seat.

Since his first setup got Castle Rock resident Adam Olson sentenced for communication with a minor for immoral purposes in April, Harts given local law enforcement six leads. Two have resulted in arrests. In two of the four other cases, the Cowlitz County Sheriffs Office said it was clear no crime had occurred. There was not enough evidence to pursue charges in a third case, and the suspect never showed up in the fourth case.

A third arrest resulted from a sting set up by Kelso resident Henry Platt, who worked with Hart on one sting.

Members of law enforcement dont think Hart has the credentials to be setting up stings. Theyre worried he or others involved will get hurt when the Punisher Squad confronts suspects. But Hart says he doesnt plan on stopping.

While these cases may seem simple to a person who does not have legal training, they actually are quite complex, Chief Criminal Deputy Charlie Rosenzweig said. There are many steps that need to be taken to ensure the case is completed in a manner that meets professional standards and legal practices. This (has) just not been the case in most of the situations that Mr. Hart has brought to the attention of our office.

Law enforcement and Cowlitz County Prosecutor Ryan Jurvakainen say theyre grateful that Hart wants to do good for his community. But they say Hart could expose himself and others to harm, criminal charges (false imprisonment or possible assaults) or civil liability (defamation in particular).

As a citizen, theres an appreciation that someone is trying to do something for the betterment of the community. But obviously, from the legal perspective, theres great concern, Jurvakainen said.

Jurvakainen said his major concern is for Harts own safety, though he said his office hasnt encountered any major problems with prosecuting the Hart cases. He said two of the Hart cases his office has handled  those involving Adam Olson and another suspect (see below)  have reached his office because of law enforcements thorough investigations.

However, Jurvakainen said theres always the potential for an entrapment defense  for a defendant to argue they were lured into committing a crime they wouldnt have otherwise committed by a member of law enforcement or, as the law states, any person acting under their direction.

Unlike most states, Washington doesnt have a law legalizing citizen arrests, putting Harts vigilante efforts further into a gray legal area.

I would say theres nothing indicating that (Hart could be construed as acting under the direction of law enforcement), but defense attorneys can argue anything they want, Jurvakainen said.

Authorities are especially worried about problems that could arise when vigilantes confront suspects and say, because of that concern, they have to organize an urgent response when Hart calls them out. For example, when Henry Platt set up a sting June 23 at Capn Yobys in Kelso, the suspect didnt show up. Restaurant staff, though, told police they believed they were about to be robbed by Platt and his group (Hart was among them) because they were milling around the restaurant at night.

The likely scenario is that there will be an incident that leads to injury, Jurvakainen said. The preference would be that the matter be handled early on (by law enforcement). Id rather a person be a good witness than a defendant.

Hart said he understands the concerns about what hes doing.

I definitely get their point now after (the) meeting with Henry Platt, he said. I totally understand where theyre coming from when they say Youre not trained. This is dangerous. Especially when that all unfolded with Henry, it was like, this is exactly what the police have been warning us about. I didnt realize that anyone who is going to come and try this isnt as smart as me, apparently.

He said hes safety taking precautions. For example, Hart said he tries to give law enforcement at least an hour warning before meeting up with suspected criminals, arms himself with a gun, fire extinguisher and, he hopes in the future, a paintball gun. He and other Punisher Squad volunteers now wear body armor a community member donated to them, too.

Asked if he would ever stop his stings because law enforcement wanted him to, Hart responded: If they started showing me that they have absolutely no support of what Im doing  probably not. I might consider it. I dont think that they would do that.  There are quite a few of them out there that understand, they know why Im doing this.

Hart said he doesnt get the sense law enforcement doesnt support him. Some, he said, have given him tips to stay safe (for example, to use his car door as a shield in case of gunfire).

Im a Libertarian, so Im not really too worried about what the governments telling me to do. If the markets out there for people to show up for these little girls in my community, then its market driven, he said.

He said believes his actions with the Punisher Squad have helped his race for commissioner against incumbent Mike Karnofski. His name gets plastered all over social media, and he said it shows hes doing good for his community.

Karnofski said hes met with Sheriff Mark Nelson and discussed law enforcements concerns with Harts actions. Karnofski said Friday he sides with law enforcement but didnt denounce Harts activities.

Asked whether he believed it was appropriate for a commissioner candidate to be hosting sex stings on the side, Karnofski responded: Its unusual. Appropriate? Curtis is allowed to do what he wants to do. I wouldnt say appropriate one way or another. Its allowed. Its part of Curtis (Libertarian) views.So far, Hart said hes never been injured while conducting a sting and believes anyone who would want to sue him for defamation wouldnt have a case against him.

For example, Hart recently posted a video and the name of a local man whom Hart alleged was trying to meet an underage girl for sex. Rosenzweig said there wasnt enough evidence to pursue charges. But Hart said if the man ever wanted to sue him, he could produce Whisper (an instant messaging app) conversations to defend himself and prove the man had bad intentions (truth is an absolute defense against libel and slander).

Longtime Longview personal injury attorney Wesley Johnson agreed with Hart. Johnson said the man could sue Hart for defamation or for putting him in false light, but Hart could defend himself by proving the mans nefarious intentions.

Typically if a private individual were to say something about someone, they have to be right  and they have to prove theyre right, Johnson said.

Being able to protect oneself from defamation, of course, is much easier than prosecuting someone for a crime, however. Many of Harts cases have lacked sufficient evidence for charging by the prosecutors office.

In deciding whether to press charges, Jurvakainen said prosecutors focus on the type or intensity of communication a suspect uses to try to have sex with a minor.

With Olson or any other case, what were the communications? Were they direct? Were they vulgar? Were they vague? Jurvakainen said.

The more obvious a suspected criminal makes their intentions known, the more likely charging them becomes, justice officials said.

If they set up some kind of a sting, and (the suspect) believes this person is underage and takes some deliberate steps to encounter this person anyway, those are all things that could lead to an arrest, Sheriff Nelson said.

Hart said to better the chance that someone will be arrested and eventually charged, hes asking more of suspected criminals to make conversations more specific.

Hart uses the Whisper app in every sting. When people on the app ask for photos of the girls he poses as, Hart sends selfies of a 15-year-old girl from the United Kingdom, which he said he hasnt asked permission to use.

Get him to say as much stuff as possible. Get him to bring as much stuff as possible, he said. It shows intent.

Hart said he didnt have to ask Christopher Scheuermann, 28, of St. Helens, for much when the two met in Kelso the evening of June 20. Hart pretended to be a 15-year-old girl bringing her 12-year-old female friend along with her. Scheuermann has been charged with attempted child rape, communication with a minor for immoral purposes and, after additional work by the sheriffs office, several counts of child porn possession.

He started sending pictures of himself without (me) ever asking for them, Hart said, adding that Scheuermann even sent a photo of his genitals labeled with the girls names.

Police found a box of condoms in Scheuermanns car. Hart said Scheuermann also offered to bring whiskey, Kahlua, a six-pack of beer and marijuana when meeting up with the girls.

Its possible that without Hart, Scheuermann wouldnt have been caught. But Harts activities still irk law enforcement.

The goal of preventing this type of crime, underage sex trafficking I guess, is a worthy goal, said Longview police Sgt. Chris Blanchard. Im not prepared to say that its a benefit (to us).
WASHINGTON  In the global revulsion at the past weeks terror attacks in four Muslim countries, the United States and its allies have a new opportunity to build a unified command against the Islamic State and other extremists. But as the U.S. seeks to broaden this counterterrorism alliance, it should be careful about partnering with Russia  unless Moscow distances itself from a Syrian regime that many Sunni Muslims despise.

The savage attacks in Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq and Saudi Arabia should convince Muslim nations and the West that they share a common enemy in extremist groups such as the Islamic State. What they need now is a shared command-and-control structure, like what the U.S. and Britain forged in December 1941, after the shock of Pearl Harbor. Merging military and intelligence resources wasnt easy, even for longstanding partners in Washington and London. But Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew that once America had fully joined the battle, the allies eventual victory was certain.

Similar confidence would be inspired by a command structure that truly fuses the resources of the U.S., Europe, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan and the many other nations that have been targeted by Islamic State terrorists.

A sign of how unpopular these attacks are with Muslims is that the Islamic State isnt taking credit for the attacks in Turkey and Saudi Arabia  even though its widely seen as the likely perpetrator  and that other Islamist groups are condemning the violence, especially the bombing in the holy city of Medina.

On Tuesday the SITE Intelligence Group gathered some of the online ripostes from rivals of the Islamic State. An Australian cleric named Abu Sulayman, who is a member of al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, tweeted: The #MedinaBlast is a criminal act that Muslims must condemn. Another pro-al-Qaeda account tweeted: If ISIS is not behind the attacks in Istanbul and Medina they should deny their involvement.

Saudi Arabia had a similar wake-up call several years after Sept. 11, 2001, when the kingdoms leaders realized that al-Qaeda terrorists were targeting the House of Saud, too. That led to joint operations by the kingdoms counterterrorism service and the CIA. Mondays attacks in Medina, Jeddah and Qatif should deepen that cooperation  and draw in other Arab partners, such as Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.

The U.S. has a chance to hit the restart button with Turkey, too. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been straddling the issue  condemning the Islamic State but failing to close his border with Syria because of pique over U.S. support for Syrian Kurdish fighters. Now that Erdogan can see the jihadist dagger at his throat, he should want closer military and intelligence links with Washington. He should also think about reopening negotiations with the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, so that hes not fighting a two-front war against terror.

What about Russia? Should Moscow and Washington join forces against terrorism? On one level the answer is obviously yes. Foreign fighters have been streaming from Russia and its former republics to join the Islamic State. Two of the three attackers in Istanbul appear to have been Russians. Real cooperation would be useful, so long as it doesnt condone and reinforce Russian bad behavior.

Syria is the test case: The Russians have been asking the U.S. for months to share targeting information about Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra positions in Syria, so that Russian forces can attack the jihadists and avoid hitting groups that, in theory, are working with the U.S.

The Obama administration is debating whether to endorse such Russian-American sharing of targeting intelligence. The U.S. military, seeing aggressive Russian behavior in Europe, is wary. Administration officials who favor cooperation argue that it should come with a warning  that if Syrian forces continue bombing U.S.-backed opposition groups, the U.S. will strike back against the Syrians and take their jets out of the sky.

If Russia accepts such a real limitation on President Bashar al-Assad, then it should join the team. But if it continues unlimited support for Assad, Russia will only fuel the jihadists rage  and complicate American efforts to build a broader, unified command.

The terrorists who struck Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad and Medina made a potentially disastrous mistake. It may not look that way, after last weeks enc
Following an 18-hour search, police have arrested a man suspected of killing three people and injuring a fourth at a Woodland home Friday night.

According to a Clark County Sheriffs Office press release, Washington State Patrol troopers and Cowlitz County sheriffs deputies arrested Brent Luyster, 35, at around 4:15 p.m. Saturday near the intersection of Abernathy Creek and Ocean Beach Highway, just west of Stella.

Luyster was awaiting an Oct. 17 trial in Cowlitz County for allegedly pistol whipping his ex-girlfriend May 16. He was out on bail, which he posted a month ago.

At about 10:30 p.m., Woodland police were called to a possible shooting and found a woman with a gunshot wound to her face. The woman drove herself to the Arco gas station on Lewis River Road in Woodland, according to the Clark County Sheriffs Office.

The woman, who was taken to a hospital, told deputies she and others had been shot at a residence at 4006 N.W. 417th St., which is on the Clark County side of the Lewis River east of Woodland off of N. Hayes Road.

Members of the Clark County Sheriffs Office and Southwest Regional SWAT responded and reportedly found two men dead outside the residence and a woman dead inside the residence. Police did not release names of any of the victims.

Staff at the gas station said Saturday the woman drove up in her red car, screaming. She was bleeding profusely from her face. They said a customer told staff to call police and to get towels for the wound.

Clark County sheriffs detectives, Woodland police and the Regional Major Crimes Unit are investigating, but released few details about the shootings Saturday afternoon. Some of the victims family members have been notified.

Law enforcement immediately began searching for Luyster, a skinhead covered in neo-Nazi tattoos, was authorities described as armed and extremely dangerous.

He was arrested without incident.

Were really pleased it ended peaceably, said Clark County Sgt. Fred Neiman on Saturday.

Luyster pleaded not guilty in Cowlitz Superior Court May 25 to allegations that he pistol-whipped his ex-girlfriend and fired at Cowlitz County sheriffs deputies during the May 16 incident. He faces charges of first-degree unlawful possession of a firearm, second-degree assault and felony harassment.

Luysters 32-year-old ex-girlfriend called police at 3 a.m. May 16 to report that she had awakened to Luyster hitting her in the head and face with a pistol at his house at 123 Solo Drive. According to the ex-girlfriend, he grabbed her hair and dragged her down the hallway.

Deputies found her bleeding from the head. When they approached Luysters house, deputies heard shots fired from the woods nearby and believed Luyster was shooting at them, according to a press release. He eventually surrendered.

Judge Michael Evans set bail at $90,000, and Luyster posted it on June 7. It appears Judge Marilyn Haan had previously set bail at $150,000.

The girlfriend later told police she feared Luyster, who was out on bail by then, was trying to look for her and the child they have together.

Police dont believe anyone besides the victims and the killer were in the home at the time of the crimes.

The Anti-Defamation League, which combats anti-Semitism and other bigotry, identified Luyster and his brother Robert A. Luyster as white supremacists.

A Confederate flag flies atop the Woodland home and neighbors suspected the homes renter also was a white supremacist. Clark County Sheriffs Office Sgt. Fred Neiman said he didnt have knowledge of any criminal or white supremacist activity at the home.

Two homes are located north and south of the property, both downhill from the home. Their residents, all friends, gathered over cigarettes Saturday afternoon at one of their homes on Backman Road. They swapped memories of what they heard and saw Friday night, and recalled a testy relationship with the homes renter.

Lisa and Jeff Daniels, who live south of the property, said they were flipping through channels in their bedroom Friday night when they heard what sounded like a cluster of gunshots.

Jeff Daniels recalled the sound, which came at about 10:15 p.m.: Pow, pow, pow. He guessed he heard between three and four shots.

We didnt act on it because its not abnormal around the area, Jeff Daniels said.

Our thought is always, hope they get that coyote! Bonnie Peterson said.

About 10 minutes later, they reported a small red car leaving the property.

Peterson described the renter, whom neighbors said was in his mid-30s, as angry and violent  the odd egg of the neighborhood. Petersons home and the home where the bodies were found are two of four homes along a half mile stretch of private road.

Neighbors described the home as a double-wide manufactured home, with a fenced off carport (like a shed) and a trailer.

Neighbors said they called police to the property two or three times last summer for complaints about the renter shooting off what sounded like a clip of bullets from a semi-automatic gun and for domestic violence complaints. By winter, though, things had calmed down and the renter became friendly. However, he had recently put up several No trespassing signs at the property.

We all wanted to get along, Lisa Daniels said.
High school football playoff pairings announced

Sunday, Oct. 23, 2022, 7:20 p.m. -- AREAWIDE -- The high school football playoff pairings are being announced as you read this posting. In Div. 1, Reg. 2, Lapeer will play at Clarkston and Grand...

Volleyball results from Thursday

Friday, Oct. 7, 2022, 8:34 a.m. -- LAPEER COUNTY -- The Almont varsity volleyball team beat Madison Heights Lamphere and New Lothrop in a triple header at Almont Thursday. Dryden beat Bay City All Saints...

Golf and tennis regional results

Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, 5:41 p.m. -- LAPEER COUNTY -- Boys' high school tennis regionals and girls' golf regionals took place yesterday. Lapeer girls' golf placed 11th at the Div. 1 regional hosted by Oxford...

Friday night football scores

Friday, September 30, 2022 10:15 p.m.  LAPEER COUNTY  Lapeer beat Grand Blanc 39-17 at Lapeer to remain undefeated at 6-0. Almont upset Croswell-Lexington 37-26 North Branch routed Richmond 62-10 Imlay City/Dryden fell to Yale...
RANGPUR: Sheikh Rasel Memorial Samaj Kalyan Sangstha organised a human chain on Saturday at Katchari Bazar condemning recent killings of innocent people.
8 lighter vessels fined in Ctg port area

Chittagong Bureau :

A mobile court of Chittagong Port Authority led by Executive Magistrate Rokeya Parvin fined Tk.1.70 lakh to 8 lighter vessels in Chittagong Port Channel on Saturday for hampering port navigation in the channel, lack of security equipments and excess cargo loading. Mobile court sources said the convicted vessels are - MV Haji Abul Kashem-1, MV Saifur Rahman, MV Monoara-2, MV Kafiluddin-1, MV Rapid-1, MV Bappi Newaz, MV Babu Shaikat, MV New Kutubdia, MV Bibi-114 .


US-Bangla to procure 4 aircraft for entering 3-yrs of operation

Economic Reporter :

Country's private carrier US Bangla Airlines has decided to incorporate four aircraft into its fleet to expand its wing to home and abroad.

The carrier has taken the move following successful completion of its two years of operation that began the journey in July 17, 2014 with its maiden flight from Dhaka to Jessore.

The aircraft-three are Boeing 737-800 and one DASH 8-Q400 aircraft-is expected to join the fleet in late August and enter commercial operation by September this year to enhance domestic, regional and International flight network, said the airlines Deputy General Manager (DGM) M Kamrul Islam in a statement.

He said US-Bangla Airlines has planned to operate flight to Kolkata, Paro, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Doha, Muscat, Dammam, Dubai and Kunming.

The Boeing 737-800 aircraft is decorated with Business Class, Super Economy and Economy class configurations with 156 seats.

In the two years, US-Bangla operated over 14,000 flights to various destinations while more than 800 effective workforces are employed here.
Rakhi alleges Qandeel Baloch was raped by brother

Controversy queen Rakhi Sawant is back in the news! And this time, Rakhi is cashing in on the shocking news of Pakistans social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch being killed allegedly by her brother. Heres what Rakhi has to say.

According to media reports, controversy queen Rakhi Sawant has alleged that Qandeel Baloch was raped by her brother Wasim who later killed her. Rakhi Sawant was quoted saying she feels Qandeels brother raped Qandeel and ran away.

Rakhi Sawant also urged the Pakistani police to do a detailed investigation over Qandeels death. News agency ANI reported that Rakhi Sawant wants Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to learn from PM Modi.


International is out and national is again back

Roberto Savio :

A sign of the time is that Germany is raising a revolt against the President of the European Commission, Jeam-Claude Juncker, whom Chancellor Angela Merkel imposed in 2014 after a strong fight with David Cameron, then a powerful British PM. The group of Visograd, formed by Poland, Hungary, Slovaquia and the Czech Republic, which resurged from ashes, to become an anti Brussels voice, has requested to bring back the Commission under the authority of the States. When Merkel organized a meeting of the leaders of the six original founders of the EU, in Berlin, she invited Donald Tusk, the President of the Council, but not Jean-Claude Juncker, who is the President of the Commission. And Wolfgang Schauble, the German minister of Finance, has launched an appeal: "it is time to bring back Brussels under the control of the states."

It is curious that the debate on Brexit has completely ignored the creeping action to end the supranational character of the EU. What is in process, in fact, is something of extreme importance: the end of internationalism and return to the national. And that is one of the fruits of globalization. Japan, China and Russia are at the peak of nationalism.

Globalization is not a neutral term. The globalization that was imposed after the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a straight jacket as strong as those of the ideologies, which were accused to bring to the Second World War, and fifty years of Cold War. It presented the market as the only basis for society, with the elimination of any national barrier for free flow of capitals and trade. It did shun, as obsolete, the values of social justice, social institutions, (like welfare); the state was seen as an impediment, a problem, not as a solution.. The new values were, for instant, individual success over community values. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher changed the direction of the world. Thatcher famously said: "There is no such a thing as society. There are only individuals". Reagan originally even wanted to eliminate the ministry of education.

Well, now every journalist is discovering that Brexit and Donald Trump are the result of the revolt of the victims of globalization. It is important to note that they usually go to the right, except few cases, like Podemos in Spain or Bertie Sanders in the US. Sanders decries that in "the last 15 years, nearly 60.000 factories, and more than 4.8 million well-paid manufacturing jobs have disappeared, because disastrous trade agreements have encouraged corporations to move to low-wage countries", He goes against a taboo that elite and mainstream economist do not even discuss. Free trade is an engine of growth., and statistics are there to prove it.

The problem, continue Sanders "is that median male worker makes now $726 dollars less than in 1973, and the median female worker is making $1.1.54 less than in 2007. And nearly 47 million Americans live now in poverty. Meanwhile, the top one-tenth of 1 per cent of successful Americans, now owns as much as the bottom 90 per cent. The wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as the bottom half of the world population: about 3.6 billion people. "

Sanders put us to a dilemma: "the change will come from demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiments, xenophobia and populism unless the new President will vigorously support international cooperation that brings peoples of the world closer, reduce hypernationalism and decreases the possibility of war: and above all, that will protect working people, not just those from the elite."

So the problem is not that globalization brings growth. The problem is that the State has left the market unregulated, without any redistribution. Why those left out would vote for the conventional wisdom of the system, when they are victims?

The engine of this kind of growth has been Greed. Now, the fear that Sanders evoks is already well installed in Europe. Migrations have been fuelling it, in the middle of fears of different nature, from terrorism to climate change, from bad food to declining social services. It is easy to ride fear and resentment, and Europe knows this well: it happened in the thirties, and Hitler left a Europe destroyed.

A sequence of referendum is now hastening the demise of democracy. In the Brexit, 70% of people voted. That means that 36% made the majority: one citizen out of three. According to the European Council of External Relations, there are 32 referendum called in 18 countries of the EU. And there are now 47 political parties who share anti-Europe positions. In a third of the 28th member countries, they are part of the government's coalitions, and their exit has been pushing the traditional parties to adopt some of their position. Referendums amount to a veto. EU will face a strong challenge from this process of vetocracybut also the idea of internationalism will be the victim

The idea behind internationalism, and more exactly international law, is based on the acceptance of principle and values under which citizens feels community and participation. Is on that basis that national entities agree to relinquish some of their sovereignty. They feel it expands the national consensus to treaties and agreements, which project their views and interests in a world of cooperation at international level. International law and cooperation were the new ideas, emerging from the ashes of the Second World War. United Nations was the most unprecedented device for lasting peace and cooperation: and little after, the idea of a European Union, and this as a supranational entity, not just a intergovernmental organization, like the UN. It was through the UN that the dangers of the Cold war were put under some kind of control.

It was through the UN that the process of decolonization was steered. The UN were the framework for the north-south relations in the world, and development its philosophy, with a sharing of international law as the instrument for dialogue, and social justice, participation and democracy, based on dialogue and cooperation, to make a lasting peace and human development the new achievement for humankind.

Well, all this went well, until in 1981 in the Summit of Cancun. Reagan and Thatcher brought back the idea that universal democracy was an unjust illusion. Regan asked to the other head of states, which had come to discuss how to advance cooperation: why my country should have the same rights that San Marino? Let us go back to a policy where countries could defend their interest without being bound by general principles and agreements. Since them, the UN lost its primacy.

The great powers took away trade, one of the two engines of globalization. The other engine, finance, was never in New York, but in Washington. The Un was left only with the social issues, increasingly irrelevant, When Boutros Boutros-Ghali tried to bring back some power to the secretariat; his re-election as the secretary general of the UN was vetoed by the US. Same mechanism with JunckerBoutros-Ghali was made a scapegoat by Bill Clinton, who was in his electoral campaign. The UN had organized an invasion in Somalia to bring peace and food. This was done under US request, US direction and US control.. The invasion backfired, with white American soldiers dead and dragged in the streets by a crowd of black people. Promptly, Boutros-Ghali was considered the responsible for the failure, with the US appearing as a victim of the UN. Juncker now is made responsible folr Brexit by Germany, whose fiscal policy and the imposition of austerity has disenchanted many of those who are now opting out from Europe.

The post-ideological world, which has accompanied globalization, has transformed political parties into machines of public opinion, directed to solve administrative problems. Citizens are deserting institutions without vision, where politicians seem interested in their perpetuation, and polling and marketing tools have substituted dialogue with citizens. Values have disappeared from the political debate. Global issues have left national parliaments more and more irrelevant. There has been no global response on finance (4 trillion dollars in fiscal paradises), which has no world regulatory body, and moves 40 times more money that the real economy of production and services. One exceptional response was a global response on the climate change, which is a real threat to human survival. But that response is clearly insufficient

Traditional parties have tried to halt their decline by taking the banners of the new parties. . The best example is Austria, where the two traditional parties changed their position on immigration., claiming that they would not leave that banner to populism. The result was to legitimize xenophobia. The extreme right wing lost for only 36.000 votes, and a new election called for irregularities may be see now its victory.

It must be clear that during all those year an irresponsible game has been going on. If anything went wrong, was the EU fault.

Anything that went right was the result of national policies. As any insider knows, is the Council, where member states are represented, which take decisions on strategy and policies. The Commission is basically an implementeronly the European Central Bank (with great irritation from Germany) and the European Court of Justice (from which Cameron announced the UK wishes to withdraw, even before the Brexit,) have some super national power left. All the efforts of the member states have been to recover as much sovereignty as possible. And we are now obliged to write in Juncker defenceif he leaves it will be for the wrong reasons

Anyhow after him, a weak guy as before, will appear. In the UN, the main candidate is Irina Bokova, the outgoing DG of Unesco, much less impressive that all the other women who are candidates. So, to see where we are now, in the decline of internationalism: would today US pledge to fund 25% of the regular budget of the UN, as it did at its creation? Would the Universal Declaration of Human Rights be approved? And finally, would it be possible to undersign the Treaty of Rome, of 1947, where the vision of a United Europe was approved unanimously? Governments would be in difficulty to answer. Let us imagine the people



(Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and publisher of Other News).
Another landlord held for hiding tenants info in city

Police arrested one landlord raiding a militant\'s den at Shewrapara in the city and recovered some grenades and black uniforms from there.

Staff Reporter :A team of the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Unit (CTTU) of Police have arrested a landlord from the city's Shewrapara area on charge of not preserving necessary documents of his tenants believed to be accomplices of the Holey Artisan Bakery attackers.Md Nurul Islam was arrested from his house 441/8, West Shewrapara early Sunday, said Masudur Rahman, Deputy Commissioner (Media) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP).He said that Nurul Islam did not collect documents from his tenants and even he tried to hide the information.They also seized a hand grenade, black uniform used by the terrorists and some other materials from the house, the DC said. This is the second time a landlord has been held on the charge of hiding tenant information after Dhaka police introduced the mandatory provision in February, he said.Meanwhile, Dhaka Metropolitan Magistrate Mohammad Tosruzzaman placed Nurul Islam on eight-day remand. Earlier on Saturday, police arrested three persons, including North South University's (NSU) acting pro-VC Dr Gias Uddin Ahsan, for renting out a flat to the attackers of Holey Artisan Bakery.The others are Alam Chowdhury, nephew of Gias Uddin Ahsan, and manager of the building Mahbubur Rahman Tuhin.On July 1, gunmen stormed a Gulshan cafe and took its guests and employees hostage. Twenty bodies, including nine Italians and seven Japanese nationals, were recovered from the crime spot the following day.On February 29, the DMP asked the house-owners of the city to submit personal information on tenants along with other information to the local police by March 15.
Increase vigilance on students, children

Staff Reporter :

Speakers at a discussion on Sunday urged the teachers and the guardians to increase their surveillance on the students apparently to prevent them from getting involved in militant activities.

At the same time, the top officials of the law enforcing agencies sought cooperation from them in their fight to curb militancy.

The call was made at a discussion between the government and the Vice-Chancellors, owners and teachers of private universities titled "Public Safety and Law and Order" in the city's Krishibid Institution Auditorium organised by the Home Ministry.

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan presided over at the programme while Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid was the chief guest.

The speakers also underscored the importance of national unity and social resistance to root out the militancy from the country. Militancy is a curse for the nation. It is now national problem. The national unity and the combined effort only can eradicate militancy, they said.

Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid said, private universities have to work to build up a social resistance against the threat of militancy in the country. "Social resistance is a must to keep our children safe from being involved in the militancy," the minister said.

Nurul Islam Nahid urged teachers to nurture morality, humanity and values among the students. "You (teachers) have to supervise your students." Some so-called teachers of the private universities are suspects to have link with militant activities. They will be identified and taken to book", he said.

"Steps will be taken to save the educational institutions from terrorism and already some steps have been taken in this regard," the minister said. Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan urged derailed youths involved in militant activities to shun the path of militancy. "I urge you to come back as we know your whereabouts. We don't want to be harsh with you we just want you to come back. If you think you willl hinder the development pace of the country and tarnish its image across the world by killing one or two people then it's wrong," the Home Minister said.

He also urged all to stand against militancy. "We don't want our children to get derailed. We want them to get back." The Home Minister has claimed that police and his ministry had all the information of the Gulshan and Sholakia attacks beforehand.

"My two children studied in private university. They informed me that the militant groups continued their activities and held meeting on the university campus almost everyday. I did not believe their information that time. Now I am observing the real scenario of the campuses of some private universities," the minister said.

Asaduzzaman Khan said that the government had intelligence report that "something might happen in Gulshan" and had made "all kinds of preparations for it."

"We know who is behind this and who supported them," he further claimed. The Home Minister claimed that police could reach the spot of Gulshan attack on July 1 within minutes because of their "preparation." He also praised the law enforcing agencies for their success in eliminating militant incidents like the Gulshan terror and Sholakia terror attack. "The country's people do not want militancy in this land. They hate terrorism and militancy. The parents of militants did not receive the body of their sons. I believe that parents do not desire that their children will be militant. That is why it is high time to make ensure national unity to root out the militancy from the country," the minister said.

Former Vice-Chancellor of Dhaka University Professor Emajuddin Ahmed condemned the recent terror attack in the country and said it is not acceptable in independent country. "We cannot tolerate terrorist activities by some students resulting in the sufferings of the 17 crore people." He observed that the spread of healthy cultural activities have been disrupted in almost all the higher educational institutions.

He also put emphasis on students' council election although he himself failed to hold Dhaka University Central Students' Unuion (DUCSU) election.

Chairman of University Grants Commission Professor Abdul Manna said, militancy is a social problem as well as state problem. Only national unity can resist the militancy and the terrorism only.

Mentioning the problem in the private universities he said the private universities are facing image crisis. It is their duty to restore the image in the interest of the universities as well as the country, he said.

Inspector General of Police (IGP) A K M Shahidul Hoque said the family members are responsible for the children' activities. The teachers also cannot ignore their responsibility. They have to increase their surveillance on the students.

"We are on zero tolerance to militancy. We will root out their activities from the country with the help of people. We believe that everyone will cooperate with the law enforcing agencies," the IGP said.

Vice-Chancellor of North South University Professor Atiqul Islam admitted that there were some militants in the university. He also said that they took all the measurers to remove them from the university campus. "I stayed in Australia for 40 years. I never thought that the students would involve in militancy in Bangladesh. When I assumed it I took initiative to eradicate. I ordered to remove all the controversial books from the university library," the VC said.

Vice-Chancellor of World University Professor Abdul Mannan Chowdhury said, there is no militancy in his university campus.

"The teachers of the World University always teach the students about the history of Liberation War. They ask the students to imbue the ideology of the Liberation War. The teachers also deliver their speech to create awareness among the students about militancy," Professor Mannan Chowdhury said.

Director General of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) Benazir Ahmed said, the country is passing a transitional period. National unity is a must to root out the existing crisis.

He warned the militant groups that the law enforcing agencies would eradicate the militancy from the country.

"Do not play with monster. You will be vanished. We will search each inch land and place. We will continue it until the militancy vanishes," Benazir Ahmed warned the militants.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) Commissioner Asaduzzaman Miah said the militancy is the problem of society, both at national and global level.

"The members of law enforcing agencies are working endangering their lives. But it is not possible to eradicate militancy for a certain group. Every one will have to come under an umbrella with high patriotism. That is why social resistance is the demand of time and we have to create awareness among the people together," the DMP commissioner said.

Education Secretary Sohrab Hossain, President of Private University Owners' Association Sheikh Kabir Hossain, Member of Board of Trustees of Stamford University Enamul Hoque Shameem, among other, spoke at the function.




Police clearance mandatory for renting house for mess

Jhenaidah Correspondent :The Imam of a mosque went missing from Kaliganj upazila in Jhenaidah district four days ago. Locals said that some plainclothes men picked up him from his house at about 1.00 pm on Tuesday. The victim has been identified as Abdul Hai, 35, son of Ashraful Alam Muhuri from Kaliganj upazilaThe villagers said, Abdul Hai was in his house. Suddenly some plainclothes men on two motorbikes arrived there. They picked up Abdul Hai and left the scene immediately.They said, Abdul Hai passed the Masters from Islamic University and became a Imam by profession. He was also imparting Arabic education to the children in the locality. During the student life, he was a worker of Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS).Kaliganj PS Officer-in-Charge Aminul Islam said that they had heard that an Imam of the mosque was missing since Tuesday. But none of the family lodged any complaint in this regard. The police men were not involved with his missing, OC said. A student named Hasan Ali (15), reading in Class X, from Chapri village in Jhenaidah Sadar upazila was reportedly missing for about a year.Sundari Begum, mother of Hasan Ali said, she filed a general diary (GD) with the police station in this regard. In the GD, the mother mentioned that Hasan Ali was studying in Madhupur High School under the Sadar upazila. He left the house saying that he would attend a private teaching class in the locality. But he did not come back home. After a week, Hasan phoned his mother and said that he was good. Since then, the family could not trace out him, the mother said.Jhenaidah Sadar PS Officer in Charge Harendra Nath Sarker said, a general had been lodged. We are searching for his whereabout. Meanwhile, Jhenaidah Police Super Altaf Hossain said, the house owners should obtain permission from the police before allocating rooms for mess purposes. He said, there is no existence of any militant in the district. Even the police was not at all informed about the presence of militants at Jhenaidah's Sonalipara. The SP said, the attack on Kastosagra Ashram attendant Shyamananda Sarker and the Gulshan Restaurant was conducted the same day and as such the report that Nibras participated in both the missions was really baseless.about militancy staying in Jhenaidah, the police man said, some media has been forecasting misleading information to panic the people.When asked about the existence of a retired Army personnel and the owner of the mess at Sonalipara where militant Nibras and Abir were staying earlier, he said, the police were not informed of the occurrence.Shibir supporters were involved in a number of killing missions in Jhenaidah district, sources said.
Erdogan for introducing death penalty

6000 held after failed coup

Soldiers push each other to board a bus to escape the mob after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge. Internet photo

Turkey has detained 6,000 people over Friday's failed coup and the number is expected to rise further, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said.The sweep has included high-ranking soldiers and 2,700 judges. More than 50 senior soldiers were detained in the western province of Denizli on Sunday. Mr Bozdag described the arrests as a "clean-up operation".At least 265 people were killed in clashes as the coup failed.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says parliament might consider a proposal to introduce the death penalty.Mr Erdogan has accused a US-based Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen of being behind the plot, which Mr Gulen denies. The arrests reportedly include Gen Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army; Gen Adem Huduti, commander of the Second Army; and Akin Ozturk, the former Chief of Air Staff.Maj Gen Ozhan Ozbakir, commander of the Denizli garrison, was among the senior military figures arrested on Sunday, Turkey's Anadolu news agency reports.One of Turkey's most senior judges, Alparslan Altan, has also been taken into custody.Eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece and claimed political asylum have appeared in court there charged with illegal entry.Their lawyer told Greek TV they had not taken part in the coup, but had flown to Greece when they were shot at by Turkish police. Turkey is seeking their extradition.Erdogan said that those behind the plot would pay a heavy price, calling the coup a "gift from God... because this will be a reason to cleanse our army".He called on the US to extradite Mr Gulen, who heads the popular Hizmet movement and is said to count military chiefs and mid-level bureaucrats among his followers.Once allies, Mr Erdogan has long accused Mr Gulen and his supporters of plotting against him.US Secretary of State John Kerry said of any extradition, that Turkey should "present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny".Gulen has denied any involvement in the coup. The 75-year-old, who has been in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania for the past 15 years, said: "I don't even know who my followers [in Turkey] are."Kerry strongly rebuked a Turkish minister who suggested Washington was behind the coup. He said "utterly false" insinuations were "harmful to our bilateral relations".US President Barack Obama has joined other world leaders in calling for all parties in Turkey to "act within the rule of law".Tens of thousands of Turks partied into the small hours of Sunday in celebration of the failure of the coup.Many of those who have been critical of President Erdogan's growing authoritarianism welcomed the speedy extinguishing of a coup as a victory for democracy, says the BBC's Middle East World Service Editor Sebastian Usher.But they are now holding their breath to see how Turkey's much prized democratic system will bear up as Mr Erdogan takes full advantage of his personal triumph in defeating those who tried to bring him down, he adds.Why did coup happen? - Jeremy Bowen, BBC News Middle East EditorThe attempted coup happened because Turkey is deeply divided over President Erdogan's project to transform the country and because of the contagion of violence from the war in Syria. President Erdogan and his AK Party have become experts at winning elections, but there have always been doubts about his long-term commitment to democracy. He is a political Islamist who has rejected modern Turkey's secular heritage. Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian and is trying to turn himself into a strong executive president.From the beginning Erdogan's government has been deeply involved in the war in Syria, backing Islamist opposition to President Assad. But violence has spread across the border, helping to reignite the fight with the Kurdish PKK, and making Turkey a target for the jihadists who call themselves Islamic State.That has caused a lot of disquiet. Turkey has faced increasing turmoil and the attempt to overthrow President Erdogan will not be the last of it.
BNP may go for nat'l unity sans Jamaat

Reza Mahmud :The BNP is seeking strong excuse to quit the Jamaat-e-Islami, its long time political ally. The party Chairperson is under tremendous pressure to take the quick decision in this regard. "We think it is high time to forge a national unity. A number of our friends have suggested us to sever relations with the Jamaat. Although a section of the BNP leaders argue that the decision to cut ties will yield no good result in the end, I think most of our leaders want separation'. However, tt will be decided in our party forum," said Brigadier General (rtd) ASM Hannan Shah on Saturday in an interview with The New Nation.BNP Joint-General Secretary Syed Moazzem Hossain Alal told The New Nation, "The matter is really a hot issue right now. The party's high command will decide what to do."In contrast, one of the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami said, " We are waiting for the BNP's decision in this regard. We are always ready to face any situation.Insiders said, The BNP is now looking for a strong excuse to leave its long time political ally Jamaat. The party high command is analyzing merits and demerits of the new decision if taken.After waves of the war crime issue in the country's political arena, BNP leaders could not take decision what to do. Again, the BNP led alliance made a mistake having boycotted the January 5 Parliament election of 2014 and announcing the blockade programme. By such adventurous decision, they ignored public opinion, which was in their favour.However, after the polls, BNP tried to form a national unity. But some progressive and liberal parties like the CPB, the Gono Forum and the JSD expressed their reservation about Jamaat. At this, Khaleda Zia told few foreign media that the BNP had formed electoral alliance only with Jamaat -e-Islam only. One of the senior leaders said, " For long, the BNP high command has been trying to keep Jamaat away. As part of strategy, the BNP officially did not condemn hanging of the Jamaat leaders on the charge of committing crimes in 1971 war of independence. But it issued a separate statement in the case of Salah Uddin Quader Chowdhury. It think the Jamaat will rather leave BNP alliance because the party did not gain politically there, but suffered. If Jamaat takes decision, the BNP will welcome, but may not issue any statement with call to return.Sources said, The BNP high command wants to quash the Jamaat from the alliance without taking any blame on its own shoulder. After the deadly militant attack into the Gulshan Cafe and Sholakia, BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia gave a call for national unity. But the government asked the BNP to relinquish Jamaat first. In this circumstance, Khaleda Zia on the 13th July sat with the 20-party alliances' top leaders. Some of the leaders in the meeting said, the Jamaat is the main obstacle to forge a national unity, because some political leaders like Gono Forum President Dr. Kamal Hossain has objection about the party.A day after, Khaleda Zia met some professional personalities. Of them, Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury of Ganoshaystho Kendro and the Veteran lawyer Barrister Rafique-ul-Haque also asked Khaleda Zia to quit Jamaat. On Saturday, BNP standing committee member Nazrul Islam Khan said that the relation with Jamaat would be decided in the party forum ASM Hannan Shah finally said, before the national election we would decide what strategy should be taken.
Deal with S'pore firm for LNG terminal today

UNB, Dhaka :

Petrobangla is set to sign the final deal on Monday with Excelerate Energy Bangladesh Limited (EEBL) for setting an LNG terminal at Moheshkhali in Chittagong, aiming to have a daily supply of 500 million cubic feet (MCF) of natural gas for feeding the country's energy-starved industries and power plants.

Bangladesh is currently producing about 2,700 mmcfd gas against its demand for 3,200 mmcfd leaving a shortfall of 500 mmcfd. "Hope, we'll be able to get the 500 mmcfd

gas for our consumers from January 2018 once the construction of the terminal is completed in the next 18 months," Petrobangla chairman Ishtiak Ahmed told UNB. As per the proposed deal, the EEBL, a subsidiary of the Singaporean Excelerate Energy, will set up the terminal within the next one and half years on build-own-operate and transfer (BOOT) basis.

Earlier, the EEBL signed an initial contract with Petrobangla on March 31 this year. Then the Cabinet Purchase Committee approved a proposal in this regard on July 22.

As per the proposal, the proposed LNG terminal will have the facilities of 138,000 cubic metres capacity floating storage and re-gasification unit (FSRU). The terminal will supply 500 mmcf gas a day to the national gas network by regasification of imported LNG.


US to consider Gulen's extradition upon Turkey's demand

Press TV :

The development came as Turkish President Recept Tayyip Erdogan insisted in a televised address on Saturday evening that Washington should turn Gulen over to Ankara, saying Turkey had never turned back any extradition request for "terrorists'' by the US and pointing to his nation's cooperation with the United States "in fighting terrorism," AP reported. "I say if we are strategic partners then you should bring about our request," he said as quoted in the report.

Secretary of State John Kerry stated, however, that Ankara would have to prove any wrongdoing by the US-based and former Erdogan ally, Gulen, who left Turkey back in 1999.

"We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen," Kerry said in a press briefing during a visit to Luxembourg. "And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately."

While Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has blamed Gulen's supporters for the failed coup, the opposition figure has rejected any involvement in the event.

Gulen has harshly condemned the attempted coup by military officers leading to a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left dozens of people and security forces dead.

Erdogan's government, however, is blaming the religious figure, who lives in the US state of Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that reportedly blends a mystical form of Islam with strong advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

US President Barack Obama urged all sides in Turkey, a major NATO ally, to back what he referred to as the democratically elected government in Ankara.
4 ABT men put on remand in Ctg

UNB, Chittagong :

A court here on Sunday placed four suspected members of banned militant outfit Ansarullah Bangla Team on a three-day remand in an arms case.

Chittagong Judicial Magistrate Hossain Mohammad Reza passed the order when police produced them before the court seeking a 10-day remand on completion of their five-day remand in another case filed under the Anti-terrorism Act. Those remanded were Shipon alias Foysal, 26, of Brahmanbaria district, Khorshed Alam, 27, of Anwara upazila, Russell Mohammad Islam of Sitakunda and Musa Ibn

Umayer, 26, of Patiya in Chittagong.

Police arrested the four suspected militants from different parts of Sitakunda upazila on July 9 and July 11. The police team also recovered four machetes, four laptops and five mobile phones from their possession. Later, two separate cases were filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act and Arms Act.
Brother held for Pak celebrity's killing

Qandeel Baloch // Waseem

BBC Online :

The brother of Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been arrested for her murder. The brother, Waseem, 25, was arrested in Dera Ghazi Khan in central Pakistan on Saturday night. The Dawn newspaper said he had confessed to the murder, saying he drugged and strangled her "for dishonouring the Baloch name".

Qandeel Baloch, 26, became a household name for posting sometimes raunchy photographs, comments and videos. She recently caused controversy by posting pictures of herself alongside a Muslim cleric.

Dawn quoted her brother as saying: "She wasn't aware I was killing her. I gave her a tablet and then strangled her." Speaking after his arrest, he said: "I am not ashamed.

We are Baloch and as Baloch we cannot tolerate [this]".

He pointed to videos his sister had made, and specifically the images taken with the cleric, Mufti Abdul Qavi.

Police said the brother had escaped to Dera Ghazi Khan after the killing in the Karimabad area of Multan early on Saturday morning. They said he fled with two friends who were still being sought. Ms Baloch, whose real name was Fouzia Azeem, was buried on Sunday morning in her ancestral village near Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab province. Images from the scene showed scores of people attending the services.

Mufti Qavi, who said he had forgiven Ms Baloch for her actions, had offered to lead the funeral prayers, reports said. Ms Baloch had built up a large social media fan-base, with 43,000 Twitter followers and more than 700,000 on Facebook. She was well aware of the opposition she faced but continued to post defiant tweets. One on Thursday read: "I will not give up. I will reach for my goal & absolutely nothing will stop me."
366 migrants rescued from boats in Mediterranean

Reuters , Rome :

Rescuers saved 366 migrants from precarious boats perplexing to cranky a Mediterranean to Italy though during slightest 20 people were reported to have drowned, Italian military pronounced on Saturday.

The survivors, who were discovered in 4 apart operations, were congested onto 3 rubber dinghies and a wooden fishing boat. They were all taken to a Sicilian pier of Augusta, where they were questioned on Friday dusk by a Italian military section Interforce, that combats bootleg immigration.

The Norwegian boat Siem Pilot went to a assist of one boat that sank in a Sicilian Channel, though many migrants were already in a sea when it arrived, Antonio Panzanaro, an Interforce official, told Reuters. One remains was recovered though survivors pronounced that during slightest 20 people had drowned before a boat arrived, he said.

There were 82 women and 25 children among a 366 people rescued, he said. The survivors were especially from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Bangladesh.

Seven people were arrested from a 4 boats, including their drivers, on guess of people-trafficking, he said.

Italy has prolonged been on a front line of seaborne emigration from Africa to Europe, and is now a categorical indicate of entrance after a European Union struck a understanding with Turkey to branch flows to Greece amid Europe's misfortune emigration predicament given World War Two.



Slightly fewer migrants arrived on Italian shores in a initial 6 months of 2016 compared with a same duration final year, though a series of deaths on a track has risen, according to a International Organisation for Migration (IOM). More than 67,000 seaborne migrants arrived in Italy between Jan. 1 and Jul 3, according to a IOM.
Attack in France : World must expose IS as anti-Islamic

Editorial Desk :The repeated involvement of persons bearing Muslim names in killing people -- be it target killing in Bangladesh or in European countries is earning bad name for Islam which is a religion of peace and Muslims all over as a nation which produces killers and murderers. The massacre of so many innocent people in the Riviera City of Nice during the French National Day celebration killing 84 including children and 52 more seriously injured showed once again how unsafe peaceful people are from Jihadists' attacks in Europe and all over. Moreover the Nice attack once again tainted the Muslims as fanatic people although the vast majority of the Muslims hate the so-called Jihadists as beast like dirty human beings who are misusing the Muslim names forcing all of us to share their unpardonable crimes. They are not Muslims at all. The father of the killer driver said the killer had no link with religion and was suffering from depression. He was also violent to his estrange wife. One can also remember that the killer of Orlando nightclub -- Omar Matin, an Afghan origin US citizen was a mental case and thousands of such killers thrives under the cover of other religions also. But killers are killers no matter mentally sick and sound or whether they are religious or not. The global media is taking the identity of the killer first as a Muslim and then whatever reasons one may bring about is not enough to remove the blame when a section of global media is particularly working to depict Muslims in wrong ways. The Islamic State (IS) group has claimed the responsibility of the attack on innocent people in Nice this time again. He drove a heavy truck into the crowd for over 2 km as people were on the peak of their celebration watching Bastille Day firework.The action of the Tunisian born French national Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel now at 31 made the French people and the entire world mute by the scale of barbaric killing. The dead included Americans, Germans, Swiss, Ukrainians, Russians and many more nationalities, It appears that the killer has hit at its worst when the IS leaders are turning their guns on innocent people in Western cities, particularly in Europe at a time they are losing more ground in fights in Iraq and Syria. It seems that the IS Jihadists are becoming panicked and also reckless as they are hitting one after another targets like attacks in Brussels and Istanbul airports and the latest being a Dhaka Cafe house killing score of people at every place. The attack at Nice is the third such attacks on French cities in 18 months after the first attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine office in February 2014 that killed at least 13 including senior cartoonists. Then they attacked several Paris landmark places in November in that year killing at least 130 people. These attacks are constant reminder to the world about the danger that peaceful people are facing everywhere and our civilization is facing in a highly tense world. Analysts in world electronic media like CNN believe that France is unique by its own socio-economic divisiveness as a highly polarized society where hatred and discrimination against African migrants are adding more unrest from within. Most young people are watched locally as criminals and put to jail where they face brainwash from Jihadists serving long time jail sentence. These people entered jail as criminals but come out as Jihadist with a purpose to fight. In our view, militancy is growing in France as byproduct of its domestic politics like that in Bangladesh. IS and such other international outfit groups are taking advantage of it. The Muslim leaders all over the world should get united against IS and expose its anti-Islam nature. But we expect the Western countries to help Muslims to expose IS and other Jihadist forces as anti-Muslim financed by anti-Islamic forces to serve against Muslim interests.
Country

United States of America US Virgin Islands United States Minor Outlying Islands Canada Mexico, United Mexican States Bahamas, Commonwealth of the Cuba, Republic of Dominican Republic Haiti, Republic of Jamaica Afghanistan Albania, People's Socialist Republic of Algeria, People's Democratic Republic of American Samoa Andorra, Principality of Angola, Republic of Anguilla Antarctica (the territory South of 60 deg S) Antigua and Barbuda Argentina, Argentine Republic Armenia Aruba Australia, Commonwealth of Austria, Republic of Azerbaijan, Republic of Bahrain, Kingdom of Bangladesh, People's Republic of Barbados Belarus Belgium, Kingdom of Belize Benin, People's Republic of Bermuda Bhutan, Kingdom of Bolivia, Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana, Republic of Bouvet Island (Bouvetoya) Brazil, Federative Republic of British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Archipelago) British Virgin Islands Brunei Darussalam Bulgaria, People's Republic of Burkina Faso Burundi, Republic of Cambodia, Kingdom of Cameroon, United Republic of Cape Verde, Republic of Cayman Islands Central African Republic Chad, Republic of Chile, Republic of China, People's Republic of Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands Colombia, Republic of Comoros, Union of the Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, People's Republic of Cook Islands Costa Rica, Republic of Cote D'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, Republic of the Cyprus, Republic of Czech Republic Denmark, Kingdom of Djibouti, Republic of Dominica, Commonwealth of Ecuador, Republic of Egypt, Arab Republic of El Salvador, Republic of Equatorial Guinea, Republic of Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Faeroe Islands Falkland Islands (Malvinas) Fiji, Republic of the Fiji Islands Finland, Republic of France, French Republic French Guiana French Polynesia French Southern Territories Gabon, Gabonese Republic Gambia, Republic of the Georgia Germany Ghana, Republic of Gibraltar Greece, Hellenic Republic Greenland Grenada Guadaloupe Guam Guatemala, Republic of Guinea, Revolutionary People's Rep'c of Guinea-Bissau, Republic of Guyana, Republic of Heard and McDonald Islands Holy See (Vatican City State) Honduras, Republic of Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China Hrvatska (Croatia) Hungary, Hungarian People's Republic Iceland, Republic of India, Republic of Indonesia, Republic of Iran, Islamic Republic of Iraq, Republic of Ireland Israel, State of Italy, Italian Republic Japan Jordan, Hashemite Kingdom of Kazakhstan, Republic of Kenya, Republic of Kiribati, Republic of Korea, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Republic of Kuwait, State of Kyrgyz Republic Lao People's Democratic Republic Latvia Lebanon, Lebanese Republic Lesotho, Kingdom of Liberia, Republic of Libyan Arab Jamahiriya Liechtenstein, Principality of Lithuania Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Macao, Special Administrative Region of China Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Madagascar, Republic of Malawi, Republic of Malaysia Maldives, Republic of Mali, Republic of Malta, Republic of Marshall Islands Martinique Mauritania, Islamic Republic of Mauritius Mayotte Micronesia, Federated States of Moldova, Republic of Monaco, Principality of Mongolia, Mongolian People's Republic Montserrat Morocco, Kingdom of Mozambique, People's Republic of Myanmar Namibia Nauru, Republic of Nepal, Kingdom of Netherlands Antilles Netherlands, Kingdom of the New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua, Republic of Niger, Republic of the Nigeria, Federal Republic of Niue, Republic of Norfolk Island Northern Mariana Islands Norway, Kingdom of Oman, Sultanate of Pakistan, Islamic Republic of Palau Palestinian Territory, Occupied Panama, Republic of Papua New Guinea Paraguay, Republic of Peru, Republic of Philippines, Republic of the Pitcairn Island Poland, Polish People's Republic Portugal, Portuguese Republic Puerto Rico Qatar, State of Reunion Romania, Socialist Republic of Russian Federation Rwanda, Rwandese Republic Samoa, Independent State of San Marino, Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, Democratic Republic of Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of Senegal, Republic of Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles, Republic of Sierra Leone, Republic of Singapore, Republic of Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia, Somali Republic South Africa, Republic of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands Spain, Spanish State Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of St. Helena St. Kitts and Nevis St. Lucia St. Pierre and Miquelon St. Vincent and the Grenadines Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Suriname, Republic of Svalbard & Jan Mayen Islands Swaziland, Kingdom of Sweden, Kingdom of Switzerland, Swiss Confederation Syrian Arab Republic Taiwan, Province of China Tajikistan Tanzania, United Republic of Thailand, Kingdom of Timor-Leste, Democratic Republic of Togo, Togolese Republic Tokelau (Tokelau Islands) Tonga, Kingdom of Trinidad and Tobago, Republic of Tunisia, Republic of Turkey, Republic of Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda, Republic of Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe
BY PATRICK LINDSAY

THE NEXT GENERATION of leaders is waiting in the wings for its chance to guide PNG into the future. They are smart, keen to take up the challenge and brimming full of hope and bright promise.

And now they have the chance to expand and develop their leadership skills and potential, thanks to the generosity of a New Guinea old hand, planter, Coastwatcher and philanthropist, the late Fred P Archer, who died in 1977 aged 87.

Last week, Australias High Commissioner to PNG, Ian Kemish, announced the 2011 Archer Scholars in Port Moresby - a program that offers six final-year PNG tertiary students a unique year-long intensive leadership program.

The scholarship covers private mentoring, community development placements, work experience, tuition and boarding support, resource support, and an exchange program to Australia.

Supported by a grant from Fred Palmers estate, the scholarships are a joint initiative of the Kokoda Track Foundation (a not-for-profit organisation working in the areas of education, health, community development and micro-business) and the Trust Company, which manages Fred Archers estate.

The Archer Leadership Scholars Program aims to identify and foster the next generation of PNG leaders and, in this first year, it found a wealth of potential. A shortlist of 14 candidates underwent an intensive interview process and six students emerged as 2011 Archer Scholars:

Nellie Hamura - Pacific Adventist University, Master of Arts in Pastoral Ministry (Eastern Highlands) Brendan Pulai - University of PNG, Public Policy Management (East Sepik) Geoffrey Ulsimbi - University of PNG, Environmental Science & Geography (East Sepik) John Pota - University of PNG, Accounting (Manus) Richard Faveve - Pacific Adventist University, Secondary Teaching (Central) Jimmy Mai - Divine Word, PNG Studies/Community Development (East Sepik)

The Kokoda Track Foundation has been offering its Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel Scholarship program since it began working in PNG in 2003, offering scholarships to bright students attending primary and secondary schools throughout the Track catchment area. This year the Foundation is supporting 313 students on scholarships.

Fred Archer was a drovers son who served with the AIF in World War I before moving to New Guinea in 1923, where he became a successful planter on Bougainville and New Britain.

When the Japanese invaded in World War II, Fred stayed behind as a Coastwatcher. After the war he rebuilt his shattered plantations and created the Bougainville Company, a successful sea freight operation.

When he retired, Fred devoted himself to philanthropic work, providing education opportunities for generations of islanders. He paid school fees, attended graduations, sending many local children to the best available schools.

Shortly before he died, Fred formed his company into a charitable trust to be managed in perpetuity with dividends distributed each year to charities in PNG and Australia.

____________________

At Port Moresby Grammar School today, the Returned and Services League will announce a scholarship for Elaine Kila, whose paternal grandfather was a carrier and guide during World War II.

The RSL supported Ms Kila through Grammar and have decided to continue supporting her through the University of PNG. Ms Kila and Australian High Commissioner Ian Kemish will speak to school students during the ceremony.
But, she added, they did this to show their frustrations over how they viewed the media as taking sides in the dispute.

Emily Matasorosoro, leader of the journalism strand at the University of Papua New Guinea, was critical of students protesting against the media earlier in the period of unrest for burning the two national newspapers, PNG Post-Courier and The National, on campus.

A PAPUA New Guinea media educator has called for an investigation into coverage of the two months of protest at the nations universities, including last months incident when police opened fire on peaceful students.

The students were calling for the resignation of prime minister Peter ONeill and for him to cooperate with a police investigation into corruption allegations.

The burning was an indication that they disliked the papers coverage of events leading up to the protest, Matasororo said in a Pacific journalism education panel session at the Fourth World Journalism Education Congress hosted at Auckland University of Technology.

Why should the Student Representative Council go as far as preferring certain media outlets over others?

The Post-Courier, The National and television station EMTV were banned from covering student activities on campus.

The UPNG is a public and government-run institution and is a public space open to everyone, including the media.

If students reacted that way, it brought up issues of credibility and integrity of the freedom of the press in Papua New Guinea.

Matasororo also said that this brought to light questions of ethics.

She quoted a statement from a student leader online in PNG Loop online news that described the news reports as shallow and biased and saying they have no trust in the media.

While I acknowledge and appreciate the tireless efforts of the medias coverage of the student protest, for me, this is a strong statement that needs to be investigated, she said.

It needs to be done by all stakeholders concerned to promote fair and just reporting and the essence of good ethics and journalism.

The stakeholders included the newspaper publishers and management, the Media Council of PNG, Transparency International, Ombudsman Commission and journalism educators at UPNG and Divine Word University at Madang.

Matasororo presented an analysis of the unfolding events in PNG.

On 8 June, heavily armed police fired upon the peaceful protesters at UPNG after a scuffle and up to 30 were reportedly wounded. Some international media reported four deaths but this was later denied by Port Moresby hospital authorities.

To mark what has been dubbed Black Wednesday, UPNGs journalism strand plans to unveil and wall display to tell the untold stories and a photo montage of unseen images for future students to ponder over.

Dr David Robie, director of the Pacific Media Centre, was chair of the Pacific journalism education panel.
Paris, TX (75460)

Today

Partly cloudy skies during the evening giving way to a few showers after midnight. Low around 50F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies during the evening giving way to a few showers after midnight. Low around 50F. Winds E at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
The sextoy market is growing quite rapidly in India right now.

Although it is not a big trend, it is a hot topic on the internet as it is secretly expanding its market.

In this article, we will focus on sextoy and introduce recommended sextoy for Indian beginners of sextoy by gender.

India, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra, is very strict about sex.

Also, premarital sex is basically not allowed. Therefore, there are many people who are sexually restricted.

But what happens when you continue to be sexually restricted?

Frustration may build up and you may end up taking your sexual stress out on your partner.

If you are able to adopt sextoy in a timely manner, you can get rid of those problems.

I want to have more exciting sex than Im having now.

I want more variation in masturbation

I want to get even stronger pleasure than I do on my own.

If you have any of these problems, please stay with me until the end.

What is sex toys for Indian?

Sextoy, as the name implies, is a toy used during sex and masturbation.

It is a generic term for vibrators, Egg-vibrators, Electric massagers, dildo, handcuffs and condoms.

They are used to make regular sex more exciting or to make masturbation more pleasurable.

Because sextoy is very stimulating, it can help you to get rid of the problems and frustrations of being in a rut of sex with your partner for a long time, or if you are unhappy with the lack of pleasure in sex with your partner.

The ability to satisfy your desires with movement, texture, and size, which cannot be done by a normal human being, can help you to be satisfied with sex and, as a result, improve your relationship with your partner.

It is also said to help improve sexual dysfunction (inability to get an erection or ejaculate) and difficulty in feeling during sex (insensitivity), which is attracting more attention than in the past.

In recent years, the demand for sextoy has increased due to the spread of smartphones and the Internet and the increasing number of people using online shopping.

Even those who are concerned about the appearance of sextoy (and find it difficult to purchase) can now easily obtain it by using mail order.

In the case of online shopping, most of the stores have taken steps to ensure that the contents of the products delivered to you are not revealed, so you can purchase them without your family members knowing.

Until a while ago, you had to go to the store where the adult goods were sold to buy them, so it was quite a hurdle to overcome.

Also, many people may have an image that sextoy is somehow embarrassing to own.

But nowadays, some of them are so stylish and cute that you cant believe they are sextoy at a glance.

More and more people are using them for travel and outdoor use because they are not too bulky and are suitable for carrying around.

Sextoy situation in India

Before introducing the recommended sextoy for Indians, lets talk about one of the sextoy situations in India in recent years.

In India, due to the high concentration of population, the following six cities have particularly high sales of sextoy in India.

Mumbai

Kolkata

Bangalore

Delhi

Chennai

Hyderabad

These cities account for roughly 70 percent of sextoy sales in India.

In the future, the percentage of sextoy use will gradually increase in other cities in India as well.

If you never talk about sextoy publicly, that girl in your neighborhood might be a sextoy user too.

If you are interested in sextoy, you dont have to suppress your desire for it.

What are Sextoys for beginner?

Among all sextoys, sextoy for beginners are vibrators, dildo, masturbators, Sex Lubricants, and condoms.

Sex Lubricants and condoms, which are familiar to people who have had sex, are also a great beginners sextoy.

I will explain the details of each toy later, but there are many sextoy products that are painful to use and can only be used after some anal expansion.

I assume that the Indian readers of this article are people who have not had much experience with sextoy.

If such people use professional sextoy suddenly, they are at risk of injury or trauma.

Therefore, to introduce sextoy, you need to start with a beginners version and gradually become familiar with it.

Advantages of using sextoy for Indians

There are three advantages of using sextoy for Indians

You can masturbate in a wide variety of ways.

Can have stimulating sex

Can develop new sexual zones

If you try to masturbate with your own fingers or hands, it tends to be a pattern.

However, with sextoy, you can easily masturbate in a variety of ways.

You will definitely be fascinated by the attraction of new stimulation.

Also, your daily sex life will be more exciting than ever.

There are many things in sextoy that are visually stimulating and give you a strong and intense feeling of pleasure.

This allows you to see your partners promiscuity in a way that you wouldnt normally see it.

When you are in a relationship, sex with your partner may become a pattern, but it can also eliminate these problems.

It can also lead to the development of new sexual zones (which is the training of sexual stimulation to allow you to feel orgasms).

For more information on the development of new sexual zones, see the following articles

[Women's Erogenous Zone]How to find and develop, 7 hidden sexual zones !![In India] In this issue, we will dissect the female erogenous zone! ..." Many of you may be like that. Men, in particular, shou...

Thus, the use of sextoy can only be a good thing for the men and women of India.

Sextoy for beginner men in India

So, lets continue with the recommended goods for Indian sextoy beginners.

For ease of understanding, we will introduce them by gender. Lets start with the men!

The following five goods are recommended for novice Indian sextoy men

Masturbator

Cock rings

Love Doll

Sex Lubricants

Toys for the prostate

Lets check each one in detail.

Masturbator

The masturbator is a sextoy for men that elaborately reproduces a womans vagina, mouth, and anus, and is one of the most popular sextoy products.

It is used by men to masturbate, and it is popular because it provides stronger stimulation and pleasure more easily than using hands.

Most are made of good quality silicone, and their softness is something that cannot be achieved with ones own hands.

They can provide stronger pleasure than a real womans vagina, so be careful not to overuse them. (You wont be able to have an orgasm in a womans vagina anymore.)

Again Male masturbators are a wonderful toy. I do not need any favourite timing, bothersome bargaining. You do not have to worry too much.

Revolutionize your masturbation time! ! !

Made in Japan is a wonderful kinky toy.#sextoysindia #SexToyIndia #Japanhttps://t.co/4k70QGzoTP pic.twitter.com/tRVdxTKPpa   SEXToys India PR  (@SextoysIndia) November 12, 2018

Some of them are disposable, while others can be washed and used over and over again, so its fun to buy a few to use depending on your mood.

If you want to know more about masturbator, please click here

Really pleasant male masturbation and how to do it Are you in a rut with your daily masturbation routine? I'm going to show you five ways men masturbate that you might ...

[For Beginners] How to choose and use a male masturbator without fail Gentlemen.Have you ever used a masturbator? The person who sees this article is probably the one who has not experien...

Cock Ring

A cock ring is literally a ring-shaped sextoy that is worn on a mans penis.

It maintains an erection by binding the penis with a ring of rubber and blocking blood flow.

It is sometimes used as an accessory to be worn on the penis, and may be made of metal or plastic as well as rubber.

In some cases, cock rings have parts or vibrators attached to them that stimulate the vagina, so they kill two birds with one stone, giving a woman pleasure while maintaining an erection.

Cock rings are also sometimes used to treat erectile dysfunction.

It can help with erectile dysfunction, where the penis doesnt get hard when you get an erection or doesnt last long when you try to insert it.

Men who are prone to breakage or who are unsure of the hardness and size of their erections can use a cock ring to increase the size of their penis and maintain an erection for a longer period of time.

Cock rings vary in price from around RS700 to over RS2000 with a vibrator function.

Some of them do not fit your penis, so you should check the size of the cock ring before you buy.

You should know the size of your partners or your own penis when it is erect.

[Penis enlargement] What is a cock ring? Types and usage Cock rings can make your penis bigger and harder. It also makes sex with women more fulfilling and increases your sat...

Love Doll

Love dolls, also known as Dutchwives, are dolls with the appearance of a woman who can experience simulated sex.

There are dolls that look like a woman, but they have no face and only have their breasts and lower torso cut off, and some dolls are so realistic that they can actually be mistaken for real women.

Some expensive dolls can cost more than 1 million yen, and the quality of the doll is easily influenced by the price.

The higher the price, the higher the quality of the doll will be, the closer it will be to the real woman, and the cheaper the doll will be, the less elaborate it will be, making it look like a real doll! Something is wrong! That is also true.

You cant go wrong if you choose a balance between price and taste.

There are stores that allow you to make custom-made love dolls, so you can create a girl of your choice.

You can make a girl of your choice. You can start with inexpensive love dolls at first, and once you get used to it, you can try custom-made love dolls.

If you want to know more about Love doll, please click here

Thorough explanation of the charm of sex dolls! Have you ever heard of sex dolls that are used primarily for pseudo-sex purposes? It is a doll that is quite close to...

Sex lubricants

Sex lubricants are used as a substitute for lubricating fluid during sex or as a lubricant for men to use masturbator rules.

It is not uncommon for women to have difficulty getting wet, depending on their physical condition, or to have difficulty getting wet due to their constitution.

Forcing the penis into the vagina at such times can cause painful intercourse.

There are various types of Sex Lubricants, some with a warming effect, some with a cooling effect, and some with a scent.

Changing the Sex Lubricant used during play is recommended as a good sex accent.

If you want to learn more about Sex Lubricants, click here.

What is sex lubricant?Explain the difference and usage of each ingredient The word "sex toy" may seem like a hurdle to overcome, but lotion is actually one of the most familiar sex toys. Many...

Toys for the Prostate

Another sextoy for men is prostate toys.

The most famous prostate toys include Enemagra, which was originally a prostate massager developed by an American urologist to treat an enlarged prostate line.

Modern prostate toys are imitations of Enemagra that have spread as sextoy for men.

Many people think of prostate toys as being used by gay men, but in fact they are often used by straight men.

What is the prostate?

The prostate is an organ found only in men. It is a walnut-sized organ located deep in the pelvis, just below the bladder, and its primary role is to protect and nourish sperm.

You cannot touch the prostate gland from outside the body, but you can touch it by inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus.

By inserting a finger or sextoy through the anus and touching the prostate and developing it, you can feel intense orgasms.

Orgasms felt in the prostate are mainly dry orgasms, which are orgasms that do not involve ejaculation. (You can also feel orgasms with ejaculation through prostate stimulation.)

The prostate is called the male G-spot, and dry orgasms can be much more intense than ejaculation.

Therefore, men who are able to develop a prostate can become addicted to the pleasure.

sextoy for beinner women in India

The following are the recommended goods for Indian women who are new to sextoy.

The following three are recommended for use by women who are new to sextoy.

Vibrator.

Dildo

Electric Masserger

Lets check out what each one is in detail.

If you want to check out womens toys, click here.

[BEST25]Sex Toys for Women in IndiaThat Can Help You Have an Orgasm There are many women who pretend to feel orgasm during sex. But don't worry, you don't have to pretend to feel orgasm...

Vibrators

A vibrator is a sextoy that vibrates with an Egg-Vibrator to provide stimulation and is often referred to simply as a vibrator.

Some vibrate as well as rotate, and there are many variations of sextoy.

It is quite a popular sextoy, and is well recognized by people who do not know much about sextoy.

Its usage is similar to that of a massager, but it is more compact and easier to carry than a massager, and many of them look as cute as a lipstick or a macaroon, so they are popular among women.

For a while, a famous influencer on twitter said, This is good! You may have heard of the topic of this article by introducing the recommended vibrators.

Vibrators are great for women to use on their own, but they are also recommended for men who have difficulty satisfying women with sex.

Since it is powered by electricity, it is far less tiring than moving your hands by yourself.

This makes it easier to satisfy a woman with sex because you can caress her for longer than usual.

Vibrators are mainly used on the female side, but they can also be used on men.

When used on men, they are used to attack the nipples and glans, and in both cases it is recommended to wear a condom for hygiene reasons.

Introducing how to use the vibrator, its purpose, and how to choose it! Vibrator uses the vibrations caused by the rotation of the motor to provide stimulation. It is one or two of the most...

Dildo

A dildo is a model sextoy made to mimic a male penis.

It can be made of silicone, elastomer (think of it as a material similar to PVC), metal or glass.

A dildo can be used by a man for his female partner during sex, or by a woman for masturbation to get pleasure from it.

They are mainly inserted into women, but some can be used in the male anus as well.

It is sometimes used synonymously with vibrators, but the vibrator is not the same thing as a vibrating device.

A model of a penis that does not vibrate is a dildo.

Some of them have suction cups that can be attached to the floor or wall so that you can enjoy realistic masturbation without using your hands.

For fun, there is a dildo made in the shape of your partners penis.

This one is also popular as a gift, and if youve been together for a long time and are having trouble finding a gift for your partner, you might want to pick one.

To learn more about dildo, please click here.

What is Dildo: Orgasms with Dildos for Men and Women A dildo is a model of a male organ that is used by women for masturbation and by men to stimulate the prostate gland. Th...

Electric Masserger

A Electric Masserger is a hand-held electric massager, also known as a handheld massager, and can usually be purchased at electronics stores.

It was originally designed to relieve stiff shoulders and back pain, so the hurdle of buying one in a physical store is quite low.

Many people may have seen or used it in some form or another, as it is often installed in leisure hotels.

Such a massager is highly recommended for beginners because it is easy for women to get pleasure from it when they use it during masturbation.

It is larger than Egg-Vibrator and vibrations are stronger than those of Egg-Vibrators and vibrators, so even just hitting the clitoris can give you a great deal of pleasure.

For those women who have never had an orgasm during sex with their man, the massager may be a good way to get a feel for what it feels like to have an orgasm.

It looks and feels like an electric massager, so you wont have to feel awkward if your roommate finds out.

If you are in a rut of having sex with your partner, if you want to feel an orgasm through masturbation, or if you are thinking of using a sextoy, why dont you try it from a simple massager?

To learn more about Electric Masserger, click here.

What is a massager? Introducing types, selection methods, and usage Originally, the Magic-wand vibrator and the massage machine were sold as a home massage machine used for the back and th...

How to choose a sextoy for Indian

Now that weve covered the different types of sextoy, heres how to choose one.

Especially if you are trying sextoy for the first time, pay attention to the following three points:  Does the size fit you (the partner)?

Does the size fit you (your partner)?

Is the environment able to produce sound without problems?

Price range

First of all, the choice of size is quite important.

Most sextoy are used against or inserted into the genitals, but the genitals are very delicate organs for both men and women.

For this reason, using an inappropriate size may cause damage.

Secondly, the environment should be able to produce sound without problems.

Some sextoys not only wear, but also rotate and vibrate. Its easier to get pleasure from something that moves than something that doesnt, but the fact that it moves means that the internal rotors make some noise.

If you live in a house with thin walls or if you have roommates, you may not be able to concentrate because of the noise, so it is best to choose one that is silent or has a low noise level.

Especially in India, where many people live with their families, it is very important that you dont have to worry about sound when you use it.

Finally, there is the price range.

The price range of sextoy ranges widely, from around RS500 at the cheapest to RS10,000 or more at the highest.

Its good to consider how much money you can afford and how much you want to buy.

Do you want your family to not find out about sextoy?

I live with my family and want to use sextoy without them finding out! If you are a man, you should buy a camouflage sextoy that does not look like a sextoy at first glance.

For men, there are many masturbators that do not look like a sextoy, and for women, there are vibrators that only look like cosmetics.

If you choose such a type, youll be safe in case your family members find out.

How to buy sextoys in India

The best way to purchase sextoy is through online shopping.

For more information on how to purchase sextoy, please see the article below.

Sextoy is one of them.

Therefore, you can easily get sextoy in India by using online shopping.

SexToysINDIA is a long established and stable sextoy store and you can have sextoy delivered to any place in India.

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The Greater Egypt Regional Planning and Development Commission held a special event this week to honor Mary "Margie" Mitchell of Carbondale for 50 years of public service.

In attendance were current commission members, local elected officials, Greater Egypt staff, and Rep. John Bradley.

During the five years that I been at Greater Egypt, Ms. Mitchell has been a tremendous help to me and the five counties that we serve," said Greater Egypts Executive Director Cary Minnis. "Her dedication to Greater Egypt and improving the communities of our district is evident each day.

Bradley presented Mitchell with a copy of House Resolution 1188, which was adopted on May 3 to honor her for her service to Southern Illinois.

Greater Egypts Board Chair Julie Peterson also resented Mitchell with a 50-Year Service award in recognition and appreciation for her dedication, service and commitment to improving the Greater Egypt District.
CARBONDALE  Two red-and-white Carbondale Fire Department trucks arrived at Attucks Park on Wednesday and sent an arc of cool water across the street into the lawn of the park.

Children playing in a different area saw the activity and began running in that direction. Reaching the water, they screamed with delight. They danced, slid and jumped, giggling as the pooling water bounced around their feet. They looked up toward the sky with their heads tilted back and their arms out and they let that cool water rain onto their little faces.

Taleka Young, a 30-year-old African-American woman, originally of Cairo but who lives not far from the park, stood on the sidewalk watching her older children play in the water. Even in the joyous moment, recent national news events weighed heavy on her mind.

Its sad. Sad. Very sad, she said as she steadied her 9-month-old boy Amond against her hip as he squirmed in her arms and grabbed at her face. All of these killings, it doesnt make any sense.

Longstanding racial tensions in America were reignited in the wake of recent filmed, fatal police shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota. Those incidents spawned more Black Lives Matter protests across the country, including in Dallas, where a lone sniper took the lives of five police officers on July 7, who were there to protect the otherwise peaceful protesters.

In Southern Illinois, the recent violence weighed heavy on the minds of many. But it hit mothers of black children particularly hard.

Parenting is hard  period. Worrying about ones children, even once they are grown and have left the home, is a near universal experience shared by parents through the ages.

Still, mothers of black children  boys and girls, but particularly black boys -- say they disproportionately face fears about their children encountering racism, negative interactions with the police, and becoming involved in gangs, drugs or other criminal activity that lands them behind bars.

They also live in disproportionate fear of what would be any parents nightmare: burying a child, especially if that child died a violent death, whether they were murdered on the street, killed in an incident with law enforcement that escalated, or because they were simply standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and took a bullet intended for someone else.

Black fathers also face the same and other unique fears, both for themselves and their children, but this story specifically explores race relations through the lens of mothers and the bond of motherhood.

Young said watching her children play in the water and sun on Wednesday introduced a note of lightheartedness into an otherwise somber two weeks.

But it was not enough, she said, to lift the burden on her heart -- all the pain she feels about recent events, as well as the history of struggle shes experienced and witnessed, and the fears she has about her childrens futures.

Young said she fears divisiveness in America is past the point of return. She looked out at her children -- ages 6, 7, 8 and 2 -- as they splashed around. While their concerns were seemingly suspended, their mom lamented a loss of innocence in a world where she lives in fear of losing her children to forces outside of her control.

Theres nothing you can do but protect you and your family, and its really hard to do that when youre worried about walking down the street and somebody might kill you -- a civilian, a police officer, anyone.

Its crazy that we live in a world like this today where a parent can say, Theres no way to protect your child.

Living life in fear

Travion Graham-Davis is a 14-year-old African-American teenager about to enter his freshman year at Carbondale Community High School. The part of him that believes in his bright future, wants to be a scientist when he grows up. His goal is to invent something cool that will help the world. He plans to experiment with mixing various elements together until he comes up with that thing. He doesnt know what it will be yet, but its going to be a big deal.

Within a 20-minute conversation, Graham-Davis also revealed the other part of him, the part that believes hell never really have that opportunity. Quietly, he said, I think its going to happen to me someday.

Asked to clarify the it, Graham-Davis said hes concerned hell be shot by police, shot in the neighborhood, or go to prison for something he either didnt do, or an insignificant crime that comes with an outsized punishment. That is the message he said hes picked up watching television and listening to those around him.

Graham-Davis said he hasnt had much interaction with the police. Just a few minutes earlier, a Carbondale police officer on foot stopped at the picnic table where he sat with his mom and asked how he was recovering. Graham-Davis arm was banged up pretty bad when he fell from the back of a motorcycle on which he was a passenger. He said he appreciated the officer checking on him. Some are rude, some are not, he said.

He recalled one time his mom being pulled over and he was in the passenger seat and the officer asked for his identification as well.

Angela Davis, his mom, said she told the officer he was still just a child, and wasnt old enough to have a drivers license or need an identification card. She couldnt help but wonder why the officer would want a passengers ID on a routine traffic stop, she said, or why he thought a child would have one. The officer backed off, she said. But it was another reminder for her of innocence that can be stolen from young black boys at an early age.

She wants him to be a child for as long as hes a child. But as his body changes -- he has some facial hair and is taller than some his age -- she worries authorities may mistake him for an adult, and that it will become more and more likely hell be regarded suspiciously by law enforcement, subjected to racial profiling, or mistaken for a criminal suspect.

Mom is aware of her sons fears. Black moms are always aware, she said. But as her son shared them, Davis looked at him, taking in his face, and said with emphasis, Im not going to let him do anything to get to that level.

A moms prayer

Katrina Jones said she has cried many days in the past two weeks on her way to work at SIU, where she is the chief academic adviser for the College of Education and Human Services. As she dropped off her youngest son, she prayed everyday: God, help me if its the last time I see him alive.

Katrina Jones, who is African-American, has three boys ages 13, 18 and 23, and an 18-year-old daughter.

Jones said that her emotions have been running high, but in recent days, shes also been able to reflect on what shes been feeling.

Its just, the first thing that runs through my mind is, How dare I get so complacent, Jones said. Jones said she knows the racism she became aware of as a teenager still exists, but said she had gotten comfortable because its been silenced for so long  out of sight, out of mind.

Jones said she grew up in Aurora in a middle-class home. She became pregnant at age 17. The year was 1992, and Jones found out shed be having a baby boy.

From that day forward, Jones said, Ive always feared -- and Ill say that word -- the worst. I know what I was facing being the mother of a black boy in this country.

My biggest thing was, What can I do as this teenage mom to prevent my son from being a stereotype, prevent him from feeling like he has to gang-bang and sell drugs to make ends meet. I wanted to give him the best I could. That her sons may have negative interactions with police, potentially fatal ones, is also a concern that has grown for her over the years.

As a young parent, Jones found opportunities at SIU, a place she said has done a good job of promoting diversity and inclusion, but that she also feels has grown complacent and could do more.

When her children were young, she moved into family housing here, and earned a bachelors and then a masters degree, and promotions along the way. Shes presently working toward finishing her doctoral degree.

But, she said, the academic and career achievements, while they open up opportunities, are not a protective shield for her children in the world. The younger two, 13 and 18, have both expressed fears to her in recent days. So naturally, as a mom, Im concerned for their worry, she said. Jones said its heartbreaking they feel worried, regardless of whether their fears are real or perceived. And thats a difficult thing to measure, she said. But certainly, she feels that many of their fears are based on some harsh realities about growing up black in America, and those are conversations shes having with her boys at home.

Her 18-year-old daughter, a twin, also is angry, she said. Naturally, her angry expressions worry me, not to mention they are not healthy, Jones said. She said she mentions this to show how sisters of black men are affected in various ways, both personally and because they see what is happening to their brothers, and the added burden this puts on a mother to help her children sort through their emotions.

With her oldest son, now a young man, the family has come face-to-face with their greatest fears.

She told a story of him being pulled over not long ago in Aurora, and the officer insisted on searching the car he was riding in with friends. Nothing was found in the car, she said. The officer did not have probable cause for a search, she said. Her son has no criminal record, she said, and the officer let them go.

But it bothered her that her son didnt feel comfortable asserting his rights and denying the search. She said she asked him why, and he said that it wasnt worth it. He and his friends knew they were not doing anything wrong, and they just wanted to get the whole thing over with, she said.

The nightmares came true

These types of interactions leave scars on the heart, though, and can breed anger, she said.

In March 2015, that same son took a bullet to the back of the head, Jones said. It was the scariest day of her life. He was taken to the emergency room and checked in under an alias, a protective measure for gunshot victims, and neither she nor his father could immediately find out information on his condition. She later learned people were posting RIP on his Facebook page.

Her son, who she said was not the intended recipient of the bullet, survived the shooting. The bullet did not hit him at full impact. He still gets headaches at the site of the injury. But worse than that, she said, she believes he continues to suffer trauma-related stress. He has night terrors, and is alarmed by sudden sounds. The 4th of July was a nightmare for him, she said.

After he was shot, Jones said it hit her: Everything Ive tried to avoid in my life for him came into fruition.

She thanks God daily that he is alive. Jones recalled recently watching the mother of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot by police in Minnesota, on the news talking about the anguish of losing her son. All of the fears she felt when she didnt know if her own son had died came rushing back to her. It wasnt the same situation, she said.

The bullet that hit her son wasnt fired by a police officer. But mothers of black children are united in a common fear, she said, one mothers of non-black children could not understand with the same depth.

When anger begins to take root in her heart, Jones said the only thing she knows to do is turn to God. She refuses to lose sight of her purpose on Earth over things she cannot control. She knows her sons watch her, and she doesnt want them to see a woman whose heart has hardened.

At the end of the day, I cannot allow any system, any man-made system, to put fear in my heart when I serve a God who can surpass all of this, she said. I cannot live in fear. That is not who I am.

I am not going to operate in a spirit of fear. Thats not the spirit that God has given me.
CARBONDALE  After the violent July 4th week that saw two highly publicized police shootings of black men and then the deadly assault on police officers in Dallas by a lone black gunman, Mary Wilson said she saw people "fill in the blanks."

"I think what happened is people gathered information from public media," said Wilson, a counselor with Centerstone in Marion, "and the information that they dont have, then they fill in the blank with their own assumptions and fears and past trauma, to help alleviate their own feelings and how they want to feel or to make themselves feel safe."

During the days after that violence, Wilson said she heard and read of people trying to make others guilty or making assumptions and posting sometimes, divisive, comments online, while she also heard from and read of other people trying to come to the rescue to neutralize the situations.

"It was creating a lot of hostility," Wilson said. "Those that were already trying to be neutral, were having to increase that and that was causing stress and the people that were already on that balancing rope  that didnt know which side they wanted to lean on  that increased anxiety for them after this event happened."

Fear running rampant?

"There's so much fear," she said. "There's a lot of fear out there."

Wilson said she believed a lot of people have an inner fear of where they thinks others are; she noted that in 2016, there is the presumption that everyone is striving for a better tomorrow,

"When these events happen, that is going to increase those fears in people do people really want equality, do people really want everyone to be treated the same?"

"Weve been having some events that make people question where were truly at ... and it causes a lot of people to fill in the blanks and question a lot of ... the myths that ... that people are never going to change, that no matter what people tell you, theyre never going to change the type of racist feelings that they have," Wilson said. "And when these sorts of things happen, this is to prove that these types of things are not going to change. So its very difficult."

On the issue of fear, she strikes a cord with the Rev. Sidney Logwood, pastor of Rock Hill Missionary Baptist Church, with a predominantly African American congregation in Carbondale.

I believe that most of what we experience is because everybody is scared of everybody, Logwood said. Youve got all these stereotypes in your mind about what blacks are like and vise-versa, and if we just took advantage of the opportunity we had to get to know each other, wed find that most of our lives are pretty much the same.

Logwood said he understands the frustration of people who feel that they are, persistently, not being heard or are being taken advantage of.

"The system did not just break down, this stuff has been going on for a long time," Logwood said. "I think its better to be able to express verbally your feelings as opposed to acting out in such a way that it might cost you your life. Who wouldnt be angry with all of this injustice and all of this killing and stuff going on . . ."

Carl Miller, who runs Christ-Care Counseling in Marion, said he saw many people reacting in emotional ways and doing things that he thought were counterproductive. He suggested those protesting remember the nonviolent methods used by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Indian resistance leader Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ himself.

When people get too stressed out they start doing irrational things, said Miller, who counsels from a Christ-centered perspective. Its sad, its very sad, thats why you need some voice (of reasoning) . . . 

As one person said to me when does the hurting stop, and I said it stops when you can experience that inner peace, that peace within yourself, that Christ has given to you, Miller said.

Isolated incidents

Wilson sees the incidents from the week of July 4th as "isolated incidents."

"The isolated incident is not the majority," Wilson said. "We cant take these isolated incidents and say that this is how it is."

One way people can deal with these situations and the related stresses is to step back from them and try to process their feelings about them, Wilson suggested.

"Weve got to be able to step back, as individuals and see who we want to be, how we want our voice to be, not fill in the blanks, that that is the danger to fill in the blanks," Wilson said. "And when we start looking at the social media, to be able to step away from that and find that person or people that is grounded and process that . . . "

Wilson suggested finding someone, preferably a neutral source, to help you process your feelings, whether that be a counselor, a parent, a pastor, a colleague or some other religious leader or a mentor. Miller, who runs his own counseling firm, also suggested that individuals and groups contact him if they needed help in learning to deal with their reactions to these situations.

"I would suggest that they dont stop this and let it go, because like history has proven, this is not going to be the last time this happens and if people do not deal with this (their reactions), then when it happens again, these thoughts and feelings that they have are going to manifest, either into anger, distorted thoughts, perceptions of others "

Though this crisis seems to be embroiled in the policing of African Americans, or blacks in this country, it fallout has ramifications for others, she said, adding that is has an impact on gun owners and hunters, for instance.

In all fairness, this situation is kind of like a domino effect," she said. "Theres so many subcultures that its domino-affecting, so there are many subculture right now that are not feeling safe.
MARION  Students in Marion have been accustomed to technology within the classroom.

High school students have even been able to bring the technology home, but now parents will be able to have more of a say about their childs browsing habits.

A new content filtering system within the Marion Community School District No. 2 will allow parents to increase or decrease the amount of freedom their student will have when outside of school boundaries, according to the district's Technology Director Jerry Stanley.

The districts Board of Education approved a contract in June with Securly Inc., a California-based company that specializes in web filtering for schools. Stanley said it is a five-year contract for $8,700 a year. It is a significant cost-saving measure, as Stanley said the former system had annual fees in excess of $70,000 in some years.

The older system also had the same type of filtering within the district all the way from kindergarten to high school students, which isnt logical, he said.

You cant filter a kindergartner the same way you would somebody in high school, Stanley said.

He pointed to specialized classes at the high school level that may require access to certain websites.

As for the power for parents at home, Stanley said if a student is playing too many games at home or if the parent feels they are looking at content they shouldnt, the parents have the ability to log into the software and increase the filtering while at home.

It is a way for the parents to be actively involved with what is going on with a district-issued device even while the child is at home, he said.

Previously, Stanley said the district didnt have the ability to filter what the students did with the technology once they left the school building. There were certain websites blocked, but the district didnt have the capability to filter everything.

This is really playing a vital role in what we are doing since we are continuing to move toward a district-wide 1:1 program, Stanley said. It gives us the satisfaction and give the parents the satisfaction to be able to monitor what goes on at home with a district-issued device.

An additional perk to this software is that the software has a bullying and self-harm keyword search built into it. Stanley said any time there is activity on social media or emails  sent, received or in draft form  the software searches for keywords involving bullying or self-harm.

If the keywords are spotted at the school, the administrators will get notice, and if it happens while the student is at home, the parent will get a notification.

It is just an all-around good program that is moving up forward as far as protection for the kids, Stanley said.

The Marion school district will be sending information to the parents of high school students before the school year starts to let them know what their options are when using the software.
But Marape had other matters on his mind yesterday. He felt able to claim the government had 91 of the 111 members of parliament on side for Friday's no confidence vote while smacking former senior minister Ben Micah for defecting to the opposition because he was "sulking" after his bid to be deputy prime minister was rejected.

Along with Peter O'Neill, Marape is still expected to turn up some time for a discussion with anti-corruption police investigating the apparent payment of some $30 million of allegedly fraudulent legal bills to Paraka Lawyers.

Here it was seeking to keep them out of harms way, also known as "inducements like money and ministries", as Finance Minister James Marape, who seems to know about such things, pointed out.

AS OPPOSITION members took a leisurely Sunday stroll through Port Moresby yesterday  almost as if they had nothing to lose except a few kilos  the ONeill government was corralling its coalition MPs into camp at Alotau.

One commentator in PNG Today had it that Micah  having made the leap - would want to be annointed opposition leader but, as of this morning, incumbent Don Polye was still in the job, perhaps considering whether stepping aside was a lousy idea with the most important office in the land maybe awaiting his arrival at the end of the week.

All colourful stuff from a colourful bunch of political folk.

As government MPs were loading themselves on to the Fokker to Alotau's Gurney airport yesterday morning, ONeill told the assembled Port Moresby media: This is not about a numbers game; we are going down there to discuss our work program for the next 12 months before the elections.

And treasurer Patrick Pruaitch noted: The National Alliance is all about stability and we believe in stability. We have seen what stability has done for the country.

And if I believed those statements I'd also believe the two cute little beauties at right might just hurtle down the runway at Jacksons and fly down to Gurney by themselves.

The MPs will be back in Moresby on Wednesday. Then O'Neill, Marape and Pruaitch will need to hold them together for a mere 48 hours before Fridays vote.

If, as PNG political pundits estimate, the opposition so far cannot claim more than 30 MPs then theyre about halfway to securing 56  that magic number that will see them win the motion of no confidence, occupy the treasury benches and accept the ministerial guernseys being handed around.

A source told Radio New Zealand International that more MPs had defected on Saturday and the opposition is confident it will have 56 by Friday. (I'm glancing at those pigs again to see if wings are sprouting.)

Meanwhile, James Marape - relishing his moment in the spotlight - expressed disgust at the oppositions move to seize power saying whilst it is their democratic right, the unstable image of the country being portrayed continues to derail work and development and investment.

In a burst of wishful thinking he called on all political party leaders to come to the parliament with your numbers and to stop ringing my members offering inducements like money and ministries.

As if.

Echoing O'Neill, Marape claimed the Alotau camp, rather than being a high class prison facility (left) to stop possible defectors hopping on a plane back to Moresby, was providing an opportunity for our members to take time to look at what we have achieved in the past years and what still needs to be done.

He also elaborated upon the departure from the fold of Micah.

Mr Micah's demands while in government were often unrealistic. This included the demand to be appointed as deputy prime minister. Ben Micah asked to be appointed as the deputy prime minister, and when this was refused he went away sulking.

Then Marape, who clearly knows how to rub salt into wounds, proceeded to apply said NaCl with an angle grinder.

Ben Micah does not have the stature, experience and respect required to be deputy prime minister.

Now they tell him.
MARION -- Members of a firefighters motorcycle club gathered on an overpass above Interstate 57 Saturday in what they called a show of support for law enforcement, firefighters and EMS.

As cars and trucks blared their horns on the interstate below, demonstrators from Fire & Iron Station 77 waved American flags and held signs with messages like all American lives matter and blessed are the peacekeepers.

Station member Marie Lee, who organized the event, said she was partially motivated by ongoing protests in Carbondale that followed two high-profile fatal shootings of black men by police earlier this month, and by the Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas that left five police officers dead and seven injured.

Its everything thats going on in our communities, everything going on in our country right now. And we need to show our love and our support for our country and for our law enforcement, she said. It doesnt matter the color of your skin, we all bleed the same color on the inside, and all of our lives matter. We need to stop saying, This life is better than this life. Because were all Americans, and thats whats important.

Currently, my son is serving in the United States Air Force. My brother is serving in the United States Army, said Angie Stewart, a Marion resident who has belonged to the group for three years. I support firefighters, EMS, military  we need these people.

More than that, this movement of some peoples lives matter and others dont is ridiculous. Were all human. We all put our pants on the same way. And it doesnt matter what color, what race, what creed, it doesnt matter. Were all human and the hate needs to stop, period.

Stewart said she hoped onlookers would take the groups messages to heart.

Maybe some people are looking at this and saying, Were Americans. It doesnt matter  we need to stand together, we need to unite. All this hate and petty bickering and the dumb stuff needs to stop. And Im not blaming one group or another. It needs to stop, she said.

Paramedic and former firefighter Thom DaCosse attended the event with his 14-year-old daughter, Meghann. He called the event a show of patriotism.

There are so many protests now for different people that are fighting for different rights, and it always seems to be kind of doom and gloom, DaCosse said. And what Marie really wanted to do this for, is to make people feel better when all youre really hearing about is the bad things on the news nowadays.

DaCosse said he supports the message all lives matter because he thinks it promotes inclusiveness.

I dont treat anybody differently whenever Im on an ambulance call, whether theyre white, black, red, purple, green, blue, whatever, you know they all get treated well. It doesnt matter if they have a heart attack, it doesnt matter if theyre an overdose, it doesnt matter if theyre drunk, it doesnt matter if theyre rich, it doesnt matter if theyre poor. All lives matter. Especially in my line of work, listening to people constantly saying that one persons better or worse than another, we dont believe that, he said.

The demonstration drew praise from drivers who whizzed by on Illinois 148, and an Illinois state trooper stopped by to thank the groups leaders.

Lake of Egypt resident Vicki Taylor said she was driving to a shrimp boil at Crab Orchard Lake when she spotted the group and pulled over to take a photo to post to Facebook.

The police are here to protect us, and praise the Lord for that, she said. More people need to support the people who are protecting us.
CARBONDALE  Terry Clark, longtime marketing professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is the new dean of the universitys College of Business.

The SIU Board of Trustees ratified Clarks appointment at its meeting today Thursday. Clark has served as acting dean for the college since July 1. His connection to the university dates to the 1970s when he first came to campus as an undergraduate student.

A native of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, Clarks higher education career began at the Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design where he studied fine art, focusing mainly on painting. He was also a street musician in London, where he met his wife Marion.

I was born a long way from where I belong. It took me 21 years to come home to Southern Illinois, Clark said.

Clark is a double alumnus of SIU, earning his bachelors degree in 1980 in aviation technology and his MBA in 1982. He completed his doctorate in marketing in 1987 at Texas A&M University.

He was an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Notre Dame from 1987 to 1993 and Emory University from 1993 to 1999. Clark returned to SIU in the fall of 1999 as an associate professor in the Department of Marketing and was promoted to professor a few years later. He also served as chair of the marketing department for about a decade. Now, hes anxious to see what he can accomplish as dean to help the College of Business and SIU.

These are difficult times for higher education, for Illinois, and for SIU. Although there are a lot of things we cant change, my plan is to identify the things we can change, and to focus on those areas we can grow and improve, to bring about positive change, Clark said.

Clark has received numerous teaching awards during his career, including being named the College of Business Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2014 and 2009, the colleges Outstanding Graduate Teacher of the Year in 2009, Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher of the Year in 2003, as well as earning a spot on the Teaching Honor Roll in 2008 and 2004. Clark also won a variety of teaching and research awards at Emory University.

His research interests include corporate governance, marketing strategy and international marketing. His work has appeared in numerous prestigious journals. In addition, he has served in a number of professional and university service roles.

The Clarks, who have been married for 44 years, have seven children and eight grandchildren scattered across the U.S.
CARBONDALE  Bill Connors knows a lot of farmers in Southern Illinois by name. He used to be a steady customer, but circumstances have changed that.

The executive chef of Southern Illinois University has for years been in the forefront of a program aimed at increasing food purchased from small-acreage farmers in the region. Chef Bill, as most people call him, has been a fixture in the farm-to-school movement for years.

State budget cuts have changed buying patterns. Still, the university is committed to buying locally as much as possible.

We had to pull back because of some of the issues we were having, obviously financial, Connors said. But weve turned the corner again.

An Illinois mandate requires that by 2020, state-funded institutions such as universities and prisons purchase at least 20 percent of meat and produce from farms within a 250-mile radius.

It is sometimes a challenge to buy locally, however.

One barrier is price. Small-acreage producers cant compete with large operations that sell on volume. Connors has experienced that first hand.

I felt bad going to a farmer and saying, My tomatoes are coming in at $1.05 a pound and thats what I can give you and nothing more,  he said. I didnt feel right about doing that. I think that they work too hard for that.

A few years ago, he dealt directly with as many as 15 farms in Southern Illinois. Budget cuts have squeezed purchasing, however. Now, Connors works mainly with wholesale producers.

One produce company, based in Mt. Vernon, can provide locally grown food that meets the 20 percent level.

Institutional menus that differ greatly from those at private restaurants pose another pricing hurdle.

When you buy a whole steer, it costs you $6 a pound, give or take, for the meat you receive after butchering, Connors said. Spread out over steaks and other cuts, thats a great price. But seeing as we dont serve many steaks here, they look at it as $6 a pound for ground beef, which is way too much.

Some of the 7,000 meals served each day by University Housing to SIU students include produce grown right on campus. A sustainability initiative serves an educational as well as practical role.

About 2.5 acres of vegetables are grown a few miles from the dining halls.

This was an idea to help invigorate the horticulture program a little bit, said April Vigardt, who oversees the program. They get outdoor, hands-on experience.

It began in 2011 with a half-acre and has grown steadily. Another 4 acres are available for possible expansion. But it is now large enough to be nearly self-sustaining.

The University of Illinois has a similar project, the Student Sustainable Farm. The operation, which includes two high tunnels, produces various greens and other produce for use in dining halls on campus.

There is also a concerted effort to introduce more locally grown foods into menus at elementary and high schools in Illinois. Seven Generations Ahead, a non-profit organization based in Oak Park, was selected last year as the Illinois point agency of the National Farm to School Network.

In one pilot program scheduled to roll out in the fall, the agency works with schools on purchasing a locally grown item to feature in their menus.

Its very easy; we do a lot of the legwork for them, said project coordinator Lydia Mills. Schools will be buying more local food than they ever have.

Her agency also works with schools to help food planners talk to their regular providers on how to get more local food.

The timing of harvest and school terms is one obstacle that advocates struggle to clear.

One of the problems with farm to school is that when farms are producing, schools not in session, said Mary Hosier, visiting project manager of the U of Is MarketMaker program.

One project that addressed that issue was the processing of tomatoes to use in sauces and concentrates. Budget cuts put a stop to that effort.
Two people from Indiana suffered major injuries Sunday after a motorcycle crash on Interstate 57 in Jefferson County, according to Illinois State Police.

William Hogan, 76, of Kokomo, Indiana, was northbound 11 a.m. on I57, near milepost 103, along with passenger Gladys Hogan, 72. The roadway is under construction and the lanes uneven. William Hogan lost control of the motorcycle on the uneven roadway and crashed into the guardrail.
A year ago, when Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif unveiled their flawed nuclear deal, I opposed it. Today it remains apparent that Iran, which the State Department calls the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, cannot be trusted.

Since the deal, Iran has repeatedly tested nuclear-capable ballistic missiles in defiance of international law, boosted its support for Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists, illegally imprisoned American citizens, and continued efforts to illicitly buy nuclear and missile technology. To reverse the deals damage, Congress should confront Irans growing threats to the U.S. and Israel.

Under the deal, the administration released over $100 billion in frozen assets to Iran. This is alarming because Iranian terrorism has killed more Americans than ISIS has.

In October 1983, Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed 241 American servicemen in the Beirut Marine barracks bombing. I attended church with Marine Sergeant Johnny Phillips of Wilmette, one of the 11 citizens of Illinois murdered by Iran that day.

Iran flooded Iraq with destructive roadside bombs that killed and maimed American troops in over 800 incidents. In 2007, an Iranian bomb critically injured Army Major Jim Hochstetler of central Illinois, but Jima real American heroreturned to combat after facial reconstructive surgery.

I dont want another American citizen to be harmed by Iran. But the alarming fact is the nuclear deal gives Tehran many billions more in resources to support terrorism as well as terror-sponsoring governments like Syrias Assad regime.

Worse, the nuclear deal paves Irans path to eventually getting nuclear weapons.

In 2011 and 2012, the Senate unanimously passed two laws that I co-authored with Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) to impose the harshest-ever financial sanctions on Iran.

The goal of Menendez-Kirk sanctions was to end Irans nuclear program. But the administrations nuclear deal traded away the leverage of sanctions without any promise by Iran to end its nuclear program.

Rather, the agreement allows Iran to keep vast nuclear capabilities that will only grow over time. The modest limits on Iran's potential for nuclear weapons disappears in about a decadeand much sooner, if Iran cheats.

Iran has stonewalled efforts by inspectors to further investigate undeclared nuclear activities at a top-secret Iranian military base.

Yet, despite mounting evidence of Iranian nuclear and missile violations, as well as Tehrans increased support for terrorism and militancy, the White House refuses to hold Iran fully accountable.

If the administration wont act, Congress should.

This week, the House of Representatives passed the Iran Accountability Act, legislation authored by House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that draws heavily on bills that Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and I authored to impose new sanctions on Irans missile and terrorism activities. The Senate should also vote on similar measures when we return in September.

The administrations dangerously flawed and unbalanced nuclear deal does nothing to hide the fact that Irans terror-sponsoring regime poses a long-term threat to the U.S. and Israel. I will fight just as hard to keep America safe from Irans threat as I have to oppose this disastrous nuclear deal.
"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them.  Socrates

Perhaps it was a lack of mirrors in ancient Greece that was responsible for Socrates lack of introspection.

The Greece of Socrates time is generally regarded as one of earths great civilizations, but never a utopia. The bottom line: Socrates' generation didnt have all the answers.

In the roughly 2,400 years since Socrates death, human beings  philistines as well as philosophers  have expressed concern about the abilities and motivations of the next generation. In the past few decades weve gone as far as labeling generations in less-than-flattering terms: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, Millennials and so on.

Looking at the world around us, particularly the racial unrest fomenting in America the past few years, its apparent the adult generations currently in power dont have all the answers. And, true to form, The imperfect among us are quick to express concerns about todays youth.

On Friday afternoon several members of the Southern Illinoisans news staff met with seven young people from Carbondale, ranging in age from 13-25. The youngsters talked frankly about race, stereotypes, discrimination and relationships with police.

Human nature being what it is, these youngsters will mature and confront the frustration that they, too, lack all the answers. On the other hand, they are entering adulthood with a maturity and an understanding that other generations lacked.

There is no question race relations in the United States have improved since Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But we have yet to turn the page on race, as evidenced by the current Black Lives Matter movement.

The young people who spoke to us represented Carbondales diversity. They were white, black, Hispanic and combinations thereof. Some exchanged hugs as they greeted each other prior to the meeting.

As a group, they acknowledged racism and stereotyping still exists on the streets and in the schools. But almost unanimously they agreed that the younger generation cares less about race than their parents generation.

Perhaps we have grown in wisdom since 1964. Perhaps these youngsters are astute enough to look around them and recognize the folly of discrimination and baseless hatred. Perhaps its neither of those things.

But, it is undeniable that, to a person, they viewed racism as a harmful waste of time.

They agreed that Carbondale is a diverse and accepting place to live, while still acknowledging some crime and racial tension. One of their core beliefs was that Carbondales small town atmosphere is partially responsible for that acceptance. When you are dealing with people from different backgrounds every day, its difficult to mindlessly accept stereotypes.

It must be noted again that this wasnt a group of idealistic Pollyannas. They talked of crime and the role of police. Several noted that meeting individual officers in the schools and the D.A.R.E. program showed them the human side of police, which in turn empowered them as individuals.

The youngsters suggested city-wide meetings where young people could meet police face to face.

Will that solve the problems faced by Carbondale and all of Southern Illinois? No. But, it couldnt hurt. It could be the first step in making life better.

If these youngsters represent the best of their generation, we neednt wring our hands.
I ask all political party leaders, to come to the parliament with your numbers, and to stop ringing my members offering inducements like money and ministries.

Whilst it is their democratic right to exercise section 145, the unstable image of the country being portrayed continues to derail work and development and investment in this country.

We have 91 members of parliament in the government as we speak. Contrast that with the 17 members who were with the opposition in parliament on Friday.

I ASSURE all our investors, business community and citizens that our government numbers stand with Peoples National Congress at 59, National Alliance at 14, United Resources Party at eight and a number from PPP, NGP, SOP, POM and other independents.

Finance Minister James Marape (right), speaking for the ONeill government caucus which is meeting in Alotau, has said government numbers are strong in the lead-up to the return of parliament on Friday.

In this term of parliament. our prime minister and government has been facing many battles sponsored by politicians and we know who they are.

We will see you all this Friday in parliament and you will have your day to show your numbers.

The difference between the two sides is that in government we are all behind one person as prime minister, whereas in the opposition you have seven people all with their knives out ready to back-stab each other,"

Policy advancement will be the main subject of discussion as members [in Alotau] waited for parliament to reconvene on Friday.

While this recall of parliament was unnecessary and expensive, when section 145 notice of vote of no confidence was placed on notice by speaker as directed by supreme court, members will make best use of our time.

Going into camp provides an opportunity for our members of the government to take time to look at what we have achieved in the past years, and what still needs to be done.

The Alotau Accord is one of the most important policy documents ever seen in our history.

Our people have seen real change in our country through the Alotau Accord commitments and this has delivered free school education, universal healthcare and improved law and order.

I welcome the move by Ben Micah and some members of PPP to the opposition. Mr Micah's demands while in government were often unrealistic. This included the demand to be appointed as deputy prime minister.

Ben Micah asked to be appointed as the deputy prime minister, and when this was refused he went away sulking.

What he has to accept is that the post of deputy prime minister is not some prize that is handed around but is a very serious position in the administration of our nation.

The deputy prime minister has direct carriage of the affairs of government when the prime minister has official overseas travel or if he was ill.

Our deputy prime minister, Hon Leo Dion MP, is a shining example of the calibre of a person who is fit and right to be in that position.

Ben Micah does not have the stature, experience and respect required to be deputy prime minister.

The government coalition members will continue to meet in the coming days and prepare to return to par1iament on Friday morning.
CLEMSON  The widow of Sen. Clementa Pinckney challenged a group of South Carolina 4-H students on campus to return home and strive to improve their communities as her late husband did.

This right here is what he was all about, you the young people, Jennifer Pinckney said at the conclusion of the inaugural 4-H Clementa Pinckney Leadership Conference at Clemson University. Go back home and encourage others. Go back home and be the leader we know you can be. Go back home and be the mentor, be the role model, and be the next Clementa C. Pinckney.

The weeklong 4-H Pinckney Leadership Conference brought 25 high school sophomores and juniors from across South Carolina to Clemsons campus to participate in numerous activities designed to promote teamwork, leadership and citizenship. They spent a morning whitewater rafting and an evening playing Capture the Flag. They made shoe soles from milk jugs and old blue jeans to donate to children in Africa.

Some activities taught them teamwork and perseverance through failure. Participants had to run through a swinging jump rope in groups of four without hitting the rope. If one person hit the rope, the entire class had to start over. They failed many times but continued to encourage each other.

They had candid discussions about race and stereotypes. The words respect and dignity became the themes for the discussion.

This conference taught us all about ourselves and how to work as a team, said participant Morgan McManus of Florence. We have all become family. This has been life-changing. Let us never forget to stay positive and always have respect and dignity.

Conference attendee Landon Bradshaw of Lake City said he was thankful to be part of something big, part of a family.

Some of us have made lifetime friends, and I believe all of us have become equipped to impact our community, he said.

A pastor, community leader and mentor, Sen. Pinckney was a strong advocate for 4-H, the youth development arm of the Clemson University Cooperative Extension Service. Hes one of the organizations most notable South Carolina alumni. In April he received the 4-H Distinguished Alumni Medallion from the National 4-H Council.

Jennifer Pinckney said her husband, a native of rural Jasper County, was molded as a youth by the four leafs of the 4-H emblem  a green clover with a white letter H on each leaf to pay homage to the organizations pledge: I pledge my Head to clearer thinking, my Heart to greater loyalty, my Hands to larger service, and my Health to better living, for my club, my community, my country, and my world.

Sen. Pinckney was among nine churchgoers killed in June 2015 during a bible study group meeting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston.

Yes, a year has come and gone. Our family is still grieving, Pinckney said. This is huge. Our family just wants to say thank you. This is a proud moment for all of us.

South Carolina 4-H plans to continue the Pinckney Leadership Conference annually, said Pam Ardern, South Carolina 4-H team leader.

We just want to honor him and keep alive his spirit and what he stood for, she said.
PETER SOLO KINJAP in Suva

REGIONAL policymakers, academics and development practitioners gather at at the University of South Pacific in Suva today for the 2016 Pacific Update Conference.

The event has been described as providing an opportunity for Pacific countries "to walk in tandem with the rest of the world".

For the next two days they will present research and discuss the latest economic and social developments in the region.
In August 2014, the South Carolina attorney general handed off to 1st Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe the job of special prosecutor in the public corruption investigation surrounding former Republican House Speaker Bobby Harrell.

The decision to turn to Pascoe, a Democrat and experienced prosecutor, was a sound one by Republican Alan Wilson. It came amid allegations by Harrell that the attorney general had a conflict of interest. Also then-Chief Justice Jean Toal had criticized state prosecutors for talking publicly about their inquiry, particularly Wilson, who had announced in January that he was handing the case to the state grand jury. By law, state grand jury proceedings are conducted in secret.

As independent counsel, Pascoe pushed the case forward. The result later in 2014 was Harrells resignation as part of a guilty plea to six campaign finance violations. He pledged to cooperate with an ongoing investigation into Statehouse corruption.

With Pascoe as special prosecutor and the State Law Enforcement Division as lead investigator, the probe went forward. But when Pascoe and SLED Chief Mark Keel were given circuit court approval and sought to initiate a state grand jury investigation, a legal showdown began in 2016.

Wilson decided to reinsert himself into the process, announcing removal of Pascoe as special prosecutor. He stated Pascoe had overstepped his authority in taking the matter to the state grand jury.

Pascoe fought back, contending he had authority to take the matter to the state grand jury and Wilson, after recusal from the case, did not have authority to fire him.

What ensued was an ugly battle during which Wilson and others went public with both personal and professional criticism of Pascoe, citing an obvious abuse of power. Pascoe was portrayed as incompetent and not the first choice for the prosecutorial position. Wilson claimed Pascoe was behind multiple news media leaks about grand jury matters.

The personal animosity became more of an issue when reports about emails and text messages from GOP insiders showed discussion about ways to discredit Pascoe. The messages came from Wilsons Chief of Staff Adam Piper, though Wilson denied any advance knowledge of the communications and said in response to newspaper reports that he advised Piper to refrain from sending emails or text messages regarding the office.

Publicly, Pascoe remained mum in response other than to push ahead with seeking Supreme Court resolution of the matter. On Wednesday, that came, with the prosecutor who had argued his case personally before the high court winning the day.

In rebuking Wilson, the court rejected all his arguments about Pascoe. It stated the attorney general cannot remove him as special prosecutor. And it ruled that Pascoe, as special prosecutor, does have authority to take the case to the state grand jury.

The decision is a victory for Pascoe but a bigger victory for the process of investigating public corruption. If a special prosecutor is to be able to independently perform the duties of the post, he must have the authority to use the tools without interference. After removing himself from the case for potential conflict of interest, the attorney general must not be able to reinsert his authority over the special prosecutor.

Expressing happiness with the decision, Pascoe did not gloat. Though after the attacks he endured during the process, no one would have blamed him for doing so.

Asked specifically about the accusations by Wilson and his allies, Pascoe told The Times and Democrat: I am not going to address Wilsons press conference other than to say of the many mistaken claims made by Attorney General Wilson and his attorney, Mitch Brown from Nelson Mullins, the most disturbing was the allegation that Chief Mark Keel and I committed an illegal act. Today the Supreme Court rejected that argument.

The special prosecutor now has no obstacle is his way to pushing the investigation forward, which is exactly what he should do, making any use of the state grand jury that he sees as necessary.
Recently, at Lyman, S.C., a shooter firing into a crowd outside a nightclub was stopped by a good guy with a gun before more people were hurt. The good guy was not charged, as his actions were lawful. This incident lays bare concerns about matters that deserve urgent consideration.

 People with no regard for others are dangerous and likely to strike at any time at unforeseen locations.

 Police and other entities are unable to defend us at all times and places.

 A good guy with a gun may be able to stop a bad guy with a gun before the bad guy accomplishes his objective.

 A good guy with a gun is not subjected to criminal charges when he does his duty in certain areas.

Now, heres the kicker. Had that good guy with the gun done the same thing inside that nightclub, he would have been charged with several crimes, lost his concealed carry license, perhaps been made unable to own a firearm, and found himself generally miserable for a long time  All because well-intentioned lawmakers (given considerable benefit of doubt) passed unconstitutional laws that infringe our God-given right to self-defense.

The unforeseen consequences of this body of unconstitutional laws have produced horrible results nationwide.

 Free-kill zones have been established in schools, health care facilities, government facilities, airports, bars, etc.

 Bad guys have taken full advantage of the unconscionable condition of being unable to defend ones self in free kill zones. Every one of the mass shootings we hear about is a direct consequence of these laws.

 These laws do nothing to reduce gun-related violence because bad guys dont care about such laws.

 Shootings and bombings in free-kill zones will get worse as terrorists wise up to their widespread availability.

 Good guys have been prosecuted and left defenseless for violating said unconstitutional laws.

 No-fly lists, domestic violence lists, etc. are sometimes secret and a person on one or more of those lists is subject to mistreatment as well as having no knowledge or defense against being placed on them or having an avenue of appeal to be removed.

 People who have been denied gun possession are sometimes permanently and wrongfully denied it even though they have lawfully paid for their transgressions, and should have the right to defend themselves restored.

 Self-defense is a God-given right. Governments do not possess it to give to anyone.

 Lawmakers at any level who allow such laws within their jurisdiction to persist are personally responsible for the devastation and grief their laws cause because they have the authority to correct this situation immediately.

Laws outlawing or restricting gun ownership have proven ineffectual in preventing gun violence.

 Bad guys unremittingly hurt defenseless people where self-defense is restricted by such laws, e.g. Chicago, IL.

 Total gun restriction in Paris did not stop bad guys from using guns (some of them supplied by the U.S. government to Mexican criminals) to murder about 150 people.

 Gun bans in England and Australia produced immediate and significant increases in gun-related crime.

Locations with an armed populace have superior safety from gun violence.

 Switzerlands government requires arms in most homes. Their crime rate is miniscule.

 Kennesaw, Georgia, permitted open carry. Its crime rate dropped immediately and has remained down.

 The Japanese rejected invading the USA during World War II because there is a gun behind every blade of grass.

Governments that arm themselves and disarm citizens eventually slaughter them.

 Mass citizen executions took place in Russia, Germany, and other countries where government ran amok.

 England tried it in its North American colonies, but it didnt work out too well because the people fought back.

 Our government agencies and police are armed to the teeth and are capable of mass executions at this moment.

So whats the point in stating the obvious? We could be next. The stage is set for a massive, coldblooded disaster.

Now is the time to repeal every existing gun law and replace them with a constitutionally adherent body of laws that eliminates existing and potential problems without infringing our God-given right to self protection. This needs to be implemented uniformly across all levels of government, but local and state governments can get started now.

--Sam Brice, Saint Matthews
BLACKVILLE -- Rain or shine, the annual Watermelon Field Day at Edisto Research and Education Center in Blackville always draws a large crowd. This year was no exception as more than 225 attendees dealt with temperatures in the upper 90s to learn about the latest research findings in melon production. It didnt hurt that ice-cold watermelon was waiting at the end of the field tour.

The days program covered everything from start to finish in the watermelon industry -- from grafting transplants to marketing tools.

Dr. Gilbert Miller, who coordinates the event, noted this had not been the best year for growing melons and the weather had caused some unfavorable conditions that all growers had had to deal with.

In the 14 years we have been having this field day, this is the worst crop weve ever had due to the excess water, Miller said.

Matt Cornwell of the South Carolina Department of Agriculture emphasized the importance of the research done with watermelon production at EREC. He briefed the crowd on the S.C. Watermelon Associations promotional campaign, Watermelon Fuels Athletes," and the associations involvement in agricultural-related legislation on the state and national levels.

Dr. Tony Keinath presented information on his current research that questioned whether planting watermelons early increased the likelihood of fusarium wilt.

We wanted to know if there was a relationship between planting date and fusarium wilt," he said.

Keinaths study compared mid-March, early April and late April planting dates. Preliminary results indicated that planting early when soil temperatures are cooler resulted in more incidence of fusarium wilt. However, the number of fruits and their weight (the marketable product) did not appear to differ significantly.

It is encouraging that the late planting date does not appear to decrease yields, Keinath said.

Gabriel Rennberger spoke on his ongoing field survey regarding foliar pathogens. His research looked into identifying the prominent foliar diseases in watermelons in multiple fields in counties across the southern portion of the state and whether field size influenced the occurrence of pathogens as well as other factors. He shared findings from 2015 and preliminary results form 2016, noting that weather conditions had a significant influence.

Gummy stem blight was the most prevalent, then powdery mildew and downy mildew, Rennberger said. In 2016, anthracnose was being found again.

The emerging technology of robotic grafting of watermelon transplants was covered by Dr. Richard Hassell, who showed videos of the process in action. He said the process of grafting a watermelon scion onto a gourd or squash root stock to improve vigor is an art. It is expensive, though, and increases the growers cost of transplants by four or five times the cost of non-grafted, Hassell said.

When asked about the advantage of grafted plants, he said so far the research did not indicate an increase in yields when grafted plants were used. He indicated grafted plants appeared to hold up better in hot, dry weather and the fruit off of grafted plants had significantly higher levels of lycopene, a beneficial antioxidant.

Jason Hanselman of the National Watermelon Promotion Board encouraged the group to visit the associations web site at http://www.watermelon.org/. A wealth of information for wholesalers, retailers, educators, food service and industry can be found on the site.

During the field tour, Miriam Jenkins gave a summary of her ongoing research into attracting native pollinators. She said watermelon flowers need to be pollinated by bees as well as other pollinators in order to set fruit. With the European honeybee in decline and the cost of renting hives to place in fields for pollination on the rise, taking a closer look at other more efficient pollinators was important and timely.

Jenkins said native pollinators need a wide variety of flowering plants available to them in order to have year-round food sources. They also require a wide variety of nesting habitats, she said. She noted that the zinnias and other flowers Miller had planted among his melon plots acted to attract pollinators.

South Carolina Watermelon Queen Laura Schurlknight gave an update on watermelon promotions for 2016, and samples of watermelon smoothies were offered to the crowd.

Rob Paladino introduced his companys product, cold-pressed juiced watermelon, which is sold as WTRMLN WTR. He said the company uses culls, or imperfect melons, and their rind to produce the purest, unadulterated, mouth mystifying, healthy hydration salvation that is second to none.

Hassell and Miller directed the crowd to the watermelon grafting trials and melon trials plots where they could see firsthand the results of current studies. Industry representatives and growers were able to have one-on-one discussions about specific varieties and taste test them onsite.

When participants returned to the main building, they were treated to a selection of the 99 melon varieties from Millers plots that had been cooled and sliced.

A Fall Field Day is scheduled for Sept. 22 that will cover the production of fall watermelons, pumpkins and sweet potatoes.

To learn more about watermelons and the South Carolina Watermelon Association, go to https://agriculture.sc.gov/resources/agriculture-organizations/south-carolina-watermelon/sc-watermelon-association/.

For more information on any of the topics covered at the field day or watermelon production in general, call Dr. Gilbert Miller at EREC, 803-284-3343.
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GEDDES  For Troy Waffner, the New York State Fair's acting director, this year is a test year for the annual 12-day event.

Construction crews recently completed the first phase of work on a $50 million project at the fairgrounds. The improvements include an expanded midway, an RV park and a new main gate.

To make all of this possible, the grandstand  the fair's paid concert venue  and the race track were demolished. Removing both freed up about 63 acres of space, Waffner said.

And that's why he views the 2016 fair as a test.

With the added space, the fair has moved between 35 and 50 vendors to new spots on the grounds. Some of these vendors have been moved from the Chevy Court area, which will now host only the concert stage and the popular Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and Gianelli stand.

That presents one of the first questions on the "test": Where will the foot traffic flow?

"Everybody always concentrates on this small area," Waffner said, referring to the portion of the fairgrounds in and around Chevy Court. "It's where every vendor wants to be. If you take everything and shove it west, you're almost forcing people to go west."

RIDES

Wade Shows, the fair's midway operator, will be taking advantage of the additional space at their disposal.

Waffner said Wade Shows is aiming to add 10 more rides this year. The company also plans to change out some older rides for new additions.

Wade Shows owner Frank Zaitshik visited the fairgrounds about a month ago to see the updated midway. Waffner said he's "excited to work" with the expanded area.

MUSIC

With the grandstand gone, the fair had to deal with much less stress in filling its concert venues.

While there are smaller stages throughout the fairgrounds, Chevy Court is the marquee free concert stage. Waffner said the fair received approval from state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli's office for a one-year deal with Live Nation to book Chevy Court concerts.

The partnership paid off. With Live Nation booking the shows, the Chevy Court lineup was finalized in February.

"Usually we're still booking in June," Waffner said. "Everything just fell into place. We booked everything in a three-month span."

The Chevy Court lineup is one Waffner is proud of. The 23 acts include rapper Flo Rida, pop stars like Kesha and Rachel Platten and legendary rock group Chicago, which will close out the fair on Sept. 5.

"We covered the genres," he said. "We covered diversity, to a large extent, in music."

PARKING

The fair did lose some spots  roughly 2,000, according to Waffner  with the removal of the track. But only about 500 to 1,000 of those spots were used on any given day, he said.

With fewer spots, the fair is working with Centro to promote the park-and-ride service and they will be maximizing the space in their remaining lots.

"It's going to be a lot tighter than it used to be in terms of parking," he said.

WHAT'S NEW?

According to Waffner, the new features include:

 A Kosher vendor will be added to the fair's food lineup. Waffner said there was some interest in Kosher food, so they made an effort to bring in a vendor to make those offerings available.

 A stingray show is coming to the fairgrounds this year. Fairgoers will be able to interact with the stingrays. (Waffner said not to fear. The dangerous part of the animal's stinger has been removed.)

 A new gate, Gate 11A, has been built by the county to accommodate fairgoers who come from Solvay. Waffner said there's a nearby business that charges $3 for parking and several fairgoers use that lot. But to enter the fairgrounds, they needed to walk to Gate 12, which is a longer distance away from the lot.

 The fair is switching to full e-ticketing this year. Every ticket will be scanned. Prior to this year's event, the fair had workers  mostly teenagers  who would count paper tickets collected at a handful of gates. Now, that task is no longer necessary.

Waffner said the e-ticketing system will help the fair monitor how many people are on the fairgrounds at any time. That information useful, especially during a severe weather event or if traffic at the gates is getting backed up.

 The tram rides will be free this year, thanks to Chevrolet.

The company is sponsoring the trams and will provide brand new Silverado trucks to pull the trailers. In previous years, the trams were pulled with tractors.

 The popular dairy cow birthing center will be in a new location closer to the midway.

"The perk is it gets it a little closer to the action and also they'll be able to set it up with more backstage area," Waffner said.

The birthing tent has been a major attraction over the past few years. But it tended to be in an area of the fairgrounds that didn't receive as much traffic.
The Turkish prosecutors issued detention warrants for 140 members of the country's Constitutional Court and 48 members of the Supreme Court over their alleged involvement in a military coup in the country, local media reported on Saturday.

According to the NTV broadcaster, ten out of 188 judges have been detained so far.

Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.

The coup attempt was reportedly suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life. Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the prime minister.




Commander of the Turkish Air Force Abidin Unal , who was taken as a hostage earlier by servicemen attempted the coup in the country, has been released during the special operation, TRT reported July 16.

Currently, there is no any threat to his life.

The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life. Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the prime minister.
Athens promised to extradite to Ankara eight alleged participants of the military coup attempt who fled to Greece, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday.

Earlier in the day, a helicopter with eight alleged coup supporters on board landed in Alexandroupolis. Turkey asked Greece to return them.

The Greek authorities replied that they will return the helicopter but will apply general procedure to the detained passengers who intend to ask for asylum in the country.

"I had a phone talk with Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias. He told me that eight rebels who fled to Greece would be returned shortly," Cavusoglu said in his Twitter account.

On Friday, a military coup attempt was carried out in Turkey. According to the Turkish General Staff, 104 coup supporters were killed, while 47 civilians, 41 police officers, 2 soldiers died in clashes. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Edrogan accused Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, an outspoken critic of the government in self-imposed exile in the United States, of organizing the unrest.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has arranged to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin within weeks, Turkish presidential sources said Sunday, Anadolu reported.

The agreement came in a telephone call from Putin in which he gave his support to Turkey following Fridays attempted coup.

According to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Russian president said he stood by Turkeys elected government and offered his condolences to the victims of the failed coup.

The leaders will meet in the first week of August, the source added. The meeting will be the first face-to-face meeting between Erdogan and Putin since the Turkish Air Force shot down a Russian jet over the Turkey-Syria border last November.

The incident led to a suspension of relations between the two countries until it was resolved in a letter and subsequent telephone call between the leaders late last month.
Emirates NBD, one of the leading banks in the region, has signed an agreement with the Community Development Authority (CDA) to solidify its strategic, long-term commitment to people with disabilities, and offer various solutions.



The agreement is part of a series of initiatives launched under the banks #TogetherLimitless platform, launched in 2015, that aims to offer solutions to the issues faced by people with disabilities, said a statement from Emirates NBD.

The platforms initiatives include: adaption of branches to be more accessible to people with disabilities; Workplace Inclusion  an initiative to recognise talent, hire and train more people with disabilities; and a long-term partnership with Manzils Pride (people receiving independence and dignity through empowerment), it stated.



Under the deal, Emirates NBD will offer all Sanad card holders1 (privilege access card developed by CDA for people with disabilities) the Beyond from Personal Banking package, exempt of minimum salary. Account holders can benefit from the preferential transaction rates, insurance premium waivers and lifestyle rewards that are featured in the package, it stated.



Husam Al Sayed, group chief human resource officer at Emirates NBD, said: As a home grown organisation, we strongly believe that our action-oriented commitment to supporting people with disabilities is a duty and privilege.



We feel that synergising the resources and knowledge of both the public and private sector will result in a sustainable long-term improvement in the integration of people with disabilities into the community, he said.



Suvo Sarkar, senior executive vice president and group head, retail banking and wealth management, Emirates NBD, added: We are incredibly proud to offer our proposition to all Sanad cardholders as a step towards financial inclusion for people with disabilities in the UAE.



We are very certain that they will gain numerous financial benefits from the package. Going forward, we will remain committed to understanding the banking needs of people with disabilities and seek to attain their complete financial inclusion in all our banking products and services, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
The Islamic Research and Training Institute (IRTI), a member of the Islamic Development Bank Group, has released a first-of-its-kind textbook titled Fundamentals of Islamic Economics and Finance.



IRTI published the textbook with the aim of satisfying the requirement for a standard, comprehensive textbook covering the necessary Islamic economics and finance topics in a simple presentation style, said a statement from the institute.



The new textbook is designed for senior undergraduate students of Islamic economics and finance, and can also be useful for students of conventional economics theory, it said.



Prof Mohamed Azmi Omar, director general of IRTI, said: The textbook will address concerns about lack of adequate, synthesised Islamic economics and finance study materials for undergraduate students.



Even though previous research in the area has produced lots of theoretical and policy literature, much of the research outcomes are scattered in various published and unpublished materials, and access to all of these is obviously difficult and time consuming, he observed.



This new textbook published by IRTI is an attempt to address these concerns by having one volume that explains the different concepts in simple language, he added.-TradeArabia News Service


Sharjah Tatweer Forum (STF) has partnered with Sharjah Leadership Programme (SLP) to develop smart initiatives and present them to concerned parties in an effort to boost the emirates bid to transform into an advanced city.



The initiatives will be designed based on the proposed projects submitted by select SLP participants.



Jassem Albloushi, chairman, STF, said: Smart city aims to improve quality of life by using technology to improve the efficiency of services and meet the needs of our people. By integrating ICT solutions into a wide range of daily human activities, we are in effect making things more efficient and sustainable.



We have been witnessing these efforts in Sharjahs transportation, health, and education sectors, among others. We are inspired at STF to substantially contribute to this significant endeavour by working closely with the young promising leaders at SLP  the result of which is a myriad of unique and innovative ideas. We look forward to strategically developing these ideas and presenting them to the concerned authorities to make a difference in the Sharjah Governments smart city initiatives.



The race to transform every emirate in the UAE into a smart city is gaining more ground, with key entities in Sharjah, including STF, have been actively taking part towards this end. Sharjah Leadership Programme was launched with an aim to prepare the next generation of private and public sector leaders in line with international standards, as well as to increase their awareness on the UAEs plans on innovation and transition into a knowledge-based economy.



The programme also plans to bring various institutions up to speed with best practices in management and leadership mechanisms, as well as highlight Sharjahs economic sectors and future plans. The programme will include visits to the United States, particularly California, where participants will take part in innovation conferences along with a number of visits to prestigious companies and research centres.



It was inspiring to be able to contribute to such an important partnership. Suggesting ideas and projects that can help transform Sharjah and the rest of the country into a sustainable, modern society is a call for everyone to take part and share his ideas to realize this dream. We are happy that our proposals have measured up to STFs objectives. Rest assured that we will remain committed to our collaboration as we move forward towards the implementation of our projects, said Abdel Aziz Fikry, projects manager at Al Wasl Asset Management Group and an SLP participant.

Sharjah Tatweer Forum is a leading and pioneering organization with a strong focus on local, regional and global issues of importance to Sharjah and the UAE.  TradeArabia News Service
The Boeing Co marked its centennial on July 15 with plans to sharpen its focus on innovation, including ambitious projects for supersonic commercial flight and a rocket that could carry humans to other planets.



But innovation at Boeing will be "disciplined" and not endanger the future of the world's biggest plane maker, chief executive Dennis Muilenburg told reporters at an event marking the company's founding on July 15, 1916.



The enterprise established by William Boeing in a Seattle boathouse has faced numerous "bet the company" moments over its 10 decades to bring out new planes such as the 707 and 747.



"We have won for 100 years because of innovation," Muilenburg said. "The key is disciplined innovation. We'll take risks. We'll invest smartly."



Chicago-based Boeing has managed to stay ahead of European rival Airbus in plane production and is a major defence and space contractor, producing fighter jets, aerial refuelling tankers, communications satellites and rockets.



The company is exploring the possibilities of commercial supersonic and hypersonic planes, Muilenburg said. It also is at work on a manned mission to Mars. Though those are perhaps many decades away, "I'm anticipating that person will be riding on a Boeing rocket," Muilenburg said.



More immediately, Boeing is pressing for licenses to conclude sales of 109 aircraft to Iran, including leased jets, despite opposition from some in Congress. "This is a significant opportunity," he said. "It does represent significant U.S. manufacturing jobs."



The company also is still working on plans for a so-called "middle of the market" aircraft that could fill a gap in its product line between the 737 and the 787. Muilenburg said it might use "existing products, derivatives of existing products or an all new airplane" to fill the gap.



"If it's an all new airplane, we think that would probably be in the 2024-2025 time frame in terms of when it would be introduced into service," he said.



Muilenburg spoke with reporters at the beginning of a celebratory weekend of events for an estimated 100,000 employees, families and retirees at Boeing Field in Seattle.



Muilenburg said Boeing is arguably stronger now than at any point in its 100-year history. It has a backlog of 5,700 plane orders, enough to keep its factories humming for six or seven years.



Beyond filling those orders, it aims to "sharpen and accelerate" its innovation, in plane design in the factory and services. This includes "second-century design in manufacturing, automation, 3-D printing, additive manufacturing," he said.



"Even though we're arguably the best aerospace company in the world today, we have to continue to invest in innovation," he said. - Reuters
Turkey's foreign minister said on Saturday he had made clear in a call with US counterpart John Kerry that followers of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen were behind a coup attempt, but had not directly discussed the cleric's possible extradition.



A faction of the armed forces, deemed by the government as loyal to Gulen, tried to seize power using tanks and attack helicopters overnight. One hundred and sixty-one people were killed, including many civilians, in the ensuing violence.



"The topic of extradition did not come up directly in our conversation yesterday. However, I said very directly once again that this was an attempt by Gulen, who is residing in their country, and his structure within the military," Mevlut Cavusoglu said in an interview in Ankara.



President Tayyip Erdogan officially designated Gulen's religious movement a terrorist group in May and said he would pursue its members. Turkey has long been expected to request his extradition from the US.



Cavusoglu said the military now needed to be "cleansed" of Gulenist influence.



"Once this cleansing is finished our military will be stronger, our soldiers will be stronger, providing better support and coordination to Nato," he said.



He said soldiers at the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, used by the US military to conduct air strikes against Islamic State militants in neighboring Syria, had been involved in the coup attempt and that arrests had been made.



"Once these operations are completed, we will continue our fight against Daesh (Islamic State) with either coalition nations, or within the Nato framework, and resume our cooperation with Nato," Cavusoglu said.



The US consulate in Turkey said earlier the authorities were denying movements on and off Incirlik. But Cavusoglu said there would be no problems regarding operations at the base.



"It is not possible to have any negative developments regarding the Incirlik base," he said.



He also said Turkey's allies, including Western Nato allies and regional powers Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran, had all shown clear support for Turkey's elected authorities and come out in condemnation of the coup.-Reuters
July 4 has come and gone. The parades, fireworks, picnics and chicken barbecues are now past. We sure like to celebrate our nations birthday in a big way with many activities throughout the county. This year was special, as it was our 240th birthday.

On July 17th, 1844, exactly 172 years ago to the day, the following article appeared in the Cayuga Tocsin. Elliot G. Storke reported on the July 4 festivities in the village of Owasco.

Convened at the West Church (True Dutch Reformed)  numbering four hundred pupils bearing ten neat banners with appropriate devices and mottos  marched under the direction of H. Titus, Esq. the efficient town superintendent, to the east church (Owasco Reformed); and spacious as it is, it was found insufficient to accommodate the large assemblage. Here the exercises consisted of vocal music by the schools separately. Prayer by Rev. Wm. Evans  Declaration of Independence read by Rev. Wm. Johnson  an appropriate and spirit stirring oration by E. G. Storke, County Superintendent  benediction.

The Procession was then reformed, and marched to a fine grove, where tables had been spread by the fair hands of the village, ornamented with bouquets and evergreens, and loaded with a choice and delicate collection  the contribution of the different schools and which was partaken by the pupils and assemblage with right good cheer.

The repast finished, the pupils marched in procession to the green where their sweet voices were joined in the performance of several appropriate pieces, they were then dismissed by a short Valedictory from the County Superintendent, and the multitude retired animated with the reflection that they had passed this anniversary in a manner equally acceptable to the young and old, to all sects and parties  to the patriot  the philanthropist, and the Christian.

N. Noyes:

Smaller celebrations took place at Scipio and at Venice. Of the one at Scipio, I have not received a report  William Allen, Orator. Of the celebrations at Venice, the Town Superintendent, writes, ten teachers, with their pupils, bearing some twelve banners, with various devices and mottos were in attendance. After prayer, the audience, which filled the church, listened to an eloquent oration by O.F. Foote, M.A. 

 E. G. S.

Laurels note: Once you get past the Victorian style of writing, you can determine the county had a bang-up time celebrating the Fourth. The town of Owasco had six district schools in 1844. Then combined together there were 400 pupils; it had to be quite a stirring parade with many proud parents to watch the procession! When I decided to submit this story, imagine my surprise to see it would appear on the same day, July 17, as this original report.
Leading construction group Carillion said one of its units has won a four-and-half-year contract extension from Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) for its integrated facilities management services in Oman.



Carillion Alawi, the UK firm's market leading business in Oman, said as per the 240-million ($311 million) contract, it will provide integrated facilities management services at 12 locations across the sultanate.



The group's partnership with PDO began in July 2013 when it was signed up to deliver an integrated facilities management service, focused on providing safe, cost effective services across the PDO concession estate, which inlcudes PDOs main cotsal estate, and covers an area of some 100,000 sq km.



The range of services being delivered comprises engineering maintenance, projects, catering and environmental services, including cleaning, housekeeping, pest control, landscaping and linen and laundry services, said a statement from the company.



Under this contract extension, which will begin this month, Carillion Alawi will continue to focus on delivering safe, cost effective services by driving cost reduction and efficiency through reducing waste, improving productivity and reshaping service delivery, it added.



Commenting on the win, Carillion CEO Richard Howson, said: "We are delighted to have secured the contract extension for PDO that reflects the strong partnership we have developed with the Omani group."



"It also reinforces our commitment to supporting PDO through the efficient management and operation of its critical infrastructure, using our sector leading ability to provide facilities management services to the oil and gas sector across the Middle East, including operating in the challenging desert environment where the vast majority of PDOs assets are located," he added.



Carillion has also been awarded two contracts by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive to deliver maintenance services for its housing stock, worth up to 366 million over a period of up to 10 years, of which some 60 million was included in the Groups order book at 30 June.



"We expect the balance of the 366 million to be added to the order book during the life of these contracts," stated Howson.



These latest contracts take the total value of new orders and probable orders won by Carillion in the first six months of 2016 to 2.5 billion, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Italian luxury footwear and accessories brand Baldinini has unveiled its Dubai Summer Surprises (DSS) offerings with its summer spring collection offering discounts from 25 per cent to 60 on women and mens shoes including accessories.



Baldinini stores will display the latest sneakers, sandals, boots, moccasins, ballerinas and high-heeled shoes in plain or multi-coloured styles of leather and calf skin materials. Bags of different sizes and colours to match every occasion are also on sale.



Baldininis 2016 Spring collection features intricate geometric shapes, expert beadwork and artisan weaving featuring neutral, bright, open and closed concept. The labels use of different materials reinforces the theme and refined elegance of the heels in the collection, a statement said.



The Baldinini Mens collection for summer is sport-inspired style, while the new classic, Driver and Oxford in soft nubuck, mocassins and derby shoes in perforated and interwoven nappa are the key models.



The DSS offer is valid at all Baldinini stores in Dubai Mall, Outlet Mall, Wafi Mall and Burjuman Center. Shoppers can avail 30 per cent to 75 per cent discount at Outlet Mall, the statement said.



DSS is running from July 9 to August 20.  TradeArabia News Service
Souq Waqif Boutique Hotels, a luxury five-star hotel brand in Qatar, has appointed Hafidh Al Busaidy as the new cluster general manager.



Al Busaidy, who brings with him 31 years of experience in the hospitality sector, has worked in seven countries and possesses a great understanding of the Middle Eastern market. With prior experience of working in countries like Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia, he will now work towards raising the level of services provided to guests at SWBH.



Commenting on his new appointment, Al Busaidy said: "I am glad to return to Qatar where I spent two of the most beautiful years in my career. I am now eagerly looking forward to working with the special team at SWBH who have achieved significant levels of excellence and sophistication in services, and will aim to continue with the success achieved till date."



Qatars hospitality sector is one of the most vibrant and evolving sectors in the region and we are committed to playing a key role in supporting this growth. In a short period of time, SWBH has strengthened its position on the global tourism map and became a prime tourist destination in the heart of the historic Souq Waqif. It stands to tell the bright history of Qatar in the most important tourist attractions in the state, he added.



Souq Waqif is considered aa an attractive destination for all segments of the community as well as guests from within and outside the country. So, the role of SWBH is to reflect the generosity of genuine Qatari hospitality, and keep pace with events and activities incubated by Souq Waqif. This reflects the perfect combination of the unique past of Doha and its culture, its history, traditional Arabian hospitality with luxury, modernity and contemporary style provided in a luxurious atmosphere along with the highest level of hospitality services. With support from our outstanding international team at SWBH, we will strive to keep SWBH on the national and global tourism map." - TradeArabia News Service
Gulf travellers looking to get away from the fast paced city life can enjoy their summer at the Tilal Liwa Hotel in Abu Dhabi, UAE, with a new holiday savings package.



Starting from Dh249 ($67.7), the summer savings package includes a buffet breakfast for two adults and two children less than 12 years of age at Al Badiya restaurant. It also offers 20 per cent off on food and beverages excluding alcohol and 25 per cent off on massage treatments.



The offer is valid from May 1 until September 15 and the reservations are non-refundable upon booking and cannot be cancelled or changed without charge.



Rates are subject to 10 per cent service charge, 6 per cent tourism fee, 4 per cent municipality fee and Dh15 ($4) per room per night municipality room fees. - TradeArabia News Service


Leading serviced residence owner-operator The Ascott is acquiring its first serviced residence in Docklands, Melbourne through a 50:50 joint venture with Qatar Investment Authority (QIA).



The A$71 million deal is part of its A$500 million strategic partnership with Quest Apartment Hotels (Quest), one of the largest serviced apartment operators in Australia.



Quest will lease the 221-unit serviced residence, which will be named Quest NewQuay Docklands, and operate it under Quests franchise when the property opens in 2019. Quest NewQuay Docklands will be Quests largest property in its network.



Ascotts serviced residence global fund was set up through a 50:50 joint venture with QIA in July 2015 with each contributing $300 million of equity funds to the joint venture.



The fund invests in serviced residences and rental housing properties with an initial focus on Asia Pacific and Europe. Ascotts four acquisitions made in partnership with QIA have a total investment amount of US$270 million and would be funded partly by debt.



Lee Chee Koon, Ascotts chief executive officer, said: Ascott is a global serviced residence leader that owns and manages over 46,000 units worldwide and we have a strong base of customer accounts that are multinational companies, while Quest is a leading operator in Australia with more than 80% of its customers from Australias top companies. Through our strategic partnership with Quest, we can combine our expertise to drive Ascotts expansion in Australia and enjoy stable income as Quest will provide fixed leases for the properties and operate them under its well-established franchise. By taking a stake in Quest, Ascott also stands to benefit from the growth of the Quest franchise. Ascott focuses on prime city centre locations whereas Quest primarily targets suburban locations with underserved demand. Together, we can lead the expansion of the serviced residence sector which has significant untapped potential.



Through the Ascott-Quest alliance formed in late-2014, Ascott will invest up to A$500 million in new properties that Quest will secure for its franchise in Australia until 2019.



Paul Constantinou, chairman of Quest Apartment Hotels, said: Demand for accommodation in Australia from both international and domestic corporate customers remains strong but the supply of new accommodation has been lacking. Melbournes accommodation sector has been getting high occupancies of above 80 per cent, driven by its strong events calendar, growing convention market and business activities. Ascotts investment will not only enable us to accelerate Quests growth to cater to the demand in Australia, our tie-up with Ascott also provides a solid platform for us to take the Quest brand overseas.



In Australia, Ascott currently manages five serviced residences with more than 670 apartment units in Melbourne, Perth and Hobart under the Citadines and Somerset brands. Quest has more than 150 properties with over 8,000 existing units in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, and a further 1,500 units under construction. - TradeArabia News Service
HotelsPro, a leading global travel wholesaler and a part of MetGlobal Group of Companies, has welcomed of Stephen Moffett as the new sales manager for its UK and Ireland market.



Moffett will be responsible for growing and developing a competent sales force in the UK and Ireland, developing a robust sales and marketing strategy for the broad-spectrum growth of the organisation and for developing more innovative and customised solutions for clients nestled in the UK and Ireland. He will report to Robert Turner, head of London operations.



HotelsPro opened its offices in London and Shanghai in May this year in a bid to provide customised support to its existing clients in the regions, as well as expanding its client base.



"Moffett brings with him a lot of experience and valuable know-how in sales. With prior experience in managing and leading sales operations in the UK and Ireland, he will become an asset for the fast-growing sales force in the region," Turner said.



It is a great opportunity for HotelsPro to become a major player in this area. I am really looking forward to growing the business and establishing HotelsPro as one of the leaders in this dynamic sector, Moffett said. - TradeArabia News Service


Dragon City, Bahrains flagship wholesale and retail shopping destination, located in Diyar Al Muharraq, will be holding a Chinese Folk Arts Exhibition from the July 22 to 25, where the Chinese culture will be represented in traditional handicrafts and folk art.



Chinese Folk Arts are artistic forms of designs inherited from a regional or ethnic scene in China, which have a long history of traditions. Chinese Folk Art encompasses art produced from an indigenous culture or by other laboring tradespeople, and embraces all aspects of daily life. In artistic representation and expression, works of folk art are straightforward, natural, vivid and intimate, presenting the lofty spirit of the Chinese nation.



The Chinese Folk Arts Exhibition will be inaugurated with a ribbon cutting ceremony on July 22, in the presence of senior officials from Diyar Al Muharraq, Dragon City Management, dignitaries from Kuwait Finance House as well as invited guests. On the first day of the Art Exhibition, visitors will be given a tour of the stands which will showcase an important part of Chinas extremely rich cultural folk art heritage.



The Chinese Folk Arts Exhibition will showcase displays of Chinese calligraphy, paintings as well as authentic Chinese handicrafts which will also be available for sale. There will be a live demonstration of Chinese calligraphy, which is a unique visual art of decorative handwriting and lettering with a broad tip instrument such as a dip pen or brush.



Speaking about the exhibition, Patrick Zheng Shuo, general manager of Chinamex Bahrain Management Company, the operating company of Dragon City, said: We are glad to offer the people of Bahrain the opportunity of experiencing firsthand the unique Chinese cultural aspect which in this exhibition will highlight the traditional Chinese artefacts, paintings and culture. Our visitors will have the pleasure of witnessing the famous art of Chinese calligraphy by folk artists up-close and purchase some of their works of art as well.



I would like to take this opportunity to extend a warm welcome to members of the public where guests can enjoy the chance to immerse themselves in the beautiful intricacies of the Chinese culture as well as avail the pieces of art at the most economical of prices. With the event starting over the weekend, we look forward to welcoming people from neighbouring countries as well to the exhibition, he added.



Dragon City is a first of its kind development that encompasses over 787 commercial units, making it the largest wholesale and retail trading centre in Bahrain. Situated to the South-West of Diyar Al Muharraq in close proximity to Bahrains International Airport, the state-of-the-art Khalifa Bin Salman Port and the capital of Bahrain, Manama, Dragon City caters to customers from both the kingdom and beyond.



Dragon City is infused with Chinese architectural and cultural aspects and offers Chinese products of the highest quality to local consumers, trade customers and tourists. Encompassing four parts, Dragon City is comprised of Dragon Mall, a 4,500-sq-m area designated for Warehouses, the Dining Village and Dragon Apartments. - TradeArabia News Service


For Chet Skilbred, standing outside the small dark office of the former Glenrock Coal Company, Tuesdays visit from Gov. Matt Mead signaled the end of decades of work.

As more than 100 wind turbines churned against a powder-blue sky, Skilbred and his wife, Carolee, took pride in a job well done, a land returned to its former glory.

Skilbred began reclamation work at the Dave Johnston Coal Mine when it was still pulling coal out of the windswept ground in 1980. When the coal was too deep to be worth the effort, the mine closed. The workers left, and the 11-mile stretch of bruised ground began the long process of reclamation, overseen largely by the Skilbreds.

Officials from the Department of Environmental Quality, the governors office and Rocky Mountain Power, which owns the land, were on hand Tuesday to celebrate the sites release from bond. After a mines closure, there is a series of required clean-up phases to bring the land back to health, before the state of Wyoming and the Office of Surface Mine Reclamation and Enforcement cede jurisdiction back to the owner.

Its a rare event in Wyoming, where most former coal land is in the first or second phase of cleanup. But the story of the Dave Johnston Mine is notable not only because the final 10-year monitoring phase has closed but because the former non-renewable energy site has become the site of three wind farms.

There is no other place where we mined coal for energy for all these years and then we started producing energy on top of the ground. Its a very unique site, said Leslie Blythe, regional business manager for Rocky Mountain Power.

The three farms  Glenrock, Rolling Hills and Glenrock III  comprise 158 turbines and produce 237 megawatts of power, said Laine Anderson, director of wind operations.

Anderson was an oilfield engineer but turned to other industries after the last big oil bust in the 1980s. He and Skilbred built the wind farm for Rocky Mountain Power.

The worlds changing, he said. You have to change with it.

Like the Skilbreds, Anderson views the windy hills with a sense of accomplishment.

Mead praised the work done on the mine site and the ingenuity of the wind projects.

The mine provided coal to produce low-cost energy to thousands of homes and businesses throughout the region for four decades, he said. At the end of its useful life, as we do in Wyoming, the land was restored to a better state. This is a model of mining, reclamation, repurposing land and our regulatory systems.

In the mines latter years about 4 million tons of coal were mined each year. In 1997, two years before it closed, the coal company paid $7.9 million in royalties to state and local governments and employed 160 people.

Reclamation is always on the back burner when youre mining, Skilbred remembered. When it quit, the mining in 1998, then [reclamation] takes on a whole new meaning, because then reclamation is the job out here.

His wife operated heavy equipment in the mining days. Now she likes to watch the pronghorn sitting in the shade of the turbines on a hot day and drinking from the truck-tire ponds she and her husband installed.

To see this job finally finished is awesome, she said. To see that it looks as good as it does is even better.
Patio talks at trails

The National Historic Trails Interpretive Center (NHTIC) is once again hosting summer afternoon programs on pioneer and Wyoming history. These short interpretive programs, ranging from 20-45 minutes, are free and open to the public.

July 23, 1 p.m. Martins Cove and the Handcarts of 1856: In 1856, five different groups of immigrants from Europe pulled handcarts from Iowa City, Iowa to the Great Salt Lake Valley. Three of the groups made it without much trouble; however the last two groups were caught in winter storms with little food. Join us as President Bushman from the Mormon Handcart Historic Site shares these stories and more regarding the Handcarts of 1856.

July 24, 1 p.m. Navigating the Plains in the 1800s: Join us as Kevin Reddy, Living Historian and re-enactor, shares the intricacies, methodology and science of land navigation in the 1800s. Kevin will provide a sound perspective of the transportation corridors, including migration and commerce along the pioneer route known as the Great Platte River road.

July 30, 1 p.m. Native American Spiritual Traditions: Stop in and help us welcome back Willie Leclair, Wyomings resident ambassador for the Eastern Shoshone people! Willie brings articles of worship and describes their significance as he explains a Shoshone spiritual perspective on the world and the human beings place in it. This is a wonderful opportunity to interact with a Shoshone cultural interpreter!

July 31, 1 p.m. Pioneer Doll Making: During the early days of America, children often played with dolls. Dolls could be soft and cuddly, such as a rag doll or made from other items found in the home. Dolls were easy to make and were generally made from scraps of fabric already available. Since these dolls were homemade, surely no two were ever the same! Join NHTIC volunteer Jean Smart as she illuminates the most popular of these early American pastimes.

For more information, please contact Jason Vlcan at (307) 261-7780.

Independent film screening

The Natrona County Librarys Independent Film Series will feature Maries Story on Tuesday, July 19 at 6:30 p.m. in the Crawford Room. Call 577-READ ext. 2 or email reference@natronacountylibrary.org for more information. Synopsis: Based on true events, Maries Story recounts the inspiring life of a young girl born deaf and blind and the courageous journey of the nun who helps her learn to communicate with the world around her. At the turn of the 19th century, a humble artisan and his wife send Marie, their deaf and blind fourteen-year-old daughter, to the Larnay Institute in central France, where an order of Catholic nuns manage a school for the deaf. There, the idealistic Sister Marguerite sees in Marie a unique potential, and vows to bring the wild girl out of the darkness.

Final free lecture at fort

Fort Caspar Museum is pleased to announce its annual free summer lecture series for 2016. The lectures will be held on seven consecutive Wednesday evenings at 6:30 p.m. Each presentation will focus on a different Impression on Wyoming, from past to present and from east to west. These free programs are funded in part by the Fort Caspar Museum Association and the Wyoming Humanities Council.

Each lecture will take place in the Multi-Use Room at Fort Caspar Museum. The programs are adult focused and will last approximately 60 minutes, including the lecture and a discussion opportunity. Most of the talks will feature a PowerPoint presentation, and if the speaker has published on a relevant topic, the lecture will conclude with a book signing.

Here are the dates, speakers, and their topics for the other free summer lectures:

July 20, John Farr will present Wyoming: Sheepherders State.

For more information, contact the museum at 235-8462 or check the Fort Caspar Museum website, www.fortcasparwyoming.com. Fort Caspar Museum is located at 4001 Fort Caspar Road.

Republican legislative and commissioner debate

The Natrona County Republican Party and the Natrona County Republican Women will be hosting a Republican primary Legislative and County Commissioner debate on Tuesday, July 26, 2016, at the Ramkota in the Theatre Room.

It is open to the public. The doors will open at 6 p.m., and the debate will start at 6:30 p.m. We will be doing the Legislative Debates first for House Districts 37, 56, 57 and 58; followed by the County Commissioner candidates. Each House District will take approximately 30 minutes and the commissioner candidates will be 30 minutes and start approximately at 8:35 p.m.

Questions can be submitted to chairman@natronagop.com or there will be an opportunity to drop them in a basket the night of the debate. No questions from the floor and no personal attack questions  issue questions only. The moderator will be Brian Scott Gamroth, Natrona County state committeeman.

Wyoming Blues Challenge

Calling all Wyoming Blues Bands and Solo/Duo Blues acts. Heres your chance to represent Wyoming in Memphis at the International Blues Challenge. Prelims will be held on August 7 at the Alibi Pub in Laramie and August 20 at the Attic above the World Famous Wonder Bar in Casper. Finals will be held on September 18 in the ballrooms at the Parkway Plaza. If you think you have what it takes, contact Rick Davis at wyomingblueschallenge@gmail.com to get rules and receive your entry information.

New displays at senior center

What is Zentangle? Zentangle is a fun, relaxing ,easy method of drawing that creates structured images.

Visit the Senior Center at 1831 E. 4th St. to view this fascinating display of amazing drawings by local artists. Also featured is a collection of Japanese collectibles including pottery, clothing, dishes and more.

For more information, call 265-4678.

Veteran Cigar Night

Every Wednesday from 5:30 to 7 p.m., all veterans are invited to Veteran Cigar Night at the Casper Cigar Company, 4717 W. Yellowstone Highway, sponsored by Casper Cigar Company. There is no cost to attend.

This is a time and place for our communitys combat veterans to relax and share their stories with other combat veterans while enjoying a good cigar. Veterans receive 20 percent off cigars. For more information, call Josh Cruse at 307-337-4400 or josh@caspercigar.com

Downtown walking tours

Casper Theater Company will present two downtown walking tours this summer. All tours are $25 per person and reservations are required.

The Casper Ghost Tour will begin at 8:30 p.m., on Thursdays and Fridays through July 29. The Ghost Tour guide will provide you with information on downtown hauntings in buildings, alleys, and businesses. She will take you on a 90-minute tour through the alleys of downtown talking about strange phenomenon seen by citizens, business owners and employees of several locations in the downtown area. You will learn about some locations such as Eggingtons, Wonder Bar, Wolfords, Lou Tauberts, the Downtown Parking Garage, the two movie theaters and much more. Tickets are $25 per person and a reservation is needed by calling 267-7243.

The Sand Bar Tour will be a murder mystery walking tour. The tour guide will take you for a walk on the Sand Bar at 7:30 p.m., where you will come upon a victim of the times. There will be characters to will meet all of which had a motive. Each character will talk with you and tell you about their life on the Sand Bar, businesses, painted ladies, bootleggers, and gamblers. All will culminate at the end to find out Who Dun It? Tickets are $25 and the tour runs two weekends, Friday and Saturday, September 9-10 and 16-17. Reservations are required by calling 267-7243.

If you have any questions about either tours please call Casper Theater Company at the above number, or email us at caspertheatercompany@gmail.com Our website is www.caspertheatercompany.net

Submit to miniature show

ART 321/Casper Artists Guild would like to invite all artists to submit entries in our 22nd Annual International Miniature Art Show 2016. You can find the specifications on entries and entry forms by visiting our website at art321.org and looking under Exhibits.

Fees and entries are due July 30, 2016. The show opens to the public on August 4, 2016, and closes August 27, 2016.

Cash awards and ribbons will be given. Size of cash awards will depend upon number of entries.

Dr. Valerie Innella Maiers is the show judge. She teaches art history and museum studies in the Visual Arts Department at Casper College.
Helping Others

Make fleece blankets

The Fleece Blanket Project provides a time of fun and fellowship while working on a community service project to benefit others. The group will be meeting at First Christian Church, 520 CY Avenue, Saturday, August 20, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Saturday, September 17, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This informal group welcomes volunteers of all ages from churches, agencies, and groups, as well as anyone who would like to help cut and tie fleece to make blankets to be given to the homeless and those in need in Natrona County.

To date, volunteers have made 190 blankets which were given to individuals and agencies that provide help to those in need of warmth and comfort. In addition to volunteering your time, you may donate fleece (2 yards each of two complementary colors/patterns). Bring sharp scissors if you have them or just come and tie! Parking is in back of the church. If you have any questions, please call First Christian Church at 234-8964.

Blood donors have chance to win Ranger

Blood Donors who give at United Blood Services blood center or blood drives through September 9, 2016, will be automatically entered to win a 2016 Polaris Ranger 900XP in the Rollin Up for a Ranger Giveaway.

We are excited to offer this giveaway particularly now because donations have been down, said Jennifer Bredahl, regional donor recruitment cirector, United Blood Services. We encourage new and existing donors to participate in this fun promotion to ultimately save lives and to ensure our supply is strong enough to respond to any emergencies or traumas.

To make an appointment please call 877-827-4376 or go to www.UnitedBloodServices.org.

To save time, donors can now fill out their Fast Track Health History Questionnaire online at www.UnitedBloodServices.org the day of their donation. To donate blood, volunteers must be at least 16 years old (16 year old donors need a minor donor permit which is available online) and be in good health. Must be 18 years or older to win. Offer applies to participating United Blood Services blood centers and mobile blood drives operated within Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana.

Thanks to Blue Envelope

Pathfinder Boat and Fishing Club would like to thank Blue Envelope Health Fund for their donation of an AED. This piece of equipment will be housed at Pathfinder Marina and would be used in a life saving event. The board and members of Pathfinder Boat Club thank you for your generosity.

Suggestions for food bags

The Wyoming Food for Thought Project is now providing weekend food bags to nearly 600 children in Natrona County weekly. While all donations are appreciated and used, this year the staff has compiled a list of things to donate monthly, in order to stock the shelves of the pantry at the program center.

Here is a list of suggestions for the entire year: July, canned vegetables; August, Chef Boyardee products; September, pork and beans; October, cereal; November, soup; December, canned chili.

Donations can be dropped off any time at Food for Thought drop site locations, which include Great Harvest Bread, eastside WAC, Reliant FCU, Mary Ann's Beans, Casper College Library, Aspen Ridge Dental, and the Food for Thought Program Center, 900 St. John St.
PALM COAST, Fla.  Authorities say a Florida man fired shots at two late-night "Pokemon Go" players in a car outside his house but no one was injured.

Flagler County Sheriff's Office spokesman James Troiano says in a news release that the homeowner awoke to a noise outside about 1:30 a.m. Saturday and saw a car sitting in the road in front of his house. He told authorities he got a handgun and approached the vehicle.

Troiano says the two teens in the car sped away and the man fired several shots at them.

Later that morning, he says, the mother of one of the teens called the sheriff's office when they realized the car had a flat tire and several bullet holes in it. She told officials the two had been playing the smartphone app.
CASPER  Gene and Bonnie (Smith) Rohrbeck will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary July 23, 2016.

They were married July 23, 1966, at Grace United Methodist Church in Nashville, Illinois.

They met at Iowa State University during Peace Corps training. They were Peace Corps volunteers in Uruguay, working with rural youth groups from 1963-1965.

After a number years as a secretary and substitute teacher, she worked for 16 years as a social worker for the Department of Social Services in Natrona County, retiring in 1995. For the next 17 years, she served first as a guest services agent at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel and later as front office manager for 12 years.

He worked as an Extension 4-H/specialist with the Cooperative Extension Service first at the University of Wisconsin and then at the University of Wyoming, retiring in 1995 after 30 years. During six of their 17 years working in Yellowstone National Park, he was a campground coordinator/trainer of summer staff.

Both are active volunteers, contributing their talents to a variety of organizations over the decades. They particularly enjoy serving the community through First United Methodist Church. She was also active in League of Women Voters and he has participated and volunteered over the years in the Audubon Society.

Their children are Brian and Patti Rohrbeck, Casper; Steve and Rebecca Rohrbeck, Salem, Oregon; and Denise and Dean Fulton, Bellingham, Washington. They have three grandchildren.

A celebration will be held at 10 a.m. Sunday, July 24, 2016, between the Sunday morning services at First United Methodist Church. Hosts are Brian and Patti Rohrbeck, Steve and Rebecca Rohrbeck, and Dean and Denise Fulton. All family and friends are invited.
SHERIDAN  Man dies after falling into hot pool.

Woman injured by bison while taking selfie.

Canadian travel group charged for walking on Grand Prismatic Spring.

The headlines pop up often. Theyre headlines about people breaking the rules at Yellowstone National Park and facing fatal or legal consequences. These mishaps of tourists at Yellowstone cause most Wyoming residents to frequently shake their heads in disbelief.

One of those Wyoming residents is Andy Robbins. Instead of getting angry about the incompetency of tourists in Yellowstone, he decided to make light of it  with a coloring book.

Robbins, an artist from Ranchester, recently published a coloring book entitled Yellowstone National Park: A Cautionary Coloring Book. The book, which Robbins stresses is for adults, depicts violent examples of the ways people can die in in the park.

I think people come to Yellowstone and they have that funny sense of entitlement, Robbins said. ... I dont intend to single out individuals with this book. Some of these things are accidents and its pretty horrific, but I guess its kind of gallows humor.

The longtime artist has always had an interest in the concept of death and he thinks highly of Yellowstone.

Given the recent headlines of Yellowstone-related deaths, he put the two together and published the book.

The public has received the book well. Within the first week it was available for sale, the Gallery on Main in Dayton (one of two places its currently being sold) sold out of its copies. Robbins said he sold around 500 copies of his coloring book as of July 6.

You never know how its going to be perceived, Robbins said. Even if people think its disgusting or people are offended by it, its still fascinating  people are still captivated by it.

With the early success, Robbins is hoping to sell copies of the book by wholesale to different areas around the state.

The book depicts people dying in a multitude of ways, such as being torn apart by a bear, trampled by a moose, in a car wreck watching wildlife and boiling in a hot pool. The coloring book also has recommended colors for drawings like selfie stick silver, beary brown and compound fracture red.

It is sad that people die in these horrific ways, but I guess maybe you just have to make light of it, Robbins said. I guess its that gallows humor. But I think its received well by people because they see these people (who die in Yellowstone) as outsiders who dont get it.

Its not all about death, though. Each illustration comes with fun facts about animals and Yellowstones wild terrain.

A record 4 million people visited Yellowstone last year, and those numbers are expected to climb this year with the 100th anniversary of the National Park System. Its had a severe impact on the park. In 2015, park rangers issued more than 50,000 resources warnings to tourists and vehicle accidents in the park have skyrocketed more than 167 percent.

Its really an awesome place, Robbins said of Yellowstone. I think what misleads people is that people think it is really sanitized, but there is something really primordial about it, you get that sense that danger is not far.

Is there an end in sight for mishaps in Yellowstone? Robbins said absolutely not. He said not even the most gruesome illustrations can deter tourists from dying at the worlds first national park.

Thats the beauty of my product, Robbins said, laughing. Its a product that will still be good next summer.
CHEYENNE  Perhaps some of you remember seeing Gov. Matt Meads announcement on television earlier this year of a program to help lawyers with problems.

Mead said that, as an attorney, he recognizes the stresses of the job and the need for a program for lawyers who are struggling under the weight of their duties.

The vehicle is the The Wyoming Lawyer Assistance Program (WyLAP).

Until it was created more than two years ago, Wyoming was the only state that did not have a formal program to help lawyers impaired by any one of the various demons that bedevil people in jobs with the pressure of deadlines and heavy responsibilities.

Some people regards lawyers as rich fat cats in suits who dont deserve sympathy. Some lawyers are well-off, but the average salary isnt that stunning.

And they are the professionals people turn to when they are in trouble. They also are the men and women assigned to defend indigents, who have no other options.

Think Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, admittedly a romantic and idealist portrait of a small-town lawyer. Or the more realistic case of the late Gov. Ed Herschler of Kemmerer, who neglected his solo practice to appeal successfully to the U.S Supreme Court the death sentence of a transient he had been assigned to defend, a man he disliked.

Jack Speight of Cheyenne, a semi-retired trial lawyer who does pro bono work for legal services, is the director of WyLAP, an unpaid position.

He was persuaded to take on the job by Wyoming Bar staff members who showed him a list of the names of attorneys who could or could have benefited from such a program.

We had four attorneys who committed suicide  three under the radar and one not, Speight said.

Since the beginning of the program, with rules adopted in April 2014 by the Wyoming Supreme Court, the outreach effort has helped 18 attorneys.

Speight said none had drug problems and only about four had alcohol problems.

The majority had complaints of depression, anxiety and feelings of hopelessness.

More times than not, he said, the judges are the ones who are concerned about an attorney who needs help.

The grant money comes from donations  from sole practitioners or large, small and medium firms as well as contributions from family members or friends.

So far they donated about $30,000, which goes in grants to lawyers for health care treatment of their problem whatever it may be.

Rhonda Woodward, a Cheyenne attorney is president of the WyLAP Foundation board.

We know from national surveys that lawyers have higher than average rates of alcohol abuse, depression and stress. Tragically, in Wyoming, we have experienced suicides by lawyers in recent years. Oftentimes, it is difficult for those who suffer from these issues to admit that they need help. Therefore, the WyLAP Foundation board wants to raise the awareness of family, friends and colleagues of these lawyers that there is help available which can save careers, families and lives, Woodward wrote in an email.

The seven-member foundation board includes four attorneys and two judges.

The rules require WyLAP, among other things, to provide assistance to members of the legal profession who suffer from physical or mental disabilities that result from addiction, disease, disorder, trauma or age and that impair their ability to practice.

Speight gave an example of the how the grants can help.

The applicant could be a 50-year-old lawyer in another part of the state, a solo practitioner, who has no health insurance and is burdened by overhead costs. He is strapped for money.

Our struggling country lawyer probably is depressed as anyone would be in similar circumstances. He is getting desperate.

Assistance could deter him from taking a clients money and being disbarred.

Once a lawyer reaches out to Speight, everything is totally confidential. He cannot tell the state bar staff or anyone else about the contact.

The program has grown to include 70 volunteer attorneys in 18 counties.

The local volunteer attorneys help with soft interventions and follow up with attorneys in their areas who are receiving professional help. The volunteers may even act as mentors.
As a small Wyoming business, it is alarming to realize your own government is willing to put you under. We expected the Obama administration to wage war on coal and oil, as promised. But we didnt expect Wyoming officials to threaten killing new business, much-needed jobs, a generous tax revenue stream and a chance to diversify our states energy-dependent economy to wage war on wind.

The Wyoming Legislatures Joint Revenue Committee was tasked with replenishing tax sources for school funding that was lost with the decline in mineral markets. This necessary mission is not the issue. However, the conversation changed from finding new tax streams to demonizing wind energy and holding it responsible for shouldering the load of lost taxes.

In May, the committee drafted bills to increase taxes at an undetermined amount to wind energy producers, claiming wind is not paying its fair share. However, the data in the report skewed the revenue realized from various industries. For instance, property taxes were excluded from the report, which seems fair if everyone pays them. What wasnt considered were property taxes paid at 11.5 percent on every multimillion-dollar turbine unit as well as the surrounding acreage, making property taxes higher for wind. The Wyoming Wind Electricity Generation Tax, (charged only in Wyoming), which charges one dollar per megawatt hour produced was included in the report, but is proposed to rise by an unknown percentage. Wyoming is poised to receive hundreds of millions of tax dollars from wind energy as it is. That seems like a fair share.

However, because wind producers are facing undefined tax increases, they cannot determine the cost of doing business here and are seeking to pay other windy states with business-friendly practices the hundreds of millions in taxes.

The conversation and mission need to revert to finding tax revenues for school funding, not making wind the enemy or low-hanging fruit. It is not the job of the Wyoming Legislature to pick winners and losers in our economy. Our schools need funding, and there is an equitable and viable solution available through other obvious tax streams. Lets manage Wyoming as a business and incentivize positives like new business development and set deterrents to negatives that do not promote the public good or boost our economy.

In 2014, an increase to the malt beverage tax of 15 cents per gallon was proposed and quickly killed. Wyoming has the lowest tax, at 2 cents. Yet, taxes are spent advertising the risks of the DUI life. It is beyond comprehension that a 10-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax was so readily passed in Wyoming, but increases in the malt beverage tax havent been reasonably considered since Prohibition ended. The Wyoming Legislature could soundly incentivize consumers by dropping gas taxes to their prior rate and increasing beer taxes by a quarter to make up the difference.

In 2015, legislators voted to oppose increasing tobacco taxes while applauding establishments for adopting no smoking policies. Colorado charges 24 cents per pack more in taxes, while other bordering states charge double that of Wyoming. Wyoming lost a year of increased revenue from this stream, and again taxes were spent advertising to us the negative effects of tobacco.

Later this year, one of the largest wind farms in North America is slated to begin construction near Rawlins. Wyoming businesses, like ours, hit hard by the bust were planning to bid on this work. Jobs would be created. Workers would earn money to spend on every market affected by the bust. Now is the time for our legislators to do things right. Incentivize the things we want, set deterrents for the things we dont want, be equitable to all concerned and stop working against Wyomings economy by picking which businesses succeed or fail.

Obviously, the federal government harmed Wyomings economy, but is Wyoming willing to harm our own economy?

Gov. Matt Mead warned against the potential losses Wyoming could suffer by increasing mineral and wind taxes. He stated, We want business here. Were trying to diversify our economy  We need the jobs. We need the infusion of capital and we need to tax wind and other industries in a way that they have motivation to stay in Wyoming.

The proposed bills to increase taxes on wind energy are unreasonable and divisive and need to be killed at the September meeting, to begin breaking free of boom and bust cycles and seize the opportunity to create a healthier Wyoming economy.
For decades, Wyoming has proudly mined the coal that fuels America. Coal still generates more than a third of U.S. electricity  more than any other single power source last year  and provides thousands of good jobs for states like Wyoming.

Unfortunately, Wyomings coal industry is now facing an all-out assault from an unlikely antagonist  the federal government. With its so-called stream protection rule, the Obama administration is determined to keep coal in the ground and low-cost electricity away from American households and industries.

If there was a poster child for needless, costly regulation, the SPR would certainly qualify. This 2,300-page regulatory behemoth could not only spell the end the U.S. coal industry but could also mean higher costs for basic industries and households that expect and need affordable electricity.

You wouldnt know this from the rules name, however. After all, who doesnt want to protect streams? But like other federal rules with poll-tested names designed to win public backing, the SPR will do more to pad a bureaucratic agencys budget than protect streams. The federal governments own reports show that virtually all U.S. mining operations carry no offsite environmental impacts. Because of this, a skeptical Congress is asking why the U.S. Office of Surface Mining needs more funding when poor market conditions have already left it with fewer coal mines to regulate.

Then theres the sleight of hand by which OSM foisted this regulation on the states. The agency spent six years dodging both its promise and legal obligation to consult with state mining agencies before proposing this massive rule. States were left in the dark as OSM, hoping to expand its role, muscled in on the states current authority to set mining standards. Thats why Wyoming is one of 17 coal-producing states that have formally protested the SPR.

The coal industry and state governments arent the only casualties of this power grab. Because the SPR is certain to drive up the cost of mining, it will also drive up the number of unemployed miners. An independent analysis of the rule projects the loss of at least 40,000 high-wage coal mining jobs nationwide, adding to the 67,000 jobs already lost since 2011. Total job losses throughout the U.S. coal supply chain  from railroads and power plants to ports and heavy equipment  could reach 281,000 jobs.

Keeping coal in the ground will be expensive. The annual value of lost coal production from the SPR could reach $29 billion, with federal and state tax revenue falling by as much as $6.4 billion annually. Thats why Americas biggest losers may not be coal communities. Displacing affordable coal power with higher-cost alternatives will mean heavier price burdens on everyone, including low-income households that can least afford it.

The SPR is a rule in search of a purpose  one that is more about politics than environmental protection  and from a federal agency that has clearly lost its way.
Sometimes the exception proves the rule. An unsafe intersection on the West Belt Loop is one such exception. Its important to recognize that the Wyoming Department of Transportation typically sets a high bar for construction and maintenance of Wyoming roads where safety is concerned.

But the new intersection west of Casper is the unfortunate exception. It was obvious to many that the intersection was dangerous. And while it is encouraging that the department is taking concrete actions to make the intersection safer, it is unfortunate it took a fatal crash to get their attention.

The new bypass, meant to divert heavy traffic around Casper, opened Dec. 31 and links the Shoshoni bypass and U.S. Highway 20-26 to Wyoming Highway 220. When it was brand-new, officials warned drivers to be aware of the new exit and entry points.

Unfortunately, those warnings werent enough. Carol Plummer and George Rott, along with three horses and a dog, were killed in a June 17 wreck.

Since the crash, Wyoming Department of Transportation officials have added safety measures to the intersection. Theyve installed rumble strips to draw attention to an upcoming stop sign and lowered the speed limit from 65 to 55 mph.

These decisions were both important and correct. However, its unfortunate that they were made only after a fatal crash.

Its particularly unfortunate because this wasnt the first time safety officials would have heard about a potentially dangerous traffic situation. Residents in the area had shared their concerns at planning meetings held before the West Belt Loop opened, asking for a traffic light at the intersection. Officials told them a light wouldnt be necessary.

Now, residents say theyve personally seen at least a couple of crashes at the intersection and wonder how many were narrowly avoided.

Its right that officials are willing to take action to make the intersection safer. But we must also learn from this and move forward with those lessons  no exceptions to the rule.
House District 57 voters need no clearer example of Ray Pachecos unfitness to hold public office than his blatantly deceitful Republican candidacy. He was a registered Democrat until 2014. Changing his party affiliation appears to be the latest tactic intended to further his desire to make a career in politics. He campaigned for Barack Obamas 2012 re-election as an official member of the Wyoming Democratic Partys Delegate Affirmative Action Committee. He lists social justice as his Facebook page interest. Republican voters must be represented by a true Republican promoting equal justice, not by a social justice warrior.

Wyoming again faces difficult economic times and it will be irresistible for politicians like Ray Pacheco to take federal money -- which never comes without strings attached -- and further subjugate Wyoming to the Washington, D.C., bureaucrats. In an interview with the Casper Star-Tribune on April 29, Mr. Pacheco said he hasnt decided whether he supports expanding Medicaid. He stated, The Obamacare measure could amount to federal intrusion. On the other hand, the state would be turning down over $100 million a year in federal funds at a time when state revenues are down and energy workers are losing their jobs. Clearly he is tempted by the lure of free federal taxpayer dollars. Where else will he compromise Wyoming sovereignty? The last thing Wyoming needs as we confront an energy bust created by Washington policies is another academic Liberal progressive politician doing Washingtons bidding.
100 YEARS AGO

Plans for the New Hotel are progressing nicely. The Board of Directors has decided upon 50 rooms at a cost of $10,000. Building is to commence as soon as all the stock has been sold. The site has not yet been chosen. Stock sales will begin soon as permission has been received from the Corporation Commission.

A free sanatorium for tubercular people has been established at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Mr. R. T. Scott of this city has been appointed to be Arizona State Secretary of the National Tubercular Association. It is to be hoped that many of these social outcasts without money to be cared for may find treatment without price at this new facility.

The auto tags for 1916 are to be a work of art in black with raised white figures embellished with a bulls head symbolic of the cattle industry.

The State Timber Public Sale held on July 6 went to A L & T Lumber Co. Seven million feet of prime timber in Section 26. N R57 at $3.25 per 1,000 board feet came to $22,750.

75 YEARS AGO

The entire county is involved in President Roosevelts drive for scrap aluminum. We have a shortage of this vital metal for the war effort in this country. A house-to-house canvas is being made by the Civil Defense Commission of Coconino County for the use of the defense industry. This is of utmost importance. F. H. La Guardia, Coconino County Director.

Babbitts has installed a Meistergram Machine, an instrument for sewing monograms on clothing. Miss Frances Bishop came from Los Angeles to demonstrate it and to instruct Miss Hazel Bishop in how to operate the machine. Miss Bishop is now monogramming in the Dry Goods department. Your monograms are free on items purchased at Babbitt's.

There were 7 lightning-caused forest fires this week. The forests are extremely dry.

50 YEARS AGO

A four-business crime spree yielded a $1,000 take Sunday night. The same modus was used when entering The Plaza Shopping Center, the A.J. Bayless Market, the Plaza Pharmacy and the, Prescription Pharmacy on Beaver Street. All doors were forced, all cash registers were forced. No narcotics, only cash was taken and there was no vandalism.

A one-way street plan has been proposed by the Arizona Highway Department to help alleviate the downtown parking problem.

With the rain the forests have been reopened although the precipitation is still well below normal.

H. 86 Sun. L. 48 Mon. Intermittent rain. Accumulation 0.10

25 YEARS AGO

The Lowell Observatory has received the donation of a prototype Earthy Tractor from the Caterpillar Corp. of Peoria, Illinois. The $100,000 tractor is to be used in the construction of the new Visitors Center.

If NAU grows beyond the proposed cap of 16,000 it will lose its unique quality of small classes, strong student-faculty interaction and small Liberal Arts atmosphere. President Eugene Hughes.

H. 87 Wed. & Thurs. L. 50 Sun. - Thurs. Rain 0.11 Mon. & Wed.
Editor:

Hunters, fishermen, campers, bikers, hikers, etc. should all be aware that Tim Stubson of Casper, an attorney and candidate for Cynthia Lummiss seat in Congress, should not have your support for several reasons.

Public lands, Wyoming's greatest asset: Stubson, if elected could cripple the state with his ideas. He supports a constitutional convention to force the feds to hold a constitutional convention to force a balanced budget amendment. While it sounds like a good idea, it sure as hell isnt. If the states force a convention, Katie, bar the door. All hell could break loose in public lands states once a convention is called, all the doors open, everything in the constitution could be up for discussion and change, i.e. we could lose all of Wyomings federal tax benefits in lien of tax monies, highway funds, fire fighting, Game & Fish, etc.

Stubson would also have the state given the operational rights to certain public lands. Quite frankly, as a member (sometimes) of the appropriations committee he should know we darn well we cant afford it.

Give us any control of federal lands and watch the money grabbers wring their hands in glee

Another reason to reject Stubson, Tim's wife is an attorney and guest columnist for the Star-Tribune who a year or so ago insinuated in an editorial that educators who voted against a $30 some million school bond issue that voters rightfully denied werent very bright. She also said that those of you who voted twice to kill a more than reasonable library building project were little wacky and must have thought she was smarter apparently than those who her husband represents -- you.

Im sure most Natrona County voters would rather have a legislator representing their voting decisions that the thoughts of his big-spending wife.

This isnt the first time the coal mines faltered, converting railroad locomotives from steam to diesel did the same thing in the 40s. I was there as a third generation rail. Terrible as both times are and were, its called progress.

Three terms in Wyoming is enough. Turn Stubson loose and keep him home.
KABUL, Afghanistan  President Obamas decision to allow more aggressive U.S. military action in support of Afghan combat operations against the Taliban could have a game-changing effect on the long war, Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said Saturday.

After prohibiting U.S. forces from targeting the Taliban except in limited circumstances beginning in 2015, Obama shifted course last month and said Nicholson could use U.S. airpower and other military assets against the Taliban if it supported offensive Afghan action as part of a strategic campaign plan.

What that amounts to, Nicholson said in an Associated Press interview at his military headquarters in Kabul, is encouragement for the Afghans to stay on the offense.

Armies win on the offense, he said, alluding to longstanding U.S. concerns that Afghan commanders have been too passive, defensive and lacking in aggressive strategies for pursing the Taliban once the militants begin to lose ground.

The ability to help the Afghan security forces when they are on the offense is really where we want to be, because when they have the initiative, when they are on the offense, when they are taking the fight to the enemy, thats how theyre going to be successful, Nicholson said.

Nicholson said that the attempted coup in Turkey had no impact on the U.S.-led campaign to support Afghanistan in its war against the Taliban.

He said the international coalition he leads includes more than 500 Turkish soldiers.
Haiti

Huge crowds wash

in sacred waterfalls

SAUT DEAU  Carrying candles or calabash bowls with offerings, tens of thousands made a pilgrimage to bathe in the sacred waterfalls of Saut dEau.

A mix of Voodoo and Christian faithful along with a cohort of young, hard-partying revelers gathered Saturday in the rushing waters, where they scrubbed their bodies with aromatic leaves and soap.

They prayed for everything from winning lottery numbers to a good harvest and an end to Haitis chronic political dysfunction. It was final day of this years annual three-day festival.

In the nearby town, pilgrims converged on the local church to pray to the Virgin Mary.

Panama

Noriega set for surgery on benign brain tumor

PANAMA CITY  Imprisoned former strongman Manuel Noriega is scheduled to have a benign brain tumor surgically removed.

Noriegas doctor is Eduardo Reyes and he says a neurologist has scheduled the surgery for Thursday.

Reyes said Saturday that representatives of the 82-year-old Noriega are requesting he be allowed to prepare for surgery at home to avoid infection. The tumor has caused severe headaches.

Finland

129 vintage Soviet cars

auctioned off at border

HELSINKI  Customs officials say over 100 mostly vintage Soviet cars abandoned by migrants crossing the Nordic countrys border with Russia have been sold in a two-day auction that drew some 1,300 car aficionados to the Arctic.

Spokesman Sampo Vaisanen from the customs unit in Salla said Saturday the Finnish state netted some $21,000 for selling 129 cars.

Many were rusty Soviet-era Ladas and Volgas from the 1970s and 1980s.

The cars, sold mainly to collectors in prices ranging from one euro to a few hundred euros, were left by migrants earlier this year. Finland barred people from crossing the vehicles-only border point in Salla on bicycles for safety reasons, so asylum seekers bought rundown Soviet-era cars in Russia and drove them to the border.

Brazil

N-physicist with ties

to terrorists is expelled

SAO PAULO  The Justice Ministry says Brazil has deported a Franco-Algerian nuclear physicist who was once convicted of association with terror plotters.

The ministrys press office says Adlene Hicheur was deported to France pm Friday night.

A French court sentenced Hicheur to five years in prison in 2012 for criminal association with al-Qaidas north African wing. He denied guilt was released in 2013 and moved to Brazil.
PHOENIX  Two statewide business groups are trying to keep voters from deciding whether $12 an hour is too much for workers and $216 an hour is too little for hospital executives.

Lawsuits filed in Maricopa County Superior Court contend both initiatives are legally flawed. They ask judges to rule that Secretary of State Michele Reagan cannot put either on the ballot.

The challenge to the minimum wage is being brought by the Arizona Restaurant Association, whose members have workers paid less than the proposal would require.

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry is taking the lead on behalf of its member hospitals to sideline the cap on hospital executive pay.

The potentially more sweeping of the measures would require all employers to pay their workers at least $12 an hour by 2020, up from the states current minimum wage of $8.05. The measure also would require employers to provide at least three days of paid personal leave.

Supporters led by Living United for Change in Arizona submitted about 270,000 signatures, about 120,000 more than required, to put the issue on the ballot.

The second measure would cap the salary of hospital executives at how much the president of the United States is paid, which is currently $450,000, including expenses. The Service Employees International Union turned in more than 281,000 signatures to get the initiative on the ballot.

In the minimum-wage case, attorney Roopali Desai raised questions about whether some people who circulated petitions were not legally qualified. Desai also said there are defects in the affidavits that circulators are required to sign.

If Judge Joshua Rogers agrees, that would mean none of the signatures these individuals gathered could be counted, even if they came from registered voters qualified to sign petitions.

But Desai could have an uphill fight: Her lawsuit acknowledges that Reagan and her staff have not found the same defects she claims and have refused to remove the petition sheets from the count.

Desai has a different legal theory she is presenting to Judge Douglas Gerlach in the case challenging the hospital pay cap.

She said circulators were gathering signatures before there was a properly formed campaign committee. That, she said, makes all of the more than 281,000 signatures invalid.

Chamber spokesman Garrick Taylor explained the moves to keep the measures off the ballot: We think theyre both terrible ideas and job-killers, he said.

Stopping either or both measures in court would be a lot cheaper than the millions of dollars it would take to persuade voters to reject them.

Steve Chucri, president of the restaurant group, said he is not trying to undermine the constitutional right of voters to propose their own laws, but that the rules must be followed.

We think theres a likelihood of fraud that took place in the gathering of those signatures, he said  a contention that petition organizers will fight in court and Rogers will ultimately decide.

Taylor said his organizations focus has been on the hospital-executive pay measure. What youd be doing is youd putting up a big sign on Arizonas health-care sector that says we are not able to attract the best and brightest to practice here, he said.

The measure would affect only administrators and managers. Service Employees International Union spokesman Steve Trossman said the state has an interest in capping administrative costs, with most hospitals set up as tax-exempt, nonprofit operations that get a majority of their funds through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.
Metro Titles Amick promoted

Metro Title promoted Laura Amick to head up its Green Valley branch.

Amick is a 30-year veteran of the escrow industry and was most recently an escrow officer for Metro Title in Green Valley.

She joined the company in 2014.

Scala takes Long Realty position

Dominick Dom Scala joined Long Realty as an agent at the River/Campbell office, focusing on properties in Sun City Oro Valley.

During more than 38 years at Eegees, Scala rose through the ranks to become director of operations, responsible for 23 restaurants and 500-plus employees.

Scala, who studied business at the University of Arizona, has held leadership posts with the Northwest Optimist Club and as a company organizer for United Way, and hes a past vice president of Canyon del Oro Little League.

Bon Voyage senior team consists

of Evans, Hansen, Hathorn, Lazarus

As part of its 40th anniversary, Bon Voyage Travel announced the formation of a senior leadership team made up of executives who together represent more than 70 years of collective service to the company.

Peter Evans, who founded the company in 1976 and has served as its president for 40 years, was named chief executive officer.

Ryan Hansen was named president of the company, having served for the past five years as vice president and chief operating officer.

Wendy Hathorn assumed the new position of vice president of sales and marketing after a four-year stint as director of marketing and more than 20 years in other positions within the company.

Adam Lazarus is the new vice president of digital strategy, a position he takes up after two years as director of digital strategy.

New editors at Arizona Jewish Life

Two editors joined Arizona Jewish Life magazine: Nancy Ben-Asher Ozeri as editor-in-chief and Mala Blomquist as associate editor, social media editor and events coordinator.

Ozeri served as director of communications for the Jewish Community Foundation of Southern Arizona, vice president of AcuComm Inc. in Tucson and founder of WordPlay in Israel. Ozeri is the recipient of two first-place American Jewish Press Association Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism. She holds a bachelor of science in journalism from Northwestern University.

Blomquist hosts a weekly segment of Arizona Midday on Channel 12 in Phoenix. For the past 17 years she worked at Raising Arizona Kids magazine, where she started off writing a column and then served as calendar and directories editor.
The body of a 36-year-old man was found Saturday at the Triangle T Ranch east of Benson, according to a media release from the Cochise County Sheriffs Office.

Deputies responded to a call at around 9:30 a.m. of a body covered with a sleeping bag about 300 yards onto the property.

After processing the scene, detectives determined that there were no obvious signs of trauma.

Security camera footage shows a light colored GMC pickup truck entering the driveway at around 11:30 p.m. Friday night and leaving after three minutes.

Initial findings suggest that the man suffered some sort of medical emergency while driving through the area and was dumped by the other occupants in the vehicle, according to the release.

An identification card found on the body indicated the man was from Mexico.
By his own account, Cesar Fierros wasnt interested in much during high school. But in his senior year, he listened to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama give a speech.

The words stirred Fierros. He was left inspired.

But the motivation wasnt instant, taking time to propel Fierros toward his goals.

He delayed going to college. When he finally enrolled at Pima Community College, he dropped out. He got a job, then was laid off.

I hit rock bottom, said Fierros, now 26.

All the while, however, the forceful, hopeful words that he heard from President Obama resonated with him.

Deep inside, Fierros knew he had to persevere, pay heed not only to Obamas words, but to his fathers advice to be an active member in his community and to participate in the political process.

It all came together  the words, the ideas, the values  when Fierro returned to Pima College and took an American government class taught by longtime instructor Erich Saphir.

Saphir became Fierros mentor.

He was somebody who struck me with the enthusiasm he brought to the subject, said Saphir, who has taught political science at Pima for 20 years. He really worked for it.

The two talked often about politics, government, civic duty and Fierros future. Saphir admired Fierros focus on setting goals and his eagerness to apply the knowledge that he learned in the three classes he took with Saphir.

Fierros transition continued at the University of Arizona, where he majors in law and public policy. His commitment to community was deepened as he immersed himself in organizing on behalf of immigrant rights and voter registration.

He underwent a transformative experience.

I learned a lot about myself, about my passion for politics and for public service, said Fierros, who has worked as an intern in the Tucson office of Congressman Raul Grijalva.

In government and public policy, Fierros understands that decisions made in Washington, D.C., in Phoenix and at the city level directly affect people.

When legislators fail to raise the minimum wage in the face of opposition from chambers of commerce, for example, he sees how working families struggle to put food on their tables.

When legislators refuse to reform immigration law and adopt comprehensive, sensible reform, he sees immigrant families with blended legal status struggle to remain together.

When legislators put up barriers to voting, making it difficult if not impossible for citizens to register to vote and to cast ballots, he sees how legislators choke off the democratic process.

I always ask myself why, Fierros said.

This summer, Fierros is an intern in the D.C. office of Phoenix Congressman Ruben Gallego through a program sponsored by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Fierros is spending long hours in the muggy capital researching, writing, attending lectures and soaking up all that he can before he returns home for his final semester at the UA.

The 2008 graduate of Flowing Wells High School plans to move on to graduate school to study foreign policy.

In the Washington internship program, Fierros is one 38 selected from hundreds of applicants.

The interns reflect the wide diversity of Latinos from 34 colleges and universities. Nearly all come from homes whose family incomes are less than $45,000 a year, according to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

The interns gain work experience and develop leadership skills, which they take back to their home towns, where theyll work with community groups to encourage more civic participation and voter turnout.

My dad always has voted, Fierros said.

And that is one of the key messages that Fierros will help spread.

If youre not participating in the political process, he said, you cant have informed decisions.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pulled several tough mitigation measures for the proposed Rosemont Mine this year after the Forest Service objected to them, federal records show.

Backfilling the open pit, kicking cattle off riparian areas and protecting against invasive, non-native species for 150 years were listed in an early draft of a federal biological opinion for the mine. The measures, which would have been mandatory, were excised from the wildlife services final opinion for the mine, published in April 2016.

The mine would extract copper and dispose its waste on private and federal lands in the Santa Rita Mountains 30 miles southeast of Tucson. As part of the approval process for the mine, the Fish and Wildlife Service requires measures to lessen or compensate for the mines impacts.

Hudbay Minerals Inc., the Toronto-based company proposing to build the Rosemont Mine, objected to these measures along with the Forest Service.

The Star obtained details of the early measures and the Forest Services objections through the federal of Freedom of Information Act.

Another since-pulled measure in the November 2015 draft, which was never publicly released, would have required Rosemont to ensure that the San Rafael Valley and Upper Santa Cruz River watersheds  an area critical to the survival and recovery of an endangered fish called the Gila chub  be secured and maintained as a wholly or nearly wholly native community over the next 150 years. Similar measures were planned for the threatened Chiricahua leopard frog and the endangered Gila topminnow and desert pupfish.

In all, the measures were targeted to protect seven of the 12 imperiled species known to live on or near the mine site. The other species were the endangered Huachuca water umbel, a plant, and the threatened Northern Mexican gartersnake and Western yellow billed cuckoo.

For the final biological opinion, the two agencies and the mining company agreed on three other conservation measures  less expensive, less sweeping and less controversial:

A $3 million invasive species control program would control non-native catfish, bullfrogs, sunfish and crayfish and non-native plants in the Cienega Creek and San Rafael Valley-Santa Cruz River watersheds. It isnt required to be effective for 150 years.

A full-time staff biologist would monitor the effectiveness of mitigation and conservation measures, including 4,800 acres of land purchases Rosemont has agreed to make outside the mine area.

A $1.25 million program would replace riparian habitat damaged by the mine and improve other habitat to benefit the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher and the yellow-billed cuckoo.

The biological opinion must be finished before the Forest Service and the Army Corps of Engineers make final decisions on whether the mine can be built. The agencies have said theyll make their decisions this summer, with the Corps decision possible within weeks.

Huckelberry: Backfill

mandate reasonable

Opponents of the mine, who want it operated under the strictest controls possible, said the wildlife service gave up too much protection from environmental damage caused by the $1.5 billion project. If approved, it will mine 243 million pounds of copper annually.

Many of those measures seemed very reasonable to me, considering the potential long-term, direct, indirect and cumulative impacts of the proposed mine, said Christina McVie, the Tucson Audubon Societys conservation chair. Were in the middle of a 17-year, state-declared drought emergency. The fact that we would sacrifice any naturally occurring seeps, springs and riparian flows without adequately mitigating for those is in my mind unconscionable.

The most significant deletion was removal of the backfilling measure, said Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry. It appears to have been ruled out without conducting a cost-benefit analysis that the county suggested long ago, he said.

Imposing mitigation measures lasting 150 years is perfectly appropriate, he said. Theres well-documented evidence that pollution from hard rock mining often occurs after the mining is finished, he said.

The Forest Service said it lacked authority to carry out some of the proposals, particularly those involving private land and whose management would last 150 years. Backfilling in particular also has been found economically unfeasible, the service said. Other grazing measures should be tried before full-scale removal of cattle from riparian areas, the service said.

Coronado National Forest Supervisor Kerwin Dewberry said backfilling was already addressed in the mines 2013 final environmental report , including an economic analysis.

We followed the process and we disclosed the information we needed to disclose based on the National Environmental Policy Act, said Dewberry. The law requires publication of an environmental impact statement for major projects such as Rosemont.

Wildlife service official Steve Spangle said the Endangered Species Act limits what the agency can ask for or impose in the biological opinion. Even though these tough measures didnt survive, the service had already come up with a significant amount of mitigation even before it started on the biological opinion, and the Forest Service came up with more ideas after the November 2015 draft appeared, she said.

If the Forest Service said its not in their authority, we feel we cant order them to do it, said Spangle, the wildlife services Arizona field supervisor.

The wildlife service also cant, under its rules, adopt any measure thats considered more than a minor change to the project, unless its shown to jeopardize endangered species, which wasnt the case for Rosemont, he said.

In its comments on the draft opinion, Hudbay staff used phrases such as red flags and Christmas wish list of measures to sum up its view that the measures were far out of scale to what it felt will be the mines true impacts.

The company said the measures were poorly written, open-ended and too easily open to interpretation.

We were flabbergasted by the contents of the document, Brian Lindenlaub, a biologist for Rosemont consultant Westland Resources, wrote in a Dec. 4 email to the Forest Service.

The mining project would create about 400 long-term jobs and spark creation of another 1,600 jobs in the surrounding community, a Rosemont-funded economic analysis by an Arizona State University economist found. But mine construction would blade 5,431 acres of federal and private land, and impact up to 146,000 acres, the final Rosemont biological opinion said.

The federal agencies, the mining company, environmentalists and supporters of the mine disagree  sometimes heatedly  over whether the project would dry up nearby riparian areas or contaminate the Cienega Creek watershed that feeds the urban Tucson aquifer.

Evaporating pit lake will follow closure

Backfilling was the most sweeping measure in the wildlife services draft opinion. It would require Rosemont to scoop up waste rock and mine tailings it leaves behind from processing copper ore, and return it to the half-mile deep open pit after it stops mining copper in 25 years or so.

The process, intended to reduce water loss from evaporation in the open pit after mining stops, is required for all new open pit mines in California, but none has reached the point of needing to backfill yet.

dangers outlined

for bulldozer drivers

To create an open pit, Rosemont would have to pump groundwater. That would reduce how much flows to neighboring streams such as Cienega Creek and Davidson Canyon.

After the mine closes, the open pit would become a pit lake whose surface water would evaporate, which critics fear would put continued pressure on the aquifer and Cienega Creek.

Other ideas in the draft opinion included an underground grout curtain, a wall, impermeable to water, that would prevent the drawdown of the aquifer caused by creating the open pit from affecting the creek.

Or, the mining company could put large plastic shade balls in the lake to block the suns evaporative force.

The state of reclamation is still in the 20th century  we dig open pits and we put all the overburden as well as tailings in a massive landfill, Huckelberry said in explaining why he favors backfilling. The process of reclamation is such that, historically, you basically clean up where you find pollution.

One would think that, in the 21st century, we ought to take a different approach to reclamation, where we minimize the footprint, he said.

But backfilling all of Rosemonts waste rock into the pit would cost an estimated $654 million to $996 million. It would take 16 years, 24 hours a day, to handle about 881 million tons of material, the Forest Service said in its 2013 final Rosemont environmental impact statement.

Either dumping all the waste rock directly into the pit or hauling it by truck would present major safety concerns, the Forest Service said. For example, hauling wastes downhill in large trucks is dangerous in open pits, especially those with sharp switchbacks. Theres not enough room for safety pullouts or escape ramps, or to redesign the switchbacks, the service said.

Dumping the waste over the pit rim also poses problems, the Forest Service said.

Dumped material would likely be pushed downward by bulldozer operators, who would be exposed to potential risks such as overturning equipment, rock avalanches, and burial by unstable material, the service said.

In 2011, however, Huckelberry wrote in a memo that even if you pegged the total backfill cost at $1.5 billion, the mine would still earn $603 million in profits over 21 years at a $1.85 a pound copper price and more than $12 billion at a $4.59 price.

He said recently that a study should compare costs versus economic benefits of keeping workers employed longer at the mine and the environmental benefits of reducing the open pits pressure on the aquifer. Rosemont officials have said Huckelberrys 2011 estimates of the mines expected profits were highly exaggerated.

Backfilling was left in the final biological opinion  but only as a voluntary measure.

It recommends that the Forest Service and Army Corps make sure Rosemont researches ways to reduce groundwater use and loss, considering any and all current and future techniques that may be technologically and economically feasible.
Pima County Supervisor Ally Miller has illegally been using private email to conduct public business, says her colleague and frequent foe Ray Carroll, who plans on submitting documents to prosecutors he says confirm his allegation.

Copies of emails from former employees of Miller show she not only conducted county business through a personal email account but also instructed her staff to do the same since 2013, Carroll said.

While using a private email address is not illegal, any document discussing government business is a public record. That means it must be made available for public review under state law.

Miller has refused to release any emails from her Yahoo account despite public records requests, stating she does not use her email for county business. The requests are mostly related to a recent complaint made by Miller to the FBI, claiming a fake news site was interfering with the operation of her office.

The Board of Supervisors recently released a finding by the Pima County Attorneys Office stating the county would likely lose a legal challenge for Millers private emails and could be required to pay attorneys fees.

Refusing to hand over private emails with her staff in which public business is discussed would be a Class 4 felony, resulting in a fine of up to $5,000.

Miller did not respond to repeated requests for comment on Carrolls claim.

Both Miller and Carroll are Republican members of the board.

She regularly communicated via her personal email and her personal Facebook messenger regarding county business, said Jeanne Davis, who had served as Millers chief of staff.

I am not sure if she stopped this practice of using her personal email address or not following my departure from her office, wrote Davis, who was fired by Miller in 2015.

Often, Supervisor Miller didnt want the County to know what her plans were so she used personal email and her personal devices to keep hidden.

In an email to another former staffer in July 2013, Miller wrote: I realized we communicated via the pima county email. And i am positive they are reading our emails, documents obtained by the Star show.

She told staff members they were going to have to change our approach, warning the countys information technology department could very easily (and legally) use a keystroke recorder to get [their] password.

Miller continued to worry about county employees spying on her in November 2014, the documents indicate.

We also cant save things on cmputer (sic) at work or they will be ahead of us. So we will go with this at this time ... but we have to be more secretive, the documents show Miller wrote. End of the day we have to be one step ahead. Max is going to be working out of office with me ... He cant be in there ... we need the element of surprise.

Miller has done a poor job to hide her alleged activities, says Phoenix attorney Dan Barr, a media law expert and counsel to the First Amendment Coalition of Arizona.

There is no doubt on what is going on, Barr said. She clearly is conducting public business on her Yahoo account.
Differing views on Mexico

While current and former Arizona governors Doug Ducey, Jan Brewer and Fife Symington support Donald Trump for president, there is one area where Ducey and Symington think the candidate is off base: His vow to build a wall along the border with Mexico.

"We've worked hard in this administration to build that relationship with Mexico,'' said Ducey. "I think separating out the relationship we have with Mexico as a neighbor, the issue of immigration, and the issue of public safety, and treating them as three unique and different issues, each with their own policy prescriptions, would be a good and positive start.''

Symington was more direct.

"His beating up on Mexico is, to me, just terrible,'' he said. "He shouldn't be doing that.''

Symington said Trump should call for a cooperative effort on immigration with Mexico.

But Brewer, who made a national reputation of sorts for herself on the issue of immigration, said Trump is on the right track and should not tone down his rhetoric, at least not on the issue of a wall.
The Salvation Army is having its annual back-to-school shopping event at Walmart on Woodlands Blvd., Aug. 6, from 7-11 a.m. The program will help 200 kids, ages 5-12, get ready for the new school year.

Volunteers are needed shop with the children, help check in the families, and help pass out backpacks and school supplies. A volunteer training will be held Friday, Aug. 5, from 1-3 p.m. at The Salvation Army, 507 Humphreys St. Donations of school supplies and monetary donations are also being accepted at the office.
Even though special master Ken Feinberg, who was in charge of the first federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, distributed $6 billion to the estates of those killed on 9/11  an average of more than $2 million to the nearly 3,000 victims  the House of Representatives passed its new Fairness for 9/11 Families Act to allow additional claims for the deaths inflicted by the terrorists and set aside $2.7 billion for them.
Help India!

By TCN News,

Patna: Popular Front of India (PFI) strongly rejected the news published and telecast in few media that, Pakistan zindabad slogans were raised here in a protest rally conducted by the organization and is now contemplating legal action against media for false propaganda.

Support TwoCircles



The said rally was one of the protest programs held by PFI in different parts of the country against targeting of Dr. Zakir Naik and Asaduddin Owaisi which it believes be a part of communal fascist agenda to silence them.

We presume that some vicious elements have fabricated the original video of the event and misused (by) a section of the media to tarnish the image of the Muslim community and Popular Front of India, said M Mohammed Ali Jinnah, general secretary of PFI.

He also asserted that no anti-national slogans were raised in Patna rally or in any other rallies held across the country on the same issue.

We will resort to legal actions against those media which have circulated the above news. We appeal to the state administration and police not to succumb to pressures from anti-minority forces, he added.

He further stated that the communal elements that are haunting Dr. Naik and Owaisi are now directing the same dirty guns against PFI in an attempt to further silence Muslim voices for justice and peace.

Popular Front which is a mass movement cant be intimidated by any such pressures or persecutions, he affirmed.


On July 12th, 2016, Tobia Lipsher Light ended her six week suffering from a ravaging cancer, and with it, her self-described 87-year wonderful life. Toby grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, attended the University of Connecticut, and became a social worker in New Haven. She met and married Albert Light, and they shared 64 years of marriage living in New York City, Salt Lake City, where their two daughters were born, West Lafayette, IN, Flagstaff, AZ, and Columbus, OH. In West Lafayette, Toby became a teacher and taught from the 1970s to the mid-1990s at Mintonye Elementary and Southwestern Middle Schools, mostly grade six. She was a member of the Lafayette League of Women Voters, on the board of Family Services, and was a volunteer and Friends member at the West Lafayette Public Library. In Flagstaff, Toby continued to be a volunteer at the Public Library, the Flagstaff Arboretum gift shop, and was a Walnut Canyon volunteer ranger. When Toby and Al retired, they enjoyed travelling throughout the world, including trips to Europe, China, Africa and Machu Pichu. Toby is survived by her husband, Albert, daughters, Audrey Light (Rini Das) and Pam Light Wilson (Jerry Wilson), and grandchildren, Aaron Wilson and Tracy Wilson. There will be no services, but memorials, if desired, may be made to Kobacker House Hospice Hospital, American Cancer Society, St. Judes Hospital or your local public library.
Flagstaff City Council candidates have been given the chance to answer a weekly question in no more than 150 words. This weeks question: In light of Flagstaffs role as a gateway to Grand Canyon Country, do you support a Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument, as proposed in the Grijalva bill? Why or why not?

Council

CHARLIE ODEGAARD

As a candidate for Flagstaff City Council, I dont believe the Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument proposition should be a matter of business or discussion for the Council. The size of that proposition, its effects on land ownership, land use and land access, plus the way its being advanced, introduces many considerations besides Flagstaff being a gateway to Grand Canyon Country.

I encourage you to visit Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatricks website www.Kirkpatrick.house.gov or phoning her field office at 928-213-9977.

JIM McCARTHY

Arizona Congressman Grijalva introduced a bill to establish the Grand Canyon Watershed National Monument. I support the bill.

It will protect our health and safety by preventing new uranium mines between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, making the current 20-year ban permanent. The tragic health effects of uranium mining in our region are well known.

The designation will only affect federal lands and will not close mines or take existing mining claims. It will protect forests, grasslands, wetlands, and wildlife migration routes, as well as archaeological and tribal sacred sites. It will not change the laws that govern recreation, hunting, fishing, grazing, rights of way, inholdings, commercial uses, water rights, other uses allowed by exiting law.

The bill was a collaborative effort that sought input from interested citizens, seven Native American Tribes, and government officials in the Flagstaff area. I support the proposal.

JEFF ORAVITS

After seeing the contentious nature of many Council Resolutions, which is the most likely way to support or oppose a Grand Canyon Watershed Protection Bill, I've decided to no longer support non-binding political resolutions.

The time and effort these resolutions require is often times a distraction from other things Council should be doing locally. The City only has so much time and resources and prioritizing efforts is critical to getting things done for Flagstaff. As your City Council Representative, I will continue to push Council to focus on funding our infrastructure, finding solutions to our traffic and housing challenges, breaking ground on a Veterans Care Home, ensuring our police and fire department are well trained and well funded, growing and diversifying our economy so Flagstaff can have good paying job opportunities, completing a maintenance facility and new courthouse and continuing to improve Flagstaff's water resources and conservation efforts.

ADAM SHIMONI

Flagstaff is a gateway town to the Grand Canyon, thriving on outdoor recreation opportunities in the Canyon. For this reason, I support the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument Act as a win-win. I believe it can serve as a powerful engine for economic growth as well as a tool for ecological protection and cultural preservation. The Monument will offer protection for above-ground tributaries, springs and interconnected groundwater, old growth trees, and native cultural sacred lands. It will also provide more jobs, enhance recreation opportunities, honor grazing rights, hunting, private property, tribal sovereignty, and existing motorized travel. I applaud the inclusive nature of the bill's advisory council and the extensive tribal involvement and collaboration that took place in its development. I have watched Tribal leaders and communities across the region  including hunters, anglers, ranchers  come together to support the monument. I think its a good step forward.

KARLA BREWSTER

As it sounds on the surface, I would be in favor of Grijalvas bill. But in looking at it more closely and reading both the pros and cons of the bill, I dont think there is a need for it. I believe it is a feel good bill that prevents anything and everything from happening on this broad expanse of land near the Grand Canyon, 1.7 million acres. There is already a moratorium on mining, timber harvests are managed, grazing is regulated, travel management has already closed miles of roads and, according to one Wildlife Conservation person, the wildlife dont need more bureaucracy to manage and conserve it. The proposed monument designation would severely impact thousands of acres of state trust lands that would be locked up within its boundaries and deny their beneficial use to the trust. In acreage, this national monument would be the nations second largest.

JAMIE WHELAN

I absolutely and unequivocally support Congressman Raul Grijalvas proposed Greater Grand Canyon Heritage National Monument Act, abill to protect 1.7 million acres of land already owned by the federal government. Leaders of the Havasupai, Hualapai, Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Paiute and Yavapai tribes all support this legislation, which will make permanent the ban on new uranium mining claims while allowing grazing, hunting and recreation to continue.

When I traveled through the Grand Canyon in May I was introduced to the writings of Martin Litton, a long-time boatman and tireless conservationist. His powerful words speak to why I support Congressman Grivaljas legislation. People always tell me not to be extreme. Be reasonable, they say. But I never felt it did any good to be reasonable about anything in conservation. Because what you give away will never come backever.

Mayor

CORAL EVANS

Yes. I support the Greater Grand Canyon Heritage Monument. The monument is necessary to prevent new uranium mining at the Grand Canyon. This is federal land on which there is a 20 year moratorium on new mines at Grand Canyon, monument designation would make that permanent.

Uranium mines are a health hazard, and mined uranium would have to be transported through Flagstaff putting our community at risk. Tourism is our Citys largest industry. Flagstaff directly benefits from the millions who visit the canyon every year; that revenue must be protected. Therefore, uranium mining is a local issue and provides no benefit to Flagstaff. On the contrary, it has the potential to destroy our economy.

As your mayor I will stand up for Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon against those who would exploit it for personal gain.

JERRY NABOURS

I do not believe the establishment of the Grand Canyon Watershed Monument will have a particular impact on Flagstaff. The area is already federally controlled.

It appears to me to be an issue of uranium mining. Experts who have studied the issue should be allowed to provide their arguments to Congress and let Congress make a decision.
The man behind the attacks last Thursday in Nice was totally unknown to French intelligence services; however, he had a criminal record in France for acts of violence, threats, and theft. The investigation that was opened by French authorities after Thursdays attacks in Nice is trying to clarify whether Mohamed Bouhlel was connected with radical groups.

Ties with a terrorist organization

French authorities are trying to determine whether the suspect acted alone or had accomplices. They will also investigate possible links with criminal organizations.

Although Thursdays attack had not been claimed by any terrorist group, it corresponds exactly with the calls to kill that terrorist organizations spread in magazines and videos.

French police found a 7.65 mm handgun, along with replica weapons and a grenade in the lorry. The investigation is now focused on finding out how the suspect obtained the weapons found in the truck and the gun with which he shot people and police, as the fact that he rented the lorry days before the attack suggests that the attack may have been planned with anticipation.

What is known about the attacker?

He was identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel through a drivers license found at the scene of the attack. He was a French resident born in Tunisia.

A picture of this man shows him as a married man with three children, although separated from his wife.Some neighbours describe him as good-looking; however, a distressed and unpredictable man who was hostile to people, as he rarely responded to a greeting and he used to stare at children with insistence.

Criminal record but no known terrorist ties

The attacker had a license that allowed him to drive a truck and worked as a delivery driver. One month before the attack, he was involved in an accident for having fallen asleep while driving, for which he was detained and arrested. In March of this year, he was convicted for an altercation with another driver whom he threw a wooden pallet at.

Being his first conviction, he was able to get a suspended sentence and would only contact police once a week.

At the time of the attack, Bouhlel was not on a watch list as a suspect militant. After the incident, Bouhlel's house was searched by the police, who found documents and electronic material. The attackersformer wife was taken into custody for interrogation.

A truck driven by a man rammed into a crowd that had gathered on Thursday to watch the fireworks celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. The attack has been related with an act of Terrorism; however French authorities are still investigating.
Only a week ago, Michael Gove was eliminated in the second ballot of the Conservative leadership election, as Conservative Party members looked to vote for the leadership of either Theresa May or Andrea Leadsom; the former the Home Secretary since 2010, and a leading figure in the party, the latter the Minister of State for Energy and a previously obscure junior minister. However, today, after Leadsoms withdrawal from the race only two days ago, Theresa May enters 10 Downing Street as the 54th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Missing a mandate

However, the circumstances of her journey to 10 Downing Street surely call into question the extent of her mandate as Prime Minister. May has stated publicly that there should be no general election until 2020, and intends to take over directly from David Cameron. But opposition parties have criticised May in this respect; the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, argues that the Tories have no mandate, as Labours election coordinator Jon Trickett calls Mays move a coronation. Indeed, the Conservatives were elected in 2010 under David Cameron by only 36.9% of the vote. Now, May proposes to pursue significantly different policies than those of Cameron, now with the backing of only 199 MPs, representing just 0.0003% of the electorate.

Obstacle against snap election.

The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act of 2011 has been cited by supporters of May as an obstacle preventing her from calling a snap election. However, this legislation should not be seen as a hindrance to an early general election; provisions have been included to deal with the situation we now find ourselves in.

May, as Prime Minister, has the power to put forward a motion for an early election; such a motion would require the support of two-thirds of MPs, but given outspoken criticism of Mays mandate by members of the opposition, this should not be a problem. Indeed, Nigel Farage, formerly leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), has called for an early election under the system of proportional representational; this would benefit smaller parties such as UKIP, who in 2015 won 12.6% of the vote but only hold one seat in Parliament.

The hypocrisy of leadership.

In 2007, as Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as both leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May openly and actively supported an early general election, stating outright that Brown was running scared of the peoples verdict. Now that she is in this position herself, May seems reluctant to follow her own advice. As Prime Minister, she will be responsible for triggering Article 50, and will lead negotiations over Britains departure from the European Union. She must also make important decisions regarding the UKs economy, healthcare system and foreign conflicts such as that in Syria. However, May has not proposed her position on these as a prime ministerial candidate and as such lacks a clear mandate to make these decisions.

Her supporters claim that there would be a risk of election fatigue in calling an early election, and that the EU referendum has caused instability. However, the post-referendum period is perhaps the optimum time to call one, as more and more people become engaged with the political system. They are also right about instability, but a general election would provide clear direction to the prime minister about what the country wants, which would undoubtedly promote stability.

The Conservative Party was elected in 2015 under the leadership of David Cameron and according to the manifesto which he provided. The Conservative Party under Theresa May has a significantly different manifesto, one severely lacking in a mandate from the people whom she proposes to lead.
At approximately 23:00 local time, in the southern French city of Nice, Bastille Day celebrations were ruined by a truck that ploughed through celebrating crowds on the Promenade des Anglais, leaving at least 84 people dead and 50 others hanging between life and death. The driver eventually came to a halt, and eyewitness reports say that as he attempted to shoot police officers, he was himself shot dead. World leaders have quite rightly condemned what has happened, including US President Barack Obama and UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who said she was shocked and saddened by the horrifying attack.

However, a distinction should be made between condemning the attacks for the lives lost, and condemning them as attacks of an undeniable terrorist nature, as has been stated by French President Francois Hollande.

The stereotype of terror

Media outlets worldwide have described the events in Nice explicitly as a terror attack; indeed, the BBC attached to their report of the attack a timeline of terror, ingraining in the minds of viewers that Islamic State (IS) are undeniably behind the deaths. Whilst this is not impossible, and given that IS members have celebrated the attacks, is perhaps likely, it is wrong at this time to define the events in Nice as an indisputable terrorist attack. The perpetrator, although not officially identified, has been named locally as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year old French-Tunisian.

According to reports, he has been in trouble with the police previously for petty crime and allegations of domestic violence, the latter of which barred him from entering the house he had shared with the partner. However, he is not reported to have been on any terrorist watch list, and had not been flagged by the French Fiche S, the indicator that a person may be a threat to national security.

Global repercussions

The repercussions of this premature assumption are both evident and severe. President Hollande has extended the state of emergency in France, was imposed in November 2015 after the attacks in Paris, as well as calling up further army reserves and continuing Operation Sentinel. Hollandes actions in this respect, although arguably justified, will continue to spread fear throughout France, and Western Europe, a primary goal of terrorist groups such as Islamic State; even if they werent directly involved in the attack in Nice, they will undoubtedly benefit from the state of fear that it has promoted.

And perhaps more controversially, Donald Trump, the US Republican presidential nominee has declared This is war, as he condemned President Obama for allowing a lot of people to come in. In this speech, Trump has further singled out immigrants from Syria and the surrounding area as the proponents of terror attacks in Western Europe and the US, making their integration in Western societies even more difficult. But it is his declaration of war that is perhaps more worrying; it directly implies that he recognises terrorist groups such as Islamic State as armies against whom war can be waged, perhaps according to the Geneva Convention, rather than militant groups who would in no way follow such rules. The consequences of calling terrorism before all the facts are known are dangerous, but it has happened here and will undoubtedly continue to happen.
Quandeel Baloch, 25, was known for posting selfies and what was deemed as controversial photos and videos political posts on social media. She had over 123,000 followers on Instagram and her brothers demanded that she stop her usage, but she refused to do so. On the evening of Friday, July 15 she was allegedly strangled to death by her brother, Wasseem after an argument with her brothers, in the name of preserving family honor. Baloch was killed while visiting her parents near the city of Multan during Eid, which marks the end of the month of Ramadan.

She was so concerned for her safety in the days before her murder that she wrote a letter to the interior ministry asking for protection. Video posted online show Baloch deceased as men attempt to remove her body from a car amid much chaos.

Quandeel was a polarizing figure.

Her outspoken nature may have been what led to her untimely death. Quandeel was criticized recently after posting pictures on Facebook of her standing beside Muslim cleric Mufti Qavi during their meeting in a hotel room to discuss Islam. According to the pair, the meeting was held so Qavi could teach her more about Islam.

Honor killing is commonplace in many cultures.

Honor killings, also called shame killings are common in Pakistani as well as other countries where women are seen as property.

Pakistan is a mostly Islamic country, but honor killings occur in several cultures. There are various reasons given for honor killing. Among those are being the victim of rape, refusing to enter an arranged marriage, and renouncing a faith. The women are also killed by stoning, burning, beating, beheading, stabbing, acid attacks, and throat slashing.

They have been documented in India, Turkey, and even the United States. Current Pakistani law allows the perpetrators of the killings to leave jail by paying blood money and asking for forgiveness. There has been anoutcry over the practice of honor killings, but many of these countries are slow to change their ideology. Baloch's parents were taken into custody but her brother remains on the run.
The U.S. State Department issued a travel warning for Americans in Turkey on Saturday after an attempted coup occurred in that country on Friday. The travel warning stated, In light of the July 15 coup attempt and its aftermath, we suggest U.S. citizens reconsider travel to Turkey at this time.

Extreme caution.

On Friday the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey was warning Americans currently in Turkey that due to a potential for demonstrations and the possibility of clashes between opposing forces, U.S. citizens should use extreme caution when leaving their residence and hotels.

Flights into Turkeys Istanbul's international airport resumed at 12:30 a.m. local time on Saturday. The latest warning suggests Americans travel to Turkey at this time. The current travel alert also continues the State Departments warning that both foreign and U.S. tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations and that tourists be vigilant in regard to their personal security.

U.S. military personnel.

On Saturday, local military authorities had denied access either onto or off of the Incirlik Air Base. The U.S. base is home to the 39th Air Base Wing and has approximately 1,500 personnel assigned there. Incirlik base has been used for American-led strike missions against the Islamic State.

Defense Department officials are continuing efforts to account for all American military personnel in Turkey.

Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said in a statement issued Saturday, All indications at this time are that everyone is safe and secure.

The aftermath.

Turkish media is reporting 161 dead, although some reports put that number as high as 265, with 1,440 injured.

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a live television speech called the attempted coup an act of treason. More than 3,000 Turkish military members and 2,700 judges have been detained by Erdogans regime.

Turkish President Erdogan.

Also on Saturday, Erdogan called on the United States to return to Turkey moderate Muslin cleric Fethullah Gulen, who is exile in the United States after leaving Turkey in 1999 when he fled Turkey over charges that he was seeking to overturn the then secular government.

"I call on the United States and President Barack Obama ... (to) either arrest Fethullah Gulen or return him to Turkey, Erdogan said in a statement, adding If we are strategic partners or model partners, do what is necessary.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, currently in Luxembourg told reporters in response to the demand, We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen  And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately.
Common interests and communication boost EU-China partnership Updated: 2016-07-17 17:25 (chinadaily.com.cn)

Scholars and experts at the event, titled the Belt & Road Initiative and EU-China Partnership, held in the Renmin University of China in Beijing, July 16, 2016. [Photo by Yao Yao/chinadaily.com.cn]

Strengthened communication and common interests contribute to fostering a sound partnership between China and the European Union, according to scholars and experts attending an event dubbed the Belt & Road Initiative and EU-China Partnership, in Beijing on Saturday.

"About the areas in relation to common interests, of course we will have many differences. Go and negotiate, we should not eye the differences, but work in a respectable manner and try to address them," said Asad Beg, head of the European Union Delagation to China and Mongolia's Political, Press and Information section, at the event held in the Renmin University of China.

Asad felt optimistic about the prosperous aspect of the China-EU Partnership, saying "we have seen for the first time Chinese foreign direct investment has been doubled, as around 20 billion euros into European Union and 9 billion euros in other way from Europe to China."

Asad Beg went on to say "we hope we can increase and improve the quantity and quality of foreign direct investment that could take place in bilateral trades."

In regards to the connectivity platform, and citing the caravans traveling between Europe and China, Asad said: "I think the exchange should not only be in terms of goods, but also be in terms of ideas and of people. And I think for now we need to do is to move from high political statements and strategic vision, and to translate that into concrete projects."

"As EU and China are the cradles of some of the world's great civilizations, there should be more exchanges to enrich our conversation."

According to Asad Beg, "if we want to make it a strong and stable mutual relationship, we need to invest in the prosperity and well-being of each other."

Professor Wang Yiwei from Renmin University gives a presentation at the event. [Photo by Yao Yao/chinadaily.com.cn]

Asad Beg's idea of pragmatic cooperation between the EU and China gets received support from scholars and experts attending the event.

"There are many common problems such as climate change and environment protection needing our joint efforts and it is not necessary to take too seriously some disputable problems between China and EU," said Professor Chen Zhimin from the Shanghai-based Fudan University. Chen highlighted pragmatism's part in the development of the EU during his presentation, citing the EU's principle that policy is driven by our interests.

"One Belt, One Road Initiative not only helps develop a Eurasian market, but also lets the two civilizations- Europe and China learn from each other again. Since the world nowadays faces many challenges and problems, we need a new mentality, new thinking and new civilization, that's why we gather here," said Wang Yiwei, director of the Renmin University of China's Centre for EU studies.

"EU focuses more on stability and resilience so that it cooperates with the one having joint interests," said Sven Biscop, from Egmont-Royal Institute of International Relations.

Other experts also outlined their proposals to strengthen the EU-China partnership.

Professor Heiduk from the Warsaw School of Economics highlighted the role of cities along the China-Europe train routes, since in his opinion, location brings trade. Professor Overbeek, from the VU University Amsterdam, said the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank and European Investment Bank could both provide a public fund to connect the Juncker Plan and One Belt, One Road Initiative.
Premier Li wins backing over South China Sea at ASEM Summit Updated: 2016-07-17 07:23 (Xinhua)

Premier Li Keqiang chats animatedly with Mongolian president Elbegdorj and German Chancellor Merkel before the leaders attending the 11th ASEM summit take group picture on July 15.[Photo/China News Service]

ULAANBAATAR - In Mongolia over the weekend, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's effort to promote China's stance on the South China Sea issue received broad support during the 11th Asian-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit.

Li said Saturday before he returned to China that the South China Sea arbitration award will have no impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime interests.

Speaking in an informal meeting during the summit, Li said the South China Sea issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions from the very beginning, or be included in the summit's agenda.

"But since certain countries commented on the issue, it is thus necessary for China to come out to clarify its stance and spell out the truth," he said.

Li said China has never participated in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines, adding that his country neither accepts nor acknowledges the so-called arbitration award.

"By doing so, we are both exercising our rights in accordance with international law, and safeguarding the dignity of international law," he said.

"Under no circumstance will the arbitration award exert any impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea," Li added.

The Chinese premier said China remains committed to settling the South China Sea disputes via dialogue and consultation with countries directly involved on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international law, so as to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.

This is the first time the Chinese premier has made an open statement on the South China Sea issue at an international forum following the South China Sea arbitration award issued Tuesday.

Li did not include the issue in his keynote speech at the start of the two-day summit. However, faced with certain nations' attempts to stir up tension and interfere in the South China Sea issue in the summit, Li expounded China's stance of non-acceptance of and non-participation in the arbitration proceedings, as part of his diplomatic offensive.

In a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc Thursday, Li said the South China Sea issue should be solved through bilateral negotiations between relevant parties in line with historical facts, international law and the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).

One day later, he told Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen that China will work with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to protect regional peace and stability as well as the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Three police officers killed, several others injured in Baton Rouge shooting Updated: 2016-07-18 00:50 (Xinhua)

Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States, July 17, 2016. [Photo/Agencies]

HOUSTON -- Three police officers were killed, several others injured on Sunday in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the US state of Louisiana.

The incident happened around 9:30 am local time and a manhunt was on for the suspect or suspects. A man, who was dressed in black with his face covered, shot indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza, according to local TV station KHOU.

Police closed the streets between the police department's headquarters and Interstate 12. Two hospitals in the city are currently on lockdown with police guarding the facilities.

On July 5, a 37-year-old black man was shot and killed by two white police officers in Baton Rouge, triggering protests across the United States.
Navy chiefs set for fresh talks on South China Sea Updated: 2016-07-18 01:34 By Zhang Yunbi(China Daily)

Naval chiefs from China and the United States are set to hold their first face-to-face meeting since the July 12 ruling on the arbitration case brought by the Philippines, which has intensified tensions in the South China Sea.

US Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson was to start his first visit to China from Sunday to Wednesday, during which he will meet with Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the Chinese navy, according to a US Navy news release on July 14.

Washington has been pressing Beijing to accept the arbitration ruling by The Hague that challenges China's sovereignty in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, the Chinese navy has conducted drills near Xisha Islands in the sea this month.

The goal of Richardson's trip is to "improve mutual understanding and encourage professional interaction", the release said. It added that the South China Sea dispute, the ongoing Rim of the Pacific exercise and navy-to-navy collaboration will be high on the agenda.

After meetings in Beijing, Richardson will also visit Qingdao, Shandong province, to see the navy's submarine academy and tour China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning.

The Chinese government did not provide further details about the trip on Sunday.

Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher at the People's Liberation Army Naval Military Studies Research Institute, said cooperation between the two navies is expanding in areas such as joint drills and officer exchanges.

However, the US has attempted to pressure China to accept The Hague ruling, which will never succeed, he added.

In the past year, Richardson and Wu have had three discussions via video teleconference. Their latest conversation, in January, touched on China's new airport on Yongshu Reef in the Nansha Islands, which was put into use that month.

Wu said China "will not seek militarization" in the sea, but it also will not allow the absence of its regular national defense either.

On July 8, senior Chinese naval officers including Wu attended a drill in waters near Xisha Islands, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Meanwhile, two supply ships serving long-range missions  the Honghu and Luomahu  officially joined the service in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, on Friday, according to the PLA's Southern Theater Command, which covers the South China Sea.

Zhao Xiaozhuo, a researcher at the Center on China-US Defense Relations at the PLA Academy of Military Science, said if the US further approaches China's territorial waters, such action would have "huge negative effects" and would be "unreasonable".

Yuan Peng, vice-president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, warned that China-US ties are "now dominated and encumbered by a single problem  the South China Sea issue".

"Barack Obama should bring the ties back on track before leaving office," Yuan added.

zhangyunbi@chinadaily.com.cn
We gathered in the ampitheatre at the Conservative Yeshiva at 6:30 on Friday evening. As I entered (and went directly to embrace dear friends), Dafna -- one of the two musicians who collaborates with Reb Ruth to create Nava Tehila -- was playing guitar and singing a niggun version of "Yedid Nefesh," a love song to God. We sang as others arrived, sparking more smiles and more embraces. My friend Deb; Reb David (of Romemu) and his fiancee; Holly, who -- with my friend Ora, also here this summer -- was part of my mishpacha group at Elat Chayyim in the summer of 2004. And, of course, we were joined by a couple dozen Jewish Renewal college-age kids who're in town this Shabbat, the reason for our gathering in the first place.

We quieted our singing to a gentle hum, and Reb Ruth explained that when the kabbalists of Tzfat invented Kabbalat Shabbat, the service for welcoming the Shabbat bride, they made a point of davening outdoors -- as we were doing in that beautiful breezy twilight moment. But the CY had other physical plans for us, so we continued singing as we moved into the lobby of the hostel and lit candles; we sang as we descended four flights of stairs (ripples of song bouncing up and down the tiled stairwell); and we sang as we entered our windowless basement room deep in the earth, where we proceeded to raise some pretty amazing musical and emotional energy during the two hours of our davenen together.

Last time Nava Tehila met, I was just back from my day trip with ICAHD. This time, Shabbat came right on the heels of a day trip to Bethlehem and Hebron. (A post about that is coming soon.) I'm grateful to have such a warm and sweet community to cradle me through the emotional aftershocks of my dips into the West Bank.

Like last time, we chanted selected pearls from the psalms of Kabbalat Shabbat, to the accompaniment of two guitars and a few drums. Reb Ruth offered a word of teaching before each. Shiru L'Adonai shir chadash, "Sing unto God a new song" -- a chance to become aware of the new songs of ourselves which we are constantly singing to the Divine. B'amud anan yedaber aleihem, "From within the pillar of cloud [God] spoke with them" -- an invitation to enter into the cloud of unknowing, to be open to the voice of God arising out of what we can't see or know. For me one of the most powerful chants was Shame'a vatismach tsion vatagelna b'not yehuda, "Listen and rejoice, Zion, and dance, daughters of Judah" -- I was overcome with emotion watching my three-year-old housemate as she danced joyously around the room.

As we worked our way through the psalms of Kabbalat Shabbat, I was struck by how powerful it is that our liturgy connects Jews around the world and across all sorts of ideological divides. On the right and on the left, we were all turning our hearts toward the Divine and welcoming the presence of Shabbat into our midst with more-or-less the same words. (That's a gloss, obviously; there are places where our liturgies differ substantially. But in that moment on the cusp of Shabbat, the common ground was what was most meaningful to me.) It's both comforting and challenging to have that commonality: with Jews who speak my language, and Jews who don't; with Jews who share my politics, and Jews who don't.

The last psalm before "Lecha Dodi" includes the lines Kol Adonai al hamayim, El hakavod hir'im, Adonai al mayim rabim. ("The voice of Adonai is upon the waters, the God of glory thunders, Adonai over the mighty waters.") That chant rolled like gospel, a call-and-response like the best kind of blues. It was amazing. When it had finally died down Reb Ruth said quietly, "If you've ever wondered what is kavod, what is glory...? What you're feeling in the room right now: that's what it is." Just remembering it, I'm getting chills all over again.

After the davenen, I joined two friends at the Three Arches restaurant at the YMCA (one of the only places I know here that's open on Shabbat.) They had dinner, and I had dessert: an enormous plate of sugar-sweet watermelon, accompanied by dense little bricks of feta cheese. Sublime. All in all: a fitting chatimah (seal) to another week in Jerusalem.





Technorati tags: religion, Judaism, Shabbat, Jerusalem, JewishRenewal.
The absolute highlight of my week: Kabbalat Shabbat with Nava Tehila.



My week at Kallah had a lot of highlights. Teaching was one of them -- getting to spend a week teaching some of my favorite classical midrashim (interpretive stories) and creating a safe container within which students could write and share their own midrash. Co-leading shacharit on Thursday morning was another -- Rabbi David and Rabbi Evan and I co-led a service around the firepit, beginning with the cowboy modah ani, which always feels extra-appropriate in Colorado!

But the capstone of my week, the absolutely most special part for me, was Friday night davenen. Friday night is supposed to be both soulful and celebratory as we welcome the Shabbat bride, the Shekhinah, the Queen, into our midst. I'd been looking forward to this Kabbalat Shabbat for months, hoping that it would give me some good "juice" to take home with me. And oh, holy wow: Kabbalat Shabbat at this year's ALEPH Kallah was everything I needed it to be and then some.

My son with an angel, on the pre-Shabbat walk.

The evening began with everyone in splendid whites, as is our custom here (following the custom of the kabbalists of Tzfat.) There was live music (Shabbat love songs) outside my dorm, and people in angel wings blessing us and pointing the way across campus to where we would daven. The kids got special white sparkly Shabbat facepaint. There is nothing like walking across a neighborhood (even an ad hoc one) calling "good Shabbes" to others who are beaming and celebrating too.

On Shabbat morning there were six different davenen options (I went to the kids' / family service, expertly led by Ellen Allard and the Kirtan Rabbi.) But on Friday night, we who were planning the Kallah chose to have only one service, and it featured the leaders of Nava Tehila, the Jewish Renewal community of Jerusalem. Friday night was the one time during the week when we wanted everyone to be together, for Kabbalat Shabbat and for the festive banquet-style meal that followed our prayer.

Reb Ruth, Yoel, and Dafna led davenen, as is their custom now, in the round. In the middle was an empty space (like the Holy of Holies in the Temple of old), circled by a ring of davenen leaders and musicians, circled by concentric rings of us. Because we were facing each other (rather than facing a bimah or stage), because in the middle was open space (sometimes filled with dancing daveners), I felt as though the music and the prayer were naturally arising among and between us.

The last time Nava Tehila led davenen at Kallah was 2009, and I was there, and it was amazing. This time was even more so.

The leaders of Nava Tehila:

Dafna Rosenberg, Rabbi Ruth Gan Kagan, Yoel Sykes.

With words, with customs, with kavanot (intentions), they brought the holy city of Yerushalayim into our midst and brought us into its glow. And their holy levi'im (the musicians accompanying them) included several of my nearest and dearest, which made it extra-special -- beloved faces, beloved voices, co-creating this extraordinary Shabbat for us and with us. As we davened and danced it felt like we were more than the sum of our parts. All of our voices, all of our hearts, raising sparks with joyous song.

I was surrounded by a community of some 500 ardent participants. I let it sweep me up: I danced in the aisle, I sang my heart out, I felt goosebumps in the silence after each psalm (as Reb Ruth once said, "If you've ever wondered what glory is...? It's this feeling in the room right now.") The six psalms of Kabbalat Shabbat became a pilgrimage, building awareness of transcendence, and then with "Lecha Dodi" we brought in immanence, unifying the Holy One of Blessing with the Shabbat Queen.

Shabbat tealights, before lighting.

I listen to Nava Tehila all the time -- especially their latest album, Libi Er / Waking Heart, the title track of which inspired the first poem in what is now Texts to the Holy. When I sing along with their music in the car, I remember every time I've been blessed to daven with them: in Jerusalem in 2008, at the Kallah in 2009, in Jerusalem in 2014... Now when I sing with their cds, or when I daven and lead davenen using their melodies, I'll remember this extraordinary night at the Kallah.

Here's Nava Tehila's Kabbalat Shabbat Playlist on YouTube. These are the melodies they used at our Kabbalat Shabbat, which they sent out in advance so that as many people as possible would know the melodies and be able to fully participate in davenning along. I expect to listen to this playlist a lot on Friday nights to come, when I am home alone and need to connect myself back to the spiritual sustenance I found in that glorious Friday night davenen at the 2016 Kallah.
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HA NOI  The chairman of the Trung Nguyen Coffee Corporation JSC, ang Le Nguyen Vu, has lost control of the instant coffee company to his wife, according to a decision by the Binh Duong Provinces Planning and Investment Department.

On July 13, the provincial department rescinded an earlier decision issued on April 21 that named ang Le Nguyen Vu as legal representative of the Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC.

According to the new decision, the department restored the previous business registration certificate of the company granted in November 2013, which named Le Hoang Diep Thao, Vus wife, as the legal representative of Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC.

The departments decisions were based on a request issued on May 13 by the Peoples Supreme Court in HCM City, which is in the process of ruling on the divorce between Vu and Thao.

Earlier, in a petition sent to Binh Duong authorities, Thao said that while waiting for the courts judgment, Vu, a member of the management board of the Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC, removed her as chairperson and general manager of the company. She said his action was illegal because it was not authorised by a majority of the management board.

According to Viet Nams Law on Enterprises, a legal representative is the company chairperson or general manager, who is authorised to represent the company and make important decisions on business operations, human resources, bank accounts and the company seal.

Trung Nguyen Corp JSC is an enterprise involved in coffee production, processing and distribution, operating under the brand name Trung Nguyen Coffee, one of the leading coffee brands in Viet Nam.

Its products have been exported to more than 60 countries, including the US, European Union, UK, Germany, China and Singapore.

Along with the Binh Duong Instant Coffee Factory run by Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC, the corporation also has factories in Bac Giang Province, HCM City and ak Lak Province.

Trung Nguyen operates a nationwide chain of coffee shops in Viet Nam and has granted franchises in other countries.  VNS
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Part painter and part magician, Pham Hong Minhs works are clever and sometimes shocking, taking peformance art to a new level. Minh Thu reports.

The painter scrawls some strokes on the easel. The painting seems difficult to understand and the audience is not interested. Suddenly, he kindles a fire on the painting. A portrait appears as its burning. The performance is impressive enough to wow the crowd.

Painter Pham Hong Minh always starts his performance with clumsy moves. He urges the audience to wait and wonder what will happen. Finally he stuns them  by burning, watering or simply rotating his work of art.

Minh was born in 1992 to a poor family in the southern central province of Binh inh. He lost his father at the age of six. His mother worked hard to bring up six children. Witnessing his mothers strenuous life, Minh was determined his would be better.

Minh has nurtured a passion for painting since childhood. He taught himself and enrolled in the HCM City Univesity of Architecture, where he studied fine arts and practised street magic tricks as a hobby. One day, he had an idea: combine the two art types to create a new and amazing type of creation.

Tricks of art

Painting seems to be a process in which the artist works independently and isolatedly, Minh said.

I want to share my passion with people. Thats why I pursue the art of performance painting. I want people to go with me from the beginning to the end of the creating process. Its not just about enjoying a completed artwork as usual.

He began looking at performance painting in other countries and created a style for himself.

He draws with paint, glue, glitter powder, fire and water. He sketches two paintings and then stacks them together to make a finished artwork.

In 2013, he participated in Viet Nams Got Talent contest, creating portraits of musician Huy Tuan and actor Thanh Loc, two contest jurors, with fire and glitter powder.

His work drew praise from the judges and enthusiastic encouragement from the audience.

The performances often last five minutes and the audience have no clue about the outcome until the last second.

I dont see many artists like Minh in Viet Nam, he seems to be the only one who does painting performance, said actor Loc.

In each performance, he combines different skills to wow the audience. And he never stops creating new pieces.

Musician Tuan said the performance makes him feel hes watching an action movie. I cant wait to see what the paintings about. It makes me more curious than watching a magic show, Tuan told Minh.

You have beautiful music accompaniment, a good idea and a convincing performing style, Tuan told Minh.

To make a successful five-minute stage performance, Minh has to practise at length and iron out wrinkles.

The first step is to find materials and decide how to make the painting emerge. Then he practises until the process is perfect.

For example, he buys many kinds of glitter powder until he finds the most suitable to go with the glue and make the painting radiant.

When using fire, he also works hard to find the suitable materials so that only one layer of the painting is burned and the one below is untouched.

Beside, I have to practise to harmonise my movements with the light and music on the stage. When the music ends, the painting is finished, he said.

After the fire painting performance, people asked him if he could paint with water. He complied.

First I paint some sketches on canvas, but people still cant imagine what will happen. Then I flush water on the painting and a portrait of Beethoven appears, he explained.

Actually, the liquid I use contains 30 per cent of transparent chemical substance and 70 per cent water, he said, revealing some tricks of his trade.

Beside performing, Minh is busy with a newly opened painting class for children, conveying to them his passion for fine arts and teaching them the basic strokes.

I never thought I would be a teacher, but because the parents enjoyed my performances, they urged me to open a class for their children, he said. Both the children and I find happiness in fine arts, thats our common thing, we inspire each other in this class.

The young artist hopes to one day open his own gallery, where he can share with visitors the secrets of his art and introduce new creations.

The performance is really thrilling on the stage but it only lasts several minutes, said Minh.

I want the painting process and my works to live longer in the heart of the audience. Who knows? My performances might inspire some other artists and we will join hands to develop this art form in Viet Nam.

Along with the Viet Nam Book of Records (Vietkings), he has proposed creating a 7m-long painting using a special material that he declines to name. He will soon perform this piece in public. VNS
WATERLOO -- A person on a bicycle allegedly fired a bullet in the 300 block of State Street, striking a home Saturday afternoon.

Waterloo Police say they got a call at 4:44 p.m. Saturday that shots were fired in the 300 block of State Street.

Upon arrival, officers found one .45-caliber shell casing and one bullet that struck a residence at 227 State St.

Police say witnesses said one individual on a bicycle fired one shot.

Police say the home wasn't the intended target.

No arrests have been made and the investigation is ongoing.
CEDAR FALLS  Karl Kurt wanted to make a difference in the lives of children when he got into the education field.

As a superintendent for the last seven years, he oversaw a school district and the children it served. When Kurt became Area Education Agency 267s assistant chief administrator and human resources director July 1, he joined an organization that works with 53 districts across 18 northeast and north central Iowa counties.

I felt like this was a good opportunity for me to have a greater impact on students, the 43-year-old said. I could have a greater impact on a greater number of kids.

He replaced retiring Kathy Enslin and has an annual salary of $155,000.

Kurt had served as the superintendent and elementary principal at North Linn Community Schools in Troy Mills since 2013. Prior to that, he was superintendent of Central City Community Schools for four years and principal of Independence High School for five years.

The Dubuque native and Loras College graduate started his career as a school psychologist after earning masters degrees in that field and educational leadership at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I started my professional career there and met my wife there, he said.

Kurt worked in Middletown City Schools for three years and then became an assistant principal in Cincinnati until returning to Iowa in 2004. We wanted to get back here to raise our kids. He and his wife, Lori, have three sons and a daughter.

While working in Independence, he earned a superintendent certificate at the University of Northern Iowa.

Since arriving at AEA 267, Kurt has been doing a lot of reading, including contracts with employee groups. Just trying to get context for where I start, he said.

Were starting to have conversations, too, he added. Theres a real focus on trying to improve our efficiency to better serve our families, students and schools. As assistant chief, Kurt works closely with Chief Administrator Sam Miller and the rest of his cabinet.

In his human resources role, Kurt will be involved in selection, development and retention of staff. Additionally, hell be overseeing the support of technology in the agency, including infrastructure such as hardware and servers.

He keeps his focus on one thing  the students  in whichever role hes functioning.

Im excited to serve in an agency that represents so many students, Kurt noted. Excited about the chance to work with a team that is so focused on students.
WATERLOO  The former bankruptcy attorney for Waterloos National Cattle Congress says the grounds under which the Meskwaki tribe of Tama is trying to foreclose on the NCC fairgrounds and NCC-owned Waterloo Greyhound Park didnt reflect the actual facts in the case.

John Titler, a Cedar Rapids attorney who handled a pair of NCC chapter 11 bankruptcy filings in the 1990s, said NCC drew the full $9.1 million the tribe extended NCC in 1995 to pay off all its creditors in full and come out of Chapter 11. He also said NCC did everything in its power to preserve its closed dog track gaming license but that some tribal officials, following a turnover in leadership, actually opposed NCC retaining its license in proceedings before the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission in the mid-90s.

Titler has not represented NCC for about 15 years and does not now, but said the two-decades-old bankruptcy court records and proceedings before the Racing and Gaming Commission should document support of his statements.

I absolutely know that we took every penny we were entitled to, Titler said. That certainly could be proven. That was in the (bankruptcy reorganization) plan and we had to fulfill that plan and we did.

However, in a ruling last month allowing foreclosure proceedings to move forward, Black Hawk County District Court Judge George Stigler said NCC did not draw approximately $4 million of the $9.1 million extended by the tribe, thereby failing to do all it could have done to maintain its solvency. Stigler based that on promissory notes entered into between the tribe and NCC produced during foreclosure proceedings.

Titler said Friday, We were battling to keep the license alive.

NCC, with new counsel, has asked for a rehearing of the foreclosure proceedings, which attorneys representing the tribe have resisted.

Titler also maintained, as NCC has argued, that the money extended by the tribe would only have to be repaid if NCC ever tried to start a gambling operation in competition with the tribes Meskwaki Casino. The tribe and NCC, working together, unsuccessfully proposed a renewed gaming operation at the closed dog track following Black Hawk County voters approving a gambling referendum in 2003. The commission ultimately granted the Black Hawk County Gaming Association a license for the Isle Casino Hotel Waterloo.

The tribe disagrees with NCCs and Titlers argument and says it is owed $13.9 million, including interest, on the money loaned 20 years ago.

Local tribal attorney Michael Treinen of Waterloo, contacted regarding Titlers comments, said the tribe declines further comment on pending litigation.
CEDAR FALLS  Supporters of a Hartman Reserve Nature Center renovation are in the weeds.

Construction bids opened this month to replace the outdated east wing of the interpretive center came well over the $2.3 million secured through a volunteer fundraising effort.

The Black Hawk County Conservation Board must decide by Aug. 7 whether to accept the low bid from Larson Construction Co. of Independence  creating a $762,000 project shortfall  or reject all bids and return to the drawing board.

It is what it is, said Carolyn Rafferty, conservation board chair, as the bids were filed Thursday. Were going to have to work with the supervisors.

Conservation staff are expecting to meet with the county Board of Supervisors Tuesday to discuss options.

But members of Friends of Hartman Reserve, a nonprofit group spearheading the project, hope the supervisors will allow the project to move forward while they return to the fundraising trail.

Our original budget was $2.2 million, said Paula Goetz, who chairs the Friends facility committee. We were just thrilled when we exceeded our goal.

Unanticipated changes, primarily driven by more stringent building code standards, forced design cuts before bids were sought. They were still unable to stay within the original budget.

Weve raised 75 percent of the money needed for the project, which is huge, Goetz said. We are confident theres support to get the project done.

Paul Lee, communications director for the Friends board, said the organization was reaching out to the community and potential donors for more support.

In 21 months time the community has been extremely generous with their contributions to us, Lee said. Its almost humbling how quickly the community said yes, this is a legacy project we want to be a part of.

Now to make up that last 25 percent, its going to take additional support from the Board of Supervisors, Conservation board and community, he added.

The Black Hawk County Gaming Association contributed more than $1.1 million to the project, while the McElroy Trust and Community Foundation of Northeast Iowa donated $200,000 each. The supervisors earmarked $100,000 it tax funding and there were dozens of smaller donations.

The nature center is named after John C. Hartman, a Waterloo Courier publisher and son of the papers founder W.H. Hartman, who teamed with the YMCA to purchased 56 acres of forested land along the Cedar River between Waterloo and Cedar Falls.

The area was used for camping and other programs into the 1970s. The Black Hawk County Conservation Board purchased the area in 1976 and turned it into an environmental education center renaming it Hartman Reserve Nature Center.

The original interpretive center was built in 1941 and has deteriorated badly, creating a need for structural repairs. The project generally retains the buildings footprint but creates a larger space for programs, events and educational activities.

This is a project decades in the making, Lee said. Its always been about the community. Its always been about nature preservation and education.

Weve outgrown the building, he added. Simply put, we could do so much more programming but we dont physically have the space.

The interpretive center in Hartman Reserve, a forested area along the Cedar River spanning Waterloo and Cedar Falls, is heavily used by elementary and high school students, community groups, senior citizens and businesses looking for space to hold retreats and team-building exercises.

Events include Halloween hikes and the popular Maple Syrup Festival each year.

Goetz said its unlikely the project could be scaled back further and still meet the growing user needs.

There were some painful decisions on how to stay within our budget already, she said. Were still very excited. We havent lost much and were still able to meet program goals and community needs.

The only cost-cutting alternate in the bid process would be leaving the basement unfinished, which would save about $125,000. The basement was expected to be used for kids program and to include 24-hour restrooms, accessible from outdoors, to serve twilight events.

The Board of Supervisors is expected to discuss the issue at 9 a.m. Tuesday.
WATERLOO  Rowing clubs from across the state dipped their oars in the waters of George Wyth Lake Saturday.

It was a red-letter day for members of the Waterloo Rowing Club who were hosting the annual Iowa Games rowing competition for the first time since they were decimated by the record 2008 flood.

Club member Steve Hasenour said the group is still working to restore its ranks, but he was thrilled to see Waterloo once again host the annual regatta.

The flood took our boathouse out, Hasenour said. We had 18 boats in there that mostly got destroyed. Weve been rebuilding since then.

It takes a lot of work to put this on, but we are very happy to do it again, he added. Rowing is a great thing for the city of Waterloo. Weve got the Cedar River right there and its a great river to row on.

While the club practices on the Cedar, the Iowa Games races are held on a 1,000-meter lake course in George Wyth State Park. Club members stretched two cables across the lake to hold the lane-marker buoys.

More than 70 competitors from the states four rowing clubs  Davenport, Iowa City and Des Moines are the others  competed in a variety of races Saturday from singles to eight-person teams. Amateur rowers ranged in age from high school students to a 70-year-old.

Waterloo Rowing Club member Steve Onken was part of an exciting morning race, which saw his crew of four men and four women hold off a hard-charging Des Moines Rowing Club to win by one second.

It was great to have the competition, said Onken, a University of Northern Iowa professor whose been rowing for more than 30 years and enjoys the social aspects of being in the club.

While Waterloos mixed-eight team doesnt train together  most crews train in all-male or all-female groups  Onken said his team managed to come together for the race and benefited from a few missed strokes by the Des Moines unit.

Its all about synchronicity, Onken said. Youre always looking for that perfect stroke.

He also credited coxswain Emily McClimon with keeping the team on track. The coxswain barks out directions for the rowers and keeps an eye on competitors.

McClimon, of Waverly, was a member of the University of Iowa womens rowing team in college who joined the Waterloo Rowing Club after taking time off to start a family.

It was time to get back into it, she said. I was missing it a lot.

Hasenour hopes the Iowa Games regatta draws more attention to the local rowing community.

Were the oldest rowing club in the state, he said. Were always interested in getting more people rowing.
A number of years ago, I created an artist by the name of Justin Case. Justin was an art major at the University of Northern Iowa and heavily into performance art. He was filming himself, painted purple and chained to a 1965 Volkswagen, when he had an epiphany.

Since most modern art is ugly, unskilled and full of hubris, almost anyone with enough ego could do it. But if anyone could create modern art, the art itself must not be the crux of art. Justin reasoned the idea behind the art was the true art. An actual corporal manifestation of that concept would deny the art conceptualized by the artist.

Therefore only in refusing to actually produce art could an artist be true to art. This was the beginning of a movement called Refusalism in which an artist conceived of a piece of art but refused to produce it.

Justin went on to be a top American artist celebrated in New York and L.A., where he filled galleries with blank walls in which his art would hang if he had actually produced it. He was very prolific and became one of the richest UNI alums in the schools storied history.

A disciple of Case by the name of Lotta Cash modified Refusalism, realizing once an art piece was produced it did not have to remain static but could change with the observation of a conscious observer; this became known as Quantum Refusalism and solved some of the epistemological problems with Cases original hypothesis.

For a decade afterward, Refusalism was debated by artists, deep thinkers, educators and theologians. Some educators at prestigious schools maintained only in the refusal to teach a class could true teaching be realized. Eventually, the movement died because some students embraced refusalism and refused to attend classes professors refused to teach. There also was the problem of being able to identify when a teacher was a true refusalist or was simply a Philistine confusing their daily habits with art.

New information has revealed Justin Cases original breakthrough may have had its beginnings in music. A recent press release indicated Refusalism is alive and well outside the fevered imagination of the current writer.

A musical composer by the name of John Cage became extolled as a genius when he produced a piece called 433, in which the musicians who play the piece must not play the music, but remain silent for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

The art world went absolutely gaga over Cages genius and his resolve to break existing paradigms.

Evidently, a Gainesville, Fla., performance artist has proposed to further celebrate Cages triumph by installing sculptures in a downtown plaza. Pieces of art will be installed in 15-minute intervals over a period of five days. But true to Justin Case, each sculpture will not physically be produced; the plaza will remain perfectly empty of any actual art.

The news article was silent about how much Gainesville will pay to have these numerous sculptures added to the public forum.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 15, 2016 | 12:53 PM | DU QUOIN, IL

The Du Quoin State Fair has announced a new and improved website just in time for fairgoers to start planning their trip to the 2016 fair. The website www.duquoinstatefair.net features has a new layout, new features, and is now easier for fairgoers to access on their mobile devices, with the fair just 40 days away.Du Quoin State Fair Manager Kevin Gordon said, "This revamped website is visually appealing and easy to navigate. As we get closer to the fair you will see more details about dates and times of events, where to find your favorite vendors, and what events are planned on the fairgrounds the other 355 days of the year."Under the Competitive Events tab, fairgoers can find the 2016 Du Quoin State Fair Premium Books and Home Show books. These books give exhibitors easy access to entry information such as, deadlines, price money, and competition rules.Another new feature on the redesigned website is a running list of all the food vendors attending the 2016 Du Quoin State Fair. This new feature, under the Food & Vendors tab, provides fairgoers will select menu items and the exact location of where you can find your favorite vendor will be on fairgrounds.There is still more information to come regarding the 2016 Du Quoin State Fair, so fans are encouraged to check back often for updates. The fair runs August 26th - September 5th, 2016.Musical acts are always a highlight at the fair, and this year's performers include Kelly Pickler, Aaron Lewis, Pat Green, Herman's Hermits with Peter Noone, Jamey Johnson, Skillet, and the Summerland Tour featuring Sugar Ray, Lit, Everclear and Sponge.

On the Net:
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jul. 12, 2016 | GRAVES COUNTY, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 12, 2016 | 04:57 PM | GRAVES COUNTY, KY

Two Graves County residents now face criminal charges, after a dog attack earlier this month that left a Farmington man badly injured.



On Tuesday, Kentucky State Police charged 27-year-old Chris Bouland and 45-year-old Tina Dykes, both of Farmington, with harboring a vicious animal, a class B misdemeanor. If found guilty, the two could face a up to a $200 fine or up to 60 days in jail, or both. The victim in the dog attack, 22-year-old Mitchell Slayden, also of Farmington, has been treated and released from Tri-Star Skyline Medical Center in Nashville, TN.



Police said Slayden was riding a bicycle on July 2 when he pulled into the driveway of Bouland's home. Slayden told police he was looking for a man that he believed lived at the home, but the man reportedly no longer lived there. When he entered the driveway, Slayden was confronted by two pit bull dogs, and as he attempted to leave the driveway the dogs reportedly attacked him.



Slayden suffered lacerations to his face, head, arms, and legs. Both dogs were taken into custody by Graves County Animal Control. They remain at the Mayfield-Graves County Animal Shelter.




By The Associated Press Jul. 15, 2016 | 04:43 PM | ANKARA, TURKEY

Turkish officials  including the president, the prime minister and the interior minister  are urging supporters to come out to city squares again overnight to defend democracy  and thousands have responded to their calls.

Massive crowds are singing and waving Turkish flags in Istanbul's neighborhood of Kisikli, in Izmir's Konak square, and in the northeastern city of Erzincan. A festive crowd has also formed in Ankara's Kizilay square.

Tens of thousands turned out Friday night to repel a coup attempt that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is blaming on a U.S.-based moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen. Erdogan says he will ask the U.S. to extradite Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania.

Earlier Story:Thurkey's state-run Anadolu Agency is reporting 754 members of the armed forces have been detained across the country in the wake of the attempted coup.Anadolu says that at the Etimesgut armored units training command, in the outskirts of Ankara, some soldiers who took part in the coup attempt were arrested by fellow officers or soldiers and handed over to police. A source at the presidency told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that 13 military officers who had earlier tried to forcibly enter the presidential palace were among those arrested.Even as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the coup is being crushed and arrests made, it is not clear who is in control of military headquarters in Ankara. Erdogan has not left the Istanbul airport as dawn broke Saturday.An official in the president's office says at least 60 people have been killed, most of them civilians. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media.Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, quoted by state-run Anadolu Agency, says security forces have "achieved results in many places" and defeated coup plotters. That includes the National Intelligence Agency, police and government buildings. He says: "There is nowhere they have they have proper control. God willing they will be defeated in the remaining areas and those in the air will be brought down."CNN-Turk is quoting Prime Minister Binali Yildirim as saying that commander of Turkey's 1st Army, Gen. Umit Dundar, has been appointed acting chief of military staff. Earlier President Erdogan said he had no information concerning Chief of Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar, who was reportedly taken hostage at the military headquarters by coup plotters.CNN-Turk also showed images of dozens of soldiers giving themselves up to government forces on Istanbul's Bosporus Bridge. They were walking among tanks with their hands held up.Turkey's state-run news agency says a military helicopter used by coup plotters has been shot down. The Anadolu Agency says Saturday the helicopter was brought down in the Golbasi district, in the outskirts of Ankara. The report says the helicopter was used to attack Turkey's satellite station Turksat.Meanwhile, European Council President Donald Tusk says the EU fully supports Turkey's democratically elected government, in the wake of the attempted coup. Speaking in Mongolia at the Asia-Europe summit meeting, Tusk says "Turkey is a key partner for the European Union. The EU fully supports the democratically elected government, the institutions of the country and the rule of law."Tusk also called for a swift return to Turkey's constitutional order.Meanwhile, Yildirim called all legislators for an emergency meeting on Saturday.Parliament Speaker Ismail Kahraman earlier said that a bomb hit one corner of a public relations building inside the parliament complex, injuring some police officers. He said there were no fatalities and that all legislators were safe at a parliamentary shelter.Original Story:The White House says President Barack Obama has been briefed on developments in key NATO ally Turkey where the military claims to have seized power in a coup.The National Security Council said Obama had been apprised of Friday "unfolding situation'' in Turkey and would continue to get regular updates.U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says he hopes for stability and continuity in Turkey following the reports.Kerry, in Moscow for talks with Russian officials on Syria on Friday, told reporters he didn't have details of the situation rapidly unfolding on the ground in Turkey and said it would be "inappropriate'' to comment on developments. But, he expressed hope that the key ally and strategically important member of the coalition fighting the Islamic State would remain at peace.
It is Sunday, the coffee is great and it is cooler this morning. I keep hoping the world will slow down and stabilize, but the powers to be have a different agenda

A failed setup Turkish coup, U.S. military operations out of Turkeys giant Incirlik Air Base suspended by Turkey and No One, but No One is asking why the hell the U.S. is storing 50+  B61 nuclear bombs there in the first place. Turkey! Such a great place to store nukes 

The mainstream media should be screaming bloody murder over nukes under siege.Turkey could take that base fast if it so desired. I am sure half the staff is Turkish, even with U.S. passports or not

Seriously; how many damn nukes does the U.S. have scattered all over the world? You should never have to ask who is the real terrorist in the world. The Western Empire just has to look in the mirror as it shaves every morning

That there is a terrorist! they should say

* * * * * * * * * *

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed bluntly to western reporters to understand that the whole world is flirting with war

We know year by year whats going to happen, and they know that we know. Its only you that they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the impending danger  this is what worries me. How do you not understand that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they pretend that nothing is going on. I dont know how to get through to you anymore.

Said Quote above, The Russian President Vladimir Putin

Sanity expressed by Russia and insanity demonstrated by the U.S.

* * * * * * * * * *

World War Three (WW3) will not be between nuclear superpowers only, itll be everyone (countries) fighting everyone, massive brawl, kinda like a saloon fight in an old western movie, but with nukes and then knives. Who ever is not bombed to oblivion, will have the knives to slit the throats of who are left, as they crawl from the radioactive ashes and piles of rubble. Interesting, to survive a nuke and have your throat slit as you think you might just make it

* * * * * * * * * *

Record stock markets! Nothing like some world terrorists attacks to raise the fake value of a bunch of worthless companies?

What part of Hotel California and Rigged Casino is unclear?

* * * * * * * * * *

Drive-by shooting injures 14 in Bakersfield

Obama: Globalism will defeat terrorism  (Not when you are the leader of the terrorists, besides Obama just goes through the motions anymore and says exactly what he is told to say!)

How about a million more pathetic links (just look at the news.) Net! Just too sad, or scared, or worried, or blind and sick to read them

* * * * * * * * * *

I think about another twenty million additional refugees into Europe, will just about garner the army needed to send Europe to the swirling drain and cesspool

* * * * * * * * * *

Is there any truth in the world anymore?

Or do we enjoy a masticated information rhythm?

* * * * * * * * * *

How about them nukes stored in Turkey? Such a fine place for nukes to lurk, in the safety of the Turkish country

Have a nice day

WtR
Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

In response to the latest terrorist atrocity, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and quite possibly the next secretary of state, suggested that the U.S. should investigate American Muslims to ascertain their level of commitment to sharia, or Islamic law. (Details about the attacker, and his motives, were still emerging as of Friday morning; police sources have said the attacker was a young French Tunisian, though at press time there was no official confirmation.) Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in sharia, they should be deported, Gingrich told Foxs Sean Hannity. Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. Modern Muslims who have given up sharia, glad to have them as citizens. Perfectly happy to have them next door.

There is much to critique in Gingrichs approach, but I was struck in particular by his statement that Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization. One of the Middle East countries that officially endorses sharia as a legal system is one of Gingrichs most favored countries, Israel, which is, by his lightsand minea crucial component of Western civilization. Israels sharia courts, which are supervised by the Ministry of Justice, allow the more than 15 percent of Israels population that is Muslim to seek religious recourse for their personal dilemmas. These courts have been in operation since Israels founding, and yet the country does not seem to have been fatally undermined by their existence. Israels sharia courts raise complicated mosque-state questions (and the power of the Israeli rabbinate raises complicated synagogue-state questions) but, so far, Western civilization, in its Israeli democratic manifestation, seems to be holding on. So, apart from the obviously unconstitutional quality of Gingrichs demandand its deeply counterproductive national security componentanother question is worth raising: Does the Israeli governments support for the existence of sharia courtsthe government actually pays the salaries of sharia judgescast doubt on the Jewish states commitment to Western values? Should Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, be questioned by American authorities for advancing the cause of sharia? And what about Israels president, Reuven Rivlin, who, in a recent ceremony welcoming the appointment of seven new Muslim court judges, quoted the following passage from the Quran: Indeed, did We send Our apostles with all evidence of truth, and through them We bestowed revelation from on high, and gave you a balance so that men might behave with equity.

More here.
Sheriff-to-be reiterates need for regional jail in Brown County

As Brown County considers the possibility of building a new regional jail, Chief Deputy Dave Lunzman reminded commissioners of why it's needed.
Lynn Lindgren keeps a list of responses ready for whenever a scammer calls.

I have a large collection of four-letter words in many languages, the Albuquerque woman says.

Lindgren made good use of her list a while ago when she got a call from a man with a heavy accent who was trying to scam her. The man was undoubtedly surprised to hear Lindgren telling him in response  and in Hindi  that one of his male body parts was small.

She hung up and he never called back.

Lindgren has experience with scam calls, some of them very unpleasant. She cited a series of calls recently that purported to be about one of her magazine subscriptions.

The caller informed her that her payment for a two-year subscription had been blocked so that she could get a 40 percent senior discount under a new program. Lindgren said the female caller was vague about the details, but said it was good news for me.

However, to reinstate her subscription and get the discount, the caller wanted Lindgrens credit or debit card number. Lindgren, unsure at first whether the call was legitimate, told the caller the truth: she couldnt make an immediate decision because she had put her dog down the day before and was distraught.

The caller responded this way: What is so hard for you to understand? This is so simple.

Lindgren ended that call (without making any body part references), but then continued to get more, sometimes four or five times a day.

The Better Business Bureau offers these tips for dealing with magazine subscription services:

Dont fall for high-pressure sales tactics. Bogus magazine representatives hope youll make a purchase or a bad decision before you can think it over.

Ask to see the terms and conditions of a subscription. Legitimate magazine companies will give you the details in writing, including the commitment period, total price and cancelation instructions.

If you are uncertain about your subscription, contact the publisher directly with questions or concerns. Find the contact information independently rather than using a phone number or email address supplied by the caller.

The state Attorney Generals Office has received complaints about phone calls telling people they have won prizes, specifically a tablet and two years of internet service.

The catch is that the supposed winner must pay $300 to $400 to claim the goodies, says an alert from the AGs Office.

When the consumer fails to send the money or refuses to send the money, the person threatens the consumer with legal action, the alert says.

Remember, if you have to pay to claim a prize, in reality you did not win, the alert says.

The AGs office also reminds people never to send money or reveal Social Security, credit card or any other personal information to someone who calls.

Report the prize scam call to the AGs office by calling 1-866-627-3249 or filling out a complaint at nmag.gov/uploads/files/ComplaintForms/ConsumerComplaintForm.pdf.

Consider taking a few easy measures now that will reduce headaches if you ever get your wallet stolen. First, make sure you are not carrying such items as cheat sheets that contain passwords, spare keys or a Social Security card.

Second, make photocopies of the front and back of every card in your wallet, including drivers license, insurance cards and credit cards. Keep the list in a home lock box or somewhere that is safe. This will give you instant access to all your account numbers and security codes if you need to cancel because of theft.

Ellen Marks is assistant business editor at the Albuquerque Journal. Contact her at emarks@abqjournal.com or 505-823-3842 if you are aware of what sounds like a scam. To report a scam to law enforcement, contact the New Mexico Consumer Protection Division toll-free at 1-866-627-3249.
Add a new name to the list of heroines in history  Dona Teresa Aguilera y Roche.

The obscure Dona Teresa was brave, strong-willed, intelligent, well-educated and armed with a good memory.

She was heroic because she successfully stood up for herself against the feared Spanish Inquisition during a lengthy ordeal. And she survived.

Dona Teresas ordeal began with her arrest in Santa Fe by Inquisition representatives. It continued on a forced journey over the Camino Real to Mexico City and during a lengthy period in which she was confined to a cell in a secret jail and in an Inquisition trial.

Guilty until proven innocent, Dona Teresa faced 41 charges.

She was the only woman from New Mexico ever tried by the Inquisition in Mexico City for the crime of being judaizante, or secretly practicing Judaism, Frances Levine writes in the introduction to her new book, Dona Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition, A 17th Century New Mexico Drama.

In oral and written testimony, she denied that and all other charges against her. Dona Teresa said she was, and had always been, a Catholic Christian.

The Spanish Inquisition, established in the 15th century, was infamous for rooting out, prosecuting, convicting and in some cases killing at the stake alleged heretics, namely Jews and Muslims who had converted to Catholicism but had relapsed.

In the New World, the Inquisition set up a Holy Office in Mexico City. Its tribunal hunted down suspected backsliders, even to its distant northern frontier.

Dona Teresa lived in Santa Fe with her husband, Bernardo Lopez de Mendizabal, the governor of New Mexico from 1659 to 1662. Being the governors wife didnt aid her cause against the charges. In fact, Mendizabal himself was accused of being judaizante and was hauled to Mexico City shackled to a prison cart. He died in prison.

The indictments against Dona Teresa were based on testimony, some second- and third-hand, from 26 people, including friars, colonial officials, maids. The tribunal never revealed to her the witnesses of her alleged misconduct.

According to Levines research, Dona Teresa languished in an Inquisition prison cell. She was informed that the charges against her included failure to fulfill religious obligations and suspicions about her personal hygiene  that she bathed and changed linens and clothes on Friday night. Witnesses thought that could be evidence she was practicing Judaism in secret.

Dona Teresa didnt cave in. Fighting to clear her name, she wrote detailed, convincing rebuttals that were read into the tribunal record.

The tribunal never convicted her of a single charge and Dona Teresa emerged from prison.

The book also paints a picture of the social life and the power struggles in Santa Fe in the mid-17th century.

Levine is president of the Missouri Historical Society and Museum in St. Louis and is a former director of the New Mexico History Museum.

IF YOU GO

Levine will lecture at 2 p.m. July 24, at the New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe. Free with museum admission.
The Clark dome of the Lowell Observatory at night. (Courtesy of Lowell Observatory) Archaeology Gallery at the Museum of Northern Arizona. (Courtesy of Museum of Northern Arizona) The Rotunda at night. (Courtesy of Flagstaff Convention and Visitors Bureau) The Arboretum at Flagstaff. (Courtesy of Flagstaff Convention and Visitors Bureau) A Dilophosaurus skeleton at the Museum of Northern Arizona. (Courtesy of Museum of Northern Arizona) Clark Telescope. (Courtesy of Flagstaff Convention and Visitors Bureau) Prev 1 of 7 Next

Flagstaff, about five hours west of Albuquerque, is the gateway city to the Grand Canyon and a short excursion from Sedona.

But there is plenty to entice and intrigue visitors without straying too far down the road. And at 7,000 feet elevation amid pine and aspen forests, Flagstaff is a great place to beat the heat.

The Museum of Northern Arizona (musnaz.org) provides displays ranging from Native American culture and art to natural history, geology, archaeology, biology and paleontology, said Cristen Crujido, museum marketing director.

Were unique in that we showcase natural history and the fine arts of the Colorado Plateau, she said.

But thats not too surprising, because the husband-wife team that founded the museum in 1928 were a zoologist and a painter, Crujido said.

They wanted to fuse the arts and science of the region, she said.

In addition to displaying an array of area items, the museum sits amid a 200-acre research campus that also is available for private, behind-the-scene tours.

The Easton Collection Center is an award-winning facility with a few hundred thousand objects, Crujido said. Its an amazing array of jewelry, pottery, baskets, a very lovely collection of fine art, botanical specimens, zoology specimens, dinosaur bones and fossils.

The museum also is home to numerous festivals, including the 67th annual Navajo Festival for Arts and Culture on Aug. 6-7. It will showcase the work of more than 80 visual artists, some of whom are established and others who are considered up-and-comers, she said. In addition, the main stage will feature both traditional and modern performing arts.

Basking in the summer sun at the Arboretum at Flagstaff is an endless splash of vibrant, horticultural color and native animals.

Although originally founded in 1981 as a research center, it has evolved into a city showcase, even hosting special events. A Shakespeare festival opens on July 31 with a production of A Midsummer Nights Dream, and a monthly concert with New West Guitar Group featuring Sarah Gazarek on Aug. 6.

In keeping with the natural surroundings, The Nature Conservancys Hart Prairie Preserve is home to what it claims is the worlds largest stand of Bebbs willow. Set on 245 acres about 14 miles from Flagstaff, the preserve is filled with wildflowers, old-growth ponderosa pine, elk and deer herds, porcupines, prairie dogs and more than 40 species of birds.

And for a mind-bending excursion, head just a bit farther out to the Lowell Observatory (lowell.edu) atop Mars Hill.

One of the storied landmarks in astronomy, the Lowell Observatory is where Pluto was discovered in 1930.

In addition to is continued use as a leading research center, the observatory is open to the public, with numerous exhibits and telescopic opportunities throughout the day and evening, spokesman Josh Bangle said.

The Rotunda Museum not only features exhibits related to Clyde Tombaughs discovery of Pluto, but also the Saturn Lamp, a stained-glass marvel constructed in 1918 by Los Angeles Light Co., Bangle said.

A new exhibit, the SpaceGuardAcademy, focuses on asteroid research and science. Visitors can use photometry to determine the movement of asteroids and unlock the mysteries of Earths formation. They can learn how to spot asteroids in a sky full of stars while also taking a stab at protecting Earth from inbound asteroids, he said.

The history of the area in another arena is highlighted by the Fort Tuthill Military Museum (forttuthill.org), which traces the lineage of the 1st Battalion 158th Infantry Regiment from its formation in 1865 through its service in Afghanistan in 2007-08, curator Jim Warbasse said. In a county park that had once been the grounds of Fort Tuthill, the museum is closed while moving its displays to larger quarters within the complex, he said. A portion of it should be open by mid-August.
SITE Santa Fes SITElines 2016 emphasizes the interconnectedness of all the Americas, with their shared experiences, colonial legacies, indigenous voices and relationships to the land.

Borders are about more than a line, SITE director Irene Hofmann said.

As visitors enter the SITE Santa Fe building, theyll be greeted by a 26- by 14-foot metaphor, a re-creation of the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater. Commissioned by design pioneer Lloyd Kiva New, it was completed in 1970. Its design spans cultures and traditions, including Native American, Spanish Colonial and European.

Five curators chose the biennials 35 participating artists, including several from Albuquerque.

El Paso-based fabric artist Margarita Cabrera gathered Hispanic immigrants in Houston, Charlotte, N.C., and Tempe, Ariz., to create cactus sculptures stitched from Border Patrol uniforms. The SITE series will feature similar sculptures made by community workshop members in collaboration with the Santa Fe Art Institute.

I had been collecting them at flea markets, Cabrera said. The uniform, unfortunately, has a very negative connotation. Im trying to change that and create a different image to that fabric and that symbol of authority. Were creating a new landscape with them.

That scenery encompasses cactus and succulents appearing along migrant border crossings.

They sew and embroider on the surface of these sculptures, Cabrera said. As you get closer, you find the buttons and closures that tell this important story.

University of New Mexico communication and journalism professor Miguel Ganderts portraits capture life in Bernalillo Countys South Valley.

In the 1980s, Gandert was one of 12 photographers commissioned by the New Mexico Museum of Art to document the state for a book funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

They are all portraits on the street, Gandert said.

In one image, the architecture of the Civic Plaza offers a backdrop for a water fountain, as well as a makeshift pool for local residents.

Ganderts intimate photograph of a couple in a car conveys a sense of lowrider culture as well as their relationship.

I was literally in the car, he said. The door was open. As I moved in closer to get the shots, the guys hand goes to the womans knee. I hope the viewer absorbs that kind of intimacy, myself as their surrogate.

Francisca Benitez breaks down barriers  specifically those between the deaf and hearing communities.

Born in Chile and trained in architecture, Benitez lives in New York.

On Sept. 30, Benitez will lead a group of students from SITE Santa Fe to the New Mexico School for the Deaf and back for an America Sign Language poetry jam session. The two institutions have never collaborated before.

Its very close to me and personal, because my father was deaf, Benitez said.

The simple act of walking together creates a connection that can be difficult to achieve between a hearing person and a deaf person, she added.

At SITE, the students will present collections from the schools Kenneth E. Brasel Centennial Museum. Benitez has chosen five 1960s photographs of deaf students communicating with one another.

About the same time the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater was built, a small poetry quarterly issued in Mexico City gave voice to progressive poets and writers across continents.

El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, co-founded and edited by Albuquerques Margaret Randall, represented the cutting edge of independent publishing. Randall will present an installation of El Corno at SITElines.

Distributed throughout the Americas, El Corno established a network of writers and artists seeking a supportive venue for rebellion.

Those voices included Mexican poets, the Beats, indigenous writers and the surrealists. If the Paolo Soleri provides a physical symbol for sitelines, El Como is its metaphorical equivalent.
The walls of Margaret Randalls tiny Nob Hill house document a life spent breaking and living beyond borderlines.

Photographs she took in Mexico, Cuba and Nicaragua hang near portraits of Randall by the abstract expressionist Elaine De Kooning. Her bookshelves groan with titles on Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Spanish verbs.

A poster from a San Francisco reading looms over her office across from a photograph of a female Sandinista soldier, pen and emery board peeking from her pocket as a gun pierces the sky behind her back.

Stacks of the small poetry magazine Randall edited sit on the coffee table. Their contents include works by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the surrealist Andre Breton, Charles Bukowski, Hermann Hesse, Octavio Paz, Robert Nichols and poetry by the painters Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Oskar Kokoshka and Salvador Dali, as well as the architect Buckminster Fuller.

The Albuquerque poet was the founding filament of the influential Mexico City-based bilingual quarterly El Corno Emplumado, or The Plumed Horn. Launched in 1962 with her second husband and poet Sergio Mondragon, it provided a forum for vanguard writers and artists.

SITE Santa Fe has dedicated an installation to Randall in its current biennial SITElines. 2016: New Perspectives on Art from the Americas, on view through Jan. 8, 2017.

Something different

The Plumed Horn was on the cutting edge of independent publishing. The bilingual quarterly, which ran from 100 to almost 300 pages per issue, published some of the best new work to come out of Latin and North America  with occasional sections from Canada, Finland, France and other countries. Its 3,000 copies were distributed worldwide. The name referenced both an Aztec god and jazz, the rhythm of its time.

Born in New York, Randall moved to Albuquerque with her parents when she was 10. Her cellist father taught in the schools. Her mother had been a sculptor until she took Spanish at the University of New Mexico and became a translator.

Randall remembers her father coming home from work and plopping into his lap in front of a large book.

From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a writer, she said.

A reading of Ginsbergs iconic poem Howl at a party in the East Mountains jolted her into poetry.

I think it was the hypocrisy, the stagnation of U.S. society, she said. There was such a double standard for girls and boys. We werent even expected to take math and science  only boys. Ginsbergs poem helped me articulate that.

A journey started

After her first semester of college, she took off to Spain with a boyfriend, studied the language, got married, then returned to New York because she thought it was where all writers lived. Soon divorced, she waited tables and worked in a feather factory for womens hats, then had a baby out of wedlock. Then she hopped onto a bus to Mexico City, where she translated comic books and penned dance and music reviews.

I wasnt scared, she said. I had the sense that Mexico was a kinder place than New York.

She met Mondragon at a poetry salon, where the idea for a magazine gestated. North America knew nothing about Neruda; South America knew nothing of Ezra Pound.

We needed a vehicle for translation, she said.

She was just 24. They had no money. But the secretary of state, himself a poet, donated 1,000 pesos, an astounding amount at the time. Then the Mexican government kicked in some cash.

We were always worried, Randall said. But it worked. We had a few ads from publishing houses.

The first issue featured a drawing by De Kooning, a piece by the well-known French anthropologist Laurette Sejourne and a work by the surrealist English painter Leonora Carrington. Soon the editors were fielding 30 submissions per month. Randall rejected 75 percent of them.

The former Cassius Clay submitted some haikus about the Vietnam War.

I rejected them, for which I am forever ashamed, she said.

Norman Mailer, whom I knew, sent me some poems I didnt like, she added. He was very gracious about it. He sent me $5. He was a sweetheart, despite his fame.

Moving on

In 1967, Randall applied for Mexican citizenship to be eligible for a better job. The U.S. Consulate refused to grant her dual citizenship, so she renounced her American passport.

Student unrest, along with the magazines support of the protesters, unraveled it all. The young were rallying for university autonomy and for the rights of the electricians and farmers unions. Mexico City was readying for the 1968 Olympics, and government officials bore no patience for disruptions.

In 1968, paramilitary troops began shooting at a peaceful protest. For years, the Mexican government maintained that 26 died; later revising the body count to 300. Randall maintains it was more than 1,000.

People just disappeared, she said.

El Corno soon lost its government subsidies. Randall divorced her husband and fled to Cuba with her new lover, Robert Cohen and four children. She had visited the island as a writer.

To me, it was very exciting what was happening in Cuba, she said. I had never been to a socialist country.

She stayed 11 years.

I loved it, Randall said. It was an absolutely wonderful place to raise children. I feel that Fidel (Castro) at that time was an extraordinary leader.

There was some support of writers; there was so much support from the government, she said. Writers were paid to be writers. Artists were paid to be artists. My kids could play in the streets. There was universal health care.

She wrote about Cuban women.

But by the 1980s, the Castro government began suppressing homosexuals and anyone else who didnt adhere to the party line. Randall lost her job at a publishing house. Her friend the poet Ernesto Cardinale had become the first minister of culture under Nicaraguas Sandinista government; he invited Randall to write about women involved in the struggle. She produced books about feminism in Nicaragua and documented the testimonies of women involved in the struggle.

Randall left after four years with the rise of the U.S.-backed Contras. Years of constant war eventually left 50,000 Nicaraguans dead.

I was exhausted, she said. My parents were getting elderly.

She returned to New Mexico in 1984 on a tourist visa, planning to apply for a green card.

They called me down to the federal building, she said. They had seven of my books opened to different passages marked yellow with magic marker.

The denial was based on a 1952 law called the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, sprung from the vestiges of McCarthyism.

I didnt really give up my citizenship, she maintains. It was taken from me. I wasnt a communist and I wasnt a member of any communist party.

She regained her citizenship in 1989  five years later, with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a group of well-known friends and acquaintances that included the writers Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Arthur Miller and Alice Walker.

Today she still works 18-hour days, rising at 3 a.m., her favorite hour because of the silence. She lives with her partner and wife, Barbara Byers, a painter. She turns 80 in December.
With his luminous lineage, its easy to assume pianist Peter Serkin was born on a keyboard.

The son of the legendary pianist Rudolf Serkin and the grandson of the violinist and composer Adolf Busch, the younger Serkin is the artist-in-residence for this years Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

Serkin will perform a solo piano recital in the New Mexico Museum of Arts St. Francis Auditorium on Aug. 16. The program will emphasize rarely heard 17th century works, as well as Beethovens Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109.

Scheduled for six collaborative performances throughout the festival, the pianist also will perform Schoenbergs Chamber Symphony No. 1 with the Orion String Quartet and Dvoraks Piano Quintet in A Major, Op. 81 with the Dover Quartet. See santafechambermusic.com for dates and locations.

Serkins fingers span five centuries of music. As a child, he grew up immersed in, enveloped and enchanted by the music of both his father and his grandfather. Rudolf Serkin was regarded as one of the greatest Beethoven interpreters of the 20th century.

The younger Serkin says he never intended to become a professional pianist.

I think it was just a progression, he said in a phone interview from New York, where he teaches at Bard College after stints at both Juilliard and Philadelphias Curtis Institute of Music. It was my whole life, anyway. I was so in love with and so excited to get to know great music. I actually started with the violin.

He began playing piano at 6 or 7, he said.

His first teacher was his father, Rudolf, who could be something of a taskmaster.

He could be tough and he could be a little acerbic, too, Serkin acknowledged. But that is the nature of being a serious musician, anyway, because its such a difficult thing to do.

Even then, it wasnt so much to be a pianist, but a means just to get to know great music.

The exploration never stopped.

Serkin began studying at Curtis at age 11. He won his first Grammy Award at 19. Since then, he has played with the worlds greatest symphonies, led by such eminent conductors as Seiji Ozawa, Pierre Boulez, George Szell, Eugene Ormandy, Simon Rattle and James Levine.

He has recently been playing with Julia Hsu, his duet partner. Hsu will perform with him in Santa Fe.
Two years ago I moved back to New Mexico. Like any good citizen, I set about ensuring all of my residency requirements were in order, including my drivers license.

While I was in the process of getting my New Mexico license, I was asked if I would like to register to vote. Great, I thought. I told the young woman behind the desk at the Motor Vehicle Division, Yes, that would be wonderful, thanks.

She then asked me if I would like to register as a Democrat or as a Republican.

I am an Independent, I told her. Oh, she replied. And again asked me if I would like to register as a Democrat or a Republican.

Again I told her I was an Independent. We dont have those here, she said. We have only Democrat or Republican. I will mark you down as a Declined to State.

I objected, telling her that I had not declined to state. In fact, I had stated that I was an Independent. Oh well, I thought.

Fast forward to June 2016.

Time for the primaries! New Mexico is one of 11 states that hold closed primaries. In other words, one must be a registered Republican or Democrat in order to vote in the primaries.

Sensing that I would not be allowed to vote, I proceeded to the Sandoval County Judicial Complex anyway to attempt to vote in the primaries. The slate included everything from the presidential candidates through the state Public Regulatory Commission candidate.

I approached the lady at the registration table and showed her my drivers license. She looked in her computer and then looked at me and asked me if I wanted to register as a Democrat or a Republican. I informed her that I was an Independent and did not desire to register as either.

She then informed me that I could not vote in the primary. After some further discussion, she summoned the polling place judge.

I stepped away from the table and explained to the judge that I was interested in voting in the primary.

Oh, she said. You cant vote. Youre a Declined to State. Would you like to register as a Democrat or a Republican?

I told her no, and that I had not declined to state. I had stated very clearly that I was an Independent.

She reaffirmed that unless I was registered as a Democrat or a Republican, I couldnt vote.

OK, I responded. Does that mean that I can stop paying my taxes since I cant vote?

Oh, no, she replied emphatically. Keep paying your taxes. You just cant vote today.

I then replied Isnt that like taxation without representation?

She stared blankly at me and said, Well, just keep paying your taxes, but you cant vote today.

I have spent 28 years of my adult life on active military duty protecting this nation and all that it stands for, New Mexico included. Now I know what it feels like to be told, in spite of that service, I could not vote in the primary.

The above is, in my mind, the quintessential example of why Americans in general are fed up with both the Republicans and Democrats, and politics as usual.

What are those 11 states that hold closed primaries worried about? Why are they afraid of the Independent voters in their respective states?

I think this illustrates clearly how the political machines try to preserve their power bases and control election outcomes.

So, I must pay my taxes, but I cant vote. The last time that happened in this country, we had a revolution!

Mike Tryon is a retired Navy captain.
Rep. Steve Pearce had some simple advice for Republicans hoping to dump Donald Trump as the partys presidential nominee at their national convention in Cleveland this week.

When we start thinking were smarter than the voters we can get in real trouble, Pearce said in a phone interview from Cleveland on Wednesday as he prepared to start work as a member of the conventions rules committee.

For the past couple of months, there has been consistent chatter among Republicans about replacing the controversial Trump at the convention in favor of another candidate.

But the reality is that Trump destroyed his GOP rivals in most of the nations state-by-state primary contests. Like him or not, Trump won the Republican nomination fair and square. Replacing him now would require a historic rules change.

That realization seemed to be dawning on all but the most hard-headed convention delegates by Thursday night, when an anti-Trump group on the rules committee failed to advance their effort. They vowed to press on when the convention convenes on Monday, but the effort is likely in vain.

While Pearce hasnt advocated dumping Trump in Cleveland, he is among many high-profile Republicans struggling to fully embrace the presumptive nominee, whose bombastic comments about Hispanics, Muslims, and others offended millions of Americans during the long primary campaign.

Ive said all along that I will vote for our nominee over Hillary Clinton, Pearce said. He wasnt my first choice or even second choice, but he is our nominee  so absolutely.

In recent weeks, Pearce and other congressional Republicans sparked media ridicule when they suggested they would support Trump as the partys nominee, but not formally endorse him. Whats the difference? Pearce explained it to me in terms of local politics.

Ive always gotten some good support from the Democratic community, Pearce said, referring to conservative Democrats who have crossed party lines to support his U.S. House campaigns. But a lot of my Democrat friends, when (Barack) Obama was running for president the first time, said, Hey man, Im going to support you but I cant endorse you  I cant say anything publicly. People out there understand the difference.

Support means Im going to vote for him (Trump) over Hillary Clinton, Pearce added. I couldnt ever imagine trying to get her elected under any circumstance by not voting for our candidate. An endorsement is saying, Im going to go out there and put my name beside yours.

And thats not something that Pearce, a seasoned and savvy politician, is quite ready or willing to do for Trump.

The New York businessmans outrageous claim last year that Mexican immigrants were often rapists and criminals did not play well with some voters in New Mexicos heavily Hispanic 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses the states border with Mexico.

Ive gone to the Trump campaign and said, Hey, if you want an endorsement from me being in the 2nd District of New Mexico were going to need to get this relationship with the Hispanics repaired, Pearce said. Were having that ongoing discussion. Theyre (Trumps advisers) catching me at events and saying, Heres what were doing  take a look. So, were having a good conversation. They understand exactly what Im saying and they intend to correct it.

Pearce, whose wife, Cynthia, is also a convention delegate this week in Cleveland, said he looked forward to welcoming other New Mexico delegates to town and working to smooth over lingering differences of opinion about the partys nominee.

Any time you have a rigorous primary like weve had, the first big gathering after that is an opportunity for people to start feeling better and forgetting the wounds of the past, Pearce said. I think theres a real opportunity for a good upbeat convention.
I put a bullet in the back of the back of the head of the police (I love myself)

 i by rapper Kendrick Lamar

Pigs in blankets, fry em like bacon

What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!

 Black Lives Matter protest chants

The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe

 Book by Heather MacDonald, released June 21

You can be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Thats what Dallas Police Chief David Brown, who is African-American, said after a dozen of his officers were gunned down during a Black Lives Matter protest by a man who wanted to kill as many white police officers as he could.

Five of those officers died.

Brown was extremely open after the shooting, saying were all on edge.  My brain is fried. Im running on fumes.  Were asking cops to do too much in this country.

El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen, who is African-American, says Black Lives Matter, as far as I am concerned, is a radical hate group. And for that purpose alone, I think the leadership of this country needs to look a little bit harder at that particular group. The consequences of what we saw in Dallas is due to their efforts.

And former Santa Fe Police Chief Donald Grady II, who is African-American, told The Atlantic this month he was disappointed and heartbroken anyone would decide that the way to resolve issues that we have between the public and the police, in particular minorities and the police, is through additional violence.  Weve got civilians dying at the hands of the police and police dying at the hands of civilians. And rather than talk about things reasonably, logically, we have the police ratcheting up the rhetoric and weve got members of the community ratcheting up the rhetoric, and that doesnt resolve any issues at all.

All three know the challenges of being black in a blue uniform. And while Grady focused much of his extensive interview on the us-vs.-them mentality of police officers, Brown used a recent briefing to tell protesters who are unhappy with the police in their own cities to change who is us and who is them.

Become a part of the solution. Were hiring. Get off that protest line and put an application in. And well put you in your neighborhood, and well help you resolve some of the problems youre protesting about.

All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens.

For that to happen, egregious conduct by police officers has to be fully prosecuted rather than rubber-stamped as justified. And critics of police have to recognize their words are more than a First Amendment right  in a knee-jerk, social media world, they have the power to inflame and incite as much as inspire.

Look no further than Micah Johnson and his retaliatory violence against law enforcement fed by Black Lives Matter rhetoric  rhetoric that ignores the fact many men and women of color wear blue. And William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, who goes tit for tat fomenting fear of minorities by trumpeting a war on cops when 2015 was one of the safest for police officers in recorded history, according to The Washington Post.

When emotions can go from zero to 60 in a heartbeat and a hair-trigger temper can have an entirely literal meaning, each side needs to take a breath and realize words matter, too.

And we should expect and demand more from our president, who has shown a propensity to jump to conclusions in cases like Ferguson and cant resist using any tragedy to try and make a political point to rally his base or advance his political agenda. He would do well to follow the example of Chief Brown.

In a world where terror strikes in Paris and Nice, New York and Orlando, words should help Americans core values bring them together, rather than encouraging differences to drive them apart.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

The Diocese of Gallup threatened to withdraw a monetary settlement that included $21 million for victims of clerical sexual abuse if claimants insisted that the church publicly release the personnel files of accused priests, attorneys for the claimants said.

Public disclosure of priest files became a significant issue during the final months of the dioceses 31-month bankruptcy case, said James Stang, a Los Angeles attorney who represented the 57 people who filed claims against the diocese.

We asked that (the files) be published or be delivered so we could publish them if we wanted to, and they said no, Stang said. We were told that it was a package deal.

Faced with the possibility of losing the financial settlement after more than two years of legal wrangling, a committee representing claimants in the case felt they had little choice but to withdraw their demand for records, he said.

The Diocese of Gallup in November 2013 became the ninth U.S. diocese to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in response to a growing number of lawsuits alleging sexual abuse of children by clergy in the diocese. To date, 11 dioceses and two religious orders have filed for bankruptcy.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge David T. Thuma of Albuquerque approved a final settlement plan in June.

Diocese of Gallup spokeswoman Suzanne Hammons responded that public disclosure of church records could harm people who had no responsibility for acts of abuse.

As the diocese said in prior news reports, those files dont just include the names of priests or clergy, but a lot of the time there is sensitive information concerning other innocent parties who have nothing to do with abuse cases, and who do not deserve to be brought into public scrutiny, she said.

Hammons also noted that the $21 million settlement marks one of the largest given the number claimants in the case.

The settlement set up a tightly controlled system that provides each abuse victim with a one-time eyes only access to a single file pertaining to that victims abuser. The plan sets out strict prohibitions against sharing or duplicating the contents.

The personnel files will be stored electronically under Stangs control for one year, and then they will be destroyed, according to court records. The files will be password protected, and may only be accessed by the intended recipient, it said.

To be clear, any duplication, including copying, printing, saving or scanning, will be strictly forbidden by order of the Court and violators are subject to court sanctions.

One claimant said he will not access the file of his abuser, the Rev. James Burns, because he fears the threat of court sanctions should he speak publicly about his abuse.

Even if you are talking about stuff you didnt get from that website that they set up, they could still accuse you of that, said Criss Candelaria, an Arizona attorney and one of 57 claimants in the case. Candelaria chaired the claimants committee.

If I never click on to that site, they can never prevent me from talking to the press or anybody, he said.

Candelaria, 56, said he was sexually abused in the early 1970s by Burns, who pastored a church in Candelarias hometown of Springerville, Ariz. Candelaria was about 11 at the time, he said.

Burns served as a priest in the Diocese of Gallup from 1962 to 2002. During that time, the diocese assigned him to more than a dozen parishes, including three in New Mexico.

Burns pleaded guilty in 2004 to two felony counts of sexual conduct with a minor in Winslow, Ariz., and was sentenced to a year and a half in prison in New Mexico. He died in 2010.

A heavily redacted copy of Burns personnel file became public as a result of a 2007 settlement in California. More than a third of the 555-page file was entirely blacked out. The file is available on the website www.BishopAccountability.org.

Another file available on that website is that of the Rev. Clemment Hageman, who was accused of sexual abuse by 18 people who filed claims in the Gallup bankruptcy case. Hagemans file became public in a civil lawsuit unrelated to the bankruptcy case.

One member of the claimants committee said in court that she had opposed the settlement because it did not require the Diocese of Gallup to release files on abusive priests.

Prudence Jones described as immeasurable and lifelong her suffering from sexual abuse she experienced as a child.

Healing has become a monumental process for me, since I am also trying to heal my daughters and unify our fractured family, Jones told Diocese of Gallup Bishop James Wall at the hearing.

Jones alleged in a 2013 lawsuit that Mark Schornack, a Franciscan brother, sexually abused her at a Catholic mission at St. Michaels on the Navajo Nation. She was younger than 15 at the time. Schornack died in 2012 at the age of 96.

You can help further this process by releasing the documents on Brother Mark and the other abusing priests, she said at the hearing. When these documents become public, it will be justice served, not only for me, but for all victims.

Journal staff writer Maggie Shepard contributed to this report.
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  Anwar Sanders, a black police officer in Santa Fe, has become part of the national conversation on race and law enforcement.

And his assessment of attitudes about race in the City Different, which prides itself in acceptance of alternative lifestyles, is far from flattering.

The 27-year-old New Jersey transplant who lives in Albuquerque says he sees a lot of racism here and gets the most disrespect when he is wearing his gun and badge.

When Im dealing with the public and doing my job, I feel the energy, or I see the way theyre looking at me, he said. I see their disgust and disappointment that a black cop is  giving them this ticket, and they want to fight it and they want to complain.

People are just so racist, Sanders said. Its like almost sickening. Just because youre gay-friendly doesnt mean youre black-friendly.

This is probably one of the most racist places Ive ever been, he said.

Sanders gained national attention with an essay he wrote 1 years ago providing a black cops perspective amid the turmoil over police shootings. In recent days, he has been interviewed by CNN and NPR in the wake of the July 7 shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers at a Black Lives Matter rally. Sanders was in tears during the CNN interview and said he felt like a victim of both sides.

Interviewed by the Journal earlier this week, Sanders talked about local issues and was pointed in his comments about Santa Fe.

Sanders believes the attitudes come from a lack of education about black people and their culture. According to U.S. Census data from 2015, only 2.6 percent of New Mexicos population identifies as African-American. In Santa Fe, it was only 1 percent in the 2010 census.

If all you know about black people is what you see in the movies, then of course youre going to be scared, he said. Our culture just happens to be perceived as more threatening, more dangerous, and sometimes black men are bigger and stronger and more confident, and we have to be because were always walking around dealing with racist people.

But he said the bias doesnt stop him from doing his job. And he wants to come up with a curriculum about black culture and addressing the perception that black men are dangerous, while giving people a glimpse of what police officers face every day. He says he plans using such a program to speak at schools.

Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales said it was heartbreaking to hear his town described as racist.

What it shows is that Santa Fe is not exempt from racism weve seen across America, he said.

When it does happen, its our responsibility to call it out and talk to our kids about it. And then I think we have to start having broader conversations about it, he said. We can confront it and need to call it out. There is work we have to do as a community to overcome that. Its all our responsibility to do that in our homes and as a community.

City Councilor Ron Trujillo, who has lived in Santa Fe all his life, said he doesnt see the city as racist. There may be some racist people here, he said, but there are racist people in any city and any state you go.

That doesnt make it OK. If this is happening, change will have to occur, Trujillo said. Its 2016. Were seeing all these things happen in other places around the county. If it is indeed happening in the city, it needs to stop.

New form of racism

TheGrio, a respected website providing news and commentary from an African-American perspective, published Sanders 2014 essay called A police officers open letter to black protesters. It was reposted on other news sites and led to his first appearance on CNN. He wrote that he was frightened by the vitriol and misconceptions directed towards law enforcement in the wake of high-profile police shootings.

I recognize the burden of my identity in this country, Sanders added in the essay. When Im in uniform, I am a peacekeeper and a protector of people with the ability to save lives. When I take my badge off at the end my shift, reality quickly sets in. Walking past white women on the streets who clutch their bags and being followed around the convenience stores are a part of the many frequent reminders that I am just another black man in America.

Sanders has been in law enforcement three years and is assigned by a New Mexico police agency to a Santa Fe district. He asked that his agency not be identified to make it clear hes speaking for himself, not the agency.

He said black people are now faced with a new form of racism, different than the in-your-face vitriol African-Americans faced decades ago.

I call it 21st-century racism, Sanders said.  Its not the blatant 60s racism where people spit on black people  21st-century racism is where youre at a bar and you can see that everybody is uncomfortable because youre in there.

He said he has been pulled over by police more than 30 times in his life, yet he received only two tickets and the rest resulted in warnings. At this point, I feel like, if I get pulled over, Im just going to put both my hands out the window, put all the windows down and just wait until I get ordered, so theres no doubt the whole time. Thats how I feel off-duty.

SFPD officer speaks

Jacquaan Matherson, a 25-year-old African-American officer with the Santa Fe Police Department who grew up in New York City, said Thursday that he also gets a lot of racist comments while in uniform, especially from people he puts in handcuffs. Ive been called the N word repetitively. They referred to me as a gorilla or a monkey. But the comments dont just come from people upset at being arrested. He said he and two other officers were responding to a call recently when a man walked by.

Its the middle of the day and he calls me shadow man, just like that, Matherson said. He was like, Oh, shadow man, stay out of the sun, you might get darker. There was nothing I could do. What am I going to tell him? Dont say it, or run after him and try to scare him? You kind of just have to take it and keep moving, and let it roll off your back. I have an obligation. Its my job to make sure I remove my emotions at that time for that situation.

Matherson agrees with Sanders that some of the bias comes from a lack of education  that a lot of the confrontations he has stem from the fact that some New Mexicans dont understand black culture and might not realize that something they say is offensive.

Certain things that are said are blatantly disrespectful, Matherson said. Its almost like people dont recognize that theyve said such disrespectful things.

Matherson said he hasnt had unfavorable interactions with other officers in New Mexico, but said some should become more acclimated with other cultures, just like he did with New Mexican culture when he moved here after graduating from high school.

Sometimes the green chile might be too hot for me, but Ill give it a go.

Mayor Gonzales, who is openly gay and has felt discrimination himself, said he understands where the officers are coming from.

They are right; unless you are African-American, you cant understand how hurtful it is. As weve seen over time, even as a society, these are all areas we have to change at a national level and confront these stereotypes, and start doing away with them and address them broadly in the community.

Sanders said the good that he can do as a police officer far outweighs the negative comments and glances thrown his way.

I like helping people, I really do, Sanders said. I like that you can  really make a difference in someones life. You can be that 911 call that stops someone from ever doing drugs again, or stops someone from ever getting beat again or saves somebodys life. I like that feeling. Youre in a position where you can actually make change.
Copyright  2016 Albuquerque Journal

WASHINGTON  New Mexico delegates to the Republican National Convention arrive in Cleveland today united  at least for the most part  behind presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump and eager to help him defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton after a long and divisive presidential primary campaign.

New Mexicos Republican Party is sending 24 delegates and 21 alternates to the convention, which starts Monday at Quicken Loans Arena  commonly referred to as The Q  in downtown Cleveland. In between the gaveling in of the convention on Monday afternoon and Trumps expected nomination acceptance speech on Thursday night, delegates will attend speakers breakfasts, policy luncheons and late-night parties featuring marquee musical acts such as Kid Rock and Martina McBride.

Republicans are set to convene at a time when Trump is surging in national polls after lagging behind Clinton for much of the summer.

Nervous Senate Democrats voiced concern with Clinton at a meeting in the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, as they pointed to recent polls showing Trump leading or tied with the former secretary of state in several battleground states, including Florida and Ohio. And that despite the fact that Trump has spent little money on advertising, while Clinton has spent millions.

A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak tracking poll, a new survey that began publication Friday, showed Trump with a narrow lead over Clinton nationally, a significant development considering she has led in virtually every poll since May. The dip in support for Clinton coincides with FBI Director James B. Comeys criticism this month of her handling of classified data while she was secretary of state as extremely careless.

NM delegates

Debbie Maestas, chairwoman of the Republican Party of New Mexico, told the Journal that, although some of the states delegates preferred other GOP presidential candidates to Trump during the hard-fought nominating process, she is confident that the delegation is now firmly united behind the New York real estate magnate.

Im proud of the New Mexico delegation. I really believe we have a delegation that wants to unify, Maestas told the Journal . I cant speak for every delegate, but, as for the majority, they want to support our nominee and all work together. We have a nominee that gives us the opportunity to actually restore leadership and put the country back in the right direction.

The Republican National Convention is scheduled to end Thursday evening with the partys official nomination of Trump, a first-time political candidate known for his shoot-from-hip rhetoric and pledge to make America great again.

At least thats the plan.

Some anti-Trump Republicans were still holding out hope earlier this month that delegates obligated to cast ballots for Trump under party rules could be unbound as a part of the conventions rule-making process and allowed to vote for another candidate. But the conventions rules committee appeared to scuttle that effort Thursday night when a so-called conscience clause to free delegates could not get the 28 votes needed to give the effort more momentum.

However, some anti-Trump delegates vowed to keep pressing the issue when the convention convenes on Monday.

Most analysts said Friday that the potential Trump rebellion is over for all practical purposes.

Rep. Steve Pearce, a New Mexico Republican who sits on the rules committee, said he opposed dumping Trump, who clobbered other Republican candidates in most of the caucuses and primaries, which ended in June.

Dont mess with the rules, Pearce said. Dont make it a rigged game. Everybody is sick of rigged games. Im just saying, let the people speak and then we go do what the people say. When we start thinking were smarter than the voters, we can get in real trouble.

No-shows

Many prominent Republicans, including former President George W. Bush, former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and others, are skipping the convention in Cleveland because of differences with Trump over immigration and other issues.

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, who chairs the Republican Governors Association, will attend the convention, but does not have a speaking role, as she did at the 2012 GOP convention. She has not publicly endorsed Trump. During the campaign, Trump has made disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants, describing some of them as rapists and criminals. Martinez strongly denounced the remarks and skipped a Trump rally in May in Albuquerque  at which Trump blasted her performance as governor.

The convention is an opportunity for the governor to tout the reforms were making in our state and promote New Mexico, while at the same time discussing ideas and policies with leaders across the country, said Martinez spokesman Chris Sanchez. She was elected the chairwoman of the New Mexico delegation and, as the RGA chairwoman, she will also hold a series of meetings with governors and leaders from all around the nation.

No hesitation

Cecilia Martinez Salazar, an alternate Republican delegate from Espanola, has attended every GOP convention since 1984. Salazar said she initially preferred that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush or Florida Sen. Marco Rubio win the GOP nomination. But now she is backing Trump without hesitation because he won the nomination.

Salazar also said that, although Trumps remarks about Hispanics were over the top, they resonated with some New Mexico Hispanics.

Weve been here for generations, and we dont like whats happening with immigration, Salazar said. We dont like people living here illegally and taking advantage of the system. They are not all rapists and drug addicts  but there is a lot of anger among the Hispanics about it.

Jason Perry, a delegate from Roswell who is chairman of the Chaves County Republican Party, said hes excited to attend his first convention and hopeful that the party comes out of Cleveland committed to get to work for Trumps campaign.

Best-case scenario would be that all of the people in the Republican Party come together and we recognize that the Republican Party has spoken  and not just spoken, but spoken loudly  about a desire for change and going back to what once made America great, Perry said. My hope is we all become unified and move forward with a vision of defeating Hillary Clinton.

Lisa Shin, a Los Alamos optometrist and convention delegate, said Trump is a breath of fresh air compared with Clinton, who has been dogged by scandals, including serious questions about her use of private email servers while she was secretary of state and controversy over foreign interests donating to the Clinton Foundation, established by her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Shes just had a litany of scandals, Shin said. It represents so much corruption and cronyism and special interests. She represents everything that is wrong about politics  that the laws dont apply equally.

Shin said Trump is an American success story who would bring new ideas about trade and job creation.

Im very supportive of his candidacy, Shin said. I think he has more to offer and has a better plan for America than Hillary Clinton. I think we need to fight for him, because we do believe Hillary is dangerous to what American is about.

Democrats

Not surprisingly, New Mexico Democratic Chairwoman Deb Haaland had a different perspective. She characterized the Republican Party platform, which last week was written to include a plank that opposes same-sex marriage, as divisive and outdated. Haaland also pointed out that Trump reportedly struggled to attract high-profile, mainstream Republicans to speak for him in Cleveland.

I dont think it bodes well for the Republican Party at all, Haaland said. Theres a void of leadership. A lot of people have declined to speak and, normally, a lot of people would be vying to speak. It looks like a quagmire.

The Democratic National Convention begins on July 25 in Philadelphia.
When security guard Stephen Wills stopped responding to radio chatter early Friday morning, his colleagues knew something was wrong.

They raced over here on bikes, said William Albrecht, one of the owners of International Strategic Partners, an Albuquerque security and investigations firm. He was already unconscious.

Albuquerque police soon responded to a shooting at the Pearl at Spring Creek apartments on Gibson SE near San Pedro. At around 1:30 a.m. Friday, they found 46-year-old Wills body in the parking lot.

Albuquerque police did not release any new details about the fatal shooting on Saturday, including whether any arrests were made.

Albrecht said Wills worked the night shift, patrolling the apartment complex unarmed, on foot from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m.

The death shook ISP, a company with 45 close-knit employees.

Many of them attended a modest gathering outside of the apartment complex at nightfall Saturday. Joined by dozens of apartment residents, Wills colleagues wore black bands over their badges as the group stood in a large circle trading stories about their good-humored, hardworking, honest friend.

He had a heart bigger than Texas, one said.

Flowers, prayer candles and balloons sat in a makeshift memorial in the corner of the apartment complex parking lot.

ISP owner Shane Knaub said Wills was the sort of person who would offer to help tenants carry their groceries.

A peacemaker, he said. Thats what the firm wants their officers to be: a crime deterrent. And thats part of what makes Wills death so hard for Knaub and Albrecht to cope with.

This is the absolute bottom, Albrecht said. The worst of the worst.

Albrecht and Knaub said ISP employees know one anothers families. They get together regularly outside of work.

He was a brother to them, Knaub said. They just lost a family member.

Joey McGovern said he and Wills started working for ISP around the same time, about nine months ago.

Im very sad, McGovern said. I have a little anger. For somebody to shoot a fellow officer in the back for no reason.

He said being a security guard has its scary moments, and its scary to be reminded that this sort of thing can happen.

Its tough right now, he said.

A police department spokesman described Wills on Friday as a father, Army veteran and dedicated employee. He asked anyone with information on the shooting to contact police at 242-COPS.
TIMBERON, N.M.  Authorities are expected to lift closures of roads in the area of a southern New Mexico wildfire that has destroyed more than 40 homes.

Fire officials say closures near a fire in the mountain village of Timberon will be lifted Sunday at 2 p.m.

However, motorists will be asked to drive at slow speeds because firefighters are still working.

The blaze, which is 60 percent contained, has destroyed 70 structures and numerous vehicles.

Residents who live within the fire perimeter have been allowed to retrieve items from their homes under escort.

The wildfire started Wednesday and has burned nearly 270 acres.

The cause remains under investigation.
By Nicholas West

Google has received vast criticism for its Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Streetview systems that have essentially removed the inherent right to privacy and transferred it to the whim of corporate terms and conditions. However, this would seem to pale in comparison to what is being announced from the largest U.S. defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, working in tandem with commercial space imagery vendor, DigitalGlobe.

According to Lockheed, they are making final preparations for a next-generation global imaging satellite called DigitalGlobe WorldView-4. If all remains according to plan, the new satellite will be launched into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base as early as September 15, 2016.

While Google rightly takes heat for its government connections, publicly traded DigitalGlobes relationship to the U.S. government is about as fascistic as could ever be constructed. As The Denver Post reported in 2014, DigitalGlobe successfully petitioned the U.S. government to remove previous restrictions on the sale of higher-resolution images to non-government buyers thus opening up new domestic and international commercial applications. The previous generation of this satellite, WorldView-3 at the time, contained an alarming level of accuracy:

WorldView-3 can produce 31-centimeter-resolution images, and several of its already-orbiting satellites already can capture 41-centimeter images. But DigitalGlobe was prohibited, until Wednesday, from selling anything sharper than 50-centimeter resolution to non-U.S. government customers. The 31-centimeter resolution images allow viewers to discern, for example, the windshield of a car and the direction the car is facing. .offers short-wave infrared resolution that sees through dust, smog and smoke as well as things on Earth invisible to the naked eye. DigitalGlobe executives told The Denver Post last month that its new sensors allow them to see minerals, identify tree and plant species and gather soil composition. When analyzed, this information can decipher whats beneath the surface  insight that can then be sold to industries including mining or oil and gas exploration. [emphasis added]



The Post goes on to reveal the key reason why such a lenient permission might have been granted: the largest customer of DigitalGlobe is the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, also known as GEOINT. The incredible scope and applications of GEOINT is laid out on the .mil websites About page  keep in mind the revolving door between military and private companies across the planet, and the choice to offer selective image sales becomes even more troubling.

From the discovery of atrocities in Kosovo, to support for the cities hosting the Olympics, through the response to Hurricane Katrina, and our work in Haiti and Japan, NGA has provided critical GEOINT support when our nation needed it most. In the White House report reviewing the response to Hurricane Katrina, NGA was specifically commended for our timely response during the crisis. GEOINT offered an early version of the same total picture for responders that the administration later recommended for the entire nation as its plan to address major disasters in the years ahead. . In fact, NGA helped track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin and shared insights with the special operations team that successfully stormed his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 1, 2011.

[emphasis added]

It is of paramount concern that the functions of Lockheeds upgraded globe-spanning satellite will no doubt be shrouded by the impenetrable cover of military National Security, while the collected images can be sold to private buyers around the world.

Scouring the planet from 400 miles overhead, the new parameters for the WorldView-4 system are described as follows from a recent Lockheed press release:

The high resolution and high accuracy images taken by WorldView-4 will support DigitalGlobes worldwide customer base, said Carl Marchetto, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin Commercial Space. DigitalGlobes smart imagery serves hundreds of thousands of end-users charged with the safety and security of nations, and enables the maps and geospatial applications relied on by billions of consumers.



Only the DigitalGlobe constellation, with the addition of WorldView-4, offers the highest quality, and most comprehensive global coverage of our changing planet through 2030, so our customers can be confident they will have the information to make critical decisions, said Dr. Walter Scott, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, DigitalGlobe. WorldView-4 will help us continue to transform the way we see the world, and advance our mission of keeping our planet and its people safe and secure. Once launched, WorldView-4 will double DigitalGlobes coverage of the worlds highest resolution imagery and increase the rate at which it grows its 15-year library of time-lapse high-resolution imagery. WorldView-4 will orbit Earth every 90 minutes, traveling 17,000 miles per hour and capturing more 680,000 square kilometers of the Earths surface daily (19.5 terabytes) the equivalent of the land area of Texas. (Source) [emphasis added]

The statement that DigitalGlobes smart imagery serves hundreds of thousands of end-users charged with the safety and security of nations should sound an alarm to anyone who finds themselves concerned with a trends toward world governance. The reference to a changing planet through 2030 also would suggest a connection to the United Nations 2030 sustainable development agenda. WorldView-4, then, would appear to be a centralized repository of sensitive images and earth analysis controlled by a single company with direct ties to government. The possibilities for exploitation, political maneuvering and conspiratorial intrigue cant be difficult to imagine.

As supposedly democratic countries ramp-up secret surveillance of their own citizens under the pretext of security based upon acts of terror that continue to be proven as State-sponsored, and climate change is set to be used as political and economic warfare, a globe-spanning corporate/government all-seeing eye funded privately and publicly offers a dangerous mechanism of total control.

Image: LockheedMartin.com

Nicholas West writes for ActivistPost.com. This article may be freely republished in part or in full with author attribution and source link.
By Claire Bernish

FBI agents involved in the probe of former Secretary of State Hillary Clintons emails were required to sign unusually-extensive nondisclosure agreements  forcing them into silence unless theyre called to testify in the matter. FBI insiders surmised there may have been an inside deal.

This is very, very unusual, said an unnamed, retired FBI chief, cited by the New York Post. Ive never signed one, never circulated one to others.

According to the Posts anonymous sources, these Case Briefing Acknowledgement forms went beyond the nondisclosure agreements agents initially sign in order to gain security clearance.

I have never heard of such a form, an FBI agent currently on the job told the Post. Sounds strange.

But suspicions didnt stop there.

FBI agents believe there was an inside deal put in place after the Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton tarmac meeting, said another unnamed, unverified source

That meeting between the Attorney General and former President took place at Phoenixs Sky Harbor International Airport on board a private plane parked on the tarmac. Though both Bill and Hillary Clinton scoffed at the immediate controversy over the meeting  downplaying rendezvous as nothing more than a cordial get-together  grumblings over a virtually undeniable conflict of interest have persisted.

A gas bomb further ignited flames of contention, when just days after the meeting, Department of Justice officials announced a not-at-all suspicious 27-month delay in the release of another batch of emails from Hillarys private server.

That dubious postponement conveniently pushed the release date to October 2018  nearly halfway through a theoretical Clinton first term in the White House.

Further, a nation already highly suspicious of Hillarys foxlike ability to continue her bid for the presidency while under federal investigation for several areas of possible criminal activity hardened into cynicism when FBI Director James Comey announced the agency wouldnt recommend charges.

In that statement, Comey  intentionally or not  ran through a laundry list of actual crimes Clinton committed, essentially rewriting federal law based on intent in order to grant her de facto immunity from prosecution.
Since an Ebola outbreak was declared in Uganda on 20 September, health assistant Nyangoma Kirrungi has been on the frontline of the countrys response day in and day out, working as a contact tracer in Madudu sub-county, one of the areas affected by the outbreak.
Arvind Kejriwal took questions from people across the country on Sunday in the first edition of his Talk to AK show, a Q and A session that was part monologue on his Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)s achievements in Delhi and part forum to renew allegations against the Centre, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP.



Phone lines were jammed as questions poured in for the Delhi Chief Minister, who is prepping to widen his base beyond the capital with elections in states like Punjab, Gujarat and Goa.

The first question came 50 minutes into the show, uncensored. On one hand you say (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi ji is not letting you work, yet you put up ads worth crores to publicise what you are doing in Delhi?

The Delhi Chief Minister, in the nearly two-hour-long programme that began with a monologue followed by a question and answer session, alleged that the Centre was trying to break the AAP government and that BJP President Amit Shah was micromanaging CBI, adding, but every dog has his day and all these will soon come to an end.

BJP leader Satish Upadhayay said there should be an award called The Biggest Bluffmaster, adding that the credit of lying would definitely go to Kejriwal.

You said you have saved money in flyovers. There can be no bigger lie than this. I want to appeal to the people of Delhi to take out an RTI to know what its earlier design was and what change took place later on. There are many awards being given in India. There should be one award called The Biggest Bluffmaster. The credit of lying will definitely go to Arvind Kejriwal. I think Talk to AK is nothing but marketing and gimmicks, he added.

Drawing parallels between Prime Minister Narendra Modis Mann ki baat program and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwals interactive session titled Talk to AK, Delhi Congress president Ajay Maken on Sunday said both leaders were using public money to propagate their own political ambitions. Both of them are indulging in monologue not dialogue. Even in the mann ki baat it is a one sided affair, and the same was repeated by Arvind Kejriwal. Questions that came to Kejriwal were edited and filtered before putting before him, so that only convenient questions come forth, he said.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogans supporters rallied in public squares, at Istanbul airport and outside his palace overnight in a show of defiance after a failed coup attempt killed at least 265 people and raised expectations of a heavy crackdown on dissent.



Rebel soldiers used tanks, attack helicopters and fighter jets to try to topple Erdogan on Friday night, strafing parliament and the intelligence headquarters in Ankara while seizing a bridge and surrounding the airport in Istanbul.

The authorities rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters, including top commanders and foot soldiers, on Saturday and ordered thousands of judges detained after forces loyal to Erdogan crushed the attempted coup.

Lets hang them! chanted crowds in Ankaras central Kizilay square late on Saturday.

Erdogan supporters waving Turkish flags also thronged the central Taksim square in Istanbul  scene of mass anti-government protests three years ago  and a smaller crowd gathered outside the gates of the his vast presidential palace complex in the capital.

For at least eight hours overnight on Friday violence shook Turkeys two main cities. But the coup attempt crumbled as Erdogan rushed back to Istanbul from a Mediterranean holiday and urged people to take to the streets in support of his government against plotters he accused of trying to kill him.

The violence shocked the nation of almost 80 million, once seen as a model Muslim democracy, where living standards have grown steadily for more than a decade and where the army last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago.

It also shattered fragile confidence among Turkeys allies about security in the NATO member country, a leading member of the US-led coalition against Islamic State which aspires to membership of the European Union. Turkey had already been hit by repeated suicide bombings over the past year and is struggling to contain an insurgency by Kurdish separatists.

US President Barack Obama urged parties on all sides of the crisis to avoid destabilizing Turkey and follow the rule of law. US authorities banned all airlines from flying from Turkey to the United States, citing continued security concerns, and urged U.S. citizens to reconsider travel to Turkey.

French President Francois Hollande said on Saturday he expected there would be a period of repression in Turkey in the aftermath of the failed coup.

They will pay a heavy price for this, Erdogan said, launching a purge of the armed forces. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.
Islamic terror haunts France as over a hundred people are massacred to death in a suicidal truck attack in an act of madness. European countries are being targeted as they have been supporting peace groups in the troubled areas of Afghanistan, Iraq and other areas having Islam population. Terror in any form is dangerous and act against god. Tit for tat is not how you bring about peace and many innocent people too are killed in the bargain. The fight should be to eliminate terror to bring about peace but civilians should be spared in this fight. Yes, like minded nations should join hands to eliminate terrorism from the globe but the target should be hard-core terrorists and not the innocents be it in the troubled gulf region or elsewhere. Else, there would be these strikes on civilians as a counter attack or reaction against the killings of the innocents in all parts of the world!

S.N. Kabra



(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
Devyani is well educated and can be a good communicator at national and international level says Athawale.

Minister of State for social justice and empowerment Ramdas Athawale has clarified that he only had recommended former Deputy Consul-General of India in New York Devyani Khobragades name to be appointed as his private secretary but never lobbied for the same. Earlier there were media reports about Athawale being keen on appointing Devyani as his private secretary. A source close to the Republican Party of India (RPI-A) chief said an order appointing Ms Khobragade was passed few days back.

Refuting the rumour he informed Afternoon Voice, I had never taken a firm stand about appointing Devyani as my personal secretary but I had felt that she was an ideal contender for the job.

Devyani has already proved herself at the international arena and has wide experience. Since Devyani is a Dalit and she is well aware about the preachings and ideology followed by Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, said Athawale.

She is well educated and can be a good communicator at national and international level. Devyani can also assist me in the day to day functioning of the Department of Social Justice. She can do justice to this job, he added.

Khobragade was selected for the Chevening Rolls-Royce scholarship in 2012. She is proficient in English, Hindi, Marathi and German. Devyanis father Uttam Khobragade, a former IAS officer, is the national executive president of RPI-A, which is part of the Bharatiya Janta Party-Shiv Sena-led Mahayuti (grand alliance) in Maharashtra, and had joined the party in September 2014.

The 1999-batch IFS officer was arrested on December 12, 2013, in the US when she was Indias Deputy Consul-General in New York on visa fraud charges and for allegedly providing false declarations in a visa application for her maid.

She later was released on a $250,000 bond. The incident had triggered a diplomatic row between the US and India.

Earlier Athawale was inducted into the Modi government in order to reach out the Dalits ahead of the crucial Uttar Pradesh assembly elections scheduled to be held next year.

Mr Athawale, who heads the Republican Party of India (Athawale), an NDA ally, has been a trade unionist and is known more for his blunt remarks and popular laughter-evoking speeches in Parliament and outside.

He has been part of NDA since 2011 after he quit the NCP-Congress alliance. He currently represents Maharashtra in the Rajya Sabha and has been a three-time Lok Sabha member.

The RPI(A) leader had last represented Pandharpur constituency in the Lok Sabha from 2004 to 2009, having been first elected to the lower house in 1998.
A 20-year-old man had a miraculous escape when he was pulled out of a New York-bound container in which he had accidentally got locked while sleeping, police said today.

The container, carrying womens footwear, was scheduled to be shipped from Mumbai to New York. It was loaded and sealed at Mira Road at around 2 AM on Saturday, police said.

At around 10 AM Saturday, the container reached the Nhava Sheva port when the Customs officials, who were inspecting it, heard some screams from inside, Police Inspector Rukmani Galande said.

The officials later opened the seal of the container and found Farooqe Ahmed, a labourer, inside it. They took him out and informed the police, she said.

The youth had apparently slept inside the container during its loading operation.

He remained inside for over eight hours. We do not suspect any foul play and are recording statements (of Customs officials, youth and the company personnel), Galande said.

Had the Customs officials not opened the seal of the container, the youth may have got suffocated to death inside, police added.
Monsoon rains is slowly and steadily picking up momentum and Maharashtra as heavy rain lashed the state in the past couple of days. Indian Meteorological Department has issued a clear cut warning of heavy rains in the next couple of days. Kolhapur, Ratnagiri, Sangli, Pune and Nashik received heavy showers with water logging reported in low lying areas. The warnings will have to be taken seriously to avoid human loss and damage to property. State disaster management cell, on their part should be able to meet the challenges with more work force to avoid calamities in Vidarbha. These areas were having deficit of rains in the last couple of years and now over 100 villages are marooned in the heavy rains. As the heavy rain forecast sound warning, disaster management cell should go all out and make sure the situation is handled without much fuss but with more care. Sound warning should be issued for public going out on these days. People wade through flooded water as Godavari overflows after downpour. Cranes were used to airlift tractors and train derailment has been reported in this sector. Monsoon mayhem makes the life more miserable in many districts.

S. Abhishek Ramaswamy

(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
The world will be celebrating Nelson Mandela International Day on July 18  Mandelas birth anniversary. Mandela Day is a global call to action for citizens of the world to take up the challenge and follow in the formidable footsteps of Madiba, a man who transformed his life, served his country and freed his people. Its objective is to inspire individuals to take action to help change the world for the better and in so doing, to build a global movement for good. It is a day not only to honour the man himself, but also a chance for us to join the global movement to make the world a better place. Most of us know the facts of his life: his fight against apartheid, his imprisonment for 27 years first at Robben Island, then at Pollsmoor Prison and finally at Victor Verser Prison, how he became the first Black President of South Africa, his winning the Nobel Peace Prize etc. Nelson Mandela of South Africa was an icon for modern democracy. He was a champion for rights of all humans. He showed to the world that all souls are created equal without any strings attached. He was a leader with a difference. A real leader according to him works and serves the people making them know about their strengths. He was not for power, money or greed. This humble soul was created for benefit of other souls who were suffering. He said, it is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see it realised. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Mandela followed three rules throughout his life, which he did at great personal sacrifice: [1] Free yourself, [2] Free others & [3] Serve every day. His greatest legacy is perhaps his commitment to the redemptive powers of hope and struggle. Peace was his motive. He achieved objectives for benefits of all mankind without violence and killings which is a lesson to everybody in present day world. He showed to world how humanity can be achieved through peace without violence and killings. In 1975 he wrote letter from prison The cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, & Never forget that a saint is a sinner who keeps on trying. Mandela was a liberator of the stature of Gandhi. Both shared a common vision and passion for the breaking away of the shackles of tyranny and oppression. Both stand as stalwarts of our proximate history. Many people have been inspired by the South African movement, especially their decision to forgive and move on.

He was a super human being and an architecture of Modern South Africa and the world. Mandela will always be remembered as a saint, a sage of humanity in line with Mahatma Gandhi. Hope our present and future generations learn from his great experiments with struggle for oppressed and downtrodden.

Vinod Chandrashekhar Dixit

(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
French investigators arrested two more people on Sunday as they pieced together details about the motives and preparations of the Tunisian who rammed a truck into a crowd in an attack that killed 84.



Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel visited the Nice promenade with his rented truck on the two days before he smashed the vehicle into a crowd of people watching Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city on Thursday night, according to a source close to the probe.

Bodies were left strewn across the storied seafront in the grisly attack by a man described by those who knew him as a loner with tendencies towards violence and depression.

While some family and friends had described the 31-year-old as someone who smoked, drank and never went to the mosque, others questioned by police indicated a recent swing to radical Islam, said a police source.

However, there has been no overt evidence linking him to the Islamic State group, which on Saturday claimed the attack.

In Nice, many people were still desperately looking for news of their loved ones among the dead and 121 still hospitalised.

We have no news, neither good nor bad, said Lithuanian Johanna, who was looking for her two friends, aged 20.

At least 10 children were among the dead as well as tourists from the United States, Ukraine, Switzerland and Germany and about 10 from Russia, a local Russian association said.

A man and a woman were arrested on Sunday and were being held alongside four people arrested earlier. Lahouaiej-Bouhlels estranged wife was released after two days of questioning.

One of those held is a 22-year-old, suspected of lending logistical support to Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, said his lawyer Jean-Pascal Padovani.

He said the two had only known each other a few months and that there is no material evidence against his client.
  Haiying

Dear Chinese folks,

I am a Chinese immigrant like most of you are. I used to support the Democratic Party because the stereotype that I had was that the Democratic Party represented the interest of ethnicity minority group while the Republican Party was a party of old white men. I had a great admiration on Hillary Clinton when she was the first lady of the United States. The impression that I had on her was that she was a strong woman with a very decisive mind. I always wished that she could be the president of the United States sometime. In 2008 presidential campaign, she lost to Obama. Although I felt a little bit unfortunate for that, it was still not too bad for me because Obama was also a candidate of the Democratic Party, which was my favorite party. Therefore, I casted my vote for him. Because of his African American background, I expected that he would be better in harmonizing the relationships among different races in this country when he became the president of the United States. To my excitement, when Obama became the president of the United States, he appointed Hillary Clinton, who was the woman I respected most, as the Secretary of State. As I watched the presidential inauguration in 2009, I was full of joy because I thought that day was the new day for the United States to enter its golden era again. However, the day, January 20, 2009, was not the first day of a new golden age of the United States at all! It was the beginning of the dark ages!

In early 2011, the Arab Spring, a series of anti-government protests, uprisings and armed rebellions spread across the Middle East. Obama administration provided rebel groups enormous supports to help them topple the governments. Most of the weapons that Obama administration provided fell into the hands of the ISIS terrorists. With the collapse of the governments in Middle East, ISIS expanded rapidly like cancer growing. Especially, after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, who was willing to make peace and cooperate with the United States, Libya became the hot bed of terrorism. On September 11, 2012, in Benghazi in Libya, terrorists attacked the US embassy and killed the U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith along with two other US SEAL members. Despite of hundreds of calls that the ambassador had made for help during 13 hours before he was killed, Hillary did not do anything at all. It was the inaction of Hillary that attributed to the death of those four Americans. In order to cover her criminal negligence, Hillary lied all about the Benghazi attack. After that, my impression on Hillary began to change. The ambassador was appointed by Hillary. Since she did not even care about his life, how can we expect her to care about us?

Moreover, instead of harmonizing the relationships among the races as what I expected, Obama is actually making racial hatreds even worse. He especially verbally expressed his hatreds toward police and incited several riots during the past two years! Every time, when an African American was killed by a non-black cop, instead of waiting for investigation reports to see what was going on exactly, he arbitrarily associated that incident with racial discrimination. As a result, the number of attacks on police has increased dramatically. Two police officers were killed in 2014, and two years later, five Dallas police officers were shot to death.

During the term of Obama, the taxes have skyrocketed, but the national debt has also skyrocketed. Where did the money go? The answer is that tremendous of taxpayers money has been spent on social welfares for illegal immigrants! Every year, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are pouring into the United States, and billions of dollars are used on their housing, food, transportation, and even cell phone expenses! In Montgomery County, the real estate tax is expected to increase the next year in order to pay the school expenses for children of illegal immigrants. Since I am an immigrant myself, they raised my taxes to pay living expenses for illegal immigrants, I did not express any resentment as long as they obeyed the laws of the United States. However, thats not the case at all! Those illegal immigrants keep committing ruthless crimes on law abiding citizens who are actually paying for their livings! For example, Kathryn Steinle, a 32-year old US citizen, was shot to death on July 1 last year by an illegal immigrant, who was harbored by the local government of San Francisco although he had committed several other crimes before. On June 2, 2016, three of Muslim boys from two refugee families sexually assaulted a 5-year old white girl and urinated on her in Idaho. President Barack Hussein Obamas top legal appointee in Idaho threatened to prosecute Americans who would try to spread out the news about that incident. This is the United States. Our speech is protected by the First Amendment. How can Hussein Obama be above the U.S. Constitution? Those two incidents are just the tip of an iceberg. It appears that illegal immigrants have special privileges over American citizens. The Democratic politicians give them the immunity from the justice for the crimes that they have committed. The Democratic Party is actually promoting crimes in order to get more votes. Obama tried to legalize the residential status for five million illegal immigrants. Fortunately, Obamas proposal was not passed in Supreme Court by a 4-to-4 vote. Hillary Clinton promised that she would finish Obamas job if she is elected to be the president of the United States. She also planned to bring 620,000 more refugees into the United States during her first presidential term at lifetime cost of over $400 billion.

As Chinese immigrants, we have to work hard to survive in the United States. We dont need any special favor. The only thing that we need is an equal opportunity to compete with others. We study hard, so we achieve the highest scores in schools. We work hard, so we make great contributions to our professional fields. Getting a higher education is the only way for most of Chinese Americans to realize their American dreams. However, the Democratic politicians even deprived of the only opportunity that we deserve. On June 23, 2016, the Supreme Court made a decision to uphold Affirmative Action in college admissions with a 4-to-3 vote. Under Affirmative Action, colleges are required to admit students based on the percentage of the racial population instead of their academic performance. To state more specifically, your children may never be able to go to the colleges that they like no matter how well they have done in high school and no matter how high the scores that they achieve on college admission tests just because they are Chinese! Even worse, the Democratic politicians in California are even trying to separate Chinese from other Asians. It is just like Nazis labeling every Jew! Hillary Clinton made a comment on the Supreme Court decision by saying, The Supreme Courts Fisher decision is a win for us all. The doors to higher education should be open to every American, not just some. After I read it, I wanted to ask her a question: Who are the some that you are talking about? Obviously, she was insinuating that it was Chinese who seized the opportunities to get higher education from others. We, Chinese Americans, are the most peaceful ethnic minorities in this country. How can we seize the opportunities from others? The only thing that we can do to compete others is to work 10 times harder than they do. Now it seems that the only door for our American dream is closed!

The only thing that we can do to protect our interests is to vote for the Republican Party! Based on the ideology of the Republican Party, everybody deserves an equal opportunity of compete with one another. There is no specialty for anyone because we are all created equal. You may be a senior citizen enjoying free meals at a senior center, and you are thankful to the Democratic Party for that. But have you ever thought that the free meals that you receive are not really free? They are paid from the heavy taxes that your son or daughter has paid. The cost of your free meals is just a very small portion of the taxes that your children have paid. Your children dont just pay your free meals. They have to pay free meals, free medical services, free education, and free cell phones for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants! Your grandchildren may never be able to go to the colleges that they dream about because the children of illegal immigrants will have the priorities to your grandchildren. So which one is more important to you? A free meal or the future of your children and grandchildren?

If you really care about your, your childrens, and your grandchildrens future, please cast your vote to Donald Trump. No matter whether or not you like him personally, he is our only chance. The US Supreme Court used to have nine justices. Five of them were Republicans, and four of them were Democrats. The justices of the Supreme Court are appointed by the president of the United States. Unlike the president who can only serve eight years at maximum, those Supreme Court justices can serve for lifetime. In other words, the Supreme Court justices are the extensions of the president of the United States, who appoints them. At the beginning of this year, one of the Supreme Court Republican justice passed away. As a result, there are four Republican and four Democratic justices in Supreme Court. After the death of the Republican justice, Obama desperately tried to appoint a Democratic justice to replace him, but the Senate stopped him. So the next justice can only be appointed by the new elected president. If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will definitely appoint a Democrat as a new justice. As a result, the political power of the United States will fall into Democratic Party completely and permanently. It is irreversible! The United States will be totally controlled by the Democratic Party indefinitely. It will be a huge disaster because they can do anything that they want! The floodgate will be opened, and millions of refugees and illegal immigrants penetrated with terrorists will flood into this country. They will beat your children and grandchildren on street. They will terrorize everybody like they do in Europe, while you will have to continue to pay their social welfares. You will be treated as lower class citizens. You will virtually live as their slaves! Terrorist attacks will happen everywhere just like what happened in Boston, Paris, Brussels, and Orlando. Your right to live will even be deprived of! I am not exaggerating. Dont you see that Europe has been turned into a hell from a paradise? What is happening in Europe today will happen in the United States tomorrow if we still allow the Democratic Party to rule our country. Thats why so many Americans get angry. Donald Trump is criticized by the Democratic politicians for creating hatred, but he did not create hatred at all. Instead he precisely pinpointed the root cause of the hatred. He just boldly spoke something that many American people had been holding in their hearts for a long time on their behalf. He broke the political correctness, so we now have the freedom to express our feelings. Since he is the only presidential candidate who has accurately identified the problems of the United States, he is the best one to solve such problems to make America great again. He welcomes legal immigrants, especially the ones who appreciate the values of this country. Again I encourage all Chinese Americans to vote for him to be our next President!
Saluting the Supreme Court verdict ordering the restoration of its government in Arunachal Pradesh, Chief Minister Nabam Tuki resigned on Saturday, a few hours ahead of the much-anticipated floor test. Congress also demanded the immediate sacking of Governor and an investigation into a tape-recorded conversation between some BJP leaders and how a plan was hatched to dismiss the government. The taped conversation points a needle of suspicion. Joining the Congress in condemning the Centres unconstitutional dismissal of a democratically elected government were other opposition parties. They included the Left parties, the Janata Dal-United, the Biju Janata Dal, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the National Conference. For the Congress, it is the second time this year that the court has ruled in its favour in the matter of dismissal of its State governments. The first was Uttarakhand, where a Congress government returned to power after a court ordered floor test.

C.K. Ramani

(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
Sambhaji Patil Nilangekar, who is representing Nilanga constituency in Maharashtra Assembly, is a rising star in the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state. He is also a member of RSS and holding the post of General Secretary of BJPs Maharashtra State Unit. Recently, he was sworn in as a Skill Development and Labour Minister in Devendra Fadnavis government.

Thirty-Eight-year-old Sambhaji Patil, had once created history by winning against his own grandfather, eight-time MLA and former Chief Minister, late Shivajirao Patil-Nilangekar. They were having some property dispute and family tussle.

Sambhaji, who has a commercial pilots licence, joined politics after his fathers demise. Politics is not new to him but then also he refused to contest the last Lok Sabha election, saying that he wanted to start his political career as an MLA. After he rejected the ticket, his mother contested the general election. For providing justice to factory workers, he stood against his grandfather. Those days, people were troubled with issues like unemployment and non-payment of crop insurance. Somewhere, the displeasure in public against senior Nilangekar was seeing. Perhaps, this has motivated Sambhaji Nilangekar to blow a bugle against his grandfather.

Sambhaji then formed his own political party  the Nilanga Vikas Aghadi to contest the election against his grandfather. There were many reasons, why Sambhaji and family had parted ways with Shivajirao, in an ongoing tussle, his father left this world for heavenly abode in 1999. Economic prosperity and development were missing in his area. Water is a major issue, especially during summer. Drought was severe. The Ambulga cooperative sugar factory, run by Mr. Patil Nilangekar, was closed and about Rs. 4.5 crores is outstanding to farmers and shareholders. About 8,000 farmers were not paid for their sugarcane. People were angry with Shivajirao, but not with his political party Congress. Nilanga epitomizes the problems in Latur and to a larger extent in Marathwada. Despite the numerous educational institutions, the taluka has few bright students. While, the Latur model of developing secondary education has worked to some extent, it has not spread to other parts of the region.

Sambhajis mother, Roopatai Patil, had won from Latur on a BJP-Sena ticket in the Lok Sabha elections, defeating the former Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, by over 30,000 votes in 2004. Later on, she advised her son to contest the election and make sure to defeat rivals in such a way that they should lose their deposits. Roopatai Patel was strong lady and was strong-minded to aim Congress mukt Nilanga. After this humiliating defeat, Shivajirao Patil, who neglected villagers, started visiting them to earn their good will. However, it was too late and Sambhaji was already their hero. Senior Nilangekar accepted the peoples mandate. The outdated domination of politicians gave way to a more meaningful representation by choosing Sambhaji. After that win, he never looked back and continued his hard work. Today, he has become one of the strongest BJP cadre and mass leader.

Since 2014, and especially after former Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Munde and former CM Vilasrao Deshmukhs demise, the state politics especially Laturs and Nilangas has changed drastically in the hands of next generation. The appointment of Pankaja Palve Munde, daughter of Gopinathji Munde, to head the youth wing of the party was being debated in hushed tones. Mundes supporters however justified the appointment. Pankaja, an MLA from Beed district, is being seen as a counter to Surpriya Sule, daughter of Sharad Pawar (NCP) and Praniti Shinde, daughter of Sushil Kumar Shinde (Congress).

Pankaja, later on became rebellious and started attacking CM Devendra Fadnavis, yet he ignored her on several occasions. However, the public spat between Fadnavis and Rural Development Minister over re-allocation of portfolios of ministers has become the highlight of the expansion of the state cabinet. As he affected a reshuffle of portfolios headed by ministers in his team, Fadnavis sprung a surprise by taking away some departments from her. Fadnavis took water conservation and employment guarantee scheme departments from her and reallocated them to two new ministers, Ram Shinde and Sambhaji Nilangekar.

Sambhaji Nilangekar too was named in a controversy. He was found to be closely associated with a company listed as a wilful defaulter by the Bank of Maharashtra. He was guarantor for a loan that was a non-performing asset (NPA) and declared as a fraud account with an outstanding balance of Rs. 49.29 crore owed to two state-owned banks  Bank of Maharashtra and Union Bank of India. Further, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) last year filed a chargesheet in a case of cheating lodged by the banks after finding that the mortgage deed papers for the loan had been tampered with. The CBI as an accused also named Nilangekar. The accused have been charged under sections 409 and 420 of the Indian Penal Code for siphoning off funds and cheating. However, Nilangekars lawyer Chandrashekhar Sabnis claimed that it was the banks that manipulated the original deed submitted with the sub- registrar. He said land was not a part of the mortgage agreement.

He said the units problems started when the banks failed to release funds that were agreed upon when the loan was approved. Sambhaji was merely a guarantor, and that the dispute over property, which the bank says was offered as collateral, was politically motivated. The CBI investigations showed that the property offered as collateral at the time of sanctioning the loan was not the property eventually mortgaged. Nilangekar said the dispute over the property arose because his grandfather, a former Congress Chief Minister Shivajirao Patil Nilangekar, had challenged its ownership and staked claim on the property.

Anyway, leaving all the controversies and disappointments aside, CM Fadnavis team has three years left to show its performance and fulfill the promises made to the people.

(Any suggestions, comments or dispute with regards to this article send us on feedback@afternoonvoice.com)








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Get the book on John Summers HERE. This is a story of evil and profound injustice in the legal community. Explore demonic minds in the legal community that include judges. This is a story of evil and profound injustice in the legal community.





Dear Law Society of Upper Canada representative,





This email is to make an official complaint against the sleazy tactics of John Summers at Bell Baker in Ottawa that I have been experiencing that have subjected me to harassment.





On 15 July 2016, Mr. John Summers' student named Damain had sought to send to me their Defence via an emailed attachment.





I told them that I would not consent to them sending me their Defence in such a manner and that they should mail their Defence t the same address that I have been receiving correspondence from the Ottawa Courthouse with no trouble.





Damian appropriately recognized that I would need to consent to such an email pursuant to the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure.





But then, Mr Summers apparently got Ms. Cleroux who is one of his colleagues to berate me on Friday with about 10 different phone calls that sought to intimidate me into relinquishing my rights under Civil Procedure.





This apparent sleazy Law firm has constantly sought to ignore Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, and I request that Mr Summers be investigated for harassement and unethical conduct.





It is a violation of the Law Society of Upper Canada codes of conduct for opposing Counsel to be engaged in such illicit activities designed to subvert or pervert the course of Justice.







Mr. Summers appears to also be supporting the criminal activities of his client who has been abusing my Mother.





As a result of the apparent criminal activities of his client, my elderly Mom can no longer walk, write or talk.





My Mom had presented a note when she could still write that his client was abusing her. His client also preventing my Mom getting access to speech therapy that was urged by an Ottawa doctor.







The harassment of Mr. Summers' agent(s) is simply the extension of the apparent criminal actvities of his client against my rights as a litigant and my elderly Mom.





Such activities by a lawyer in this province tarnishes the professional image and reputation of more ethical lawyers in this province.





In the above video you will see that his client ignored the order of a Judge and the efforts of Ottawa Police Services to facilitate that order on 11 February 2016.



Since that time, Mr. Summers has used apparent chickanery to frustrate the course of justice.



Please note that this is an Open Letter.





Regards.



Complainant



Readers, we welcome your comment and your support in affirmation of women's rights and against the unethical activities of lawyers in our society.


July 17, 2016

CAIRO  During the first official visit by an Israeli prime minister to the African continent since Yitzhak Shamirs in 1987, Benjamin Netanyahu embarked on a tour beginning July 4 with a visit to Uganda, followed by Kenya and Rwanda, and concluding with Ethiopia. He was accompanied by a delegation of 80 officials representing more than 50 Israeli companies.

Netanyahus visit to a number of countries in the Nile River basin has stirred up curiosity in Egypt concerning the goals of this visit. In particular, some are questioning the timing, which coincides with the approaching conclusion of construction on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which precipitated a crisis between Cairo and Ethiopia. Egypt said the dam threatens to reduce Egypts historic share of the Nile River waters, which are estimated at 55.5 billion cubic meters (14.7 trillion gallons) annually.

Netanyahu said that Israel will support Addis Ababa to enable Ethiopia to benefit from its water resources in agricultural development by extending advanced technology to Ethiopia. Water, Netanyahu said, is an area where "Israel has great expertise." In a brief speech addressing the Ethiopian parliament July 7, he said, Israel would like to participate with you as you develop your country and your society.

Atiyah Isawi, a journalist specialized in African Affairs at Al-Ahram newspaper, told Al-Monitor, Israel seeks to increase its presence on the African continent, to confront rising Iranian influence in East Africa. He told Al-Monitor that African states seek to gain experience in the realms of security, counterterrorism, cultivating desert lands and the modern means of irrigation at which Tel Aviv excels, as well as investment in the agricultural and mining sectors, particularly in Ethiopia.

Concerning any hidden goals, Isawi said, Israel is attempting to increase its influence by adopting a policy of 'pulling in old parties' against Egypt and Sudan in particular. Israel will use these good relations with African states to pressure Egypt when any [future] Israeli-Egyptian dispute of [sufficient gravity] merits it. This might influence Cairos interests in the continent, particularly the crisis over the dam.

Saeed Okasha, an expert in Israeli affairs at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, disagrees with this take. Okasha told Al-Monitor that Netanyahus visit will play a positive role should tensions grow between Egypt and Ethiopia, noting that Cairo and Tel Aviv face shared challenges, especially in the realm of countering terrorism and Hamas movements in the region.

During his visit, Netanyahu obtained promises from seven African heads of state that they will work to restore Israels observer status in the African Union, which he said holds very great significance. However, the Sudanese ambassador to the African Union (AU), Osman Nafie, in a statement to Anatolia News Agency, dismissed the possibility that Israel would obtain that status, due to the unions rejection of the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The AU rejected a previous Israeli request on the same matter in 1976, when African states considered Israel an aggressive and expansionistic state.

Mai Mahmoud, the secretary of the African Affairs Committee in the Egyptian House of Representatives, said Israel has exploited Egypts growing distance from African states since the era of former President Hosni Mubarak, to forge its own relationships with the states of the continent. He told Al-Monitor that Israels growing presence in the region will require greater caution and observation on Egypts part. However, he dismissed the possibility that Israel would exploit its ties with Ethiopia to pressure Egypt concerning the dam, out of deference to Egypts peace agreement with Israel.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn also commented on his countrys relationship with Israel.

We wish to upgrade bilateral ties with Israel, and the principle of cooperation will be sustained between us in international forums, particularly given Tel Avivs support for our bid to become a temporary member of the [United Nations] Security Council, he said July 7 on the sidelines of the signing ceremony for a Cooperation Agreement and Memorandum of Mutual Understanding in several areas with Israel.

Dore Gold, the general director of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said on Israeli public radio July 8 that the growing ties between Israel and the African continent could help Israel in votes at the UN and its institutions. Israel faces international criticism concerning what are often described as dark horizons for the peace process with the Palestinians, which has been on hold since April 2014.

At the same time, Arab countries are seeking proposals that will affect Israel at the UN and other international organizations.

In a rapid development, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry made an official visit to Israel July 10  the first of its kind in more than nine years. During the visit, he held a joint press conference with Netanyahu and said the visit was part of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisis vision for achieving a warm peace between the Israeli and Palestinian sides. The leaders also discussed the political aspects of the bilateral relationship as well as regional conditions, and Shoukry said that the vision of a two-state solution is not far-fetched.

Isawi expects that Ethiopia will seek to use Israel to pressure Egypt to pass or advance various concessions, particularly pertaining to the dam.

He said, Whenever Israel feels that Egypt has begun to pressure it into making some concessions that it rejects in order to resume negotiations with Palestine, or if Egypt should threaten to sanction Israel in international forums over its hindrance of peace efforts in the region, or even for Israel taking some security measures in the Sinai Peninsula contrary to the terms of the peace accord, then Israel will seek to harm Egyptian interests in Africa  especially once Israel builds stronger ties with states on the African continent.

Okasha disagreed with Isawis view, saying, I dont believe that Israel expects to use Ethiopia to pressure Egypt concerning the Palestinian cause, noting that Cairos and Tel Avivs interests largely coincide there. But he said, At the same time, I dont trust Israel."

Cairo is playing the role of mediator in an attempt to revive negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Accordingly, Shoukry visited Ramallah and met with the Palestinian leadership. He held protracted talks June 29 concerning Sisis initiative, which was welcomed by Tel Aviv.

Israel has already announced that it rejects the French initiative, which calls for establishing an international peace conference by the end of the year to relaunch Israeli-Palestinian negotiations under international supervision. The Palestinians welcomed the initiative, but Israel rejected the proposed talks on the grounds that they call for the return to the 1967 borders, the withdrawal from the Golan Heights and a just solution to the refugees issue.

Concerning possible dangers to Egyptian national security resulting from a growing Israeli presence on the continent, Maj. Gen. Kamal Amir, the head of the National Security and Defense Committee in the House of Representatives, told Al-Monitor, We are tied to Israel by [shared] interests.

He said, It is their right to operate in Africa to break out of their international isolation, but Egypt must be alert in the event that this influences our own national security. The Israeli presence on the continent does not worry us. All the cards and all the eventualities are on the table before Egyptian decision-makers.

He noted that Shoukrys visit to Israel was a natural event that could be used to drive peace efforts in the Middle East.
July 14, 2016

The recent report by the Middle East Quartet bluntly criticized Israels systematic settlement expansion and large land takeovers in Area C, targeted at preventing a two-state solution. Nevertheless, the report was met with considerable disappointment at the highest levels of the Palestinian Authority, and also a sigh of relief in the prime ministers office in Jerusalem.

The Palestinians had hoped that similarly to the June 3 Paris summit declaration, the report would include terms of reference for the permanent status negotiations. They expected the report to specifically highlight the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative as the main basis for negotiations leading to a state along the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital. Ramallah had even asked the EU and the United States for a binding timeline for negotiations, followed by a Security Council resolution.

A senior Palestine Liberation Organization official close to President Mahmoud Abbas told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Abbas is severely critical of US Secretary of State John Kerry for pressuring the EU not to make the Quartet report a policy platform for future negotiations. The senior official assessed that the United States will publish guidelines for future negotiations as a platform for the next administration, possibly via a presidential policy speech. He also expressed concern that the US policy statement will allude to the need to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. According to this source, Ramallah is committed to working with Egypt and France on a binding UN Security Council resolution on Palestinian statehood referring in detail to settlement expansion, the 1967 lines, East Jerusalem and a two-year timeline. As the official put it, For us the Quartet report is a non-paper; our sole basis is the Arab Peace Initiative.

Though highly criticized by the Quartet, the Israeli government is satisfied with the report. A confidante of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that Netanyahu sees the report as a non-binding declaration. The prime minister had asked Kerry in their Rome meeting June 27 to refrain from making reference to the 1967 lines. As for the issue of settlements, the Israeli Cabinet responded with the approval for the building of hundreds of new housing units in the Jerusalem area.

The responses and reactions by the two parties are understandable. The Quartet presented unprecedented work, outlining the obstacles to a two-state solution in great detail. The most striking finding is the gradual de facto annexation of much of Area C (which makes up 61% of the West Bank) by Israel.

US diplomatic sources in Tel Aviv affirmed that Kerry convinced the EU to refrain from setting a new basis for future negotiations. There is no US-EU consensus on many of the permanent status issues, as the US administration traditionally tilts more toward Israel.

The outcome, though, is that the Palestinians are left without any hope for an internationally monitored two-state solution process, and their despair could lead to more violence or a new intifada. Israel was not warned strongly enough to force it to halt settlement construction and does not have to pay for its occupation policies. All in all, the Quartet report seems to have missed its original target of producing a path of hope for the pragmatists on both sides.

This is not Brussels' view. Though Ramallah and Jerusalem have both made their positions clear to the US, the EU has not lost hope, nor has it retracted its commitment to continuing the path toward a policy platform for a two-state solution and an international conference before the end of 2016.

A senior official close to EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini told Al-Monitor that in the aftermath of endorsing the French initiative and the publication of the Quartet report, EU officials are preparing a tentative road map for progress in the diplomatic process. The EU's premise, he explained, is that Europe will have to act independently this year because of the US presidential transition. This road map will include several stages, beginning with talking to the parties about curbing Israeli settlement expansion and Palestinian incitement to violence, together with economic confidence-building measures in Area C for the Palestinian agricultural sector. Thereafter, Brussels, in coordination with the French, will start preparing for a possible international peace conference with the parties before the end of 2016.

Israeli rejection, Palestinian political weakness and US passivity alarm Brussels, increasing its fear of violent escalation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And so, despite negative reactions by both sides, Europe is stepping into the current policy vacuum. At the moment, its the only show in town.
July 17, 2016

Kerry: Jabhat al-Nusra plotting terror attacks

After meetings in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, US Secretary of State John Kerry announced July 15 that the United States and Russia had made progress toward concrete steps to restore the fraying cessation of hostilities, collaborate in targeting Jabhat al-Nusra  al-Qaedas Syria affiliate  and boost talks on a political transition in Syria.

Kerry refused to lay out the details because they need more work in order to work. The United States has proposed a plan to set up a Joint Implementation Group with Russia to coordinate airstrikes in Syria in return for Moscow restraining the Syrian governments air force against Syrian armed groups.

Laura Rozen reports, The US proposal for deeper US-Russian coordination against Jabhat al-Nusra is controversial within the US administration, with some Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials expressing doubt the Russians could be trusted to restrain the Syrian regime or not to use the intelligence to target US-backed rebels, given their track record of doing so in the past months.

In a joint press conference with Lavrov, Kerry described critics of his initiative as completely screwed up. He reminded the "dissent" crowd that Jabhat al-Nusra, just like the Islamic State (IS), is designated as a terrorist organization under numerous UN Security Council resolutions. He said that Nusra is plotting against countries in the world and that what happened in Nice last night could just as well have come from Nusra. Kerry refused to characterize Jabhat al-Nusra as opposition and expressed confidence in the non-terrorist organization opposition, the legitimate opposition, the opposition we have supported.

Kerry noted that, in addition to the Syrian government, Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies have also violated the cessation of hostilities, as this column has reported  a fact often missing in press accounts. The secretary said opposition forces pairing up with Jabhat al-Nusra because of a shared commitment to fight President Bashar al-Assads forces will not excuse it in our eyes. We saw what happened when people said the same thing about [IS] for a period of time  oh, dont worry, theyre just a force against Assad, and down the road we can take them on. Well, they became more than just a force. And so I think that it is important for the United States, Russia, the entire coalition of ISSG [International Syria Support Group] to stand up against terrorism, and that is what we intend to continue to do. Kerry made clear that the United States maintains that Syria cant have peace while Assad is there, and that Washington and Moscow disagree on this point.

Kerrys initiative with Moscow offers the best bet to end the war and deal with an expansive global terrorist threat emanating from Syria. Last week, we noted two developments that reinforce the Obama administration's bold effort and strengthen Kerrys rebuke of his critics  which we had labeled as "misguided" but we will go along with "completely screwed up" too: testimony by a State Department official that Jabhat al-Nusra is al-Qaedas largest affiliate ever, and Amnesty Internationals report on the record of Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies in northern Syria, which is hardly distinguishable from the gruesome tactics of IS. To lump Jabhat al-Nusra with the Syrian opposition is not only wrong-headed, but it is an injustice and insult to the legitimate Syrian opposition and to those suffering under the horrific rule of these armed Salafi gangs. And Kerry is also right to remind that the murders of 84 people in Nice, for which IS claims credit, could have easily been committed by Jabhat al-Nusra.

Erdogan: Time to "cleanse our army"

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to the failed military coup attempt as a "gift from God" and is casting a wide net in his determination to root out any and all suspected of treason.

On July 15-16, 104 alleged coup plotters and 161 civilians were killed in the attempted takeover of the Turkish government. The putschists bombed the Turkish parliament and other government buildings, and killed unarmed civilians who took to the streets to challenge the coup. The leaders of the coup reportedly include Gen. Erdal Ozturk, the commander of the third army at the time of the coup; Gen. Adem Huduti, the commander of the second army, which has responsibility for Turkeys border security; and Gen. Ozhan Ozbakir, who commands forces in southwest Turkey.

Erdogan will also seek the extradition of Fethullah Gulen from the United States, declaring, Once they hand over that head terrorist in Pennsylvania to us, everything will be clear.

While there has been widespread disenchantment with Erdogans authoritarian and divisive policies, Turks of all political persuasions spurned the failed bid and those behind it. Opposition politicians, civil society leaders, and critical journalists and writers deplored the attempt to bring about change through the use of violent military force. The country is collectively mourning those citizens who lost their lives in confronting the perpetrators of the coup.

No doubt those implicated in the coup had a formidable network, but the president will no doubt see opportunity to settle scores with the widest range of opponents. So far, nearly 3,000 military officers have been arrested, with warrants for the arrest of nearly as many judges. Turkeys next chapter will be marked by increased uncertainty about the direction of the Turkish state, which less than a decade ago was widely lauded as a model for governance in the region.

Mustafa Akyol wrote last week just days before the coup that Turkey desperately needs reconciliation within itself in order to steady its political course. That course, for now, will be a road not taken. Erdogans enemies have drawn blood, so revenge  not reconciliation  will carry the day.
Alabama state troopers confirm four people were killed in a Saturday afternoon crash near Winterboro in Talladega County.

The crash occurred at about 1:45 p.m. at the intersection of Highway 21 and Grist Mill Road.

Trooper Johnathan Appling tweeted that the victims in the crash are related to a fellow trooper.

The names of the victims have yet to be released.
Barack Obama

President Barack Obama speaks about the Baton Rouge, La., shooting of police officers, Sunday, July 17, 2016, from the briefing room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Confronting another killing of police officers, President Barack Obama on Sunday urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions as a violent summer collides with the nation's heated presidential campaign.

Obama said the motive behind Sunday's killing of three officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was still unknown. It was the latest in a string of deadly incidents involving law enforcement, including the police shooting of a black man in Baton Rouge and the killing of five officers in Dallas.



"We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies attacks on law enforcement," Obama said in remarks from the White House briefing room.

Baton Rouge police shooting suspect ID'd as Gavin Long of Missouri, CBS News, AP say

The president spoke on the eve of the Republican Party's national convention, where Donald Trump will officially accept the GOP nomination. The businessman has cast the recent incidents as a sign that the country needs new leadership, often using heated rhetoric to make his point.



"Every one right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further," Obama said.



The president spoke earlier Sunday with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden to hear the latest on the investigation into the shootings and pledge federal support.



Obama has spent most of the last week focused on defusing tensions and rebuilding trust between police departments and the communities they serve.



On July 7, an Army veteran opened fire on law enforcement in Dallas, killing five and wounding seven other officers. The shooter, who was black, said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers. Obama spoke at the memorial service for the officers killed and told Americans not to despair, that the nation is not as divided as it might seem.



The next day, Obama held an extraordinary four-hour meeting at the White House's executive offices with police officers, community activists and elected leaders, emerging from the session saying "we're not even close" to the point where minority communities could feel confident that police departments were serving them with respect and equality or where police departments could feel adequately supported at all levels.



The shooting of the police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge were preceded by police shootings of two black men, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, which sparked protests around the country. Dallas police were defending protesters in that city when the gunman opened fire on them.




Trump introduces Pence as running mate

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event to announce Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., as the vice presidential running mate on, Saturday, July 16, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Republicans are ready to kick off their biggest party of the year.

The 2016 Republican National Convention will be held July 18-20 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. Almost 2,500 delegates and 2,300 alternate delegates form all 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories will be on hand to see business mogul-turned-presidential candidate Donald Trump and running mate Mike Pence officially accept the GOP nomination.

2016 marks the fourth time the Republican Party will meet in Ohio. The Buckeye State also played host to the 1876, 1924 and 1936 Republican National Conventions in Cincinnati '76 and Cleveland '24 and '36.

RNC convention schedule of events

Convention events will get underway July 18 at 1 p.m. EST. Tuesday's schedule will get underway at 5:30 p.m. EST; Wednesday at 7 p.m. EST; and Thursday at 7:30 p.m. EST.

The New York Times obtained a partial list of speakers:

July 18th:

Jamiel Shaw Sr, whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant and who supports stronger border control

Senator Tom Cotton

Rudy Giuliani

Trump's wife, Melania

Sen. Joni Ernst

July 19th:

Dana White, president of Ultimate Fighting Championship

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey

Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn

Senator Mitch McConnell

Tiffany Trump

Donald Trump Jr.

Governor Scott Walker

July 20th:

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi

Eileen Collins, retired astronaut and first female commander of a space shuttle mission

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich

Senator Ted Cruz

Eric Trump

Natalie Gulbis, a professional golfer

Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence

July 21st:

There are several others who are expected to speak, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Dr. Ben Carson, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions that are not yet listed on the schedule.

What to expect:

The convention will be full of party pomp but the real matter at hand will be officially making Trump the GOP nominee. Before he picked up the required number of delegates needed to lockup the nomination, there was talk of trying to oust the controversial Trump for another candidate. Though the "never Trump" camp has kept that drumbeat steady, they have failed to make headway and there's no expectation that anyone other than Trump will be the party's nominee in the race for the White House.

As for candidate himself, Trump is unpredictable and what he will say or what he will do remains to be seen.

Keeping up with convention?

The 2016 Republican National Convention has official app for your phone. The app will provide gavel-to-gavel week-long live stream coverage with 360 degree video for special events. Click to download on iOS or Android.

You can follow along online at #RNCinCLE.
Two women are dead after a patient shot them in a Titusville, Florida, hospital room, according to Florida Today.

The shooting happened on the third floor of the Parrish Medical Center around 2 a.m. in a patient's room, WKMG reported.

Police told the station that the gunman entered the hospital room, where an elderly woman was being treated, and shot the patient and a hospital employee who was sitting with the patient.

The victims' names have not been released.

Police told Florida Today that the suspected shooter is in custody. Hospital security guards held down him down until police arrived and arrested the man.

"It appears to be extremely random," said Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said to WKMG.

Titusville Police Chief John Lau said, "We got a call from Parrish Medical Center that there was an active shooter...Our response was within minutes, and two security guards already had the sole shooter in custody. I cannot stress enough the response of the Parrish Medical staff. (They), without a doubt, saved more lives."

The hospital remains open this morning.
A Texas corrections officer was killed by an inmate early Saturday morning, CNN reported.

Mari Johnson, 55, was found around 3 a.m. Saturday morning in the kitchen area of French Robertson Unit, a maximum security prison in Abilene, Texas.

She was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Gov. Greg Abbott said that Johnson was killed by an inmate, who has not been identified.

"Texas will ensure the perpetrator receives swift justice, and TDCJ [Texas Department of Criminal Justice] has been instructed to take all necessary measures to enhance the safety of their staff to prevent such tragedies."

Police have not said how Johnson was killed.

"Ms. Johnson made the ultimate sacrifice to keep this state safe. She will never be forgotten. We will see that the offender who committed this cowardly act is held accountable," Brad Livingston, TDCJ Executive Director, said to CNN.

She had worked with the Department of Criminal Justice for seven years.

"Correctional officers have one of the most difficult jobs in all of state government, protecting the public from dangerous individuals," Livingston said.
Choice of right-wing governor as vice presidential candidate seen as safe and solid for the party base.

Cleveland, United States  The strains of The Rolling Stones singing You cant always get want you want had just faded away. A low cheer came from the crowd and Donald Trump strode on stage.

It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of music given the reports that he wasnt entirely sure he wanted the man he was about to announce as his vice presidential pick to be by his side.

In his gut, numerous reports suggest, Trump wanted to pick Chris Christie. Hed known the combative New Jersey governor for years. He was comfortable around him. And lets not forget he was the first establishment Republican to throw his support behind Trump.

He liked Newt Gingrich. He liked his brain and he liked his Washington connections.

But his top advisers were pushing him towards Mike Pence, the right-wing, socially conservative governor of Indiana.

Poll: Most Americans fear election of Clinton or Trump

Pence was spotted in New York on Thursday night, all ready for the big reveal on Friday. And even though Trump said he was delaying his announcement because of the attack in Nice, he still tweeted out his decision on Friday.



Trump taps Mike Pence as running mate

The campaign also unveiled its Trump-Pence logo, which was immediately ridiculed on social media.

It was nowhere to be seen at Saturdays event. Trump took his place on the podium with the solitary name of Trump emblazoned on the front.

The presumptive Republican nominee was speaking without a prompter. You could tell. This was an unfocused meandering through the recent past.

Several times he said Now back to Mike Pence, as if he suddenly remembered the point of the event, before dashing off down another avenue of disjointed thoughts.

Trump reminded us he was against the Iraq war. The man he picked as his vice president voted in favour of it. He reminded us he was against the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA. Pence as a congressman voted in favour. And he reminded us that before the Indiana primary, his vice presidential pick wanted Ted Cruz to win. He suggested the governor really wanted to endorse him, but caved under pressure from establishment Republicans, which made his choice look weak and malleable.

And one of his big reasons for picking Pence: Party unity. I have to be honest. So many people have said party unity. Because Im an outsider. I dont want to be an outsider.

Normally politicians will tell you their choice would be a great president if something happened to them; that they have great people skills, or will add so much to any administration. This was the full, unvarnished truth from the businessman. Its what has won him a lot of support.

Can Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump?

So after 28 minutes, which focused mainly on himself, Donald Trump formally introduced his vice presidential pick. Pence, tall and grey, walked purposefully on stage. The two men shook hands, Trump patted him on the shoulder and walked off stage. No posing together, no triumphant punching of the air. It was a thumbs-up and a step to the side.

Pence spoke for 12 minutes. He was deliberate and focused. He insisted he was a pretty basic guy: a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order. He praised God for bringing him such an opportunity, and thanked Donald Trump for putting him on the ticket.

Pence  a former conservative talk radio host  is well liked by the right wing of the Republican Party. A social conservative, he has opposed changes in abortion laws. But hes best known as the governor who signed a religious freedom law in his state that critics claimed cleared the way for discrimination against the LBGT community in Indiana. The outcry against the law was so strong that he was forced to amend it.

The Republican establishment will hope that he helps to unify the party which, despite all its claims, is deeply split. Hell help lock down core support. Many conservatives can now tell themselves they are voting for Pence, rather than Trump.

The problem the Trump campaign has is that this choice is unlikely to broaden his support base. Few independents or wavering Democrats  and there are more than a few of them  will suddenly decide to vote Republican because Mike Pence is on the ticket.

Vice-presidential picks can help tickets win; think Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy. Or they can scare voters away: think Sarah Palin and John McCain. The first rule is Do no harm. Mike Pence will arrive here in Cleveland as a safe solid pick. Certainly not an exciting one.
Politicians are finally talking tough on an opioid abuse epidemic. But they may lack the will to fully kick the habit.

New York, United States  Quitting isnt easy. Just ask Kasey Kearney-Argow.

She kicked prescription painkillers and other drugs six months ago. But in the back of her mind are euphoric memories of opioid stupors and the knowledge that a doctor nearby will write a prescription any time she asks.

They didnt ask me too many questions because Ive been in three car accidents and I have extremely bad migraines due to my neck pain, so I can get Percocet whenever I want, Kearney-Argow, 23, told Al Jazeera, referring to a strong pain reliever that can also give a high.

Even if that wasnt true and I told the doctor that, they would prescribe it to me anyway. Its too easy to get any opiates down here.

As a bullied, bereaved and shy teenager in New Jersey, Kearney-Argow started using cannabis, ketamine and the types of powerful painkillers that doctors prescribe to cancer victims but have increasingly been doled out for lesser ills.

Once she was hooked, injecting heroin became a cheaper route to the same buzz. Her weight fell to 43kg and she dropped out of college. A clinic in Florida has helped to straighten her out. She kept the tattooed rock chick look, but now has a steady job and plans to start modelling.

She is not unique. According to the US governments Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), opioid abuse is an epidemic. The number of overdose deaths involving opioids  including some strong painkillers and heroin  nearly quadrupled between 1999 and 2014.

Every day, 78 Americans die from such overdoses, often when pills are mixed with alcohol or sleep aids and users pass out and stop breathing. In April, the music icon Prince, 57, joined this statistic after an accidental, self-administered overdose of fentanyl.

US doctors have prescribed ever-more opioid painkillers since the 1980s, but lawmakers are finally waking up to the problem. US President Barack Obamas budget request for 2017 includes $1.1bn in new funding to expand treatment to all opioid addicts who want help.

The only way we reduce demand is if were providing treatment and thinking about this as a public health problem and not just a criminal problem, Obama said when launching his plan in March.

So far, none of the bills passed by Congress includes enough cash, but this may change before the mid-July summertime recess. Campaigners warn that bitterness between the two parties in an election cycle could kibosh a much-needed deal.

Even with a breakthrough, former politician Patrick Kennedy, a scion of a Democratic dynasty who published a warts-and-all tale of his own battle with addiction, called A Common Struggle, warns that its too little, too late.

Neither the president nor Congress wants to treat this as the disease that it is, Kennedy told Al Jazeera.

Every single family in America is touched by this illness. Every single family is worried about a family member being affected by this illness, and if we want to make fundamental change, we need to change everything.

Kennedy has teamed up with Newt Gingrich, a Republican who hopes to be running mate to presumptive nominee Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential vote, and others to campaign for better treatment via the charity Advocates for Opioid Recovery.

READ MORE: Mindful addiction recovery

They say addiction is a sickness for which users need levels of treatment akin to sufferers of diabetes, cancer and other diseases. Only half of them receive drugs such as buprenorphine and naltrexone which help reduce cravings and the risk of an overdose.

Spending a little more on treatment would yield huge savings down the road, with fewer addicts filling courthouses, jails and emergency rooms, said Kennedy. He should know. He has seen the dark side of the pill bottle.

I have lived experience. My brain was absolutely addicted to these opiates. I had to be [an] inpatient on a number of occasions to get detoxed and I dealt with all of the ancillary issues of humiliation, arrest  a lot of things that come with this, he explained.

Fortunately it wasnt death, but it couldve been.

Opioid crisis

It does not top the agenda in the 2016 White House race, but both Trump and Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, have addressed the opioid crisis  not least because it blights New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio and other battleground states.

Clinton says addiction is a disease, not a moral failing. She calls for more treatment, re-training of doctors and putting fewer non-violent users behind bars. Trump says a beautiful wall along Mexicos border will stop banned substances reaching the US.

At heart, this is a complex problem. America has divergent policies on narcotics. For decades, it led a global war on drugs. But times have changed. A handful of states now allow recreational weed use for adults. California is poised to follow suit.

Hard drugs such as heroin are banned, but opioid painkillers have lawful uses. Such drugs as oxycodone and hydrocodone were once reserved for the acute pain of those recovering from car crashes and surgery, and those getting palliative care for Aids, cancer and other killers.

But drug firms began marketing painkillers more aggressively and, thanks to some research supporting their wider use, doctors followed suit. Soon, they were doling out Percocet and Vicodin when teenagers got their wisdom teeth yanked out.

READ MORE: Drug addiction in the US

Despite clinical names, the pills are highly addictive and even short courses can leave users hooked. They stimulate receptors in the brain to produce a strong pain-numbing effect, while also lessening the anxiety and depression that can accompany pain.

Nowadays, ever more opioid painkillers are prescribed and consumed. Clinicians wrote nearly a quarter of a billion opioid prescriptions in 2013  enough for every American adult to have their own bottle of pills, the CDC says.

Americas fee-for-service health model incentivises giving patients what they ask for. Repeat prescriptions mean more business for doctors. Hospital patients leave better feedback forms when doped up on opiates.

So-called pain clinics have popped up in some states, dispensing pills to just about anyone who asked. Dealers drove to Floridas many clinics to stock up and re-sell back in Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere. Costing $1 per milligram, addicts can easily blow through $150 a day.

The typical addict is poor, white and single. As such, the pills were dubbed hillbilly heroin, which users like to grind up and snort. State and federal officials have clamped down on overprescribing and pill mills by training doctors and in the courts.

In 2007, Purdue Pharma, the maker of the painkiller OxyContin, paid a $634m fine for misrepresenting the drugs addictiveness. In December it reached a $24m settlement with Kentucky after the state claimed Purdue cost it an entire generation to OxyContin.

Results have been mixed. Many addicts were forced to switch to heroin  which is cheap and readily available  to feed their cravings, leading many users to needles. Desperate addicts have even tried getting high from anti-diarrhoea pills.

Instead of being hooked on OxyContin, its much cheaper to buy a bag of dope, Paul Pellinger, who helps run Recovery Unplugged, the Florida-based clinic where Kearney-Argow kicked her habit via musical therapy, told Al Jazeera.

Thats why the people who were once hooked on the pills are now hooked on heroin.

He blames the opiate epidemic on a profit-hungry healthcare system that plays into the vulnerabilities of mollycoddled American millennials, who use soporific drugs to ease worries over joblessness and college debt.

Another patient, Gene Lewis, is a case in point. As a teenager in Greenford, a rust belt Ohio town, he fell into a group of weed-smoking, pill-popping friends who saw shuttered steel mills and few opportunities around them.

He has been clean for eight months and now runs a call centre in Florida. Things are looking up for the 25-year-old, but he has little faith in lawmakers turning the tide on an addiction problem that tears through users like a tornado.

We should make it a lot harder to get them [pills]. But Im sure they make a lot of money off giving people those medications, Lewis told Al Jazeera. Theyll give you Vicodin for getting a tooth pulled out. Thats enough to start somebody on the wrong path.

Follow James Reinl on Twitter: @jamesreinl
Pakistanis express sorrow and anger after social media star is killed by her brother, but some condemn her lifestyle.

The murder of Pakistani social media sensation, Qandeel Baloch, by her own brother has angered millions of Pakistanis, while others have celebrated her death on account of her rebellious, provocative, and what some considered unIslamic statements in the largely conservative nation.

The 26-year-old was found dead in her family home, having been strangled by her brother, Waseem, who later said he had no regrets and killed his famous sister to preserve the familys honour.

READ MORE: Pakistani social media star killed by brother

As in life, Baloch has polarised the nation in her death. Many condemned the killing outright, others said she had it coming, and some said while she should not have been killed, they could understand the brothers motive.

The media has been blamed for sensationalising the details of her personal life, thus increasing the shame factor upon her family, as many called for an anti-honour killing bill to be implemented.

We asked some Pakistanis to share their views:

Mosharraf Zaidi, 40, Islamabad-based analyst

Its a very sad situation, and an opportunity for men not only in Pakistan, but men everywhere to be introspective about life, culture, humanity, modernity, human agency.

People who blame the media dont understand the media, nor its commercial landscape. A race to the bottom in popular culture will intensify.

Men everywhere need to think about what century they are living in  If you dont like whats on TV, turn it off. You dont like whats on the channel  flip it. You dont like a video? Stop watching it. Dont Google the person you dont like even more.

Look away from what titillates and enrages. Stop looking directly at it.

Mehmood Ahmed, 49, driver from Azad Kashmir

What her brother has done is completely wrong. If she was my sister, I would have tried to explain to her what she was doing was wrong  I would not have resorted to killing. Killing one person is like killing all of humanity  and thats wrong. Our religion tells us so. Anyone who commits that crime is a [disbeliever].

After your parents, the most important relationship is with your sister. I have five sisters and when each one was getting married, I asked them if they liked someone they want to marry. I [gave] them a choice.

The media is responsible for blowing the episode with Maulvi Qavi out of proportion. [Before she died, Baloch met with Qavi, a leading cleric, and posted selfies of her sitting on his lap]. There were selfies, videos and they enraged the brother. The brother ought to have thought, this is my sister, she is my honour. Qandeel apologised for the video, so what was the issue? I dont understand the drama.

People in the family and neighbours like to talk about everything, good, bad or ugly. No one understands the problems someone is going through, and if you leave them be and ignore them, next week they talk about something else.

Arsalan Khan, Assistant Professor at Union College, New York, USA

Balochs tragic murder points to a culture of toxic masculinity in Pakistan in which mens reputations are bound up with their ability to control the bodies and lives of their daughters, sisters, and wives. We think of women as the keepers of family and national honour, and so they are endlessly scrutinised for upholding the values of sexual modesty and propriety, and are relentlessly policed to ensure that they do not transgress those norms.

Those who fail or refuse [to uphold values] are mercilessly attacked, as Qandeel was on her social media pages, and where there are verbal attacks, physical violence is sure to follow.

We should also think about how the mass media may have contributed to this particular murder. In his statement to police, Qandeels brother says he killed her because she brought shame to him and his family  Its important to remember that Qandeels murder happened only a few days after the Pakistani media disclosed her true identity, an identity that she clearly went to great lengths to hide.

While its impossible to know precisely how this contributed to her murder, it was an incredibly irresponsible act on the part of the Pakistani media.

Qasim Nagori, 30, graphic designer from Karachi

I was not a fan of her antics, didnt like her page or follow her doings, but I feel so bad for how she was treated.

I didnt understand why she did dirty videos and photos  I feel it was cheap publicity to get famous and that never lasts, and doesnt take you anywhere.

Neighbours, extended family members .. its those very people that suffocate the family, taunt them, isolate them and jeer at them. That makes someone so angry that they lash out in the most primal form.

The brother is guilt-free because he must feel relieved, because people around him must have made his life hell. The problem is the society.

Nauman Babri, 36, member of the Tablighi Jamaat from Lahore

Islam doesnt allow you kill anyone. If this society were 100 percent Islamic Sharia-based, then the killing could be justified if many warnings were given, and if she didnt rectify her behaviour.

It really would be the last resort and even then, you are not allowed to kill a human being.

If there was Islamic law, then zina [the death penalty for extramarital relations] and other Islamic jurisprudence would be applicable.

Is the brothers punishment justified? It is, and he should be punished. If it were Islamic law, it would be blood for blood. [Al Jazeera asks: Are women allowed to make their own decisions?] Fathers and husbands are the custodians of women.

Shamayel Tareen, actor from Balochistan

Baloch was a living example that women in Pakistan are not free.

Being a strong and independent woman can get you killed, whatever profession you are in.

I do not stand by Qandeels behaviour that was in her videos and pictures but I avoided going through her [Facebook] page.

We are no one to judge.

Everyone has been given a mind and free will to choose the path they walk on.

Its so painful to see someone so innocent go. Shes innocent because she didnt harm anyone, but yet we found a way to harm her.

Saad Rasool, lawyer based in Lahore with a masters from Harvard Law School

The most important thing to realise is that this [honour killing] is only a cultural name.

There is no such thing, none whatsoever, in Pakistani law. There is no justification of murder in Pakistans superior courts in terms of honour killing, and there is no specific provision either in the Sharia courts or the Sharia law, as applied in Pakistan, that justifies honour to be a justification for killing.

The case has to be dealt with under Pakistans Penal Code Provision of 1860, and the provisions relating to murder would be the provisions that apply to this particular case.

Pakistans law as informed by the Islamic practices allows the family of the deceased under certain circumstances to forgive the accused murderer. In this case, Qandeels parents can forgive their own son  in such a case, Pakistani law says the courts and state will have to make a decision if the family forgives.

This [case] would be an opportunity for Pakistans courts to [make an example of the case to show that] a crime particularly of this nature is a crime against society, and society must have its law followed to the logical conclusion, even if the family forgives the accused.

Mehreen Shamsi, Australia-based finance worker, originally from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

The term honour killing is extremely incomplete and yet extremely explicit in the context that it is used in, if thats possible.

Its very much like the term act of terror. Both have been used for a very specific part of the world, for its specific cultures, religions, traditions and more so for extremist factions of illiterate groups, as I would call them, as they carry out these activities.

Both terms are [about] upholding values, guarding the social fabric, and honouring religious duty.

Honour killing, therefore, assumes that everything wrong in society will be fixed by taking a life  mostly taking the life of a woman.

It may be in that most cases of violence against women are based on the term honour. When the result is the death of a woman, the man feels he has resolved all problems.

Follow Alia Chughtai on Twitter: @aliachughtai
More than 65 million people around the globe have been forced to flee their homes because of conflict and violence, the highest level since records began.

People who have had to leave their lives behind and start afresh far from home often struggle to make a living and support their families. Many are living in refugee camps or within local communities, where opportunities for work are scarce.

Yet behind the statistics lie powerful stories of survival and determination. People show remarkable courage and ability to keep going, in spite of the challenges they face  often learning new skills and taking up different jobs from those they had before.

From Iraq to Tanzania, Lebanon to the Democratic Republic of Congo, there are millions of refugees  as well as people forced to flee within their own country  who are making ends meet while they wait to eventually return home.

People fleeing conflict and persecution are at their most vulnerable, and are often met with hostility and discrimination in the places they seek refuge, but these stories are testament to their will to keep going.

As one Burundian teacher-turned-tailor living in Tanzania explained: People survive in different ways.
Palestinians retain several diplomatic nuclear options they could deploy if all hope for a solution fades.

A settlement, negotiated between the parties, will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbours. The settlement will  end the occupation that began in 1967.

This statement was not made by Cornel West as part of his laudable but ill-fated attempt to get the Democratic Party Platform Committee merely to say the word occupation. Rather, it was one of the first communiques of the Quartet, in April 2003, echoing US President George W Bushs October 2001 declaration that creating a viable Palestinian state had long been part of the United States vision for the Middle East.





Thirteen years later, the occupation continues, and seemingly nothing Palestinians can do  from official protests to well-coordinated civil resistance, to random stabbings  will change that fact.

Miracle worker

Bernie Sanders was hailed as a miracle worker merely for declaring that Palestinians have the same rights as other human beings. The likely next president, who wants to take Americas relationship with Israel to the next level, clearly does not share that view.

Or rather, Hillary Clinton feels they have the same rights as Hondurans and all the other peoples suffering under the corrupt and brutal client regimes she has supported as senator, secretary of state, and through the Clinton Foundation.

READ MORE: Muslims for Bernie Sanders

As for progressive stalwart Elizabeth Warren, putative frontrunner for vice president, she is being celebrated as a surprising pro-Israel hawk by Alan Dershowitz, who should know.

The departure of the predictably pro-Israel UK from the European Union could, in theory, strengthen the Union's inclination to act as a counterbalance to US support for Israel. by

The much-awaited report of the Quartet, which is expected to place significant responsibility on Israel for the lack of negotiating progress, still holds to the fiction that only direct negotiations between the all-powerful occupier and the ever more occupied population will lead to a viable resolution to the conflict.

Even The New York Times has acceded to the normalisation of the occupation, recently putting the word in scare quotes to reflect the fait accompli.

Changes on the horizon?

The departure of the predictably pro-Israel UK from the European Union could, in theory, strengthen the Unions inclination to act as a counterbalance to US support for Israel. More likely, the need to staunch a haemorrhage of members will drain most of its energy.

Of the remaining major donors to Palestine, hardly a single country can be expected to lift a finger other than to write a cheque.

Even Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have abandoned Palestinians as part of his official rapprochement with Israel.

Indeed, it is hard to think of a time when Palestinians had a weaker hand to play diplomatically or strategically.

The growing support within international civil society and the spread of BDS  the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement  globally, the upgrading of Palestines status to a non-member observer state at the United Nations and joining of the International Criminal Court, have done nothing to change the calculus or behaviour of Israels leadership, which now brazenly cuts off water to the West Bank without a care in the world.

Nuclear options and new identities

Israel might be the regions only country with nuclear weapons, but observers have long believed that Palestinians retain several diplomatic nuclear options they could deploy if all hope for a solution fades. Joining the ICC was one, but it has so far produced no hint of an investigation of Israel.

READ MORE: US Democratic Party  Closer to justice on Palestine?

Dissolving the Palestinian Authority is another, but its highly unlikely given the almost 150,000 people, including the entire political elite, who would see their salaries disappear with the PA.

Creative civil and artistic resistance with international partners has no doubt raised international awareness and support, but is unlikely to do more than slow down the inexorable push towards annexation, which is the stated policy of Israels ruling establishment.

A similar option would be to return to the International Court of Justice, which in 2004 ruled that the Occupation was in fact an occupation, to request it declare the Occupation itself illegal. This could severely weaken Israels position, but would take years to generate.

There is another nuclear option, one which would blow the entire political edifice of the occupation to smithereens, that could be pursued by Palestinians: to demand citizenship and full rights in an Israeli state that would encompass the entirety of present-day Israel/Palestine.

This particular political jujitsu would go one step beyond dissolving the PA, demanding not just that Israel assume responsibility for administering the occupied territories but also accepting that a one-state solution has already been in place for years, and any hope for an sovereign independent Palestinian state will have to be relinquished in favour of fighting for full civil and political rights within Greater Israel.

The brilliance of Israeli strategy ... has been that by dangling the possibility of independence in front of Palestinians, Israeli leaders have incentivised them to devote decades of energy towards investing in ... a solution that had no chance of being realised... by

The brilliance of Israeli strategy over the past 50 years has been that by dangling the possibility of independence in front of Palestinians, Israeli leaders have incentivised them to devote decades of energy towards investing in an identity and a solution that had no chance of being realised in the existing local, regional and international contexts.

And with both the PA and Hamas invested in the continuation of the status quo, any change in Palestinian politics and identity would have to arise from a grassroots that is under incredible pressure merely to hold the line on a daily basis.

But as no less than the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned, the day that Palestinians would ask for passports Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state would be done for.

But a very different Israeli and Palestinian polity would be born. However painful and traumatic its birth, it would at least open the possibility for a different future.

The question remains, what will it take before Palestinians avail themselves of their final nuclear strategy, and how much violence will the Israeli government deploy before it is forced to re-imagine itself as a very different society than it has become during the last half century?

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
The Hague ruling is binding and final, so China can comply or be branded as an outlaw in the region.

Nothing but truth in here and it was unfair, lamented Aglaya Ivanovna, one of Dostoyevskys protagonists in The Idiot. This was essentially Chinas response to a major legal setback, when an arbitration body at The Hague ruled against the Asian giants expansive claims and assertive manoeuvres in the South China Sea.

The arbitration case was brought forward by the Philippines, which has been locked in a bitter territorial dispute with China in recent years.

Back in 2012, Chinese paramilitary forces wrested control of the Manila-claimed Scarborough Shoal, a disputed land feature that lies only 220 kilometres away from Philippine shores but almost 900 kilometres away from the nearest Chinese shoreline.





It was a tragic episode for Manila, which lacked the requisite military capabilities to reclaim what it viewed as an integral element of Philippine territory.

No tangible assistance

With key traditional allies like the US unwilling to commit any tangible assistance, former Philippine President Benigno Aquino decided to take China to international court.

At the beginning, few believed that the Southeast Asian country could convince an international court, formed under the aegis of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, to rule against China.

READ MORE: Hague ruling could spark China-Japan row

Led by world-class lawyers, however, the Philippines managed to pull off a major victory after three years of excruciating legal proceedings. Though the verdict is binding and final, enforcement is far from assured.

Though the verdict is binding and final, enforcement is far from assured. by

A defiant China, which boycotted the whole arbitration proceedings, has dismissed the final ruling null and void and a worthless piece of paper without any consequence.

In truth, however, China faces major strategic and diplomatic costs. If it fails to comply with the arbitration outcome, it risks being branded as an international outlaw, inviting further legal and/or military countermeasures by its neighbours as well as by external powers such as America.

Enraged China

From the very beginning, China sought to undermine the Philippines arbitration case by invoking jurisdictional rebuttals.

It argued that arbitration bodies under the UNCLOS have no mandate to adjudicate the South China Sea disputes.

It sought exemption from third-party arbitration by citing legal provisions (Art. 298, Section 2, Part XV) in the Convention. China even accused the Philippines of abusing international law and violating prior bilateral and multilateral agreements by initiating a compulsory arbitration proceeding.

On the diplomatic front, China sought the support of up to 40 countries to oppose the Philippines case, while threatening to withdraw from the global maritime convention altogether. Earlier this year, it also announced its decision to set up alternative international arbitration bodies.

It also embarked on a relentless campaign to delegitimise and denigrate the whole arbitration proceedings, tried to lobby some court officials to dismiss the case, and went so far as accusing the tribunal of having failed to be impartial, acting in a law-abusing, careless, and irresponsible manner. The Arbitral Tribunal, however, rejected almost all of Chinas arguments.

Legal victory

In its final ruling, the court dismissed Chinas doctrine of historic rights, undergirding its sweeping nine-dashed-line claims, as ultimately incompatible with modern international law, since there was no evidence that China had historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or their resources.

READ MORE: Chinas peripheral diplomacy disaster

Thus, the tribunal nullified any Chinese claim to the high seas and bulk of the waters of the South China Sea. It also ruled that the Asian power violated the Philippines sovereign rights by depriving its Southeast Asian neighbour of the unimpeded opportunity to exploit fisheries and hydrocarbon resources within its 200-nautical-mile Exclusive Economic Zone.

It also criticised Chinas massive reclamation activities  17 times larger than all other claimant states combined in the past 40 years  arguing that they are incompatible with the obligations of member states, because they inflicted irreparable harm to the maritime environment and destroyed evidence of natural condition of features in the disputed area.

Finally, it also ruled that the bulk of Chinese-occupied land features in the area are low-tide-elevations, which cant generate any territorial claim. Others are, at most, only rocks, that can only generate 12 nautical miles territorial sea.

Hard choices

The verdict is binding, but enforcement is a huge concern. The Philippines has the option of releasing a strong statement calling for China, an aspiring regional leader, to comply or be branded as an outlaw.

The Philippines has the option of releasing a strong statement calling for China, an aspiring regional leader, to comply or be branded as an outlaw. by

The Southeast Asian country can also call upon external powers such as America, Japan, and Australia to enforce the verdict by conducting multilateral Freedom of Navigation Operations in the disputed waters and close to Chinese-occupied land features.

The Philippines legal victory also provides an encouraging precedent for other claimant states such as Vietnam to file a similar arbitration case against China.

The newly elected President Rodrigo Duterte, however, has called for restraint and sobriety, refusing to flaunt the historic legal victory to taunt China.

Most likely, Manila will not release a strongly worded criticism of its giant neighbour based on the verdict as a gesture of goodwill.

For the Duterte administration, it is important to manage a soft landing by restarting high-level negotiations with China in order to peacefully manage maritime disputes in the South China Sea.

The new governments priority is to avoid escalation, re-open communication channels with Beijing, explore joint-development agreements in disputed areas, and bring back Chinese investments into the Philippines. Ultimately, it may use the favourable verdict to bargain for a good deal in disputed waters. But this will a huge gamble.

Richard Javad Heydarian is a specialist in Asian geopolitical/economic affairs and author of Asias New Battlefield: US, China, and the Struggle for Western Pacific.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Society should focus on cultivating understanding and empathy, not peace.

Morwari Zafar is an international security consultant and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Oxford.

On a day dedicated to liberty, equality, and fraternity, France reeled against yet another terrorist attack.

The barbarity of a lorry driven into a crowd of fireworks spectators in Nice punctuated an otherwise uneventful nine months since the November 2015 attacks in Paris.

It was a bitter reminder that violent extremism is an unfortunate fixture. To counter it, society should focus on cultivating understanding and empathy  not peace. Peace is elusive because peace is unlikely.

The exclusionary rhetoric

Conflicts around the world arise from the perception of differences. They may be political in practice, but they relate to something far more intrinsic in nature.

Finding differences, rather than similarities, is a window into the evolutionary strategies that allowed early humans to identify potential dangers and ensure their survival.

It would be an effective strategy if humans still encountered sabre-tooth tigers. But they dont; they encounter each other.

The exclusionary rhetoric of debates on immigration, which will surely ensue in the wake of the Bastille Day attack, is evidence enough of growing social divisions.

The polarity stems from an us versus them binary that allows individuals to cast judgments while maintaining a sense of superiority and entitlement. And it is this polarity and the tension it generates that staves off peace.

Dehumanisation is a choice. Calling a police officer a 'pig' or reducing any population to a 'threat' not only perpetuates stereotypes, it does nothing to temper discontent. by

In a talk at Oxford University entitled Encountering Others anthropologist Henrietta Moore offered a simple but pragmatic solution to the discord around the world today.

She urged that amid a desire to find differences, people must use their ethical imagination  the very human capacity to empathise and envision ones self in anothers place.

An ethical imagination allows people to objectively understand human beings and, above all, being human.

In the impetus to classify and label people, it is worth a pause to think about what happens when we suspend bias and judgment: we begin to understand the other. We begin to perceive similarities that define human universals. We begin to see a reflection of ourselves.

Negating our dynamic nature

Too often, politicians and policymakers conceptualise world events as parts of processes and systems that are divorced from the human component.

Humans are considered in attempts to predict behaviour and pre-empt threats; an approach that negates the dynamic nature of human societies.

Disciplines such as the social sciences, however, inspire approaches to problems that remain faithful to people  the one constant amid a variety of social, political, and environmental issues.

IN PICTURES: Nice lorry attack

When investigating the draw of violent extremism, for example, governments tend to focus on the processes that enable recruitment.

What they overlook is that violent extremism is not a thing in and of itself  it is a choice enacted by human beings. It is not the act of extremism or the medium of radicalisation, but the individual that begs understanding.

Dehumanisation is a choice. Calling a police officer a pig or reducing any population to a threat not only perpetuates stereotypes, it does nothing to temper discontent.

Seeking comfort in the insularity of bias and hearsay makes it easier to treat others with indifference  specifically people with whom we would like to believe we do not share similarities in values and dignity.

Faulty assumptions override good judgment, just as fear disables the courage to do the right thing.

Fearmongering, as a result, has become an effective tactic for governments and organisations to constitute complacent subjects.

Donald Trump has preyed upon the fears of Americans, who believe that United States national security hangs by a thread  one under assault from others who are not American-born, English-speaking, Christian Caucasians.

Urging the unity of communities based on exclusion rather than inclusion will have lasting adverse effects.

Such politics instigate suspicions that stifle the ethical imagination. The more people are judged, forced out, and dehumanised, the more they become embittered and unfeeling.

The pressure to conform

Take, for instance, Omar Mateen  the gunman who targeted the homosexual community at a gay nightclub in Florida last month.

Born to a socially conservative, religious family, Mateen repressed his homosexuality for fear of being alienated for deviating from the norm.

Compound his issues with the fact that he was part of the Afghan diaspora in the US, where tight community networks and the pretence of keeping up appearances often define self-presentation.

Particularly where perceptions of class matter, ones values and comportment are reflections of his/her upbringing and a commentary on the status of the household.

IN PICTURES: Mourning for Nice

For Mateen, the pressure to conform to conservative social norms for his familys sake in conjunction with the Afghan communitys reticence about sexuality  and general homophobia  contributed to his anger, sense of inadequacy, and ultimately, a tragic end for the 49 people killed and 53 people wounded.

Although he most likely suffered from some sort of pathological psychological disorder, his cold-blooded mass murdering is a reminder of what people are capable when they lack understanding, support, and a sense of community  in Mateens case, he attempted to secure the latter by pledging support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The roots of some of the problems countenanced by the world today are complex, but not all that complicated.

Individuals and states can avoid falling into a Hobbesian trap by suspending fear and judgment, and creating a basis of trust and understanding through sincere interactions.

However, especially in the realm of domestic and international politics, people would rather be insular and paranoid than being objective, sincere, and risk being wrong.

The basic principle of having an ethical imagination is an honest pursuit of understanding and tolerance; of recognising and mitigating personal biases, and simply but sincerely being kind.

It may sound terrifically facile. But it is humanitys one legitimate hope against bloodshed over differences by people who bleed the same.

Morwari Zafar is an international security consultant and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Oxford.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial policy.
Unknown number of hostages taken inside police station as local media report group wants release of opposition figure.

Armed men have seized a police station in Armenias capital, Yerevan, and taken an unknown number of hostages on Sunday morning, the countrys security service said.

Deputy police chief Artur Vanoyan was killed and three officers were wounded during the armed takeover of the station, first deputy of Armenias national police force Hunan Poghosyan told reporters on Sunday outside the police station

As of Sunday afternoon, armoured police vehicles had surrounded the station in preparation for a potential raid.

Poghosyan said the police and security forces would undertake necessary means to bring an end to the hostage situation if the armed men refused to surrender.

Because there is no other way to deal with murderers, Poghosyan said. But as long as there is still hope to end the situation through negotiations, we will continue to negotiate.

Negotiations were under way to resolve the situation peacefully, the National Security Service said, accusing the hostage takers supporters of spreading false rumours on the internet that an armed uprising against the government was under way.

A group of armed men entered the premises of a police regiment in Yerevan and is holding hostages under the threat of violence, the security service said.

Armenian news agencies reported that the armed men were demanding the release of Jirair Sefilian, an opposition leader and former military commander, who was arrested in June.

Sefilian has strongly criticised Armenias President Serzh Sargsyan and is unhappy about the way the government has been handling a long-running conflict between pro-Armenian separatists and the breakaway Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

OPINION: Nagorno-Karabakh  Contested narratives

Supporters of Jirair Sefilian have always said they would launch an armed uprising to get rid of the current authorities. His organisation maintains that this is an illegitimate government that came to power through flawed elections and is holding on to power against the will of the people, she added.

Among their demands is the resignation of President Serzh Sargsyan and the release of all political prisoners in Armenia. They do not have wide support in the country.

The security service said law enforcement agencies were working as normal to uphold public safety. TV images of the scene showed a heavy police presence with armoured vehicles blocking off the road to the police station.

The hostage takers supporters were spreading what it called disinformation about the seizure of other buildings as part of a coup, according to the security service.

The National Security Service officially announces that such information is absolutely untrue, it said.
French police have arrested two more people in connection with an attack that killed at least 84 people when a lorry deliberately drove into crowds celebrating the countrys main national holiday in Nice.

French judicial sources told the Reuters news agency on Sunday that a man and a woman with ties to the attack claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also know as ISIS) group were detained but provided no details on their identities.

Five other people were already in custody, including the estranged wife of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian with no apparent links to ISIL. Bouhlel was shot dead by police.

Authorities are trying to determine whether Bouhlel, a 31-year-old who had lived in Nice for many years, was acting alone in Thursdays attack.

ISIL said it carried out the attack in response to calls to target civilians in countries that are part of a coalition fighting ISIL.

Speaking from Nice on Friday, French President Francois Hollande said about 50 people were in a critical condition, still between life and death after the attack.

The attack also injured more than 200 people, including many children, and left the area strewn with bodies.

France declared three days of national mourning after the Bastille Day massacre.
Manama dissolves main Shia opposition group Al-Wefaq, accusing it of fostering violence in the island kingdom.

A court in Bahrain dissolved the main Shia opposition group Al-Wefaq on Sunday, accusing it of helping to foster violence and terrorism in the island kingdom.

The ruling comes amid an increasing crackdown on opposition figures in the Sunni-led, Shia-majority Gulf monarchy, which in 2011 crushed a large pro-democracy protest movement.

Al-Wefaq was shut down last month under an emergency court order after the Justice Ministry accused it of undermining the state, spreading sectarianism, and having connections to terrorist activities.

The official Bahrain News Agency (BNA) said the court ruled that Al-Wefaq had taken aim at the respect for the rule of law and the foundations of citizenship based on coexistence, tolerance and respect for others; provided an atmosphere for the incubation of terrorism, extremism and violence and for foreign interference in national affairs.

Its funds would be claimed by the state treasury, BNA said.

READ MORE: Bahraini court suspends Al-Wefaq opposition group

Lawyers for Al-Wefaq said they had not yet decided whether to appeal against Sundays ruling.

They had withdrawn from the case after the judge refused their request to access the party offices to obtain documents they said were needed for their defence.

The ruling comes a day after authorities said they planned to prosecute Bahrains top Shia religious figure, 79-year-old Ayatollah Isa Qassim, for alleged illegal fund raising and money laundering.

Qassim, seen as the spiritual leader of Al-Wefaq, was stripped of his citizenship last month, angering his supporters who have mounted a sit-in outside his home in a village north of the capital Manama, fearing his deportation or arrest.

READ MORE: Iran warns Bahrain over revoking clerics citizenship

Al-Wefaqs political leader, Sheikh Ali Salman, was sentenced to nine years in prison at the end of May on charges that include attempting to overthrow the regime and inciting sectarian hatred.

The crackdown has led the UN human rights office to call for the release of Bahraini political prisoners, while UN chief Ban Ki-moon has expressed concern over restrictions on the opposition and moves against human rights activists.

Bahraini Shia complain of discrimination by the government. Since the authorities crushed street protests in 2011, demonstrators have clashed frequently with security forces, who have been targeted by several bomb attacks.

Bahraini authorities deny any discrimination. Bahrain has accused the opposition of undermining security and blamed the bombings on Iran and Lebanons armed Shia group Hezbollah. Iran and Hezbollah deny any involvement in Bahrains unrest.
Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump has introduced Mike Pence as his running mate, calling the Indiana governor his first choice.

At a formal announcement in New York on Saturday, Trump also acknowledged that one of the reasons he selected Pence was to promote unity within the Republican Party.

Pence headed back to Indiana later in the day, where he urged supporters to vote for Trump whom he called a good man who will make a great president.

Pence, 57, has served as governor of Indiana since 2013 and also represented the state in Congress for more than a decade.

READ MORE: Poll  Most Americans fear election of Clinton or Trump

Trump has signalled that he wanted an experienced politician to help his presidential ticket because he is a political outsider with no experience in governing.

Trump met Pence on Wednesday in Indiana, as he had done with other candidates he has said are his top choices.

Trump himself had said that Pence was among his top picks, along with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Trump is to be formally nominated as the partys candidate for the November 8 election at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Traditionally, the vice presidential choice is used to build enthusiasm among party loyalists.

Pence is seen as a fiscal and social conservative who can appeal to a broad swath of voters in the centre-right party so that Trump can make himself more palatable to Republicans who have been wary of his candidacy.

Pence points to his work enacting the largest tax cut in state history and lowering business taxes, balancing the states budget and efforts to draw businesses to the state.

OPINION: Donald Trump\s dangerous demagoguery

As governor, Pence came under fire after signing a so-called religious freedom bill that opponents said would have allowed businesses to discriminate against gays, but he later revised the legislation.

Pence, however, has disagreed prominently with Trump on a number of issues; he has spoken out against the Republican presidential candidates controversial call for a ban on Muslims entering the US and on trade deals.

Pence had been in a tight re-election bid for governor and faced a Friday deadline to withdraw from that race in order to run for vice president instead.
Authorities in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir have shut down printing presses and temporarily banned newspapers from publishing in a sweeping information blackout after days of anti-India protests left dozens of people dead in the volatile region.





State government spokesman and Education Minister Naeem Akhtar said the measures were aimed at saving lives and strengthening peace efforts.

The government says 36 people  35 civilians and a police officer  have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, while local human rights groups and newspapers say at least 40 have died.

A strict curfew was in effect in troubled areas for the ninth straight day on Sunday, with hundreds of thousands of people trying to cope with shortages of food and other necessities.

Tens of thousands of government troops patrolled mostly deserted streets in the region, where shops and businesses remained closed.

Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim region, is divided evenly between India and Pakistan, but both claim it in its entirety.

Most people in Indias portion resent the presence of Indian troops and want independence or a merger with Pakistan.

Crackdown

Since 1989, more than 68,000 people have been killed in the uprising against Indian rule and the subsequent Indian military crackdown. India and Pakistan have fought two wars over control of Kashmir since British colonialists left the Indian subcontinent in 1947.

Unwilling to take any chances, Indian authorities appear to be persisting with their clampdown to avoid aggravating tensions in view of Pakistans call for a black day on Wednesday to protest against Indias handling of dissent in Kashmir.

On Friday, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed that his country would continue extending political, moral and diplomatic support to Kashmiris. He said he called for observing the black day to express solidarity with Kashmiris who are facing atrocities at the hands of Indian forces.

The largest street protests in recent years in Indias portion of Kashmir broke out last week after Indian troops killed the popular young leader of the largest rebel group fighting against Indian rule in the region.

Kashmiri doctors have lamented the use of pellet-firing shotguns on protesters after more than 100 people suffered grievous injuries to their eyes in a weekend of ferocious violence following the killing of rebel leader Burhan Wani.

READ MORE: Kashmiris decry worlds silence over killings

The divisional commissioner, Asgar Samoon, said that 80 percent of the injuries were minor, although the Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday that they had counted 110 people with bullet wounds in Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian state, alone.

Doctors said that security forces had been deliberately using rubber pellets to inflict maximum physical and psychological damage on protesters without risking further deaths.

Information has been thin, with most cellular and internet services, as well as landline phone access, not working in the troubled areas, except for in Srinagar, the main city in the Indian portion of Kashmir.

Police began raiding newspaper offices and seizing tens of thousands of local newspapers on Saturday, imposing a ban on their printing until Monday. They also detained scores of printing press workers.

Newspaper editors denounced the government action and termed it gagging and enforcing emergency on media.

The Kashmir Reader, a daily English newspaper, said on its website on Sunday that the government has banned local media publications in Kashmir, and called on its readers to bear with us in this hour of crisis.

Most English dailies, however, continued uploading news on to their websites.

Editors and journalists held a protest march in Srinagar late on Saturday, carrying placards reading Stop censorship and We want freedom of speech.

Live ammo, pellet guns and tear gas

Meanwhile, anti-India protests have persisted, marked by clashes between rock-throwing Kashmiris and troops firing live ammunition, pellet guns and tear gas.

Clashes were reported in several places in northern Kashmir on Sunday, and at least six people were injured, police said.

Government forces fired bullets at villagers who threw stones at them and tried to torch a police station in a remote village in the northern Kupwara area, close to the highly militarised Line of Control dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan, a police official said.

One young villager was killed and at least two other people were wounded, he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to reporters.

READ MORE: Kashmiri doctors lament injuries by pellets in protests

Authorities on Sunday extended the summer break for schools and colleges by a week, until July 24.

Although rubber pellets are not fatal, when fired by hydraulic pump action guns they can cause blindness, disfigurement and damage to organs.

Sajjad Khanday, a doctor at the Shri Maharaja Hari Singh Hospital in Srinagar, told Al Jazeera that at least 105 people had come to the hospital with severe eye injuries from rubber pellets.

Khanday said that the hospital had been overwhelmed by injured protesters at the weekend, adding that it was very likely that most victims would suffer permanent damage to their vision.

We have operated on more than 90 people with injuries to their eyes. Many have multiple injuries with pellets lodged inside their eyes, forehead, back and abdomen. Many need multiple operations. It is very painful and gruesome.

Additional reporting by Azad Essa and Showkat Shafi








At least three policemen killed after gunman shoots several officers near police headquarters in Baton Rouge.

At least three police officers and a suspect have been shot and killed in Baton Rouge, the second largest city in the US state of Louisiana.

The officers in Baton Rouge were responding to a call of a man with a gun when shots were fired. Two Baton Rouge police officers and one sheriffs deputy were killed.

One gunman is dead and police believe he was the only one involved in the attack, Mike Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said in a press conference.

We do not have an active shooter scenario in Baton Rouge, Edmonson said.





Multiple US news outlets identified the suspected gunman in Sundays fatal shootings of law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge as Gavin Long. CBS News said Long was a black male from Kansas City, Missouri.

It was not immediately clear whether there was a link between the shootings and the recent unrest over the police killings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

Police did not give any information about a possible motive.

US President Barack Obama condemned the cowardly shooting and demanded an end to such violence.

It is so important that everyone  right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further, Obama said.

We dont need inflammatory rhetoric. We dont need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us.

Obama has repeatedly called for racial unity.

We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement, Obama told reporters at the White House.

This has happened far too often.

In an interview with national broadcaster NBC, Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden confirmed that three officers had been killed in the shooting near the citys police headquarters on Sunday.

Three other officers were reportedly injured and hospitalised.

All indications at this point are that it was an ambush. One officer was at a convenience store  and a woman approached him and said there was a man around the back of the store with a weapon. When he went to investigate he was fired upon  it looks like a it was a planned ambush at this point, local journalist Bill Profta told Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeeras Rosiland Jordan reported that one witness had seen a man dressed all in black and that he started firing indiscriminately between a service station and a convenience store.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards referred to the incident as an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us.

He said in a statement: Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice.

Republican presumptive candidate Donald Trump, writing on Facebook, demanded law and order following the shooting incident.

Protests

Baton Rouge became the scene of large protests against police brutality after officers shot dead 37-year-old Alton Sterling on July 5.

Police officers killed Sterling outside a supermarket, claiming he had a gun. The father of five, whose funeral was held on Friday, had been selling CDs.

Footage of the moment Sterling was killed was captured on a mobile phone, which contains images some readers may find distressing, was circulated online  sparking outrage and then protests.

OPINION: Structural racism in the US wont diminish with time

On Wednesday, Baton Rouge Police Department and state law enforcement agents were sued in a federal court after arresting at least 180 protesters in protests against Sterlings killing.

The suit, filed by activist groups, accuses the police and law enforcement officers of excessive force and violating demonstrators right to freedom of expression, among other allegations.

Alexis Phillips, a 30-year-old Baton Rouge resident who has participated in protests, said the killing of Alton Sterling was the point when people were fed up with discriminatory police violence.

We live in an outright racist city, she told Al Jazeera. The killing of Alton Sterling was only the catalyst  the [boiling] point for our black community and its allies. Something has to change.

Black Lives Matter

Sterlings killing was followed the next day with another police shooting. An officer killed a 32-year-old black man, Philando Castile, at a traffic stop in the midwestern US state of Minnesota. The aftermath of the shooting was also captured on video and streamed live by Castiles girlfriend on Facebook.

The deaths sparked outrage and protests in many cities across the US.

Last week, five white police officers were shot dead at one such protest in Dallas, Texas.

READ MORE: Obama on Dallas shootings  a wake-up call for America on racism?

Police identified Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, as the suspect and said he had set out to kill white people. Police shot and killed Johnson after the incident.

The Black Lives Matter movement  which campaigns against police killings of African Americans  disavowed the killing of the officers and said in a statement it stands for dignity, justice and respect.

The Guardian has documented at least 587 people killed by police across the US so far this year. From that total, 145  nearly 25 percent  were black, although black Americans constitute only around 13 percent of the countrys total population.
Fresh fighting in South Sudans capital has killed hundreds of people and forced thousands to flee their homes.

Renewed fighting in South Sudan that has killed more than 300 people is set to dominate an African Union summit that starts in the Rwandan capital of Kigali on Sunday.

A shaky ceasefire has held since late on Monday after fighting raged for four days in the South Sudanese capital of Juba, forcing 40,000 people to flee their homes.

The violence echoed fighting that triggered the civil war and marks a fresh blow to last years deal to end a bitter conflict that began when President Salva Kiir accused ex-rebel and now Vice President Riek Machar of plotting a coup.

The unrest has also plunged into doubt a peace deal signed in August 2015.

Al Jazeeras Catherine Soi, reporting from Juba, said the ceasefire appeared to be holding but there was a sense of uncertainty in the city.

Locals, she said, were wondering about the whereabouts of Machar, who has been in hiding.

What is certain is that he has not left the country, Soi said. But he says he still feels his life is in danger and until his safety is guaranteed he will not come out.

Speaking to regional grouping IGAD in Kigali on Saturday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said a critical stage in the South Sudan crisis had been reached.

READ MORE: South Sudan refugees could soon hit one million

Now is the time to send a strong message to the South Sudanese leadership, he said.

The people of South Sudan have been let down by their own leadership. Their hopes and dreams have been tarnished at the expense of warring parties enriching and empowering themselves. We cannot and will not tolerate this.

Leadership crisis

The AU will also seek to hammer out a solution to a crisis engulfing Burundi, where a spate of killings have rocked the country since President Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would seek a third term.

Also on the crowded agenda will be the ongoing fight against the Boko Haram armed group that has its roots in northern Nigeria but has carried out attacks across the Lake Chad region.

Recent violent incidents in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also expected to feature in the talks.

Efforts to secure peace in the South Sudan and elsewhere, however, will be complicated by divisions over who should succeed Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as chair of the AUs new commission.

WATCH: Can talks lead to peace talks in Burundi?

Several countries on the continent have indicated that they do not back any of the leading candidates for the job, arguing that they lack stature.

Now all three of the leading candidates  Botswanas Foreign Minister Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi, her Guinean opposite number Agapito Mba Mokuy and Ugandas former vice president Specioza Wandira-Kazibwe look like they may fail to get a majority of votes from the African Unions 54 members.

If that happens the vote could be abandoned and re-run at the next AU summit in January 2017.
Two top military chiefs are among thousands arrested after the failed coup attempt, with more detentions expected.

At least 6,000 people have been detained in Turkey in relation to a failed coup, with more detentions expected, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on national television.

The judicial process on this will continue, Bozdag said on Sunday, shortly before clashes between security forces and coup plotters broke out at the Sabiha Gokcen Airport in Istanbul on Sunday evening, and at an air base in central Turkey.

The number of 6,000 arrests includes 29 generals and 2,839 military personnel, a senior Turkish official told Al Jazeera.

The top judicial body, the HSYK, dismissed 2,745 judges on Saturday, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency.

Among those arrested is General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base from which US aircraft launch air strikes on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants in Syria and Iraq (ISIL, also known as ISIS), an official told Reuters.

The chief military assistant to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, Ali Yazici, was also detained on Sunday, according to broadcaster CNN Turk.

News of the arrests came after Erdogan accused an exiled businessman and cleric, Fethullah Gulen, of orchestrating the violence and demanded the US extradite him.

Gulen, though, denies any involvement and has publicly condemned the events of Friday and Saturday.





Al Jazeeras Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington DC, said: US Secretary of State John Kerry is now saying the US had neither knowledge nor assisted in the coup attempt. The US understands Erdogan is suspicious of Gulen.

If Erdogan wants to extradite him for conspiracy and colluding with the coup [plotters], he [Kerry] said the Turkish government needs to provide very convincing, solid legal evidence.

The government quickly began a purge of soldiers and judiciary officials allegedly connected to the plot after it became clear the attempt had failed on Saturday.

There are still a few important soldiers on the run and being sought. I believe they will be captured shortly, an official told Reuters.

During the attempted coup, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives in Istanbul and Ankara, according to government figures. More than 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military said.

For his part, Erdogan said Turkey was not seeking revenge.

We are not after revenge. If they have guns and tanks, we have faith, the president said, speaking at a funeral on Sunday for some of the civilians killed in the violence.

Let us think before taking each step. We will act with reason and experience. The Gulen Movements step received its response. The putschists are the representatives of Gulens terrorist organisation.

One of the masterminds

A senior Turkish official told Al Jazeera that at least two judges from the constitutional court and 10 judges from the HSYK had been detained.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said that the judges were detained based on financial transactions and communications between the individuals in question and the putschists, but added that detention did not necessarily mean conviction.

Another senior official, also speaking anonymously, told Al Jazeera that a top army general was also being held over his alleged involvement.

General Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, has been detained, he said.

Our sense is that the would-be junta had made preparations for some time. They had determined which military officers would take over as governors, heads of government agencies  but they were forced to rush due to the upcoming Supreme Military Council meeting, he said.

The official described Ozturk as one of the masterminds behind the plan.

The coup attempt began at around 19:30 GMT on Friday with the partial closure by troops of two major bridges over the Bosphorus in Istanbul as tanks moved into the streets and fighter jets were seen in the skies.

A member of the Erdogans ruling AK Party, Kani Torun, told Al Jazeera that the coup leaders helped thousands to infiltrate security forces, the army, police and judiciary.

If you look at this number [6,000 detained], its big, but not more than 10 or 20 percent, he said. This cult-like organisation is like a religious cult. They have their own agenda and they use their own agenda against a legitimate elected government. This group has always acted secretly.
Erdogan wants businessman Fethullah Gulen sent back from the US, accusing him of being behind failed coup.

US-Turkish tensions have grown after government forces put down an attempted coup on Friday night.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused exiled Turkish businessman and cleric Fethullah Gulen of orchestrating the violence and is demanding that the US extradite him.

Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, denied any involvement and condemned the coup attempt.

Secretary of State John Kerry told his Turkish counterpart in a phone call that Turkey needs to respect due process as it investigates those it believes were involved in the plot.

At least one senior Turkish official has directly blamed the US for the attempt to topple Erdogan. That prompted Kerry to tell Turkeys foreign minister that public insinuations about a US role are utterly false and harmful to US-Turkish relations.

The exchange comes against the backdrop of Turkey closing its air space, effectively grounding US fighter jets that have been targeting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) forces in neighbouring Syria and Iraq.

Purge launched

Turkey has begun a purge of soldiers and judiciary officials allegedly connected to the plot.

By Saturday evening, the government had detained 2,839 military personnel, with the number of arrests expected to rise, according to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

Turkeys top judicial body, the HSYK, dismissed 2,745 judges on Saturday, according to Turkeys Anadolu news agency.

Additionally, a senior Turkish official told Al Jazeera that at least two judges from the constitutional court and 10 judges from the HSYK had been detained.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said that the judges were detained based on financial transactions and communications between the individuals in question and the putschists, but added that detention did not necessarily mean conviction.

Another senior official, also speaking anonymously, told Al Jazeera that a top army general was also detained over his alleged involvement.

General Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, has been detained, he said.

Our sense is that the would-be junta had made preparations for some time. They had determined which military officers would take over as governors, heads of government agencies  but they were forced to rush due to the upcoming Supreme Military Council meeting, he added.

The coup attempt began at around 19:30 GMT on Friday with the partial closure by troops of two major bridges over the Bosphorus in Istanbul.

Their immediate goal was to seize control of key areas like the Bosphorus Bridge or Taksim Square, the same official told Al Jazeera.

In Ankara, they tried to storm the Presidential Palace, the Prime Ministers office, the National Intelligence Organization and the Parliament. They also attempted to take down the satellite infrastructure and, in some areas, seized control of telecommunications hubs, he added.

An official described Ozturk as one of the masterminds of the coup.
Turkeys potential reintroduction of capital punishment could complicate its bid for EU membership.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said Turkey will consider reinstating the death penalty after the failed attempt to overthrow his government.





In democracies, decisions are made based on what the people say. I think our government will speak with the opposition and come to a decision, he said on Sunday, reacting to crowds in Istanbul calling for capital punishment.

We cannot delay this any more because in this country, those who launch a coup will have to pay the price for it, he told supporters after attending funerals for victims of the coup attempt.

Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 under reforms aimed at obtaining European Union membership.

Reinstatement would create further issues between the EU and Ankara in the already stalled membership talks.

READ MORE: Turkeys coup attempt captured in dramatic images

Erdogan repeated calls for the United States to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the US-based Turkish businessman and cleric whom Turkey accuses of orchestrating the attempted coup.

Gulen condemned the coup attempt in the strongest terms in a rare interview with reporters in Pennsylvania and rejected charges of being the coup mastermind, suggesting Erdogan may have staged it himself.

Our own jet fighters, our own weapons

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Sunday, former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu dismissed concerns that Turkeys relations with its allies could potentially be affected by its post-coup measures.

First of all, we are grateful to all the countries and all the leaders who declare support to Turkey, he said.

Yet, Davutoglu continued, the international community must understand that Turkeys facing  another terrorist organisation which used our own jet fighters, our own weapons against our people.

He added that there is no correlation between Turkeys current measures against alleged coup plotters and its cooperation with allies in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

OPINION: The people defeated the coup in Turkey

At least 6,000 people have been detained across the country in relation to the failed coup, with more detentions expected, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on national television on Sunday.

The judicial process on this will continue, Bozdag said.

Among those arrested was General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base from which US aircraft launch air strikes on ISIL fighters in Syria and Iraq, an official told the Reuters news agency.
Fault Lines travels across the US to find out how Donald Trump became the Republican Partys presidential nominee.

He is the presidential candidate few saw coming. His rise was baffling, dramatic, and to many, completely unexpected.

Donald Trump won more votes than any other candidate in a Republican primary in US history.

As Donald Trump takes the reins of the Republic Party, Fault Lines examines the rise of the billionaire businessman, from reality TV star to a populist who has managed to capture the support of a large and often angry voter base. How did he get so far? And who are his supporters?

I by Barbara

 as with any great demagogue  is that he tests propositions to see what the applause lines are, and he found that the more outrageous he was the more people liked him because of this business of defiance of the elites.]

We travel 1,000 miles across Donald Trumps America  exploring the rust belt states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Indiana, where the middle class is shrinking, opportunities are dwindling and people feel that they were left behind in the countrys economic recovery.

In Logan County, West Virginia, the state where Trump has the most support, we speak to Kevin Adkins, a coal miner who said he has been laid off six times since 2008. He told us he has put his faith in Trump to resuscitate a dying industry. We also hear from former Democrats who say theyve crossed party lines because they feel that no one else is addressing their economic concerns.

At a time when perhaps the most politically incorrect candidate in US history rises to the top of the GOP, we have difficult conversations with Trumps supporters about immigration, their place in America and why they believe the anti-establishment politician will make America great again.

We visit Huntington, Indiana, one of the many towns in the US where residents feel they are being squeezed by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). We speak to Chris Setser, an employee at United Technologies, a company that announced in February that it was moving jobs to Mexico. As Trump railed against the companys sister factory, Carrier, in speech after speech, we find that anger over free trade and globalisation has helped propel his unlikely candidacy.

Trump rose to the top of his party not just by tapping into and exploiting fears and anxieties over immigrants and Muslims, but also by speaking to some of the real economic struggles of a section of the middle class that feels like no one else has been listening to them.
We examine the debate over climate change in the US and how the city of Miami is dealing with the effects now.

Receding glaciers, volatile weather, and rapid greenhouse gas accumulation all point towards human-induced climate change. In fact, 97 percent of published reports agree that climate change is fuelled by man-made greenhouse gases.

But while there is overwhelming consensus within the scientific community, climate change remains a contentious topic in politics in the United States. In this episode, TechKnow examines the debate over climate change.

Lindsay Moran travels to Washington DC to look at what is at stake in the debate.

Politicians fall into two camps: those who believe in human-induced climate change and those who dont.

When asked why climate change is so politically charged, John Holden, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, tells us: I think the most fundamental reason is this misperception that being in favour of addressing the climate change challenge is to be against jobs and the economy.

As mayor I don't have the liberty or time to debate why climate change is happening. All I have is the opportunity to fix it ... That bay is not Republican, it's not Democrat, it knows no limits. by Philip Levine, mayor, Miami Beach

Shini Somara heads to Miami, Florida, where there simply isnt time for a debate over whether climate change is a legitimate threat. The state is already facing the immediate effects of rising sea levels.

According to climate scientist Ben Kirtman, Florida is the epicentre for climate change impacts.

Rising sea levels are already affecting the lives of Miami coastline residents. Some have faced property damage from rising water, while others reflect on the reality of relocation.

Ive been here for my entire lifetime, says Dan Kipnis, a Miami resident and environmental activist. I know for a fact Im going to have to leave.

Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine says he cannot afford to be concerned with the politics of climate change.

As mayor I dont have the liberty or time to debate why climate change is happening. All I have is the opportunity to fix it, he says. That bay is not Republican, its not Democrat, it knows no limits.

City officials are moving quickly to keep the city dry by installing pumps and raising buildings and streets. The infrastructure is expensive, and applying for funding from the state or federal level again highlights the political divides surrounding climate change.

When they are trying to get resources from the state of Florida, says climate scientist Ben Kirtman, they cant really talk about the climate change part of it.
           2005     ..        
The Islamist terror attack in Nice France, carried out by a jihadist in a heavy truck, should be yet another blow to the Democrat gun control movement in the U.S., and an indictment of the Euro-socialist model of government that the left adores.

First and most obviously, the attacker used a commonly available, useful, but potentially dangerous tool to slaughter many more people than his fellow jihadist in Orlando managed with firearms. Are we to ban heavy trucks now? It is probable that some Islamist nutcase in America will try to imitate his French co-religionist. When that occurs will President Obama bewail the availability of heavy truckseasier to rent from U-Haul than buying a book?

There is another aspect of this tragedy that undercuts the gun controllers as well. France is one of the worlds most restrictive nations when it comes to ownership of firearms, yet saw its people helplessly victimized by an armed (the driver also apparently carried a pistol though seemingly without effect) and brutal attacker without effective recourse, despite enhanced security efforts in the country. If such an event happened in some parts of America, particularly in a state that doesnt unreasonably restrict the right to carry, there at least would be a significant possibility that a civilian on the scene could stop or at least mitigate the attack.

Of course, gun controllers will argue this is mere fantasy and that armed civilians would not and could not stop a runaway jihadist in a truck. Except that we have very good evidence that this can happen from many incidents in Israel. Several years before the latest knife intifada Palestinian-Arab terrorists launched a similar series of attacks with vehicles (with bulldozers being a favorite) much like the Nice attack. And they continue to occasionally attempt this type of attack. Although many Israelis have been killed and injured in these attacks, they are frequently frustrated by armed citizens, resulting in little more than dead Arab jihadist drivers.

I discussed these attacks and many others involving armed civilians a few years ago in Counter-Terror Magazine. The long and short of it is that even though Israel has strict gun control laws there are many armed citizens out about at all times, as anybody that has visited the country can testify to. Some of these are on-duty soldiers, but many others are off-duty troops, reservists going to or from depots, a large number of armed civilian security guards, ordinary civilians permitted to carry in certain areas, some public transit and tour bus drivers, and other civilians who served in combat units and can more easily acquire firearms permits.

The net result of this is that a jihadist attacker in Israel, whether armed with a vehicle, knife or a firearm, is unlikely to last long. Attacks frequently occur, but they are also usually frustrated, almost always with fewer casualties than we see in attacks in other countries, or no casualties at all. Most of these attacks are not even published in the foreign press. When foreign reporters do comment, it is often to lament the disproportionate number of dead Palestinians to Israelis, in the perverse dance of moral equivalency that the leftist media and politicians engage between slain murderers and their victims.

Specifically, in the case of the bulldozer (or front-end loader) attacks on Israelis a few years ago, at least two were ended by armed civilians or off duty soldiers, while most other attacks have been thwarted or shortened by police or on-duty soldiers. The U.S. doesnt have anything like the number of armed police, paramilitary border police, and armed soldiery in and around its cities as Israel does. But we do have millions of armed civilians who could foil or mitigate such attacks in such a situation. And for those that will say that a civilian with a typical concealed carry handgun (of say modest size and caliber) could not stop a terrorist in a truck, take a look at the video showing the conclusion of the attack in Nice, where police engage the attacker with handguns, likely little different from what many citizens carry in America today. At the very least they could put out a tire, distract or injure the driver, or otherwise reduce the likely deadliness of such an attack.

After the Nice attack, residents booed French officials and complained that the government had not done enough to protect them. This despite the fact that France has been in a state of emergency since last years attacks in Paris. That emergency order was slated to expire in two weeks until the recent attack. Despite massive deployments of troops and police French security services are still unable to prevent such mass casualty attacks by Islamic militants.

Israel and the United States, perhaps uniquely among modern Western democracies, and for different reasons, possess a better ability to deter and frustrate such attacks.

France for all its centralized police forces, massive internal military deployments, and draconian gun control law is now beset by a violent Islamist onslaught against a mostly cowed and defenseless population, with jihadist attackers causing heavy civilian losses at every turn. And this, along with open immigration and a stagnated state dominated economy is the model that Obama, Hillary Clinton and the Democrat party would have the United State emulate. That seems to be a pretty good model for Republicans to run against.
Curtis Gatewood is currently the field director of the North Carolina NAACP. He has described the killing of mass murderer Micah X. Johnson by the Dallas Police as a lynching:

Make no mistake, by taking this Black suspect and demonizing and using a killer robot to blow him up in this unprecedented and barbaric manner and without a trial in a court of law is the truest and most literal example yet of a high-tech lynching.

In the period 1882 through 1964, according to the archives at the Tuskegee Institute, 4,742 American citizens were lynched. Each and every one was a captive, executed, often tortured, without any due process of law legitimizing their sentence of death by mob. Of those, 3,445 were black and 1,297 were white. The majority of them, black and white, were Republicans. The Ku Klux Klan, the terror wing of the Democratic Party, used lynching in the South as a political tool to:

...put black people back into their place as the labor force of the Southand to drive out of business the political force, the Republican Party, that was trying to take them to higher places.

Efforts by Republicans, including passing anti-lynching legislation in Congress several times during the administration of Democratic President FDR, were repeatedly defeated by filibuster by Democrats in Senate.

Those lynchings are not ancient history. Some occurred in the years after Curtis Gatewood, himself a registered Democrat, was born. Gatewood dishonors the memory of every one of those innocent victims, black and white alike, who were killed because they stood in the way of those who would deny Americans the rights endowed to them by their Creator. History does not record anyone being lynched while in the act of committing mass murder. No one was ever lynched because there was little or no recourse left to stop that person from killing others. The admirable Dallas Police Chief David Brown, who is black, explained the decision to use explosives on a robot to eliminate the threat posed by Johnson without putting any more lives at risk. That was a moral decision. Curtis Gatewoods implication that the police were somehow obligated to risk their own lives and those of others, so that Johnson could be taken alive is amoral. Fourteen people had been shot; twelve police officers and two civilians, several were dead and dying, and Johnson was still armed and threatening to kill more.

Curtis Gatewood is a man who spreads hate. That was the purpose of his lynching statement. David Cole writing at Takis Magazine had exposed him on that more than a year ago. However, every time Gatewood says or does something for which he should, at the least have been removed from leadership at the NC NAACP, that organization simply shuffles him around from position to position. His hate speech is protected hate speech.

In this age of the ubiquitous cell phone camera, there is now a video on YouTube of some very brave French policemen advancing on the terror truck in Nice, firing to stop the driver who had already killed several dozens. In the hate spewing mind and fear inducing rhetoric of Curtis Gatewood, what we see there is an execution, a lynching, because obviously the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a member of a minority in France, was not taken alive and handcuffed so as to be given his day in court, just like Micah Johnson.

Gatewood went on to say:

Yes, Im coming to the defense of the defenseless. That includes [Micah] X. Johnson who has been accused of shooting about 12 police officersEven if [Micah] was carrying a gun or [rifle], that in of itself does not prove he murdered the police officers.

As Gatewood waters the seeds of paranoia, fear, and hate, with implications of a police conspiracy to frame an innocent man, there are the words of someone who was there that deserve far more attention that this charlatan seeks.

Shematia Taylor attended the march in Dallas with her four sons. With all that has happened and how it has been presented in the media and elsewhere, it is understandable that a mother of four teenaged black sons could be sufficiently concerned about the subject of police using unwarranted excessive and deadly force on young black men. As she and her sons were getting ready to leave the protest, she heard two shots fired, and saw a police officer near her get shot. She later said "As he was going down, he said, 'He has a gun. Run.'"

As the family fled, she was shot in the leg. She knocked her fifteen year old to the ground and covered him with her own body. Then, as bullets filled the air around them, a police officer jumped on top of both of them as they lay in the street. She recalled that:

And there was another one at our feet. And there was another one over our heads. And there were several of them lined against the wall and they stayed there with us. And I saw another officer get shot right in front of meThey had no regard for their own life. They stayed there with us. They surrounded my son and II want to say thank you to the officersThey were really heroes for us. They saved my life, my son's life and I want to say thank you to them first and foremost.

In another interview, contrary to the hateful and dangerous perception that Gatewood desires to spread, Mia Taylor said of the police:

I am forever indebted to them. There was no color there.

The New York Post reported Mia Taylor wiping away tears as recalled being in the hospital and full of joy at finding out all her children were safe, when she overheard a police officer tell another about one of their colleagues who had been killed.

I saw an officer tell another officer that an officer didnt make it. And I [was] celebrating my kidsIt hurt.

Reverend Curtis Gatewood is a minister, but one who spreads hate. Mia Taylor, however, is in my mind a child of God. To her was given the grace to see, even in the darkest of times, that which can bind the wounds and broken hearts of so many, and bring us together, rather than pry us apart, and offer her heartfelt testimony to that.

The Southern Poverty Law Center will never place the North Carolina NAACP on its list of hate groups, but by the standard it claims to set, it should.
Local media and leftist blogs are drenched in outrage over House Bill 2, which was known as "the Bathroom Bill" until they figured out they needed to focus attention about it somewhere else. They settled on the economy.So they took a hiatus from complaining about Fox, Big Oil, and the Koch brothers to insist state policy should absolutely be set according to what a few outside multinational companies and multimillionaires say.Are there legitimate concerns about HB2's provisions? Yes. The section prohibiting lawsuits from those who believe they were fired for discriminatory purposes seems to be tacked on and doesn't address the Charlotte City Council action that prompted the legislation.For that matter, a lawsuit over the city council's diktat would have been preferable to legislation. But since the council's move also targeted private businesses' shower, locker room, and bathroom facilities, a response was warranted.The section removing an ability of local governments to force higher minimum wages on companies they contract with also seems beside the point. Even though it is eminently sensible from an economic and freedom-minded point of view.(But good grief. The minimum wage was founded by racist Progressives expressly to keep jobs from minorities, the poor, and society's "undesirables." Why would anyone demand a huge hike in the minimum wage? Let alone those who browbeat others with "morality" and purport to advocate for minorities, the poor, and "the least of these." It's perplexing.)For whatever reason, though, these issues aren't at the forefront of discussion. Instead, it's a daily tally of economic harm supposedly created by some companies not relocating, some concerts not happening, some tourists supposedly not touring.Let's assume these aren't put-on hysterics geared toward November. Let's treat them as voicings of real worry over the state's economy.That way we won't have to ask why the same voices have been quiet (or opposed) as the state's economy grew following historic tax reforms and regulatory reforms in 2013 and other reforms. Consider:North Carolina's GDP growth is fastest in the nation in current dollars since 2013, and in dollars adjusted for purchasing power is first in the region and ninth overallNorth Carolina's economy added 250,000 net new jobs since June 2013 (growth rate of 6.2 percent), outstripping the national and regional averagesNorth Carolina's growth rate in per-person incomes (3.6 percent) also bested national and regional averagesNorth Carolina progressed from 44th on the Tax Foundation's business tax climate rankings (better than only six other states) in 2013 up to 16th in 2015North Carolina progressed from 26th in economic outlook in 2011 in the American Legislative Exchange Council's annual "Rich States, Poor States" rankings all the way to 2nd in economic outlook in the 2016 edition.So North Carolina's economy is growing at a lively rate, which is good, however unremarked upon it has been by the state's new economic growth protectorate.But what if retaining the status quo ante regarding locker rooms, showers, and restrooms really does result in a slowing down of the state's economy?It takes a host of unconventional economic assumptions to make that case to media satisfaction. But consider, for argument's sake: if the Bathroom Bill is slowing the economy down, are there other ways to speed up the state's economy elsewhere.Yes, of course.Red tape is holding us all backConsider red tape, for example.Oh, don't make that face. If you can foresee economic impacts from not changing who gets to disrobe in which dressing room, which is out-Bastiating Bastiat, you can certainly grasp the idea that cutting unnecessary costs of getting into and doing business here can produce significant economic benefits.On just the state level, red tape and regulation costs the North Carolina economy annually as much as $25 billion. That is every year. Those losses accumulate, leaving an economy markedly lower over time than what it could be without the unnecessary red tape.So push the governor and General Assembly to focus on red tape reduction, which would boost the state's economy by making it quicker and easier for people of all descriptions to do business here.On the federal level, it's much the same if not worse. New research by professors from Duke University finds that if federal red tape and regulation had been held constant at 1980 levels, then the U.S. economy would be 25 percent larger than it actually is. Growth in red tape and regulation resulted in an economy $4 trillion smaller than it would have been - that's a $13,000 per person loss on average.That's according to research published in April by Pietro Peretto, professor in Duke's economics department; Bentley Coffey, a visiting assistant professor at Duke from the University of South Carolina; and Patrick A. McLaughlin of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.Imagine if every North Carolinian had an extra 13 grand a year to spend!The losses from accumulating red tape continue to pile up. Go back to 1949 instead of 1980, as economists John W. Dawson of Appalachian State University and John J. Seater of North Carolina State University did. They found all the subsequent red tape and regulations had limited the U.S. economy to about one-fourth the size it potentially could be.Imagine if every North Carolina household had an extra $277,100 per year to spend!Then realize this absence, this unseen cost to every household, accumulates and grows each year as federal red tape does. So for a faster growing economy to help North Carolinians of all persuasions, also petition the president and Congress to come together over red tape reduction. The issue has long had bipartisan appeal, after all.Speaking of red tape reduction that could boost the state's economy and has bipartisan support, look especially at expanding labor freedom in North Carolina. Getting rid of unnecessary occupational licensing is an issue that unites the Obama administration with libertarian and conservative policy groups nationally, and locally unites policy thinkers on the right and left.New research from Heritage Foundation economist Salim Furth characterizes licensing as a "hidden tax" on households. According to Furth, the size of this hidden tax varies by state according to the scope of its licensing regime. At the low end of the scale, the cost of occupational licensing for households in South Carolina is only $473 per year. At the other extreme, however, households in Washington bear an annual cost of licensing of $1,550. For households in North Carolina, Furth estimated that their annual cost of occupational licensing to be $923.Imagine if every North Carolina household had an extra $923 per year to spend!Red tape is bad on the individual level as well. The more red tape in a society, the more income inequality there is. Licensing also shields lower-income communities from benefiting from a "double dividend" of local entrepreneurial activity as well as new jobs, goods, and services.Encouraging state leaders to sunset unnecessary licensing would open new avenues to economic growth, job creation, and opportunities to all North Carolinians. It would have the added benefit of helping its low-income workers the most.ConclusionMore people getting interested in removing limits on the state's economy is very welcome. Marshaling this additional energy can foster pro-growth economic policies that benefit all North Carolinians, overwhelming whatever costs the Bathroom Bill actually produces.These are worthy reforms to pursue regardless of whether HB2 is repealed or its forecast economic impacts turn out to be fallacious.
One of the most dangerous lies of political correctness is the equality of different civilizations. The rage of Islam is largely rooted in the reality that while Islam destroyed Persian, Byzantine, and Hindu civilizations, it replaced those civilizations with nothing. The poor backwaters of Europe first halted Islamic imperialism and then produced a flourishing of science, enterprise, art, and government that left the once great lands in Egypt and Iraq and Iran as exporters of only oil and terrorism.

So embittered young Moslems murder innocents throughout the West because that is the only argument they can make. The logical response, adopting the superior values of the Judeo-Christian West, chokes on this incoherent rage. This explains the irrational hatred of Israel and the persecution of Christian minorities in the region: Israel works, just as Christian Lebanon once worked (when it was Christian), and this is an intolerable affront to militant Moslems.

The flow of illegal immigration into the United States from Latin America is often made by families desperate to find a better life  and we can sympathize with them, even though that sympathy cannot descend into allowing violation of our immigration laws. There is a separate thread, however, of Hispanics who wish to blame the misery of their homelands on the prosperity and safety of America.

The obvious cure for the failure of Latin America is for the citizens of these lands to insist upon the rule of law, honest law enforcement and judges, and limited government. The term "banana republic" was coined to describe the drearily predictable morass of revolution and military rule or corrupt government that inevitably descends into the breakdown of ordered liberty.

The worst possible action, for everyone's sake, would be to turn the Southwest into an extension of Mexico  and yet that is precisely what some militant Hispanics in America want, ensuring greater misery for everyone to sate their rage at the failure of Latin America over the last two hundred years.

This is the same sort of rage at failure we see by many angry blacks in America, culminating in the assassination of police officers and the venom so well represented by Jeremiah Wright's infamous "God damn America" sermon. There is a macabre and hypnotic fascination these blacks have toward the imagined suppression of blacks in America.

Even before slavery was ended in America, the nation of Liberia was created for freed slaves to have as their homeland back in Africa. (Britain created Sierra Leone for similar reasons.) Haiti was the second nation in the Western Hemisphere to gain independence two centuries ago. Ethiopia has been ruled exclusively by blacks, except for a brief period from 1936 to 1941. If white oppression was the problem, then those four nations would be the happiest for blacks in the world.

If white oppression was the problem, then the end of European colonial rule in Africa should have brought a gush of affluence, liberty, and safety. Sadly, that is not the case at all. Most of the lands of sub-Saharan Africa are awful places, with poverty, disease, genocide, and corruption the norm. No sane black in America would want to leave his native land and move back to Africa.

The civilization of Africa, like the civilizations of the Islamic world and Latin America, fails horribly. The logical response would be to adopt the value system of superior civilizations. Instead, Islamists despise Western civilization and reach back, incredibly, to the Crusades as inspiration for their hatred or blame America, which never held lands in that region, or Israel, which occupies a tiny strip of land, for the suffering in their world. In the same spirit of illogical blame, many militant Hispanics sincerely believe that restoring the "stolen" lands from California to Texas into Mexico is somehow noble and wise. We see in the streets of America blacks who, instead of being grateful that they were born in America, honestly believe that all their problems result from the "vestiges of slavery" or Jim Crow in the South, despite the fact that these wrongs were righted long ago.

This absurd calumny is not only foolish, but evil. Until we understand precisely what is warring against us, we can never prevail in the attacks upon our way of life. It is a battle of values and a contest of ideals warring against us. It is not terrorists we are fighting, but rather the rage of failure.
I thought I would share my perspective as a conservative Christian father who recently adopted a black teenage son during this time of media and activist inspired racial conflict.

No doubt, some number of Americans refused to vote for President Obama on the basis of his race. But whatever the number, it is dwarfed by the number of Americans who voted FOR him on the basis of his race. At no point in our history and in few places on earth is racism less of a problem.

Yet 80% of young blacks and more than 50% of young whites say that racism is a "major problem." How can that be? Quite simply, because they've been taught that. We now know (shouldn't we have examined the evidence first?) that police don't shoot black suspects resisting arrest any more than they do whites, according to the research of Dr. Roland Fryer, a Harvard professor who had the courage to bring some veritas into this national discussion. Better, as a black man, he'll even get to keep his job.

But why would the news media deliberately perpetrate a hoax on America that has led to the execution murders of multiple police officers and many more innocent black citizens killed in the ensuing lawlessness created by a neutered police force? In a word, politics.

After nearly two terms with our first black president, the fact that the conditions in our inner cities have not improved is so starkly obvious that only a smokescreen of burning racial conflict could obscure it. And obscure it they must since what is ailing black America is not white racism but progressive policies. Well intentioned (aren't our intentions always?) but ill conceived welfare programs have largely removed the black father from the home and replaced him with Uncle Sam -- a mindless, heartless buffoon of a relative who can provide neither protection nor love, but can create a lifelong problem for his children when it comes to authority figures.

From that environment, most black children are confined to a school system where they will find neither effective discipline nor public accountability. A system that could be readily reformed by funding students rather than bureaucracies, if not for the teachers unions and the Democrat politicians beholden to them.

The Big Lie that led to the scapegoating of policemen (low paid, under-appreciated heroes who would willingly risk their lives should any BLM activist dial just 3 numbers on his smart phone) and their subsequent murders was employed merely to distract us from making an accurate diagnosis based on the evidence that progressivism does not want examined. Dead cops were just an unintended, if predictable, side effect. That's my diagnosis. But I will defer to another Doctor for the remedy.

"Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that," Dr. King famously implored and I believe his prescription of love and light continues to ring true, as I witnessed in my conversation with my sons this week -- the white son I have known for all his 12 years and our 17 year old black son who just recently joined our family. Like all parents of black sons, we had "the police talk." Not because (armed as I am with knowledge) I feared for his safety from our local police, but because I did not know what lies about them he may have already absorbed that could endanger him. It went something like this:

Me: "Boys, (the girls were in the car too) you should know that 95% of all civilians shot by police are male."

Them: "That's awful! Everyone knows girls are just as likely to commit violent crimes and resist arrest. Why do they hate us so much and what can be done to end police sexism?"

. . . actually no. Despite never having accessed the FBI statistics on police shootings, they seemed to not be at all surprised to hear this. So I continued.

Me: "The police have a really hard job, often dealing with people at their worst. They never know who is strung out on drugs or might try to shoot them to avoid arrest. Sometimes they make mistakes, like the medical professionals that kill by some estimates 100,000 people each year. Despite what you might have heard, they shoot people rarely (less than 400 most years), reluctantly and based on the suspects threatening behavior, not their race. Studies have confirmed this. They would risk their lives for you if you needed them to, so treat them with respect and do exactly what they ask you to do. Does that make sense?"

Them: "Yes, it sure does"

Light. Cleansing their minds of the creeping darkness of fear and paranoia. My black son received this truth as readily as my white son did, despite having some reason (as do, we must remember, many of the black activists) to have a psychological issue with authority figures and the police officers that hold that place in his psyche. But I believe he was able to see the light.

Matt Poling MD is a family physician and adoptive father.
Newt Gingrich evoked the wrath of many on the left and right with his comments about the horrific terrorist attack in Nice. "We're dealing with people without uniforms ... we are allowing people into our country  we have no idea where they are coming from. They have no paperwork, no documentation," he said. "This may be the great Trojan Horse of all time."

Then he said: "Every person here who is of a Muslim background" should be tested to determine whether he or she believes in Shariah, a legal code based on the Quran and other Islamic scriptures.

If they do, he said, they should be deported  even if they're U.S. citizens. Gingrich added that anyone who simply visits any website "favoring ISIS or al Qaeda or other terrorist groups" should be guilty of a felony, "and they should go to jail."

Strong stuff indeed but close to the sentiments with which many millions of Americans agree at this moment in time. Yes, a religious test is a violation of the Constitution but let's give Newt a pass. Eighty-four people, ten of them children, had just been mowed down by an agent of ISIS, that JayVee team Obama so likes to belittle, that seventh-century gang of thugs that believes paradise awaits when and if they slaughter a sufficient number of innocent infidels. The more, the better.

Then Hillary weighed in with her usual blather. She did connect the words "radical jihadism," a slip of the tongue if there ever were one. She did not mention Islam! She began every sentence with "Well...." Of course. Beyond that she did the Obama thing -- long pauses between words and phrases, being careful that she did not offend anyone on any side of any ideological spectrum. The woman is a coward of the first order. "We need an "intelligence surge!" What the hell is that? It is meaningless from the woman whose husband, with Jamie Gorelick, saw to it that under his administration no agency could share information with another; the FBI could not share with the CIA. That produced the lack of "intelligence" that brought 9/11 upon us.

Because the weapon of choice in Nice was not a gun, she could not fall back on her usual gun control meme. So she babbled: blah, blah, blah. No other person can talk for so long and say absolutely nothing. The woman is without a soul, wholly without character. Like Obama, she denies that Islam has anything to do with the gruesome attacks that have taken place in Paris, Brussels, Bangladesh, San Bernardino, Orlando, Istanbul, Iraq, or Nice. She knows better of course but does not want to offend anyone whose vote or money she seeks. She promises to import more refugees from Syria in her first hundred days, along with amnesty for all who are already here illegally. If she reads the reports of violence plaguing Germany, Sweden, Norway, France, Italy, etc., she is ignoring the obvious: many of these people are violent, inassimilable criminals and she means to foist them upon Americans throughout the country who do not have armed security guards or live in gated communities and whom she intends to deprive of their Second Amendment rights.

"We have to stand with France, with NATO," she says. We have done nothing of the kind under Obama's leadership from behind. Instead, the Middle East has been handed over to the seventh century barbarians who are murdering their way across the Middle East and now Europe and the US. Obama has encouraged those nations to embrace those millions of refugees among whom the terrorists are hiding, seething with anger, ripe for recruitment by ISIS.

These facts aside, Hillary wants more diplomacy, more talk. She is the enemy of peace and national security. She does not want to take out ISIS in Raqqa! No troops. She is wrong about the Turks "helping" as well. She has not a clue, nor does she care, about stopping terrorism. She is in bed with the Muslim Brotherhood via Huma Abedin. Hillary cares only about money and power. This woman must never again get close to the White House. She is a short-sighted politician, the opposite of what we need. She will get many of us, if not all of us, killed.
The Turkish government has arrested 6,000 military and non-military individuals in connection with the failed coup against President Erdogan.

Of those detained, more than 2700 are judges and prosecutors who have opposed Erdogan's constitutional power grab. An unknown number of journalists, lawyers, and other regime opponents have also been arrested. Erdogan is taking full advantage of the crisis to "clean up" the military and the judiciary where most of the opposition to his rule is based.

Erdogan is demanding the extradition from the US of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic scholar who went into exile in Pennsylvania 15 years ago. Turkey is claiming that Gulen is behind the coup, but has offered no evidence to that effect. Gulen denies he was involved in the plot and suggested that Erdogan may have staged the coup to justify a crackdown on the opposition.

Daily Mail:

Speaking from his home, Gulen claimed democracy in Turkey could not be achieved through military action. He condemned the plot, although authorities in Ankara are not convinced. He said: 'There is a slight chance, there is a possibility that it could be a staged coup. It could be meant for court accusations and associations.' He added: 'It appears that they have no tolerance for any movement, any group, any organisation that is not under their total control.' President Erdogan told a crowd chanting for the death penalty on Saturday that such demands may be discussed in parliament after a coup attempt by a faction in the military killed at least 161 people. Looking relaxed and smiling, giving an occasional thumbs up to his supporters in Istanbul, Erdogan said the coup attempt had been carried out by a minority in the army. He said: 'The army is ours, not that of the parallel structure. I am chief commander.' Earlier Erdogan urged the US to extradite Gulen claiming Turkey never turned down an extradition request from Washington for 'terrorists'.

Secretary Kerry demanded the Turkish government supply proof of Gulen's complicity in the coup:

US Secretary of State John Kerry said of any extradition, that Turkey should "present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny". Mr Gulen has denied any involvement in the coup. The 75-year-old, who has been in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania for the past 15 years, said: "I don't even know who my followers [in Turkey] are." Mr Kerry strongly rebuked a Turkish minister who suggested Washington was behind the coup. He said "utterly false" insinuations were "harmful to our bilateral relations".

With Erdogan taking full advantage of the crisis to round up his opponents and attempt to settle the score with his longtime ally Gulen, is it possible he manufactured this coup so he could justify a crackdown?

Gulen may be trying to deflect attention from his own guilt by suggesting a set up, but with the absence of any evidence at all of his involvement, the idea cannot be entirely dismissed.

Also, the small number of troops involved, the incompetent prosecution of the coup, and the apparent lack of planning by the plotters suggest an extremely amateur attempt to overthrow Erdogan. But might Erdogan's agents have goaded the plotters into taking action? It's a seductive theory that has no evidence to back it up.

The simplest explanation is that Erdogan is a ruthless SOB who is simply following the advice of Obama's former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; "Never let a crisis go to waste."




Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a political bull often on the lookout for a politically correct china shop, has rattled the orthodoxy of political correctness once again, saying that those who follow Sharia law cant also be loyal to the U.S., Constitution and the Western values it represents and either shouldnt be allowed to enter the U.S. or should be deported from it. This didnt sit well with President Barack Hussein Obama. As the Daily Caller reports:

On Friday, Barack Obama called Newt Gingrichs plan to deport sharia-adhering Muslims in America repugnant and an affront to everything that we stand for as Americans. In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Nice, France, Gingrich said, We should, frankly, test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported. Sharia is incompatible with Western civilization.

Gingrich is right. Everything we stand for as Americans, free speech, freedom of religion, equal rights for women, all are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Sharia law is incompatible with our values and our democracy. So says Syrian Islamic scholar Abd Al-Karim Bakkar who said in 2009 that democracy and Oslam are like matter and anti-matter in physics:

Democracy runs counter to Islam on several issues. In democracy, legislation is the prerogative of the people. It is the people who draw up the constitution, and they have the authority to amend it as well. On this issue we differ.

Agreeing with Gingrich is former rival presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson. Speaking on NBCs Meet The Press during the primary campaign, Dr. Ben Carson was asked if a Presidents religious beliefs mattered. He said they did, and, when pressed on the issue, said no Muslim should be President of the United States (insert Obama joke here) and that in fact Islam is in conflict with the U.S. Constitution:

Chuck Todd: Should a presidents faith matter? Should your faith matter to voters? Ben Carson: Well I guess it depends on what that faith is. If it is inconsistent with the values and principles of America then of course it should matter. But, if it fits within the realm of America and consistent with the constitution then no problem Todd: So do you believe that Islam is consistent with the Constitution? Carson: No I do not, I do not. I would not advocate that we would put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.

This is self-evident in the fact that Islamic theocracy rules throughout the Islamic world, crushing human rights such as those in our Bill of Rights. In some secular states like Turkey and Egypt democracy is tolerated for Western acceptance, but try telling a Coptic Christian in Egypt for example about the freedom of religion there, or try imposing a government dictate contrary to Islam, as ObamaCare imposes on pro-life Christians, on Muslims. Under Islam and Sharia Law, there is no freedom of religion or speech and equal rights are forbidden to women and non-Muslims. If you should convert to Christianity, you have signed your death warrant.

As Islamic expert Robert Spencer notes in FrontPage Magazine:

In January 2013, the Saudi Islamic scholar Sheikh Abdul Rahman bin Nassir Al Barrak declared: Electing a president or another form of leadership or council members is prohibited in Islam as it has been introduced by the enemies of Moslems. The idea of popular elections, he said, has been brought by the anti-Islam parties who have occupied Moslem land. Tunisian author Salem Ben Ammar wrote last month: To hell with democracy! Long live Islam! One hundred percent of Muslims agree with that. To say anything else is apostasy from Islam. These two competing political systems are antithetical to each other. You cant be democratic and be a Muslim or a Muslim and be a democrat. A Jew cant be a Nazi and a Nazi cant be a Judeophile.

Ben Carson is merely recognizing what Islamic scholars and political leaders publicly declare. Islam and democracy are incompatible and Sharia Law is particularly toxic to our way of life and human rights and freedom, as Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, noted:

Obamas policies should be the subject of very concerted debate. He [Gaffney] is hoping that what Dr. Ben Carson did on Sunday with his comments brings to light the fact that a president can not uphold, defend and support the constitution of the United States and adhere to Sharia Law. It cannot be done. Because Sharia says, No its not the Constitution of the United States that must govern. It is Gods law. It is Sharia. It is this repressive totalitarian, misogynistic program that must govern.

An October 2010 report from the Center for Security Policy documented the threat posed by Islam and Sharia Law to our democracy, our government, our Constitution, and our way of life:

The report, whose authors included former defense, law enforcement and intelligence officials such as Clinton administration CIA Director R. James Woolsey and Andrew C. McCarthy, former assistant U.S. attorney in New York, a career counterterrorism prosecutor during the Clinton administration, was released Wednesday at a Capitol Hill press conference. The report concludes the Shariah system is "totalitarian" and incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, our system of democratic lawmaking and the constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience, individual liberty and freedom of expression, including the right to criticize Shariah law itself. The report cites the 1991 document from the Muslim Brotherhood in North America describing a covert process of Islamic "settlement" in the United States. The plan is to carry out a "grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated," the document stated.

These documents and statements by Muslim clerics and radical Islamists are warning of their intentions that we would be foolish to ignore. We ignored the announced goals and intentions of Adolf Hitler in his book, Mein Kampf, which came to pass in a horrific war and Holocaust. As Investors Business Daily editorialized:

Shariah is used around the world to condone barbarities such as the stoning and subjugation of women and the execution of homosexuals. It does not support freedom of speech, conscience or religion or even equal treatment under the law

Newt Gingrich is right. To paraphrase President Barack Hussein Obama, the future should not belong to those who threaten the U.S. Constitution.

Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investors Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Let me introduce you to the richest young woman in Venezuela, or "la chica rica", i.e. the rich girl.

Her name is Maria Gabriela Chavez, or the daughter of the socialist Hugo Chavez.

According to Ezequiel Spector, a lawyer, PhD candidate, professor at the University Torcuato Di Tella and contributor at PanAm Post, this is one lucky Maria:

The alleged fortune of Maria Gabriela Chavez, daughter of the late Hugo Chavez, has recently stirred up controversy in Venezuela. Media reports suggest that Chavezs daughter has US$4.2 billion stored in bank accounts in the United States and Andorra, which might make her the wealthiest person in Venezuela. Critics have pointed to a supposed inconsistency: how can one support the so-called Bolivarian Revolution while enjoying such enormous riches? However, the premise of this critique is flawed, because it assumes that Chavismo emerged to uphold rights and equality.

How did the Chavez family get so filthy rich? Did they create great industries and hire thousands of people? Did they contribute to the economy? They did it because they stole it in the name of income inequality:

They are rich because the government has awarded them privileges and subsidies, at the expense of the average citizen. Thats 21st-century socialisms social mobility. They dont want capitalism, since their socialist system has already made them quite comfortable.

They also do it because the Western media doesn't ask them about their wealth.

For example, Raul Castro's daughter, Mariela, recently visited the US. She was given a total pass by US journalists who were fascinated by the Cuban health care system rather than Castro, Inc, the empire that has made her family fifthly rich too.

Maria Gabriela in Caracas and Mariela in Havana, a couple of lucky girls who preach socialism and live like Maria Antoniette!

As Hall & Oates sang many years ago:

"You can rely on the old man's money You can rely on the old man's money...."

P.S. You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
This week-end, when talking about Islamic terror with Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich had an absolute brainstorm of epic proportions  one that would make Pollyanna proud: have a sharia test for every Muslim living in the United States. If they say they support sharia, deport them. If they say they dont support sharia, theyre cool. They can stay. Heck, hed even love to have them as his neighbor.

Well golly gee! Who doesnt love a quick fix to an enormous problem? I mean, why didnt anyone think of that before?

Hello? Mr. former Speaker of the House? Have you heard of taqiyya, whereby Islamic law sanctions deception in order to advance the caliphate through stealth means? (See here, here, here, and here)

As when Islamic terrorists dress as Orthodox Jews in order to move about undetected and then kill their targets. As when clean-shaven, soft-spoken members of Muslim Brotherhood front groups go on television and peddle lies to the American public. As when imams say one thing in English and another thing in Arabic. As when the seemingly normal Muslim neighbor next door comes down with a case of sudden jihad syndrome. The list of examples could fill volumes.

Good grief!

Not that the Muslim community needed Newts comments to set off internal communication about how to behave and respond to all manner of inquiry, but after his absurd announcement of an absurd idea, I could almost hear the keyboards typing and phones ringing.

Hey, make sure if anyone asks about your position on sharia, say you dont support it.

Right. Got it.

Hat tip: The Right Scoop, The BBC
I dont think I have ever recommended the same author as the read of the day twice in a row. But yesterday Spengler brought a meaningful framework to Turkeys attempted coup, and today he puts the Nice massacre in perspective, making absolute sense by looking at important factors other observers ignore. Writing in Asia Times as David P. Goldman, he deduces that Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a known criminal, was allowed to stay in France because he was a snitch for the police.

Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

Of course! It makes sense. You have to know something about the Muslim community and about the way police agencies really work to infer this. But with this in mind, the terrorists have sent a message to Muslims living in Western countries.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015. The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam. These attacks, in other words, are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished. The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims. Ordinary Muslims live in fear of the terror networks, which have infiltrated their communities and proven their ability to turn the efforts of western security services against them. They are less likely to inform on prospective terrorists and more likely to aid them by inaction.

The message is, in bin Ladens term, that Islam is the strong horse, and degenerate, weak Western Modernity is the weak horse.

With Nice, the jihadists scored a major victory, presaging many more acts of terror.

Spengler has a solution to the dilemma. I encourage readers to read the whole thing to weigh his argument.
Some remarkable video below that shows police storming the CNN-Turkey broadcasting studios to arrest soldiers taking part in the coup.

The scene gets more chaotic as the video plays, with employees getting involved in the fight.

cnn'de darbecilere once polis, sonra siviller mudahale etti pic.twitter.com/fiw5jVRC9v  ismail saymaz (@ismailsaymaz) July 16, 2016

Losing the last media source they controlled at the start of the coup was the killer. With Erdogan in charge of the media, the rebel's message couldn't get out and communication between rebel units became much harder.

It was the beginning of the end for the plotters.
This presidential election now hinges on the selection of the vice presidents and the impression of the entire package to voters.

To begin with, the oddly feckless, passive Republican Party failed to come forth with a credible, vetted candidate. Instead, they dawdled and left the door open for a number of questionable odd ducks and wannabes to declare themselves, compete, and  in the vacuum  win. Worse, the party failed to have a reputable alternate candidate ready and are only now scheming to surface one at the Cleveland convention if they can sidestep the legal obligations of delegates during that first vote, which betrays the will of the voters they represent who have selected Trump.

All of this, anyway, is too little, too late.

Likewise, the Democratic Party was force-marched to accept its candidate, leaving Democrats open to an irrational Socialist who understandably gained a strong following from young people by offering a cornucopia of pie-in-the-sky freebies, such as free college and medical care for all, with not a scintilla of an idea how to pay for the trillions of dollars of promises. The Democrats are now married to a candidate recognized as extremely careless with security and dishonest and contemptuous of laws and restrictions. She operates in the mode of that arrogant New York real estate mogul, Leona Helmsley, "The Queen of Mean": only the little people must abide by laws.

The hands have been dealt, and both parties must move ahead with their dodgy choices. As George Wallace said, "there's not a dime's difference between them."

Facing this reality that neither political party has arrived at appealing presidential candidates, much of the coming election hinges on the choice of vice president. They each have one more choice and can better their hands by picking strong running mates.

This election now has become a choice of the lesser of two nearly equal evils, and the selection of V.P.s can shift the odds considerably; hence, these selections are of great importance. With Donald Trump's selection of Mike Pence, it offsets voter concern over Trump's inexperience and tendency to be undiplomatic with numerous off-the-cuff gaffes. Pence is cautious, conservative, and well-spoken.

The attention now shifts to see if the Clinton campaign selects someone who offsets Hillary's many failings  and to then see which total package is the most promising for the voters and the country.

Not surprisingly, the voters are focusing on these vice presidential choices as the last hope of regaining some sanity for the future of the nation  not the America we have known in the past.

Gene Poteat is a former CIA senior scientific intelligence officer. He is also the president emeritus of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers in Falls Church, Virginia.
Court of Appeals says anonymity cannot shield caller's identity when content is considered testimony

Statements are nontestimonial when made in the course of police interrogation under circumstances objectively indicating that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to enable police assistance to meet an ongoing emergency. They are testimonial when the circumstances objectively indicate that there is no such ongoing emergency, and that the primary purpose of the interrogation is to establish or prove past events potentially relevant to later criminal prosecution.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals held that the 911 caller's statements were testimonial in nature and thus inadmissible since McKiver had no opportunity to cross-examine the caller.

RALEIGH Among the basic guarantees of liberty provided by the Bill of Rights is the right to confront one's accusers during a criminal trial. A recent ruling by the state's second-highest court highlights how this right can extend even to those accused by callers to 911 emergency networks.On the evening of April 12, 2014, Wilmington Police Department officers responded to an anonymous 911 call in the Long Leaf Park subdivision reporting a possible dispute involving a man with a gun. Officer Scott Bramley was among those responding to the call. When he arrived in the area, he noticed two men standing next to a black Mercedes-Benz parked beside a vacant lot. One of the men, in a red and white plaid shirt, walked toward the officer. Bramley did not have a description of the suspect, but he decided to confront the man and ask if he had a gun. The man said no, submitted to a pat down, and after Bramley did not find a gun, he let the man go.Bramley the contacted the New Hanover County 911 dispatcher for a description of the suspect. The dispatcher replied that the caller, who wished to remain anonymous,and thatThe man with the gun was described as wearing a light plaid shirt.Police searched the area around the Mercedes and found a Sig Sauer P320 handgun. Bramley was convinced that the man he encountered was the suspect. Soon after that, the man - Christopher Allen McKiver - returned and asked what the police were doing to his car. Bramley then arrested McKiver.The Mercedes was registered to McKiver's brother in Elizabethtown. No fingerprint or DNA evidence was found on the gun, which had been reported as stolen from an address in Elizabethtown.At trial, McKiver was convicted of possession of a firearm by a felon; Superior Court Judge Benjamin Alford refused to suppress the information from the anonymous 911 caller. Alford sentenced McKiver to six months in prison and three years of supervised probation.On appeal, McKiver renewed his argument that using the 911 caller's statements violated his rights under the 6th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that "in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him."In the 2004 case of Crawford v. Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Confrontation Clause forbids "admission of testimonial statements of a witness who did not appear at trial unless he was unavailable to testify, and the defendant had had a prior opportunity for cross-examination." Two years later, in Davis v. Washington, it provided additional guidance:In the court's opinion, Judge Linda Stephens wrote the record suggested there was no emergency, and thatGiven that there was little to tie McKiver to the gun besides the anonymous call, the Appeals Court held that admitting it was not a harmless error and that McKiver was entitled to a new trial.The case is(15-1070).
Political correctness has attained a level of institutional power today in the United States that it can justifiably be compared with the totalitarian brainwashing efforts seen in Mao Tse-tungs Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (also known as "fundamental transformation"). The salient social mechanisms shared by the two efforts at thought reform are pubic shame and self-criticism.

Consider the case of Louis Graham, editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the citys venerable daily newspaper. He had the temerity to publish an accurate headline. Jazz Shaw explains at Hot Air: (hat tip: Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit)

a newspaper found themselves having to issue an apology for publishing a headline which included a direct quote from the killer. (Fox News) A newspaper in Memphis quickly apologize after protestors complained about its choice of headline in the wake of the deadly police shooting in Dallas. Gunman targeted whites, read the lead story headline in the Commercial Appeal, a member of the USA Today network. The headline was accurate, as Dallas gunman Micah Xavier Johnson explicitly talked about wanted to kill white police officers before he was eliminated via robot bomb. That didnt stop protestors from gathering outside the papers office in downtown Memphis on Wednesday to express their displeasure, some holding signs that read Black Lives Matter. Commercial Appeal editor Louis Graham quickly apologized after meeting with the protestors, and wrote an editorial titled, We got it wrong.

In that editorial, Graham issued what can only be called self-criticism. The errant true-but-unacceptable headline:

badly oversimplified a very complex, rapidly evolving story, and angered many of our readers and many more in the broader community.

Decades ago, when China first opened up, I met a prominent Chinese scientist finally able to travel to the USA, who had been denounced, tortured, and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for his crimes of having a PhD from an American university and being dedicated to scientific truth instead of political doctrine. I will never forget the broken man talking about he had been made to confess his crimes in front of a howling mob.

Things have not come to this point in the US, I realize, But the mechanism of self-criticism is the same. By affirming something that is known to be untrue, the subject loses control of his own will, surrendering something of the soul.

So when editor Graham writes,

Too few people looked at the front page before it rolled off our presses. We've taken steps to correct that. But the larger challenge is recruiting a diverse enough staff to better reflect the city we cover. We continue to work on that and will be more introspective about how we do our jobs.

He is surrendering to the Party Line, and conforming to the Partys will with his work.

Clarice Feldman cited some relevant commentary a couple of weeks ago:
Incirlik air base in Turkey has been placed on "Condition Delta" - the highest level of force protection as the Turkish government cut power to the base and is preventing any flights from taking off or landing.

The 2200 US military personnel at the base - along with 90 nuclear weapons - are now, essentially, hostages of the Turkish government.

President Erdogan has demanded that the US extradite Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania. The Turkish government claims that Gulen is the ringleader of the coup.

The demand to turn over Gulen and the closing of the air base appear to be connected. Since Incirlik is vital to the air war against ISIS, the US will probably acquiesce and hand over Gulen - even though the Turkish government has yet to offer any proof whatsoever that he had anything to do with the coup.

ABC News:

U.S. troops at Turkeys Incirlik air base were at the highest force protection level, known as "condition Delta," after power was cut off at the base and the Turkish government closed the airspace around the site in the hours following a foiled military coup attempt, a U.S. official told ABC News today. Turkish officials told ABC News they believe Turkish planes docked at Incirlik Air Base took part in Friday night's coup attempt, which is why the airspace is locked down. Turkey allows the United States to use the air base for operations associated with its air campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. There are 2,200 U.S. personnel in Turkey, including 1,500 stationed at Incirlik. A Pentagon spokesman said the loss of commercial power to Incirlik has not affected operations because the U.S. facilities there are operating on internal power sources. U.S. officials are working with their Turkish counterparts to resume air operations at the air base. All U.S. government personnel in Turkey appear safe and secure, he added. "Turkish government has closed its airspace to military aircraft, and as a result air operations at Incirlik Air Base have been halted at this time," Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook told ABC News. "In the meantime, U.S. Central Command is adjusting flight operations in the counter-ISIL campaign to minimize any effects on the campaign."

A member of Erdogan's cabinet, Suleyman Soylu, Turkey's minister of Labor, has gone so far as to accuse the US government of being behind the coup:

It's doubtful the US would have actively supported the coup attempt. We may not have control over Turkish planes parked at the air base, so it's possible that some of them were used in the coup attempt without US support.

Or, the Turkish government is making the whole thing up.

The round up of suspected coup participants is proceeding as expected. Erdogan is taking advantage of the crisis to arrest regime opponents who almost certainly had nothing to do with the military plot. More than 6,000 people have been arrested so far. Estimates of the number of Turkish military personnel who took part in the coup range from 2500-3500.

Never let a crisis go to waste, President Erdogan.
The island of Staffa in Scotland is probably best known for its unique geological features, such as the many caves and the unique shape of the basalt columns which are also found in the Giant's Causeway. This remarkable little island, located south-west off the isle of Ulva and halfway between the Ross of Mull and the Treshnish Isles is one of the smallest in the Southern Hebrides.

On the east coast of Staffa are Goat Cave and Clamshell Cave. The latter is 10 m high, about 6 m wide at the entrance, some 45 m long, and on one side of it the ridges of basalt stand out like the ribs of a ship. On the southwest shore are Boat Cave and Mackinnons Cave, which has a tunnel connecting it to Cormorant Cave. Staffa's most famous feature is Fingal's Cave, a large sea cave located near the southern tip of the island some 20 m high and 75 m long formed in cliffs of hexagonal basalt columns.

The island was once inhabited in the 1700s by as much as 16 people but nowadays seabirds and tourists have taken over their place. The island came to prominence in the late 18th century after a visit by Sir Joseph Banks. He and his fellow travellers extolled by the natural beauty of the basalt columns and by the island's main sea cavern which Banks re-named 'Fingal's Cave'. Their visit was followed by that of many other prominent personalities throughout the next two centuries, including Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth an English poet, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Jules Verne and Dr David Livingstone, to name a few.

Photos: http://estranic.livejournal.com/

Sources: 1, 2
Now that Samsung has set the official date for their next Unpacked event this year, which is slated for August 2nd in New York, this is largely the expected date for when Samsung is going to unveil the next generation Note device, the Galaxy Note 7. While Samsung have not confirmed this, the invites that were sent out to press heavily suggest this to be the case. Leading up to its announcement and throughout this year there have been a number of leaks about the Galaxy Note 7 concerning many of its potential hardware specifications, along with leaked renders of the final hardware design. One of the heavily discussed rumored specs is the inclusion of the iris scanner which would give users the means to unlock the device using their eyes and the integrated component.

Most recently, the iris scanner showed up in an alleged leaked image of the Galaxy Note 7, further suggesting that Samsung was indeed going to manufacture this device with an iris scanner installed in it. Further back and towards the end of December of last year the initial rumor for the iris scanner inside of the device popped up, and as of today a new leak of the import data for the Galaxy Note 7 seems to show that the iris scanner will be a part of the device hardware features.

The Zauba listing, which can currently be seen, lists off the words iris cam prior to the model number SM-N930F which is one of the model numbers for a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 variant. Although the origin country is listed as Vietnam, its highly unlikely that, if the device does come with an iris scanner on any model its a safe bet that it would be present in all models that are aimed at separate regions. Another detail worth mentioning is that the import data logs detail that 2,000 units of the device have been shipped out to the region, which suggests that the iris scanner is more than just a potential test feature as that many units with an iris cam would likely only be included if Samsung were planning to make it a permanent piece of hardware that hits the final production model of the handset.
Samsung launched the original Galaxy Note in October 2011, considered by many to be the first successful device with a display of 5.0-inch or larger. At the time, the Note came with an outrageously large display of 5.3-inch, a higher performance variant of the dual core Exynos System-on-Chip that resided in the Galaxy S II, a 2,500 mAh battery and Samsungs take on the stylus, the S Pen. The Note made good use of the S Pen, bringing with it increased functionality over and above the Galaxy S II, plus that extra large (for the time) battery meant the device gave solid battery life. And since late 2011, Samsung have launched another four Galaxy Note smartphones, although one did not make it into Europe. Samsung typically release their Galaxy Note smartphones in the second half of the year and their more mainstream flagship Galaxy S device in the first half of the year. This year, Samsung are set to announce the next generation Galaxy Note, called the Galaxy Note 7, on August 2nd.

As with former Galaxy Note releases, the Galaxy Note 7 has seen its fair share of pre-release leaks, rumors and information. Weve seen renders of the device leaked in the Coral Blue color but now reports are appearing showing the Galaxy Note 7 in all available color options which include Coral Blue, Gold, Silver Titanium and Black. From what we understand, the device will be released very close to the 2nd August and quite probably will be available for preorder that day. It is expected to be built in two variants. The one destined for the North American market will likely use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset and be backed up by 6 GB of RAM. The other model will use the Samsung Exynos 8893 chipset but will again have 6 GB of RAM. Both devices will come with 64 GB of internal storage, a 5.7-inch QHD resolution Super AMOLED panel. There will be a 12MP primary camera complete with Samsungs dual-pixel phase detection autofocus technology. The Galaxy Note 7 will be able to quickly go through its internal storage thanks to the ability to record at 4K resolution. On the front, Samsung are expected to improve over and above the Galaxy S7s 3.7MP front facing camera with a 5MP unit. We are also expecting all models to come with a microSD card slot, and come with Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It should also be updated to Android 7.0 Nougat in a timely manner, use a 4,000 mAh battery and have IP68 water and dust resistance. Samsung have integrated an iris-scanner into the front of the phablet and with this being a Galaxy Note, the device will of course come with the S Pen.

We will know more in approximately two weeks, when Samsung is set to officially unveil the device and of course those colors. However, it does seem that the Galaxy Note 7 has few secrets left to reveal. Meanwhile, more rumors and stories can be expected to surface over the next generation Galaxy Note phablet.
While Pokemon GO fever is still going wild with a large number of smartphone owners, it might seem like there is little else going on in the world of Android devices. On the contrary, though, there was quite a few noteworthy things to happen in the past week. Perhaps the most exciting was the reveal for what is now largely thought to be the Galaxy Note 7 announcement, as Samsung sent out invites this past week to the press for their second 2016 Unpacked event to happen on August 2nd. With the design of the S Pen showing on the invite image, its highly likely to be the unveiling.

This past week also revealed a video of 3D renders of the previously leaked Sailfish Nexus renders that went out during the week prior to this past week, and some renders made their way to the web for the rumored smartwatches that Google is suspected to be making. A leak for a brand-new and so far unannounced Xiaomi Phone has popped up on Geekbench this past week, and LG is suspected to be releasing the LG V20 in September. Speaking of rumors, Sony is also rumored to be releasing or announcing a new smartphone at the upcoming IFA conference in Berlin, and YouTube has confirmed that they will be streaming the U.S. National Convention in VR. If you happened to miss any of the top stories from this past week, you can find them in the links below.

Xiaomi Capricorn Leaks On Geekbench, Is This The Mi Note 2?

Advertisement

Rumored Google Assistant-Powered Smartwatches Get Rendered

Japan is Getting Android Auto Beginning Today

Samsung To Announce The Galaxy Note 7 On August 2nd

Advertisement

Rumor: LG V20 To Be Released In September

YouTube Will Stream U.S. National Conventions In VR

Possible New NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet Passes Through the FCC

Advertisement

Rumor: Sony To Unveil At Least One Smartphone At IFA 2016

3D Video Rendering Of Nexus Marlin & Sailfish Based On Leaks

Samsung Gear IconX Earbuds Go Live In Select Regions
In light of continued developments, primarily since 2008, there exists in these United States a Legal System which operates on a proved Two Tiered approach to justice rendered, which primarily benefits Democratic Elites and Woke Ideological Virtue Signalers, representing their co-dependent wards, to the expressed exclusion of normal hardworking American citizens: What is your suggestion in remedying this widespread injustice and, if not corrected, its existential outcome for our Constitutional Republic?

Complete overhaul of the Department of Justice and their enforcers - the FBI - to reflect a far more honest justice system to keep patriots remaining calm.

Disband the FBI, and request that congress investigate all unethical and non patriotic practices to partially right the wrongs of a distrusted and politically weaponized "Department of Justice."
Hebdo, Jews, Paris and Nice  the evolution of a death cult

What a sad and twisted little story on the BBC. In Attack on Nice brings danger to France closer to home, Hugh Schofield follows up the story of how Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel murdered scores of people at a Bastille Day celebration by noting:

Through the last 18 months of jihadist terror in France, a simple pattern is emerging: it keeps getting worse.

Worse than mass murder?

If the January 2015 attacks were aimed at specific groups  Jews and blasphemers  the November follow-up was more indiscriminate.

Murdering Jews and blasphemers is not worse  is it better, then?  than killing anyone else.

Is it time to update Pastor Martin Niemollers poem:

First they came for the Satirists, and I did not speak out

Because I agreed that You cant say that!, words are criminal and US Secretary of State John Kerry saw a rationale in the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo. Then they came for the Jews at the supermarket, and I did not speak out

Because Jews are behind everything and fight with Palestinians, says the man at the BBC. Then they came for the rock fans, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a rock fan and they are hedonists. Then they came for me  and there was no one left to speak for me.

So goes the evolution of a death cult.

At the Bataclan Massacre, the scene was gruesome. HeatStreet says:

A French government committee has heard testimony, suppressed by the French government at the time and not published online until this week, that the killers in the Bataclan appear to have tortured their victims on the second floor of the club

Or as Schofield puts it:

At the Bataclan and at the cafes the Islamists killed young adults, out being European hedonists. This time, its gone a step further. In Nice, it is the people at large  families and groups of friends  doing nothing more provocative than attending a national celebration. Ten children were among the dead.

People at large are not Jews and hedonists at a pop concert. Jews shopping for Shabbat dinner were being more provocative than non-Jews walking about in Nice?

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, we learn, is a victim, who fell prey to the torrent of jihadist propaganda emanating from so-called Islamic State (IS), and elevated his personal grievances into matters of cosmic importance. He had a weakness for Islamist ideology.

And then comes the inevitable story that its not them, its us.

This is the moment when the attacks become so outrageous they provoke a backlash. A mosque is burned to the ground. Some white youths go on a rampage through a banlieue (suburb).

Dont react. Dont be furious. Fear yourselves. Fear the masses  irony of ironies  the very people who stormed the Bastille and gave rise to democracy and human rights founded on universalism and enlightenment values. Treat people as suspects.

There will be no debate about why and who? Why is Islam a lightning rod for these horrors? Why are young, third generation Muslims radicalised? Why has identity-based politics come to the fore? Why France? Why now?

Schofield adds:

This is what IS desperately wants to happen, of course, because France could then be on course for a truly bloody civil conflict.

What were the murders of 84 people in Nice; the murders of Charlie Hebdo journalists; the murders of 89 freedom lovers at the Bataclan theatre; mass murder on the Rue de Charonne, Rue de la Fontaine-au-Roi and Rues Bichat and Alibert if not truly bloody?

Stand up for freedom. Dont be scared to uphold the values France epitomises.

Vive La France!

Anorak

Posted: 17th, July 2016 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
RALEIGH In history books, Anti-Federalists often are depicted as losers during the constitutional ratification debates. But in many ways, they were victorious.For instance, they assured that a Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution, and their concerns prompted a vigorous political debate and constitutional commentary that Americans still reference.One of the leading founders and proponents for a Bill of Rights was North Carolina planter Willie (pronounced Wiley) Jones. The Anti-Federalist Jones influenced many of his contemporaries' political views and demands for a declaration of rights.A Virginia native, Jones and his family moved to present-day Northampton County, N.C., in the early 1750s. The son of a large landholder, Willie was tutored at home and traveled to England for his formal education.Willie married Mary Montfort, the daughter of Col. Joseph Montfort, on June 27, 1776. The couple had 13 children, of whom only five survived childhood (three girls and two boys), and only the three girls married. Jones died in 1801.Jones' political career is worth examining. While North Carolina was a royal colony, Jones had served in the House of Commons. Becoming disenchanted with the Royal Governors and the British Crown, Jones eventually became an ardent revolutionary.Royal Gov. Josiah Martin remarked that Jones was one of the loudest voices encouraging secession from Britain and the establishment of an independent state.During the Revolutionary War, Jones served in various political and military roles. He was a delegate of Halifax County at the Provincial Convention of 1774. He served in the 1775 and 1776 Provincial Congresses as a delegate of Halifax County. He was the president of the 1776 Provincial Council.From 1777-80, he served in the General Assembly House. He then represented North Carolina at the Continental Congress of 1780. In 1782, 1784, and 1788, Jones served in the North Carolina Senate.During the war, Jones also fought the British; he became a lieutenant colonel under the command of Nathanael Greene and led 300 men in the pursuit of Lord Charles Cornwallis. In 1787, Jones was elected as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia (a meeting to solve the problems deemed inherent in the Articles of Confederation), but Jones declined, claiming to be too busy.Once a new constitution was submitted to the states for ratification, Jones vigorously opposed its adoption. In North Carolina, two prominent Federalists (supporters of the Constitution) were James Iredell and William Davie.Jones opposed ratification for several reasons: He feared a standing army, a U.S. Supreme Court that could overrule state court decisions, and a federal government that regulated the economy to benefit a few commercial interests.To Jones, the Constitution could be a dangerous instrument of centralization. To prevent it from becoming so, he wanted the document to enumerate specific, individual rights. Until such a list was included, Jones encouraged his colleagues not to ratify the Constitution.In great part because of Jones' influence, North Carolina was the only state to have two ratification conventions; the state initially voted neither to ratify nor reject the Constitution.North Carolina finally ratified the Constitution in 1789. And because of Jones and other Anti-Federalists, the Bill of Rights eventually was drafted.After North Carolina ratified the Constitution, Jones never served in political office again, though he continued being a public servant.Thanks in great part to Jones' effort on a planning committee, the city of Raleigh was established in 1792. For his significant role in the establishment of the capital, Jones has been called the "real founder of Raleigh."Jones also served as a trustee for the University of North Carolina in the 1790s. For decades Jones had wanted (in true Jeffersonian spirit) a university that offered North Carolinians a means of enlightenment.


remaining of

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Under the contract, AAR Airlift will provide passenger and cargo transport helicopter services and external cargo transport to US Department of Defense forces. AAR Airlift will provide two helicopters, flight operations, maintenance and logistics support as well as personnel.



"Leveraging our extensive flight operations experience in this austere and inaccessible region, AAR will field an additional operational hub in fewer than 10 days following contract award notification, including two aircraft, personnel, spares, tooling and consumables, said Steven B. Harrison, President, AAR Airlift Group. The Company has operated rotary wing aircraft in Afghanistan since 2009.


Investigators had earlier said that the other black box retrieved from the site had confirmed smoke alarms had sounded onboard and there are signs of soot on parts of the wreckage which had indicated a fire.

The committee had ... started listening to the cockpit voice recordings before the occurrence of the accident; where the existence of fire was mentioned, the committee said in a statement.

Still it is too early to determine the reason or the place where that fire started, it said.

The data recorder points to smoke signals indicating fires in the lavatory and avionics section of the plane, according to the committee.

Egyptian investigators have confirmed the aircraft made a 90-degree left turn followed by a 360-degree turn to the right before hitting the sea.

The Airbus A320 was carrying 40 Egyptians from Paris to Cairo. There were 15 French, two Iraqis, two Canadians and one passenger each from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

The latest committee statement also said the search for the remains of passengers has ended.


An announcement from The airline said: "'Upon the call of our President and Commander-In-Chief H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, our operations at Istanbul Ataturk Airport have gone back to normal and our flights resuming safely.
YEREVAN, JULY 17, ARMENPRESS: Armenian police and law enforcement system have necessary means to neutralize the group that has taken hostages in the building of the Patrol Police in Yerevan, the Deputy head of the Armenian Police Hunan Poghosyan told the journalists. All indispensible preventive and investigative steps have been undertaken. If our calls are not heard, we have the capacity to neutralize them, Poghosyan said, as Armenpress reports. He also noted that during the attack Armenian police colonel Artur Vanyan was killed, colonel Aram Hovhannisyan, vice-colonel Hrach Khosteghyan and junior officer Gagik Mkrtchyan were wounded. At this moment we conduct negotiations. The police and the law enforcement bodies call on them to stop the illegal actions and surrender to the authorities, Poghosyan said. He went on saying that the attackers have voiced only one demand: to release Jirayr Sefilyn. They have 7 hostages. There are no injured among the attckers. An armed group has entered the building of the patrol police department in Yerevan and keeps people there with the threat of violence. The official statement of the National Security Service of Armenia runs as follows A group of armed people have taken hostage a small group of policemen and in order to release them they demand the release of Jirayr Sefilyan who was imprisoned with the charges of illegally obtaining, keeping, transporting weaponry. A policeman has been killed, two have been wounded. In order to stop and disrupt the criminal actions of the armed group that illegally holds the area, the Special Forces have released two hostages. Armenian law enforcement bodies fully control the situation and have undertaken all necessary means to resolve the issue. Meanwhile, the National Security Service calls on the mass media to use the information from official sources, as in case of the contrary that would assist the illegal actions and would pose threat for peoples life and health.
Theres a new frozen yogurt shop in downtown Laurel, blending a simple concept with a simple name.

The Yogurt Shop opened July 1 at 105 W. Main St., a cavernous space formerly home to an antique store.

Mother-daughter team Lynnette Blumhagen, 59, and Jackie Johnson, 34, will be running the daily operations at the shop. They have a third partner, Darby Gerondale, 34, a former classmate of Johnsons at Billings Senior High. She has a full-time job and will help behind the scenes.

Everybody has been very open, and we hope we stay open. They say, Laurel needs something like this, said Blumhagen, a Lockwood resident.

Blumhagen and Johnson, who lives in Laurel, previously operated Jumpin Jacks Daycare in town, which they closed to open The Yogurt Shop.

The idea is simple: Customers can choose yogurt, ice cream or custard, and then pile on fruit, chocolate or other sweets from the selection of about 30 toppings.

The three women spent about $19,000 to renovate and freshen up the space, adding lively bright colors to the walls. They currently have seating for 27, but the occupancy for the building is 148, according to Johnson.

Blumhagen said they plan to host parties in the back.

The hours at The Yogurt Shop are 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. weekends. Call 633-4477 for more information.

Hastings auction set

A bankruptcy auction for all Hastings stores, including one in Billings at West Park Promenade on Grand Avenue, is set for July 20.

Buyers are required to submit bids by July 18 for the auction approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, according to officials at Texas-based Hastings.

The sale had been originally set July 13 but was postponed to attract more offers, Hastings officials said.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Hastings, which announced its bankruptcy intentions last month, owes about $80 million in secured debts and $59 million in trade bills.

Soueidi retires

Tony Soueidi has retired after nearly 40 years in the jewelry business in downtown Billings, but he says hes found a trusted colleague and master jeweler to take his spot.

Elichai Fowler has taken over the business inside the First Interstate Bank building at 401 N. 31st St. suite 725.

It is now called Elichai Fine Jewelry. The phone number is the same: 406-248-2233. His website is www.elichai.com.

In a written statement, Soueidi noted that hes been in the jewelry business for 37 years and is almost 80 years old. He thanked his customer friends who have trusted him over the years, and assured them that Fowler would maintain that trust.

Top retirement city

Retirees should think about spending their golden years in Billings, according to Kiplinger, a Washington, D.C.-based financial publication.

Billings was named one of the top 12 retirement destinations by Kiplinger Personal Finance for its August edition.

The publication cited the citys proximity to outdoor recreation and growing urban amenities, lack of sales and estate taxes and strong health care sector.

Facebook exec comes to Billings

An unscheduled guest stopped by Gov. Steve Bullock's Innovation Symposium in downtown Billings last week: Chris Weasler, director of Facebook's global connectivity initiative.

Weasler discussed his work on Internet.org, a Facebook initiative to bring online access to rural areas worldwide.

The biggest challenges are affordability, infrastructure and awareness, Weasler told Bullock in a sit-down interview at the Crowne Plaza hotel.

Asked what he would do to improve Internet access in Montana were he the state's governor, Weasler said, "I would probably anoint a connectivity czar. I would ask that person to put together a broadband connectivity plan."

The two-day Innovation Symposium brought business leaders together from around the state to discuss ways to improve Montana's business climate.

Wrong contractor

Last week, I misidentified whos building the new Western Security Bank branch in Laurel.

The general contractor is Dick Anderson Construction of Billings.

The branch is across the street from Western Securitys current building and will be completed at the beginning of next year.

Haikus from the valley

Marketing downtown

is now easy. Just say find

Pokemon Go there.
YEREVAN, JULY 17, ARMENPRESS: Armenian Police colonel Artur Vanyan was killed during the attack of an armed group on the Patrol Police building in Yerevan on July 17. As Armenpress reports Deputy head of the Armenian Police Hunan Poghosyan told the journalists that the other wounded among the policemen are colonel Aram Hovhannisyan, vice-colonel Hrach Khosteghyan and junior officer Gagik Mkrtchyan. Poghosyan added that there are other police officers with lighter injuries.

An armed group has entered the building of the patrol police department in Yerevan and keeps people there with the threat of violence. The official statement of the National Security Service of Armenia runs as follows A group of armed people have taken hostage a small group of policemen and in order to release them they demand the release of Jirayr Sefilyan who was imprisoned with the charges of illegally obtaining, keeping, transporting weaponry. A policeman has been killed, two have been wounded. In order to stop and disrupt the criminal actions of the armed group that illegally holds the area, the Special Forces have released two hostages. Armenian law enforcement bodies fully control the situation and have undertaken all necessary means to resolve the issue. Meanwhile, the National Security Service calls on the mass media to use the information from official sources, as in case of the contrary that would assist the illegal actions and would pose threat for peoples life and health.
Francis spoke today about Jesuss visit to two sisters, Martha and Mary, one of whom was busy and the other was contemplative. The right attitude belongs to those who "value the most important thing, i.e. the presence of the guest, Jesus." After the Marian prayer, the pope turned his thoughts to the Nice massacre. May God, the good Father, welcome all the victims into his peace, support the wounded and comfort the families. May he dissolve every project of terror and death, so that no one dares to spill his brother's blood. He also greeted the great Chinese brothers and sisters in the square.

Vatican City (AsiaNews)  Guests should not just be served, fed, and cared for in every way. They need to be heard, accepted as people, with their own story, and heart full of feelings and thoughts, so that they can really feel at home," said Pope Francis those who suffered in Nice. "May God welcome all the victims into his peace, support the wounded, and comfort the families."

Today's Gospel is about Jesus' visit to two sisters, Martha and Mary. "Both offered hospitality to the Lord, but they did so in different ways. Mary sat at the feet of Jesus and listened to his words. Martha instead was totally taken by the things she had to prepare. At one point she told Jesus, " Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving? Tell her to help me. " Jesus replied, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her."

In her bustling, Francis added, "Martha might forget, and that's the problem. She might forget that the most important thing is the presence of the guest, Jesus. She forgot the presence of the guest. Guests should not just be served, fed, and cared for in every way. They need to be heard, accepted as people, with their own story, and heart full of feelings and thoughts, so that they can really feel at home. But if you welcome a guest in your house and keep doing your own thing, and he says nothing and you say nothing . . . as if he was the guest of stone. One needs to listen to the guest.

For sure, "the reply Jesus gives Martha  when he says that there is only one thing that is needed  finds its full meaning in reference to listening to the words of Jesus himself, the word that enlightens and supports all that we are and do. If we are going to pray, for example, before the crucifix, and [instead just] talk, talk, and then go away, we do not listen to Jesus. Listening! That is the key word. Do not forget that Jesus words enlighten us. "

But "we must not forget that even in the house of Martha and Mary, Jesus, before he was Lord and Master, he was a pilgrim and a guest. Hence, his reply has this first and most immediate meaning: 'Martha, Martha, why are you doing so much for the guest that you forget his presence?' The stone guest. Not many things are needed to welcome him; indeed, only one thing is necessary: listen to him, the word is listen to him, show him a fraternal attitude so that he feels like he is in a home, not in a temporary shelter. "

Thus understood, "hospitality, which is one of the works of mercy, really looks like a human and Christian virtue, a virtue that in today's world is likely to be neglected. In fact, there are more and more nursing homes and hospices, but not always is real hospitality practiced in these places. Several institutions that cater to many forms of illness, loneliness, and marginalisation are created, but the chance for those who are foreigners, marginalised, or excluded to find someone willing to listen decreases. Because they are outsiders, refugees, or migrants . . . listen to that painful story ... Even in ones own home, among family, it might be easier to find service and care than willingness to listen and welcome. "

Today "we are so frantically caught up by so many problems, some of which are not important, that we lack the ability to listen. We are constantly busy, and so we have no time to listen. Let me ask you, and each of you reply in your own heart: you husband, do you have time to listen to your wife? And you woman, do you have time to listen to your husband? You parents, do you have time to spare to listen to your children? Or you grandparents, the elderly? Old people always say so many things . . . But they need to be heard! I call on you to learn to listen and to spend more time listening. The ability to listen is the root of peace."

After the Angelus, the pope turned his thoughts to the Nice massacre. "The pain over the massacre is alive in our hearts, when last Thursday evening in Nice, so many innocent lives were mowed down, even many children. I am close to each family and the entire French nation in mourning. May God, the good Father, welcome all the victims into his peace, support the wounded and comfort the families. May he dissolve every project of terror and death, so that no one dares to spill his brother's blood. A paternal and fraternal hug goes to all the inhabitants of Nice and the whole French nation. Now let us all pray together, thinking about this massacre, the victims, and the families. Let us pray first in silence [this is followed by a moment of silence in the square, then the popes recitation of Hail Mary].

Immediately after the customary greetings to the pilgrims present, the pope saw "the great Chinese brothers and sisters. A big hello to you." Finally, he wished everyone "a good meal and a good Sunday. Please, do not forget to pray for me! ".
Classic Hairstyles That Never Go Out Of Style

The 5 Classic Hairstyles That Will Never Go Out Of Fashion

Few men have looked back on mohawks or mullets  or, indeed, man buns and braids  with the warmth of nostalgia. But somewhere among all the fleeting trends, five haircuts have stood the test of time. We unpack five classic cuts and explain how to go about styling them.



The Side Parting

The defining look of the '20s, the side parting has not waned in its popularity (mostly due to the popularity of Mad Men). Classically speaking, the top would be a few inches longer than the sides, says Jack Merrick Thirlway, senior stylist at Neville Hair & Beauty. The important thing is that the corners on both sides are square in order to maintain a more masculine shape, he adds. You do need more length at the front but this needs to be measured properly by a barber. Grow it too long and the cut wont sit properly or look neat (or it will just look like a dodgy combover).

A post shared by Charlotte Hughes ????? (@charlottehughes01) on Jul 6, 2017 at 12:40pm PDT

The actual parting should be done with a comb while your hair is still wet. Seek out the point at which the hair naturally wants to separate  this will be different for each guy  rather than attempt to enforce an artificial line. If theres no obvious spot, Thirlway recommends aiming for around the middle of the eyebrow. To style. I would put a matte wax on wet hair and blow-dry it into place. This will give hold and shine without making it look like your head is overloaded with product, he adds.



Celebrity Inspiration: Liam Hemsworth / Daniel Radcliffe

The Buzz Cut

A low-maintenance solution with a distinct dont-mess-with-me vibe, the buzz cut works especially well on guys with a square or well-proportioned face. Those less lucky in the genetics department  or who have bumps and birthmarks on their scalp  can soften the look by leaving a little more length on top. A good barber should be able to adapt this classic style to suit your face shape.



If youre going whole hog, then its a clipper job from start to finish with regular tidy-ups every four weeks or so. Anything under a grade 3 will reveal scalp and make the look more Fight Club than desk job. And while this is a relatively easy cut, wed advise against DIY jobs as you wont be able to attend to your neckline (or, indeed, the back of your head) with any kind of precision.

A post shared by ang kah meng (@meng5354) on Jul 11, 2017 at 1:45am PDT

The buzz cut is ideal for guys who are starting to thin or lose their hair  do it early enough and onlookers will be none the wiser.



Celebrity Inspiration: Wentworth Miller / Matthew Fox

RELATED: The Definitive Guide To Facial Hair Styles

The Quiff

Modest takes on the quiff will feature a soft back and sides while more contemporary incarnations feature a severe disconnect between voluminous length on top and tightly clippered angles. Neither, unfortunately, will look right with a hairline thats receding. Darren Fowler, Creative Director of Fowler35, says, The thing to remember is that a quiff adds height and length to the face so you dont want to overdo it if you already have a long face.

1st campaign shot for my new role as ambassador for Wellman vitamins @vitabiotics #wellman #fitness photo:#tomobrejc hair:@larrykinghair styling:@gracegilfeathergq jacket: @hackettlondon shirt/tie: @emmawillislondon A photo posted by David Gandy (@davidgandy_official) on Jun 7, 2016 at 2:29am PDT

Opting for a quiff means getting to know your blow dryer on a daily basis. Fowler suggests using a gutsy product like a dry shampoo spray (such as Crepage De Chignon by L'Oreal Professionnel) and then blow drying it in, all the while lifting the hair with a comb or brush. Dont forget to keep lifting as the hair cools so it sets in place, he adds.



Celebrity Inspiration: David Gandy / Ryan Gosling



The French Crop

There are countless variations on the French crop, a carefully disheveled style with lots of texture. This cut is a scissor job from start to finish and its adaptable to almost any face shape. The sides and back should be kept relatively short and soft while the top is long enough so that it can be pushed forward or swept to the side. The choppiness of the cut works especially well on guys with naturally wavy hair.



Even though it looks low maintenance, your styling game needs to go up a couple of notches in order to maintain the style. Texturising powders such as Tecniart Super Dust by lOreal Professionnel will give a matte finish, add volume and accentuate the choppiness of the cut.

A post shared by PROFESSIONAL BARBER? MELa (@joel_gonzalez_barber) on Jun 5, 2017 at 2:38pm PDT

As evidenced by George Clooney in his ER heyday, the cut works especially well on mature guys who want to create the illusion of thicker hair. This ultimately comes down to the skills of your stylist. Adam Brady of Ruffians in London says The barber should increase the texture on top by point cutting with downward  rather than horizontal  scissor movements. In addition to this, the sides and back can be tapered tightly in order to create a contrast with the top. Not only will this allow the top to grow out longer but it will give the illusion of thicker hair, he adds.



Celebrity Inspiration: Gary Barlow / George Clooney



The Slick Back

If you have straight hair and a strong hairline, then the slick back can create an air of mature elegance. Popularized in the 20s and 30s, it is a sharp, no-nonsense cut that reveals the whole face, making a moustache or a beard more prominent (along with every tiny facial expression).



Ask your barber to taper the sides with scissors and to leave the top comparatively long (a good four to six inches). Hipsters, meanwhile, will invariably ask for an undercut, which can be achieved with clippers, creating a strong disconnect at the temples. The cut may be simple but it requires a lot of upkeep: ensure the neckline is always shaved clean and that the top doesnt get so long that you fall into mullet (or indeed ducks ass) territory.

@andybovine and I answer the age old question- where do brothers come from? You're welcome. #BrothersDay #mikeanddaveneedweddingdates [link in bio] A photo posted by Zac Efron (@zacefron) on May 24, 2016 at 8:56am PDT

Styling couldnt be easier: blow dry the hair straight back with a comb and finish with a pomade for shine or, alternatively, a matte clay / paste. The pitfall here is that an over-styled or overly sharp slick back is too intense and will invariably make you look like one of those repugnant hedge funder types, a serial killer or, indeed, Silvio Berlusconi. To avoid this, try to create a little height when styling or soften the look with a side parting.



Celebrity Inspiration: Zac Efron / Brad Pitt
A Big Timber-area landowner and the Forest Service have locked horns over an old trail that crosses private land on the eastern face of the Crazy Mountains to access hard-to-reach federal lands.

Hailstone Ranch owners Lee and Barbara Langhus have hired Livingston attorney Joseph Swindlehurst to counter the Forest Services contention that Trail 115, also shown as Trail 136 on some maps, is a public prescriptive easement across their property.

My clients are not aware of any easement that the public or the Forest Service has to cross their property, Swindlehurst wrote in a March 25 letter to Alex Sienkiewicz, the Yellowstone District ranger based in Livingston.

Old trail

The Forest Service sees things differently.

As far as the trail at issue, it is a century-old trail, part of a century-old trail system that circumnavigates the Crazy Mountains and connected historic U.S. Forest Service guard stations, Sienkiewicz wrote in an April 19 response to Swindlehursts letter.

The Billings Gazette received a copy of the correspondence between Swindlehurst and Sienkiewicz  three letters  through a Freedom of Information Act request. A message left for the Langhuses was not returned; instead Swindlehurst returned the call.

Checkerboard

Unlike many other mountainous areas in Montana, the Crazy Mountains are unique in that they contain a patchwork of private and Custer Gallatin National Forest lands. More than 8,000 acres of forest land in the Crazy Mountains is not accessible because the sections are surrounded by private land and because crossing from public land to public land at property corners is illegal in Montana.

The private holdings are remnants of the 50,000 acres in the Crazies given to the Northern Pacific Railroad by the U.S. government in the 1860s as payment for building the transcontinental rail line. In the 1890s the railroad began selling the lands to individuals.

It was in the early 1900s that Ole Langhus homesteaded along Big Timber Creek and began raising sheep, according to a family history posted online. Ole is Lee Langhus grandfather.

The land that Trail 115/136 crosses has been owned by Lee Langhus for about 45 years, according to Swindlehursts letter. In that time the family has not been aware of any public use of the route, he added. The Langhuses now operate Crazy Mountain Ranch Hideaway Cabin rental on the property, touting the beauty, quiet and exclusive access to streams and wildlife on the ranch on their website.

Sienkiewicz has countered that the route has always been on official forest maps and was vetted in such legally mandated public processes as the 2006 Gallatin Forest Travel Plan.

Access seekers

The reason the trail has only recently become a bone of contention is that Sienkiewicz said he has been contacted by several sportsmen over the past year who complained of a locked gate across the trail and a remote camera monitoring who enters. When those people contacted Sienkiewicz, he told them that the Forest Services position is that the agency and the public hold legal rights to use the route.

Billings hunter Joe Rookhuizen said he saw the route on a forest map last year and decided it would be a good way to access federal lands in the Crazy Mountains that are otherwise difficult to reach. Public access to the Crazies along the entire 35 miles of their eastern flank is limited solely to Big Timber Creek.

Rookhuizen contacted Sienkiewicz and then called the Langhus family, leaving a message to let them know he planned to use the route. Langhus didnt return Rookhuizens call until after he had already left for the hunt, but Langhus warned in a message left on Rookhuizens phone that he would be trespassing if he used the trail.

Swindlehurst countered Sienkiewiczs claim that a prescriptive easement exists saying it must be proved by clear and convincing evidence. It is not up to my clients to prove that no prescriptive easement exists across their land. If the Forest Service or the public thinks there is a prescriptive easement across the land, then it is up to them to prove it.

Burden of proof

Its that stance that has prompted the Public Land/Water Access Association to attempt in the last two legislative sessions to pass a bill that would alter the dynamic. Instead of a landowner being able to gate and lock a road or route and force the public to sue to prove it should be open, the onus would be put on the landowner to prove the route isnt public. Both bills have died in committee.

The burden is on the public to prove an access is public, Sienkiewicz said.

Largely for that reason, access to public lands has become a hot button issue across Montana, often pitting landowners  and sometimes their agreements with outfitters for exclusive hunting rights  against public hunters and anglers. The disputes have become more common in the past two decades as many older ranches are sold to new owners who possess different values and desires. One of the big selling points for many large parcels is exclusive access to federal land as well as healthy big game populations for hunting.

Ive been hiking in the Crazies since I was a youngster, Rookhuizen, now 36, said. I continue to see more and more access shut down.

Its also something Sienkiewicz has encountered elsewhere in the Crazy Mountains  the Porcupine Trail, No. 237, on the western side of the range similarly weaves through private land where it has been blocked off.

An offshoot to the access issue is that the lack of public hunting access to some private ranches has led to the growth of large elk herds. The states main means of managing those elk numbers is through public hunting, so without access many herds have grown beyond some ranchers' tolerance levels since the elk can compete with cattle and sheep for feed. The states game managers have been frustrated in attempts to try and reduce elk numbers without having public hunter access to private lands.

Blocked

Sienkiewicz sees the Langhuses attempt to block public access as a way to deny that a prescriptive easement exists by keeping the public off the land for five years.

The history is that the Forest Service has not filed many lawsuits on these access suits lately, Sienkiewicz said, although the Yellowstone District did see a recent success when access was restored to the Cherry and Deer creek areas south of Big Timber. Yet that only occurred after the landowner was threatened with the possibility of eminent domain proceedings.

The agency would rather compromise with landowners, and in his letter Sienkiewicz extended an olive branch to the Langhuses. Swindlehurst wrote his clients probably would consider a further discussion with the Forest Service Supervisors of a land swap.

For now, the Sweet Grass County Sheriff and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks is taking a hands-off approach to the dispute between the Langhuses and the Forest Service.

Sheriff Dan Tronrud said he has not received any trespass complaints so far. If one is made, he said he or one of his officers could cite the individual and leave it up to the county attorney to decide whether to prosecute.

If its a feud between the Forest Service and a landowner, they need to settle that themselves, he said.

Likewise, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks' Bob Gibson said his agency wouldnt get involved other than to state that FWP supports public access to public lands.

We havent done any research on it, and no one has asked us to, he said.

Sienkiewicz sees protecting the old trail as a public access point as part of his duty to the public and to his children and grandchildren.

We represent the general public, Sienkiewicz said. These access points are a big part of their lives.
Hi



My name is Joanne and i am currently living in the UK

I have been with my husband 13 years and been married for 7 years

I have 2 children who live with us and will hopefully be migrating with us



I applied for a spouse visa May 2015

I was allocated a Case Officer 23rd June 2015

I was sent an email 21st December 2015 to ask us to go for our medicals and for our police checks.

We had our Medicals done on 7th January 2016 ..... All Cleared

Police Checks were submitted on 24th January 2016....All Cleared





And now i am over the 14 months waiting time and starting to worry i haven't heard anything. I have tried several times calling them to get an answer they will send a message to the CO but not heard anything......Anyone else having problems? Or our other people getting there Visa's granted quicker than me? I just don't know what to do as i am now worried with having our medicals and police checks done in January when we was asked too we have now only got just over 5 months to get to australia to validate visa before medicals and police checks run out. I really don't understand what the problem is as i thought this would be a straight forward case
Jokes aside, the invitations for the Gigafactory opening specify many other details about the event. From my point of view, Tesla Motors went to such lengths because the American automaker was bombarded with many complaints from invitees after the Model X and Model 3 unveil events.The two screenshots to your right come courtesy of the peeps at the Tesla Motors Club forum and the specifics are pretty straightforward. Arrive at the Sparks, Nevada facility at 5 p.m. for the check-in, have fun on a factory tour or test ride between 6 and 9 p.m., chow something and drink some bubbly from 6 p.m. onward, keep quiet when Elon Musk starts to make his remarks at 9 p.m., then have more fun for the rest of the night.But as Ive stated beforehand, closed toed shoes must be worn. That said, the Gigafactory opening isnt the same thing as the Gigafactory going online.During the Annual Tesla Shareholders Meeting, chief executive officer Elon Musk and Tesla Motors CTO J.B. Straubel made it clear that cell production will begin later this year. If Elon Musk isnt bluffing (like he often does), the planned output of the Gigafactory 1 facility could triple.Also during the Shareholders Meeting, Elon Musk said that production could go up to approximately 105 GWh of battery cells and close to 150 GWh of battery packs . As a brief refresher, Teslas ambitions in building battery cells are supported by the Panasonic Corporation. The cells, for example, will be produced by impressive machines designed by the Japanese conglomerate.Oh, and another thing. Word on the street is Elon Musk will reveal something about the long-awaited Model 3 during the Gigafactory Grand Opening.
17 July 2016 12:56 (UTC+04:00)

Armenias National Security Service has informed about an attack on the police headquarters in Yerevan, RIA Novosti reported.

The attackers have taken hostages, said the statement from Armenias National Security Service.

People are being evacuated from the buildings nearby the seized police headquarters where the attackers are keeping hostages, RIA Novosti reported.

All entrances to the captured police headquarters have been cordoned off.

At the same time, there were attempts to spread misinformation through social networks about the start of a rebellion and capture of buildings in the country, said the security service.

Armenias Security Service officially announces that this information is false. Armenias public administration bodies operate in a normal mode and the law enforcement bodies carry out their functions for ensuring security, said the statement.

An armed group captured a police regiment in Yerevan on July 17 in the morning and demanded the resignation of Armenian authorities, press service of the countrys police said, TASS reported.

The representatives of Armenian authorities have started talks with the armed group which has seized the headquarters of the police and interior troops in Erebuni, Yerevan, Interfax news agency reported citing Armenian National Security Service.

We assure that this and any other illegal activities will be immediately suppressed by the law enforcement bodies and those who have carried out these activities will be neutralized and brought to justice, said the security service.

One police was killed and 2 injured as a resualt of capture of a group of armed men of the building of police and internal troops in Yerevan, Interfax reported.

Earlier, Interfax reported that a group of armed men seized the building of police and internal troops in Yerevan, demanding the release of arrested of the coordinator of the opposition Armenian civil initiative Founding Parliament Zhirayr Sefilyan, .

Sefilyan was arrested June 20 for possession of weapons.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
17 July 2016 13:54 (UTC+04:00)

Euroactiv news portal has published an article prepared by Texas-based global intelligence company Stratfor titled Talking around the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The article says: Diplomatic talks over the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute are proceeding apace. These unusually positive accounts could bode well for talks over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which have been at a stalemate for more than two decades. In April, dozens of soldiers on both sides of the dispute were killed and hundreds more injured when fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia briefly escalated to levels not seen since a cease-fire was reached there in 1994. The flare-up sparked fears that another large-scale military conflict between the two countries could erupt.

That said, continuing to hold talks that produce no significant change to the status quo may not be tenable in the long term. After all, a lack of progress in negotiations precipitated the April skirmish in the first place, and Azerbaijan is unlikely to stand by indefinitely for the current round of talks. If diplomacy does not produce tangible results, a similar or more serious military escalation by Azerbaijan cannot be ruled out. But, ultimately, resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will require actions more than words.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
17 July 2016 09:00 (UTC+04:00)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded the US for extradition Fethullah Gulen, NTV TV reports on Saturday.

He also noted that the movement of Fethullah Gulen, Islamic public figure currently residing in the US, stands behind the attempted military coup.

Addressing a crowd in Istanbul less than 24 hours after his call for the public to take the streets helped end a coup, Erdogan said Turkey had asked the U.S. many times to extradite Pennsylvania-based preacher Gulen, an expatriate Turk, Azertag reported

"I had told you [the U.S.] to deport or give this person back to Turkey."

"I had told you that this person was in a preparation for a coup against Turkey, but I could not make you listen to me," Erdogan said.

Reiterating his demand, Erdogan said, "I repeat my call on the U.S. and president [Barack Obama], give this person back to Turkey."

Erdogan also emphasized that Fridays failed coup had not come from within the higher echelons of the army but instead "a small minority within the military."

"They [Gulen supporters] were like a tumor within the military, and now this tumor is being removed," he added.

Friday night saw military elements make a vile attempt to overthrow Turkeys elected government, according to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Around 160 people were martyred in the ensuing violence.

Some 2,839 military personnel involved in the coup attempt have been arrested, and 20 pro-coup soldiers, including some senior officers, were killed in the attempt to overthrow the government.

The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life.

Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the prime minister.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
17 July 2016 12:39 (UTC+04:00)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has vowed to deal with the issue of unconventional salaries.

The government promises to tackle the unconventional salaries, IRNA news agency quoted President Rouhani as saying at a gathering of people in the western province of Kermanshah.

Saying that the government has already taken immediate measures against the unconventionally high salaries paid to a group of senior managers at the country, he added that these types of violation of law will not make the people to forget embezzlements that took place in the country in past, IRNA news agency reported.

The government pledges to settle the issue of unconventional salaries but the government will not forget about the violations of the law that took place in the previous years and also the issue of fighting against the corruption, he added.

The president is in Kermanshah Province on a one-day official visit as part of his provincial tours.

Over the past three months, President Hassan Rouhanis government has been harshly criticized as the payslips of several high-ranking government employees were leaked online, revealing that they were receiving unusually high salaries or bonuses.

Several high-ranking financial managers were later dismissed over the scandal.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
17 July 2016 12:41 (UTC+04:00)

Former commander of the Turkish Air Force General Akin Ozturk, who has been accused on a coup attempt, has said that Chief of General Staff of Turkish Armed Forces Hulusi Akar was aware of preparations for a military coup in the country, the Milliyet newspaper reported July 17.

I was acting jointly with Hulusi Akar, said Ozturk while being arrested.

Turkish leadership informed about a military coup attempt in the country July 15 in the evening. The servicemen, for their part, announced about seizing the power. The rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 in the morning. Turkish authorities said that the coup attempt has failed.

Turkish law enforcement bodies have already arrested 2,800 people. As many as 161 people were killed as a result of the coup attempt, according to the latest reports.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
When Montana education officials proposed new science standards Thursday, they emphasized the standards' local roots.

They are truly Montanas science standards, said Jael Prezeau, the Office of Public Instruction director of content standards and instruction.

The standards also bear a striking resemblance to Next Generation Science Standards, which were developed by a 26-state group in 2013. The proposed standards, which the Board of Public Education signed off on, are endorsed by many education and industry groups, including ExxonMobil, and are praised for being more rigorous and encouraging more critical thinking.

They have also been controversial, particularly for linking climate change to human activity and for explicitly addressing evolution.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau emphasized that committees who wrote the standards reviewed examples from 17 states; she never actually used the phrase Next Generation Science Standards during repeated questioning about the relationship with the proposed standards.

That was one of the resources that they looked at, she said. There was tons of opportunity for people to have input into this. At the end of the day, whatever the draft looks like, thats what it reflects.

University of Montana education professor Lisa Blank noted that changes between Montanas proposed standards and NGSS mean that you cant use the terms interchangeably, despite similarities. Other states have adopted standards that draw heavily from NGSS, but they arent included in the official tally of 16 states who have adopted NGSS.

Whatever their name, its clear that the standards are built on the back of NGSS. While a handful edits significantly change the language from NGSS and the proposed standards dont include NGSS engineering standards, most changes clarify language like adding and contrast to compare, or adding provisions for Indian Education For All. Significant sections read verbatim from NGSS.

Scott Dubbs, the curriculum director for Lewistown who was involved in writing the proposed standards, called them Montanas take on what we think is important in NGSS.

In at least one area, a tweak appears to back away from human-caused climate change.

The final NGSS standard in the "Earth and Human Activity" section reads, "use a computational representation to illustrate the relationships among Earth systems and how those relationships are being modified due to human activity."

The proposed Montana standard that appears to correspond reads "create a computational simulation to illustrate the relationships among management of natural resources, the sustainability of human populations, biodiversity, and investigate and explain how some American Indian tribes use scientific knowledge and practices in managing natural resources."

The phrase "modified due to human activity," is gone.

However, NGSS and the proposed standards match up on other standards in the section, like "evaluate or refine a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems."

Perhaps state officials have reason to be wary of comparing the proposed standards to NGSS. In 2014 Wyoming education officials signed off on NGSS, only to watch the state legislature torpedo the standards by banning the state from spending money to review or adopt NGSS. Some lawmakers from the coal-producing state blasted language regarding climate change and humans as a leading cause.

However, individual Wyoming school districts appear free to adopt the standards on their own, which several districts have done, and state officials have resumed work on crafting new standards. The budget language banning NGSS funding has since been removed.

Montana's legislature has little power over Montana's education standards. When a legislator declared in 2013 that he was going to defund Common Core, Juneau said that there was nothing to defund; the legislature didn't dedicate any specific money to its implementation.

Angela McLean, the former lieutenant governor and chair of the Montana Board of Regents who now works for the Commissioner of Higher Education, praised members of committees who crafted the proposed Montana standards for their bravery.

(NGSS) shook up the education community, perhaps moreso folks in the political arena, she said.

Laurel, home to the Montana Family Foundation, a conservative nonprofit that frequently advocates against federal education policy, is known as a hotbed of anti-Common Core sentiment in Montana. While several districts said they work to balance community views with state standards, schools are ultimately beholden to state officials.

From my perspective, were gonna follow what the state standards say, Laurel Superintendent Linda Filpula said. We follow the Board of Public Education. Whatever shakes out, were accredited by the Office of Public Instruction.

She and other administrators said that there are sensitive ways to address controversial topics like evolution and climate change.

"What we would like to do is work from an evidence-based approach and encourage students to learn to be consumers of the information and to critically think and evaluate and use evidence to make judgments, said Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent Mark Thane. Missoula recently adopted NGSS.

Were trying not to force science on everybody  that this is the only way to believe it, but (instead teach) this is what science is, Dubbs said. Weve really tried to walk the fine line and not just rub things into peoples noses. I just think the critical part in that is respecting where each others at.

Its very easy to take the high road and just not teach that (controversial) stuff, which some districts do, he said. They just try to not offend anybody.

Thane said that Missoula had no major opposition while considering NGSS.

When there is opposition, it's not just about external debate, Dubbs said. It can affect classroom relationships and student learning.

Theres a tendency to kind of forget (opposition) is there, he said. It creates a level of distrust, thats its just a black-and-white issue. That isnt the world. That isnt how it works.

You have to work with all of those kids and all of the things that they bring with them.
UP

Serious fun. Today the Big Sky State Games completes its three-day run in Billings and its 31st year of bringing together amateur athletes for healthy competition. Congratulations to the 10,000 athletes who competed this weekend and at events throughout the year. Thanks to the many sponsors, the dedicated volunteers and small staff led by Karen Sanford Gall. Billings is proud to be the home of the Big Sky State Games, the No. 1 state games in the nation for per capita participation.

UP

Expanded care. The new primary care clinic at RiverStone Health got another dose of strong community support with a $150,000 gift from the First Interstate Bank and its foundation. Groundbreaking on the $11 million project is scheduled for Aug. 9.

UP

Convention business. Billings hosted a bevy of visitor groups last week and this weekend. Seventy-seven cars departed from Skypoint early Monday morning to start the four-state Big Sky Rally. The governors Innovate Montana business conference convened downtown at midweek. Then came the opening events of Big Sky State Games, Outdoor Writers Association of America, Catholic Alumni Clubs International and Chevrolet Nomads Association. The confluence of conferences is the result of hard work on the part of Visit Billings and its energetic executive director, Alex Tyson. Total local economic impact for the week of visitors is estimated to be $5 million.
It has been just over six years since President Barack Obama signed his sweeping health care legislation into law, subjecting every American to federal mandates. How is it working out? Are your insurance premiums lower? Are your deductibles lower? Is it easier to get an appointment to see a physician? Were you able to keep your same physician?

The legislation was passed in such a fashion as to strain the boundaries of the Constitution so severely that the Supreme Court had to decide if several of its components were legal, including whether the costs to implement the legislation were considered taxes or just fees.

Call them whatever you want, the American people and the people of Montana have been paying dramatically more for health insurance ever since the passage of Obamacare. Two weeks ago, the Montana Auditors Office (review online at CSIMT.gov) released the new rate requests from insurance companies, and rates are increasing yet again. The proposed rate increases range from a whopping 20 percent to an unbelievably high 108 percent. In simple terms, that means your already-high insurance premium could be twice as high next year.

While the auditors office does not set rates, they do set policy; that policy affects price. The current auditors office has been staunch advocates of Obamas nationalized health care agenda which has been a disaster for the people of Montana. The auditors office has refused to support options such as primary care provider agreements, health care sharing ministries, and increased competition across state lines for insurance. I have worked tirelessly in an attempt to pass many of these reforms while serving as majority leader in the Montana Senate. I believe that providing options  not mandates  is the best way to reduce costs and improve the quality of our health care.

Meanwhile, insurance companies are guaranteed a profit and their executives are receiving huge bonuses. Who is really looking out for you?

Montana will not see any meaningful change in the cost and delivery of health care as long as the same people continue to play musical chairs in the offices that are charged with watching over it.
The University of Montana has suffered tremendously from five painful years of bad publicity, the loss of several thousand students, the accompanying loss of millions of dollars in revenue, and devastating cuts that have gutted its budget and curriculum. Meanwhile, the UM president and the commissioner of higher education have failed to address the unfolding crisis.

Instead of accepting any responsibility for the abysmal state of the university, they have assigned surrogates and proxies to attack their critics, portraying them as an isolated and disgruntled minority, all the while continuing to blame the root causes of the present crisis on an array of external and, at times, irrelevant factors.

After five years of alarming decline, we have no choice but to confront the stubborn facts in front of us, especially because they have a direct impact on the Missoula and Montana economies:

1. Since 2011, the University of Montana has lost more than 3,000 students;

2. Since 2011, the University of Montana has lost tens of millions of dollars;

3. In addressing budgetary shortfalls, the UM administration has cut low-paid staff positions, as well as a significant number of academic positions either by direct cuts or by not filling positions that have become vacant due to retirements.

The administration has refused to cut any high-paid administrators. In fact, the UM administration has spent millions on hiring a team of administrators who have not been able to address the financial and academic challenges confronting UM. Neither the commissioner of higher education nor the UM president seem to understand the fundamental fact that throwing money at pricey bureaucratic positions is not a sustainable solution for an institution fighting for its survival.

4. The plan for downsizing UM originated in OCHE in Helena, the same office which has added new administrative positions for itself. Commissioner of Higher Education Clayton Christian, whose present salary stands at $302,000, is expected to receive a $455,000 bonus, while the UM President Royce Engstrom, expects to receive a $500,000 bonus, to be paid over 10 years. Christian was appointed to the commissioner's post after the Board of Regents decided not to conduct a national search for the position. At the same time, the regents did away with the requirement that the commissioner hold a doctoral degree. Christian holds only a bachelor's degree.

UM suffers from inept leadership, both in Helena and Missoula. Worse, the sharp drop in enrollment numbers has had a profound impact on Missoula's economy.

It is troubling to see that Gov. Steve Bullock has refused to address the numerous petitions that his office has received, signed by hundreds of Montana residents pleading with him to address the alarming situation at UM. As a Democrat who has voted for Bullock, I expect no less of him than to act like a true leader and confront this situation head on. Montana higher education cannot be used as a political tool in this or any election year. Montana's universities are the state's economic engines and they play a central role in educating and training the workforce for the great state of Montana.

What is to be done? First, the leadership of the Montana University System should be recruited through open and transparent national searches, which would allow the best and the brightest, as well as the most competent and experienced to rise to the top. Second, rewards and bonuses should be paid based on performances and outcomes. If, after five years of abysmal performance, a leader and a team cannot produce positive results, they should be replaced by a new group of leaders who can produce the necessary results.

Third, the Board of Regents is ultimately responsible for addressing the present crisis at UM. The board is obligated to take a deep look at the underlying causes of the decline and hold open meetings in which a diverse set of voices are heard. UM leadership should be held accountable by Montana's taxpayers. Accountability is the cornerstone of good governance.
Some Bay area medical professionals are joining the fight to tackle the nations opioid epidemic.

Probuphine approved by FDA in May

Treatment involves implant that releases medication daily

Expert says opiod addiction in Bay area on the rise

A treatment called Probuphine allows doctors to implant a subdermal device that releases medication daily for a six-month period. If doctors want to continue medication after that, they can remove the device and implant another six-month dose in the opposite arm.



Dr. Michael Frost, an addiction medicine specialist out of Philadelphia, led a training session this weekend to teach Bay area doctors how to administer the treatment.



"This is the first time that it has gone into a form that the patient doesn't have to worry about remembering to take every day or can possibly forget to take every day," Dr. Frost said.



Dr. Michael Cromer is one of the local doctors who participated in the training. He said opioid addiction is on the rise in the Bay area.



"I've been managing patients with opioid dependencies for about 25 years," said Cromer, "and certainly we've seen a rise over the last 10 years."



Probuphine was approved by the FDA in May.



Federal leaders have also recently taken action to tackle the nations opioid crisis. The Senate passed legislation that would strengthen prevention, treatment and recovery efforts largely by empowering medical professionals and law enforcement with more tools to help drug addicts.



To learn more about Probuphine, visit the manufacturer's website at braerunpharmaceuticals.com.


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The green stalks all in a tidy row poked above irrigation water in the July heat, awaiting harvest.

The grains of rice inside, which are headed to seven unidentified millers for an opinion of their quality, are the culmination of more than six years of seed cultivation by Rodante Tadien, an assistant professor and rice breeder at the Texas A&M University Agri-Life Center on U.S. 90.

A plaque in front of the plot of rice is labeled "TXEL001."

If the rice succeeds in its milling and is accepted, Tadien will have the honor of naming it.

It's been his practice to name a new rice variety for a river in Texas, though this one won't be revealed until the milling evaluation is done later this year.

There already is a "Neches," which was named by Anna McClung, a former A&M rice scientist who worked at the Beaumont station. She now leads a similar operation in Stuttgart, Arkansas, another major rice-growing area.

"Sabine" also is taken, as are "Brazos" and "Presidio" and "Jacinto," named for the San Jacinto River.

"We will not run out of names," Tadien said.

How about "Trinity?"

"It's on my list," he said.

A rice breeder deals in growing seasons, one after the other, to learn the traits of the seed he is trying to cultivate and to encourage the traits he wants. It's not for people seeking instant gratification.

By contrast, "the farmers are" impatient, said Mo Way, the Beaumont station's entomologist, who studies the pests that endanger crops.

"I wish I had a magic wand," Tadien said. "We're working for the farmers. We love our jobs."On Thursday, Tadien and Way sat in metal folding chairs waiting for tourists on trailers pulled by the station's pickup trucks.

As the trucks pulled up to each stop, the scientists explained what was in back of them.

Way spoke of a pest that migrated from Central and South America and attacked rice crops in the Texas southern rice belt around Brazoria County.

The pests didn't damage the main crop but infested the second, or ratoon, crop, which grows from the stubble of the first-cut harvest.

The pests might not have had enough mass to damage the main crop but wielded sufficient power to destroy 25 percent of the ratoon crop, Way said. The pest hasn't been spotted in Southeast Texas.

"I just want to alert, not alarm," Way told a trailer of tourists. "It was here for one or two years in the late 1950s, early 1960s and then disappeared."

Rice, like wheat, is not a grain crop that is typically genetically modified, mostly because of market resistance, Way said.

The rice breeders prefer "mutation" breeding to produce the results they want, which is a disease-resistant, high-yield grain that also defeats its relative weed known as red rice, which mimics a rice plant, but has no grain within the head of the plant.

Just down the way from Tadien's TXEL001 are stands of other named rices, like Jupiter, from Arkansas.

Louisiana breeders also contribute Cajun names to creations that emanate from research at Louisiana State University.

LSU created a variety called "Jazzman" because New Orleans is famous for jazz. The rice is an aromatic variety. Think "jasmine."

DWallach@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/dwallach
Donald Trump probably thinks the Hippocratic Oath is something a Greek guy shouts if he stubs his toe. But he got the legendary part of it right anyway with his VP selection: First, do no harm.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is mostly known for being unknown outside the Midwest. He's very conservative - initially endorsing Sen. Ted Cruz for president - but that's true of most elected Republicans these days. But Pence also served in the U.S. House for six terms and is generally respected within the party. He brings gravitas to the ticket, which is important if the guy at the top is a reality TV star.

To prove that point, Trump almost unselected Pence soon after he had chosen him. Several reports had Trump making frantic phone calls late Thursday night to see if he could back away from Pence before Friday's announcement. But either because he really wanted Pence, or it would have been too embarrassing to switch gears, Trump stuck with him.

Hey, it could have been worse. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were also on Trump's short list. If there's anything worse than one blowhard on a ticket, it's two of them. Newt, like Trump, is also on his third wife. Six combined marriages on one ticket is too much of a good thing for the party of family values. Just sayin'.

Compared to Trump, Pence is low-key, some would even say boring. That's actually a plus for the millions of voters who detest Hillary Clinton but have serious reservations about putting a wild card like Trump in the White House. Pence offers reassurance that if a President Trump started ranting about nuking some country - which he has actually done, incidentally - real grownups would be there to talk him down.

Pence isn't a woman or a minority, and Trump said he wouldn't try to pander by selecting someone for race or gender. He deserves some credit for that, but he's also mistaken if he thinks he can win by just appealing to cranky old white guys like him and Pence - and Newt and Christie. (Even though it worked in the primaries.)

Pence won't help Trump carry a single state. Indiana is solidly Republican and would have gone for him anyway. But Pence won't cost him any state, and that's important too. Pence also differs with Trump on some major issues like trade, but that's not a problem either since Trump is, ahem, "flexible" on actual issues.

It's often said the VP nominations don't matter because people vote for the person at the top of the ticket, not the bottom. That's basically true, but a candidate's first significant choice also says a lot about how he or she might govern and his or her values.

Even if it matters a little, in the end this election will be Trump's to win or lose - as it should be for Hillary too. But since both candidates are highly unpopular, their VP choices will get more attention than usual.

Now if we could only persuade Trump or Clinton to resign immediately after getting inaugurated, the next four years might not be so gloomy.

----------------------------

Thomas Taschinger, TTaschinger@BeaumontEnterprise.com, is the editorial page editor of The Beaumont Enterprise. Follow him on Twitter at @PoliticalTom
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Actress Bryce Dallas Howard has praised the "wisdom and courage" of Jennifer Aniston following her criticism of tabloid scrutiny of female celebrities.

The Jurassic World star said Aniston "took a stand for people taking responsibility for their own words" after she issued a lengthy statement denying reports she was pregnant.

The Friends actress told how she was "fed up" with "body-shaming" by celebrity news outlets and branded the "objectification" of women as "absurd and disturbing".

Howard told the Press Association: "I think Jen approached that essay with such grace and wisdom and courage.

"There are often times a lot of people will say about celebrities, 'We don't want to hear it'. She had something to say that wasn't just about someone who's in the public eye.

"It's about women, but also just humans in general, and the way we interact with one and other, and the ways in which judgment can actually affect a person.

"She really took a stand for people taking responsibility for their own words and the things they put out there. I think that was really important what she did."

Promoting the new Disney movie Pete's Dragon, Howard said having a famous father, film director Ron Howard, had helped her acting career.

"I think largely I've pretty much only experienced positive things," she said.

"It's obviously a great help to have a parent who when you ask for advice about the work you're doing, they can actually give you a really well-informed answer.

"My parents were really supportive of me. They didn't say, 'Oh go and get a real job'. They did say, 'You'll have to get real jobs to make a living but of course we're fully supportive of you pursuing this'.

"Just having parents who are emotionally supportive like that makes all the difference in the world."

Pete's Dragon, which stars Howard and Robert Redford, is released in UK cinemas on August 12.
An ambulance worker and police officers were assaulted in Coleraine

A man has been charged after an ambulance worker and police officers were assaulted in Coleraine.

The 21-year-old has been charged with two counts of assaulting an ambulance worker following an incident at a property in the Lodge Road area on Friday.

He has also been charged with grievous bodily harm, common assault, criminal damage, attempted criminal damage and assault on police.

He is due to appear at Coleraine Magistrates' court on Monday 18th July.
A Belfast couple's campaign to save their dog after he was seized by Belfast City Council has raised over 5000 in less than 24 hours.

Joanne Meadows said she was shocked on Friday when police officers and council workers arrived at her home and took Hank away, and turned to Facebook to vent her heartache.

"To whoever reported Hank to the council for 'looking like a pitbull' - thank you so much for not even giving me the courtesy of speaking to me first," she wrote in a post that was shared thousands of times across the world.

Joanne has launched a social media campaign to save Hank, and more than 15,000 people have liked the page.

They have also set up a crowdfunding page to help raise money for their legal costs.

The online appeal has raised over 4,545 in less than 24 hours.

Joanne's partner Leonard Collins posted: "Hank was taken from my home by 8 police officers and 4 dog wardens. He has been condemned to die because he looks like a pitbull.

"Our only legal recourse is to fight this in the courts. We will do anything to save Hank, he is a much loved part of our family. He is more than a pet. The best chance at returning Hank to his home is to prove that he is not dangerous, this is costly due to the need for professional opinion."

He also has thanked everyone who had shown support.

He added they do not plan to speak to the media until they have consulted with a lawyer.

Expand Close A campaign has been launched to save Hank the dog / Facebook

Twitter

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Whatsapp A campaign has been launched to save Hank the dog

"Joanne and I are both overwhelmed with the genuine compassion that is being expressed", he said, "We are sorry that we haven't had the opportunity to get back to everyone but we do very much appreciate you reaching out," he posted on the Save Hank page on Facebook.

"We are aware of all of the support and pressure groups and before we speak to them or the media regarding Hank we feel it is prudent to meet with our legal counsel.

"This should be happening early next week. The same goes for blood testing issues, this will be discussed with our solicitors.

"Joanne and I have always been aware of the discriminatory nature of BSL legislation but recent events have solidified our opinions on the matter.

"Eight police officers and four dog wardens removed Hank from my home yesterday, three days after a warrant was signed by a judge."

Read more

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A spokeswoman for Belfast City Council said: "The council has a statutory duty in relation to the enforcement of the Dogs (NI) Order 1983 as amended. The dog known as Hank has been taken in for assessment, and it would be inappropriate to comment further while this assessment is ongoing.

"We would like to assure those who have expressed concern about the dog's welfare that he is being well looked after and his needs are being met."

Two years ago, a campaign to save a Belfast dog named Lennox hit the headlines around the world.

Lennox was seized by Belfast City Council in 2010 as an "illegal pit-bull terrier type" dog, and was put to sleep in 2012 following a lengthy legal battle.
BUTTE  Watching chunks of ore get crushed into money is billionaire Dennis Washington's favorite pastime when he visits the mine he owns in Butte  Montana Resources.

Not so surprising for the Montanan with a Midas touch.

Now 82, Washington has built an empire that includes not only the Butte mine, but also rail and shipping companies, as well as aviation technology, environmental remediation and heavy equipment companies. Forbes magazine ranks Washington as the 241st richest man in the U.S. and estimates his worth at $6 billion. Forbes lists Washington as the richest man in the state.

But it wasnt always so. He started with virtually nothing. The Missoula-based Washington launched his construction empire in 1966 with a D-8 Caterpillar bulldozer, a $30,000 loan and a contract to build roads for the Forest Service.

Washington believes the key to his success came from a simple formula  work hard and love the work. In an emailed response to The Montana Standard, Washington described how he got MRs Butte operations  once a defunct mine no one else would buy  off the ground:

I believe (we benefited from) my discipline to be a very hard worker, and (that I) always did the best I could do. (And from) my passion for anything to do with equipment. I also have always pursued opportunities that have come before me with passion and discipline.

Retired MR president Frank Gardner, 82, attributes Washingtons success  and his Midas touch  to more than that. Gardner, who has known Washington for 35 years, says Washington takes chances.

He always said, Im not a gambler, but Im a risk-taker, Gardner said.

In the beginning

The story of Dennis Washington is also the story of Montana Resources and Butte. All three are intimately entwined.

When Atlantic Richfield Co. bought the nearly 100-year old Anaconda Copper Mining Co. in 1977, times were still good in Butte and nearby Anaconda. But it didnt last.

Gardner, a third-generation Butte miner, had relocated to Butte in the late 1970s after spending a few years working in mines abroad. ARCO hired Gardner to run Buttes Berkeley Pit  at the time one of the worlds largest open pit copper mines  and he remembers that by 1979 the operation was losing money.

ARCO lost $100 million over two years, Gardner recalls. We were asking to shut down. There was no hope left.

By the time the shovels fell silent for good in the Berkeley Pit in June 1983, ARCO had laid off 1,300 workers in Butte. This blow came on top of ARCO shutting down the Anaconda smelter in 1980. These were bleak times for the Richest Hill on Earth.

Copper prices were less than 79 cents a pound when ARCO ended its operations. It was costing the company $1.30 a pound to mine copper in Butte, a New York Times article reported in 1982.

Current Butte-Silver Bow Chief Executive Matt Vincent moved in the late 1970s with his family to Butte, where his father, a bricklayer, found plenty of work.

At 13, he distinctly remembers how the closure affected his family.

Nobody knew what was going to happen when the mine shut down. It was right after we had put down roots. (Vincents dad) ended up working out of state all the time, Vincent said.

Don Peoples Sr., who was chief executive of Butte-Silver Bow from 1979 to 1990, said the smelter and mining closures sent shock waves through the community. Unemployment in Butte rose to 20 percent. The countys tax revenue fell sharply.

A lot of people were really hurting, Peoples said.

With precipitously falling mineral prices, Gardners plan was to close the mine, with the hope of reopening it a year later. But ARCO, an oil giant, decided to get out of the mining business altogether and sought to divest itself of the property.

Peoples remembers trying to shop the mine around to different mining companies.

We went to every major copper company. Everybody (but Washington) said, bye-bye, Peoples said.

Washington steps in

Washington was willing to take a chance on a mine  and a town  that no one else would take.

If it hadnt been for Dennis   Peoples said, his voice trailing off.

The risk was that much greater because the Berkeley Pit was an environmental disaster. With the closure of the underground mines, the pit began to slowly fill with water contaminated by heavy metals.

The Environmental Protection Agency had declared the Berkeley Pit, Silver Bow Creek, a portion of the Clark Fork River and the towns of both Butte and Anaconda as Superfund sites in the early to mid-1980s. This made the area one of the largest Superfund sites in the U.S.

When Peoples and Gardner were trying to find a new owner for the mining operation, no one knew for sure what they were buying into  on top of the uncertain commodity prices.

In addition, ARCO made a deal with Butte-Silver Bow that if the county couldnt find a buyer by 1986, the company would tear down the concentrator, an integral part of the pits mining operation. Without that, Peoples felt no one would ever again mine in Butte.

It was September 1985. The clock on the concentrator was ticking. Washington expressed interest.

Washington was busy building a stretch of Interstate 15 between Butte and Helena, Peoples said.

Gardner knew Washington because he had supplied trucks for the Berkeley Pit. Washington showed up to view the defunct mining site with a friend who had experience in scrapping a mine in Wyoming.

But by December 1985, Washington had changed his mind.

Gardner, who said Washington was willing to listen, said he talked Washington into going into a different direction. In his emailed statement to The Standard, Washington explained what happened:

"Frank Gardner had a plan that he felt confident would be successful if we decided to open the mine. ARCO said they would pay until the end of the year for approximately 60 people, which gave us time to do the things we had to get done to make it work: power, smelting, labor, financing. (I believed) in the people Frank put together, and (had) confidence in Frank. The work force wanted to get the mine going."

Gardner said that once Washington made up his mind to reopen the operations as an active open pit copper mine, there was no turning back, no matter what the risks.

He thinks (things) out in his mind, Gardner said of Washingtons decision-making process. Once hes made a decision, thats it.

After Washington bought the operation, he and Gardner flew to Butte. On that day, laid-off miners who had built a giant replica of the Virgin Mary  called Our Lady of the Rockies  atop the East Ridge were putting the final piece onto the statue. Gardner remembers standing with Washington watching the helicopter as it hovered over the ridge. They stood outside of MRs office building on Continental Drive for the first time.

They were putting the head on the Lady of the Rockies. That was a good sign, Gardner said.

Butte-Silver Bow Commissioner Jim Fisher, who began working in the mines in 1975 while still in high school, called that moment, "a spark of light for the community."

How MR came to be

By then, the price of copper had dropped to 60 cents a pound. Molybdenum, a metal used to harden steel, among other uses, hovered at $3 a pound. Within the next seven months, copper slipped again to 58 cents a pound.

Everyone kept saying, we cant do it, Gardner said. The mill wont run. But he stood with us. It took my breath away, but he said, lets go with it, and we did.

The Continental Pit, only partially dug under ARCO, became the new open pit copper mine. On July 16, 1986, at 12:08 p.m., the first blast went off on the floor of the Continental Pit, located just east of the defunct Berkeley Pit, launching the new era of mining in Butte.

Now, 30 years later, MR has weathered the ups and downs of commodity prices, taking on partial liability for the Berkeley Pit Superfund site and a temporary closure in the early 2000s. Today, the Continental Pit employs about 350 people and provides some of the highest paying jobs in the county. The mine that in 1986 was expected to have a 16-year operation has a mining permit that runs through 2040.

Of all the businesses Washington has touched, MR might be the one that best proves that the man who started with next to nothing has an almost uncanny ability to turn that nothing into gold  or perhaps copper.

Gardner remembered a joke he told Washington once. He repeated it to The Standard with an impish grin.

I told him not to buy a mortuary. If he did, everybody would die the next day.
A probe has been launched into the incident

A family have escaped injury after a number of shots were fired at their home in west Belfast. It was reported that the shots were fired through the front window and door of the house in Tollnamona Court in the early hours of Saturday morning.  Matt Mackey / Press Eye

A child has escaped injury after shots were fired at a house in the middle of the night.

Detectives are investigating the shooting incident in Tollnamona Court in west Belfast in the early hours of Saturday, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said.

It was reported that a number of shots were fired through the front window and door of the house at around 2.40am.

A man, woman and child who were upstairs in the house at the time of the shooting were not injured.

Detective Sergeant Keith Wilson said: "We are currently working to establish a motive for this incident and I would appeal to anyone with any information to contact detectives at Musgrave on 101, quoting reference 176 16/07/16.

"Information can also be given anonymously through the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111."
Police and the family of missing 35 year old Kevin Shortt from the Dunmurry area are becoming increasingly concerned for his welfare. Image supplied by PSNI Press Office 17 July 2016

Police are appealing for help to find a 35-year-old Dunmurry man who has not been seen for over a week.

Kevin Shortt was last seen in the Woodside Walk area of Dunmurry on Friday July 8 and was wearing a grey Superdry jacket, grey trousers and black slippers.

Kevin is around 511 tall, of slim build with dark shaven hair and a dark beard and has the names Andrew, Lewis and Caoimihin tattooed on his arms.

Police said Kevin is known to frequent the greater west Belfast and Drumbo Park areas and officers are appealing for Kevin or anyone who knows of his whereabouts to contact them at Woodbourne on 101 quoting reference 629 15/07/16.
Gerry Adams has rejected calls to stand aside as leader of Sinn Fein in the Republic

Gerry Adams has rejected calls to stand aside as leader of Sinn Fein in the Republic.

Sources close to the party say he is facing his biggest challenge to date as leader.

A growing number of party workers want Mr Adams to step aside and assume a position such as 'honorary vice president' so the party can expand in the Republic.

A call by the chairman of a Cavan Sinn Fein cumann for Mr Adams to step down was described by sources yesterday as "very significant". It is the first time that a long-time member of the party has called on Mr Adams to resign.

It is believed among party members that the call by the Virginia-Mullagh cumann chairman, Tommy McNulty, who is originally from Co Tyrone, is being seen as the start of a move to get Mr Adams to retire.

Mr McNulty's call for Mr Adams to step aside, the first from a serving party member in the Republic, was contained in a letter he wrote to the Irish News after Mr Adams gave an interview in which he said he had no intention of retiring as leader. Mr Adams has been president of Sinn Fein since 1983.

In his letter, Mr McNulty said he had been present at the 1986 Sinn Fein Ard Fheis when Mr Adams and other figures from the North assumed control over the party. He wrote: "I supported that transition of leadership because I knew that the years ahead needed the leadership of the Northern men and women under Mr Adams to steer the republican movement from conflict to peace.

"This has now been successfully achieved, due in no small measure to Mr Adams and his team and the top of the party.

"But just as there was a time for change in 1986, there is a time for change again in 2016. Sammy Davis Jnr once famously said that one of the great secrets of life was 'knowing when to get on the stage and knowing when to get off it'. I believe the time has come for Mr Adams to get off it."

Sources close to the party said it is the first time such a direct call has been made from a long-serving member in the Republic.

It signals that the party in the Republic is 'fed-up' with the domination by Mr Adams's Northern-based leadership, who are out of touch with events south of the border. One source said there is "exasperation" over Mr Adams's insistence on "hogging" media time to speak for the party on almost any subject.

Mr McNulty said there was a view within the party that it was time for Mr Adams to assume a role of "honorary vice president" or take on an "ambassadorial role" for the party.

Speaking in Dublin yesterday, Mr Adams rejected the call and said he was launching a "party consultation process".

Source: Sunday Independent
Boris Johnson is not a Donald Trump figure, but is civilised and intelligent, said ex-foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind

Boris Johnson's appointment as Foreign Secretary is "a gamble that might pay off if he can reinvent himself" and ditch his celebrity status, according to Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

The Conservative politician, who served as foreign secretary between 1995 and 1997, insisted Mr Johnson was not a Donald Trump figure, but rather a "civilised and intelligent person".

The former London mayor faced a wave of criticism when Theresa May handed him the key role in her Cabinet last week.

Speaking on the BBC's Sunday Politics Scotland programme, Sir Malcolm said: "It's a gamble that might pay off if he can reinvent himself.

"I think in all seriousness Boris is an extremely intelligent and able guy, he is not a Donald Trump figure.

"He's a very civilised and intelligent person, who could be a very good Foreign Secretary.

"However, he has made his name as a celebrity, and he's got to choose.

"You can't be a foreign secretary carrying out the rather sober serious difficult problems of international diplomacy and at the same time expect to continue to be the kind of celebrity as Boris is."

On a lighter note, Sir Malcolm recommended Mr Johnson could start his reinvention with a hair cut and by " tucking his shirt into the back of his trousers on a regular basis".

He added that the Foreign Secretary would also have to quickly demonstrate he is in command of UK policy objectives in difficult areas such as the Middle East and Russia.

"To be much more serious about it, I think he has got to adopt a dialogue, a conversation, that doesn't just get a nice enjoyable headline that cheers us all up on a Monday morning," he said.
The unrest in Turkey is being monitored by the British government as the country aims to restore stability in the wake of the attempted military coup, Downing Street has said.

British holidaymakers have been urged to exercise caution in the coastal resort of Marmaris, where gunfire has been heard as the Turkish government cracks down on suspected perpetrators.

Similar action against alleged plotters has also been reported in Konya, Van and at Sabiha Gokcen airport in Istanbul, the Foreign Office said.

Some 6,000 suspects and opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been arrested, Turkey's justice minister Bekir Bozdag said, following a night of bloody conflict on Friday.

The Government's emergency Cobra committee met on Sunday morning to discuss the aftermath of the failed armed uprising, which claimed the lives of at least 294 people.

Close co-operation will be maintained with the Turkish government, while efforts to assist Britons stranded abroad will become a main focus, the committee said.

Flights to the UK from the troubled country have begun to return to normal and the Government confirmed the backlog of passengers was starting to ease.

The Foreign Office said in its travel advice that the situation was "calming" but could still be "volatile".

It advised British tourists to avoid public places, especially demonstrations, in Ankara and Istanbul, and to follow the advice of authorities.

They said coastal resorts other than Marmaris do not appear to be significantly affected.

Tanks rolled through the streets of major Turkish cities, while jets tore across the skies when a dissident section of the military rose up against Mr Erdogan.

Thousands of people were left injured by explosions and running gun battles between loyal forces and the rebel group in cities including Ankara and Istanbul, as the incident developed throughout Friday night.

The attempted uprising was eventually suppressed after civilians also flooded the streets in defence of the government, and state forces managed to regain control.

Mr Erdogan moved swiftly and ruthlessly against those suspected of involvement in Friday's bloodshed, purging nearly 3,000 judges seen as loyal to an exiled cleric, Fethullah Gulen, blamed by the president for galvanising the military faction.

The Turkish leader also said on Sunday that he might move to reinstate capital punishment - abolished in 2004 as the country made efforts to join the EU.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, he vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen supporters.
Expatriates in Nice, where at least 84 people died in the lorry massacre, said they did not intend to leave

Expatriates in Nice remained defiant in the face of terror in France, praising the area and saying they had no intention of leaving.

The city is popular with British holidaymakers, but is also home to people from the UK and Ireland.

Thursday's attack was the third to hit France in 18 months, and took place after security measures across the country had been increased.

But a number of expats living in the seaside resort said the latest atrocity, following those in November and January last year, have not made them think twice about living there.

Barry Gallagher, who moved to Nice eight years ago, said many terrified revellers took refuge in his pub on Rue Saint-Francois de Paule, one street back from the promenade.

He had gone home after watching the fireworks but said the bar opened its doors to anyone who needed help.

He said: "The lads at the pub were letting people in for safety, half of them were young children with their families."

The 40-year-old, who is originally from Dublin, said while it was a shocking tragedy he will not let it put him off living there.

Speaking in Ma Nolan's he said: "It can happen anywhere, there is no point in living life like that. You would never go out again if that was the attitude.

"We have been used to having the Army on the streets for a long time now."

He said he is hopeful the attack does not cause racial tensions, after Islamic State claimed lorry driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was "a soldier" acting for them.

"I hope it doesn't lead to any rise in the far-right, he said.

"We have a great mixture of people who come to have a drink here - locals, tourists, all races and we have never had a problem with anyone."

Barman Michael Robinson, who works at The Snug and Cellar on Rue Droite, said the city and people are hurt by what happened, but are very resilient.

The 35-year-old, from Newcastle, said: "It's a beautiful city in a beautiful country, with very friendly people. It's just a shame that it's been targeted.

"I haven't once thought of leaving, even after what happened in Paris, I haven't felt I wanted to get out of France at all."

Mr Robinson, who has lived in Nice for five years, said he has attended the fireworks for previous Bastille Day celebrations and defended security measures, saying the attack would have been difficult to stop.

He said: "It would be almost impossible to close off all the surrounding streets I think."

He added: "I think it's important people know how great a city this is and continue to visit or come to live. What happened is awful but you can't let these things get to you too much."
Two police officers are confirmed dead in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge. A third officer is feared dead and others seriously wounded.

Authorities talk to the driver of a car near an area where several officers were shot while on duty less than a mile from police headquarters, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (AP Photo/Mike Kunzelman)

Three police officers are dead after several masked men opened up shooting at them in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Another three officers have been shot and injured.

One of the masked men is also dead and police are looking for at least one more suspect believed to be dress in black, combat-style clothing.

A manhunt is underway to find other suspects.

State Police SWAT now on scene pic.twitter.com/r3Eni4aODL  Michael Vinsanau (@MVinsanau) July 17, 2016

The shooting unfolded in the area of Airline and Old Hammond highways and roads were closed off in both directions between Goodwood Boulevard and Interstate 12.

Police responded to reports of a suspicious person armed with an assault rifle on Sunday morning. When police arrived, the gunman opened fire.

One witness told WBRZ-TV that a man was dressed in black with his face covered began randomly shooting as he walked by a convenience store and car wash.

LSU Police armed with rifles several blocks away from the scene @WBRZ pic.twitter.com/VhkqfMOpOd  Michael Vinsanau (@MVinsanau) July 17, 2016

Kip Houlden, mayor-president of East Baton Rouge Parish, said that security authorities were still trying to get a handle on the situation but told

PIX11/WPIX-TV: "There is still an active scene. Right now we are trying to get our arms around everything."

The incident comes 10 days after five officers in Dallas were shot during a protect against two recent by police which resulted in the deaths of two black men.

Alton Sterling (37) was shot dead by two white police officers in Baton Rouge earlier this month after he was pinned down outside a convenience store where he was selling CDs.

Further reading:
Following a failed coup against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government moved swiftly to shore up his power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying on Sunday it has detained 6,000 people.

The crackdown targeted not only generals and soldiers, but a wide swathe of the judiciary that has sometimes blocked Mr Erdogan, raising concerns that the effort to oust him will push Turkey even further into authoritarian rule.

Friday night's sudden uprising by a faction of the military appeared to take the government - and much of the world - by surprise.

The plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but it ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military, and civilians took to the streets in support of Mr Erdogan. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded, the government said.

On Sunday, premier Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life has returned to normal.

"Another calamity has been thwarted," Mr Yildirim said in Ankara after visiting state TRT television, which had been seized by soldiers supporting the coup.

"However, our duty is not over. We shall rapidly conduct the cleansing operation so that they cannot again show the audacity of coming against the will of the people."

Mr Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve". Mr Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was legally abolished in 2004 as part of the country's bid to join the European Union.

Speaking to a large crowd of his supporters in front of his Istanbul residence on Sunday evening, Mr Erdogan responded to frequent calls of "We want the death penalty!" by saying: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get."

Funerals were held for some of those who were killed in the coup attempt, including MR Erdogan's campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, Abdullah Tayyip Olcak.

The president, who attended the service, wept and vowed to take the country forward in "unity and solidarity".

The government's announcement that 6,000 people had been detained - including three top generals and hundreds of soldiers - suggested a wide conspiracy.

Observers said the scale of the crackdown, especially against the judiciary, indicated the government was taking the opportunity to further consolidate Mr Erdogan's power.

"The factions within the military opposed to Erdogan who did this just gave him carte blanche to crack down not only on the military but on the judiciary," said Aykan Erdemir, a former politician from the main opposition party and now a senior fellow at the US-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies. "The coup plotters couldn't have helped Erdogan more."

Even before the chaos in Turkey, the Nato member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Mr Erdogan's increasingly heavy-handed rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissent, restricted the media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

The rapid suppression of the putsch was greeted by Turks across the political spectrum with opposition parties joining quickly to condemn it. In a half-dozen cities, tens of thousands marched throughout the day after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Mr Erdogan, Turkey's top politician for 13 years.

At nightfall, flag-waving crowds rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere.

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline Traitors Of The Country, while the Hurriyet newspaper declared Democracy's Victory.

"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," said Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at a morning rally in Istanbul.

The failed coup and the subsequent crackdown followed moves by Mr Erdogan to reshape both the military and the judiciary. He had indicated a shake-up of the military was imminent and had also taken steps to increase his influence over the judiciary.

This month, parliament approved a controversial bill to reform two Turkish high courts, which allows the government to dismiss hundreds of administrative and high appeals court judges and allow Mr Erdogan to replace them with judges loyal to him. Parliament passed the bill even as authorities were grappling with a deadly triple suicide bomb attacks at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport.

The opposition had appealed against the legislation to the high court unsuccessfully, but Mr Erdogan has not yet signed it in to law. Two Constitutional Court justices were among the thousands of members of the judiciary it had detained on Saturday.

It is not clear what effect the post-coup purge will have on the judiciary, how the government will move to replace the dismissed judges and prosecutors, or where the trials for those detained would be held.

The government alleges that the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Mr Erdogan has often accused of trying to overthrow the government.

Mr Gulen, who lives in Saylorsburgh, Pennsylvania, espouses a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy. He is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey, where the government has labelled his movement a terrorist organisation. He strongly denies the government's charges.

In recent years, the government had already moved to purge the police and judiciary of Gulen followers. The military, founded on secularist ideals, has been a staunch opponent of Mr Gulen, and so far officials have not offered evidence that he was involved in the coup attempt.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul, Mr Erdogan vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Mr Gulen's supporters. He also called on Washington to extradite Mr Gulen.

At two weekend news conferences, Mr Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.

He said he did not fear extradition.

"This doesn't worry me at all. But I'm not going to do anything that will harm my dignity or that will go against my dignity," he said.

US secretary of state John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Mr Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny".

Ziya Meral of the Centre for Historial Analysis and Conflict Research, a civilian think tank affiliated with the British Defence Ministry, said the motives of the plotters remain unclear, but the allegations against Mr Gulen were dubious.

"I am more inclined toward a network within the armed services who were disturbed about where Turkey is heading," she said.

The allegations will only add to the pressure on the US government and signal new uncertainty in US-Turkish relations.

The putsch attempt led to a temporary halt to air operations by the US-led coalition against the Islamic State group in neighbouring Syria and Iraq from Turkey's Incerlik air base, but the Pentagon said on Sunday that Turkey has reopened its airspace.

A Turkish government official said that the commander of the base, General Bekir Ercan Van, was among those detained.

The state-run Anadolu Agency also said authorities have issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr Erdogan's top military aide, Colonel Ali Yazici, although it was not clear what role he may have played in the attempted coup.

The agency said 70 generals and admirals, including former General Akin Ozturk, an air Force commander, were detained in the investigation. Of the generals and admirals brought before court, 11 were put under arrest as of Sunday night and the rest are awaiting processing.

Security forces arrested a group of coup plotters who had been holding out at one of Istanbul's airports on Sunday, a Turkish official said. In addition, Anadolu reported that seven people, including a colonel, were detained at an air base in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

General Umit Dunda said at least 104 conspirators were among those killed, describing them as mainly officers from the air force, the military police and armoured units.

Security forces rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged links to the coup. Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for alleged involvement with the group responsible for the coup.

The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organisation" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function". The agency said 58 homes of prosecutors and judges have been searched.

Officials also said 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

Another 149 police were detained in Ankara, according to Anadolu, citing the office of the city's governor.

AP
Descendants of Northern Cheyenne tribal members who fled Fort Robinson, Neb., in 1879, returned on Thursday and Friday to dedicate a memorial thats been 15 years in the making.

More than 200 members of the tribe gathered around the four-sided pyramid-shaped monument inlaid with precisely cut slabs of red pipestone. A brass plaque on each side is inscribed with historic words of the Northern Cheyenne. The 15-foot-high, 22-ton monument is 20-feet tall including the two-dimensional stainless steel Morning Star designed to appear straight on from all angles.

The dedication began at Fort Robinson in the morning as people joined together to walk the two miles to the monument, turning off of Highway 20 onto a newly built road leading up to the site. Above the monument are skyscraping cliffs where archaeologists have uncovered clues that skirmishes with soldiers took place there after the escape.

This is a healing event, said Jay Mullins, an engineer who has been working on the project for more than a decade. His remark echoed the sentiments heard over and over from speakers during the dedication.

The idea for the memorial came in 2001 after Edna Seminole, then 75, made the pilgrimage from Montana to Fort Robinson with others to visit the site where her ancestors had made a heroic, desperate escape from Army imprisonment during the freezing Great Plains winter. She, Rosie Eaglefeathers and others left in tears, heartbroken.

There was no tangible recognition of the Fort Robinson Outbreak, in which 149 escaped and 61 were killed in their efforts to reach freedom.

There was an old wood sign with bullet holes through it, thats all, Seminole said. How could this be, they wondered, during the long drive home. Their thoughts then turned to What can we do about it?

Determined to get a proper memorial erected on the site, Seminole and Eaglefeathers began fundraising on the Northern Cheyenne reservation.

They began with $200 from Seminoles son Vincent Whitecranes employer, Western Energy. With the money they bought the best cuts of meat, and their meat bingo games were wildly successful. From their small apartments at the Heritage Living Center in Ashland  an assisted living facility funded solely by private donations  they brainstormed.

Then there was a breakthrough with the land. A Nebraska rancher and friend of the Cheyennes, T.R. Hughes, had always believed there needed to be a monument. He and his wife Kays land surrounded the site. When the land the monument sits on today came up for sale he bought it, and donated 350 acres of it to Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer.

Another friend who had received a rare permit to pull stone from the Pipestone rock quarry in Pipestone, Minn.,  the only place on earth where geology has formed the red soft rock  determined he would help, a lot. Rick Hall, a Northern Cheyenne, mined the massive pipestone slabs for the monument, noting the specific grade and thickness required was 12 feet below ground. Machinery is not permitted in the quarry. Shovel, slegehammer and buckets, he said. Hall eventually moved to Crawford, Neb., a few miles down the road from the monument.

A huge development came when a Wisconsin engineer spoke with Seminoles brother Ralph in the early 2000s. Mullins threw in, and brought a contractors arsenal of equipment and labor every summer to the site beginning in 2004. The structure began to take shape.

Then we ran out of money, Seminoles son Vincent said, who by then was fully invested in the project.

David Sands runs a private land conservation organization out of Lincoln, Neb. They had it three-fourths finished, but needed money for the professional services they couldnt do, he said. The road, plaques, trimming would require $150,000. Sands and others facilitated behind-the-scenes fundraising and discovered there were many in the Lincoln area who loved the project. In two years they had they money.

Looking over the scene Friday one couldnt help but sense a feeling of pure joy and satisfaction. Few Indians came here before this (to Fort Robinson), said pipestone supplier Hall. Now they will.

Hughes died before he could see it completed. His wife Kay was humbly ever-present at the dedication. She knows the story of the escape well. They found breastworks over there. They were up on top over there. Some made it to where Harrison is now (30 miles away) and then went north another 16 before...

Four teepees were positioned a hundred yards or so from the monument forming the corners of a rectangle. Bison grazed in an adjacent field on Fort Robinson State Park land. Overcast skies turned sunny and an eagle appeared overhead.

The monument is on private land and unaffiliated with state or government operations. However park services have endorsed and supported the project from the beginning.

The thing is, we are all, from here, Whitecrane said, meaning those on the reservation today are all descendants of the men, women and children in a single wooden army barracks 137 years ago, breaking out into the winter.

Eaglefeathers died in 2013. Seminole, now 89, would have to see it through.

A dozen speakers took turns speaking. Clearly there were many people, subcommittees and organizations who contributed to getting the monument built. From Mullins perspective theres only one reason its there.

She was firm and determined, she made staunch decisions. No question, its Edna.
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Bismarck-based Carbontec Energy Corp. is hitting pause on a Jamestown iron plant to pursue a new venture in northern Indiana.

The recent downturn in the iron and steel industry has provided Carbontec with a new business opportunity, according to Chairman John Simmons.

As steel companies have become interested in cost-saving measures, Carbontec is working with a large, international steel company to convert iron bearing steel mill waste products into iron nuggets. Carbontec plans to commercialize the technology, constructing a 100,000 metric ton-per-year plant near the steel mills in Northern Indiana.

Currently, that waste is stockpiled, buried on site or hauled to commercial waste dumps at a cost of $20 per metric ton, Simmons said.

A recently completed test program of Carbontecs E-Iron Process successfully converted the waste products into pig iron-grade iron nuggets with 95 percent iron and 3 percent carbon. The nuggets, worth $300 per metric ton, are high-value feedstock for electric steel-making furnaces and iron foundries.

It will cost about $180 per metric ton, including financing, to produce a $300-per-metric ton product, which would lead to earnings of 55 percent before interest, taxes and scheduled debt payments.

The U.S. imports about 4 million metric tons of pig iron, largely from Brazil, Russia and Ukraine. The pig iron produced at a Carbontec plant would replace a portion of these pig iron imports while providing additional jobs, Simmons said.

Carbontec is looking for funding sources for the Indiana plants construction as well as operating costs.

The plant will cost $70 million to build plus working capital and will take 14 months to construct, Simmons said. Construction will start when financing is in place.

The plant will employ 40 people initially and will be designed for a future expansion to 300,000 metric tons per year, at which point it would provide 100 jobs. Job skill requirements would be similar to those of a coal-fired power plant, Simmons said

The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced a $300,000 grant to Purdue University Northwest, The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Carbontec, to utilize LLNLs super computers and Purdues modeling expertise to optimize the design of the E-Iron Process furnace, which is expected to lower the cost of plant construction and improve energy efficiency.

Carbontec developed the E-Iron Process, in cooperation with Michigan Technological University, to use organic biomass in the place of coke or coal, minimizing the negative environmental impact of iron making. Any carbon dioxide emitted is recaptured from the atmosphere.

After cars and power plants, the iron and steel industry is the third largest contributor to carbon dioxide and other noxious emissions in the world.

In 2013, Carbontec had started plans for a 100,000-metric-ton iron plant in Spiritwood Industrial Park near Jamestown.

Steel and scrap prices put that project on hold, Simmons said, but the Jamestown plant remains on Carbontecs future agenda. For our first plant, the (Indiana plant) provides a bigger opportunity.

The 80,000-square-foot plant would have made pig iron nuggets using sugar beet residue or wood chips in place of coal and was expected to generate $50 million in annual revenue, Simmons said.
TePastte joins hospital

Dr. Michelle TePastte has joined CHI St. Alexius Health in hospital medicine.

TePastte earned her medical degree from Wayne State University Medical School, Detroit, and completed an internal medicine residency at Michigan State University, Grand Rapids, and a hospital medicine fellowship at CHI St. Alexius Health, Bismarck.

TePastte is board certified by the American Board of Family Medicine.

Gustafson hired

Jeffrey Gustafson is the new director of facilities at CHI St. Alexius Health Bismarck Medical Center.

Gustafson holds a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering, is a certified health care environmental manager and earned his California professional engineering license.

He previously was the facility director at Ukiah Valley Medical Center in California.

Wald achieves

David Wald, a representative in Bismarck with Securian Financial Advisors of N.D. Inc., has been named Securians adviser of the month for June based on production and client service.

Lawyers included

Lawrence Bender and William P. Pearce have been named to the 2016 Great Plains Super Lawyers list in the energy and resources area.

Both are attorneys at Fredrikson & Byron in Bismarck office.

Only 5 percent of lawyers in Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota are selected for the annual list.

On CDC board

Lori Gabriel, Mandan, is among those recently elected to a three-year term as a director of Dakota Certified Development Corp. Gabriel was also elected chair and Andy Maragos, Minot, was elected vice chair.

The past chair, John Phillips, of Beulah, continues on the board.

Promoted, hired

Ashley Kittleson has been promoted to insurance agent at the Washington and Century branch of Starion Insurance in Bismarck.

Kittleson joined Starion in 2009 and most recently was an insurance sales assistant. She is licensed in property, casualty, life and annuity, and accident and health, and is a certified insurance service representative.

Lindsey Hulm has been hired as an insurance sales assistant at the Mandan branch. Hulm graduated from North Dakota State University and has several years of insurance customer service experience. She is licensed in property, casualty, life and annuity, and accident and health.

Changes at Odney

Jamie Fischer, Dickinson, and Hope Sisk, Bismarck, have joined Odney as public relations specialists, and Odney employees Jodene Friesz and Meghann Chamberlain have new roles.

Fischer graduated from Montana State University-Billings with a public relations degree and is based in Dickinson. She has worked at a Dickinson medical center, chamber of commerce and a state agency.

Sisk, an Emmy award-winning journalist, is working in the Bismarck office. She has a journalism degree from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo.

Friesz, an account assistant for five years, is now with the media team, focusing on print ad space. A graduate of the University of Mary with a business administration degree, she has nine years of experience in sales and business management.

Chamberlain is now working as a digital media strategist. She spent six years with the company as a public relations specialist. Chamberlain has a communications degree from U-Mary.

Artlip gets award

Tyler Artlip, branch manager for Capital Credit Union, was named the Emerging Leader of the Year by the Credit Union Association of the Dakotas. This award is for credit union employees who are building a career in the industry.

Church on staff

Bradley Church has joined Bismarck Aero Center as an A&P maintenance technician, relocating from Berrien Springs, Mich.

Church just completed a bachelors degree in aviation technology with an emphasis in business/maintenance from Andrews University, Berrien Springs. He also obtained his airframe and powerplant license and a private pilots license.

Church also went to Mabaruma, Guyana, South America, where he worked primarily on a Cessna 206 that was used for medical evacuations.

Eider promoted

Stacy Eider has been promoted to assistant vice president/mortgage operations manager at Cornerstone Bank in Bismarck.

Eider joined Cornerstone in 2008 and had been mortgage operations manager since 2014.

Horner gets award

Melissa Horner, a certified family nurse practitioner, psychiatry, received the American Association of Nurse Practitioner State Award for Excellence in Nurse Practitioner Clinical Practice during the recent AANP national conference in San Antonio.

Horner earned her doctorate, masters and bachelors degrees in nursing from the University of Mary and works at Sanford Seventh & Rosser Clinic in Bismarck.

Recognized, promoted

John Cozby, who works at Credit Collections Bureau in Bismarck, has been named client services representative of the month for June.

Laurie Jeschke, who also works in Bismarck, has been named employee of the month for June.

CCB has also promoted two Bismarck employees. Kim Black is now a collection associate and Mandi Smith is a collection adviser.

Stylist joins

Kellye Trzpuc is a new stylist at Luxe Beautique, Bismarck, where she specializes in hair and nail services, including cuts, colors, manicures and pedicures.

She also is owner of the BLU Elephant clothing line at Luxe Beautique.

Serving on board

Susan Wagner and Vicki Michels are among new members of the board of directors of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention North Dakota Chapter.

Wagner is the program manager and standard coordinator for Heartview Foundation in Bismarck and has more than 32 years of experience in the social/human services and juvenile justice field.

Michels is a licensed psychologist, professor and chair of the Minot State Universitys addiction studies, psychology and social work department.

Gab hired by Marco

Jeff Gab has been hired by Marco as a technology adviser in southwest North Dakota and southeast Montana. Gab will be based in Dickinson.

He most recently worked at Southwest Business Machines Inc. and has more than 30 years of experience in the technology industry.

Lawyers included

Attorney David Maring, Mandan, who is with Maring Williams Law Office, has been named to the 2016 Great Plains Super Lawyers list in the area of plaintiffs personal injury work.

No more than 5 percent of the lawyers in any state are selected by Super Lawyers, a Thompson Reuters rating service.

Lindsay Harris, also with the firm, was selected to the 2016 Great Plains Super Lawyers Rising Stars list.
Scheurer crowned

Lyndsey Scheurer of Bismarck was crowned Miss North Dakota's Outstanding Teen on June 12 in Williston. She competed in interview, talent, sportswear, evening gown and on-stage question among other preliminary titleholders from across the state.

Scheurer was awarded a crown, sash, $5,000 college scholarship and will compete for the title of Miss America's Outstanding Teen Aug. 2-6 in Orlando, Fla. A send-off party for her and a silent auction will be held Sunday, July 24, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Baymont Inn in Mandan.

Throughout the year, Scheurer will make appearances, help at local preliminary pageants, volunteer in the community and promote her platform of helping the homeless. She has been competing in pageants since the age of 6. She will be a senior at Century High School and is the daughter of Lee and Susan Scheurer, of Bismarck.

Hale-Lewis presents

Karen Hale-Lewis, assistant professor of sociology at Dickinson State University, presented integrated learning at DSU at the North Dakota General Education Summit April 1 at Mayville.

Hale-Lewis provided a review of DSUs integrated learning activities and participated in a discussion panel with colleagues from Bismarck State College, Minot State University and the University of North Dakota who reported on integrated learning at their respective campuses.

Hale-Lewis, a member of DSUs general education and assessment committees, was one of several DSU faculty members who attended AAC&Us Institute on Integrated Learning at California State University, Fullerton, in 2014. The work at the institute laid the foundation for DSUs current integrated learning committee while complementing prior learning community projects organized through the Academic Support Services and the Departments of Language and Literature and Social Sciences in 2011-14.

Also attending the summit was Alan Church, professor of English. Church reported on the goals of the North Dakota Faculty Collaboratives, an AAC&U project for promoting the scholarship of teaching and learning through the state, and he represented DSU at the NDGE Council meeting afterward.

Meier selected

David Meier, professor of history at Dickinson State University, has been selected as one of the scholars-in-residence for an intensive two-week workshop-based curriculum development program in interdisciplinary contemporary antisemitism studies sponsored by the ISGAP-Oxford Summer Institute, held at St. Antonys College, in Oxford, United Kingdom, from July 31 to Aug. 12.

Under the guidance of leading international academics, scholars-in-residence will develop a course syllabus and curriculum in the interdisciplinary study of contemporary antisemitism, to be taught in their home university upon completion for course credit.

Luncheon hosted

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, the Minishoshe-Mandan Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution recently hosted a luncheon for the Vietnam veterans and their families.

Over 400 veterans and family members were in attendance. Gov. Jack Dalrymple gave the keynote address. The governor presented over 200 veterans with a Vietnam Veterans Lapel Pin, honoring them for their service.

Other dignitaries were first lady Betsy Dalrymple; members of the North Dakota National Guard Family Support Unit; Nancy Legerski, state regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution; S. Shelly Sizer, chief warrant officer; Col. Scott Boespflug; and Col. Brian Keller.
Prior to becoming the longest-serving U.S. senator from North Dakota during the first 80 years of statehood, Porter J. McCumber's services were called upon by the U.S. government to ameliorate a crisis that existed between the government and the Turtle Mountain Chippewa.

Through a treaty agreed upon in 1863, the Chippewa were authorized control of nearly 11 million acres. In 1884, the Native Americans in northeastern North Dakota saw that reduced to 46,000 acres. In 1892, McCumber led a commission that specified compensation for much of the land that was seized. Though the amount was much less than what most Chippewa wanted, it may have prevented open hostilities.

Porter James McCumber was born Feb. 3, 1858, south of Chicago, to Orlin and Anna Elvira (Fuller) McCumber.

McCumber graduated from the law department at the University of Michigan in 1880 and, after he was admitted to the bar, established a law practice briefly in Lisbon before entering into a partnership with Bruce Bogart in Wahpeton.

In 1884, McCumber ran for a seat in the Dakota Territorial legislature. On the campaign trail, he managed to attract and impress large crowds. According to the New York Times, McCumber was not a polished speaker.

McCumber was elected to the House, which would be meeting for the first time in Bismarck. In 1883, the capital had been moved from Yankton to its new location.

When the legislative session convened on Jan. 13, 1885, it soon became apparent to the other legislators that McCumber was a gifted politician. He was very intelligent and he was all business. One of the legislators who quickly saw McCumber's potential was Judson LaMoure, of Pembina. LaMoure was Alexander McKenzie's chief lieutenant in the territorial government and he could assure political success to those politicians he favored.

In 1886, McCumber ran for a seat on the territorial council (senate) and was elected. Shortly after the legislature convened on Jan. 11, 1887, he decided to run for president of the council. In a close election, McCumber finished second to George Mathews, the prosecuting attorney of the fifth judicial circuit in Dakota Territory. Influenced by the Farmers' Alliance that was beginning to organize in the territory, McCumber got laws passed that regulated railroad freight and passenger rates. He also introduced legislation that reduced the penalty for delinquent taxes from 30 percent to 15 percent and, another of his laws made it more difficult for banks to foreclose on land and property.

Leading to the 1888 election, McCumber prepared the railroad bill for the Farmers Alliance, but, instead of seeking a state-wide office, he ran for and succeeded in obtaining the position of state's attorney of Richland County.

Soon after North Dakota achieved statehood in 1889, a situation that had been simmering during most of the territorial days came to a boil, and McCumber was put in charge of cooling it. In 1858, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa agreed to the Sweet Corn Treaty that allotted to them more than one-third of what is now North Dakota. In 1863, the Old Crossing Treaty was reluctantly agreed to by the Chippewa in which they ceded 11 million acres to the government. Most of the land was in the Red River Valley.

In the early 1880s, whites began to illegally settle on the remaining parts of Chippewa land. Little Shell III warned the settlers that they were encroaching on tribal land and some of them petitioned the government to open the land for settlement. In October of 1882, the Secretary of the Interior approved of this without negotiating with the Chippewa.

Then, through an executive order on Dec. 21, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur created the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, consisting of 460,800 acres. In the process, the government seized about 9 million acres. On March 29, 1884, Arthur signed another executive order reducing the size of the reservation to 46,080 acres.

Since Little Shell and other tribal leaders did not agree to this, the Chippewa and Metis living on the reservation did not receive compensation. Resentment against the government increased when "many people starved" on the reservation because of a severe drought and brutal winters.

The situation was exacerbated in 1889 when county officers took some cattle from the half-breeds for nonpayment of taxes.

In 1890, Congress established a three-man commission to meet with Little Shell and other tribal leaders and tell them of the government's plan to relocate the Turtle Mountain inhabitants on the White Earth Chippewa Reservation in Minnesota. The Indian and Metis leaders on the Turtle Mountain Reservation flatly rejected this proposal. In 1892, McCumber was authorized to lead a three-man commission in drafting a plan that the members of the reservation would find acceptable.

After the McCumber Commission conducted a census, members met with U.S. Indian Agent John Waugh, who handpicked a committee of 32 Indians to assist the commission. On Sept. 21, McCumber met with the Committee of 32 to work out an agreement. On Oct. 22, he signed this agreement that ceded 10 million acres of land to the government in exchange for $1 million spread out in payments over 20 years.

North Dakota historian Elwyn Robinson noted that "the Turtle Mountain Chippewa formally ceded a large portion of north-central North Dakota 10 years after it had actually been taken away from them." Today, most people would agree that the Indians got a raw deal, but at least McCumber was able to retroactively get them some compensation.
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 16/07/2016 (2294 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Police statistics show that the streets of Brandon are about as prone to collisions as a bumper car ride at a carnival.

The numbers show that officers dealt with about 240 collisions within the first six months of 2016 and, statistically, there are some intersections to steer clear of if you want to avoid an accident.

The top intersections are, not surprisingly, the ones with the largest volume of traffic, Brandon Police Service Sgt. Bill Brown said.

Tyler Stephens/The Brandon Sun This map uses Brandon Police Services CrimeReports data to show the city intersections that had the most crashes between Jan. 4 and July 4, 2016, based on the number of collisions recorded in and around those intersections.

According to Brandon Police Service data posted online at CrimeReports, officers responded to 237 collisions between Jan. 4 and July 4, 2016. Of those, 25 involved injuries.

But Brown noted that there are actually more collisions than are recorded in those police statistics as, under changes made to Manitoba law in 2011, motorists are no longer required to report minor fender benders to police.

Due to privacy concerns, when it comes to the location of crimes, police typically only release the block in which a crime is said to have been committed or reported.

That practice seems to apply to collision data in CrimeReports, too. It doesnt specify whether a collision happened in an intersection, it simply locates the crash in the nearest block.

Still  on the premise that collisions are more likely at intersections  it was possible to identify problem intersections based on the accidents that occurred within a block.

Police say the worst intersections are the following: First Street and Victoria Avenue; 18th Street and Victoria Avenue; 26th Street and Victoria Avenue; First Street and Richmond Avenue.

Brown added that the stretch on 18th Street between Victoria and Rosser Avenue is especially a problem.

Thats backed by our number-crunching at The Brandon Sun, except that we also attributed seven collisions to 34th Street and Victoria Avenue, and six collisions to 18th Street and Brandon Avenue.

For First Street and Victoria Avenue, The Brandon Sun counted four crashes; 18th Street and Victoria Avenue, four; 26th Street and Victoria Avenue, five.

The stretch on 18th Street between Victoria and Rosser Avenues logged 12 collisions. But, also, the stretch between the 600 and 900 blocks of Victoria Avenue seemed to be a problem with six collisions.

Collision times also seem inaccurate in CrimeReports. However, Brown said most accidents happen between noon and 5 p.m., with Mondays and Fridays being the busiest days.

The numbers plucked from CrimeReports confirm that Monday led the way with 50 collisions, followed by Friday with 41.

Brown said its difficult to say why certain intersections pose a challenge to drivers, except to say that they happen at high-traffic areas and are most often caused by distracted driving  cellphone use  and failing to follow the rules of the road  running red lights and speeding, for example.

 ihitchen@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @IanHitchen
While nations can untangle themselves from international trade agreements, it is nearly as impossible to return to a previous normal as it would be to unscramble an omelet.

A nation can return its laws to a previous legal situation  but it cannot change the laws or policies of the other parties to the agreement. Nor can it undo actions taken by private individuals or businesses in reaction to a newly renounced pact.

Last months referendum in the United Kingdom does not legally force its government to withdraw from the European Union, but, politically, it will be very hard for any of the U.K.s principal parties to ignore the results.

Advocates of Brexit implicitly argued that their country could maintain its current free trade relations with the other 27 EU members while shedding any onerous business or tax regulations and ending flows of money from the U.K. to the EU. But what will actually happen will depend upon some complex negotiations.

Continued favorable trade access is not impossible. When the EU was formed, other European countries formed a free-trade area of their own. These included the U.K., all of Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal. They reduced barriers to trade between themselves nearly to zero but, unlike the EU, did not adopt common external tariffs for imports from the rest of the world. This was particularly important for Britain, which still imported large quantities of food from Australia and New Zealand.

This EFTA, as it is known, has shrunk as most members joined the EU. But the remaining ones, notably Norway and Switzerland, enjoy near-open trade access to the EU. Britain may revert to this status. But there is no contractual reason why the EU need grant it.

Moreover, services are more complicated than merchandise trade. London is an enormous center of financial trading, banking and insurance with a history going back four centuries. Many international financial firms have chosen to base their European operations there. But Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Milan all covet that business, and there is no certainty Londons access to all of the continent will continue unchanged. Nor, for that matter, is it guaranteed that the U.K. can revert to barrier-free access for trade in goods.

In the United States, U.K.'s move raises the NAFTA question to higher prominence. Republican candidate Donald Trump calls for abolition of NAFTA and the imposition of 45 percent tariffs on imports from Mexico, along with a 35 percent levy on trade from Canada. Abolishing the agreement and levying tariffs are two separate issues.

If he persuaded Congress to pass the necessary legislation, the country could repudiate the NAFTA treaty, signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. From the U.S. side, that would return Mexico to the status it had 25 years ago. It would simply be one of many other nations in the World Trade Organization and a poor one that still qualified, along with other low-income countries, for slightly preferential access to U.S. markets under the generalized system of preferences begun under the WTOs antecessor organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

That would place U.S. tariffs on imports from Mexico at their pre-NAFTA average of about 3 percent. Those were not a major barrier to Mexicos exports before 1993 and would not be now. To legally impose the promised 45 percent levels on Mexican imports would require that we apply them to those of all other WTO members. That essentially would mean U.S. repudiation of our participation in a key organization that we helped found 70 years ago. It would be a U-turn unprecedented in U.S. economic and diplomatic history.

Moreover, no U.S. president or Congress can force Mexico to change its policies. The overlooked reality is that our country made very few changes in entering NAFTA. Most of the change was on the Mexican side, much of that was a consolidation of an economic-opening process that had begun 15 to 20 years earlier.

At its core, NAFTA was the result of a U.S. administration acting as a willing foil so that a particularly friendly Mexican administration could achieve its domestic political objectives. We can withdraw now, but that does not mean Mexico would return to its hostile treatment of foreign firms adopted in the 1920s. With U.S. tariffs boosted all the way back to 3 percent and Mexico still welcoming foreign business, it is hard to see how abolition of NAFTA would change that much.

The broader problem for those seeing withdrawal from the EU or NAFTA as an economic panacea is not one of government policy. It is that private firms have made investments for more than 43 years in the case of the EU and 24 years in the case of NAFTA.

Companies were bought, factories were built, offices were opened, sales and distribution chains were constructed. These private investments are now facts on the ground, to borrow a diplomatic term. They also are sunk costs in economic terms. We can change laws, but these investments create enormous inertia, politically as well as economically.

Could a President Trump persuade Congress to repudiate NAFTA? Perhaps. Would returning to 1980s levels of tariffs change where U.S. auto companies actually produce things? No. Raising tariffs to 35 percent or 45 percent as Trump calls for would indeed reduce imports from Canada and Mexico. That would be a devastating blow to North American auto production and to many other industries. It will never happen.
Around 85 people remain in hospital after the deadly lorry attack in Nice, and 18 of them - including one child - are in a life-threatening condition, the French health minister said.

Marisol Touraine urged any survivors to seek counselling offered by the government after the Bastille Day attack on Thursday night which killed 84 people.
In the UK Theresa May's new government has begun preparing trade talks with Australia, Canada and the US, ahead of the Brexit.

Australia has already called for a free trade deal with Britain as soon as possible, and Canada has also started negotiations.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave signals that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment in the wake of Friday's failed coup attempt.

Mr Erdogan spoke to his supporters in front of his Istanbul residence on Sunday evening.

His speech was punctuated by frequent calls of "we want the death penalty" from the large crowd, to which Mr Erdogan responded: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get."

Adding that they will be in contact with Turkey's opposition parties to reach a position of capital punishment, he said: "We will not delay this decision for long. Because those who attempt a coup in this country must pay."

Turkey has not executed anyone since 1984 and capital punishment was legally abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union.

Earlier Mr Erdogan spoke with Russian president Vladimir Putin following the failed military coup attempt in which at least 265 people died.

A statement from Mr Erdogan's office reported that Mr Putin said Moscow stood by "Turkey's elected government" and expressed his good wishes to the Turkish people. It said the two leaders - who recently patched up relations following Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane - also agreed to meet face to face next month.

Meanwhile, Turkey's justice minister Bekir Bozdag said some 6,000 people have been detained in a government crackdown on alleged coup plotters and government opponents.

Mr Bozdag said he was confident that the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey.

The Turkish president has blamed Mr Gulen and his followers for the failed military coup on Friday night, but Mr Gulen denies any involvement in or knowledge about the attempted coup. The US says it will look at any evidence Turkey has to offer against Mr Gulen, and judge accordingly.

Mr Bozdag said: "The United States would weaken itself by protecting him. It would harm its reputation. I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey."

Prayers were being read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques to rally the country to defend its democracy and honour those who died in the attempted military coup.

Already, three of the country's top generals have been detained, alongside hundreds of soldiers. The government also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities briefly, ended hours later when loyal government forces including military and police regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Mr Erdogan.

At least 265 people were killed and over 1,400 were wounded. Government officials said at least 104 conspirators were killed.

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets to defend democracy and support the country's long-time leader.

It was an emotional display by Turks, who rallied in headscarves and long dresses, T-shirts and work boots, some walking hand in hand late on Saturday and early on Sunday with their children.

Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, the attempted coup appears to have bolstered Mr Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.

Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at the rally in Istanbul, said: "Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back."

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country", while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

Premier Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve".

However, the government crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a region swept by conflict and extremism.

Mr Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

"It will allow him to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before," he said.

The coup attempt started with tanks rolling on Friday night into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul as the president was on a seaside break.

Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night. It quickly became clear, though, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government.

In a dramatic iPhone interview on TV, Mr Erdogan urged his supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

Before the chaos, Turkey - a Nato member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group - was wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Mr Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule.

He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels. Mr Erdogan later vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of Mr Gulen.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul earlier on Sunday, he pledged to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen supporters.

Mr Erdogan said Turkey, through the justice ministry and foreign ministry, would request the extradition of the cleric from the US.

Crowds chanted "Fethullah will come and pay", ''Allah is Great" and "We want the death penalty". Mr Erdogan said that in democracies "you cannot push the wish of the people to one side" but also said "we are not after revenge".

Meanwhile, Turkish Airlines said it has cancelled 196 domestic and international flights in and out of Istanbul due to disruptions in air traffic brought on by the attempted coup.

The cancellations will affect flights on Sunday and Monday.

Regular operations had resumed on Saturday, but a backlog of flights congested traffic at Istanbul's main Ataturk International Airport.
Officials representing charities say granting North Dakotas five American Indian tribes exclusive rights to host online gambling could effectively end charitable gambling in the state. The tribes want Gov. Doug Burgum to approve the idea under tribal-state agreements known as compacts. The current compacts expire at the end of this year and only Burgum can approve them. The tribes argue that their casinos have been hurt by the explosion of the charities Las Vegas-style pull tab machines. Burgum heard arguments from the charities and tribes on Friday. He says the terms of the compacts are still being negotiated and should be completed next month.
A gunman entered a Florida hospital and shot and killed a patient and an employee before being arrested.

Local media said the shootings happened at about 2am on Sunday at the Parrish Medical Centre in Titusville, which is near the Kennedy Space Centre.
Turkey's president has spoken with Russian president Vladimir Putin following the failed military coup attempt in which at least 265 people died.

A statement from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office reported that Mr Putin said Moscow stood by "Turkey's elected government" and expressed his good wishes to the Turkish people.

It said the two leaders - who recently patched up relations following Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane - also agreed to meet face to face next month.

Meanwhile, Turkey's justice minister Bekir Bozdag said some 6,000 people have been detained in a government crackdown on alleged coup plotters and government opponents.

Mr Bozdag said he was confident that the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey.

The Turkish president has blamed Mr Gulen and his followers for the failed military coup on Friday night, but Mr Gulen denies any involvement in or knowledge about the attempted coup. The US says it will look at any evidence Turkey has to offer against Mr Gulen, and judge accordingly.

Mr Bozdag said: "The United States would weaken itself by protecting him. It would harm its reputation. I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey."

Prayers were being read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques to rally the country to defend its democracy and honour those who died in an attempted military coup.

Already, three of the country's top generals have been detained, alongside hundreds of soldiers.

The government also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities briefly, ended hours later when loyal government forces including military and police regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Mr Erdogan.

At least 265 people were killed and over 1,400 were wounded. Government officials said at least 104 conspirators were killed.

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets to defend democracy and support the country's long-time leader.

It was an emotional display by Turks, who rallied in headscarves and long dresses, T-shirts and work boots, some walking hand in hand late on Saturday and early on Sunday with their children.

Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, the attempted coup appears to have bolstered Mr Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.

Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at the rally in Istanbul, said: "Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back."

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve".

However, the government crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a region swept by conflict and extremism.

Mr Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

"It will allow him to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before," he said.

The coup attempt started with tanks rolling on Friday night into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul as the president was on a seaside break.

Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night. It quickly became clear, though, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government.

In a dramatic iPhone interview on TV, Mr Erdogan urged his supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

Before the chaos, Turkey - a Nato member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group - was wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Mr Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule.

He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Mr Erdogan later vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of Mr Gulen.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, he pledged to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen supporters.

Mr Erdogan said Turkey, through the justice ministry and foreign ministry, would request the extradition of the cleric from the US.

Crowds chanted "Fethullah will come and pay", ''Allah is Great" and "We want the death penalty".

Mr Erdogan said that in democracies "you cannot push the wish of the people to one side" but also said "we are not after revenge".

Meanwhile, Turkish Airlines said it has cancelled 196 domestic and international flights in and out of Istanbul due to disruptions in air traffic brought on by the attempted coup.

The cancellations will affect flights on Sunday and Monday.

Regular operations had resumed on Saturday, but a backlog of flights congested traffic at Istanbul's main Ataturk International Airport.
SHANGHAI: The value of Chinas yuan against its major trading partners fell to the weakest level in more than a year...
Speaking some time ago to a four-state meeting of tribal leaders in Billings, Mont., Alvin Windy Boy, a Montana Chippewa, suggested that reservations deserved a Marshall Plan akin to the post-World War II $120 billion program that rebuilt Europe.

We were annihilated by the turn of the century (1900) but weve never been rebuilt, Windy Boy pointed out.

The Marshall Plan was not based solely on American compassion for the 18 European countries that participated. We had a selfish interest in stopping the spread of communism with a strong Europe as a partner and buffer.

A Marshall Plan for reservations would be a great benefit for Native Americans but it would also be good for all of North Dakota to have vibrant economies and societies on reservations.

We have kept Native Americans dependent at a cost that has been staggering for both Native Americans and taxpayers. It will continue to be a chronic tax burden until we start thinking of economic development on reservations as investment rather than expense.

Europe was a good investment for American taxpayers. Reservations could be a good investment if we would quit offering temporary solutions that prolong dependency instead of funding long-term solutions that would result in self-reliance.

Before a visionary Marshall Plan will work, we all need to overlook the grievances of the past and focus on the future. There is plenty of justification for a victimhood complex but it is time for a new mindset.

Charles Trimble, former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians and a columnist in Indian Country Today, once urged Native Americans to quit clinging to their paradigm of victimhood.

Victimhood is working for us but it is a prison from which we must free ourselves if we mean for our children to go forward, he wrote.

North Dakota has had enough talk about moving forward. It is time to reassess and underwrite opportunities on and off reservations. Other tribes and other states are ploughing new ground every year. We could do more.

When he was governor, John Hoeven suggested to Indian leaders at a United Tribes Intertribal Council that Indian heritage was a major asset on reservations because culture tours are a No. 1 priority of the international tourist trade.

Four tribes in Maine are doing wonders capitalizing on culture and providing a game plan that could be emulated in North Dakota.

The casinos have helped but the greatest need on reservations is activity that can be streamed into the national and world economy. In the past, we have relied on undercapitalized startups and government contracts, none of which could be mainstreamed or sustained.

A prerequisite for mainstreaming is a properly trained workforce. This may require some redirection of the reservation education system and behavioral changes by potential employees and managers.

The reservation education systems need to include serious incentives to encourage young people to pursue marketable skills, with students learning to accept the discipline of the clock.

To guide students, Arkansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Maine require the publication of post-college employment opportunities and the potential earnings for each skill. Reservation curriculum planners and students might take a good look at that strategy.

Just as the success of the Marshall Plan rested on the mutual goals of the United States and Europe, a Marshall Plan for reservations must rest on mutual goals of us European immigrants and Native Americans.

If we keep doing what we have been doing, nothing will change. Native Americans will continue to struggle for meaningful lives, society will be denied the benefits of latent Native American ingenuity and taxpayers will keep paying the bill.

With a new administration coming to Bismarck, this would be the time for a new beginning in North Dakota-Native American relations.
Red Cross nurse Kim Kovac says demand for car parks will only grow at Leppington. Credit:Peter Rae "We are looking at how we use our membership base and our balance sheet to make sure we provide those parks. It is a big solution for what is a major problem out there." At present, car parking disrupters such as Divvy, Parkhound and ParkMonkey tend to focus on inner-city areas, rather than outer suburbs where the NRMA wants to link motorists to vacant car spaces at homes and businesses. Deputy lord mayor James Limnios Limnios said he hoped a motion for free weekend parking would work to attract shoppers. "We are also looking at how we can value add to the parking experience with solutions like car servicing while the car sits unused in the parking station, or by encouraging and promoting car-share services," he said.

Mr Lund said one of the biggest barriers to people using public transport was a lack of parking near commuter hubs. "We need look no further than the commuter car parks that have been built along the new South West Rail Link for proof. Demand has almost outstripped supply." People tend to drive to stations the further out of Sydney they live, partly because buses to them are infrequent. At Leppington, pressure for spots has skyrocketed since direct train services to Sydney's CBD began late last year. While the problem has not been as acute over the past two weeks, the end of the school holidays again increases demand. "When it first opened, not many people used the station," said Austral resident and nurse Kim Kovac, who parks at Leppington and catches the train to work at the Red Cross in Sydney's CBD. "Now it fills quickly.

"Before long it is not going to be enough. I can just envisage the problem when the land is subdivided and there are 20,000 homes here." Jocelyn Schankaran has also watched demand for car spaces surge since she moved to Leppington in November. "This is going to get really chaotic because we have got houses going up every week," she said. "There are 25,000 people moving into Oran Park. "I used to park in the section that faces the station at this time of the morning [at 7.30am]. Now I am almost down the other end." Only about a fifth of the population in greater western Sydney lives within 800 metres  regarded as a reasonable walking distance  of a train station.

And at Penrith, fewer than 8 per cent of the population lives within a reasonable distance of major public transport, according to figures from the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils. The organisation said there would be little respite from the debilitating effects of traffic congestion unless more railway stations were built and there was greater density of homes and businesses around major transport hubs. At Penrith, parking near the station is a major challenge not only for commuters but for local retailers. Commuters turn up early to nab long-stay parking, reducing the spaces available for shoppers later in the day. A spokeswoman for Penrith Council said commuter car parking placed "enormous pressure" on the city centre, due largely to a lack of buses between the train stations and outer suburbs forcing people to drive. "We support any initiative that frees up, or creates, extra car spaces for commuters," she said. The NSW government, which is responsible for commuter car parks, has provided more than 5800 new spaces since early 2011, and has plans for a further 7900 across the state.
Oil is flowing unhindered through Turkey's pipelines and waterways, one of the world's largest energy trading corridors, after a coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan failed.

The Turkish straits are open to shipping traffic, an official at the Istanbul shipping centre said on Saturday. Crude oil shipments from Azerbaijan and Iraq into Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan were operating normally, a port agent said as BP, operator of the Baku-Tifilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, confirmed the oil flow was uninterrupted.

Oil prices have not been affected by the attempted coup in Turkey. Credit:Bloomberg

"Our facilities in Turkey are open and operating normally," BP spokesman David Nicholas said. "There are no disruptions to the flow of oil through the BTC pipeline."

At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Turkey is a vital conduit of crude transport from Russia and Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea. Millions of barrels of oil travel through its waterways and pipelines each day.
China churned out a record amount of steel daily in June as mills in the world's top producer boosted supply to take advantage of a rebound in prices, surprising analysts who'd expected a weaker figure.

Crude steel output was 1.7 per cent higher than in June 2015 at 69.47 million tonnes, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday. On a daily basis, the rate of 2.32 million tonnes surpassed the previous high set in April.

Chinese steel production was strong in June. Credit:Chris Ratcliffe

The strong output is good news for Australian iron ore miners, who have enjoyed better than expected prices this year for the steel ingredient.

Iron ore was fetching $US58.42 a tonne when measured on Friday night.
Sherlock creator Steven Moffat must have sensed the world needed a little cheering up after the events of this week.

On Friday, he unleashed the first photo from the detective drama's fourth season, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and a bloodhound, a possible hint that the show could be taking on Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles this time around.

But Moffat also acknowledged that Sherlock's next season could be its last, because stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are in high demand.

"I don't know how long we can keep it going," he told Britain's Telegraph. "I'm personally willing, but I'm hardly the main draw. I would be moderately surprised if this was the last time we ever made this show. But it absolutely could be."
Sydney PR queen Roxy Jacenko is no stranger to headlines of late, but her breast cancer diagnosis has come as a shock.

At 36 and a mother of two young children, Pixie, 4, and Hunter, 2, Jacenko believed she was an unlikely candidate, despite being in the at-risk category following her mother Doreen Davis' mastectomy a decade ago for the same disease.

The Sweaty Betty publicist says she regrets not being more pro-active and urges all women to "be vigilant with self-examination".

"Don't just happen to be showering and come across a lump like I did," she told Fairfax Media.
Laurina and Michael Chilcott had hoped a rally in Sydney's inner west on Sunday would be a chance to celebrate Premier Mike Baird's decision to ban greyhound racing.

Instead, the Newtown couple joined about 150 people  and a large number of their pooches  to express their outrage at Labor leader Luke Foley's move to oppose the ban in NSW, threatening their dreams that the greyhound racing industry would finally be shut down.

"He is backing the wrong side," Michael Chilcott said.

The couple has fostered 15 greyhounds in less than three years, Atlas being their latest.
A driver accused of running down a man in his car before allegedly bashing him with a brick will face court on Sunday, charged with attempted murder.

The 54-year-old victim remains in a critical condition in Westmead Hospital after being attacked in the front yard of a house in Shalvey, in Sydney's west, on Saturday afternoon.

The scene of an alleged attempted murder in Shalvey on Saturday. Credit:9 News

Emergency services found the man unconscious just after 2pm when they were called to Westward Avenue, where a blue Kia had mounted the kerb and partially demolished a brick fence.
A toddler critically injured when a car ran her over in her Gold Coast driveway has been moved to a Brisbane hospital as she fights for life.

Taya Parker, 17 months, was struck by a reversing four-wheel-drive in the driveway of her family home at Burleigh Waters about 4pm on Sunday.

Paramedics rushed her to the Gold Coast University Hospital with life-threatening injuries but she had to be moved to the Lady Cilento Children's Hospital overnight.

A spokeswoman for the hospital said the girl remained in a critical condition on Monday afternoon.
A woman who died when fire ripped through her Sunshine Coast home was within a metre-and-a-half of escape when she collapsed, according to the neighbour who almost saved her life.

Alan Lawry forced his way into the burning Coolum Beach home after it went up in flames about 10.30pm on Sunday, dragging the only occupant, Kylie Allen, to apparent safety.

But his bravery wasn't enough to save her life, as the 44-year-old died in hospital within hours.

Mr Lawry told reporters outside the Greenoaks Drive home of how he battled smoke so thick he had to drop to the ground to gasp for air as he searched for Ms Allen, reportedly a teacher.
Counting has resumed in the Toowoomba South by-election race, with the LNP expected to retain the seat and continue its seven-year run.

As of Sunday morning, LNP candidate and banker David Janetzki had claimed 46.38 per cent of primary votes, followed by Independent Di Thorley on 35.11 per cent, with 81 per cent counted.

LNP candidate for Toowoomba South David Janetzki.

The Darling Downs-based seat was up for grabs when Liberal National Party MP John McVeigh vacated the seat after his successful election to federal parliament.

Labor didn't run a candidate in the seat, which has been in either LNP hands or its parent party the Nationals since 1974.
A police officer will be disease tested after being bitten by a man on the Gold Coast.

About 9.40pm Saturday, police arrived at Thomas Drive, Chevron Island, following reports of a domestic disturbance.

An ambulance officer has been bitten on the hand while transporting a patient to Gold Coast University Hospital.

Police allege a man had assaulted a woman and, while he was being restrained, bit a female constable on the hand.

It is also alleged while the man was being transported to Gold Coast University Hospital, he bit a male paramedic on the hand.
The fate of Queensland dairy farmers is in the hand of consumers and one local producer is taking matters into his own hands, travelling across the state by tractor to secure his future.

Dairy farmer Greg Dennis, affectionately known to milk-lovers as 'Farmer Gregie', is journeying through Queensland in his tractor to stress the importance of buying local farmers' milk over cheaper supermarket brands.

Queensland dairy farmer Greg 'Farmer Gregie' Dennis will cover about 2000 kilometres during his campaign to swing the supermarket milk price war in local farmers' favour. Credit:Andrea Crothers

Just after noon on Sunday, he crossed the Story Bridge, a significant milestone in his 2000-kilometre road trip.

"Regardless of whether or not you know the truth about the value of milk, if you're spending less than $2 per litre for milk you're helping financially break a farmer somewhere in Australia," he said.
"Don't shoot", read the handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard held aloft in the crowd in front of Flinders Street Station.

It was a poignant reminder of the many US police shootings of black Americans that have triggered a worldwide response.

But for the thousand-strong crowd who marched in a Black Lives Matter rally in Melbourne on Sunday, concerns about racism went further than police brutality.

As well as showing support for the US #BlackLivesMatter movement, organisers wanted to highlight Indigenous Australian deaths in custody and the dispossession of people of colour in the region; including those living in West Papua, speakers told the crowd.
Students at an elite private boys' school set up a "young sluts" Instagram account to share photos of girls without their knowledge and vote on the "slut of the year."

It's understood the vile account, titled "ys_academy_puspus", was created by several senior boys at Brighton Grammar in Melbourne's bayside suburbs, and featured photos of unsuspecting girls in various stages of dress.

One mother discovered her daughter had been featured on the social media page over the weekend - and then saw images of other girls as young as 11 or 12, some in their school uniforms, others not.

One photo apparently showed a schoolgirl wearing bikini bottoms and a white singlet top and included a caption describing sex acts she would perform on the boys, she said.
US Vice President Joe Biden has praised the "profound" efforts of Victoria's new billion-dollar cancer centre and declared the world on the cusp of major breakthroughs in treatment.

Mr Biden - who lost his eldest son to brain cancer last year - toured the labs of the new cancer research and treatment centre on Sunday at the beginning of a four-day visit to Australia.

US Vice President Joe Biden spoke to Gillon McLachlan as Carlton took on West Coast at the MCG. Credit:Quinn Rooney

Calling for a "team sport" collaboration in the fight against cancer, Mr Biden announced the US and Australia will sign a deal to share about 60,000 patient records to study the genetic makeup of different types of cancer.

He said the potential breakthroughs offered by supercomputing could hopefully lead to a future where cancer treatment was a simple as tackling diseases such as mumps or measles.
The opposition on Sunday criticised what called a "blase" response from Health Minister John Day to the exposure of workers to asbestos at Perth's new children's hospital - an accusation the Minister says is pure "grandstanding".

Workers were covered in a white substance after drilling into roof panels on Monday but the area was not isolated for 24 hours, with tests later confirming the dust was asbestos.

A number of workers have signed a asbestos register following the revelation at Perth Children's Hospital. Credit:AFR

Opposition health spokesman Roger Cook said the federal government needed to release the results of a review into border protection measures against asbestos products.

"Clearly the building industry in WA has got a role and a responsibility to maintain its vigilance in relation to the sort of products being brought in from overseas but in the first instance what we want to see the contents of the review taken into border protection measures," he said.
Other reports suggest Long had been a dean's list student at the University of Alabama. He was previously married, but divorced in 2011. Police said they received a 911 call early on Sunday morning about a "suspicious person walking down the Airline Highway with an assault rifle". Baton Rouge Police Department Officer Markell Morris holds a bouquet of flowers after the fatal shooting on Sunday. Credit:AP Investigators reportedly said there was reason to believe the 911 call may have been used to lure police to the shooting scene and that the possibility it had been a conspiracy was being examined. US Vice-President Joe Biden, in Melbourne on Monday as part of a four-day visit to Australia, condemned the attack. He said the shooting was a "despicable act" and extended sympathy to the families of the officers killed.

An FBI armoured vehicle patrols the perimeter of the crime scene where Baton Rouge police officers were shot. Credit:AP He said it was unclear who had made an emergency call. Officers arrived minutes after the call and were fired upon by a man, who was dressed all in black and had his face concealed. Baton Rouge police block Airline Highway after police were shot on Sunday. Credit:AP In footage sent to a Baton Rouge television station by a woman who said she saw the shooting, a woman can heard saying that she saw a man with "a mask on, looking like a ninja".

The woman says: "He's about to start popping again. Oh my God!" Mourners in Baton Rouge raise their fists during a night rally on Monday in honour of Alton Sterling, who was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police earlier this month. Credit:AP Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards condemned the "absolutely unspeakable heinous attack" on the police. "We have to do better. An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us and the people who carried out this act ... do not represent the people of Baton Rouge or the state of Louisiana," he said. "There simply is no place for more violence. That doesn't help anyone; it doesn't further the conversation. It doesn't address any injustice, perceived or real. It is just an injustice in and of itself."

Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said two Baton Rouge police officers, aged 32 and 41, as well as a 45-year-old sheriff's deputy, were killed. US media have identified the three police officers killed in the shootout as Montrell Jackson, 32, Matthew Gerald, 41, and Brad Garafola. Three officers were also injured. A 41-year-old officer is in critical condition, while two sheriff's deputies, aged 41 and 51, were less seriously wounded. Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden said he had spoken to officials from the White House, who offered to assist in any way possible. "It's touched, basically, people all across the country," he told WAFB in a telephone interview. "The phones have not stopped ringing."

Mr Holden could not confirm reports from various media outlets that as many as seven officers had been wounded. "In the word 'community' is the word 'unity'," Mr Holden said. "If this is not a defining moment for us, to bridge the divide and come out with a unified voice, than I don't know what is." President Barack Obama was briefed about the shooting and asked to be updated throughout the day, according to the White House, which said officials there were in touch with authorities in Baton Rouge. He pleaded for calm and understanding and offered condolences for the three police officers killed and praise for law enforcement officers, expressing his "respect and gratitude" for their work, the Washington Post reported. But his main message was broadly directed to a country that seems increasingly on edge and specifically to the two candidates trying to replace him.

"We don't need inflammatory rhetoric," Mr Obama said. "We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts. All of us. "A bullet need happen only once. But for peace to work, we need to be reminded of its existence, again and again and again." Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, the country's largest police union, said: "When police officers have to worry about citizens committing unprovoked acts of violence against them, it makes it more difficult for them to interact with citizens and that is a key factor in law enforcement." Sunday's deaths brought the total number of officers killed in the line of duty to 30 so far this year, up from about 16 at this point last year. The average mid-year total is 25, according to FBI data. Two bailiffs, both deputised by the sheriff, were killed in a Michigan courthouse last week.

Mobile phone video allegedly taken as Sunday's shooting unfolded and aired by television station WAFB showed police vehicles descending on a petrol station while gunfire echoed in the background. Mark Clements, who lives two blocks behind the nearby Hammond Aire shopping plaza, said he heard 10 to 12 gunshots coming from that direction about 8.40am. He was letting his dogs out in his backyard when he heard the gunfire, followed by sirens and helicopters. A reporter for the local news channel WFAB who was at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Centre, where the injured officers were taken, said the flag outside the hospital was already flying at half mast. As events unfolded, the Louisiana Governor issued the following statement via Twitter.

The attack happened in a region still on edge after a white police officer fatally shot Alton Sterling, 37, outside a convenience store on July 5. Graphic video images showed one officer shooting Mr Sterling five times at close range and the other taking something from his pocket as he was dying. The shooting of Mr Sterling and Philando Castile, 32, near St Paul, Minnesota, on July 6 sparked "Black Lives Matter" protests over alleged police brutality against African Americans in cities from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore and New York. The protests stretched for days in Baton Rouge, with at least 15 people outside police headquarters at most times since Mr Sterling's death.

The largest protest occurred on June 9, when people lined Airport Highway carrying signs, singing and chanting. During the protests in the city, more than 100 people were arrested, and some in the region have criticised police for their aggressive response to demonstrators. Baton Rouge said that they responded in that way to protests because they had received a threat to law enforcement officials. Police said that a teenager accused of stealing guns during a burglary told investigators that he and others involved were seeking bullets to shoot officers. Officials said that they felt this threat was credible enough that it shaped their response to protests. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have sued the Baton Rouge police and the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office for their response to the protests, accusing law enforcement officials of using excessive force.

C. Denise Marcelle, a Democrat member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, pleaded with residents to stay home and not protest in Baton Rouge following the latest shooting. She said the timing of the shooting was devastating for Baton Rouge. A former Baton Rouge city councilwoman, she was in church when the shooting broke out. "My pastor came up to me and asked me to pray the prayer of peace and unity," she said. "I got up and led the prayer, and that was right around the same time that this incident happened. "I'm pretty shaken up that at the same time I was praying for peace someone was killing our officers. It has to stop."
The woman says: "He's about to start popping again. Oh my God!" An FBI armoured vehicle patrols the perimeter of the crime scene where Baton Rouge police officers were shot. Credit:AP Military service Long left the Marines in 2010 with an honourable discharge. His final Marine rank was E-5 (sergeant), CBS News reported. Baton Rouge police victims: (clockwise from left): Montrell Jackson with his son. Photo: Twitter/@BritniDWrites; Matthew Gerald. Photo: Twitter/@WAFB; East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Deputy Brad Garafola. Photo: Twitter/@TRex21 Credit:Social Media

Yvonne Carlock, the deputy public affairs officer for the United States Marines, provided details of Long's military service to The New York Times. She said he had the rank of sergeant as of July 1, 2008. He served in the military from August 22, 2005 to August 21, 2010 and in Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009. His speciality was "Data Network Specialist". He had earned a string of awards: Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, Iraq Campaign Medal, Sea Service Deployment Ribbon (3rd Award), Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Navy Unit Commendation Medal. His "duty assignments" included: Marine Corps Recruit Training Depot San Diego; School of Infantry, Camp Pendleton, California; Marine Corps Communication-Electronics School, Twentynine Palms, California; Headquarters Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, Okinawa, Japan; Marine Aircraft Group 38, 3rd Marine Air Wing, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, San Diego.

YouTube account A YouTube account operated by Long contains several videos in which he discusses recent shootings in the US, The Daily Caller reported. Videos on the account reveal he was a former Nation of Islam member, and made references to Alton Sterling, the black man who was killed by police in Baton Rouge on July 5. "If I would have been there with Alton - clap," Long says in a video posted on July 14. He promotes a book he wrote and discusses black liberation ideology.

"I wrote it for my dark-skinned brothers," Long said of his book. "If you look at all the rebels like Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X  Elijah Muhammad, they was light-skinned. But we know how hard y'all got it," Long continued. Long is heard lamenting "working for the white people". In another video, he defended Micah Johnson, the man who fatally shot five police officers Dallas on July 7. "It's justice. You know what I'm saying?" Long says, defending Johnson's attack.

"If I'm peaceful protestingI know they would try to arrest me, and I would die right there because you're not going to kidnap me. I know my rights, but I stand on my rights. That's what separates me, that's why they're afraid of me." On a website that he apparently operated, ConvoswithCosmo, he called himself "Freedom Strategist, Mental Game Coach, Nutritionist, Author and Spiritual Advisor". The website claims he "has been an avid student of nutrition, health, fitness, personal transformation and spiritual mastery since the age of sixteen. He conducts sports nutrition workshops locally, nationally, and internationally. He has traveled nationally to over thirty States in the U.S., and internationally to The Bahamas, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Maldives (Island country near India), Iraq, and Africa to name a few." Man with AK47 at door: reporter

A reporter with Fox4KC in Kansas City tweeted that she went to the address listed for Gavin Long, and "a man answered the door with an AK-47". Officers in Baton Rouge were responding to a call of a man carrying a gun when shots were fired about 9am local time. Two Baton Rouge police officers and one sheriff's deputy were killed. US media have identified the three as Montrell Jackson, 32, Matthew Gerald, 41, and Brad Garafola. The gunman died in a shootout with police a short time after he opened fire on the first group of officers, Colonel Mike Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said in a press conference.

It was not immediately clear whether there was a link between the shootings and the recent unrest over the police killings of Mr Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Authorities did not give any information about the gunman's possible motive. The shootings occurred about two kilometres from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of people were arrested this month while protesting against Mr Sterling's death. The 37-year-old African-American father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by a law enforcement officer on July 5. A witness to Baton Rouge shootings, Brady Vancel, told a CBS television affiliate he had seen a gunman, a second man in a red shirt lying in a parking lot and another gunman running away "as shots were being fired back and forth from several guns". He said the police arrived shortly after the gunfire began.
They were the two intertwined initials that had the internet erupting in laughter, and have now seemingly prompted a logo change from the Republican ticket running for the White House.

When Donald Trump revealed his vice presidential running mate Mike Pence this week, he also revealed a new logo, with the internet quickly asking what exactly Mr Trump's 'T' was doing to Mr Pence's 'P'.

Indiana Governor Mike Pence joined Donald Trump as confirmed Republican president and vice-president nominees. Credit:AP

Many suggested the design was itself suggestive in nature, or perhaps a little too representative of a close working relationship.
Bangkok: Thailand's infamous sex industry is under fire, with the tourism minister pushing to rid the country of its ubiquitous brothels and a spate of police raids in recent weeks on some of the largest establishments providing sex services in Bangkok.

Those who work in the industry say curbs on commercial sex services would hurt a flagging economy that has struggled to recover after political turmoil took the country to the brink of recession in 2014.

A motorcyclist rides past a group of young women hanging out near the Lumpini park in Bangkok. Credit:AP

Thailand is predominantly Buddhist and deeply conservative, but is home to an extensive sex industry, largely catering to Thai men. Hordes of tourists also flock to the bright lights of go-go bars and massage parlours in Bangkok and main tourist towns.

Thailand's beaches and temples have been the poster child for Asian tourism for decades and the country expects a record number of arrivals in 2016.
Latest News Westpac predicts another RBA double hike If it is correct, an average borrower with a $500k loan could be paying an additional $800 a month, expert says

Properties listed for sale in Australia down significantly Just two capital cities have experienced spring growth, says PropTrack

Demand for office space across large Australian markets has lifted by 22% off the back of increased activity among small businesses, according to new data from Colliers International.According to Colliers International's latest Office Demand Index, a total of 621,156sqm of demand was recorded in Q2 2016  a 22% increase from Q1 2016.Enquiries from small businesses looking for sub-1,000sqm of office space rose a massive 85% in Q2 2016, compared to Q1 2016. This sector also recorded a 51% year-on-year increase in enquiry.In the current market, small businesses are driving a significant amount of enquiry for office space nationally, compared to this time last year, Simon Hunt, Colliers International managing director of office leasing, said.Small businesses are also catering for more than 80% of the number of deals that have been transacted year-to-date.Small businesses are currently most active in the Sydney market, Colliers data shows, where enquiries almost tripled in the second quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter.The amount of space enquired for in the Melbourne market also more than doubled in Q2 2016, compared to Q1 2016, Hunt said.Small businesses are also increasing their enquiries in Brisbane and Adelaide, recording quarterly rises of 25% and 15% respectively.However, Colliers International's Office Demand Index found activity in larger markets was also being driven by mid-sized businesses (1,000-2,999sqm), which enquired for 18% more space in Q2 2016 than in Q1 2016.This quarter, we have seen more small businesses enquire for office space than ever previously recorded, however this doesn't mean large business activity has stopped, Hunt said.The second quarter of 2016 has seen large businesses increase their enquiry for 3,000sqm-plus space by 23%, compared to the same period last year.Hunt said he expects to see larger businesses increasing their transactional activity into the second half of this year.
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Lowell 4

Cyclones 0

July 16 at MCU Park

Brooklyns bats were silenced in a 4-0 loss to Lowell on Saturday night at MCU Park. It was the second shutout in the series and its starting to feel like 2015 with the lack of production from the Cyclones lineup.

I keep saying that I think theres better personnel on this team, but certainly the averages after 29 games dont lie, manager Tom Gamboa said. Were right there where we were a year ago at the bottom of the pack.

Lowell took the lead against Brooklyn starter Nabil Crismatt in the second. Victor Acosta led off with a single, moved to second on a groundout and scored on Carlos Tovars single to center.

Crismatt settled down after that  and retired nine batters in a row  before designated hitter Tyler Hill led off the sixth with a home run.

Crismatt gave up two runs in six innings and struck out five.

I tried to do what I had to do and what I know how to do Crismatt said. I tried to do my best. Today was not the day for the hitters, but I know the team is pretty good right now. And theres a good staff pitching for [Lowell].

The Cyclones lone scoring chance came in the sixth. Arnaldo Berrios and Jay Jabs drew walks, bringing Jacob Zanon to the plate with runners at first and second and one out. Zanon hit a soft liner to short which was snagged by Tovar. Berrios was caught off second and Tovar dove to the base and slapped it with his glove to end the inning.

Gamboa called it the play that killed us, especially with power-hitter Pete Alonso on-deck.

That was such an easy ball to read, Gamboa said. They tell me last year at Kingsport [Berrios] was the worst base runner and had all kinds of problems. And we spent every day of the two months we were in Florida talking about base running, working on base running.

Berrios was also thrown out at second in the eighth trying to stretch a single into a double, although credit should be given to Lowell right fielder Chris Madera for making a perfect throw on a line.

Adam Atkins entered to pitch the seventh for the Cyclones and the Spinners used the change to help pad the lead. Yoan Aybar hit a tapper back to Atkins, but the rightys underhand flip to first went over Alonsos head for a two-base error.

Thats something Ive never seen before, Gamboa said. Youve got a topped ball to first and all youve got to do is just underhand it to the guy and I dont know what the hell happened.

The error came back to haunt Brooklyn. With two on and two out, Maderas single to center scored Aybar. Two batters later, Roldani Baldwins run-scoring single gave Lowell a 40 lead.

Josh Pennington (five-and-one-third innings), Matthew Gorst (one-and-two-thirds innings) and Kuehl McEachern (two innings) combined to shutout the Cyclones.

The 1316 Cyclones look to get back in the win column when they travel to Hudson Valley for a 5:05 pm game with the Renegades on Sunday.

UPS AND DOWNS

Over the first 16 home games, only once has a Cyclones starting pitcher recorded a victory.

First-round pick Justin Dunn didnt pitch on Saturday. He had been throwing two innings on every sixth day. The Cyclones have gone to a six-man rotation. According to Gamboa, Dunn will pitch behind Joel Huertas on Sunday, and then will start every sixth day for three innings per start.
News / Africa

by Staff reporter

The African Union (AU) has today launched the African passport, a development aimed at enhancing African integration through the free movement of people and quick delivery of goods and services on the continent.Outgoing AU Commission Chairperson, Dr Nkosazana Dhlamini Zuma handed over the documents to delegates during the opening session of the 27th AU Summit underway in Kigali, Rwanda.The first copy of the passport went to the current AU Chairperson, President Idriss Deby of Chad followed by host and Rwandan president, Mr Paul Kagame."This is a step forward in the realisation of Africa's movement towards the dream Agenda 2063," said Dr Dhlamini Zuma before outlining the progress that the AU has made in realising integration and hurdles that still stand in Africa's path.She however expressed hoped that the dreams are achievableIn his welcoming address at the occasion, President Kagame stressed the need for unity of purpose in the movement towards Africa's integration and industrialisation.In his opening address, President Deby saluted African heads of state and government for taking bold steps towards weaning Africa from donor dependency by devising its own ways to finance its activities.He suggested that a fund be set up to fight terrorism.On the conflict in South Sudan, President Deby implored the warring rivals in that country, Riek Machar and President Salvar Kiir to follow the path of peaceful solution to their differences.The summit is being held under the theme: '2016 - The Year of African Human Rights,' with particular emphasis on women's rights.
News / National

by Staff reporter

Bulawayo High Court judge Nicholas Mathonsi on Friday granted MDC-T Women's Assembly the right to demonstrate today in Bulawayo.That was after the Zimbabwe Republic Police had refused to sanction the demo citing shortage of manpower.Police also claimed that the situation was volatile in the country.The demonstration is code-named "beat the pots campaign."The beat-the-pots demonstration is meant to show women's disgruntlement over the ongoing economic crisis that is causing hunger in the homes of ordinary Zimbabweans.
Opinion / Columnist

Well, like I indicated last week, the pilferage of the uumph of civil servants demonstrations by some externally glamorised fringe political upstarts last week was bound be exposed in the failed lockdown call this week. Simply, these upstarts overreached, mistaking civil servants action and WhatsApp-induced fear for a measure of their influence. Of course the gullible will say, ah but Manheru, did you not see the crowds that thronged the Magistrates Court this week. I did, and what a variegated crowd it was! The issue is not to have seen the crowd. Rather, the issue is to correctly read the message from it.Who was who in the throngThe crowd comprised a dominant youthful age group - yuppies and lumpens - something sure to explain the extensive use of social media in these overrated fringe WhatsApp politics. It comprised a significant handful of whites, among them Ben Freeth, the renowned "white African" who is the face of dislodged white settler farmers in desperate valedictory agitation and vexatious legalism. It comprised one or two ambassadors and scores of western diplomats  largely intelligence officers  out to gauge and garner on the impact of what they had sponsored and fomented. It comprised opposition supporters all of them wistful  gauging this new, emerging political force that is a ringing indictment on their own failures as a viable alternative to Zanu-PF. And it is not fortuitous that even the ailing Tsvangirai had to be dragged from his bed of recuperation to save the situation which this unstructured runaway force is threatening to dominate. It comprised pseudo-Pentecostals hoping to catch the attention of the broad church in the hope of getting a patina of moral high ground in what has turned out to be a campaign of violence and naked, WhatsApped lies and impersonations. It comprised vendors who hoped to clinch a few dollars from the sale of national flags which this unstructured movement may not be allowed to abuse for long. That was the throng, quite a mosaic in motives as in dress.Photogenic techniquesOf course to all that add nocturnal theatricals, including the blinking politics-by-candlelight, and you have an idea of new photogenic techniques belying this abortive, storm-in-teacup politics with the lifespan of froth in the dry Harmattan. I was about to forget a handful of over-counted "human rights" lawyers meant to suggest formidableness. Except we have met these before, from the early days of land reforms when their cause enjoyed generous support from white farmers and western governments. Nothing new, plainly. Nothing to fear at all. An ensemble of same old forces only rearranged and rejuvenated by a new catchment of impressionable followers.Juvenalian politicsIt was a seemingly spectacular show. Until of course you remember that the real agenda of the day and the day to follow was a lockdown of the country meant to eventuate in an ouster of an elected, constitutional government. Not my agenda by any count. Theirs by a well reared WhatsApp declarative! The court action was thus a sideshow meant to hide a monumental flop that the lockdown call was, full stop. As also were sporadic demonstrations in South Africa and UK which no one cared about. Or a song on YouTube. Today no one is under any illusion as to the length and breadth of this twitter-movement. It cannot blame police high-handedness. All the authorities did was to assure safety and security to law-abiding citizens: business operators, informal traders, commuter omnibus operators, educators, students, civil servants and others chasing different odds and ends. That action removed the fear factor, itself the only mobilising ingredient of this movement, second only to socially networked lies. All this brings out the Juvenalian outlook of these impressionable youths in elementary politics. Surely it was not difficult to know that the business sector actually sponsored SI 64 of 2016? Surely it is not difficult to recall that previous stayaways called by the MDC-T a few years back at the height of the land reforms collapsed simply because businesses are not in the habit of underwriting spurious change. Or any change for that matter. They are for stability, for the status quo. Except failing ones hoping for bailouts from the aftermath of chaotic change. By asking businesses to lock down, even then for two consecutive days, you are essentially asking them to fund a larger national political question which they are not wont to doing. Or are these youths too young to have read from the forerunning stayaways? Of course you have strange business propositions like Food Lovers directly linked to gratuitous imports from South Africa  agricultural by the way  who feel hurt by the SI. You don't need extra wisdom to know that Food Lovers is the latest initiative by embittered white farmers meant to depress agricultural activity in the country through needless imports in order to encourage a perception of futility of land reforms. Well, the authorities have noticed. As indeed they have also the connection between white-run schools and such politics.Endless hashtag chainGentle reader, in my description of various elements that made up the throng at the court, I am sure you have already sensed the deadly fault lines in this much vaunted hashtag movement. It will not be long. No politician worth an election will be fooled by Mawarire's claims that he is simply putting pressure on Government to be heard, that he has no political ambition. His vaulting ambition this already excited, his imagined grandiosity this already stoked, it is only a matter of days before he launches himself as a political party. Check this column. Unless he is an out and out fool who does not know that sustainable politics require an organisational framework provided by a party, an ideology, a manifesto, a leadership structure, etc, etc. And in not being a fool by providing all these things itemised above, he in fact becomes one. A big one too. That is the bind associated with all so-called civil movements. For now here is the sheer absurdity of it all: Name: #This Flag; Cause: #This Flag; Ideology: #This Flag; Manifesto: #This Flag; Membership: #This Flag; Leader: #This Flag; Sponsor: #Outgoing Laurent Delahousse; Sympathisers: #SkyTv , BBC, IFP, Freeth; Reach: #Avondale ; Voters: #Diaspora ; Opponents: #Anxious Opposition; Tolerated by: # Government; Still to be responded to by: #Zanu-PF One Laurent DelahousseA good friend e-mailed me from UK to say his sumptuous breakfast had been interrupted by images of alleged Zimbabwe police beatings showing on ITV. He added, "Zimbabwe back on British radar all for wrong reasons." I did not hesitate. "Beatings you said? Elsewhere they shoot." Of course I added an exclamation mark to good measure. "I know", he answered resignedly, adding: "The British have a special standard for us". Really, I quipped. "Do you remember Ayi Kwei Armah's "Why are we so blest"? A good point to introduce Laurent Delahousse and his French masters. He is the outgoing French Ambassador who appears to have chosen drama for a parting shot to this society. A while ago, he visited maverick hashtag demonstrators who had decamped at Africa Unity Square. At night, too! Of course the broad light of national publicity caught up with him and he was left gasping for lame defences. This time around he has dispensed with nightfall, choosing to associate with fringe oppositional politics in broad daylight. It is not a mark of ambassadorial courage; just the recklessness of a lacklustre ambassador whose tour time is up. Much like an estranged wife who knows she can no longer salvage anything from a collapsing marriage, he is now going for broke. But there is more to the behaviours of this French envoy than has been covered by the local press. Let me help out.See what their govt has wroughtTwo days ago, the French were celebrating the storming of the Bastille, which is how they recognise their national day. The Bastille was the castle that housed the French monarch before the 1789 bourgeois revolution that guillotined and swept away monarchical rule in France and the greater part of Europe, heralding the ascendency of bourgeois rule. As the Ambassador was dishing out wine in honour of the day, France itself was under attack, leaving scores of Frenchmen and women dead. "The protection of the people by the State without unnecessary use of force, even the right to stay home without having to face the full wrath of the law . . . Those are some of the rights deriving from liberation struggle of your elders. I want to remain hopeful that Zimbabwe will not deviate from the progress accomplished in recent years". Such were the words of Ambassador Dalahousse to us, words ironically virtually contemporaneous with the attack on his country by what we can only assume to be terrorists. This is not the first such attack which France has suffered this year and in the last two years. One can only condole with the French families which have lost their loved ones, while noticing repeated failure by their Government to protect them. And in doing so, one is not blind to the sheer culpability of the French Government whose policies on the African continent and elsewhere in the Middle East causally link with the raging insecurity which has now visited its citizens.A dose of French piffleAnd the Ambassador should be the first one to know that rearing and pepping up violence in any society, including celebrating the actions of forces of violence as "light that shone . . . on the other side of this (Harare) beautiful city" and heralding, to use his own words "a new, united peaceful Zimbabwe", creates not just instability but a spiral of violence which ends up engulfing an otherwise peaceful society. The French led operations in Mali. We have seen the blowback from that precipitous action that never settled matters in the Maghreb. Today their man here thinks he is being helpful by romancing a burgeoning movement that introduces "ghosts" clad in balaclavas on YouTube, a movement that encourages attack on the police, while he takes advantage of the parapet of diplomatic immunity. And as he goads and pampers these still amateurish but potentially potent dark forces incubating in our society, he injects a dose of piffle: "France supports the Government of Zimbabwe's policy to re-engage with the international community and its strategy of arrears clearance more commonly known as the Lima Process". How are we supposed to take such words?Voting for lawlessness and violenceAt one level he is hunting with the hounds while at another level he is running with the hares, even romancing the "liberation struggle of (our) elders", while castigating the very ideas which moved that liberation as "outdated ideology that is not helping your country to (adjust) to the reality of the world today". What is the reality of the world today, Mr Ambassador? That you can brazenly tell us that "I make no excuse for backing (anti-government) protests" in Zimbabwe as if you are a citizen and stakeholder? Would France countenance such gross interference in its own affairs by an African diplomat accredited to it? Or is it because we are a small nation comprising people of colour, comprising a race your country once colonised in the past? And you dare assert the right of Zimbabweans to demonstrate "within the framework of the law" and to use the social media "in a peaceful manner" as if you did not follow what happened when those actions unfolded here. Did you castigate departures from framework of the law, ominous forays beyond peace? How would your government have reacted to a figure in balaclava calling for an uprising?How dare you venture into the backyard?Like I said, there is a method to the man's rank madness. France has been upset by the way President Mugabe brokered peace in Mali during his time as Chairman of the AU. To France, this was an affront. Mugabe should not have set foot in France's backyard. Or inviting the Malian President for a return visit. We are paying dearly for it. To aggravate matters, Zimbabwe invited the Togolese President to open the ZIFT. This was sacrilegious. The French do not want Mugabe politics in their erstwhile colonies, politics sure to upset the neo-colonial applecart. It was not also lost to them that after the inauguration of President Buhari, the President was due to fly to Ivory Coast at the invitation of a continental bank. They stepped in to stop that. This is the tiff between us and France, which the Ambassador has been asked to fight out here. He has lost the fight, and is set to go back limping.Hoping for EU leadership in AfricaThere is also a new angle to it. With the anticipated departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, France hopes to lead in reshaping the bloc's policy towards Africa, but in a way that recognizes French interests and its neo-colonial tradition. France thinks its entry point is appearing to be on the side of democracy it does not support in its so-called African backyard, so it has a transcendental ticket for encroachment into former British colonies, and also for out-shining a reticent Germany, the real powerhouse of the EU. Tackling Zimbabwe, currently seen as the hardest nut to crack on the continent, would assure it of that leadership in the bloc. And sponsoring new political forces in the country in the hope of their take-over will also guarantee it of a client government more beholden to it than to the exiting British. It is a very facile policy the French are launching, one sure to fail. In the meantime, till we never meet again, it's a goodbye Mister Ambassador.Icho!nathaniel.manheru@zimpapers.co.zw
Where are the Phillies' players from 2008 World Series title team?

The 2022 Phillies are back in the World Series against Houston but where are the members of the 2008 team?
Some independent directors (ID) have been altering their status as non-independent non-executive directors in some boards, to help get appointed in a new company as ID. This helps them get around the cap on IDs, while continuing to keep their board seats.
North Dakota highway signs that portray a silhouette of a Native American head are being switched out for ones featuring the states shape, but it could take years before the signs that have represented North Dakota for almost 100 years disappear.

The state Department of Transportation recently began replacing what are known as the Red Tomahawk signs used to number state highways, spokeswoman Jamie Olson said Thursday. Signs with a silhouette of North Dakota will slowly replace the old signs on an as-needed basis, she said.

Itll kind of be a slow process, she said. It could take several years before everything is changed over just because were not going out to replace the signs just to replace them. Were waiting until they need replacing. People will see both versions out there for a number of years before everything is changed over.

Drivers may have noticed the signs on a few routes across the state. The change mostly has taken place along highways undergoing construction, though signs that have lived out their life expectancies are candidates for the replacement.

The switch was calculated into the DOTs budget and will not require additional funds, Olson said.

Not everyone is happy about the change. Some have taken to social media to criticize the decision, saying it is an attempt to appease the politically correct movement.

We do this politically correct crap just to be politically correct, Ron Martin of Fargo said. Thats the real sad part.

Uniformity

The DOT decided last year to begin the switch during the 2016 construction season, Olson said. There were multiple reasons behind the decision, including changing out the signs ahead of the departments 100-year anniversary, which will be celebrated in 2017, and to mark significant spending on updating North Dakotas roads in recent years.

Another reason was to help keep uniformity across the nation, Olson said.

A number of different states use their state outline or symbol on the highway signs, she said.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has a model for state highway signs, which features a circle and the highways number, but states are free to choose the design of the signs.

More than a dozen states, including Minnesota and South Dakota, have an outline of their states on state highway signs, while others feature squares, circles or other geometric shapes.

But several states use other symbols on their signs, such as an outline of George Washington for Washington state, New Mexicos sun symbol from the its flag, Wyomings cowboy riding a bucking horse and a beehive for Utah.

Kansas state flower, the sunflower, is featured on its state highway signs. Eric Nichol, state signing engineer for the Kansas Department of Transportation, said he doesnt know how long the signs have featured the sunflower, though he doesnt expect itll go away any time soon.

Those (signs) have been a part of the state for quite a long time, he said. The shape of it has been modified over the years, but for the most part it still looks like a sunflower.

History of Red Tomahawk

North Dakotas signs were modeled after Marcellus Red Tomahawk, a Lakota Indian who fought against U.S. soldiers as settlers moved in the 1800s to the Dakota Territory. He eventually took part in several peace negotiations, worked as a Lakota goodwill ambassador and became a member of the Bureau of Indian Affairs police force. Hes mostly remembered as the man who shot and killed Sitting Bull in 1890.

Red Tomahawks image first appeared on the North Dakota signs in 1923 after the state developed a marking and numbering system for state highways. The North Dakota Highway Patrol also features a more detailed image of Red Tomahawk on patrol cars, uniforms and elsewhere. It has been an official symbol of the Highway Patrol since 1951, and there are no plans to retire it, according to the Highway Patrol.

The state highway signs have been criticized in previous years, with some calling them offensive and demanding that the state remove the image. Olson said the NDDOT has heard from both sides of the argument.

Some people dont like Red Tomahawk on the signs, and some dont like the state on the signs, she said.

The department considered the history of Native American in the state as well as the sentiment the image may have to North Dakotans, but it wasnt the main reason for the switch, she said.

We know there is some sensitivity surrounding that, she said. We know that has been a hot topic, and it certainly played a part in our conversations when we began that process.

NDDOT officials contacted the descendants of Red Tomahawk to discuss the switch, Olson said, adding everyone walked away from the conversation with an understanding of the changes.

Others have criticized the move, with some comparing it to the retirement of UNDs Fighting Sioux nickname in 2012.

That change and the switch of the state highway signs are not related, Olson said.

Martin said the move is just another attempt by bureaucrats to just continue to mold society while disregarding history. He said he feared North Dakota's Native American culture may be forgotten as a result of moves like this.

"Were losing our heritage, he said.
The traditional art of jewellery making is ripe for disruption in India, with new age firms such as BlueStone, AuGrav and Caratlane swapping out handmade one-offs in favour of 3D printed pieces.
Four Tamil Nadu suffered minor injuries when they were attacked allegedly by Sri Lankan naval personnel off Katchathivu islet.

The naval personnel took away their cellphones and GPS equipment and also damaged nets of 10 other boats, P Sesuraja, Fishermen's Association leader said.

The fishermen, part of a group of 3,000 who had put out to sea from here last night, returned without any catch after the navy officers threatened them against fishing in the island nation's territorial waters, he said.
With the tense situation in Jammu and remaining grim, the Centre on Sunday sent 20 additional Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troops to the Valley to maintain law and order in the state and also as a precautionary measure against any possible violence by locals and untoward elements.

Also, the summer vacations for all schools in the Valley have been extended to July 24.

Meanwhile, curfew in the Valley continued for the ninth day on Sunday in an attempt to maintain law and order in the state, as well as preventing the people from staging demonstrations against the killing of Wani.

Around 38 people have been killed so far and several others injured after clashes between the protesters and security forces so far.

Cell phone services have been blocked and mobile internet in Jammu and remains suspended.

The government has also blocked Cable TV networks across Valley.

The violence has shown no signs of subsiding as the protesters on Saturday attacked a police post in Kupwara district in which a civilian was killed.

Two civilians were also reportedly injured in fresh incidents of violence in the area.

A mob attacked a police post at Hatmulla in Kupwara district, following which the security personnel retaliated.

On Friday, another protester was killed and three others injured in fresh police firing in Kupwara district and another civilian died in South Kashmir district.

The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti calling on the people of the state to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to bring peace in the valley.
A mob tried to storm an army camp on Sunday in Bandipora district, shattering the day-long fragile peace in Kashmir, where a curfew has been imposed, even as the Centre rushed about 2,000 additional CRPF personnel to shore up security in the Valley, where violence since July 9 has claimed 39 lives.

Protesters attacked the army camp at Ajas in Bandipora district, forcing the security forces to open fire. Three persons were injured in the incident, police said.

Earlier, Usman Abdul Majid, member of Legislative Assembly from Bandipora, had claimed that one person was killed and three others were injured in the clash.

Curfew was in force for the third consecutive day while normal life remained paralysed in the wake of deadly clashes that have rocked the Valley following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani nine days ago, leaving 39 dead and over 3,160 injured.

Two persons were also injured in action by security forces when a mob threw stones in Eidgah area of the city. The fresh violence came even as the situation was mostly peaceful during the day.

After restricting mobile telephone services, authorities have now snapped landline connections to check violent protests. Local newspapers failed to hit the stands for the second consecutive day after the governments alleged clampdown on the media. No local paper was available as newspaper owners decided not to publish after authorities on Saturday allegedly raided some media houses and seized their printed copies.

The Editors Guild of India condemned the Jammu and government for unwarranted muzzling of media in the state and termed as unfortunate the attempts to shoot the messenger. It is extremely unfortunate that the state government, under fire for its poor management of the law and order situation in the Valley, has sought to shoot the messenger, a statement from the Editors Guild said.

It said the police were sent into the offices of the local media in in the wee hours today and copies of the newspapers that had just been printed seized and printing presses shut down.

Reports suggest that the journalists and other staff working in Greater and Rising Kashmir were detained, harassed and their mobiles (phones) taken away by the raiding police parties, it said.

We are also aghast to note that the media censorship will continue for a minimum of three days if not more, it added.

Police and paramilitary personnel were deployed in strength across the Valley for strict implementation of the prohibitory orders, the official said.

A police officer said: All 10 districts of Kashmir Valley continue to remain under curfew today as a precautionary measure for maintaining law and order.



He said the decision to continue the curfew was taken to maintain law and order as one person was killed in fresh violence in Kupwara district on Saturday.

Official said that a total of 20 fresh companies (100 personnel in each) are being rushed to the Valley which will be in addition to 2,800 Central Reserve Police Force personnel which were sent to assist the state police last week.

Some of the fresh units will exclusively render the task of road opening parties in order to secure the movement of security forces convoys, a senior official said.

About 60 battalions are already stationed in the state as part of counter insurgency grid.
Union Minister for Urban Development, Housing & Urban Poverty Alleviation, Information & Broadcasting M Venkaiah Naidu has said he expects the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill to pass in the coming session of the Parliament.

At a Meet the Minister programme organised by the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce (SIFCC) in Chennai, Naidu said, "With regard to GST, the entire country is watching what is going to happen in Parliament tomorrow. Broad consensus has emerged. Still there are certain points which are to be addressed by the Finance Minister".
The mega-size solar energy projects planned at Ladakh, Leh and Kargil might be aborted, due to lack of takers from beneficiary states and no grid infrastructure to handle this capacity.
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Taking a grim view of incomplete applications, which ultimately delays the licence-approval process, the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) has decided on a time limit of 45 days for supplementary clarifications or information, whenever asked for.
The scope of agriculture is very vast. Our farmers not only grow food grains in the field but they are contributing very much in the development of the country by doing another work associated with farming and getting employment. Bee keeping is one of them. It is a very attractive rural agriculture/horticulture based activities. It neither requires technology nor capital investment or comprehensive infrastructure. Our farmers, agriculture workers can increase their income alone and by forming groups also. Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister, Shri Radha Mohan Singh said this on the occasion of inauguration of two days seminar of Integrated Bee Keeping Development in Piprakothi, Motihari in Bihar today on awareness, promotion and technology transfer in bee keeping. .

.

The seminar was organized by National Bee Keeping Board (NBB), Department of Agriculture Cooperation and Farmers Welfare, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India. Union Minister has said that we have learnt bee keeping from our tradition. It is a traditional industry of forest areas and many tribal and other persons know the original art of honey collection. We have to help them by scientific management. We have to link it with employment. He said that bee keeping has so many benefits: (a) To provide self employment to rural and forest based population (b) Production of honey, pollen, wax, venom and royal jelly; (c) To provide employment to rural educated youths in collection, processing and marketing of bee products; (d) To increase the yield by cross pollination of several agriculture and horticulture crops and to improve their quality. The Government is trying its best for this. .

.

Shri Radha Mohan Singh said that we not only get honey from honey bees but there are so many species of honey bees in India which are very helpful in giving pollination support for increasing yield of agriculture and horticulture corps. In many developed countries honey bees are used for pollination in agriculture and horticulture crops in a very large number for increasing per acre productivity for the last three four decades. The agriculture scientists of America and Europe have estimated that the yield of crops has increased manifold due to bee pollination. In many of the crops, yield has increased manifold by cross pollination of honey bees e.g. 159.8% in Mustard, 20 to 3400% in Sunflower, 24-33150% in Burseme, 180 to 6950% in Apple, 10,000% in Lichi, 471 to more than 900% in Orange, 70 to more than 140% in Guava, upto 30% in Pulses like Arhar etc. According to National Bee Board, 12 main crops are unfertile themselves and they require bee pollination and for this atleast 2000 lakh bee colonies are required. Recently about 25 lakh bee colonies are reared by more than 2.00 lakh bee keepers and the estimated annual production of honey is about 90,000 metric tonne. .

.

Thus we see that bee keeping has double benefits. On the one hand our agriculture yield is increasing and we are getting bee products on the other hand. Besides honey, we get wax, venom, royal jelly, propolis etc. from bee keeping which are used in medicine and cosmetics. These products are in great demand in national and international markets. .

.

National Bee Board (NBB) is putting on constant efforts for the development of bee keeping in the country. It makes the people aware and has done many work for the increase of the capacity of the bee keepers. The main aim of the NBB are nucleus stock production, capacity building and training of bee producers and bee keepers, to make holistic development of scientific bee keeping in India by popularising state of art technologies relating to processing and quality control of bee products. .

.

The Minister said that if we talk of Bihar, it has huge capacity of bee keeping in Bihar. Keeping this capacity in view National Bee Board, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, Government of India while taking decision have given a project of about Rs. 2 crores for establishment of Integrated Bee Keeping Development Centre (IBDC) in Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Piprakothi, Motihari with the cooperation of Rajendra Agriculture University, Samastipur for promotion of scientific bee keeping in the state. Everything will be provided for scientific bee keeping in the centre situated in Piprakothi i.e. production, storage, processing, marketing unit of manufacturing equipments, increase in the number of mother bees, identification of the diseases of honey bees and clinical laboratories. For collection of honey and other products and for maintaining the quality, centres will be opened. This centre will promote bee keeping from scientific methods in Bihar and this centre will prove itself helpful in giving much incentives and benefits to bee keepers and farmers. .

.
Five more combat helicopters were delivered by the United States to the in a bid to improve the capabilities of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF).

The helicopters are capable of firing rockets or .50-caliber machine guns.

"Five new MD-530 Cayuse Warrior helicopters arrived at Hamid Karzai Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, July 16, 2016, via a C-17 Globemaster III from McChord Air Force Base, Wash. The MD-530s were delivered to the increasing their fleet from 18 to 23," Khaama Press quoted the 438th Air Expeditionary Wing as saying.

The (AAF) had earlier in July received five new combat helicopters from Washington.

Priced at about $ 5 million each, the MD-530 provides both an economical and critical air-to-ground capability, enabling Afghan pilots to engage the enemy.

The MD-530s were purchased using the Afghan Security Forces Fund.
CLEVELAND -- U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer said hes confident that Cleveland will be the safest place on planet Earth this week.

Cramer is headed to Ohio for the Republican National Convention, set to run Monday through Thursday, and as an early endorser -- and energy adviser -- of Donald Trump, hell appear at venues around the city acting as a surrogate.

But despite his confidence in security, Cramer still points out a risk:

Given whats been happening around the world, it also looks like the most irresistible target for terrorism, he said. My antenna is up and very tuned into possible threats.

And while Cramers attitude on his trip to the buckeye state is tuned to terrorism, it coincides with a broader and deeper uncertainty over local unrest playing out nationally on exactly what could happen at next weeks convention. Reuters reports that Cleveland police have tightened convention security Dallas shooting death of five police officers; CNN adds that numerous protest groups are laying plans for dozens of rallies and marches.

That doesnt bother multiple GOP politicians headed to Ohio, though.

State Rep. Mark Owens, a Grand Forks Republican and a North Dakota delegate to the convention said that he has no concerns about violence.

Experience teaches those in charge of security how to better handle that over time, said Owens, who noted he plans to vote for Trumps nomination. Naturally, the first thing that pops into my mind (on convention security) is the 1968 Democratic convention. Its not going to be anything near that.

U.S. Sen. John Hoeven agreed.

Certainly there will be protests. We know that. I hope theyre done peacefully, he said. Am I personally concerned? No. I have confidence in our law enforcement officials.

The convention caps off a lengthy and especially candidate-heavy primary season for the GOP, with Trump, a clear leader in delegates, expected to win the partys presidential nomination. There have been rumblings that some party members might try to avert that outcome, but none of the convention-goers interviewed said they support it. Cramer said the movement has little staying power, and Hoeven noted that choosing a candidate other than Trump could fracture the party badly enough to put the White House out of reach this November.

There is a little Stop Trump movement  but its barely a blip on the screen anymore, Cramer said.

Assuming Trumps nomination, the convention kicks off the run to November. Trump announced he will compete with Indiana Governor Mike Pence, whom he announced as his running mate in a tweet on Friday morning.

Cramer pointed out that Pence is a sound choice.

He brings a calming sense to an otherwise chaotic campaign up to this point. Governor Pence, just by virtue of his personality, is a calming presence, Cramer said. Plus, he also brings a calm to the evangelical base of our party that had some anxiety in some corners.

Not every GOP leaders is headed to Cleveland -- in fact, far from it. A spokesman for Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska told The Hill, a Washington, D.C., newspaper, that he will instead take his kids to watch some dumpster fires across the state, all of which enjoy more popularity than the current front-runners.

By The Hills count, as of July 7, 32 GOP senators were set to attend, 18 to skip, and four were undecided.

Cramer said some of those skipping might simply be bitter.

Some of these members, especially senators  a lot of them picked somebody else early on. Theres more of that sort of competitiveness that they cant seem to get over, he said. Frankly a lot of the Senate is made of the very thing that Donald Trump ran against, and thats the establishment, good ol boy, non-productive club.

Hoeven, for his part, said hes attending from Monday through Wednesday of the convention, before leaving to meet on behalf of a North Dakota unmanned aircraft systems test site.

Im going in to make sure I support our delegation, he said.
He hounded network executives at all hours, demanding Nielsen reports and asking: "How'd we do? How'd we do?"



He routinely fibbed about ratings, declaring "The Apprentice" the No. 1 show on television even when, as NBC officials would sheepishly admit, it was not.
A second round of the UN-facilitated peace talks between Yemen's warring parties resumed in Kuwait after a two-week break, government officials said.

The negotiations aimed at ending the civil war, bringing security and stability to the war-torn Middle East country were officially halted late last month and were scheduled to resume on Friday, Xinhua news agency reported.

The UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed confirmed that the talks were held on Saturday evening with the presence of representatives from the two warring rivals.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdul-Malik Mekhlafi, who heads the government's peace negotiating team, said on Twitter that "the government decided to return to the peace talks after receiving written response from the UN envoy to our previous demands."

The upcoming talks will continue for about two weeks and will mainly focus on discussing withdrawal from cities, handing over government facilities, release of prisoners and lifting siege on cities, he said.

The Foreign Minister added that "we agreed with the UN envoy that the two-week duration of the negotiations won't be extended more and no other topics will be debated."

The delegation of the Shia Houthi rebels and their allies from General People's Congress Party arrived in Kuwait on Friday from .

Yemeni political observers said that the UN-brokered peace talks that kicked off in Kuwait City on April 11 failed to reach any tangible breakthroughs to end the conflict after more than two months of negotiations.

Delegates of the government strongly insisted that they represent Yemen's sole legitimate governing authority, and call for the full implementation of last year's UN Security Council Resolution 2216.

The resolution orders Houthi militias to withdraw from capital Sanaa and all other cities occupied earlier, hand over weapons and release political prisoners before forming a new sharing transitional government.

However, the Houthis have said that they represent the country's de facto rulers and urged to form a new transitional government before discussing withdrawal from cities and the other topics.
Sri Lankan Prime Minister expressed his support for Turkey's elected government on Saturday as a coup attempt had been squashed by authorities earlier in the day.

Wickremesinghe said in a statement that foiling an attempt to overturn a democratically-elected government through a military coup would please all people who valued democracy, Xinhua news agency reported.

He said he was happy to note that the President and Prime Minister of Turkey had been able to preserve democratic rule and assured the support of Sri Lanka and its people.

At least 2,800 military officers have been detained throughout Turkey after suspected coup plotters attempted to overthrow the government late Friday, using tanks and helicopters and blocking bridges and taking over some media outlets.

The Turkish government said on Saturday evening that the coup attempt had been thwarted and the situation was under control.

Over 200 people have been killed in the attempted coup, reports said.
Three top commanders who were held hostage by the coup attempters were saved on July 16, Defence Minister Fikri Isik announced on Saturday night.

"Our commander of air staff, naval staff and the second chief of general staff were saved from the Akinci Base where they were held and are in good condition," Xinhua news agency quoted Isik as saying to reporters in the capital Ankara, adding that it was early to say that the coup danger was completely over, while urging caution.

Meanwhile, the commander of gendarmerie forces Gen Galip Mendi was also saved later.

In addition, a total of 72 coup plotters were detained during police operation at the Akinci Base in the capital Ankara.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan made a "thank you call" to parliament speaker and leaders of the two opposition parties on July 16.

The president thanked Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and National Movement Party (NHP) leader Devlet Bahceli for not giving credit to the July 15 coup attempt during a phone conversation.
Turkish President on Saturday reiterated a call for his US counterpart Barack Obama to hand over the leader of an opposition movement accused of being behind the coup attempt in Turkey.

"Please meet our request if we are strategic partners," Xinhua news agency quoted Erdogan as saying in remarks delivered in Istanbul.

The Turkish leader has blamed the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Islamic scholar living in the US state of Pennsylvania, for the unsuccessful coup that started on Friday night.

"I asked you previously either to deport him or surrender him to Turkey," Erdogan said, referring to Obama. "I told you that he is considering the coup d'etat, but you didn't listen."

The Turkish leader's audience chanted, demanding "the execution of Fethullah".

Ankara has been accusing the Gulen Movement of running a parallel state and trying to topple the Turkish government.

As many as 2,839 Turkish troops are now detained over suspected involvement in the failed coup, but Erdogan stated that "The Turkish army does not belong to the parallel structure".

The president urged his audience to shun schools run by the Gulen Movement for their children.

Erdogan's extradition request is expected to further heighten tensions between Ankara and Washington, as the NATO allies have long been in dispute over the treatment of Kurds in Syria.
Eight Turkish soldiers seeking political asylum in Greece, where they arrived by helicopter, hours after the failed coup d'etat in Turkey, on Sunday appeared before the district attorney.

Speaking to the private television channel, Skai, the lawyer who represented the soldiers, said they denied involvement in the failed coup, but feared an unfair trial if they were to be extradited to Turkey, Efe news reported.

At least 265 persons died in clashes during the failed coup that started on Friday night. Of them, 161 were civilians and police officers, while 104 were alleged coup supporters.

The Turkish government has since launched a wave of mass arrests, nearly 3,000 alleged coup-plotters have been detained.

A few hours after the soldiers landed the Black Hawk helicopter at Alexandroupoli airport, in north-east Greece, Turkish Minister for Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu called on Athens to immediately extradite the "traitors".

Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotozias said that it would be difficult for the soldiers to obtain asylum in Greece, considering that they have been accused of complicity in the attempted coup.

More than 1,000 people across Turkey were injured in the clashes.

Cities across Turkey held pro-democracy demonstrations on Saturday night.

Since the beginning of the failed coup, Erdogan has repeatedly asked the Turkish population to take to the streets in order to demonstrate against the coup and "defend democracy".

The head of the Turkish counter-terrorism police unit, Turgut Aslan remained in a critical condition in hospital on Sunday, after sustaining a gun shot to the head during the clashes.

The community unanimously condemned the attempted coup and has called for stability.
A former US police officer has been charged with the murder of an unarmed African-American man, officials said.

James Burns turned himself in to the Fulton county jail in US's Georgia state on Saturday, CNN reported.

Burns responded to a call from an off-duty officer of suspicious activity at an apartment complex on June 22. Burns and two other officers saw Devaris Caine Rogers attempt to leave in a vehicle, said a statement from the district attorney's office.

Burns, who is white, blocked Rogers' path and fired one shot into the passenger side of his vehicle, striking Rogers in the head and killing him, CNN reported citing the statement.

"At the time of the shooting, Burns was not provided with any facts describing Rogers as a threat to the officer or the public. Neither was Rogers identified as the man the off-duty officer had previously reported," the statement said.

Rogers had not also tried to strike the officer with the vehicle, the district attorney's office said.

Burns was charged with felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and two counts of violation of oath by a police officer.

Burns' lawyer, Drew Findling, told Atlanta-based WSB News on Saturday that he would aggressively investigate the case.

"We recognise this is a tragedy," Findling said, adding, "That being said, I defend officer Burns and I think that warrant was issued prematurely."

Tensions prevailed across the US earlier this month over the police shooting of two African-American men in Louisiana and Minnesota.

The situation went out of control when people took to the streets in Dallas city to protest the killings, and a sniper attack killed five policemen.

The policemen were killed by a lone gunmen, Micah Johnson, as he was upset about the fatal police shootings of the two African-American men.
Scores of activists were detained in Vietnam's capital on Sunday as they gathered to protest against China, after it rejected a recent ruling that dismissed its claims to much of the South China Sea.

Anti-Chinese sentiment runs deep in communist but the country's authoritarian rulers move swiftly to tamp down expressions of public anger, fearful that allowing such protests might embolden criticism of their rule.

Activists had used social media to call for protests in Hanoi on Sunday in the wake of this week's ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague which found there was no legal basis for Beijing's claims to vast swathes of the South China Sea.

The case was brought by the Philippines but the ruling has been a boon for other regional countries like who also have competing claims to the strategic sea.

Authorities in the capital Hanoi were ready for protests on Sunday.

Plainclothes security forces were out in force, blanketing much of the city centre and keeping a close eye on any crowds that might be gathering, an AFP reporter on the scene said.

Throughout the morning around 30 activists were swiftly bundled onto waiting buses and cars by security forces after they gathered to hold a protest near the city's famous Hoan Kiem lake, a common spot for demonstrations.

Some chanted "Down with China invasion!" as they were led away to detention.

Later in the day a group of nine activists held a brief rally outside the Philippines embassy. One held aloft a banner that read: "Thank you Philippines. You have a brave government."



The group dispersed on motorbike before security forces arrived.

Activists posted pictures on social media of similar flashmob rallies in southern Ho Chi Minh City with protesters riding around the city on motorbikes holding banners criticising China.

Beijing lays claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, putting it at odds with regional neighbours the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, which also have partial claims.

China boycotted the PCA hearings, saying the court had no jurisdiction, and has reacted furiously, vowing to ignore the ruling and arguing it misinterprets law.

and China frequently trade diplomatic barbs over the disputed Paracel island chain and waters in the South China Sea.
Russian President and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who on Friday survived a coup attempt, in a phone conversation on Sunday reaffirmed their intention to meet in person soon, the Kremlin said.

The Kremlin said Putin offered condolences to Erdogan over the victims in Friday's coup attempt, which killed at least 161 people and injured 1,440 others, Xinhua news agency reported.

Putin said Russia deemed the actions "categorically unacceptable".

Putin also expressed concerns about the safety of Russian tourists travelling in Turkey, whose numbers have significantly increased after Moscow lifted the restrictive measures against Ankara, and Erdogan vowed to take all necessary steps in that regard, according to the Kremlin press service.

Earlier on Saturday, Turkish authorities said they had regained control of the country after thwarting the coup attempt by a military faction late Friday night.
The recently released (2015), which covers 15,000 brands, talks about how FMCG brands must gear up for greater uncertainty in the months to come. Josep Montserrat, Worldwide CEO, Kantar Worldpanel, K Ramakrishnan (ramki), GM and country head, Kantar Worldpanel & Hemant Mehta Senior vice president (media and retail), IMRB speak with Arundhuti Dasgupta



Is the phenomenal rise of local brands universal?



Ramakrishnan: Local brands are gaining faster than the MNC brands everywhere and in India we are seeing another trend, the growth of hyperlocals.
L&T Infotech might witness a subdued listing, fear market players, due to heavy participation from small investors. The company's initial public offering (IPO) of equity attracted over one million applications, one of the highest among recent IPOs, from retail (small) investors.
The Rs 50,000-crore domestic chicken sector has urged the government to ensure a level-playing field to protect their interests, after the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled Indias ban on import of meat and eggs from the US was inconsistent with international norms.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Sunday lashed out at the Congress for levelling baseless allegations on the Centre over the ongoing political crisis in and advocated that the grand old party should instead introspect the reasons behind the present state of affairs.

"Instead of leveling political allegations, the Congress Party would also do well to reflect what was the reason of dissatisfaction that their own leaders and MLAs walked out of their party and merged with another party," BJP leader Nalin Kohli told ANI.

"The BJP had only provided support from outside. So, it's the Congress who has to answer the larger political question," he added.

Yesterday, Pema Khandu was elected as the new leader of Congress Legislature Party (CLP) after 44 MLAs chose him in place of chief minister Nabam Tuki, who assumed charge after the Supreme Court restored the government in .

He will today take oath as the new chief minister of in Itanagar. The much anticipated floor test in Arunachal Pradesh Assembly was cancelled after Tuki resigned as the CLP leader.

Khandu, the son of late chief minister Dorjee Khandum who died in a chopper crash in 2011, hails from Tawang area, bordering China.

Khandu joined the Congress in early 2000 and became the secretary of Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee in 2005.

Khandu was later re-elected without any opposition from Mukto in the 2014 assembly elections.

The Supreme Court, in a historic verdict on Wednesday, reinstated Tuki-led Congress Government and quashed the actions of the Governor post December 15 last year.

Tuki-led Congress government was dismissed following days of turmoil after 21 of its 47 lawmakers rebelled against the chief minister.

The Congress, which had 47 MLAs seats in the 60-member assembly, suffered a jolt when 21 of its lawmakers rebelled. Eleven BJP MLAs backed the rebels in the bid to upstage the government. Later, 14 rebel Congress MLAs were disqualified.

The leader of the dissident faction, Kalikho Pul, was sworn-in as the chief minister on February 19 with the support of the 20 Congress rebels and 11 legislators of the BJP.
Hailing the Supreme Court's order of restoring the Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh, the grand old party on Sunday said it is thankful to the judiciary for preventing the murder of democracy.

Congress spokesperson Tom Vadakkan told ANI that the apex court's verdict is a step that has happened in the right direction.

"The judiciary has intervened to prevent the murder of democracy in the northeast. It is a right step in the right direction," said Vaddkan.

"The message of unity coming from Arunachal Pradesh is a message across India. The message that democracy is important than the manipulation, muscle power and money bags who try to influence politics. It is not just the victory of the Congress Party, this is a victory of democracy across India," he added.

The Supreme Court had earlier this week ordered restoration of Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh by quashing as "unconstitutional" governor's decision to advance the legislative assembly session by a month in December 2015.
The Bangladesh Police is investigating at least 11 reported cases of missing persons in Mymensingh, Gaibandha and Jamalpur in the aftermath of the Gulshan cafe attack in which the assailants had been missing for many months before resurfacing.

The police is looking for seven teens and young men, including a 12-year-old madrasa student, who went missing from different places in the past 18 months, reports the Dhaka Tribune.

After the law enforcement agencies urged citizens to report any suspicious case of missing persons in their families, hundreds of reports have been registered- especially of the people in their teens and 20s missing around the country.

A source in the Detective Branch said they are giving high priority to the cases of missing persons in the wake of the recent terror attacks.

Earlier, the Bangladesh Government had ordered all educational institutions in the country to give the lists of students, who have been absent for over 10 straight days.
With the situation in Jammu and Kashmir continuing to simmer on the tense side, the Congress on Sunday accused the Centre of not taking concrete steps to reach out to the victims and said it is the Centre's style of not discussing any matter with anyone.

Former external affairs minister and Congress leader Salman Khurshid said that Bharatiya Janata Party-led government at the Centre is in a denial mode and doesn't want to talk to the other parties with experience of dealing with difficult situations on board.

"The situation here is very unfortunate. It has been nine-ten days and the Centre has not given much importance to it and there has been no effort from its side. The Central Government has not taken concrete steps to reach out to the victims. The Centre has a style that they do not talk to anyone. As far as our foreign policy issues are concerned, the Centre never consults us on it," Khurshid told the media here.

Escalating his attack, Khurshid said there is need to talk to the people in Kashmir and the media.

"But there have been no indications that they are interested for a discussion. I think this is wrong in democracy," he added.

Khurshid said that it was unfortunate to hear about young people losing their vision due to stone pelting.

"Forces seem to be resorting to disproportionate use of force while dealing with the protestors. There are set rules for dealing with crowds, such things seem to have disappeared in Kashmir," he added.

Khurshid was accompanied by All India Congress Committee General Secretary Ambika Soni, who expressed her sympathies to the families of those who have been victims of the Kashmir violence.

She called for holding an all-party meeting for taking concrete steps to ensure peace in Kashmir.

"It's been many days that curfew is still in place. We will fully contribute to this so that peace gets restored in the valley. In such a situation, the first thing should have been an all party meeting to discuss the situation and bringing of normalcy here. Our priority is the treatment of the innocent victims who got injured during the violence," she said.

She asked the Centre to come forward and help the patients who are victims of the protests.

"Even we will try to provide medical aids to them. It's a voluntary effort.we are not in the government. The real anger for last one and a half year, since results were announced is that people have not accepted the coalition government," she added.

The duo visited the valley earlier today on being asked by Congress president Sonia Gandhi to see the ground reality and take stock of the situation.

Yesterday, the Congress had lauded the role of security personnel in dealing strictly with stone-pelters and said the country stands firmly behind them.

Meanwhile, curfew in the Valley continued for the ninth day today in an attempt to maintain law and order in the state, as well as preventing the people from staging demonstrations against the killing of Wani.

Around 38 people have been killed so far and several others injured after clashes between the protesters and security forces so far.

Cell phone services have been blocked and mobile internet in Jammu and Kashmir remains suspended.

The government has also blocked Cable TV networks across the Kashmir Valley.

The violence has shown no signs of subsiding as the protesters on Saturday attacked a police post in Kupwara district in which a civilian was killed.

Two civilians were also reportedly injured in fresh incidents of violence in the area.

A mob attacked a police post at Hatmulla in Kupwara district, following which the security personnel retaliated.

On Friday, another protestor was killed and three others injured in fresh police firing in Kupwara district and another civilian died in South Kashmir district.

The incidents of violence continue to crop up despite the Centre and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti calling on the people of the state to maintain calm and cooperate with the state government to bring peace in the valley.
With the Congress party succeeding in roping in its rebels back to the party fold by forcing Nabam Tuki to step down, Congress MLA Pema Khandu on Sunday will be sworn in as the new Chief Minister of here at 12 p.m.

The much-anticipated floor test in state Assembly was cancelled after Nabam Tuki resigned as the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader.

Khandu, the son of former chief minister Dorjee Khandu, was elected as the chief of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP).

Tuki, on his part, said that he sacrificed all his powers in a bid to strengthen the grand old party.

Tuki resigned owing to internal disputes in the party over his leadership.

Rejecting Tuki's request to provide some more time to hold the floor test to prove his majority, Governor Tathagata Roy yesterday said the floor test would go ahead as scheduled.

The Supreme Court, in a historic verdict on Wednesday, reinstated Tuki-led Congress Government and quashed the actions of the Governor post December 15 last year.

In December last, Congress rebels, backed by the BJP, staged a coup and ousted Nabam Tuki as chief minister.
Expressing delight over Pema Khandu being selected as the next Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Congress leader Ninong Ering today expressed hope that the former carries forward his father Dorjee Khandu's legacy.

"I know him personally since the times his father Late Dorjee Khandu was the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh. I know he is a very good man; his late father was a very good friend of mine. He was a Chief Minister, who was deep in the hearts of the people and they still remember him and still love him because this is a legacy, there has to be precedence, he just can't act like any other legislator or minister and has to follow his father's footsteps. When they say that he is the son of Doorjee Khandu, he has to keep up the trend and tradition." said Ering.

"He should take the Congress Party ahead. He has been a very faithful Congress man. Due to misunderstandings, he had just taken a shift but not to BJP or any other political party. He was there and even after the shift, he had slightly gone away but was with us. The Supreme Court judgement has proved that he is still a Congressman," he added.

Khandu, who was elected leader of the Congress in the Arunachal Pradesh assembly yesterday, has taken oath as the Chief Minister.

He replaced Nabam Tuki who resigned after stepping down as leader of the Congress Legislature Party or CLP yesterday, hours before he was to seek a trust vote.

The 36-year-old leader was part of a group of 30 party lawmakers who had rebelled against Mr Tuki's leadership.

Ering further said that his party would support the GST Bill in the Monsoon Session of Parliament.

"We also wanted the GST should be passed, the parliamentary standing committee has also rectified it, and the NDA has also agreed to the proposals we have made," he said.

Reacting to the approach of NDA government as well as Prime Minister, Ering said that he should take everyone along instead of reiterating his call for 'Congress Mukat Bharat'.

"It has to be reciprocated, you just can't clap with one hand, and we all have to work together. The development of the country, reaching out to the people with all his agendas, it would be better to move together," he added.

Ering's remark came ahead of the all-party meeting called today by the government to seek the support of Opposition parties in the passage of pending legislations during the Monsoon Session of Parliament beginning tomorrow.
The government has called an all party meeting on Sunday, to seek the support of opposition parties in the passage of pending legislations during the Monsoon Session of Parliament beginning Monday.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has also convened an all party meeting today to ensure smooth functioning of Parliament.

The session will have 20 working days and will conclude on August 12.

A total of 25 bills including crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill are expected to come up for passing and consideration during the session.

The government has reached out to the main opposition party for the passage of the GST Bill, while the Congress is also fine tuning its strategy on the legislation.

Ahead of the session, top Congress leaders met party chief Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi on Saturday and chalked out strategy on crucial issues, including the GST Bill.

Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad and other senior party leaders including Anand Sharma and Jyotiraditya Scindia attended the meeting.

This came a day after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar had a meeting with Azad and Anand Sharma.

The two ministers discussed all points to bring Congress on board on GST Bill.

The opposition party is also expected to corner the government in Parliament on the recent Arunachal Pradesh issue in wake of the Supreme Court judgment reinstating the Congress regime in the state.
Communist Party of Nepal (UML) secretary Pradeep Gyawali has claimed that the government had not been reduced to a minority despite the major coalition partner CPN-Maoist Centre pulling out.

At an interaction programme organised by Press Chautari Nepal on Saturday, Gyawali reiterated that there was no legal basis to prove that the government was in minority, reports the Himalyan Times.

He accused the Nepali Congress and the Maoist Centre of inviting anarchy in the country.

"The Speaker has made a serious mistake by forwarding the vote of no-confidence," he said.

The Maoists party withdrew its support from Prime Minister Oli-led coalition government, charging the ruling party with failure to implement the past agreements, including gentlemen's agreement to hand over the leadership to them, made with them in the past.

It also passed a 'no-confidence motion' against Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli to force him to step down from the office after he refused to resign.

The Maoist centre also bagged support of the Nepali Congress, the largest party in Parliament which holds 207 seats, in its bid to form a majority government under Maoist Centre Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal.

The CPN (UML) now faces the challenge to prove its majority in the Parliament while the Nepali Congress and the Maoist Centre are consulting lawyers and constitutional experts for legal complications in the process of forming a new government.

Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli had earlier cited Article 298 of the Constitution, which reads: "The Council of Ministers existing at the time of commencement of this Constitution shall remain until the transformed Legislature-Parliament constitutes a new Council of Ministers;" post which he decided to go through with the floor test instead of resigning from his post.

As per Article 298, the government will remain until next parliamentary elections take place.
Jennifer Lopez, who is all set to ring in her 47th birthday later this month, has spilled beans on her 'selfless' birthday wish.

In a recent interview, Lopez, 46, said, "I wish something bigger than for myself. I wish that the world would find a way to resolve our differences and have more love and unity right now," during the premiere of Ice Age: Collision Course in Los Angeles, E! Online reports.

It is said that Lopez's wish came just two days after a member of the terrorist group ISIS killed eighty four people in Nice, France, a day before 265 people died during a failed military coup in Turkey and more than a month after a man who wore allegiance to ISIS shot dead 49 people at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida.

Recently, the 'Booty' hit-maker and Hamilton musical creator Lin-Manuel Miranda paid a touching tribute to the Orlando victims and their families with their song 'Love Make the World Go Around.
Two Chinese peacekeepers, who were seriously injured in the recent violence in South Sudan, were airlifted to Beijing aboard a specialist medical rescue plane sent by the Chinese military for specialized treatment and operations.

China also evacuated some of its embassy staff and some citizens trapped in South Sudanese capital, Juba, reports Xinhua.

The Chinese people evacuating from South Sudan arrived at Entebbe International Airport in Entebbe on Saturday, about 40 kilometers south of Uganda's capital Kampala.

Major General Su Guanghui, acting director of the Peacekeeping Affairs Office of the Chinese Defense Ministry, and his delegation arrived Saturday morning in Juba and evacuated 17 embassy staff, 12 members of the Chinese medical team and 20 people from Chinese companies.

The relieved team from the conflict-hit country aboard a special plane organized by the authorities in Beijing was received by Chinese Ambassador to Uganda Zhao Yali at Entebbe International Airport.

The evacuation is part of the emergency measures the Chinese government is taking to protect its citizens in the recent fighting between government troops of President Salva Kiir and forces loyal to Vice President Riek Machar in Juba.

Two Chinese peacekeepers under the UN Mission in South Sudan were killed and four others injured on last Sunday evening as the fighting between government and anti-government forces continued.
Next time you are at a Justin Bieber concert, you may want to keep your stuffs away from the stage, or else he might tell you to go "love yourself."

The 22-year-old 'beauty and the beast' hit-maker was apparently speaking to the crowd during a concert at Boardwalk Hall Arena in Atlantic City, New Jersey,when an attendee threw her cap, reports E!online.

"Take this moment to listen and try not to give me a hat or whatever you're trying to throw onto the stage right now, because I probably don't want that (shit)," Bieber said mid-way through his performance.

He, however, quickly realised he had been a bit hasty with his temper and called his remark "mean" but admitted the incident had "ruined the vibe" of the song.

"Sorry for throwing your hat but you ruined the moment," he shared with a fan. "Whatever, let's do it," he said before starting the new song.

With just two more dates in the United States, Bieber's 'the Purpose World Tour' will now head off to Japan, Iceland and other parts of the world.
Sri Lanka's Ministry of Health has taken legal action against a thousand individuals for breeding dengue mosquitoes.

The authorities in a national Dengue Prevention Program inspected 63,595 premises and prosecuted 1,135 people during the first-two days of the three-day program, reports the Colombo Page.

The four-day long program commenced on July 13 and concluded on July 15.

The Health Ministry also issued notices to 2,847 individuals in this regard.

The authorities have this year has so far inspected around one million premises and out of them around 200,000 places were identified as possible dengue breeding sites.

So far this year, 24,400 suspected dengue cases have been reported to the Unit from all over the island, according to the Epidemiology Unit of the Health Ministry.
Pakistan has said that it will observe July 20 as 'black day' to express solidarity with Kashmiris against the Indian barbarism in the Kashmir Valley instead of July 19 that was declared earlier.

"Kashmir's Accession day will be observed on July 19 while nation-wide 'Black day' will be observed on July 20 to protest the brutalities of Indian forces in Kashmir," Dawn quoted the government's announced as saying.

The federal cabinet in a surprise move on Friday decided to observe a countrywide 'black day' on July 19 for expressing solidarity with the people of Kashmir, several of whom were killed while protesting against the murder of slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

The decision was made at a special Cabinet meeting preceded over by Prime Minister Sharif, who termed the movement of Kashmiris as a 'movement of freedom' in Lahore.

Prime Minister Sharif said that Pakistan will continue to extend moral, political and diplomatic support for Kashmiris in their just struggle for "right to self-determination."

He went on to call the 22-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen leader Burhan Wani as "martyr" of the independence movement.

Prime Minister Sharif said that Kashmiris will get their right to self-determination for which the whole Pakistani nation is standing behind them.

He also directed all the relevant departments to highlight "Indian atrocities" by armed forces in the valley at international fora.

Meanwhile, curfew in the Kashmir Valley continued for the ninth day today in an attempt to maintain law and order in the state, as well as preventing people from staging demonstrations against the killing of Wani.

Around 38 people were killed including 1500 injured police and CRPF jawans in these days after clashes between protesters and forces.
Expressing confidence of a meaningful and purposeful discussion in the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Information and Broadcasting Minister M Venkaiah Naidu on Sunday said the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill should be approved by consensus as it will boost the Indian economy.

Stating that several people are in favour of the Bill as they are pro-development, Naidu said this would not only benefit the Centre but also the states.

"So, I'm confident that we will have a meaningful session because the people of the country they are more interested in development, more interested in the reforms for development, more initiatives by the government and the situation worldwide is favourable to India. World is looking towards India, world economy is slowing down. China is going negative; India is the only bright spot," Naidu told mediapersons here.

"In the last two years, we have brought back the economy on rise. Now, if we have also approved, the economy will get further boost and it will be strengthened, it will provide more opportunities for job. The Centre will also be benefited and states will also be benefited," Naidu added.

The Information and Broadcasting Minister stated that the Centre has made all efforts to ensure that the suggestions put forth by various state governments with regard to the Bill are incorporated in the legislation.

"Many of the issues raised by the states were also answered by the Finance Minister and then the five finance ministers of different states headed the empowered committee on GST. They made their recommendations," he said.

Naidu further said Prime Minster Narendra Modi had invited his predecessor Dr Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi for a meeting during which they raised three issues against the Bill, adding the government has solved two of their issues.

"Once the Bill comes before the House, we can have a meaningful discussion and I'm sure at the end of it, the GST will be approved," Naidu said while stating that the general mood in the country is in the favour of the Bill.

"Majority of the states are in favour of the Bill and no political party has taken the open stand against the Bill. That being the case, I'm sure the Bill will be passed," he added.

Urging the opposition parties to ensure the GST Bill passage through consensus, Naidu said, "Let us pass the Bill by consensus and majority through majority of the numbers... I wish at the end of the day if it is approved through consensus then that will be good for the country."

The Information and Broadcasting Minister also threw light on the other important Bills likely to come during the Monsoon Session.

"Then there is a CAMPA Bill also...that also if it is approved, we will get around 40,000 crores. Much of the money will go to the states. Then we have a Medical Council of India, Dental Council of India ordinances, we have a Bill for the Enemy Property. The Bill also brought as an ordinance that has to be approved," he said.
After being elected leader of the Congress in the Arunachal Pradesh assembly yesterday, Pema Khunda on Sunday was sworn-in as the new Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, bringing back the rebel leaders in the fray.

Chowna Mey took oath as the Deputy Chief Minister of the state.

The Congress succeeding in roping the rebels back to the party fold by forcing Nabam Tuki to step down as the chief minister.

The much anticipated floor test in Arunachal Pradesh Assembly was cancelled after Tuki resigned as the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader.

Khandu, the son of former chief minister Dorjee Khandu, was elected as the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader.

Khandu was part of a group of 30 party legislators, who had rebelled against Tuki's leadership.

Tuki, on his part, said that he sacrificed all his powers in a bid to strengthen the grand old party.

Tuki resigned owing to internal disputes in the party over his leadership.

Rejecting Tuki's request to provide some more time to hold the floor test to prove his majority, Governor Tathagata Roy yesterday said the floor test would go ahead as scheduled.

With all its 45 lawmakers back in the fold, the Congress will have a majority yet again in the 60-member Arunachal Pradesh Assembly.

The Supreme Court, in a historic verdict on Wednesday, reinstated Tuki-led Congress Government and quashed the actions of the Governor post December 15 last year.

In December last, the Congress rebels, backed by the BJP, staged a coup and ousted Tuki as the chief minister.
A day after Pakistan's social media star Qandeel Baloch was choked to death in Multan city, her brother Muhammad Waseem, who confessed to killing her in the name of 'honour,' has been arrested in Dera Ghazi Khan.

In a press conference, the 25-year-old admitted that he had drugged and strangled his sister as "she brought dishonour to the Baloch name" due to risque videos and statements that she posted on social media, the Dawn reported.

Referring to a recent controversy over Qandeel's selfies with Mufti Qavi, he said, "There are other issues as well... Like the maulvi issue."

Revealing how he killed the 26-year-old model-actor, Waseem said, "She wasn't aware I was killing her. I gave her a tablet and then strangled her."

According to city police chief Azhar Akram, Waseem had killed her by covering her mouth and nose.

Akram said, "After that he fled to Dera Ghazi Khan with two of his friends. We are working on catching the friends and I expect they will also be caught soon. After speaking to them, we will be able to determine whether they were involved or not."

In a First Information Report, Qandeel's father Muhammad Azeem revealed that his daughter came to Multan from Karachi to celebrate Eid with the family. They were joined by Waseem on July 14.

He alleged that Waseem, who was against Qandeel working in showbiz, had taken this extreme step at the behest of his brother Mohammad Aslam Shaheen.

Arrangements were being made to send Qandeel's body to her hometown of Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan for burial.

Qandeel had recently taken the internet by storm as she shared a couple of selfies and a video of herself with Mufti Qawi, a former member of the Central Ruet-e-Hilal Committee.

Some days back she starred in a Pakistani music video, 'Ban,' by Aryan Khan featuring twerks, a slashed bodysuit and lots of laces.
A six-year-old boy died in Hyderabad after he was allegedly beaten up by another minor at his school, said police officials on Sunday.

Mohammed Ibrahim, a first standard student, suffered serious injuries in his private parts after he was allegedly kicked by a seven-year-old senior on Tuesday.

After he reached home, his parents took Ibrahim to a local hospital when he complained of severe pain.

On Saturday, he succumbed to his injuries after undergoing two surgeries.

Ibrahim's father, Abdul Mujeeb filed a complaint with the police alleging negligence on the part of the school management.

"He (boy) developed some complications during treatment. Surgery was also conducted. Even after surgery, he couldn't be cured properly and died yesterday (July 16). Later, his parents came to the police station and lodged a case. We have registered a case. We went to school for inquiry. School authorities told us that they were not aware about the incident," Deputy Commissioner of Hyderabad Police, Venkateshwar Rao, he said.

The aggrieved father demanded strong action against the authorities of Promising Scholars High School.

"The concerned authorities must take stringent action against school. The school is very irresponsible. What was the management doing when this incident took place at its premises?" Mujeeb told ANI.

Police investigation is underway to ascertain the truth of the allegations.
Tibetan Prime Minister in-exile Lobsang Sangay has rejected China's claims that it was making efforts to develop the restive Tibet.

His comments came days after Beijing invited foreign delegates and news media to a state-sponsored tour in Tibet for a development forum.

"Not much positive change. You know, I mean, generally we (have) been saying internationally. Chinese foreign policies have been both nationalistic and assertive. Domestically all over China, they have been more aggressive and situation in Tibet has not been changed," Sangay said after chairing a meeting of the Tibetan Task Force.

Exiled Tibetans and rights groups say China, which took control of Tibet in 1950, has tried to stamp out religious freedom and culture in the Himalayan region. China rejects the criticism, saying its rule has ended serfdom and brought development.

China has ruled Tibet with an iron fist since 1950, when Communist troops marched in and took control in what Beijing calls a "peaceful liberation".
Firmly stating that his government is in full control, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has demanded the U.S to arrest or extradite exiled Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen whom he blames for a coup attempt.

The failed coup by a faction of military ended with nearly 200 people dead.

Gulen, living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, had reportedly suggested that assassination attempts have been staged in the past.

He, however, did not directly accuse Erdogan of deliberately plunging Turkey into chaos.

"This country suffered a lot in the hands of the Gulen Movement," CNN quoted Erdogan as saying near his home in Istanbul.

"I call on the United States and President Barack Obama ... (to) either arrest Fethullah Gulen or return him to Turkey," he added.

The coup exposes deep discontent within the military ranks and questions still remain about who was behind it and why they decided to act now.

The military said that the government had lost all legitimacy and pressed that it wanted to maintain democratic order.

Officials said that at least 161 civilians and around 20 coup plotters were killed.

At least 2,839 military officers were detained after the failed coup.

The Ankara chief public prosecutor's office reportedly took nearly 200 top Turkish court officials into custody.

Erdogan's call for the U.S. involvement in punishing his rival comes after Turkish authorities closed the airspace around its Incirlik Air Base, which American military uses to launch operations in the air campaign against the ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

He was elected the Prime Minister in 2003 and Turkey became a powerhouse in the Middle East under his rule.

In 2014, his reign came to an end and his own party's rules prevented him from seeking a fourth term.

He later ran for the President's post and won.
Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal has claimed that the police and his ministry had information on the Gulshan and Sholakia attacks beforehand.

Kamal while speaking at a discussion in Dhaka on Sunday said that the government had intelligence that "something might happen in Gulshan" and had made "all kinds of preparations for it," reports the Dhaka Tribune.

"We know who is behind this and who supported them," he claimed.

Kamal said the police reached the spot of Gulshan attack on July 1 within minutes because of their "preparation."

The deadly attack killed 20 people, including nine Italians, seven Japanese, one Indian, one Bangladeshi American and two Bangladeshis at Holey Artisan Bakery in Gulshan, Dhaka after assailants stormed the cafe and took people hostage.

The 12-hour-long hostage crisis at the cafe ended after a two-hour long assault by armed forces' commandos killing six gunmen.

The Sholakia attack came days after when three suspected assailants attacked the Eidgah where thousands had gathered to offer Eid prayers.
Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar has hailed Operation Sankat Mochan -- initiated to evacuate Indians from South Sudan, which has been rocked by violence that has claimed hundreds of lives.

The actor, who had earlier urged External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for speedy evacuation of Indians from South Sudan, tweeted: "Congratulations on the success of Operation Sankat Mochan undertaken to evacuate Indians from war-torn South Sudan Sushma Swaraj Gen VK Singh."

A total of 156 Indian nationals, including 46 from Kerala, were brought back to India from violence-hit South Sudan on Friday on board a special IAF plane as part of 'Operation Sankat Mochan'. Sushma Swaraj and Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh led the operation.

Earlier, the "Airlift" star had expressed his concerns for the Indians stuck on the foreign shores in a tweet: "Sushma Swaraj Ma'am request for speedy measures and actions to evacuate Indians stranded in Sudan. Prayers with them."

She responded then with a post "Akshay Kumar ji - Pl do not worry. We are evacuating Indian nationals from Juba (South Sudan)."

The issue is close to Akshay's heart as he had starred in "Airlift" -- a film on the evacuation of Indians from Kuwait during Iraq's invasion of that country in 1990.

--IANS

sug/rb/vt
Actress Amyra Dastur, who made her southern movie debut with Tamil film "Anegan" last year, has now started shooting for her maiden Telugu film "Raju Gadu" with Raj Tarun.

"It has been a week since she started shooting. She plays a bubbly character and has donned a completely 'desi' look. It's a situational comedy and Amyra will get to portray her comic side," a source from the film's unit told IANS.

The film is being helmed by Sanjana Reddy, who is making her directorial debut with the project.

Although Amyra had signed two Telugu films earlier this year including a project with filmmaker Puri Jagannadh, she had to let go of the offers for Jackie Chan's "Kungfu Yoga".

--IANS

hp/rb/vt
While the bill for the introduction of Goods and Services Tax across the country remains a priority, the Government has listed around a dozen bills pending introduction, consideration and passage during the Monsoon Session of parliament, starting on Monday.

Two bills are pending passage in the Lok Sabha, while seven bills are pending in the Rajya Sabha, including the GST Bill.

Here are the bills listed by the government:

*The Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Ordinance, 2016 - The bill replaces an ordinance. It introduces a uniform entrance examination for all medical educational institutions for undergraduate and the postgraduate courses.

*The Dentists (Amendment) Ordinance, 2016 - The bill will replace an ordinance promulgated on May 24 to amend the Dentists Act, 1948. It seeks to introduce a uniform entrance examination for all dental colleges for the undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Bills pending in the Lok Sabha:

*The Indian Trust (Amendment) Bill, 2015 - The Lok Sabha has to pass this bill again with amendments made by the Rajya Sabha. The bill amends certain archaic provisions in the Act of 1882, which allows trusts to invest surplus income in certain categories/areas, including certain specified securities in the UK, Karachi and Rangoon.

*The Enforcement of Security Interest and Recovery of Debts Laws and Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) Bill, 2016 - The bill is presently lying with a joint committee of parliament. It seeks to amend four laws -- Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002 (SARFAESI), Recovery of Debts due to Banks and Financial Institutions Act, 1993 (RDDBFI), Indian Stamp Act of 1899 and Depositories Act of 1996.

Bills pending in the Rajya Sabha:

*The Whistle Blowers Protection (Amendment) Bill, 2015 - The bill was passed in the Lok Sabha in May 2015 even as opposition parties sought sending it to a parliamentary panel. The bill seeks to amend the Act to incorporate necessary provisions to strengthen safeguards against disclosures which may prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of the country and security of the state, among other things.

*The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill, 2016 - The bill establishes the National Compensatory Afforestation Fund under the Public Account of India, and a State Compensatory Afforestation Fund under the Public Account of each state. It has been passed by the Lok Sabha.

*The Regional Centre for Biotechnology Bill, 2016 - The bill seeks to provide legislative backing to the regional centre after India entered into an agreement in 2006 with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) regarding establishment of the Regional Centre for Biotechnology Training and Education in India to serve the member-countries of UNESCO. It has been already passed by the Lok Sabha.

*The Goods and Services Tax Bill (The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-second Amendment) Bill, 2014) - Being pitched as the most important legislation for the session, this bill seeks to introduce Goods and Services Tax in India. The government has been talking to the opposition parties to get it through, after failing to take it through the Upper House in the previous sessions. It was passed by the Lok Sabha in May 2015.

*The Enemy Property (Amendment & Validation) Bill, 2016 - The bill seeks to amend the Enemy Property Act, 1968, to vest all rights, titles and interests over enemy property in the Custodian. The bill has been already passed by the Lok Sabha.

*The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2012 - The bill seeks to amend the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, and adds a new category of persons called "adolescent". An adolescent means a person between the age of 14 and 18. The bill seeks to prohibit employment of adolescents in hazardous occupations as specified, like mines and hazardous processes.

*The Homeopathy Central Council (Amendment) Bill, 2015 - The Act establishes the Homoeopathy Central Council to regulate and enforce standards with regard to homoeopathy colleges and homoeopathy practitioners. The bill seeks to disallow admissions in homeopathy medical colleges which do not conform to the prescribed educational standards.

Bills for Introduction:

*The High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill, 2016 - The bill facilitates change in the names of Bombay High Court as Mumbai High Court and Madras High Court as Chennai High Court' respectively.

*The Institute of Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2016 - The bill amends The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961, for incorporation of new IITs at Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh), Palakkad (Kerala), Dharwar (Karnataka), Bhilai (Chhattisgarh), Goa, Jammu (Jammu and Kashmir) and conversion of Indian School of Mines (ISM) at Dhanbad (Bihar) to an IIT under the law.

*The National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research (Amendment) Bill, 2016 - The bill includes NIT, Andhra Pradesh, in its First Schedule.

*The Use and regulation of DNA-based technology in Civil and Criminal Proceedings, Identification of Missing Persons and Human Remains Bill, 2016 - Regulates the use of DNA analysis of human body substances, profiles and establishes the DNA profiling board and a national DNA data bank.

Apart from these, the government has also listed discussion and voting on Supplementary Demands for Grants (General) for 2015-16.

--IANS

ao/tsb/dg
Australia has called for a free trade deal with following its exit from the European Union (EU), the BBC reported on Sunday.

In a phone call to the new Prime Minister Theresa May on Saturday, her Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull said he urgently wanted to open up trading between the two countries.

"I have been very clear that this government will make a success of our exit from the EU," May said.

"One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe. It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal."

"This shows that we can make Brexit work for Britain," BBC quoted the Prime Minister as saying.

Liam Fox, the new International Trade Secretary, said he was already "scoping about a dozen free trade deals", the BBC reported.

He told the Sunday Times, "We've already had a number of countries saying, we'd love to do a trade deal with the world's fifth biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU."

But cannot sign any deals while it is still an EU member.
The Congress on Sunday said it is still awaiting a concrete response from the Centre on its concerns over the Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill, and added the proposed legislation was not discussed at Sunday's all-party meeting.

The main opposition party accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of stalling the proposed law for four to five years.

"The Congress gave birth to the . We believe the GST is in the country's interest, it cannot be a flawed GST," Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia told the media after the meeting called by Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar.

"The GST was not discussed in this meeting with regard to the three issues raised by us. The government is still to revert to us with its response. There have been intermittent discussions but it is not the solution," Scindia said.

The Congress has objected to the proposed levy of 1% additional tax on inter-state sales and wants states to not have the power to levy additional tax over 18%, and has also raised the issue of a dispute resolution mechanism.

The Parliamentary Affairs minister, meanwhile, said that the government will talk to all opposition parties on the GST bill, and that during the all-party meet all parties agreed to cooperate in the normal functioning of both the houses of parliament during the ensuing monsoon session.

"We are talking to all parties and will talk in future as well on the GST and other bills. We want to create a consensus," Ananth Kumar said.

"In Sunday's meeting, the government told various political leaders that we want to run the house and need their support in this regard. All parties, including the Congress, said they will support us in running the house and support the bills on merit. We will create a consensus," he said.

Earlier, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said the Congress will not obstruct the passage of any bill, adding it will support any bill that is in the country's interest.

Azad, however, did not clarify his party's stand on the GST bill, which tops the government's priority list for the monsoon session beginning on Monday.

"The Congress will support any bill which will be in the interest of the nation, people and growth. We will let the bills pass on the basis of merit; we do not obstruct passage of bills," he said.
The Bangladesh government on Sunday held a meeting with authorities of all private universities in the country against the backdrop of several of their students being linked to militant outfits.

The meeting, presided over by Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal took place on capital Dhaka, bdnews24 reported.

Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid, University Grants Commission Chairman Abdul Mannan, Bangladesh Police chief Shahidul Hoque and other top officials of security forces were present at the meeting.

Apart from officials and trustee board members of universities, students, teachers and parents also took part.

Ninety-five private universities have the licence to operate across Bangladesh but only 80 function currently.

The government and parents have raised security concerns over private university students going missing, as it has emerged that some of those involved in recent militant attacks were from private universities.

Islamic State reportedly published photos of five gunmen who killed 22 in a Dhaka cafe earlier this month. The gunmen also were gunned down during the operation to rescue the hostages in the cafe.

Soon afterwards, a suspected militant was killed during a gunfight following an attack on police guarding the Sholakia Eid congregation ground on July 7.

Of those six youths, four were from English-medium schools.

Two of them were students of the North South University and another of BRAC University.

They were reported missing for months, their families said.

Last year, an investigation team of the University Grants Commission found jihadi books of banned militant outfit Hizb-ul Tahrir in the university library.

Media reports said several teachers and students of the university were expelled for their links with militancy.

The government has asked the families to inform police if any of their young members has been missing. The educational institutions have also been asked to inform bout absentees.

--IANS

ksk/vt
Bangladesh police have found a house in the capital that was used as a hideout by the attackers who massacred 20 hostages at an upscale cafe on July 1.

The landlord of the house in west Shewrapara area in Dhaka has been arrested on charges of not preserving the necessary documents of his tenants who are believed to be accomplices of the Holey Artisan Bakery attackers.

Landlord Md Nurul Islam was arrested from his residence.

"Police have found handmade grenade, black dresses and some other equipment from the house," Deputy Police Commissioner Masudur Rahman told bdnews24.com.

Police raided the house on Saturday night.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) Deputy Commissioner (Media) Masudur Rahman confirmed the arrest and said Nurul did not collect any necessary documents from his tenants as per the DMP order and even concealed the information.

Hours before the raid, police arrested the acting Pro-Vice Chancellor of North South University Professor M. Gias Uddin Ahsan and two others from Dhaka's Bashundhara Residential Area for sheltering the cafe attackers.

The two others held are Ahsan's nephew Alam Chowdhury, and Mahbubur Rahman Tuhin, the building manager.

Several cartons packed with sand and the dresses they left behind in the flat were seized.

Police suspect the cartons were used to keep the grenades used in the attack that killed 20 hostages and two police officers.

Police said a person, suspected to be a member of Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), had rented the flat in May.

"The man fled on the day of the Gulshan attack. It appears from the information we initially got that some of the Gulshan cafe attackers had come to this house," Detective Branch Deputy Commissioner Saiful Islam told bdnews24.com.

--IANS

ss/rn
Chadigarh's famed 'Capitol Complex', was on Sunday added to the UNESCO's world heritage list, an official said.

The final decision of inclusion was taken in the meeting held by UNESCO in Turkey, a spokesman of the Chandigarh Administration said here

"We have been inscribed in a Trans Continental serial Nomination. Various sites from seven countries - France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Japan and India - were listed to show the global reach of the works of Le Corbusier. Capitol Complex, designed by Le Corbusier also was included in the entry which represented India for the Heritage Status," the spokesman said.

"It is a moment of pride for our city as Capitol Complex gets the Heritage Status. The Administration ensures all the residents that we will conserve and preserve this Heritage Site and make the city a major international tourism destination," Adviser to the Union Territory administration Parimal Rai said after the heritage status was announced.

Chandigarh Home Secretary Anurag said: "This is a great achievement for the administration, another feather in the cap as we bring home a heritage status, I congratulate everyone on the successa.

The Capitol Complex was designed by Chandigarh's founder architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s when the city was constructed as a symbol of independent, modern India.

--IANS

js/vd
Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Sunday that the Congress will not "obstruct" the passage of any bill in the upcoming monsoon session of parliament, and will support any legislation that is in the interest of the nation.

Speaking to reporters ahead of an all party-meeting called by the government, Azad did not clarify the party's stand on the much-awaited Goods and Services Tax bill, which tops the government's priority list in the session, which opens on Monday.

"Congress will support any bill which is in the interest of the nation, people and growth. We will let the bills pass on basis of merit, we do not obstruct passage of bills," he said.

He also said the Congress will raise the issue of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir and also slammed the Centre for targeting state governments under "opposition parties".

"Situation in Jammu and Kashmir is a very serious issue, it must be discussed in parliament and the government should be answerable," Azad said.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader Sitaram Yechury said the issue of the GST bill cannot be settled between the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alone.

"As far as the GST Bill is concerned, it's not a matter to be settled bilaterally between BJP and Congress. I have been requesting the government since two years to call an all-party meet to discuss the GST bill and listen to our concerns to form consensus," Yechury said.

Keen on passing the GST bill, the government has been holding a series of meetings with opposition leaders, which included a meeting between Finance Minister Arun Jaitley with Azad and deputy leader Anand Sharma on Thursday.

This is also the first parliament session since Ananth Kumar has been made the new Parliamentary Affairs Minister. A veteran BJP leader, Ananth Kumar is known for his management skills and for sharing good relations with several opposition leaders.

Ananth Kumar also has a new Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs in S.S. Ahluwalia, who too is known for good equations with opposition leaders.

A second all-party meeting on Sunday has been called by Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan in the evening.

--IANS

ao/rn/vt
He has made Bollywood stalwarts like Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Hollywood stars Kevin Spacey and John Travolta sway to his steps. Now, National Award-winning choreographer Shiamak Davar is more than happy that dance-based films are creating waves in India as they help in promoting the genre in places where the reach is limited.

Films like "ABCD: Any Body Can Dance" and its sequel, "ABCD 2", directed by choreographer-director Remo D'Souza, have gained popularity among the youth for their focus on western dance forms.

Giving a thumbs up to this trend, Davar told IANS in an email interview from Vancouver: "It is great that is happening because it exposes more people to dance in places where the reach is limited. There are many different films that are remakes or take inspiration from Hollywood."

However, unlike D'Souza, Davar isn't keen on making a dance film yet.

"That's true! (I don't wish to direct a film). But never say never. There is a lot of things close to my heart that I would like to express through cinema; so let's see. Right now, directing movies isn't my focus though," Davar said.

"I am happy spreading the joy of dance via my schools," he added.

Popular for his twinkle toes, the ace choreographer has been instrumental in popularising contemporary jazz and western forms of dance in India.

Talking about the hip-hop boom in the country, Davar said: "Every era is defined by a style. The youth loves hip-hop; so that is what is ruling the music and dance scene currently in terms of its influence on Bollywood cinema."

Amidst the popularity of western dance styles in Bollywood, does he think that the film industry is not focusing on Indian dance forms?

"Not really. There is a bit of everything. There is a strong classical influence in period dramas. It's the requirement of the song and the film that defines the dance style," said the 54-year-old, who is known for his enchanting smile.

Davar, who has choreographed dance sequences in films like "Dil To Pagal Hai", "Taal", "Bunty Aur Babli" and "Dhoom 2", feels choreography in films is no more about running around trees as it has become more lyrical.

"Running around trees more than dance was an interpretation of romance back in the good old days... Now it's different, choreography is more lyrical or to the accents rather than only an interpretation of emotions," Davar noted.

Davar, who worked with Big B in the 2005 film "Bunty Aur Babli", said the 73-year-old thespian exudes "inspiring" professionalism.

"Legends are legends. The professionalism that Mr. Bachchan has is inspiring. Most of the new lot is also very hard working. With me, they have all been great, always on time for rehearsals, prepared before they come and hard working," he said.

According to Davar, "competition helps actors strive for their best, which helps push their limits to make them perform even better".

(Durga Chakravarty can be contacted at durga.c@ians.in)

--IANS

dc/ank/vm
On the second anniversary of the being shot down in eastern Ukraine, the European Union (EU) on Sunday called for prosecution of those responsible for the tragedy.

"The EU recall the tragedy of flight MH17, which occurred on July 17, 2014, and renew their sympathy to all those who have lost their loved ones. We all remember what happened two years ago with sorrow and sadness," Efe news quoted High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini.

The Italian politician said the UN Security Council Resolution 2166 demands that those directly or indirectly responsible for the downing of MH17 must be held accountable and are brought to justice.

"The EU reiterates its full support to the work of the joint investigation team and the ongoing efforts by the countries involved to come to an effective prosecution," she said.

The countries that are in a position to assist with the investigation and prosecution of those responsible must fully cooperate with the ongoing criminal investigation", Mogherini said.

The MH17 flight, with 298 persons aboard, was on way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, when it was downed by a surface-to-air missile fired from a region in eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian rebels.
"Pushpa", a vibrant account of Danish designer-turned writer Inger Solberg's experiences in India since over 15 years, is set to be adapted for the big screen. The makers are in talks with British actress Naomi Watts for the lead role and were keen to cast Bollywood star Ranveer Singh too.

Solberg's book traces the lessons she has learnt in India -- a country she describes as "incredible" -- and how she fought against money-hungry, uneducated goons, and bureaucracy. It's a story of hardships, faith and resolve of a woman who never lost her spirit.

The writer was initially apprehensive when offers came in for a film adaptation of the book.

"Maybe I was afraid they would kill the story and use it differently. In film language, they call it 'killing your darlings'," Solberg told IANS in an email interview from Goa where she stays.

But an offer from celebrated Indian cinematographer Santosh Thundiyil -- who has movies like "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai", "Pinjar" and "Rowdy Rathore" to his credit -- changed Solberg's mind.

"He suggested that I should not sell the rights, but we should make the film together. Santosh also introduced me to the screenplay writer Suresh Nair," she said.

German director Franziska Buch has been locked in to direct the movie, for which the team is "in the process of finalising the negotiations with Naomi Watts's agents".

"They have already given us the dates of her availability," Solberg said.

Talking of why Naomi Watts suits the lead role, Solberg said: "She looks Scandinavian and could be a family member, so I thought her a perfect choice."

"Since the lead role is being negotiated subject to the script with a big Hollywood star, and since it is a women-oriented film, I have chosen to work with the European female director Franziska Buch who also is an India lover," added Solberg, who says she will work closely with the team to make the movie a reality.

The title of her book "Pushpa" comes from the name her Indian boyfriend used to call her by. He was killed in a motorcycle crash a few years ago.

Solberg wanted Bollywood's livewire star Ranveer for a key role in the film.

"I had approached Ranveer Singh. I have also given him my book personally. Ranveer reminded me of one of the lead characters in the book, so he would have been the perfect artiste for that role."

"Unfortunately, he is not available before end of 2017, which is too late for us. We are now considering other options," she said.

This international feature film project is being proposed on the same lines as the successful multi-cultural collaborations like "Slumdog Millionaire", "Monsoon Wedding", "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" and "Eat Pray Love".

The team has help from the Scandinavian Film Council and the International Brand Sponsors, and they have also approached a few production houses.

The author feels her book has potential to be made into a film as her stories are inspirational to women who need to live independently without fear.

"Lots of women, worldwide, live oppressed lives in bad marriages and other exploited situations," said Solberg, who came to India with $40 in her pocket, fresh from a messy divorce.

"My story, my film is applicable to every woman worldwide (and men too). I hope it will act as a conduit for empowering women to live in hope and not fear. After all, tomorrow is another day," said the optimist, who wears many hats as a business consultant, interior decorator, writer, real estate developer and a fashion designer.

The movie is likely to be shot in Delhi, Goa, Shimla, Risikesh, Jaipur, Varanasi -- and as Solberg puts it -- "the most beautiful places in my incredible India".

Through the film, she hopes they will "show the glory of India which I love and will always defend, as well as show the darker side of India which many people, not only foreigners are facing when it comes down to business activities".

(Radhika Bhirani can be contacted at radhika.b@ians.in)

--IANS

rb/vt
A Hindi film that traces the 14-day epic journey that Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama undertook from the Tibetan capital Lhasa to India, crossing the Himalayas on foot, to seek asylum 57 years ago, has been released.

The second and last part of film "Escape of the Dalai Lama", produced by Mumbai-based Rangrez Films, will be aired on TV channel EPIC on July 22.

Filmed in the picturesque Spiti Valley of Himachal Pradesh, adjoining Tibet, the film, completed in record 15 days, traces the extraordinary life and struggle of the elderly Buddhist monk respected world wide.

It narrates the Dalai Lama's life in Tibet and the treacherous journey he made at the age of 24, escaping Chinese persecution and finally seeking asylum in India in March 1959.

Crossing the Himalayas on foot with a handful of soldiers and cabinet members, the Dalai Lama travelled only at night to avoid detection by the Chinese troops.

But until the Dalai Lama appeared in India, two weeks after taking flight from Lhasa, people around the world feared that he had been killed, according to the BBC.

According to the official website of the Dalai Lama, he escaped at night from Norbulingka Palace in Lhasa on March 17, 1959. He entered India from Tibet after a 14-day harrowing escape.

"At 16, I lost my freedom and at age 24 I lost my country," the Dalai Lama has been often saying in his addressees.

"Yes, I remain optimistic that I will be able to return to Tibet. China is in the process of changing. Besides, I am not seeking separation from China," the Nobel Peace laureate wrote on his official website.

The film, "Escape of the Dalai Lama", was made by Nidhi Tulli and Ashraf, who have earlier made documentary films on the Tibetan issue, "Art in Exile".

Tenzin Dalha, a Tibetan boy from Darjeeling studying in Delhi University, plays the role of the young Dalai Lama. Earlier, he had acted in Bollywood film "Margarita with Straw".

Except for Dalha, all other cast members are amateur Tibetan actors, some of whom have never acted in their life.

The film will be shown in two parts. The first part was aired on July 15 and the second will be telecast on July 22.

--IANS

vg/rb/vt
Human trafficking is witnessing an increase in the north-eastern states this year, Manipur Commission for Protection of Child Rights member Keisham Pradipkumar said on Sunday.

"Human trafficking in this region had decreased for a few years but has seen a sharp increase in 2016," he said.

The state Social Welfare Department has been informing parents in Manipur not to be lured by tall promises by traffickers of free education and jobs for their wards outside the state, the panel member said.

He also defended the Manipur Commission for Protection of Child Rights vis-a-vis the detention of 21 Muslim boys on July 14 by the Central Industrial Security Force at the Tulihal international airport here.

"We verify such cases as per the Supreme Court directive. Our actions are not directed against any community. Most boys detained were under the age of 12," he added.

--IANS

il/tsb/vt
Indian industry remained upbeat about the business environment in the first quarter ended June owing to salary hikes recommended by the Seventh Pay Commission, progress of monsoons and the government's proactive reforms agenda, industry chamber said on Sunday.

"A rise in business expectations sends an early signal that industry is anticipating an upturn in demand propelled by factors such as implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission, progress of a favourable monsoon and pro-active reforms agenda of the government," Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Director General Chandrajit Banerjee said in a statement here citing a survey conducted by the body.

The Business Confidence Index (BCI) has improved to 57.2 in April-June 2016, from 54.1 in the previous quarter.

Over 60% of the 200 firms that participated in the survey expect the country's real GDP growth to range between 7-8% in the current fiscal.

Moreover, 61% of the firms expect an increase in sales in April-June 2016 compared with only 42% in January-March.

"Much of the recovery in business conditions is expected to be domestically driven as a majority of the firms expect to maintain status quo on their export orders in April-June 2016," said.

Profit expectations have improved in April-June, with nearly half of the firms anticipating an increase in after-tax profit in the said quarter, it added.

The survey also found that a majority have put their investment plans on hold in the quarter under review, despite expectations of improvement in sales and new orders in the period in question.

"A large proportion of the firms (40%) feels that a turnaround in the global economy is required to jumpstart the private investment cycle," the statement said.

"Firms, when asked to rank their concerns, rated low domestic demand, fragile global economic recovery and lack of political consensus on economic reforms as their top three concerns," it added.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Actor Irrfan Khan will meet Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday for an interview related to his film "Madaari".

Irrfan, who interviewed RJD chief Lalu Prasad during his visit to Bihar capital Patna last week, fixed a meeting with Kejriwal via Twitter.

Irrfan tweeted: "I am a common citizen of this country. I want to ask some questions. Can I meet you Arvind Kejriwal (Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochhnay the)." The politician readily agreed.

Kejriwal also shared: "Irrfan Tuesday 11 am, my office."

The actor then responded "Thanks again, will see you on Tuesday Arvind Kejriwal".

"Madaari", which explores a father-son relationship and traces the plight of a common man who loses his son in an accident, also features Jimmy Sheirgill in a pivotal role. The film is slated to release on July 22.

Irrfan, who has garnered global fame with his international projects, also tried to set up a meeting with other political figures by posting to the 'Office of RG' twitter account and Prime Minister's Office (PMO) Twitter handle.

--IANS

sug/rb/vt
Japan police on Sunday began the interrogation of a man who claimed he jumped from a North Korean ship and swam ashore clinging to a plastic container, the BBC reported.

According to officials, the man was carrying no proof of identity when he was found in the city of Nagato prefecture on Saturday.

Police are expected to hand him over to immigration officials who will decide whether he is a genuine defector, the BBC noted.

In 2011, nine North Koreans were picked up by the Japanese Coast Guard after spending five days at sea.

They later settled in South Korea.

--IANS

ksk/vt
At least four people were injured when a 38-year-old man on Sunday allegedly set his house on fire to kill himself and his family members, police said.

The bizarre incident, which occurred in south Delhi's Jaitpur area on Sunday morning, came to light when the neighbou5rs raised the alarm of fire.

A senior police officer told IANS that Kenai Ram Mondal set the house on fire while his wife Sharmila Mondal 32, his 12-year-old son and a 62-year-old relative were asleep.

All the injured were immediately taken to hospital. Mondal's son is in critical condition as he received 70 per cent burns. While Mondal sustained 15 per cent burn injuries, his wife and relative sustained 40 per cent burn injuries.

A police officer said that motive for taking such extreme step is yet to be ascertained. Investigation into the matter is going on, police added.

--IANS

aks/vd
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday praised all political parties for speaking in "one voice" over developments in Kashmir, where violent protests have erupted over the death of a local militant commander.

"Various parties have given statements on events which benefitted the country. This has sent a right message and I thank all the parties for the same," Modi said here while addressing an all-party meeting convened by the government ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament beginning on Monday.

He also urged all political parties to keep national interest above any other considerations.

"We represent both the people and parties and there is a need to keep national interests above anything else," he said.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the party will raise the issue of the prevailing situation in Jammu and .

"Situation in Jammu and is a very serious issue, it must be discussed in parliament and the government should be answerable," said Azad, who is the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha.

The Congress has sent a two-member committee, comprising of senior party leaders Salman Khurshid and Ambika Soni, to Kashmir to take stock of the situation and ground realities.

Curfew and a separatist-called shutdown continued for the 10th day on Sunday, crippling normal life across the restive Kashmir Valley with the government ordering schools and colleges to close for one more week amid an information blackout due to a ban on local newspapers.

The shutdown in the Valley started on July 9 in the wake of the death on July 8 of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in a gunfight with the security forces. At least 40 people have died in clashes since then.

--IANS

bns/vd
Nepal Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, set to face a no-confidence motion in Parliament on Thursday, on Sunday continued consultations with legal and constitutional experts in a bid to save his now minority government while new-found allies CPN (Maoist Centre) and the Nepali Congress, too, asserted the constitutionality of their claim.

The CPN (Maoist Centre) and the Nepali Congress, joint sponsors of the no-trust move against Prime Minister Oli, maintained that a new government "can be formed as per Article 298 of the Constitution of Nepal".

However, Oli, too, has taken refuge under the same article and refused to step down despite his coalition government having been reduced to a minority after the Maoists on Tuesday withdrew crucial support to him.

Oli, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxists-Leninists) chief, told his lawmakers that "constitutional complexities" would prevent the formation of new government, Kathmandu Post reported on Sunday.

However, constitutional expert Surya Dhungel said on Saturday that a new government "can be" formed as per due parliamentary process.

"The president will first give seven days to form a national consensus government, and if that does not happen, the process to form a majority government will start."

Experts here said there were some ambiguities in clause 1 of Article 298, "but the succeeding clauses have made unequivocal references to formation of new government".

Maoist Centre Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal "Prachanda" lambasted Oli for going against the constitutional provisions.

He claimed that Oli, in cahoots with royalist forces, was conspiring to end historical achievements of the democratic movement.

NC President Sher Bahadur Deuba said the constitution has clearly envisioned the provision of formation of a new government before the General Elections.

--IANS

py/dg
The man who drove a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day in the southern French city of Nice had researched the route days before the Thursday night attack, the media reported.

The terrorist, identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, drove through the seafront Promenade area of Nice on Tuesday and Wednesday in preparation of the attack that left 84 people dead, BBC reported.

Over 200 people -- 52 critically -- were also injured when the Tunisian man ploughed his heavy duty white truck into people enjoying the fireworks and music. The man opened fire at the crowd before he was shot dead by the police.

As many as six people were later held in connection with the killings.

The latest, a man and a woman who have not been identified, were arrested on Sunday morning, French judicial sources said.

CCTV footage from the days beforehand showed the terrorist driving through the area in the truck, closely observing the scene.

France has called up 12,000 police reservists to boost security in the wake of the killings which was the second major terror attack in the country after the November 2015 attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead and over 250 injured.

BBC reported that the beaches and cafes in Nice were busy again and the Promenade was reopened on Saturday.

People paid tributes and their respects to those, including 10 children, who were killed.

The bloodstains on the tarmac are gradually disappearing. The lampposts the truck smashed into will be replaced.

"He will never defeat us," said one message on Promenade. Another read: "Love defeats hate."

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel's estranged wife, who was detained on Friday, was released on Sunday.

Those still being held were said to be close associates of the killer but have not been identified.

French President Francois Hollande, who has called the attack "terrorism", on Friday extended the state of Emergency in the country for three months beyond July 26.

Officials said investigators will seek to find out whether the Tunisian had links with extremist groups.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel seemed to have been "radicalised very quickly".

He was unknown to French intelligence services although he had been in trouble with the police for threatening behaviour, violence and petty theft.

It is not known if he trained in Syria or had any help planning the attack.

The Islamic State militant group in a statement published in the Amaq news agency, said the attacker was acting in "response to its calls to target civilians in countries that are part of the anti-IS coalition".

--IANS

py/dg
People in Odisha on Sunday celebrated 'Rasagola Dibasa' while the state government claimed to have found evidence about the origin of the syrupy sweet in the state.

Following the sweet battle with neighbouring West Bengal over its origin, some youngsters and sweet traders observed, for the second year in succession, the day on the occasion of Lord Jagannath's "Niladri Bije" (return to the temple after annual Rath Yatra).

During Niladri Bije, Lord Jagannath offers the sweet to appease his wife Laxmi, who was upset after Jagannath went on the nine-day Rath Yatra to his aunt's house.

While people took to social media to celebrate 'Rasagola Dibasa', noted sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik created a sand art at Puri beach on the occasion.

Meanwhile, the state government claimed that it had found a new evidence about the origin of Rasagola in the state, and it would apply to get the Geographical Indication (GI) tag for the sweet.

"We have collected authentic evidence about the origin of the sweet in Odisha before 1500 AD. The expert committee constituted for this has submitted the evidence to the department," said Science and Technology Minister Pradeep Kumar Panigrahi.

The expert committee in its report said the sweet was cited in "Dandee Ramayana", the Odia adaptation of the Valmiki Ramayana by sage poet Balarama Das, the eldest of the Panchasakhas in the 15th century.

Further, Dandee Ramayana has featured in World e-Book of 1921 published by Calcutta University.

Historians in West Bengal believe that the sweet was invented in the state in 1868 by iconic confectioner Nobin Chandra Das, whose son later founded the famous sweetmeat chain K.C. Das.

--IANS

cd/vd/dg
Nepal's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has received over 54,000 cases of human rights abuses committed during the decade-long civil war in the Himalayan country.

The complaints pertaining to murder, abduction, injuries, rape, arson, torture, and grabbing of land and properties were filed with the transitional justice mechanism, which ended its four-month period for filing of such grievances on Sunday.

Formed in February last year, the commission has a mandate of looking into the conflict-era cases within two years.

Another panel, the Commission on Inquiry of Disappeared People, has received over 3,000 cases.

According to government data, over 13,000 people were killed and some 900 disappeared during the Maoist insurgency in Nepal from 1996 till 2006.

According to both the commissions, these cases were registered by victims of both the State and the Maoist.

Dozens of cases have been registered against top political leaders, including deposed king Gynendra Shah, Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba, Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal and senior officials of security agencies and others.

Both the commissions will have a seven-month window period to deal with the cases, like establishing the veracity of complaints, recommendation for action or forwarding the cases in a court of law.

National Human Rights Commission Chairman Anup Raj Sharma, who is not happy with the powers given to the TRC, on Sunday said that if the victims did not get justice, there will be international intervention.

While political parties and their leaders as well as security agencies favour clemency for wrong-doers, human rights activists maintain that serious human rights abuses cases should be heard in court and those responsible for different crimes should serve jail terms.

Several political leaders, including the Maoists, have raised questions over the efficacy of the TRC process in Nepal, which they say is more oriented towards clemency rather than bringing perpetrators of human rights abuses to justice.

--IANS

giri/tsb/dg
Israeli police on Sunday arrested a Palestinian man carrying explosives in his backpack as he was about to board a tram in the centre of Jerusalem, police said.

The 20-year-old Palestinian, who lives in the West Bank, was arrested after raising the suspicion of a security guard near the light rail stop on Jaffa road.

The guard, who asked to check the contents of the young man's backpack, realised there was a bomb inside and called the police.

Eyewitnesses told EFE news that after the incident, security forces evacuated all people in the area, closed shops and cordoned off the perimeter while the suspect was being investigated.

Several homemade bombs were found in the suspect's bag.

--IANS

ksk/dg
Congress legislator Pema Khandu was on Sunday sworn in as the new Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, becoming the youngest lawmaker to head a state in the country.

The 37-year-old Khandu, son of former Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, was administered the oaths of office and secrecy by acting Governor Tathagata Roy at a ceremony in the Durbar Hall of the Raj Bhavan here.

On the occasion, legislator Chowna Mein also took oath as Deputy Chief Minister.

Speaking to reporters after the ceremony, Khandu said age is never going to be an issue in his governance and he will run the state administration very well if he has the support of all his legislators.

Former Chief Minister Khaliko Pul said: "I wish all the best to Pema Khandu... we'll co-operate with him for the development of Arunachal Pradesh."

Present at the ceremony were former Chief Minister Nabam Tuki and Speaker of the state legislative assembly Nabam Rebia, besides senior Congress leaders.

Tuki resigned from his post to make way for Pema Khandu in a bid to get the support of the rebel legislators who had defected from the Congress to unseat Tuki.

Earlier, Tuki resigned as Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader, and proposed the name of Khandu as the next CLP leader.

The proposal was supported by all the 44 legislators, including 15 Congress and 29 dissident Congress legislators who had joined the People's Party of Arunachal (PPA) in February.

The 44 legislators also include former CM Kalikho Pul, who unseated Tuki and became the Chief Minister in February.

Khandu, who has passed out from Hindu College of Delhi University, started his career in the construction business and played a vital role in assisting his father Dorjee Khandu in his developmental initiatives for the state.

The tragic death of his father, in a chopper crash in 2011, compelled Pema Khandu to enter to keep the political lineage of his family alive. He won from his father's constituency -- Mukto -- uncontested.

He held the portfolio of Water Resource and Tourism in the erstwhile cabinet of Nabam Tuki. However, he resigned in 2015 after he developed differences with Tuki.

Khandu later joined the dissident faction of the Arunachal Pradesh Congress led by Kaliko Pul and supported Pul in toppling the Tuki government in February this year.

He came to the forefront of Arunachal Pradesh only last Wednesday when the Supreme Court verdict restored the Congress government in the state terming the decision of Governor J.P. Rajkhowa to advance the session of the state assembly in January this year as violative of the Constitution.

The apex court directed that status quo ante in Arunachal Pradesh be restored as it prevailed on December 15, 2015.

--IANS

ah-rup/rn/dg
A day after Punjab Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal accused the central government for reducing states to the status of "mere beggars", he on Sunday made a U-turn, now lauding Prime Minister Narendra Modi for "promoting federalism".

In Sunday's statement, he now blamed the Congress for reducing the states to the level of beggars before the central government and accused them of stalling the Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill.

A statement issued by the office of Sukhbir Badal, who is also president of NDA constituent Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) on Saturday, accused the central government of reducing states to the status of "mere beggars".

He had emphasised on the dire need for a "genuine federal structure" in India with devolution of more powers to states, while also accusing the central government of "usurping the rights and authority of the states in violation of the spirit and provisions of the Constitution".

On Sunday, Sukhbir Badal, welcoming Prime Minister Modi's call for promoting federalism, said that the "country was poised for a genuine federal structure".

The Modi government had on Saturday during the Inter-State Council meeting assured all states that it wants to promote federalism in India, saying the country will progress well only if the centre and states work as a "Team India".

Calling for an all-party consensus in favour of the Prime Minister's initiative, Sukhbir Badal said: "The country is poised for a genuine federal structure and we must rise above political differences to make use of this historic opportunity.

"The ball has been set rolling by the Prime Minister for fiscal autonomy and it is for all states and all political parties to forget political differences to make use of the political and constitutional opening created by the new atmosphere under NDA government at the Centre."

Hitting out at the Congress, he said: "We have come a long way from the times when successive Congress governments indulged in constitutional rampage and reduced the states to the level of beggars at centre's door."

Claiming the party was out to stall the GST bill which was of utmost necessity for the Country's progress, he said: "It is clear that for NDA and BJP country comes first, and for Congress, 'politics' comes first."

--IANS

sid/vd
The rain-swollen Kosi river has flooded about 50 villages in Supaul district of Bihar, forcing people to abandon their homes, and the river system is threatening hundreds of villages in over half a dozen districts, officials said.

"Nearly 200 thatched houses in Ghogharia panchayat in Supaul have been washed away by waters overflowing from Kosi river," a district official said.

"Water levels in the Kosi river system are rising over the past two days, threatening hundreds of villages in over half a dozen districts," an official of the state disaster management department told IANS.

"Flood waters entered over 50 villages in Supaul district," the official said.

The department officials said that fear of floods is gripping villages in Supaul again with Kosi and other rivers rising because of heavy rains in Bihar and in the catchment areas in neighbouring Nepal.

The state government has alerted engineers and asked them to keep a 24-hour vigil in the area.

"All engineers have been directed to be ready with necessary equipment and boulders to face any situation and to protect the embankments," an official said.

Bihar's Water Resources Development Minister Lalan Singh said all embankments were safe and there was no need to panic.

He said the eastern Kosi embankment, which had breached in 2008, flooding five districts of northern Bihar, was totally safe.

"The embankment was strengthened and breach repair work was completed," he said.

In 2008, more than three million people were rendered homeless in Bihar when the Kosi river breached its bank upstream in Nepal and changed course.

It was said to be the worst flood in the state in over 50 years.

--IANS

ik/kb/vt
Since the success of 'Mike & Molly' and her breakthrough role as the self-assured lovable goofball Megan Price in 'Bridesmaids,' Melissa McCarthy seems to have burst onto the silver screen with her feet running, appearing or starring in at least one feature-length movie every year. Aside from the independent drama 'St. Vincent,' each has been met with relatively great returns at the box-office. So, isn't rather ironic that 'The Boss,' a comedy about an insolently self-important titan of industry jailed for insider trading, basically breaks even and might be a sign of McCarthy's bankability starting to wane. Of course, I could be reading too much into this since the wildly hilarious actress has several smash hits under her belt  one with 'Horrible Bosses' director Seth Gordon but most while Paul Feig was at the helm, including their latest collaboration 'Ghostbusters'. However, when joining forces with her husband Ben Falcone, who also produced, directed, and co-wrote this surprisingly aseptic and mean-spirited comedy, McCarthy's success rate is on a downward slump with predictable results.

In 'The Boss,' McCarthy dons suffocatingly hideous turtlenecks which are never explained or ever used as a source of humor or even lead up to some unexpected gag by movie's end. Outside of being an implied quirky character trait, the obscenely garish outfits actually don't provide any particular attribute to McCarthy's savvy business tycoon turned self-help guru Michelle Darnell. Instead, the usually enjoyable comedian appears constricted and uncomfortably restrained by the tight-fitting clothing, barely able to turn her neck and walking awkwardly stiff. On the other hand, the gaudy apparel often accessorized by a shiny piece of jewelry serves as our metaphor for what's going on in this Will Ferrell-Adam McKay production and possibly determine where the filmmakers went horribly wrong. Much like McCarthy's snugly fitted garb, the occasionally funny but more often misfiring comedy is the result of a taut, stilted and very much by-the-numbers script. Although several one-liners muster the requisite guffaw, such as McCarthy and Annie Mumolo's barrage of outrageous insults, the movie is a calculated series of raunchy dark gags that come off as desperate, frantic attempts to shock audiences.

Naturally, the always charismatic McCarthy delivers the wit and genuine appeal with that same sardonic tone and snap timing that has made her the star she is today, providing her relentlessly uncompromising Michelle with an aggressive, hard-as-nails demeanour that hides a tender, gooey side, which reveals itself right on cue. Only, the story leaves little room for McCarthy to breathe and simply let loose on the scene, to just spew whatever random improvised thoughts pop in her head as events happen around her. Whether she's interrupting a Dandelion's troop meeting or goes toe-to-toe with Peter Dinklage's love-spurned business rival Renault, incidents that happen due to Michelle's arrogant exploits largely feel scripted and like a vehicle perfectly tailored to McCarthy's talents, which it obviously is. And for a person that can't curb her potty-mouthed personality around little girls, the former corporate magnate isn't daring enough and refuses to take risks. This is surprising for an R-rated comedy spoofing the Girl Scouts in a jaw-droppingly violent turf brawl of where to sell baked goods that ends with cookies ingested incorrectly.

From the opening moments of 'The Boss', where a young Michelle is returned to her orphanage to the tune of various 1980s pop hits, her journey at redeeming herself is rigidly structured in the most predictable character arc. It's as though we're watching the filmmakers marki a checkbox list of prescribed tropes for breaking apart Michelle's pompous, self-absorbed massive chip on her shoulder. Who better to chisel away at her cheeky, cutthroat cynicism than her disillusioned, down-to-earth personal assistant Claire, played by Kristen Bell with a spunk and gumption that nicely matches McCarthy's. Though Michelle proves herself more an annoyance and disturbance to Claire's single-mother life and her sadly one-dimensional daughter (Ella Anderson), the two women end up exactly where we'd expect them to. As he did in his directorial debut, Ben Falcone demonstrates a journeyman quality in his approach, hitting those prescribed beats at the right time with little to no surprise. This being the second time the married couple have teamed up, and it being a lesser success than the last, perhaps the third feature set to release in 2018 will have them reconsider their tactics towards comedy.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

Universal Studios Home Entertainment brings 'The Boss' to Blu-ray as a two-disc combo pack with an UltraViolet Digital Copy code. Housed inside a blue, eco-elite keepcase with a glossy, lightly embossed slipcover, the Region Free, BD50 disc sits comfortably opposite a DVD-9 copy of the film. The Blu-ray includes the 99-minute theatrical version along with an unrated director's cut that clocks in at 105 minutes, adding 6 minutes of raunchy, offensive dialogue and character interactions not seen in theaters. After skipping various trailers, viewers are greeted by a static menu screen with the usual options and music.
Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi on Sunday held talks on the country's peace process for the first time with armed groups non-signatory to the Nationwide Ceasefire Accord.

The meeting in Yangon with the armed groups, represented by the United Nationalities Federal Council's Delegation for Political Negotiation (DPN), came ahead of a four-day ethnic summit planned for July 26-29 in Maijayan, northernmost Kachin state, controlled by the Kachin Independence Organisation.

Aung San Suu Kyi had discussions with the DPN, headed by U N'Ban La, chairman of the UNFC.

U N'Ban La is from the KIO, while other key DPN delegation members included U Say Htin of the Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP), Khun Abel Thut of the Karreni National Progressive Party (KNPP) and Nai Htaw Mon of the New Mon State Party (NMSP).

According to the decision of the July 8 Chiangmai meeting involving both signatories and non-signatories, the upcoming four-day Maijayan ethnic summit, to be attended by 55 ethnic armed groups, will lay down a common stance in preparation for attending the government-sponsored Panglong Conference slated for late August in Nay Pyi Taw.

The Panglong Conference Preparatory Committee decided to allow the NCA non-signatories to join the Panglong Conference to ensure access for them to political dialogue.

Suu Kyi has outlined the policy guidelines for the peace process which include allowing non-signatory groups to the Nationwide Ceasefire Accord (NCA) to join the Panglong Conference, relaxation of restriction on inviting political parties that do not hold a parliamentary seat to the conference and functions of the National Reconciliation and Peace Centre in dealing with international donors and their assistance to the peace process.

The former Myanmar government and eight ethnic armed groups out of 15 signed the NCA on October 15, 2015 and there remains seven other armed groups who have yet to sign the accord.

--IANS

py/dg
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has cautioned French citizens that they have moved to a different age, saying that "terrorism is now part of our everyday lives for a long period of time".

At least 84 people were killed, and around 300 more injured on Thursday night when a truck crashed into a crowd in the city of Nice during France's national day celebrations, Xinhua news agency reported.

In an interview with the French newspaper Journal Du Dimanche (JDD) published on Sunday, Valls said, "Some irresponsible politicians say that this attack could be avoided. But there is no such thing with zero risk."

"I have always told the truth about terrorism: We are facing a war, there will be further attacks. It is hard to say, but more lives will be lost. It will take a long time," stressed Valls.

Following the Nice attack, three days of national mourning were declared. Meanwhile, the investigation into the attack is going on.
Security forces on Sunday gunned down three top National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB-S) rebels during a series of counter-insurgency operations in Assam's Kokrajhar district, an official said.

"Retaliating to heavy non-discriminatory fire, a team of the army and Assam Police neutralised three hardcore NDFB(S) militants. Two of them have been identified as Rahul Basumatary and Ritu Basumatary," said a defence official.

Four pistols, a large quantity of ammunition, hand-grenades and other war-like stores have been recovered from the slain terrorists, the official said.

--IANS

and/pgh/vt
The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) will raise the demand for immediate bifurcation of the high court during the monsoon session of Parliament beginning Monday, the party said.

Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao directed party MPs to press for an early bifurcation of the high court and for addressing other pending issues in Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act.

Rao presided over a meeting of TRS parliamentary party in New Delhi on Sunday. The meeting, attended by parliamentary party leader K. Kesava Rao and all MPs discussed the strategy to be adopted by the party during the session.

TRS leader in Lok Sabha, A. P. Jitender Reddy told reporters after the meeting that bifurcation of the high court will be top on their agenda. He said the party's strategy in both the houses of Parliament would depend on the government's response over the long pending demand.

High Court of judicature at Hyderabad is currently serving as the common high court for both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Reddy said though two years have passed since formation of Telangana state, the high court has not been bifurcated. "When states like Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand were formed, high courts were set up within in 15 days but in case of Telangana it has been delayed for over two years. Our demand is that it should not be delayed any further," he said.

The delay in bifurcation of high court recently led to protest and strike by lawyers across Telangana.

Reddy said the TRS would continue to extend issue-based support to the NDA government. The regional party will support GST bill in the Parliament.

The TRS MPs will also seek central assistance for state government's flagship schemes like Mission Kakatiya, Mission Bhagiratha and Harithaharam.

--IANS

ms/vd
The US has warned Turkey against public insinuations of American involvement in a failed military coup, saying such claims were utterly false and harmful to their relations.

After Turkey's Labour Minister suggested Washington's involvement in the coup, Secretary of State John Kerry said the US was willing to provide assistance conducting investigation in the attempted coup, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the US are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.

Kerry reiterated the US support for the democratically elected government in Turkey, a statement from the US State Department said.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday urged the US to extradite Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in the US in self-exile, whom he has accused of being behind the plot.

Gulen, speaking from his home in Pennsylvania, denied the claims and said as someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt.

The attempted coup began on Friday night when a faction of the military took over key bridges in Istanbul and attacked parliament buildings in Ankara.

According to the Turkish government, 161 people  civilians and police  and 104 plotters were killed in ensuing clashes. Over 1,440 people were injured.

Nearly 3,000 soldiers were detained and more than 2,700 judges were sacked on Saturday as the government sought to re-assert its power.

Many within Turkey's military and mid-level bureaucracy supported Fethullah Gulen, the inspiration behind the hugely-influential Hizmet movement.

Once allies, Erdogan has long accused Gulen and his supporters of plotting against him.

Erdogan told the US that it had never refused the country's extradition request for terrorists, and asked Washington to extradite Gulen if we are strategic partners.

Kerry said the US fully anticipated there will be questions raised about Gulen, adding that Turkey should present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the US will accept that and look at it and make judgements about it appropriately, BBC reported.

The attempted coup occurred because Turkey is deeply divided over Erdogan's project to transform the country and the contagion of violence from the war in Syria.

Erdogan, expert at winning elections, has always been doubted about his long-term commitment to democracy.

Erdogan is a political Islamist who has rejected modern Turkey's secular heritage. He has become increasingly authoritarian and trying to turn himself into a strong executive president.

Erdogan's government has been deeply involved in the war in Syria, backing Islamist opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But violence has spread across the border, helping to reignite the fight with the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (Kurdistan Workers' Party), and making Turkey a target for the Islamic State.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Sunday said that July 15 will be marked as "democracy fest" day for Turkey as the attempted military coup was foiled with the cooperation and support of the Turkish people.

The Turkish Parliament would discuss a number of new measures to prevent future attempts at a military coup in Turkey as legal procedures were launched to heavily punish the plotters, the Hurriyet daily news reported Yildirim as saying at a press conference.

Yildirim was accompanied at the press confference in his office by Chief of General Staff General Hulusi Akar, who was rescued from the hands of coup plotters after hours of captivity.

A critical question raised to Yildirim was whether the government would consider re-installing capital punishment for those military personnel on charges of treason.

"As you know the death penalty had been removed from our legal system. We will discuss with other political party leaders on what further measures we should take to prevent such future attempts," Yildirim said.

The coup attempt on July 15 was a black stain on Turkish democracy, but could be turned into the fest of democracy thanks to the Turkish people's loyalty to democracy and its freedoms, the Hurriyet daily news reported Yildirim as saying.

"Our people gave the best response to this terror gang. July 15 has now turned into the fest of our democracy," he said, praising the citizens who stood in front of tanks in Istanbul and elsewhere in the country.

"We could therefore get rid of a very big trouble," Yildirim added, praising those civilians and security personnel who have lost their lives while opposing the plotters.

Political parties, non-governmental organisations, media and all other institutions who have expressed their support with the government against coup plotters played a crucial role in stalling the attempt, Yildirim stressed.

"Those who have committed terror by using the state's weapons, tanks, warplanes, ammunition against the Turkish people were much more inglorious than the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party)," Yildirim added.

At least 161 persons were killed and 1,440 wounded during the coup, the Prime Minister said, adding 2,836 soldiers were arrested, including high-ranking officers.

The Prime Minister said the first phase against plotters has ended and it was time to pass to the second phase in which plotters will undergo prosecution to get necessary punishment.

--IANS

ask/rn/vt
Union Women and Child Development Minister and animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi is moved by the appalling evidence of elephant torture and trauma brought out by "God in Shackles", a critically acclaimed documentary exposing the abuse of Kerala's captive elephants. She says elephant rescue centres were the need of the hour.

"Gods in Shackles", directed by Canada-based Sangita Iyer, portrays stories behind the veil of Kerala's prestigious temple festivals.

The film was screened for public at PVR Rivoli here on Saturday, read a statement.

Maneka Gandhi said: "Over 800 elephants have died in the last two years of beating and starvation in Kerala. To say that elephant is thriving in India, it is not. There are less than 20,000 left, of which Kerala is killing as many as it possibly can. Begging elephants must get off the road. We must have elephant rescue centers. The Kerala Government has to take a decision now -- to keep killing these endangered species or take action to rescue them."

She added: "We have strong laws in place. Wildlife Act is a strong law but if Kerala Government chooses to ignore it, what can we do. It is because of the strong stance that the Atal Bihari Vajpayee led BJP Government took to rescue and rehabilitate bears that they are finally off the road."

Iyer shared that "people are so blinded by greed and selfishness that they are unable to see the pain and suffering of another sentient and supremely intelligent animal".

She said: "Asian elephants are exploited all across India. They are tortured and traumatised in circuses and zoos, and worse yet by the temples under the guise of religion. How ironic it is to even think that gods creations are tortured in temples, where people believe gods live."

The documentary has been nominated by the International Elephant Film Festival at the United Nations General assembly and has won seven international film festival awards including the Los Angeles Cinefest Award, Hollywood International Independent Documentary Film Festival Award, The IMPACT Docs - Award of Merit, Golden Award at the World Documentary Awards.

--IANS

sug/rb/dg
Genres : Crime, Drama, Thriller

Starring : Meiko Kaji, Rie Yokoyama, Yoyoi Watanabe

Plot Synopsis

Starring the iconic and beautiful Meiko Kaji (Lady Snowblood, Stray Cat Rock) in a role that came to define her career, the four-film Female Prisoner Scorpion series charts the vengeance of Nami Matsushima, who assumes the mantle of Scorpion, becoming an avatar of vengeance and survival, and an unlikely symbol of female resistance in a male-dominated world. Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion introduces Nami, a gullible young woman unjustly imprisoned, who must find a way to escape in order to exact revenge upon the man who betrayed her. The visually avant-garde Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 sees director Shunya Ito and star Meiko Kaji re-unite as Nami and six other female convicts escape prison once more. The Gothic horror-inspired Beast Stable finds Nami branded public enemy #1 and on the run. She soon finds refuge with a sympathetic prostitute, but runs afoul of a local gang. The final film in the series, #701's Grudge Song (from director Yasuharu Hasebe, Retaliation, Massacre Gun), shows a gentler side of Nami as she falls in with Kudo, an ex-radical suffering from physical and psychological trauma caused by police torture. Spiritual kin to Ms. 45, Coffy and The Bride Wore Black, the Female Prisoner Scorpion is the pinnacle of early 1970s exploitation cinema from Japanese grindhouse studio Toei, and one of the greatest female revenge sagas ever told. Bonus features include: New visual essay on the career of star and icon Meiko Kaji by critic Tom Mes, Newly filmed appreciation by critic Kat Ellinger, Archive interview with director Shunya Ito, Original Theatrical Trailer, New interview with production designer Tadayuki Kuwana, Newly filmed appreciation by critic Kier-La Janisse, Japanese cinema critic Jasper Sharp looks over the career of Shunya Ito, Archive interview with director Shunya Ito, New interview with assistant director Yutaka Kohira, Theatrical Trailers for all films in the series, Newly filmed appreciation by filmmaker Gareth Evans (The Raid), Booklet featuring an extract from Unchained Melody: The Films of Meiko Kaji, an upcoming book on the star by critic and author Tom Mes, an archive interview with Meiko Kaji, and a brand new interview with Toru Shinohara, creator of the original Female Pri, Reversible sleeves for all films featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ian MacEwan, Double-sided fold out poster of two original artworks, Optional English subtitles for all films, Original mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-rays) for all films, Brand new 2K restorations of all four films in the series presented on High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD , Limited Edition Blu-ray collection (3000 copies), Original Theatrical Trailer, Newly filmed appreciation by filmmaker Kazuyoshi Kumakiri (Kichiku: Banquet of the Beasts), Archive interview with director Yasuharu Hasebe, Japanese cinema critic Jasper Sharp looks over the career of Yasuharu Hasebe, Visual essay on the Scorpion series by critic Tom Mes, Original Theatrical Trailer
A World Bank-funded Horticulture Development Project is being implemented in the state with an outlay of Rs 1,115 crore, mainly to protect apple cultivation, a government spokesperson said on Sunday.

The project spread over seven years would focus on providing new technologies to horticulturists for increasing crop productivity and capacities.

To protect the fruit crop, mainly from the hailstorms, the state government has increased subsidy on anti-hail nets to 80%.

The spokesperson said for strengthening marketing facilities, 10 fruit yards and collection centres have been made operational in the state in the past three and a half years with an expenditure of Rs 27.45 crore.

is one of India's major apple producing states, with more than 90% of the produce consumed in the domestic market.

Himachal Pradesh's fruit economy is worth around Rs 3,500 crore a year, with apple alone contributing 89% to this figure, mostly in Shimla, Kullu, Mandi, Lahaul and Spiti, Kinnaur and Chamba districts.

A Horticulture Department official said growers are taking to apple plantation on a large scale even in the remote district of Lahaul-Spiti.

Overall area under apple cultivation has increased to 1,09,553 hectares in 2014-15, he said.

He said the government has started weather-based crop insurance scheme to protect growers' interests.

Initially, the scheme was launched in six blocks for apple crop and four blocks for mango crop. The coverage under the scheme has since been extended in view of the scheme's popularity.

In the last financial year, the scheme was implemented in 36 blocks for growing apple, 41 blocks for mango, 15 blocks for kinnow, 13 blocks for plum and five blocks for peach crops.

In addition, 17 blocks have been covered under add-on cover scheme to protect the apple fruit crop from hailstorms.
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday accused the Centre of creating obstructions in the working of his Aam Aadmi Party government due to which, he said, it was unable to work to its full potential.

"Had the Centre not created an India-Pakistan like situation in Delhi, we would have done four-fold more work," Kejriwal said while answering a caller during his maiden interactive session 'Talk To AK'.

The Chief Minister alleged that the central government wanted to "paralyse" the Delhi government.

"The central government wanted to paralyse the Delhi government to stall the development of Delhi. But I want to assure everyone that we will continue to work and hire experts from outside if officers are not provided by the central government," he said.

Kejriwal on Sunday held an interactive session with people across the country through the social media, phone calls and text messages during the programme titled 'Talk to AK'. The programme was moderated by noted music director Vishal Dadlani.

During the two-hour session, the AAP convener answered queries of callers and touched upon several issues ranging from coming assembly elections in several states to farm loan waiver and the popular odd-even traffic scheme.

Kejriwal said he had urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to waive off farmers' loans during the inter-state council meeting held on Saturday.

"I demanded that loans of all farmers be waived by the Centre, which should give adequate crop prices (to farmers) as per the M.S. Swaminathan report. Also, I raised the issue of increasing pulse prices due to large-scale hoarding by a few traders," he said.

Highlighting the initiatives of his government in the education sector, the AAP leader called for the repeal of the "no-detention policy" under which every student is automatically promoted to the next class till Class VIII.

"No-detention policy should end; it is ruining the country. I urge the central government to clear the pending bill we have passed against the no-detention policy in schools," the Chief Minister said.

"Don't mess around with the youth and education of this country," Kejriwal said, adding, "If this system continues the future (of young people) may be in danger and unemployment will increase. The Centre has a no-detention policy in place till Class VIII."

"But, in most cases, it is found that in Class IX students suffer from depression and even commit suicide as they can't even read and write," he said.

The AAP leader said he would meet Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar for giving reservation to Delhi students in 28 Delhi University colleges financed by the state government.

Meanwhile, responding to a question whether AAP will contest assembly polls in Gujarat next year, he said: "The party does not contest polls. It's the people of the state who fight it. Even in Delhi, the people spent (their own) money to bring us to power.

"Similarly, if people of Gujarat want us to contest, we will fight assembly elections in the state."

Asked about the Jan Lokpal Bill, Kejriwal replied: "The bills passed by the Delhi assembly, including the Jan Lokpal Bill, were either not accepted by the central government or were pending for more than eight months."

On his promise of providing Internet services in the national capital, the AAP leader said that Delhi will get free WiFi in two to three years.

"WiFi will come through fibre optics network which will take two to three years (to install). However, some parts of East Delhi will get free WiFi services by early next year," the Chief Minister added.

He said the third phase of the popular odd-even traffic scheme will be back in winter.

"The pollution in Delhi increases in winters. Therefore, we have decided implement the third-phase of the odd-even scheme in the winter. The Transport Minister is working on the details of the third phase," Kejriwal said.

While mentioning any specific date, Kejriwal said the second interactive session will be held after over a month.

--IANS

av-aks/tsb/dg
Call it the "Yahoo rule". The internet firm's failure to spin off Alibaba to shareholders could be a boon for future separations. The US Treasury Department's Internal Revenue Service (IRS) proposed modified regulations on when such splits can qualify for tax-free treatment. The move comes after the IRS declined to bless Yahoo's carve-out of its Alibaba stake last year. Similar deals have been on hold since.
Assets under management (AUM) of portfolio managers in India are up almost 5.5 times in the past five years, according to data from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi). Portfolio Management Service (PMS) providers, which cater to high net worth individuals (HNIs), could not have enjoyed a very savoury reputation five-six years ago but seem to be getting their act together, both in terms of returns generated and the quality of service offered, as is evident from their rising AUM.
Today there's a strong case for investors to look at property in Tier-II cities. Residential real estate prices in some of these cities have seen a correction in the past few quarters, according to the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) House Price Index. Moreover, many of these cities could grow at a faster pace compared to the metros if the country's economy grows at over seven per cent annually. Then, there's the government's smart city project. If successfully implemented, it has the potential to transform many Tier-II towns into metros.
It was a blazing hot day in May. The Punjab unit of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) resolved to gherao the residence of Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on the issue of farmer suicides and an alleged Rs 12,000-crore wheat scam.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, known as the Bharatiya Janata Partys Mr Clean, faces an acid test of defending tainted ministers in his Cabinet in the three-week monsoon session of the state legislature starting Monday. Since he took over as the CM on October 31, 2014, Fadnavis, in spite of his attempts to implement Prime Minister Narendra Modis diktat of na khaoonga, na khaane doonga, ( I won't be corrupt, and won't allow others to be) 16 minister from his Cabinet face serious charges of corruption and lapses in administration.
In the midst of his bitter fight with the Centre on a range of issues, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday accused the Modi dispensation of turning its relationship with Delhi government into an "India-Pakistan" type situation and alleged that BJP President Amit Shah was "micromanaging" functioning of the CBI. In the first edition of his Talk to AK show, seen as his answer to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Maan Ki Baat and an attempt to increase Aam Aadmi Party's connect, the Delhi Chief Minister said his government would have achieved four times of what has been done for the city in the last 17 months had "obstacles" not been put by the Centre. Kejriwal called for repealing the "no-detention policy" under which every student is promoted till Class IX. "Don't mess around with the youth and education of this country. If this system continues then the future may be in peril, unemployment will be widespread. The Centre has a no-detention policy in place till Class VIII.
Three loaders working at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) here were arrested for allegedly stealing six mobile phones from the check-in baggages of fliers.

Sonu, Puran and Amit, employed by a ground handling agency at the airport, allegedly stole the phones on July 12 while handling baggages of a foreign airline. The theft was detected by CISF personnel, officials said.

"Six mobile phones were recovered from their possession and they handed over to Delhi Police which arrested them. The trio has been sent to 14 days judicial custody," they said.
UNESCO today listed Chandigarh's Capitol Complex and Sikkim's national park home to the world's third highest peak Mount Khangchendzonga among its World Heritage Sites, approving all three nominations linked to India this session.

Today's approval comes two days after the ruins of Nalanda University in Bihar made to the elite tag at the 40th session of The World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul.

This is the first time that any country got three sites inscribed in the Word Heritage List at a single session of the committee meeting, a Culture Ministry official said.

The meeting had resumed for a day today, after being suspended a day earlier due to a failed coup bid in Turkey which claimed over 260 lives.

"Much awaited dream come true. CapitolComplex of Chandigarh now a WorldHeritage site. Thanks @UNESCO @RuchiraKamboj," India's Culture Ministry tweeted. Ruchira Kamboj is India's Ambassador to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

"Khangchendzonga National Park of India is now a WorldHeritage site. Thank you @UNESCO @IrinaBokova," it said in another tweet, tagging UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova.

The Capitol Complex is part of the group of 17 sites - across seven countries (France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Japan and India) - designed by Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier which were included in the list by the Paris-based body.

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, had planned Chandigarh in the 1950s.

It said the 17 sites spread over seven countries are a "testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past".

"The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh (India), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Japan), the House of Dr Curutchet in La Plata (Argentina) and the Unite d'habitation in Marseille (France) reflect the solutions that the Modern Movement sought to apply during the 20th century to the challenges of inventing new architectural techniques to respond to the needs of society.

"These masterpieces of creative genius also attest to the internationalisation of architectural practice across the planet," it said in an official statement.

In another major recognition, Sikkim's Khangchendzonga National Park - home to the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga - made it to the list.

Located at the heart of the Himalayan range in northern



India (State of Sikkim), the Khangchendzonga National Park includes a unique diversity of plains, valleys, lakes, glaciers and spectacular, snow-capped mountains covered with ancient forests, including the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga which has an elevation of 8,586 m.

"Mythological stories are associated with this mountain and with a great number of natural elements (e.G. Caves, rivers, lakes, etc.) that are the object of worship by the indigenous people of Sikkim. The sacred meanings of these stories and practices have been integrated with Buddhist beliefs and constitute the basis for Sikkimese identity," the statement said.

Besides these, Antigua Naval Dockyard and Related Archaeological Sites (Antigua and Barbuda) and Pampulha Modern Ensemble (Brazil) were also included in the elite list.

A World Heritage Site is a place (such as a building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, or mountain) that is listed by the UNESCO as being of 'special cultural or physical significance'.
Genres : Anime, Adventure, Fantasy

Plot Synopsis

When she hears a strange song from a crystal radio, Asuna tunes into more than just a magical stream of music. Soon, she is transported to a mysterious world where mythical beasts roam and brave warriors fight for their lives. Agartha is a land of breathtaking beauty and unimaginable danger-a place where, it is believed, even the dead can be brought back to life. But at what cost? Children Who Chase Lost Voices is a spellbinding new work from Japanese visionary Makoto Shinkai, who amazed audiences the world over with Voices of A Distant Star and 5 Centimeters per Second. Now, with Children, Shinkai affirms his place as one of animation's most original voices.
At least three police officers were killed and several others wounded today in a shootout in the US city of Baton Rouge with one gunman dead and two suspects believed to be at large, the latest gun violence incident to rock the country.

The motive of the shooting was not known but comes amid spiralling tensions across the city and the country between the black community and police. The races of the suspects and the officers were not immediately known.

Officials confirmed that three law enforcement officers died during an early morning shooting on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, over a kilometre away from a local police station.

One shooter is dead, said Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office.

She said law enforcement officials believe there are at least two other shooters who may be at large. However, investigators were working to determine the exact number of shooters involved.

"We do know, and do believe there are more than one suspect. That's why we're alerting the community," said Cpl. L'Jean McKneely. "We sending in the robot to see if there are any explosives in the area or any explosives on him."



Police received a call of "suspicious person walking down Airline Highway with an assault rifle," a source said, adding that when police arrived, the man opened fire.

According to a senior White House Official, US President Barack Obama has been briefed on the Baton Rouge shooting.

White House has been in contact with local officials in Baton Rouge and has offered necessary assistance, the official said.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called Baton Rouge shooting an "unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us".

"Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice," Edwards said in a statement.

The victims were from Baton Rouge Police Department as well as East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office.

A witness described hearing at least 25 to 30 gunshots in the area. The shooting started shortly before 9 AM (local time) this morning.

"I walked out into the street to see what was going on, there was a man lying in the street. I assume he was dead because he wasn't moving," a witness told WAFB-TV.

During a call to dispatch, an officer said, "unknown where the shots are coming from."



Tensions have been high between members of the Baton Rouge community and law enforcement since Alton Sterling, a black man, was killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store. It is unclear whether today's shooting is connected to the Sterling incident.

The injured policemen were reported to be in a critical



condition.

Baton Rouge City Mayor Kip Holden told local media that he was still gathering details on the total number of officers who were wounded in the shooting.

"It's like a nightmare all over again. The rhetoric now needs to be toned down to zero. This is not a Wild West town. This is a town of law and order," Holden said.

The shooting is the latest in a series of high-profile killings that have rocked the country recently that have exposed the undercurrent of racial prejudice and an epidemic of gun violence.

A gunman killed five police officers in Dallas earlier this month during a demonstration triggered by the fatal police shooting of two African-American men.

Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets in Baton Rouge to condemn Sterling's death. Authorities arrested about 200 people over the weekend.
The Delhi government will conduct an "opnion poll" and not a "referendum" on the issue of full statehood for the national capital and bringing subjects such as police and land under the jurisdiction of the state government, Chief Minister said on Sunday.

Kejriwal, who had earlier spoken of referendum on the issue, said there was no provision for such a vote.

His remarks came in response to a question during his two-hour-long live interactive session 'Talk to AK' in which he held forth on a wide range of issues including measures such as the odd-even scheme and promises like free wi-fi.

"It's a good idea. We are thinking about it and will surely do it. Few people call it referendum but there is no provision for it in the Constitution. It could be an opinion poll. We will ask the people of Delhi whether land and police should come under the elected government," Kejriwal said.

Soon after the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, he had tweeted, "After UK referendum, Delhi will soon have a referendum on full statehood."



On the odd-even road rationing measure, two phases of which have already been implemented, Kejriwal said his government was considering enforcing it again in winters.

Asked if AAP would deliver on its promise to provide free wi-fi, Kejriwal said, "We are laying a fibre optic cable network in Delhi. It will take another two-three years. Meanwhile, we will create a network of hotspots. It will be ready by early next year provided the Lt Governor does not nullify the proposal."



Replying to a question on the land pooling policy, Kejriwal said it is under consideration and his government has asked the Delhi Development Authority to insert a clause enabling the setting aside of 10% land for infrastructure development.

The next such interactive session would be held after a month or so, Kejriwal said. He also promised a caller of resolving issues that have apparently arisen out of laying of sewerage line in his area.

"When you are in public life, you have to be ready for public scrutiny. At times, we feel that the media's questions and people's questions are different. There was a need for a platform to take questions directly. And you can face the public only when you are ethical and honest," Kejriwal said in his opening lines.
Cancelling a flight or denying boarding to a flier is going to cost heavily to domestic airlines as the new guidelines by the aviation regulator provides for massive compensation in such cases.

As per the revised compensation norms, which are effective from August 1, an airline will have to pay up to Rs 10,000 to a flier in the case of cancelling/delaying a flight beyond two hours, while the compensation for not allowing a passenger to board the flight stands at up to Rs 20,000.

As of now airlines offer a meagre amount of up to Rs 4,000 for both denied boarding and cancelling a flight.

The revised compensation has been arrived at after extensive consultations with all stakeholders including the airlines.

Fliers body, Air Passengers Association of India (APAI) founder and president D Sudhakara Reddy, however, has said that the new norms leave certain grey areas which need to be addressed.

Airlines shall pay a compensation of Rs 5,000 or booked one-way basic fare plus fuel charge, whichever is less for cancelled/ delayed flights having a block time of up to one hour in addition to refund of ticket, in case a flier has not been informed by the carrier as per the norms.

In the case of an airline cancelling/delaying its flight over one hour but up to two hours the compensation amount will be Rs 7,500 or booked one-way basic fare plus fuel charge, whichever is less, besides the refund amount, according to the revised norms.

An amount of Rs 10,000 or booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, whichever is less, will be the compensation for flights having a block time of more than two hours, according to the new compensation norms.

Block hours refer to the period when an aircraft pushes back from its departure gate till the moment it reaches the arrival gate. These hours are used to calculate an airline's on-time performance (OTP) besides determining the compensation in the eventuality of a flight getting cancelled or delayed.

In case of denied boarding, airline will have to pay an amount equal to 200 per cent of booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, subject to maximum of Rs 20,000, in case airline arranges alternate flight that is scheduled to depart within 24 hours of the booked scheduled departure, as per the revised norms.
Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh today questioned the "moral authority" of Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Badal to accuse the NDA government at the Centre of "undermining" the Constitution's federal structure since his SAD is very much a part of it, with his wife being a Cabinet minister.

"You are trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds," he told Sukhbir and his father Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, referring to their "double standards" of "saying something and doing something else".

If they are seriously feeling "aggrieved why are they not withdrawing Harsimrat Kaur Badal from the Union Cabinet", he asked, adding, "This is a classic case of having and eating the cake at the same time."



At the 11th Inter State Council meeting here yesterday, Sukhbir had accused the Centre of "usurping" states' powers and indulging in a "constitutional rampage" by quietly shifting subjects from the 'State List' to 'Concurrent List' and then to 'Union List'.

In a statement, Amarinder claimed that in view of the strong possibility of the Supreme Court of India ruling against Punjab on the Sutlej Yamuna Link (SYL) canal issue, and the NDA government's clear stand in favour of Haryana, the Badals were now trying to prepare ground and make some excuse for exit.

"The father-son duo is preparing the ground to shirk off all responsibility and pass it on to the Centre despite their party still being part of the government there," he observed.

The former Chief Minister asked what steps and measures did they take to prevail upon their alliance partner at the Centre in supporting Punjab's case or at least be neutral.

"Show me a single word you wrote to the Prime Minister on the issue," he challenged the Badals.

Amarinder alleged despite Congress' clear and unambiguous stand and support to the government on the SYL issue, Badal is "deliberately doing flip-flop to make some political capital out of it".

"But let me tell you, your bluff has already been called and you stand exposed among people that you stayed as a mute spectator while the NDA government at the Centre supported Haryana on SYL," he claimed.

"While we will support you along the legal and constitutional parameters on SYL, we will in no way be part of your dangerous game plan of pushing Punjab into anarchy for your vested interests," he warned Badal.

"Badal is capable of doing anything for his own survival even if it means putting peace and harmony in Punjab at stake," he alleged.
"Star Treck" actor Anton Yelchin's family has thanked everyone for the outpouring of sympathy following their son's tragic death.

The 27-year-old actor died from "blunt traumatic asphyxia" in a freak accident at his Los Angeles home last month when his car rolled backward and trapped him against his gate and his parents Irina Korina and Viktor Yelchin conveyed their appreciation for the tributes that have since poured in for the star.

In an ad placed in The Hollywood Reporter, they said: "Thank you, to all of you who have sent flowers and gifts, for your condolences and kind words. We are deeply grateful for your unconditional love. He would be surprised at how many hearts and souls he touched."



Anton was famous for playing Pavel Chekov in "Star Trek" and "Star Trek Beyond" - which has just been released in cinemas - and his co-stars Simon Pegg, Zachary Quinto admitted they are finding it hard to promote the film while they are grieving their friend.

Anton was mourned at a private service by close friends and family and buried in an "undisclosed location" five days after his death at his home in Studio City, California.

On the night he died, Anton was due at rehearsals but when he failed to show up, his worried friends went to his home to check on him and found his lifeless body.

The tragic death was officially ruled an accident, however questions were raised over why the vehicle rolled back and whether it was a mechanical or human error.

An investigation is also being held into whether Anton's car was a model that should have been recalled because of a gear-shifting problem.
The Nice truck attacker staked out the seafront for two days before striking, it emerged today as investigators pieced together details of the IS-claimed massacre and questioned possible accomplices.

A source close to the investigation told AFP that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian, sent a text message just before the attack in which he "expresses satisfaction at having obtained a 7.65mm pistol and discusses the supply of other weapons".

He also took a selfie at the wheel of the 19-tonne truck in the days before he ploughed it into a crowd of people who had been enjoying a fireworks display on Bastille Day, France's national day, killing 84 and injuring about 300.

Mangled bodies were left strewn across the Riviera city's seafront in the grisly attack by a man described by those who knew him as a loner with a history of violence and depression.

While some relatives and friends described the delivery driver as someone who drank heavily and never attended the local mosque, others questioned by investigators spoke of "a recent shift to radical Islam", said a police source.

But there has been no evidence yet linking him to the Islamic State group, which yesterday claimed the attack.

An Albanian suspected of providing the driver with the pistol was arrested in Nice today. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel fired at police who sprayed his rampaging truck with gunfire, eventually killing him.

Two replica assault rifles and a dummy grenade were also found in the truck, which he rented a few days earlier and used for reconnaissance on the seafront on the two consecutive days before the attack.

One of five other people being held over the carnage is a 22-year-old suspected of lending logistical support, said his lawyer Jean-Pascal Padovani.

The lawyer said the pair had only known each other for a few months.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel's estranged wife, the mother of his three children, was released today after two days of questioning.

In Nice, many people were still desperately waiting for of their loved ones.

Prosecutors said only 35 victims have been officially identified as they take painstaking measures to avoid errors of identification seen during the Paris attacks last November.

"We have no news, neither good nor bad," said Johanna, a Lithuanian who was looking for her two friends, aged 20.

At least 10 children were among the dead as well as tourists from the United States, Ukraine, Switzerland, Germany and about 10 people from Russia, a local Russian association said.
Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal today batted for strengthening the religious, cultural and social bond amongst states in the country.

Addressing a gathering after inaugurating the Baba Namdev Ji college here, he said in the present scenario it is the need of the hour to promote communal harmony and brotherhood across the country.

He asserted that to achieve the same, Sri Guru Granth Sahib ji is the "lighthouse of socialism and secularism" and can guide the path to the entire country.

He said setting up of the university by the state government is a step towards this direction to further strengthen the ties with the people of Maharashtra.

Badal said in recognition of the supreme sacrifice made by Rajguru, who attained martyrdom along with Bhagat Singh, the state government has made a contribution in giving a facelift to his memorial in his native town in Maharashtra.

Recalling the strong bond between the people of Punjab and Maharashtra, the chief minister said the great spiritual ambassador Baba Namdev ji, who hailed from Maharashtra, spent 19 years of his life in this town of the state and gave the message of equality and oneness of God to the people.

Badal said that from centuries people from both the states have been visiting these holy places of immense religious importance due to which a strong bond has developed amongst them.

Union Rail Minister Suresh Prabhu nd Member of Parliament Sharad Pawar along with other dignitaries were present in the function.

He assured the dignitaries and office bearers of Sarhad foundation that the state government will extend full support and cooperation to them for constructing the Yatri Niwas and Language Bhawan here.

"I extend a permanent invitation to all the dignitaries and Maharashtrians to visit this place every year so that the state government can welcome them," Badal said.

He added that Prabhu has done a lot for Punjab and even a Railways Minister from the state could not have done so much.
A Pakistani cleric, who got suspended from the membership of a top religious body after selfies with Qandeel Baloch, the Internet sensation murdered by her brother in a case of honour killing, today said the incident is a lesson for others.

"Those who intend to or humiliate clerics must learn from Qandeel Baloch's fate," Mufti Abdul Qawi said.

Qawi was last month embroiled in a scandal with Qandeel after she uploaded her pictures with him during a meeting.

Qandeel, 26, was killed yesterday by her brother for what he said was "dishonouring" the family by posting risque videos and posts on Facebook.

Reacting on the killing of social media celebrity, Qawi, who was suspended from government's Ruet-e-Hilal Committee membership following the selfie controversy with Qandeel, said: "Those who have humiliated clerics must seek repentance and should ask forgiveness from clerics as well as Almighty Allah.

"I had forgiven Qandeel for what she had done against me. I have never had any hatred for her," he told Express Tribune newspaper.

Qandeel had ridiculed Qawi on various TV channels and tried to imply that he was crazy about herself.

Qawi said: "I had met Qandeel in an effort to bring her the path of righteousness. I was asked by some people why you met Qandeel. I told them we should hate sin but not a sinner."



The cleric further said: "People should realise that religious clerics are the pious face of Islam and they should not dare to play with their reputation or try to malign them otherwise they will face the curse of God.

"I had convinced Qandeel to repent on her sins and asked her to come towards the right path. I had even offered her a marriage proposal in her new life," Qawi said.

Qandeel had received threats from the supporters of Mufti Qawi for allegedly trying to disgrace him.

Following that she had requested security from the interior ministry which she was denied.

Meanwhile, members of the civil society today held a demonstration at Liberty Chowk Lahore and condemned her killing.

Demonstrators raised slogans like 'Stop Violence against Women'.

Some of the slogans read: 'We Failed You Qandeel', 'No Country for Bold Women', 'No Honour in Killing'.

The protesters demanded exemplary punishment for the killer, action by the media regulatory authority against TV channels who assassinated her character and posthumously disrespected her by broadcasting images of her body.

Awami Workers Party General Secretary Farooq Tariq said Qandeel joined thousands of women in Pakistan and around the world who were raped, mutilated and murdered by men.

He said Qandeel was punished for transgressing the norms that were fundamental to a patriarchal order.

Some 1,100 women were killed in Pakistan last year in the name of honour.
The BJP Parliamentary Party's executive will meet tomorrow to firm up its strategy for the Monsoon Session of Parliament with the Opposition set to attack the government over a number of issues, including the developments in Arunachal Pradesh.

The NDA constituents will also meet after the BJP Parliamentary Party executive meeting in the evening.

BJP is bracing for the Opposition assault over its alleged attempts to destabilise governments in states ruled by non-NDA parties.

The recent Supreme Court verdicts on Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have come as a shot in arm for Congress and other Opposition parties.

The Opposition has said it will also raise the developments in Kashmir, floods in parts of the country and India's unsuccessful NSG bid among others issues in the Parliament.

BJP, on its part, has hinted at raising the issue of alleged corruption in Congress-ruled states and law and order problems in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to hit back.
Britain's boarding school teachers have been ordered to address transgender children as 'zie' rather than 'he' or 'she' to avoid offending them.

The official guidance issued by the UK Boarding Schools Association calls on teachers to address transgender pupils as "zie" to avoid offence, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

Staff have been told they need to learn a "new language" for a growing number of pupils who demand not to be addressed as 'he' or 'she'.

Zie is considered a gender-neutral pronoun which has been gaining ground in its usage across Europe and British teachers are being advised to address children by their "pronoun of choice", including they or 'zie'.

Elly Barnes, founder of charity Educate and Celebrate and author of the new guidelines, said that as more trans pupils "come out" in boarding schools, it becomes an imperative to "break the binary".

"Schools need to make sure that all students are treated equally and fairly according to the Equality Act," she told the newspaper.

"We need to educate adults to speak a common language because we grew up in a generation with no prior experience about the (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities)," she said.

New guidance also reminds schools in England, Wales and Scotland of their obligations under the Equality Act 2010 under which gender identity and "reassignment" is one of so-called protected characteristics.
Part of the fun of biopics or movies about historic events is that they work as a sort of visual time capsule. They're a way for people to be reminded of the past, fashions, architecture, technology - all of it can be put on display without having to wait 100 years to dig up a box. It's a way for people to reconnect to an important era or event and possibly be entertained. The catch 22 of this is that the movie may not always be the most accurate source of information - even if it revolves around a well-known event. In this case, when Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll met the president of the united states Richard M. Nixon. We know the pair met, we've seen the photos, but how they met and the circumstances are for the most part, unknown. Directed by Liza Johnson and written by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and Cary Elwes 'Elvis & Nixon' recounts the odd and humorous circumstances of how two of the most influential men of the 20th century met.

As 1970 is coming to a close, the United States is stuck in a bloody war in Viet Nam. There is unrest in the streets as the nation's youth clash with authority figures. John Lennon is urging these young people to protest and pins the world's problems squarely on the shoulders of President Richard M. Nixon. All of this is just too much for The King. Elvis (Michael Shannon) has had enough, so with his trusty .45 and his ankle pistol he's going to Washington D.C. traveling commercial air - except no one seemed to tell him he couldn't bring guns onto an airplane. In order for Elvis to get back on track with his secret mission, he's got to call in his best friend Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer) to not only get him out of jail but get him back on his way to Washington D.C. in order to meet with President Nixon.

Along with their friend Sonny West (Johnny Knoxville), Jerry and Elvis set about meeting Nixon. After dropping by the White House gates to hand-deliver a letter, the wheels of government are set in motion to ensure this clandestine meeting will happen. President Nixon (Kevin Spacey) doesn't want to have anything to do with the King of Rock and Roll, but his aids Egil Krogh (Colin Hanks) and Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters) along with White House Chief of Staff H.R. Halderman (Tate Donovan) think it's a great idea that the President meet Elvis. With Nixon's approval rating in the gutter, this meeting could well be the thing they need to turn the numbers around and put the nation back into favor with the President. The only trouble is they have no idea what they're in for when the King of Rock and Roll comes to town!

For a President who was so paranoid about the people that he worked with that he recorded nearly 4,000 hours of Oval Office meetings, it's incredible that on December 21, 1970, those recorders would be turned off. Other than anecdotal stories from Jerry Schilling himself, there are no real official records giving the world the details behind the meeting that lead to the shooting of the most requested photograph in the National Archives. Just how did Elvis Aaron Presley and Richard Milhous Nixon meet? While 'Elvis & Nixon' goes a long way towards providing a hilarious and entirely possibly account for this meeting, the viewer needs to take it with an extreme grain of salt. It's better to view this movie as a sort of cartoon rather than a real to life account of events.

At the head of this movie are two incredible actors playing two of the most polarizing and famous Americans. Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon is perfect casting. Given that this particular story features these two individuals, one would naturally expect that this 'Elvis & Nixon' would be loaded with over the top caricature portrayals. Thankfully, Shannon and Spacey play things with an amount of straight forward restraint. Shannon isn't trying to crib all of the Elvis mannerisms and Spacey isn't just goofing around as a jittery gesticulating Nixon. They just feel like they're playing real life honest men - only with a slightly humorous bent. It's absurd when you hear Elvis' supposed real motivation for wanting to meet Nixon, but at the same time, you can totally believe it. I don't want to spoil it here because it is actually a smart recurring joke.

Taken as a whole, 'Elvis & Nixon' isn't the type of comedy that delivers great big belly laughs. You more or less chuckle your way through the movie and that's perfectly okay for this type of story. As a pseudo-biopic, 'Elvis & Nixon' works to tell the tall tale behind the meeting of two of the most famous Americans who ever rose to the height of fame and power. While some of the details of the film may have happened in this way, it's important not to take this too seriously and just let it wash over you because it is damn fun.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

'Elvis & Nixon' arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Sony Pictures. Pressed onto a Region A BD25 disc, the disc is housed in a standard Blu-ray case. The disc opens to trailers for other Sony releases before arriving at a static image main menu with traditional navigation options.
VHP leader Praveen Togadia today said the protesters who pelted security personnel with stones in Kashmir Valley should be booked on sedition charges.

"The government should show courage and register cases against those who threw stones at police and army personnel despite curfew being in force in Kashmir.

"Those who were injured during curfew were treated in hospitals and on the basis of the hospital records, they should be identified and slapped with sedition charges as attacking police and army personnel amounts to waging war against India," the VHP International Working president said.

"The government should take strict action against those who disturb the peace in Kashmir. Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti should resign if she fails to take action against such elements," the VHP leader said, while demanding that Article 370 of the Constitution that grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir be scrapped.

The VHP leader went on term those not supporting India on the issue of Kashmir as "either traitors or Pakistanis".

Expressing concern on the alleged migration of Hindus from Kairana town in Uttara Pradesh, Togadia said VHP will conduct surveys in all villages across the country to ascertain the reasons behind their mass departure.

He also stressed the need for introducing a "common population policy" mandating two children per couple.

"If those having more than two children are denied bank loans, ration, services in hospitals and schools, it will have a strong impact on population control.

"This is a secular way of economic development," he said.

On terrorists attack across the world, Togadia said that leaders will have to recognise that it is Islamic terrorism.

"It is Islamic terrorism and leaders should gather courage to say this," he said.
India's revolutionary policy initiatives have brought positivity among entrepreneurs across the globe, Union Minister has said as he invited Indian IT professionals in the Silicon Valley to actively participate in India's startup movement.

Speaking at the Global Indian Technology Professionals Association (GITPRO), Gadkari invited Indian professionals to bring their innovations and technologies to India in key sectors of the economy, particularly in the infrastructure sector like roads transport, highways and shipping as well as in the road safety programmes.

Noting that the agriculture sector is another area of cooperation between India and the US, the Minister for Road, Transport, Highways and Shipping assured the entrepreneurs from the US all possible assistance in making the ease of doing business a hassle-free process.

Highlighting some of the key achievements of his ministry, Gadkari, who is on a week-long official visit of the US, said he has ordered equipment from Australia to construct a road to Manasarovar from Uttarakhand via Himalaya.

He said that average road construction per day had been 2 km per day and it has now reached to 20 km per day and he promised that by next April it would be 41 km per day.

In a meeting with TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) members from its local chapter in Silicon Valley, Gadkari shared his ministries' policy innovations with a view to motivating young creative minds to turn up ideas into action in the new Indian scenario which he said will help in job creation.

During his meeting, Gadkari explained at great length the relaxation of rules and regulations and other procedural bottlenecks in the departments under him which he emphasised have made things simpler and easier for potential investors in India in the infrastructure sector.

Gadkari also visited Boom Energy establishment and evinced keen interest in the next generation energy generation system with modern technologies, a media release said.

In his address to a meeting organised by the Overseas Friends of BJP, Gadkari said the positive impact of Indian policy initiatives in road transport, highways and shipping sectors have given a boost to the Indian economy which is now growing as one of the emerging economies in the world.

During his interaction, Gadkari said IIT and IIM graduates from India working in the US were "excited about the success story of India" in the last two years and were enthusiastic about making a positive contribution to the growth and progress of their country of origin.
Claiming a "broad consensus" on the long pending GST Bill, Union Minister M Venkiah Naidu today said the Centre was "very serious" about its passage in the monsoon session of parliament, but virtually rejected Congress' demand for a tax rate cap terming it "not feasible and advisable".

The Union Urban Development Minister said the government was pursuing the matter with "all parties concerned" and he expected it to be passed in the monsoon session of Parliament beginning tomorrow.

"The entire country is watching what is going to happen in Parliament tomorrow. Broad consensus has emerged. Still there are points being addressed by the Finance Minister (Arun Jaitley). GST is the need of the hour," he said at a 'Meet the Minister' programme organised by the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce here.

Last week, Naidu, a former Parliamentary Affairs Minister, spoke to Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad in a bid to drum up Opposition support for the crucial legislation.

If the common taxation code was implemented "harassment will be reduced, middlemen exploitation will be reduced and corruption will get reduced," he said, adding it will help in increasing revenue and job opportunities.

"That is why the government is very serious (about the Bill) and we are pursuing with all the parties concerned...I am sure in the coming session of the Parliament itself the GST bill will be passed. That is my expectation," Naidu said.

While the GST Bill has been passed in the BJP-dominated Lok Sabha, the government has faced roadblocks in the upper house where it lacks the numbers to get it cleared.

Earlier, speaking to reporters in Coimbatore, Naidu exuded confidence that the bill would be passed in the monsoon session but said Congress' demand for cap on tax rate in the Constitution bill was "not feasible and advisable."



"There is a broad consensus, with a few reservations, even as Tamil Nadu being a manufacturing State has opposed the bill. Congress wants a cap on tax rate in the constitution bill, but it is not feasible and advisable...And the GST bill is pending for the last eight years," he said.

The government wanted to pass the bill with consensus and "not scrape through" by its majority, he said.

Recalling that the bill was in place when Pranab Mukherjee was the Finance Minister and P Chidambaram had made some changes to it, Naidu said it took shape after a committee comprising Finance Ministers of five states went through it in detail.

The new generation wants the bill to passed as they want empowerment, Naidu, who was in Coimbatore to participate in the 4th Edition of India International Coir Fair, said.
Canadian Foreign Minister Stephane Dion pressed Turkey to handle the aftermath of a coup attempt according to "fundamental principles of democracy."



Speaking on the television network Radio-Canada after a phone call with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Canadian diplomatic chief said it was "important to avoid collect punishment" against those who organized the aborted coup that sought to seize power from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"Democracy has been saved," Dion said yesterday, after Turkish authorities wrested back control of the country Saturday.

"We must be discerning to ensure that those on trial have the chance to prove innocence or express their point of view according to the fundamental rules of justice we must aim to respect."



Turkish authorities crushed the putsch bid by discontented soldiers in a chaotic night of violence that left at least 265 dead.

With the coup defeated, Turkey rounded up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm that the country could reestablish its death penalty, which Dion said Canadians are against "in all circumstances."



Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the coup bid.

Though he praised Erdogan's swift return to control, the Canadian minister said "the use of military force was completely unacceptable."



Canada has advised its citizens against travel to Turkey since Friday.
A Canadian court has dismissed a drunk driving charge against a Sikh man because police officers did not return his turban for over three hours after it accidentally fell off while he was being arrested.

Charges of impaired operation and excess blood alcohol against Sardul Singh were dismissed because Peel Regional Police officers did not return his turban after it fell while he was being placed in a cruiser in Southern Ontario.

Ontario Court Justice Jill Copeland, in a decision released last month, wrote that the failure to return Singh's turban while he was in custody constituted a Charter breach.

Copeland ruled that the breach of the defendant's right to freedom of religion by police was a serious one and that Singh's breath sample evidence should be excluded because its admission into evidence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Peel police Chief Jennifer Evans, in a statement on Friday, was quoted as saying by The Canadian Press that she ordered a review of the decision and the officer's actions after Singh was detained on December 10, 2014.

Evans said Peel Regional Police have had a directive in place since 2012 regarding the proper search and handling of religious items and a training bulletin has been issued internally to remind officers of this and other directives.

Peel police recognise "the proper search and handling of religious items are of great importance in keeping with the freedom of religious rights," Evans was quoted as saying.

"I am concerned by the negative impact that this incident and my officer's actions have had on members within our community," she said.

"We have since reinforced the importance of this directive to ensure that this type of mistake does not occur in the future," she added.

Copeland said in her ruling there was no dispute that the removal of Singh's turban was an accident, but it was not returned to him for more than three hours.

"The evidence of the various officers who interacted with Mr Singh about the cause for this delay in returning the turban, and what steps were taken when in relation to the turban, contains numerous inconsistencies," Copeland wrote.

Peel police policy states the only exception to returning a turban is that if a prisoner is suicidal, or if continuous monitoring of the prisoner is not possible, then the turban shall not be returned for security reasons.

"Neither of those concerns is at issue in this case," Copeland wrote in her ruling.

"I accept Mr. Singh's evidence that he felt ashamed at being without his turban, and that it made him feel vulnerable," she said.
Congress today criticised the Centre for not pressing "checks and balances" available to it while handling the violent protests in Kashmir Valley and said while the security personnel were under pressure, the use of "disproportionate and excessive" force should be avoided.

A two-member Congress team, comprising party leaders Ambika Soni and Salman Khurshid, which is in the Valley to take stock of the situation, urged the central government to call an all-party meeting to discuss steps to deal with the situation even as it appealed to the people to maintain peace, saying their is no other answer but dialogue to any problem.

"The situation in Kashmir is very serious. We are pained by it. The Congress President, in her message, has expressed sympathies with the families of the victims of the violence," Soni told reporters.

She said her party does not want to indulge in politics but is lending support for restoration of normalcy in the Valley.

"We have also decided to send medicines, baby food and other essentials for the people here," she said.

Soni lamented that in the last 10 days, the Prime Minister had held a meeting on the situation only once. "The Chief Minister (Mehbooba Mufti) was not present there and it is also not in public knowledge as to what steps has the government taken," she said.

"Our party feels that the first thing to do in such a situation is to call an all-party meet so that all of us discuss the steps to be taken to stop this unnecessary, unfortunate violence and restore normal life," she said.

Stressing the need for providing best possible treatment to those injured in the violence, she said, "We know that many people, including small children, have been blinded by pellets. UPA had proposed to use rubber pellets so that there is no lasting effect.

"Our people have informed us that there is no space in hospitals. Isn't it the duty of the government to airlift such patients immediately to Chandigarh, Amritsar or Delhi."



Khurshid said, "Our understanding is that disproportionate and excessive force is being used. But at the same time, men who serve in these conditions are also under tremendous stress.

"The world over you know that when you are constantly under pressure, apprehensions, fear of attacks...You won't say that people in paramilitary forces have not lost their lives in Jammu and Kashmir. They have, so we cannot be completely insensitive to young men who come here to protect the country but that doesn t give them the freedom to kill at will."



"In any system in the world, there are safety checks and balances...There are safeguards. Right now, the safeguards have all disappeared. (Even) one person killed is one too many. But we know as a fact, agitations happen, people are killed, there are inquiries," he said.

Voicing concern over reports of pellet injuries, Khurshid said "excessive force is absolutely unacceptable".

He said the style of the central government is "not to talk to anyone, but there is a need to talk to everyone in Kashmir".
Congress government in Union Territory of Puducherry today alleged that the Centre discriminating against non-BJP-ruled states in allocation of funds.

Chief Minister V Narayanswamy, who offered worship at various temples in the town, claimed that the NDA government in the Centre was allotting more funds to states where its party was in power and lesser to non-BJP ruled states.

"For flood relief we had claimed Rs 492 crores, but were given only Rs 35 crores... The centre is not acting fairly with respect to allocation of funds for flood relief," he told reporters.

On Cauvery water issue, Narayanswamy sought constitution of a management board for the river to ensure that the Union Territory got its due share of water.

"The Karnataka government is supposed to release 9 TMC water to Puducherry, but now they have given only 2 TMC," he claimed.
UNESCO today listed Chandigarh and Sikkim's national park home to the world's third highest peak Mount Khangchendzonga among its World Heritage Sites, approving all three nominations linked to India this session.

Today's approval is besides the archaeological site of Nalanda Mahavihara (Nalanda University) in Bihar entering the list at the 40th session of The World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul.

The meeting had resumed for a day today, after being suspended a day earlier due to a failed coup bid in Turkey which claimed over 260 lives.

The Paris-based body listed Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier's works - including the Indian city of Chandigarh which he planned in the 1950s - among its World Heritage Sites.

It said the 17 sites spread over seven countries are a "testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past".

"The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh (India), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Japan), the House of Dr Curutchet in La Plata (Argentina) and the Unite d'habitation in Marseille (France) reflect the solutions that the Modern Movement sought to apply during the 20th century to the challenges of inventing new architectural techniques to respond to the needs of society.

"These masterpieces of creative genius also attest to the internationalisation of architectural practice across the planet," it said in an official statement.

In another major recognition, Sikkim's Khangchendzonga National Park - home to the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga - made it to the list.

The Khangchendzonga National Park includes a unique diversity of plains, valleys, lakes, glaciers and spectacular, snow-capped mountains covered with ancient forests, including the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga.

"Mythological stories are associated with this mountain and with a great number of natural elements (e.G. Caves, rivers, lakes, etc.) that are the object of worship by the indigenous people of Sikkim. The sacred meanings of these stories and practices have been integrated with Buddhist beliefs and constitute the basis for Sikkimese identity," the statement said.

A World Heritage Site is a place (such as a building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, or mountain) that is listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as being of 'special cultural or physical significance'.
Donald Trump is at the centre of attack in a new advertisement by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign that invites adults to imagine what a child might be learning from the Republican presumptive nominee's provocative rhetoric.

Soft, inviting piano tones are set against a pink sunset and a neighbourhood at dusk, before the 70-year-old real estate tycoon's voice interrupts the tranquil scene.

"I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks," Trump is heard telling a crowd.

More of his acidic comments are played, while the screen is filled with close-ups of children gazing at television sets, seemingly soaking up every R-rated remark, the New York Times said in a report.

"Our children are watching," a text card warns after two young children watch on television Trump appearing to mock a reporter with a disability.

At the end, Clinton is shown delivering a speech on children, closing with: "We need to make sure that they can be proud of us."



The ad paints Trump as "unpresidential and unfit for office, in the eyes of both children and, the ad assumes, their voting parents (who, one could argue, might not be too happy with the Clinton campaign's rebroadcasting of the messages to children watching television)," the NYT report said.

It added that the Clinton campaign has also made the 68-year-old former secretary of state's record of working for children and families a central focus, while trying to portray Trump as a poor role model for children.

While the underlying message feels familiar, the timing is important as Trump heads into the Republican National Convention and is set to enjoy several days of free, unabated media coverage, often in prime time and perhaps when children are watching. The Clinton campaign can counter with a paid message placed strategically in the coverage, it said.
Dr Reddy's Laboratories (DRL) expects complex generics, proprietary products, including creation of branded generics platform in the US, to be the main drivers of its growth going forward.

"Our growth, going forward, will be driven by the attractive pipeline of complex generics as well as our new proprietary products," Dr Reddy's Laboratories Chairman K Satish Reddy said in a message in the company's latest annual report.

The company will leverage these across the markets we operate in, together with increasing our OTC portfolio, he added.

Highlighting the roadmap the company is taking for expansion, Reddy said: "We are creating a branded generics platform in North America and expanding our biologics play in Russia, CIS and other emerging markets".

The outlook for the API business is also positive, he added.

A branded generic is a drug that is bioequivalent to the original product, but is now marketed under another company's brand name.

During the fiscal year 2015-16, the company's revenues from North America for generics grew 19 per cent to Rs 7,540 crore during 2015-16.

"The sustained performance of our injectables franchise and market share gains in key molecules were the main reason," Reddy said.

Dr Reddy's Laboratories had posted a consolidated net income from sales and services of Rs 15,470.8 crore for 2015-16 fiscal. It was Rs 14,818.9 crore in the previous fiscal.

About the other global markets, Reddy said: "It is difficult to assess the probable situation in Venezuela and Russia in the near future."



In case of Venezuela, the company has decided to supply medicines only against letters of credit or pre-payment, he added.

"We are cautiously optimistic about Russia, given that there is a gradual recovery in the crude prices, and its direct impact on the rouble," he added.
"Anybody got a match?"

That innocuous yet incendiary question marked the first words of on-screen dialogue uttered by the smoky-voiced Lauren Bacall, introducing her not only to the moviegoing public, but also her best-known co-star and future husband, Humphrey Bogart. The film was 'To Have and Have Not,' director Howard Hawks' (very) loose adaptation of what many regard as Ernest Hemingway's worst novel. And though the line would be eclipsed by a far more provocative come-on she would suggestively purr a couple of reels later ("If you want me, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together andblow"), it lit a fuse that would fuel both Bacall's multi-decade career and a storied romance that still captivates today.

Just 19 at the time, Bacall had never acted before and by all accounts was nervous as hell, but the 44-year-old Bogart put her at ease. The two soon became inseparable, and one of Hollywood's greatest romances - and box office bonanzas - was born. The couple wed less than a year later in the spring of 1945 and remained married until Bogart's death from cancer in 1957. The union spawned two children and four films, all of which are bona fide classics. Whether 'To Have and Have Not' is the best of the bunch remains open for debate, but there's a playful innocence emanating from it that the other, more serious Bogart-Bacall movies lack. Moments of joy come at a premium in 'The Big Sleep,' 'Dark Passage,' and 'Key Largo,' but they're strangely abundant here, and enhance the movie's charm.

Strip away the Bogart-Bacall angle and 'To Have and Have Not' is really just a thinly veiled retread of 'Casablanca' with more sex and fewer memorable lines. Viewers at the time didn't particularly care, but the myriad similarities - which don't at all limit the picture's appeal - are worth noting. Both films are set during World War II in an exotic locale populated by displaced persons seeking a way out. Both feature an underground Free-French faction that hopes to challenge the Vichy government, and a neutral, cynical hero who doesn't want to get involved but eventually takes up the cause, presumably for personal gain. There's also local political intrigue and corruption in both movies and a noble, freedom-fighting French couple that needs protection, as well as a lively saloon where much of the action transpires and a jaunty piano player who sings a couple of good-time tunes. There's even a rotund adversary who's named Captain Renard instead of Captain Renault and cleverly combines the physique of Sydney Greenstreet with the eloquence of Claude Rains. And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head!

The major differences? The plot gets wrapped up in a tidy bow and this time Bogie gets his girl.

Bogart plays Harry Morgan (no relation to the 'M*A*S*H' actor of the same name), a boat captain who takes tourists on fishing expeditions off the coast of Martinique. Bacall is Marie, an aimless young woman with unspecified plans who's broke and stranded on the island. They meet by chance in a bustling cafe when he spies her swiping the wallet of one of his deadbeat clients. There's an instant attraction. She calls him Steve (we don't know why), and he calls her Slim. They banter, flirt, and help a radical faction organize an effort to fight back against the Axis.

The blush of new love definitely propels the tale (the Bogart-Bacall chemistry is more interesting than the story), and Hawks' decision to veer (far) away from Hemingway's novel bolsters its appeal. Only the bare framework of the original story is retained, and the script, much like 'Casablanca,' was extensively rewritten even while the film was in production. (An interesting side note The abandoned shootout climax would oddly and ironically wind up in 'Key Largo' four years later and provide that somber film with the type of slam-bang finish it craved.) Somehow, Hawks makes this hodgepodge work, and deserves a lot of credit for doing so.

Walter Brennan gives a typically spirited performance as Bogart's devoted, alcoholic, and totally unnecessary sidekick and musician Hoagy Carmichael adds some low-key charm as Bacall's deadpan bar chum, but 'To Have and Have Not' only really comes alive when the two stars share the screen. Reportedly, the womanizing Hawks was jealous of Bogart during shooting because Hawks was also attracted to Bacall and hoped to have a relationship with her (he got over it by dallying with Dolores Moran, the film's second female lead, instead), but he was smart enough not to let his personal feelings stand in the way of exploiting the couple's undeniable romantic attraction, which is what really sells this film.

Not nearly as pure on screen as Ingrid Bergman, Bacall seems a more suitable mate for the gruff, weathered Bogart. You can picture them boozing it up, trading barbs, knocking each other around, and cozying up by the fire. Her acting may be stilted, but her sassy attitude ("It's even better when you help," she quips after their second kiss), undeniable sex appeal (watch her swing her hips as she walks out of the bar in the final scene), and smoldering glances make her an instantly mesmerizing presence. Bogart isn't used to aggressive dames, but Bacall takes charge and stands up to him, and in the process, helps him further refine the sensitivity he so winningly displayed in 'Casablanca.'

With apologies to Claude Rains and Captain Renault, 'To Have and Have Not' marks the beginning of a beautiful friendship - and love affair - between Bogart and Bacall. Their four movies together were released over a period of only four years, but they remain timeless, still evoking the same excitement, glamour, and magnetism they did seven decades ago. Screen teams come and go, but only a handful - Astaire and Rogers, Tracy and Hepburn, Newman and Woodward, Taylor and Burton - endure. Bogart and Bacall are chief among them, and 'To Have and Have Not' lets us be a fly on the wall watching their potent chemistry mix, percolate, and bloom. The movie is good, but they are magic.

The Blu-ray: Vital Disc Stats

'To Have and Have Not' arrives on Blu--ray packaged in a standard case. Video codec is 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 and audio is DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono. Once the disc is inserted in the player, the static menu with music immediately pops up; no previews or promos precede it.
Companies will now have to ensure that all statements annexed with the cost audit report are first approved by their board of directors before final submission.

Corporate Affairs Ministry, which is implementing the Companies Act, has amended the rules pertaining to cost records and audit in this regard.

Cost audit is mandatory for various classes of companies, including those in the areas of healthcare, construction and education.

As per the rules, cost auditor has to submit the cost audit report to the company's board of directors within 180 days from the close of a particular financial year.

Within 30 days of receiving the report, the company concerned has to submit the same to the ministry along with explanations about any "reservation or qualification" flagged by the cost auditor.

Now, the ministry has made it mandatory that any statement to be annexed with the cost audit report should be first approved by the company's board before being finalised.

"The cost statements, including other statements to be annexed to the cost audit report, shall be approved by the board of directors before they are signed on behalf of the board by any of the director authorised by the board, for submission to the cost auditor to report thereon," as per the revised rules.

According to the ministry, a cost auditor can be removed before the term ends provided there is a board resolution. The entity or person concerned should be given reasonable opportunity to be heard besides recording the "reasons for such removal in writing".

Cost audit rules are applicable broadly on four classes of firms including those engaged in an industry regulated by a sectoral regulator or a central government ministry.

It would be in place for companies engaged in the production of goods in strategic sectors such as machinery and mechanical appliances used in defence.

Further, companies operating in areas involving public interest such as railways and firms that are into production, import and supply or trading of certain medical devices come under the cost audit rules.

Among the four categories, there are various thresholds for determining the requirement for maintaining cost records.
Four RSS activists have been arrested here today in connection with the July 11 murder of a 38-year old CPI(M) worker over political rivalry in the politically volatile Payyannur district, police said.

A team led by Payyannur Circle Inspector V Ramesh arrested Vysakh (21), Sukesh (29), Prejithlal (21) and Anoop (21), all hailing from the district, they said.

The arrested men were among the eight persons identified as accused in the case. The four allegedly had direct involvement in the crime and the others will also be nabbed soon, police said.

C V Dhanaraj was hacked to death by a group of people, allegedly RSS activists, when he was entering his house at Payyannur. He hadsuccumbed to his injuries while being rushed to the hospital.

In a suspected retaliatory attack hours later, 52-year-old BJP activist Ramachandran, an autorickshaw driver, was murdered by another group at his house in Vellur village in the district, police said.

No arrests had been made so far in this connection.

Kannur and some parts of the state had witnessed clashes between CPI-M and BJP workers after the May 16 Assembly election results.
Leading Ayurvedic Fast-moving Consumer Goods firm, India Ltd, has tied up with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to promote sustainable cultivation of high-altitude medicinal plants in Ladakh.

India has signed a pact with DRDO's unit Defense Institute of High Altitude Research (DIHAR), Leh, under which both the organisations will educate farmers and help enhance livelihood opportunities in the cold desert area.

DIHAR Director Bhuvanesh Kumar said, "The first step towards the goal of implementing conservation & environmental development benefits in Leh-Ladakh will be a baseline survey of the area for cultivation of highly endangered medicinal plant species."

India Head - Healthcare Research Dr JLN Sastry said, "We are pleased to be the initiator of this developmental programme, which will not only help in growing and cultivating high altitude medicinal plants to prepare Ayurvedic medicines but also provide an alternative source of income to the farmers living in the often neglected high altitude mountain areas."

Under this tie-up with the unit of DRDO, Dabur will also impart training to the villagers on sustainable cultivation of herbs.

Jivanti Welfare and Charitable Trust , Dabur's corporate social responsibility arm, had approached DIHAR & Pragya  an NGO operating from Leh-Ladakh  with the primary focus on helping the local community in Leh-Ladakh while also augmenting the population of medicinal herbs in the country.
A Muslim organisation Popular Front of India today held a demonstration in support of controversial Islamic preacher and AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi alleging that a section of society and government is trying to defame them.

The demonstration was held in front of Musjid Kureshian on Moti Dungari road in the city.

State president of the organisation, Anish Ansari, said both the leaders are "popular" and their activities are not hidden from people living.

" is an Islamic preacher and on several occasions he has condemned all forms of terrorism. His speech is available on social media sites and he has crores of followers across the world," he said.

Ansari said any move against Naik is a "blow on the Constitutional right of protection of interests of minorities".

For Owaisi, who has been booked under sedition charges over extending legal aid to alleged ISIS members in arrested from Hyderabad, Ansari said protection in respect of conviction in offences is also a Constitutional right and giving a legal aid is nothing wrong.

"Those who are accusing Owaisi of supporting terrorism either have no knowledge of the basic principles of the Constitution or they are deliberately targeting him because they hate his political status," he alleged.
Director General Corporate Affairs B K Bansal, an additional secretary-rank officer in Ministry of Corporate Affairs, who was arrested by CBI in a bribery case was today remanded in two days of the agency's custody by a special court here.

CBI during its searches at eight locations in connection with the case claimed to have recovered over Rs 56 lakh from Bansal, while Rs 16 lakh were recovered from Delhi-based middle man Vishwadeep Bansal, the agency sources said.

The duo along with two others were arrested yesterday evening in connection with the bribery case involving Rs 20 lakh.

The sources said Bansal, working in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, was nabbed while receiving Rs nine lakh of the bribe amount which was second instalment of the agreed upon amount.

Bansal, Senior Administrative Grade officer of Indian Corporate Law Service (ICLS), was promoted to the post of Director General of Corporate Affairs (DGCA) last year.

A CBI spokesperson said a case was registered under provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 on the allegations that Bansal had been dealing with matters related to certain violations committed by Mumbai-based Pharmaceutical company Elder Pharmaceuticals.

The sources said the Chief Operating Officer of Elder Pharmaceuticals had allegedly sought assistance of the middleman, who was also working as their distributor in Delhi.

They said Bansal had allegedly demanded a bribe of Rs 50 lakh for not recommending investigation by the SFIO on the inspection report and finally the middleman negotiated it to Rs 20 lakh.

They said the accused officer had earlier allegedly accepted Rs 11 Lakh and was demanding the balance amount.

They said CBI laid a trap and the accused officer was caught while accepting the bribe of Rs nine lakh outside a hotel here.
"Preacher" star Ruth Negga has suggested that improving diversity in TV and film is "about being inclusive, not colour-blind".

The Ethiopian-Irish actress plays Tulip on Preacher - a character portrayed as white in the original comic books, reported Digital Spy.

"I don't like the term 'colour-blind' - because I don't want people to be blind to my colour. There's just something about the semantics of that term that suggests there's a problem there... And I don't think there is a problem," Negga said.

"It makes me feel like... 'Let's not talk about her being brown, because it's a problem' - so it's not about being colour-blind, it's about being colour appreciative, and inclusive.

"It's just about being seen for who you are - noticing my colour but not having that make people nervous about casting me. That's what it is, really.
In November 2014, when Toronto based biologist, Sangita Iyer visited "soul-animal" Lakshmi, in her hometown in Kerala, she was devastated to see the elephant reeling under pain having been blinded by her mahout.

Lakshmi, is among the many elephants who are held captive by religious authorities in Kerala to be used in the state's globally popular temple festivals.

"It was devastating to witness how they treated my soul animal Lakshmi. She was tortured to blindness. I still remember when I first met her, she had gorgeous honey brown eyes. She is one of the few female elephants in Kerala and I bonded with her on a much deeper level.

"But, when I saw her in 2014, my jaw dropped because her left eye was swollen shut and tears were constantly streaming out. When she openend her eye, I saw a white scar in her eye. When I asked around, I learnt that her mahout beat her mercilessly because she ate his food that was left unattended. One of his blows struck her in the eye and she became blind," Iyer says.

In the absence of a veterinarian who was supposed to treat Lakshmi's eye, the local people nailed the ailing elephant to make her lie down and forced open her eye with their "filthy hands" to pour in the eye drops, she narrates.

To bring the plight of captive elephants like Lakshmi to the attention of the concerned authorities and create an awakening within the larger public, in 2015 she came out with a documentary titled, "Gods in Shackles," which was screened here recently.

"I saw that they were shackled so tightly, they had massive tumors on their hips and raw bleeding wounds on their ankles. Many blind elephants were being paraded in the sun as tears streamed down their eyes. It was heartbreaking and I knew that I had to do something about it. That's how I decided to make this film," she says.

The 92-minute documentary follows the lives of four "celebrity" elephants for a year, including Lakshmi. A fifth male elephant named Sundar who made international headlines for having been able to break the shackles of captivity has also been featured.
France's foreign minister warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today against using his country's failed coup as a "blank cheque" to silence his opponents.

"We want the rule of law to work properly in Turkey," Jean-Marc Ayrault told France 3 television, warning Turkey's government against "purges".

His remarks came as Turkish authorities continued a crackdown over the coup, arresting over 6,000 people accused of involvement in the putsch or of supporting the coup plotters.

Ayrault said the events of the past two days had raised questions about Turkey's "reliability" in the fight against Islamic State.

Turkey is a member of the US-led coalition that has been carrying out airstrikes against the group in Syria.

"There's (the question of) reliability on the one hand and, indeed, an element of suspicion on the other," he told France 3 television.
A dalit family from Meerut today met a Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist lodged in the Lucknow jail who it had claimed was their lost son.

"The meeting lasted 50 minutes," Jail Superintendent Shashikant Mishra told PTI.

"They exchanged some words," he said, refusing to divulge further details.

The district administration allowed the family members to meet the convicted terrorist Abid in the presence of senior officials of the special task force, anti-terror squad and local intelligence unit.

Permission was granted after the family members met senior officials in the Lucknow administration and submitted a memorandum claiming that one of the convicted terrorists, Mohammad Abid alias Fatte, is their son Pravin Jatav, who has been missing since May 5, 2006.

The family's claim had a come a day after a special court sentenced the three alleged members of JeM to life imprisonment.

Mahesh Devi and her son Pawan had claimed that Pravin was her lost son whom they had identified from a photograph.

"When the photographs of the three JeM men held guilty by the court on June 30, 2016 appeared in newspapers on July 1 in Meerut, we realised that Pravin and Abid hold an uncanny resemblance. Thereafter, we came to Lucknow to meet Abid," Pawan said.

"My son was a contractual driver who went missing in 2006. We wrote to the Human Rights Commission and also filed a petition in the high court (to help him trace him), but nothing happened. He was 27 then," Mahesh had Devi said.

The family was not available for comments today.

A special court had on June 30 convicted Mohammed Abid alias Fatte, Mirza Rashid Beg alias Raza Kazzafi and Shaifurrahman alias Yusuf of "plotting to kill innocent people in the country in order to create an atmosphere of terror".

The quantum of punishment was pronounced on July 14.

According to police, the three JeM men were Pakistani nationals and were kept in Lucknow jail after their arrest in November 2007 from Sitapur road following an encounter when they were on their way to Lucknow.

Three pistols, two AK-47 rifles, 60 live cartridges, 16 hand grenades, 4kg RDX and fake I-cards were recovered from them.

Police claimed the operation was carried out following intelligence inputs that some Pakistani nationals, who were members of JeM, had sneaked into the country in order to free their associates lodged in Indian jails.
Four persons, including a 12-year-old boy, sustained severe burn injuries after a man allegedly set his own house on fire to kill himself and his family members at southeast Delhi's Jaitpur area on the wee hours today.

The injured persons have been identified as Kenai Ram Mondal (38), his wife Sharmila Mondal (34), son Amit (12) and another relative Rang Lal (65), a senior administration official said.

While Kenai Ram himself sustained 15 per cent burn injuries, his wife and relative sustained 40 per cent burn injuries and the son, whose condition is stated to be critical, received 70 per cent burns.

The incident took place around 5 AM when Kenai Ram set the house on fire while the others were asleep. Later, the neighbours raised an alarm.

Investigation into the matter is underway and his motive for taking the extreme step is yet to be ascertained, a police official said.
Towns in Mississippi and other Tea Party-ruled states with large (often private) prison industries are totally reliant on state/fed funding transfers to local prisons for cash and jobs, forced prison labor to provide local services for free, and War on Drugs arrests and minimum sentencing to fill those jails. The first tiny steps toward criminal justice reform have eroded the underpinnings of the whole system, leaving the towns facing collapse.

Increasing vacancy rates in these prisons mean less revenue (and less free, forced labor), but the counties and towns still have to keep up payments on the bonds they floated to raise the money to build their prisons.

Meanwhile, "fiscally responsible" states run by slash-and-burn Tea Party governors have cut services and transfer payments (except the per-prisoner/per-diem payments), eroding the towns' infrastructure (see also), leaving the towns in a state of absolute precarity.

State lawmakers can claim to be acting conservatively, Cochran said, but they're not responsible for the consequences of their decisions. "The state's dumping responsibility on local government," he said. "The department has had to reduce spending by $5 million to comply with Gov. Phil Bryant's recent order," Fisher said in a February statement, citing the budget constraints as the reason for the prisoner transfers. Fisher added that he was re-evaluating the agency's spending, given "low pay, high turnover, critical staff shortages, and aging facilities." The state was paying prison guards so little that it couldn't even find staff for its community work centers, which run the convict labor program, Fisher said. Mississippi, in other words, couldn't even afford free labor. "I don't like having to close community work centers, but we simply don't have the staff to keep some of them operating. Until we improve the pay of corrections officers, staffing will continue to be a critical issue," Fisher said. Like Mississippi, neighboring Louisiana, as well as Kansas, have recently become laboratories for conservative policy, with hard-line Republicans slashing taxes and dramatically cutting spending. The argument was that the tax cuts would fuel growth. Instead, the states have become economic basket-cases  Kansas actually performed worse economically than its neighbors. Deficits in Kansas and Louisiana both soared and basic services have been cut beyond the bone.

Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are 'Devastated' By The Loss Of Revenue

[Ryan Grim/Huffington Post]





(via JWZ)
The Tunisian who rammed a truck into Bastille Day crowds in Nice, killing 84 people, sent a text message just before the attack about the supply of weapons, a source close to the investigation said today.

In the message, 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel "expresses satisfaction at having obtained a 7.65mm pistol and discusses the supply of other weapons", the source said.

The driver, who was shot dead by police after his deadly rampage, took pictures of himself at the wheel that he shared by SMS, the source added.

Over 200 investigators are working on identifying the recipients of the messages, one of the officers told AFP.

Six people are still being held for questioning over the third major attack in France since January 2015.

Among the six is a 38-year-old Albanian, who was arrested this morning on suspicion of supplying the pistol that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel used to fire at police trying to block his route.

Police later found the gun in the truck, along with two replica assault rifles and a dummy grenade.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel's estranged wife was released today after two days of questioning.
The government is launching 50 India International Skill Centers (IISC) across the country, which will support the youth in getting foreign placement.

It introduced 15 centers today in Uttar Pradesh, Kerala, Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradhesh/Telangana, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab and Rajasthan, Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship said in a statement.

The government, which is celebrating its anniversary the first anniversary of Skill India drive, said it would bridge the global shortage of labour force in the coming years by reaping the demographic dividend of young Indian labour force.

"In a phased manner we will launch 50 IISC centres in the country, out of which 15 centers are being introduced today in the states of UP (6), Kerala (2) and one each in Jharkhand, Bihar, Andhra Pradhesh/Telangana, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab and Rajasthan," Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Rajiv Pratap Rudy said.

The proposed IISC will be set up through the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and implement the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) and Pravasi Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PKVY) to youth seeking global mobility for jobs.

Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) shall provide support for Pre-Departure Orientation Training, which includes language and soft skills training modules, it added.

"Through this initiative, our government intends to create a cadre of highly skilled individuals who are recognized and respected in different parts of the world and make India's Flag fly high," Rudy added.

IISCs are envisaged to provide complete training and certification programme to youth intending to migrate overseas for work.
Eight Turkish military officers who fled to by helicopter after a failed coup were charged on Sunday by a prosecutor with illegal entry and violating Greek airspace, their lawyer said.

The men, who have sought asylum in Greece, arrived by military helicopter on Saturday after sending a distress signal to authorities at the airport in the northern city of Alexandroupolis.

They were prosecuted for illegal entry into Greece, their lawyer, Ilia Marinaki said, adding that they will appear in court tomorrow.

She added that they remained under arrest and had not made contact with their families.

The asylum seekers insist they took no part in the putsch and fled to to save their lives "when policemen started shooting against them".

Marinaki added that the soldiers, all married and in their forties, feared for the safety of themselves and their families.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara had asked Athens to send the officers, including two majors, back following Friday night's challenge to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rule by discontented soldiers in which more than 250 people died.

Erdogan spoke late on Saturday by phone with the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and thanked him for his stance during the failed uprising, according to Greek government sources.

Tsipras had early on Saturday expressed his "support for the democratically elected" Turkish government.

According to Athens News Agency, the Greek Prime Minister told Erdogan that the procedure for the Turkish asylum seekers will be swift but in line with law and human rights treaties.

Greek government sources estimate that the procedure will take up to two weeks.

Early on Sunday, the Blackhawk helicopter, the asylum seekers had used was flown back to Turkey.
A gunman fatally shot an elderly patient and a hospital employee in an apparently random attack inside a Florida hospital early today, police said.

"Victims are an elderly female patient, & female hospital employee. Unk motive," the Titusville Police Department said on Twitter.

The shooting took place on the third floor of the Parrish Medical Center in Titusville -- 64 kilometres east of Orlando -- local police said earlier via Twitter, adding that the victims had died.

Police arrested the gunman at the hospital, local television station WFTV reported. The authorities have not yet identified him.

Unarmed security guards had subdued and detained the suspect before the police arrived.

The suspect apparently did not know the victims or have any connection with the hospital, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey told local reporters.

"It appears to be extremely random," he said, local channel WKMG reported. However, he cautioned that it was still early in the investigation.

Last month, a gunman killed 49 people inside a gay nightclub in Orlando, the worst gun massacre in recent US history.
Patel quota stir leader Hardik Patel, who walked out of jail on Friday, left for Udaipur in Rajasthan early on Sunday morning, in accordance with the Gujarat High Court's condition while granting him bail that he will have to stay out of the state for next six months.

The 22-year-old leader will stay at a house owned by former Congress MLA and local Patel leader Pushkarlal Patel in Udaipur for the period.

According to Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) leader and Hardik's close aide Dinesh Bambhaniya, the Patel quota agitation spearhead started his journey for Udaipur from his native place Viramgam here at around 7:30 am on Sunday.

"Hardik will reach Udaipur in the afternoon. He was greeted by his supporters on Gujarat border. Though Hardik was supposed to go to different parts of north Gujarat before leaving the state on Sunday, he has cut short his trip due to time constraints and directly left for Udaipur," said Bambhaniya.

The HC had earlier paved the way for Hardik's release after granting him bail in two cases of sedition and a case related to violence at Visnagar MLA's office.

According to the HC direction, Hardik had to leave Gujarat within 48 hours of his release from jail.

Since the 48-hour time limit was ending at 11 am on Sunday, Hardik left for Udaipur early on Sunday.

In an undertaking submitted before the sessions courts of Surat and Ahmedabad, Hardik's lawyers had informed that the leader will stay at house no 190, Shrinath Nagar on Airport road in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

The owner of the house is Pushkarlal Patel, a former Congress MLA and local Patel leader.

"I have made all the arrangements for Hardik at my place. Hardik is fighting for the rights of our community and he has the support of Patel community in Rajasthan too," Patel told reporters.
Many Bollywood stars might be heading to the west right now to make their mark, but actor John Abraham says he never felt the need to venture there despite being offered Hollywood films in the past.

Celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, Irrfan Khan have expanded their horizons and are currently active in international cinema.

John, 43, says he wants to focus on making Indian movies, which would be of the global standard.

"I have been offered films from there (Hollywood) since 2006. The only difference is, I've never mentioned it or spoken about it. My aspirations are very simple. I want to make a film out of here that's world standard, that will make me very happy," John told PTI.

The "Rocky Handsome" star, however, says if an interesting project comes his way, he will think about it.

"There is no (such thing that) 'I need to do a Hollywood film', but if interest is shown, I would love to meet those people but nothing more, at this point of time."



The actor, who made his debut in 2003 with "Jism", went on to star in films like "Saaya", "Paap" before getting a breakthrough with "Dhoom".

John has since then appeared in big commercial films like "Dostana", "Garam Masala" and New York" while also doing off-beat movies like "Water", "No Smoking" and "Madras Cafe".

The 43-year-old "Force" actor believes it is his unusual films choice, which he loves and enjoys the most.

"I've always done what I wanted to do from the start. Aditya Chopra always tells me, my smartest choices have been my unconventional ones. That I am a thinking actor who doesn't want to go down the same route."



John says even filmmaker Karan Johar is of the view that the way he mixes commercial and unconventional spaces of cinema is quite exciting.

"Karan Johar says, 'In a commercial space you are a big star but you also do different things, so with you there is a lot of unpredictability'. But I enjoy that and I love being in the space of doing different things all the time."



"Like, I would love to do a film like 'No Smoking' again. I have been texting Anurag (Kashyap) but it seems he is too busy. I love that space very much."



The actor, meanwhile, will be next seen in the buddy-cop thriller "Dishoom" which also stars Varun Dhawan. The film releases July 29.
A job for a dedicated hedgehog officer in the English town of Ipswich to improve animal numbers has sparked worldwide interest.

Scores of applications for the two-year post of Ipswich hedgehog officer - with an annual salary of 24,000 pounds - flooded in to Suffolk Wildlife Trust.

It drew attention from many countries.

A trust spokesman said they had always hoped to get a good response, but had been "overwhelmed" by the interest.

of the post was reported in Russia, Portugal, Poland, Spain, Germany and Hungary, and now the trust is sifting through applications before interviews next week.

The role came about after it found hundreds of people reported seeing hedgehogs in Ipswich, either dead or alive. Hedgehog is a small nocturnal mammal.

Funding for the role came from the Heritage Lottery Fund and British Hedgehog Preservation Society.

A spokeswoman for the trust said: "We thought we would get a good response, but we were overwhelmed by the numbers who responded and the international reach.

"Applications have closed now and we're really excited to go through them, and to start the interview process next week.

"The person we're looking for will have an inspirational, and quite unique mix of skills, which will make the face of hedgehog conservation in Ipswich."



Suffolk Wildlife Trust chose to focus on the town after receiving a large number of sightings by members of the public.

Almost 12,000 hedgehogs, dead and alive, have been recorded in the county over the past two years, with about 2,500 of these around Ipswich.

The trust previously said there was a "rich natural network" for hedgehogs across Ipswich, "including its beautiful parks as well as the cemetery, allotments and churches".

A year-long campaign called 'The Whole Hog' to make Suffolk the UK's first hedgehog-friendly county is on, aiming to help halt the decline in numbers.
Work on launching a high-speed train between Amritsar and New Delhi will be initiated soon following the successful trial run of Spanish-made Talgo which became the fastest train in the country by clocking a speed of 180 km/hr, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu today said.

"We have already tested train to run at the speed of 180 km per hour which was successful and after watching its results, Amritsar will be linked with a high-speed train," he said after laying the foundation stone of one MW solar power plant here.

The Union minister also said railway stations of Amritsar and Ludhiana will be redeveloped with modern facilities.

"Punjab is the food bowl of the country and Union Government will leave no stone unturned to develop the railway stations in the state," Prabhu said.

The Minister regretted the delay in laying railway tracks on Amritsar-Patti route via Ferozpur but hoped that the work on this project will begin soon with the help of the state government.

He said the Centre was focusing on producing solar energy from waste material that will help reduce railways' expenditure on purchase of electricity. The savings, he said, could be used for creating additional facilities for the passengers.

Railway ministry will install solar panels at all the railway buildings across the country in order to reduce expenditure on electricity, he said.

Later, Prabhu along with his wife paid obeisance at Golden Temple where he was honoured with a set of Sikh religious books, a replica of Golden Temple and woolen shawl. He also paid obeisance at Durgina Temple.
The six-member central team visiting the worst dengue-hit Barbil area of Keonjhar district in Odisha, today said the impact of the disease was declining due to rise in awareness level among the people.

"There has been no rise in the incidence of dengue in Barbil. It is actually on a decline. Since the awareness level among the community on dengue has gone up, more people are coming to the hospital for check-up," Dr Gagan Singh Sonal, the head of the Central team, said.

Sonal also praised the measures taken by the district administration immediately after outbreak of the dengue which had assumed the proportions of an epidemic.

He said the disease now appeared to be under control.

After visiting several warsd in Barbil CHC, Dr Sonal advocated the community should strictly follow the instructions and guidelines given by the doctors and the Health department on preventive measures like not allowing water to stagnate for a long time at a particular place, which becomes the breeding place for the Aedes mosquito.

Out of 2494 blood sample tests conducted at the Barbil Community Health Centre (CHC) so far, 739 have tested positive.

Meanwhile, a report from Cuttack said there is a steady rise in the number of dengue patients with more than 150 admitted to the dengue ward in the SCB Medical College and Hospital.

SCB Medical and Hospital Emergency Officer Dr B Maharana said till date, 157 patients have been admitted in the hospital of which 125 are male and 32 female.

Out of 157 patients, 10 have been admitted in the ICU of which six patients are from Cuttack, two from Jajpur and one each from Kendrapara and Puri districts.

Of the 157 patients presently admitted at SCB Medical College and Hospital, the highest number of 87 patients are from Cuttack followed by 22 from Keonjhar, 15 from Kendrapara, 9 from Jajpur, 6 from Jagatsinghpur, 4 from Dhenkanal, 3 each from Nayagarh and Mayurbhanj, 2 from Bhadrak, 1 each from Balasore, Rayagada, Puri and Medinipur district of West Bengal, he said.

Dr Moharana said of total of 328 dengue patients so far admitted at the medical college hospital, 169 have been discharged.
In the biggest recovery of cocaine here, 310 gm of the contraband with street value of Rs 3.5 crore was seized from a Nigerian national by Narcotics Cell of Crime Branch, police said today.

Acting on a tip off about supply of cocaine in Delhi and nearby areas by Okpala James, 28, a team of Narcotics Cell nabbed him near a bus stand close to New Delhi railway station on July 10, said Ravindra Yadav, Joint Commissioner (Crime) of Police.

The accused was carrying 310 gram of fine quality cocaine estimated to be worth Rs 3.5 crore, he alleged. "It is the biggest catch of the drug by Crime Branch's Narcotics Cell," Yadav said.

James had first come to India in April 2015 on a medical visa and during that visit he met a fellow Nigerian, Chi Chi B, who lured him into joining the smuggling racket. James came back to India in June 2015 and joined the drug trafficking gang, the Joint CP said.

Besides Chi Chi B, the accused was also in contact of another Nigerian national, who is a big player in the illegal cocaine trade and is said to have supplied the contraband to James, Yadav said.

Police have also recovered several mobile phones from James.
The Israeli army said it fired two Patriot missiles at a drone that "infiltrated" from war-ravaged neighbouring Syria today.

"Moments ago two Patriot air defence missiles were fired towards a drone which infiltrated Israeli airspace from Syria," the military said in a statement.

The statement did not say whether the missiles hit the drone, which crossed in the Golan Heights where the demarcation line between Israel and Syria is located.

Stray fire from Syria's five-year civil war has occasionally landed on the Israeli side of the demarcation line.

Earlier this month, the Israeli army attacked two Syrian military targets on the Golan Heights after stray Syrian fire damaged the security fence along the line.

While Israel has sought to avoid being dragged into the Syrian civil war, it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over into its territory.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also acknowledged in April that Israel had attacked dozens of convoys transporting weapons in Syria destined for its enemy Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.
A 25-year-old Kashmiri man allegedly raising slogans against security forces and waving banner demanding "justice" for the people of the state was detained by the police in Dwarka here today and released after almost six hours of interrogation.

Amir Amin, a resident of Shopian in Kashmir, was caught by the locals atthe crossing of Sector 6-10 in Dwarka with the banner and allegedly raising slogans against the security forces at around 2.30 pm, a senior police officer said.

The locals tore apart the banner and allegedly manhandled him before making a call to the police.

"A PCR call was received atDwarka south police station saying that at sector 9, a man is supporting terrorists. The person, Amir Amin,a resident of Shopian was found at the spot and wasinterrogated," said the officer.

Some literature, allegedly supporting jihadist activities, was recovered from him and he was interrogated by a joint team of local police and the Special Cell of Delhi Police till late night before being released, police said.

The youth lives at Sector 13 in Gurgaon and was apparently disturbed as he could not talk to his parents back in Shopian due to snapped telephone network, they said.

The police also contacted their J&K counterpart and Amin's parents for more information about him.

He was reportedly trained under the Skill India programme, police said.
Six undergraduates at the Jaffna University have been hospitalised after clashes erupted between the Sinhalese and Tamil student groups at the campus, authorities said today.

The University of Jaffna's science faculty was shut today for a week after violent clashes between student groups yesterday during a 'welcome party' at the campus, held for first year students, police said.

Clashes erupted after the performance of Kandyan dance by Sinhalese students, who are a minority in Tamil-dominated Jaffna University.

The majority Tamil students had opposed the performance of the traditional dance.

Riot Police have been deployed and the security was beefed up at the university following the clash, police said.

Jaffna police chief Sanjeev Dharmaratne said statements will be recorded from students when the faculty will be reopened.

"We urge the government to start an inquiry. This was a very unfortunate situation," Channa Jayasumana, an academic from the University Teachers' Association said.

Meanwhile, the student union, Inter University Students' Federation said that attempts were being made to portray the incident as a communal clash.

The Jaffna University was a hot bed of Tamil nationalism and a breeding ground for the LTTE during the 1980s.

LTTE fought a three-decade-long battle in the north and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka for a Tamil homeland before it was defeated in 2009.
DMK president M Karunanidhi today faulted Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa for not personally attending the 11th Inter-State Council meeting convened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying it did not augur well for the state's welfare.

In a letter to partymen, Karunanidhi also pointed out to Jayalalithaa deputing Finance Minister O Panneerselvam for the council meeting, convened after a gap of 10 years, held in New Delhi yesterday.

"Isn't there a difference between the Chief Minister highlighting the state's demands and necessities in person at a meeting convened by the Prime Minister, instead of a minister doing that," he said.

The DMK veteran pointed out that it was in one such council meet that he as a Chief Minister had raised the issue of nationalisation of banks.

Jayalalithaa not attending the the meet in person "does not augur well for Tamil Nadu's welfare", he said.
In the midst of his bitter fight with the Centre on a range of issues, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today accused the Modi dispensation of turning its relationship with Delhi government into an "India-Pakistan" type situation and alleged that BJP President Amit Shah was "micromanaging" functioning of central probe agency CBI.

In the first edition of his 'Talk to AK' show, seen as his answer to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'Maan Ki Baat' and an attempt to increase Aam Aadmi Party's national connect, the Delhi Chief Minister said his government would have achieved four times of what has been done for the city in the last 17 months had "obstacles" not been put by the Centre.

Kejriwal touched upon a number of contentious issue including appointment of 21 Parliamentary Secretaries, arrest of a top bureaucrat by CBI and transfer of officers even as he taunted the Prime Minister saying, he was the "only corrupt Chief Minister in the country in the eyes of" Modi.

The Delhi Chief Minister, in the nearly two-hour-long programme that began with a monologue followed by a question and answer session, alleged that the Centre was trying to "break" the AAP government and that Shah was micromanaging CBI, adding, "but every dog has his day and all these will soon come to an end."



Kejriwal, the AAP national convenor, indicated that the party may contest the next assembly polls in Gujarat, alleging that an "atmosphere of suppression" was prevailing there and people wanted to overthrow the BJP regime.

He said the Delhi government will conduct an "opnion poll" and not a "referendum" on the issue of full statehood for the city and bringing subjects such as police and land under the jurisdiction of the state government.

Soon after the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, he had tweeted, "After UK referendum, Delhi will soon have a referendum on full statehood."



Justifying his government's spendings on advertisement, he insisted that it spent only Rs 75 crore not 526 crore in the last fiscal and accused the RSS of spreading rumours on the issue, saying it has no parallel in the world in spreading rumours.

"If they would not have made this India-Pakistan situation, then work done by us would have been four times. I had told him (PM), forgive me if I have committed any mistake, but please end this irritants. A lot of work has been done. If not for obstacles, the amount of work done would have been four times more.

"Our Assembly passed 14 bills, including on time-bound services delivery, which had the clause of automatic compensation. It's been eight months since this passage of this bill," Kejriwal said.

Flanked by his deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and music composer Vishal Dadlani - the moderator for the programme, Kejriwal alleged that Delhi has become the "victim" of Centre's confrontational attitude as AAP MLAs are being arrested on "false charges".

"In PM's eyes there is only one corrupt CM in the country. They want to break us. They enter into settings with other parties.

"Have FIRs been filed against Robert Vadra or Sonia Gandhi or Shivraj Singh Chouhan? They are not scared of me, they are scared of my honesty. The full police force is after us," he said.

Alleging that Centre was trying to paralise Delhi administration, Kejriwal said his government will soon bring out ads to recruit experts from across for various departments.

"The Centre is working like the British used to treat the



freedom fighters. I have told MLAs this is the second freedom struggle," Kejriwal said



"They are not probing the CWG scam. I have told my MLAs to be ready to go to jail. If Rajendra Kumar was not in my office then I can challenge that he would not have been arrested.

"The message to officers is do not work for us. Amit Shah is micromanaging CBI. But every dog has his day. All these will soon come to an end," he said.

Warning the Centre not to "mess" with the student community, he said if the current "trend" continues then there may be a "danger" for the country in the future.

"The Centre led by BJP reduced the education budget by 25 per cent. From 82,000 crore to 68,000 crore. The country will be ruined if youth don't study," he said.

Referring to a letter to him by former Gujarat BJP MLA Yatin Oza in which the latter alleged that Amit Shah had struck a deal with AIMIM MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi ahead of the 2015 Bihar elections, the Delhi Chief Minister said if the claims are true, then it was very dangerous.

"Oza is a senior lawyer who was very close to Amit Shah. If what the letter says is true then it's very dangerous. In Gujarat there is an atmosphere of suppression. There are cases of treason against teachers.

"People have decided to teach them a lesson. We will contest elections in Gujarat if people want. The response we received was tremendous. We will replicate our good work in Punjab," he said.

"In Punjab, there will be a crackdown on illegal agencies taking people abroad. We will form a board to manage the issues of people who want to go abroad," he said.

On the issue of transfer of 11 top officials of Delhi Government out of the city, he said the city dispensation must be discussed on such crucial matters and added that his government will bring officers from outside.

"Officers from my office has been transferred. Probably for the first time in India's history officers have been transferred from CMO without permission. Your intention is to stall governance in Delhi.

"We will bring officers from outside by giving advertisement. Delhi government has 39 posts at the secretary level. 20 posts are empty. This is the level of shortage and despite that they transfer.

"They want to paralyse us but we will go strong. Will bring out ads in few days inviting experts from across the country," he said.

Severely critical of functioning of the Anti Corruption Branch (ACB), Kejriwal said "Last year, on June 8, the Centre had sent paramilitary forces in taking over the ACB.

"Today if I spot anyone taking bribe in front me, I won't be able to do anything. We have sent 32 cases in the last one year to it, and people have forwarded 150 complaints but no action has been taken. It has only worked to catch Manish Sisodia, Kapil Mishra and to file FIR against me."



On the issue of appointment of Parliamentary Secretaries, he said he has "full faith" on the Election Commission which was examining the issue and claimed that MLAs holding the post in Punjab and Gujarat were earning in crores.
Kerala Finance and Coir minister T M Isaac today said his state always wanted cordial ties with neighbouring states and contentious issues such as Mullaperiyar dam could be resolved through dialogue.

"We are all neighbouring states and the problem can be resolved through discussions," he told reporters replying to a question about the Mullaperiyar dam issue with Tamil Nadu.

Kerala has been insisting on replacing the more than a century-old Mullaperiyar Dam in Idduki District citing safety concerns, but the lower riparian state of Tamil Nadu, which has administrative control over the reservoir under an agreement, is opposed to the move.

On inter-linking of rivers, Isaac who was here to participate in the 4th Edition of India International Coir Fair, said nobody had ever made an attempt to analysis the availability of water in the peninsular rivers.

However, he made it clear that Kerala had no surplus water to share with others.

To a question on incidents of murders of CPIM and RSS workers, Isaac said it was "very unfortunate".

On transporters' complaints about abnormal delay at the check-post in Walayar on Tamil Nadu-Kerala border, the Minister said an integrated check post will be set up in another three months and it would help ease the congestion and delay.
Cutting across party lines, MPs from Kerala, today assured the state government that they would take up the matter of scaling down of Central investment in the state during the monsoon session of Parliament beginning from tomorrow.

Kerala Agriculture Minister V S Sunil Kumar told reporters here that the meeting of the Members of the Parliament from Kerala, chaired by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan evoked a positive response from all parties.

"Investment by the Centre in state has gone down and we plan to raise this issue in the Parliament along with the change in the ratio policy of investment by the Centre. The earlier 20:80 ratio has been changed to 40:60, which is drastically affecting the state budget," he said.

"MPs from Kerala will also jointly take up the issue of Centre issuing in-principle nod to Colachel Port in Tamil Nadu," Kumar said.

The Chief Minister has also conveyed, in the conference, the decision to call an "evaluation meeting" of the state's MPs before and after every session of the Parliament.

"Today's meeting turned out to be fruitful and evoked a very positive response from the MPs and we have decided to voice the concerns of the state together in the Parliament," state Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan told reporters after the conference.

The meeting was attended by all the members of the Parliament from Kerala except Congress leaders K V Thomas, Vayalar Ravi and Indian Union Muslim League leader E Ahamed. Nominated members Suresh Gopi and Richard Hay were also not present at the meeting.

Sunil Kumar also said that after "prioritising" the issues of the state, the CM, concerned ministers and MPs will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The MPs conference which started at 11.30 am lasted till 3 pm and all the members expressed their suggestions ahead of the monsoon session of Parliament.

The meeting has also decided to ensure that the departmental secretaries follow up the development activities which has got the approval of the Union Government.

Former Defence minister and Rajya Sabha member A K Antony told the press that a consensus has been formed among the members of Parliament to raise the issues related to the people of the state during the session.

"Setting aside the political differences, we all have decided to stand by the state government and raise the issues related to the state and its people and have agreed to extend all sorts of help to the CM and the minsters in this regard," Antony said.

Meanwhile, Lok Sabha member and Congress leader



Mullappaly Ramachandran demanded to bring the details of the Cabinet meetings under the ambit of Right to Information Act.

After the conference, the Chief Minister met Union Rural Development minister Narendra Singh Tomar and reiterated the state's demand of relaxing the norms for identifying the beneficiaries under The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana



Later in the evening, before leaving for Thiruvananthapuram, Vijayan met Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and discussed the "Learn to code" project for Eight grade students and Digital literacy in the state.
Real estate firm M3M India has entered into an agreement with and Infrastructure to sell its proposed information technology-special economic zone at Gurgaon for about Rs 500 crore.



M3M India's subsidiary Mikado Realtors had formal approval from the commerce ministry to develop a 25-acre SEZ for electronic hardware, with a developable area of 3-3.5 million sq ft.



According to sources, M3M group has signed an agreement to transfer its shares in the proposed SEZ to Tata group firm and Infrastructure along with Standard Chartered Private Equity.

The deal size is around Rs 500 crore, they added.

When contacted, M3M group Director Pankaj Bansal declined to comment.

and Infrastructure Ltd is a 100% subsidiary of Tata Sons to serve as a real estate and infrastructure development arm. It has projects in Nagpur, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kochi and Amritsar among others.

M3M group has a land bank of around 2,000 acres in the national capital region. It is developing 16 projects, of which about 10 projects are residential.

In December 2014, M3M India bought 185 acres of land in Gurgaon from Sahara group for Rs 1,211 crore.

M3M India had in April this year paid the last installment of over Rs 700 crore to Sahara, thereby completing the land deal.

The 185-acre land in Gurgaon, with 12 million square feet built-up area, would be used for mix-use development and has sales revenue potential of Rs 12,000 crore, M3M India had said while announcing the deal.

M3M group had in March pledged to invest Rs 45,365 crore in Haryana over the next 5-10 years in different projects such as smart city, low-cost homes, IT Park, SEZ and others.

The company had signed three memorandum of understanding with the Haryana government at the 'Happening Haryana Global Investors Summit'.
Maharashtra government is planning to set up a policy research department to keep tab on various schemes, policies and services run by it involving the tax payer's money.

The department, which will be called Institute for Policy Research (IPR), will be on the lines of the Centre for Policy Research (which acts like a think-tank) to review and research schemes, policies and services where tax payer's money is involved, said a senior government official said.

The IPR will study schemes, policies and services and find out if they need any amendments or improvement in implementation so that the tax payer's money is utilised properly, the official said requesting anonymity.

"The government is in the process of finalising the draft proposal which is expected to be tabled before the state Cabinet for final approval. After its notification in the Government Resolution, the government expects to implement it from January 2017," the official said.

He added that initially the government will take up some policies on pilot basis and thereafter research will cover the rest of the schemes, policies and services.

"The state administrative training institute YASHADA, Pune will anchor the research. The government may appoint few administrative officers, hire private experts on policy for the purpose. The government will take assistance from the reputed Harvard Business School in the exercise," he said.

"The IPR system will definitely help to improve the policy of implementing process. The study will be helpful in whether the policy, scheme or service is being properly implemented or not or it has a loophole, or if it should be continued at all," he said.

The official further said departments like Home, under which police render services to the people, their services have never been audited to find out if they really serve the people or the public feedback has ever been sought.

He said the system also needs to upgrade so that a departmental inquiry gets completed within six months which otherwise normally goes on for 5-6 years.

At present, there are about 24 major government departments like agriculture, school education, rural development, food and civil supplies, public health, social justice, energy, Home, women and child development and others.

Some of the major schemes that are being implemented by the government include Bal Thackeray Upgath Vima Yojana, Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Jeevandayeeni Yojana (for cashless treatment for poors), Rajashri Shahu Maharaj Scholarship for SC students and others.
A 15-year-old girl was brutally raped allegedly by three men before she was throttled in Kopardi village in Karjat taluka of Ahmednagar district, police said today.

All three accused, Jitendra Shinde, Santosh Bhaval and Nitin Dhailume, were arrested by the local crime branch after the incident occurred on July 13, police said.

The crime has sparked protests in Karjat, where villagers took to streets demanding strict action against the accused, even as a political slugfest erupted with opposition demanding Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavais' resignation over the matter on "moral grounds".

"The incident took place on July 13 between 6.45 PM and 7.30 PM when the 15-year-old victim was returning after meeting her grandfather. She was accosted by three persons, namely Jitendra Shinde, Santosh Bhaval and Nitin Dhailume, who gangraped her violently before throttling her to death. Her both shoulders were found to be dislocated," Ahmednagar district Superintendent of Police Saurabh Tripathi told PTI.

He said Shinde alias 'Pappu' was arrested on July 14 while the other two accused were held later.

The accused have been booked under IPC sections 376 (punishment for rape), 302 (murder) and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

The officer has dismissed media reports about the nature of cruelty the victim was allegedly subjected to by the trio.

On the eve of beginning of monsoon session of the state Legislature, Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil today demanded that Fadnavis should step down taking moral responsibility of the incident.

"We have a chief minister who also holds Home portfolio. He refuses to acknowledge that law and order situation in the state is deteriorating under his tenure. He did not even have time to go and visit the bereaved family. He should immediately take moral responsibility and resign," the Congress leader said.

Leader Of Opposition in the Legislative Council Dhananjay Munde demanded capital punishment for the accused, besides a high-level inquiry.

He alleged that photos of Ahmednagar district Guardian Minister Ram Shinde with the "prime accused" in the case are doing rounds in media.

"There was laxity on the part of police officials in arresting the accused. Photos of Guardian minister (of Ahmednagar district) Ram Shinde with the prime accused are going around in media. Thus, there needs to be a high-level inquiry into the incident. Also, we demand fast track hearing of this case and capital punishment for the accused," the NCP leader said.

When contacted, Shinde, who was recently elevated to the post of cabinet minister, said he had no relation with the accused and that the guilty will be dealt with an iron hand.
News / Africa

by Staff Reporter

A BULAWAYO man allegedly shot his wife 11 times before turning the gun on himself after discovering WhatsApp messages and pictures that suggested she was in love with another man.The incident happened last Sunday in Johannesburg, South Africa when the man, Knowledge Matwasa allegedly shot himself on the forehead after shooting his wife Aquila Matwasa.The two have been married for more than 20 years and have three children. They are, however, alleged to have had longstanding marital disputes.Knowledge's brother, Mr Charles Matwasa confirmed the incident to the Sunday News saying as a family they had tried to intervene in the two's marital dispute but failed to restore peace as the two would only temporarily live in harmony before they start fighting again."My brother told me about his sexual problems with his wife, where he claimed he was now impotent.We tried everything in our power to rectify the situation, we even tried traditional means but it failed.The issue was also brought to the attention of his wife's family and they summoned them for counselling.When I later asked my younger brother about the situation he told me that things were now better," said Charles.It is alleged that while the husband was trying to find solutions to his personal challenges, Aquila was seeking marital pleasure from other men. As the couple continued fighting, the husband was suspecting that his wife was having an affair with another man as the wife was nagging him for divorce.Reports are that Knowledge allegedly saw pictures and messages on his wife's cellphone that proved that his wife was enjoying a picnic in Cape Town with another man."He called me at around 10pm telling me how much he misses me, I think this was a way of him saying goodbye to me. Around 1am, this is when the incident took place," said Charles.Plans are underway to bury the couple back home.
A 20-year-old man had a miraculous escape when he was pulled out of a New York-bound container in which he had accidentally got locked while sleeping, police said today.

The container, carrying women's footwear, was scheduled to be shipped from Mumbai to New York. It was loaded and sealed at Mira Road at around 2 AM yesterday, police said.

At around 10 AM yesterday, the container reached the Nhava Sheva port when the Customs officials, who were inspecting it, heard some screams from inside, Police Inspector Rukmani Galande said.

The officials later opened the seal of the container and found Farooqe Ahmed, a labourer, inside it. They took him out and informed the police, she said.

The youth had apparently slept inside the container during its loading operation.

"He remained inside for over eight hours. We do not suspect any foul play and are recording statements (of Customs officials, youth and the company personnel)," Galande said.

Had the Customs officials not opened the seal of the container, the youth may have got suffocated to death inside, police added.
To promote anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela's vision of education for all children through using technology, a series of affordable mobiles and tablets pre-embedded with content on the life and times of the former South African President have been launched in the country.

The project by AG Media in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom Foundation is a Mandela Day initiative as millions of South Africans are preparing to a 67-minute community service tomorrow in memory of the globally-revered leader's 98th birth anniversary.

All devices feature exclusive educational content and approved content never seen before about Mandela in the form of pictures, wallpapers, quotes and more.

The devices have been also pre-loaded with Madiba's Journey App where users can explore Mandela's "inspiring journey".

By finding key locations on the phone's mapping system, users can follow directions and immerse themselves in narratives from poignant moments throughout South African history.

Users will also be able to create a customised itinerary before embarking on their journey into Mandela's inspiring life.

In schools, where the Mandela Library project has already built a library, the devices will be donated on merit basis, like how many children attend the school and their needs.

AG Mobile's CEO Anthony Goodman said that encouraging learning and education among the children is the cornerstone of the Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom Education Project.

"Literacy is the key to all education. We are looking towards the future where technology will play an increasingly important part of our literacy campaign, not to mention the fact that access to technology often accelerates the learning process," Goodman said.
In the midst of his bitter fight with the Centre on a range of issues, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today accused the Modi dispensation of turning its ties with Delhi government into an "India-Pakistan" type situation and said absence of obstacles would have helped him achieve four times of what has been done so far in the city.

In the first edition of his 'Talk to AK' show, seen as an attempt to increase Aam Aadmi Party's national connect, Kejriwal touched upon a number of contentious issue including appointment of 21 Parliamentary Secretaries, arrest of a top bureaucrat by CBI and transfer of officers even as he taunted the Prime Minister saying, he was the "only corrupt Chief Minister in the country in the eyes of" Narendra Modi.

The Delhi Chief Minister, in the nearly two-hour-long programme that began with a monologue followed by a question and answer session, alleged that the Centre was trying to "break" the AAP government and that BJP President Amit Shah was micromanaging CBI, adding, "but every dog has his day and all these will soon come to an end."



Kejriwal, the AAP national convenor, indicated that the party may contest the next assembly polls in Gujarat, alleging that an "atmosphere of suppression" was prevailing there and people wanted to overthrow the BJP regime.

Justifying his government's spendings on advertisement, he insisted that it spent only Rs 75 crore not 526 crore in the last fiscal and accused the RSS of spreading rumours on the issue, saying it has no parallel in the world in spreading rumours.

"If they would not have made this India-Pakistan situation, then work done by us would have been four times.

"I had told him (PM), forgive me if I have committed any mistake, but please end this irritants. A lot of work has been done. But if not for obstacles, the amount of work would have been four times.

"Our Assembly passed 14 bills, including on time-bound services delivery, which had the clause of automatic compensation. It's been eight months since this passage of this bill.

"Remember the Ramlila version of Jan Lokpal Bill? It's been eight months that we passed it and since then the Centre's approval is awaited," Kejriwal said.

Flanked by his deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and music composer Vishal Dadlani - the moderator for the programme which is seen as Kejriwal's answer to PM's 'Maan Ki Baat' radio address, Kejriwal alleged that Delhi has become the "victim" of Centre's confrontational attitude as AAP MLAs are being arrested on "false charges".

"In PM's eyes there is only one corrupt CM in the country. They want to break us. They enter into settings with other parties.

"Have FIRs been filed against Robert Vadra or Sonia Gandhi or Shivraj Singh Chouhan? They are not scared of me, they are scared of my honesty. The full police force is after us," he said.

"The Centre is working like the British used to treat the



freedom fighters. I have told MLAs this is the second freedom struggle," Kejriwal said



"They are not probing the CWG scam. I have told my MLAs to be ready to go to jail. If Rajendra Kumar was not in my office then I can challenge that he would not have been arrested.

"The message to officers is do not work for us. Amit Shah is micromanaging CBI. But every dog has his day. All these will soon come to an end," he said.

Warning the Centre not to "mess" with the student community, he said if the current "trend" continues then there may be a "danger" for the country in the future.

"The Centre led by BJP reduced the education budget by 25 per cent. From 82,000 crore to 68,000 crore. The country will be ruined if youth don't study," he said.

Referring to a letter to him by former Gujarat BJP MLA Yatin Oza in which the latter alleged that Amit Shah had struck a deal with AIMIM MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi ahead of the 2015 Bihar elections, the Delhi Chief Minister said if the claims are true, then it was very dangerous.

"Oza is a senior lawyer who was very close to Amit Shah. If what the letter says is true then it's very dangerous. In Gujarat there is an atmosphere of suppression. There are cases of treason against teachers.

"People have decided to teach them a lesson. We will contest elections in Gujarat if people want. The response we received was tremendous. We will replicate our good work in Punjab," he said.

"In Punjab, there will be a crackdown on illegal agencies taking people abroad. We will form a board to manage the issues of people who want to go abroad," he said.

On the issue of transfer of 11 top officials of Delhi Government out of the city, he said the city dispensation must be discussed on such crucial matters and added that his government will bring officers from outside.

"Officers from my office has been transferred. Probably for the first time in India's history officers have been transferred from CMO without permission. Your intention is to stall governance in Delhi.

"We will bring officers from outside by giving adverts. Delhi government has 39 posts at the secretary level. 20 posts are empty. This is the level of shortage and despite that they transfer.

"They want to paralyse us but we will go strong. Will bring out ads in few days inviting experts from across the country," he said.

Severely critical of functioning of the Anti Corruption Branch (ACB), Kejriwal said "Last year, on June 8, the Centre had sent paramilitary forces in taking over the ACB.

"Today if I spot anyone taking bribe in front me, I won't be able to do anything. We have sent 32 cases in the last one year to it, and people have forwarded 150 complaints but no action has been taken. It has only worked to catch Manish Sisodia, Kapil Mishra and to file FIR against me."



On the issue of appointment of Parliamentary Secretaries, he said he has "full faith" on the Election Commission which was examining the issue and claimed that MLAs holding the post in Punjab and Gujarat were earning in crores.

(Reopens DEL45)



"Actually rival parties have no habit of working. One of our parliamentary secretaries makes rounds of schools daily - he is not given any money, cars anything - and he reports to Sisodia. Other goes to hospitals," Kejriwal said.

"We have given responsibilities to other MLAs. We had to name them parliamentary secretaries then to give authenticity to their work.

"Otherwise even schools would question their legitimacy outside their respective constituencies. We have spoken to top lawyers and all of them said that this is not an office of profit," said Kejriwal.

Responding to criticism against his government over spending on advertisement, Kejriwal said ads are being given in newspapers outside the capital also as people want to know what is happening in Delhi.

"We spent Rs 75 crore not Rs 526 crore. RSS is an expert in spreading rumours. They have no parallel in the world in spreading rumours. We have centralised ads. And why are we giving ads outside Delhi? Because Delhi is the capital of the country and people from all the states stay here.

"Everyone would want to know what's happening here. It's important that people know that good work is happening in Delhi for attracting investments.

"For example in the event management industry, NOCs from 27 departments were required. We cancelled many NOCs and made the rest online.

"This people should know if they want to organise event here. If things are improving, then people from India and across the world should know," he said.

On the the Talk to AK programme, he said it was to make him available for public scrutiny.

"When you are in public life you have to be ready for public scrutiny. At times we feel that media's questions and people's questions are different.

"There was a need for a platform to take questions directly.

"And you can face the public only when you are ethical and honest," said the Delhi Chief Minister.

(REOPENS DES32)



Kerjriwal said that courts have "acquitted" a few of his MLAs suggesting that the charges against them were a product of "political vendetta".

"I have clearly told my MLAs that they should be prepared to go to jail. If anyone is scared then he should resign. It is possible that they may even lose their lives. Someone told me that in many cases they resort to encounters," he said.
A group of Buddhist monks and sex-workers came together in the same multiplex to watch the premiere of Hindi film "Umformung - The Transformation", which is about how a Tibetan monk travels all the way to a city brothel to realise the truth of life.

The film has been directed by criminal psychologist- filmmaker Dr Sudeep Ranjan Sarkar.

"I liked the film as it is about the life of a Buddhist monk and his search for truth in life," Dr Arunjyoti Bhikkhu, director of the Tallygonj Sambodhi Buddhist Monastery, told PTI after the screening.

The monk, who has openly endorsed the film, said Lord Buddha preached against hating anyone and this film follows that spirit.

The film which will be released commercially in theatres on August 26 has already won awards at various film festivals.

"At a time when there is so much of strife, intolerance and terrorism, we have a story which inspires us to remain together," the director said.

When asked whether he fears any controversy arising out of the subject of the film he said, "I have shown this to many monks who have endorsed my film completely.

One of the sex-workers present during the screening said it is a matter of pride for them to be invited to a film's premiere.
At least 21 people were killed in rain-related incidents in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Rajasthan and Assam, with gaining momentum in several parts of north and northeast India.

At least 10 people were killed in Uttarakhand in rain-related incidents. Four persons lost their lives in Tehri district as their car was hit by debris falling from a hillside in the wake of a landslide. Two others were killed in Uttarkashi district when a tree fell on their house, following heavy rains.

Incessant rains sent the Ganga, Yamuna and their tributaries into spate, with all of them, including the Bhagirathi, Alaknanda and Mandakini flowing close to the danger mark, prompting authorities to evacuate people living there.

Heavy rains are likely to continue in the state for another 24 hours, especially in Udhamsingh Nagar, Haridwar and Dehradun districts where heavy rains are expected at a couple of places during the period, state Met Office said.

The Capital witnessed light rains, keeping the mercury within comfortable levels, with the maximum temperature at 30.1C, five notches below the normal.

According to the India Meteorological Department, 2.5 mm rainfall was recorded between 8.30 am and 5.30 pm at Safdarjung observatory, while weather stations at Lodhi Road and Ridge recorded 2.6 mm and 0.6 mm rainfall, respectively.

Several parts of UP received over 10 cm rainfall, even as the weather department predicted rain and thundershowers at many places in the state on Monday.

Overnight showers have wreaked havoc in most parts of Aligarh and Mathura.

In Bijnors Nahtor area, two sisters, aged 30 and 32 years, were killed after the roof of their house collapsed on them due to heavy rains.

A minor and a 40-year-old woman died in Muzaffarnagar and Mathura, respectively, due to house collapse. A 25-year-old man died in lightning strike in Balrampur, while three persons were electrocuted in Aligarh after coming in contact with a livewire as they were trying to pump out rainwater from their house.

Widespread rains lashed Punjab and Haryana, causing mercury to dip by a few notches. Many places in Punjab including Patiala, Ludhiana received rains which dropped the temperature by several notches, giving relief to residents from the hot and humid conditions.

Rains also pounded many places in Haryana including Yamunanagar, Narwana, Hisar, Ambala, Karnal and Gurgaon.

In Assam, flood situation remained serious as one person lost his life and nearly 1.77 lakh people were affected across seven districts in the state.

According to Assam State Disaster Management Authority, one person died at Narayanpur in Lakhimpur district being swept away in swirling flood waters.

The ASDMA spokesman said nearly 1.77 lakh people are reeling under flood in 267 villages across Lakhimpur, Golaghat, Morigaon, Jorhat, Dhemaji, Biswanath and Sivasagar districts. Over 13,3000 hectares of crop land are under water at this moment in the state.

An elderly woman and her minor grandson were killed when a portion of their house collapsed in Rajasthan's Karauli district due to heavy rainfall.

Heavy to very heavy rainfall has affected normal life in Karauli, where several people have been shifted to safer places by teams of district administration and police.
In a suspected case of 'honour killing', a 45-year-old woman allegedly murdered her 19-year- old unmarried daughter at their house here after she found that she was pregnant.

Muktabai came to know that her daughter, a school dropout, is having an affair with a boy from the same locality in Wadi area and was three-months pregnant, Nagpur Police said in a statement.

She asked the girl to abort but she refused to do so. Fearing that her pregnancy would harm the reputation of the family, Muktabai decided to kill her, it said.

Muktabai strangulated her daughter with a 'dupatta' at their house around two days ago. The accused allegedly tried to destroy the evidence by attempting to cremate her body with the support of other family members, the release said.

Police said some unidentified persons from the locality informed them that the girl had died under suspicious circumstances.

A team of Wadi Police Station led by Woman Sub-Inspector S Kutemate visited the crime spot and suspected foul play. The body was sent for autopsy which revealed that the girl was three-months pregnant and died of strangulation, police said.

The police interrogated the family after which Muktabai broke down and confessed to have killed the girl, the release said.

Muktabai was yesterday arrested and a case under section 302 (murder) of the IPC was registered, it said, adding that further investigations were on.
Bengali superstar Prosenjit Chatterjee says his role of a writer with dual personalities, in director Kamaleswar Mukherjee's "Khawto", is one of the most complex characters he has portrayed on screen.

"Khawto is an erotic thriller. It's the story of a writer, who pens erotic novel and believes what he writes today the world will follow up later. I essay the role of the writer," Prosenjit told PTI.

"Nirbed Lahiri may be a character who goes beyond the known system around us. He is sophisticated, he is scary at times. He has dual selves which struck two important women in his life. I can say it is one of the most complex roles I have portrayed so far," the "Sankhachil" star said.

Prosenjit, 53, added Lahiri is a man who has not been able to defeat the demons of his past.

"There are many people around us who carry and nurture wounds inflicted on their psyche and carry on in their normal lives but remain restive deep within. This manifests in certain moments of their lives which may turn self-destructive. My character is one such soul."



The actor said for the first time something this bold was being attempted in Tollywood.

"We have seen many movies with bold content in Hollywood and even in Bollywood. But this is the first time we are trying something so bold for the Tollywood audience."



The film also features Raima Sen and Paoli Dam in two major roles.

Paoli said, "'Khawto' is a tale of love, lust and



betrayal, it's a dark love story which Bengali cinema had not seen at least in recent times.

Heaping praise on his leading ladies, Prosenjit said "Paoli is great and has matured as an actor. Raima has also matured a lot as an actor. They have executed difficult and complex scenes and worked hard."



The actor revealed he was offered the film eight years ago and while he gave his nod for the project, he felt the audience wasn't ready then for such a bold subject.

"Kamaleswar came to me eight years ago with the script of 'Khawto' when he was thinking of leaving the medical profession and making films. I liked the concept at the first go and told him that I will definitely do it.

"But that was not the right time for such a bold subject. Now when we found that the audience have matured with the success of films like 'Shororipu' we believe this is the right time to do the film," Prosenjit said.
The agitating Madhesis groups in Nepal will not join the new government but help form the new coalition, a senior leader of the ethnic group, mostly of Indian-origin, said today.

Interacting with media here, Laxman Lal Karna, co-chair of Sadbhawana Party, said the party was not interested in joining the new government.

He said that the United Democratic Madhesi Front that has been protesting against the constitution for last one year will, however, help in forming a new coalition government comprising Nepali Congress, the largest party in the Parliament, and CPN-Maoist Centre.

Nepali Congress and the Maoists tabled a no trust motion in the parliament last week against Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli, accusing him of not honouring his past commitments.

However, the Speaker of the parliament has not yet fixed date for discussion on the no-trust motion.

Karna said the Madhesi front will help in forming the new coalition as the Nepali Congress and the Maoists have assured to address their demands.

Karna said that Prime Minister Oli did not respond to their demands as a result of which they are compelled to help form the new coalition.

Madhesis launched a six-month-long agitation from September to February in which more than 50 people were killed. The agitation had also crippled the landlocked country's economy as supplies from India were blocked.

The major demands of Madhesis include re-demarcation of the seven province model of federal structure, inclusiveness and proportionate representation of marginalised groups and ethnic minorities including the Madhesis, indigenous groups and dalits in all the state bodies.

"Our other demands include proportionate representation, inclusive representation for the Madhesis and other marginalised groups in various state mechanisms, and rights related to language and citizenship certificate," Karna, one of the members of the alliance, had said earlier.

The United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF), an alliance of seven Madhes-based parties, have accused Oli's government of using excessive force to suppress their agitation demanding more constitutional representation.
Congress' newly-elected office- bearers of Uttar Pradesh unit today assumed charge in the presence of party's chief ministerial face Shiela Dikshit, hoping to swing fortune its way in the 2017 Assembly elections, being billed as a 'do-or-die' battle for the party.

It was flowers all the way from the city airport to the Congress headquarters on Mall Road as the cavalcade of new state PCC chief Raj Babbar and Dikshit meandered through 16 km-long route dotted with welcome arches and chock-a-block with enthusiastic party workers showering rose petals and shouting slogans.

"We will fan out to the interiors of the state and tell the voters that Congress can give a viable alterative to the state," Dikshit told reporters.

"The manner in which UP should have developed that has not taken place in the last 27 years," she said, flanked by Babbar and other newly-ppointed party functionaries.

Dikshit said N D Tiwari was the last Congress chief minister during whose tenure the state had made significant progress.

The UPCC chief claimed the party would storm back to power after remaining in political wilderness in the state for nearly three decades.

"It is not about 'I', it is about 'we'," Babbar said.

"We will seek blessing from all and march towards a grand victory in the 2017 Assembly polls," he asserted.

"Our mission is to pull out Uttar Pradesh from misgovernance of 27 long years," he claimed.

The new team appointed by the party includes Sanjay Singh, Chief of the Campaign Committee, RPN Singh, senior vice-president and four vice-presidents.

The party has planned "massive" outreach programmes next month for which district chiefs have been asked to submit details.

Dikshit has decided to extensively tour the entire state as soon as the district and the block-level programmes are ready.

Congress has been out of power in the state for almost 27 years now.
THE new darling of the West's regime change agenda, Mr Evan Mawarire, has reportedly been summoned to the United States to debrief his handlers on his activities in trying to destablise Zimbabwe, and to get instructions on his next steps ahead of the 2018 harmonised elections.Mr Mawarire, a church leader who is fronting the anti-Government #ThisFlag campaign, has sparked frenzied activities among opposition elements keen to secure donor funding as the organisations now try to outdo each other to be recognised as the West's point persons in fighting President Mugabe's constitutionally elected Government.On Friday, Mr Mawarire posted on his Facebook page that he was out of Zimbabwe. Though he did not say where he had travelled to, a close associate told The Sunday Mail that his colleague was scheduled to go to the US to debrief on his activities and possibly secure more funding for his campaign.Mr Mawarire, the associate said, was also likely to visit the United Kingdom for the same purposes.Last week, Mr Mawarire's calls for a national stay-away were ignored as Zimbabweans snubbed the economically destructive activity and possibly shied away from a protest driven by third forces that Government has already identified as the US and French embassies in Harare.His Facebook post read: "Fellow Citizens thank you for your concern for my safety and whereabouts. I am well and safe taking some time to recuperate  Currently I have travelled to attend to a previously arranged engagement outside the country and will be back home to my family and work soon."Efforts to get a comment from him were fruitless yesterday.His activies have seen opposition political parties and civil society organisations getting locked in frantic competition to access Western donor funds.Analysts say a look at events over the past two weeks confirmed that the groups and individuals were trying to outdo each other in proving to donors they deserved a bigger slice of money routinely set aside for anti-Zimbabwe activities.After Zanu-PF resoundingly won elections in 2013, donors who used to pamper MDC-T and other hostile NGOs, retreated and left the organisations bankrupt.Now, these organisations are doing all they can to create a perception of continued relevance as new anti-Government players enter the fray.The shadowy #Tajamuka group has even spoken of being "jealous" of Mr Mawarire's donor support, while MDC-T leader Mr Morgan Tsvangirai rushed from South Africa where he was undergoing chemotherapy to hold a Press conference in Harare to get in on the act.MDC-T also urged women to take to the streets with pots and pans as a means of showing that they were still active in the anti-Zimbabwe movement.Not to be outdone was Viva Zimbabwe leader Mr William Mutumanje, also known as Acie Lumumba, who last week distributed fliers calling on people to come to the Harare Magistrates' Courts where he was appearing on charges of using filthy language to insult President Mugabe.This was after white commercial farmers and donor-linked groups gathered at the courts for Mr Mawarire's appearance on criminal charges related to seeking to disturb the peace.Government has indicated it is aware of the foreign hand in the social media-led elitist protests, which have failed to garner much traction after initially trying to hijack a civil service stay away.Home Affairs Minister Dr Ignatius Chombo last week said, "It is interesting to note that some former white farmers, and company executives went to the extent of attending Evan Mawarire's appearance in court and chanting out solidarity messages with him."Some of the former white farmers and individuals went on to record and post videos on the internet inciting the public not to cooperate with authorities in Zimbabwe and stay at home. This hypocrisy should stop forthwith. No one from the white community has openly denounced the debilitating sanctions, which were imposed on the country by the Western world. I want to categorically tell them that their regime change agenda machinations will not work."Commentator Professor Claude Mararike said of the scramble for donor support: "These are political lunatics  whom people should not follow as they have no basis to contribute anything meaningful as far as the political landscape of this country is concerned."People should just ignore these political prostitutes who want to suck Western sponsors money, when they actual know in their minds that they won't last the distance. These are just poor bunch of hare-brained attention-seekers who want to gain political mileage."
Scientists have developed a new robot - with human sized feet laced up in a pair of sneakers - that closely imitates the walking motion of humans, making it more energy-efficient and better at navigating uneven terrain.

The bipedal robot steps with a heel-toe motion that copies human locomotion more closely than flat-footed robot walkers can, according to Christian Hubicki, a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).

The humanoid robot DURUS was designed collaboratively by the research nonprofit SRI International and Georgia Tech's Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics (AMBER) Lab.

An earlier DURUS design was modified to accommodate the new manner of walking.

Robots that walk on two legs typically have 'feet' that are large and flat, to provide a more stable platform, Hubicki told Live Science.

The algorithms that dictate a robot's forward momentum typically keep those big feet flat on the ground when pushing off, to minimise the risk that the bot will tip over.

While a flat-footed walker might perform well on a treadmill, uneven terrain in the real world could stop a robot in its tracks.

The researchers designed a new algorithm that works to keep a robot upright and moving forward even if only parts of the foot are engaged.

They tested DURUS using a modified foot with an arch; every step began with the heel making contact and then rolling to the ball of the foot to push off from the ground, said Hubicki.

Springs installed by the robot's ankles act like tendons.

DURUS' feet are about the same size as human feet - about half as long as the feet on the original model. To enhance the similarity, researchers also gave it pair of sneakers.

The new algorithm may even have applications beyond robotics, Hubicki added.

It could be used to improve the design of prosthetics and exoskeletons to help people who use assistance to get around.
Top officials of Uttar Pradesh Health Department had allegedly colluded to give contract of a crucial high-tech tele-medicine project under the National Rural Health Mission to a construction company, CBI has claimed.

The agency in its probe also found that the company allegedly outsourced the project worth over Rs nine crore to a small company thereby causing a loss of over Rs three crore to the exchequer, CBI sources said.

They alleged that the contract which was to be handled by National Cooperative Consumers' Federation of India Limited (NCCF) was given to a private firm Aanjaneya Business India Private Limited, which allegedly dealt with civil construction and had no experience in executing tele-medicine project which required expertise in latest tele-communication technologies.

Under the tele-medicine project patients and doctors in 10 districts of Uttar Pradesh, with support from Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Science could consult super specialists from their hospitals using communication tools.

After three years of probe into the scam, CBI has recently filed a charge sheet in the scam at Ghaziabad Special Court accusing the then Project Manager of NCCF A K Saxena now posted in RDSO, the then Director General Medical Education of Uttar Pradesh M C Sharma (now retired), the then Joint Secretary in Uttar Pradesh Government Ram Kumar Prasad (now retired), Prashant Saxena, Director, Aanjaneya Business India Private Limited and the company, the sources said.

CBI has alleged that these officials colluded to award the telemedicine project at exorbitant rate in an arbitrary manner to NCCF in 2008 which does not have expertise to implement the work, the sources said, adding NCCF got the work the implemented through Aanjaneya Business India Private Limited, a business associate of NCCF which lacked expertise to handle such project.

The project was then again outsourced to another private company which implemented the project at much cheaper rates.

The probe showed that the officials allegedly "abused



their official position" and "violated due procedure" in the award of contract by indulging in criminal conspiracy with private persons and company, the sources said giving details of the charge sheet.

CBI alleged that in pursuance of the conspiracy the officials "pre-decided" the tender and allegedly awarded "important and highly technical work" of the project to NCCF which did not have any such experience.

The sources said over 60 charge sheets have been filed so far in connection with its probe into the National Rural Health Mission scam cases.

The CAG has also criticised poor execution of the project saying NCCF changed scope of the work from linking health facilities of 10 remote districts to SGPGI to linking of medical colleges in the major towns with the Lucknow-based tertiary care hospital.

"The objective of providing telemedicine facilities for rural people of 10 districts was defeated," it had said.
The odd-even scheme may return during the winter, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said today.

Responding to a query on the future of the road-rationing measure during the 'Talk to AK' session, he said it would be again considered during the winter months when the pollution levels remain on the higher side.

"We will surely think of implementing it. Transport Minister (Satyendra Jain) has already said that pollution goes up during winter months. So we will think of implementing it during the winter months," Kejriwal said.

Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia backed Kejriwal, saying that more steps need to be done to improve the public transport system.

"The Lt Governor had stopped the bus aggregator service. Our ultimate objective is to improve public transport," Sisodia said.

Jain recently told a group of reporters that there was no need to implement the third phase of odd-even scheme during monsoon as pollution is usually at its lowest level during the period.

"Whenever the scheme is implemented, it would be in the winter season when the pollution levels are high," he had said.

The first and second editions of the road-rationing scheme had been implemented in January and April.

Experts consider it to be an effective emergency response to bring down peak levels of air pollution.
Opposition parties today boycotted the customary tea party hosted by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on the eve of beginning of the monsoon session of state Legislature over the gang-rape and murder of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district.

While the Leader of Opposition in Legislative Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil demanded resignation of Fadnavis, who heads Home ministry, on "moral grounds" over the incident, the Leader of Opposition in Legislative Council Dhananjay Munde asked for a high-level inquiry into the incident.

"We have a chief minister who also holds Home portfolio. He refuses to acknowledge that law and order situation in the state is deteriorating under his tenure. He did not even have time to go and visit the bereaved family. He should immediately take moral responsibility and resign," Vikhe Patil said.

Alleging "laxity" on the part of police officials in arresting the accused, the NCP leader Munde sought "fast track hearing of the case and capital punishment for the accused".

The 15-year-old girl was brutally raped and murdered allegedly by three men in Kopardi village on Wednesday. All the accused have been arrested by police.

Appearing unfazed Fadnavis said he had "never seen an Opposition without any issues".

Slamming the Congress and NCP for the criticism over the rising price of Tur dal, he said the Opposition did not read the government's proposed Price Control Order (PCO), which he said specifically mentions that the maximum price of Tur dal shall not exceed Rs 120 per kg.

"Earlier, there has been 125 per cent increase in area under sowing of pulses, cereals and oilseeds. The government will distribute Tur dal to the poor under BPL category through ration card," Fadnavis told reporters at 'Sahyadri' state guest house here.

He evaded a direct reply on his war of words with Rural Development Minister Pankaja Munde who was recently divested of Water Conservation portfolio in a cabinet rejig.

"We both know how to use twitter," he said.

Munde, sulking after the portfolio was taken out from her by Fadnavis, had refused to participate in a global water leaders' meet in Singapore by virtue of 'not being Water Conservation Minister' anymore.

In his tweet, Fadnavis had prodded Munde to attend the event.

On a query over recent order of the Aurangabad bench of



the Bombay High Court setting aside the tender by the state government for supply of ready-to-cook food for beneficiaries in one lakh-odd anganwadis, he said the court has held the process to be proper.

"Media should first go through the verdict of the HC in detail," he said.

Fadnavis said his government will table 10 new bills before the legislature, including allowing farmers to sell their vegetables and fruits directly to consumers and not through the Agriculture Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs), which has hitherto been the norm; setting up metropolitan region development authorities on the lines of Mumbai in Pune and Nagpur as well, along with three pending bills in Legislative Assembly.
Opposition in Maharashtra today indicated it will adopt an aggressive stand on the issue of "tainted" ministers in BJP-led government and "deteriorating" law and order situation in the state during monsoon session of the legislature beginning here tomorrow.

Congress and NCP members boycotted the customary tea party hosted by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis to register their protest over the induction of "tainted" ministers in his Cabinet, which was expanded last week, setting the stage for fireworks in both Houses over a range of issues.

Addressing reporters, Leader of Opposition in Legislative Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil of Congress said the exercise was nothing but an "expansion of corruption".

Leader of Opposition in Legislative Council Dhananjay Munde of NCP remarked this is the first government in the history of the state under which "corruption" of eight ministers has been exposed in a span of mere one-and-a-half years.

"When in the past did the state see induction of ministers being probed by CBI, SITs and having their names in chargesheets? The Chief Minister has sullied the image of the State," Vikhe-Patil said.

The Opposition will continue to protest against these ministers till they resign, he said.

The BJP-Shiv Sena government should be "ashamed" of being slammed by the Courts time and again on issues like irregularities in implementation of 'Take Home Ration' scheme for anganwadi children, laxity in drought relief and disbursal of financial aid to farmers, the Congress leader maintained.

"We have a twitter government in place today where ministers, instead of talking on phone, talk publicly on social media (referring to Fadnavis and Rural Development Minister Pankaja Munde's twitter slugfest on allocation of portfolios). The CM has no control over his ministers. The government is only indulging in ease of doing corruption and ease of punishing good officers," Vikhe-Patil said.

Congress will tomorrow hold a protest to highlight the prevailing "corruption" under the Fadnavis government, he said, adding "we have invited the CM to be a part of it."



Munde, meanwhile, said farmers and working class have lost faith in the BJP-led government, which assumed office in October 2014.

"There is so much unease and distrust among people in just one-and-a-half years. People are regretting voting for this government. This is the first government in the history of the state where corruption cases of eight ministers have been unearthed by us in such a short time," he said.

The NCP leader said the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl in Ahmednagar district a few days ago reflects the "deteriorating" law and order situation in the state.

The session comes in the backdrop of resignation by BJP



veteran Eknath Khadse as Revenue Minister in June after a string of allegations, including one related to graft.

The Chief Minister is "shamelessly" giving clean chits to all tainted ministers despite solid proofs of wrongdoing given against them by the Opposition, Munde claimed.

"'Tum khaate raho, main bachata rahunga' (you continue indulging in corruption, I will keep backing you) seems to be the mantra this CM is following. The BJP has betrayed the people by forgetting all their electoral promises," he added.

On the brutal gang-rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl in Ahmednagar district a few days ago, Vikhe-Patil demanded resignation of Fadnavis, who handles Home portfolio, on "moral grounds", while Munde sought death penalty for the culprits besides a high-level inquiry.

The issue is likely to figure prominently during the session.

"We have collected corruption-related documents of these recently inducted Ministers," a Congress leader said.

Among the ministers facing charges is Jaikumar Rawal, who is Minister for Employment Guarantee Schemes, Tourism and Self-Employment.

He is facing allegations of submitting fake documents, showing that he had planted pomegranate trees that got damaged in a hailstorm. He received a compensation of over Rs one crore from the Maharashtra government for this damage.

Another minister on the Opposition radar is Shiv Sena's Gulabrao Patil, Minister of State for Co-operatives.

Patil was recently jailed for a day for allegedly forging documents and copying dead people's signatures in one of the school trust general body meetings. He also faces 13 various cases of cheating and threatening government officials.

BJP's Ravindra Chavan, who is Minister of State for Ports, Medical Education, Information and Technology, Food and Civil supplies, has an atrocity case filed against him. He was also in the limelight for allegedly equating Dalits with pigs.

BJP's Subhash Deshmukh, Minister for Cooperation, Marketing and Textiles, faces charges that as director of a sugar factory, took a loan on farmers' names without their consent.

Farmers were surprised when they received defaulter notices from banks. A cheating case has been filed against him.

Shiv Sena's Arjun Khotkar, Minister of State for Textiles, Animal Husbandry, Dairy Development and Fisheries, faces allegations of threatening government employees and obstructing their work.

BJP's Sambhaji Patil-Nilangekar, Minister for Labour, Earthquake Rehabilitation, Skill Development and Ex-servicemen Welfare, has been in the for his association with a company declared as a wilful defaulter by a bank.
Digitalisation of Parliamentary documents have helped save 1000 trees, Lok Sabha Speaker said on Sunday, enumerating the steps taken to turn the House into a "paperless institution".

"The number of copies of various Committee reports and papers laid on the table of the House has been considerably reduced. The number of hard copies of Budget documents also has been reduced by 35%," she said after meeting the leaders of various political parties in Parliament Library Building here.

The House has been able to save Rs 80 lakh annually by reducing the use of 194 lakh A-4 size papers translating into nearly 40,000 reams of paper, she was quoted as saying in an official release.

Mahajan said the principal intent behind striving towards paperless office has been preservation of environment, adding that according to research, for every tree destroyed, around 20,000 sheets of paper are generated.

"Therefore, by reducing the use of paper, we have saved about 1000 trees! I am sure with your kind cooperation, we would be able to convert Lok Sabha into a paperless institution," she said.

Mahajan also launched a web-portal for Lok Sabha members which would facilitate online submission of various notices by them.

"The existing system of giving physical notices in the Parliamentary Notice Office would, of course, continue at present," she said.

Giving details about the portal, Mahajan said separate login and password would be assigned to each MP who will be able to interact with each other and with various branches of the Secretariat through e-mail and SMSes.

"The portal also provides ready information regarding Bills, meeting schedules of various committees, agenda and reports, verbatim debates and other parliamentary information. A member's reference service Interface has also been developed where they can send requests for reference material on various subjects and receive material electronically," she said.

The Speaker also released the seventh edition of a book "Practice and Procedure of Parliament" written by MN Kaul and SL Shakdher.

It was first published in 1968 and has been revised and updated at regular intervals to make it apposite to time. The book has 47 chapters. The Hindi edition of the book will be published soon, she said.

"Over the years, it has earned the reputation of being the most authentic work on practices and procedures of our Parliament and is extensively consulted by the parliamentary fraternity in India and abroad alike," Mahajan said.
The brother of Pakistan's social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been arrested for drugging and strangulating to death the model for bringing "shame" to the family by posting risque videos and posts on Facebook, reigniting debate on a spate of honour killings that has plagued the country.

26-year-old Qandeel's younger brother Muhammad Waseem was arrested in Dera Ghazi Khan district of Punjab Province late last night. He was later presented before media where he confessed that he drugged and strangled his sister.

Waseem, 25, said that he killed her as she brought "dishonour to the Baloch name" due to risque videos and statements that she posted on social media.

"There were other issues as well...Like the Maulvi issue," he said, in an apparent reference to a controversy surrounding Qandeel's selfies with Mufti Abdul Qavi, which hit the headlines last month.

Her controversial pictures recently led to the suspension of Mufti Qawi's membership from the Ruet-e-Hilal committee, a top religious body.

"She wasn't aware I was killing her. I gave her a tablet and then strangled her," he said.

The actor-cum-model was strangled to death in her house in Multan's Karimabad area in the early hours yesterday.

Qandeel's father, Muhammad Azeem, had lodged the FIR and named his two sons for killing her in Multan where she had come from Karachi to live with her parents on the occasion of Eid.

In his police complaint, Qandeel's father said Waseem killed her as he was against her working in showbiz.

The father alleged that Waseem had taken this extreme step at the behest of his brother Mohammad Aslam Shaheen.

City police chief Azhar Akram said the younger brother fled after the crime to Dera Ghazi Khan with two of his friends.

Police was searching for the friends also.

Qandeel came from a humble background and became a social media sensation. She had received threats from her family to quit modelling and stop her provocative appearances on social media. Her brother had been threatening her over her Facebook posts and videos, the police said.

Three weeks ago, she had written to the interior minister, the director general of the Federal Investigation Authority (FIA) and the senior superintendent of Islamabad asking them to provide security to her.

Her real name was Fouzia Azeem but she chose Qandeel Baloch as her pseudonym after stepping into modelling.

Qandeel became famous through her tireless self-promotion and suggestive "selfies" posted on social media and had amassed tens of thousands of followers.

Meanwhile, arrangements are being made to send Qandeel's body to her hometown of Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan for burial.

Honour killing is common in Pakistan and every year hundreds of women are killed by male relatives for allegedly dishonouring the family.
A day after Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar pitched for abolishing the Governor's post, MP Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav today demanded that the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils be removed as these are a "total waste of hard-earned public money".

"Both the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils in the states should be abolished as these are arrangements made by British regime and are no longer required," he said here.

"I will raise this issue in the Monsoon session of Parliament. I will also file a PIL in the Supreme Court for abolishing the arrangements of the Rajya Sabha and the Councils," said the MP from Madhepura.

Alleging that rich people try to be in the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils merely on basis of money power, Yadav said, "The Upper Houses both at the Centre and in the states are no longer required as it is a complete waste of hard-earned public money.

"Rather, the money should be spent on education and health," he said.

The Bihar Chief Minister had made the demand for abolishing the Governor's post at the Inter-State Council meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi stating that the existing federal democratic structure does not warrant its continuance.

Referring to Kumar's demand, Yadav said the government should first scrap the system of Rajya Sabha and Legislative Councils before abolishing the post of Governor.

Both the Central and state governments should explain as to why they have continued with the arrangement that was made by Britishers, Yadav said.
The CID and Bihar police are investigating the antecedents of Mohammad Tausif who was arrested from the state capital for allegedly raising pro-Pakistan slogans.

Tausif was arrested yesterday for allegedly raising pro-Pakistan slogans during a protest march, on Friday in Patna, in support of AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi and controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik.

Superintendent of Police Akhtar Hussain said a police team has gone to Tausif's native village Makya yesterday evening to inquire about him, his family and his activities.

A police team headed by Benipatti SHO Mohammad Anish had gone to the area.

Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Manu Maharaj had yesterday SAID that one person identified as Tausif was arrested in connection with the rally.

Police and CID are examining who all are visiting his house and from where they belong, the SP said, adding that it is also being probed whether any of Tausif's relatives lived in foreign countries or not.

Besides, the police team are also probing as what prompted and incited him to raise pro-Pakistan slogans, Hussain said.

Police in its probe have so far not found any evidence vis-a-vis his (Tausif's) involvement in any terror-related activities, he said.

Tausif's bank account is being scrutinised to ascertain whether or not he received any funds from foreign or criminal organisations.

(Reopens CAL8)



Tausif, who is a resident of Makya village under Benipatti police station area of the district, is a student of BA in a Darbhanga College and has seven brothers, the SP said, adding that he is associated with a religious outfit 'Popular Front of India'.

The march was taken out from Science College, Patna and some people present in the rally raised pro-Pakistan slogans, police said.

The footage of the march telecast by a few TV channels showed protestors under the banner of 'Popular Front of India' demanding Bihar government to intervene and speak to the Centre on Zakir Naik issue.

Patna police swung into action immediately after the developments and made the arrest.

Senior BJP leader Sushil Kumar Modi had yesterday claimed in a statement that the raising of pro-Pakistan slogans and eulogising Zakir Naik proved that the Nitish Kumar government had "emboldened such elements.
Opposition-controlled parts of Syria's battered northern city Aleppo came under total siege today, after government forces severed the last route out of the east.

An estimated 300,000 civilians live in rebel-held neighbourhoods of Syria's second city, the UN says, and there are fears that they could face starvation.

The rebels have failed to thwart a major Russian-backed army offensive around Aleppo, which has been devastated by Syria's five-year conflict.

Today, regime fighters descended on the Castello Road and fully cut it, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"The eastern neighbourhoods are now completely besieged," he told AFP.

The Observatory also reported that five civilians were killed today in regime air strikes on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Al-Maysar while 16 rebel fighters died in the regime advance on Aleppo.

The city is divided roughly between government control in the west and rebel control in the east.

The Castello Road had been used by rebels but also by shopkeepers bringing in produce for residents and by villagers visiting relatives in the city.

"Aleppo is now 100-percent besieged," one rebel from the Aleppo Revolutionaries group told AFP.

He said the army had reached the road and was setting up sandbag barriers.

Facebook pages run by Aleppo-based activists urged civilians to stay away from the route to avoid being arrested or wounded.

Sieges by both the regime and its opponents have had a devastating impact on other areas of Syria, including the town of Madaya where aid groups say dozens of people have died from starvation and malnutrition.

The United Nations says that nearly 600,000 people are living under siege in Syria, most of them surrounded by government forces.

Eastern Aleppo has not been designated by the UN as besieged, but residents complain of food shortages and shopkeepers have begun rationing their products.

A leading opposition group warned last week that hundreds of thousands of civilians in the city were at risk if the Castello Road was cut.

Anas al-Abdeh, head of the Istanbul-based opposition National Coalition, said his group feared "that if the Castello route is totally cut off, more than 300,000 civilians will starve".

Fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have tried over the past two years to cut the strategic road as part of a campaign to retake all of Aleppo.
News / National

by Staff Reporter

Harare Bureau DR Charles Utete was an unassuming torchbearer who quietly shaped Zimbabwe's Government, working behind the scenes to create a civil service that could meet the country's ever-changing development needs, President Mugabe has said.Dr Utete served as Secretary to then Prime Minister Mugabe and as Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet from 1981 to 2003.The highly respected veteran mandarin collapsed and died at his home in Harare on Friday. In a condolence message sent last night from Rwanda where he is attending to African Union business, President Mugabe spoke passionately about a dedicated public servant who went beyond the call of duty in executing a weighty mandate."An intellectual of renown, Dr Utete was at the centre of the transformation of our civil service from what it was at Independence, ensuring its rapid Africanisation but without compromising on systems, efficiency and best practices," President Mugabe said.He went on: "This was no small task given the entrenched white Rhodesian ethos which had made the civil service a key lever of settler rule, black discrimination and oppression. "Given his prior association with the liberation movement and vast knowledge in the tenets of public administration, we did not hesitate to appoint him to this key post which he discharged with distinction."As head of the civil service, he was at the centre of service delivery, always coordinating the drafting of policy initiatives which saw the new Government record key milestones, including reconciling a war-torn society, rehabilitating and re-integrating thousands of war displaced, as well as embarking on successive programmes of socio-economic transformation that underpinned our espousal and commitment to majority rule."President Mugabe said the signing of the Unity Accord in 1987 and its attendant constitutional changes creating an Executive Presidency in 1988, Dr Utete "characteristically rose to the occasion, again playing a seminal role in readjusting the massive bureaucracy to the requirements and challenges implied by the new political and administrative situation".The Head of State and Government said this load was "made heavier by successive shifts in economic policies which followed as the country tried out various models of growth and social development".President Mugabe said, "When Government embarked on the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme in 2000, Dr Utete found himself once again at the centre of even more taxing planning challenges which he managed admirably."A loyal, committed team player, the late Dr Utete's services went far beyond the duties of a civil servant, readily making seminal inputs to key party policies which helped Zanu-PF deal with emerging issues and challenges."What I personally found admirable about him was his humility and self-effacement against such a lofty role and his multiple contributions. He never beat his drum. "It was the mark of the man who even after leaving Government in 2003, continued to accept and discharge assignments we continued to load on him in his 'retirement'."The President said Zimbabwe would forever remember Dr Utete's services to land reforms via his chairmanship of the Presidential Review Commission. "On behalf of the party, Zanu-PF, the Government which he helped shape and which he served whole-heartedly, and on my own behalf, I wish to express my deepest, heartfelt condolences to the Utete family, especially to Mrs Utete and the children who have lost such a loving and caring husband and father respectively."We robbed them of much of what would have been family time, and for their unconditional forbearance, but we in Government are truly grateful for his service and loyalty. "As they grieve over the untimely death demise of the late departed, may they derive solace and comfort in his having served his nation well and truly, which today salutes and thanks him heartily as he joins his Maker."Born in Chivhu on 30 October 1938, Dr Utete did his schooling at Kwenda Mission, Tegwani High and Goromonzi High schools. He attended the University of Rhodesia and in 1963 graduated with a BSc (Honours) in Economics, before furthering his studies in the United States (Master's in Political Science, Tufts University), Canada (MA and PhD in International Relations and Public Administration, University of Ottawa).Dr Utete went back to the US and lectured there, before returning to Zimbabwe in 1979 to join the University of Rhodesia as a senior lecturer in Political Science before serving as Dean of the Faculty of Social Affairs.In February 1981, Dr Utete was appointed Secretary to Prime Minister Mugabe, and then Secretary to Cabinet in 1983  a post he would hold for 20 years. After his retirement in April 2003, Dr Utete headed the Presidential Land Review Commission, which assessed progress in implementation of the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme.He also served and/or chaired various boards, including Cairns Holdings, the Industrial Development Corporation, Seed Co Zimbabwe, Zimpapers (1980) Limited and Astra Industries Ltd, as well as being patron of Chivhu District Hospital.He is survived by his wife, Verna, and five children.
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus is banking on this week becoming a turning point in the GOP quest for the White House.

After Donald Trump's somewhat clumsy introduction of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate, during which Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and "crooked" Hillary Clinton, Priebus said today that he expects Trump to debut his presidential side during this week's convention in Cleveland.

"I think Thursday night's a critical night for him, delivering a great speech, the balloon drop, the people in this country saying, 'I can see Donald Trump being in the White House. I think he's presidential,'" Priebus told ABC's "This Week" today.

The Trump-Pence pairing was designed in part to bring together fractious elements of the Republican Party on the eve of its national convention.

Yet the usual trappings of a presumptive nominee's most significant announcement were missing in the Manhattan hotel ballroom where a few hundred supporters gathered yesterday morning.

Nowhere in sight were "Trump/Pence" signs, for example, and Trump's decision had been tweeted the previous day, stealing any sense of surprise from the event. Choosing a venue in a state Trump has little chance of winning also broke with traditional politicking strategy.

Trump and his new running mate appeared on stage together only briefly before Trump disappeared and Pence gave a speech that closely hewed to the populist themes that Trump has voiced, describing himself as "really just a small-town boy."



He praised Trump effusively as "a good man," a fighter, a legendary businessman and a patriotic American.

"The American people are tired," Pence said in remarks that included many of the same talking points that until recently he was using in his bid for re-election.

"We're tired of being told that this is as good as it gets. We're tired of having politicians in both parties in Washington, DC, telling us we'll get to those problems tomorrow."



Trump returned for a round of photos with the Trump and Pence families.

The lack of hoopla contrasted with Mitt Romney's introduction four years ago of running mate Paul Ryan on the deck of a Navy battleship, the USS Wisconsin, off the shore of swing-state Virginia.

With cheering, flag-waving crowds and a soaring patriotic soundtrack, the pair faced the nation for the first time flanked by a massive red, white and blue banner displaying their new campaign logo.

The underwhelming rollout of the GOP ticket continued when Pence flew back home to Indiana without Trump. A few hundred people greeted him at a suburban Indianapolis airport hangar bereft of any "Trump-Pence" signs. He spoke for only a few minutes, telling the crowd that he and his family were headed home for "pizza night.
An Indian-origin man in South Africa has been fined over USD 270 for stealing an expensive African Grey parrot from a pet shop for his eight-year-old son who "insisted" on having the bird.

Prakash Debichand, who hails from Verulam near Durban, first pretended to be looking at the bird for a purchase, but was caught on closed circuit television steaing the coop and hiding it under the boy's jacket.

The footage showed Debichand opening the boy's blue jacket, hiding the parrot inside before zipping up the jacket.

"The shop assistant was on the floor behind the counter, busy on her cellphone. Besides us, there was nobody in the store. I was tempted and I stole the bird," Debichand said in his guilty plea before the Verulam Magistrate's Court last week.

Debichand said he stole the parrot as his son loved the bird and "insisted" on having it, but he could not afford to buy the expensive bird.

The father of two said he went to the pet shop with his sons, aged 8 and 14 years, as they were bird lovers.

"As a hobby, I normally raise birds and then release them," he added.

Taking into account the mitigating factors, the magistrate slapped a Rands 4,000 (USD 274) fine or four months in jail, which was wholly suspended for five years on condition that he was not convicted of theft or attempted theft during this time.

The parrot worth Rands 2,000 (USD 137) has now been named "Evidence" by the owner and is back on his perch at the pet shop.
Saudi authorities executed a murderer in the holy city of Mecca today, the first death sentence to be carried out since before the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Fahd al-Hasni, a Saudi, was put to death after being convicted of stabbing dead a fellow citizen, the interior ministry said in a statement published on the official SPA agency.

Most people executed in Saudi Arabia are beheaded with a sword.

It was the 96th execution of the year in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom, which imposes the death penalty for offences including murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy.

The last execution in the Gulf country took place on May 29, more than a week before Ramadan began.

There were no beheadings during the fasting month and the following Eid al-Fitr feast.

Rights group Amnesty International says the kingdom carried out at least 158 death sentences last year, making it the third most prolific executioner after Iran and Pakistan. Its figures do not include secretive China.

The London-based watchdog has said that the rate of executions this year is "higher than at the same point last year".

Murder and drug trafficking cases account for the majority of Saudi executions, although 47 people were put to death for "terrorism" offences on a single day in January.

They included prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, whose execution prompted Iranian protesters to torch Saudi diplomatic missions triggering the severing of relations between the Middle East's leading Sunni and Shiite powers.
Schools and colleges in the Valley, which were scheduled to reopen tomorrow, will now open on July 25 as the Jammu and Kashmir government today extended summer vacations by a week in view of the prevailing situation.

The Valley has been witnessing protests after the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani.

"We have decided to extend the summer vacations in the schools and colleges of the Valley by one week," Education Minister Naeem Akhtar told PTI.

He said the decision to extend the vacations was taken in view of the ongoing law and order problems in the Valley.

Schools and colleges in the Valley were scheduled to reopen tomorrow after a 17-day summer vacation. If the situation returns to normal, the institutions will reopen on July 25.

Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following the death of Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces a day earlier.

In the ensuing clashes with security forces, 39 persons including a cop have been killed, while 3,160 persons including 1,500 security force personnel have been injured.

Normal life has remained paralysed since on account of separatist sponsored-strike and curfew-like restrictions impose by the authorities.
Schreiber Dynamix Dairies Pvt Ltd (SDDPL) today launched its second aseptic food processing and packaging facility at Fazilka here.

Set up in International Food Park here, Rs 100 crore was invested in this project, the company said in a statement today.

The facility was inaugurated by Francois Salamon, President of Schreiber International; Amitabha Ray, Chairman and Managing Director of SDDPL and Kandarp Singh, Managing Director of Tetra Pak South Asia Markets.

SDDPL is country's first dedicated contract packer for foods in Tetra Pak cartons and uses Tetra Pak's advanced processing and packaging technology to partner leading food and beverage players like PepsiCo, Nestle, Danone, Britannia and Hector Beverages, it said.

Aseptic beverages offer high quality and safe products with long shelf life, without the need for refrigeration or preservatives, it said, adding that currently, brands like Tropicana, Nestle and Paper Boat are processed and packed in SDDPL's plant at Baramati, Maharashtra.

Salamon said: "The market for aseptic beverages in India is showing exponential growth and there still is a lot of untapped potential. This along with the Government of India's support in developing Food Parks has given us the impetus to invest in a second facility.

Ray said that with his company's existing plant at Baramati running at full capacity, this new integrated facility not only increases production capabilities, but also gives a geographical advantage to cater to consumers in North India who account for 50 per cent of the country's aseptic beverage consumption.

"We are proud to extend our 20-year partnership with Tetra Pak that has allowed us to offer end-to-end solutions to our customers. With growth of over 23 per cent over last year in contract packaging, we are confident that this new facility in Punjab will provide an exciting opportunity for more companies to enter this sunshine sector," he added.

Singh said Tetra Pak brings in world-class technology, strong technical support and high quality standards. "We are the only company in the industry that provides an integrated, end-to-end full-system solution to food companies.
Renewed fighting in South Sudan that has claimed more than 300 lives dominated discussions at an African Union summit that opened today in the Rwandan capital Kigali.

A shaky ceasefire has held since late Monday following the fighting that raged for four days in Juba, leaving hundreds dead and forcing 40,000 to flee their homes.

The violence in the South Sudan capital echoed the fighting that triggered the civil war and marks a fresh blow to last year's deal to end the bitter conflict that began when President Salva Kiir accused ex-rebel and now Vice President Riek Machar of plotting a coup.

The unrest has also plunged into doubt a peace deal struck in August 2015 between the two sides.

After meeting with the UN Secretary-General yesterday night leaders of the regional bloc IGAD supported Ban Ki-moon's calls for an arms embargo, targeted sanctions and a strengthened peacekeeping mission and called for "the deployment of a regional protection force to separate the warring parties".

AU Commission chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma praised IGAD for acting "swiftly" in holding a meeting on South Sudan's crisis.

"We shall not be indifferent and shall act in the belief that, when the power of love for fellow Africans overcomes the love of power there shall be peace within our lands," she said in an opening address.

South Sudan is just the most recent crisis on the continent that African leaders will address during the summit.

The AU will also seek to hammer out a solution to the crisis engulfing Burundi where a spate of killings have rocked the country since President Pierre Nkurunziza's announced in April 2015 that he would seek a third term.

Also on the agenda is the ongoing fight against the Boko Haram jihadist group that has its roots in northern Nigeria but has carried out attacks across the Lake Chad region.

Recent violent incidents in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also expected to feature in the talks.

Efforts to secure peace in South Sudan and elsewhere, however, will be complicated by divisions over who should succeed Dlamini-Zuma, ex-wife of South African President Jacob Zuma, to become the AU's new commission chair.

Several countries on the continent have indicated that they do not back any of the leading candidates for the job, arguing that they "lack stature".

Now all three of the leading candidates look like they may fail to get a majority of votes from the African Union's 54 members.
A woman from Tajikistan has been arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle in gold worth about Rs 85 lakh at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) here.

The accused was intercepted by the customs officials after her arrival from Dushanbe.

"She was carrying gold in raw form in her purse. On detailed examination of her baggage we recovered the yellow metal," Vinayak Azaad, Additional Commissioner of customs at IGIA, said.

The gold weighing 2.7 kgs has been seized and the passenger arrested yesterday, he said.

The value of the gold is assessed to be Rs 85.13 lakh.

The Tajikistan's embassy here has been informed about the arrest of the accused, the official said.
In a series of joint operations, the Army and Assam Police today gunned down three top NDFB(S) militants in Kokrajhar district.

On specific intelligence inputs on movement of hardcore NDFB(S) terrorists, Army challenged suspected individuals who were moving through dense jungles in the early hours today.

After coming under "heavy nondiscriminatory fire" the joint team retaliated with controlled fire and killed the three hardcore NDFB(S) militants, the officials said.

Two of them have been identified as Rahul Basumatary and Ritu Basumatary, officials said.

Four pistols, a large quantity of ammunition, hand grenades have been recovered from the slain militants.

Officials claimed that the surgical operation which was carried out under torrential rains, in thick foliage and undergrowth of the Assam jungles, is a major setback to the NDFB(S), which has been active in the area.
Some tiny islands formed by backwaters of scenic Ashtamudi Lake and Kallada River in Kollam Disrict in southern Kerala, among the major tourist attractions, are sinking due to rising sea level and erosion, according to local authorities.

The authorities of Munroe Thuruth Gram Panchayat, under which these islands fall, and political activists have sought assistance from global conservation organisations to deal with the "alarming" situation.

Panchayat officials said the shrinking tiny islands, ranging from one acre to over one hectare, were inhabited by humans. But now people were leaving these tiny islands as they find it very difficult to survive here as saline water has invaded the localities.

President of the Munroe Thuruthu Grama Panchayat, Binu Karunakaran, said they are facing a "huge crisis" as there are not much funds to adopt scientific measures to save "the sinking islands" which are part of the panchayat.

"We have decided to adopt a sustainable way to save the islands from saline waters encroaching the small land areas in the lake. We think that planting mangroves around the islands will help us to save these scenic areas," he said.

"These small islands are shrinking fast," K Madhu, a political activist, told PTI pointing towards tiny islands during a boat journey through the confluence of Ashtamudi Lake and Kallada River in which Munroe Island is located.

The Munroe Thuruth Grama Panchayat comprises eight medium size islands and several small islands. It is named after the British administrative head of erstwhile Travancore kingdom Colonel John Munro.

"We need advice and assistance from global conservation organisations like IUCN to protect these islands from impact of global warming," said former Rajya Sabha M P K N Balagopal, who had taken up the issue with the Union government and environmental organisations like Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi.

"Sea levels set to rise far more rapidly than expected. So we need aid from centre and global conservation organisations to save the sinking islands," he said.

Balagopal suggested utilising a part of the the Green Climate Fund, sponsored by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for developing countries, to help the islands to deal with sea level rise.

As Rajya Sabha member, he had sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi'sintervention to save the Munroe island, Balagopal said, adding former Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar had deputed an official team to study the situation.

He said "special care" from the Centre was required to protect the lives of 15,000 people living in Munroe island, which is being hit by increasing level of saline water.
Tripura has demanded fund allocation to all the northeastern states in a ratio of 90:10 for implementation of the smart city mission in the region, a minister said here today.

"Our Chief Minister Manik Sarkar met Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu on Friday in Delhi and demanded central fund allocation in 90:10 ratio for the implementation of the smart city mission in the region considering its feeble economy," State Urban Development Minister Manik Dey told reporters.

"The Centre has offered fund in the 50:50 ratio for the smart city programme implementation for the states, but it is not acceptable to Tripura," he said.

He said if the state accepted the Centre's proposal, the government would have to bear 50 per cent of the total cost of Rs 1,000 crore for implementation of the project, which was impossible.

Earlier, sharing pattern for all Central government sponsored schemes was 90:10 in north eastern states, but the 2nd NDA government had changed the pattern, which was not acceptable to Tripura, he said.

However, Dey said the urban development minister did not respond positively to the demand of the state government.
A policeman stands atop of a military armored vehicle after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul

Erdogan also said Turkey could consider reinstating the death penalty following the putsch bid, despite concerns in the community.

World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned Friday's attempted takeover by an army faction, but there is also alarm over the retaliatory purges, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some suspects.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said around 6,000 people had been detained in "clean-up operations" and warned that the number would rise.

They include senior army commanders, top judges, prosecutors and a military aide to Erdogan.

A resurgent Erdogan raised the prospect of bringing back capital punishment, which was abolished in 2004 as the country sought to improve its chances of joining the EU.

"In democracies, decisions are made based on what the people say. I think our government will speak with the opposition and come to a decision," he said, reacting to crowds in Istanbul calling for the death penalty.

"We cannot delay this anymore because in this country, those who launch a coup will have to pay the price for it," he told supporters.

Earlier he told a crowd of thousands at a funeral for the victims in Istanbul there would be no let-up in the fight against his sworn enemy Fethullah Gulen, the US-based Islamic preacher he accuses of masterminding the coup plot.

"We will continue to clean the virus from all state bodies because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state," he said.

A total of 265 people were killed during the coup bid, including 161 civilians and regular troops and 104 coup plotters, according to government and military figures.

Clashes erupted at an air base in the central city of Konya between security forces and putschists trying to evade arrest, while at Istanbul's second airport Sabiha Gokcen, police fired warning shots at rebel troops who later surrendered, a Turkish official told AFP.

Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, which sparked fears of chaos in the strategic NATO country of 80 million people.

It was the biggest challenge to Erdogan's rule in his 13 years as prime minister and president.

The group behind the putsch, which called itself the



Council for Peace in the Homeland, said it was necessary to stop the increasingly authoritarian president from undermining Turkish democracy.

Critics at home and abroad had voiced mounting concern over the state of democracy and freedom of speech under Erdogan.

But the 62-year-old leader successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.

Thousands again responded late yesterday to Erdogan's call to pour into the streets and celebrate the "victory of democracy", with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.

"They may have tanks but we have our faith. We will not leave the squares... But we will continue defiantly," said Erdogan.

Turkish television has shown images of captured suspects forced to lie face down on the tarmac after their arrest while AFP photographers have seen suspects roughly led away, pursued by angry mobs.

NTV television said 34 generals of various grades had been detained so far.

Air force brigadier general Bekir Ercan Van was also detained at the key Incirlik air base used by US forces for raids in Syria, along with a dozen lower-ranked officers.

But the crackdown is not restricted to the military, and Anadolu said warrants have been issued for 2,745 judges and prosecutors.

Turkey shut down airspace around Incirlik after the coup, forcing the US to halt its strikes in Syria.

But Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said today that operations against the Islamic State group had resumed from the base.

The putsch added to the turmoil in Turkey after a wave of deadly bombings blamed on IS jihadists and Kurdish rebels.

Erdogan has long accused Gulen of running a "parallel state" in Turkey, and called on Obama to extradite the reclusive preacher from the United States to face justice.

Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu went even further, saying "the United States is behind the coup" and adding it had to hand over Gulen.

The 75-year-old preacher has categorically denied any involvement in the plot and suggested it could have been staged by Erdogan himself.

Obama meanwhile told Turkey there is a "vital need" for all parties to "act within the rule of law".

And French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault warned Erdogan against using the failed putsch as a "blank cheque" to silence his opponents.

But there was no such concern from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who called Erdogan to wish for a "speedy restoration of strong constitutional order".

Turkey has also demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Turkish authorities have detained a senior air force general and a dozen other suspects accused of backing the failed coup, at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria, an official said today.

Brigadier air force general Bekir Ercan Van was detained along with 11 lower-ranking officers on Saturday at the air force base of Incirlik in Turkey's southern Adana province, the official said.

One police officer from the base was also arrested. All are suspected of "complicity" in the coup plot, the official said.

Officials have said the authorities suspect that Incirlik was used by rogue troops to refuel military aircraft "hijacked" by the coup plotters on Friday night.

The base has become a key hub for US forces after Turkey last year agreed to allow the United States to use Incirlik to carry out lethal raids against jihadists in Syria.

The US said today that strikes had resumed from the base, after Turkish authorities imposed a security lockdown in the wake of the coup attempt, allowing no movement in or out.

"After close coordination with our Turkish allies, they have reopened their airspace to military aircraft," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.

"As a result, counter-ISIL coalition air operations at all air bases in Turkey have resumed," he added, using an acronym for the IS group.

The Turkish official said Ankara remained an active partner in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) group.

"Turkey suspects a small group of Turkish troops stationed at Incirlik supported the coup attempt," said the official.

The official added the air space closure was a short-term measure that "won't have a significant impact on coalition operations" against IS.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the events of the past two days had raised questions about Turkey's "reliability" in the fight against IS.

"There's (the question of) reliability on the one hand and, indeed, an element of suspicion on the other," he told France 3 television.
Turkish authorities have reportedly detained a senior air force general and other officers accused of backing the failed coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria.

Brigadier air force general Bekir Ercan Van was detained along with over a dozen lower ranking officers yesterday at the air force base of Incirlik in Turkey's southern Adana province, newspapers including the Hurriyet daily said.

They were now being interrogated by investigators, the reports added.

A Turkish official told AFP yesterday that Ankara suspected Incirlik was used to refuel military aircraft "hijacked" by the coup plotters on Friday night.

The base has become a key hub for US forces after Turkey last year agreed to allow the United States to use Incirlik to carry out lethal raids against jihadists in Syria.

But the Turkish authorities imposed a security lockdown on the base in the wake of the coup, allowing no movement in or out, the US consulate in Adana said.

Meanwhile, operations from the Incirlik air base were suspended because of the closure of the airspace used for the missions, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.
Turkish authorities pressed today with a ruthless crackdown against suspects in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with 6,000 people detained as he vowed to stamp out the "virus" of the putschists.

World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned Friday's attempted takeover but also urged Turkey to respect the rule of law in its aftermath, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some arrested coup plotters.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said today around 6,000 people had been detained in "clean-up operations" and that the number would rise.

They include senior army commanders, judges, prosecutors and a military aide to Erdogan, Ali Yazici, who had only been working for the president since August last year, state-run agency Anadolu reported.

The suspects are being charged with membership of an "armed terrorist organisation" and attempting to overthrow the government by force, the Hurriyet Daily reported.

A resurgent Erdogan told a crowd of thousands at a funeral for the victims in Istanbul that there would be no let-up in the fight against his enemy Fethullah Gulen, the US-based Islamic preacher he accuses of running the "terrorist group" and masterminding the coup.

"We will continue to clean the virus from all state bodies because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state," he said.

The president broke down in tears at another Istanbul funeral -- that of his friend Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, shot dead on the Bosphorus bridge while protesting against the coup on Friday night.

"Erol was an old friend of mine," Erdogan told mourners.

Unable to control his tears, he said: "I cannot speak any further. Condolences to our nation."



According to the government, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives in the bid by an army faction to overthrow Erdogan by seizing key strategic points in Istanbul and Ankara.

A total of 104 coup plotters were also killed, the military says.

Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, which sparked fears of chaos in the strategic NATO country of 80 million people.

It was the biggest challenge to Erdogan's rule in his 13 years as prime minister and president.

The group behind the coup, which called itself the Council for Peace in the Homeland, said it was necessary to stop the increasingly authoritarian president from undermining Turkish democracy.

But the 62-year-old leader successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.

Thousands responded late yesterday to a new call by Erdogan to pour into the squares to celebrate the "victory of democracy", with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.
Turkish authorities rounded up dozens of senior military personnel and judges in a ruthless crackdown today, after thousands massed in the streets nationwide overnight to denounce a coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned the attempted putsch but also urged Turkey to respect the "rule of law" in its aftermath, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some coup plotters when arrested.

According to the government, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives when a group within the army sought to overthrow the authorities by seizing key strategic points in Istanbul and Ankara.

Over 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military has said.

The botched coup bid marked the biggest challenge to Erdogan's rule in 13 years as prime minister and now president. But he successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.

Thousands responded late yesterday to a new call by the president to pour into the squares to celebrate the "victory of democracy" with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks reported in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.

Europe Minister Omer Celik urged people to stay on the streets, writing on Twitter that the "vigil for democracy" continues.

The Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, accusing the plotters of acting on behalf of Erdogan's arch enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.

The government has already said that almost 3,000 soldiers had been detained on suspicion of involvement in the putsch which raised fears of chaos in the strategic NATO member state of almost 80 million.

Turkish television has shown images of captured coup plotters forced to lie face down on the tarmac after arrest while AFP photographers have seen suspects roughly led away pursued by angry mobs.

NTV television said that 34 generals of various grades had been detained so far. They include senior figures like Erdal Ozturk, commander of the third army and the commander of the Malatya-based second army, Adem Huduti.

In an operation early Sunday, authorities detained the commander of the garrison in the western town of Denizli, Ozhan Ozbakir, along with 51 other soldiers, according to the state-run Anatolia agency.

Turkey also detained a senior air force general and other



officers accused of backing the failed coup at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria.

Brigadier air force general Bekir Ercan Van was detained along with over a dozen lower ranking officers on Saturday at the Incirlik air force base in Turkey's southern Adana province, newspapers including the Hurriyet daily said.

The base has become a key hub for US forces after Turkey last year agreed to allow the United States to use Incirlik to carry out lethal raids against jihadists in Syria.

Former chief of staff Ilker Basbug told Dogan agency that Turkey should make a distinction between the coup planners and young soldiers "of 20 years old who may have been mistaken".

The crackdown is however not restricted to the military and Anadolu said that prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for a total of 2,745 judges and prosecutors across Turkey.

The entire investigation is being led by Ankara prosecutors and those arrested are suspected of belonging to Gulen's group, which Turkey dubs the "Fethullahci Terror Organisation (FETO)".

Gulen's supporters say their group which they call Hizmet (Service) is entirely peaceful.

US President Barack Obama has warned Turkey there is a "vital need" for all parties to "act within the rule of law" in the aftermath of the coup.

Friday's putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets. Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul.

Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.

Erdogan has pinned the blame on Gulen, a former ally who he accuses of running a "parallel state", and called on Obama to extradite the reclusive preacher to face justice.

"Mr President, I told you myself, either deport or hand over to us this person who lives in 400 acres of land in Pennsylvania," he told a triumphant rally in Istanbul late Saturday, carefully not referring to Gulen by name.

In an interview with Haberturk television, Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu went even further saying "The United States is behind the coup" and adding it had now to handover Gulen.

But Gulen has categorically denied any involvement in the plot.

Meanwhile, Turkey has demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.

The suspects are still in Greece, but the chopper itself is now been flown back to Turkey, a Turkish official said.

Istanbul authorities have sought to get life back to normal, resuming service at Ataturk International Airport, which was shut down by the plotters.

But Washington on Saturday warned citizens against travel to the country, suspending flights and banning all airlines from flying to the United States from Turkey due to uncertainty after the coup bid.
The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the justice minister today saying that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers.

In addition to those mentioned by Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, dozens of arrest warrants have been issued for judges and prosecutors deemed to be government opponents.

The government has also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.

"The cleansing (operation) is continuing. Some 6,000 detentions have taken place. The number could surpass 6,000," Bozdag said in televised comments.

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities, ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan.

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets into the early hours today in half a dozen cities after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Erdogan, Turkey's top politician for 13 years.

It was an emotional display by Turks, who rallied in headscarves and long dresses, T-shirts and work boots, some walking hand-in-hand with their children. Rather than toppling him, the attempted coup that left some 265 dead and 1,440 wounded appears to have bolstered Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."



"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... But we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at the rally in Istanbul, said today morning.

General Umit Dunda said the dead included at least 104 conspirators, describing them as mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and armored units.

Officials claimed the conspirators were loyal to moderate US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government.

Gulen, a staunch democracy advocate who lives in exile in



Pennsylvania, is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey. He strongly denies the charges.

Funeral ceremonies and prayers for those killed in the coup were held in Ankara and Istanbul today, where relatives beside themselves with grief. Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died in an attempted military coup.

Sela prayers are traditionally recited from mosques during funerals, though they are also performed to rally people, as they were all night Friday during tense coup hours.

A government official said autopsies have been completed on 165 people, including 115 reclaimed by their families. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Forty policemen, including twin brothers, were killed when the renegade soldiers attacked a special forces station in Ankara.

The victims also included Erdogan campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year old son Abdullah, killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul on Friday night.

The elder brother of one of Erdogan's chief advisers was also killed in gunfire while protesting the coup in front of the Istanbul Municipality building. Ilhan Varank died during clashes that lasted five hours.

The wide reach of the government crackdown raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a tumultuous region swept by conflict and extremism.

Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

"It will allow him (Erdogan) to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before and find strong public support within the country," he said.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve."



Security forces today rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged coup links. The state agency Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for their alleged involvement with the group reportedly responsible for the failed coup.

The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function.
Britain's Special Air Service (SAS) sniper teams have been trained to stop a speeding vehicle by shooting through the engine block with armour-piercing bullets in the event of a Nice-style attack, a report said today.

British police fear that Islamic State (ISIS) sympathisers in the UK may attempt a copycat attack on the lines of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's killing of over 80 people by driving an armed lorry through crowds in the French beach town last week.

'The Sunday Times' report claims that SAS snipers have already trained to deal with a similar situation in the UK.

"Every terrorist incident that happens worldwide we look at to see what the latest tactics and methodology are, and we think about whether that could happen here," Neil Basu, deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police who is in charge of the UK's protective security, told the newspaper.

Basu said that all police forces have been asked to review security at large events over the next week, but there are concerns about other big public gatherings later in the year and in the longer term.

British police and security services have become more concerned about a possible attack since May this year, when Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a senior ISIS figure, told supporters in the West that civilians and crowds are legitimate targets.

Al-Adnani, the group's chief spokesman and head of external attack planning in Syria, said "Know that inside the lands of the belligerent crusaders there is no sanctity of blood and no existence of those so-called innocents".

"Know that your targeting (of) those who are called 'civilians' is more beloved to us and more effective, as it is more harmful and painful and a greater deterrent to them. So go forth!," he had said.

Police believe that extremists who have been thwarted in their efforts to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq are among those Britons who pose the greatest danger.

Policing levels are expected to be upgraded at major events across the UK in the coming months.
An exiled Muslim cleric whom Turkey's president has accused of orchestrating a failed coup attempt denied any responsibility, saying he had no knowledge of the plot.

Fethullah Gulen yesterday told reporters at his Pennsylvania compound he knows only a "minute fraction" of his legions of sympathizers in Turkey, so he cannot speak to their "potential involvement" in the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup. They could be sympathizers of the opposition party. They could be sympathizers of the nationalist party. It could be anything," Gulen, who has lived in the U.S. For more than 15 years, said through an interpreter.

The reclusive cleric, who very rarely speaks to reporters, talked about the failed overthrow attempt shortly after Erdogan demanded that the United States extradite him. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration would entertain an extradition request but Turkey would have to prove wrongdoing by Gulen.

Looking frail, Gulen, who is in his mid-70s, sat on a sofa in a large reception room outside his living quarters, with an aide taking his blood pressure before the conference. He said he wouldn't have returned to Turkey even if the coup had succeeded, fearing he would be "persecuted and harassed."



"This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here. Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important," said Gulen, who lives on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, an Islamic retreat founded by Turkish-Americans.

He has criticized Erdogan, his onetime ally, over the Turkish leader's increasingly authoritarian rule. The Erdogan regime has launched a broad campaign against Gulen's movement in Turkey and abroad, purging civil servants suspected of ties to the movement, seizing businesses and closing some media organizations.

In the United States, a lawyer hired by the Turkish government has lodged numerous accusations against a network of about 150 publicly funded charter schools started by followers of Gulen, whose philosophy blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Nobody associated with the U.S. Schools has been charged with wrongdoing.
The administration in the Union Territory today congratulated the city residents on UNESCO listing the Capitol Complex among its World Heritage Sites and thanked Haryana and Punjab Governor Kaptan Singh Solanki for his guidance and support.

The Capitol Complex is part of the group of 17 sites - across seven countries (France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Japan and India) - designed by Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier which were included in the list by the Paris-based body.

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, had planned Chandigarh in the 1950s.

The city administration in a statement expressed gratitude to local BJP MP Kirron Kher, Union ministries of Culture and External Affairs, the representative of India to UNESCO and Le Corbusier's foundation, Paris.

It also appreciated the efforts of officials of Tourism, Urban Planning, Engineering departments.

"It is a moment of pride for our city. The administration assures all the residents that we will conserve and preserve this heritage site and make the city a major international tourism destination," Rai Parimal Rai, Adviser to the Administrator, Chandigarh Administration, said.

The Fondation Le Corbusier in a statement said: "The preservation of the modern heritage and more specifically of Le Corbusier's architectural work is a long-term venture.

"The inscription on the World Heritage List of 17 buildings designed by Le Corbusier encourages everyone to maintain his work and hand over this living heritage to the future generations. It also contributes to the understanding of that complex and fragile legacy and helps its dissemination to the widest audience.
When lakhs of people will gather in Vatican City this September to watch the historic ceremony of granting sainthood to Mother Teresa, a group of Kolkatans will hold photo exhibitions in Rome inviting visitors to the city where the late nun worked.

Using the power of images, music and verbal discussions, internationally acclaimed photographer Kounteya Sinha and his team of volunteers will hold exhibits at 11 places in Rome and the Vatican City, as part of their two week-long civilian movement called 'The Sainthood Project'.

"The Mother used to work in slums of Kolkata. If she could, then why can't we walk around potholes and slum areas where there is gutter? We want people from all over the world to come and see Kolkata where the Mother worked all her life," Sinha told PTI.

The Kolkata-born ace lensman, who has lived in London for many years, said hardly one per cent of those who will be coming to see the canonisation ceremony know about Kolkata where the Roman Catholic nun spent 45 years serving the poor and sick on the streets.

He plans to present a collection of 50 shots of the city by hanging it using clips on a rope and display it in roadsides where volunteers will hold the two ends of the rope.

"The idea is also to break all stereotypes about the city. So we are not keeping the Victoria Memorial, Howrah Bridge or the British architectural beauty of the city," he said.

They are promoting small localities like Kumartoli, where potters make clay idols of Goddesses Durga and Kali, the flower market, Sonagachi (Asia's largest red-light area), the numerous lanes and and slums of the city in which Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity worked.

During the open-air roadside exhibition, young lawyer Amlan Guha, also an amateur musician, will play 15 new tracks on the streets of Rome to glorify Kolkata.

Surasree Seal, a young photographer from Government Art College here, will document the whole journey.

"We want the world to come to Kolkata and see it, feel



its pulse, embrace its warmth, communicate with its ever so charming people, eat its finger licking food, walk through its clean and dirty streets, sit and have a meal with those who live in the slums and above all walk the same roads that Mother Teresa once did," the young team said.

They all describe themselves as ambassadors of Kolkata and will talk about the city which they are passionate about during their exhibits.

"I want to glorify the people of Kolkata and so we will have photos of the common man and not of well-known faces. Our exhibition will be about the people of Kolkata and how they live. So we will have the traditional Bengal architecture, food, clothes, traditions, customs, etc," Sinha said.

The exhibition will go on for a fortnight from August 22 till September 6 at 11 major spots in the Vatican City and Rome like Roman Forum, the Trevi Fountain, Vatican Musuem, Colosseum, Spanish Steps, etc.

The entire project of the team 'The Nobody's', as they call themselves, is being funded by raising money from public donations for their travel and stay in Rome. Besides money, they are inviting Kolkatans and Bengalis settled anywhere in the world to join them in Rome to talk about their city.

Mother Teresa will be declared a saint on September 4 by Pope Francis in the Vatican City at an event which will be attended by lakhs across the globe, including West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
Karnataka BJP today questioned Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi's "silence" over the alleged suicides of "honest" police officers in the state.

"I would like to ask Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi, why you are silent on the death of DySPs? why are you not visiting Karnataka?" BJP Karnataka unit president B S Yeddyurappa said.

"You go to other states on minor issues, but 1,450 farmers have committed suicide, now police officials are committing suicide. If you are still not ready to visit the state and question your Chief Minister (Siddaramaiah), it is clear that you have come to a conclusion that there is no future for you here," he said addressing a BJP rally here.

Mangaluru DySP M K Ganapathy allegedly committed suicide at a lodge in Madikeri on July 7 and in a pre-death declaration blamed minister K J George and a senior official, which has triggered a huge political storm with the opposition demanding the resignation of the minister.

His death came two days after 35-year-old DySP of Chikkamagaluru, Kallappa Handibag, accused of kidnapping a person for ransom, was found hanging in his father-in-law's home at Murgod in Belagavi district. His family had alleged harassment and conspiracy by senior officials.

Union Minister D V Sadananda Gowda, who also spoke at the rally, criticised Siddarmaiah for not attending 'Inter-State Council' meeting chaired by the Prime Minister yesterday.

"The Chief Minister probably did not attend the meeting under the fear that he might have to face an embarrassment, if prime minister questions him about the series of suicides in the state," Gowda said.

BJP will continue its protest against the government on the suicide issue both inside and outside the legislature until the Minister named by the officer resigned, K S Eshwarappa, Leader of Opposition in the state Legislative Council told reporters in Shivamogga.

"Our protest will continue until George resigns. Until legislature session is on we will protest inside the House, after that we will continue our protest outside," he said.

BJP and JD(S) have been stalling proceedings in the Assembly demanding a CBI probe and resignation of George among others.

With the government refusing to budge and announcing a judicial probe, opposition parties have begun a day-night protest in both Legislative Assembly and Council.

Prior to committing suicide, Ganapathy has given an interview to a local TV channel, saying the minister and A M Prasad (IG-Intelligence) and Pranab Mohanty (IGP- Lokayukta) would be responsible "if anything happens to me.
"Rexit": A Tough Job for the Government

This refers to your well presented cover story on the Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan's proposed exit from office (Rexit)once his term ends in September 2016 (Unfinished Agenda, July 17). Rajan's exit proposal is being widely discussed in the country and has caught the imagination of the media and the masses. And the media coverage has made it a prestige issue for both the government and Rajan alike. The opposition parties are already pointing fingers at the government but that is understandable as they have their own axe to grind. All said and done, Rajan has done his job quite expertly so far, and his replacement will have a tough job in extracting the country and its economy from the morass it is in due to a few national and international issues. Taking his unfinished agenda of reforms to its logical conclusion should now be the top priority cutting across all party lines. Rajan has, indeed, left his imprint on policy making and let us hope whoever follows him does a good job.

J.S. Broca, New Delhi

Who Needs FDI?

This refers to your article on FDI (Doors Wide Open?, July 17). Who needs FDI when there is enough money for investments in India itself? Our tax laws are faulty, which encourage hoarding of black money. The other failure is corruption and bureaucracy. Foreign investors bring their money in India and create employment opportunities, but they earn sizeable profits and take out the capital. Instead of FDI, it is better to create a friendly investment regime with minimum red-tape, corruption and roadblocks India to manufacture and sell goods. Gandhiji's Swadeshi movement helped make economic progress without attracting FDI or foreign help. But this is possible only if the government so desires.

Mahesh Kapasi, New Delhi

A Win-win for the Common Man

This refers to your story on crowdfunding platforms (Herd Mentality, June 5). There is no doubt that equity crowdfunding has democratised funding and made access to capital easier for entrepreneurs who do not have access to the traditional venture capital/angel investors. It also seems a win-win for the common man, who wants to be an investor as he can potentially be part of an exciting start-up that could someday be a Google or Facebook. As an investor, who would not want that? However, having seen this model play out in the US for the past couple of years, and having participated in many such investments as an investor, I should point out that there is a considerable risk for the investor. Just because many people are investing in a start-up is no assurance that the venture is going to succeed and the investor will get the promised returns he is expecting. The main issue is that most investors in a crowdfunding model have neither done the due diligence nor have the time to do so. In some cases they even lack the skills to perform the due diligence required before investing. Everybody is hoping that someone in the crowd would have done that. As such, there is a good chance that they might lose their entire investment.

Prasenjeet, through e-mail

A Great Indian Brand

This refers to your article The New L&T (July 3). It is quite interesting to read this well researched article. L&T is a great Indian brand. The challenge will always be to protect it under changing times, especially when heads roll in the company. A.M. Naik was an institution himself. To replicate that goodwill and success will not be an easy task for S.N. Subrahmanyan and his team. Good resource is always in short supply. It was intriguing to know that even a company like L&T is suffering from a resource crunch when it comes to manning key leadership positions in its various businesses. Hope to see more articles in Business Today, like this one, on Indian corporates.

Robin Banerjee, Deputy Managing Director, Bilcare

Send all your comments to: editor.bt@intoday.com
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Texas prison system to host job seminar

Texas Department of Criminal Justice will host a job seminar at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 11 at the Corpus Christi Workforce Solutions office, 5858 S. Padre Island Drive, Suite 1.

A recruiter will explain the pay plan, an outline of the employee benefits and retirement program, explain the duties and requirements of a correctional officer and other positions and answer questions.

A $4,000 recruiting bonus is available for new correctional officers who agree to work at one of 19 units across the state.

Beginning correctional officer pay starts at $2,695.55 per month and progresses at intervals to $3,587.45 after 91 months of service within the job classification.

Candidates must be at least 18 years old and possess a high school diploma or GED equivalent.

Information: 936-437-4098 or www.tdcj.texas.gov and use the link marked "Employment."

Compiled by Natalia Contreras
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TUESDAY

8(a) business program explained

The Small Business Administration will conduct a free seminar to explain the 8(a) Business Development Program for small businesses seeking opportunities in federal government contracting.

The seminar is from 1-2:30 p.m. at the Corpus Christi International Airport DMC Hangar, 7179 E. Glasson. Information 361-879-0017, ext. 301; elizabeth.soliz@sba.gov.

WEDNESDAY

Orientation for small businesses

A small business orientation is from 4-6 p.m. at the Economic Development Center, 3209 S. Staples St., CED 146. The seminar will provide new business owners information to start a business. Topics include: small business loans and financing requirements, business plan, licensing, contracting and permit information and resources. Free. Information: www.seminarscc.com

Small business forum in Robstown

The Small Business Administration will present at meet and greet small business forum at the Robstown City Hall Chambers that will feature city and business leaders. The forum is from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Robstown City Hall Chambers, 101 E. Main Ave., Robstown. Information: 361-698-1021, and to register go to www.seminarscc.com.

THURSDAY

Get familiar with QuickBooks

The Small Business Development Center of Del Mar College is hosting a seminar on how to use QuickBooks, accounting software for small businesses. The seminar will take place at the Center for Economic Development, 3209 S. Staples St., from 2-5 p.m. QuickBooks can help track income and expenses, create invoices and organize financial data. Sue McCown will be the instructor at the seminar. Cost: $45. Information: www.seimnarscc.com

Simply social for small business

The Small Business Administration will present at Rockport-Fulton's Chamber of Commerce's Simply Social on "How to Read your Facebook Insights" for small businesses. The seminar will be from 1:15-2:15 p.m. at Rockport-Fulton Chamber of Commerce, 319 Broadway St. Rockport. Information: 361-879-0017 ext. 301 or elizabeth.soliz@sba.gov

Compiled by Natalia Contreras
Associated Press/Richard Drew Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump answers questions during a news conference in New York on May 31. Local Republican leaders say Trump is drumming up an excitement and draw to the political right in Nueces County that recent Republican campaigns have failed to do this early in the process.

SHARE Associated Press/Rich Pedroncelli Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Redding Municipal Airport on June 3 in Redding, Calif. ASSOCIATED PRESS/Mary Altaffer Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump smiles as supporters cheer during a news conference at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester on June 7, 2016, in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. Related Coverage Trump Nation: Supporters see themselves in Republican nominee

By Matt Woolbright of the Caller-Times

He wasn't Texas' first choice, but many of the state's top Republicans are rallying behind the party's unconventional presumptive nominee ahead of the national convention.

Trump's sometimes abrasive speeches have galvanized his supporters while simultaneously fueling the rise of a "Never Trump" movement among voters from all slices of the political spectrum.

Still, especially in Nueces County, there's one campaign among conservative-leaning voters that's stronger than the #NeverTrump trend, said Mike Bergsma, the chairman of the Nueces County Republican Party  Never Hillary.

"He's better than Hillary," Bergsma said.

He pointed to his preference of a Republican administration to a Democratic one to navigate the economic issues America faces in 2016.

Institutional change in Washington  and not an excitement about a Trump presidency  is what's driving Susan Guggenheim to volunteer and get involved with the 2016 election.

Guggenheim, who immigrated to the U.S. from France in 1992, said Trump was never her preference, but "he can do well if he chooses the right people to work with."

"Our country is in critical need of a deep change, and we can only get that if we get (the Republican) candidate elected," she said. "If we don't get Donald Trump elected, Hillary will keep things the way they're going, and I think she could even make things worse economically and internationally."

But elsewhere in the Texas Republican ranks Trump is stirring up an unexpected kind of excitement.

"He was not following the prescribed pattern for serious candidates, and there's a huge part of the population that likes that," said Bill Crocker, who served on the Republican National Committee from 2004 to 2012. "There's a huge part of both Democrats and Republicans that are either tired of  or educated to reject  the traditional pattern of political leadership."

"Some of it works better with the masses that (President Ronald) Reagan attracted to the Republican ticket," he added of Trump's style.

Few have better credentials than former Republican Party state chairman Tom Pauken when it comes to comparing Trump to President Ronald Reagan, who was Pauken's former boss. Pauken, who served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, said Trump's supporters remind him of the voters that put Reagan in the Oval Office.

"I'm very comfortable with him as the nominee. He's going to defeat Hillary in November. The issues he's been addressing (border security, trade deals and foreign policy)  all resonate with the American people."

He added Trump's selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his vice president was a "safe choice" that will likely soothe tensions within the "Never Trump" segment of voters within the party who are largely "neoconservatives and the disgruntled supporters of former candidates."

Still, the biggest reason Republicans must elect their pick, Crocker explained, isn't the Oval Office  it's found at 1 First Street Northeast.

"There are two words why we must elect a Republican, and those words are: Supreme Court," Crocker said.

In the last 30 years, 11 justices have left the court. On average, those justices were just under 80 years old when their stint on the bench ended. There are three justices that are either older than 79 already or will be in the next four years, and Justice Antonin Scalia's seat is still vacant.

The next president could be responsible for nominating four of the court's nine members. Two more justices will be in their mid-70s in eight years.

"The significance of membership on the Supreme Court lasts a generation  30 years at least," Crocker said. "That's a lot more than four."

Justices who served on the court over the last three decades  excluding President Barack Obama's appointments from 2009 and 2010  spent just over 23 years on the court, on average.

For Chuck Cazalas, an at-large delegate from Corpus Christi who will be voting in Cleveland next week, Trump's business acumen is what earned his support. And Cazalas, a former Nueces County commissioner, believes that is what the country is looking for as well, despite media reports on his bankruptcies and business dealings.

"People want a leader to bring the jobs back to this country. People are not going to vote against their own good," Cazalas said. "People are going to support him  especially Hispanics here  because he will bring the jobs back."

Outside the realm of party insiders, Trump is drumming up an excitement and draw to the political right in Nueces County that recent Republican campaigns have failed to do this early in the process, Bergsma said.

"Most of the Trump supporters who are now enthusiasts have not been involved in politics before," the longtime Republican leader said. "They voted, but they didn't really get involved."

That excitement has prompted Bergsma to launch two campaign teams in November, which hasn't been done here before, he said. One will focus efforts exclusively on Trump's election, and the other will work for state and local candidates.

Bergsma added residents are also requesting signs and bumper stickers supporting Trump earlier than they did for the failed campaigns of Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts.

But that doesn't mean some of Trump's remarks on minorities won't make campaigning more difficult in some Nueces County circles, Bergsma said.

"I have several Hispanic friends, Republicans, who were offended by what he said and they won't be supporting him," Bergsma said. "We're going to have to do a lot of hard work to convince Hispanic voters here Trump is the guy for them."

Twitter: @reportermatt

SUPREME COURT APPOINTMENTS

In the last 30 years, 11 justices have left the Supreme Court via resignation, retirement or death. There is one vacancy on the court, and three justices are nearing retirement age. The next president  should he or she win a re-election bid  could be responsible for appointing a majority of the nation's highest court.

The current court

Name Age Years on the bench Party of president who made appointment

John Roberts 61 10 Republican

Anthony Kennedy 79 28 Republican

Clarence Thomas 68 24 Republican

Ruth Bader Ginsburg 83 22 Democrat

Stephen Breyer 77 21 Democrat

Samuel Alito 66 10 Republican

Sonia Sotomayor 62 6 Democrat

Elena Kagan 56 5 Democrat

Of the four most likely seats to be filled (based on the average departure age of last 30 years), two are justices appointed by President Bill Clinton, and two were appointed by President Ronald Reagan. The three current members have served at least 21 years each, and the vacant position had been filled by Antonin Scalia, who served 29 years.

Facts on the previous 11 to leave the court:

Average age when they left the bench: 79 years, 11 months

Average tenure: 25 years, 5 months

Republican-appointed justices: 9

Democrat-appointed justices: 2

Source: Supreme Court of the United States' website
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Johnny French

Veterans help further medical research

If you are unaware of the Million Veteran Program, you are not alone. During the Veterans Summit sponsored by Rep. Blake Farenthold on July 9, I was passed from one individual to another six times before meeting someone who did.

The MVP is a multiyear program sponsored by Veterans Affairs to use the medical histories and genetic materials, donated by a million veteran volunteers, in pioneering research in many areas critical to the health of the everyone.

As of last August, nearly 400,000 veterans had given their histories, a blood sample, and consent to the MVP.

Unfortunately, there are only three locations in Texas, the closest being in San Antonio, where veterans may visit to donate the last two elements. Many western states have no locations at all. Worse still, the appointment information I received stated in bold print: "We are unable to provide travel reimbursement for research." And, as I finally learned at the summit, one cannot give the blood and sign the consent forms at the VA clinic in Corpus Christi.

In preparation for attending his summit, on July 8 I emailed this question to Rep. Farenthold's constituent liaison: "Has Congressman Farenthold submitted, co-sponsored and/or voted to provide the VA with money earmarked for the purpose of funding the MVP's staff, offices, research and travel, including the travel expenses of the research volunteers?" I received no reply, but drove the 300-mile round-trip journey to join the MVP in San Antonio Tuesday, anyway.
CAMEROUN :: Cameroon: Sea Turtle Shell Trafficker Arrested

A man was arrested in Njombe, in the Littoral Region, illegal possession of sea turtle shells - sea turtles are protected wildlife species.The 39-year old man was arrested on July 7, 2016 during a crackdown operation by wildlife officials from the Njombe -Penja Forestry and Wildlife Control Post who were accompanied by the gendarmerie. The suspect who was under investigation for several months was arrested as he sat on a motorcycle in front of the Eglise Evangeligue in Njombe.

He rode the motorcycle with the bag of shells strapped to the backseat of his bike and stopped just a few metres to the church building, then make rapid glances of the surroundings before making a phone call. As he called, wildlife officials who had been tracking his movements quickly made it fast to the bike where he was briefly questioned before being arrested. He was taken to Penja where the forestry and wildlife control post it located. The Last Great Ape Organisation  LAGA provided technical assistance during the operation.

Sources close to the case say he has been in the business for a couple of years and sells a variety of wildlife products. He admitted to wildlife officials to also selling crocodiles and several primate species and his client base was equally wide and varied.

A photo of a Nile monitor tied to his bike was found inside his phone. Njock Filibert Ewozouk an assistant forestry technician who was part of the team declared after the operation that This was a case study of law enforcement as it raised the curiosity of some who may now understand that commercialization wildlife species is an illegal and destructive activity. According to the him, the operation is of vital importance to senstise people around the Njombe  Penja areas of the illegality of commercializing wildlife which is regular activity to some in these parts.

A case filed is being established against the trafficker who was held in custody at the gendarmerie bridage in Penja awaiting the completion of the process and according to Njock we are going to complete the dossier and move to the next step which is forwarding the matter to the state counsed, our Ministry is very strict on this and those who think they are going to destroy our forests are being misled.

The arrest of the dealer in Njombe is one of several cases of arrests carried out in the country in the recent past and in many other African countries applying the same law enforcement model as Cameroon. These arrests have a clear message  that the illegal trade in protected wildlife species is the main cause for the massacre of Africas wildlife to extinction and for this reason, government is sending out a signal that it shall not stand by and look on as species are killed to extinction. It is also informing potential traffickers or those interested in the illegal activity that the trade is prohibited and the law is actively applied against offenders.

Sea turtles are listed in Class A which is reserved for animals that are totally protected and may in no condition be subjected to trade. Many other species including chimpanzees, gorillas, several monkey species etc are all found in this same class and according to Njock Fillibert Ewozouck the objective of this classification is to protect the animas in such a way that they can reproduce and replenish their numbers. Trafficking in wildlife species is undermining this effort.
The agreement, some of which has been made public already, is signed between John Holland and CPB Contractors, and the CFMEU and the Australian Workers Union. It sets out basic wages of $30.23 an hour for an entry-level labourer with fewer than 12 months in the industry, rising to $31.44 by April, and 4 per cent each year after that. The pay rates move through nine levels, to $40.84 an hour for a crane operator and $42.55 for a materials coordinator. All pay rates increase 4 per cent a year.
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, governments occasionally deviated from Ataturk's vision, usually to try to dilute Turkey's secular culture and give more statutory power to Islamic clerics. It was these attempts to weaken the keystones of Ataturk's Turkey that prompted the military to intervene  most recently in 1997. In most instances, most Turkish people, at least those in urban areas, supported these coups; after all, the military was acting as the guardian of the national legacy that the population held dear.
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.
Paul Walkers estate has reached a resolution regarding the theft of 30 of the late actors cars, all of which will now be returned to the family.



Within a day of Walkers death in late 2013, Richard Taylor, a worker at a warehouse where Walker stored more than 30 of his cars, stole and hid the vehicles. He then failed to tell the Walkers where the cars were in his attempt to extort money from them.

Lawyers acting for the Walker family filed a lawsuit in 2015 against Taylor requesting that the cars be returned. Following an amicable resolution between the parties, the suit was dismissed last week by the Los Angeles Superior Court.

While specifics of the settlement are confidential, an attorney for the Walkers said It was settled amicably and one of the conditions is that were getting things back.

Some of the cars in the collection include an orange 2011 Porsche 911 GT3 RS, a 2004 GMC truck, three sought-after E30-generation BMW M3s and a 2008 M3.

In 2014, some of the cars from Walkers collection were sold at an auction but it remains unclear what will happen with the remaining 30 in question.

VIDEO
Photo: Getty Images

Families will begin receiving their new Canada Child Benefit this month, putting more money in the pockets of nine out of 10 families to help with the high cost of raising their kids.

The new Canada Child Benefit replaces the old Canada Child Tax Benefit, including the National Child Benefit Supplement and the Universal Child Care Benefit.

It will provide a maximum annual benefit of up to $6,400 per child under the age of six and up to $5,400, per child, aged six to 17. Families with less than $30,000 in net income will receive the maximum benefit.

Families whose children qualify for the disability tax credit can receive an additional amount as part of their Canada Child Benefit, up to a maximum annual benefit of $2,730 per child eligible for the disability tax credit.

If you wish to calculate your benefit amount, a benefit calculator is available.

Our government has made a commitment to implement measures that will help alleviate poverty for Canadian families with children.

Under the new Canada Child Benefit more than million families will receive more money than before and lift almost 300,000 children out of poverty.

More Affordable Housing in Kelowna-Lake Country

I was pleased to attend the official opening of Pleasantvale, an affordable housing initiative that will support seniors and modest income families in the city.

Congratulations to everyone involved in this great project, especially to The Society of Hope, and to the funding partners  the federal government, the Province of British Columbia and the City of Kelowna.

Our government is committed to tackling housing and homelessness challenges here in B.C. and across the country. This includes asking Canada Mortgage and Housing to investigate the rapid rise in property prices we are witnessing in some Canadian cities.

Budget 2016 announced significant new investments to give Canadians greater access to more affordable housing, including doubling the amount of existing funding, providing additional funding for northern and Inuit regions.

It also targeted funding for seniors, victims of family violence, and to improve water and energy efficiency through retrofits and renovations to existing social housing.

We are also committed to delivering a comprehensive national housing strategy through a renewed relationship with the provinces, territories, municipalities and other stakeholders to achieve better outcomes across the housing continuum.

As a first step toward open dialogue on social issues between federal, provincial and territorial governments, Jean-Yves Duclos, minister of Families, Children and Social Development and minister Responsible for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, co-chaired the first meeting in 10 years of federal-provincial-territorial ministers responsible for social services.

Our government wants a national housing strategy that will meet the needs of all Canadians and improve the lives of those in greatest need.

In this regard, we are seeking input directly from Canadians. Constituents can participate in the consultation process by taking part in a survey and/or submitting their ideas or written submissions online.

Id also be happy to hear your thoughts.

Constituents can reach me the summer by contacting our constituency office or by calling 250 470-5075.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

Penticton residents can expect to encounter plenty of road work this summer.

The city has commenced its annual capital works contract and will be focused on some road re-surfacing, parking lot development and water main replacement.

The roads will remain open during construction and motorists are advised to expect delays or attempt, when possible, to avoid the roads altogether.

People are asked to drive carefully through construction zones and pay close attention to detour and warning signs, traffic control persons, construction workers and equipment operating at all times.

The contract for the work has been awarded to Grizzly Excavating and any questions can be directed to their office at 250-462-9736 or to the city engineering office at 250-490-2521.

Work on busy Government Street is expected to start on Monday morning.

For more information on the streets that will be impacted, go here.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

Children manned hoses along with experienced firefighters and were invited to take a ride in the fire truck at an event in Naramata on Saturday.

The fire hall on Lower Debeck Road opened its doors to the public, so people could meet the firefighters and learn about fire safety.

"It's so the residents in the community get to see their local fire department and what we do," said fire chief Tony Trovao. "And we are always looking for new recruits, so this is a way to entice more people to join."

I also love meeting the people. There is nothing like talking to people over a cup of coffee."

The busy morning included a community pancake breakfast, the fire engine rides, the opportunity for children to try on gear and water games.

Calgary resident Cameron Michaud, who spends the summer in Naramata with his family, described it as a great event.

"I just think it's a lot of fun for the kids and gives them fire safety awareness as well," he said,.

While Chelsea Ouimette, who was there with her young daughter, enjoyed the learning experience.

"It's interesting because you never get to actually do this," she said.
Photo: Deborah Pfeiffer

Saturday night's rain showers didn't stop people from packing the stands at the Penticton Speedway for some exciting bull-riding.

This year is the third that Bull-A-Rama, featuring riders from all the world, has taken place at the race track.

"I was watching the Calgary Stampede all day, and I thought why not come out and see something live," said Ron Phillips, who travelled down from Kelowna for the Bull Riders Canada event.

The action-packed night featured about 20 riders in a double header.

Among them was Miles Pennington from Alberta, who has been riding for 14 to 15 years and was one of the original four who came up with the idea to get the BRC going.

For Pennington, who said he was probably in the top 20 right now, the wild and exciting event is all about the adrenaline rush.

"I just love the rush and all the people I've met over the years," he said. "Everyone is a close family."

Fellow competitor Matt O'Flynn from Quesnel has been riding steers since the age of 9 and with the BRC since it started four years ago.

"It's not so much about adrenaline anymore," he said. "It's my Zen, it's where I'm happiest."

As for travelling and riding in different places, like at the speedway, he described it as an adventure every time.

People in the crowd shared in that excitement as they watched the riders attempt to stay mounted, while the bulls tried to buck them off.

"Hello, it's cowboys on bulls," said spectator Laura Penney. "You can't beat that."

For more Bull Riders Canada information, go here.
Photo: The Canadian Press - AP

Officials say a dead whale that keeps returning to the Southern California coast after being towed out to the ocean might have floated back to the coast again.

Encinitas lifeguards say a whale body that came ashore Saturday at Grandview Beach had been decaying in the water for about two weeks, KABC-TV reports.

Officials have not yet conclusively determined if the body is that of Wally, but they believe it is the female whale, the TV station says. Officials say they will remove the carcass on Sunday.

Wally was first towed out into the ocean after washing up on Dockweiler State Beach in Los Angeles County before the Fourth of July weekend.

The decaying carcass was towed again a week later when it drifted toward San Pedro.

Wally was spotted near Newport Beach on July 10 and was towed out a third time but drifted back on July 11 and had to be removed again.
Photo: CTV

A Coquitlam family shaken by a young womans death will have to deal with another loss in what police are now calling a murder-suicide.

CTV reports that tearful neighbours placed flowers at the home of Lisa Wei and her 22-year-old daughter Ivy  both found dead in the space of 12 hours, leaving behind a grieving husband and a six-year-old son.

She was a beautiful girl, and she loved the lord too. I know she is in heaven, one neighbour told CTV.

RCMP say officers responded to a call about a woman in medical distress (in the 1100 block of Eagleridge Drive) Friday evening.

The 22-year-old woman was pronounced dead at the scene, and police say her injuries suggest foul play.

They also reportedly arrived to find Weis husband pacing outside the home.

A female suspect who knew the victim was identified, but left the scene before police arrived.

Officers tracked the suspect's vehicle to Buntzen Lake on Saturday morning, where police say the suspect's body was found in the water.

While evidence gathered suggests this to be a tragic case of murder-suicide, there remains much work to be done, said Staff Sgt. Jennifer Pound of the RCMPs Integrated Homicide Investigation Team.

The six-year-old was left with neighbours, who described Wei as a fantastic mother and friend.

Clearly something went wrong. Lisa is a good mother and a wonderful person, said one neighbour, who gave her name as Yvette. As for Ivy, Yvette said, She was so sweet. My boys adored her. They said she made the best smoothies.

An investigation is still ongoing.

 with files from CTV Vancouver
Photo: The Canadian Press

A 59-year-old man who authorities say drove a rented car from Arizona to a rural Nevada town and detonated two bombs at the house of former co-workers shot himself dead before the blasts erupted, according to autopsy results made public Sunday.

Glenn Franklin Jones' death was ruled a suicide, Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg told The Associated Press.

Jones' body was blown up in the blasts in Panaca. Fudenberg said the body was identified through fingerprints.

A motive for the bombings hasn't been disclosed. Federal, state and local authorities are still investigating the type of fuses or detonators used to trigger the powerful Wednesday evening blasts.

"He definitely ignited the devices," Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee said. "We don't know what with."

A damaged semi-automatic handgun was found in the rubble following the blast, and Lee said authorities believe Jones used it to kill himself.

Lee said residents Tiffany Cluff and two daughters fled barefoot from the house before the blast. Husband Joshua Cluff and another daughter weren't home at the time. The sheriff said the family of five has been cared-for since the explosions by family and friends. Messages left for the Cluffs by AP haven't been returned.

"I guess he was bent on destruction, but not killing," neighbour Richard Katschke said of Jones, a former nurse who once cared for Katschke's mother at Grover C. Dils Medical Center in the neighbouring town of Caliente.

Katschke and another neighbour, Dennis Sanders, said Jones knew the Cluff family and helped the Cluffs build the house that was badly damaged.

A hospital administrator confirmed that Jones and the Cluffs worked together as nurses, and that Joshua Cluff was Jones' supervisor.

Lee said Friday that investigators were trying to confirm whether Jones had military experience.

Sanders said Jones told him he'd been an explosives and demolition expert in the Army. Katsche said Jones seemed fascinated with military memorabilia, but didn't say he'd been in the service.

Both described Jones as quiet and courteous, but Sanders said Jones appeared to be struggling to lift himself out of depression following the deaths of his wife and his mother.

Police in the northwest Arizona town of Kingman found several pounds of explosives and improvised bombs in a motorhome where Jones had been living in recent weeks in a recreational vehicle park.

The Cluff home in Panaca was left uninhabitable, Lee said. The rented Ford Flex that Jones drove there was obliterated.

The sheriff said a crater 3 feet deep and 10 feet around was left where the vehicle was parked, and large chunks of debris landed up to a mile away.
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USDA Rural Development State Director Bobby Goode announced funding for five Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT) projects in Tennessee. These projects will help connect rural communities with medical and educational experts in other parts of the country, increasing access to health care, substance misuse treatment and advanced educational opportunities.

Funding DLT projects is important because the program ensures rural residents and businesses with access to modern, 21st Century communication technologies, Mr. Goode said. Additionally, the program helps rural communities to compete in a global economy.

USDA is awarding $23.4 million in grants to support 45 distance learning and 36 telemedicine projects in 32 states. In Tennessee alone, nearly $1.07 million will be used to fund various DLT projects across the state.

The following recipients and their respective counties were selected to receive funding:

 Chattanooga Hamilton County Hospital Authority  Hamilton County

 Tennessee Rural Education Association (receiving two grants)  Polk and Marion Counties

 Carey Counseling Center, Inc.  Obion County

 Mountain States Health Alliance  Johnson County

Some of the awards will help communities provide services to address opioid misuse, a problem that is especially prevalent in rural areas. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is leading an interagency effort to address the rural opioid crisis. On June 30, Vilsack hosted a town hall meeting in Abingdon, Va., to address how the crisis is affecting rural America and parts of Appalachia, and while there he announced funding for five DLT projects in rural Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia to respond to the issue.

USDA Rural Development has provided $213 million for 634 DLT projects in rural areas nationwide since 2009. USDAs Rural Utilities Service, which administers the DLT program, also offers infrastructure programs that bring broadband, safe drinking water and improved wastewater treatment facilities to rural communities.

USDA Rural Development is moving investments to rural America with housing, business and infrastructure loans and grants to create jobs and strengthen rural economies with an emphasis to assist areas of persistent poverty. Since 2009, the agency has assisted more than 1.5 million Tennessee families and businesses in 230 communities in all 95 counties of Tennessee, investing more than $6.6 billion through affordable loans, loan guarantees, and grants.

For more information on USDA Rural Development programs available in Tennessee contact the State Office at 615-783-1300.
Startups looking for funding to develop next-generation technology like artificial intelligence and robotics are increasingly likely to find it in China.

Companies working on equipment to deliver parcels to the moon, robots to stock warehouse shelves, and computers capable of acquiring knowledge like a human are among more than 30 startups seeded by Comet Labs since its founding last year.

The venture capital firm, created by Chinese investment fund Legend Star, gave the media an introduction to its work this week. It provided only the briefest of glimpses into its investment portfolio, without disclosing further details on the seed companies, but it was enough to make clear the cutting-edge nature of their technology.

Legend Star is owned by Hong Kong-listed Legend Holdings, which is also the parent company of Chinese PC maker Lenovo. Comet Labs not only provides funding for startups, but also helps find them clients.

Comet Labs Managing Director Saman Farid said the startups it has backed have managed to secure a combined 40 million U.S. dollars in follow-up funding rounds that have also drawn investors including Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator.

"The world has been carried forward by waves of technology, from digitization to the Internet, then mobile Internet and we believe the next wave will be artificial intelligence," said Farid.

Until recently, China had mostly been on the receiving end of venture capital from around the world as many of the country's top Internet firms, from Alibaba and Tencent to Uber competitor Didi and smartphone maker Xiaomi, received backing from overseas.

But the outbound investment made by Chinese firms like Comet Labs could signal a reverse in the flow of capital, as investors in China look out for entrepreneurs tinkering with what could eventually evolve into technology that redefines industries.

Earlier this month, Zhongguancun Development Group, a state-backed investment firm based in Beijing's tech hub Zhongguancun, also set up a fund to raise 10 to 20 million yuan (about 1.5 to 3 million U.S. dollars) to incubate startups focused on smart manufacturing in Germany.

In June, a group of Chinese investors, including Baidu, CICC Alpha, China Everbright and IDG also participated in the 60-million-dollar financing round for U.S. online cross-border payment startup Circle, which uses the block chain technology that many in the financial industry say has the potential to bring sweeping changes to the financial world.

This investment comes at a time when China's vast manufacturing sector is wobbling. Industrial production growth has been slowing consistently, sinking to 6 percent for the first half of 2016, compared with double-digit rates couples of years ago.

Rather than consumer-facing firms, much of China venture capital's outbound investment goes to startups working on technology to enhance businesses' operational efficiency and productivity, as such technology holds the promise of catapulting Chinese manufacturing to the higher end of the industrial value chain.

"A lot of traditional industries like agriculture, healthcare and construction have been little changed by the Internet and digitization, but they could look very different with technology like artificial intelligence and smart machines and these technologies will go beyond borders," Comet Labs' Farid said.
One of Facebook's biggest accomplishment this year has nothing to do with how many new parents post baby photos on the site or use it to wish friends happy birthday. Instead, the social network's latest victory may reside in its arcane finances.

Facebook said it expects its effective tax rate to fall from 40 percent to about 27 percent this year. That is considerably lower than the federal corporate tax rate, 35 percent, and tax experts say a reflection of the tech giant's growing maturity.

"When companies start making money they start thinking about taxes more," said Steven Rosenthal, a senior fellow of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.

But this also comes as Facebook tangles with the Internal Revenue Service over assets the tech giant moved to Ireland, which has a considerably lower tax rate than the United States, and amid a worldwide re-examination of the tax strategies employed by U.S. multinationals.

Facebook, the IRS said in court documents, may have underestimated by "billions of dollars" the value of some of the assets. That would have allowed the company to avoid potentially millions in taxes, tax experts say.

"It looks like Facebook is taking affirmative steps to shift income from the U.S. to more friendly foreign environments," said Robert Willens, an independent tax expert.

Facebook declined to comment on the investigation. "Facebook complies with all applicable rules and regulations in the countries where we operate," the company said in a statement.

The fight is just the latest example of a large U.S. company under scrutiny for its tax practices. French authorities raided the Paris headquarters of Google and McDonald's in May and the European Commission is investigating tax deals that Amazon and Apple reached in Luxembourg and Ireland.

The European Commission is slated to rule by the end of this month on whether Apple owes billions in back taxes. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who had repeatedly complained that the European investigations of U.S. companies were unfair, is scheduled to meet with European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager this week.

"There is certainly an irony to Jack Lew going over there to defend U.S. companies accused of [dodging their taxes] when they are being accused of the same thing here in the U.S.," said Rosenthal, former legislative counsel to the Joint Committee on Taxation. "If anybody is going to squeeze our companies it ought to be U.S."

Facebook has already been forced to change the way it operates overseas. Earlier this year, the tech giant said it would change the way it pays taxes in Britain. Instead of booking revenue earned in Britain through its Irish unit, where the tax rate is lower, Facebook said it would pay local, higher British taxes on it.

That followed withering criticism the company received after news emerged that it paid just $6,100 in British corporate tax in 2014, while giving employees in the country an average bonus of more than $200,000 that year.

The company declined to comment on how it lowered its tax rate. But tax experts note the effective tax rate reported by companies to the Securities and Exchange Commission is often higher than what the company actually pays because it doesn't reflect deductions taken for stock options issued to employees or other expenses. In fact, said Willens, the tax expert, when Facebook was reporting a 40 percent tax rate, its rate was likely closer to 13 percent.

"It is really impressive. It is really a testimony on what they've done," he said.

Many of the tax strategies being employed by large U.S. companies, including Facebook, have become commonplace, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, a University of Michigan law professor. "What has really changed is that the Europeans have woken up to this. They have started worrying about American companies not paying taxes in Europe," he said.

And Facebook is hardly alone is the tech community in finding ways to lower its tax rate. Twenty-one tech companies on the S&P 500 had an effective tax rate of 20 percent or lower, including IBM and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, according to a report by S&P Global Market Intelligence. Another 10 companies, the report said, has "no material tax rates," the report said.

"I think their [U.S. corporations] income taxes are complicated because commerce and the world is complicated now," said Rosenthal. "Things we do here affect far corners of the planet, everybody talks around with an iPhone these days."

Facebook's current tussle with the IRS centers on the company's decision in 2010 to transfer many of its global "intangible" assets -- those not in the United States or Canada -- to its Irish holding company. The transfer allows the company to pay a lower tax rate on the profits made from those assets, tax experts say.

"This is very standard operating procedure. They want to have all, or as much profits as possible in a market that has a low tax rate," said Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research. "That is the optimal corporate tax structure."

But the IRS began reviewing the move in 2013 and said in court documents that the way the assets were valued was "problematic." The "transferred intangibles" may have been undervalued by "billions of dollars," the agency said in a court documents.

Last month, the IRS sent Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Wehner a request for more information so the agency could better understand the valuations, according to the court documents. The tech giant did not respond by the June 17 deadline and the IRS has now gone to court to force the company to produce the documents.

"Facebook's failure to comply with the summonses continues to this date," the Justice Department's Tax Division said in court filing last week.
China and the European Union are looking for "an appropriate mechanism" to solve their steel trade disputes, the Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday.

The ministry confirmed reports that Chinese and EU leaders discussed steel trade, and the many European anti-dumping investigations into Chinese steel, during the 18th China-EU summit, held on Tuesday.

The EU has launched 15 anti-dumping investigations into Chinese exports since 2014, with eight of them related to steel products.

"Leaders from both sides have asked their departments in charge of foreign trade to enhance exchanges in the steel trade," according to a brief statement on the ministry's website.

Ministry officials have said on many occasions that China, the world's largest steel producer, has been wrongly blamed for the difficulties faced by the global steel industry. Actually, it is the anemic global economy and weak demand that are to blame.

The ministry maintains that frequent use of protectionist measures will not help end global steel overcapacity, but rather disrupts normal trade order.
John Boyega (L) and Alden Ehrenreich, who will play Han Solo, on stage during Future Directors Panel at the Star Wars Celebration 2016 at ExCel on July 17, 2016 in London, England. (Ben A. Pruchnie /Getty)

LONDON -- Directors Rian Johnson, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, accompanied by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, discussed the future of the "Star Wars" franchise at Star Wars Celebration Europe at the ExCel Centre. Alden Ehrenreich was also officially introduced as young Han Solo for the upcoming standalone movie.

"This is going to start right where the last one left off," "Episode VIII" director Johnson said. "It was a break from tradition."

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He added, "The second film is where we zoom into the characters, getting to the heart of them and challenging them."

In preparation to direct the highly anticipated sequel, Johnson screened gritty 1949 WWII drama "Twelve O'Clock High" ("It became extremely important") and Mikhail Kalatozov's 1959 survival adventure "Letter Never Sent" plus classics like "The Bridge On The River Kwai," "The Dambusters," "Sahara" and "Gunga Din."

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Johnson went to San Francisco and spent six weeks figuring out the story.

"We would watch dailies come in from 'VII.' It was probably really healthy creating the story based on our reactions to the footage rather than the cultural reactions. It was a unique experience."

As a surprise for fans, stars John Boyega, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher made unscheduled appearances. "Rian is awesome," said Boyega. "He is doing an indie movie within a studio franchise. It is so much funRian has a new energy for a new story."

Lord and Miller will direct the as yet untitled Han Solo picture as a standalone "Star Wars Story," which features the iconic smuggler in his early 20s from a script written by Lawrence Kasdan and Jon Kasdan. According to Miller, the film will shoot "end of January or early February" in the U.K.

Lord said, "I sort of relate to him. He doesn't want to do anything he is told. He is very sarcastic and at the end of the day he is unreasonably optimistic. He is a grouchy, cynical guy with the biggest heart in the galaxy."

Miller added, "He's a maverick, a scoundrel. He is clever but he's not smart. He wants to present himself as this tough guy but he is lovable. He is one of the most iconic characters of all time."

After months of speculation, Alden Ehrenreich ("Hail Caesar!") was officially announced as young Han Solo. He was brought in front of the crowd of 4000 to a rapturous reception.

"We thought this was the hardest casting challenge of all time. They were the biggest boots to fill," said Miller.

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Casting Solo, Lord and Miller looked at over 3000 people, "but we cast the first person who walked through the door," said Miller. "Sorry Kathy -- we wasted your money."

"I am going to take it out of your salary," quipped Kennedy.

Ehrenreich said, "I read the sides and I loved them. I auditioned for six months. The coolest part was I went on the Falcon for a chemistry test with Chewbacca. It was unbelievable. It was more exciting than nerve-racking."

Johnson is picking up the reins of the saga from director J.J. Abrams, whose "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" made $2.8 billion worldwide. Kennedy picked Johnson because of his "substance and sense of humor. Rian moves the camera as good as Steven Spielberg. I don't say that about many people."

"Episode VIII" sees the return of Hamill, Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie and Andy Serkis.

New cast members include Benicio Del Toro, Laura Dern and Kelly Marie Tran.

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Following preliminary work in Skellig Michael off the coast of Ireland, the film lensed in Pinewood Studios, England, Dubrovnik, Croatia and County Cork, Ireland. Production started recreating the closing moments of "Episode VII."

"Star Wars: Episode VIII" will open on Dec. 15, 2017. The untitled Han Solo standalone movie will bow on May 25, 2018.







Watch the latest movie trailers.

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 126 Woody introduces the gang to a homemade spork toy with self-esteem issues in "Toy Story 4." Read the review. (Pixar / AP)
HBO is sitting pretty on the Emmy throne this year, with 94 nominations, including one for "Game of Thrones'" Lena Headey (above) for supporting actress in a drama series. But an army of streaming series are coming on strong as contenders for future crowns. (AP)

The shifts in the TV landscape brought on by online video streaming are more apparent than ever in the nominations for the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards announced Thursday.

HBO dominated the competition with 94 nominations  the most of any network for the 16th consecutive year  for the awards presented by the Television Academy. But its total was down from the 126 it received in 2015, a sign of how streaming services  as well as other cable outlets  have upped their game in the scripted programming arena.

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One significant indicator of the new TV world order: Three out of the seven nominees in the comedy series category  "Master of None" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," both on Netflix, and Amazon's "Transparent"  are only available through online viewing. Broadcast networks had dominated the category as recently as 2011, but this year only ABC was represented with "black-ish" and "Modern Family." The commercial broadcasters have not had a series nominated for drama series since that same year.

Netflix received 54 nominations, a gain of 24 over last year. Its signature series "House of Cards" received 13 nominations, tying its previous high in 2014. It also had several first-year nominees, including two for "Jessica Jones," four for "Master of None" and six for "What Happened Miss Simone?," its documentary on legendary soul-jazz artist Nina Simone.

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HBO had plenty to crow about, led by its wildly popular and enduring hit series "Game of Thrones," which received the most nominations of any program, with 23. The premium cable network's come-dies "Veep" and "Silicon Valley" earned 17 and 10 nominations, respectively, while its original movie"All the Way," starring Bryan Cranston as President Lyndon Johnson, picked up eight. Beyonce's audacious visual album "Lemonade," which premiered on HBO, earned four nominations.

But the network's lead was shortened by FX, which had the most critically hailed and talked about program of the year in "The People v. O.J. Simpson." FX set a record for nominations by an ad-supported basic cable network with 56, up from 38 last year.

"The People v. O.J. Simpson" received 22 nominations, the most for any limited series or miniseries and trailing only "Game of Thrones" overall. The second season of the limited series "Fargo," a winner last year, earned 18 nominations to finish with the third highest total.

[ See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour  ]

VIDEO: Watch Sterling K. Brown, who plays Christopher Darden, talk about converging with his character in the glove scene of "The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. (Los Angeles Times)

Amazon saw its nomination total rise from 12 to 16  which includes 10 nominations for "Transparent," while Sony's Crackle service earned three, thanks to Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" and "SuperMansion," a stop-motion animation series.

Several programs from streaming services were also recognized, even though they did not come from a corporately supported platform. Nominations went to Louis C.K.'s self-financed series "Horace and Pete," and "Acting Dead," a short-form series comedy about unemployed actors who decide to pursue zombie roles in TV and movies, made available on the website ActingDead .com.

"Her Story," a scripted series about two transgender women in Los Angeles, was independently produced and distributed over YouTube. It earned a nomination for short form comedy or drama series.

The influence of streaming video was also seen in the late-night category. James Corden, host of "The Late, Late Show" on CBS, toils in the 12:35 a.m. time slot. But his "Carpool Karaoke" segments became a sensation on YouTube, likely helping to earn him a nomination for variety talk series.

Corden's nomination is notable as his better-known lead-in Stephen Colbert, who replaced David Letterman on "The Late Show" and a previous winner for "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central, did not make the cut in the variety talk category. Other nominees included "Comedians In Cars With Coffee," HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" and NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon."

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Along with Colbert, "Daily Show" alum Samantha Bee also failed to get recognized. Former "Daily Show" correspondent John Oliver did score six nominations for his HBO show, "Last Week Tonight."

The list of nominees included a significant number of first timers that critics believed worthy of greater recognition.

USA Network's "Mr. Robot" earned a drama series nomination in its first year of eligibility, while FX's much-lauded "The Americans" is getting recognized in the category after four seasons on the air.

The newcomers will contend against "Game of Thrones," "House of Cards," AMC's "Better Call Saul," Showtime's "Homeland" and PBS' "Downton Abbey."

Rami Malek of "Mr. Robot" and Matthew Rhys of "The Americans" are also first-time contenders in lead actor in a drama series, up against Bob Odenkirk for "Better Call Saul," Liev Schreiber of Showtime's "Ray Donovan," and Kevin Spacey for "House of Cards."

Keri Russell also earned a first-time nomination for "The Americans" in the lead actress in a drama category, putting her against five returning contenders  Claire Danes for "Homeland," who won in 2012, last year's winner Viola Davis for "How To Get Away With Murder," Taraji P. Henson for "Empire," Robin Wright for "House of Cards" and Tatiana Maslany for BBC America's "Orphan Black."

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"UnReal," Lifetime dramatized behind-the-scenes look at a reality dating show, broke through with a supporting actress in a drama series nomination for Constance Zimmer. She is up against formidable competition from three "Game of Thrones" stars (Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey and Maisie Williams) and previous winner Maggie Smith for "Downton Abbey."

Kit Harrington gets a first-time nomination for his work as "Game of Thrones" hero Jon Snow in the supporting actor in a drama category. He faces an Academy Award winner in Jon Voight who will try to win his first Emmy for his work on "Ray Donovan."

Others in the category are two-time winner Peter Dinklage for "Game of Thrones," Michael Kelly for "House of Cards," Ben Mendelsohn for the Netflix series "Bloodline" and Jonathan Banks for "Better Call Saul."

On the comedy series side, HBO's "Veep" scored the most nominations overall with 17, including comedy series. It defends its crown against "black-ish," "Master of None," "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" "Transparent," "Modern Family" and its HBO stable mate "Silicon Valley."

The lead actress in a comedy series category had two first-time nominees with Tracee Ellis Ross for "black-ish" and Ellie Kemper for "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt." They will face four past winners in Julia Louis-Dreyfus for "Veep," Amy Schumer for "Inside Amy Schumer," Lily Tomlin for the Netflix series "Grace and Frankie" and Laurie Metcalf for HBO's "Getting On."

Metcalf also earned guest actress nominations for "Horace and Pete" on the drama side and "Big Bang Theory" in comedy, while Schumer had multiple nods thanks to her "Live At the Apollo" special for HBO and a hosting stint on "Saturday Night Live."

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Thomas Middleditch of "Silicon Valley" and Aziz Ansari of "Master of None" are the first-time nominees for lead actor in a comedy series, up against Anthony Anderson of "black-ish," last year's winner Jeffrey Tambor of "Transparent," William H. Macy of Showtime's "Shameless" and Will Forte of Fox's "The Last Man on Earth."

"The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story" is a contender for limited series against ABC's "American Crime," FX's "Fargo," A&E's "Roots" remake and AMC's "The Night Manager" (which landed 12 nominations overall).

The six-episode series about Simpson's trial for murder has Sarah Paulson competing in the lead actress in a limited series or movie category, while Cuba Gooding Jr. and Courtney B. Vance will contend on the lead actor side. Three cast members will compete in the supporting acting category with Sterling K. Brown, David Schwimmer and John Travolta.

The winners of Emmy Awards will be presented at a ceremony held Sept. 18 at the Microsoft Theater in L.A. and televised on ABC.

ALSO

Complete list of 2016 Emmy nominees

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Emmys 2016: Updates, reactions, videos and commentary

Emmy voters snub Samantha Bee and other deserving women

Mary McNamara: Emmy nominations reflect the moment we are in  political, divided and distrustful
I have tried in vain to get a refund from American Airlines. On a recent flight back to Bermuda, my 7-year-old daughter and I experienced hours of delays caused by weather. Finally, our flight was canceled, and chaos ensued.

The line to see an agent was about two to three hours long, and I was carrying a sleeping child. Agents were yelling, "Call American Airlines!" I had an international cellphone but called and was told there was a wait time of two hours. Then the agents were yelling at the crowd to use AA.com to rebook their flights.

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I turned on the data on my phone, clicked on AA.com, and it said my booking reference did not exist. There were seats on the next day's flight, so we paid $2,157. I waited an hour for a taxi in the rain. I was carrying a child. I checked into a hotel, which took 90 minutes, as so many passengers were stranded.

The following day, I still couldn't get near an agent. The lines were hours long. I also still couldn't get through to American by phone. Hold times were more than two hours. I checked in and, once through the gates, finally found an agent. I explained it all to her. She said that American had booked me on a flight later that day. I explained that I had had zero communication about the rebooking. She said to take it up with customer service.

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I have been trying to deal with customer service since January. I eventually discovered that the airline refunded me $74 for each ticket! I am seriously out of pocket. I understand the bad weather thing; however, I was told to rebook my tickets on AA.com. I did that. The agent whom I spoke to that day canceled the flights American had put me on, as they were much later in the day. I would like American to refund me the money I am out for the rebooking.

 Pamela Doherty, Pembroke, Bermuda

A: What a nightmare! Your initial flight delay was caused by weather, and unfortunately, your airline's contract of carriage  the legal agreement between you and the airline  says that the airline owes you nothing for the inconvenience.

Is that right? No, but when you buy a ticket, you agree to those terms, and they can't really be renegotiated after a flight delay.

Here's where your problem happened: A representative told you to rebook your flight, and you took that to mean you should buy new tickets on American. That's not how it works. The airline will rebook you on the next available flight at no charge. Instead, you made a brand-new reservation and then asked to be reimbursed.

If this ever happens to you again, your best option is to wait and let the airline rebook you. Otherwise, you could spend a lot more money, and you might not get a refund.

You could have appealed this to an executive at American Airlines. I list their names, numbers and email addresses on my consumer-advocacy site: www.elliott.org/company-contacts/American.

Your first round of appeals yielded a more generous offer: $600 in travel vouchers. But American refused to refund the money you had to spend on the new tickets. American should bear some of the responsibility for giving you information that led you to believe you could make a new reservation. Our team of advocates contacted the airline on your behalf, and it agreed to refund the $2,157.

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Christopher Elliott is the ombudsman for National Geographic Traveler magazine and the author of "How to Be the World's Smartest Traveler." You can read more travel tips on his blog, www.elliott.org, or email him at chris@elliott.org.

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A member of the Chicago Police Department works at the scene of a shooting in the first block of South Leamington Avenue on July 16, 2016. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Chicago Police Department patrol officers will continue to work in pairs as a safety precaution after three police officers were killed and three more wounded in a shooting in Baton Rouge, La., on Sunday morning.

CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said officers were notified of the fatal shootings and said the policy of officers working in twos  put in place after five officers were gunned down in Dallas on July 7  will remain in place for the time being. Police officials previously said having officers team up helps keep them safe by increasing visibility.

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Guglielmi added there was no known specific threat to law enforcement here, but officers were reminded to stay vigilant.

"Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the Baton Rouge Police Department and the families of the slain officers," CPD officials said in a statement. "CPD has reached out to offer any support and police resources that could possibly assist."

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel condemned the shooting and called on all Americans to unite.

"We must rise above the senseless violence that seeds hate at the very time we need to build unity," he said. "We must move beyond words and declarations and work toward mutual respect and trust."

It was not immediately clear what sparked the shooting not far from police headquarters in Baton Rouge. The suspect, who police believe was the lone attacker, was shot and killed at the scene, according to officials.

But as more details unfold, the shooting already appears to be deepening ongoing tensions that resurfaced earlier this month after police in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul, Minn., fatally shot Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, both black men.

Those shootings, both captured on camera, touched off massive demonstrations nationwide to protest police violence, including several in Chicago. The sniper attack in Dallas occurred as one such protest was coming to a close.

Daywatch Weekdays Start each day with Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox. >

Several Chicago officers have said morale throughout the department has plummeted even further in the wake of the Dallas shootings.

Some police officials and politicians have accused protesters of stoking anti-police fervor that has made officers a target for retaliation. Demonstrators repeatedly have disavowed those who have attacked police and countered that their demonstrations are aimed at peacefully criticizing discriminatory police practices.

Deepening the divisions are multiple proposals of "Blue Lives Matter" laws throughout the country that would make attacking a police officer a hate crime. Activist groups have blasted such efforts  including an ordinance floated in Chicago by Ald. Edward Burke, 14th  saying the legislation essentially criminalizes citizens who advocate for greater police accountability.

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But providing police hate-crime protections has gained traction elsewhere. Louisiana passed its "Blue Lives Matter" law in late May.

Associated Press contributed.

cdrhodes@tribpub.com

Twitter @rhodes_dawn
Markings from a double fatal accident can be seen on State Park Road, just north of U.S. Hwy. 12, in Fox Lake, Ill., on July 17, 2016. Two people died and five were injured after a pickup truck hit a group of motorcyclists on the road on July 16, 2016. (Nancy Stone / Chicago Tribune)

The driver of a pickup truck was dead and six people injured in Fox Lake after the pickup crossed into oncoming traffic, hitting several motorcycles Saturday afternoon, officials said.

The crash happened about 3:10 p.m. on State Park Road about a quarter-mile north of U.S. Hwy. 12, said Fox Lake police Chief Russell Laine. The driver of the pickup that hit several motorcycles on Grass Lake died after the crash, said Laine and Lake County deputy coroner Orlando Portillo.

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The truck was headed south on State Park Road as a group of motorcycles was heading north, and the pickup veered into northbound traffic, Laine said. The pickup hit at least two motorcycles, apparently causing another driver with a passenger to lay down his bike  put the bike on its side  to try to avoid a collision, Laine said.

The pickup driver was dead at the scene, Portillo said. Six people were injured and taken to either Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville or Northern Illinois Medical Center in McHenry, Laine said.

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A number of people who were driving past or otherwise nearby stopped to help pull people away from the crash and "very heroically were able to keep people from being injured further," Laine said.

Detailed information about the person killed and those injured was not immediately being released. The cause of the crash was under investigation.

State Park Road between U.S. Hwy. 12 and Grass Lake Road was closed about 3:10 p.m. Check the Illinois Department of Transportation traffic map to confirm when it reopens.
A lone member of a group supporting the carrying of weapons openly speaks to the media at what was supposed to be a march ahead of the Republican National Convention on July 17, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

The president of the Cleveland police union said he's planning to ask Ohio Gov. John Kasich to declare a state of emergency and ban the open carrying of weapons in the city during the Republican National Convention, a request the governor said he can't grant.

Detective Steve Loomis of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association said union attorneys are drafting a request to Kasich and plan to submit it on Sunday after news media reported that three officers were fatally shot and three others wounded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

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"It's taking away our interest from where it should be focused," Loomis said by phone on Sunday about the open carrying of weapons during the convention.

The governor said while he's sympathetic to the concerns of law enforcement, he doesn't have the authority.

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"Law enforcement is a noble, essential calling and we all grieve that we've again seen attacks on officers," Kasich spokeswoman Emmalee Kalmbach said by email. "Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested."

President Barack Obama on Sunday condemned the second deadly attack on a U.S. police force in as many weeks.

"These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop," Obama said in a statement. "We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: There is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None."

The specter of unrest and potential violence hangs over the convention in Cleveland, with the volatile mix of daily demonstrations planned by groups both for and against Donald Trump and uneasiness following the shooting of officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday and in Dallas on July 7.

The "open carry" of firearms by those allowed to have weapons is a legal activity in Ohio, according to a state attorney general's manual. Weapons are not allowed inside the arena where the convention will be held or in the secure area around it.

"Don't tell me it can't be done," Loomis said of his request to Kasich. "It needs to be done."

Expand Autoplay Image 1 of 160 With their families behind them, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump and Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence are cheered on by delegates at the close of the final day of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams was asked about the state's open-carry law on CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday, and said it's always a challenge when firearms and the public mesh.

"But we've had open carry scenarios in this city before. And we've handled them," Williams said. "We plan to handle them the same way as we always have. Of course, we've ramped that up a little as far as our technique and our tactics to handle them. But in this state, everyone has the right to open carry. And we want to make sure people do that safely."

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Williams said police have changed their tactics in response to recent attacks including the one in Nice, France, on July 14 by placing barriers or barricades at key streets and intersections downtown.

"Things that happen around the country and around the world do affect to some degree how we respond here in Cleveland," Williams said.

The city has issued permits for groups and individuals to rally in city parks, march on a designated parade route, or appear at specific times on a speaker's platform in Public Square from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day.

"We've heard reports from different sources about everyone from anarchists, to black separatists, to, you know, just regular Trump followers, anti-Trump followers," Williams said on CBS. "Everybody has been, you know, in some way, shape, or form touted as coming to Cleveland to either cause trouble or to exercise their first amendment rights. But we're prepared for it all."
People place flowers on the Promenade des Anglais at the scene of Thursday's truck attack, prior to a minute of silence in Nice, southern France, Monday, July 18, 2016, to honor the victims of the Bastille Day attack. (Claude Paris / AP)

French police arrested five people late Saturday evening in connection with the savage truck attack in the resort city of Nice  as ISIS took credit for the beachside bloodshed, calling the 31-year-old driver a "soldier" in the militant Islamic terror group.

An ISIS-run news outlet said the driver "carried out the operation in response to calls to target the citizens of coalition countries fighting the Islamic State."

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The statement neither named the driver  Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel from Tunisia  nor offered evidence the terror group helped plan the attack. Bouhlel drove a 19-ton truck through throngs of people who had gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks Thursday night, killing at least 84 people and injuring 202.

Police in Nice have said Bouhlel was known to them, but only as a petty criminal. His neighbors described the father of three as an angry man in the middle of a divorce, prone to drinking and womanizing. His father, from Tunisia, said Bouhlel did not pray or fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

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French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Bouhlel "radicalized very quickly," which demonstrates the "extreme difficulty of the fight against terrorism."

After an emergency security meeting yesterday, Cazeneuve promised to call up 12,000 police reserves to augment the 120,000-person security force ?already dispersed across France.

With three major terror attacks unfolding in France in the last 18 months, the government is coming under criticism for lax security at the Bastille Day celebration.

But Cazeneuve said that high security had been assured in the region  including at the Cannes Film Festival and the Nice Carnival. He told reporters Bouhlel drove the truck onto the sidewalk to dodge a police barricade blocking the Promenade des Anglais.

The Paris prosecutor's office said five people are now in custody in connection with the truck attack. The office offered no details about the identities of those arrested or the reasons for their arrests.

The Boston Herald's Brian Dowling and Associated Press contributed to this report
A 20-year-old college student was found in the roadside bushes of a small northern Indian city last week, raped and left for dead. In the days afterward, a shocking possibility came to light: Her attackers may be the same five men who had raped her three years earlier but were out on bail. They allegedly raped her again because she had been so steadfast in her case against them.

Heinous rape cases periodically find airtime in the Indian news cycle, but the outcry is often muted when the victim belongs to a lower caste. The unnamed girl in this case is a Dalit, a term used to describe the lowest rungs of India's caste system. Casteism is outlawed by India's constitution, but the practice is widespread, especially in smaller towns and rural areas. The five men whom the girl's family blames for the rapes belong to the upper castes.

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According to local media interviews with the girl's family, two of the five accused were arrested in 2013 after the first incident of rape but were let off on bail.

Family members said the attack last week was retaliation for not withdrawing the case. Instead of settling the matter in court, the five men had wanted to do so out of court, the victim's family members said. The accused wanted to pay about $75,000, a great deal of money in a country where the average annual income hovers about $1,500, but the victim's family members said they repeatedly rejected the offer.

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"We had filed a case in the court for the arrest of the remaining three and re-arrest of the two out on bail. We were getting constant threats from the accused to reach a compromise outside the court, but we remained firm. That's why they have attacked her again," the victim's brother told the Hindustan Times.

Rohtak, the place where the rape occurred, is outside Delhi, in a state known for its deeply chauvinistic attitudes and patriarchal prejudices - where male-dominated village councils often mete out their brand of misogynistic justice with impunity.

The victim's family said this week that her attackers took her from outside her college, drugged her and raped her in a car.

The victim was interviewed in her hospital bed and could barely speak. She was able to tell a TV crew that she went unconscious during the rape but could not muster any more words. Her mother said she had relocated her family to Rohtak after the first rape for safety and better education prospects.

The Washington Post
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Saturday called for joint actions against terrorism to root out the global scourge following a deadly truck attack that claimed more than 80 lives in Nice, France, on Thursday.

Speaking in an informal meeting during the 11th Asian-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Ulan Bator, Li said Asia and Europe are enjoying peace and stability in general terms, but outstanding security challenges, both traditional and non-traditional ones, remain on the two continents.

In particular, he said, terrorism poses a common threat for all countries in the region.

Li's remarks came two days after a truck rammed into a crowd marking the national day of France in Nice on Thursday evening, leaving at least 84 people dead.

The driver of the truck, identified as a 31-year-old French citizen of Tunisian origin, was shot dead by French police and arms and grenades were found inside the vehicle. French authorities have yet to determine whether he acted alone.

"Countries must join hands to counter terrorism and build a truly open, inclusive society, in order to wipe out the hotbed for terrorism," said the Chinese premier.
Workers in Istanbul demolish the Halit Pasa Residence hotel on July 20, 2016. According to the state-run Anadolu news agency, the hotel was allegedly the meeting point of the plotters who planned the failed July 15 coup. (Lefteris Pitarakis / AP)

LUXEMBOURG  U.S.-Turkish tensions escalated Saturday after a quashed coup in Turkey, as the country's leader bluntly demanded the extradition of a U.S.-based cleric he accused of orchestrating the violence. Another senior official directly blamed the United States.

After strongly supporting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when it seemed his government might topple and then opening the door to sending home the cleric, a stung Obama administration fired back at its NATO ally.

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"Public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told his Turkish counterpart, according to the State Department's readout of their telephone call.

The back-and-forth occurred against the backdrop of Turkey closing its airspace, effectively grounding U.S. warplanes that had been targeting Islamic State forces in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech in Istanbul, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP)

At the center of the controversy stood Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Gulen quickly condemned Friday night's coup attempt by military officers that resulted in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left dozens dead. Erdogan's government said Gulen directed the coup all the same.

In a televised speech Saturday, Erdogan said Turkey had never rejected a U.S. extradition request for "terrorists." Addressing Washington, he requested the handover of Gulen and said, "If we are strategic partners, then you should bring about our request."

Although he didn't outline any threat, Erdogan's emphasis on U.S.-Turkish counterterrorism cooperation raised the prospect of a prolonged closure of the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey if he didn't get his way. The Pentagon said it was trying to get permission to resume air operations from the base, while adjusting mission operations in the meantime.

Suleyman Soylu, Turkey's labor minister, went further than Erdogan, suggesting the U.S. was behind the coup.

In their second call in as many days, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavosoglu told Kerry the government was in control of state institutions.

Kerry reiterated U.S. support for Turkey's democratically elected government, according to the State Department readout, and urged authorities to respect the rule of law and safeguard civilian life as they respond to the coup attempt. Kerry also said Turkey needed to respect due process as it investigates those it believes were involved in the plot.

Earlier, on a visit to Luxembourg, Kerry told reporters the U.S. would entertain an extradition request for Gulen if the Turks provided evidence of wrongdoing. Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government, but Washington has never found the claims compelling.

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gestures while speaking to the media during his and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov news conference following their long talks in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 15, 2016. (Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP)

"We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen," Kerry told reporters. "And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately."

Gulen is understood to maintain significant support among some members of the military and mid-level bureaucrats. His movement called Hizmet includes think tanks, schools and various media enterprises. Gulen and Erdogan only became estranged in recent years.

A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey was preparing a formal extradition request with detailed information about Gulen's involvement in illegal activities. He said the coup attempt was seen as "one more thing to add to an already extensive list."

In a statement, Gulen said he condemned, "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey" and sharply rejected any responsibility or knowledge of who might be involved.

At a news briefing Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, the cleric noted that he has been away from Turkey for more than 15 years and would not have returned if the coup had succeeded. He cited greater freedoms in the United States as a reason.

"In brief, I don't even know who my followers are," the frail-looking cleric said through an interpreter. "You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup."

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The coup failed after appearing not to have been backed by the most senior ranks of the military. Turkey's main opposition parties, too, condemned the attempted overthrow of the government. Prime Minister Benali Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the overnight violence. He said 2,839 plotters were detained.

Kerry said the U.S. had no indication beforehand of the coup attempt, which began as he and Russia's foreign minister were in a Russian government villa in Moscow, locked in negotiations over Syria.

"If you're planning a coup, you don't exactly advertise to your partners in NATO," Kerry said. "So it surprised everyone. It does not appear to be a very brilliantly planned or executed event."

Associated Press
The mocking began shortly after a memo leaked from Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's office revealing plans for a state-run news agency to distribute prepackaged articles for local papers.

"Pravda on the Plains," some called it, likening the idea to a Soviet-style propaganda machine. The state House speaker, a fellow Republican, brought a Russian dictionary to a news conference to poke fun at the plan. When Pence appeared on a popular conservative radio show to tamp down the controversy, the host begged him for assurances that nothing that "smells, sounds, tastes or looks anything like this is going to pop up again."

Pence soon withdrew the proposal - one of several politically damaging moments that pointed to a bigger problem of his tenure as governor. A series of reversals, such as championing and then pushing to change an anti-gay "religious freedom" law and changing his mind on whether to reject federal education money, chipped away at his standing with voters. And although Pence had run for office in 2012 as a restrained wonk focused on jobs and business despite his earlier reputation as an ideologue, he instead picked fights over conservative causes that strained relations with lawmakers.

While Donald Trump introduced his new running mate Saturday as "a highly talented executive leading the state of Indiana to jobs, growth and opportunity," the picture of Pence that emerges from his gubernatorial tenure shows a man who struggled under the spotlight to find his identity as a Republican within today's fractured versions of conservatism.

Pence's standing in his home state was so shaky that polls showed him in a neck-and-neck race for re-election in his heavily Republican state, with voters' memories of the religious freedom controversy that has come to symbolize Pence's tentative leadership.

"There was no real vision or follow-through on that issue," said Joshua Claybourn, an Evansville and Republican activist.

"If Mike Pence wanted to take a particular issue and carry it forward, it wasn't done successfully," added Claybourn, who recently resigned as a GOP convention delegate out of opposition to Trump. "There was a lack of controlling the agenda."

Brian Howey, an Indiana political analyst who runs the popular website Howey Politics Indiana, said Pence's ascent to the national stage is probably a relief for many of the state's Republicans, who feared that the governor's race was going to be a referendum on Pence's first term.

"The national Republicans seem to be completely overlooking the fact that he had a very controversial and polarizing first term in Indiana," he said.

Before he became governor, Pence, 57, spent 12 years in the U.S. House carving out an image as a conservative true-believer. He doubted climate change, supported the Iraq War and called for HIV-fighting funds to be redirected to programs that encouraged gays to "change their sexual behavior." He aligned himself closely with the tea party movement that helped propel the GOP to the House majority in 2010.

In Congress - one member out of 435 - it was easier to avoid situations that forced him to choose between different strands of conservatism.

When he ran to replace the popular and pragmatic Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), Pence played down his past as a culture warrior and emphasized his business credentials, unveiling a "Roadmap for Indiana" that promised lower taxes, less red tape and more affordable higher education.

"If we make job creation Job 1, Indiana will be the state that works," Pence said in a campaign commercial set in a factory.

He won, by three points.

Pence's staff in Indiana did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Trump on Saturday credited Pence for the state's falling unemployment rate, and other backers say Pence notched accomplishments in expanding Medicaid and prekindergarten while improving worker training and building a budget surplus.

"He's a quick study," said David Long (R), president of the Indiana state Senate, referring to Pence's transition in 2013 from a career in Congress to the governor's office. "By the end of his first year, I remember turning to people and saying, 'He's the governor.' You know? He's doing a great job, he's in charge, and he's grown in the position."

Pence, in accepting Trump's invitation Saturday, touted his state's healthy budget and job gains on his watch as evidence that "Republican principles work every time you put them into practice."

"In Indiana, we prove every day you can build a growing economy on balanced budgets, low taxes, even while making record investments in education, roads and health care," he said.

But as governor, Pence has found it harder than before to be steadily conservative, as parts of the old conservative coalition were moving steadily further apart.

The most famous example of that was the 2015 controversy over Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That bill protected business owners who, for reasons of religion, declined to provide services for same-sex couples. Pence signed it, after objections by gay-rights groups and threats by companies to pull business from the state.

After the signing, the objections increased.

Pence wound up in the national spotlight.

"Yes or no: If a florist in Indiana refuses to serve a gay couple at their wedding, is that legal now in Indiana?" George Stephanopoulos asked Pence on ABC's "This Week."

Pence's answer was not yes or no. Stephanopoulos asked again.

"George, look, the issue here is, you know, is tolerance a two-way street or not?" Pence said. At another point in the interview, Pence said, "George, look, we're not going to change the law, okay?"

A few days later, they changed it.

Pence signed a revised version saying that no business "may deny service to anyone on basis of sexual orientation, race, religion or disability." Pence continued, however, to say that the original law had been misunderstood.

Business groups were left feeling that Pence had been reactive, whiplashed by the legislature. Groups that had supported the law were left feeling that they'd been abandoned.

"This time it was the gay activists. Next time it might be the labor unions," pushing the governor to capitulate, said Micah Clark, of the American Family Association of Indiana, who said he supported Pence overall. "It's a bad way to pass laws, to say, 'We'll pass laws, but when the pressure comes, we'll reverse it a week later.' "

Pence has since signed other measures supported by religious conservatives, including a bill that outlawed abortions performed because the fetus was diagnosed with a disability. But the distrust from the 2015 religious freedom fight lingers.

"He's not just a coward, but a quisling," said Steve Deace, an Iowa radio host, referring to a Norwegian traitor who collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.

Gay-rights groups still viewed Pence with suspicion. Kevin Warren, a gay real-estate agent in Indianapolis, started selling yard signs and T-shirts that said, "Pence must go! (Your rights could be next)." He's raised $62,000 for an anti-Pence PAC.

"I cannot let people forget. I cannot let people forget what he's done to us as a community," Warren said. Overall, polls have shown that Pence's approval rating fell from the 60s to the 40s.

Pence has also struggled to reconcile his belief in limited government - "I was tea party before it was cool," he once said - with his own ambitions as governor.

In several cases, he was forced to reverse course.

One such embarrassing moment came after the Indianapolis Star broke the news of the Pence administration's plan for a state-run news agency.

Even the Republican state House speaker joined in the ribbing. "I do have a new Russian version that will be coming out shortly," speaker Brian Bosma told the Daily Beast. The Star reported that he used the Russian dictionary as a prop to crack that the program prompted him to direct his staff to work on their language skills.

Pence seemed caught off guard and not firmly in control of his own office as he sought to distance himself from a memo laying out plans for an extensive operation of editors and writers.

"How does an idea that's that antithetical to what you were setting out to do go that far?" radio talk show host Greg Garrison asked Pence when the governor appeared on air.

Pence called the idea a well-intentioned effort to promote transparency in government but said it was a staff effort that he learned about only in the media. "I had only passing knowledge of this project, as you might suspect," Pence said.

In the end, he killed it.

- - -

In another case, Pence first rejected federal funding to expand an early education program in Indiana - then reversed himself, more than a year later, as polls showed the program was popular. He asked for the money.

On a different issue, Pence started out in the other direction. When he proposed a 10 percent cut in the income tax rate, other Republicans thought that was too much and that they'd be left to fix the hole in the state's budget.

"We'd like to be heroes and cut taxes," said state Sen. Luke Kenley (R), a chief budget writer, at the time, according to local news accounts. "You also need to be prepared to take care of your priorities, and you need to have enough money to do that."

Pence said he'd barnstorm the state for his idea.

It didn't work.

The legislature eventually adopted a smaller cut than Pence had advocated, which he described as a "great victory."

Corporate support for Pence returned since the religious freedom debate. Many executives in the state credit Pence with continuing an era of economic advancement for Indiana.

"Gov. Pence has a strong record of supporting a pro-jobs, pro-economy agenda, including reducing our corporate income tax rate and maintaining a strong fiscal balance sheet for the state," said Kevin Brinegar, president and chief executive of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. "On core business issues, he has been very strong."

Still, Brinegar and other corporate leaders said that Pence's approach to the religious freedom bill and other social issues was a concern. "That was a disappointment to business," Brinegar said.

Michael Maurer, chairman of the board of the National Bank of Indianapolis and a former commerce secretary under Daniels, said Pence lost his support because of his "toxic positions" on social issues such as abortion, gay rights and his initial opposition to taking the federal education dollars.

"Every one of the CEOs that I have had an opportunity to discuss this with in Indiana says - to a man - that they have concern about Pence's approach on these social issues," Maurer said.

One case in which Pence angered conservatives - but did not reverse himself - had to do with Medicaid, the federal health-benefit program for the poor.

Pence accepted an Obama administration offer of federal money to expand Medicaid in Indiana. That meant taking advantage of the Affordable Care Act, the health-care overhaul that is hated by many conservatives - and that Pence has said he wants to repeal.

Pence added tweaks to Indiana's version, designed to make the law more conservative-friendly. Indiana, for instance, requires that poor residents pay some premiums for health coverage instead of getting it for free.

Pence's decision pleased Democrats.

Now, it may please them even more. With Pence on the ticket with Trump, Democrats would like to use this decision against him - to remind other Republicans about Pence's struggles to stay on the right side of conservative orthodoxy.

Asked on Friday about Pence's selection as the GOP vice-presidential nominee, White House press secretary Josh Earnest described him as the "Medicaid-expanding Mike Pence."
Crew leader Dan Swanson gives a tour of the Batavia Central Water Treatment Plant Saturday. This is one of the main control panels at the public utility. (Linda Girardi / The Beacon-News)

Residents got a rare look inside the Batavia central water treatment plant Saturday.

"With the Flint, Mich., water crisis people became concerned about their own drinking water," said Carolyn Burnham, chairperson of the Batavia Environmental Commission.

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The water supplies in Flint became tainted with lead in 2014.

"We are confident our drinking water is safe. Batavia has been ahead of the curve  the issues that Flint was dealing with, Batavia actually addressed years ago," Burnham said.

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Residents were invited to tour the public water utilities to see how the city's water resources  a blend of shallow-well and deep-well water  is purified and tested to ensure it is safe and palatable to drink before it is distributed to households.

One of the buildings filters the water for the removal of iron, manganese and hydrogen sulfide and then chlorinated, while water from the deep aquifer is processed in another building for the removal of radium.

Charlie Grimm, 5, gets a drink of water "fresh from the well" during a tour of the Batavia Central Water Treatment Plant Saturday. "I want my boys to see where their drinking water comes from," said Tim Grimm, of Batavia. (Linda Girardi / The Beacon-News)

"Flint, Mich., was a wake-up call for communities to start doing a better job of educating the public about lead in drinking water. We have been adding phosphates for 20 years, and we sample the water regularly for contaminants," said John Dillon, superintendent of water and sewer.

Dillon added that "by next year, you will probably see new regulations for testing."

According to Dillon, there is no lead in the municipal water supply. He said lead can enter drinking water when it comes in contact with lead products used in plumbing systems, such as the service lines that carry water from the city water mains to the house, lead-based solder used to connect copper pipes in homes and lead plumbing fixtures such as faucets.

He said Batavia has used an ortho-phosphate corrosion control chemical since the 1990s to help mitigate the effects of lead and copper corrosion. The ortho-phosphate provides a protective barrier on the interior of plumbing so the water does not come in contact with the lead or copper pipe materials, he said.

Dillon said homes built since 1986 were built without lead solder and pipes. "Lead pipes in Batavia were used from 1895 to the 1940s. Lead solder was used until 1986," Dillon said.

He said the city's first water system was built in 1894, and today, it has 150 miles of water main, along with thousands of hydrants and valves. Batavia pumps close to 3 million gallons of water per day, but summer peaks can be two times the average.

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Dillon said in 1992, the city decided to abandon some of the deep wells in the downtown used for 100 years and utilize the shallow-well aquifer located two miles west of Randall Road.

Crew leader Dan Swanson (right) gives a tour to residents at the Batavia Central Water Treatment Plant Saturday. (Linda Girardi / The Beacon-News)

"The shallow wells do not have naturally occurring radium like the deep-bed aquifers. We are blending the two aquifers before it is distributed to residents  it is the best of both worlds," Dillon said.

Dillon said as demand increases with population growth in northeastern Illinois, there may be a push for communities as far west as Batavia to get water from Lake Michigan, like communities in Cook and DuPage counties, or use the Fox River as a resource, as do the cities of Aurora and Elgin.

"In 50 years, Lake Michigan might be possible  using the Fox River is also possible," he said. "Illinois is known as a water-abundant state, but the well water that we rely on is not an infinite supply of water."

The last open house at the water treatment facilities was about 10 years ago, officials said.

Linda Girardi is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News
It is considered by many as one of America's greatest films. Yet there's always been controversy surrounding "Citizen Kane," including now, 75 years after it was released.

Who really wrote the screenplay?

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The 1941 movie garnered nine Academy Award nominations and took home the Oscar for best original screenplay for writer Herman Mankiewicz and star Orson Welles, who also directed the film.

Since then, however, several books and essays have tried to discredit Welles for his part in the screenplay, and give sole credit to Mankiewicz.

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And that doesn't set well with Batavia Public Library Director George Scheetz.

He even wrote a letter of rebuttal to the Smithsonian Magazine after it published an article this spring about the growing controversy surrounding "the most lauded American movie ever."

"How fitting that a film about the elusiveness of truth is the subject of endless argument," proclaimed the Smithsonian article headlined "Sparks Fly Over Tabloid Biz Flick."

The controversy centers around Mankiewicz's son Frank, former press secretary to Robert Kennedy who, in his memoir about his father , "So As I was Saying," claims Welles wrote "not one word" of the script.

But Scheetz says he was "disheartened" that the article continues to promote the controversy while making no mention of Robert L. Carringer.

With good reason.

Scheetz says he was a graduate student in library science at the University of Illinois back in 1978 when Carringer, with grant money in his pocket, asked him to be his research assistant on a book he was writing "about Orson Welles in general and 'Citizen Kane' in particular."

At the time, he and Carringer had "unrestricted access" to the archives from RKO Pictures, which included the day to day workings of the movie and the screenplay. Describing his role as "grunt work," Scheetz nevertheless found the project "quite interesting," as he and Carringer compared all the revisions to the script.

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That's when it became obvious, he said, that Welles' work on "Citizen Kane" was not only substantial, he was, in fact "they key author."

Scheetz says he's not sure why Welles' work has long been disputed, although it might go back to the fact the actor was considered somewhat of a dilettante, and that "Mankiewicz really did not like Welles and became more upset by him in the last years of his life."

Scheetz says the controversy only grew after influential film critic Pauline Kael's 1971 essay, "Raising Kane," that appeared in The New Yorker Magazine, questioned Welles' authorship. Although much of her essay was later discredited because of poor research, the debate continued.

Batavia Public Library Director George Scheetz points to research he worked on as a graduate student at the University of Illinois as evidence of Orson Welles' involvement with the controversial "Citizen Kane" screenplay. (Batavia Public Library / Handout)

Then along came Frank Mankiewicz's book defending his father's work and disputing even further Welles' influence.

The Batavia librarian pointed out in his letter to the Smithsonian, published last month, that Carringer "studied the collection of script records  almost a day to day record of the history of the scriptings that were still intact at RKO." And after reviewing "seven drafts they concluded evidence reveals Welles' contribution was not only significant but definitive."

Scheetz is also puzzled as to why there was no word in the Smithsonian article about Carringer's research "which at the time," he noted, "was groundbreaking."

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"I am a librarian," he said. "So the first thing I did when I read that Smithsonian article was to bring attention to the professor."

Scheetz says even before college, he was intrigued by "Citizen Kane" and gained an appreciation for Orson Welles not only as a filmmaker but "as a personality  albeit an eccentric one." And as he learned more about his films, he "became a fan."

The last time he watched "Citizen Kane?" Earlier this year.

Carringer and some associates, said Scheetz, actually owned one of the original Rosebud sleds for a time.

And yes, it still bothers him, he added, "when we learn, at the end, that Rosebud is the sled in the incinerator."

Dcrosby@tribpub.com
College of Lake County students looking to transfer to UIC will have an easier time under a new agreement reached by the two schools, officials said.

College of Lake County students looking to transfer to the University of Illinois at Chicago will have an easier time under a new three-year agreement between the two schools, officials said.

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The Grayslake-based community college has been increasing its collection of transfer guides, which provide guidelines to students looking to transfer to particular four-year programs, and establishing agreements that guarantee admissions into those programs.

The one reached this summer with UIC was the first to be pursued by CLC officials, said Christina Carpenter, dean of the counseling, advising and transfer center at CLC.

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CLC has also recently reached guaranteed-admission agreements with the American Business School in Paris, Arizona State University, DePaul University, Eastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Herzing University, North Central College, Northeastern Illinois University, Olivet Nazarene University, Trinity International University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's College of Engineering.

Carpenter added the biggest difference between the agreement with UIC and the ones it has with other institutions is that it starts the student's relationship with the four-year institution through advisers and other resources while they're still at CLC.

"This a real plus for our students," Carpenter said.

The three-year agreement also defines what criteria students need to meet in order to be automatically accepted into undergraduate programs at UIC's colleges of architecture, design and the arts; business administration, engineering, liberal arts and sciences; and urban planning and public affairs, according to a news release.

The college had a previous agreement with UIC that included guidelines for students interested in studying engineering but it didn't guarantee admissions, Carpenter said.

The agreements are part of a larger push by community colleges across the country to boost their completion rates through streamlined and fast-track degree programs and agreements with four-year institutions.

A 2015 study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found 38.1 percent of first-time college students who enrolled at a public community college in the fall of 2009 earned a credential from a two- or four-year institution within six years compared to 61.1 percent of students who started at a four-year college the same year.

Carpenter said the College of Lake County will continue to encourage students undecided about their futures to explore options, but the transfer agreements help advisers connect with students earlier in the process. Classes that don't earn students college credit, or don't work toward their ultimate goal, can drive up costs and increase the odds of frustrated students giving up, she said.

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These programs can also help the college build its enrollment of international students by giving greater assurances to visa sponsors that students will be able complete the programs, she said.

About a quarter of College of Lake County students transfer to another institution, according to CLC data.

Nearly 200 former CLC students were enrolled at the University of Illinois-Chicago over the 2014-15 school year, making it one of the top five public institutions CLC students transfer to, Provost Richard Haney said in a news release.

The college is trying to build a "culture of transfer," getting professors to talk about how the classes they teach fit into larger transfer tracks and putting signs up around the college to raise awareness, Carpenter said.

"If they don't know anything about it, they don't know what to ask," she said.

emcoleman@tribpub.com

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Twitter @mekcoleman
Sonam Doje's dream came true when he secured a job as a teacher of Tibetan medicine shortly after he graduated from university in June.

"When I was a child, there was no hospital in the village. Little ailments often worsened into big troubles and even became fatal," said Doje, who is preparing to leave home for his job in Chamdo Prefecture, Tibet.

His dream to be a medical teacher originated in his home province of Qinghai, which neighbors Tibet. "I longed to learn Tibetan medicine, spread the knowledge, and save lives in Tibet's herding areas."

Doje entered Qinghai University's School of Tibetan Medicine in 2011. "Five years of study, at school and in hospitals, taught me a lot about the ancient practice, and I'm eager to start working," he said.

Nearly all 51 graduates from Doje's class have secured jobs. His classmate U'Maigya is now a doctor at the Hospital of Tibetan Medicine in Qinghai's provincial capital Xining.

"Girls rarely had any chance to enter university in the past, let alone work as doctors," said U'Maigya.

Today, however, women graduates like U'Maigya are very popular at hospitals in Qinghai and Tibet.

"Some of our best doctors are women," said Goin Qoiyang, a senior Tibetan herbalist at the Hospital of Tibetan Medicine in Qinghai.

Tibetan medicine was traditionally taught at monasteries and the best doctors were often high monks, he said. "In those days, women were rarely given the opportunity to learn medicine."

"Tibetan medicine is evolving into a multi-disciplinary subject. Its further development needs university graduates who are well-grounded in Tibetan medicine as well as modern science," according to Goin.

Altogether, 151 students graduated from Qinghai University's School of Tibetan Medicine this summer. They majored in the five disciplines of Tibetan medical practise, Tibetan herbs, nursing, public health administration and modern medicine.

"About 85 percent of them have secured jobs in Qinghai Province and the rest have chosen to work in Tibet, or the neighboring Gansu and Sichuan provinces," said Ma Xueyuan, dean of the university's Tibetan medicine department.

Instead of securing a job in a hospital, Doje Cedain joined a Tibetan pharmaceutical group in Gansu Province. "I think it's a promising career, as an increasing number of patients nationwide are seeking Tibetan-style treatment for chronic diseases," he said.

The total output value of traditional Tibetan medicine has topped 1.3 billion yuan (201 million U.S. dollars), thanks to growing demand across China for the ancient herbal therapy.

There are now 18 pharmaceutical companies in Tibet alone, including two public companies.

Tibetan medicine, known as "Sowa Rigpa" in Tibetan, is at least 2,300 years old. It has absorbed the influences of traditional Chinese, Indian and Arab medicine and is mainly practised in Tibet and the Himalayan region.

It uses herbs, minerals and sometimes insects and animal parts. It was put on the official list of China's national intangible cultural heritage in 2006.
A total of 5,000 people -- the maximum allowed -- were expected to attend the 4th annual Naperville Ale Fest Saturday at the Naper Settlement. (David Sharos, Naperville Sun)

A record number of people turned out to sample a record number of craft beers at the 4th annual Naperville Ale Fest, held Saturday at Naper Settlement.

The beautiful summer weather helped bring out the crowds, said organizer Josh Seago, who estimated they would near their 5,000-person event capacity.

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"Last year it was 98-degrees with a heat index over 100 and it was miserable being out  even to drink beer," Seago said.

The four-hour event featured 104 beer companies handing out 3-ounce samples of more than 220 types of beer as well as a number of ciders. For a flat $50 entrance fee, attendees are given tickets to sample up to 18 beers or ciders.

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"We usually have about 100 vendors each of the four years we've done this, but this year there were a few new vendors that are really trending as far as their products go, and we wanted to include them," Seago said. "We've added a lot of 'session beers,' those that are lower in alcohol, as well as close to 20 ciders and those clean and crisp summer beers people enjoy now."

They also made a concerted effort to step up the food offerings this year, he said.

"We're featuring six food trucks, including the 'Happy Lobster,' which is featuring fresh lobster that was flown in for their lobster rolls, a Brazilian steak house and four local restaurants for a more upscale pairing of food with the beer," Seago said.

Greg Gaardbo and his wife Kristina brought their Palatine-based Rockin' Rodizio food truck, which offers pork chops, bacon and other meats that aren't smoked but "fire kissed," Greg Gaardbo said.

"We brought 300 pounds of bacon and 300 of sausage, and we're going to ramp up more next year," Gaardbo said.

The fest also featured music by Miles Nielsen, son of recent Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Rick Nielsen, lead guitarist for Rockford-based Cheap Trick.

The cooler temperatures were the first thing Kyle Budd, of Naperville, noted when comparing this year's fest to last year.

"We had a great time, but it was over 100 with the heat index," he said. "We've got a much better day."

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With so many beers to choose from, Budd said there was no science to selecting the ones he would try other than he was hoping to "pick a winner."

"We look for anything that stands out," he said.

Kyle's sister-in-law, Lucy Budd, said she was enjoying the sour beers, including an apricot-flavored one she sampled from a vendor named Destihl.

"This is kind of a one-stop beer shop, and it's fun to try small amounts and not have to go and buy a whole six-pack," she said.

Her husband, Kevin Budd, said he likes that the ale fest "supports local breweries."

"You look around here, and most of these places are maybe 30 to 40 miles away," he said. "I appreciate the local focus."

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Mike Murphy, a brewer for Naperville's Solemn Oath brewery, said he brought six kegs to the fest.

"We've been here the last three years, and want to be here for a hometown event," Murphy said. "Even though craft beers have been around quite a while, I feel there is still a lot of educating to do. We still get asked everyday what an IPA is."

Chrissy Gentile, of Homer Glen, said she believes more woman drink beer today than years ago, and credits that to the craft beer explosion.

"It's sort of like wine, where they are so many varieties to try," she said. "I think craft beer is kind of becoming the same thing."

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for the Naperville Sun.
Anthony Clark leads a group in a chant of "More Love, Less Hate" as they arrive at Madison Street and Marengo Avenue in Forest Park. Clark, an Oak Park River Forest High School teacher, organized a "March to Madison" peaceful protest against racism and discrimination. (Jon Langham / Pioneer Press)

Speaking to a group of more than 100 demonstrators Saturday night, a 71-year-old Oak Park resident, who said she marched in the Civil Rights movement decades ago, said it's "absolutely ridiculous" that individuals must continue to take a stand against racism and discrimination in their communities.

Eena Aikens, a grandmother of two, told the dozens who gathered for a peaceful march against racism and discrimination in Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park, that she's worried about the way her black 13-year-old grandson will be perceived by the community, especially as he grows older.

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"My grandson likes to ride his bike, and it makes me nervous," she said in interview following the demonstration. "When more than two kids are on bikes, it raises eyebrows in the neighborhood. ... I'm just being realistic."

The march, which began at Oak Park River Forest High School and ended on Madison Street outside the Forest Park Music Fest, was led by OPRF teacher Anthony Clark. Clark said he organized the demonstration to raise awareness of racism and discrimination in Chicago's suburban communities.

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The high school educator teared up as he spoke to the substantial crowd - a diverse mix of ages and races  gathered outside the high school Saturday evening.

Oak Park River Forest High School teacher Anthony Clark organized a "March to Madison" peaceful protest against racism and discrimination. (Jon Langham / Pioneer Press)

"You can't be neutral when it comes to equity and peace," Clark told the crowd. He urged the group to remain peaceful, to not respond to any incendiary comments they may elicit from passersby and also thanked the Oak Park Police Department for their collaboration on the event.

"We're happy to be here tonight to make sure everyone can deliver their message .. in a safe and effective way," Oak Park Police Cmdr. Joseph Waitzman said.

More people joined the group as they marched toward Forest Park. Motorists honked in support, and pedestrians waved and cheered as they passed by. A man riding a bike alongside the marchers spat on a police car and was immediately rebuked by a crowd of demonstrators for his action.

The marchers chanted "no justice, no peace," and "more love, less hate" at various intervals, while demonstrators hoisted signs in support of their cause. One read: "To be neutral is to be complicit."

The catalyst for the demonstration was an incident that allegedly occurred at a bar in Forest Park. Oak Park resident Pem Hessing, who attended the Saturday night demonstration, said she was at a bar last weekend with several of her friends, and they requested that the DJ working at the time play some 1990s-era hip-hop. Hessing said her friends overheard the DJ say he didn't want to play any hip-hop music because it would attract black people to the establishment.

Hessing's friend, Cynthia Martz, said she reported the comment to the bar's manager, who told her the DJ was not a direct employee of the bar and did not apologize for the remarks. She said she was "appalled" that the manager didn't offer an apology or try to rectify the issue.

Hessing posted on Facebook about the incident, and it quickly went viral, spreading to various Oak Park-centric Facebook pages. She said the responses have been mixed.

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"I wanted people to be aware of what businesses they choose to frequent. I had this bad experience, and I wanted people to know about this experience," Hessing said.

In light of the incident, Clark drafted a pledge for local businesses to sign stating that they would do everything in their power to prevent racism and discrimination in their establishments and to address any instances of either alongside community members and advocates. Of the 40 businesses he visited on Lake and Madison Streets, only 17 agreed to sign the pledge, he said.

Clark said he wasn't interested in calling out the business who refused to sign the pledge, but would make it a point to patronize those that did, and encouraged the crowd to do so as well.

A Hillside resident who participated in the march, Latylia Gilbert, said it's not an uncommon experience for her to feel singled out in a business because of her race. Gilbert, who is black, said she was encouraged by the diverse turnout at the demonstration.

"I'm hoping by this happening more and more often that it will open the eyes of those who don't believe (discrimination and racism) goes on," she said, referring to the march.

Comedian Vicky Victoria, an Oak Park resident, who marched with the group, said she hails from a "blended family." Her mother is Asian and a Buddhist, her father is African and a Muslim, and her step family is white, she said.

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When her non-black relatives refuse to acknowledge that racism exists, it's "painful," and that their silence on the issue serves to worsen the problem, Victoria said.

Victoria, who heard about the demonstration via social media, said she moved to Oak Park two years ago because of its diversity.

"This, to me, is giving back to my community. I've sat idle for too long," she said.

Matt Baron, president of the Oak Park Public Library Board, attended the demonstration with his wife, Bridgett, and their 13-year-old twins. He said it wouldn't sit right with his conscience if he were to sit out the march, because to remain silent on discrimination and racism would make him and his family "part of the problem."

Bridgett Baron said it was important for the couple to bring their children to the demonstration, and to explain to them that "their black male friends in a couple of years are going to be viewed differently." She said she wants to teach her children about racism and how to be advocates for their black peers.

At the conclusion of the protest, Aikens said she was so happy she came, even though she was worried she wouldn't be able to complete the hour-long walk. Before the demonstrators dispersed, she told the crowd that she would continue to fight against discrimination and racism in any way she can.

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"Anything I can do, I will continue to do until the day I die," Aikens said.

Lee V. Gaines is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
Well-known actress Zhao Wei was forced to remove her leading star Leon Dai from her second directorial venture, No Other Love, for his alleged pro-Taiwan-independence stance. The actress said all the scenes that had been shot with the Taiwanese actor will be reshot.

Zhao took a lot of flak since April for signing Dai, who reportedly took part in several pro-Taiwan independence activities. The controversy boiled over after Zhao posted pictures of her cast and crew on June 27. Netizens called for a boycott of the film.

Dai denied being a separatist, claiming he was only concerned about social problems. The films official Weibo account reposted his statement but it failed to appease the protesters who insisted that Dai openly come out and say Taiwan belongs to China. Dai didnt.

Yesterday, the makers of the film released a statement saying the director and the investors had decided to replace him. We did not carry out a thorough investigation on his political background, which caused much anger and criticism. We have ordered Dai to make his stance clear. But he preferred to remain ambiguous, the statement said. We are sorry for the oversight ... We firmly stand by the unity of China.

Zhao also issued a personal apology. We cant have an ambiguous attitude in matters of right and wrong. I am a Chinese and I will never forget it, she said.
The Jihadist violence grew as it does traditionally in the Ramadan period, which is supposed to be one of peace and self-reflection. First there was Orlando. A crazed, self-hating homophobic Afghan-American went on a crazed rampage in a club, committing one of the worst mass murders in the history of United States. The traditional media narrative blamed it on American gun culture, claiming if guns were taken away from the public, these murders would stop.

When I saw the familiar response of flowers, candle light vigils and lots of "sending love and solidarity" on social media, I didn't even feel sympathetic. First of all, before the killer in Orlando was even apprehended, it was pinned on generic gun violence, but the moment it was found out this was a jihadist attack all the solidarity evaporated. Similar things are now seen after the Dhaka attack. Lots of social media grief and vows to stop this ever growing atrocity, but no concrete plans and no policy reshaping.

It is the attack in Dhaka that is the most dangerous. Since the creation of Bangladesh, the country has been a secular hub. Even though it is a Muslim majority country, Bangladesh is a beacon of democracy in the Islamic world. This is due to the fact that Bengalis have a pragmatic culture that is secular and moderately liberal in its outlook, which has its origin in the Bengali renaissance

However that seems to be changing. And the ramification of the rise of Islamism is relevant to India, China and greater Asia.

Nobody was really surprised by the massive attack in Dhaka. The signs were already there. For the past two years, murders of liberal secular atheist bloggers have continued without action being taken to stop them. Then the attacks turned against Hindu and Christian minorities. The Bangladeshi government, beset with policy paralysis and domestic chaos, again turned a blind eye. This attack, no matter how brutal it was, was inevitable and expected. The Indian intelligence services, Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW in short, also warned of attacks against Indian and foreign nationals but of course, Bangladesh is a sovereign country beyond the realms of the operational mandate of Indian counter-terrorism forces.

The result could be severe. Bangladesh is a major stable country and it stands in the middle of a corridor of different powers in Asia. It has easy access to Myanmar, China and Thailand, not to mention India. In fact, India shares a porous border with Bangladesh. If Bangladesh turns into an Islamist stronghold, one can only imagine how that would have potential to spread across the region. Let's analyze the connections in the region. Myanmar is beset with insurgency, a significant amount of which comes from Rohingya community, who have links with Thai insurgent groups and the Moro Islamic Front in Philippines. If they found a safe hold in Bangladesh, they could start a nascent insurgency that might transcend borders and pour into India, possibly even destabilizing Kashmir and China's western provinces via Nepal.

More importantly, the ISIS insurgency in Bangladesh might have auxiliary ramifications. If violence continues against Hindus in Bangladesh, retaliation against Muslims in India might be the result. Even if there is no violence, it will inevitably embolden the right-wing ultra-nationalist section of the ruling center right party, and that might have a spill-over effect on Indian foreign and military strategy, instigating a security dilemma in Asia.

It is therefore imperative that Bangladesh remains stable and secure. Some solid steps could be taken immediately. Intelligence cooperation should be increased among all the great powers including India, China and United States. Human intelligence and surveillance and monitoring needs to be strengthened as well as the active monitoring of people and anyone suspicious or with sympathies to the cause of Islamic jihadism. Finally, an active counter-terrorism action needs to be started.

Candle lights vigils don't win wars, and neither does lofty rhetoric on Twitter. For greater stability in the region, all powers must come together and face the threat that's knocking at the gate.

Sumantra Maitra is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SumantraMaitra.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors only, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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Premier Li Keqiang chats animatedly with Mongolian president Elbegdorj and German Chancellor Merkel before the leaders attending the 11th ASEM summit take group picture on July 15.[Photo/China News Service]

In Mongolia over the weekend, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's effort to promote China's stance on the South China Sea issue received broad support during the 11th Asian-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit.

Li said Saturday before he returned to China that the South China Sea arbitration award will have no impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime interests.

Speaking in an informal meeting during the summit, Li said the South China Sea issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions from the very beginning, or be included in the summit's agenda.

"But since certain countries commented on the issue, it is thus necessary for China to come out to clarify its stance and spell out the truth," he said.

Li said China has never participated in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines, adding that his country neither accepts nor acknowledges the so-called arbitration award.

"By doing so, we are both exercising our rights in accordance with international law, and safeguarding the dignity of international law," he said.

"Under no circumstance will the arbitration award exert any impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea," Li added.

The Chinese premier said China remains committed to settling the South China Sea disputes via dialogue and consultation with countries directly involved on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international law, so as to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.

This is the first time the Chinese premier has made an open statement on the South China Sea issue at an international forum following the South China Sea arbitration award issued Tuesday.

Li did not include the issue in his keynote speech at the start of the two-day summit. However, faced with certain nations' attempts to stir up tension and interfere in the South China Sea issue in the summit, Li expounded China's stance of non-acceptance of and non-participation in the arbitration proceedings, as part of his diplomatic offensive.

In a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc Thursday, Li said the South China Sea issue should be solved through bilateral negotiations between relevant parties in line with historical facts, international law and the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).

One day later, he told Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen that China will work with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to protect regional peace and stability as well as the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

Follow China.org.cn on Twitter and Facebook to join the conversation.
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The Islamic State (IS)-linked news agency Amaq claimed responsibility for the attack in Nice on Thursday that killed 84 people, reported French media.

"The executor of the deadly operation in Nice, France, was a soldier of the IS", said Amaq, cited by several French media.

"He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations, which fought the IS," said Amaq.
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Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the Standing Committee of National People's Congress (NPC) and Ji Bingxuan, vice chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, met Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly of Pakistan Murtaza Javed Abbasi, who is currently on a visit to China, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on July 15, 2016.

Zhang and Ji termed Pakistan and China as "Iron Friends" and "All Weather Strategic Partners." They commended Pakistan's 'One China Policy' and its consistent support on issues of concern to China. The Chinese side reiterated its understanding and support for Pakistan's stance on the Kashmir issue and expressed support for developmental initiatives of the Government of Pakistan.

During the meetings, Abbasi termed friendly relations with China as a key priority for Pakistan. He expressed the hope that frequent parliamentary exchanges and people-to-people contacts would further strengthen this historically robust bilateral relationship. He reiterated Pakistan's longstanding 'One China Policy' and expressed appreciation of China's stance onthe South China Sea issue.

The two sides reiterated their commitment to the timely completion of projects under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and expressed satisfaction on the progress of ongoing projects. Abbasi highlighted the complete consensus in Pakistan on the importance of CPEC and on Pakistan-China relations. The two sides agreed on the need for frequent parliamentary exchanges at the various levels with the aim to further strengthening the bonds of friendship between the two countries. They also decided to set up joint parliamentary groups in areas of mutual interest.

Deputy Speaker Abbasi is leading a multi-party parliamentary delegation to China on the invitation of Chairman, NPC. The visit is a part of regularparliamentary exchanges between the parliaments of the two countries.
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Turkey's prime minister said on Saturday that at least 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the coup attempt that swept the country on Friday night but was foiled by Saturday morning.

Binali Yildirim was speaking outside his Cankaya palace in Ankara and accompanied by top general Hulusi Akar who was held during the coup attempt.

As many as 2,839 soldiers are now detained over suspicion of involvement in the failed coup.

"Those who form the backbone of the coup have been taken into custody and arrests are still being made," Yildirim said.

He vowed to consider enacting a death penalty, which is not included in Turkey's constitution, "to make sure this will not happen again."

The prime minister added that a parliamentary meeting will be held later in the day to discuss the coup attempt.

He warned any country against supporting Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose followers are blamed for the coup.

A country that will stand by cleric Gulen won't be a friend of Turkey and will be considered at war with Turkey, he pointed out.

Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile in the United States for years.
Editor's note: Spending in Beijing is relatively cheap. If you were to visit the city, how could you spend 100 yuan? Many people might think of Beijing's famous spots such as the Great Wall and Forbidden City, however, ticket prices are high. The following list plans a route for visitors to explore another side of Beijing.

1. Breakfast in Beijing

A good morning should start with a delightful breakfast. Beijing has different choices for breakfast. The price is usually within 10 yuan and keeps you full. The food in photo is called Jianbing, a traditional Chinese street food similar to crepes. [Photo by Yu Winglam/China.org.cn]

Price: 8 yuan
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Chinese nationals evacuated from South Sudan applaud members of Chinese Embassy in Sudan for their help at the international airport of Khartoum, capital of Sudan, on July 15, 2016. Fifty-four Chinese nationals evacuated from the conflict-hit South Sudan and arrived in Khartoum of Sudan on Friday. [Xinhua]

China on Saturday evacuated some of its embassy staff and some citizens trapped in the recent fighting in South Sudanese capital, Juba.

Major General Su Guanghui, acting director of the Peacekeeping Affairs Office of the Chinese Defense Ministry, and his delegation who arrived Saturday morning in Juba evacuated 17 embassy staff, 12 members of the Chinese medical team and 20 people from Chinese companies.

The relieved team from the conflict-hit country aboard a special plane organized by the authorities in Beijing was received by Chinese Ambassador to Uganda Zhao Yali at Entebbe International Airport, about 40 kilometers south of the capital Kampala, on their way home.

"I felt proud, relieved and safe when I boarded the special plane organized by the Chinese government. I thank our government for organizing and sending this plane to evacuate us," Jiang Feiyun, deputy leader of the Chinese medical team in Juba, told Xinhua in Entebbe.

The evacuation is part of the emergency measures the Chinese government is taking to protect its citizens in the recent fighting between government troops of President Salva Kiir and forces loyal to Vice President Riek Machar in Juba.

Two Chinese peacekeepers under the UN Mission in South Sudan were killed and four others injured on last Sunday evening as the fighting between government and anti-government forces continued.

The two seriously injured peacekeepers, Chen Ying and Huo Yahui, were on Saturday afternoon airlifted to Beijing aboard a specialist medical rescue plane sent by the Chinese military for specialized treatment and operations.

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Pakistani human rights activists hold placards as they chant slogans during a protest in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, on May 30, 2014 [Xinhua]

Honor killing has claimed the life of another victim in Pakistan Friday, as a female social media celebrity known for posting controversial content was strangled by her brother.

Qandeel Baloch, 26, had a reputation for being Pakistan's first social media celebrity, and was also dubbed Pakistan's Kim Kardashian. She became a household name in the Islamic Republic in 2014 for posting bold pictures, videos or comments, which attracted criticism as well as support.

Her pictures, including some showing her in revealing clothes, were considered by many Pakistanis as "immodest," a view shared by her brothers, who had asked her to quit modelling.

Baloch's parents, who have been taken into custody, told local media that Baloch was killed in Punjab Province after an argument with her brother and her body was not found until the next morning.

Local media reported that Baloch had previously expressed fear for her safety, but her plea for better security was ignored by the authorities.

Honor killing is not uncommon in Pakistan as many people believe it's justified to punish a person who has brought shame to the family name. Victims of this tradition are mostly women.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday reiterated a call for his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama to hand over the leader of an opposition movement accused of being behind the coup attempt in Turkey.

A total of 265 people were killed in the coup attempt.

"Please meet our request if we are strategic partners," Erdogan said in remarks delivered in Istanbul.

The Turkish leader has blamed the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Islamic scholar living in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, for the unsuccessful coup that started on Friday night.

"I asked you previously either to deport him or surrender him to Turkey," Erdogan said, referring to Obama. "I told you that he is considering the coup d'etat, but you didn't listen."

The Turkish leader's audience chanted, demanding "the execution of Fethullah."

Ankara has been accusing the Gulen Movement of running a parallel state and trying to topple the Turkish government.

As many as 2,839 Turkish troops are now detained over suspected involvement in the failed coup, but Erdogan stated that "The Turkish army does not belong to the parallel structure."

The president urged his audience to shun schools run by the Gulen Movement for their children.

Erdogan's extradition request is expected to further heighten tensions between Anraka and Washington, as the NATO allies have long been in dispute over the treatment of Kurds in Syria.

At least 265 people were killed. An official said 161 of them were mostly civilians and police officers, while the remaining 104 were coup supporters.
JINAN - An elevator fell from the 18th floor of a construction site and left eight people dead in East China's Shandong province Friday evening, the local government said Saturday.

There were eight people in the elevator when it fell from the 18th floor of an apartment building under construction in Longkou city at around 6:30 pm on Friday, the city government said in a statement.

They were immediately rushed to hospitals but none survived, the statement said.
LHASA -- An avalanche in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region on Sunday morning buried nine people, local authorities said.

Snow up to eight meters deep fell on a grazing point some 300 km from the seat of Rutog County, Ngari Prefecture, at around 11 a.m., according to the prefectural government.

The local government has dispatched rescuers and equipment to the scene.

Rutog County is in the northwestern part of Tibet, with an average elevation of 4,500 meters (about 14,800 feet).
Vocational education in China is becoming more attractive to foreign students, though there's still some work to be done that will add to its appeal and international reputation, according to educators in the field.

A total of 3,847 students from overseas studied at 69 Chinese vocational colleges during the 2015 academic year, up almost 40 percent from the year before, when only 50 vocational colleges had international students on campus, a recent report found.

The report, released in Beijing on Friday by the Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences and education research company MyCOS Institute, found that the reputation of China's vocational colleges is growing. Some of the colleges are having an international impact through their excellence in areas such as electronics, mechanics, architecture and rail transit.

"By cooperating with educational institutions overseas, these Chinese vocational colleges will play a special and important role in the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative," the report said, citing colleges in China's border regions and provinces, including the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, as examples.

"Some vocational colleges in Guangxi make full use of their geographic position and strong courses to attract lots of students from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations," the report said.

The skills acquired and techniques learned are usually urgently needed for the economic development of the students' home countries and are helpful in helping graduates land high-paying jobs.

However, 3,847 remains small by comparison with other college programs. Almost 400,000 students from overseas studied in China last year. Some Chinese universities that are popular with international students, such as Beijing Language and Culture University, Peking University and University of International Business and Economics each has thousands of international students on campus in any given year.

So the challenge for vocational colleges seems stark.

Ma Shuchao, former deputy director of Shanghai Academy of Educational Sciences, said many vocational courses, such as Chinese cooking, are very attractive to international students who are interested in the culture.

"However, after hearing that the courses last for only three years and culminate in a vocational certificate, many give up on the idea of coming because they prefer a four-year experience that delivers a bachelor's degree," Ma said.

Zhang Huibo, president of Ningbo Polytechnic, a vocational college in Zhejiang province, said some national-level scholarships and funds, such as the Chinese Government Scholarship, are only provided to international students at some universities in China.

"Study at a vocational college is excluded," Zhang said. "If international students could get more financial support from the Chinese government for vocational education, I believe their number would increase greatly."

zhaoxinying@chinadaily.com.cn
Chen Ying, Chinese peacekeeper in South Sudan, was carried down a medical rescue plane in Beijing, capital of China, July 17, 2016. The two seriously injured peacekeepers, Chen Ying and Huo Yahui, were airlifted to Beijing aboard a specialist medical rescue plane sent by the Chinese military for specialized treatment and operations. Two Chinese peacekeepers under the UN Mission in South Sudan were killed and four others injured on last Sunday evening as the fighting between government and anti-government forces continued. [Photo/Xinhua]

BEIJING - Two Chinese UN peacekeepers who were seriously injured in South Sudan landed in Beijing midday Sunday onboard a medical rescue plane.

Chen Ying and Huo Yahui have been admitted to an army hospital, military sources said.

Two peacekeepers were killed and five injured on the evening of July 10 after a mortar shell hit their armored vehicle during fighting between two army factions in Juba, capital of South Sudan.

Chen and Huo were seriously injured, while the others sustained mild injuries.

The other peacekeepers are receiving treatment in Kampala, capital of Uganda.

It was the first time the People's Liberation Army sent a medical rescue aircraft to rescue injured UN peacekeepers. The aircraft, with three crew and a small team of medical workers, can transport two seriously ill patients and has the equipment and manpower to treat serious cases during the flight.

The remains of Li Lei and Yang Shupeng, who were killed in the incident, were airlifted to Uganda on Friday. They are expected to be returned to China early next week.
The headquarter of Tencent in Shenzhen. [File photo]

Chinese internet giant Tencent has reportedly agreed to acquire China's leading online music provider "China Music Corp" for roughly $2.7 billion.

Tencent already holds 16 percent of company shares at this point.

Its holding will be up to 60 percent after the completion of the deal.

Tencent is said to be planning a merger between its own online music service QQ Music and China Music Corp in a move to create a dominant player in the domestic market.

Sources familiar with the matter say the new business, valued at around $6 billion, will be operated as a subsidiary of Tencent.

China Music Corp had been planning an initial public offering in the US.

The move has been put on hold as a result of the new deal.

Data compiled by market research firm iiMedia show China had nearly 450 million mobile-music users in this year's Q1, the world's biggest market in this field.

Related:

Digitizing the Forbidden City, one emperor at a time
ISTANBUL - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday reiterated a call for his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama to hand over the leader of an opposition movement accused of being behind the coup attempt in Turkey.

A total of 265 people were killed in the coup attempt.

"Please meet our request if we are strategic partners," Erdogan said in remarks delivered in Istanbul.

The Turkish leader has blamed the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Islamic scholar living in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, for the unsuccessful coup that started on Friday night.

"I asked you previously either to deport him or surrender him to Turkey," Erdogan said, referring to Obama. "I told you that he is considering the coup d'etat, but you didn't listen."

The Turkish leader's audience chanted, demanding "the execution of Fethullah."

Ankara has been accusing the Gulen Movement of running a parallel state and trying to topple the Turkish government.

As many as 2,839 Turkish troops are now detained over suspected involvement in the failed coup, but Erdogan stated that "The Turkish army does not belong to the parallel structure."

The president urged his audience to shun schools run by the Gulen Movement for their children.

Erdogan's extradition request is expected to further heighten tensions between Anraka and Washington, as the NATO allies have long been in dispute over the treatment of Kurds in Syria.

At least 265 people were killed. An official said 161 of them were mostly civilians and police officers, while the remaining 104 were coup supporters.
Tung Chee-hwa, vice-chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and former Chief Executive of Hong Kong SAR, addresses a keynote speech at the Public International Law Colloquium on Maritime Disputes Settlement at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center in Hong Kong, on July, 15 2016. [Photo by Roy Liu/China Daily]

HONG KONG - Tung Chee-hwa, vice-chairman of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said on Friday that there is ample evidence for China to reject the "award" rendered on July 12 in the South China Sea arbitration established at the unilateral request of the Philippine government.

Delivering a keynote speech at the Public International Law Colloquium on Maritime Disputes Settlement, Tung said China has indeed adhered to international legal norms in the South China Sea dispute.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has provided its signatories with an option to make an exception in cases concerning maritime boundary delimitation, with more than 30 countries have taken the option including UN Security Council permanent members Britain, France and Russia, Tung said.

On this basis, Tung said, China ratified the Convention in 1996, when it made a declaration reaffirming its sovereignty over all its archipelagos and islands, including those in the South China Sea.

In 2006, China made another declaration, under Article 298 of the Convention, that any maritime boundary delimitation issues are excluded from the jurisdiction of any dispute resolution mechanism under the Convention.

Another reason for China declined to attend the arbitration proceedings is that, in 2002, a Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea was agreed, promoting bilateral negotiation among the disputing nations over sovereignty issues, and calling for the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea for all nations of the world in accordance to UNCLOS.

"To have attended the arbitration proceedings at the Hague would undermine a process that has long been in place to resolve the dispute in a bilateral and peaceful manner," Tung said.

Furthermore, UNCLOS rules clearly provide that, until the bilateral discussions have been exhausted, a country should not approach the Permanent Court of Arbitration to adjudicate border disputes, Tung added.

Tung also talked about the historical evidence to support China's sovereignty over the South China Sea, saying the Chinese discovered Nansha Islands with the earliest archaeological evidence of their use dating back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years.

In more recent history towards the end of the World War II, there emerges ample, clear and convincing evidence that China has sovereignty over the Nansha Islands.

This evidence has been recognized by the international community, including the United States. These can be found in very important international treaties and declarations including the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration, he said.

"Whilst a strategic intend is to pursue peace above all, China will firmly and steadfastly pursue the protection of her territorial integrity," Tung said, emphasizing peace is precious and stands above all and China would like to resolve territorial disputes peacefully.

Tung also criticized the US for frequently carrying out military exercises in the South China Sea, sometimes in conjunction with the military of another claimant to the disputed region, which helps to consolidate suspicions of many Chinese people that the US pivot to Asia is to contain China.

He said the best way to demonstrate this is for the US to persuade the Philippine government to positively engage with the Chinese government on resolving the territorial dispute.

"It is well recognized that the China-US relationship today is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Economically, the relationship is becoming more and more interdependent in terms of trade and investment," he said.
Naval chiefs from China and the United States are set to hold their first face-to-face meeting since the July 12 ruling on the arbitration case brought by the Philippines, which has intensified tensions in the South China Sea.

US Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson was to start his first visit to China from Sunday to Wednesday, during which he will meet with Admiral Wu Shengli, commander of the Chinese navy, according to a US Navy news release on July 14.

Washington has been pressing Beijing to accept the arbitration ruling by The Hague that challenges China's sovereignty in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, the Chinese navy has conducted drills near Xisha Islands in the sea this month.

The goal of Richardson's trip is to "improve mutual understanding and encourage professional interaction", the release said. It added that the South China Sea dispute, the ongoing Rim of the Pacific exercise and navy-to-navy collaboration will be high on the agenda.

After meetings in Beijing, Richardson will also visit Qingdao, Shandong province, to see the navy's submarine academy and tour China's first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning.

The Chinese government did not provide further details about the trip on Sunday.

Zhang Junshe, a senior researcher at the People's Liberation Army Naval Military Studies Research Institute, said cooperation between the two navies is expanding in areas such as joint drills and officer exchanges.

However, the US has attempted to pressure China to accept The Hague ruling, which will never succeed, he added.

In the past year, Richardson and Wu have had three discussions via video teleconference. Their latest conversation, in January, touched on China's new airport on Yongshu Reef in the Nansha Islands, which was put into use that month.

Wu said China "will not seek militarization" in the sea, but it also will not allow the absence of its regular national defense either.

On July 8, senior Chinese naval officers including Wu attended a drill in waters near Xisha Islands, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Meanwhile, two supply ships serving long-range missions  the Honghu and Luomahu  officially joined the service in Zhanjiang, Guangdong province, on Friday, according to the PLA's Southern Theater Command, which covers the South China Sea.

Zhao Xiaozhuo, a researcher at the Center on China-US Defense Relations at the PLA Academy of Military Science, said if the US further approaches China's territorial waters, such action would have "huge negative effects" and would be "unreasonable".

Yuan Peng, vice-president of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, warned that China-US ties are "now dominated and encumbered by a single problem  the South China Sea issue".

"Barack Obama should bring the ties back on track before leaving office," Yuan added.

zhangyunbi@chinadaily.com.cn
After concluding his successful visit to Mongolia and attendance of the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), Premier Li Keqiang left Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar for Beijing on the afternoon of July 16.[Photo/english.gov.cn]

ULAANBAATAR - The 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit concluded Saturday in the Mongolian capital with a chair's statement and a declaration that emphasizes the need to promote connectivity.

"Enhancing connectivity across diverse domains is an important and commonly shared objective," according to the declaration issued after a two-day event under the theme of "20 Years of ASEM: Partnership for the Future through Connectivity."

The summit, gathering heads of state and government or high-level representatives of 51 European and Asian countries as well as leaders of international organizations, set course for enhancement of the inter-regional process in the next decade while celebrating its 20th anniversary.

"Connectivity will be mainstreamed into all ASEM cooperation frameworks. Given the growing interdependence between the two regions, Asia and Europe cannot be treated separately in any area of ASEM activities," the declaration said.

Representatives also exchanged views on the current regional and global political and socio-economic situation, and discussed ways to address the existing and emerging challenges to peace, security, stability and sustainable development.

"As shifting geopolitics lead to greater uncertainties and volatility in the world, ASEM will reinforce its role as a catalyst for effective multilateralism and a rules-based international order," it said.

ASEM is an intergovernmental forum for dialogue and cooperation aimed to foster political dialogue, reinforce economic cooperation and promote collaboration in other areas of common interest.

The next ASEM summit will be held in Brussels, Belgium, chaired by the European Union, in 2018.
Taiwan's aboriginal people have experienced economic competition and military conflict, even turned as a guest from being the host of this island since a major Han immigration began in the 17th century that overran the island's population. There are still unhealed wounds in their hearts as the history of the island showed that the Taiwanese aborigines were oppressed and ill-treated by Han and that sentment remained.



"Chinese Homecoming 2016" pays a great attention to the reconciliation between Han Chinese and Taiwanese aborigines.



"This (the unity of Greater China) has been accomplished because the work of the Lord Jesus on the cross completed it. But we must not stop here, and listen to their (Taiwanese aborigines) stories, touch their hearts and feel what they experienced to let the Holy Spirit open everyone's heart." said Rev. Ma Jianming on the morning of July 14, the first day of the gathering.



He invites several aborigines to go up unto the platform, appealing for Greater China to be united.



Rev. Enoch, a Taiwanese aborigine, shared that God knows that their history is made of sufferings as their songs were composed by tears. Thus, He sent a group of Han people to visit the indigenous Taiwanese and God healed them when the team knelt on the ground before the people with tears dropping on the land while listening to their stories.



Following this, a pastor who led the visit tells the audience the whole story. He says the visit originated from "Chinese Homecoming 2013" when God spoke through an Egyptian prophet to require the Chinese to present genuine repentance to Taiwanese aborigines in the next assembly.



Led by the Lord in prayer, he began the visit from the confession of an Atayal pastor, as well as his friend. But he had no idea on how to say any word to apologize before his friend, while the Lord asked them to surrender their ears and hearts to listen.



The next day, he suddenly burst into tears when the pastor told them his story.



"We never thought of the impact of their said issues had on their lives," he says with sobs when recalling the past experience, "We always consider ed'what our relationship is' or 'what we felt sorry to them' but don't feel what they think and feel."



They prayed with tears on their knees, repenting for the grudges of the last generation and their ignorance, pride, evil, blindness without understanding God's will for the native people.



The friend accepted their apology, blessing them and led them to the next tribe. They also visited other ethnic groups including the Truku, Amis, Bunun, Seedip, Saisiyat, Thao, Tsou and Tao.



His speech moved a number of mainland Han Christians to tears and he apologized for and repented for the past evil on the natives, asking God to heal them to be really united in Christ's love.



Finally, an aboriginal representative who experienced the apology of the pastoral team said that his heart started to melt while telling the previous experiences of such instances and came to know that the heavenly father who cared about their past and the group finding them. He added that he felt joyous and identified them as his family when seeing their Han friends.

Taiwan's aboriginal people have experienced economic competition and military conflict, even turned as a guest from being the host of this island since a major Han immigration began in the 17th century that overran the island's population. There are still unhealed wounds in their hearts as the history of the island showed that the Taiwanese aborigines were oppressed and ill-treated by Han and that sentment remained.



"Chinese Homecoming 2016" pays a great attention to the reconciliation between Han Chinese and Taiwanese aborigines.



"This (the unity of Greater China) has been accomplished because the work of the Lord Jesus on the cross completed it. But we must not stop here, and listen to their (Taiwanese aborigines) stories, touch their hearts and feel what they experienced to let the Holy Spirit open everyone's heart." said Rev. Ma Jianming on the morning of July 14, the first day of the gathering.



He invites several aborigines to go up unto the platform, appealing for Greater China to be united.



Rev. Enoch, a Taiwanese aborigine, shared that God knows that their history is made of sufferings as their songs were composed by tears. Thus, He sent a group of Han people to visit the indigenous Taiwanese and God healed them when the team knelt on the ground before the people with tears dropping on the land while listening to their stories.



Following this, a pastor who led the visit tells the audience the whole story. He says the visit originated from "Chinese Homecoming 2013" when God spoke through an Egyptian prophet to require the Chinese to present genuine repentance to Taiwanese aborigines in the next assembly.



Led by the Lord in prayer, he began the visit from the confession of an Atayal pastor, as well as his friend. But he had no idea on how to say any word to apologize before his friend, while the Lord asked them to surrender their ears and hearts to listen.



The next day, he suddenly burst into tears when the pastor told them his story.



"We never thought of the impact of their said issues had on their lives," he says with sobs when recalling the past experience, "We always consider ed'what our relationship is' or 'what we felt sorry to them' but don't feel what they think and feel."



They prayed with tears on their knees, repenting for the grudges of the last generation and their ignorance, pride, evil, blindness without understanding God's will for the native people.



The friend accepted their apology, blessing them and led them to the next tribe. They also visited other ethnic groups including the Truku, Amis, Bunun, Seedip, Saisiyat, Thao, Tsou and Tao.



His speech moved a number of mainland Han Christians to tears and he apologized for and repented for the past evil on the natives, asking God to heal them to be really united in Christ's love.



Finally, an aboriginal representative who experienced the apology of the pastoral team said that his heart started to melt while telling the previous experiences of such instances and came to know that the heavenly father who cared about their past and the group finding them. He added that he felt joyous and identified them as his family when seeing their Han friends.

Han Pastor Shares Experience of Apologizing to Taiwanese Aborigines in "Chinese Homecoming 2016"
This is the latest in a new series of letters home from a local Marine getting ready to be deployed to the Republic of Georgia to train the Georgian army for their mission in Afghanistan:

The major event of the week was the Secretary of State John Kerry paid a visit to Tbilisi. During his speech, he mentioned the program that I am here on as significant to the partnership of the two countries.

At this current time, Georgia is the third highest contributor of troops to Afghanistan, the leading non-NATO member of the coalition. I didnt see any mention of it in the American press. With all of the domestic issues in the news, there is little room for what is happening in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The Georgian battalion, along with the trainers, have moved out to the field to conduct the last training exercise before the final assessment for deployment. In the progression of training, we started with individual skills of each soldier, then moved progressively larger from fire team, to squad, then platoon, on to company and now we are at the final stage, battalion level training.

This training revolves around command and control, reporting procedures, and strategic planning. It is the final step where all other training is put together.

As the Company First Sergeant, one of my responsibilities is to ensure that customs and traditions are upheld. One of those traditions is during a cruise or deployment, a book is made recording those on the deployment and what they did.

This tradition goes back a long way. I can remember looking at my fathers cruise book from when he was in the navy in the 1950s. I spent this last week going around getting photographs of all of the members in the unit as well as shots of the camp and the training that we are conducting.

I need to get this all together by the end of the month so I have enough time to get them printed and handed out to the Marines before we deactivate and are to the wind. Cruise books are like year books; you open them up after 10 years, dont recognize anyone and comment on how young and/or thin you were.

The end of the deployment is drawing near, there are still three months but I have come to realize that is a blink of an eye. We are preparing to turn over with the next rotation. A lot of our effort now is to ensure that our relief is set up for success and we make it home safely.

In the meantime, we will allow our Marines to take leave in Europe before they go home. I am encouraging them to pick a country and spend a week there, even if they do not want to.

There are a few that want to save their money and stay on camp. I am doing everything I can to talk them out of it. There are a hundred places that I promised myself that I would go someday when the time was better. Wisdom and experience are what you get after you need it  and there is only so much wisdom you can pass to 20-somethings.

This series began in the March 20 edition of The Dunn County News and can also be found at www.dunnconnect.com
(Photo : USAF) U.S. Air Force F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters

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The commander of the U.S. Air Force's Air Combat Command emphatically said China will continue preying on U.S. technology secrets, especially those having to do with aerospace technologies, to close its huge technology gap with the U.S.



General Herbert J. "Hawk" Carlisle, Commander of the Air Combat Command, warned the U.S. Congress' House Armed Services Committee the U.S. must remain vigilant against unceasing Chinese cyberattacks aimed at stealing U.S. secret technologies.



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"They've watched our success and they know how good we are ... They'll steal technology so they avoid the challenges that we faced," said Gen. Carlisle about China.



"The lead we have is shrinking as our near peer adversaries, and countries with which they proliferate, have developed, likely stolen, and fielded state-of-the-art systems."



Gen. Carlisle said many of China's leaps in military aerospace technology were obtained through dubious means. The results of this unrelenting spying are clear enough for the U.S. to be alarmed.



The general gave proof to this claim by showing how similar China's J-31 stealth fighter is to the US' F-35 Lightning II, even in its design.



The Air Combat Command that Gen. Carlisle heads is the primary force provider of non-nuclear global strike combat aircraft to America's warfighting commands. It operates fighter, attack, reconnaissance, combat search and rescue, air battle management and electronic combat aircraft along with command, control, computing, communications and intelligence (C4I) systems, and conducts global information operations.



Gen. Carlisle also said stolen U.S. secrets have enabled China and Russia to develop counter technologies to American air power.



"It now comes as no surprise that our near peer adversaries' capabilities have been modernized to specifically counter and negate American capabilities," Gen. Carlisle pointed out.



"Many other nations, Russia and China in particular, copy very well. Original thought, they're not as good."



Gen. Carlisle said China and Russia are creating threats to U.S. aerial superiority that include the development of their own 5th generation fighters, anti-satellite weapons and new surface-to-air weapon systems that might be able to acquire, track, and target the U.S.' stealth aircraft such as the F-35.



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TagsU.S. Air Force, Air Combat Command, General Herbert J. "Hawk" Carlisle, spying, hacking, china
(Photo : US Navy) US Marine Corps F-35B Lighning II.

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The Pentagon will deploy the U.S. military's first operational F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters to Japan this December as tensions with China over the South China Sea continue to simmer.



It said 10 F-35B Joint Strike Fighters of the U.S. Marine Corps will move permanently to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan on or before December.



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These jets will be joined by six more F-35B fighters in June 2017 with the arrival of the multipurpose amphibious assault ship USS Wasp (LHD-1). Since 2011, this ship has been testing the F-35B, the version built specifically for the Marines.



The F-35B is a short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) variant of the jet. It can also take-off and land vertically like a helicopter.



"I can't wait to get the airplane out to the Pacific," said Lt. General Jon Davis, Deputy Commandant for Aviation, Headquarters Marine Corps.



"It's tailor-made for that part of the world with its fifth generation capability and its expeditionary capabilities to land on a small ship or strip, and flow back and forth between those."



Gen. Davis said the Marines' F-35s are ready for combat now if needed. He revealed the F-35s are doing a lot better in combat exercises than expected, achieving kill ratios of 24 to zero in mock aerial combats against other jets, and surviving every sort of simulated enemy attack.



"It is like watching a velociraptor going through. Everything in its path is killed," he said.



Gen. Davis said the Marines are working to ensure its small-deck carriers have enough bandwidth to take full advantage of the F-35's extensive data-gathering and sharing capabilities.



General Herbert J. "Hawk" Carlisle, Commander of the Air Combat Command, expects to declare an initial squadron of U.S. Air Force 12 F-35A jets ready for combat as early as August.



The Marine's F-35B can carry two 450 kg smart bombs plus air-to-air missiles in its internal weapons bay. It's also armed with a four-barrel 25 mm GAU-12 Equalizer cannon.



Among the bombs the F-35B can carry are the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM); Paveway series of smart bombs; the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW); Brimstone anti-tank missiles and cluster munitions (Wind Corrected Munitions Dispenser).



The F-35Bs can be armed with AIM-120 AMRAAM, AIM-132 ASRAAM and AIM-9 Sidewinders. It has a range of 1,670 kilometers and a top speed of 1,930 km/h.


I had the privilege or reading a pre-release version of "God Shines Forth: How the Nature of God Shapes and Drives the Mission of the Church." Here are 20 quotes from the book, which you should pick up.
Suddenly, black and white Americans are praying together, hugging each other and breaking racial barriers after Dallas

Something remarkable is happening in America following the killing of five police officers in Dallas on July 7 by a black sniper who was reportedly infuriated by police shootings of black men.

Across the country, Americans are breaking down barriers and crossing racial lines to pray together for peace and safety, CBN News reports.

The Christian news network notes that in many areas police officers and members of the black community have come together in a dramatic demonstration of support for one another.

A number of social media posts carried messages and images that have gone viral related to this phenomenon, all indicative of the apparent healing process underway.

In Baton Rouge, Lousiana, Kim L. Muyaka, a black woman, posted on Facebook about her experience praying with an officer.

"When God say move! God is not the Author of confusion ... All I felt when I touch and agreed with him is fear he was shaking but y'all...Violence is not the answer...Bible say pray w/o Ceasing I pray that God will cover this Police Officer ... and use his hands not to hurt or harm but to protect the citizens!" Muyaka writes.

In Virginia, Capt. Kenneth Miller of the Virginia Beach Police Department was photographed praying with protesters on Monday. 13NewsNow (WVEC) posted the image on its Facebook page with this caption: "Captain Miller from the Virginia Beach Police Department prays with marchers. Prayer changes things. :)"

In Montgomery, Alabama, Twitter user Ken posted an image captioned: "Montgomery: #BlackLivesMatter protesters and the local police department join hands in prayer."

In Dallas, a CNN video shows Black Lives Matter protesters and members of a counter protest group meeting in the street and hugging out their differences. "This is how you break down walls," one protester says.

Before parting ways, the groups prayed together for their city and a police officer joined them.

Another video posted on YouTube also shows people lining up in Dallas to hug police of

New York City Pastor Chris Durso also posted a statement on Twitter, saying, "YES #AllLivesMatter which is why #BlackLivesMatter - To agree is NOT to negate the rest of humanity, it's to love a hurting part of it."

Also on Twitter, user illumynous posted a picture showing men hugging each other in a prayer circle after a Black Lives Matter protest.
'Trust God no matter what': Pastor and wife previously deemed barren now proud parents of triplet boys, plus 2 other kids

This supposedly barren Christian couple has just been blessed by God with not just one, not just two, but three healthy babies on the same day!

Moreover, in a span of seven years, they have actually received five such blessings.

In Facebook and Twitter posts, pastor and New Testament scholar Jeremiah Johnston announced last July 8 that his wife Audrey has given birth to triplet boys at the Texas Children's Pavilion for Women in Houston, Texas. The new arrivals in the Johnston family are Ryder, who weighed in at 3.8 pounds, Abel, 4.6 pounds, and Jaxson, 5.5 pounds, local news station KPRC reports.

What made the births special was that doctors had earlier told the couple that they could not conceive.

But the couple held on to their faith and trusted that God, not the doctors, would have the final say on the matter, The Christian Post reports.

With the help of in vitro fertilisation and lots of prayer, the Johnstons are now the parents of five children. Before Audrey gave birth to the three boys, the couple also celebrated this year the seventh birthday of their daughter, Lily Faith, and fourth birthday of their son, Justin.

In vitro fertilisation, or the manual joining of an egg and sperm, is considered the most effective form of assisted reproductive technology, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Johnston credited his wife's strong faith for the blessings they have received from God. Before their first child was born, he said there were times when he wanted to give up on believing that they would ever have a baby. But Audrey's faith helped bolster their hopes, he told The Christian Post in an earlier interview.

"She was the one who kept believing, kept trusting in spite of all of the odds," he said. "In spite of people saying 'you'll never get pregnant.' The beautiful thing was, as couples, especially as couples who follow Jesus, we have to make a decision when we experience problems  are we going to allow those problems to drive us apart or drive us closer together?"

Johnston said God finally answered their prayers when their first child was born after he and Audrey had resolved "to trust God no matter what."
For a few minutes Friday afternoon, it mattered whether you had a blue or pink ticket. It mattered whether you had the right number that was printed on that ticket.

Because if you were 12 or under and had the winning ticket, you were going home with a new, shiny and flashy new bicycle. Which Conner Hanson, 9, of New Auburn did.

His ticket along with 17 others were drawn in a bike giveaway put on by law enforcement agencies in Chippewa and Eau Claire counties.

Not that he's been lucky all week. He had outgrown his other bicycle, said his mother, Kris Hanson, who took Connor and his sister Carmyn, 12, to the fair.

So the family sold Conner's bike.

"It was too small for you. We have to get you a new one," she recalled telling Conner.

Conner got his free ticket before Friday's drawing. After his ticket number was read out before a packed audience around the law enforcement stand, Conner picked out one of the flashiest bikes available. It is bright yellow with black.

So why did he settle on that bike?

"Because it's really bright," he said.

"Carmyn has her own bike, so this worked out very well," Kris Hanson said.

All of the bicycles given away are from Walmart and were purchased thanks to the donations of several Chippewa Valley businesses and individuals, said Trooper Al Christian of the Wisconsin State Patrol said.

"So far we've given out 20. We have 47 bikes left," he said before Friday's bike giveaway.

Another 19 bicycles were set to be given on Saturday and the final ten at 3 p.m. Sunday, the final day of the fair.

"We give out free raffle tickets," Christian said. Then the winning tickets are drawn and announced. Usually the announcement is greeted by loud moans by the people with numbers close, but not close enough, to the one is drawn.

Then a happy parent or child marches up, hands off the ticket to be checked and picks out one of the available bikes.

Turning wood into art

People gathered around at a safe distance to watch Shawn Corbin of Chippewa Falls work.

Corbin's company is Chippewa Valley Chainsaw Carver. His work with a chainsaw turns a block of wood 3 1/2 feet tall or smaller and 14-to-16 inches in diameter into small bears, other animals and objects.

Corbin, who performed four times a day Wednesday-Saturday and will perform at noon, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Sunday, said he's never been injured by a chainsaw with a spinning chain.

He was nicked once when the chainsaw wasn't operating, but he said that was his own fault. He said chainsaw operators have to be aware and take precautions against a kickback to the face or shoulder when starting a chainsaw.

"I think cutting firewood is a lot more dangerous," he added.

He learned his craft being an apprentice for two years at Sculpture Studios in Green Bay. This is his second year at the fair, and he's having fun.

"It's been a positive one. I hope to be back next year," he said.

Food is sizzling

Sales at the Chippewa Falls Lions Club booth were going well on Friday.

"Our steak sandwich is selling well this year," said Otto Wagner, a member of the Chippewa Falls Lions Club, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

The Lions stand is known for its Intimidator, a sausage that weighs somewhere around three-quarters of a pound or more. The sausage sells for $5.

This is the second year the Lions have been in a new stand at the fair, and Wagner said the club members love it. The stand has a walk-in cooler and all of the cooking can be done indoors, something the old stand couldn't offer.
A father of three who stopped at a Walgreen's store in northeast Houston for a snack was fatally shot early Sunday morning, a bystander struck by gunfire intended for a group of teenagers, police said.

The victim, 49-year-old Edward Long, had stopped at the store at Tidwell and Homestead with his girlfriend. He was shot at about 1 a.m. as he walked into the store.

Long "had nothing to do with this incident, other than being here at the wrong time." said Robert Klementich, a Houston police detective.

Klementich said there were "strong indications" the drive-by shooting was gang-related. Long was simply caught in the crossfire. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The teenagers were also struck but sustained non-life-threatening injuries. Two of the teens, both 18, were taken by ambulance to Ben Taub Hospital. The third, a 15-year-old, was transported by private vehicle to Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital.

Long's girlfriend, Melinda Moreno, and others posted tributes to Long, who lived in north Houston and had attended Kashmere High School, according to his Facebook profile.

"RIP I love you so much I am so full of pain [right] now," Moreno wrote on Facebook. "Only God knows why."

Moreno's mother, Joann Moreno, wrote on Facebook that her daughter and her boyfriend went to the store that night "not knowing that this was going to be the last trip to Walgreens together."

"He was a son and a father and a brother and uncle and a friend to many," she added.

Police are asking for the public's help in identifying and locating the person responsible for the shooting.

A candlelight vigil for Long will be held Monday at 7:30 p.m. at Rosewood Park.
Despite a slump in the U.S. oil industry, Wisconsin frac sand producers are planning to spend millions of dollars on new plants and loading facilities as they seek to increase efficiency and sell their product in new markets.

According to documents filed with state officials, at least half a dozen companies have hatched plans to build mines or loading terminals along rail lines that provide an economical link to drilling operations in Texas, where the demand for silica sand used in a process called hydraulic fracturing remains strong, as well as other regions.

We feel that from a longer-term prospective its still a good time to make some investments, said Jack Mitchell, president of Wisconsin Proppants, which is planning a $23.5 million rail loading facility for its mine in Jackson County.

Over the past decade, demand for silica sand soared as new technology allowed drillers to reach previously untapped oil, much of which was found in the Bakken formation of North Dakota, with a process called hydraulic fracturing. The fine-grained sand, prevalent and easily accessible across western Wisconsin, is used as proppant to hold open fissures in underground rock formations.

The number of permitted industrial sand mines and processors ballooned to nearly 130, but oil prices began falling in 2015, making North Dakota crude less competitive. As drills went idle, so did Wisconsins sand mines, which have laid off hundreds of workers in the past two years.

But even as producers have shuttered some mines, others are making big investments  or even preparing to open new mines  to meet the demands of a changing energy marketplace.

Meteor Timber, a Georgia investment company that has explored the possibility of mining in Jackson Countys public forests, has plans to build a $65 million sand mining operation in Jackson and Monroe counties.

Terracor Resources is proposing a combined mine, processing and loading facility between Black River Falls and Alma Center that could produce about 3 million tons of sand a year.

Hi-Crush Proppants is seeking to add three rail sidings at its 857-acre mine, processing and loading facility in Wyeville. Hi-Crush says it has idled a facility in Eau Claire County and is focusing on maximizing production and efficiency at the Monroe County site.

Smart Sand Inc. plans to build a rail terminal near Tomah to handle sand from the Texas companys existing 1,118-acre mine in Oakdale, which is about four miles away and already has a loading facility on the Canadian Pacific railroad.

All of those operations, which would allow the loading and storage of multiple trains, are situated on the Union Pacific rail line. A fourth project, since shelved because of market prices, would have been sited on the Wisconsin Northern rail line in Chippewa County, which connects to Union Pacifics track.

Theyre all trying to get on the UP, said Brad Johnson, who reviews mining-related water permit applications for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Unlike the Canadian Pacific and BNSF, two major U.S. rail lines that link Wisconsin to the Bakken basin, Union Pacific lines offer a direct route to Texas.

With low production costs, abundant reserves and a good supply of workers, the Permian basin in west Texas has steadily increased production even as drillers in the Bakken range have cut back. The Permian basin puts out about twice as much crude than the Bakken and has more than five times as many active rigs, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Two of the regions major producers have announced plans to increase production in the region.

"The Permian is still a real hot area right now and its because of their cost structure," Mitchell said.

Whats more, its easier to transport the crude to Houston refineries thanks to a network of pipelines and terminals, said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for Oil Price Information Service.

Its considerably more expensive to use pipelines or rail to get crude from the Bakken to the real refining clusters, Kloza said.

Seeking efficiency

Since the beginning of the sand boom, industry experts have said rail proximity is key to profitability, though when prices were at $70 per ton, mines were being opened in places where sand had to be hauled by truck to the nearest rail terminal. But with todays tighter market, producers are expected to deliver sand at half those prices, which means they must shave costs wherever possible, and transportation is the single-biggest cost.

Under the new model, producers need to have their own rail terminals where they can load "unit trains" that are less expensive and arrive at their destinations sooner than a few cars of sand mixed in with other freight on a manifest train.

Sand producers also have to minimize costly and time-consuming switches, said Joel Schneyer, a minerals industry analyst with the investment banking firm Headwaters MB, so they are trying to locate on railways that offer direct access to shale basins.

Even as analysts and producers are optimistic about the prospects for growth in the Permian basin, Schneyer said Wisconsin sand producers will have to compete with producers much closer to the oil fields.

While one can get to the both Permian and Eagle Ford on the UP, it is pretty damn far, he said.

Ultimately it may come down to grain size, Schneyer said. If oil drillers can use finer sand, it would be cheaper to get northern white sand from Arkansas or Missouri, or use local Brady 'Brown sand native to Texas.

Smart Sand says in addition to providing access to new regions, its second loading facility will save the company $7.5 million a year in shipping costs to existing customers.

In its application to build three additional rail sidings at its Wyeville facility, Hi-Crush says its investments were spurred in part by the market downturn, which is forcing sand suppliers to become more efficient.

Tyler Deines, a geologist and land-use specialist for the Texas-based company, said the addition will allow it to simultaneously load two-unit trains, which has become the industry standard.

Its cheaper if you can do it that way, and its quicker to market, Deines said. Especially in a down market, just any efficiency you can gain, people are looking for.

Hi-Crush also notes that the industry downturn has created a surplus of rail cars that the company has to store.

Terracor Resources says it would ship sand from its proposed Alma mine to the companys own terminals in the Bakken as well as the Eagle Ford basin in southern Texas. Terracor says with its existing loading facilities it could hold 80 percent of its fleet, avoiding potential storage fees from the railroad.

The status of that project is unclear since the Canadian company filed for bankruptcy in April. Attempts to reach a company representative were unsuccessful.

Wisconsin Proppants, has proposed building a rail loading facility on the Canadian National line, about 2 miles from its 670-acre Hixton mine. The Green Bay company currently trucks its sand 19 miles to a Union Pacific loading site and says the new facility will save more than $4 million a year.

Mitchell said the project will both open new markets and eliminate inefficiency.

Canadian National serves oil fields in western Canada and can deliver to the Utica basin of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The railroad also has a reputation for cooperating with other carriers, which Mitchell said could make delivery viable in other markets as well.

While he doesnt expect the price of oil to rebound any time soon, Mitchell said hes optimistic prices will stabilize again in the next two years.

I have a longer term outlook on things, he said. Its like anything else: Things always go back to the mean.
A pipeline leak of a highly flammable chemical outside an ExxonMobil plant in Baytown prompted the evacuation of nearby residents Sunday morning, along with a shelter-in-place warning that extended into the afternoon.

No one was injured in the leak of dilute propylene, a highly flammable gas often used for fuel, in the leak of a pipeline extending from the largest chemical plant and oil refinery complex in the country.

Emergency responders evacuated residents in the area and successfully shut down two valves to stop the leak, said Victor Medrano, assistant fire chief for the Baytown Fire Department. He said his team took extra precautions because the agent does not easily dissipate.

Ashley Smith Alemayehu, an ExxonMobil spokeswoman, said the company has launched an investigation into the incident to determine the leak's source. The pipelines will not be restarted until "it is safe to do so," she added.

In a followup email, the ExxonMobil spokeswoman wrote: "The release has been stopped and the pipeline has been safely isolated. We are preparing to safely conduct repairs on the pipeline. We appreciate the assistance of the Baytown Police and Fire Departments, who ensured a safe and effective response. We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this caused to nearby residents."

Medrano said he responded to reports of a pipeline leak near ExxonMobil's plant on Bayway at 10:10 a.m.

At 10:30 a.m., the Baytown Police Department issued a shelter-in-place warning for residents near the 5500 block of Bayway Drive, between Park and Arbor streets, due to a "chemical emergency."

Less than an hour later, the department said it planned to evacuate residents from the community 25 miles east of downtown Houston.

ExxonMobil confirmed the leak in a statement earlier Sunday.

"ExxonMobil Pipeline Company has shut down two chemical product pipelines in Baytown this morning to investigate a release," the statement said. "We are working with local emergency responders and closely with local officials to ensure the safety of the public. We are continuing to investigate the source of the release."

The incident occurred at a facility that stores and handles numerous dangerous chemicals and has a history of chemical leaks and other incidents. According to an analysis by Texas A&M University, in partnership with the Chronicle, ExxonMobil's Baytown Chemical Plant has a high potential for harm to the public, as does the company's nearby refinery.

Propylene is a highly flammable, colorless fuel gas produced during the refining of gasoline. The chemical, which bears similarities to propane, can also be used to make acetone and plastics.
Sunburns didn't deter hundreds of residents from grabbing an inner tube Sunday and returning for Day 2 of the third-annual Float Fest music festival at the 220-acre Cool River Ranch.

The ranch, which backs up to the San Marcos River, is hosting acts this weekend such as Chromeo, Rick Ross, Bleachers, Santigold, Metric, Yeasayer, Kongos, Big Gigantic, Future Islands, Bone Thugs N Harmony, Slim Thug, and Blue Healer, plus Houston acts Fat Tony and the Wild Moccasins.
Texas officials and law enforcement agencies have been offering their condolences after three officers were fatally shot and three others were wounded Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, La.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he had spoken with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and that they discussed "their shared grief about back-to-back similar tragedies in our neighboring states," according to a news release from Abbott's office.

The Texas governor "offered any assistance needed for Louisiana to respond to the ongoing law enforcement needs as well (as) the healing needs of the affected families, the police force and the entire State of Louisiana," the news release said.

U.S. Sen Ted Cruz decried "the senseless violence" that he said had made targets of officers in Baton Rouge.

"This is a trying time for our country, and understandably, frustration is mounting," Cruz said in a written statement. "As we just saw in Dallas, this is a horrific act fueled by people who hate. Now more than ever, we must stand united and support the very people who put their lives on the line to protect us every day."

Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown, coming off a week in which funerals were held for five officers fatally shot in a rampage this month in that city, offered his condolences in a brief tweet: "Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police."

The Harris County Sheriff's Office concurred, tweeting, "Our hearts are heavy this morning -- again. Thoughts and prayers for our colleagues in @BRPD & their families."

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner also expressed his sympathy via Twitter, writing, "Too many incidents have taken place over past couple of months. Too many senseless acts. We must come together as one."
MADISON  Depending on how old you are and how long youve lived in Wisconsin, youve likely heard the dismissive phrase When in doubt, Stout! Its an outdated reference to the University of Wisconsin-Stout being a college choice of last resort.

As the universitys reputation for excellence in science, technology, engineering and math education grows along with its record in placing its graduates in jobs, a more apt slogan today is Theres no doubt, its Stout!

The campus is also an example of why state investments in higher education can pay dividends to communities, the economy and taxpayers.

A recent visit to the Stout campus in downtown Menomonie, about halfway between Eau Claire and the Minnesota border, was a reminder of the ways in which college campuses intersect with regional businesses while providing students with a broad-based education.

With 48 undergraduate majors and about 24 graduate majors, Stout offers plenty of choices for students who attend classes there. Most settle into one of six career pathways  science and engineering, technology and communications, business and management, health and human services, arts and design, and education.

Because theres a blend of applied learning and liberal arts, students gets hands-on experience through internships and co-ops, industry projects, career conferences and campus facilities that feature twice as much laboratory space as traditional classroom space.

Examples include the UW-Stout Discovery Center, which features more than 50 industry projects, a digital fabrication workshop (or fab lab), a Manufacturing Outreach center, an affiliated business park and two of the largest student career conferences in the Midwest. Collectively, those two conferences are attended by 600 employers.

This all leads to students who graduate with a future: More than 97 percent of Stouts undergraduate students are employed or pursuing graduate degrees within six months of their graduation, and more than three-quarters are employed in their field of study.

That performance helps to explain why UW-Stout recorded the third largest enrollment increase in the UW System over the past decade, with a record enrollment of 9,535 in 2015 and an expected 2016 enrollment that appears on track.

Like most UW System campuses, however, Stout has troubles lurking below its seemingly productive surface.

Speaking to members of the Wisconsin Technology Councils board of directors, Chancellor Bob Meyer noted that cuts in state support for the UW System have encouraged other colleges  mostly outside Wisconsin  to poach Stout faculty members who are worried about their future.

About 60 faculty and staff out of 1,300 employees of all descriptions have moved on, which Meyer warned will hurt Stouts program quality if the cuts continue and talented faculty arent replaced.

Most recently, Gov. Scott Walker has said he wants to avoid further cuts to higher education and even restore some funding if there are measurable performance standards by which campuses can be judged.

Meyer said hes fine on UW-Stout living up to such metrics because hes confident the campus, which won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2001, will continue to perform at a high level.

We value assessing our performance in a variety of areas, Meyer said. Therefore, we welcome the governors call for basing additional funding for the UW System on performance metrics. We hope, however, that one of the metrics includes accurate measurements of the success that graduates have in the workplace after leaving campus.

The Tech Councils May report on the economic value of higher education to Wisconsin noted a number of examples of how public and private campuses benefit business by delivering talent, expertise and research partnerships. Without a doubt, a leading example for Wisconsin is UW-Stout.
A man was shot to death late Saturday night when a group of men forced their way into his south Houston home.

Houston patrol officers responded at 11:53 p.m. to the home in the 7800 block of Tierwester, where they found a man who had been shot several times in his living room, said Stephen Jimenez, an investigator with the Houston Police Department.
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Texans know a Yankee when they see one. And by any definition, John F. Kennedy was a Yankee.

Born and raised in Massachusetts. Graduate of Harvard. Scion of a powerful East Coast political family.

So how did Houston end up having such a significant impact on his career and legacy?

Kennedy's three visits to this city served as professional touchstones.

More Information From the speech that launched America to the moon "But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun - almost as hot as it is here today - and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out, then we must be bold." - John F. Kennedy, Sept. 12, 1962 See More Collapse

He reassured voters about his Catholic faith. He directed humanity's gaze and ambition to the stars. He met with a national organization of Latinos just hours before his life was snuffed out by an assassin.

Kennedy's relationship with Houston began with Herbert Meza.

In the 1960 campaign for the White House, prominent Protestant ministers were objecting to Kennedy, saying a Catholic couldn't be president.

All the talk of politics and faith disturbed Meza, who was president of the Houston Ministerial Association.

"There should be no religious litmus test for office," Meza thought.

He had the idea to invite Kennedy to speak to his group and explain his views.

Meza invited Richard Nixon, too, but only Kennedy accepted.

The speech was broadcast live from the Rice Hotel, and the nation tuned in to see what the young politician would say.

"His hands were really shaking," Meza said. "I was surprised. But when he got up to speak, all that left him."

He stood before a crowd of ministers who objected to his faith, and for some, his candidacy.

"Because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured - perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this," Kennedy said. "So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in - for that should be important only to me - but what kind of America I believe in."

Meza was deeply moved by what Kennedy said and how he said it.

Others clearly were, too. After taking numerous questions, Kennedy received a standing ovation. It lasted for more than three minutes.

The speech became the template for politicians to discuss their beliefs.

Kennedy's second visit to Houston focused on what would become one of the defining aspects of the city.

It was Sept. 12, 1962. The United States was in a space race with the Soviet Union.

President Kennedy was touring aerospace facilities, and Houston was on the agenda.

A year earlier, NASA had announced its Manned Spacecraft Center would be located on land donated by Rice University. The center would later be renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center.

Kennedy's speech to the crowd of 40,000 on a sweltering September day was like the birth announcement for Space City.

Just a month and a half earlier, the Soviets had succeeded in putting the first man in space. Congress was grumbling about spending too much on Kennedy's goal of a lunar landing.

Kennedy addressed the doubts head on, and played to the crowd.

"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may as well ask: why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard "

His words redefined the space race as more than just a way to outpace the communists. He cloaked the effort in themes of Manifest Destiny.

"He gave a speech that changed the course of America's space program," said Rice historian Melissa Kean, in a video produced by the university for the 50th anniversary of the speech.

Kennedy pledged to spend $5.4 billion on NASA, and Rice University started up a rocket program months later, further supporting the space effort it helped launch.

Less than eight years later, Americans walked on the moon.

To most, Kennedy's last visit to Houston was more about what happened after, in Dallas, than what occurred here.

For William Bonilla, it was a defining moment of his life.

Kennedy arrived in Houston on Nov. 21, 1963, while he was campaigning for re-election and on a whirlwind tour of Texas cities.

He would be in Houston for only six hours.

Kennedy's first stop would be at the Rice Hotel. He met with the publisher of the Houston Chronicle, who told Kennedy his poll numbers were abysmal in Texas.

He also was scheduled for a banquet at the Houston Coliseum for Congressman Albert Thomas.

Bonilla's organization, the League of United Latin American Citizens, known as LULAC, had invited Kennedy to an event, also at the Rice Hotel, but it wasn't guaranteed that the president could find the time.

"I got advance notice he was coming, so I asked security where the president and first lady would be coming in," Bonilla said.

He stood right by that door, so when the Kennedys walked in, it was Bonilla who greeted them.

It was the first time a sitting president had attended a national LULAC meeting.

Kennedy was introduced to the crowd, but he stayed in his seat.

"You don't want to hear from me," the president said. "You want to hear from my wife."

When Jacqueline Kennedy came to the stage, she gave a speech entirely in Spanish.

"The people went wild," Bonilla said.

She told the gathering she was delighted to be among so many Spanish speakers. She hoped that Latinos would be uplifted in their lifetimes.

The crowd soaked up every word, Bonilla said.

The next day, Bonilla was in his law office when his wife called. She told him the president had been shot. He thought it couldn't be true. Reality sunk in later, after he turned on the radio and heard the news himself.

"It was a real tragedy," Bonilla said.
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.
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Cleveland tech entrepreneurs are changing the world in a big way.

(Courtesy photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland expats are creating a buzz in the tech world. Two big names in the global venture capital world expose their Cleveland roots and the impact the Sixth City had on them as they merged their Midwest values into the Silicon Valley state of mind.

Additionally, Jebbit, and its young native-Clevelander CEO now based in Cannes, France, were recently named one of the top 50 Tech companies in the world.

In light of the great success Cleveland's tech scene has been having the past few years, our greatest export is still our own homegrown talent.

Michael C. DeAloia

A Capitalist Calling. I was just beginning to read the Forbes Midas List (published March 23, 2016) that details the Top 100 venture capitalists in the world. About half way through the list, I noticed an email from one of Cleveland's leading tech entrepreneurs letting me in on a little secret that the top venture capitalist, according to Forbes, had a Cleveland connection. I couldn't believe it. I was reading the same article and decided to jump ahead to the No. 1 ranked VC in the world.

Meet Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital. He was born in Detroit but in sixth grade moved to Cleveland, where he spent nearly a decade before he headed to the University of Cincinnati, where he is still an active sponsor of undergraduate scholarships, and got involved in the school's co-op program.

He then earned his master's degree at Stanford. While there, he worked at a startup and was hooked on the entrepreneurial lifestyle, he said. Goetz reinforces the fact that, "as a venture investor, my value system is my greatest asset and this was instilled in me in the Midwest and Cleveland."

Goetz has become one with the startup world and the capital scene. His recent $60 million (Series A $8 million, Series B $50 million and an additional $2 million in other rounds) investment into WhatsApp turned into a $3 billion enlightenment for Sequoia Capital after Facebook bought the trending hot app company for $22 billion.

Goetz, through a different dialect, offered some fascinating insight on how a city such as Cleveland could compete in the global tech community. I have distilled our robust conversation into five bon mots that best reflect what philosophies Cleveland should embrace:

Reward risk and risk-seeking behavior within the local culture. Embrace failure. Being a founder and failing should create more currency within the ecosystem for the next venture. Unknown underdogs with ambition and intelligence are often at the epicenter of upstart success. Ignore or discount founder pedigree when pondering a venture investment. Innovation and immigration are often correlated. Together they are a recipe for great regional success.

Success truisms. Cleveland has taken steps in these ideal notions, but still has much to do to fully embrace what they all mean.

Second Call. Sometimes lightning does strike twice - thankfully when writing a tech column. Shortly after talking with Jim Goetz at Sequoia, I was made aware of another successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who has Cleveland ties. A key member of the Case Western Reserve University's Board of Trustees, Dr. Joseph Mandato is a prime example of the world-class educational institutions Cleveland is blessed to have. All three of Mandato's degrees came from CWRU.

He joined DeNovo Ventures in 1993 and still works there as a Managing Director. Mandato is also a lecturer at Stanford University and a senior advisor at Mainsail Partners. But it is his time in Cleveland, he said, as a student but also as a trustee at Case, that stands out. He firmly believes that Case "is an undiscovered gem in American academia." Mandato gets to witness the tech talent that walks the hallowed halls of the university. For example, the creator of Gmail and the founder of Craigslist both attended CWRU.

Like Goetz he speaks a different version of English. And it is refreshing to hear him talk through what it takes to compete in the globally competitive world of tech startups.

"Biggest challenge of all is that a region must have young entrepreneurs," he noted, "People use age as a crutch. And it is not an indicator of talent." To the West Coast evangelists, the Midwest tends to err on the side of caution. Of age, or being older, equates to talent. Not true.

"Youth is wonderful. Don't ever give it up," he said. Mandato sees wonderful things ahead for Cleveland since data analytics, SaaS, digital healthcare and healthcare big data are all strengths in Northeast Ohio's tech ecosystem.

Home Grown Talent. St. Edward's class of 2011 grad Jonathon Lacoste is making a big imprint on the Boston tech scene. While a student at the venerable West Side Catholic high school, he won a business plan competition which inspired him to follow his entrepreneurial passion.

Lacoste attended Boston College where he met another student, Thomas Coburn, and the two developed Jebbit three years ago after winning a Boston College business plan competition.

Jebbit is a venture-backed company offering a digital-marketing platform that

Jonathon Lacoste

creates engaging micro-content thus personalizing a brand's interaction with its customers. Customers of the platform include Dunkin' Donuts, The Boston Globe and AutoNation. Recently, the Cleveland native and the rest of the Jebbit team were named one of the Top Fifty tech companies in the world by the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The venue is a world-class event that brings startups with game-changing products together with investors and amazing storytellers. It is truly a big honor.

It is satisfying to see how Clevelanders continue to change the world in a big way -- through investment, intellectual curiosity and, yes, even through technology. They all deserve the success they earned. And yet, I still hold this whimsical thought that perhaps they might come home to give a well-deserved power boost to the Cleveland tech scene.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 2-year-old girl shot in the head and arm outside her East Side home Friday continues to fight for her life, the girl's uncle said Sunday.

Alaya Brown was in her 21-year-old mother's arms outside the family's home in the 4100 block of East 146th Street when a gunman opened fire, the uncle said.

Alaya underwent brain surgery Friday at University Hospitals Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, where she remains in critical condition in the pediatric intensive care unit.

"She's fighting for her life," the uncle said. "We're distraught. Most of us are at a loss for words. It was just so sudden and unexpected."

Alaya raised her arm in self-defense, her uncle said. The bullet first went through her arm, slowing it down before it hit her in the head.

The bullet cracked Alaya's skull. The right side of her brain is dead, and she is blind in one eye, he said.

"She was playing; her mom was holding her," the uncle said. "We're just hurt that this happened."

The gunman, who was driving a silver Toyota Camry, was talking to Alaya's mother for several minutes before the shooting, the uncle said. Another car drove up, and there may have been words exchanged because the car couldn't pass by, he said.

Both cars started to drive away, and the gunman started shooting. Alaya's uncle said the man in the Camry was aiming directly at his sister and niece.

"He deliberately, purposely and intentionally shot them," the uncle said. "I don't know why, but I know he did."

The uncle said he doesn't know the gunman, but he has seen him around the neighborhood.

A bullet grazed Alaya's mother in the arm, and the gunman fled in the Camry, the uncle said.

The shooting happened around 7 p.m., police said. There have been no arrests.

Alaya was born premature and has battled epilepsy and diabetes for her entire short life, family members said.

She had trouble walking and talking, and seizures before the shooting.

"We are just taking it hour-by-hour, day-by-day," the uncle said. "Please pray for my niece and my family."

If you wish to discuss or comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments section.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio - Several hundred law enforcement officers from across the country have been sworn in as "special police officers" for the Republican National Convention.

More than 300 officers from the California State Highway Patrol and Pittsburgh Police Department were sworn in Saturday afternoon at Case Western Reserve University. The oath took less than 10 minutes before the officers were privately briefed of policies and procedures ahead of the convention, which begins Monday.

Earlier in the day, more than 400 Ohio State Highway Patrol officers, as well as officers from Ohio University, were sworn in, Cleveland police deputy chief Ed Tomba said.

The exact number of out-of-state law enforcement officials assisting Greater Cleveland and Ohio police departments won't be disclosed until after the convention, Tomba said. However, he did say the goal number of additional law enforcement officials wanted for the convention was exceeded.

"We overplan to make sure that we have enough officers for anything that may happen," Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams said.

In addition to the California and Pennsylvania officers, law enforcement officials from other states like Virginia, Florida and New Jersey will be on hand, Tomba said.

"We can't thank the states and municipalities enough for stepping up to help us," Tomba said. "You hear the word partnership a lot in law enforcement, and truly, they stepped up."

Tomba is the "RNC lead," according to Williams, meaning he was in charge of placing the calls for assistance to police departments nationwide.

The deputy chief said he has the "utmost confidence" in all law enforcement officers in town for the RNC, as well as in the operational plan that he helped devise.

Once the assisting officers were sworn in for their special duty, they were able to help local police in and around downtown Cleveland. Their presence would be noticeable after about 5 p.m. Saturday, Tomba said.
EXETER, New Hampshire - The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School in New Hampshire gets no money simply because a student enrolls in the school.

Unlike Ohio, New Hampshire pays the school only when kids make progress in their classes.

"We are not funded based on seat time," said Steve Kossakoski, the school's founder and CEO. "If a student were to complete a full-year algebra course, we would get funding for that amount of time."

If students enroll, do no work and make no progress, the Virtual Learning Academy (VLACS) is paid nothing.

"If we have kids just hanging out on our rolls, we're not going to get any compensation for them," Kossakoski said.

It's a very different funding structure than what Ohio uses for its giant -- and growing -- e-school industry. Online schools in Ohio are paid, just like other charter schools, for the number of students enrolled at a school.

While Ohio has complicated rules covering log-in times and the number of hours of "learning opportunities" students have available to them, Ohio has no rules covering the results online schools must achieve.

The state is also now facing a court fight with the largest online school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), over whether students have to "participate" in online classes or just have them offered to them for the school to be paid.

In a report last month, the largest charter school advocacy group, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, urged states to stop paying online schools the way traditional schools are. Students at online schools don't take classes on a fixed schedule like at most schools and make progress at their own pace, the report noted.

The group suggested that states look at how Florida, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Utah have created performance-based funding systems that allow flexibility but base funding on results.

That report echoes recommendations of the main advocacy group for online schools, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL).

"What if education funding was not based on seat-time, but on rewarding student performance?" a report from iNACOL asked. "What if supporting students to achieve at higher levels and accelerate student progress was rewarded--rather than simply having them show up and funding education based on attendance?"

See that full report below.

In a visit to the Virtual Learning Academy this spring, The Plain Dealer found a much simpler funding system than Ohio has - one with features that will appeal to many in Ohio. But other parts of the plan will raise red flags here, mainly because it places great trust in teachers and the school to determine when kids have learned enough for the school to be paid.

Here are the basics about the school and comparisons to Ohio:

It's a newer school: It was created in 2007-08 in the former high school for the town of Exeter, located an hour's drive north of Boston.

Its enrollment pattern is very different from Ohio e-schools: In Ohio, students have to be enrolled in a single school and can't split time between a district school and a charter school. New Hampshire allows students to decide -- they can take all of their classes through the Virtual Learning Academy or just one.

Districts aren't penalized if students take a class or two at VLACS. The state will pay VLACS but does not take any money away from the district.

Tony Baldassaro, the school's human resources director, said that allows VLACS and districts to view each other as partners.

"We're not competing for resources," he said. "They know we're working with them to help their students graduate on time."

Most students are part-time: About 12,000 students enroll in nearly 25,000 VLACS courses in a school year. But most are part-time. Last year, the school had just 240 students attending VLACS full-time.

The school recently added full-time middle school options to its high school ones.

It's non-profit: Just like Ohio charter schools, the school is a non-profit. But unlike Ohio's largest e-schools, it is not connected with for-profit companies.

ECOT buys many of its services from companies run by its founder, William Lager. Ohio Virtual Academy is under the wing of national e-school company K12 Inc., and Ohio Connections Academy is operated by Pearson, the education services giant that came under fire last year for how it handled the controversial PARCC tests.

"I'm a capitalist and I believe in the American way," Kossakoski said. "But there are certain places where you have to decide your incentives and what's your motivation. I just don't see how managing a school for profit can lead to good decisions."

How does this funding model work? It's a "mastery" model in which students advance only when they show they have mastered material. New Hampshire as a state is using that model statewide, while only a few schools in Ohio use it.

In VLACS' case, classes are divided into units and students are considered to have mastered that unit's material if they score 85 percent or above on unit tests. The school then receives money from the state for that unit.

How much money?

VLACS receives $5,600 from the state each year for each full-time student, Kossakoski said. That amount is pro-rated for part-timers and for completing units of individual courses.

That's lower than the $6,000 per student in base aid from Ohio to online schools, but VLACS does not provide computers or internet access to kids, as Ohio schools do.

"Since tech tools are becoming so ubiquitous, we don't become involved in that," Kossakoski said.

Who determines if a student has learned enough? That's a sticky point and one that could be an issue in Ohio, where many might balk at leaving that funding judgment to for-profit operators.

VLACS and New Hampshire let teachers decide.

"Well, that's rife with problems," Sam Abrams, a Columbia University professor who studies online schools told New Hampshire public radio for a report on VLACS. "Because it gives the virtual school administrators the incentive to lower the bar."

Others have noted that it's not much different from the level of authority we give teachers in traditional schools,

As the above chart from NACSA showed, other states leave that determination to state test scores or a state board.

Don't they end up losing money on kids that are behind or don't improve?

Maybe, Kossakoski said, but it all evens out.

"There's a balance between the students who need more time and the students who need less time," he said.

Though some kids need extra attention, he said, "We've also had the kid who is very motivated and very talented and finishes earlier."

If students are not active in class, the school contacts parents and can drop them. At that point, he said, they're no longer costing the school any money.

What do test scores show?

shows students scoring above the statewide average on the SAT and on many state tests. With strong results, the state renewed the school's charter in 2012.

But as the New Hampshire Public Radio story noted, those scores mostly covered just the small number of kids enrolled full-time -- not the thousands of part-time students.

New Hampshire also does not have a measure of student progress, like the Value-Added calculation of academic growth over a school year that Ohio uses. That's a key difference, since poor Value-Added grades are partly why the academic performance of Ohio e-schools has been under fire.
ECOT sign.JPG

Ohio's largest online school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), and the Ohio Department of Education are fighting over how much e-schools should have to document the academic work of students to justify their funding by the state.

(Patrick O'Donnell/The Plain Dealer)

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The state's attempt to make sure that taxpayers get their money's worth for the $267 million paid to online charter schools each year flared into an ugly legal battle this week, with the state seeking proof that students at Ohio's largest e-school truly take classes and the school claiming that the demand threatens its very survival.

State officials say they need to audit the attendance and funding for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) and other online schools to make sure students are engaged in their schoolwork enough to justify state money going to them.

ECOT, an online giant with 15,000 students, is just the latest charter school to have its attendance reviewed this year, both to make sure students do not fall behind and to make sure the state is not being cheated. Already, two smaller online schools, Provost Academy and Lakewood Digital Academy in Hebron, have been ordered to pay money back to the state for inflating their attendance.

In ECOT's case, the Ohio Department of Education wants proof that students are spending more than one hour a day online, as early reviews showed, before approving $108 million in payments to the school last year.

Because the school in the past has not had to provide documentation of the work that its students do, school leaders say it's unfair to expect the documentation retroactively for the just-finished 2015-16 school year.

If the state makes ECOT show evidence of how much time its students spend learning or else lose some of its state funding, ECOT Superintendent Rich Teeters told supporters this week, the school's future is in danger.

"These underhanded procedural changes would severely limit our ability to provide a quality school experience," he wrote on the school's Facebook page. "In fact, they would likely force us and other e-schools to close our doors altogether."

ECOT having to close wouldn't bother some charter school critics. State Sen. Joe Schiavoni, the Democratic minority leader, said online schools are valuable for some students, but the schools have to be held accountable with so much state tax money involved.

"This is a really, really big issue," Schiavoni said Friday. " I think they're finally being exposed."

He added: "We should be paying for the students who are actually enrolled and logged in and having education every day."

See below for an overview of the debate and what's at stake.

ECOT won't cooperate

In the latest development, ECOT balked at cooperating with the state's audit this week, despite losing a bid in Franklin County Common Pleas Court to halt it.

That audit had been scheduled for Monday, but ECOT filed suit last Friday, trying to block it from happening. When Judge Stephen McIntosh rejected ECOT's argument Monday, investigators went to the school, as they had scheduled weeks earlier, to see records of when students were logged in to the school's system to take lessons.

ECOT, the state says, would not make those records available.

"ECOT is refusing to provide ODE personnel with access to the log-in/log-out data for the students that ODE identified in connection with the year-end review," Douglas Cole, a lawyer hired by ODE, said in a letter to ECOT on Tuesday.

The audit has been postponed for two weeks to give ECOT another chance to provide records.

ECOT has not responded to a Plain Dealer request for comment about the failure to provide records, but spokesman Neil Clark told Ohio Public Radio that a 2002 agreement with the state says the school doesn't have to provide them.

"Our attorneys are in the room and they've made it very clear that any information that the Department of Education asks outside of our contract that they will need to file other paperwork with the court and make a request to the court that we submit the other data," Clark said.

Why should I care about e-schools?

Because they are a growing part of education in Ohio. In the 2014-15 school year, 38,500 students took their classes on computers from home through an online school. Ohio, along with California and Pennsylvania, is one of the top states in the country for the number of kids in online schools, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS).

For the 2015-16 school year, Ohio paid online schools $267 million to educate those students -- more than a quarter of what it paid all charter schools in the state.

ECOT and Ohio Virtual Academy, with 15,000 and 11,000 students, are the largest online schools in Ohio.

Are online schools any good?

That's a matter of heated debate.

State report cards say they aren't. The last state report card for the 2014-15 school year gave both ECOT and Ohio Virtual Academy a D for how well its students scored on state tests.

For Value-Added, a measure of how much progress students make, ECOT received an F. Ohio Virtual Academy received a C -- a grade that means students there made expected academic progress over the year.

These low grades were the center of controversy last year when the Department of Education intentionally left them out of the ratings of the agencies -- school districts, county education service centers and non-profits -- that oversee charter schools, because the poor grades would make the agencies look bad.

Last fall, Stanford University's Center for Research of Educational Outcomes (CREDO) reported that kids in Ohio's online charter schools fall far behind their peers in traditional schools and learn almost nothing at all in online math classes.

Those findings are costing e-schools support within the charter school community. The NAPCS recently said people should be "outraged" at how little learning occurs at some online schools, and called on states to take several steps to restrict and improve them.

For their part, ECOT and other charter supporters say the grades are unfair, and have campaigned to change how schools are measured on state report cards. They say that test scores are often low because many students are in online schools as a last resort before dropping out.

Attendance at e-schools is complicated

Unlike a standard school where kids are either at school or not, measuring whether kids are taking classes from home is more difficult. But it's crucial in how online schools are funded. They receive state money for each child counted as attending the school, so deciding what kids count can affect millions in state aid.

The state requires students at e-schools to spend 920 hours each school year on "learning opportunities" that can include online classes, but also time spent offline doing research or on field trips.

The state says schools have to show that students participated in those "learning opportunities," while ECOT says it only has to offer them.

In the past, the state has allowed ECOT to have a faculty member certify that students were offered "learning opportunities," but never required the school to show that students participated in them, beyond simply logging in regularly.

But House Bill 2, the state's new charter reform law that passed last fall and took effect Feb. 1 -- well after the 2002 contract ECOT is basing its denial of records on -- now requires schools to track student participation in classes each day.

Citing HB2, the state is now demanding that ECOT show log-in records and other data indicating participation, particularly in the months after the law took effect.

ECOT is not the first to face scrutiny

Last year, there was mild scrutiny of Ohio Virtual Academy after accusations that about 400 students were chronically truant, but remained enrolled at the school so the school could keep collecting state money for them. The Ohio Department of Education left that investigation to the school's oversight agency, which found that the school had just made an error.

Those oversight agencies, known as "sponsors" or "authorizers," all have a financial interest in schools they work with, since they receive fees of 3 percent of each school's revenue.

This year, the education department has been aggressive in its attendance and funding reviews under the new HB2 requirements. This spring, it ordered Provost Academy in Columbus to repay $800,000 after finding that it had the equivalent of just 35 full-time students, not the 160 it had claimed.

It also ordered Lakewood Digital Academy -- in Hebron, not here in Cuyahoga County -- to repay $150,000 for not properly documenting student work.

The state also found issues at Akron Digital Academy, Massillon Digital Academy and the Buckeye Online School for Success.
Horizon Science Academy High School.jpeg

Horizon Science Academy in Cleveland is part of a charter school network with some ties to the exiled cleric accused of promoting a failed coup attempt in Turkey last week.

(Patrick O'Donnell/The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - There could be a connection between the attempted coup in Turkey and a few local charter schools, along with dozens more around the country, but the link isn't solid.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed dissident cleric Fethullah Gulen for the attempt by the military last week to oust him from office.

Gulen, living in Pennsylvania, has been connected to several charter school networks across the country, including the Concept Schools network that the Noble Academy and Horizon Science Academy schools in Northeast Ohio and across the state belong to.

But it's unclear how direct Gulen's connection is to the schools or the failed coup. And it is still unclear whether Gulen was involved in the failed coup.

Though Erdogan seeks to extradite Gulen to Turkey, he has made that request previously and the State Department is demanding more evidence of Gulen's involvement before taking action. Gulen has also denied involvement and accuses Erdogan of staging the coup attempt.

Here are a few basics, as events unfold in Turkey and surrounding Gulen:

Who is Fethullah Gulen?

According to multiple sources, Gulen, 75, a former imam, moved to the U.S. in 1999 in self-imposed exile and now runs a movement known as Hizmet from the Golden Generation Prayer and Retreat Center in the Poconos.

Once an ally of Erdogan, the two now disagree on several issues.

You can learn more about the Hizmet movement through its umbrella group, the Alliance for Shared Values.

You can also see Gulen's own website for more on his views.

What does he believe?

Last year, he wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal titled, "Muslims Must Combat the Extremist Cancer," calling on Muslims to denounce violence.

"If we don't, we'll be partly responsible for the smeared image of our faith," he wrote.

Here's how the Washington Post describes him: "Gulen has long advocated tolerance, peace and "acceptance of religious and cultural diversity," his movement's website says, drawing on the traditions of Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam that is generally viewed as moderate."

Here's how the New York Times describes him: "His movement promotes a version of Islam that embraces science, education and interfaith dialogue, which has earned him millions of followers but also drawn the suspicion of many in Turkey's secular establishment."

But a 2012 article, also in the New York Times, painted a far more political picture:

"He has long advocated tolerance, peace and interfaith dialogue, drawing on the traditions of Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam generally viewed as being moderate.

But the movement's stealthy expansion of power -- as well as its tactics and lack of transparency -- is now drawing accusations that Mr. Gulen's supporters are using their influence in Turkey's courts and police and intelligence services to engage in witch hunts against opponents with the aim of creating a more conservative Islamic Turkey. Critics say the agenda is threatening the government's democratic credentials just as Turkey steps forward as a regional power."

See also this report from The Guardian in Britain on Gulen and how he fits into Turkish politics.

What is his connection to charter schools here?

This map, created by critics of Gulen, shows schools and organizations connected to his movement. Note that some are listed twice, notably Horizon Science Academy and Concept Schools, the family of schools Horizon belongs to, are shown separately. The Plain Dealer has not verified other organizations or their connections to Gulen.

Followers of Gulen, or at least Turkish immigrants sympathetic to him, have created more than 160 charter schools in the U.S., mostly with a math, science and technology focus. That's in keeping with his teachings that education, particularly science, is an important way to serve Allah.

There are several networks of these schools across the country, including the Concept Schools family with 23 schools in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.

Among them are Noble Academy schools, like the one in Euclid, and Horizon Science Academy schools in Cleveland, Lorain, Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati.

Click here for a 60 Minutes report about Gulen and the schools.

Or click here for a USA Today report on the schools.

Schools are sometimes called "Gulen Schools"

Though many label any of these schools as "Gulen Schools", it's a designation that Concept leaders object to. Concept leaders have told The Plain Dealer that while many are sympathetic to Gulen or even follow his teachings, they are not "affiliated" with Gulen and his Hizmet movement.

"Just because some of the founders of those organizations happen to be Turkish Americans, they do not automatically become "Turkish Schools" or "Gulen Charter Schools," Concept says on its website.

The schools have been controversial

At times, some of the Concept Schools have been praised for how much their students learn.

But in 2014, four former teachers at Horizon schools in Dayton accused officials at the school of possibly completing state tests for students, of unqualified teachers, of teachers showing videos day after day in class, of women being treated as second-class citizens and of teachers encouraging sexually harassing behavior toward female students.

They also told of favoritism toward both teachers and students from Turkey.

Investigations by the Ohio Department of Education, the Dayton Police and Montgomery County children's services were unable to substantiate those accusations.

Schools under federal investigation

In 2014, FBI agents in Cleveland, along with the U.S. Department of Education and the Federal Communications Commission, searched 19 locations, including three in Northern Ohio, related to Concept schools.

That investigation, which continues, covers use of the federal E-Rate grant program to install technology and communications upgrades in schools, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.

"According to a sworn statement from Geoffrey Wood, a U.S. Department of Education investigator, the feds suspected that Concept and some of its schools 'engaged in a scheme to defraud a federal program' for at least seven years," the Sun-Times has reported. "Court records show Wood told a judge that Concept violated government bidding rules by steering more than $5 million in E-Rate funds to companies with ties to the charter group."

Immigration, property and hiring practices also raise controversy

The Akron Beacon-Journal in 2014 questioned Concept's practices of hiring Turkish immigrants to teach at the schools, finding that more than 300 teachers had come from Turkey.

The Beacon-Journal also raised questions about how former concept leaders lease buildings to the schools.

Political influence also questioned

USA Today reported late last fall that different groups connected to the Gulen movement have funded 200 trips to Turkey for members of Congress since 2008, in possible violation of House rules and federal law.

Gulen affiliates have also paid for trips for Ohio lawmakers. As the Beacon-Journal reported, State Rep. Cliff Rosenberger, a Clarksville Republican, two other lawmakers and two local officials traveled to Turkey in 2012. That trip, to promote economic development, was paid for by the Niagara Foundation, a group that lists itself as a supporter of the Gulen movement.

Rosenberger, who is now House Speaker, did not offer comment to the Beacon-Journal on that story.
IMG_0133.JPG

Standing behind a two-way mirror, GOP pollster Frank Luntz talks with a presidential focus group of 27 undecided voters from northern Ohio. The group indicated concerns with Democrat Hillary Clinton's trustworthiness and Republican Donald Trump's suitability to be president.

(Jeremy Pelzer, cleveland.com)

INDEPENDENCE, Ohio--Sitting in a room in a non-descript office building, a focus group of 27 northern Ohio swing voters repeatedly hammered home that they want better choices for president than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Speaking with prominent Republican pollster Frank Luntz at an event taped for CBS, they described Clinton using terms such as "dishonest," "power-hungry," and "corrupt." Trump fared no better: he was labeled "mean-spirited," "a would-be fascist," and "a dumpster fire."

When Luntz asked who saw either Trump or Clinton as trustworthy, no one raised their hands. And when the group was given dials to rate several campaign ads in real time, their scores rarely jumped very high when Trump and Clinton spoke on screen.

"If they're the only two choices, gun to my head, just pull the trigger," said Robert K., who voted Republican in the past but said he can't bring himself to support Trump. (Like everyone in the group, Robert was identified only by his first name and last initial).

The focus group was too small to reliably indicate which candidate might win Ohio this November. But Luntz said it did show that both Clinton and Trump will struggle to win over undecided voters in Ohio - a key demographic in a key swing state.

Luntz also said he was surprised by the anger the group showed about how politically divided the United States is now.

"The level of frustration and sadness among these people is palpable, and it makes me sad," Luntz said.

When the group did offer praise, the results were sometimes surprising. A majority of the group - including a few longtime Republican voters -- said they would rather see Clinton address the nation following a tragedy such as the recent killings of Dallas police officers.

And some past Obama supporters joined a majority of the group in saying they believe Trump would be better for Ohio's economy than Clinton.

"We need a leader who's going to bring us together," said group member Michael P. "If I can see a candidate like that, who can show empathy for the American people, that's the person I'm going to vote for."

The group was split on Trump's newly announced vice-presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.

Michele B. said she's leaning toward Trump because of Pence, calling Pence "a good, American country boy" who "comes from the values of the Midwest that I was raised upon."

"I feel that if Trump can get the right people around him, because they will write his speeches and tone him down, that he could be an effective leader," she said.

But after the group watched some anti-Pence ads, George M. said that he now slightly favors Clinton because he "didn't realize how negative Pence is."

"He's pretty much a junior Trump," he said.

But when asked who would be the most effective spokesperson for Trump, a majority of the group favored U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, followed by Trump's daughter Ivanka. No one picked the other choices Luntz offered: Pence and two other rumored VP picks, Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie.

For Clinton, the group favored Clinton's primary opponent, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, over President Obama, ex-President Bill Clinton, or Clinton's daughter Chelsea.

One stance the group was united behind was that the mainstream media is biased. But while most indicated they felt the media was biased in favor of Clinton, they were divided on whether the media was pro-Trump or anti-Trump.

Danielle W., one of two black group members and the only black woman in the room, said she's waiting to hear some piece of information that will convince her which candidate to support.

"I'm waiting for one thing to come up that's going to click, and that will be it," she said. "There's no other way to do it."
Hillary Clinton makes campaign stop in Cleveland, June 13, 2016

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton waves to supporters with Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown during a campaign stop June 13, 2016, at the Cleveland Industrial Innovation Center.

(John Kuntz, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Hillary Clinton's team is ringing in the start of the Republican National Convention by emphasizing a rift between Donald Trump and Ohio GOP leaders.

"Already, Ohio Republicans are fleeing Trump's candidacy following more than a year of words and deeds that prove he is temperamentally unfit to serve as president," Chris Wyant, director of Clinton's Buckeye State campaign writes in a Sunday memo obtained by cleveland.com.

"Ohio Republicans, just like Americans across the country are looking at Trump and deciding, we are better than this," adds Wyant, who links to several news pieces and opinion columns.

Trump's struggle to win over Republicans in this key November battleground has been well-documented. Many in the GOP establishment supported Ohio Gov. John Kasich's unsuccessful White House bid. State Sen. Shannon Jones, for example, resigned as a delegate to this week's convention bin Cleveland because she wanted no part in Trump's formal nomination.

Wyant's memo also calls attention to Trump's organizational challenges in Ohio - a byproduct of his poor relationships here. The New York businessman was weeks behind Clinton in appointing a campaign director in the state - though he ultimately snagged one of the best in Bob Paduchik, who has guided George W. Bush and Rob Portman to statewide wins.

"Public polling will show a tight race in Ohio every day up to November 8, so we are taking nothing for granted," Wyant writes. "For months, we have been working to build the kind of grassroots organization that helps Democrats up and down the ballot win close elections in Ohio and across the country. By the end of this week, the Ohio campaign will have a dozen offices open in communities around the state - with dozens more on the way."

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, will be in Ohio on Monday to address the NAACP's annual conference in Cincinnati. Her campaign, working with national Democrats, plans an aggressive week of counter-messaging near the convention.
ted strickland.JPG

Democratic senate candidate Ted Strickland speaks at a Sunday, July 17 campaign appearance in Cleveland.

(Andrew J. Tobias, cleveland.com)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ted Strickland at a campaign appearance in Cleveland on Sunday attacked Republican U.S. Sen. Rob Portman for his record of staunchly supporting international free trade deals that he said have hurt Ohio workers.

Strickland, the former Democratic Ohio governor who is running for Portman's senate seat, criticized Portman for voting for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1994 deal signed by then-President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Strickland, a former Ohio governor, as a congressman voted against the bill, which he said has cost Ohio 300,000 manufacturing jobs.

Strickland spoke at a Euclid Avenue union hall as Cleveland gets ready to host the Republican National Convention this week. In a somewhat more complicated rhetorical task, Strickland also attempted to tie Portman to presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who has railed against NAFTA and other trade agreements.

"You know, they say a broken clock is right occasionally," Strickland said of Trump. "Donald Trump, his rhetoric about trade would be more convincing if his behavior matched his rhetoric... he can talk about trade, but his own manufacturing, much of it is done in countries around the world. So it's hard to believe that he really means what he says about trade. But there are some things that he's said about trade that I agree with."

In an email, spokeswoman Michawn Rich said "Rob has a long record of fighting for Ohio manufacturers and workers and is the only candidate in this race with a record of standing up to China," and that Strickland has the "worst record of any Senate candidate in America."

"In Congress, [Strickland] refused to vote to hold China accountable for unfair trade practices," Rich said. "As governor, despite his strong rhetoric, Strickland's administration opened a trade office in China and he even gave a $4 million taxpayer-funded loan to a now-bankrupt company with a Chinese factory."

Strickland, who has called for a $12 national minimum wage, was also asked about a looming proposal to raise Cleveland's minimum wage to $15 an hour. The city's Democratic leaders have opposed the minimum-wage increase, backed by the Service Employees International Union, saying a Cleveland-only wage increase would put the city at an economic disadvantage and result in job losses.

"I would encourage local communities, if they choose to do so, to increase [the minimum wage] to $15," Strickland said. "I do not believe that $15 is too much for working people. I believe that i you work hard, you should not have to live in poverty. So the people in Cleveland will make a decision, and I support the right to do that, certainly."
CLEVELAND -- It may seem strange that the GOP will convene in Cleveland, a Democratic stronghold. But, for the Republicans' first few decades, they owned Northeast Ohio.

Those decades were long ago, of course, and locals say the Republicans of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt were very different from the ones who'll be backing Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention July 18 to 21 at The Q.

Charles Bolton of Mentor is a former Republican state senator with prominent ancestors in both parties: Thomas Bolton, an important founding member of the Republican Party; Democratic U.S. Sen. Henry Payne and three Republican Boltons who served in the U.S. House of Representatives.

"In those days," Charles Bolton says of the late 1800s and early 1900s, "the Democratic Party was similar to the Republican Party today."

Allan Peskin, retired Cleveland State University professor, whose biographical subjects include GOP President James Garfield, said, "There's been a big switch. The Republicans have become the party of the white South, while racists were a bulwark of the Democratic Party down to the 1940s."

There were many other differences back then. The Democrats were the bigger populists, for instance, decrying big government. Meanwhile, the Republicans were the stronger party on women's rights, as exemplified by Harriet Taylor Upton of Warren, who served as treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1894 to 1910, lured its headquarters to her town and became the first woman on the Republican National Executive Committee.

From 1869 through 1923, eight Republicans born or living in Ohio won the White House, and two of them came from the state's northeastern corner: Garfield from Orange Township, Hiram and Mentor and William McKinley from Niles and Canton. (By grim coincidence, the two were also the state's only slain presidents.)

Cleveland has turned out other powerful Republicans over the years, including U.S. Sens. George Voinovich, Harold Burton and Mark Hanna, the last a presidential confidante and power broker.

Historians say the original Republican Party naturally appealed to Northeast Ohio.

"This was a big abolitionist town," says James Robenalt of Shaker Heights, a lawyer and historian whose subjects include President Warren Harding from Marion, Ohio, and the author's great-grandfather, William Durbin, who chaired the Ohio Democrats.

Many Northeast Ohio pioneers came from New England and upstate New York. They brought along those areas' hatred of slavery, partly as an element of unfair economic competition.

They sheltered many escaping slaves on the Underground Railroad. They mobbed to free captured slaves during the County Line Road Incident of 1843 in Lake and Ashtabula counties and the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of 1858. A year later, John Brown from Hudson and Akron pushed the cause into open revolt at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

Northeast Ohio also championed women's rights. Oberlin College went both interracial and co-ed in the 1830s. In 1851, one of the nation's earliest meetings for women's rights took place in Akron, where former slave Sojourner Truth famously showed her calloused hands and asked, "Ain't I a Woman?" Two years later, Cleveland hosted the fourth national women's rights convention.

So Northeast Ohioans championed the new Republican Party. Historians say it began in 1854 with rallies, including one in Columbus, to protest the spread of slavery through the Kansas-Missouri Act. Party co-founders included lawyer Thomas Bolton of Cleveland and U.S. Rep. Joshua Giddings and Sen. Benjamin Franklin Wade, both of Jefferson, Ashtabula County's seat. (In 1868, Wade would have become president if the impeached Andrew Johnson had not narrowly escaped conviction.)

In its first few decades, the Republicans always captured Ohio and ran especially strong in its northeast quadrant, according to ohioelectionresults.com, a trove of data amassed by Mike Dawson, once gubernatorial press secretary for the late Voinovich.

The Republicans' first presidential nominee, John Fremont, drew 59.70 percent of Northeast Ohio's votes in 1856 versus 48.51 percent statewide. He took Cuyahoga and all its contiguous counties, drawing 80.97 percent of the vote in Geauga. From then until today, Geauga has opposed just one Republican presidential nominee: Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Meanwhile, all seven of Greater Cleveland's counties stayed Republican from the party's birth through 1908, with the exceptions of Cuyahoga and Summit in 1892. Overall, the northeastern quadrant remained more Republican than the rest of the state throughout those decades.

Things began to change with the three-way race of 1912, which unseated downstate Republican William Howard Taft. Democrat Woodrow Wilson won Cuyahoga, Portage and Summit. Teddy Roosevelt, Republican turned Bull Moose, won Geauga, Lake, Lorain and Medina. Roosevelt was the only candidate to fare better in the northeast quadrant than statewide.

For the next few cycles, Geauga returned to the Republican fold, and the rest of the region voted rather similarly to the state overall, typically supporting the party, but not doing so steadily.

In 1936, Cleveland hosted the Republican convention, but Northeast Ohio voted more Democratic that year than the rest of the state, a trend that has lasted through today.

Regional results still vary widely by county, though. Cuyahoga has not endorsed a Republican presidential nominee since Richard Nixon in 1972. Last time around, Democrat Barack Obama drew 69.42 percent of the vote in Cuyahoga, won more narrowly in Lorain, Portage and Summit, lost respectably in Lake and Medina and drew just 38.55 percent in Geauga.

Local historians and leaders say it's not so much the region that's changed as the parties. African-American voters, for instance, swung especially sharply between the parties when the cause of civil rights swung likewise.

Virgil Brown Jr. is a holdout: a former state school board member loyal to Republican forebears, including his father, Cuyahoga County's first African-American commissioner.

"The Republican Party has been associated with Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves and some progressive voting rights acts and other legislation," says Brown. "That's not the pervasive feeling today."

Democrat Frederick Taft, a former Moreland Hills councilman descended from President Taft and other leading Republicans, says the local GOP used to produce what were called "goo-goo's," or supporters of good government, limited but effective and fairly consensual. He's thinking of Voinovich, Brown Sr. and his own father, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Seth Taft, who was widely praised for running a nonracial campaign for Cleveland mayor against Carl Stokes.

"You have to look pretty hard," says the younger Taft, "to find that feeling evidenced in Republican political activists today."

Grant Segall is a reporter for The Plain Dealer.

To contact Grant Segall: gsegall@plaind.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Maybe the best thing anyone ever said to describe Northeast Ohio came from LeBron James two years ago: "In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given. Everything is earned. You work for what you have." As I prepare to travel north this morning as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, it's earning time again.



Let's be honest: Everybody in Ohio is proud that the national spotlight is on Cleveland this week -- and most of us are nervous about what's about to happen here. This is a city where talent is never enough, and the breaks often seem to go the other way. Usually, Cleveland is nobody's preseason favorite to win, whether you're talking sports, the economy or politics.



But here we are. It's earning time.



I'm not a fan of the prospective nominee of my party, for reasons that I made clear before the primary, when it might have mattered.

But I'm a big fan of some of his most ardent supporters, and it somehow seems right that this convention is here. These are people who, like Cleveland, have been given nothing, who worked for everything they have. There's steel in their spine, their will and often in the toes of their boots. They represent what's best about Ohio, and Ohioans.



They haven't given up on America - but they've been wondering a lot lately about our political system, about the government, about the media. With all the attention given to the nominee, the real story is where these folks end up.



But here's one thing I know for sure: America would do well to re-learn the lessons of Northeast Ohio: Never give up, expect nothing, earn it all.



* * *



I'm Ohio's auditor and a Kasich delegate. I'll be writing each morning in this space about my observations at the convention - what it's like to be there, what folks are saying. There won't be any scoops, and the big-brain punditry is outside both my weight class and above my pay grade.



My hope is simply to share the experience.



The Rules and Platform committees have been here to for days, doing the lead-in work for the main event. Today the rest of the delegation begins to arrive in Cleveland and settle in. My wife, Darlene, and I will at least be able to drive and avoid the airport.



Tonight's schedule has a variety of social events, and tomorrow is the first official session, where votes will be taken. The one thing that most of my fellow delegates seem to agree on, though, is the coming week is unlikely to be precisely what any of us expected, or planned for.





* * *





I married into Cleveland - Darlene grew up on the West Side, and her brother worked at Republic Steel. I played some of the bars here in the 1970s when I was a musician, and have come to love this town over the years.



To be honest, I'm a little peeved about the snarkiness from the East Coast types about CLE, especially the smirks about the River That Catches Fire. For anybody who thinks a current events reference from 1969 makes them hip and relevant, I propose we show them what's really hip and relevant and buy them a Burning River Pale Ale with a smile.



Only a town like Cleveland could take a civic black eye and defiantly name its excellent flagship brew after it.



* * *



As tough as Cleveland is, we are nervous. It looks like there will not be any attempt to wrestle the nomination away from the prospective nominee. The Establishment doesn't riot, so the risk of civil unrest seems slight on the GOP side of things.



The thousands of protestors said to be arriving with dreams of TV cameras dancing merrily in their heads are another matter. It probably won't get ugly, and law enforcement will likely be able to contain it if it does. We are confident, but nervous.



This is Cleveland. Anything can happen. Just ask LeBron.





* * *



Dave Yost is Ohio's Auditor of State, one of five independently elected statewide offices. He is serving his second four-year term.
CAR SEATS

Headed out of town this summer with your baby? Here are some lessons learned the hard way for how to ensure a smooth ride on a road trip. Here, a 10-month-old baby sits in a rear-facing car seat. (David Petkiewicz/cleveland.com)

(DAVID PETKIEWICZ)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Summer is the perfect time to pack up the car, head out of town for a few days, recharge your batteries and listen to a baby scream in the backseat for hours on end.

Wait, what? No one wants to listen to a screaming baby; it's heartbreaking and terrible for everyone in the car and leads to distracted driving.

I don't know if this is true of all babies, but my baby has a 45 minute car-seat limit. For the first 45 minutes, he's great. He snoozes, he plays with the little toys that hang above his head, he coos sweetly. Then, as if a timer had gone off, he starts crying his adorable round little head off.

I took two road trips with him already this summer, one to Cincinnati and another to Washington D.C. I learned a lot after the first harrowing road trip to improve our chances for the second.

So if you're planning to get out of town this summer to visit family and friends, or just to escape the craziness of the Republican National Convention, here are a few tips to help you and your baby enjoy the ride.

Get a good car seat

Make sure you have a safe car seat that is the right size for your child, and is properly installed. A whopping 70 percent of car seats have been installed wrong. If you have concerns, many fire stations and hospitals do car seat inspections for free so make sure your little one is secure in their seat.

Having said that, a good car seat is also a matter of comfort. Sitting in the car for hours at a time is uncomfortable for anyone, but babies can barely even shift their tiny booties. On our first trip, my son was still in his infant car seat, which was the correct size for him at the time. But by the time we went on our second road trip we upgraded to a bigger car seat since he'd grown so much, and the difference in comfort level was clear. He slept better and squirmed less on the second trip.

Be prepared with food

Babies have tiny stomachs, and as any mom can attest they eat all the time. But it's not very practical to pull over every hour or two to feed your baby. I learned this the hard way when my son started crying on the highway, right after a sign that declared there would be no more rest stops for 60 miles! Panic set in. I ended up crawling in the back seat, using a hand pump to get some milk, pouring that milk into a bottle, and then feeding him in a car going 60 mph. It was not one of the highlights of my life.

The second time around I pumped some milk ahead of time for just such a situation. If your baby is on formula, prepare some ahead of time. Remember to pack a cooler or thermos if you need one.

Also, if your baby is experimenting with solids this is a great way to pass the time. On our second, much more successful road trip I sat in the back with him and handed him different fruits and vegetables in a mesh bag (like this one) for him to try out.

Be prepared with entertainment

There is this one song that my son absolutely loves. It's a Hungarian song called Nandu about an emu (we only speak Hungarian at home). Maybe it's because his dad made up a goofy dance to it, or maybe it's because we played it all the time when he was a newborn. Whatever the case, it works like magic. If my son is crying, we'll put this one song on, and nine times out of ten he'll just start sucking his thumb and chill out.

If your child also has a favorite song like this, do yourself a favor and make this song readily available in all the cars even remotely affiliated with your household. Create a CD or playlist that has this song on it over and over and over again. It'll drive you nuts, but not nearly as nuts as listening to a baby cry.

I also made an exception to the no TV or iPad rule on our second road trip and let my son watch videos on the iPad to keep him occupied. He was entranced watching videos of himself learn how to crawl and make funny sounds.

Some other great tips I've read include making sure you have a sunshade on the baby's window, taking lengthy breaks to let your baby crawl around and use up some of that energy, pack strategically, and remember to be flexible and enjoy the ride.

What's your best advice for hitting the road with a baby? Let me know in the comments below.

Be sure to follow Ida on Twitter at @Ida_in_Cle, and send her your parenting related thoughts to ilieszkovszky@cleveland.com.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The head of the Cleveland police patrolmen's union is asking Ohio Gov. John Kasich to suspend the state's open carry laws in Cuyahoga County for the Republican National Convention in the wake of the deaths of three police officers in Louisiana, according to WJW-TV.

The station reported Sunday that union president Steve Loomis said he is working with an attorney to draft a request to be sent to Kasich for consideration. Reuters reported Loomis asked the governor to declare a state of emergency, which would allow Kasich to immediately suspend the law.

Ohio's open carry laws generally allow anyone without a felony record to carry guns in the state, including in downtown Cleveland. There are exceptions. Firearms are not permitted inside the U.S. Secret Service security zone around Quicken Loans Arena, where the RNC will be held Monday through Thursday.

"I don't care what the legal precedent is, I feel strongly that leadership needs to stand up and defend these police officers," Loomis, the head of the police union, told Reuters, on Sunday.

Kasich's spokeswoman, Emmalee Kalmbach, said the governor does not have the authority to suspend state and federal laws regarding open carry.

"Law enforcement is a noble, essential calling and we all grieve that we've again seen attacks on officers," Kalmbach said in a statement. "Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested. The bonds between our communities and police must be reset and rebuilt--as we're doing in Ohio--so our communities and officers can both be safe. Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal."

And Article 1 of the Ohio Constitution specifically limits the right to suspend laws to the legislature: "No power of suspending laws shall ever be exercised, except by the general assembly."

Brian Betley, who leads the Cleveland police union representing sergeants, lieutenants and captains, told cleveland.com he agrees with Loomis' request. Betley said he would contact the state's police officer's union to see what help they can offer.

"They would declare a state of emergency if something happened, but it's all too late at that point," Betley said. "Why not do it before something happens?"

Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, issued a statement also supporting Loomis' request.

"The RNC has already determined it's too dangerous to allow convention goers to carry firearms inside the convention center," Gross said. "Limiting open carry outside the event seems a natural next step, especially given the heightened tensions in our nation and today's tragedy in Baton Rouge."

Three law enforcement officers were killed early Sunday and three others were injured in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Officers there earlier this month shot and killed Alton Sterling, 37, sparking protests in that city and across the country. Five officers were killed at a Dallas Black Lives Matter protest the same week.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson told cleveland.com's Andrew Tobias last week that the city would not ask the governor to suspend the state's open carry laws.

"If we believed there was a cooperative venture that could result in a positive outcome on a temporary basis it would have happened by now," Jackson said.

Loomis is also asking Police Chief Calvin Williams to have three officers working at intersections for security at the RNC, instead of one.
4-4 vote blocks Obama immigration plan migrants from A1

Immigration has emerged as a major issue during this presidential campaign. As the Republican National Convention comes to Cleveland, we ask some experts about border security and other immigration issues. In this recent photo, Border Patrol agent Eduardo Olmos walks in San Diego near the secondary fence separating Tijuana, Mexico, background, and San Diego.

(Associated Press photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Immigration is a hot button issue even without a presidential race.

With the Republican National Convention meeting in Cleveland this week, The Plain Dealer is highlighting some issues that have played prominently in the race for the White House.

Immigration is not only a politicized issue, but a multi-faceted one, as well, often offering many entry points for high-emotion debate. They range from homeland security to immigration reform.

We take a look at a few of these issues by interviewing experts with varying viewpoints. They include David Clingingsmith, an economics professor at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University; David Inserra, a policy analyst for homeland security and cyber policy at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and Victor Narro, a project director at the UCLA Labor Center.

What should become of the undocumented immigrants already here?

Most estimates put the undocumented immigrant population in the United States at at least 11 million. Congress has not passed immigration reform legislation and the status of these immigrants is no less pressing.

"It is physically impossible, numerically impossible, to deport every single immigrant who is in this country undocumented," said Narro, who has been involved in immigrant rights and labor issues for 25 years. "They are here to stay, and they are very integrated. They come from mixed households where there are U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents and undocumented in the same household.

"The question of immigration reform becomes, 'How do you deal with a legalization program that is going to create the opportunities for them to become legal residents of this country?'" he said.

Narro answers the question by saying, "it should be comprehensive, but humane." In the absence of congressional action, Narro said some states and municipalities have come up with some good solutions for taking undocumented workers out of the shadows, so that they won't be exploited by unscrupulous employers or other untrustworthy entities.

Narro

"In the last five years, we've created a good environment for undocumented immigrants in California," he said. "We have drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants. We're creating a health care process for undocumented immigrants who don't qualify for Obamacare. We have created provisional licenses for undocumented immigrants, so that they can qualify for professional licenses. We're trying to integrate undocumented immigrants into society because of the failure of Congress to act."

Inserra says one cannot discuss immigration reform without also discussing the lax enforcement of immigration laws. He said lax enforcement serves as an incentive for undocumented immigrants to come to the U.S. So, even if Congress passes immigration reform, the country will still have an undocumented immigrant problem.

Inserra said a look at removals - deportation in which an undocumented person receives penalties - shows how enforcement has become lax. He said a look at returns in which an undocumented person agrees to leave the U.S. in exchange for not receiving penalties - also shows lax enforcement.

"When we see people being removed and returned from the United States, we see that has reached its lowest level since 1971," Inserra said.

"When you look at the interior of the United States, we've seen fewer and fewer people being removed, including people who are criminals," he said. "The number of criminal aliens being removed between 2011 and 2015 fell about 60 percent to 63,000 in 2015."

Inserra

Inserra stressed that his deportation figures were based on removals and returns and emphasized undocumented immigrants, who had lived in the U.S., and hadn't been sent back shortly after being caught at the border.

"Technically, the (Obama) Administration only counts removals as deportations," he said. What the administration started doing was removing people caught at the border. So, the number of removals was very high in about 2011. As a result they were able to claim that we have deported more people than we ever have. In actuality, the overall number of people being expelled from the United States was actually falling."

Clingingsmith said immigration reform shouldn't be fueled by the threat that immigrants are taking jobs away from native-born Americans.

"While people might think that if a lot of immigrants come in then, 'I might be competing with them for a job, and that they may make it harder for me to get a job, or immigrants will reduce my wages,' the consensus in the literature is that while there may be some small short-run effects like that, in the long-run there are actually complementaries between immigrants and native-born Americans," he said. "This means that native-born wages actually go up in the presence of immigrants. And that is because, for the most part, natives and immigrants are involved in somewhat different skills. They're involved in different occupations. There is a small benefit to having immigrants it the country, and no big negative."

Clingingsmith said immigrants often fill niches in the labor market that aren't being met by native born Americans; and that immigration reform should take this into account.

"I think that it would be good to consider a formal system of temporary work visas, with some eventual path to citizenship."

Is building a wall along the southern border of the U.S. a bad idea?

Donald Trump, who is scheduled to become his party's nominee in Cleveland this week, has proposed building a wall along the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. Clingingsmith, Inserra and Narro all say it is an impractical solution.

"Every little bit of the border is different," Inserra said. "What we need is a good system of technologies that best meets the needs of different parts of the border. It could be drones. It could be sensors in the ground. It could be fixed cameras or infrared - different sorts of technology that would allow our officers to physically do more with less.

"A great fence is only as good as the people who are watching it," he said. You need to have, in my view, better aerial, sensor and camera surveillance of the border. That way, border patrol officers have better awareness of what is going on."

Clingingsmith and Narro said past efforts to strengthen the U.S. border with Mexico haven't served as a deterrent. They have only forced people seeking to illegally enter the U.S. into dangerous terrain, which has often resulted in a spike in deaths.

Clingingsmith

Narro also said Trump's talk of building the wall -- coupled with comments about Mexico sending people with problems to the U.S., including rapists - vilifies people to a point that it has the impact to influence public policy relating to undocumented immigrants as well as those who are here legally.

"At what point do you want to commit to a security system of border enforcement and interior enforcement that is in violation of civil liberties, like the right to privacy?"

Should U.S. immigration policy be refocused to prioritize attracting skilled and educated workers?

A primary focus of U.S. immigration policy has been to unite immigrants with family members who are still abroad. However, many believe the U.S. should institute an immigration policy aimed at attracting skilled and educated workers. Such an approach is common in many industrialized nations, including Canada.

"The U.S. gives out 66 percent of our green cards for family-based reasons," Inserra said. "There are good things about family-based immigration, but I would like us to move in the direction of accepting the best and the brightest from around the world - people who have job offers, and have most likely already worked in the United States."

Clingingsmith expressed similar sentiments.

"The U.S. doesn't do a great job, compared to other countries, of attracting high-skilled workers to come into the country," he said. "We would benefit from having those people come here and pay taxes and come up with ideas (for innovation). We should be more liberal in providing - in a sensible way - more opportunities for people who have skills, especially skills for which we may have an excess need."

The Penn Wharton Budget Model, an interactive tool designed to examine policy issues, shows that the U.S. could benefit by dramatically changing the mix of immigrants accepted each year to included more skilled and educated workers. It found that the new mix of immigrants could help in addressing such goals as shoring up the Social Security and Medicare systems.

See: U.S. benefits by doubling immigration; raising share of educated: UPenn

While Narro isn't against skill level and education being part of immigration policy, he questions wither it should be a primary focus.

"People should be allowed to bring people to this country for the purpose of family unity," he said.

Follow @OPinfo
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Most restaurants shoot for a low-key sneak-peak for family and friends, in advance of the grand opening.

Uh, Nuevo Modern Mexican is doing is it a little different... How about a "soft" opening for 500 GOP power players and the international media under the world's spotlight?

The restaurant will take center stage at the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee's welcome party for the 2016 Republican National Convention. "Rock the Night in Cle" hits North Coast Harbor at 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

The invitation-only event is expected to bring 500 VIPs and 10,000-12,000 people to the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame and Museum, the Great Lakes Science Center and Voinovich Park.

Nuevo, which opens to the public on July 25, is an Akron-based eatery owned by Zack and Lisa Hirt. The restaurant is the first building in a 28-acre project planned by developer Dick Pace's Cumberland Development and the Trammell Crow Co., of Dallas.

"We're going to be opening this a patio and doing a happy hour and people can come here after going to the Rock Hall or playing volleyball," says marketing manager Rick Hirt, pointing to a new courts and recreation area just north of the bar-restaurant.

The 9,000-square-feet, two-story Nuevo will specialize in contemporary Mexican-American fare, margaritas and tequila. It will cater to tourists and locals on the first floor and parties on an airy upper level.

Though, of course, nothing like the RNC party.

The soiree will feature 50 area chefs displaying their cuisines, including Zack Hirt. Jonathon Sawyer of the Greenhouse Tavern, who oversaw the chef show, is included along with Zack Bruell, Eric Williams and Michael Symon.

The owner is Lola and co-host of "The Chew" who made news by saying he didn't want Trump to eat at his restaurants is not expected to attend.

The bash will also feature live music on five stages.

GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump often talks about the "silent majority" - a term popularized in a 1969 speech by Richard Nixon. Ah, perfect timing: Headliner Three Dog Night scored its first hit in 1969 and enjoyed an amazing during the Nixon administration, with 21 Top 40 hits.

If their Nixon-era is the barometer, then Three Dog Night would no doubt love to make American absolutely amazing again.

The Doobie Brothers, who had been scheduled to play the event, cancelled.

Guests at the Sunday soiree - which runs until 10 p.m. -- will also have access to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the Great Lakes Science Center and North Coast Harbor. Fireworks will end the evening, which is being sponsored by local donors to the Host Committee.

More on Nuevo next week...
CLEVELAND, Ohio - There were some high-profile guests at the Arkansas delegation's RNC party at the Cleveland History Center Saturday: Governor Asa Hutchinson, Senator Tom Cotton .... John D. Rockefeller?

Well, the last one was just a reenactor, albeit a sharp-dressed one in a sweet suit and straw hat. But there were real Rockefellers among the delegation, hence the reason the Southern state hosted a party dedicated to the Standard Oil founder, one of Cleveland's most famous and influential sons. Born in New York in 1839, John D. Rockefeller and his family moved to Cleveland in 1853. He founded Standard Oil, which became one of the largest companies in the world, in Cleveland in 1870. Though he and his business later moved to New York, his imprint on Cleveland can be seen to this day on buildings and parks and housing estates that bear his name.

The 40-member delegation to the 2016 Republican National Convention includes John. D's great-great-grandson Will Rockefeller, son of late Arkansas Lt. Governor Win Rockefeller. Win was the son of John D.'s Rockefeller Jr.'s fourth son, Winthrop Aldrich Rockefeller, the Republican Governor of Arkansas from 1967- 71. He was "the first Republican Arkansas governor since reconstruction," as Will Rockefeller proudly pointed out.

Will's mother, Lisenne Rockefeller, is also with the Arkansas delegation.

"We wanted to do something to celebrate that connection to Cleveland," said Jonathan Barnett, National Committeeman for Arkansas - and party organizer for this elegant dinner party for 160, set amid the classic cars, Great Lakes Expo posters and Cleveland memorabilia in the History Center's main hall.

In addition to the John D. Rockefeller impersonator -actor John Thobaben - the evening included a pre-party tour of Lake View Cemetery, where John D. and many members of the Rockefeller family are buried.

"It was short, but it was very emotional," said Barnett.

The convention is Will Rockefeller's first visit to Cleveland.

"It has been fantastic. I always wanted to come visit," said the Little Rock resident who worked with Senior Arkansas Senator John Boozman before deciding to take a position in his family's business. "There's a lot of strong emotion to see where John D. got in start in business and in life, and his eternal resting place."

Will Rockefeller said he's especially interested to learn more about Cleveland - and his great-great-grandfather's - history.

"Being a history major, and because of interest in my family's history, it's fascinating to see Cleveland," said the Rhodes college graduate. He made a point to walk over to see the Rockefeller Building in the Warehouse District after dining at Cleveland Chop earlier this week.

Will Rockefeller wasn't the only Arkansian excited about Cleveland history at the party.

"Cleveland has some incredible history," said Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson. "I've been reading Karl Rove's book about William McKinley and he talks in there about Mark Hanna."

Before dinner he took a detour to see the History Center's collection of artifacts from McKinley and Clevelander Hanna, considered to be the architect of the modern political campaign, in their new Power and Politics exhibit.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton also chimed in on Cleveland.

"What a great year this is for Cleveland, with the Cavs and Indians," said the Senator at the pre-dinner cocktail reception.

"That 19-inning game was really something," said Cotton, who arrived Saturday afternoon and had a quick lunch at Subway at the Tower City Center food court. "I'm very happy to be in Cleveland, everyone has been so friendly. ... Arkansians and Clevelanders have a lot in common - a spirit of industry, hard work, family - whether it's on an Arkansas farm or in the city."

There were a few Trump hats in sight, some elephant brooches and many Arkansas lapel pins, but no one seemed to be talking politics Saturday. This was a grand old party of a different sort.

Dinner began with a host from the History Center noting that this night was "certainly the most Arkansians we've ever had in this building at once" to genial laughter.

After the dinner - beef, chicken or vegetarian, served on lovely table set with a sea-green cloth, white flowers and china - guests were headed over to Severance Hall for a private organ concert. Before they left they were able to take a spin on the History Center's restored Euclid Beach Carousel, which Governor Hutchinson's wife did even before dinner.

Another Cleveland treat was given to each guest as a favor before they left: Humphrey popcorn balls with a RNC 2016 label next to the Euclid Beach logo.

Will Rockefeller, for one, was reveling in the Cleveland connections Saturday.

"Cleveland made John D.," he said. "Everyone thinks of the Rockefellers and New York as being synonymous, but really New York would not have had John. D. had he not had Cleveland first."
trumpguy.JPG

Julian Raven, an alternate delegate from New York, stands on Public Square on Sunday, showing off a painting he made of Donald Trump. He and other Republican delegates poured into Cleveland, upbeat about the national convention.

(The Plain Dealer)

CLEVELAND, Ohio - Republican delegates streamed into Cleveland on Sunday, buoyed by the city's welcome and the upbeat dawn of a convention they hope will mend the party's internal strife. Most of all, they said they were excited by their first impressions of Cleveland and its preparations.

"I came in and said, 'O.K., this is a major city,' " said Ryan Davidson, an Idaho delegate for Ted Cruz. "It looks great.''

Connie Hair, the chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said she didn't know what to expect from the city.

"My impression of Ohio came from watching 'M*A*S*H,' with Klinger,'' she said, referring to the character who hailed from Toledo and was played by Jamie Farr. "I even watched 'WKRP in Cincinnati.' But this is great. I'm happy to see police everywhere. It's great to see that."

Hair spoke as news reports streamed about the shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge.

"Let's put it this way, I'm very upbeat, but guarded,'' she said.

Eric Eakin wasn't so upbeat.

"Our town is an armed camp,'' said Eakin, of Bay Village, as he drove near Public Square. "(City officials) have girded their loins to the nth degree. There can't be this deep of a divide in this country for this type of military response.''

Others disagreed.

Sheri Auclair, a delegate for GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump from Wayzata, Minn., said she was impressed by the sense of security.

"There's a general feeling of safety,'' Auclair said.

The delegates said they expect tense protests. They said they fear that those protests will overshadow the message of the convention.

"I'm sure there will be protests,'' said Butch Marsalis, a Trump delegate who drove 1,200 miles from Deadwood, Texas. "They're getting paid to do it, so I'm sure they're going to feel a need to earn their money.''

Davidson, the Idaho delegate, said he also expects protesters: "It's all part of the experience. Of course, something could happen. It can happen anywhere if people are motivated enough. But will it happen? No.''

Julian Raven met some protesters early Sunday. He praised Trump behind a large painting he made of the candidate. Others ripped the candidate.

"I love it here,'' he yelped.

Others who pulled into the city were more concerned about the experience and less about tensions.

"Everyone has been so friendly,'' said Senator Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas. "Arkansasians and Clevelanders have a lot in common - a spirit of industry, hard work, family, whether it's on an Arkansas farm or in the city.''

Charles Blankenship, a surgeon from Texarkana, Texas, flew into the city Sunday morning. Downtown streets were quiet, and he seemed upbeat. He said he realizes that protests will be a big part of the convention. He also said Cleveland's welcome was great. But his focus is on what happens on the stage at Quicken Loans Arena.

"The main thing will be what happens at the convention, not what city it is in,'' he said. "We need to get over the hurdles and get the party together.''
Damien Meyer | AFP | Getty Images

The Department of Justice is widely expected to be nearing a decision on Aetna's $34 billion deal with Humana and Anthem's $54 billion agreement to buy Cigna , one year after the mega-health insurance mergers were announced. For months, analysts thought the Anthem-Cigna deal was the more challenged of the two when it comes to regulatory approval, because of the potential impact their combination would have on competition in the commercial large-employer market.

Now, investors are increasingly concerned regulators could block Aetna and Humana's merger because of the potential dominance the combined company would have in the market for private Medicare health plans known as Medicare Advantage. These fears were fanned by reports, citing unnamed sources, that claimed federal regulators raised significant concerns about this issue.

"Humana today trades at a 45 percent discount to the implied acquisition price (of $230 per share), which has widened since the middle of June as skepticism has increased about their potential to get the deal closed," said Steven Halper, an analyst at FBR Capital Markets.



Hurdles to approval

The combined firm's Medicare Advantage enrollment would be nearly 4.5 million members, accounting for 25 percent of national enrollment this year. UnitedHealth Group is currently the largest Medicare Advantage health insurer with 3.8 million members, or about 21 percent of enrollment. In order to win approval from the Justice Department, the companies have reportedly offered to divest regional plans covering roughly 350,000 members, and have reportedly received bids from smaller Medicare rivals WellCare Health and Centene , but analysts say regulators may not see the sales alone as enough to maintain competition.

"The question is not can you find a buyer for the plans but will the government approve the buyer?" said Halper. "There are many markets  where there's too much overlap and unfortunately no qualified buyer for these plans if the government insists on having an existing market participant  who's familiar with the local market."

It's an issue that arose following Humana's acquisition of Arcadian Health for $150 million in 2012. As condition of approval, the Justice Department required the companies to divest plans in five states, representing 13,000 Medicare Advantage members. As part of the DOJ's consent decree, Humana sold the plans to WellCare, Cigna and a Louisiana-based regional insurer Vantage Health .

Like other private health insurance plans, Medicare Advantage plans use provider networks to try to control costs and offer competitive premiums for seniors. Without those networks in place, new insurers in local markets can face a significant competitive disadvantage.

A study by antitrust policy researchers at The Capitol Forum found that two years after the Humana sale of Arcadian assets, Vantage Health was the only insurer still operating the plans it had bought from Humana in 2015. Cigna and WellCare were unable to offer competitive plans and exited the markets.

Medicare Advantage vs traditional Medicare
watch now

Your next doctor visit could be in your home, but not as a traditional house call. Instead of going into a medical office, a Cleveland Clinic program lets patients schedule a "virtual visit" with a doctor using a tablet, smartphone, or desktop. "What we're really driving at is access to health care anywhere, anytime," Cleveland Clinic President and CEO Toby Cosgrove told CNBC's "On the Money." Last year, the Cleveland Clinic said 4,200 virtual visits or online consultations were completed. Cosgrove, who first joined the institution as a heart surgeon in 1975, predicted to CNBC that would be just the beginning. "I think this is what's going to happen in many, many areas," Cosgrove told CNBC, adding that mobile appointments are "more efficient for caregivers" and patients alike. "Clearly, it saves you from going to the doctor's, parking your car, going into the waiting room, waiting and then repeating the process," he said. Cosgrove added that users "can do it from any locationand it is an opportunity to expand the scope of care to remote areas."



Obamacare health insurance agency Getty Images

The $7.2 billion clinic has more than 3,000 doctors in its system, and sees nearly 7 million patients per year. However, Cosgrove told CNBC he would "absolutely" do an online consultation with a patient himselfwith some caveats, of course.

"Obviously, if [a patient has] cardiac disease, I don't think I'm going to be doing that online," he said. "But if [one has] a dermatological problem, or if I have an orthopedic problem, or a follow-up from a heart operation. Or a follow-up from some sort of surgery where really someone just needs to look at the incision and make sure it's OK? Absolutely," he added.

Obamacare check up

Six years since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, more people have health care coverage. According to Gallup, the number of uninsured Americans is 11 percent this year, a record low.

But according to PwC's Health Research Institute, cost of medical insurance is rising at 6.5 percent a year. Cosgrove, who has called Obamacare a "long term project" in an interview last year, said the combination of rising costs and more demand will put pressure on health care providers moving forward. "I think health care costs are really going to be dependent upon the aging of the population," he said. "We've got more and more people living longer and there are more and more things we can do for them." At the Cleveland Clinic, the traditional payment model is changing, with some 60 percent of the institution's payment and revenue coming from government sources like Medicaid and Medicare, Cosgrove said. "So 40 percent is from private insurance and that is shifting over time," he added. Cosgrove explained that "private insurance is decreasing at about 1 percent a year, and government pay is increasing at about 1 percent a year." In prior years, "we have lost money on Medicare and Medicaid and we have made up the difference in private insurance. Now private insurance, as it becomes less common, is not making up that gap for us," the CEO added. In response, Cosgrove says doctors have to "reduce the cost" and "improve the efficiency of how we deliver care. That ultimately means changing care, how we deliver it, where we deliver it, who delivers it and the way we deliver it."


At least three Baton Rouge police officers were killed and three others injured Sunday morning, the city's mayor and the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said.

At least one suspect is dead. Law enforcement officials initially said they believed that two others suspects were at large, but at a news conference Sunday afternoon officials said the deceased suspect was likely the only shooter.

A senior law enforcement official said that suspect wore black fatigues and was armed with a rifle.

By 3 p.m. (CT) Sunday, state police said there was "no active shooter" situation.

Several law enforcement officials told NBC News that the man shot and killed in the shootout with police was identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, born on July 17, 1987  meaning he turned 29 on the morning of the shooting.



The attack comes less than two weeks after the fatal shooting of a black man by police sparked protests in Baton Rouge, turning the city into the latest flashpoint in the ongoing debate over law enforcement tactics.

The officers were responding to a call of shots fired when they were gunned down in an apparent "ambush" around 9 a.m. local time, said Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden.

Two of the officers killed were from the Baton Rouge Police Department. They were identified as Officer Montrell Jackson, 32, a 10-year veteran, and Matthew Gerald, 41, who had been serving for less than a year, officials said.



Also killed was Brad Garafola, 45, a 24-year veteran of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's office, officials said.



"These men are husbands, fathers, sons and brothers," Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said. "We are devastated to lose one of our own, and another is now in a fight for his life. We are asking for your prayers at this time. We will get through this together as a family and as a community."



A 41-year-old Baton Rouge police officer suffered non-life threatening injuries, while two East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office Deputies, aged 41 and 51, were injured. The 41-year-old was in critical condition, and "absolutely fighting for his life," said Gov. John Bel Edwards.
The head of Cleveland's police union called Sunday for the suspension of open-carry gun laws in the city during the Republican National Convention.

Steve Loomis of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association cited the shooting death of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in urging the Ohio's governor, John Kasich, to ban guns for the week.

"This is not an attack on the Second Amendment. This is not an attack on the right to open carry," Loomis told NBC News. "We believe it is a reasonable request to protect the safety of our folks."

A statement from Kasich's office said he could not suspend the law.

"Law enforcement is a noble, essential calling and we all grieve that we've again seen attacks on officers," the statement read.

"Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested. The bonds between our communities and police must be reset and rebuilt  as we're doing in Ohio  so our communities and officers can both be safe. Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal."
The man who killed 84 Bastille Day revellers in the French city of Nice by driving a truck at a crowd had been radicalized recently and quickly, France's Prime Minister told a newspaper as a further 18 victims fought for their lives on Sunday.

Thursday night's attack at peak holiday time on the Riviera plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after jihadi gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.

French Health Minister Marisol Touraine said the 18, including one child, were in a critical condition, while about 85 people in total were still hospitalized.

The attacks, along with one in Brussels four months ago, have shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.

Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31 year-old delivery driver, Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any actual links to Islamic State. The Islamist militant group claimed the attack though, and Valls said there was no doubting the assailant's motives.

"The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalized very quickly," Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview with newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

As of Sunday no evidence had been produced to show how he underwent that rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion.

Relatives and friends interviewed in Nice painted a picture of a man who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and according to French media even ate pork, behaviour that would be unlikely in a devout Muslim.

A report in the Nice Matin newspaper on Sunday said investigators had found no radicalization material in his flat, although they were still looking at his telephone and his computer.

Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel's sister told Reuters he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005 and had sought medical treatment.

As authorities were trying to better understand his motives, two more people, a man and a woman close to Bouhlel, were arrested in Nice early on Sunday.

Three others arrested previously were still being held, but Bouhlel's estranged wife was released without charges after being held since Friday.

The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said on Saturday in claiming the attack that Bouhlel "was one of the soldiers of Islamic State".

The group, which is under military pressure in its Irag and Syria strongholds from forces opposed to it, considers France a key target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States, which is leading a coalition against it.

France is also home to Europe's biggest Muslim population, and has been criticized in some quarters for fostering racial, ethnic and religious disharmony through its strict adherence to a lay culture that allows no place for religion and ethnicity in schools and civic life.

Long and open borders with neighbouring countries also make it an easy target for attackers who want to melt away afterwards.

Security failures?

Valls defended France's record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years and said the group's modus operandi of cajoling unstable people into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible was difficult to combat.

"Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts...this is probably what happened in Nice's case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and the far-right over how President Francois Hollande's Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no such thing as zero risk and that new attacks would occur.

"I've always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It's a difficult thing to say, but other lives will be lost."
I am an undergraduate summer 2016 reporter with an emphasis in arts & culture journalism. When I'm not being a student, you can catch me hiking, making music or trying new food. Feel free to shoot me an email at jjhwy6@mail.missouri.edu.

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'Wendell & Wild' is great to look at, not much fun to watch
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By Michael Collins of The Commercial Appeal

WASHINGTON  If the District of Columbia becomes the 51st state, Tennessee will have helped pave the way.

Just don't expect Tennesseans in Congress to lend much of a hand.

Statehood has been a decades-long goal for many leaders of the nation's capital for reasons succinctly summarized in the motto on the city's license plates.

"Taxation Without Representation," it complains.

The district's more than 670,000 residents pay federal taxes but have no real representation in the federal government. Their sole voice in Congress is Eleanor Holmes Norton, a delegate who serves in the House but isn't permitted to vote on the floor.

What's more, Congress has the power to review all bills by the D.C. city council and can prevent them from taking effect.

That can spell trouble for the liberal city when the GOP holds a majority in Congress. Just last year, congressional Republicans warned that D.C. officials could go to prison if they implemented a marijuana legalization measure overwhelmingly approved by voters. Ultimately, however, Congress chose not to block the law.

Now, D.C. leaders are making another push for statehood. And they're looking to take the same route that Tennessee followed when it became the 16th state in 1796.

In November, D.C. residents will vote on a statehood referendum that would split the city in two. One part would be a new state called New Columbia. The other part would remain a small federal district that would house government buildings and monuments.

If the referendum is approved, D.C. would petition Congress for statehood. That's where Tennessee comes into play.

Because Tennessee was already a federal territory in the 1790s, Congress allowed it an abbreviated entry into the union. Tennessee residents voted to ratify a constitution and pledged to begin a republic form of government. Congress then admitted the new state into the union without requiring a ratification vote by existing states.

If "the Tennessee model" worked for Tennessee, the thinking goes, it might work for D.C.

Not everyone, though, is on board. Opponents to granting D.C. statehood include Tennesseans in Congress.

"I'm very much opposed to D.C. statehood," said Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., R-Knoxville. "The District of Columbia was set up to belong to all Americans, and it has a special place, not only in the life of our country, but I think to all of the individuals who come here from all of the states."

In reality, Duncan said, D.C. is nothing but a city.

"It's a very important city," he said, "but it is a city. All other states are combinations of urban, suburban and rural areas, and they have all of these different aspects to them, all of these competing interests, all of these combinations that D.C. doesn't have."

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Maryville, makes essentially the same argument.

"Our nation was formed by states, and the district is a unique city  not a state," Alexander said. "The Constitution itself makes that distinction."

The most logical alternative to giving D.C. residents full representation in Congress would be to give the district back to Maryland, Alexander said. The district was created from land ceded by Virginia and Maryland.

"Just as Arlington and part of Alexandria went back to Virginia in 1846, most of the district could again become part of Maryland, leaving only a small area around key federal buildings and monuments," Alexander said.

Another option, he said, would be to keep the district as a separate entity, but allow its residents to vote in Maryland.

Rep. Phil Roe, R-Johnson City, isn't a fan of D.C. statehood either.

"We set the country up the way we did for a reason," he said. "I believe we can look further into the consequences of D.C. statehood, but I do not support D.C. becoming a state at this time."
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By Daniel Connolly of The Commercial Appeal

The Memphis Police Department is sending 14 officers to help at the Republican National Convention next week in Ohio, police spokeswoman Karen Rudolph confirmed in an email Saturday evening. She didn't elaborate.

Tensions are high in advance of the convention, which starts Monday in Cleveland. Donald Trump will likely be confirmed as the Republican nominee.

Various groups are planning protests. Adding to security concerns, Ohio allows the open carry of weapons in public, which means some people will be armed.

U.S. Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson told a congressional panel Thursday he's concerned about violent clashes between protesters or other violence during the convention.
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By Jane Roberts of The Commercial Appeal

Germantown city employees have a perk almost no one else in the workplace gets: They can sell up to 200 hours of unused vacation back a year, plus carry forward any leftover time.

In fiscal 2015, city employees sold back 14,545 hours, or $408,016, in unused vacation, according to a ream of data the city has released in the past two weeks through Open Records requests filed by residents Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman and Jon Thompson.

Emails from April 2015 made public by the request show Aldermen Rocky Janda and Mary Ann Gibson were aware of the policy and questioned why the city also allowed accrued time.

To Wilkerson-Freeman, the emails prove aldermen have been aware of the benefits for more than a year and have done nothing.

"We know as a result of the recently released files that the vacation buyback is extraordinarily rich and excessive, and that aldermen knew about it in April 2015 and seem not to have done anything about it," she said.

According to a 2016 survey of employee benefits done by the Society of Human Resource Management, only 20 percent of U.S. firms offered vacation buyback programs.

SHRM did not have data on the average number of days employees were allowed to cash out.

In Germantown, firefighters are by far the single largest user, redeeming 6,242 hours in fiscal year 2015. While the records do not break out individual use, they do show that City Administrator Patrick Lawton received $41,285 in vacation buyback for 2014 and 2015.

Lawton did not comment except to say that vacation buyback is a benefit the city offers all employees.

The city of Germantown has one of the richest benefit packages of governments in the region. Besides vacation buyback, employees may also cash in accrued sick time when they leave their jobs.

"All these things may have been necessary to keep people when they were underpaid in comparison to private industry, but that is no longer the case," Janda said in text message Friday.

Janda has been on a quiet crusade for more than a year to get city benefits in line with the private sector, according to emails produced in the Open Records files. In a March 1, 2015, email, he told the members of the voluntary Personnel Advisory Commission that a comprehensive review of benefits had not been done "in over 10 years, if not longer."

He also noted when he was elected in 2012, the city's benefits were worth 53 percent of employee pay. He said they should be in the 35-40 percent range.

Benefits are high partly because Germantown has employed unconventional practices. Until Jan. 1, 2016, taxpayers covered the health insurance of the lawyers (and their dependents) who did the city's business on contracts. Over the years, the practice cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Until 2013, two-term aldermen also received city-paid health coverage for life.

Germantown also had whole-life insurance policies for 18 "key men" that paid generous death benefits to their survivors and a smaller benefit back to the city. In late 2015, before the city started paying the premiums out of the policies' cash value, citizens had paid $1.5 million in premiums.

Lawton's policy was the largest, with a $500,000 face value. He surrendered it in April 2015. Palazzolo also surrendered his. The cash values from both were deposited in the city's account.

Janda was upset about the policies and the vacation buyback. In a "confidential" email to members of the PAC, written in July 2015, he says the buyback policy needs "adjustment if not outright termination ...

"It doesn't make sense that we have a program that rewards employees for not taking their vacations."

His "local research" at the time showed that "none of the other municipalities" have a similar program; his goal was to reduce the use to 25 percent of the 2015 costs "or totally eliminate it."

He also didn't want word to get out that he wanted to scale back the benefit, saying "everyone will start cashing in their vacation."

The city of Germantown adopted its buyback program in 2004, initially allowing employees to sell back 100 hours. In 2008, the number of hours doubled.

It is not clear that the Board of Mayor and Aldermen approved the change.

Employees who sell back vacation must have a balance of at least 40 hours. Firefighters may request 280 hours; police may request 212 hours per year.
Authorities talk to the driver of a car near an area where several officers were shot while on duty less than a mile from police headquarters on July 17, 2016. (Photo: Mike Kunzelman, AP)

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By Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

Three police officers have been shot dead in Baton Rouge, La., and others may have been wounded, authorities said Sunday.

The three officers were shot near the department headquarters, Baton Route Mayor Kip Holden told MSNBC. At least four others were injured in the shooting, he said.

"They are investigating," he said. "Right now we are trying to get our arms around everything."

Two Baton Rouge police officers and one East Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy are dead, according to WBRZ's Michael Vinsanau.

The gunman was shot, a Louisiana State Police spokesman said, but his condition was not immediately clear.

Both lanes of Airline Highway are shut down from Goodwood Boulevard to Old Hammond Highway and from Old Hammond to Drusilla Drive, according to East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Casey Rayborn Hicks. The scene is still active, Hicks told The Advocate.

About 20 police officers wearing bulletproof vests are near the scene and a helicopter was flying overhead, the paper reported.

The Baton Rouge mayor's office urged urged people to stay home, stay off the streets for now in immediate wake of police shooting, according to The Advocate.

Baton Rouge police have been scrutiny after officers fatally shot Alton Sterline, 37, while he was pinned to the ground. Sterling's funeral was Friday. Police have said they thought he was reaching for a gun
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Stephen Phillips

Cordova

In most situations the truth will set you free, but in the case of The Commercial Appeal the truth must be backtracked as a result of its disconnect pandering to the larger majority African-American population of Memphis.

This paper continues to perpetuate the false narrative that innocent black men are targeted and being killed by white police officers in incident after incident, just adds fuel to the Black Lives Matter protesters.

In reality, the sniper in Dallas by his own admission during negotiations with the police admitted his desire to kill white people and in particular white police officers. That is the plain and simple truth.
With the political conventions set for the next two weeks, now is the time to offer a summary of where Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton stand on tech's top issue, immigration.

Silicon Valley fears Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president. A letter released Thursday and signed by about 150 technologists, inventors and entrepreneurs, said Trump would be a disaster for innovation. Much of their criticism was directed at his proposed immigration policies.

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, is far more aligned with Silicon Valley on immigration.

The green card divide

Clinton supports near-automatic green cards for foreign students who earn an advanced STEM degree at a U.S. university. Although details of her plan have not been released, these "staple-a-green-card-to-the-diploma" proposals typically require the grad to first get a STEM job.

For his part, Trump wants a "pause" in issuing new green cards to foreign workers. The idea is to encourage employers to hire the unemployed. He argues this will also improve hiring of women and grow wages. The division between Trump and Clinton on employment-based green cards could not be sharper.

Trump has pitched a rewrite of the H-1B system. He wants to raises the wages of foreign workers and give preference to American workers. Clinton has yet to offer an H-1B reform plan.

But nothing is ever as clear as it seems. There are big uncertainties ahead.

Can Trump be trusted to reform the H-1B program?

No.

Gage Skidmore/Trump Campaign Donald Trump at a rally in Florence, South Carolina, on Feb. 5, 2016

During the campaign Trump came very close to retreating on his promised H-1B reforms. In a GOP debate in Detroit, Trump said he was "changing" his H-1B positon after considering the arguments for keeping foreign students who graduate from U.S. universities in this country.

After the debate, Trump's campaign issued a statement reiterating his visa platform pledges including "hire Americans first."

Trump is a businessman and a tough one. Jamaican model Alexia Palmer, who worked for Trump Model Management for just over three years, filed a lawsuit against that business in 2014. Palmer worked on an H-1B visa.

The lawsuit claimed that Palmer was to be paid $75,000 a year. But for all the work she did from 2011 to 2013, she received a check in the amount of $3,880. Palmer had signed a separate contract explicitly stating that she would be responsible for all expenses. The lawsuit alleged her employer "took more than 80%" of Palmer's "hard earned money by cloaking it as expenses."

The expenses included postage, "unnecessary cosmetic kits" and "expensive limousines, all at the plaintiff's expense," the lawsuit claimed. Supporting court records show a long list of expenses, including $4,000 in administrative fees, Federal Express charges, an Internet promo website and stylist charges, among others.

The case was dismissed in a New York federal court on a number of issues, including failure to first file an administrative complaint with the government. The case was never heard by a jury.

The Palmer case is just one labor dispute and doesn't definitely speak to what Trump would do as president. But he would be under enormous pressure to moderate his views to adopt more business-friendly reforms.

One of the voices Trump will be listening to is his vice presidential nominee, Mike Pence, the Indiana governor. As a congressman, Pence supported a 2006 bill to increase the 65,000 H-1B cap to 115,000. It included an escalator provision that would allow it to rise in respective years if demand exceeded the cap.

Is there reason to believe Trump will deliver H-1B reforms?

Yes.

Laid-off Disney IT workers have spoken at Trump rallies, and Trump has raised the visibility of displaced IT workers to a new level in a presidential campaign.

Trump's visa platform was drafted with the help of U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who was also the first U.S. senator to endorse him. His H-1B reforms are the same type of reforms being sought in a number of bills.

Sessions heads the Senate's immigration subcommittee, and is part of a group of bipartisan senators pushing for visa reforms. Sessions would likely keep a President Trump focused on reform.

Can Clinton be trusted to reform the H-1B program?

No.

Let's be clear: Clinton hasn't even suggested the idea of reforming the H-1B visa program.

Chris Usher/CBS Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the CBS News Democratic Presidential Debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 14, 2015.

Clinton doesn't mention the visa in her platform. It doesn't come up in the Democratic party's platform. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who talked about the need for a H-1B visa reform in his campaign, didn't mention the issue in his recent endorsement of Clinton.

The only time that Clinton expressed any concern about IT workers was an interview this week with Vox. She said it was "heartbreaking" when IT workers must train their H-1B replacements.

But Clinton probably understands the importance of H-1B visa to India. While in Congress, Clinton co-founded and co-chaired the Senate India Caucus. She has had working ties with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), one of the largest IT services firms in India, and that continued through her tenure as secretary of state. Ratan Tata, then chairman of Tata Group, a conglomerate whose holdings include TCS, was co-chair of the U.S.-India CEO Forum.

Clinton, similar to President Barack Obama, will accept H-1B reforms only as part of a comprehensive immigration reform proposal. That's a hard line. Some lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, believe it is possible to get some H-1B reforms passed independent of a broader immigration reform package.

If Clinton, as president, couldn't get support for comprehensive immigration reform, would she be willing to seek H-1B reforms? Or would she hold any action on H-1B reforms hostage to comprehensive immigration reform?

Is there reason believe Clinton will deliver H-1B reforms?

Perhaps.

Clinton, in her Vox interview, made two key admissions about the H-1B visa program. She said the use of foreign replacements is a "cost-cutting measure to be able to pay people less than you would pay an American worker." Clinton also said that businesses find it easier to get a foreign worker because they will be "largely compliant."

That H-1B workers are hired because they are less expensive, and more reliant on or compliant with the employers who sponsor the visa, are two major criticisms of the program. And they are problems that could be addressed in standalone legislation.

As president, Clinton would be under pressure to take action on the H-1B program. Support for H-1B reform is bipartisan and appears to be growing. For instance, after Disney cut some 250 workers, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), introduced an H-1B reform bill that was endorsed by Sen. Sessions.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), once a supporter of a major H-1B cap increase, changed his view after he started campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination. With Sessions, he introduced an H-1B reform bill. Similarly, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) revisited his support for a H-1B cap increase after hearing from laid-off Northeast Utilities IT workers. He has since moved into the reform camp.

The bipartisan support for H-1B reform in the Senate and House means, as president, Clinton would face ongoing pressure from allies in her own party to reform the program.
6 a.m. Thursday: America wakes up.

"Maybe this will be a good day," it thinks as tears pool in its Irish coffee.

9:35 a.m.: Driving on Heidelbach Avenue, Wife and I see a woman calmly strolling down the street with a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck.

11:15 a.m.: Despite pleadings from party officials, Mitch Daniels announces he will not seek another term as governor if Mike Pence steps down to run for vice president alongside Donald Trump. It would take too much time away from the hedge maze he's building in his backyard.

11:20 a.m.: News breaks. Pence has been chosen, and will fly to New York for a Friday morning unveiling at Trump Tower. Mike packs three suits for the trip: one for Thursday night; one for the announcement; and one to sleep in.

Noon: Visitation ends at the funeral services for Philando Castile, the 32-year-old black man who was shot and killed by St. Anthony, Minnesota, police officer Jeronimo Yanez last week.

A white horse-drawn carriage delivers Castile's body to St. Paul Cathedral while his grieving family walks behind it. The Star Tribune quotes the eulogy delivered by the Rev. John Ubel:."If today's service provides even a tiny measure of peace, then today  this day  will have been a good day."

12:30 p.m.: Police release a composite sketch of the man media have dubbed "the Phoenix Serial Shooter." The suspect, an unidentified male in his 20s, is accused of killing seven people and wounding two others since beginning his spree on March 17.

Phoenix police say the shootings take place at night and target people while they stand outside their homes or near their cars. The suspect may have an accomplice, but for police, leads have been scant.

"It's unbelievable that there is this monster that has done so much harm," a sister of one of the victims told local station KNXV. "(And) nobody is coming forward."

12:45 p.m.: Blithering sexist mouth-breather writes angry Facebook post about all-women "Ghostbusters" reboot.

"Everybody knows the job of fictional spirit eradication can only be done by men," idiot probably writes. "Otherwise it's just not realistic."

12:46 p.m.: World lets out anguished scream.

1:15 p.m.: "Maybe I will run for governor," Daniels thinks as he takes another wrong turn in the hedge maze. "Let's see: I took a left at the pergola. That should have taken me past the 7-foot hedges, which descend in height by a quarter-inch every three feet until you reach the clearing. But where's the clearing? Is there a flaw in my design?"

1:30 p.m.: From USA Today: "Two men suffered moderate injuries when they tumbled off a seaside cliff north of San Diego while reportedly playing Pokemon Go."

4 p.m.: The funeral takes place for Michael Smith, one of five officers killed in the July 7 shooting in Dallas. A photo taken by a Dallas Morning News reporter shows Smith's two young daughters weeping over his coffin.

4:30 p.m.: CNN confirms that Trump has offered and Pence has accepted. Mike celebrates with a single saltine.

6 p.m.: The C.K. Newsome Center hosts a vigil at the edge of Downtown Evansville. Civic and religious leaders alike plead for an end to a recent rash of national and worldwide violence.

"I think the message is we all need each other," says Mayor Lloyd Winnecke. "We need to look for peaceful solutions."

6:30 p.m.: Reports begin crystallizing on a deadly attack in Nice, France. A suspect with terroristic ties plowed a truck laced with hand grenades and other explosives into a large crowd gathered to celebrate Bastille Day, according to French police. More than 80 people are killed.

Witnesses said the driver, after finally stopping the truck following a murderous rampage up the sidewalk, exited the vehicle and began firing a gun into the crowd. France officials said the tragedy was yet another act of terrorism in a country still reeling from the Paris massacre last November.

Wassim Bouhlel, a Nice native, described the scene to the Associated Press.

"Bodies everywhere."

6:31 p.m.: World lets out anguished scream.

7 p.m.: Despite confident reports from the Indianapolis Star pegging Pence as the sure-fire VP candidate, Donald Trump tells Fox News that he hasn't made a "final, final" decision. Pence, pacing his New York hotel room, blames himself for Trump's waffling.

"Of course God would smite me after that indulgent saltine dinner," he says.

10:20 p.m.: "What is money, really, but a man-made construct?" Daniels thinks, his exhausted, sweaty body covered in grass clippings. "Like God with the baiji white dolphin, we created it. And we can take it out."

11:30 p.m.: Baltimore police release details of an alleged shooting that took place earlier in the night. According to Justin Fenton, crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, four officers heard gunfire while driving through the city. Upon investigating, they reportedly saw a man armed with an AR-15. When the man turned the gun on officers, they shot and killed him.

11:45 p.m.: "What's his name again?" Trump asks a campaign aide. "Mark Pants?"

11:59: America lies awake, trying to sleep.

Contact Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com or follow him on Twitter @JonAdamWebb
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Herman and Doris Bass

65th anniversary

Herman and Doris Bass of Evansville plan to celebrate their 65th wedding anniversary.

Bass and the former Doris Hughes were married July 18, 1951.

They are the parents of Steven Bass and Pamela Bass, both of Evansville, and Belinda Roettger of Finksburg, Maryland. They have seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Herman Bass retired from Southern Indiana Gas and Electric Co.
By Mark Wilson of the Courier and Press

Not much has changed in the year since Shane Breedlove was fatally shot while walking on Evansville's East Side.

The known facts of the case haven't changed. Neither has the heartache of his family.

"I can't tell you what a difficult year this has been," said Carole Cleveland, Breedlove's mother.

Breedlove, 41, was shot three times while walking near Washington and Thompson avenues about 9:30 p.m. July 19, 2015.

A club disc jockey and musician, who also worked repossessing cars for area dealerships, Breedlove was walking to his job as a DJ at KC's Time Out Lounge in Washington Square Mall when he was shot. He was just a half-mile from his house.

The Evansville Police Department has been silent on the case since October, when murder charges were dismissed against three suspects. Vanderburgh County Prosecutor Nicholas Hermann said at the time that there was not evidence to proceed with the case, although police officials expressed confidence that evidence would be found.

Police spokesman Sgt. Jason Cullum said recently that the case remains open and the investigation active. The prosecutor's office declined to comment.

"We're going on a year now and we still don't have any answers," said Robbie Hensley.

Hensley said he had been best friends with Breedlove since before middle school in Henderson, Kentucky, where Breedlove grew up.

"I wish somebody would do more, that there would be more activity with the investigation," Hensley said. "Let's get the case closed so the family can have some closure."

Hensley is president of the Shane Breedlove Foundation, a nonprofit organization to raise money for Breedlove's children.

"They are holding together as well as can be expected," Hensley said. "They are like everybody else, they want to see justice."

Cleveland said police have gone sometimes for months at a time without communicating to her about the case.

"It gets so quiet, you get the feeling nobody is doing anything," she said. "We just keep hanging on for the hope something will happen."

Cleveland said Police Chief Billy Bolin told her that the case was assigned to a new detective. Bolin did not return a Courier & Press telephone call seeking comment about the investigation.

Breedlove's friends and family haven't just been struggling with who did it but also with why.

"I've had a lot of questions as to why somebody would do this. Shane was the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back. He would give you the last dollar in his pocket if you needed it," Hensley said.

Police arrested Evansville residents Bobby John Handegard and his son, Bobby Michael Handegard, in August 2015, along with Derrick Murray, known for his various drug-related arrests and alleged gang involvement.

Murray was also known for making anonymous Internet threats against Bolin and police in general  for which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to federal prison.

Affidavits for arrest and search warrants cited a confidential source, as well as information reportedly given by Bobby Michael Handegard's girlfriend, who was 17 years old and pregnant when detectives brought her to the police headquarters for questioning.

The teenage informant later hired her own defense lawyer and said she would invoke her constitutional right not to testify if called as a witness.

Police also cited jailhouse phone calls in which Murray  who was arrested and accused of violating his federal supervised release by allegedly selling marijuana  told an acquaintance to delete certain information from his Facebook page.

All three men denied involvement and their attorneys loudly criticized police and prosecution for lack of evidence.

"It's a tragedy. I just hope and pray somebody feels guilty and comes forward to say they did it," Hensley said.

A public remembrance will be held at the crime scene, Washington and Thompson avenues, at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
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By Zach Osowski, zach.osowski@courierpress.com

INDIANAPOLIS  Two Evansville apartment complexes were named in a complaint to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, alleging a large housing group with properties in Indiana is illegally turning away families with children.

Addison Place and North Park apartments, both owned and operated by AMP Residential, were two of 20 complexes named in the complaint. Those complexes, located in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, are being accused of discriminating against families with more than four members by enacting rules mandating no more than two people in a bedroom.

That means a family of five would need to rent an apartment with three bedrooms, regardless of how big a two-bedroom apartment is. With most apartment complexes only offering one or two bedroom layouts, the complaint alleges they are effectively pushing families with children away.

Amy Nelson, executive director of the Fair Housing Center for Central Indiana, said things like what they're seeing in the 20 apartments named in the complaint shouldn't be happening.

"It's disappointing and frustrating that we still find housing providers enacting written policies to prevent families with children from enjoying their right to equal housing," Nelson said.

AMP did not respond to requests for comment.

The Central Indiana housing center is joined on the complaint by four other housing centers from Michigan and Ohio. The complaint argues adequate room is determined by square footage per person, not by how many bedrooms are in a floor plan. The complaint also states the apartments don't take into account smaller rooms such as dens, which the housing centers say can be used as a bedroom.

Nelson said the compliant was sent to Maurice McGough, the Midwest regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. McGough will review the complaint and, if he finds there is discrimination, send the case to federal court.

According to the complaint, the Central Indiana center sent an investigator to Addison Place and North Park posing as a parent of a five-person family. In both instances, the investigator was told families that size cannot rent at either location because of the two person per room rule.

The complaint spells out one such interaction at Addison Place where the investigator was asking about a two-bedroom, 1,155-square-foot Kensington apartment.

"Before confirming whether the Kensington apartment was available, AMP's leasing agent asked the tester how many occupants would be living in the unit.

When the tester told the agent that the unit would be occupied by his family of five, AMP's employee told the tester that the property adhered to a two-person per bedroom policy and, as a result, he would be unable to rent the unit there," the complaint reads.

Evansville has its own code on how many square feet must be available for each occupant in a housing development. Current law states a bedroom with more than one occupant must have at least 50 square feet per occupant. According to the floor plans of the Kensington model in question, one bedroom is 196 square feet, big enough for three occupants, the smaller bedroom is 120 square feet, big enough for two occupants under the city guidelines.

Nelson said she couldn't speak to the intent of AMP but said there seems to be a policy in place at their housing complexes that courts have ruled against in the past.

"There simply aren't that many three or four bedroom apartments being built anymore," Nelson said. "That creates a real problem for families trying to find affordable housing."

Nelson said it's hard to say when a ruling could come down. She said typically complaints with HUD tend to take about as long as normal litigation.
JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS Scott Township firefighter Andrew Baumgart adds black pepper as he helps prepare dinner for fellow firefighters at the manned fire station in northern Vanderburgh County recently. A $1.1 million local tax hike next year will begin funding an expansion of manpower and equipment into firefighting and emergency medical service in the County's fastest-growing area next year.

SHARE JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS Scott Township firefighter Patrick Fisher takes a phone call at the manned fire station in northern Vanderburgh County recently. A $1.1 million local tax hike next year will begin funding an expansion of manpower and equipment into firefighting and emergency medical service in the County's fastest-growing area next year. JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS Scott Township firefighter Andrew Baumgart walks past Quint 1 at the manned fire station in northern Vanderburgh County recently. A $1.1 million local tax hike next year will begin funding an expansion of manpower and equipment into firefighting and emergency medical service in the County's fastest-growing area next year. JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS An American flag whips in the open air in front of Scott Township's manned fire station in northern Vanderburgh County recently. A $1.1 million local tax hike next year will begin funding an expansion of manpower and equipment into firefighting and emergency medical service in the County's fastest-growing area next year. JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS Scott Township firefighters (from left) Bryan Riordan, Patrick Fisher, Andrew Baumgart and part-time employee Paul Michelletti dig into a pork-roast and more during dinner in between runs at the manned fire station in northern Vanderburgh County recently. A $1.1 million local tax hike next year will begin funding an expansion of manpower and equipment into firefighting and emergency medical service in the County's fastest-growing area next year.

By Thomas B. Langhorne of the Courier and Press

A $1.1 million local tax hike next year will fund an infusion of manpower and equipment into firefighting and emergency medical service in Vanderburgh County's fastest-growing area.

The increase is the result of a new financial partnership between Scott and Armstrong townships and the town of Darmstadt. Creation of a new governmental unit  the Scott Township Fire Territory  allows the localities to impose a new uniform property tax rate for fire and EMS services provided by the "combination" paid/volunteer Scott Township Fire Department.

But it's not credits and debits that animate Fire Chief Adam Farrar. The real imperative, Farrar said, is using the planned addition of six full-time firefighters to respond faster to calls for help. All three of the fire department's stations will be manned 24/7. The township will buy another paramedic ambulance, too.

"We will get there quicker than we do now because we'll have more manpower in different locations," Farrar said.

They have to get there quicker.

Growth is a fact of life in northern Vanderburgh County, and it has been for years. City-county planning officials can produce a raft of statistics showing the largest local rates of population and housing growth for the past 25 years are north of Evansville city limits. For nearly three decades, the county has assiduously installed infrastructure  water and sewer lines, drainage improvements, flood plain management  in anticipation of major commercial and industrial development along a northern U.S. 41 corridor.

The new tax rate  29.4 cents per $100 of assessed value  will first appear on residential, commercial and agricultural tax bills in Scott, Armstrong and Darmstadt next spring, replacing lower rates levied by the localities themselves. For property that isn't already tax-capped, the rate is expected to cause residential property tax increases of $38, $65 and $76 per $100,000 of assessed value in Scott, Armstrong and Darmstadt respectively. Property, income and vehicle excise taxes will rise by a combined $1.1 million, according to H.J. Umbaugh & Associates, the localities' Indianapolis-based financial advisory firm.

Accounting for the six new firefighters, the creation of a new equipment replacement fund and the costs of running all three fire stations continuously, the fire department's budget will effectively double next year  from just over $1.1 million to more than $2.2 million.

'Trying to be proactive'

Northern Vanderburgh County's growth is an old story by now, but it is also a new one. More is coming.

Jobs, available land and the perception of good schools have made the area a magnet. Some of the growth is compelled by lack of developable land elsewhere. But the area has other assets, like jobs at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant in Princeton and the desirability for workers of living nearby.

Scott Township's projected growth over the next two decades is well-nigh explosive. The township, which comprises about three-quarters of the fire department's coverage area, is expected to grow in population by 34 percent by 2035. The figure, contained in the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Area Plan Commission's latest Comprehensive Plan, is the highest anywhere in the county  and nearly three times as high as the second-highest projected growth rate. That would be in Armstrong Township, also part of the fire department's coverage area.

Fire and EMS service is big business in the area.

The Scott Township Fire Department covers 76 square miles  a larger swath of Vanderburgh County than any other local emergency response agency, including the city's department. Scott Township's department has more full-time firefighters than any agency not named the Evansville Fire Department. It is the only local fire department that uses its own paramedic ambulances.

Farrar said he and elected officials in his coverage area are "trying to be proactive" to brace for what's coming. They've been trying since at least 2011, when they used a federal grant to add an initial wave of six new career staff positions.

By such methods township officials are forced to be creative to fund fire protection. They can't compete with the resources available to the Evansville Fire Department, a full-time municipal agency with a $28 million budget. Just last month, the City Council approved spending $925,000 in riverboat money  a source unavailable to townships  for a large firetruck and a utility pickup for the EFD.

The Scott Township Fire Department's need for more is illustrated, Farrar said, in a comparison that carries a warning. In 2006 the department made 538 emergency medical and fire runs. Central Dispatch data indicates it had already made 455 responses this year by June 30.

'Laying on the floor dying'

Local government leaders are calling the Scott Township Fire Territory a forward-thinking move to keep pace with the area's growth.

"It's going to bring us into the 21st Century as far as EMS and fire protection in northern Vanderburgh County," said Steve Kahre, a Darmstadt Town Council member.

For Kahre, a lifelong Darmstadt resident, the Scott Township Fire Department is practically family. He was a volunteer firefighter in the department for six years in the late 1970s and early 80s. His first cousin, Keith Kahre, spent 36 years in the department, the last 12 of them as chief.

Guessing the department's coverage area has twice as many residents as it did when he was fighting fires, Steve Kahre said the Scott Township Fire Territory had to happen. He said the benefits far outweigh the costs.

"If your husband or wife or kids are laying on the floor dying, would you like to have an ambulance four minutes away or have an ambulance 15 minutes away?" Kahre said. "For very few dollars, we're getting a heck of a lot."

The problem

It is perhaps a measure of northern Vanderburgh County's growth that the fire department can have so much more treasure in men and equipment than any other suburban department  and Scott, Armstrong and Darmstadt agree it's still not enough.

The Scott Township Fire Department has 13 "career" firefighters  seven paramedics and six EMTs  who staff two paramedic ambulances daily, with one in reserve. It supplements that force with about 30 volunteers who are certified firefighters, just like the paid personnel. About half of those are EMTs or paramedics.

The other local combination departments, German and McCutchanville, have two and four paid firefighters, respectively. The Perry Township Fire Department is all-volunteer.

Scott Township officials launched their own paramedic ambulance service in 1995, contending the fire department could transport emergency medical patients and fire victims to hospitals faster than Mercy Ambulance, the private company that had the contract to provide city-county service. Vanderburgh County and Evansville now contract with paramedic-level medical transportation company American Medical Response (AMR), which bought Mercy Ambulance.

But even with its own paramedic ambulance service, the Scott Township Fire Department confronts some of the same limitations faced by combination agencies everywhere. Response times are influenced by where callers live, how close that is to one of the department's stations and whether full-time or volunteer emergency service personnel are available to respond.

There are still swaths of open land to cover  76 square miles out of fire stations located on E. Baseline Road and in Darmstadt and Daylight. Slower response times are inevitable.

The Darmstadt station, located at 12949 Darmstadt Road, is closer to Armstrong Township residents  particularly those in easternmost Armstrong  than the department's primary station on Baseline.

That's a problem, because the Baseline station is the only one that's manned 24/7. Two full-time career firefighters  one paramedic, one EMT  answer calls from the station daily. Two more work from the Daylight and Darmstadt stations, but only one of those stations is manned on any given day and then only for about 10 hours. The fire department rotates the coverage.

That means one or another of the outlying stations is unmanned every day. If it's the Darmstadt station, what could have been a two- or three-minute response time from that station to an emergency there or in Armstrong Township's center becomes 10 minutes.

The Daylight station, located at 12425 Green River Road on the easternmost reaches of Scott Township, poses the same problem in reverse. If an emergency call comes in near the well-known Hornet's Nest tavern and the Baseline and Darmstadt stations are the only ones manned, a slower response results.

And if all four of the department's daily contingent of paid firefighters are occupied on one end of the coverage area when an emergency call comes at the other end, Farrar must rely on mutual aid agreements with area fire departments and his own volunteers until paid personnel arrive on scene. If the call involves a fire, there's no getting around the fact that OSHA regulations require paid and combination departments alike to have four firefighters on-scene before anyone can go inside.

There are few meaningful comparisons between the Scott Township Fire Department and the city's department.

The Evansville Fire Department's primary coverage area is much smaller  the city comprises almost 48 square miles  but it has 14 strategically located emergency response stations from which it answers about 10 times as many calls for help as the Scott Township Fire Department. Central Dispatch data indicates the EFD received 4,525 calls this year through June compared to Scott Township's 455.

The Scott Township Fire Department's 13 full-time firefighters are required to undergo the same state-mandated training and certification as those who work for the city agency. But the city has at least 66 on any given day, and 273 in all. Scott Township has 11 vehicles that meet the same federal guidelines as the city's. It's just that the city has more of them  17 front-line vehicles with seven in reserve.

The solution

Residents of northern Vanderburgh County will know what's coming long before the extra manpower arrives.

On July 1, 2017, with money from the spring property tax distribution, the fire department will throw six new full-time emergency responders  three firefighter-paramedics and three firefighter-EMTs  into the front lines.

The move will bring the department to 19 career firefighters, including Farrar  enough to assign the equivalent of six positions daily to the three fire stations without any one of the firefighters working more than 216 hours per month. All three stations will be manned at all times by one paramedic and one EMT. Fire response could begin with a force of six full-time firefighters even if no other career or volunteer personnel were available to help.

There's something else, something shiny and new.

The township will spend about $200,000 to add a third staffed paramedic ambulance next year. The fire department will use its oldest ambulance as the backup.

'No guarantees'

With the beefed up workforce and extra wheels  and the attendant desire for quicker responses to fire and medical emergencies  may come expectations that the fire department's performance data will prove it.

But that is not so easily deciphered.

There is no federal or state law mandating how fast all-volunteer, career or "combination" fire departments must respond to emergencies, a fact Ken Willette attributes to variables in population density and terrain in coverage areas everywhere.

While many volunteer and combination departments cover large swaths of open land in unincorporated areas, others work in more densely packed urban areas. Some rely more than others on volunteers who respond to emergencies from their homes  and sometimes those volunteers must first drive to the station to board firetrucks before heading to an emergency scene.

"It defies a one-size-fits-all approach," said Willette, a firefighter for more than three decades and now a spokesman for the National Fire Protection Association.

Willette's Boston-based nonprofit develops federal guidelines  recommendations, in essence  on fire department response times. The organization crafts codes and standards which are sometimes adopted by regulatory agencies.

The NFPA's guidelines for volunteer and combination departments such as Scott Township's reflect the difficulty of arriving at an easy answer about their response times. The guidelines include five types of coverage areas based on population density and recommended minimum staff, five recommended response times ranging from nine to 14 minutes and recommendations that those times be met at 80 or 90 percent rates.

Those guidelines may not have the force of law, but there is another force exerting pressure for fast response times by the Scott Township Fire Department  the agency's contracts with the localities it covers. Scott Township and the town of Darmstadt require the fire department to respond to emergencies there within seven minutes 90 percent of the time.

But the statistics are muddled by caveats.

Farrar offers a number culled from his own department's data  an "average response time" of 6 minutes and 38 seconds so far this year. But he cautions that the number, like the localities' contract stipulations, measures only responses inside the fire department's coverage area. Central Dispatch performance data includes responses made as part of mutual aid agreements with other departments, and those involve driving farther distances. The response times will be higher.

Moreover, Farrar's average response time differs with the NFPA's guidelines in a way that markedly affects the numbers. Farrar includes a 30 to 40-second "turnout time" for firefighters to secure gear and board trucks before they roll out of the station. The NFPA believes the clock should start ticking only when fire departments notify dispatchers they are leaving.

Average response times don't account for those occasions when undermanned emergency responders are out of position answering another call. Even when all three stations are fully staffed, those times will come. There's no room in an average for context.

Armstrong Township officials don't place much stock in statistics of any kind  averages or percentages. Until now, Armstrong officials haven't even bothered naming a desired response time, although Township Trustee Randy Kron said they are watching.

"What we were looking at was the longer response times to make sure it was in a reasonable time period," Kron said.

Calling the fire department "excellent," Kron said township officials are open to adopting Scott Township and Darmstadt's seven-minute requirement when the Fire Territory begins operating on July 1. But Kron believes  and Kahre and Farrar agree  that the typical seven-minute response likely will shrink dramatically once the additional equipment and paid personnel are on board.

Kahre said Darmstadt town officials never seriously discussed altering their contract demands to include a shorter required response time.

"It boils down to, we're going to do the best we can with what we've got," he said. "There's no guarantees in the emergency medical or fire service."
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EASTON  The legal battle over the proposed Saddle Ridge development on 124.7 acres of watershed land along Sport Hill Road has officially ended.

For more than five years, town residents, officials and others argued a housing development was too intense a proposal for the privately owned parcel bordered by Sport Hill, Westport, Silver Hill and Cedar Hill roads.

The towns Planning and Zoning Commission and Conservation Commission denied two separate plans  one for a 105-unit development and another for a 99-unit proposal  in 2011.

Developers Huntley Bucky Stone and Robert Carlson, on the other hand, contended that their plans, which would include affordable housing within the development, would not have a substantially different impact on the land than a plan approved in 2009 for 21 mansions. They appealed the commissions decisions in Superior Court.

Earlier this year, Hartford Superior Court Judge Marshall K. Berger ruled that the plans were not appropriate for the area. And recently, ending the debate once and for all, the Appellate Court decided not to take up the case, as requested by the developers.

Verne Gay, president of Citizens for Easton, a community group formed in the 1970s to help protect the towns open space, said hes not sure whether Stone, the face of the development, will now give up plans to develop the site or submit a new proposal.

The courts rejected the appeal, Gay said. Does he have another move? I dont know.

For town residents, the legal battle was a long one that required constant attention and funds to pay a lawyer of their own. Citizens for Easton created the Coalition to Save Easton for this reason, which attained intervenor status in the case, meaning it was always aware of the latest actions in the case.

It has been very hard, Gay said. We all have our own jobs and lives. Over the years, Bucky was well funded and he had a very good legal team. At any point through this process he could have prevailed. Our difficulty was to just keep fighting.

Were very simply a local tree-hugger group here, Gay added. It has no other motivation. Its just protecting the town.

Stone and Carlson did not return calls for comment.

The towns regulations limit development in the propertys zone to one dwelling unit per 2 acres of buildable area, excluding the wetlands. The developers sought a more dense housing complex of 99 units in 31 buildings, with 30 percent of the townhouses set aside as affordable.

Under state statute, if a town with less than 10 percent affordable housing rejects a developer's application to build affordable housing, the burden of proof is on the town to show the plan would harm public health, safety or other matters.

Ira Bloom, of the law firm Berchem, Moses and Devlin P.C., served as legal counsel for the town commissions. For Easton it was extremely important to protect the towns resources and, in particular, the public water supply area, he said.

The complex would have sat within two watersheds: the Easton Lake Reservoir and the Aspetuck Reservoir. Both serve as the Aquarion Water Co.s public drinking water supply reservoirs that serve more than 400,000 Fairfield County residents.

First Selectman Adam Dunsby said protecting the watershed land merits appropriate restrictions on developments.

Brian Roach, program manager of environmental protection for Aquarion, said the 99-unit complex proposed housing densities that were more than two times the maximum density shown to be appropriate to protect water quality within watersheds.

While Aquarion acknowledges the need for affordable housing in Connecticut, it strongly believes that high-density residential developments should only be considered for locations that are not within public drinking water supply watersheds, Roach said.

In his 56-page decision, Judge Berger noted that the state statute that addresses affordable housing, section 8-30g, was not meant to tie the hands of communities like Easton, who have a low percentage of affordable housing.

Saddle Ridges application highlights Eastons need for affordable housing, the decision states. The Legislatures enactment of (Section) 8-30g to accomplish that goal was not intended to allow every development at the cost of damaging natural resources such as our wetlands and watercourses. Sometimes, a different type or less intensive use of the land is demanded.

ktorres@hearstmediact.com; 203-330-6227
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ANSONIA The long awaited revamping of Wakelee Avenue is finally coming, as Eversource starts digging up the street to lay new plastic gas pipeline.

This is a $1.6 million investment, said Mitch Gross, an Eversource spokesperson.

Their work on Wakelee will be similar to the digging and laying of at least 1,500 of new plastic gas lines that dogged businesses and drivers on Main Street since mid-May.

I was expecting only a few weeks but its been two months now, said Hasan Koch, who owns Kaptans Pizza located in the former Vonetes spot across from City Hall. No one ever said they were going to close the whole street down.

As a result, Koch said he lost at least $6,000 in business since May.

I have seven or eight older customers who always parked in front, he said. With the street closed they dont want to park down below (on West Main Street) and have to walk up.

But Mayor David Cassetti said its all for the best.

Sometime after Labor Day the state will be paving Main Street and were hoping to secure funding to build a bike and pedestrian path, the mayor said. We also intend to redo the sidewalks.

Beautiful again

And as the attention turns to Wakelee, Koch and Sulo Arslan of the nearby Ansonia Smoke shop on Main Street are warning the nearly two dozen businesses there to get ready for detours.

If they close a side of the street, it will affect the businesses, said Roshan Chadima, an employee at XtraMart, a convenience store which sells gas on Wakelee Avenue. But what can we do. We need these things and a better street.

And Eversource isnt the only one investing in Wakelee, which connects Ansonia to Derby in one direction and Seymour in the other, as well as serving as a main road to both Griffin Hospital and Nolan Field.

Beginning next summer the state and federal government along with a 10 percent match from the city will begin a $4.3 million renovation of the historic road from its intersection with Division Street to the opening of Nolan Field at Franklin Street.

For too long the residents of the West Side have been neglected, Cassetti said. Wakelee Avenue is an historic section of the city and were going to make it beautiful again.

In addition to straightening, milling and paving the buckled road, Cassetti said the plan calls for nearly a mile of new sidewalks with handicapped accessible curbs as well as street lights on every block.

Thats got to be good news for the dozens of people who walk the street everyday.

Were going to dig out the old sidewalks, most of which have buckled and some of which no longer exist, said Cassetti, who operated a construction business before becoming mayor in 2013. Well lay new cement over a new base.

And Cassetti said the plans preserve the historic nature of the street.

The cement block horse ties will stay in place as well as the Pork Hollow monument in front of Klankos Grocery. That granite monument erected in 1901 commemorates the actions of Colonial soldiers and residents for hiding provisions from an invading British Army in 1777.

This is the West Sides Main Street, Cassetti said adding that included among the numerous multi-family 1900 era-built homes are nearly two dozen businesses. Those include the soon-to-be 100 year old Lear Pharmacy; Klankos; the law offices of former longtime Probate Judge Clifford D. Hoyle and John Sponheimer; Romas and Zanis Pizza; Franks and Chippys Auto Repair; Wakelee Memorial Funeral Home; Pine Grove Cemetery and Seccombe Brothers Memorials.

Delays ahead

Cassetti said its been at least 25 years since Wakelee Avenue was paved. Cracks, potholes and road heaves attest to that.

Eversources Gross said the utility coordinates their work with the city to minimize traffic disruptions.

Drivers may experience short delays, Gross said. We want to keep that minimal.

Joan Radin, a fifth ward alderman who owns Lears, foresees the gas line and renovation work impacting the avenues businesses.

But we need new sidewalks here, said Radin, whose pharmacy with its sitting area operates as the areas complaint and gossip post. What people want to know is when the public hearings will be. They want to have a say in what their street will look like.

Sheila OMalley, the citys economic development director and grants writer, said boring samples to determine where the gas mains will go are beginning.

Weve probably got 75 percent of the design phase complete, she said. But before we agree on anything there will have to be two or three public hearings which the state and federal government require.

No dates for those hearings have been set yet, she said.

Still OMalley anticipates that the renovation project will be put out to bid in the spring with construction hopefully expected to start in the summer.

Once it starts we expect it to take about six months to completion, she said.

The Eversource work on both Main and Wakelee involves replacing the old existing cast iron and bare steel gas mains with newer plastic pipe, Gross explained. The plastic pipe is more durable and much better able to handle the flucations in temperature we get in Connecticut.

He said 100 customers on Wakelee and two of its side streetsDwight Street and Dwight Street extension-will be hooking up to gas lines.

If anyone else in that area is interested now is the time to contact us, Gross said.

Several business installed gas during the Main Street upgrade which involved 1,500 feet of plastic pipe costing about $600,000.

When everyone is through working it will be an improvement...it will be nice, said Patel, who runs Klankos. But for now we have no idea how much it will effect business.

(Anyone in the Wakelee Avenue area looking to hook-up to gas during Eversources work should call them at 855-645-2427).
Dave G. Houser / Corbis The Congo River in Western Central Africa.

Le Blanc and I are into our 500th kilometer on the river when he turns my view of modern African history on its head. "We should just give it all back to the whites," the riverboat captain says. "Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won't see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn't just stay where we were. We went backwards."

Le Blanc earns his keep sailing the tributaries of the Congo River. He's 40 years old, and his real name is Malu-Ebonga Charles  he got his nickname, and his green eyes and dark honey skin, from a German grandfather who married a Congolese woman in what was then the Belgian Congo. If his unconventional genealogy gave him a unique view of the Congo's colonial past, it is his job on the river, piloting three dugouts lashed together with twine and mounted with outboards, that has informed his opinion of the Democratic Republic of Congo's present. "The river is the artery of Congo's economy," he says. "When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations  cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned." Using a French expression literally translated as "on the ground," he adds: "Everything is par terre."

It's true that our journey through 643 kilometers of rainforest to where the Maringa River joins the Congo at Mbandaka, has been an exploration of decline. An abandoned tugboat here; there, a beached paddle steamer stripped of its metal sides to a rusted skeleton; several abandoned palm oil factories, their roofs caved in, their walls disappearing into the engulfing forest, their giant storage tanks empty and rusted out. The palms now grow wild and untended on the riverbanks and in the villages we pass, the people dress in rags, hawk smoked blackfish and bushmeat, and besiege us with requests for salt or soap. There are no schools here, no clinics, no electricity, no roads. It can take a year for basic necessities ordered from the capital, Kinshasa, nearly 2,000 kilometers downstream, to make it here  if they make it at all. At one point we pass a cargo barge that has taken three months to travel the same distance we will cover in two days. We stop in the hope of buying some gasoline, but all we get from the vessel are rats.

Even amid the morbid decay, it comes as a shock to hear Le Blanc mourn colonialism. The venal, racist scramble by Europeans to possess Africa and exploit its resources found its fullest expression in the Congo. In the late 19th century, Belgium's King Leopold made a personal fiefdom of the central African territory as large as all of Western Europe. From it, he extracted a fortune in ivory, rubber, coffee, cocoa, palm oil and minerals such as gold and diamonds. Unruly laborers working in conditions of de facto slavery had their hands chopped off; the cruelty of Belgian rule was premised on the idea that Congo and its peoples were a resource to be exploited as efficiently as possible. Leopold's absentee brutality set the tone for those that followed him in ruling the Congo  successive Belgian governments and even the independent government of Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled from 1965 to 1997 and who, in a crowded field, still sets the standard for repression and corruption among African despots.

Le Blanc isn't much concerned with that history; he lives in the present, in a country where education is a luxury and death is everywhere. Around 45,000 people die each month in the DRC as a result of the social collapse brought on by civil war, according to a study released in January by the International Rescue Committee. It estimated the total loss of life between 1998 and April 2007 at 5.4 million. For many Congolese like Le Blanc, the difficulties of today blot out the cruelties of the past. "On this river, all that you see  the buildings, the boats  only whites did that. After the whites left, the Congolese did not work. We did not know how to. For the past 50 years, we've just declined." He pauses. "They took this country by force," he says, with more than a touch of admiration. "If they came back, this time we'd give them the country for free."
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Windber-Portage renew rivalry in Week 10 Heritage-WestPAC crossover

Check out what to watch on Friday night in Somerset County as the high school football regular season comes to a close in Week 10.
Check it out: Fun things to do this weekend in Lake County

This list of weekend entertainment includes festivals, Vet Fest and the premiere of 'The Diary of Anne Frank' on a local stage.
Opinion Psychology

Its not enough for us to survive terrible experiences. Now were supposed to thrive because of them. Nonsense. Victims of trauma dont need to add a sense of failure to their burden.
As I watched the remarkable scenes play out on Friday night my thoughts turned to my friend, Chief of the Turkish General Staff General Hulusi Akar, who was taken hostage as part of the coup and has thankfully since been rescued.

I worked with him closely both as Commander of Natos Allied Rapid Reaction Corps and when Deputy Supreme Allied Commander.

A well-educated, highly capable and Western-orientated officer, he is committed to a democratic, secular Turkey and to serving the elected Government. In that respect he is typical of the highest echelons of the Turkish military, many of whom have been educated at American and indeed the UKs staff colleges.

Clothes and weapons beloging to soldiers involved in the coup attempt that have now surrendered lie on the ground abandoned on Bosphorus Bridge

Very much a 21st Century general, I think he would have been horrified by the attempted coup.

Now his thoughts, like mine, will turn to the implications of the coup not only for the Turkish Armed Forces, but also for Nato and what this means for the alliance.

The coup was shocking and highly destabilising for Nato at this critical time. Turkeys role in the fight against Islamic State, deterring Russian aggression and in the migrant crisis cannot be overstated.

Turkeys armed forces are the second-largest in Nato after the United States, and highly professional. Its generals are on an equal footing with British and US commanders.

Sadly, not only will Turkey be weakened by the failed coup, which saw soldiers firing on other soldiers, but Nato as a whole will be weakened  at least in the short term.

In the wake of the coup, Erdogan has threatened to cleanse the military and there are even calls for executions. Such bloodletting will leave deep scars within the Turkish forces and compromise Turkeys ability to contribute to our military alliance. This at a time when Nato needs to stand united and strong.

My fear is that the Erdogan regime may use the coup to justify an authoritarian Islamist backlash and to take a more isolationist stance.

Yet the international family needs Turkey more than ever. It occupies such a significant geopolitical position, at the axis of Europe and Asia.

If, for example, it takes its eye off the Black Sea I fear Russia will exploit that vulnerability.

People gather for celebration around Turkish police officers, loyal to the government, standing atop tanks abandoned by Turkish army officers

Similarly, the international community does not want Turkey to go down a more Islamist path, because this will lessen Turkeys contribution to Nato and make it more difficult for the West to do business with Turkey; while for its part the UK must now show solidarity to a Nato ally at its hour of need.

The Turkish Army is the guardian of the secular legacy of Ataturk  the founder of modern Turkey  and an increasingly autocratic President will be as much a concern to Nato, an alliance founded on principles of democracy, individual freedom and the rule of law, as would have been a successful coup.

I hope the events of Friday do not damage the UKs military relationship with Turkey. Our ties are close. There are Turkish officers studying at our Joint Service Command and Staff College and serving in the HQ of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps.

For our part, we have UK officers serving with the Turkish-led National Rapid Deployable Corps (NRDC) in Istanbul and in key roles at Natos Land Command HQ at Izmir.
PHILADELPHIA  In all of last year, there were only 22 days when someone wasn't shot in Philadelphia. Nearly 1 in 5 victims died.

Now, in a bold effort to stem the bloodshed, several Philadelphia hospitals are about to conduct a citywide experiment that will ask: When gunshot or stabbing victims are being rushed to the emergency room by ambulance, could paramedics do more to save them by doing less?

It's a counterintuitive approach that could test long-held beliefs and change practices at trauma centers across the country.

And every resident of or visitor to Philadelphia could become a study subject, though the biggest effect will probably be in the most violent neighborhoods  poor, mostly black sections where people are skeptical of essentially being experimented on.

During the study, paramedics treating adults who have been shot or stabbed in the torso will, on a random basis, not insert a tube down a victim's throat or administer intravenous fluids  two traditional life-saving techniques some doctors say may actually harm such patients.

Normally, paramedics intubate patients to keep their airway open, and give IV fluids to counteract a drop in blood pressure. But supporters of the study say that for victims who are bleeding through an open wound, these procedures may cause an increase in blood pressure that can accelerate blood loss and death.

Philadelphians who don't want to participate in the study if they are ever wounded can opt out by wearing wristbands indicating their wishes. They can obtain a wristband by filling out a form online or on paper.

The study is expected to start in the fall and last five years, or until doctors have about 1,000 patients, whichever comes first. It could end early if researchers are able to prove or disprove their theory sooner.

It is being headed by Temple University Hospital's chief of surgery, Dr. Amy Goldberg, who has treated thousands of shooting victims in the three decades she has worked in Philadelphia.

"If this is not a public health crisis, I don't know what is," she said.

Last year, there were 236 homicides in Philadelphia and more than 1,200 shootings, or one roughly every seven hours. Of those victims, nearly 700 were black men ages 18 to 34.

Temple has been working for five years to set up the study. As part of the process, Dr. Zoe Maher, a Temple trauma surgeon, has been giving presentations at community forums.

Maher, who is white, gave a 20-minute slideshow at a recent meeting in Hunting Park, a largely black and Hispanic neighborhood. Her audience was initially dubious.

"You're using people to do this study," said Charles Lanier, head of a neighborhood revitalization group. "I hear what you're saying, but in the interim, you're still sacrificing somebody to prove which (method) is better."

Yanitza Gonzalez, a councilwoman's representative, chimed in: "It's almost like we're gambling with people's lives."

Joann Taylor, a block captain, retorted: "We're already gambling with people's lives."

The Temple surgeon patiently laid out her case, even as she acknowledged the selection process is "like the flip of a coin." Retrospective studies, she said, have shown that gunshot and stabbing victims given basic life support  such as an oxygen mask, CPR or immobilization  had an 18 percentage-point survival advantage over those given advanced procedures, such as intubation, in an ambulance.

The study, involving all six of Philadelphia's trauma hospitals, has been exempted from the Food and Drug Administration's informed-consent rules, which require research subjects to be told the risks and benefits and to give permission in advance  something not feasible with gravely wounded people.

Organizers had to meet certain requirements before launching the study, including getting approval from city and hospital review boards that oversee research on humans, holding community meetings and informing a certain percentage of the public.

Karen Maschke, a scholar at the Hastings Center, a medical ethics think tank in suburban New York City, said the experiment appears ethically sound.

"Getting to the emergency room, where equipment and experts are waiting, is a really critical window, especially for people with any kind of wound that involves bleeding," said Maschke, editor of the journal IRB: Ethics & Human Research. "Sometimes that's going to mean you can't stop and ask people if it's OK."

A version of this experimental approach is already in place.

For a generation, many Philadelphia police officers, instead of waiting for an ambulance, have been taking shooting and stabbing victims to the ER in their cruisers, a practice known as "scoop-and-run." Data from the longstanding practice helped inform the surgeons proposing this study.

"All of the evidence we have points to us being right, but if we are wrong, we will end the study early," Maher told the community group.

Some paramedics have opted out of participating.

Dr. Patrick Reilly, trauma chief at Penn Presbyterian Hospital, a study partner, said doctors and society tend to think more is better.

"If we said we were going to give another medicine, people would tend to go, 'Let's see if this works,'" he said. "This might be a situation where more isn't better."
It was just before noon on Wednesday when I set eyes on Theresa May for the last time.

I was standing in the corridor behind the back of the Speakers Chair, waiting to see David Cameron enter for his final PMQs. She was with Michael Ellis, her resolutely perpendicular PPS, but no one else. No entourage. She looked happy, maybe even a touch excited.

There was a bit of joking with a colleague about whether she was going to have to fight them for a seat on the front bench, and then she walked into the Chamber. I never saw her again.

Theresa May has got off to a brilliant start but the real crunch will come when she clashes swords with The Three Brexiteers

Six hours later I was standing at the top of Downing Street to observe the arrival of our new Prime Minister. The steel gates opened, a BMW glided up, and someone got out.

She looked a lot like Theresa May, but it wasnt her. The woman in front of me was taller. The eyes were keener. The tread more purposeful. Evidence power brings a physical, as well as political, transformation.

Over the past seven days events have moved at an almost incomprehensively rapid  and consequentially dangerous  pace.

Against a backdrop of national crisis, a three- month transition of office has been frenetically compressed into 48 hours.

But its a transition that has already revealed something significant about what May insiders have been keen to stress is not a conventional reshuffle but an entirely new Government.

Speak to anyone who has ever been involved in the nuts and bolts of establishing a new administration, and they will tell you the same thing: the first decisions are the most important.The mistakes you make in the first 48 hours take you years to unravel, said a Coalition veteran.

To date Theresa May and her team have already taken three important decisions, and they have all been good ones. The first was to place The Three Brexiteers  Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox  in charge of the paving the way for implementation of Article 50.

Theresa May was hailed after appointing a Cabinet containing more State-educated ministers than at any time in Tory Party history

Within two hours of walking through the famous black doorway, May had put the potentially destabilising does Brexit really mean Brexit? argument to bed. While we are all pro-Brexit now is Team Mays motto, she is only too aware that out in the Tory shires, some Brexiteers appear more Brexity than others.

As a result, Thursdays headlines were dominated by talk of the Brexit Cabinet, even though three of the four major offices of state are now held by Remain supporters, and of the five Cabinet Ministers who backed Leave at the start of the referendum campaign, only one  Chris Grayling  survives.

The second major decision involved anchoring her new administration firmly in the political centre ground. Those hoping May would pull the handbrake on David Camerons modernisation project have been disappointed.

Indeed, with her rallying cry The Government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few but by yours, she plans to accelerate it.

Despite liberal media talk of a lurch to the Right, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, David Davis, Amber Rudd, Liz Truss, Justine Greening and Damian Green are all passionate advocates of social liberalisation and mobility.

Mixed backgrounds: Mrs May's cabinet features former private school pupil Amber Rudd (left), grammar school student Andrea Leadsom (centre) and comprehensive pupil Justine Greening (right)

Hence the heavy emphasis on the fact that she had appointed more state-educated Ministers than any other Conservative Prime Minister  a clear attempt to hose away the rich, posh boy graffiti that has clung to the wall of Downing Street for the past six years.

Johnson  the last surviving member of the Bullingdon Set  is being given the benefit of the doubt. Hes not really one of the Bullingdon Boys, one senior May aide told me, tongue slightly in cheek. Hes not slick enough.

The last key decision was to make a clean break with the past. The cull of the Cameronites was brutal, but necessary. Both John Major and Gordon Brown were hamstrung and ultimately destroyed by their failure to move out of their predecessors shadows.

May intends to cast her own. This proved especially harsh for George Osborne, the man who warned David Cameron against holding a referendum, then dutifully sacrificed his career in defence of it.

But politics is a cruel business. The result is May will enjoy her first weekend as Prime Minister knowing she has succeeded in her first task: that of bringing a measure of reassurance to her country and her party. In the aftermath of the referendum there was a sense of, Oh my God, what have we done,  says a May ally.

Changes: In May's new cabinet Greg Clark (left) is the new Business Secretary, while Chris Grayling (centre) has become Transport Secretary and Jeremy Hunt (right) will remain Health Secretary

That was even coming from the Brexit supporters. Now theres a feeling of relief, and actually some excitement. There certainly is. Shes like Elizabeth Gloriana, one Tory MP cooed. Shes turned her collar up and said, Right boys, Im in charge now. 

But Mays team know this early wave of optimism cannot alter the fundamentals. And the fundamentals dictate she faces the greatest challenge of any incoming Prime Minister since Churchill.

A popular Westminster narrative is currently forming that she has skilfully dumped the momentous decision to leave the EU into the lap of its architects. You Brexit, you own it, was one Ministers description.

Its a nice line, but an inaccurate one. May knows responsibility for management of EU withdrawal cannot be outsourced.

She is primus inter pares, and her ability to bring the political, economic and diplomatic cycles into alignment will define her premiership. From here on in, she will own her Governments successes  and its failures.

She will also have to demonstrate a Lincoln-like capacity to construct a team of rivals. While May has a reputation as a strong departmental manager, that is not the same as the asymmetrical team-building that will now be required.

Just take the Three Brexiteers. David Davis is a born adventurer. On the wall of his office is the ice axe that saved his life  I had to punch it in, breaking up the knuckles a bit.

Managing the unpredictable personality of newly crowned foreign secretary Boris Johnson will be a challenge for Theresa May

Liam Fox is driven by a belief (not entirely unjustified) that he has done much of the heavy lifting for the Eurosceptic cause, without receiving the recognition of some of his more high-profile colleagues  one of whom happens to be Boris Johnson, the man who can cause a diplomatic incident simply by being Boris Johnson.

This is a challenge for him, one May ally acknowledged soon after Johnsons appointment was announced. All of this would be daunting enough for any new PM.

But May is taking office without any mandate from the country, her party or even the technical endorsement of her own MPs.

On Monday, I stood outside the Boothroyd Room in the House of Commons while the parliamentary party gathered for her coronation.

As May finished addressing them, they cheered and stamped their feet with such vigour the room shook. Moments later they poured into the corridor through two doors.

Mays supporters funnelled through the one on the right, the one closest to the side of the room from which she had spoken. They were laughing and patting one another on the back.

But from the door to the left came many of the 80-strong supporters of Andrea Leadsom. Many of their expressions were more neutral.

One MP who had been in despair since the referendum result said to me: For the first time Im feeling quite upbeat. Another grabbed me and said: We all love grammar school girls!
Brexit Minister David Davis is already considering how to deal with a possible surge of new EU migrants before the UK leaves

Theresa Mays new Government is flexing muscles that have long been unused. It will be an alarming feeling at first, but Government and people will quickly get used to being a sovereign nation again.

A good example of this new attitude is Brexit Minister David Davis, who reveals in a Mail on Sunday interview today that he is already considering how to deal with a possible surge of new EU migrants before the UK leaves.

While determined to be civilised, and to treat existing migrants with generosity, Mr Davis warns that if we feel our hospitality is being exploited by new arrivals, we have the will and the power to act.

Mr Daviss adventurous appointment is itself a sign of a thoughtful, broad-minded boldness and confirmation which shows that this newspaper was right to endorse Mrs May from the start.

It is all part of a new mood in British politics, since the swift, orderly uprising which ended the Cameron era. It is hard to think of any other nation or people who could have coped so calmly with such an upheaval, without rancour or violence.

But we face a stern test. David Camerons Government confronted major economic problems, which were quite hard enough to solve.

But Mrs May must govern a country torn down the middle, in which one half of the nation seeks reassurance that there will not be too much change, and the other is afraid there will be too little.

Theresa Mays new Government is flexing muscles that have long been unused. It will be an alarming feeling at first, but Government and people will quickly get used to being a sovereign nation again

And she must also cope with what could still be a great existential crisis, a kingdom disunited by the competing desires of its component nations. She will need to be both resolute and skilful to resolve this.

The tone of toughness mingled with diplomacy set by Mrs May on a highly significant visit to Scotland was a good sign that the new premier has quickly got the measure of her momentous tasks.

There she simultaneously assured First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that the concerns of Scottish people will be listened to, and made it plain beyond doubt that she intends to preserve the Union. All the signs so far are good. Let us hope that Mrs May continues as she has begun.

Police lose the plot

Who do the police serve? Until quite recently, the question did not need to be asked.

But increasingly the police appear to have withdrawn from the role they once performed. They have begun to resemble an old-fashioned, nationalised industry which works for itself first, and for the public second.

This is absolutely not the fault of individual officers, who continue to wish to serve as they always did, and are obstructed by poor leadership.

But today we reveal two shocking stories  a police force which sold a house to unsuspecting members of the public, knowing that it might be the target of a deadly revenge attack; and another which allowed a senior officer to send serving policemen and women to entertain pupils at her sons private school.

The first case is outrageous and unpardonable. The second reveals an arrogance regrettably common in the over-protected parts of the public sector.

The police are perhaps the last remaining great unreformed part of that sector, as our new Prime Minister well knows.
There was never any doubt that Boris Johnson would be a more colourful Foreign Secretary than his rather grey predecessor Philip Hammond. So it comes as no surprise to learn that one of BoJos first decisions as our top diplomat has been to reverse the anti-gay-marriage Hammonds ban on flying the LGBT movements rainbow flag at the Foreign Office and British embassies during Gay Pride events.

One of BoJos first decisions as our top diplomat has been to reverse the anti-gay-marriage Philip Hammonds ban on flying the LGBT movements rainbow flag at the Foreign Office

Theresa Mays decision to fire virtually every member of David Camerons backroom staff could haunt her. It was described by one mandarin as Theresas No 10 De-Baathification  a reference to the dismissal of Saddam Husseins civil service and police force by the Allies in the aftermath of the Iraq War. The mandarin added drily: If she wants to discover the risks, all she needs to do is read the Chilcot Report.

A pall hung over a thank you cocktail party held by kamikaze Tory leadership contender Michael Gove for his supporters at Londons Mosimanns restaurant. Goves wife, Sarah Lady Macbeth Vine, fulminated at everyone who betrayed Michael. Glum Gove could not have chosen a more appropriate venue for the funereal event: Mosimanns is a converted former church.

Is Scrapper Crabb in the mood for a maul?

Stephen Crabb will soon be able to take out his frustration at losing his Cabinet job after sending rude texts to a young female Tory. Married Crabb, 43, is looking forward to a new season with MPs Rugby XV (hes pictured below in an earlier match). Whenever theres a punch-up, Crabby is first to pile in, says a team-mate.

Stephen Crabb is looking forward to a new season with MPs Rugby XV

Insurrection in Whitehall over Philip Hammonds elevation to Chancellor. Within minutes, his Wikipedia entry was amended to include the line: After leaving Oxford, Hammond spent three years as a fishmonger. An investigation is under way after the change was traced to a Government computer. The culprit can expect a severe filleting from Big Phil.

Matt meets Resistance

Hyper-ambitious Tory Minister Matthew Hancocks last-minute switch from Boris Johnsons campaign to Theresa May cheerleader cut no ice with Mays supporters, who stripped him of his Cabinet status. Itd be wrong to compare Matt with collaborators of the Vichy Government in German-occupied France in the Second World War who claimed to have been in with the Resistance, said one. Wrong but tempting maybe

Rebel Labour MP John Woodcock was taken aback when deputy leader Tom Watson told him: Youre looking a bit tubby, John. Six-footer Woodcock  a stripling compared to roly-poly Tom  retorted: Talk about pots and kettles! Youd think Watson would steer clear of fattist jibes. His political dark arts reputation  and rotund frame  inspired the saying among awed Labour MPs: Dont mess with the fat man.
Pomp: President Erdogan enjoys lavish ceremony

The 400 million palace of Turkeys President Erdogan is the biggest in the world. It is also a monstrosity. Thirty times the size of the White House, all the seats of government of Turkeys Nato allies could be contained inside its vast marble halls and endless corridors.

No wonder the sprawling modernist structure is compared to the Peoples Palace built by Romanias dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. It actually looks more like a massive public lavatory. Saddam himself would blanch at the silk wallpaper in the bathrooms, the cabinets displaying gold inlaid glasses that cost 250 each, and the 63 lifts. The carpet bill was a staggering 7.8 million.

It was here that blood was shed during the botched coup. And it is in its absurd dimensions that we can learn so much about the overweening, ego-inflated ambitions of its prime resident  and, more critically, of the dangerous consequences of the failed putsch. The stakes could scarcely be higher.

From his humble beginnings, Recep Tayyip Erdogans rise to the top ought to be a classic heart-warming story. But his taste in mega-architecture reflects a personality that has more in common with the most grandiose of Ottoman Sultans. The high-handed way in which he overrode normal rules and budgets to push through his gigantic living memorial is why critics call him an elected dictator.

The coup may have fizzled out, showing Erdogan had support in the streets. But many reasons why the other half of Turks resent his way of ruling are still there. To them, he is a president who abuses office to benefit his family and cronies.

He is seen as pushing Islamic fundamentalism on them through the back door. This matters to Britain because Turkey lies at the junction of the planets tectonic plates in so much more than simple geography. A civil war  even rumbling instability  is hugely dangerous for the rest of Turkeys Nato allies. With Russia to the north, Syria and Iraq to the south and Iran in the east, Turkey has acted as Natos south-eastern bastion for decades.

Sprawling: The 400 million palace of Turkeys President Erdogan is the biggest in the world

Just take last years refugee crisis to see what problems the West could face if Turkey goes off the rails. Add the countrys millions to those already funnelling into Europe from the Middle East to get an idea of the worst-case scenario.

In recent decades, Turkey seemed to combine democracy with a strong military, adding to the Wests general security. That confidence was shattered even when the military coup fizzled out yesterday. Its aftershocks will disturb Turkey and us for the foreseeable future.

At its worst, people fear Turkey could be entering the downward spiral that has engulfed Iraq and Syria in civil war and terrorism. That is the last thing anyone in the West should want. Prayer mats are out everywhere for stability on Natos south-east flank. The crowds opposing the coup should not lull us, or President Erdogan, into thinking national unity has won the day. Turkey is still bitterly polarised.

Yesterdays triumphant return to office cannot silence widespread allegations of corruption and abuse of office against Erdogan. Intolerant of even jokes at his expense, he has prosecuted the media which report allegations against him and his family.

At its worst, people fear Turkey could be entering the downward spiral that has engulfed Iraq

But many ordinary Turks admire their Teflon president  even after pictures emerged of the bank-tellers cash-counting machine found in his sons home, along with shoe-boxes stuffed with dollars and euros.

The West used to accept Erdogans ability to mix his appeal to the Muslim majority with sensible economic policies. It thought he was at heart a rational man rather than an Islamist playing at a Western-style politician.

As long as the economy grew, so did Erdogans popularity at home, while the West saw him as a model for states undergoing revolution in the Arab Spring of 2011. But as the years went by, Erdogan became more autocratic and more religious. Fourteen years in power have given him the patronage to reshape the civil service and military in his own image. The rebel officers hated that.

Like many authoritarians, he is both capricious and cynical. His response to the Arab Spring showed this when he suddenly denounced his friend President Assad of Syria as a blood-soaked tyrant. Similarly, he switched from dialogue to all-out war against the Kurdish minority.

Popular: Erdogan reigns supreme as he delivers a speech to his supporters

The same dirty game was going on when he switched from backing the jihadi rebels against Assad to supporting the US-led war on Islamic State. Having let Islamist radicals pour across the border with Syria, Erdogan suddenly declared himself their enemy. They have hit back inside Turkey, so now the country needs a strong man to defend it.

Erdogan has tried Europes patience but its elites were too quick to think the coup was the solution. Like Turkeys liberals, they are scornful of this self-made mans mega-ego, but these criticisms wash over 50 per cent of Turks.

They voted for him. We didnt. It is his trump card. In all this chaos, Erdogan reigns supreme. That is his strength and Turkeys tragedy. Terrorism and Friday nights coup are body blows to the countrys economy. This could push millions of Turks into joining migrants from the Middle East. It is a nightmare haunting Brussels and Berlin.

Now, Erdogan is out for revenge. Even opponents of the coup fear his purge will sweep them up too. The West was losing influence in the run-up to the coup. Now Erdogans price will be for Washington and Europe to sacrifice some of their principles and interests to recover his friendship.
Why is it supposed to be a good thing that the new Cabinet are worse-educated than the old one? Half the media trumpeted on Friday that Theresa Mays new Government was full of state-educated Ministers, as if this were a cause for rejoicing.

But why should it be? It is a regrettable fact that this countrys private schools are vastly, incomparably better than all but a very few of its state schools. All figures and results confirm this. All employers know it.

Theresa May was hailed after appointing a Cabinet containing more State-educated ministers than at any time in Tory Party history

And almost all the good state schools are academically selective grammar schools, a tiny, hugely oversubscribed remnant of survivors, utterly untypical of the state sector. And they must remain a pitiful few dozen, besieged by desperate parents  because it is against the law to open any new ones.

Most of the other good state schools select just as ruthlessly, judging pupils by their parents ability to afford expensive houses, or to fake religious belief, or both at once.

So what is there to celebrate about all these new Ministers? Either they have taken advantage of a rare privilege just as unfair as that used by fee-paying parents, and more secret. Or they have been poorly educated and are not going to be very good at their jobs as a result.

This very odd cult of state education among politicians used to be confined to the Labour Party, where the worse the school was, the more virtue points you scored. Private education was a matter of shame. A grammar school education was often concealed.

I once caught a Labour MP pretending to have gone to a comprehensive when he hadnt  because none had existed in his home city at the time. Then, the Tory Party turned into the Labour Party.

The transformation is now complete, which is why the Labour Party is biting its own tail trying to work out what on earth it is for.

And Tory politicians started bragging about sending their children to state schools, as well as looking embarrassed about having been privately educated themselves.

Mrs May seldom mentions her time at a private convent school, and tried for years to keep quiet about her grammar school days, though she now seems to have decided to trade on it as it suits her new image as the woman from Middle England.

But none of this changes the fact that in the 50 years since most grammar schools were abolished, state education in this country has been in decline  and that the continuing existence of private schools has shown it up again and again.

So lets have no boasting about having the worst-educated Cabinet in modern history.

Instead lets restore the lost grammar and direct grant schools that were taking on and beating the private schools at their own game, until politicians destroyed them.

Roll up for Theresa's street theatre!

There is lots of talk about a supposedly brutal reshuffle. But actually the fall of David Cameron is much more like an old-fashioned General Election than a reshuffle.

My generation were quite used to the rather satisfying sight of Alec Douglas-Homes sofa, or Harold Wilsons desk, or Ted Heaths piano being carted out of Downing Street by whistling removal men. They lost. They went. Government really changed, in character and policy.

It was our great triumph that we had peaceful revolutions in which the beaten party were actually turned out, and accepted it. It was good and healthy and I miss it.

But in recent years the true changes are all inner-party putsches  Lady Thatcher stabbed in the back by her own Cabinet in 1990, the long march of the Blairites in the Labour Party, the ejection of Iain Duncan Smith.

The fall of David Cameron is much more like an old-fashioned General Election than a reshuffle

Despite all the flag-waving fuss in 1997, when Labour Party employees were bussed into Downing Street and told to pretend to be a crowd, weve had more or less the same government since 1990  pro-EU, high-spending, politically correct and broadly approved of by Michael Heseltine.

If the millions who voted to leave the EU had had a party, it would have been the opposite of all that, and wed have had a huge political change.

As it is we have to make do with Mrs May, who personally opposes her governments main aim of leaving the EU.

And, knowing she is unlikely to deliver what the Leave majority wanted, she has cunningly provided some satisfying street theatre  plenty of heads rolling, some new faces, a furniture van in Downing Street and poor old David Davis, who she no doubt hopes will fail to get us out of the EU, so that she can sack him and do a deal with Brussels that keeps us in, in all but name.

NO ONE TRUSTS A ROBOCOP If you ever wondered whether the growing transformation of police forces into heavily armoured riot squads was a good idea, this picture of protester Ieshia Evans confronting a phalanx of Louisiana cops will confirm your doubts. Pictured, Protestor Ieshia Evans is detained by law enforcement near the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department The whole point off police in free countries is to be on the side of the people against crime and disorder. Once they climb into armour, and rely on menace, they are bound to lose a great deal of our friendliness and trust. And that will mean more armour, more clubs and more guns. Advertisement

A solution to 'terror' that no one cares about

Thought is the first casualty of terror. Nobody ever actually applies reason to the subject. And so we flounder on, uselessly doing the wrong thing.

In general, we end up doing whatever the most powerful lobby, or the Government, wanted to do anyway. Those who are not thinking This is a good day to bury bad news are saying: Never let a good crisis go to waste.

In the US, mass murder is blamed on relaxed gun laws, though other countries with strong gun laws have mass murders. And mass murders are new, as is the widespread use of mind-altering drugs, while Americas gun laws are very old.

Over here, mass murder is blamed on Islamic radicalisation  though the killers are almost invariably drugged-up low-lifes with criminal records for violence and theft. I can already be sure that this is what the Nice murderer will turn out to be, once all the facts are in. By definition, devout Muslims wouldnt live such lives.

And in all cases, politicians reach for blunt instruments, such as Frances state of emergency  which has just been proved useless by the events in Nice, or more surveillance (likewise it failed to find the culprit of this outrage), or stupid travel restrictions, which treat us all like criminal suspects.

And they make pious speeches in which they growl and thunder against terrorists in general. Is this because they feel guilty about the fact that they have negotiated with terrorists in the past, or that they will certainly do so in the future, or how is Martin McGuinness getting to meet the Queen and how is Algeria independent? Either way, I find it unconvincing. So should you.

The best solution, if there is one, lies elsewhere. But there is no lobby for it, so it is never considered. Can you work out what it might be from the words above?
Following this botched coup attempt, it would be foolishly premature for the rest of the world to breathe a sigh of relief.

For the relative calm that has settled on the streets of Turkey is likely to give way to a storm that heralds an even darker and more violent period for the country  and the wider region  both of which, of course, are already convulsed in unprecedented chaos and bloodshed.

A new wave of turmoil in Turkey is an especially sobering prospect, for the vast country of 75 million people  which borders Syria, Iraq and Iran  is in the crosshairs of the current wave of region-wide civil wars, sectarian strife and terrorism, and has given refuge to almost three million refugees.

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The relative calm that has settled on the streets of Turkey is likely to give way to a storm that heralds an even darker and more violent period for the country

For his part, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now chiefly pre-occupied with hunting down all and sundry who threaten his cherished goal of establishing an Islamic theocracy.

The result is that as political and military elites reach for each others throats, this mess will drag on for months, or possibly even years.

This will paralyse a country that has Natos second-largest standing army and is, along with Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Wests most crucial (if at times notoriously unreliable) ally.

Alas, the terrorist leaders of Islamic State will be the most immediate beneficiaries.

They have already launched a string of devastating terrorist attacks on Turkish soil, and their bloodthirsty foot-soldiers will undoubtedly take advantage of continuing instability to cause still more carnage  deepening the gulf between Erdogan and the millions of secular Turks who despise him.

ISIS certainly would have celebrated the news that U.S. warplanes involved in the fight against their soldiers in Iraq and Syria were prevented from operating at Incirlik air base in Turkey following the failed coup attempt.

Although air-strikes have since resumed, ISIS must be hoping that, for Turkey, the internationally coordinated fight inside the self-declared caliphate will now be put on the back burner  just when it appeared to be on the verge of collapse within the vast territory it controls.

Worse, the Obama administrations blustering reaction to the coup did little to endear itself to Erdogan  creating yet greater divisions within Nato that will likewise only benefit the terrorists.

Make no mistake, Turkey and the U.S. are now embroiled in their worst diplomatic spat for decades.

Rage: Protesters could be seen beating cowering soldiers in the violent scenes

For a start, it took U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry two hours to respond to the fact that Washingtons Nato ally seemed in the midst of a military take-over.

And when he did finally issue a statement, it was merely to announce that he was observing events as reported on the television  giving no clear support to Erdogan rather than the coup-leaders.

Infuriated, Turkey has now effectively declared the U.S. an enemy state for harbouring an Islamist cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who is an enemy of Erdogan whom he believes (rather fancifully) was the instigator of the coup-bid against him.

Then there is the question of how Washingtons supposedly all-powerful, all-seeing intelligence services failed to anticipate the coup-attempt in the first place  just as they spectacularly failed to predict the rise of Islamic State or Russian military intervention in Syria.

Sadly, it is difficult not to conclude that the failure by the Turkish army leaders to take over the reins of government and the immediate fall-out offers yet another sign that the Obama administration has lost all control over events in the region.

And true to form, wily Russian leader Vladimir Putin is quickly moving to fill the diplomatic vacuum. In contrast to John Kerry, he offered unconditional support for Erdogan from the moment he learnt of the attempt to oust him.

The two countries had already buried the hatchet over Turkeys reckless downing of a Russian fighter plane last year that had strayed into its airspace from northern Syria.

Full diplomatic and economic ties between the two countries had therefore already been restored  in the name of fighting terrorism.

Perhaps most depressing is that the failed coup has scuppered what appeared to have been the first serious moves on Turkeys part to help resolve the Syrian crisis  with Erdogan presumably having realised that many millions of Turks were increasingly furious at the terrorist blowback they were suffering at home for their leaderss initial clandestine support for ISIS.

Turkeys Prime Minister, Binali Yildirim, had strongly hinted that his country was prepared to restore full ties with the Assad regime in Syria as well as with Egypt, whose government was furious over Turkeys support for the Muslim Brotherhood, its opposition in Cairo.

But as so often in the Middle East, things have merely moved one step forward and then two steps back.

For as news of the coup-attempt broke, scores of Syrians flooded into the streets of their capital, Damascus, with the Assad regimes support through official media channels, firing celebratory gun-shots into the air in anticipation of Erdogans removal.

A Turkish civilian whips soldiers with his belt after they surrendered to police on Bosphorus Bridge, a strategic landmark which was seized by the army during the coup

More than 6,000 rebels have been detained after their failed military coup that killed at least 250 as Turkish President Erdogan vows revenge for the bloody uprising

Meanwhile, yesterday, Egypt blocked a UN statement in support of the Turkish government by claiming  somewhat ironically, since Egypt itself is a military dictatorship  that Turkeys government could not justifiably be called democratic.

Nor, even more predictably, can we hope for any intelligent peace-making initiatives from Western governments.

Shamefully, dozens of U.S. and U.K. diplomats  the same imbeciles responsible for orchestrating the Iraq and Libya debacles  recently called for full military action by the West to topple the Assad regime in Syria.

Assad may well be a brute, but no one in their right minds believes that a war against Syria at this juncture would be anything but insanity.

Indeed, from a purely pragmatic assessment  and for world stability  it is now more important than ever that the Syrian regime stays.

After all, we are now faced with a scenario where ISIS will feel emboldened at a time when Nato appears increasingly enfeebled and divided.

Another factor, of course, is the effect of mass migration across the Mediterranean  with Western European countries desperate for good relations with Turkey and a strong government that upholds promises to stop migrants using the Turkish coast as a jumping-off point to travel to Greece and Italy, and then beyond.

The tragedy is that the price of stability is the continued rule of Erdogan  a mini-Putin with little domestic opposition and who is closely tied with the Kremlin.

We thought the world was a dangerous place  but with Erdogan now reigning supreme, ISIS given breathing space, and renewed calls to launch a war to remove Assad, I fear that it has become even more terrifyingly dangerous and unstable.

We can at least be thankful for one thing: that the British were correct in their assessment before the Brexit vote that the prospect of a basket-case such as Turkey joining the EU  in the near or distant future  was simply too much to stomach.
Even more traditional brides will wear a flower crown at the reception

The crowns a 'romantic and ethereal' and give a bohemian feel

She said more brides are opting for flower crowns on their wedding day

Ness Falzon, 28, from the Gold Coast has a floral headpiece business

Brides looking to create a romantic and ethereal feel on their wedding day are embracing flower crowns as their must-have accessory.

Gold Coast business owner Ness Falzon, 28, sells floral headpieces through her business Nesst, and told Daily Mail Australia custom crowns are on the rise.

Over the last few years there has definitely been an increase in the fresh flower crowns, she said.

Bohemian bride: Gold Coast business owner Ness Falzon (pictured with her fiance Luke) said an increasing number of brides are choosing to wear flower crowns at their wedding

Ethereal: The crowns are often custom made with either artificial or fresh flowers

Beautiful: Ms Falzon said an increasing number of women are opting for fresh flower crowns on their wedding day

The crowns themselves are works of art.

Brides can opt for a fresh flower comb for an elegant pop of colour or a statement half or full flower crown.

I think it is so personal to how they want to feel on the day and what they have in mind, Ms Falzon said.

Find your style: Brides can choose between a half flower crown (pictured), fresh flower comb or full crown

Gorgeous: The half flower crowns are popular at weddings that have more of a relaxed style

Boho vibe: The full flower crown is popular for women after a bohemian style wedding

For those who want a classic look then a fresh flower comb might be more on their comfort level.

Bohemian and relaxed styled weddings tend to attract the full or half flower crown option.

What I love is that even the most traditional bride might be free of flowers for the ceremony and then mix it up with a flower crown for the reception.

Pop of colour: Some brides choose to be flower free for their ceremony but wear a crown for the reception

Rising trend: Ms Falzon (pictured) said there was a massive trend in women ordering artificial custom crowns for their wedding

Crown for all occasions: Women also choose to wear the crowns at baby showers, Hens parties, birthdays and engagement parties

Ms Falzon said the flower crowns gave a romantic and ethereal vibe to weddings.

She started her business in 2011 as a hobby, and said at first she used artificial flower pieces.

A massive trend saw brides order custom artificial crowns, but in the last few years there has been an increase in fresh flower orders.
Kimberlee King just wants to be able to play with her children and wake up without thinking about chronic pain.

The 33-year-old Sydney mother of six has excruciating pain caused by torn abdominal muscles after giving birth to her children, including her four-year-old triplets.

But she's discovered that a once-subsidised surgery for mothers has now been deemed 'cosmetic' rather than reconstructive - because it's also known as a 'tummy tuck'.

Mrs King, an aged care case manager, told Daily Mail Australia she has had to take out a personal loan to cover her $16,000 abdominoplasty because it was taken off a Medicare Benefits Schedule in January.

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Mrs King with her husband Takahi and children (at back from left) Tane, 12, Taison, seven and Makaya, 10 and at front, triplets Mackenna, Madisyn and Mariyah, all four

Mrs King pictured when she was pregnant with her triplets, Mackenna, Madisyn and Mariyah, now all aged four

Mrs King, 33, from Revesby, Sydney, is an aged care case manager and mother of six

An ultrasound scan of Mrs King while she was pregnant with her her triplets, now aged four

She endured four years of pain until March to have the surgery when her youngest children were more independent, only to be told a review by the Medical Services Advisory Committee led to the surgery being changed from reconstructive to 'cosmetic'.

'I missed out by three months,' she said.

'I always knew that I would have to get the surgery. The frustrating thing for me is that I don't expect the public to pay for all my surgery... I have paid for private health care every two weeks my whole life but I can't use that because Medicare hasn't attached an item number to my surgery because I'm not eligible.'

The surgery involves making hip-to-hip cut across the pubic line, pulling back the skin and reattaching the stomach muscles, before pulling the skin back down tightly, reattaching it and cutting off the excess.

It's because of the skin tightening and removal the surgery is now considered cosmetic.

According to the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons the decision was 'misogynistic' and unfair to women with multiple children, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Mrs King's husband, Takahi, with their triplets. They were born nine weeks premature but haven't suffered any health issues

Mrs King's children with Santa Claus. Back from left are Makaya, Taison and Tane, with (at front) triplets Mackenna, Madisyn and Mariyah

Mrs King hopes to get the decision on abdominoplasty changed so other women don't face a large surgery bill like her

Mrs King with her husband, Takahi, 35

The society's secretary, Doctor Daniel Kennedy, contacted Health Minister Sussan Ley in May to ask for the 'mistake' to be reversed.

'I can understand the need to rein in costs but a patient like her (Mrs King) has had a massive impost on her abdominal wall and it wont get better by itself,' the Daily Telegraph quoted him as telling the minister.

At the moment, Mrs King can't play with her children, has urgency incontinence, and constant back pain, because her stomach muscles are torn and can't support her.

Only about 150cm tall, carrying children had caused a lot of back pain, and she suffered daily, at work and at home.

She booked in for the surgery at her own cost in September because she couldn't continue the same.

'Nothing alleviates the pain. It's a constant. I live with it every day.

'It's not fair on my husband or my kids having to deal with a cranky mum.'

Mrs King said the decision to list abdominoplasty as cosmetic couldn't be overturned by the time she had surgery, but she hoped she could make a difference for women in the future.

She has contacted the Health Minister begging for the decision to be changed and a petition for change is circulating.

'I think [this] affects a lot of women.

'This is about changing it for the future. If it changes for other women then it's a job well done.'

The King family together. Mrs King says her condition isn't fair on her children or husband, who have to deal with a 'cranky' mum who is in pain
Donna Air has long kept her cards close to her chest when it comes to her relationship with her rumoured partner of three years James Middleton.

However, the model and actress has hinted that perhaps things may be getting a little more serious between the both of them after saying she would like to get married.

In an interview with Fabulous magazine the 36-year-old discussed her long term relationship with her former partner Damian Aspinall who is father to her daughter Freya.

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Donna Air has said that she would consider getting married just a month after she and on-off partner James Middleton are rumoured to have got back together

Speaking of their relationship she said: 'I feel like I've already had a marriage of sorts. But would I like to have an official one? Yeah. Hell, why not! I always say you have to try everything once.'

Donna, who is a mother-of-one to her 12-year-old daughter also alluded to that she would like to have more children.

The former Byker Grove star said: 'I'm very happy and have got an amazing daughter. Sure, why wouldn't I [do it again]? I'm happy now, but I'm open to more.'

The pair are said to have split in February this year after James moved to Hong Kong for work but were seen dining together upon his return to the UK last month

Donna, who has a 12-year-old daughter Freya with her former partner Damian Aspinall, said that she wouldn't rule out having more children. Pictured: Donna with Damian (left) and Freya (right)

Donna and the brother of the Duchess of Cambridge were said to have split in February after James Middleton, 29, moved to Hong Kong for his marshmallow business Boomf.

However, upon his return to the UK last month the couple have been spotted together along with Freya dining together in Mayfair.

But Donna remains ever tight lipped about the nature of their relationship.

Staying coy about her romantic status, she told the magazine, 'There's lots of speculation and creation in my love life and it's quite entertaining.'

Although neither Donna nor James have confirmed or denied that they are back together she says she finds the speculation about her love life 'quite entertaining'

A mutual friend told the Daily Mail at the time: 'There's still a lot of love between them and they have been seeing each other again for the past few days.

'They've decided that what they have is the real deal.'

The source continued: 'Donna is very aware that she's older than James,' explains the source.
Dental surgeons have developed a revolutionary implant procedure using an electrical transmitter to speed up the waiting time before a new tooth can be fitted.

Dental implants  a fixed alternative to removable dentures  are fitted in two stages, starting with inserting a screw to hold the tooth in the jawbone.

Patients then have to wait up to nine months for the bone to integrate with the metal screw before a tooth can be fitted on to it.

Dental implants  a fixed alternative to removable dentures  are fitted in two stages, starting with inserting a screw to hold the tooth in the jawbone (file photo)

But by using electromagnetic transmitters in the end of the screw, the new implant procedure can speed up the integration process by between 40 and 70 per cent, according to its originators.

The device, invented by Israeli company Magdent, is approved in the EU, and is due to be marketed to UK dentists early next year.

Electromagnetic fields are already used by surgeons to heal complicated bone fractures because they encourage the creation of bone-building cells.

Magdent says its MED (miniaturised electronic device) makes bone grow faster and more densely by transmitting an electromagnetic field into the implant and surrounding bone graft.

The company claims the new technology has significant potential for patients who were previously considered to be risky dental-implant candidates because of poor bone quality due to osteoporosis or cancer treatments that weaken bone strength.

Magdent boss Elad Yakobson explained: All dental implants use titanium screws, and many companies have tried to accelerate osseointegration by changing the shape of the screw, but the differences are minor.

Ours is the first innovation that lets the doctor actively influence the healing process. The MED creates stimulation from microelectronics inside the healing abutment and can help people whose jawbone was not considered good enough to take an implant.

But by using electromagnetic transmitters in the end of the screw, the new implant procedure can speed up the integration process by between 40 and 70 per cent, according to its originators (file photo)

Dental surgeons have developed a revolutionary implant procedure using an electrical transmitter to speed up the waiting time before a new tooth can be fitted (file photo)

In addition to shortening the integration process and improving the quality of the bone by up to 40 per cent, MED may prove helpful in preventing or treating peri-implantitis, an infection that can occur around the dental implant after the procedure, as electromagnetic stimulation helps to kill bacteria.

The dental-implant market is said to be worth about 2 billion a year in the US and Europe as patients search for the perfect look or to have missing teeth replaced.

Implants typically cost from 2,000 to 4,000 each and are available only privately, although the NHS may provide them for mouth-cancer patients or those who have damaged their jaw in an accident.

The cost of using a transmitter on the titanium implant will push up the price of treatment to the patient by about 50 per tooth.

Dr Andrew Dawood, a dentist and dental-implant specialist in Harley Street, said: This is fascinating technology.
Is Britains new prime minister, Theresa May, Margaret Thatcher reincarnated? There are similarities.

May is certainly as tough as the Iron Lady. As home secretary for longer than any of her predecessors, she has strongly opposed uncontrolled immigration. The Home Office introduced visa restrictions that require non-European Union immigrants living in Britain for fewer than 10 years to minimally earn the equivalent of about $47,000 USD, so as not to be a drain on social welfare programs. With Britains planned exit from the EU, that policy could be broadened to include all immigrants.

In a speech to her Conservative Party last year and in more recent remarks, May has struck a chord with British citizens who feel they are losing their country and its unique characteristics to foreigners who refuse to assimilate (sound familiar?). When immigration is too high, when the pace of change is too fast, its impossible to build a cohesive society, she told fellow party members.

This has driven the left nuts. They have accused her of everything, except being a lady. It seems the last thing the British and American left want is a cohesive society because such a society would not allow them to pit groups against each other, dividing and conquering at the ballot box.

Heres something else that should appeal to average British citizens, at least the older ones, who are mostly more reserved than Americans and younger Brits. Says May, Im not a showy politician. I dont tour the television studios. I dont gossip over lunch. I dont drink in Parliaments bars. I dont wear my heart on my sleeve. I just get on with the job in front of me.

That two women competed to replace David Cameron ought to have delighted feminists. Not so. Sophie Walker, who heads the Womens Equality Party, said of Mays rise to Number 10 Downing Street: While its symbolically important to have women represented at the top of politics ... who look like you ... its as important that the person is creating policies in a way that answers your experiences.

Say what? So it isnt really about electing more women to political office; its about electing more liberals, some of whom can be women.

History doesnt always repeat, but the political stars seem to be aligning over London and Washington for a possible sequel to what happened with Thatchers election win in 1979. Ronald Reagans victory followed a year later.

While May is ideologically closer to Thatcher than Trump is to Reagan, Trump has picked up on a theme that worked for both Reagan and Nixon. Following the Dallas ambush and the protests that have exploded in major cities, Trump has styled himself as the law-and-order candidate. That this is occurring in an election year should be no surprise, but just as riots in the streets contributed to Republican victories in 1968, the political fallout this year might repeat.

In a recent speech in Virginia Beach, Va., Trump said: We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country ... I am the law and order candidate. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is weak, ineffective, pandering, and as proven by her recent email scandal, which was an embarrassment, not only to her, but to the entire nation as a whole, shes either a liar or grossly incompetent. One or the other ... its probably both.

Britain and the U.S. are experiencing social and political turmoil. Both nations are perceived by many to have weak leaders. Trump and May display strength and in troubled times British and American voters have demonstrated that they prefer strength to weakness.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.
Hospitals are risking patients lives by serving them sandwiches contaminated with a lethal bug, say experts in a shocking report.

The danger comes in pre-packed sandwiches, a popular menu option with many patients  and one that NHS managers like because they are cheap and easy to serve.

But food safety advisers are warning that they can contain the deadly bug listeria, which can trigger meningitis. It also kills up to 30 per cent of those it infects.

Food safety company STS believes patients may be dying from eating infected sandwiches

The report says that pre-packed sandwiches have been responsible for almost all hospital outbreaks of listeria since 2003.

The bug kills around 50 people a year in England, according to official figures, with most deaths thought to be due to food being prepared and stored incorrectly.

Food safety company STS, which advises hospitals and care homes, believes patients may also be dying from eating infected sandwiches at these institutions.

Fiona Sinclair, director of food safety at STS, said: Hospitals and care homes feed the most vulnerable people in society. The last thing these people need is to get something else on top of their illness.

Pre-packed sandwiches often contain protein-rich fillings such as meat, pate, cheese, prawns and egg, on which listeria can thrive. Days can elapse between preparation and consumption, giving listeria time to multiply, and experts say too few people understand that sandwiches must be kept very cold  below 5C  to stop the bug growing.

The report, written by Ms Sinclair and colleagues, says: Research into previous [listeria] outbreaks in hospitals found that almost all were linked to consumption of pre-packed sandwiches.

These cases were thought to have been caused by low-level contamination during manufacture in the factory, followed by a breakdown in the control of the cold chain in the hospitals. During recent inspections, Ms Sinclair found sandwiches were being kept in fridges that were not cold enough, staff were serving packs past their use-by date, and sandwiches were being left on trolleys for lengthy periods before being handed to patients.

The firms report, commissioned by the Food Standards Agency, has prompted the FSA to revise its guidance to hospitals and care homes on minimising the risk of listeria.

The listeria bug, which food safety experts warn can be found in pre-packed sandwiches

Measures include cutting maximum fridge temperatures from 8C to 5C.

Welcoming the new rules, STS said: The thought that a loved one should lose their life from eating a sandwich in hospital is ridiculous.

Ms Sinclair said the research, undertaken with Surrey University, identified nine hospital listeria outbreaks across the UK since 2003. Each case affected between two and seven patients. Ms Sinclair said it was unclear from the data they had seen if anyone died from listeria infection during these outbreaks.

The fact that the bug kills up to 30 per cent of people in vulnerable groups  such as pregnant women and the elderly  suggests that some did.

Hugh Pennington, emeritus professor of bacteriology at Aberdeen University, said: If somebody is at deaths door, they could be finished off by a sandwich.

Listeria can be lethal  its as simple as that. Its one of the nastiest food bugs there is.
At The Mail on Sunday we take great pride in the quality of our journalism.

All our journalists are required to observe the Editors' Code of Practice and The Mail on Sunday is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the regulatory body for the Press set up in response to the Leveson Inquiry.

We aim to correct any errors as promptly as possible.

An article on May 29 suggested Anthony Bailey had made an amendment to a letter from the Prime Minister before it was read out at a banquet Mr Bailey was hosting for the President of Hungary. We would like to make clear Mr Bailey made no such amendment and are happy to set the record straight.

If you wish to report an inaccuracy, please email corrections@mailonsunday.co.uk.

To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please go to www.mailonsunday.co.uk/readerseditor where you will find an easy-touse complaints form.


Michael Goves political career has endured some memorable setbacks but he may not survive this.

Losing out in the Tory leadership race is one thing but being used as a villainous template in a Young Adult (YA) thriller surely takes the biscuit.

In a plush hotel just a mid-morning croissants throw from Westminster, Simon Mayo, beloved BBC broadcaster turned edgy teen novelist, confesses that he inadvertently based the baddie in his new book Blame on the bespectacled Brexiteer.

Mayo already has three books under his belt, the best-selling childrens Itch trilogy, but Blame, his first YA novel, takes it up a level

My son Ben pointed this out to me, says Mayo, 57, in the familiar, best-mate tone that speaks to six million listeners each weekday evening on his Radio 2 Drivetime show. When you go through all the characteristics, he is basically Gove. Mayo admits that the character, a sinister prison reformer named Assessor Grey, uncannily resembles Gove, too.

Even down to the hair and the glasses, the DJ frowns, concerned about the detail. Although the Assessor has an Edinburgh accent, so thats not quite right, because I think Goves parents came from Aberdeen.

Then there is the fact that he is a passionate prison reformer and a real zealot  that dangerous kind of zeal.

Mayo already has three books under his belt, the best-selling childrens Itch trilogy, but Blame, his first YA novel, takes it up a level.

Set in a dystopian near future, the bulk of the frequently gruesome action takes place in the family prison HMP London, where inmates are interned for heritage crimes  the misdemeanours of their parents and grandparents. Tightly written with a screenplay-like urgency, Blame takes on flavours of The Hunger Games and Divergent series but retains its own dark, London-gone-wrong identity.

At the storys heart are Ant, our flawed teenage heroine, and her brother Mattie. They are half-Haitian, full-blooded street kids with a past theyre aching to escape or avenge.

Tensions build, tempers fray and blades flash but none of this thunderous delinquency tallies with the man sitting before me.

A slight figure with a kind face, Mayo seems an unlikely chronicler of urban UK decay. Who could have guessed that the softly spoken disc jockey harboured a grim fascination for grisly acts of ultra-violence?

You do go into a different place, he chuckles. I knew that if I was going to write a prison book, it had to be a tough book.

Im going to mention Hunger Games here, he allows. You cant get tougher than kids killing kids, but the genius of that book is that you felt it still had its moral compass.

Like Hunger Games, Blame stays on the right side of the censor. While Mayos imagination can conjure shocking violence, he eschews sex, drugs and bad language in the book

Like Hunger Games, Blame stays on the right side of the censor. While Mayos imagination can conjure shocking violence, he eschews sex, drugs and bad language in the book.

The writer Anthony Horowitz has always said the English language is rich enough that there is usually an alternative, Mayo says. No one gets to the end of Hunger Games and goes, You know the one thing that was missing is any cursing? And theres actually no swearing in Hunger Games at all, but its violent, and its visceral.

Mayo adds that it was a bonus having his children Ben, 24, Natasha, 22, and Joe, 16, on hand during the three years it took to write Blame, as they helped keep the language real for teenagers. Theyre particularly good on dialogue, he enthuses.

Mayo speaks with equal affection about the latest teenager in his life, Blames core character, Ant.

Shes a tough cookie, he smiles admiringly, and she looks scary  shes emotionally damaged but shes loyal, fiercely determined and very brave.

I ask how Mayo would feel about her were he still a teenage boy. Oh, Id have fallen in love with her, he laughs. Absolutely. Shed be the bad girl from down the road.

The son of a headmaster and a French teacher, Mayo was moved about a lot as a child and remembers being constantly on the outside of everything.

He found a home in radio, discovering that the seemingly extrovert medium acted as a magnet for misfits and shy people.

Radio is full of quiet people, he says. Because communication on the radio is not the same as standing up in front of people and talking  its one to one.

Never one for boozy craziness, naughty pharmaceuticals or Radio 1 Roadshow shenanigans, Mayo, a practising Christian, will in October celebrate the 30th anniversary of his marriage to Hilary, whom he met at Radio Nottingham.

His strong work ethic fuelled the writing of Blame. Hed work for three hours each morning, using Stephen Kings how-to guide On Writing as a manual.

King talks about doing 1,000 words a day, five days a week or six days a week, giving yourself a day off, and always writing in one particular place, Mayo explains.

He also said, I have an open mind and a closed door. So no distractions.

Mayo laboured on Blame at his 2 million home in Islington, north London, a short walk from both Holloway and Pentonville prisons, which he would later amalgamate for his storys principal backdrop, and where heritage crime  an idea that came to him in a dream  was hatched.

The key with heritage crime was to make it believable, he says. I wanted to construct it so that some shoddy politician could go on Question Time and defend it, and get a round of applause.

Douglas Alexander, the former Shadow Foreign Secretary, is a friend of ours. So I said, OK, this is the idea, Douglas. I need the language of a politician to defend it.

He was great. Then he put me in touch with Charlie Falconer, Lord Falconer, who was Lord Chancellor under Blair and is probably very busy thinking about blame at the moment.

Charlies also an expert in American law. He said, In some US states, if your grandparents ran an asbestos factory, which is now long gone, and so are your grandparents, and my family grew up near that asbestos factory, and my parents and grandparents health was badly affected, I can sue your estate, because my family suffered as a result of your family. You have done nothing wrong, I have not suffered, but my family have suffered, and so I can sue you.

Then he said, Simon, you have to realise that many people would say slavery is a heritage crime, and that there are many banks and institutions who did very well, and they continue to do well, and their profit was built on the slave trade.

So the idea of heritage crime is not that far away.

Sensing that this may be getting too serious, Mayo acknowledges that some of Blames lesser characters have familiar-sounding names. Like Tony Pellow.

Im getting my own back on Marti for not turning up for an interview once about 20 years ago, Mayo smirks.

But before he can elaborate, new author insecurity takes hold.

What if everybody says, I got up to the first chapter and that was it? he worries.

Mayo needlessly imagines the jurys worst-case-scenario reaction to the quite brilliant Blame, his voice descending to a theatrical radio whisper. I hated it from start to finish, he shudders. e

Simon Mayos Blame is out now, priced at 7.99

Simon Mayo's three essential summer reads

Quiet - Susan Cain

A book about introverts that says: If youve got an introverted child, maybe theyre quite happy being there, accept them for what they are.

Sapiens  Yuval Noah Harari

A fantastic book about how homo sapiens came to conquer the world. Its is a brief history of human civilisation.

The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair  Joel Dicker
Francis Bacon: Invisible Rooms

Tate Liverpool

Rating:

Throughout his career, Francis Bacon vehemently denied ever doing preparatory work for his paintings. I do not make sketches nor drawings, he said. I just proceed. But in Invisible Rooms, Tate Liverpools stunning exhibition of the painters work, there is an extensive section of sketches, many discovered strewn on the floors and work surfaces of his South Kensington studio after his death in 1992.

The sketches here  of boxers, wrestlers and crouching, caged figures  sit alongside lists of ideas. In almost illegible writing, inside the covers of books, he scrawled hasty reminders to himself of what he might want to paint: portrait of Peter as opposite, figure going through door as in Eichmann photo, butcher shop hanging meat. It could almost be a shopping list, yet these ingredients are the recipe for some of the greatest 20th-century British figurative paintings we know.

Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion, 1944

A particular favourite source material appears to be studies of the human figure in motion from the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Images of his Soho circle in the Sixties, taken by photographer John Deakin, are also on display, alongside sketches Bacon did based on them.

In the case of Bacons fellow artist and friend Isabel Rawsthorne, Bacon took a photograph of her and turned it into a disturbing full-size painting, with Rawsthorne standing caged in a circular arena, face glowering and distorted. As an artwork and composition, this piece is captivating; as a portrait, the distortion takes us beyond physical appearances to a psychological interpretation.

This exhibition shows just how much Bacon manipulated his source material, condensing the content, intensifying the figures and creating for them a new  and unsettling  stage or arena. And it is the structures that Bacon created on the canvas that is this shows common theme. These framing devices are often in the form of cages and curtains, and they draw attention to the painted figure and our encounter with it.

Portrait Of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing In A Street In Soho, 1967.

Asked by the critic and curator David Sylvester about this technique of creating frames within frames, Bacon explained that he simply wanted to concentrate the image down. Much has been made, however, of the similarity between the cage in Study For A Portrait from 1949 and photographs from the Nuremberg trials, showing Nazi war criminals boxed behind glass.

Bacon was undeniably influenced by these events, and much of his work speaks of the violence and cruelty of mankind. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility, he said.

From the Man In Blue series of 1954, thought to portray Bacons lover, Peter Lacy

He also believed that humans were simply animals, subject to carnal desires, urges and fears, and his caging might therefore be seen as a direct reference to this bestial nature. Certainly it is captured in his gaping mouths, from which silent screams rage, and his distorted, grotesque bodies, sometimes carcasses, that writhe within these confines.

Invisible Rooms contains many well-known Bacon works. There are his terrifying paintings based on Velazquezs Portrait Of Pope Innocent X, in which the subject sits, as if strapped into an electric chair, mouth wide open, so that his scream is almost audible. And his works relating to the Crucifixion, including Tates own ghoulish triptych, Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion, from 1944, with its maimed, mutilated and bandaged figures, drained of colour and set against a bloody red background, are also included here.

Photograph of Bacon (c 1962)

There are pieces, too, from his Man In Blue series from 1954, thought to portray Bacons lover, Peter Lacy, in which a ghostly white presence drowns in a dark blue lake, imprisoned within bars, capturing the disembodiment, isolation and hopelessness of homosexuals in an era when same-sex relations were still illegal.

For fans of Bacon, this is a worthy exposition. While the premise of framing techniques might seem to be just a spurious excuse to bring together another mini-retrospective of an over-exposed painter, this exhibition does shed some light on the techniques of this nevertheless most mysterious and confounding of artists.
Staying with friends in the Pyrenees recently, I was astonished by the visible improvement to my skin brought about by the pure mountain air.

The contrast clearly demonstrated the effect pollution has on our largest organ  a long-standing concern for natural skincare expert Annee de Mamiel.

Now, Annee, who is qualified in Chinese medicine and aromatherapy, is launching her new Atmospheriques collection to combat the damage caused by environmental pollutants, particularly in urban areas and offices.

Recent research published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology demonstrates the link between traffic-related air pollution and skin ageing  in particular, increased pigmentation and dark spots

Even on the way to work, skin is attacked by dirt, dust and diesel particles, which can clog the pores and leave a film of impurities, says Annee.

This interferes with the skins ability to regulate moisture levels.

When this debris interacts with UV rays it can heighten skin damage. Recent research published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology demonstrates the link between traffic-related air pollution and skin ageing  in particular, increased pigmentation and dark spots.

POTENT ANTIOXIDANTS

Annee de Mamiels Atmospheriques Intense Nurture Antioxidant Elixir (80, victoriahealth.com and demamiel.com) contains superoxide dismutase, ferulic acid and the mineral malachite  all potent antioxidants. Also, marine samphire helps cell renewal, plus hyaluronic acid and ceramides increase hydration. Costly, but you need only two or three drops daily so it lasts a long time. Advertisement

The impetus behind creating Atmospheriques came from Annees belief  based on her experience and extensive research  that using skin products containing synthetic chemicals and mineral oils can make the problem worse.

They can impair the skins ability to breathe and repair itself. The result is that skin gets congested, inflamed and sensitive, which can lead to common woes such as dullness, dryness, redness and lines  as well as adult acne, says Annee.

The assault on your skin does not stop inside the office.

Damaging particles can circulate through air conditioning and heat systems, says Annee. Also, screens of any size and mobile phones emit high energy visible light [or blue light], which may penetrate deeper levels of the skin and cause damage.

So, apart from moving to the mountains, what can you do to protect your skin? Here are Annees suggestions:

 Apply an antioxidant-rich serum each morning  look for one containing superoxide dismutase or oryzanol, which is rich in ferulic acid.

 Eat fresh or frozen red and purple berries  such as blueberries and goji berries  daily. Also consume stone fruits, nuts and seeds.

 Apply an SPF 30 on face and hands before going out. Reapply at lunchtime in the summer. If you are wearing foundation, top up with a mineral powder sunscreen.

 Buy a hands-free earpiece for your mobile phone to avoid holding the screen directly against your face.

 Turn down screen brightness to reduce the blue light.

If you have acne or blemished skin, always wash your hands before applying make-up with your fingers, says London-based aesthetic skin therapist Jasmina Vico. If youre on a train or bus, use a hand sanitiser first (eg, Dr Bronners Lavender Organic Hand Sanitizer, 2.99, drbronner.co.uk) and always ensure that cosmetic sponges or brushes are clean.

It is not just your skin that suffers from the assault of polluting particles in offices. Friends say noses get stuffy, eyes feel sore, allergies increase and infections abound.

One helpful option is to invest in a portable air purifying system. Annee de Mamiel recommends two brands which are also suitable for home use.

Philips 3000 Series Air Purifier Anti-Allergen With NanoProtect Filter (390, philips.co.uk) claims to capture 99 per cent of bacteria in one hour and removes 99 per cent of airborne particles, eg, dust, pet hair and pollen.

The Dyson Pure Cool Link (from 349.99 for the desk size, dyson.co.uk) performs similarly, claiming to remove 99.95 per cent of allergens and pollutants. It also has a fan and can be remotely controlled from your Dyson Link app.
That awkward handshake that summed up uncomfortable relationship between PM Modi and CM Kejriwal

An awkward handshake on Saturday summed up the uncomfortable relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

In videos from the Inter-State Council meeting held in New Delhi that went viral, the PM is seen spending only a fraction of a second holding the AAP chiefs hand even as he looked relaxed in the presence of other chief ministers, including those from non-BJP states.

Kejriwal has been a bitter critic of the Prime Minister, often blaming him for all the ills plaguing the Delhi government.

From questioning his educational qualifications to sending vitriolic tweets, the CM has not missed an opportunity to target Modi.

The 11th meeting of the Inter- State Council- that looks at disputes between states and between the states and Centre - saw the presence of many formidable opponents of the BJP such as Nitish Kumar of Bihar and Mamata Banerjee from West Bengal.

None of them allowed the friction to come in the way during the informal greetings at the all- important event that came against the backdrop of the Arunachal Pradesh controversy, with the BJP receiving a setback in the Supreme Court which reinstated the states ousted Congress government.

Even Congress chief minister Harish Rawat, whose government in Uttarakhand was nearly toppled by the BJP, was seen greeting the Prime Minister with warmth.

In his inaugural address at the conference, the Prime Minister even singled out Congress-ruled Karnataka for reducing the consumption of kerosene and getting 75 per cent of the savings from the Centre.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with others at the eleventh Inter-State Council Meeting in New Delhi

The government of Karnataka, while moving swiftly on this initiative, has sent its proposal to the Petroleum Ministry. This has been accepted and the grant has been disbursed to the state government, he said.

Modi also said that the states share in central taxes has gone up from 32 to 42 per cent, which meant availability of greater resources to the state.

In the videos of the event that went viral Prime Minister Modi is seen giving only a flash of a seconds attention to Delhi CM Arvind Kejrwial.

I am happy to share that the total amount received by states from the Centre during 2015-16 is 21 per cent higher than the amount received in 2014-15. Similarly, panchayats and urban local bodies will receive 2.87 lakh crore rupees during the 14th finance commission, which is substantially higher than last time, he said.

The Prime Minister also shared with the chief ministers that 102 crore Aadhaar cards have been distributed in the country of 128 crore people.

Among adults, 96 per cent of the people now have Aadhaar cards.

In his concluding remarks too, the Prime Minister said that the near total acceptance of Aadhaar as a tool to promote good governance and transparency will result in savings to the exchequer.

He also discussed security issues and told the chief ministers that happenings across the world cannot be ignored, in light of the deadly terrorist attack in the French city of Nice.

He stressed on the importance of a good CCTV network and maintaining a visible presence of police forces.

Nitish Kumar pitches for abolishing Governors post

By Mail Today Bureau

After the role of Governor in dismissing Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh government came in for criticism from the Supreme Court, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Saturday made a pitch for abolishing the post.

Nitish made the remark at the meeting of the Inter-State Council chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday.

The Supreme Court had come down heavily on the role played by the Governor in Arunachal Pradesh in toppling the Congress government early this year.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made a pitch for abolishing the post of Governor

In the landmark judgment the court had restored the government.

Several opposition leaders have often complained that the Governors were meddling in the affairs of state governments though they agreed that it will be difficult to do away with the constitutional authority.

The Bihar chief minister said that the CM of a state should have a role in the appointment and removal of the Governor.

Existing federal democratic structure does not warrant continuance of the gubernatorial post. However, if it is not possible to do away with it, then our opinion is that provisions relating to the appointment of Governor must be clearly defined and made transparent, he said, setting off a debate on the issue.

He said that the chief minister of a state should also be consulted and the criteria laid down by Sarkaria Commission should be followed in the Governor's appointment.

The propensity to change the Governor, whenever a new Government is formed must be curbed by making constitutional provisions, he said.

An official statement from Bihar government said that the state's Chief Minister must be formally consulted before removal of incumbent Governor and, if required, Article 155 of the Constitution may be amended to provide for such consultation, he added, according to an official statement.

The chief minister also referred to the Punchhi commission report on the Centre-state relations which had recommended that for the removal of the chief minister, the governor must give the leader of the house a chance to prove majority on the floor of the house.
After receiving a barrage of bizarre complaints, the National Commission for Women (NCW)s NRI cell has decided to go niche and will now only focus on marital disputes and trans-national marriages.

The apex womens rights body has come up with a list of complaints not ordinarily entertainable under the NCW (Procedure) Regulations, 2016 for the NRI Cell.

The cell of late has been receiving several weird complaints from women living abroad. We have noticed that women associate a sexual harassment angle to the complaint and move to the NRI cell. Some women complained about property issues while others said they were being harassed by their neighbours at home and colleagues at work, said Rekha Sharma, member, NCW.

the National Commission for Womens NRI cell has decided to go niche and will now only focus on marital disputes and trans-national marriages.

It becomes very difficult for us to deal with such complaints as the focus on martial disputes, and women abandoned by their husbands gets diverted in entertaining such complaints.

The NRI Cell was formally started in NCW in 2009, to deal with complaints received from India and abroad resulting from cross country marriages involving any deprivation of womens rights or any issue causing grave injustice to women.

Sharma said the panel has written to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs to help women in distress in other countries as the NCW finds progress difficult in such cases since it has to go through the embassies.

For instance, the commission is handling the case of a woman from Mohali, who was married to a man living in the US and following a fight with her he allegedly forcibly took their baby and left her in India.

NCWs list of complaints not ordinarily entertainable comprises of grievances that are illegible or vague, anonymous or pseudonymous, matters not related to marital disputes, involving NRI/PIO couples, matters not related to cross-country marriage issues, etc. It also does not usually focus on civil disputes between the parties such as contractual rights obligations, division of property, service matters, labour or industrial disputes, civic issues and matters which that are subjudice."

The NRI Cell was formally started in NCW in 2009, to deal with complaints received from India and abroad resulting from cross country marriages involving any deprivation of womens rights or any issue causing grave injustice to women.

Since its 2009 inception, 1691 complaints have been registered till March 31, 2014, in the commission.

During the year 2013-14, 375 cases have been registered in the NRI cell of the commission.
Hardline Hurriyat Conference Chairman Syed Ali Geelani has written to China and Iran for the first time, seeking their support for the resolution of the Kashmir issue.

Geelani said that if the world community including China and Iran persuades India to take Confidence Building Measures (CBMs), it would create an atmosphere conducive to peace and resolution.

The suggested measures include accepting the disputed nature of Jammu and Kashmir and peoples Right to Self Determination, repealing laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and releasing political prisoners.

Indian policemen detain senior separatist leader Syed Ali Geelani (centre) in Srinagar on July 13

He said that if these steps are taken with urgency and responsibility they could help restore calm, "thereby dispersing the perpetual clouds of war and conflict that threatens global peace.

Geelani has also written to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and heads of the UNSC Permanent Members - the US, UK, China, France and Russia.

He writes that the government of India should be asked to announce a rapid demilitarisation process in J&K's population centres, and to repeal laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Public Safety Act.

Geelani says these laws facilitate the arbitrary and irresponsible behaviour of an already hostile army, and that provides them with the legal immunity against heinous crimes like extra-judicial killings, rape, torture and arson committed against a defenceless local population.

Clashes between protesters and the security forces have left at least 39 people dead and over 3,100 injured in Kashmir since July 9

He said UN Special Rapporteurs and all international human rights and humanitarian organisations should be allowed to work in the Valley so that the iron curtain of the occupation is lifted.

The separatist also called for space for all the parties, particularly those advocating the Right to Self determination.
There has been a consistent increase in the number of intravenous drug users testing positive for HIV over the last five years in Delhi.

The trend comes after volunteers from several NGOs running awareness programmes stopped working with the government as their workers could not be paid.

Our eight month-long pending salaries have been paid to us last week. For the last eight months, we did not have any funds to run the programme or carry out any awareness exercise among the groups. There was no peer-led intervention, said Francis Joseph, chairman of Delhi Drug Users, an NGO.

Almost 20 per cent of those diagnosed with HIV are intravenous drug users, figures show. (Picture for representation only.)

While transgender people, men having sex with men (MSM), female sex workers, and truck drivers are also included in the high-risk category, injecting drug users (IDU) comprise 20 per cent of the affected people.

In 2010-2011, as many as 18.27 per cent of injecting drug users (IDUs) tested positive for HIV, while in 2014- 2015, the figure rose to 21.8 per cent.

Sexual route still remains the most common way among the general population for getting HIV. But among high risk group, IDU have the highest prevalence of HIV infection. Almost 20 per cent of the affected people falls under this category, said Dr Praveen Kumar, additional project director, Delhi State AIDS control society (DSACS).

The DSACS works with several NGOs running intervention programmes.
India is welcoming back a bevy of priceless artefacts, but the central government is in a quandary over where to put these long-lost national treasures amid massive security concerns.

A series of ministerial meetings has failed to find an answer, with scores of antiques - either stolen or illegally exported from the country - due to be returned.

India is one of the principal targets for smugglers, who sell stolen artefacts to art dealers and museums abroad.

The process of sending these artefacts back to India kicked off last month, when US Attorney General Loretta E Lynch formally announced their return

Now the problem is if we get these antique idols back to India, where will we keep them? We cant dump them randomly at museums as many of them have high religious value. And on the other hand, if we reinstall them at the temples or other places where they used to be, who will take care of the security of these items? sources at the Ministry of Culture told Mail Today.

An official said that if these artefacts are put back at their original locations, attempts would be made to steal them again.

A proper security mechanism needs to be in place, such as CCTV cameras around the premises and security personnel, to thwart such efforts.

The US government returned to India over 200 stolen cultural artefacts, some dating back 2,000 years, when PM Modi visited the country in June this year.

The haul is worth nearly $100 million.

The PM called the gesture a great binding force in bilateral relationships which helps to restore Indias cultural inheritance.

Expressing his gratitude to US President Barack Obama for returning these treasures, Modi said that in the last two years various countries had endeavoured to return Indias stolen cultural heritage.

Sources say that some Indian cultural wealth illegally exported out of the country in the past few years has recently surfaced in Germany, and efforts are being made to get the pieces back.

According to sources at the Ministry of Culture, a majority of the antique cultural objects  such as a bronze Ganesh idol and a likeness of Bahubali  were seized during Operation Hidden Idol. This began in 2007 after investigators from the US Department of Homeland Security received a tip about a shipment of seven crates destined for that country.

The process of sending these artefacts back to India kicked off last month after a ceremony of Repatriation of Cultural Property, where US Attorney General Loretta E Lynch formally announced the beginning of the process.
     :     ; -  CM      ?;  -  
Strikes, bad weather and security alerts can all disrupt your travel plans but if something goes wrong with your journey you can claim back compensation.

Whether it's on a train, plane or boat, follow The Mail on Sundays in-depth guide to find out how much you're entitled to and how to claim your money back.

Off the rails: Commuters on Southern trains protest at Victoria last week

Trains

Thousands of rail passengers travelling on Southern trains continue to face serious disruption after management stripped back the timetable following strike action at the company.

Workers have walked out over their employers plans to switch to driver-only trains and this  along with high staff sickness absence  has led to widespread train cancellations.

Last week, hundreds of passengers gathered at Victoria Station in London to protest against the timetable changes while London Major Sadiq Khan branded the train operator an embarrassment to our city.

Painful as it is to suffer such delays, rail passengers hit by disruptions have some reason to cheer  so long as they can get to grips with claiming compensation.

More than 25 million a year is handed out to passengers whose trains are delayed, according to figures from the Department for Transport.

I GOT 400 - FIVE YEARS AFTER OUR FLIGHT WAS HELD UP Emma Joyce, 36, was finally awarded around 400 compensation after her family faced a flight delay of more than 11 hours on their return from Seville, Spain in June 2011. The flight with Ryanair was delayed owing to a technical fault. Emma says: It was a nightmare. I was travelling with my husband and a tired nine-month-old baby, and we were given only a measly food voucher worth a few euros. We were due to fly in the morning, but left late at night. We sat in a crowded airport all day, only getting home just before midnight. Emma, a marketing consultant from Wolverhampton, sent several letters to Ryanair by recorded delivery demanding compensation, but got nowhere. She says: I was told I couldnt claim, and didnt even get an apology. I was furious, but several years later I found out I could get help from lawyers to get the money I was owed. She approached solicitor Bott & Co in March this year. She says: It dealt with the claim on my behalf, and soon I got a cheque in the post. I felt strongly that Ryanair was hoping Id go away  but I wasnt going to let them get away with treating us like they did.

Patience: Emma Joyce, with son Finlay, five, would not give up

Bank holidays account for a hefty chunk of payouts, but only 20 per cent of passengers claim what they are entitled to for delays and cancellations.

Consumer group Which? has blasted rail companies for failing to make clear to passengers their compensation rights.

Alex Neill, policy director at the organisation, says: Train companies need to do more to ensure people are aware of their entitlement and how they can claim.

Rules vary widely among train companies, but typically, if you arrive at your destination station more than 30 minutes late  an hour for Eurostar bookings  you can make a claim.

Like Eurostar, a few rail companies, such as Grand Central and Northern, compensate only for longer delays of 60 minutes or more. Check the companys passenger charter online for its specific rules.

For delays of between 30 minutes and an hour expect a 50 per cent refund on a single ticket, or 25 per cent on a return.

For longer delays of up to two hours you typically get a full refund on a single ticket, or 50 per cent on a return.

If you are delayed for more than two hours, expect a full refund on a return too.

For season tickets and weekly tickets, compensation is calculated as a proportion of the daily cost of the price of the ticket.

Rules vary but typically, if you arrive more than 30 minutes late  an hour for Eurostar  you can make a claim

If you have made a seat reservation and this cannot be honoured, you are entitled to a full refund of the fare and any reservation fee.

You can also claim a full refund if your train is cancelled and you do not use your ticket for a later train.

Remember that the train companys policy on delay compensation is the minimum offered. If a delay or cancellation seriously affects you, ask for more and state your reasons why.

To ensure you can get compensation quickly, keep hold of your travel ticket and make a note of the journey details and delay. Then get a delay repay form either online or at a ticket office.

About 90 per cent of train companies are signed up to this compensation scheme. Other companies have their own arrangements, detailed on their websites. In this case, you will need to write to the company concerned to seek compensation.

Delayed again? Only 20 per cent of passengers claim what they are entitled to for delays and cancellations

Delay repay forms must be completed within 28 days of the journey. You will need to submit the ticket with the form, either by post or by scanning it and sending it online. If you are seeking a refund for a cancelled train, you should be able to obtain this at the station ticket office.

If you no longer have the ticket, try using proof of purchase, such as a bank statement or receipt. Some train operators may accept this as proof of your claim, although they do not have to.

You should be able to claim either money or vouchers. The Consumer Rights Act forces retailers to pay compensation in the form a ticket was bought in. This did not originally apply to rail companies, but they will now start to be covered by these rules from October.

Many rail companies offer cash compensation if you ask. Or you might be able to exchange vouchers for cash.

Some make it simpler to claim than others. Virgin Trains West Coast passengers receive money directly on to their cards within three days if their journey is delayed by at least 30 minutes.

This applies only to passengers who buy tickets in advance through the website or app. Great Western has different compensation schemes depending on the route. Passengers on its London to Thames Valley service receive compensation for delays of 30 minutes or more. On other routes payouts are only given for delays of 60 minutes or more.

Take an unresolved dispute to the watchdog. This will either be Transport Focus (transportfocus.org.uk) for routes outside London, or London TravelWatch (londontravelwatch.org.uk) for services in the capital.

Transport Focus says: We ask that people check what the operators own response times to complaints are and then wait for that amount of time before chasing and then escalating to us.

On the right track: Rebecca Field says she still tries to claim even if the delay is less than 30 minutes

Rebecca Field, from Sheffield, has claimed hundreds of pounds in compensation for delayed trains over the past year. She says: I wish Id known about the scheme before  but I wasnt aware it was possible to get money back.

The 24-year-old project assistant in the post industry says she still tries to claim even if the delay is less than 30 minutes. Rebecca says: It takes two trains to get to my parents from where I live and missing a connection means I have up to an hours wait on a platform in the cold  so Ill still put in a claim regardless.

Rebecca, who also runs cleaning business Mopology, typically takes a TransPennine followed by a Northern Rail service to get to her parents home near Chester. She says: Im not always successful, but I quite often get a money off voucher for my next journey.

She adds: Some of the rail company websites are an absolute maze. But tweeting the company usually gets them to help. Sometimes I only get a partial refund, but its my opinion that I should get a full refund  particularly when it causes inconvenience.

Ive had delays that have made me late for work, interviews, gigs and appointments  everything, really  and when a replacement train does come along its often so jammed you have to sit on the floor for hours. It should be made more obvious how you go about claiming the compensation due.

Claims can be made for flight delays of at least three hours and you have six years to demand redress

Planes

Airline passengers whose flight is heavily delayed or cancelled have the right to claim compensation under European law.

You are able to claim compensation of up to 600 per passenger (500) under EU law, depending on the flight distance and length. Claims can be made for delays of at least three hours and you have six years to demand redress.

Airlines can only refuse to pay out if the delay was for reasons out of their control, classed as extraordinary circumstances. For example, in the case of strikes or bad weather you cannot make a claim. But they cannot argue that a technical fault falls under extraordinary circumstances.

You can claim up to a maximum of 250, or about 212, for a three-hour delay on flights up to 1,500km departing from an EU airport. This covers, for example, a trip from London to Majorca. The sum rises to a maximum of 600, or about 500, for a delay of more than four hours on flights over 3,500km.

THE KEY STEPS TO MAKE YOUR CLAIM SUCCEED Keep hold of your tickets and make a note of the journey details and the length of the delay. You must be delayed by at least 30 minutes to your destination, or 60 minutes under some train companies rules.

Check the train operators website to find out how much you can get back under its policy.

Request a claim form from the station, the train operators website or over the phone.

Post your tickets with the form or scan them if applying online.

Arrange a refund through the website you bought a ticket from, such as redspottedhanky or thetrainline.

Apply within the time limit specified, typically 28 days  but it might be less. You will need to allow a further 28 days for the processing of the claim.

Complain if your claim is rejected but you think you are entitled to compensation. There is a template letter at resolver.co.uk.

Escalate your complaint if you are still rejected by going to Transport Focus or London TravelWatch.

Whether your ticket cost 100 or 4,000, the compensation remains the same. So it is possible you could claim more or less than the cost of the flight itself.

If you are stranded at the airport, you are entitled to subsistence costs on delays  typically from two hours. You should be provided with food, drink and accommodation if you fall victim to an overnight delay.

Compensation for flight delays falls under a piece of European law called EC Regulation 261/2004.

Whether this consumer law changes post-Brexit depends on negotiations over the coming years. But it should still apply to flights departing from other EU airports when Britain leaves the EU. It is worth making your claim as soon as possible after the event to ensure the greatest chance of a payout.

You can claim up to a maximum of 250, or about 212, for a three-hour delay on flights up to 1,500km departing from an EU airport

In terms of claiming, you must find out what caused the delay  to check you are entitled to compensation. Write to the airlines customer services department, enclosing flight details, length of delay and any costs incurred as a result.

Regulator the Civil Aviation Authority has information on how to make a claim at caa.co.uk. Many airlines, such as British Airways, have online claim forms. For template claim letters, visit the Resolver website.

Compensation payments must be made by cheque or bank transfer. You do not have to accept vouchers for future travel if you are offered them. Be warned that airlines are notorious for wriggling out of paying compensation for flight delays. Typically, they claim extraordinary circumstances outside their control, meaning they do not have to pay out.

If your claim is rejected and your flight was from the UK, take your case to the Civil Aviation Authority. If your flight was from another EU country, go to that countrys enforcement body for aviation.

You could also sign up to a no-win, no-fee legal firm specialising in compensation claims such as Bott & Co. But remember the firm will take a fee plus a percentage payout if the case is won. For example, Bott & Co charges 25 per cent of the compensation sum plus VAT, and a 25 administration charge.

EU citizens can claim compensation of 25 per cent or 50 per cent of the ticket price for delays to boat trips, depending on the length and duration of their journey

Boats

Thousands of holidaymakers travel by ferry or take a cruise each year  but they can be just as much blighted by delays and cancellations as other transport.

Ferry users have similar rights to airline passengers in the event of delays or cancellations. EU citizens can claim compensation of 25 per cent or 50 per cent of the ticket price for delays, depending on the length and duration of their journey.

Passengers delayed by an hour or more on journeys of four hours or less are entitled to a refund of 25 per cent of the ticket cost. In the case of delays totalling half or more of the journey time that rises to 50 per cent.

Hitting the high seas: Ferry users have similar rights to airline passengers in the event of delays or cancellations

In the case of cancellation, or delays of more than 90 minutes, the ferry or cruise company must also provide food, drink and overnight accommodation if needed. Accommodation costs may be limited to 80 per night per passenger for a maximum of three nights.

This is under legislation laid down by the European Commission. The law around delay compensation relates to ferries or cruises departing from or arriving in an EU port.

Claims cannot be made for delays due to unforeseen circumstances, such as bad weather. Passengers need to send any claim to the company concerned within two months of the delay.

If they are entitled to compensation, this must be paid out within one month.

Compensation must be paid in cash if this is requested. Otherwise, it may be paid in vouchers for future travel.

Cruises can cost a fortune. But the good news is that if there is a delay or cancellation, payouts are likely to be reasonable, according to the Association of British Travel Agents.

It says: There are no specific rules around compensation payouts, but if a cruise is cancelled you should get a full refund.

In our experience payouts are usually generous  there was a case with a breakout of norovirus on board, and passengers got half their money back and a free cruise.
Recruitment specialist Reed Group said demand for new staff has flourished since the referendum, with 150,000 more jobs added to its website in the past three weeks compared with the same period last year.

James Reed, chairman of the 1 billion-plus turnover group, said the 8 per cent increase was a sign that it was business as usual despite fears that job vacancies could drop. The growth  in line with the first half of the year  bucks fears of a recruitment crash.

The situation is surprisingly good, Reed said. The vote hasnt affected things. People are still hiring and there are lots of opportunities.

On the move: 83 per cent of companies Reed Group surveyed said they did not plan to freeze recruitment

If a drop in confidence begins to feed through I think wed be the first to see it. We were the first to see the jobs recovery after the financial crisis because people advertise jobs that only later come through in Government statistics.

Reed added that 83 per cent of companies it surveyed said they did not plan to freeze recruitment, although two-thirds of the firms had backed Remain before the referendum.

The sectors in line to benefit most from the boost are education, with nearly 13,000 new jobs advertised; IT and telecoms, with 12,000 new vacancies; and sales, with nearly 11,000 new posts. There are also 10,000 new accountancy jobs advertised and 8,000 in engineering.

The market is strongest in London, where 15,000 new jobs are advertised. There are nearly 5,000 new vacancies in Manchester and 4,000 in Birmingham.

In a study by Reed 83 per cent of companies said they weren't planning a recruitment freeze

In contrast, technology firm CEB Global said earlier this month that the number of jobs being advertised had halved since the referendum.

But Reed said: That doesnt chime with our data at all. For a lot of firms its just business as usual.

Weve seen faster growth in previous years, but the market is still growing and there are lots of jobs out there. Weve seen consistent growth in areas like technology and engineering. And we are expecting to see more people coming to Britain on the back of the change in exchange rates so we are anticipating more jobs in tourism and hospitality.
Staff at family-owned Yorkshire Tea company Bettys & Taylors Group were able to treat themselves to a few of the firms cream teas as they were given bonuses equalling five weeks pay last year.

The 97-year-old business, which played host to the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall earlier this year, saw sales increase by 5 per cent to 163.4 million in the year to October 31, 2015 as its six tea rooms were visited by 1.3 million customers.

Boost: Sales at the group, which owns Bettys tea rooms, rose to 163 million

The company, which owns a cookery school, leading tea merchant Taylors of Harrogate and the Yorkshire Tea brand, saw pre-tax profits dip slightly from 10.8 million to 9.6 million due to an increase in raw material costs.

But shareholders  descendants of founder and Swiss confectioner Frederick Belmont  still shared a 2 million dividend, up from 1.9 million the previous year.

Finance director Paul Cogan said: This has been a year in which competitive pressures in our core markets continued to grow. We have responded to the challenge by listening to customers and developing new and innovative products.
High-tech firms supplying car makers in the automotive heartland of North-East England are optimistic about their prospects in spite of last months shock Brexit result.

The region voted strongly to quit the European Union despite being home to some of the countrys biggest car makers such as Nissan, a huge exporter to the EU.

It has been suggested that Nissan may move out of Britain if Prime Minister Theresa May fails to secure a decent trade agreement with the EU.

Motoring on: Nissans factory in Sunderland is a major exporter to the EU

But at a meeting of the North East Automotive Alliance, a group representing more than 160 members with a combined turnover of 9.5 billion, members were sanguine in response to the result of the ballot.

We had a meeting of more than two hours shortly after the referendum and Brexit took less than three minutes of our time.

'We are manufacturers. We are businessmen and weve just got to get on with it, said Stephen Irish, chief executive of Hyperdrive Innovation.

The Sunderland-based company makes lithium batteries that can operate autonomously if needed.

Founded four years ago, it has just formed a multi-million pound partnership with Nissan to produce batteries for third parties, such as other car marques, driverless vehicles, industrial vehicles and even homes.

Were a highly technical company and were growing very fast because we make something that everyone wants.

'Of course, Brexit will affect us but the UK has a reputation for innovation. We have the best engineers and the best universities, so I am optimistic, said Irish.

Dave Cann, UK general manager of French-owned car parts maker Mecaplast, echoed his confidence.

'Brexit will affect us but the UK has a reputation for innovation. We have the best engineers and the best universities, so I am optimistic', says Smith

The UK makes good cars and it will carry on making good cars. Thats what matters, so Im upbeat. Its business as usual for us and our turnover is growing, he said.

Nonetheless, businesses in the region are concerned about their long-term future, particularly if there is a period of protracted uncertainty about trade negotiations and the ability to hire employees from the EU.

Paul Butler, chief executive of the North East Automotive Alliance, said: The Government really needs to provide clarity about the future. Our members find the prospect of prolonged uncertainty quite frightening.

Meanwhile, Matt Boyle, chief executive of Sevcon, a US-listed company headquartered in Gateshead, said: We cant plan because we dont know what kind of agreement we will end up with, so we have to make decisions based on not knowing.

A survey of the alliances members, conducted last week, highlights car suppliers fears.

Three in four worry that Brexit will hit companies access to the EU market and have a negative effect on inward investment.
Britain's new Brexit Secretary believes bondholders should sit on boards to curb executive pay.

David Davis suggested that Prime Minister Theresa Mays plan to have employee representatives on boards might not be enough.

I used to believe that, and made the case for it at the Tory conference when I was 18, he said.

But his experience as a corporate troubleshooter at food ingredients group Tate & Lyle taught him that the existence of employees on continental boards meant the other members held private meetings in advance, where real decisions were made.

Critical: New Prime Minister Theresa Mays Brexit chief David Davis

Bondholders as lenders tend to pull the trigger in difficult company situations, Davis said, referring to the fact that they often call in debts or administrators if they think they cannot be repaid.

So their voice would carry more weight over corporate pay than that of shareholders. Before the EU referendum, Davis was writing a book about capitalism, which is due to come out later this year.

But it was unclear this weekend whether it would still be published.

In an interview about the book with The Mail on Sunday given before last months vote, he was critical of banks, saying: What society gets out of the financial system today is the same as it used to be 30 years ago, but the cost has gone up.

He said that while his heart backed former Chancellor George Osbornes National Living Wage, it would accelerate the use of robots to replace workers.

If you go to a supermarket checkout, the payback on one of those automated tills was about four years, and it becomes three years as a result of the living wage. It accelerates automation.
The falling pounds means less of us will be able to afford to go away

The future is Brexit and amid the uncertainty one sector has not only welcomed the prospect, but predicts that business will rocket as a result.

Britains leisure industry  which was already on a roll having welcomed record numbers of foreign and domestic tourists last year  is expecting to reach new heights in 2016 as the falling pound makes the UK great value for overseas visitors.

Meanwhile, British holidaymakers faced with the prospect of their pounds buying a lot less foreign spending money are more likely than ever to stay within these shores.

Hotting up: Website traffic has gone up for both the Isle of Wight and Cumbria

And terrorist atrocities such as the attack in Nice last week are making Britons even more reluctant to travel abroad.

Patricia Yates, director of tourism organisation VisitBritain, said: Tourism has the potential to benefit from the weakened pound and we know that online travel agents and tour operators have seen an increase in searches for travel to Britain during the past two weeks.

The year has got off to a cracking start, with the first quarter of 2016 breaking records for inbound visits to Britain as well as the number of Britons holidaying at home, and we expect this growth to continue.

Leisure companies are already reporting an upsurge in business since the referendum.

Andrew Shelton, managing director of travel website Cheapflights, said that in the days after the Brexit vote, searches for flights from the US to Britain doubled; searches from China jumped 61 per cent; and searches from Canada were up by 49 per cent.

Searches for flights to the UK from EU countries shot up 31 per cent in the same period, with Spain and Italy leading the push, showing increases of 84 per cent and 62 per cent respectively.

Online travel agents and tour operators have seen an increase in searches for travel to Britain during the past two weeks

Shelton said: The EU referendum result may have sparked a Brexit boom for UK inbound tourism as travellers around the world adjust to the fact that the UK has suddenly just become much better value.

For Britons looking to travel abroad, he said it was a mixed message, noting that the weak pound mixed with a widespread sense of uncertainty is giving British holidaymakers pause for thought before they book.

Simon Phillips at foreign exchange firm No 1 Currency warned: With the pound widely predicted to continue heading south in coming weeks, those going to the Continent should consider stocking up on euros now to lock into a better exchange rate.

Mark Walton, chief operating officer of Roomzzz apartment hotels operating across the north of England, said that while business had fallen off in the weeks leading up to the referendum due to a fear of the unknown, since June 23 bookings from UK holidaymakers had shot up 11 per cent year on year.

What I didnt expect is that bookings from EU countries would have gone up 17 per cent, he added.

People from the Continent still want to come here in spite of the vote and I think British people want to stay in the UK as a vote of confidence in the country. Its a case of people wanting to spend their money in their own country.

Dimitri Konovalovas of hotel price comparison website HotelsCombined said he had seen an increase of 13 per cent in searches for UK accommodation by British users in the three weeks since the vote.

Uncertainty around the pound does appear to have convinced many that its safer to stay at home, at least for now, he said.

Searches for flights to the UK from EU countries shot up 31 per cent in the last two weeks, with Spain and Italy leading the push, showing increases of 84 per cent and 62 per cent respectively

The hospitality and tourism industry is the UKs fourth-largest employer, providing jobs for 10 per cent of the workforce in 180,000 businesses.

The British Hospitality Association has long campaigned for a cut in VAT for the industry and its chairman, Nick Varney, said the industry should seize the moment and lock in that competitive advantage with a permanent cut to VAT for accommodation and possibly, in the future, also for restaurants.

While the weak pound has boosted Britains attractiveness as a holiday destination, tourism was already booming. Last year set a record for UK inbound tourism, with 36.1 million visits  5 per cent up on 2014  and spending up 1 per cent to 22.1 billion.

The trend has been continuing into 2016. Figures just released by VisitBritain show strong growth from markets including the US, Germany, China and Australia in January to March 2016, making it the best ever first quarter for total inbound visits.

It was also a record first quarter for spending on overnight domestic holiday trips in England. Visitors paid out 1.8 billion from January to March  up 23 per cent on the same period last year.
National Grid is preparing to break up its 13 billion pension scheme ahead of the 11 billion sale of its UK gas distribution business.

City sources said National Grid  which owns and runs much of the countrys electricity system  is in advanced talks with the Pensions Regulator about changing the structure of its current scheme, which supports 110,000 members.

The company wants to create a separate fund for the employees of its gas distribution business.

Break up: National Grid is changing its pension structure

The FTSE 100-listed company aims to restructure the National Grid pension scheme to help with the sale of the gas distribution division, which supplies 10.9 million customers across the Midlands, the North-West, Eastern England and North London.

It is understood that National Grid recently wrote to all members of the scheme to tell them about the shake-up.

Sources said each section of the scheme will be ring-fenced with separate assets and liabilities.

However, it is understood that any buyer of the gas distribution business will ultimately be responsible for the associated section of the pension.

Past reports suggest that specialist infrastructure investors from Canada, Kuwait and Germany are in talks with British investors to organise bids for the gas business.
Bosses at a fifth of the top 100 UK-based firms were born elsewhere in the EU

The boss of one of Britains biggest companies  who is a European Union national  sought advice about officially obtaining permanent residence in the UK in the run-up to last months referendum vote. Permanent residence status is a prerequisite to applying for British citizenship.

Business advisory firm KPMG said it had helped the unnamed chief executive of a FTSE 100 blue-chip business in a case which is the most high-profile example of anxiety among EU workers about their rights to stay and work in the UK following the referendum.

During the Tory leadership campaign Theresa May said EU workers here would only be given a permanent right to remain in the UK if the same rights were extended to British citizens living elsewhere in the EU.

Remain: Business advisory firm KPMG said it had helped the unnamed chief executive of a FTSE 100 blue-chip business

Punam Birly, head of immigration legal services at KPMG, said: We have seen an immediate tripling in demand for our immigration law advice services as companies have sought to understand the current immigration law framework and how that might change and importantly, what they can do now to prepare for a new immigration system.

About a fifth of the top 100 UK-based firms  including Lloyds Banking Group, Unilever, Vodafone and AstraZeneca  are run by bosses born elsewhere in the EU.

It is understood that Lloyds boss Antonio Horta-Osorio has dual UK and Portuguese citizenship.

Businesses in Britain are also concerned that Brexit could affect their future interaction with European clients.

Birly said: Companies which are used to sending their staff to Europe regularly are worried about the cost, administration burden and

impact on the natural flow of business relationships as a result of having to apply for visas.

Flexibility around business travel in the EU is crucial for the UK to maintain competitiveness with the remaining EU countries who post-Brexit may well cite this as a benefit to choosing, say, a German company over a British one.

KPMG says it's seen a tripling in demand for its immigration law advice services after the EU vote

There are thought to be three million non-British EU nationals living in Britain. Census figures from 2011 suggest that almost one in ten of those working in the City  around 30,000  fell into that category.
A new whistleblower has emerged from the rank and file of state-owned bank Lloyds to confirm widespread mis-selling of packaged bank accounts going back to 2012.

The bank mole says the tactics staff were encouraged to use were shocking and monstrous. He also says staff were bullied and harassed and threatened with being managed out of the business if they did not sell enough fee-charging accounts and other products.

These accusations of product mis-selling are the latest to dog the bank. Back in 2011, former employee Ian Taplin brought to light concerns about vulnerable customers in Maidenhead, Berkshire, being unfairly treated when buying insurance.

Mole: The whistleblower says staff were bullied and harassed if they didn't sell enough packaged accounts

His campaigning won support from local MP and then Home Secretary Theresa May and he gave evidence to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards.

Taplin has continued his campaign against the bank and says he was in contact with May, now Prime Minister, only months ago.

The latest whistleblower to come forward says customers should now review whether they were wrongly sold fee-based bank accounts. He says Lloyds is under pressure to refund those affected.

About nine million customers of all banks are thought to hold these accounts, which offer a range of benefits  such as holiday or mobile phone insurance  and can cost up to 25 a month. Packaged accounts are still sold, but have been improved.

A letter circulated to Lloyds staff in March this year, seen by The Mail on Sunday, details how customers whose complaints have been accepted by the bank will receive letters informing them of a refund and that their account will change to a free alternative.

The letter also reveals that failings in previous years have led to the creation of a dedicated packaged bank account mis-sale team.

A culture that allowed mis-selling

Referring to a long period of mis-selling that was rife in 2012, the whistleblower says: Staff and customers were treated very badly.

Staff were bullied and harrased into selling paid-for packaged bank accounts, says the whistleblower

Vulnerable people, including people who arent financially literate and those from Eastern Europe, were seen as easy prey as they didnt know about UK banking, didnt speak good English or wouldnt know how to make a complaint. Some were told packaged accounts were good for building a credit score. It was shocking and monstrous.

Staff were bullied and harassed and threatened with being managed out of the business. They were obsessed with targets and profit.

Employees were incentivised to sell packaged accounts, regardless of whether or not they were suitable. Doing so would push an adviser closer to sales targets  with packaged accounts earning them 170 points compared with 30 points for fee-free current accounts.

Those who did not reach their targets were put under a performance review.

The whistleblower adds: Bearing in mind the difference in points, when an adviser is sitting in front of a customer, do you think they were more likely to sell a normal current account or a packaged account?

He says those customers who later tried to cancel their accounts were dissuaded by staff because it would affect the advisers selling record.

This approach was eventually dropped by the bank, but many who were sold the accounts years ago still have them.

Lloyds says: The accusations made by this individual are unfounded and refer to practices and processes no longer in place.

Lloyds Banking Group does not have sales targets. We believe that in the vast majority of cases, packaged bank accounts provide good value to customers. Where we receive customer complaints, we review each one on a case-by-case basis. There is no evidence that staff were harassed.

The bank mole said staff that didn't meet their sales targets were put under 'performance review'

The Wider Problem

In the year to March 2016, complaints about packaged accounts across the market more than doubled, with about 44,000 cases referred to independent arbiter the Financial Ombudsman Service.

In its annual report, released at the end of May, it states: Some customers had been sold accounts that they didnt want or need.

Some people couldnt have used any of the accounts extras  or couldnt use the extras theyd specifically opened it for.

In a few cases, people who hadnt had a UK bank account before werent told that free account options were available.

Thousands of people have had valid claims backed by the Ombudsman, with banks told to issue refunds. It is believed many more could still be paying for accounts they should never have been sold and banks have reportedly set aside up to 1 billion to compensate those who complain. Lloyds put aside 225 million last year.

How to claim your money back

Appeal to the bank that provided the account, explaining why you feel you were missold it. Include your account details, why you feel the sale was inappropriate and how you would like the problem resolved.

Keep a copy of the dated letter for your records. If it is a Lloyds Bank account, write to Lloyds Bank, Customer Services, BX1 1LT.

You must give the bank eight weeks to resolve your complaint. If your complaint is rejected or you dont hear back in eight weeks, you can refer your case to the Ombudsman, which will look at the facts independently and decide whether or not you should be refunded. Visit financial-ombudsman.org.uk or call the helpline on 0800 023 4567.
The prime minister of the southern African state of Lesotho has fled after claiming the army had staged a coup.

The tiny kingdom's military seized two police stations today as gunfire rang out in the capital of the mountainous region.

Prime minister Thomas Thabane said the actions amounted to a coup - though an army spokesman said the soldiers were only securing the country.

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Prime minister Thomas Thabane said the actions amounted to a coup - though an army spokesman said the soldiers were only securing the country (file picture)

Reports suggest the capital Maseru is now calm.

Political tensions have been high in the tiny kingdom that is completely surrounded by South Africa, since June, when there was a power struggle after Prime Minister Thomas Thabane suspended parliament to dodge a vote of no confidence.

At the time, South Africa warned against simmering conflict.

'As we speak now, the situation in Lesotho, in the capital, is back to normal. It's business as usual,' defense forces spokesman Ntlele Ntoi told The Associated Press.

The military had gathered intelligence that the police were going to arm factions participating in a demonstration planned for Monday by one of the coalition parties, the Lesotho Congress for Democracy, he said.

The military disarmed police in the capital, Maseru, to avoid bloodshed, Ntoi said.

An exchange of gunfire between the military, youths and police injured one soldier and four policemen, he said.

'The arms have been removed and they are in military custody. The military has returned to the barracks,' Ntoi said, denying reports of any coup attempt.

The tiny kingdom's military seized two police stations in the capital Maseru, pictured, today as gunfire rang out in the capital of the mountainous region (file image)

'We are not in a position now or in the future to stage a coup. All we do is to carry out our mandate to secure our country and property.'

He said that the military did not know if the march will still take place Monday.

Ntoi said he had heard reports that radio stations had been down for a few hours. He said he could not say if they were down for technical problems or because of the military.

But Lesotho's Prime Minister Thomas Thabane told South Africa's eNCA television that the military actions amounted to a coup.

He said he did not give permission for the action and that something like this should not be happening in a democratic state.

He is going to meet with South African officials, and expects South Africa to help his government restore law and order, he said.

'There is a situation unfolding in Lesotho and our interest is to see it resolved through peaceful means,' said Clayson Monyela, spokesman for South Africa's Department of International Relations and Co-operations.

He said actions by Lesotho's military bore the hallmarks of a coup d'etat, but added, 'The situation in Lesotho is still unfolding. No one has claimed to take over government ... so we are monitoring that.'

'We are calling on the commander of the armed forces to return to the barracks and allow the democratically elected government to return to its business,' he said.

There was a power struggle after Prime Minister Thomas Thabane, pictured, suspended parliament to dodge a vote of no confidence

Monyela said the actions taken by the military have forced the prime minister to go into hiding.

However, the prime minister had earlier told BBC that he is in South Africa visiting his daughter and would return to Lesotho on Sunday.

Calls to the prime minister's spokesman and office were not answered.

Monyela said the 15-nation regional group, the Southern African Development Community, will intervene and they are trying to bring all players to the table for talks at this time.

When asked if South Africa would send military, Monyela said that wasn't under consideration at this time.

'We prefer peaceful resolution to any crisis, particularly if it's a political crisis... Such things become last resorts,' he said.

Bernard Ntlhoaea, a guard at the U.S. Embassy in Maseru, confirmed that gunfire was heard in the capital early Saturday.

'The military has been moving around from 3 o'clock in the morning, occupying police stations in Maseru and moving around to other districts,' said Ntlhoaea.

He said the military was armed and he saw at least one armored personnel carrier on the streets.

The landlocked country's first coalition government was formed in 2012 after competitive elections that ousted the 14-year incumbent Pakalitha Mosisili, who peacefully stepped down from power.

The coalition has since been fragile.

Lesotho has seen unrest in its past and has seen a number of military coups since gaining independence from Britain in 1966.

The constitutional government was restored in 1993, after seven years of military rule.

Violent protests and a military mutiny in 1998 came after a contentious election prompted intervention by South African military forces.

Political stability returned after constitutional reforms, and parliamentary elections were peacefully held in 2002.
His death sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the country including in Dallas where five cops were shot dead

One of suspects arrested at the scene admitted the theft was as part of a plot to harm police officers

Police uncovered plot while responding to a burglary of a pawnshop where eight guns were stolen on July 9

The boy, 12, was the fourth suspect to be arrested over an alleged plot to kill Baton Rouge cops

A 12-year-old boy has become the fourth suspect to be arrested for an alleged plot to kill Baton Rouge cops in revenge for the fatal Alton Sterling shooting.

Louisiana State Police said the arrests were made after they received information about a 'substantial, credible' threat.

Tensions are high between police and civil rights protesters following the fatal shooting of two back suspects by police officers, and the mass shooting of five cops at a Dallas demonstration on July 7.

Today another Baton Rouge cops were killed, and six were injured in another mass shooting. The shooter, who was wearing black, was seen firing indiscriminately at around 9am.

A suspect, a black man from Missouri, has been shot dead and police say two others may be at large following what appears to have been an ambush.

Three officers have been confirmed dead. Four more have been injured and one is in a critical condition in hospital.

A 12-year-old boy has become the fourth suspect to be arrested for a plot to kill Baton Rouge cops in revenge for the fatal Alton Sterling shooting. Pictured are other suspects Antonio Thomas, 17, (left) and Malik Bridgewater, 20 (right)

Police uncovered the plot while responding to a burglary at a Baton Rouge pawnshop on Saturday morning, July 8.

Authorities said surveillance video showed the suspects using a ladder to climb the roof of the building to get in.

Officers arrested one suspect, Antonio Thomas, 17, at the scene with a handgun and a BB gun. Another suspect, Malik Bridgewater, 20, was apprehended the next day on July 9, and a third suspect, a 13-year-old boy, was apprehended on a street.

The 12-year-old was arrested a few days later on July 15.

Another man was arrested for allegedly purchasing two of the stolen guns, but he hasn't been linked to the alleged plot, a police spokesman said.

The suspects face charges including burglary, simple burglary, and theft of a firearm. They have not been arrested on any charges related to plotting to kill police.

Six of the eight handguns stolen have since been recovered.

Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie said at a press conference that the first suspect arrested told police that 'the reason the burglary was being done was to harm police officers.'

He said the suspect didn't give any details about when or where a possible plot would be carried out.

Panic: Three police officers have been killed after at least six were shot by a masked gunman in Baton Rouge today. Pictured, police running at the scene

High alert: The shooting took place at a gas station less than a mile from Baton Rouge's police headquarters shortly before 9am

The police department has come under criticism for the tactics it's employed to deal with protesters, using riot police and military-style vehicles on the streets of the capital city. Over a three day period, police arrested about 200 protesters

Police say that the reason they have had to use harsh tactics against protesters is becasue of threats like these (pictured is a July 9 photo of a protester being grabbed by police officers in riot gear in Baton Rouge)

The police department has come under criticism for the tactics it's employed to deal with protesters, using riot police and military-style vehicles on the streets of the capital city. Over a three day period, police arrested about 200 protesters.

'We have been questioned repeatedly over the last several days about our show of force and why we have the tactics that we have. Well, this is the reason, because we had credible threats against the lives of law enforcement in this city,' he said.

A week after 37-year-old Alton Sterling was shot and killed by two white police officers in Baton Rouge outside a convenience store, tension are high in the city. While protesters demand justice for Sterling, the shootings in Dallas last week and other attacks on police around the country have put the police on edge.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has defended the police response to protesters rallying against the shooting death of a black man by white officers, saying Tuesday that the riot gear and weaponry was appropriate.

'We've had a police officer with teeth knocked out of his face because of a rock. If you don't have on riot gear, you have no defense against that sort of thing,' said the Democratic governor, who comes from a family of sheriffs.

The arrests were made amid protests over the police shootings of Philando Castile (left) in Minnesota and Alton Sterling (right) in Louisiana

'In light of what happened in Dallas, understanding that just one gunman can change the situation entirely, how do you in good conscience put police officers on the street without the ability to defend themselves?' he said.

Protests have spread across the country as people express outrage over the recent death in Baton Rouge and of a second black man, Philando Castile, at the hands of police in Minnesota.

he Justice Department has opened a federal civil rights investigation into Sterling's shooting.

In the first few days after Sterling's death, police took a reserved approach to enforcement, keeping a low profile as hundreds gathered outside the convenience store where Sterling died.

But tensions escalated at weekend protests that moved away from the store and into other areas of the city, with nearly 200 people arrested and a show of force from law enforcement that included police wielding batons, armed with long guns and wearing shields.

Tension between protesters and police have been high since Micah Johnson, a 25-year-old black Army veteran (left, while in the army, and right) shot dead five cops

The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana has criticized police as using 'violent, militarized tactics on groups of people who have gathered peacefully.' Amnesty International has questioned the high number of arrests.

Community leaders have tried to defuse tension and keep interactions between protesters and law enforcement calm.

State Rep. Ted James, a black lawyer who grew up in the area where Sterling was shot, and Cleve Dunn Jr., a prominent black businessman in Baton Rouge, met with local Republican leaders at a public luncheon to discuss the shooting. The two men have showed up at protests and urged calm.

'I truly believe that we can have parallel conversations about respect for police officers, making sure that they're safe, but also have a parallel conversation about the things that are happening with African-American males across the country,' James said.
Police calculate her pay at about $1.80 an hour, but she

Lili Huang (pictured), 35, of Minnesota is charged in with five felony counts, including labor trafficking, false imprisonment and assault

A Chinese nanny escaped from a Minnesota home where she was being kept in a 'state of slavery', which included beatings and working 18 hours a day, after being brought to the U.S. in March, according to a criminal complaint.

Lili Huang, 35, of Woodbury is accused of malicious acts such as breaking the ribs of an unidentified woman and allegedly ripping out her hair so frequently, the nanny had to hide it or be forced by Hunag to 'eat it', a criminal report said.

Huang's has been charged with five felony counts, including labor trafficking, false imprisonment, assault and unlawfully taking another person's passport.

The 58-year-old nanny, who is not named in the complaint, arrived in the U.S. on a visa and was kept at a house in the 9700 block of Wellington Lane, a prosecutor said.

The woman, using a Chinese language interpreter, told police she had worked for Huang's wealthy family in Shanghai, noting she was treated well there, the Star Tribune reported.

She was then asked to provide services for the family in Minnesota with the family agreeing to deposit $890 a month into the woman's bank account in China, according to the complaint.

Once in the U.S., the woman was forced to work up to 18 hours a day doing child care, cooking and cleaning, the complaint said.

Police calculate her pay at about $1.80 an hour, but she apparently did not receive any of it.

Washington County prosecutor Pete Orput said the nanny was held in appalling conditions, the St Paul Pioneer Press reported.

Shortly after arriving, Huang started assaulting the woman 'on a regular basis, sometimes in front of the family's children, according to the complaint.

She was rationed crackers for meals and her weight had dropped from 120 pounds when she arrived in the country to 88 pounds, the complaint said.

A Chinese nanny escaped from this Minnesota home (pictured) where she was allegedly being kept in a 'state of slavery' by Huang

Once in the U.S., the woman was forced to work up to 18 hours a day doing child care, cooking and cleaning, the complaint said (the neighborhood pictured above)

When she asked Huang's husband to assist her in buying an airline ticket, he allegedly took her passport from her and said 'she was not going anywhere.'

As the assaults continued, the nanny feared for her life because she did not speak English and was never allowed to leave the home, the complaint said.

During one incident, Huang allegedly grabbed the woman by the hair and then slammed her head into tables before punching and kicking her while she was on the floor, according to the complaint.

At one point, the woman was beaten relentlessly until she could not stand up, the complaint said.

The nanny was then allegedly forced to walk through the house on her hands and knees 'like a dog for about four hours' on these hardwood floors, the complaint said (inside of the house pictured)

While the woman was never allowed to leave the house, she told a police investigator she had fled the home when Huang threatened to kill her with a knife (home interior pictured)

The nanny was then allegedly forced to walk through the house on her hands and knees 'like a dog for about four hours,' the complaint said.

While the woman was never allowed to leave the house, she told a police investigator she had fled the home when Huang threatened to kill her with a knife, according to the complaint.

The nanny was found wandering in the street on Wednesday night with her eyes blackened, and an exam at the United Hospital in St Paul later found she had many broken bones, the complaint said.

The woman later told officers that at the time she was looking for the airport so she could go home to China, according to the complaint.

The nanny was found wandering in the street on Wednesday night with her eyes blackened, and an exam at the United Hospital in St Paul (pictured) later found she had many broken bones, a criminal complaint said

Police from four cities and agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security searched Huang's home and arrested her, the complaint said.

A bag hidden under the nanny's mattress was found containing a large amount of her hair, which Huang allegedly ripped from the woman's head.

The nanny had been hiding it so Huang would not find it 'and force her to eat it,' the complaint said.

The woman's passport was also found in Huang's purse, according to the complaint.

Huang remains jailed in lieu of $350,000 bail after making her initial court appearance on Friday.
The Republican National Convention doesn't start for another two days, but a sign marked 'White Elevators', already has onlookers raising their eyebrows over the disturbing resemblance to Jim Crow era segregation.

The four-day convention kicks off on Monday in Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena, where party members are likely to solidify Donald Trump's bid for presidency by officially nominating him.

Byron Tau, a Wall Street Journal reporter who first spotted the signs, said they would be replaced, although the GOP may have bigger fish to fry as the party has fallen $6million short of their $64million fundraising target.

As the Republican National Convention is set to kick off next week, a sign marked 'White Elevators' (pictured) has onlookers raising their eyebrows. Byron Tau, a Wall Street Journal reporter who first spotted the sign, said it would be replaced 'for obvious reasons'

It is unclear why the sign was put up, but many were quick to point out the glaring oversight among RNC organizers for failing to see its similarity to signs common in the Jim Crow era, designating everything from water fountains to park benches as 'whites only'

The four-day convention kicks off on Monday in Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena, where party members are likely to solidify Donald Trump's bid for presidency by officially nominating him

Byron Tau, a Wall Street Journal reporter who first spotted the signs, said they would be replaced, although the GOP may have bigger fish to fry as they come up about $6million short of their fundraising goal

Tau first posted a photograph of the 'White Elevator' sign on his Twitter, adding: 'I'm told it's being replaced for obvious reasons.'

It is unclear why the signs were put up, but many were quick to point out the glaring oversight among RNC organizers for failing to see its similarity to signs common in the Jim Crow era, designating everything from water fountains to park benches as 'whites only'.

The photo, which has been shared nearly 2,000 times, is the latest gaffe associated with Trump, who has been called out for making racist comments by members of his own party.

Trump's controversial nature may have also cost the GOP several million, after a letter obtained by Politico said FedEx, Pepsi and other about two dozen other corporations and individuals withheld money. The list was later disputed as inaccurate.

The letter, sent to casino magnate and Republican backer Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam Adelson by the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee, directly pointed to the 'negative publicity' surrounding Trump.

It read: 'Over the past couple months, negative publicity around our potential nominee resulted in a considerable number of pledges backing out from their commitments.'

The party ended up about $6million short of their $64million fundraising target, which organizers hoped Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate worth about $25billion, would cough up, according to the letter obtained by Politico.

Adelson and his wife gave more than $100million to the party during the 2012 election, but has made no direct contributions this time around, NBC reported.

After the letter was leaked citing a figure of $8.1million in pledged donations that had been revoked, spokesperson Emily Lauer for the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee said the list of 'reneging donors' was inaccurate and that an apology would be issued to Adelson's team.

She said Adelson's staff asked for specific fundraising information and the letter was sent in haste due to the timing of the request.

'Some of what were referred to as pledges were actually expectations based on pledges made to previous conventions, while a handful had been withdrawn,' David Gilbert, the CEO of the host committee, said in a statement to Politico.

He added that only one of the five people who appeared to have signed the letter had seen it before it leaked.

It is unclear why the signs were put up, but many were quick to point out the glaring oversight among RNC organizers
Erdogan warned his supporters that those behind the coup 'would pay a heavy price' for their treachery

He urged his fans to remain on the streets and occupy public spaces to prevent any retaliation by the military

The president addressed supporters following his dramatic return to Istanbul where he announced the clampdown

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rounded up almost 6,000 troops, judges and prosecutors following Friday night's coup

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Wiping tears from his eyes, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan broke down today as he attended a mass funeral for victims of Friday's failed coup attempt.

Speaking at the service in Istanbul he then vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of an Islamist cleric his government blames for the uprising. Erdogan promised to cleanse the country of the 'virus' of those who back Fethullah Gulen.

He said Turkey, through the justice ministry and foreign ministry, would request the extradition of the cleric, who is based in the United States, and his backers.

The country's president was overcome with grief at the funeral of his friend Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, who were shot dead on the Bosphorus bridge while protesting against the coup. But Erdogan's political rivals claim it was the leader himself who staged the takeover to further tighten his grip on power, an accusation he denies.

The mass funeral was held for civilians who died on Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, including Ilhan Varank, the brother of Erdogan's chief supervisor. He was a professor of computer science and was shot according to Turkish media.

Crowds chanted 'Fethullah will come and pay', 'Allah is Great' and 'We want the death penalty'. Erdogan said that in democracies, 'you cannot push the wish of the people to one side' but also said 'we are not after revenge.

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Emotional: Wiping tears from his eyes, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan broke down today as he attended a mass funeral for victims of Friday's failed coup attempt. Erdogan promised to cleanse the country of the 'virus' of Fethullah Gulen backers

Speaking at the service he vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of an Islamist cleric his government blames for the uprising

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, centre, has vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of an Islamist cleric his government blames for Friday's failed coup attempt

Relatives mourn near by coffins of victims who were killed in a coup attempt which started on Friday and was defeated the next day

Women fight to hold back the tears during the funeral of a victim killed during the attempted coup by Turkish military members

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, stands near by coffins of victims who were killed in a coup attempt. The ceremony is too much for one woman who collapses to the floor, right

Crowds chanted 'Fethullah will come and pay,' 'Allah is Great' and 'We want the death penalty'. Pictured, mourners carry a coffin

Buried: Several men lower the body into the ground during the funeral of a victim of the failed coup attempt in Istanbul on Friday

Some 104 coup plotters were killed during the uprising, while 160 people - made up of police officers and civilians - 'fell as martyrs'

Turkish Land Forces commander General Salih Zeki Colak (left0 stands with army commanders as they attend a mass funeral, while a colleague cries as friends carry the coffin of a police officer killed in the failed military coup (right)

On Saturday, Erdogan made a brief public appearance amid a phalanx of heavily-armed bodyguards, he said: 'They will pay a heavy price for this. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.'

Life in Turkey is back to normal after a failed coup attempt, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday afternoon, saying the central bank, capital markets board, banking system and stock exchange were all functional.

At least 265 people were killed in clashes between the armed forces and police. Scores of civilians were among the dead.

Rebel leader General Erdal Ozturk, who commands armed forces in Istanbul has been arrested and charged with treason. The state-run news agency Anadolu said the commander of the Second Army, which guards the borders with Iraq, Syria and Iran has also been detained.

Many soldiers who participated in the coup have been beaten up by Erdogan's supporters.

Meanwhile, a Turkish government official reported that the commander of an air base used by U.S.-led coalition jets that conduct bombing runs against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria has been detained.

The official said Sunday that Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, ten other soldiers and one police officer from the Incirlik base are detained for their role in the botched Friday coup attempt.

The Turkish private DHA news agency showed footage of Van handcuffed and pushed into a van outside a courthouse.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan vowed to 'clean all state institutions of the virus' of Fethullah Gulen supporters

Three women hold on to the coffin of Omer Can Katar, who was among those to be killed during the attempted military coup

Rebel leader General Erdal Ozturk, pictured, has been arrested and charged with treason and possibly faces the death penalty

Supporters of Erdogan returned to Taksim square in Istanbul to celebrate his victory over the rogue military elements behind the coup

Tens of thousands of government supporters packed into areas such as Kizilay Square in Ankara following an appeal by Erdogan

In Taksim square, which was occupied by troops on Friday, thousands of people waved flags and sang patriotic songs

People clambered on top of a monument in the coastal city of Izmir to unveil a giant poster of Erdogan while decrying 'Gulenists'

There were growing fears about the security of opposition figures within Turkey after Erdogan's supporters continued their protests

ARMED MEN SIZE POLICE STATION IN ARMENIAN CAPITAL YEREVAN AND TAKE UNKNOWN NUMBER OF HOSTAGES A group of armed men seized a police station in Armenia's capital Yerevan along with an unknown number of hostages on Sunday morning, the country's security service said. Negotiations were underway to resolve the situation peacefully, the security service said, accusing the hostage takers' supporters of spreading false rumours on the internet that an armed uprising against the government was underway. Armenian news agencies reported that the armed men were demanding the release of Jirair Sefilian, an opposition leader and former military commander, who was arrested in June. Sefilian has strongly criticised Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan and is unhappy about the way the government has been handling a long-running conflict between pro-Armenian separatists and the breakaway Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Agencies reported that the armed men were demanding that President Sargsyan quit and that both some policemen and some of the hostage takers had been wounded. Reuters could not immediately confirm either assertion. The security service said law enforcement agencies were working as normal to uphold public safety. TV images of the scene showed a heavy police presence with armoured vehicles blocking off the road to the police station. The security service said the hostage takers' supporters were spreading what it called 'disinformation' about the seizure of other buildings as part of an armed uprising. 'The National Security Service officially announces that such information is absolutely untrue,' it said. Police in Armenia block a street after a group of armed men seized a police station along with an unknown number of hostages, according the country's security service Advertisement

The President accused the plotters of being part of a conspiracy led by his former ally Fethullah Gulen, who is based in Pennsylvania. The US-based preacher accused Erdogan of staging the coup himself to justify his purge.

In his address to his fanatical following, he revealed how he was almost assassinated while on holiday. He said: 'They bombed places I had departed from right after I was gone. They probably thought we were still there.'

Military tanks were stopped by supporters from occupying Ataturk airport in Istanbul after civilians lay down in the road to prevent them passing.

Data on Flight Radar 24 showed Erdogan's jet circling for more than 30 minutes south of Istanbul until it was safe for the aircraft to approach the airport.

A soldier suspected of being involved in the coup is escorted by policemen as he arrives at a courthouse in the town of Marmaris, Turkey

Admiral Namik Alper, commander of Aksaz naval base, is escorted by plainclothes policemen as he arrives at the courthouse in Marmaris

Soldiers suspected of being involved in the coup attempt are escorted by policemen as they arrive at a courthouse in the town of Marmaris

Amid the joyous scenes, almost 3,000 members of the military have been rounded up accused of being part of the coup

More than 265 people were killed during the five-hour coup which ended in the early hours of Saturday morning amid dramatic scenes

Critics of Erdogan have accused him of using the instability as an excuse to clamp down on opposition against his regime

After he emerged from the jet, he announced the coup was over before branding the rebel soldiers as 'traitors'.

Turkish officials claimed some of the plotters were based in Incirlik air base in the south east of the country from where the US military is conducting bombing missions against ISIS in northern Syria.

Tens of thousands of supporters of the regime gathered in cities across Turkey with Prime Minister Binali Yildirim claiming those behind the coup 'will receive every punishment they deserve'.

He and Erdogan have indicted laws banning the death penalty could be repealed so those involved in the coup could be executed.

Eight members of the coup fled to Greece on a stolen Blackhawk helicopter.

Greek PM Alexis Tsipras said the eight men's asylum applications would be dealt with 'quickly.

Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research at The Washington Institute said Erdogan has been strengthened by the coup.

He said the president was now a 'sort of mythical figure'.

Cagaptay said: 'It will allow him (Erdogan) to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before and find strong public support within the country.'

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the Chatham House think tank in London, said the attempted coup appeared to have been 'carried out by lower-ranking officers'.

'Their main gripe seems to have been President Erdogan's attempt to transform his office into a powerful and centralised executive presidency. In the short term, this failed coup plot will strengthen President Erdogan.'

Despite the success of civilians challenging the attempted military takeover, some of the unarmed protesters were shot dead on Friday

A civilian punches a Turkish soldier who took part in the failed military coup as he is led away by police having surrendered

Thousands of supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan congregated in Istanbul awaiting for him to address a major rally

Supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan clashed with journalists near the Turkish military headquarters in Ankara following the coup

The President used Twitter to call on supporters to prevent any additional military action, adding: 'We should keep on owning the streets no matter at what stage because a new flare-up could take place at any moment'

Thousands of people congregated outside the parliament building in Ankara as a crisis meeting was held to discuss the attempted coup

Turkish Prime Minsiter Binali Yildirim briefed politicians on the attempted coup in the national parliament in Ankara

Senior members of the judiciary and chief of the military chief of staff General Hulusi Akar, centre, attended the emergency meeting

A relative of polie officer Nedip Cengiz Eker clings to his coffin during his funeral in Marmaris, Turkey following last night's coup attempt

Eker received a guard of honour from the Turkish navy and military who remained loyal to president Recep Tayyip Erdogan last night

President Erdogan has described those who died protecting his government as martyrs while branding the insurgents as traitors

Hundreds of Turks have taken to the streets to ensure no fresh coup could take place after last night's uprising was defeated

A soldier cowers as he is confronted by plain-clothes police officers and civilians after the military surrendered on Bosphorus Bridge

People wave national flags as they march from Kizilay square to Turkish General Staff building to react against military coup attempt

A young girl joins police officers loyal to President Erdogan atop a tank abandoned by military personnel who surrendered

More than 2,800 rebels have been detained after their failed military coup that killed at least 250 as Turkish President Erdogan vows revenge for the bloody uprising (pictured: Up to 100 rebel soldiers surrendered on Bosphorus Bridge after their failed uprising)

Ordinary Turks confronted rifle-wielding soldiers, climbed atop tanks and laid in front of military vehicles in an effort to take back control of the country, ignoring a curfew issued by coup plotters designed to allow the army to bring down the government unopposed

There were unconfirmed reports of one soldier being beheaded by a mob of civilians on the bridge after a video surfaced online showing a crowd launching an attack on the downed man. However in the video the man is still alive and shows no beheading, though it is unknown if this happened after the footage ended

People wave Turkish flags as they stand around the Republic Monument in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey

Men wave flags as they stand on tanks as people walk on the Bosphorus Bridge after taking over the military position in Istanbul

A Turkish civilian whips soldiers with his belt after they surrendered to police on Bosphorus Bridge, a strategic landmark which was seized by the army during the coup

People climb on tanks after around a hundred soldiers occupying Bosphorus Bridge surrendered in Istanbul, Turkey

The President made his triumphant return back to Istanbul after his forces quelled the coup on Friday evening, as he warned that the members of the military behind the plot to oust him would pay a 'heavy price for their treason'.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that, while the death penalty was abolished in Turkey in 2004, the country may consider legal changes to deter any such coup happening again.

The Greek police ministry said a Turkish military helicopter landed in Greece this morning and eight men on board, thought to be senior coup plotters, have requested political asylum. Turkey has asked for the men, made up of seven soldiers and one civilian, to be extradited back to the country.

The rebel army faction - who call themselves the 'Peace Council' - said they were trying to overthrow the government to 'protect human rights' and restore democracy from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, AKP, which has repeatedly faced criticism from human rights groups and Western allies over its brutal crackdowns on anti-government protesters.

However, Erdogan has blamed his old scapegoat, Fethullah Gulen for orchestrating the uprising. Muslim cleric Gulen, the president's rival who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, U.S. as the head of a billion dollar religious movement, has often been blamed for political unrest in Turkey.

One bloodied soldier cowered underneath a coach as a mob started beating him on Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge

The five hours of chaos began when two busloads of soldiers burst into the headquarters of the state-run TRT news agency, taking news off the air and replacing it with a stream of weather forecasts.

After launching the coup, the Turkish military imposed a curfew on civilians telling them to stay in their homes, but Erdogan called on supporters to ignore the order and take to the streets, which is thought to have caused the army to relinquish control.

Turkey's top general Hulusi Akar was taken hostage at the military headquarters in the capital Ankara after an attempt to bring down the government, but was rescued during the night.

One military official, Navy Fleet Commander Admiral Veysel Kosele, is currently unaccounted for and it is unknown whether or not he was part of the coup against President Erdogan.

Turkey's state-run news agency said five warships which reportedly set sail during the attempted coup have returned to their military port in northwest Turkey, but it is unclear whether or not the Admiral was abroad one of the ships.

After the uprising was crushed in the early hours of Saturday morning, Erdogan told the gathered masses at Ataturk Airport that those loyal to Gulen had 'penetrated the Armed Forces and the police, among other government agencies, over the past 40 years'.

'What is being perpetrated is a rebellion and a treason,' Erdogan said. 'They will pay a heavy price for their treason to Turkey.'

Soldiers, who surrendered following the defeat of last night's attempted coup, are loaded onto a bus following their arrest by police officers and civilians

A man lays down in front of a tank on the approach to Ataturk airport in Istanbul as citizens took to the streets to oppose the military coup

Civilians launch an attack on an armoured police car carrying Turkish soldiers who participated in the coup against President Erdogan

People celebrate on an abandoned military tank after they took over military position on the Bosphorus bridge in Istanbul

People shout at the soliders involved in the coup attempt who have surrendered on Bosphorus Bridge following their surrender

A soldier lies dead underneath rubble following the defeat of a military coup by Turkey's army to overthrow President Erdogan

Police officers arrest a soldier after he was attacked by a mob of civilians following the surrender of 100 rebels on Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul

Up to 100 rebel soldiers surrendered on Bosphorus Bridge after their failed uprising. At least 2,863 connected have been arrested in connection with the dramatic coup which lasted approximately five hours.

New British foreign secretary Boris Johnson said on Twitter that he has spoken to Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu following the attempted military coup, adding: 'I underlined UK support for the democratic elected government and institutions.'

Explosions and gunfire erupted in Istanbul and Ankara on Friday night during the coup which killed at least 250 people in the army's bid to overthrow the Islamic government.

Elsewhere troops opened fire on civilians attempting to cross the river Bosporus in Istanbul in protest to the military coup, while a bomb exploded at the parliament building according to the state's press agency as the security situation in the country becomes more perilous.

Colonel Muharrem Kose reportedly led the Turkish military forces in the uprising.

Kose had recently been kicked out of the army, from his position as head of the military's legal advisory department, over his links to Gulen. He was killed during the clashes with Erdogan's supporters, sources report.

Civilians take cover outside the building of the General Staff, the final landmark still held by coup plotters who are in the process of surrendering to police officers

A Turkish policeman and other people stand atop of a military vehicle in Ankara after crushing the rebellion

Clothes and weapons beloging to soldiers involved in the coup attempt that have now surrendered lie on the ground abandoned on Bosphorus Bridge

The man then stood up and took off his shirt in an effort the present the tank from taking position in the airport

The police siege around the building of the General Staff, thought to be the final landmark held by coup plotters who are in the process of negotiating their surrender

As military took to the streets, Erdogan had urged his supporters to ignore a curfew and take back control of the country.

Tanks and armoured personnel carriers tried to seize strategic points in Istanbul and Ankara but were faced down by unarmed civilians who lay down in front of the heavy armour.

Police special forces headquarters was also hit and was razed to the ground. Other witnesses reported attack helicopters firing machine guns in the capital Ankara in a bid to depose the Islamic government.

There were also reports that a Turkish Air Force F-16 had shot down a Sikorsky helicopter over Ankara. The government claimed the jet destroyed the helicopter which had been 'hijacked by coup plotters'.

In Takism square, around 30 rebel soldiers surrendered following a gun battle with police loyal to Erdogan. A number of F-16 fighter jets had screamed across the square at low level blasting the area with a sonic boom.

During the night, both the civilian government and the military claimed they were in control of the country, with reports of sporadic gunfire and explosions.

In a statement, the army faction said that they took action 'to reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for the law and order to be reinstated'.

The Turkish military has also long seen its role as safeguarding Turkey's secularist agenda, and has staged numerous coup's over the last 60 years when it feels the government's stance is moving too far away from that.

Civilians help police officers to arrest soldiers at Taksim Square in Istanbul after ordinary Turks helped to stop the attempted coup

People gather for celebration around Turkish police officers, loyal to the government, standing atop tanks abandoned by Turkish army officers

Meanwhile, Erdogan made it clear he believes rival Gulen is behind the attack.

Gulen's nonprofit organization, the Alliance for Shared Values, denies any involvement and condemned the actions of the Turkish military.

Gulen, 75, was initially a close ally of Erdogan, who rose from the mayor of Istanbul to prime minister before he became president in 2014.

But the two fell out over a massive corruption scandal in 2013 that cost the country $100billion in a campaign thought to be initiated by Gulen's followers against Erdogan's closest allies.

Trained as an imam, Fethullah Gulen gained notice in Turkey some 50 years ago, promoting a philosophy that blended a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Erdogan has long accused Gulen of plotting to overthrow the officially secular government from a gated 26-acre compound in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, which has a population of about 1,100.

The President, who was on vacation in the resort town of Marmaris when the coup began, issued a statement to CNN tonight referring to a 'parallel structure' behind the coup, a reference to Gulen's followers.

Supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan ambush a tank as it attempts to seize ground in Turkey's capital city of Ankara

One man throws himself onto the front of a moving tank. Supporters played a key role in stopping the military from taking control

Turkish civilians throw a tarpaulin over a tank to stop it from seizing control of key locations in Ankara

Pictured: Groups of protesters take to the streets of Ankara and face down soldiers rolling through the city in tanks
With the Pimms and gin-and-elderflower cocktails flowing, the summer party at the British mission in Istanbul was in full swing on Friday evening. No one noticed an attempt at a full-blown military coup detat was underway.

The party was thrown in honour of Consul General Leigh Turner, to mark the end of his four years as the UKs representative in the city, and the dress code was summer chic  hats and gloves welcome.

But, as rebel forces seized control of key bridges and aircraft circled the city, the gregarious Mr Turner was busy DJ-ing, playing disco hits to a crowd of around 300 diplomats, expats and businessmen.

UK Consul General Leigh Turner was playing DJ at his farewell party in Istanbul when the Turkish military coup began on Friday night, prompting the British mission to swing into action and help UK citizens in the country

The party had moved inside as darkness fell  and Mr Turner leapt at the chance to take to the decks.

As a group of putschists blockaded the bridges connecting the European side of the city with its Asian half, Mr Turner was spinning 1970s chart classics.

One guest, Nick Hobbs, 62, a British concert promoter who has lived in Istanbul for 13 years, said he had no idea an attempted coup was in progress, even when he heard helicopters overhead.

The party would have gone on until midnight were it not for the extraordinary events unfolding across the city  and in the capital, Ankara, 300 miles away.

People climb on tanks after around a hundred soldiers occupying Bosphorus Bridge surrendered in Istanbul, Turkey

At around 11pm, the Turkish Prime Minister acknowledged an attempted coup was under way, and Foreign Office staff went into crisis mode, setting up a hotline for the estimated 250,000 British citizens in Turkey.

At the party, guests were given the choice of heading back to their homes or taking shelter in the consulate for the night.
After a whirlwind trip to New York City where he accepted Donald Trump's invitation to run as his vice president and then grabbed a bite at Chili's, Indiana governor Mike Pence introduced himself to the nation as a humble and prayerful midwestern man wrapped up in the 'unimaginable moment' of his selection.

'My family and I couldnt be more humbled - couldnt be more humbled and honored by the confidence that our nominee and his family have placed in us,' said Pence, appearing alone without Trump just hours after a joint appearance in Manhattan.

'The last few days have been pretty overwhelming. But this is the best part,' Pence told a few hundred people who gathered in an airport tarmac near Indianapolis to hear the governor spin homey references that offered a stark contrast to the flashy urban swagger and populism that allowed Trump to grab the Republican Party's nomination.

'Karen and I will cherish this Hoosier homecoming for the rest of our lives,' Pence, 57 said, referencing his wife of more than 30 years. 'There really is no place like home.'

'NO PLACE LIKE HOME': Indiana governor Mike Pence single out his wife and family for their support during an Indiana homecoming, and even invoked 'The Wizard of Oz'

Pence said he was about to head home for 'pizza night,' but first wanted to offer thanks.

'I want to pay a debt of gratitude to those who made this moment possible, this unimaginable moment,' he said.

He thanked his wife first, then gave her a light kiss on the lips, hailing her as a 'A school teacher turned mom, turned first lady who I know is gonna be a great second lady of the United States of America.'

It was a much tamer reminder of the time Al Gore smooched his wife Tipper on stage during the Democratic National Convention in 2000.

The all-American display by Pence, who Trump hailed as a 'small-town boy' earlier in the day, made clear that Trump didn't only choose Pence for his reputation as a disciplined House Republican leader and social conservative with governing experience, but also for his family friendly biography  something Pence intends to share on the campaign trail.

LIP LOCK: Pence kissed his wife Karen and thanked her for her support over the years

PDA: Pence's peck was a marked contrast to Al Gore's smooch of his wife Tipper in 2000

Pence barely ventured into politics at his solo event, and his most pointed remark joined three themes likely to unite conservatives, including some harboring doubts about Trump.

'For the sake of our troops who deserve a commander in chief who will have their back, for the sake of hard working Americans and businesses who deserve a president who will get Washington, D.C. off their back, and for the sake of a Supreme Court of the United States that will uphold our Constitution and our God-given liberties, lets make Indiana the first state on the board to make Donald Trump the 45th president of the United States and send another Hoosier to the vice presidents office,' Pence said.

The last line was a reference who Indiana senator Dan Quayle, who was George W. Bush's running mate.

Pence thanked his children, Charlotte, Michael, and Audrey, for their 'unflinching love and tireless efforts' to support mom and dad.

And he embraced his mom as a 'daughter of an Irish immigrant who always believed in every one of us.'

'Mom, thank you for always being there. Youre my hero,' Pence said.

Pence hugged his mom, Nancy, and called her his hero

NIGHT OUT IN THE BIG CITY: Pence tweeted that he was having a 'busy weekend in NY!' and enjoying a 'quck dinner with the family @Chilis.'

'To my brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews and all of our big disastrous family, thank you for always loving us,' Pence said.

When a man appeared to yell out a prayer, Pence said, 'People often say to me, "Im prayin' for you.' But Id like to ask you to pray for my family as well, that we might as a family do you proud as we represent our state all across this nation.'

Pence arrived back in his home state with a dramatic entrance. Cable networks carried his arrival via private jet  something that usually occurs when Trump lands in his Boeing 757 or one of his helicopters.

WELCOME HOME: Pence flew back to Indiana from New York after an appearance with Donald Trump

ONE POTATOE, TWO POTATOE: Pence called for sending 'another Hoosier' to the vice president's office, a reference to Indiana native Vice President Dan Quayle

The homage to 'Hoosier ideals' and family came after reports of intrigue in the VP selection process, with reports of second-guessing by Trump even after he mostly settled on Pence.

'We're different people. I understand that,' Trump told CBS '60 Minutes' in an interview to air Sunday. Referencing Clinton, Trump said, 'I call her "crooked Hillary." She's crooked Hillary ... I din't ask him to do it, but I don't think he should do it because it's different for him,' Trump said.

Earlier Saturday, Pence appeared onstage with Trump for the first time since his nomination was announced.

Trump hailed him as a 'man of honor, character and honesty'  then added, 'Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of corruption.'

Pence drew a standing ovation for a line he uttered Tuesday, during the pair's only other joint public appearance: 'Hillary Clinton must never become President of the United States of America.'

The 57-year-old Indianan lauded Trump, 'this builder, this fighter, this patriotic American who has set aside a legendary career in business to build a stronger America.'

Trump told a hotel ballroom of several hundred invited guests that Pence is 'the leader who will help us deliver a safe society and a really prosperous society for all Americans. ... He is a solid, solid person.'

'He's really got the skills of a highly talented executive, leading the state of Indiana to jobs, growth, and opportunity.'

Trump sought to tamp down concerns that he was maneuvered into picking the Indiana governor, tweeting that Pence was his 'first choice'

Donald Trump bashed Hillary Clinton as 'the embodiment of corruption' and said Mike Pence has 'the skills of a highly talented executive,' at a New York event billed as a joint campaign kickoff

Members of the Trump and Pence families joined the two men on stage after their remarks at the Hilton Midtown in New York City

 Slide me  A day after debuting a 'sexually suggestive' campaign logo that was widely mocked online, it appears Donald Trump and Mike Pence have unveiled a new logo (shown above)
The cop was cleared of criminal charges in 2014 but could still face federal civil rights charges

Pantaleo was caught on camera putting Garner in a chokehold move banned by the NYPD as he said 'I can't breathe'

The family continues to wait as federal authorities decide whether to press charges against NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo

Garner's widow Esme and daughter Emerald cried during a rally held by the Rev Al Sharpton on Saturday

It has been two years since Eric Garner's death, but the tears flowing down his widow and daughter's faces are as fresh as they were the day he died after uttering 'I can't breathe'.

Those three words have since become a rallying cry against police brutality, and Garner's family is making sure the man who uttered them before he died in a police chokehold is not forgotten.

Rev Al Sharpton joined Gwen Carr, Garner's mother, for a march through Brooklyn's Prospect Park on Saturday, the eve of the anniversary of Garner's death.

Eric Garner's widow Esaw Garner (center) and his daughter Emerald crying during an event held by the Rev Al Sharpton commemorating the two year anniversary of his death

Garner was just 43-years-old when he was killed after being placed in a chokehold during an arrest while selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island in 2014

Garner's mother Gwen Carr (pictured holding a photo of him) has been fighting to keep her son's name alive ever since his death

It came just a week after the deaths of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, both at the hands of police, ignited Black Lives Matter protests across the country.

But Carr could not watch the now viral video Castile's girlfriend took as he died from gunshot wounds after a policeman opened fire as he reached for his wallet.

'It was like my son getting killed all over again,' she told New York Daily News. 'It just reduced me to tears.'

Although 24 months have passed, federal authorities have not yet decided if NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo will face federal civil right charges.

Pantaleo, who was cleared of criminal charges, was caught on camera putting Garner in a chokehold after he was stopped by officers for selling loose cigarettes.

The legal limbo is playing out on the watch of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has come under persistent pressure in the city and elsewhere to bring Pantaleo to justice.

The New York City case turned out to be a forerunner to a series of videotaped police killings across the country that have fueled outrage and protests.

Before becoming attorney general, Lynch ran the US attorney's office in Brooklyn, which initiated the review of Garner's case after a state grand jury refused to indict Pantaleo in 2014, and she personally met with Garner's family in that role.

Questioned by Congress this week, she said the Garner investigation remains open but gave no indication of how or when a decision will be made.

Sharpton (center), who holds a weekly National Action Network rally, focused on Garner's death on Saturday

He later marched with Garner's mother Gwen Carr (right) and 200 others through Brooklyn's Prospect Park

Carr and Sharpton were joined by members of his National Action Network as well as Black Lives Matter protesters for the demonstration

Last year, the city agreed to pay $5.9million to settle the family's wrongful death claim, but the push for a federal case has persisted.

Garner's siblings performed on a rap song called I Can't Breathe that was released to mark the second anniversary of his July 17, 2014, death, and Carr has proposed converting a small park across the street from where he died into a playground named after him.

'What's in my heart is to keep my son's name alive,' Carr said. 'This is my work for the rest of my life.'

A resolution has been hampered by a behind-the-scenes disagreement over the direction of the federal investigation of Garner's death in Staten Island, according to two people with inside knowledge.

On one side are prosecutors in Lynch's former office in Brooklyn, who aren't sure there's enough evidence to charge Pantaelo at the federal level.

On the other side are their counterparts in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division in Washington, who feel more confident in forging ahead.

Both people were not authorized to discuss the decision-making process and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Carr said it has become her 'life's work' to keep her son's name alive and fight against police brutality

Supporters wore shirts with Garner's face and carried the Black Liberation Flag

Although 24 months have passed, federal authorities have not yet decided if NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who put Garner in a chokehold during his arrest, will face federal civil right charges

Officials at the Justice Department declined to comment.

The disagreements reflect the challenge of finding enough evidence to prove an officer willfully deprived a citizen's civil rights, said Samuel Bagenstos, the former No. 2 official at the Civil Rights Division.

Historically, the high legal bar has prevented prosecutors from charging most officers who kill unarmed men, including the one who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

'These are hard cases to prove,' Bagenstos said. 'That can create a lot of difficult conversations within the department about them.'

For Garner's family and its supporters, the cellphone video shot by a bystander capturing the last moments of his life has always been evidence enough.

'It's been two years,' Sharpton said at recent gathering with Garner's family. The fatal encounter 'was on video and we've not seen justice. So that's why people are questioning what's going on now.'

Sharpton vowed to keep marching against injustice until a culture of mistreating black people ends.

The medical examiner ruled Garner's death a homicide caused in part by the chokehold. But police union officials and Pantaleo's lawyer have argued that the officer used a takedown move taught by the police department, not a chokehold, and that Garner's poor health was the main reason he died.

Under the circumstances, 'a federally protected civil right wasn't violated,' Pantaleo's lawyer, Stuart London, said this week.

'This was a simple street encounter where the officer performed his duties as he was trained.'

The officer remains on desk duty as the New York Police Department awaits the outcome of the federal probe before deciding whether to discipline him on its own.
A woman is in critical condition after she was shot in the face with a speargun overnight at a home in Melbourne's south-east.

The woman, in her 40s, was rushed to the Alfred Hospital after the spear pierced through her cheek in Hallam at 11.30 pm on Saturday.

Police are trying to determine if the shooting was an accident and officers have said they have a man in his 40s in custody, The Today Show reported.

A Melbourne woman is in critical condition after she was shot in the face with a speargun overnight

The woman, in her 40s, was rushed to the Alfred Hospital after the spear pierced through her cheek

Forensic police were at the scene early Saturday morning to search the property on Cornwall Street.

The woman suffered 'significant facial injuries,' according to an Ambulance Victoria spokesperson, 7News reported.

No charges have been laid.

A speargun is a tool used by fishermen to propel a spear and strike large fish.

Police are trying to determine if the shooting was an accident and officers have said they have a man in his 40s in custody
The parents of the three young children killed in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 two years ago have revealed they have suffered devastating depression and trauma since the tragedy.

Couple Anthony Maslin and Marite Norris' heartbreak was laid bare in court documents lodged as part of their claim for compensation from the airline, and details the depths of their despair when sons Mo, 12, and Otis, 8, and daughter Evie, 10, were killed along with their grandfather, Nick Norris, as they returned home to Perth in 2014.

The documents reveal the couple has suffered extensive psychiatric and emotional harm because the airline failed to contact them about the tragedy before they saw detailed footage of the crash on television, reports Perth Now.

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Anthony Mastin and Marite Norris filed court documents which reveal the depths of their suffering after losing their three children in the MH17 crash

The documents allege Anthony and Marite were told in phone calls from people not related to Malaysia Airlines and had seen graphic crash images on TV before the airline contacted them

Mr Maslin and Ms Norris's children Mo (left), 12, Evie (right), 10, and Otis (centre), 8, are pictured above

The MH17 crash site near the village of Hrabove, some 80 kms east of Donetsk, in the Ukraine

MH17 was shot down on July 17, 2014, as it flew over eastern Ukraine on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.

The Maslin family, including Mr Norris' wife Lindy, learned of their loved-ones' deaths 'by watching news reports displaying graphic images of the crash site' and from phone calls from people who were not employed by the airline, the document said.

As a result, they suffered 'varying degrees of psychiatric injury, conditions or illness, depressive illness and economic loss'.

Anthony, Marite and Lindy have all employed a counsellor, are undergoing treatment and require medication for the heavy emotional toll.

Mo, 12, Evie, 10 and Otis, 8, were on their way back to Perth to resume school, accompanied by their grandfather, while their parents stayed behind in Amsterdam.

Sunday is the two year anniversary of the tragic event, which saw 298 passengers and crew, 40 of whom were Australian, die when the plane was shot out of the sky.

An international investigation found the plane was downed by a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile, believed to have been fired by pro-Russia separatists.

Preliminary findings from the forensic investigation into the crash are due this year.

On July 17, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was blown out of the sky as it flew over eastern Ukraine on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all people on board including the three children

Investigators examining the crash site to collect human remains and belongings following the downing of the plane

Their grandfather Nick Norris (pictured), 68, was also killed on the doomed flight

STATEMENT FROM ANTHONY MASLIN AND MARITE 'RIN' NORRIS Violet May Maslin came in to the world on Tuesday 10 May, bringing with her love and light, hope and joy. Our family was torn apart when MH17 was blown out of the sky by the violent anger of a nationalist missile, on July 17, 2014. Our three innocent, beautiful and inspiring children were killed, alongside their grandfather, Nick Norris. We believe that Mo, whose 14th birthday was Saturday, Evie, 12 next week, Otis, 10 next month, and Grandad Nick have sent us an amazing gift. Violet's birth is a testament to our belief that love is stronger than hate. We still live with pain, but Violet, and the knowledge that all four kids are with us always, brings light to our darkness. As Martin Luther King said, 'Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.' We will continue to love all four of our children equally. Violet brings some hope and joy for us. We hope she brings hope and joy for you too. Advertisement

In May this year, Anthony and Marite welcomed a new daughter, Violet, into the world. In a statement released to the public, they mentioned the pain of the last two years.

'Our family was torn apart when MH17 was blown out of the sky by the violent anger of a nationalist missile,' they said.

'Violet's birth is a testament to our belief that love is stronger than hate.'

Anthony Maslin and Marite Norris, who lost their three children in the downing of flight MH17 over the Ukraine almost two years ago, have a new baby girl named Violet (pictured)

Ministry team workers of the emergency situation of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic and members of the Dutch expert team collect parts of the plane

The children were travelling with their grandfather from Amsterdam back to Australia
Moved out: ACC Steve Heywood and his wife left their home after threats

A police force bought a senior officer's house because he had been targeted by notorious killer Dale Cregan  then cynically sold it to a young couple without warning them of the danger, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The astonishing cover-up happened after one-eyed Cregan  who murdered two female PCs  vowed to take revenge on Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood, who helped put him behind bars.

ACC Heywood moved out of his family home because of the threat. Greater Manchester Police and the local crime tsar then took the highly unusual step of using taxpayers' money to buy it for 205,000.

It was then sold to a young married couple  but GMP failed to tell them the chilling reason it had been put on the market. The couple moved in with their two young children.

The police frantically sent a senior detective round to the house on Friday to 'reassure' the family only after this newspaper uncovered the deal.

Last night the couple  whose identities we are protecting  told this newspaper of their fear and anger at being kept in the dark about the risk from Cregan and how they fear retribution from his underworld associates. They are also now considering legal action against the force.

The woman said: 'I am quite scared over the whole thing  I just do not understand why they did not tell us. I want to know whether they considered it to be a threat and whether at any time they considered telling us about it.

'How would they know if we were still under threat, because they would not have told Cregan that the police officer had moved? I am going to speak to the police again face- to-face and I want some answers. We were betrayed  there are no two ways about it.'

When they moved into the four-bedroom detached property in Greater Manchester, the couple knew it was being sold by the police and noted that it was equipped with two burglar alarms.

Sold on: A family moved into the house in this estate, unaware of its history

At the time, they were simply told that the previous occupant was moving with his job which 'happens from time to time'.

But ACC Heywood and his wife Janet, who lived there for almost 20 years, had actually left a year earlier  after being told that he was at risk over his role in the hunt for the notorious drug dealer and murderer.

In a deadly rampage across Greater Manchester lasting several months in 2012, Cregan had shot dead one man in a pub, then killed the victim's father with a hand grenade. He then made a hoax 999 call to which PCs Nicola Hughes and Fiona Bone responded. They died when he threw a grenade at them and opened fire.

In June 2013, Cregan was given a whole life sentence  meaning he will never be released  for all four murders.

Last week, David Cameron unveiled a memorial to the fallen officers in one of his first official acts after quitting as Prime Minister.

Sources told this newspaper that after his conviction, 33-year-old Cregan confessed that while on the run, he had considered killing ACC Heywood after seeing him make an appeal for him to hand himself in.

Notorious: Criminal Dale Cregan saw ACC Heywood as a target for revenge while on the run

The force considered the threat to be genuine and so decided, highly unusually, to step in and help the officer move house.

GMP said it spent almost 30,000 on arranging the move for ACC Heywood, who was paid an estimated 100,000 a year.

Documents seen by The Mail on Sunday show that the property first went on the market on September 7, 2013, for 205,000. It was finally sold in September 2014, after lying empty for a year, by estate agents Urban Vision for 190,000.

I'm scared. I don't understand why they didn't tell us

A GMP spokesman admitted that the couple were not told of the threat to its former occupant.

He defended the move by saying the threat 'was not against them'  however Cregan and his associates would not have known that ACC Heywood, 50, had moved out.

He left the force in 2014 to become a deputy director of the National Crime Agency, intended to be Britain's equivalent of the FBI.

The spokesman said: 'In 2013, GMP became aware of a threat against ACC Steve Heywood linked to his involvement in the investigation into Dale Cregan and the murders which he was suspected of committing. After assessing the risk to ACC Heywood, assistance was provided for him and his family to move house. This included the purchase and subsequent sale of his house and associated costs. The total costs were 27,528. The Police and Crime Commissioner Tony Lloyd made the decision after considering information provided by the Chief Constable.

Killed: PCs Fiona Bone, left, and Nicola Hughes were murdered by Cregan

'The purchasers of the house were not at that time informed of the risk to ACC Heywood as the risk was considered to be against him and not his former house. There was also a year between the purchase of the house and its subsequent sale, during which time the property was vacant.

'We have since spoken to the family who purchased the house to explain this decision and to offer them reassurance.'

The family is now anxious for Manchester's criminal underworld to know that the police officer once in Cregan's sights is no longer living there. 'Whatever or whoever these alleged threats were directed at, Steve Heywood is long gone from this property,' said the woman.

'We should have known when we were buying the house. It is as simple as that. At the very minimum, that information would be important for us to know because it may have informed our decision [to buy].'

I want to get some answers

After the MoS made enquiries about the extraordinary case, a senior officer from GMP visited the homeowners on Friday evening. He assured them that they do not believe the family are currently at risk, and tried to explain their decision not to tell them of the death threats to the previous occupant.

But the couple say he did not answer their questions and they are now considering legal action against the police force. They claim the officer who attended the family home admitted that the force had been at fault.

'They agreed that we should have been told. He said to me that he understood why I would feel like this. He agrees we should have been told,' the woman added. 'I am thankful for their response but I do want to get some answers. I want to know why the police considered Mr Heywood's safety and security more important than mine or my family's. He can't answer that  he said he could understand why I am asking.'

Tony Lloyd, the Labour PCC for GMP, said: 'This was the right decision to take at that time and it remains the right decision.
There was a time when she looked upon him as a mentor and friend, a father figure even.

He was, after all, the charismatic business hero whose backing sent her financial career soaring, a man who is godfather to her daughter and about whom she delivered a heartfelt speech at his lavish 60th birthday bash at Blenheim Palace just three years ago. She even wrote  and read out  a poem.

Today, Nathalie Dauriac-Stoebe still has much to say about her former business partner, Phones 4U billionaire John Caudwell, but not much of it is complimentary.

The scales, she says, have fallen from her eyes. Because, as we have seen this past week, the professional union between the two has ended in spectacular bitterness, which is now due to play out in the theatre of the British courts.

Nathalie Dauriac-Stoebe in her London office has given an interview about her former business partner, Phones 4U billionaire John Caudwell

Ms Dauriac-Stoebe has accused Mr Caudwell of improperly avoiding VAT at their joint firm, Signia Wealth Ltd, which invests money on behalf of a stable of super-rich clients. She says she has been cast out of the business she sacrificed four years with her children for, had her shares seized for a token 2 and is left in professional limbo, unable to work in her field.

She claims Mr Caudwell told her to take a lie detector test and that she needed psychological help, and urged her to sign a pre-written confessional letter more befitting an episode of Game Of Thrones than the boardroom of a leading finance house. In short, she says he is a bully who owes her an estimated 15 million in shares and has made her life a living hell.

Mr Caudwell, meanwhile, accuses Ms Dauriac-Stoebe of fiddling 33,000 in expenses and  a particularly serious charge in the world they occupy  of losing money at Signia Wealth.

Both Ms Dauriac-Stoebe and Mr Caudwell vigorously deny the claims made against them in almost every detail, most of which have been set out in court documents ahead of the legal battles to come.

Neither side, for the moment at least, is willing to back down.

Today, French-born Ms Dauriac-Stoebe, 38, has set aside the caution and discretion that became second nature as she rose steadily upwards in the finance industry. Finding herself unable to work in her specialist field with such serious charges hanging over her, she is determined to set the record  as she sees it  straight.

She offers an account not just of the finance industry with its tough deals, but of the business practices and character of Mr Caudwell himself, a working-class hero worth an estimated 2 billion.

Mobile phone billionaire John Caudwell has accused Dauriac-Stoebe of fiddling 33,000 in expenses

When I meet Ms Dauriac-Stoebe at the home she shares with Konrad, 40, and their two children  Juliette, four, and Theo, two  in Hampstead, London, there is little sign of the strain that the past couple of years must have taken on her. She looks immaculate in a skirt suit, her striking features framed by a curtain of expensive highlights.

True, she appears unusually focused, determined to prove her detractors wrong. But it soon becomes clear there is a sadness in what has taken place.

I never thought John would do this to me, she says. I was very close to him. I spoke to him most days. He was like a father figure for me. I promised him I would work like a dog for him and I did. I gave him so much of my life and my family life. The fact he can do this to me today is painful.

Frankly, our relationship was perfect until I raised the issue of VAT avoidance. Now, his only aim in life is to destroy me.

Paying me what he owes me in shares is nothing to him, Ms Dauriac-Stoebe adds.

I made him 30 million the year I left the business, so why would he care? Its an obsession. Hes a bully. Hes been bullying people all his life. I was warned many times.

Ive been through so much hell over this, but Im not going to give up. He thought I would do what everyone does in his life: what he wants. He has underestimated me.

Ms Dauriac-Stoebe was the youngest client partner at the Queens bank, Coutts, when she met Mr Caudwell. She had encouraged him to invest in the private office she had set up. He gave us 300 million to invest. He gave the same amount to five banks but we were the best performer, she says.

Clearly impressed, Mr Caudwell founded Signia Wealth with Ms Dauriac-Stoebe in 2009. They both invested 300,000.

Mr Caudwell was already well known, an entrepreneur whose no-nonsense appearance on BBC documentary Trouble At The Top in 2002 is still remembered today. He has since become richer and more famous, a household name known for glamorous consorts, a lavish Mayfair mansion estimated to be worth as much as 250 million, and huge donations to charity. He is also well known as someone who cant abide those who shirk their responsibilities to the Inland Revenue.

In 2009, Ms Dauriac-Stoebe says, she was young, ambitious and wanted to make a difference. In the first year, the firm had 1 billion under supervision. By year four, that figure had rocketed to 2.5 billion.

The business was making money and everything was happy days, she says. Even her pregnancy did not seem to disturb the smooth running of business.

I called him up and said, John, Im scared to tell you this, but Im pregnant. Of course I was scared. Everyone is scared of John. To be fair to him, he was very supportive.

After giving birth to Juliette in 2011, Ms Dauriac-Stoebe was back at work within a week and Mr Caudwell agreed to be the girls godfather.

The trouble started in October 2014, when Signias financial director approached her with a problem.

He said, Nathalie, were not going to do what we just did again. 

Ms Dauriac-Stoebe says she asked him what he meant and he replied that it was the arrangement he had reached about VAT. The details of the allegations are complex. Put simply, Ms Dauriac-Stoebe accuses Mr Caudwell of falsifying two invoices in order to avoid paying VAT.

Mr Caudwell denies falsifying invoices, claiming that Ms Dauriac-Stoebe had in fact condoned a legitimate arrangement at the time and suggesting her subsequent complaint is artificial, aimed at exploiting his strong views on the importance of paying tax. Ms Dauriac-Stoebe says she raised the issue with Mr Caudwells colleagues. They were wishy-washy to begin with, telling me it was all fine and not to worry about it, she says. Now, he is trying to say I knew about it but my job was not to look at invoices. Im not an accountant. When I realised it was problematic and unethical, I immediately decided to address the issue.

Just weeks later, after being given 24 hours to prepare three years of expenses for inspection, Ms Dauriac-Stoebe was accused of fiddling 33,000, using company credit cards for holidays and foreign shopping trips. She denies this.

About 70 per cent of the expenses were to go and see John on his request, she says. They werent holidays. We did in excess of 1 billion worth of deals for him during these trips.

She says meetings took place on Mr Caudwells yacht in the Seychelles and the South of France and at his ski lodge in Colorado. She admits there was one honest mistake: There is 132 of expenses that I should have paid myself. It was for chocolates for my obstetrician.

Mr Caudwell also accused Ms Dauriac-Stoebe of incompetence and being an under-performer, despite the fact, she says, that she personally made 30 million for the company in 2014.

Three months before this, John also guaranteed me a yearly bonus of 300,000 for the rest of my life with him. Why would he do that if I was an under-performer?

Nathalie Dauriac-Stoebe arrives at the High Court in London this month where she was starting a legal battle against Phones4u founder John Caudwell

On a cold November night in 2014, Ms Dauriac-Stoebe went to Mr Caudwells mansion in Mayfair to see his now ex-partner, Claire. The pair were due to go to a party.

John said, Youve stolen money from me, Im going to report you to the police. It was the first time he had spoken to me like this in his life. I couldnt believe he could do that after all I had done for him.

I remember sitting on the pavement outside his house crying, with John shouting. It was devastating.

The next day, she was escorted to the office by two of Mr Caudwells executives. It was then that they discovered no money was missing and they had been mistaken.

They then changed their mind over that weekend. They told me they would start a full investigation. I was still managing the business. I didnt sleep for two months. Just days later, she was once again summoned to the Mayfair mansion, this time to take a lie detector test. It made me feel bullied and abused. I felt it was a tactic to humiliate me and force me to resign. As a woman, I felt extremely stressed by the forcefulness of the accusations.

Ms Dauriac-Stoebe claims that, extraordinarily, Mr Caudwell then demanded she sign a confessional letter.

He also offered to help find her psychological help and, she says, later wrote in a text message: I absolutely believe youre ill and need help.

Mr Caudwell says he wished to support her as a close and long-standing personal friend, according to tribunal documents. 'The letter said that I was sick and that I had stolen money from him. John said he had written it up for me and unless I signed it, he would report me to the Financial Conduct Authority, which would mean Id never be able to work in the industry again. I felt disgusted that after so much dedication and sacrifice, I was rewarded with such lack of respect. It was so sudden and brutal. I felt very intimidated.

A week before Christmas, Ms Dauriac-Stoebe was suspended from the firm. They told me I was fired but gave me a letter saying that I was suspended.

The next day, I woke up and my resignation was on Sky News but I hadnt resigned. I was fired unlawfully and bullied out of the company while being robbed of shares worth an estimated 15 million. I felt abused as a woman and taken advantage of at a time when I had recently given birth to my son.

Ms Dauriac-Stoebe officially resigned from Signia in January 2015 and started employment tribunal proceedings asking simply for the value of her shares.

This was halted when Mr Caudwell launched a civil lawsuit in the High Court last year, accusing her of stealing money from the firm. Ms Dauriac-Stoebe counter-sued and a hearing is set for next year.

Ms Dauriac-Stoebe said: I dont believe Im the only person hes done this to, but Im the only person who has fought back.
Fears were growing last night that a small number of Britons were among those killed or critically injured in the Bastille Day massacre in Nice.

It is understood they have been missing since the attack on Thursday and while their families have been in regular contact with authorities in the UK and France, they have heard nothing and now fear the worst.

In the immediate aftermath, it was not thought any Britons were among the 84 dead.

Monster: Truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel who murdered 84 on Bastille Day in Nice, was described as someone who

Pictured, Police forensics officers inspect the scene of the atrocity in Nice, on Thursday night, as the truck driven by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel stands in the background peppered by bullet holes

But sources confirmed last night that a small number of worried relatives had contacted the Foreign Office.

As heartbreaking stories continued to filter out of the Riviera city, it emerged that five people linked to Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel are now in custody.

Bouhlel, 31, struck on Thursday, ploughing his lorry into crowds watching fireworks on the Promenade des Anglais before police shot him. The attack also left 202 people injured, 52 of them critically.

As police carried out arrests across the city, Islamic State claimed responsibility, declaring that Bouhlel was one of its soldiers.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Bouhlel  who enjoyed salsa dancing and went to a local gym  seemed to have been radicalised very quickly.

However, friends and relatives insisted he was not religious and said he drank alcohol and ate pork.

Cazeneuve added that the new type of attack showed the extreme difficulty of the fight against terrorism.

The arrests followed analysis of the killers mobile phone records. Bouhlel had been in contact with all five suspects on a number of occasions, said the judicial source. One is his wife who has links to terror suspects in Tunisia.

Another is Ramzie Arifa, a 22-year-old from Nice, who spent time talking with Bouhlel before the attack.

MYSTERY OF ORPHAN BOY: POLICE TRY TO TRACE FAMILY OF YOUNG VICTIM Police and doctors are desperately trying to trace the relatives of a seven-year-old victim of the massacre who is clinging to life in intensive care. Nobody has claimed the boy  who comes from Romania  and it is feared that his parents are either dead or critically ill in another hospital. Staff at the Lenval Childrens Hospital, which is treating 29 young victims, including one aged only six months, are monitoring social media to see if his picture is posted by worried relatives. Everyone here is incredibly sad that this little boy is alone, said a hospital source. He has not had any visitors. At least ten children were killed in the massacre. Advertisement

Arifas sister, Arefa Bilet, said the door of the familys flat was broken down by anti-terrorist police at 6am yesterday.

She said: My brother is not a terrorist. We are Muslim but by my brother is not that religious  he drinks and smokes.

He was on the promenade on Thursday night with family and friends when the attack happened. He was as shocked as everyone else.

Meanwhile, Christophe Lyon saw six members of his family wiped out in the massacre. He was the only survivor.

His wife Veronique Lyon, 55, and her son, Michael Pellegrini, 28, were both killed.

Michael Pellegrini (pictured) was killed in the terrorist attack in Nice along with his mother Veronique Lyon

They were on holiday on the Riviera with her parents Francois Locatelli, 82, and Christiane Locatelli, 78, who also lost their lives.

They had met up with Christophes parents  Gisele Lyon, 63, and Germain Lyon, 68. They, too, died in the horror.

The first to die, though, was a Muslim mother-of-seven who wore a veil. Fatima Charrihis son Hamza said she was with her nieces and nephews at the time.

He said: She wore the veil, practising an Islam of the middle ground. A real Islam. Not that of the terrorists.

Eight months ago, 130 people were slaughtered in Paris, which along with the 2015 attacks at the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket, were claimed by Islamic State.
A Grieving father caught up in the Nice massacre has spoken of his heartbreak over the death of his four-year-old son.

Mickael Coviaux and his wife had taken their only child Yannis out to play on the beach with friends before watching the Bastille Day fireworks.

As they walked back to their car, the boy was mown down by the lorry being driven by terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

Mickael Coviaux, pictured, said his 'heart had been ripped out' at the death of his son, who was playing with friends moments before he died

Yannis was left with fatal injuries after his tiny body was flung 30ft through the air. The lorry missed Mickael and his wife by inches.

I feel completely empty, as if somebody has torn out my heart, Mr Coviaux said.

He told how he later cradled his son in his arms and stared out at the sea after the atrocity as he tried to process what had happened.

Mr Coviaux said: It was my wife who insisted that we went out to see the fireworks to make Yannis happy.

We were sitting on the beach with my wifes friend, her nieces and her two children.

Yannis was delighted  he was messing around with his pals. It was a beautiful evening.

Yannis (pictured) was left with fatal injuries after his tiny body was flung 30ft through the air

At the end of the fireworks we went up to the Promenade des Anglais to get back to our car. My son was a little further on with his friends.

Seeing the lorry suddenly veering towards them, Mr Coviaux said he pulled his wife to safety but could not save his son.

The lorry passed within ten centimetres of me, he said.

I went to the floor and when I got up there was this crowd around us.

'I was praying to God that Yannis was safe and sound but then I saw him lying 20 metres in front of me. He was covered in blood.

I understood what had happened straight away.

Mr Coviaux said he didnt want to believe he was dead and that he picked up his child and began running like a madman towards the nearest hospital a mile away.

After sprinting 600 yards along the road with his son in his arms, Mr Coviaux said he bundled him into a car full of strangers also en route to the hospital before they spotted an ambulance ahead of them in the road.

Paramedics began their attempts to save the boy and Mr Coviaux said he then ran back up the promenade to find his wife, where he was confronted by another tragic scene.

He said: Selfishly, in the panic, I only thought of my own family. But then I saw my wifes friend lying in the road.

She was dying in the street in front of her own children.

My wife and I went to the hospital to see Yannis but the doctors simply told me it is all over. They gave me a white sheet and left us. My wife was screaming.

I stayed there for a long time cradling my son in the white sheet, staring at the sea. I held my baby in my arms, my baby who died at the beach.

Pictured, Police forensics officers inspect the scene of the atrocity in Nice, on Thursday night, as the truck driven by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel stands in the background peppered by bullet holes

He was four-and-a-half years old and we called him our little rascal. Once he was on the beach he never wanted to leave. His loved throwing pebbles into the sea.

My last certainty is my son died happy. It was a lovely day. Yannis died with a smile on his face.

Another grieving father Tahar Mejri, 39, wailed and raised his arms in despair as it was confirmed he had lost both his wife Olfa and son Kylian, four, in the attack.

Mr Mejri had already found his wifes body on the promenade on Thursday night after she and their son had gone out without him to watch the fireworks.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge joined thousands of soldiers yesterday to mark the 75th anniversary of the Special Air Service.

The royal party  which also included two-year-old Prince George  unveiled a statue at the SAS base near Hereford, where they met serving and retired members of Britains most elite regiment.

The Red Arrows put on a display and there was a Spitfire flypast as Prince William and Kate spoke to a group of veterans in their 80s, who served in the original SAS during the Second World War.

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, joined her husband William and thousands of soldiers yesterday to mark the 75th anniversary of the Special Air Service. They have often shown support for the military. Here the Duchess greets members of the 1st Battalion Irish Guards after she presented operational medals for Afghanistan, on Armed Forces Day at the Victoria Barracks on June 25 in 2011

The regiment was formed in 1941 by Colonel David Stirling and the SAS barracks are called Stirling Lines in his honour.

Five thousand troops past and present attended the ceremony, including former soldiers previously banned from the SAS camp because they have spoken publicly about their service, such as novelist Andy McNab.

In another show of support for the military, the Duke And Duchess of Cambridge attended a military awards night at the Imperial War Museum, London, in 2012

An SAS source said: It was a fantastic occasion.

Soldiers were not allowed to take photographs of the Royal party or the statue, which was of two troopers and an Army working dog.
Scotland Yards Assistant Commissioner Pat Gallan gave out the certificates during a special ceremony

Fifty police officers have been given awards for their work on the controversial 40 million investigations into phone hacking and bribery, which resulted in dozens of journalists being arrested but just 11 convicted.

The Metropolitan Police awarded the commendations despite heavy criticism of the way they handled the cases.

Scotland Yards Assistant Commissioner Pat Gallan gave out the certificates during a special ceremony last month.

Detectives and senior officers were thanked for their hard work on the cases sparked by the scandal at the News of the World five years ago.

The police investigation finally ended earlier this year. But one journalist cleared by a jury of hacking called the awards a disgrace.

Former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis, who was left on bail for nearly two years, said: I would hope most of those officers would have been embarrassed to be caught up in an obvious stunt by the Met to justify its ludicrous waste of resources.

They had hundreds of officers on this for years, neglecting other crimes, and destroyed the lives and careers of many innocent people.

The Met first faced criticism over phone hacking almost a decade ago when News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for accessing the voicemails of members of the Royal Family  but senior figures on the tabloid were not arrested.

former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks (left) was cleared, although eight journalists were convicted, including her successor  and one-time lover  Andy Coulson (right)

After a host of celebrities sued, executives handed over millions of staff emails and memos to police, giving them the evidence to launch a massive new probe in 2011.

At one stage, 90 officers were working on the investigation, called Operation Weeting. They looked into more than 6,000 people who had their mobiles hacked, including Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller.

The News of the World was closed when it emerged reporters had accessed voicemail left for murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, and as the scandal grew David Cameron established the 5 million Leveson Inquiry into press ethics.

In total, 41 people were arrested under Weeting but after trials costing an estimated 100 million, former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks was cleared, although eight journalists were convicted, including her successor  and one-time lover  Andy Coulson.

He was jailed for 18 months. The Met faced widespread condemnation for the separate Operation Elveden, which looked into public officials who had been paid for information by tabloids.

It cost an estimated 15 million and led to 90 arrests but of all the journalists brought to trial, only two were convicted as juries ruled their stories had been in the public interest. There were 34 convictions, mostly of prison guards and police officers who had sold information.

Another case looking at computer hacking, Operation Tuleta, cost 4 million but only led to two convictions, one of whom was a journalist.
Cops say Joshua Lee Long, 26, used the embalming fluid on the brain to soak marijuana which he then smoked in order to get high

A man arrested on suspicion of burglary has been slapped with additional charges after police say they found a human brain hidden in a plastic bag beneath another man's trailer.

Cops say Joshua Lee Long, 26, kept the human specimen in a Wal-Mart carrier bag underneath the porch of friend Robbie Lee Zoller's Pennsylvania home.

Officers say Long hid the brain, which he had nicknamed 'Freddy', underneath the step and that he and Zoller used the embalming fluid coating the outside to soak marijuana, which they smoked.

Police say the brain was almost certainly stolen, but worryingly they don't know where it came from and they're now appealing to find the owners.

State trooper Bob Hicks told WPMT: 'At this point now, were just trying to figure out where it came from.

'Were hoping that if anyone feels like theyre missing a human specimen brain, bring it to our attention and maybe we could return it to its rightful owner.'

Officers say the bag was discovered by Long's aunt while he was in jail on a burglary charge, and she called to ask if he knew about it.

When he admitted the brain belonged to him she called police, who came round and retrieved it.

A police spokesman said: 'The defendant related that he knew it was illegal to have the brain and that he and (another man) would spray the embalming fluid on "weed" to get high.'

The coroners who examined the brain believe it was most likely a stolen teaching specimen, according to the arrest affidavit.

As well as facing the burglary rap, Long has subsequently been charged with abuse of a corpse and conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of two years in jail.

The Drug Enforcement Administration reports that cigarettes and marijuana soaked in embalming fluid or PCP is a growing trend as it causes the substances to burn slower, giving a longer high.

The fluid is typically a mixture of formaldehyde and methanol, the active ingredient in alcohol, which can produce a hallucinatory effect when smoked.
She was with her friend's family and it was her first trip away from home

Cheeky, affectionate and funny, the texts on Clive Gardners mobile phone are the sort so commonly exchanged between a 14-year-old daddys girl and a doting father.

Full of smiling emojis, excited exclamation marks and text-speak, Emilys messages are those of a happy, home-loving young girl.

There is one, however, that  while he cannot bear to delete it  causes anguish to wash over him every time he sees it.

This was the very last time I heard from Emily, he says, his voice wobbling, as he holds out his phone. When I see this, I think it was some sort of premonition.

Unbearable grief: Deborah and Clive Gardner are calling for a change in the law following their daughter's tragic death

On the screen is an emoji showing a huge surf wave. And beside it, a peaceful, sleeping face.

The text was sent at 9.10am on May 2 last year, little more than three hours before Emily was killed in a speedboat accident in a picturesque Devon harbour.

She was trapped beneath a sunken boat for 25 minutes as a lifeboat crew battled to free her.

He said his equipment was all top-notch

It is a case which raises both troubling questions and dangerous emotions, and not just because of the loss to Mr Gardner and his wife Deborah.

The inquest heard that Emily had been wearing an outsized life vest which led to her death when it became snagged beneath the hull of the boat.

And the man responsible for giving her the ill-fitting vest, and for driving the boat at full speed into a 6ft wave, was Paul Pritchard, the father of Emilys best friend, Holly.

It was Emilys first trip away from home.

We trusted Emily would be safe, says Clive. The knowledge that she died when we were not there to protect her but were trusting those she was with, is unbearable.

No one can blame us for believing Emily wasnt properly supervised. Nor the bitterness we feel towards Paul Pritchard.

'He was not blamed at the inquest. But we do blame him. It was the first time she had gone away without her mum and dad.

Daddy's girl: Emily Gardner was on her first trip away from home when she died

It is easy to understand the anger that Clive and Deborah now feel, as well as the grief they share with their surviving children, Katie, now 12, and Todd, nine.

Emily had known Holly since they were two, but although Deborah and Clive were on friendly terms with the Pritchards, they didnt consider them close friends.

Indeed, when Emily had asked her father if she could go on an overnight boat trip with the Pritchards, Clive wasnt keen.

He says: I phoned Paul Pritchard and he reassured me that his equipment was top notch.

What he didnt tell me was that he had attached a new propeller that meant the boat accelerated more swiftly. I wouldnt have been happy if I had known that.

And I certainly wouldnt have been happy if I had known Emily would be given a life vest that would swamp her. The straps on the life vest were loose and it was those loose straps that were caught on the bottom of the hull.

He assured me the girls would be very safe and, though I still had misgivings, Emily so desperately wanted to go that I gave in.

Emily was certainly not frightened of the water, explains her mother.

Over the years weve been on many boating and canoe trips  we once had a jet ski holiday in Turkey  so Emily was very comfortable around the water and boats in general.

Aftermath: Emily was trapped beneath a sunken boat for 25 minutes as a lifeboat crew battled to free her

The last time Deborah saw her daughter was at their home in Gloucester on the Friday morning of the day before she died.

She says: When I left home on Friday it was just a normal school morning. I said love you as I left but I never for a second thought I would never see my precious girl again.

That afternoon, Clive drove his daughter to Mr Pritchards house where the group was getting ready to leave. Give your old dad a kiss, Clive said to Emily as they said their goodbyes.

The couple spoke to their daughter later in the evening. Emily texted her mother the next morning and at 9.07am texted her father saying: LoL, I am here.

Three minutes later, she sent the text containing the huge wave and the sleeping face.

Down in Devon, the Pritchards, Emily and Gemma Gadsen, another friend, headed into the harbour town of Brixham, where Paul Pritchards 15ft boat, a Fletcher 155, was moored.

The texts on Clive Gardners mobile phone are the sort so commonly exchanged between a 14-year-old daddys girl and a doting father

He had bought it on eBay for 1,800.

He told the girls to take life jackets from the back of his car. They clambered aboard, and headed out into the waters of the harbour.

The inquest in Torquay heard that the boat capsized within minutes of launching after it ploughed at close to top speed into a 6ft wave, instantly throwing all those aboard into the choppy waters.

A Marine Accident Investigation Branch report said that minutes after the boat left Brixham at 11.30am, the driver of the speedboat opened the engine throttle to almost full speed.

The report said the speed and course of the boat in the seconds before the accident contributed significantly to the tragedy.

It also concluded that the weather, tidal and sea conditions had not been fully investigated before the party set out.

The driver was not attached to the kill cord  a device that stops the engine if the wearer is thrown overboard.

Holly and her father were hurled clear of the upturned hull and Holly managed to pull Gemma from under the boat.

But petite Emily, who was wearing an extra-small wetsuit but an out-sized buoyancy aid, was trapped beneath the boat when it became tangled with cleats on the hull.

Once freed, doctors at Torbay hospital tried desperately for 80 minutes to revive her, but she was pronounced dead from a heart attack and drowning.

That morning, Clive had taken his other two children rollerskating. Deborah, meanwhile, was at work when she received a call from Hollys mother Alison telling her: Theres been an accident.

Deborah immediately called Clive who drove to Alisons house.

In tears, Mrs Pritchard  who had stayed at home because she felt the boating trip would be too cold for her  told Clive his cherished daughter was dead.

Clive and Deborah dashed to Torbay hospital where they were asked if they wished to see Emily.

I cut a lock of her hair and keep it with me

It was every parents dread, says Deborah, tears spilling down her cheeks. She looked perfect, as though she was asleep. I cuddled her. But I knew she was gone.

The following few days were agonising. Deborah says: To get your 14-year-old daughters clothes  the last things she touched and wore  returned in a bag marked deceased is excruciating.

The anguish of holding your dead daughters body, so cold yet so perfect still, in the morgue is truly unbearable. I cut a small lock of her hair and I keep it with me always.

Upstairs in the Gardner home, Emilys room remains untouched, her iPod still sits on her dressing table and her blinds have been closed since her death.

Clive and Deborah were appalled when they discovered that the buoyancy aid their daughter had been wearing was an XL adult size, designed for a 45-50in chest, while she measured just 32-34in.

And only since the accident has Clive found out that there are no legal requirements for anyone, even children, to wear any sort of life preserver, let alone a correctly sized one.

The couple are now determined that no one else should lose someone in a similar accident.

Recently they met their MP, who is helping them press for legislation  to be known as Emilys Law  that makes both a speedboat driving qualification and a licence mandatory.

The UK is one of the few EU countries that doesnt insist on this. Its too late for Emily. Nothing can take away the pain of that, says Deborah.

But what we want is some meaningful memorial for our daughter and such a law would go some way towards that.

Paul Pritchard declined to comment last night.
A baying mob of masked anarchists have marched on Boris Johnson's house and clashed with police while threatening to kill the new Foreign Secretary.

The gang of about 100 protesters assaulted officers, set off smoke bombs and chanted slogans outside the property in North London on Friday evening.

At least nine officers maintained a cordon outside the front door of the four-storey, 2.3 million home while protesters paraded a banner featuring Mr Johnson's face and the rope and blade of a guillotine.

The Foreign Secretary was not at home at the time but one protester remarked that if Boris were to return, he would 'probably be killed'.

New job: Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. A gang of 100 anarchists marched on his London house

Mob: Anarchists let off smoke bombs outside Boris Johnson's home and chanted slogans outside the property

The protest was organised by Class War, a direct action group founded in 1982

A female protester was knocked over and cut her head. Enraged anarchists charged up the street after her assailant but were stopped by police

The protest was organised by Class War, a direct action group founded in 1982. It turned violent when a number of men, chanting their support for Mr Johnson, waded into the group. A female protester was knocked over and cut her head.

Enraged anarchists charged up the street after her assailant but were stopped by police. The mob then lashed out at the officers. More smoke bombs were set off and extra police drafted in.

An ambulance was called for the injured woman and the man responsible was arrested.

Two protesters were arrested for assaulting police.

The Foreign Secretary was not at home at the time but one protester remarked that if Boris were to return, he would 'probably be killed'

An ambulance was called for the injured woman and the man responsible was arrested. Two protesters were arrested for assaulting police
Malcolm Turnbull is setting the table for a lavish dinner for every Liberal-National Coalition MP and Senator to congratulate them for winning the election earlier this month.

But one well-known MP will reportedly not be partaking in the sausage rolls, meat pies and chicken satay at the Prime Minister's official resident, The Lodge, on Sunday night - Tony Abbott.

The former prime minister - ousted in a party room coup by Mr Turnbull last year - has rejected Mr Turnbull's invitation due to prior 'family commitments',The Advertiser reported.

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (right) is preparing to entertain dozens of senators and MPs at the Lodge to celebrate election win but Tony Abbott (left) has prior 'family commitments' and cannot attend

The function at the PM's official Canberra residence, the Lodge, will take place on Sunday evening

The function at the PM's official Canberra residence will take place on Sunday evening and guests will enjoy food offerings off a sample menu as the Coalition celebrate its narrow federal election victory.

The menu for the lavish event includes Moroccan lamb rissoles with harissa yogurt, 'Pialligo estate' smoked salmon on rye toasties with horseradish cream and roast beef en croute with stilton cream and tomato chutney.

Mr Abbott is still in the dark on his cabinet future, as Mr Turnbull falls under internal pressure to reappoint Liberal MPs who lost their seats.

Liberal MP Kevin Andrews has announced he believes the Prime Minister should allow Mr Abbott to return to the front bench.

'It would make sense to me to reappoint Mr Abbott. I mean, he's a man who's been prime minister of the country, he's got a lot of experience, he's seen as a figurehead, I think, of conservatives within the parliamentary party,' he said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

Guests will enjoy food offerings off a sample menu as the Coalition celebrate its narrow federal election victory

The menu for the lavish event includes Moroccan lamb rissoles with harissa yogurt, 'Pialligo estate' smoked salmon on rye toasties with horseradish cream. The Lodge following extensive renovations is pictured

Mr Turnbull and his wife Lucy moved into the Lodge on January 24

The function comes after it was revealed Mr Turnbull reportedly donated $1 million from his own pocket to the Liberal Party during the election

The function comes after it was revealed Mr Turnbull reportedly donated $1 million from his own pocket to the Liberal Party during the election.

Unnamed sources told The Australian the Prime Minister made the 'tightly kept secret' donation in the second half of the eight-week campaign and it is understood not to be tax-deductible.

The donation is believed to have gone towards a general poll of funds to pay for television advertising, direct mail-outs and polling.

Mr Turnbull and his wife Lucy moved into the Lodge on January 24.
As Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker, he was constantly locked in battle with Darth Vader and the evil Empire.

But when actor Mark Hamill tried to take his pet dog to an event to celebrate the end of filming the latest blockbuster in the series, he came up against a far more formidable force  beady-eyed officials at the Natural History Museum in London.

Hamill took rescue dog Millie  believed to be a mix of chihuahua, dachshund, spaniel and shih tzu  with him to the wrap party for Star Wars VIII, the sequel to last years huge hit The Force Awakens.

Dressed up and nowhere to go: Mark Hamill and his dog Millie at the Natural History Museum in London

No entry: The rescue dog, who was wearing a pretty white and red bow, was forced to wait in the car, pictured

Millie had even dressed for the occasion, with a pretty white and red bow tied around her neck. Seemingly unaware of strict rules that no dogs  apart from guide dogs  are allowed at the attraction, Hamill led his pet inside.

But shortly afterwards, Millie was carried out by an assistant and taken to a nearby car, where she curled up and went to sleep as she waited for her owner to return.

Millie originally belonged to Hamills daughter, Chelsea, 27, but has been keeping the Hollywood star company while he has been filming in the UK.

Carrying the burden: Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker with his Jedi mentor Yoda

Also spotted outside the party was a pet pug, Gary, which belongs to Hamills co-star Carrie Fisher, who plays Princess Leia in the Star Wars films. The two dogs have been photographed together on set, and appear to have struck up a friendship.

A spokesman for the museum said: The museum is home to many animals but unfortunately our four-legged friends are not allowed, except for guide dogs.
Farmers leaders have stepped up pressure on supermarkets over their misleading invention of fake farm brands which dupe shoppers into thinking they are buying British when the produce can be foreign.

The president of the National Farmers Union, Meurig Raymond, has urged trading standards officers to investigate the practice because he believes consumers are being misled.

The Mail on Sunday revealed last week the NFU is considering legal action over Tescos invented brands such as Woodside, Boswell, Nightingale and Rosedene farms.

The president of the National Farmers Union, Meurig Raymond, has urged trading standards officers to investigate the practice because he believes consumers are being misled

These names evoke the British countryside but produce can come from the Continent or as far afield as Honduras.

The NFU believes its case has been strengthened by a YouGov poll which found six out of ten people believed food sold under the fake farm labels was definitely or probably British, and consumers said they would feel misled if this were not so.

A quarter of the 1,796 adults questioned admitted they did not know if the food brands were fake or real, and 30 per cent were unsure where food sold under the British-sounding farm label came from.

The Mail on Sunday revealed last week the NFU is considering legal action over Tescos invented brands such as Woodside, Boswell, Nightingale and Rosedene farms

Farmers leaders believe the branding is in breach of country of origin labelling rules.

Mr Raymond said: Our survey shows mixing imported product with British product under the same fictional farm name can be misleading to customers.
Detained: Michael Sandford is taken from the Trump rally after allegedly trying to snatch a gun

A Tory MP has vowed to ask Boris Johnson to intervene in the case of a Briton accused of trying to kill Donald Trump.

Sir Paul Beresford is to raise the plight of Michael Sandford with the new Foreign Secretary after he was approached by the Sandford family.

They are hoping to have their son deported from a US jail to Britain to be given the psychiatric treatment they believe he desperately needs.

Mr Sandford is due to face trial in August for allegedly trying to snatch a policemans gun at a Trump rally in Las Vegas last month.

The 20-year-old, who suffers from autism, told police he travelled to the city to kill Mr Trump, according to court documents.

His family has secured the services of the top lawyer who successfully represented Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon, who also suffers from autism.

Mr McKinnon hacked into Nasa and security service computers from a house in London, leading American authorities to demand he face a US court and possible life imprisonment.

But lawyer Karen Todner fought a ten-year battle to stop Mr McKinnon from being extradited, and the move was finally blocked by the then Home Secretary Theresa May in 2012.

Ms Todner was concerned about the treatment Mr Sandford might experience in prison in America, but added there was a chance he could serve any sentence he receives in the UK under an existing agreement with the US.

She said: There is a provision under the repatriation and transfer of prisoners treaty, but Michael needs to enter into a plea arrangement for there to be any chance of getting him back to the UK. There are similarities with McKinnons case but the real difference is he was in the UK and Michael is not. Michael has a long history of mental illnesses. He needs to be bought back here to be cared for as quickly as possible.

Last night, Michaels mother Lynne said: The Foreign Office told me someone went to visit him earlier in the week and said he was not in a good way.

Announcement: Donald Trump yesterday with Indiana governer Mike Pence, who was named his presidential running mate. Mr Sandford old police he travelled to the city to kill Mr Trump, according to court documents

He is now on suicide watch in a padded cell and on three strong pills  one for hallucinations, one for anxiety and one for sleeping.

He is being kept in isolation and I cant even speak to him let alone see him. Its heartbreaking.

At the Republican rally in Las Vegas on June 18, Mr Sandford allegedly told a police officer he wanted Mr Trumps autograph before trying to grab the officers gun. In a police interview he told detectives he was trying to shoot and kill Donald Trump.

Days later, a confused-looking Mr Sandford, from Dorking, Surrey, was paraded in handcuffs and leg irons in a county court.

Last week he pleaded not guilty to one charge of disrupting business and official functions, and two charges of being an illegal alien in possession of a gun. If found guilty he faces up to 30 years in prison.
Smiling assassin: Strolling along the beach on a family holiday, trucker terrorist Mohamed Bouhlel shows off his muscular frame in a picture taken just months before he slaughtered 84 people

Strolling towards the camera on a family beach trip, topless terrorist Mohamed Bouhlel suns himself in a holiday snap taken just months before he slaughtered 84 people on Bastille Day.

The Tunisian-born gym fanatic, 31, ploughed a 19-tonne lorry into crowds of men, women and children while they were celebrating France's most important national holiday in Nice on Thursday.

A further 202 people were injured, including 50 who are 'between life and death', after monstrous Bouhlel brought terror and bloodshed to the French Riviera.

The delivery driver, who was also a keen kickboxer, is believed to have been taking strong medication to control mood swings which had destroyed his marriage.

His cousin told MailOnline Bouhlel never prayed or attended a mosque, and hit his wife - with whom he had three children aged five, three and 18 months - and was in the process of getting a divorce.

Bouhlel is also said to have been addicted to strong cannabis which made his bouts of mental illness worse.

The terrorist, who had been known to the French police since January, had been on the radar for six months for petty criminality.

It is understood he lost his job as a delivery driver when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into four cars and had also been involved in a bar brawl.

Walid Hamou, a cousin of Bouhlel's wife Hajer Khalfallah, told MailOnline: 'Bouhlel was not religious. He did not go to the mosque, he did not pray, he did not observe Ramadan.'He drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs. This is all forbidden under Islam.

'He was not a Muslim, he was a s***.

'He beat his wife, my cousin, he was a nasty piece of work.'

Yesterday, he was stopped by police just hours before he crushed scores of people underneath the wheels of his 25 tonne truck and fired shots indiscriminately at police and innocent bystanders.

He told officers that he was delivering ice-cream to the area and was allowed to park on the waterfront for several hours.

Monster: Truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel who murdered 84 on Bastille Day in Nice, was described by a cousin as a 's***' and a 'nasty piece of work' who never observed the rules of Islam

The front of the truck was badly damaged after it knocked down hundreds of people enjoying their evening

Mass murderer: The Tunisian-born gym fanatic, 31, ploughed a 19-tonne lorry into crowds of men, women and children while they were celebrating France's most important national holiday in Nice on Thursday

Horrifying footage of the moment the truck turned into a deadly juggernaut were uploaded online within minutes, showing a trail of dead bodies left in its path.

Bouhlel's wife was taken into protective custody by police this morning.

Detectives had raided the 12th floor apartment she had shared with her estranged husband in the early hours of the morning and another rented property nearby.
Three relatives of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel are Islamic extremists who were jailed in Tunisia.

They are understood to be brothers and cousins of Bouhlels wife. Police sources said two of them were arrested in 2008 for training with weapons in the mountains.

One said: After release, one, who we think is extremely dangerous, went to Syria, and we are checking if one was in Nice, but he definitely flew to Europe from Tunisia. The third man usually lives here but we havent traced him.

Pictured, Jaber Bouhlel, the brother of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the terrorist who committed the Bastille Day Massarce

Father-of-three Bouhlel, 31, had been in trouble with police and lost his job as a lorry driver after falling asleep at the wheel.

His wife was divorcing him after claiming he beat her. Last night, speaking at the family home in Msaken, Tunisia, Bouhlels brother Jaber said: I was with my parents when we were told Mohamed was driving the lorry.

We thought it must be an accident. Then we heard he was dead and police shot him. We couldnt believe it.
As governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney is used to dealing with the far-reaching effects of the global economic crisis and now Britains decision to quit the EU.

But there is one issue closer to home that has stumped the Canadian  saving a tiny bank for just 4,000 clients at his own headquarters.

Mr Carney has ended more than 300 years of tradition by closing the Banks internal branch for staff because it cannot compete in the modern era of online banking and contactless payments.

As governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney is used to dealing with the far-reaching effects of the global economic crisis and now Britains decision to quit the EU

Until recently, current and former staff could open accounts and receive specially issued Bank of England cheque books and debit cards marked with the figure of Britannia. The sort code of 10-00-00 indicated its status as Britains most important branch, with cheques grandly addressed to the cashiers of the Bank of England London.

Customers could withdraw money from two branded cash machines at its Threadneedle Street building.

But according to insiders, the institution could not offer the modern services provided by ordinary high street banks. With the advent of online banking and contactless payments, we just couldnt keep up, a source told The Mail on Sunday.

Customers could withdraw money from two branded cash machines at its Threadneedle Street building

Clients were told last November that their accounts would be wound up and in the past few months each customer has been personally assisted in finding a new bank. The Bank has also closed the accounts of Government departments, forcing ministries to turn to the high street. The internal bank was a sought-after perk for employees, helping attract experts from the City, but opening new accounts was forbidden once the consultation began.

A long-term customer, who did not wish to be named, said: Its very disappointing as its my main bank account. But sadly Ive been suspecting the day was coming for a long time. I am writing as many cheques to friends as I can so they all have a souvenir to keep from the Bank and its 300-year-old tradition.

Despite the closure of personal services, there will still be a cashiers desk at Threadneedle Street where the public can exchange old and damaged notes for their face value  if more than half the note can be presented.

A Bank of England spokesman said: After a full consultation process, the Bank confirmed to customers in November 2015 that it would close its personal banking service.
Fourteen people have been shot and two were critically injured during a drive-by shooting in California.

The shooting took place at a party in South Bakersfield shortly before 1am on Saturday morning, when people were stood outside the house.

Local police said officers are working to determine how many were in the car and fired on partygoers in the street, ABC 23 reports.

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Fourteen people have been shot and two were critically injured during a drive-by shooting in California

Victims were hit in the arms, legs and chest, the Kern County Sheriff's Office said.

The two people who were critically injured are expected to survive.

A neighbor said when they first heard the gunshots they thought it was fireworks being let off.

'Then the pops got a little slower, and I realized it was a gun, and by the time I looked out my window, everyone was scattering,' Vic Hager told the Los Angeles Times.

Hager told the newspaper he thought he heard about 15 shots, and when he looked out his window towards the house he saw three people on the ground and heard screaming.

The shooting took place at a party in South Bakersfield shortly before 1am on Saturday morning, when people were stood outside the house

He went on to say the people who live in the house are the 'best neighbors', who even keep an eye on his home when he is out of town.

Hager added they are not 'gang-banger-type people'.

About 150 people attended the party, with most between the age of 15 and 18. An invitation was reportedly posted on social media.

Kern County Sheriff's Office said it believes at least two different guns were used by those in the car that drove by the house, while adding people in the crowd fired back at the car as it left the scene.
homes sell at below-average prices and can often be renovated to their former glory at low cost

properties in an effort to break into the Sydney property market

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In an effort to break into Sydney's competitive property market young buyers are snapping up fire-damaged homes.

With blackened walls and burnt out rooms these properties sell at below-average prices and can often be renovated to their former glory at low cost.

Sydneysider Michael Perry bought a fire-damaged property in Busby, near Liverpool, in the city's west with his wife Bianca and friend Jamie Williams in April.

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 Slide me  Sydneysider Michael Perry bought a fire-damaged property in Busby in April for $440,500- After an extensive renovation the home is back on the market for $550,000

With blackened walls and burnt out rooms fire-damaged properties sell at below-average prices and can often be renovated to their former glory at low cost

In an effort to break into Sydney's competitive property market young buyers are snapping up fire-damaged homes (pictured)

The renovated property in Busby is listed with Richard and Wrench-Hoxton Park's Phil Norman- Mr Norman said the property was now one of the best looking in the area and the renovation had added ' a lot of value' to the home

Mr Perry said he had to compete with other buyers to get the home at 24 Guernsey Street in Busby (pictured)

Mr Perry told The Daily Telegraph they had to compete with other buyers to get the home.

'We had been looking for a home like this for some time. We knew we'd have to get in ahead of the auction if we wanted to buy it.'

The trio purchased the property at 24 Guernsey Street ahead of auction for $440,500.

After an extensive renovation the home is back on the market for $550,000 with Richard and Wrench-Hoxton Park's Phil Norman.

Mr Norman told The Daily Telegraph that the property was now one of the best looking in the area and the renovation had added ' a lot of value' to the home.

A two-bedroom terrace at 48 Little Riley Street in Sydney's inner-city suburb of Surry Hills sold in April at auction for $911,000- more than $500,000 under the suburb average.

St Peters, in Sydney's inner-west has an average house price of $1.1million but a free standing brick house ravaged by fire at 81 Frederick Street sold in 2014 for the red-hot price of $790,000.

Both properties attracted buyer interest and huge crowds at auction.

Young couples are beating the housing boom by buying homes damaged by fire at red-hot prices- Pictured is 48 Little Riley Street in Surry Hills

A two-bedroom terrace at 48 Little Riley Street in Sydney's inner-city suburb of Surry Hills sold in April at auction for $911,000- more than $500,000 under the suburb average (pictured)

Young buyers are snapping up fire-damaged properties in a desperate bid to break into the Sydney property market- Pictured is 48 Little Riley Street in Surry Hills

St Peters, in Sydney's inner-west has an average house price of $1.1million but a free standing brick house ravaged by fire at 81 Frederick Street (pictured) sold in 2014 for the red-hot price of $790,000

Talk about hot property- This image shows a house in St Peter's with its ceiling caving in following a fire

81 Frederick Street sold in 2014 for the red-hot price of $790,000
Shams Rahman, the father of the two-year-old who died in a Perth Kmart after choking on a piece of bubblegum, says his wife gave the little boy the treat to keep him quiet in the store.

Mr Rahman recalled being stuck in peak hour traffic as he raced to hospital to reach his son Essa after being told the little boy had choked at Joondalup Kmart in Perth on Monday.

'When I got to the hospital, everything was finished... It's like you've lost all life, all hope,' he told 7News.

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Shams Rahman (pictured) says he can no longer go home because the memories of his son are too painful

Essa, 2, (pictured) died on Monday after his mother gave him a piece of bubblegum to stop him from crying and he choked on it

Mr Rahman says his wife gave the little boy the bubblegum to stop him from making a scene as he was crying in the store.

Essa's mother spent two days in hospital after the traumatic accident under sedation.

The little boy turned blue in the face as a screaming woman ran into a chemist next door and pleaded for help, witnesses said.

A stunned crowd watched on helplessly as bystanders attempted to rescue the child, described by his father as his 'only beloved son'.

By the time paramedics arrived he was unconscious and had stopped breathing.

He was rushed to the nearby Joondalup Health Campus where he was pronounced dead.

It is understood the boy choked on bubblegum which came from a bag of lollies placed next to him in his stroller.

Father Shams raced through peak hour traffic to make it to his son (pictured), but he didn't get a chance to say goodbye

A two-year-old boy died after choking on a piece of bubblegum at a Kmart in Joondalup, Perth (pictured)

Two-year-old Essa Rahman (pictured) could not be revived. His father described the boy as his 'only beloved son'

Essa's father Shams Rahman thanked the community for its support following the tragedy.

In a Facebook post he said: 'Thank you for your heartfelt sympathy with which you shared your great love.

'My only beloved son Essa Rahman Siddiqui was only two and a half years old.'

Paramedics rushed the boy to the Joondalup Health Campus (pictured) where he was pronounced dead

Kmart's head of corporate affairs Tracie Walker said the incident was a tragedy and her thoughts were with the grieving family.

She said: 'We are all devastated by what has happened.

'In respect for the family we will not be commenting further.'

The boy turned blue in the face before he passed out. By the time paramedics arrived he had stopped breathing (stock photo)

The incident has been referred to the Coroner's Court of Western Australia for further investigation.

A spokeswoman for Western Australia Police said: 'Police were called to Joondalup Health Campus at 5pm on 11 July 2016 in relation to the death of two-year-old boy.

'The child had been taken to hospital after an incident at a shopping centre in Joondalup in which the child was found to have trouble breathing and was possibly choking.
Australians are forking out incredible sums of money for bottled water that comes from the tap.

Consumers are copping markups higher than 55,000 per cent for the glorified tap water marketed under purified or organic branding.

Bottled tap water sells for more than $1 a litre while the same stuff costs just $0.002 a litre straight from the faucet.

Pureau Water is tap water that has been purified. It sells for $1.11 a litre in Coles supermarkets

Pureau Water markets itself as Australias purest and best tasting water and sells in Coles supermarkets for around $1.11 for one litre.

It is essentially tap water that is treated in a purification process which Pureau said removes contaminants including chlorine, bacteria, salt, fluoride, and heavy metals.

Chlorine is a salt that is added to all tap water to purify it and fluoride is added to water to prevent tooth decay.

Sydney Water said that tap water cost the average household around $2.00 for every thousand litres.

In other terms, Pureau is sold to consumers for 55,000 per cent more than drinking water from the tap.

The label on the Pureau bottle describes the process for purifying the water of 'contaminants' such a chlorine and fluoride

Other brands of purified tap water include Active Original, Aqua Pura, Mount Everest, Natures Best, Refresh and Water4us, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Natures Best can sell for up to $3.33 a litre in Sydney, a markup of more than 166,000 per cent on tap water.

Owner Warren Peffer told Fairfax that is was so cheap to sell tap water he was essentially just charging for plastic bottles.

He said: Our filters are not a huge cost. Being filtered may be part of the appeal for some.

Glaceau Smart Water sells for $5 a litre at Coles - 249,000 per cent more expensive than drinking water from the tap

Consumers can expect to fork out even more for bottled spring or mineral water.

Glaceau Smart Water is produced using a cloud inspired vapour distillation process and sells in Coles for $5 a litre, or 249,000 per cent more than tap water.

Luxury brand Evian is spring water from the French Alps that costs $3.99 a litre, almost 200,000 per cent more than tap water.

Italys Santa Vittoria water sells for an astonishing $12 a litre, a whopping 600,000 per cent more than water from the tap.

Marketing expert Gary Mortimer said luxury brands such as Evian used images to convey their water was good for you

Sydney Water health advisor Peter Cox told Fairfax Media that many people misunderstood what they were buying in bottled water.

He said: People like to believe bottled water is pure, straight from nature, with no human intervention, but it has to be treated.

Queensland University of Technology marketing expert Gary Mortimer told Fairfax that marketers used special terms and imagery to convey their water was healthy.
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Among the scorched black earth of a Hawaii forest just ravaged by lava lies a bright, glowing red hole.

This is a lava tree mold. It is all that remains of the once majestic Ohia tree that stood tall before 2,000-degree Fahrenheit lava from the Kilauea active volcano swallowed a forest on Hawaii's Big Island.

Photographer Kawika Singson immediately knew what he had come across when he saw the hole, but he had never seen it such an early stage - still orange hot.

Singson was able to capture the Ohia tree's death in sequence, before its trunk was reduced to a shell of its former self.

This is a lava tree mold. It is all that remains of the once majestic Ohia tree that stood tall before 2,000-degree lava from the Kilauea active volcano swallowed a forest on Hawaii's Big Island

Photographer Kawika Singson captured the Ohia tree's death in sequence, before its trunk was reduced to a shell of its former self

These molds are created when hot fast-flowing lava engulfs a moist tree. The layer of lava next to the tree cools and insulates the tree 'from the heat of the oncoming flow'. The lava solidifies as the tree eventually burns, leaving behind either a shell of the tree or a mold

'A majestic Ohia tree standing among many, in the distance the cackling sound of a slow moving lava flow,' Singson wrote about the first picture of the tree.

'It's only a matter of time before the inevitable occurs, the heat, the magma, the singe, the burn, then the fall from gracefully standing tall, to the demise, lying there hopelessly engulfed in flames, in the end, a hole in the ground, the only remnant of what once stood tall and proud.'

These molds are created when hot fast-flowing lava engulfs a moist tree. The layer of lava next to the tree cools and insulates the tree 'from the heat of the oncoming flow', according to the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

The lava solidifies as the tree eventually burns, leaving behind either a lava shell of the tree or a mold like the one Singson photographed.

Singson has been hiking the lava fields since the 1980s to capture these breathtaking photographs

The Hawaiin native has no fear when it comes to navigating the dangerous conditions and getting 10 feet away from a burning forest

'I can actually see the orange glow of the lava beneath my steps as I navigate the heated terrain,' he said. 'I know it sounds dangerous, and it is if you don't know what you're doing'

Singson has been hiking the lava fields since the 1980s to capture his breathtaking photographs.

'I can actually see the orange glow of the lava beneath my steps as I navigate the heated terrain,' he told the Huffington Post. 'I know it sounds dangerous, and it is if you don't know what you're doing.'

But the Hawaiian native has no fear when it comes to hiking miles to get within 10 feet of a burning forest if it means he'll get to capture rare natural phenomenons like the glowing lava mold.

'This was the culmination of all my lava hikes and the countless hours I put in navigating Madame Pele's domain,' he said.

'I'm very grateful that I was able to witness and record all that took place within that little kipuka.'

Capturing the rare glowing lava mold felt like a 'culmination' after countless hours spent hiking the lava fields, Singson said
Two teens looking for Pokemon late at night ended up getting a car riddled with bullets instead when they angered one Florida homeowner.

The 19-year-old and 16-year-old, whose names have not been released, were searching for a Marowak and Tauros when they parked in front of the man's house around 1.30am on Saturday.

The 37-year-old man had been sleeping in his Palm Coast home when he was awaken by a loud noise.

He looked outside and saw the teens' car and grabbed his handgun before he went to confront them.

Two teens looking for Pokemon late at night ended up getting a car riddled with bullets instead when they angered one Florida man who thought they had just burglarized his home (file photo)

Authorities said as he approached the car, the man heard one of the teens ask the other 'Did you get anything?'

He thought they may have just broken into his home and stepped in front of the car, ordering the teens not to move, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

The man claimed the vehicle sped toward him and he moved out of its path and opened fire, thinking the teens were 'attempting to strike him', police said.

After the car fled the man called authorities, but there was no sign of the vehicle anywhere.

But police received a phone call from the 19-year-old's mother the next morning, saying her son had revealed he was playing Pokemon Go when a man came outside and shot at him.

The teens told police they heard gunfire after one of them asked 'Did you catch him?' and then sped away.

They at first decided not to report anything to authorities because they had not been hit and did not find any damage on the car, thinking someone had just been 'trying to scare them'.

But the next day they discovered bullet holes in the rear tire, hub cap and fender.

The incident remains under investigation.
It is believed Brown is currently on assignment filming in the US

Tara Brown is reportedly back at work in the US for 60 Minutes

Australian television journalist Tara Brown is reportedly back at work and shooting for a 60 Minutes assignment in the US.

She has not worked for the Nine Network program since the botched kidnapping of Sally Faulkner's two young children in Lebanon.

Ms Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew, including Brown, were jailed after the bungled operation but were able to return to Australia in April after Nine reached a plea bargain to secure the release of its staff.

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Embattled Australian TV journalist Tara Brown (pictured) is reportedly back behind the camera for 60 Minutes on assignment in the US

She has not worked for the Nine Network program since the botched kidnapping of Sally Faulkner's two young children in Lebanon

Ms Faulkner (centre right) and the 60 Minutes crew, including Brown (centre left), were jailed after the bungled operation but were able to return to Australia in April after Nine reached a plea bargain to secure the release of its staff

The man who allegedly organised the kidnapping, Australian-born recovery agent Adam Whittington and three of his staffers were also jailed in Lebanon and are set to be released on bail later this week after spending almost five months behind bars.

Brown took stress leave until Nine released the findings of their independent review into the case on May 27.

The troubled reporter has been back at the network's head office in Willoughby, Sydney since early June.

TV Insider spied on Brown during a recent visit to the Sydney office and spotted her in full hair and makeup, chatting with co-workers, reportedly before recording new footage for 60 Minutes' opening and closing credits, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Brown's last appearance on the program was an interview with fellow reporter Michael Usher and followed the crew's return to Australia after their release from jail in Lebanon.

'I thought when we presented ourselves (in court) and were being questioned, I really thought: 'We're journalists, we're doing our jobs', they will see reason, they'll understand that, you know, that we are here just to do a story on a very, very desperate mother. And I just thought that reason would prevail, and it didn't,' she said during the interview.

The troubled reporter has been back at the network's head office in Willoughby (pictured), Sydney since early June

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
A 5-year-old Ohio boy was shot in the head Saturday, apparently while playing with a gun in his home, police and relatives say.

Sincere Peek, who turned 5 last month, was upstairs at his Cincinnati home when shots rang out, the boys' mother said.

'[Mom] said she thought he was going to use the bathroom and he went upstairs and then she just heard a "boom, boom" like two times and then just heard something drop,' Sincere's sister, Feneshia McCrary, told WLWT.

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Sincere Peek, of Ohio, has just celebrated his fifth birthday last month. On Saturday, he was found shot in the head while apparently playing with a gun in his Cincinnati home

Sincere, remember as a bright boy with a warm smile, loved riding his bike and playing with friends

Sincere's 11-year-old brother, Omarion, was sleeping at the time. He woke up to the sound of gunshots  and found his little brother while his heart was still beating.

'I pick him up and I carry him,' Omarion told WCPO.

'I ran with him all the way downstairs, told my mama, "Call 911,"  ran to the neighbors.

The mother attempted to revive the boy while she called 911.

Sincere was rushed to Children's Hospital but succumbed to his injuries.

Police is yet to say who fired the shots or who owned the gun.

Lt. Steve Sanders, of the Cincinnati Police Department, said initial reports indicate Sincere may have shot himself with playing with a gun, WCPO reported.

But the spokesman added if may be too early to know for sure and police continue to investigate the death.

'I never would think that this would hit home and it just hurts so bad,' McCray told WLWT.

'I'm trying to stay strong for my mother, but it's like how, just how can you stay strong?'

Family members are distraught as they remember Sincere as a bright boy with a warm smile. He loved riding his bicycle and enjoyed playing with his friends.

'I just ask God, 'Why? Just, why us?' McCrary told WLWT.

She added: 'I'll miss seeing his smile.

'Every time I see him, he always come up to me and he always say, 'What's up, Ne?' and shakes my hand.'

Sincere's sister, Feneshia, says the family is trying to stay strong in the aftermath of the tragedy

The shooting happened in the city's Madisonville neighborhood and was the second this week involving a young child.

Police say a man and a 2-year-old child were shot and wounded as the man was placing the child in a vehicle Wednesday night.

Ernest Cephas, 35, has been arrested on charges of felonious assault.
Leon Jayet-Cole's gravestone has the name of the man accused of killing him etched into it.

The five-year-old autistic boy died last May after being rushed to hospital in Christchurch, New Zealand with a serious head injury. His stepfather, James Roberts, was charged with the little boy's murder.

Before the case could go to trial, Roberts was found dead in early July while out on bail in a suspected suicide, according to Newshub.

But not before the little boy's gravestone was etched with an epitaph that names the boy as the 'loved son' of his mother and stepfather.

That is something Leon's birth father, Michael Cole, cannot bear. He has launched a fight to have it removed.

Leon Jayet-Cole's gravestone in a cemetery in Christchurch, New Zealand, which says: 'Dearly loved son of Emma and James'. James is James Roberts, Leon's accused killer

Leon was five when he died in May 2015 after being rushed to hospital with a serious head injury

Leon's mother, Emma Jayet, and his stepfather and accused killer, James Roberts

Leon's father, Michael Cole, is fighting to have James Roberts' name removed from his son's graveston

The gravestone reads: 'Leon Michael Jayet-Cole (Roberts) 19.4.2010 - 28.5.2015 Dearly loved son of Emma and James'.

Mr Cole says he wasn't asked about the inscription, Stuff.co.nz reports.

'I want to be able to go there and relieve some of my anger through grief.'

'How could I stand there and look at [Roberts' name]? It just wouldn't be right.'

Any mention of Roberts should be removed and it amended to reflect that he was the father, he told Stuff.co.nz

Mr Cole previously said he had repeatedly attempted to get better support for his children, who he believed were in a dangerous situation in the home with Roberts, New Zealand radio station Newstalk ZB reported.

Leon's grave in the Avonhead Park Cemetery in Christchurch, on the South Island of New Zealand

Leon was one of three children Ms Jayet and Mr Cole had before they separated in 2010 following a volatile relationship

His lawyer, Alexandra Beaumont, had written to Ms Jayet but had received no response.

'Emma shouldn't have put [the inscription] up without consultation with Michael, who's a guardian as well,' she said.

She said she'd contact Ms Jayet again about changing - and paying for changing - the gravestone.

If not, she intended to apply for a forced change in the city's High Court.

Mr Cole and Ms Jayet had three children together but they separated in 2010 after a 'volatile' relationship, Stuff.co.nz reported.

Ms Jayet was granted custody of the children, although Mr Cole now sees them once a week.

Although she had stood by Roberts after Leon's death, she recently said she realised Roberts was responsible when she saw her son's autopsy.

Mr Cole said Roberts should never have been granted bail, he told Newstalk ZB.

'Whether he's innocent or guilty, we could have got to the bottom of this, and I wouldn't be left with this great big hole in my life.'

Roberts (pictured) was found dead in early July in a suspected suicide as he awaited trial
A white supremacist was taken into custody on Saturday on suspicion of a triple murder in Washington.

Brent Luyster, 35, was arrested after one woman drove to a convenience store in Woodland on Friday night with a gunshot wound to the face, alerting police that three others had been shot.

Police released a photo of Luyster and the tattoos covering his arms, torso and back in an appeal to the public as they launched a manhunt warning he was 'armed and extremely dangerous'.

An investigation is ongoing, but police said the shooting was not racially motivated.

Brent Luyster, 35, (pictured with Skinhead, Hitler and Nazi tattoos) was taken into custody on Saturday on suspicion of a triple murder in Washington

Police released decades-old mugshots of Luyster when he was heavier-set as they launched a manhunt warning he was 'armed and extremely dangerous'

A woman drove to an AM PM convenience store around 10.30pm on Friday, and notified police that two men and another woman had been shot at a house about two miles away.

She was unable to speak because of her injuries, but she identified Luyster as the gunman through a handwritten note to the police.

She is still in the hospital although her condition is unclear.

Police found the bodies of the two men outside the house at 4006 NW 417th Street, while the woman was dead inside.

None of the victims' names have been released, but Sergeant Tony Barnes told the New York Daily News they were all white.

Police believe Luyster was looking for something when he opened fire.

Police launched an online appeal showing Luyster's tattoos, which includes 'skinhead' scrawled over his abdomen. Adolf Hitler and other Nazi Germany symbols are tattooed on his back.

A friend wrote on his Facebook page on Saturday: 'My heart breaks that my comrade Brent Luyster is on the loose with multiple body bags in tow, brother ODIN is calling for you, may you have a proper taking into Valhalla......'

Police received a tip and arrested Luyster at 4.15pm on Saturday while he was in his gold Ford Explorer on the Ocean Beach Highway.

The Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office issued a tweet announcing Luyster's arrest, adding that he was taken into custody 'peacefully by his choice'.

Police received a tip and arrested Luyster at 4.15pm on Saturday while he was in his gold Ford Explorer (pictured, with sheriff's vehicle in foreground) on the Ocean Beach Highway

None of the victims' names have been released, but Sergeant Tony Barnes told the New York Daily News they were all white

Luyster was due in court on Monday after he pleaded not guilty to assault, harassment and illegal firearm possession in the face of allegations that he pistol whipped his ex-girlfriend on May 16

Spokesman Fred Neiman said: 'We are very pleased that Mr. Luyster was taken into custody without incident. We were fearful that, given what we know of him, it might have been a different story,' The Columbian reported.

Luyster was due in court on Monday after he pleaded not guilty to assault, harassment and illegal firearm possession in the face of allegations that he pistol whipped his ex-girlfriend on May 16.

He has a lengthy criminal history stretching back to 1988 when he was just seven.

The Anti-Defamation League has described him as a white supremacist along with his brother Robert Luyster in 2013.

The 35-year-old pleaded guilty and served 90 days in jail for rioting with a weapon after he was accused of pointing a loaded gun at a black man in a Vancouver, Washington, tavern because he became angered by an interracial couple.

He used a racial slur and when another black customer intervened, Luyster started threatening to kill the couple, according to court documents cited by KPTV.

The Columbian reported he was involved in a drive-by shooting, taking a motor vehicle without permission, rioting while armed, malicious mischief and theft, among many others.
A white former Atlanta cop charged with murder over the shooting of a 22-year-old unarmed black man has turned himself in.

James R Burns was arrested on Saturday on charges including felony murder in the June 22 shooting of Devaris Caine Rogers.

The incident occurred when Burns, who had been called out to help an off-duty officer catch a suspected car thief, first blocked, then opened fire on a car being driven by Rogers.

Burns claimed he was scared the car was going to hit him, but a report released earlier this week said Burns put himself in harm's way and fired at Rogers without knowing if he was even the suspect they were looking for, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Shooting: Atlanta Officer James R Burns (left) shot and killed Deravis Caine Rogers (right), 22, on June 22. An investigation concluded Rogers 'posed no immediate threat' to Burns prior to the shooting

Crash: Burns fired on Rogers' silver sedan (pictured) without knowing who was in it, much less if Rogers was the suspect Burns was pursuing, investigators said. It also said Burns deliberately got in the way of the car

Worse, it was later concluded that there hadn't even been any car break-ins in the area that night.

Atlanta Police Department (APD) fired Burns on July 1, with police chief George N Turner telling the officer that the shooting was an unnecessary and excessive use of force.

'As the vehicle approached you, you were in your vehicle,' said a memo written by Turner.

'The driver of the vehicle posed no immediate threat to you... You did not have probable cause that the driver posed a threat of serious physical harm either to yourself or others.'

Burns had been called to the Monroe Place Apartments on Monroe Drive in northeast Atlanta at around midnight on June 22 to help an off-duty cop who believed a man seen near vehicles might be a car thief.

An investigation later concluded that there was no evidence car break-ins - or any illegal activity - had occurred that night before the officers arrived on the scene.

The suspect had fled the first officer on foot, the Internal Affairs report said. There is no evidence that this was the same person as Rogers.

As he drove into the complex, Burns saw a silver sedan parked on the wrong side of the road pulling away from the curb and heading towards his cruiser.

The officer had initially told investigators: 'I didnt know to block that particular car. I shot at the car who was trying to run me over and kill me.'

But according to investigators, dashcam video from two vehicles showed that he had indeed positioned his car to block the sedan's path.

Burns also turned on his lights and used his siren to indicate the driver should slow down.

That driver, Rogers, continued to drive towards and around Burns's cruiser on the passenger side, the report claimed.

The report says that Burns then exited his own vehicle, slammed his door and shouted for the driver to stop. Instead, Rogers gunned the engine.

At this point, Burns was near the front headlight of Rogers' vehicle. Burns told investigators that he was initially blinded by the light.

Confusion: Burns had been called out to help an off-duty cop who believed he'd seen a car thief who'd fled on foot. No car break-ins occurred that night, the report said, and Rogers was never identified as the suspect

He fired once on Rogers, hitting him in the head. Rogers' car continued on down Monroe Place before entering the parking lot of Cirque Daiquiri Bar and Grill on Monroe Drive and colliding with an SUV.

The young man was pronounced dead at Grady Memorial Hospital, three miles away.

Turner's office concluded that Burns's decision to block the car of a person who wasn't even a suspect, to exit his own vehicle, and to subsequently fire on Rogers constituted breaches of department policy.

'You did not have reasonable suspicion that the driver of the vehicle engaged in, or was about to engage in, criminal activity,' Turner said in his memo.

'Yet rather than allow the driver to drive past you, you exited your vehicle and ultimately prevented the driver from driving away through the use of deadly force.'

Media had initially reported the incident as Burns firing on a suspected car thief, but the report rebukes those claims: Rogers was not the suspect and there was no evidence of a theft having taken place.
The pair were married at 'wedding of the century' less than a year ago

He is also prevented from going within 50 metres of her work or home

Salim Mehajer has launched a personal Instagram account just days after an AVO banned him from contacting or seeing his estranged wife.

Mr Mehajer had previously shared a couple's conjoined social media account with wife Aysha, but the page was taken down in recent months.

The former deputy mayor of Auburn posted to his new personal Instagram account on Sunday, with an image of him sitting alone on a white Rolls Royce with the caption: 'Expect nothing from no one.'

Mr Mehajer later posted a months old image of him and his estranged wife, alongside the words: 'She is my autobiography.'

The same photo had been posted to his Facebook page in March.

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Salim Mehajer has launched a personal Instagram account, and posted his first photo - of himself sitting on a white Rolls Royce

'Expect nothing from no one,' Mr Mehajer wrote on Sunday alongside his first Instagram image, just days after he was slapped with an AVO

Mr Mehajer promoted his Instagram account, which is private and requires approval to follow, on Sunday afternoon on Facebook.

'I've officially and finally joined the Instagram family! Be sure to ad [sic] me @salim.mehajer - "Now put your feet up and have a great weekend",' he wrote.

Two of his sisters also shared his first Instagram picture to their own pages.

'The time has come  @salim.mehajer's official Instagram page. Love you !' Mary Mehajer wrote.

His sister Aiisha shared the picture and said any other accounts with his name were either a fan page or fake.

He later posted an image to Instagram of him with Aysha. The picture is months old and was posted to his Facebook account in March

The former deputy mayor of Auburn in Sydney's west launched a personal and private Instagram account on Sunday

Mr Mehajer had previously shared a couple's Instagram account (pictured) with Aysha before it was taken down in recent months

The pair were married less than a year ago when their self-proclaimed 'wedding of the century' shut down a Lidcombe street in western Sydney.

Despite rumours the pair had split, Mr Mehajer has continued to share images of them together on Facebook.

His newly launched Instagram account comes after the Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday extended an urgent 28-day Apprehended Violence Order from police against Mr Mehajer on behalf of his wife.

Mr Mehajer, 30, has been prevented from approaching or contacting his wife, also 30, who reverted to using her maiden name Aysha Amelia Learmonth in court proceedings.

He is also prevented from going within 50 metres of her work or home.

But company records have revealed Mr Mehajer's estranged wife has control over key parts of his business empire.

The conditions on the AVO could restrict Mr Mehajer from running his million dollar business empire, which is currently tied up in legal disputes.

Mrs Mehajer is the director of multiple Mehajer companies including Skypoint Towers Holdings, SM Engineering and Construction Services, Mehajer Consolidated Limited and Frances St Dual Property Pty Limited.

In some cases she shares directorship with Mr Mehajer's sisters Khadijeh and Aiisha.

'You put the smile on my face, the sparky in my eyes and the Love in my heart,' Mr Mehajer wrote on Facebook, just days after police pursued an AVO against him on behalf of his wife Aysha

'If I did not fear flying, we would have travelled the world,' Mr Mehajer wrote on Facebook on July 2

Neither Mr Mehajer nor his wife were present for the proceedings in court on Wednesday.

The order, in place until 17 August, means the couple will not be together on their first anniversary on August 15.

The lavish million-dollar wedding in Lidcombe included a fleet of supercars, limousines, motorbikes, helicopters, and even a jet flyover.

Police applied for the AVO following allegations of a dispute at the Wollongong home of Mrs Mehajer's sister.

Police filed the AVO application against Mr Mehajer on behalf of his wife after she told police he kept 'popping up wherever she is' and feared he could become violent, a police source said.

On Tuesday, the suspended deputy Auburn mayor confirmed his wife was no longer living in their Lidcombe mansion but claimed they see each other 'every day', according Daily Telegraph.

'Aysha has not taken out an AVO against me  the police are pursuing an AVO,' he told media on Tuesday.

The property developer's lawyer, Matt Ward, told the court that his client did not oppose three points in the AVO, including that 'the defendant must not assault, molest, harass, or threaten' his wife.

He has also been ordered not to intimidate or stalk her.

'Aysha has not taken out an AVO against me  the police are pursuing an AVO,' Mr Mehajer told media on Tuesday

On Tuesday, the suspended deputy Auburn mayor confirmed his wife was no longer living in their Lidcombe mansion (pictured) but claimed they see each other 'every day'

However, Mr Mehajer will challenge the following:

'The defendant must not go within 50 metres of the premises at which his wife resides or works' and that Mr Mehajer 'must not approach or contact his wife' except through the defendant's legal representative.

But he won't have any opportunity to change that ruling until the middle of next month, at the earliest.

Deputy Chief Magistrate O'Brien heard that she had not yet provided a statement about the incident to police and was given until 27 July to do so.

Mr Mehajer is required to provide his own version of events by 10 August.

Mr Ward was outlining his proposal to the court when Magistrate O'Brien intervened.

'Your client (Mr Mehajer) is not here, we can't proceed, it won't come back until the expiration of the provisional order,' he said.

Police also confirmed in court they will be proceeding with the matter.

The provisional orders preventing any sort of contact will remain in place until 17 August when the matter returns to court.

It means if the ex-Auburn Council deputy mayor tries to wish his wife a happy first wedding anniversary, he will be in breach of court orders.

The couple's wedding shut down a Lidcombe street in Sydney's west last year

The AVO means he will be in breach of court orders if Mr Mehajer tries to wish his wife a happy first wedding anniversary

Mr Mehajer (left) has been prevented from approaching or contacting his estranged wife Aysha (left)
More than a hundred children have been reported for hate crimes over the past year with those as young as three being investigated by police.

Figures obtained from 37 of 43 police forces in England and Wales showed that 138 incidents of racial or religious abuse by those under the age of 10 were reported last year - almost double the number of those reported in 2011.

Examples of the hate crimes being reported included both verbal and physical abuse.

Rise: More than a hundred children have been reported for hate crimes over the past year with those as young as three being investigated by police (file photo)

A nine-year-old from Manchester who allegedly told a classmate 'my dad told me not to sit next to Jews' and an eight-year-old from Humberside accused of telling someone to 'go back to Poland' are among those being investigated according to the Mirror.

The three-year-old, who is also from Manchester, reportedly caused 'harassment, alarm or distress' to his victim.

One eight-year-old girl from Cheshire was accused of sustaining the abuse towards a female victim for two years.

In the south west, Devon and Cornwall Police are investigating a nine-year-old boy who was allegedly wielding a knife as he shouted racial abuse as well as an eight-year-old who reportedly said they would 'kill us all' about people of different religious beliefs.

Many of those being investigated are over racial or religious assault or slurs both in and outside the classroom but there are also incidents of arson and other more serious crimes.

Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton, NPCC lead for Hate Crime, told MailOnline: 'Children under 10 are below the age of criminal responsibility. They cannot be prosecuted for any offence.

'Police can take reports of any hate incident but in cases involving children under 10 police will not take any criminal action against a child.

'Police may however work with families, schools and other agencies to ensure that there is a proportionate and age appropriate response to these issues.'

Serious: Many of those being investigated are over racial or religious assault or slurs both in and outside the classroom but there are also incidents of arson and other more serious crimes (file photo)

The shocking number of children being investigated comes as a spike in racially-led hate crimes are seen across the UK following Brexit.

There was a increase in the number of hate crime reported online following the EU Referendum according to the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC).

The NPCC said there were 85 reports made to True Vision, an online hate crime reporting site, between Thursday and Sunday after the referendum - a rise of 57 per cent compared to the 54 made on the corresponding four days four weeks earlier.

Assistant Chief Constable Mark Hamilton said at the time: 'At the national level, the vast majority of people are continuing to go about their lives in safety and security and there have been no major spikes in tensions reported.

'However, we are seeing an increase in reports of hate crime incidents to True Vision.

'This is similar to the trends following other major national or international events. In previous instances, crime levels returned to normal relatively quickly but we are monitoring the situation closely.'
Truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel spent two days preparing his deadly attack by driving up and down the Nice promenade before he killed 84 people, it was revealed today.

Video surveillance which has been viewed by investigators shows Bouhlel, 31, at the wheel of the hired lorry on Tuesday and Wednesday driving up and down the famous Promenade des Anglais.

According to sources, he can be seen observing the scene carefully as he plots his assault on the Bastille Day revellers.

The revelation comes as French police today arrested a man and a woman believed to be linked to Bouhlel - bringing the total number of those being held to six after they released Bouhlel's wife.

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Raids: A man covered with a towel is apprehended by French police on Saturday as the investigation continues

Arrests: An officer was spotted examining a vehicle just yards from where a man covered in a towel was apprehended by officers on Saturday

And the French health minister Marisol Touraine today confirmed that 85 people are still in hospital following the attack, with 18 - including one child - in a life-threatening condition.

The new figures come as haunting text messages were found on the killer's phone, with one reading: 'It's good. I have the equipment.'

Another added: 'Brought more weapons. Bringing in 5.'

On Saturday, a suspect with his head covered by a towel was held by French police as part of coordinated raids linked to the investigation into the atrocity.

Three men were detained on Saturday morning along with a fourth who was held on Friday night. Bouhlel's estranged wife Hajer Khalfallah has also been questioned by anti terror experts.

It comes as eyewitnesses revealed that police vans which were parked to block off the promenade in Nice were moved just hours before the lorry driven by Bouhlel carried out his attack.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the tragic incident and described Bouhlel, 31, as a 'soldier of the Islamic State'.

Just 60 officers were on duty even though France was on heightened alert amid fears that the French Riviera city was a target for attack due to the large number of jihadists which had fled Nice for Syria.

And before the shocking attack on Thursday, French authorities withdrew four police vans which blocked off the Promenade des Anglais, reports the Sunday Telegraph.

Around 30,000 had gathered on the famous seafront to celebrate Bastille Day and many were watching a live band perform on a stage when the 19-tonne lorry careered towards terrified locals.

It also emerged yesterday that the terrorist hired the vehicle - which became a weapon of mass murder - from a rental company 30 minutes west of Nice.

The manager at the Via Location branch told of the moment she came face-to-face with the ISIS killer when he hired the 19-tonne lorry.

She said: 'The terrorist demanded the biggest vehicle we have. The heaviest, the most powerful, the most massive, to create the maximum number of victims.

'We only rent out lorries here, not weapons, not Kalashnikovs. We are all very shocked. We all live in Nice and are thinking of the families.'

Dead: Trucker terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel killed at least 84 people - including 10 children - after driving a lorry into a Bastille Day crowd

Carnage: The lorry driven by Bouhel was covered in bullet holes after French police shot at the vehicle when it was being driven in Nice

The new arrests come as ISIS claimed responsibility for the Nice terrorist attack and described Bouhlel as a 'soldier'

He was due to return the vehicle on Wednesday, 24 hours before he drove into crowds enjoying the July 14 Bastille Day fireworks on the promenade.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said father-of-three Bouhlel, who worked as a delivery driver in Nice rapidly descended into extremism after separating from his wife two years ago.

Authorities are investigating whether he acted alone or with accomplices, and if his motives were connected to radical Islam.

The arrests on Saturday concerned the attacker's 'close entourage' and were made in two different areas of Nice.

Around 40 elite police officers were seen raiding a small apartment at Rue Miollis - north of the central station - where one man was arrested.

The arrests come after a video showed French police grappling with a second man, just moments after shooting dead Bouhlel on Thursday night.

Several officers were seen grappling with a man at the rear of the truck which drove for more than a mile targeting innocent tourists walking along the popular Promenade des Anglais in the city.

Lair: Officers searched the last known home of truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel in Nice, France

Promenade of terror: Around 40 elite police officers were seen raiding a small apartment at Rue Miollis (pictured) - north of the central station - where one individual was arrested

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, there were conflicting reports about a possible second gunman.

France has begun a period of national mourning for the 84 people who were killed following the attack in Nice.

Police raided Bouhlels home and held his estranged wife for questioning after he drove a truck into a crowd celebrating France's National Day.

Officers discovered two automatic weapons, ammunition, a mobile phone and documents in the truck, as well as fake weapons at his home.

Bouhel was married with three children but it was reported that he and his wife were going through divorce proceedings.

The new arrests came as French President Francois Hollande met with the head of the armed forces and ministers after calling a meeting of his top security advisors in Paris.
An Australian couple were among a panic-stricken tour group that was attacked by a swarm of wasps while climbing Sri Lankas Sigirya Rock.

Sue Lalor and husband Peter were nearing the top of the 200metre landmark when a stampede of screaming people ran down the narrow staircase towards them.

They bolted towards an overcrowded safety cage installed as protection against the frequent attacks but it was so full Peter got trapped outside.

Frightened tourists take shelter during a wasp attack in Sri Lanka. Australian Sue Lalor said hysterical families were screaming inside the shelter during the attack

Sue Lalor (pictured) was visiting Sri Lanka with her husband Peter when the pair were caught in a wasp attack

Speaking from Sri Lanka where the Sydney couple were celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary, Mrs Lalor said all hell broke loose when the swarm descended on the group.

She told Daily Mail Australia: We could hear screaming and then we saw people running down the stairs.

Peter couldnt fit inside the shelter and he had to hide outside under a tarpaulin.

There were families and children inside the shelter who were hysterical and screaming. They tell you youre meant to stay quiet and calm in a wasp attack.

The Lalors were climbing to the top of Sigirya Rock (pictured) when they heard screaming from a group up ahead

Panicked tourists bolted for safety inside this mesh shelter. It was so overcrowded that some tourists were left outside, screaming in pain as they were repeatedly stung

Tourists who did not make it to safety screamed in pain and writhed in agony on the ground while the swarm attacked them, Mrs Lalor said.

Luckily her husband managed to wriggle out from the tarpaulin and slip inside the shelter.

Others were less fortunate.

There were people stuck on the stairs outside getting attacked, she said.

A tourist is pictured through the protective netting pulling a wasp sting from another man's face

Mrs Lalor takes shelter inside the netting. She said: 'People tried to come down the stair case to find shelter but they were all attacked'

She continued: One Chinese man was so badly stung his entire body was covered. He couldnt even speak. He was semi-conscious. He was in a bad way.

People tried to come down the stair case to find shelter but they all were attacked.

Eventually staff at the monument rallied and drove away the swarm with kerosene and smoke screens.

Then began the task of moving the traumatised and injured group back to ground level.

One Chinese woman had to be carried down the stairs, Mrs Lalor said.

She couldnt even walk.

A staff member at the UNESCO Heritage Site dons a protective suit to ward off the wasps. He is pictured through the netting of a protective cage

The wasp attack on Sigirya Rock was the third that week. Despite their prevalence, Mrs Lalor said staff seemed completely unprepared. Pictured are warning signs at the base of the rock

Sigirya Rock, or Lion Rock, is an ancient monument in central Sri Lanka.

Visitors must climb 200metres of winding, single-file staircases to reach the peak.

Wasp attacks are common at Sigirya Rock  the attack the Lalors were caught in was reportedly the third that week.

Despite their frequent occurrence, Mrs Lalor said staff at the UNESCO Heritage Site were not well prepared for the emergency.

One attendant was so traumatised by an incident three days earlier he shook as he tried to close the door to the safety cage.

Mrs Lalor said: Staff really tried hard to help but they just did not seem prepared.

It was unclear who was in charge and the safety cage was packed.

They struggled to find their protective suits or the spray repellant to drive off the wasps.

Sigirya Rock is an ancient Sri Lanka monument and popular tourist spot that looks over iconic water gardens. Pictured is the view from the top of rocks

To reach the top of Sigirya Rock (pictured in the distance) tourists must climb 200metres of winding stairs

When the couple asked locals why they did not try and get rid of the wasps they were told that mother nature had thwarted previous attempts.

One local said the rock was struck by lighting the last time they tried to get of them.

They havent tried ever since.

The couple were speaking out about the ordeal so other tourists eyeing up a trip to Sigirya Rock went into the experience with their eyes open.

People need to know about this stuff, Mrs Lalor said.
A man has been accused of biting a female officer and a male paramedic after allegedly assaulting a woman in Surfers Paradise in Queensland.

The 22-year-old Chevron Island man attacked the pair after they were called to a home on Thomas Drive on Saturday night at about 9.40pm.

It is alleged that the man bit the female constable on her hand when she tried to restrain him and the male paramedic in the same place when being transported to the Gold Coast University Hospital.

A man has been accused of biting a female police (stock) officer and a male paramedic after allegedly assaulting a woman in Surfers Paradise in Queensland

The 22-year-old had allegedly assaulted a 20-year-old woman, had sustained minor injuries and was transported to the Gold Coast University Hospital for treatment as well.

The 31-year-old female constable sustained a wound to her finger and will undergo disease testing.

But the 37-year-old male paramedic did not sustain any injuries in the incident.

It is alleged that the man bit the female constable on her hand when she tried to restrain him and the male paramedic in the same place when being transported to the Gold Coast University Hospital (stock)

The Chevron Island man has been charged with one count each of serious assault of a police officer, a public officer and assault occasioning bodily harm.

He will appear at the Southport Magistrates Court on Monday July 18 for the three assault charges.

Anyone with information on the incident should contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or online.
Police do not believe his claims and say a train accident is more likely

But he refused and they cut off his hands as a punishment, he claims

Lahore man says captors tortured him, forcing him to renounce Christ

Petrol pump worker Aqeel Masih says he was taken from the LDA quarter of Lahore, Pakistan

A Christian man reportedly had his arms cut off when he refused to convert to Islam after being kidnapped by Muslim extremists.

Petrol pump worker Aqeel Masih says he was taken from the LDA quarter of Lahore, Pakistan.

He claims his kidnappers whipped and tortured him, even though the the Quran states: 'Let there be no compulsion in religion.'

When he refused to renounce Christ and accept Allah as his God, they cut off his arms in brutal punishment, he said.

A Christian organisation in Pakistan wrote: 'The extremists exerted pressure on him to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam.'

'Aqeel however, did not give up on his Christian faith and refused to comply with their demand.

'Notwithstanding...his rebuttal, they chopped off his both arms, and absconded,' wrote Legal Evangelical Association Development.

Masih has reportedly filed a lawsuit against the extremists and yesterday appeared at Ghalib Market police station.

But police do not believe his story and think it is more likely that he lost his arms in a train accident.

A senior police investigator yesterday told The Nation that three suspects are detained in connection with the incident.

But officer Ammara Athar said: 'The circumstantial evidences do not support the claims of the victim. Apparently, it seemed that the man lost his arms in a train accident.'

Police sources told the outlet that Aqil Masih is a drug addict who got too close to an oncoming train after an overdose.
A landed gentry family has changed inheritance rules so their 300 year-old stately home can be passed down to the partners of gay descendants.

The Pemberton family, who own Trumpington Hall near Cambridge, won High Court approval for the changes to their trust - meaning any future gay partner will have a life interest in the estate after their spouse's death.

Richard Pemberton, 46, who lives in the 3,200 acre estate with his wife Helen, 42, and their three children, said they had a 'moral obligation' to grant the rights.

The Pemberton family, who own Trumpington Hall (pictured) near Cambridge, won High Court approval for the changes to their trust - meaning any future gay partner will have a life interest in the estate after their spouse's death

The family's lawyers told Judge Hodge the adjustments would bring a 'huge moral benefit' to future generations of civil partners or same-sex couples.

A tax-efficient family trust governing the passing down of the listed country pile through the generations was established by Sir Francis Whingate William Pemberton, High Sheriff of Cambridge, in 1965.

The home has featured in the popular ITV drama Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green.

The Pembertons originated in Pemberton, and can trace their family tree back through a series of High Sheriffs and philanthropists in 16th century St Albans and Cambridgeshire.

Sir Francis Pemberton, a former Chief Justice and Privy Councilllor, purchased the house and 1,000 acres, for 1,000 guineas in gold, in 1675.

Judge David Hodge QC was told this week that lawyers for the family had recently put their minds to the 'financial, ethical and moral issues which can arise with settlements relating to substantial family wealth' and come up with proposed changes to the family trust.

The most modern of those changes is the 'extension of the definition of spouse' in regard to inheritance rights over the hall to include 'any civil partner or spouse in a same sex marriage.'

The family's lawyers went to the High Court to seek approval for the proposed changes with their lawyers telling Judge Hodge they would bring 'a huge moral benefit' to future generations.

He added that the Pemberton family 'agree the changes are in the interest of their immediate family and the wider Pemberton family and give it their approval'.

'The proposed settlement is a fit and proper one for the court to approve,' he told the court last week.

The Judge added that the changes hadn't been sparked by fear that any living heirs might be excluded.

Judge Hodge said the present form of the family trust was 'much in the style of a 19th Century dynastic family settlement' which 'does not include civil partners or spouses under same sex marriages.

The home - which Mr Pemberton's ancestor Sir Francis bought in 1675 for 1,000 guineas - has featured in the popular ITV drama Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green

'The trust is in need of a much needed overhaul,' the judge said, adding: 'The proposed variation will be for the benefit of the family as a whole and therefore of benefit to each individual member.'

Of the changes to include future gay partners - who under the amended trust will have a life interest in Trumpington Hall following the death of their spouse - the judge said: 'These classes of beneficiary will be include after the variation, although there is no beneficiary of those classes in

existence at this time.'

The variations also increased the trust's lifespan for another 125 years, to 2141, and conferred additional investing powers on the trustees.

Mr and Mrs Pemberton, who married in 1997, have two daughters, Jemima, 14, and Madeline, 12, and a 10-year-old son called Henry.

After Sir Francis bought the hall, his eldest son Francis - an Eton-educated lawyer - built the present Trumpington Hall, incorporating an Elizabethan manor house and earlier remains to the estate.

Since taking over the estate in 2007, Mr Pemberton has created a 28-acre solar farm, planted 15,000 trees and more than seven miles of hedgerows.

He manages the 70 acres of semi permanent wetland of the estate as well as managing the land of three Cambridge colleges.

His father Anthony Pemberton, a former High Sherriff of Cambridgeshire who became the owner of Trumpington Hall in 1990, appeared in High Court in 2010.

He asked the court to rectify a document of his inheritance tax 'mitigation' plan which 'terminated' his interest in the estate.

Mr Justice David Richards agreed to put right the error, which was due to the words 'as regards the lease' being left out of the deed,

Trumpington Hall was used as a hospital during World War Two for officers who had had motorcycle accidents.

Richard Pemberton's great-grandmother Viola, a founding member of the Women's Institute, acted as Commandant at the time.
The Boarding Schools Association told teachers in the UK to learn a 'new language' as part of official guidance which is aimed at helping transgender pupils and 'queering the education system'

Teachers are being told to call transgender children 'zie' rather than 'he' or 'she' to avoid giving offence under new official guidelines.

The Boarding Schools Association has told teachers to learn a 'new language' as part of official guidance which is aimed at 'queering the education system'.

The advice aims to help teachers navigate the 'minefield' of gender identity and deal with children and young adults who do not want to be referred to by male or female pronouns.

As part of it teachers have been told to address children by their 'pronoun of choice', including they or 'zie'.

Alex Thompson, deputy chief executive of the Boarding Schools' Association, said the guidelines hope to help school staff who may be 'in the dark'.

He told The Telegraph: 'Teachers, heads and deputy heads were asking questions about these issues and they felt they were in the dark on what was politically correct and had fears of causing offence as young people largely between the ages of 13 and 18 were questioning their gender identity.

'There was a strong understanding when it more obvious and direct when someone came out as gay but not in the area where young people were asking 'who am I?' to a member of staff and these were questions they had not been asked before.

Mr Thompson added: 'It's amazing how complicated the whole thing is in a community where the norms are the ones we have accepted for years.

'It's tricky for individuals that are having difficulty accepting there is something beyond the binary system of gender we take for granted.'

Last month teachers at Britain's leading girls' schools were told to stop calling pupils 'girls' or 'young women' in case it offends those questioning their gender identity.

Head teachers belonging to the Girls' Schools Association were instructed to use gender-neutral words like 'pupils' or 'students' to avoid discrimination.

The advice also banned the phrase 'young ladies' and recommended the creation of unisex lavatories.

The advice aims to help teachers navigate the 'minefield' of gender identity and deal with children and young adults who do not want to be referred to by male or female pronouns (file image)

Caroline Jordan, President of the GSA and headmistress of 33,000-a-year Headington School in Oxfordshire, backed the advice saying it affects an increasing number of young people questioning their identity.

'In assemblies, instead of saying 'Girls, go to lessons,' staff should consider saying 'Pupils, go to lessons,' or 'Students, go to lessons,'' she told the Sunday Times.

'I do not want anyone to think that girls' or boys' schools are invested in one way of being a girl or one way of being a boy.

My view is that where you can use gender-neutral language about people that is a good thing,' she added.

The advice was given to the GSA by Gendered Intelligence whose chairman, Jay Stewart, branded the phrase 'young ladies' sexist and 'transphobic'.

He said about one per cent of the population were transgender and that the new guidance helps them to not feel like 'freaks.'

Some schools have already introduced gender-neutral uniforms, including Brighton College in the private sector and a further 80 state schools.

Brighton College said it scrapped its traditional uniform to accommodate 'gender dysphoric' pupils.

The college said it has axed the 170-year-old code to meet the needs of youngsters who see themselves as the opposite sex from their biological gender.

Instead, the school is introducing a 'trouser uniform' and a 'skirt uniform' for pupils up to age 16. Girls who have gender dysphoria will be able to wear a tweed blazer, tie and trousers, while dysphoric boys will be able to wear a skirt, bolero jacket and open-neck blouse.
The UK's highest profile atheist Richard Dawkins and his actress wife Lalla Ward have confirmed they have separated after 24 years of marriage.

Professor Dawkins, who suffered a minor stroke earlier this year, and the 65-year-old former Dr Who star said their split was 'amicable'.

The pair, who were unable to have children, are understood to be still living at their 3million home in Oxford, where Miss Ward has illustrated some of her husbands work - and 'remain friends'.

Prof Richard Dawkins, left, and actress wife Lalla Ward, right, have confirmed they are divorcing after 24 years

According to the Sunday Times, they released a joint statement which said: 'Our marriage, like everyone's, is a private matter and we are not prepared to share any details. Suffice to say it is true that we recently separated entirely amicably.

'Obviously, this remains a difficult time, one which we simply will not discuss any further publicly. We would, however, like to stress that we shall always be friends and that we will, of course, continue to work together.'

The former couple met are said to have met at a party in 1992 hosted by mutual friend Douglas Adams, a former Dr Who scriptwriter who went on to pen The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Six months later they married, despite the twice-previously divorced Dawkins claiming he was 'not looking to marry again'.

Oxford academic Prof Dawkins fell ill on February 5, forcing him to cancel a tour of Australia and New Zealand.

He described feeling that the stroke had taken him 'back to childhood' because his 'biggest challenge is buttons', but is believed to have made a full recovery.

The author of The God Delusion was taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital, in Oxford, where doctors found he had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke, affecting movement on the left side of his body.

Prof Dawkins initially found fame in 1976 with his work on evolution, The Selfish Gene.

But he became a household name when Delusion was published in 2006, in which he argued believing in God was delusional because there was no evidence to support his existence.

Prof Dawkins released the second part of his autobiography, Brief Candle in the Dark, last year in which he wrote fondly of their time together and dedicated the book 'For Lalla'.

The couple, pictured, met at a party in 1992 hosted by author Douglas Adams and married six months later

Ward began her acting career in the Hammer Horror series in the early 1970s before playing Time Lady Romana in Dr Who between 1979 and 1981.

She has previously described her husband as 'totally different' at home to the 'outspoken' atheist he comes across as in public, stating 'he doesn't do emotional outbursts, get grumpy or depressed'.

After the couple married, Ward, who was previously married to Dr Who star Tom Baker, effectively ended her acting career, becoming a textile artist.

She has also co-narrated several audio books with her husband and worked on the committee of the Actors' Charitable Trust.

Ward is the daughter of Edward Ward, 7th Viscount Bangor, and his fourth wife, Marjorie Alice Banks.
A paraglider had a lucky escape after his equipment malfunctioned and he had to emergency land - narrowly avoiding high voltage power lines - but survived unscathed.

The lucky daredevil was taking part in the Norwegian Paraglider Cup when the wing's suspension lines became twisted, forcing him to release his reserve parachute.

Terrifying GoPro footage captured his alarming descent.

The lucky daredevil was taking part in the Norwegian Paraglider Cup when the wing's suspension lines became twisted, forcing him to release his reserve parachute

The sportsman, from Stavanger, Norway, can be seen initially soaring high above snow-covered mountains, with fellow paragliders flying in front of him

The sportsman, from Stavanger, Norway - whose name is unknown - can be seen initially soaring high above snow-covered mountains, with fellow paragliders flying in front of him.

'Nice day and nice task,' he adds on a edited-in caption.

But as the view below turns into a green, rocky landscape, disaster strikes.

The man cries out as the lines twist and he gets a 'cravat' - a technical term to describe when a wing tip deflates and becomes trapped in the suspension lines.

He begins to plummet downwards as the movements of the camera reflects his panic and loss of control.

Fortunately he succeeds in throwing out his reserve parachute - which can open within a very short distance, and bring the pilot down softly as possible - although he continues to descend at a worryingly fast rate, narrowly missing high voltage power lines as he plunges.

He stretches out his legs as he prepares to land on the rocky ground speedily approaching beneath him.

The man cries out as the lines twist and he gets a 'cravat' - a technical term to describe when a wing tip deflates and becomes trapped in the suspension lines

He begins to plummet downwards as the movements of the camera reflects his panic and loss of control

Fortunately he succeeds in throwing out his reserve parachute although he continues to descend at a worryingly fast rate, narrowly missing high voltage power lines as he plunges

'Big stones,' the paraglider writes jokingly on the footage.

He ploughs down to the ground, tumbling over as he lands among the plants and rocks.

His right knee took all the damage, he explained and he fractured his tibia. 'Hospital said so,' the man said.

He commented afterwards: 'There was no doubt in my mind to use the reserve but I was really afraid how close the power lines became.. Lucky me!'

He is unsure of what caused the malfunction but admitted he was too low.

He stretches out his legs as he prepares to land on the rocky ground speedily approaching beneath him. 'Big stones,' the paraglider writes jokingly on the footage

He ploughs down to the ground, tumbling over as he lands among the plants and rocks
A policemen was killed as an armed Armenian group with links to a jailed opposition leader seized a police building in Yerevan on Sunday and took hostages, demanding the president's resignation.

'A group of armed men entered the premises of a police regiment in Yerevan and is holding hostages under the threat of violence,' Armenia's National Security Service said in a statement.

'One policeman was killed and two others wounded. Two hostages were freed,' it said.

One of the gunmen said on social media that the hostages included the country's deputy police chief.

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Armenian news agencies reported that the armed men were demanding the release of Jirair Sefilian, an opposition leader and former military commander, who was arrested in June

Agencies reported that the armed men were demanding that President Sargsyan quit and that both some policemen and some of the hostage takers had been wounded

Nikol Pashinyan, a lawmaker in Armenia's parliament who met the hostage takers, told journalists that the group had taken eight police hostage but then released a hostage who was suffering from high blood pressure.

'The Armenian state continues to operate normally, police carry out their duties to protect public order and security,' the security service said, dismissing rumours on social networks that a coup was underway.

Media reports said that the group was demanding the release of Zhirair Sefilyan, an opposition politician who was arrested last month for alleged procession of firearms.

'We demand the release of Zhirair Sefilyan, we will only obey his orders. Sarkisian must resign,' one of the group members, Varuzhan Avetisyan, wrote on Facebook, referring to Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian..

The news will lead to new fears that a second coup could occur in a matter of days, following the failed military uprising in Turkey which started on Friday night

He said that two top police officers, Armenia's deputy police chief General Major Vardan Egiazaryan and Yerevan deputy police chief Colonel Valeri Osipyan, were being held hostage.

One of the gunmen, named as Tatul Tamrazyan, has been 'seriously wounded', Avetisyan wrote.

Sefilyan, the leader of a small opposition group, the New Armenia Public Salvation Front, and six of his supporters were arrested in June after the authorities said they were preparing a plot to seize several government buildings and telecommunication facilities in Yerevan.

A fierce government critic, Sefilyan was arrested in 2006 over calls for 'a violent overthrow of the governmnent' and jailed for 18 months. He was released in 2008.

Last year, Sefilyan and several of his supporters were arrested again on suspicion of preparing a coup, but released shortly afterwards.

A shrewd former military officer, Sarkisian has been president of the tiny country of 2.9 million since winning a vote in 2008 that saw bloody clashes between police and supporters of the defeated opposition candidate in which 10 people died.

An Armenian serviceman in a tank looks on as police block the streets to Erebuni police station in Yerevan

Negotiations were underway to resolve the situation, the security service said, accusing the hostage takers' supporters of spreading rumours that an armed uprising against the government was underway

The news will lead to new fears that a second coup could occur in a matter of days, following the failed military uprising in Turkey which started on Friday night.

More than 2,800 rebels were detained after their failed coup that killed at least 250 and wounded more than 1,500 as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed revenge.

Some 104 plotters were killed after a coup attempt to bring down the Turkish government, while 160 people - at least 41 of them police and 47 civilians - fell as 'martyrs'.

The rebel army faction - who call themselves the 'Peace Council' - said they were trying to overthrow the government to 'protect human rights' and restore democracy from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, AKP, which has repeatedly faced criticism from human rights groups and Western allies over its brutal crackdowns on anti-government protesters.

However, Erdogan has blamed his old scapegoat, Fethullah Gulen for orchestrating the uprising.

Muslim cleric Gulen, the president's rival who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, U.S. as the head of a billion dollar religious movement, has often been blamed for political unrest in Turkey.

After launching the coup, the Turkish military imposed a curfew on civilians telling them to stay in their homes, but Erdogan called on supporters to ignore the order and take to the streets, which is thought to have caused the army to relinquish control.
British SAS snipers are being trained to shoot speeding vehicles amid fears popular public events in the UK could be targeted in an attack similar to the Nice atrocity which left at least 84 dead.

Aides of London Mayor Sadiq Khan are said to be concerned about Notting Hill Carnival, which entertains more than one million people in the capital during the August bank holiday weekend.

The new training exercises have been implemented as police fear ISIS sympathisers in the UK may attempt a copycat attack, reports the Sunday Times.

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Aides of London Mayor Sadiq Khan are said to be concerned about Notting Hill Carnival (pictured), which entertains more than one million people in the capital during the August bank holiday weekend

The SAS snipers have now been taught how to shoot through engine blocks on vehicles using armour-piecing bullets.

The training comes after truck terrorist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, rented a 19-tonne lorry before driving into a crowded promenade - killing at least 84 people, including 10 children.

French police have arrested two more people, a man and a woman, in connection with the horrific incident - bringing the total number of those held to six after his estranged wife was released.

Neil Basu, the Metropolitan Police's deputy assistant commissioner, told the Sunday Times: 'Every terrorist incident that happens worldwide we look at to see what the latest tactics and methodology are, and we think about whether that could happen here.'

It comes as the French health minister confirmed that 85 people are still in hospital following the attack, with 18 - including one child - in a life-threatening condition.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the tragic incident and described Bouhlel as a 'soldier of the Islamic State'.

British SAS sniper units are being trained to shoot speeding vehicles as security fears grow over popular public events following the Nice atrocity which left at least 84 people dead

Their official radio station, al-Bayan, warned that other 'crusader states' in Europe are not safe following the attack on Thursday evening.

Al-Adnani, the group's chief spokesman, said in May: 'Know that your targeting [of] those who are called 'civilians' is more beloved to us and more effective, as it is more harmful and painful and a greater deterrent to them. So go forth!'

Police are also aware that terrorists could also target an ordinary high street.
Ministers are aiming to secure ground-breaking free trade deals with zones ten times the size of the EU before Britain leaves in 2019.

Australia wants to strike a deal 'as soon as possible,' the country's prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told Theresa May yesterday.

And Liam Fox, the new International Trade Secretary, is due to fly to the US in the coming days to meet the White House's most senior trade negotiator in the coming days.

Trade deals with those two countries alone could be worth billions of pounds to the British economy.

Mrs May said the early developments were proof she could 'make Brexit work for Britain' and said her talks her Australian counterpart were 'very encouraging'.

Liam Fox (pictured right), the new International Trade Secretary, is due to fly to the US in the coming days to meet the White House's most senior trade negotiator in the coming days. Yesterday the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (left) told Theresa May he wants to strike a deal with the UK 'as soon as possible'

Today Mr Fox revealed he had held 'very fruitful' talks with the Canadian trade minister, who said on Friday that her country were keen for Britain to piggyback on the landmark deal it has just signed with the EU even after Brexit takes effect.

He told the Sunday Times he is 'scoping about a dozen free-trade deals outside the EU to be ready for when we leave', adding: 'We can make Britain a beacon for open trade.'

Revealing a number of countries had already been in contact about striking free trade deals, Mr Fox said: 'We've already had a number of countries saying: we'd love to do a trade deal with the world's fifth-biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU.'

The willingness of leading players from the world's most powerful economies to open trade talks defies countless warnings from pro-EU campaigners before last months' referendum that Britain would struggle to strike free trade deals if we cut ties from Brussels.

In a further sign of the potential for Britain to strike lucrative free trade deals once it leaves the EU, a leading US Senator has tabled a bill calling on President Obama to maintain all existing trade deals with Britain and immediately strike a new deal with the UK once it cuts ties with Brussels.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas condemned Mr Obama for telling the UK it would be at 'the back of the queue' for new trade deals if it left the EU during the campaign.

He now wants the President to commit to retaining the 'special relationship' with the UK to help it 'chart its own path in the world'.

Theresa May (pictured with her husband Philip attending church this morning) said the early developments were proof she could 'make Brexit work for Britain' and said her talks her Australian counterpart were 'very encouraging'

Britain is barred from striking individual trade deals until it officially leaves the EU, which is set to be a lengthy and complicated process that will take up to two years once Article 50 - thee formal process for leaving - is triggered.

But Mr Fox hopes to have agreed the terms of new trade deals with countries beforehand so they could take effect immediately after Britain is no longer an EU member state.

Mrs May appointed Mr Fox, a prominent Brexit campaigner, to drum up new trade deals with non-EU countries around the world as part of her wide-ranging Cabinet reshuffle last week.

However, splits among senior government ministers started to emerge over the weekend over when Britain should trigger Article 50.

David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, wants Britain to start the formal process of leaving the EU this year to enable the UK to start life outside the Brussels club from January 1 2019.

Tonight Boris Johnson (pictured) will launch his own charm offensive with EU politicians when he travels to Brussels for a meeting of foreign ministers

But on Friday Mrs May insisted she would not trigger Article 50 until she had agreed a UK-wide approach to the process for leaving the EU.

This would need the support of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has pledged to do 'everything' she can to stop Scotland departing the EU.

More than six in ten Scots (62 per cent) voted in favour of remaining in the EU, while just 38 per cent backed Brexit.

This morning she suggested Scotland had a veto on the Brexit negotiations, which threatens to delay the process for even longer and could threaten Britain's ability to strike new free trade deals.

After speaking to Australian PM Mr Turnbull yesterday, Mrs May said: 'I have been very clear that this Government will make a success of our exit from the European Union.

'I have been very clear that this government will make a success of our exit from the European Union. It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal.'

She added: 'One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe.'

Tonight Boris Johnson will launch his own charm offensive with EU politicians when he travels to Brussels for a meeting of foreign ministers.

Britain's new Foreign Secretary will tell them the UK is ready to become a 'truly global' nation when it officially leaves.

He will meet Federica Mogherini, the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs, tonight, ahead of his meeting with his EU counterparts.

In an interview with the Sunday Express today Mr Johnson said Britain is well-placed to become 'more active on the world stage than ever before' and would use its 'humane, compassionate and principled' voice to 'do good around the world'.

He faced a baptism of fire in his first few days in the job, however, after the attack in Nice and the attempted military coup in Turkey.

But he insisted his new team worked 'coolly and calmly' to deal with the crises.

Nicola Sturgeon suggests she has a veto over when to trigger Brexit process after Theresa May put Scotland in a 'very, very strong position'

Nicola Sturgeon has suggested she has a veto over when Britain triggers the formal process of leaving the EU.

The First Minister said Theresa May had put Scotland in 'a very, very strong position' when it comes to triggering Article 50, which sets a two-year time limit on negotiations to leave.

The pair met when Mrs May made her visit to Edinburgh on Friday her first official trip as Prime Minister.

The new PM told Ms Sturgeon she would not start the Brexit process until she had agreed a 'UK approach' with leaders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ms Sturgeon's words today will infuriate Tory Brexit campaigners, who warned on Friday that no region of the UK should be allowed to 'hold the rest of the country to ransom' by delaying the negotiations.

Scotland was one of only three major regions to vote to stay in the EU, with six in ten Scots backing Remain. Only London and Northern Ireland were the other regions backing EU membership.

Nicola Sturgeon (pictuerd speaking from Glasgow on the Andrew Marr Show this morning) has suggested she has a veto over when Britain triggers the formal process of leaving the EU

Asked today if Mrs May had given her a veto over triggering Article 50, Ms Sturgeon told the BBC: 'That certainly appeared to be an interpretation that some put on the Prime Minister's remarks after the meeting...and certainly from what she said after the meeting, I think that puts Scotland in now in a very, very strong position.

'That's a position I am going to use as well as I can.'

The First Minister also insisted that the EU's attitude to Scotland's place in Europe has softened since June's referendum result, and the option of Scotland staying in while the rest of the UK 'Brexits' should not be ruled out.

Mrs May's visit to Bute House, the First Minister's official residence, aimed to show her commitment to preserving the United Kingdom following the UK's decision to leave the EU.

But Downing Street denied Mrs May had handed a veto to Miss Sturgeon, who wants to keep Scotland in the EU.

The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (pictured being interviewed by video link on the Andrew Marr Show this morning) said Theresa May had put Scotland in 'a very, very strong position' when it comes to triggering Article 50, which sets a two-year time limit on negotiations to leave

Nicola Sturgeon tweeted a picture of her greeting Theresa May at Bute House in Edinburgh on Friday along with the words: 'I hope girls everywhere look at this photograph and believe nothing should be off limits for them'

Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon met for the first time since entering No 10 today, travelling to Edinburgh for talks at Bute House

Tory MP Steve Baker, chairman of the group Conservatives for Britain, warned against allowing the SNP to delay Brexit.

'No region of the UK should be allowed to hold the rest of the country to ransom,' he said.

Fellow Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin was also worried about Scotland slowing Brexit negotiations.

The former Andrea Leadsom supporter said the new PM had his 'unqualified support' but added 'I do believe the pressure will mount for us to move far more quickly on this.'

The First Minister has said a second referendum on Scottish independence is now highly likely because voters north of the border rejected Brexit in the June 23 vote.

Speaking after the meeting, the Prime Minister said she will not trigger Article 50 - the formal mechanism for leaving the EU, which starts two years of negotiations - until she thinks 'we have a UK approach and objectives'.

Ms Sturgeon has set up an expert group to look at the options for protecting Scotland's place in Europe.

Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House in Edinburgh

Ms Sturgeon greeted Mrs May at Bute House today as the new Prime Minister arrived on her first official trip since entering No 10

Mrs May drew admiring looks from onlookers as she left Bute House this afternoon following her talks with Ms Sturgeon over Brexit and the Union on Friday

She said it could be possible to find a solution where Scotland remains in the EU and the UK, while the rest of the country leaves the EU - a move Scottish Secretary David Mundell has described as fanciful.

She said this morning: 'My position is there might be. We're in uncharted territory, and when you are in uncharted territory with effectively a blank sheet of paper in front of you, then you have the opportunity to try to think things that might have previously been unthinkable and shape the future.

'I think there are opportunities. The positive outcome of the meeting I had with the Prime Minister on Friday was that she said she was prepared to listen to options the Scottish Government would bring forward to give effect to how Scotland voted and we will certainly bring forward options.'

Her comments contradict remarks by some EU leaders, including Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who have suggested that if the UK leaves, Scotland leaves too.

But the First Minister, who met with key EU figures during a trip to Brussels after the referendum, said Europe's attitude to Scotland has changed since the 2014 independence referendum.

Asked if the EU may put aside its own rules and act politically to keep Scotland in, she said: 'I do think that mood is there, and what I encountered in Brussels was a warmth, an openness, a great sympathy to the position that Scotland finds itself in.
Eight men have been pictured arriving at court in city of Alexandroupolis

They were arrested by Greek authorities and requested political asylum

Turkish military officers who fled to Greece by helicopter after a failed coup were charged on Sunday by a prosecutor with illegal entry and violating Greek airspace.

The men, who have sought asylum in Greece, arrived by military helicopter on Saturday after sending a distress signal to authorities at the airport in the northern city of Alexandroupolis.

They were prosecuted for illegal entry into Greece, their lawyer Ilia Marinaki said, adding that they will appear in court on Monday.

She added that they remained under arrest and had not made contact with their families.

Turkish military officers who fled to Greece by helicopter after a failed coup were charged on Sunday by a prosecutor with illegal entry and violating Greek airspace, their lawyer said

They were prosecuted for illegal entry into Greece, their lawyer Ilia Marinaki said, adding that they will appear in court on Monday

The asylum seekers insist they took no part in the putsch and fled to Greece to save their lives 'when policemen started shooting against them'.

Marinaki added that the soldiers - all married and in their forties - feared for the safety of themselves and their families.

Greece claimed it would have to consider international laws before returning them, although it promised to send the helicopter back.

Marinaki, the lawyer representing four of the men, told Greece's Skai TV the men were following orders by their superiors to transport injured people from the streets of Istanbul via helicopter to ambulances elsewhere.

'That's what they did until they came under fire by police,' Marinaki said. 'They did not know a there was a coup and they were not involved in it,' Marinaki said.

In a phone call late on Saturday, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan the requests would be processed 'swiftly' but with 'absolute respect' to what is stipulated by international law and human rights treaties.

His foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, told his Turkish counterpart on Saturday it would be 'borne very seriously in mind' by authorities that the arrested stand accused in their country of violating constitutional legality and attempting to overthrow democracy.

The news comes after Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildrim said the nation would consider bringing back the death penalty to deal with them, after it was abolished in 2004.

The blackhawk helicopter landed in Greece on Saturday after a night of violence in Istanbul, where more than 1,500 people were injured.

The Turkish Blackhawk helicopter takes off from the airport of Alexandroupolis, northern Greece

The asylum seekers insist they took no part in the putsch and fled to Greece to save their lives 'when policemen started shooting against them'

Greece claimed it would have to consider international laws before returning them, although it promised to send the helicopter back

Some 104 plotters were killed, while more than 200 people - at least 41 of them police officers and 47 civilians - fell as 'martyrs'.

Footage shows Greek officials leading the men out in handcuffs after they were arrested for illegal entry into Greece.

A spokeswoman for Greece, Olga Gerovasili, today said that they are in contact with Turkish authorities and will arrange 'the return of the military helicopter as soon as possible'.

As for the eight military passengers, she said: 'We will follow the procedures of international law.

'However, we give very serious considerations to the fact that (the Turkish military men) are accused, in their country, of violating the constitutional order and trying to overthrow democracy.'

On Friday night, the army had told people to stay indoors so that they could depose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but they were met by civilians who confronted them.

Ordinary Turks confronted rifle-wielding soldiers, climbed atop tanks and laid in front of military vehicles in an effort to take back control of the country.

President Erdogan called on people to take to the streets, leading to reports of groups of soldiers surrendering at several key locations in Ankara and Istanbul, including Bosphorus Bridge.

More than 2,800 rebels have been detained after their failed military coup that killed at least 250 people
The body of Cathriona White, 30, (pictured with her ex Jim Carrey) was discovered at her home in Los Angeles in September after she took a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs

Jim Carrey's ex-girlfriend's family have revealed they received death threats blaming them for her tragic suicide after it emerged she rowed with her mother shortly before she died.

The body of Irish make-up artist Cathriona White, 30, was discovered at her home in Los Angeles in September after she took a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs.

Shortly after her family began receiving vile letters and death threats from fans who blamed them for the pretty brunette's death.

But details of heartbreaking notes Ms White left for Mr Carrey before she took her own life emerged at her inquest last month - proving once and for all that the family row was not behind her decision to end her life.

In one of the letters, White wrote to the actor: 'I've spent 3 days now in disbelief that you're not here. I can go on brokenhearted and try to put the pieces back. I could, I just don't have the will this time.

'I'm sorry you felt I wasn't there for you. I tried to give you my best part.'

Discussing details of her funeral, she wrote: 'I don't really know about burial or that sort of thing. You are my family so whatever you choose will be fine.'

She added: 'Please forgive me. I'm just not for this world.'

Now,her stepfather Brian Sweetman has told the Sunday Mirror the family felt 'huge relief' the letters were released.

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He said: 'We've had a terrible few months since Cathriona's death. There's been death threats and angry letters.

'We're just glad it's reached a conclusion and that the truth has finally come out.'

But details of heartbreaking notes Ms White left for Mr Carrey before she took her own life emerged at her inquest last month - proving once and for all that the family row was not behind her decision to end her life

A source close to the family added: 'To lose Cathriona was hard enough but to then have messages like this arrive has only made things all the harder.

'Cathriona's family are focusing on trying to move forward in their lives the best they can given the tragedy which has befallen them.'

Shortly after Ms White was found dead, her grieving mother Brigid was forced to issue a statement denying she was to blame for her beloved daughter's death.

She said at the time: 'There's a story saying I sent Cathriona an email on her birthday nine days before she died, calling her a failure. I don't know who would say such lies, but this never, ever happened. I am devastated people would say this.

'I absolutely adored Cathriona, like I adore all my three children. They are my life and I'm so proud of all of them.

'From the moment she was born, I cherished her. Calling her a failure is never something I would never have done. It's an awful thing to say to anyone, let alone your own child.'

Ms White was discovered by two of her friends and Mr Carrey's personal assistant Nicole Montez on September 28 after they went to her home to check on her.

Ms White was discovered by two of her friends and Mr Carrey's personal assistant Nicole Montez on September 28 after they went to her home to check on her

According to the coroner's report, Mr Carrey had sent a text message to Ms White a day before her body was found asking where his painkillers had gone from under his sink.

It is understood he was referring to the prescription drugs Ambien, Percocet and Propranolol , made out to the name 'Arthur King', which were found at Ms White's home, the report said.

Ms White's cause of death was given as 'multiple drug effects' after a toxicology report discovered propranolol, zolpidem, oxycodone and oxymorphone in her system.

The last activity on Ms White's phone was a three-minute FaceTime call with Mr Carrey four days before she was found, the coroner said.

Her friend Dennis Bradshaw told investigators she was 'happy and upbeat' but would get 'really down' and her friends would not hear from her for a while.

Ms White told Mr Bradshaw she was missing her family in Ireland and she was 'madly in love with Jim' but their relationship was a 'rollercoaster', he said.

Mr Carrey (pictured centre) carried the coffin at Ms White's funeral in the village of Cappawhite, Co Tipperary, in October as she was laid to rest beside her late father

'She tied her identity to him and if she felt he (Jim) was slipping away, she would become depressed,' the report said.

Mr Carrey was 'reclusive' due to his celebrity status and Ms White would often stay at his home, Mr Bradshaw told investigators.

Another friend, Jenny Burpee, said Mr Carrey had first 'unexpectedly' broken up with Ms White in 2013 and she had 'not eaten or slept for a year afterwards'.

Ms Burpee said she believed Ms White had previously taken an overdose of pills around two years earlier.

Mr Carrey carried the coffin at Ms White's funeral in the village of Cappawhite, Co Tipperary, in October as she was laid to rest beside her late father.

The actor described Ms White's death as like being 'hit with a lightning bolt'.

Ms White had moved to Los Angeles in 2009 and took roles as an extra on television before working behind the scenes.
Parramatta Eels boss Steve Sharp has backed the NSW government's decision to appoint an administrator to the club after it was announced the entire board of directors would be sacked.

He said that 'As chairman I believe that a temporary administrator is the only solution to overcome the political, constitutional and organisational challenges facing our club,' according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

'It is the best outcome for our members, staff and players going forward and I call on all remaining board members to support this club-first initiative.'

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Parramatta Eels boss Steve Sharp (pictured) has sensationally quit just hours after the NSW government announced it would sack the entire board of directors at the club

Parramatta Eels boss Steve Sharp has backed the NSW government's decision to appoint an administrator to the club

Sharp wrote a letter to Eels members on Saturday evening in which he confirmed his resignation.

In the letter he added that 'persons with improper motives will always seek to gain control of our great Club and will by any means necessary attack, blackmail, or smear those in power to do so', according to the Daily Telegraph.

'Regrettably I will not be a part of that future but I trust that the State of NSW will be able to do what myself and the Board were unable to do and overcome the political, constitutional and organisational challenges that need to be addressed at the Club before handing it back to the members and a revamped, constitutionally elected Board,' he said.

Sharp's decision comes after Deputy NSW premier Troy Grant announced on Saturday morning he would sack the Eels board of directors as early as Monday.

Grant said the axe could fall on the embattled board within days and he would appoint a temporary administrator after the NRL club's plans to appeal some of the penalties for salary cap breaches.

The Parramatta Leagues club is under investigation by Liquor & Gaming NSW and the government believes it has enough evidence to remove the board.

Grant will have the power to move should he receive advice from the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority.

NSW Deputy Premier Troy Grant will move to disband the Parramatta Eels board after salary cap breaches and an investigation by Liquor and Gaming NSW

A view of Parramatta Leagues Club in Sydney, Australia. The NSW government plan to sack the NRL club's board on Monday

The Eels were fined $1million for the breach and were deducted 12 competition points

It was revealed that the rugby league team had broken the salary cap for three years, using under the table payments and dodgy tax invoices

'Obviously the news is terrible out of Parramatta,' Grant told Sydney radio station 2GB.

'If there's a call from the fans, the members, and the broader industry of registered clubs, then I will move onto it immediately, and as soon as that advice is at hand, make a determination and advise everyone.'

Grant described the Parramatta board as selfish.

'You've got to put service above self in anything that you do in public administration or administration of a body that's on behalf of others. I'm not sure that's being done,' he said.

NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg welcomed the move, saying via Twitter: 'Lots of questions & concerns re Eels. We strongly support any government move to make the Parramatta Eels strong. Players and fans deserve it!'

The NRL has already banned chairman Steve Sharp, deputy chairman Tom Issa and director Peter Serraro as part of the club's sanctions.

The government is now seeking a fresh start in removing the remaining directors.

NRL CEO Todd Greenburg spoke out in support of Deputy Premier Troy Grant's decision via Twitter

Mr Greenburg said there were lots of 'questions and concerns' about the embattled Parramatta team

The Eels announced their intent to appeal their fine and points deduction on Friday afternoon

The Eels on Friday announced plans to fight some of the sanctions, including a $1million fine and loss of 12 competition points.

It came as the club struck down three bids by separate groups to call an emergency general meeting to unseat the board.

Parramatta Leagues Club chief executive Bevan Paul said there were 'legal problems' with the proposals for an EGM and voted them all down.

The Eels were found to have engaged in $3million worth of systemic salary cap breaches since 2013 through the use of illegal third party deals, issuing false invoices and under-the-table player payments.

John Boulos, who was hired as permanent CEO in January this year, was fired as part of the team's punishment for breaching the salary cap

Football manager Daniel Anderson has also been deregistered in relation to the salary cap scandal
A Hampshire mother has died while swimming in the sea with her 'absolutely devoted' husband.

An inquest heard how Julie Dudhill, from Fleet, was 'swept out to sea' in Alicante, Spain, while the couple were on holiday in June this year.

The 57-year-old was said to have been just yards away from her husband Andy when the tragedy struck.

Tragedy: An inquest heard how Julie Dudhill (right), from Fleet, was 'swept out to sea' in Alicante, Spain, while on holiday with her husband Andy (left)

Devoted: The 57-year-old was said to have been just yards away from her 'absolutely devoted' husband Andy when the tragedy struck

An inquest in Basingstoke, Hampshire, was told the couple were swimming together in the water in Alicante on June 27.

Julie, a project manager for John Lewis in London, had been in the water just yards away from her husband Andy.

When he turned around to find her, she had disappeared.

The inquest heard how she had been swept out to sea.

Andy, who works as an electrician, swam back onto dry land to call the lifeguard.

Happier times: Julie, pictured in 2014, enjoying a Tipsy Cake at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London

Loved: The 57-year-old was described as 'lovely' by a neighbour. Above, Julie enjoying a drink at a hotel in Zell am See, Austria, in 2014

Her body was eventually brought back to the beach in Alicante, where she was pronounced dead.

The cause of her death was asphyxia by drowning.

When the family was contacted on Saturday, they declined to talk about the circumstances of the tragedy.

Her husband Andy had gone away for the weekend and their 300,000 home was deserted.

The tragedy has left neighbours in a state of shock.

A neighbour said on Saturday: 'He was absolutely devoted to her.

'She was lovely. Everybody is so shocked at what has happened.'
Theresa May took a break from her whirlwind start to her new job as Prime Minister to attend her weekly Sunday church service this morning.

Pictured with her husband Philip by her side, the new PM looked remarkably relaxed given her hectic start to her time in No 10.

It was just another Sunday routine for Mrs May, the daughter of a vicar, as she dressed in a smart blue jacket over a casual white blouse and a handbag slung over her shoulder on her way to church in her Maidenhead constituency in Berkshire this morning.

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It was just another Sunday routine for Theresa May and her husband Philip (pictured). The new PM, the daughter of a vicar, was dressed in a smart blue jacket over a casual white blouse and a handbag slung over her shoulder on her way to church in her Maidenhead constituency in Berkshire this morning

Mrs May might well have needed a moment of reflection this morning, having wielded the axe in one of the most brutal Cabinet reshuffles in modern times, then turning statesman to respond to the horrifying terrorist attack in Nice and the extraordinary attempted military coup in Turkey.

On Friday she jetted up to visit First Minister Nicola Sturgeon as she makes preserving the union one of her top priorities.

She is also preparing for a key vote on renewing Britain's Trident nuclear warheads in Parliament tomorrow, as well as kick-starting Brexit negotiations with her EU allies.

It all comes just five days after being appointed Britain's second female prime minister on Wednesday following Andrea Leadsom's dramatic decision to drop out of the Tory leadership race.

Pictured with her husband Philip by her side, Theresa May looked remarkably relaxed given her hectic start to her time in No 10

Theresa May (pictured with her husband walking behind her) took a break from her whirlwind start to her new job as Prime Minister to attend her weekly Sunday church service this morning

Mrs May's remarkable journey to No 10 has been supported by Philip, described as 'her rock', over the course of their 36-year marriage, with whom she lives in Sonning, Berkshire.

Her father - the Rev Hubert Brasier - was the reason Theresa - at the young age of 12, decided she wanted to be a politician.

Rev Hubert was a Church of England clergyman who was a hugely popular figure in the small Oxfordshire countryside where he raised Theresa.

She spent a short spell at an independent Catholic school before going on to become a convent schoolgirl and then winning a place at the former Holton Park Girls' Grammar School, which was turned into a comprehensive shortly after she joined.

Explaining the importance of religion to her life, Mrs May has said her Christian faith 'is part of me, it is part of who I am and therefore how I approach things'.

Mr Cameron faced an abrupt end to his six-year tenure in No 10 after Andrea Leadsom cut the Tory leadership race short by pulling out last week. Removal vans turned up yesterday to finish off the packing

The turnaround was so quick that the Cameron family didn't have time to finish packing up their belongings before they left No 10 on Wednesday

Bed posts were removed from No 10 as removal vans finished the process of packing up the Cameron family's belongings yesterday

Removal vans packed up the Cameron family's belongings yesterday after David Cameron resigned as PM on Wednesday to make way for Theresa May

With such a deeply religious upbringing it is unsurprising Mrs May makes going to Sunday church a fixture of her weekly schedule and her faith is more central to her than it was for David Cameron during his premiership.

He said he considered the Bible 'a sort of handy guide' on morality and although he was a member of the Church of England he admitted he was 'hardly a model church-going, God-fearing Christian' and said he was 'a bit hazy on the finer points of our faith'.

Mr Cameron faced an abrupt end to his six-year tenure in No 10 after Andrea Leadsom cut the Tory leadership race short by pulling out last week.

The turnaround was so quick that the Cameron family didn't have time to finish packing up their belongings before they left No 10 on Wednesday.

Yesterday the removal vans returned to finish the packing, revealing the Cameron family's prized possessions.

Removal teams were seen lugging boxes onto five vans marked 'Cameron by storage' as the ex Prime Minister finally moved out.

As Theresa May clears out her cabinet of David Cameron allies removal vans were seen carting off the last remaining belongings of the former Prime Minister at Downing Street

A wicker chair is removed from No 10 as David Cameron's belongings were taken away yesterday

Larry the cat, No 10's resident pet, was spotted sniffing around the removal vans as they packed up his former owner's belongings

Removal vans arrived at No 10 yesterday to finish off the packing after the Cameron family left on Wednesday

Removal teams were seen lugging boxes onto five vans marked 'Cameron by storage' as the ex Prime Minister finally moved out

Clearing out Cameron's cabinet: Five removal vans haul off former PM's belongings as Theresa May sacks his allies

As Theresa May clears out her cabinet of David Cameron allies removal vans were seen carting off the last remaining belongings of the former Prime Minister at Downing Street.

Mrs May has wasted no time in ridding herself of key members of her predecessor's administration by disposing of eleven key ministers, including Michael Gove, in one of the most brutal political re-shuffles in Britain's history.

Today the cull continued as the new Prime Minister axed a series of junior Cameron supporters across different departments of the Government.

Five removal vans were seen carting off the last of former Prime Minister David Cameron's belongings from 10 Downing Street today

As a removals workers clears out the last of Mr Cameron's things, new Prime Minister Theresa May clears out her cabinet of his allies

Mrs May has promised her cabinet will be more inclusive than the famous Notting Hill set, the group of privileged friends who ruled Westminster during Mr Cameron's tenure.

A series of high profile ministers have either resigned, including Chancellor George Osborne, or been banished to the backbenches as Mrs May asserts herself in her new role.

Mr Cameron and his long-time friends Mr Osborne and Mr Gove were seen looking gloomy as they were caught adjusting to life out of the spotlight this week.

As the former Premier shared a lunch with his family and his former Chancellor in a west London cafe, he may have been thinking about the logistics of moving his belongings into his new home.

Removal teams were seen lugging boxes onto five vans marked 'Cameron by storage' as the ex Prime Minister finally moved out.

As one clear-out finished another rolled on with Mrs May removing further key supporters of her predecessor.

Downing Street says arts minister Ed Vaizey, a friend of Cameron, has left the government. Ros Altmann, Cameron's minister for pensions, has also been dismissed

The government shuffle is in its fourth day Saturday as May fills out junior ministerial ranks.

It has also been announced that Dominic Raab, an ally of former justice minister Mr Gove, has left his ministerial post at the Ministry of Justice.

Removals men haul the Cameron's TV into the back of one of the five cans outside 10 Downing Street

Mr Cameron was seen looking gloomy as he shared lunch with his former Chancellor George Osborne in west London earlier this week. Pictured, one of the removal parked outside 10 Downing Street

As human rights minister, Mr Raab took the lead on controversial plans to scrap the Human Rights Act to replace it with a British Bill of Rights.

Hugo Swire said he was retiring from his role as a foreign minister hours after likening sacked allies of David Cameron to condemned prisoners sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

He tweeted yesterday: 'Not a good time to be a Cameroon. The tumbrils are rolling again!'

Tumbrils were carts used to carry prisoners to the guillotine during the revolution.

Theresa May was hailed after appointing a Cabinet containing more State-educated ministers than at any time in Tory Party history

Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne were pictured looking glum outside a West London cafe as their closest political allies were culled

On Saturday, he tweeted a photo of the famous Looney Tunes cartoon sign-off 'that's all folks!' and said: 'I am retiring to the backbenches to join my friends.

'It's been an honour and a privilege to have served as a Minister in the Government since 2010.'

Foreign Minister James Duddridge announced that he was also leaving the Government, having been in post since August 2014.

He tweeted: 'Sad to be leaving a great team at the Foreign Office. More time in Southend and will also keep up with friends in Africa'.

Caroline Dinenage said she was also leaving her post at the MoJ but would continue in Government at the Education department.

She tweeted: 'Sad to be leaving my amazing team @MoJGovUK but excited about new challenges at @educationgovuk & continuing role with @WomenEqualities'.

Meanwhile, Philip Dunne was moved from the Ministry of Defence to become a minister of state at Health.

Nick Hurd was moved from International Development to become a Minister of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Lord Price was appointed Minister of State at the Department for International Trade.

Among the Cameron allies to leave or be axed from their roles are Ros Altmann (left) and former culture minister Ed Vaizey

Foreign Minister James Duddridge announced that he was also leaving the Government, having been in post since August 2014.

He tweeted: 'Sad to be leaving a great team at the Foreign Office. More time in Southend and will also keep up with friends in Africa'.

The reshuffle are part of dramatic changes made by May, who has also placed leading proponents of a British exit from the European Union in charge of foreign affairs, international trade and EU negotiations.

All the same, the new PM has signaled she's in no rush to start exit talks.
A Tasmanian couple who were brutally attacked on their honeymoon in Samoa have finally got justice after the man who was on the run from prison pleaded guilty to all charges, including rape.

But Angie Jackson, 28, and Tommy Williams have warned other Australians not to visit the South Pacific nation because of lax prison security which allowed their attacker to escape and attack them, the couple told Nine Network's 60 Minutes program.

Serial felon Lautiiti Tualima had been on the run for a month when he climbed up to their room at Lupe Sina Tree Resort armed with a pair of scissors to bind the couple and rape Ms Jackson.

Nine months on, Tualima has pleaded guilty to all seven charges against him, but the couple fears he could continue to hurt by escaping again.

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Angie Jackson and Tommy Williams (pictured) have warned Australians not to visit the South Pacific nation because of lax prison security which allowed their attacker to escape time and time again

Serial felon Lautiiti Tualima had been on the run for a month when he climbed up to their room at Lupe Sina Tree Resort armed with a pair of scissors to bind the couple and rape Ms Jackson

Video shot by 60 Minutes outside Tafaigata, Samoa's highest security prison, shows a worryingly low fence  which Tualima has escaped from twice since attacking Ms Jackson and Mr Williams.

At the time of the attack, Tualima was on the run from the prison on rape, robbery and violence convictions when he climbed into the couple from Hobart's accommodation in a tree-house.

Ms Jackson said she believed the poor security was endangering the lives of tourists, as well as locals.

'And the people of Samoa don't deserve that,' she said.

'The best thing that we can hope for is that the prison conditions are improved, the security is improved, so that when he is put away for the rest of his life, he stays there.'

Video shot outside Tafaigata, Samoa's highest security prison, shows a worryingly low fence (pictured)

Ms Jackson said she believed the poor security was endangering the lives of tourists, as well as locals

At the time of the attack, Tualima was on the run from prison on rape, robbery and violence convictions when he climbed into the couple from Hobart's accommodation in a tree-house (pictured)

The couple believe they would have come home 'in body bags' if it weren't for the hotel manager (pictured), who went to check on them when their taxi to the airport arrived at 3am

Tualima will be sentenced on July 22.

The President of Samoa told 60 Minutes the prison was being rebuilt and moved to a new location.

Australia has given the country about $15 million over seven years through the Samoan Australian Police Program to assist policing functions.

The couple had spent the day fishing to celebrate Ms Jackson's 28th birthday and retired to bed ahead of an early flight the next day, with an alarm set for the next morning at 2am on September 24.

Ms Jackson woke and went to shower, when she saw the man hiding in the corner of their room.

Tualima (pictured) pleaded guilty to all seven charges and will be sentenced on July 22

'The best thing that we can hope for is that the prison conditions are improved, the security is improved, so that when he is put away for the rest of his life, he stays there,' Ms Jackson said

She said Tualima was asking for money as he ripped up the couple's clothing and used it to tie up and gag Mr Williams, before tying up Ms Jackson's arms and raping her.

'I was just like, this can't be the way we die, I want to see my family again,' Ms Jackson told 60 Minutes.

He asked her why he shouldn't kill them, Ms Jackson recounted.

The couple believe they would have come home 'in body bags' if it weren't for the hotel manager, who went to check on them when their taxi to the airport arrived at 3am.

Tualima fled, but Ms Jackson managed to identify him to police because he had asked for their iPad password to steal it, which illuminated his face.

Prior to his guilty plea, the couple had launched a GoFundMe page to assist with legal fees and raised more than $30,000 in donations.

The couple had spent the day fishing to celebrate Ms Jackson's 28th birthday (pictured) before they retired to bed ahead of their early flight home the next morning

She said Tualima was asking for money as he ripped up the couple's clothing and used it to tie up and gag Mr WIlliams, before tying up Ms Jackson's arms and raping her

Prior to his guilty plea, the couple had launched a GoFundMe page to assist with legal fees and raised more than $30,000 in donations

The couple told 60 Minutes they were relieved he has been convicted for the attack, but worry he could escape again
An American family were stuck in Istanbuls Ataturk Airport overnight after violence erupted when the military attempted a coup to overthrow Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and put the country on lockdown.

Scott Wiggins, his wife and three children had been waiting for their next flight at the airport on Friday night when the coup attempt occurred, beginning with tanks rolling into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul while the president was on vacation, ABC News reports.

The family is traveling with another three couples to Iraqs Kurdish region to teach English with a non-governmental organization, according to the station.

But they ended up stuck in Istanbul overnight when the airport was closed amid the chaos.

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Scott Wiggins( above), his wife and three children were stuck in Istanbuls Ataturk Airport overnight after violence erupted when the military attempted a coup to overthrow Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan

People gathered at the Ataturk Airport to react against military coup attempt, in Istanbul, on Friday night

'There were a number of times that crowds starting running in one direction so we kind of ducked into the duty-free shop in the terminal,' Wiggins said on Good Morning America on Sunday morning.

We managed to find a corner of a lounge to stay the night and wait for news, Wiggins told ABC News. Theres tension in the air because of what occurred here last month.

Istanbul Ataturk Airport, one of the worlds busiest travel hubs, was targeted by three suicide bombers on June 28.

The airport was closed after the attack, which left 44 people dead.

Friday nights botched coup saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities.

Meanwhile, military tanks were stopped from occupying Ataturk airport by civilians who lay down in the road to prevent them from passing.

A man stands in front of a tank in the entrance to Istanbul's Ataturk airport, early on Saturday morning

People demonstrate outside Ataturk international airport during an attempted coup in Istanbul

Video footage showed protesters climbing onto the tanks and chanting Erdogans name.

But the attempted coup ended hours later when loyal government forces including military and police- regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan.

At least 265 people were killed and over 1,400 were wounded. Government officials say at least 104 conspirators were killed.

On Saturday, Wiggins added: Last night there were several false alarm stampedes. The sonic boom of low flying jets rattled the whole place.

He added: Were stressed to say the least.

The airport opened and flights resumed on Saturday morning after the government declared the coup over.

Passengers wait on Friday after their flights were cancelled after a failed coup attempt at Ataturk International Airport, in Istanbul

Flights were cancelled when the military attempted a coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities

Turkish Airlines reported flights had resumed in Twitter.

In a statement, the airline said: With the unflinching will of the people, Turkey has awakened to a new day with a much stronger sense of democracy and freedom.

Upon the call of our President H.E. Recep Tayyip Erdogan our operations at Istanbul Ataturk Airport are now back to normal and flights have begun.

However, the Federal Aviation Administration has banned airlines from flying from Turkey to the United States.

All airline carriers, regardless of country of registry, are prohibited from flying into the United States from Turkey either directly or via a third country, the U.S Embassy in Ankara said on Saturday.

The FAA did not clarify how long the ban would be in place - causing problems for Americans who don't know how to get out of the country.

The FAA ban on flights from Turkey into the United States has left Americans trapped in Turkey. Left, Shon Abrams was performing a concert when the chaos unfolded and right, California resident Milton Smith said he was unable to get a flight

Milton Smith, a California resident stuck in Turkey, said on GMA: 'Every airline that we thought I could get, on the computer said that it was available, but when you actually bought the ticket, it said it was cancelled or delayed.'

Shon Abrams was in the middle of a concert when the chaos unfolded.

'Just a lot of people walking by and gunshots,' he told the program.

Since the attempted coup, the U.S. State Department has warned Americans to avoid travel to southeastern Turkey due to the increased threats from terrorist groups in the area.

In light of the coup attempt and its aftermath, the department suggested U.S. citizens reconsider travel to Turkey at this time.

The department also urged Americans in Turkey to stay away from large crowds, including at popular tourist destinations, as well as exercise heightened caution when visiting publicly access areas.

It added that for safety, people should stay away from political gatherings and rallies, follow the instructions of local authorities in an emergency, stay at hotels with identifiable security measures in place and monitor local media.
A desperate hunt is underway for the vaccine of a highly infectious rabbit virus that has killed 400 pets in Britain in the last six months.

Owners are being warned of a new mutated strain of rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD-2) that kills pets rabbits within days and has no UK vaccine.

The deadly virus, which has almost no symptoms, may have affected 2,000 rabbits already, with a further 1.3million unprotected pets at risk.

A desperate hunt is underway for the vaccine of the highly infectious rabbit virus RHD-2 that has killed 400 pets in Britain in the last six months

The current death toll of the virus, first reported in the UK in 2014, is believed to be unrepresentative of the reality, as up to 80 per cent of unforeseen deaths are unrecorded.

Neill Gardner, chairman of the British Rabbit Council, has said the vaccine is expected to be licensed next month.

RHD-2 spreads through people, animals and bedding for rabbits - like hay - with the only vaccines having to be imported from France and Spain.

The mutated disease was first recorded in France in 2010 and targets domestic and wild rabbits.

It came to Britain two years ago and there have been cases from Devon and Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands.

Most of the country's 1.2 million pet rabbits are at risk.

Since March, RHD-2 has been recorded across Cheshire, Devon, Leicestershire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Leeds and Moray. It is believed to have particularly affected Devon and Cornwall.

Richard Saunders, a Rabbit Welfare Association and Fund veterinary expert, said the 'vast majority' of owners didn't know about the virus.

The deadly virus, which has almost no symptoms, may have affected 2,000 rabbits already, with a further 1.3million unprotected pets at risk

He added that a number of vets were also unaware - or didn't deem it necessary to vaccinate the rabbits.

Higher temperatures were also said to help spread the disease.

'The biggest worry about this virus is that it is endemic  it spreads slower than it kills so it creeps around the country in a more sinister pattern than the first strain,' he told the Telegraph.

Vet's Klinic in Swindon said that rabbits could catch the disease through contact with other infected animals, through people who have contacted infected animals and through biting insects.

Vaccines are easily accessible for the original virus - rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD) - which was first reported in the UK in 1992.

For RHD-2 some vets with access to the vaccines are offering vaccinations for rabbits.

WHAT IS RHD? RHD is a highly infectious and fatal disease which affects wild and domestic rabbits The original strain of RHD is endemic in the UK but was brought under relative control by vaccination in the 1990s In November 2015, the new strain of RHD was first confirmed in the UK Although less virulent than RHD-1, RHD-2 is more difficult to diagnose in the early stages, meaning rabbits can carry the disease for a longer RHD-2 is common in mainland Europe, particularly in France where it was first identified in 2010 Source: BRC Advertisement

They are charging between 25 and 30 for domestic rabbit owners, who only need one dose.

Peter Smith, and his 15-year-old daughter Claudia saw 10 of their rabbits die within just three days at their home in Morpeth, Northumberland, last September.

The chartered accountant, 47, said: 'I was in the kitchen, which isn't too far from where our rabbits are kept, and I heard an almighty squeal.

'There were no outward signs whatsoever.'

Mr Smith said both young and adult rabbits died, concluding that the deaths didn't seem to have a distinctive pattern.

Hazel Elliott, a member of the British Rabbit Council's governing body, said European vaccine firms were applying for licences in the UK, but was unclear as to when they get them.

The outbreak of RDH-2 has forced the closure of show competions in Devon, Cornwall and Cheshire.

'The fear factor is we don't know how it's spreading,' said Neill Gardner, chairman of the British Rabbit Council (BRC) told the BBC.

Mr Gardner added: 'With the former strain 'there was usually a visible sign, like bloody discharge from the nostrils.
David Owens (pictured), 29, was booked into Brevard County Jail and is suspected of shooting and killing Cynthia Zingsheim, 88, and Carrie Rouzer, 36, both from Titusville

A gunman shot and killed two women at a Florida hospital early Sunday morning in what police have called a random shooting before he was tackled by two unarmed hospital security guards.

David Owens, 29, was booked into Brevard County Jail and is suspected of shooting and killing Cynthia Zingsheim, 88, from Titusville, after entering her hospital room.

Hospital employee, Carrie Rouzer, 36, was sitting with Zingsheim at the time and she was also shot and killed, according to News 6.

Two unarmed security guards were able to disarm the gunman after tackling him.

They pinned him to the ground as they waited for police to arrive.

Police said Owens was taken into custody and has now been charged with two counts of murder.

'It appears to be extremely random,' Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said during a press conference.

Ivey said the investigation is ongoing and still in the preliminary stages.

A motive in the shooting remains unknown, but officials confirmed that the shooter, who left behind one handgun recovered by officers, acted alone.

Two unarmed security guards were able to disarm the gunman after tackling him. They pinned him to the ground as they waited for police to arrive

The shooter appeared to have randomly targeted the two victims, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey (pictured) said during a press conference. Police said Owens was taken into custody and has now been charged with two counts of murder

The incident occurred at the Parrish Medical Center in Titusville, Florida, early Sunday morning.

Officers from the Titusville Police Department responded to a call regarding an active shooter and upon arrival found Zingsheim and Rouzer dead in a third floor hospital room upon their arrival.

After the shooting police were only able to identify the two victims as 'an elderly female patient' and a 'female hospital employee'.

Titusville Police Chief John Lau told WFTV 9 that the quick actions of the two unarmed security guards 'no doubt saved more lives'.

Ivey said the victims and the suspect did not know each other and the suspect didn't appear to have any connection with the hospital, according to ABC.

The investigation is ongoing.

Officers from the Titusville Police Department found the two victims dead in a third floor hospital room upon their arrival. A motive in the shooting remains unknown, but officials confirmed that the shooter, who left behind one handgun recovered by officers, acted alone

The victims and the suspect did not know each other and the suspect didn't appear to have any connection with the hospital, according to police
Nicola Sturgeon has suggested she has a veto over when Britain triggers the formal process of leaving the EU.

The First Minister said Theresa May had put Scotland in 'a very, very strong position' when it comes to triggering Article 50, which sets a two-year time limit on negotiations to leave.

The pair met when Mrs May made her visit to Edinburgh on Friday her first official trip as Prime Minister.

The new PM told Ms Sturgeon she would not start the Brexit process until she had agreed a 'UK approach' with leaders in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ms Sturgeon's words today will infuriate Tory Brexit campaigners, who warned on Friday that no region of the UK should be allowed to 'hold the rest of the country to ransom' by delaying the negotiations.

Scotland was one of only three major regions to vote to stay in the EU, with six in ten Scots backing Remain. Only London and Northern Ireland were the other regions backing EU membership.

Nicola Sturgeon (pictuerd speaking from Glasgow on the Andrew Marr Show this morning) has suggested she has a veto over when Britain triggers the formal process of leaving the EU

Asked today if Mrs May had given her a veto over triggering Article 50, Ms Sturgeon told the BBC: 'That certainly appeared to be an interpretation that some put on the Prime Minister's remarks after the meeting...and certainly from what she said after the meeting, I think that puts Scotland in now in a very, very strong position.

'That's a position I am going to use as well as I can.'

The First Minister also insisted that the EU's attitude to Scotland's place in Europe has softened since June's referendum result, and the option of Scotland staying in while the rest of the UK 'Brexits' should not be ruled out.

Mrs May's visit to Bute House, the First Minister's official residence, aimed to show her commitment to preserving the United Kingdom following the UK's decision to leave the EU.

But Downing Street denied Mrs May had handed a veto to Miss Sturgeon, who wants to keep Scotland in the EU.

The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (pictured being interviewed by video link on the Andrew Marr Show this morning) said Theresa May had put Scotland in 'a very, very strong position' when it comes to triggering Article 50, which sets a two-year time limit on negotiations to leave

Nicola Sturgeon tweeted a picture of her greeting Theresa May at Bute House in Edinburgh on Friday along with the words: 'I hope girls everywhere look at this photograph and believe nothing should be off limits for them'

Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon met for the first time since entering No 10 today, travelling to Edinburgh for talks at Bute House

Tory MP Steve Baker, chairman of the group Conservatives for Britain, warned against allowing the SNP to delay Brexit.

'No region of the UK should be allowed to hold the rest of the country to ransom,' he said.

Fellow Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin was also worried about Scotland slowing Brexit negotiations.

The former Andrea Leadsom supporter said the new PM had his 'unqualified support' but added 'I do believe the pressure will mount for us to move far more quickly on this.'

The First Minister has said a second referendum on Scottish independence is now highly likely because voters north of the border rejected Brexit in the June 23 vote.

Speaking after the meeting, the Prime Minister said she will not trigger Article 50 - the formal mechanism for leaving the EU, which starts two years of negotiations - until she thinks 'we have a UK approach and objectives'.

Ms Sturgeon has set up an expert group to look at the options for protecting Scotland's place in Europe.

Prime Minister Theresa May meets with Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in Bute House in Edinburgh

Ms Sturgeon greeted Mrs May at Bute House today as the new Prime Minister arrived on her first official trip since entering No 10

Mrs May drew admiring looks from onlookers as she left Bute House this afternoon following her talks with Ms Sturgeon over Brexit and the Union on Friday

She said it could be possible to find a solution where Scotland remains in the EU and the UK, while the rest of the country leaves the EU - a move Scottish Secretary David Mundell has described as fanciful.

She said this morning: 'My position is there might be. We're in uncharted territory, and when you are in uncharted territory with effectively a blank sheet of paper in front of you, then you have the opportunity to try to think things that might have previously been unthinkable and shape the future.

'I think there are opportunities. The positive outcome of the meeting I had with the Prime Minister on Friday was that she said she was prepared to listen to options the Scottish Government would bring forward to give effect to how Scotland voted and we will certainly bring forward options.'

Her comments contradict remarks by some EU leaders, including Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who have suggested that if the UK leaves, Scotland leaves too.

But the First Minister, who met with key EU figures during a trip to Brussels after the referendum, said Europe's attitude to Scotland has changed since the 2014 independence referendum.

Asked if the EU may put aside its own rules and act politically to keep Scotland in, she said: 'I do think that mood is there, and what I encountered in Brussels was a warmth, an openness, a great sympathy to the position that Scotland finds itself in.

'Things have changed fundamentally.'

Britain aims to secure free trade deals with 12 countries before leaving the EU as Australia and the US emerge at the front of the queue for deal worth billions to UK economy

Ministers are aiming to secure ground-breaking free trade deals with 12 countries before Britain leaves the EU in 2019.

Australia wants to strike a deal 'as soon as possible,' the country's prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told Theresa May yesterday.

And Liam Fox, the new International Trade Secretary, is due to fly to the US in the coming days to meet the White House's most senior trade negotiator in the coming days.

Trade deals with those two countries alone could be worth billions of pounds to the British economy.

Mrs May said the early developments were proof she could 'make Brexit work for Britain' and said her talks her Australian counterpart were 'very encouraging'.

Liam Fox (pictured right), the new International Trade Secretary, is due to fly to the US in the coming days to meet the White House's most senior trade negotiator in the coming days. Yesterday the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (left) told Theresa May he wants to strike a deal with the UK 'as soon as possible'

Today Mr Fox revealed he had held 'very fruitful' talks with the Canadian trade minister, who said on Friday that her country were keen for Britain to piggyback on the landmark deal it has just signed with the EU even after Brexit takes effect.

He told the Sunday Times he is 'scoping about a dozen free-trade deals outside the EU to be ready for when we leave', adding: 'We can make Britain a beacon for open trade.'

Revealing a number of countries had already been in contact about striking free trade deals, Mr Fox said: 'We've already had a number of countries saying: we'd love to do a trade deal with the world's fifth-biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU.'

The willingness of leading players from the world's most powerful economies to open trade talks defies countless warnings from pro-EU campaigners before last months' referendum that Britain would struggle to strike free trade deals if we cut ties from Brussels.

In a further sign of the potential for Britain to strike lucrative free trade deals once it leaves the EU, a leading US Senator has tabled a bill calling on President Obama to maintain all existing trade deals with Britain and immediately strike a new deal with the UK once it cuts ties with Brussels.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas condemned Mr Obama for telling the UK it would be at 'the back of the queue' for new trade deals if it left the EU during the campaign.

He now wants the President to commit to retaining the 'special relationship' with the UK to help it 'chart its own path in the world'.

Theresa May (pictured with her husband Philip attending church this morning) said the early developments were proof she could 'make Brexit work for Britain' and said her talks her Australian counterpart were 'very encouraging'

Britain is barred from striking individual trade deals until it officially leaves the EU, which is set to be a lengthy and complicated process that will take up to two years once Article 50 - thee formal process for leaving - is triggered.

But Mr Fox hopes to have agreed the terms of new trade deals with countries beforehand so they could take effect immediately after Britain is no longer an EU member state.

Mrs May appointed Mr Fox, a prominent Brexit campaigner, to drum up new trade deals with non-EU countries around the world as part of her wide-ranging Cabinet reshuffle last week.

However, splits among senior government ministers started to emerge over the weekend over when Britain should trigger Article 50.

David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, wants Britain to start the formal process of leaving the EU this year to enable the UK to start life outside the Brussels club from January 1 2019.

Tonight Boris Johnson (pictured) will launch his own charm offensive with EU politicians when he travels to Brussels for a meeting of foreign ministers

But on Friday Mrs May insisted she would not trigger Article 50 until she had agreed a UK-wide approach to the process for leaving the EU.

This would need the support of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, who has pledged to do 'everything' she can to stop Scotland departing the EU.

More than six in ten Scots (62 per cent) voted in favour of remaining in the EU, while just 38 per cent backed Brexit.

This morning she suggested Scotland had a veto on the Brexit negotiations, which threatens to delay the process for even longer and could threaten Britain's ability to strike new free trade deals.

After speaking to Australian PM Mr Turnbull yesterday, Mrs May said: 'I have been very clear that this Government will make a success of our exit from the European Union.

'I have been very clear that this government will make a success of our exit from the European Union. It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal.'

She added: 'One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe.'

Tonight Boris Johnson will launch his own charm offensive with EU politicians when he travels to Brussels for a meeting of foreign ministers.

Britain's new Foreign Secretary will tell them the UK is ready to become a 'truly global' nation when it officially leaves.

He will meet Federica Mogherini, the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs, tonight, ahead of his meeting with his EU counterparts.

In an interview with the Sunday Express today Mr Johnson said Britain is well-placed to become 'more active on the world stage than ever before' and would use its 'humane, compassionate and principled' voice to 'do good around the world'.

He faced a baptism of fire in his first few days in the job, however, after the attack in Nice and the attempted military coup in Turkey.
Many arrived at Heathrow this morning following widespread cancellations

Fifty thousand Britons on holiday Turkey have been warned to stay away from public places in Istanbul and Ankara.

The warning comes from Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), which says travellers should avoid demonstrations and remain vigilant in its seaside resorts.

Some flights between the UK and Turkey were cancelled over the weekend after more than 250 people were killed in an attempted military coup.

Britons were advised to stay indoors on Friday night and Saturday following gunfire and explosions in Ankara and Istanbul and reports of shooting near the tourist resort of Marmaris.

Passengers arrive back to Heathrow airport from Istanbul. Fifty thousand Britons on holiday Turkey have been warned to stay away from public places in Istanbul and Ankara

People wait patiently for the arrival of a flight from Istanbul to Heathrow, as the Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued a warning to those still in Turkey

However, there were signs of a return to normality and the FCO has not issued an official warning to stay away from the country.

As a result, package holiday companies say they are operating as normal and expect to do so over the coming weeks.

This means that families who have booked to go on holiday to Turkey during the school holidays will lose their money if they refuse to go.

Many fewer Britons have booked holidays in Turkey this year following a series of terror attacks targeting tourists.

The failed coup and the sight of the military on the streets threaten to destroy what is a vital source of income in the troubled country.

Most of the 50,000 Britons currently in the country are staying in beach resorts hundreds of miles away from Istanbul and Ankara.

However, Istanbul has long been a favourite with British travellers visiting the Topkapi Palace, the Grand Bazaar and the Blue Mosque.

An FCO spokesman said: 'The situation in Turkey appears to be calming following an attempted coup overnight on July 15 to 16.

Some flights between the UK and Turkey were cancelled over the weekend after more than 250 people were killed in an attempted military coup

People climb on tanks after around a hundred soldiers occupying Bosphorus Bridge surrendered in Istanbul, Turkey on July 16

Britons were advised to stay indoors on Friday night and Saturday following gunfire and explosions in Ankara and Istanbul and reports of shooting near the tourist resort of Marmaris

'The security environment, however, remains potentially volatile.

'Following earlier disruption, flights to and from airports in Turkey are returning to normal, although some disruption remains and you should check with your airline or tour operator before travelling. You may need to turn up at the airport earlier than normal to get through the additional security checks in place.

'If you are in Turkey, please follow the advice of the authorities, closely monitor travel advice and contact your airline or tour operator.'

He added: 'In Ankara and Istanbul we advise you to avoid public places, in particular demonstrations, and remain vigilant. Take sensible precautions if you are in the vicinity of any military or security forces. Roadblocks are in place in some areas.

'The coastal resorts do not appear to be significantly affected at present. You should check with your airline or tour operator before travelling to the airport. Continue to exercise vigilance in resort areas.'

British Airways cancelled all flights to and from the country on Saturday and ran a reduced service on Sunday.

A spokesman said: 'We continue to keep our flights to Turkey under review and we recommend that customers check ba.com for the latest information'.

Thomas Cook initially advised families to 'stay in their hotels until further notice'.

Mohsin Ali, his wife Kanwal and children Sharjeel and Amina pose having landed back in the UK from Turkey

More than 2,800 rebels have been detained after their failed military coup that killed at least 250 as Turkish President Erdogan vows revenge for the bloody uprising

Most of the 50,000 Britons currently in the country are staying in beach resorts hundreds of miles away from Istanbul and Ankara

Later, it said: 'Our flight and holiday programme is operating as normal and our staff on the ground in resort tell us that everything is calm and customers are enjoying their holidays.'

easyJet said it did not expect any changes to its schedule, while Turkish Airlines advised passengers to check the latest flight information due to cancellations.

Thomson and First Choice flights to Dalaman, Antalya and Izmir are operating as normal.

Flight disruption meant a party of British schoolchildren were stranded at Istanbul Ataturk Airport after leaving Birmingham on Friday evening.

Some 41 students and seven members of staff from the Arthur Terry School in Sutton Coldfield were stuck at the airport since their connecting flight to South Africa was grounded.

The UK's largest travel association, Abta, said: 'The vast majority of British travellers to Turkey will fly directly to the beach resorts on Turkey's south coast which are hundreds of miles away from Istanbul and the capital Ankara.'

Reham Alkhalil is pictured arriving back at Heathrow airport from Turkey. Many fewer Britons have booked holidays in Turkey this year following a series of terror attacks targeting tourists

Abta estimates that there are currently 50,000 people on holiday with its members in Turkey, while the Foreign Office said more than 2.5 million British nationals visit Turkey every year.

But the tourism industry in Turkey has taken a hit due to recent terror attacks and the country's proximity to Syria.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister's office told MailOnline: 'The National Security Adviser chaired a COBR meeting of senior officials this morning to discuss the situation in Turkey. Representatives from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the intelligence agencies, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Department for Transport attended. The Ambassador and Embassy staff in Ankara also joined by video link.

'They noted that the situation in Turkey continued to stabilise, but that we needed to maintain our focus on the situation and monitor any developments over the coming days and weeks, including close cooperation and dialogue with the Turkish government.

'British consular staff are working around the clock to support and reassure British nationals in Turkey at the moment, with a particular focus on supporting those waiting for planes in Turkey's main airports. Flights are starting to get back to normal and backlogs of passengers are beginning to ease.
'Did I kill anyone?'

Those were the first words of rookie NYPD officer Nicholas Batka, accused of plowing his SUV into four people in Brooklyn, killing one and leaving the others in critical condition.

Right before delivering his damning speech to cops, Batka tried to flee the scene, the New York Post reported.

'He switched sides from the drivers seat to the passenger side,' a witness told The Post.

'Everyone saw him do it.'

Rookie cop Nicholas Batka (pictured) plowed into four people in Williamsburg shortly after 3am on Saturday, killing one

Batka was speeding down Bedford Avenue when he lost control of gray Dodge Durango (pictured)

Batka is led into a squad car following his arrest for plowing into four pedestrians while driving drunk in Brooklyn

Batka , 28, crashed into the victims, all in their 20s, on Bedford Avenue near N. 8th Street in Williamsburg shortly after 3am on Saturday

He was speeding down Bedford Avenue when he lost control of the vehicle and struck two men and two women, police said.

A witness said neighbors held the door of the officer's Dodge Durango so he wouldn' t escape, The Post reported.

'People were trying to stop him,' Brandon Smith told the newspaper.

Batka, who was driving a gray Dodge Durango, was taken to the hospital in police custody  still carrying a bar receipt in his pocket,' reeking of alcohol, court documents show.

The four victims were college students, three at at MIT, one at NYU, according to The Post.

A 21-year-old man died at Bellevue Hospital. The other three victims  one man, 24, and two women, 20 and 23, are expected to survive, the newspaper reported.

On social media, most of Batka's pictures feature him drinking, such as these two post on his Facebook page

Batka, who has been with the NYPD for 18 months, is facing a number of DUI-related charges, a police spokesman told Daily Mail Online.

He was supposed to be reporting for duty at 7am. Police said he refused to take a breath test at the scene.

The victims have not been identified, but witnesses told the New York Daily News that three are from Boston and interning in the city. Three were said to be in serious condition in hospital..

Witnesses also described the horrific scene in the aftermath of the collision.

Ryan Carpenter, 27, had been walking home when he saw the scene of the crash and ran over to help.

He described the horror of trying to calm one of the screaming victims whose leg was seriously injured.

Police said he refused to take a breath test at the scene and will be facing a number of charges

One person is dead and the other three victims are in hospital in a serious condition after the crash

Witnesses described the crash scene as pure chaos.

'I heard people screaming and saw people lying all over the place,' one neighbor told The Post.

'Just covered in blood and really badly injured. Someone in front of my stoop had a bone sticking out of his leg. People were screaming.

'Help! God!' someone screamed in agony, another neighbor told the paper.

'Her head, her leg were bleeding,' one neighbor said, adding a victim was impaled on a fence, to The Post.

'She was squirming and squealing.'

Witnesses said the officer also flashed his badge at the scene as he tried to get out of his car

'One guy took his shirt off and used it to try to stop the bleeding,' yet another witness added. 'She was conscious, she was very young.'

Batka, who apparently tried to flash his badge after the crash, is being held on $300,000 bail.

On Facebook, many of his pictures feature Batka drinking.
Secretary of State John Kerry has hit back at Turkish President Recep Erdogan after he demanded the extradition of a Pennsylvania-based cleric accused of orchestrating Friday night's failed coup.

Erdogan has blamed Fethullah Gulen for the attempted coup, which left at least 265 dead and more than 1,500 injured.

Gulen lives in self-imposed exile in the U.S. and promotes the moderate Hizmet Islamic movement that advocates democracy and secular institutions and is popular with Turkey's upper classes.

The Turkish president has repeatedly called on President Obama to extradite Gulen, however U.S. officials have already told Erdogan they would only do so if Turkey can prove any wrongdoing.

Kerry slammed Erdogan last night, saying 'insinuations' that the U.S. was involved in the failed coup were 'utterly false and harmful' to the relationship between the two countries.

Gulen has denied any involvement in the uprising and harshly condemned the attempted coup by military officers that resulted in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire.

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Secretary of State John Kerry (left) has hit back at Turkish President Recep Erdogan (right) after he demanded the extradition of a Pennsylvania-based cleric accused of orchestrating Friday night's failed coup.

Erdogan has blamed Fethullah Gulen (pictured) for the attempted coup, which left at least 265 dead and more than 1,500 injured

The Obama administration said it would entertain an extradition request for Gulen if Turkey's government can prove his wrongdoing.

The 75-year-old cleric left Turkey in 1999 just ahead of a treason charge.

'I call on the United States and President Barack Obama,' Erdogan said on Saturday.

'Dear Mr President: I told you this before. Either arrest Fethullah Gulen or return him to Turkey.

'You didn't listen. I call on you again, after there was a coup attempt. Extradite this man in Pennsylvania to Turkey. If we are strategic partners or model partners, do what is necessary.'

Tensions between the U.S. and Turkey appeared to have escalated later on Saturday.

A spokesman for Kerry said: '[The Secretary of State] made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.'

The statement followed much more lenient stance from Kerry, suggesting he has grown frustrated with Erdogan's rhetoric.

He said earlier in the day: 'We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr Gulen. And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately.'

Fethullah Gulen has been blamed for the failed coup attempt by military officials that killed at least 250 people and wounded 1,500 more. People are pictured kicking a soldier who participated in the coup on Istanbul's Bosporus Bridge on Saturday

Gulen has insisted he had nothing to do with the attempted uprising and suggested Erdogan may have staged the attack himself in order to legitimize a fresh crackdown on the judiciary and military.

The cleric was previously blamed for coordinating damaging corruption allegations that targeted senior ministers, as well as Erdogan's son, Bilal, in 2013.

Erdogan was on a seaside vacation when tanks rolled into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul overnight Friday, blocking key bridges.

From a cell phone, he delivered a televised address that called for huge crowds to come out and defend Turkey's democracy - which they did in Ankara, the capital, and in Istanbul, facing off against troops who had blocked key Bosporus bridges that link the city's Asian and European sides

Groups of soldiers reportedly surrendered at several key locations in Ankara and Istanbul, including Bosphorus Bridge, where 100 rebels laid down their arms and submitted themselves to advancing civilians and police officers.

On Saturday morning Erdogan used Twitter to call on supporters to prevent any additional military action, adding: 'We should keep on owning the streets no matter at what stage because a new flare-up could take place at any moment.'

Supporters of Erdogan light flares during a pro-government demonstration on Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey

Throughout the night, supporters of Erdogan threw themselves in front of tanks at key landmarks to prevent the military from maintaining a stranglehold on the country, notably outside Ataturk airport in Istanbul, where some civilians lodged themselves under the wheels of tanks to stop them from advancing.

Some 104 plotters were killed, while 160 people - at least 41 of them police and 47 civilians - fell as 'martyrs'.

More than 2,800 rebels have been detained after their failed military coup, as Erdogan vowed revenge for the bloody uprising.

Already 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been arrested after the regime questioned their loyalty, while 2,839 soldiers have also been jailed.

Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government, but Washington has never found any evidence.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that, while the death penalty was abolished in Turkey in 2004, the country may consider legal changes to deter any such coup happening again.

Yildirim described the night as 'a black mark on Turkish democracy' and said the perpetrators 'will receive every punishment they deserve'.

He said July 15 will be remembered as 'a festival for democracy', the day when those who carried out a coup against the people were hit by a coup themselves.

The Greek police ministry said a Turkish military helicopter landed in Greece this morning and eight men on board, thought to be senior coup plotters, have requested political asylum. Turkey has asked for the men, made up of seven soldiers and one civilian, to be extradited back to the country.

Erdogan was on a seaside vacation when tanks rolled into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul overnight Friday, blocking key bridge

The rebel army faction - who call themselves the 'Peace Council' - said they were trying to overthrow the government to 'protect human rights' and restore democracy from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, AKP, which has repeatedly faced criticism from human rights groups and Western allies over its brutal crackdowns on anti-government protesters

The rebel army faction - who call themselves the 'Peace Council' - said they were trying to overthrow the government to 'protect human rights' and restore democracy from Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, AKP, which has repeatedly faced criticism from human rights groups and Western allies over its brutal crackdowns on anti-government protesters.

Muslim cleric Gulen, the president's rival, who is the head of a billion dollar religious movement, has often been blamed for political unrest in Turkey.

President Barack Obama urged all sides in Turkey on Friday to support the democratically elected government in Turkey, a key NATO ally.

In a statement issued after a meeting with his national security advisers Obama also urged those in Turkey to show restraint and avoid violence or bloodshed.

Kerry told reporters: 'We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr Gulen. And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately.'

'I'm confident there will be some discussion about that,' Kerry added.

Gulen, who lives in Saylorsburg, on a 26-acre compound called the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center, is understood to maintain significant support among some members of the military and mid-level bureaucrats.

His movement called Hizmet includes think tanks, schools and various media enterprises. Gulen and Erdogan only became estranged in recent years.

In a statement, Gulen said he condemned 'in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey'.

'Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force,' he said.

'I pray to God for Turkey, for Turkish citizens, and for all those currently in Turkey that this situation is resolved peacefully and quickly.'
This is the moment a heroic 7-Eleven clerk disarmed a teenage robber armed with a rifle.

The attempted robbery began in the early hours of Tuesday morning when a masked man entered the store on Sundays Lane near Frederick, Maryland.

He was captured on surveillance footage approaching the counter shortly before 4am and threatening the clerk.

While two male customers step away in shock at the sight of the shotgun, the clerk grabs the rifle and wrestles it out of the robbers grasp.

Surveillance footage captured the moment a heroic 7-Eleven clerk disarmed a robber armed with a rifle

The suspect, wearing a bandanna over part of his face and a dark hooded top, is seen running away after the clerk got hold of the firearm.

Police received information the following day that led them to arrest Ryan J. Wages, the Frederick News Post reported.

The 18-year-old, of Thurmont, was charged with armed robbery.

He remains in custody at the Frederick County Adult Detention Center on $200,000 bail, a jail spokesman confirmed to Daily Mail Online.

The masked robber entered the 7-Eleven near Frederick, Maryland, at around 4am on July 12

He was captured pointing the shotgun at the clerk, who quickly grabbed it out of the robber's hands

Abdul Ayab, who owns the store, said the suspect was screaming in his employees face. He didnt identify the clerk.

[The man] pointed it at my employee and started screaming at my employee, screaming in his face and my employee grabbed the gun and took it out of the guys hands, Ayab told the Post.

And the guy ran out of the store, so now the police have the gun and he didnt get anything.

Sheriffs deputies found the gun wasnt loaded, but they increased patrols in the area of the store.

They came into tell Ayab and his staff that they took Wages into custody on Wednesday and believe he is behind other similar incidents.

While two customers looked on and then fled, the clerk was able to grab the firearm from the robber

The suspect, wearing a bandanna over his face and a hooded top, fled the scene after his gun was taken

Ryan Wages, 18, was arrested and booked into the Frederick County Adult Detention Center on Wednesday

The Frederick County Sheriffs office received credible information that connected Wages to numerous other crimes, including home invasion, assault and burglary, a spokesman told the Post.

Meanwhile, Ayab is considering adding further security measures as his store has been robbed four times in eight years.

After a robbery in March, he added increased security  but now is thinking about installing a system that will allow employees to stay behind locked doors and only buzz in customers during certain hours.

Anyone with information about the case is urged to call the sheriffs offices tip line at (301)-600-4131.

The owner of the store did not name the clerk, but said he is considering adding further security measures




An incredible sing-off between two men traveling on a bus in Chicago late at night has gone viral after a fellow passenger uploaded it online.

Brianne Downing said she started filming the first man showing off his vocal skills because he reminded her of Titus Andromedon from Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

He sang his version of His Eye is on the Sparrow, a Gospel gym recorded by artists including Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill.

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An incredible sing-off between two men traveling on a bus in Chicago late at night has gone viral after a fellow passenger uploaded it online

When a second man responded with a stunning rendition of Mattinata (The Morning), an Italian classic composed by Ruggero Leoncavallo more than a century ago, she recorded that too.

There was an air of friendly competition between the pair - and they even ended up hugging at the end.

Downing then uploaded both clips to her Facebook page last week, writing: Tonights late-night Chicago Avenue bus ride was AMAZING.

Since then, the videos have amassed a combined total of more than 65,000 views.

Downing said she had been talking on the bus with a very outgoing man who resembled the character played by Tituss Burgess on the hit Netflix show.

There was an air of friendly competition between the pair - and they even ended up hugging at the end

Like the fictional character, this man loved to sing too.

One of my good friends loves both the show and the character and I wanted proof to show him that I found basically Titus on the bus, Downing told WGN.

She started to record the man in action  and his offering was well-received by passengers who gave him a round of applause.

The, a stranger, who said he was in town for a singing event, decided to also perform for passengers. He too was applauded by passengers.

I see viral videos online all the time and wonder how people know to start recording before something starts, Downing added to the local station. I get it now.

Brianne Downing said she started filming the first man (right) showing off his vocal skills because he reminded her of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's Titus Andromedon played by Tituss Burgess (left)
The remains of two men missing after a boat overturned on Lake Lanier in Georgia have been recovered, officials said.

The bodies of Arthur Gene McMahan Jr, 46, and Anthony Reece Jr, 44, both from Kentucky, were located early on Sunday, a Georgia Department of Natural Resources spokesman told WHAS.

The men were found in about 90 feet of water before they were pulled from the lake, according to officials.

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Arthur Gene McMahan Jr, 46, (left) and his wife Melissa Renee McMahan, 45, (pictured with him right), were both identified as two of the four bodies recovered after a boat overturned on Lake Lanier in Georgia on Friday

The bodies of Anthony Reece Jr, 44, and Tammy Reece, 44, were also recovered in Lake Lanier

On Saturday morning, crews announced they had recovered the bodies of Melissa Renee McMahan, 45, and Tammy Reece, 44, both from Kentucky.

Officials said the boaters were visiting from Atlanta for a charity event on the north-Georgia lake, WHAS reported.

According to Major Stephen Adams, the single-vessel cigarette-style speedboat carrying the group overturned just before 4pm on Friday. A collision with another boat is not suspected.

The boat was a 38-to-40-foot, tunnel-hull, racing style vessel, Adams said.

Officials believe the boat was involved in the Pirates of Lanier Poker Run, where boats travel to different spots on the lake and pick up playing cards in an attempt to get the best hand and win a prize.

The charity event benefits children in need in Georgia.

On Saturday night, relatives of the McMahans released a statement saying the couple (Mrs McMahan left and Mr McMahan, right) meant the world to them and will be truly missed

Witness reportedly said that the boat was traveling south near Cocktail Cove on the lake when it encountered a wake and overturned.

The boat was found partially submerged and investigators are looking into whether speed was a factor in the crash.

'The Lanier Partners would like to send our deepest thoughts and prayers to the families of those involved in an accident on Lake Lanier today,' the group wrote on Facebook.

The group also asked that no boat go over 60mph.

On Saturday night, relatives of the McMahans released a statement saying the couple meant the world to them and that they will be truly missed.

The cigarette style boat was found partially submerged, witnesses said it hit a wake - investigators will try to determine if speed played a role in the accident

The foursome were known for their love of boating and belonged to the Lake Havasu Powerboat Club, according to its Facebook page - above, the boat they were in that capsized

'The Lanier Partners would like to send our deepest thoughts and prayers to the families of those involved in an accident on Lake Lanier today,' the group wrote on Facebook

'At this time we want to thank the community, friends and family for their ongoing love and support, the statement read.

'Our parents meant the world to us, we never realized how much impact they had on people's lives.

'They both were such amazing, loving and caring parents, grandparents, children siblings and friends to so many.

'They were one of a kind and will truly be missed. Thank you again for your continued prayers.'

The cause of the accident remains under investigation, with authorities saying it will likely take several weeks to complete, according to FOX 5 Atlanta.

Video courtesy of 11Alive News

'Pirate' boats compete up and down Lanier Lake to get cards and the best hand to win prizes at the Lanier Poker Run (one such boat, above, not the boat that capsized)
Supporters of the Turkish president took to the streets of Istanbul today to take selfies with tanks abandoned by soldiers after Friday night's failed coup.

Leaning against the camouflaged armoured vehicles, individuals and groups of supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan descended on Taksim Square.

They grinned broadly and gave the victory sign after President Erdogan managed to hold onto power.

Get my best side: Locals posed alongside the tanks discarded in the street before they were moved away

Delighted: Supporters of President Erdogan were thrilled to be photographed next to the tanks in Taksim Square, turning the presence or armoured vehicles into photo opportunities

Victory: A large clean up operation has taken place across Istanbul to remove any sighs of the attempted military coup.

Shortly after they had gathered in the square, the police arrived to take the armoured vehicles away as part of a nationwide effort to clean up all signs of the coup.

Today, Mr Erdogan has vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of an Islamist cleric his government blames for Friday's failed coup attempt.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan vowed to 'clean all state institutions of the virus' of Fethullah Gulen supporters.

He said Turkey, through the justice ministry and foreign ministry, would request the extradition of the cleric, who is based in the United States, and his backers.

Crowds chanted 'Fethullah will come and pay,' 'Allah is Great' and 'We want the death penalty.' Erdogan said that in democracies, 'you cannot push the wish of the people to one side' but also said 'we are not after revenge.'

The cleric, whose movement is labelled a terrorist group by Turkey, has denied any involvement in the coup effort.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan vowed to 'clean all state institutions of the virus' of Fethullah Gulen supporters - whom he claims was behind the failed coup

Life in Turkey is back to normal after a failed coup attempt, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday afternoon, saying the central bank, capital markets board, banking system and stock exchange were all functional

Locals took advantage of the unusual sight of the tanks in Taksim Square before the abandoned vehicles were removed by the police

The funeral was for Prof. Dr. Ilhan Varank, the brother of Erdogan's chief supervisor who was killed on the Bosphorous Bridge on Friday.

He was a professor of computer science and was shot according to Turkish media. Erdogan attended the funeral at Fatih Mosque in Istanbul.

It was part of a mass funeral for seven other civilians who stood up to soldiers on the bridge.

At least 265 people were killed in clashes between the armed forces and police. Scores of civilians were among the dead.

Rebel leader General Erdal Ozturk, who commands armed forces in Istanbul has been arrested and charged with treason.

The state-run news agency Anadolu said the commander of the Second Army, which guards the borders with Iraq, Syria and Iran has also been detained.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan vowed to 'clean all state institutions of the virus' of Fethullah Gulen supporters

Today's funeral was for Prof. Dr. Ilhan Varank, the brother of Erdogan's chief supervisor who was killed on the Bosphorous Bridge on Friday

The funeral was part of a mass ceremony for seven other civilians who stood up to soldiers on the bridge.

Relatives mourn near by coffins of victims who were killed in a coup attempt which started on Friday and was defeated the next day

Many soldiers who participated in the coup have been beaten up by Erdogan's supporters.

Meanwhile, a Turkish government official reported that the commander of an air base used by U.S.-led coalition jets that conduct bombing runs against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria has been detained.

The official said Sunday that Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, ten other soldiers and one police officer from the Incirlik base are detained for their role in the botched Friday coup attempt.
When confronted, Sharpton said he has 'no idea' who Anders was

He was later shocked to read allegations by the New York Post that Sharpton received thousands in donations from Verizon

promises to promote the case in the media and arrange mediation meetings were never carried out

Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton has been accused of swindling an Arizona trucker out of $16,000 after he agreed to take on his discrimination case, according to a lawsuit.

Reggie Anders Sr. is suing the outspoken preacher after he claims Sharpton took no action in his discrimination dispute with Verizon, the New York Post reports.

Anders claims that he agreed to pay Sharpton $16,000 - in cash - in exchange for him publicizing the dispute in the media and on his weekly radio broadcast, as well as setting up mediation meetings with the communications giant.

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Reggie Anders Sr. (left( is suing outspoken preacher Al Sharpton (right) after he claims Sharpton took no action in his discrimination dispute with Verizon

It was only later he read a report in the New York Post claiming that the preacher, and his National Action Network (NAN), received thousands of dollars in donations from Verizon and other large corporations in what the newspaper alleged what 'protection money'.

Firms that didn't pay up were threatened with bad press or boycotts, it reported last year.

'He's a crook, he's a fraud, and that's all he is,'Anders told the Post. 'He didn't do anything he promised. Absolutely nothing.'

Anders says that when he called Sharpton to confront him about his lack of action, and links with Verizon, that the civil rights leaders was furious.

'He said people write stuff about him all the time,' Anders said. 'Then for a year and a half he strung

Representatives for Sharpton deny the claims which they have branded 'untrue and frivolous'.

Anders was advised to get in touch with Sharpton last year by his own minister, the Rev. David Wade of Phoenix, when his 2009 case against Verizon - who he claims were in breach of contract and discriminated against him - after his suit was thrown out in 2014.

He and his pastor then flew out for a meeting at NAN headquarters in Harlem in March 2015.

Sharpton agreed to help on one condition. He wanted $16,00, in cash. Anders say he never explained why.

'I thought he was an honest guy,' he said. 'I thought he would do what he said he would do.'

Anders's suit seeks $1.75 million in damages from Sharpton and Verizon for 'conspiring' against him.

Michael Hardy, of NAN, told DailyMail.com that Rev. Sharpton had never accepted money from Anders and called his allegations 'frivolous and untrue.'

Anders claims Sharpton took $16,000 to help him with his discrimination dispute with Verizon

He confirmed that Anders had reached out to NAN, through his pastor, and the organization had followed up by making inquiries to Verizon.

But he said that their research found his claims were 'frivolous', 'not to mention that he had already lost his 2014 lawsuit.'

Asked specifically about the claims Sharpton had accepted $16,000 in cash from Anders, he said: 'There was no money ever given to Rev Sharpton.

'We would deny that, we don't believe that he gave him any money.

'I think a lot of times people think they can get an advantage by making allegations against Rev Sharpton.'

He added that they had not yet seen Anders' lawsuit but they would be responding accordingly.

When asked about Anders by the Post, Sharpton responded: 'Who? I have no idea what you're talking about.'

It is not the first time Sharpton has been accused of being overly concerned with money.

In February last year, NYPD chokehold victim Eric Garner's daughter called out the civil rights leader for being obsessed with financial gain, according to new undercover video.

Erica Snipes, the daughter of Eric Garner who died in Staten Island in 2014 after a New York City Police officer put him in a chokehold, aired her complaints during a secretly recorded conversation with two conservative activists.

The undercover video was released by undercover filmmaker James O'Keefe's group,Project Veritas.

'You think Al Sharpton is kind of like a crook in a sense?' one of the undercover investigators posing as an Eric Garner supporter asked Erica Snipes.

'He's about this,' Snipes replied rubbing her thumb and index finger together in a universal sign symbolizing money.

'He's about money with you?' the Project Veritas staffer asked, to which Snipes, 25, replied in the affirmative.

On his part, Rev Sharpton, 61, accused O'Keefe's conservative group of 'exploiting' Eric Garner's daughter, whom he described as a 'sincere victim.

Theyre splicing and dicing stuff together, he said. It was a distortion.Sharpton insisted that his organization, which is dedicated to helping small businesses and low-income families, does not take money from them.

The revered is an outspoken supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.

He recently criticized those calling to scale back or stop rallies organized by BLM.

Sharpton added that numerous protests create a climate for change and provide participants a sense of sanity amid rising gun-related violence. He also deplored the killing of police officers in Dallas last week.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has hit back at accusations that the global internet giant failed to pay enough taxes in Europe on Sunday, and warned of the potential fallout from Britain leaving the EU.

He explained that whilst Google respected tax laws, governments will need to do more in order to ensure 'better results'.

Pichai also stressed that the US company invested 'very heavily' in Europe and employed 14,000 people there.

Defence: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has hit back at accusations that the global internet giant failed to pay enough taxes in Europe on Sunday

As Google faces a raft of fiscal probes across the continent, Pichai told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper: 'As a global company, we find ourselves between the conflicting priorities of international tax law.

'Based on the structure of existing tax law, most companies pay the bulk of their taxes in their home countries.'

He said, in remarks that were published in German, that Google respected the laws on the books, and that governments would have to take action if they wanted to ensure more revenues stayed at home.

Pichai added: 'Only the further development of the global tax system by politicians can lead to better results.'

When asked about Brexit following last month's watershed referendum, Pichai underlined the importance to Google of a 'unified digital market' in Europe.

He said it was a 'challenge' for a multinational company 'to come to terms with different laws and regulations in each country'.

Conflict: Pichai explained that whilst Google respected tax laws, governments will need to do more in order to ensure 'better results'

'This complexity makes greater engagement difficult, which also plays out in investment,' he said, stressing however that large companies were better able to deal with such issues than small firms.

European officials have raised questions about the tax liabilities of companies including Google, Amazon and Apple. Some firms have taken advantage of tax breaks offered from Ireland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Google's offices in Madrid were searched in a tax probe in late June, just over a month after police raided the Internet giant in Paris in a similar investigation.

The European Union also filed new anti-trust charges against Google last week, piling pressure on the company over the alleged abuse of its market dominance.
The ban on allowing new grammar schools to open in England could be lifted under Theresa May's new-look government.

The new Education Secretary Justine Greening said she was 'open-minded' to calls by Tory MPs to allow selective state schools but suggested they may not be 'old-fashioned' grammar schools when asked about the prospect of lifting the ban today.

Tony Blair banned any new grammar schools from opening in 1998 and David Cameron refused to repeal it during his six years as Prime Minister.

The new Education Secretary Justine Greening (pictured) said she was 'open-minded' to calls by Tory MPs to allow selective state schools but suggested they may not be 'old-fashioned' grammar schools when asked about the prospect of lifting the ban today

But since Mrs May became PM there has been widespread speculation of a change in policy because Mrs May, who won a place at a grammar school as a young girl, is understood to be a supporter of new selective schools having reportedly backed a grammar school's proposal to open a new 'annexe' in her Maidenhead constituency, which is allowed under the current rules.

She is one of nine Cabinet ministers who went to a selective school.

Her new chief of staff in No 10 Nick Timothy has also backed new selective schools in the past.

Signalling a change in government policy, Ms Greening insisted the education system has changed 'dramatically' from the 'binary' choice between grammar and secondary modern schools.

Graham Brady, chair of the influential backbench Tory 1922 Committee, has urged the Government to repeal the 'silly ban' on new grammar schools passed by Labour in 1998 in Sunday newspaper interviews.

Ms Greening suggested the Government could allow some form of selection in the new 'landscape' of education, in which free schools can be set up independently of central control.

The new Education Secretary Justine Greening (pictured on the Andrew Marr Show, left, and arriving at the studios, right) paved the way for the ban on new grammar schools to be lifted in England

The Education Secretary told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show: 'The setting in which schools find themselves has actually changed quite dramatically, it's gone from really being a binary world in many respects to being an education world where there are many different schools now that have many different offers.

'So I think we need to be prepared to be open-minded.'

She went on: 'I've been in this job two or three days, I'm not going to make some big sweeping policy pronouncement, I'm going to take a very measured, sensible approach in this role.

'And I recognise that this is an important debate so of course I've got lots of things in my in-tray, I will work my way through them very, very carefully over the coming weeks.'

Asked if she was completely closed-minded to the idea, Ms Greening said: 'I think that the education debate on grammar schools has been going for a very long time but I also recognise that the landscape in which it takes place has changed fundamentally and I think we need to be able to move this debate on and look at things as they are today and maybe step away from a more old-fashioned debate around grammar schools and work out where they fit in today's landscape.'

Since Theresa May (pictured attending Sunday church in her Maidenhead constituency this morning with her husband Philip) became PM there has been widespread speculation of a change in policy because Mrs May, who won a place at a grammar school as a young girl, is understood to be a supporter of new selective schools having reportedly backed a grammar school's proposal to open a new 'annexe' in her Maidenhead constituency, which is allowed under the current rules

But teaching charities insisted Ms Greening's priority should be on other areas of education.

Alex Shapland-Howes, managing director of social mobility charity Future First, said: 'The key priority for the new Secretary of State has to be reducing the gap in outcomes between those born in high and low income homes.

'In particular, we urge the new government to continue growing the investment in ensuring all young people have access to career role models.'

Lib Dem leader Tim Farron said giving the green light for new grammar schools to open would be a 'step in the wrong direction' for the new Tory Prime Minister.

'Segregating our schooling is not going to create a fairer more united society, Theresa May should start by ensuring our schools are properly funded and teachers are better supported.

'A strong, open and accessible education system is vital to a healthy and fair society. Opening new grammar schools is a step in the wrong direction which the Liberal Democrats will continue to oppose.

'If Theresa May is serious about fighting the burning injustices in our society she could start by keeping her hands off our school system.'
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Armed police raided a mental health centre after a suspected double stabbing left two people in hospital.

It is believed a patient took part in the brutal incident causing the pair to suffer serious injuries at the Bracton Centre in Dartford, Kent.

Pictured, an air ambulance flies near the Bracton Centre in Dartford, Kent, after a suspected stabbing

One man has been arrested in connection to the attack and police are not searching for any other potential suspects.

The injured parties were airlifted to hospital just after 12.30pm today.

A witness told Kent Online, that she had seen a man being walked out of the centre 'in his pants, handcuffed and surrounded by armed police'.

The Bracton Centre is a medium secure unit and cares for adults under the age of 65 that are suffering from mental health issues.

Armed police raided the Bracton mental health centre in Dartford, Kent, after a suspected double stabbing left two people in hospital

Fire engines were also seen at the centre, run by the Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, after reports of a blaze earlier today.
David Carter has served 34 years and is now Nevada's High Desert State Prison

A British ex-public schoolboy has spoken out from the prison cell where he is serving life for the rape, torture and murder of a housewife in a crime which shocked the US.

David Carter has served 34 years for an act so horrifying that he avoided the death penalty by the skin of his teeth.

The 55-year-old, from Walsall, West Midlands, will spend the rest of his life behind bars, with no possibility of parole.

The former sailor was convicted after subjecting housewife Gloria Black to a sickening ordeal during a visit to his parents in Pasadena, California.

Ms Black's killer placed a cushion on her back and drove a knife through it with such force that the blade penetrated the 51-year-old's heart.

Carter has never spoken to the press before, but has now broken his silence to protest his innocence.

He sent a letter to the Sunday Mercury newsdesk from Nevada's High Desert State Prison, a penitentiary notorious for violence and dubbed a cauldron of race hate.

On yellowed prison paper, Carter scrawled: 'I've never been on Death Row, but my case was a death penalty case. I have always maintained my innocence.

'I have life without the possibility of parole, which means exactly that. I have been incarcerated for the last 34 years.

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'As an English citizen, born in Walsall, Birmingham, I do have family members in the UK. I have applied for transfer to the UK three times and been denied three times.'

Few on America's West Coast will have sympathy for Carter, but a former British policeman who attended Normanton School, in Buxton, Derbyshire with him has no doubt cops got the wrong man.

David Longland, born in Shropshire but now living in New Zealand, said: 'I was a police officer in England and New Zealand. I know a bad person when I see one and David's a good man at heart.'

The reality is that Carter is extremely lucky to be alive. Only his age of 21 years and a courtroom character reference from his headmaster Noel Hadley staved off the ultimate sentence.

The prosecution had argued that the crime was so heinous, Carter should be executed. They said that the torture provided the 'special circumstances' needed to pass the death penalty.

And the evidence against Carter, who arrived in Pasadena only three weeks before the murder, is compelling, to say the least.

Carter sent a letter to the Sunday Mercury newsdesk from Nevada's High Desert State Prison, a penitentiary notorious for violence and dubbed a cauldron of race hate

His fingerprints were found all over a whisky bottle at Mrs Black's flat. A cigarette stub found at the scene matched those at the suspect's family home.

That, Carter admits, is because he did break into the property - but he insists he did not brutally murder its owner.

Those close to Carter and the case believe that his guilt or innocence is not the overriding question.

The real mystery is what drove a quiet, shy individual with no history of violence to sink to such depths of depravity.

Carter's parents, and his 17-year-old brother, moved into Mrs Black's neighbourhood only weeks before the August 1982 murder.

I have been incarcerated for the last 34 years. I have always maintained my innocence

Carter pounced while the victim's husband was on a fishing trip, the court heard.

Friends who visited the apartment the following day were greeted by a sickening scene.

Mrs Black's body lay in a pool of blood on the bedroom floor, her wrists and ankles bound by electric cable harnessed to furniture. The victim's nightgown was torn and she had been sexually assaulted.

Carter's defence team flew seven character witnesses from England for the trial and one told the local newspaper: 'I have been around criminal cases for 20 years and I don't think this kid is guilty.'

David Longland, who runs a successful import business in New Zealand, was not among the witnesses, but has kept in touch with Carter during his incarceration.

He paints a picture of an introverted, even troubled, individual. His schoolfriend reveals that Carter was nicknamed Toby by classmates at the private school, which closed in 1998.

RACISM, FEAR, AND GLADIATORIAL FIGHTS IN HIGH DESERT PRISON High Desert, close to Las Vegas is described as uncompromising. Earlier this month prison guards were accused of covering up the shooting of an inmate involved in a 'gladiator-style' fight. A lawsuit alleges two handcuffed prisoners were made to brawl in the prison before one was shot dead by a trainee guard. And court papers disclosed that guns have been fired inside High Desert more than 200 times in a five-year period. Last December guards at the remote Susanville prison - erected in the middle of the Nevada Desert - were accused of creating a 'culture of racism'. The state's Inspector General also reported warders engaged in 'alarming use of force' against inmates. A months-long investigation was sparked by reports that some guards mistreated disabled inmates and set up sex offenders for assaults because of the nature of their crimes. The probe found evidence of 'a culture of racism and lack of acceptance of ethnic differences' among correctional officers, three-quarters of whom are white. One inmate told investigators: 'I got that KKK feeling from High Desert.' The prison's 3,500 inmates are ruled by fear and will not report abuse for fear of violent retaliation from staff. 'The dangerous staff misconduct has been tolerated for too long,' Rebekah Evenson, an attorney with the Prison Law Office, which represents prisoners, said in a statement. 'The culture of abuse at High Desert endangers prisoners and the prison staff.' Investigators said they found so-called sensitive-needs yards - set up to shelter inmates likely to be attacked in the general population - were 'just as violent' as the rest of High Desert 'with gang politics meting out abuse and punishment for drug and gambling debts and extorting vulnerable inmates for protection.' In April this year, inmate Ralph Goodman was stabbed to death in the prison yard by two inmates. Advertisement

Carter, who attended 2,000-a-year Normanton for three years, leaving in 1980, actually sparked a police hunt after going missing from the school.

Such was the concern for his safety that his father Brian, a construction engineer, flew over from Holland.

The hunt ended when Carter strolled into a police station in Essex. Speaking from his home in Mt Albert, Auckland, Mr Longland said: 'He was very quiet at school, he kept himself to himself. I remember him as a calm individual although I would not describe him as an intellectual type.

'He joined the Navy - I don't know why, but that was a surprise. I didn't think that would appeal to him.'

Mr Longland remains convinced of his former schoolfriend's innocence. 'I do not believe he is capable of that crime,' he said. 'When I knew him, there was no way he would hurt anyone. I don't remember him being in any kind of trouble.

'He went for a walk, the neighbour was burgled and later murdered. They didn't find any blood on David, but they did find a bottle of spirits with his fingerprints on it. David has always held his hands up to the burglary.

'He has tried to lodge an appeal and failed. He has also lodged three applications to be transferred to a UK prison, where he has family, although I think his mother and brother moved to Canada.

'The prisons over there are privately funded, so letting out a lifer is letting go of a cash cow. Financially, there's not a lot of appetite to do it.

'High Desert State Prison has a reputation for violence, but David has kept his head down and stayed clear of trouble. He's been in a number of prisons.
A drunk British tourist in Canada was brutally punched and kneed by police as they tried to arrest him for causing a ruckus during the popular Calgary Stampede festival.

Police say Daniel J. Maguire, 23, was 'belligerent and heavily intoxicated' at one of the festival's tents  'stealing other patrons' drinks and refusing to leave the premises.'

He later tried to grab one a police Taser, officials said.

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Daniel J. Maguire, 23 of England, is taken down by police after he wouldn't leave a tent at the popular Calgary Stampede festival

Maguire was confronted by on-site security several times and asked to leave. He was led out by Calgary police.

'As officers were attempting to escort the man off the premises, he pulled away and grabbed hold of one of the officers duty belts and on to the handle of the members conducted energy weapon,' police said in a statement.

'Several officers began wrestling with the combative man in an attempt to get him to the ground and under control.'

A video of the incident shows four officers round up on him, punching and kneeing Maguire as he resists and maintains his footing.

Eventually, he goes down  and officers promptly arrest him.

Three officers are seen leading him away as Maguire still tries to free himself.

A total of 12 officers stand around the man while he is taken into custody.

Maguire is charged with resisting arrest, obstruction of justice, failure to leave a licensed liquor establishment and causing a disturbance, Calgary police said.

A video of the incident shows four officers round up on Maguire as he resists arrest  though not for long

The officers' use of force is being investigated by the Calgary Police Commission.

'Use of force is never pretty. Even when completely justified,' wrote police spokesman Riley Babott on Facebook.

'To most citizens witnessing police using force may be shocking or disturbing to see. That is understandable. But while it may look shocking, that doesn't immediately mean it is not justified and reasonable given the totality of the circumstances that an onlooker likely won't be privy too.'

He added: 'No one has the right to physically fight the police. The proper venue to dispute an arrest and charges is court.'
pilot with United Airlines who 'removed him from flying' pending their investigation

A West Virginia politician has come under fire after making comments on Twitter that called for Hillary Clinton to be 'hung on the Mall in Washington, DC'.

Michael Folk, a Republican for the House of Delegates posted the tweet Friday that read: 'Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution... then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.'

Folk told WOWK-TV that he posted the tweet following the FBI's decision to not charge Clinton over the investigation into her private email server.

Michael Folk (left), a Republican for the House of Delegates posted the tweet Friday that read: 'Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution... then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC'

Folk said in a telephone interview Sunday that his comments on Twitter (pictured) calling for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's public execution weren't meant to be taken literally. The tweet has since been removed from Folk's account

He said if a private person had done what Clinton did, they would be put in prison, according to the station.

The tweet has since been removed from Folk's account.

Folk said in a telephone interview Sunday that his comments on Twitter calling for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee's public execution weren't meant to be taken literally.

He said the tweet was 'hyperbole' and he doesn't want her executed.

'I do think she should be tried and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,' Folk told CNN.

But as for being hanged, he said: 'No, my gosh. That was the hyperbole in the statement.'

The state Democratic Party has called for his resignation. Folk says he won't resign.

The West Virginia Democratic Party (WVDP) is recommending that Folk resign.

Belinda Biafore, the WVDP chair told WOWK: 'Folk's actions should deem him as unfit to serve and Speaker Tim Armstead should take action if Folk doesn't resign.

Folk, who is a commercial pilot, is employed by United Airlines, and the company also responded to the incident on Twitter

Several people who say they are regular customers with United Airlines took to Twitter and demanded the carrier fire him immediately. Folk said he's receive his own death threats over the comments

One Clinton supporter tweeted at United Airlines telling them to 'let us know when Michael Folk will be fired'

She added that it makes her 'worrisome for the people of West Virginia that someone who can feel this type of hate and use this type of rhetoric is in any position of power'.

Folk, who is a commercial pilot, is employed by United Airlines, and the company also responded to the incident on Twitter.

'Were appalled by comments advocating harm to anyone. They do not represent United & were looking into the matter.'

Several people who say they are regular customers with United Airlines took to Twitter and demanded the carrier fire him immediately.

The carrier later tweeted the removal of Folk while they continue to investigate.

'This pilot has been removed from flying pending our investigation. We are appalled by his threatening comments.'

Folk said he's received his own death threats over the comments.

United Airlines later tweeted that Folk has 'been removed from flying pending our investigation'

Another Twitter user called Folk a 'danger to our society' following his 'outrageous threats against Hillary'

Several Twitter users expressed their outrage by saying they'll never fly with the carrier again if the company doesn't terminate Folk

Another user said Folk's comments don't align with the 'mindset of a pilot' he would want to fly with




Boris Johnson's new deputy at the Foreign Office is Sir Alan Duncan, who only last month mocked his new boss by describing him as 'Borisconi'.

Sir Alan was comparing him to the 'theatrical and comical antics' of the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in the House of Commons as he tried to persuade his Tory colleagues not to elect Mr Johnson as their new leader.

At the time, Mr Johnson was favourite to become Tory leader and Prime Minister but dropped out the following day after Michael Gove deserted his campaign.

Today Theresa May appointed Sir Alan as a Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, meaning he will be working under Mr Johnson on important foreign affairs issues, including Brexit.

Sir Alan is a close ally of the new Prime Minister, suggesting she has installed him at the Foreign Office to keep an eye on Mr Johnson.

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Boris Johnson's new deputy at the Foreign Office is Sir Alan Duncan (pictured), who only last month mocked his new boss by describing him as 'Borisconi'

Sir Alan was comparing Boris Johnson to the 'theatrical and comical antics' of the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi in the House of Commons as he tried to persuade his Tory colleagues not to elect Mr Johnson as their new leader last month

When Sir Alan made the joke during Prime Minister's Questions last month, Mrs May was seen laughing.

The appointment is unlikely to go down well with Mr Johnson, who has faced a baptism of fire since being appointed Foreign Secretary in a shock move by Mrs May last week.

Sir Alan, a former international development minister, questioned Mr Johnson's leadership credentials before the Tory leadership contest even began.

Urging colleagues not to select Mr Johnson as their new leader, he told them to 'pick someone based on competence because they're going to go straight in to being leader of the party and Prime Minister.

He also urged Tory members not to vote for Mr Johnson because the party would not enjoy a 'permanent ride on the big dipper' under the former Mayor of London's leadership.

But Mrs May did promote one of Mr Johnson's closest allies in Parliament. She handed Ben Wallace, who acted as Mr Johnson's leadership campaign manager, to the important position of Security minister at the Home Office.

Another notable appointment is David Jones, the former Welsh Secretary, as a minister under David Davis at the newly-created department for Exiting the EU.

He played a key role in the Leave campaign in Wales during the EU referendum, where a majority voted for Brexit.

Mrs May's new Government is nearly complete after a string of junior ministerial appointments this morning.

Sacked former Cabinet minister Michael Gove's team at the Ministry of Justice has been dramatically reshaped with Prisons Minister Andrew Selous the latest to leave the department.

Mrs May's former parliamentary private secretary (PPS) Michael Ellis became deputy Commons leader.

George Hollingbery moved from the whips' office to become Mrs May's parliamentary private secretary.

Former foreign minister Hugo Swire has quipped that sacked allies of David Cameron were like condemned prisoners sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

But the new PM did show faith in some of the old guard, keeping George Osborne's former PPS Robert Halfon in Government as an Education Minister.

Today Theresa May (pictured with her husband Philip as they attended Sunday church in Maidenhead today) appointed Sir Alan as a Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, meaning he will be working under Mr Johnson on important foreign affairs issues, including Brexit. Sir Alan is a close ally of the new Prime Minister, suggesting she has installed him at the Foreign Office to keep an eye on Mr Johnson

Meanwhile the former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind said Mr Johnson's appointment to his old job is 'a gamble that might pay off if he can reinvent himself' and ditch his celebrity status.

The Conservative politician, who served as foreign secretary between 1995 and 1997, insisted Mr Johnson was not a Donald Trump figure, but rather a 'civilised and intelligent person'.

The former London mayor faced a wave of criticism when Theresa May handed him the key role in her Cabinet last week.

Speaking on the BBC's Sunday Politics Scotland programme, Sir Malcolm said: 'It's a gamble that might pay off if he can reinvent himself.

'I think in all seriousness Boris is an extremely intelligent and able guy, he is not a Donald Trump figure.

'He's a very civilised and intelligent person, who could be a very good Foreign Secretary. However, he has made his name as a celebrity, and he's got to choose.

'You can't be a foreign secretary carrying out the rather sober serious difficult problems of international diplomacy and at the same time expect to continue to be the kind of celebrity as Boris is.'

On a lighter note, Sir Malcolm recommended Mr Johnson could start his reinvention with a hair cut and by 'tucking his shirt into the back of his trousers on a regular basis'.

He added that the Foreign Secretary would also have to quickly demonstrate he is in command of UK policy objectives in difficult areas such as the Middle East and Russia.

'To be much more serious about it, I think he has got to adopt a dialogue, a conversation, that doesn't just get a nice enjoyable headline that cheers us all up on a Monday morning,' he said.
Dallas police chief David Brown led the messages of support to police in Baton Rouge after three officers were killed and three others injured in an ambush on cops on Sunday morning.

Three officers were confirmed dead and a further three were injured after a shooting in the Louisiana city.

One suspect is dead and law enforcement officials believe a further two may still be at large, a spokesman for the sheriffs office said.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police, Brown tweeted on Sunday afternoon.

Dallas is still mourning five slain police officers who were targeted in an ambush during a protest 10 days ago. The last of the officers - Patrick Zamarripa - was laid to rest yesterday.

Reverend Al Sharpton added: Praying for the families of the police officers shot in Baton Rouge as we await the full details. This senseless violence really must stop.

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Dallas police chief David Brown (pictured speaking at a memorial for Dallas' fallen officers on July 12) led the messages of support to police in Baton Rouge after three officers were killed and three others injured in an ambush on cops on Sunday morning

Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police, Brown, whose department is still mourning, said

The attack, which happened just before 9am, less than a mile from police headquarters, comes amid spiraling tensions across the country between the black community and police.

Baton Rouge has seen constant protests since the shooting of a black man outside a convenience store on July 5.

Alton Sterling, 37, was killed in a scuffle with two white police officers  sparking Black Lives Matter protests across the country.

His killing was captured in a cellphone video and circulated widely online.

The shooting of Philando Castile, 32, by a Minnesota police officer in Falcon Heights during a traffic stop a day later, exacerbated tensions further.

The aftermath of the shooting was streamed live on Facebook by Castiles girlfriend.

On July 7, a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas turned deadly when a sniper opened fire and killed five police officers, heightening tensions even further.

Reverend Al Sharpton and actress Yvette Nicole Brown also took to Twitter to brand the attack 'senseless'

Micah Johnson told authorities he wanted to kill whites  especially white police officers - before he was killed with a remote-controlled robot by police.

The massacre left law enforcement across the country on alert, with heads of police departments across the country ordering police officers to patrol in pairs.

And protesters continued to take to the streets of Baton Rouge to condemn Sterling and Castiles death.

Last weekend, thousands protested  and authorities arrested around 200 people over a three-day period.

The Baton Rouge police department has come under fire for the tactics it's employed to deal with protesters, using riot police and military-style vehicles on the streets of the city.

Earlier this week, Baton Rouge police Chief Carl Dabadie said the department had knowledge of credible threats to harm officers.

Four suspects were arrested after they stole firearms from a pawn shop and one told authorities they were planning to attack police in the Baton Rouge area.

'We have been questioned repeatedly over the last several days about our show of force and why we have the tactics that we have,' Dabadie said on Tuesday.

Baton Rouge police block Airline Highway after police officers were shot on Sunday morning

Baton Rouge police officers with assault rifles block Airline Highway after three officers were killed

'Well, this is the reason, because we had credible threats against the lives of law enforcement in this city.'

Dabadie said the alleged plot was the main reason officers were quick to become aggressive when they believed protesters in the city were becoming disruptive last week.

And in the wake of a second co-ordinated ambush on Sunday, people turned to Twitter to condemn the violence once again.

Actress Yvette Nicole Brown, who is best known for playing Shirley Bennet on Community, said: I stand proudly with #BlackLivesMatter AND condemn the senseless murders of the police officers in Dallas & now in Baton Rouge

Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the attack unspeakable and unjustified.

This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing, he said in a statement.

Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice.
Nearly 40 years after Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz set out on a reign of terror in New York killing six people and wounding seven, a survivor has broken her silence for the first time.

Jody Valenti, now 59, recalled the night in July 1976 when Berkowitz, one of America's most notorious serial killers, began his killing spree that left her friend Donna Lauria, then 18, dead.

Speaking in an interview with the New York Post, Valenti told of how it took her years to overcome several fears following the night she and her friend were attacked.

'It took probably about six years of my life to be able to get in a car at night,' she told the Post.

'It took a long time to be able to deal with the sounds of popping fireworks and stuff like that... But I faced my fears.'

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Survivor Jody Valenti (left) has broken her silence for the first time 40 years after she and her friend Donna Lauria (right) were attacked by Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz in 1976 when she was 19 years old

Berkowitz is pictured above in a 2009 photo when he was interviewed at the Sullivan Correction Facility in Fallsburg, New York. He is one of the most notorious serial killers

On July 29, 1976, Berkowitz, then a 24-year-old postal worker from the Bronx, shot dead Lauria as the teens sat in a car in Pelham Bay, New York, leaving Valenti injured with a gunshot wound to her thigh.

Lauri, was shot once in the back, was killed instantly.

At the time, Valenti was a 19-year-old nursing student and Lauria was studying to be an EMT, according to the Post.

The 'neighborhood buddies' had just returned to Lauria's family home in the Bronx after a night of dancing at a local disco, and were chatting with one another when Berkowitz suddenly appeared and fired four shots through the right, car-door window.

'I feel bad for all those people that lost their lives,' Valenti told the Post as she reflected on the night of the attack and the others that followed.

'I feel bad for my friend. At this point, she would have been my age and having a family of her own, and children and maybe grandchildren.'

Valenti also shared how the recent mass shootings across America have deeply impacted her and has even lead her to face her biggest fear, guns.

'Just recently I took a gun class,' she told the Post.

'I went and learned how to shoot a gun. It's my own fear that I faced. I did it myself.

'I did it to face my fear of a gun, my fear of holding a gun... my fear of the sound of a gun - fear, fear, fear.'

Berkowitz, then a 24-year-old postal worker, is pictured in 1977 as he is escorted to court by officers. He was arrested August 10 outside his Yonkers home after his 13-month murderous rampage

On April 17, 1977, victims Valentina Suriani, 18, and Alexander Esau, 20, (both pictured above) were shot dead

Following the widespread gun violence across the nation, she also explained how there is a need to 'care for people with mental illness,' she told the Post.

'The person whos holding the gun who has a mental illness.'

She added: 'I have a lot of thoughts and I have a lot of feelings about what's going on in this country right now, the terrifying issues with handguns and who's having handguns.

'Look what's happening with the police, it's just getting out of control, and I'm conservative. I'm not a left-winger.'

With the anniversary of the Valenti-Lauria attack later this month, Valenti is bewildered how the murderer is still making it into headlines.

'What are we celebrating? The lunatic that's in prison for life who's getting benefits,' she told the Post.

'He's getting three square meals. He's getting an education. He's getting everything he needs, and I find it very disturbing.'

Berkowitz carried out a murderous 13-month rampage throughout the streets of New York during which he killed six women and wounded seven others before being captured.

Following the July 1976 attack, he struck a second time on October 23, 1976, wounding 20-year-old Carl Denaro as he shot up the car that was also carrying Denaro's girlfriend, 18-year-old Rosemary Keenan, as they drove through Queens.

Denaro, who was shot in the head, had long hair and was believed to be a shooter by the girl, according to the Post.

Donna DeMasi, 16, (left) was shot while she and a friend chatted under a street lamp in Queens. They both survived, though her friend paralyzed. Christine Freund was shot dead while sitting in a car with her fiance

The victim survived but required a metal plate in his head while Keenan was not hit.

His next victims, two friends Donna DiMasi, 16, and Joanne Lomino, 18, were shot by Berkowitz Thanksgiving weekend as they chatted under a street lamp in Queens.

He approached the girls, pretending to ask for directions before shooting them at point blank range. While both survived, Lomino was rendered a paraplegic.

It was not until his next murder in January 1977 that police acknowledged the killings might be linked.

While details were hard to come by, police knew was that all the victims had been shot with a .44 caliber pistol, leading the press to call Berkowitz, 'The .44 Caliber Killer.'

On January 30, 1977, newly engaged couple Christine Freund, 26, and John Diel, 30, were sitting in a car in front of the Forest Hills Inn in Queens when the car erupted with gunfire.

Freund was killed while her fiance survived.

A few months later in March, 21-year-old college student Virginia Voskerichian was walking down a street in Queens when Berkowitz opened fire, killing her instantly.

That same month, police set up a 300 strong Operation Omega, headed by Deputy Inspector Timothy J. Dowd, to hunt for the killer.

The following month, Berkowitz struck again not far from where DiMasi and Lomino were attacked in the Bronx.

On April 17, 1977, victims Valentina Suriani, 18, and Alexander Esau, 20, were shot dead.

In April, Berkowitz also left the first of his notorious hand written letters beside the bodies of two more of his victims.

Calling himself the 'Son of Sam', Berkowitz's letter was a bizarre rant about how his 'father' mistreated him, locking him in an attic all day.

He signed off with the taunting: 'Police  Let me haunt you with these words; I'll be back! I'll be back! To be interrpreted [sic] as  bang, bang, bang, bank, bang  ugh!! Yours in murder Mr. Monster.'

Berkowitz shot 13 people in cold blood - killing six. Seen right is one of several bizarre notes he sent taunting police

In May, New York Post columnist Jimmy Breslin received another letter from 'Son of Sam', in which he asked Breslin how he planned to commemorate Valenti and Lauria's shooting.

'What will you have for July 29,' he wrote.

In one of his most terrifying letters, he wrote of a 'thirsty lad' Sam, derived from his neighbor Sam Carr, who he said 'won't let me stop until he gets his fill of blood.'

He wrote: 'Hello from the gutters of NYC, which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood . . . Sam's a thirsty lad and he won't let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood.'

The barks from Carr's dog kept Berkowitz up during the night and conveyed demonic messages to him, according to the Post. Berkowitz ended up killing the dog.

Not long after, panic set in across New York City.

With the killer only striking those with long black hair, women in the city rushed to cut or dye their hair, causing a shortage of peroxide.

Such was the sensational media coverage, people stayed indoors and the streets were deserted after dark.

'It was a terrible time,' Valenti told the Post.

And the killings continued. On June 26, 1977, Judy Placido, 17, and her friend Sal Lupo were sitting in Lupo's car when they were shot both shot.

Despite Placido being shot in the right temple, back of the neck and on her right shoulder while Sal was struck in his fright forearm, both managed to survive.

The following month on July 30, 1977, in his final murder, Berkowitz struck again, but this time in Brooklyn where he shot Stacy Moskowitz and Robert Violante, both 20, in their heads.

Moskowitz died but Violante, blinded, survived.

Berkowitz was eventually caught on August 10, 1977 thanks to a traffic ticket left on the windshield of his car following his final murder. He is shown above in an interview at Attica Prison in New York in 1979

Police said they found a .44 calibre Bulldog revolver under the seat of the car

Berkowitz was eventually caught on August 10, 1977 thanks to a traffic ticket left on the windshield of his car following Moskowitz murder.

Prior to the shooting, a woman who lived near the scene of the attack had seen a man remove the ticket and cops were able to trace the summons to an address in Yonkers.

When he was caught and asked to identify himself, Berkowitz said with a smile: 'I am Sam. David Berkowitz' and asked, 'What took you so long?' according to the Post.

Inside his car, officers found the .44-caliber pistol along with a rifle and maps of the crime scenes.

The Son of Sam killer was sentenced to six life sentences in June 1978.

While in prison, Berkowitz claimed he was the member of a satanic cult who had directed him to carry out the killings.

Ten years into his prison sentence, Berkowitz became a born again Christian and now spreads his message with the help of a group of friends who print religious pamphlets telling his life story, including his conversion to Christianity and his warnings to youth.
The family of a teenage boy killed after a brawl turned nasty have appealed for calm as four of his murder suspects have been released on bail.

Relatives of 17-year-old Jack Gudge have asked people 'not to take matters into their own hands' by seeking revenge for his death.

Police were called to reports of a punch up outside a Tesco Express in Winton, Dorset, on Saturday night, and arrived to find the Bournemouth schoolboy lying unconscious on the floor.

He was surrounded by a pool of blood and was immediately rushed to hospital, but died shortly after from serious head injuries.

Police were called to reports of a punch up outside a Tesco store (pictured) shortly before 1am and found the victim surrounded by a pool of blood

Victim: 17-year-old Jack Gudge (above) was rushed to hospital but paramedics were unable to save his life

A 15-year-old boy and three men, aged 27, 24 and 23, were arrested by the police, and today they were bailed pending further inquiries.

Jack's mother wrote on Facebook this morning: 'With a very heavy heart, me and his dad request that no one takes any action on their own behalf as this will affect the justice that Jack rightly deserves. Please share.'

And Chief Inspector Mike Claxton warned against people making threats to those released on bail, including online, stating the Gudge family have appealed for the community to remain calm.

Flowers have begun to be laid at the scene of the assault by grieving family and friends. The message above reads 'going to be missed by so many

Police officers were initially called to reports of a fight outside the Tesco store when they discovered the teenager who had suffered serious head injuries

Grieving friends and family expressed their grief by flooding social media with tributes under the #ripgudge hashtag, and left flowers and balloons outside at the scene of his death.

Jack's cousin Josh Gudge commented: 'RIP Jack Gudge. You were (the) best cousin anyone could have. I will miss you so much. I love you xx.'

A friend wrote: 'I'd happily swap places with you, Jack. Miss you too much.'

Another posted: 'Can't even begin to imagine the pain his close friends and family are in now. This has impacted so many people.'

Jack's school, Oak Academy in Duck Lane, wrote on Twitter: 'Heartbroken to hear the awful news about the loss of our lovely Jack. Our community is a sadder place today. Shine bright, Jack.'

Reverend Roger Constantine, a pastor at the Bournemouth Community Church in Moordown, led hundreds on the street in silent prayer this morning.

He said: 'I think Martin Luther King probably said it best - you don't fight darkness with darkness, you don't fight hate with hate,' reports the Bournemouth Echo.

Grieving friends and family of the teenager have begun to express their grief on social media using the hashtag #RIPGudge

Relatives of Jack have asked people 'not to take matters into their own hands' by seeking revenge for his tragic death

A 15-year-old boy and three men, aged 27, 24 and 23, were arrested by the police on suspicion of murder

Chief Inspector Mike Claxton warned against people making threats to those released on bail, including online

Mr Claxton said: 'It is understandable that people will wish to express their upset and offer sympathies to Jack's family at this sad time.

'However, posting well-intended but inappropriate comments on social media could cause problems with the investigation in the future.

'This includes any comments that could be deemed threatening towards those on police bail or proved to be inaccurate that could prejudice the ongoing investigation.

A picture of Jack, posted by his cousin Josh on Facebook, who wrote: 'RIP jack Jack Gudge you were best cousin anyone could have I will miss you so much I love you xxxx'

'This is particularly the case if you personally know the people involved or if you have provided any information to the police that may form part of any future court case.'

On Saturday paramedics rushed Jack to Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospital by ambulance where he was pronounced dead. A file was prepared for the coroner and the boy's family were informed of his death.

Police then set up a cordon around the murder scene in Wimborne Road, Winton, and crime scene investigators could be seen combing the area for clues. Discarded clothing and medical equipment could also be seen outside the Tesco Express store.

The victim had suffered from serious head injuries and was immediately taken to Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospital but was pronounced dead shortly after

Mr Claxton added: 'This tragic incident has understandably shocked and upset the whole community and I send my condolences to the family and friends of Jack.

'Jack's family have asked that, out of respect for him, everyone remains calm and for people not to take matters into their own hands. His family has also asked to be allowed time to grieve in private.

'I would like to reassure the public that we have an expert team investigating the circumstances surrounding Jack's death and we continue to support the family throughout this difficult time.

'We appreciate everyone's help with the investigation including those people that have already come forward and spoken to police and to those who have responsibly shared our social media appeals.'

Detective Chief Inspector Neil Devoto, of Dorset Police's major crime investigation team, said: 'Jack's family has been updated with the developments of the investigation by specially trained officers and our thoughts continue to be with them at this time.'

Detective Inspector Wayne Seymour, of the Major Crime Investigation Team, said: 'Following the death of the boy enquiries are now underway to establish exactly what happened during the incident.

'I am appealing for anyone who may witnessed what happened or has any other information that may help with the investigation and who has not already spoken to police to contact us as soon as possible.'
A Florida woman heroically crashed her car into another vehicle to save the lives of a mother and her child when she noticed the driver was having a seizure behind the steering wheel.

Brigitte Gonzalez tells WSVN that she was on US 441 when she noticed something wrong in the car next to hers.

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Hero: Brigitte Gonzalez intentionally crashed her car so she could save the lives of a mother and her daughter

Saved: Nakia Moore, pictured with her daughter, suffered a stroke on the road and lost control of her car

'Everybody was honking, honking, honking  I looked to my left, and I saw the lady, and she was having a stroke, a seizure,' Gonzalez told the station.

'She was foaming out of the mouth. She was just shaking. Then I saw her daughter, and that's when I guess it hit me in my heart that I was like, have to stop her.'

Nakia Moore had been driving to West Park, just north of Miami, to pick up her husband when she suffered a stroke.

'I remember the car rolling and after that is just a blank,' Moore, who had her daughter in the car, told WSVN.

That's when Gonzalez went into action  cutting off Moore's car and slowly forcing it to a halt.

'I just decided to slow down and kind of slightly hit her,' the hero told WSVN. 'It wasn't like a hard impact. I slightly hit the tip of the front of her car.'

Other drivers flagged down police, who rushed to the crash location.

'She just positioned her car, you know, with the speeds that the car was going, to minimize that amount of damage and the impact,' said Sgt. Kypps Pollard, of the Broward County Sheriff's Office, to WSVN.

Thankful: Moore (left) credits Gonzalez (right) with heroically saving her life as well as her daughter's

Moore says she's thankful to have had a hero save her and her daughter.

'The next thing I remember is coming to and seeing the police officers and everybody around the car,' she told WSVN.

'I'm just grateful for her, I thank God for her,' she added.

For her part, Gonzalez says she doesn't care about her car and is happy everything turned out OK.
The head of the Cleveland police union on Sunday urged Ohio's governor to declare a state of emergency and suspend state laws allowing people to openly carry firearms during the Republican National Convention.

His requested followed Sunday morning's shooting of six police officers in Louisiana.

'I don't care what the legal precedent is, I feel strongly that leadership needs to stand up and defend these police officers,' Loomis, the head of the police union, told Reuters in an interview at the union's headquarters on Sunday.

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Second Amendment supporter Steve Thacker, a member of a group supporting the carrying of weapon, is armed with an AR-15-style weapon as he talks to the media during a protest on Sunday in Cleveland

Steve Loomis, head of the Cleveland police union, (left) urged Ohio Gov. John Kasich (right) to declare a state of emergency and suspend state laws allowing people to openly carry firearms during the Republican National Convention

Gov. Kasich, however, responded saying governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or laws.

'Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested,' Kasich spokeswoman Emmalee Kalmbach said.

'The bonds between our communities and police must be reset and rebuilt - as we're doing in Ohio - so our communities and officers can both be safe.

'Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal.'

On Sunday, an Ohio man was seen openly carrying a semi-automatic rifle and handgun in Cleveland.

Steve Thacker, 57, said he decided to visit the city's Public Square armed with guns the day before the start of the convention to assert his Second Amendment rights.

A group called Northeast Ohio Open Carry had planned a noon rally Sunday in downtown Cleveland, but only 57-year-old Steve Thacker (pictured left and right) showed up with guns

Thacker drew attention from news media as Cleveland police officers milled nearby and a line of around 60 police bicyclists took a break before pedaling off

Thacker, shown holding his guns, said he was trying to make a statement about his rights

A group called Northeast Ohio Open Carry had planned a noon rally on Sunday in downtown Cleveland, but only Thacker showed up with guns.

He drew attention from news media as Cleveland police officers milled nearby and a line of around 60 police bicyclists took a break before pedaling off.

Ohio's open-carry law, allows people with proper permits to carry a loaded weapon on the streets.

Weapons are not permitted inside a secure zone around the Quicken Loans Arena, where the convention will be held.

The open-carry law will remain in effect outside of the secure zone, which will allow gun owners to carry firearms into downtown Cleveland, including inside the event zone where thousands of Trump supporters and anti-Trump forces will hold competing rallies next week.

Thacker said he was trying to make a statement about his rights, and complained that fees and background checks associated with purchasing weapons results in the government 'selling back' his privilege to buy and own firearms.

On Sunday, Cleveland deployed overwhelming security, bracing for possible violent protests as delegates poured into town for the convention.

The killing of three police officers Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana only added to the tensions in Cleveland, where law enforcement agencies have thrown a ring of steel around downtown.

Loomis' request to Ohio's governor followed Sunday morning's shooting of six police officers in Louisiana. Above law enforcement officers block the entrance to the Louisiana state police headquarters on Sunday

Law enforcement officers block Airline Highway near the site of the shooting of police in Baton Rouge

The motivation for the latest shooting was not immediately clear.

Authorities in Cleveland have erected eight-foot-tall metal fencing around the Quicken Loans Arena, closed off streets and deployed thousands of armed police officers.

The four-day convention is due to begin on Monday.

The city has taken out $50million in protest insurance.

'We have policies in place for mass arrests through our prosecutor's office, our clerk's office and our court system,' Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams told a news conference.

Williams said barricades had also been erected downtown to thwart any potential terror attack after a truck bomber killed 84 people in the French city of Nice last Thursday.

There were no plans to delay Monday's start of the four-day Cleveland convention, where thousands of Republican delegates are gathering amid a threat of protests both for and against Donald Trump

'We use blocking vehicles, we use concrete barriers and things like that at positions that we think may be vulnerable to attacks like that which happened in Nice,' he said.

The US homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, told Congress last week that he was concerned about demonstrations getting out of hand.

US authorities have been on alert since a gunman intent on killing white policemen went on a rampage and shot five Dallas officers dead earlier this month.
Donald Trump jumped on the opportunity to blast President Barack Obama once again while paying tribute to three police officers in Baton Rouge

Three officers were confirmed dead and three more were injured after Gavin Eugene Long at a gas station along Airline Highway in the Louisiana city on Sunday morning.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, took to Facebook to pay tribute to the fallen officers, but couldn't resist taking a swipe at Obama.

'We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today,' the billionaire businessman said, adding: 'How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.'

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Donald Trump jumped on the opportunity to blast President Barack Obama once again while paying tribute to three police officers in Baton Rouge

On Twitter, the 70-year-old added: 'We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police.

'Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching.'

Trump continued to repeat the word 'divided', first telling fans to watch his upcoming 60 minutes interview and promising he would be discussing 'law and order' before adding, 'Bad times for divided USA!'

And three hours later Trump went on a second rant that took aim at Obama, writing: 'Our country is totally divided and our enemies are watching.

'We are not looking good, we are not looking smart, we are not looking tough!

'President Obama just had a news conference, but he doesn't have a clue. Our country is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse!'

Trump was also quick to blast Obama in the wake of the terror attack on Nice, France, on Thursday evening.

He also reiterated his call for the United States to tighten its borders and brought up his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country as a solution in interviews hours after the attacks.

The Baton Rouge attack, which happened just before 9am less than a mile from police headquarters, comes amid spiraling tensions across the country between the black community and police.

Baton Rouge has seen protests since the shooting of a black man outside a convenience store on July 5, though these had died down in recent days.

Alton Sterling, 37, was killed in a scuffle with two white police officers  sparking Black Lives Matter protests across the country.

Trump continued to repeat the word 'divided' as he went on a second rant about Obama three hours later

Three officers were confirmed dead and a further three were injured after a shooting at a gas station

His killing was captured in a cell phone video and circulated widely online.

The shooting of Philando Castile, 32, by a Minnesota police officer in Falcon Heights during a traffic stop a day later, exacerbated tensions further.

The aftermath of the shooting was streamed live on Facebook by Castiles girlfriend.

Tension has only increased after a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas turned deadly on July 7 when a sniper opened fire and killed five police officers.

Micah Johnson told authorities he wanted to kill whites  especially white police officers - before he was killed with a remote-controlled robot by police.

The massacre left law enforcement across the country on alert, with heads of police departments across the country ordering police officers to patrol in pairs.

And in the wake of a second co-ordinated ambush on Sunday, people turned to Twitter to condemn the violence once again.

Baton Rouge police respond to active shooter near Hammond Aire Shopping Center in Baton Rouge

Reverend Al Sharpton added: Praying for the families of the police officers shot in Baton Rouge as we await the full details This senseless violence really must stop.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police, Dallas police chief David Brown, whose department is still mourning five dead police officers who were targeted in an ambush during a protest 10 days ago, tweeted on Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the attack unspeakable and unjustified.

This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing, he said in a statement.

Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice.
Adele and Matt Allen believe in an all-natural approach to bringing up their children - so much so they refuse modern medicine, traditional schooling and encourage full-term breastfeeding.

Adele, 32, and Matt, 33, from Brighton, call their parenting style 'Off-Grid Parenting' and their children Ulysses, five and Ostara, one, are therefore both still breastfed, have never visited a doctor and will not attend a mainstream school.

When Adele, a writer, fell pregnant with her son, the couple's controversial methods felt completely natural to them.

She said: 'Off-grid is moving towards self sustainability and being a bit more free range and less institutionalised.'

Adele, 32, and Matt, 33, from Brighton, call their parenting style 'Off-Grid Parenting' and their children Ulysses, five and Ostara, one, are therefore both still breastfed, have never visited a doctor and will not attend a mainstream school

Matt said: 'We did collect a lot of information but essentially it was just this feeling.'

Adele gave birth to both her children completely unassisted and with no medical intervention with only her husband Matt by her side.

She said: 'The thought of giving birth in a hospital just didn't appeal to me because of many reasons - mostly the observer effect.

'Also, the interventions I think can be gently nudged on you when you are in a very vulnerable state.'

Adele and Matt also decided to have 'lotus births' meaning the placenta and umbilical cords were not surgically removed at birth.

Instead, Adele carried the attached placenta in a cool bag - scattered with salt and rose petals to disguise the smell - around with her until it fell off naturally.

She said: 'With both my births it took six days for the umbilical chord to fall away naturally.

'You wrap it up and keep it clean and it falls away and forms a perfect belly button.

Adele feels very strongly about full-term breastfeeding and her five-year-son still regularly feeds from her bosom for comfort

'In my knowledge, it's perfectly safe and it worked beautifully for us. I don't know of any known cases where it's gone wrong.

'I very much honour the postpartum-period and I didn't go out at all during that first week. So it was just a matter of transporting it to the toilet or to the kitchen.'

Adele feels very strongly about full-term breastfeeding and her five-year-son still regularly feeds from her bosom for comfort.

She said: 'Ulyssess does still nurse from time to time. Since the baby came along it has decreased rapidly and we had to come to a mutual understanding that it needed to graduate down a bit, but then I wasn't willing to say 'no you need to stop now.

'I think its up to him to decide when he wants to move on from it

Distrusting of modern medicine, Adele prefers to treat her youngsters' ailments naturally, squirting breast milk in their eyes to cure eye infections and serving them lemon juice when they have a cold

Adele and Matt also believe in attachment parenting methods, such as co-sleeping and the family of four all sleep in the same room

'It's something that's just as natural as a hug is, it's a connection.'

Aside from a hospital trip with Ulysses following an asthma attack, the Allen children have never seen a doctor or received vaccinations.

Adele said: 'I don't really see that there's any need other than using breastfeeding to supplement them.

'I don't see any need to inject any foreign substance directly into the blood stream. That's not how children will come into the contact with a germ naturally anyway, be it in the mouth or another way.'

Distrusting of modern medicine, Adele prefers to treat her youngsters' ailments naturally, squirting breast milk in their eyes to cure eye infections and serving them lemon juice when they have a cold.

She said: 'If you use plants and herbs you target the bad without attacking the good bacteria as well.

Adele gave birth to both her children completely unassisted and with no medical intervention with only her husband Matt by her side

'If I had something serious like cancer, I would definitely take the natural path. I whole-heartedly have faith in it now and I've experienced enough of it to know that is the way forward.

'The kids' health is just as important as mine if not more so, and so again I would go with what I trust and for me, that is the natural path.'

Adele and Matt also believe in attachment parenting methods, such as co-sleeping and the family of four all sleep in the same room.

Adele said: 'It works quite nice for us. Normally we put the baby down to sleep first. Uly pretty much picks up his own bed time, but as we don't have a school routine in morning he is then able to wake up when it suits him.'

Ostara and Ulysses do not attend mainstream school and instead spend their days outside among nature, learning about plants.

The mother-of-two said: 'We basically spend lots of time in nature. It's more important to us for them to interact with animals and plants and learn about the environment than it is for them to have big sets of plastic toys.

'Ostara really likes to play with woodlice and in the mud. In the park, there's a big herb patch and she likes to pick and eat the mint leaves. Already at this young age she is thinking about what she can pick from nature and eat.'

The parents accept that reading and writing are imperative life skills but do not want learning to be forced upon their children and five-year-old Ulysses can only recognise basic letters and numbers.

Adele said: 'I don't have an issue with that. There is no need for him to be able to read and write at this age anyway.'

Instead, Adele and Matt believe that Ulysses and Ostara are becoming curious about letters and numbers from seeing them out and about.

She added: 'They see letters on drain covers and numbers on signs and then learning happens as a consequence of just being out in the world, rather than it being forced upon them in a classroom that is not particularly inspiring.'

And the parents don't worry that their untraditional schooling will affect the children's future.

Adele and Matt also decided to have 'lotus births' meaning the placenta and umbilical cords were not surgically removed at birth. Instead, Adele carried the attached placenta in a cool bag - scattered with salt and rose petals to disguise the smell - around with her until it fell off naturally

Aside from a hospital trip with Ulysses following an asthma attack, the Allen children have never seen a doctor or received vaccinations. The family rely on natural herbal remedies

Despite spending most of their time outdoors, Adele and Matt have decided not to smother their children in suncream the way parents are usually inclined to do

Adele said: 'I think home school kids are very successful entrepreneurs normally because they have been educated in that way that, they do want to build their own business and not to be a slave to someone else.'

Despite spending most of their time outdoors, Adele and Matt have decided not to smother their children in suncream the way parents are usually inclined to do.

'We don't use sun cream,' the mother continued. 'Not at all on the kids. We don't believe it protects you from cancer.

Adele writes a successful blog on natural parenting and she and Matt are adamant, despite some negative comments, they would not raise their children any other way.

Matt said: 'The whole process of doing it in a completely different way has been an amazing journey and a learning curve for all parties involved.

'I have got such a fantastic connection and bond with both of them and they know who we are - more than just being Mum and Dad - it's a much deeper connection than that.'

The family are currently saving to migrate to Costa Rica, to live an eco-lifestyle.
President Obama condemned the 'cowardly and reprehensible' attack on police officers in Baton Rouge - and promised: 'Justice will be done.'

Three officers were confirmed dead and a further three were injured after a shooting at a gas station along Airline Highway in the Louisiana city on Sunday morning.

One suspect, Gavin Eugene Long, 29, was shot dead while two other 'persons of interest' were questioned but later released without charge.

In a statement, Obama blasted the assault on officers 'who put their lives on the line for ours every day' and branded the perpetrators 'cowards who speak for no one.'

And in an address to the nation shortly after 5pm, President Obama reiterated his pledge that justice would be done, adding: 'Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible.'

Urging Americans to unite in the wake of the latest tragedy, he added: 'We need to temper our words and open our hearts.'

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President Obama (pictured on Friday) condemned the 'cowardly and reprehensible' attack on police officers in Baton Rouge - and promised: 'Justice will be done'

Obama said the motive for Sunday's attack, the second targeting police in less than two weeks, was unknown, but there is no justification for violence against law enforcement.

In his earlier statement, he said: 'These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes.'

He added: 'I condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge,' he said.

'For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault.

'These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop.'

Obama added that he has offered his full support, as well as the full support of the federal government, to Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, Mayor Kip Holden, the Sheriff's Office, and the Baton Rouge Police Department.

'And make no mistake  justice will be done,' he added.

'MAKE NO MISTAKE - JUSTICE WILL BE DONE': OBAMA'S FULL STATEMENT I condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge. For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault. These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop. I've offered my full support, and the full support of the federal government, to Governor Edwards, Mayor Holden, the Sheriff's Office, and the Baton Rouge Police Department. And make no mistake  justice will be done. We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes. The officers in Baton Rouge; the officers in Dallas  they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now  all of us  to be at our best. Today, on the Lord's day, all of us stand united in prayer with the people of Baton Rouge, with the police officers who've been wounded, and with the grieving families of the fallen. May God bless them all. Advertisement

Attorney General Loretta Lynch pledged the full support of the Justice Department as the investigation unfolds.

She said agents from the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are on the scene.

The Justice Department will make available victim services and federal funding support, and provide investigative assistance to the fullest extent possible, she said.

Lynch added that there is no place in the United States for such appalling violence.

In a statement issued on Sunday, Lynch said she condemns the shooting 'in the strongest possible terms.'

She added that everyone's hearts and prayers are with the fallen and wounded officers, their families and the entire Baton Rouge community in 'this extraordinarily difficult time.'

Obama spent most of the last week focused on defusing tensions and rebuilding trust between police departments and the communities they serve.

Now, a second attack has further placed a nation on edge as Americans anxiously watch the spate of violence at home and abroad with Thursday's attack in Nice, France, contributing to a picture of a troubled world.

'The officers in Baton Rouge, the officers in Dallas, they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now  all of us  to be at our best,' Obama said.

Three officers were confirmed dead and a further three were injured after a shooting at a gas station along Airline Highway in the Louisiana city on Sunday morning

'WE MUST TEMPER OUR WORDS AND OPEN OUR HEARTS': OBAMA'S SPEECH As all of you know now, this morning, three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge were killed in the line of duty. Three others were wounded, one is still in critical condition. As of right now, we dont know the motive of the killer. We dont know whether the killer set out to target officers or whether he gunned them down as they responded to a call. Regardless of motive, the death of these three brave officers underscores the danger that police across the country confront every single day. We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement. Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible. Earlier this afternoon, I spoke with Governor Edwards and Mayor Holden and I offered them the full support of the federal government and reiterated my full support for law enforcement in Baton Rouge and for police officers across the country. I also spoke to the Attorney General. The FBI has been already on the scene and through the work of all levels of government, justice will be done. Most of all, our hearts go out to the families who are grieving. Our prayers go out to the officer whos still are fighting for his life. This has happened far too often and Ive spent a lot of time with law enforcement this past week. Im surrounded by the best of the best every single day and I know whenever this happens, wherever this happens you feel it. Your families feel it, but what I want you to know is respect and gratitude of the American people for everything that you do for us. Five days ago, I traveled to Dallas for the memorial service of the officers who were slain there. I said that that killer would not be the last person who tries to make us turn on each other, nor will todays killer. It remains up to us to make sure that they fail. That decision is all of ours, the decision to make sure our best selves are reflected across Americans, not our worst, thats up to us. We have our divisions and they are not new. Round-the-clock news cycles and social media sometimes amplify these divisions. And I know were about to enter a couple weeks of conventions where our political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual and that is why it is so important that everyone, regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organization you are part of - everyone right now, focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further. We dont need inflammatory rhetoric. We dont need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us. We need what we saw in Dallas this week as a community that came together to restore order and deep in unity and understanding. We need the kind of efforts we saw this week in meetings with community leaders, some of which I participated in, where I saw people of goodwill pledge to work together to reduce violence throughout all of our communities. Thats whats needed right now and it is up to all of us to make sure we are part of the solution and not part of the problem. Someone once wrote that a bullet need only happen once, but for peace to work we need to be reminded of its existence again and again and again. My fellow Americans, only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided and were gonna have to keep on doing it  again and again and again. Thats how this country gets united, thats how we bring people of goodwill together. Only we can prove that we have the grace and the character and the common humanity to end this kind of senseless violence. To reduce fear and mistrust within the American family, to set an example to our children. Thats who we are and thats who we always have the capacity to be and thats the best way for us to honor the sacrifice of the brave police officers who were taken from us. May God bless them and their families and may God bless the United States of America. Advertisement

The president's statement came as Donald Trump quickly jumped on the opportunity to blame Obama for the ambush - while simultaneously paying tribute to three police officers in Baton Rouge

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, took to Facebook to pay tribute to the fallen officers, but couldn't resist taking a swipe at Obama, despite details of the attack still being unclear.

'We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today,' the billionaire businessman said, adding: 'How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.'

On Twitter, the 70-year-old added: 'We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police.

'Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching.'

Trump was also quick to blast Obama in the wake of the terror attack on Nice, France, on Thursday evening.

He also reiterated his call for the United States to tighten its borders and brought up his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country as a solution in interviews hours after the attacks.

In his address to the nation, Obama made no mention of Trump, but hinted at his remarks when he said: 'We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda.'

He did reference the political conventions set to take place soon, where the Republican and Democratic nominees for president will be officially decided.

Obama said: 'I know were about to enter a couple weeks of conventions where our political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual and that is why it is so important that everyone, regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organization you are part of - everyone right now, focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further.'

He added: 'We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us. We need what we saw in Dallas this week as a community that came together to restore order and deep in unity and understanding.

'We need the kind of efforts we saw this week in meetings with community leaders, some of which I participated in, where I saw people of goodwill pledge to work together to reduce violence throughout all of our communities.

'Thats whats needed right now and it is up to all of us to make sure we are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

'Someone once wrote that a bullet need only happen once, but for peace to work we need to be reminded of its existence again and again and again.

'My fellow Americans, only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided and were gonna have to keep on doing it  again and again and again.'

The Baton Rouge attack, which happened just before 9am, less than a mile from police headquarters, comes amid spiraling tensions across the country between the black community and police.

Donald Trump jumped on the opportunity to blast President Barack Obama once again while paying tribute to three police officers in Baton Rouge

Baton Rouge has seen constant protests since the shooting of a black man outside a convenience store on July 5.

Alton Sterling, 37, was killed in a scuffle with two white police officers  sparking Black Lives Matter protests across the country.

His killing was captured in a cellphone video and circulated widely online.

The shooting of Philando Castile, 32, by a Minnesota police officer in Falcon Heights during a traffic stop a day later, exacerbated tensions further.

The aftermath of the shooting was streamed live on Facebook by Castile's girlfriend.

On July 7, a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas turned deadly when a sniper opened fire and killed five police officers, heightening tensions even further.

Micah Johnson told authorities he wanted to kill whites  especially 'white police officers' - before he was killed with a remote-controlled robot by police.

The massacre left law enforcement across the country on alert, with heads of police departments across the country ordering police officers to patrol in pairs.

And in the wake of a second ambush on Sunday, people turned to Twitter to condemn the violence once again.

Reverend Al Sharpton added: 'Praying for the families of the police officers shot in Baton Rouge as we await the full details This senseless violence really must stop.'

'Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police,' Dallas police chief David Brown, whose department is still mourning five dead police officers who were targeted in an ambush during a protest 10 days ago, tweeted on Sunday afternoon.

On Twitter, Trump added: 'We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police'

Three officers were confirmed dead and a further three were injured after a shooting at a gas station (pictured, Baton Rouge Police running outside Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center Sunday)

Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the attack 'unspeakable and unjustified.'

'This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing,' he said in a statement.

'Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice.

'For now, I'm asking all Louisianans to join Donna and me in praying for the officers who were involved and their families as the details continue to unfold.'

On Monday, Obama spoke at the memorial service for the five slain Dallas officers killed and told Americans not to despair, that the nation is not as divided as it might seem.

The next day, he held an extraordinary four-hour meeting at the White House's executive offices with police officers, community activists and elected leaders.

He emerged from the session saying 'we're not even close' to the point where minority communities could feel confident that police departments were serving them with respect and equality or where police departments could feel adequately supported at all levels.

Baton Rouge police respond to active shooter near Hammond Aire Shopping Center in Baton Rouge




Boris Johnson had a bumpy start to his role as Britain's new Foreign Secretary when the plane he was on to Brussels was forced to make an emergency landing in Luton.

The Foreign Office confirmed there was a 'technical issue' with the BAE 146 jet carrying Johnson from RAF Northolt to Belgium, where he was travelling to meet European leaders for the first time.

The Royal Air Force plane made its unscheduled stop at Luton airport, north west of London on Sunday, and caused delays to other flights in the process - sparking a Twitter backlash.

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The Foreign Office confirmed there was a 'technical issue' with the aircraft carrying Boris Johnson (file photo)

The unplanned stop caused disruptions to other flights leaving the airport and people vented their frustration

Luton Airport confirmed that several scheduled flights were disrupted while the runway was cleared

One Twitter user announced that her flight had been delayed by the unplanned landing at Luton Airport

The jet suffered a problem with its hydraulic system and fire engines were deployed as the plane landed at the airport, according to the Guardian.

The ministry said that Johnson 'thanked the RAF crew for their professionalism and was grateful to Luton Airport for the brief, unscheduled welcome.'

The new Foreign Secretary continued to Brussels by other means.

The unplanned stop also caused disruptions to other flights leaving the airport and people quickly took to social media to vent their frustration.

One Twitter user wrote: 'Short delay for Boris... In the meantime, flights cancelled for everyone else! Yay Boris!', while another said: 'So my flight back to London is delayed thanks to Boris Johnson. Great.'

Others took the opportunity to poke fun at the new Foreign Secretary, with one Twitter user writing: 'Presumably he tried to take back control of it for reasons of personal ambition?'

While another said: The Foreign Sec who can't even leave the country!' and a third wrote: 'Even aircraft know that Boris Johnson travelling abroad on behalf of the country is not a good idea.'

A spokesman for Luton Airport said: 'At 5.26pm an RAF aircraft landed safely at London Luton Airport after reporting a technical issue.

'Emergency procedures were put in place and all 16 passengers left the aircraft safely. Several scheduled flights were disrupted whilst the runway was cleared. The runway reopened at 5.59pm.'

Other Twitter users took the opportunity to poke fun at the new Foreign Secretary by posting pictures

One Twitter user announced that his flight had been cancelled and blamed the unscheduled landing

A social media user took the opportunity to make a joke about Johnson, who was appointed Foreign Secretary by new Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday

Johnson, who helped lead the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, was appointed Foreign Secretary by new Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday.

His appointment triggered near uproar in European capitals, and he was booed at the French ambassador's Bastille Day party in London.

The event on Thursday was his first engagement in the role.

Johnson later had to respond to the Nice terror attack and the failed coup attempt in Turkey in an eventful first week.

EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini was due to welcome the former mayor of London on Sunday 'for an initial contact' before he sets about rebuilding relationships with his counterparts during meetings on Monday.

He will meet EU officials in Brussels for the first time since the referendum result.

Johnson was travelling to Brussels to meet European leaders for the first time when the plane he was on made an emergency landing. The impromptu stop caused delays as people took to social media to make jokes
The girlfriend of a man who was mowed down by the 19-tonne truck in the Bastille Day massacre in France has shared a picture to social media of her 'tough cookie' as the pair reunited in hospital.

Bridget De Jong, 22, became separated from her partner Marcus Anderson, 23, as the truck plowed through the crowd in Nice on Thursday.

On Saturday, Ms De Jong uploaded a photo of the pair, both from Sydney, cuddling in Urgences, Hopital De Cannes as Mr Anderson recovers from a punctured lung, broken ribs, damaged feet and a gunshot wound to his arm.

'Back with this tough cookie - he asked me to check the NRL score so I think he's alright,' Ms De Jong wrote alongside the photograph.

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Bridget De Jong (pictured right) has shared a picture to social media of her 'tough cookie' after she was reunited with boyfriend Marcus Anderson (left) who was mowed down by truck in Bastille Day massacre

Bridget De Jong (right), 22, became separated from her partner Marcus Anderson (left), 23 as the lorry plowed through the crowd in Nice on Thursday

'Everyone send all of your love, good vibes, thoughts, prayers and wishes all the way to France for Marcus'.

Mr Anderson was walking down the street with three friends when the truck smashed into his back.

As he fell, the driver shot him in the arm.

'There were just so many bodies and there were not enough people to help,' he told The Daily Telegraph.

Mr Anderson has been left with three broken ribs and a punctured lung, but considers himself one of the lucky ones.

'I'm so glad all my friends are safe and I feel so bad for the others,' he told The Today Show on Sunday.

Mr Anderson had help from two travel companions, Adelaide Stratton and Chiara Ronzel, after he collapsed from his injuries in the massacre on Thursday.

He now faces a wait of up to a month before he can travel home to Australia, but his father David is on his way from Artarmon on Sydney's lower North Shore to Nice to help care for him.

Marcus Anderson, from Sydney, was walking down the street with three friends when the truck smashed into his back

Mr Anderson has been left with three broken ribs and a collapsed lung, but considers himself one of the lucky ones

'There was someone looking after him that night, we're very relieved and I think he was very lucky in the circumstances,' he said.

This comes as another Australian tourist revealed she narrowly escaped the Bastille Day attack and woke up surrounded by bodies and in a pool of her own blood.

Bronte Stuntz, 18, said she initially thought the deafening noise was a bomb detonating and made the split-second decision to run in a straight line away from the chaos in Nice on Thursday.

After running for just three seconds, Ms Stuntz, from Sydney, was struck on the left side by the body of a man and went flying for about three-metres before blacking out on the street.

'I woke up with my friend holding my head and when I looked around I was the only person on the ground that was alive,' she told Channel Nine's Today Show.

Bronte Stuntz (pictured), 18, said she initially thought the deafening noise was a bomb detonating and made the split-second decision to run in a straight line

Ms Stuntz was released from hospital with raw wounds to her torso and back

'Everyone was dead around me'.

The horrific terrorist attack claimed the lives of at least 84 people, including 10 children, and has left 202 victims in hospital.

Ms Stuntz was one of three Australians injured in the attack.

The Sydney teenager has been left with extensive damage to the left side of her body and struggles to move her foot, leg, back and shoulder.

She said although she was badly hurt, her friends helped keep her neck straight for over 15 minutes while paramedics helped others with more severe injuries.

Ms Stuntz was then rushed to hospital and has been left in a wheelchair until her body recovers.

'I never thought I'd have to witness the amount of dead bodies and blood I saw that day,' she said.

On Thursday Foreign Minister Julie Bishop confirmed three Australians had been injured in the atrocity.

'They have suffered minor injuries, seeking to flee the scene, to get away from the scene. We are working to provide consular assistance to all three,' she said.

After running for just three seconds, she was struck on the left side by the body of a man and went flying for about three-metres before blacking out on the street

Ms Stuntz suffered the injuries as she fled the attack in Nice, France, on Thursday
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Locals and holidaymakers have tried to return to normality in Nice three days after the horror terror attack that left 84 people dead.

The scene of Thursday night's tragedy on the Promenade des Anglais has been cleared less than 72 hours after ISIS fanatic Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel mowed down revellers as they watched Bastille Day fireworks.

Police closed off the famous coastal avenue as they cleared the debris and bodies left strewn across the tarmac by the 31-year-old's lorry rampage.

Large security fences were erected along the front as the recovery operation was carried out, closing off large parts of the promenade to the public.

Moving on: Locals and holidaymakers have tried to return to normality in Nice three days after the horror terror attack that left 84 people dead

Different view: The scene of Thursday night's tragedy on the Promenade des Anglais has been cleared less than 72 hours after ISIS fanatic Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel mowed down revellers as they watched Bastille Day fireworks

Reminded: Police closed off the famous coastal avenue as they cleared the debris and bodies left strewn across the tarmac by the 31-year-old's lorry rampage

However, the area was fully reopened today with the only reminder of last week's horror being the sea of floral tributes gathering at the site of the massacre.

Thousands of mourners visited the area to pay their respects to those who died and the two hundred people injured.

Tourists also took to the beach for a day of sunbathing and swimming just yards from where 31-year-old Bouhlel was shot dead by police after zig-zagging down the road killing men, women and children.

Expatriates in Nice today vowed to stand defiant in the face of terror in France, praising the French Riviera and saying they had no intention of leaving.

The city is popular with British holidaymakers, but is also home to people from the UK and Ireland.

Thursday's attack was the third to hit France in 18 months, and took place after security measures across the country had been increased.

But expats living in the seaside resort said the latest atrocity, following those in November and January last year, have not made them think twice about living there.

Holiday: Tourists took to the beach for a day of sunbathing and swimming just yards from where 31-year-old Bouhlel was shot dead by police after zig-zagging down the road killing men, women and children

United: Expatriates in Nice today vowed to stand defiant in the face of terror in France, praising the French Riviera and saying they had no intention of leaving

Continuing on: A cyclist watches flowers being placed in tribute to one of the victims at the scene of a deadly attack while joggers pass by

Image: A man using selfi stick to take photographs and videos down the road where 84 people killed when Lahouaiej Bouhlel used a lorry to drive though crowds of people

In memory: Large security fences were erected along the front as the recovery operation was carried out, closing off large parts of the promenade to the public, but have since been removed

Tribute: Thursday's attack was the third to hit France in 18 months, and took place after security measures across the country had been increased. Today flags along the coast were flying at half mast

Barry Gallagher, who moved to Nice eight years ago, said: 'It can happen anywhere, there is no point in living life like that. You would never go out again if that was the attitude.

'We have been used to having the Army on the streets for a long time now.

'We have a great mixture of people who come here - locals, tourists, all races and we have never had a problem with anyone.'

It was today revealed that Bouhlel asked for the 'heaviest truck' available when he rented his 19-tonne killing vehicle.

Tearful: Thousands of mourners visited the area to pay their respects to those who died and the two hundred people injured

Together: A police officer surveys people gathering around a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack

Heartbreak: The promenade was fully reopened today with the only reminder of last week's horror being the sea of floral tributes gathering at the site of the massacre

Respects: In tribute to those who lost their lives mourners laid cards and flowers and lit candles in their memories

Never to be forgotten: A moving message was written down the centre of this French flag, which was surrounded by personalised pebbles

He spent two days driving up and down the Promenade des Anglais working out how to cause the greatest amount of damage.

French police this morning arrested a man and a woman believed to be linked to Bouhlel - bringing the total number of those arrested to eight.

Another man was arrested and taken in for questioning this afternoon by police in Nice. He is the eighth person to be taken into custody since early Friday.

The number being held has fallen to six after Bouhlel's estranged wife Hajer Khalfallah - who was among those arrested on Friday - was released this morning.
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Brandishing flags, singing patriotic songs and snapping selfies, thousands of Turks have once again taken to the streets to rally in support of the country's president just 48 hours after a failed coup.

As night set on Sunday, large crowds streamed into Ankara's Kizilay Square and Taksim Square in Istanbul after authorities called on the public to stay vigilant and continue to protect Turkish democracy.

Similar demonstrations were held outside the residence of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, and the coastal cities of Izmir and Antalya, according to local media reports and footage.

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A sea of people: Brandishing flags, singing patriotic songs and snapping selfies, thousands of Turks have once again taken to the streets to rally in support of the country's president just 48 hours after a failed coup attempt

Voicing their support: As night set on Sunday, large crowds streamed into Ankara's Kizilay Square and Taksim Square in Istanbul after authorities called on the public to stay vigilant and continue to protect Turkish democracy

Snapping a selfie: Similar demonstrations were held outside the residence of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, and the coastal cities of Izmir and Antalya, according to local media reports and footage

Emotional: Wiping tears from his eyes, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan broke down today as he attended a mass funeral for victims of Friday's failed coup attempt. Erdogan promised to cleanse the country of the 'virus' of Fethullah Gulen backers

At least 265 people were killed in clashes when parts of the Turkish military attempted to seize power.

Earlier today Erdogan broke down in tears as he attended a mass funeral for victims of Friday's failed coup.

Speaking at the service in Istanbul he then vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of an Islamist cleric his government blames for the uprising. Erdogan promised to cleanse the country of the 'virus' of those who back Fethullah Gulen.

He said Turkey, through the justice ministry and foreign ministry, would request the extradition of the cleric, who is based in the United States, and his backers.

The country's president was overcome with grief at the funeral of his friend Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, who were shot dead on the Bosphorus bridge while protesting against the coup. But Erdogan's political rivals claim it was the leader himself who staged the takeover to further tighten his grip on power, an accusation he denies.

The mass funeral was held for civilians who died on Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, including Ilhan Varank, the brother of Erdogan's chief supervisor. He was a professor of computer science and was shot according to Turkish media.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, centre, has vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of an Islamist cleric his government blames for Friday's failed coup attempt

Relatives mourn near by coffins of victims who were killed in a coup attempt which started on Friday and was defeated the next day

Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan waved flags as they gathered in Istanbul's main Taksim Square on Sunday night

Thousands of Turks have once again taken to the streets to rally in support of the country's president just 48 hours after a failed coup

Plea: President Erdogan has called on his supporters to stay in streets and public squares all week following last Friday's failed coup

Vocal: Pro-Erdogan supporters waved giant flags and sang patriotic songs after gathering on Taksim square in Istanbul on Sunday night

On Saturday, Erdogan made a brief public appearance amid a phalanx of heavily-armed bodyguards, he said: 'They will pay a heavy price for this. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.' Supporters in Istanbul's main square

Crowds chanted 'Fethullah will come and pay', 'Allah is Great' and 'We want the death penalty'. Erdogan said that in democracies, 'you cannot push the wish of the people to one side' but also said 'we are not after revenge.

On Saturday, Erdogan made a brief public appearance amid a phalanx of heavily-armed bodyguards, he said: 'They will pay a heavy price for this. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.'

Life in Turkey is back to normal after a failed coup attempt, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday afternoon, saying the central bank, capital markets board, banking system and stock exchange were all functional.

Rebel leader General Erdal Ozturk, who commands armed forces in Istanbul has been arrested and charged with treason. The state-run news agency Anadolu said the commander of the Second Army, which guards the borders with Iraq, Syria and Iran has also been detained.

Many soldiers who participated in the coup have been beaten up by Erdogan's supporters.

Life in Turkey is back to normal after a failed coup attempt, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday afternoon, saying the central bank, capital markets board, banking system and stock exchange were all functional. Istanbul's main Taksim Square is pictured

Crowds: Pro-Erdogan supporters gather on Taksim Square in Istanbul during a demonstration in support to the Turkish government

Capturing the moment: Supporters of Erdogan take selfies and other pictures of the crowds in Taksim Square in Istanbul on Sunday night

Thousands gather: As night set on Sunday, large crowds streamed into Ankara's Kizilay Square and Taksim Square in Istanbul after authorities called on the public to stay vigilant and continue to protect Turkish democracy

Taking a picture: Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan take selfies as they gather in Istanbul's main Taksim Square

Brandishing flags and singing patriotic songs, thousands of Turks have once again taken to the streets to rally in support of the president
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Europe is braced for a fresh migrant surge following the failed coup in Turkey.

The turmoil means the EUs 5billion deal with Ankara to stop people crossing the Mediterranean is in doubt.

Arrivals in Greece have fallen sharply since the decision to return all newcomers to Turkey.

But the post-coup crackdown  with the possibility of executions  means migrants could argue it is no longer a safe country to be sent back to.

A sea of people: Brandishing flags, singing patriotic songs and snapping selfies, thousands of Turks have once again taken to the streets to rally in support of the country's president just 48 hours after a failed coup attempt

Turmoil: The violent unrest in Turkey, following the the attempted coup by the armed forces, could create a problem for the EU's migrant deal with Ankara. Pictured, pro-government demonstrators at a rally in Istanbul

Voicing their support: As night set on Sunday, large crowds streamed into Ankara's Kizilay Square and Taksim Square in Istanbul after authorities called on the public to stay vigilant and continue to protect Turkish democracy

Snapping a selfie: Similar demonstrations were held outside the residence of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Istanbul, the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, and the coastal cities of Izmir and Antalya, according to local media reports and footage

Emotional: Wiping tears from his eyes, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan broke down today as he attended a mass funeral for victims of Friday's failed coup attempt. Erdogan promised to cleanse the country of the 'virus' of Fethullah Gulen backers

Turkeys president has vowed his opponents will pay a heavy price for their treason. Responding to an angry crowd baying for the death penalty yesterday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: In a democracy, whatever the people want they get.

As Boris Johnson prepared for crisis talks with fellow foreign ministers in Brussels today:

2,745 judges were among 6,000 people in detention following the coup attempt;

Mr Erdogan was accused of staging the takeover to further tighten his grip on power;

Thousands of people attended funerals for the first of 290 coup victims;

There were fresh clashes at a military base and at an airport;

50,000 British holidaymakers were warned to avoid public places and demonstrations.

Martin Schulz, who is the president of the European Parliament, yesterday warned that Mr Erdogans proposed crackdown was unacceptable. One-man rule and arbitrary decisions are not acceptable in a country which is not only a strategic ally but also an accession country to the EU, he said.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants had made the short crossing from the Turkish coast to the Greek islands before the EU deal was struck in March.

The leaders of the EUs 28 member states agreed to hand over six billion euros and loosen visa restrictions for Turkish travellers, if Ankara took back all arrivals.

The UN says 1,554 people landed on the Greek islands last month compared with 31,318 in the same month last year.

The EUs border agency Frontex last week said numbers had fallen even further, to around 50 a week. The figures suggest migrants and refugees have been put off paying thousands of pounds to smugglers to make the perilous journey from Turkey because they know they face being sent back.

But the scheme will be scuppered if the EU is no longer able to return migrants because Turkey, a Nato member, could be judged unsafe. It is also possible the chaos in Turkey will itself increase numbers wanting to reach Europe.

Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan waved flags as they gathered in Istanbul's main Taksim Square on Sunday night

Angry: A Pro-Erdogan supporter holds a sign reading 'We want execution' as a child reacts during a rally in support of the government at Taksim square

Relatives mourn near by coffins of victims who were killed in a coup attempt which started on Friday and was defeated the next day

On Saturday, Erdogan made a brief public appearance amid a phalanx of heavily-armed bodyguards, he said: 'They will pay a heavy price for this. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.' Supporters in Istanbul's main square

Vocal: Pro-Erdogan supporters waved giant flags and sang patriotic songs after gathering on Taksim square in Istanbul on Sunday night

Thousands of Turks have once again taken to the streets to rally in support of the country's president just 48 hours after a failed coup

Plea: President Erdogan has called on his supporters to stay in streets and public squares all week following last Friday's failed coup

Life in Turkey is back to normal after a failed coup attempt, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Sunday afternoon, saying the central bank, capital markets board, banking system and stock exchange were all functional. Istanbul's main Taksim Square is pictured

If Ankara does bring back the death penalty, it would wreck its relationship with the EU and prevent it becoming a member state. Turkey has not executed anyone since 1984 and capital punishment was legally abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the Brussels club.

EU rules state that it holds a strong and principled position against the death penalty  abolition is, of course a pre-condition for entry into the union.

However a Turkish mob outside the presidents residence yesterday chanted we want the death penalty for generals and soldiers involved in the coup. In response, Mr Erdogan told them: We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get.

He said he would hold talks with opposition politicians on the return of capital punishment, adding: We will not delay this decision for long. Because those who attempt a coup in this country must pay.

He said there would be no let-up in the fight against his enemy Fethullah Gulen, the US-based Islamic preacher he accuses of running a terrorist group and masterminding the coup.

We will continue to clean the virus from all state bodies because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state, he said.

Crowds: Pro-Erdogan supporters gather on Taksim Square in Istanbul during a demonstration in support to the Turkish government

Capturing the moment: Supporters of Erdogan take selfies and other pictures of the crowds in Taksim Square in Istanbul on Sunday night

Thousands gather: As night set on Sunday, large crowds streamed into Ankara's Kizilay Square and Taksim Square in Istanbul after authorities called on the public to stay vigilant and continue to protect Turkish democracy

Enemy: Erdogan has accused Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Islamic preacher, of running a terrorist group and masterminding the coup against his government

Memorials: People arrive to attend funerals of the victims killed in a failed military coup, at Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey

US SLOW TO SUPPORT ERDOGAN: KERRY TOOK TWO HOURS TO RESPOND US Secretary of State John Kerry took two hours to respond to the attempted military takeover in Turkey. And when he did react, it was noticeable that he only offered lukewarm support for President Recep Erdogan. Mr Kerry, in Moscow for talks with Russian officials over Syria, told reporters he didnt have details of the situation rapidly unfolding on the ground in Turkey. He expressed hope the key ally and strategically important member of the coalition fighting Islamic State would remain at peace. Later, in a separate statement, Mr Kerry said: The US views with gravest concern events unfolding in Turkey. I spoke this evening to foreign minister [Mevlut] Cavusoglu and emphasized the United Statess absolute support for Turkeys democratically-elected, civilian government and democratic institutions. Tension has been evident between the two Nato allies over the presence in America of President Erdogans former friend turned rival, moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen. By contrast, Russia was swift in offering support to the Turkish leader. President Erdogans office also confirmed he and Vladimir Putin would meet face-to-face next month. Advertisement

Mr Gulen, who remains a powerful figure in Turkey despite living in exile, said the coup might have been engineered. He said: I dont believe that the world believes the accusations made by President Erdogan. There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup and it could be meant for further accusations.

Thousands yesterday attended the funeral of six people in Istanbul who were killed during the botched coup attempt. Relatives wept and clutched each other for comfort amid chants of God is great.

Turkeys state-run news agency last night said authorities had issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr Erdogans top military aide, Colonel Ali Yazici.

Clashes broke out between security forces and plotters at a Turkish air base in the city of Konya. Officials also said there had been an incident at Istanbuls Sabiha Gokcen airport.

The speed with which thousands of members of the judiciary were targeted following the coup bid has alarmed human rights defenders who fear Mr Erdogan may be targeting rivals rather than genuine plotters.

Mr Johnson last night had dinner with the EUs foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in Brussels in his first overseas trip since his surprise appointment as Foreign Secretary.

His trip did not get off to a good start when his plane had to make an emergency landing at Luton airport shortly after take-off.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards has called for an end to hatred and anti-cop killings in the wake of the deaths of three police officers in a shooting in Baton Rouge.

Police shot dead a masked man from Missouri this morning after he opened fire on officers next to a gas station in what appears to have been an ambush on Sunday morning.

In the wake of the shooting, Governor Edwards made a passionate plea to the state and the nation, and called the attack 'unjustified'.

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Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards (pictured) has called for an end to hatred and killing in the wake of the deaths of three police officers in a shooting in Baton Rouge

Police shot dead a masked man from Missouri this morning after he opened fire on officers next to a gas station in what appears to have been an ambush. Pictured, police at the scene

'The violence, the hatred just has to stop,' he said.

'It's unspeakable that these men, risking their lives to protect and serve, were taken out in the way they were. They are everyday heroes.

'I want tor reassure everyone that we are doing everything humanly possible so that everyone is protected.

'Everything will be done to bring the shooter, or shooters if there's more than one, to justice.

'It's unspeakable that these men, risking their lives to protect and serve, were taken out in the way they were. They are everyday heroes,' Governor Edwards said

Governor Edwards made his passionate plea for an end to anti-police violence during a press conference on Sunday afternoon

'There simply is no place for more violence, it doesn't help anyone, it doesn't help any injustice perceived or real, it is just another injustice. We are not going to tolerate more hate and violence tearing apart the lives and families of people in Louisiana.'

Baton Rouge Police Cpl. L'Jean McKneely Jr said the shooting took place outside and possibly inside the B-Quik convenience store on Airline Highway. The suspect's body was found next door, outside of a fitness center, he said.

President Barack Obama condemned the shooting, and called on all Americans to take a stand against attacks on police.

'We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement,' Obama said, speaking from the White House.

Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy after three cops were killed early this morning on July 17

Police received a 911 call reporting a 'suspicious person walking down Airline Highway with an assault rifle'. Pictured, police at the scene

'Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible.'

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton echoed the President's statement, also calling the attack 'an assault on all of us'.

'There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities,' Clinton said in a statement.

'We must not turn or backs on each other. We must not be indifferent to each other. We must stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities. Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and families of the police officers who were killed and injured today.'

FBI patrol the perimeter of the crime scene in an armored vehicle where three Baton Rouge police officers were shot

Police blocked off the Airline Highway near the scene of the fatal shooting on Sunday morning

Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump wrote on his Facebook page: 'We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today.

'How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.'

Officers are continuing to hunt down two more suspects who were said to be 'on the run', but it looks increasingly likely that the gunman, who was dressed in black and carrying an assault rifle, acted alone.

A robot was used to check the man's body for explosives after he was shot dead outside a B-Quik convenience store on Airline Highway.

The 9am shooting took place less than a mile from Baton Rouge's police headquarters. Pictured, police on the scene this morning

East Baton Rouge Sheriff's deputies man a road block on Airline Highway after police were shot on Sunday morning

The three officers who died have not been named but are aged 45, 41 and 32. The 41-year-old joined the police less than a year ago, whereas the 32-year-old was in his 10th year of service, police said.

The three police officers injured have also not been identified. A 41-year-old is in a critical condition in hospital, while two others - aged 51 and 41 - are stable.

The shooting comes 12 days after Sterling was shot dead outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge by two police officers.

Sterling was armed but his handgun was in his pocket and the footage does not appear to show him reaching for it.

Police guard the emergency room entrance of Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center, where wounded officers were brought, after the shooting in Baton Rouge

Three officers have been confirmed dead and three more have been injured, with one in a critical condition. Pictured, police patrolling the highway

His shooting on July 5 - and that of Philando Castile in St Paul, Minnesota, the next day - led to nationwide protests over the treatment of black people by the police.

Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets in Baton Rouge to condemn Sterling's death, including hundreds of demonstrators who congregated outside the police station.

Authorities arrested about 200 people over the three-day weekend.

A peaceful Black Lives Matter protest days after Sterling's was hijacked by Micah Johnson, who used the demonstration as an opportunity to ambush police, killing five.

Two of the dead are Baton Rouge police officers, while the third is a sheriff's deputy in East Baton Rouge, an official said. Pictured, police in an armored vehicle near the scene

Dallas police chief David Brown led the messages of support to police in Baton Rouge following the shooting.

'Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police,' Brown said.

Reverend Al Sharpton added: 'Praying for the families of the police officers shot in Baton Rouge as we await the full details.
There was no need to worry, I told my nine-year-old son. 'It's a check-up, nothing more  we'll be home in time for lunch.'

'Will I have an injection?'

'No injections. A check-up.'

Two hours later we were in the casualty department of a hospital in Washington DC  where I then worked for the BBC as its North America editor  joined by the whole family, in tears, in shock. And a long way from my earlier assurances.

Suddenly Sam, whom I had only taken for a check-up because of his unusual behaviour that week  wetting the bed several nights running and a constant thirst  was being told by a doctor: 'You're not going to die. We can save you. But your life has changed today.'

The BBC's Justin Webb and his son Sam, diagnosed as a nine-year-old with Type 1 diabetes in America

The most obvious, shattering change for a nine-year-old was his dad's claims about needing no injections being completely overturned. Yes, you will need injections. Every time you eat. For ever.

Type 1 diabetes is a miserable and irreversible autoimmune disease which stops the body producing insulin. It affects half a million people in Britain, 30,000 of them children.

It comes as a bolt from the blue. And unlike the more common type 2, it has nothing to do with what you eat and drink.

It is almost certainly triggered by a virus but, as with other autoimmune conditions including multiple sclerosis, scientists don't know why some people are more at risk than others.

People like my son Sam, and people like our new prime minister, Theresa May, who developed the condition much later in life but will also have faced an upheaval of all she once took for granted about her daily routine  her eating, sleeping, concentration, fundamental health.

For Theresa May, her diagnosis in 2013 came with that same visit to a doctor that changes everything.

'It was a real shock,' she said months later. 'And yes, it took me a while to come to terms with it.'

Type 1 is a life-changing wrench. Your pancreas has shut up shop. For good. It's not a case of go easy on the cakes and take a pill a day. This is a daily, hourly grind that will affect the rest of your life.

For Theresa May, her diagnosis in 2013 came with that same visit to a doctor that changes everything

At the very minimum, you have to inject insulin whenever you eat any kind of carbohydrate. But sometimes you get it wrong and have to inject more.

As a parent you can never relax. And of course the sufferer picks up on your unease. Sam used to say to us in moments of tearful frustration: 'You only care about my blood sugar number, not about me.'

He had a point. Sam has been staying with his grandparents this week  I realise I've texted him three times about his blood sugar and not asked once if he was having a good time. Blood sugar can become an obsession  because it really matters.

If you don't take the utmost care, if you're not continually monitoring by pricking your finger and checking levels on a blood glucose meter, you will find yourself in serious trouble.

In the short term, that means being unable to function properly, even going into a coma.

Type 1 diabetes is a miserable and irreversible autoimmune disease which stops the body producing insulin

In the longer term, the damage to nerves and blood vessels can lead to amputations, blindness, strokes and heart attacks.

The complications of uncontrolled diabetes hang over type 1 sufferers in particular because the condition is simply so hard to keep in check.

You see, blood sugar levels are affected by food intake. But they are also affected by excitement, tension, exercise, minor illnesses. In other words, the blood sugar level target you are aiming to hit is always moving, dodging, slipping out of reach.

And even the most assiduous of us make mistakes when a meal contains fewer carbohydrates than you estimated, or more, or when something else entirely affects a routine.

That happened with Sam a few years ago on the morning of a school reading competition, when he felt clammy and hot and at first blamed nerves but realised, as he reached the lectern and gazed at his chosen passage, that he could not see. Out-of-kilter blood sugar levels  on that occasion, his were low  affect your vision and concentration.

Type 1 is a life-changing wrench. Your pancreas has shut up shop. For good. It's not a case of go easy on the cakes and take a pill a day. This is a daily, hourly grind that will affect the rest of your life

And crucially, they affect your ability to understand what is happening to you and take appropriate action.

Blood sugar lows are particularly dangerous at night.

Soon after Sam was diagnosed, my wife woke one night, sat bolt upright and said: 'We've given him too much insulin.'

And, raddled with tiredness, we had. If my wife had not woken up then, he might have slipped into a coma. We had to give him orange juice, repeatedly pricking his fingers and checking his blood sugar until it was normal.

I know of two sets of parents who have cared for a type 1 diabetic child all the way to adulthood, only for the grown-up child to die in their sleep. If you have type 1 diabetes, you need a ministering angel on your shoulder at all times.

Which brings us to the good news. Theresa May's presence in No 10 is a signal to all those who have the condition that times have changed

Have you injected yourself with the right dose? Do you need to check your blood sugar levels right now  at school, at work, in a Cabinet meeting  however inconvenient that might be?

But blood sugar problems can affect your judgment about what is the best course of action. You will need constant help.

Which is where Theresa May's husband Philip will shine. My wife and I met them at a diabetes charity event a couple of years ago and it was evident he had the full measure of the role he needed to play.

And he knew full well it was more than just moral support required of him. Type 1 diabetics need constant active involvement from those closest to them.

Philip May will play a pivotal part in his wife's ability to manage her condition alongside her new responsibilities. And he might tell you that keeping someone's blood sugar steady is a damned sight harder than leaving the EU. For make no mistake, juggling type 1 diabetes with a demanding career is no easy feat.

When the Tory party began its leadership contest and the knives were being sharpened, an anonymous senior Conservative said of Theresa May: 'I'm afraid she might die in office.' The clear suggestion was that the impact of type 1, coupled with the strain of the job, would be too much to cope with.

As Labour MP and fellow type 1 sufferer Jamie Reed put it: 'The next PM will show that having type 1 diabetes doesn't hold you back'

Once upon a time that might have been true. Indeed, until 1922 everyone in the whole of human history who contracted type 1 diabetes died within months of the diagnosis. It was the discovery of the hormone we now know as insulin  and the injection of it into a young boy named Leonard Thompson in a hospital in Toronto, Canada  that made medical history.

Which brings us to the good news. Theresa May's presence in No 10 is a signal to all those who have the condition that times have changed.

As Labour MP and fellow type 1 sufferer Jamie Reed put it: 'The next PM will show that having type 1 diabetes doesn't hold you back.'

True, people with type 1 diabetes still have shorter lives, on account of the blood sugar highs and lows that are generally seen as unconducive to a healthy life.

But the mistake made by those whispering about Theresa May is to confuse the long-term average with the reality of life today, particularly for those who take control of the condition.

Yes, some people die of complications brought on by bad blood sugar control. But plenty of others live perfectly healthy lives, using the modern technology available to sufferers to make the illness a relatively minor part of their lives.

Philip May (right) will play a pivotal part in his wife's ability to manage her condition alongside her new responsibilities

In fact, Mrs May is just one of those who combine demanding careers with the condition. As a rugby fan, my favourite player is the England centre Henry Slade. Does he look ill? Depressed? Lacking in self-esteem? 'Likely to die in office'? I don't think so.

He looks like a young man in peak form. But here's the thing: it's not an accident that he is coping so well. It is hard work. Henry Slade has taken control, deciding to do the extra work necessary for him to succeed.

Does Theresa May also have the kind of personality that lets her take control?

Exactly. Even her most vehement political critics would accept that she has what it takes.

And what an ice-breaker diabetes will be if she meets Barack Obama before he leaves office next year.

Obama is genuinely knowledgeable about type 1, silencing those same health scare mutterings when he appointed Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice  the very pinnacle of American legal power  who had been a sufferer since she was a little girl.

I talked to Obama about diabetes shortly after Sam was diagnosed, so I know at first hand that he has a real sense of how much of a blow it is, but also about how much progress has been made.

After Mrs May became Prime Minister, my son, who is now 16, tweeted: 'Type 1 diabetics taking over the world. Watch out Russia.'

Quite right, Sam. From Leonard Thompson to Theresa May in the space of less than a century.

When you feel depressed about human conflicts and failings, it's good to be reminded that life can get better.
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After the abortive coup, the terror. Turkeys dictatorial president last night launched a brutal wave of repression against his enemies, arresting more than 6,000 soldiers, judges and opposition figures amid barbaric scenes of revenge.

As the sun rose over Istanbul yesterday morning, a huge purge was under way by Recep Erdogans secret police.

There were gruesome accounts and images of Islamic mobs beating to death soldiers said to be linked to the plot.

Turkey in turmoil: Turkeys dictatorial president last night launched a brutal wave of repression against his enemies, arresting more than 6,000 soldiers, judges and opposition figures amid barbaric scenes of revenge

On the famous bridge over the River Bosphorus, which links Asia and Europe, terrified young Turkish army conscripts were attacked by lynch mobs after the president called on his supporters to take to the streets to defy the coup leaders.

As F-16 fighter jets joined the coup attempt by strafing the parliament building and helicopter gunships attacked police headquarters, Erdogan  who was on holiday at a Turkish coastal resort  called a television news channel. Via a FaceTime video message on his iPhone, he urged the Turkish people to rise up and smash the uprising.

They did just that, using extreme violence and bloodshed.

While some tanks were halted by Erdogan supporters laying down in front of them, other young colleagues in the military who were ordered to overthrow the democratically-elected government refused to fire on Turkish civilians.

And so the attempted military coup was crushed within 12 hours.

But its what happened afterwards that has horrified many.

Awful images were last night circulating on social media of hardline Islamists killing soldiers by beating them to death with metal bars, wooden fence-posts and knives.

In one scene filmed by witnesses, a soldier is beheaded on the bridge over the Bosphorus with a gleaming knife.

The disfigured body is shown left lying in pools of blood.

Rage: Protesters beat cowering soldiers. In other footage, gangs are seen lashing soldiers, despite them laying down their weapons and surrendering

In other footage, gangs are seen lashing soldiers, despite them laying down their weapons and surrendering. Ignoring their pleas for mercy, Erdogan supporters forced one group of captured soldiers to the ground  and jumped on their heads.

A witness told me that police officers tried to intervene to protect some of the soldiers, most of whom were poorly paid conscripts carrying out compulsory military service (which, incidentally, can be waived on payment of a 6,000 fee to Erdogans regime).

As bloodstains and debris were cleared from the streets yesterday and an eerie calm fell over the city, I was told how police tried to save soldiers from being killed by the mob who chanted: We will kill them all!

Another witness told me that soldiers claimed they had not been told they were participating in a coup attempt, but were simply told it was part of a training exercise.

Some people tried to protect the soldiers, I was told. Women were calling from windows to the mobs, begging Erdogan supporters not to kill. But they paid no attention.

Those spared by mobs didnt fare much better in custody.

Beaten and stripped naked, they now face the death penalty, which Erdogan has called to be reintroduced saying it has popular support, adding: In a democracy, whatever people they want, they will get.

The president has accused moderate Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in the US, of being behind the coup attempt, and has called for American authorities to extradite him to Turkey to face justice.

For his part, the cleric denies any involvement and suggests that Erdogan actually staged the coup as an excuse to jail opponents.

Protesters clamber on a tank: While some tanks were halted by Erdogan supporters laying down in front of them, other young colleagues in the military who were ordered to overthrow the democratically-elected government refused to fire on Turkish civilians

Many of those linked to the military coup attempt will be held at the notorious Silivri Prison, where more than 10,000 inmates are already held, including hundreds of journalists, academics, lawyers and judges  many without charge  for daring to question Erdogans rule.

While the Turkish president has been at pains to argue that people power saved his regime, the truth is far more complicated.

Military leaders have substantial backing from those worried about Erdogans growing abuse of power and what they claim is his complicity with Isilamic State terrorists.

I was celebrating when we heard explosions and were told the military was taking over, said a Turkish friend of mine.

President Erdogan wants to turn Turkey into Saudi Arabia, with sharia law and all pleasure outlawed. Now, were terrified he will crack down on liberals even harder.

Despite the weekend calm, the country is now even more bitterly divided between hardcore Islamists and moderates who look to Western Europe as an example of the type of government they want. Erdogan is accused, too, of boosting his own wealth by striking oil deals with extremists.

With a fortune estimated at over 1billion secreted in eight Swiss bank accounts, he has become increasingly dictatorial  having once said sinisterly: Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.
Failed online travel firm Lowcostholidays lured in customers with a cut-price sale just hours before it collapsed into administration.

The company, run by controversial business tycoon Paul Evans, prolonged a summer sale promising up to 60 per cent off trips last Thursday.

It posted an advertisement online boasting: 'Our holiday sale has been extended for a limited time only. Grab your lilo and go.'

The company, run by controversial business tycoon Paul Evans (pictured), prolonged a summer sale promising up to 60 per cent off trips last Thursday

But more than 110,000 travellers will not be going anywhere fast after their summer holidays were thrown into chaos by the firm's collapse.

Less than 24 hours later, the firm posted a message on Facebook on Friday, saying: 'We deeply regret to announce that the lowcosttravelgroup (LCTG) ceased to trade on July 15, 2016.'

It added: 'The directors wish to profusely apologise for the inconvenience and distress that this will cause to our customers.'

Lowcostholidays is one of Britain's biggest online booking firms, with sales of 500m that helped fund a 1.9million, four-bedroom, three-bathroom property in Fulham, West London, for Mr Evans.

Many of its customers were furious that it enticed them to pay for cut price breaks just hours before the firm collapsed.

Some took to Facebook to vent their fury. Morgan Bayfield wrote: '60% off Sale the DAY before you disappear off the face of the earth with everyone's hard earned money. Absolutely disgusting...'

Glynis Stuart added: 'You still tried to fleece the public with this sale page, if someone had booked on Thursday you'd have kept their money cause individuals have little or no chance of reclaiming once you go into administration, despicable practice.'

More than 110,000 travellers will not be going anywhere fast after the firm's collapse

Lowccostholidays currently has 27,000 customers overseas on holidays, and a further 110,000 who have booked trips. Many now face uncertainty over whether they will get some or any of their money back.

Evans courted controversy in 2013 by moving the firm's offices from the UK to Spain, where it is no longer became part of an industry safety-net run by travel body Atol, which protects travellers if the firm they booked with has gone bust.

British airlines regulator the Civil Aviation Authority tried to block Lowcostholidays from leaving the Atol scheme, but failed.

Back in 2013 Evans reassured customers, saying: 'What we have done is completely legal. We have the maximum bonding available under Spanish law.'

Accountancy firm Smith & Williamson has been appointed administrator of the firm.

Partner Finbarr O'Connell claimed the collapse was due to Brexit.

He said: 'The group experienced significant headwinds in the run up to the EU referendum as holidaymakers delayed decisions.

'This was compounded by the Leave vote itself and the subsequent fall in value of the pound. Regrettably, in these extraordinary conditions, the directors had no option but to place LowCostTravelGroup Limited into administration.'

The firm blamed a fall in bookings for destinations such as Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Orlando, and Belgium.
Jon Stewart will join Colbert during coverage of the national convention

Has impersonated him before in The Hungry For Power Games series

Stephen Colbert recorded a skit ahead of the Republican national convention Sunday - and his blue wig and costume looked like the glittery promise of many Hunger Games-inspired puns.

The Late Show host visited the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland, Ohio for the taping, just a day before the start of the four-day convention.

He sported two different outfits. One of them included a sparkly Stars And Stripes vest, and the other, a tuxedo with a giant bow tie, a blue wig and matching eyebrows, made him look like the Hunger Games character Caesar Flickerman.

Colbert has impersonated Flickerman several times before in a series of skits called The Hungry For Power Games, which has chronicled the presidential election in sketches such as 'Carson Eversleep', 'Dyin' Ted' and 'May The Branch Be Forever In Your Face'.

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Stephen Colbert recorded a skit ahead of the Republican national convention Sunday in Cleveland, Ohio wearing two different costumes - one of which involved a blue wig and matching eyebrows (pictured)

Colbert (pictured on the stage of the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland) appeared to be channeling Caesar Flickerman, a character from the Hunger Games series

In the Hunger Games trilogy, Flickerman hosts the Hunger Games in front of a crowd of rich viewers from the upper-crust Capitol. Colbert has impersonated him in a series of skits called The Hungry For Power Games

Colbert (pictured) also wore a glittery Stars And Stripes vest with a white shirt and a red bow tie while taping a segment for the Late Show on Sunday, one day ahead of the beginning of the GOP convention

The Hunger Games-inspired costume also came with a stuffed weasel, which Colbert carried around - and at one point set on a chair with a handwritten sign reading 'Gov Christie' (pictured)

In the Hunger Games series, Flickerman hosts the Hunger Games in front of a crowd of rich viewers from the upper-crust Capitol.

Colbert began impersonating him in September 2015, adopting Flickerman's campy delivery, flashy outfits and overly enthusiastic laugh.

The series has also drawn a comparison between the presidential candidates and the Hunger Games' tributes, a crop of young people who must kill one another in a desperate effort to survive.

Colbert also carried a stuffed weasel while recording his skit and at one point set the animal on a chair with a handwritten sign reading 'Gov Christie'.

Colbert (pictured Sunday) began impersonating Flickerman him in September 2015 to chronicle the presidential election in sketches such as 'Carson Eversleep' and 'May The Branch Be Forever In Your Face'

In the Hungry For Power Games series, Colbert (pictured Sunday) compares the presidential candidates to the Hunger Games' tributes, a crop of young people who must kill one another in a desperate effort to survive

Colbert (pictured Sunday) has now perfected his version of Flickerman's campy delivery, flashy outfits and overly enthusiastic laugh

Fans laughed and gathered around Colbert while he walked around in his Hunger Games-inspired costume (pictured). He took a break to take a selfie with the group - without letting go of his stuffed weasel

CBS journalist John Dickerson (left) shook hands with Colbert (right) while the host recorded skits on Sunday. Colbert's Late Show will have live coverage of the GOP convention from July 18 to 21

Colbert (pictured gesticulating with his stuffed weasel in hand) will also cover the Democratic convention from July 25 to 28 on his Late Show

The host appeared in need of a break as he lay down on a row of chairs in his Hunger Games-inspired outfit. Jon Stewart will appear on Colbert's Late Show Monday to kick off the convention coverage

Colbert (pictured in his other costume Sunday) recorded segments for the Late Show ahead of the Republican national convention Sunday as it is set to begin Monday

The Late Show will have live coverage of both the Republican convention, from July 18 to 21, and the Democratic convention, from July 25 to 28.

Jon Stewart will come out of retirement temporarily to assist Colbert with the coverage, Vulture reported.

The former Daily Show host will be on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Monday. His specific role hasn't been revealed, but the episode will kick off the two weeks of convention coverage on Colbert's show.

Colbert has nicknamed this year's GOP convention the The 2016 Trumpublican Donational Conventrump, Starring Donald Trump As the Republican Party. His name for the Democratic event is The 2016 Democratic National Convincing a Technically Historic Event: Death. Taxes. Hillary.

His guests for the two weeks of convention coverage will include, according to Vulture, Anthony Weiner, Elizabeth Warren and John Oliver.

With his blue wig and giant bow tie, Colbert seemed to channel his inner Flickerman as he taped Sunday. He usually plays the character on the Late Show set, with a glass of champagne in his hand

Colbert has perfected his version of Flickerman and was all smiles as he imitated the ever-enthusiastic Hunger Games host - who is known for laughing even if the context is grim

It was unclear why Colbert's Hunger Games costume included a stuffed weasel (pictured), but the word can be used as an insult against a deceitful person

Colbert looked around happily Sunday as he found his way around the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland , where speakers, delegates and reporters will congregate Monday

The host (pictured Sunday) has nicknamed this year's GOP convention the The 2016 Trumpublican Donational Conventrump, Starring Donald Trump As the Republican Party

Colbert (pictured taking photos with fans after recording a sketch Sunday) will cover both conventions over the next two weeks, with guests including Anthony Weiner, Elizabeth Warren and John Oliver
There are now more Russian spies trying to gather intelligence in Britain than at the height of the Cold War, a former GCHQ official warned last night.

Foreign intelligence agents are trying to intercept secret communications between arms companies making deadly weapons, members of the Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defence.

Techniques they are using include sending code to mobile phones which allows them to turn the device into an eavesdropping device, monitoring all calls, and also text messages, he said.

An ex official at GCHQ (pictured), has said Russian spies could be sitting outside key buildings in vans intercepting information from computer screens

John Bayliss, a former official at Britains eavesdropping agency GCHQ, said spies could also be sitting outside key buildings in vans intercepting information from computer screens.

He also warned Islamic State militants were sophisticated enough to use the mobile phone spying technology in Britain.

Speaking after his nearly 40-year career at the top agency, which included training Royals, soldiers and four-star generals, he said: There are more Russian intelligence agents now than at the height of the cold war.

While some are involved in traditional state espionage, many others are engaged in industrial spying for the commercial benefit of Russian firms, he said.

Mr Bayliss, who now runs the security consultancy firm Communications Risk Management, added: A lot of them want information from defence contractors and also the MoD.

Spies are mainly operating in London and cities and towns with a big Royal Navy presence, particularly the Clyde (pictured), home to the nuclear deterreny

He said there are approximately six Russian intelligence officers for every British intelligence officer in the world.

Earlier in the year it emerged there were as many agents working in Britain as there were during the Cold War - around 30 - but it is believed the figure has since soared towards the 100 figure.

Spies are mainly operating in London and cities and towns with a big Royal Navy presence, particularly the Clyde, home to the nuclear deterrent.

Mr Bayliss has briefed security teams at defence contractors such as Rolls Royce working on the nuclear submarines on how to stop their devices being intercepted and controlled by spies.

Detailing one of the common techniques used by the enemy, he said agents would be able to send code they can buy online to mobile phones.

This would enable them to take control of the phone.

He said: They can then listen to conversations and see your texts. It is even possible for them to get a text saying this person has just received a phone call.

They can then dial in and join the conversation as a conference call, only the other two dont know they are there.

They can also turn the phones microphone on and off and listen to all the conversations had near the mobile phone.

Mr Bayliss briefed soldiers before they went out to Afghanistan on security issues. He said there was evidence of locals selling cheap sim cards to soldiers outside their bases.

He added: I advised them not to take advantage of these SIMs as there was no telling what may have been done to them

The enemy could potentially have had access to their communications.

Another source said that in Afghanistan family members back in the UK were even contacted by insurgent terrorists who wrongly told them their husband or son had been killed on the battlefield.

Mr Bayliss, who also briefed Prince Harry on security before he deployed, added: One of the main aims of terrorists is to terrorise.

The Russians are throwing their weight around so theres concern about them and Islamic State are also sophisticated enough to be able to use this technology.

Speaking about another technique, he warned of spies sitting outside buildings and being able to read computer screen images.

They do this by intercepting the electromagnetic radiation from the screen - a technique known as TEMPEST.

The longer the image is on the screen, the easier it is to recover in its entirety

They can also intercept keystrokes due to the electronic pulse the keys emit from up to 25 metres away.




Holidaying families are being ripped off by stealth charges of up to 30 per cent for using debit cards abroad, the Daily Mail has found.

Banks are cashing in on a rise in tourists using contactless cards for smaller purchases at shops and restaurants.

Our investigation also revealed companies such as Lloyds, TSB, Bank of Scotland and the Co-op are charging unsuspecting account holders as much as an extra 2.25 for taking out just ten euros at cash machines.

Companies such as Lloyds, TSB, Bank of Scotland and the Co-op are charging unsuspecting account holders as much as an extra 2.25 for taking out just ten euros at cash machines

Many customers realise the high costs only when they check statements at home. Holidaymakers, thought to hand banks a total 2billion a year in the fees, had already felt a sharp fall in the value of the pound since the Brexit vote. On referendum day June 23, 1 bought 1.31 euros; it is now worth around 1.20.

Hardest hit are tourists who make repeated small withdrawals from ATMs of the equivalent of 20 or less, often to buy drinks or ice creams, as banks will add a minimum fee of around 2 each time.

Research for the Mail by travelsupermarket.com found withdrawing ten euros costs 8.42 on a card without fees but holidaymakers fork out 10.67 for the same sum with a Lloyds, Bank of Scotland or TSB debit card  an extra 2.25 in charges, or 27 per cent more.

Doing this ten times over a two-week break to take out a total 200 would add 22.50 in fees alone.

Ten euros on a Co-op debit card costs 10.65, an extra 26 per cent. Shop and restaurant purchases were slightly cheaper: Spending ten euros on a Lloyds, Bank of Scotland or TSB debit card costs 9.67, an additional 1.25 or 15 per cent.

Bob Atkinson of TravelSupermarket said: 'All holidaymakers are doing by using their credit and debit cards overseas is lining the pockets of the big banks. Customers should wise up and apply for a card with no charges, or find cheaper alternatives.'

Banks are cashing in on a rise in tourists using contactless cards for smaller purchases at shops and restaurants

Mick McAteer, director of campaign group the Financial Inclusion Centre, said: 'Banks need to be far clearer about how they explain these fees. It's the charges on small transactions that can really hurt customers and will cast a cloud over any holiday once you are home.'

Experts say businesses in many popular holiday destinations including Spain and France now have the 'tap and go' debit card technology, making purchases quicker as tourists do not have to enter a PIN or hand over the card.

Lining pockets of the big banks Bob Atkinson of TravelSupermarket

Banks use a maze of complex charges to add large sums to card payments, up to 2.99 per cent of the value, then add a second fee often fixed at 1 or 2 for purchases or ATM withdrawals. Taking out cash on a credit card costs around 3 per cent more, often with a minimum 3 fee.

A method known as exchange rate loading also means customers get a poor exchange rate when it is converted back into sterling in their accounts.

Some firms do not charge for overseas spending, including Halifax's Clarity credit card and Norwich and Peterborough's Classic debit card. Metro Bank's debit card is free to use in Europe.

Tourists are also being ripped off by hotels, car hire firms, restaurants and at ATMs if they agree to pay in sterling. They find it easier to see the sum in pounds but are often unaware the 'dynamic currency conversion' method used to display this at the point of sale can add up to 10 per cent to their bill, with a cut for the firm involved.

Hardest hit are tourists who make repeated small withdrawals from ATMs of the equivalent of 20 or less

A family could be hit by nearly 80 in fees on 1,000 of spending if they turn every transaction into pounds, according to currency firm Fairfx.

The UK Cards Association trade body says spending on cards by British tourists hit 64billion last year, tripling the 21.6billion spent in 2011, as they flashed the plastic 1.9billion times abroad, up from 415million four years ago.
The three police officers killed in cold blood when a masked gunman opened fire on them in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have been remembered as heroes.

Montrell Jackson, Matthew Gerald, and Brad Garafola were killed on Sunday morning by Gavin Eugene Long from Kansas City - a former Marine who was honorably discharged after achieving the rank of sergeant, CBS News reports.

Jackson, 32, was a 10-year veteran of the force and recently became a father. He also shared a poignant message on social media about his struggles being a black police officer in the wake of the Dallas shootings on July 7.

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Montrell Jackson was one of the three officers killed near a gas station when a masked gunman from Missouri opened fire about 9am on Sunday

Jackson, 32, was a 10-year veteran of the force and recently became a father. He is pictured with his wife Trenisha Jackson at a baby shower for their first child

'Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments but hey what's in your heart is in your heart,' the 32-year-old wrote.

'I still love you all because hate takes too much energy but I definitely won't be looking at you the same.

'Thanks you to everyone that has reached out to me or my wife it was needed and much appreciated.'

He continued: 'I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me.

Matthew Gerald, 41, was a married father-of-two, joined the force last year after serving in the Marines and the Army

Brad Garafola, 45, was also killed during the shooting attack in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday morning

'In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat. I've experienced so much in my short life and these last three days have tested me to the core.

'When people you know begin to question your integrity you realize they don't really know you at all.

'Look at my actions they speak loud and clear. This city must and will get better. I'm working in these streets so any protesters, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you.'

A GoFundMe page has been set up to help Jackson's family, called the 'Montrell's Fallen Hero Fundraiser'.

Montrell Jackson (pictured), one of the police officers gunned down in Baton Rouge, shared a poignant message about his struggles being a black cop after the Dallas shooting

Montrell Jackson, left with his aunt Darlene Cavalier and former Baton Rouge Police Chief Jeff LeDuff pose at a graduation ceremony to become a police officer

Jackson, a 10-year veteran who recently became a father, said he was 'tired physically and emotionally' in a poignant message shared shortly after five police officers were shot and killed by Micah Johnson in Dallas

'During this time of uncertainty and imminent danger in our world, there are heroes among us. One of our heroes, Officer Montrell Jackson has fallen, on Sunday, July 17, 2016, in the line of duty,' family member Melissa Rose Kancov wrote.

'Words cannot describe the devastation that we feel right now, and would ask that those who are able to please contribute to this meaningful cause in order to assist Montrell's family financially during this time of mourning.

'Rest in Peace, Montrell, you will always be our hero.'

At 7:30pm, more than $12,615 had already been donated.

Gerald 'couldn't turn off' his desire and drive to help people after leaving the military, the 41-year-old's friends said

Matthew Gerald, pictured with his wife and two children, was described by a former military friend as someone who lived to serve other people

'Today he did his final service by giving his life to protect the citizens of Baton Rouge and his fellow brothers and sisters in uniform,' Ryan Cabral said of his friend, Matthew Gerald (middle)

The 32-year-old's friends remembered him as someone who was passionate and loved him job.

'He loved his job,' friend Darnell Murdock told The Advocate.

'It motivated him to go out and change people's lives. He was on (the force) to help people, to make you have a better day.

'He was humble, kind and sweet.  He wasn't on there to write tickets. I don't understand how this could happen to someone like him.'

He was humble, kind and sweet A friend of Montrell Jackson

Kedrick Pitts, the 24-year-old younger half brother of Jackson, said he was very close to his older brother.

'With him it was God, family and the police force,' Pitts said outside his mother's house in Baton Rouge, where family was gathered Sunday. 'He went above and beyond ... He was a protector.'

He said his brother had been on the force for 10 years, having joined in 2006 and had risen to the rank of corporal.

Pitts said he woke up Sunday to find his mother crying as news broke about the shooting involving police. He drove his mother to the hospital and it was there that they discovered Jackson had been shot. He said Jackson leaves behind a wife and a 4-month-old son named Mason.

Jackson and his family were planning to go to Houston soon for a vacation, Pitts said.

Pitts, stunned by his brother's death, put on a brave face and did not shed any tears. 'I did all the crying I can do. It's not going to bring him back,' he said.

An online fundraising page has been created to help Montrell Jackson's family cope financially after his death

Police shot dead a masked man from Missouri this morning after he opened fire on officers next to a gas station in what appears to have been an ambush. Pictured, police at the scene

Pitts described Jackson as a person with a humorous streak but a serious side. He said he was fond of shoes and had a collection of more than 500 pairs - such as special Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan shoes. He said his brother was a big fan of the New Orleans Pelicans and the Dallas Cowboys.

He called Jackson a hard-working police officer who often worked seven days a week.

His aunt, Octavia Lacey, a 55-year-old disabled woman in Baton Rouge, called Jackson an exceptional person.

'Never a problem (as a child,)' she recalled. 'Good spirited child.'

She expressed disbelief that her nephew was shot by someone who allegedly came from out of state. 'I don't get it,' she said.

In the rural Livingston Parish, family of Jackson's wife was also mourning their loss.

Lonnie Jordan, Jackson's father-in-law, described his son-in-law as a 'gentle giant' - tall and stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition, saying he was 'always about peace.'

Jordan said his son-in-law had been working long hours since the death of Alton Sterling and the resulting protests. But Jordan said if the work was a strain, Jackson didn't let it show.

East Baton Rouge Sheriff's deputies man a road block on Airline Highway after police were shot on Sunday morning

Gerald, 41, was a married father-of-two, joined the force last year after serving in the Marines and the Army.

He had been deployed to Iraq three times, and his Facebook page was covered with pictures of his family and the American flag.

A former military buddy said the 41-year-old was 'made to serve the people'.

'We did our time in the military, and when that time was up, you just can't turn off that want to serve the people,' Ryan D. Cabral told the Washington Post.

'Today he did his final service by giving his life to protect the citizens of Baton Rouge and his fellow brothers and sisters in uniform.'

Officer Gerald and his wife, Dechia, celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary just two weeks ago, according to WWL-TV.

The couple had a 3-year-old daughter together and Gerald had adopted his wife's older daughter from a previous marriage.

He's a good family man, good cop, loving husband, A friend of officer Gerald

Gerald was a former Marine and Blackhawk crew chief in the Army. He became a Baton Rouge police officer four months ago, the station reports, and started doing solo patrols less than two weeks ago.

'He's a good family man, good cop, loving husband,' family friend Skye Turner said.

Garafola, 45, was killed while working one final extra shift before going on vacation with his wife, Tonja.

She described her husband as a man people depending on, and who 'loved [his family] so much'.

'He was always bragging about his family,' Tonja told The Advocate.

'He was a great guy. Not just a great law enforcement, he was a great husband and a great father. He didn't deserve this. He always helped everybody.'

Garafola has four children, three daughters aged 21, 15, and 7, and a 12-year-old son.

A neighbor, Rhonda Smith said Garafola was a family man.

'You never saw him without at least one of his kids, she said.

'He was low-key, happy,' she said. 'He never raised his voice, never hollered at anyone. The epitome of a peace officer.'
Hillary Clinton has called the attack on police officers in Baton Rouge 'an assault on all of us'.

Three officers were shot dead and another three were injured after they were ambushed at a gas station by Gavin Eugene Long, 29, along Airline Highway in the Louisiana City on Sunday morning.

'There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities,' Clinton said after the attack.

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Hillary Clinton (pictured Wednesday) has called the attack that left three Baton Rouge police officers dead 'an assault on all of us', pleading for the country to 'stand together' and 'reject violence'

Clinton released her statement on Twitter as Obama addressed the nation about the assault at 5pm Sunday

'We must not turn our backs on each other,' she continued. 'We must not be indifferent to each other.'

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee pleaded that the country 'stand together' and 'reject violence' in order to 'strengthen our communities'.

'Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and families of the police officers who were killed and injured today,' she concluded.

President Obama likewise condemned the 'cowardly and reprehensible' attack on the officers, promising Americans that 'justice will be done'.

In a statement, Obama blasted the assault on officers 'who put their lives on the line for ours every day' and branded the perpetrators 'cowards who speak for no one.'

And in an address to the nation shortly after 5pm, the president said: 'Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible.'

Urging Americans to unite in the wake of the latest tragedy, he added: 'We need to temper our words and open our hearts.'

In his earlier statement, Obama said: 'These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes.'

He added: 'I condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge,' he said.

'For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault.

'These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop.'

Obama (pictured on Friday) condemned the 'cowardly and reprehensible' attack on police officers in Baton Rouge - and promised: 'Justice will be done'

'MAKE NO MISTAKE - JUSTICE WILL BE DONE': OBAMA'S FULL STATEMENT I condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge. For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault. These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop. I've offered my full support, and the full support of the federal government, to Governor Edwards, Mayor Holden, the Sheriff's Office, and the Baton Rouge Police Department. And make no mistake  justice will be done. We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes. The officers in Baton Rouge; the officers in Dallas  they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now  all of us  to be at our best. Today, on the Lord's day, all of us stand united in prayer with the people of Baton Rouge, with the police officers who've been wounded, and with the grieving families of the fallen. May God bless them all. Advertisement

Obama added that he has offered his full support, as well as the full support of the federal government, to Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, Mayor Kip Holden, the Sheriff's Office, and the Baton Rouge Police Department.

'And make no mistake  justice will be done,' he added.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch likewise pledged the full support of the Justice Department as the investigation unfolds.

Lynch added that there is no place in the United States for such appalling violence.

In a statement issued on Sunday, Lynch said she condemns the shooting 'in the strongest possible terms.'

She added that everyone's hearts and prayers are with the fallen and wounded officers, their families and the entire Baton Rouge community in 'this extraordinarily difficult time.'

Obama spent most of the last week focused on defusing tensions and rebuilding trust between police departments and the communities they serve.

Now, a second attack has further placed a nation on edge as Americans anxiously watch the spate of violence at home and abroad with Thursday's attack in Nice, France, contributing to a picture of a troubled world.

'The officers in Baton Rouge, the officers in Dallas, they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now  all of us  to be at our best,' Obama said.

Three officers were confirmed dead and a further three were injured after a shooting at a gas station along Airline Highway in the Louisiana city on Sunday morning

'WE MUST TEMPER OUR WORDS AND OPEN OUR HEARTS': OBAMA'S SPEECH As all of you know now, this morning, three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge were killed in the line of duty. Three others were wounded, one is still in critical condition. As of right now, we dont know the motive of the killer. We dont know whether the killer set out to target officers or whether he gunned them down as they responded to a call. Regardless of motive, the death of these three brave officers underscores the danger that police across the country confront every single day. We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement. Attacks on police are an attack on all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible. Earlier this afternoon, I spoke with Governor Edwards and Mayor Holden and I offered them the full support of the federal government and reiterated my full support for law enforcement in Baton Rouge and for police officers across the country. I also spoke to the Attorney General. The FBI has been already on the scene and through the work of all levels of government, justice will be done. Most of all, our hearts go out to the families who are grieving. Our prayers go out to the officer whos still are fighting for his life. This has happened far too often and Ive spent a lot of time with law enforcement this past week. Im surrounded by the best of the best every single day and I know whenever this happens, wherever this happens you feel it. Your families feel it, but what I want you to know is respect and gratitude of the American people for everything that you do for us. Five days ago, I traveled to Dallas for the memorial service of the officers who were slain there. I said that that killer would not be the last person who tries to make us turn on each other, nor will todays killer. It remains up to us to make sure that they fail. That decision is all of ours, the decision to make sure our best selves are reflected across Americans, not our worst, thats up to us. We have our divisions and they are not new. Round-the-clock news cycles and social media sometimes amplify these divisions. And I know were about to enter a couple weeks of conventions where our political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual and that is why it is so important that everyone, regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organization you are part of - everyone right now, focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further. We dont need inflammatory rhetoric. We dont need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us. We need what we saw in Dallas this week as a community that came together to restore order and deep in unity and understanding. We need the kind of efforts we saw this week in meetings with community leaders, some of which I participated in, where I saw people of goodwill pledge to work together to reduce violence throughout all of our communities. Thats whats needed right now and it is up to all of us to make sure we are part of the solution and not part of the problem. Someone once wrote that a bullet need only happen once, but for peace to work we need to be reminded of its existence again and again and again. My fellow Americans, only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided and were gonna have to keep on doing it  again and again and again. Thats how this country gets united, thats how we bring people of goodwill together. Only we can prove that we have the grace and the character and the common humanity to end this kind of senseless violence. To reduce fear and mistrust within the American family, to set an example to our children. Thats who we are and thats who we always have the capacity to be and thats the best way for us to honor the sacrifice of the brave police officers who were taken from us. May God bless them and their families and may God bless the United States of America. Advertisement

The president's statement came as Donald Trump quickly jumped on the opportunity to blame Obama for the ambush - while simultaneously paying tribute to three police officers in Baton Rouge

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, took to Facebook to honor the fallen officers, but couldn't resist taking a swipe at Obama, despite details of the attack still being unclear.

'We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today,' the billionaire businessman said, adding: 'How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.'

On Twitter, the 70-year-old added: 'We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police.

'Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching.'

Trump continued to repeat the word 'divided', first telling fans to watch his upcoming 60 minutes interview and promising he would be discussing 'law and order' before adding, 'Bad times for divided USA!'

And three hours later Trump went on a second rant that took aim at Obama, writing: 'Our country is totally divided and our enemies are watching.'

'We are not looking good, we are not looking smart, we are not looking tough!'

'President Obama just had a news conference, but he doesn't have a clue. Our country is a divided crime scene, and it will only get worse!'

Trump was also quick to blast Obama in the wake of the terror attack on Nice, France, on Thursday evening.

He also reiterated his call for the United States to tighten its borders and brought up his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country as a solution in interviews hours after the attacks.

In his address to the nation, Obama made no mention of Trump, but hinted at his remarks when he said: 'We don't need inflammatory rhetoric.'

'We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda.'

'I know were about to enter a couple weeks of conventions where our political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual.'

Donald Trump jumped on the opportunity to blast President Barack Obama once again while paying tribute to three police officers in Baton Rouge

'That is why it is so important that everyone, regardless of race or political party or profession, regardless of what organization you are part of - everyone right now, focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further.'

'We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us. We need what we saw in Dallas this week as a community that came together to restore order and deep in unity and understanding.

'My fellow Americans, only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we will not be divided and were gonna have to keep on doing it  again and again and again.'

The Baton Rouge attack, which happened just before 9am, less than a mile from police headquarters, comes amid spiraling tensions across the country between the black community and police.

Baton Rouge has seen constant protests since the shooting of a black man outside a convenience store on July 5.

Alton Sterling, 37, was killed in a scuffle with two white police officers  sparking Black Lives Matter protests across the country.

His killing was captured in a cellphone video and circulated widely online.

The shooting of Philando Castile, 32, by a Minnesota police officer in Falcon Heights during a traffic stop a day later, exacerbated tensions further.

Trump continued to repeat the word 'divided' as he went on a second rant about Obama three hours later

The aftermath of the shooting was streamed live on Facebook by Castile's girlfriend.

On July 7, a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas turned deadly when a sniper opened fire and killed five police officers, heightening tensions even further.

Micah Johnson told authorities he wanted to kill whites  especially 'white police officers' - before he was killed with a remote-controlled robot by police.

The massacre left law enforcement across the country on alert, with heads of police departments across the country ordering police officers to patrol in pairs.

And in the wake of a second coordinated ambush on Sunday, people turned to Twitter to condemn the violence once again.

Reverend Al Sharpton added: 'Praying for the families of the police officers shot in Baton Rouge as we await the full details This senseless violence really must stop.'

'Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police,' Dallas police chief David Brown, whose department is still mourning five dead police officers who were targeted in an ambush during a protest 10 days ago, tweeted on Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the attack 'unspeakable and unjustified.'

'This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing,' he said in a statement.

'Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice.'

Three officers were confirmed dead and a further three were injured after a shooting at a gas station

Baton Rouge police respond to active shooter near Hammond Aire Shopping Center in Baton Rouge




Corbyn's rivals for leadership Eagle and Smith are also pro-Trident

New PM said she was prepared to kill innocents by launching weapons

May is pro-Trident while Corbyn has always been anti nuclear weapons

Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn took part in debate over Trident renewal

MPs have backed renewing Trident by a huge majority as Theresa May insisted she would be willing to push the nuclear button in the last resort.

The Commons voted by 472 to 117 for a like-for like replacement of the deterrent, with some 138 Labour MPs supporting the government motion despite pleas from Jeremy Corbyn.

Making her first appearance at the despatch box as Prime MInister earlier, Mrs May warned that the threat to Britain from states such as North Korea and terrorist groups had increased rather than receded. She urged MPs not to 'gamble' by giving up the weapons.

Challenged on whether she would kill 'a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children' by launching the devastating weapons, Mrs May replied bluntly: 'Yes. And I have to say to you, the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to.'

The new Prime Minister used her first speech at the despatch box to say it would be a 'gross irresponsibility' to abandon the ultimate insurance of the UK's nuclear deterrent

Mrs May told the Commons it would be a 'dereliction of duty' if the UK was to give up its nuclear deterrent

The vote was not technically necessary for the government to go ahead with its policy of renewing the existing continuous at-sea deterrent, which is operated by four Vanguard class submarines.

But the overall 355 majority emphasised the deep rifts in Labour on the issue, with CND activist leader Jeremy Corbyn forced to defy his party's own policy and vote against renewal.

During extraordinary scenes in parliament, senior MPs queued up to slam Mr Corbyn for failing to understand the principle of deterrence as they prepared to join Tories in the 'aye' lobbies.

Backbencher Neil Coyle accused him of reneging on a promise to read out the party's official policy from the despatch box.

Copeland MP Jamie Reed lashed out at the leader's 'reckless, juvenile, narcissistic irresponsibility' in opposing the 'settled will of the country'.

Former frontbencher Toby Perkins said Mr Corbyn was spouting arguments he would have regarded as credible when he was 13 years old.

Ilford's Mike Gapes compared the veteran left-winger unfavourably to Michael Foot, who led Labour to disaster in the 1980s.

In the event 138 sided with the government, with just 48 total voting to scrap the weapons.

Another 45 - including shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry and shadow defence secretary Clive Lewis - abstained.

Mr Corbyn - who had been forced to offer his MPs a free vote in order to avoid becoming the first leader in history to rebel against his own party whip - said the costs of replacing Trident were huge and it was 'morally' wrong.

He repeated that he would not be prepared to press the nuclear button if he was in Number 10, arguing that threatening 'mass murder' was not the way to handle international relations.

'I make it clear today that I would not take a decision that kills millions of innocent people. I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations.'

He told MPs 'we are not debating a nuclear deterrent but our continued possession of weapons of mass destruction', which are capable of killing one million people per warhead.

He added: 'What is the threat that we are facing that over a million people's deaths actually deters?'

As the six-hour debate continued, anti-Trident demonstrations here held in Parliament Square by CND and other activists. A group chanting and singing peace songs also gathered in the Central Lobby just outside the Commons chamber.

David Cameron, who handed over Downing Street to Mrs May last week, was watching from the backbenches in the Commons as she delivered her opening speech.

One of the first acts of a Prime Minister is to write a letter to the commanders of the Trident submarines telling them whether they should fire missiles if the government is wiped in a strike by another state.

SNP MP George Kerevan asked Mrs May: 'Can we cut to the chase? Is she personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that can kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children?'

But Mrs May did not hesitate before saying she would, and ridiculed the idea that Mr Corbyn could be in power with a nuclear deterrent 'but not actually be wiling to use it'.

Mrs May warned that unilaterally scrapping our nuclear weapons would be a 'reckless gamble' was the safety of Britons.

'The nuclear threat has not gone away; if anything, it has increased,' she said.

The premier stressed how important it is for the government to be 'getting on with the job of renewing an essential part of our national security for generations to come'.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said the nuclear deterrent was expensive and morally wrong

Mr Corbyn is poised to vote against Labour's official party policy and on the opposite side to around 100 of his MPs

'It is impossible to say for certain that no extreme threats will emerge in the next 30 or 40 years to threaten our security and way of life,' she said.

'And it would be a gross irresponsibility to lose the ability to meet such threats by discarding the ultimate insurance against those risks in the future. Once nuclear weapons have been given up it is almost impossible to get them back, and the process of creating a new deterrent may take decades.'

Mrs May added: 'We cannot compromise on our national security. We cannot outsource the grave responsibility we shoulder for keeping our people safe. And we cannot abandon our ultimate safeguard out of misplaced idealism.

'That would be a reckless gamble: a gamble that would enfeeble our allies and embolden our enemies. A gamble with the safety and security of families in Britain that we must never be prepared to take.'

Mrs May insisted 'no credible deterrent is cheap', and warned there would be no going back after scrapping the weapons.

'Once nuclear weapons have been given up it is almost impossible to get them back,' the PM said.

'The process of creating a new deterrent takes many decades.

'You could not redevelop a deterrent fast enough to respond to a new and unforeseen nuclear threat.

'The decision on whether to renew our nuclear deterrent hinges not just on the threats we face today but also on an assessment of what the world will be like in the coming decades.'

The Prime Minister said it would be an 'act of gross irresponsibility to lose the ability' to meet current and future threats 'by discarding the ultimate insurance against those risks'.

The cost of renewal has been estimated at 31 billion with a 10 billion contingency fund also set aside.

Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, one of Mr Corbyn's last allies in Parliament, today claimed Brexit meant scrapping Britain's nuclear weapons should be considered because 'money is important'.

Speaking ahead of the vote, Ms Thornberry claimed it was 'reckless' to press ahead with buying new submarines without considering cheaper options.

And she told the BBC: 'The Labour party's position is that we're having a review and we're looking sensibly and in a grown-up way at all of the options. The options have not been considered properly in our view and that is what we're in the process of doing.

'Jeremy [Corbyn] is going to campaign and always will campaign for unilateral disarmament, that has always been his position.

'But the Labour party has to come to a collective position and we have to do that by way of collecting evidence and considering it in a proper.

'We were going to get it the week after Brexit but, do you know what? Brexit happened and that has an effect on all of the countries, money we have to look carefully...it's certainly, do you know what? Money is important, money is important particularly at a time of financial stress.'

But Deputy Labour leader Tom Watson lashed out at Mr Corbyn for opposing the official Labour party policy to renew Trident and also hit out at colleagues who are abstaining in tonight's vote.

He said Labour had a 'duty and responsibility' to take a united position on Britain's nuclear deterrent because the country 'expects us to know our position'.

Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, visited HMS Vigilent - one of the four Vanguard class boats - in January and today warned it would be a gamble to scrap nuclear weapons

At least one of the four boats, including HMS Victorious pictured, is patrolling the seas somewhere in the world at all times

Remarkably, he took a swipe at his frontbench colleague Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, who is planning to abstain in the vote.

'To abstain is to not take responsibility and that is the situation that I strongly believe,' he told the BBC.

Accusing the Tories of 'political artifice' for calling the 'unnecessary' vote, Mr Watson nevertheless saved most of his criticism for Mr Corbyn and his unilateralist allies.

'We might know that this is political skulduggery by the Tories but the country expects us to know our position on strategic defence matters  particularly as something so important as our independent nuclear deterrent and I think we have to take a position on it,' he said.

The head of the GMB trade union Tim Roache insisted Mr Corbyn should abide by existing Labour Party policy, which is to back Trident renewal. He warned that 45,000 jobs around the country - many of them highly skilled - were dependent on the programme going ahead.

Mr Roache, who supported Mr Corbyn as leader, told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: 'The Labour Party have a clear policy. The clear policy is that Labour will uphold an at-sea deterrent.

'I would expect therefore all Labour MPs, including the leader of the Labour Party - in fact, especially the leader of the Labour Party - to uphold that current policy.'

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon told the Today programme: 'Defence budgets are increasing, we're spending more on terrorism, more on armed police in cities, more on troops and planes.

'But we can't neglect our nuclear forces as well and need to decide now whether we can afford to dispense with them.

'Our view, and both political parties in the last election agreed on this, is that it is a gamble that we simply can't afford to take..'

The decision to hold an immediate vote on Trident has plunged Mr Corbyn into a fresh crisis as his party is deeply divided on the issue. Labour's official party policy remains in favour of renewing Trident  at an estimated cost of 40billion  despite the leader's long-standing opposition to nuclear weapons.

The majority of Mr Corbyn's MPs will back the nuclear deterrent in a free vote. Up to 150 of 231 Labour MPs are expected to support renewal.

This is the actual nuclear trigger used on Trident submarines to fire the weapons

Labour's official party policy remains in favour of renewing Trident - at an estimated cost of 40billion - despite Jeremy Corbyn's longstanding opposition to nuclear weapons

Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, said the Brexit vote was cause to look carefully at the cost of the nuclear weapon system

Mr Smith told the BBC's Andrew Marr show: 'I'm a multilateralist and I believe that the world has actually got more volatile and more insecure over the last few years.'

John Woodcock, Labour MP for Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, where the subs are built, said: 'There is a natural majority of MPs who want to honour the Labour manifesto and do the right thing for the country.

'But the unilateralists in the shadow cabinet will be throwing everything at this to stop people voting to renew.'

Lord Robertson, the Scottish peer and Labour former defence minister, called Mr Corbyn a hypocrite for not backing Trident renewal.

He said: 'They are great believers in democracy and annual elections and things like that but when it comes to the crunch it does not apply to them.'

Mr Watson said scrapping the deterrent would be a 'grotesque abandonment' of Britain's allies at a time of 'great peril'.

In an apparent swipe at Mr Corbyn, he said those who vote against the renewal are in favour of putting the livelihoods of thousands of workers at risk and inflicting 'real harm' on defences.

But he also dismissed the vote as 'partisan political game-playing' by the Tories.

Owen Smith, who is challenging Corbyn for the Labour leadership, is expected to vote for Trident to be renewed, while his leadership rival Angela Eagle also supports the weapons' system

Labour's shadow defence secretary, Clive Lewis, and Emily Thornberry, promoted to shadow foreign secretary following mass resignations from Labour's frontbench, urged MPs to abstain from the vote. They said it was 'shameful' and 'a political game'.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said: 'Our nuclear deterrent is the ultimate guarantee of our national security. We use it everyday to deter the most extreme threats this country faces.

'Anyone who wants to scrap our deterrent needs to be sure that we will face not such threats in the 2030s, 2040s and 2050s. That is a gamble I'm not prepared to take.'
Rothschilds seem to have descended into family feud

It is one of the wealthiest and most famous banking dynasties in history.

But the Rothschilds seem to have descended into family feud  with the only son and heir refusing to invite his father to his wedding to a former Page Three model.

Nat Rothschild, 45, is due to marry Loretta Basey, 26, next weekend but his parents are now not expected to attend the ceremony at an exclusive Swiss ski resort.

The Eton-educated financier, who has not yet had children himself, is thought to have snubbed his 80-year-old father following a fall out in the family.

While the cause of the feud is not known widely outside the family, it is understood it was not ignited by his choice of bride and her past as a topless model.

Absent: Lord Rothschild and his wife Serena will miss the nuptials between his only son and heir Nat and former Page Three girl Loretta Basey next weekend

Lord and Lady Rothschild, who have been married for 55 years and also have three daughters, have been reported to have found her intelligent and charming.

Bullingdon Boy Baron Rothschilds first marriage to model Annabelle Neilson  and friend of Kate Moss - in 1995 collapsed after three years and produced no children.

While his father, who is worth 650 million, was ranked at number 182 on the Sunday Times Rich List, the younger Rothschild fell off the list completely  with a fortune diminished to 70m following doomed investments.

His car-pooling app, launched in 2014, ceased operating after ten months, and in 2010 he made an ill-fated investment in the Indonesian coal mining market that was reported to have lost 80million.

He has also used Twitter to broadcast his support the legalisation of drugs to his more than 6,600 followers, writing: Overwhelming evidence that 1971 Misuse Of Drugs Act needs reform #legalize.

Next weekends nuptials are due to take place at the posh resort of Klosters  a favourite with Princes William and Harry.

Baron Rothschilds parents are also not expected at a second wedding reception to be held in Wiltshire later this month.

The Rothschild family descends from Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who established his banking business in Frankfurt in the 1760s.

He bequeathed his wealth and established an international banking family through his five sons in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples.

During the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the largest private fortune in the world.

Miss Basey, who grew up in a terraced house in Buckinghamshire, is the daughter of a chartered accountant and former model. Before she met Baron Rothschild, the 5ft 8in tall model dated actor and comic Steve Coogan.

Rift: Nat at an event with his fiancee Loretta. She was once a prolific social media user, but recently deleted her public accounts

When she quit Page Three after a two-year stint, the papers photographer Alison Webster said she was a big loss.

She said: (She) was a great glamour model, a very beautiful girl with a fantastic figure, great boobs, small waist, good bum, and with the bluest eyes and lots of long, chestnut hair.

Being a glamour model is more difficult than you may think.

When you take your clothes off, every little blemish that you have is exposed and visible, but she had none.

The photographer also said Miss Basey  who went by the first name Elle - was also a very strong character, and ambitious, adding: Wed sit with a glass of wine after a days shoot and shed tell me she wanted to make something more of herself. And I always felt that she would.

Former Page Three girls also told The Sun she always did like an older, richer man, adding: I think she thought it was what she deserved.

She never seemed to enjoy modelling and gave everyone the impression she was too good for it.

She has been working in sales for an upmarket private jet charter company over the last two years.

A friend also told The Sun earlier this year: She has been saying she is ready for kids  and what better way to start a family than with one of Britains richest men? Shes not just a pretty face.

The rift was revealed by family friend Sir David Tang last week at a public talk alongside the heirs former Eton schoolmate multi-millionaire entrepreneur Ben Elliot, The Mail on Sunday reported.

He said: Nat Rothschild is getting married and his father is not going. But there it is. That is a piece of gossip.
High-tech sea drones packed with cameras and sensors powered by the sun and waves are being deployed to protect Britains coastline from people traffickers.

Secret trials of the drones have taken place and the UK Border Force is monitoring the results, The Mail on Sunday has been told.

The 16ft-long craft can see vessels over a five-mile radius using optical lenses that can magnify an image by 30-fold, while their acoustic sensors pick up engine noises from the smugglers boats.

How the sea drones being trialed by UK Border Force work

The drones, which are built from fibreglass and weigh 550lb, are expected to provide a much-needed boost to border officials, who have just three vessels to patrol more than 7,000 miles of coastline.

Traffickers, who charge migrants up to 10,000 to come to Britain, are routinely exploiting weaknesses in the UKs sea defences.

Last month, police revealed that hundreds of migrants have landed on beaches around Britain, or been smuggled into small ports.

In June, three Iranians were rescued in waters off Hastings, East Sussex, after their boat sank.

And in May, an Albanian family had to be rescued off the Kentish coast after their boat capsized. A British man was also arrested in Chichester, West Sussex, on suspicion he helped 17 Albanians cross the Channel in a catamaran.

Drone expert Bill Briggs, from the research company Qinetiq, said: These drones are probably best acting as a tripwire.

You could have a line of them operating networked together. They see something and report it back to an aircraft or shore station and that cues something that is a bit bigger and a bit faster [to intervene].

The drones, which cost tens of thousands of pounds each, can remain at sea for several months at a time.

Shipwreck of an overcrowded boat of migrants off the Libyan coast in May this year. Migrants have been travelling to the UK and landing on beach or being smuggled into small ports

They travel across the surface using fins powered by the action of the waves  and solar power for camera and communications. Live video footage is relayed to land-based operators and infra-red cameras mean the drones can provide 24-hour protection against traffickers approaching the coast.

One drone being tested is called the AutoNaut. Karen Weech from Vreo Innovation, which makes the drones cameras and communications systems, said: The AutoNaut has quickly generated a high degree of interest from governments and law enforcement agencies who recognise the benefits of establishing vision capability off-shore.
A groundbreaking radio telescope has discovered 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the sky where just 70 had been spotted before - despite operating at just a quarter of its eventual capacity.

South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope showed off its phenomenal power yesterday, revealing 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe where only 70 had previously known to exist.

The image showing off the latest finds was released on Saturday and was the first from MeerKAT, where 16 dishes were formally commissioned on the same day.

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The first MeerKAT image: Each white dot represents the intensity of radio waves recorded with 16 dishes of the MeerKAT telescope - more than 1,300 individual galaxies in the distant universe - are seen in this image

Part of the ensemble of dishes forming South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope in Carnarvon

MeerKAT's full contingent of 64 receptors will be integrated next year into a multi-nation Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which is is set to become the world's most powerful radio telescope.

Fernando Camilo, the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa, said the images produced by MeerKAT 'are far better that we could have expected'.

He spoke from the site of the dishes near the small town of Carnarvon, 600 kilometres north of Cape Town.

He added: 'This means that this telescope as is today, only one quarter of the way down (to its full contingent) is already the best radio telescope in the southern hemisphere.'

View showing 10% of the full MeerKAT First Light radio image. More than 200 astronomical radio sources (white dots) are visible in this image, where prior to MeerKAT only five were known (indicated by violet circles). This image spans about the area of the Earth's moon

This montage shows the first radio image and four zoomed-in insets. The two panels to the right show distant galaxies with massive black holes at their centers. At lower left is a galaxy approximately 200 million light years away, where hydrogen gas is being used up to form stars in large numbers

When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA will comprise a forest of 3,000 dishes spread over an area of a square kilometre (0.4 square miles) across remote terrain around several countries to allow astronomers to peer deeper into space in unparallelled detail.

It will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe's origins some 14 billion years ago.

MeerKAT is being built in the remote and arid southwest of the Karoo region of South Africa that offers prime conditions for astronomers.

It will serve as one of the two main clusters of SKA. The other will be in Australia.

Some 200 scientists, engineers and technicians working in collaboration with industry, local and foreign universities have developed the technologies, hardware and software systems for MeerKAT.

South African Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor told AFP that 'this the first time that an African group of countries will host global science infrastructure of this character.'

This image shows a " massive black hole in the distant universe - matter falling into it produces the bright dot at the center

When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA will comprise a forest of 3,000 dishes spread over an area of a square kilometre (0.4 square miles) across remote terrain around several countries

'It's a first for us as Africa and also it's a first for the world because the world hasn't done this in Africa,' said the Minister. 'We are building a global infrastructure for the world.'

'We can now expect when the 64 dishes are in place next year, it will be the best telescope, not only in the southern hemisphere but in the world,' said Pandor.

More than 20 countries are members of the SKA, including Britain, which hosts the headquarters of the project.

Despite its slowing economy, South Africa, which hosts the bulk of the SKA project, has so far invested three billion rands ($205 million) into the telescope project, funded mainly from the public purse and science research partners.

Already some 500 scientific groups from 45 countries have booked slots to use the MeerKAT array between next year and 2022.

'What this will do is bring to South African and world astronomers, the most astonishing and profoundly powerful instrument ever used before in radio astronomy,' SKA South Africa project director Rob Adam told AFP.
Once upon a time you could make a crane or a simple car from Lego, but things have got more ambitious since I first left tiny bits of Danish plastic all over the carpet for my mum to step on.

These days you can make a theme park. And amazingly, Legoland Windsor is marking its 20th anniversary this year.

There will be many events to celebrate, but the big one is already here  the new Lego Movie 4D. Its a great stopgap for those who enjoyed 2014s full-length Lego Movie and cant wait until 2018 for the next one.

Legoland Windsor is marking its 20th anniversary this year. New this year is the 500,000-brick Death Star, part of the Star Wars exhibition

But as the sunshine was out we decided to take in some other attractions first.

New this year is the 500,000-brick Death Star, part of the Star Wars exhibition. My daughter Claudia was freaked out by Darth Vaders breathing, so my geek-excitement was a snatched pleasure.

More to her taste was the driving school, where she and her friend Isabel raced Lego cars around Toytown, observing the traffic lights like model citizens.

It was on the first ride that I realised I loved the Q-Bot Express, the virtual queuing device that allowed the girls to go on the same ride three times in a row with only minimal waiting in between.

The last time I came to Legoland Windsor, sans Q-Bot, getting on rides was a battle of endurance. This time we had a seamless journey through the park, reserving our place on each ride and whizzing from Atlantis Submarine to Squid Surfer to Spinning Spider without missing a beat.

It also helps to plan your park visit carefully for fun without frazzle  Minilands incredible Lego model cities are peaceful to stroll round. In contrast, Heartlake City, with its restaurants, lake and pirate show, is always heaving.

Top gear: Claudia driving a Lego car around Toytown (left) and right, fans watch the Lego Movie 4D

Staying overnight as part of a Legoland mini-break makes things smoother too, giving you two days in the park to fit everything in.

Book a room at the Legoland Resort hotel and youll get entry into the park slightly earlier than everyone else.

Alternatively, you can wind down at one of the parks partner hotels  ours, the Beaumont Estate hotel, was family-friendly with a pool and playground, and was just 15 minutes away.

In the end we were so busy with rides that we didnt watch the Lego Movie 4D until the following day. We booed and hissed at Risky Business, the brother of original movie baddie Lord Business, as he tried to lure the Lego heroes to Brickworld, his knock-off Legoland.

The Lego Movie 4D is not going to win any awards for plot development but the script is fun. And thanks to the films special effects, you get an indoor snowstorm and blasts of fire, which made the girls squeal with excitement.

As the Lego Movie song goes, everything is awesome
Rome's appeal, from its blockbuster ancient sites to its charming piazzas, is hardly a secret, which makes the tranquility of Villa Spalletti Trivelli so extraordinary.

It is difficult to believe we are just a stones throw from tourist hotspots the Trevi Fountain and Forum.

Built in the early 1900s, the hotel has been in the same family for more than a century.

A wish come true: Above, the citys Trevi Fountain. It is said that throwing a coin into the fountain will ensure your return

Although modern luxuries abound  including a chic rooftop bar that has just opened following a 4 million refurbishment  the villa is also filled with precious heirlooms.

A 16th Century clock chimes as we walk down parquet floors to meet other guests for drinks.

As my husband Nick and I admire the Rubens and 15th Century Flemish tapestries (a present from Spains Charles V) in the drawing room, we sip Sariano Pomario, the villa owners award-winning red wine.

When Andrea Spalletti Trivelli offers to drive us to his winery for a tasting the next day, we readily accept.

Pomario, the organic winery and olive farm, is on the border between Umbria and Tuscany, and we spend an afternoon sampling the goods.

Jennifer visited the Quirinal Palace (pictured), which sits on top of the highest of Romes seven hills

Theres more wine over a lunch of pasta with mushrooms and truffles, and a glass or two with some local cheeses.

The next day, our sightseeing begins in earnest, first visiting the Quirinal Palace which sits on top of the highest of Romes seven hills.

Later, we make our way to the recently restored Trevi Fountain.

It is said that throwing a coin into the fountain will ensure your return (2,300 is tossed in each day). I just hope its true  Im already desperate to go back.
These tourists learned the hard way that it's never a good idea to stand in the way of a passenger plane's powerful jet blast.

They ran for cover - and one woman walking by was almost blown off her feet - when a rush of air from the UK-bound plane's jet engines created a sandstorm behind the runway.

It was a painful lesson for tourists who gathered to watch the Thomson Holidays plane take off from the airport on the Greek island of Skiathos, in the Aegean Sea, as they were pelted with sand, stones and debris.

Holidaymakers gathered to watch the Thomson Holidays plane take off from the Greek island of Skiathos

Some of the tourists crouched behind a low wall in anticipation of the jet blast from the Boeing 757

The crowd was caught up in a sandstorm created by the jet blast, which nearly knocked a woman off her feet

Holidaymakers and plane enthusiasts gather daily at the edge of the island's airport, at Xanemos Beach, to get close to aircraft as they take off and land.

Signs warn people of the dangers and urge them to 'keep away from aircraft blast'.

Footage posted on YouTube showed the crowd waving at the plane as it prepared to take off, and then scattering as they were struck by sand and their belongings were sent flying.

Holidaymakers were forced to run for cover as they were pelted with sand and their belongings were blown

Footage of the incident shows a second vantage point as the jet blast whipped up sand and debris

Before the plane took off, some of those gathered crouched behind a low wall in anticipation of the jet blast from the Boeing 757.

But others apparently had no idea what was in store for them.

The person who recorded the video wrote on YouTube: 'This Boeing 757 of Thomson departed back home to England and lots of tourists were watching the biggest airplane which is allowed to operate from this airport.
Between his recent fistfight in Cleveland and several cryptic Instagrams, he's be exhibiting some slightly irregular behavior as of late.

And it seems like Justin Bieber's darker side manifested itself again on Friday night during a concert in Atlantic City, New Jersey, when a fan apparently threw a hat at him.

The 22-year-old pop heartthrob went so far as to stop his show and talk to the audience about the practice of giving him gifts onstage, as documented by several Twitter videos.

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Trouble brewing? It seems like Justin Bieber's erratic behavior manifested itself again on Friday night during a concert in Atlantic City, New Jersey when a fan apparently threw a hat at him

'Take this moment to listen and try not to give me a hat or whatever you're trying to throw onto the stage right now, because I probably don't want that sh**,' he tersely stated, before walking back his comment just a bit with 'sorry that was mean.'

He then appeared to get more emotional about the apparent interruption.

'But yeah, no I lost what I was going to say,' he continued, 'I was deep into, like, a mode and a zone. I was into it. Now I'm out of it. I'll get it back. Just give me a second.'

After pausing for a moment, the young Canadian crooner apparently got back into the groove, as he segued from some observations into his song Purpose.

Stop everything: The 22-year-old pop heartthrob went so far as to stop his show and talk to the audience about the practice of giving him gifts onstage, as documented by several Twitter videos

Part of the show? After pausing for a moment, the young Canadian crooner apparently got back into the groove, as he segued from some observations into his song Purpose

Lots of clothes: Aside from his reflective speech, Justin had a busy night on stage from a costume-change perspective as well

'I just wanted to take this moment to acknowledge the fact that we all have a purpose, that we all have a meaning to life and it's not, like, we just don't live to die. And this life is not all struggles. I know that sometimes when we wake up in the morning, and it's like "God another day."

'Sorry for throwing your hat, but you ruined the moment,' he says to the fan, before transitioning into the ballad with 'whatever, let's do it.'

Aside from his reflective speech, Justin had a busy night on stage from a costume-change perspective as well.

Classic look: He started the show sporting a red and white varsity-style jacket with a hood, which he paired with some light wash jeans

Quite hole-y: Later he transitioned into a very ripped white t-shirt

A bit strange: He also pulled a yellow and black kilt-type garment over his jeans

He started the show sporting a red and white varsity-style jacket with a hood, which he paired with some light wash jeans.

Later he transitioned into a very ripped white t-shirt, and pulled a yellow and black kilt-type garment over his jeans.

Of course he also donned the red and white two tone shirt in which he gave his impromptu speech.

Partnering up: That same day, Justin shared a video of himself dancing with a professional hoofer during the Atlantic City stop on his 114-date Purpose World Tour on Friday

Easy does it: At one point, the Where Are U Now hitmaker gently lowered the pretty redhead into the splits as the crowd cheered

Swing low: Canadian-born Bieber impressively flipped his mesh-clad colleague around during a dance break between singing verses

Venting? On Saturday, The Biebs shared a snap and some Snqpchat video showing him doing a boxing workout with his trainer

Take that! The 22-year-old seemed quite adept at getting a punch in
It has been a difficult month for Roxy Jacenko as she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis just weeks after her husband Oliver Curtis was jailed for insider trading.

And now, the Sydney PR maven said that she regrets not being more 'vigilant' about her risk of the disease knowing that her mother Doreen Jacenko also suffered from it 10 years ago.

The 36-year-old mother-of-two urged other women to get themselves checked regularly, telling The Sun-Herald: 'I should have known better.'

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Shock diagnosis: Roxy Jacenko (right) told The Sydney Morning Herald she regrets not being more 'vigilant' about her risk of breast cancer knowing her mother Doreen (left) also suffered from the disease 10 years ago

'I should have done routine mammograms knowing that my mum had suffered from breast cancer - but I didn't, I just thought, 'I'll worry about that when I'm 40 plus,'' she said.

Doreen had a mastectomy a decade ago and told The Daily Telegraph that she was confident her daughter will beat the disease, just like she did.

'She will tackle this head on as she does with everything, exactly as I did 10 years ago,' she declared.

'I am sure, now we are 10 years down the line with breast cancer treatment advances, her treatments will be as positive as mine were.'

Challenge: It's been a difficult month for Roxy, 36, as she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis three weeks after her husband Oliver Curtis (left) was jailed for insider trading. Pictured with their children Pixie and Hunter

Meanwhile, Roxy encouraged women to be more proactive in detecting breast cancer in its early stages.

She continued: 'Even when you think, 'That will never happen to me', one day you could wake up to start the day and it will - just like me.'

On Wednesday, Roxy revealed she had been diagnosed with breast cancer - three weeks after her husband Oliver was sentenced to two years in prison.

She underwent a second biopsy on Thursday and is understood to be awaiting results to decide on the appropriate course of treatment.

'She will tackle this head on as she does with everything': Roxy's mother Doreen (pictured) had a mastectomy a decade ago and told The Daily Telegraph she was sure her daughter will beat the disease just like she did

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday, Roxy explained she found a lump in her left breast while showering at her Bondi home.

She asked her four-year-old daughter Pixie Curtis to feel it afterwards because she was 'confused' by what it was.

'When I found the lump two weeks ago and got out of the shower, I asked Pixie to feel it as I was a little confused to what it actually was,' she added.

'Her instant reaction was, 'Eugggh mum!'' she revealed.

'Her reaction was, 'Eugggh mum!'' Roxy explained on Wednesday she found a lump in her left breast while showering at her Bondi home two weeks ago, and then asked four-year-old daughter Pixie to feel it

The businesswoman underwent a 'quick and efficient' biopsy on Tuesday but has vowed not to let her treatment interfere with her busy work schedule.

Earlier, Roxy appeared upbeat as she spoke to the media from her luxury car on her way to work at Sweaty Betty PR.

'It can only be up from here. You can never expect things in life. You've got to tackle things head on and that's what I'm going to do,' she told Nine News.
She has shared a series of revealing selfies on social media over the past few weeks while showcasing her new slimmed-down physique.

And breakfast radio announcer Mel Greig, took to Instagram again on Saturday ahead of a charity ball to show off her enviably toned legs in a chic black gown that featured a dramatic thigh slit.

The 33-year-old media personality drew comparison to the famous Angelina Jolie pose, where the A-lister showed a whole lot of leg while on the red carpet for the 2012 Academy Awards.

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A whole lot of leg! Breakfast radio announcer Mel Greig (pictured), 33, took to Instagram on Saturday ahead of a charity ball to show off her enviably toned legs in a chic black gown with dramatic thigh slit

'Ready for the ball,' the bubbly blonde captioned the shot shared with her 5,314 Instagram followers.

'Thank you for your magic hands Roza @totalblisshairandbodyspa_,' Mel continued.

She also added in the hashtags #feelingfab, #balltime, #havetobefancy and #fundraiser.

Killer curves: A previous snap shared to the social media site saw the bubbly blonde flaunt her impressive cleavage in a plunging black three-quarter sleeved top

The popular keynote speaker highlighted her svelte frame in a dark purple hued long-sleeved frock with two dramatic thigh slits on either side.

Accessorising with a grey faux-fur jacket and statement jewelled bracelet, Mel elongated her bronzed legs with a pair of black pointy-toed heels.

Her signature blonde tresses appeared curled with a tong, while she sported a glamorous makeup look of a subtle smoky eye, touch of highlighter on her cheekbones and a soft pink lip.

Confident: Mel took to the red carpet at the opening night of Singin' In The Rain in Sydney, highlighting her cleavage in a black form-fitting frock with a plunging neckline

A previous snap shared to Instagram saw the Celebrity Apprentice star flaunt her impressive cleavage in a busty selfie.

Posing with one leg forward while donning a skin-tight black top with plunging neckline and coordinating high-waisted skirt, Mel let her body do the talking as she cropped out her head from the shot.

'It's been an all black and all boob kind of weekend,' she captioned the shot alongside the hashtags #sundaycatchups, #busyweekend, #backintohibernation, #sydney, #boobsaway, #singlelife and #funtimes.

Plunging: Since achieving a slimmed-down physique, the keynote speaker hasn't been shy of flaunting her frame

Meanwhile, Mel has been very open about her new found singledom on social media, after splitting from husband Steve Pollock in April after one year of marriage.

However, a comment on her Instagram account suggested she may be missing the comfort of a relationship.

The presenter uploaded a selfie ahead of a night out and one follower posed the question to newly single Mel: 'The next Bachelorette?'

Mel was quick to respond, saying: 'If I'm still single next year I'll totally give that a crack.'

New avenues? The presenter revealed that she signed up for Tinder, but didn't have much luck with the popular dating app

The newly single star revealed in a blog post for Mamamia that she's recently signed up to the dating app Tinder, but hasn't had much luck.

'Tinder is the most superficial and judgemental form of dating I've ever seen,' she wrote.

'I swiped right on 10 guys in total and received an instant message from all of them but this instantly felt wrong.

'It mainly felt wrong because I'd forgotten how to flirt and what the hell do we chat about late at night on a Friday night and can I handle 10 fake conversations?,' Mel added.
They had a lot to celebrate last week as their first single to be released as part of their comeback landed in the top spot on the ARIA singles charts.

And this week, the celebrations continue for The Veronicas as their hit In My Blood sits at number one for the second week running.

Jess Origliasso, one half of the pop duo which consists of her and twin sister Lisa, took to Instagram on Sunday to express her gratitude and excitement.

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Grateful: The Veronicas' hit single In My Blood is sitting at number one on the ARIA charts for the second week running, and Jess Origliasso, one half of the band, shared this throwback snap to Instagram on Sunday

The 31-year-old shared a throwback snap with her 110,000 followers, of her and Lisa as toddlers, in a reference to how far they've come together.

In the lengthy caption, she wrote: 'Just found out IN MY BLOOD is #1 for a 2nd week on the Australian ARIA charts. Thank you again to everyone who has bought it, played it, supported it, streamed it!!'

She continued by mentioning the struggles they faced with their former management, which brought about a seven-year hiatus from the music industry.

In good stead: Jess wrote a lengthy caption alongside her throwback snap, saying: 'Thank you again to everyone who has bought it, played it, supported it, streamed it!!'

'To think about how close to the brink of insanity we've been so many times after the release of our first two albums, fighting so hard against people who were in a position to 'have our best interests at heart', but behind the scenes worked against us in favour of their own ego and power, only makes these moments so humbling and sweet.'

Adding: 'We finally have the most incredible team and talented friends to create with, people who truly DO have our best interests at heart, and I couldn't feel more grateful.'

Last week, they celebrated the wave of the 'lady boss' with Delta Goodrem - after her album Wings Of The Wild also hit number one on the ARIA charts.

Girl power: Last week they celebrated the wave of the 'lady boss' with Delta Goodrem - after her album Wings Of The Wild also hit number one on the ARIA charts

In a statement released by The Veronicas, they expressed their gratitude, writing: 'We're lucky and extremely thankful to be embraced so warmly by Australia.'

Sony Music Chairman and CEO Denis Handlin was also excited about the success from the three women and said: 'It is an exciting day for Australian music.

'And I'm incredibly proud that three fantastically talented Australian women sit at the top of both the ARIA singles and albums charts this week, a feat that has not happened in over a decade.'

Celebrating their weirdness: After a seven year hiatus from the music industry - brought on by disputes with former label Warner, the sisters are back and seem more determined and focused than ever

Lisa took to Instagram herself to share a picture with her sister and Delta as they accepted their awards writing: 'Celebrating an @Aria_official #1 in Australia this week beside these stunning women'.

The twin sisters are clearly enjoying being back in the spotlight and once again making music that reflects their artistic ambitions.

After a contract dispute with former lablel Warner, the duo weren't able to release any new music for seven years - resulting in an extended hiatus from the industry.

Staying strong: The Brisbane-born musicians revealed that the issues with Warner almost forced them to give up and end the band they loved

The Brisbane-born musicians revealed that the issues with Warner almost forced them to give up and end the band they loved.

'There were some moments when it looked like we couldn't extricate ourselves out of the drama and I thought The Veronicas had to be over,' Jessica told News Corp.

She said she was surprised the twin sisters held it together as long as they did, and credited the bond they shared, close friends, and constantly writing music for staying the course.

'There were no secret stints in rehab, we had unhealthy things which could have derailed us but we were lucky we had each other's back,' she said.

United: Fame has made them prone to criticism about their looks and talents, however, the sisters have formed a thick skin over the years

With the legal dramas behind them and their 2014 album certified platinum, they are keen to let the world know they are still around and should not be forgotten.

Jessica said the group had a better relationship with new label Sony and they 'don't have to compromise anymore'.

'After all the s*** that went down with Warner and our last management company, now we are not legally bound to any situation where we can't do exactly what we want,' she said.

In My Blood is the first single from the Veronicas' yet-to-be-named forthcoming fourth studio album.
They formed as a band 27 years ago and have been living it up in Las Vegas for the last seven years.

Now, Human Nature have opened up about their long-running success.

With countless awards under their belt, including a 2006 ARIA for Highest Selling album, the Australian boy group said recently that they almost ended their career earlier than expected however their move to the US ultimately revived them.

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Life saver: Human Nature have revealed they nearly ended their 27 year career early than expected but the decision to relocate to the States saved them

In their latest interview with Insider, Phil Burton explained that the band felt they had reached the end before receiving their residency at the Imperial Palace in 2009.

'Las Vegas has given us a second wind when it comes to our career,' he said.

Band member Toby Allen went on to explain that 'early on, we were up against it' and that they were 'an unknown act' playing in the middle of party central.

Making it: Phil Burton explained the band felt they had reached the end before receiving their residency at the Imperial Palace in 2009: 'Las Vegas has given us a second wind when it comes to our career'

He went on to explain that they had a low 'eight paying people' during their first show in Vegas but 'the reaction following was great.'

'People latched on and word of mouth spread fast,' Toby said, adding that they soon after moved on to play at The Venetian.

Last week the band announced they were heading back to Australia in 2017 for a national tour.

Spreading the word: Band member Toby Allen addes 'early on, we were up against it' and that they only had 'eight paying people' during their first show in Vegas but 'the reaction following was great'

'We're incredibly excited to be creating a brand new two hour show specifically for our Australian fans,' Andrew said.

'This show is bigger, bolder and jammed with all the songs that have defined and made Human Nature who we are as performers  singing live and entertaining our home country gives us the greatest satisfaction.'
It's definitely an outfit that says 'check me out'.

Kaitlynn Carter showed off her stunning beach body in Miami on Saturday.

The 27-year-old, who is engaged to Brody Jenner, showcased her perfect figure in cute black and white bikini.

Check her out: Kaitlynn Carter showed off her stunning beach body in Miami on Saturday

Her only accessory was a black snapback, bearing the name of E11even nightclub, where she was headed later in the night.

She later swapped it out for a peach coloured fedora as she left the sand and headed back to her hotel, slipping on some matching flip-flops.

The only other thing she wore besides was the massive sparkler given to her by her fiance.

Earlier in the day, the model and blogger shared a pic of herself and two friends heading for a bite to eat, this time wearing a floral sundress belted at the waist.

Wow: The 27-year-old, who is engaged to Brody Jenner, showcased her perfect figure in cute black and white bikini

Style: She rocked a peach coloured fedora as she left the sand and headed back to her hotel, slipping on some matching flip-flops

'The best thing about my job @foraycollective is getting to hang with these two and so many other nice, smart, fun, talented, genuine girls on such a regular basis!!' she wrote. 'Today headed to brunch in Miami.'

In a another post she invited followers to head to the club, where her beau would be spinning.

'T O N I G H T all my #SwimWeek friends come hang with me, @foraycollective and @brodyjenner at @11miami for the official FORAY Swim Week afterparty!!' she captioned the sexy bikini snap.

Bling: The only other thing she wore besides was the massive sparkler given to her by her fiance

Knows her stuff: The model runs the fashion blog The Western Wild

Wedding bells: Brody and Carter began dating in 2013, and got engaged in May of this year

Jenner has had a string of high profile relationships before Carter, including Laguna Beach star Kristin Cavallari, Nicole Richie; Lauren Conrad and Avril Lavigne.

He and Carter began dating in 2013, and got engaged in May of this year.

If she takes his name when they do wed, she'll be the second Kaitlynn Jenner in the family, spelling aside.

In the club: Her only accessory was a black snapback, bearing the name of E11even nightclub, where she was headed later in the night

Ladies who brunch: Earlier in the day, the model and blogger shared a pic of herself and two friends heading for a bite to eat, this time wearing a floral sundress belted at the waist
He was reportedly spotted with Victoria Secret darling Adriana Lima on Wednesday evening.

But Scott Eastwood may be keeping his options open, as he hit the beach in Miami with some new babes on Saturday.

The 30-year-old Suicide Squad star flashed his toned torso in a pair of blue gradient board shorts while he splashed around in the water with a friend.

Playing the field? Scott Eastwood may be keeping his options open dating-wise, as he hit the beach in Miami with some new babes on Saturday

Following his dip in the ocean, the Fury actor trudged across the no-doubt sizzling sand, retreating to some chase lounges.

Luckily for the heartthrob, some female companions were apparently waiting for him in the seating area.

He soon became the center of attention, with one of the lovely bikini-clad ladies apparently holding his interest as she laid down in front of him, causing him to lower his Persol shades.

On Friday, US Weekly reported that model Adriana Lima and the hunky Scott Eastwood were spotted arm-in-arm in New York on Wednesday night.

Beach boy: Scott looked right at home bounding around on the sand

Putting on a show: The 30-year-old Suicide Squad star flashed his toned torso in a pair of blue gradient board shorts

Belly flop! He looked quite carefree as he dove into the surf

Fun day: He splashed around in the water with a friend

However before fans get too excited, the 35-year-old model's spokesperson has denied they got flirty over seafood at CatchNYC, saying the handsome son of Clint Eastwood was not even dining with the beauty.

Confirming the model was at Catch but with different dinner company, the rep told Us: 'Adriana had dinner that evening with a small group of friends and family, however, Mr. Eastwood was not in attendance.'

Despite the denial, a restaurant insider told the magazine the pair arrived 'arm-in-arm' to Meatpacking District eatery.

Friendly group: Luckily for the heartthrob, some female companions were apparently waiting for him in the seating area

Taking a closer look: He soon became the center of attention, with one of the lovely bikini-clad ladies apparently holding his interest as she laid down in front of him, causing him to lower his Persol shades

The magazine described the evening as a 'flirty night out' after the onlooker said: 'The two were close and affectionate throughout the night.'

Adriana only recently got back on the market with numerous outlets reporting earlier this week that she had split from boxer and fitness instructor Joe Thomas.

It seems Scott may have had his eye on Adriana for some time, joking back in January that he messed up a red carpet photograph as he was too taken by the beauty.
She's been mobbed by fans after every one of her Funny Girl performances since returning from a two-month break.

And the ever-amiable Sheridan Smith, 35, once again took plenty of time to speak with her adoring audience outside The Savoy Theatre, on Saturday.

Stepping out in a striking leopard print shirt, the actress looked radiant as she flashed smiles at the waiting crowd.

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Glowing: The ever-amiable Sheridan Smith, 35, once again took plenty of time to speak with her adoring audience outside The Savoy Theatre, on Saturday

The talented star hugged her ecstatic fans and looked genuinely moved by the reception she received.

She posed for selfies and conversed enthusiastically with the fans before making her way to a waiting car.

Sheridan styled her blonde locks in a small ponytail and her fringe in a cool quiff, while she gave her lips a slick of rouge.

Grateful: The talented star looked genuinely moved by the reception she received

Fan favourite: Sheridan's been mobbed by fans after every one of her Funny Girl performances since returning from a two-month break

Blonde beauty: Sheridan styled her blonde locks in a small ponytail and her fringe in a cool quiff

It's been a welcome return for the Cilla star, who pulled out of the West End smash two months ago, taking a break from performing due to stress and exhaustion.

Understudy Natasha J Barnes was drafted in to replace Sheridan as leading lady Fanny Brice and won rave reviews for her performance from critics and theatre-goers alike.

But none have been more pleased than those able to see Sheridan return to her leading role at the Savoy this week.

Fans have routinely lined the streets of London to catch a glimpse of the Gavin & Stacey star, especially since she has been coming out to meet and greet.

Made-up: She gave her lips a slick of rouge and decorated her piercing blue peepers with lashings of mascara

All smiles: She posed for selfies and conversed enthusiastically with the fans

Sheridan has been putting smiles on faces and appears to be going from strength to strength onstage, too.

In a statement from producers Sonia Friedman, David Babani and Scott Landis on Friday, enormous excitement was shared.

It said: 'We are delighted to welcome Sheridan Smith back to Funny Girl this evening. It is currently planned that Sheridan will also play this Saturday evening (not matinee), and Monday to Saturday next week.'

Natasha will stand in for the Wednesday matinee and Thursday evening performances, but Sheridan's schedule is subject to change.

Happy! Sheridan looked to put meaning into every hug, holding her fans tight

Hug it out: Sheridan looked slightly emotional following an encounter with one fan

Standing tall: The star's coordinated ensemble oozed glamour

The C-Word actress previously cancelled a number of performances in April after audience members had complained she appeared drunk on stage.

She had been nominated for a Best Actress BAFTA for her portrayal of writer Lisa Lynch in BBC drama The C-Word earlier this year, but she lost out to Suranne Jones.

Lynch died of cancer in 2013, aged just 33. The C-Word had also been nominated for Best Single Drama.

Sheridan was said to be 'desperate' to win a Bafta to honour the woman whose battle with breast cancer inspired the programme.

Wild side: Sheridan matched her top with black jeans and leather boots
She is best known as the bubbly co-presenter of Channel Seven's breakfast show Sunrise.

And Edwina Bartholomew showed off her fun personality as she hosted the Fremantle Dockers Ball at Crown Perth on Saturday night.

The 5ft 3in blonde laughed off the dramatic height difference between herself and 6ft 9in AFL player Aaron Sandilands on Instagram.

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A tall order! Edwina Bartholomew (L) laughed off the height difference between herself and 6ft 9in AFL star Aaron Sandilands (R) as they posed for a Instagram photo at the Fremantle Dockers Ball in Perth on Saturday

In the social media snap, Edwina posed in a glamourous sparkly dress next to the injured Fremantle ruckman.

Standing next to Aaron, the 33-year-old TV star barely reached his chest and she made light of the height gap in the caption.

'Knee high to Aaron Sandilands. 211cm to my 163 + 2cm of hair,' Edwina wrote.

Aaron, 33, is known as the equal-tallest player in the AFL alongside Collingwood's Mason Cox.

Height gap: At 6ft 9in, Aaron is recognised as the equal-tallest player in the AFL alongside Collingwood star Mason Cox. But Sunrise co-host Edwina is significantly shorter at 5ft 3in

Edwina made headlines in February when her outfit at the Oscars red carpet in Los Angeles was widely mocked online.

Several fans compared the the detailing on the front of her Rachel Gilbert blue dress to 'a part of a female anatomy'.

Edwina took the remarks in good humour, however, and jokingly called the incident, 'Vajayjaygate'.

'Vajayjaygate': Edwina made headlines in February when her dress at the Oscars red carpet in Los Angeles was compared to 'a part of a female anatomy'

She later told The Kyle and Jackie O Show: 'I did know they might call it 'the vagina dress' and I still wore it anyway!'

She also made light of the wardrobe malfunction on Twitter, writing: 'Lucky I didn't put it in the middle.'

Edwina was previously Sunrise's weather reporter before announcing she was taking on a studio role in January.
After being scouted as a male model at the age of 16 while working at McDonald's, she is now one of the world's most famous transgender models.

And Andreja Pejic is proving her beauty knows no bounds, in a sultry snap shared to Instagram on Saturday.

The 24-year-old, who underwent sex reassignment surgery in 2014, was posing up a storm poolside in the Spanish coastal city of Marbella.

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Legs for days! Transgender model Andreja Pejic is proving her beauty knows no bounds in a sultry snap shared to Instagram on Saturday of her relaxing poolside in Marbella, Spain

She has sprawled her lofty frame out over a sunbed and her enviably trim pins are on full display as she stretched them out in front of her.

The model and activist has thrown her head back, drawing attention to her decolletage and plunging neckline.

She was sporting a skimpy black dress - which barely concealed her thighs - a pair of lace-up black flats and she added dark shades to complete her chic look.

Work it: The Bosnian-born beauty was scouted as a male model at the age of 16 while working at McDonald's, and she is now one of the world's most famous transgender models

The confident model has cheekily captioned the snap: 'Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go EVERYWHERE.'

Andreja's career has seen her both challenge and break down gender barriers, after being discovered at the age of 16 while working at McDonald's.

And she has now forged a career for herself as a transgender model, walking for Jean Paul Gaultier in 2011 and becoming the first transgender model to be profiled by Vogue in May last year.

Top of her game: The beauty has forged a career for herself as a transgender model, walking for Jean Paul Gaultier in 2011 and becoming the first transgender model to be profiled by Vogue in May last year

In an interview with ES Magazine, the Australian model spoke candidly about her transition and why she will never be ashamed of her past again.

'When I was little, the idea of waking up as a girl was like a fairytale,' she said.

'I had this idea that I'd meet a witch who would transform me. From the moment I found out that it was actually possible, I went to bed each night feeling that when it happens, it will be the best day of my life. And it was!'

Changes: She underwent sex reassignment surgery in 2014 and said that as a young boy, she dreamt of waking up as a girl

Andreja explained that when she emerged from surgery, she 'felt complete' and told the doctors to 'throw away! her discarded body parts.

'I'd planned on a p**** shower, but actually the time afterwards wasn't easy as I had to work out what to do with my career,' she said.

As a child, Andreja fled war-torn Bosnia with her family to Serbia where they settled in a refugee camp near Belgrade, the country's capital.

When she was eight years old, she immigrated to Melbourne with her mother and younger brother as a political refugee.
She's been through a challenging month with her husband Oliver Curtis jailed for insider trading and the recent news that she has breast cancer.

But Sydney PR maven Roxy Jacenko remains upbeat and continues to make family her priority as she took to Instagram on Saturday.

The 36-year-old shared snaps of a home cooking class that featured daughter Pixie and son Hunter as cute chefs, as she exclaimed: 'All systems go!!!'

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'All systems go!!!': Sydney PR Maven Roxy Jacenko, 36, shared a sweet snap to Instagram on Saturday of her precious children Hunter (L), two, and Pixie (R), four, taking part in a home cooking class

The first of two snaps saw her precious children stirring ingredients in Le Creuset cookware while being assisted by a female cook.

'All systems go!!!,' she captioned the shot shared with her 106,000 Instagram followers.

Two-year-old Hunter beamed while dressed in an all-navy ensemble as four-year-old Pixie, clad in a pink cardigan and coordinating bow headband from her own range, looked on with a determined expression.

The end result! Roxy shared the impressive results of the homemade dish in a later snap shared to Instagram

Another snap showed the impressive results of the homemade dish that appeared to be a soup consisting of wontons and fresh Asian greens.

Served in Mediterranean-inspired dishes on top of a round hessian placemat, the bubbly personality highlighted her design flare.

'First go,' Roxy captioned the later post alongside a tick emoji.

Fresh food aplenty: In an earlier post, the mother-of-two took to social media to share an impressive food delivery, part of which was required for the cooking lesson

In an earlier post, the mother-of-two took to social media to share an impressive food delivery, part of which was required for the cooking lesson.

Fresh fruit and vegetables were aplenty in a wooden crate, while a bamboo steamer, sieve and various other cookware featured prominently on Roxy's kitchen island.

'Tomorrow I take up cooking,' she began the caption.

'Soup of course. Nothing too over the top or too filling, thanks @lecreusetau and @chrisanticofruit for the delivery - now all I need to do is work out how to get the cook top going,' Roxy continued.

'Hand in hand': The businesswoman shared a sweet snap of her holding daughter Pixie's hand in an earlier snap shared to Instagram

Remaining upbeat: Having underwent a 'quick and efficient' biopsy on Tuesday following her breast cancer revelation, Roxy has vowed not to let her treatment interfere with her usual day-to-day life

Having underwent a 'quick and efficient' biopsy on Tuesday following her breast cancer revelation, Roxy has vowed not to let her treatment interfere with her usual day-to-day life.

The businesswoman appeared upbeat as she spoke to media from her luxury car on her way to work at Sweaty Betty PR on Tuesday.

'It can only be up from here. You can never expect things in life. You've got to tackle things head on and that's what I'm going to do,' she told Nine News.

Happy: The media mogul often takes to social media to share affectionate snaps with her children
Former Bachelor Tim Robards has slammed claims that an all-expenses paid trip that he took to South Africa with his partner Anna Heinrich lacked coverage.

It comes after South African Tourism ANZ defended the reality TV couple to The Daily Telegraph, in the wake of reports claiming the organisation was unimpressed by social media coverage of their trip.

Tim hit back this week, telling Daily Mail Australia: The 'sources' they speak of all sit at the desk next to them.

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Having his say: Former Bachelor Tim Robards has slammed claims that his and girlfriend Anna Heinrich's all-expenses paid trip to South Africa lacked coverage (The pair are seen here in South Africa)

Reports claimed that South African Tourism believed the couple's social media posts lacked proper coverage, in that they were limited to one-dimensional selfies of the stunning pair instead of picturesque images of Cape Town and its wildlife as well as popular tourist attractions.

But the board told the publication: 'We are extremely proud of our partnership with Tim & Anna and excited that they chose South Africa as a destination of choice for their YouTube series, Tim & Anna Escape.'

'We have nothing but praise for their level of professionalism and the content captured while they were experiencing what South Africa has to offer,' the board added.

'We are extremely proud': South African Tourism ANZ defended the Bachelor couple on Friday, after it was claimed that the organisation was disappointed with coverage of their trip to Cape Town

In March, the reality TV stars embarked on an all-expenses paid jaunt to Cape Town in exchange for social media coverage of their experience, including videos posted to their Tim and Anna Escape YouTube series.

The globe-trotting pair recently extended their travels to Europe.

The couple, who found love on the hit reality TV series in 2013, shared a series of romantic photos from cities across Italy and Greece on Instagram last month.

They are said to have travelled across the world with family members to celebrate Anna's mother's 60th birthday as well as a relative's 30th.

All-expenses paid: The reality TV stars embarked on an all-expenses paid jaunt to the African nation earlier this year in exchange for social media coverage of their experience, including videos posted to their Tim and Anna Escape YouTube series

African adventure: The couple also documented their trip on Instagram

Lacking: Reports claimed SA Tourism believed that Tim and Anna's posts lacked proper coverage

Limited: A source claimed the organisation was disappointed because the couple's coverage was supposedly limited to one-dimensional selfies instead of picturesque images of Cape Town and its wildlife

Tim, a chiropractor, said recently that he would love to marry Anna in a beach ceremony if they were to get engaged.

'I would love to elope to a beach, a nice tropical location somewhere,' he said on The Morning Show.

He added: 'A little tropical location somewhere.'

Smitten: Tim, a chiropractor, said recently that he would love to marry Anna in a beach ceremony if they were to get engaged

Though the genetically-blessed couple are yet to tie the knot, they're also in no hurry.

'That would be nice,' he told Daily Mail Australia in February when asked if an engagement ring would present itself any time soon.

'I do get a lot of pressure,' he added, no doubt referring to 2015 Bachelor star Sam Wood's recent proposal to Snezana Markoski just a few months after dating.
Former Home And Away star Tammin Sursok wasn't afraid to show off her svelte figure on Saturday.

Taking to Instagram, the 32-year-old actress shared a photo of herself posing in a red hot dress, with her trim pins on show for all to see.

'Weekend rose. @bottleandheels (sic),' the mother-of-one captioned the image, making reference to her blog Bottle And Heels.

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Red hot: Former Home And Away star Tammin Sursok wasn't afraid to show off her svelte figure on Saturday in this stunning social media snap uploaded to Instagram

Sitting on the ground, the brunette beauty had her scarlet wrap dress pulled up to reveal a generous glimpse of her thighs and toned legs.

She slipped her feet into a pair of brown strappy wedged shoes, while her dark tresses were worn in a half-up, half-down style.

With a slick of light pink lipstick and dustings of dark eyeshadow, Tammin effortlessly exuded sass and style as she stared into the camera lens.

The Pretty Little Liars star is happily married to director Sean McEwen, and the pair share two-year-old daughter Phoenix.

Screen star: Tammin, who first shot to fame playing Dani Sutherland in Home And Away, has gone on to star in US television series Pretty Little Liars

Tammin, who first shot to fame playing Dani Sutherland in Home And Away, has been open with how motherhood has affected her life.

Earlier in the month, the South-African born beauty admitted she spent the bulk of being a new mother 'obsessing' about regaining her identity as an actress and not relishing enough time with Phoenix.

Writing on her blog Bottle And Heels, she said: 'I remember going to a spin class three months after my little one was born and the teacher spoke about feeling lost and I crumbled.

'I had caked old breast milk on my activewear. It truly hit a nerve. Lost, lost, lost.

'My life had changed the day my magnificent daughter came into the world,' she added.
She's been living the dream in Hollywood for the past six years as co-host of Extra.

But TV star Renee Bargh showed off her softer side on Saturday as she doted over her friend's baby in Los Angeles.

The 29-year-old media personality shared an Instagram photo of herself holding the three-month-old son of US nutritionist Kimberly Snyder.

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Feeling clucky? Extra co-host Renee Bargh showed off her softer side on Saturday as she doted over the baby son of her friend and Hollywood nutritionist Kimberly Snyder

In the social media snap, Renee smiled next to the lively baby boy and confessed to having 'heart explosions'.

Suggesting she was feeling a clucky, the former Channel [V] host also added a love heart emoticon.

Renee styled her blonde hair loosely and opted for simple, natural-look make-up for the outdoor photo.

Meanwhile, a glance at Kimberly's popular Instagram page shows she's embraced motherhood with joy.

Making a splash: Renee has been living the dream in Hollywood for the past six years as co-host of Extra

Chic: On Friday, Renee nailed Californian off-duty style in an Instagram photo she shared of her summer outfit

She often shares adorable photos of Emerson Bruce, who she affectionately refers to as her 'Lil Bub.'

According to a post on her blog, Kimberly welcomed 'Baby E' in April and claimed that his name came to her 'in a dream.'

On Friday, Renee nailed Californian off-duty style in an Instagram photo she shared of her chic summer outfit.

She flaunted her slim legs in a pair of denim cut-offs, while paying homage to her native Australia with a locally designed T-shirt.

Day job: it's been business as usual for Renee, who recently attended the Ghostbusters premiere as a journalist for Extra. Pictured with executive producer Dan Aykroyd

The slouchy tee read 'Martin' in a bold serif font, a product of the Aussie label Nice Martin, and she wore a pair of slightly scuffed Converse high top sneakers.

Renee accessorised with a pair of rounded sunglasses to continue her rock 'n' roll theme, and wore simple gold bangles and rings adorning her left arm and hand.

Meanwhile, it's been business as usual for Renee, who recently attended the Ghostbusters premiere as a journalist for Extra.

Her return to work on the red carpet comes after enjoying a girls' holiday in Mexico with Australian model Ashley Hart.
She had a heated on air spat with Jenny McCarthy on Friday that ended with her walking out of the SiriusXM studio.

And Tara Reid made a confident statement with her outfit as she stepped out in NYC on Saturday.

The 40-year-old rocked a bold red pair of heeled boots with her black skinny jeans.

Statement: Tara Reid rocked bold red heels as she emerged following her on air spat with Jenny McCarthy in New York on Sunday

The actress almost fell out of her very plunging sleeveless black top and donned full make-up with her signature blonde hair poker straight.

She looked a little pre-occupied as she crossed the street, phone in hand, probably with her mind still on the 'unprofessional' assault by the Sirius XM host.

It all kicked off when the star turned up for The Jenny McCarthy Show to promote the fourth installment of Sharknado.

While it started out civilly enough, it soon became a duel of words over each other's love lives and cosmetic surgery.

Mood: The 40-year-old paired them with black skinny jeans and plunging, cleavage and shoulder-baring black top

Tara seemed to be on the defensive early on when Jenny tried to ask her a straight question about Marriage Boot Camp, which she is currently appearing on with boyfriend Dean May, despite not being married.

Jenny sort of obliged, and asked about her fitness regime for the film, before seguing into her plastic surgery, another topic Tara was in no mood to talk about.

'No, I haven't had any surgeries for a while, Jenny,' Tara replied icily. 'I think I've made that clear about a hundred times,' Tara retorted.

Meow: It all kicked off when the star turned up for The Jenny McCarthy Show how to promote the fourth installment of Sharknado

Zing: While it started civil, it soon became a duel of word over each other's love lives and cosmetic surgery

'I didn't hear that a hundred times, I'm so sorry,' Jenny apologized.

'Maybe you only read the bad things, but I've made that really clear so many years. But read what you want to read. But it was really nice talking to you and really good luck with your show,' she said before storming out.

'Good luck to you too, and I'm so excited about Sharknado,' Jenny said, before firing after her: 'And I hope you stay married.'

Nope: Tara seemed to be on the defensive early on when Jenny tried to ask her a straight question about Marriage Boot Camp, which she is currently appearing on with boyfriend Dean May, despite not being married

On the promo trail: Reid has been doing the promotional rounds for the fourth installment of Sharknado as of late

The American Pie actress fired back in a pleasant voice: 'I hope you stay married too.'

The insults escalated when Jenny continued: 'I will, and I hope your knees get a little wobblier than they already are.'

'Oh, my knees?' Tara asked. 'Oh yeah I hope your t*ts get even nicer, because they're amazing, same guy who did mine, right?'

'They are! Thank you so much!' Jenny replies. 'Yes, same guy. Love you Tara, good luck with Sharknado 18!'
She just finished documenting her tropical vacation.

But on Saturday Shay Mitchell was already back on social media documenting her latest photo shoot for her fans via Snapchat.

The Pretty Little Liars star was posing for photos for Smashbox Cosmetics and showed off multiple styles created for her by the team during the fun-fulled session.

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No rest: On Saturday Shay Mitchell was already back on social media, specifically Snapchat, to share the workings of a photo shoot on a Saturday

The actress, 29, had a full team of stylists to change up her look and she gamely let them all go to work on her while Snapchatting.

In on clip she showed herself with an elaborate braided haido featuring silver rings and small interwoven metal leaves, and most likelt a weave.

And after taking a quick spin in front of the cameras in a short black dress and low heels, the Canadian beauty headed back to the chair for yet another whole new look.

Group goals: She then shared a picture of her beauty team descending on her

Next up was a black bobbed wig with bangs, followed by long caramel fake tresses blown out into loose curls.

New make-up was also applied, including some pouty rose lipstick, eye shadow and generous eye-liner, along with some blush.

She also changed her outfit and rocked a black ensemble composed of an airy long sleeve shirt and some black trousers.

Throughout the day she also experimented with Snapchat's famous filters, including the wreath and face warp filters.

Black as night: Next up appeared to be a raven black wig with bangs, though she didn't share if that look actually made it into the shoot

Not real: Her following look was an amazing caramel blonde style, though she did reveal that the luscious tresses were in fact a wig

By the end of the day, there was only one look left, which required her wig be removed along with all her braids.

Her natural brunette tresses were left to billow out into a large frizzy bob, which of course, ever the pro, Shay pulled off with no problem.

While the crew did have to work on a Saturday, the star at least acknowledged their hard work with an instagram snap of the team.

She captioned the candid photo: 'This crew makes working on a Saturday a full blown party.'
Jason Dundas raised questions about his status as a David Jones ambassador after deleting the job title from his Instagram account last week.

But before The Sunday Telegraph reported the change, it would appear Jason had swiftly restored his biography without explanation.

Meanwhile, it was also revealed that model Jarrod Scott will make his David Jones debut next month at their 2016 Spring/Summer launch.

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Mixed messages? Jason Dundas (L) raised questions about his status as a David Jones ambassador at a time when the department store hired New York-based model Jarrod Scott (R) to walk their Spring/Summer runway

Over the weekend, the News Corp publication claimed there was confusion surrounding Jason's 'social media CV' due to recent edits he had made.

The X Factor host removed all traces of David Jones from his Instagram page the same week Montana Cox was dropped as an ambassador after three years.

However, on Saturday the position was once again added to his social media profile, which now includes: 'David Jones Ambassador'.

Company man: The Sunday Telegraph claimed there was confusion after Jason swiftly restored his Instagram biography without explanation after removing all references to David Jones earlier this month

Not renewing her contract: Jason deleted 'David Jones ambassador' from his Instagram page the same week model Montana Cox (pictured) was dropped from the Australian brand. He later restored the job description

Changing line-up: David Jones confirmed to Daily Mail Australia on Thursday they reached 'a mutual agreement with Montana that her contract as an official David Jones Ambassador will not be renewed'

This series of events were reported as US-based Jarrod confirmed to the Telegraph he was returning to Australia for David Jones' catwalk show on August 3.

'This will be the first time I've walked in one of their shows,' he claimed.

'They always look really impressive, so I'm ready to have some fun on the runway with their ambassadors and their other special guests.'

Dapper display: Due to his Instagram edits, Jason's status as a David Jones ambassador was temporarily uncertain. Pictured at a rehearsal for the brand's Autumn/Winter 2016 launch in February

Unclear: It is unclear if Jason's change to his 'social media CV' and the announcement that Jarrod will feature in the department store's upcoming event are in any way related

It is unclear if Jason's profile edits and the announcement that Jarrod will feature in the department store's upcoming event are in any way related.

At this stage, it is also not known if David Jones has plans for Jarrod as a potential brand ambassador.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to David Jones for comment and clarification.

Homecoming: Meanwhile, New York-based Jarrod confirmed on Sunday that he was returning to Australia for David Jones' catwalk show on August 3
All eyes were on her as she sunned herself in a daringly low-cut bathing suit earlier in the day.

And Kelly Brook flaunted her enviable curves once again as she stepped out with her beau Jeremy Parisi at the Ischia Global Film & Music Fest in Italy on Saturday night.

The 36-year-old model basked in her newly topped up tan as her eye-popping cleavage was just about tamed by the body-hugging number.

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At it again! Kelly Brook, 36, flaunted her enviable curves once again as she stepped out with her beau Jeremy Parisi at the Ischia Global Film & Music Fest in Italy on Saturday night

Head-turner: The model's eye-popping cleavage was just about tamed by a body-hugging number

The pink and white striped dress clung on tightly to her ample bust before cinching in her tiny waist.

It went on skim her sensational curves before falling just below her knees and she completed the look with classy nude heels as she went on stage to present an award.

Drawing attention to her spectacular decolletage, the Kent born star threw her brunette tresses in to a glamorous bun, while a pair of statement earrings framed her bronzed face.

Jeremy looked 'summertime slick' himself in a button down blue top and white chinos which he teamed with brown shoes.

Bronzed goddess: She basked in her newly topped up tan

Great length: Her dress went on skim her sensational curves before falling just below her knees

Flattering her figure: The pink and white striped dress clung on tightly to her ample bust before cinching in her tiny waist

Glamour: Drawing attention to her spectacular decolletage, the Kent born star threw her brunette tresses in to a bun

And evidently the smile on his face signalled his love towards his girlfriend who hogged the spotlight as they enjoyed the day on the waters a few hours earlier.

The School For Seduction actress struggled to contain her assets in a floral bathing suit as she frolicked in the water.

And Jeremy couldn't resist taking pictures of the former glamour model as she arrived back on board.

Accessorising: A pair of statement earrings framed her bronzed face

Style rules: The former glamour model accentuated her legs with classy nude heels

Confident lady: She also took on presenting duties during the night

Stunning: She oozed sex appeal as she posed up a storm on the red carpet

Lucky man: Evidently the smile on his face signalled his love towards his girlfriend who hogged the spotlight as they enjoyed the day on the waters a few hours earlier

Kelly- who has previously been engaged to Jason Statham, Billy Zane and Thom Evans- recently shot down rumours of a union after she was spotted wearing a ring on her engagement finger.

She told BBC Asian network's Preeya Kalidas that it was only for her 'chubby fingers'.

'Jeremy bought me a lovely ring but we're not engaged. I only wear it on that finger because it doesn't fit on the others,' she revealed.

She did however enter the relationship in April 2015 with high hopes as at the time she told Closer: 'I'm not sure we're ready for marriage just yet, but we're definitely heading in the right direction. I'm a very loved-up lady right now.'

Holding her own: Kelly looked glam alongside supermodel Petra Nemvoca

Work it: She clearly loved posing for the photographers

Star sighting: Blue's Lee Ryan looked on in the background

With no intentions of taking their relationship slow, she continued: 'Hopefully I'll have a baby soon. Ultimately, I am entering a new phase in my life.'

Explaining why the French hunk has changed her outlook on men, she added: 'Jeremy's great and things are going really well. We just have a lot of fun together and laugh all the time, so he makes everything enjoyable.'

Meanwhile supermodel Petra Nemcova dazzled at the Italian cinematic event where she picked up an award.
She was spotted cosying up to a mystery male while enjoying her time in Italy.

But Petra Nemcova ditched her male companion as she put on a stunning solo display, for the Ischia Film Festival, on Saturday night.

The beauty, 37, showed off her model credentials, as she oozed glamour in a figure hugging floor-length Redemption gown, that teased a hint of cleavage with a daring sheer panel across the chest.

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Glamorous! Petra Nemcova put on a stunning solo display, for the Ischia Film Festival, on Saturday night

Petra kept her look chic and stylish as she opted for a monochrome palette, which she enhanced with silver accents.

She proved that a dress doesn't need to be short to be revealing as she flaunted her fabulous pins with a daring thigh-high split.

And she showcased her impressive cleavage with a diagonal semi-sheer panel that stemmed from the gown's asymmetric neckline.

Flaunting it! The 37-year-old beauty showed off her model credentials, as she oozed glamour in a figure hugging floor-length gown, that teased a hint of cleavage with a daring sheer panel across the chest

Although Petra had all the elements of a classic red carpet look, she chose to round off her ensemble with a pair of casual black sandals, which featured just a few gemstones between her toes.

Meanwhile, she added even more sparkle to her look with a range of dazzling accessories - including a metallic boxy clutch bag, Chopard Happy Heart Bangles and a shimmering pendant necklace.

Sticking to her theme of clean lines, Petra swept her blonde tresses away from her face in a slicked back style and left her locks to fall straight down her back.

It's in black and white! Petra kept her look chic and stylish as she opted for a monochrome palette, which she enhanced with silver accents

Daring! Petra proved that a dress doesn't need to be short to be revealing as she flaunted her fabulous pins with a daring thigh-high split

And the Czech-born beauty maintained her high-glamour status with an enviably golden glow and pristine makeup, including an eye-popping rouge lipstick and lashings of mascara.

Petra posed effortlessly for the camera as she placed a hand elegantly on her tiny waist and flashed a hint of her pearly whites.

And it appeared as though she she certainly had something to smile about as she clutched her Ischia Humanitarian Award proudly to her chest.

Comfortable and chic! Although Petra had all the elements of a classic red carpet look, she chose to round off her ensemble with a pair of casual black sandals

Hard work pays off! It appeared as though she she certainly had something to smile about as she clutched her Ischia Humanitarian Award proudly to her chest

Petra was joined by other big names at the event, including Kelly Brook and her boyfriend Jeremy Parisi, and Eliana Miglio.

Kelly put on an extremely busty display for the evening as she poured her curves into a candy striped bandeau midi-dress.

The 36-year-old stunner showed off her perfect hourglass figure in the gown, as she cinched in her shapely waist with a thin white belt.

Stunning! The Czech-born beauty maintained her high-glamour status with an enviably golden glow and pristine makeup, including an eye-popping rouge lipstick and lashings of mascara

Working it! Petra posed effortlessly for the camera as she placed a hand elegantly on her tiny waist and flashed a hint of her pearly whites

Meanwhile the strapless neckline of the dress struggled to contain the model's ample assets - drawing attention to her impressive cleavage.

Kelly kept things simple in the accessories department as she eschewed all jewelry apart from some large drop earrings, which she wore in a pretty peach shade.

And she made sure she coordinated right down to her toes in a pair of nude stiletto heels in a soft suede material.

Curvy! Kelly put on an extremely busty display for the evening as she poured her curves into a candy striped bandeau midi-dress

Sticking to the elegant theme of the evening, she also swept her glossy brunette tresses into a ladylike up-do.

She also accentuated her deep tan with a dash of bronzer along her impossibly high cheekbones and drew attention to her peepers with a generous helping of mascara and eye-liner.

As she looked so gorgeous it was no surprise that Jeremy stayed close to her side throughout the entire evening.

Standing tall! Kelly made sure she coordinated right down to her toes in a pair of nude stiletto heels in a soft suede material

Living up to his tall, dark and handsome reputation, Kelly's beau rocked a smart, casual look in a short-sleeved blue shirt and white trousers.

He rounded his outfit off with a pair of classic tan loafers, which featured weave detailing across the front.

However, while most of the guests stuck to either classic black or candy shades, Eliana wasn't afraid to stand out from the crowd in an eye-catching scarlet dress.

Perfect match! Living up to his tall, dark and handsome reputation, Kelly's beau rocked a smart, casual look in a short-sleeved blue shirt and white trousers

The 50-year-old Italian actress showed off a figure that would be envied by women half her age in the stunning backless number, which plunged all the way down to her pert posterior.

But she kept things ladylike as she sported a flattering high-neckline and perfectly coordinating shoulder bag.

Eliana tamed her firey locks into loose Hollywood waves, which she swept over her head in a deep and sensual side parting.

Red hot! While most of the guests stuck to either classic black or candy shades, Eliana wasn't afraid to stand out from the crowd in an eye-catching scarlet dress

Baby got back! The 50-year-old Italian actress showed off a figure that would be envied by women half her age in the stunning backless number, which plunged all the way down to her pert posterior

And she showed off her natural beauty, with minimal makeup apart from a subtle smokey eye and dusting of rosy blush on her cheeks.

The Ischia Global Film & Music Fest takes place every year and this will be the 14th year of the arts celebration.

This year is a special one for the Czech model, who is being honoured with the Ischia Humanitarian Award.

Aside from her prominence in the modelling world, Petra is known for founding and chairing the Happy Hearts Fund.

It has now been running for a decade, having been launched two years after her fiance was among the claimed the lives of 230,000 people killed in the Thai natural disaster.

She now works with the charity to rebuild safe, resilient schools in areas impacted by natural disasters.
A sexy topless Instagram shot in sun-drenched Mykonos caught the attention of her 317,000 followers earlier this week.

But Mischa Barton opted for a more covered up look as she carted her luggage through LAX, Los Angeles on Saturday.

Calling it a wrap on her enviable getaway, the 30-year-old actress went make-up free as she cut a lone figure after landing.

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Staying grounded: Mischa Barton, 30, went make-up free as she carted her luggage through LAX, Los Angeles on Saturday

Opting for maximum comfort for the long haul flight, the British born star went for a grey crop top and slouchy black trousers.

Her white trainers allowed her to push along her hefty belongings which included two large suitcases, one grey handbag and a shopper.

Leaving the glamour behind in Greece, Mischa looked tired as she donned a pair of black shades and gathered her tresses into a low-lying messy ponytail.

It was a different story days earlier when the stunner shared a racy photo on a balcony, where she forewent a top.

Back to reality: Calling it a wrap on her enviable Greek getaway, the actress cut a lone figure after landing

Comfy: Her white trainers allowed her to push along her hefty belongings which included two large suitcases, one grey handbag and a shopper

Relaxed vibes: The British born star went for a grey crop top and slouchy black trousers

With the Greek island's breathtaking scenery laid out beneath her, the actress puffed on a cigarette in the image, while she seductively stared at the camera wearing just a pair of blue skinny jeans.

In less than 24 hours, the image garnered well over 12,000 likes and 450 comments from her army of followers, a number of whom remarked that she was 'back to her old self'.

This comes a few days before she was slated over her choice of imagery to accompany a post about a recent US shooting.

Jet-lag: Leaving the glamour behind in Greece, Mischa looked tired as she donned a pair of black shades

No time for beauty: She gathered her tresses in to a low-lying messy ponytail

Daring: Days earlier Mischa shared a topless shot of herself on her Instagram account, showing her relaxing on a balcony in Mykonos while puffing on a cigarette

Hoping to express her solidarity with the late Alton Sterling's family and apparently the Black Lives Matter movement at large, she posted a bizarre picture to Instagram on Thursday - showing her looking downcast and drinking wine on a yacht.

In the caption, the actress wrote that she was 'truly heartbroken' after watching the video of the 37-year-old man's shooting at the hands of the police - which has sparked protests in the US.

'This may have been going on forever in the United States but thank god the pigs get caught on camera now. It's unthinkable and an embarrassment to America. The country I was brought up in.

Controversial: Mischa sparked fury from Alton Sterling supporters and Blue Lives Matter backers on Thursday, when she posted a picture of herself looking downcast on a yacht on Instagram paired with a statement about the police shooting

'Somebody make change. We need gun control and unity. And a real President so think about that when this election is around the corner. The world is a precarious place right now. #stop #reflect and #act appropriately,' she wrote.

The choice of image to go with her words sparked widespread criticism from all sides, prompting the star to quickly delete the image.

After forging a glittering career in her late teens and early twenties, Mischa attempted a comeback this year - appearing on Dancing With The Stars - but was booted off after just three episodes.

Comeback: Mischa appeared on Dancing With The Stars this year but was booted off after just three episodes




She has a number of projects on the go and was recently spotted filming for yet another mystery role.

But Kristen Bell took time out of her hectic schedule on Saturday to pay tribute to the victims of the recent tragedy at Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

The 35-year-old put on a vibrant display at the FORlando event in Beverly Hills as she rocked a stylish scarlet culotte jumpsuit.

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United: Kristen Bell took time out of her hectic schedule on Saturday to pay tribute to the victims of the recent tragedy at Pulse nightclub in Orlando

Kristen showed off her enviably svelte figure in the ensemble, which cinched in her tiny waist with a simple tie belt.

And the wide-leg cut of the one-piece made her toned pins appear even longer than usual.

The Frozen actress looked relaxed as she slung her hands in the deep pockets of the outfit and drew attention to her decolletage with a plunging v neck-line.

Red hot! The 35-year-old put on a vibrant display for the evening in Beverly Hills as she rocked a stylish scarlet culotte jumpsuit

But despite her laidback attitude, Kristen was nothing but glamorous in every other aspect of her ensemble as she added some height to her petite frame with a pair of towering nude heels.

And she styled her golden tresses into loose Hollywood waves that spiraled around her shoulders and framed her heart-shaped face.

Kristen also showed off her movie star good looks as she flaunted a naturally dewy complexion and a perfect pearly white smile, which she accentuated with a subtle rosy gloss.

The mother-of-two was attending the FORlando event at The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts.

The evening included performances from the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles and the cast of Hit The Wall.

Flaunting it! Kristen showed off her enviably svelte figure in the ensemble, which cinched in her tiny waist with a simple tie belt

There was also a panel event and speeches.

Last month Kristen opened up again about coping with depression in an online essay on Tuesday.

The 35-year-old actress in an essay for Motto said her nurse mother Lorelei urged her to seek help when she was age 18 if she ever felt 'like a dark cloud' was following her.

'Im so thankful for her openness on this predominantly silent subject because later, when I was in college, that time did come. I felt plagued with a negative attitude and a sense that I was permanently in the shade,' Bell wrote.

The Veronica Mars star said that thanks to her mother she knew help was available.

'I didnt speak publicly about my struggles with mental health for the first 15 years of my career. But now Im at a point where I dont believe anything should be taboo. So here I am, talking to you about what Ive experienced,' Bell added.

The actress earlier this month revealed that she had been hiding mental health issues in an interview with Off Camera With Sam Jones.

The interview was later shared with NBC's Today Show and Bell revealed that both her mother and grandmother also suffered from depression.

Bell in her Motto essay said there's an 'extreme stigma' over mental health issues and 'I can't make heads or tails of why it exists' since nearly 20 percent of US adults 'face some form of mental illness in their lifetime'.

'Mental health check-ins should be as routine as going to the doctor or the dentist.'
He voiced his fears that his flame-grilled cobia fish was under-cooked.

But Harry Foster's dish was hailed as 'one of the tastiest ever' by the MasterChef Australia judges when Finals Week kicked off on Sunday night.

The bartender, 21, blew the other five remaining contestants out of the water in the mystery box challenge and was given an advantage in the invention test.

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Triumphant: Harry Foster's dish was hailed as 'one of the tastiest ever' by the MasterChef Australia judges when Finals Week kicked off on Sunday night

After presenting his dish for tasting, judge Gary Mehigan told him: 'My lips are tingling and it's one of those things where you go specifically to a restaurant because there's one dish you want.

'That's one of those dishes. I love it. This is one of those tastings of the tastiest dishes ever on MasterChef.'

Matt Preston added: 'The way that you used smoke to tie together the elements in this dish is inspired, especially when you've got that big char on the skin of the cobia.

Impressed: After presenting his dish for tasting, judge Gary Mehigan (pictured) told him: 'My lips are tingling'

Wow: Judge George Calombaris could also not get enough of the flame-grilled fish dish

'I love it for its sweetness, I love it for its heat and I love it especially for that layer of fat just under the cobia skin that is absolutely like... ..it's like the underside of pork crackling, that really jellified fat.

'If we were looking at the other two boys' dishes compared to yours, theirs are all finesse and elegance and cleanness, and this is a dirty street-fighter of a dish and I like it.'

He went head-to-head with Elena Duggan, Trent Harvey, Mimi Baines, Matt Sinclair and Elise Franciskovic on the Channel 10 show.

Matt, Trent and Mimi were all sent through to the elimination round on Monday night after they failed to impress with their dishes.

They were all put through their paces to create a mind-blowing dish in an hour using at least one of the rather unusual ingredients from a tricky mystery box.

Talented: Harry, 21, blew the other five remaining contestants out of the water in the mystery box challenge and was given an advantage in the invention test

Tasty: Matt Preston added: 'The way that you used smoke to tie together the elements in this dish is inspired'

This included some of the trendiest ingredients being used around the world, such as camel milk, Pisco, Matcha, Gochujang (a fermented chili paste), cobia fish and Kaiserfleisch (German bacon).

The judges gushed over Matt Sinclair's cured and smoked cobia with Gochujang custard and fried kohlrabi leaves.

After tasting the dish, Gary Mehigan told him: 'There's more than a few things I love about it.

'Number one, the tempura-like crunch on that kohlrabi leaf with that little hit of salt. The beautiful way you've handled that fish in terms of the sugar and salt.

'It's subtle, it's delicious and I love that Gochujang custard. That is absolutely smashing. Put those three things together and there's an absolute riot in my mouth.'

Finalists: The judges congratulated the remaining six contestants for making it through to Finals Week

Trendy ingredients: They were all put through their paces to create a mind-blowing dish in an hour using at least one of the rather unusual ingredients from a tricky mystery box

Matt Preston added: 'I think the custard works beautifully with the fish and I love the fact that there's not a dish like this on an Australian menu, as far as I know, anywhere using that combination, so that makes you a true original, Matt.

'But above all what I love is how far you've come and wondering how far you'll go.'

During the cooking process, Elena said she was 'disappointed' that her Gochujang caramel sauce had gone too hard.

'I'm really disappointed with my gochujang caramel sauce,' she said. 'I wanted a nice slick on the plate so that I could hold the other elements in place, but I've taken it too far and it's gone hard. I need this sauce to tie all of my elements together, so I can't afford to leave it off.'

But her textures of cobia and kohlrabi dish was still praised by the judges.

Disappointed: The judges praised Matt Sinclair's mystery box dish, but he was still sent to Monday's elimination round

Inspired: The judges enjoyed Matt's cured and smoked cobia with Gochujang custard and fried kohlrabi leaves

Earlier in the episode, Gary congratulated the remaining six contestants for making it through to Finals Week.

'Welcome back to the MasterChef kitchen. And more importantly, congratulations. You made it to finals week! Nerves? Who's nervous?' he said.

'You're nervous. OK, I get it. It's finals week. All we can say is, we are absolutely proud as punch. We are exactly where we wanna be right now.

'You are this country's top amateur cooks and you should be very proud of it. We are. And now, we are just a little over one week away from knowing who is gonna be crowned MasterChef for 2016.'

Matt added: 'You all deserve to be here. You are all great cooks and on your day, any one of you can win the title of MasterChef 2016.'

Stressed: Matt voiced his concerns after he tried and failed to use liquid nitrogen to set his mousse
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Osher Gunsberg has witnessed a fair share of dates on TV as the host of both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

Earlier this month, the popular presenter joined Australia's second Bachelorette Georgia Love on a group date at a trapeze school in Sydney.

The 42-year-old cut a casual and relaxed figure for the occasion as he animatedly chatted with the brunette beauty while watching from the sidelines.

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Back at it: Osher Gunsberg recently joined Australia's second Bachelorette Georgia Love on a group date at a trapeze school in Sydney

Handsome Osher looked smart in a heavy navy coat matched with navy trousers with the cuffs slightly rolled up.

The reality television host finished his look with a pair of black lace up shoes and wore his dark locks styled with a hint of gel to create a swish across his forehead.

Meanwhile, Georgia appeared to be dressed to attempt the trapeze herself wearing a light blue tank top and matching leggings with a vibrant floral print.

Casual cool: The 42-year-old cut a casual figure dressed in a heavy navy coat and matching trousers for the group date and animatedly chatted with the brunette beauty as they watched on from the ground

The pair appeared deep in conversation as they stood on the grass underneath the elaborate trapeze set up waiting for the male contestants to get rigged up.

Georgia threw her hands out as she emphasised a point which caused Osher to laugh as they enjoyed a lively chat.

The television and radio personality recently wrapped on filming The Bachelor with Richie Strahan - which is set to air later this month.

It appears that the beauty is serious about her search for love as she has quit her job as a journalist in Tasmania to become the next Bachelorette.

Offering some advice? The pair appeared deep in conversation as they stood on the grass underneath the elaborate trapeze set up waiting for the male contestants to get rigged up

He's been busy! The television and radio personality recently wrapped on filming The Bachelor with Richie Strahan which is set to air later this month

Last month the brunette told The Daily Telegraph: 'I've gotten to a point in my life where I've realised I want to prioritise myself more than my career and the thing that is missing is love and this is my number one focus right now.'

She said she quit her job because doubling up on television 'wouldn't have worked for either party.'

Georgia also admitted that leaving her job in the hopes of snagging a man is risky.

'That makes the whole thing even scarier and exciting and more daunting because I've worked really hard my whole career to get to this point and I've loved what I've done but this is how serious I am that I want to find somebody and I want to settle down that I've actually taken a step away from all that.'
She's the Australian swimwear designer, who is making a splash at Miami Swim Week.

But on Saturday, Bianca Elouise took some time out from her busy schedule to take a dip in the cool water as she flaunted her shapely derriere in a very daring swimsuit.

The blonde beauty wore a mocha coloured one-piece from her own collection Myra Swim that left very little to the imagination.

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Making a splash: Australian swimwear designer Bianca Elouise took some time out from her busy schedule to take a dip in the cool water on Saturday flaunting her shapely derriere in a very daring swimsuit

Bianca stepped out of the refreshing water, narrowly avoiding a wardrobe malfunction as she adjusted the chest of the slinky swimsuit.

A very plunging neckline barely contained her chest as she made her way out of the waves with plenty of skin on display.

A very high cut on the hip elongated her legs and showcased her hourglass figure as she strode up the sand.

Adding to her look, Bianca wore a stylish pair of Celine sunglasses and didn't bother to take them off as she plunged into the water.

Time out: The swimwear designer is in the U.S. for Miami Swim Week although looked delighted to spend some time to herself showcasing her curvaceous figure

Cheeky: The blonde beauty wore a mocha coloured one piece from her own collection Myra Swim that left very little to the imagination

She wore simple accessories for the casual outing, adding a fine gold chain necklace and delicate ring on her left hand to finish her look.

As she made her way up the sand, the model attempted to squeeze the excess water out of her cropped blonde locks which were slicked back across her neck.

The leggy beauty flaunted her curvaceous figure as she strolled along the sand looking in positive spirits.

Taking the plunge: Bianca stepped out of the water narrowly avoiding a wardrobe malfunction adjusting the chest of the slinky one piece that featured a very daring neckline

Frolicking: The designer revealed a generous amount of her derriere in the barely there swimsuit as she splashed about in the water

The designer revealed a generous amount of her derriere in the barely there swimsuit as she splashed about in the water.

Models and designers from across the globe have flocked to America's Sunshine State for Miami Swim Week.

And businesswoman Bianca - founder of MyraSwim - was no exception as she joined the crowds at the annual fashion event while also squeezing in some down time.

The Australian beauty has been seen soaking up the Miami sunshine in a collection of her skimpy swimsuits throughout her stay.

Enjoying herself: The beauty flaunted her curvaceous figure as she strolled along the sand looking in positive spirits as she soaked up the sunshine
A simple case of twerking left her ample posterior exposed for the world to see a few days earlier.

But even that unfortunate situation didn't keep Lateysha Grace from highlighting her curvaceous figure as she partied the night away at London's Cafe De Paris with her Big Brother co-star Georgina Leigh Cantwell.

The 23-year-old The Valleys star oozed sex appeal in an extremely tight mini-dress which featured corset detailing down the side.

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Booty-ful! Lateysha Grace, 23, highlighted her curvaceous figure as she partied the night away at London's Cafe De Paris with her Big Brother co-star Georgina Leigh Cantwell

With the party atmosphere in full swing and drinks flowing, Lateysha flaunted her impossibly pert derriere in the bodycon number.

And knowing full well it was her best angle, the mother-of-one kept to her signature side pose which captured her buxom figure in all its glory.

She opted for an extensive lashings of mascara as she smouldered into the camera while her long brunette locks were styled in immaculate waves.

Posing alongside her, Georgina looked sensational in a navy number as she puckered up for an air smooch with her pal.

Affectionate: The reality star looked sensational as she puckered up for an air smooch with her pal

Attention grabbing: Lateysha flaunted her impossibly pert derriere in the bodycon number

All eyes were on Lateysha on Wednesday following her shock eviction as she spoke to Rylan Clarke on Big Brother's Bit On The Side.

After challenging her to show off her sexiest dance moves, Lateysha bravely stood up to put on her flirty display.

Unfortunately -mid-twerk, her denim minidress ripped clean up the back, exposing her ample derriere and bright pink thong.

The mortified TV personality collapsed on the sofa, screaming in embarrassment as she descended into complete hysterics alongside stunned Rylan.

Glam: Knowing full well it was her best angle, the mother-of-one kept to her signature side pose which captured her buxom figure in all its glory

Gorgeous: She opted for an extensive lashings of mascara as she smouldered into the camera while her long brunette locks were styled in immaculate waves

However it could have been even more mortifying, as Lateysha has now revealed she almost ditched her underwear before her live appearance.

'About 30 seconds before I was due to enter the BB BOTS studio I had a little pose in a full length mirror in the disabled toilets, the lighting in there was awful so I decided against a selfie, but I could see a big panty line from my thong,' she said.

'I hate VPL and so I was about to whip my knickers off and go without, because it was a really long skirt, so no one would know any different, or so I thought.

'Imagine how 'shamed' I'd be if my actual whole bum was out, I think I would have died in Rylan's arms, she said before adding: 'Also, thank god I shaved those legs'.

VIP treatment: The Big Brother stars posed alongside Cafe De Paris' marketing director Liam Norval

The single mother previously spoke of her medical woes after getting illegal bum fillers in Los Angeles in a bid to boost her buttocks.

Revealing her complex about the size of her bottom, Lateysha told the Daily Star: 'My bum wasn't small, it was average-sized.

'When I went to Miami, I seen all these girls with massive bums and I was thinking, 'How the hell do these girls have massive bums and small waists?''

However, Lateysha - who calls herself the Welsh Beyonce - called upon the services of a dodgy nurse, who didn't speak English and didn't brief her on the procedure.

She recalled: 'I don't even know what it was, it was some sort of filler but I don't know what it was called. I had about five in each cheek. The needle was massive.'

The butt of the joke: Lateysha was left red-faced when her dress split open on live TV during Big Brother's Bit On The Side on Wednesday night

Mortifying moment: Certainly not the shy and retiring type, the starlet eagerly began flaunting her posterior for the camera when there was an almighty ripping sound

The star has been left with life-changing problems since getting her bum fillers - but that hasn't put her off having surgery in future.

Lateysha explained: 'If I'm on the train or driving [for] more than an hour, I get really sharp pains in my bum, which I never used to have before.'

She was ordered to leave the house on Wednesday night's episode after Jason Burrill won 20,000 in exchange for choosing someone to depart the show.

Meanwhile former TOWIE star Elliott Wright also looked handsome as he enjoyed a night at Cafe de Paris.

Bringing out the stars: Former TOWIE star Elliott Wright stepped out in style at Cafe de Paris




Poldark is set to go head-to-head in a ratings war with The X Factor.

The second series of the hit BBC drama, based on the novels of Winston Graham, is set to air on Sunday evenings when it returns in September, and will clash with Simon Cowell's talent show.

ITV bosses are said to be fearful that viewers will be tempted to tune in to see hunky Aidan Turner portray troubled protagonist Ross Poldark once again, rather than watch the X Factor's results show and cause ratings to plummet.

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Battle of the bods: Poldark is set to go head-to-head in a ratings war with The X Factor

However, the schedule means it should only affect two of Simon's shows, and a source said: 'The Sunday night X Factor show could well come off worse. Poldark is hugely popular.

'It's a headache the bosses really didn't need. Luckily, this will only affect two shows.'

The second ten-part series may not have even hit television screens yet but BBC bosses have already decided to commission a third installment following the huge success of the first.

War: The second series of the hit BBC drama, based on the novels of Winston Graham, is set to air on Sunday evenings when it returns in September and clash with Simon Cowell's talent show

Here come the boys! Veteran judge Louis Walsh previously announced his return to the show and revealed last month he would be back on the judging panel alongside Simon Cowell

Damien Timmer, Mammoth Screen Managing Director, said: 'Poldark' is a passion project for all of us, and it's with real excitement that we prepare for both the launch of series two and our return to Cornwall to shoot series three.'

The BBC has confirmed Turner will return for the third series when filming kicks off in Cornwall and Bristol, where the other two installments were shot, in September.

A spokesperson explained: 'The third series will be filmed in even more stunning locations across Cornwall and Bristol later this year for transmission in 2017.'

It's not yet known if any more series are in the pipeline as of yet but the 33-year-old actor previously revealed he would love to bring to life all 12 novels Winston penned from 1945 until 2002 to the small screen.

He said at the time: 'It's about six seasons' worth! I'm up for six, if we make it that far.'

Hunk: ITV bosses are said to be fearful that viewers will be tempted to tune in to see hunky Aidan Turner portray troubled protagonist Ross Poldark once again, rather than watch the X Factor's results show and cause ratings to plummet

Success: The BBC has confirmed Turner will return for the third series when filming kicks off in Cornwall and Bristol, where the other two installments were shot, in September

The second series of Poldark, which is set in 1794, is expected to hit screens in the autumn and will follow Aidan's alter-ego Ross as he deals with his own battles while the French revolution casts a shadow over life in Cornwall.

Meanwhile Sharon Osbourne and Nicole Scherzinger were confirmed as the judges joining Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell on the X Factor judging panel following months of speculation in June.

The new line-up marks the return of all four judges, who have all acted as winning mentors during their varying times on the panel.

Dermot O'Leary will also reprise his job as presenter after Caroline Flack and Olly Murs took over last year.

MailOnline have gone to both representatives for comment.
Blac Chyna's sizzling romance with her brother Rob Kardashian is a source of contention on the latest series of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

But it seems like Khloe Kardashian has called it truce with the video vixen as she strutted her stuff to meet up with her for dinner with Casa Vega, California on Saturday.

Putting on a bold display, the 32-year-old reality star ditched her bra as she flaunted her perky assets in a skin-tight bodysuit.

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Flashing what she's got: Khloe Kardashian, 32, went braless as she made her way to dinner with Blac Chyna at Casa Vega, California

The extreme plunging neckline also made her assets further prominent as it went on to skim her sensational curves.

Khloe added to the glamorous look with ripped jeans which showcased a peek of her tanned legs, while adding to her 5 ft 10 in frame with statement studded heels.

Quite the fashionista, the entrepreneur added a beige fedora which complemented her shoulder length blonde locks and chiselled make-up look.

Sporting a sunnier outlook, she added a pop of colour with a large yellow handbag as she made her way to an awaiting vehicle.

Bold display: The reality star ditched a bra as she flaunted her perky assets in a skin-tight bodysuit

Head-turner: The extreme plunging neckline also made her assets further prominent as it went on to skim her sensational curves

On display: Khloe added to the glamorous look with ripped jeans which showcased a peek of her tanned legs

In the current season of KUWTK, Khloe was fuming at brother Rob when he revealed he was expecting a child with Blac.

Their brother and sister relationship also proved to be strained as it was revealed they hasn't spoken in a while- something Khloe took to heart given her closeness to the younger sibling growing up.

However, it looks like the family differences and unresolved issues with Blac were dealt with off-screen.

The smitten couple even put on a fun display as they attended Khloe's 32nd birthday on June 27.

Both Khloe and Blac were spotted simultaneously giving Rob a kiss on his cheeks as he grinned at the happy ending.

Fashionista: he entrepreneur added a beige fedora which complemented her shoulder length blonde locks

Sunny outlook: She added a pop of colour with a large yellow handbag

Standing tall: She added to her 5 ft 10 in frame with statement studded heels

All is good! It looks like Khloe's family differences and unresolved issues with Blac were dealt with off-screen as they put on a fun display at her 32nd birthday last month

Rob and Chyna have begun shooting their very own six-part docuseries for E! titled Rob & Chyna which will debut in the fall.

But instead of shooting in Kardashianland - California's wealthy Calabasas suburb just outside of Los Angeles - the couple headed to her hometown of Washington DC to shoot a portion of the show.

The two are expecting their first child in October and may marry this month, according to UsWeekly.

Chyna already has a three-year-old son with her and Kylie Jenner's beau Tyga.
They were recently confirmed as safe following the horrific Bastille day terror attack in Nice.

And Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson no doubt had mixed emotions as they prepared to film their final Fifty Shades scenes in the south of France after what has been a heartbreaking week.

The pair were pictured heading to their waiting cast vehicles as they wrap their final interior scene in the South of France before heading to Paris to finish the movie sequel, Fifty Shades Darker.

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Wave goodbye: Jamie Dornan waves to photographers as he prepares to film the final Fifty Shades Darker scenes in south of France with Dakota Johnson

There's Dakota: The pair were pictured heading to their waiting cast vehicles as they wrap their final interior scene in the South of France before heading to Paris to finish the movie sequel

Jamie, 34, gave a wave to waiting photographers as he stepped out wearing a light coloured shirt, looking a little lost in his thoughts.

Dakota, 26, did the same as she stepped out wearing a grey T-shirt with a pair of denim shorts and white Birkenstock sandals.

Her brunette locks were thrown up in a simple up do and she hid her eyes behind a pair of designer shades.

Heartbreaking week: Jamie, 34, gave a wave to waiting photographers as he stepped out wearing a light coloured shirt, looking a little lost in his thoughts

The movie tells the story of Christian who, as he wrestles with his inner demons, Anastasia must confront the anger and envy of the women who came before her.

It is slated for release on February 10, 2017

Concerns for the welfare of the Fifty Shades cast and crew has been raised following the tragic terror attack in Nice on Thursday night, as the team are on location in the city.

But after everyone's welfare was accounted for, Dakota and the rest of the crew resumed work on Friday at the top of a medieval castle in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

Beauty: Dakota, 26, did the same as she stepped out wearing a grey T-shirt with a pair of denim shorts and white Birkenstock sandals

The tragic Bastille Day terror attack in Nice, where the cast and crew are staying while filming takes place, which killed 84 people including 10 children.

Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, drove a white lorry drove into the heavily populated Promenade des Anglais crushing people before exiting the vehicle and spraying crowds with bullets.

Horrifying footage of the moment the truck turned into a deadly juggernaut were uploaded online within minutes, showing a trail of dead bodies left in its path.
She's been inseparable from Jenson Button for the past few months.

And Brittny Ward showed just why the British Formula 1 star is so smitten, as she frolicked on the beach in Miami on Saturday.

The 25-year-old American model showed off her tanned and toned body in a tiny black triangle bikini, which featured transparent straps across her hips, back and shoulders.

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Beauty on the beach: Brittny Ward showed just why the British Formula 1 star is so smitten, as she frolicked on the beach in Miami on Saturday

Showcasing her long lean legs and toned waist, the two-piece featured Brazilian-style bottoms, making the most of her pert derriere.

Beaming as she jumped into the warm ocean and chatted with friends on the beach, the brunette beauty's flawless complexion was clearly visible behind her sunglasses.

Leaving her long ombre-hair loose, she wore a delicate gold chain and showed off a coral pink manicure.

Golden girl: The 25-year-old American model showed off her tanned and toned body in a tiny black triangle bikini, which featured transparent straps across her hips, back and shoulders

Fit: Showcasing her long lean legs and toned waist, the two-piece featured Brazilian-style bottoms, making the most of her pert derriere

Sizzling! Beaming as she jumped into the warm ocean and chatted with friends on the beach, the brunette beauty's complexion was clearly visible behind her sunglasses

Model Brittny hit fame for her relationship with the Formula 1 ace, who split from his wife Jessica Michibata in December 2015.

The new couple made their red carpet debut at the beginning of the month, when they put in a joint appearance at the Hope & Homes End The Silence fundraiser at Abbey Road Studios in London.

She also accompanied him to Monaco this year for the Monaco Grand Prix, just one year after his ex-wife Jessica was on the sidelines supporting him.

Jenson and Jessica, who tied the knot in a lavish Hawaiian ceremony at the end of 2014, remained on good terms despite calling time on their relationship.

Preened: Leaving her long ombre-hair loose, she wore a delicate gold chain and showed off a coral pink manicure

New girl: Model Brittny hit fame for her relationship with the Formula 1 ace, who split from his wife Jessica Michibata in December 2015

New flame: She also accompanied him to Monaco this year for the Monaco Grand Prix, just one year after his ex-wife Jessica was on the sidelines supporting him

A spokesperson for the former F1 World Champion told MailOnline in December: '(They) have decided to go their separate ways and it is very amicable. There is no one else involved.'

The driver, 36, and the 31-year-old fashion model first met in 2008 in a hotel bar in Tokyo and began dating eight months later.

Their relationship experienced ups and downs and they split for a short time in 2011 before the McLaren star proposed on Valentine's Day 2014, with a ring worth 250,000.
The Great Australian Spelling Bee is back, and viewers already seem to have a favourite.

Alistair melted hearts with his adorable voice, cheeky smile and dynamic character as he fought his way through to the top 18 on Sunday nights premiere.

But it was the nine-year-olds sportsmanship that sent Twitter into meltdown, when he asked fellow competitor Max B to keep in contact after knocking him out of the competition.

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Fan favourite: Alistair melted hearts with his adorable voice, cheeky smile and dynamic character as he fought his way through to the top 18 on Sunday nights premiere

As the defeated boy walked off the stage after failing to spell his word correctly, Alistair called after him: Great job Max, keep in contact!

Alistair telling the kid he just beat out to "keep in contact" is iconic, one viewer wrote, while another declared Im dying! after the cute moment.

The Queensland boy seemed to have the audience hooked early, with many Twitter users willing him to win and becoming anxious when he spelled a word wrong.

Good sport: It was the nine-year-olds sportsmanship that sent Twitter into meltdown, when he asked fellow competitor Max B to keep in contact after knocking him out of the competition

Alistair telling the kid he just beat out to "keep in contact" is iconic, one viewer wrote

Another declared Im dying! after the cute moment

NOOOOO!! Not Alistair!! Way too invested already, one particularly concerned watcher exclaimed when he spelt emoticon incorrectly.

Fortunately for him and his fans, he got another shot after other kids spelled wrong and was able to clinch a spot in the next round with the word upheaval.

I wanna be Alistair when I grow up, one viewer quipped, and another said he was the cutest contestant and was literally drying while watching.

Through to next round: After getting one word wrong, he got another shot after other kids spelled wrong and was able to clinch a spot in the next round with the word upheaval

NOOOOO!! Not Alistair!! Way too invested already, one particularly concerned watcher exclaimed when he spelt emoticon incorrectly

I wanna be Alistair when I grow up, one viewer quipped

Another said he was the cutest contestant and was literally drying while watching

Another Twitter user likened him to a character from The Simpsons in an episode featuring a spelling bee

Another Twitter user likened him to a character from The Simpsons in an episode featuring a spelling bee.

Super-fast speller Zach also won the admiration of audiences with his rapid-fire answers and supreme confidence.

In a clip introducing the eight-year-old, he is shown practicing spelling with his father in their Sydney home with extremely quick timing.

Quickest speller: Super-fast speller Zach also won the admiration of audiences with his rapid-fire answers and supreme confidence

Practice makes perfect: In a clip introducing the eight-year-old, he is shown practicing spelling with his father in their Sydney home with extremely quick timing

On the show he was no less speedy, prompting one user to write I wanted Zach to spell it so fast the pronouncer couldnt understand it

Zach is a speed machine, one declared

Another said amazing confidence in these youngest spellers

On the show he was no less speedy, prompting one user to write I wanted Zach to spell it so fast the pronouncer couldnt understand it.

At one point Zach nailed a word and then ask was that easy? winning him points for confidence from watchers.

Zach is a speed machine, one declared, while another said amazing confidence in these youngest spellers.

Cool points: Also earning some points from the social media crowd was Katelyn for the matter-of-fact way she handled being knocked out of the competition

One viewer commented: All said with a beautiful smile. Youre the boss, Katelyn,

While another joked she had been kicked out for too much sass

Also earning some points from the social media crowd was Katelyn for the matter-of-fact way she handled being knocked out of the competition.

This was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I blew it! she said.

One viewer commented: All said with a beautiful smile. Youre the boss, Katelyn, while another joked she had been kicked out for too much sass.

Eighteen young spellers made it through to the next round and will compete on the show next week.
Their multi-million pound love nest has been under renovation for 18 months.

Yet George Clooney and his stunning wife Amal are continuing to perfect their Oxfordshire paradise as it has been revealed their latest purchase is a 10,000 rowboat.

The 55-year-old E.R. star is set to move into the home with his human rights lawyer spouse, 38, after a reported 20million worth of renovations, although the boat is their latest treat.

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On your boat: George Clooney and his stunning wife Amal are continuing to perfect their Oxfordshire paradise as it has been revealed their latest purchase is a 10,000 rowboat

The Clooneys paid an undisclosed sum for the Grade II-listed property, which was put on the market for 7.5 million, in September 2014, a couple of weeks after their three-day wedding extravaganza in Venice.

After dramatic renovations to the property, with a total overhaul of both the interior and exterior of the home, the boat is possibly one of the less lavish purchases.

Locals said the pair would use their new boat for rowing trips on the Thames. One said: 'Its good to see the Clooneys making the most of the English countryside. But were hoping the river bank wont get packed with excited middle-aged women.

Planning documents submitted to South Oxfordshire District Council, and publicly available on their website, reveal, the building work commissioned by the couple has turned an illustrious property into a sumptuous home.

The happy couple: The 55-year-old E.R. star is set to move into the home with his human rights lawyer spouse, 38, after a reported 20million worth of renovations, although the boat is their latest treat

Plush: Now the building work has finished however, difficulties have been resolved and tranquillity restored, while the finished product has been declared a Grand Design on a truly monumental scale

What she wants: George is said to have told the builders at the start of the project: 'What Amal wants, Amal gets'

Remodelled during the Georgian era, the house, stands on a five-and-a-half acre island on one of the most idyllic stretches of the Thames, at Sonning Eye, which marks the boundary with Oxfordshire.

George is said to have told the builders at the start of the project: 'What Amal wants, Amal gets.'

The brief was to create the perfect family home  whatever the cost. Not long afterwards, intensive renovation work began, with a 20-strong workforce tasked to create a dream family home.

Loved-up: The Clooneys paid an undisclosed sum for the Grade II-listed property, which was put on the market for 7.5 million, in September 2014, a couple of weeks after their three-day wedding extravaganza in Venice

The happy couple: Remodelled during the Georgian era, the house, stands on a five-and-a-half acre island on one of the most idyllic stretches of the Thames, at Sonning Eye, which marks the boundary with Oxfordshire

For many months, the villagers endured a cacophony of building work. The skyline, for a time, was dominated by a 200ft crane, the streets filled by a constant stream of HGVs and goods vans going to and from the property.

It was reported that neighbours had expressed their annoyance when there were complaints about the height of the poles on which CCTV cameras were to be placed, and concerns about the position of the wooden fence erected around the island perimeter to repel intruders attempting to land on the island from the water.
Alden Ehrenreich has been confirmed to play a young Han Solo.

The 26-year-old Hail, Caesar! star will take over the reigns of the iconic character from Harrison Ford, 74, for an upcoming Star Wars spin-off movie.

The confirmation was made on Sunday in London at a Star Wars Celebration event where he sat next to Star Wars: Force Awakens vet John Boyega.

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He got it! Alden Ehrenreich has been confirmed to play the young Han Solo. The Hail, Caesar! star will take over the reigns of the iconic character from Harrison Ford, 74, for an upcoming Star Wars spin-off movie

The big announcementL Speaking at a Star Wars Celebration event in London on Sunday where Alden appeared to officially announce the news, he revealed how he won the part; here he is seen with John Boyega

 Slide me  Can he pass as a young Han? ON the left is Alden and on the right is Harrison Ford in the 1977 blockbuster

He said: 'I screen tested with Chewbacca - Id never acted with a Wookiee!'

John Boyega - who joined the film franchise as Finn in 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens - was also there to congratulate Alden for securing the part and compared him to Harrison, 74.

He said: 'Oh man, youre playing Han Solo, man. Damn! Hes smiling just like him!'

The original one: Ford, now 74, first played Han Solo in Star Wars with Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher

He came back: Ford played the space smuggler again in 2015's The Force Awakens

Alden's name has been in the mix for a while and rumours circulated earlier this year that he was reportedly finalising a deal with Disney and Lucasfilm to play the iconic space smuggler in the science fiction franchise.

The 26-year-old actor has beat off competition from big Hollywood names including Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Dave Franco, Jack Reynor, Scott Eastwood and Taron Egerton.

Despite the big reveal, fans are still being kept in the dark about the story's plot but it has been confirmed that it will focus around 'an origin story about Han Solo and Chewie.'

The film is thought to be titled Han Solo: A Star Wars Story and is set to be released on May 25, 2018.
It is one of the most hotly-anticipated new shows in the world.

And filming for The Grand Tour's studio segments has begun in the wilderness outside the city of Johannesburg.

Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond looked on top form as they chatted in front of a studio audience with the jaw dropping backdrop of the South African bush.

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Impressive backdrop: Filming for The Grand Tour's studio segments has begun in the wilderness outside the city of Johannesburg

The trio of presenters were smartly dressed in blazers as they sat around a table in surroundings rather different to those they were used to in the old Top Gear hangar.

Bedecked with antique rugs and vintage travelling cases, the set was clearly designed to look like an old-world hotel or station waiting room.

Another shot of the set, taken from a helicopter, shows a vast tent, emblazoned with the programme's logo, on the brow of a hill in the barren savanna landscape.

Parked in front of the khaki tent were three 4x4 vehicles, loaded with supplies, presumably for use by the stars of the show.

Excited to get started: Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond looked on top form as they chatted in front of a studio audience with the jaw dropping backdrop of the South African bush

In the wild: Another shot of the set, taken from a helicopter, shows a vast tent, emblazoned with the programme's logo, on the brow of a hill in the barren savanna landscape

Despite having hundreds of Top Gear episodes under his belt, Clarkson was nervous for filming his new project.

And in his column in The Sun wrote: 'In a field just outside Johannesburg, James May, Richard Hammond and I will record the first studio segment for our new show, the Grand Tour. And I dont mind telling you. Im crapping myself.'

It comes after Chris Evans, 50, quit as co-host of the revamped Top Gear on the BBC last week after presiding over viewing figures plummeting from an average of 6.49million during their final series to less than two million.

Popular: Despite having hundreds of Top Gear episodes under his belt, Clarkson was nervous for filming his new project

Isolated: Parked in front of the khaki tent were three 4x4 vehicles, loaded with supplies, presumably for use by the stars of the show

Evans had been much abused by viewers on social media for his 'shouty' approach to presenting and, with rumours of rifts between him and Matt LeBlanc.

Taking to Twitter, the car series' frontman announced: 'Stepping down from Top Gear. Gave it my best shot but sometimes that's not enough. The team are beyond brilliant, I wish them all the best.'

The BBC has already confirmed that the former TFI Friday host will not be replaced, leaving Matt LeBlanc to front the series alone, although he has only signed up to present one series.

Loving the crowd: Clarkson basked in the adoration of fans as he filmed scenes for his new show The Grand Tour in Vicenza, Italy

Former frontmen: Clarkson's dismissal from Top Gear after a 'fracas' with a producer prompted a mass walkout as Richard Hammond and James May

Evans was roped in to present the show following the departure of controversial frontman Clarkson after what was described as a 'fracas' with producer Oisin Tymon in March last year.

It was revealed that the row, which happened in a North Yorkshire hotel, took place because no hot food was provided following a day's filming.

His dismissal prompted a mass walkout as Richard Hammond, James May and Andy Wilman, the executive producer and old school friend of Clarkson, all resigned.

Not the best of friends: Clarkson is reportedly pleased at Evans quitting Top Gear, and one cameraman for the Amazon show said:Jeremys been trying to keep quiet about it, but hes pleased as punch.'

The former Top Gear hosts are happy to see the back of Evans from the show, and while filming for The Grand Tour, May quipped he was 'very chuffed' that his rival's catastrophic spell as host of the once popular BBC show is over.

Clarkson is also reportedly pleased at the outcome, and one cameraman for the Amazon show said:Jeremys been trying to keep quiet about it, but hes pleased as punch.'

Hes kept his mouth shut about Evans the whole time, and now Evans has hung himself by his own rope without Jeremy getting involved,' he added.

The Grand Tour will launch this autumn, exclusively for Amazon Prime customers.
She is one of the ultimate pin-up girls of the 1990s and 2000s.

And Kelly Brook proved she's still a beach babe as she posed for an unfiltered snap during her romantic break in Italy with boyfriend Jeremy Parisi.

All eyes were on the 36-year-old model and actress as she sunned herself in a daringly low-cut bathing suit earlier in the day.

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Sizzling: Kelly Brook proved she's still a beach babe as she posed for an unfiltered snap during her romantic break in Italy with boyfriend Jeremy Parisi

Kelly, famed for her bountiful curves, showed off exactly what made her famous as she sizzled in the metallic swimwear which highlighted every inch of her phenomenal figure.

The triangle bikini cups were supported by a halterneck strap, which was working overtime to contain her extremely ample assets.

Proving her posing prowess, the stunning model stood with her hands sharply pulling in her tiny waistline to further emphasise her diminutive middle.

Pulling on a pair of sunglasses and wearing her brunette tresses scraped off her naturally stunning face, the English rose proved herself to be a total natural beauty.

At it again! Shortly before posting the sexy snap, Kelly once more flaunted her enviable curves as she stepped out with her beau Jeremy at the Ischia Global Film & Music Fest in Italy on Saturday night

Shortly before posting the sexy snap, Kelly once more flaunted her enviable curves as she stepped out with her beau Jeremy at the Ischia Global Film & Music Fest in Italy on Saturday night.

She basked in her newly topped up tan as her eye-popping cleavage was just about tamed by the body-hugging number.

The pink and white striped dress clung on tightly to her ample bust before cinching in her tiny waist.

Head-turner: The model's eye-popping cleavage was just about tamed by a body-hugging number

It went on skim her sensational curves before falling just below her knees and she completed the look with classy nude heels as she went on stage to present an award.

Drawing attention to her spectacular decolletage, the Kent born star threw her brunette tresses in to a glamorous bun, while a pair of statement earrings framed her bronzed face.

Jeremy looked 'summertime slick' himself in a button down blue top and white chinos which he teamed with brown shoes.

Bronzed goddess: She basked in her newly topped up tan

Great length: Her dress went on skim her sensational curves before falling just below her knees

Flattering her figure: The pink and white striped dress clung on tightly to her ample bust before cinching in her tiny waist

Glamour: Drawing attention to her spectacular decolletage, the Kent born star threw her brunette tresses in to a bun

And evidently the smile on his face signalled his love towards his girlfriend who hogged the spotlight as they enjoyed the day on the waters a few hours earlier.

The School For Seduction actress struggled to contain her assets in a floral bathing suit as she frolicked in the water.

And Jeremy couldn't resist taking pictures of the former glamour model as she arrived back on board.

Accessorising: A pair of statement earrings framed her bronzed face

Style rules: The former glamour model accentuated her legs with classy nude heels

Confident lady: She also took on presenting duties during the night

Stunning: She oozed sex appeal as she posed up a storm on the red carpet

Lucky man: Evidently the smile on his face signalled his love towards his girlfriend who hogged the spotlight as they enjoyed the day on the waters a few hours earlier

Kelly- who has previously been engaged to Jason Statham, Billy Zane and Thom Evans- recently shot down rumours of a union after she was spotted wearing a ring on her engagement finger.

She told BBC Asian network's Preeya Kalidas that it was only for her 'chubby fingers'.

'Jeremy bought me a lovely ring but we're not engaged. I only wear it on that finger because it doesn't fit on the others,' she revealed.

She did however enter the relationship in April 2015 with high hopes as at the time she told Closer: 'I'm not sure we're ready for marriage just yet, but we're definitely heading in the right direction. I'm a very loved-up lady right now.'

Holding her own: Kelly looked glam alongside supermodel Petra Nemvoca

Work it: She clearly loved posing for the photographers

Star sighting: Blue's Lee Ryan looked on in the background

With no intentions of taking their relationship slow, she continued: 'Hopefully I'll have a baby soon. Ultimately, I am entering a new phase in my life.'

Explaining why the French hunk has changed her outlook on men, she added: 'Jeremy's great and things are going really well. We just have a lot of fun together and laugh all the time, so he makes everything enjoyable.'

Meanwhile supermodel Petra Nemcova dazzled at the Italian cinematic event where she picked up an award.
John Legend and Chrissy Teigen celebrated a romantic milestone in their three-year marriage Sunday while on holiday in Lake Como.

'Back to where it all began,' the 30-year-old presenter -who boasts 9.6M followers - captioned the selfie.

'First came here in 2007. A boat tour guide took us to a little spot on the lake and told us to make a wish. I asked for this to be the man I marry and have children with.

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'I asked for this to be the man I marry and have children with': John Legend and Chrissy Teigen celebrated a romantic milestone in their three-year marriage Sunday while on holiday in Lake Como

Anything for a laugh! The 37-year-old Oscar winner tied the knot with his 30-year-old All of Me muse in the Northern Italian lakeside resort back in 2013

Nine years strong! The new parents - who welcomed daughter Luna on April 14 - first met on the set of the Ohio-born R&B belter's 2007 music video for Stereo

'I think John asked for the most perfect bite of cacio e pepe. Both came true, and here we are.'

The 37-year-old Oscar winner tied the knot with his All of Me muse in the Northern Italian lakeside resort back in 2013.

The new parents - who welcomed daughter Luna on April 14 - first met on the set of the Ohio-born R&B belter's 2007 music video for Stereo.

On Thursday, Teigen and Legend - born Stephens - and their entourage enjoyed pasta/pizza-making lessons, truffle hunting, and wine-tasting in Tuscany.

Baby on board! On Thursday, Teigen and Legend - born Stephens - and their entourage enjoyed pasta/pizza-making lessons, truffle hunting, and wine-tasting in Tuscany

'Famiglia!' Chrissy and John were joined on their Italian vacation by their precious princess as well as Meghan Mackenzie, Luke Dillon, Jen Atkin, and her husband Mike Rosenthal

Chrissy and John were joined on their Italian vacation by their precious princess as well as Meghan Mackenzie, Luke Dillon, Jen Atkin, and her husband Mike Rosenthal.

'We've got some embryos on hold,' the M.I.L.F. $ video vixen told Self in March of their plans for three more children via IVF.

'I've always pictured everyone around the table for the holidays and together once a week. It'll be heartbreaking if it doesnt end up happening, but hopefully it will...We are going to love the s*** out of our kids.'

'I cannot believe this congratulations everyone!' Also on Thursday, the Lip Sync Battle 'Color Commentator' celebrated her Spike series' first Emmy Award nomination for outstanding structured reality program

'Congratulations everyone!' Perhaps the M.I.L.F. $ video vixen will attend the August 25 ceremony airing on NBC for the show, which was already renewed for a third season

Also on Thursday, the Lip Sync Battle 'Color Commentator' celebrated her Spike series' first Emmy Award nomination for outstanding structured reality program.

Perhaps Chrissy will attend the August 25 ceremony airing on NBC for the show, which was already renewed for a third season.

Catch more of the Cravings author as food stylist on daily morning talk show FABLife, which will conclude this summer after one season.

Still on the air: Catch more of the Cravings author as food stylist on daily morning talk show FABLife, which will conclude this summer after one season

EDM-infused track: On Thursday, Tiesto dropped his Dominican Republic-set music video for Summer Nights featuring vocals from John

On Thursday, Tiesto dropped his Dominican Republic-set music video for Summer Nights featuring vocals from John.

The 10-time Grammy winner has an acting gig as Keith in the musical dramedy La La Land, which hits US theaters December 16 and UK theaters January 13.

The jazz pianist falling for an aspiring actress flick stars Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, and J.K. Simmons.

Coming this winter! The 10-time Grammy winner has an acting gig as Keith in the musical dramedy La La Land, which hits US theaters December 16 and UK theaters January 13
She is currently in Florida for Miami Swim Week.

And among some of the most beautiful models in the world, Australian beauty Natalie Roser certainly stood out as she frolicked in the ocean on Sunday.

The 25-year-old stunned in a revealing white bikini as she posed up a storm during a photo shoot for Kopari.

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Some like it hot! Australian model Natalie Roser brought the heat to Miami, Florida on Sunday as she slipped into a white bikini for a photo shoot

Earlier in the year Natalie explained to the Daily Telegraph that she used to be stick thin before increasing her food intake and working out in the gym.

'Getting toned and getting healthy has completely changed my career,' she said.

'I'm modelling pretty much every day, which never happened before I started training and healthy eating and taking care of myself.'

Refreshing dip: During the shoot the stunning model cooled off as the ocean water crashed around her

Not an inch to pinch! The blonde beauty showed off her incredible frame in a her swimsuit, which featured cheeky Brazilian-style bottoms

Flaunt it: Natalie has been modelling since the age of 13 and once acted as a body double for Jennifer Hawkins

Natalie has been modelling since the age of 13 and once acted as a body double for Jennifer Hawkins in a Mount Franklin commercial.

The blonde beauty, who was a contender in Miss Universe Australia last year, is currently one of the models of coconut oil based beauty brand Kopari.

She's currently dating Sydney-based personal trailer Dan Adair.

Striking: She's currently dating Sydney-based personal trailer Dan Adair

Carefree: The leggy blonde amassed coconut shells on the beach

Relaxed: She cut a contented figure as she frolicked on the beach

Earlier in the year Natalie explained to the Daily Telegraph that she used to be stick thin before increasing her food intake and working out in the gym.

'Getting toned and getting healthy has completely changed my career,' she said.

'I'm modelling pretty much every day, which never happened before I started training and healthy eating and taking care of myself.'

Double take: She briefly met a pal also clad in white on the beach

Nice bunch: She piled up coconut shells as she posed for snaps in the sea
It was a shock diagnosis that came weeks after her husband Oliver Curtis was jailed for insider trading.

But PR queen Roxy Jacenko says she will use her mother Doreen Davis's 'strength' and 'determination' used to beat the same disease she was diagnosed with ten years ago in her own fight.

The 36-year-old mother-of-two told Woman's Day: 'I remember vividly mum's treatment and what a strain it put on her...

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Fighting spirit: Roxy Jacenko (right), who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, says she will adopt the same 'strength' and 'determination' her mother Doreen (left) used to fight the disease 10 years ago

'If anything her strength and determination gives me a clear vision of the fact most things are solvable.'

It has indeed been a difficult month for Roxy who says she regrets not being more 'vigilant' about the risk of the disease knowing her mother underwent a mastectomy after suffering the disease.

She has urged other women to get themselves checked regularly, telling The Sun-Herald: 'I should have known better.

Jailed: Roxy's stockbroker husband Oliver Curtis (left) arrives with her at the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney ahead of being found guilty of insider trading charges last month

'I should have done routine mammograms knowing that my mum had suffered from breast cancer - but I didn't, I just thought, 'I'll worry about that when I'm 40 plus,'' she said.

For her part, Doreen told The Daily Telegraph that she is confident her daughter will beat the disease.

'She will tackle this head on as she does with everything, exactly as I did 10 years ago,' she declared.

'I am sure, now we are 10 years down the line with breast cancer treatment advances, her treatments will be as positive as mine were.'

Challenge: It's been a difficult month for Roxy, 36, as she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis three weeks after her husband Oliver was jailed for insider trading. Pictured with their children Pixie and Hunter

Meanwhile, Roxy encouraged women to be more proactive in detecting breast cancer in its early stages.

She continued: 'Even when you think, 'That will never happen to me', one day you could wake up to start the day and it will - just like me.'

On Wednesday, Roxy revealed she had been diagnosed with breast cancer - three weeks after her husband Oliver was sentenced to two years in prison.

She underwent a second biopsy on Thursday and is understood to be awaiting results to decide on the appropriate course of treatment.

'She will tackle this head on as she does with everything': Doreen (pictured) had a mastectomy a decade ago and firmly believes her daughter will conquer the disease thanks to advanced medicine

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday, Roxy explained she found a lump in her left breast while showering at her Bondi home.

She asked her four-year-old daughter Pixie Curtis to feel it afterwards because she was 'confused' by what it was.

'When I found the lump two weeks ago and got out of the shower, I asked Pixie to feel it as I was a little confused to what it actually was,' she added.

'Her instant reaction was, 'Eugggh mum!'' she revealed.

'Her reaction was, 'Eugggh mum!'' Roxy explained she found a lump in her left breast while showering at her Bondi home two weeks ago, and then asked four-year-old daughter Pixie to feel it

The businesswoman underwent a 'quick and efficient' biopsy on Tuesday but has vowed not to let her treatment interfere with her busy work schedule.

Earlier, Roxy appeared upbeat as she spoke to the media from her luxury car on her way to work at Sweaty Betty PR.

'It can only be up from here. You can never expect things in life. You've got to tackle things head on and that's what I'm going to do,' she told Nine News.
After making the move from modelling to acting it seems Jessica Gomes can't shake her runway strut.

The 30-year-old was seen turning the side-walks of Los Angeles into a catwalk as she headed out on Friday in a casual ensemble and a pair of sexy designer heels.

Sporting $1,700 Azzedine Alaia strappy sandals, the Perth-born beauty teetered along the suburban street looking particularly fashionable for the outing.

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Strutting her stuff! Jessica Gomes turned the side-walks of Los Angeles into a catwalk as she headed out on Friday in a casual ensemble and a pair of sexy designer heels

The brunette beauty let her long tresses fall over her unbuttoned khaki shirt, which featured the sleeves folded up in the warm weather.

Underneath the summer jacket, Jessica donned a white crop top which exposed a flash of the model's taut tummy.

This was paired with high-waisted skin-tight ripped black jeans, which were cropped just above the ankle, allowing full view of the suede and button straps of her shoes.

Jessica sported the same heels at the InStyle & Audi Women Of Style Awards in Sydney in April, which she teamed at the time with a Zimmerman dress.

Killer heels! The 30-year-old actress donned a crop top paired with ripped black jeans, which were cropped just above the ankle, allowing full view of the $1,700 Azzedine Alaia shoes - a favourite of Kim Kardashian

So nice, she wore it twice: Jessica sported the same heels at the InStyle & Audi Women Of Style Awards in Sydney in April, which she teamed at the time with a Zimmerman dress

The Italian designer heels are a favourite of celebrities across the globe, most notably Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham and Eva Longoria.

Also sporting the style recently was PR maven Roxy Jacenko, who donned the shoe of the moment at the trial of her husband Oliver Curtis in Sydney last month.

Jessica also accessorised with a black designer mini-tote, which sat neatly on her wrist as the plaited strap hung to one side.

One more year! The David Jones ambassador is understood to have signed another one-year contracts worth an estimated $350,000

The David Jones ambassador completed her look with reflective aviator-style sunglasses and sported a minimal make-up look.

The model, who has been with the department store since 2013, is understood to have signed another one-year contracts worth an estimated $350,000.

Jessica will be juggling her duties with her burgeoning Hollywood career as her movie alongside Bruce Willis and another with Owen Wilson are released over the next year.
She welcomed her first daughter Lily-Grace Victoria Rothschild nine days ago.

And Nicky Hilton appears to have snapped straight back into shape as she stepped out with her husband James Rothschild on Sunday.

The 32-year-old socialite had a licence to frill as she wore a ruffled white mini dress in NYC.

Slender: New mum Nicky Hilton appears to have snapped straight back into shape as she stepped out in NYC on Sunday

The new parents left their new addition at home to take a stroll to meet pals at Fiat Cafe in the city.

The beauty showed off her slender post-baby body and toned and tanned legs in the angelic outfit.

She teamed it with a barely-there pair of nude leather thong-sandals, for her walk around the city.

Parent-time: She went for a stroll with her husband James Rothschild on Sunday

Looking every inch the yummy mummy, she added reflective cat-eye sunglasses as she kept effortlessly cool.

The blonde beauty still had her pregnancy glow as she added just a slick of pink lip-gloss, and flaunted her flawless skin.

Nicky wore her lengthy locks in twin french plaits, perhaps finding the style practical when tending to a newborn.

Frilling time: The 32-year-old socialite stepped out in a ruffled white sun dress in NYC

Baby-free lunch: The new parents left their new addition at home to take a stroll to meet pals at Fiat Cafe in the city

Stylish: The beauty showed off her slender post-baby body and toned and tanned legs in the angelic outfit

Slim: Looking every inch the yummy mummy, she added reflective cat-eye sunglasses as she kept effortlessly cool

Radiant: The blonde beauty still had her pregnancy glow as she added just a slick of pink lip-gloss, and flaunted her flawless skin

Her billionaire banking heir husband James kept it simple with a crumpled white T-shirt and blue jeans.

The pair celebrated their one year wedding anniversary last Sunday.

Nicky shared a glowing message for her baby daughter to mark the occasion.

She posted an Instagram photo of her and James on their wedding day along with the caption: 'Thankful for the best anniversary gift ever...our beautiful daughter Lily-Grace.'

In the image, James kissed his gorgeous new bride following their nuptials at Kensington Palace in London last July.

The happy couple started dating in 2011 after meeting at mutual friend Petra Ecclestone's wedding, and got engaged in August 2014 while on holiday in Lake Como, Italy.

Only a month ago: She was sporting a healthy baby bump on June 9 in NYC




World touring solar plane's final leg to UAE delayed

The final leg of an unprecedented world tour by a solar-powered plane was postponed Saturday due to the pilot's health, he said in a message on Twitter.

The Solar Impulse 2 had been scheduled to leave Cairo for Abu Dhabi.

"I'm sick. Stomach upset. I prefer to postpone the take-off @solarimpulse. I cannot go flying for 48 hours in that shape. Sorry," Bertrand Piccard wrote on Twitter.

Solar-powered Solar Impulse 2 aircraft lands at Cairo International Airport on July 13, 2016, for the penultimate stage of its world tour Khaled Desouki (AFP/File)

The aircraft had arrived in Cairo on Wednesday after a two-day flight from Spain, finishing the 3,745 kilometre (2,327 mile) journey with an average speed of 76.7 kilometres an hour.

It had earlier landed in Seville after completing the first solo transatlantic flight powered only by sunlight, flying through the night with energy stored in its 17,000 photovoltaic cells.

Piccard had completed the 6,765 transatlantic flight in 71 hours.

The plane is being flown on its 35,400-kilometre (22,000 mile) trip in stages, with Piccard and his Swiss compatriot Andre Borschberg alternating at the controls of the single-seat plane.

"So Piccard was not feeling well yesterday. Was much better this morning. And then again tonight things got a bit worse. So we took the decision... it's not an easy decision but it's a wise decision for safety reasons," Borschberg told journalists who had assembled to watch the plane take off in Cairo.

The plane should depart during "the next weather window," he said. "Sometime in the middle of the week."

Borschberg had piloted the plane in its 8,924 kilometre (5,545 mile) flight from Japan to Hawaii in 118 hours, breaking the previous record for the longest uninterrupted journey in aviation history.

The Solar Impulse 2 embarked on its journey in Abu Dhabi in March 2015.

Both pilots have described flying the plane as a delight, but they have to be in good condition for the long flights.

Piccard had said that the pilots take 20 minute naps as the plane, which is no heavier than a large car but with the wingspan of a Boeing 747, inches across the sky.

"It is comfortable. But of course you need to train for that. You need to train to make some exercise in the capsule, in the cockpit, because otherwise after several days you cannot move your legs and your arms anymore," Piccard had said when the plane landed in Cairo.

Borschberg and Piccard have said they want to raise awareness of renewable energy sources and technologies with their project.
South Sudan violence tops African Union summit agenda

Renewed fighting in South Sudan that has claimed more than 300 lives dominated discussions at an African Union summit that opened Sunday in the Rwandan capital Kigali.

A shaky ceasefire has held since late Monday following the fighting that raged for four days in Juba, leaving hundreds dead and forcing 40,000 to flee their homes.

The violence in the South Sudan capital echoed the fighting that triggered the civil war and marks a fresh blow to last year's deal to end the bitter conflict that began when President Salva Kiir accused ex-rebel and now Vice President Riek Machar of plotting a coup.

Fighting raged for four days in the South Sudanese capital Juba, leaving hundreds dead and forcing 40,000 to flee their homes Beatrice Mategwa/UNMISS (UNMISS/AFP)

The unrest has also plunged into doubt a peace deal struck in August 2015 between the two sides.

After meeting with the UN Secretary-General on Saturday night leaders of the regional bloc IGAD supported Ban Ki-moon's calls for an arms embargo, targeted sanctions and a strengthened peacekeeping mission and called for "the deployment of a regional protection force to separate the warring parties".

AU Commission chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma praised IGAD for acting "swiftly" in holding a meeting on South Sudan's crisis.

"We shall not be indifferent and shall act in the belief that, when the power of love for fellow Africans overcomes the love of power there shall be peace within our lands," she said in an opening address.

- Numerous crises -

South Sudan is just the most recent crisis on the continent that African leaders will address during the summit.

The AU will also seek to hammer out a solution to the crisis engulfing Burundi where a spate of killings have rocked the country since President Pierre Nkurunziza's announced in April 2015 that he would seek a third term.

Also on the agenda is the ongoing fight against the Boko Haram jihadist group that has its roots in northern Nigeria but has carried out attacks across the Lake Chad region.

Recent violent incidents in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also expected to feature in the talks.

Efforts to secure peace in South Sudan and elsewhere, however, will be complicated by divisions over who should succeed Dlamini-Zuma, ex-wife of South African President Jacob Zuma, to become the AU's new commission chair.

Several countries on the continent have indicated that they do not back any of the leading candidates for the job, arguing that they "lack stature".

Now all three of the leading candidates look like they may fail to get a majority of votes from the African Union's 54 members.

If that happens the vote could be abandoned and re-run at the next AU summit in Addis Ababa in January 2017.

- 'African self-reliance' -

The AU, meanwhile, announced a plan to work towards funding itself. Currently foreign donors pay for 73 percent of the $781 million (708 million euro) budget but on Sunday a plan was adopted to levy a new 0.2 percent tax on imports and use the funds to pay for the AU.

Rwanda's Finance Minister Claver Gatete said it could bring in as much as $1.2 billion (1.1 billion euros).

Dlamini-Zuma welcomed the "historic landmark decision" as "an unprecedented leap forward for African self-reliance and dignity".

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, hosting the summit, said the plan, "puts responsibility and ownership in our hands".

"We need to start doing things differently, and better," he told delegates at the opening ceremony.

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir (L), flanked by African Union special envoy and former Malian president Alpha Oumar Konare (R), talks to the media in Juba Samir Bol (AFP)

Photo provided by the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (UNMISS) people receiving rations of water at the UN compound in the Tomping area in Juba Beatrice Mategwa/UNMISS (UNMISS/AFP)
US warns against travel to Turkey after coup attempt

The United States warned its citizens against travel to Turkey after authorities crushed a military coup that claimed at least 265 lives.

"The US Department of State warns US citizens of increased threats from terrorist groups throughout Turkey and to avoid travel to southeastern Turkey," a statement read.

"In light of the July 15 coup attempt and its aftermath, we suggest US citizens reconsider travel to Turkey at this time."

Pro-Erdogan supporters gather at Taksim square in Istanbul to support the government following a failed coup attempt Bulent Kilic (AFP)

Turkish authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.

The State Department said travel restrictions have been imposed on US government personnel in southeastern Turkey.

"US citizens are reminded to review personal security plans and remain vigilant at all times," it added.

"Foreign and US tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations."
Bad year for Wall Street's Golden Boy Ackman

For a Wall Street star once dubbed the "Baby Buffett," Bill Ackman is having a pretty bad year.

Huge bets on companies like Valeant and Herbalife have delivered steep losses to the flamboyant billionaire's Pershing Square hedge fund.

With some $12 billion under management, Pershing lost around 20 percent in the first half this year, securities filings show.

Huge bets on companies like Valeant and Herbalife have delivered steep losses to Bill Ackman's Pershing Square hedge fund Cindy Ord (Getty/AFP/File)

And everything suggests that the second half won't be much better, after Ackman's crusade against nutritional supplement direct sales company Herbalife, which he shorted as he labeled it a pyramid fund, was rebuffed Friday.

Agreeing with Ackman's longtime rival in Wall Street big-time activist investing, Carl Icahn, the Federal Trade Commission ruled the Herbalife is not a pyramid operation and, while forcing it to pay out $200 million to injured distributors, said the company could stay in business.

Herbalife shares jumped 9.9 percent, generously benefiting Icahn, who holds 25 percent.

It's not clear how Ackman, 50, fared financially at the apparent end of his three-year siege of the company, in which Pershing took a large short position, betting Herbalife shares would sink.

"This is a total victory for Herbalife shareholders and a total defeat for the short camp," said Timothy Ramey, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group.

Icahn, the doyen of Wall Street activists who famously squared off with Ackman in a long televised argument over Herbalife in 2013, declared victory, saying the younger Ackman had gotten his research on the company wrong.

"A significant part of my investment success is directly tied to our in-depth investment research and understanding of often complex and unique issues facing companies," he wrote in a statement.

"Unlike many of those that 'shorted' Herbalife, we did not rely on one or two research papers prepared by non-experts," he said.

Ackman did not concede, even if the market moved against him. He noted that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had ordered changes to the way Herbalife does business, and that eventually those will undermine the company's business model.

"We expect that once Herbalife's business restructuring is fully implemented, these fundamental structural changes will cause the pyramid to collapse," Pershing said in a statement.

- Big bets go sour -

The stylishly coiffed, Harvard grad golden boy of the exclusive New York hedge fund billionaires club, Ackman has a history of taking contrarian stakes and then going very public with them.

After Pershing made a billion-dollar bet in 2012 that Herbalife's shares would tumble, he publicly labeled the company a Ponzi scheme, comparing it to Enron, the high-flying energy group that plunged into bankruptcy in 2001, and the Bernie Madoff fund collapse seven years later.

Putting his credibility on the line, Ackman inundated media and the internet with appearances and videos arguing his case that Herbalife would collapse.

The Pershing short gambled on Herbalife shares falling from $47. But they have traded well above that level since February and finished at $65.25 Friday. Ackman has admitted that carrying the short bet has cost the fund $20 million a year.

Ackman's seeming emotional commitment to his positions was also apparent in his investment on Valeant.

He took a huge position on the future of the Canadian drugmaker as it expanded via aggressive takeovers, only to see the shares plummet in scandals over Valeant's business model and accounting methods.

After surging to a peak of over $263 in the middle of 2015, Valeant's shares have plunged to below $23, while Pershing has clung to its sizable stake in the debt-laden company.

Ackman's style and recent record has not impressed some on Wall Street.

"We believe Ackman typifies the activist behaviors that destroy, rather than create, long-term shareholder value," David Trainer and Sam McBride from investment research house New Constructs said in a note.

Joseph Fahmy, managing director at Zor Capital in New York, tweeted a similar view.
New social media tools empower citizen journalism

It may be inside a protest rally, or in front of a deadly shooting. Smartphones, video and social media are empowering citizens to tell their stories like never before.

This became clear with the live video earlier this month from Diamond Reynolds when she captured the aftermath of the shooting by a police officer of her boyfriend Philando Castile in Minnesota and streamed it live on Facebook.

The unprecedented live feed was just the latest in a series of events highlighting the power of citizen journalists to bring to light events and viewpoints that would otherwise not be part of mainstream media.

When Diamond Reynolds captured the shooting by a police officer of her boyfriend Philando Castile and streamed it live on Facebook it highlighted the power of citizen journalists

Citizen journalism has been around for centuries, but each technological advance has made it easier to reach more people, said Valerie Belair-Gagnon, who heads the Yale University Information Society Project and is an incoming professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota.

Prominent examples from the past include the 1963 Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and the 1991 beating by Los Angeles police of Rodney King and the events of the Arab Spring.

More recently, citizen videos offered immediate and intimate perspectives from Thursday's truck attack in the southern French city of Nice and the 2015 rampage in Paris, as well as dozens of citizen confrontations with police in the United States.

"In each case, a new technology prompted us to be aware that citizens can contribute journalism in certain ways," Belair-Gagnon said.

"In the shift we are seeing since 2004, citizen media is becoming fully integrated to journalism."

Belair-Gagnon said the rise of citizen journalism is not necessarily negative for the mainstream media.

"For me, it's a positive story because journalists are not the only gatekeepers," she told AFP.

"The fact that the public or citizens are able to gather information and distribute it to the public provides an opportunity for richer storytelling."

- Democratizing media -

Jeff Achen, executive editor of the Minnesota nonprofit group The UpTake, which trains citizen journalists, said the latest incidents show a "democratization" of the news media.

"Media can't be everywhere, but there is something with a citizen telling their own story from their own perspective which can be very valuable."

Achen, a former television and print report, said citizen journalism won't necessarily replace traditional media but may augment it.

"With the legacy media, some of the news can feel manufactured and manipulated. It can feel corporate sponsored," he said.

Citizens can enhance journalism's traditional role of holding powerful institutions like the police accountable.

Platforms such as Twitter's Periscope and Facebook Live, which allow anyone to broadcast an event, can create "excitement" in this effort, said Achen.

"I think this will become more prevalent," he added.

"Everyone is going to make it routine. They will take out their cellphones whenever a police officer pulls over and does something" to bear witness to the facts, Achen said.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the ability for citizens to reach the masses can help drive social change.

"Powerful as these videos are for mobilizing activists, they may be more powerful in bringing new participants into the racial justice movement," he said in a blog post.

- Change accelerating -

Dan Gillmor, an Arizona State University professor and author of a book on citizen journalism, said Reynolds "changed our perception of media" with the "shocking and heartbreaking real-time web video of the last minutes of Philando Castile's life."

Gillmor said the Reynolds video was not necessarily something new but showed "the velocity of change is accelerating" in citizen news production. "Her video was a three-faceted act: witnessing, activism and journalism," Gillmor said in a blog post.

"Even though few people saw it in real time, she was saving it to the data cloud in real time, creating and -- one hopes -- preserving a record of what may or may not be judged eventually to have been a crime by a police officer. What Reynolds did was brave, and important for all kinds of reasons."

Gillmor said Reynolds "taught the rest of us something vital: We all have an obligation to witness and record some things even if we are not directly part of what's happening."

These events also raise questions about how platforms such as Facebook respond to their role as conduits for citizen journalism.

Facebook's role came into question when it briefly took down Reynolds video, before restoring it.

Gillmor and others argue that the event underscores that Facebook is part of the news industry, despite its claim to be a neutral platform.

"Facebook hasn't given a plausible explanation for its initial removal of Reynolds' video," Gillmor said.

"The point is that the video remains visible because Facebook allows it to be visible."

Gillmor added that it is "enormously dangerous that an enormously powerful enterprise can decide what free speech will be. I don't want a few people's whims in Menlo Park overruling the First Amendment and other free speech 'guarantees.'"

Protestors march in Chicago after the video of Alton Sterling being killed by Baton Rouge police was released Tasos Katopodis (AFP/File)
Libya PM-designate urges unity for fractured country

The head of Libya's unity government on Sunday urged his countrymen to close ranks to overcome political divisions in a country wracked by the threat of jihadists.

Prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj spoke to reporters after a day of UN-hosted talks focused on creating a "unified" army in the oil-rich North African country.

The United Nations brokered late last year a power-sharing deal to form a Government of National Accord (GNA) but the Sarraj government is still struggling to assert its authority.

Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj speaks during a press conference following his meeting with representatives of Libyan political parties on July 17, 2016 in Tunis Fethi Belaid (AFP)

"We call again on all the children of the country who have not yet joined us to place the nation's interests before any other consideration," Sarraj said in Tunis.

On Saturday, the head of the UN's support mission in Libya, Martin Kobler, said that "all Libya's problems today are tied up to the security issue".

Speaking after the talks in the Tunisian capital, Kobler said the goal of the meeting was to create "a unified Libyan army under the command of the presidential council".

"Libya cannot be united as long as it has several armies," he said, according to an Arabic translation of his remarks.

The meeting also touched on humanitarian issues.

The GNA faces a fearsome set of military, economic and political challenges in a country where rival militias have vied for power since the overthrow of veteran dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

Forces loyal to the unity government are fighting to drive the Islamic State group out of the jihadists' coastal stronghold of Sirte.

The two-month battle has killed around 250 pro-GNA fighters and wounded more than 1,400, according to medical sources at the unity forces' command centre.

The GNA arrived in the capital three months ago, but it has not been endorsed by Libya's elected parliament, while a rival political authority based in the country's far east has refused to cede power.

A controversial general, Khalifa Haftar, controls forces loyal to this authority.

"I want to meet General Haftar, to see and understand his position. I contact him every week to arrange a meeting, but so far he has refused," Kobler said.

Libya's UN-backed presidential council would meet on Monday and Tuesday with "influential security parties" for further talks on a unified army, he said, without specifying who these parties would be.
Vietnam detains activists after South China Sea ruling

Scores of activists were detained in Vietnam's capital on Sunday as they gathered to protest against China after it rejected a recent international ruling that dismissed its claims to much of the South China Sea.

Anti-Chinese sentiment runs deep in communist Vietnam but the country's authoritarian rulers move swiftly to tamp down expressions of public anger, fearful that allowing such protests might embolden criticism of their rule.

Activists had used social media to call for protests in Hanoi on Sunday in the wake of this week's ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague which found there was no legal basis for Beijing's claims to vast swathes of the South China Sea.

Anti-China activists protest in the capital of Vietnam Hanoi, on July 17, 2016 Nhac Nguyen (AFP)

The case was brought by the Philippines but the ruling has been a boon for other regional countries like Vietnam who also have competing claims to the strategic sea.

Authorities in the capital Hanoi were ready for protests on Sunday.

Plainclothes security forces were out in force, blanketing much of the city centre and keeping a close eye on any crowds that might be gathering, an AFP reporter on the scene said.

Throughout the morning around 30 activists were swiftly bundled onto waiting buses and cars by security forces after they gathered to hold a protest near the city's famous Hoan Kiem lake, a common spot for demonstrations.

Some chanted "Down with China invasion!" as they were led away to detention.

Later in the day a group of nine activists held a brief rally outside the Philippines embassy. One held aloft a banner that read: "Thank you Philippines. You have a brave government."

The group dispersed on motorbike before security forces arrived.

Activists posted pictures on social media of similar flashmob rallies in southern Ho Chi Minh City with protesters riding around the city on motorbikes holding banners criticising China.

Beijing lays claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, putting it at odds with regional neighbours the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, which also have partial claims.

China boycotted the PCA hearings, saying the court had no jurisdiction, and has reacted furiously, vowing to ignore the ruling and arguing it misinterprets international law.

Vietnam and China frequently trade diplomatic barbs over the disputed Paracel island chain and waters in the South China Sea.

China has encouraged patriotic citizens to visit the contested Paracels, which are known as Xisha in Chinese.

Such acts have deepened already simmering anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam while domestic critics accuse Hanoi of being too meek towards its giant northern neighbour.

At least three Chinese nationals were killed in 2014 when rioting broke out in Vietnam after Beijing sent an oil rig into contested waters.
Biden announces 'unprecedented' US-Australia cancer database

US Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday unveiled a series of agreements between the US and Australia to create an "unprecedented" international research database of cancer patients as he kicked off a three-day visit in Melbourne.

Fighting cancer is a personal goal for Biden, who lost his son Beau Biden to brain cancer last year, with the opening of an Aus$1 billion (US$760,000) medical facility his first event on his Australia tour, ahead of talks with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

"Cancer research has not really been a team sport the last 25 years," Biden, who heads up the White House's "moonshot" initiative to speed up research into the disease, said at the launch of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre.

US Vice President Joe Biden (C) speaks to guests after a tour of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Melbourne, on July 17, 2016 Tracey Nearmy (Pool/AFP)

"But you're making it, as we say in the States, a team sport," he added, declaring that the world was on the verge of major breakthroughs in treatment.

The collaboration would see an "unprecedented international dataset" of at least 8,000 US patients and 50,000 from Australia made available to cancer researchers and doctors by 2021, he said in a statement.

Biden's visit comes amid tensions in the region following a UN-backed tribunal's ruling against China's claims in the South China Sea.

The US vice president, who warned that Beijing should abide by the same international rules as everyone else in comments to the Sydney Morning Herald Saturday, is expected to address Washington's military alliance with Canberra during his visit.

Later Sunday, he joined Foreign Minister Julie Bishop at an Australian Rules game in Melbourne. He is due to meet Turnbull on Tuesday before making a "major policy speech" about US-Australia relations on Wednesday.
Pakistani star's brother 'not embarrassed' by killing her

The brother of a murdered Pakistani celebrity said Sunday he is "not embarrassed" to have killed her, as Qandeel Baloch's death reignited polarising calls for action against the "epidemic" of honour killings.

The strangling of Baloch, judged by many in deeply conservative Muslim Pakistan as infamous for selfies and videos that by Western standards would appear tame, has prompted shock and revulsion.

"Yes of course, I strangled her," Baloch's brother Muhammad Wasim told reporters at a defiant press conference organised by police in the city of Multan early Sunday.

Waseem (R), brother of Qandeel Baloch, a social media celebrity, is escorted by police after arrest in Multan on July 16, 2016 S S Mirza (AFP)

"She was on the ground floor while our parents were asleep on the roof top," he continued. "It was around 10.45 pm when I gave her a tablet... and then killed her."

Wasim said he acted alone.

"I am not embarrassed at all over what I did," he said.

"Whatever was the case, it (his sister's behaviour) was completely intolerable."

Baloch, believed to be in her twenties and whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, was killed on Friday night at her family's home near Multan.

Her brother, arrested a day later after her father filed a police complaint against him for the killing, appeared in court briefly Sunday ahead of another hearing set for Wednesday.

Hundreds of women are murdered for "honour" every year in Pakistan.

The killers overwhelmingly walk free because of a law that allows the family of the victim to forgive the murderer -- who is often also a relative.

A vigil held late Saturday in Lahore was attended by dozens of mourners, while an online petition entitled "No Country for Bold Women" and demanding accountability over Baloch's death had gained more than than 1,600 signatures Sunday.

A scathing editorial in Pakistan's biggest English-language newspaper Dawn said her murder must serve as "impetus" for anti-honour killing legislation.

It lauded Baloch for "breezily" pushing the boundaries of what Pakistan considers "acceptable" behaviour for women, saying her determination to live on her own terms was "in itself an act of courage".

But many conservatives pushed back, with some echoing Wasim's statement by arguing that her family would have had "no choice".

Baloch was buried early Sunday near her family home in southern Punjab.

- Face of honour killings in Pakistan -

Some of Baloch's more notorious acts included volunteering to perform a striptease for the Pakistani cricket team, and donning a plunging scarlet dress on Valentine's Day.

She also posed for selfies with a high-profile mullah in an incident that saw him swiftly rebuked by the country's religious affairs ministry.

She told local media she had received death threats in the wake of the controversy, and that her requests for protection from authorities had been ignored.

Initially dismissed as a Kim Kardashian-like figure, she was seen by some as empowered in a country where women have fought for their rights for decades.

In her final Facebook post on July 4 she wrote how she was trying to "change the typical orthodox mindset of people", and thanked her supporters for "understanding the message i (sic) try to convey through my bold posts and videos".

"Qandeel was an extremely astute individual who knew that what she was doing was more than being the most loved bad girl of Pakistan," columnist and activist Aisha Sarawari told AFP.

Her killing "defines yet another setback for the women of our generation... This makes it harder for women. Period".

"Many in Pakistan have laid blame for her death on her bold and provocative public acts," noted Benazir Jatoi, who works with the Aurat Foundation, a local NGO working on women's legal and political empowerment.

"Qandeel has put a face to the countless ordinary Pakistani women that are murdered because society has given carte blanche to men," she added.

Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose documentary on honour killings won an Oscar earlier this year, slammed Baloch's murder as symptomatic of an "epidemic" of violence against women in Pakistan.

Obaid-Chinoy's film "A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness" was hailed by Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who in February vowed to push through anti-honour killing legislation.

No action has been taken since then.

Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, pictured in June 28, 2016 speaking at a press conference in Lahore Str (AFP/File)

Relatives and residents carry the coffin of social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch during her funeralon July 17, 2016 SS Mirza (AFP)
Bahrain court orders Shiite opposition bloc dissolved

A court on Sunday ordered the dissolution of Bahrain's Shiite main opposition group Al-Wefaq, despite international criticism of the Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom's intensified crackdown on dissent.

The administrative court in Manama also ordered the funds of the group, found guilty of "harbouring terrorism" among other charges, to be seized by the government, said the justice ministry.

The ruling can still be appealed in the case which Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said his country would continue to follow "closely".

People hold placards bearing the portrait of Sheikh Ali Salman, head of the Shiite opposition movement Al-Wefaq, during a protest in Bahrain against his arrest Mohammed Al-Shaikh (AFP/File)

Al-Wefaq was the largest group in parliament before its lawmakers resigned en masse in protest at the crushing of demonstrations in 2011 calling for an elected government.

The court said Al-Wefaq, which draws most of its support from Bahrain's Shiite majority, incited violence and encouraged demonstrations and sit-ins which threatened to spark "sectarian strife".

It said the bloc had "criticised the performance of the state authorities -- executive, judicial, and legislative".

Britain was quick to condemn the ruling.

"I am deeply concerned" by the court decision, said Johnson, urging the Bahraini government "to guarantee and protect political freedoms for all its citizens."

"I encourage all sides to engage in constructive and inclusive dialogue to promote social cohesion and inclusivity, including political representation, for all Bahrainis," said the new foreign minister.

On June 28, Al-Wefaq's defence lawyers withdrew from court proceedings in protest at the government's push to accelerate the process, which had initially been set for October 6.

The court had already suspended all of Al-Wefaq's activities on June 14, ordering its offices closed and assets frozen.

But Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa insisted "there will be no backtracking on the measures taken to preserve the nation's security and stability."

"There are hands that sought to become tools used by foreign regimes which want no good for Bahrain and its people. Their attempts have failed," he said in remarks published on the official BNA news agency.

That is an allusion to Iran which Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, accuses of fomenting unrest among its Shiite majority.

The justice ministry, which sought Al-Wefaq's dissolution, had accused the bloc of providing a haven for "terrorism, radicalisation and violence" and opening the way for "foreign interference" in the kingdom's affairs.

In October 2014, the administrative court banned Al-Wefaq for three months for violating the law on associations.

Political parties are banned in Bahrain, as in other Gulf Arab monarchies, so Al-Wefaq has the status of an association.

- Crackdown on leading Shiites -

Al-Wefaq, also known as the Islamic National Accord Association, is heir to the Bahrain Freedom Movement which played a key role in Shiite-led anti-government protests in the 1990s that sought the restoration of the elected parliament scrapped in 1975.

Sunday's ruling comes despite appeals by the United Nations, United States and rights groups for the legal action against the bloc to be dropped.

Washington has labelled the crackdown on Al-Wefaq as "alarming" and repeatedly appealed for "reform and reconciliation" in Bahrain.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had also expressed concern about the move against Al-Wefaq.

In recent months, Manama has intensified its crackdown on leading Shiite figures.

Al-Wefaq's chief, Shiite cleric Ali Salman, is serving a nine-year jail term for inciting violence after a court in May more than doubled his sentence.

His arrest in December 2014 sparked protests in Bahrain, already rocked by the Shiite-led uprising that erupted in February 2011.

Authorities have also stripped at least 261 people of their citizenship since 2012, according to the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, including the country's Shiite spiritual leader Sheikh Isa Qassem.

And on Tuesday, a court denied bail for prominent human rights activist Nabeel Rajab as he went on trial on charges of insulting a state institution and neighbouring Saudi Arabia online.

Amnesty International and Human Rights First were among international rights watchdogs that had viced concern over the legal proceedings against Al-Wefaq and the government's crackdown on opponents.
Myanmar's Suu Kyi holds landmark rebel talks

Myanmar's de facto premier Aung San Suu Kyi held landmark talks with senior rebel leaders on Sunday, as she strives to seal a ceasefire with a patchwork of ethnic minority militias that have battled the national army for decades.

Suu Kyi has made peace a flagship policy of her newly installed civilian-led government which replaced decades of brutal junta rule earlier this year.

It is a tall order in a country where the military, which is loathed and deeply distrusted by many ethnic rebel groups, still retains significant control.

Myanmar's foreign minister and state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi has made peace a flagship policy in her government Lillian Suwanrumpha (AFP/File)

A number of key rebel factions have yet to sign up to a national ceasefire agreement, something Suu Kyi's government hopes Sunday's talks might change.

Zaw Htay, deputy director general of the president's office, told reporters the veteran democracy campaigner and her close associates were meeting with five leaders from the United Nationalities Federal Council.

The body represents both rebel groups that have signed up to the ceasefire agreement and those who have so far refused.

"It will be like meeting family," he told reporters ahead of the meeting.

Among those present was General N'Ban La, from the Kachin Independence Organisation, the political wing of one of Myanmar's most powerful rebel factions, which has yet to sign a ceasefire.

"It's a confidence building meeting, there can be many questions and answers from both sides," Hla Maung Shwe, a government advisor on the peace process told AFP.

Media were ushered out after filming the initial greetings ahead of the meeting in the commercial capital Yangon.

Myanmar has been scarred by ethnic conflicts ever since its independence in 1948, with minority groups battling for greater autonomy against a central government that they believed has long ignored and abused them.

Suu Kyi has vowed to overturn that painful legacy with plans to hold a major peace conference later this summer.

However, conflicts continue to rage in several areas between ethnic minority armed groups and the army, which operates beyond the reaches of civilian government, particularly in northern Kachin and eastern Shan states.

Some 240,000 people are displaced due to unrest and communal conflict across the country.

More than a dozen rebel factions also plan to hold their own talks later this month in Kachin, with Sunday's meeting seen as a crucial stepping stone towards persuading the hold-out groups to embrace the peace process.

Both Myanmar's military and rebel groups have a long history of rights violations linked to decades of conflict, including the use of child labour and drug trafficking.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy government has spoken out in favour greater federalism for Myanmar's ethnic minorities.

But her hands are partially tied.

Under Myanmar's junta-era constitution, the crucial interior, home and border ministries are still controlled by the army, giving the generals huge sway over whether the peace process is a success.
Several US police officers shot in Baton Rouge

At least three police officers were shot in Louisiana on Sunday, officials said.

"Several officers were struck by gunfire," Baton Rouge police spokesman Don Coppola told local television station WAFB.

"There are three they are describing as very seriously ill," Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told the station, adding that more details will be forthcoming.

At least three police officers have been shot in Baton Rouge on July 17, 2016 Mandel Ngan (AFP/File)

The station aired video footage of police responding to the scene in Baton Rouge. Multiple shots could be heard as civilian cars quickly backed away.

CNN reported a local source as saying at least seven officers were shot and three are feared dead. Some of the others are reported to be in critical condition, the station said.

The shooting appeared to be carried out by a lone gunman carrying an assault rifle, local media reported.

"We think that the situation has been contained," Coppola said.
Israel fires missiles at drone from Syria: army

Israel's military on Sunday fired two Patriot missiles at a drone that "infiltrated" from war-ravaged neighbouring Syria, it said.

The missiles missed the drone which "returned to Syria" after the incident in the central Golan Heights, where the demarcation line between the two countries is located, the military said.

"Moments ago two Patriot air defence missiles were fired towards a drone which infiltrated Israeli airspace from Syria," the military said in a statement on Sunday evening.

Israel fired two Patriot missiles at a drone that "infiltrated" from neighbouring Syria Isaac Brekken (Getty/AFP/File)

Sirens sounded in the area.

While Israel has sought to avoid being dragged into Syria's five-year civil war, it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over into its territory.

Earlier this month, the Israeli army attacked two Syrian military targets on the Golan after stray fire damaged the security fence along the line.

In September 2014, Israel used a Patriot missile to shoot down a Syrian warplane it said had crossed the UN-patrolled ceasefire line on the Golan which it regards as its international border.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also acknowledged in April that Israel had attacked dozens of convoys transporting weapons in Syria destined for its enemy Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.
Hizmet: The Turkish global network accused of launching a coup

Their name means service and followers insist the Hizmet movement is an informal grouping of individuals promoting moderate Islam and the development of poorer countries as well as Turkey.

For their opponents, it is a shadowy organisation with links in the media and business whose spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen has much unelected and unaccountable influence in the country.

Now the movement and Gulen are accused of launching Friday's military coup together, acting under the name the "Fethullahci Terror Organisation (FETO)", accusations they deny strongly.

Exiled Turkish Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen at his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania on September 24, 2013 Selahattin Sevi (ZAMAN DAILY/AFP/File)

- Altruistic Muslims? -

The movement's leader is a Sunni Muslim, part of the Hanafi tradition of Islamic jurisprudence and is believed to have been influenced by the ideas of one of the most significant Muslim theologians of the modern world, Said Nursi.

Gulen promotes a tolerant and moderate Sufi Islam, of which Hizmet's supporters are also affiliates, but he himself is a reclusive figure.

He has been active since the 60s and 70s but now lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania in the United States.

Hizmet promotes peace and harmony through hard work and altruism, supporters say.

Their charity efforts and work on education spreads as far as the United States where they have over 100 charter schools, the largest network within the country.

Hizmet-affiliated schools can also be found in Africa including Kenya and as far as Pakistan and Kazakhstan, usually funded by wealthy Turkish businessmen.

The movement encourages followers to work in the civil service and be useful members of society through charity or employment.

It is not known exactly how many individuals are part of the movement but some believe it could be millions across the world.

There are many think-tanks, businesses, media organisations linked to the movement worldwide including the Journalist and Writers Foundation based in Istanbul and the Rumi Forum in Washington.

- Purge of followers -

Followers of the movement have had senior positions within Turkey's civil service, media and business, though that has declined since the authorities' purge of those accused of Hizmet links.

Media organisations in Turkey linked to Hizmet have come under great scrutiny and attack.

In March, the headquarters of Zaman daily newspaper was seized by authorities and state administrators put in charge of the parent company, Feza.

That incident came five months after Koza-Ipek media group, parent company of Bugun TV broadcaster -- was ordered to be seized by a court ruling.
Cleveland on security knife edge for Republican convention

Cleveland deployed overwhelming security Sunday, bracing for possible unrest as delegates poured into town for the Republican National Convention that will anoint Donald Trump as the party's US presidential nominee.

The killing of three police officers Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana only added to the tensions in Cleveland, where law enforcement agencies have thrown a ring of steel around downtown and anti-Trump demonstrators began marching toward the convention site.

President Barack Obama urged calm.

A checkpoint on Carnegie Ave is seen amid preparations for the Republican National Convention on July 17, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio Dominick Reuter (AFP)

"I know we're about to enter a couple of weeks of conventions where our political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual," he told reporters at the White House.

"And that is why it is so important that everyone... right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further. We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda."

Authorities have erected eight-foot-tall (2.5-meter) metal fencing around Quicken Loans Arena, closed off streets and deployed thousands of armed police officers.

The four-day political jamboree, which begins Monday, will see the bombastic billionaire secure the nomination for the Party of Lincoln after a thumping primary victory that confounded the US establishment.

Roads in the Ohio city are lined with concrete barriers and helicopters patrol overhead, as light aircraft, paid for by sponsors, trail anti-Hillary Clinton slogans.

Law enforcement is on edge, braced for protests by demonstrators enraged by Trump's divisive presidential campaign and preparing for the worst after anti-police violence erupted in Louisiana.

"We are TRYING to fight ISIS (the so-called Islamic State extremist group), and now our own people are killing our police," Trump tweeted shortly after the shooting.

"Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching."

He later posted a more tempered message on Facebook.

US authorities have been on alert since a gunman intent on killing white policemen went on a rampage and shot five Dallas officers dead earlier this month.

Cleveland, a Midwestern city of nearly 400,000, has taken out $50 million in protest insurance, and Ohio's open-carry law that allows people with proper permits to carry a loaded weapon on the streets, has inflamed fears of violence.

"We have policies in place for mass arrests through our prosecutor's office, our clerk's office and our court system," Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams told reporters.

Williams said barricades had also been erected downtown to thwart any potential terror attack after a truck bomber killed 84 people in the French city of Nice on Thursday.

"We use blocking vehicles, we use concrete barriers and things like that at positions that we think may be vulnerable to attacks like that which happened in Nice," he said.

- 'Declare war against ISIS' -

Trump, a New York tycoon who has never held elected office and who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, vowed in his latest interview to wage war against IS.

"We're going to declare war against ISIS. We have to wipe out ISIS," he told CBS in excerpts aired on the eve of the convention, which will culminate with a Trump speech accepting the nomination on Thursday.

Trump made the remarks in his first joint interview with his pick for vice president, Indiana's conservative governor Mike Pence, an evangelical Catholic.

Trump's choice of Pence, announced Friday, has been welcomed by 61 percent of Republicans and conservatives in critical battlegrounds, states likely to decide the November election, according to a CBS News poll.

The survey found that these voters believe Pence brings stability to the ticket and will boost Trump's chances of defeating Clinton. Pence, however, is not well known beyond the party rank and file.

- Critics and protests -

Trump faces a herculean task to win over legions of critics.

His salty rhetoric and populist message have outraged many conservatives, raising fears he has fanned a racial backlash and prompting a battle for the soul of the Republican Party.

Unusually, the Cleveland convention features no former presidents, few party luminaries and only a smattering of elected officials. Instead, it is expected to hand a starring role to Trump's family to make his case.

The first major anti-Trump protest kicked off Sunday, drawing about 200 demonstrators .

"There is a real tension at the moment in the city and in Ohio in general," said student Charlie Michel, 22.

"We are rejecting the invasion of the GOP and their racist ideology."

Another "Stop Trump" march has been permitted by the city for noon on Monday, just hours before the convention opens.

The US homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, told Congress last week that he was concerned about demonstrations getting out of hand.

"We have absolutely no idea what to predict," said Shanna Merola, who works for the National Lawyers Guild, which is training volunteer observers to monitor interactions between police and protesters.

IT engineer Steve Thacker, 57, slung his AR-15-type semi-automatic rifle over his shoulder as he spoke to reporters about the need to protect gun rights enshrined in the US Constitution.

US political conventions, quadrennial affairs, are designed to bring a party together, formally select its presidential nominee and catapult the candidate and party toward November's election.

Staff on the stage at the Quicken Loans Arena on July 17, 2016, as workers and media prepare for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio Timothy A. Clary (AFP)

People join hands in a peace rally amid preparations for the Republican National Convention on July 17, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio Dominick Reuter (AFP)

US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (R) shakes hand with his vice presidential running mate Indiana Governor Mike Pence on July 16, 2016 Kena Betancur (AFP)

A woman's America-themed socks are seen amid preparations for the Republican National Convention on July 17, 2016, in Cleveland, Ohio Dominick Reuter (AFP)
Over 100 nude women pose against Trump in Cleveland

More than a hundred women stripped and posed naked with mirrors in Cleveland, answering a photographer's call to blend art with politics and portray Donald Trump as unfit for the White House.

They gathered on the eve of the Republican National Convention, where the brash New York billionaire will be anointed the party's nominee for president after winning a raucous primary race despite alarm from the party establishment and the country at large about his divisiveness.

"He is a loser," photographer Spencer Tunick told AFP after the sunrise shoot in which 130 women took part. One hundred of them will be featured in the picture to be unveiled shortly before the November 8 election.

Women participate in a photo shoot by artist Spencer Tunick for his work "Everything She Says Means Everything" in Cleveland, Ohio on July 17, 2016 Timothy A. Clary (AFP)

The installation took place on private property in sight of the arena where the convention kicks off on Monday, the focus of multiple groups of protesters expected to take to the streets this week.

The owner gave permission, said Tunick, and so while public nudity in Cleveland is illegal, it was not possible for police to intervene.

Entitled "Everything She Says Means Everything," the photo art featured women of all shapes, colors and sizes participated, holding up mirrors toward the arena.

Tunick's website said the mirrors reflected "the knowledge and wisdom of progressive women and the concept of 'Mother Nature'... onto the convention center, cityscape and horizon of Cleveland."

The artist is well known for his sometimes startling images of nude people. But Tunick told AFP he thought it was his most political shoot ever, saying he felt compelled to take action.

Just voting against Trump at the ballot box in November was not enough.

"I have two daughters and a wife," he said. "I can't believe the language and rhetoric of hate against women and minorities coming from the Republican Party."

He said he had to do something to counter "this idiotic thinking."

- Fearless -

MaPo Kinnord, 55, an art professor and artist, said she took part because she loved Tunick's work and happened to be visiting her niece in the city where she grew up.

Currently living in New Orleans, she said the installation opposed Republicans who were making Americans afraid, by telling them they should fear Muslims and immigrants.

"To be totally naked and out in the open and to be fearless is what we need to be," Kinnord explained.

Trump has called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and a wall to be built on the Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants.

Kinnord said she would "never" vote for Trump and expressed hope that Britain's recent referendum voting to leave the European Union had been a wake-up call against complacency in the US election.

While she voted for self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the primaries, she said she was happy to back presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Morning Robinson, 18, took part with her mother, saying she wanted "to do something a little different" before going off to college that would enable her to express herself freely.

"I was really nervous at first," but it felt good being out in the open and not afraid of her body, she said.

"Republicans have this view of how women should be in society and I just don't agree," she said. "I don't know exactly, I just know their views don't match mine."

Size-wise, the artwork was a far cry from Tunick's most recent work.

In Colombia last month, he convinced more than 6,000 women to bare all in Bogota as the war-torn country neared a peace deal with the leftist rebels of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

Spencer Tunick's art installation "Everything She Says Means Everything," featured women holding up mirrors toward the arena where Republicans this week are set to formally name billionaire Donald Trump as their presidential nominee Timothy A. Clary (AFP)
Ex-US Marine kills three Baton Rouge police officers

An ex-US Marine and Iraq war veteran shot and killed three Baton Rouge police officers on Sunday, in an act reminiscent of slayings in Dallas to avenge African-Americans killed by police.

The shooting, which also wounded three other officers, took place in a city scarred by racial tensions and protests against police brutality since the July 5 death of Alton Sterling, a black man shot at point-blank range by white police.

Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told reporters the gunman -- identified by US media as Gavin Long, 29 -- was killed in a gunfight and there are no suspects at large. The motive was not immediately clear.

Police officers stand near the scene of where three police officers were killed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 17, 2016 Sean Gardner (Getty/AFP)

"Until we come together as a nation, as a people, to heal as a people, if we don't do that and this madness continues, we will surely perish as a people," a shaken Edmonson said at a press conference.

A recent series of shootings involving police have exposed deep fault lines through US society surrounding racial prejudice and gun violence.

The early July shooting of Sterling by Baton Rouge police and another black man by Minnesota police led to a nationwide wave of marches against police abuses.

The dying moments of both men were captured in video footage that went viral online.

At a July 7 march in Dallas, Texas, a black gunman killed five police and wounded several others before he was slain. The Dallas shooter, identified as Micah Xavier Johnson, an army reservist who served time in Afghanistan, said that he wanted to kill white cops.

- Troubled shooter -

The Baton Rouge shooting took place along a highway near the police headquarters around 8:40 am (1340 GMT), after officers responded to a call about a man carrying a rifle. The suspect was dressed all in black and, some reports said, wore a mask.

A witness told local media the gunman carried what appeared to be an AR-15 assault-style rifle.

The shooter, based in Kansas City -- more than 700 miles (1,100 kilometers) north of Baton Rouge -- was a former Marine whose served a 2008-2009 tour of duty in Iraq tour.

In 2015 Long legally changed his name to Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, claiming to be a member of the Washitaw Nation, a group of African Americans claiming to be a Native American nation in the United States.

Setepenra's Twitter feed said he had traveled to Dallas after the July 7 shooting. It is also filled with posts targeting white people.

But one of the officers killed by Long -- Montrell Jackson, 32 -- was black. The other two were identified as Matthew Gerald and Brad Garafola.

"I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat," Jackson wrote recently on Facebook.

"Please dont let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better ... if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer I got you."

- 'Cowardly' -

President Barack Obama condemned the "cowardly" Baton Rouge shooting and demanded an end to such violence.

"It is so important that everyone... right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further," Obama told reporters at the White House.

"We don't need inflammatory rhetoric. We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us."

Obama, the first black US president, has repeatedly called for racial unity. "Nothing justifies violence against law enforcement," he said.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, expressed grief in a Facebook post.

"How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order," he wrote.

Presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said the shooting is an assault on everyone. "We must stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities," she said.

Sterling's aunt Veda Washington-Abusaleh made a tearful plea for an end to the violence.

"We don't want no more bloodshed. Leave. Go home. Go wherever you come from. This is our house. You can't come in our house killing us," she said in an emotional interview with local television.

"No justice! No peace! That's what we're calling for. Stop this killing!"

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards described the shooting as "an absolutely unspeakable, heinous attack on law enforcement here in Baton Rouge."

He added: "The violence, the hatred, just has to stop."

Last week, police arrested more than 100 protesters taking part in a demonstration against police brutality in Baton Rouge under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Graphic showing recent prominent cases in the United States involving police shootings - (AFP Graphic)

Louisiana State Police Superintendent Colonel Mike Edmonson told reporters the gunman behind the shootings was killed and there are no suspects at large Sean Gardner (Getty/AFP)

Montrell Jackson, seen in this photo released by the Baton Rouge Police Department, was one of of the three officers killed in Sunday's attack

US President Barack Obama makes a statement at the White House about a deadly shooting in Baton Rouge on July 17, 2016 Yuri Gripas (AFP)
Morocco wants to rejoin African Union: king

Morocco wants to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after quitting the bloc in protest at its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member, King Mohammed VI said Sunday.

Morocco maintains that Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, is an integral part of the kingdom even though local Sahrawi people led by the Polisario Front have long campaigned for the right to self-determination.

"For a long time our friends have been asking us to return to them, so that Morocco can take up its natural place within its institutional family. The moment has now come," the monarch said in a message sent to an AU summit taking place in Kigali, the MAP Moroccan news agency reported.

Moroccan King Mohammed VI, pictured in February 2016, says his country want to rejoin the African Union Fadel Senna (AFP/File)

Morocco has occupied the sparsely populated Western Sahara area since 1975 in a move that was not recognised by the international community.

Morocco quit the AU in protest in 1984 when the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was admitted as a member.

But although Morocco left the club, "it never quit Africa", King Mohammed said in his message to AU leaders as they began a two-day meeting in the Rwandan capital.

"Through this historic act and return, Morocco wants to work within the AU to transcend divisions," he added.

In 1991, the United Nations brokered a ceasefire between Moroccan troops and Sahrawi rebels of the Algerian-backed independence movement the Polisario Front but a promised referendum to settle the status of the desert territory has yet to materialise.

Earlier this year Morocco expelled several UN staff members who were part of the MINURSO mission in Western Sahara in angry retaliation over UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's use of the term "occupation" to describe the status of the territory.

In his address to the African Union, King Mohammed urged the bloc to rethink its position on the "phantom state" of Western Sahara, saying that a political solution was being worked on under the auspices of the UN.

"The recognition of a pseudo state is hard for the Moroccan people to accept," he said.

The SADR is not a member of the UN or the Arab League, the king went on to note, adding that "at least 34 countries" do not recognise it.

"On the Sahara issue, institutional Africa can no longer bear the burden of a historical error and a cumbersome legacy," the monarch said.

Morocco's return to the AU would need to be validated by a vote.
Raimondo lowers flags in honor of Nice attack victims

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  Gov. Gina Raimondo has ordered all United States and Rhode Island flags to be flown at half-staff at all state facilities and buildings in honor of the victims of the deadly truck attack in Nice, France.

The Democrat's order says flags should remain at half-staff until sunset on July 19. Raimondo also asks that Rhode Islanders lower their flags as a mark of respect.

Raimondo made the order Friday in accordance with a proclamation ordered by President Barack Obama.
US-based Turkish cleric denies involvement in coup plot

SAYLORSBURG, Pa. (AP)  An exiled Muslim cleric whom Turkey's president has accused of orchestrating a failed coup denied any responsibility Saturday, saying he had no knowledge of the plot.

Fethullah Gulen told reporters at his Pennsylvania compound he knows only a "minute fraction" of his legions of sympathizers in Turkey, so he cannot speak to their "potential involvement" in the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup. They could be sympathizers of the opposition party. They could be sympathizers of the nationalist party. It could be anything," Gulen, who has lived in the U.S. for more than 15 years, said through an interpreter.

FILE - In this March 15, 2014 file photo, Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, sits at his residence in Saylorsburg, Pa. A lawyer for the Turkish government, Robert Amsterdam, said that "there are indications of direct involvement" in the Friday, July 15, 2016, coup attempt of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who is living in exile in Pennsylvania. (AP Photo/Selahattin Sevi, File)

The reclusive cleric, who very rarely speaks to reporters, talked about the failed overthrow attempt shortly after Erdogan demanded that the United States extradite him. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration would entertain an extradition request but Turkey would have to prove wrongdoing by Gulen.

Looking frail, Gulen, who is in his mid-70s, sat on a sofa in a large reception room outside his living quarters, with an aide taking his blood pressure before the news conference.

He said he wouldn't have returned to Turkey even if the coup had succeeded, fearing he would be "persecuted and harassed."

"This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here. Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important," said Gulen, who lives on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, an Islamic retreat founded by Turkish-Americans.

He has criticized Erdogan, his onetime ally, over the Turkish leader's increasingly authoritarian rule. The Erdogan regime has launched a broad campaign against Gulen's movement in Turkey and abroad, purging civil servants suspected of ties to the movement, seizing businesses and closing some media organizations.

In the United States, a lawyer hired by the Turkish government has lodged numerous accusations against a network of about 150 publicly funded charter schools started by followers of Gulen, whose philosophy blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Nobody associated with the U.S. schools has been charged with wrongdoing.

On Saturday, Gulen denounced Erdogan over what he called the government's "repression and persecution" of Gulen's followers in Turkey.

"It appears that they have no tolerance for any movement, any group, any organization that is not under their total control," Gulen said.

Given the chance to deliver a message directly to the Turkish leader, Gulen demurred.

"If I were to send him a message, he would probably consider it as a slur and reject it," Gulen said, adding, "but I have always prayed for myself and for him. I have prayed to God to lead us to the straight path, to the virtuous path."

About 150 supporters of Erdogan protested outside the compound Saturday, chanting and waving signs.
Haitians trek to sacred waterfalls in Voodoo festival

SAUT D'EAU, Haiti (AP)  Some carrying candles or calabash bowls with offerings of goat meat, thousands of Haitians made a Saturday pilgrimage to bathe in sacred waterfalls and pray for everything from a good harvest to an end to Haiti's chronic political dysfunction.

A mix of Voodoo and Christian faithful along with a cohort of young, hard-partying revelers gathered in the rushing waters of Saut d'Eau, where they scrubbed their bodies with aromatic leaves and soap. It was the final day of this year's annual three-day festival.

A number of impoverished Haitians made long treks by foot, motorbike or crammed into the back of pickup trucks to reach the 100-tall foot falls, surrounded by white candles placed in moss and tree stumps.

A voodoo pilgrim bathes as he prays in a waterfall believed to have purifying powers during the annual celebration in Saut d' Eau, Haiti, Saturday, July 16, 2016. After bathing, voodoo pilgrims throw away the dresses they wore to the site, and don new clothes for good luck. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

A group of subsistence farmers from the coastal town of Arcahaie spent their meager savings to travel to the falls clad in their best clothes for Voodoo rituals: purple dresses with a red collar for the women and white shirts and pants for the men.

"I've come to put my sickness in the water and gain fresh luck," said Dieudeaue Beauvil, who says she's been struggling with a mysterious malady.

There were no shortage of younger Haitians who came mostly for a good time, drinking shots of homemade moonshine and flirting in the waters.

But many took their prayers seriously, tossing their soaked clothing into the water in a symbolic shedding of their old self. Some shook spastically when the spirits overtook them.

Haitian-American social worker Andrea Bellevue was lured from Boston to seek help from Erzulie, a spirit god of love in Voodoo, or Vodou.

"Whenever you come to her and ask her for something you shall receive," said the Boston resident as she and many others stripped to their underwear and scrubbed their bodies with leaves.

In the nearby town of Saut d'Eau, pilgrims converged on the local church to pray to the Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, closely associated with the Voodoo goddess of Erzulie. Saut d'Eau's mystique owes to a 19th century legend that an image of the virgin appeared in the waterfalls.

Voodoo evolved in the 17th century from African slaves. French colonizers forced them to practice Roman Catholicism, but many remained loyal to their African religions in secret by adopting Catholic saints to coincide with African spirits. The Voodoo religion has long been central to Haitian life.

___

AP videographer Pierre-Richard Luxama and AP photographer Dieu Nalio Chery contributed to this story.

___

David McFadden on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dmcfadd

Voodoo pilgrims bathe in a waterfall believed to have purifying powers during the annual celebration in Saut d' Eau, Haiti, Saturday, July 16, 2016. After bathing, voodoo pilgrims throw away the dresses they wore to the site, and don new clothes for good luck. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

Voodoo pilgrims heat aromatic leaves before bathing in a waterfall believed to have purifying powers during the annual celebration in Saut d' Eau, Haiti, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Tens of thousands of Haitians makethe pilgrimage to bathe in the sacred waterfalls. A mix of Voodoo and Christian faithful along with a cohort of young, hard-partying revelers gathered Saturday in the rushing waters of Saut d'Eau, where they scrubbed their bodies with aromatic leaves and soap. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

Dieudone Beauvil, center, a voodoo pilgrim walks with Jesula Francois, front right, as they arrive to bathe in a waterfall believed to have purifying powers during the annual celebration in Saut d' Eau, Haiti, Saturday, July 16, 2016. After bathing, voodoo pilgrims throw away the dresses they wore to the site, and don new clothes for good luck. ( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

Voodoo pilgrims place their candles on a mound before bathing in a waterfall believed to have purifying powers during the annual celebration in Saut d' Eau, Haiti, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Tens of thousands of Haitians makethe pilgrimage to bathe in the sacred waterfalls. A mix of Voodoo and Christian faithful along with a cohort of young, hard-partying revelers gathered Saturday in the rushing waters of Saut d'Eau, where they scrubbed their bodies with aromatic leaves and soap.( AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)
The Latest: Off-duty officer who hit pedestrians is charged

NEW YORK (AP)  The Latest on the off-duty New York City police officer accused of striking pedestrians in his SUV (all times local):

___

7:15 p.m.

Police say an off-duty New York City police officer has been arrested on charges including manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter and driving while intoxicated after his SUV struck four pedestrians in Brooklyn, killing one of them.

Authorities say 28-year-old Nicholas Batka lost control of his vehicle at 3 a.m. Saturday and it mounted a sidewalk, hitting four people.

Police spokesman Officer Brian Magoolaghan says Batka has worked 1 years in the New York Police Department Transit Bureau Manhattan task force. He says Batka has been suspended from the department. It was not immediately clear who will represent him in court.

Police say Batka's vehicle hit two men and two women. A 21-year-old man was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital. His name was not immediately released. The other three victims are in stable condition.

___

11:30 a.m.

Police say at least one person has been killed after an off-duty police officer's SUV struck four pedestrians in Brooklyn.

Authorities say 28-year-old Nicholas Batka lost control of his vehicle and it mounted the sidewalk, striking four pedestrians. Batka faces driving-while-intoxicated charges after the accident at 3 a.m. Saturday.

Police spokesman Officer Brian Magoolaghan said Batka has worked 1 years in the New York Police Department Transit Bureau Manhattan task force. He said Batka has been suspended and remains in custody. It was not immediately clear who will represent him in court.
Thousands of Venezuelans enter Colombia for food, medicine

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP)  Tens of thousands of Venezuelans poured into neighboring Colombia to buy food and medicine on Saturday after authorities briefly opened the border that has been closed for almost a year.

A similar measure last week led to dramatic scenes of the elderly and mothers storming Colombian supermarkets and highlighted how daily life has deteriorated for millions in Venezuela, where the economy has been in a freefall since the 2014 crash in oil prices.

Colombia's foreign ministry said in a statement that at least 35,000 Venezuelans entered Colombia on Saturday, and their entry took place "in an orderly manner and under conditions of security." The border was opened for roughly eight hours and will be opened again on Sunday, it said. Roughly 35,000 people also crossed during last week's 12-hour border opening.

Saturday's opening took businesses in the Colombian border city of Cucuta by surprise since it had been announced that the border would opened on Sunday.

Colombian Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas said "we have made a great effort to have sufficient supplies" for the Venezuelans expected to stream across the border on Saturday and Sunday.

Gov. Jose Vielma of the Venezuelan border state of Tachira said that President Nicolas Maduro supported the opening, ordering that people "not be disturbed" when they crossed into Colombia.

Maduro blames the shortages of food, medicine and basic staples in Venezuela on his opponents, who he accuses of trying to sow economic chaos to oust him from office. His critics accuse his socialist government of economic mismanagement.

Maduro ordered the 1,378-mile (2,219 kilometer) border shut in August 2015 to clamp down on criminal gangs smuggling over the border goods and gasoline sold at subsidized prices in Venezuela.
Officials: Man shoots at 'Pokemon Go' players outside house

PALM COAST, Fla. (AP)  Authorities say a Florida man fired shots at two late-night "Pokemon Go" players in a car outside his house but no one was injured.

Flagler County Sheriff's Office spokesman James Troiano says in a news release that the homeowner awoke to a noise outside about 1:30 a.m. Saturday and saw a car sitting in the road in front of his house. He told authorities he got a handgun and approached the vehicle.

Troiano says the two teens in the car sped away and the man fired several shots at them.

Later that morning, he says, the mother of one of the teens called the sheriff's office when they realized the car had a flat tire and several bullet holes in it. She told officials the two had been playing the smartphone app.
Yemen's warring sides resume UN-led peace talks in Kuwait

KUWAIT CITY (AP)  Yemen's government has resumed talks in Kuwait with Shiite Houthi rebels despite its earlier threats to boycott the process.

The state-run Kuwait News Agency, KUNA, reports that the parties participated in the U.N.-led talks Saturday evening, after a roughly two-week hiatus.

Previous peace talks have failed to bridge the gap between the internationally-recognized and Saudi-backed government of exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and the rebels, who overran the Yemeni capital in late 2014.

The war in Yemen has killed some 9,000 people.

Hadi's negotiators are demanding the implementation of a U.N. Security Council resolution which stipulates the withdrawal of militias from all cities. The Houthis want a share of power in a transitional government.
Pakistani model's brother says he killed her for 'honor'

MULTAN, Pakistan (AP)  The brother of slain Pakistani model Qandeel Baloch on Sunday confessed to strangling her for "family honor" because she posted "shameful" pictures on Facebook.

Baloch, who had become a social media celebrity in recent months, stirred controversy by posting pictures online taken with a prominent Muslim cleric. She was found dead on Saturday at her family home in the central city of Multan.

Police arrested her brother, Waseem Azeem, and presented him before the media in Multan, where he confessed to killing her. He said people had taunted him over the photos and that he found the social embarrassment unbearable.

Relatives and local residents carry the coffin of slain model Qandeel Baloch for funeral prayers in Shah Sadar Din village, near Dera Ghazi Khan, Pakistan, Sunday, July 17, 2016. The brother of Baloch confessed to strangling her to death for "family honor" because she posted "shameful" pictures on Facebook. Baloch, who had become a social media celebrity in recent months, stirred controversy by posting pictures online taken with a prominent Muslim cleric. (AP Photo/Asim Tanveer)

"I was determined either to kill myself or kill her," Azeem told The Associated Press as he was being led away.

He said that even though Baloch was the main breadwinner for the family, he slipped her sedatives the night before and then strangled her in her sleep.

"Money matters, but family honor is more important," said Azeem.

Nearly 1,000 women are murdered in Pakistan each year for violating conservative norms on love, marriage and public behavior. The so-called "honor killings" are often carried out by family members.

Such killings are considered murder. But Islamic law in Pakistan allows a murder victim's family to pardon the killer, which often allows those convicted of honor killings to escape punishment.

Regional police chief Sultan Taimuri said authorities will seek the maximum punishment for Azeem, without providing further details.

Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, was buried Sunday.

She had shot to fame and notoriety through social media postings that would be considered tame by Western standards but were seen as scandalous by many in deeply conservative Pakistan.

video of her dancing to a popular rap song was widely circulated, and at the time of her death she had 40,000 followers on Twitter and 700,000 on Facebook. In postings and public comments, she presented herself as a symbol of female empowerment

She became embroiled in scandal earlier this month when she posted pictures taken with Mufti Abdul Qavi, a prominent cleric, in a Karachi hotel room during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. In one picture, she is wearing the cleric's trademark fur-lined hat.

Qavi maintained that he only met with her to discuss the teachings of Islam. But the government suspended Qavi and removed him from the official moon-sighting committee that determines when Ramadan starts and ends in accordance with the Islamic lunar calendar.

Baloch's death produced a mixed reaction on the same social media outlets that helped fuel her popularity.

One poster on Twitter wrote: "A girl who decides to publish her naked pics for sake of publicity ... what her brother is supposed to do?"

But Alizeh Tahir wrote on Facebook: "I am sad to hear the news of Qandeel Baloch's murder. What saddens me more is the reaction of my nation. People who celebrate someone's death are, probably, themselves dead inside."

The leading daily newspaper Dawn published an editorial expressing the hope that Baloch's murder would spark a national round of soul-searching and finally lead to the end to Pakistan's 'honor killing' phenomenon. "The death of Qandeel Baloch conveys an insidious message: that women will be kept back at all cost; murdered, if they dare nurture ambitions to break the glass ceiling," the newspaper stated. "Her murder, therefore, must serve as an impetus for legislators to renew demands for legislation to protect women who are threatened under false notions of 'honor.' "

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Khan reported from Islamabad.

In this picture taken on June 28, 2016, Pakistani fashion model Qandeel Baloch speaks during a press conference in Lahore, Pakistan. Baloch, who recently stirred controversy by posting pictures of herself with a Muslim cleric on social media, was strangled to death by her brother, police said Saturday, July 16, 2016. (AP Photo/M. Jameel)

Pakistani police officers stand beside volunteers unloading the dead body of fashion model Qandeel Baloch upon arrival at a local hospital in Multan, Pakistan, July 16, 2016. Baloch, who recently stirred controversy by posting pictures of herself with a Muslim cleric on social media, was strangled to death by her brother, police said Saturday, July 16, 2016. (AP Photo/Asim Tanveer)

In this picture taken on June 28, 2016, Pakistani fashion model Qandeel Baloch speaks during a press conference in Lahore, Pakistan. Baloch, who recently stirred controversy by posting pictures of herself with a Muslim cleric on social media, was strangled to death by her brother, police said Saturday, July 16, 2016. (AP Photo/M. Jameel)
Turkish govt cracks down after coup try; 6,000 detained

ISTANBUL (AP)  The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the justice minister saying Sunday that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers.

In addition to those mentioned by Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, dozens of arrest warrants have been issued for judges and prosecutors deemed to be government opponents.

The government has also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.

Mourners carry the coffin of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, during his funeral procession in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

"The cleansing (operation) is continuing. Some 6,000 detentions have taken place. The number could surpass 6,000," Bozdag said in televised comments.

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities, ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan.

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets into the early hours Sunday in half a dozen cities after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Erdogan, Turkey's top politician for 13 years.

It was an emotional display by Turks, who rallied in headscarves and long dresses, T-shirts and work boots, some walking hand-in-hand with their children. Rather than toppling him, the attempted coup that left some 265 dead and 1,440 wounded appears to have bolstered Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at the rally in Istanbul, said Sunday morning.

Gen. Umit Dunda said the dead included at least 104 conspirators, describing them as mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and armored units.

Officials claimed the conspirators were loyal to moderate U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen, a staunch democracy advocate who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey. He strongly denies the charges.

Funeral ceremonies and prayers for those killed in the coup were held in Ankara and Istanbul on Sunday, where relatives beside themselves with grief. Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died in an attempted military coup.

Sela prayers are traditionally recited from mosques during funerals, though they are also performed to rally people, as they were all night Friday during tense coup hours.

A government official said autopsies have been completed on 165 people, including 115 reclaimed by their families. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Forty policemen, including twin brothers, were killed when the renegade soldiers attacked a special forces station in Ankara.

The victims also included Erdogan campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year old son Abdullah, killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul on Friday night.

Photojournalist Mustafa Cambaz also took to the streets, following calls by the president for people to oppose the coup attempt. Cambaz, who worked for the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper, was killed by gunfire in Istanbul.

The elder brother of one of Erdogan's chief advisers was also killed in gunfire while protesting the coup in front of the Istanbul Municipality building. Ilhan Varank died during clashes that lasted five hours.

The wide reach of the government crackdown raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a tumultuous region swept by conflict and extremism.

Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

"It will allow him (Erdogan) to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before and find strong public support within the country," he said.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve."

Security forces on Sunday rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged coup links. The state news agency Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for their alleged involvement with the group reportedly responsible for the failed coup.

The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." The agency said 58 homes of prosecutors and judges have been searched.

Officials say 2,745 judges and prosecutors across the country have been dismissed.

The coup attempt began late Friday with tanks rolling into the streets of the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul as Erdogan was on vacation. Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night. It quickly became clear, however, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government. In a dramatic iPhone interview broadcast on TV, Erdogan urged supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

In an unusual show of unity, Turkey's four main political parties released a joint declaration denouncing the coup attempt, as did Turkey's NATO allies, including President Barack Obama.

Before the weekend's chaos, Turkey  a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group  had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen but at a news conference Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny."

Flights resumed late Saturday into Istanbul's Ataturk Airport after being halted for nearly 24 hours but Turkish Airlines said Sunday it had to cancel 196 flights because of a backlog of traffic.

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Fraser reported from Ankara. Dominique Soguel, Emrah Gurel, Bram Janssen and Cinar Kiper in Istanbul and Mucahit Ceylan in Ankara also contributed.

Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

People gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

People apprehend a Turkish soldier, third right in blue, that participated in the attempted coup, on Istanbul's Bosporus Bridge, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the nation Saturday that his government was working to crush a coup attempt after a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire across the capital that left dozens dead and scores wounded. Government officials said the coup appeared to have failed as Turks took to the streets overnight to confront troops attempting to take over the country. (AP Photo/Selcuk Samiloglu)

People chant slogans as they gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

People chant slogans during a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A woman looks up during a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A man holds his child at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

People gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

The sister of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The wife, right, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The wife, center, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The mother, right, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Mourners pray over the coffin of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer looks at burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer looks at burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer walks between burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish citizens pass by burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish citizens walk past burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish citizens walk past burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Trump ready to complete improbable rise at GOP convention

CLEVELAND (AP)  A year ago, few imagined Donald Trump as a headline speaker at the Republican National Convention  let alone as its star.

Back then, maybe the billionaire New Yorker was alone in thinking he would arrive in Cleveland this week as the GOP's presumptive nominee for president. There are still some Republicans trying to stop him, but the party's four-day coronation of its unlikely White House hopeful will complete his rise from real estate mogul to potential leader of the free world.

"It was quite a journey," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said. "Not just what he was able to do in getting more votes than any Republican in the history of our party, but do it with 16 people running. It is a remarkable thing."

CORRECTS PHOTOGRAPHER TO JOHN LOCHER - A woman arrives at Quicken Loans Arena as preparations take place for the Republican National Convention, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/John Locher)

Indeed, the man who opened his campaign as a late night TV punchline will face the nation as the Republican Party standard-bearer, delivering what could be the most watched convention speech of all time.

Trump will do so in a time of tumult at home and abroad, punctuated Sunday by the fatal shooting of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Earlier this month the slaying of a black man in Baton Rouge by white officers led to protests nationwide and heightened concerns about the state of race relations in America. President Barack Obama, responding to the shooting Sunday, noted that the incidents had come just before political conventions that tend to involve "overheated" rhetoric, and he urged both parties to avoid "careless accusations" intended to score political points.

"Everyone right now, focus on words and actions that can unite this country, rather than divide us further," Obama said.

But Trump, insinuating that Obama held some responsibility, earlier blamed a "lack of leadership" for that shooting and added on Twitter, "We demand law and order." Democrat Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, echoed Obama's words in a statement urging Americans not to "turn our backs on each other."

In the days before the convention was set to open, Trump's choice of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate was overshadowed by a terror attack in France and attempted coup in Turkey.

Protests are widely expected outside the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, where the city's police chief, Calvin Williams, said Sunday that it seems everyone is coming to town to "exercise their First Amendment rights."

The circumstances only add to the attention placed on Trump and his politically incorrect and unscripted campaign, which has successfully tapped into a wave of populist anger that few others saw as the race for president began more than a year ago.

Trump has thrilled supporters with a willingness to hurl insults at Democrats and Republican alike, tearing them down them with pet nicknames: "Little Marco" and "Crooked Hillary" among them. Yet his lack of discipline and disorganized campaign has turned off many Republican leaders. His blunt tone and aggressive approach to immigration and terrorism has done the same with key segments of general election voters: women, blacks and Hispanics, especially.

According to any number of preference polls, Trump heads into the convention as one of the most unpopular major party nominees ever.

All of it makes the convention starting Monday must-see TV.

"He doesn't have natural filters," New York GOP Chairman Ed Cox said. "Let's see about the acceptance speech. That's probably going to be the most watched acceptance speech ever, because it's going to be dramatic. People don't know exactly what it's going to be."

An estimated 30 million people watched 2012 nominee Mitt Romney address the convention four years ago. After setting ratings records throughout the Republican primary season, Trump could very well shatter that number.

But what those tuning in will see between the chairman's opening gavel Monday afternoon and when roughly 125,000 balloons fall from the rafters at Quicken Loans Arena at the end of Trump's speech Thursday night remains, to a large degree, a mystery.

"We want America to understand who Donald Trump the man is, not just Donald Trump the candidate," Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, said Sunday on the convention floor.

It wasn't until the evening before before the convention was set to begin that GOP officials released a full list of speakers or said who will speak when. The party said the first night's theme would be "Make America Safe Again," followed by a focus on jobs on Tuesday. Monday's headliners include Trump's wife, Melania, and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, while Trump's children Tiffany and Donald Jr. will speak on Tuesday. Pence will speak on Wednesday.

Plenty of Republicans are skipping the show  including the GOP's two living ex-presidents and its last three nominees. While an official printed convention program features Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rob Portman near the front, neither will speak or even appear inside the convention hall.

The only professional athlete on the program is pro golfer Natalie Gulbis, after college football star Tim Tebow called his attendance "a rumor." Ivanka Trump's rabbi, scheduled to deliver the opening prayer, also backed out.

The pre-convention show got off to a rocky start, as the addition of Pence to the ticket dragged out over a few days amid rumblings that Trump was having second thoughts. Trump called the Indiana governor "my first choice" when introducing him Saturday in New York, but spent most of his 28-minute speech talking about anything but his new running mate and spent only a few seconds with him on stage.

Trump and his allies do appear to have quashed a rebellion from the so-called "Never Trump" movement. Rebel delegates still vow to cause convention mischief, but Trump will get an immediate boost when the nomination roll call starts with Alabama. At the mic will be delegation chairman Jeff Sessions, the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump and one of his most full-throated supporters in Congress.

"This 'Never Trump' push, it's been an interesting story, but it's one of noise at this point, not of substance," Alabama GOP Chairwoman Terry Lathan said Sunday.

That moment may help Trump score what he needs most from the convention: a picture of a Republican Party united behind his candidacy. To do it, the RNC chairman suggests that for this week, the infamously freewheeling Trump would do well to follow the script.

"He does really well on the teleprompters," Priebus told The Associated Press. "It really is, I think, presidential."

___

Associated Press writers Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Josh Lederman in Cleveland contributed to this report.

___

Follow Steve Peoples on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/sppeoples

Workers place a sign as they prepare at Quicken Loans Arena for the Republican National Convention, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

A protester carrying a peace flag walks in downtown Cleveland, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in preparation for the Republican National Convention that starts Monday. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Talk show host Stephen Colbert walks around downtown Cleveland, Sunday, July 17, 2016, ahead of the Republican National Convention that starts Monday. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort walks off the floor of the Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena after talking to reporters, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Howard Wilkinson, right, takes a picture of a bobblehead for sale of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. The Republican National Convention starts Monday, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Talk show host Stephen Colbert performs on the floor of the Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena during a taping of his program, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Officials: France truck attacker may have become radicalized

NICE, France (AP)  There is mounting evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Tunisian-born truck driver responsible for the deadly carnage in Nice last week, had recently absorbed extremist ideas and had become radicalized, French authorities said Sunday.

The image of a religious extremist is at odds with the portrait that neighbors and family members initially painted of a man who ignored even the most basic rules of Islam, eating pork, drinking alcohol and shunning the mosque.

Many of those who knew him said in the days after Thursday's Bastille Day attack that Bouhlel was a difficult person, describing him variously as aloof and hostile, even violent at times. In March, he received a suspended sentence for a road-rage incident  not enough to put him on the radar of France's security services.

French police officers patrol on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, three days after a truck mowed through revelers, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

But officials said Sunday that the 31-year-old had apparently undergone a rapid conversion to radical Islam and carefully planned the attack that claimed the lives of at least 84 people, including 10 children, raising the question: how did a delivery driver go from petty crime to carrying out an act of mass slaughter in the space of a few months?

Hours after the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack Saturday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities "now know that the killer radicalized very quickly."

Neither IS nor the French government have provided tangible evidence of a link between the group and Bouhlel. But Valls told the newspaper the Journal du Dimanche in an interview Sunday that the extremist group "is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks."

"That is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack," said Valls, warning that "terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time."

While authorities have said little publicly about their investigation, a French security official told The Associated Press on Sunday that Bouhlel sold his car just before the attack, which ended only when he was killed by police.

Bouhlel rented the refrigerated truck on July 11, purchased a pistol and was seen on closed-circuit TV footage visiting the promenade in the following days, according to the security official, who wasn't authorized to be publicly named speaking about an ongoing investigation.

On July 14, France's national day, Bouhlel sent text messages to people who may have been accomplices, the official said. One of those who received text messages was among eight people taken into custody after the attack. The official wouldn't comment on the content of the text messages or confirm reports that they included a request for more weapons.

At least two of the three people detained Sunday are suspected of helping Bouhlel obtain the pistol found in the truck, the official said.

Most of those taken in for questioning, including Bouhlel's estranged wife, who has since been released, described him as violent and unstable. While they all said he had long been indifferent to religion, some described a recent and very rapid conversion to radical Islam, the official said, noting that the attack appeared clearly premeditated.

Experts say that Bouhlel would have moved in an environment where he would have been exposed to the extremist ideology preached by the Islamic State group and others.

According to Yasmina Touaibia, a political scientist at the University of Nice, the region is home to more than a dozen informal mosques known to spread radical and fundamentalist ideas. Along with Paris and Lyon, it has become one of the main recruiting grounds for jihadis who have left France to fight in Syria.

A lawyer for one of those detained by police said his client hadn't recognized any signs of radicalism in Bouhlel.

Jean-Pascal Padovani said his client had known Bouhlel casually and consumed drugs with him in recent months. "(Bouhlel) wasn't really a soldier of God who went to Syria and came back to France," Padovani said. "He was a depressed person who used terrorism to justify this act."

Brigitte Erbibou, a psychologist who has long worked in Nice, said Bouhlel's reported lack of religious conviction may not have precluded a sudden embrace of extremism, noting that people who have resorted to violence in the past can apply that instinct in other situations.

"This quick flip to violence in the name of a political ideology becomes legitimate," she said. "The instructions of IS are to act wherever one is, by whichever means one can, so this (attack) matches exactly the recommendations of IS."

Sudden, extreme violence isn't the reserve of religious extremists, of course. There are grim parallels to the case of Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who crashed his plane into a mountain not far from Nice last year, killing all 150 people on board.

Investigators found Lubitz had researched how to lock his fellow pilot out of the cockpit before the crash and even briefly simulated the fatal descent on an earlier flight.

Both the Germanwings pilot and the driver in Nice received treatment for psychological problems in the past. Bouhlel's father said after the attack that his son had been prone to violent episodes.

"Each time he had a crisis, we took him to the doctor, who gave him medication," Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel told BFM-TV.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that the challenge of finding and stopping people like Bouhlel was "worse than the needle in the haystack."

If someone is an extremist of "one or two days vintage" it's easy to cause mayhem, he said on CNN.

___

Angela Charlton reported from Paris. Colleen Barry and Maeva Bambuck in Nice, and Thomas Adamson in Paris, contributed to this report.

An unidentified man, center right, wounded in the truck attack, leaves with relatives the Pasteur hospital in Nice, southern France, three days after a truck mowed through revelers, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

Sunbathers enjoy the beach in Nice, southern France, as French flags flutter at half mast to honor the people killed in a deadly attack, on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

A police officer watches people gathering around a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

Unidentified people comfort each other outside Pasteur hospital in Nice, southern France, three days after a truck mowed through revelers, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

A woman and her child pass by French flags at half mast near the site of a deadly attack on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice southern France, Saturday, July 16, 2016. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says that the truck driver who killed 84 people when he careened into a crowd at a fireworks show was "radicalized very quickly." (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A teddy bear is laid with flowers and candles to honor the victims of an attack, on the Promenade des Anglais, near the area where a truck mowed through revelers in Nice, southern France, Saturday, July 16, 2016. A large truck mowed through revelers gathered for Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, killing scores of people and sending people fleeing into the sea as it bore down for more than a mile along the Riviera city's famed waterfront promenade. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

A couple watch flowers placed in tribute to one of the victims at the scene of a deadly attack while joggers pass by, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

People are silhouetted as they walk under a canopy of arches near the scene of a deadly attack on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A jogger trots past flowers and candles placed in tribute of one of the victims at the scene of a deadly attack on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A French flag stands stall amongst a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A cyclist watches flowers placed in tribute to one of the victims at the scene of a deadly attack while joggers pass by, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A police officer surveys people gathering around a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

In this July 16, 2016 picture people look at flowers, cards and candles laid where people were killed in Thursday's attack on the seafront promenade in Nice, France. A jewel in the French Riviera, Nice's sunny Mediterranean shoreline, artistic heritage and ubiquitous open-air terraces attract some 4 million tourists a year. And it was precisely this international culture that was hit on Thursday's Bastille Day in a bloody truck rampage killing more than 80 people that threatened to dim the ancient city's sparkle. (AP Photo/Frank Jordans)
Brexit minister: Some EU migrants may have to leave UK

LONDON (AP)  Exposing the uncertainties unleashed by Britain's decision to leave the European Union, the U.K. minister in charge of negotiating the divorce said Sunday that most EU citizens in Britain when it leaves the bloc will be able to stay  but some might have to leave.

Brexit Secretary David Davis dismissed suggestions that the estimated 3 million EU nationals now living in Britain might be forced to leave, telling Sky News that "I want to see a generous settlement for the people here already. They didn't seek this circumstance  we did."

But he said if a surge of new immigrants trying to "beat the deadline" floods into Britain before it leaves the EU, the Conservative government may have to set a cutoff date.

FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009 file photo, the then British lawmaker David Davies attends a press conference in London. Brexit Secretary David Davis in charge of negotiating Britains exit from the European Union, said on Sunday July 17, 2016 that some EU citizens may not be allowed to stay after the U.K. leaves the bloc. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

"We may have to say that the right to indefinite leave to remain protection only applies before a certain date," Davis said in a separate interview with the Mail on Sunday newspaper. "You have to make those judgments on reality, not speculation."

A desire to reduce immigration from other EU nations was a key reason many Britons voted last month to leave the EU. Under the bloc's rules, EU nationals can move feely among member states, and Britain has seen its population swelled by hundreds of thousands of new arrivals in recent years.

Prime Minister Theresa May has been criticized for refusing to guarantee the right of EU citizens to remain in the U.K. after its EU exit  something that is more than two years away. She says she needs to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Britons living in other EU countries get the same protection.

Britain's vote to leave the EU has unleashed political and economic turmoil, as people and markets absorb the uncertainties about the country's economic future as it leaves the 28-nation single market of 500 million people.

Davis said he believes Britain will be able to retain access to the single market while opting out of the EU's right to free movement. EU leaders say that's impossible because free movement is a key EU principle, but Davis said "everybody is taking starting positions."

"Of course they are talking tough," he said. "If I was negotiating to buy your house or your car my first offer wouldn't be my final one, would it?"

The referendum has also put the future of the U.K. itself in question, with the pro-independence Scottish administration suggesting it could seek a new independence referendum if Britain takes Scotland out of the EU against its will. Scottish voters strongly backed remaining in the EU in the June 23 referendum.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said Sunday she did not rule out Scotland staying both in the U.K. and in the EU even if the rest of the country leaves the bloc  though it's not clear how that could happen.

"We're in uncharted territory, and when you are in uncharted territory with effectively a blank sheet of paper in front of you, then you have the opportunity to try to think things that might have previously been unthinkable," Sturgeon told the BBC.

Meanwhile, the government is seeking to reassure Britons that the U.K. can build strong and profitable trade ties outside the EU. May said she spoke with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who expressed a desire for a free trade deal with Britain as soon as possible.
The Latest: Germany says military flights resume from Turkey

ISTANBUL (AP)  The Latest on Turkey's failed military coup. (all times local):

4:40 p.m.

Germany's military says reconnaissance jets supporting the mission against the Islamic State have resumed their flights from an air base in Turkey.

Turkish soldiers march after a mass funeral for the victims of a failed military coup last Friday, outside Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday, July 17, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the justice minister saying Sunday that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

The military told the dpa news agency that two Tornado reconnaissance jets and a tanker flew missions Monday morning from the Incirlik air base. They were the first missions they had flown since Turkey restricted flights in the wake of a failed coup Friday night.

The Bundeswehr says naval patrols it has been operating off the coast of Turkey in the Aegean as part of a NATO mission to try and stop the smuggling of refugees across to Greece were not affected by the coup attempt.

____

4:30 p.m.

Turkey's state-run news agency says a total of 103 generals and admirals have been detained for questioning across Turkey over the failed coup.

Anadolu Agency says Monday that 41 of them have been ordered jailed pending trial so far.

Earlier, the agency said prosecutors in Ankara were questioning 27 generals and admirals, including former Air Force commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, who has been described as the ringleader of the foiled uprising.

Ozturk, who remained in active duty, has denied he was involved and insisted he worked to quell the uprising in statements he made to Turkish media.

___

3 a.m.

Turkey's state-run news agency says 1,800 special forces police officers have arrived in Istanbul from neighboring provinces.

Anadolu Agency reported the officers have taken up positions in critical facilities and were patrolling the city.

The report said Istanbul Police Chief Mustafa Caliskan had ordered the shooting down of any helicopters flying overhead without warning.

This comes as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered F-16s fighter jets to patrol Turkish airspace nationwide, according to Anadolu.

Turkey is still reeling from Friday's failed coup attempt that plunged the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul into a night of violence. Sunday marked a day of funerals for some of the victims and arrests of scores of alleged coup supporters within the military and judiciary.

___

2:45 a.m.

Turkey's prime minister is praising the solidarity displayed among the country's rival political parties in the wake of Friday's failed coup.

Speaking early Monday to throngs of government supporters in Ankara's central Kizilay Square, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim thanked the Turkish people for defeating the coup. The crowd chanted the name of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in tribute to the country's president who survived the coup.

Yildirim said the attempted coup showed "that no matter their political views, all parties came together arm-in-arm against the coup. They cried out together."

"This shows that when the matter at hand is the country, then everything else is incidental," he added, expressing his thanks.

In an unusual show of unity, Turkey's four main political parties released a joint declaration during an extraordinary parliamentary meeting Saturday, denouncing the coup attempt.

Tens of thousands of pro-government demonstrators held nighttime rallies in cities across the country.

____

11:50 p.m.

Turkey's state-run agency, citing the office of the governor of Ankara, says 149 police personnel have been detained in the capital in connection to Friday's failed attempted coup.

Anadolu Agency also reports that 70 generals and admirals, including former air force commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, have been detained as part of ongoing investigations.

Of the generals and admirals brought before court, 11 have been put under arrest so far as of Sunday night. The rest are awaiting processing.

Dogan news agency, meanwhile, reports 42 police officers have been dismissed from duty in the southeastern province of Batman.

___

11:20 p.m.

The new death toll from Friday's failed coup attempt in Turkey is 294.

A Turkish official says more than 190 citizens, most of them military, were killed and more than 1,400 people were wounded in Friday's failed coup attempt.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government rules, said the fatalities excluded "terrorists" in reference to those who acted against the government.

At last count, government officials said at least 104 conspirators were killed in the unrest.

--By Dominique Soguel in Istanbul.

___

10:30 p.m.

Turkey's justice minister says his government expects Washington to extradite U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating Friday's attempted coup.

Speaking to state-run news channel TRT Haber, Bekir Bozdag said keeping Gulen "wouldn't befit the solidarity, cooperation, alliance and friendship between Turkey and the United States."

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had announced earlier that Washington might consider extradition, but required evidence proving the cleric's wrongdoing.

Bozdag said there wasn't a single person in Turkey who doubted Fetullah Gulen was behind the attack

He said, "does one need evidence to prove the existence of the Sun? This is just as clear a matter." He added that Turkey would be submitting the necessary documentation, but hoped the U.S. would extradite without waiting for the paperwork.

___

9:45 p.m.

Thousands of Turks are rallying again in the capital and other cities to show their support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his party whose leadership was challenged in a failed coup.

As night set in Sunday, large crowds carrying Turkish flags streamed into Ankara's Kizilay Square and Taksim Square in Istanbul after authorities called on the public to stay vigilant and continue to protect Turkish democracy.

Similar demonstrations were held outside the president's residence in Istanbul, the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir and the coastal cities of Izmir and Antalya, according to local media reports and footage.

At least 265 people were killed in clashes when parts of the Turkish military attempted to seize power.

___

8:10 p.m.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has shed tears at a funeral two days after a failed military coup.

Erdogan's campaign manager, Erol Olcak and the man's 16-year-old son Abdullah Tayyip Olcak, were killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul on Friday night. Yeni Safak journalist Mustafa Cambaz was killed by gunfire in Istanbul.

At their funeral, Erdogan was overpowered by emotions and cried. He used a handkerchief to wipe away the tears and turned around as he continued to weep.

Erdogan vowed to take the country forward in "unity and solidarity."

___

7:50 p.m.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave signals that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment in the wake of Friday's failed coup attempt.

Erdogan spoke to his supporters in front of his Istanbul residence Sunday evening. His speech was punctuated by frequent calls of "we want the death penalty" from the large crowd, to which Erdogan responded: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get."

Adding that they will be in contact with Turkey's opposition parties to reach a position of capital punishment, "We will not delay this decision for long. Because those who attempt a coup in this country must pay."

Turkey hasn't executed anyone since 1984 and capital punishment was legally abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union.

___

7:35 p.m.

Turkish official says law enforcement officials fired warning shots at Istanbul's Sabiha Gocen Airport after backers of the failed coup had resisted arrest.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government protocol, initially reported there were clashes in the area.

He later retracted that statement saying there was "no exchange" of fire and security forces had only fired "warning shots."

Meanwhile, Anadolu Agency reported that seven people, including a colonel were detained at an air base in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

The same official said the situation in Konya was "under control" after coup backers there also resisted arrest.

"This is why we have been asking the people to stand guard and remain aware," he said.

--By Dominique Soguel in Istanbul.

___

7 p.m.

Turkey's state-run news agency says police officers have entered an air base in central Turkey to arrest military personnel.

Anadolu Agency says police had entered the air force base in Konya to round up high-ranking officers as part of the investigation into Friday's failed coup attempt.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Sunday that the coup plotters have been defeated, the coup has failed and life has returned to normal.

___

6:45 p.m.

The top U.S. military officer says U.S. officials were surprised by the attempted overthrow of the Turkish government.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Sunday in an interview with The Associated Press that he was pleased by the response of top Turkish military leaders to the coup attempt led by a minority of officers.

Dunford was in Afghanistan when the coup attempt was made.

Dunford says he hasn't yet spoken to his Turkish counterpart, Gen. Hulusi Akar, who had been detained by the coup leaders and then rescued. He said he hopes to speak to him in coming days.

___

5:20 p.m.

Thousands have attended the funeral of six people in Istanbul who were killed during a botched coup attempt in Turkey.

At least 265 people were killed in clashes when parts of the Turkish military attempted to seize power.

Among those buried in Istanbul was Ilhan Varank, the brother of Mustafa Varank, an aide to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Relatives of those killed wept and clutched each other for comfort amid chants of "God is great."

Mourners also called for the death penalty for a U.S.-based cleric the authorities blame for the coup.

___

5:05 p.m.

Turkey's state-run news agency says authorities have issued a warrant for the arrest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's top military aide.

The Anadolu Agency says Sunday the warrant was issued against Col. Ali Yazici following Friday's failed coup attempt. It wasn't immediately clear what role, if any, Yazici played in the attempted coup that started late Friday.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says the coup plotters have been defeated, the coup has failed and life has returned to normal.

___

5 p.m.

The Pentagon says Turkey has reopened its airspace to military aircraft, allowing the U.S.-led coalition to resume air operations against the Islamic State group.

Turkey had closed its airspace following an attempted coup, which was crushed.

Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook says "U.S. facilities at Incirlik are still operating on internal power sources, but we hope to restore commercial power soon. Base operations have not been affected."

Turkey, a NATO member, is a key partner in U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group, and has allowed American jets to use its Incirlik air base to fly missions against the extremists in nearby Syria and Iraq.

___

4:40 p.m.

Turkey's deputy prime minister says that crushing the coup attempt was a lesson to anti-democratic forces around the world.

In an interview with CNN-Turk Sunday, Numan Kurtulmus wouldn't comment on who authorities suspect is the chief instigator of the attempt, saying the investigation was underway.

He said: "the hierarchy of this coup, of this junta will be brought to light."

Turkish officials have blamed the coup on a U.S.-based Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who strongly denies the accusation.

Asked whether the government would start a witch hunt, Kurtulmus said authorities would purge the cleric's supporters within the rules of law.

He also said he believed that Greece, which has suffered as much as Turkey from military coups, would stand against the coup plotters who fled to the Greece.

___

3:50 p.m.

A Syrian government newspaper says the failed coup in Turkey was fabricated and aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the military.

The daily Al-Thawra said Sunday that the attempted coup was a plot by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to "avenge the military and strip it of its remaining popular support."

It said police loyal to Erdogan "deliberately humiliated" the army in front of the people.

Erdogan is a strong backer of the insurgents trying to remove President Bashar Assad from power in neighboring Syria. The Syrian government views the rebels as terrorists.

___

3:45 p.m.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says the coup plotters have been defeated, the coup has failed and life has returned to normal.

He made the victory declaration Sunday after visiting state TRT television station headquarters in Ankara.

The broadcaster was temporarily seized and used by soldiers to announce a coup on Friday.

The prime minister asked that people remain in the streets in the evenings to continue to protect and celebrate democracy.

"Another calamity has been thwarted," Yildirim said. "However, our duty is not over. We shall rapidly conduct the cleansing operation so that they cannot again show the audacity of coming against the will of the people."

___

3:40 p.m.

A lawyer says the eight Turkish military officers charged in Greece with illegal entry claim they initially knew nothing about Friday's coup attempt.

Ilia Marinaki says the officers were ordered to carry injured people in their helicopter. She says that soon after finding out the coup, they were fired at by police, were scared and crossed the border, emitting a distress signal. They were allowed to land at Alexandroupolis, the closest airport inside Greece.

The officers are being held in the town of Ferres, near Alexandroupolis, and are in court Monday.

___

3:35 p.m.

Eight Turkish officers who landed in Greece in a helicopter Saturday have been charged with illegal entry.

The officers were examined by a magistrate in the northeastern city of Alexandroupolis, near the border with Turkey.

The pilot was charged with an illegal flight into the country, and the other seven were charged as accessories.

The eight officers will appear in court Monday and are likely to ask for a one- or two-day postponement to answer the charges, lawyer Ilia Marinaki said.

The eight have applied for political asylum in Greece. The Greek government has said that it will examine their demand, as prescribed by international law, while taking into account that they are wanted in Turkey and accused of trying to subvert the constitution.

___

3:25 p.m.

A Turkish government official says the commander of an air base used by U.S.-led coalition jets that conduct bombing runs against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria has been detained.

The official said Sunday that Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, 10 other soldiers and one police officer from the Incirlik base are detained for their role in the botched Friday coup attempt.

The Turkish private DHA news agency showed footage of Van handcuffed and pushed into a van outside a courthouse.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

___

3 p.m.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of an Islamist cleric his government blames for Friday's failed coup attempt.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, Erdogan vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Fethullah Gulen supporters.

He said Turkey, through the justice ministry and foreign ministry, would request the extradition of the cleric, who is based in the United States, and his backers.

Crowds chanted "Fethullah will come and pay," ''Allah is Great" and "We want the death penalty."

Erdogan said that in democracies, "you cannot push the wish of the people to one side" but also said "we are not after revenge."

The cleric, whose movement is labelled a terrorist group by Turkey, has denied any involvement in the coup effort.

___

2:55 p.m.

Turkish Airlines says it has canceled 196 domestic and international flights in and out of Istanbul due to disruptions in air traffic brought on by Friday night's attempted coup.

The cancellations will affect flights on Sunday and Monday.

Regular operations had resumed on Saturday, but a backlog of flights congested traffic at Istanbul's main Ataturk International Airport.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had suspended all U.S. airline carriers from flying to or from Istanbul and Ankara Airports. All airline carriers, regardless of country, are also prohibited from flying into the U.S. from Turkey either directly or via a third country.

___

2:05 p.m.

Turkey's president has spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin following the failed military coup attempt.

A statement from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office said Putin said Moscow stood by "Turkey's elected government" and expressed his good wishes to the Turkish people.

It said the two leaders  who recently patched up relations following Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane  also agreed to meet face-to-face next month.

___

1:15 p.m.

Turkey's justice minister says some 6,000 people have been detained in a government crackdown on alleged coup plotters and government opponents.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag says in a television interview that "the cleansing (operation) is continuing. Some 6,000 detentions have taken place. The number could surpass 6,000."

Bozdag also said he was confident that the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey. The Turkish president has blamed Gulen and his followers for the failed military coup on Friday night, but Gulen has denied any involvement in or knowledge about the attempted coup. The U.S. says it will look at any evidence Turkey has to offer against Gulen, and judge accordingly.

Bozdag says "the United States would weaken itself by protecting him, it would harm its reputation. I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey."

___

12:35 p.m.

Prayers are being read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to rally the country to defend its democracy and honor those who died in an attempted military coup.

Sela prayers are traditionally recited from mosques during funerals, though they are also performed to rally people. During Friday night's attempted military coup, sela prayers were repeatedly recited from mosques across the country throughout the night to rally the people against the coup plotters.

Religious Affairs Directorate President Mehmet Gormez told private channel Ulke TV that "as a nation who wasn't disturbed by the barrel of tanks pointed at the people or the sounds of F-16s flying overhead, I do not see anyone in this land who would be disturbed by the sound of sela. This tradition will continue."

___

12:10 p.m.

The Turkish government has accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the botched coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, issuing dozens of arrest warrants for judges and prosecutors and detaining military officers.

Already, three of the country's top generals have been detained, alongside hundreds of soldiers. The government has also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities briefly, ended hours later when loyal government forces including military and police regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan.

At least 265 people were killed and over 1,400 were wounded. Government officials say at least 104 conspirators were killed.

___

12 noon

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets into the wee to defend democracy and support the country's long-time leader after a failed military coup shocked the nation.

It was an emotional display by Turks, who rallied in headscarves and long dresses, T-shirts and work boots, some walking hand-in-hand late Saturday and early Sunday with their children. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, the attempted coup that left some 265 dead and 1,440 wounded appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.

Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at the rally in Istanbul, says Sunday that "just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back."

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

___

11:20 a.m.

Turkish security forces have rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged coup links and issued detention orders for 53 more judges and prosecutors, continuing the purge of judges seen as government opponents.

Officials say about 3,000 soldiers, including officers, are already in detention. Almost a similar number of judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve," and the government said it would take steps toward extraditing a U.S.-based cleric it accused of fomenting the uprising.

Still, the government crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a region swept by conflict and extremism.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

"It will allow him to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before," he said.

___

10:00 a.m.

The coup attempt, which started with tanks rolling Friday night into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul as the president was on a seaside vacation, has claimed at least 265 lives, according to officials.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the process of putting down the coup attempt, while Gen. Umit Dundar said at least 104 "coup plotters" had died.

Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night. It quickly became clear, however, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government. In a dramatic iPhone interview broadcast on TV early Saturday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged his supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

Before the chaos, Turkey  a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group  had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan right, wipes his tears during the funeral of Mustafa Cambaz, Erol and Abdullah Olcak, killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan right, wipes his tears during the funeral of Mustafa Cambaz, Erol and Abdullah Olcak, killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Mourners at a funeral carry the coffin of a person killed Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

People walk past destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Ali Unal)

Turkish military personnel who were aboard a Blackhawk military helicopter are transferred to a prosecutor's office in the city of Alexandroupolis, northern Greece, Sunday July 17, 2016. A Blackhawk military helicopter with seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian landed in the Greek city, where the passengers requested asylum. While Turkey demanded their extradition, Greece said it would hand back the helicopter and consider the men's asylum requests. (Giannis Mosiadis/InTime News via AP) GREECE OUT

Mourners carry the coffin of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, during his funeral procession in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

People apprehend a Turkish soldier, center in blue, that participated in the attempted coup, on Istanbul's Bosporus Bridge, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the nation Saturday that his government was working to crush a coup attempt after a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire across the capital that left dozens dead and scores wounded. Government officials said the coup appeared to have failed as Turks took to the streets overnight to confront troops attempting to take over the country. (AP Photo/Selcuk Samiloglu)

People gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

People chant slogans as they gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

People chant slogans during a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A woman looks up during a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A man holds his child at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

People gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Forces loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quashed a coup attempt in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left some hundreds of people dead and scores of others wounded Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

People apprehend a Turkish soldier, third right in blue, that participated in the attempted coup, on Istanbul's Bosporus Bridge, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the nation Saturday that his government was working to crush a coup attempt after a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire across the capital that left dozens dead and scores wounded. Government officials said the coup appeared to have failed as Turks took to the streets overnight to confront troops attempting to take over the country. (AP Photo/Selcuk Samiloglu)

The wife, center, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The mother, right, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The sister of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The wife, right, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Mourners pray over the coffin of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer looks at burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer looks at burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer walks between burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish citizens walk past burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish police officers walk between burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
The Latest: American student confirmed among Nice dead

NICE, France (AP)  The Latest on the truck attack in Nice on Bastille Day that killed 84 people: (all times local):

11:20 p.m.

An American student has been confirmed among the dead from last week's truck attack in the French city of Nice.

A couple watch flowers placed in tribute to one of the victims at the scene of a deadly attack while joggers pass by, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

The University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement that the body of 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie has been identified. The university says it was informed of the death Sunday by the FBI.

Leslie was from Del Mar, in the San Diego area.

He was among three foreign students studying entrepreneurship at the European Innovation Academy who had been among the missing from the attack.

The other program participants still unaccounted for are 22-year-old Canada-based Ukrainian national Misha Bazelevsky and 21-year-old Estonian Rickard Kruusberg, Annie Seneard, a communication officer at the Nice branch of the academy, told the Associated Press.

Three other UC Berkeley students were injured in the attack, all suffering broken bones, according to the school statement. Two have been released from the hospital while a third remains hospitalized.

___

10:30 p.m.

The imam of Nice's main mosque says many victims of last week's Bastille Day truck attack were themselves Muslim.

Mahmoud Benzamia , imam of the En Nour Mosque, was at Nice's Pasteur Hospital on Sunday to console and pray with victims' relatives. He pointed to one weeping woman whose daughter had died in the attack leaving two of her children behind in Algeria.

"We are touched, profoundly touched by this horrible act that affects many Muslim families," Benzamia told AP Television. He said the first victim to fall in the attack worshipped at his mosque.

Benzamia noted that relatives of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhiel, the Tunisian-born truck driver responsible for the attack that claimed the lives of at least 84 people, said he wasn't a devout, practicing Muslim. Officials said Bouhiel had apparently undergone a rapid conversion to radical Islam.

"He is a madman, a fanatic who committed an act that has been put on Islam," said Benzamia. "And we don't accept this and in fact the precepts of Islam have nothing to do with this act."

____

8:15 p.m.

French authorities have detained a third person in connection with the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice that killed 84 people, according to an official in the prosecutor's office, which oversees national terrorism investigations.

The 37-year-old man was said to be part of the attacker's "entourage," according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government policy.

--By Maria Sanminiatelli in Paris.

___

6:20 p.m.

Three students on a European study program  an American, Ukrainian and Estonian  are still missing following last week's truck attack on the French city of Nice.

A communications officer at the Nice branch of the European Innovation Academy, Annie Seneard, told The Associated Press on Sunday that among the missing is 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie, who was doing a stint at the EIA from the University of California at Berkeley. He was among dozens of Berkeley students on the program, and fellow students have posted fliers in Nice trying to find him.

The other program participants still unaccounted for are 22-year-old Canada-based Ukrainian national Misha Bazelevsky and 21-year-old Estonian Rickard Kruusberg, Seneard said.

A fourth missing student from the academy, 22-year-old Estonian Hans Joosep Lahe has been located.

___

5:30 p.m.

A lawyer for the estranged wife of the truck attacker who killed 84 people in Nice says the woman was no longer in touch with her husband.

Jean-Yves Garino told BFM-TV on Sunday that the woman, who is the mother of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's three children, had been physically abused by her husband, and eventually threw him out of the house.

Garino said "it was hard, but she did it," adding, "she was no longer in contact with him."

He said Bouhlel also was violent with the rest of the family, including the woman's mother.

The woman was detained Friday and released from custody earlier Sunday. Six people are still being detained.

___

5:05 p.m.

Officials have at last identified a 7-year-old boy in a coma whose picture had been circulated on social media after no relatives stepped forward immediately after he was injured in the Nice truck attack.

The spokeswoman of Lenval children's hospital in Nice, Stephanie Simpson, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the boy is Romanian and had been visiting Nice with his parents, who remain missing.

The boy's grandmother traveled from Germany on Saturday to make the identification, after a relative in Nice reported the family missing.

The boy is among six children still hospitalized after the attack, Simpson said. She said the boy was on artificial respiration and had not undergone any surgery. Simpson said "there is still hope he is going to wake up."

___

4:40 p.m.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the challenge of finding and stopping people like the truck driver who plowed into a crowd at Bastille Day festivities in the French city of Nice is "worse than the needle in the haystack."

Kerry says the U.S. had no knowledge of the killer as a radicalized individual and that if someone is an extremist of "one or two days vintage" it's easy to cause mayhem.

Kerry, appearing on CNN, says the attack shows the Islamic State group is under great pressure, and that people are acting out in various places. He says the group sees "the noose closing around them."

___

2 p.m.

A French official in the Paris prosecutor's office says the estranged wife of truck driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel  who killed 84 people on a Thursday night rampage in Nice  has been released from custody.

The woman was released Sunday. She is the mother of Bouhlel's three children, and was in the process of divorcing him. She was arrested Friday, a day after the 31-year-old Tunisian plowed through revelers out to see the Bastille Day fireworks on Nice's famed seaside boulevard.

Investigators hunting for possible accomplices to Bouhlel arrested two people Sunday. In total, 6 people remain in custody relating to the attack that IS has claimed.

 By Thomas Adamson in Paris.

1:05 p.m.

French authorities say they still haven't identified 16 of those killed and one person wounded in the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice.

The government says 84 people were killed and 202 injured in the attack Thursday night, including many tourists from multiple countries.

An official with a special victims' center in Nice told reporters Sunday that 16 bodies remain unidentified, and forensic experts are working with DNA samples to determine their identities. The official did not give his name.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine said Sunday that one hospitalized person remains unidentified. In all, 85 people are still hospitalized after the attack, 18 of them in critical condition.

Many family members have been frustrated by a lack of information about their missing loved ones.

Adam Pemble in Nice.

___

12:55 p.m.

Pope Francis has prayed for the end of "terror and death" of innocents as he expressed closeness to families and all of France mourning the loss of lives, "even of many children," in the Nice truck attack.

Francis told the public in St. Peter's Square on Sunday that "sorrow is great in our hearts" for the massacre in the southern French city last week, and prayed that God sustain the wounded and comfort relatives.

He prayed that God "disperse every plan for terror and for death, so that no man dare spill more blood of his brother."

Francis then offered "a paternal and fraternal embrace for all of Nice's inhabitants and all of France," and invited those in the square to join him in silent prayer for the 84 Nice victims and their families.

___

12:25 p.m.

France's prime minister says the Islamic State group could have been responsible for last week's Bastille Day attack on Nice.

Manuel Valls, in an interview with the Journal du dimanche newspaper published Sunday, said the Islamic State group "is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks." While the investigation is working on details, he said "that is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack."

IS claimed responsibility for Thursday's truck attack that killed 84 people, but neither the extremist group nor the French government has provided concrete signs of an IS link with the driver. Valls said only that authorities "now know that the killer radicalized very quickly."

Valls also warned that "terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time."

___

11:45 a.m.

France's health minister says about 85 people remain hospitalized after a deadly truck rampage in the Mediterranean city of Nice, and 18 of them are in life-threatening condition  including one child.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine urged any survivors to seek counseling offered by the government after the Bastille Day attack Thursday night that killed 84 people.

Speaking to reporters in Nice on Sunday, Touraine said while scores of people who were hospitalized have been released, some may need further medical treatment as their injuries heal.

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack by a local Nice truck driver who was killed by police.

___

11:15 p.m.

French authorities have detained two more people in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man.

A man and a woman were detained Sunday morning in Nice, according to an official with the Paris prosecutor's office, which oversees national terrorism investigations. The official provided no details on their identities, and said five people detained previously remain in custody. Neighbors told The Associated Press that the attacker's estranged wife was among them.

Investigators are hunting for possible accomplices to truck driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years. He was killed by police after ramming his truck through crowds on Nice's famed seafront after a holiday fireworks display Thursday night.

The Islamic State statement said Bouhlel was following their calls to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists, but it's unclear whether he had concrete links to the group.

___

10 a.m.

Nice's famed Promenade des Anglais is gradually reopening and becoming a shrine to the dead, with memorials set up on the westbound lane of the road where victims were felled by an attacker with a truck. Some spots are still identifiable by bloodstains.

Joggers, bikers and sunbathers on Sunday cruised along the pedestrian walkway along the glistening Mediterranean Sea, where well-wishers placed flowers, French flags, stuffed animals and candles.

The site is also becoming a platform for anger at the attacker. Pained and outraged epitaphs are now written in blue maker on stones placed where police shot him dead.

Many families are angry that they couldn't find information about missing loved ones, and many are angry at police for not preventing the deadly attack despite France being under a state of emergency imposed after Islamic State attacks last year in Paris.

Pope Francis prays for the victims of Nice deadly truck attack, during the Angelus noon prayer in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Sunday, July 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

A teddy bear is laid with flowers and candles to honor the victims of an attack, on the Promenade des Anglais, near the area where a truck mowed through revelers in Nice, southern France, Saturday, July 16, 2016. A large truck mowed through revelers gathered for Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, killing scores of people and sending people fleeing into the sea as it bore down for more than a mile along the Riviera city's famed waterfront promenade. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

People gather at a makeshift memorial to honor the victims of an attack, near the area where a truck mowed through revelers in Nice, southern France, Saturday, July 16, 2016. A large truck mowed through revelers gathered for Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, killing scores of people and sending people fleeing into the sea as it bore down for more than a mile along the Riviera city's famed waterfront promenade. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

A cyclist watches flowers placed in tribute to one of the victims at the scene of a deadly attack while joggers pass by, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A police officer watches people gathering around a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

A police officer surveys people gathering around a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)

People are silhouetted as they walk under a canopy of arches near the scene of a deadly attack on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
Cleveland, a fractured city, an apt place for GOP convention

CLEVELAND (AP)  Donald Trump's effort to unite a splintered Republican Party around his candidacy is about to take center stage in a city that is itself deeply fractured.

Once an industrial powerhouse, Cleveland is one of the poorest and most segregated big cities in America. Two out of 5 people live below the poverty line, second only to Detroit. Infant mortality rates in its bleakest neighborhoods are worse than in some Third World countries.

The city's mostly blighted east side is almost entirely black, the slightly more prosperous west side more mixed. And there's deep distrust between the black community and police, in part because of police shootings such as the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and a U.S. Justice Department report that found a pattern of excessive force and civil rights violations by the department.

FILE - This Nov. 8, 2013, file photo shows Cleveland's skyline and the venue of the 2016 Republican National Convention, Quicken Loans Arena, framed by the Guardians of Traffic sculptures at the east end of the Hope Memorial Bridge in Cleveland. Donald Trump's effort to unite a splintered Republican Party around his candidacy is about to take center stage in a city that is itself deeply fractured. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan, File)

Yet there are also islands of prosperity, created in part by a wave of college-educated young people moving into downtown neighborhoods, a trend that has reshaped the city's image and helped attract the Republican National Convention, which will be held July 18-21.

"It's a city full of neighborhoods and a city full of divides," said John Grabowski, a local historian.

___

This is the place that in the 1970s  when the city was in default and a quarter of its population was moving out  embraced the slogan "Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough."

Tough is a good way to describe Cleveland's east side, where blacks from the South filled industrial jobs and settled during and after World War II. It's now marked by high crime and abandoned factories. Over half the children live in poverty.

Chris Brown, a 41-year-old black man and lifelong Clevelander, admits he was part of the problem in his younger days. "I was a thug, almost. On a highway going nowhere fast," he said.

Caught selling drugs, he went to prison for three years. Afterward, getting by was a struggle until he started working at a commercial laundry four years ago.

Funded by civic leaders, foundations and local institutions, the laundry is part of a wider mission to stabilize east side neighborhoods by creating jobs. Built inside a former torpedo factory, it employs about 40 people, most of whom have done time in prison, and operates as a worker-owned cooperative. The employees can use their wages to buy a piece of the company and get a split of the profits.

Brown took advantage of its loan program to buy his first house on the east side, where 1 in 5 homes is vacant. "Where we come from, there ain't many guys like that," Brown said.

Those behind the cooperative, which also operates a greenhouse and a renewable-energy business, aren't selling it as a solution to pervasive unemployment. But it's a bright spot in an area desperately needing something positive, said plant manager Claudia Oates. "It shows we work, we believe in work," she said.

The convention will mean more hotel sheets for the laundry to wash, but apart from that, Brown said, the money the event will bring into the city won't show up where he lives.

"I don't know many black people who've got anything to do with convention," he said. "Nobody else I know is getting a job or money from the convention."

___

Downtown is where delegates will spend their money at souvenir shops and sidewalk cafes.

It's also where millennials are moving into renovated warehouse apartments and new condominiums. Once a ghost town at night, it's now home to 14,000 people.

The city's spirits soared just a month ago when the NBA's Cavaliers won Cleveland's first major sports championship since 1964. Finals MVP LeBron James, who grew up in nearby Akron, talked about what winning meant at the ESPY Awards on Wednesday night.

"The struggles we've had over the last 52 years, not only in sports, but just in everything. Families losing jobs, communities, just poverty all over Cleveland," James said. "For us to be able to give a sense of hope to everyone that grew up in our town that we play in and the town we live in..."

In the two years since the GOP awarded the convention, vacant downtown storefronts have been filled with new businesses, and the Public Square underwent a $50 million renovation. Health care and high-tech jobs are drawing young people, stabilizing the city's population at about 388,000 after a peak of over 900,000 in the 1950s.

"Cleveland's got a long way to go. I'm not going to sugarcoat it," said Bill Mangano, a white man who bought a downtown apartment after growing up in the city's western suburbs. "We're never going to be New York or Chicago, but we can carve out our own place."

Peter Karman, a 27-year-old white man, left behind a two-hour commute in San Diego for a job within walking distance.

"All of my family and friends asked, why Cleveland?" he said. Here, he said, he can afford a lifestyle not possible in California, living in a downtown warehouse overlooking the Cuyahoga River.

___

The crooked river that caught fire during the 1950s and '60s from industrial pollution sparked an environmental movement resulting in the federal Clean Water Act. But for many generations, it was Cleveland's racial boundary.

Blacks stayed east of the river and out of the white neighborhoods to the west, fearing unwelcome stares and police harassment.

Kevin Conwell, a black city councilman, remembers his parents warning him 40 years ago not to cross certain streets or risk having the police haul him back home.

"People my age still tell kids not to go over there," he said. "How do you break down that gap?"

To this day, many of the east-side neighborhoods are at least 90 percent black, according to census data. But over the past 15 years, more blacks are moving to areas once off-limits, creating neighborhoods that are more racially diverse yet still poor.

Overall, blacks make up about 53 percent of the city's residents, whites 37 percent, Hispanics 10 percent.

What's holding back the neighborhoods now, Conwell said, are companies and unions that won't hire minorities and lenders that won't offer them home loans.

"When you're not working, you tear your neighborhood apart," he said. "That's your great divide."

___

Associated Press writer Mark Gillispie contributed to this report.

Carpenter Bill Kaim of Cleveland, works on the convention floor at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, in preparation for the upcoming Republican National Convention Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

In this Thursday, June 23, 2016 photo, John McMicken, chief executive at Evergreen Cooperatives, gives a tour of the facility, in Cleveland. The greenhouse sits on nearly 12 acres once occupied by mostly vacant, foreclosed and burned out homes. The greenhouse sits on nearly 12 acres once occupied by mostly vacant, foreclosed and burned out homes. In the two years since the GOP awarded the convention, vacant downtown storefronts have been filled with new businesses, and the Public Square underwent a $50 million renovation. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

In a Friday, June 24, 2016 photo, Chris Brown moves laundry at the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry in Cleveland. Donald Trump's effort to unite a splintered Republican Party around his candidacy is about to take center stage in a city that is itself deeply fractured. Brown, a lifelong Clevelander, admits he was part of the problem in his younger days. Caught selling drugs, he went to prison for three years. Afterward, getting by was a struggle until he started working at the commercial laundry four years ago. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

In this Friday, June 24, 2016 photo, Chris Brown releases laundry onto a table at the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry in Cleveland. Brown, a lifelong Clevelander, admits he was part of the problem in his younger days, selling crack on the streets. Caught twice dealing drugs, he went to prison in 2001 for three years. Getting by was a struggle after getting out until he found a job working at a commercial laundry four years ago. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

In this Thursday, June 23, 2016 photo, Ernest Graham talks about his experience working at Green City Growers Cooperative, in Cleveland. After just over a year into his job, Graham bought a house in a neighboring, racially mixed suburb with tidy streets and better schools. The emotional ties to where he grew up were outweighed by a desire for something better. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

In this Thursday, June 23, 2016 photo, Ernest Graham talks about his experience working at Green City Growers Cooperative, in Cleveland. After just over a year into his job, Graham bought a house in a neighboring, racially mixed suburb with tidy streets and better schools. The emotional ties to where he grew up were outweighed by a desire for something better. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

The main stage on the convention floor at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, is prepared for the upcoming Republican National Convention Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Carpenter Bill Kaim of Cleveland, works on the convention floor at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, in preparation for the upcoming Republican National Convention Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

The main stage on the convention floor at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, is prepared for the upcoming Republican National Convention Wednesday, July 13, 2016. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
Global AIDS conference exposes South Africa's dramatic turn

JOHANNESBURG (AP)  The first time the world came to South Africa for a conference on AIDS, the country's leader shocked attendees by questioning whether HIV really caused the disease.

President Thabo Mbeki then walked out of the room as a slender 11-year-old boy with AIDS addressed the crowd in response, pleading for treatment and understanding in a region where the epidemic was taking its harshest toll.

"Don't be afraid of us. We are all the same," Nkosi Johnson said. He died the next year.

Several hundred protesting grandmothers gather in Durban, South Africa, Saturday July 16, 2016, and march to the International Conference Center, to demand more government support as caregivers for children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. On Monday, the return of hundreds of AIDS researchers and activists to Durban will highlight how radically the country's outlook has changed. South Africa now is a global proving ground for treatment and prevention, including a study of an experimental HIV vaccine set to begin later this year. (AP Photo)

South Africa's official attitude to AIDS at that meeting in 2000 and for several years afterward set back the country so badly that more than 330,000 people died because the government withheld HIV drugs, a Harvard study found.

The AIDS conference was "the low-water mark for South Africa," the country's current health minister, Aaron Motsoaledi, wrote in the Mail & Guardian newspaper last week.

On Monday, the return of hundreds of AIDS researchers and activists to the seaside city of Durban will highlight how radically the country's outlook has changed.

South Africa now is a global proving ground for treatment and prevention, including a study of an experimental HIV vaccine set to begin later this year.

Today, the country says its HIV drug treatment program is the largest in the world. Life expectancy, which sank as the epidemic grew, has rebounded from 57.1 years in 2009 to 62.9 years in 2014.

And current President Jacob Zuma has publicly tested for HIV to push back against stigma.

But South Africa still leads the world in infections, with 6.8 million people living with HIV. Only half receive treatment.

"The government is trying his best," said Charity Mathe, who lives with dozens of mothers and children affected by HIV at Nkosi's Haven, a Johannesburg-based project named for the boy who challenged the president in 2000.

More solutions are needed, philanthropist Bill Gates warned an audience in the capital, Pretoria, Sunday night. "If we fail to act, all the hard-earned gains made in HIV in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 15 years could be reversed."

South Africa now wants to double the number of people getting treatment, part of a global goal to have 90 percent of infected people on treatment by 2020.

In the largely black Johannesburg community of Alexandra, one project is taking on that challenge by trying to make drug delivery as convenient as withdrawing cash.

What looks like a row of ATM machines has been installed in a shopping center, ready for an official rollout later this year. People will be able to walk up, insert their medical registration or speak via a video monitor with a pharmacy worker, select their prescription and pick up the drugs that pop out.

The Right ePharmacy project, the first in Africa, is meant to save time for people infected with HIV, who can lose one day a month lining up in health centers to fill their prescriptions.

"You used to have a waiting time of almost four hours," said Raj Gudala, a pharmacist at Helen Joseph Hospital who is part of the project. People can pick up other chronic disease medications at the machines as well, he said, explaining that "you don't want to segregate it" to HIV alone and add to stigma.

Across town, in the historically black community of Soweto, uninfected heterosexual teenagers are among the first in the world to test the daily use of AIDS drugs as prevention.

"It's a bit like family planning," said Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, who oversees the Pillsplus program.

Every week in South Africa, about 2,000 teenage girls and young women between 15 and 24 are infected, a rate so alarmingly high that the government this month launched a national campaign to bring it down.

Asking teens who are discovering their sexuality to practice abstinence or stay faithful to a single partner is tricky, Bekker said. And using condoms can be challenging for young women with older men.

Taking a daily AIDS drug, like taking a contraceptive pill, can be private. "For the first time, we have something we can offer to people where they're totally in control," Bekker said.

Major challenges remain for South Africa, whose success in fighting HIV will signal whether global treatment and prevention goals can be achieved. One issue is how the country, with a stagnant economy and regular protests over lack of basic services, can pay for it.

"It is clear that having the largest treatment program on the planet isn't enough," Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa wrote for the Daily Maverick website last week.

But people are staying alive and speaking out, and for one member of an HIV support group in Umlazi, near the AIDS conference site in Durban, that's far better than before.

"When somebody hears that he or she is positive, they come to my organization, they say, 'How many years am I going to live?'" said Zodwa Ndlovu, who joined hundreds of grandmothers this weekend to demand more support as caregivers for children orphaned by the epidemic. "I tell them, 'You live as long as you want to."

FILE - In this July 9, 2000 file photo, AIDS activist and sufferer Nkosi Johnson addresses the opening of the 13th International Aids Conference in Durban, South Africa. The first time the world came to South Africa for the conference the then president Thabo Mbeki shocked attendees by questioning whether HIV really caused the disease. Mbeki then walked out of the room when Johnson addressed the conference pleading for treatment and understanding in a region where the epidemic was taking its harshest toll. Johnson died the following year. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe,File)

In this photo taken Wednesday July 13, 2016, children play at Nkosi's Haven where dozens of mothers and children affected by HIV and AIDS stay. The Johannesburg-based project was named after the boy Nkosi Johnson, who challenged the president at the 2000 International AIDS Conference. South Africa now wants to double the number of people getting treatment, part of a global goal to have 90 percent of infected people on treatment by 2020. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

FILE - In this July 9, 2000 file photo, president Thabo Mbeki addresses the opening of the 13th International Aids Conference in Durban, South Africa. Mbeki shocked attendees by questioning whether HIV really caused the disease then walked out of the room when 11-year-old activist Nkosi Johnson addressed the conference pleading for treatment and understanding in a region where the epidemic was taking its harshest toll. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe, File)

In this photo taken Friday July 15, 2016, a pharmacist makes up packets of drugs at the Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg. In the largely black Johannesburg community of Alexandra, one project is trying to make drug delivery as convenient as withdrawing cash. What looks like a row of ATM machines has been installed in a shopping center, ready for an official rollout later this year. People will be able to walk up, insert their medical registration or speak via a video monitor with a pharmacy worker, select their prescription and pick up the drugs that pop out. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell)

Several hundred protesting grandmothers gather in Durban, South Africa, Saturday July 16, 2016, and march to the International Conference Center, to demand more government support as caregivers for children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. On Monday, the return of hundreds of AIDS researchers and activists to Durban will highlight how radically the country's outlook has changed. South Africa now is a global proving ground for treatment and prevention, including a study of an experimental HIV vaccine set to begin later this year. (AP Photo)

Several hundred protesting grandmothers gather in Durban, South Africa, Saturday July 16, 2016, and march to the International Conference Center, to demand more government support as caregivers for children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. On Monday, the return of hundreds of AIDS researchers and activists to Durban will highlight how radically the country's outlook has changed. South Africa now is a global proving ground for treatment and prevention, including a study of an experimental HIV vaccine set to begin later this year. (AP Photo)
The Latest: Trump's convention more of a family affair

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Latest on the 2016 presidential campaign (all times local):

___

9:20 p.m.

Workers place a sign as they prepare at Quicken Loans Arena for the Republican National Convention, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Donald Trump once promised a "showbiz" convention, packed with flash, celebrities and a "winner's night" featuring sports stars and champion coaches.

But the Republican National Convention kicking off Monday looks more like a family-focused affair, with a lineup that features everyday Americans, successful business people and four of his five children.

Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort says the goal is to feature ordinary people impacted by the current president's policies. That's along with friends, employees and others who've worked with Trump over the years who can talk about his business skills, his personal life and his ability to solve problems.

___

7:50 p.m.

Republican Donald Trump is defending his new running mate Mike Pence's support for the Iraq War, despite criticizing rival Hillary Clinton for voting to authorize it.

Asked about their difference of opinion about the war during their first joint interview on "60 Minutes," Trump was dismissive.

Trump says he doesn't care because: "It's a long time ago" and "they were also misled."

Trump often cites his opposition to the war as evidence of his judgment on foreign policy  despite evidence that he actually supported the invasion early on.

He's cited Clinton's vote as an example of her bad judgment, but says Pence is "entitled to make a mistake every once in a while."

But when it comes to Clinton, he says: "She's not."

___

5:30 p.m.

Hillary Clinton says the shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana are an assault "on all of us."

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee says there is no justification for attacks on men and women "who put their lives on the line every day" to protect families and communities.

She made the comments three police officers were killed and three others wounded in Baton Rouge.

Clinton says it's important that people not turn their backs on each other, but stand together and reject violence.

___

5:10 p.m.

Donald Trump's campaign slogan "Make American Great Again" is behind the theme of each night's show at this week's Republican National Convention.

Monday night's theme is "Make America Safe Again." On Tuesday, it's "Make America Work Again."

The Wednesday theme is "Make America First Again." The convention closes on Thursday with the theme of "Make America One Again."

The Monday night headliners include Trump's wife Melania and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The featured speakers on Tuesday include Trump's children Tiffany and Donald Jr.

Son Eric Trump, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump running mate Mike Pence speak on Wednesday.

The convention closes on Thursday, when the headliners are businessman Peter Thiel and Trump's daughter Ivanka. The convention closes with Trump's speech accepting the nomination.

___

4:45 p.m.

Dissident delegates making a last-gasp attempt to prevent Donald Trump's nomination at the Republican National Convention say they will try forcing a state-by-state vote on the rules governing the gathering.

But its questionable that they have that level of support needed to do so. And even if they do, it's a vote they seem very likely to lose.

Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort says if there any such attempt, "the party and Trump are going to rise against it."

The Trump opponents want to change the rule that requires delegates to vote for the candidate to which they were committed after state primaries and caucuses.

Some social conservatives also want to take power away from party leaders and limit future GOP presidential primaries to Republican voters.

Some states let independents and Democrats participate in Republican nominating contests. That helped Trump win some primaries this year.

___

2:45 p.m.

Republican Donald Trump is blaming a "lack of leadership" for Sunday's shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Trump says in a statement posted on his Twitter and Facebook pages that "We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today."

Three officers are dead and three others wounded after the shooting less than 1 mile from local police headquarters.

Trump is placing the blame on a lack of leadership and demanding "law and order."

He asks, "How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order."

The violence comes less than a month after a pair of police shootings prompted the assassination of five police officers in Dallas.

___

1:50 p.m.

Haley Barbour, former chair of the Republican National Committee, says that any GOP senators up for reelection this year should probably skip the annual convention to campaign in their home states.

The Trump campaign won't say who will speak when at the GOP convention in Cleveland this week. But plenty of Republicans you might otherwise expect are skipping the show  including the GOP's two living ex-presidents and its last three presidential nominees.

Barbour told CBS "Face the Nation" that Republicans should be supporting their nominee. But if they are up for reelection "they are much, much better off to take this week in their own states, for their own elections," he said.

___

11:00 a.m.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says Donald Trump has "pivoted" from his proposed ban on Muslims coming into the United States.

Priebus tells CNN "there is no religious test on the table," despite Trump's statement in December calling for a temporary ban of foreign Muslims from entering the U.S. until elected leaders could figure out "what is going on."

Priebus says Trump is calling for a temporary ban on immigration from countries that harbor and train terrorists until the U.S. has a better vetting system.

The proposed ban is an example of where Trump differs from his pick for vice president. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence immediately called Trump's proposal in December unconstitutional.

Priebus says the selection of Pence shows Trump didn't want to surround himself with "yes people."

___

10:43 a.m.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Johnson says there are no credible threats against the Republican National Convention, and that the city is prepared to handle anything that might occur.

Speaking on ABC's "This Week," Johnson says that includes the protests expected to begin as the convention opens Monday.

He says Cleveland is not a stranger to demonstrations and acknowledges that the city has taken out $50 million in protest insurance.

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams says in a Sunday appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" that "everyone is coming to Cleveland to protest or exercise their First Amendment rights" throughout the convention, where Donald Trump presumably will be named his party's presidential nominee.

Both Williams and Johnson acknowledged Ohio's open-carry gun law and said that had been taken into account in preparations.

___

10 a.m.

The chairman of the Republican Party says Donald Trump will bring a message of unity to this week's convention, also working to attract women, young people and minorities into the party.

Speaking on "Fox News Sunday," Reince Priebus discounted the notion that Trump's selection of conservative Indiana Gov. Mike Pence might alienate demographic groups who in recent presidential elections have tended to vote Democrat.

Priebus described Trump and Pence as being "somewhere in the middle of each other" and says Trump plans an engagement tour soon to attract Latino voters.

Priebus says Trump understands the need to grow the party beyond white voters. He says as a whole, after Trump's convention speech on Thursday, voters of different groups will understand why Trump should be president.

___

9:25 a.m.

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, says he expects Thursday night will be a turning point in Donald Trump's bid for the presidency. Priebus says that's when Trump will likely speak at the GOP convention, which starts Monday.

Priebus tells ABC's "This Week" that Trump is already an intriguing figure to Americans. But Priebus says he believes Trump's speech on Thursday will give them a chance to see his presidential side and erase any doubt about Trump's ability to run the White House.

Priebus called Trump's selection of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate a "mature pick." He also said he doesn't expect GOP opponents of Trump will successfully disrupt proceedings this week at the GOP convention.

___

5:00 a.m.

Hillary Clinton's campaign is launching a major voter mobilization drive during the Republican National Convention.

Campaign officials say the presumptive Democratic nominee is setting a national goal of persuading more than 3 million people to register and commit to vote in the 2016 election.

Clinton intends to announce the plan on Monday in a speech to the NAACP convention in Cincinnati, followed by a stop at an Ohio voter registration event with volunteers. She is kicking off the voter drive as Republicans meet in Cleveland to nominate businessman Donald Trump at their national convention.

The mobilization effort aims to capture the energy of Democrats watching the GOP convention from home each evening and harness it into a stronger voter base.

FILE - In this July 8, 2016, file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks in Philadelphia. The nation is poised to elect one of its oldest presidents, and while age doesn't determine health, it begs the question: How much do we know, and should we know, about how physically fit Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are for the job? Trump at 70 would be months older than Ronald Reagan on his election day, and Clinton will have just turned 69. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

A resident walks near a road closure on Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland, in preparation for the Republican National Convention that starts Monday. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

In this May 13, 2016 file photo, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus answers questions from The Associated Press at RNC headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Ohio's Kasich urges working together at NAACP convention

CINCINNATI (AP)  Ohio Gov. John Kasich condemned the slayings of police officers Sunday while urging that people work together for healing in a speech sprinkled with biblical references at the NAACP national convention.

Three officers were killed earlier Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in the latest violence involving police across the country, and the Republican said he learned just before taking the stage Sunday evening of the shooting of a police officer in Milwaukee. That officer was seriously wounded, police said.

"And I know everyone in this ... auditorium condemns these terrible murders," Kasich said, as his audience burst into applause. "The Lord wants us to heal. The Lord wants us to work together. The Lord doesn't want violence."

Ohio Gov. John Kasich addresses the 2016 National Convention of the NAACP, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Gary Landers)

In his address Sunday evening, Kasich described his Ohio initiative for a statewide collaborative effort on police-community relations. The bipartisan special board, which grew from a series of police shootings of blacks in the state, has been working on statewide policy for use of deadly force, improving recruiting of police to reflect more community diversity, developing data collection, and improving police-community understanding from both sides.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will speak to the convention Monday morning. GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump turned down the NAACP's invitation, with the Republican National Convention starting Monday in Cleveland.

Kasich, who opposed Trump for the GOP nomination, has declined to endorse Trump and won't speak at his party's convention in his home state. Kasich has disagreed with Trump's attacking style and presented himself as a more unifying, positive candidate.

"See, I think we all want the same thing," Kasich said. "We all want our children to do well. We all want peace and tranquility in our neighborhoods."

At a convention that warmed up for its evening session with rousing gospel music, Kasich quoted from the Bible: "Love God; love your neighbor, as you love yourself. ... Think about what that means in the way we approach others; even those that we may not agree with. Or some that we significantly disagree with."

The audience applauded several times during his speech and at the close. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney got booed at the 2012 NAACP convention when he told attendees he'd be better for black families than President Barack Obama had been.

___

Follow Dan Sewell at http://www.twitter.com/dansewell

For some of his other recent stories: http://bigstory.ap.org/content/dan-sewell

Ohio Gov. John Kasich addresses the 2016 National Convention of the NAACP, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Gary Landers)

Ohio Gov. John Kasich addresses the 2016 National Convention of the NAACP, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Gary Landers)
Former Marine kills 3 Baton Rouge officers, wounds 3 others

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  A former Marine dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition shot and killed three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers Sunday, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police here in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide.

Three other officers were wounded, one critically. Police said the gunman was killed at the scene.

The shooting less than a mile from police headquarters added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police. Just days earlier, one of the slain officers had posted an emotional Facebook message about the challenges of police work in the current environment.

Police guard the emergency room entrance of Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center, where wounded officers were brought, in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Multiple law enforcement officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

President Barack Obama urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions.

"We don't need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts ... all of us," Obama said.

The gunman was identified as Gavin Long of Kansas City, who turned 29 on Sunday.

Long, who was black, served in the Marines from 2005 to 2010, reaching the rank of sergeant. He deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, according to military records.

Although he was believed to be the only person who fired at officers, authorities were investigating whether he had some kind of help.

"We are not ready to say he acted alone," state police spokesman Major Doug Cain said. Two "persons of interest" were detained for questioning in the nearby town of Addis. They were later released without any charges being filed.

While in the military, Long was awarded several medals, including one for good conduct, and received an honorable discharge. His occupational expertise was listed as "data network specialist."

The University of Alabama issued a statement saying that Long attended classes for one semester in the spring of 2012. A school spokesman said university police had no interactions with him.

In Kansas City, police officers, some with guns drawn, converged on a house listed as Long's.

It was the fourth high-profile deadly encounter in the United States involving police over the past two weeks. In all, the violence has cost the lives of eight officers, including those in Baton Rouge, and two civilians and sparked a national debate over race and policing.

Authorities initially believed that additional assailants might be at large, but hours later said there were no other active shooters. They did not discuss the gunman's motive or any relationship to the wider police conflicts.

The shooting began at a gas station on Airline Highway. According to radio traffic, Baton Rouge police answered a report of a man with an assault rifle and were met by gunfire. For several long minutes, they did not know where it was coming from.

The radio exchanges were made public Sunday by the website Broadcastify.

Nearly 2 minutes after the first report of an officer getting shot, an officer on the scene is heard saying police do not know the shooter's location.

Almost six minutes pass after the first shots are reported before police say they have determined the shooter's location. About 30 seconds later, someone says shots are still being fired.

The recording lasts about 17 minutes and includes urgent calls for an armored personnel carrier called a BearCat.

"There simply is no place for more violence," Gov. John Bel Edwards said. "It doesn't further the conversation. It doesn't address any injustice perceived or real. It is just an injustice in and of itself."

From his window, Joshua Godwin said he saw the suspect, who was dressed in black with a ski mask, combat boots and extra bullets. He appeared to be running "from an altercation."

Mike Spring awoke at a nearby house to a sound that he thought was from firecrackers. The noise went on for five to 10 minutes, getting louder.

Of the two officers who survived the shooting, one was hospitalized in critical condition, and the other was in fair condition. Another officer was being treated for non-life-threatening injuries, hospital officials said.

Two of the slain officers were from the Baton Rouge Police Department: 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, who had been on the force for a decade, and 41-year-old Matthew Gerald, who had been there for less than a year.

The third fatality was Brad Garafola, 45 and a 24-year veteran of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office.

Jackson, who was black, posted his message on Facebook on July 8, just three days after the death of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store.

In the message, Jackson said he was physically and emotionally tired and complained that while in uniform, he gets nasty looks. When he's out of uniform, he said, some people consider him a threat.

A friend of Jackson's family, Erika Green, confirmed the posting, which is no longer on Facebook. A screenshot of the image was circulating widely on the internet.

Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since Sterling's death. The killing was captured on cellphone video.

It was followed a day later by the shooting death of another black man in Minnesota, whose girlfriend livestreamed the aftermath of his death on Facebook. The next day, a black gunman in Dallas opened fire on police at a protest about the police shootings, killing five officers and heightening tensions even further.

Thousands of people protested Sterling's death, and Baton Rouge police arrested more than 200 demonstrators.

Sterling's nephew condemned the killing of the three Baton Rouge officers. Terrance Carter spoke Sunday to The Associated Press by telephone, saying the family just wants peace.

"My uncle wouldn't want this," Carter said. "He wasn't this type of man.

A few yards from a police roadblock on Airline Highway, Keimani Gardner was in the parking lot of a warehouse store that would ordinarily be bustling on a Sunday afternoon. He and his girlfriend both work there. But the store was closed because of the shooting.

"It's crazy. ... I understand some people feel like enough is enough with, you know, the black community being shot," said Gardner, an African-American. "But honestly, you can't solve violence with violence."

Michelle Rogers and her husband drove near the shooting scene, but were blocked at an intersection closed by police.

"I can't explain what brought us here," she said. "We just said a prayer in the car for the families."

Also Sunday, a domestic violence suspect opened fire on a Milwaukee police officer who was sitting in his squad car. The officer was seriously wounded, and the suspect fled and apparently killed himself, authorities said.

___

Associated Press writers Eric Tucker in Washington, Rebecca Santana and Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans, Maria Sudekum in Kansas City and Kevin McGill, Cain Burdeau and Gerald Herbert in Baton Rouge contributed to this report.

Police guard the emergency room entrance of Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center, where wounded officers were brought, in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Multiple law enforcement officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

In this aerial photo, investigators work part of the shooting scene in Baton Rouge, La., where law enforcement officers were injured and killed, Sunday, July 17, 2016. At least three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers investigating a report of a man with an assault rifle were killed Sunday, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police here in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide. A few other officers were wounded, one critically. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Police guard the emergency room entrance of Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center, where wounded officers were brought, in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Multiple law enforcement officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Baton Rouge Police Department Officer Markell Morris holds a bouquet of flowers and a Superman action figure that a citizen left at the Our Lady of the Lake Hospital where the police officers were brought this morning, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Multiple law enforcement officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge. (Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times via AP)

This undated photo made available by the Baton Rouge Police Dept. shows officer Montrell Jackson. Jackson, 32, has been identified as one of the police officers killed in a shooting early Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Baton Rouge, La. (Baton Rouge Police Dept. via AP)

This undated photo made available by the Baton Rouge Police Dept. shows police officer Matthew Gerald. Gerald, 41, was killed by a gunman in Baton Rouge, LA., Sunday, July 17, 2016. (Baton Rouge Police Dept. via AP)
Trevor Noah emerging from Stewart's shadow

NEW YORK (AP)  Maybe it's time to forgive Trevor Noah for not being Jon Stewart.

The new "Daily Show" host is finding his footing after a rough start replacing the man who made the broadcast essential. His comedy has grown sharper, he's becoming more comfortable with his adopted country and he's finding an audience of his own, even if smaller than his predecessor's.

"Some people are still going, 'you're not Jon Stewart,'" Noah said. "Some people are still grading me accordingly ... They're doing the wrong thing. They're grading me on something I'm not trying to do. Many of them have caught on, some faster than others. All I can do is make the show for the people who wish to watch it."

FILE - In this Sept. 29, 2015 file photo, Trevor Noah appears during a taping of "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah" in New York The new "Daily Show" host is finding his footing after a rough start replacing Jon Stewart, the man who made the broadcast essential. His comedy is sharper, he's becoming more comfortable with his adopted country and he's finding an audience of his own, even if smaller than his predecessor's.. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

In recent weeks, Noah mixed comedy and forceful opinion by advocating for restrictions on gun access following the Orlando massacre, and said it's possible to both support police and activists fighting against institutional racism. Praising House Democrats who used C-SPAN and the Internet to spread news about their sit-in to support gun legislation, he said, "I haven't seen the young and old work that well together since the first 'Karate Kid.'"

Following a story about criticism directed at Justin Timberlake for appropriating black culture, correspondent Roy Wood Jr. tried to "outblack" Noah by noting he'd been born in Alabama, attended a black university and worked in urban radio.

"I'm from South Africa," Noah replied, ending the argument.

A "black Trump" rap video used the candidate's own words for comedy. That and last fall's comparison of Donald Trump to African dictators, probably his first breakthrough segment, are examples of "Daily Show" humor you couldn't imagine in Stewart's hands.

Comedy Central had installed Noah last September only five weeks after Stewart left, giving him a show with Stewart's writers, staff and format.

"You almost got the sense he was mouthing Jon Stewart's words," said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. "And, actually, he was."

That invited comparisons and, inevitably, Noah was found wanting. In Slate, critic Willa Paskin wrote of a "Daily Show"-shaped hole in culture, despite a lesser version airing each weeknight. She wrote that Noah was too cautious, backing away from tough issues. "You may still laugh, but an inessential 'Daily Show' is a real loss," Paskin wrote.

Noah couldn't ignore the criticism, or the tweets urging him to shut up about Africa and wondering about his funny accent.

Sometimes he'd disarm the haters by tweeting back but, yes, there were adjustment issues.

"I was deferring to the old style of show, because you're so afraid to tarnish an institution," he said. "You're afraid to be the person who destroyed the 'Daily Show.' Once you get that monkey off your back  you realize the "Daily Show' with Jon Stewart is over. As Jon said to me, the show died when he left. The slot exists, the name exists, but the show has to start anew."

Besides incorporating new forms of comedy into the mix, Noah said he's making the show less about media coverage of events than the events themselves. He can't match Stewart's passion for politics, so he's tried to broaden the subject matter. The political conventions  Noah will be in both Cleveland and Philadelphia this month  will give viewers a new chance to see how he's adapted.

Comedy Central had no choice but to give Noah the existing show since there wasn't enough time to create something new from scratch, said Kent Alterman, network president.

"We didn't hire him for his experience," Alterman said. "We hired him for his talent. We always knew it would be a long game, and it would take him awhile to find his way, find his voice, find his rhythm. If we take a step back and look at how he's growing, we're very happy."

Alterman points out that it took time for Stewart to mold the show in his image after replacing Craig Kilborn, and said it's unfair to compare Noah to Stewart in his 16th year.

The Emmy Awards nominations last week spoke to the show's diminished presence. The "Daily Show" wasn't nominated for best variety show, a category that Stewart had dominated. The show was nominated every year between 2002 and 2015, winning 11 times. The recently announced departure of Jessica Williams, who predated Noah and was the show's best-known correspondent, leaves a significant hole.

Stewart took a good chunk of the audience with him; "Daily Show" nightly viewership is down 35 percent since Noah took over, according to the Nielsen company.

Comedy Central says measuring Noah's show strictly on how many people watch each night is outdated, and claims that Noah has increased the show's visibility online, among coveted younger male viewers and internationally. The network said the show reaches 7.9 million people each week through multiple platforms, although it didn't have a similar figure for Stewart's last year.

"It's hard," Alterman said, "to change a rocket ship while you're flying it."

Paskin said she hasn't seen enough of the show lately to update her assessment on Slate. Syracuse's Thompson said the passage of time has helped Noah. Memories of Stewart's "Daily Show" are fading, the comparison less relevant.

"In the past couple of weeks, he seems to really have begun to do what I hoped and expected he would  and that is to find his own voice while still relying on the behemoth that is the 'Daily Show's' system," Thompson said.

___
Israeli military says missiles fire at drone from Syria

JERUSALEM (AP)  The Israeli military says it fired two missiles at a drone that crossed into its airspace from neighboring Syria.

The military says two missiles from its Patriot air defense system were launched at the drone over the Golan Heights. The military says the drone returned to Syria.

Israel has shot down Syrian aircraft in the past. In 2014, it brought down a Syrian drone and fighter jet that had entered its airspace on two separate occasions.
PICTURED: Relatives mourn victims of Turkey's failed coup

ISTANBUL (AP)  Funeral ceremonies and prayers for those killed in Turkey's failed military coup were held Sunday in Ankara and Istanbul, where the grief-stricken relatives mourned.

"God bless the society who resisted," said Lutfi Pala, a relative of one of the victims. "Our wish is that such coups never happen in Turkey, but it happens. They are martyrs. May God rest their soul."

Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died in an attempted military coup. Sela prayers are traditionally recited from mosques during funerals, though they are also sometimes performed to rally the people, as they were all night Friday during tense coup hours.

Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 161 pro-government forces and civilians were killed in the coup attempt, and a general said 104 coup plotters died. A government official said autopsies have been completed on 165 people, including 115 reclaimed by their families. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government regulation.

Forty policemen, including twin brothers, were killed when the renegade soldiers attacked a special forces station in Ankara.

The victims also included the campaign manager for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Erol Olcak, and his 16-year old son Abdullah, killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters Friday night at one of the Bosporus bridges in Istanbul. Photojournalist Mustafa Cambaz also died following calls by Erdogan for supporters to oppose the coup attempt, killed by gunfire in the streets of Istanbul.

The elder brother of one of Erdogan's chief advisers was also killed by gunfire while protesting the coup in front of Istanbul's Municipality building. Ilhan Varank died during clashes that lasted five hours.

Erdogan attended the funeral of Varank and five others at a mosque in Istanbul's Fatih neighborhood, accompanied by former president Abdullah Gul and a large security detail.

Addressing mourners, Erdogan vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of a U.S.-based Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who his government blames for the botched coup. He said Turkey would request the extradition of the cleric, who has denied any involvement in the coup.

Crowds chanted "Fethullah will come and pay!" ''Allah is great!" and "We want the death penalty!"

Erdogan was overpowered by emotion at the funeral and shed tears. He used a handkerchief to wipe away the tears and turned around as he continued to weep.

Erdogan vowed to take the country forward in "unity and solidarity.

___

AP photographer Hussein Malla contributed from Ankara. AP journalists Bram Janssen, Berza Simsek and Dominique Soguel in Istanbul also contributed.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan right, wipes his tears during the funeral of Mustafa Cambaz, Erol and Abdullah Olcak, killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

The wife, center, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan right, wipes his tears during the funeral of Mustafa Cambaz, Erol and Abdullah Olcak, killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Mourners bring a child next to the Turkish flag-draped coffin of their loved one, during a funeral for people killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, centre, joins mourners for prayers during the funeral for people killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Mourners pray next to the Turkish flag-draped coffins of people killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, during a funeral procession in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Relatives carry the Turkish flag-draped coffin of their loved one, during a funeral for people killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Relatives mourn over the Turkish flag-draped coffin of their loved one, during a funeral for people killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Relatives mourn over the Turkish flag-draped coffin of their loved one, during a funeral for people killed Friday while protesting the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

A relative mourns over the Turkish flag-draped coffin during a funeral for people killed Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Relatives mourn over the Turkish flag-draped coffin of their loved one, during a funeral for people killed Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

Mourners at a funeral carry the coffin of a person killed Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Mourners at a funeral carry the coffin of a person killed Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Mourners at a funeral carry the coffin of a person killed Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan leaves the mosque after attending a funeral for people killed Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup appears to have bolstered Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Mourners carry the coffin of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, during his funeral procession in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The sister of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The wife, right, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
AP Newsbreak: Bombing suspect killed himself before blasts

LAS VEGAS (AP)  A 59-year-old man who authorities say drove a rented car from Arizona to a rural Nevada town and detonated two bombs at the house of former co-workers shot himself dead before the blasts erupted, according to autopsy results made public Sunday.

Glenn Franklin Jones' death was ruled a suicide, Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg told The Associated Press.

Jones' body was blown up in the blasts in Panaca. Fudenberg said the body was identified through fingerprints.

This July 14, 2016 photo provided by Dennis Sanders shows a house in Panaca, Nev. after it was destroyed by explosives. Arizona police announced Friday the discovery of improvised bombs and several pounds of explosives found in Kingman, Ariz., in the home and car of a man who traveled to the quiet Nevada town and set off bombs that killed him and showered the community with shrapnel and debris. (Dennis Sanders via AP)

A motive for the bombings hasn't been disclosed. Federal, state and local authorities are still investigating the type of fuses or detonators used to trigger the powerful Wednesday evening blasts.

"He definitely ignited the devices," Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee said. "We don't know what with."

A damaged semi-automatic handgun was found in the rubble following the blast, and Lee said authorities believe Jones it used to kill himself.

Lee said residents Tiffany Cluff and two daughters fled barefoot from the house before the blast. Husband Joshua Cluff and another daughter weren't home at the time. The sheriff said the family of five has been cared-for since the explosions by family and friends. Messages left for the Cluffs by AP haven't been returned.

"I guess he was bent on destruction, but not killing," neighbor Richard Katschke said of Jones, a former nurse who once cared for Katschke's mother at Grover C. Dils Medical Center in the neighboring town of Caliente.

Katschke and another neighbor, Dennis Sanders, said Jones knew the Cluff family and helped the Cluffs build the house that was badly damaged.

A hospital administrator confirmed that Jones and the Cluffs worked together as nurses, and that Joshua Cluff was Jones' supervisor.

Lee said investigators were trying to confirm whether Jones had military experience.

Sanders said Jones told him he'd been an explosives and demolition expert in the Army. Katsche said Jones seemed fascinated with military memorabilia, but didn't say he'd been in the service.

Both described Jones as quiet and courteous, but Sanders said Jones appeared to be struggling to lift himself out of depression following the deaths of his wife and his mother.

Police in the northwest Arizona town of Kingman found several pounds of explosives and improvised bombs in a motorhome where Jones had been living in recent weeks in a recreational vehicle park.

The Cluff home in Panaca was left uninhabitable, Lee said. The rented Ford Flex that Jones drove there was obliterated.

The sheriff said a crater 3 feet deep and 10 feet around was left where the vehicle was parked, and large chunks of debris landed up to a mile away.

This July 14, 2016 photo provided by Dennis Sanders shows a house in Panaca, Ariz. after it was destroyed by explosives. Arizona police announced Friday the discovery of improvised bombs and several pounds of explosives found in Kingman, Ariz., in the home and car of a man who traveled to the quiet Nevada town and set off bombs that killed him and showered the community with shrapnel and debris. (Dennis Sanders via AP)

Police investigate shrapnel from a Wednesday night bombing that killed one person on 5th Street in Panaca, Nev., on Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
6 die as small plane crashes in Bolivian jungle region

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP)  A small plane piloted by a former Bolivian senator has crashed while trying to land, killing all six people aboard.

The chief of the airport in the city of Trinidad says Roberto Yanez was trying to land as strong winds gusted across the town of Santa Rosa in a jungle region of eastern Bolivia.

David Pedraza says the Cessna crashed Saturday a half-kilometer (about 500 yards) short of the runway.

The plane was carrying a Bolivian family that has been living in Spain. Two children are among the dead.
US Coast Guard calls off for search for 15, mostly Cubans

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)  The U.S. Coast Guard said Sunday it has called off a search for 15 people reported missing in an attempt to reach the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Survivors who were rescued Monday near the British Virgin Islands told officials that 13 Cubans, a Colombian and a Dominican were missing. They said the boat set off from the Dutch island of St. Maarten on July 9 and was headed for the U.S. territory, roughly 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the west, where Cubans have legal right to remain if they can reach land.

British and Dutch rescuers also took part in the search.

The head of the Coast Guard sector in Puerto Rico, Capt. Robert W. Warren, announced the search was ending.
Gates: Foundation to invest $5B in Africa over next 5 years

JOHANNESBURG (AP)  Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates said Sunday his foundation will invest another $5 billion in Africa over the next five years.

Gates delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture ahead of Mandela Day, when South Africans are encouraged to donate 67 minutes of their time to help others.

Gates is also in South Africa to attend a global AIDS conference that starts Monday.

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates delivers the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Pretoria, South Africa, Sunday, July 17, 2016. Gates said that his foundation will invest another $5 billion in Africa over the next five years. (AP Photo)

Gates said the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has already invested more than $9 billion in Africa. Health is a major focus.

Gates warned that if the world doesn't come up with more creative ways to make HIV treatment and prevention accessible, "the hard-earned gains made against HIV in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 15 years could actually be reversed" as high birth rates continue.

He said Africa is the world's youngest continent in terms of demographics. "By 2050, 40 percent of the world's children will live on this continent," he said.

Still, he said Africa had made notable progress in fighting AIDS, saying that the last time South Africa hosted the global conference 16 years ago, only a few thousand Africans were on HIV drugs. At the time, the drugs were too expensive for many in the region hardest hit by the epidemic.

South Africa now says half of its infected population of 6.8 million people is on treatment.

Gates noted that Mandela fought stigma by announcing publicly the death of his son from AIDS in 2005.

Gates' speech focused largely on youth and on how to achieve ambitious global development goals endorsed by countries last year.

In the only sharp words of his address, he said: "I get angry when I see that Africa is suffering the worst effects of climate change, although Africans had almost nothing to do with causing it."
Al-Qaida reports death of commander in Mali

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP)  A group that monitors online extremist activity says al-Qaida's North Africa branch has reported the death of a commander in Mali.

The SITE Intelligence Group on Sunday quoted a statement from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb saying Abu Bakr al-Shinqiti was killed during a raid on a Malian army barracks near the border with Burkina Faso. SITE said he was Tunisian.

The statement did not specify the date or location of the raid, nor did it report any Malian casualties.

On July 10, an official in Mali's Koro region near the Burkina Faso border said unidentified gunmen had killed two Malian soldiers in a raid on a military checkpoint.
The Latest: Bombing suspect killed himself before blasts

LAS VEGAS (AP)  The Latest on the investigation of explosions in a small Nevada town (all times local):

10:57 a.m.

Federal, state and local authorities are still investigating the type of fuses or detonators used to trigger the powerful Wednesday evening blasts detonated by a man in a small Nevada town.

This July 14, 2016 photo provided by Dennis Sanders shows a house in Panaca, Nev. after it was destroyed by explosives. Arizona police announced Friday the discovery of improvised bombs and several pounds of explosives found in Kingman, Ariz., in the home and car of a man who traveled to the quiet Nevada town and set off bombs that killed him and showered the community with shrapnel and debris. (Dennis Sanders via AP)

Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee says Glenn Franklin Jones "ignited the devices."

A damaged semi-automatic handgun was found in the rubble following the blast, and Lee said authorities believe Jones it used to kill himself.

Authorities say the 59-year-old man drove a rented car from Arizona to Panaca (pah-NAK'-uh), Nevada, and detonated two bombs at the house of former co-workers. He fatally shot himself before the blasts erupted, according to autopsy results made public Sunday.

Lee said residents Tiffany Cluff and two daughters fled barefoot from the house before the blast. Husband Joshua Cluff and another daughter weren't home at the time.

___

8:51 a.m.

An autopsy found that the man who authorities say detonated two bombs that destroyed a home and a vehicle in a small Nevada town killed himself before the explosions.

Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg (FYOU'-den-berg) tells The Associated Press on Sunday that Glenn Franklin Jones shot himself in the head. His death was ruled a suicide.

Jones blew himself up in the Wednesday night blasts, but no one else was seriously injured.

The family of five who lived in the house are OK.

Fudenberg says Jones was identified by fingerprints.

The detonations scattered debris more than a mile in Panaca (pah-NAK'-uh), a town of about 900 residents located 120 miles northeast of Las Vegas near the Utah state line.

Police in Kingman, Arizona, found bombs and several pounds of explosives in a motorhome where Jones had been living in recent weeks.

This July 14, 2016 photo provided by Dennis Sanders shows a house in Panaca, Ariz. after it was destroyed by explosives. Arizona police announced Friday the discovery of improvised bombs and several pounds of explosives found in Kingman, Ariz., in the home and car of a man who traveled to the quiet Nevada town and set off bombs that killed him and showered the community with shrapnel and debris. (Dennis Sanders via AP)

Police investigate shrapnel from a Wednesday night bombing that killed one person on 5th Street in Panaca, Nev., on Thursday, July 14, 2016. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
A murder suspect who has gone on the run after bolting from a courtroom in Florida allegedly received help from his girlfriend and three others as part of a plot that had been planned during jailhouse calls and visits.

LaQuay Stern, 18, and three men have been charged with helping Dayonte Resiles, 21, escape from Broward County Courthouse in Florida on Friday.

But Resiles remains on the lam and police say he is considered armed and dangerous.

Scroll down for video

Dayonte Resiles (left) is on the run and believed to be armed. He was awaiting trial for the murder of Jill Halliburton Su when he escaped on Friday. Armed police (right) scoured the area but he got away

LaQuay Stern (left) has been charged with helping her boyfriend, Dayonte Resiles, escape from court Friday. Winston Russell (right) has also been charged and both have been remanded in custody

Stern, Winston Russell, 22, and two twins, Kretron and TreVon Barnes, 17, have been charged with assisting Resiles' escape.

Sheriff Scott Israel said Stern parked her silver BMW under a bridge next to the courthouse, where she waited with Russell.

Sheriff Israel said the Barnes twins went into the courtroom where Resiles was awaiting a hearing on whether he would face the death penalty in his upcoming trial on charges that he murdered Jill Halliburton Su, 59, a member of the wealthy Halliburton family, during a home invasion robbery in September 2014.

It is alleged that as Resiles slipped out of his handcuffs and leg shackles and broke for the door, one of the twins coughed into a cellphone to signal to Stern and Russell that he was on his way.

Resiles fled the courtroom, shed his jail jumpsuit, leapt into Stern's car and sped off, claimed Sheriff Israel.

Video courtesy Local 10 News WPLG

Resiles was accused of murdering Jill Halliburton Su (pictured right, with husband Nan-Yao Su) who was found stabbed to death in the bathtub at her upscale mansion in September 2014

Russell allegedly gave him a change of clothes and also had a police uniform, although that was apparently not used.

Stern and Russell allegedly drove Resiles to an apartment and he has since vanished into thin air.

A huge manhunt remains focused on South Florida but a nationwide alert has been issued and a reward of $20,000 has been offered.

'The fact that Resiles remains at large tells me that there are others aiding and abetting in his escape,' said Sheriff Israel.

The escape was allegedly planned during several phone calls and visitations Resiles had with Stern and Russell.

Stern and Russell have allegedly confessed and laid out the plot to investigators.

They have been charged with escape and accessory after the fact to capital murder and are being held without bail at the Broward County Jail. The twins face the same charges, albeit as juveniles.

Kreton Barnes and his twin TreVon were allegedly in court when Resiles escaped. One of them is alleged to have coughed into a cellphone to alert their accomplices in a waiting car that Resiles was on his way outside

Sheriff Israel said there was no indication at this stage that Resiles had received help from a guard or other law enforcement agent but an internal affairs investigation has been opened and investigators remain baffled how he was able to shed his shackles.

'There is only two ways to get out of cuffs - either they weren't put on tight or you have a cuff key,' he said.

Resiles was awaiting trial for the murder of Mrs Halliburton Su, grand-niece of Erie P. Halliburton, the founder of oilfield development firm Halliburton Company.

Her body was found, bound at the hands and feet and stabbed multiple times, in the bathtub of her home in Davie, Florida.

Resiles is described as five feet 10 inches tall and 175 pounds with tattoos on both arms, including the names Kerry, Joaquin and Shay.
Hundreds line Cleveland bridge in pre-convention rally

CLEVELAND (AP)  The Latest on the Republican National Convention in Cleveland (all times local):

___

4:25 p.m.

People gather around the stage as preparations take place at Quicken Loans Arena for the Republican National Convention, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Hundreds of people have gathered at a peaceful rally along a major bridge near downtown Cleveland the day before the Republican National Convention gets underway.

The "Circle the City With Love" event began with a Dixieland-style band leading participants onto the bridge on Sunday afternoon.

Once people lined the entire bridge on either side, they held hands and waited in silence for several minutes.

After an air horn signaled the end of the vigil, the participants, including several children, walked back off the bridge.

___

3:35 p.m.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (KAY'-sihk) says he doesn't have authority to suspend the state's law allowing people to openly carry guns.

Kasich responded Sunday to a request by the Cleveland police union president for the suspension of the law during the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday.

The request by union president Steve Loomis followed Sunday morning's fatal shooting of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Kasich says Ohio governors don't have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or laws.

Kasich, a Republican, called law enforcement a noble and essential calling and said people are grieving again after new attacks on officers.

Kasich says the bonds between communities and police must be reset and rebuilt.

___

2:30 p.m.

An Ohio man says he decided to visit Cleveland's Public Square armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun the day before the start of the Republican National Convention to assert his Second Amendment rights.

A group called Northeast Ohio Open Carry had planned a noon rally Sunday in downtown Cleveland, but only 57-year-old Steve Thacker showed up with guns. He drew attention from news media as Cleveland police officers milled nearby and a line of around 60 police bicyclists took a break before pedaling off.

Ohio law allows legal gun owners to openly carry firearms. Thacker says he was trying to make a statement about his rights. He complained that fees and background checks associated with purchasing weapons results in the government "selling back" his privilege to buy and own firearms.

___

10:15 a.m.

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams says it seems "everyone is coming" to the city to exercise their First Amendment rights.

The Republican National Convention starts Monday, and Williams said in a Sunday appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" he expects groups of all stripes to be vocal throughout the four-day convention when reality TV star and businessman Donald Trump presumably will be named the party's nominee for president.

Williams says he's hearing that anarchists, separatists, anti-Trump protesters, "everyone is coming to Cleveland to protest or exercise their First Amendment rights."
Families caught in painful limbo awaiting IDs of Nice dead

NICE, France (AP)  The painstaking process of identifying the victims of the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice dragged into its third day Sunday, adding to the anguish of family members caught between uncertainty and grief.

Eighty-four people were killed in the Thursday night attack on the Promenades des Anglais, which happened as they were making their way home from a waterfront fireworks display. But just 35 bodies had been identified definitively by Sunday afternoon, according to the Paris prosecutor's office.

The excruciating delay is adding to the suffering of survivors.

Unidentified people comfort each other outside Pasteur hospital in Nice, southern France, three days after a truck mowed through revelers, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

One family spent days canvasing hospitals and office for news of a 4-year-old boy whose mother perished, their frustration boiling over into a confrontation with a regional official. University of California, Berkeley students plastered flyers around the city asking for any information on the whereabouts of three classmates at a technology entrepreneur education program. Several imams stepped into the official breach, posting themselves outside the Pasteur Hospital on Sunday to help family members visiting the injured or looking for confirmation of their worst fears from the hospital morgue.

"It puts them in extreme angst, and extreme tension," said Brigitte Erbibou, a psychologist who has been counselling family members at center helping victims and family members.

"It's unbearable because the more the days go by, the more they suspect the (death) announcement will come. However, until it is announced, the wait is absolutely unbearable because there is no way to come to terms and to begin the work of . the grieving process."

She counselled two children this weekend whose father was killed but whose mother remained missing. "The children were telling me, 'For Dad we know, but for Mom, it's unbearable.'"

___

Prosecutors in Paris said the identification was being carried out under an accelerated procedure established after last November's Paris attacks, using DNA or family medical records. They gave no indication of how long the process would take.

"This process is step by step, so that everything will be guaranteed the moment that the identities will be released," French health minister Marisol Touraine told reporters during a visit to Nice, where she met families at a hospital and a victims' center.

Three days after the attack, families of 12 victims were able to see the bodies for the first time. Officials also issued the first death certificates and burial permissions.

___

Among those summoned was the Sahroui family, who a grief counselor said lost a mother, an 8-year-old boy, a 3-year-old girl and an uncle. In the ethnically mixed Madeleine neighborhood, three women wearing abayas  one of them the two children's sister  left for the morgue for a final identification.

The Algerian-born father remained inside as friends and neighbors made their way upstairs to pay their respects.

Yasmin Touabia, a volunteer at the victim's center, counseled them on Saturday. "They were staggered, in a state of shock. The grandmother . kept repeating that her pain was not being able to bury them, that it was the wait. That if they had died at home, they could have been buried right away."

___

The official morgue summons, even if just for a few, was a breakthrough of sorts. Authorities on Saturday had gathered grief counsellors at several points in the city as they prepared to issue a list of the dead. But that was called off at the last minute.

Hisham Kahlfallah, whose sister Olfa died and 4-year-old nephew Kylan was listed as missing, was already waiting outside the victims' center when they said no lists would be issued, his frustration boiling over when the head of the regional council, former Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi, emerged from an official visit.

"Christian, you are not coming our way. Christian come here," he implored. "We have questions for you, Mr. Estrosi. You called the media and you don't call the families of the victims."

Estrosi strode away to answer reporters' questions, while an aide talked to Kahlfallah, explaining that they had been trying to get the prosecutors' office to release the list without success.

About the same time across town, the boy's father gave an excruciating howl of grief outside the Pasteur hospital, crying, "Bye-bye, Kylan."

Friends contacted by The Associated Press insisted that the death hadn't yet been officially confirmed, and the Nice Matin newspaper said that a hospital worker had communicated the death with a nod of the head.

Hours later, a Facebook page for victims, "Solidarite Nice" carried photos of the boy leaning against a teddy bear bigger than him. The message: "Rest in peace next to your mother, my little angel. Your sweet smile will always be engraved in my heart."

___

UC Berkeley student Abhinav Kukreja was canvassing this weekend outside the Nice police station to find three missing friends studying at the European Innovation Academy in Nice, a program for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.

"The police wasn't helping us at all. We had multiple calls. So we just decided to bring our flyers," Kukreja told the AP. The U.S. Embassy gave permission to post the number for tips, he said. "But apparently the police didn't like that we were putting out flyers."

One of the friends he searched for, 20-year-old UC Berkeley student Nicolas Leslie, was declared among the dead on Sunday, according to his school. The university said in a statement that it was informed of Leslie's death by the FBI. Leslie was from Del Mar, in the San Diego area.

Still among the missing were Ukrainian national Misha Bazelevsky, a 22-year-old Canadian resident; and Estonian Rickard Krussberg, 21, a spokeswoman for the academy said. Kukreja's flyers said Leslie and Bazelevsky were last seen at the High Beach along the Promenade des Anglais.

_____

Meanwhile, 85 people remained hospitalized. The health minister told reporters that all but one of those hospitalized had been identified by Sunday. One of the last was a 7-year-old boy whose picture had been circulated on social media after no relatives stepped forward immediately after the attack.

The Romanian boy was identified by his grandmother who traveled from Germany on Saturday, said Stephanie Simpson, a spokeswoman at the Lenval pediatric hospital. His father remains missing, but foreign ministry officials in Bucharest confirmed that the mother was hospitalized in serious condition.

Simpson said most of the 30 injured children treated at Lenval will also have to deal with having a family member who was killed or injured.

"This is the really sad part of this tragedy. It really hit deeply the families who were there. What is going to be the most difficult part to handle are the psychological aspects after, because the wounds can be healed and treated very easily. ... It is really the psychological issues that are causing the biggest damage."

___

Associated Press writers Angela Charlton and Thomas Adamson contributed from Paris.

A woman reacts after learning of the death of a relative, outside the Pasteur hospital in Nice, southern France, Saturday, July 16, 2016. The man responsible for turning a night of celebration into one of carnage in the seaside city of Nice was a petty criminal who hadn't been on the radar of French intelligence services before the attack.(AP Photo/Claude Paris)

Tahar Mejri, center, who lost his wife and his son during the deadly attack, is conforted by relatives outside the Pasteur hospital in Nice, southern France, Saturday, July 16, 2016. The man responsible for turning a night of celebration into one of carnage in the seaside city of Nice was a petty criminal who hadn't been on the radar of French intelligence services before the attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

Relatives of the victims of the Bastille Day attack confort each other as they gather in front of Pasteur Hospital in Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. A large truck mowed through revelers gathered for Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, killing more than 80 people and sending people fleeing into the sea as it bore down for more than a mile along the Riviera city's famed waterfront promenade. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)

Tahar Mejri, right, reacts after learning the death of a relative, outside the Pasteur hospital in Nice, southern France, Saturday, July 16, 2016. The man responsible for turning a night of celebration into one of carnage in the seaside city of Nice was a petty criminal who hadn't been on the radar of French intelligence services before the attack.(AP Photo/Claude Paris)

Relative of the victims of the Bastille Day attack confort each other as they gather in front of Pasteur Hospital in Nice, southern France, Friday, July 15, 2016. A large truck mowed through revelers gathered for Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, killing more than 80 people and sending people fleeing into the sea as it bore down for more than a mile along the Riviera city's famed waterfront promenade. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Mourners mark second anniversary of Eric Garner's death

NEW YORK (AP)  Marking two years since Eric Garner's death became a flashpoint in a national debate about relations between police and minority communities, his mother joined families of more than a dozen men killed by police Sunday at a New Jersey church before laying flowers at her son's grave.

"My heart is heavy today," Garner's mother, Gwen Carr, said as she stood at his gravesite holding a bouquet of yellow flowers and white balloons.

"I love you my son. You'll always be my strength," she said with tears streaming down her face.

Mothers of slain children and others, including Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, react as Rev. Al Sharpton, right, sings and speaks during services at Hope Memorial Baptist church Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Two years after the chokehold death of Eric Garner made "I can't breathe" a rallying cry for protests over police killings of black men, federal authorities are still grappling with whether to prosecute the white officer seen on a widely watched video wrapping his arm around Garner's neck. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

Before traveling to the cemetery in a white limousine, Carr joined the Rev. Al Sharpton and dozens of mourners to remember Garner at a church service in Elizabeth. They were joined by more than a dozen families whose children had been killed by police, including the family of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old who was killed in Cleveland months after Garner.

"We're not fighting for revenge, we're fighting for justice," Sharpton said. "This is not a battle against the police, it's a battle against wrong."

Carr echoed those sentiments saying families of all races need to do more to support each other and called for stronger police-community relationships.

"Let's not wait until tragedy knocks on our door," Carr told churchgoers.

Garner's July 17, 2014, death had been captured on video, which showed him calling out "I can't breathe" as New York City police officers pinned him down and one held him in an apparent chokehold. Garner's dying words became a rallying cry at protests nationwide over police killings of black men amid a nationwide debate over police use of force.

A passer-by's cellphone video shows the 43-year-old Garner, after being stopped by police officers for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, telling officers to leave him alone and refusing to be handcuffed.

New York Police Department Officer Daniel Pantaleo is seen putting Garner in an apparent chokehold, which is banned under NYPD policy, as he was taken to the ground. Garner, who was heavyset and had asthma, was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

A New York grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo in 2014 and he remains on desk duty while police officials await the outcome of an ongoing federal civil rights probe. Pantaleo's attorney has maintained his client didn't violate Garner's civil rights and that he was performing his duties, which he was trained to do.

Garner's sister, Ellisha Garner, said the wait for the Justice Department to conclude its probe has been trying on the family, but that they'd wait as long as it takes to get justice.

At a church service in Staten Island, New York, Sunday morning, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said society had to overcome "a history of structured racism to move forward." Eric Garner's daughter planned to lead a march through Staten Island later Sunday.

People pray at New Hope Memorial Baptist church before Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, and Rev. Al Sharpton speak at a service Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Two years after the chokehold death of Eric Garner made "I can't breathe" a rallying cry for protests over police killings of black men, federal authorities are still grappling with whether to prosecute the white officer seen on a widely watched video wrapping his arm around Garner's neck. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

Mothers of slain children fill the back two rows, including Gwen Carr, center right, mother of Eric Garner, as Rev. Al Sharpton, front right, speaks during services at Hope Memorial Baptist church Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Two years after the chokehold death of Eric Garner made "I can't breathe" a rallying cry for protests over police killings of black men, federal authorities are still grappling with whether to prosecute the white officer seen on a widely watched video wrapping his arm around Garner's neck. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

A woman waves her arm as she prays at New Hope Memorial Baptist church during services where Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner and Rev. Al Sharpton spoke Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Elizabeth, N.J. Two years after the chokehold death of Eric Garner made "I can't breathe" a rallying cry for protests over police killings of black men, federal authorities are still grappling with whether to prosecute the white officer seen on a widely watched video wrapping his arm around Garner's neck. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)
Crackdown following failed coup in Turkey raises concerns

ISTANBUL (AP)  Following a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government moved swiftly Sunday to shore up his power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying it has detained 6,000 people.

The crackdown targeted not only generals and soldiers, but a wide swath of the judiciary that has sometimes blocked Erdogan, raising concerns that the effort to oust him will push Turkey even further into authoritarian rule.

Friday night's sudden uprising by a faction of the military appeared to take the government  and much of the world  by surprise.

A protester salutes as he takes part in a rally in Taksim Square, Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the justice minister saying Sunday that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

The plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but it ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military, and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded, the government said.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life has returned to normal.

"Another calamity has been thwarted," Yildirim said in Ankara after visiting state TRT television, which had been seized by soldiers supporting the coup. "However, our duty is not over. We shall rapidly conduct the cleansing operation so that they cannot again show the audacity of coming against the will of the people."

Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve." Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was legally abolished in 2004 as part of the country's bid to join the European Union.

Even before the weekend chaos in Turkey, the NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly heavy-handed rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissent, restricted the media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Speaking to a large crowd of supporters in front of his Istanbul residence Sunday evening, Erdogan responded to frequent calls of "We want the death penalty!" by saying: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get."

Grief-stricken relatives in Ankara and Istanbul buried those killed in the coup attempt, and prayers for the dead were read simultaneously at noon Sunday at Turkey's 85,000 mosques. Erdogan attended a funeral for his campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, Abdullah Tayyip Olcak. The president wept and vowed to take the country forward in "unity and solidarity."

The government's announcement that 6,000 people had been detained  including three top generals and hundreds of soldiers  suggested a wide conspiracy. Observers said the scale of the crackdown, especially against the judiciary, indicated the government was taking the opportunity to further consolidate Erdogan's power.

"The factions within the military opposed to Erdogan who did this just gave him carte blanche to crack down not only on the military but on the judiciary," said Aykan Erdemir, a former lawmaker from the main opposition party and now a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "The coup plotters couldn't have helped Erdogan more."

The rapid suppression of the putsch was greeted by Turks across the political spectrum with opposition parties joining to condemn it. In a half-dozen cities, tens of thousands marched throughout the day after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Erdogan, Turkey's top politician for 13 years.

At nightfall, flag-waving crowds rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere.

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," said Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at a morning rally in Istanbul.

The failed coup and the subsequent crackdown followed moves by Erdogan to reshape both the military and the judiciary. He had indicated a shake-up of the military was imminent and had also taken steps to increase his influence over the judiciary.

This month, parliament approved a controversial bill to reform two Turkish high courts, which allows the government to dismiss hundreds of administrative and high appeals court judges and allow Erdogan to replace them with judges loyal to him. Parliament passed the bill even as authorities were grappling with a deadly triple suicide bomb attacks at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport.

The opposition had appealed the legislation to the high court unsuccessfully, but Erdogan has not yet signed it into law. Two Constitutional Court justices were among the thousands of members of the judiciary it had detained Saturday.

It is not clear how the post-coup purge will affect the judiciary, how the government will move to replace the dismissed judges and prosecutors, or where the trials for those detained would be held.

The government alleged the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of trying to overthrow the government.

Gulen, who lives in Saylorsburgh, Pennsylvania, espouses a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy. He is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey, where the government has labeled his movement a terrorist organization. He strongly denies the government's charges.

At a funeral in Istanbul, Erdogan vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen's supporters. He also called on Washington to extradite Gulen.

At two weekend news conferences, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.

Gulen even raised the possibility the coup attempt had been staged, saying it had "all the signs of a movie scenario," in order to purge the military of Erdogan's opponents.

In recent years, the government has moved to purge the police and judiciary of Gulen followers. The military, founded on secularist ideals, has been a staunch opponent of Gulen.

Gulen told reporters he did not fear extradition.

"This doesn't worry me at all. But I'm not going to do anything that will harm my dignity or that will go against my dignity," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny." So far, officials have not offered evidence he was involved.

Ziya Meral of the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, a civilian think tank affiliated with the British Defense Ministry, said the motives of the plotters remain unclear, but the allegations against Gulen were dubious.

"I am more inclined toward a network within the armed services who were disturbed about where Turkey is heading," she said.

The allegations will only add to the pressure on the U.S. government and signal new uncertainty in U.S.-Turkish relations.

The putsch attempt led to a temporary halt to air operations by the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group in neighboring Syria and Iraq from Turkey's Incerlik air base, but the Pentagon said Sunday that Turkey has reopened its airspace.

A Turkish government official said that the commander of the base, Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, was among those detained.

The state-run Anadolu Agency also said authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Erdogan's top military aide, Col. Ali Yazici, although it wasn't clear what role he may have played.

The agency said 70 generals and admirals, including former Gen. Akin Ozturk, an air Force commander, were detained. Of the generals and admirals brought before court, 11 were put under arrest as of Sunday night and the rest are awaiting processing.

Security forces arrested a group of alleged plotters who had been holding out at one of Istanbul's airports Sunday, a Turkish official said. In addition, Anadolu reported that seven people, including a colonel, were detained at an air base in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

Gen. Umit Dunda said at least 104 conspirators were among those killed, describing them as mainly officers from the air force, the military police and armored units.

Security forces rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged links to the coup. Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for alleged involvement with the group responsible for the coup.

The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." The agency said 58 homes of prosecutors and judges have been searched.

Officials also said 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

Another 149 police were detained in Ankara, according to Anadolu, citing the office of the city's governor.

___

Fraser reported from Ankara. Dominique Soguel, Emrah Gurel, Bram Janssen and Cinar Kiper in Istanbul and Mucahit Ceylan in Ankara, Desmond Butler in Washington and Michael Rubinkam in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania also contributed.

Protesters gather in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Sunday, July 17, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the justice minister saying Sunday that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Turkish honor guards carry the coffin of a policeman killed Friday during the failed military coup, during a mass funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday, July 17, 2016. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the justice minister saying Sunday that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen speaks to members of the media at his compound, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Saylorsburg, Pa. Turkish officials have blamed a failed coup attempt on Gulen, who denies the accusation. (AP Photo/Chris Post)

Mourners carry the coffin of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, during his funeral procession in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The sister of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The wife, right, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The wife, center, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

The mother, right, of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Relatives of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government, mourn during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Mourners pray over the coffin of Turkish geologist Cuma Dag, 39, during his funeral in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, who was killed by helicopter gunfire last Friday while protesting against the attempted coup against Turkey's government. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer looks at burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer looks at burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

A Turkish police officer walks between burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish citizens pass by burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish citizens walk past burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish citizens walk past burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Turkish police officers walk between burnt and destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the the presidential palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Sunday July 17, 2016, that were attacked by a Turkish airstrike during a military coup late Friday. Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)

Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen speaks to members of the media at his compound, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Saylorsburg, Pa. Turkish officials have blamed a failed coup attempt on Gulen, who denies the accusation. (AP Photo/Chris Post)

Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen speaks to members of the media at his compound, Sunday, July 17, 2016, in Saylorsburg, Pa. Turkish officials have blamed a failed coup attempt on Gulen, who denies the accusation. (AP Photo/Chris Post)
Tommy Hilfiger's SUV stolen; cops in tony town warn drivers

GREENWICH, Conn. (AP)  Police in a wealthy Connecticut town are urging residents not to leave their keys inside their vehicles after a rash of Range Rover thefts.

Fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger is among the Greenwich residents who have had their Range Rovers stolen in recent months. Hilfiger was targeted in late June.

Police Lt. Kraig Gray says the theft from Hilfiger's mansion fit the pattern of several other cases in which keys were left inside unlocked, unattended vehicles.

FILE - In a Monday, Feb. 15, 2016 file photo, designer Tommy Hilfiger acknowledges the audience after his Fall 2016 collection show during Fashion Week, in New York. Police in Greenwich, Connecticut are urging residents not to leave their keys inside their vehicles after a rash of Range Rover thefts. Fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger is among the Greenwich residents who have had their Range Rovers stolen in recent months. Hilfiger was targeted in late June. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)

Gray says Range Rovers and other vehicles have been stolen from driveways and also from public parking spots in the town center.
Party time for Prince George as he celebrates turning three

Prince George celebrates his third birthday this week.

Third in line to the throne and future king, George turns three on Friday July 22 and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's son will be looking forward to his party and opening his presents.

The prince is known for his boundless energy, with Kate describing her eldest child as "a really lovely little boy".

Prince George wears ear defenders in a helicopter at the Royal International Air Tattoo, RAF Fairford

George marked his second birthday at home in Anmer Hall, Norfolk, close to the Queen's Sandringham estate.

He was joined by friends and family, including his parents, younger sister Princess Charlotte, grandmother Carole Middleton, nanny Maria Teresa Turrion Borrallo and great-grandfather the Duke of Edinburgh.

The prince, who started nursery at the beginning of the year, might even invite some of his new friends from the Westacre Montessori nursery school to this year's birthday celebrations.

But William and Kate should take note. According to the parenting guide What To Expect: The Toddler Years: "Three-year-olds can handle a little more party than two-year-olds - but just a little more.

"Too much more can send pint-sized party-goers into celebration overload, with less than pleasant results".

Kate will have plenty of help from her parents who run a party paraphernalia business. She could even turn to sister Pippa Middleton whose book Celebrate was marketed as a one-stop guide to entertaining - although it was mocked by some for its over-simplistic advice.

The Duke and Duchess usually release an official photograph to mark the prince's birthday.

George made a rare public appearance just over a week ago when he donned ear defenders to explore the aircraft at the Royal International Air Tattoo in RAF Fairford - in what was his first official engagement in the UK.

As a three-year-old, George will be becoming increasingly independent - and might now even be able to dress himself and prepare his own bowl of cereal.

Three-year-olds can already run and jump with ease, but George may be able to balance on one foot for a second or more.

The prince, who is enrolled in nursery for a few days a week, will soon be eligible for a free nursery place.

All three to four-year-olds in England are entitled to 570 hours of free early education or childcare per year - usually taken as 15 hours a week in term time.

William and Kate could begin claiming this in September - the term after George turns three.

He is due to start full time school in September 2017, with the Duke revealing that they are trying to decide on where to send him.

Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge was born at St Mary's Hospital's private maternity unit, the Lindo W ing, at 4.24pm on July 22 2013, weighing 8lbs 6oz.

He made his public debut in front of the world's media on the hospital steps one day later, wrapped in a white merino wool shawl, cradled in his proud parents' arms.
Hazard can be as good as Messi and Ronaldo, claims new Chelsea boss Conte

Antonio Conte is confident he can transform the likes of Eden Hazard into world-class performers during his time in charge of Chelsea.

Hazard was voted the PFA Player of the Year in 2015 for the dazzling displays that helped Chelsea win the Premier League, but suffered a dip in form last term as the Blues endured a dismal title defence that saw Jose Mourinho sacked.

Having shown glimpses of returning to his best for Belgium during Euro 2016, Mourinho's successor Conte is hoping Hazard will improve into one of the world's best.

Chelsea forward Eden Hazard suffered a dip in form last season

"Last season was very bad for the players," Conte was quoted as saying in the Daily Express. "It is incredible that Chelsea finished 10th.

"When you have great players in a team with great character, and Hazard is one of them, the expectation can be very high. It is important for us to get Hazard back to his best condition, technically, physically and mentally. I spoke with him and I am very happy to train a fantastic player like him.

"Chelsea have players with great talent, who can become top, top, top players.

"At the moment the world doesn't think they're at the same level as (Lionel) Messi or (Cristiano) Ronaldo or Neymar. But there are players that can reach this level, I'm sure.
Carrie Fisher's Force awoke as she spanked Star Wars son Adam Driver

Carrie Fisher told an audience of Star Wars fans that she gave her on-screen son Adam Driver a spanking when she met him for The Force Awakens.

Fisher, 59, played Princess Leia in the original movies. As General Leia in 2015's sequel, she has a grown-up son, Kylo Ren, played by Driver.

Unfortunately, Kylo turned to the dark side, following in his grandfather Darth Vader's footsteps.

Carrie Fisher, who plays Princess Leia, addressed fans at Star Wars Celebration in London

Speaking at Star Wars Celebration in London, Fisher said Leia had been through a difficult time with her son and her partner, Han Solo (Harrison Ford).

She explained: "Han and I have a very, very volatile relationship, obviously, which leads to space divorce as you know. No, I don't think we are divorced, we're just estranged.

"Which is very rough, and we had a child, who turned out to be Hitler. Naughty Hitler. Well, you'd feel bad too if your son did all that, wouldn't you?

"But I did spank Adam when I first met him, so that felt good."

She added: "He's very tall so I don't think he was scared."

The actress added that she had enjoyed reuniting with Ford, 74 - but her favourite part of filming The Force Awakens was getting to shout at him again.

She said: "There was a little bit where I kind of yell at him. Not really yell, but it's fun to go back to the old days when we treated each other badly. That's always my favourite part, is treating Harrison badly."

Fisher told host Warwick Davis, who played an Ewok, that she was inseparable from her character.
Turkey situation still volatile, British travellers warned

The unrest in Turkey is being monitored by the British government as the country aims to restore stability in the wake of the attempted military coup, Downing Street has said.

British holidaymakers have been urged to exercise caution in the coastal resort of Marmaris, where gunfire has been heard as the Turkish government cracks down on suspected perpetrators.

Similar action against alleged plotters has also been reported in Konya, Van and at Sabiha Gokcen airport in Istanbul, the Foreign Office said.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan prays at the funeral of his campaign manager Erol Olcak, who was killed along with his 16-year old son at the Bosphorus Bridge (AP)

Some 6,000 suspects and opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been arrested, Turkey's justice minister Bekir Bozdag said, following a night of bloody conflict on Friday.

The Government's emergency Cobra committee met on Sunday morning to discuss the aftermath of the failed armed uprising, which claimed the lives of at least 294 people.

Close co-operation will be maintained with the Turkish government, while efforts to assist Britons stranded abroad will become a main focus, the committee said.

Flights to the UK from the troubled country have begun to return to normal and the Government confirmed the backlog of passengers was starting to ease.

The Foreign Office said in its travel advice that the situation was "calming" but could still be "volatile".

It advised British tourists to avoid public places, especially demonstrations, in Ankara and Istanbul, and to follow the advice of authorities.

They said coastal resorts other than Marmaris do not appear to be significantly affected.

Tanks rolled through the streets of major Turkish cities, while jets tore across the skies when a dissident section of the military rose up against Mr Erdogan.

Thousands of people were left injured by explosions and running gun battles between loyal forces and the rebel group in cities including Ankara and Istanbul, as the incident developed throughout Friday night.

The attempted uprising was eventually suppressed after civilians also flooded the streets in defence of the government, and state forces managed to regain control.

Mr Erdogan moved swiftly and ruthlessly against those suspected of involvement in Friday's bloodshed, purging nearly 3,000 judges seen as loyal to an exiled cleric, Fethullah Gulen, blamed by the president for galvanising the military faction.

The Turkish leader also said on Sunday that he might move to reinstate capital punishment - abolished in 2004 as the country made efforts to join the EU.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul on Sunday, he vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen supporters.
Shanghai Shenhua striker Demba Ba suffers horrific leg break

Former Chelsea striker Demba Ba faces a lengthy spell on the sidelines after suffering a horror leg break playing for Chinese Super League side Shanghai Shenhua.

The 31-year-old, who left Stamford Bridge in 2014, sustained the injury in the clash with Shanghai SIPG where his left leg tangled with defender Sun Xiang and was left at a right angle.

Chelsea, for whom he scored 14 goals in 51 appearances, wished their former player a speedy recovery.

Demba Ba played for Besiktas after leaving Chelsea

The Premier League club tweeted: "All at Chelsea FC send our best wishes to former striker @dembabafoot. Get well soon Demba."
Both of Istanbul's Bosphorus bridges closed -TVs

ISTANBUL, July 15 (Reuters) - Istanbul's Bosphorus Bridge and Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge were both closed on Friday, local television channels reported, without giving a reason.

Dogan News Agency footage showed cars and buses being diverted. CNN Turkey showed two military vehicles and a group of soldiers lined up at the entrance of one of the bridges in Turkey's biggest city.

A Turkish official who did not want to be named said soldiers had been deployed in other cities in Turkey, but did not specify which ones.
UK opens 'very fruitful' trade talks with Canada, says minister

LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - Britain opened "very fruitful" trade talks with Canada on Friday, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox told the Sunday Times newspaper as he prepares to renegotiate Britain's commercial ties following its vote last month to leave the European Union.

In limited extracts of his interview, Fox said he would soon travel to the United States to ensure that Britain was not at the back of the queue in trade talks as President Barack Obama had suggested before the June 23 vote.

He said was "scoping" about a dozen free trade deals outside the EU to be ready for when Britain leaves, some with countries that had indicated they wanted a quick deal and others with some of the world's major economies.

"We can make Britain a beacon for open trade," he told the paper. "We have already had a number of countries saying 'we'd love to do a trade deal with the world's fifth-biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU.'"

Earlier, Prime Minister Theresa May's office said Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had told her he would like to strike a free trade deal with Britain as soon as possible.
Soaring prison population prompts Thailand to re-think "lost" drug war

By Amy Sawitta Lefevre

BANGKOK, July 17 (Reuters) - Somsak Sreesomsong was 18 when he was jailed for selling illegal drugs. Now, turning 30, he is not yet half way through his 33-year sentence at Bangkok's high-security Klong Prem prison.

Somsak was "just a kid, not a big-time dealer", his older brother Panit told Reuters after a visit to the jail. "We're also serving time, waiting for him to get out so he can help the family."

More than a decade after Thailand declared a "war on drugs", the country is admitting defeat. As the prison population soars, Justice Minister Paiboon Koomchaya told Reuters he was looking at changes to the country's draconian drug laws.

"I want to de-classify methamphetamine but Thailand is not ready yet," said Paiboon, meaning downgrading the drug, popularly known as "meth", from a Category 1 substance, which would reduce jail time for possession or dealing.

Use of methamphetamine is spiralling across Southeast Asia, and authorities are struggling to respond.

In the Philippines, which has some of the highest rates of "meth" use, police killings of drug suspects have spiked since the swearing-in of President Rodrigo Duterte, elected on a platform of harsh measures to wipe out drug crime.

Myanmar, the source of much of the drugs flooding through the region, is bracing for an explosion in domestic use.

Overall, drugs supply in Southeast Asia, especially of methamphetamine, is at a record level, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

HARSH PUNISHMENTS

In common with much of the region, Thailand's criminal justice system treats drug offenders harshly.

Producing and trading in Category 1 drugs, which also include heroin, MDMA - the main chemical for ecstasy pills - and LSD, is punishable by death or life imprisonment.

Klong Prem is home to 6,267 inmates serving sentences that range from 15 years to life, with 64 percent convicted of drug-related crimes.

A typical cell measures 1.5 x 3 metres (5 x 10 feet) and sleeps five inmates, side-by-side on dark blue mattress on the floor.

"Some of the men, especially the foreign prisoners, are pretty big, so it's a squeeze for them," said one prison guard.

Lengthy sentences for drug offences are part of the reason why Thai jails struggle with chronic overcrowding, according to both Justice Minister Paiboon and U.N. experts.

Thailand has approximately 40 percent of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' prison population, despite having only 10 percent of the bloc's total population, the UNODC says.

Paiboon, an army general and senior member of the junta that seized power in a 2014 coup, said in an interview that Thailand would build more prisons, including 17 temporary jails for prisoners who have served at least a third of their sentence.

He added that his priority was to tackle drug trafficking and addiction - an ambitious plan in a country where a record number of people use methamphetamines, known in Thai as "ya ba" or "crazy medicine", according to a 2015 U.N. report.

A crackdown launched by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2003 aimed at suppressing drug trafficking killed more than 2,800 people, according to an independent inquiry chaired by a former attorney general.

But the country's growing number of drug users and bulging jails have forced policymakers to think again.

"The world has lost the war on drugs, not only Thailand," said Paiboon. "We have clear numbers that drug use has increased over the past three years. Another indicator is there are more prisoners."

CRISIS POINT

A 2015 report by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research shows Thailand has the fourth highest number of women imprisoned in the world, after the United States, China and Russia.

"We know from meeting and interviewing prisoners, including female prisoners, in Thailand, that the impact is profoundly negative for families," said Jeremy Douglas, the UNODC's Asia-Pacific chief.

One former female inmate, who declined to be named because of the social stigma attached to drug offenders in Thailand, said she was jailed for three years after being caught with 20 methamphetamine pills.

"My boyfriend was the dealer. I was carrying the pills for him. My son doesn't want anything to do with me now," she said.

The number of inmates jailed for drug convictions has almost doubled over the past decade, Thai Department of Corrections figures showed, a result of unsparing sentencing that puts even petty users behind bars.

"We need to change sentencing and make a distinction between small and big time dealers," said Klong Prem prison commander Thawatchai Chaiywat. "Thailand thinks prisons are a panacea for all crimes, including drug crimes."

In the meantime, Thailand's jails grow ever more crowded. Corrections department figures for July showed a prison population of 321,347, with around 70 percent jailed for drugs offences.

Institute for Criminal Policy Research data showed Thailand has the eighth highest incarceration rate in the world.
Earthquake measuring 5.0 rattles Tokyo and eastern Japan

TOKYO, July 17 (Reuters) - An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.0 struck eastern Japan on Sunday, Japan's Meteorological Agency and the US Geological Survey (USGS) said, rattling buildings in Tokyo.

The USGS put the epicentre of the quake 44 km (27 miles) northwest of Tokyo at a depth of about 44 km. There were no were immediate reports of damage.
Australia keen on early free trade deal with Britain - May's office

LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told his British counterpart Theresa May he would like to see the two countries strike a free trade deal as soon as possible following Britain's vote to leave the EU, May's office said on Sunday.

The two leaders had spoken on Saturday to discuss their priorities after May took office on Wednesday and Turnbull retained power a week ago in a national election.

Turnbull had congratulated May, her office said in a statement, and "expressed a desire to strike a free trade deal as soon as possible".

While acknowledging that legal obligations prevent Britain from signing deals while still an EU member, May had replied she would be very keen to complete an agreement as soon as possible, the statement said.

"I have been very clear that this government will make a success of our exit from the European Union," it quoted her as saying afterwards. "One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe."

She added: "It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal."

Turnbull confirmed in Sydney on Sunday that he had discussed a free trade agreement with May, describing their conversation as constructive.

"Clearly our free trade arrangements with the United Kingdom of course are with the European community," he told reporters.

"So as Britain leaves the EU, what we will need to do is negotiate direct arrangements with Britain," he said.

Britain's June 23 vote to leave the European Union means the world's fifth-largest economy will have to negotiate new trade deals with Europe and other major markets in talks that could take years.

The European Commission hammers out trade deals on behalf of EU countries, meaning Britain has not negotiated its own deal since it joined the bloc in 1973.
Armed men in Armenia seize police station, demand politicians' release

By Hasmik Mkrtchyan and Andrew Osborn

YEREVAN/MOSCOW, July 17 (Reuters) - Armed men seized a police station and hostages in Armenia's capital Yerevan on Sunday, killing one police officer in the process before demanding Armenians take to the streets to secure the release of jailed opposition politicians.

Their main demand was to free Jirair Sefilian, an opposition leader whom the authorities have accused of plotting civil unrest. Sefilian was jailed in June over allegations of illegally possessing weapons.

Armenia's security service said one policeman had been killed and two wounded in the violence, but that negotiations were now underway to try to persuade the hostage takers to lay down their weapons.

"Special units remain on the scene in a state of combat readiness, but the order to attack or take any other action has not been given to them," the National Security Service said in a statement.

Two hostages had been freed, it said, and "several" hostages remained. The city's deputy police chief, Valery Osipyan, was reported to be among them. Photographs from the scene show the area crowded with white armoured police vehicles.

Though far smaller in scale, suggestions by one opposition politician that an armed uprising was underway stoked speculation that the hostage takers had drawn inspiration from an unsuccessful coup attempt in neighbouring Turkey.

President Serzh Sargsyan held a meeting with security officials to decide how best to handle the situation, his office said, saying he had been told that the siege was completely under control.

The National Security Service accused the hostage takers' supporters of spreading false rumours on the internet about an uprising and the seizure of other buildings. Such assertions were "disinformation," it said.

DEMANDS

Video footage of the hostage takers posted on Russia's lifenews.ru portal showed the men, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, and wearing bullet proof vests, listing their demands.

"Dear compatriots. It has started. We ask everyone to take to the streets," one of the men said. "Our demand is to set free all political prisoners ... and for them to be brought here."

Another hostage-taker said: "The police station has been in our hands for three and a half hours. We have captured all the weapons. There is no other way. We appeal to you. Don't leave us here alone. We are doing our bit - you do your bit."

There were no reports of crowds taking to the streets.

Several prominent Armenian political commentators said the men appeared to sympathise with the Founding Parliament opposition group, which they said did not enjoy wide support.

At least one other opposition group, Flourishing Armenia, denounced the violence and said the men were unlikely to inspire more than 50 people to take to the streets.

Some Armenian news outlets reported that the armed men were also demanding that the president quit. Reuters could not confirm that assertion.

Sefilian, a former military commander and the man the hostage takers most want freed, has strongly criticised President Sargsyan in the past, saying he is unhappy about the way the government has been handling a long-running conflict between pro-Armenian separatists and the breakaway Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

A Moscow-brokered ceasefire halted four days of violence in the South Caucasus region on April 5, the worst flare-up in years, but sporadic shooting is still frequent at night and people on both sides have been killed since.
Bahrain court dissolves main Shi'ite opposition

DUBAI, July 17 (Reuters) - A Bahrain court on Sunday dissolved the main Shi'ite Muslim opposition group al-Wefaq, accusing it of helping to foster violence and terrorism, in an escalation of a crackdown on dissent in the U.S.-allied Gulf kingdom.

The official Bahrain News Agency (BNA) said the court ruled that Wefaq had taken aim at "respect for the rule of law and the foundations of citizenship based on coexistence, tolerance and respect for others; provided an atmosphere for the incubation of terrorism, extremism and violence and for foreign interference in national affairs."

Its funds would be claimed by the state treasury, BNA said.

Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, has a Shi'ite majority but a Sunni Muslim-led government, mainly drawn from the ruling al-Khalifa family. Seen by other Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdoms like Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against Iranian influence, it put down Arab Spring protests in 2011.

It drew U.S. and U.N. criticism in June when it moved to strip a top Shi'ite cleric's citizenship and announced it was suspending Wefaq and closing its offices.

Close ally Britain expressed deep concern at Sunday's ruling. In a statement, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged Bahrain to guarantee political freedoms for all its citizens.

He called for a dialogue among all sides to "promote social cohesion and inclusivity, including political representation, for all Bahrainis. I understand there is a right of appeal."

A U.S.-based rights group said the latest ruling had left no outlet for peaceful grievances in the island monarchy.

"Today's decision is a dangerous mistake, leaving no real outlet for peaceful grievance," said Brian Dooley of Human Rights First. "The kingdom's government has told its people that from now on not only are you not allowed rights, you're not allowed to complain about it."

"DANGEROUS MISTAKE"

Bahraini Shi'ites complain of discrimination by the government. Since the authorities crushed street protests in 2011, demonstrators have clashed frequently with security forces, who have been targeted by several bomb attacks.

Bahraini authorities deny any discrimination. Bahrain has accused the opposition of undermining security and blamed the bombings on Iran and Lebanon's armed Shi'ite group Hezbollah. Iran and Hezbollah deny any involvement in Bahrain's unrest.

Dooley said U.S. President Barack Obama should respond swiftly by reimposing a ban on U.S. arms transfers to Bahrain's military that the U.S. State Department imposed after the 20011 crackdown but lifted a year ago.
Armed men seize police station, hostages in Armenia - security service

YEREVAN, July 17 (Reuters) - A group of armed men seized a police station in Armenia's capital Yerevan along with an unknown number of hostages on Sunday morning, the country's security service said.
Israel's Adama says makes progress towards Sanonda merger

JERUSALEM, July 17 (Reuters) - Adama Agricultural Solutions said on Sunday a possible merger with smaller Chinese rival Sanonda, first announced last year, could be completed in the first half of 2017.

Sanonda is a subsidiary of China National Chemical Corp (ChemChina), which also owns 60 percent of Adama and may also buy the remaining 40 percent of the Israeli company, which is the world's biggest producer of generic crop protection products.

The proposed deal is part of a big push among global agrochemicals companies to consolidate, partly in response to a drop in commodity prices that has hit farm incomes.

ChemChina is in the process of acquiring Swiss pesticides and seeds maker Syngenta for $43 billion but its business is expected to be run separately from Adama.

Adama said two recent developments had helped to pave the way for the potential merger.

The first was when a Chinese agency published a proposed amendment to China's securities regulations that would allow a global entity to be combined with one publicly-traded in China. Sanonda is listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

That was followed by Adama shareholders agreeing to a unit of ChemChina, or a third party designated by it, buying the remaining 40 percent stake in Adama from Israel's Discount Investment Corp. That transaction would value Adama's equity at approximately $3.5 billion.

The merger of Adama and Sanonda would speed up Adama's integration into China and allow it to be floated on the Shenzhen exchange, Adama said.

Sanonda's shares have been suspended from trading since Aug. 2015 when the proposed combination was first announced. They are expected to resume on Aug. 4, when Adama said it hoped to conclude the framework of the deal.
Putin asks Turkey's Erdogan to ensure safety of Russian tourists

MOSCOW, July 17 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin phoned his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan, saying he hoped Russian tourists would be protected in the aftermath of the failed coup attempt, according to a Kremlin statement on Sunday.

Putin said Russia found anti-constitutional acts and violence unacceptable and was hoping for the restoration of order and stability in Turkey, the statement said.
Israel expects reconciliation with Turkey to remain on course

JERUSALEM, July 17 (Reuters) - Israel reacted tersely on Sunday to a thwarted coup in Turkey, saying it expected a new reconciliation deal between the two regional powers following a six-year rift to be implemented as planned.

Violence erupted in Turkey late on Friday after the start of the Jewish Sabbath, when most government business officially takes a break.

This allowed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu time to consider his response on the move against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, long a critic of Israeli policies but now a key player in the rapprochement with Israel.

When the announcement came, it was brief and measured, coming three weeks after Israel and Turkey - once its principal Muslim ally - signed an accord to restore relations.

"Israel and Turkey recently agreed on a reconciliation process. We estimate that this process will continue, unrelated to the dramatic events in Turkey over the weekend," Netanyahu told his cabinet in televised comments.

On Saturday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman sent a text message to reporters on Saturday that spoke of Israel's respect for "the democratic process in Turkey".

Relations between the two countries crumbled after Israeli marines stormed a Turkish activist ship in May 2010 to enforce a naval blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, killing 10 Turks on board.

Israel, which had already offered its apologies for the raid, agreed under the deal to pay out $20 million to the bereaved and injured.
Despite reform, Saudi "guardianship" still restricts women - HRW

By Tom Finn

DOHA, July 17 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabian laws requiring women to have male guardians have been reformed in recent years but continue to restrict and endanger them, obstructing government plans to reform the economy, U.S.-based Human Rights Watch says in a report.

The report drew criticism on Sunday from a government rights official, who said the system was designed to protect and help women, and was less restrictive than portrayed by HRW.

Women in Saudi Arabia must usually obtain permission from a guardian - father, husband, or son - to travel, study or marry.

These laws, making women legal wards of a male relative and backed by a powerful clerical establishment, have in recent years been reformed, with women no longer needing to obtain male guardian permission to work, HRW said in the report, "Boxed In: Women and Saudi Arabia's Male Guardianship System."

But the system remains largely intact and an impediment to realising women's rights, it said.

Mufleh al-Qahtani, chairman of the government-licensed National Society for Human Rights, told Reuters the report confused tradition with state policy that was improving women's status.

"It conflates the laws on women's guardianship that authorities are being asked to amend or develop with customs prevailing in society that may... take time to change," he said.

Dozens of Saudi women interviewed by HRW said their lives were subject to male supervision when it came to applying for a passport, leaving the country, getting married and accessing courts and medical treatment.

A 25-year-old woman referred to as Zahra, whose father used to beat her and later refused to allow her to travel overseas to study, was quoted as telling HRW: "Whenever someone tells me, 'You should have a five-year plan,' I say I can't. I'll have a five-year plan and then my dad would disagree. Why have a plan?"

Other women told HRW their friends or relatives had sought to marry to escape strict, conservative, or abusive fathers and brothers. A woman named Tala said: "The guardianship system is always a nightmare. I don't want to get married because I don't want a stranger to control me ... Basically, it is slavery."

CONSERVATIVE SOCIETY

Women are not allowed to drive and face difficulty in many transactions such as renting an apartment, without a male relative.

But the late King Abdullah in 2011 gave women the right to vote and run for office in local elections, and in 2013 appointed 30 women to the Shura Council, the appointed parliament that discusses new laws and advises the government on legislation.

Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled in April an ambitious plan to transform the economy by 2030, which envisages increasing women's participation in the workforce to 30 percent from 22 percent.

HRW's Kristine Beckerle said the kingdom could not achieve this vision if it did not abolish male guardianship.

Officials often say the failure to end discrimination against women is not due to state policy but difficulties in implementation.

On the question of travel, Qahtani said: "There is no problem for any woman to travel in the absence of a dispute in the family. In the event of a dispute it must be resolved first to ensure each party fulfils its obligations towards the family."
Turkey's huge and rising role in world trade of oil, gas, grains

July 17 (Reuters) - A failed Turkish military coup attempt briefly closed the Bosphorus Strait to shipping traffic on Saturday, reminding the world of Turkey's huge and growing importance as a transit route for commodities between Russia, Central Asia and Europe.

Turkish authorities thwarted a coup by rebels to topple President Tayyip Erdogan.

Below are the key facts about Turkey's role as a major transit country for oil and grains, as well as a significant consumer of commodities such as natural gas and gold.

THE BOSPHORUS

The Bosphorus is one of the world's most important chokepoints for the maritime transit of oil. Over 3 percent of global supply or 3 million barrels per day, mainly from Russia and the Caspian Sea, passes through the 17-mile waterway that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and eventually to the Mediterranean.

The route, which also ships vast amounts of grains from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan to world markets, was closed for several hours on Saturday for security reasons. Around one-quarter of the world's grain exports are shipped from Black Sea ports.

Only half a mile wide at the narrowest point, the Turkish Straits are among the world's most difficult waterways.

About 48,000 vessels transit the straits each year, making this area one of the world's busiest maritime gateways, according to the U.S. government. Commercial shipping has the right of free passage through the straits in peacetime, although Turkey claims the right to impose regulations for safety and environmental purposes.

For U.S. government analysis of the role of the Bosphorus:

http://tinyurl.com/j5szs5c

CASPIAN SEA ROUTE

Pipelines bypass the Bosphorus by carrying around 0.7 million bpd of oil from Caspian Sea countries such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan directly to Turkey's export terminals on the Mediterranean, such as the port of Ceyhan.

A BP-led group operating oil and gas pipelines running from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia said there had been no disruption to shipments.

KURDISH OIL FLOWS, IRAN

Ceyhan is also the final destination for an oil pipeline running from Iraqi Kurdistan and carrying some 0.5 million bpd. A source close to Kurdish oil export operations said they were flowing as usual.

Turkey also receives gas and some petrochemical products from neighbouring Iran. Iranian Mehr news agency said Iran had temporarily stopped exports of petrochemical products to Turkey due to a closure of the border between the two countries.

ENERGY CONSUMER

Besides its transit role, Turkey is also a very important consumer of commodities in its own right. It is one of the top five gas users in Europe, on a par with France.

Turkey refines slightly less than 1 million bpd of oil, making it one of the top seven consumers in Europe, on a par with the Netherlands. It oil comes from Iraq, the Caspian Sea, Iran and Russia. Turkey takes its gas mainly from Russia, Azerbaijan and Iran.

For U.S. government analysis of Turkish energy trends see:

http://tinyurl.com/z53uv5n

GRAINS AND GOLD

Turkey is the second-largest importer of Russian wheat after Egypt. It bought 3 million tonnes from July 2015 to May 2016.

It also imports barley and corn via Russia's Black Sea ports.

In total, Turkey is forecast to import 4.3 million tonnes of wheat in the current 2015/16 season, down from 5.95 million in 2014/15.

It is also forecast to import 900,000 tonnes of corn (maize) in 2015/16, down from 2.36 million in 2014/15. The drop reflects a rise in domestic production.

Turkey is one of the top 10 gold markets in the world, with demand reaching 72 tonnes (around $3 billion) in 2015, according to data from the World Gold Council.
Turkey reopens air base for U.S fight against Islamic State- Pentagon

WASHINGTON, July 17 (Reuters) - Turkey will reopen its Incirlik air base to U.S. planes, used to attack Islamic State, following an attempted coup, the Pentagon said on Sunday.

"After close coordination with our Turkish allies, they have reopened their airspace to military aircraft. As a result, counter-ISIL coalition air operations at all air bases in Turkey have resumed," a Pentagon statement said.

Turkey, a major U.S. ally, has allowed the United States to use the air base in Incirlik to launch attacks against the militant group. Those air operations were temporarily halted following the coup attempt on Friday.

Secretary of State John Kerry said on CNN's "State of the Union" that he had spoken with Turkey's foreign minister three times on Saturday.

"They assure me that there will be no interruption of our counter-ISIL efforts," Kerry said, using an acronym to refer to the Islamic State.

Kerry said that the difficulty for U.S. planes accessing Incirlik may have been a result of planes flown in support of the coup using the air base to refuel.

On NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Kerry was asked if Turkey's president Tayyip Erdogan would use the coup attempt to seize more power.

Kerry said such a move by Erdogan would be a challenge to his relationship with Europe, with NATO and others.

"We have urged them not to reach out so far that they are creating doubts about their commitment to the democratic process," he said.

Erdogan has blamed his rival, Fethullah Gulen, for masterminding the coup attempt. Gulen, who is currently living in Pennsylvania, has denied any involvement.

Kerry said he had no evidence at this time that Gulen was behind the plot to seize power from Erdogan, but he urged Turkish authorities to compile evidence as rapidly as possible so the United States can evaluate whether Gulen should be extradited to Turkey.
Malaysia Airlines has struck a deal to settle damages claims to most of the victims of the doomed MH17 flight, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine two years ago.

Veeru Mewa, a lawyer representing Dutch victims, said under the Montreal Convention airlines must pay damages of up to about 130,000 ($145,000) to victims' families regardless of the circumstances of a crash.

The Boeing 777, carrying mainly Dutch passengers, was shot down by pro-Russia separatists en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam, killing all 298 on board.

Pictured, wreckage from Flight MH17 smoulders shortly after the tragedy in July 2014 - a crash that left almost 300 people dead

The flower shrine outside Departures at Schiphol Airport, Holland, two years before settlements were finally agreed

The Malaysia Airlines passenger jet was hit by a surface-to-air missile on July 17, 2014 over eastern Ukraine, during heavy fighting between Kiev's armed forces and pro-Russian separatists.

Two thirds of the passengers were Dutch, but a group of 10 Britons died onboard including Newcastle fans Liam Sweeney, 28, and John Alder, who were travelling to New Zealand to watch their team take part in a pre-season friendly match.

An international inquiry concluded last October that the plane was downed by a Russian-made BUK missile fired from a zone held by pro-Russian separatists, but stopped short of saying who was responsible.

Initial findings of a Dutch-led criminal inquiry are expected to be presented later this summer.

It was the second anniversary of the tragedy on Sunday, and vigil's around the world allowed families and friends to pay homage to their loved ones.

Mariam Yusof, wife of the flight's pilot Captain Wan Amran Wan Hussin, visited Sepang outside Kuala Lumpur with her children for a private MH17 remembrance ceremony.

Mariam Yusof (L), wife of late Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 pilot Captain Wan Amran Wan Hussin, and her children react while leaving the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) Flight Management Building after a private MH17 remembrance ceremony in Sepang outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Veeru Mewa, a lawyer representing Dutch victims, said under the Montreal Convention airlines must pay damages of up to about 130,000 ($145,000) to victims' families regardless of the circumstances of a crash

Investigators examining the crash site to collect human remains and belongings following the downing of the plane

Around 60 people gathered at the crash site in the village of Petropavlivka, carrying flowers and lighting candles at the square where some of the victims' remains and belongings fell to the ground.

Some youngsters from the village - still controlled by pro-Russian separatists fighting pro-Western government forces - also carried paper planes in memory of children killed in the downing of the jet.

Village council head Natalia Voloshina, said: 'Some of the relatives of people who were killed phoned us and asked us to find things that were valuable for them, for example, the toys that belonged to children aboard.'

Some small pieces of wreckage, not yet handed over to Dutch investigators, were stacked outside Voloshina's office to mark the anniversary.

Pictured, villagers place pictures of the passengers of MH17 flight at a makeshift memorial in the village of Petropavlivka, Donetsk region

Pictured, a young boy looks at debris from the crash of the MH17 flight next to small paper airplanes made by local children

The parents of the three young children killed in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 two years ago have revealed they have suffered devastating depression and trauma since the tragedy.

Couple Anthony Maslin and Marite Norris' heartbreak was laid bare in court documents lodged as part of their claim for compensation from the airline, and details the depths of their despair when sons Mo, 12, and Otis, 8, and daughter Evie, 10, were killed along with their grandfather, Nick Norris, as they returned home to Perth in 2014.

The documents reveal the couple has suffered extensive psychiatric and emotional harm because the airline failed to contact them about the tragedy before they saw detailed footage of the crash on television, reports Perth Now.

The Maslin family, including Mr Norris' wife Lindy, learned of their loved-ones' deaths 'by watching news reports displaying graphic images of the crash site' and from phone calls from people who were not employed by the airline, the document said.

As a result, they suffered 'varying degrees of psychiatric injury, conditions or illness, depressive illness and economic loss'.

Anthony, Marite and Lindy have all employed a counsellor, are undergoing treatment and require medication for the heavy emotional toll.
Israel launches anti-aircraft missiles at Syrian drone -army

JERUSALEM, July 17 (Reuters) - Israel on Sunday fired missiles towards an unmanned drone that entered Israeli-controlled airspace from Syria and it turned back, the military said in a statement.

"Two Patriot air defence missiles were fired towards a drone which infiltrated Israeli airspace in the central Golan Heights. The drone returned to Syria," the Israeli army said.

A military spokeswoman said there were no known casualties.

Israel has often responded to errant mortar fire from the civil war in neighbouring Syria on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights with tank and mortar shells and with air strikes, but the use of Patriot anti-aircraft interceptor missiles is unusual.

A Syrian rebel source in the area said the Syrian army had launched a rare air raid on al-Shajara village along the Jordanian border. The village, which is also close to the Israeli frontier, is held by the Shuhada al-Yarmouk group, who are thought to be Islamic State affiliates.

Though formally neutral on the civil war, Israel has frequently pledged to prevent shipments of advanced weaponry to Lebanon's Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, whose fighters have been allied with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Two months ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had launched dozens of strikes in Syria.
Ohio governor lacks power to suspend open carry law -spokeswoman

CLEVELAND, July 17 (Reuters) - Ohio Governor John Kasich lacks the power to suspend a state law allowing citizens to openly carry guns, his office said on Sunday, after a police union official called for a suspension ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Algerian parliament passes new investment law to improve business climate

By Hamid Ould Ahmed

ALGIERS, July 17 (Reuters) - Algeria's parliament on Sunday approved a new investment law that the government hopes will improve the business climate outside the oil sector after a drop in energy earnings of almost 50 percent due to falling oil prices.

The law is part of reforms planned by the OPEC member state to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, which account for 95 percent of export revenues and 60 percent of the state budget.

The passage of the law coincided with a call by a visiting International Monetary Fund (IMF) delegation for quicker and deeper reforms to help compensate for losses caused by the fall in crude oil prices.

The law, due to come into force by the end of this year, stipulates tax cuts and steps to reduce bureaucracy.

"We want to put in place stable, transparent and coherent legislation to ensure efficiency on the ground," Industry Minister Abdesselam Bouchouareb told parliament.

The law does not, however, address one of the main obstacles cited by would-be foreign investors: a rule requiring local partners to hold a majority stake in new investment projects.

The new law states that all imported goods and services intended for investment projects will be exempted from customs duties and value-added tax (VAT).

Businesses will get a 10-year exemption from tax on property needed for a project, as well as a three-year tax exemption on company profits once the project starts.

Furthermore, infrastructure needed for any investment project will be partially or totally financed by the government.

The law identifies industry, agriculture and tourism as priority sectors in which investors will have "additional benefits". It does not provide details; the government says these will be included in upcoming implementation texts.

Algeria has been trying to make the three sectors more attractive to investors in a bid to boost domestic production in a country of 40 million people that imports almost all of its needs, from goods to food and services.

A heavy import bill and the fall in energy revenues contributed to a trade deficit of $13.7 billion in 2015 against a $4.3 billion surplus the previous year. The deficit was up 35.5 percent in the first five months of 2016 from the same period a year earlier.

"The oil shock has had a strong and rapid effect on public finances," Jean-Francois Dauphin, member of the IMF staff team, told the state news agency APS on Sunday.

The law also tries to simplify the bureaucracy around investment applications by largely directing them through a "one-stop" approval process, rather than leaving them up to various authorities.
Venezuelan shoppers flock across border to Colombia

By Anggy Polanco

SAN ANTONIO, Venezuela, July 17 (Reuters) - Thousands of Venezuelans streamed into neighboring Colombia on Sunday to take advantage of a temporary opening of the border to buy food and medicine unavailable at home in their country's collapsing economy.

Socialist President Nicolas Maduro shut the border last year in an effort to crack down on smuggling of subsidized products. Venezuela's product shortages have since worsened, creating further incentives to buy goods in Colombia and bring them back.

A plunge in global oil prices have left the OPEC nation's government unable to maintain lavish subsidies created during the rule of late President Hugo Chavez, while currency controls have left businesses struggling to obtain raw materials and machine parts.

Venezuelans routinely spend hours in lines at home seeking items ranging from corn flour to cancer medication to auto parts. Shoppers complain of violence in lines, and looting is on the rise.

Bus terminals were packed and hotels filled to capacity in the border town of San Antonio, with many traveling hundreds of miles to shop.

"We got here at 2:00 a.m. and slept here in the street. I came to buy medicine because I can't find any in my country," said Erna Millan, 59, who drove 12 hours with two friends with the equivalent of about $30 in cash to buy medicine.

"I also came to buy a Cesarean section kit for my daughter, who is about to give birth," she said.

Crowds of people flooded the bridge that links San Antonio to the Colombian city of Cucuta to cross the border on foot, at times singing the national anthem or chanting "This government is going to fall!"

The governor of Venezuela's state of Tachira opened the border last Sunday, attracting some 35,000 people, and this weekend allowed crossings both Saturday and Sunday.

Colombia's government said 44,000 people crossed on Saturday to buy food, medicine and cleaning products and said it expected that number to almost double on Sunday.

"I've come to buy what I can't find in the country - rice, beans, lentils, sugar, toilet paper," said Elizabeth Perez, 47, a public employee. "I came a few days ago with a group of people so I could cross into Colombia today. We're only eating once a day."

Maduro says socialist policies helped reduce poverty in Venezuela during Chavez's 14-year rule and insists his government is now the victim of an "economic war" led by political adversaries with the help of the United States.
Signalling that India-Pakistan relations continue to remain mired in a quagmire, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced after a cabinet meeting that Pakistan will observe July 19 as a "black day" to protest Indias "atrocities" in Kashmir.

He said, "Pakistan would continue to extend moral, political and diplomatic support for Kashmiris in their just struggle"

Mian Nawaz Sharif forgets that while the Kashmiris who are part of India are ruled by a duly elected representative government, those who reside in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) are ruled from Islamabad, with the concurrence of GHQ (General Headquarters of the Pakistan Army), Rawalpindi.

He also forgets that the people of Gilgit-Baltistan have no rights and that the Baloch peoples quest for freedom has been suppressed by the military jackboot ever since independence from the British.

According to Nawab Brahumdagh Bugti, head of the Baloch Republican Party, "Balochistan is burning since the forceful occupation by state in 1948. Five major military operations had been launched by the armed forces of Pakistan and the latest of them still continues full-fledged. During this period of 66 years, Balochistan has suffered from gross human rights violations by the Pakistani forces which have been getting worse and accelerated with the passage of every single day."

Nawab Bugti had said two years ago, "140,000 Baloch had been killed and at least 20,000 Baloch were missing since 2006."

Baloch peoples quest for freedom has been suppressed by the military jackboot ever since independence from the British.

The deteriorating internal security environment has gradually morphed into Pakistans foremost national security threat.

Karachi remains a tinderbox that is ready to explode.

The Al Qaeda is quietly making inroads into Pakistani terrorist organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), Harkat-ul-Jihad Al-Islami (HuJI), Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has consolidated its position in North Waziristan despite Operation Zarb-e-Azb launched by the Pakistan army two years ago.

Fissiparous tendencies in Balochistan and the restive Gilgit-Baltistan Northern Areas are a perpetual security nightmare.

Sectarian violence has become almost a daily occurrence.

The organised elimination of Shias and Ahmadis has become so common that it barely makes it to the evening news.

Pakistans Hindus have also been receiving rather shabby treatment.

Meanwhile, creeping Talibanisation is making deep inroads into civil society. Even the armed forces have been penetrated and attacked with virtual impunity.

The naval base at Mehran, Karachi, and GHQ, Rawalpindi, have been attacked, though the attackers were gunned down at the gate of the armys headquarters.

Nawaz Sharif would do well for Pakistan if he were to look within and come to grips with the challenges confronting the country, the job for which he was elected with a huge majority.

Despite facing the grave danger of a possible collapse of the state, the Pakistan government's counter-insurgency policy had until recently lacked cohesion.

The commencement of a peace dialogue with the TTP in February 2014, despite the abject failure of several such efforts in the past, allowed the terrorist organisation to re-arm, recruit and train fresh fighters.

In March 2014, the TTP had offered a month-long ceasefire.

The army honoured the ceasefire but soon withdrew its pledge and blamed the government for failing to make any new offers.

In the face of mounting public and army pressure, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reluctantly agreed to approve military strikes.

He was apprehensive that General Raheel Sharif, the COAS, may unilaterally decide to launch an all-out offensive.

The PM said that he will not allow Pakistan to become a "sanctuary of terrorists" and that the military operation will continue till all the militants are eliminated.

Realisation about the gravity of the internal security situation took time to dawn on the Pakistan army as well.

Two successive army chiefs have declared publicly that internal instability is the number one national security threat.

However, the Pakistan army is relatively inexperienced in counter-insurgency operations.

General Kayani had declared 2009 as "Military Training Year" to re-orientate the army to internal security duties.

Before becoming the COAS, General Raheel Sharif had developed the training manuals for counter-insurgency.

Over the last decade, the Pakistan army has deployed more than 150,000 soldiers in the Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa and FATA areas.

It has suffered over 15,000 casualties, including about 5,000 dead since 2008.

On June 15, 2014, the Pakistan army finally launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb (sharp and cutting), its much delayed ground offensive against the TTP in North Waziristan. The army claims to have killed several thousand TTP cadres, but the restive province continues to defy the army.

Hurt by a series of Taliban successes in "liberating" tribal areas and under pressure from the Americans to deliver in the "war on terror", in the initial stages the Pakistan army employed massive firepower to stem the rot  as had been visible on television screens worldwide when operations had been launched to liberate the Swat Valley (Operation Rah-e-Rast, May-June 2009) and South Waziristan (Operation Rah-e-Nijat, Oct-Nov 2009).

Fighter aircraft, helicopter gunships and heavy artillery were freely used to destroy suspected terrorist hideouts, irrespective of civilian casualties.

This heavy-handed, firepower-based approach without simultaneous infantry operations on the ground failed to dislodge the militants, but caused large-scale collateral damage and alienated the tribal population even further.

Counter-insurgency operations against the TTP in South Waziristan earlier had driven most of the fighters to North Waziristan.

North Waziristan has rugged mountainous terrain that enables TTP militants to operate like guerrillas and launch hit-and-run raids against the security forces.

When cornered, the militants find it easy to slip across the Durand Line and find safe sanctuaries in Khost and Paktika provinces of Afghanistan.

Ahmed Rashid, the author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, has written: "Not only does North Waziristan house Pakistani and Afghan Taliban; it is also a training ground for al-Qaeda, which attracts Central Asians, Uighurs from China, Chechens from the Caucasus and a flow of militant Muslim converts from Europe."

Quite clearly, the Pakistan army is in for the long haul and will undoubtedly suffer a large number of casualties.

Recent attacks against the army are clearly indicative of the ability of Pakistans terrorist organisations to strike at will and underline the helplessness of the security forces in taking effective preventive action.

Political turmoil, internal instability, a floundering economy and weak institutions make for an explosive mix.

Pakistan is not yet a failed state, but the situation that it is confronted with could rapidly degenerate into unfettered disaster.

All institutions of the state need to stand together if the nation is to survive its gravest challenge.
In a month of seemingly unremitting horror, news on Saturday (July 16) of the alleged "honour killing" of Pakistani social media sensation Qandeel Baloch, in a region where women's rights and indeed women's lives are often shrugged off as secondary concerns, has brought a sense of despair.

An attractive woman of 26, Baloch gained fame and notoriety for a provocative series of videos gaining her half a million followers on Facebook and making her one of the most searched for names on the internet in Pakistan.

Some people ranted, as is only too predictable in sexually repressed cultures where hypocrisy is perforce a way of life, about her performances leading people astray and bringing disrepute to a nation associated with global terrorism, military dictatorships, zealotry and spectacular violations of human rights.

While for some, Baloch was the first of a kind of celebrity in Pakistan, enjoying the attention she got without feeling ashamed of wanting it, for much of the elite, she was a laughing stock.

Qandeel Baloch.

And whether or not in the aftermath of her terrible death, they wish to rebrand it, as a Pakistani columnist did, as disapproval of her "mistaking narcissism for feminism", the fact remains that if you wish to be risque but speak English with an accent and didn't study at a grammar school, you will fall prey to the immense insecurity of an elite that needs the world to throw them a bone now and again to further reinforce their sense of entitlement.

Incidentally, I never got the impression that Baloch minded the sniggering.

She wasn't the insecure party here. If you put yourself out there, you will attract both positive and negative attention, and she was surely savvy enough to have realised that.

Besides, too many good things were happening in her life for the haters to bother her. She had, reportedly, walked out of an abusive marriage, an act that the most privileged and empowered of women still approach with some reluctance.

I don't say this to make her out to be an ideal woman. For instance, in Indian movies if a scantily-clad heroine performs an item number, we see her taking care of orphaned children.

I say it because Baloch's past like her videos, was a series of acts of extraordinary courage to be celebrated. She had left her husband, moved to a shelter and then supported herself as a bus hostess driven by the desire, as she had said, of "standing on my own feet", which she was doing, along with financially supporting her family.

While one is sadly familiar enough with the ugly chauvinism, hyper-religiosity and misogyny of the vast swathe of the populace who've been left insensate and mentally stunted by repression of all sorts, the real disappointment came from some Pakistani liberals who felt the need to temper their commiserations with qualifiers along the lines of "while she was no role model".

I appreciate that especially for Pakistani public figures, being liberal requires a sort of balancing act and an endless compromise with a society that demands you respect its conservatism. Still, if one must score points off a dead girl to do it, a major rethink is required.

In all this darkness though, there is some hope, some prospect of progress, albeit of a limited, stuttering, slow-moving variety. I see women, far from being scared into silence, clamouring for justice for Baloch and for greater freedoms for themselves.

Perhaps more unusually, I see men, not from the regular bubble of Pakistani liberals-when-suits-them sickened by this murder, wanting to discuss why their masculinity is perceived as being so fragile that women must die to protect it.

I see the sort of people who ten years ago wouldn't have given it another thought to vociferously condemn not just Baloch's murder but the culture that made it possible.
1945-1974Edit



Right after the Second World War, immigration to France significantly increased. During the period of reconstruction, France lacked labor, and as a result, the French government was eager to recruit immigrants coming from all over Europe, Latin America, and Africa.



Although there was a presence of Vietnamese in France since the late 19th century (mostly students and workers), a wave of Vietnamese migrated to the country after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the Geneva Accords, which granted Vietnam its independence from France in 1954. These migrants consisted of those who were loyal to the colonial government and those married to French colonists. Following the partition of Vietnam, students and professionals from South Vietnam continued to arrive in France. Although many initially returned to the country after a few years, as the Vietnam War situation worsened, a majority decided to remain in France and brought their families over as well.



This period also saw a significant wave of immigrants from Algeria. As the Algerian War started in 1954, there were already 200,000 Algerian immigrants in France. However, because of the tension between the Algerians and the French, these immigrants were no longer welcome. This conflict between the two sides led to the Paris Massacre of 17 October 1961, when the police used force against an Algerian demonstration on the streets of Paris. After the war, after Algeria gained its independence, the free circulation between France and Algeria was once again allowed, and the number of Algerian immigrants started to increase drastically. From 1962 to 1975, the Algerian immigrant population increased from 350,000 to 700,000. Many of these immigrants were known as the "harkis," and the others were known as the "pieds-noirs." The "harkis" were Algerians who supported the French during the Algerian War; once the war was over, they were deeply resented by other Algerians, and thus had to flee to France. The "pieds-noirs" were Europeans settlers who moved to Algeria, but migrated back to France.
um..... no. your understanding of islam is inaccurate. you have probably been educated by a muslim and that muslim probably thought he was telling the truth when he spoke his rubbish. few muslims actually know anything about the quran or sharia.



the quran is not the teachings of muhammad. the quran is the word of allah. the story goes, allah narrated the quran, bit by bit, to the angel gabriel. gabriel then repeated allahs words to muhammad, who then spoke them out loud to his followers. these revelations were recorded over several years, until muhammads death, and eventually collated into a single book.



the other books of islamic doctrine are the hadith and sira. the hadith are collections of sayings, quotes, deeds and acts of muhammad during his life. the sira is muhammads official biography, his life story. sharia law is derived from these core books. it goes like this:



sharia first and foremost enforces the quran. everyone has to follow what the quran says, because its gods orders.



on matters not decided in the quran, sharia follows muhammad. muhammad is the perfect role model for all people, says so in the quran.



Quran, 68:4. And verily, you (O Muhammad) are on an exalted standard of character



Quran 33:21. Indeed in the Messenger of Allah (Muhammad) you have a good example to follow for him who hopes in (the Meeting with) Allah and the Last Day and remembers Allah much



what he did and said is, by definition, good and what he didnt like and criticized is, by definition, bad (according to sharia). sharia law means reading through the words and deeds of muhammad (ie: hadith and sira) and doing what he said to do, or copying what he did.



for example, on homosexuality



Quran (7:80-84) - "...For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds.... And we rained down on them a shower (of brimstone)"



Hadith Abu Dawud (4462) - The Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) said, "Whoever you find doing the action of the people of Loot, execute the one who does it and the one to whom it is done."



hence, its pretty clear that under sharia law, homosexuality is punished by death.



regarding apostasy,



Quran 2:217, And whosoever of you turns back from his religion and dies as a disbeliever, then his deeds will be lost in this life and in the Hereafter, and they will be the dwellers of the Fire.



the quran clearly doesnt like apostates, but this is a bit ambiguous. luckily the hadith clarify it.



Sahih Bukhari (84:57) - [In the words of] "Allah's Apostle, 'Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.'"



thus, under sharia law, apostasy is punished by death.



Abu Dawud (32:4092) - The Apostle of Allah... said: "O Asma', when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands"



and women need to cover up.



most muslims dont know any of this. but, as you can see, its nothing to do with bedouins. also, its not true that the "vast majority of muslims follow quranic teachings", very few of them actually know much of what the quran says. if you really want to know what sharia looks like, there are three places in the world where sharia law is implemented in its pure form: saudi arabia, the taliban, and islamic state.
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Editor's note: This story, written by The Associated Press, ran in the Democrat-Herald on Saturday, July 27, 1985. At the time, the movie was still referred to as "The Body," which was the title of a novel by Stephen King.

BROWNSVILLE  Some residents of this southern Linn County town have stepped back in time, trading their 1980s fashions for the garb of the 1950s, their auto store for a diner and their dentists office for a drug store.

Thats because this town has turned over its streets and its people to the business of filmmaking. There may be a mayor, but the real authority for now is actor-director Rob Reiner, who is calling the shots on Embassy Pictures The Body.

Historic Brownsville, with its handsome brick facades and wooden structures, is now fictional Castle Rock.

The Body is a $7.5 million filming of a Stephen King novel.

Crews have been in Brownsville for the last week as they work toward a mid-August completion date. The seven-week visit to Oregon, which started June 17, includes locations in the Eugene and Cottage Grove areas and is expected to leave behind up to $3 million, said Embassy publicist Peter Benoit.

Thats good news to local extra Jamie Garcia, who was garbed in the 1959 styles of the movie, along with daughter Lisa, 11.

The numerous retakes may be boring, she said, but my husband is not working, so its an added extra.

Theyre just people doing a job, she said of the film crew. The exciting thing will be seeing the movie.

Over at the Pioneer Market, checker Sharon Williams was lamenting that its newly cleaned windows were dirtied for movie purposes.

Itll be nice to have them gone and things back to normal again, she said, while also praising the free-spending visitors. Theyre real nice. We havent had any problems.

Embassy is paying for the changes it made in the store facades, hiring up to 100 extras, and will buy new picnic tables for the park. Another reward will be that Brownsville should make up about 20 percent of the finished film, said Benoit.

Brownsvilles people have been amazingly cooperative, according to Benoit, a contrast to California, where location filming is treated as an annoyance. Partly as a result, Castle Rock will be placed in Oregon in the movie.

The only thing bothering the cast and crew of about 80 was the unusually hot and sunny weather  the script calls for five overcast days.

Co-producers Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, who also helped write the script, said Hollywood may have to be called up to turn the truck.

Evans and Gideon, who wrote John Carpenters Starman, are very excited about this new film, its cast and Reiner had a recent success in The Sure Thing.

They even want to rush out a print for Oscar consideration in December, though the film is not due for release until spring of 1986.

Unlike the typical King horror fare, this is an autobiographically inspired story of four boys coming of age in a small town.

The title refers to a missing boy, the four heroes  played by Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry OConnell  set out to find along a railroad line. The story will emphasize human elements and the producers summon up the example of The Big Chill as they talk about its appeal.

Although the actors names are unfamiliar, they are the rising stars of such films as Explorers (Phoenix) and The Goonies (Feldman)

David Dukes plays the grown King character, played by Wheaton as a boy and John Cusak of The sure Thing has a brief part.

(Note: Scenes involving David Dukes were later re-shot with Richard Dreyfuss as the lead.)

Evans describes Castle Rock as a small mythic kind of American town with the story kind of a blend of The Summer of 42 and Deliverance.

The film will be true to the original story, Gideon said.

All we did is focus more of the story on Chris (Phoenix) and Gordie (Wheaton), he said, as well as clarify some other characters.
BROWNSVILLE  For a movie thats about a dead body, Stand by Me has shown a lot of life over the last 30 years.

But Linda McCormick didnt rush to the theater to watch the film when the movie, directed by Rob Reiner, was released in August 1986.

I probably waited until it came to TV, McCormick said.

So, she is as surprised as anybody to have become Brownsvilles resident expert on the coming-of-age movie that includes numerous scenes shot in and around the community in June and July of 1985.

She and her husband, Ray, didnt even move to Linn County until 2005.

But now, McCormick can tell you there are 180 parking spaces in Brownsvilles business district  including five handicap-designated spots. She can also predict with certainty that there will be many visitors from as far away as Japan at the communitys 30th anniversary celebration of the movies release on Saturday, July 23.

The Japanese are especially fascinated with this movie, McCormick said.

In addition to Brownsville, other filming locations were near Veneta and Cottage Grove in Oregon, and Burney, California.

Based on horror writer Stephen Kings short novel, The Body, "Stand by Me" has captured the attention of children, teens, young adults and seniors across all socio-economic classes.

Theres just something about it that people relate to, McCormick said. Although there are very few girls or women in the movie, they also relate to it. Theres something deeply sentimental about this movie. It brings out peoples emotions. They can somehow relate to scenes, whether its those teen-year friendships or being bullied.

McCormick said movie fans travel to Brownsville year-round, although the summer months are the busiest.

She met one young woman from Japan who flew to Oregon solely to visit the areas of Brownsville used in the movie.

Were not really sure how they picked Brownsville, McCormick said. They wanted someplace that looked like the 1950s and we certainly have that look.

So far, McCormick said visitors are expected from Japan and Canada, plus many states, including Minnesota and New York.

The owner of property where the treehouse scene was shot once found a jar of pennies  significant in the movie  and eventually it was learned they were left there by a fan from New Zealand.

I met a man from Australia and when we got in front of what is now the Fitness Center, he stopped and put his hand on one of the porch supports, McCormick said. He said, Ive waited a long time to touch this spot.

The community began celebrating Stand By Me Day in 2007 and there were about 2,000 visitors, McCormick said.

I actually picked the day of July 23 five years ago after looking at the community calendar and searching for a date that didnt interfere with other annual events and wasnt too close to the start of the school year, McCormick said.

Over the years, McCormick has gotten to know several persons associated with the movie.

Martin Hansen of Bend. the fire tender on the train whose scenes were shot in California, plans to be at the celebration.

Local casting director Katherine Wilson lives near Eugene and has attended past Stand By Me events, as has Kent Luttrell, who played the dead body.

McCormick said there were about 100 locals hired as extras for the movie.

Ive heard that at one point, they needed quiet and someone was mowing their lawn, McCormick said. So, they paid the person to wait a while before they started mowing again.

Numerous vintage cars and trucks used in the movie will be parked in downtown Brownsville and City Hall will be open so visitors can view the Castle Rock sign used to disguise the real City Hall sign during filming.

Shari Duncan Chinchen, who was a stunt double for Jerry OConnell in the movie, lives in the Gresham area and plans to attend.

New this year will be the Ray Brower Memorial 5K walk/run. Ray Brower was the name of the dead body in the movie, plus there will be a replica of the tree house in the downtown area.
The Linn County Sheriff's Office is investigating the death of a man in the Scio area.

According to a news release, the office's 9-1-1 Dispatch Center received a call shortly after 6:30 a.m. Saturday from 57-year-old Kevin Hansen, who reported that his friend, 55-year-old James Arthur Byrns, was unresponsive. Both men are homeless; Hansen told deputies he has been staying in the Scio area.

Hansen said he and Byrns were driving in the Roger's Mountain area of Scio when he noticed that Byrns had passed out. Hansen called police when he discovered his friend wasn't breathing.

Medics from the Scio and Lebanon fire departments responded, as did deputies from the Linn County Sheriff's Office. Byrns was transported to Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital where he later died.

There were no obvious signs of foul play, but the investigation into Byrns' death continues.

The Linn County Sheriff's Office was assisted by members of the Linn County Medical Examiner's Office.
GLASGOW - Scotland - Thanks to Theresa May, Article 50 to leave the EU will probably never be triggered.

It only took a few days for the ineffectual Theresa May to go and hand SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon a major bargaining chip against Brexit.

What May has done is she has effectively handed over the onus for Brexit to 62% of Scots, ignoring the majority of the United Kingdom.

All the hard work was thus for absolutely nothing and the majority of the UK is being ignored for the likes of Scotland, a moribund economically morose sector of Britain.

Scot Blackmail

Scotland has no mandate, but Theresa May has already shown her cards, and cannot be trusted as she is working for the Remain side.

Mrs May is putting the wishes of the majority of people who voted for Brexit second to those of Scottish nationalists and this is a shameful betrayal of the will of the people.

Why did Theresa May set up a Brexit department if she is now handing over the power to trigger Article 50 to Nicola Sturgeon?

As far as we can see there will not be a Brexit as the Scots will stall for years.

Thank you Theresa May. Youre about as useful as Anne Franks drum kit.
Trung Nguyen founder is on the rocks.

Binh Duong Provinces Department of Planning and Investment has withdrawn a decision made on April 21 that named Dang Le Nguyen Vu as legal representative of the Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC.

Vu, a member of management board of the Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC, had asked the department to approve an adjusted business registration certificate of the company, in which he would replace his estranged wife, Le Hoang Diep Thao, as the legal representative of the company.

Vu and Thao are currently in the middle of a divorce settlement.

Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company owns the popular G7 instant coffee brand and is a subsidiary of the Ho Chi Minh City-based Trung Nguyen Corporation JSC, of which Vu is the founder and chairman.

In another decision, the department restored the previous business registration certificate of the company granted in November 2013 that named Thao as the legal representative of the Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC.

The departments decisions were made based on a request dated May 13 from the Peoples Supreme Court in Ho Chi Minh City, which is in the process of handling the divorce case between Vu and Thao.

In a complaint sent to Binh Duong authorities, Thao said that while waiting for the judgment from the court, Vu, a member of the management board of the Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC, made his own decision to remove her as chairman and general manager of the company. Thao said it was against the law because it was not authorized by a majority decision by the management board.

According to Vietnams Law on Enterprises, a legal representative, company chairman or general manager is authorized to represent the company and decide on important decisions such as business operations, human resources, bank accounts and company seal.

Vu holds a 10 percent stake in Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company JSC, while Thao has 5 percent and Trung Nguyen Corporation JSC holds 85 percent, according to local media.

Trung Nguyen Corp JSC is involved in the production, processing and distribution of coffee. It is the leading coffee brand within Vietnam and exports products to more than 60 countries, including the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Germany, China and Singapore.

Besides the Binh Duong Instant Coffee Factory, which is run by Trung Nguyen Instant Coffee Company, the group also has factories in Bac Giang Province, Ho Chi Minh City and Dak Lak Province.

Trung Nguyen operates a nationwide chain of coffee shops in Vietnam. Franchises have also been opened in other countries.

Related news:

> Dry spell likely to push Vietnam's coffee output to four-year low
Businesses from both countries will be looking at fresh opportunities and connections.

Vietnam and Singapore are both members of a large economic community and free trade agreements, so the upcoming Vietnam  Singapore Business Forum 2016 is a great opportunity for enterprises from the two countries to foster their connections.

Following the success of the Vietnam  Singapore Business Forum (VSBF) in 2011, 2013 and 2014, the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) will hold the VSBF 2016 on July 20-21, according to a press release.

This year, the forum will focus on four panel discussions which will be moderated by industry leaders, experts and government officials centered on four key topics: Financial Services, Processing & Manufacturing, Real Estate Development, and Tourism & Hospitality.

Singapore is Vietnam's largest economic partner in ASEAN. Photo by Erwin Soo, Creative Commons 2.0

The event will continue to enhance cross-border business cooperation with corporate leaders from Vietnam and Singapore. Following the success of past events, this business platform will connect companies in Vietnam and Singapore to explore cooperation opportunities between the two economies.

Additionally, VSBF 2016 will also focus on highlighting Vietnams efforts to improve its investment environment, with the expected participation of leaders of Party Committees and Peoples Committees from major cities and provinces in Vietnam.

VSBF 2016 will take part in two days, aiming at welcoming an exclusive group of nearly 250 business leaders, industry experts, policy-makers and government officials from both Singapore and Vietnam as panelists and participants.

VCCI Vice President Dr. Doan Duy Khuong said: VSBF 2016 is an important event which will further contribute to the success of multifaceted bilateral cooperation relations between Vietnam and Singapore, especially after the two countries reached their strategic partnership agreement in 2013. This is also a practical platform for businesses to promote international economic integration since both countries have become members of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC).

VSBF 2016 will continue to provide participants with valuable business opportunities and access to resources, capital and a credible business network to promote bilateral economic growth for both countries.

The VCCI is a national organization representing the business community, employers and business associations in Vietnam. The organization operates with an aim to develop, protect and support businesses, contributing to economic and social development as well as promote cooperation in economy, trade and science & technology between Vietnam and other countries on the basis of equality and mutual benefit. The VCCI is independent, non-governmental and non-profit, and has a legal status and financial autonomy.

With a solid foundation from the Vietnam  Singapore Connectivity Framework Agreement, the VSBF is an annual practical business platform for companies from Singapore and Vietnam to explore opportunities between the two economies.

First held in Singapore in 2005, VSBF 2016 will continue to foster economic bilateralism, connecting businesses in a context elevated by the Strategic Partnership Agreement signed by the two countries in September 2013.

VSBF 2016 will be held from 20th to 21st July 2016 at Hotel Equatorial, District 5, Ho Chi Minh City. For more information and registration, please contact the VSBF hotline at 0123 608 38 38.

For more information, please visit: www.vsbf.org.vn

Related news:

> Singapores Mapletree acquires Kumho Asiana Plaza in Saigon for $215 million

> Private Vietnamese rice firm secures export deal to Singapore

> The Bun Cha storm has touched down in Singapore
Vietnamese firm scammed into transferring money to fake Czech bank account.

Vietnam's E-Commerce and Information Technology Agency (Vecita) has issued a warning to Vietnamese companies, asking them to focus more on information security while making transactions with foreign partners.

According to Vecita, a Vietnamese company signed a contract to buy polyethylene from a Singaporean partner in June this year. The two companies had previously made transactions with each other through a bank in Singapore. It did not provide the names of the two companies.

Later in the month, the Vietnamese firm received an email allegedly from the Singaporean partner. The email, with a power of attorney attached, asked the former to make a payment through a bank account in the Czech Republic because the Singaporean company was in the process of being audited.

About a week later, the Vietnamese company contacted its Singaporean partner but the latter said they had not sent any such request and did not have a bank account in the Czech Republic.

Vecita believes details of the transaction between the two companies had been intercepted by a third party, who then set up a fake bank account in the Czech Republic and a fake email address to look like the Singaporean company. Soon after the Vietnamese company made the payment to the bank account in the Czech Republic, the third party withdrew the majority of the money from the bogus bank account.

The Vietnamese company has been asked to report the case to the Ministry of Public Security for investigation.

Vecita said it is not the first time that Vietnamese companies have been cheated through email intercepts and advised them to tighten information security for transactions with foreign partners.

Related news:

> Hackers attack Quang Ninhs email system
New Delhi: The Commerce Ministry has launched an e-marketplace for online purchase of goods and services by various central government ministries and departments.

The move is aimed at bringing in more transparency and streamlining the government procurement of goods and services. The Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D) has developed the portal for the purpose.

The department, which is under the Commerce Ministry, carries out the procurement. "To bring in transparency, the DGS&D has worked on it very hard.

The Department of Electronics and IT has also played a very big role in this. What they have done is to start with on those regularly purchasable items which the various government departments will need. They are just putting it on their portal," Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told PTI.

Citing example of computers, she said if one wants a particular specification of a computer, various brands and specifications are available at the portal with cost.

Through this portal all the government departments and ministries can procure goods, she said adding "the prices are going to be there, it is for you to say how many units you want".The minister said this is just a beginning and many more things are in the offing.

"It will get expanded in the longer term. By March next year, we want it to make it comprehensive. So this is one way to make government procurement absolutely transparent," she added.

The DGS&D has asked the departments that for the success of the marketplace, it is necessary to upload the demands of common user goods and services required by government buyers.

This would help aggregate demand which will lead to lower prices, better choices and faster procurement. E-commerce is a fast growing industry in the country.

According to a study, e-commerce market is likely to grow 10-fold in next five years to reach USD 100 billion on the back of increasing penetration of Internet, smartphones and spread of digital network in rural areas.
So far this year, FPIs have invested Rs 23,630 crore in equities, while withdrawing Rs 6,265 crore from the debt market.

New Delhi: Foreign investors have brought in over Rs 9,700 crore into the Indian capital markets in the first two weeks of this month on improving prospects for the economy and hopes of better corporate earnings.

Interestingly, most of the incoming investments are in the debt markets during the period under review. The investment in July is followed by an outflow of Rs 4,373 crore in the preceding two months (April-May).

The pull out was mainly due to outflow in debt markets. According to the depositors' data, the net investment of foreign portfolio investors (FPI) stood at Rs 4,464 crore in the stock market during July 1-15, while it Rs 5,304 crore in the debt markets during the same period taking the total inflow to Rs 9,768 crore (USD 1.45 billion).

A slew of steps taken by the government to turn around the economy including relaxing FDI rules, approval of new mineral exploration policy as well as model law on shops and establishments. All this cheered investors, market experts said.

Besides, there was good news on the monsoon front and experts are hoping for better corporate earnings numbers for the quarter, which helped in boosting investors' sentiments.

So far this year, FPIs have invested Rs 23,630 crore in equities, while withdrawing Rs 6,265 crore from the debt market. This resulted in a net flow of Rs 17,365 crore.
Hyderabad: Buoyed by strong stock markets, labour minister Bandaru Dattatreya has said the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) may invest up to 12 per cent of its investable amount in equities over a period of time.

According to the minister, as on June 30, the EPFO invested Rs 7,468 crore in two index-linked ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds)  one to the BSEs Sensex and the other to NSEs Nifty  and as of now the market value of the investment stood at `8,024 crore with 7.45 per cent yield.

There will be a CBT meeting before July 22. We may take a decision on the quantum of investments to be made in ETF. We are in discussions with BSE and NSE also. The investment will certainly increase (over last year).

The finance ministry gave us clearance to invest between five and 15 per cent. It is a long term investment. It may up to 10 to 12 per cent also depending up on the market conditions. We expect the markets would be stabilised in the long run. Markets also need money, Mr Dattatreya said.

Replying to a query, he said the ministry is creating 21 zones in place of the existing 10 zones. Extension of EPFO to unorganised and contract workers may result in increase of subscribers from existing 6 crores to about 9 crores.
Ever since it was announced that Akshay Kumar would be joining hands with Rajinikanth for 2.O, fans have been going crazy  after all, it is not often you get to see two of the biggest stars in Indian cinema, sharing screen space. With the shoot of 2.O going on in full swing, Akshay Kumar is in Chennai to enact his portions. In a candid conversation with DC, he opens up about his excitement over Rajinis Kabali, his respect for Tamil cinema fans, his upcoming Bollywood flick Rustom and more.

I cant wait to see Superstars Kabali. I heard that lots of people have already started requesting for leave on the day of the release! I also came to know that fans wake up as early as 4 am to witness their beloved idol on the big screen. Even on the sets of 2.O, I hear the Kabali ringtone everywhere! This is unbelievable. I really wish I were in Chennai on the day of Kabalis release, says Akshay.

He goes on to say that though he has been in adoration of Rajini for a long time, hes now getting to see more of Superstars aura up close  Theres a saying that cinema is magic and actors are magicians. For me, Rajinikanth sir is the real magician. From what I have noticed, he has his own way of delivering dialogues  which I cant even think of doing myself!

With his upcoming Bollywood flick Rustom slated to release this August, he shares interesting anecdotes  The film was a different experience for me. In many movies, you would have seen husbands having affairs and then asking for the wives forgiveness. In Rustom, it happens the other way around! As it is based on a real life story, it will be very intriguing.

The Airlift actor also says that he has learnt a lot from South industry  I closely follow the works of actors like Vijay, Vikram and Kamal Haasan.
The incident took place inside the premises of its Arts Faculty campus of Delhi University. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: A woman research scholar of the University of Delhi was harassed by a group of inebriated men, who were allegedly consuming alcohol inside the premises of its Arts Faculty campus, police said on Sunday.

The incident took place around 4.30 pm on Thursday when the woman, who is pursuing PhD at the Department of Hindi in DU, was sitting outside the canteen which is located inside the Arts Faculty and spotted the men consuming alcohol openly.

"Suddenly, they approached the woman, trying to strike a conversation. When she did not show any interest, they collected some rain water in a glass and spilled it on her. When she objected, they started misbehaving with her," a police official said.

In her complaint, the woman alleged, while the security guards in the Arts Faculty were nowhere to be seen, the canteen owner tried to intervene and stop the men, but failed.

The group then turned vulgar and started abusing her. The woman called up the police control room but by the time the officers arrived, the men fled the scene in a car, whose number the complainant had noted, the official said.

The police later registered a case under IPC Section 509 (Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman) in connection with the matter, the official said.

"We have zeroed in on the group and the accused will be arrested soon. We are also likely to take up the issue with the University with regard to security measures," the official added.
Lay Buon Thi, the Cambodian police officer with the short gun he used to kill the Vietnamese gold shop owner. Photo by VnExpress/Cuu Long

Restaurant row turns into blood-bath in southern Vietnam.

A Cambodian police officer allegedly killed a Vietnamese gold shop owner and injured another in a restaurant in the Mekong Delta province of An Giang on Saturday.

An Giang shares a 100km border with Cambodia.

Initial investigations show that Lay Buon Thi, 52, deputy commander of Cambodias Tham Dung Border Gate Police Station, has a house and runs his own business in An Giangs Tinh Bien Town. At about 8:00 p.m. on Saturday, Thi and three other Cambodian men drove a car from Cambodia to have dinner at Huong Xua Restaurant in Tinh Bien.

Two locals, Le Van Duoc, 38, a gold shop owner in Ba Chuc Town, Tri Ton District, and Le Van Quang, who works at cock fighting arenas in Cambodia, invited Thi to drink some beer, but an argument between Thi and Quang erupted.

Thi left the restaurant and returned from his nearby house with a K59 pistol. The Cambodian police officer held down Quang and shot him in the shoulder, according to investigators. Duoc tried to step in but Thi shot him in the head and chest, killing him instantly, according to a witness.

The Cambodian officer fled the scene and returned to his house. He shot at the people chasing him but no one was hurt. After that, he locked himself inside and stayed there, the Vietnamese police said.

Vietnamese armed forces, nearly 100 people, surrounded the two-storey house overnight trying to persuade him to surrender. The stand-off lasted until 5:00 a.m. Sunday when Thi finally came out.

Searching the house, Vietnamese authorities found three guns, including a K59, a K54 and 500 bullets, according to Colonel Ly Ke Tung, deputy commander of An Giang Border Guard Force.

General Bui Be Tu, director of An Giang Police, told VnExpress that police have detained Thi for further investigation. The incident took place in Vietnam, so it will be dealt with in accordance with Vietnamese laws, he said.

Related news:

> Vietnamese fisherman shot dead in Cambodia
The fishermen returned without any catch after the navy officers threatened them against fishing in the island nation's territorial waters. (Representational Image)

Rameswaram: Four Tamil Nadu fishermen suffered minor injuries when they were attacked allegedly by Sri Lankan naval personnel off Katchathivu islet.

The naval personnel took away their cellphones and GPS equipment and also damaged nets of 10 other boats, P Sesuraja, Fishermen's Association leader said.

The fishermen, part of a group of 3,000 who had put out to sea from here last night, returned without any catch after the navy officers threatened them against fishing in the island nation's territorial waters, he said.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday asserted that India cannot ignore what is happening in the world and urged all concerned to keep politics aside in tackling terrorism in the interest of national security.

He was speaking at a meeting of the Inter State Council which felt that terrorism should be put down with an iron hand. Addressing Chief Ministers at a day-long meeting of the Inter-State Council, he asked the states to focus on Intelligence sharing which will help the country stay alert and updated in countering internal security challenges.

In his concluding remarks, the Prime Minister touched on law and order and emphasised that both the Union and State governments in India cannot ignore what is happening across the world today. On this issue, he urged all concerned to keep politics aside and keep national security paramount, the PMO said releasing his concluding remarks.

The Prime Ministers statement comes in the wake of series of terror attacks in some countries, including in France. The meeting, held after 10 years, saw several state Chief Ministers, including Punjab, ruled by Akali Dal-BJP coalition, were sharply critical of the Centre accusing it of usurping state's powers.
The NDA constituents will also meet after the BJP Parliamentary Party executive meeting in the evening. (Photo: file)

New Delhi: The BJP Parliamentary Party's executive will meet tomorrow to firm up its strategy for the Monsoon Session of Parliament with the Opposition set to attack the government over a number of issues, including the developments in Arunachal Pradesh.

The NDA constituents will also meet after the BJP Parliamentary Party executive meeting in the evening.

BJP is bracing for the Opposition assault over its alleged attempts to destabilise governments in states ruled by non-NDA parties.

The recent Supreme Court verdicts on Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have come as a shot in arm for Congress and other Opposition parties.

The Opposition has said it will also raise the developments in Kashmir, floods in parts of the country and India's unsuccessful NSG bid among others issues in the Parliament.

BJP, on its part, has hinted at raising the issue of alleged corruption in Congress-ruled states and law and order problems in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to hit back.
BSP MP Narendra Kashyap and his wife were arrested by the police for the death of their daughter-in-law. (Photo: PTI)

Ghaziabad: Policemen posted at Ghaziabad's Dasna district jail were in for trouble after video footage showed some of them accepting money from an aide of former BSP Rajya Sabha member Narendra Kashyap, who was released from there yesterday.

Kashyap, an accused in the dowry death case of his daughter-in-law, was released on bail.

In the footage, he is shown walking out of the jail accompanied by an aide. As the former MP walks up to a supporter and receives a bouquet of flowers, the yet to be unidentified confidante, is seen distributing Rs 100 notes to policemen who readily accepted the 'tip'.

Kashyap is then seen walking through a crowd of supporters to a white-coloured SUV before leaving.

When reached for comments, Jail Superintendent S P Yadav said he had come to know of the incident and action will be taken against the policemen who received money from Kashyap's aide.

"Action will be taken against the guilty policemen after an inquiry. They will be suspended," he said.

Kashyap's daughter-in-law Himanshi was found dead in the bathroom of his home with a gunshot wound to her temple in April this year. Kashyap, his wife Devendri and son Sagar were arrested in the case. The accused have claimed Himanshi committed suicide.
Bengaluru: The state government appointed a retired Karnataka High Court judge, K.N. Keshavanarayana to head the one-man commission to inquire into the circumstance and events leading to the suicide of DySP M.K. Ganapati. The notification was issued on Saturday evening.

The terms of reference reads: To inquire into the circumstances and events leading to the unnatural death of M.K. Ganapati in Vinayaka Lodge in Madikeri on July 7.

The government has set six months time for the commission to inquire and submit the report. The headquarters of the commission will be Bengaluru and the administrative department has to make arrangements for arranging logistic support, a government statement said.
The 22-year-old leader will stay at a house owned by former Congress MLA and local Patel leader Pushkarlal Patel in Udaipur for the period. (Photo: PTI)

Ahmedabad: Patel quota stir leader Hardik Patel, who walked out of jail on Friday, left for Udaipur in Rajasthan early this morning, in accordance with the Gujarat

The High Court's condition while granting him bail is that he will have to stay out of the state for next six months.

The 22-year-old leader will stay at a house owned by former Congress MLA and local Patel leader Pushkarlal Patel in Udaipur for the period.

Read: 'Will not disturb law and order', Hardik Patel files undertaking in court

According to Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) leader and Hardik's close aide Dinesh Bambhaniya, the Patel quota agitation spearhead started his journey for Udaipur from his native place Viramgam here at around 7:30 am on Sunday.

"Hardik will reach Udaipur in the afternoon. He was greeted by his supporters on Gujarat border. Though Hardik was supposed to go to different parts of north Gujarat before leaving the state today, he has cut short his trip due to time constraints and directly left for Udaipur," said Bambhaniya.

The HC had earlier paved the way for Hardik's release after granting him bail in two cases of sedition and a case related to violence at Visnagar MLA's office.

As per the HC direction, Hardik had to leave Gujarat within 48 hours of his release from jail.

Read: BJP wants to abolish reservations, we oppose EBC quota: Hardik Patel

Since the 48-hour time limit was ending at 11 am on Sunday, Hardik left for Udaipur early.

In an undertaking submitted before the sessions courts of Surat and Ahmedabad, Hardik's lawyers had informed that the leader will stay at house no 190, Shrinath Nagar on Airport road in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

The owner of the house is Pushkarlal Patel, a former Congress MLA and local Patel leader.

"I have made all the arrangements for Hardik at my place. Hardik is fighting for the rights of our community and he has the support of Patel community in Rajasthan too," Patel told reporters.
Mumbai: The Monsoon session of Maharashtra Legislature beginning in Mumbai from Monday, is likely to see opposition Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) training guns on "tainted" ministers in the Devendra Fadnavis Cabinet.

The session comes in the backdrop of resignation by then Revenue Minister Eknath Khadse after a string of allegations against him, including one regarding 'illegal' purchase of MIDC land in Pune.

The BJP-led government will miss Khadse's presence in Legislative Council, as being Leader of the House in Council then, Khadse managed to keep the opposition in check in the Upper House, with his experience, a Congress leader said.

The presence of aggressive Congress MLC and former Chief Minister Narayan Rane in the Council, will add to the government's woes in the Upper House. It will also have to deal with Leader of Opposition in the Council, Dhananjay Munde, who was re-elected to the post recently.

The government will also have to face the opposition onslaught on issues of agrarian crisis, including relief measures during the recent drought in many parts of the state.

Senior Congress and NCP leaders held a joint meeting recently, where leaders from both parties chalked out a strategy to raise various issues, including that of the "tainted" ministers, during the three-week long session.

"Whenever the issue of corruption came up, BJP always took the high moral ground. So I was surprised when (Chief Minister) Fadnavis inducted corrupt faces in his Cabinet. Most of the inducted ministers are facing grave corruption charges.

BJP claims it is a party with a difference. But the induction of tainted ministers has exposed them," NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said.

It will be difficult for the government to explain why was a leader of Khadse's stature asked to resign merely on the basis of allegations, he said.

Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil alleged that Fadnavis was protecting corrupt ministers.

"How will people get justice from these tainted ministers?" he asked.

"We have collected corruption-related documents of these recently inducted ministers," a Congress leader said. Among the ministers facing charges is Jaikumar Rawal, who is Minister for Employment Guarantee Schemes, Tourism and Self-Employment.

He is facing allegations of submitting fake documents, showing that he had planted pomegranate trees that got damaged in a hailstorm. He received a compensation of over Rs one crore from the Maharashtra government for this damage.

Another minister on the Opposition radar is Shiv Sena's Gulabrao Patil, Minister of State for Co-operatives. Patil was recently jailed for a day for allegedly forging documents and copying dead people's signatures in one of the school trust general body meetings. He also faces 13 various cases of cheating and threatening government officials.

BJP's Ravindra Chavan, who is Minister of State for Ports, Medical Education, Information and Technology, Food and Civil supplies, has an atrocity case filed against him. He was also in the limelight for allegedly equating Dalits with pigs.

BJP's Subhash Deshmukh, Minister for Cooperation, Marketing and Textiles, faces charges that as director of a sugar factory, took a loan on farmers' names without their consent.

Farmers were surprised when they received defaulter notices from banks. A cheating case has been filed against him.

Shiv Sena's Arjun Khotkar, Minister of State for Textiles, Animal Husbandry, Dairy Development and Fisheries, faces allegations of threatening government employees and obstructing their work.

BJP's Sambhaji Patil-Nilangekar, Minister for Labour, Earthquake Rehabilitation, Skill Development and Ex-servicemen Welfare, has been in the news for his association with a company declared as a wilful defaulter by a bank.

Opposition has alleged that he is a guarantor to a loan, declared as a fraud account, with an outstanding balance of Rs 49.29 crore owed to two state-owned banks.
The body was sent for autopsy which revealed that the girl was three-months pregnant and died of strangulation, police said. (Representational image)

Nagpur: In a suspected case of 'honour killing', a 45-year-old woman allegedly murdered her 19-year- old unmarried daughter at their house here after she found that she was pregnant.

Muktabai came to know that her daughter, a school dropout, is having an affair with a boy from the same locality in Wadi area and was three-months pregnant, Nagpur Police said in a statement. She asked the girl to abort but she refused to do so.

Fearing that her pregnancy would harm the reputation of the family, Muktabai decided to kill her, it said. Muktabai strangulated her daughter with a 'dupatta' at their house around two days ago.

The accused allegedly tried to destroy the evidence by attempting to cremate her body with the support of other family members, the release said. Police said some unidentified persons from the locality informed them that the girl had died under suspicious circumstances.

A team of Wadi Police Station led by Woman Sub-Inspector S Kutemate visited the crime spot and suspected foul play. The body was sent for autopsy which revealed that the girl was three-months pregnant and died of strangulation, police said.

The police interrogated the family after which Muktabai broke down and confessed to have killed the girl, the release said. Muktabai was on Saturday arrested and a case under section 302 (murder) of the IPC was registered, it said, adding that further investigations were on.
The CMs were especially united in their condemnation of 'misuse' of Article 356 by the Modi government, to topple non-BJP governments.

New Delhi: The Inter-State Council meeting chaired by PM Narendra Modi on Saturday did not proceed as smoothly as the central government may have liked.

According to a report in The Indian Express, several Chief Ministers from non-BJP ruled states expressed concerns on a number of issues.

The CMs were especially united in their condemnation of what is seen as a misuse of Article 356 by the Modi government, to topple non-BJP state governments.

In view of the role played by governors in Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh, which has been sharply criticised by the courts, Bihar CM Nitish Kumar went to the extent of asking for the governors post to be abolished entirely.

Nitish Kumar made a strong pitch for respecting the federal spirit, demanding that chief ministers at least be given a role in the appointment and removal of governors.

Kumar also quoted the Punchhi Commission report to stress that the use of constitutional provisions like Articles 355 and 356 should be limited to extreme and grave emergencies.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, who was represented at the meeting by her finance minister O Panneerselvam, called for preventing adventurism by governors.

NDA ally Shiromani Akali Dal delivered the quote of the night when it accused the Centre of reducing states to the status of mere beggars, according to a statement issued by the office of party president Sukhbir Singh Badal.

The Punjab deputy chief minister stressed upon the dire need for a genuine federal structure in India with devolution of more powers to states. He claimed that the Centre had usurped the powers of the states in violation of the spirit of the Constitution.

Badal said there was consensus across party lines that the trend towards centralisation of authority still continued. He alleged that the Centre has been quietly shifting subjects from the State List to the Concurrent List and from the Concurrent to the Union List.

Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal demanded that the Centre waive the debts of farmers across the country. He also asked for free medicines and diagnostic tests in all government hospitals of the country. He said that Presidents Rule be imposed only if the government loses majority in the assembly.

However, Uttarakhand CM Harish Rawat, whose government survived a confidence vote this year, did not, however, raise the issue of the imposition of Presidents Rule. He spoke about issues like the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission, which he claimed reduced benefits available to his state.

The Inter-State Council meeting took place after a gap of 10 years. The complaints were highlight of the meeting even as PM Modi noted that the Inter-State Council was the most significant platform for strengthening Centre-State and inter-state relations, and insisted that the nation could progress only if the union and state governments walked shoulder to shoulder.

Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah and UP CM Akhilesh Yadav did not attend the meeting.
MP Pappu Yadav said he would raise the issue in Monsoon Session of the parliament. (Photo: PTI)

Patna: A day after Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar pitched for abolishing the Governor's post, MP Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav today demanded that the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils be removed as these are a "total waste of hard-earned public money".

"Both the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils in the states should be abolished as these are arrangements made by British regime and are no longer required," he said here.

"I will raise this issue in the Monsoon session of Parliament. I will also file a PIL in the Supreme Court for abolishing the arrangements of the Rajya Sabha and the

Councils," said the MP from Madhepura.

Alleging that rich people try to be in the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils merely on basis of money power, Yadav said, "The Upper Houses both at the Centre and in the states are no longer required as it is a complete waste of hard-earned public money. Rather, the money should be spent on education and health," he said.

The Bihar Chief Minister had made the demand for abolishing the Governor's post at the Inter-State Council meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi stating that the existing federal democratic structure does not warrant its continuance.

Referring to Kumar's demand, Yadav said the government should first scrap the system of Rajya Sabha and Legislative Councils before abolishing the post of Governor.

Both the Central and state governments should explain as to why they have continued with the arrangement that was made by Britishers, Yadav said.
Another fisherman remains incarcerated in Cambodia.

Vietnamese fisherman Nguyen Thanh Liem from the southern province of An Giang was shot dead on July 14 while fishing illegally in Cambodian waters, Lieutenant Colonel Hoang Van Nam, Commander of the Vinh Nguon Border Guard Station in An Giang, announced on Saturday.

A group of six armed people in camouflage uniforms approached Liem and three other Vietnamese fishermen in a small boat while they were fishing illegally in the waters off Cambodias Takeo Province, around 2.5 km from the Vietnam-Cambodia border, Nam said, without clarifying more about the Cambodian group.

During the clash, the Cambodians opened fire at the Vietnamese fishermen, killing Liem and injuring two others - Le Ngoc Nha and Phan Van Loi. While Nha was detained by the Cambodian forces, Loi and Le Hoang Dat managed to escape back to Vietnam, according to the lieutenant colonel.

An Giangs Border Guard and police are working with their Cambodian counterparts to investigate the incident, the Vietnamese commander said.

Last year, The Cambodia Daily reported that a Cambodian man was killed after a group of fishermen from Cambodias Kampot Province clashed with Vietnamese fishermen while at sea in late July.

An Giang is located in Vietnams Mekong Delta, and shares a 100km border with Cambodia.

On July 8 this year, Thailand's naval forces also opened fire on three Vietnamese fishing boats from Ben Tre Province with 18 crew members on board, injuring two fishermen and leaving another missing. Two of the boats sank after colliding with Thai naval vessels. The missing fisherman was eventually found and safely returned to Vietnam.

Related news:

> Thai navy searches for missing Vietnamese fisherman after firing on boats
Pema Khandu, who has the support of 44 other MLAs in the Arunachal Assembly, taking oath on Sunday (Photo: ANI Twitter)

Itanagar: Pema Khandu was on Sunday sworn in as the ninth Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh marking the culmination of fast-paced political developments in this north-eastern state.

Meanwhile, Chowna Mein taok oath as Deputy CM of Arunachal Pradesh.

Itanagar: Chowna Mein takes oath as Deputy CM of Arunachal Pradesh pic.twitter.com/PKnuKsk16E  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

Hours ahead of the scheduled floor test in the Assembly on Saturday which Chief Minister Nabam Tuki was directed by the governor to take, the Congress Legislature Party had elected Pema Khandu, in place of Tuki, who was restored to the Chief Minister's post earlier this week after the apex court verdict.

Son of late Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, who died in a chopper crash in 2011, the 37-year-old graduate from Delhi's prestigious Hindu College had an early entry into governance after his father's demise.

Read: Pema Khandu likely to be the youngest chief minister of India

And in five years, he has emerged as the chief ministerial prospect after Supreme Court's intervention that changed the course of politics in the state with dissidents returning to Congress.

Khandu was on Saturday chosen as the new leader of Congress Legislature Party after 44 party MLAs unanimously elected him in the place of Chief Minister Nabam Tuki, who was restored to the post only two days ago after the apex court verdict.

Khandu, who hails from Tawang, bordering China, first entered the Arunachal Pradesh assembly in 2011 to fill the vacancy caused by his father's death. His election as MLA from Mukto (ST) constituency was uncontested and he was soon included in the state government as Cabinet Minister for Water Resource Development and Tourism.

Read: 'Team Arunachal' to work for state's development: Pema Khandu

He had joined the Congress in early 2000 and became Secretary of Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee in 2005 and President of Tawang District Congress Committee in 2010.

Khandu was re-elected unopposed from Mukto in the 2014 assembly elections.

In a volte-face, ousted chief minister Khaliko Pul, also returned to the party fold with 30 dissident MLAs.

In the 60-member House with an effective strength of 58, Congress now claims the support of 47 MLAs, including two independents.
Mumbai: In a message to his family, Mohammad Marwan one of the 15 Kerala youths who allegedly traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State has reportedly confirmed that he is in ISIS territory, and added that he would come back only after he "finishes work with IS to help the persecuted Muslims in Kashmir, Gujarat and Muzaffarnagar".

Asserting that he was not influenced by anyone to take up the journey, he explained that he was fully aware of what he was doing. No one has brainwashed me and recruited me to IS. I decided to leave for fighting for Islam after reading news about the developments in the Islamic State," he said.

Marwan communicated with his family using the communication app Telegram, towards the last days of June.

"Here, Muslims, including little children, are killed in the bomb attack by the US and Russian forces. How can I sit comfortably at home when the Muslim ummah (community) is attacked," he wrote. People may call me a terrorist. If fighting in the path of Allah is terrorism, yes I am a terrorist," he added.

Read: Kerala youth joins ISIS, tells parents 'won't return from abode of Allah'

Talking about the scenario in Syria, Marwan details, things are in bad shape in IS-controlled areas. You have facilities like palatial houses, fridge and car, but see the condition of the Muslims here. Here, they don't have even have electricity as the enemies of Islam have blocked everything. However, the people are contended and happy as they believe that Allah is with them Right now it is a 24-hour war here."

Claiming that he would be hailed as a martyr in afterlife if he were to die in the battlefield, Marwan wrote, "The martyr who died fighting for Islam has the privilege of recommending 70 persons from family to the other world.

Earlier, Ijas Muhammad, a physician and native of Kasargode in northern Kerala, another one of the 15 member group believed to have travelled to join the ISIS, sent an audio message to his parents, telling them not to look for him as he had reached his destination.

At least 8 of the missing 15 have slipped out from Bengaluru and Mengaluru airports in neighbouring Karnataka. Among them were two women in advanced stages of pregnancy.

Police suspect the role of Salafi groups in radicalising these people. Most of them are inspired by Wahabism. The IS too is driven by the same principles, said a Muslim reformist in Kozhikode who did not want to be named.
Hyderabad: An 18-month-year old child playing in his third floor home accidentally fell to his death in Rahmathnagar on Sunday. Police said Yateesh Venkati slipped through the grill in the balcony and fell down.

Police Venkati was the younger son of Khammam natives Satyanarayana, a techie who works in Madhapur, and Tripura, a homemaker.

Police said Ms Tripura was at work in the kitchen and Mr Satyanarayana was taking his bath and Venkati along with his brother were playing in the hall. After some time, when she could not see him, Ms Tripura searched all over the flat, and found him lying in a pool of blood on the ground.

While playing he accidentally slipped through the gap between the grills and fell to the ground floor and suffered a severe head injury. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where he succumbed, said Mr K. Sattaiah, sub-inspector, Jubilee Hills.

A case of suspicious death was registered and the body handed over to the family after post-mortem.
Hyderabad: Former Union minister Jairam Ramesh blamed the NDA government for failing to divide the High Court between Telangana state and AP.

Responding to observations that the High Court issue was not dealt properly in the AP Reorganisation Act, Mr Ramesh explained that the Congress kept six months deadline to complete the formalities.

After the bifurcation, he said both states should have their own judiciary and the onus is on the Centre to expedite the process. Dr Ramesh was in the city to launch his book on the bifurcation of AP.

Explaining his thoug-hts about bifurcation, Mr Ramesh said that Bhadrachalam temple was included in Telangana due to objections from Telangana leaders that AP already had two major pilgrim centres in the form of Tirumala and Srisailam.

Meanwhile, TJAC chairman Prof. Kodandaram criticised Andhra Pradesh leaders for claiming that the bifurcation was done unscientifically.

The Congress high-command gave ample time for AP leaders to give their wish-list at the time of bifurcation. But they did not utilise the opportunity and focused only creating hurdles for the formation of Telan-gana, he said.

Former Congress MP Undavalli Arun Kumar faulted his party high-command for not taking AP politicians into confidence while dividing Andhra Pradesh.
Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, currently in New Delhi, will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament on Monday, when the Monsoon Session begins.

Mr Rao has also secured an appointment with Union home minister Rajnath Singh followed by one with Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, also on Monday.

Mr Rao had sought the PMs appointment to discuss the issue of bifurcation of the High Court and several other bifurcation-related issues between Telangana state and Andhra Pradesh.

The meeting with Mr Rajnath Singh assumes significance as the Home ministry is the nodal agency for implementing the AP Reorganisation Act. Mr Rao wants to bring to the notice of both the Prime Minister and Home Minister the non-implementation of various provisions of the Act, even after two years of bifurcation.

The Chief Minister, who went to New Delhi to take part in Saturdays inter-state council meeting convened by the Prime Minister with the Chief Ministers of all states, decided to stay back for four days.

Split issues to top agenda

The Chief Minister will meet Mr Modi and Union ministers for resolution of the long-pending bifurcation issues. The bifurcation of the High Court is on top of the CMs agenda. The recent judicial officers and lawyers strike in Telangana, demanding bifurcation of the High Court, had paralysed judicial activities in the state. There is an urgent need for bifurcation of the High Court, said Mr A.P. Jitender Reddy, TRS floor leader in Lok Sabha.

The CMs agenda with Mr Rajnath Singh is mainly to discuss the bifurcation of Schedule IX and X institutions, mostly located in Hyderabad.

Mr Rao wants these institutions to be divided based on their geographical location, while AP has been pitching for division based on the population ratio of 52:48 between AP and TS. The CM is expected to urge both Mr Modi and Mr Singh to file an affidavit in Supreme Court in support of TS on this issue.
New Delhi: Displaying a consensual approach towards the Opposition parties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday sought their cooperation in the passage of the much-delayed Goods and Services Tax Bill, even as they asserted that the government will be targeted over the recent developments in Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir during the Monsoon Session of Parliament that begins on Monday.

With sparks sure to fly in Parliament over a range of issues, Mr Modi also urged all political parties to keep the national interest above all other considerations.

We represent both the people and parties and there is a need to keep the national interest above anything else, he said on Sunday.

At an all-party meeting convened by the government a day before Parliament meets, the Congress said it would support bills on the basis of merit, but gave no specific assurance on the GST Bill, saying it could take a decision only after the government gives it a written draft over the concerns it had raised earlier.

Noting that several important bills, including GST, will be taken up in the session, Mr Modi expressed the hope that there would be meaningful discussions and outcomes.

Parties stand as one to end Kashmir fight

The issue is not about which government would get credit for the introduction of GST, what is important is the passage of the Bill, he said.

With the continuing protests in Kashmir following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani expected to generate heat in Parliament, Mr Modi commended the political parties for speaking in one voice over the issue. Various parties have given statements on the Kashmir events, which benefited the country. This has sent the right message and I thank all the parties for the same, he said.

The growing incidents of terror attacks in different parts of the world and their implications on India, foreign policy, floods in states like Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand are among the issues which could come up for discussion during the Monsoon Session.

The governments legislative agenda includes taking up 16 Bills, including three to replace ordinances. Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said there should be a discussion in Parliament on the tense situation in Kashmir and the government should provide an answer. The governments unsuccessful NSG bid, floods in some states, agrarian crisis and terrorism were among the other issues raised by the Opposition leaders at Sundays meeting. Though he did not refer to GST directly, Mr Azad said the Congress will offer support to bills on merit.
Guwahati: The Arunachal Pradesh Governor Tathagata Roy on Sunday sworn in Pema Khandu as the ninth chief Minister of the state. The 36-year-old Mr Pema, the youngest chief Minister of the country, replaced Mr Nabam Tuki who resigned after stepping down as leader of the Congress Legislature Party on Saturday, hours before he was to seek a trust vote.

Mr Khandu was part of a group of 30 party lawmakers who had rebelled against Mr Tukis leadership. Mr Chowna Mein was sworn in as the deputy chief minister. Indicating that at least 10 more MLAs would be inducted in the council of ministers, sources said that Mr Khandu would be expanding his cabinet soon.

Mr Khandu who was elected the leader of the Congress Legislature Party on Saturday had staked claim to form the government on the basis of the support of 45 MLAs including two independents. In a volte-face, ousted CM Khaliko Pul, who was confident to win the confidence vote on Saturday also returned to the party fold with 30 dissident MLAs.
Hyderabad: There were ugly clashes between students of rival political ideologies in the University of Hyderabad late on Saturday night which left Kailasam Guduri, a student of the varsitys Telugu department, with a fractured leg.

It was such a clash between rival student groups last year which led to the series of events that ultimately resulted in the suicide by Dalit PhD scholar Rohith Vemula.

On Saturday night, members of some Left and Dalit student organisations conducted a meeting in the university about the ongoing protests and violence in Kashmir.

Following this, Right-wing students organisation Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad took out a bike rally to counter the views aired in the meeting. Around 25 students participated in the rally.

UoH ABVP president Kaluram Palsaniya said, We were outside one of the hostels when Amol Singh, his brother Sumel Singh who is not a student of the university, and another student, started abusing Bharat Mata and raised separatist slogans.
The Singapore consortium has offered a 42 per cent stake to Amaravati Development Company (ADC), a special purpose vehicle floated by the state government, under Swiss Challenge, says CM Naidu. (Photo: PTI)

Amaravati: The Andhra Pradesh government has decided to go ahead with the controversial Swiss Challenge model for selecting the master developer for the state's new capital city Amaravati.

The state Cabinet, which met on Friday under the chairmanship of Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, approved the Swiss Challenge model after a high-powered committee headed by Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu cleared the proposal.

Briefing media at the end of the Cabinet meeting, the Chief Minister said a Singapore consortium of Ascendas-Singbridge and Sembcorp Development Limited had submitted a proposal on October 30 last year under Swiss Challenge to be the master developer of Amaravati.

"We have thoroughly scrutinised the proposal at various levels and the high-powered committee gave its approval last week. We discussed this in the Cabinet meeting and approved the Singapore consortium's proposal," the Chief Minister said. Singapore government has 74.5 per cent equity in the consortium, he added.

"The Singapore consortium has offered a 42 per cent stake to Amaravati Development Company (ADC), a special purpose vehicle floated by the state government, under Swiss Challenge. The master developer will develop 6.84 sq km of seed capital area," he said.

The Singapore consortium and the ADC will together form the Amaravati Development Partner that would be given 1691 acres of land in three phases for development of the seed capital area, Chandrababu explained.

"We will give 50 acres at a nominal price. The Singapore consortium offered Rs 4 crore per acre for 200 acres to be developed in the first phase," he added.

"We have sounded Japan, China, UK and other countries for development of the seed capital under Swiss Challenge. August 15 will be the deadline for selecting the master developer," Chandrababu announced. Swiss Challenge model aims to award project works to bidders having best ideas to execute them.
Hyderabad: A six-year-old Class I student at Promising Scholars High School at Toli Chowki died on Saturday of injuries he had reportedly suffered in a quarrel with another student, one year older than him, on the school campus on Tuesday.

Police said Mohammed Ibrahim was kicked in the groin in the incident. His family took him to Niloufer Hospital, where he succumbed on Saturday. Ibrahim was the son of Mohammed Abdul Majeed, a Meru Cabs driver from Toli Chowki.

Mr Majeed said Ibrahim had complained of pain in the groin area and had said that a student from Class II had kicked him. Mr Majeed found the testicles swollen, and took him to the hospital, where doctors performed two surgeries on his abdomen and testicles.

He had said that the boy would beat him often. That day, when he kicked my son, Ibrahim said he walked away. But the boy came after him and kicked him four times, Mr Majeed said.

Police has registered a case for culpable homicide not amounting to murder under 304(II) of IPC against the Class II student. As he is a minor, we will inquire into the case and proceed as per the guidelines of the Juvenile Justice Act, Banjara Hills inspector K. Srinivas said.
Observations from Europe By: Bryan Caplan

Just got back from a month in Europe, where I was a visiting professor at the University of Munster, teaching a short course in Advanced Public Choice. Along the way, we drove to London for the Institute of Economic Affairs THINK conference, and to Heidelberg to address European Students from Liberty. Overall, a month of fantastic intellectual and aesthetic experiences, and I cant thank all my gracious hosts enough.

Random observations:

1. I was based in Munster, near the Dutch border, the historic home of the original Khmer-Rouge-type communist revolution. From 1534-5, Anabaptist fanatics seized power and established a theocratic communist dictatorship, predictably drenched in blood. While 20th-century socialists minimized their crimes, Rothbards gruesome account seems right to me.

A crucial part of the Anabaptist reign of terror was their decision, again prefiguring that of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, to abolish all private ownership of money. With no money to purchase any good, the population became slavishly dependent on handouts or rations from the power elite. Accordingly, Matthys, Rothmann, and the rest launched a propaganda campaign that it was un-Christian to own money privately; and that all money should be held in common, which in practice meant that all money whatsoever must be handed over to Matthys and his ruling clique After two months of unremitting propaganda, combined with threats and terror against those who disobeyed, the private ownership of money was effectively abolished in Munster. The government seized all the money and used it to buy goods or hire workers from the outside world. Wages were doled out in kind by the only employer: the theocratic Anabaptist State. Food was confiscated from private homes, and rationed according to the will of government deacons. Also, to accommodate the host of immigrants, all private homes were effectively communized, with everyone permitted to quarter themselves everywhere; it was now illegal to close, let alone lock, ones doors. Compulsory communal dining halls were established, where people ate together to the readings from the Old Testament. [] Totalitarianism in Munster was now complete. Death was now the punishment for virtually every independent act. Capital punishment was decreed for the high crimes of murder, theft, lying, avarice, and quarrelling. Death was also decreed for every conceivable kind of insubordination: the young against the parents, wives against their husbands, and, of course, anyone at all against the chosen representative of God on earth, the government of Munster. Bernt Knipperdollinck was appointed high executioner to enforce the decrees. The only aspect of life previously left untouched was sex, and this deficiency was now made up. The only sexual relation now permitted by the Bockelson regime was marriage between two Anabaptists. Sex in any other form, including marriage with one of the godless, was a capital crime. But soon Bockelson went beyond this rather old-fashioned credo, and decided to enforce compulsory polygamy in Munster. Since many of the expellees had left their wives and daughters behind, Munster now had three times as many marriageable women as men, so that polygamy had become technically feasible. Bockelson convinced the other, rather startled preachers by citing polygamy among the patriarchs of Israel, reinforcing this method of persuasion by threatening any dissenters with death. Compulsory polygamy was a bit much for many of the Munsterites, who launched a rebellion in protest. The rebellion, however, was quickly crushed and most of the rebels put to death The rest of the male population also began to take enthusiastically to the new decree. Many of the women reacted differently, however, and so the Elders passed a law ordering compulsory marriage for every woman under (and presumably also over) a certain age, which usually meant becoming a compulsory third or fourth wife. Since marriage among the godless was not only invalid but also illegal, the wives of the expellees became fair game, and they were forced to marry good Anabaptists. Refusal of the women to comply with the new law was punishable, of course, with death, and a number of women were actually executed as a result.

2. German Masters students are even more reluctant to participate than American undergraduates. Eventually, however, I found a topic that drew them out: the political economy of environmentalism. In my lecture on expressive voting, I argued that popular environmental policies are often driven by expressive, not instrumental concerns, as evidenced by pronounced disinterest in trade-offs, cost-benefit analysis, and creative ways to take the easy way out. There are 663,000 square miles in Alaska, so why not use .1% of that area for an immensely valuable pipeline? My students favorite answer was the slippery-slope: After the first pipeline mars the virgin wilderness, further desecrations are likely to follow. I pointed out that Munster stably combines natural beauty with ample development, but I dont think that convinced my class.

3. In contrast, my lecture on anarcho-capitalism sparked minimal pushback.

4. While my class largely drew on U.S. data and examples, I routinely asked students if my claims generalized well to Germany. They usually affirmed that they did. Voter motivation in Germany, as in the United States, seems driven by ideology and group identity rather than material self-interest. But for finer-grained details, the U.S. results are more contingent. Religious identity plays little role in modern German politics, the legacy of the Thirty Years War notwithstanding.

5. Brexit passed right before I went to London. I was aggravated but not surprised that many observers hastily claimed I had lost my 2008 EU bet. The original specified official withdrawal by January 1, 2020 to guard against this overreach. If the UK disappears from the list of EU members before January 1, 2020, I will happily pay. If it disappears on January 1, 2020 or later, I will declare victory and demand payment (assuming, of course, that no other EU member with 2007 population over 10M withdraws by that date).

6. Betting markets got Brexit very wrong, but theyre still the best forecasting institution in the world, and they imply a roughly 50/50 chance of Article 50 being invoked no sooner than 2018. Since Article 50 opens up to two years of negotiations, Im still somewhat optimistic about winning  though I would not make the same bet again.

7. Socially, of course, whats important is not whether I win my bet, but what happens to the British, European, and global economies. Many analysts treated the initial stock market crash as proof that Brexit is terrible; others treated the rebound as proof that Brexit is fine. I reject both views. Ive long regarded financial markets as a poor measure of the goodness of policy. If X happens and stock markets hold steady, this could mean X is harmless. But it could also mean that the burden of X falls on consumers rather than capitalists. Does that ever happen? Probably yes  the standard view of trade agreements, for example, is that they make consumers better off, but leave the average domestic business earning its standard vanilla rate of return.

8. The important question, rather, is how British exit from the EU would change economic policy. Both sides seem overconfident here, but I lean toward those who think overall trade and especially migration openness would fall in Britain, Europe, and the world. Indeed, even if Britain never leaves the EU, its behavior marginally raises the probability the EU moves away from internal freedom of movement.

9. Students at the THINK conference in London leapt at every chance to participate. Why were they so different from my German students? Since Students for Liberty Heidelberg were similarly enthusiastic, Id guess the gap was 20% cultural, 80% self-selection.

10. Accents in Germany were easier to understand than accents in England, strangely.

11. Due to a strong accent, I think I failed to properly answer one THINK attendees question. In my open borders talk, I addressed the political externalities of immigration. My claim: While immigrants are indeed more socially conservative and economically liberal than natives, the differences are marginal and immigrants dont vote much anyway. When the attendee asked why my results were so atypical, I claimed they were standard. In hindsight, I should have acknowledged that immigrants are much more likely to vote for left-wing parties. But since this holds even for the richest, most socially conservative immigrants, the best explanation is that right-wing parties treat immigrants with great disrespect. Since parties are potent name brands, even pro-immigration right-wing politicians have trouble winning immigrant support.

12. Germany is much more multi-cultural and multi-racial than I remember it, even in a smaller city like Munster. And horrific headlines notwithstanding, its wonderful to behold. The people of the world can and should work side-by-side to Finally Make Mankind Great.

13. When I taught my German students Kuran and Sunsteins availability cascades model, I used terrorism as a prime example. Over a thousand people are murdered on Earth on an average day. Every death is a tragedy, but theres no good reason to treat the small minority of terrorist murders as disproportionately important or revealing, except in the trivial sense than countries overreact to terrorism. I know this is an unpopular view, especially after a major attack, but I love numeracy more than popularity.

14. This was my first trip to London. Id heard it was remarkably multi-cultural, but I didnt expect it to be the most multi-cultural place Id ever seen. While I personally find big cities claustrophobic and inconvenient, if London doesnt convince you that Western civilization is a hardy weed, nothing will.

15. The fact that Londoners showed little sympathy for Brexit is telling: People who experience true mass immigration first-hand tend to stop seeing it as a problem. Backlash, as Tyler Cowen calls it, is a symptom of insufficient migration  the zone where immigrants are noticeable but not ubiquitous. I know he disagrees, but I honestly cant figure out why.

16. Averaging over my four days, the UK had the nicest people Ive ever encountered. They were more than polite. Strangers literally handed me money for parking. Why did Americans want independence again?
Hubballi: Having met with no success on the Kalasa Banduri project despite agitating for a year, thousands of farmers spearheaded a bandh in Dharwad, Gadag and Bagalkot districts on Saturday, to mark the completion of 365 days of their agitation.

While the farmers arrived in all taluks and distict headquarters to condemn the failure of the state and Centre to resolve the Mahadayi water dispute with Goa and clear the way for the Kalasa Banduri project, religious heads, who are backing their agitation, resolved to take a delegation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to persuade him intervene in the dispute.

The bandh saw all business establishments voluntarily down shutters, and schools and colleges shut for the day in Gadag. Bus services were suspended as farmers blocked the Hubballi-Vijaypur national highway and Nargund town, the launch-pad of the movement, saw a total shut down.

While farmers here set fire to tyres in several places, there was no violence anywhere else in the region. Normal life came to a grinding halt in Dharwad as well, but the bandh received mixed response in Hubballi with leaders of several local organisations refusing to back it and schools and colleges functioning as usual.
Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala MPs would raise anxieties of the state over the proposed Colachel port adversely affecting prospects of Vizhinjam in the parliament session beginning on Monday. The decision was taken at a meeting convened by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in New Delhi on Sunday. Mr Vijayan would also raise the concern of the state with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during their meeting. However, the date of the meeting could not be confirmed as the PM was preoccupied.

K. V. Thomas and Suresh Gopi did not attend the meeting as they were busy with other commitments. Meanwhile, many MPs questioned the logic of conducting such a meeting a day before the Parliament session. The questions to be asked should be given to the Parliament Secretariat two weeks in advance. Hence, questions prepared based on Sunday's meeting could not be raised in this session. Though the meeting was first scheduled for June 16, it was later put off until July 6. As that date was not convenient for Congress lawmakers, the meeting was further postponed.
Bengaluru: Little did Abhinav and his friends know that a weekend night-out along with their Delhi-based friends would turn nightmarish as they and 24 others from different groups lost their way in the Savandurga forest range in Magadi under Ramanagar district early on Sunday morning.

Abhinav, a resident of Madiwala, and his five friends  Chetan, Sudhanshu, Siddhant, Rajat and Sanchit, who hail from Delhi, got stuck on a 80-metre high hillock on Sunday morning after they lost their way after it started raining.

They reached the plains only around 6 am after a trekker from Kerala made an SOS call to the Fire and Emergency Control room. All the five have completed their graduation from Bengaluru University.

Abhinav, who is from Bhopal, told Deccan Chronicle, We left for Magadi around 2.30 am and reached Savandurga around 3.30 am. We waited for sometime to go to the hillock to watch the sunrise. A local woman offered to help us and even charged `100 from each group to show us the way. We were not aware that trekking is prohibited in the area as there were no signboards.

He said, After we lost our way, we chose to wait as none of us know Kannada. But one of the trekkers from Kerala panicked and called the Fire and Emergency Control room as we were heading back to the plains.

After the SOS, a team of officials from the police and fire and emergency services rushed to the area and helped the trekkers. The police said that the trekkers started climbing around 4 am, but as it started raining soon after, they lost their way. Around 6 am, we saw some of them coming down and we helped the others get down safely, the police said.

A senior police officer said, Fortunately, no untoward incident took place and they were stuck for a couple of hours. They were misguided by a local woman. All of them have submitted a written statement mentioning they are safe."

As per procedure, trekkers are supposed to seek prior permission from the administration and police before going on a trek so that officials can rush to their help in case of an emergency, a police official said.
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In a fillip to the state IT sector, global IT giant Oracle is expanding its operations at Technnopark. A considerable increase in the manpower is also expected with the expansion. According to Technopark sources, Oracle has already acquired 36,000 square feet more space at Leela Infopark. Already it was operating from 80,000 square feet space in the facility. The present manpower of Oracle at Technopark in 400 and it may go up to 1000 in the near future, said the source.

Oracle commenced operations in Technopark in 2011 It was the third development centre of Oracle in the country after the one at Bangalore and another one at Hyderabad. Over the last couple of years, Oracle was looking for more space in Technopark. Now they had acquired the space which was recently vacated by another leading firm which moved on to own campus.

It is learnt that the expanded facility of Oracle would be formally opened next month. Thiuvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor had initiated talks with Oracle Corporation in 2010. The firm started operations from a 40,000-square feet space in 2011 and later scaled it up.

Oracle had also recently announced its plans to set up an incubator in Thiruvananthapuram. The global IT major is planning to set up nine Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerators across the country, including one in Thiruvananthapuram. Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Gurgaon, Noida, Hyderabad and Vijayawada are the other cities where Oracle planned to set up incubators.
MANGALURU: Describing the anti-superstition bill as a tribute to the late Dr B R Ambedkar during his 125th birth anniversary, Congress leader in Lok Sabha, M Mallikarjun Kharge, on Saturday asked the state government to ensure passage of the legislation at the earliest.

Speaking at a Congress convention and an event organized by Mangaluru City and South Block to mark the 125th birth anniversary of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, Mr Kharge said Dr Ambedkar was against superstition and passing the bill will be a tribute to him. I ask ministers present here (D K Shivakumar, Ramanath Rai and U T Khader) to ensure that the bill is passed at the earliest. This bill is not to harm or interfere or hurt anybodys religion sentiments but to ensure that superstitious beliefs like Bettale Seve, untouchability, human sacrifice and the like, which harm people, are stopped, he added.

He expressed confidence that leaders of opposition parties would support the proposed bill. Basavanna was against superstition and thus I believe his followers like Jagadish Shettar and others will not oppose the bill. Kuvempu was a rationalist. So, Kumaraswamy too may not oppose the bill. The government has to work on getting this bill passed at the earliest, he added.

He criticized the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for taking credit for projects which were initiated by Congress governments. KPCC working president Dinesh Gundurao lambasted the Opposition for disrupting proceedings during the monsoon session of legislature. If they give me single piece of concrete evidence against minister K J George, I will ask the CM to drop Mr George from the cabinet, he added.
He has cautioned that this state of affairs can spiral out of control and trigger a fresh confrontation in the region (Photo: PTI/file)

Srinagar: Separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani has said that in spite of the mayhem Kashmir is witnessing over the past nine days and bitter experiences of the past a good beginning can be made to create an atmosphere conducive for peace and resolution.

He has placed six conditions which he says are actually Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) which can work as a prelude to meet the objective of reconciliation.

Spelling these out in a letter he has written to the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, the octogenarian leader says;

Accept the disputed nature of Jammu and Kashmir and announce the acceptance of the peoples Right to Self Determination Announce rapid demilitarization process of population centres Repeal draconian laws like AFSPA and Public Safety Act that facilitate the arbitrary and irresponsible behaviour of an already hostile army and that provides them with the legal immunity against heinous crimes like extra-judicial killings, rape, torture and arson committed against a defenceless local population, few of them read.

Release all the political prisoners from prisons, detention centres and house arrest and restore their right to free political activity Allow UN Special Rapporteurs and all international human rights and humanitarian organisations to work in Jammu and Kashmir, so that the iron curtain of the occupation is lifted... Announce and ensure free political space for all the parties to the disputed Jammu and Kashmir, particularly those advocating the Right to Self Determination for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, read the other three demands.

The copies of the letter, which were released here on Sunday, says that these steps if taken with a sense of urgency and responsibility can help towards restoring calm and peace in an agitated population and pave the way for the processes required for the 'final and just resolution' of the 'dispute' of Jammu and Kashmir and thereby disperse the perpetual clouds of war and conflict that threatens global peace.

Geelani who remains under house arrest at his Hyderpora residence here for the past several months said he had written to Moon on behalf of the oppressed and besieged people of Jammu and Kashmir and wants to draw the attention of World Community towards the grave and grim situation being faced by the caged people of the Valley for the past 7 decades in general and for the last two and a-half decades in particular.

The letter begins with his known premise that the people of the State have been facing repression at the hands of Indian occupation forces right from the day they landed in Srinagar in October 1947 after the British withdrew from Indian subcontinent and divided it into two states-India and Pakistan.

Accusing New Delhi if forcibly annexing the State against the principles of partition, self-determination and natural justice, he says that India has been continuoysly denying its people the right to self-determination.

Since then the people of Jammu and Kashmir have been relentlessly struggling to free themselves from this Indian military grip using all means. In response to our struggle for freedom India has deployed more than half a million armed forces to crush and control less than 10 million people of this occupied region turning it effectively into a huge prison with the densest military concentration anywhere in the world as reported by many international organizations including European Union, the letter says.

It alleges that, so far, more than 100,000 people have been killed in Kashmir Valley and around half a million in (post-Partition violence) in Jammu region and that thousands have been maimed, imprisoned or tortures besides about ten thousand fallen victim to involuntary disappearances.

This situation has not only destroyed the lives of the people of Jammu and Kashmir but has jeopardized world peace and resulted in three wars and numerous confrontations between, now nuclear-armed, India and Pakistan-two populous and poor countries- whose meagre resources are being eaten up by an endless and fruitless arms race, the letter pleads.

Turning to the ongoing turbulence, he alleged that a new wave of state terror has been unleashed on the people of the Valley and that the security forces have used extreme violent means to prevent the people from mourning the killing of a popular resistance commander (Burhan Wani).

The letter says, Indian forces killed more than 40 people so far, injured more than 3,500 ranging from kids as old as 4 year to 80 year old, and damaged eyes of more than a 100 people, firing pellet guns rendering at least 35 people completely blind in both eyes...curfew and severe restrictions have been imposed besieging the already imprisoned population further. Pro-freedom leadership has been either imprisoned or placed under house arrest.

He has cautioned that this state of affairs can spiral out of control and trigger a fresh confrontation in the region which, he says, will result in further destruction of life, resources and property, which needs to be avoided.
Bengaluru: Under siege by the opposition on the suicide of DySP M.K. Ganapati, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah claimed on Saturday that more policemen had committed suicide during BJP rule in the state.

Going by the National Crime Records Bureau 24 policemen committed suicide in 2007, and 17 in 2012. The highest number of police committed suicide during BJP rule, he asserted, participating in an interaction with districts journalists here.

Moreover, he said suicide was a  cowardly act and quoted a Chennai High Court judgment which said, suicide is not a solution to the problem, it is a cowardly act of a person, to underline his point.

The Chief Minister regretted that although his government had come out with several pro-people programmes, there wasnt enough publicity for them and promised to revamp the Information and Publicity department over the next two years to correct this.

Compared to other state governments, I am far behind in using publicity. Nowadays marketing is all important. As I hold the information department portfolio I will look into this, he said.

On extending night life in the city, Mr Siddaramaiah said the government would take an appropriate decision after considering the pros and cons. Well have to see if we can extend it without affecting law and order or public peace, he said.

When it was pointed out that the Devadasi system continued to flourish in some parts of north Karnataka with even children of these women being lured into it despite the ban, the Chief Minister said the government had decided to open residential schools in every hobli to provide free education to the children of Devadasis.

The journalists present raised issues like the delay in implementing Article 371 J in Hyderabad Karnataka and the malnutrition, which still prevails in parts of the state.
The failed coup attempt in Turkey is not a return to the periodic coups of the past but a warning to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that his overweening ambition to be a modern Ataturk in the 21st century has more critics than he had imagined. In this instance, sections of the security services were unhappy with his rule and tried to change the scenario in the only way they knew. A coup broadcast said the Army had seized power in order to save democracy. The coup was put down rather quickly but only after the reported deaths of nearly 265 people and 1,400 who were left injured in Ankara, the capital, and elsewhere.

Its political consequences will linger to present a major challenge to the Presidents ambition of converting his countrys parliamentary system into an executive presidency. Beyond it is the task of meeting the domestic, regional and international challenges. The attempted coup is the last thing Turkeys friends and allies would have wished because it was one of the few countries in the Middle East considered stable. Turkey has of course been heavily involved in the Syrian civil war and has been the entry point of jihadis going to fight for Islamic State and other groups. Today, Turkey hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees.

Only in recent times has the Turkish leadership exerted itself in policing its borders more rigorously, allowed the United States to use the Incirlik airbase for anti-Islamic State operations and sought to reduce the number of regional antagonists by making peace with Israel and Russia. However, President Erdogans problems are mostly at home. He fell out with self-exiled cleric Fetullah Gulen, who was once his close ally, and has had an army of followers in the countrys legal, administrative and media sectors. The President has charged him with instigating the coup  a charge he has denied  and asked the United States for his extradition. Significantly, 2,750 judges were dismissed after the coup.

After falling out with Mr Gulen, Mr Erdogan went to great length to try to clean the administration of Gulenists and took on the added burden of fighting the Kurdish rebels, the PKK, concentrated in the countrys southeast, with whom he had once sought peace. The Turkish establishments hopes of joining the European Union have faded although recently it did do a deal with the EU on stemming the flow of Syrian refugees into Europe in exchange for economic assistance.

President Erdogans basic problem will not go away even if he is willing to compromise on the fringes. His Ataturk complex, on view in the over 1,000-room Ankara palace he built for himself in Ottoman style, is taxing the nations politics and resources. Clearly, he doesnt brook dissent. The media, particularly the publishing empire of Gulen, have been browbeaten or taken over. And his ruthlessness in dealing with political opponents is a byword. President Erdogan, however, has accomplished one task in his 13 years of rule, mostly as Prime Minister. He did put the military, which had got used to running the country through a succession of coups, in its place.

But the new coup attempt has the potential of setting off discontent. First, there is the overt Islamisation of the country to please Mr Erdogans political constituency in Anatolia, much to the dislike of secular Turks. The second is the restriction of democratic freedoms. The coup was attempted while President Erdogan was on holiday. He flew home post-haste. But the plot involved only some sections of the armed forces and the speedy surrender of young soldiers was a sign of fear although some colonels and a few generals were complicit. The Army chief has been replaced. Officially, 265 people died, more than 1,400 were wounded and nearly 3,000 servicemen have been detained.

President Erdogan has undergone many changes in his political career. As mayor of Istanbul, he was a rebel. As Prime Minister, he first presented himself as a democrat and moderniser, seeking to meet EU goals in pushing his countrys membership of the organisation. As the prospects of Turkeys membership receded, Mr Erdogan swung to greater observance of Islamic custom and precepts, recognising it was the religiously observant, upwardly mobile middle class that had put him in power. A string of electoral victories also gave him the confidence of fancying himself as a latter-day Ataturk, the great moderniser who built the modern state out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The irony, of course, is that in trying to seize Ataturks mantle, he is taking the country back to the religious baggage his hero had dispensed with.

President Erdogan is well aware that he lives in a dangerous region. Before he decided to cease playing a double game with jihadis to help oust Syrias President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey was viewed favourably by Islamic State supporters. His change of stance brought about deadly terrorist strikes that killed hundreds of Turks ascribed to the Islamic State or Kurdish rebels. There are other ironies stemming from the vainglorious role Mr Erdogan sees for himself.

He is seeking to firm up a super majority he needs for a constitutional amendment to change the parliamentary system into a presidential one, though in practice he already enjoys supreme power after dispensing with the services of his more independent-minded Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, in favour of an old supporter, Binali Yildrim. Mr Erdogan rides several horses. His country is an important member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation even while he played footsie with jihadists. It is the nature of Turkeys balancing acts that some moves go wrong in the changing equations and circumstances. Ankaras ambition at one point was to have zero problems with neighbours. Even after mending relations with Israel and Russia, hostile neighbours remain. Mr Erdogans actions in the immediate post-coup phase will be watched with keen interest at home and in the region.
Turkey is a modern state that ranks among the worlds top economies, besides being a Nato member. It was riding on such characteristics that it has long aspired to join the European Union. It was hard to imagine a military coup could be attempted in this era in such a country, but it was late night Friday, creating considerable anxiety. The coup has been put down. But the Army chief was held hostage for a time. The Turkish Parliament was bombed. Order was restored within 24 hours, but it is arguable that a phase of instability may have set in, that could impact regional politics as well as politics in Islamic societies. Many of them looked up to Turkey for its modernity, poised as the country is, geographically, between Asia and Europe.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a consummate politician. He has been in power since 2003 and in this period he has revived full-blown Islamic politics in the country. In the process, Turkeys secular civil society was pushed back. After the First World War, Kemal Ataturk, an Army officer, had seized power and brought European-style modernity to the country, pushing back the religious-minded sections, precisely the people who have prospered under Mr Erdogan.

Pressing his political gains, the President has increasingly sought to run authoritarian politics, cracking down on secular elements, dissenters, journalists and the intelligentsia, and proceeding on the path of accretion of greater power for himself by seeking to manipulate the Constitution of late. He also revived the anti-Kurd military campaign, and involved his country in the quicksand of Arab politics. The Army, secularisms traditional bastion, has mounted coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and pushed out an Islamic PM in 1997. Evidently, in Mr Erdogans Turkey, the character of the Army has been changed imperceptibly, and Islamist-leaning elements have gained advantage.

The coup-makers were so obviously in a minority, as we can see now. The democratically-elected President has won. We hope this would have a calming effect. But any sense of optimism must be muted. More than 2,800 armed forces personnel have been arrested. But an almost equal number of judges have also been rounded up. The judiciary and sections of the intelligentsia in Turkey are said to be influenced by the movement of a former Sufi-style imam, Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in self-exile in the United States. Mr Erdogan accused him of instigating the coup, a charge that he rejects, and asked the US to extradite Mr Gulen. So, interesting  possibly risky  politics might unfold. Turkey suddenly looks vulnerable.
The Congressmen, however, were at their wits end trying to figure out the caste to which the new UPCC president belongs and even called up their Mumbai friends to get fresh ammunition that could be used against Mr Babbar.

Babbar is caste away

Congress leaders in Uttar Pradesh have started doing what they are best at  pulling down their own leaders. Within hours of the announcement that actor-turned-MP Raj Babbar had been appointed UP Congress president, disgruntled elements started calling their contacts in the media to give crucial inputs about the star politician. The Congressmen, however, were at their wits end trying to figure out the caste to which the new UPCC president belongs and even called up their Mumbai friends to get fresh ammunition that could be used against Mr Babbar.

Some channels harped about his being a non-brahmin and suggested the Congress should have named a brahmin as party chief, but the issue petered out as Wikipedia says he belongs to a Viswabrahmin family. When they could not find any worthwhile controversy to nail him down, they used his stint in the Samajwadi Party.

A veteran party leader who is now semi-retired remarked, This is what has brought the Congress down. Instead of using Babbars star power to relaunch the party, we are busy pulling him down. Babbar should recognise such elements before he arrives here. Mr Babbar, sources said, was very well aware of politicking in the party and even prepared to face it  caste or no caste.

In Punjab, a war is on

Punjab Congress chief Amarinder Singh and Aam Aadmi Party MP Bhagwant Mann were recently targeting each other in Punjab. Mr Singh described Mr Mann as a drunkard, a person who even comes to Parliament smelling of liquor, and said, Representatives like Bhagwant Mann are maligning the image of Punjab.

Attacking Mr Singh, Mr Mann claimed that the Punjab PCC chief was acting like Aamir Khans Ghajini on the issue of his familys accounts in foreign banks. He said his (Mr Singhs) denying having knowledge of the Swiss bank accounts of his family looked like as if he is suffering from selective memory loss. When politicians fight, it is the public that has the last laugh.

Hit the bottle, be happy

Three-time Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan is on a mission of his life. He is in search of ways to ensure true happiness in his state. He, it seems, firmly believes that basic needs such as roti, kapada aur makaan (food, cloth and shelter) alone cannot bring happiness to people. True joy cannot be bartered with even material prosperity. He constituted a joy department, first of its kind in India, to discover ways to ensure eternal happiness in MP.

An 11-member advisory body comprising spiritual luminaries of India such as Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Baba Ramdev have been mooted to guide the newly-created department in research work. An erudite minister in his Cabinet, however, has another idea. Let the new department function under excise department, state forest minister Gauri Shankar quipped, indicating, of course in lighter vein, to encourage people to turn tipplers with government patronage.

The Congress however pulled up the chief minister for saying basic needs alone cannot ensure happiness for people. If the chief minister seriously thinks roti, kapada aur makaan cannot ensure happiness in common people of the state, where 44.3 per cent of population lives below the poverty line, then he should seriously consider the ministers suggestion. This way, the states coffers will swell and people will also forget their hardships by hitting the bottle. And joy and happiness will rule across the state, state Congress spokesman Pankaj Chaturvedi said sarcastically.

Remembering Rajendra Kumar

It was chief minister Arvind Kejriwals former principal secretary Rajendra Kumars court hearing in a `50-crore scam that brought back memories of legendary Bollywood actor Rajendra Kumar Tuli in Delhi circles on his death anniversary on July 12. While putting up a story on the bureaucrats case going on in the Patiala House courts, a Hindi news e-portal used the picture of the actor on its website.

That was enough for the veteran actors fans to start a debate not only on the state of Bollywood movies but also on the casual approach of the news-hungry mediapersons to put anything or everything in the breaking news format to catch more eyeballs. Though many fans would have forgotten his death anniversary, the news report went viral with many ending up paying tribute to the legendary actor. Before the news item was removed by the e-portal, there were many in media circles who had got involved in discussing the classic roles played by the actor in his career spanning for decades.

Javadekars sweet gesture

Prakash Javadekar, who was elevated by the Prime Minister to the Union Cabinet and given the HRD ministry, decided to celebrate his elevation in a unique way. While attending his first Cabinet meeting last week, the minister sent out boxes of sweets to mediapersons who were waiting outside South Block, where the meeting was on. The sweet gesture took everyone by surprise.

Ray turns philosophical

Former Union minister and BJP leader Dilip Ray, who had good relations with the leaders of all major political parties, has turned quite philosophical these days.

Mr Ray held the key coal portfolio and also handled the steel ministry for a brief period in the Vajpayee government, and went into political hibernation after 2008, but resurfaced in the 2014 Assembly elections. He got elected from Rourkela and is now an ordinary MLA.

With not much work in hand, the lawmaker is now concentrating more on the affairs of his constituency and devoting the remaining time on Facebook. In a recent post, he wrote: Life is a journey. If you got everything you wanted all at once, there would be no point of living. Enjoy the ride, and in the end youll see these setbacks as giant leaps forward... all you have to do is show up every day, stay true to your path and you will surely find the treasure you seek.

In another post, he wrote: Keep on moving... Only connect! The more connections we make, not just between ourselves, but between our minds, our hearts and our souls, the more we will strengthen the bond of our relationship...

His followers are wondering why the politician had suddenly shrugged off his mundane desires and turned spiritual as well as philosophical.

Unending controversies

The problems for film actress-turned-lawmaker Angoorlata Deka seem to be far from over. A young BJP MLA, Ms Deka, who won from Assams Batadroba constituency, had to face sexist remarks from Ram Gopal Varma on sleazy and morphed photographs that went viral in the social media soon after the election. As the controversy was settling down, Ms Dekas name has now been dragged into a fresh controversy. A Twitter account in the name of Ms Deka tweeted: Shame on Hindus for wasting huge amount of money on Khan (Salman Khan) movies... fools use this money on Ram Mandir instead.

A Twitter account, bearing Ms Dekas photo, was apparently opened in May 2016. It says it is the unofficial account of the most beautiful MLA of the BJP. It has over 2,000 followers. Bogged down by the controversy, Ms Deka approached the police. I cannot even think of such comments. I am from the film fraternity. Ever since I became an MLA, the social media is after me. I am being repeatedly targeted, she said. The young actor joined the BJP in 2015. She was one of the six women candidates fielded by the party in Assam, and one of the two who won.
Jim Hamilton:

Helicopter money : Despite aggressive actions by central banks, many of the worlds economies are still stagnating and facing new shocks, leading to renewed calls for helicopter money as a serious policy prescription for countries like Japan and the U.K. . And, if things go badly, maybe the United States? ...

After discussing helicopter money, he concludes with:

... If helicopter money is no more than a combination of fiscal expansion and LSAP, and if we think LSAP hasnt been able to do that much, its clear that the fiscal expansion part is where the real action is coming from. On the other hand, if we think both components make a difference, theres no inherent reason that the size of the fiscal operation has to be exactly the same as the size of the monetary operation.

Nevertheless, as has been true with LSAP, there might be some psychological impact, if nothing else, from announcing this as if it were a new policy. For example, I could imagine the Fed announcing that for the next n months, it will buy all the new debt that the Treasury issues. For maximal effect this would be coupled with a Treasury announcement of a new spending operation. Doubtless the announcement would bring out calls from certain quarters that the U.S. was going the route of Zimbabwe. And just as in the previous times we heard those warnings, those pundits would be proven wrong, as indeed the effects would not be that different from what were already getting from central bank expansions around the globe.

Helicopter money is no bazooka for stimulating the economy. Ben Bernanke offered this reasonable summary:
The aircraft had arrived in Cairo on Wednesday after a two-day flight from Spain, finishing the 3,745 kilometre (2,327 mile) journey with an average speed of 76.7 kilometres an hour.

CAIRO: The final leg of an unprecedented world tour by a solar-powered plane was postponed Saturday due to the pilot's health, he said in a message on Twitter. The Solar Impulse 2 had been scheduled to leave Cairo for Abu Dhabi. "I'm sick. Stomach upset. I prefer to postpone the take-off @solarimpulse. I cannot go flying for 48 hours in that shape. Sorry," Bertrand Piccard wrote on Twitter.

The aircraft had arrived in Cairo on Wednesday after a two-day flight from Spain, finishing the 3,745 kilometre (2,327 mile) journey with an average speed of 76.7 kilometres an hour. It had earlier landed in Seville after completing the first solo transatlantic flight powered only by sunlight, flying through the night with energy stored in its 17,000 photovoltaic cells. The plane is being flown on its 35,400-kilometre (22,000 mile) trip in stages, with Piccard and his Swiss compatriot Andre Borschberg alternating at the controls of the single-seat plane.

"So Piccard was not feeling well yesterday. Was much better this morning. And then again tonight things got a bit worse. So we took the decision... it's not an easy decision but it's a wise decision for safety reasons," Borschberg told journalists who had assembled to watch the plane taking off in Cairo.

The Solar Impulse 2 embarked on its journey in Abu Dhabi in March 2015.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
Though smart phones try to be one stop solution for all our needs, most of us end up having two separated devices for personal and professional use. Juggling two devices is often, a problem. The recently launched Panasonic Eluga Note might be one solution. It comes with support for 'Android for Work': a tool that helps to manage your professional and personal data, without mix-up. You can set up a dedicated work profile for business content that never mixes with your personal stuff, so IT managers cant see or erase your photos, emails, or other personal data.

The Eluga Note, is also one of the few devices in India with an infrared sensor -- IR Blaster -- which can convert the device into a universal remote control for household electronic devices like television, air conditioner, DVD players, etc.

Panasonic classes this device under phablets, but at 142gms and just 8.1mm thick, it doesnt look or weigh anything like a phablet and is sleek enough for single-handed operation. The 5.5 inch display is full-HD 1080x1920 pixels with a pixel density of 403ppi.

The primary camera of 16mp with F1.9 aperture, auto focus and triple LED flash is a decent performer. The front camera is only 5mp, which might not impress selfie lovers.

The Eluga Note comes with latest Android 6.0 with Panasonics FitHome 2.0 UI on top, which allows few gesture controls and thumb app access. It runs on a 1.3 GHz Octa-core Processor with 3 GB RAM. The 32 GB internal memory is expandable up to another 32 GB via micro SD card. The dual-SIM device supports VoLTE and packs a decent 3000 mAh battery.

For a device priced in the smartphone mid range at Rs. 13,290, the Panasonic Eluga Note packs a lot of high-end productivity features.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
But some Turkish officials have reportedly suggested the United States was covertly sympathetic to the rogue military officers, a claim Kerry angrily denied. (Photo: AP)

Luxembourg: Secretary of State John Kerry called his Turkish opposite number Saturday to offer US support in the wake of a failed coup but also to protest claims Washington had backed it.

The United States was quick to denounce the military revolt in its NATO ally Turkey and to express support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's elected government.

But some Turkish officials have reportedly suggested the United States was covertly sympathetic to the rogue military officers, a claim Kerry angrily denied.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said that Kerry had called Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu for a second day running to promise US support in probing the putsch.

"He made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," Kirby said of Kerry's call to Cavusoglu.

Earlier, Turkey's labour minister Suleyman Soylu had reportedly suggested the United States was behind the revolt, which triggered fighting that left at least 265 dead.

Erdogan's government has now apparently crushed the revolt, but he has demanded expatriate opposition figure Fethullah Gulen be returned to Turkey from the US to stand trial.

Kerry said earlier Saturday, during a visit to Luxembourg, that the United States would entertain an extradition request if Turkey provided proper evidence against Gulen.
The southern city was the scene of a deadly encounter between a black man and white policemen earlier this month. (Photo: AP)

Louisiana: Multiple police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot on Sunday morning, a department spokesman said, as the country remains on edge about police and community relations.

According to reports, two police officers were confirmed dead in the firing while seven others were injured.

The officers were taken to a local hospital, Sergeant Don Coppola told the local CBS affiliate, adding he did not know the extent of their injuries.

"Several officers were struck by gunfire," Baton Rouge police spokesman Don Coppola told local television station WAFB.

Our thoughts are with the @BRPD & @EBRSheriff this morning. Media reporting multiple officers shot and killed in Baton Rouge. #ThinBlueLine  Aurora Police Dept (@AuroraPD) July 17, 2016

"There are three they are describing as very seriously ill," Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told the station, adding that more details will be forthcoming.

The station aired video footage of police responding to the scene in Baton Rouge. Multiple shots could be heard as civilian cars quickly backed away.

The shooting appeared to be carried out by a lone gunman carrying an assault rifle, local media reported.

While the scene of the shooting was contained, police have still not taken the shooter into custody and warned local residents to stay away from the scene, near Airline Highway.

The reports come a week after a wave of protests against police violence in Baton Rouge and other cities after a 37-year-old father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers. At one of the demonstrations in Dallas, a gunman opened fire on white officers assigned to the protest, killing five of them.
Authorities talk to the driver of a car near an area where several officers were shot while on duty in Baton Rouge, La. (Photo: AP)

Baton Rouge, Louisiana: The shooting that left at least three police officers dead in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday may have been carried out by multiple gunmen, police authorities in the city have said. The officers were responding to a call of shots fired when they were ambushed by at least one gunman, at around 9 a.m. local time. One suspect is dead and police are checking the shooting scene with a robot to make sure there are no explosives.

Police told reporters authorities are seeking more than one suspect and said the public should be on the lookout for people dressed in black and carrying long guns. It was not immediately clear whether there is a link between Sundays shootings and the recent unrest over police killings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.

Police-community relations in the city have been especially tense since the killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, who was killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video and circulated widely on the internet. It was followed a day later by the shooting death of another black man in Minnesota, whose girlfriend livestreamed the aftermath of his death on Facebook.

Then on Thursday, a black gunman in Dallas opened fire on police at a protest about the police shootings, killing five officers and heightening tensions even further. Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets in Baton Rouge to condemn Sterlings death, including hundreds of demonstrators who congregated outside the police station. Authorities arrested about 200 people over the three-day weekend.
Brussels: European leaders greeted the defeat of Turkeys coup on Saturday with relief as it averts chaos and keeps alive a deal that has helped to stem the migration crisis threatening the continent.

But while some hope a reminder of resistance to his personal grip on power may prompt President Tayyip Erdogan to heed European pleas for him to respect civil rights, many fear he is far more likely to step up his crackdown on opponents and so complicate European Union efforts to maintain the bargain.

The coming weeks, starting when EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels on Monday, will be crucial to the fate of a plan at the heart of the migrant deal: To have sceptical EU lawmakers approve after the summer an end to visa requirements for Turks.

Erdogan will be judged on his response, one EU official involved in the plan said, citing arrests of judges as an early sign that justified deep concern that this will lead to a new trampling on rights of freedom of expression and demonstration.

Senior members of the European parliament, where anger at the prickly Turkish leaders treatment of elected opponents could stymie the EU deal to reward Turkey for stopping refugees, were pessimistic about the outlook for Turkish democracy.

Erdogan will try to extend his position of power, foreign affairs committee chair Elmar Brok, an ally of the Turkey deals architect German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Die Welt daily.

French President Francois Hollande expects repression.

If Erdogan responds to public demands to restore the death penalty to execute putschists, or if Turkey moves to jail ethnic Kurdish parliamentarians whom it stripped of immunity in May, EU lawmakers may turn against the migrant deal, EU officials said.

Turkish officials have warned that its collapse could see Ankara allow a resumption of traffic that last year saw a million people, many refugees from Syria and Iraq, cross to Greek islands and trek over open borders to Germany.

That shook Europeans support for the EU and, some argue, fuelled last months devastating British vote to leave the bloc.

Nuanced support

Official statements from the EU stressed backing for a democracy that many acknowledge Erdogan has himself abused.

The EU fully supports the democratically elected government, an early overnight statement read, taking care to add it also backed the institutions of the country and the rule of law - a nuanced distinction from Erdogans personal power.

With the plot seemingly already undone, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini followed up to urge a swift return to Turkeys constitutional order with its checks and balances and ... fundamental freedoms. It seemed hardly a call to defeated soldiers dead or in jail, but rather to the victor.

This is not about supporting Erdogan or not, it is about supporting the rule of law and democracy, a second senior EU official involved in relations with Ankara said.

EU officials have reminded Turkish counterparts that their past cooperation, in engaging Ankara in a decade of halting reforms to enhance its -- distant -- prospects of joining the bloc, has helped Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted party to curb the historic threat to civilian rule from Turkeys armed forces.

Now, closer ties with the economic bloc are at stake, the second official said, insisting Europe can use that leverage, despite criticism from human rights groups that Merkels deal with Erdogan to hold back migrants put Europe at his mercy.

This is not a blank cheque for Erdogan, he said of backing against the coup. He has to be extremely careful not to overshoot the reaction.

Erdogan is not Putin

Many EU diplomats argue that Turkey, faced with conflict across its borders in Iraq and Syria that has fuelled internal strife with its Kurdish minority, and at odds with Russia and most West Asia powers, cannot afford to alienate Europeans.

And some dared to voice hope on Saturday that the coup bid might make Erdogan more willing to reach beyond his own voters:

Erdogan is not Putin - he is not that strong. We have to keep him on the democratic path, a third EU official said.

Expressing a hope that Europeans might now warm to Erdogan again as a lesser of two evils, less unappealing than chaos, or army rule, a fourth EU official referred to the presidents call to unarmed supporters to face down the army: If you win by saying democracy is stronger than tanks, he said, then the democratically elected government should act for democracy.

A fifth EU official was, however, pessimistic. It would be nice if Erdogan saw this as a wake-up call to respect civil rights, he said, but a crackdown seemed almost inevitable.

Senior diplomats dismissed suggestions, however, that the EU had hesitated to condemn the plotters in the early hours in the hope of change. However irksome many find Erdogan, they said, statements against the putsch came as quickly as possible.

Clearly Europe would have more reasons to worry if the coup had prevailed, one EU official said.

Cards to play - Turkey benefits

Some fear Erdogan can use his control of the migration route to Europe to ignore calls for restraint in penalising opponents, but others argue that Europe has cards to play against him.

They even play down the importance of Turkish cooperation in the migrant crisis, citing data showing that closing down routes from Greece through the Balkans was at least as big a factor in deterring all but a few from crossing to Europe since March.

Referring to Ankaras hopes of aid for 2.7 million Syrians it is housing, and for visa liberalisation eagerly anticipated by many Turks, a senior European government official said: The deal is in Turkeys interests, so why should they change it?

As big a hurdle could be the European parliament, where some had threatened to block the visa bill if Turkey jails any of dozens of Kurdish lawmakers who were stripped of their immunity from prosecution by a pro-Erdogan majority two months ago.

German leftist Martina Michels said it was Europes failure to stand up to the Turkish president that had destabilised Turkey. Now, she said: An uncritical courting of Erdogan as a partner in the wrong solution to the refugee issue must end.
People lay flowers and light candles to honor the victims of an attack, on the Promenade des Anglais, near the area where a truck mowed through revelers in Nice, southern France. (Photo: AP)

Nice, France: France has called on young "patriots" to join the reserves following an ISIS-claimed truck attack in Nice which killed 84 and prompted tough questions over security failures.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve made the appeal for volunteers to boost the security service on Saturday as France reels from its third major Islamist attack in the past 18 months.

"I want to call on all French patriots who wish to do so, to join this operational reserve," said Cazeneuve of a force which is currently made up of 12,000 volunteers aged between 17 and 30.

The call came as the government faces searing criticism over the Thursday attack, in which Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne truck into a crowd of people who had been watching Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city.

Some 300 people were injured in the assault and many remain in a critical condition.

Opposition politicians and newspapers demanded more than "the same old solemn declarations", and far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen called on Cazeneuve to step down.

"In any other country in the world, a minister with a toll as horrendous as Bernard Cazeneuve -- 250 dead in 18 months -- would have quit," she said.

But Cazeneuve defended France's security efforts, saying the country was facing "a new kind of attack" which highlighted "the extreme difficulty of the anti-terrorism fight".

Speaking as France began three days of mourning, he said 31-year-old Lahouaiej-Bouhlel "had not been known to the intelligence services because he did not stand out... by being linked with radical Islamic ideology".

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel's neighbours and father earlier described him as a violent depressive who showed no outward signs of being a devout Muslim.

Islamic State group claim

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the killings on Saturday, three days after the assault.

In a statement via its Amaq news service, IS said one of its "soldiers" carried out the attack "in response to calls to target nations of coalition states that are fighting (IS)".

After crisis talks in Paris, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian noted that IS had recently repeated calls for supporters to "directly attack the French, Americans, wherever they are and by whatever means".

"Even when Daesh is not the organiser, Daesh breathes life into the terrorist spirit that we are fighting," he said, using an Arabic name for IS.

Police said they had arrested four more people linked to Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, in addition to his estranged wife who was taken into custody on Friday.

Cazeneuve said the father-of-three "seemed to have been radicalised very quickly, from what his friends and family" have told police.

"We are now confronted with individuals open to IS's message to engage in extremely violent actions without necessarily having been trained or having the weapons to carry out a mass (casualty) attack," he said.

IS also claimed responsibility for the November 13 attacks which killed 130 people in Paris, while gunmen in January 2015 attacks on the Charlie Hebdo weekly and a Jewish supermarket were linked to both IS and Al-Qaeda.

A French parliamentary inquiry last week criticised numerous failings by the intelligence services over the Paris massacres.

France is also home to hundreds of jihadists who have flocked to fight alongside IS.

'Where is my son?'

At least 10 children and adolescents were among the dead in Nice as well as tourists from the United States, Russia, Ukraine, Switzerland and Germany.

A spokeswoman for the city's paediatric hospital said 16 bodies had not yet been identified.

The first compensation payouts to victims under a French government scheme will begin next week, minister Juliette Meadel said Saturday.

Five children and 21 adults remained in a critical condition and were among 121 people still hospitalised, the French health ministry said.

Tahar Mejri is one of 30,000 people who had gone to watch the fireworks on the palm tree-lined Promenade des Anglais when their night turned to horror as the truck left mangled bodies strewn in its wake.

He lost his wife in the attack and was hunting Saturday for his four-year-old son.

"I have called everywhere, police stations, hospitals, Facebook and I can't find my son. I have been looking for him for 48 hours," he said.

"My wife is dead, where is my son?"

Hours later, he emerged wailing in distress from the Pasteur Hospital in the north of Nice after learning that his son was also dead.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaks to the media outside Bute House, following an emergency Scottish cabinet meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Photo: AP)

London: Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she would not rule out the possibility of Scotland remaining in the European Union as well as part of Britain, which backed Brexit overall in a referendum mainly due to voters in England and Wales.

"I don't think that should be ruled out at this stage," she said.

Voters in Scotland rejected independence in 2014 but heavily backed remaining part of the EU in a referendum on June 23, with Sturgeon suggesting there could be a second secession vote.
Turkish citizens wave their national flags as they protest against the military coup outside Turkey's parliament near the Turkish military headquarters in Ankara, Turkey. (Photo: AP)

Ankara: Thousands took to the streets of Turkey on Saturday in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after authorities crushed a military coup that claimed at least 265 lives.

After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan triumphantly addressed flag-waving supporters in Istanbul following Friday's chaos in the strategic NATO member of 80 million people.

The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who is Erdogan's arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.

Turks woke up early Saturday to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.

"The situation is completely under control," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkey's top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.

Describing the attempted coup as a "black stain" on Turkey's democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.

General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters has been killed. Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters' hopes.

During a night where power hung in the balance, supporters of Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders' orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime.

On Saturday, thousands of jubilant supporters again mobilised in response to Erdogan's call to fill Turkey's squares, massing in Taksim in central Istanbul, the president's home district of Kisikli, Ankara's Kizilay Square and in the coastal city of Izmir, AFP correspondents said.

Crackdown concerns

Friday's putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul.

Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets.

Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd.

Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.

As protesters poured onto the streets, an AFP photographer saw troops open fire on people gathered near one of the bridges, leaving dozens wounded.

There was chaos in the city as angry crowds jeered the passing tanks, with much smaller numbers welcoming the troops.

With the coup defeated, Turkey rounded up its backers, from rank-and-file soldiers to generals, fuelling concern over the risk of summary justice.

US President Barack Obama stressed the "vital need" for all parties to "act within the rule of law".

While condemning the coup bid, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also said the plotters had to be dealt with "under the rule of law".

General Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, has been detained while Alparslan Altan, one of 17 judges on the constitutional court, was taken into custody.

Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the attempted coup.

In a call to his Turkish opposite number Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry offered Washington's continued support, but also denounced claims by some Ankara officials that the US had backed the coup.

Calls for extradition

The president's critics have long accused him of undermining modern Turkey's secular roots and of sliding into authoritarianism -- but he was believed to have won control of the military after purging elements who opposed him.

Turkey's once-powerful military has long considered itself the guardian of the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.

It has staged three coups since 1960 and forced out an Islamic government in 1997.

Erdogan immediately pinned the blame on "the parallel state" and "Pennsylvania" -- a reference to Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him, and calling for his extradition.

But Gulen "categorically" denied any involvement in the plot, calling the accusation "insulting".

Meanwhile, Turkey demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.

Istanbul authorities have sought to get life back to normal by reopening the bridges to traffic and gradually resuming service at Ataturk International Airport, which was shut down by the plotters.

But the US government said it has suspended all flights to Turkey, and banned all airlines from flying to the United States from Turkey due to uncertainty after the coup bid.

Turkish authorities also imposed a security lockdown at the Incirlik air base in the southern province of Adana used by US and other coalition forces in the fight against jihadists in Syria, the US consulate said.
A Turkish man looks at destroyed police and civilian vehicles near the presidential palace, in Ankara. (Photo: AP)

Ankara: Turkey's justice minister says some 6,000 people have been detained in a government crackdown on alleged coup plotters and government opponents.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag says in a television interview that "the cleansing (operation) is continuing. Some 6,000 detentions have taken place. The number could surpass 6,000."

Read: Turkey detains 'coup plotters' at base used by US: reports

Bozdag also said he was confident that the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey. The Turkish president has blamed Gulen and his followers for the failed military coup on Friday night, but Gulen has denied any involvement in or knowledge about the attempted coup. The US says it will look at any evidence Turkey has to offer against Gulen, and judge accordingly.

Bozdag says "the United States would weaken itself by protecting him, it would harm its reputation. I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey."

Prayers are being read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to rally the country to defend its democracy and honor those who died in an attempted military coup.

Sela prayers are traditionally recited from mosques during funerals, though they are also performed to rally people. During Friday night's attempted military coup, sela prayers were repeatedly recited from mosques across the country throughout the night to rally the people against the coup plotters.

Religious Affairs Directorate President Mehmet Garmez told private channel Ulke TV that "as a nation who wasn't disturbed by the barrel of tanks pointed at the people or the sounds of F-16s flying overhead, I do not see anyone in this land who would be disturbed by the sound of sela. This tradition will continue."
Policing levels are expected to be upgraded at major events across the UK in the coming months. (Photo: AP)

London: Britain's Special Air Service (SAS) sniper teams have been trained to stop a speeding vehicle by shooting through the engine block with armour-piercing bullets in the event of a Nice-style attack, a report said today.

British police fear that Islamic State (ISIS) sympathisers in the UK may attempt a copycat attack on the lines of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel's killing of over 80 people by driving an armed lorry through crowds in the French beach town last week.

'The Sunday Times' report claims that SAS snipers have already trained to deal with a similar situation in the UK. "Every terrorist incident that happens worldwide we look at to see what the latest tactics and methodology are, and we think about whether that could happen here," Neil Basu, deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police who is in charge of the UK's protective security, told the newspaper.

Basu said that all police forces have been asked to review security at large events over the next week, but there are concerns about other big public gatherings later in the year and in the longer term.

British police and security services have become more concerned about a possible attack since May this year, when Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a senior ISIS figure, told supporters in the West that civilians and crowds are legitimate targets.

Al-Adnani, the group's chief spokesman and head of external attack planning in Syria, said "Know that inside the lands of the belligerent crusaders there is no sanctity of blood and no existence of those so-called innocents".

"Know that your targeting (of) those who are called 'civilians' is more beloved to us and more effective, as it is more harmful and painful and a greater deterrent to them. So go forth!," he had said.

Police believe that extremists who have been thwarted in their efforts to join ISIS in Syria and Iraq are among those Britons who pose the greatest danger.

Policing levels are expected to be upgraded at major events across the UK in the coming months.
Gulen is understood to maintain significant support among some members of the military and mid-level bureaucrats. (Photo: AP)

Luxembourg: The Obama administration would entertain an extradition request for the US-based cleric that Turkey's president is blaming for a failed coup attempt, US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday.

But he said Turkey's government would have to prove Fethullah Gulen's wrongdoing.

Visiting Luxembourg, Kerry said Turkey hasn't yet requested that the United States send home Gulen, who left Turkey in 1999.

Gulen has harshly condemned the attempted coup attempt by military officers that resulted in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left dozens dead.

But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government is blaming the chaos on the cleric, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government. Washington has never found any evidence particularly compelling previously.

"We haven't received any request with respect to Mr Gulen," Kerry told reporters. "We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr Gulen.

And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately."

"I'm confident there will be some discussion about that," Kerry added.

President Barack Obama today was briefed on the latest developments by his national security and foreign policy advisers. The White House said afterward that Obama reiterated the US' "unwavering support" for Erdogan's government, which he had done yesterday.

The White House also lamented the high death told and said it had no indications as yet that any Americans had lost their lives in the coup attempt.

Gulen is understood to maintain significant support among some members of the military and mid-level bureaucrats. His movement called Hizmet includes think tanks, schools and various media enterprises. Gulen and Erdogan only became estranged in recent years.

In a statement, Gulen said he condemned, "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey."
Fridays putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul. (Representational image)

Ankara: Fridays putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul. Parts of Parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets. Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd. Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories. There was chaos in Istanbul as angry crowds jeered the passing tanks, with much smaller numbers welcoming the troops.

While condemning the coup bid, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the coup plotters had to be dealt with under the rule of law. Meanwhile, judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the coup bid. Mr Erdogan, who flew back from the holiday resort of Marmaris to a triumphant welcome from supporters at Ataturk Airport, said the plotters will pay a heavy price for this act of treason. He immediately pinned the blame on the parallel state and Pennsylvania  a reference to Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him. But the Presidents former ally categorically denied any involvement in the plot, calling the accusation insulting.

Yildirim took aim at the US for hosting what he called the leader of a terrorist organisation. Speaking in Luxembourg, US Secretary of State John Kerry invited Turkey to hand over any evidence it had against Gulen. Meanwhile, Turkey demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece. Istanbul authorities sought to get life back to normal with the bridges reopening to traffic and Ataturk International Airport gradually reopening.
Relatives of the victims of the EgyptAir flight arrive at a hotel where French authorities are informing them, at the Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris. (Photo: AP)

Cairo: Audio from the flight recorder of crashed EgyptAir flight MS804 mentions a fire on board the plane in its final moments, the investigation committee said on Saturday, confirming what sources on the committee had previously told Reuters.

The Airbus A320 plunged into the eastern Mediterranean en route from Paris to Cairo on May 19. All 66 people on board were killed. The cause of the crash remains unknown.

Earlier analysis of the planes flight data recorder showed there had been smoke in the lavatory and avionics bay, while recovered wreckage from the jets front section showed signs of high temperature damage and soot.

Initial audio extracted from the flight deck voice recorder had indicated an attempt to put out a fire on the jet before it crashed, committee sources had told Reuters.

The committee said on Saturday it was still too early to determine the reason or the place where that fire occurred.

The committee also said the John Lethbridge vessel, belonging to Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, had completed its search for human remains, which will now be transferred to Cairo for DNA analysis.
Nice: Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel staked out the Nice promenade with his rented truck twice in the two days before he smashed the vehicle into a crowd of people watching Bastille Day fireworks on Thursday night, according to a source close to the probe. French investigators have arrested two more people as they pieced together details about the motives and planning of Bouhlel.

While some family and friends have described the 31-year-old as someone who smoked, drank and never attended the local mosque, others questioned indicated a recent shift to radical Islam, said a police source. However there has been no evidence yet linking him to the Islamic State group, which on Saturday claimed the attack.

In Nice, many people were still desperately waiting for news of their loved ones among the dead. Prosecutors said only 35 victims have been officially identified as they take painstaking measures to avoid errors of identification seen during the November Paris attacks.

We have no news, neither good nor bad, said Johanna, a Lithuanian who was looking for her two friends, aged 20. At least 10 children were among the dead as well as tourists from the United States, Ukraine, Switzerland Germany and about 10 from Russia, a local Russian association said.

Health Minister Marisol Touraine said that 85 people were still hospitalised, 18 people of them in critical condition. On the second day of national mourning, the Russian Orthodox Church in Nice held an emotional mass for the victims. Another service was planned later at Pariss iconic Notre-Dame cathedral.
Islamabad: Pakistani internet sensation Qandeel Balochs brother Wasim Baloch on Sunday told police he did not regret killing his sister. Baloch was arrested late Saturday by police from Dera Ghazi Khan where he fled after murdering Qandeel Baloch. Qandeel was bringing dishonour to the Baloch people and I could not tolerate that. Her issue with the clergyman had increased our troubles, Baloch said. He said he drugged her and then strangled her, adding he did not regret his action.

I proudly admit to murdering Qandeel and I have earned heaven and honour by providing relief to my parents and family. After the videos with Mufti Abdul Qawi went viral, I planned to murder her and was only waiting for the right moment, he said. Now everybody will remember me with honour that I have provided relief to my parents and brothers who were suffering for the last two decades because of her, he said.

Relatives and neighbours carry the body of Qandeel Baloch during her funeral. (Photo: AFP)

Girls are born only to stay at home and to bring honour to the family by following family traditions. But Qandeel never did that. My friends would send videos and pictures of her on my mobile. Murdering her was better than committing suicide so I went ahead with my plan.
Lesser-known in his own country, bravery tales of Lance-Daffadar Gobind Singh Rathore of Rajasthan will now be heard across the world. Britain has launched a new digital archive telling the inspiring stories of war heroes, including Gobind Singh and five other Indians, as a part of the UK governments centenary celebrations to mark World War I.





The new digital archive was launched by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) last month to chronicle individual biographies of Lance-Daffadar Gobind Singh from Rajasthan, Risaldar Badlu Singh from Punjab, Sepoy Chatta Singh from Uttar Pradesh, Naik Darwan Singh Negi and Rifleman Gabar Sing Negi from Uttarakhand and Lance Naik Lala from Himachal Pradesh. It has launched a new digital archive narrating the inspiring stories of 175 war heroes who received Victoria Cross (VC).



FCO Minister Hugo Swire says: By putting their stories online we are sending a message that these men, and the important role played by their home countries in the First World War, will never be forgotten by the people of the United Kingdom. Behind every name engraved on the memorial plaques there is a truly remarkable story. It is fitting that we pay tribute to the Victoria Cross recipients from overseas by bringing their stories together in this digital archive. Also, a separate audio narrative of their tales has been archived in the library.



The new digital archive can be accessed through the UK governments official www.gov.uk portal. August 2014 marked 100 years of Britain entering the First World War. (The then) Prime Minister David Cameron had launched the commemoration programme in October 2012.



Gobind Singh's kin and people in Damoi village of Rajasthan, where the hero was born, are thrilled at the development.



Born on December 7, 1887, Gobind Singh Lance-Daffadar of the 2nd Lancers (Gardners Horse) had bagged the VC, highest Commonwealth award for gallantry valour in the face of the enemy given to members of the armed forces of British territories.



Damoi in Nagore district has a population of 500. When one enters the village and starts looking for Gobind Singh's house, one realises that he's rather famous as VC Sahab (Victoria Cross Sahab). And suddenly people are eager to accompany you to his house, a weathered haveli he built after his retirement.



Painted in sky blue colour, this haveli, built on 70 bighas of land, has 12 rooms with traditional arches over long baradaris. When a visitor steps into the courtyard, he is greeted by two big frames of his painted portraits in army fatigues, his proud eyes behind bushy mustaches gazing intently at you. The portraits hang outside a room with four windows where he breathed his last. At present his daughter-in-law Kamal Kanwar lives there.



Gobind was keen to study but his village had no school. So, he was admitted to prestigious Chowpasni school situated in Jodhpur,175 km from his village. After returning from the World War I he resumed his studies. During those days women hardly went to school but he made his wife, Jattal Kanwar, study till fifth standard in the same school. Most of the time, Gobind served away from home.



At the time of his death, Gobind had extracted an assurance from his wife that she will never compromise with son's studies. Ganga Singh Rathore, who was just five when Gobind died, went on to become a brigadier. Thanks to initiatives of his family now the village has a senior secondary school. Singh survived the war and died at 55 in 1942.



He joined the British Indian Army along with his brother Amar Singh in 1910. When the Great War broke out, the unit had to be deputed to Europe. Both brothers volunteered to go, but their officer advised that one should stay back to look after the family. Amar stayed back, and Gobind left for France. He was 29 when he became a Lance in the 28th Light Cavalry. He was later attached to 2nd Lancer which was also called Gardners Horse.



Gobind was awarded for his actions against German forces in France at the Battle of Cambrai on December 1, 1917 during the World War I.



His citation for the VC in the London Gazette of January 11, 1918, reads: For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty in thrice volunteering to carry messages between the regiment and brigade headquarters, a distance of over 1 1/2 miles over open ground which was under the observation and heavy fire of the enemy. He succeeded each time in delivering his message, although on each occasion his horse was shot dead and he was compelled to finish his journey on foot.



The VC was presented to him at Buckingham Palace by the King. It was later presented to 2nd Lancers by Govinds son, Brig Ganga Singh (1937-1999). Ganga joined the Regiment as a recruit; rose to command its B Squadron, then 2nd Lancers, and, finally, an Infantry and an Armoured Brigade.



As part of the World War 1 Centenary Celebrations, the UK Government has just unveiled a hand-crafted bronze plaque in memory of Indian soldiers awarded the VC.



Carrying forward the legacy of his family 53-year-old Col Rajinder Singh like his father Ganga Singh and grandfather Gobind Singh also belongs to prestigious 2nd Lancers (Gardners Horse). Proud Rathore who is currently posted in the 52 Infantry Brigade Jammu (LOC), told Deccan Herald over phone: Every time people talk about the heroic deeds of my grandfather my heart swells with pride. I appreciate the British Government's innovative way of preserving the priceless stories of the heroes in their digital archives. Now, people from all over the world can easily access his information. However, such initiative should be replicated by the Indian and the Rajasthan governments .



Unhappy at the response of state and Central governments, family believes that bravery of Singh needs bigger recognition in his own country. Expressing his concern, Col Narpat Singh Rathore (retd), another grandson of Gobind Singh who presently lives in Jaipur, told Deccan Herald: I still remember the bravery tales of my grandfather narrated by my father. He had told me that Ganga Singh was nominated second time for the VC. But it is given only once. Although his bravery stories are archived in the digital library a memorial in his village can be built or a defence academy could be dedicated to him, so that people, especially the new generation, can recognise his work."






Namma Metro connectivity to the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) has been in the pipeline for several years now. But clarity eludes this critical link even nine years after the commercial launch of the airport. There are now indications that the second phase of the Metro project will have an extenstion to the airport, although the exact alignment is yet to be finalised.





Engineering consultancy firm, RITES has already prepared a feasibility report on the link line, recommeding five alignments. The most feasibile option could be an extension of the Gottigere to Nagawara line under Phase-II. But this 21.25-km line has a 13.79-km underground stretch which could prove tricky in speedy completion of the project.



Faced with the hard rock problems on the Chickpet-Majestic and Majestic-Mantri underground stretches, the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRCL) is wary about tunnelling issues. Only when the Gottigere-Nagawara line is fully complete can the Airport extension make sense.



Experts are convinced that the Airport link from the Nagawara side will take years. However, BMRCL officials feel they can accelerate the work if the tunnelling job is entrusted to multiple contractors. Simply put, this would mean several Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) working in tandem at different underground station points.



What is a better, quicker alternative? Is a Metro line along Airport Road a viable option? The now-on, now-off High-Speed Rail Link (HSRL) was designed to take this path. But, as urban rail analyst, Sanjeev Dyamannavar points out, there are big issues with this route.



An elevated Metro line would mean cutting short the runway and eventual closure of the Government Flying Training School at Jakkur. This problem becomes even more pronounced on Airport Road along the Yelahanka Air Force Station. The Air Force will definitely not allow that elevation so close to its important base. The only option will be to go underground for a minimum of 4-5 km, explains Dyamannavar. Inevitably, going below the ground will escalate the project cost.



Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) had ruled out a second entry to the airport from the Southern side, citing construction of its second runway along that direction. This contention could apply to a Metro link extended from Nagawara.



But aviation experts have an easy solution to this: Take the Metro line under the runway and extend it all the way to the terminal. This model has been perfected in airports across the world.








Hopelessly trapped in a massive traffic jam on Airport Road, 400 passengers missed their flight that March afternoon. Protesting farmers had driven their tractors right into the city in droves, squeezing the only access route to the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA).





Frantic airport taxi drivers desperately looked for alternative roads. But there was none. In their design to maximise toll collection on the only route, the authorities had ensured that no second access road would be developed.



The airport access issue demanded a quick response. But that urgency evaded policy-makers until the road was jammed again, last month. A tree-fall was all that it took to reduce vehicular movement to a crawl. The frantic search for a second route commenced all over again.



Roads do exist on either side of Airport Road. But without a second entry to KIA, these are really not alternatives.



Heres why: Airport-bound commuters who take the Outer Ring Road and get onto either Thanisandra or Hennur Main Road eventually get back onto the Airport Road through Kogilu Road or Bagaluru Main Road. Inevitably, they end up at the toll gate before the Trumpet Flyover before heading to KIA.



Citing security concerns, the Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) has been steadfast in its opposition to a second entrance to the KIA. But now, following discussions with the state government and other agencies concerned, there is apparently a change in that position.



Bypassing Airport Rd

The airport will now have an entry point at the Southwest corner of its compound. Confirmed by a top BIAL official, this would mean commuters could completely bypass the Airport Road and the Trumpet Flyover. But there is a condition: Completion of the road from Nagawara on ORR through Thanisandra.



If everything works out as planned, the alternative route will look something like this: You get onto Thanisandra Main Road from ORR, take right at its junction with Bagalur Main Road to reach Mylanahalli. The airport wall is only a few metres away from here.

BIAL has ruled out a gate here citing alignment of the second runway cutting across this path. Instead, the proposed road turns left here to reach Begur. Turning right at Begur will leave commuters at the proposed entry gate of the airport lands southwest corner.



An access road from the gate will link it to the existing 5-km KIA Road that connects the Trumpet Flyover with the airport terminal. But the project will not happen in a jiffy. On the agenda are land acquisitions and road upgrades to connect the missing links.



Thirteen acres of land is to be acquired for a 3-km link at Mylanahalli, Chikkanahalli and Begur. This will take up Rs. 21.80 crore of the Rs. 31.50 crore earmarked for the project. Work is expected to be completed in the next six months.



Existing routes

To access KIA from beyond KR Puram, commuters have an existing road branching out of the Old Madras Road at Budigere Cross. This road passes through Mandur and Budigere to eventually join the Hoskote-Devanahalli NH648. Cabs then get onto the Airport Road and approach the Trumpet Flyover from the Northern side.



Besides commuters, the one agency that has been pushing the hardest for a viable alternative route is the traffic police department. At a Bangalore Traffic Review Action Committee (BTRAC) meeting, the traffic police had proposed their own options.



One option requires commuters to turn left on Airport Road at Sir MVIT College Road, turn right to Telecom Layout Road and take a right turn again to IVC Road before joining Ballari Road ahead of Devanahalli. Airport-bound commuters would then have to turn right and head back towards Trumpet Flyover to reach KIA. The traffic police rationale: Vehicular movement near Devanahalli is relatively less compared to Yelahanka.



But as urban commute analysts point out, a lasting solution should entirely bypass the already saturated Airport Road. This only access road gets choked during VIP movements, during the annual Krishi Melas and the biennial Air Shows at the Yelahanka Air Force Station. Besides, the Chalukya Circle steel flyover proposed by BDA threatens to unload thousands of vehicles at Hebbal. The message is clear: For passengers desperate not to miss their flights, there is no alternative to an alternative road to KIA.


Admission time at Delhi University is also the peak time for student groups to interact with the new students and woo them into campus politics  if not as members in their organisations, then at least as voters.





This year targeting these new students has been tougher. The online admission system implemented this time meant that applicants didnt have to visit the campus till late in the admission process. Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) office bearers could interact with them only after the cut-offs were announced.



But later the opportunities presented themselves.



The main interaction started after the first cut-off list was out. We got up to 50 queries related only to the website every day till the fourth list came out, says DUSU vice-president Sunny Dedha.



Soon the online admission process became the reason for most students to reach out to DUSU. With the problems which the college officials or the teachers could not resolve, they looked up to DUSU for help.



Different roles

Traditionally, the roles of student political groups during admissions and elections are different.



During admissions, members from different student parties work as `friends to help the applicants. Often, rivals coordinate with each other to help freshers.



For example, with the Indian National Students Organisation (INSO), which is focused mainly on making students from outside Delhi feel comfortable. They have a scattered presence on DU and arent too strong in student politics. This actually helps them maintain friendly relations with the more dominant groups.



Sachin Namberdar, an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) member, says INSO is a hit amongst Jat students. At times, he has sent Jat students to INSO volunteers during admissions, believing they would deal better with their problems.



He says top leaders across student parties may not choose to be friends with each other, but this doesnt apply down the line.



Without friendship, it is also difficult to climb the ladder of success, says INSO spokesperson Ankur Dhama. Ideology is not everything, he adds.



And student parties have in the past kept their ideological differences aside for what they perceived to be the common interests of all students.



In 2013, all parties, including NSUI, ABVP, and All India Students Association (AISA), came together to demand rollback of FYUP (Four-Year Undergrtaduate Programme), says Dedha.



There are other common agenda, highlighted in the manifestos of rival parties. On the implementation of room rent control, starting evening colleges or increasing the number of hostels, Congress-linked National Students Union of India (NSUI), BJP-affiliated ABVP and INSO, all stand together.



Protests

While the admissions are on, student groups have indicated their presence on the campus through protests.



The NSUI protested outside the deans office on Chhatra Marg on the first day of implementation of admissions through the online

system.



Many students were not able to fill their forms online. As soon as the cut-offs were out, the DU website would crash. We demanded from the dean to make the system offline or increase the efficiency of the website, says NSUI general secretary Ameet Singh Teema.

On the very next day, the university sent the NSUI a letter stating that they would rectify the problem and make the website faster.



The ABVP held a protest during admission time against Delhi Universitys Teachers Association (DUTA), asking them to withdraw their decision to not evaluate

answer papers of undergraduate students. Soon after that, the teachers agreed to begin checking the exam papers.



Most admission-seekers are aware that in case they face any problem with the authorities, they can come to us, says DUSUs Dedha.



We go straight to the principal and sort out their problems. The principal of any college is never too busy for us he says.



Similary, the union sorted out a problem over admission after the third cut-off at Satyawati College, he says. Dedha visited the principals office with fellow ABVP

members.



Many lost souls, who have come to DU for the first time, wander outside DUSU office looking for help. They believe that DUSU can help them get a seat in any course at any DU college. In this, obviously, they are disappointed.



DUSU office

Both ABVP and NSUI have set up help desks outside many colleges. But at the DUSU office, its mostly members from ABVP, the group which swept DUSU elections last year.

Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti (CYSS), Aam Aadmi Partys student wing, created some noise last year when it entered student politics, but has withdrawn from the coming DUSU elections. AISA also appear to be missing from the campus during this admission season. NSUI remains the sole competitor to ABVP.



While ABVP members sit inside the DUSU office and attend to admission-related queries from students, members from NSUI are seen outside trying to talk to others.



But overall, student groups are subdued this admission season.




One dead, several injured as opposition group storms police building in Yerevan

One police officer was killed and two others wounded early on Sunday when an armed opposition group stormed a police station in Yerevan demanding the release of Jirayr Sefilyan, a jailed opposition leader and Artsakh War veteran arrested last month for illegal arms trafficking and possession. They seized the building and continue to keep several hostages in it. Yerevan Police Chief Valery Osipyan and Deputy Police Chief Vardan Yeghiazaryan are among the hostages. The group calling itself Sasna Dzrer (Daredevils of Sasoun), has announced that the storming of the police station is the start of an armed uprising in Armenia. They called on Armenians to join in the initiative. The Armenian authorities warned the gunmen to surrender themselves and rejected their demands to free Sefilyan. The police and other law-enforcement bodies are continuing to urge them to give up their criminal plans and to surrender themselves to the authorities, General Hunan Poghosyan, First Deputy chief of the Armenian Police said. At the same time Poghosyan confirmed that one police officer was killed and several others were wounded during the unprecedented armed attack. He identified the victim as Colonel Artur Vanoyan. Another colonel is among the wounded officers, he said. We are capable of neutralizing them. You cant deal with murderers otherwise, Poghosyan added. In the meantime, in a video address, Pavel Manukyan, one of the armed group members that seized the Erebuni Police Station, said they demand the release of various individuals, including Jirayr Sefilyan and other political prisoners. In the video, the gunmen say they will not hand themselves over without a fight. Hunan Poghosyan again spoke to journalists at the scene later in the day. He said that anti-terrorism forces deployed around the seized police station have not yet received an order to attack it because the negotiations are underway. We just dont want more bloodshed and are again urging them to surrender to the authorities, he said. Serzh Sargsyan held an emergency meeting with the countrys top law-enforcement officials on Sunday hours after the attack. The meeting participants discussed the seizure of the police building and efforts by the law enforcement agencies to free the police officers held as hostages there. Also, Armenian Ombudsmans Office said on Sunday that it had received numerous reports of people being detained by the police after the seizure of the police station. The Ombudsmans Office said its staffers are following up the developments and have visited several of those held at police stations. At present, the police building continues to remain in the hands of the group affiliated with the radical opposition movement Founding Parliament. More police forces are seen arriving in the street which is blocked by police officers. Two buses arrived at the scene at around 8:00 p.m., bringing about 50-60 policemen. Also three KAMAZ trucks came up to the police compound but it was not clear what they were carrying. Also, the traffic is suspended for an indefinite time in several streets of the Armenian capital.
As much as one lakh cusecs of water is being released from the Almatti reservoir (Bagalkot district) with the storage in the dam reaching 518 metres against the full reservoir level of 519.60 metres since Saturday morning.





Of the 26 crest gates of the dam, water is being released from 22 gates and also through a hydel unit situated near the dam. The gates have been raised to a height of 0.6 metres to allow the water discharge. The inflow into the dam stood at 2.05 lakh cusecs. Sources said that the inflow may come down in the coming days as the rains have receded in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra.



Meanwhile, following increased demand for release of water through canals for irrigation purposes, a new irrigation consultative committee has been formed under the chairmanship of district in-charge minister H Y Meti.



The committee is scheduled to hold its meeting on Monday in Bengaluru. The hydel unit at Almatti is now generating 290 MW per day - its installed capacity. At present, Almatti dam has 101 tmc feet of water.



Tungabhadra dam

On the other hand, the outflow from Tungabhadra dam (Hosapete, Ballari district) too has been increased to 735 cusecs. The dam has received 33 tmc feet of water in the past two weeks. However, the inflow has come down as the rains have receded in the catchment areas. At present, the dam has 36.68 tmc feet of water. The reservoir can impound a maximum of 133 tmc feet of water. However, silt deposit has reduced the storage capacity to 100 tmc feet.



Scanty rains in Kodagu

The Kodagu district experienced scanty rainfall on Saturday. In the last 24 hours, the district received an average of 5.69 mm of rainfall. The water level in Harangi reservoir stood at 2857.66 feet. It rained moderately for some time in Mysuru.



Moderate rains lashed some parts of Shivamogga district on Saturday. Thirthahalli received heavy rains for around 15 minutes in the morning. Heavy rains lashed Shivamogga around noon for a short while.



Meanwhile, Cauvery Neeravari Nigam Executive Engineer Shivashankar said on Saturday that as per the award of Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, 7.5 tmc feet of water has been released to Tamil Nadu from June to till date.



Speaking to reporters, he said that as per the as per the award, the state has to release 192 tmc ft of water to Tamil Nadu in a year.


From assisting his father Dorjee Khandu in politics to working for social transformation, Pema Khandu has travelled a long way to sit in the coveted post of chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh.





37-year-old Pema, the youngest chief minister of the country, is all set to follow the footsteps of his father and former chief minister Dorjee Khandu, who died in a chopper crash in 2011 near Luguthang in Tawang district bordering China.



Pema was elected leader of the Congress Legislature Party yesterday in a dramatic turn of events for the beleaguered party fighting to save its government.



Eldest son of the family, Pema, a graduate from Delhi's prestigious Hindu College had an early entry into governance after his father's demise.



And in five years, he has emerged as the chief ministerial prospect after Supreme Court's intervention that changed the course of politics in the state with dissidents returning to Congress.



Pema, who hails from Tawang, first entered the Arunachal Pradesh assembly in 2011 to fill the vacancy caused by his father's death.



His election as MLA from Mukto (ST) constituency was uncontested and he was soon included in the state government as Cabinet Minister for Water Resource Development and Tourism in the Jarbom Gamlin ministry.



He also became the cabinet minister for Rual Works Department (RWD) and Tourism since November 21, 2011 in Nabam Tuki government and thereafter served the state as cabinet minister for Tourism, Civil Aviation and Art & Culture.



He was re-inducted as the Urban Development Minister on June 1 2014 in the Nabam Tuki government after the general election.



He quit as minister in October last year and sided with dissident Kalikho Pul.




Two men involved in credit card phishing have been arrested by the Delhi Police from Deogarh in Jharkhand.





They used to cheat people by gathering details about their credit/ATM/debit cards posing as bank officials on the pretext of card verification. They used Paytm Mobile Solutions to transfer the amount swindled in other bank account in Jharkhand, the police said.

The two have been identified as Sawan Verma (25) and Manish Rai (26), both residents of Deogarh.



The incident came to light on June 21 when Dr Dinesh Kumar, a senior doctor at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital filed a complaint at North Avenue police station alleging that he had received phone calls from a person claiming to be from State Bank of India (SBI).

The caller informed Dr Kumar that his credit card had been blocked due to some reasons. In the pretext of unblocking his credit card, the caller obtained from him details of his credit card.



After the call, Dr Kumar received a message from his mobile phone service provider that a new SIM card would be sent as requested by him and current SIM was to be blocked with immediate effect. Dr Kumar realized something fishy was taking place and he immediately called up his bank.



By the time he could get access to the bank executive through bank IVR (Instant Voice Response) system, the culprits had withdrawn Rs 30,000 in four installments from his account. Fifth withdrawal, however, was blocked by the bank, the police said.

Keeping in view the latest trend of cheating and sensitivity of the case, a team of Crime Branch was formed.



The team started investigation of the case and it was revealed that the amount from the victims account was transferred through Paytm Mobile Solutions to an SBI bank account at a SBI branch situated at Deogarh, Jharkhand.



After developing concrete information regarding whereabouts of accused persons, a joint raiding party consisting of police officers from Crime Branch and North Avenue police station conducted raids in Jharkhand and arrested Sawan Verma and Manish Rai from Deogarh on July 12.



During their interrogation, the accused revealed that they used to make random phone calls to different mobile phone numbers and would obtain details of the Credit/ATM/Debit cards of victims posing as bank officials. They used SIM cards obtained on fake IDs to make such calls. After obtaining the card details of the victims, the accused would make fraudulent transactions from the account of the victim.


Turkish authorities rounded up dozens of senior military personnel and judges in a ruthless crackdown today, after thousands massed in the streets nationwide overnight to denounce a coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.





World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned the attempted putsch but also urged Turkey to respect the "rule of law" in its aftermath, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some coup plotters when arrested.



According to the government, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives when a group within the army sought to overthrow the authorities by seizing key strategic points in Istanbul and Ankara.



Over 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military has said.



The botched coup bid marked the biggest challenge to Erdogan's rule in 13 years as prime minister and now president. But he successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.



Thousands responded late yesterday to a new call by the president to pour into the squares to celebrate the "victory of democracy" with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks reported in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.



Europe Minister Omer Celik urged people to stay on the streets, writing on Twitter that the "vigil for democracy" continues.



The Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, accusing the plotters of acting on behalf of Erdogan's arch enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.



The government has already said that almost 3,000 soldiers had been detained on suspicion of involvement in the putsch which raised fears of chaos in the strategic NATO member state of almost 80 million.



Turkish television has shown images of captured coup plotters forced to lie face down on the tarmac after arrest while AFP photographers have seen suspects roughly led away pursued by angry mobs.



NTV television said that 34 generals of various grades had been detained so far. They include senior figures like Erdal Ozturk, commander of the third army and the commander of the Malatya-based second army, Adem Huduti.



In an operation early Sunday, authorities detained the commander of the garrison in the western town of Denizli, Ozhan Ozbakir, along with 51 other soldiers, according to the state-run Anatolia news agency.



Turkey also detained a senior air force general and other officers accused of backing the failed coup at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria.



Brigadier air force general Bekir Ercan Van was detained along with over a dozen lower ranking officers on Saturday at the Incirlik air force base in Turkey's southern Adana province, newspapers including the Hurriyet daily said.



The base has become a key hub for US forces after Turkey last year agreed to allow the United States to use Incirlik to carry out lethal raids against jihadists in Syria.



Former chief of staff Ilker Basbug told Dogan news agency that Turkey should make a distinction between the coup planners and young soldiers "of 20 years old who may have been mistaken".



The crackdown is however not restricted to the military and Anadolu said that prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for a total of 2,745 judges and prosecutors across Turkey.



The entire investigation is being led by Ankara prosecutors and those arrested are suspected of belonging to Gulen's group, which Turkey dubs the "Fethullahci Terror Organisation (FETO)".



Gulen's supporters say their group which they call Hizmet (Service) is entirely peaceful.

US President Barack Obama has warned Turkey there is a "vital need" for all parties to "act within the rule of law" in the aftermath of the coup.



Friday's putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets. Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul.



Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.



Erdogan has pinned the blame on Gulen, a former ally who he accuses of running a "parallel state", and called on Obama to extradite the reclusive preacher to face justice.



"Mr President, I told you myself, either deport or hand over to us this person who lives in 400 acres of land in Pennsylvania," he told a triumphant rally in Istanbul late Saturday, carefully not referring to Gulen by name.



In an interview with Haberturk television, Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu went even further saying "The United States is behind the coup" and adding it had now to handover Gulen.



But Gulen has categorically denied any involvement in the plot.



Meanwhile, Turkey has demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.



The suspects are still in Greece, but the chopper itself is now been flown back to Turkey, a Turkish official said.



Istanbul authorities have sought to get life back to normal, resuming service at Ataturk International Airport, which was shut down by the plotters.



But Washington on Saturday warned citizens against travel to the country, suspending flights and banning all airlines from flying to the United States from Turkey due to uncertainty after the coup bid.


Celebrating Vietnam and its culture is Benjarong with its Saigon festival by expert chefs Nguyen ThiNho and Ly Kim Ngan. The young chefs hail from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon.





Ask chef Nguyen ThiNho about the festival and she says, We wanted to bring the flavours of Vietnam to the city and celebrate our food with the world. As the city has a lot of foodies who like to explore different cuisines, this festival gives them a chance to try something new. It took a lot of work to match the flavour palates with the taste we have back home but our hardwork has paid off.



With the ongoing festival, the expatriate chefs are in the country for a month. They will also be flying to Chennai and Kolkata for the food festival in other Benjarong restaurants.



Chef Ly Kim Ngan says, Bengaluru has been very good to us so far. The autorickshaw rides are very funny and amusing. I love having onion dosa, appam and chicken curry here. Though many like having the parotta with a curry, I prefer mine with payasam.



The duo hopes to make some time between the restaurant hours to explore other things in the city. One of the things that chef Nguyen is looking forward to trying is chicken biryani.



The festival features one-of-a-kind delicacies curated by the chefs. The menu includes a wide range of mocktails, appetisers, salads, soups, main course dishes and desserts. The Gaoi Cuon Tom vdi Tuong Ngot va Do Chua (Vietnamese fresh shrimp spring rolls dipped in fermented bean sauce and mixed pickle) is a great start to the meal. For the main course, Cary Ga Nuoc Cot Dua (Vietnam chicken curry in coconut gravy) and Ca Khi To(caramelised fish in clay pot) go perfectly well with Com Chien Hat Sen va Thit haoc Hai San (fried rice with lotus seeds wrapped in lotus leaf) and jasmine rice. To end the meal, there is mung bean cake and crystal steamed banana cake served with coconut cream.



The Saigon festival is on till July 24. Benjarong is located at 1/3, Ulsoor Road, behind Manipal Center.




Returning home after an abortive trip to find some ice cream late Thursday evening, Mario Aufiero, a French retiree, waited patiently on the sidewalk as a big truck lumbered down the short street he needed to cross to get to his apartment building just off the Promenade des Anglais.



The truck, he said, displayed no unusual menace but upset him all the same as heavy vehicles are supposed to be banned from the sedate residential area at that hour. Moreover, it was moving in the wrong direction down the one-way street outside his apartment. There was nothing I could do, so I went home to bed, Aufiero recalled.

The deeply uncomfortable question now confronting French leaders and the countrys security apparatus, however, is whether they, too, dozed off that night.



Moments after Aufiero got home, the driver of the truck he had seen remorselessly turned it into a killing machine. The truck ran over scores of people as it barrelled down the Promenade des Anglais for more than a mile before police officers finally stopped it by shooting to death the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian.



As investigators try to piece together what drove Lahouaiej Bouhlel to such extreme and random violence, many people in Nice and around the world are asking how, in a country that has been under a state of emergency since November, a lone driver could so easily flout elementary traffic rules and then race unimpeded through throngs of people who had gathered to watch a Bastille Day fireworks display.



As in previous years, security forces, worried about a possible terrorist attack on Frances national day, set up barriers to block traffic on the Promenade des Anglais, a crescent-shaped boulevard that stretches eastward from the citys airport to its old port. But the barriers, crowd-control devices made of hollow metal tubes, started far to the east of where Lahouaiej Bouhlel entered the boulevard.



The number of police officers on duty that night was more than usual, but nearly all were concentrated in the sealed-off area by the old port, where most people traditionally gather to watch the fireworks.



This left Lahouaiej Bouhlel more than a mile of open road on which to crush revellers who had decided to stay outside the heavily guarded spectator zone  and build up speed before he reached the first police barriers near the point where the seaside promenade joins the Boulevard Gambetta. Such was the 19-ton trucks speed that when it first encountered any obstruction by police, it would have required a wall of concrete to stop it, Anthony Borre, an official in the regional government, told local television.



French leaders, including President Francois Hollande, who visited Nice on Friday, repeatedly praised security services for swiftly stopping the truck once they encountered it. Indeed, the truck advanced only 500 or so yards after smashing through the barriers near Boulevard Gambetta. But this was only a short part of Lahouaiej Bouhlels long and murderous drive.



Why was he allowed to drive so far without anyone bothering him? asked Pierre Roux, who, from his balcony, watched the truck plough through the crowd outside his apartment. This is a terrible screw-up, he said after emerging from his home early Friday to put a candle on a bloodied white sheet covering a corpse.



How big a screw-up is still being deciphered. It is not clear, for instance, whether police tried to shoot out the tires before being able to shoot the driver, or whether smaller cities around France prepared for the possibility of a large-scale terrorist attack with the same vigilance as Paris, the scene of two major attacks last year.



There, in stages starting early on Frances July 14 national day, police snapped in place a security perimeter extending many blocks from the fireworks display at the Eiffel Tower. They closed even major thoroughfares to vehicles, including scooters, and placed checkpoints at nearly each approaching intersection to search pedestrians bags.



The question of whether more could have been done to prevent 84 people from being killed has been taken up by local leaders on the French Riviera, most of whom represent right-wing forces opposed to Frances Socialist government in Paris.



National unity does not signify national naivete or, even less, national incompetence, Eric Ciotti, the president of the department in which Nice is located, told Nice Matin newspaper. Zero risk never exists, but it is our duty and our responsibility to limit it to the maximum.



Frances Socialist government has responded angrily to such criticism, insisting it did everything it could to prevent a terrorist attack. It pointed out that nobody expected a rampage by truck and that the attacker had never popped up on the radar of intelligence and other services that monitor potential extremists. Still, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced on Saturday that he was calling up 12,000 police reserves to augment security around the country.



The prefecture for Alpes-Maritimes, the department that encompasses Nice, added its own voice to the defensive chorus, issuing a statement Saturday that said security for this years fireworks show had been increased with 64 national police officers and 42 from the city plus 20 soldiers. It said vehicles had been positioned to block the Promenade des Anglais beyond the closely monitored security zone but acknowledged that Lahouaiej Bouhlel had bypassed one of these control points by simply driving onto the sidewalk.



Aufiero and other residents in the area near a childrens hospital where the truck entered the promenade said they had seen no extra police in their neighbourhood and nothing on the boulevard to impede Lahouaiej Bouhlels murderous progress until it was far too late.



Everything was like it always is every year on July 14. There was nothing to stop him until he got down to Gambetta, said Pierre Devit, a resident on the promenade in the citys Magnan district near the hospital. He also asked why it had taken so long to shoot the driver. They should have opened fire as soon as they saw the truck approaching, he said.



Others, however, were more understanding of authorities failure to quickly halt the citys worst episode of violence since World War II.



People need to be logical. The truck was moving at 60 kilometers an hour, so what could anyone do? asked Jeanne-Jacques Cuny, an employee in a foundry that makes the metal barriers studded along the seafront walkway. We cant put police every 10 meters. That would be completely unreasonable, and people would only complain.



The Islamic State on Saturday gloated over the success of what it called a new, unique operation in Nice. In a radio broadcast claiming responsibility for the attack, it warned: Let the crusader states know that regardless of how much they mobilise their security capabilities and tighten their procedures, they will not be safe from the strikes of the mujahedeen, which will continue to beat upon their doorsteps.




The BJP corporator from the Lakkasandra ward in Bengaluru and two of his friends were killed on the spot in a collision between two cars on the Bengaluru-Mysuru highway, near Gowripura in Srirangapatna taluk of Mandya district on Sunday morning.



Mahesh Babu (40) was a second-time corporator from the Lakkasandra ward in the BTM Layout Assembly constituency.



The two others killed in the accident were identified as Balaji (40) of Bannerghatta and Mudassir Pasha (45) of Marathahalli. Jagadeep, who was travelling with them was seriously injured and has been hospitalised, the police said.



A Maruti Swift car that was going towards Mysuru from Bengaluru rammed the road divider, veered into the opposite lane and hit the Maruti WagonR in which the corporator and his friends were travelling to Bengaluru. The occupants of the other car, Suresh (38) his wife Bhavya (28) and their nine-year-old son Subhash and car driver Kumar (40), all residents of Thorehalli in Bengaluru were injured. They have been admitted to a private hospital in Mysuru, the police said.



It is said that Babu and his friends had been to Mysuru on Saturday and were returning to Bengaluru on Sunday morning. Sureshs family was heading to Nanjangud. Sureshs driver lost control over the vehicle and rammed the median. The Srirangapatna Town police have registered a case.



The police had a tough time controlling Babus supporters who had gathered in large numbers near his house in Lakkasandra in Bengaluru. Four inspectors and KSRP personnel were deployed to control the crowd. The police placed barricades to control the flow of visitors to Babus house. But local residents removed the barricades and rushed towards Babus house once his body was brought there around 5.30 pm.



Most of the shops in the area downed their shutters as a mark of respect to the departed leader. The local residents also burnt a tyre to express their anguish. The police have deployed additional forces in and around Babus residence. Transport Minister Ramalinga Reddy, former deputy chief minister R Ashoka, Mayor B N Manjunath Reddy and other leaders visited Babus house and paid their last respects. The funeral will take place on Monday, family sources said.



Babu had served as chairman of the BBMPs Standing Committee on Social Justice during his first term as corporator. He had introduced solar water heaters for slum dwellers in many areas. He is survived by his parents, Krishnappa and Sugunamma, wife Sarala and twin daughters Monisha and Monica, who are second standard students. Sarala and her two daughters were highly inconsolable.


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Patel quota stir leader Hardik Patel left for Udaipur on Sunday, in accordance with the Gujarat High Courts condition that he will have to stay out of the state for six months.



The high court had earlier paved the way for Hardiks release after granting him bail in two cases of sedition and a case related to violence at Visnagar MLAs office. As per the courts direction, Hardik had to leave Gujarat within 48 hours of his release from the jail. Since the 48-hour time limit was ending at 11 am on Sunday, Hardik left for Udaipur at 7.30 am.



The 22-year-old leader will stay at a house owned by former Congress MLA and local Patel leader Pushkarlal Patel in Udaipur.



Court order

In an undertaking submitted before the sessions courts of Surat and Ahmedabad, Hardiks lawyers had informed that the leader will stay at House No 190, Shrinath Nagar on Airport road in Udaipur.



I have made all the arrangements for Hardik at my place. He is fighting for the rights of our community and he has the support of Patel community in Rajasthan too, Pushkarlal Patel told reporters.



Hardik, who is demanding inclusion of the Patel community under the OBC quota, had walked out of jail on Friday.



To a question that day on his chances of joining active politics, he had said: People of my community will decide if I have to join politics or not. I will take the decision when my community tells me. Otherwise, I dont feel that we have to be in politics to do something for our nation and people.



Following this, all Opposition parties in Gujarat are trying to woo the firebrand leader, apparently with an eye on the state Assembly polls next year.



The Congress, the NCP and the AAP made a beeline for Hardiks inclusion in their parties  some openly inviting him while others did so by sending feelers.
The brutal sexual assault and ghastly murder of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district has snowballed into a major political issue. The Opposition Congress and the NCP combine is targeting the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance government and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on the eve of the Monsoon session of the Maharashtra legislature.



Speaking to reporters here on Sunday, Leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil (Congress) and his counterpart in the Council Dhananjay Munde of the NCP, displayed a photo of the accused, Santosh Bhavan, with Water Resources Minister Ram Shinde, who is also the Guardian Minister of Ahmednagar district.



However, later in the evening, Fadnavis produced another photo, that of the accused, which was different from the ones shown by the Vikhe-Patil and Munde. The Opposition leaders should have cross-checked facts on such a sensitive issue, Fadnavis told reporters at Sahyadri, the official guest house at Malabar Hill. He also said that the Opposition leaders must apologise to the minister.



On Wednesday evening, the victim, a ninth standard girl, was found mutilated under a tree in Kopardi in Karjat town. The incident took place when her mother sent her to her grandmothers house to fetch masala. When she did not return after a few hours, family members began looking for the girl and found her cycle. Later, they found the body of the victim in a farm. She was badly tortured and raped to death.



Ahmednagar Superintendent of Police Saurabh Tripathi is personally supervising the case. So far, three people have been arrested and efforts are on to track down the other accused. On Sunday evening, Minister of State for Home Deepak Kesarkar visited the town, however, he was given a cold shoulder. NCP women activists headed by Chitra Wagh tried to gheraoe Kesarkar.



The incident reflects the law and order situation, said Vikhe-Patil. We wonder why there has been a delay of two days in arresting the accused, added Munde. On its part, the Maharashtra Government assured to try the case in a fast-track court and ask Ujjwal Nikam to be the special public prosecutor.






Education Minister and government spokesman Naeem Akhtar said the telecom blockade would be lifted in the next two or three days.



He also said, keeping in view the prevailing situation, the government had extended summer vacations in all education institutions till July 25.



Due to the communication blockade imposed by the government, the actual situation on the ground could not be verified. A senior police official said the curfew would continue on Monday.



All vernacular and English dailies suspended publication for the second day on Sunday. Akhtar said newspaper owners were asked to suspend publications till July 19.

Cable television operations were allowed on Saturday evening, after remaining suspended for a day.



The resumption of operations was allowed after the operators agreed to take off all Pakistani news channels and two private news channels, Times Now and Zee News.



Meanwhile, people have been facing an acute shortage of essential commodities, including medicines, due to the curfew. Residents of Srinagar complained that they were not even allowed to move out of their homes to arrange for food and medicines.





There seems to be no let-up in the violence in Kashmir as one more protester was killed on Sunday. With this, the death toll touched 43 in nine days of unrelenting clashes.Reports said an unruly mob defied curfew and tortured a police picket in north Kashmirs Bandipora district. In retaliatory action by the forces, one protester was killed, while three others were injured. However, a police spokesperson said the overall situation in the Valley remained under control though stray incidents of stone pelting were reported.The curfew remained in place in most parts of the Valley as the authorities desperately seek an end to the vicious cycle of violence, triggered by the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani on July 8.Telephone services, barring the post-paid network of BSNL, remained suspended for the third consecutive day, while mobile internet services remained blocked for the ninth day on the trot with only broadband services spared of the clampdown.
Eleven trekkers from Bengaluru were stranded at Savandurga Hill near Magadi for a few hours due to bad weather.



The incident could have been prevented had they not flouted the forest department rules. As per Section 26 1(d) of the Indian Forest Act, any kind of trespassing, including trekking or climbing, is prohibited. Prior permission from the department is needed to undertake such trips.



The group had started the trek around 4 am on Sunday, but lost its way due to a heavy downpour, the police said.



When they realised they were lost, one of them alerted the control room and Magadi police set out in search of them. Around 6 am, a few of them were spotted coming down. The police helped the others to safety. A senior police officer said, They were stuck for a couple of hours. Fortunately, no untoward incident took place. They claim they were misguided by a local woman, and the rain made it impossible to find the route. All of them have submitted a written statement.



Speaking to DH, a senior forest department official said the 11 have been warned under the Karnataka Forest Act for trespassing in a forest area.



There are no timings, people are prohibited all through the day. However, many people walk in, visit the temples and then start climbing. The forest department is constantly patrolling and warning the crowds. We are now putting barricades and boards to keep people at bay, the official said.



The 11 are Balu, Sibin, Deepak, Shahrukh, Shashank, Rajesh, Sudarshan, Abhinav, Siddhanth, Chetan and Suchith.



Trekkers version

Abhinav told DH he and five of his roommates decided to go trekking to Savandurga Hill. Around 4 am, we reached the foothill and came across a few other trekkers. A woman approached us and said she would show us an easier route, if we paid her. We handed over Rs 100 and took the path she pointed out. However, there were no signboards and soon we realised we are on the wrong track.



We decided to head back, but it started raining and we did not know which way to go. It was dark and we decided to wait for sunrise. By around 6 am, the rain stopped and we started the climb down. That is when the police spotted us. We were not stranded, but were waiting for the rain to stop, he added.



Similar incident

Three months ago, a team of techies had strayed into Savandurga for night trekking and were unable to find their way back. They were booked for trespassing under the Forest Conservation Act.


The Delhi Jal Board (DJB) has identified 10 water bodies to be revived in next one month. These are located in South and South West areas of the capital.



The DJB has the working permission from the land owing agencies of the water bodies and the focus would be to revive these 10 during the ongoing monsoon so that the storm water in the rain does not get wasted.



The revival plan has three major components  cleaning of garbage, arrange for the source of water (rainwater in the first phase) and arranging for perennial source of water throughout the year which would require getting the treated water.



Out of the 10 identified water bodies, two are in Dwarka sector 20 and 22, and others are located in areas such as Mitraon village in Najafgarh, Chhawla, Kangan Heri, Aya Nagar, etc.



These water bodies have been chosen keeping in mind factors like sufficient amount of land available, no technical hurdle or resistance from population, a government official said. The officials associated with the project visited the site of the water bodies on Sunday along with scientists from NEERI (National Environmental Engineering Research Institute) and a feasibility report will be prepared after which the work will start.



The capitals water bodies lakes, ponds, and step-wells  are dying a slow death with problems like encroachments and sewage plaguing them. The Delhi government had in June set up a high-level committee to look into the matters related to water bodies, under the chairmanship of Public and Works Department (PWD) Minister Satyendar Jain.



In a first of its kind initiative for the national capital, treated water from Sewage Treatment Plants (STPs) will be provided throughout the year for these water bodies and the DJB also has plans to set up STPs close to where these are located.



These water bodies remain dry throughout the year so we have to find a perennial source of water for them. The DJB will provide good quality treated water from STPs after the monsoon is over and where there is no STP, we will either set up new plants or take up online treatment or look for another source of waste water.





The model is there in Mumbai and some other cities but not been done in Delhi so far, he said. The setting up of treatment plants is concurrent with the DJBs plan to decentralize the treatment of waste water by putting up small STPs in colonies.



This is, however, a time consuming exercise, the official added. According to Delhi governments records, there are 971 identified water bodies in the capital, but the figure could well be above 1,000 as some are non-traceable, according to officials.



Out of the 971, only 250 have water and can come under the clean category. Over 300 water bodies are such which have completely dried up and 100 have been taken over by encroachments like buildings, parks and slums, leaving no scope of revival. Moreover, around 150 water bodies are partially encroached which will be taken up for revival. In around 100 water bodies, mostly in villages, sewage flows unmonitored.


The members of the Rajarajeshwari Nagar Residents Welfare Association and Kodava Samaja staged a protest in the city on Sunday demanding that the state government order a CBI probe into the suicide of deputy superintendent of police, M K Ganapathi.



Hundreds of protesters formed a human chain near the Rajarajeshwari Nagar arch and staged a dharna for over two hours.



Somaiah A N, a member of Kodava Samaja and a good friend of Ganapathi, said it was high time the government did something to protect efficient police officers before another tragedy struck.



A courageous person

He said that the late police officer used to stay at RR Nagar in 1990s and was a courageous person.



Secretary of RR Nagar RWA, Chandrashekhar, said that he had filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the High Court seeking directions to the state government for handing over the case to CBI.


Aster DM Healthcare has entered into a seven-year agreement with Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) to manage around 10,000-sq ft medical services facility at the Kempegowda International Airport.



Aster DM Healthcare will aid BIAL in manning the airport clinic 24/7. Besides this, they will also be extending emergency medical technicians 24/7 to provide services to employees, passengers, and disaster management services of KIA. The healthcare group will also be responsible for the standalone Airport Medical Care Facility which is expected to be commissioned before March 2017. The services can be availed by the general public as well.


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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

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

LEVEL UP ONLY FOR STUDENTS: UCOM OFFERS X2 AND X3 MORE INTERNET

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
A clean and green mela to make people aware of such things as waste segregation, composting, the ban on plastic and its alternatives drew hundreds of participants on Sunday.



An initiative of HAL 3rd Stage Taxpayers and Residents Association and Bangalore Eco Team, the event was held at Visvesvaraya Park. The event had quite a few highlights. Among these was a session to educate apartment dwellers on a recent High Court ruling on mandatory composting for all sites measuring 2,400 sq ft and above. The residents were informed about appropriate waste management solutions.



The session was anchored by Malini Parmar, a member of Solid Waste Management Round Table, and Vasuki from Bangalore Eco Team. This was followed by a quick street session which educated citizens on the plastic ban, the list of items that are banned and their alternatives. Students of St Josephs College took out a plastic ban march on Thippasandra main road. We have been carrying out drives on plastic ban in different parts of the city. We are also visiting Cubbon Park and Lalbagh every week, urging people to keep their localities clean. The response to the mela has been good, said Brother Philip, who guides students in the drive.



A display of composting solutions for independent homes and apartments was another highlight of the programme. Waste management service providers such as Daily Dump, Shudh Labh, ITC Wow, Stonesoup, Quantum Leap among others took part in the event.




Pavel Manukyan, Jirayr Sefilyan talked on phone - ArmLur.am

The demand of the armed group that stormed a police station in the Armenian capital remains the same and they are not going to surrender, Pavel Manukyan, one of the members of the group, said to ArmLur.am. Mr. Manukyan, has anyone visited you and tried to negotiate with you during this time? Only Nikol Pashinyan visited us. It is reported that negotiations are underway. What kind of talks are they talking about? There was no such thing, they only talked to us on the phone. We demand that they [authorities] free Jirayr Sefilyan, while they say they can take us to see Sefilyan in prison. They are mocking at us. We demand that Sefilyan participate in future processes. Have you talked to Sefilyan during this period? Yes, we have talked to him on the phone. What is his opinion of your move? Sefilyan did not know anything [about our plans]. I presented the situation to him because he was unaware of the attack. That is why he said, "Decide for yourselves!
OMG: Salmans Reaction To Ranveers Dance On Baby Ko Bass Pasand Hai Will Shock You!
Columbus schools reformats WCBE programming to less NPR, more music

Columbus City Schools has reformatted its radio station WCBE. Though still NPR-affiliated, there will be less of that and more local music, programs.
A private medical scanning cavity is to be officially opened in Letterkenny this week.

Health minister, Simon Harris, will open the 2 million facility which is creating ten jobs on Thursday.

The facility is being opened by Affidea, which describes itself as Irelands leading independent diagnostic imaging provider and was formerly known as Euromedic.

The company is opening in faculty at Scally Place, where the Health Service Executive has moved much of the outpatients services from Letterkenny University Hospital following the flood at the hospital in July 2013.

The facility will serve as a primary care diagnostic scanning facility, offering MRI, ultrasound and X-ray. Affidea Letterkenny will be equipped with state of the art technology including the high specification Philips ingenia wide bore MRI Scanner, providing the highest quality scans and a much improved patient experience, particularly for patients who experience claustrophobia or those who find it difficult to tolerate the noise of older scanners.

Affidea clinics are accredited with the internationally recognised standard in ambulatory care from the Joint Commission International (JCI) and will operate the new clinic in Letterkenny to the same exacting standards while undergoing the accreditation process.

Tom Finn, CEO of Affidea has described the opening of the facility as a landmark in a primary health care evolution for Donegal and the North West.

The Letterkenny clinic will serve to ensure local patients have greater accessibility to medical scans, quickly, professionally and to the highest of standards. The new clinic will ensure patients can receive the timely attention they need in a primary care environment, rather than hospital based setting. Affidea currently offers an ultrasound service in conjunction with the HSE from the same building and from June will offer an expanded and seamless service to public and private patients.
As many area communities will be observing Trick-or-Treating this weekend and Monday, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections advises you and your family to keep your children safer this Halloween by discussing ahead of time what to do if you are ever separated. A list of safety tips from state agencies is below to help ensure a safer Halloween weekend for everyone. You can also find the hours for trick-or-treating in Door and Kewaunee counties by clicking here.

-A parent or trusted adult should always accompany children

-Stay on well-lit streets and stick to neighborhoods you know

-Only stop at homes where the porch light is on

-Never enter a home or car for a treat

-Trick-or-treaters should carry a cell phone to allow for quick communication

-If the child carries a cell phone, activate location services prior to trick-or-treating

-Call 911 if you see any suspicious or illegal activity

Children should yell No! and run from any stranger who tries to take them somewhere

-Have a responsible adult check treats at the end of the night

Similarly, the Wisconsin Department of Health also suggests some tips for families with trick-or-treaters and families who are giving out candy.

Costume Tips

-Choose costumes that are light-colored and more visible to motorists.

-Use reflective tape to decorate costumes and candy bags to increase the visibility of children to drivers. Reflective tape may be purchased at hardware, bicycle, or sporting goods stores.

-Use make-up rather than a mask; if your childs costume does include a mask, make sure it fits snugly and that the eyeholes are large enough to allow full vision.

-Children should wear well-fitting, sturdy shoes.

-Costumes should be short enough that a child will not trip and fall.

-Choose costume accessories such as swords or knives that are made of soft and flexible material.

-Do not use novelty contacts such as cat eyes or snake eyes.

Pedestrian Safety

-Engage in Halloween activities during the daylight hours, if possible.

-Do not enter homes or apartments without adult supervision.

-Remind children to walk, not run, and to only cross streets at crosswalks.

-Be sure your children are accompanied by a responsible adult who has a flashlight. -----

-Flashlights or chemical light sticks should be used so that children can see and be seen by motorists.

Halloween Home Safety

-Remove obstacles from your lawn, porch, or steps if you are expecting trick-or-treaters.

-Make sure your front porch is well-lit.

-Avoid using candle-lit jack-o-lanterns if possible. If you do use candles, dont place them near curtains, furnishings, or decorations. Move them off porches where childrens costumes may ignite.

-Keep your pets in another room when you are expecting trick-or-treaters.

-Small children should not carve pumpkins; instead, allow them to draw the designs on the pumpkin and adults may carve.

-Turn on an outside light if welcoming trick-or-treaters.
Yes, you can transfer your domain to any registrar or hosting company once you have purchased it. Since domain transfers are a manual process, it can take up to 5 days to transfer the domain.

Domains purchased with payment plans are not eligible to transfer until all payments have been made. Please remember that our 30-day money back guarantee is void once a domain has been transferred.

For transfer instructions to GoDaddy, please click here.
Google and its parent company Alphabet are facing new charges in the European Commissions ongoing investigation of allegations that Googles comparison shopping and online advertising platforms violated antitrust laws.

The EC on Thursday alleged that Google had abused its dominant position by systematically favoring its own comparison shopping service in search results. Further, it artificially restricted the ability of third-party websites to display search ads from Googles competitors.

While Google has developed many innovative products, it doesnt have the right to deny other companies the right to compete and innovate, said Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

Today we have further strengthened our case that Google has unduly favored its own comparison shopping service in its general search results pages, she said. It means consumers may not see the most relevant results in their search queries.

The Commission also has raised concerns that Google has hindered competition by limiting the ability of its competitors to place search adverts on third-party websites, Vestager said.

Google responded to the allegations via Twitter.

In reaction to EC: We believe our innovations and product improvements have increased choice for EU consumers and promote competition (1/2)

 Google in Brussels (@GoogleBrussels) July 14, 2016

Well examine the Commissions renewed cases and provide a detailed response in the coming weeks (2/2)

 Google in Brussels (@GoogleBrussels) July 14, 2016

Google and Alphabet have 10 weeks to respond to the charges.

Merchant Links

The Commission made a detailed examination of Googles prior argument: that it shouldnt consider comparison shopping services in isolation, but together with services provided by merchant platforms such as Amazon and eBay.

The EC has received several complaints about Google in a range of areas, including the companys advertising business, according to an EU official who asked not to be identified.

The charges involving AdSense cover an area that the Commission already was aware of when it opened the investigation in November 2010, the official told the E-Commerce Times.

Dominant Position

Google has controlled about 80 percent of the market for search advertising in the European Economic Area over the past 10 years, according to the Commission.

A large percentage of the companys revenue stems from agreements with Direct Partners, which might result in antitrust violations. Among the arrangements the EC considers problematic are exclusivity deals that prohibit search ads from Google competitors; premium placement of a number of search ads; and giving Google the right to authorize competing ads.

The EC charges are another step in leveling the playing field to achieve fair competition, said Foundem CEO Shivaun Raff, the lead complainant in the EC case against Google.

The Commission should be wary of Googles attempts to use delaying tactics to reinforce its dominance in the market, he warned.

While the Commission is clearly heading towards a robust prohibition decision, Raff said, we are concerned that if it does not act conclusively in the near future, there may be little competition left to protect.
Its not often that a conversation inspires an idea leading to a project that improves peoples lives and potentially transforms an industry. But thats what happened to Jorge Gaviria, founder of Masienda.

While serving as a host and translator at the G9 Chefs Summit at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, New York in 2013, Gaviria heard chefs discuss responsibly sourced ingredients.

Masienda / Facebook

This inspired him to travel to Mexico and learn about the countrys rare heirloom corn varieties. He got the idea to work with smallholder farmers there to buy their corn, import it to the U.S. and supply restaurants, which would make delicious tortillas using the corn.

In 2014, Gaviria founded Masienda, which is a combination of the words masa or corn flour and tienda or store, to accomplish his goal.

Jorge Gaviria, founder and CEO of Masienda Masienda

Sourced Landrace Non-GMO Corn Varieties

I gained an appreciation for the storied history of corn, Gaviria said. The more I learned the more I wanted to create opportunities for farmers and to connect chefs to them.

Mexico, particularly the southern state of Oaxaca, is known as the birthplace of corn.

Mexico has been producing corn for 12,000 years, Gaviria explained.

The country has as many as 59 landraces or locally adapted, traditional varieties of corn, according to Martha Willcox, Maize Landrace Improvement Coordinator at CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center), who has helped Gaviria with his project.

Masienda partner grower, Catarino and his family in Oaxaca. Masienda

Maize is the culture in Mexico, she said. Everyone eats maize every day and there are 2,000 culinary applications.

Within those 59 landraces, Gaviria says there are tons of varieties of corn, including many colors such as white, blue, red and yellow.

There is a huge amount of diversity in the landraces, Willcox said.

Masienda sources its corn from Oaxaca, whose corn varieties are among the most rare and diverse in Mexico. Gaviria buys the corn from the regions smallholder farmers who have been growing these corn varieties for generations.

These farmers are custodians of a very precious commodity, said Alan Tank, former assistant vice president of the National Corn Growers Association and an adviser to Masienda. The value it represents to them and to the world is nothing short of phenomenal.

As an Iowa farmer, Tank appreciates the value of Mexicos corn heritage. Being part of family farm, I understand the need for biodiversity and preserving it, he said.

Masienda

Provides Needed Income to Farmers

The average size of the smallholder farms range from about 2 to 12 acres. Oaxacas farmers are poor with 62 percent of the population living below the poverty line.

Masiendas purchase of the farmers excess cornmost of the corn they need for foodprovides the farmers with income they would not otherwise receive.

We are providing a fair price to the farmers for growing the corn and having a big impact on rural communities there, Gaviria said.

Its a way to provide markets with good prices for farmers who have continued to grow these landraces, Willcox said.

This year Masienda is working with 1,200 farmers after starting with 100 in 2014. Willcox and CIMMYT helped Gaviria identify the best corn varieties, connect with the farmers, source the corn and pay the farmers.

Masienda imports 10 to 15 different landraces. According to the companys website, this is the first time in history these corn varieties have been available outside of the remote, indigenous communities of Oaxaca.

Masienda supplies corn to about 100 restaurants, mostly in the U.S. with a few in Canada.

One of those restaurants is Taquiza in Miami, Florida. Owner and chef Steve Santana uses blue and white bolita corn varieties to make masa flour, which is then made into tortillas and chips.

Santana is enthusiastic about Masiendas corn. Visually its really cool looking and the flavor is unmatched, he said.

Santana could buy much cheaper U.S. domestic corn but he prefers the heirloom varieties.

I like knowing that farmers are getting treated well throughout the supply chain, he said. We are preserving a little history; this is pure food in its natural state.

Masienda

Non-GMO Market Opportunity

Masienda is growing exponentially. In just two years, the companys corn imports grew from 40 tons in 2014 to 80 tons last year and 400 this year.

The company is also co-branding tortilla products with Chicago-based restaurant Frontera Grill and plans to sell its own branded products.

Gaviria says the market potential for the landrace corn is huge. According to the Tortilla Industry Association, the U.S. tortilla market is worth $12.5 billion.

Most tortillas in the U.S. are likely made from genetically modified corn since more than 90 percent of the corn grown here is GMO. But with the soaring demand for non-GMO foods, there is great market potential for Mexicos heirloom non-GMO corn.

Mexico has not approved production of GMO corn, but last August a Mexican judge overturned a September 2013 ban on plantings of GMO corn, paving the way for field trials of the controversial crop.

The concern is that GMO corn production could cross pollinate and contaminate Mexicos landrace corn varieties. In 2001, University of California scientist Ignacio Chapela published a paper documenting GMO contamination of some of Oaxacas landrace varieties. Willcox thinks this may have occurred when Mexican migrant workers brought back GMO seed from the U.S. and planted it.

However, she said: I havent seen evidence (of GMO contamination). I dont worry about it. Its still not legal in Mexico.

Gaviria sees GMOs as a threat to Mexicos corn biodiversity. GMOs could have a fundamental impact on the tradition and scope of preservation, he said.

Provides Vehicle to Preserve Landrace Corn

Gaviria has ambitious plans for Masienda. We want to educate consumers on what corn can and should taste like and provide an alternative supply chain to what weve conventionally known in the U.S. for the last 50 plus years, he said.

In the process Masienda aims to support smallholder farmers, sustainability and biodiversity.

What Masienda does and represents is nothing short of essential, Tank said. It provides a vehicle to ensure landrace genetics can be preserved and protected. It allows farmers to capture value. What better way to preserve the landraces than to create a market for them so they are preserved for history.

Willcox says Masienda is an exciting project with a lot of potential: Its a conservation effort, a development effort and a research effort.
Tata Institute of Social Sciences and The Social Impact Lab based at the University of Southampton is conducting Spark India, a three-week student collaboration programme to launch student-led social ventures in Mumbai. Students from Mumbai and UK will be trained to understand social entrepreneurship in the global context. They will also be equipped with leadership skills including working in international teams, cultural awareness and project management sessions. The event will be conducted in Mumbai between July 28 and August 14. Student fellows from both the universities will work in teams to develop and roll out social work ventures. Eight undergraduate students from UK have been selected to travel to Mumbai. The programme will also include community engagement opportunities, specialist leadership workshops and a skills-based reflection session. I am a BSc in psychology student and plan to take up a course in design and art foundation next year. I applied to Spark India since I wanted to make sustainable social change and implement solutions to the issues faced by communities in India. I want to work in the areas of sustainability, design and fast fashion, says Beckie Thomas, student, University of Southampton. Shweta Chavan, an MA in social entrepreneurship student, TISS says, I participated in the programme since it will help me bring about a change in the society through my venture.
A team of college students from India are on the list of the 2016 Imagine Cup World finalists. The competition, conducted by Microsoft , announced Axe Julius among 35 teams. The finale is scheduled from July 26-29, 2016, in Seattle in the US.



The team of college students has come up with a project related to eBook distribution to create an ecosystem which benefits publishers as well as readers.



The four-member team is trying to address everyday problems through technology -- their project deals with books and their distribution, especially academic publications. Working with the help of college mentors as well as people from the company has improved their technical and non-technical, while the competition opened a window to the outer world full of opportunities, said the team comprising Adish Jain, Akshay Kumar Gupta, Akshit Sharma and Garv Jasuja from Delhi.



To the team members, the high point of their experience was a meeting with the CEO of the company, Satya Nadella. The team said it felt motivated after meeting fellow students, mentors, persons from the start-up world and inspirational personalities.



The team takes pride in representing India on an international platform and, hence, is preparing for the finale. We will give our best shot at the finals and make our nation proud. We also wish to meet international teams and see innovations from all around the globe.

The students expects its project to be in actual use soon. It would like it to be released so that students can benefit from it.
For the first time, the University of Delhi ( DU ) has decided to release only five cut-off lists for admissions for the upcoming academic session. As per the final schedule, it is going to issue the last list on July 20 both online and offline. Candidates can enrol in undergraduate programmes afterwards.

The university will begin an additional registration process if colleges still have vacant places after the last list. However, this time, colleges will notify the status of vacancies course- and category-wise on their and DUs websites. Only those who had registered online with the university earlier will be eligible. They would be required to apply to colleges online through the university portal. Once candidates applications are received online, for three days each in two phases, the college will issue three fresh merit lists for the eligible ones from July 27 to August 4. This allows colleges to decide the admission criteria for vacant places after the fifth cut-off list on their own.



The university released the fourth cut-off list on Friday, with vacancies on some popular courses at several colleges. Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) is inviting applications for economics honours with 97.25%. The cut-off for all courses declined by about 0.25-4%.



Citing a delay in the enrolment process, the university had constituted a 24-member committee, comprising deans from the faculties of science, commerce and arts, nine college principals and members of the executive and academic councils, to draft an admissions policy. The policy is expected to be notified by the end of this month.

Issuing multiple cut-offs delays the admission process but since the seats remain vacant, it is not fair to end the process. Therefore, this year, it has been decided that there will be a maximum of five lists unlike previous years when the university used to issue as many as 12," said a committee member.



However, colleges may be asked to notify their criteria beforehand to ensure there are no back-door entries.
In 2013, in the course of hearing a petition filed by the Extrajudicial Execution Victims Families Association and Human Rights Alert, the Supreme Court had asked the Manipur government whether there was a war going on in the state. At the heart of this petition which demands an inquiry into the 1,528 cases of alleged fake encounters over the last 20 years by security forces and the state police is the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), 1958. The AFSPA, which was enacted ostensibly to tackle insurgency in the North East (with a modified version for Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) enacted in 1990), has been a bitterly contentious law. While the government and the Army argue that its draconian provisions are needed to deal with extremist and secessionist violence, the people of the areas and states where it is imposed are clear that it results in military personnel enjoying total impunity and non-accountability for their acts. In an interim ruling in the same case the Court has made significant statements about the deployment of the act and what it means to the democratic process while also questioning the arbitrary definition of an insurgent.

More importantly, while the Courts interim ruling has been welcomed by those opposed to AFSPA, what it will mean at the ground level is a matter of speculation. Will the legal implications it has for the North East and the other areas where it is implemented in a largely similar form (notably parts of J&K) have a political impact too? In 1997, the Supreme Court clubbed a number of petitions challenging AFSPAs constitutional validity, upheld its validity but said the Army should follow the dos and donts issued by the military authorities. Going by the experience since then, these have not been followed. In 2005, the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee recommended repeal of the act while adding that some of its provisions be incorporated in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2004. This report has not been officially made public, though it has been leaked.
The neural architecture in the auditory cortex - the part of the brain that processes sound - of profoundly deaf and hearing people is virtually identical, a new study has found.

The study raises a host of new questions about the role of experience in processing sensory information, and could point the way toward potential new avenues for intervention in deafness. The study is described in a June 18 paper published in Scientific Reports.

The paper was authored by Ella Striem-Amit, a post-doctoral researcher in Alfonso Caramazza's Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory at Harvard, Mario Belledonne from Harvard, Jorge Almeida from the University of Coimbra, Quanjing Chen, Yuxing Fang, Zaizhu Han and Yanchao Bi from Beijing Normal University.

"One reason this is interesting is because we don't know what causes the brain to organize the way it does," said Striem-Amit, the lead author of the study. "How important is each person's experience for their brain development? In audition, a lot is known about (how it works) in hearing people, and in animals...but we don't know whether the same organization is retained in congenitally deaf people."

Those similarities between deaf and hearing brain architecture, Striem-Amit said, suggest that the organization of the auditory cortex doesn't critically depend on experience, but is likely based on innate factors. So in a person who is born deaf, the brain is still organized in the same manner.

But that's not to suggest experience plays no role in processing sensory information.

Evidence from other studies have shown that cochlear implants are far more successful when implanted in toddlers and young children, Striem-Amit said, suggesting that without sensory input during key periods of brain plasticity in early life, the brain may not process information appropriately.

To understand the organization of the auditory cortex, Striem-Amit and her collaborators first obtained what are called "tonotopic" maps showing how the auditory cortex responds to various tones.

To do that, they placed volunteers in an MRI scanner and played different tones- some high frequency, some low frequency - and tracked which regions in the auditory cortex were activated. They also asked groups of hearing and deaf subjects to simply relax in the scanner, and tracked their brain activity over several minutes. This allows mapping which areas are functionally connected - essentially those that show similar, correlated patterns of activation - to each other.

They then used the areas showing frequency preference in the tonotopic maps to study the functional connectivity profiles related to tone preference in the hearing and congenitally deaf groups and found them to be virtually identical.

"There is a balance between change and typical organization in the auditory cortex of the deaf" said the senior researcher, Prof. Yanchao Bi, "but even when the auditory cortex shows plasticity to processing vision, its typical auditory organization can still be found".

The study also raises a host of questions that have yet to be answered.

"We know the architecture is in place - does it serve a function," Striem-Amit said. "We know, for example, that the auditory cortex of the deaf is also active when they view sign language and other visual information. The question is: What do these regions do in the deaf? Are they actually processing something similar to what they process in hearing people, only through vision?"

In addition to studies of deaf animals, the researchers' previous studies of people born blind suggest clues to the puzzle.

In the blind, the topographical architecture of the visual cortex (the visual parallel of the tonotopic map, called "retinotopic") is like that in the sighted. Importantly, beyond topographic organization, regions of the visual cortex show specialization in processing certain categories of objects in sighted individuals show the same specialization in the congenitally blind when stimulated through other senses. For example, the blind reading Braille, or letters delivered through sound, process that information in the same area used by sighted subjects in processing visual letters.

"The principle that much of the brain's organization develops largely regardless of experience is established in blindness," Striem-Amit said. "Perhaps the same principle applies also to deafness".

###
Hi



Im vikram from india. i have a CRS rank 411.



Kindly let me know, will the points increase if i get married and add my spouse details.



Anyone explain me how much points will get added if spouse details such as age, education, IELTS and work experience is added.



I need minimum of 450 points to get ITA.
Sunday, July 17, 2016

On Friday, July 29 from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., join Gail Rubin for an Osher Lifelong Learning class, Laughing and Learning: A Practical End-of-Life Workshop.

Even though humans have a 100% mortality rate, only 25% of us do any end-of-life planning. The Laughing and Learning workshop will give you the tools and the inspiration to take practical steps for outlining your funeral plans/memorial celebration, drafting your own obituary and/or famous last words and preparing advance medical directives.

Funny film clips, supportive conversations and take-home printed materials are included in this workshop. Attendees will participate in Death Cafe-inspired discussions, tackle a quick first draft obit with the help of provided questions and receive their own copy of The Five Wishes form. You will laugh in the face of death and learn what you need to know BEFORE someone goes and dies.

Sign up for Course 19865 in the Psychology and Health section. Its only $20, through Oshers website.

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The thing that might one day keep a truck from barreling into a crowd and killing scores, like the tragedy in Nice last week, just might be sitting on an old runway in College Station.

And it might be coming to a lot more places soon.

Texas A&M Transportation Institute researchers test and design a litany of barriers meant to avoid everything from a vehicle bumping into a gas pump to protecting a military base from a tank attack.

I think we are going to have to think even bigger at places where we have large gatherings, said Dean Alberson, senior research engineer with the institutes Crashworthy Structures Program.

At least 84 people died when a Tunisian man living in France plowed through a crowd in the French beach city celebrating Bastille Day.

Numerous options exist and are commonly deployed to stop trucks, ranging from permanently installed bollards and railings to temporary solutions, Alberson said. He and other transportation institute researchers recently tested a system in which old tires were lashed together and filled with sand. The test successfully stopped a 15,000-pound truck traveling 30 mph at the institutes Riverside campus, which is the former Bryan Army Airfield.

The practical use of temporary barriers in cities around the world varies.

In most cases, it is driven by the need for when something happens to your permanent perimeter, Alberson said.

Alberson said the U.S. State Department, which relies on A&M transportation institutes work and testing for embassy protection, and militaries globally also might occasionally need to close a street, requiring a temporary barrier.

The same thinking is coming to more and more large events across the globe, he said, both for general protection and because of threats of violence. The 2014 incident in Austin where a car was driven through a street crowded by South By Southwest Festival revelers is another example of when a barrier could prevent chaos.

Were becoming aware of the pedal error stuff, Alberson said, referring to low-speed crashes caused when someones foot slips off the brake or mistakenly hits the accelerator pedal instead. At least in America we are aware of that. With the other incidents, I think we are still pretending like it cant happen here.

Safety is, however, informing more and more of the decisions. Discovery Green in downtown Houston, for example, is bounded by trees that provide shade and a natural barrier along LaBranch. Along the sides, bollards protect walkways into the park but can be removed to allow for heavy trucks to enter for setup of events.

Large-scale public events can be a different challenge. Safety for the Super Bowl in Houston in February will be a coordinated effort between organizers, Houston police and the National Football League, said Amanda Weeks, host committee director of external relations. She referred questions related to safety and security specifics to Houston police.

Police spokesman Kese Smith said Houston has used hard barricades  sometimes filled with water to help withstand impacts  at some public events.

We have used them to protect from threats from vehicles, Smith said of the hard barricades.

There is no standard based on the size or substance of the event, or its surroundings.

Each event is different and you may have natural barriers that can help us out, Smith said.

Safety provisions must reflect the use. Making a park or public space look like a war zone isnt ideal, Alberson said, though it might be the perfect fit for a military base in a hostile country.

It depends on what youre trying to achieve, he said. What message are you sending to the bad guys and what you are trying to say to everyone else?

Less-obtrusive security methods also can help lessen the impact someone can cause driving into a crowd. In some areas, safety is focused on not letting a vehicle have an opportunity to pick up speed by adding traffic-calming chicanes  a spot where concrete barriers force a driver to slow down to maneuver around a curve or narrowing of the roadway.

When applied to acts of violence, though, Alberson said some of the best defenses involve not allowing people to know what design experts are capable of building.

We dont want to make the bad guys any smarter, he said.

dug.begley@chron.com
During his trip, former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle met President Tran Dai Quang to discuss the Chile-Vietnam relationship, and international and regional issues of shared interest.



The former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle affirmed Vietnam is Chiles important partner in Southeast Asia and wished to tighten the comprehensive relationship with Vietnam, particularly in economy, trade, investment, agriculture, science, education, health and technology.



He said the Chilean government looks forwards to a visit by President Tran Dai Quang.





President Tran Dai Quang (right) receives Former Chilean President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle,

who is paying a visit to Vietnam. (Source: VNA)

For his part, President Tran Dai Quang welcomed former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagles return to Vietnam on the 45th anniversary of the Vietnam-Chile diplomatic relationship and appreciated the positive progress of the relationship, including the Vietnam-Chile Free Trade Agreement, which took effect on January 1, 2014, helping raise two-way trade from USD554 million in 2013 to USD1 billion USD in 2015.He also welcomed the fact that the two countries maintain the frequency and effectiveness of the Bilateral Free Trade Council mechanism and the Deputy Minister-level Political Consultation between the two Ministries of Foreign Affairs.The two sides agreed on the need to continue with measures to boost the comprehensive cooperation relationship as well as promote exchanges of all-level delegations.They reached consensus that the two countries should continue signing cooperation agreements to complete the legal framework serving long-term and stable cooperation; push the passing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and support each other at international forums and multilateral forums.Concerning international and regional issues, the two sides agreed to promote the regional integration process in Asia-Pacific via cooperation mechanisms and frameworks like APEC, FEALAC, ASEAN-AP and especially the TPP and shared viewpoints on maintaining peace, stability in the region and resolving territorial disputes via peaceful negotiations based on international law.Within the framework of the visit, former President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle also met officials of the Ministries of Industry and Trade, and Agriculture and Rural Development to discuss measures on making the cooperation relationship in trade, investment, agriculture, and rural development more practical and effective./.
Growers are being urged to prepare for a slug onslaught this summer as reports indicate populations have surged after several months of wet weather and may even surpass that of 2012.

The spring months of April and May typically represent the peak in the slug breeding cycle and with regular showers during this time and since, molluscs have enjoyed excellent conditions.

With an already high population coming through the winter the pressure could be intense, says slug expert David Glen of Styloma Consulting.

"Newly drilled oilseed rape crops will be particularly susceptible and those intent on establishing crops early to overcome flea beetle attack should be wary of exchanging one pest for another," he says.

Every opportunity to reduce numbers through cultural controls, such as straw raking, should be fully exploited to limit damage potential.

"Effective control begins with good stubble hygiene, such as destroying the green bridge between crops, but the pressure to establish the next crop can mean this is compromised, especially in wet weather," he says.

Pellets

Although not practiced in average years, where slug populations are particularly high and the stubble is moist, David Glen suggests applying pellets to stubbles in the days after combining, provided that the pellets can be left undisturbed for a few days before drilling.

"The move to direct drilling has all but removed the control benefits once derived from deep cultivations so tactics need to evolve in response.

"The threshold for applications is quite low in practice, just one slug per trap in stubble before oilseed rape and four slugs per trap ahead of a cereal, so an application of about 30 pellets per square metre shortly before drilling may be advisable."

After drilling standard advice resumes and he is quick to point out the benefits of rolling in consolidating the seedbed.

"Rolling post-drilling is probably the single most worthwhile action a grower can make before applying pellets.

"It reduces the ability of slugs to reach vulnerable seeds and seedlings in the soil, deprives them of the living spaces to retreat to during the day and ensures pellets are not lost below the surface."

Only after exploiting all practical cultural controls should growers consider pellets, says De Sangosse commercial manager Simon McMunn.

Pellet choice 'is critical'

But pellet choice is critical he says and by utilising both types of active substance  metaldehyde and ferric phosphate  it is possible to achieve effective control over a prolonged period while managing application limits.

Metaldehyde and ferric phosphate pellets are equally effective, but the different modes of action mean that the effects of one are more readily obvious.

"Metaldehyde destroys the slugs mucus producing cells rendering them immobile which is why they die on the surface.

"In contrast, ferric phosphate is a stomach poison which causes the pest to stop feeding immediately, but means it may have retreated underground before death occurs so its effects can seem less obvious."

What sets pellet performance apart however, is size and manufacturing process.

"The pasta-based larger pellets such as TDS and Ironmax Pro are often the most effective as they have the mass needed to spread evenly and the durability to persist," he says.
A three-year Welsh Government investment of 1.2 million to support the export activities of Hybu Cig Cymru  Meat Promotion Wales (HCC) has resulted in over 38 million of new and safeguarded business for PGI Welsh Lamb and PGI Welsh Beef.

Among the new business secured in emerging markets over the three years of the programme were almost 11 million of new exports to Scandinavia, 4 million of additional business in Italy, and 1.5 million in extra business in new and developing markets for PGI Welsh Lamb such as Hong Kong, Switzerland and Canada.

The programme helped to secure a range of existing business, including 13 million of combined exports to France, Spain and the United Arab Emirates.

In a project lasting from 2013-16, Welsh Government support enabled HCC to undertake a wide range of promotional activities across the globe.

This included raising awareness of the PGI Welsh Lamb and PGI Welsh Beef brands among consumers, working with supermarkets and prestige food service agents to promote Welsh red meat, supporting a presence for exporters at key trade fairs, and hosting inward missions to Wales by chefs and journalists.

With the vote to leave the European Union having led to uncertainty over the future terms of trade between the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, safeguarding existing markets and developing new trading relationships has become even more important for export-dependent industries such as Welsh red meat.

'Difficult global economic climate'

Lesley Griffiths, Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs, said: "In the face of a difficult global economic climate, we have had to maintain our gains in recent years in terms of red meat exports against cheap imports, and political pressure in favour of domestic produce.

"So its very pleasing that the Welsh Governments three-year investment programme in supporting exports and developing new markets for quality Welsh Lamb and Beef has produced such an excellent return.

"For an investment of 1.2 million over three years, we have supported HCC and the Welsh red meat sector to maintain 20 million of existing trade, and secured over 18.5 million of new business, both in markets where Welsh produce is already well-known, and breaking new ground.

"This export development work contributes greatly to protecting lamb prices at home against the substantial recent pressure from cheap imports.

"The three-year programme has given a major boost to the important red meat sector, which is worth 1 billion a year to the Welsh economy, and accounts for 200 million of total exports.

"The success of this programme will be vital in putting the industry on a firm footing during the uncertainty of the post-referendum period, as Wales seeks to maintain established markets in Europe and renew our efforts to develop trade further afield."

'Business relationships are protected'

Dai Davies, Chairman of HCC, was delighted at the results of the Welsh Government-funded project to develop overseas markets for PGI Welsh Lamb and PGI Welsh Beef.

"Before embarking on this project, HCC undertook thorough research on which countries we needed to do work to protect existing trade, where there was the greatest potential for export growth, and the strategies that would work in each market," said Mr. Davies.

"Its very encouraging that business relationships were protected and developed in existing markets such as Italy, France, Germany and Spain, and that red meat from Wales is also now gaining a presence in Switzerland, Hong Kong and other new areas."

He added: "We are very grateful to the Welsh Government for this support, and to ourproducers and processors throughout the supply chain for maintaining the premium quality for which Welsh Lamb is renowned.

"Now that this project has been successfully completed HCCs market development team will continue to work with retailers across the world on promotional campaigns, to meet the challenges of the next few years when the Brexit vote will change the landscape for our industry."
The NFU has written to formally complain to the Chartered Trading Standards Institute over the use of fake farm branding by retailers on some food products.

This follows concerns expressed by NFU members that the use of fake farm labels can be misleading for shoppers resulting in them being at risk of mistakenly buying a product that differs from the product they thought they were buying.

The farming industry has reacted angrily to the branding, accusing retailers of misleading consumers and riding on the coattails of the trust UK farmers have built.

The most recent and high profile example is Tescos introduction of brand names such as Woodside Farms and Boswell Farms.

Meanwhile, at least three in five respondents to a YouGov survey commissioned by the NFU, who said these farm products in their view were definitely or probably British, would feel misled if this was not the case and were told that the product could be from another country.

'Misleading customers'

NFU President Meurig Raymond said: "The NFUs legal team has looked at this carefully and as a result we are asking Trading Standards Institute to look at whether fake farm branding complies with the relevant legal requirements.

"I have spoken to senior management at Tesco to highlight our members concerns about the use of these fake farm brands.

"I urge all retailers to consider seriously the results of our survey which show that mixing imported product with British product under the same fictional farm name can be misleading to many of their customers.

"I am pleased that Aldi has now made a commitment to only source British product in their fictional farm brands by the end of March 2017.

"British farming is proud of its high standards and the NFU would be delighted to work with retailers to ensure that customers are given clear and unambiguous information about where their food comes from."

'Completely unacceptable'

NFU Cymru President Stephen James, speaking at the start of this years Royal Welsh Show, said: "These fake farm brands are completely unacceptable and we believe are misleading consumers.

"This practice has been going on across the retail sector for a long time and enough is enough.

"In particular, NFU members feel the brands confuse shoppers about the country of origin of the food products in question.

"Country of origin labelling is important because we know from consumer surveys that shoppers want to buy British food products; clearly, consumers cannot exercise that choice without clear country of origin labelling.

"Thats why we have now written to Trading Standards to argue our point and to ask for clear guidelines for retailers on the clarity of country of origin labelling."

NFU YouGov commissioned survey

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 1,796 adults.

Fieldwork was undertaken between June 8/9 2016. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

The respondents were asked various questions about food information and labelling, and were shown various food products sold under a fake farm brand.

Results:

 Of the respondents who said that the fake farm products in their view were definitely or probably British, at least three in five said they would feel misled if this was not the case and the products were not in fact British.

 Around one in five respondents were unclear as to whether the fake farm brands were real farms.

 Three in ten respondents were unsure about the provenance of products with a fake farm brand.
She said abattoir handling had greatly improved in the past 25 years with 100pc of US beef abattoirs stunning 95pc or more of their cattle with the first shot compared to just 30pc in 1996. To maintain high standards, observable measurements to score animal handling was needed, such as the percentage of animals that fall in handling and the percentage vocalising during time in the squeeze chute.
Relocated in the form of the build-operate-transfer (BOT) on an area of 8.8 ha, the school is equipped with modern facilities and devices. It is expected to provide training for about 6,000 students.





Hanoi school of public health

National Assembly Chairwoman Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan plant tree at the school

Speaking at the launching ceremony, Health Minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien highlighted the significance of the project, saying that it will contribute to improving health care for the people in general and the training of preventive medical personnel and health managers in particular.As part of the Governments plan to move educational institutions in the downtown to outlying areas, the project aims to meet the increasing demand of healthcare services and medical training, and reduce traffic and population pressure in the centre of Hanoi.The Hanoi School of Public Health is among 26 universities and colleges in inner Hanoi, where a large number of students are pursuing their study.This is the first relocated project of the health sector under the BOT form./.
Fort Bragg to be known as Fort Liberty. Here's what to know.

military
It is not a bad thing for us, that the route known as the Goldene Strae or the Golden Road as we will get to know it- has escaped the attention of so many. It has been spared being overrun by hordes of tourists and as you will discover the
Alden Ehrenreich has been confirmed to play the young Han Solo.

Alden Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich will take over the reigns of the iconic character from Harrison Ford for an upcoming 'Star Wars' spin-off movie.

Speaking at a Star Wars Celebration event in London on Sunday (17.07.16) where Alden appeared to officially announce the news, he revealed how he won the part.

He said: "I screen tested with Chewbacca - I'd never acted with a Wookiee!"

John Boyega - who joined the film franchise as Finn in 2015's 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' - was also there to congratulate Alden for securing the part and compared him to Harrison, 74.

He said: "Oh man, you're playing Han Solo, man. Damn! He's smiling just like him!"

Alden's name has been in the mix for a while and rumours circulated earlier this year that he was reportedly finalising a deal with Disney and Lucasfilm to play the iconic space smuggler in the science fiction franchise.

The 26-year-old actor has beat off competition from big Hollywood names including Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Dave Franco, Jack Reynor, Scott Eastwood and Taron Egerton.

Despite the big reveal, fans are still being kept in the dark about the story's plot but it has been confirmed that it will focus around "an origin story about Han Solo and Chewie".

The film is thought to be titled 'Han Solo: A Star Wars Story' and is set to be released on May 25, 2018.
As one of the most celebrated actors to be a part of Wentworth Prison, Pamela Rabe has garnered an incredible fanbase since starring on the show, despite playing villainous Joan 'The Freak' Ferguson.

Pamela Rabe as Joan 'The Freak' Ferguson

We got the opportunity to once again catch up with Pamela to find out all about filming some hugely emotional scenes in the fourth season of the show, how things work behind the scenes with her co-stars and much more...

(A huge thank you to fans who sent in questions for this interview! We love collaborating with you. If you'd like your Twitter handle included with your question, you know where to find me...)

In season 4 we see Joan go from Governor to prisoner - how did you find that transition?

Pretty challenging actually, is the short answer to that. I love a challenge, so it was really exciting as well. I think having played a character from the last couple of seasons who, for the most part felt pretty sure of who she was, as long as she had the bun and the uniform on, when that bit of armour disappears it suddenly becomes a much more tricky thing to negotiate. I was very intrigued with all the twists and turns that the writers threw into my past and did my best to embrace them, and work out how Joan would work her way through those things.

There are some really emotional scenes this season such as the sexual assault on Joan in the showers - have any of them been particularly difficult for you to film?

They're all challenging, but they're acting challenges. I'm old enough and experienced enough now to know how to protect myself, and I actually quite enjoy plumbing those deep recesses and corners of one's self, one's instrument in order to tell the story as best as I possibly can. I really relish that. I think one of the delights of being an actor and being presented with good, challenging work, is how best, how much you can reach into yourself and provide surprises for an audience, and even actually surprises for the people you're working with, that are true to the essence of the piece, but are tapping into something that feels true and feels real, and I really relish that.

Having said that, there was some pretty dark places and difficults situations they were putting Joan in. They were tricky, interesting to play, but often, if you're specifically talking about that bashing in the shower by Juicy Lucy and her group, in a way I feel that was maybe harder for the actresses who were playing the perpetrators in that. I tend to protect myself the same way Joan would protect herself, which is to exit my body, go to another place in your mind, whereas they were being called upon to do things that were really quite violent and brutal, terrible, and I think that takes a toll.

A lot has to be said for the editors and crew as well who deal with putting the scene together, because it's always done so well...

Yeah, I remember the editors coming out of the suite actually on several days doing the next block ashen-faced, saying 'I've just had to come out and have a breather and get a bit of air'. They're the ones who are actually living with it for hours on end trying to cut the material together in a dynamic and sensitive way.

Joan and Bea Smith are often paralleled despite being such different characters - what does that suggest to you about their relationship?

I think I've always felt and said in the past that Joan Ferguson sees Bea Smith as a viable opponent and Joan likes a good fight. So, she's much quicker to dismiss what she considers weakness in people and, unexpected weakness disappoints her, she feels she must punish it, but I think that there's a grudging respect for what Bea Smith has done to herself to survive and, I think she considers her... That fencing metaphor that was set up really early on in season two has carried through. She likes someone who she can thrust and parry with.

What do you think are Joan's ultimate motivations? Is she even aware of them?

Well, there'll be the motivations that she is aware of, which I think she believes very much in excellence, success, what she would think is the greater good and that the ends of what she believes to be the greater good justify any means, as clearly demonstrated by her behaviour! There are obviously deeper, unconscious motivations that drive her that are constantly evolving depending on what the writers throw at me! (laughs)

What effect on Joan's emotions do you think being in prison has had?

That's a really interesting question actually and it's one I've thought about a lot. I found it very challenging filming season 4, because as I alluded to when we first started chatting, with her bun and her uniform, Joan knew who she was and suddenly to lose those things, it becomes much fuzzier and, I was often asking questions of the writers and the directors, 'Is she still there?' She was having to employ all her skills in her toolkit, chameleon-like to survive. Whoever she was engaging with, she had to become who Joan felt they wanted her to be, and at the same time presenting as a non-threat to anyone in order to achieve her goals. It was so un-Joan-like for the Joan that we'd encountered in seasons 2 and 3, that occasionally I would feel like, 'Maybe she's slipping away?' So it was a question I was asking myself all the time and, luckily, with a lot of help, occasionally you can reconnect with the glimmer in her eye! (laughs) Or something that would keep us connected to know that Joan, God knows she may lose everything but she always has a plan.

You work closely with Tammy McIntosh who plays Kaz this season - what is she like to work with?

Absolutely fabulous. I adore Tammy, she's just a fireball. She's so utterly committed and volatile, unpredictable and very, very present when she's working, and that was such a wonderful kind of foil against Joan's natural icy calm, that to try to become a person that Tammy's Kaz Proctor would trust and engage with, was really, really a lot of fun. A real challenge, but a lot of fun!

What do you think Joan was trying to prove with her move from isolation to general population?

I think it was pretty clear from the events, that if Joan Ferguson's gonna find herself under the same roof as all the people that she both employed as well as cared for in terms of prisoners for the past two seasons, it was gonna be dangerous. In terms of credibility I think it was a real gamble the writers were taking, but I think they very skillfully trod that path, saying it was the only female prison in the state and while she was on remand and waiting trial, it was the obvious place to put her, as long as she was in isolation and kept apart from all the other prisoners. It becomes clear at the end of the second episode that all that has to be rejigged when Joan realises she loses her one key witness, and the only way she's gonna be able to get what she needs done, done, is to get her to general population. Once that becomes her main priority she will do whatever it takes to get there.

But she's not stupid, she would know that that was always a huge risk to take, that she might end up dead, at the very least she'd have to cop something. But if she's skillful and clever she will manage to slalom down that minefield! I'm mixing my metaphors there but you know, it is literally a minefield, and if she can tiptoe her way through that, there's gold at the other end.

When Joan moves into gen-pop we see Vera give her a tissue when she's spat on - do you think some part of Vera still has empathy for Joan?

Well, I think it was a very close relationship, I suspect it was one of the closest relationships, other than Jianna, that Joan Ferguson has ever had, or perhaps that was her parents or her father in particular, but even of those I suspect that her relationship with her father was a very complex, dysfunctional one, the relationship with Jianna was somewhat, I'd suspect, if not one-sided, Joan's version of it might not be the same when shared by Jianna, whereas I think the relationship with Vera, they'd achieved a level of trust before everything went wrong and I think on some level, Joan feels the loss there. It's partly I think what fuels her anger, that betrayal, that loss. Clearly Vera too on some level put her faith, her trust, transferred it I suppose from her mother to Joan and so, there's still rumblings of that, that sit underneath.

That was an important relationship in both those women's lives. I adore working with Kate Atkinson, that moment, the passing of the handkerchief is something that Kate and I discovered in the filming of it. It was something that wasn't in the script, we just discussed that. So the little subconscious, as you say, reachings out, little things that they do, that they say, they're constantly having to fight but there is some bond there that's complicated.

Do you miss Joan's black leather gloves?

They'll be tucked away somewhere safe. You believe me! Don't you worry about that!

You've directed theatre in the past, would you consider directing an episode of Wentworth?

I haven't considered that, no, but I've always been very interested in all sides of any projects that I'm involved in, so I do watch in awe of all the skill that goes into bringing a show like this to life. Every aspect of it, I just love watching them do their job, I love watching the sound recorders, I love going in and watching the editors in the suite and all that kind of stuff. Part of that's just general curiosity and maybe some day it'll be useful.

Congratulations on your recent AACTA Award - how did it feel to win that for this show?

Fabulous. Thanks Daniel. I think it's extraordinary actually that in a very short period of time this show has garnered so many accolades and really caught the attention of television viewing audiences. As I said at the time, these awards could go to any of the members of the cast and, it does! There's this kind of revolving door that keeps moving around the cast, nominations and awards and stuff, and it's testament to the extraordinary work that's been done, the quality of the work that's been done by the actresses and actors in this series, and also by the producers and writers, and giving us roles where people can show off. What we're hired to do is tell stories, if they give us good stories to tell, we'll dive in and give it our all. It's great when people sit up and take notice.

You met fans in the UK for the first time earlier this month - how was that experience?

Fabulous, it was great. Really, really wonderful. A couple of events both in England and Scotland. Because I'm somebody who works on stage a lot, we meet our audience eight times a week, but when you're working on screen, you rarely meet your audience, and to get up close and personal with the fans of the show - and they're such a committed, engaged and sometimes a little bit spooky group of people! (laughs) - that it's such a thrill to have them talk about the show, the stuff that excites them, that frustrates them, that scares them and moves them. I found it really moving actually, really wonderful.

Finally what's coming up next for you?

I've got a number of projects lined up both on screen and on stage. A very, very busy year and a half ahead actually. I feel very blessed.

Wentworth Prison continues in the UK on its new home on 5STAR, Tuesdays at 10pm.

by Daniel Falconer for www.femalefirst.co.uk

find me on and follow me on
Moments ago at the Legacy Arena in Birmingham, Alabama, WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder kept his undefeated record intact, battering and stopping challenger Chris Arreola until his corner finally threw in the towel after 8 rounds of punishment. Wilder used his superior height and reach to keep Arreola at bay with a piston-like jab, dropping him with a big right hand in the 4th round and easily controlling the remainder of the action before the stoppage. Relive all the action in FightHype's round-by-round results!



ROUND 1

Wilder fires his jab. Arreola circles on the outside. Quick jab from Wilder. Arreola shakes his arms out. Not much coming from Arreola right now. 1-2 from Wilder is blocked. Arreola just circling; not throwing anything back. Jab from Wilder. Arreola throwing absolutely nothing. Stiff jab lands for Wilder. Right hand from Wilder. Wilder flicking out his jab. Round to Wilder.



Wilder 10 Arreola 9



ROUND 2

Both men fire the jab. Jab lands for Wilder. Left hook from Wilder. Arreola pressing forward more now. Wilder on his back foot. Right from Wilder is blocked. Left hook from Wilder. Arreola backs him up to the ropes, but Wilder dances away. Arreola digs some shots to the body. Hard 1-2 lands for Wilder. Arreola shakes his head. Jab lands for Wilder. Another. Left hook lands for Wilder. Arreola gets in a right to the body. HARD right lands for Wilder. Arreola is cut. Round to Wilder.



Wilder 20 Arreola 18



ROUND 3

Wilder fires his jab. Stiff jab lands for Wilder. Right hand lands for Wilder. Arreola digs to the body. Looping right lands for Arreola. Right hand down the middle for Wilder. Arreola backs him up to the ropes. They trade on the inside. Arreola eats a hard 1-2 from Wilder. Another right and a left lands for Wilder. Jab lands for Wilder. Arreola works him along the ropes. Wilder ties him up. Round to Wilder.



Wilder 30 Arreola 27



ROUND 4

Jab lands for Wilder. Another. Another. Wilder can't miss with that jab. Arreola lands a nice left hook upstairs. Arreola digs to the body. Wilder fires an uppercut. Jab lands for Wilder. Hard double left lands for Wilder. Arreola backs up. Wilder taunting him now. Stiff jab lands for Wilder. Arreola fires to the body. Uppercut lands for Wilder; he gets a warning from the ref for holding Arreola's head down. Hard jab lands for Wilder. Arreola gets in a right and digs to the body. Jab lands for Wilder. HARD right lands for Wilder and Arreola is hurt. Wlider flurries and Arreola goes down. He's up at 8. Wilder lands a huge right. Another big right lands for Wilder and Arreola is shook again. Wilder unloads and lands some more, but somehow, Arreola survives the round. Big round for the champion.



Wilder 40 Arreola 35



ROUND 5

Hard jab lands for Wilder. Another. HARD left to the body from Wilder backs Arreola up. Jab from Wilder snaps Arreola's head. Left to the body lands for Wilder. Arreola presses forward and lands a right upstairs. Now he digs to the body. Wilder pushes him off. Arreola works him against the ropes. Left hook lands for Wilder. 1-2 from Wilder. Left hook from Wilder. Arreola backs him up to the ropes. They trade jabs. Jab lands for Wilder. Arreola fires to the body. Uppercut lands for Wilder. Round to Wilder.



Wilder 50 Arreola 44



ROUND 6

Jab from Wilder backs Arreola up. Short left hook lands for Wilder. A few more hard jabs from Wilder. They trade on the inside. Hard 1-2 lands for Wilder. Arreola gets in a looping right. Arreola digs to the body. Left hook from Wilder. Hard jab lands for Wilder. 1-2 from Wilder. Left hook from Wilder. Round to Wilder.



Wilder 60 Arreola 53



ROUND 7

Wilder continues to fire his jab. Arreola presses forward. Good uppercut lands for Wilder. Jab lands for Wilder. Arreola gets in a left and a right. They trade on the inside. Arreola landing some good shots. Arreola digs to the body and lands some shots upstairs. Wilder taunting him; Arreola continues to work. HARD 1-2 lands for Wilder. Stiff jab lands for Wilder. Nice 3-punch combo lands for Wilder. Left and a right lands for Wilder. Arreola fires to the body. BIG left hand lands for Wilder that rocks Arreola right at the bell. Arreola wobbles on his way to his corner. Round to Wilder.



Wilder 70 Arreola 62



ROUND 8

Hard jab lands for Wilder. Another. And another. Arreola's face looking battered. A few more jabs land for Wilder. Hard uppercut lands for Wilder. Arreola backs up. More jabs from Wilder. 1-2 lands for Wilder. Left to the body lands for Wilder. Arreola tries to fire back, but not much on his punches. Jab from Wilder. Another. Another. All Deontay Wilder right now. Left hook lands for Wilder. Big left hook lands for Wilder. Round to Wilder.



Wilder 80 Arreola 71



THAT'S IT...IT'S OVER...ARREOLA'S CORNER THROWS IN THE TOWEL...THE WINNER BY WAY OF TKO...DEONTAY WILDER



Also on the televised portion of the card, after some confusion in the tallying of the scorecards, Felix Diaz was awarded the unanimous decision victory over Sammy Vasquez in a fight that was originally announced a draw, and Erickson Lubin earned a unanimous decision victory over Ivan Montero.

[ Follow Ben Thompson on Twitter @fighthype ]
When I woke up on Saturday morning, the first thing I heard was news of Qandeels murder. I thought, like many must have, that this was just another publicity stunt. After all, she was a social media celebrity known to leave no stone unturned in her quest for fame and shock value. I thought the furor would die down in a little while, and Qandeel would resurface to attack those who wished her ill.

Little did I know that the woman who took over Pakistans social media was truly no more. That she had, in fact, been murdered by her brother. I wished at that moment that this had been another outrageous rumour circulated to shock a country that didnt know quite what to make of her, to gauge its reaction. At least then I could have been slightly annoyed, and moved on with life. I wished she had made a video, confirming that her death was another rumour concocted by those who had a twisted fascination with her, and that she would not back down in the face of intimidation or threats.

But Qandeel is dead. And there are plenty (both men and women) who are celebrating what her brother did, claiming that he should have done it sooner. While we are yet to find out more about his motivations, Pakistan has done a good enough job of concluding that if she was murdered for honour, it is something to be celebrated because this is what happens to women who refuse to behave themselves.

We are all responsible for Qandeels murder. We mocked her and shamed her for what she did because she made us uncomfortable. When she became enough of a sensation, the media went on a witch hunt to find out more, tracing her origins, and consequently her name, and the fact that she had escaped an abusive marriage, leaving behind a young son for whom she could not care because she was destitute for a period of time and living in a shelter for victims of domestic violence. What I know about her now makes me believe that Qandeel did not want to be a victim, or a bechari. That she wanted Pakistan, and the world at large, to accept her on her own terms, however outrageous they might have been for this country. However, both sympathy and empathy in Pakistan are reserved for those who fit into our neat little narratives. We did not want to humanize Qandeel. Doing so would have meant letting go of some of that judgment tonic that we love drinking, which was entirely too much fun when it came to her. So we continued to ridicule her. Even in death we have been quick to disassociate ourselves from what she represented before condemning the murder.

In a society where honour is found in womens bodies, Qandeel baring hers was an expose of the hypocrisy that permeates every layer. The Pakistani woman is not allowed to be a sexual being beyond certain strictly defined lines (read: within marriage). The same men who watched her videos and enjoyed her sexuality were the ones who were eager to shame her, and comments on the pictures and videos she posted on social media varied from compliments on her brazenly suggestive behaviour, to people wishing she was dead. She took them all on, regularly chastising those who watched her videos and proceeded to shame them on their hypocrisy, and then asking her fans what theyd like to see more of.

In response to her death, a considerable chunk of people on social media are celebrating what they see as the right end to a woman who broke more rule than she should have and conformed to none of the values of decency and modesty that the Islamic Republic of Pakistani prides itself on having as a national characteristic. It was this lack of conformity that has led to her death being celebrated because the sanctity of honour, as we all know, is more important than the sanctity of life, especially the lives of women.

Pakistan has had no dearth of female celebrities who have indulged in risque behaviour and flaunted their sexuality, but there have always been lines. Qandeel clearly crossed those. She didnt quite fit in, because after all, Veena Malik too turned to religion and domesticity to make up for her bad behavior. Dupatta donned and two children in tow, Veena is Pakistans prodigal daughter whose transgressions can be forgiven in light of her shiny, happy family-woman persona. Qandeel, not so much. She wasnt interested in toning it down. Shed escaped from the clutches of a small town and an impoverished background, and she wanted to make it big, as she liked to remind us on a regular basis.

All Pakistani women have to conform, in one way or another. Being a woman in the country is a lifelong process of negotiation, and Qandeel seemed to be done negotiating. In her last few posts in the days leading up to her death she had claimed that she represented girl power, and would not back down because she believed she was empowering girls by using her voice and sexuality the way she wanted to. Whether she did it for empowerment, fame, or attention, or for all three, it was heartening to see a woman defy norms of propriety in so tongue in cheek a manner. What is tragic is that she will do it no more, and we are happier for it.

The author is based in Karachi and works in the development sector.
New Delhi: Cancelling a flight or denying boarding to a flier is going to cost heavily to domestic airlines as the new guidelines by the aviation regulator DGCA provides for massive compensation in such cases.

As per the revised compensation norms, which are effective from 1 August, an airline will have to pay up to Rs 10,000 to a flier in the case of cancelling/delaying a flight beyond two hours, while the compensation for not allowing a passenger to board the flight stands at up to Rs 20,000.

As of now, airlines offer a meagre amount of up to Rs 4,000 for both denied boarding and cancelling a flight.

The revised compensation has been arrived at after extensive consultations with all stakeholders including the airlines.

Fliers body, Air Passengers Association of India (APAI) founder and president D Sudhakara Reddy, however, has said that the new norms leave certain grey areas which need to be addressed.

Airlines shall pay a compensation of Rs 5,000 or booked one-way basic fare plus fuel charge, whichever is less for cancelled/ delayed flights having a block time of up to one hour in addition to refund of ticket, in case a flier has not been informed by the carrier as per the DGCA norms.

In the case of an airline cancelling/delaying its flight over one hour but up to two hours the compensation amount will be Rs 7,500 or booked one-way basic fare plus fuel charge, whichever is less, besides the refund amount, according to the revised norms.

An amount of Rs 10,000 or booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, whichever is less, will be the compensation for flights having a block time of more than two hours, according to the new compensation norms.

Block hours refer to the period when an aircraft pushes back from its departure gate till the moment it reaches the arrival gate. These hours are used to calculate an airlines on-time performance (OTP) besides determining the compensation in the eventuality of a flight getting cancelled or delayed.

In case of denied boarding, airline will have to pay an amount equal to 200 percent of booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, subject to maximum of Rs 20,000, in case airline arranges alternate flight that is scheduled to depart within 24 hours of the booked scheduled departure, as per the revised norms.

An amount equal to 400 per cent of booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, subject to maximum of Rs 20,000, will have to be paid to a flier in case airline arranges alternate flight that is scheduled to depart beyond 24 hours of the booked scheduled departure, as per the revised norms.

In case passenger does not opt for alternate flight, refund of full value of ticket and compensation equal to 400 per cent of booked one-way basic fare plus airline fuel charge, subject to maximum of Rs 20,000, will have to be paid to a flier, it said.

We have strong objection to certain issues. The operating airline would not have the obligation to pay compensation in the situations which are beyond the control of the airline including political instability and delays on the part of air traffic control, among others. How can the ATC delays be a reason for compensation and this leaves the decision in a grey area and will lead to many disputes. It is also not transparent ," Reddy questioned.

"Also, since no financial compensation shall be payable to passengers who have not provided adequate contact information at the time of making booking or when the ticket for firm travel on the selected flight is issued. This will lead to dispute settlement mechanism and which agency will be the responsible agency and in what time frame. This is especially true when it comes to transit passengers/connecting international passengers ," he said.

Besides, the burden of proof concerning the questions as to whether and when the passenger has been informed of the delay of the flight shall rest with the operating airline, Reddy said adding, " this is a grey area and leaves the burden of proof in the hands of the airline and cant be accepted."
New Delhi: Buoyed by the restoration of its governments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Congress on Sunday said it will target the Modi dispensation for "using all tricks" to destabilise opposition ruled states which no longer trusted the Centre.

The Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad also cited developments in Kashmir and India's failed bid for NSG membership as other issues on which his party will attack the treasury benches in the Monsoon Session of Parliament beginning Monday.

The Congress will extend merit-based support to bills which are pro-people and pro-growth, he told reporters after attending the all-party meeting called by the government. Taking potshots at Modi over his call for cooperation between the Centre and states at the Inter-State Council meeting yesterday, Azad said even Punjab government in which BJP is junior partner, attacked it for "undermining" states.

Congress agreed with the Prime Minister's comments that states should share terror-related intelligence with the Centre, he said, adding BJP itself did politics over terrorism.

He also referred to the "abuse" of Governor's office to topple state governments. "All tricks were used. States no longer trust the Centre," he said, referring to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's suggestion for abolishing the post of Governor.

He also referred to UP Governor Ram Naik's reported defence of arms training to Hindu right organisation Bajrang Dal's cadres. "If government starts giving training to such organisations, then you can understand....where does terrorism begin from," Azad said.

Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia played down the talks between his party and the government to break the impasse over the long-pending GST bill and said they wanted the government to share with them the draft legislation.

"We can give a response only after we receive a written draft from the government," he said as he rejected the contention that the Congress was blocking the bill, saying GST was "a baby given birth" by his party. He also referred to the issue of alleged migration of Hindus from Kairana town in Uttar Pradesh, contending it was aimed at stoking communal tension. He said Congress party will take it up during the session.
New Delhi: Delhi University teachers have decided to call off the boycott of evaluation of undergraduate exams in protest against the new UGC norms to ascertain their academic performance.

The Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) said the decision has been taken after the ministry and UGC officials agreed to set up a committee to resolve their demands.

However, a formal announcement of withdrawl of the boycott will be made after the decision is ratified in a General Body meeting of the teachers' body.

"The negotiations have begun and the administration has agreed to our minimal demands of setting up a committee to resolve our long standing demands.

"In order to create an atmosphere wherein negotiations are fruitful in order to press for final resolution of our problems, and in order to continue a sustainable movement to ensure resolution of pending matters, the DUTA Executive resolves to withdraw the boycott of evaluations and boycott of Staff Council Committees," DUTA President Nandita Narain said.

Teachers have been boycotting evaluation of UG examinations since 24 May in protest against amendments to UGC regulations that, they argue, will lead to job-cuts to the tune of 50 percent and drastically decrease pupil-teacher ratio in higher education.

When the protest was started, the DUTA had boycotted evaluation for all years and later extended it to even the admission process. Teachers lifted the boycott of evaluation for final-year students on by June 16 and decided to rejoin the admission process on 5 July.

The new gazette notification had increased the workload for assistant professors from 16 hours of "direct teaching" per week (including tutorials) to 18 hours, plus another six of tutorials, bringing the total up to 24 hours. Similarly the work hours of associate professors had been increased from 14 to 22.

The teachers argued that altering work-load norms would have led to massive retrenchment - to the tune of 4,500 - in teaching posts. That amendment has since been withdrawn. However, Narain says they will continue to fight against the API (Academic Performance Indicator) system of promotions for teachers "till it is completely withdrawn".

"We have written to the new HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar already seeking an appointment. We also want a proper roster system for appointments and a committee to look into the promotion policy that DU adopted with retrospective effect thereby, virtually stopping all promotions for eight years," Narain said.
Etah: The toll in the spurious liquor tragedy on Sunday climbed to 24, even as the main accused was arrested and 11 officials from excise department and police have been suspended.

While 14 persons died on Saturday, the fresh casualties were reported overnight from Etah and Farukhabad, officials said.

"Twenty one persons have died so far in the liquor tragedy in Etah," District Magistrate Ajay Yadav said. In Farukhabad, Sub Divisional Magistrate of Kayamganj, Ajit Kumar said three persons, who had consumed liquor in Etah, died in the district.

The main accused Sripal was arrested from Nayagaon area in Etah last night, SP Ajay Shankar Rai said. The incident occurred late on Friday, when several people from Luhari Darwaja and adjacent Laukhera village consumed the spurious liquor and were taken ill.

Five government employees, including three from the excise department, have been suspended following the incident. Six of the victims have lost their eyesight, locals claimed.

The DM said an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh will be given to the families of each deceased and action will be taken against the liquor mafias.

In Lucknow, Chief Secretary Deepak Singhal apprised Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav of the incident. Singhal directed Principal Secretary (Excise) and Principal Secretary (Home) to take action against officials found guilty of dereliction of duty.

"Taking serious note of the incident, district excise officer, excise inspector and an excise personnel have been suspended," Principal Secretary (Excise) Kishan Singh Atoria said.

Principal Secretary (Home) Debashish Panda said Circle Officer of Aliganj, Asaram Ahirwar and Station House Officer Mukesh Kumar have been suspended. Etah SP has suspended Sub-Inspector Yogendra Kumar and constables Bhagat Singh, Om Prakash, Tukiram, Bhagwan Singh and Mahesh Chandra.
Strict curfew continued on Sunday in Jammu and Kashmir in the wake of the violence that has paralysed the volatile state for 10 days now.

"Curfew shall continue in all the 10 districts of the Valley," a senior police official said. "Security forces have been instructed to allow movement of patients along with their attendants." Twenty additional companies of CRPF were also rushed to Kashmir on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the death toll reached 41 on Saturday after an unruly mob torched a police picket in north Kashmir's Kupwara district. The police responded by opening fire at the mob. The turmoil in Kashmir started after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces on 8 July.

The curfew is accompanied by a suspension of all vernacular and English daily publications. The Mehbooba Mufti government clamped down on press offices on Friday night in an attempt to block news and information to contain the violence brewing in the state.

The police raided the offices of major newspapers in Srinagar and shut down a major printing press in Srinagar.

Although the authorities took away the printing plates of the newspaper, the e-paper has been uploaded. The publishers on their websites have claimed that their print copies were seized and people working for the printing press were also arrested.

Mobile phone operations without any internet facility have resumed on post paid mobile phones provided by the BSNL. Internet services remained suspended in most parts of Kashmir on Sunday. After nine days, cable TV services, except the Pakistani channels, were restored on Saturday.

Violent protests have been witnessed in Baramulla and Bandipora districts where several persons have been injured. The decision to impose the curfew was taken in view of large number of stone-pelting incidents across the Valley.

The separatist groups  Hurriyat Conference and JKLF  have been issuing strike calls and have extended their latest strike till Monday. Senior separatist leaders including Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabir Ahmad Shah and others have been either placed under house arrest or taken into preventive custody to restrain them from participating in protests.

Burhan Wani is seen as more dangerous dead than alive. His death provoked such violent reaction from the people of Kashmir that it poses a huge test for the Mufti government, as Aijaz Nazir points out in this Firstpost piece.

Burhan was considered the poster boy of Kashmirs new-age militancy. Even the leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Hafiz Saeed warned that violence will escalate in India-ruled Kashmir following his death.

The death has intensified the freedom struggle in the India-occupied part of Kashmir. Young boys were seen shouting anti-India and pro-azaadi slogans. "Burhan has become a youth icon in recent years for Kashmirs freedom struggle. This is for the first time that rural areas of south Kashmir have come out in open to support the azaadi," Nazir quotes Mohammad Aamir from Anantnag in his article.

It is interesting to note that areas which remained peaceful even in the 2010 agitation in Kashmir, when the Army claimed to have killed three Pakistani infiltrators which later turned out to be a fake encounter, witnessed a series of protests in 2016.

Burhans popularity and charm has enamored many even as the PDP became unpopular in the state after forming an alliance with the BJP, David Devadas wrote in a Firstpost article.

The Centre also starved its own state government of funds which further tainted the reputation of the PDP.

Videos and pictures of Burhan went viral on the internet and he became a household face. Youth immediately identified with him. Kashmiris assert that he was 'pure'  celibate, without any vices, leave alone addictions, writes Devadas. According to him, the Kashmiris remember him as one of us even though he became a heroic ideal.

It was because of him that the youth associated militancy with familiar and happy spaces instead of a dark esoteric world. Senior separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani blamed the pro-Indian forces for the violence and bloodshed in the state.

According to him, the new generation of Kashmir was sensitive and more politically aware and are facing brutal forces fearlessly.

He accused the Indian government for creating Burhan Wanis. "India shows no respect for humanity, fundamental rights of Kashmiris," he said.

The situation was possibly exacerbated by Pakistan calling Burhan a freedom fighter. It also accused Indian security forces of committing state-terrorism in Kashmir. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared 19 July to be observed as Black Day in view of the violence simmering in the state.

#BREAKING | Nawaz Sharif announces July 19 to be observed as black day in Pakistan over #KashmirViolence: Sources pic.twitter.com/kTAxj8pfIl  News18 (@CNNnews18) July 15, 2016

Pakistan's demand for a fair and impartial plebiscite to resolve the Kashmir dispute seems a little opportunistic.

Political parties too reacted differently to the unrest which has been brewing in Kashmir.

Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi said that the mishandling of the situation in the state by the Narendra Modi government has led to political turmoil.

CPI and MIM urged the Centre to order a judicial probe into the matter and call an all-party meet to discuss the issue.

UN chief Ban Ki-Moon called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint to avoid further violence.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to the people of Jammu and Kashmir to maintain peace and calm.

It remains to be seen if the situation in the state will worsen in the coming days, possibly instigated to some extent by Pakistan or the violence will wither away.

Whatever the situation might be, Burhan and his death has left a permanent imprint on the people of Kashmir and the anger accumulated over the years might burst soon.

With input from agencies.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has come out strongly on terror and the unrest in Kashmir, saying that acts to curb terrorism dont violate human rights.

It outright rejected the claims that there had been human rights violation in the Kashmir valley in the ongoing clashes between the civilians and the police, in the wake of Burhan Wanis killing  the slain Hizbul Mujahideen commander.

In the backdrop of the violent clashes with security forces that followed his death  that led to the death of 39 persons  senior RSS functionary Dattatreya Hosabale said, Acts to curb terror dont violate human rights. People and the media shouldnt glorify terrorists and their acts. They should not be made netas (politicians) out of it.

RSS Sahsarakaryavah Hosabale, while addressing a session during the six-day all-India meeting of Prant Pracharaks in Kanpur, expressed satisfaction with the Centres stand against militancy  what he termed as, anti-national activities of some.

Rejecting claims of human rights violation in J&K, he said, Kashmir is burning due to terror activities and the terrorists shouldnt be glorified. Afzal Guru, Yakub Memon  all were hanged because they were terrorists. Their hanging was constitutional. They shouldnt be eulogised. Public and media support is required to end terrorism in India. And, there has been no violation of human rights.

Appreciating the Centres stand on eradicating terrorism, Hosabale said, The Centre has taken a strong stand against terror activities through its policy of no-tolerance towards terrorism and it should do what is required to eliminate terrorism. We support it at every step.

According to sources, the Sangh, after having a week-long meeting of its all-India executives with prant pracharaks from 44 prants and 11 kshetras across the country, has chalked out an action plan for the next year.

There has not only been a phenomenal increase in the number of our shakhas, but RSS has also received membership requests from nearly 50,000 people in this year alone. This speaks of the Sanghs increasing support base, Hosabale added.

During its ongoing meeting, the RSS had revealed the numbers reflecting its expansion of Shakhas (units) across the country in the last six years  from 45,000 in 2010 to over 57,000 shakhas as of today.

There has been an unprecedented growth in our Shakhas across the country in the last six years. As on date, there are more than 57,000 Shakhas, which shows peoples increasing faith in the Sangh Parivar and reflects the acceptability of the Sangh and its ideology among the common people, said Dr Manmohan Vaidya, Akhil Bharatiya Prachar Pramukh (head of Media & Publicity) of RSS.

The six-day meet of the RSS concluded on Saturday.
Mir Shahnawaz, who lives in the Barbarshah area of Srinagar, is not able to reach out to dealers outside the state to carry out his shawl business due to the breakdown of cell-phone networks across Kashmir. The 25-year-old would visit different parts of country, but is now stuck at home. Due to the communication blockade in Kashmir, people like Shahanawaz have faced the brunt of the unrest, with some not even able to locate their family members.

The Kashmir shutdown is now into its 10th day, and the state government has not only shown its inability to control the situation but the continuous blockade of cell-phone services and the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway have also ensured that people are facing a grave crisis. The Valley remains short of essential commodities and as the clampdown intensifies, there is a real threat that families may not be able to reach out to their members.

Except for State-run BSNL, none of the telecom providers have been allowed to operate their services. Only the post-paid cell phone network of BSNL and the landline services are functioning, but in the North Kashmir areas of Baramulla and Kupwara, which have seen civilian deaths, even they remain snapped.

Although the death toll has been higher in South Kashmir, the unrest in Kupwara due to the civilian killings for the last two days has ensured that the Valley remains simmering. There have been sporadic incidents of stone pelting reported in Srinagar city as well, while a youth was killed earlier in the outskirts of Tengpora, triggering clashes between forces and the residents here.

Manzoor Ahmad Beg, 41, is not able to contact his family at Punzoo in Tral, among the most restive areas of Kashmir after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Muzafar Wani. Manzoor works as a cook in Srinagar but has not even been able to visit his family for the last seven days. He came to Srinagar on Friday, the second day of Eid, and subsequently Kashmir has witnessed shutdown and the massive security restrictions.

Due to the communication breakdown, the tourism trade has also taken a massive hit while e-commerce services have been completely shut. President of the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industries (KCCI), Mushtaq Ahmad Wani, said the breakdown of the cell phone services have impacted tourism and e-commerce businesses. "Companies dealing with e-commerce have not been able to transact business due to the breakdown of internet and cell phone services," he said.

Wasim Ahmad, a youngster from Maisuma, said he doesn't drive on the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway after the attacks on Kashmiri drivers in the Amarnath land row agitation and during a row over the beef ban. "We ferry all sorts of commodities from Jammu to Srinagar. But due to the lack of mobile service and the closure of the Jammu-Srinagar highway, I couldn't operate on the highway," he said.

A police head constable, Arshad Ahmad of Shopian, said that he couldn't contact his family earlier and they had to travel from the restive South Kashmir area to reach here and find him. "I work on guard duty with a protected person and I'm put up at the Srinagar police lines. Due to the lack of phone network, I couldn't reach out to my family. My brother and uncle came to Srinagar today to ask for my well-being. They were relieved after knowing that there was no problem," he said.
New Delhi: About two thousand additional CRPF personnel are being rushed to violence-hit Kashmir Valley.

Official said that a total of 20 fresh companies (100 personnel in each) are being rushed to the Valley which will be in addition to 2,800 Central Reserve Police Force personnel which were sent to assist the state police last week. They said the additional reinforcements will be deployed to further enhance the security arrangements in the Valley, where the outbreak of violence following the dead of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani has left 39 persons dead and over 3,100 injured.

"Some of the fresh units will exclusively render the task of road opening parties in order to secure the movement of security forces convoys," a senior official said.

About 60 battalions (about 1,000 in personnel each) are already stationed in the state as part of counter insurgency grid. Curfew remained in force in Kashmir and normal life paralysed for the ninth day on Sunday
A minor girl was brutally gangraped allegedly by three men and her body was found in a mutilated state under a neem tree in Kopardi village in Karjat taluka of Ahmednagar district on Wednesday.

The situation in Karjat tehsil is flaring up as the villagers and activists took to the streets on Sunday demanding stiff action against the accused of the 15-year-old girl, even as a political slugfest erupted with opposition demanding Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavais' resignation over the matter on "moral grounds".

All three accused, Jitendra Shinde, Santosh Bhaval and Nitin Dhailume, were arrested by the local crime branch after the incident occurred on 13 July, police said.

He said Shinde alias 'Pappu' was arrested on 14 July while the other two accused were held later.

The accused have been booked under IPC sections 376 (punishment for rape), 302 (murder) and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

"The incident took place on 13 July between 6.45 pm and 7.30 pm when the victim was returning after meeting her grandfather. She was accosted by three accused who gangraped her violently before throttling her to death. Her both shoulders were found to be dislocated," Ahmednagar district Superintendent of Police Saurabh Tripathi told PTI.

According to The Asian Age, the victim was a ninth standard girl whose body was badly mutilated. The flesh from all over her body, including her genitals, were torn. Her hair had been pulled out, hands were dislocated from the shoulders, her teeth were smashed and she was strangled to death after rape, states the report.

However, the officer has dismissed media reports about the nature of cruelty the victim was allegedly subjected to by the trio.

On the eve of beginning of monsoon session of the state Legislature, Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil on Sunday demanded that Fadnavis should step down taking moral responsibility of the incident.

"We have a chief minister who also holds Home portfolio. He refuses to acknowledge that law and order situation in the state is deteriorating under his tenure. He did not even have time to go and visit the bereaved family. He should immediately take moral responsibility and resign," the Congress leader said.

Leader Of Opposition in the Legislative Council Dhananjay Munde demanded capital punishment for the accused, besides a high-level inquiry.

He alleged that photos of Ahmednagar district Guardian Minister Ram Shinde with the "prime accused" in the case are doing rounds in media.

"There was laxity on the part of police officials in arresting the accused. Photos of Guardian minister (of Ahmednagar district) Ram Shinde with the prime accused are going around in media. Thus, there needs to be a high-level inquiry into the incident. Also, we demand fast track hearing of this case and capital punishment for the accused," the NCP leader said.

When contacted, Shinde, who was recently elevated to the post of cabinet minister, said he had no relation with the accused and that the guilty will be dealt with an iron hand.

With inputs from PTI
Kathmandu: In a blunt statement, Nepal Prime Minister KP Oli has blamed India for being behind the CPN (Maoist Centre) pulling out support to his government.

"India's role was primarily behind" the pulling out of support by the Maoists, Oli said on Thursday in a conference on National Security in Kathmandu, adding that the process of government change was "not an automatic process but conducted by remote control".

Nepal-India ties took a dip after Oli came into power last October, which was followed by the five-month-long economic blockage on the Nepal-India border by the Madhesi protesters. Oli since the very beginning has been a critic of Indian "high-handedness" in Nepal's internal political affairs.

Nepal's Maoists pulled out support from the government on Tuesday and a no-trust motion was registered by the CPN (Maoist Centre) and Nepali Congress in Parliament against Oli after the latter refused to resign.

Oli said "there was a feast in a five-star hotel" after the Maoist Centre pulled out support.

It was widely reported in Nepali media that Indian Ambassador to Nepal Ranjit Rae "threw a feast" after the Maoist Centre pulled out support to the government on Tuesday evening.

Oli, who now faces a no-confidence motion in Parliament, said he "cannot compromise on national security" in the name of maintaining cordial relationship with neighbours.

"I had never compromised on national interest in any difficult situation; so India used the Nepali Congress and Maoists against my government and are trying to topple it," he said.

Earlier in May, when the Maoists attempted government change, Oli had accused India and recalled Nepal's Ambassador from New Delhi and cancelled the visit of the President to India.

"Maintaining good relations with neighbouring countries is an important aspect of national security. But we cannot jeopardize nationality for its sake," Oli said.

"Neither we think against anyone nor we have spoken against one. We won't let this country be used against others," he said.

Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba and CPN (Maoist Centre) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda' were also invited to the seminar but both leaders opted to boycott it. Hinting at the absence of the two leaders, Oli said the issue of national security was not related to any particular person or party but of the country as a whole.

Taking aim at the Terai protests, Oli maintained the new Constitution had not discriminated against anyone. He added the new Constitution could only be amended as there was no provision for rewriting mentioned in it.

Oli said the government was ready to redraw the federal boundaries as per the demand of the Terai-based political parties. "But such drawings should be justifiable," he said.
Patna: A day after Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar pitched for abolishing the governor's post, MP Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav demanded that the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils be removed, saying these are a "total waste of hard-earned public money".

"Both the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils in the states should be abolished as these are arrangements made by the British regime and are no longer required," he said on Sunday. "I will raise this issue in the Monsoon Session of Parliament. I will also file a PIL in the Supreme Court for abolishing the arrangements of the Rajya Sabha and the

Councils," said the MP from Madhepura.

Alleging that rich people try to be in the Rajya Sabha and the Legislative Councils merely on basis of money power,

Yadav said, "The Upper Houses both at the Centre and in the states are no longer required as it is a complete waste of hard-earned public money. Rather, the money should be spent on education and health."

The Bihar CM had made the demand for abolishing the governor's post at the Inter-State Council meeting chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi, stating that the existing federal democratic structure does not warrant its continuance.

Referring to Kumar's demand, Yadav said the government should first scrap the system of Rajya Sabha and Legislative Councils before abolishing the post of governor. Both the central and state governments should explain as

to why they have continued with the arrangement that was made by Britishers, Yadav added.
Lucknow: Congress' chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh, Sheila Dikshit, had a narrow escape on Sunday, suffering minor injuries after a makeshift platform on an open mini-truck collapsed during a roadshow in the state capital.

The 78-year-old Congress veteran lost her balance after the plank she was standing on gave way when the cavalcade was on its way to the party headquartes on Mall Avenue from the Amausi airport. Dikshit was extended a helping hand by other leaders present there and later shifted to a car, a senior party functionary said.

This was her first visit to the state capital after Congress declared her as its chief ministerial candidate for the crucial 2017 polls, considered a do-or-die battle for the party.

Congress chose Dikshit, a Brahmin, as its face for the polls considering "her strong credentials as chief minister of

Delhi for three consecutive terms" to enable the party regain support of the electorally-sizeable community. The Brahmin community, a traditional Congress vote bank, had shifted its allegiance to BJP in the advent of the Mandir-Mandal politics.

A large chunk of Brahmin votes had also gone to Mayawati's BSP in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to that community, whose support determines the poll outcome in several seats in central and eastern UP.

Newly-appointed UPCC chief and actor-turned-politician Raj Babbar accompanied Dikshit during the road show which started from the airport, braving intermittent smart showers.

Congress has also announced coordination and campaign committees for Uttar Pradesh which will be headed by Sanjay Singh and Pramod Tiwari respectively.

The new team took over formally at the Congress headquarters later in the day.
Seeking to break the impasse over the Goods and Services Tax bill, the Narendra Modi government called an all-party meeting on Sunday, requesting support from the Opposition parties in the passage of pending legislations during the Monsoon Session of Parliament that will begin on Monday.

Visuals of All Party meeting called by Parliamentary Affairs Min Ananth Kumar,ahead of Monsoon session of Parliament pic.twitter.com/RAMzkDHU6Q  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

"We will support any bill which will be in the interest of the nation, people and growth. We will let the bills pass on basis of merit, will not obstruct passage of bills," Leader of Opposition, Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad was quoted as saying by ANI after the meet.

Congress will support any bill which will be in the interest of nation, people and growth: Ghulam Nabi Azad, Cong pic.twitter.com/iQggwUINWA  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

Hoping for meaningful discussions and outcomes, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, "GST is of national importance, issue isn't about which government gets credit. I hope for meaningful discussions and outcomes. Let's keep national interests above everything else."

Furthermore, Modi thanked all political parties for speaking in one voice on Kashmir issue.

Assuring that there should not be any hindrance in gaining consensus for the passage of GST bill, Union Minister of Urban Development Venkaiah Naidu said, "Majority of the states are in favour of GST bill, no political party has taken an open stand against it. I'm sure it will be passed. GST bill should be passed by consensus than majority. It will be good for the nation if it's approved by consensus."

#GST bill should be passed by consensus than majority. If it's approved by consensus will be good for nation-V Naidu pic.twitter.com/QmWUyEtv5Y  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

Stating that all the parties assured full cooperation during the meet, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar told ANI, "We had a very fruitful discussion. All parties assured full cooperation."

However, stressing that they need consensus on GST bill, that has been pending for a long time due to stiff opposition from Congress, Kumar said, "All parties are holding discussions regarding GST bill, we want consensus to be developed on that. Congress has assured that they will support bills on the basis of merit. We have proposed 16 legislative business."

CPM General Secretary, Sitaram Yechury, however remarked that GST bill is not a matter to be settled bilaterally between BJP and Congress. "We have been requesting the government since two years to call an all party meet to discuss GST bill and listen to our concerns to form consensus."

As far as the GST bill is concerned, it's not a matter to be settled bilaterally between BJP & Cong: Sitaram Yechury pic.twitter.com/zTYbManv4g  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

On Friday, Union Ministers Arun Jaitley and Ananth Kumar reached out to senior Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma with the Finance Minister saying the government is trying to build a consensus on GST Bill.

However, as Parliament meets for the Monsoon Session on Monday, sparks are set to fly with the Opposition, boosted by the Supreme Court verdict on Arunachal Pradesh, seeking to corner the treasury benches on a host of issues, including India's failure to secure NSG membership.

Besides the political developments in Arunachal, which saw the installation of a new Congress dispensation in the state, the Modi government's decision to seek a report from the Law Commission on the proposal for introducing a Uniform Civil Code are likely make the session a tempestuous affair.

The government is hopeful of the passage of the GST bill in this session amid indications that a number of regional parties have broken ranks with Congress on the issue and are willing to extend their support to the crucial economic reform measure.

Besides the GST, another key legislation pending passage is the Whistle Blowers Protection (Amendment) Bill, 2015, which was moved in December last year but the discussion on it had remained inconclusive. In the Budget Session this year, this bill could not be taken up for debate.

In the Lok Sabha, important pending bills include the Consumer Protection Bill 2015 and the Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Amendment Bill, 2015.

The last few sessions of Parliament have seen frequent face-offs between the ruling and the opposition benches but the second part of the Budget Session saw a relative improvement as far the completion of government business was concerned.

The session comes at a time when the ruling BJP's morale is high after its maiden victory in Assam Assembly polls and its performance in Kerala and West Bengal elections.

With inputs from PTI
Nobody in Kerala, not even the Congress, would have thought that Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan would prove himself to be a bundle of contradictions this fast. The man who campaigned against the lack of transparency and alleged cronyism of the Oomen Chandy government is now a big symbol of both afflictions.

Worse still is that while Chandy looked for ways to trick the people with his mild manners, Vijayan is brazening it out.

Two controversies, real controversies, surround Vijayan government, or rather Vijayan himself. First, he is refusing to obey the orders of the chief information commissioner who has asked the government to make public the decisions of his cabinet meetings; and second, his honorary legal advisor is also the advisor of many suspected lawbreakers that the state is seeking to prosecute.

In simple terms of democratic governance, both denote blatant impropriety. Right to Information was a major breakthrough that began to clear the rot in Indian democracy and offered some hope against corruption and political immorality. The CPM was a big beneficiary of the Right to Information (RTI) Act in Kerala because many of their battles against the Chandy government rode on the information gathered by the media and the public using the Act.

Pushed to wall by the media and RTI activists, Chandy had even issued an order in the final days of his government not to disclose details of the vigilance cases against his officials and ministers. Vijayan was at his acrimonious best then and had charged that Chandy was hiding behind secrecy out of fear. Chandy was scared that he would be driven out by people if they saw his true colours, Vijayan had said.

Had there been no RTI or media leaks from the reformists within the Congress, Vijayan would have been short on ammunition and probably the Left Front wouldnt have managed its present majority. The same Vijayan is now emulating Chandys secretive ways and is justifying them too.

Chandy had become secretive only at the end of his term, but Vijayan wants to install an iron curtain right from the beginning and seemingly doesnt care about the public outcry and mounting media pressure. Chandy had been extremely accessible, held media briefings after every cabinet meeting, and freely gave interviews. In contrast, Vijayan scrapped the long-held tradition of post-cabinet press briefings with the excuse that public relations was not the job of his office, and blocked the reach of the RTI Act.

That his government will contest the chief information commissioners order in court rather than disclose the details of his cabinet decisions smacks either of an anxiety that totalitarian, including communist, regimes always betrayed, or a total disregard for the principles of democracy and governance. Opposition will be completely justified if they allege that this obsession with opacity is a cover for corruption, cronyism and illegality. In the UN book, transparency is one of the defining principles of democratic governance. As a party that picked on Chandys lack of transparency and misconduct, the CPM should have gone one step ahead by even submitting its governments performance to public audit. Unfortunately, it began by cowering under pressure for transparency.

The other controversy is equally baffling. He has appointed a top Kerala lawyer, MK Damodaran, as his honorary legal advisor, who also appears for people against whom the government has filed cases. In simple terms, he is the lawyer for both the plaintiff and the defendant. While advising Vijayan, he is also appearing for the accused in corruption and criminal cases  such as an alleged illegal lottery operator, the quarry lobby and even a Congress-leader involved in a scam  against whom the government has to make a strong legal case. A simple case of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.

People in the state and the media see an obvious conflict of interest and impropriety, but Vijayan, his party and its proxies dont see it that way. According to them, the advise is only for Vijayan and the government doesnt pay because the service is free. However, there is no satisfactory answer to the question of conflict of interest. In fact, Vijayan, his party and the proxies, dont see a conflict at all. They are certain that there is no elephant in the room.

They also dont have a satisfactory answer to the question as to why the chief minister needs a separate official advisor, on the rank of a principal secretary, when he has the whole state apparatus that includes the advocate general, the law secretary and the law department.

Vijayan is also under fire for appointing a director general of prosecution (DGP) who has a pending case of financial misappropriation against him. He has defended him and rejected opposition demands for dropping him saying that the DGP was only a signatory to a decision by the board of directors of a company and has done nothing wrong himself. Legal experts point out that this is bad in law and by this procedural yardstick, some allegations against the Chandy government too could have been explained away.

Vijayan has only begun and has already demonstrated a certain self-righteousness that when displayed by Oomen Chandy was dubbed as a cover for corruption and immorality. In fact, Chandys decline started when he clammed up after a glorious and extended honeymoon. Sadly, Vijayan seems to be starting from the point where Chandy began to slide.
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However, former Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Nabam Tuki's resignation and further developments in Arunachal's politics could be one of the key points to be discussed in this meet.

According to CNN News18, Congress will hold a strategy meet at 10 Janpath on Saturday ahead of Monsoon Session.

Arunachal Pradesh Congress President Padi Richo said that only Khandu will take the oath on Sunday. His oath-taking ceremony will be attended by all senior leaders, officers and Opposition as well as independent MLAs.

Pema Khandu, who was elected as the new Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader of Arunachal Pradesh on Saturday will take oath as the new Chief Minister on Sunday.

I wish all the best to Pema Khandu, we'll co-operate with him for the development of Arunachal Pradesh: Kalikho Pul pic.twitter.com/lr1226G1I8

Will work unitedly in the interest of the people and development of the state: Chowna Mein, Deputy CM, Arunachal pic.twitter.com/ITSHwJYmwM

Mein further said, "Now that the issues (within the party) have been resolved, we look forward to work in co-operation to fulfil our responsibilities."

The newly sworn-in Deputy Chief Minister Chowna Mein said that will work unitedly in the interest of the people and development of Arunachal Pradesh

Will work unitedly in the interest of people and development of the state: Chowna Mein

Differences have ended once for all,party stands united & everyone will work together for dev of state: Nabam Tuki pic.twitter.com/PayYphxKYd

"The party stands united and everyone will work together for the development of the state," Tuki said.

Former Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Nabam Tuki said that differences within the party have ended once and for all.

Itanagar: Pema Khandu addresses media after being sworn-in as the CM of the Arunachal Pradesh pic.twitter.com/2XJjqMTnJp

"We'll try to fulfill our responsibilities, and focus on starting new projects. We will look at completion of stalled projects for the development of the state," Khandu said.

Pema Khandu addresses media after being sworn-in as the CM of the Arunachal Pradesh

Expectations of the public are high. I believe in team work, will work hard: Pema Khandu, Arunachal Pradesh CM. pic.twitter.com/ehVcTbuHig

All the differences within have been resolved under one roof, both teams are united who have decided for me to lead:Pema Khandu,Arunachal CM

All the differences within have been resolved under one roof, says Khandu

In a dramatic turn of events, the Congress on Saturday chose Pema Khandu as its new leader in

Arunachal replacing restored Chief Minister Nabam Tuki, hours ahead of a scheduled Assembly floor test in a bid to save its government.

Pema Khandu, son of late chief minister Dorjee Khandu, was unanimously elected leader at a meeting of Congress Legislature Party, which was attended by 44 MLAs, including rebel Khaliko Pul, who became chief minister in February with outside support from BJP.

The Assembly now has an effective strength of 58 in which BJP has 11 and Independents 2. With Speaker Nabam Rebia and the return of dissidents, the Congress strength has gone up to 45.

The Arunachal Pradesh Legislative Assembly at Naharlagun has been put under tight security cover ahead of the floor test by Chief Minister Nabam Tuki on Saturday.

Security personnel were deployed in and around the Naharlagun town, particularly near the State Legislative Assembly complex and all entry and exit routes have been placed under security cover to ensure that no anti-social element hamper the the session.

Arunachal Pradesh Governor Tathagata Roy had reinstated Nabam Tuki as the state Chief Minister following the Supreme Court judgment on Wednesday and asked him to take the floor test to prove the majority of his government in the House no later than Saturday.

Tuki held a Cabinet meeting on Friday and appealed to the Governor to defer the session of the House by 10 days so that he gets reasonable time to prove his majority in the House.

Roy, however, asked Tuki to take the floor test on Saturday as scheduled.

Meanwhile, the political situation is changing rapidly in the state as sources in the Congress party said that the a meeting of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) is slated on Saturday, ahead of the scheduled House session to prove the majority of the Nabam Tuki led government.

"A section of the Congress leaders are not projecting Pema Khandu as the Chief Minister instead of Tuki and the CLP meeting is likely to elect Khandu as the CLP leader. After his election as the new CLP leader, Khandu will meet the Governor and prove the majority of his government in the House," the sources said.

Former Chief Minister Kalikho Pul, who had unseated Tuki in February this year with the help of a faction of dissident Congress legislators and BJP members, claimed that he has got the support of 42 legislators in the 60-member house, whose effective strength is 58 now after two members resigned earlier.

Pul, who is camping in a hotel in Guwahati since last two days with 42 legislators, also expressed fear that Tuki might try to resort to "horse trading" if more time is given for the floor test.
Chennai/Coimbatore: Claiming a "broad consensus" on the long pending GST Bill, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu on Sunday said the Centre was "very serious" about its passage in the monsoon session of parliament, but virtually rejected Congress' demand for a tax rate cap terming it "not feasible and advisable".

The urban development minister said the government was pursuing the matter with "all parties concerned" and he expected it to be passed in the monsoon session of Parliament beginning Monday.

"The entire country is watching what is going to happen in Parliament tomorrow. Broad consensus has emerged. Still there are points being addressed by the Finance Minister (Arun Jaitley). GST is the need of the hour," he said at a 'Meet the Minister' programme organised by the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce.

Last week, Naidu, a former Parliamentary Affairs Minister, spoke to Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad in a bid to drum up Opposition support for the crucial legislation.

If the common taxation code was implemented "harassment will be reduced, middlemen exploitation will be reduced and corruption will get reduced," he said, adding it will help in increasing revenue and job opportunities.

"That is why the government is very serious (about the Bill) and we are pursuing with all the parties concerned... I am sure in the coming session of the Parliament itself the GST bill will be passed. That is my expectation," Naidu said.

While the GST Bill has been passed in the BJP-dominated Lok Sabha, the government has faced roadblocks in the upper house where it lacks the numbers to get it cleared.

Earlier, speaking to reporters in Coimbatore, Naidu exuded confidence that the bill would be passed in the monsoon session but said Congress' demand for cap on tax rate in the Constitution bill was "not feasible and advisable."

"There is a broad consensus, with a few reservations, even as Tamil Nadu being a manufacturing State has opposed the bill. Congress wants a cap on tax rate in the constitution bill, but it is not feasible and advisable...and the GST bill is pending for the last eight years," he said.

The government wanted to pass the bill with consensus and "not scrape through" by its majority, he said.

Recalling that the bill was in place when Pranab Mukherjee was the Finance Minister and P Chidambaram had made some changes to it, Naidu said it took shape after a committee comprising Finance Ministers of five states went through it in detail.

The new generation wants the bill to passed as they want empowerment, Naidu, who was in Coimbatore to participate in the 4th Edition of India International Coir Fair, said.
New Delhi: Opposition parties on Sunday pressed for a discussion on the Kashmir issue and on the role of Governors against the backdrop of Arunachal Pradesh political crisis in the Monsoon session of Parliament beginning on Monday, at an all-party meeting convened by Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan.

Emerging from the meeting, Mahajan said leaders of various parties have assured their support in the smooth functioning of the proceedings.

"We hope that the House will function without adjournments and we will be able to transact business as the previous session," she said.

Responding to posers, she said the situation in Kashmir and the overall issue of terrorism are likely to be discussed during the session which has 20 sittings.

"Discussion is also likely on the role of Governors and the issue of price rise...how and in what form it is taken up will be decided," she told reporters.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the dinner hosted by the the Speaker after the meeting which is held ahead of Parliament sessions.
New Delhi: The Opposition said it would seek to corner the government for its "attempts to destabilise" Congress-ruled states and the Kashmir unrest when the Monsoon Session of Parliament begins from Monday. However, the parties said they would also support the GST Bill, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi said was of "national importance".

At an all-party meeting one day before the Monsoon Session, leaders of several opposition parties spoke of developments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand to signal their intent to train guns on the government, with Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad saying the states no longer trusted the Centre.

Modi, who joined the meet later, thanked all the parties for "speaking in one voice" on the developments in Kashmir and sought their support in the passage of the GST Bill, saying it was of "national importance". He also urged them to keep national interests above everything else, sources said.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar told reporters after the two-hour meeting that Parliament was a

"mahapanchayat" where all issues could be raised. He said the government will talk to all parties to evolve a consensus on the GST.

"Our legislative business, including GST, is a priority. We want to see to that we pass the GST bill with consensus. We are going to take every party on board," he said.

Kumar downplayed the attacks of Congress, the Left and some other parties on the government over the Arunachal issue, saying different issues can be debated. "We have assured all parties that there will be open-mindedness and we are ready to discuss all issues," he said.

Speaking to reporters, Azad accused the government of "using all tricks" to destabilise opposition-ruled governments

and took potshots at Modi over his talk of cooperation between the Centre and states by pointing out that even a BJP ally like Akali Dal has attacked it over "undermining" states.

Though he did not refer to GST directly, he said the Congress will offer support to bills on merit. "We have not taken any decision that we have to stop a bill. We will support on merit. We will support any bill which is in support of people, progress and growth," he said.
Pema Khandu, the newly elected chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh said on Sunday that his priority would be to complete all important projects started by his father Dorjee Khandu, Nabam Tuki and Kalikho Pul.

"All projects undertaken by the previous regimes in the last four years will be fast tracked and thrust will be given to tourism, hydropower, agriculture and horticulture, health education and communication," he said.

He also said that he would inculcate a 'Team Arunachal' spirit among elected leaders irrespective of party affiliations for overall development of the state. All elected leaders of the state would be made a part of the development process cutting across political lines.

He added that he would make special effort to stop migration of people from border areas by providing all facilities with the help from the Centre under the Border Area Development Programme (BADP).

Marking the culmination of dramatic political developments in this north-eastern state, Khandu, who was unanimously elected leader of the meeting of Congress Legislative Party (CLP) on Saturday, took oath as the chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh on Sunday in Itanagar. Chowna Mein was sworn in as the deputy chief minister.

Khandu staked claim to power on Saturday on the basis of support of 45 party MLAs along with two Independents in the CLP meeting, which was attended by 44 MLAs, including rebel Khaliko Pul, who became chief minister in February with outside support from BJP.

Arunachal Pradesh Congress president, Padi Richo, said that only Khandu will take the oath on Sunday. Khandu's oath-taking ceremony was attended by all senior leaders, officers and Opposition as well as independent MLAs.

The Assembly now has an effective strength of 58 in which BJP has 11 and two Independents. With Speaker Nabam Rebia and the return of dissidents, the Congress claims to have the support of 45 MLAs.

Congress leader Bamang Felix and former Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Nabam Tuki had proposed Khandu's name as the new CLP leader. According to Tuki, a floor test is not required now because Khandu has been elected by the congress leaders with majority.

"Pema Khandu has the support of all 45 reunited Congress MLAs. To appoint him as the CLP leader was a collective decision," Tuki told Firstpost from Itanagar.

He denied that there was any pressure from the Congress high command to step down.

After the swearing-in ceremony, Tuki said that the differences within the party have ended once and for all. "The party stands united and everyone will work together for the development of the state."

Differences have ended once for all,party stands united & everyone will work together for dev of state: Nabam Tuki pic.twitter.com/PayYphxKYd  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

Adressing the media after his swearing-in, Khandu said: "Expectations of the public are high. I believe in team work, will work hard. We'll try to fulfill our responsibilities, and focus on starting new projects. We will look at completion of stalled projects for the development of the state."

Expectations of the public are high. I believe in team work, will work hard: Pema Khandu, Arunachal Pradesh CM. pic.twitter.com/ehVcTbuHig  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

All the differences within have been resolved under one roof, both teams are united who have decided for me to lead:Pema Khandu,Arunachal CM  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

Newly sworn-in Deputy Chief Minister Chowna Mein said, "We will work unitedly in the interest of the people and development of the state. Now that the issues (within the party) have been resolved, look forward to work in co-operation to fulfil our responsibilities."

Will work unitedly in the interest of the people and development of the state: Chowna Mein, Deputy CM, Arunachal pic.twitter.com/ITSHwJYmwM  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

Also, rebel leader Pul, wished the best to Khandu and said that they will cooperate with him for the development of Arunachal Pradesh.

I wish all the best to Pema Khandu, we'll co-operate with him for the development of Arunachal Pradesh: Kalikho Pul pic.twitter.com/lr1226G1I8  ANI (@ANI_news) July 17, 2016

At 37, Pema is definitely the youngest chief minister in India among all incumbents but not the youngest one to take office. Former Puducherry chief minister MO Hasan Farook Maricar holds the record of being the youngest chief minister ever in India as he took office at the age of 29.

A graduate from the prestigious Hindu College under Delhi University, Khandu also served as the state's Minister of Tourism and Water Resources in 2014.

With rogue MLA and former chief minister Kalikho Pul and other rebel legislators returning to the Congress fold for now, there is no immediate threat to Khandu. However, given the fluid nature of politics in the state, it would require real guts to brim with confidence over longevity of a government.

With inputs from Agencies
In the midst of his bitter fight with the Centre on a range of issues, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday accused the Modi dispensation of turning its ties with Delhi government into an "India-Pakistan" type situation and said absence of obstacles would have helped him achieve four times of what has been done so far in the city.

In the first edition of his 'Talk to AK' show, seen as an attempt to increase Aam Aadmi Party's national connect, Kejriwal touched upon a number of contentious issue including appointment of 21 Parliamentary Secretaries, arrest of a top bureaucrat by CBI and transfer of officers even as he taunted the Prime Minister saying, he was the "only corrupt Chief Minister in the country in the eyes of" Narendra Modi.

The Delhi Chief Minister, in the nearly two-hour-long programme that began with a monologue followed by a question and answer session, alleged that the Centre was trying to "break" the AAP government and that BJP President Amit Shah was micromanaging CBI, adding, "but every dog has his day and all these will soon come to an end."

He said that the government has saved over Rs 350 crore in building five flyovers across the national capital since the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) took charge in February 2015.

"Some flyovers were under construction in Delhi when we took over. We completed those projects before schedule and saved over Rs 350 crore. This was unprecedented. In our country, every government project is delayed by years. But we changed all of it," said Kejriwal during his inaugural interactive session "Talk to AK".

He said that the government also slashed tax rates to reduce the burden on businessmen.

"We saved hundreds of crores and as a result we slashed the tax rates. Another good thing that happened was that tax collection went up after we reduced the tax rates," he added.

When asked to defend the various charges filed against AAP MLA's, Kejriwal alleged that the Centre has been hampering the progress of Delhi by turning various institutions like the anti-corruption board against the AAP government. He said, "The centre has done various unconstitutional things to hamper the progress done by Delhi government."

The fact that filing an FIR is impossible for the common man but the Central Govt rains FIR's on us is evident of vendetta #TalkToAK  Talk To AK (@TalkToAK_) July 17, 2016

We are not playing the victim card but Delhi is a victim of the narrow politics of the Central Govt. @ArvindKejriwal LIVE #TalkToAK  Talk To AK (@TalkToAK_) July 17, 2016

He also talked about the lack of investors in Delhi saying, "If Delhi is being governed well and becoming a good place for investors, then I need to let the country and the world know, so people can come here."

The Chief Minister also said that his government is focusing on four sectors  education, health, electricity and water.

"We have worked on various things but our main priority is on four sectors  education, health, electricity and water. We believe that spending on health and education is not an expenditure, but an investment," he said.

"When our youth is educated, the government would not have to worry about development, the youth will themselves develop the country. Therefore, we doubled the budget on education by 100 percent and health by 50 per cent," Kejriwal noted.

Kejriwal talked about harnessing power of the youth. He said, "AAP is youth's party. None of our families were in politics. We mostly have young people. I would invite young people to join politics to improve it. We've started an Urban Fellowship programme for this."

You can watch the video here:

Access to quality health services is a fundamental right. - Arvind Kejriwal LIVE #TalkToAK  Talk To AK (@TalkToAK_) July 17, 2016

            -   LIVE #TalkToAK  Talk To AK (@TalkToAK_) July 17, 2016

Taking part in a meeting of the Inter-State Council chaired by Modi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader also raised the issue of surging pulse prices in the country.

I demanded that loans of all farmers be waived by Centre, give adequate crop prices (to the farmers) by implementing (M.S.) Swaminathan report, Kejriwal tweeted.

Also, I raised the issue of increasing dal (pulse) prices due to large-scale hoarding by a few traders, he said.

The Chief Minister asked the Centre to give Delhi its due as per the 14th Finance Commission formula, which he said came to Rs 5,000 crore.

I am fighting for the people, not just for myself - Arvind Kejriwal #TalkToAK  Talk To AK (@TalkToAK_) July 17, 2016

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will contest assembly elections in Gujarat if "people ask for it," said Kejriwal.

"The party does not contest polls. It's the people of the state who fight it. Even in Delhi, the people spent (their own) money to bring us to power," he said while responding to a query during his maiden "Talk to AK" interaction with the public.

"Similarly, if people of Gujarat want us to contest, we will fight assembly elections in the state," said Kejriwal, who is also national convenor of the AAP.

The party would hold a meeting in Gujarat in the next two or three months to decide its next move in the state, he said.

The Kejriwal government in Delhi has been at loggerheads with the central government over various issues of governance.

The government has launched a dedicated website, talktoak.com, through which people can directly ask questions to the Chief Minister. A dedicated twitter handle, "@TalkToAK_" has also been created for the programme.

This move holds importance as the AAP is gearing up for assembly elections in Goa, Punjab and Gujarat.

Kejriwal promised the next Talk to AK after a month or two and has welcomed the suggestions of the citizens for better governance of Delhi.
As a full-fledged state, Arunachal Pradesh is less than 50 years old, but what a tumultuous journey it has been for the erstwhile North-East Frontier Agency as it was known earlier. It has already seen 11 terms of chief ministers and has slipped into President's Rule twice, the latest stint being from 27 January to 19 February, 2016.

Baptised as Arunachal Pradesh by then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1972, the union territory's legislature came into existence in 1975 with Prem Khandu Thungan assuming charge as the first chief minister. In fact, Arunachal Pradesh was conferred complete statehood on 20 February, 1987 when Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister.

Political upheaval has ironically become the only constant in the governance history of Arunachal Pradesh. The state's long-term chief minister Gegong Apang, who was in office from 18 January 1980 to 19 January 1999 at a stretch, perhaps is the best example of it. Having an unchallenged run for nearly two decades as a chief minister, Apang was quick to form the Arunachal Congress in September 1996, when he revolted against former prime minister PV Narsimha Rao. Arunachal Congress was formed as a breakaway unit of the Congress, which snatched 54 out of 60 MLAs of the Legislative Assembly to form the state government.

But there was a split in the split group as well with the then Arunachal Congress Lok Sabha MP Wangcha Rajkumar opposing the appointment of Omak Apang as a junior minister in the second BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1998. Because of the revolt, Rajkumar was thrown out of the party along with five ministers in the state government. One of them was Mukut Mithi. Mithi then formed a breakaway unit called the Arunachal Congress (Mithi) and became the chief minister with 40 MLAs supporting him. However, the party merged with the Congress ahead of the 1999 Assembly polls. Following the victory in the state polls, Mithi became the chief minister under the Congress government and remained in power until August 2003.

However, Apang returned to power again by usurping Mithi after the Arunachal Congress and several other parties came together under the umbrella of United Democratic Front. Soon after, the front merged with the BJP allowing the national party to open its account in the North East. This honeymoon with the BJP however, did not last long after the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance wrested power from the NDA. Sniffing the change in political tide, Apang was quick to return to the Congress but had to finally give up his chief ministership with MLAs demanding his resignation and seeking Dorjee Khandu in his place. Being the opportunist he is, it is not surprising that Apang quit the Congress in February 2014 to join the BJP when the Narendra Modi wave was at its peak ahead of the Lok Sabha elections that year.

More than the governance itself, staying in power is a greater challenge for a chief minister in Arunachal Pradesh as revolts have become a common phenomenon in the political grammar of the state. Given the history of the state, the ouster of chief minister Nabam Tuki from power, in whatever form it may be, was not at all surprising. That Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa, who despite holding a Constitutional post, displayed such partisanship is another matter of course.

The no-nonsense verdict of the Supreme Court on Wednesday had put everything in place, including the restoration of the Tuki-led Congress government, but the phase of uncertainty is far from over. It is no wonder that Congress chose to keep its celebrations low key as it knew the real test lay ahead on the floor of the House when the strength of the government would get tested.

Fearing another disaster, the Congress leadership convinced Tuki to resign as chief minister and allow a more acceptable Pema Khandu to take over as the leader of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP).

"Pema Khandu has the support of all 45 reunited Congress MLAs. To appoint him as the CLP leader was a collective decision," Tuki told Firstpost from Itanagar.

Even as the outgoing chief minister on Saturday claimed that there would be no floor test as a letter of support from all 45 Congress MLAs and two Independent legislators to Pema Khandu have been submitted to in-charge Governor Tathagata Roy, it is for the Raj Bhavan to decide as to how it is going to implement the Supreme Court verdict.

The apex court in its order on Arunachal Pradesh governance crisis had clearly said, "The Sarkaria Commission recommended that if a government loses its majority, it should be given a chance to prove whether it has a majority or not on the floor of the House."

Technically, it should hold the same for Pema as well.

With rogue MLA and former chief minister Kalikho Pul including other rebel legislators returning to the Congress fold for now, there is no immediate threat to the chief minister-designate. However, given the fluid nature of politics in the state, it would require real guts to brim with confidence over longevity of a government.

As this copy was being written, there was no information on the date and time of the swearing-in. Although Governor Roy had fixed Saturday as the floor test day for Tuki, the equation changed after Pema was elected as the Congress Legislature Party leader.

Congress leader and former state minister Bamang Felix said that the legislators braved inclement weather to be in Itanagar to participate in the floor test that was earlier scheduled for Saturday.

"There is monsoon in Arunachal Pradesh and at many places roads are blocked. Some MLAs even had to risk their lives and walk for hours together to reach Itanagar today," the Nyapin MLA said. "Because of them we had 100 percent attendance in the CLP meeting this morning."

When asked if Congress is facing an uncertain future in the state, the Nyapin legislator replied in the negative.

"There are tussles everywhere. It is like a small family issue. Tuki is a large-hearted man and a seasoned politician. He resigned for the larger interest of the state and welfare of the people and the party," Felix told Firstpost from Itanagar.

Welcoming the elevation of Pema as the CLP leader, he said, "Pema Khandu would work for the unification of the party. He would work for the betterment of the state. He would follow the footsteps of his father Dorjee Khandu."

Dorjee Khandu was the chief minister of the state when he passed away on 20 May, 2011 in a helicopter crash near Tawang.

Bolstered by the landmark judgment of the Supreme Court, the Congress leader made it clear that there is no fear from Governor Rajkhowa after he joins back as he is now undergoing treatment at a Guwahati hospital.

What actually holds water is at the end when Felix said, "Pema won't make any blunder."
London: New British foreign minister Boris Johnson vowed to defend the country's sovereignty of Gibraltar, whose future was thrown into question after Britain voted to leave the European Union.

"The people of Gibraltar have repeatedly and overwhelmingly expressed their wish to remain under British sovereignty and we will respect their wishes," Johnson said following a meeting with Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo.

"I reassured him (Picardo) of both our steadfast commitment to Gibraltar, and our intention to fully involve Gibraltar in discussions on our future relationship with the EU."

The tiny rocky outcrop on Spain's southern tip has long been the subject of an acrimonious sovereignty row between London and Madrid, which wants Gibraltar back after it was ceded to Britain in 1713.

Immediately following Britain's vote last month to quit the EU, Spain said the "Spanish flag is much closer to the Rock".

Many of the 33,000 inhabitants of the Rock are now worried that it will be at the mercy of Madrid without the protection of the EU, which has had to intervene in the past to ease rows between the two, particularly over the flashpoint border crossing.

Gibraltar is also concerned about its flaourishing economy, which depends in large part on its access to the EU's single market.

Johnson pledged that the government "will not enter into any process of sovereignty negotiations with which Gibraltar is not content.

"We will continue to take whatever action is necessary to safeguard Gibraltar, its people and its economy including maintaining a well-functioning Gibraltar-Spain Border," he said, in a Foreign Office statement.
Do you remember what China said a few weeks ago, while justifying its opposition to India entering the Nuclear Supply Group (NSG)? It said that there were global rules and norms such as the Nuclear-Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which India did not care to join. It said that if an exception to the rule was made for India, what is the point of even developing norms and regimes?

In other words, while painting itself as a champion of international organisations and their sanctity, Beijing projected India as an irresponsible country and unworthy of NSG membership. Whether India deserved such a comment from China, despite the fact that it is universally recognised to have maintained an impeccable non-proliferation record, while China is widely known to be one of the biggest non-proliferators of nuclear and missile technologies to North Korea and Pakistan is another matter.

But look at the same China now. On 12 July, a tribunal of five judges at The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration issued a unanimous award in Republic of Philippines v. People's Republic of China, a case filed in 2013 by Manila to know its maritime entitlements and status in South China Sea, where China maintains sweeping territorial claims.

The tribunal's 500-page ruling squashes any justification China might have had for harassing ships passing by its "controversial artificial islands". It ruled that China's map showing the vast area as its own territory is illegal and without basis under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which is at the core of modern maritime law and signed by over 160 nations (including China).

The treaty, it may be noted, grants exclusive economic zones (EEZs) to coastal nations extending 200 nautical miles from the shore baseline, giving them sole exploitation rights over all natural resources in that zone.

The tribunal made it clear that while China may have made use of the islands in the South China Sea (it has built seven artificial islands), there was nothing to suggest that China "had historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or their resources". If anything, this is a strong rebuttal to Chinas position and its rhetoric on the South China Sea issue. To be precise, China's territorial claims in South China Sea include the Reed or Recto Bank and the Scarborough Shoal with the Philippines; the Paracel Islands with Vietnam; and portions of the Spratly Islands with the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.

China, which was lecturing India on the sanctity of the NSG, has come down severely on the verdict of the tribunal, set up under the aegis of the UNCLOS (of which China is a member). Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that China's "territorial sovereignty and marine rights" in the seas would not be affected by the ruling. Xinhua, the country's official news agency, described the "ill-founded" judgment as "naturally null and void". The Communist party's mouthpiece newspaper, People's Daily, said, "The Chinese government and the Chinese people firmly oppose (the ruling) and will neither acknowledge it nor accept it."

And what is more, the Chinese response has come with military threats; China has just commissioned a new guided missile destroyer at a naval base on the southern island province of Hainan, which is responsible for the South China Sea.

It may also be noted that China has territorial maritime disputes with Japan over the Daiyutai/Senkaku islands, and the Suyan/Leodo reef with South Korea. In all these cases, China uses its history to claim sovereignty, though in the strict sense of the term, it only decided to claim sovereignty over the disputed territories  whether maritime or land  only in late 1940s. Its arguments have invariably been about the distant past, when some Chinese kingdom or the other covered these territories, even though the then king or the ruler did not exercise effective authority or sovereignty over them.

In certain cases, as with the South China Sea example, its historic claims have been based on the logic that the Chinese were the first to discover the islands, evident from the remnants of Chinese terracotta in them. Going by the same logic, the Americas, both South and North (including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina), should have been parts of either Italy or Spain since these two continents were discovered by Christopher Columbus (Italian by birth, whose journey was sponsored by the Catholic monarchs of Spain).

History is often a confused heap of facts and that is why history's lessons are no more enlightening than the wisdom of those who interpret them. And going by the Chinese interpretations, Tibet became a part of the Chinese empire when the great Mongol Genghis Khan annexed Tibet (most parts of it) in the early 13th century. It is a strange logic, because taken to its logical conclusion, one could argue that China is a part of Mongolia and does not deserve to exist as an independent nation.

And secondly, why are the Chinese not claiming a quarter of Europe, Russia and the whole of West Asia (Middle East) and Central Asia since these also constituted the Mongol empire of Genghis Khan?

The problem with the Chinese version of history is the inability to draw the line. After all, it is also fact that the pre-Mongol history of Tibet was militarily glorious. In the eighth century, the Tibetan empire was expanding at such a pace that the then Chinese emperor had to flee his capital and a Tibetan nominee was put on the Chinese throne! Peace was restored in the year 821 with the conclusion of a treaty, which laid down clearly the boundaries between China and Tibet. It read: "Tibet and China shall abide by the frontiers of which they are now in occupation. All to the East is the country of Great China; and all to the west is, without question, the country of Great Tibet."

That being so, on what basis has China brought Tibet under its sovereignty? This is a logical question for us Indians to ponder over since our northern frontiers remain "disputed". It may be noted that for centuries together, India shared a border with Tibet, not with China.

Even if one were to accept Beijing's "historical claims" argument for a moment, the problem, as Prof Mohan Malik has pointed out succinctly, is that the Chinese empire was not the only empire in pre-modern Asia and the world.

"There were other empires and kingdoms too. Many countries can make equally valid 'historical claims' to lands that are currently not a part of their territory, but under Chinese control (eg, the Gando region in China's Jilin province that belongs to Korea). Before the 20th century, there were no sovereign nation-states in Asia with clear, legally defined boundaries of jurisdiction and control. If China's claims are justified on the basis of history, then so are the historical claims of Vietnamese and Filipinos based on their histories. Students of Asian history, for instance, know that Malay people related to today's Filipinos have a better claim to Taiwan than Beijing does. Taiwan was originally settled by people of Malay-Polynesian descent  ancestors of present-day aboriginal groups  who populated the low-lying coastal plains," writes Prof. Malik.

In fact, if India follows the Chinese logic, then Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia (Srivijaya), Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have no right to exist as independent nations since each one of them at some point of the time was a part of the empire, of either Chandragupta Maurya or Ashoka or a Chola or a Moghul or the British.

In other words, if one accepts the Chinese theory of history to advance territorial and maritime claim, then it will amount to rejection of the history of other countries, particularly India, Vietnam, Philippines, Japan and South Korea. China may extol the virtues of a multipolar world, but in the process it is striving for a unipolar Asia, where, true to its theory of "Middle Kingdom" (China is the only civilised country of the world according to God; others are only peripheral and must pay obeisance to it), China will not allow another pole, whether it is India or Japan, to make the world truly multipolar.
New York: Donald Trump presented running mate Mike Pence to the nation Saturday, hailing the Indiana governor as his "first choice" and "my partner in the campaign." But he left no doubt in a sometimes awkward event that Pence's role will surely be as sidekick to the businessman-turned-reality-star-turned-politician at the top of the ticket.

Glancing at notes, Trump lauded Pence's personal character and conservative credentials. Then he moved on to draw sharp contrasts between the newly formed Republican team and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Yet the announcement lacked much of the stagecraft typically associated with the public unveiling of a running mate, one of the most significant moments under a presidential campaign's control.

The only sign onstage in the Manhattan hotel ballroom bore only Trump's name. The two men appeared together just briefly. And Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, spoke for nearly 30 minutes before calling Pence to the stage.

His far-ranging remarks devoted more time to recapping his primary victories  and he even found time to tout his new hotel in Washington  than introducing the relatively unknown Pence to America's voters.

"All right, back to Mike Pence," Trump said at one point after a long tangent talking about the Republican Party's efforts to overturn rules that limit church leaders' political involvement.

The event  the culmination of a vice presidential rollout that featured mixed signals, second-guessing and a 24-hour delay  was intended to assert that Trump and Pence would stand up to America's enemies while being "the law-and-order candidates" at home.

"What a difference between crooked Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence," Trump said. He added: "He's a solid, solid person."

Pence, standing alone in front of ten American flags, hewed closely to the populist themes that Trump has voiced on the campaign trail, describing himself as "really just a small-town boy." He praised Trump effusively as "a good man," a fighter, a legendary businessman and a patriotic American.

"The American people are tired," Pence said in remarks that included many of the same talking points that until recently he was using in his bid for re-election. "We're tired of being told that this is as good as it gets. We're tired of having politicians in both parties in Washington, D.C., telling us we'll get to those problems tomorrow."

The joint appearance was meant to catapult the party toward a successful and unified Republican National Convention, which kicks off in Cleveland on Monday. Trump conceded that one of the reasons he'd selected Pence was to promote unity within the Republican Party, left deeply fractured by Trump's ascent.

"One of the reasons is party unity, I have to be honest," he said.

There was little hoopla  and no questions, though Trump on Thursday had billed the event as a news conference. In contrast, four years ago, Mitt Romney introduced running mate Paul Ryan on the deck of a Navy battleship, the USS Wisconsin, off the shore of swing state Virginia. With cheering flag-waving crowds and a soaring patriotic soundtrack, the pair faced the nation for the first time flanked by a massive red white and blue banner displaying their new campaign logo.

There were no newly printed banners or logos at the hotel ballroom event, which was set in a state that Trump has little chance of winning in November. The two men, instead of presenting an image of an emboldened, unified front, barely spent any time on stage together, as Trump quickly exited after greeting Pence with a perfunctory handshake and arm pat. He did return for a brief photo-op at the end.

The underwhelming rollout continued when Pence got back to Indiana, where a few hundred people greeted him at a suburban Indianapolis airport hangar bereft of any "Trump-Pence" signs or other obvious trappings of a presidential campaign. He spoke for only a few minutes, telling the crowd that he and his family were headed home for "pizza night."

And that was exactly what Pence's fans at home in Indiana expected.

"Even though the Trump rallies are big productions ... for Mike Pence, this is his style: a little more understated, a little more traditional, a little more what you'd expect from a conservative," said Dana Carroll of suburban Indianapolis.

The lead-up to the low-key Saturday was anything but smooth.

On Thursday, Trump had convened a midnight campaign conference call about his pick, even after he'd had Pence fly to New York to accept his offer.

He then announced the choice on Twitter, though the presentation event was postponed a day after the terror attack in Nice. Through no fault of the campaign, the show ended up on a Saturday morning, competing on TV with two international crises: the aftermath of the France attack and news about an attempted military coup in Turkey.

Brandishing his running mate's job-creating credentials, Trump  who pushed back against reports of indecision by deeming the governor "my first choice"  ticked through a list of statistics he said showed how Pence had pulled Indiana out of economic recession: an unemployment rate that fell to less than 5 percent on his watch, an uptick in the labor force and a decrease in Indiana residents on unemployment insurance.

"This is the primary reason I wanted Mike  other than that he looks very good, other than he's got an incredible family, and incredible wife," Trump said.

Just as Trump was settling on Pence, Republicans gathering in Cleveland essentially quelled the effort to stop him at the convention, all but assuring he'll be the GOP nominee.

"They got crushed," Trump said moments after praising party unity. "And they got crushed immediately, because people want what we're saying to happen."

The Indiana governor is well-regarded by evangelical Christians, particularly after signing a law that critics said would allow businesses to deny service to gay people for religious reasons. But his hard line ideology is sometimes at odds with Trump. The two have had differing views on issues including abortion and trade.

Clinton's team was already painting Pence's conservative social viewpoints as out of step with the mainstream. Her campaign also seized on Trump's chaotic process for selecting and announcing his pick, painting him in a web video as "Always divisive. Not so decisive."
In Shashi Tharoor's essay for the BBC, on why the Indian soldiers who took part in WWI were forgotten, he writes a poignant paragraph that puts things into perspective.

These men were undoubtedly heroes  pitchforked into battle in unfamiliar lands, in harsh and cold climatic conditions they were neither used to nor prepared for, fighting an enemy of whom they had no knowledge, risking their lives every day for little more than pride. Yet they were destined to remain largely unknown once the war was over: neglected by the British, for whom they fought, and ignored by their own country, from which they came. Part of the reason is that they were not fighting for their own country. None of the soldiers was a conscript  soldiering was their profession. They served the very British Empire that was oppressing their own people back home.

The heroism of the Indian soldiers who fought on behalf of the British Empire still remains forgotten  how many of us can recall the chapter from our history textbooks in school? India's struggle for independence was an essential read, but what about our contribution to what was largely a British war effort?

A piece in British Council's magazine Voices, puts the number of volunteers from India, who fought on behalf of the allied forces, at 1.5 million (Muslim, Sikh, Hindu men from Punjab, UP, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Bihar). These men were sent to places as far away as East Africa, Egypt, Gallipoli and Mesopotamia. And of these 1.5 million men, around 50,000 died, 65,000 were wounded and 10,000 were reported missing. Our efforts to help out the Empire weren't limited to troops alone: India also contributed in the form of supplying animals, jute and a large loan that amounts to 2 billion today.

All that has been commemorated in the form of a memorial  the India Gate in New Delhi.

A new website, Empire, Faith & War: The Sikhs and World War One (EFW), plans to take this forward. The website, which is an endeavour by the UK Punjab Heritage Association (UKPHA), aims to chronicle, map and record the contribution of the Sikh community that made up nearly 20 percent of India's armed forces at the outbreak of WWI. The EFW has been funded by a grant of 448,500 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF).

Harbaksh Grewal, the head of PR and Comms, spoke about how the idea for EFW came about. "As far back as 2011, we were conscious that the centenary of World War I was approaching. As the world would be turning its attention to this monumental event in global history, we thought it only appropriate to commemorate the Sikh contribution."

The website, done up in muted tones, functions as a database that will contain "previously untold accounts of Sikh soldiers"  who they fought alongside, the families they left behind and their experience in the war. This information is displayed on an interactive 'soldier map' where records will point to a soldier's birthplace, rather than where they fought, so that people who visit the site can also discover undivulged connections to their heritage.

According to Grewal, nearly 8,000 records of Sikh soldiers killed in action, information of which has been taken from the Commonwealth War Graves Commissions (CWGC), is pinned on the map. Click on a location, and a name pops up, with place of birth, next of kin, the rank he served with the service number and regiment appears.

Grewal, too, ruminates on why the role of the Indian soldiers in WWI has largely been forgotten. He attributes it to a "post-colonial mindset in India and Pakistan" and the "consequent nationalistic narratives" that have led to this situation. But he does admit that there has been a shift and a "reawakening of awareness" of their role and of India's contribution to both the world wars.

"In the UK and elsewhere, we have also seen a collective amnesia, whereby the history books and school curriculum have failed to pay due credit to India's forgotten army. They have remained mere footnotes in wartime histories, and indeed in the story of Britain and the saving of Europe, but we are doing our part to help reawaken the public and those in authority to their invaluable role," he said.

Around 200 families have taken part in this project that calls out to people to join them as 'citizen historians' to create the Sikh people's history of the war. But it's not just Sikh history that EFW looks to record. If you are not a Sikh and have an ancestor who fought for WWI and fought alongside the Sikhs, you can create a new record for them on the site.

Sikhs, who played a disproportionately large role for a small community, have a wartime connection. It's not surprising then that once famously Lord Curzon remarked in 1899 after The Battle of Saragarhi

The name of your race has become almost synonymous in the English language with traditions of desperate courage and unflinching loyalty

Shrabani Basu, who authored For King and Another Country, wrote in The Telegraph that the Sikhs have been a major player in Britain's colonial military history, fighting in the muddy trenches in France and in the harsh deserts of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

They returned to the frontline in World War II, taking part in the 1940 campaign and the evacuation from Dunkirk. They fought and died in Italy at Cassino, Florence, Forli, Ravenna and Sangro river, and took part in the liberation of Greece. They went to the Western Desert, the Middle East, Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the jungles of Burma they fought the Japanese and collected five Victoria Crosses.

Naturally, EFW has preserved a lot of personal stories. Peruse the website and you'll find a series of short films, illustrated talks and uncovered archives of WWI. But the section about 'Soldier stories' is the one that reads more interesting than history textbooks back when we were in school. Here, pictures awash in black, white, orange, sepia and green tints show the soldiers in their proud stance  there's Lal Singh, Bhagwan Singh, Natha Singh and Gurmukh Singh, among others. It's easy to get lost in the site for hours, which then compels you to pick up a book on India's contribution to World War history  it isn't too bad a deal. It's time we pursued the Indian Armys path in the war.
Washington: A former US police officer has been charged with the murder of an unarmed African-American man, officials said.

James Burns turned himself in to the Fulton county jail in US's Georgia state on Saturday, CNN reported.

Burns responded to a call from an off-duty officer of suspicious activity at an apartment complex on 22 June. Burns and two other officers saw Devaris Caine Rogers attempt to leave in a vehicle, said a statement from the district attorney's office.

Burns, who is white, blocked Rogers' path and fired one shot into the passenger side of his vehicle, striking Rogers in the head and killing him, CNN reported, citing the statement. "At the time of the shooting, Burns was not provided with any facts describing Rogers as a threat to the officer or the public. Neither was Rogers identified as the man the off-duty officer had previously reported," the statement said.

Rogers had not tried to strike the officer with the vehicle, the district attorney's office said.

Burns was charged with felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and two counts of violation of oath by a police officer.

Burns' lawyer, Drew Findling, told Atlanta-based WSB News on Saturday that he would aggressively investigate the case. "We recognise this is a tragedy," Findling said, adding, "That being said, I defend officer Burns and I think that warrant was issued prematurely."

Tensions prevailed across the US earlier this month over the police shooting of two African-American men in Louisiana and Minnesota.

The situation went out of control when people took to the streets in Dallas to protest the killings, and a sniper attack killed five policemen. The policemen were killed by a lone gunmen, Micah Johnson, as he was upset about the fatal police shootings of the two African-American men.
Istanbul: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday reiterated a call for his US counterpart Barack Obama to hand over the leader of an opposition movement accused of being behind the coup attempt in Turkey.

"Please meet our request if we are strategic partners," Xinhua news agency quoted Erdogan as saying in remarks delivered in Istanbul.

The Turkish leader has blamed the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Islamic scholar living in the US state of Pennsylvania, for the unsuccessful coup that started on Friday night.

"I asked you previously either to deport him or surrender him to Turkey," Erdogan said, referring to Obama. "I told you that he is considering the coup d'etat, but you didn't listen."

The Turkish leader's audience chanted, demanding "the execution of Fethullah".

Ankara has been accusing the Gulen Movement of running a parallel state and trying to topple the Turkish government.

As many as 2,839 Turkish troops are now detained over suspected involvement in the failed coup, but Erdogan stated that "The Turkish army does not belong to the parallel structure".

The president urged his audience to shun schools run by the Gulen Movement for their children.

Erdogan's extradition request is expected to further heighten tensions between Ankara and Washington, as the NATO allies have long been in dispute over the treatment of Kurds in Syria.
When the global influential preachers like Zakir Naik are still hell-bent on the rationalisation of suicide bombing  the gravest terror tool today  declaring it permissible as a war tactic, boldly quoting their theological ideologues, there is no point in our run-of-the-mill condemnation of the terror-playing havoc across the globe.

For the Indian Muslims anchored in the progressive values, it was deplorable to see Zakir Naik, in his press conference in Mumbai through Skype from Saudi Arabia, justifying the suicide bombing as a tactic for war. Blatantly enough, he made an attempt to justify his statement by making a reference to the Second World War, stating that suicide bombing was used as a tactic during Second World War.

Actually, his recent press conference was organised to refuse the charges against him that his sermons had inspired terror activities, including the Dhaka attack. Among his provocative statements that have serious repercussions, given the growing radical Islamist onslaughts in the world, is the following:

Suicide bombings are permitted if a country is at war and is directed by a commander."

When he was particularly asked to make clarifications on his notorious speeches justifying suicide bombings, he averred: "I challenge you to show me any unedited answer of mine where I have not condemned suicide bombing of the kind that is happening." Clearly, he does not categorically condemn all kinds of suicide bombing, but only the suicide bombing of the kind that is happening. What if an extremist jihadist indulges in other kinds of the suicide bombings that Naik justifies?

He did say that he considered such attacks as haraam (religiously forbidden) in Islam. But he also added: however, many scholars permit it as a war tactic."

Who are, then, those many scholars who have permitted the suicide bombing as war tactic? Naik has honestly named a few of them like Shaikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz, a Saudi Arabian Islamic scholar and a leading proponent of the Salafi sect. Notably, Ibn Baz has served as Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia from 1993 until his death in 1999.

Naik also cited another Salafist Shaikh Abdul-Muhsin al-Abbaad who wrote a complete paper entitled, With Which Religion and Intellect are Suicide Bombings and Destruction Considered Jihaad?

The top-most contemporary Salafist cleric and the ideological icon of the Ikhwan al-Muslimin (The Muslim Brotherhood) whose fatwas are authoritative for the global Salafi-Wahhabi clergy, is the Qatar-based Islamist jurist Shaikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi. He has also justified the suicide bombing as a defensive tactic in his fatwa issued in the 1990s. Much like Zakir Naik, Shaikh Qaradawi has also repeatedly said that he is not the only cleric to justify suicide bombings and that his fatwa was tailored specifically for helpless Palestinians in their fight against the Israeli occupation.

It would be relevant here to reproduce what the world-renowned moderate Islamic scholar of Turkish origin, Fethullah Gulen, has stated in retort to the theological justification of suicide booming by Shaikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi. Gulen writes:

Apparently, Qaradawi has said that this is legitimate in Islam since they (Palestinians) have no other weapons to use. I was deeply saddened when I heard this statement by Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b.1926) because he, like Ratib al-Nabulsi (b.1938), said Ramadan al-Buti (d.2013) and Hassan al-Turabi (b.1932) are well-known people in the Muslim world  they are not average people, they are well-known. When they speak, it is as if they speak on behalf of Islam and as a result, Islam is negatively impacted by this statement. How can he legitimise such an act? On what Islamic rule or principle does he base this opinion? That does not mean I am suggesting that we remain indifferent to what is happening there  I die with every person I see dying in those lands. But this form of action is not in accordance with the pleasure of God or with reason."

The Pakistani Sufi Islamic scholar Dr Muhammad Tahir ul Qadri wrote a 512-page voluminous book, Fatwa on Terrorism and Suicide bombing in 2010 in the wake of 9/11 terror attacks. He delegitimised every form of terror activity and suicide bombing in unequivocal and categorical terms. He argued: Islam never allowed rebellion against the regimes, even if they were unjust or oppressive. Takfiri terrorists, who declare fellow Muslims of being apostates, have existed in every era in Islamic history and will continue to exist until the end times...Some terrorists in fact appear so devout that Hadith warns they would be difficult to target, because their pious works discourage any offensive against them. The violent jihadists' mix of piety and attractive, grievance-based interpretations of political events, especially those that appear to be against the Muslim world, serves as both a powerful recruiting tool and a strong self-defensive measure."

While the authoritative Islamic scholars of the Indian subcontinent have also endorsed the above consistent stance against all kinds of suicide bombings and terror attacks, the countrys Muslims are distressed at the misleading stand of Zakir Naik on suicide bombing adding a qualifier. Buttressing his viewpoint on suicide bombing, Naik has referred to the Salafist-Saudi ideologues who he considers as only the authentic Islamic scholars and authorities in religion. Thus, he is clearly trying to install the exclusivist religious narrative of the Salafi theologians such as Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn Abdul Wahhab, Shaikh Ibn Baaz and the ilk, in place of the inclusivist, multicultural and pluralistic Indian Islam. At a time when several Muslim countries like Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Cyprus, Malaysia and Indonesia have banned the books and videos of all these clerics, fearing the influence of their takfirist contents on the young and gullible youth, how come they are still being propagated on a secular soil like India?

A violent jihadist does not spare a moment to rethink his decision before engaging in wanton and virulent killings of innocent lives, especially when inspired by an intolerant theology and emboldened by any religious justification of his attack.

The latest terror unleashed in France and Turkey is a reminder for us to call a spade a spade. Increasing acts of terror in the world are not just a law and order problem. There is a crystal-clear ideological battle that has deep roots in an extremist theology. As long as the extremist preachers continue to cherry-pick and quote the medieval jurisprudential rulings which are canonised in the so-called Islamic State, we should not hope for any tremendous upheaval breaking the cycle of brainless violence.

The author is a scholar of Comparative Religion, Classical Arabic and Islamic sciences, cultural analyst and researcher in Media and Communication Studies. Contact him at grdehlavi@gmail.com
Thousands took to the streets of Turkey in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after authorities crushed a military coup that claimed at least 265 lives.

After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan triumphantly addressed flag-waving supporters in Istanbul following Friday's chaos in the strategic Nato member of 80 million people.

The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who is Erdogan's arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.

Turks woke up on Saturday to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.

"The situation is completely under control," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkey's top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.

Describing the attempted coup as a "black stain" on Turkey's democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.

General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters has been killed. Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters' hopes.

During a night where power hung in the balance, supporters of Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders' orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime.

On Saturday, thousands of jubilant supporters again mobilised in response to Erdogan's call to fill Turkey's squares, massing in Taksim in central Istanbul, the president's home district of Kisikli, Ankara's Kizilay Square and in the coastal city of Izmir, AFP correspondents said.

Friday's putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul.

Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets.

Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd.

Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.
Turkey's pivotal roles as an ally in the US-led war against the Islamic State group and a guarantor of refugee agreements are likely to remain intact for now after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerged triumphant followingr a failed coup attempt.

However, looming tension over Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Islamic cleric, blamed by Erdogan for the rebellion, could strain ties between Turkey and the United States. For one, it has led to a back-and-forth between the leaders of the two countries.

Turkey has bluntly demanded the extradition of a US-based cleric he accused of orchestrating the violence; another senior official went a step ahead and directly blamed the United States, while the US says it would assess any Turkish extradition request.

After strongly supporting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when it seemed his government might topple and then opening the door to sending home the cleric, a stung Oba administration fired back at its Nato ally.

"Public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," US Secretary of State John Kerry told his Turkish counterpart, according to the State Department's readout of their telephone call.

The US also advised its Nato ally to keep collateral damage at the minimum and respect due process as it clamps down against those it believes are plotting against the democratically elected government.

Meanwhile, Turkey hit back saying the US should cooperate with extradition request just as Turkey has done in the past. In a televised speech Saturday, Erdogan said Turkey had never rejected a US extradition request for "terrorists." Addressing Washington, he requested the handover of Gulen and said, "If we are strategic partners, then you should bring about our request."

Although he didn't outline any threat, Erdogan's emphasis on US-Turkish counter-terrorism cooperation raised the prospect of a prolonged closure of the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey if he didn't get his way. The Pentagon said it was trying to get permission to resume air operations from the base, while adjusting mission operations in the meantime.

Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue, has denied involvement in the unrest.

In an already politically charged environment, an expected purge of military factions responsible for the attempted putsch, could leave the armed forces in turmoil and overstretched. While trying to rebuild with loyalists, the military must continue to confront autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels in Turkey and control its turbulent border with war-torn Syria.

Turkey is a strategic US ally at the crossroads of the Asian and European continents and abuts Mideast conflict zones. It is a majority-Muslim country in Nato and a key partner in efforts to solve international challenges, including terrorism and mass migration, as well as being an important interlocutor with regional powers such as Iran and Russia.

US, European and other world leaders have condemned the assault on Erdogan's democratically elected government, while watching for further fallout from the uprising on Turkey, which was seen as a generally stable partner in a neighborhood plagued by upheaval.

The United States is monitoring the situation closely, in part because it stages air strikes from Turkey's Incirlik air base against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq. The Turkish government closed the airspace around Incirlik for several hours on Saturday following the coup attempt, although there was no indication of a long-term negative effect on US operations.

The uprising was launched Friday night with military jets overhead, tanks and soldiers in the streets and firepower that left at least 161 dead and 1,440 wounded, according to the government. It appears to have been led by air force, military police and armored units, but not the senior commanders of the military, who closed ranks behind Erdogan and put down the putsch early Saturday. Even opposition political parties condemned the attempt to oust the government.

Nearly 3,000 accused plotters already have been detained and new purges in the military are expected to remove any sympathizers among soldiers and officers. This continued internal turmoil could be a challenge for the armed forces as they battle Kurdish rebels and support the campaign against the Islamic State group.

On Saturday, Turkey's state-run news agency said the commander of the country's second army was arrested in connection with the coup. The second army is based in eastern Turkey to counter threats from Syria, Iran and Iraq.

"A new wave of purges in military will likely weaken overstretched security services... even if basic policies will remain same," said Howard Eissenstat, associate professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

Erdogan, an often combative figure, has been accused of increasingly autocratic conduct even though his government was democratically elected and he commands deep support among Turkey's pious Muslim class. The military has long seen itself as the guarantor of secular government in Turkey, and many in its ranks have bristled at both his tightening grip on power and the growing Islamic influence under Erdogan. The president had jailed or sidelined many of his military adversaries, but clearly others remained to launch the failed coup.

In the international arena, Erdogan recently sought to patch up disputes with Israel and Russia, and to lend stronger support to US-led efforts against the Islamic State group after being accused of tolerating the flow of foreign extremists and weapons from Turkey into Syria. He also was key to an agreement with the European Union that provides for the safe, regulated passage of Syrian civilians between Turkey and Europe, which has received a massive influx of refugees.

While that pragmatic approach is likely to continue as Erdogan shores up international support after the coup attempt, the president has often lashed at out his Western partners, questioning their commitment to democratic values and alleging that Kurdish militants enjoy refuge in some European countries.

The United States, emphasizing the importance of its alliance with Turkey's current leadership, expressed support for the democratically elected government as the violence unfolded. US Secretary of State John Kerry was quick to speak with Turkey's foreign minister. That response contrasted with US comments after the Egyptian military ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi following protests against him in 2013  at that time, Kerry said the military was restoring democracy in Egypt.

According to a report in AFP, while supporting the Erdogan's return, another key Nato ally, Canada has also issued a cautious statement which may not go down well with Turkey. Canadian Foreign Minister Stephane Dion pressed Turkey to handle the aftermath of a coup attempt

according to "fundamental principles of democracy." He sait it was "important to avoid collect punishment" against those who organized the aborted coup that sought to seize power from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"We must be discerning to ensure that those on trial have the chance to prove innocence or express their point of view according to the fundamental rules of justice we must aim to respect."

Though he praised Erdogan's swift return to control, the Canadian minister said "the use of military force was completely unacceptable."

Although many Turks are disgruntled over Erdogan's moves against civil liberties such as freedom of the press, and are fearful in the wake of a deadly IS attack on Istanbul's Ataturk Airport last month, the country appeared to reject the military rebellion. In fact, if anything, rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity.

Turkey has endured three military coups between 1960 and 1980.

Yet Turkey could be poised for a fresh bout of polarization under Erdogan, who vowed that the coup plotters would pay a heavy price. Domestic tension and suspicion, in turn, could undermine the consistency or effectiveness of Turkey's international commitments and challenges, particularly when the military is involved.

"Bottom line is the relationship between the government and the military, no matter how loyal the generals may claim to be in future, is broken for good," Chris Kilford, a former Canadian military attache in Turkey and an expert on the Turkish military, wrote in an email to the AP.

With inputs from agencies
One of the major advantages that militants have is their fallback on gaining harbour in other countries. As more nations realise that this offer of refuge finally turns rabid and causes them more acute and deadly problems in the long run, they may be more prepared to hand over terrorists to countries that have accused them of being behind violent plots.

The United States, now, faces an acid test. If it does not return Gulen to Ankara seeing as how all extradition requests by Washington have been conceded by Turkey, it could be losing its strategic ally. Despite all its civil rights protections, the US will consider its foreign policy priorities very seriously indeed and Secretary of State John Kerry has already hinted that if Turkey follows the right procedures, extradition would be on the cards. The US is a tough nation to pull someone out from if they are legally on their soil but the stakes are now getting stiff and Obama cannot blink.

For President Obama, it would be tough not to give up a man who is suspected of having masterminded a coup against a democratically-elected government and a Nato ally. This is not some Saturday night despot being overthrown, this is Americas east-west buddy. And the coup was blocked by civilians who stood in front of guns and tanks and said, no. What greater custodians of democratic principles?

Can President of Turkey Erdogan prove that his erstwhile ally is the mastermind? Merely loathing Gulen is not sufficient and evidence of conspiracy will have to be found.

Off the books, the US will probably help Erdogan formulate the appeal and request and guide him on how to proceed so that the legal parameters are maintained. Although there will be a certain concern about the silent uproar in over three million Gulen followers and their very strong and highly-placed global network the US will have to bite that bullet.

If they do not accede to the demand made (and it is not a request), they will establish a very strong base for future asylum seekers and make a mockery of being the custodians of the free world. It will also be a free pass to other nations to open their doors and invite in their enemys enemies.

If the US does allow the Turks to take him home and can absorb the repercussions, it might start a new chapter in anti-terror activity. If there is no place to hide and nations, sick and tired of being targeted, begin to place economic sanctions on those who give such refuge and the will to do something manifests itself we might see a slowing down in terror attacks.

Chritpher Dobson and Ronald Payne wrote a book called Fightback as far back as 1979 on the need to see extradition as a weapon. It didnt fly during those limited Red Army and IRA and Baader Meinhoff days because terror was still seen as a fringe activity and particular to specific countries.

Today, Fightback would mean a clear move from extraction by the powerful over less powerful (bin Laden assault, removal of Noriega) to extradition by international fiat. As things stand, extradition treaties are softened by cumbersome procedures and the fear that a return might endanger the life of the individual.

A simple add-on step would call for a UN committee with assistance from the Interpol or one under the International Court comprising a certain number of nations on a rotational basis. If a host nation refused the request it would be sent to the committee and a simple majority vote would suffice.

This would protect the innocent while locking the door on those seeking shelter.
Alexandroupoli (Greece): Eight Turkish military officers who fled to Greece by helicopter after a failed coup were on Sunday charged by a prosecutor with illegal entry and violating Greek airspace, their lawyer said.

The men, who have sought asylum in Greece, arrived by military helicopter yesterday after sending a distress signal to authorities at the airport in the northern city of Alexandroupolis.

They were prosecuted for illegal entry into Greece, their lawyer, Ilia Marinaki said, adding that they will appear in court on Monday.

She added that they remained under arrest and had not made contact with their families.

The asylum seekers insist they took no part in the putsch and fled to Greece to save their lives "when policemen started shooting against them".

Marinaki added that the soldiers -- all married and in their forties -- feared for the safety of themselves and their families.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara had asked Athens to send the officers, including two majors, back following Friday night's challenge to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rule by discontented soldiers in which more than 250 people died.

Erdogan spoke late on Saturday over the phone with the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and thanked him for his stance during the failed uprising, according to Greek government sources.

Tsipras had on early Sunday expressed his "support for the democratically elected" Turkish government.

According to Athens News Agency, the Greek Prime Minister told Erdogan that the procedure for the Turkish asylum seekers will be swift but in line with international law and human rights treaties.

Greek government sources estimate that the procedure will take up to two weeks.

Early on Sunday, the Blackhawk helicopter the asylum seekers had used was flown back to Turkey.
Petropavlivka (Ukraine): Dozens of villagers carried flowers and lit candles on Sunday at the site where flight MH17 crashed two years ago, killing all 298 people on board.

About 60 people joined the vigil on the small square in the village of Petropavlivka, in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, where some of the remains and personal belongings of passengers on the Malaysia Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur fell to the ground in 2014.

Some youngsters from the village  still controlled by pro-Russian separatists fighting pro-Western government forces  also carried paper planes in memory of children killed in the downing of the plane.

"Some of the relatives of people who were killed phoned us and asked us to find things that were valuable for them, for example, the toys that belonged to children aboard," village council head Natalia Voloshina told AFP.

Local residents continue to find small fragments of the jet's wreckage in the nearby forests, she said. Some of the small pieces of wreckage that have not yet been handed over to Dutch investigators were stacked outside Voloshina's office to mark the anniversary.

The majority of the dead were Dutch citizens and many relatives are planning legal action against the airline and others they blame for the downing of MH17, including separatists and their backers.

In October, an international inquiry concluded that the Boeing 777 was shot down by a Russian-made BUK surface-to-air missile fired from a zone held by pro-Russian separatists.

But the investigation stopped short of saying who was responsible for the jet downing, and initial findings of a Dutch criminal inquiry into who shot down the plane are expected to be presented in early autumn.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Sunday vowed that "the perpetrators of this tragedy must be punished". "Jointly with our partners, we are doing everything necessary to bring those guilty to justice," Poroshenko said in a statement on his website.

The separatist authorities deny responsibility, saying that Ukrainian forces were to blame for the attack. The European Union in early July formally extended damaging economic sanctions against Russia by six months due to lack of progress in resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
2000 - 2022   24 .-   .       focus-news.net,                 () .                  24 .                 24      .       .       24 .
This article has been developed and expanded from an earlier version prepared for AOL DailyFinance in 2013.

Great news! Your kid is ready to go off to college, and you just heard back that she's been accepted to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Kiplinger's Magazine rates UNC Chapel Hill the No. 1 best value in public colleges, and no wonder: In-state tuition and fees there come to less than $8,600.

Worse news! You don't live in North Carolina. You live somewhere else. And as a result, sending Little Miss off to UNC is likely to cost you more than $33,600 -- four times the price for an in-state student.

The 75% dilemma

Does this sound familiar? It should. Thousands of parents face this dilemma every year. Live on the right side of the state line, and your kids get a world-class education at a "name" public university for a bargain price.

Live on the wrong side of the border, though, and you're faced with a choice: Pay a cheap in-state rate to send your kids to the local Podunk State U, or pay through the nose to send them to their public or private dream school. After all, when you factor in the higher cost of out-of-state tuition surcharges, an out-of-state public university can easily cost as much as an in-state private school -- or more.

But could it be possible to avoid paying the higher cost of out-of-state education? Is there any way to sneak into your out-of-state dream school, but pay the in-state price?

Six ways to save 75%

In fact, there are several ways to avoid the full out-of-state "penalty." Not all of these strategies will work for all people, all the time, in all situations. But when you're talking about the chance to cut your tuition cost by 75%, it's probably worth running down your options.

1. Take advantage of academic common markets

Across the country, four groups of states have banded together into what they call "academic common markets," or ACMs. Within each ACM, students from member states may be entitled to discounted tuition rates -- up to and including full in-state tuition benefits -- when attending schools outside their home state, but within the ACM. Here are the big four:

New England Board of Higher Education's (NEBHE) Tuition Break covers 82 public colleges and universities in the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Discounts range from as little as 25% to as much as 85% off the cost of out-of-state tuition.

The Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB) Academic Common Market offers an even better deal to residents of Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. Instead of a tuition break covering some of the difference between in-state tuition and out-of-state, students across the SREB receive the in-state rates.

Both NEBHE and SREB are degree-specific and available only to out-of-state students seeking a degree in a field not offered at any public institution in their home state. To find a more flexible program, you need to go west (young man):

Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC): Here, participating public institutions in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wisconsin have agreed to charge out-of-state students from participating states no more than 150% of in-state tuition rates -- and without the "no equivalent degree offered in-state" restriction. Private schools offer discounts of 10%.

The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE)likewise caps rates for out-of-state students at no more than 150% of the in-state rate. WICHE covers Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

And did you notice that residents of North Dakota get their choice of two academic common markets? Lucky ducks -- they get out-of-state tuition reduction in almost half the states in the Union.

2. "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania"

An analogous program, dubbed the "friendly neighbor policy," may be available from states that are willing to bend the rules a little. Sometimes, a state will grant in-state tuition rates to a student who lives near its border but in a neighboring state. But we need to emphasize that this is a "sometimes" option. The friendly neighbor policy is less official and more variable than an academic common market.

3. Neighbors with benefits

You should also looks into whether your state has negotiated a specific deal for in-state tuition reciprocity with a neighboring state. Such deals take place outside any academic common market, and they're not at all common. That said, Ohio and Minnesota, for example, are fond of negotiating these types of agreements. Colorado and New Mexico also have one between them.

Washington, D.C.'s D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant (DCTAG) operates in one direction only, offering D.C. resident students as much as $10,000 in annual tuition assistance to attend schools outside the District.

4. Doesn't everyone "move" to college?

Is your dream school's home state in the "wrong" market? Is it not feeling particularly friendly?

Then it may be time to get creative. Just because you move to a new state to attend college doesn't make you an in-state resident. To the contrary, moving to a state to attend college may in fact disqualify you for in-state status. The key is to move into the state before applying to the college, establish ties to the state, and only then apply.

As a general rule, you'll want to make the move at least one full year before the school year begins. You'll also want to begin assembling documentary proof of your ties to the new state immediately -- so make sure to pay your taxes, register to vote, and get a new driver's license in your new state as well.

5. Emancipate yourself from college debt

Too late to make the move before school starts? There's still another option. If a student declares financial independence from his or her parents -- and can prove it by, for example, showing he or she has sufficient funds (or access to sufficient loans) to pay for tuition and room and board -- then it may be possible to become an in-state resident even after starting school.

Again, documentary proof is key here, so taxes, voter registration, driver's license -- make sure to tick all the boxes. And, of course, parents must not be claiming the "independent" student as a dependent on their tax returns.

6. You want cheap tuition? Uncle Sam wants you!

Finally, here's a sixth option: Join the Army (or Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps). Members of the U.S. military can essentially pick a state for their domicile, and if that state just happens to be the one with the best in-state tuition rate, well, what a happy coincidence!

The ultimate "your mileage may vary" caveat

Does it seem that the strategies above would make it all too easy for your out-of-state student to pay in-state tuition? If so, beware: They won't. By restricting in-state tuition rates to in-state students, state schools earn millions of extra dollars per year off of out-of-state kids. That's money that can pay professors' salaries, fund the construction of luxurious campus amenities, and lower tuition for state residents. Schools won't give up that money easily.

Before planning to take any of these six routes to in-state tuition, get ready to argue your case, and be sure to do further research into any caveats, provisos, and quirks that your dream school's home state may insist on. This quick summary is merely the starting point for your journey.



But at least it's a start.
China's submarine fleet is bigger than America's.

That's according to U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces. What's more, according to Forbes, at the rate China is building new subs -- and at the rate the U.S. Navy is retiring submarines -- China could have "twice the number of submarines we have in just over a decade."

Bigger versus better

There are important caveats to that statement. As Politifact pointed out in a column in May, Forbes' estimate of the U.S. submarine fleet doesn't appear to include fleet ballistic missile submarines in its count, focusing instead on attack submarines. It also doesn't address qualitative differences between the U.S. submarine fleet (comprising modern, nuclear powered boats) and that of China (which includes some obsolete designs, and is heavily dependent on shorter-range diesel-electric subs).

That's a key differentiator, the wide gap in quality between the two sub fleets -- and it's one that the U.S. Navy wants to make even wider through...

Better subs for a smaller Navy

In a little-noticed announcement contained in the Pentagon's daily digest of contracts last week, the Navy awarded General Dynamics (GD 0.94%) $116.2 million for work on Virginia-class fast attack submarines. Part of the award will go to installing "Virginia Payload Modules" in new Block V Virginia-class submarines. Essentially, this involves stretching the submarine's design to accommodate the addition of cruise missile tubes amidships -- increasing each submarines missile capacity from 12 to 40 missiles.

An even more interesting development, though, is that part of General Dynamics' award will pay for "South Dakota Insertion" (SDI) prototype materials to be installed in the new USS South Dakota (SSN 790), currently under construction by General Dynamics in cooperation with Huntington Ingalls (HII 0.95%).

"Acoustic superiority"

While the Pentagon doesn't say so outright, the SDI package that it's hiring General Dynamics to develop refers to a long-standing program dubbed "acoustic superiority." This program aims to give U.S. submarines an edge in the eternal game of hide and seek with hostile submarines and surface vessels on the high seas.

Details on SDI aren't exactly easy to come by, but the acoustic superiority the Navy seeks -- and that General Dynamics will try to provide -- appears to involve both offensive and defensive elements. Offensively, the SDI prototype will feature a large vertical sonar array -- bigger "ears" for hearing enemy boats -- and may incorporate such emerging technologies as laser or LED detectors. Defensively, General Dynamics will incorporate special sound-absorbing coatings on the hull, and improvements to dampen the noise of the subs' machinery within the boat.

What it means to investors

If all goes as planned, Rear Adm. Charles Richard, director of undersea warfare for the Navy, says the SDI will deliver "very dramatic" improvements in the Navy's "ability to compete in our acoustic spectrum." In the best case, such improvements could permit future iterations of U.S. Virginia-class nuclear submarines to operate undetected even in heavily patrolled waters off hostile coasts.

Such improvements could be huge force multipliers for an increasingly outnumbered U.S. submarine fleet. If they work as planned, they would certainly be incorporated into the new Ohio Replacement class of nuke boats currently under development at General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls, and into future versions of the Virginia-class sub as well. There's also a real possibility that if the tech can be added into existing boats, the current fleet of submarines would also be retrofitted to upgrade their acoustic superiority.

How much additional revenue this would mean for General Dynamics is hard to say. Already, though, we know that the Navy has:

Invested $881 million in technology "insertion" programs for the Virginia-class boats since awarding an original contract back in October 2011.

Supplemented that with $42.5 million in additional funding in July of last year.

Now added a further $116.2 million in funding for the latest round of missile payload and acoustic superiority upgrades.

Tally that up, and General Dynamics has $1.04 billion in the bag from these contracts already -- a likely $94.5 million profit, or $0.31 per share, if we assume that these contracts will achieve the same 9.1% operating margin currently earned by the company's Marine Systems division. And there's more where that came from, because two things are certain:

These numbers are growing -- and these upgrades are ongoing.
This could potentially be a groundbreaking year for the marijuana industry.

In November, residents in up to a dozen states could be voting on whether or not to legalize recreational or medical marijuana. This comes after Pennsylvania and Ohio passed laws legalizing medical marijuana in their legislatures this spring. As it stands now, half of the country has legalized the use of medical marijuana, and four states (plus Washington, D.C.) allow for the sale of recreational marijuana to adults ages 21 and up.

Arguably just as exciting is the possibility that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency could reclassify medical marijuana in a matter of weeks. The Food and Drug Administration has already submitted its opinion to the DEA, with the DEA now conducting its own investigation into the safety of medical marijuana. If the agency were to reclassify medical marijuana as anything other than schedule 1, which means an illicit drug, medical marijuana could be prescribed by physicians, and insurers may even begin covering the substance.

But that isn't all. The good news just keeps streaming in for the cannabis industry.

Cut Medicare's expenditures with... medical marijuana?

Last week, Ashley Bradford and David Bradford, both of the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, published findings that examined a possible correlation between medical marijuana prescription use in legal states between 2010 and 2013 and Medicare prescription use under Part D over the same timeframe. The authors' work can be found in the online journal Health Affairs.

What the study authors found was a correlation between medical marijuana prescription use and lower prescription drug use under Medicare for ailments commonly treated by medical marijuana in states where medical marijuana is legal. For instance, medical marijuana is often prescribed to treat anxiety, depression, nausea, seizures, sleep disorders, and spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis. In states where medical marijuana is legal, the authors found a marked reduction in Part D expenses for FDA-approved drugs to treat these ailments. Prescription drug use under Medicare Part D for ailments that medical marijuana isn't used for did not see a drop in these same medical marijuana-legal states.

What's more telling is the amount of money the authors calculated that medical marijuana saved Medicare Part D in 2013. Per their estimates, it was about $165 million. According to the authors' extrapolated estimates, they believe a nationwide legalization of medical marijuana would result in about $470 million saved annually by Part D.

One final positive is that no marijuana overdoses have led to any deaths. The same can't be said for opioids, which are commonly prescribed as painkillers. Opioid overdoes, which include heroin, killed more than 28,000 people in 2014, and at least half of all of these deaths involved a prescription opioid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thus, it's possible that if cannabis were incorporated into the care regimen for seniors, or all patients for that matter, it could reduce the costs for Medicare and Medicaid, as well as prevent unnecessary opioid-related overdose deaths.

Hold your horses

But before you get too excited that medical marijuana will save Medicare and Medicaid, keep a few things in mind.

First, saving money is great for Medicare Part D, but we're talking about $470 million in savings on an estimated $88 billion in drug spending for 2016, per the Kaiser Family Foundation. Don't get me wrong, saving money would be a good thing for the Medicare program, with the Hospital Insurance Trust expected to deplete its spare cash reserves by 2028. But we're really only talking about one-half of one percent based on 2016's spending estimates. With prescription drug costs seemingly rising by a mid-to-upper single-digit percentage each year, medical marijuana isn't going to be Medicare's white knight.

Secondly, we have no clue what the DEA is going to do with marijuana when it makes its ruling in the coming weeks. The DEA could decide to do nothing and leave it as an illicit schedule 1 substance. It could also de-schedule the drug completely, putting it on par with tobacco and alcohol, which seems like a longshot.

More reasonably, the DEA could reschedule medical cannabis as a schedule 2, 3, 4, or 5 drug, implying that a medical benefit exists, but suggesting that addiction to the substance exists, too. Labeling cannabis as a schedule 2 drug could prove to be a nightmare for the industry, with regulatory costs soaring. Schedule 2 means the FDA coming in and controlling package labeling, ensuring that manufacturing standards remain consistent, and potentially requiring medical marijuana companies to run clinical studies to support their claims that cannabis treats certain ailments. A rescheduling may be a victory in name only for the cannabis industry.

Finally, we still have federal restrictions on the cannabis industry, which are making life tough, if not impossible, for investors trying to take advantage of marijuana's growth. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill don't look anywhere near ready to change their tune on marijuana, which means inherent disadvantages for businesses involved in the cannabis industry will continue for the foreseeable future.

For starters, access to basic financial services is hit-and-miss. Only 3% of the nation's roughly 6,700 banks are currently willing to work with cannabis-based companies for fear of federal prosecution down the line. This means few businesses have access to business checking and savings accounts, or lines of credit to buy product and expand.

Additionally, marijuana businesses get the short end of the stick come tax time. IRS tax code 280E, in its simplest form, disallows businesses that sell illegal substances from taking normal business deductions. As long as the marijuana plant is considered an illicit substance on Capitol Hill, cannabis companies will be paying tax on their gross profits instead of net profits, thus forking over far more than they should in taxes. It's simply not an investor-friendly environment.

Although things appear to be moving in the right direction for cannabis, you'd be wise as an investor to avoid the industry altogether until these inherent disadvantages disappear.
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Seventeen weeks pregnant with her fourth child, Katie Hauge and her husband Curtis, both of Havre, Mont., decided to have an elective gender ultrasound to find out the sex of their baby.

Yet instead of getting happy news, the ultrasound technician urged Hauge, then 28, to go to the emergency room immediately.

He showed me that the baby had a bunch of fluid in places in her body where she shouldnt, she recalled.

Once at the hospital, doctors did another ultrasound which confirmed that the baby had fluid and swelling throughout her body. Yet they didnt give Hauge a diagnosis and instead told her that the baby had less than one percent chance of living. Shes just going to die, theres nothing we can do about it, the nurse explained.

When Hauge got home, she sat down with the report, started to do her own research and discovered that it was likely that her baby had hydrops fetalis, a serious condition that causes fluid to buildup in several organs of the body.

Everything I was reading said the sooner that you get in for treatment, the higher the chance for survival, she said.

After calling several perinatologists who refused to see her without a formal diagnosis, she finally found one who took her in immediately.

More ultrasounds, an amniocentesis and several tests determined that her baby indeed had hydrops fetalis and heart failure. They believed the cause was parvovirus B19, or fifth disease, a common infection in children.

If a mom gets an infection, it can also cause the fetus to develop anemia where it can basically shut down the fetus ability to make red blood cells, said Dr. Kevin Gomez, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the Center for Perinatal Medicine at Northside Hospital in Atlanta, Ga.

Her doctor explained that the infection would eventually go away, and the hope was that the baby would make her own blood cells and recover.

Hauge was monitored several times a week, and although the baby initially seemed to improve within just a few days her condition worsened. Hauge was referred to a specialist who is an expert in intrauterine fetal blood transfusion, an ultrasound-guided procedure that delivers life-saving red blood cells to the fetus either through the umbilical cord or through the babys abdomen.

When we saw him, he said my baby probably had less than 48 hours left to live unless we did the blood transfusion, she said.

There was also a 50-50 chance the baby would die during the procedure and Hauge was told that if anything went wrong, they would deliver the baby but they wouldnt try to save her.

Shes too sick, shes too early, theres no chance that she could make it, her doctor said.

Intrauterine fetal blood transfusions are rare, but save pregnancies

The most common reason intrauterine fetal blood transfusions are done is for RH incompatibility, which happens when the mothers blood is RH negative and the baby is RH positive.

The mother makes antibodies which attack the fetal blood cells and cause anemia. The anemia can become so severe that the baby develops hydrops fetalis and heart failure.

If left untreated in that situation, the fetus can die, Gomez said.

Intrauterine fetal blood transfusions allow the baby to receive blood cells from a donor to treat the anemia and prevent him from making his own.

When we sample the baby, we get to the point where the baby has no more fetal blood cells during the pregnancy, Gomez said.

Since most pregnant women are screened and given RhoGAM injections if they are RH negative, intrauterine fetal blood transfusions for this reason are not very commonless than 10 in 10,000 pregnancies will need it.

In pregnancies without hydrops fetalis, the survival rate is high between 1 to 2 of transfusions will result in a loss, said Dr. Stephen Vermillion, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System in Spartanburg, South Carolina

Yet in pregnancies with hydrops, loss is more common. In fact, a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that 39 percent of fetuses with persistent hydrops and 26 percent who were classified as severely hydropic who had the procedure survived.

Since both the parvovirusB19 and RH incompatibility can persist, fetal blood transfusions may be done three or four times throughout a pregnancy.

After delivery, some babies need more transfusions because theres a risk that it could take months for them to make their own. Fetal blood transfusions are also done when a baby is at risk for developing a low platelet count, a condition known as neonatal thrombocytopenia.

The procedure may also be utilized in pregnancies with twin-twin transfusion syndrome, in which babies share a placenta. Since the donor twin dumps all of his blood into the recipient twin, the donor twin becomes anemic. Although hydrops fetalis can be caused by anemia, in this case the recipient becomes overwhelmed and develops hydrops fetalis, Vermillion said.

A blood transfusion for the donor twin is then done at the same time as laser surgery to tie off the blood vessels that leak blood to the recipient twin.

When you remove that connection, you have in essence removed the cause of anemia, Vermillion said.

As with any procedure, a fetal blood transfusion carries risks, although they are small. Premature rupture of membranes occurs in about 1 out of 500 pregnancies. There is also the possibility of emergency preterm delivery, bleeding which can cause the baby to become severely anemic or a blood clot that can cause fetal distress, Vermillion said.

A happy ending

At 23 weeks, Hauge underwent an intrauterine fetal blood transfusion, but the procedure proved challenging. Since her doctors had trouble accessing the umbilical cord, they had to transfuse a small amount of blood into the babys liver and abdomen. Transfusions through the umbilical cord vein are preferred because they have a higher rate of absorption and higher chance of survival, Vermillion said.

After two hours, her heart rate started to slow down and they were forced to stop yet the transfusion was a success.

They did an ultrasound the next morning and immediately she showed drastic signs of improvement, Hauge said.

Within a week, the swelling was gone and the babys signs of heart failure improved by 28 weeks.

At 34 weeks, Hauge delivered a healthy baby girl they named Anni.

Now, 3 years old, Anni has some breathing, feeding and growth issues, and doctors say its unclear whether they are related to the hydrops or not.

Shes spunky, Hauge said. I cant imagine what would have happened if I never got to have her.
The area around the Republican National Convention site in Cleveland increased security measures Friday to thwart a similar attack to what occurred in Nice, France Thursday, adding concrete traffic dividers and tall metal fences.

According to Reuters, security experts said police, U.S. Secret Service agents and other law enforcement officials have viewed vehicles  similar to the truck that plowed through a crowd during Bastille Day festivities in Nice killing 84 revelers  as a potential threat since the early stages of planning for the convention.

However, the decision to add the protective barriers around the Quicken Loans Arena was taken before the attack. Ron Rowe, a high-ranking agent with the Secret Service, said Tuesday that some of the barriers would be going up that day, according to Reuters.

Security officials have mostly focused on stopping a car or truck bomb similar to one that hit the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City federal office building in 1995.

"A vehicle-borne attack is always something you're concerned about," Jason Porter, vice president for the central region of security provider Pinkerton, said.

Officials havent said whether the Nice attack had altered their plans for Cleveland, but did confirm earlier in the week that the Dallas police shootings did.

Police Chief Calvin Williams noted the city had changed its security plans in light of last weeks murder of five police officers in Dallas but said he would not elaborate for obvious reasons.

Williams said planning has been exhaustive and Cleveland is prepared. We invite people to come here enjoy the convention, exercise your constitutional rights and were here to assist you in doing that.

The 74 different agencies providing security will be overseen and coordinated by the US Secret Service. I dont sleep well to begin with, said Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy. He added that when there is an event the size of a convention, with all of its tension and dynamics, an emergency is unavoidable.

Every event has some incident. The key is: do you have a good plan in place? Do you have good leadership that can adapt and be flexible to whatever is thrown your way? And I'm confident that here in Cleveland we have that," Clancy said.

Fox News Michael Tobin contributed to this report.

Click for more from Reuters.
Ohio Gov. John Kasichs office rebuffed a call Sunday from the Cleveland police union to ban the open carry of firearms during the Republican National Convention, in the wake of the deadly shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge.

FOX 8 reported earlier that Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, is asking Kasich to prohibit open carry this week in Cuyahoga County, which surrounds Cleveland.

A spokeswoman, though, indicated the governors hands are tied when it comes to unilaterally changing a state law like open carry.

"Law enforcement is a noble, essential calling and we all grieve that we've again seen attacks on officers. Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested, Kasich spokeswoman Emmalee Kalmbach said. The bonds between our communities and police must be reset and rebuilt -- as we're doing in Ohio -- so our communities and officers can both be safe. Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal."

Convention CEO Jeff Larson, at a press briefing in Cleveland late Sunday, echoed the governors office.

The governor cant simply say, Im going to relax [the law] for a day, Larson said.

The shooting in Baton Rouge  in which at least three officers were killed  is the latest police tragedy to heighten concerns about security and clashes at the GOP convention, which starts Monday.

According to USA Today, Loomis said the open-carry law has made security far more difficult for the convention.

"Somebody's got to do something, Loomis reportedly said Sunday. "What we have now is completely irresponsible."

City leaders have voiced confidence about their ability to secure the site.

Police Chief Calvin Williams said Sunday that theyve had protests every day for eight days and all have been peaceful.

"We've not really had any problems to speak of, he said.

As for the open-carry law, he said he has briefed officers who may not be familiar with the states law. He said he wants to "make sure officers are not taken aback when they see that activity and know how to respond.

Williams said he also is briefing officers on the responsibilities someone must maintain when exercising their open-carry rights, saying people have to handle their guns in a "safe manner" and should not "menace people or threaten people" with their weapon.

As for the convention itself, he said, "It's game time and we're ready for it." Williams said they have "hundreds of agencies and thousands of officers" working to keep people safe.

Fox News Hillary Vaughn and FoxNews.com's Judson Berger contributed to this report.
President Obama has been briefed on the deadly shootings Sunday morning of three Louisiana police officers, and the White House said it is offering any assistance necessary to local authorities.

Three Baton Rouge officers were fatally shot and three others wounded in the attack, less than a mile from police headquarters. Police are checking for explosives near where one suspect was killed.

Its just an awful tragedy, Louisiana GOP Rep. Garret Graves told Fox News.

He also said that the people in his district have the deepest respect for police officers and they, like other Americans, are very concerned about recent attacks on police officers, including five killed July 7 in Dallas by a sniper.

The shooter, Micah Johnson, who was killed by authorities in a standoff, apparently acted in retaliation for two cases in which black men were shot and killed by police officers in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, respectively.

Graves said he has worked across the aisle on Capitol Hill to stop such tragedies and will continue to make such efforts.

We really have to come together as a country, he said.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who now calls himself the law and order candidate," said on Twitter: We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today. How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.

The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, North Carolina Democratic Rep. G. K. Butterfield, said the group offers its deepest sympathies to the families of the officers killed and injured.

Tensions are high in our country, but violence does not lead to justice and targeting law enforcement does not bring about solutions, he also said. The CBC continues to call for peace and we stand by state and federal officials as they investigate to find the individuals responsible for todays horrific event.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told Fox News: Our country feels the loss. We grieve on so many levels, beginning with the families.

"I have the utmost respect and gratitude for what our police officers do," Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told Fox News, urging elected officials to support police officers.



Obama last week attended a memorial service for Dallas police officers and led a nearly four-hour meeting featuring dozens of leaders from police organizations, community activists and elected officials.

He also spoke by telephone to the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the men shot in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul, Minn.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Kenneth and Colleen Shults want to permanently welcome a foster child into their Fairmount, Ill., family, but claim in a federal suit filed this week they are being forced to surrender their Second Amendment rights to do it.

Already parents of three, the couple is in the process of formally adopting a daughter through the state foster care system and is fighting Department of Children and Family Services rules they say severely restrict their gun rights. The couple charges that the firearm restrictions aimed at safeguarding foster children violate their constitutional rights and threaten their ability to keep their family safe.

Our family has always owned and used firearms, said Kenneth Shults, 37, who is a firearms safety instructor and a machine shop manager. No foster parent should have to forfeit their constitutional rights in order to be a foster parent.

Prospective Illinois foster parents must either certify that there are no firearms in their home or complete a form called the Foster Family Firearms Arrangement. That document requires a list of all guns and ammunition in the home and locations where they are stored. Would-be foster parents also must certify the guns have trigger locks and are stored unloaded, separate from ammunition and in locked containers accessible only with a key kept off the premises or on the owners person.

The rules can be enforced by involuntary home inspections, according to the lawsuit.

The states rules defeat the purpose of keeping a firearm for protection, said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Washington-based Second Amendment Foundation, which has joined the suit as a plaintiff along with the Illinois State Rifle Association.

"When seconds count, having your gun unloaded, locked up and ammunition stored somewhere else makes you a likely victim of a violent crime," Gottlieb said.

The Shultses claim to have a legitimate need for the protection afforded by an accessible, loaded gun. Colleen, a nurse at the Illinois Department of Corrections Danville Correctional Center, was warned in March by her employer that prisoners were seeking home addresses of prison staff, including correctional officers and nurses. The letter warned that she and other prison employees should take unspecified precautions.

The Shultses have complied with the state policy so far, but now believe they need guns at the ready for self-defense and defense of family.

This lawsuit is important not just for foster families in Illinois, but all across the nation, said Gottlieb. What we are challenging is the denial of the fundamental right to defend yourself and your family.

The suit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois, accuses the director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services of deprivation of civil rights under color of law. The complaint maintains the constitutional Second Amendment rights of foster parents were violated because Illinois Department of Children and Family Services policy effectively prohibits current and prospective foster parents from possessing firearms for the purpose of self-defense.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services told FoxNews.com that the agency had no comment because it had not yet received and reviewed the lawsuit.

The suit is one of a series filed by the Second Amendment Foundation challenging gun laws in the state of Illinois over the last several years. One of the most publicized was McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which Otis McDonald, a maintenance worker and grandfather living in Chicago, claimed he was unable to protect himself and his family in a dangerous neighborhood because of an ordinance banning the possession of handguns.

The landmark case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, when, in a 5-4 decision, the justices held that the right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" in every state is protected by the Second Amendment.

In another Illinois lawsuit, the foundation forced the State Legislature to adopt a conceal-carry statute.

One would think the state would have wised up by now, Gottlieb said. But here we are again, to make sure that the state cannot discriminate against foster parents who merely wish to exercise the rights weve restored in Illinois.
A Pennsylvania man accused in a string of burglaries faces new charges after admitting to using a stolen human brain to make a potent form of marijuana.

Joshua Long, 26, was formally charged Thursday with misdemeanor abuse of a corpse and conspiracy to commit abuse of a corpse.

Investigators say Long's aunt discovered the brain last month. It was being kept in a WalMart shopping bag under the porch of a trailer where one of Long's friends lived.

Local media, citing police, reported that when Long's aunt asked him about the brain, Long admitted that it was a human organ and that he and his friend, Robbie Lee Zoller, would soak marijuana in the preserving formaldehyde.

Authorities say the high from smoking so-called "wet" marijuana is intense and dangerous, often causing hallucinations.

Authorities said that Long told his relative that he and Zoller had even given the brain a name: "Freddy".

Police believe the brain was a stolen teaching specimen.

"At this point now we're just trying to figure out where it came from," Pennsylvania State Trooper Robert Hicks told Fox 43. "We're hoping that if anyone is missing a human specimen brain to bring it to our attention and maybe we can return it to its rightful owner."

Zoller and another relative of Long's, Angela Micklo, are being sought in connection with the theft.

Click for more from Fox43.com.

Click for more from The Sentinel.
The FBI is hunting a man wanted in the killing of his wife, a Fort Bragg soldier.

The FBI is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of 27-year-old Jason Earl Armstrong Jr., Fox 11 Los Angeles reported Saturday.

A federal warrant charges him with killing Iris Armstrong in the couples Fort Bragg home in North Carolina July 1.

She had been stabbed and beaten, the station reported.

The FBI said Armstrong was captured on a surveillance video using his wifes debit card shortly after the murder, the station reported.

He has ties to South Carolina; Atlanta; New Orleans; Amarillo, Texas; Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Iris Armstrong was a human resources specialist assigned to the 189th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division Sustainment Brigade, the Fayetteville Observer reported. She joined the Army in 2012.

The couples two children are safe, according to the FBI.

Lt. Col. Jeremy St. Laurent, commander of the 189th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, told the Observer Iris Armstrong was an outstanding soldier and well-liked.

"Our thoughts, prayers and condolences go out to her family, friends and loved ones during this very difficult time," he said.
Authorities charged a 29-year-old man with two counts of murder in the shooting deaths of a patient and employee inside a Florida hospital earlier Sunday in what is being described as a "random" attack.

David Owens, of Titusville, entered Parrish Medical Center at 2 a.m. and used a handgun to shoot and kill 88-year-old patient Cynthia Zingsheim and employee Carrie Rouzer, 36, in Zingsheim's room, Titusville police said.

Police said Owens entered the building through the emergency room before making his way to the third floor. The women were shot in a third-floor room, near where the 210-bed hospital's birthing suites are located.

"It appears to be extremely random," said Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey.

Police are crediting two unarmed security guards at the hospital with responding quickly to the active shooter situation.

"The suspect left the one handgun used behind in the room," the Titusville Police Department said in a press release. "Hospital security guards tackled the suspect shortly after and held him down for arriving officers."

Owens has been booked into the Brevard County Jail for two counts of murder, authorities said.

Investigators have not been able to determine a motive or any connection between the shooter and the victims.

"This was strictly an isolated incident," Cpl. Dave Jacobs, spokesman with the sheriffs office, told Florida Today.
Ohio police said Saturday they have recovered the remains of a 30-year-old woman who disappeared 10 months ago.

Lindsay Bogan, of Middletown, Ohio, was last seen in September by her boyfriend, who Middletown police say is a person of interest in her disappearance. Detectives have been investigating her case as a homicide since March, Fox19 reported.

Her remains were identified through dental records, according to the station.

No one should be thrown away like this, said Butler County Sheriff's Office Lt. Todd Langmeyer. That is exactly what someone did to this woman. We are finding out more in each stage of this investigation and we will work diligently until we find out who did this to her.

Owners of a farm in Madison Township found bones on their property last weekend and notified police, Fox19 reported.

The boyfriend Eric Sexton, 48, told cops he last saw Bogan getting into an SUV in downtown Middletown. He is the father of Bogan's now 19-month-old daughter.

Sexton has been charged with promoting prostitution, the Hamilton Journal News reported. Cops charged him with acting as Bogans pimp. He pleaded guilty to the prostitution charge and served a 9-month jail sentence. He was released July 8, according to the paper.

Middletown Police Maj. Mark Hoffman told the paper that detectives investigating Bogans disappearance gave Sexton and his brother a lie-detector test. They showed deception, he said.

Hoffman said Sexton and his brother remain persons of interest in the disappearance.

Sexton has said he had nothing to do with the disappearance.
DEVELOPING --Several officers have been shot in Baton Rouge while on duty Sunday, according to reports.

The shooting happened early Sunday, less than 1 mile from police headquarters.

Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Coppola did not know the extent of the injuries or the precise number of officers injured.

He said that authorities believe the "scene is contained," meaning that a shooter was unlikely on the loose.

A witness told WBRZ-TV, a man was dressed in black with his face covered was shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza, according to Fox radio affiliate WJBO.

Shots were fired around 9 a.m. Sunday.

Fox8 Live reported that police were responding to a report of officers shot.

Multiple agencies are responding to the scene, the station reported.

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development reported the area was closed to traffic.

The city has seen protests since the death of Alton Sterling , 37, was shot and killed July 5 as he wrestled with two white police officers outside the convenience store in a Baton Rouge, La., suburb where he sold music and movies on compact discs. Police say he was armed.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.


Most domestic companies start their international expansion by staying in the neighborhood, playing it relatively safe by venturing into Canada or maybe Mexico. Moran Family of Brands is taking a different route, one that stretches 5,972 miles from the automotive repair and maintenance franchisors Midlothian, Ill., home, all the way to Lagos, Nigeria.

Thats where, this past March, the company broke ground on its first foreign franchise, a 38,000-square-foot facility that will serve as both a cobranded Mr. Transmission/Milex Complete Auto Care shop and headquarters for master franchisees Temi Adelu-Davis and Glen Davis. Temi is a native of Nigeria who came to the U.S. to earn her MBA while Glen ran an auto repair store in Houston. Now relocated to Lagos, the couple will be responsible for operating their shop once it opens this fall as well as recruiting franchisees to open nine more locations throughout Nigeria over the next seven years.

We spoke to Morans president, Pete Baldine, about the companys first foray into a foreign market.

It took 26 years for Moran to go international. Why now? And why Nigeria?

More From Entrepreneur.com To Celebrate Canada Day, Here Are 10 Franchises From Our Neighbors to the North

It had more to do with the right people. Wed looked at other international opportunities over the years but never felt comfortable enough to move forward. The Davises actually approached us, and after several months of due diligence, we felt confident that they not only had the financial strength and leadership ability necessary, but that they knew their market.

Why did they choose you?

They had done their research and looked at some of our competitors, but they liked our cobrand option and felt that a one-stop shop strategy was right for Nigeria.

Did you have to make any adjustments to your system?

Because parts sourcing is limited in Nigeria, were making their facility larger than normal so they can warehouse parts there to supply future franchise locations. We also modified our training program, adding an entire week to teach them how to award franchises, get them open and support the franchisees.

Whats in store for the future?

The Nigerian deal got the inertia going. Now were ready to continue that international movement. Were already working on a deal to sign another master franchisee in Liberia, and weve signed on with two brokerage groups to help us expand in Europe and the Middle East.
Turkey reopened the airspace around Incirlik Air Base on Sunday, allowing the U.S. to restart strike missions targeting the Islamic State terror group, as the alliance between the two nations showed signs of serious strain.

Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook confirmed that power had been cut to the air base in southern Turkey, near the Syria border.

"U.S. facilities at Incirlik are still operating on internal power sources, but we hope to restore commercial power soon. Base operations have not been affected," Cook said in a statement.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavosoglu, for the second time in as many days following the failed coup, which left at least 265 people dead and 1,400 wounded.

Despite the support for Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government by the Obama administration during the coup, the country's labor minister suggested Washington was behind the uprising. Meanwhile, Erdogan himself bluntly requested the extradition of Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan blamed for inspiring the coup, saying, "If we are strategic partners, then you should bring about our request."

Although he didn't outline any threat, Erdogan's emphasis on U.S.-Turkish counterterrorism cooperation raised the prospect of a prolonged closure of Incirlik if he didn't get his way.

Stung by the criticism, the State Department fired back. In a readout of the telephone call between Kerry and Cavosoglu, the department said Kerry told his fellow diplomat, "public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations."

Kerry reiterated U.S. support for Turkey's democratically elected government, according to the State Department readout, and urged authorities to respect the rule of law and safeguard civilian life as they respond to the coup attempt. Kerry also said Turkey needed to respect due process as it investigates those it believes were involved in the plot.

Earlier, on a visit to Luxembourg, Kerry told reporters the U.S. would entertain an extradition request for Gulen if the Turks provided evidence of wrongdoing. Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government, but Washington has never found the claims compelling.

"We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen," Kerry told reporters. "And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately."

A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey was preparing a formal extradition request with detailed information about Gulen's involvement in illegal activities. He said the coup attempt was seen as "one more thing to add to an already extensive list."

In a statement, Gulen said he condemned, "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey" and sharply rejected any responsibility or knowledge of who might be involved.

Kerry said the U.S. had no indication beforehand of the coup attempt, which began as he and Russia's foreign minister were in a Russian government villa in Moscow, locked in negotiations over Syria.

"If you're planning a coup, you don't exactly advertise to your partners in NATO," Kerry said. "So it surprised everyone. It does not appear to be a very brilliantly planned or executed event."

Turkish authorities arrested Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, the Incirlik commander, a U.S. official told Fox News.



Late Saturday, the State Department also issued a new travel warning, suggesting U.S. citizens "reconsider travel to Turkey at this time."

Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called on the U.S. Saturday to extradite a Muslim cleric living in Pennsylvania following a failed military coup.

In a televised speech, Erdogan said Turkey had never refused any request by the U.S. to extradite terrorists and invoked Washington and Ankara's relationship as "strategic partners" in an effort to force the return of Fethullah Gulen.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday the Obama administration would entertain an extradition request but Turkey would have to prove wrongdoing by Gulen.

Gulen denied knowledge of the coup to reporters at his Pennsylvania compound Saturday. The cleric said that he knows only a "minute fraction" of his legions of sympathizers in Turkey, so he cannot speak to their "potential involvement" in the takeover attempt.

"You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup. They could be sympathizers of the opposition party. They could be sympathizers of the nationalist party. It could be anything," Gulen, who has lived in the U.S. for more than 15 years, said through an interpreter.

The frail-looking Gulen, in his mid-70s, said he wouldn't have returned to Turkey even if the coup had succeeded, fearing he would be "persecuted and harassed."



"This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here," he said. "Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important."

Erdogan and Gulen, former political allies, have fallen out in recent years over Erdogans years-long crackdown on domestic dissent and Turkeys once-open media landscape.

Given the chance Saturday to deliver a message to Erdogan, Gulen demurred.

"If I were to send him a message, he would probably consider it as a slur and reject it," Gulen said, adding, "but I have always prayed for myself and for him. I have prayed to God to lead us to the straight path, to the virtuous path."

The cleric, who left Turkey in 1999, now lives in exile in a Pennsylvania Islamic retreat owned by Turkish-Americans and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue. He rarely speaks to the media, but his sermons appear online.

Turkey will not be run from a house in Pennsylvania, Erdogan said in remarks earlier Saturday was quoted as saying by TRT World. Turkey is not a country that can be bought or sold cheaply.

In his own statement, Gulen said he condemned "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey" and sharply rejected any responsibility for it.

"Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force," Gulen said. "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations."

The Turkish government detained thousands in the military after quashing the coup attempt and reasserting control of the country's two major cities. Authorities said at least 265 people had been killed in the violence and more than 1,400 others were wounded.

Before Friday's coup attempt, more than 2,000 Gulen supporters had been arrested in Turkey on various charges since their split in 2013. In March, Turkish authorities seized control of one of Turkeys largest newspapers, Zaman, which was associated with Gulen.

Even before the latest unrest was under control, Erdogan's government pressed ahead Saturday with a purge of Turkish judicial officials, with 2,745 judges being dismissed across Turkey for alleged ties to Gulen, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency. It said 10 members of Turkey's highest administrative court were detained and arrest warrants were issued for 48 administrative court members and 140 members of Turkey's appeals court.

Gulen preaches what many consider a moderate form of Islam. And he has regularly and stridently condemned jihadist terror attacks much more so than Erdogan, say the presidents critics  and typically advocates interfaith dialogue.

Gulens movement is widely considered dangerous in Turkey. In Erdogans view, he is an arch-enemy of the state, whose followers represent a seditious parallel-state within Turkey.

Gulen is specifically accused of scheming to have his followers infiltrate the Turkish government for the purpose of overthrowing Erdogans ruling Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish acronym as the AKP. Gulen also faces espionage charges, and two trials are now being held in absentia.

He is the head of a faith-based social movement that boasts a global following, has deep roots in Turkish society, and cultivates notable influence in the U.S. education through a network of roughly 150 secular charter schools.

Fox News John Lauinger and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Save The Elephants Preciousy Online Clothes Jewelry Charity Store Launched

Preciousy, a popular brand selling elephant inspired jewelry, clothing and household items, has launched an online store and will be donating five percents of their profit to Save The Elephants.

--

A new site has launched selling elephant inspired products, with items ranging from art for the home to watches, and every sale goes towards the Save The Elephants charity. Called Preciousy, it is described as a marketplace for people who love elephants, with a mission to help make elephants' life better and less stressful.

More information can be found on the Preciousy website at: http://preciousy.com.

The site explains that the vision behind Preciousy is a safer world for elephants, without ivory markets. The website has a hand-picked team who strive to serve their customers as best as possible, and who are more than happy to take requests for items that aren't currently available in the store.

Items available include elephant inspired jewelry, elephant inspired items like cushions, candleholders, lamps and art, and elephant inspired clothes. Clothes range from t-shirts to pants, as well as beach cloths, leggings, and socks.

Each item is broken down into categories on the Preciousy website, making it easier for customers to find what they're looking for. Filters can also be applied to help choose between the options available.

Five percents of Preciousy profit goes towards Save The Elephants, whose mission is to secure a better future for elephants and to sustain the beauty and ecological integrity of the places they live, as well as to promote delight in their intelligence.

The charity conducts vital research in elephant behaviour and ecology, and has pioneered GPS radio tracking in Africa to help provide detailed information on the lives of elephants. The charity also works with wildlife departments, area managers and communities to defend elephants against poachers and traffickers.

Save The Elephants explains that elephants are intelligent creatures that have long had a profound role in human cultures as well as African ecosystems. The Preciousy store is donating 5% of its profits to the charity in an effort to help it grow and continue its work, as well as to ensure the livelihood of the animals are protected.

Any interested parties with further questions can get in touch with the store using the contact form provided on site

For more information, please visit http://www.preciousy.com

Contact Info:

Name: John Stephenson

Organization: Preciousy



Release ID: 123789

For more information visit r



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Farmers could soon monitor the heart rate and body temperature of their livestock through their smartphone using a solar-powered ear tag.

The WM Systems tag  designed by Ollie Godwin, an industrial design and technology student at Loughborough University  records heart rate and body temperature every five minutes, alerting the farmers to potential health problems.

If body temperature or heart rate are detected outside set limits the farmer is alerted.

Location is also monitored, and a pulsating LED on the ear tag allows farmers to visually identify the animal flagged up by the system.

Mr Godwin, who was inspired to develop the tag after helping lamb his sisters flock of pedigree Zwartbles in Gloucestershire, says the device is ideal for use at lambing, when body temperature spikes in sheep prior to birth.

This will allow farmers to react quickly, but also lessens the need for regular night visits during lambing season.

If theres human intervention, most problems at lambing can be easily solved, Mr Godwin told Farmers Weekly.

If not, you could end up with a dead lamb.

Sheep worrying

Sheep farmers can also keep an eye out for signs of distress: By monitoring heart rate, you can pick up immediate signs of stress in sheep, such as being chased by a dog, he says.

See also: New ear tag can detect early onset of cattle pneumonia

Or if theyre stolen, the signal will drop. The farmer can be informed of that too.

It is also suitable for use with cows, pig, and goats, and has a range of just over a mile, which increases to 15 miles with the addition of a signal bouncer on farm.

Commercialise

Mr Godwin exhibited his design at graduate design show New Designers in London earlier this month.

Since then, a couple of US livestock hardware companies have shown interest in the patent-pending prototype.

Its all there in theory and aesthetically, and in terms of functionality it is viable, he says.

To commercialise it will mean speaking to manufacturers and electrical engineers to further refine the concept.
College Hill High School student Keyadri Summerlin had a back-to-school experience last fall that is likely familiar to many students.

I remember last year I finished German I. The next year I opened up my German textbook and I was like What is this? she said last week.

Summerlin, a senior who is transferring to the alternative high school this fall from Corvallis High School, said that sometimes it can be easy to catch up, but not always.

If there are concepts you werent really solid on before it takes a while getting them back, she said.

Summerlins experience matches one documented in education research: students can lose educational progress during the idle summer months. However, local education experts say summer also gives opportunities for other kinds of learning that can not only stave off this summer slide, but get kids excited about education.

Summerlin herself is in a summer program that is aimed at doing just that: this year she is participating in the Corvallis School Districts summer credit recovery program, which is held from late June to late July.

In the program, which is located at Corvallis High, students from all three of the districts high schools work in 90-minute sessions twice a week on online courses in subjects such as math, English, science and social studies. Teachers and teaching assistants are on hand to provide individual help with the lessons. Through the program, which is serving more than 100 students this summer, students can recover up to three credits.

Just over two weeks into the program, Summerlin had already recovered two credits for completing health I and health II courses and had moved on to consumer economics. She said she was ill during her freshman year, which caused her to fall behind in school. With the summer credits and the opportunity to recover even more at College Hill, Summerlin hopes to graduate on time, attend Linn-Benton Community College and eventually become a teacher herself.

Summerlin said if she becomes a teacher shed encourage her students to do things like take community college classes over the summer so they can return to school ahead of where they were when they left, not behind.

I would tell them to explore things they are interested in and if I had them, I would give them resources to help them do that.

Academic mindset

Kathleen Muravez, who has run the summer school program for the last three years, said she believes offering summer school has helped the district improve its graduation rate.

This fills a significant need, she said.

Muravez , who runs the Corvallis High School online program during the school year, said in her experience some kids who read a lot or take advantage of activities like the Corvallis-Benton County Public Librarys summer programs may not have much of an academic decline over the summer. For others, though, its not unusual for to experience a little summer slide.

Marin Langer, a Crescent Valley High School teacher who is teaching in the summer program, teaches both AP English and alternative education classes, so she sees a wide range in how quickly students can transition back into the school year.

Its less a decline in reading and writing than in academic skills and mindset, she said.

She added that that the summer credit recovery program helps students maintain momentum in their education. The program can do this because it is structured differently than traditional classes. Students move through their own courses and assignments at their own paces and can use some of the assignments as a tool for exploring their own interests.

And for students who have not experienced much academic success, it gives them the opportunity for a fresh start, Langer said.

Its kind of a do-over.

And success in a different environment can help to fuel a student's confidence going back into the school year.

Its really empowering to enter school further ahead than they were in June, she said.

The summer credit recovery program and the districts other summer programs, which also exist at the middle and elementary levels, are funded by the Corvallis Public Schools Foundation, which contributed $45,700 to the programs this summer.

Ecosystem of learning

Lynn Dierking, a professor and associate dean of research with Oregon State Universitys College of Education, said there is no doubt that some children come back to school in the fall behind their peers.

She referenced a 2007 study in the American Sociological Review that examined students in the city of Baltimore and how they compared to peers in the more affluent Baltimore County.

She said the study showed that during the school year the low-income inner-city children actually had similar gains as their more affluent county peers and in some cases had even more academic growth. However, over the summers, the county students had access to enriching activities and continued to improve; those programs were not available to city students, and they ended up falling behind the county students.

Each year they got a little further behind their peers, she said.

Dierking and her colleagues at OSU are doing a five-year study in the Parkrose School District that is trying to develop programs to help prevent a decline in interest in science, technology, engineering and math fields. The study, which is funded by a $2 million National Science Foundation grant, is building on a previous five-year study Dierking and her colleagues did in the district, in which they observed a decline in interest in those so-called STEM fields between sixth and seventh grades.

However, she noted, not all of the students lost interest in the fields.

The kids who maintain their interest are participating in things out of school, she said.

She and fellow OSU education professor John Falk argued in a 2010 piece in American Scientist that the majority of Americans do most of their science learning through free-choice learning opportunities like museums, science centers, zoos, parks, organizations like 4-H and through educational media.

I would argue there is an equity issue around these complimentary educational services, Dierking said in an interview.

Dierking said students in lower-income families do not have access to the same enriching activities, but she said more school in the summer is not the answer  at least, not school in the same format as during the school year. She pointed to programs in Rhode Island, where summer school is heavy on activities and then students are tasked with writing about them after.

Instead of more traditional classroom time, she said the focus should be on an ecosystems of other educational organizations and sites, like the free-choice opportunities mentioned above.

Dierking and her colleagues' current study is attempting to help schools develop the systems to connect students to those resources throughout the year and over the summer. Additionally, she said, teachers could, for example, give the parents of a student interested in astronomy information so they could go out and stargaze, an activity that would not cost a lot for families to do. Or students could connect families to a local astronomy club.

it's an approach that could allow students in low-income families to stay intellectually active over the summer months.

What they need are the same set of enriching activities children in the middle class and affluent families consider a normal summer, she said.

Advice for parents

So what can parents do over the summer to help prevent their children from losing ground over the summer? The educators interviewed offered suggestions.

In addition to the library, Muravez suggested families check out activities at other locations, such as The Arts Center in Corvallis and Oregon State University. She said the key is giving the kids a chance to explore things in which they already have interest.

Langer agreed.

In summer the learning should have some excitement about it," she said. "Kids should be able to go a direction of their choosing."

In a blog, the U.S. Department of Education offered tips for parents to keep their children from going through a summer slide.

For elementary and middle school parents, the post advised visiting libraries and creating summer reading lists for children and giving rewards when kids complete them. The department also suggests that parents encourage kids to do arts-and-crafts projects. The website kids.gov has other ideas.

For high school students, the post recommends dedicating one day each week to keeping math and science skills fresh, potentially getting books with practice problems from local libraries. The post also recommends doing college preparation research, like researching financial aid. Part time jobs and volunteering are also recommended as ways to get experience for both personal and professional development.

Ryan Noss, Corvallis interim superintendent for the 2016-17 school year, agreed that knowing what children are passionate about and giving them opportunities to pursue it is critical.

Making sure kids continue to read and write is also important, he said.

Noss, who has two middle-school aged children himself, added that programs at the library or the summer programs offered by organizations like the Boys & Girls Club of Corvallis can be beneficial.

But he noted that activities don't need to cost money to be beneficial.

Kids are really inquisitive, he said, so encourage that  even if its just doing things like going out to look for bugs.
ULAN BATOR, July 16 -- In Mongolia over the weekend, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's effort to promote China's stance on the South China Seaissue received broad support during the 11th Asian-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit.

Li said Saturday before he returned to China that the South China Sea arbitration award will have no impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime interests.

Speaking in an informal meeting during the summit, Li said the South China Sea issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions from the very beginning, or be included in the summit's agenda.

"But since certain countries commented on the issue, it is thus necessary for China to come out to clarify its stance and spell out the truth," he said.

Li said China has never participated in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines, adding that his country neither accepts nor acknowledges the so-called arbitration award.

"By doing so, we are both exercising our rights in accordance with international law, and safeguarding the dignity of international law," he said.

"Under no circumstance will the arbitration award exert any impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea," Li added.

The Chinese premier said China remains committed to settling the South China Sea disputes via dialogue and consultation with countries directly involved on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international law, so as to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.

This is the first time the Chinese premier has made an open statement on the South China Sea issue at an international forum following the South China Sea arbitration award issued Tuesday.

Li did not include the issue in his keynote speech at the start of the two-day summit. However, faced with certain nations' attempts to stir up tension and interfere in the South China Sea issue in the summit, Li expounded China's stance of non-acceptance of and non-participation in the arbitration proceedings, as part of his diplomatic offensive.

In a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc Thursday, Li said the South China Sea issue should be solved through bilateral negotiations between relevant parties in line with historical facts, international law and the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).

One day later, he told Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen that China will work with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to protect regional peace and stability as well as the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.

Li's toughest remarks were directed at Japan, which, according to a Chinese diplomat that demanded anonymity, had sought in vain to include the arbitration case into the chair's statement of the summit.

Tokyo, not a state directly involved in the South China Sea issue, should thus stop hyping up and interfering in the South China Sea issue and "exercise caution in its own words and deeds," Li told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abein a Friday meeting at the latter's request.

China's stance on the issue is completely in line with international law and the DOC, Li said.

The Chinese premier's statements have been keenly received and won the backing from a number of Asian and European heavyweight leaders.

In the meeting with Li, Vietnam's Nguyen Xuan Phuc said his nation respects China's stance on the arbitration, adding that the disputes should be solved peacefully through negotiations.

Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said on the same day that Laos supports China's stance over the South China Sea issue, and stands ready to work with China to maintain peace and stability in the region.

Their words were echoed by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who said on Friday that his country supports settlement of the South China Sea disputes through dialogue and consultation between countries directly concerned.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev also said Russia opposes the internationalization of the South China Sea disputes or any interference by the forces outside the region.

Russia supports China's principles on resolving the disputes, Medvedev said. He called for bilateral negotiations and consultations between directly relevant parties to solve the issue.

According to the anonymous Chinese diplomat, a vast number of countries "expressed understanding of China's stance in difference forms" and "accepted our stance on dispute settlement via dialogue and consultation."

"On the one hand, more and more countries have come to understand China's standpoints via extensive exchanges with the Chinese side," he said.

"On the other hand, the Nice attack had shed light on the importance of peace and stability," he added, referring to Thursday's truck attack in southern Francethat has claimed over 80 lives.

"We realize that the real threat in front of us is terrorism. There are neither wars nor conflicts in the South China Sea. Only a volatile South China Sea would threaten regional peace and stability," the diplomat noted. "Our 'friends circle' on the South China Sea issue seems to be getting bigger and bigger."
Recently, families came to the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library to play board games for an afternoon and evening as part of the Summer at Your Library Program. We were fortunate to have some community partners loan us some games and attend the event. A huge thank you to the following fantastic Corvallis businesses: Matts Cavalcade of Comics; Pegasus Games; The Toy Factory.

Thank you for sharing your resources and your time with the families of Corvallis! We appreciate you!

Elizabeth Johnson

Corvallis-Benton County Public Library

G-T covered holidays well

I appreciate the Gazette-Times for the excellent coverage of the patriotic ceremonies and celebration in the community. These national holidays are intended for us as citizens to reflect on our heritage and feel a sense of gratitude for the many blessings we enjoy.

The reporting and stories help those who cannot or do not take part in the celebrations to share some of the importance of these events.

The Fourth of July parade was a lot of fun and significant. The participants were enthusiastic and there was a nice crowd lining the parade route.

The reporter, Nathan Bruttell, was enthusiastic and energetic. His story caught the essence of the parade well.

The coverage of the Memorial Day ceremonies was outstanding. The recognition of Les Whittles contribution to the community remembrance of the sacrifices of local military is well deserved. He has invested much time, effort and talent in designing and bringing to life the veterans memorial and organizing outstanding ceremonies.

I particularly appreciated the reporting of Anthony Rimel of the Memorial Day ceremony at Crystal Lake cemetery. He completely captured the essence of Lt. Col Robbs inspiring speech. I was a nice ceremony with an instrumental ensemble of musicians from the Philomath area, appropriate remarks from County Commissioner Jay Dixon, and solemn laying of wreaths by representatives of organizations commemorating the contributions of the military in our wars.

Bennett Hall deserves our gratitude for his work in organizing and reporting on these events.

Thank you G-T for representing the community so well.

Charles Nelson

American Legion Post 11

July 4 parade was rousing success

Th 30th annual All-American, Anyone Can Join, Fabululous, Fantastic 4th of July Parade was a rousing success.

Thanks to all the volunteers who helped make it work. Chief Emery and the Corvallis Fire Department sponsored the event and also furnished a fire truck with a bucket from which this year's diva, Rian Emery (dressed as Superman), sung "The Star-Spangled Banner" to start the parade.

The Police Department sent officer Steven Teeter to lead the parade on his motorcycle and the department stopped traffic on Third and Fourth streets while the parade went by.

The parade filled Monroe Avenue, side to side, from Eighth to First, an estimated 650 marchers, counting kids, elected officials, dogs, llamas, horses, goats, bicycles, scooters, cars and tractors. And three times that number lined the route to watch and to catch the candy that was thrown.

Thanks to the volunteers who stopped the traffic along the route: Gayle and Even Evenson, Courtney Cloyd, Ann Staley, Carol Mason, Tim Oliver, Carol Rathbun, Christino Montez-Cruz, Kate McNutt, David Sherrill, Becky Merja, Larry LeBlanc, Ginger Stevens, Jon Paul Stevens, Susan Weeks, Patio Thomas and especially Bill Cohnstedt and Gene Johnson, who always put out and pick up the "Parade Ahead" signs.

Best of all, the parade didn't cost the city anything and furnished a forum that gave our local politicians a safe way to spend the holiday.

Steven Black

Parade director

Volunteers aided emergency fair

The Emergency Services Division of the Benton County Sheriffs Office would like to thank all the individuals and organizations who gave of their time to make the inaugural Emergency Services Fair so successful.

These include main stage speakers Aaron Crawford, Owen Dell, Chris Bentley and Gail Moldovan-Trujillo; exhibitors American Red Cross, Benton County Public Works, Benton County Community Development, CERT, CoEnergy Propane, Consumers Power, Corvallis Fire Department, G. Christianson Construction, OSU Extension Master Food Preserver Program, Preparedness Strategies, Quake-Safe Consulting, Thrive, and United Way; volunteers from the Sheriffs Office Auxiliary Team; and all those who donated raffle prizes.

Special thanks to the Benton County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue team volunteers, not only for their work on this event, but also for their ongoing commitment to being prepared and responding to emergencies when needed. Thank you!

Kevin Higgins

Benton County Sheriffs Office

Donors, volunteers helped Gondar effort

By early July, the Corvallis Sister Cities AssociationGondar and members of the Education Workgroup had successfully filled a 40-foot container, now on its way to our sister-city partner agencies in Gondar, Ethiopia.

Local educators donated 68 boxes of teaching aids, science books, and 20 identical computers for our partner elementary school in Gondar. Oregon State University faculty donated 34 science journals (210 boxes) to a new College of Agriculture while World of Good (Junction City) donated 100 boxes of reading books to area schools. Worlds Children (Corvallis) donated six computers and nine boxes of childrens reading books to agency partner, Bridge of Hope Orphanage. The Ethiopia Project in Vancouver, Washington, also added a large supply of running shoes and jerseys.

A special thanks goes to Bertsch Moving and Storage and Furniture Share who have, over this two-year period, stored the above collections and also helped in loading the container for shipment. But beyond all expectations, the Corvallis Sister Cities Association-Gondar wishes to honor our dedicated member, Ray William, for planning, persisting against all odds, and directing this project to its completion.

A work-study travel package is now being planned for fall 2016. To learn more, contact Maxine at 541-760-5588.

Robel Tadesse

Corvallis Sister Cities Association-Gondar

To send Good Words

Items for the Good Words column are published to recognize good deeds and charitable events. No promotions or advertising, please. Include the senders name, address and a daytime telephone number for verification or in case of questions.

Good Words items can be up to 150 words or generally will be edited to that length. We prefer that they be sent electronically to opinion@gtconnect.com, but also can be mailed to the Gazette-Times, attention Good Words, P.O. Box 368, Corvallis, OR 97339-0368. Written copies can be dropped off between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. at our office at 1837 N.W. Circle Blvd. Please label them Good Words.

Good Words are published Saturday on a space-available basis, generally in the order in which they are received.
Demonstration in Bonn : Kurds protest Erdogan regime in the inner city

Bonn The German-Kurdish cultural house led an annual demonstration in front of the Frankenbad in Bonn. This year, the overarching theme was Friday nights attempted military coup in Turkey.

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On Saturday afternoon members of the German-Kurdish cultural house took to the streets of the Bonn inner city to protest the current political events in Turkey. The demonstration was supposed to venture throughout Bonn, but instead came to a halt in front of the Frankenbad. The chair of the cultural house, Mehmet Emin Senocak, said that only 80 of the expected 200 participants were present, most likely due to anxieties surrounding the attempted military coup or because people were on vacation or had to work.

At the beginning of the demonstration at 5 p.m., there was a moment of silence for Kurds killed in their fight for freedom, followed by speeches in Turkish and German. As in the past, the protest was peaceful, with no opposition to the German-Kurdish cultural house on hand. Communication with the police and other public authorities was pleasant and without complications, as in years previous. The overarching theme was the role of ISIS as related to the last two terrorist attacks and the dictatorial regime of Erdogan. We have nothing against Turkish people in general, we are just very dissatisfied with the system in place there, said Senocak to the GA.

Some believe the attempted coup made little progress and created new problems instead. One participant at the demonstration stressed that taking care of the people was most important, and that other countries should position themselves around the population. Felix, a 17-year-old of the Bonn Youth Movement helped moderate the event in German, while another spoke in Turkish. Many Kurds who have lived in Germany for a longer amount of time are homesick, but cannot return to their broken homeland. What the attempted coup has shown is that not everyone in Turkey stands behind Erdogan.
NICE, July 16, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Flowers offered to the victims of the terrorist attack of Promenade des Anglais are seen on a bench at seaside in Nice, France, July 16, 2016. The Islamic State (IS)-linked news agency Amaq claimed responsibility for the attack in Nice on Thursday that killed 84 people, reported French media. (Xinhua/Xu Jinquan).

The Islamic State (IS)-linked news agency Amaq claimed responsibility for the attack in Nice, reported French media.

Four men have been arrested by Saturday over the terrorist attack in Nice that killed at least 84 people.

Among the four men linked to the killer, one was arrested Friday and three others on Saturday morning. The driver's ex-wife has also been arrested.

At around 10:30 p.m. (2030 GMT) on Thursday, 31-year-old French citizen of Tunisian origin Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a truck into a crowd celebrating the French national day in the southern city of Nice. At least 84 people were killed.
CAIRO, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The word "fire" was heard on the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of crashed EgyptAir flight MS804, the Egyptian Aircraft Accident Investigation Committee reported Saturday after data analysis.

The report said the CVR's recording before the occurrence of the accident mentioned a "fire," but it is still too early to determine the reason or the place where that fire occurred.

EgyptAir Flight MS804, an Airbus A320, went missing from radar screens on May 19 en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French.

The Egyptian military later announced personal belongings of victims and small pieces of the plane wreckage found in the Mediterranean Sea 290 km north of the coastal city of Alexandria, Egypt.

The committee said in Saturday's statement that it had studied a large number of data of the CVR and the flight data recorder (FDR) and synchronized between the two, noting the data analysis process still continues.

"Additional work on the CVR, the FDR and the recovered debris is continuing," the committee said.

The committee said that French vessel Lethbridge John, which was hired by the Egyptian government to locate and pick up debris and body remains, arrived Saturday at Alexandria seaport after its mission is accomplished.

The vessel managed in June to find and pick up the doomed flight's CVR and the FDR that were later taken for repairs in Pairs and then returned to Cairo.

Probe into the tragic fall of EgyptAir Flight MS804 still continues with all theories on the table, including a terrorist bomb and a severe technical failure, yet without a strong clue for any.
ENTEBBE, Uganda, July 16 (Xinhua) -- China on Saturday evacuated some of its embassy staff and some citizens trapped in the recent fighting in South Sudanese capital, Juba.

Major General Su Guanghui, acting director of the Peacekeeping Affairs Office of the Chinese Defense Ministry, and his delegation who arrived Saturday morning in Juba evacuated 17 embassy staff, 12 members of the Chinese medical team and 20 people from Chinese companies.

The relieved team from the conflict-hit country aboard a special plane organized by the authorities in Beijing was received by Chinese Ambassador to Uganda Zhao Yali at Entebbe International Airport, about 40 kilometers south of the capital Kampala, on their way home.

"I felt proud, relieved and safe when I boarded the special plane organized by the Chinese government. I thank our government for organizing and sending this plane to evacuate us," Jiang Feiyun, deputy leader of the Chinese medical team in Juba, told Xinhua in Entebbe.

The evacuation is part of the emergency measures the Chinese government is taking to protect its citizens in the recent fighting between government troops of President Salva Kiir and forces loyal to Vice President Riek Machar in Juba.

Two Chinese peacekeepers under the UN Mission in South Sudan were killed and four others injured on last Sunday evening as the fighting between government and anti-government forces continued.

The two seriously injured peacekeepers, Chen Ying and Huo Yahui, were on Saturday afternoon airlifted to Beijing aboard a specialist medical rescue plane sent by the Chinese military for specialized treatment and operations.
U.S., Coalition Continue Strikes Against ISIL in Syria, Iraq

From a Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve News Release

SOUTHWEST ASIA, July 16, 2016  U.S. and coalition military forces continued to attack Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists in Syria and Iraq yesterday, Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve officials reported today.

Officials reported details of yesterday's strikes, noting that assessments of results are based on initial reports.

Strikes in Syria

Bomber, attack, fighter and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 13 strikes in Syria:

-- Near Raqqah, two strikes struck two ISIL oil pumpjacks.

-- Near Manbij, nine strikes struck eight separate ISIL tactical units and destroyed 14 ISIL fighting positions and two ISIL vehicles.

-- Near Mara, two strikes destroyed three ISIL mortar systems.

Strikes in Iraq

Attack helicopter and bomber, ground-attack, fighter, and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 10 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:

-- Near Baghdadi, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL assembly area.

-- Near Habbaniyah, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL fighting position, an ISIL bunker and an ISIL vehicle-borne bomb.

-- Near Mosul, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle.

-- Near Qayyarah, two strikes destroyed 21 ISIL boats and suppressed two ISIL mortar positions.

-- Near Ramadi, a strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL staging area.

-- Near Sinjar, a strike suppressed an ISIL mortar position.

-- Near Sultan Abdallah, a strike suppressed an ISIL mortar position.

-- Near Tal Afar, two strikes struck an ISIL vehicle-borne-bomb factory and damaged an ISIL excavator.

Task force officials define a strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect. Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target. Ground-based artillery fired in counterfire or in fire support to maneuver roles is not classified as a strike.

Part of Operation Inherent Resolve

The strikes were conducted as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, the operation to eliminate the ISIL terrorist group and the threat it poses to Iraq, Syria, the region and the wider international community. The destruction of ISIL targets in Syria and Iraq further limits the terrorist group's ability to project terror and conduct operations, officials said.

Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Iraq include the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Jordan, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Coalition nations that have conducted strikes in Syria include the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Jordan, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

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Saudi air raids, shelling kill 19 Yemeni civilians

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 5:6PM

Fresh Saudi airstrikes and artillery shelling have killed at least 19 civilians, including women and children, in different parts of Yemen, local media reports say.

Yemen's al-Masirah TV reported on Saturday that at least 10 civilians lost their lives after Saudi fighter jets struck a residential area in Nihm district of the capital, Sana'a.

Separately, the Saudi artillery fire struck a residential area in Sabr district of the southwestern province of Ta'izz, resulting in the deaths of nine civilians.

The developments came one day after at least five people, among them women and children, were killed and a dozen others wounded when Saudi warplanes struck a vehicle travelling along a road in the Harib al-Qaramish district of Yemen's central province of Ma'rib.

Saudi Arabia launched its military aggression against Yemen on March 26, 2015 in a bid to reinstate the resigned Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh, and defeat the Houthi Ansarullah movement.

More than 9,400 people have been killed and at least 16,000 others sustained injuries since the onset of the aggression.

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US military boosts security to 'highest level' at bases in Turkey

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 3:53PM

The US military increased security at bases it uses across Turkey to the highest level during a coup attempt against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

US force protection was elevated to level "Delta" on Friday night, which is used when there is a terrorist attack, a Pentagon official told the Washington Post on condition of anonymity.

The official, however, said the US military has not received any request from the State Department to reinforce its diplomatic facilities in Turkey, including the embassy in Ankara and consulates in Istanbul and Adana.

Late on Friday night, a faction of the armed forces used tanks and attack helicopters in an ill-fated attempt to seize power from President Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

Erdogan and Yildirim, however, appeared on television soon after the coup was launched, declaring an early end to the attempt. At least 160 people were killed in the violence, including many civilians.

The coup attempt raised questions about whether it would have an impact on the ongoing US military campaign in Iraq and Syria.

The Pentagon has increasingly relied on Turkish military bases as launch points for operations against purported Daesh (ISIL) positions.

In particular, the joint US-Turkish Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, which houses about 1,500 American troops and personnel, plays a direct role in the military offensive.

"As of this time, there has been no impact to Incirlik Air Base and counter-ISIL air operations from Incirlik continue," a senior defense official said in a statement.

Turkey has long been the key point of transit for Daesh militants moving in and out of Syria. It is also accused of helping militant groups fighting the Syrian government.

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Nearly 150,000 Afghans displaced in first six months of 2016: UN

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 9:23AM

The United Nations (UN) says nearly 150,000 Afghan residents were displaced from their homes in the first six month of 2016 as a result of violence in Afghanistan.

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said many of those displaced were farmers, who missed critical sowing and harvest times.

The UN report said the northern province of Baghlan was among the worst-hit areas by the nationwide conflict that is still affecting at least 29 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces.

According to the report, armed clashes in Baghlan, Kunduz and Badakhshan in recent months have left hundreds of families homeless.

The crisis has also put the livelihood of affected locals at risk and further deteriorated food insecurity across Afghanistan.

The latest figures show that the number of the internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the country has surpassed the one million mark this year.

Afghanistan's Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation has not yet commented on the UN report.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed serious concern last month about a rise in recruitment and killing of children in conflict-hit countries across the globe in 2015 while releasing an annual report on the issue.

According to the report, Afghanistan recorded the highest number of child casualties in 2015 since the UN began documenting civilian deaths and injuries in 2009.

This comes as a large number of civilians, including children, have been killed in the US-led airstrikes across various parts of Afghanistan over the past years.

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Ghani orders anti-Daesh operation in Nangarhar

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 8:46AM

Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani has ordered the country's National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) to launch a major operation against Daesh-linked terrorists in an eastern province.

Ghani announced the order during a Friday speech before the Afghan military forces in a visit to Nangarhar Province, which has witnessed an increasing Daesh presence in recent months.

He added that the key objective of the ANDSF operation is the eradication of Daesh loyalists in the area.

He further said the main focus of the annual Shafaq military offensive, which he said is currently underway across the war-ravaged nation, would be Nangarhar from next week.

The difficult days of Afghanistan have passed, said Ghani, cautioning, however, that enemies are still plotting against the nation.

During his tour of the province, Ghani also visited the residents of war-torn Kot District and commended their resistance against the Takfiri terrorist elements.

The remarks by the Afghan president come as the Daesh-linked militants have been making efforts to expand their foothold across Afghanistan.

Nangarhar, which borders Pakistan, has been the main area where Daesh has managed to carry out high-profile attacks.

Daesh has reportedly managed to establish connections with the Taliban's splinter groups, especially those believed to be discontent with changes in the militant group's leadership.

The Takfiri group has also enjoyed defections from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan remains gripped by insecurity 15 years after a massive US-led military invasion of the country as part of Washington's so-called war on terror.

The war removed the Taliban from power, but terror and instability is still rampant in the Asian nation despite the presence of thousands of foreign troops.

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Yemeni Houthi Rebels Attack Saudi Arabian Base With Ballistic Missile

Sputnik News

18:14 16.07.2016(updated 18:17 16.07.2016)

Houthi rebels in Yemen fired a ballistic missile at a military base in the south of neighboring Saudi Arabia, local media reported Saturday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  According to the Al Masirah broadcaster, the rebels said that the attack was a response to the continued shelling of different areas in Yemen by the Saudi Air Force. It was noted that the missile has accurately hit the target, yet no data on casualties or damage was released.

Yemen has been engulfed in a military conflict between the government headed by Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and Houthi rebels, the country's main opposition force. The Houthis are backed by army units loyal to former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Since March 2015, the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Persian Gulf countries have been carrying out airstrikes against the Houthis at Hadi's request despite a ceasefire agreed in April.

On Thursday, media reported that the talks between Yemen's Houthi rebels and the government delegation will reconvene in Kuwait on July 16. In late June, UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmad announced that the UN-brokered talks to end the Yemeni conflict, which started in Kuwait on April 21, were suspended and would resume in July.

 Sputnik

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US Federal Court Rejects Lower Court's Ruling for Navy's Sonar Use

by VOA News July 16, 2016

A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that a lower court was wrong to allow the Navy to use sonar that could harm whales and other marine life in the world's oceans.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco Friday rejected the lower court's 2012 decision that gave the Navy permission to use low-frequency sonar during peacetime maneuvers in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean Sea.

Sonar is used to detect submarines, but can harm whales, seals, dolphins, walruses and other marine life, including disrupting their mating and feeding habits.

The rules of the 2012 decision were adopted by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which allowed the Navy to turn off or delay sonar if a marine animal was detected near a Navy ship.

The appellate court ruled the lower court's decision failed to adhere to the standards set in the Marine Mammal Protection Act that requires peacetime programs to have "the least practicable adverse impact on marine mammals."

The court's decision says the fisheries service "did not give adequate protection to areas of the world's oceans flagged to its own experts as biologically important."

The decision said "The result is that a meaningful proportion of the world's marine mammal habitat is under-protected."

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NANJING, July 13 -- When Japanese explorer Takeji Miyoshi's expedition dropped anchor near a small island in the South China Sea on Aug. 19, 1933, they were received by three Chinese fishermen.

Takeji's diary entry stated that the fishermen had built houses on Beizi (Northeast Cay), one of the Nansha Islands, which are also known as the Spratly chain. The fishermen offered to show the crew around the island.

Following this first interaction with Chinese residents, Takeji Miyoshi discovered it was not a chance meeting, as he explored the area he found that many of the other islands were home to groups of Chinese fishermen.

He wrote that a large number of fishermen from Hainan had relocated to the small islands in the South China Sea. His team kept detailed records on the daily lives of the fishermen, who called these islands home. Their archives include information on agriculture cultivation and a birth register.

Hu Zhuoran, a member of the Modern History Association in east China's Jiangsu Province, has been researching Miyoshi's documents.

He said that the Japanese had collected lots of details on Chinese inhabitants of the Nansha Islands.

"The archives show that Chinese actually lived on and explored the islands. They were settled," Hu said.

The central government on Tuesday refused to recognize an tribunal award issued on the South China Sea, which denied China's territorial sovereignty on the sea.

The award by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague stated that all of the "features" in the Spratly chain mean the islands are legally "rocks."

The Philippines sought the arbitration from the tribunal on several issues related to its territorial disputes with China.

The Spratly chain is known as the Nansha Islands to China.

The Japanese explorer, in his ledger, said that his expedition team saw anti-Japanese posters across the island of Zhongye.

The posters were related to the Japanese invasion of northeast China in 1931.

Hu Dekun, head of the China Institute of Boundary and Ocean Studies with the Wuhan University, said that records show that in 1939, Japan occupied all of the Xisha and Nansha islands.

After the World War II, China recovered its sovereignty and jurisdiction over the islands in compliance of the Cairo Declaration, which states that "the territories stolen by Japan from China should be returned to China."

In 1948, an official Chinese map of the South China Sea was released to the International Community. None of the countries in the sea area objected to China's nine-dashed line demarcation.

Hu pointed out that before the Philippines gained independence in 1946, America had not recognized Nansha Islands as Philippine territory.

In 1970s, the Philippines illegally occupied the islands. As a smoke screen, it described the largest island, Taiping Island, as a "rock", in a rejection of China's sovereignty over the island and its surrounding waters.

The "rock," however, had six freshwater wells and lush vegetation when China recovered it from Japan.

According to Japanese archives, during its occupation of Taiping Island, Japanese mined phosphate, and it was home to over 600 people.

Hu said there was plenty of evidence showing the Nansha Islands and its adjacent waters to be Chinese territory. The Chinese people were the first to name and develop the islands and it was the Chinese government that first asserted sovereignty over them.
Captain Renault: Round up the usual suspects.

Casablanca (1942)

July 2016 - Coup / Mutiny - Now What ?

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wasted little time before launching a purge of his enemies. The conflict between Erdogan and Gulen is a conflict between two flavors of Sufi Islam. Erdogan represents a more traditional "tarikat" - the Naksibendis - which emphasized Sunni orthodoxy and discouraged heterodox innovative practices and groups. Fethullah Gulen leads a Cemaat, a more recent phenomenon, emerging in the 19th century, with far less emphasis on ceremony than tarikats, and lacking the sheikh-disciple relationship that is central to tarikats.

The Great Purge

Erdogan promised on his arrival at Istanbul Ataturk Airport to punish the coup plotters who had tried to kill him. They will pay a heavy price for this, said Erdogan. This uprising is a gift from God to us, because this will be a reason to cleanse our army, the president told supporters at the airport. Few regional analysts doubt that he would use the failed coup to strengthen his presidential powers and to cleanse not only the military but other institutions suspected of harboring opponents.

Addressing his supporters in Istanbul, Erdogan called on the US to either arrest or extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric who he accuses of being behind the coup attempt. He told the crowd: "The army is ours, not that of the parallel structure [behind the coup]. I am chief commander." Erdogan frequently referred to "masterminds" who he says were bent on breaking up Turkey, in what appeared a veiled reference to the West in general, and more specifically, the United States. Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu accused Washington of being behind the coup attempt.

Erdogan said : From members of the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors to those in the Constitutional Court, people are being dismissed and arrested. Is that enough? No, it is not. This had to happen, but it is not enough.

An attack 17 July 2016 by Erdogan supporters on members of the Alevi religious minority in Malatya, in eastern Turkey, raised fear among rights activists, dissidents, Kurds and religious minorities of widening polarization after the failed coup. News reports said pro-Erdogan demonstrators in Malatya also attacked a Protestant church and a Catholic church in the northern Black Sea city of Trabzon.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted the country's armed forces and National Intelligence Organization to be brought under the presidency's control in the wake of the failed coup of 15 July 2016. The remarks came after Erdogan was cited as saying by television news channels that the move would require a constitutional change and support by major opposition parties. The developments came as a meeting of Turkey's Supreme Military Council (YAS), the highest body responsible for appointments in the armed forces, was expected to agree on a sweeping overhaul of the armed forces.

The Turkish government ordered by decree the dismissal of 149 generals and admirals, 40 per cent of military personnel in that rank, as the Supreme Military Council convened to elect replacements. Turkish news agency Anadolu said that the recent orders aimed to dismiss soldiers who were members of, or have links to "the Fetullah Gulen terrorist organisation." The total number of Turkish military personnel dismissed from their post topped 1684; the majority from the Turkish Army, including 87 generals, 726 officers and 256 sub-officers expelled from duty. Furthermore, 32 admirals as well as 122 officers and sub-officers were ordered to relinquish their posts in the Navy as well as 30 generals and 431 other personnel who were dismissed from the Turkish Air Force.

Turkish authorities suspended nearly 8,000 police officers in the wake of the failed military coup attempt, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported on 18 July 2016, citing the Interior Ministry. More than 7,500 people, including members of judiciary and military, had been detained in sweeps across the country in connection with the July 15 coup attempt. Turkish authorities also removed dozens of governors of towns, state media reported as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to continue the cleansing.

Erdogan has promised to rid Turkey of people involved in the coup attempt. "At every level of government, the period of cleaning this virus will continue," said Erdogan. "Like the cancer virus, it spreads all around the government." Turkeys state-run Anadolu Agency reported 19 July 2016 that courts had ordered 85 generals and admirals jailed pending trial over their roles in a failed coup attempt. Dozens of others were still being questioned. The arrested included former air force commander Gen. Akin Ozturk, alleged to be the ringleader of the July 15 uprising, and Gen. Adem Hududi, commander of Turkeys 2nd Army, charged with countering threats to Turkey from Syria, Iran and Iraq.

State media said 18 July 2016 that about 14,000 people had been suspended from their government positions or detained on suspicion of being involved in the coup, including members of the judiciary, police officers, high-ranking officials, members of the military, and at least 100 generals and admirals.

By 19 July 2016 authorities had suspended or detained close to 35,000 soldiers, police and judges since the coup bid on 15 July 2016. By 20 July 2016 around 50,000 soldiers, police, judges, civil servants and teachers had been suspended or detained since the coup attempt. By the next day, nearly 70,000 government or military employees were affected in total, including close to 10,000 arrests. The list of those to be eliminated was based on information provided by people close to or obedient to the AKP. The government seized the opportunity and put it into action.

Turkish authorities on 19 July 2016 fired tens of thousands of employees from the education and interiors ministries and shut down media outlets deemed to be supportive of a US-based cleric accused of plotting the coup bid. In rapid-fire reports, Turkish media announced that the Ministry of Education had axed 15,200 personnel and Turkey's Board of Higher Education had requested the resignations of more than 1,000 university deans. The Interior Ministry announced more than 8,777 employees had been fired. In addition, 257 people working at the office of the prime minister were dismissed and the Directorate of Religious Affairs announced it had sacked 492 staff including clerics, preachers and religious teachers.

By 20 July 2016 some 29,000 government employees had been suspended, including more than 6,300 soldiers and 3,000 members of the judiciary. Over 21,000 teachers at private institutions had their licenses revoked. The Higher Education Board ordered all 1,577 university deans at state and private institutitions to resign as part of a crackdown following the failed coup, banned academics from leaving for work trips abroad, and urged those overseas to return home "within the shortest possible time". The Interior Ministry dismissed nearly 9,000 workers. Another 1,500 in the Finance Ministry were fired, as were hundreds more in the religious affairs directorate, the family and social policy ministry and prime minister's office. The National Intelligence Organization suspended 100 staff from their duties, a senior Turkish official said. Most of those fired were not active agents.

On 20 July 2016 Turkey formally charged 99 generals and admirals in connection with the weekend's thwarted coup attempt - just under a third of the country's 356 top military officers.

By 15 August 2016 Erdogans government had purged some 82,000 people from government positions and detained 26,000 people accused of being Gulenists. On 17 August 2016 Turkey was set to release 38,000 prisoners in an apparent move to make space for thousands of people arrested after the coup, as more putsch-related dismissals and arrests were taking place. Nearly 20,000 people had been arrested since last months coup attempt. By the end of October 2016 more than 100,000 people had been sacked or suspended and 37,000 arrested over the coure of three and a half months. A further 10,000 civil servants were dismissed and 15 more media outlets ordered closed on on 30 October 2016 over suspected links to Gulen's network and militant groups.

The Turkish Education Ministry was set to close over 1,600 private education institutions allegedly linked to the outlawed Gulen movement, the Hurriyet Daily News reported 22 July 2016. Legal action has been taken against 936 private schools, 449 student dormitories and 284 private institutions. Work permits for some 27,157 personnel have been rescinded by the ministry and they have been barred from working at other private schools.

Turkish lawmakers 21 July 2016 approved President Erdogan's call for a three-month state of emergency in a move that paved the way for further purging of his opponents after a coup attempt Friday failed to topple him and his government. The state of emergency will be in place for a period of three months, Erdogan announced in a televised address 20 July 2016 that followed marathon meetings, first with his national security council and later with his cabinet. Erdogan said the state of emergencys purpose is to be able to take the most efficient steps to return to democracy and rule of law. The Turkish leader said the armed forces would not take control of the country during this time. Turkey suspended parts of the European Convention on Human Rights under the state of emergency, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said. A far-reaching state of emergency like this one has never been declared on nationwide level before. Martial law was imposed across the country for three years following a successful military coup in 1980, which saw stricter controls on individuals' movements.

The first state of emergency decree ordered the closure of 1,043 private schools, 1,229 charities and foundations, 19 trade unions, 15 universities and 35 medical institutions over suspected links to cleric Fethullah Gulen.

On 12 November 2016 Turkey suspended the activities of 370 civic groups, including women's and children's rights organizations, as the Ankara government continues its roundup of individuals and groupings with alleged ties to a failed coup attempt four months earlier. The civic groups learned about the government move when police in Istanbul began raiding their offices and seizing files. Lawyers at several community-based legal organizations told The Associated Press the police gave no explanation for the action. The head of a children's rights organization also said authorities provided no information. Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus on Saturday defended the crackdown and said it was justified under state-of-emergency regulations in effect since July. He said there was "strong evidence" linking the suspended organizations to alleged terrorist networks.

An Interior Ministry statement said 153 suspended associations were suspected of links to U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey accused of playing a central role in the July 15 failed coup attempt. Another 190 were said to have ties to the outlawed Kurdish militant group known as the PKK, and the remaining suspensions targeted groups with alleged ties to either a far-left militant group or to Islamic State extremists.

More than 100,000 people, including academics and journalists, had been removed from their jobs since government forces crushed the coup attempt days after it was launched. More than 35,000 others, including military officers and opposition politicians, had been arrested for suspected ties to Gulen, who denied any involvement in the plot.

The Turkish government eliminated about 15,000 employees from the military, police and the civil service on 22 November 2016 as part of an investigation into the failed coup attempt. The government also closed more than 500 institutions, nine news outlet, and 19 health establishments. Authorities had arrested at least 36,000 people and removed more than 100,000 others from government jobs. We know that the state is not fully cleared of this treacherous gang. They are still within the armed forces. They are still within the police. They are still within the judiciary and they are still within the various sections of the state," Erdogan said. We won't allow them to destroy this country nor to crush the people. We will do whatever is necessary, he added.

Since the July 2016 failed coup, the military had been hit by a succession of major purges within its ranks. According to figures published by Anadolu, 151 of the 358 generals and admirals in the Turkish Armed Forces remained in police custody. Turkey's top military council promoted 99 colonels to the rank of general or admiral. Nearly half its senior commanders had been arrested or dismissed, while its army special forces and air force have been hit especially hard. Over 300 of its 600 combat pilots have been arrested or dismissed.

The Supreme Measure of Social Defense

Adding to fears that the governments reaction to the coup would match Erdogans threats and his record of ruthlessness, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the government was considering legal changes to bring the death penalty back to make sure this does not happen again.

Speaking 17 July 2016 to people who called for the death penalty outside his home in Istanbul, Erdogan said the use of capital punishment cannot be delayed, saying "We cannot ignore this demand." His speech was punctuated by frequent calls of "we want the death penalty" from the large crowd, to which Erdogan responded: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get." Erdogan said he would discuss it with opposition parties but that "We will not delay this decision for long. Because those who attempt a coup in this country must pay."

No judicial executions had taken place Turkey since left-wing militant Hidir Aslan was hanged on Oct 25, 1984 in the wake of the 1980 military coup. Capital punishment was legally abolished in 2004 as part of Turkey's bid to join the European Union. Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz said the reintroduction of the death penalty would be "absolutely unacceptable" in an interview with state media ahead of his meeting with his European counterparts.

There are deaths worse than death for the plotters of the July 15 coup attempt compared to death penalty, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 16 August 2016. The death penalty is a one-time death, but there are deaths worse than death for the coup plotters. That is an objective and fair judgement, Yildirim said , adding that they would not act with the feeling of revenge.

International Reaction

Former US ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, told VOA he was very concerned Erdogan might use the attempted coup as a pretext for becoming more authoritarian than he has been. "Erdogan, who has already shown some very strong anti-democratic tendencies before the coup, will use the coup plot and the attempt of the generals to take power as a justification for cracking down on society even more. And I think we may see a more restrictive environment for Turkey  less press freedom, less political openness".

"We firmly urge the government of Turkey to maintain calm and stability throughout the country," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on 18 July 2016. "We also urge the government of Turkey to uphold the highest standards of respect for the nation's democratic institutions and the rule of law. We will certainly support bringing the perpetrators of the coup to justice but we also caution against a reach that goes well beyond that," Kerry said, speaking in Brussels after meeting with EU counterparts.

At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest stressed U.S. support for Turkey's "democratically elected" government and said Washington strongly values "the important relationship" with its NATO ally. But he said the government should be supportive of due process and freedoms that are outlined in the Turkish constitution that include freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of assembly.

More than 250 people were killed in the attempt as rogue soldiers commandeered warplanes, helicopters and tanks in a bid to take control of key state institutions. Turkey declared a state of emergency after the failed coup and carried out a large-scale crackdown which alarmed Ankaras Western allies. Some 292,000 people have been detained over alleged links to Gulen, nearly 100,000 of them jailed pending trial, Anadolu cited interior minister Suleyman Soylu as saying. Some 150,000 civil servants were sacked or suspended after the coup, with some 20,000 expelled from the military. Courts have handed down more than 2,500 life sentences.

On 26 November 2020 a Turkish court jailed 337 former pilots and other suspects for life over plot to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a failed coup attempt four years earlier. Nearly 500 defendants were accused of carrying out the attempt to overthrow the government on July 15, 2016, from an airbase near the capital Ankara. The trial was the highest-profile of dozens of court cases targeting thousands of people accused of involvement in the coup attempt, which Ankara blamed on the supporters of the United States-based Muslim preacher and businessman, Fethullah Gulen. A total of 475 defendants were on trial, 365 of them in custody. Out of the 337 life sentences given, 291 were aggravated life sentences  the most severe punishment in Turkish courts  meaning there is no possibility of parole,





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Daesh claims fatal attack in France's Nice

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 9:51AM

The Takfiri Daesh terrorist group has claimed responsibility for a deadly attack in France's southeastern city of Nice during the country's national holiday, Bastille Day.

Amaq, a news outlet affiliated to Daesh, said in a statement via its Telegram account on Saturday that the person behind the assault was a member of the terror group.

"He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the [US-led] coalition" allegedly fighting Daesh, the statement read.

On Thursday night, a truck driver ploughed through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, killing 84 people and wounding 200 others.

The assailant, who was later shot dead by police, was identified as 31-year-old Franco-Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.

The attacker's father said he had suffered from "a nervous breakdown."

"From 2002 to 2004, he had problems that caused a nervous breakdown. He would become angry and he shouted... he would break anything he saw in front of him," Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej-Bouhlel said in Tunisia.

President Francois Hollande described the attack as being of an "undeniable terrorist nature," adding that 50 of those injured in the attack are in critical condition.

Arrests over Nice massacre

In another development on Saturday, the Paris prosecutor's office said five people were taken into custody over the Nice carnage.

The identities of those arrested were not clear, but residents in the Nice neighborhood, where Bouhlel used to live, said his estranged wife had been taken away by police on Friday.

The arrests come as Hollande met with the head of the armed forces and ministers after calling a meeting of his top security advisors in the capital, Paris.

Also on Saturday a jazz festival, which was scheduled to be held in Nice between July 16 and July 20, was cancelled.

France is observing three days of national mourning in homage to the victims of the deadly Nice rampage.

The European country has been in a state of emergency since last November, when assailants struck at least six different venues in and around Paris, leaving 130 people dead and over 350 others injured. Daesh claimed responsibility for the horrendous assaults.

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Islamic State Claims Responsibility For French Truck Attack

July 16, 2016

by RFE/RL

The Islamic State (IS) terrorist group has claimed on social media that one of its "soldiers" carried out the truck attack in Nice, France, that left 84 dead and more than 200 injured.

The July 16 statement was reported by a news service that is affiliated with IS.

The statement said the July 14 attack came "in response to call to target nations of coalition states that are fighting [IS]."

Terrorism experts cautioned that the statement did not necessarily point to a formal link between IS and the Nice attack.

Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, drove a heavy truck through a crowd of people marking Bastille Day in the resort city. He was shot dead by police during the incident.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said France has no evidence that Bouhlel had ties to IS. He was not previously known to French intelligence agencies.

"It seems that he was radicalized very quickly -- in any case, these are the elements that have come up from the testimony of the people around him," Cazeneuve told journalists in Paris.

Police said on July 16 that they have detained five people in connection with the incident, including Bouhlel's estranged wife.

Bouhlel's father told French television his son was not religious and did not attend any mosque. He said Bouhlel drank alcohol and "even took drugs."

France has begun a three-day period of national mourning.

President Francois Hollande canceled a planned trip to Central European countries next week in order to oversee the security situation.

Hollande's spokesman, Sephane Le Foll, said "we must recall the unity and cohesion of this country" in the face of efforts to divide it.

The Nice incident was the third major attack in France in 19 months, a spate that includes the shootings at the office of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in January 2015 and coordinated attacks around the capital in November 2015.

With reporting by AFP, AP, and Reuters

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/islamic-state-french -attack-nice-responsibility/27861938.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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The 'Caliphate' At 2

July 16, 2016

by Kyle Orton

The extremist group now known as Islamic State (IS) first claimed statehood, with clear pretentions to a new caliphate, in 2006 -- and eight years later made it explicit.

"Now the dream has become a reality," Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) said in his speech on June 29, 2014, declaring that the territory IS held in Syria and Iraq constituted the rebirth of the caliphate. "The State will remain."

Two years later, this looks like an unsafe proposition.

After IS openly seized control of territory in northern and central Iraq, adding it to their Syrian domains, in the summer of 2014, it controlled an area roughly the size of Great Britain. Since then, IS has lost about half the territory it held in Iraq and about one-fifth in Syria -- and a further one-tenth overall in the first half of this year. Operation Inherent Resolve managed to hold IS out of Kobani in late 2014 but then in early 2015 suffered a setback: After IS was driven out of Tikrit, the extremist group took over Ramadi and Palmyra. Since then, though, progress against IS has been steady.

In June 2015, IS lost Tel Abyad, due north of Raqqa on the border between Syria and Turkey, and with it one of its main access points to the outside world. Iraq's Sinjar Province was finally cleared in November 2015. Large parts of Ramadi were recaptured from the militants in December 2015. IS lost Shadadi (east of Raqqa) in February 2016, Palmyra (central Syria) was retaken in March, and Fallujah (west of Baghdad) in June. In northern Syria, IS-held Manbij is completely surrounded and its fall will precipitate the collapse of IS's position in Aleppo Province, closing off its access to Turkey. And in Iraq, the removal of IS from its last important urban center in Saladin Province, Shirqat -- a development that will further open the road to Mosul -- is only a matter of time, Meanwhile, IS has come under tremendous pressure in Sirte, its de facto capital in Libya.

What reason, then, to call the military campaign against IS anything but a success?

One reason is that IS has actually been making (modest) gains even as the net result is a loss of territory. While IS is losing its access to the Turkish border via Manbij and soon al-Bab, it is -- albeit in a very fluid situation -- gaining territory around Azaz, another border town. In southern Syria, IS has pulled off the remarkable feat of growing an organic wing of the organization, partly playing off the U.S.-led coalition's foolish decision to stop the rebels in the area fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces and to redirect them against the Jihadi-Salafists. This left the rebels vulnerable to charges of being hirelings of foreigners who have betrayed the revolution, and opened the space for the jihadis to position themselves as the banner-carriers of the anti-Assad struggle. And in the mixed Iraqi province of Diyala, from which IS was expelled in early 2015, IS has shown greater activity recently -- not coincidentally after a spate of atrocities by the radically sectarian Shi'ite militias controlled by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

More broadly, IS has adapted to its new environment -- with lethal consequences far outside Iraq and Syria. Falaha effectively conceded in both the IS newsletter al-Naba and a major speech in May that the demise of IS's statelet is approaching. The organization is therefore switching back to insurgent and terrorist tactics. The car bombings in the shopping district in Karrada, Baghdad, on July 3 -- which killed 300 people, the second-worst atrocity IS has conducted on Iraqi soil since it arrived in 2002 -- foreshadowed this. So did attacks in Tartus City and Jableh on May 23. IS has nearly doubled the rate at which it employs suicide bombers in the last six months, averaging about three per day.

The reversion to insurgency underlines the question of how IS views territorial control. Doubtless IS ultimately intends to create an Islamist imperium, but it is not operating as if it believes now is the moment it can forge a durable state.

A study released as IS fell back in Tikrit noted that, while IS "holds out until the last possible moment" in the cities, it "seems more focused on actively defending the rural zones in which urban areas are located. In many cases, the urban center may be the part of the defended zone allocated the smallest proportion of available Islamic State forces."

"The jihadists fight as if they were pirates, with the desert being their sea," Nibras Kazimi has written. "They treat the cities and towns they have captured as ports of call, for booty and resupply. When challenged by superior forces attempting to retake these ports, the jihadists dissolve away into the desert, leaving small and determined bands of fighters to deflect and bleed out the invading force."

IS's strategic thinking is deeply shaped by the work of Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim (Abu Bakr Naji), the author of the infamous Management Of Savagery, and Mustafa Nasar (Abu Musab al-Suri), whom they personally revile. Both stress exhausting the jihadists' foes.

"Were we defeated when we lost the cities in Iraq and were in the desert without any city or land?" Falaha asked in May. "And would we be defeated and you be victorious if you were to take Mosul or Sirte or Raqqa or even take all the cities and we were to return to our initial condition? Certainly not!" IS sees this war as cyclical and attritional, and it sees its enemies' will fading. Last time around, there were tens of thousands of Western soldiers on the ground. This time there are only special forces and air strikes. Next time there will be even less, IS predicts.

It is not to deny that IS is heading into a period of hardship: Its leadership has been dented, the flow of foreign volunteers has been restricted, and less territory means fewer people to be taxed. It is to say that, given IS's strategic vision and proven capacity to adjust to conditions in pursuit of it, territorial control per se is not only not the defining metric of the progress of the war, but the focus on it at the expense of all else is dangerous.

The caliphate is the "driving" force behind IS's recruitment, the U.S. representative to the anti-IS coalition, Brett McGurk, recently said. "So we have to shrink the core". Less than a week later, CIA Director John Brennan said, "Despite all our progress against [IS] on the battlefield  our efforts have not reduced the group's terrorism capability and global reach." The answer to the discrepancy in the two statement lies in the nature of IS's territorial losses.

In Syria, IS's losses are largely to ground forces dominated by the local branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), and in Iraq to IRGC-run militias -- both of which are regarded as illegitimate by the local populations in areas from which IS has been displaced. The PKK clearly intends to use its U.S.-backed campaign in Aleppo to link its cantons in the east of the country to Efrin, encompassing much territory where the inhabitants do not wish to be part of a Kurdish nationalist project. The support to the IRGC-controlled militias is especially toxic given the recent record of the United States and especially in tandem with U.S. overtures to Russia, solidifying the perception in the region that the United States has sided with the Iranian axis against the Sunnis. In the medium term, this has created the political space for IS to return to the cities, but this narrative of IS as the vanguard against a global anti-Sunni conspiracy enables it in the short-term to call on its foreign sympathizers to "punish" the countries engaged against it.

The foreign terrorism track is not, as some have argued, reactive to the territorial losses; it has always been integral to the state-building project and this increased activity is partly a sign of maturity. "Don't hear about us, hear from us," was IS's mantra. The group developed a mania for pre-emptively infiltrating its near-abroad -- and areas well beyond -- in response to its having been infiltrated and pulled apart during the Surge-and-Sahwa period. The return to insurgency has, however, certainly had an impact on the timing of these strikes by IS.

Put simply, on the current trajectory the coalition is allowing IS to "convert territorial losses into legitimacy." Unless IS is replaced by an accepted local force, the "dream" that Falaha spoke of will find a larger and larger audience as the least-bad alternative -- ensuring IS's territorial collapse is merely a prelude to another cycle of violence.

Kyle Orton is a research fellow and Middle East analyst for the Henry Jackson Society.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/islamic- state-caliphate-at-two/27862260.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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UN Court Reaffirms Unrelated to South China Sea Arbitral Tribunal

People's Daily Online

By Ren Yan (People's Daily) 00:41, July 16, 2016

The United Nations (UN) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently issued statements reiterating that they have no connection to the temporary arbitral tribunal established under UNCLOS for the South China Sea case brought unilaterally by the Philippines.

The spokesperson of UN Secretary-General also stated that "the UN doesn't have a position on the legal and procedural merits of the case or on the disputed claims" at a daily briefing on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, the UN's official account on Sina Weibo, China's answer to Twitter, posted that the tribunal has nothing to do with the UN.

"The ICJ, located at the Peace Palace, is the principal judicial organ of the UN, which was established in accordance with the UN Charter," reads the post.

The Peace Place is built to house the Permanent Court of International Justice, the predecessor of the ICJ, by the Carnegie Foundation. The UN donates to the foundation annually for using the building, the post explained.

"Another tenant of the Peace Palace is the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) established in 1899, but it has no correlation with the UN," the post further pointed out.

Former ICJ Judge Abdul Koroma confirmed the UN's post to People's Daily. He said that the temporary tribunal is not an UN institution and the PCA is not a court in a real sense.

"Many people who are not familiar with the situation would confuse the tribunal with the ICJ who shares the same office building," Koroma noted.

The PCA is merely an international mediation agency that allows arbitration for non-state entities and individuals. According to Koroma, only 16 arbitration requests have been accepted in its 117-year-long history.

The ICJ also released a statement on its official website on Thursday, stating that "the Award in the South China Sea Arbitration was issued by an Arbitral Tribunal acting with the secretarial assistance of the PCA. The ICJ, which is a totally distinct institution, has had no involvement in the above mentioned case."

According to insiders of the ICJ, the temporary tribunal only used the hall room of the PCA during court hearing. The arbitral tribunal is just a provisional organization set at the unilateral request of the Philippines for compulsory arbitration.

An unnamed staff member of the PCA told People's Daily that arbitrators of this temporary set-up have no work ethic and they only care about money. "This institution is no place for justice. It has been reduced to a commercial venue for private interests," said the employee.

In an interview with People's Daily, Rao Pemmaraju, former Chairman of the International Law Commission, explicitly pointed out that territorial issues are not subject to the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea and delimitation issues have been excluded from compulsory arbitration procedures in statements of the Chinese government, thus the tribunal has no jurisdiction over the case.

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FM presents report to Majlis commission on JCPOA

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, July 16, IRNA -- Head of Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said on Saturday that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif presented a second report to the Commission on implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

He said that Zarif presented the report to the Majlis Commission on Saturday afternoon.

The report will be read out and examined in the Commission after Majlis holidays, the lawmaker said.

The Foreign Minister has been obliged to deliver a report to the Commission every three months and the Commission has to convey the process of implementation of the nuclear deal to formal session of Majlis every six month.

Iran is critical of the US procrastination to authorize the online dollar-to-euro exchange for the Iranian transactions with the European banks and the parliament put pressure on the government to make the US Administration honor its commitment to JCPOA.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif protested to US Secretary of State John Kerry over the US Department of Treasury's refusal to lift the sanctions with the US banks.

Kerry promised to help remove the obstacle to Iranian transactions with the US and the European banks and obliging the US Department of Treasury to authorize the US banks to do business with Iran.

9341**1416

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Iran to deploy radar capable of indentifying tiny flying objects

ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency

Sat / 16 July 2016 / 11:34

TEHRAN (ISNA)- Iran plans to deploy a radar with the capability of identifying tiny flying objects in North Khorasan province, northwestern Iran, said Brigadier General Farzad Esmaili, Commander of Khatam al-Anbiya Air Base.

The newest aerial defense achievement is deployment a radar system with the capability of finding tiny flying objects which would be soon conducted in North Khorasan Province, he said.

Esmaili continued that the radar is capable of identifying a tiny flying object with cross section of one hundredth in both active and passive forms.

He said Iran is designing and producing indigenous systems for its intended goals, creating ambiguity for enemies from any aspect.

The commander noted that in current threatening regional situation, Iran is sending the message of peace for friendly countries, the message of calm for Iran and the message of hell for enemies.

End Item

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UN: Mosul Liberation Could Trigger Major Humanitarian Crisis

by Margaret Besheer July 15, 2016

The U.N.'s top diplomat in Iraq is warning that the expected military operation to liberate the city of Mosul from Islamic State fighters could become the world's biggest humanitarian crisis.

"OCHA [UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] estimates that the Mosul operation will be the largest and most sensitive humanitarian crisis in the world in 2016," Iraq envoy Jan Kubis told the U.N. Security Council in a briefing on Friday. Mosul is Iraq's second largest city.

He said a U.N. aid appeal for $861 million stands at less than 40 percent funded, and a reallocation of existing resources is urgently required, not just to meet current emergency needs, but for those anticipated for the Mosul liberation campaign.

"The [Mosul] humanitarian effort could cost as much as $1 billion," Kubis warned.

Iraq is already classified as a Level 3 emergency  the highest crisis category. Currently, the U.N. estimates more than 10 million Iraqis require some form of humanitarian assistance  including the 3.4 million people who have been displaced since the rise of the self-styled Islamic State began in 2014.

Next week in Washington, a donors conference is planned in support of Iraq.

Military campaign

The U.S. announced Monday it would send 560 more troops to Iraq, many to be positioned near Mosul in an effort to retake the largest city under IS control. Washington has also been training Iraqi forces to carry out the campaign.

Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim told the Security Council that his government and the international coalition have liberated 60 percent of territory held by Islamic State.

"We are also working to prepare for the liberation of Mosul; certain operations have already begun." He said some villages have already been retaken in the initial phase.

Alhakim said that across Iraq some 700,000 residents have returned to areas liberated from IS and other armed groups.

Last month, Iraqi troops with international support, liberated the city of Fallujah in Anbar province from more than two years under IS control.

Some 85,000 residents then fled the city, overwhelming camps for the displaced and requiring a massive humanitarian response. Many arrived to safety in terrible condition, after months of food shortages and a lack of clean drinking water and medicines.

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Latest advances prove Iraq ability to defeat Daesh: UN

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 8:52AM

A United Nations official says recent strategic gains by Iraqi armed forces against Daesh indicate that the troops are capable of defeating the Takfiri terrorist group.

Speaking at the UN Security Council on Friday, Jan Kubis, the special representative of the UN secretary general for Iraq, referred to the victories in Fallujah and Qayyarah as well as progress in cutting off Daesh supply lines in Hawjiah as proof of the Iraqis' ability to crush the terror group.

Kubis also called on Iraq to consolidate control of armed groups and promote political reconciliation in a bid to achieve lasting peace and stability throughout the Arab country.

Given the latest advances on the battlefield against the extremists, local officials must accelerate planning for what happens "the day after," he said, noting that the gains put the liberation of Mosul high on the agenda.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has vowed the liberation of Mosul in the near future, saying the national flag would be raised in the country's second largest city.

Elsewhere in his remarks, the UN official warned that the Daesh militants are increasingly resorting to brutal tactics to compensate for their heavy losses.

He also expressed concerns about the humanitarian situation in Iraq, urging more aid for people in the conflict-ridden state.

Some 640,000 people have been displaced in the western province of Anbar alone, while more than 10 million Iraqis require some form of humanitarian assistance, Kubis added.

The northern and western parts of Iraq have been plagued by gruesome violence ever since Daesh terrorists began their reign of terror in the country in June 2014.

Iraqi army soldiers and allied volunteer fighters are seeking to win back militant-held regions in joint operations.

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20 Libya troops killed in clashes with Daesh terrorists in Sirtre

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 5:23AM

At least 20 members of forces loyal to the Libyan unity government have lost their lives as they engaged in clashes with Takfiri Daesh terrorists in the northern city of Sirte.

The loyalists to the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) said in a statement that 105 of their troops were also injured in Friday's fighting around the Ouagadougou conference hall complex, which serves as a command headquarters for Daesh militants in Sirte.

Friday's confrontation was reportedly the fiercest in the coastal city in recent weeks.

Ahmed Hadia, a spokesman for the pro-government soldiers, said the latest skirmishes around Sirte's conference center had been underway for two days, adding, "Our forces entered the complex and are fighting (but) they still cannot take the complex."

Friday's casualties "were a result of targeting by snipers and of mines" by the extremists, Haida said, noting that the militants had further tried unsuccessfully to counter attack with three car bombs.

Meanwhile, Daesh said on Twitter that two of its elements, a Libyan and an Egyptian, carried out bombings in southern Sirte targeting government forces.

Libyan forces launched a military operation in May to retake Sirte, which fell to Daesh in last year. They managed to enter the city on June 9 and, since then, they have liberated a number of residential districts.

The two-month battle for Sirte has left around 250 pro-government forces dead over 1,400 others wounded, according to medical sources at the unity forces' command center.

Sirte's recapture would be a major blow to Daesh, which has faced a series of setbacks in Syria and Iraq.

Libya has been dominated by violence since a NATO military intervention followed the 2011 uprising that led to the toppling and killing of longtime dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.

The oil-rich African state has had two rival administrations since mid-2014, when militants overran the capital and forced the parliament to flee to the country's remote east.

The two governments achieved a consensus on forming a unity government, the GNA, last December after months of UN-brokered talks in Tunisia and Morocco to restore order to the country.

Daesh has taken advantage of the political chaos in Libya to increase its presence there.

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ANKARA/ISTANBUL, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's acting army chief Gen. Umit Dundar said Saturday that 104 coup plotters have been killed and 1,563 soldiers detained.

"We're determined to cleanse the army of a parallel structure," the chief said in a televised speech soon after he was promoted from the rank of 1st Army Commander to replace Gen. Hulusi Akar, who was taken hostage but later rescued in the coup attempt that swept the country on Friday night but was foiled by Saturday morning.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had earlier blamed the coup on the movement led by Turkey's Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen now living in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.

Ankara has been accusing the movement of running a parallel state and trying to topple the Turkish government.

"A military unrest has begun outside the chain of command around several cities of Turkey, mainly in Istanbul and Ankara," said Dundar.

"It has been understood that this unrest was an attempt of coup d'etat by a group of soldiers from different ranks who have nested inside the Turkish army," he added, noting that many commanders were taken to an unknown location.

The general spoke of the casualties inflicted upon the police, the army and the civilians.

"We have 90 casualties including 41 police and two soldiers," he noted.

"In Turkey the coup d'etat era is over in a way that it will not be opened again," he stated.

In remarks delivered early Saturday in Istanbul, Erdogan vowed to finish the operation against the military plotters, saying "Our army is clean and no one can harm it."
Russian airstrikes kill 18 Daesh militants in central Syria: Group

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 4:45AM

At least 18 members of the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group have been killed in Russian airstrikes in central Syria, including near the ancient Semitic city of Palmyra, a monitoring group says.

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday that the aerial attacks were carried out around the town of al-Sukhnah, situated 220 kilometers (some 140 miles) east of the city of Homs, as well as close to Palmyra, located 215 kilometers (133 miles) northeast of the capital, Damascus.

It said that a number of European nationals were among the slain militants.

The report came on the same day that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said his country's aerial campaign against foreign-sponsored Takfiri militant groups operating inside Syria had changed the course of the developments on the ground in favor of the Damascus government.

Russia has been bombing Daesh and al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front terrorist groups in Syria at the official request of President Bashar al-Assad since September 30, 2015.

Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. The United Nations (UN)'s Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimates that over 400,000 people have been killed in the conflict. The UN has stopped its official casualty count in Syria, citing its inability to verify the figures that it receives from various sources.

A ceasefire brokered by the US and Russia went into effect in Syria on February 27, but it does not apply to the Daesh and al-Nusra Front terrorist groups in the Arab country.

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Turkey intelligence agency: Coup attempt 'repelled'

Iran Press TV

Fri Jul 15, 2016 7:56PM

The Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) says a coup attempt in the country has been "repelled" and the situation has been restored to "normal".

In comments carried by Turkish broadcaster NTV on Saturday morning, the MIT spokesman said the intelligence agency's headquarters was targeted by hijacked military helicopters, but the coup attempt was "foiled".

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim also announced in the early hours of Saturday morning that the situation is largely under control and that a no-fly zone was imposed over the capital Ankara.

Yildirim added that Chief of Military Staff Hulusi Akar and other high-ranking commanders are now in charge of the situation. The country's state news agency had earlier reported that Akar was being "held hostage" at the military headquarters.

According to Reuters, Turkey's state broadcaster TRT is also now back on air.

Citing witnesses, Reuters also reported that some 30 soldiers in the coup attempt surrendered their weapons to police in Istanbul's Taksim Square.

An NTV report said a Turkish Air Force F-16 jet shot down a Sikorsky helicopter operated by the army group attempting the coup.

Hours earlier, the Turkish military said it had fully seized control of the country and that the rule of law must remain a priority.

"The power in the country has been seized in its entirety," said a military statement read on NTV television, without giving further details.

The statement went on to say that the military aims to "reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms," and "to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for the law and order to be reinstated."

"All international agreements and commitments will remain. We pledge that good relations with all world countries will continue," the military statement added.

It further vowed to try all those who "have betrayed the country" in "fair courts."

According to Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency, a bomb hit the parliament building in Ankara following the death of 17 police officers in an aerial attack on the Ankara Special Forces headquarters.

Erdogan vows to overcome situation

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reportedly safe, although there has been no immediate report about his whereabouts.

Speaking on cellphone to CNN Turk, the Turkish president said this is an act encouraged by "parallel structure".

He also called on the Turkish people to flood the streets and defy a curfew that was imposed nationwide by the coup leaders, adding that the attempted coup will be resolved within a short time.

Reports said the Turkish president was returning to the capital Ankara, contradicting earlier reports that he was leaving the country.

Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News quoted Erdogan as telling CNN Turk that the US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen was to blame for the attempted coup.

"We will not leave the ground to them," Erdogan further said, vowing to end the "occupation" by the "minority group".

However, a group affiliated with the opposition Gulen Movement condemned the coup attempt against the Turkish government.

"We condemn any military intervention in the domestic politics of Turkey," read part of a statement by the Alliance for Shared Values as quoted by AFP.

A TRT correspondent told Reuters that soldiers were inside the broadcaster's building.

Earlier, the Turkish prime minister said an "illegal attempt" by "a group" in the military was underway and security forces were taking necessary measures to resolve the situation.

He said those involved in the coup attempt would "pay the highest price" for their actions.

Reports also said that a number of tanks had surrounded the Turkish parliament and opened fire near the building. NTV also aired footage of tanks at the entrance to Istanbul's Ataturk airport.

Gunfire could be heard across the capital as military warplanes and helicopters were flying low over the city.

Helicopters were flying over Istanbul, the country's biggest city, whose Bosphorus and Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridges were reported to have been closed by military forces.

Global reactions pouring in

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif expressed his deep concern about the crisis in neighboring Turkey in a message on his twitter account, saying "stability, democracy and the safety of the Turkish people are paramount."

The Iranian foreign minister said in another tweet that "Turkish people's brave defense of democracy & their elected government proves that coups have no place in our region and are doomed to fail."

Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani also said the Islamic Republic is concerned about the situation in Turkey, adding that Iran is in full control of all its ground and aerial borders with the neighboring country. He further said that Tehran believes the Turkish nation's security and peace will be jeopardized by instability in the country.

Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that bloodshed should be avoided in Turkey, and that the situation should be settled within a constitutional framework. He also called on his countrymen in Turkey to stay indoors.

The Russian foreign minister made the statement during a joint press conference with his US counterpart John Kerry, who also expressed hope for peace in Turkey.

"I hope there will be stability and peace and continuity within Turkey, but I have nothing to add on what has transpired at this moment," Kerry was quoted by US media as saying.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called for "restraint" in Turkey after the attempted coup.

"In constant contact with EU Delegation in Ankara & Brussels from Mongolia. Call for restraint and respect for democratic institutions #Turkey," she wrote in a tweeted from a regional summit in Ulaanbaatar.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also said in a statement that the Western military alliance supports Turkey's democratic institutions.

"I call for calm and restraint, and for full respect for Turkey's democratic institutions and its constitution. Turkey is a valued NATO ally," Stoltenberg said. "I have just spoken to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. I am following events in Turkey closely and with concern."

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The Situation in Turkey

Press Statement

John Kerry

Secretary of State

Washington, DC

July 15, 2016



The United States views with gravest concern events unfolding in Turkey. We are monitoring a very fluid situation.

I spoke this evening to Foreign Minister Cavusoglu and emphasized the United States' absolute support for Turkey's democratically-elected, civilian government and democratic institutions.

We urge all parties to ensure the safety and well-being of diplomatic missions and personnel and civilians throughout Turkey.

Our Embassy and Consulates in Turkey continue to provide updates to U.S. citizens in Turkey. U.S. citizens should shelter in place and stay indoors; and update family and friends of status when possible.

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Obama Briefed on Turkey Situation; Incirlik Closed, but Safe, Officials Say

By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, July 16, 2016  President Barack Obama received a briefing today from his national security team on the situation in Turkey following a coup attempt, White House officials said.

The president reiterated to his national security team that the United States will continue its unwavering support for Turkey's democratically elected government, officials said in a statement.

Work with Counterparts

Obama instructed the team to continue to work with Turkish counterparts to maintain the safety and well-being of diplomatic missions and personnel, U.S. service members and their dependents, White House officials said.

"While we have no indications as of yet that Americans were killed or injured in the violence," the White House statement said, "the president and his team lamented the loss of life and registered the vital need for all parties in Turkey to act within the rule of law and to avoid actions that would lead to further violence or instability."

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said all NATO personnel and units in Turkey "are safe and secure." Turkey is a member of the NATO alliance.

Turkish officials have stopped all flights into and out of Incirlik Air Base in the southwestern part of the nation. U.S. and coalition aircraft fly missions against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant from the base. Defense Department officials continue their efforts to fully account for all DoD personnel in Turkey, Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

All Safe and Secure

"All indications at this time are that everyone is safe and secure," Cook said today in a statement. "We will continue to take the necessary steps to ensure the safety and security of our service members, our civilians, their families and our facilities."

The Turkish government has closed its airspace to military aircraft, including to coalition aircraft operating out of Incirlik at part of Operation Inherent Resolve. "U.S. officials are working with the Turks to resume air operations there as soon as possible," Cook said. In the meantime, he added, U.S. Central Command is adjusting and will use other facilities in the region to launch sorties.

"U.S. facilities at Incirlik are operating on internal power sources, and a loss of commercial power to the base has not affected base operations," Cook said.

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Iran expresses concern over Turkey developments

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, July 16, IRNA -- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said early Saturday morning that he feels concern over latest developments in Turkey.

Zarif said that he is 'Deeply concerned about the crisis in Turkey.'

'Stability, democracy and safety of Turkish people are paramount. Unity and prudence are imperative,' he added.

According to dispatches, Turkey's military announed on Friday it seized power, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a televised message to the Turkish people that the attempted coup would be put down.

The Turkish prime minister added that the government remains in charge; military jets and helicopters seen flying low over Ankara and tanks reported in the streets; two major bridges in Istanbul are closed to traffic.

'We will overcome this,' Erdogan said, speaking by mobile phone to the Turkish sister station of CNN. He called on his followers to take to the streets to defend his government and said the coup plotters would pay a heavy price.

Meanwhil, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the elected government remained in office. However, it appeared that those behind the coup had the upper hand initially.

Reports coming from Turkey said that airports were shut, access to Internet social media sites was cut off, and troops sealed off the two bridges over the Bosphorus in Istanbul.

Earlier, gunshots were heard in the Turkish capital, a Reuters witness said, as military jets and helicopters were seen flying overhead.

Soldiers took control of TRT state television, which announced a countrywide curfew and martial law. An announcer read a statement on the orders of the military that accused the government of eroding the democratic and secular rule of law. The country would be run by a 'peace council' that would ensure the safety of the population, the statement said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking jointly after talks in Moscow, both said they hoped bloodshed would be avoided. The U.S. State Department said Americans in Turkey should shelter indoors. Other countries issued similar advice.

9191**1394

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Zarif: Coups have no place in our region, doomed to fail

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

Tehran, July 16, IRNA -- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Saturday morning that 'coups have no place in our region and are doomed to fail.'

Zarif said in his twitter post that 'Turkish people's brave defense of democracy and their elected government proves that coups have no place in our region and are doomed to fail.'

Iranian foreign minister had said earlier in his first twitter post on Saturday morning that he feels concern over latest developments in Turkey.

'Stability, democracy and safety of Turkish people are paramount. Unity and prudence are imperative,' he added.

The statements released shortly after a group of Turkish military forces announced Friday night that they have seized power in that country.

In the meantime, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani had also expressed his concern over latest developments in Turkey in separate message.

Shamkhani said that Iran is 'carefully and worriedly monitoring latest developments in Turkey and believes that instability will damage people's security and peace.'

According to dispatches, Turkey's military said on Friday it had seized power, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the attempted coup would be put down.

'We will overcome this,' Erdogan said, speaking by mobile phone to the Turkish sister station of CNN.

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Turkish army group announces takeover; president says coup attempt unsuccessful

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 10:19, July 16, 2016

A military statement on Turkish media said Friday the armed forces have fully seized power in the country but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said early Saturday the coup attempt has failed, urging people to protect democracy.

According to the military statement, reported on NTV, the military move was made to restore the constitutional order, democracy, human rights, freedom and rule of law.

The statement said that all our international agreements and commitments is continue to be kept valid.

"We hope that our good relations with all countries of the world will be continued," the statement said.

President Erdogan's office website said he is safe and and that a coup attempt by a small group of soldiers was "unsuccessful."

In his appearance on CNNTurk via a reporter's mobile phone, Erdogan urged people to take to the streets to protect "democracy."

"This is an act encouraged by the parallel structure." he said. "I believe that this act will have the necessary punishment that will be given by our nation."

The president was referring to the movement led by U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, who has been accused of running a parallel state and trying to topple the Turkish government.

"I will be at the squares as well either in Istanbul or Ankara," Erdogan said in remarks delivered later on NTV.

Shortly after Erdogan's statement, soldiers started leaving the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, while some Turks walk toward the airport, the Hurriyet daily said.

It said supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are among the throng gathering there.

Reports earlier said that tanks were sent to the airport, where all flights were canceled.

In Ankara, helicopters could be heard hoving above. There were also reports of gunshots and explosions heard in the capital.

There were also reports of tanks being deployed outside the Turkish parliament.

On the capital's Kizilay Avenue, Xinhua reporters saw a large crowd gathering, some throwing rocks on tanks passing by and calling for peace.

On Friday evening, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told local media that there has been a coup attempt.

"This is a mutiny attempt; we will not let it win," Anadolu Agency quoted Yildirim as saying. "Those who are doing this will be punished in the hardest way."

Meanwhile, NTV reported that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar was taken hostage by a group of soldiers.

Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said the coup attempt is unlawful and Ankara and Istanbul public prosecutors have launched an investigation, Milliyet News reported.

"The coup of some armed forces was made without command," Bozdag said. "It is time we show our attitude to democracy."

In Istanbul, the gendarmerie closed the two bridges that connect the city's Asian and European parts over the Bosphorus Strait, with tanks reported on the bridges.

A military statement on Turkish media said Friday the armed forces have fully seized power in the country but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said early Saturday the coup attempt has failed, urging people to protect democracy.

According to the military statement, reported on NTV, the military move was made to restore the constitutional order, democracy, human rights, freedom and rule of law.

The statement said that all our international agreements and commitments is continue to be kept valid.

"We hope that our good relations with all countries of the world will be continued," the statement said.

President Erdogan's office website said he is safe and and that a coup attempt by a small group of soldiers was "unsuccessful."

In his appearance on CNNTurk via a reporter's mobile phone, Erdogan urged people to take to the streets to protect "democracy."

"This is an act encouraged by the parallel structure." he said. "I believe that this act will have the necessary punishment that will be given by our nation."

The president was referring to the movement led by U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen, who has been accused of running a parallel state and trying to topple the Turkish government.

"I will be at the squares as well either in Istanbul or Ankara," Erdogan said in remarks delivered later on NTV.

Shortly after Erdogan's statement, soldiers started leaving the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, while some Turks walk toward the airport, the Hurriyet daily said.

It said supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are among the throng gathering there.

Reports earlier said that tanks were sent to the airport, where all flights were canceled.

In Ankara, helicopters could be heard hoving above. There were also reports of gunshots and explosions heard in the capital.

There were also reports of tanks being deployed outside the Turkish parliament.

On the capital's Kizilay Avenue, Xinhua reporters saw a large crowd gathering, some throwing rocks on tanks passing by and calling for peace.

On Friday evening, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told local media that there has been a coup attempt.

"This is a mutiny attempt; we will not let it win," Anadolu Agency quoted Yildirim as saying. "Those who are doing this will be punished in the hardest way."

Meanwhile, NTV reported that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar was taken hostage by a group of soldiers.

Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said the coup attempt is unlawful and Ankara and Istanbul public prosecutors have launched an investigation, Milliyet News reported.

"The coup of some armed forces was made without command," Bozdag said. "It is time we show our attitude to democracy."

In Istanbul, the gendarmerie closed the two bridges that connect the city's Asian and European parts over the Bosphorus Strait, with tanks reported on the bridges.

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Heavy military deployment seen in Ankara, Istanbul

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 11:28, July 16, 2016

ANKARA/ISTANBUL, July 16 -- Heavy military deployment were seen early Saturday morning in the Turkish capital of Ankara and Turkey's most populous city Istanbul, following a military coup attempt in the country, according to Xinhua reporters.

In Ankara, Xinhua reporters saw warplanes such as F-16 fighters and military helicopters flying over head and heard sounds of guns and suspected warplane bombing.

Turkish NTV reported on early Saturday that a Sikorsky helicopter of rebels was downed by F-16 fighters.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told media that the Turkish army would shoot down the planes flying over Ankara.

Reports cited the prosecutor's office reporting that 42 people were killed in capital Ankara during the military coup attempt.

At around 1:00 a.m. (2200 GMT Friday), several military tanks passed the intersections near the Turkish parliament building and the headquarters of the General Staff. Emotional civilians were seen launching stones at the tanks.

Due to the blockade caused by the civilians, the tanks had to change their route and continued to advance, crashing into the vehicles and telegraph poles at the roadside.

According to Xinhua reporter, the parliament building was bombed by anti-government forces in early Saturday morning, which injured a dozen people.

Until 3:00 a.m. (0000 GMT), interrupted gunshots were still heard near Xinhua's Ankara bureau, while there were not many people on the street.

Meanwhile, three warplanes were seen flying over Taksim area in central Istanbul and huge explosions were heard.

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US offers help to investigate coup attempt in Turkey

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 3:4PM

US Secretary of State John Kerry says Washington is ready to help Turkey investigate a failed coup, inviting Ankara to share any evidence it has against US-based opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Kerry, who is in Luxembourg, said Saturday that the US had not yet received a formal extradition request for Gulen, who is now being blamed for Friday night's coup attempt.

Ankara said on Saturday that followers of Gulen were behind the failed coup launched by a faction of the military which used tanks and attack helicopters in an attempt to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

"We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen," Kerry said.

"And obviously we invited the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny and the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately," he added.

Meanwhile, Yildirim warned that any country that stands by Gulen will not be a friend of Turkey and will be considered at war with Ankara.

Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer for the Turkish government, accused the opposition figure of having "direct involvement" in the coup attempt.

Amsterdam said he and his firm "have attempted repeatedly to warn the US government of the threat posed" by Gulen and his movement.

He said, according to Turkish intelligence sources, "There are signs that Gulen is working closely with certain members of military leadership against the elected civilian government."

Gulen, once a close ally to Erdogan, fled to the US in 1999 after former secular authorities laid charges against him. Turkey says it 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, however, denies the allegations.

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Turkish helicopter lands in Greece, 8 crew members nabbed

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 2:21PM

A Turkish military helicopter carrying eight men has landed in northeastern Greece, with its crew seeking political asylum after a putsch attempt in Turkey, Greek officials say.

The Black Hawk helicopter landed in an airport in Alexandroupoli, located in the region of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, at midday on Saturday, after sending a distress call to authorities at the airport, Greece's Defense Ministry said in a statement.

According to the Greek ERT TV, the passengers, seven of them in military uniforms, are believed to be among those who orchestrated the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey on Friday night.

The seven men had reportedly removed their badges and insignia from the uniforms to make it impossible to know their rank, but Athens News Agency reported that the asylum seekers comprised majors, captains and sergeant majors, and a civilian.

All the crew, however, were detained by Greek security police upon their landing on charges of illegal entry into the country. According to the Greek government spokeswoman, Olga Gerovassili, "as far as the asylum seekers are concerned, we are going to proceed according to the international law."

She added that Athens was in "constant" contact with Turkish authorities and would consider the fact that the detained crew "took part in a coup against the Turkish constitution."

"The helicopter is scheduled to be sent back immediately to Turkey," AFP quoted an unnamed official in the Greek National Defense General Staff as saying.

Reports say Greece is to examine political asylum requests of the crew.

Earlier in the day, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras expressed his "support for the democratically elected" Turkish government.

Turkey's reaction

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara had requested Athens to return the eight people.

"We have requested Greece to extradite the eight traitors as soon possible," Cavusoglu was quoted as telling HaberTurk television.

The Turkish foreign minister later said in a message posted on Twitter that the eight people will be repatriated to Turkey as soon as possible.

What happened?

It all began when a faction of the Turkish military declared last night that it had fully seized control of the country and that President Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yldrm were no more in charge.

A group calling itself the "Council for Peace in the Homeland" declared martial law and a curfew in the statement.

Soldiers and tanks took to the streets late on Friday and multiple explosions rang out throughout the night in Ankara and Istanbul, the two biggest cities of the strategic NATO member country.

Gunfire could be heard across the capital as military warplanes and helicopters were flying low over the city.

Since the early hours of Saturday, however, with Erdogan's call on the nation to violate the curfew imposed by the coup attempters by filling in the streets, the coup forces, group by group, surrendered themselves or were arrested by security forces loyal to Erdogan.

At least 161 people including civilians were killed and over 1,400 others sustained injuries during the coup attempt. The government says 104 coup plotters have been killed and about 100 army members have been detained at Diyarbakir military base.

Over 2,800 armed forces suspected of involvement in the coup are already under arrest and five members of Turkey's highest judiciary board, the HSYK, along with more than 2,700 judges have also been removed from duty.

In his Saturday remarks in Ankara, Yldrm accused the US-based cleric Fetullah Gulen of being responsible for the coup attempt. Gulen, however, has denied any involvement and strongly condemned it in a statement on Saturday.

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BEIJING, July 17 -- Wu Zhiguang teaches all the courses at Yukeng Elementary School. He has to, for he is the only teacher at the school in a mountainous village of Yongtai County, Fujian Province.

The all-rounder admits that he has his weaknesses. Wu says he finds teaching music, art and English particularly difficult.

"Luckily the local education authority is well aware of the problem and has helped the school install computers, so students now learn those courses online," he said. "But it can't compare to on-site teaching."

The vast majority of Chinese village teachers face a similar situation: They only have a single teacher. Disparities between quality of education in China's countryside and its cities are down to uneven funding, but also lack of training for teachers. If lone teachers have to be one-man bands, they need to know their stuff.

"I believe the math and Chinese my students learn is at the same level as what students learn in cities, but for courses such as music and art, the difference is there," said Cheng Guiying, another lone teacher in Hexi Village, Yongtai County.

"Though online education has made up for some deficiencies, learning from a computer is far different than learning face-to-face from a teacher," Cheng said.

To narrow the urban-rural education gap, the Chinese government has increased investment. The latest move announced on Tuesday includes a budget of 500 billion yuan (74 billion U.S. dollars) to build more schools and develop existing ones, and a plan to train village teachers to cover a broader variety of subjects.

As China has set the objective of compulsory eduction developing at the same pace as urbanization by 2020, the country wants versatile teachers who will be able to perform multiple roles, just like general practitioners in medicine, said Liu Limin, vice minister of education.

For Wu, "the policy sounds exciting and it reveals that rural education now has gained more public concern."

He agreed that training teachers was important. "As people's knowledge expands fast nowadays, it's harder for rural teachers to keep pace, which is not healthy for the development of village students," Wu said.

According to Yongtai County's education bureau, it spent 202 million yuan from 2012 to 2015 on new school buildings covering a total of 90,000 square meters. Another 1.2 million yuan went on computers for the schools.

"Though efforts have been made, the gap between rural and urban education remains huge. The shortage of teachers and the low salaries offered to teachers are the major causes," said an official with the bureau.

Huang Nengxian, director of the college of education at Fujian Normal University, said lack of students is also a major concern for China's rural education.

"What we need is a better overall system, to balance education resources in the urban and rural areas, to cultivate better rural teachers and to keep students in villages," Huang said.
Iran supports Turkey's legitimate government amid coup attempt: SNSC

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 1:28PM

Iran denounces an attempted military coup in Turkey and will fully support the legitimate Turkish government and will of the country's people, the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) says.

The SNSC convened a meeting, chaired by Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, on Saturday and discussed the latest developments in Turkey, where people and government forces were fighting to repel the remnants of a coup attempt launched on Friday night.

"We support Turkey's legal government and oppose any type of coup - either [initiated] domestically or supported by foreign sides," the SNSC Secretary Ali Shamkhani said on Saturday at the end of the council's meeting.

He added that Iran condemns any military move to forcefully impose one's political will and supports the resolve and demands of the Turkish people.

Shamkhani added that staging any type of coup runs counter to real demands of people and said, "What has determined the fate of Turkey's developments were the will and presence of the nation and vigilance of political parties who's contribution thwarted this coup."

The coup attempt, launched late on Friday, plunged Turkey into hours of chaos unseen in decades during which soldiers and tanks took to the streets and multiple explosions rang out throughout the night in Ankara and Istanbul.

The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim appeared on television soon after the coup was launched, declaring an early end to the putsch.

However, gunfire, bomb explosions and military airstrikes continued in the capital, Ankara, despite repeated statements by government officials that the coup had been "repelled."

Gradually, though, government forces seemed to be regaining control and pockets of rebel soldiers started surrendering.

"The situation is completely under control," Yildirim said outside his offices in Ankara.

He described the attempted coup as a "black stain" on Turkey's democracy and said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.

The Turkish premier added that 2,839 soldiers were now detained on suspicion of involvement in the putsch and added that the 161 toll did not include the assailants.

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Attempted Turkey coup falters, government reasserting control

Iran Press TV

Sat Jul 16, 2016 2:47AM

An attempted coup in Turkey was faltering on Saturday, hours after a faction of the military used tanks and helicopters in an ill-fated attempt to end the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

Erdogan and Yildirim appeared on television soon after the coup was launched, declaring an early end to the putsch.

However, gunfire, bomb explosions and military airstrikes continued in the capital, Ankara, despite repeated statements by government officials that the coup had been "repelled."

Gradually, though, government forces seemed to be regaining control and pockets of rebel soldiers started surrendering.

Reports indicate that fighting continues in Ankara even as the government has achieved the upper hand.

Erdogan, who had been flown away from the capital to Istanbul, on Friday urged his supporters to pour out onto the streets to stop the coup. On Saturday, he urged them to remain on the streets until the situation normalizes.

Earlier, AFP cited NTV television as saying on Saturday that a fighter jet dropped bombs near the Turkish presidential palace in Ankara. Plumes of black smoke were seen rising over the Bestepe district where the palace is located, according to the TV.

A presidential source said Turkish F-16s were launching airstrikes against tanks outside the palace.

Reuters cited CNN Turk as saying on Saturday that Turkish authorities shot down a military helicopter firing on the offices of state satellite operator Turksat.

A senior official said Turkish military headquarters were now held by pro-government forces, but small groups of rebel soldiers were still resisting.

A second official said 29 colonels and five generals were removed from posts in the military amid the coup attempt.

A Turkish intelligence source told Reuters on Saturday that Turkey's intelligence agency headquarters were attacked by military helicopters and heavy machine gun fire during the attempted military coup overnight, wounding at least three people.

The head of the agency, Hakan Fidan, was at a secure location throughout the events and was in constant contact with President Erdogan and Prime Minister Yildirim, the source said.

The intelligence agency was still working with the armed forces, the police and the government against the coup plotters in ongoing operations in Istanbul and Ankara in particular, the source said.

A coup begins

It all began when a faction of the Turkish military declared last night that it had fully seized control of the country and that Erdogan and Yildirim were no more in charge.

A group calling itself the "Council for Peace in the Homeland" declared martial law and a curfew in the statement.

Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency reported a bomb explosion at the parliament building shortly afterwards.

Soldiers and tanks took to the streets late on Friday and multiple explosions rang out throughout the night in Ankara and Istanbul, the two biggest cities of the strategic NATO member country.

Gunfire could be heard across the capital as military warplanes and helicopters were flying low over the city.

Commanders taken hostage

Meanwhile, Turkish military chief of staff, General Hulusi Akar, who was reported earlier to have been taken hostage by the coup plotters, has been rescued, a senior official said.

Erdogan had earlier said he did not know the whereabouts of Akar, and Prime Minister Yildirim had appointed General Umit Dundar, the commander of the First Army, as the acting chief of military staff to cover Akar.

Dundar said later on Saturday that many military commanders have been taken hostage by rebel soldiers, raising the prospect of continued drama in the country.

Casualties

As the situation seemed to calm down, Prime Minister Yildirim appeared outside his Cankaya palace in Ankara to brief reporters on Saturday, saying that 161 people were killed in the coup attempt against the government. He said 2,839 soldiers were now detained on suspicion of involvement in the putsch.

The toll 161 did not include the assailants, he emphasized. Dundar had earlier said 104 putschists had been killed.

Yildirim said some 20 individuals involved in planning the coup had also been killed and 30 others wounded. It was not clear if the 20 coup plotters were part of the figure 161 or if the larger toll was that of civilians and police who fought the putschists.

Early statements of coup failure

On Saturday morning, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MIT) said the coup attempt in the country has been "repelled" and the situation has been restored to "normal."

Prime Minister Yildirim also announced in the early hours of Saturday morning that the situation was largely under control and that a no-fly zone was imposed over Ankara.

Yildirim did not provide any information on the state of the commanders who are said to have been taken hostage. Akar, the Turkish military chief of staff, was standing beside him during the briefing.

Reuters quoted a witness as saying that Erdogan's supporters have attacked a number of soldiers who surrendered in Istanbul.

Uncertainty

"Normal," however, did not seem at first to explain the situation in the country correctly.

A senior Turkish official, whose name was not mentioned in the reports, said bomb attacks continued on the parliament building in Ankara.

The official added that rebel soldiers were warned they would be shot down if they attempted to use more military aircraft.

Who's to blame?

There are conflicting reports about who exactly the coup plotters were. Factions of the military apparently took on each other during the attempt.

In his Saturday remarks in Ankara, Yildirim accused the US-based cleric Fetullah Gulen of being responsible for the coup attempt.

Gulen, once Erdogan's mentor, is now his perceived enemy number one.

However, Gulen himself has said he had nothing to do with the putsch and strongly condemned it in a statement on Saturday.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations," Gulen said in a brief statement just before midnight Friday.

A group affiliated with the opposition Gulen Movement had condemned the coup attempt against the Turkish government earlier.

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Obama urges support for Turkish government

Iran Press TV

Fri Jul 15, 2016 11:27PM

US President Barack Obama has called on all sides in Turkey to avoid "any violence or bloodshed" amid the ongoing military coup in the country.

Obama urged support for the "democratically-elected" Turkish government on Friday after an army group said it has taken over the country.

The White House said that the president has been briefed by aides on events in Turkey.

"The president's national security team has apprised him of the unfolding situation in Turkey," said National Security Council spokesman Ned Price.

In addition, US Secretary of State John Kerry emphasized the United States' "absolute support" for Turkey's government during a phone call with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu.

"I spoke this evening to Foreign Minister Cavusoglu and emphasized the United States' absolute support for Turkey's democratically elected, civilian government and democratic institutions," Kerry said in a statement.

The Turkish military released a statement Friday saying, "The power in the country has been seized in its entirety."

The statement went on to say that the military aims to "reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms," and "to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for the law and order to be reinstated."

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is reportedly safe, although there has been no immediate report about his whereabouts.

Speaking on cellphone to CNN Turk, the Turkish president said this is an act encouraged by "parallel structure".

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Scores Dead, Injured Following Failed Turkey Coup

July 16, 2016

by RFE/RL

Security operations were continuing across Turkey on July 16 following a failed military coup attempt overnight that left many dozens of people dead and more than 1,000 injured.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on July 16 confirmed that Turkish security forces loyal to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government had imposed a lockdown on the Incirlik Air Base in the southeast of the country -- a facility where about 1,500 U.S. soldiers also are based for operations against Islamic State (IS) militants in neighboring Iraq and Syria.

Cavusoglu said the lockdown was imposed because some Turkish soldiers at Incirlik were involved in the attempted coup. He said some arrests had been made there.

Meanwhile, the state-run Anadolu Agency said the commander of Turkey's Second Army, General Adem Huduti, was detained in connection with the attempted military takeover as a roundup of suspected coup plotters continued.

Huduti, the most senior officer to be apprehended so far, heads forces that protect Turkey's borders with Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Lieutenant General Erdal Ozturk, the commander of Turkey's Third Army Corps, also was detained on July 16 and faces charges of treason.

Headquartered in Istanbul, Ozturk's field corps is the NATO Rapid Deployable Corps from Turkey's First Army.

CNN Turk reported that Alparslan Altan, a member of the country's top court, also was detained on July 16 -- the most senior judicial figure among scores of suspects detained.

Although the government said the situation in the country is "under control," President Erdogan posted a message on the Twitter social-media site urging supporters to remain in the streets to prevent "a new flare-up" of coup activity.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon confirmed that Turkey has closed the airspace around Incirlik as part of its lockdown -- forcing a temporary halt of air strikes launched from the facility against IS militants.

NATO-member Turkey, with a population of some 80 million, is a key player in the effort to combat IS militants in Iraq and Syria.

A U.S. consulate official in Turkey said pro-government security forces where denying movement on and off the Incirlik base on July 16 and had cut power to the facility as the roundup of suspected coup plotters continued.

The Pentagon said U.S. forces at Incirlik were not in danger and were using internally generated power to continue operations in the facility.

However, U.S. military command in Europe on July 16 ordered U.S. forces across Turkey to take maximum protective measures known as "Delta" force protection level  which is invoked when a terrorist attack is taking place or security threat appears imminent.

The U.S. military has about 2,200 troops and civilian contractors stationed in Turkey, including about 1,500 at Incirlik.

Earlier on July 16, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Haberturk television that 161 people were killed and 1,440 were injured during the unrest the previous night.

He did not appear to be including the 104 soldiers supporting the coup who were reported killed overnight, meaning the death total for the unrest would be at least 265.

Yildirim said 2,839 military personnel supporting the coup attempt had been arrested.

Yildirim said the coup attempt was a "black mark" on Turkish democracy.

Government officials also said that five generals and 29 colonels were removed from their posts for suspected involvement in the bid to overthrow the Erdogan's government.

The acting military chief of staff, General Umit Dundar, said that 41 police officers were among the dead.

"The coup attempt has been foiled," Dundar said at an Ankara news conference.

Dundar said that an unknown number of loyalist military officers are still being held by coup plotters in unknown locations.

He said the military is determined to eliminate "parallel structures" within its ranks. He said most of the coup participants were connected with the Air Force.

"A group within the military carried out an attempt, outside of the chain of command, to overthrow the democratically elected government," Erdogan's office said in a statement early on July 16.

At an extraordinary session of parliament called on July 16 by Yildirim to discuss the crisis, all four parties in the legislature condemned the coup and backed the government.

Turkish maritime authorities reported that the Bosphorus Strait had been reopened and that traffic through the strategic waterway was "back to normal."

Eight soldiers who were involved in the coup fled in a helicopter to neighboring Greece. Ankara has called for their extradition, while Athens said it would consider the soldiers' asylum request.

Regional powers Iran and Israel both issued statements condemning the coup attempt. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said he had spoken three times with his Turkish counterpart and wrote on Twitter that "coups have no place in our region."

Saudi Arabia also said it "welcomes the return of the situation to normal under the leadership" of Erdogan.

The coup plotters used tanks and aircraft during the night, including attacks on the parliament building and the president's office in Ankara. The headquarters of Turkey's intelligence service also came under attack during the night.

The state-run Anadolu news agency reported that some 200 unarmed soldiers at the Turkish military headquarters had surrendered to government security forces.

The chief of the military staff, General Hulusi Akar, was detained by coup supporters during the night, but was freed by a helicopter rescue mission early on July 16.

Most news stations in the country appeared to be up and running again, and Istanbul's Ataturk airport, which the military had shut down at the outset of the putsch attempt, had resumed processing flights.

Dozens of civilians were killed and hundreds wounded in nightlong battles and street fighting in Istanbul and other cities, with the heaviest casualties of at least 42 dead in Ankara, the scene of the heaviest fighting.

Erdogan claimed the coup plotters had tried to kill him by bombing a resort where he had been vacationing. He arrived back in Istanbul during the night to rally supporters against the coup and to pledge to "cleanse" the military of disloyal elements.

"They will pay a heavy price for this act of treason," Erdogan said when he arrived at Istanbul's airport. "We will not leave our country to occupiers."

At a critical time during the struggle, U.S. President Barack Obama urged all parties to support Erdogan's democratically elected government and to "show restraint and avoid any violence or bloodshed," the White House said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he spoke with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and emphasized the United States' "absolute support" for the government.

Their announcements were echoed quickly afterwards by the leaders of the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a key colleague of Turkish military officers who called for "full respect for Turkey's democratic institutions and constitution."

EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker on July 16 urged a "swift return" to normalcy in Turkey, saying "there is no alternative to democracy and the rule of law."

While Erdogan and his deputies blamed a handful of military officers for leading a "minority" uprising in the military, overall they blamed the coup attempt on a political opponent: the reclusive Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.

Yildirim said countries that support Gulen would be considered enemies of Turkey.

Kerry said the United States would consider an extradition request for the exiled cleric, but said Anakara would have to present evidence of wrongdoing by Gulen that withstands scrutiny.

Speaking in Luxembourg on July 16, Kerry said Turkey had not requested Gulen's extradition.

Foreign Minister Cavusoglu said he made it clear in talks with Kerry on July 16 that Ankara believes the coup attempt was carried out by a network of Gulen supporters.

But he said he did not raise the issue of an extradition request during his conversation with Kerry.

Gulen, a one-time Erdogan ally with many followers in Turkey's military and government offices, vigorously denied any involvement, saying "governments should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force."

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," Gulen, 75, added. "I categorically deny such accusations."

With reporting by AFP, Reuters, AP, the Dogan news agency, and dpa

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/turkey- coup-attempt-security-operations- continue-dead-injured/27861848.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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Erdogan Vows Revenge As Turkish Coup Appears To Crumble

July 16, 2016

by RFE/RL

An attempted military coup in Turkey appeared to be crumbling as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrived back in Istanbul on July 16 and told crowds of supporters he's "not going anywhere."

Calling the uprising that led to a night of confusion, fighting, and mass casualties an "act of treason," Erdogan vowed to exact the most "severe" punishment on the coup supporters and "cleanse" the military of disloyal elements.

"They will pay a heavy price for this act of treason," Erdogan said at Istanbul's airport. "We will not leave our country to occupiers."

Authorities announced that at least 60 people were killed during the coup attempt and 754 members of the armed forces have been arrested so far. Among the dead, the head of Turkey's police said, are at least 16 coup plotters.

One official was quoted as saying five generals and 29 colonels have been removed from their posts.

Television broadcasts showed soldiers who occupied Istanbul's Taksim Square and the Bosphorus bridge overnight being led away by police as crowds jeered at them.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said a general who helped organize the coup was killed. He appointed a new acting chief of military staff, General Umi Dundar, after the previous chief, General Hulusi Akar, was taken hostage by coup plotters.

Turkish broadcasters were reporting that Akar had been freed by a helicopter rescue mission.

Dozens of civilians were killed and hundreds wounded in nightlong battles and street fighting in Istanbul and other cities, with the heaviest casualties of at least 42 dead in Ankara, the scene of the heaviest fighting.

WATCH: Turkish Troops Block Bosphorus Bridges

Yildirim said he had ordered Turkish fighter jets to shoot down any aircraft hijacked by the coup plotters, some of whom remained at large and in the air.

"Those who drive around in tanks will have to go back to where they came from," Erdogan proclaimed, describing a narrow escape from death as coup plotters bombed the hotel where he was staying on holiday in the Marmaris Sea resort, but he had already left.

"The most important thing right now is that millions of Turkish citizens are on the streets" supporting the government, he said. "Turkey has a democratically elected government and president. We are in charge and we will continue exercising our powers until the end. We will not abandon our country to these invaders. It will end well."

Erdogan acknowledged that a "small problem" remained in Ankara, where holdout rebels continued to fight. Fighter jets dropped bombs on tanks still guarding the presidential palace and parliament in that city.

But the tide appeared to turn in Erdogan's favor after he called for citizens to take to the streets to show their support for his government. At the same time, the United States, European Union, NATO, and other critical allies came out firmly behind his government and demanded a return to the rule of law and democracy.

While Erdogan and his deputies fingered a handful of military leaders for leading a "minority" uprising in the military, overall they blamed the coup attempt on a political opponent: the reclusive Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen who lives in exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.

Gulen, a one-time Erdogan ally with many followers in Turkey's military and government offices, vigorously denied any involvement, saying "governments should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force."

Gulen, 75, added: "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations."

While street demonstrators clashed sporadically with soldiers in Istanbul during the putsch, resulting in at least two deaths, authorities said, the battle was much more extensive in the capital, Ankara, where the parliament was bombed several times, planes were shot down, and at least 42 people died in fighting.

Legislators said they were forced to take cover when the parliament was bombed, and some sustained injuries. Nevertheless, Turkish leaders called for an emergency session to reestablish order later on July 16.

During the fighting, 17 police officers were killed in a helicopter attack on a police special forces headquarters on the outskirts of Ankara, the Anadolu news agency reported.

NTV reported that a helicopter used by soldiers backing the coup was shot down by a military jet.

The private Dogan news agency reported that tanks were deployed outside the parliament building while jets buzzed overhead. Sporadic blasts were heard in the city during the fighting.

Dozens of tanks were seen moving toward a palace used by the prime minister and deputy prime ministers. A civilian car tried to stop one of the tanks, but it rammed through the vehicle as those in the car escaped.

The struggle was marked by multiple takeovers of television and news outlets by armed factions. The targeted outlets which often showed footage of soldiers entering their premises and forcing statements to be read on air or demanding the shutdown of operations.

By morning, most news stations appeared to be up and running again, and Istanbul's Ataturk airport, which the military had shut down at the outset of the putsch, was scheduled to resume flights at 6 a.m.

At a critical time during the struggle, U.S. President Barack Obama urged all parties to support Erdogan's democratically elected government and to "show restraint and avoid any violence or bloodshed," the White House said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he spoke with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and emphasized the United States' "absolute support" for the government.

Their announcements were echoed quickly afterwards by the leaders of the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office, and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, a key colleague of Turkish military officers who called for "full respect for Turkey's democratic institutions and constitution."

EU leaders Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker on July 16 urged a "swift return" to normalcy in Turkey, saying "there is no alternative to democracy and the rule of law."

Erdogan's defense and interior ministers called on members of the armed services to stay loyal to the government and fight what they described as a "minority" faction attempting to overthrow it.

The eruption of fighting came after the Turkey's military had said late on July 15 that it had "fully seized control" of running the country in a bid to protect democratic order and to maintain human rights.

State television announced shortly afterward that the military had declared martial law and a curfew.

The military said all of Turkey's existing foreign relations would be maintained and that the rule of law would be a top priority.

Meanwhile, Anadolu reported that senior members of Turkey's military were taken hostage at military headquarters in Istanbul -- including the Turkish chief of military staff.

Later, as the situation grew murky, various military officers heading special forces and other factions made television appearances to express support for the government, as did the head of Turkey's main political opposition group.

During the hours that the military asserted control, major social networks were blocked and state television went dark.

One of the first moves by the military was to block off both of the Bosphorus bridges linking the European continent with Asia. They later shut down all incoming and outgoing flights from Istanbul's busy international airport and deployed tanks to guard the entrance.

Turkey's army has been methodically marginalized during the last 13 years under Erdogan's leadership of the country.

Analysts say Erdogan has long considered the army as a potentially dangerous adversary. Turkey's military has forced four civilian governments from power since 1960.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, AP, dpa, and Dogan News Agency

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/istanbul -bridges-closed-military-aircraft- deployed-over-ankara/27860918.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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Four Reasons Behind Turkish Instability That Lead to Military Coup Attempt

Sputnik News

21:10 16.07.2016(updated 21:12 16.07.2016)

The growing instability as well as the domestic policy of Recep Tayyip Erdogan were among the main factors behind the recent military coup attempt in Turkey. At the same time, the military has always played an important role in the Turkish politics.

On Friday, member of Turkey's armed forces attempted to stage a coup in the country. Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the Turkish government.

On Saturday morning, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the government restored full control over the country.

The reasons behind the attempted coup are a power struggle, the spread of terrorism and the growing autocracy of the Turkish leader, an article in the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten read.

"None of Erdogan's predecessors of the same political caliber has resigned via democratic procedures. They either died or were toppled during a coup," Einar Wigen, a specialist in Turkish affairs at Oslo University, said.

According to the expert, the domestic situation in Turkey has been gradually deteriorating in recent years.

The situation in Turkey has long been unstable and unpredictable. Wigen listed four conditions for such a state of affairs.

First, Turkey borders Syria in the south. There is a war going on in Syria. Over 2.7 million Syrian refugees are currently in Turkey. Before Ankara and the European Union reached a deal on the migrant situation Turkey was a transit country for millions of migrants coming to Europe.

Second, members of Daesh are active in Turkey. There are also other terrorist groups that are reportedly affiliated with al-Qaeda. In recent years, Turkey has seen a series of terrorist attacks, including in major cities such as Ankara and Istanbul.

Moreover, last summer the Turkish government launched an offensive in Kurdish regions. Since then, those regions have lived in a state on the brink of civil war.

Finally, Erdogan is conducting an increasingly authoritarian domestic policy. Particularly, he established partial control over the juridical system. He also granted additional powers to police and intelligence. He is also known for a crackdown on freedom of speech in Turkey.

"If this coup doesn't result in Erdogan's resignation Turkey will turn even more authoritarian. It is possible that Erdogan will grab more power," Wigen suggested.

Active involvement of the military in political processes has been part of Turkish history. In the 2000s, Erdogan announced the reforming of relations between the military and civic institutions. Under his political course, the military did not dictate its policy to the government.

Here is a brief history of military coups in the Republic of Turkey.

1960 Turkish military coup

The first military coup in Turkey in the 20th century took place in May 1960. At the time the Democratic Party ruled the country. The government was led by Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. Turkish intellectuals and military were discontent with the growing level of corruption in the government. In response, the government turned to repressions, including jailing opposition activists.

In May 1960, the military joined mass protests. The coup was led by General Cemal Gursel. Menderes was toppled and the military arrested the ruling elite of the Democratic Party.

He was hanged by the military after the coup, along with two other cabinet members, Fatin Rustu Zorlu and Hasan Polatkan. He was the last Turkish political leader to be executed after a military coup.

1971 Turkish military coup

In March 1971, Turkey saw its second military coup. An economic recession sparked a wave of social unrest marked by street demonstrations, labor strikes and political assassinations. The military was discontent with the policy of Prime Minister Suleiman Demirel and demanded the creation of a new government to stop chaos and carry out reforms.

The military delivered a memorandum to the government on March 12, 1971, so the 1971 coup is known as the "coup by memorandum."

Demirel rejected the memorandum and resigned. However the parliament was not dissolved. The new government made a number of constitutional amendments, including restricting the freedom of press and labor unions as well as strengthening military involvement in politics.

In the next nine years, Turkey saw 11 new cabinets, including three led by Demirel.

1980 Turkish military coup

The next military coup was staged in 1980. On September 12, the National Security Council led by General Staff General Kenan Evren declared a coup on the national TV channel.

The government of Demirel was abolished, the constitution was suspended, and martial law was declared across the country. Political parties and labor union were prohibited.

On a referendum on November 7, 1982, a new constitution was adopted. Two days after, Kenan Evren was elected president and was in power until 1989.

After the coup, many activists of leftist and right movements were tried in accordance with the military law. Some 230,000 were convicted, 14,000 were stripped of citizenship.

1997 Turkish military coup

On February 28, 1997, the Turkish military leadership issued a memorandum at a National Security Council meeting. The memorandum was aimed at observing the principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, including the secular nature of the Turkish state.

The document presumed the resignation of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and the end of the coalition government. Erbakan was the first Islamist to take the chair of the Turkish prime minister.

At the same time, the parliament was not dissolved and the constitution was not suspended.

Erbakan's Welfare Party was dissolved. It was succeeded by the Virtue Party. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was then a member of the party. He was given a prison sentence for inciting religious intolerance in 1998.

 Sputnik

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Erdogan Urges Obama to Extradite Fethullah Gulen Suspected of Coup Attempt

Sputnik News

20:56 16.07.2016(updated 20:57 16.07.2016)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday requested his US counterpart Barack Obama to extradite Turkish opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been reportedly linked to the coup attempt, to Turkey.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup took place in the country. Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military. Later, Erdogan and other officials have blamed Gulen staying in self-imposed exile in the United States and his supporters for the coup attempt.

Gulen himself denied the allegations.

"I hereby call on US President Obama to extradite that person living on a 400-acre compound in Pennsylvania," Erdogan said, as quoted by the Daily Sabah newspaper.

The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life. Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the prime minister.

 Sputnik

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Three Turkish Top Military Men Taken Hostage by Coup Perpetrators Released

Sputnik News

20:53 16.07.2016

According to the Turkish defense minister, three high-ranking Turkish military officials, who have been taken hostage during the military coup attempt, have been released.

ANKARA (Sputnik)  Three high-ranking Turkish military officials, who have been taken hostage during the military coup attempt, have been released, Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik said Saturday.

"Commanders of Air Force, as well as of the gendarmerie and the deputy head of [Turkish] General Staff, who have been taken hostage during the coup have been released," Isik told reporters.

Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup took place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.

The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life.

Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the prime minister.

 Sputnik

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Coup Attempt in Turkey Foiled, Yet Danger Still Remains - Defense Minister

Sputnik News

20:05 16.07.2016(updated 20:06 16.07.2016)

The military coup in Turkey was foiled, however the danger still remains, Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik said on Saturday.

ANKARA (Sputnik)  Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.

The coup attempt was reportedly suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters have been detained and the country is returning to normal life. Over 180 were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have been detained, according to the prime minister.

"The attempt of the military coup was thwarted, however it is premature to say that we have totally escaped the danger. We will keep taking our people to streets and squares until we are confident that the danger is over," Isik told journalists.

 Sputnik

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Commander of Turkey's Airbase Detained on Coup Attempt Links

Sputnik News

19:43 16.07.2016

Commander of Turkey's western Balikesir airbase Brig. Gen. Ishak Dayioglu was detained on coup attempt links, local media reported Saturday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Dayioglu was brought to the local police headquarters for questioning, Anadolu news agency reported.

Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.

The coup attempt was reportedly suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters have been detained and the country is returning to normal life. Over 180 were killed and 1470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have been detained, according to the prime minister.

 Sputnik

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(Global Times) 10:35, July 17, 2016

An attempted coup in Turkey on Friday ended in failure. The government of President Recep Erdogan got hold of the situation. The coup has led to the deaths of over 100 people and arrest of more than 3000 military personnel, including high-ranking military officers. Turkey has seen four coups from 1960 to 1997 and all succeeded. The latest is the only one where the government survived.

Analysts said that the Internet played a decisive role in the Erdogan government succeeding in mobilizing citizens to come out in the streets. The armed forces had seized a TV station. They were only one step away from success.

Turkey is the most secular Islamic country, but just like authoritarian regimes like Egypt, the military plays a special role in Turkey. In those countries, the military is susceptible to Western influence. The military is a major force in promoting and ensuring secularization. When the elected government veers towards a theocracy, the military will step in. And the West usually will take an acquiescent attitude toward the coup.

Erdogan blamed radical religious leader Fethullah Gulen who has lived in exile in the US for manipulating the coup. Based on this, certain part of the Turkish military served as a bullet for traditional religious forces this time around, assuming a totally different political role from the past. But the claim hasn't been confirmed.

As of press time, the situation remained uncertain. The influence the coup will have on domestic politics and geopolitics remains to be seen.

A few things are clear. Turkey is far from completing its secular movement that began a century ago. The country is still wavering between accepting Western political institutions and defending traditional Islamic culture. Different forces don't always follow rules.

As a NATO member which is also an Islamic country, Turkey is likewise a hub of the Middle East. While its nexus function in NATO was emphasized during the Cold War era, today's Turkey is more subjected to the impact of the Middle East. The Iraq War, the civil strife in Syria and the rise of IS have exerted a deep influence on the country, which has fallen heavily to terrorism. Uncertainty of its future direction has compounded the disorientation of the entire Middle East.

In this failed coup, the military lost out to the democratically-elected government and the tanks couldn't win over the unarmed public. This might suggest the Middle East is undergoing a fundamental change. Instead of a color revolution, the military suffered a heavy blow. It was unprecedented to see soldiers surrender to the public with their arms up.

Major Western powers have expressed their support to Turkey's constitutional order and criticized the coup. But their real attitude is more complex than this, given their disapproval of Erdogan and close association with Turkey's military.

Observers widely believe that Erdogan will further consolidate his power after foiling the coup. A political purge will be inevitable as he has stated he would punish the participants. This coup will not be the end to the country's political woes. Rather, it might signal a more intense political struggle. This major Islamic country is facing a daunting challenge.
Turkish Prosecutors Order to Detain 188 Court Members

Sputnik News

16:48 16.07.2016(updated 16:49 16.07.2016)

The Turkish prosecutors issued detention warrants for 140 members of the country's Constitutional Court and 48 members of the Supreme Court over their alleged involvement in a military coup in the country, local media reported on Saturday.

ANKARA (Sputnik)  According to the NTV broadcaster, ten out of 188 judges have been detained so far.

Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.

The coup attempt was reportedly suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life. Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the prime minister.

 Sputnik

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Why Turkish Intelligence Agency Failed to Uncover Coup Plot

Sputnik News

17:50 16.07.2016(updated 17:55 16.07.2016)

US State Secretary John Kerry said that nobody in Turkey or beyond saw the military coup that rocked the country on Friday night coming. But how did Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) miss the signs of the looming insurrection?

Journalist Evgeni Krutikov maintained that the MIT was too distracted with its recently bloated responsibilities to surveil the Turkish Armed Forces in a country that has a long history of successful military coups.

Turkey's National Intelligence Organization was the first agency to undergo "total cleansing" when Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to power, he wrote for the Vzglyad newspaper.

"All those who were recruited to work for foreign intelligence and particularly counterintelligence departments from the field army were removed by the dozens. As a result the share of MIT employees with a military background fell from 35 percent to a tiny 4.5 percent," he said.

The reason behind this decision appears to be simple. Turkey's National Intelligence Organization was behind all four previous coups in the country. The agency was the one "that carried out the operations; it also outlined key mission" of each coup, the journalist explained.

For instance, in 1960, an anti-corruption campaign was the key issue, while in 1971 the coup was carried out to restore the order and tackle local terrorism.

"Erdogan did not just reform the MIT, he allowed those close to him, who lacked a military background and came from his party, to turn a once powerful organization into almost a mom-and-pop store," Krutikov observed. "Hiring relatives has become a common practice."

At the same time, the National Intelligence Organization's duties have become overblown, he added. The MIT apparently entered into competition with police intelligence. It was also tasked with promoting Erdogan's foreign policy vision.

At the moment, the MIT is engaged in "selling arms, supporting Islamist and quasi-Islamist groups in Syria, dealing with the Kurds and transporting crude oil across the border," the journalist detailed.

According to Krutikov, the MIT has been too busy with its newfound duties to keep an eye on the army. This is the reason why mid-level officers were able to work on a coup undetected.

 Sputnik

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Erdogan's Opponent Gulen Denies Military Coup Attempt Links

Sputnik News

16:41 16.07.2016

Fethullah Gulen, a political exile living in the United States and founder of the influential Gulen movement, denies any involvement in the military coup attempt in Turkey, he said in a statement on Saturday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  The coup attempt was suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters were identified and would be apprehended as the country was returning to normal life. Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have already been detained, according to the prime minister.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations," Gulen said in a statement received by the New York Times newspaper.

He also condemned the coup attempt in the strongest terms saying that "government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials have blamed Gulen and his supporters for the coup attempt earlier in the day.

 Sputnik

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Turkey Reopens Bosphorus Strait for Tankers After Coup Attempt

Sputnik News

14:57 16.07.2016(updated 14:58 16.07.2016)

Turkey has reopened the Bosphorus strait for tanker transit after briefly closing the waterway in the wake of Friday's coup attempt, the GAC Group logistics company said Saturday.

MOSCOW (Sputnik)  Earlier in the day it was reported that the Bosphorus Strait was closed for tankers transporting oil, but not for the vessels carrying food supplies.

"The traffic for transit vessels is back to normalalong with non-dangerous cargo carriers," GAC told Reuters news agency.

Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.

The coup attempt was reportedly suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters have been detained and the country is returning to normal life. Over 180 people were killed and 1,470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have been detained, according to the prime minister.

 Sputnik

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Deeply Concerned': World Reacts to Attempted Military Coup in Turkey

Sputnik News

14:45 16.07.2016

On Friday, the Turkish government came under siege by a faction of military forces who sought to end the rule of President Recep Tayyip.

However, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has maintained his hold on power while the military coup attempt left at least 90 people dead.

Following the developments of the last night, politicians across the world expressed their concerns about the developments in the country.

The EU

European Council President Donald Tusk said that the consequences of the attempted coup in Turkey will be crucial for the whole region and Turkey's relations with the EU.

Moreover, Tusk and head of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker have supported Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government and urged a normalization of the situation in the country.

"Military coups have no place in modern Turkey. There is no alternative to democracy and the rule of law," Tusk said at a press conference during an Asia-Europe summit in Mongolia.

Russia

The Russian Foreign Ministry also expressed concerns over the attempted military coup in Turkey and called on the authorities and the people of Turkey to resolve conflicts without the use of force. A corresponding statement was released on the official website of the Ministry.

"We call on the government and people of Turkey to solve the existing problems without violence, to respect the constitutional order," the statement said.

At the same time, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova posted on her Facebook page a comment on behalf of Minister Sergei Lavrov.

"Lavrov has recommended Russians located in Turkey not to leave their homes," the post said. "I might add: those who were planning a trip to Turkey should weigh all the risks! Especially when it comes to traveling with children," Zakharova wrote.

United States

US President Barack Obama and US Secretary of State John Kerry also strongly condemned the attempted coup and urged all parties to "support the democratically elected government of Turkey".

"The president and secretary agreed that all parties in Turkey should support the democratically-elected government of Turkey, show restraint, and avoid any violence or bloodshed. The secretary underscored that the State Department will continue to focus on the safety and security of US citizens in Turkey," the White House statement said.

Iran

Iran's Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, expressed his concerns about the situation in the country on Twitter:

"Deeply concerned about the crisis in Turkey. Stability, democracy & safety of Turkish people are paramount. Unity & prudence are imperative."

India

For its turn, the Foreign Ministry of India also said in its statement that it was closely monitoring the situation in Turkey.

"India calls upon all sides to support democracy and mandate of the ballot and avoid bloodshed," the ministry said in a statement, cited by Al Jazeera.

 Sputnik

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Coup Supporters Seize Turkish Frigate, Hold Turkish Fleet Commander Hostage

Sputnik News

14:16 16.07.2016(updated 17:55 16.07.2016)

Turkish military coup supporters have seized Yavuz frigate and taken head of Turkish fleet as a hostage, CNN Turk reported on Saturday.

ATHENS (Sputnik)  The frigate was seized at the Golcuk naval base on the east shore of the Marmara Sea, according to CNN Turk. The Turkish government warned of the possibility of repeated attempts to take over.

Earlier, a Turkish helicopter allegedly carrying several coup supporters landed in Greece, according to local TV ERT.

Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.

The coup attempt was reportedly suppressed by early Saturday, with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim stating that all coup supporters have been detained and the country is returning to normal life.

In total, over 180 were killed and 1470 were injured during the events, while nearly 3,000 people have been detained, according to the prime minister.

 Sputnik

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Number of Arrested Turkish Military Officers Spikes to 1,563 Servicemen

Sputnik News

09:38 16.07.2016(updated 13:38 16.07.2016)

The number of arrested military personnel has risen to 1,563 people, Reuters reports with reference to a senior Turkish official.

According to the official, the majority of the arrested servicemen are junior officers.

Earlier, the Turkish Interior Ministry reported that Turkish law enforcement have detained 754 servicemen who were involved in the failed military coup attempt in the country, including five generals and 29 colonels.

The detained individuals have been stripped of their military titles, according to the ministry.

Earlier on Saturday, the Turkish government came under siege by a faction of military forces who sought to end the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan citing the leader's drift away from the country's long-held secularist values.

The military attempted to use helicopters and tanks to overthrow the Turkish leadership.

According to the state-run Anadolu agency, at least 90 people were killed amid the military coup attempt in Turkey. The victims include civilians and military servicemen.

The coup attempt was led by Col. Muharrem Kose, a former Turkish military officer who was dishonorably discharged in March 2016 for his alleged association with anti-government and US-based Imam Fethullah Gulen.

Gulen's movement known as Hizmet, once claimed as many as 2,000 officers within the Turkish military prior to crackdowns by President Erdogan. Supporters of Gulen have long attempted to use the judiciary to advance corruption investigations against Erdogan sparking a bitter divide between the two groups. Turkish authorities accuse Gulen of attempting to form an opposing "state within a state" known by many in Turkey as the "Parallel Structure."

 Sputnik

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Military Officer Fired for Gulenist Ties Named as Leader of Turkey's Coup

Sputnik News

04:59 16.07.2016(updated 11:12 16.07.2016)

Colonel Muharrem Kose, a former officer in the Turkish Armed Forces was named by state-run Anadolu News Agency as the leader of the coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government.

The bloody coup attempt that struck Ankara on Friday now has a face  a former Turkish military officer who was dishonorably discharged in March 2016 for his alleged association with anti-government and US-based Imam Fethullah Gulen.

Colonel Muharrem Kose announced the formation of the "Peace Council," an interim government to restore democracy and human rights in Turkey that Erdogan's opponents claim have been stripped from the country as it had begun to drift ever closer to a theocracy after long being adored as the secular gem of the Middle East.

Military forces loyal to Colonel Kose seized the state-run TRT News station, the bridges, and Ataturk International Airport on Friday evening before being pushed back by Turkish forces loyal to Erdogan as bloody struggles have ensued throughout the country.

It appeared that the coup effort had succeeded until President Erdogan took to CNN Turk, calling in via FaceTime, pleading with his countrymen to resist the effort to overthrow the government by taking to the streets. The move, initially mocked by Western media and leaders, appears to have been successful with millions of Turks taking to the streets to resist Colonel Kose's Peace Council.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier in the day blamed supporters of the Pennsylvania-based Imam Fethullah Gulen, prior to identifying Colonel Kose as the lead agitator in the coup attempt. Despite Muharrem Kose's apparent links to Gulen, the Imam's non-profit, the Alliance for Shared Values, denies any involvement and has condemned "any military intervention in the domestic politics of Turkey."

Gulenists are not hardliners as the Imam preaches a blend of piety and Sufi mysticism while calling for free markets, democracy and religious tolerance in keeping with the original vision of Turkey laid down by the country's founder Kemal Ataturk.

Gulen's movement known as Hizmet, once boasted as many as 2,000 officers within the Turkish military prior to crackdowns by President Erdogan. Supporters of Gulen have long attempted to use the judiciary to advance corruption investigations against Erdogan sparking a bitter divide between the two groups. Turkish authorities accuse Gulen of attempting to form an opposing "state within a state" known by many in Turkey as the "Parallel Structure."

Prior to being ousted for his alleged ties to the Gulenist movement, Muharrem Kose proudly served as the chief legal counsel to the Turkish military's chief of staff Hulusi Akar. Akar was taken hostage in the first hours of the coup attempt that began on Friday evening.

 Sputnik

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Turkey's President Erdogan Lands in Istanbul, Will Address the Nation

Sputnik News

03:37 16.07.2016(updated 11:12 16.07.2016)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrives at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport in a bid to address the nation and reestablish control over the government after a coup attempt was unleashed on the country during his vacation.

An aircraft carrying President Erdogan has landed at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport according to presidential sources. The Turkish leader whose control over the country remains tenuous at this hour will address the nation in an effort to get the people to rise up in an effort to quell an ongoing coup plot.

During the early hours of the coup President Erdogan addressed the nation via CNN Turk calling into the Western media outlet by FaceTime after military leaders had seized the TRT News station along with the bridges and Ataturk International Airport. At this hour, forces loyal to Erdogan have gained ground against the coup plotters who they accuse of being a handful of Gulenists inside the military although pictures coming in from the region suggest that the attempt to overthrow the government may be more serious.

A massive blast had been reported near the Ataturk International Airport within minutes of the arrival of President Erdogan. The Turkish leader was seen among a crowd of supporters outside of the airport prior to the explosion. Erdogan planned to address the crowd and reporters quoted the leader saying that an uprising has been attempted against the solidarity and unity of our country and that those responsible will face a "necessary response" regardless of what institution they are a part of.

Soldiers took control of Istanbul's Ataturk International airport on Saturday shortly after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed there to condemn what he said was an attempted coup by a faction within in the military. The soldiers who took control of the airport were pro-Erdogan forces according to reports by Anadolu news agency which said that operations at the airport were back to normal and that flights would begin again at 6:00am (0300 GMT).

 Sputnik

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Erdogan Blames Gulenist Network, Calls on Public to Fight in Public Squares

Sputnik News

00:45 16.07.2016(updated 11:12 16.07.2016)

Speaking on CNN Turk by phone, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke to the country from a safe space calling on them to fight back against the military coup by taking ground in public spaces and the airport.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave a brief statement via CNN Turk calling on the country's people to fight back against what he called a Gulenist network effort to undermine the country's democracy. In the statement, Erdogan urged citizens to wage conflict and take to the streets in protest.

Turkey remains in a state of martial law under the total control of a self-appointed military government that refers to themselves as a "Peace Council" that purportedly will serve as an interim government to reinstall democratic practices and the rule of law in the Middle East country.

Despite losing control of the government, Erdogan remained defiant declaring that those responsible for the attack would face a heavy price and that the coup would be stopped in a "short time."

"It is know that there was a coup attempt," said Erdogan. "I'm waiting for all of our people on the streets and squares. Together we will give an adequate response. It is know that this attempted coup was led by the "Parallel Structure." The instigators of the coup will suffer severe punishment and will pay dearly for it."

"Parallel Structure" is a reference to followers of Fethullah Gulen, also known as Gulenists, a US-based Muslim cleric who has repeatedly been accused of attempting to foment an uprising against the Turkish government.

The Turkish President faced mockery for giving the report to Western media via Skype or FaceTime with analysts saying it was a final sign that Erdogan had once and for all lost control.

Erdogan also made appeals via Twitter to the Turkish people to stop the coup saying that "The survival of our democracy and national unity rely on seizing back the public squares and airports."

The Turkish people appear to be heeding the call of the country's president taking to the streets to demand that the military return to their barracks and end their attempt to take control of the government. Rumors that the military's chief of staff had been killed remain unconfirmed.

State run media outlet TRT World has also started to turn against the coup plotters with staff taking to Twitter under #failedcoup decrying the effort to oust the government, blaming it on Gulenist sympathizers, and quoting media outlets that say the coup plotters are not in full control of the government.

The government appears to have turned the tide against the coup plotters following Erdogan's plea for the people to take to the streets using a very low technology resources  an SMS text message. A variety of messages have reportedly gone out to people all across Turkey calling for them to take to the streets as effectively cannon fodder against the coup or to resist the coup attempt through action in the streets.

"In the face of the coup attempt, we call on you to stand with the legitimate government! We call on all citizens to stand against this treacherous act against the citizens of our country," said one SMS message below.

Once the gem of the region and a bastion of both human rights and democracy, the country's posture towards dissent has changed in recent years under Erdogan who recently pushed a constitutional amendment providing authority to imprison opposition lawmakers under an expanded definition of terrorism. The government has also repeatedly cracked down against journalists throughout the country by stripping credentials, ousting reporters, and in some instances imprisoning those they viewed as a threat.

 Sputnik

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A knife-wielding man killed one nurse and injured four other people at a hospital on Saturday afternoon in south China's Guangdong Province, local authorities said.

The knife attack occurred around 2:53 p.m. at a urology hospital in Huizhou City. The suspect, surnamed Lai and 26 years old, has been controlled by police.

One nurse is killed while a security guard and three other medical workers were injured. The injured has been hospitalized and are in stable condition.

The suspect's motive is unknown and police is investigating the case.
UN officials condemn attempt to overthrow Turkish Government

16 July 2016  The President of the United Nations General Assembly today condemned the attempt on Friday to overthrow the Government of Turkey.

"I strongly condemn the attempt from groups in the armed forces to overthrow the Government of Turkey and express my sincere condolences for the lives lost during the coup attempt," said Assembly President Mogens Lykketoft in a statement issued by his office.

According to media reports, a faction of military forces in Turkey attempted a coup on Friday night.

"The international community must fully support the democratically elected Government and the rule of law in Turkey," Mr. Lykketoft added.

In a separate statement today, the High Representative for the UN Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC), Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, condemned the "failed coup that aimed at overthrowing the legitimate Government in Turkey on Friday."

"He expresses his support to the democratically elected civilian Government of Turkey and the legitimate leadership of the President of Turkey H.E. Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan," the statement said.

The High Representative noted that the Government of Turkey provides support to UNAOC, a political initiative of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon under the co-sponsorship of the Governments of Spain and Turkey.

The High Representative also expressed his solidarity with the people of Turkey and their "democratic choice."

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Arrests of Turkish Soldiers Top 2,800; Exiled Cleric Denies Role in Coup Plot

by Dorian Jones July 16, 2016

Turkish officials said Saturday that 2,839 soldiers and officers who attempted a coup late Friday had been arrested, as the president accused an exiled cleric of organizing the plot.

Among the top military officers detained was the commander of the Third Army Corps, General Erdal Ozturk, based in Istanbul, who would face charges of treason.

A number of high-ranking military officials have fled to neighboring Greece by helicopter and have requested political asylum. According to local media reports, some of them are believed to be among the architects of the coup.

As many as 2,745 judges reportedly have been suspended for allegedly having links to the cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Turkish media also reported that 140 arrest warrants had been issued against members of Turkey's Supreme Court.

Gulen, who lives in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, has denied he was behind the plot. On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that Turkey had not made a formal extradition request for Gluen, but that the United States would consider complying with it if Turkey's government presented solid evidence of wrongdoing.

Sources said the chief concern in Turkey at the moment was whether the detentions and purges would be confined to just followers of Gulen or would be expanded to opponents of the president.

Prime Minister Binali Yildrim addressed the nation Saturday afternoon, calling the night a "dark stain for the Turkish state." Officials warned that those who backed the coup would not be easily forgiven.

There were varying reports of the number of people killed in clashes, but officials said it was at least 265.

On Saturday, the situation remained tense in Istanbul, Ankara and some other cities, with sporadic violence continuing. Turkish media reported intense clashes at a large military barracks outside Ankara, which was thought to be a stronghold of the coup plotters.

The U.S. Defense Department released a statement Saturday saying that the Turkish government had closed its airspace to military aircraft, and that as a result, air operations at Incirlik Air Base had been halted. The statement said U.S. officials were working with Turkey to resume the flights, and U.S. Central Command adjusted flight operations to minimize effects on the air campaign against Islamic State.

Western intelligence and military officials were closely monitoring developments in NATO member Turkey, a key U.S. ally in the war against Islamic State terrorists. Turkey is also a supporter of the moderate opposition looking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Kerry issued statements calling on all parties in Turkey to support the country's democratically elected government.

Obama also underscored the shared challenges that will require continued Turkish cooperation, including joint efforts of the two countries against terrorism.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told VOA the coup should be rejected and denounced.

"Any attempt to delegitimize and take over the government is an assault on the will of the Turkish people, because they elected that government through the ballot box and bullets should not be used in any fashion to take away that will. So we denounce it, and we ask all people to stand with Turkey and Turkish people," he said.

Speaking to the people

Events began Friday when the army released a statement on Turkish television that it had "fully seized control" of the government to protect democracy and maintain human rights.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who conducted a FaceTime interview with CNN Turk late Friday, urged the Turkish people to go to the streets to protest the soldiers' actions. He said those behind the move were associated with Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan who has accused the president of corruption.

In a statement, Gulen condemned "in the strongest terms" the coup attempt. "As someone who suffered under multiple coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.

Issues facing Turkey

There was also concern about how other issues will be affected by the coup attempt, including the fate of the region's Kurdish population and the involvement of Russia and Iran in the region.

Earlier in the week, CIA Director John Brennan admitted to disagreements between the United States and Turkey, and not just over Syria, where the U.S. has repeatedly urged Turkey to do more to crack down on IS insurgents.

"There are some things that are going on inside the Turkish political system that are subject to a lot of debate and even controversy," he said.

"But I'll just leave it that we do work closely with the Turks," Brennan added. "I have very close interaction with my Turkish counterpart."

VOA's National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, Mary Alice Salinas at the White House, Dorian Jones in Istanbul, Jill Erzen, Ken Schwartz and VOA's Turkish service contributed to this report.

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Experts Saw Signs of Turkish Military Discontent Before Coup

by Jamie Dettmer July 16, 2016

For weeks there were signs that tensions between Turkey's secular military and the Islamist-aligned government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were reaching a boiling point. Semi-public disagreements between the politicians and the generals, especially over Syria policy, were becoming all too frequent. Military briefings appeared increasingly to be at odds with government statements.

And some analysts in recent weeks had feared a coup might be in the offing, with concerns mounting in military ranks about the series of recent deadly terrorist attacks in Turkey, the government's no-holds-barred war on the Kurdish minority in southeast Turkey, and Erdogan's attempts to consolidate ever greater control over the media and judiciary.

Afzal Ashraf of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, said he was surprised by the level of hostility among officers toward the government. They expressed increasing alarm at the autocratic tilt of Erdogan and anger at what they saw as the creeping Islamization of Turkey.

Officers' remarks

"For the first time in 15 years, young officers were making comments about their government in cynical terms," said Ashraf, a frequent visitor to Turkey. That was unusual, especially in front of visiting foreigners, he said. He noted, though, that top-ranking officers seemed more supportive of the government.

Omer Taspinar, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, also had warned for months of the possibility of a coup.

"Right now, the question is whether the attempted coup is from the top command, with the top brass involved, or a colonel-level or officer coup, from a certain segment of the army," he said. "There are indications right now that it is the latter."

In past Turkish coups, the chief of staff of the military and other generals have been the main ringleaders. This time, that appears to not to be case. There were local media reports that the chief of staff and other members of the military top brass had been taken captive by pro-coup forces Friday and held at the main military base in Ankara.

"It seems like this is an officers' coup," Gonul Tol, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told VOA.

"So unlike past coups in Turkey, where the chain of command was involved, we have not heard anything from the top military brass recently," he said. "Usually the top generals appear on TV, and they announce the coup and explain the reasons for the coup. And this has not happened yet. We don't know where the chief of staff is. There are rumors that he's captive."

At Istanbul's Ataturk airport, a crowd of Erdogan supporters surrounded a tank, bickered with the tank commander when he fired warning shots from a machine gun, and then clambered aboard the vehicle. Elsewhere in Istanbul, government supporters confronted soldiers backing the coup  including in the city's iconic Taksim Square, as police looked on impassively.

Outsiders watch, wait

The fast-moving events Friday left foreign governments scrambling to calculate who would win  the government or the coup-plotters. In a statement, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, "The United States views with gravest concern events unfolding in Turkey. We are monitoring a very fluid situation."

But with splits appearing within military ranks  elite units appear not to have been involved in the coup attempt  and between the military factions supporting the bid to oust Erdogan and the police and intelligence services, analysts were predicting the coup would fail.

And if it does, they said, Erdogan will emerge stronger.

Tol said he feared the president would be emboldened if he survived the coup.

"He will use this as an opportunity to move forward with his presidential agenda," Tol said. "And so far, he's already used people's fear of a military coup in order to rally people behind his presidentialism agenda. So this will just give him another excuse to use a heavy-handed approach in dealing with the Kurds, dealing with the opposition and even the legal opposition. So we will see a more authoritative Erdogan after this."

According to former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Robert Pearson, either way "there's going to be a great deal of turmoil in Turkey's relations with all countries and the organizations that they belong to, and of course including the U.S. and NATO."

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Readout of the President's Update on the Situation in Turkey

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

July 16, 2016



The President this morning received an update from his national security and broader foreign policy team on the situation in Turkey. The President's advisors apprised him of the most recent developments on the ground, and the President reiterated the United States' unwavering support for the democratically-elected, civilian Government of Turkey. The President instructed his team to continue to work with their Turkish counterparts to maintain the safety and well-being of diplomatic missions and personnel, U.S. servicemembers, and their dependents. While we have no indications as of yet that Americans were killed or injured in the violence, the President and his team lamented the loss of life and registered the vital need for all parties in Turkey to act within the rule of law and to avoid actions that would lead to further violence or instability. The President also underscored the shared challenges that will require continued Turkish cooperation, including our joint efforts against terrorism. The President requested continued updates, as the situation warrants.



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Ali Stephens-Pickeral received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University on May 23.

Commencement ceremonies for Yale seniors were held over a three-day period on the historic old campus in New Haven, Connecticut.

The events included a baccaauleatic ceremony, the Campus Day Ceremony with Samantha Power, Secretary of United Nations, and finally the graduation from Yale University with a speech from the President of Yale Peter Salovey, and following, the reception of the diploma acknowledging her graduation.

Stephens-Pickeral has accepted a job with TTI, a firm that develops and sells software.

She is living and working in Manhattan.
Jacob L. McDaniel of Danville has been selected to attend the Virginia Space Coast Scholars Summer Academy at the NASA Flight Facility located at Wallops Island on Virginias Eastern Shore from July 23-29.

The summer program showcases the talents of approximately 120 high school students from throughout the commonwealth of Virginia who have completed a four-month science, technology, engineering and math online experience through the Virginia Space Grant Consortium.

With the recommendation of several teachers, McDaniel applied for the competitive program last fall by writing two essays about his passion for science and technology. He was accepted and began the program in November. He worked on the course outside of school at night and on weekends to complete reading assignments, research papers, simulations, engineering design challenges, case studies, graphing exercises and math assignments to learn about NASAs aircraft, balloon, and rocket missions that are conducted and launched from Virginias Space Coast.

The coursework was graded by Master Teachers who provided feedback and support to the Virginia Space Coast Scholars throughout the online experience. Based on their performance during the online course and certain other criteria, only about one-third of the scholars were selected to attend the summer program.

At the Summer Academy, scholars will apply the basic project management skills acquired during the online experience to real-world, hands-on scenarios tied to NASA Wallops Flight Facilitys current space missions.

Students will be mentored and taught by NASA and aerospace industry scientists and engineers who will share their knowledge and skills with the scholars throughout the week.

Jacob is a rising junior at Carlisle School in Martinsville. He is the son of Randall and Katherine McDaniel and the grandson of Dan and Sally Davis, all of Danville.

Also, he is the grandson of Patsy McDaniel of Patrick Springs and the late Joseph McDaniel and Nancy McDaniel of Rhoadesville.
Danville Community College President Bruce Scism is confident more training attracts more companies and brings higher salaries to the region.

The announcement earlier this week that British company Overfinch is opening its first manufacturing location in the United States in Danville is being viewed as a win-win situation at DCC and its advanced manufacturing program.

The regions training programs for advanced manufacturing  particularly precision machining  were cited as being one of the main reasons Overfinch chose Danville for the new plant.

Scism said the promised 41 jobs at Overfinch will add more options for DCC students completing various certificates, diplomas and degrees and degrees in advanced manufacturing fields.

Our students get jobs, Scism said. And theyll make really good money.

Graduates currently find jobs at local companies such as EIT, Piedmont Precision Machine, IKEA, Master Gage & Tool Co. and out of the area at companies that include BWXT in Lynchburg and Rolls Royce in Prince George County, Scism said.

But while some of the jobs taken are out of town, not all employees choose to leave their homes in the region  instead they commute, like Teresa Rice.

Rice said Troy Simspon, director of advanced manufacturing at DCC, encouraged her to stick with the program even when she doubted it.

Rice graduated from DCC 10 years ago and found a job with BWXT in Lynchburg and has been commuting ever since.

She began as a machinist, became a trainer and is now a manager.

Im so thankful Troy inspired me to stay with the program, Rice said. I have no regrets.

***

In recent weeks, both Danville City Manager Ken Larking, Danville Mayor John Gilstrap and Scism have all said more job announcements are expected in the near future.

Forty-one may not sound like a lot, but the other announcements will add to that, Scism said, adding that he wouldnt be surprised to see 200 new jobs come to the region over the next year as a result of economic development projects being worked on now.

Admittedly, not every job at a new manufacturing plant will be for machining  businesses need administration, human resources, clerical and other staff, Scism pointed out  but they will be new jobs.

Advanced manufacturing involves much more than the precision machining program, Scism said. It includes welding, metalworking, fabrication, industrial maintenance, mechatronics and even information technology applications.

Manufacturing is not the brute labor of the past, Scism said, noting that new manufacturing facilities are clean and involve more computer work than physical labor. Its more of the mind than the body now.

DCCs metalworking programs have been growing to the point where the college has issued about one-third of the national certifications awarded in the state the past two years.

Metalworking includes metal forming  such stamping, press brake, roll forming and laser cutting  and machining, such as tool and die making, mold making, machine building and machine maintenance, service and repair.

To earn national certification through the National Institute for Metalworking Skills students must pass tests based on NIMS standards.

According to the NIMS website, all NIMS standards are industry-written and industry-validated, and are subject to regular, periodic reviews under the procedures accredited and audited by the American National Standards Institute.

Students not only have to pass performance tests, but theory requirements as well.

There are 52 distinct NIMS skill certifications in 24 operational areas in metalworking.

In 2014 and 2015, a total of 250 DCC students earned their NIMS certifications  better than one-third of the 743 such certifications issued statewide during the same time period, according to Kim Buck, public relations and marketing director for DCC.

Other advanced manufacturing programs also offer certifications, diplomas and/or associates degrees  the level of education depends on what the student is seeking to begin a career that offers good-paying jobs, Scism said.

A year or less in a certificate program, or two years in a diploma program, are all that stand between many people getting gainful employment, Scism said. There are two structures for jobs: if you have low skills, youll get low pay; if you have high skills, you get high pay.

***

Graduates from DCCs advanced manufacturing programs can expect to earn between $17 and $24 an hour to start, Scism said.

DCC has partnered with the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research to provide a third year of precision machining training at the Gene Haas Center for Integrated Machining.

The college also has partnered with Pittsylvania County Schools to set up a program for juniors and seniors to take enough precision machining courses while in high school to earn a years worth of credits at DCC.

Danville Public Schools will be adding to the pipeline of advance manufacturing students as well, since Danville City Council approved $1.6 in funding to open a machining lab at George Washington High School for the 2017-18 school year.

I wish theyd had that when I was in high school, Dylan Hardy said. He graduated from Tunstall High School in 2013  right before the program started.

He has availed himself of the opportunities at DCC, earning certificates and a diploma, and completed the third year of training offered at the Haas Center.

I started out taking welding and got interested in CNC [computer numerical controls], Hardy said.

That interest quickly grew, and he stayed with the program through the third year at the Haas Center  and won the national SkillsUSA competition this year in the CNC Turning Specialist category at the college level (high school students compete as well in separate competitions).

Hardy now practices his craft part time at EIT in Danville  but hes not done honing his skills yet.

He is currently completing the coursework necessary to earn an associate degree in precision machining  and plans to earn a second associate degree in engineering.

Hardy said his ultimate goal is a degree from Virginia Tech in mechanical engineering  but hell earn as many credits toward it as he can at DCC first.

***

Scism said several expansions are planned at DCC. Nearly $7 million will be spent renovating the EIT building on the main campus this year; a new project management certificate program is being added to the curriculum and they are looking at a new IT certificate in cyber security.

The precision machining program will grow as more students move into that area, Scism said, as will other advanced manufacturing trianing programs.

In the future, training for 3-D printing applications for manufacturing  where, basically, tools and parts will be manufactured by printing them out on three-dimensional printers  will be added to the programs of study, Scism said.

But those classes wont happen soon, Scism said.

Its just not widespread enough, Scism said. It is the most cutting-edge and were watching it, but we cant train for something that wont really be in use for five, 10 or 20 years ... we have train for jobs now.
To the editor:

If we are not a nation under God, we are a nation gone under. That quote was attributed to Ronald Reagan by a speaker on the Daystar television network broadcast of the Southwest Believers Conference recently. The speaker talked to my spirit as he asked Americans who are followers of Jesus Christ to prayerfully consider the choice we are called to make in the November election for the next president of this country.

I had pretty much decided not to vote at all. Neither Donald Trump (Republican) nor Hillary Clinton (Democrat) is palatable. I am no longer willing to hold my nose and vote for a Democrat  my black friends were appalled at the idea I would not be voting. Anyone who knows me knows I am a proud American  the blood of my ancestors helped to bring us to the premier spot on the world, the leader in every sphere of international affairs.

I held my nose and voted for Barack Obama and I am proud of what he represents to Americans of all colors. But he ran on the Democratic platform  abortion on demand, gay marriage, a panderer to every interest group. I believe that the decision to give the force of law to outright sin is taking this country down the wrong road.

God gave us the principles, values and structure that are guaranteed to lift each of us as an individual and collectively as a nation.

Every true believer knows we are called to be on Gods side  totally and completely committed to heaven on earth. This same believer has read the last chapter  Revelation  you know that we win.

How can we decide what marriage is? He made us  its not the other way around. Marriage is a sacrament between a man and a woman.

If we say that life is a right  as our Constitution does  the right to be born regardless of the circumstances (rape, incest, birth defects, the wrong sex, inconvenience, money, etc.) then we have no right to murder children.

Roe v. Wade  the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion  appalls me. In February 1973, my only child was still-born. At six and a half months, perhaps today he would have lived. My point is: I knew pretty quickly that there was life inside me. Over those few months, I came to know him  his likes and dislikes. How can I not defend that life that comes from God?

As for the Republicans, they smugly assert their spiritual correctness  sort of like the Pharisees.

I have been observing Donald Trump since last year. In my opinion  and I am no professional  he is insane.

If you have the opportunity, I hope that you will try to see this broadcast. If you cant, just ask God what He would have you do. I dont know the chapter and verse, but God said if my people who are called by my name would humble themselves and pray, I will hear from heaven and heal the land.

CAROLYN TANNER

Danville
File photo shows the office of Chinese Ministry of Commerce. [Photo: huanqiu.com]

It's being suggested Chinese and European commerce authorities are actively looking for "an appropriate mechanism" to solve their trade disputes in the steel sector.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce says the issue is one of a number of topics which were addressed at the China-EU summit held this past week.

Chinese steel producers are facing a 2nd anti-dumping probe this year in Europe amid complaints by European producers who claim Chinese producers have been flooding the market with cheap steel products to lower inventories.

Chinese officials have refuted this, saying weak global demand is the main culprit.

A European court threw out a similar complaint filed by European steel producers earlier this year, saying there wasn't enough evidence to back up the dumping allegations.

Since 2014, a total of 8 anti-dumping cases have been launched by the European Union into Chinese steel exports.
Peck had S-T staffer star-struck

The late Le Killgore worked first as a reporter for the Standard-Times, then as political affairs editor from 1972-92.

Le was one of my favorite editors at the newspaper. Sadly, she died Oct. 19, 2008.

I interviewed a half-dozen or so former Standard-Times reporters after Le died. All had fond memories of her.

I heard some great newsroom stories, and almost everyone I talked to brought up "the Gregory Peck interview."

Here's what happened: Le interviewed Gregory Peck in 1978 while the film star was campaigning for U.S. Rep. Bob Krueger. The New Braunfels representative, whose 21st Congressional District included San Angelo, was running for a Senate seat against U.S. Sen. John Tower.

Interviewing high-powered people was nothing new for Le. She wasn't afraid to tackle anyone from a president to a police chief.

But while she could be a tough reporter, Le also had a softer side. I've read stories she wrote, asking help for people in need. She knew how to get to the emotional heart of a story. Le's stories could move readers to tears, and to action.

Her one-on-one interview with the Academy Award-winning "To Kill a Mocking Bird" actor took place in a huge empty ballroom at a Houston hotel.

A campaign worker introduced Le to the movie star  then left.

"I was alone with Gregory Peck," Le later breathlessly wrote.

"I told my heart it would have to do its pounding later. For now, I had work to do!

"My heart paid attention. Sort of."

Le was an old-school reporter who took excellent notes with a pen and notebook.

But for this assignment she brought a tape recorder, because everyone in the Standard-Times newsroom wanted to hear the actor's voice.

She carefully placed the recorder on the chair between the actor and reporter.

Then Le made a fatal mistake: She looked up.

"I looked at this tall, dark, incredibly handsome man, took a deep breath and tried to act like a professional," she wrote.

Le later admitted what she really wanted to ask him was about making movies and about his family life.

Instead, always the professional, she stuck to business. To questions about politics.

When Le's 15-minute interview with the legend ended, he "shook hands with me, smiled that fine smile, assured me he was just delighted to have met me, said his farewells and left."

Le collected herself and her tape recorder, but "despite my insistence that I was not rattled, I guess I was  at least a little bit," Le wrote.

She had forgotten to turn on the recorder.

And back in San Angelo, the newspaper people never let Le live down her star-struck moment.

Rick Smith is a local news and community affairs columnist. Contact him at 325-659-8248 or rick.smith@gosanangelo.com.
In this June 29, 2013 photo, muxes, as Zapotec indigenous men who dress and behave in ways associated with women are known, gather for a party in Mexico City. Muxes, (pronounced MOO-shays) living in Mexico City gathered to share their traditions at a community party or "vela," as the event is called in their hometown Juchitan, a city of Zapotecs in the southern state of Oaxaca. A cumbia band played while the singer invited people sitting and talking at tables packed with food and drinks to dance. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

SHARE In this June 29, 2013 photo, Thanya Mimosa, a muxe, prepares her outfit before attending a gathering of muxes in Mexico City. Muxes, (pronounced MOO-shays), as Zapotec indigenous men who dress and behave in ways associated with women are known, gathered for a "vela," as community parties are called in Juchitan, in the southern state of Oaxaca, to share their traditions with others in the capital. Most donned Tehuana dresses, popularized around the world by Mexican artist Friday Kahlo, and many wore traditional large gold earrings and necklaces and a "resplandor," a headdress made from a starched veil placed around the face that creates a type of halo. (AP Photo/Gabriela Sanchez) In this June 29, 2013 photo, a Muxe, center, dances at a party of Muxes, as Zapotec indigenous men who dress and behave in ways associated with women are known, in Mexico City. Muxes, (pronounced MOO-shays) living in Mexico City gathered to share their traditions at a community party or "vela," as the event is called in their hometown Juchitan, a city of Zapotecs in the southern state of Oaxaca. Gay men, transvestites and transgender people are generally accepted in Juchitan and often work as home helpers, embroiderers, decorators, cooks and entertainers. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) In this June 29, 2013 photo, a Zapotec indigenous man who dresses and behaves in ways associated with women known as a muxe, back to camera, dances with a man at a party in Mexico City. A group of Muxes, (pronounced MOO-shays), living in Mexico City gathered to share their traditions at a community party or "vela," as the event is called in their hometown Juchitan, a city of Zapotecs in the southern state of Oaxaca. Gay men, transvestites and transgender people are generally accepted in Juchitan and often work as home helpers, embroiderers, decorators, cooks and entertainers. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) In this June 29, 2013 photo, Ivonne, a muxe, shades her eyebrows as she prepares for a party in Mexico City. A group of Zapotec indigenous men, living in the capital, who dress and behave in ways associated with women and known as muxes, gathered for the community party called a "vela" to share their traditions. The contact between muxes, (pronounced MOO-shays), and the gay community in Mexico City has led to the fusion of urban and indigenous cultures and it was "important to have this party to rescue our culture, to rescue who we are and show the rest of the people in this city how we live our sexuality, how we exercise our rights," said David Kelvin, who organized the vela. (AP Photo/Gabriela Sanchez)

MEXICO CITY (AP) ? Wearing a long skirt, headdress and loose blouse embroidered with bright flowers, Mariana de la Noche road on a float in Mexico City's recent gay pride parade. The float was for "muxes," Zapotec indigenous men who dress and behave in ways associated with women.

The 33-year-old restaurant cook was picked as queen of the "muxes" (pronounced MOO-shays) living in Mexico City, where for the first time Saturday they celebrated a "vela," as community parties are known in their hometown of Juchitan, a city of Zapotecs in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Gay men, transvestites and transgender people are generally accepted in Juchitan and often work as home helpers, embroiderers, decorators, cooks and entertainers.

Like Mariana, most of the muxes at her crowning wore Tehuana dresses from the Juchitan area, popularized around the world by Mexican artist Friday Kahlo, along with the region's traditional large gold earrings and necklaces and "resplandor," headdresses made from a starched veil worn around the face like a halo.

It was a party to have fun but also an opportunity to reaffirm the muxes' presence in the capital and celebrate their traditions from back home, said David Kelvin, who organized the event.

"We want to bring the party here, but through the party we want to have a (message) about exercising our rights, of respect, of dignity, of culture," Kelvin said.

The contact between muxes and the gay men from Mexico City has led to the fusion of urban and indigenous cultures, said Kelvin. The gathering was important "to rescue our culture, to rescue who we are and show the rest of the people in this city how we live our sexuality, how we exercise our rights," he said.

According to anthropological studies, some women in Juchitan encourage sons' muxe leanings because they tend to stay home and care for their parents rather than get married.

"Muxes are a blessing from God because they look after you when you are sick more than a woman would," said Vicenta Toledo, who attended the party with her gay son. "They are a very important part of life."
Air Force illustration by Airman 1st Class Caelynn Ferguson/Released Explosive mechanisms accounted for 74.4 percent of combat casualties between the year 2005 to 2009, according to the United States Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health. The photo depicts an airman caught in an explosive-like scenario to represent retired Air Force Staff Sgt. Chris Campbell's trials during his service in Iraq in 2005.

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By Airman 1St Class Caelynn Ferguson, 17th Training Wing Public Affairs

A man walks home to his trailer in Balad Air Base, Iraq, from the movies. It had been his first day off during his deployment. With the dining hall on his mind, he drops off groceries he had recently bought at the Exchange in his empty trailer and heads out the door for dinner.

As he turns around the corner a blinding white light explodes next to him. The next thing his mind registers is that sirens are wailing across the base, but it usually takes one to two minutes after a blast for them to start. Was he unconscious for that long? He gets up and goes back inside his trailer to find his roommate inside and trying to talk to him, but the man hears no words spilling out from his roommate's lips. All he can hear is a steady ringing through a jumble of noises in his ears.

A moment of time is unaccounted for in his mind and, miraculously, he's in one piece. Or so he thought.

This event and memory are those belonging to retired Staff Sgt. Chris Campbell, an Air Force active-duty and Army/Air guardsman hailing from West Virginia.

Campbell's family has a history of being in the military, reaching back to his parents, grandparents and great uncles. He grew up in a poor part of West Virginia and knew his options were limited within that area.

"You either go to the coal mines or college," Campbell said. "I knew going into my junior year (of high school), I wanted to join the Air Force. I had no desires for college, I just knew the military was the path for me."

His first duty station as an enlisted airman was Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, as an F-16 crew chief in 1994. His time was mostly spent working 12-hour shifts, six to seven days a week. But the hard work could not make him love the military any less. However, the Air Force began to change over time and cutbacks on funding became intolerable.

"We had aircraft that we couldn't repair," Campbell said. "It was pretty much a bare-boned Air Force at the time. They would actually take one jet and cannibalize it to use parts on other aircraft just to keep them flying. (The budget) went from being very good to where we were begging and hoping, just trying to get parts any way we could to keep aircraft in the air."

Campbell cross-trained into a Defense Travel Management Office in 2004 and was offered a slot to deploy to Balad Air Base, Iraq.

"We flew into Iraq, they had somebody at the air field to pick me up and I'd been up for about 20 hours before I hit the ground and my boss looked at me and said 'Hey, I need you, can you make it today?' and I said, 'Let's do it,'" Campbell said.

His boss needed to respond to a plane crash that occurred on Monday, May 30, 2005. Four Americans and an Iraqi crashed before midday. Campbell had gotten there just in time to help bring in the recovered parts of the crash and send them back to the United States to help determine the cause of the crash during the first 10 hours of his deployment.

"I've got their four names (on dog tags)," Campbell said. "They're all buried in Arlington Cemetery. I go visit them every year. Whenever I go back home, I just remember who they were and what they were doing."

Then that fateful day happened a month or so later. The rocket hit, and Campbell would spend the next two years wondering what was wrong with him and seeking answers from anyone who would help. From each duty station and each military doctor, Campbell would hear answers from "You'll be fine, just get some more sleep" to "It's only PTSD."

Campbell had continued giving what he could to the military by seeking any volunteer opportunities to serve. He volunteered to help with Hurricane Katrina just two months after being hit by the rocket, which he would find out only worsened his internal injuries.

"We all can still contribute in some way or some form," Campbell said. "Never feel like you're a failure or you're hopeless. We all have a purpose. Don't feel ashamed to ask for help. I'm always around if somebody needs anything."

Campbell now resides in San Angelo and would like to support his fellow veterans.

It wasn't until about 2007 when the studies began to reveal a deeper understanding of war injuries and as such, the term 'traumatic brain injury' was given for one of Campbell's conditions.

Campbell would undergo many tests, which included the water test. Cold and hot water would be injected into Campbell to test the pressure against his brain. The test concluded that one side of his brain had a neurological deficit. The injuries' known common symptoms would include loss of balance, walking problems, weakness of the arms or legs, abnormal reflexes and sometimes even the inability to speak. As the doctors continued testing, they found that the hearing in his right ear was only 44 percent effective because of the blast. The doctors would also eventually find that because of inhalation of debris in the blast and in Hurricane Katrina, his lungs had deteriorated to that of an 80-year old chronic smoker, despite the fact that he had not smoked a day in his life.

"In 1920, Calvin Coolidge famously noted 'The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.' If you are standing here today, you would know our nation is the greatest nation on earth and that it does not forget our defenders," Col. Michael Downs, 17th training wing commander, said. "Staff Sgt. Campbell, you powerfully overcame the enemy's attempt to take your life. This act only made you stronger, you are resilient and an inspiration to all of us. Thank you so much for your service and for your sacrifice."

Campbell and his family received a new home in San Angelo as part of Operation Finally Home, a nonprofit organization that provides custom-built, mortgage-free homes to military heroes and the widows of the fallen.

This story was originally published July 13 on the Goodfellow Air Force Base website and is reprinted here with permission.
Under a barrage of information from a young age about the dangers of drugs, students face an almost daily challenge of whether to use them.

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Campus access only part of youth substance abuse picture

By Michelle Gaitan of the San Angelo Standard-Times

Under a barrage of information from a young age about the dangers of drugs, students face an almost daily challenge of whether to use them.

As the daily gathering point for young people, middle schools and high schools see one part of the youth drug use picture, which often is an extension of what is happening in the family and off-campus lives of students.

The San Angelo Independent School District compiles an annual report that offers insight into what students are experiencing.

The criminal and violent incident report, released early this year, showed a few of its campuses had an increase in the number of students involved with controlled substances. The report is part of the district's Texas Academic Performance Report for the 2014-15 school year.

"This is not a new challenge for SAISD," said Jamie Highsmith, the district's public information officer, noting that teachers, counselors and administrators are alert to what may be going on with students and substance abuse.

"Even though we have a large student population, about 14,500 students, any increase in the numbers is of concern," she said.

At the district's three high school campuses, the number of students reported to be involved with controlled substances increased sharply since the 2012-13 school year, although the absolute numbers remained relatively low.

At Central High School, the number of students involved in reported drug incidents jumped from 14 in school year 2012-13 to 47 for school year 2014-15. In that same period, Lake View High School went from six to 25 and Central Freshman Campus increased from nine to 16.

The report reflects the number of students caught either in possession or under the influence of drugs, not the number of incidents. An incident, Highsmith said, could involve more than one student.

According to SAISD's Student Code of Conduct, "controlled substances or dangerous drugs include but are not limited to marijuana; any narcotic drug, hallucinogen, stimulant, depressant, amphetamine, barbiturate; or prescription medicine provided to any person other than the person for whom the prescription was written."

At the middle school level, Glenn and Lincoln, based on 2014-15 numbers, have relatively low student totals  with three students or fewer reported. Lincoln showed a steep decline, from 26 students involved with controlled substances the previous year.

Lee's numbers fluctuated between six to 15 students per year over the past three school years.

The consensus among school officials is that drugs are present on campuses  mostly marijuana and some prescription drugs  but the numbers remain small and without indication of an underlying problem.

The sudden spike in high school incidents and drop in middle school drug events suggests individual students may be taking their habits through the system.

Most educators say a graduating class will develop its own personality over time, said Eddie Heath, director of student services at SAISD, offering a possible explanation for a rise in numbers as nothing more than a group of students who continue to make bad decisions year after year as they move through the grades.

"It's strange how they move through the ranks together, but the different kind of classes have different personalities," he said. "There may be a set of students in this particular grade level that they have an inclination toward something. ... It's not necessarily a reflection of a trend as it is a reflection of the individual people that are a part of that (group of students), that just move forward."

As far as local law enforcement is concerned, whether drug use by students is happening on or off campus, figuring out how frequently schools are having to deal with the issue is a challenge.

"It's hard to say whether it's a problem or not because it's widespread, but it's highly underreported I think at the schools," said Jeff Fant, who was assistant police chief with the San Angelo Police Department during the period the reports cover. "Not necessarily by the schools, but it's just well-hidden and unless you are specifically looking for such things, then you are not going to see the extent of it."

Finding drugs on campus is not out of the ordinary.

"It's not an uncommon thing for them to run across that on a relatively regular basis," Fant said. "And you figure there is, what, 12,000-14,000 kids in the school district going to SAISD? Percentage-wise it's probably not much different from the population  but it's something that definitely needs to be looked at in depth."

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

Students are surveyed in the effort to get a snapshot of their attitude toward drugs, but the data obtained is incomplete because the polls are not consistent from one year to the next and participation is low.

An annual Core Measures Survey to gauge student views and attitudes about controlled substances is conducted by the Concho Valley Community Action and Resources for Empowerment and Success Drug Free Communities Coalition.

The regional coalition operates as part of the Alcohol & Drug Abuse Council for Concho Valley's prevention team, and works in partnership with San Angelo ISD to hold drug awareness presentations and curriculum for students in all grade levels.

The survey gathers self-reported student data concerning use of alcohol, tobacco and other drug substances from grades 7, 9 and 12. Surveys are prepared by Angelo State University's Center for Community Wellness, Engagement & Development and provide area-wide results, also sorted by district and campus.

Surveys from SAISD's three high school campuses from 2010-14 show the majority of its students view using controlled substances as risky behavior. However, not all campuses or grade levels participate every year.

The spring 2015 survey, representing academic year 2014, included only 144 participating Central High School seniors. No other campus or grade level participated.

Data collected from the five surveys show the average onset age students say they first used a substance  alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana  is 12.

And although the majority surveyed whether students viewed using controlled substances as risky behavior, students perceived smoking one or more packs of cigarettes a day to be more harmful than occasionally using any other substances, including marijuana, alcohol and prescription drugs.

Based on percentages from the spring 2014 survey, which had the highest number of participants among all five surveys years, 59.7 percent of freshmen and 51.2 percent of seniors perceived smoking marijuana once or twice a week had great risk of personal harm.

Kenneth Stewart, professor at ASU, said he "wouldn't recommend people read these kinds of results and say 'OK, that proves it without a doubt.'"

"What we do with it, at least in my mind, is use it as an indicator of changes in the behavior of the youth population when it comes to attitudes toward drugs and when it comes to use of substances," he said.

However, because school districts are not obligated to participate, Stewart said, what comes into question is the technical reliability and validity of the results.

"So what that means from a statistical point of view is that the more area people you get together in the pot, then the better indication you have to simplify the problem," he said. "So when you're looking at smaller numbers  those numbers are going to be less stable. You might go back next year and have a similarly small number of people responding but with a much different response."

From a statewide perspective, the majority of students across Texas who participated in the Texas School Survey of Drug and Alcohol Use  which collects self-reported tobacco, alcohol and substance use data among students in grades seven through 12 in public schools  also view drugs as risky and harmful.

The statewide survey is sponsored by the Texas Department of State Health Services and administered by the Public Policy Research Institute.

San Angelo ISD falls into Region 9  the state's health service region  which encompasses 30 counties including Tom Green, Coke and Schleicher.

"Districts in Region 9 are the hardest to recruit from," said Sharon Pearson, senior research associate with the Texas School Survey, in reference to getting participation in the surveys. "They just don't want to do it."

Lee Middle School was the only San Angelo ISD campus to participate in 2014, "therefore, there is no district or campus report for them. They did not participate at all in 2012," she said.

SAISD said although it "appreciates the interest of entities that wish to survey our students," it is "unable to accommodate the high volume of survey requests the district receives."

"Each year, the district is inundated with survey requests to be completed in the classroom setting," Highsmith wrote in an email. "Because we closely guard our instructional time, not all survey requests sent to the district can be completed."

STUDENT PERSPECTIVES

"You just know who does it," said one sophomore from Central High School.

"You can smell it on them and you can see that their eyes are all red," said another student, also a sophomore at Central.

Both students agreed the visibility of drugs on campus is a problem, but it falls more along the lines of students using drugs than it is drugs floating around campus.

"Usually kids are stoned, and they usually go off campus and do it, and when they come back to school they act different," the student said.

The teens said marijuana is probably the easiest drug to obtain, and even though there is a presence of prescription drugs, it's not as common as marijuana.

The statewide survey's report for 2014 found that 6.3 percent of seventh-graders found it to be very easy to get marijuana. The percentage climbed by grade level, with 36.6 percent of 12th graders finding it very easy to get the drug. Ease of access to prescription drugs was not surveyed.

Despite SAISD campuses' drug-free motto, students acknowledge it's not difficult to get drugs.

"Everyone knows who does it and who sells it. It's pretty accessible," one student said.

PREVENTION PROGRAMS & DISCIPLINARY ACTION

Highsmith said the district has not increased enforcement to keep drugs out of schools, but it does provide students with a number of preventive resources and education about the harmful effects of controlled substances.

Programs include the San Angelo Police Department's DREAM, Court Appointed Special Advocates' Parent Project, and the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Council of the Concho Valley's Kids Connection and Red Ribbon Week.

Chelsea Ashton, prevention coordinator for ADACCV, said the agency has five staff members who provide the majority of their on-site services to schools in SAISD and within a 13-county coverage area, but services depend on school needs and are provided on request from the schools.

At the elementary school level, the anti-drug curriculum is age-specific for students in first through fifth grade. Primarily, the discussion focuses on social skills and decision-making so students learn more about dealing with anger, about bullying and about how differences are OK, she said.

"And we do cover alcohol, tobacco and prescription drugs, and those are usually our first ones because they are legal, they're everywhere," Ashton said.

As students get older, ADACCV's conversation expands to include other drugs such as marijuana, a favored choice among teens, and is geared toward students who are experiencing some type of risk factor.

That curriculum looks more at effective communication, chemical dependency in families, education about the consequences of long-term drug use and their choices, she said.

When preventive measures fall short of accomplishing their goal, the district's next step is disciplinary action.

The district operates two separate Disciplinary Alternative Educational Program placements for the elementary and secondary schools at the Carver Learning Center. Students are placed in Carver short term or long term, depending on the type of offense a student commits.

"There is a case being made to establish a rapport and a relationship with the student so that you can work with them and help them in any way possible and give them opportunities for that as well as supporting the families," Heath said. "But just like anything else, just like at the adult level, you're not going to get too far with someone that is not interested in doing different, and so we try to make sure the student and the families know what we have available to them."

LAW ENFORCEMENT'S INVOLVEMENT

Walking the halls of the Carver Learning Center and Glenn Middle School, campus Officer Charles Flores sees firsthand what happens on school grounds.

"Drugs are common here in San Angelo and of course, on campuses, drugs are present, but it's not an overwhelming issue like you see in some other areas," he said, while acknowledging he has recovered drugs from students.

Flores, who began working with the school district in August, divides his time one day a week between both campuses.

"Working from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. at Carver and noon to 4 p.m. at Glenn, I've recovered narcotics at both places," he said. "The most that I've seen is usually weed, and of course prescription pills are the easiest to find. Harder stuff like meth is, I am not going to say hard to find, but it's not as common."

Since 2010, SAPD has made five felony arrests for controlled substances  such as meth and cocaine  at the high school and middle school campuses. During that same time period, there have been 228 misdemeanor arrests for controlled substances  such as marijuana and prescription drugs  from elementary to high school.

Central, including its Freshman Campus, has the highest number of misdemeanor arrests with 97. It is also the biggest combined campus in the city.

Citywide, from 2010 to June 2016, there have been a total of 604 felony and misdemeanor arrests for ages 17 and younger. This total combines arrests on campuses, other education facilities, public areas and private residences.

At Carver "we've got elementary-aged kids that are there for drug violations, junior high kids there for drug violations and high school kids there for those same violations, and the concern for these kids isn't necessarily that they're doing it at school," he said. "It's that they're doing it, period. And that's really what we have to tackle."

Beyond what law enforcement and school officials are able to do to confront students using drugs  however problematic drug use on campuses is viewed  finding a workable solution to the challenge proves elusive.

"That's the $64 million dollar question  asking what can be done because drugs are a problem across the board and at the schools there are a number of problems and issues that go along with that," which kids typically are not willing to share with adults and especially with police officers, Fant said.

"So what can be done? It's got to be through an educational campaign  at the school age level," he said. "The kids have to be comfortable to be able to report what they see, what they hear, what they know to either to the school personnel or to a school officer on campus."

Names of students interviewed are withheld for privacy.
KUALA LUMPUR, July 17 -- Malaysian government reiterated its commitment on Sunday to seek the truth two years after the loss of Malaysian Airlines fight MH17.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said the downing of flight MH17 "was a criminal act that outraged the world and caused the loss of all 298 lives aboard."

"The Malaysian government continues all efforts to find a full and satisfactory explanation of the events that led to this tragedy," he said through his social network account.

On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine. The plane was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said his country remains wholly committed and determined in pursuit to bring justice to the criminals responsible for the loss of so many innocent lives.

The criminal investigations by a joint investigation team is expected to come out with preliminary conclusions on the forensic research conducted, including the type of weapon used and other pertinent details, by the later part of this year, Liow said in a statement.

He also called for strengthening international cooperation to improve security standards in civil aviation, including the implementation of real time global tracking of commercial aircraft as well as addressing the risks to civil aviation arising from conflict zones.
An undated photo shows a plane of Thailands City Airlines is in a flight. [Photo: jiemian.com]

A group of travel agencies in south China's city of Shenzhen have issued a joint statement against Thailand's City Airways, boycotting the airline for its unilateral decision earlier this year to cancel flights.

Thirteen travel agencies in Shenzhen said they will not buy any tickets, sign any agreements, or establish any business partnerships with City Airways.

The recent statement comes after failed attempts by the agencies to reach a mutually agreed solution with the airline.

On February 12, City Airways cancelled all of its flights to Hong Kong for the following two days without offering any explanation, a decision that stranded over 1,600 tourists.

The Thai airline later cancelled all flights after February, disrupting travel plans of many other tourists.

The agencies and the Shenzhen Tourism Association have since attempted to establish contact with City Airways but have not received any responses.

Stats from the Shenzhen Tourism Association show the agencies suffered an estimated loss of 10 million yuan due to the unexpected flight cancellations.

These agencies are mulling over launching a transnational legal action against City Airways.

The cancellation also led the Thai civil aviation authority to ground the airlines saying the company's huge financial debt was the reason.

The airlines started operations in 2011 and all its routes flew between Thailand and Hong Kong.

The company earlier also operated flights to the Chinese mainland but was banned from flying into the mainland due to lack of payment of fees owed to airports there.
North Carolina students performed the worst theyve done in more than 20 years on national tests of reading and math performance  showing how much achievement has declined since the pandemic. Reading and math scores in the state dropped from three years ago for fourth- and eighth-grades on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. The results released on Monday by the U.S. ...
From News & Record community columnist Louis Panzer:

If you are wondering why children do not follow rules, consider this:

I recently traveled home to Greensboro on a flight from Atlanta. The instructions were very clearly stated three times. No phone conversation. Shut down your electronics to airplane mode. I sat while a woman blatantly ignored these rules and continued her conversation over the safety instructions as the plane was taxiing. Through all three requests.

Another woman next to me was texting. Not as obnoxious but certainly prohibited. Finally an attendant caught the woman in the act and told her to get off the phone. He explained that she was not to be talking on the phone, but did she comply, embarrassed at her transgression?

No. Instead she defiantly responded, I wasnt talking. ... Mostly listening. Yeah.

To the Delta attendants credit, he made it clear that they would bring the plane back to the gate and security personnel would remove her if she didnt wish to follow instructions.

But what does this say about us as a society? People ignoring rules designed to help themselves and keep others around them safe because they dont feel like complying is the beginning of an unraveling  a loose thread that gets tugged and tugged until the fabric is tattered.

We expect our children to behave, mostly, and then the examples we set are clearly Do as I say, not as I do. But why even do as you say if you yourself arent following the rules?

Increasingly, this level of noncompliance takes us from a place of merely inconvenience or mild defiance to a place where others are placed at risk. Stop sign? Speed limit? So says you!

Dont text while driving? Im sorry ... were you talking to me? I had my ear buds in.

As I write this, my phone is in airplane mode and we have reached cruising altitude.

The woman beside me? Still texting. Meh.
NANNING, July 17 -- Living deep in southwest China's karst rocky mountains, Lan Yuefen only has two household necessities in her house -- a bed made of a wooden slab on bricks and a cooking pot.

Houses in her village, Li'ao, in Nandan County, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, are scattered across the mountains. People live in 24 groups, the furthest community is about a two-hour walk from the village center. There are literally no paths leading to many of the groups, and people have to cut their own trails through the moutain greenery.

Lan's fellow villagers' lives are no better than her own. Although they all live in brick houses, they have little of value inside.

The houses were built up in a government-sponsored flood-relief program last year, as mountain flashes damaged many of their old ones. But the new houses alone could not help lift the villagers out of poverty.

The Yao ethnic village, which has 2,000 inhabitants, still follows the traditional, primitive matriarchal society, where children only know their mothers. After so long living in solitude, not many know the names of their spouses or how old their offspring are.

Lan Yuefen, 31, only has the corn that she grows on small plots of land on the mountain slopes to feed her 13-year-old son.

"We have not had meat since winter," said her son Meng Mingsheng.

China aims to lift more than 70 million people above the poverty line before 2020, including these ethnic communities.

In January, Vice Premier Wang Yang visited Yunnan's minority groups, who are enjoying life under socialism after years of primitive living or serfdom.

He urged the local government to make targeted efforts to help all documented people out of poverty, and improve education and training to raise their own ability to shake off poverty.

In answer to the vice premier's call, local governments sent poverty-relief officials directly to the impoverished villages.

Zheng Yeqiang was one such official. He was dispatched to Li'ao to make changes during his two-year tenure.

"I am encouraging the villagers to communicate with the outside world," he said.

Young people were encouraged to look for jobs, while those that stayed in the village were offered help to sell their crops and produce outside of the area.

He said plans for paths and water conservation facilities were in the pipeline, too.

Li Huobao, a poverty-relief official sent to Bulangshan, a Lagu ethnic minority village in Yunnan, put improving hygiene habits as a priority.

He helped villagers devise methods to ensure garbage and livestock excrement was cleaned up in a timely, organized manner.

His next plan is to install kitchens and toilets in each house.
They seem clear about the solution. But what is the problem? Thats less clear.

The Board of Selectmen appointed a committee Thursday to review a proposal that originated with Representative Town Meeting members from District 8. It would expand the Board of Education from eight members to 10 and set up an eventual election cycle in which five members would be elected every two years.

Thats the solution. But what does it fix?

They say its about lack of voter choice in non-competitive elections. But Greenwich BOE elections offer maximum voter choice, provided the political parties present a full complement of candidates. If each party endorses four candidates, the voter may choose four of the eight, two from each party.

True, these elections do not allow for competitive choice between the two parties due to the boards bipartisan structure. While the proposed change will not necessarily offer more individual voter choice, it will effectively eliminate the bipartisan structure.

So, is the bipartisan structure the problem? Is there a negative educational impact? After all, the quality of our schools should be the foremost consideration.

In an email response to my query regarding educational impact, Greenwich First Selectman Peter Tesei cited high turnover in the school superintendent position as one problem, and also unstable BOE leadership. For him, this demonstrates the need for review of the proposed change.

But if superintendent turnover is the problem, its hard to understand how increased BOE membership is a solution. Theres a strong argument that increasing the number of people to whom the superintendent reports would likely exacerbate the problem.

And what about BOE leadership?

At the June 23 BOS meeting, Tesei said, as quoted in Greenwich Time:  we have suffered a great deal of instability on the board itself, with failure at times to have leadership due to a political system that puts (board membership) at 4-4, with no clear demarcation as to which party is responsible and accountable for what that board does.

Is this then the real problem, no one political party in control of the BOE? But how, and for whom, is this a problem? Its hard to understand why responsibility and accountability for the education of our students should rest in the hands of any political party.

Many consider this relative absence of political partisanship on a bipartisan school board as an educational plus. This structure promotes cross-party consensus since no one political party dominates.

The Connecticut Association of Boards of Education, an organization concerned with best practices for school boards, emphasizes the importance of individual board members working well together in the service of quality education. Best practices caution against succumbing to special interests or partisan politics.

The Connecticut PTA has long advocated for nonpartisan school boards. But Connecticut statutes do not allow for this. Our Greenwich BOE, which many other communities view as a positive model, may be the next best thing to a nonpartisan board.

Connecticuts local boards of education are creatures of the state, not agents of the municipalities. While Greenwich town charter provisions govern the election, structure, and functioning of its finance board, the charter barely mentions the school board.

The options for school boards are contained in the Connecticut General Statutes (CGS). In 1966, Greenwich opted to increase its BOE from six members to eight. And in 1975, Greenwich opted to elect its school board under the provisions of CGS Section 9-204a.

This option allows political parties to endorse as many candidates as there are seats to fill in that election. Voters then select as many candidates as there are seats to fill. However, if the number to be elected is even, as for Greenwich in each of the biennial municipal elections, not more than half may be from the same political party. If the number is odd, not more than a bare majority may be from the same party.

Greenwich is somewhat unique in having chosen an entirely even numbered, bipartisan structure. Adopted by the RTM and by referendum in a municipal election, this structure reflects significant community deliberation.

The newly appointed committee should respect this earlier deliberation and ask how a 10-member, partisan board better serves our students. Otherwise, the proposed solution will likely become the problem.

Alma Rutgers served in Greenwich town government for 25 years. Her blog is at blog.ctnews.com/rutgers/.
The news section is overrun by rumors these days. It is hard to definitively say whether the Galaxy Note7 or the iPhone 7 is fueling more fan excitement, but both are shaping up to be true market-defining offers.

Starting with camp Samsung, information about the next Note phablet seems a bit clearer and straightforward. There are still some major points of interest, like the enhanced S Pen mechanics, USB port type and new software features. But other than that, we think we have a pretty good idea of what to expect - a 5.7 or 5.8-inch curved Super AMOLED display, 6GB of RAM and Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 821 SoC. More recently, we even got to see the new Iris scanner tech in action.

As for the iPhone, we are still mostly hearing about the design. Color options are under discussion and we are yet to figure out the whole Plus, Pro variant dilemma and how it relates to the new dual camera setup. However, we still got to see a glimpse of the performance of the new Apple A10 chip, as well as some rumors about a bigger battery.

ASUS managed to squeeze in a few new device announcements amid all the commotion. Sadly, the Taiwanese company seems to be heading towards the same naming scheme madness it made with the Zenfone 2 lineup. This week saw the announcement of the Zenfone 3 Laser and Zenfone 3 Max, as well as the top-of-the-line Zenfone 3 Deluxe. And going by experience, we can only expect more to come as well.

We also can't fail to mention Xiaomi, which is plotting its next big move with two new Note devices, allegedly in the works. Both the Mi Note 2 and the budget-friendly Redmi Note 4 are shaping up to be interesting offers.



Samsung Galaxy Note7 spotted online again, this time it's working The unit appears complete and fully functioning, but sadly we don't get a closer look at the S Pen.





Huawei unveils the Honor 8 with dual rear camera, 4GB of RAM The camera setup is eerily similar to that of the much more expensive P9, but the chipset is a step down.





Moto E3 unveiled: 5" upgrade indistinguishable from the Moto G4 Play The Moto E3 is a big step up from the previous generation Moto E, but it's not clear how it's different from a rebadged Moto G4 Play.





Samsung outs Galaxy On5 Pro and On7 Pro The new Galaxy On5 Pro and On7 Pro offer minor upgrades, come with Marshmallow and S-Bike Mode.





First actual image of the Samsung Galaxy Note7 surfaces No more renders, ladies and gentlemen - we can now show you a real Note7 handset photographed in the wild somewhere.





Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 will have dual camera according to a teaser image The dual rear camera trend will reach Xiaomi too once it launches its next affordable phablet.





Samsung Galaxy Note7 back with more leaked photos We get a glimpse at the revamped UI and the curved screen.





iPhone 7 might have 1,960 mAh battery, 14% bigger than iPhone 6s A new rumor comes to please people who value battery life in their smartphones above everything else.





Asus announces the Zenfone 3 Laser and Zenfone 3 Max The two new smartphones became official today at an event in Vietnam.





Another alleged iPhone 7 photo spotted in the wild The shot looks a lot more authentic than some previous photos and seems to confirm the new design.





MIUI 8 Global Beta ROM now available for select devices The first to get the update are the Redmi Note, Redmi Note 4G, Redmi Note Prime, and Mi Max 32GB.





iPhone 7 color options photographed - no Space Black in sight Despite rumors, only four color options are shown - Silver and Space Grey, Gold and Rose Gold.





ZTE nubia Z11 sold out in hours; next sale on July 13 The company is making sure that there are enough units available for the upcoming sale.





Microsoft allegedly upgrading the Windows 10 Mobile Action Center It seems Microsoft is working on some changes on the Windows 10 Mobile Action Center that should make it a bit more functional.





Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 821 chipset, ups performance by 10% Snapdragon 821 is a slight improvement over its 820 predecessor, higher clock speeds for the CPU.


Chinas non-acceptance and non-recognition of the so-called award rendered by the South China Sea arbitral tribunal is safeguarding the dignity of the international law, a group of veteran experts voiced their support to China, adding that the overstep and expansion of power by the tribunal has set a bad example in the international law field.

Those experts made the statements at a special panel on the South China Sea arbitration case on Saturday in Hong Kong. Over 210 scholars on the international law and the law of sea from more than ten countries and regions, including China, the US, Australia and France were present.

The so-called verdict under political manipulation will surely be cast aside, they reiterated.

Li Shishi, President of Chinese Society of International Law expressed at the seminar that the Chinese government is the first to have exercised consistent, peaceful and effective jurisdiction over the islands in the South China Sea.

China has sufficient historical and legal basis for its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea, Li added.

The problem of the tribunal is whether its eligible to deliver a verdict, said John Anthony Carty, a professor with Tsinghua University.

The tribunal has abused the United Nations on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) by actually demarcating the territory of the South China Sea, he pointed out. Many international law experts and lawyers believe this is in fact a game of law, Carty noted.

Law professor Sienho Yee of Wuhan University said that the tribunal neglects many crucial evidences, such as the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea signed between China and ASEAN countries in 2002 and multiple other bilateral as well as multi-lateral agreements.

These agreements stipulate that bilateral negotiation is the only way to settle disputes, but the tribunal failed to adopt such consensus, Yee emphasized.

He added that the tribunal also failed to regard the Nansha Islands composed of territorial waters, exclusive economic zone and continent shelf as a single unit for sovereignty, maritime rights and delimitation purposes. Such practice is unorthodox, Yee noted.

Carty also believed that the provisional tribunal has disregarded the UNCLOS and overstepped its power by putting forward judgment criteria on the status of islands and reefs.

He challenged the tribunals conclusion on Nansha islands that none of the islands is capable of generating extended maritime zones.

Its absurd. If that is the case, does such criteria also apply to any of the uninhabited islands and reefs of Japan? Carty stressed.

Abdul Gadire Koroma, former judge of the International Court of Justice told the Peoples Daily that the so-called South China Sea arbitration case is highly-controversial and contradicts the international law on many aspects. Koroma also believes that historical rights can affirm territorial sovereignty.

Carty told Peoples Daily that the results of the so-called arbitration have no meaning on the South China Sea issue. Bilateral negotiation is the only effective channel to resolve the issue. The arbitration has set a bad example in the international law society.

Stefan Talmon from University of Bonn concurred Cartys opinions, saying that due to lack of jurisdiction, the arbitral tribunal contribute nothing to the settlement of the issue. Its so-called verdict will even cause negative impacts, Talmon emphasized.




Haiti - Diplomacy : The Core Group deeply regrets the inability of Parliament





Sandra Honore, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations and other members of the "Core Group" (the Ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, Spain, France, United States of America, the European Union and the Special Representative of the Organization of American States) "deeply regret that for the fourth time in as many weeks, the National Assembly was unable to deliberate on the provisional governance arrangements at the helm of the State in accordance with Article 7 of the 5 February 2016 Agreement due to the absence of a number of parliamentarians leading to a lack of a quorum.



Haiti continues to face serious long-term socio-economic and humanitarian challenges. These challenges cannot be fully addressed in an environment of institutional instability. Therefore, the 'Core Group' once again calls on Parliamentarians to resume the session of the National Assembly and to take action to end the uncertainty that prevails.



Reiterating the need to return to constitutional order, the 'Core Group' urges all actors to ensure the completion of the electoral process."



Note HL : For the attention of some of our readers prompt to react by shouting to the interference of the International Community (IC), remember that through its programs in all sectors (education, infrastructure, agriculture, education, security, sanitation, health, direct budget supports, etc... The IC unds each year more than 50% of some  122 billion gourdes of the State budget (over one billion dollars) ...



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Social : Arrest of dozens of Haitian in DR





Thursday, during several operations conducted by members of Military Intelligence S2 on the North border with Dajabon, the Dominican Army arrested at various checkpoint, dozens of illegal Haitians trying to enter Dominican territory. Haitians were arrested at military checkpoints of Santiago de La Cruz, El Guanal, Las Caobas, Canongo, Botoncillo, Hatillo Palma and in some areas of the province of Valverde. The Haitian nationals arrested were handed over to the immigration service to be identified and repatriated to Haiti.



In addition, several individuals of Haitian and Dominicans involved in trafficking of minors, were also arrested. Minor children, victims of trafficking, were entrusted to the authorities of National Council for Children and Adolescents (CONANI) where they received food and care, pending the identification and location of their family in Haiti and repatriation.



Recall that the military operations were strengthened after mafia activities of a gang of Haitian and Dominicans, dedicated to child trafficking were identified. These minors are either sent to beggars networks or directly exploited as illegal workers in the Dominican Republic.



S/ HaitiLibre


















Up and coming contemporary Christian artist, Cindy Gibbs, announces the new LP titled "Overtaken" will be released on iTunes August 5, 2016. The album will feature twelve brand new tracks that were produced by Tom Malkiewicz (Tye Tribett, Israel Houghton, Coffey Anderson).

Cindy brings a dynamic worship experience, as she truly believes the Holy Spirit transforms lives in those moments. Whether it is a service, revival, conference, or workshop, Cindy strives to uplift and motivate her listeners. "Overtaken" features a variety of tracks that will engage a diverse set of listeners.

Q: Cindy, you have been involved in music from a very young age. Tell us about how you discovered your love for singing.

I was born in Luttrell, TN. I grew up in a diverse musical family. At the age of 3, I began singing with my mother and sister. By age 7, I was traveling and singing with my family at churches across the U.S. At age 14, I recorded my first family recording in Nashville, TN.

Growing up, I got my start in a local studio singing background vocals. After majoring in Music Education at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga I moved to Los Angeles, CA. There I started writing, producing and recording my own music consisting of Christian and Country.

Q: Your roots I believe is in country music. Why country music?

My roots are in Christian music but my second love is country. (I think you can hear some reflections of country music in my current style). Christian music is what I was raised on and has strengthened my faith in God. I find it rewarding to sing Christian music because my sole purpose is to bless others.

Q: Who are some of the artists who have influenced you both musically as well as theologically?

I enjoy artists like Kari Jobe, Francesca Batastelli and CeCe Winans. Eva Cassidy, Celine Dion, Colbie Caillat, Carrie Underwood and Rascal Flatts.

Q: You are about to release your new album "Overtaken." How would describe the style of music on this new record?

I would say this album is Contemporary Christian- with a mixture of ballads and worship tunes set to inspire the heart with a common thread of hope and redemption through God's grace and mercy.

Q: Did you write all the songs on this record? Are there any covers?

I wrote or co-wrote most of the new album myself. My co-writers include Laron Christopher, Joe Otis and Tyler Logan.

Q: Who have you worked with on this new album in terms of producer and musicians?

The record is produced by Tom Malkiewicz and mixed by Tom Malkiewicz and myself. It is mastered by Nathan Dantzler. The musicians include Tyler Logan, Andre Frappier, Laron Christopher, Cindy Gibbs, Joe Otis, John Thomas, Justin Saunders and Jon Jackson.

Q: From your website, I believe you do lead worship in churches. Besides your own songs, what are some of your favorite worship songs?

My Favorite Worship Songs: Amazing Grace (My Chains are Gone), Something about that Name, He Knows My Name, Ten Thousand Reasons and Alabaster Box.

For more on Cindy Gibbs and her music, please visit www.cindygibbsmusic.com or email [email protected]

Tags : cindy gibbs cindy gibbs news cindy gibbs overtaken cindy gibbs new album
Baku, Azerbaijan, June 17

Trend:

Armenian armed forces have 8 times violated the ceasefire with Azerbaijan on the line of contact over the past 24 hours, said the message from Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry June 17.

Armenian armed forces were using heavy machine guns.

Armenian armed forces, stationed in Paravakar village of Armenia's Ijevan district and on nameless heights of the Ijevan district, opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the village of Kohnegishlag in Aghstafa district on nameless heights of the Gazakh district.

Armenian armed forces, stationed in the Chinari village of Armenias Berd district opened fire at Azerbaijani positions located in the villages of Agbulag in Tovuz district.

Moreover, Azerbaijani troops underwent fire from the positions located near the village of Horadiz Fuzuli district and on nameless heights of the Goranboy districts.

Moreover, Azerbaijani positions underwent fire from the positions located near Chileburt village of the Terter district, Kuropatkino village of the Khojavand district, Horadiz village of the Fizuli district, Mehdili village of the Jabrayil viilage and nameless heights of the Goygol, Goranboy and Fizuli districts.

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.
Published on 2016/07/17 | Source

The falling birthrate is starting to manifest itself in falling student numbers at universities and colleges, which will need to adapt to smaller classes and raise their game.

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They are expected to admit about 510,000 students for the academic year 2017 out of some 520,000 applicants who want to go to college, the Education Ministry estimates. Only four years ago the quota was 560,000, and dwindling numbers will fall short of the student quota from academic year 2019, and by 2023 there will be about 110,000 fewer freshmen than there are places.

Korea has 386 colleges and universities, including vocational colleges and cyber-colleges, according to the ministry.

Some 630,000 students born in 1998 are supposed to take their college entrance exams this year, but around 110,000 will either fail or not want to go to college. The student population is expected to dwindle fast to 470,000 in 2020 and 400,000 in 2023, the ministry predicts.

The government will have to make good on its perpetual promises to reform universities and colleges and close failing private institutions once and for all in the face of dwindling numbers.

If nothing is done they will gradually wither and die and in the meantime provide substandard education to half-empty classrooms.

The ministry plans to adjust the quota step by step as numbers shrink.

But Statistics Korea estimates that by academic year 2030 only 220 universities and colleges will be needed, a mere 56 percent of the current number. That means more than 160 will have to close over the next 14 years

But that number includes many degree mills and vanity colleges set up by regional worthies, which will be no great loss to the educational landscape.
Published on 2016/07/16

A new K-drama podcast launches, see how some Korean's are raising the country's consciousness on screen addiction, the country's pet cultural to be regulated, and find out what aspect of Korean culture foreigners find most challenging to adapt to.

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"K-Online Television releases first podcasts, official launch this July"

K-dramas are one of leading drivers of K-culture, and if you're a fan of South Korea's popular music scene, why not give this new podcast on Korean dramas a listen and let us know what you think.

...READ ON DAEHAN DRAMA

"Screen-addicted South Koreans compete in 'space out' contest"

Yes, South Korea is one of most technologically advanced countries in the world. Truly, this place is incredible, but all that screen time can have negative effects. So how are some of the country citizens attempting to balance things out? Well, under the slogan of "relax your brain", 60 people spent 90 minutes just "thinking nothing" with the aim of "promoting a life free from stress and information overload".

...READ ON THE GUARDIAN

"South Korea to Regulate Ownership of Pets"

In order to help protect our fuzzy (best) friends, to protect them from abuse and neglect, South Korean is trying to regulate pet ownership: "Measures announced on Thursday, July 7, will enable South Koreans to legally operate services for pets such as animal cafes, hotels and funeral parlours, while imposing stiffer punishment on breeders found using unsanitary or inhumane methods".

...READ ON THE WIRE

"Foreign students struggle to adapt to Korea's hierarchical culture: survey"

What's the biggest cultural difference foreigners find hard to adapt to? A recent survey reveals that Korea's hierarchical cultural is the most troubling for outsiders: "According to the survey by the Institute of Language Research and Education, 32.8 percent of foreign students said that they had trouble adapting to the country's hierarchical culture while living and studying in Korea".

...READ ON THE KOREA HERALD
Published on 2016/07/16

Catch The Korea Times' roundup of upcoming events, AsianDate promotes love in The Land of the Morning Calm, find out what festivals are happening in Jeju in July and August, and robots to be introduced at Incheon International Airport.

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"[Around the hotels] Round up of hotel events and news"

The Korea Herald has their weekly roundup of upcomming special events, programs and places to stay in South Korea that are worth checking out. Looking for something to entertain the kids? How about an exotic summer vacation? No problem...

...READ ON THE KOREA HERALD

"AsianDate Chooses South Korea as its Featured Country in July to Bring Members Closer To this Ultra-modern Land"

Asia's premier online dating service, AsianDate, has chosen South Korea this July "to bring romantic members closer to this dynamic land". Why not come and find your heart in Seoul! "The move is aimed at enhancing the knowledge and interest of members about this wonderful country's culture, traditions, and people".

...READ ON DIGITAL JOURNAL

"Asia Minute: Robots to Help at South Korea's Largest International Airport"

If you're planning a trip to Korea anytime soon, you may discover robots roaming around Incheon International and lending a helping hand: "They look like overgrown versions of those little circular robots that go sweeping around floors in people's houses. But the ones planned for Incheon are more complex---they're designed to help passengers with questions about directions, or flight times or gate numbers". Incheon's airport is one of most advanced in the world and it continually ranks favourably among travelers.

...LISTEN ON HAWAII PUBLIC RADIO

"Summer Festivals Guide 2016"

There is arguably nowhere better to spend your summer in Korea than the southern island of Jeju. In this post from Jeju Weekly you'll discover all sorts of wonderful events to enjoy in July and August, including a host of awesome festivals...

...READ ON THE JEJU WEEKLY
By Vasia Orion | Published on 2016/07/16

Korean revenge dramas are a popular genre and some diversity would be a good idea. This is what the creators of "Master - God of Noodles" must have thought when they chose which work to adapt, because revenge by noodles is certainly new. The series is stylish and dark, its characters are many and interesting and its villain is terrifying. At the same time, it is constrained by its medium.

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Moo Myeong (Chun Jung-myung) is a man who has to give up his name and live a new life after his family is murdered and his father's name is stolen by Kim Gil-do (Cho Jae-hyun). After the makeshift orphanage family Myeong belongs to splits up, they discover how many lives Gil-do has tainted. Myeong aims to become a master of noodles and have his revenge.

The main strength of the series is definitely its characters, at least for the most part. Prime time dramas of a short duration usually place everything on the leads, leaving supporting roles largely underutilized and underdeveloped. "Master - God of Noodles" gives us people with different ambitions, different virtues and vices. Their relationships and interactions are exciting and centered around a captivating and complex villain.

Noodle making might not seem like serious business compared to fighting against high-ranking politicians as dramas usually portray, but the series has a great way of presenting its small world as one that matters. It matters to its characters and while noodles are the surface and a culinairy type of symbolism are the theme, lives and justice are at stake underneath it all.

Unfortunately, the series eventually succumbs to its nature as a Korean drama and places power games above character development, relationships and emotions. It remains exciting, but with too many characters who have little influence in the crime part of things, some have to go and others remain at a standstill before the resolution. Kneading dough for revenge is a tough concept to sell to producers and audiences, but the balance could have been better.

Stripping down the noodle making part brings about another issue, which is the male lead. Myeong is the most typical and therefore least interesting character of the lot, but he is also stuck behind the kitchen counter in a series which eventually moves on to bigger concepts. His faltering morality is not explored well and he ultimately fades into the background.

"Master - God of Noodles" could have been much more, but if one puts those higher expectations aside, it is still a really good show by the end. Perhaps friends of more fast-paced revenge works which rely on grand confrontations will find this slow by comparison, but it could be appreciated by those who find more typical works overly dramatic and formulaic.

"Master - God of Noodles" is directed by Kim Jong-yeon and Lim Se-joon, written by Chae Seung-dae and features Chun Jung-myung, Cho Jae-hyun, Jung Yoo-mi and Lee Sang-yeob.

Written by: Orion from 'Orion's Ramblings'

Watch on Viki
By William Schwartz | Published on 2016/07/16

Funded by the South Korean Ministry of Unification, "I Miss You" is an omnibus feature that explores the emotional rift created by the arbitrary partition of the Korean peninsula into two halves. The presentation is emotionally striking and frequently sad, moving from past to present to future. There is always hope, and even if reconciliation seems impossible one day, bit by bit, working together, maybe dreams will come true.

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The first segment, Love Letter by director Seo Eun-ah-I, deals with young soldier Won-seok (played by Kim Hee-chan) reading letters from his wife Ok-ja (played by Ye Soo-jung). This is no minor feat, as Ok-ja was an illiterate teenager when they last met face to face. Little does Won-seok realize that it has taken Ok-ja much longer to put her feelings to word than he initially assumed. The climax is heartbreaking- a powerful expression of timeless love.

The next segment, Hitchhiker by director Jero Yun, involves a North Korean drifter (played by Lee Tae-gyoo) who gets in trouble for really stupid reasons and grumpily starts demanding alcohol to soothe the pain. The thrust of the story is pretty transparent- we're all human, so why can't we act like it? Even as a happy ending of sorts is arrived at, there's still the definite sense that there's a long way to go...

...In the far-off year of 2020, where the final segment, Boys Meets Girl by director Jang Eun-youn takes place. Woo-yeong (played by Uhm Ji-sung) is a bratty South Korean boy whose family participates in a homestay for North Korean girl Ha-jin (played by Park Sa-rang), who has her own surreptitious motive for wanting to come to South Korea.

Boy Meets Girl is the main event of "I Miss You". By far the longest piece of the three, it also has the most complicated character arc. While Woo-yeong is initially quite uninterested in inconveniencing himself for the sake of some random girl, over time he develops a crush on her. Ha-jin is simultaneously Korean and not Korean. She represents an unknown aspect to Woo-yeong's own identity that is quite familiar for all the superficial differences.

And like any good love story, Boy Meets Girl redeems Woo-yeong by making his love an act of compassion rather than possession. Woo-yeong wants to help Ha-jin because it's the right thing to do. This is the central theme that resonates throughout all of "I Miss You". As Gandhi said, there is no road to peace. Peace is the road, and the stories all excellently demonstrate that this is the true meaning of reunification.

That the South Korean government produced "I Miss You" genuinely surprises me, since official reunification policy for the last nine years has simply been to hope that the North Korean government will collapse on its own without any kind of positive proactive effort necessary on the part of South Koreans. "I Miss You" exposes this idea as misguided. While the notion of homestays in 2020 sounds utterly far-fetched, you know, maybe we're better off setting our hopes high rather than low.

Review by William Schwartz

"I Miss You" is directed by Jang Eun-youn, Jero Yun, Seo Eun-ah-I and features Ye Soo-jung, Kim Hee-chan, Lee Tae-gyoo, Hong Seung-il, Uhm Ji-sung, Park Sa-rang,...
Published on 2016/07/17 | Source

Some 75 percent of public servants take advantage of paid maternity leave compared to only 35 percent of workers in the private sector, a study finds.

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The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs said Tuesday that the study of 788 working women who had their first child after 2011 showed only 41.1 percent of them took maternity leave.

That was a huge improvement compared to only 5.3 percent who had their first baby before 2000, but six out of 10 employed women are still missing out on the benefit.

Civil servants and teachers (75 percent) or employees of state-run firms (66.7 percent) take maternity leave relatively freely, but workers in private companies (34.5 percent) are often reluctant to take time off.

"Only employees of companies offering state unemployment insurance benefits can take maternity leave, so workers at small businesses without such benefits cannot benefit from the measure", a KIHASA spokesman said. "Also, women in some private companies are afraid of losing their jobs if they stay away for extended periods".

The figure was also brought down by women on non-regular contracts. Among regular employees, 46.9 percent took maternity leave, but among contract workers only 1.9 percent.

Park Jong-suh at KIHASA said, "Government policies are needed to boost the number of employers who join the unemployment insurance program for their workers. This could also decrease the number of women who quit their jobs in the middle of their careers to raise children".

Read this article in Korean
Published on 2016/07/17 | Source

Gimpo International Airport is packed with travelers on Monday. /Newsis

More than 8 million tourists visited Korea in the first half of this year as the stigma of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak wore off and Chinese package tours returned to industrial scale.

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The Korea Tourism Organization on Tuesday said the number of foreign tourists in the first six months of this year rose 21 percent compared to the same period last year to 8.1 million.

A KTO staffer said, "If there are no unexpected events, we will be able to achieve our annual target of attracting 16.5 million tourists this year".

Some 3.81 million Chinese visited the country, up 27 percent.

The KTO staffer said, "We are now seeing the effects of marketing campaigns in central and western China". The number of big group tours of more than 1,000 Chinese at a time rose 35 percent to 140,000 people.

The KTO plans to target Chinese package tourists during the summer vacation as well, while also doing more to promote halal compatibility to attract visitors from Islamic countries.

Soap star Song Joong-ki is to star in an advertising campaign in countries where Korean TV series have a massive fan base.
Published on 2016/07/17 | Source

Hwachae or traditional punch made with various fruits or edible flower petals is one of the popular drinks to help Koreans beat the summer heat.

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The first step to preparing a bowl of hwachae is to dice seasonal fruit and then soak them in sweetened water or juice. Flower petals can be added as a garnish.

Ancient books on festive occasions at the royal court describe the punch as being made with omija (red Korean berries), diced pears and honey. Pears used to be the favorite, but watermelons, peaches and strawberries can be used instead.

After the Japanese colonial rule of Korea in the early 20th century, sugar replaced honey as the usual sweetener.

Until the 1970s, hwachae was the most popular tonic for muggy weather during the summer.
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.

13:18, 27 OCT 2022
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

By Khalid Kazimov  Trend:

The volume of Irans crude export in winter increased by 14.4 percent year on year, the countrys central bank suggested in its latest statistics.

On average, Iran exported 1.787 million barrels of oil per day in a period of three months between December 21, 2015 and March 19, 2016, IRNA news agency reported.

In the meantime, the country produced 3.379 million barrels of oil.

According to the report, over the last Iranian calendar year (ended March 20) the country, on average, produced 3.231 million barrels per day, indicating 5.5 percent growth year on year.

In the preceding calendar year Iran (ended March 21,2015), the country produced 3.063 barrels per day out of which 1.435 million barrels were exported.
Azerbaijan has criticised the International Monetary Fund for its response to the oil price crash,arguing that the stigma associated with borrowing from the fund has prevented it from supporting energy rich countries.

The IMF said the decrease in oil price would have a positive impact on the global economy. It has not happened, Samir Sharifov, Azerbaijans finance minister, told the Financial Times.

The stigma of [needing assistance from] the IMF prevents many countries from approaching the fund to address a very small problem before it becomes really big.

Mr Sharifovs complaint hits at a concern for the IMF. In the wake of the collapse of global oil prices, a growing number of governments have shunned the IMFs emergency lending in favour of low interest loans from the World Bank. The bank said last week that its total lending in the fiscal year to the end of June surged to $61bn largely because of growing demand for such budgetary support.

Azerbaijan, which has traditionally relied on hydrocarbons for 95 per cent of its exports, briefly flirted with a $4bn package of loans from the IMF and World Bank early this year. Mr Sharifov said the country, with little debt and a sovereign wealth fund worth $34bn, never needed bailing out. But he added the IMF could have provided Azerbaijan with much cheaper loans than the market rate.

If we borrowed [at a rate of] around 7 per cent, and there is a funding which is available at much cheaper terms, for example, from IMF it would be . . . 1 per cent . . . why should I not blend it? he asked. For me it is not an issue of bailing out the economy, it is an issue of funding  the way I can get cheap funding.

The IMF tried to address the stigma attached to its emergency lending by creating new precautionary facilities following the 2008 global financial crisis. Those facilities have been tapped by countries such as Mexico and Kenya but their use remains relatively rare. Mr Sharifov said the IMF was working on four or five new products to address the issue. This is the kind of conversation which the IMF is having with many oil rich countries, he said. Some of course borrow from international capital markets. At the same time there is an institution sitting on cash which they cannot basically disburse.

Baku is in talks with a range of international financial institutions, including the World Bank.

European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Asian Development Bank, for $5bn in loans and guarantees to fund its share of a pipeline project that would deliver Caspian gas directly to Europe for the first time, Mr Sharifov said. Azerbaijan would be able to fund its share of the project, estimated at $13bn, even without support from international organizations, he added.

Despite the shock that we have experienced, I believe we are resilient, Mr Sharifov said. President Aliyev directed the government to prepare for the so called post oil era. This is the policy which we now have to accelerate.
Flat Rock dedicates Bryan Playground

Kendall Bryan, Eleanor Bryan, Pierce Mathews, John Mathews, Charlton Mathews and Eleanor Bryan Mathews.

FLAT ROCK  Eleanor Bryan snipped a big red ribbon at the Bryan Playground in Flat Rock Park on Saturday morning, officially opening the play area designed to get kids off their smart phones and into nature.

We are just thrilled with the end result," Eleanor Bryan said. "It couldnt be better.

The Flat Rock Village Council unveiled a plaque honoring the Bryans four children, who now have children of their own.

Kendall Bryan said he wanted kids to stop playing on their phones and start playing outside in creative ways.

Flat Rock Village Council member John Dockendorf echoed the idea.

The playground committee wanted to create one that makes kids want to play longer outdoors and one that beats video games, he said.

After making a generous donation to the playground last summer, the Bryans saw the playground for the first time in April.

I really want to applaud them, Dockendorf said of the couple. They have given a gift to all the children of Western North Carolina.

Beanstalk Builders from Morganton made the councils vision come to life.

We ended up with something better than expected," said Dockendorf, who runs a summer camp and an adventure guide business. "The Flat Rock Council wanted something cutting edge. They embraced an innovative playground.

The Bryan Playground, the first public playground in Flat Rock, is already attracting big crowds.

They had the capacity to do something big and they did it, Maurean Adams said of the Bryans. The finished product is all about the enjoyment of the kids."
LIBATION NATION: Southern App blazed trail in city

Andy and Kelly Cubbin opened the first craft brewery in Henderson County in April 2011.

At the same time Kelly and Andy Cubbin were looking to open a brewery in Asheville, a lot of other brewers had the same idea.

Related Stories



In the first four years, four breweries opened in Asheville, Andy says. I remember the day I was going to pick her up and I saw a fermenter being loaded into a building that I thought would be perfect for a brewery. I called Kelly and I said, Thats it. No more Asheville.

It was like every building I thought would make a great location somebody took it, he adds. We just felt like it was getting crowded.

This was one time when the rich didnt get richer. The Cubbins went east, to sleepy Hendersonville, where, lo and behold, there was no brewery at all.

I saw this area, which was similar to areas we were looking at in Asheville, he says of the small warehouse district on Locust Street, where his neighbors would be an antique mall, a commercial dry cleaner and two oil companies. Kind of an up-and-coming neighborhood, affordable rent, industrial. Not only did we see Asheville as getting a little crowded, we really saw that Hendersonville had some great opportunities.

It soon became obvious that Henderson Countys building inspectors were inexperienced in permitting breweries and overconfident in their knowledge. The regulatory apparatus would be test-driven by Andy Cubbin, who found it to be woefully underpowered.

Inspectors who had never permitted a craft brewery before threw up hurdles, if for no other reason, the applicants thought, than the deep recession.

They had plenty of time on their hands, Kelly says.

Their myopic examination  and misreading of the regulations, in Andys mind  contributed to a six-month delay in opening and countless email appeals to the inspectors bosses in Raleigh.

It happened about four different times, Andy says. One of the inspectors looked at my tanks, which are not in his jurisdiction, and said those are not ASME certified. Are you telling me the brewery I just bought I cant use in this county. Thats true, came the answer. If you have a problem you can go talk to Raleigh. So another month (of appeals ensued)  It was a six-month fight. By the time we were ready to open, we were just dead. We had nothing left.



Music Appreciation Club

If Henderson County caused the building inspections hassle, the state of North Carolina and its prohibition-era alcohol laws accounted for the patchwork of retail permitting.

When we first opened, in order to have a wine and beer license, you had to have a liquor license, Andy explains. Since you had a liquor license, you either had to be a restaurant or a private club. We werent a restaurant so we opened as a private club.

We would have done it free because we were being forced to do it, Andy adds. But we had to charge at least a dollar. After 5,000 members we said we should have charged at least five.

We had two canine members, Kelly adds.

Plus a few independent spirits who resisted membership in a private club.

They would only pay in cash, Andy recalls. We didnt officially know their names. We just called them by their number  Oh, its No. 152!

New patrons scratched their heads when Kelly, a welcoming front-of-the-house type, asked an unusual question: What are your three favorite bands?

Kelly was by the book. She understood that if she owned a club, the club had to be about something. Its a Music Appreciation Club, shed say.



Ready or not 

If the couple questioned whether slower-paced, retiree-rich Hendersonville had a thirst for craft beer, they soon had their answer.

On Saturday, April 30, 2011, after a long and painful labor, Southern Appalachian Brewery was born.

We opened at 4 that day, Kelly says. Customers literally just said ready or not here we come.

We were still literally opening boxes of pint glasses, Andy puts in.

We didnt expect it, Kelly says.

Some were angry, Andy remembers. They said, Whats taken so long? I would just try to hold my temper.

The new brewery had a tiny taproom and a large concrete patio surrounded by a towering block wall and an eight-foot chainlink fence. It looked more like a prison yard than a playground for toddlers. The market decided otherwise.

Its amazing how its evolved into a family, community space, Andy says. We never envisioned that.  We hear from people every week that say we were going to move to Asheville but we didnt want to move away from this place.

SAB hosts kids birthday parties in the concrete yard, where toddlers mix with friendly dogs and dodge beanbags flying toward cornhole boards.

We have a whole family that has four little boys, Kelly says. Shes potty trained them all in our bathroom.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, the Cubbins are too busy focusing on the next thing to dwell on the past. SAB distributes statewide now and has recently expanded to South Carolina. Bottling for retail sales is next.

I think we have really good products, Andy says when a visitor asks him why SAB has worked. We have a great atmosphere. People love this place. Kelly is a huge part of it. When shes gone, everybody says how much they miss her.

Kelly has left the interview at that point to go serve customers, wipe tables and check with the bartenders.

I think it was timing, too, she says a few minutes later. Asheville was hot, to be sure, but in Henderson County there was no Sierra Nevada, no winery, no competition. Because we opened before the beer craze was so big, it was good timing, she says. People were looking for another place to hang out. They wanted family, they wanted community. We were able to do that.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

By Maksim Tsurkov  Trend:

Revenues of the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) from the project for development of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli (ACG) block of fields totaled $119.314 billion from early 2001 to July 1, 2016, SOFAZ told Trend.

SOFAZ said its revenues from the project totaled $2.305 billion in H1 2016; out of this, $504 million accounted for June.

A contract for development of ACG block of oil and gas fields was signed in 1994. The proven oil reserves of the block near one billion tons.

The shareholders in the project are BP (operator of the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli, 35.78 percent), Chevron (11.28 percent), Inpex (10.96 percent), AzACG (11.65 percent), Statoil (8.56 percent), Exxon (8 percent), TPAO (6.75 percent), Itochu (4.3 percent) and ONGC (2.72 percent).

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov
Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi underlined that security is prevalent along Iran-Turkey borders.

The borders are under control in Turkeys borders, Alavi said in reaction to the recent development in Turkey.

We hope security and stability for Turkey, he added.

Turkish government officials said the army factions that have staged the coup are receiving orders from Islamist opposition leader Fetullah Gulen who is in exile in the US. Hundreds of Gulen's followers in the army, police and judiciary were arrested and jailed last year. Prosecutors in Turkey's capital announced on Wednesday that 'Ankara has prepared a file for extraditing the US-based preacher Gulen, who is accused of leading a terrorist organization, as well as trying to infiltrate and overthrow the elected government'.

Fetullah Gulen and his supporters issued a statement last night to 'condemn the coup' in an apparent attempt to distance themselves from government accusations.

The opposition, including the Kurdish minority, have also condemned the coup attempt.

Turkey is a NATO member, which has been convulsed by military takeovers at least three times over the past half-century. The coup has taken the lives of 265 people, including 41 policemen, 49 civilians and 104 coup supporters, and injured 1,440 others. Also 2,900 pro-coup forces have been arrested so far.


Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

By Khalid Kazimov  Trend:

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has slammed those who were involved in the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey.

We are in a region where unfortunately some people still assume they can change the power structure through a coup; or overthrow a government that has come to the power through the polls using tanks, fighter jets and helicopters, IRNA news agency quoted President Rouhani as saying at a gathering of people in the western province of Kermanshah.

The president is in Kermanshah Province on a one-day official visit as part of his provincial tours.

President Rouhani further added that some people, so far, have not realized that the period of coup is over and artillery and tanks are not solutions to the existing problems.

These people should understand that the way of resolving the problems is democracy and respecting the nations vote, he added.

Rouhani also said that dissidents must speak through ballot boxes.

A coup attempt was launched in Turkey late on July 15 by a group of Turkish military servicemen. Later, Turkeys officials announced that the attempt was foiled.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

By Khalid Kazimov  Trend:

Following the recent turmoil in its northwestern neighboring country, Iran has operated 12 empty flights to Turkey to facilitated returning Iranian passengers stranded there.

Reza Jafarzadeh, an official with the Irans Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) has said that 12 free-flights have been operated since July 16, Tasnim news agency reported.

He added that the countrys airlines will continue operating flights until all Iranian passengers return home.

Following the Friday nights failed coup attempt in Turkey, Iranian airlines suspended all flights to the neighboring country.

A coup attempt was launched in Turkey late on July 15 by a group of Turkish military servicemen. Later, Turkeys officials announced that the attempt was foiled.

The CAO has also announced that the normal flights to Turkey will be resumed when security is ensured.
Maybe the Presbyterians smote the squirrels.

I dont even know if theyre a smiting bunch, but thats all I could think of as we stood there in a particularly wooded section of this handsome retreat, trying to check off the final item  spot a squirrel  on a birthday party scavenger hunt list. Accomplish that task and it was back to the picnic area for our reward, a small piece of candy.

I didnt want a small piece of candy  I had an unPresbyterian-like hankering for an icy cold, faraway beer  but, at that moment, my 8-year-old daughter wanted a small piece of candy more than anything in the world.

The kids birthday party was held at this Presbyterian retreat, but everyone, be they Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Buddhist or heathen, was welcome as long as accompanied by the prerequisite kid.

And the scavenger hunt before cake was a fine idea, I thought. Send the children into the misty woods and see how many come back, with or without the items on the list. Missing a few young uns? Heck, thats more cake for me.

Then I was forced to participate.

Come on, Daddy. Lets go.

Gosh, I think its just for kids. My helping would probably be both a breach of child birthday party etiquette and Presbyterian doctrine. An abomination, really. Now run along into the woods.

But, I want you to   and thats when her voice reached that unique pitch just above a whine and slightly below the sound required to shatter glass. It runs directly from my eardrums to the backs of my eyes, making them vibrate as if someone were holding a blender to my forehead.

And we were off, finding a purple flower and stuffing it into the plastic bag along with the list of items. We plucked a red leaf fairly quickly, but a pinecone, for some reason, was more elusive.

Eventually, we worked our way down to the next-to-last item  and Im serious now  bug on a stick.

This caused a bit of a moral dilemma that, given more time, I would have discussed at length with any Presbyterian scholar I happened upon near the rustic latrine.

Daddy, is it cheating if we find a bug and put it on a stick?

Absolutely not.

Are you sure?

Very, very sure, I said.

With some trepidation, she held a stick as I plopped down a bug we found after repeatedly kicking a stump.

Then there was spot a squirrel, the only item on the list requiring use of the honor system.

It should have been easy. At our house, squirrels are so abundant they form conga lines and dance through the trees. I shoo them away and warn them Ill soon take up where my granddad left off  fattening them up outside the kitchen window until one day, when they are nice and plump, the window opens, the .410 sounds and the fat squirrels swim in gravy.

But here, at the end of the scavenger hunt, it was as if Noah, that old Presbyterian, had forgotten to whistle the critters aboard when the ark set sail.

We see so many squirrels at home, I told the increasingly frantic child. Lets just count that, go back and get your candy.

No. Thats cheating.

We stood silently and scanned the trees. Minutes dragged into more minutes. I tried to reason with her, but she had become increasingly more Presbyterian-like during our short time at the retreat.

Finally, we slunk back to the picnic area, dejected and one item shy of that magical, bite-sized piece of candy.

Had the Presbyterians smote the squirrels, or had we learned a valuable lesson about adversity, honesty and, ultimately, humility?

I think they smote the squirrels.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

Trend:

13:23 (GMT+4) One policeman was killed and two were injured, as a group of armed men have captured the building of police and internal troops in Yerevan, RIA Novosti reported.

11:34 (GMT+4) One was killed and several were injured, as a group of armed men have captured the building of police and internal troops in Yerevan, Interfax reported.

10:54 (GMT+4) The group of armed men seized the building of police and internal troops in Yerevan, demanding the release of arrested coordinator of the opposition Armenian civil initiative Founding Parliament Zhirayr Sefilyan, Interfax reported.

Sefilyan was arrested June 20 for possession of weapons.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

Trend:

The representatives of Armenian authorities have started talks with the armed group which has seized the headquarters of the police and interior troops in Erebuni, Yerevan, Interfax news agency reported citing Armenian National Security Service.

We assure that this and any other illegal activities will be immediately suppressed by the law enforcement bodies and those who have carried out these activities will be neutralized and brought to justice, said the security service.
Adam Lowe reflects on the epic run that put him in the hospital

Adam Lowe, a Sharpsburg Elementary phys-ed teacher, recently ran the entire length of the C&O Canal towpath  and then spent six days in the hospital.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

Trend:

People are being evacuated from the buildings nearby the seized police headquarters where the attackers are keeping hostages, RIA Novosti reported.

All entrances to the captured police headquarters have been cordoned off.

An armed group has seized the headquarters of the police and interior troops in Erebuni, Yerevan, demanding the release of coordinator of the opposition Armenian civil initiative Founding Parliament Zhirayr Sefilyan. He was arrested for illegally purchasing and storing weapons.

The attackers have taken hostages, said the statement from Armenias National Security Service.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

Trend:

Seven policemen have been taken hostage by the armed group which has seized the police station in Erebuni, Yerevan, the local Lragir.am website reported citing an Armenian MP Nikol Pashinyan.

MP Nikola Pashinyan has visited the police base in Erebuni and informed that the blood pressure of one of the policemen taken hostage by the attackers has gone up. Doctors arrived at the scene and taking into account the health condition of the hostage, it was allowed to take him to the hospital.

The participants of the armed group Varuzhan Avetisyan and Pavlik Manukyan told Pashinyan that their demands remain unchanged: resignation of Serzh Sargsyan and creation of a temporary government.
The recent upsurge of jihadist attacks from Nice and Istanbul to Medina and Dhaka is a reminder that the global war on terror stands derailed. The use of a truck for perpetrating mass murder in the French Riviera city of Nice shows how a determined jihadist does not need access to technology or even a gun to unleash terror. Terrorists are increasingly employing innovative methods of attack, and all the recent strikes were on soft targets.

To bring the war on terror back on track, it has become necessary to initiate a sustained information campaign to discredit the ideology of radical Islam that is fostering jihad factories and promoting self-radicalisation. Blaming the Isis for the recent strikes, just as most attacks after 9/11 were pinned on al-Qaeda, creates a simplistic narrative that obscures the factors behind the surging Islamist terror.

Attention needs to be focussed on the cases where the scourge of jihadism is largely self-inflicted. This will help to highlight the dangers of playing with fire.

Take the growing Islamist attacks in Bangladesh: The countrys military intelligence agency, the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI)  like Pakistans rogue Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)  reared jihadist groups for domestic and foreign-policy purposes. During the periods when Bangladesh was under direct or de facto military rule, DGFI was the key instrument to establish control over civil and political affairs and partnered with the National Security Intelligence agency in the sponsorship and patronage of jihadist outfits.

Read | The secular core of Bangladesh is under threat

The cosy ties that security agencies developed over years with jihadists promoting Islamic revolution in Bangladesh has made it difficult for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas government  elected in 2008  to effectively clamp down on Islamists. The Dhaka cafe attack by five young men, some with elite backgrounds, highlighted the dangers of the accelerating radicalization in Bangladesh.

Now consider Turkeys Pakistanisation under Recep Tayyip Erdogans leadership: The recent Istanbul Airport attack was a reminder that Turkey has come full circle. Turkey served as a rear base and transit hub for Isis fighters. But when Isis became a potent threat to Western interests, Turkey came under pressure and began tightening its borders. By allowing the US to fly sorties over Syria and Iraq from one of its air bases, Turkey has now incurred the wrath of the group whose rise it aided  Isis. Turkeys increasingly difficult security predicament reflects the maxim: If you light a fire in your neighbourhood, it will engulf you.

Take another case: For more than four decades, Saudi Arabia has exported a hyper-conservative and intolerant strain of Islam known as Wahhabism, which has spawned suicide killers by instilling the spirit of martyrdom. Wahhabism is actually the root from which the worlds leading terrorist groups, including Isis, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, draw their ideological sustenance.

The monsters that Saudi Arabia helped create have undermined the security of a number of countries, including India. Now those very monsters are beginning to haunt Saudi Arabias own security, as the July 4 terror attacks there indicate. This underscores the law of karma: What you give is what you get returned.

According to the analyst Fareed Zakaria, Riyadh most lavishly and successfully exported its ideology to Pakistan, where Saudi-funded madrasas and mosques preach Wahhabism. Such has been the extent of the Saudi success in Wahhabising Pakistan that the blowback has now reached the Saudi kingdom. Twelve of the 19 people arrested for the triple bombings on July 4 are Pakistani. In one attack, a Pakistani suicide bomber struck outside the US Consulate in Jiddah.

The same day there was an unprecedented attack outside the Medina mosque where Prophet Mohammad is buried, thereby challenging the Saudi monarchys claim that only it can protect Islams holiest sites. The Prophets Mosque is considered to be Islams second holiest site after Meccas Masjid-al-Haram.

The cloistered Saudi royals are reaping what they sowed: Having aided the Isiss rise, they now confront an existential threat from that terrorist organisation, which believes that its caliphate project cannot succeed without gaining control of Mecca and Medina. The Isis thus is using Wahhabism to topple the Wahhabism-exporting House of Saud, labelling it as decadent.

Read | Fighting Islamic State, ending blowback terrorism

The fact that what goes around comes around is apparent also from the recent Orlando attack. The Orlando killers jihadist indoctrination can actually be traced to his father who was a local guerrilla commander in the US-backed jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The elder Mateen, a CIA asset, was rewarded with permanent residency in America.

Against this grim background, the fight against terrorism demands two main things. The first is finding ways to stop the religious-industrial complexes in the Persian Gulf from funding Muslim extremist groups and madrasas in other countries. The other imperative is for the US and some of its allies, including France, Britain and Turkey, to learn lessons from their role in aiding jihadism through interventionist policies designed to achieve narrow geostrategic objectives.

Jihad cannot be geographically confined to a targeted nation, however distant, as the examples of Libya, Syria and Afghanistan indicate. Nor can terrorism be stemmed if distinctions are drawn between good and bad terrorists, and between those who threaten their security and those who threaten ours. As illustrated by the Turkish, Saudi and Pakistani cases in particular, the viper reared against another country is a viper against oneself and against third countries. As an Indian proverb warns, feeding milk to a cobra doesnt make it your friend.

Liberal, pluralistic states could come under siege unless the global war on terror is salvaged and concerted efforts are made to drain the terrorism-breeding swamps reared or tolerated by some countries. After all, radical Islam shares a fondness for totalitarianism and targets what it sees as ideologically antithetical  secular, pluralistic states. Never before has there been a greater need for close international cooperation on counterterrorism, intelligence and law enforcement.

Read | Tricky to assume plurality will be a shield against terrorism

Brahma Chellaney, a geostrategist and author

The views expressed are personal
During our 16-hour journey, on a dog-eared page of a novel, we discovered an interesting historical fact about Chicago, USA. In 1871, in a farm south of Chicago, a cow kicked a lantern, which ignited some hay, which further lit some lumber, and caused the entire city to light up in flames. Centuries later, as we drove out of OHare International Airport, our groggy eyes werent prepared for the magnificent and towering skyscrapers that stretched as far as we could see. It took less than a second for the city of Manhattan to pop up in our minds. The Windy City, however, is a less-crowded and cleaner version of the concrete jungle. Although it is packed with buildings, it is spacious and well-planned. You can never go wrong with Google maps here. Chicago also has parks that sprawl over acres of lands, and a hint of greenery every few miles. Heres how you can make the most of the city in a short span of time.

Read: Tech-savvy Gurgaon commuters turn to travel apps

Once a Lake Michigan dock and warehouse, the Navy Pier, is now one of the liveliest spots in the city, with a bevy of restaurants and places to shop. (Getty Images)

Sky is the limit

Chicago is renowned for its bold architecture. It, therefore, comes as no surprise that most of the tourist attractions overlook the beautiful skyline brimming with skyscrapers. The Willis Tower, Chicagos tallest building, situated in the Loop (business) district, is one such spot. The ear-popping, 60-second elevator ride to the Skydeck transports you to the heavens. You can stroll around and get a spectacular view, spanning four different states, or step on to the Ledge  a glass box jutting out in mid-air. Be prepared to feel a tad light-headed; the ledge that peers 103-floors down the Wacker Drive is not meant for the faint-hearted. But once you get accustomed, the view is addictive. For a similar high, you can also enjoy drinks on the 96th floor at the buzzy Signature Lounge, located in the iconic John Hancock Centre on Michigan Avenue.

Grant Park, which boasts a large fountain, known as the Buckingham Fountain, is a five-minute walk from Millennium Park. (Getty Images)

Architecture paradise

They say the best way to discover a city is by foot. Wed say the best way to discover Chi-town is by the boat tour that cuts through downtown, weaving past dozens of skyscrapers. Our tour guide pointed out to the Trump International Hotel and Tower, and said, The 98-storey building was designed by architect Adrian Smith. The tallest structure in the world, The Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, was also built by the same firm. As we drifted downstream, she pointed out to the only building that had an unobstructed view of the lake  Lake Point Tower. It is believed that American philanthropist-TV host Oprah Winfrey is a resident of this building. It was built years ago due to a loophole in the system. No other skyscraper was allowed to be built as close to Lake Michigan ever after, she explained.

Reflections of Chi-Town on Cloud Gate, a sculpture at the Millennium Park. (Getty Images)

Lose track of time

Make sure you keep your camera handy on your visit to the Millennium Park in the Loop district. The Bean or the Cloud Gate that draws a large crowd every day is situated in this park. British artist of Indian origin Anish Kapoors massive, mirrored-surface sculpture, The Bean, reflects the citys skyline and the mesmerised onlookers. Grant Park, which boasts a large fountain, known as the Buckingham Fountain, is a five-minute walk from Millennium Park. If you have missed out on the architecture tour, then a stroll down The Magnificent Mile is a must. You will see some of the most fascinating buildings, including the neo-gothic Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, which has stones from 120 iconic spots around the world. This stretch of Michigan Avenue is definitely not called Mag Mile for nothing. You can also walk down the The Navy Pier. Once a Lake Michigan dock and warehouse, the Navy Pier, is now one of the liveliest spots in the city, with a bevy of restaurants and places to shop. The gigantic Ferris wheel is the most prominent structure on the pier, which is located in the Streeterville neighbourhood.

You havent truly experienced Chicago if you havent tried the Deep Dish Pizza. The crunchy deep pie-like crust oozes mozzarella cheese. (Getty Images)

A foodies haven

While strolling down the street, you will often be pulled back by the whiff of caramel in the air. Chicago is famous for its Garrett Popcorn. It is found in various nooks and corners of the city. The most recommended flavour is the Garrett Mix, a combination of caramel and cheese popcorn. You havent truly experienced Chicago if you havent tried the Deep Dish Pizza. The crunchy deep pie-like crust oozes mozzarella cheese. It is topped with a layer of meat or vegetables of your choice, and finished with some tomato sauce. Giordanos is the most recommended chain for the Chicago-style pizza.
Many Bollywood stars might be heading to the west right now to make their mark, but actor John Abraham says he never felt the need to venture there despite being offered Hollywood films in the past.

Celebrities like Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, Irrfan Khan have expanded their horizons and are currently active in international cinema.

John, 43, says he wants to focus on making Indian movies, which would be of the global standard.

I have been offered films from there (Hollywood) since 2006. The only difference is, Ive never mentioned it or spoken about it. My aspirations are very simple. I want to make a film out of here thats world standard, that will make me very happy, John told PTI.

Read: Heres why John Abraham should take a break from work

The Rocky Handsome star, however, says if an interesting project comes his way, he will think about it.

There is no (such thing that) I need to do a Hollywood film, but if interest is shown, I would love to meet those people but nothing more, at this point of time.

The actor, who made his debut in 2003 with Jism, went on to star in films like Saaya, Paap before getting a breakthrough with Dhoom.

John has since then appeared in big commercial films like Dostana, Garam Masala and New York while also doing off-beat movies like Water, No Smoking and Madras Cafe.

The 43-year-old Force actor believes it is his unusual films choice, which he loves and enjoys the most.

Read: Sylvester Stallone is the reason why John Abraham is in Bollywood

Ive always done what I wanted to do from the start. Aditya Chopra always tells me, my smartest choices have been my unconventional ones. That I am a thinking actor who doesnt want to go down the same route.

John says even filmmaker Karan Johar is of the view that the way he mixes commercial and unconventional spaces of cinema is quite exciting.

Karan Johar says, In a commercial space you are a big star but you also do different things, so with you there is a lot of unpredictability. But I enjoy that and I love being in the space of doing different things all the time.

Like, I would love to do a film like No Smoking again. I have been texting Anurag (Kashyap) but it seems he is too busy. I love that space very much.

The actor, meanwhile, will be next seen in the buddy-cop thriller Dishoom which also stars Varun Dhawan. The film releases July 29.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

Trend:

19:17 (GMT+4) Military vehicles began moving to the area in front of the building of police and internal troops in Yerevan, Sputnik Armenia reported.

16:19 (GMT+4) The security forces launched a special operation to free hostages in Yerevan on July 17, RIA Novosti reported.



Armed men seized a police station and hostages in Armenia's capital Yerevan on Sunday, demanding Armenians take to the streets to press their demands for the release of opposition politicians they said had been jailed unfairly.
Katrina Kaif turned a year older on July 16, and brought in her birthday with a private, star-studded bash on July 15. She admits that she loves birthdays, balloons, partying hard, jumping around and having fun with friends and family. Here, the actor who had a working birthday, and will soon fly to London (UK) , talks about her working birthday, focus on her personal life, and more.

Like last year, you had a working birthday this year too.

Yes (smiles). Honestly, I am working really hard on my new film (co-starring Sidharth Malhotra), which is in the dubbing stage. Plus, right before my birthday, there was work on the Facebook launch, which we did on July 16. So, now, I am on Facebook since Saturday. And a few weeks later, I will join Twitter and, perhaps, Instagram too.

Katrina Kaifs last release was Fitoor, earlier this year, with Aditya Roy Kapur as her co-star.

Till now, you stayed away from social media completely. What made you join it now?

The best way to answer this is that the right time for everything is when you are ready. This is exactly what I felt this time. In my heart, I was just happy about doing it. Also, I was starting to feel that even though I am a star and a shy person, there are some things that are best said, and more importantly, are understood best when you say them. That kind of voice or that presence is what I was happy to have [with social media]. So, it seems this was the time I was ready to take this step.

Read: All work and no play for Katrina Kaif

Also, of late, you havent been seen around much, where have you been?

Where have I been? I am right here. Where have you guys been (laughs)?

In the past three years, you did only three films.

Yes, but in the past three years, I had other things that were a little more important to me. I think it was a natural phase to be in, and I was happy [giving attention to that phase].

Katrina Kaif starred with Hrithik Roshan in Bang Bang but the film didnt live up to expectations.

For the past several months, your personal life has been in the focus?

This question is a bit easy for me to answer. Its been this way for the most part of my career. So, its something that has always been covered in a parallel manner, along with my career. While work has been my main focus, there has always been certain coverage of my personal life, as is the case with most people [in the industry]. But in my case, it has been a little more or maybe more frequent that my personal life has been highlighted. But its okay. As they say, What doesnt kill you makes you stronger.

Read: Never give up on your dreams: Katrina Kaif

Now, as you join social media, will you be more visible?

I hope so (smiles), because I think thats what the fun is. As I said, it felt like the right time (to join), and I am going to learn all the steps to understand how the space works. And thats all the planning that I have done (laughs). Theres no other plan; I dont have any strategy.

Social media has positives, but there are some negatives also

Absolutely. Its the same with everything in life. On some days, there are wonderful interviews or stories about you, on others, there are reports which make your blood boil. So theres good and bad in everything we do. The same goes for social media too. Dont engage with negativity, and interact only with people who are genuine, well-wishers or genuine supporters. Its not like I have all the knowledge and experiences of social media. I have just started, so I will learn along the way.

Katrina Kaif starred alongside Aamir Khan in Dhoom:3.

Workwise, theres a perception that Katrina has slowed down. How true it is?

Honestly, its my process of choosing films, and the way I have approached my work in the past few years. You have different phases and times in your life. There are different priorities that take precedence. Thats what makes the journey of life amazing. We all follow our hearts, and work where our passion and heart lies. At the moment, whatever projects I have, I am working with a lot of passion and working as hard as I can. So lets see; as and when there are decisions to be made, I will do that. In terms of films I am currently in the process of finalising the projects I will work on next year. Hopefully, youll hear something exciting soon.

Read: I never get compliments, says Katrina Kaif

So, where has such a perception (you have slowed down) come from?

Every actors immediate perception is, of course, associated with his or her last film. The larger perception comes from the body of work that you build over the years, and where have you reached in life along with all the accumulative work. Of course, they didnt do very well for me, but you got to look at it, accept it and try to see where you went wrong and rectify those errors. You dont have answers for some things, and for some you do; thats what life is. There is a famous saying - Dont take success or failure to your heart. But, we do so, since after all, we are all humans. You feel happy when you are successful and cry when theres a failure, but keep going.

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Megastar Salman Khan hit out at fellow actor Ranveer Singh, who was seen dancing with the audience in a Paris theatre where Sultan was being screened, saying he was not watching the Salman-starrer but making people watch him instead.

Read: Ranveer has a 440 volt gift for Salman, rocks Paris theatre screening Sultan

Asked if he had seen Ranveers video, Salman on Saturday said: I saw that and I am going to break a chair or something on his head. Watch a film... dont start dancing and disturb the film.

I was like what is this. I said he is not watching Sultan, he is making people watch him there. We should have charged money for that.

A video of Ranveer watching Sultan in an Indian single screen theatre in the French capital along with some audience and dancing in front of the screen had gone viral in no time.

C'est reparti pour un tour pic.twitter.com/33iZAWUvOa  Norma Bates (@__mayssane) July 10, 2016

The Bollywood superstar also said says strict action must be taken against those who leak films online.

Recently, films like Udta Punjab, Great Grand Masti and Salman-starrer Sultan were leaked online before their official release.

Its disgusting that films are getting leaked online before release. These people are nothing less than thieves as they make money in the name of other persons hard work. It (piracy) is the worst profession, Salman said in an interview.

Read: Udta Punjab leaked online, producers file complaint with cyber cell

Someone suggested you should put TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act) on people who buy and sell it (pirated DVD). As we pay tax and Maharashtra has the heaviest tax, something should be done. When two people will go to prison, others will stop it. It (piracy) doesnt happen in South, he said.

One of the reasons often cited for piracy are huge ticket prices. The 50-year-old Dabangg star, however, feels that ticket prices reduce after the weekend and there are single screen theatres as well where the prices are not much high.

What about watching the film after the weekend that is Monday onwards. There are single screens as well. Even I feel the ticket prices are high but if you look at the infrastructure, the cost of real estate then you will understand that if they (multiplexes) dont charge that much, then the theatre will close down, he said.

Salman will be seen next in Kabir Khans Tubelight.
Soon after her actor-husband Saif Ali Khan confirmed Kareena Kapoor Khans pregnancy on July 2, reports about her maternity break and speculation about her upcoming projects started doing the rounds. It was also reported that the Bollywood actor, who is due in December, will complete the shoot of her next with Sonam Kapoor and also the shoots for some magazine covers by October before she goes on maternity leave. But Kareena is disappointed with these reports.

Read:Will Alia Bhatt replace Kareena Kapoor in Golmaal 4?

Im pregnant, not a corpse. And what maternity break? Its the most normal thing on earth to produce a child. It is high time the media back off, and stop treating me any different than I ever was. Anybody who is bothered shouldnt work with me... but my work goes on as is, like always. Stop making it a national casualty. We are in 2016, not in the 1800s. Probably, even at that time, people were way more civilised and normal than the way the media is behaving and speculating now, says Kareena, adding, Im just fed-up of people making it (her pregnancy) to be a death of some sort. In fact, it should be a message to a lot of people that marriage or having a family has absolutely nothing to do with my career.

Saif and Kareena are expecting their first child in December. (IANS)

Read: Kareena Kapoor is todays brave modern woman: Anil Kapoor

Apparently, Kareena currently has over 18 brand endorsement deals, and she plans to shoot for the campaigns in the upcoming months. Ask her about her association with her brands, and she says, It is great they will love me for what I stand for, what I represent, and my talent.
NEW DELHI: Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Saturday said chief ministers should be consulted before the appointment of lieutenant governors or governors in their respective states.

Speaking at an Inter State Council Meeting here on Saturday, Kejriwal sought a resolution in this regard. ...and Presidents rule can only be imposed in any state if the government loses majority in the Assembly and not on any frivolous grounds by misusing the office of governors appointed by the Centre, a government spokesperson said, quoting the Delhi chief minister.

Kejriwal also raised the issue of pending bills with the Centre. Bills passed by the Delhi Assembly are still pending with the centre. The chief minister demanded that the bills pending with the Centre be immediately granted approval so that people of Delhi could get benefit of the welfare schemes, said the government spokesperson.

Kejriwal also demanded that the central government should waive off all the debts of farmers across the country to reduce their sufferings.

In the meet, CM also demanded that medicines should be provided free of costs and tests should also be conducted free in all government hospitals across the country like it has been done by the Delhi government since February.

Kejriwal also said the allegations of rise in prices of pulses due to hoarding at the Mundra Port should be probed with all seriousness.

Kejriwal also pointed out that Delhi contributes Rs 1.5 lakh core to the Centres kitty in taxes, but surprisingly gets only a paltry Rs 325 crore out of it. He demanded that Delhi be given Rs 5,000 crore as per the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission.
NEW DELHI: A 33-year-old Croatian national, who had come to India for a holiday, was found dead in his hotel room in south Delhis Mahipalpur on Saturday. Police said there were cuts on his wrist and the injuries appeared self-inflicted.

The victim, Nenad Kresoja, a school teacher, had reportedly visited China and Nepal before coming to India. The incident came to light after his daughter called the hotel to speak to him as he was not picking up his phone. The hotel staff knocked at the door but Kresoja did not respond.

They informed the police, who broke open the door and found him on the floor. He was rushed to a hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. His family in Croatia has been informed.

A CFSL team along with crime branch officials visited Kresojas hotel room to collect evidence. The window glass was found to be broken and the glass pieces found beside his body. It appears he used a piece of glass to slash his wrist. There are three to four deep cuts on his wrist which suggest that it was not a murder. No suicide note has been found but we do not suspect any foul play. We are, however, not ruling out probing the case from all angles, a police officer said.

Kresoja came to India on a tourist visa and checked into the hotel on July 14 for three nights. He reportedly had to visit Agra after Delhi. He came to the hotel on Friday night and went to his room. He did not order food but just asked the staff to keep a bottle of water in his room, police said.

The following day, he did not call for bed tea or laundry, police said. The room was locked from inside so there is little possibility of someone from outside entering the room. We have checked the CCTV footage of the hotel which shows Kresoja entering his room. None of his belongings was missing and the room was not ransacked, which rules out robbery, a police officer said.
GURGAON: A 43-year-old garments businessman was shot dead by three bike-borne assailants at the gates of his residence in Roshanpura in Old Gurgaon on Friday night. The incident was caught on two CCTV cameras installed outside houses in the area.

The assailants pumped 3-4 bullets into Sanjeev Jindal from close range and, in an attempt to colour the incident as a robbery, they fled with his bag which is believed to have contained cash.

However, quoting Jindals relatives, the police said he was not in the habit of carrying money home. It is more than a robbery and we are investigating the case from all angles, Sumit Kumar, DCP (West), said.

According to the police, around 10pm, Jindal, who owns a garments showroom in Chandni Chowk, Delhi, was returning home from his shop. He got off the metro at MG Road and boarded a bus to Sadar Bazar.

The police said the CCTV footage shows two men trailing Jindal who got off the bus and was walking home with a backpack and a white polythene bag in his right hand. As he reached the gates to his house, the men fired at him from close range, killing him on the spot.

Jindal was shot in the forehead, neck and shoulder, the police said.

As Jindal fell to the ground, the duo snatched the bag he was carrying. The second CCTV footage shows the two men running towards a motorbike on which a third member is waiting and all three flee the spot. The footage also shows one of them wielding a pistol while the other carried the white polythene bag.

The gunshots alerted Jindals family and neighbours who ran outside and rushed Jindal to the hospital, but he succumbed to injuries by then.

We heard gunshots and ran to the gate. We saw Sanjeev lying in a pool of blood. Sanjeev did not have any enemies. At first, we thought it was a case of robbery, but three bullet injuries have raised suspicions about their motive, said Amit, Jindals cousin.

Jindal used to return home daily around 10 pm, Amit said.

The DCP said, Initially, it looked like a case of robbery, but after talking to relatives, we realised the assailants probably knew about Jindals schedule and travel habits. However, he never carried money along.

Jindal is survived by wife and two children -- a daughter and son.

The neighbours said Jindal was a quiet person and never used to interfere in anyones business.
NEW DELHI: The failed coup targeting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is unlikely to impact the ties between India and Turkey or affect the miniscule Indian community in Istanbul and Ankara.

It could, however, immediately impact tourists who have begun shunning Turkey after recent terror attacks. India and Turkey s historic connection dates back to the 15th century. However, Ankaras partnership with Islamabad has come in the way of stronger relations with India in the modern era.

Turkey, which often voted against India on the Kashmir issue at the UN, has made some efforts in recent years to strengthen its ties with India and Pakistan. PM Narendra Modi attended the G20 Summit in Antalya last November and held a bilateral meeting with President Erdogan while foreign minister Sushma Swaraj travelled to Turkey in January 2015.

There has been steady growth in bilateral trade with the balance largely in Indias favour and an increase in Indian tourists visiting Turkey. However, the numbers dipped following a string of terror attacks allegedly by IS. According to Turkish Statistical Institution, Turkeys imports from India during January-November 2015 were $5.11 billion while its exports to India in the same period were $606.8 million.
NEW DELHI: Delhi Police arrested three people on Friday in connection with the murder of a 23-year-old woman earlier this month.

The men were arrested from Khanpur. Police recovered a loaded country-made pistol, cartridges and five mobile phones used in the crime.

According to officials, the accused, Monty (19), was in a one-sided love affair with the victim, Arti. When she turned down his proposal several times and dated another man, Monty roped in two of his friends, Athar Rehman (23) and Ravi (19), to kill her.

On July 9, police received a PCR call from Artis landlord, who spotted blood coming out of the main door of the house.

They broke open the door to find Arti on the floor, blood splattered all over the house, right from the first floor to the third floor, on the staircase and on the walls. Three mobile phones were found on the spot. A case was registered.

During the investigation, Artis family told the police that her estranged husband Sunny might be involved in the murder.
SRINAGAR: Authorities on Saturday banned newspaper publication in Kashmir for three days after police raided media houses and shut down a major printing press in what is being seen as the most sweeping information blackout in the Valley rocked by violence.

The undesirable step was taken to ensure peace, government spokesman Nayeem Akhtar said.

The gag on print media followed the worst violence in the restive valley in six years that has left at least 40 people dead and scores wounded in clashes between security forces and protesters angry over the killing of top militant leader Burhan Wani.

Mobile and internet services are already blocked in the Valley where curfew was extended to the eight day on Saturday. Cable TV was also blocked but was restored on Saturday.

Pakistan has given (a) black day call. There is an attempt to subvert peace, it is an unusual situation so we were forced to take such an undesirable step, Akhtar said. Pakistan on Friday said it will observe July 19 as a black day to protest what it said was killing of innocent people in Jammu and Kashmir by Indian troops.

Akhtar added the step was taken to save lives and strengthen peace efforts.

Shujaat Bhukari, the editor of the Srinagar-based Rising Kashmir whose printing press was raided around midnight on Friday, said the ban order was conveyed verbally to editors by a government official.

In a statement, newspaper editors quoted the government official as saying that the ban is in view of apprehensions of serious trouble in Kashmir Valley in the next three days aimed at subverting peace strict curfew will be imposed and movement of newspaper staff and distribution of newspapers will not be possible.

Terming the ban a press emergency, Bhukari said such steps were not taken during the violent protests in 2008 and 2010.

There was gag then also but today for the first time they have formally asked us not to publish, he added.

The government doesnt want the public to know the ground situation. We will publish online but with a ban on internet, who will it reach.

The clampdown started late on Friday night when teams of policemen raided newspaper offices and printing presses.

Around 2am, the press was raided The police asked us to stop printing, took away our plates. About 10,000 copies of the Urdu daily Uzma were already printed.

Police arrested three of our employees and took away the printed copies, plates and even the newsprint, said Rashid Makdoomi, printer-publisher of Greater Kashmir, the largest circulated daily in the Valley. The three employees were released in the morning.

Raja Mohiud Din, the owner of KT Press, said his press was also seized. KT Press prints around eight newspapers in the Valley.

The police have seized newspaper copies which were printed in thousands besides printing material and printing plates of a few newspapers which were ready.

Hawkers in Lal Chowk, the citys centre, alleged that police did not allow them to distribute the newspapers and seized their copies.

Journalists held a protest on Residency Road near Press Colony against the clampdown.

Separatists, meanwhile, extended their call of a shutdown to three more days as residents ran out of supplies.

In a joint statement issued from Hyderpora, the Hurriyat Conference leadership said they had no option but to announce a shutdown call amid relentless curbs. The separatists also thanked Pakistan for its support.

Protesters in the past week have torched police stations and armoured vehicles, and hurled stones at military camps in the restive territory where an estimated eight lakh Indian troops, deeply resented by locals, are stationed.

More than 1,800 people have been injured, including around 200 police, while hospitals have struggled to cope with the rush of injured protesters.

Hundreds have bullet wounds, including many who suffered severe eye injuries caused by shotgun pellets fired by the police.

The violence is the worst since 2010 when huge rallies were crushed, leaving 120 dead.

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NEW DELHI: Checking in at Delhis Indira Gandhi International Airport will get less cumbersome. After months of trial run, the Delhi airport operator has introduced a portable check-in system for use by passengers.

The hand-held gadgets will act as portable check-in counters, which will save passengers the trouble of standing in queues to get to traditional counters. This facility is expected to reduce congestion and queues.

The devices will be handed over to the airline staff who will roam around and ask passengers for check in. The traditional check in counters will continue to function as earlier.

Passengers carrying hand baggage can directly make their way for security check. Those carrying registered baggage will have to go to the traditional counters to drop their bags.

The mobile gadget is based on the ARINC v MUSE platform and can be used for both domestic and international check ins at the airport.

The gadget can be moved to any location within the terminal, wherever an increased number of passengers need to be checked in.

This would make passenger check-in a very smooth affair at the countrys busiest airport. This digital initiative would ensure better queue management at the airport, especially during peak hours, winters and monsoon, when weather causes irregular operations due to flight delays and disruptions, said I Prabhakara Rao, CEO, DIAL.

DIAL has successfully conducted extended trial of this value added service over the last few months at Terminal 3 of IGI Airport. During the trial period, an average of 8% to 10% of commuters experienced smooth check in through the wi-fi-enabled check in gadget, which has a Bluetooth-based printer attached to it to print the boarding pass.

Jet Airways and Vistara airlines have been using the portable device since the beginning of the trial period. The software-based mobile gadget enables all airlines operating from both the terminals of Delhi airport to check in their respective passengers away from the traditional kiosks.

DIAL has been actively promoting various self-service digital initiatives at IGI airport with an intention to leverage technology for passenger experience and operational efficiency. These include self check in kiosks at the airport, mobile app-flyDEL and flap gates, among several others, said a DIAlL spokesperson.
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 17

Armenian opposition party "Heritage" considers that the Armenian authorities are guilty for the events connected with the seizure of the police building in Yerevan, RIA Novosti reported.

"Heritage" calls for early presidential and parliamentary elections that could "radically change the situation".

Armed men seized a police station and hostages in Armenia's capital Yerevan on Sunday, demanding Armenians take to the streets to press their demands for the release of opposition politicians they said had been jailed unfairly.
NEW DELHI: Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal will interact with people from across the country at 11 am on Sunday as part of his Talk to AK initiative even as the opposition BJP was critical of the move.

The Delhi government said it had received at least 20,000 queries, mostly from states where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) would contest the elections, prompting the BJP to ask the ruling party to stick to issues related to Delhi.

If the chief minister Arvind Kejriwal wants to answer questions related to Punjab and other states then the cost of publicity and telecast of this programme should be borne by the AAP, said Satish Upadhyay, Delhi BJP president.

Upadhyay said it was clear that the CM would answer comfortable questions selected out of the lot, most likely from states such as Punjab and Goa. The programme should be specifically for the people of Delhi whose CM Arvind Kejriwal is but it is actually planned for Kejriwals political expansion and people of Delhi will have to bear its expenses, he added.

The interaction will be live streamed on the website www. talktoak.com.

According to officials, a majority of questions are about AAPs plan for Punjab and drug addiction. Queries about AAPs model of governance are also coming in.

A few have questions about the tussle between the AAP and the Centre over a range of issues. Some are asking why the central government is not letting us work, the source said.

Its an ongoing process. It will be difficult to give any number on the questions received by the team. But the response is overwhelming with people asking questions on range of issues from civic to health and corruption, said a Delhi government official.

A team is busy segregating questions and dividing it into categories. People have been sending questions through Facebook, Twitter, SMS and email.

A contact number is given on the website and those wishing to ask a live question can do so by dialling the number. The session will be moderated by music director and AAP supporter Vishal Dadlani.

Ravinder Gupta, mayor of north MCD, released a list of 18 questions the public could ask Kejriwal during the programme. These include schools opened by the AAP and the status of Wi-Fi.

A government spokesperson said any question was welcome.

The AAP is running a high-octane campaign in Punjab, ahead of the assembly elections in 2017. It will contest in Goa and Gujarat.
NEW DELHI: The Delhi Police arrested two people  a BTech engineer and a science graduate  on Thursday, for allegedly posing as bank officials to verify debit and credit cards of customers.

The men were arrested from Deogarh in Jharkhand.

Sawan Verma,(25) and Manish Rai (26), convinced people to share their passwords, which they then used for shopping and other transactions.

Verma and Rai recently duped a doctor of RML hospital to the tune of several thousands.

The duo used to gather details about the credit, ATM and debit cards from people, posing as bank officials on the pretext of card verification and used Paytm Mobile Solutions to transfer the amount in another bank account in Jharkhand. They used to withdraw the amount through their ATM, joint commissioner of police, crime, Ravindra Yadav said.

The gangs operations came to notice on June 21, when Dinesh Kumar, head, division of paediatric cardiology, RML Hospital, filed a complaint alleging that he received phone calls from Ravi Sharma, an employee of State Bank of India.

He told Kumar his credit card had been blocked as it was not verified and asked him to share his details, including the CV V number.

After Kumar shared his details and disconnected the call, he received a message that his SIM has been blocked and that a new SIM card would be sent, as requested by him, to his residence. His phone stopped working. It is then when Kumar realised that it was a fraud call, Yadav said.

Kumar immediately called up his bank but by the time he could get access, the culprits already withdrawn Rs 1,20,000 in four instalments. He blocked his card to avoid a fifth withdrawal, Yadav said.

The crime branch then formed a special team to track the men. During investigation, police found that the men were transferring the duped money from SBI Branch in Deogarh, Jharkhand.

The men used fake IDs to operate Paytm. Information was developed using their bank account numbers and call detail records and their location was traced. A team then went to Jharkhand and made the arrests, Yadav said.

During interrogation, the two confessed that they used to make random phone calls to mobile phone numbers using different SIM cards and obtained details of debit and credit cards, posing as bank officials. After obtaining the card details, the duo made fraudulent transactions from the said account.
ISTANBUL: Turkeys fifth coup in as many decades lasted just five hours, leaving 161 people dead and more than 1,400 injured, but the fallout is likely to see President Recep Tayyip Erdogan further tighten his grip on power and intensify the crack down on his opponents.

The attempted putsch began on Friday night when a faction of the military sent tanks backed by fighter planes into the capital Ankara and Istanbul, Turkeys financial hub, to seize power while Erdogan was holidaying in the Mediterranean resort of Marmaris.

Authorities blamed the coup on Erdogans arch enemy, the reclusive US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Rebel troops blocked two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, triggering a standoff with angry protesters. Amateur videos posted on social media showed troops firing at protesters near one of the bridges and at Taksim Square and tanks mowing down people.

Tanks also surrounded the parliament building in Ankara, which was damaged by a blast, as the police engaged the rebel troops at several places.

The army faction behind the coup accused Erdogans government of eroding democratic and secular rule of law. It said in a statement the Turkish armed forces were taking over the administration to reinstate constitutional order, human rights and freedoms, the rule of law and the general security that was damaged.

Thousands of people responded to Erdogans appeal on a cellphone video link to take to the streets to oppose the coup. Erdogan then flew into Istanbul airport, where he was welcomed by thousands of supporters.

On Saturday, PM Binali Yildirim said the situation was completely under control as TV channels beamed images of dozens of soldiers surrendering. Confusion persisted about the situation in Ankara, but defence minister Fikri Isik said on Saturday night authorities were in full control of all areas in Turkey.

Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 injured. Some estimates put the death toll much higher, including 104 coup plotters though the figure couldnt be independently confirmed.

More than 2,800 soldiers were detained over the coup. At least five generals  Gen Erdal Ozturk, commander of the 3rd army, 2nd army generals Adem Huduti and Avni Angun, Maj Gen Metin Akkaya and Maj Gen Mustafa Kurutmaz  were detained for alleged involvement in the coup attempt.

Erdogan has made it clear he is going after Fethullah Gulen, once his closest ally. Erdogan, who has led Turkey since 2003, accuses Gulen of using members of his Hizmet party within the military, media and the judiciary to establish a parallel government.

They will pay a heavy price for this, said Erdogan after the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.

Galip Dalay, research director at Al Sharq, an Istanbul-based think tank, told Hindustan Times: There is no doubt that there will be mass arrests. The president has long said that Gulen wants to destabilise the country.

He is going to purge the state structures of Gulen-affiliated appointments and there will be major changes to the higher echelons in government.

Gulen, who is in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania in the US, has denied he is linked to the coup.

Though the government linked the plot to Hizmet, it did not indicate how the detained generals were linked to Gulen.

The detention of the soldiers was followed by the removal of 2,745 judges on the orders of the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors ( HSYK). Five members of HSYK, Turkey s high judiciary board, were also removed and Alparslan Altan, one of 17 judges on the constitutional court, was taken into custody.

When tanks rolled onto two of Istanbuls iconic bridges across the Bosphorus, a strait that cuts Asia from Europe and divides the city, and fighter jets roared through the skies, their sonic booms shattering windows, many Turks were reminded of previous military takeovers.

Erdogans AK Party has long had strained relations with the military, which has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism and has staged three coups since 1960.

There were reports of the bridges being blocked and that some kind of military activity was going on. Ten minutes later, heavily armed soldiers in battle fatigues arrived at our office. We were ordered out, and the transmission was stopped, said Mark Klusener, a news editor at state broadcaster TRT.

We thought at that stage, it might be a terror attack and that the army was there to help us but when we got outside, there was a truck and several other military vehicles and about 40 soldiers. I realised that this was not a security scare and it was a textbook coup.
The Centre has created an India-Pakistan-like situation with the Delhi government, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Sunday as his interactive show Talk to AK debuted on social media. He also announced the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)s intention to contest elections in Gujarat if the people want.

Talk to AK was the top Twitter trend in India between 11am and 3pm as the CM lauded his governments achievements despite, what he termed, the Narendra Modi governments non-cooperation.

The Centres aim is to stop work in Delhi, but we wont stop. The work we are doing for education and womens security is being hampered because the Centre is not passing bills the Delhi government has sent for clearance. Modiji, dont create this India-Pakistan-like situation between the state and the Centre. Let us work and we will give you a world-class city. You take all the credit, Kejriwal said in response to a callers query.

Read | As it happened: Will contest polls in Gujarat if people want, says Kejriwal

Speaking of the poor condition of health and education in other states, he suggested they could learn a thing or two from Delhis mohalla (neighbourhood) clinics and its improved education infrastructure.

Taking on the BJP-ruled states in particular, he said he had seen public anger there. I was in Gujarat earlier this month and saw an atmosphere of suppression. People are being imprisoned and threatened. People are angry and sad. They want change. If the people want, we will contest the Gujarat elections next year.

I went to a dispensary in Gujarat at 1pm. On a working day, it was locked. If things can improve in Delhi, they can improve in Gujarat, in Goa and in Chhattisgarh. All you need is the will to work and zero tolerance for corruption, he said.

To a query on why the Delhi government was spending money on advertisements outside the city, Kejriwal said, Delhi is the capital of the country and everyone wants to know what is happening here. Every bit of news here gets attention. That is why we advertise in other states. Also, we want to tell investors that Delhi is the place for them.

Read | Centre trapping AAP MLAs in fake cases: Kejriwal

Touching on the statehood issue, he said his government was considering an opinion poll. We cant do a referendum as it is not permissible in the Constitution, but we want a sort of opinion poll where people can vote.

On the radical odd-even plan, Kejriwal said the government was thinking about bringing it back in the winter.

The scheme, under which cars with odd and even registration numbers can ply on alternate days, was first implemented last January to improve Delhis air quality and reduce traffic congestion. But the jury is out over its effectiveness, with experts saying the second phase of the scheme in April was mostly ineffective in tackling air pollution.

The show, which went a little over two hours, started with a 40-minute monologue on the governments achievements and the problems it faced. This was followed by Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia taking questions via Twitter and Facebook, text message and on phone from callers in Delhi, Punjab, Kerala and Hyderabad.

The next episode of Talk to AK is expected next month.


Actor Irrfan Khan will meet Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday for an interview related to his film Madaari.

Khan, who interviewed RJD chief Lalu Prasad during his visit to Patna last week, fixed a meeting with Kejriwal via Twitter.

Khan tweeted: I am a common citizen of this country. I want to ask some questions. Can I meet you Arvind Kejriwal (Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochhnay the). The politician readily agreed.

Kejriwal also shared: Irrfan Tuesday 11 am, my office.

The actor then responded Thanks again, will see you on Tuesday Arvind Kejriwal.

Madaari, which explores a father-son relationship and traces the plight of a common man who loses his son in an accident, also features Jimmy Sheirgill in a pivotal role. The film is slated to release on July 22.

Irrfan, who has garnered global fame with his international projects, also tried to set up a meeting with other political figures by posting to the Office of RG twitter account and Prime Ministers Office (PMO) Twitter handle.
The Aam Aadmi Party will contest elections in Gujarat next year if the people demand it and Delhi might see the odd-even road rationing scheme return this winter, city chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Sunday. In his live webcast Talk to AK, the AAP chief lashed out at the Centre, saying the NDA government was trying to paralyse the city administration.

AAP vs BJP

The Centres problem is our honesty and integrity. Have asked our MLAs to get ready to go to jail, he said in response to a question by a viewer.

This is the latest in a long string of bitter clashes between the BJP and AAP, who have publicly slugged it out earlier over police jurisdiction, files and bureaucrats.

He alleged that BJP chief Amit Shah was micromanaging the CBI, days after an AAP legislator was arrested on molestation charges. A bureaucrat close to the CM is also under central probe. Police working like British police. The Centre wants to break us.

Read: As it happened: Will contest polls in Gujarat if people want, says Kejriwal

Gujarat foray

Kejriwal said the party received a tremendous response in Gujarat. He recently visited the state in an attempt to woo angry farmers and Patel community leaders, who are moving away from the BJP after violent protests over quota demands last year. People are angry and sad. They want change.

He also said that he planned to meet the human resource development minister to press for priority treatment for Delhi students in 28 city colleges. But experts say such a quota for local students is impractical because Delhi University is not under the state government and the admission season is nearing its end.

Odd-even

On the radical odd-even plan, Kejriwal said the government was thinking about bringing it back in the winter.

The scheme, under which odd and even-numbered cars are allowed on city roads on alternate days, was first brought in last January to clean Delhis air and reduce traffic congestion.

But the jury is out over the effectiveness of the plan with experts saying the second phase of the scheme in April was mostly ineffective in tackling air pollution.
With the weather department predicting rainfall in the Capital on Monday, the first day of the week is likely to open on a chaotic note.

The unpreparedness of the citys civic agencies was exposed over the weekend, with traffic snarls and instances of water-logging reported from many parts. Authorities face an uphill task on Monday, when a large number of office-goers are expected to swarm the roads in private vehicles.

The places most likely to witness water-logging on Monday are Nawada, Kakrola, Defence Colony, Sangam Vihar, Okhla, Okhla Phase-2, Garhi, Nehru Place, Janakpuri, Naraina, Lajpat Nagar, Safdarjung, Dwarka, Dhaula Kuan, ITO, Vikas Marg, Akshardham, Geeta Colony, Minto Road, Chandni Chowk, ISBT Kashmiri Gate, Rohtash Nagar, Loni and Mandawli.

Read | City caught in monsoon mess, officials busy passing the buck

The Delhi Traffic Police have advised commuters to plan their route in advance, and avoid points that generally witness traffic jams or water-logging. We will be deploying many of our personnel, and the focus will be on major water-logging points. We have already listed out 163 water-logging points and apprised the agencies concerned of the need to fix them, said Sandeep Goel, special commissioner of police (traffic).

Traffic updates will be posted on Twitter and Facebook for maximum outreach among commuters, he added.

Two buses broke down on flooded streets over the weekend, spurring the Delhi Transport Corporation to advise drivers against taking the vehicles into water-logged areas. Heavy rainfall on Saturday caused water-logging and traffic snarls at many places across the city, and a road cave-in was reported at Mahavir Nagar in West Delhi on Sunday morning.

Though Sunday only witnessed light showers, it still caused water-logging at several places. Just 14.8 mm of rain was recorded on Sunday, as compared to 65 mm the previous day.

Read | Rain rain dont go away: This monsoon season, explore Delhi on foot

According to the weatherman, this week will see less rain than the last. Light showers are expected on Monday as well as the next three days.

The previous week witnessed enough precipitation to compensate for Delhis rainfall deficiency. While the rainfall was 30% below normal at the beginning of last week, it now stands at 1% above normal.

Read | Heavy rain brings down Delhis monsoon deficit

The rain gods were much harsher on other parts of northern India, with at least 21 people dying in rain-related incidents over the last 24 hours. The worst affected were Uttarakhand, which witnessed the death of 10 people, and Madhya Pradesh, where the toll has already touched 35.
Moderate to high fever, sore throat, runny nose or severe head and body ache, if you experience any of these symptoms, chances are high you are suffering from viral influenza that has held the city in its grip these days.

While rain may bring some respite from the scorching sun, the humid weather is also conducive for faster growth and spread of disease-causing bacteria and viruses that have led to an increase in the cases of influenza, upper respiratory tract infection and various allergies.

Last one week has been particularly bad as there has been a jump in the number of cases landing up at hospitals and clinics with fever, cold and cough and head ache.

Since last week, there has been about 20 to 30% jump in the number of people I see in my out patient department (OPD) with symptoms such as high fever, severe head and body ache and sore throat. And 80% of them are due to viral influenza, said Dr Srikant Sharma, senior consultant, department of internal medicine, Moolchand Medcity Hospital.

I have been getting fever as high as 105 degrees Fahrenheit this season, which in most cases lasts for at least three to four days, he said.

People are also complaining of severe head and body ache along with fever, and even after the fever has subsided, the person may feel weak for days.

The good thing, however, is that rest and symptomatic treatment is working in most cases.

It is advisable to take rest when the fever is high and to not pop in unnecessary medicines, especially antibiotics or aspirin. In most cases paracetamol helps bring down fever and alleviate pain, said a senior doctor from the department of medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

Since high fever tends to dehydrate the body, one must increase the fluid intake in the form of soups, lukewarm water, buttermilk, coconut water etc.

Doctors strictly advise against taking over-the-counter medicines. Its an unhealthy practice and could lead even to serious complications, he said.

The elderly and the children are more at risk of getting infected, and also those suffering from underlying health problems such as asthma, diabetes and heart diseases. People with compromised immunity also need to be more careful.

With viral load high in the environment, it is a good idea to follow preventive measures such as avoiding crowded places, washing hands frequently, covering mouth and nose while coughing, wearing full-sleeved clothes and avoiding eating raw or semi-cooked food outside.

Also, drink boiled or purified water only.

If high fever and sore throat lasts for more than 48 hours, see a doctor.

Box

Symptoms

*High grade Fever (above 102 degrees Fahrenheit)

*Sore throat

*Severe head and body ache

*Runny nose

*Pain behind the eyes

*Cough

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Nepal has had 23 governments in the last 26 years. With the Maoists withdrawing support from the current Prime Minister K P Oli-led dispensation in Kathmandu, the saga of political instability continues. For any country, this kind of staggering political churning spells bad news for governance. But despite this, Olis possible departure will come as a relief to all those interested in the prospect of inclusive democracy and better Nepal-India relations.

Read | Maoists, Nepali Congress register motion of no-confidence against Prime Minister Oli

Oli was among the prime drivers of a deeply divisive constitution that eroded the rights of Nepals marginalised communities and left women as second-class citizens. In government, he has presided over a coalition of the far-Left and the far-Right  united in their belief in ethnic majoritarianism and anti-Indian nationalism. He made little effort to reach out to Madhesis, despite a six-month struggle in Nepals plains for rights and instead resorted to excessive use of force. The Oli government also performed dismally on the all-important task of post earthquake reconstruction  busy as it was in dividing up the aid kitty among its loyalists. He also tried to invite Chinese role in direct Nepali politics. No one is suggesting that Kathmandu should not have good ties with Beijing, but if it is done with the sole intention of eroding Indian influence, Delhi cannot but take note. Olis calling card, through this period, was hollow nationalism  which did little to alleviate the suffering of one of South Asias poorest countries. Oli also sought to infiltrate all key state institution with party loyalists  triggering fears of creeping authoritarianism.

Read | Why India must speak up strongly on Nepal

But his possible departure  Oli has not resigned and will face a no confidence vote in parliament this week  will not unlock all of Nepals problems. At the moment, Maoist chairman Prachanda is the front-runner to become PM  with the support of the largest party in the house, Nepali Congress, and the outside support of agitating Madhesi forces. The next government will be more sensitive to the constitutional aspirations of the excluded communities  but to amend the constitution, it needs a two-thirds majority. With Olis party in opposition, this will be difficult to achieve. Nepal also needs to begin implementing the constitution. Three elections  local, provincial and national  need to be held by January 2018. Maoists and NC also have a deal to rotate the leadership of government; if Prachanda refuses to give way in nine months, it could force another realignment.

Read | Maoist Party asks Oli to resign, Nepali Congress to support Prachanda as PM

Yet, the next government must be supported for it offers the best chance of steering Nepal back to inclusive democracy. For Delhi, which was exasperated with Olis games, his possible departure opens up the space to restore bilateral ties with a special neighbour. It must discreetly continue to encourage constitutional accommodation, and publicly reach out to Nepals new leadership  once elected  with an immediate invitation to visit Delhi.

Read | Kathmandu is playing futile games
Girl students in Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology cannot wear miniskirts, nightgowns and shorts in the campus, dining room and hostel office area, according to an order issued by college authorities, drawing strong reaction from the young ladies.

A notice in this regard was issued by campus hostel warden, Jyoti Swaroop, in which it was also said that hostel residents will have to report back by 9:30 pm if they go out.

While girls in the campus were not happy with the order, authorities said it was issued in view of their safety.

This notice was issued by the warden for the safety of girls, as there are many male workers in the campus and mess. We didnt expect that it would become a big issue, public relations officer, MANIT, Ajay Verma said.

There are national institutes like NIFT, IIFM and NLIU in Bhopal, but nowhere have we heard about such notices, a girl student told HT, on condition of anonymity. Why are we restricted then? Why is our freedom infringed? she asked.

Hostel is our home now. Why cant we dress the way we want to? Had this notice been put up in the college, it would have been justified. I am afraid girls will not really follow this here, another girl said.

The girls said they would talk to the in-charge director of the institute, N K Chaudhary, who is out of station now, and convince him to roll back the order.

This is not the first time comments on the attire of women has kicked a controversy in Madhya Pradesh.

Former women and child development minister Maya Singh had said that women should not wear naqaabs (veils) and found a backer in former education minister Paras Jain, who said it will be good if people do not cover their faces.

However, these comments were strongly condemned by womens rights activists and Congress leaders.

The girls also voiced objection to the 9.30 pm deadline for returning to the campus, saying they have to sometimes stay late for their projects and if they are not able to make it to the hostel on time, would have to stay outside all night.

(with inputs from Saima Abbasi)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced hope that a reconciliation deal between Israel and Turkey will not be affected by a failed coup attempt in Turkey, Anadolu reported.

"Israel and Turkey recently have agreed on a reconciliation process, Netanyahu said during a weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, according to a statement released by his office.

We assume that process will continue regardless of the dramatic events that took place in Turkey over the weekend, he said.

On Friday night, renegade elements within Turkeys military attempted to stage a coup against the government.

Although the coup was soon put down by the countrys legitimate authorities and security apparatus, roughly 160 people were martyred in the ensuing violence.

Two weeks ago, Turkey and Israel agreed to normalize diplomatic relations following a six-year hiatus.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said that Tel Aviv had met all of Ankaras preconditions for normalizing ties, which were severed in 2010 after Israeli commandos stormed a Gaza-bound Turkish aid vessel.

The attack resulted in the death of nine Turkish activists and left another 30 injured, one of whom succumbed to his injuries nearly four years later.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey had demanded an official apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed, and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Netanyahu voiced his regret to Turkeys then-prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the incident.

Under the terms of the agreement, Turkey and Israel will exchange ambassadors and Tel Aviv will pay $20 million in compensation to the families of the 2010 flotilla attack victims.

Israel has also agreed to Turkeys request to maintain a humanitarian presence in the blockaded Gaza Strip.
Irked by the delay in giving possession of flats, 100 homebuyers of Today Canary Greens project in Sector 73 held a demonstration against the developer at Subhash Chowk, Shona Road, on Sunday.

Last month, buyers had approached the builder, Today Homes, and raised concerns about the delay in handing over apartments. While investors were assured that their concerns will be looked into, they allege that no action has been taken.

Amit Raheja, who has invested in the project , said, The project was to be handed over to us in 2014. Almost 90 % of the money has been paid but we still have not got possession of our flats. Only brick and concrete walls have been constructed at the site so far.

Investors also say that the builder has been demanding more money from them without delivering the flats.

There are many issues with regard to the companys projects. In case of this project, they have charged for parking space even when they do not have any plan for that, Maniram Bisnoi, another homebuyer, said.

Protestors claimed none of the 450 buyers who have invested in the project that spreads across 11 acres have received finished flats. The builder has not compensated buyers for the delay either.

We have been paying rent and EMI for the last two years. We have lost all our savings now, Basant Bhumka, one of the protesters, said.

VK Arora, an aggrieved buyer said that there is no intention on part of the builder to complete the project. We are mostly senior citizens who have no options left.

Buyers have registered their grievances with the CM window and have sent a letter to the Prime Ministers office but there has been no response so far.

A company spokesman said that the project got delayed for reasons beyond their control. It is mainly because our main contractor got bankrupt and banks came to our site and impounded his machinery.... he went to court and the litigation is still going on and we had to bear huge losses.

The spokesperson said that the company still tried to expedite the work and appointed another contractor. However, there was some problem in the management of the contractor and they abandoned the work. As the contractor did not clear the site, it led to a further delay in appointing another contractor. The spokesperson said that there was also a delay in supply of materials such as steel and bricks.

We are trying our best and by 2017, we will start offering possession. We request everyone to be patient ..and we are ready to fulfil our commitment, the spokesperson said.

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Actor Chris Pine reportedly partied with 15 girls on a night out and then took three of them back to his hotel room.

According to a source, Pine spent as much as 5,000 pounds on champagne at West Londons Cirque Le Soir nightclub earlier this week, where he was spotted dancing on the tables before leaving with three women, reports femalefirst.co.uk.

Chris got to Cirque Le Soir around midnight and all hell broke loose. The venue had to call in extra security because girls were going crazy to get to him, the source told The Sun newspaper.

He had at least 15 girls around him. He loved the attention and was laughing and flirting with them all. By 2 am he was spraying champagne over everyone and dancing on the tables, the source added.

Read: This new Star Trek Beyond character was inspired by Jennifer Lawrence

Pine attended the party with his Star Trek co-star John Cho.

Read: Star Trek Beyond: Early reactions are in. Find out what they have to say

He has previously been romantically linked to a number of big-name stars, including Audrina Patridge, Beau Garrett and Olivia Munn. He dated actor Vail Bloom in 2015.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
At least 21 people were killed in rain-related incidents across the country over the last 24 hours, with the monsoon gaining momentum in several parts of northern India.

The worst affected was Uttarakhand, where 10 people died in various rain-related mishaps  causing the death toll to shoot up to 30 since July 1. Police and state disaster management sources said four people were killed when their car was buried under the debris of a landslide triggered by heavy rain near Narendra Nagar town on Sunday afternoon.

Three others lost their lives after their vehicle fell into a gorge, and two of a family died when a tree fell on their house in Uttarkashi district. In the fourth incident, an elderly woman was killed after a bus fell into a rivulet in Haldwani the same day.

Heavy rains are likely to continue in the state for another 24 hours, the state MeT office said.

Volunteers shift people to higher areas after heavy monsoon rains flooded parts of Guwahati, Assam on Sunday. (AP)

The Capital, on the other hand witnessed light showers  bringing its maximum temperature down to 30.1 degrees Celsius, five notches below normal. Neighbouring Haryana witnessed widespread rainfall.

Madhya Pradesh has been badly affected, with rainfall-induced floods affecting 23 of its 51 districts. Thirty-five people have been confirmed dead so far, and nine reported missing. Over 8,000 people across the state have been forced to leave their inundated homes, and take shelter in 27 temporary relief camps.

Eight people were reportedly killed in rain-related incidents across Uttar Pradesh, even as the weatherman predicted more rains for Monday. Among the casualties were two sisters, aged 30 and 32, who were killed when the roof of their house collapsed in the heavy rain at Bijnors Nahtor area. A 25-year-old unidentified man was also killed after being struck by lightning in Balrampur.

The Karauli district administration in Rajasthan placed 53 villages on red alert after three lakh cusecs of water was released from Panchna dam. The administration has also sought the Armys help to tackle a potential flood-like situation.

An elderly woman and her grandson were also killed in Karauli district when a portion of their house collapsed in the heavy rainfall.

The situation in Assam was also grave, with 1.77 lakh people being affected by unrelenting rainfall. Over 1,33,000 hectares of agricultural land are said to have been inundated across the state. According to the Assam State Disaster Management Authority, a man died at Narayanpur in Lakhimpur district after being swept away in the swirling flood waters.

With inputs from agencies
Making a hard push for the GST bill on the eve of Parliaments monsoon session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked an all-party meeting on Sunday to keep national interest in mind and not just who gets the credit.

The Congress  which finds itself increasingly isolated on the issue  in turn, announced plans to take on the NDA government in the House over attempts to destabilise state governments and the Kashmir situation, drawing the battle lines for what is likely to be a stormy session.

Finance minister Arun Jaitley will meet senior Congress leaders on Tuesday for negotiations on the goods and services tax bill. The government senses a bright chance for its passage after parties like the Trinamool Congress, Samajwadi Party and BJD backed the key reform at the meeting.

Read | Why this monsoon session gives Modi govt its best shot at reforms push

The Congress also indicated it was open to negotiations with Ghulam Nabi Azad, leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha, saying, We have not taken any decision to stop a bill. We will support it on merit. We will support any bill that is in support of people, progress and growth.

The GST bill, which aims to replace myriad local levies with a central indirect tax, has been pending before Parliament since 2008.

The monsoon session, starting Monday, will run till August 12 and have 20 working days, during which time the government hopes to get the bill cleared along with some legislative backlog, especially those pending in the Rajya Sabha where the Opposition is in a majority.

But while pledging their support to the GST bill, the opposition parties made it clear they were geared to attack the government on other issues.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with home minister Rajnath Singh and Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Jyotiraditya Scindia at an all-party meet ahead of the monsoon session, at Parliament House in New Delhi. (Arvind Yadav/HT Photo)

A day after the Congress returned to power in Arunachal Pradesh after a spell of Presidents Rule on the recommendation of the governor, Azad said state governments no longer trusted the Centre.

The BJDs Bhartruhari Mahtab sought a debate on the role of governors, often accused of acting on the Centres behest.

The government cannot do constitutional murder in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Meghalaya and expect GST to be passed, said senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh, accusing the NDA of poisoning the political atmosphere.

Azad said the government was using tricks to destabilise opposition-ruled governments, pointing out that even the Shiromani Akali Dal, a BJP ally, had attacked the Centre for undermining states.

Read | Debate GST bill to clear confusion: Naqvi says govt confident of its passage

Racing against time to roll out GST from the next financial year, Modi pitched the bill as a matter of national importance.

Parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar said the government would talk to all parties to evolve consensus on the bill, which requires a constitution amendment bill to be passed separately in both Houses with a two-thirds majority. Our legislative business, including GST, is a priority. We want to pass the GST bill with consensus. We are going to take every party on board, he said.

The Telangana Rashtra Samithi said it would support the GST bill if the states demand for a separate high court was fulfilled, while the SP advised the government to engage with all parties and not just the Congress. The CPI(M)s Sitaram Yechury asked the PM to convene an all-party meeting exclusively on the GST bill.

A second all-party meeting was held in the evening, this time called by Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan. She said the parties had given an assurance to let Parliament function while the government said it was ready to talk on any issue that is raised.

Read | GST deadlock: Congress goes into huddle over Parliament strategy
Activists and social welfare workers across Tamil Nadu are up in arms after policemen in Salem reportedly beat up prominent environmental activist Piyush Sethia in jail on Friday.

Sethia was arrested on July 8 after chaining himself to a road-roller in protest against the ongoing construction of the Mulvadi bridge in Salem. Police charged him with criminal intimidation under Section 506(2), disobedience of an order duly promulgated by a public servant, wrongful restraint and wrongful confinement.

On Thursday, his bail plea was rejected after the police said that he had a dozen similar cases against him, and a sedition case dating from 2012. Section 506(2) is also a non-bailable offence.

Following the rejection of his bail plea, he was allegedly beaten for half-an-hour. But his supporters and well-wishers are not sure whether it was authorities at Salem jail or other policemen who attacked him.

We are 100% certain that Piyush has been brutally beaten by the police, said Suresh Kumar, an activists with the Salems Citizens Forum (SCF), a civic organisation that has spearheaded numerous campaigns in defence of the environment over the years.

This is evidence of a vindictive, high-handed attitude on the part of the police and the administration, said Madhumita Datta, a scholar and member of the Chennai Cooperative. The response is completely disproportionate to the protest Piyush undertook. Hes being physically and mentally abused.

Salem jail officials have denied all allegations of custodial violence, and have said that Sethia has been unharmed.

However, a voice recording accessed by Hindustan Times shows a different side to the story.

In the voice recording, a jailer in the Salem Central Jail first says that he doesnt know what happened, before saying that an internal inquiry is currently being conducted.

Its clear that they are making an example out of Piyush as a warning to others, Datta said. Piyushs alleged mistreatment is completely unacceptable, she added.

Known as Salems Green Warrior, Sethia is a prominent environmental rights activist and founder of the SCF. A veteran activist, the 40-year-old has spearheaded green campaigns across Salem district for more than a decade, as well as fighting on behalf of ST groups.

He was charged with sedition after marching against human rights violations in Chhattisgarh.

Supporters of Sethia have approached the sessions court that is scheduled to hear their plea on Monday.

Others have taken to social media to drum up support for the activist.

In an email to Tamil Nadus home secretary, which is being circulated via social media, fellow activist Kavita Kuruganti wrote: Your detention of activists obviously puts an enormous dent in your credibility and image. Release Piyush immediately please. We urge you to take personal interest in this, intervene immediately and ensure that the citizens issues are heard out properly and Piyush is out.



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Union urban development minister Venkaiah Naidu said on Sunday that the tax-rate cap on GST in the Constitution bill sought by the Congress was not feasible but hoped that the GST bill will be passed in the Monsoon session of the Parliament starting tomorrow, with a broad consensus.

There is a broad consensus, with a few reservations. Tamil Nadu being a manufacturing state has opposed the bill. Congress wants a cap on tax rate in the constitution bill but it is not feasible and advisable... The GST bill is pending for the last eight years, Naidu said.

We want to pass the bill with consensus and not scrape through by majority, he said as he hoped that the bill will be passed during the session.

Naidu recalled that the bill was being discussed even when Pranab Mukherjee was the finance minister and his successor in the ministry P Chidambaram made some changes, which took shape after a committee comprising FMs of five states went through it.

The new generation wants the bill to be passed as they want empowerment, said Naidu, who was here to participate in the 4th Edition of India International Coir Fair.

Mindful that the Congress was expected to raise the issues in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir in the Parliament, Naidu said they were welcome to raise them and added that ministers concerned would respond to them.

He, however, said that the issues in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand were purely an internal matter of the Congress.

Was it democratic... the way the Speaker disqualified some MLAs before voting, Naidu asked.

To a question on implementing the M S Swaminathan Committee recommendations for farmers, Naidu said it was being examined and government would take a call on it after detailed study.
The central information commission has asked leaders of six national parties -- Rajnath Singh, Mayawati, Sonia Gandhi, Prakash Karat, Sharad Pawar and Sudhakar Reddy -- to appear before it for not responding to RTI queries.

The named notices were issued after one of the complainants, RK Jain, accused the CIC registrar of adopting double standards in handling his complaints against the BJP, Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Communist Party of India (Marxist) and CPI by only naming Gandhi while addressing other notices to party chiefs.

Jain in February 2014 filed right to information pleas with the Congress and other parties, seeking details of donations, funding and internal elections. He lodged a complaint with the information watchdog, which had in 2013 said parties were bound to reveal information under the RTI act, after his pleas remained answered.

The leaders have been asked to present their case on July 22 before a full bench comprising information commissioners Bimal Julka, Sridhar Acharyulu and Sudhir Bhargava that will hear Jains plea.

Take notice that if you fail to furnish your comments/reply by 20th July, 2016 and fail to appear on the aforesaid date and time, it will be presumed that you have nothing to say in your defence and the matter will be processed further as per law, the notice said.

Earlier, a notice was issued to Congress chief Gandhi by name while for other parties, the notices were addressed to presidents/general secretaries without naming those holding the positions to which Jain objected.

In his complaint to chief information commissioner RK Mathur, Jain alleged CIC registrar MK Sharma had issued notice to Sonia Gandhi by name, while the names of Singh (BJP), Karat (CPI-M), Pawar (NCP), Mayawati (BSP) and Reddy (CPI) were omitted though the complaints had named them.

Jain alleged that the then BJP chief Singh had been named in his complaint but registrar MK Sharma issued the notice to the current president, Amit Shah.

At present, Amit Shah is the president of BJP thus Rajnath Singh has illegally and indirectly been exonerated by MK Sharma, Jain said in his complaint on June 15.
A group of villagers in West Bengals Malda district allegedly stripped a 33-year-old woman, thrashed her and chopped two fingers off her left hand after her cow ate grains from neighbours fields.

The incident happened at Munnitola village in Malda on Saturday evening. The woman has been admitted to the Malda Medical College and Hospital in a critical state.

Now the goons are threatening us to withdraw the police complaint, the woman told Hindustan Times.

Her son was also injured when he went to save his mother, sources said. The victims family lodged a complaint against Harun Sheikh, Lalu Sheikh, Iftar Sheikh, Ahmed Sheikh and 3 three local goons, police said. The suspects are on the run.

I cant imagine people can strip my wife and try to kill her. I have already lodged a written complaint against seven persons with police, the womans husband said.

I work as a labourer. When the incident happened, I wasnt in the village.

Sources said one of the 33-year-olds cows entered Haruns field and ate some food grains. After this, Harun caught the cow and beat the animal mercilessly, fracturing two of the animals legs.

Police said when the woman found her cow is being thrashed, she rushed to Haruns field and repeatedly requested him to let the cow go.

But instead of listening to the woman, the men pounced upon her and started beating her after stripping her. They also tried to hack Ayesha with a sickle, sources said.

When the woman tried to resist the attack with her left hand, her little finger and ring finger were chopped off.

As the word of the thrashing spread, the womans son Iqbal rushed to the field, only to be attacked by the same men, who hit him on the head with a sickle.
Curfew continued in Kashmir for the ninth consecutive day, even as the Valley remained tense on Sunday amid deaths of at least 41 people in clashes between civilians and forces.

Mobile networks, apart from that of government-owned BSNL, remained suspended, while cable TV network was gagged early on Saturday, but restored by night.

The weekend saw the death of a youth in Kupwara district during clashes that left two others injured. Similar protests occurred in Baramulla and Bandipora districts, police said. A mob attacked a police post at Hatmulla in the northern district of Kupwara, following which the security personnel retaliated.

On Friday, the state administration gave out figures of those injured in the turmoil going on since the July 8 killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani by security forces. A total of 1,882 persons have been injured  600-odd have received pellet wounds and 125 were hit with bullets, in the first such list revealed.

On Sunday, streets in Srinagar remained completely empty with deployment of armed personnel in sensitive areas. A shutdown call given by the separatists has been extended to Monday.

Read| Its yesterday again: Kashmirs old wounds need political healing
When Praveena Solomon decided to run the Velankadu crematorium in Chennai two years ago, the public response was less than favourable, to say the least.

The locals were hostile towards the idea of a woman being in charge a burial ground, recalls the community worker. This, when the place itself looked like a garbage dump. The stench of urine around the entrance was unbearable.

Particularly difficult were the first six months. I constantly thought to myself that I should run back home, she adds.

An English graduate from the University of Madras, Solomon has been attached to an NGO--for more than 15 years. Of late, the voluntary organisation, Indian Community Welfare Organisation (ICWO), owns the crematorium, but Solomons initial projects were educating underprivileged children and, later, sex workers.

I decided to work with this NGO because I saw an article about their work. I wanted to help, the married woman says. Ive experienced a lot of new things, thanks to that stint.

Praveena Solomon (L) and her assistant Divya (R) at the Velankadu Crematorium, Anna Nagar, Chennai. (Aditya Iyer/ HT Photo)

Then, in March 2014, Solomons profile changed. That was because the 1994-registered ICWO got nominated to run one of Chennai Corporations 38 burial grounds in the metropolis. That change in management, though, left a burning resentment on the part of the corporation workers.

Some of them even threatened to throw acid in my face, the mother of two reveals. We did not have the support of the local people. They were also perturbed to see a woman handled the affairs of the dead.

Thus, the challenge of running the 4.5-acre crematorium in bustling Anna Nagar seemed all the more overwhelming.

Eventually, she managed to win over the peoples hearts, courtesy a combination of support from the police and her own hard efforts. Solomon worked untiringly to change the looks of crematorium that looked ugly when she took over its affairs more than two years ago. Now people say it looks like a park, she says, gesturing at the colourful walls and potted shrubbery.

The Velankadu Crematorium is one of the 38 Corporation run burial grounds in Chennai. (Aditya Iyer/ HT Photo)

Today, the Velankadu crematorium has new infrastructure, including an elevated furnace and toilet facilities. The burial ceremonies are done free of cost, with Solomons team receiving Rs 750 from the corporation for each body they process, as well as donations from the local residents.

The Chennai floods in November-December last year made the burial ground a busy place for a while. A lot of bodies began getting diverted to Velankadu because we had one of the few furnaces that could actually work, she notes. We would get an average of 5-7 corpses per day, and we cremated 246 in total during last November.

Solomons current avatar is unique as it marks the first time a woman is running a burial ground in Tamil Nadu, where--like in most parts of the country--upkeep of crematorium is a male domain traditionally.

Her bold career choice appears to have also inspired other women to join in: Solomon is assisted in her work by a sprightly young woman: Divya R. I joined the crematorium 6 months ago out of sheer interest, she says.

Solomon notes none knows the time of arrival of death. I consider it my duty to help the bereaved through the sudden shock, she adds.

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A US gunman has fatally shot three police officers and wounded four more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the same city where a black man was killed by white officers earlier this month, PressTV reported.



The shots were fired around 9 am Sunday morning, kicking off a manhunt for the shooter.



The scene seems to be contained right now, but it is still active, said Sgt. Don Coppola, Baton Rouge Police Department. Were asking everyone to stay out of the area.



On July 5, 2016, Alton Sterling, 37, was shot several times after being tackled to the ground by two white officers, one of two consecutive police killings that led to mass protests against racial bias in law enforcement.



One day after Sterlings death in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile, 32 was fatally shot by police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, after being pulled over.

On Friday, five policemen were killed and seven others wounded by a black gunman in Dallas, Texas, during a protest against police brutality and racial profiling of African Americans.



The killings have renewed racial tensions that have flared repeatedly across the US since the 2014 police killing of unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Missouri.



Police in the United States killed over 1,150 people in 2015, with the largest police departments disproportionately killing at least 321 African Americans, according to data compiled by an activist group that runs the Mapping Police Violence project.
Within hours of his release from a Surat prison where he was incarcerated for nine months on charges of sedition, young Patidar leader Hardik Patel has received offers to join three BJP rivals: the Congress, AAP and the NCP.

Out on bail from the Lajpore Central Jail on Friday, the 22-year-old was accorded a rousing welcome by his community in Surat, where Nationalist Congress Party leaders, too, rushed to receive him. Leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party caught up with him at Ahmedabad, while the state unit of the Congress made an open appeal.

Hardik shook the BJP government in the state last year by mobilizing the Patidars with a demand of college admissions and government jobs under reservation benefits. With eyes on the 2017 assembly elections, when Patidars--the BJPs most-trusted vote bank--are angry with the party, Hardiks emergence has made him a means for other political players to woo the community that constitutes around 12 to 14 per cent of total 6 crore Gujaratis.

Congress state chief Bhartsinh Solanki made an open appeal to the Patidar leader. Those fighting for a society against evils are always welcome in the Congress, he said.

AAP leader Ashutosh came to Ahmedabad and met Hardik at midnight when the youngster arrived here from Surat. In Delhi, AAP is fighting against injustice. Hardik is doing the same in Gujarat, said the journalist-turned-politician.

NCP legislator Jayant Patel was among the first to garland Hardik upon his release. Our doors are always open for Hardik, said party leader Praful Patel, a former union minister.

Hardik has so far maintained he was not planning to join any political party. Who told you so? Have I said that? was his response to a media query about his joining hands with political parties.

The leaders four-month agitation started in July last year, demanding Other Backward Classes status for the Patidars. On October 19, Hardik was booked under sedition charges over alleged remarks on killing cops.

Known for his firebrand image, Hardik continues to retain his outspoken character. Only, he is now seen consciously maintaining a distance from the media in an apparent bid to avoid controversies.

After a day-long roadshow in Surat, Hardik, who stayed in Ahmedabad overnight, reached his home in nearby Viramgam to a heros welcome.

Neighbours, along with his sister Monica and mother Usha, danced to the tune of garba and greeted him on Saturday in the traditional way. He spent two hours with the family, before leaving for a pilgrimage. His destination: Sarangpur Hanuman temple in Botad of Saurashtra peninsula. There, the gates that customarily close at 12.30 pm every day, were specially opened for him.

At Lathidal village, he was weighed by blood, which was then given for donation.

Everywhere in the Patidar-dominated belt of Saurashtra, the members of the community turned in large numbers to welcome their leader, who was little known until last year.

On Sunday, by evening, Hardik was scheduled to visit two temples: Khodaldham of Leuva Patels and Sidsar of the Kadva Patels. He was also to lead roadshows at Gondal, Morbi and Rajkot before going back to his home around midnight.

As per the bail condition by the high court, which had given him 48 hours in the state after release, Hardik is set to move out of Gujarat--on Sunday. His destination is Udaipur, where he is scheduled to stay at Shrinath Society--in a house of former Congress MLA Pushkarlal Patel. The exile in the Rajasthan city would mean Hardik is 250 km away from Ahmedabad and 120 km far from the Gujarat border.
Mild tremors were felt in Punjabs Amritsar and at a few adjoining areas on Sunday, officials said.

Tremors of magnitude 4.6 were felt at the India (Punjab)-Pakistan border region at 5:24 pm, said ANI, quoting the Indian Met department.

However, there was no immediate report of loss of life or property, officials said.

Earthquake tremors also jolted Lahore, Sheikhupura and some other areas of Pakistan, ANI reported.

Earlier, an earthquake measuring 4.7 on the Richter scale hit Surat district in south Gujarat in the morning, though no casualty or damage was reported, an official said.

The earthquake, which occurred at 9:24 am had its epicentre at Bhada village under Kamrej taluka of Surat district, nearly 24 kms north-west of Surat, he said.

Tremors were felt in parts of Surat district and in Bhavnagar, Amreli, Palitana, Savarkundla, Adajan, among other places, officials said.
Minister of state for parliamentary affairs, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, says the Centre has received a positive response from regional parties, ensuring them of a smooth passage of various pending bills. Excerpts:

Agenda for the Session

We have around 12-13 working days in Parliament for government business, excluding weekends and Fridays when you have private members bills. We will try to make the best use out of it. The GST Bill is high on priority. The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill,2016, The Enemy Property (Amendment and Validation) Bill,2016 and The Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Bill,2013, are some other important ones.

Concerns about disruptions

The government expects the monsoon session to be successful, fruitful and constructive. The weather outside is lovely and we are sure that business inside Parliament will also be conducted in a pleasant atmosphere. We are ready for a debate on every issue that the Opposition wants to discuss. There should be no disruption.

Trouble with regional players

We dont foresee that happening. Government leaders have reached out to their leaders, seeking support to the passage of bills and smooth conduct of Parliament. We have received a positive response. There is no reason to worry. The Arunachal Pradesh controversy should not have a bearing on Parliament. Why only regional parties, even the BJP and Congress have spoken in the past about the limits of the boundaries of judiciary and the executive.

Passage of the GST

The government is committed to this reform. This is a long-pending bill and we are confident that it will see the light of the day in this session. Most of the opposition parties are in agreement with the government. Even Congress opposition has softened. We dont believe that the Congress is opposed to reforms and the economic progress of this country. Its stand so far created a negative perception about the Congress. We hope that they have realised that opposing GST wont serve them any purpose.

Read | BJP-led government only believes in Modilogue, says Jairam Ramesh

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The Supreme Court will examine if a public prosecutor should mechanically sanction legal action against a public servant, including the President, Prime Minister and chief ministers, under the criminal defamation law.

The apex court will review the issue on the petition of DMDK chief Vijayakanth who is facing several defamation cases filed by Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa. A bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra is likely to lay down the guidelines for a prosecutor while giving a go ahead for legal action.

The bench had on May 13 upheld the provisions that make defamation a criminal offence in India, and dismissed a batch of petitions to declare two sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) in this regard unconstitutional.

Cutting across party lines, political leaders, including Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, BJP MP Subramanium Swamy, and Delhi chief minister and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal, had sought this declaration.

Vijayakanths lawyer, GS Mani, contended before the bench that a public prosecutor should be independent and not misuse his sanctioning authority to muzzle free speech or harass those who criticise government policies.

A public prosecutor is a government employee, who tends to become a post office at the hands of the state administration, Mani claimed.

Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar held a similar view. He said prosecutors should be neutral and grant sanction after considering all the facts of the complaint presented before him.

Mani argued the citizenrys right to criticise cannot be atrophied by constant launching of criminal prosecution for defamation on each and every issue to silence the critics.

When criticism in a vibrant democracy in this manner is crippled, the democracy, which is best defined as the Government of the People, by the People, for the People would lose its cherished values, he said.

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Separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani has sought the intervention of the United Nations and the heads of several Western and Muslim countries in the wake of a new wave of state terror unleashed by the Indian armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir.

Geelani said he wrote the letter on behalf of the oppressed and besieged people to draw the attention of the world community, as curfew continued in the region for the ninth day following the death of dozens of protestors in retaliatory firing by government forces.

Kashmir has been on the boil since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in an encounter on July 8.

Geelani has alleged that India continues to institutionally perpetrate violence in Jammu and Kashmir, and has ensured so far that no armed forces personnel involved in heinous war crimes to be prosecuted by its own judicial mechanism.

...therefore we urge the international community to pave way for an international inquiry led by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the letter reads. This inquiry is not unprecedented. Recently, the OHCHR instituted an inquiry into the crimes perpetrated by the Sri Lankan government.

Read | Its yesterday again: Kashmirs old wounds need political healing

New wave of terror

The veteran separatist leader has also accused the Indian Army of unleashing a new wave of terror, killing dozens and maiming hundreds of unarmed protesters, utilizing bullets and lethal pellet-guns aimed to kill and maim.

At least 41 people have been killed in the ongoing turmoil, mostly due to bullet injuries, and over 1,800 have been injured.

Curfew and severe restrictions have been imposed, besieging the already imprisoned population further. Pro-freedom leadership has been either imprisoned or placed under house arrest. The killing spree continues and an enraged population is getting desperate, the letter states.

He adds that influential states, such as the members of the UNSC, EU and OIC, have a special responsibility to challenge the behaviour of the Indian state to stop this reign of terror.

Earlier this week, the UN had expressed regret over the loss of lives and injuries in the clashes in Kashmir. UN chief Ban Ki-moon called on all parties to exercise maximum restraint to avoid further violence and hoped that all concerns would be addressed through peaceful means. And the US has called for dialogue between India, Pakistan and Kashmir to resolve the conflict in the Valley.

Along these lines, Geelani wants the world community to take measures to build confidence among the people of the occupied Jammu and Kashmir and to create an atmosphere conducive for the resolution of the dispute... as per the principle of Right to Self Determination and as enshrined in the various UN Resolutions on Jammu and Kashmir.

Among his other requests, the separatist leader has also asked world leaders to push India to accept the disputed nature of the state, rapidly demilitarise the region, repeal draconian laws like AFSPA and the Public Safety Act and release all political prisoners.

Read | Separatists in Kashmir extend shutdown call till July 15

Free political space for all parties

Geelani also wants India to allow UN Special Rapporteurs and all international human rights and humanitarian organisations to work in the region and ensure free political space for all parties, particularly those advocating the right to self-determination.

These steps, if taken with a sense of urgency and responsibility, can help restore calm and peace in an agitated population and pave way for the processes required for the final and just resolution of the dispute of Jammu and Kashmir, thereby disperse the perpetual clouds of war and conflict that threatens global peace, Geelani writes.

The letter has been sent to the United Nations Security Council; the heads of UNSC permanent members (US, UK, China, France and Russia), members of the European Union, the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), the South Asian Association of Regional Countries (SAARC) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN); the Prime Ministers of Pakistan and Turkey; the King of Saudi Arabia; and the Presidents of China and Iran.

Days earlier, Pakistans foreign office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria too claimed to have informed the international community about the human rights violations in Kashmir, and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif urged India to fulfil its human rights obligations and commitments under UN Security Council Resolutions.

The Indian governments response was sharp. External affairs ministry spokesperson Vikas Swarup said, Pakistan is advised to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of its neighbours.

Islamabad has long been insisting on a plebiscite in Kashmir, and sees a role for the UN. However, India maintains that there is a democratically elected government in place in Jammu and Kashmir, and has rejected the possibility of UN or international intervention in settling the Kashmir issue.

Read | Talk peace: Dialogue alone can draw Kashmir out of the abyss
Heavy rains in Uttarakhand have left six people dead in the last 48 hours. More than 140 roads across the hill state are blocked while major rivers are flowing above the danger mark.

Incessant rain has triggered landslides at various places, disrupting the Char Dham yatra. Officials said Char Dham pilgrims are safe and the administration is making efforts to evacuate them.

The access to the Sikh shrine Hemkund Sahib has been also blocked after a foot bridge was swept away. The rising Bhagirathi river is close to engulfing the Gangotri temple while the national highway near Yamnnotri has been blocked since Saturday.

According to reports, two persons died in Barkot (Uttarkashi) on Saturday night after a tree fell on their kuccha house. Three people were killed in Pauri district after their car plnged into a gorge in low visibility.

Pauri Garhwal, sub-divisional magistrate Raja Abbas said that a car with six people onboard, fell into a gorge in heavy rain. They were residents of Najibabad in UP who were coming to Srinagar (Pauri) to attend a marriage. Three people died on the spot while three other injured, were rushed to the nearest hospital.

A woman was kiled and another person was injured as a bus tumbled into a local stream that had swelled after torrential rains near Haldwani.

Major rivers in Uttarakhand, including the Ganga, are flowing above the danger mark. The State capital has received 26.2 mm of rainfall since Friday night, the meteorological department said.

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External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj said on Sunday government would help a Kalyan-based family in arranging for cremating bodies of its three members killed in a road accident in Long Island in the US.

38-year-old IT professional Chandan Gavai and his parents -- Archana Gavai (60) and Kamalnayan Gavai (74)-- were killed when the vehicle they were travelling in was hit head-on by a truck on July 4. Chandans 32-year-old wife suffered life-threatening burns and is in comma. The couples 11-month-old son survived the crash and is under treatment.

The Gavai family members in India were finding it difficult to bring back the bodies for cremation due to high expenses involved. Swaraj promised to help the family after she came to know of their difficulty.

Swaraj said Indias consulate general in New York has suggested the family to cremate Chandans parents in New York. She said as per US laws, Chandans body cannot be cremated as his wife is in coma and unable to give consent.

Swaraj said the consulate general suggested the family that Chandans mortal remains be buried as his wife Manisha alone can give consent for his cremation.

Swaraj said the government will help the family get death certificates and insurance money for all the three deceased members. The family hails from Maharashtra.

Our consulate will bear the expenses for cremation, Swaraj tweeted, adding All members of the family who are in US incl. Manishas parents are agreeable to this proposal. We hope to resolve this accordingly.

Burial only till his wife Manisha recovers from coma. Once she gives consent, Chandan will also be cremated.

Swaraj said one of the family members Anand Gavai wants the money be given to him but it cannot be done as he is a Dutch national. Under government rules, money cannot be given to a foreign national, she said.
The return of rebels to the Congress in Aruanchal Pradesh on Saturday to diffuse a political crisis was a bolt from the blue for many, including the BJP. But former chief minister Nabam Tuki had it planned over two months.

The rebels, led by former chief minister Kalikho Pul, had formed the Peoples Party of Arunachal (PPA) government that the Supreme Court virtually de-recognised by turning the states political clock to what it showed on December 15 last year. Tuki was heading the Congress government then.

It did not happen in a day, as you might be inclined to think. I was in touch with the rebels for two months, telling them how the case in the SC would pan out. And since the problem of some of them was with my leadership, I promised to step down to ensure the Congress government remains, Tuki told Hindustan Times.

Tuki blamed BJP president Amit Shah and union minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju for creating the trouble in the state.

They herded the rebels in a five-star hotel in Guwahati and thought they had things in control. But I managed to convince 21 of the 30 rebels to come home to Congress the night before the floor test was scheduled (Saturday).

The remaining rebels, including Pul, joined the party Saturday morning. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The BJP did not get wind of what was happening. It was taken by surprise. But I have an advice for the party that wants to rid India of Congress: Read the Constitution thoroughly before you start needling the Congress-ruled states. The BJP was non-existent when the Constitution was written, so it is yet to learn how to go by it, Tuki said.

But, Tuki said, he has nothing against Pul. He did not say anything. But I told him you are my younger brother, and we dont have any permanent enmity. Politics is like this; there cannot be permanent enemies but there can be permanent friend.

Pul, though, sulked after he hugged Tuki at new chief minister Pema Khandus swearing-in ceremony. He said the Congress misinterpreted the SC judgement and scared the PPA legislators into believing they would be disqualified.

There was a Gauhati high court verdict that legitimised the PPA, but this thing happened too fast for us to do anything, Pul said, adding he was glad to be back among friends and assured he would play a constructive role in Khandus new Congress government.

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The army and Assam Police gunned down three top NDFB(S) militants in Kokrajhar district on Sunday.

On specific intelligence inputs on movement of hardcore NDFB(S) militants, the army challenged suspected individuals who were moving through dense jungles in the early hours of Sunday.

After coming under heavy non-discriminatory fire, the joint team retaliated with controlled fire and killed the three hardcore NDFB(S) militants, the officials said.

Two of them have been identified as Rahul Basumatary and Ritu Basumatary, officials said.

Four pistols, a large quantity of ammunition, hand grenades have been recovered from the slain militants.

Officials claimed that the surgical operation which was carried out under torrential rains, in thick foliage and undergrowth of the Assam jungles, is a major setback to the NDFB(S), which has been active in the area.
Indias first e-court was opened on Sunday at High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad, the common high court for the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

Inaugurating the e-court, Supreme Court judge justice Madan B Lokur said Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were first two states in the country to be chosen for Integrated Criminal Justice System (ICJS) project.

While noting that the two states made lot of progress in technology, he said it was one of the reasons for the decision to launch the ICJS, a system which is going to integrate police stations with the courts, with jails, with the prosecution and with the forensic science laboratories.

Justice Lokur, who heads the e-committee of the Supreme Court, said modalities of the system will be worked out at a meeting scheduled on July 28, and he was impressed with the e-court at Hyderabad High Court.

It is not only the e-court in the sense it is fully computerised but it also a paperless court. We spent few minutes understanding the system and I tried my hand at using the technology. Its extremely user friendly. I will encourage all judges to try it, he said

During this coming week I am going to try and introduce this in Supreme Court as well. If it happens in the Supreme Court, you (Telangana and Andhra Pradesh high courts) can take all credit for it, he said.

Stating that technology today is much better, he exuded confidence that all judges will be able to use it easily. He hoped that there will be more e-courts in near future.

Justice Lokur said a huge amount of progress has been made in this high court over couple of years due to the keen interest taken by the chief justice.

Things dramatically changed over last 3 or 4 years. The team effort led to this change. The e-committee trying to supplement this team effort, he added.

He said the purpose of e-courts was to ensure speedy justice for the litigants. He stressed the need to appoint staff for paperless courts and advised judges to focus on online data entry.
Turkey has no aircraft missing besides the helicopter seized by eight pro-coup soldiers who flew to Greece in the wake of the failed coup attempt, Turkeys defense minister said Sunday, Anadolu reported.



Speaking to reporters in Ankara, Defense Minister Fikri Isik dismissed rumors that five or six Turkish aircraft had disappeared after the attempted coup as untrue.



Late Saturday, a diplomatic source said the Black Hawk helicopter used in the escape had been returned to Turkey.



It was received by the Turkish military and left Alexandroupoli, Greece accompanied by two other Turkish helicopters, the source said on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to the media.
Charging Prime Minister Narendra Modi with poisoning the political atmosphere,senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said it is unrealistic for the BJP-led NDA government to expect his party to cooperate and facilitate passage of the GST bill in the Monsoon Session of Parliament.

Government cannot do constitutional murder in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Meghalaya and expect GST (bill) to be passed, Ramesh told PTI here on Sunday.

Murder process is still going on in Meghalaya and Manipur. Government is doing its best to cut and clip the wings of the Supreme Court and I think this is dangerous for our democracy, the former Union minister alleged.

Mr Modi wants to silence all opposition. He wants to silence opposition parties and he wants to silence the Supreme Court. This is unacceptable to Indians, he said.

There is a certain political environment that is required for bills to be passed and Mr Modi has done everything possible to poison the atmosphere. In this atmosphere to expect the Congress to cooperate, I think its been very unrealistic, the Rajya Sabha member said.

He claimed that the government is looking at the Goods and Services Tax (GST) from the point of view of big industries.

We are looking at GST from an industry, trade and consumer point of view. We want GST to be not only pro-industry, but also pro-consumer. GST is a major innovation, we want GST. GST will benefit, if properly implemented, the Congress spokesperson said.

But, he also pointed out that the bill would not usher in full GST.

First of all, its not uniform GST...(there is) central GST and state GST. There will be a band. States are free to set their own rates, he noted.

Petroleum has been kept out of GST purview for five years, while tobacco, alcohol, electricity and real estate have been kept out permanently. It (GST) is a half-way a house. Its not a perfect GST, but its some GST, he said.
What is death? This was what an eight-year old boy in Hyderabad asked the police when questioned why he allegedly killed a six-year-old schoolmate after a scuffle over repeated bullying.

Last Tuesday, the eight-year-old Class 3 student repeatedly teased his junior, the six-year-old Class 1 student, for a runny nose during the lunch break, police said

Enraged, the younger boy reportedly hurled abuses, triggering a brawl between the children. Both kids studied at the same school in the city.

During the fight, the older boy kicked the six-year-old in the stomach and private parts, sources said.

The Class 1 student collapsed during the scuffle and the school management rushed him to a local hospital, where he was given first aid treatment and sent home.

But later in the evening, he complained of severe pain in his private parts and was taken to Hospital, where doctors performed two surgeries to stop the internal bleeding. But he did not recover and succumbed to his injuries on Saturday evening. He was the son of a local cab driver.

But when police went to question the older boy about the murder, he asked them, Mar gaya matlab kya hai? (What does it mean he has died?) He claimed the younger boy had beaten him and he retaliated.

The schools principal said the brawl might have taken place outside the premises as it was not recorded in any of the closed-circuit television cameras installed in the school.

Police have registered a case against the eight-year-old under Section 304 of the IPC (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), but have not arrested him because he is a minor. He is likely to be produced before a juvenile court on Monday.

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The toll in the spurious liquor tragedy climbed to 24 by Sunday night while the main accused was arrested and 11 officials from the excise and police departments were suspended.

District magistrate Ajay Yadav confirmed that 21 deaths had occurred in Etah earlier in the day while in Farukhabad, sub divisional magistrate of Kayamganj, Ajit Kumar, said three had died in the district.

Meanwhile, the main accused, Sri Pal, was arrested from Nayagaon area in Etah by Saturday night, superintendent of police, Ajay Shankar Rai said.

The main accused, Sri Pal has been arrested and was presented before the court and sent to jail. We are working on information obtained from him during interrogation, said Rai.

Sri Pal was arrested four times in 2015 but was bailed out each time. A massive campaign was launched in June this year and about 3 lakh litres of illegal liquor was recovered and destroyed in Aliganj town, Govind Agarwal, deputy inspector general, Aligarh told Hindustan Times.

The tragedy occurred late on Friday, when several people from Luhari Darwaja and adjacent Laukhera village consumed the spurious liquor and were taken ill. Six of the victims lost their eyesight, locals claimed. By Saturday night, 14 people had died.

Read | 17 die in Etah after drinking spurious liquor

Yadav said an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh will be given to the families of each deceased apart from assuring action against the liquor mafias.

In Lucknow, chief secretary Deepak Singhal apprised chief minister Akhilesh Yadav of the incident.

Singhal directed the principal secretaries of excise and home to take action against those officials found guilty of dereliction of duty.

Five government employees, including three from the excise department, were suspended following the incident.

Taking serious note of the incident, district excise officer, excise inspector and an excise personnel have been suspended, Kishan Singh Atoria, the principal secretary (excise) said.

The principal secretary (home), Debashish Panda, said circle officer of Aliganj, Asaram Ahirwar and station house officer Mukesh Kumar were suspended.

In Etah, the superintendent of police suspended sub-inspector Yogendra Kumar with constables Bhagat Singh, Om Prakash, Tukiram, Bhagwan Singh and Mahesh Chandra.

As the death toll spiked, police further looked into Sri Pal to determine how far the net was cast.

Sri Pal had gone silent after repeated arrests in 2015 but turned active again in June and began selling pouches of toxic liquor for Rs 15-20. He is believed to have added chemicals to increase the intensity of the liquor.

The inspector general of police, Agra Zone, DC Mishra, and Mukesh Rajput, the MP from Farukkhabad, were in town to take stock of the situation.

(With inputs from PTI)
A 22-year-old man, who was rescued from a sealed container carrying shoes just before the consignment was to be shipped to New York from Nhava Sheva on Saturday, was let off by the police after a few hours.

Farooq Ahamad, originally from Assam, joined the shoe company in Mira Road around 10 months ago, while his uncle has been working with the company for more than two years now. The police said Ahamad fell asleep inside the container on the company premises as he was tired. Ahmad fell asleep inside the container around 2am on Saturday. The excise officers sealed it without a proper check. It is a case of negligence, said an officer from the Nhava Sheva police station.

The police handed him over to his uncle after a detailed interrogation. The excise officials should have checked the container. We have called them for questioning on Monday, said Babasaheb Budhwant, assistant commissioner of police.

We have not recovered anything from Ahamad. If he had plans to flee the country illegally, he would not have banged on the container door to get rescued. It takes more than 25 days to reach the US from India using the sea route. No one can stay alive inside a container for so long, he said.

A senior Customs official from JNPT said, According to the rules, a designated range officer of the excise department should check the container minutely before sealing and sending them to the ports. Usually, one officer has to check more than 10 containers. Taking advantage of this loophole, sandalwood and drugs are illegally exported from India.

What if someone planted weapons or explosives in the container? The international community would have questioned Indias intention, he said.

The police are not sure if Ahamad was drunk at the time of the incident. He was rescued after 10 hours of staying inside the container.

Rukmini Galande, senior inspector, Nhava Sheva police station, said, We will call all agencies involved and conduct a detailed inquiry in this case. We have summoned a few officials on Monday.

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MUMBAI: In fresh trouble for embattled liquor baron Vijay Mallya, the metropolitan magistrate court in Andheri issued a non-bailable warrant against him on Saturday in a cheque bounce case, where the Airport Authority of India (AAI) is the complainant.

The court had, in a hearing on May 7, given Mallya last chance to appear before it as the AAI had sought a warrant to secure his presence. The advocate for AAI, Anil Kathuria, had pleaded that Mallyas presence was required.

In a criminal case, presence of the accused has to be ascertained to award punishment, if found guilty, Kathuria said.

On Saturday, when the case came up for hearing, Mallyas lawyer said he could not be present as his passport was revoked. The lawyer pleaded that Mallyas presence was not necessary and the case hearings can go on without him being present.

However, discarding the arguments of Mallyas lawyer, the court ordered a non-bailable warrant against him to secure his presence before the court.

The court was hearing applications filed by the AAI against M/s Kingfisher Airlines, which is now defunct, in connection with three cheques of total Rs107 crore, which were dishonoured.
A prompt apology from the Dadri family which allegedly possessed beef could have averted the flare-up the country saw last year after the mob lynching of a middle-aged man in the eastern Uttar Pradesh area, according to a senior leader with the Muslim wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Instead, the issue got politicised with the state government trying to hide the truth in the case where 52-year-old Mohammad Ikhlaq was killed and his son severely injured ten months ago, Indresh Kumar, who is a guide of the RSSs Muslim Rashtriya Manch, said.

Kumars statement on Saturday comes a after an FIR was lodged against the family of Ikhlaq, who was killed in his Bisara village near Noida on September 29 last year by angry protestors who also seriously injured his 22-year-old son Danish. On Thursday, a trial court Surajpur directed the Greater Noida police to register a case against Ikhlaq and his family.

If the family knew it had done injustice (by killing a cow), it could have just said sorry. That would have cleared their conscience, he told reporters, after attending a Sangh-sponsored Eid Milan Samaroh in Saket Nagar. The local administration could have registered the crime then itself.

Uttar Pradesh is among the states that has enacted a law (since 1955) prohibiting slaughter of cow.

The RSS leader wanted the SP government in the state to bring out the truth it sought to hide, lest the people will be compelled to ensure justice on the matter.

Kumar went to the extent of saying that Islam, too, prohibited eating cow meat. Prophets from Adam to Mohammad never had meat in their life, and Islam preaches against hurting sentiments to get God accept ones prayers, he claimed.

On Zakir Naik, Kumar said Muslims the world over have opposed the controversial preacher more than people from other religions. I will say if your words spread hate and incite people to kill, you are not for Insaniyat (humanity) but Shaitayinat (devious). Millions of Muslims view him this way, he said.

The central government should consider the Muslim sentiments that are against him, and initiate appropriate action against the founder of the Islamic Research Foundation in Mumbai, the RSS leader said.

Supporting the idea of a uniform civil code, he said the country needed the proposed legislation for it to progress and foster brotherhood. He refused to comment on the practice of triple talaq in Islam, but said the scriptures of that religion defined divorce as the most undesirable sin.

On the latest strife in Kashmir, Kumar said he sensed positivity this time with the Muslim clerics in the Valley appealing the masses not to resort to violence.

Earlier in the day, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said the Sangh might go for certain changes in the working style of the cadres, but there would be absolutely no change in the basic policies of the nine-decade-old organisation.

Sangh sah-sahkaryavaha Dattatreya Hosbole, speaking at the valedictory session of a three-day long training meet of the outfits volunteers, said RSS additional general secretary Krishna Gopal would continue to work towards ending groupism in the state unit of the BJP, and strive to make the party stronger ahead of next years assembly election.

Hosboles statement sought to quell rumours that the RSS was contemplating to bring in sar-sahkaryavaha Suresh Soni in place of Gopal.
Apparently, doctors at Katni district hospital take their meetings very seriously. Nothing  not even a medical emergency  can force them to walk out of one.

In yet another incident of medical negligence in Madhya Pradesh, a 23-year-old woman was reportedly forced to deliver her infant in a makeshift tent of sarees outside the government medical institute on Friday just because its doctors were too busy attending a meeting.

Sources said when Ramadevi went into labour that day, her husband  Raghvendra  called the 108 Janani Suraksha ambulance. They soon reached the district hospital, only to find that not a single doctor or nurse was on duty.

About half an hour later, Raghvendra came to know that the doctors were in the middle of a meeting, and there was no attendant to help them. Hearing Ramadevis screams, who was left in the ambulance for over an hour, other women patients at the hospital carried her out of the vehicle. They then created a makeshift tent with sarees, and helped the woman deliver the baby outside the hospital.

It was only after the procedure was over that the nurses arrived at the scene and took the mother and her newborn inside.

However, hospital in charge Dr Umesh Namdev denied the allegations.

Dr Rajendra Thakur was present in the emergency ward while the meeting was on, said Dr Namdev. In fact, the local women were very reluctant to let us handle the delivery. As soon as the matter came to my notice, I sent a few staffers to admit the mother and the infant to the hospital. They are doing fine now.

When contacted, health minister Rustam Singh said, I am unaware of the incident, and will address the issue later. I am busy right now.

The incident came barely 10 days after a similar case of medical negligence was reported in the state on July 5, when a 65-year-old woman was forced to commandeer a cycle-rickshaw to ensure that her neighbour reached the district hospital on time to deliver her baby. Their efforts to hail a 108 Janani Suraksha van had gone in vain.

Read | Delhi hospital, doctors ordered to pay Rs 64 lakh for negligence

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SRINAGAR/NEW DELHI: Pellet guns used by security forces have killed at least two people during the latest round of violence that swept Kashmir, busting the myth that they are non-lethal weapons.

Records of Srinagars Sri Maharaja Hari Singh hospital (SMHS) show that an unknown 20-year-old youth died of pellet injuries to his head on July 9. Another boy, Altaf Ahmad, died of pellet injuries to his chest the next day. Doctors said the pellets had punched holes in his heart.

A weapon of choice for the security forces currently battling angry locals, who have taken to the streets in the aftermath of last weeks killing of the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, pellet guns have been as much in the news as the upheaval engulfing the state.

Pellet guns are loaded with lead that disperses in no set direction and in large numbers when fired. These pellets often pierce through the skin and eyes, causing significant damage.

As many as 177 people have received pellet injuries, including 95 who were hit in the eyes, triggering a public outcry. Many of the victims now risk losing their eyesight.

A senior security official told HT that pellet guns were not non-lethal, as largely believed. They are less-lethal, he said.

Currently used by the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), which has about 200 such guns in Kashmir, and the state police, pellet guns are supposed to be used as the second-last option to control an agitated crowd. When every other measure such as baton charge, water cannons and rubber bullets fail, pellet guns are to be used. If that fails as well, the forces resort to firing live bullets.

However, locals say pellet guns are the first choice, not the second-last, for security forces in Kashmir. The CRPF has been using pellet guns in the Valley since 2010, after street protests that year resulted in the deaths of 100 people in firing by security forces. The force also recently began using such weapons in Maoist-affected areas such as Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Casualties there are, however, unknown.

Two senior police officials, however, have blamed the large number of casualties to lack of training and application.

One needs just 7-15 days of training in police lines but that doesnt generally happen, one of them said. However, those who fire them on the ground are not necessarily the ones who were trained.

The standard operating procedure also requires an official of the rank not less than an assistant sub-inspector of police to use the weapon. But both officers said the pellet guns are handed over to constables for use.

The other official pointed out that the manner in which they are fired can also make a huge difference. It is like a stone. If a stone hits the leg, it is non-lethal. If it hits the head, it can even cause death, he said. Ophthalmologists say once lodged in the posterior part of the eye, pellets damage the retina and optic nerves and vision can never be recovered.
Kashmir has been virtually brought under press emergency. This is unprecedented. Earlier on Saturday, police parties raided the press premises of prominent newspapers, including those of Rising Kashmir, Greater Kashmir, Kashmir Images and Kashmir Times, stopped the workmen from going ahead with the printing, detained some of them briefly and seized the copies that had already been out of the machine.

This was apparently done to black out the news that would tell the people that the death toll in the violence in Kashmir had touched 43. Later, the editors of these newspapers were told by the government that they could not publish the newspapers for the next few days in view of apprehensions of more trouble in the Valley. This is unprecedented and reprehensible as the government sees the media also as a threat to peace.

As routine policing failed to contain the outrage Kashmir has never seen after the killing of a militant, the government choked the means of communication people have been using. First it was social media, which according to its managers, was uncontrolled and unaccountable. But the newspapers are very much regulated and accountable. There is a mechanism to cross check the facts and a high degree of responsibility is maintained in disseminating the information to the public. Giving the real picture from the ground to a reader is needed at this time of crisis. By stopping the circulation of newspapers, the government is creating a space for rumour mills that could prove more dangerous.

Read | Kashmir newspapers raided, printing banned for 3 days to ensure peace

Moreover, a section of national TV channels has taken up the job of firefighting in their own way and projecting as if Kashmirs population had waged a war. Their reportage and shouting debates are adding fuel to fire even as an average Kashmiri feels pushed to the wall. This does not help to contain the situation but further aggravates it. Local media could be the only tool that could help bring the situation to normal. The logic behind this decision, which was not communicated to the newspaper owners officially, is not understandable.

This is not the first time the media has been gagged. Since 1990, when an armed rebellion broke out in Kashmir, the media has faced numerous challenges. Deaths, threats, intimidation, arrests and coercion has been the part of their daily routine. In 2008 when Armarnath land row derailed normality the media was one of the targets of the government then headed by Governor N N Vohra.

Later in the 2010 unrest, the Omar Abdullah-led government also gagged the media, forcing newspapers to suspend publication for 10 days. To force the newspapers to toe a line, the government has also used the discretion of banning DAVP advertisements to prominent newspapers without any legal authority. Now the press emergency that has come under Mehbooba Muftis rule has set a new standard in muzzling the press. This wont help restore normality and surely will dent a democratic institution in a state that is fighting multiple battles to ensure stability.

Read | Kashmir unrest: Its yesterday once more

The writer is Editor-in Chief, Rising Kashmir. Views expressed are personal.
NEW DELHI: Textiles minister Smriti Irani, who lost her education portfolio in the reshuffle of Prime Minister Narendra Modis council of ministers, has been dropped from the cabinet committee on parliamentary affairs.

Irani has been replaced by her successor at the human resource development ministry, Prakash Javadekar, who was elevated to the cabinet ministers rank. Javadekar was earlier a special invitee to the committee.

According to a list of cabinet committees put out this week, skill development minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy, who was divested of the charge of the parliamentary affairs portfolio, was moved out of the cabinet committee too. He has been replaced by SS Ahluwalia, who is the junior minister in the ministry. Junior law minister PP Chaudhary has also been made a special invitee.

Law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad also replaces his predecessor DV Sadananda Gowda in the panel. The CCPA, headed by home minister Rajnath Singh, is mandated to recommend the dates of Parliament sessions. It has 11 members.
US President Barack Obama has called for unity among Americans in the wake of a shooting in Louisiana that left three police officers dead, PressTV reported.

Days after the fatal shooting of a black man in Baton Rouge, three cops were killed by a gunman identified as Gavin Long.

The president took the stage on Sunday to condemn the move, portraying it as a divisive measure to boost enmity with the US police.

"We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies attacks on law enforcement," Obama said in the White House briefing room, calling on Americans to "focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further."

The remarks were made on the eve of the 2016 GOP Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, where real estate mogul Donald Trump is supposed to be nominated for the Republican Party. He has on various occasions used the shooting to promote hate speech and undermine the Obama administration.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards also condemned the attack, calling it an "unspeakable and heinous move with no purpose.

"There simply is no place for more violence. That doesn't help anyone, it doesn't further the conversation, it doesn't address any injustice, perceived or real. It is just an injustice in and of itself," he told reporters in Baton Rouge.
The cash-strapped Punjab government deposited Rs 926 crore in the cash credit limit (CCL) account last month to come clean on the funds the Centre released to it to buy foodgrains.

The SAD-BJP government, which struggles to pay its employees, was forced to dip into departmental funds to generate Rs 1,000 crore for the CCL, which is money advanced to the state by the Centre to buy foodgrain.

This came as a surprise since the Parkash Singh Badal government had been claiming that its the Centre that has to reimburse it Rs 26,000 crore to buy foodgrains.

Returning the amount is part of an exercise to settle the 20-year-long CCL dispute with the Centre. The government had to release some amount to the banks to resolve the CCL issue, state finance minister Parminder Singh Dhindsa said.

A committee, comprising Punjab and central government officers, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi set up to break the logjam, met in Delhi on Saturday.

The Centre and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) sanction the CCL as working capital, funded by a consortium of banks, to buy foodgrain. The value of foodgrains in godowns of state agencies should match the amount the Centre releases.

Punjab says there is a huge gap between the cost incurred in buying foodgrains and reimbursement by central agencies.

We are pressing the Centre to reimburse our money, Punjab food minister Adaish Partap Singh Kairon said after the RBI asked banks in April to classify the Rs 12,000 crore given to the state for buying foodgrains as bad loans.

Cash-rich departments

In the process of generating the Rs 1,000 crore, the Punjab government realised that its departments, boards, corporations and public sector undertakings (PSUs) are cash surplus. After seeking information about each departments financial status from banks, it was found that they have Rs 4,455 crore stashed away. Sources say 42 government-run organisations have Rs 3,457 crore in fixed deposit (FD) or bonds, while Rs 106 crore is in current account and Rs 892 crore in saving accounts.

This is financial imprudence and will be set right. How can departments park money outside the treasury? This will be stopped, a government functionary said.

Managing funds

The state government was unaware about this money and is exploring options to see if this money can be used in an emergency.

A committee, led by chief secretary Sarvesh Kaushal, is examining how the government can use this money. The departments should have deposited this money in the treasury. (On the positive side) We know how much each department has now, Dhindsa said.

The government began the scrape-the-barrel exercise when it had to deposit money in the CCL account, the foodgrain loan kitty.

The picture is not clear. We are awaiting information from departments about their financial status. But it is a fall back option, Punjab additional chief secretary for finance DP Reddy said.

The state departments were told to reveal their financial status to ascertain if their funds were in order, he said, adding that the government could use the money if there is a necessity.

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The Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) clean chit to former Patiala mayor Jaspal Singh Pardhan, who was booked for the murder of a woman in February 2013, may give boost to his political career.

Pardhan has approached cabinet minister Sikandhar Singh Maluka, Janmeja Singh Sekhon and Surjit Singh Rakhra. He has also sought time from the party president, Sukhbir Badal, to put forth his case.

An Akali Dal minister, reportedly, has also put forward Jaspals case for reappointment.

Sources in the party say he may be appointed as the president of the Akali Dal (Patiala Urban) or a chairman at some other place.

I came to know from the media that I got a clean chit in the murder case of Parampreet. I never committed the crime I was booked for. My political opponents framed me a false case when my career was at peak, said Pardhan, adding, I have faith on the party leadership, who have assured me space in the party.

The case has taken three years of my political career. Now, I hope that the party will restore my status on the same post, he said, adding that once the CBI presents the report in the court, he will expose the leaders, who had framed him.

Meanwhile, the investigation report, which has been finalised and cleared from the Delhi head office, will be submitted in the court next week, said an investigating official.

The CBI has found nothing incriminating against Jaspal Singh, against whom the probe was focused. The CBI concluded its report on the basis of scientific evidences, the official added.

The CBI, in its report, said it was a case of suicide.
Punjab deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal on Saturday urged Centre to increase Border Security Force (BSF) deployment along the Punjabs 553-km border with Pakistan on the pattern of Jammu and Kashmir till assembly elections, due in early 2017.

Speaking in New Delhi at the inter-state council meeting that Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired, the deputy CM accused the Centre of usurping the rights and authority of the states, and reducing them to the status of mere beggars.

Also read: More force, technology give teeth to BSF in Punjab

Sukhbir described the decisions of the Centre to shift subjects from the state list to the concurrent list and from the concurrent to the union list as a dangerous exhibition.

On the SYL issue, he said not even a drop of water is spare with Punjab for discharge in the SYL canal.

He also rued that the decision of maintaining 60:40 ratio in posting officers in Chandigarh from Punjab and Haryana is being violated.

The deputy CM said Punjab has waged a national war against cross-border drug smuggling, he said: Roughly 60% of the total illicit drugs confiscated in India are seized in Punjab.

Dont miss: Dozen laser walls activated along Indo-Pak border

Haryana seeks womens battalion

Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar urged the Central government to sanction a womens India Reserve Battalion (IRB) for dealing with female protesters and also sought financial and technical support for modernisation of the police force, besides funds for the purchase of equipment for regional forensic science laboratories.

Stating that the security environment in Haryana was largely impacted by the states proximity to the national capital region (NCR), the state faced a large number of agitations because of its location in the vicinity of New Delhi. Protesters included large number of women, making it difficult for the male police personnel to handle them, hence the need for a women reserve battalion, he added.

Virbhadra demands green bonus for hill states

Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh, urged the Centre to grant green bonus to hill states in lieu of the environmental services being provided by these states on regular basis as an opportunity cost in terms of the area not available for other economic activities.

It will be a big incentive for the states and will also be a step towards environment protection and sustainable development.

The chief minister also raised issue of special products category for apple crop as safeguard mechanism to increase import tariff in event of surge in import of apple. He also stressed on the need for improvement of rail and road network in the state owing to its proximity with international borders.
With the iconic Christ Church and clock tower in Shimla in for restoration, hopes are up that time will be right again. But what about the other towers in the region?

Ludhiana: Icon in name, yet in a shambles

A least 35 visitors a month make enquiries if they can climb the stairs, but return disappointed. (JS Grewal/HT Photo)

Constructed by the British in 1906 to mark the silver jubilee of Queen Victorias coronation, the clock tower or ghanta ghar here is in dire straits. The clock shows incorrect time, the building has cracks, pigeons have made it their home, and the stairs are out of bounds. On its ground floor is the office of Punjab tourism department, whose brochure cites it as an icon of Ludhiana. The district administrations website too features the tower prominently.

A least 35 visitors a month make enquiries if they can climb the stairs, but return disappointed. The small stairs and a broken wooden plank above the first floor make climbing to the second floor a risky affair. This is why the municipal corporation has banned the entry.

Inaugurated on October 18, 1906, by Sir Charles Montgomery, the then lieutenant governor of Punjab, and Diwan Tek Chand, the then deputy commissioner of Ludhiana, the tower was renamed Bhagwan Mahavir Clock Tower by former Punjab CM Giani Zail Singh, who later became President.

The British-era clock that had to be wound manually was replaced two decades ago with electronic ones on the four sides. The original is lying as scrap on the first floor. Even a board displaying names of those who donated for it is gathering dust. A constant stink and plants populate its insides. On the walls outside, illegal hoardings are put up.

When contacted, mayor Harcharan Singh Gohalwaria said, We will get the clock repaired and take adequate steps to repair the wooden planks of the stairs too. No official could say when the last repair was done.

Shimla: Funds in, plan being worked out

The 162-year-old Christ Church in the heart of Shimla, on the Ridge, is one of the most photographed monuments of the town. Yet, it has fallen into neglect for years. The clock on it stopped working two decades ago.

Read more: Shimla Christ Church clock to chime once again

Asian Development Bank (ADB) has allotted Rs 5.9 crore for restoration of the church, which was built in 1844 by Colnel JT Boleau, under the aegis of Anglican Society of Shimla. The clock was donated by Colonel Dumbleton in 1860. No one seems sure when the last restoration effort was carried out. Mustaq, a priest at the church, told HT, All these years we did not have money to restore the church. But the government has been kind now.

But the tourism department is not so sure as to how the work will be done. In a couple of weeks, tenders will be called. Repairing clocks and chimes requires specialisation, and we have few companies still undertaking the repair of such old clocks, said the joint director for tourism, Manoj Sharma. He could not come up with specifics as to which companies were available. Its for the contractor to ensure the clock starts ticking and the chimes jingle, he said.

There is vegetation inside that hampers the clock. Work needs to be done properly, he added.

Hoshiarpur: Like a forgotten Urdu couplet

There is no clarity either on when the tower came up  some say the 1890s, and others say 1936. (Harpreet Kaur/HT Photo)

There is an inscription that appears to be in the Persian script, but you cannot see what it says. All people can tell is that its an Urdu couplet by a man called Balak Ram Mattu, but no one could be found who could remember the words. Its on a pillar of a clock tower built in the form of a gate of Hoshiarpur, the city founded in 1846.

There is no clarity either on when the tower came up  some say the 1890s, and others say 1936. Today, shopkeepers stack their wares against it; vendors have encroached the space under it; and municipal authorities say they have lost the records. Yet, the clock worked until about five years ago, say locals. Older residents recall how the chime from the structure, located in the heart of the city, could be heard to a kilometre and more. Originally it had to be wound manually but some years ago it was replaced with an electronic device. Since it stopped working, the MC has not earmarked any funds for its renovation.

Mayor Shiv Sood said that since the metal ladder which was part of the original structure was demolished long back for construction of the city police station, maintenance became tough. We are unable to find the file carrying its details, he said.

Its a monument the city identifies with. But the authorities appear not bothered at all, said SS Chana, a city resident.

Amritsar: Hall Gate clock in bura haal

It was named after the then deputy commissioner CH Hall. (HT Photo)

Gandhi Gate  or Hall Gate, as it was called before Independence and is still popular as  has a clock that was installed in 1876, but has lying defunct, in the latest, for the past two years.

It was named after the then deputy commissioner CH Hall, and the clock was designed by John Gordon, the then executive engineer in Amritsar. Though the gate is on a route to Walled City and Golden temple, no attention has been paid to keep the clock ticking.

Parveen Sehgal, who runs a newspaper circulation agency in the area, said, I havent seen the clock work in the past couple of years; it hardly does. MC commisioner Sonali Giri said she would gather details.

Faridkot: A pigeon house thats painted every year

The tower was built by Raja Balbir Singh of the then Faridkot royal estate in 1902. (Amit R Joshi/HT Photo)

Victoria Memorial Clock Tower here stands ignored and isolated amidst the chaos of a market. The glory it once commanded is lost, and it gets attention only from pigeons that have made it their home. It doesnt work since the 1970s, say locals.

The tower was built by Raja Balbir Singh of the then Faridkot royal estate in 1902 in memory of Queen Victoria (1819-1901) of England. It was built over a 115 feet high platform. Most of it vanished due to rise in the road level. The tower has four clock faces. The design was inspired from French architecture. The facades are decorated with motifs. The clock installed in the tower was manufactured by Joyce, Whitchurch, Salop, UK and supplied by Anglo-Swiss Watch Company, Calcutta. The clock machine takes its power from falling weights once a week. This is controlled by an oscillating mechanism. The bell installed on the fourth storey bears the name of Taylor Loughboro. It used to gong every hour. Each dial can be illuminated by placing a source of light behind it.

Pramod Kansal, 57, owner of a chemist shop opposite the tower, said it was once known for its technology: It was part of daily life as rarely anybody used to have a watch. The administration paints it during Baba Farid Mela in September every year. Kansal said the clock is defunct since the late 70s. Harpreet Sandhu, 32, said he has never seen the clock functioning and it is merely a landmark for them.

The base of the tower has a room open on all four sides and until 2007 the public relations department kept newspapers and magazines in it. It was a hangout for the residents, but now broken benches and chairs are all it houses.

Lalit Gupta, member of Maharwal Khewaji Trust, which manages the properties of the erstwhile king of Faridkot, said they have given the custody of the tower to the administration. Deputy commissioner MS Jaggi said, It is a private property but we look after it as it is a historical monument. The administration paints and repairs it annually. He added that the administration was trying to find someone who can repair the clock. We have asked a Ludhiana-based dealer to arrange spare parts.

Kapurthala: Cousin of the Big Ben

Like the one at the London tower, the clock here bears a plate saying, Clockmaker to HRH (His Royal Highness) The Prince of Wales. (HT Photo)

It is 115 years old, and a cousin, in essence, of Londons Big Ben. The clock made by Benson London on the clock tower here was got installed by Maharaja Jagatjit Singh in the heart of the then princely state of Kapurthala, and it gongs every hour.

Like the one at the London tower, the clock here bears a plate saying, Clockmaker to HRH (His Royal Highness) The Prince of Wales. It was ordered from London in 1893 by the maharaja and eventually installed in 1901. It is now located on the premises of Government Senior Secondary School (Girls) near the local bus stand, and was repaired most recently by experts from ITC company in May 2015, after it remained non-functional since 2007.

The tower has stairs that take you to the four-face clock that are set in wooden frames. A massive bell is installed inside the tower. A guard appointed by the city administration keeps watch at all hours. Jai Parkash, who has been on the job since 2001, said the clock functions after rolling its key every five days.

An unconfirmed story is that the clock stopped chiming in 1949 when Maharaja Jagatjit died. It remained ignored for decades by the state government and was repaired only after it got heritage status in 2001. It stopped working again in 2007 after which the administration took eight years to repair it.

Bhiwani, Sirsa: Ones that stood once

A clock tower in the heart of Bhiwani was demolished during Emergency by the government of Bansi Lal in Haryana. The structure  built in the 1890s, some say  had a dharamshala (inn) too.

In its place is now a market, most of it owned by the family of Ramnij Das, who owned the tower. Ramnijs forefathers were given the title Rai Bahadur by the British. The place is still called Ghanta Ghar (hour house) Chowk. People attribute the demolition to many reasons. After Bhiwani became a district in 1972, the government started building a hospital in front of the tower. They planned to upgrade it later, for which land was taken, activist Sampoorn Singh told HT. And, before formalities were done, the government initiated demolition. Sources attributed it to political rivalry between Ramnij and Bansi.

Ramnij was jailed in Emergency and, once released, filed a case against it. Then CM Banarsi Das Gupta gave the land back to Ramnij, saying the government did not need it anymore. Ramnij and his family chose to establish a market over rebuilding the tower. It is a busy area. Rebuilding the tower would have meant traffic trouble, said Ramnijs son, Titu, known as Titu Ghanta Ghar Wala.

A similar tale is told by Sirsa residents. Ravinder Puri, co-author of Pracheen aur Adhunik Sirsa (Ancient and Modern Sirsa), said, A rich family constructed a clock tower on the south-west side of Sirsa. But no one could be found who knows when it was built. Some put it close to 1837 when Sirsa was built as such. Local journalist Surender Bhatia said, It stood in the middle of four markets... It is not clear exactly when it was demolished, like other such towers, during the Emergency (1975-77). The idea was to make crossings more spacious.

(By Harshraj Singh, Gaurav Bisht, Aseem Bassi, Harpreet Kaur, Amit R Joshi, Jatinder Mahal, Hardik Anand, Bhaskar Mukherjee and Richa Sharma)
Doctors have discharged my mother though she still needs treatment. Where should I take her? asks Sarabjit Singh, a Rayaa resident, whose mother was admitted to Guru Nanak Dev Hospital a few days back.

This is not an isolated case as many other patients have been discharged abruptly as junior resident doctors and paramedics continued their strike for the third consecutive day in protest against the beating up of their colleagues on Thursday.

Medical superintendent Dr Ram Sarup Sharma said, I am aware of the situation, but there is staff shortage. What else can be done?

The hospital authorities said they had accepted the demands of the doctors, such as introducing pass system for visitors to the hospital. The proposal is to issue a pass to a person wishing to see a patient admitted to the emergency ward, against a refundable security deposit of Rs 100.

After assurance from college principal Dr BS Bal and medical superintendent Dr Ram Sarup at a meeting, the resident doctors were not convinced, saying assurances are seldom fulfilled. The doctors were assured of not to deploy them as emergency medical officer and register for their attendance.

Dr Gagan Deep Shergill of Resident Doctors Association said, The protest will continue till the authorities implement whatever has been assured. They have told us that things will be implemented by Monday. We will wait till then.

Though the services have not been stopped at the hospital, but staff shortage is affecting the functioning. Around 400 paramedics and doctors are sitting on protest. On Friday, protesting doctors took out a candle march and also walked towards the residence of minister Anil Joshi.
It is not the first time the Congress is making its ticket aspirants sign loyalty pledges. But do they help? So far, the party has had no such luck.

The application forms released by the party for 2017 state elections once again come with a loyalty pledge asking ticket aspirants to submit an attested declaration that if not selected for any constituency, they will not contest against the Congress candidate but support the chosen one.

But the same pledge was also part of the 2012 and earlier elections. Still 22 Congress contenders who signed it in 2012 contested as rebels. Many are back in the party for the 2017 round of elections. All they have to do is sign another loyalty pledge!

Read more: Amarinder backs loyalty affidavits, says rebels will be expelled

There was a rebel twist to the tale of highest victory margins of both deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal and his brother-in-law, (revenue minister) Bikram Singh Majithia, in the 2012 polls. Sukhbir pulled a victory against Congress rebel Hansraj Joshan from Jalalabad by more than 50,000 votes and Majithia against another Congress rebel, Sukhjinder Raj Singh Lalli Majithia, by 47,581 votes.

At both places, official Congress candidates Milkit Singh and Shailenderjit Singh Shelly finished third.

Both Joshan and Majithia are back in the Congress fold for the next round as top contenders. Malkit and Shelly, partys youth faces, are out in the woods.

Musical chairs

If you win as a rebel, you stand a greater chance of being rewarded with a ticket in the next election, even if it demands a round of musical chairs! Madan Lal Jalalpur, once loyalist of former Congress minister Jasjit Randhawa, had contested as a rebel and defeated Randhawa in 2007 from Ghanaur. In 2012, Jalalpur again got the Congress ticket, while Randhawa was shifted to Dera Bassi, from where he lost, this time in a triangular contest foisted by another party rebel, Deepinder Dhillon. The latter made a grand entry to the Congress this year and is seen as top contender for the seat. Jalalpur has been promised Ghanaur this time, too.

Similarly, at Pathankot, Ashok Sharma, independent candidate who rebelled against Congress candidate Raman Bhalla is back and so is Naresh Puri, who had rebelled against party nominee Vinay Mahajan from neighbouring Sujanpur. In both places, the Congress lost. Bhalla was second In Pathankot and Puri in Sujanpur. At Kotkapura, Opinder Sharma, who rebelled against Ripjit Brar, is back in the party, while Ripjit is in political wilderness after his elder brother, Jagmeet Brar, turned rebel and was expelled from the Congress this year.

Dont miss | Will not contest as rebel: Cong pledge for ticket seekers for Punjab polls

Rebels who turned winners

While most rebels played spoilsport in 2012, those who won got instant recognition. In Mukerian for instance, the Congress was quick to make truce offer to rebel candidate Rajnish Kumar Babbi who won and pushed the Congress candidate to the third spot.

Since Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi announced to allot more than 35 seats to youth and Punjab Congress president Captain Amarinder Singh endorsed it, many in the party fear the rebel trouble may revisit from the old guard in 2017. Amarinder, in his report card to the party, had blamed rebels as one of the reasons for the 2012 poll drubbing. During the elections, he had openly accused Sukhbir of propping rebels by paying them crores of rupees. In 10 seats, the difference between the winner and the runner-up was less than 1,000 votes. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) won nine of these seats and the Congress one, which shows how rebels can turn the scales. But loyalty pledges may not do the trick for the Congress, not until they come with bonus points for breaking them!

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That pest whitefly is back. At least 4,400 hectares of the 36,000-hectare cotton area in Punjabs border belt of Fazilka is under its invasion. The Centre will remain in touch with the state government to protect the crop in the remaining season.

The next 45 days are critical, so the Union Ministry of Agriculture will keep the fibre crop under its eyes throughout. On Saturday, its three-member expert team led by plant protection adviser SN Sushil gathered the inter-state monitoring committee that includes agriculture officers from Haryana and Rajasthan as well. Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) will give us updates on the crop health, Sushil said.

Read more | Whitefly fear: Cotton area in Punjab, Haryana shrinks 27%

The Union ministry will come to Punjabs rescue if the pest attack intensifies. We are in the cotton belt to review the situation, Sushil said. On the second day of their visit, the experts said Abhohar and Khuhian Sarwar seemed the only affected blocks in Bathinda, Mansa, and Muktsar districts. Whiteflys presence in all these areas is below the alarming level, said one of the three central experts.

PAU vice-chancellor Baldev Singh Dhillon said whiteflys population had declined from last year. Farmers, who last time had to go for multiple sprays of pesticides, havent given the cotton plants even a single dose this year, Dhillon further said.

PAU to develop resistant seeds

Pest-busters are in action. Punjab Agricultural University. Ludhiana, and National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI), Lucknow, are going to sign a deal to develop whitefly-resistant seeds. The formalities are done, said university vice-chancellor Baldev Singh Dhillon, The NBRI has developed whitefly-resistant gene TMa12, which we will add to the new hybrid seeds. The research will take eight to 10 years. We are also testing the pest-resistant hybrid varieties prepared in collaboration with Gujarat Seeds Corporation.

Replug | Whitefly attack: Tranquil Haryana, turbulent Punjab
Nausheen Ali Sardar, who rose to fame with her hit show, Kkusum, has been away from the small screen for the past two years. While her work has often kept her in the news, last week there were reports of her break up with actor Rahil Azam, of Hatim fame, post their three-year relationship. However, Nausheen, who is back on the tube in an ongoing show, wants to focus only on her work.

Read: Kkusums Nausheen Sardar Ali to be back on TV very soon

When asked about the reports, Nausheen refused to divulge anything. She said, I dont want to talk about it. I dont want to cry over spilt milk. I have no space for negativity in my life, and I dont like to brood. I learnt this after losing my father and being on my own for the next two years that no one is worth crying over. This is one life, and you have to make the most of it. It is not worth it to cry or feel hurt over someone. You should simply take away all the negativity from your life and move ahead with a positive approach.

Read: I want to be a father very soon: Ravi Dubey

Reports claimed that Rahil and Nausheen were living together, and it was expected that the couple would tie the knot soon. But apparently, things turned sour and their relationship crumbled. Her family wants her to settle down, and is urging her to go for an arranged marriage.

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Police in Dhaka on Saturday arrested three people, including a university professor, for failing to register information about tenants renting a property who later attacked a cafe in the city, killing 20 people.

Gias Uddin Ahsan, a professor at North South University in Dhaka, his nephew, and the manager of Ahsans apartment were arrested by Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) for failing to comply with rules forcing landlords to register information about their tenants with the police, Mohammad Masudur Rahman, a senior police official told Reuters.

The men will appear in court on Sunday, he said.

Five militants who were killed by police after they stormed the cafe on July 1 had rented the apartment along with another person in a nearby residential area in May and started living there from June, Rahman said.

From here they attacked the cafe. There were other militants also who fled after the attack, he said.

We also found evidence that they kept grenades and other explosives in the apartment. If we had been informed they were living there, then that brutal killing would not have been possible and we could also have arrested the other militants who fled.

Earlier this year, the DMP issued an order to all apartment owners to provide details of their tenants for a database to help police crack down on criminals and militants using rented accommodation as hideouts.

Bangladesh has suffered a series of attacks on liberal bloggers, university teachers and members of religious minorities over the past year. The government says two domestic militant groups trying to replace secular democracy with Islamic sharia rule are responsible for the violence.

Twenty people including 18 foreigners were killed before police stormed the cafe, rescued 13 hostages and shot five of the attackers dead.

Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said on Saturday that investigators had identified the masterminds of the attack and that the remaining perpetrators would soon be arrested.

Some of the assailants had attended prestigious schools or universities and had been reported missing, according to the police. One was the son of a politician.
The State Department cautions travelers not to visit Turkey in the wake of the coup citing an enhanced terror risk as the government attends to the post-coup crisis.

The US State Department issued a warning on Saturday calling on citizens to refrain from travelling to the country in the wake of the failed coup attempt that left at least 265 dead and over 2000 individuals injured.

The State Department says that in the wake of the coup that US citizens are exposed to "increased threats from terrorist groups" and went on to say that "US tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations" that remain uncontained inside of Turkey.

US officials also reiterated that per a Federal Aviation Administration notice to airmen (NOTAM) dated July 15, 2015 all commercial airliners are prohibited from flying to or from Istanbul and Ankara indefinitely.

The State Department also cautions those inside of Turkey to shelter in place and to exercise "heightened vigilance and caution when visiting public areas" and to "stay way form political gatherings and rallies" particularly in light of accusations lobbed by Ankara on Saturday claiming that the United States was behind the failed coup attempt.

In the aftermath of the failed coup attempt, Turkish authorities have arrested 2,745 judges and at least 2,800 military officials and although Ankara says that the situation inside of Turkey is now contained, security forces are more vulnerable than ever to an attack by a foreign terror organization.
Resisting calls for strong measures in the wake of the Bastille Day attack, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned the country against what he called the Trumpisation of the mind, while the police arrested two more people on Sunday.

The estranged wife of the attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was released after 48 hours of questioning, but official sources said a man and a woman linked to him were arrested on Sunday, taking the total of those held to six.

Hundreds of Nice residents, people from the region and tourists continued to mourn at the Promenade des Anglais, at two venues near the site of the truck attack that left 84 dead and many more battling for life in local hospitals, including children.

Valls regretted the increasing calls for escalating the security narrative, and said: "I see, too, in the escalation of the proposals, to climb the temptation to put into question the rule of law. The authority is for me an essential value, but to question the rule of law, would undermine our values and would be the greatest renunciation".

Referring to US presidential candidate Donald Trump's controversial plan to ban the entry of Muslims in his country, Valls said: "The response to the Islamic State cannot be the Trumpisation of minds.

Terrorism, he said, was part of our daily life for a long time", and rejected calls for undermining of the rule of law in the name of fighting terrorism.

Making an emotional statement on Sunday, Nice mayor Philippe Pradal said: Do not be afraidAt this moment ...I can think only of the dead and the wounded, innocent victims of incredible savagery.

Nice, a city open to the Mediterranean and to the world, welcoming in all respects with those who docked there, and accost all those who love and respect; Nice, how will she overcome the outrage?

But Nice, I know, will overcome by continuing to live proudly in the face of life. Because Nice is what it is, a city lighthouse, a place that the whole world is watching, it cannot give success to these barbarians, he added.

Investigators continued to comb through the attacker's mobile phone and other details, while officials in Paris invited people to join the country's reserve forces to deal with the threat of terrorism.

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New British foreign minister Boris Johnson on Saturday vowed to defend the countrys sovereignty of Gibraltar, whose future was thrown into question after Britain voted to leave the European Union.

The people of Gibraltar have repeatedly and overwhelmingly expressed their wish to remain under British sovereignty and we will respect their wishes, Johnson said following a meeting with Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo.

I reassured him (Picardo) of both our steadfast commitment to Gibraltar, and our intention to fully involve Gibraltar in discussions on our future relationship with the EU.

The tiny rocky outcrop on Spains southern tip has long been the subject of an acrimonious sovereignty row between London and Madrid, which wants Gibraltar back after it was ceded to Britain in 1713.

Immediately following Britains vote last month to quit the EU, Spain said the Spanish flag is much closer to the Rock.

Many of the 33,000 inhabitants of the Rock are now worried that it will be at the mercy of Madrid without the protection of the EU, which has had to intervene in the past to ease rows between the two, particularly over the flashpoint border crossing.

Gibraltar is also concerned about its flourishing economy, which depends in large part on its access to the EUs single market.

Johnson pledged that the government will not enter into any process of sovereignty negotiations with which Gibraltar is not content.

We will continue to take whatever action is necessary to safeguard Gibraltar, its people and its economy including maintaining a well-functioning Gibraltar-Spain Border, he said, in a Foreign Office statement.
Pakistani internet star Qandeel Balochs brother publicly confessed on Sunday that he drugged and strangled his sister to death, adding he could not tolerate her bringing dishonour to Baloch people.

I proudly admit to murdering Qandeel and I have earned heaven and honour by providing relief to my parents and family, Waseem Baloch, who was arrested on late Saturday, said at a press conference held by Multan police.

Read: Controversial Pakistani model Qandeel Baloch killed by brother for honour

After the videos with Mufti Abdul Qavi had gone viral on social media, I planned to murder her and was only waiting for the best moment, he said, referring to the social media starlets selfie appearance with a local cleric.

Baloch, believed to be in her twenties and whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, rose to fame for her racy Facebook posts that saw her praised by some for breaking taboos but condemned by conservatives.

Pakistani police officers present Waseem Azeem, the brother of slain model Qandeel Baloch, before the media following his arrest at a police station in Multan, Pakistan, on Sunday. (AP Photo)

She was in Multan to visit her parents as her father had been unwell, and spent Eid with her family, her mother told police.

She was on the ground floor while our parents were asleep on the roof top, Waseem said. It was around 10.45 pm when I gave her a tablet... and then killed her.

I am a drug addict but I was in my senses when I murdered her and I accept it with pride. Now everybody will remember me with honour that I have provided relief to my parents and brothers who were suffering for the last two decades because of her, Waseem added.

Read: Qandeel Baloch: The model who outraged and titillated Pakistan

Hundreds of women are murdered for honour every year in Pakistan. The killers overwhelmingly walk free because of a law that allows the family of the victim to forgive the murderer -- who is often also a relative.

Girls are born only to stay at home and to bring honour to the family by following family traditions but Qandeel had never done that. My friends used to send me videos and pictures on my mobile and everyone in the mobile market was sharing pictures and videos of her with me. Murdering her was better than committing suicide.

Waseem said he had acted alone and was unrepentant. He was presented in a criminal court Sunday, where he said: I do not need a lawyer; I have no regrets for what I have done.

Read: Qandeel Baloch murder: Most controversial things she said and did

Police officials said Waseem had stolen money and other possessions from Qandeel after killing her. According to some reports, Waseem escaped with Qandeels wallet, jewellery and cell phone.

Initial investigations have revealed he had acted alone and fled to DG Khan after the murder, along with two friends, police said.

Pakistani relatives and residents carry the coffin of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch during her funeral in Shah Sadar Din village, around 130km from Multan. (AFP Photo)

Waseem had been threatening her to stop posting photos and videos on Facebook, they said.

But Qandeels father Azeem told media he suspected that his other son, Aslam Shaheen, who is in the army, may have played a role, and alleged that the police was protecting him.

Read: Qandeel Baloch: Another statistic in Pakistans struggle with honour killings

In the First Information Report to police also, Azeem said Aslam Shaheen and Waseem were responsible for their sisters death. He alleged Aslam provoked Waseem to kill Qandeel as she reportedly brought disrepute to the family.

He said his sons killed Qandeel for her money. My daughter was brave and I will not forget or forgive her brutal murder, he said.

Waseem was arrested from DG Khan. Police continue to look for the other men believed to have played a part in the killing.

Read: Indian, Pakistani Twitter users express anger over Qandeel Balochs killing

No marks of torture were found on Qandeels body, said a senior police official. The post-mortem was conducted at Multans Nishtar Hospital.

Some of Balochs more controversial acts included volunteering to perform a striptease for the Pakistani cricket team, and donning a plunging scarlet dress on Valentines Day. She told local media she had received death threats in the wake of the controversy, and that her requests for protection from authorities had been ignored.

Balochs funeral was held early Sunday near her family home in southern Punjab.

With AFP inputs


A Canadian court has dismissed a drunk driving charge against a Sikh man because police officers did not return his turban for over three hours after it accidentally fell off while he was being arrested.

Charges of impaired operation and excess blood alcohol against Sardul Singh were dismissed because Peel Regional Police officers did not return his turban after it fell while he was being placed in a cruiser in Southern Ontario.

Ontario Court Justice Jill Copeland, in a decision released last month, wrote that the failure to return Singhs turban while he was in custody constituted a Charter breach.

Copeland ruled that the breach of the defendants right to freedom of religion by police was a serious one and that Singhs breath sample evidence should be excluded because its admission into evidence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Peel police Chief Jennifer Evans, in a statement on Friday, was quoted as saying by The Canadian Press that she ordered a review of the decision and the officers actions after Singh was detained on December 10, 2014.

Evans said Peel Regional Police have had a directive in place since 2012 regarding the proper search and handling of religious items and a training bulletin has been issued internally to remind officers of this and other directives.

Peel police recognise the proper search and handling of religious items are of great importance in keeping with the freedom of religious rights, Evans was quoted as saying.

I am concerned by the negative impact that this incident and my officers actions have had on members within our community, she said.

We have since reinforced the importance of this directive to ensure that this type of mistake does not occur in the future, she added.

Copeland said in her ruling there was no dispute that the removal of Singhs turban was an accident, but it was not returned to him for more than three hours.

The evidence of the various officers who interacted with Mr Singh about the cause for this delay in returning the turban, and what steps were taken when in relation to the turban, contains numerous inconsistencies, Copeland wrote.

Peel police policy states the only exception to returning a turban is that if a prisoner is suicidal, or if continuous monitoring of the prisoner is not possible, then the turban shall not be returned for security reasons.

Neither of those concerns is at issue in this case, Copeland wrote in her ruling.

I accept Mr. Singhs evidence that he felt ashamed at being without his turban, and that it made him feel vulnerable, she said.
Rather than toppling Turkeys strongman President, a failed military coup that left at least 265 people dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogans immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity.

Tens of thousands marched through the streets in half a dozen Turkish cities late Saturday, waving flags and singing songs in an emotional outpouring of support for the long-time leader as security forces rounded up military personnel it branded coup supporters and launched a purge of judges seen as government opponents.

Prime minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Fridays failed coup will receive every punishment they deserve, and the government said it would take steps toward extraditing a US-based cleric it accused of fomenting the uprising.

Read: Turkeys bungled putsch: A strangely 20th century coup

A relative mourns over the coffin holding body of police officer Nedip Cengiz Eker during a funeral ceremony in Marmaris, Turkey.

Future tense

The government threat of further crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself in its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a tumultuous region swept by conflict and extremism.

The coup attempt began late Friday with tanks rolling into the streets of the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul as Erdogan was enjoying a seaside vacation. Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night.

It quickly became clear, however, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government. In a dramatic iPhone interview broadcast on TV, Erdogan urged his supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

The unrest claimed at least 265 lives, according to a tally compiled from official statements. Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the process of putting down the coup attempt. Turkeys acting chief of the general staff, Gen Umit Dundar said at least 104 coup plotters had died.

Before the weekends chaos, Turkey - a Nato member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group - had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogans increasingly authoritarian rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan wave Turkish national flags and shout slogans as they stand around the Republic Monument in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey. (Reuters)

Cheering on Erdogan

By Saturday afternoon, when tensioned eased, an atmosphere of celebration broke around as Turks answered official calls to rally in the squares to protect Turkish democracy. Thousands gathered in major cities singing and waving Turkish flags while others held prayers in support of Erdogan and chanted God is great.

In Istanbul, crowds gathered at Taksim Square, where a man stood on an iconic monument with a Turkish flag draped on his chest.

Government supporters marched through Ankara as cars honked in apparent approval. Some gathered outside parliament and amid the burnt cars outside the presidential palace. One man took a selfie with a Turkish police officer standing atop an abandoned tank.

We are here for democracy, so the country lasts, retired soldier Nusret Tuzak said at the Ankara gathering.

By late Saturday afternoon, flights had resumed into Istanbuls international airport after being halted for nearly 24 hours. Mostly national carriers were flying into Istanbul, but other airlines preferred to wait another day to test the precarious security situation. Late Saturday, the usually buzzing airport was eerily quiet with some stranded travellers sitting on the floors of the largely empty terminals.

In an usual show of unity, Turkeys four main political parties released a joint declaration during an extraordinary parliamentary meeting Saturday, denouncing the coup attempt and claiming that any moves against the people or parliament will be met with the iron will of the Turkish Grand National Assembly resisting them.

Turkeys Nato allies lined up to condemn the coup attempt. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg urged all sides to support Turkeys democratically elected government.

Supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan shout slogans on the back of a truck during a pro-government demonstration on Taksim square in Istanbul, Turkey.

Read: Turkey Prez tightens grip on power, cracks down on army post coup attempt

Purge begins

Erdogans survival has turned him into a sort of a mythical figure and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

It will allow him (Erdogan) to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we havent seen before and find strong public support within the country, he said.

Government forces arrested 2,839 accused coup supporters, Yildirim said. Dundar, the general, said the plotters were mainly officers from the air force, the military police and armoured units.

Anadolu Agency said the government dismissed 2,745 judges across Turkey. Two constitutional court judges were also detained over their alleged role in the coup attempt, according to a Turkish official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

Officials accused the judges and the coup plotters of being loyal to moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen, a staunch democracy advocate who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, USA, is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey. At a news conference in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

Ankara recently classified his movement as a terrorist organisation. Washington, however, has never found any evidence particularly compelling previously against the cleric.

In a televised speech Saturday, Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen, saying Turkey had never turned back any extradition request for terrorists by the United States. A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey was preparing a formal extradition application.

US secretary of state John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny.

Turkish citizens stand on a damaged Turkish military APC that was attacked by protesters in a street near the Turkish military headquarters in Ankara, Turkey. (AP)

Gulen condemned the coup.

Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force, he said. As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations.

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the Chatham House think tank in London, said the attempted coup appeared to have been carried out by lower-ranking officers.

Their main gripe seems to have been President Erdogans attempt to transform his office into a powerful and centralised executive presidency, Hakura said. In the short term, this failed coup plot will strengthen President Erdogan.

Turkeys military staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pressured prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, a pious mentor of Erdogan, out of power in 1997.

Turkey has allowed American jets to use its Incirlik air base to fly missions against the Islamic State group in neighbouring Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon said US warplanes stopped flying those missions from Incirlik after the Turkish government closed its airspace to military aircraft during the attempted coup. US officials were working with Turkish officials to get permission to resume air operations as soon as possible.

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In May, the Islamic State released a video that was targeted specifically at India even if it was in Arabic. Its English magazine Dabiq too has focused on the country. IS has been known for cultivating a strong online propaganda presence usually marked by graphic videos of its brutality.

Toronto-based researcher Amarnath Amarasingam sees this online mobilisation as part of what makes the conflict in Syria different and unique.

There is posting of real-time information. Interestingly, while having connected to nearly 100 jihadis during the course of his research over an almost 18-month span, Amarasingam hasnt yet established communication with any IS member from India.

One factor behind that missing link could be that the golden age of IS recruits using social media frequently has perhaps passed, said Amarasingam, a fellow with George Washington Universitys Programme on Extremism.

Those from other organisations like Jabhat al-Nusra, an al Qaeda affiliate, are more available. For instance, during the course of his meeting with HT, Amarasingam messaged an Indian-origin Nusra fighter, who responded to his queries.

These extremists piggyback Turkish or Jordanian networks to get online, using a variety of social media platforms. Those particularly popular include the obvious Twitter and Facebook, but also Tumblr, Telegram and Kik.

One Telegram channel Syria through Indian Eyes has close to 550 members.

These interviewees are cagey, often spooked when personal or locational details are sought, Amarasingam said. The first he contacted, who went by the alias of Indian Mujahid, didnt want to talk.

The jihadi behind that handle, believed to be from Kerala, posts across platforms. On Facebook, for instance, he enthused about Indian cuisine: One needs to taste Indian cooking! Ghee rice and Potato sabji with Yogurt!

He also does a promotional spiel to those he can galvanise, and to the nearly 1,650 that like this Facebook page with an image of wall writing: SHAM welcomes muhajireen (Migrants). People portray their love towards us on walls!

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The death toll from Turkeys failed military coup has risen to more than 290, the foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday, adding that more than 1,400 people were wounded.

Of the dead, more than 100 were participants in the coup, the ministry said, adding that there was no doubt the coup had been staged by followers of US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, has denied involvement in the attempt to overthrow the government, condemning it as an affront to democracy.
The United Nations Security Council failed on Saturday to condemn the violence and unrest in Turkey after Egypt objected to a statement that called on all parties to respect the democratically elected government of Turkey, diplomats said.

The US-drafted statement, seen by Reuters, also expressed grave concern over the situation in Turkey, urged the parties to show restraint, avoid any violence or bloodshed, and called for an urgent end to the crisis and return to rule of law.

Read: Turkeys bungled putsch: A strangely 20th century coup

Statements by the 15-member Security council have to be agreed by consensus.

We proposed different language that respects democratic and constitutional principles but the Americans refused to engage, Egypts UN ambassador Amr Aboulatta told Reuters.

Diplomats said Egypt asked for a call for all parties to respect the democratically elected government of Turkey to be removed from the draft statement, saying the council is in no position to qualify, or label that government - or any other government for that matter - as democratically elected or not.

After the United States and Britain objected to the proposed change to the text, Egypt proposed that the council call on the parties in Turkey to respect the democratic and constitutional principles and the rule of law, diplomats said.

Read: Coups and plots in Turkey over the past 50 years

Negotiations on the text ended at this point, diplomats said.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that it was surprised that its proposed amendment was not taken up, and with the claim that it is obstructing the release of the statement.

Turkish forces loyal to President Tayyip Erdogan largely crushed an attempted military coup on Saturday after crowds answered his call to take to the streets in support of the government and dozens of rebels abandoned their tanks.

Read: Europe breathes easy as Turkey coup fails, but Erdogan a worry

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a former general who overthrew elected President Mohamed Mursi, of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, in 2013 after mass protests against Mursi. Turkey provided support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
European leaders greeted the defeat of Turkeys coup on Saturday with relief as it averts chaos and keeps alive a deal that has helped to stem the migration crisis threatening the continent.

But while some hope a reminder of resistance to his personal grip on power may prompt President Tayyip Erdogan to heed European pleas for him to respect civil rights, many fear he is far more likely to step up his crackdown on opponents and so complicate European Union efforts to maintain the bargain.

The coming weeks, starting when EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels on Monday, will be crucial to the fate of a plan at the heart of the migrant deal: To have sceptical EU lawmakers approve after the summer an end to visa requirements for Turks.

Erdogan will be judged on his response, one EU official involved in the plan said, citing arrests of judges as an early sign that justified deep concern that this will lead to a new trampling on rights of freedom of expression and demonstration.

Senior members of the European parliament, where anger at the prickly Turkish leaders treatment of elected opponents could stymie the EU deal to reward Turkey for stopping refugees, were pessimistic about the outlook for Turkish democracy.

Erdogan will try to extend his position of power, foreign affairs committee chair Elmar Brok, an ally of the Turkey deals architect German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Die Welt daily.

French President Francois Hollande expects repression.

If Erdogan responds to public demands to restore the death penalty to execute putschists, or if Turkey moves to jail ethnic Kurdish parliamentarians whom it stripped of immunity in May, EU lawmakers may turn against the migrant deal, EU officials said.

Turkish officials have warned that its collapse could see Ankara allow a resumption of traffic that last year saw a million people, many refugees from Syria and Iraq, cross to Greek islands and trek over open borders to Germany.

That shook Europeans support for the EU and, some argue, fuelled last months devastating British vote to leave the bloc.

Supporters of Tukish President Tayyip Erdogan lift up his portrait as they celebrate with flags in Ankara, Turkey. (Reuters)

Nuanced support

Official statements from the EU stressed backing for a democracy that many acknowledge Erdogan has himself abused.

The EU fully supports the democratically elected government, an early overnight statement read, taking care to add it also backed the institutions of the country and the rule of law - a nuanced distinction from Erdogans personal power.

With the plot seemingly already undone, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini followed up to urge a swift return to Turkeys constitutional order with its checks and balances and ... fundamental freedoms. It seemed hardly a call to defeated soldiers dead or in jail, but rather to the victor.

This is not about supporting Erdogan or not, it is about supporting the rule of law and democracy, a second senior EU official involved in relations with Ankara told Reuters.

EU officials have reminded Turkish counterparts that their past cooperation, in engaging Ankara in a decade of halting reforms to enhance its -- distant -- prospects of joining the bloc, has helped Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted party to curb the historic threat to civilian rule from Turkeys armed forces.

Now, closer ties with the economic bloc are at stake, the second official said, insisting Europe can use that leverage, despite criticism from human rights groups that Merkels deal with Erdogan to hold back migrants put Europe at his mercy.

This is not a blank cheque for Erdogan, he said of backing against the coup. He has to be extremely careful not to overshoot the reaction.

Pro-Erdogan supporters gather at Taksim square in Istanbul to support the government following a failed coup attempt. (AFP)

Erdogan is not Putin

Many EU diplomats argue that Turkey, faced with conflict across its borders in Iraq and Syria that has fuelled internal strife with its Kurdish minority, and at odds with Russia and most West Asia powers, cannot afford to alienate Europeans.

And some dared to voice hope on Saturday that the coup bid might make Erdogan more willing to reach beyond his own voters:

Erdogan is not Putin - he is not that strong. We have to keep him on the democratic path, a third EU official said.

Expressing a hope that Europeans might now warm to Erdogan again as a lesser of two evils, less unappealing than chaos, or army rule, a fourth EU official referred to the presidents call to unarmed supporters to face down the army: If you win by saying democracy is stronger than tanks, he said, then the democratically elected government should act for democracy.

A fifth EU official was, however, pessimistic. It would be nice if Erdogan saw this as a wake-up call to respect civil rights, he said, but a crackdown seemed almost inevitable.

Senior diplomats dismissed suggestions, however, that the EU had hesitated to condemn the plotters in the early hours in the hope of change. However irksome many find Erdogan, they said, statements against the putsch came as quickly as possible.

Clearly Europe would have more reasons to worry if the coup had prevailed, one EU official said.

Cards to play - Turkey benefits

Some fear Erdogan can use his control of the migration route to Europe to ignore calls for restraint in penalising opponents, but others argue that Europe has cards to play against him.

They even play down the importance of Turkish cooperation in the migrant crisis, citing data showing that closing down routes from Greece through the Balkans was at least as big a factor in deterring all but a few from crossing to Europe since March.

Referring to Ankaras hopes of aid for 2.7 million Syrians it is housing, and for visa liberalisation eagerly anticipated by many Turks, a senior European government official said: The deal is in Turkeys interests, so why should they change it?

As big a hurdle could be the European parliament, where some had threatened to block the visa bill if Turkey jails any of dozens of Kurdish lawmakers who were stripped of their immunity from prosecution by a pro-Erdogan majority two months ago.

German leftist Martina Michels said it was Europes failure to stand up to the Turkish president that had destabilised Turkey. Now, she said: An uncritical courting of Erdogan as a partner in the wrong solution to the refugee issue must end.
Interactions between a Canada-based terrorism expert and jihadis fighting in Iraq and Syria have thrown up a hitherto unknown aspect of Indian fighters  many of them gravitate towards an al Qaeda affiliate and not the Islamic State, perceived as global jihads sexy beast.

Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow with George Washington Universitys Programme on Extremism, has contacted close to 100 jihadis in the conflict zone since late 2014.

Of those, he has interviewed nearly 40, and about half a dozen were from India.

Amarasingam found almost all the Indians he interviewed had joined the Jabhat al-Nusra, which is affiliated to al Qaeda and fell out with IS.

IS is the sexy topic for most people who are watching this stuff. And anyone leaving their home country to go to Syria, people just assume theyre going to join IS. But a lot of people are drawn to Nusra because its al Qaeda in Syria, its carrying the torch of Osama bin Laden and carrying the torch of the original movement, Amarasingam told Hindustan Times.

Read | Jihad 2.0: How Islamic State has changed global terrorism

There is also the sense that Nusra offers the purest form of jihad as against IS, which is a bit more theologically corrupted.

According to the latest estimates, nearly 50 Indians have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight with jihadi groups, including 21 cases that recently came to light in Kerala. At least six Indians have reportedly died. Another 25 were arrested while in Syria or on their way to the war-torn country.

There are definitely Indians who have left to go fight with the IS. There are also very likely women and families who have left to go live under the so-called caliphate, Amarasingam said.

But its important to recognise that just as many or around the same number have left to go fight with a variety of different organisations that are active in Syria, such as Jabhat ul-Nusra, Jund al-Aqsa and a lot of these other smaller movements, he pointed out.

There are even those like one Indian who is independent and works with whatever group in the region can utilise his services at a particular juncture.

Watch | Exclusive chat with Amarnath Amarasingam

A top official of the National Investigation Agency said his organisations findings did not reflect those of the Canada-based scholar.

There are indeed many groups in Syria. But our experience has been that most people from India, who have travelled Syria or wanted to, had their eyes set on the IS, not the other groups, said the official, who did not want to be named as he wasnt authorised to brief the media.

C Uday Bhaskar, director of the Society for Policy Studies, a New Delhi-based think tank, said his interactions with experts and members of the Indian Muslim community who had tracked the movement of Indians to Iraq and Syria had revealed a sense of revulsion and unease with the extreme violence associated with IS.

So some of these people who criticise the situation in Kashmir and Palestine and may be thinking of going to Iraq and Syria are also people who dont subscribe to the extreme violence perpetrated by IS. Its like a dampener, Bhaskar said.

Read | Most Islamic State fighters in Afghanistan are from Pakistan: Official

Amarasingams work offers a crucial insight into the minds and motives of the jihadis in Iraq and Syria at a time when a growing number of Indian families are grappling with the radicalisation of their sons and daughters and their decision to leave home to travel to the Middle East. He is also part of the Canadian Network for Research into Terrorism, Security and Society (TSAS).

He said, I do get the sense that more of them (Indians) are with Nusra than IS, Im not sure why. I think a lot of this has to do with the networks they were involved with leaving SyriaSome of them were early enough that they did kind of spend some time with IS and then leave.

I do get the sense a lot of them are drawn to the Nusra brand because they feel like Nusra is addressing the needs of the Syrians more than IS, which is killing Sunni Muslims, is after something very different. They feel like Nusra, to some extent, maintains grassroots support with Syrians.

The Indians Amarasingham has communicated with are well-educated, having been to college, and all are young males in the 23-28 age bracket. A lot of the guys are involved in daily fighting. They are on sentry duty, manning the frontlines. At that time, they talk a lot more.

The Indians in Syria appear to be influenced by the Afghan and Chechen jihads, and by preachers like Anwar al-Awlaki. These are often not lone wolves who make their way to Syria, not individuals leaving randomly, but usually part of a like-minded group making the journey together or friendship clusters.

While the ISs caliphate tries to attract women and families to showcase it as a land of abundance, that isnt the case with Nusra. Its young men are a lot more honest about the struggle of everyday life, scarcity of food, of water. This is seen through the prism of sacrifice, Amarasingam said.

Also part of the sacrifice is leaving parents and families behind in India. They always miss home but they downplay it and missing home is part of the sacrifice. If it was easy, it wouldnt be meaningful, Amarasingam explained.

Indians are not a whole lot different from others drawn to the conflict out of religious conviction.

What is unique in a weird way is they maintain a kind of Indianness. Others are Muslims first. Indians offer their unique experience, he said.

Amarasingham hasnt heard of any of them seeking to return to India, as a lot of them are there for martyrdom. They also see Syria as the place that offers the most rewards in the afterlife.

Syria is a draw because its seen as the greatest jihad, as a place where the most afterlife rewards are. Its the biggest and most urgent fight they can be involved in, is Amarasingams analysis.

Some experts have taken comfort in the fact that Indian security agencies have registered less than 100 cases of jihadis either travelling to Iraq and Syria or being detained on their way to the conflict zone even though the country has a Muslim population of about 180 million.

But Bhaskar said such figures shouldnt be a reason for complacency. IS or al Qaeda are global brand names and people are gravitating towards their affiliates but we shouldnt be waiting for the lights to turn red only when we find out that thousands of Indians have joined these groups, he said.

Our numbers may be limited now but a group like IS has shown even 100 fighters can carry out attacks of a virulently sadistic nature.

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Russia's President Vladimir Putin called President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the phone on Sunday, expressing condolences for the victims of failed coup attempt and wishing restoration of order and stability in Turkey, Daily Sabah reported.



Putin described the attempted coup as unacceptable and voiced his hope for a speedy return to stability, the Kremlin said in a statement.

Putin stressed the "categorical unacceptability in the life of a state of anti-constitutional acts and violence."

Following strained relations between two countries over the jet downing incident on November 2015, Turkey and Russia showed signs of reconciliation in recent weeks.
Israel on Sunday fired missiles towards an unmanned drone that entered Israeli-controlled airspace from Syria and it turned back, the military said in a statement.

Two Patriot air defence missiles were fired towards a drone which infiltrated Israeli airspace in the central Golan Heights. The drone returned to Syria, the Israeli army said.

A military spokesperson said there were no known casualties.

Israel has often responded to errant mortar fire from the civil war in neighbouring Syria on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights with tank and mortar shells and with air strikes, but the use of Patriot anti-aircraft interceptor missiles is unusual.

A Syrian rebel source in the area said the Syrian army had launched a rare air raid on al-Shajara village along the Jordanian border. The village, which is also close to the Israeli frontier, is held by the Shuhada al-Yarmouk group, who are thought to be Islamic State affiliates.

Though formally neutral on the civil war, Israel has frequently pledged to prevent shipments of advanced weaponry to Lebanons Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, whose fighters have been allied with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Two months ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel had launched dozens of strikes in Syria.

The Golan Heights is a strategic plateau that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East, and annexed in a move that has not won international recognition.
Malaysia Airlines has struck a deal to settle damages claims for most victims of its MH17 flight that was shot down over eastern Ukraine two years ago on Sunday, Dutch national broadcaster NOS reported.

NOS cited Veeru Mewa, a lawyer representing Dutch victims. Under the Montreal Convention, airlines must pay damages of up to about 130,000 euros ($145,000) to victims families, regardless of the circumstances of a crash.

MH17 was shot down over territory held by pro-Russia separatists, killing all 298 passengers and crew. Most of the passengers were Dutch.
The Nice truck attacker staked out Nices seafront for two days before striking, it emerged on Sunday as investigators pieced together details of the Islamic State-claimed massacre and questioned possible accomplices.

A source close to the investigation said that Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian, sent a text message just before the attack in which he expresses satisfaction at having obtained a 7.65mm pistol and discusses the supply of other weapons.

He also took a selfie at the wheel of the 19-tonne truck in the days before he ploughed it into a crowd of people who had been enjoying a fireworks display on Bastille Day, Frances national day. Eighty four people died that night and about 300 more were injured.

Read | Two new arrests in Nice truck attack as Islamic States claim studied

Mangled bodies were left strewn across the riviera citys seafront in the grisly attack by a man described by those who knew him as a loner with a history of violence and depression.

While some relatives and friends described the delivery driver as someone who drank heavily and never attended the local mosque, others questioned by investigators spoke of a recent shift to radical Islam, said a police source.

But there has been no evidence yet linking him to the Islamic State (IS) group, which on Saturday claimed the attack.

An Albanian suspected of providing the driver with the pistol was arrested in Nice on Sunday. Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had fired at police who sprayed his rampaging truck with gunfire, eventually killing him.

Two replica assault rifles and a dummy grenade were also found in the truck, which he rented a few days earlier and used for reconnaissance on two consecutive days.

One of five other people being held over the carnage is a 22-year-old suspected of lending logistical support, said his lawyer Jean-Pascal Padovani.

The lawyer said the pair had only known each other for a few months.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlels estranged wife, the mother of his three children, was released Sunday after two days of questioning.

Slow identification of victims

In Nice, many people were still desperately waiting for news of their loved ones.

Prosecutors said only 35 victims have been officially identified as they take painstaking measures to avoid errors of identification seen during the Paris attacks last November.

We have no news, neither good nor bad, said Johanna, a Lithuanian who was looking for her two friends, aged 20.

Read | Nice truck attack: Timeline of terror in France since Charlie Hebdo shootings

At least 10 children were among the dead as well as tourists from the United States, Ukraine, Switzerland, Germany and about 10 people from Russia, a local Russian association said.

Health minister Marisol Touraine said 85 people were still hospitalised, 18 of them in critical condition.

Radicalised very quickly

Despite several brushes with the law for petty crime, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had never appeared on the radar of intelligence services.

Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve on Saturday said that the attacker seemed to have been radicalised very quickly, from what his friends and family told police.

Read | A petty criminal radicalised quickly? The portrait of Nice attacker Bouhlel

People who went to the same gym as Lahouaiej-Bouhlel  where he took salsa dancing classes and lifted weights  described him as a vain man who flirted with anything that moved.

IS said one of its soldiers carried out the attack in response to its calls to target countries from the US-led coalition engaged in airstrikes against the group.

Cazeneuve described the massacre as a a new kind of attack.

We are now confronted with individuals open to IS message to engage in extremely violent actions without necessarily having been trained or having the weapons to carry out a mass (casualty) attack, he said.
President Barack Obama condemned as cowardly a shooting that killed three police officers and wounded three more in the Louisiana capital of Baton Rouge on Sunday.

For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault, Obama said in a statement.

These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law and on civilized society, and they have to stop.

A separate shooting in Dallas, Texas earlier this month killed five police officers during a demonstration triggered by the fatal police shooting of two African American men whose dying moments were captured in shocking video footage that went viral online.

Obama said he had offered his full support and that of the federal government to authorities in Baton Rouge and to Louisiana state as a whole.

And make no mistake -- justice will be done, the President added.

We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes.

Obama stressed that the police officers in Baton Rouge, like those in Dallas before them, were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now -- all of us -- to be at our best.

The first African American president of the United States, Obama has made repeated calls for racial unity.

During a memorial for the slain policemen, he insisted that we are not as divided as we seem.
The UK Brexit minister, in charge of negotiating the divorce of Britain with the European Union, on Sunday exposed the uncertainties unleashed after the June 23 vote, saying that most EU citizens will be able to stay in Britain when it leaves the bloc, but some might have to leave.

Brexit secretary David Davis dismissed suggestions that the estimated 3 million EU nationals now living in Britain might be forced to leave, telling Sky News that I want to see a generous settlement for the people here already. They didnt seek this circumstance  we did.

But he said if a surge of new immigrants trying to beat the deadline floods into Britain before it leaves the EU, the Conservative government may have to set a cutoff date.

We may have to say that the right to indefinite leave to remain protection only applies before a certain date, Davis said in a separate interview with the Mail on Sunday newspaper. You have to make those judgments on reality, not speculation.

A desire to reduce immigration from other EU nations was a key reason many Britons voted last month to leave the EU. Under the blocs rules, EU nationals can move feely among member states, and Britain has seen its population swelled by hundreds of thousands of new arrivals in recent years.

Prime Minister Theresa May has been criticized for refusing to guarantee the right of EU citizens to remain in the UK after its EU exit  something that is more than two years away. She says she needs to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Britons living in other EU countries get the same protection.

Britains vote to leave the EU has unleashed political and economic turmoil, as people and markets absorb the uncertainties about the countrys economic future as it leaves the 28-nation single market of 500 million people.

Davis said he believes Britain will be able to retain access to the single market while opting out of the EUs right to free movement. EU leaders say thats impossible because free movement is a key EU principle, but Davis said everybody is taking starting positions.

Of course they are talking tough, he said. If I was negotiating to buy your house or your car my first offer wouldnt be my final one, would it?

The referendum has also put the future of the UK itself in question, with the pro-independence Scottish administration suggesting it could seek a new independence referendum if Britain takes Scotland out of the EU against its will. Scottish voters strongly backed remaining in the EU in the June 23 referendum.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said on Sunday she did not rule out Scotland staying both in the UK and in the EU even if the rest of the country leaves the bloc  though its not clear how that could happen.

Were in uncharted territory, and when you are in uncharted territory with effectively a blank sheet of paper in front of you, then you have the opportunity to try to think things that might have previously been unthinkable, Sturgeon told the BBC.

Meanwhile, the government is seeking to reassure Britons that the UK can build strong and profitable trade ties outside the EU. May said she spoke with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who expressed a desire for a free trade deal with Britain as soon as possible.

It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal, May said  although Britain cant make any new trade arrangements until it actually leaves the EU.
The Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency says authorities have rounded up over 100 more judges and prosecutors and 60 more military officers for their alleged roles in the failed coup.

The reports Sunday followed an intensive crackdown against the judiciary and the military in the wake of the botched coup Friday night against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Officials say about 3,000 soldiers, including officers, are already in detention. Almost a similar number of judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

Still, the coup appears to have boosted Erdogans popularity. Clapping, singing and dancing, thousands of government supporters celebrated the defeat of the coup in public squares in Ankara and Istanbul into the wee hours Sunday, bolstering support for the man whos led Turkey for over 13 years.
ADEN: Yemens al-Qaeda wing has claimed responsibility for a bomb attack that targeted the governor of the southern city of Aden, according to US monitoring group SITE. Security officials said on Friday that a car packed with explosives blew up when the convoy of governor, Aidaroos al-Zubaidi, passed by in the Inma area of Aden. One soldier was wounded in the attack but Zubaidi was unhurt. SITE said both Zubaidi and Aden police chief, Shallal Shayei, were in the vehicle.

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DHAKA: Bangladesh on Saturday said it has identified the masterminds of the deadly Dhaka cafe terror attack that killed 20 foreigners, including an Indian, and a second assault just days later. The government has identified the masterminds of the two attacks, they will be exposed to justice, Home minister Asaduzzaman Khan told a media briefing but declined to elaborate in the interest of investigations. Islamist militants launched a sudden attack on a posh restaurant in Dhakas upmarket Gulshan diplomatic zone on July 1 killing 22 people, including 19-year-old Indian girl Tarishi Jain among 20 foreigners and two police officers while six suspected militants were gunned down in the commando operation next morning. Security officials later said they confirmed the identities of five of the six suspected slain Islamists. Six days after the Gulshan cafe attack, militants tried to carry out an assault on the countrys biggest Eid congregation in Sholakia.

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PANAMA CITY: Panamas imprisoned former dictator Manuel Noriega will undergo surgery next week for a benign brain tumour, his doctor said on Friday. Physician Eduardo Reyes told AFP the surgery is set for July 21 at the Santo Tomas hospital in Panama City. He will be admitted prior to the operation on July 18 for medical testing. The ex-generals relatives renewed calls to move the 82-year-old to house arrest for health reasons, requests that have been turned down several times. Reyes said the tumour was originally diagnosed in France and has grown in Panama in recent years in a worrisome way.

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SEOUL: North Korea on Friday presented to media a man it alleges is a South Korean spy who tried to enter the North to kidnap children. During a Pyongyang news conference, detainee Ko Hyon Chol said he apologised for a crime he called unforgivable. Ko, 53, said he was born in North Korea but fled the country in early 2013 to resettle in the South. He said he was later recruited by South Koreas spy service for a mission to abduct children from the North.

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The commander of the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey that is used by the U.S. and other coalition partners has been detained for complicity in the attempted coup, a government official said on Sunday, Reuters reported.

General Bekir Ercan Van was detained, the official said. Incirlik is used by the United States and other coalition partners in the fight against Islamic State militants in Syria.
NICE: Pain and grief was pervasive across the sylvan Promenade des Anglais as French authorities completed a cleaning operation after the Bastille Day truck attack that left 84 people dead, with many more battling for life in local hospitals.

Tourists and residents flocked to two venues near the scene of Thursdays massacre, which became the focus of collective pain and grief. A French flag was placed amid a sea of bouquets, candles and moving messages placed by the young and the old.

Felix, a student from Boston, said he had decided not to cut short his holiday: They cant stop us from having the kind of life we are used to. We will complete our stay to respond to the errorists.

Some like Jean from the village of Gattieres stood alone, watching people pay their respects in silence. Six children from her village, 25 km from Nice, died when a Tunisian-orgin man drove a 19-tonne truck nearly two kilometres through revellers. The location of the tragedy was cordoned off but was due to be reopened on Saturday. Tourists in the rest of the promenade resumed sun bathing and water sports, while there were fewer people at the Nice Cote dAzur international airports departure terminal, unlike on Friday morning, when holiday-makers left in droves.

Amid mournful silence on the promenade, authorities warned against rumours that spread on social media about hostages and another attack in Cannes. One post, strongly denied by officials, showed an image of smoke around the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

An official website said: Be responsible! Share only official and reliable information: Avoid spreading rumours! The spreading of false information can threaten the smooth deployment of rescue teams and put you and your relatives at additional risk.

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WASHINGTON: Introducing running mate Mike Pence on Saturday Donald Trump called him a solid, solid person and explained the pick as a move to bring about party unity.

So many people have said party unity , because Im an outsider, Trump said .I dont want to be an outsider.

Trump had announced Pence, who is governor of Indiana, his running mate in a tweet on Friday. Slamming his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Trump said ,What a difference between crooked Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence, Trump said .He s a solid, solid person.

Saying he accepts the offer to run as Trumps vice-president pick, Pence describes himself a basic guy who is Christian, conservative and Republican, in that order . Pen ce has shaped his politics around his faith.

He is anti same-sex marriage, opposes abortion and has said he will defund Planned Parenthood, a government-funded healthcare programme for women that also provides abortion services.
ISTANBUL: It started off as a casual dinner party for friends on Friday night but ended in horror as an Indian family waited for the first rays of sunlight to end their nightmare of being trapped in an Istanbul under fire.

When a dissident faction in Turkeys military attempted to seize power from President Recep Tayip Erdogan with tanks and air support and shut down state broadcasters, the government limited internet access for social media sites as part of its measures to assert control, making it difficult for people to know what was happening.

But for Geeta, a 34-year-old woman from New Delhi, who did not want to use her real name, the information black-out made matters worse.

It was the worst nightmare and we were waiting for the first trickle of light so that things could get back to normal, Geeta told Hindustan Times.

Our lights were all switched off and we were speaking in whispers, lest anyone hear us because we could feel the military presence outside, the mother of a three-year-old said.

Geeta and her husband are part of the 250-odd Indians in Turkey, mostly professionals and their families living and working in Istanbul and Ankara.

Military jets flew very low, triggering sonic booms that added to the fear.

As a mother, you feel so hopeless. I started thinking about the women in Afghanistan and what they must be going through.

Geeta said a WhatsApp group of about 70 women helped her get through the night. Its made up of very determined women who love Turkey and who said no matter what, we will move on.
WASHINGTON : The United States probed links between the government of Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 attacks, finding multiple suspicions but no proven ties, documents declassified Friday showed.

Part of a Congressional report that had been kept under wraps for more than a decade showed US intelligence believed that Saudi officials may have had multiple contacts with some of the 9/11 hijackers.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. The findings however show no smoking gun for Saudi involvement, but rather an inability to identify definitively Saudi links to attacks on US soil and global terror.

While in the United States, some of the 9/11 hijackers were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who maybe connected to the Saudi government, the declassified document said.

One individual on the US East Coast, believed to be from the Saudi interior ministry, raised suspicions when appearing to fake a seizure during FBI questioning about his links to a hijacker.
He weathered anti-government protests that lasted for months in 2013. He escaped the flames that engulfed some of his ministers in a corruption investigation nearly three years ago.

And now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has survived a military coup  a boast many of his predecessors ousted in previous army takeovers cannot share. No one in Turkey predicted what happened on Friday night when soldiers took control of Istanbuls two main bridges across the Bosphorus and flew F-16 fighter jets low in Ankara.

Read | Turkey coup attempt: A night of fear for Bengali film crew in Istanbul

What prompted the coup?

In recent years, critics, foreign governments and Turkish citizens have expressed concerns about a steady decline into authoritarianism under Erdogan. Although he won much praise in the first few years after becoming prime minister in 2003, since becoming Turkeys first directly-elected president in August 2014 Erdogan has been accused of dictatorial ambitions.

Erdogan wants to change Turkeys constitution, which was installed in 1980 following the last military coup, to adopt an US-style presidential system which would give him greater power. According to Aykan Erdemir, senior fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, the coup was a result of many factors including the militarys fear of the new system. He explained that the reasons for the coup included one of the latest developments( that) has been the bill re designing the high courts as well as Erdogans refusal to be impartial.

Read | Turkey President tightens grip on power, cracks down on army post coup attempt

Why did the coup fail?

For Sinan Ulgen, director of the Edam think tank and visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, this was not a coup by the full army as in previous cases, but undertaken by a clique who themselves held the top general hostage.

This time the country put on more of as how of solidarity, with even the three opposition parties in parliament swiftly condemning the attempted putsch.

A Turkish army armed vehicle drives in Istanbul. (AFP Photo)

Crackdown

Erdogan will sense the failed coup has created opportunities to tighten his control over Turkey but faces a critical choice. He will come out of this stronger, Ulgen said, butthe question is whether he is willing to use that to drive towards a more consensual politics.

Read | Turkeys bungled putsch: A strangely 20th century coup
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Turkey will reopen its Incirlik air base to US planes, used to attack Islamic State, following an attempted coup, the Pentagon said on Sunday.

"After close coordination with our Turkish allies, they have reopened their airspace to military aircraft. As a result, counter-ISIL coalition air operations at all air bases in Turkey have resumed," a Pentagon statement said, Reuters reported.

Turkey, a major US ally, has allowed the United States to use the air base in Incirlik to launch attacks against the militant group. Those air operations were temporarily halted following the coup attempt on Friday.

Secretary of State John Kerry said on CNN's "State of the Union" that he had spoken with Turkey's foreign minister three times on Saturday.

"They assure me that there will be no interruption of our counter-ISIL efforts," Kerry said, using an acronym to refer to the Islamic State.

Kerry said that the difficulty for U.S. planes accessing Incirlik may have been a result of planes flown in support of the coup using the air base to refuel.

On NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Kerry was asked if Turkey's president Tayyip Erdogan would use the coup attempt to seize more power.

Kerry said such a move by Erdogan would be a challenge to his relationship with Europe, with NATO and others.

"We have urged them not to reach out so far that they are creating doubts about their commitment to the democratic process," he said.

Erdogan has blamed his rival, Fethullah Gulen, for masterminding the coup attempt. Gulen, who is currently living in Pennsylvania, has denied any involvement.

Kerry said he had no evidence at this time that Gulen was behind the plot to seize power from Erdogan, but he urged Turkish authorities to compile evidence as rapidly as possible so the United States can evaluate whether Erdogan should be extradited to Turkey.
Limericks Rusangano Family hit the stage running, for their Sunday afternoon set at Longitude. It was like they were headlining the whole shebang.

MuRli, God Knows and mynameisjOhn whipped the tent into a frenzy with a set that was heavy on tracks from their excellent debut Let The Dead Bury The Dead.The level of lyrical and literal gymnastics on display was a bit gobsmacking and by mid-set God Knows had given up on the stage, vaulted the barrier and was delivering his rhymes from the middle of the crowd. Having solidifyied their reputation as one of the islands most exciting live acts, Rusangoano Family will be moving up the bill at future festivals and fast.

Next up was Rationale at the Whelan's Stage, the London-based producers brand of silky soul funk a perfect accompaniment to those seeking shelter from the blazing sun. It has to be said that the man has an incredible voice, and the crowd were quickly won over and grooving along to the excellent backing band.
Bono, Bruce Springsteen & Thom Yorke were among the 78-year-old's most ardent fans

Team Hot Press is saddened to learn of the death of Alan Vega, one half of the legendary New York punk electronic outfit, Suicide.

The news that the 78-year-old had passed away was broken by friend and admirer Henry Rollins on his website.

The family statement he posted reads as follows: With profound sadness and a stillness that only news like this can bring, we regret to inform you that the great artist and creative force, Alan Vega has passed away. Alan passed peacefully in his sleep last night, July 16. He was 78 years of age.

Alan was not only relentlessly creative, writing music and painting until the end, he was also startlingly unique. Along with Martin Rev, in the early 1970s, they formed the two person avant band known as Suicide. Almost immediately, their incredible and unclassifiable music went against every possible grain. Their confrontational live performances, light-years before Punk Rock, are the stuff of legend. Their first, self-titled album is one of the single most challenging and noteworthy achievements in American music.

Alan Vega was the quintessential artist on every imaginable level. His entire life was devoted to outputting what his vision commanded of him.

One of the greatest aspects of Alan Vega was his unflinching adherence to the demands of his art. He only did what he wanted. Simply put, he lived to create. After decades of constant output, the world seemed to catch up with Alan and he was acknowledged as the groundbreaking creative individual he had been from the very start.

Alans life is a lesson of what it is to truly live for art. The work, the incredible amount of time required, the courage to keep seeing it and the strength to bring it forththis was Alan Vega.

Alan is survived by his amazing family, wife Liz and son Dante. His incredible body of work, spanning five decades, will be with us forever.

Using synths and primitive drum machines, Vega and partner Martin Rev more than held their own playing with the likes of Iggy Pop, The New York Dolls and the Clash, and have been cited as a key influence by everyone from U2 and Radiohead to Bruce Springsteen and Daft Punk.

Thank you Alan Vega for all your passion, energy and rebellion! RIP Ghost Rider, say Irish band Altered Hours while Luke Haines of The Auteurs describes him rather wonderfully as an art attack Gene Vincent from space crooning dystopia over a $5 Walmart keyboard  what an idea, what a genius.

Adds filmmaker Paul Duane: Suicide were one of the greatest and most influential bands of all time. And they were a RIOT live.

We suggest you get your hands on their self-titled 1977 debut album, which remains as abrasively potent as the day it was released.
An intoxicated woman from Houston was involved in an accident Saturday night south of Evening Shade, the Missouri State Highway Patrol said.

Cpl. Terry Nelson said Sharon L. Decker, 59, was driving a northbound 1990 Chevrolet truck that failed to negotiate a curve, travelled off the roadway and struck a tree.

Decker, who was not wearing a seat belt, was treated and released at the scene, which was at Slabtown and Long Hollow roads about three miles south of Evening Shade, said Nelson.

The vehicle had moderate damage.

Decker was charged with DWI, careless and imprudent driving, driving while suspended and wearing no seat belt, the patrol said.
The Turkish General Staff issued a statement Sunday praising the efforts of the public, who it said played the biggest role in thwarting Friday nights attempted coup, Anadolu reported.

"Right after the coup attempt started, our obliged nation took to the streets after having heard of this attempt, in an effort to protect the true members of the Turkish Armed Forces and to prevent a blow to our democratic legal system, eventually giving these traitors the biggest and best lesson, the statement said.

Thus, the biggest role in thwarting this treacherous attempt belongs to our noble nation, it added.

The General Staff also praised the efforts of the heroes of the Turkish Armed Forces and police forces, who it said gave a prompt and resolute response to the coup attempt of terrorist traitors embedded within the Turkish army who belonged to an illegal organization.

The coup plotters, who are members of an illegal structure, have been neutralized as of now and will receive the heaviest punishment permitted by law, it concluded.

The attempted takeover is said to have been organized by followers of US-based Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the government through supporters within the Turkish state, particularly the military, police, and judiciary, forming the so-called parallel state.

Friday night saw military elements make a vile attempt to overthrow Turkeys elected government, according to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Around 160 people were martyred in the ensuing violence.

Some 2,839 military personnel involved in the coup attempt have been arrested, and 20 pro-coup soldiers, including some senior officers, were killed in the attempt to overthrow the government.

Turkey accuses Gulen of being behind the coup and called for him to return to Turkey to face trial.
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Twenty years ago when I started in recruiting, I was quickly educated on the math and science of recruiting. Although we are largely dealing with people who are unique individuals, when you step back and look at things from a macro  level, statistics and metrics certainly apply. Overtime, you gain a better understanding of how many people you need to call to result in a phone interview, how many submittals you need to result in an interview, and how many interviews need to take place to ultimately result in a hire. Now, there are a number of factors that influence these metrics: factors related to the skill of the recruiter, attractiveness of the job, company brand, market conditions, compensation package, and candidate circumstances, etc., but no factor tends to negatively impact your ultimate probability of success as much as a RELOCATION. The math was clear very early on  introduce relocation to the set of variable and reduce your probability of success by at least 50%. Lets face it. We as people are afraid of change and avoid things that make us uncomfortable. So, when contemplating both a change in jobs and a change in location, it is often much easier to just say not interested. It can be the right job, with the right company at the right time in their career, but if the location isnt right... forget about it! That being said, many of our clients face tal...
A Toronto man has been arrested and charged for allegedly selling fake Tragically Hip tickets for the band's Toronto show coming August 12.

A woman bought a set of tickets from a seller on Kijiji, but became suspicious when tickets for the same seat and section remained online, according to Durham Regional Police.

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She contacted the seller using a different name, and a photo of tickets, again showing the same information as the ones she had just purchased, so she got the police involved.

Officers went along to a meeting with the seller, 27-year-old Coleman Ward of Toronto, who attempted to flee upon arrival, the statement said.

After a struggle, police arrested Ward and charged him with escaping custody, resisting arrest, fraud under $5,000, and possession of proceeds of crime.

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The Tragically Hip perform in London, England in 2013.

The Canadian band's Man Machine Poem tour is said to be their last, after frontman Gord Downie announced his terminal brain cancer diagnosis in May.

With fans eager to score a ticket to the band's final shows, scalping has been a major issue.

Tickets sold out the morning they went on sale, and were soon posted on resale websites, such as StubHub, for between $310 and $3,653.

Meanwhile, the original prices were only $116 to $166.

The Hip will be broadcasting their Aug. 20 show in their hometown Kingston, Ont. live on CBC.

With files from Jesse Ferreras.

Also on HuffPost
Neil Hall / Reuters

Despite much evidence to the contrary, there's a well embedded narrative that the influence of newspapers is waning. Newspaper sales are declining and people first hear about world events on social media - and so you'd therefore expect users to have access a much wider range of commentary and perspectives than those of the establishment. Whether we like it or not, though, newspapers still set the agenda. Sure, your favourite left-wing website might earn thousands of shares/likes refuting allegations made in mainstream broadcast media (which can be a worthy cause) but those allegations still permeate in people's minds.

Why is this particularly relevant? Because it's important not to lose sight of why there was a coup against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the first place.

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As The Huffington Post reported, The Media Coalition found that "the press set out to systematically undermine Jeremy Corbyn ... with a barrage of overwhelmingly negative coverage". Let's not beat around the bush: the MPs that orchestrated the Labour coup are the same ones that have been regurgitating these smears on social media and broadcast media for months now.

The official coup to oust Corbyn effectively began after the EU referendum, even though the grounds for dismissal look a bit shaky on reflection. Even his own former shadow cabinet ministers, such as Chris Bryant, said he believed Corbyn to have voted Leave. The fact that Corbyn gave numerous speeches for Remain around the country, wore 'Remain' badges, urged people to vote Remain in front of a big massive banner saying 'Vote Remain', and tweeted that he'd voted Remain suggests he voted to Remain.

How passionately Corbyn campaigned for EU membership is up for debate, yes, but the statistics show that two thirds of Labour voters ultimately went with Corbyn. Based on empirical evidence, the referendum was not a reason for Corbyn to step down. Indeed, our new Prime Minister Theresa May campaigned less regularly and with arguably less enthusiasm, and yet her honest reservations about the EU are by contrast seen as evidence of sensible leadership.

Corbyn, quite rightly, has not allowed himself to get worn down by the constant attacks, but I know people who voted for him that have been. They point to his lack of charisma, lack of fire at PMQs and stuttering speeches. They forget that they knew all this a year ago and why they voted for him regardless: his vision, his policies and his ideas. Without the support of his MPs and supporters, Corbyn's anti-austerity policies were always going to be lost in the fog caused by the media onslaught.

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It's why I'd urge anybody on the left that thinks the post-Brexit coup was a good idea to get real. Even ignoring the absolutely disgraceful manner in which the Conservatives behaved in the aftermath of (and indeed during) the EU referendum, there was a massive open goal for Labour to hammer home the Prime Minister's failures. He's leaving a country that is among the most unequal in Europe and where food bank use is at a record high. It's Labour's job to point out these failures - that's literally what the party is supposed to be for.

Instead, the PLP's hatred of their leader supersedes everything else. Rather than attempting to come to terms with why so many people registered to vote for an anti-austerity candidate only a year ago, they're determined to revert back to safe centrism and candidates that are willing to betray their own principles, as is the case with Owen Smith, or candidates whose principles are so vague they're barely discernible, as with Angela Eagle.

The message from the right of the party is, as ever, that Labour are never going to win back middle class voters under Corbyn and so won't have the numbers to win an election. The irony of that is that the working classes that they have historically represented are disappearing under their feet. The process began in Scotland long ago, but in England the only real alternative is worryingly UKIP. Instead of fighting the right's anti-immigration message, expect 'New' Labour to continue patronising working class people rather than fighting the real enemy (see my last blog).
A painting with the colors of the French flag covers the asphalt near a makeshift memorial to honor the victims, three days after a truck mowed through revelers, on the famed Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France, Sunday, July 17, 2016. French authorities detained two more people Sunday in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people, as authorities try to determine whether the slain attacker was a committed religious extremist or just a very angry man. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Recent terror in Europe and U.S. has been ever more frequently committed by those who appear to have little motivation or connection to the "cause." Rather, motivation, as much as any, may be a sense that the perpetrator's life has been less than... Failures in personal relationships, social marginalization or serial run-ins with the law due to drug trafficking, pimping or violence are reflected in the CV of many if not most terror suspects. The Orlando attacker may have been a self-loathing gay man while the Nice killer had a combative divorce along with a long record of non-ideologically linked petty crimes. The subsequent terror may have been an effort to camouflage personal failures or doubts regarding identity and rationalize all in one final act that would overwhelm all the previous contradictions and perceived shortcomings whether in profession, family or righteousness. A BBC presenter perhaps instinctively labelled them as "Loser Terrorists."

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Failures Recruited as Soldiers to the "Cause," after the Act

Subsequent to the fact, ISIS has claimed these terrorists as "soldiers" for the cause. However, this may be a highly convenient alignment of interests that has little to do with the stated goals of the so-called "Islamic State." ISIS offers not so much perceived salvation and over-emphasized heavenly rewards but rather a fresh identity to overwhelm the previous "loser" label and/or to camouflage doubts about self. Indeed, the "loser" label would readily fit many of ISIS's soldiers on the ground who have migrated to Iraq and Syria in a perverse pilgrimage to reverse a lifetime of a petty life. ISIS understands this appeal and views non-religious recruits as more desirable, in the least because they do not have to discuss, debate and/or justify theology.

This notion of a non-ideological, non-committed recruit seeking to turn around their life's failures and/or hypocrisies in one dramatic but easy moment though is not limited to ISIS or Muslims and in fact has been lionized and romanticized in almost all struggles for nation or religion. We have called them heroes, patriots or even saints. "Jihadist" unfortunately has become the aspirational lifestyle, or more accurately end of life moment.

The Dirty Dozen:

History is encrusted or littered, depending on your view of the cause, of demons becoming reborn crusaders/warriors for the cause. What is different is how broadly and quickly the new identity can be retooled via global media and even more a polarized segment of social media. I'm a supporter of and teach students/global citizens how to engage and find common ground through "digital-diplomacy." However, darker corners of the Internet have also been employed as echo chambers which can turn losers into apparent spokespersons.

Even among broader society, there is an inclination to romanticize the convert to the cause, or at least the criminal willing to become the soldier on behalf of a perceived broader good. "The Dirty Dozen" film with a studded cast of Hollywood heroes became a theater hit a half-century earlier. The title and romanticization resonates even more now. It lionized a group of murderers, rapists and violent criminals who never reformed their means but only volunteered for a suicide mission to employ their skills to kill Nazis. Like many of today's so-called jihadists, it was not though about the presented enemy but rather being able to extend their violence in the realm of a war, justified or not, waged against soldier or civilian.

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"One Man's Hero" is Another Man's....

The notion of countering ISIS's deceitful as well as hateful presumably theological message is a worthy goal in the fight against terror. There are some who may be misled and inspired to act in what all extremists, from East, West, North and South, want to transform into a "war of civilizations." However, terror is increasingly conspired not among like-minded individuals but within the head of one loser. It also should be emphasized that any assault upon one's society, neighbors and/or civilians is more about the loser rather than any cause which might even remotely be considered.

History has shown that one person's terrorist may be hero or at least martyr to another. In the the 1840's a significant number of Irish immigrants recruited to the US Army rebelled against their overwhelmingly Protestant officers. These "Catholic Papists," (which included other immigrants from Poland, Italy, France, Scotland, Germany, Spain and other European states), were welcomed by Santa Anna's Mexico and then joined the Mexican Army as the Mexican-American War unwound. After Mexico lost the war, the Irish-Catholic "traitors" were hanged by the U.S., but they continue to be honored by Mexico as the " San Patricios" or Saint Patrick's Battalion. (The real life story was memorialized in a well-done film, that was not particularly well attended by audiences at least in part due to its conflicted subject matter, starring Tom Berenger and directed by Lance Hool, with whom I had the opportunity to share lunch -- (See: WikipediA "One Man's Hero")

The fight of American Revolutionaries against a monarchy, or French Resistance against Nazis, or Africans against colonialists has relied upon armed resistance and at times immense violence with conflicting views on the justification for such. As in the case of the San Patricios, hero or villain/terrorist may vary on the perspective. However, the inspiration of today's terrorist to be able to achieve name recognition or even re-branding from loser to terrorist is both degrading to those who fought for a greater good and misleading to the self-centered motivation of many of today's perpetrators.

PHOTO Credit: Crime Scene Database: Wisconsin Sikh Temple Shooting

This is not just limited to Muslim perpetrators or ISIS -- from the Oklahoma Federal Building bomber, murderer of Sikhs at Wisconsin Temple, or Norway's 2011 mass murderer who systematically killed 69 children. As a general practice, we increasingly refrain from repeating the name of these perpetrators as not to perpetuate their individual recognition, and more frequently than not we do not identify them as "terrorists" but as killers or simply criminals. The term "terrorist" though is increasingly reserved for those who have some identity connection to Muslim. There is an immediate search for links with terrorist groups as soon as a perpetrator is potentially of Muslim identity or roots. By contrast, the term "crusader" is never used, something that at least some of these Christian losers aspire to, from Norway, Bosnia, Ukraine or US. "Jihadi" and "Crusader" have similar connotation within Muslim and Christian terminology respectively.

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Jihad can be employed as notion of self-improvement as much as "Crusade," even as the latter is linked to a historical event for which Pope John-Paul II perceived as needing an apology. In today's environment, labeling one as a crusader or jihadi can be seen as bestowing a badge of honor in the eyes of some as well as successful re-branding from "loser." Further, even the term "terrorist" may now be perceived as legitimizing actions within political and/or theological shroud rather than being seen as an extension of a petty, narcissistic, violent life now seeking some perversion of redemption via a last chapter of mass killing.

Painting Humanity with the Banners of Conflict

As far as ISIS is concerned, the label "radical" or "extreme" Islam on theological basis may be deserving, and desired by its leaders. However, the term extremist can be associated with actions of those presumably acting on behalf of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu... identity/cause or simply. Nationalism/Patriotism have also too frequently been expressed in xenophobia, intolerance and violence, and religion frequently serves as tool of exclusion rather than inclusion. The challenge to Islam though may be greatest today, as Christianity for example has faced it during the Inquisition, and it most often comes from within. While in Muslim majority states that have suffered from terror as Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Saudi Arabia, the "terrorists" are more likely to be labelled as "criminals." By contrast, there may not be adequate self-evaluation in some as to whether theology can be misused to promote authoritarian or intolerant tendencies. The response in the Muslim world has varied as much as there has been a reflexive response in political debate in the West.

Efforts to paint the Muslim world in homogeneous light are not only inaccurate but counterproductive in the fight against terror. Candidate Donald Trump and others have fed the narrative of ISIS and other extremists on all sides, out of ignorance or perhaps other motives. (See: "More American than @realDonaldTrump?")

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President Obama has avoided employing the term "radical Islam" as to negate ISIS's claims to the religion. However, there is another reason to employ a whole new terminology as to deny the aspirational motivations of a loser seeking redemption in mass killing. Media as well as political figures are too quick, even eager to identify the perpetrator with some political or particularly religious cause linked by nothing more than a thread of presumed identity. Some on either side of a theological delineation would like to polarize democratic, secular society into groups of obedient "believers," followers. Perhaps the only draw to my/your religion is focusing on the perceived inconsistencies, flaws of the other, (ignoring the shared Old Testament roots, progressive or regressive, among monotheistic faiths.) Religion as concept will be judged and perhaps survive in modern society on basis of contribution to overall good rather than promise of rewards or punishment beyond this world. (See: "The Decadence of Persecuting Deviance")

Denying ISIS the Dead Recruit as means to Counter Efforts to Attract new Support?

When ISIS adopts and embraces a dead "terrorist," it keeps part of its bargain with the "lone-wolf" by completing the re-branding from "loser." This also enhances the perception and thus eventual reality of ISIS reach, potency and importance. As part of the fight against terror, we must deny both the perpetrators and those who would enhance their potency via the deed, including after the fact. There is no redemption or re-branding via terror, and those who aspire to something else by a continuation of the petty, narcissistic and violent will be forever associated with label of "loser."
The Blog Sunday Roundup

This was a week of tragedy and chaos, with the world looking on in horror as a truck-driving terrorist plowed through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 84 people and injuring more than 200. The next evening, factions in the Turkish military attempted a coup against President Erdogan. Meanwhile, Donald Trump postponed his Friday announcement of running mate Mike Pence because, according to campaign manager Paul Manafort, Trump "reacted emotionally" to the Nice attack. There were also reports that, as of late Thursday night, Trump was making calls to see if he could reverse his choice of Pence (a man who wrote that "global warming is a myth," smoking "doesn't kill" and apparently doesn't believe in evolution). Uncertain and unsteady times call for steady and clear-eyed leadership -- not emotionally driven, ad hoc improvising and posturing. On the eve of the Republican Convention, we don't need to know whether Tim Tebow will or will not end up speaking to know that Donald Trump is dangerously unfit to lead the country that leads the world.
Participants of the military coup attempt in Turkey have clashed with police while the law enforcers attempted to detain them at the Sabiha Gokcen airport in Istanbul, Reuters reported citing a Turkish official.



The Law enforcers opened warning fire during the arrest of the supporters of the military coup in Turkey; the coup plotters did not fire back. Currently a police operation is being carried out, the Turkish official said.



Moreover, clashes took place near an airbase in Konya, he added.



"The situation is under control," an unnamed official said as cited by Reuters.



Late on Friday, Turkish authorities said that an attempted coup is taking place in the country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged Turkish citizens to take to streets, stating that the coup attempt was carried out by a small group within the military.
The world is being consumed by unforeseen man-made events that have taken the pundits and prognosticators by complete surprise. Whether it is the outcome of the Brexit vote, successive terrorist attacks in Europe, the attempted coup in Turkey, increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks, or fracking-induced earthquakes, the pace of change is accelerating, and man-made risk is at the center of it all. So much so, that we are now being governed by man-made risk. At no time in history have so many unanticipated man-made events occurred at the same time, having so much impact on so many people, and in so many ways. We have been reduced to merely reacting to these events, because we do not have the ability to predict them, and because so many of our approaches to risk management lack foresight and agility.

For these reasons we must change how we recognize and think about man-made risk. Terrorism, climate change, cyber risk, political change, and other forms for man-made risk can no longer be consigned to the rear of the global threat matrix; On the contrary, they should be moved to the top of the queue. In spite of all the forecasting tools at our disposal, even in the age of instant global communication, surprises continue to abound, and occur completely outside of our control.

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For example, the Islamic State's (IS) declared Ramadan offensive took an unprecedented human toll this year, even though the world was put on notice that is was coming. While not widely reported in the West, the number of global deaths attributed to the offensive (which ended on July 5th) exceeded 1,200 and involved at least 13 countries (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Bangladesh, Jordan, the U.S., France, Yemen, Turkey, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia). The vast majority of these deaths occurred in Iraq (685), Syria (150), and Libya (148), although substantial numbers of deaths also occurred in the U.S. (49), Yemen (43), Turkey (44), and Afghanistan (47). Even having been put on notice, the IS was able to kill so many people because of an in ability to anticipate the attacks (which largely exploited soft targets) and a failure to react in a pre-defined manner when the attacks occurred. The airport attacks in Brussels and Istanbul, and the truck attack in Nice, point to the West's ongoing vulnerabilities. The rest of the world is more vulnerable in a general sense, because of the absence of resources to adequately address the problem.

Turkey -- a stable country with an entrenched democracy -- was shaken to its core by a few hundred disaffected soldiers. Even though Turkey's president Erdogan has a vise-like grip on power, he and his intelligence apparatus apparently had no idea it was coming. Intelligence and security agencies around the world continue to sift through immense amounts of data to uncover nuggets of information that might prove useful, but as the threat vectors grow, the challenge becomes all the more insurmountable. This is particularly true when there are no detectable indications that an event or attack is coming.

Although the tea leaves were there for all to read in the UK, few accurately predicted that the Leave campaign would prevail. The outcome of the Brexit vote underscores how many countries are not only prepared to pull the handbrake on globalization, but are willing to reverse course, despite the dire warnings of the integrationists. Nationalism and economic nationalism are prominent influences in elections all over the world. And in the U.S., terrorist attacks, immigration, race relations, and a host of other issues have consumed the political landscape, opening the door for extremists to gain traction in the electoral process.

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The world continues to set monthly temperature records, hurricanes set new intensity records each year, and weather patterns are being routinely upended as a result of climate change. The fracking 'revolution' has prompted frequent earthquakes in places that had rarely or ever seen them, such as the U.S. state of Oklahoma, which is now one of the world's earthquake capitals. Cyber attacks now occur on a daily basis, impacting individuals, businesses and governments alike. The intersection of man-made and natural risk - such as in the case of the Fukushima Disaster - is also impacting the risk management landscape as never before. In short, the era of man-made risk has raised the stakes for all concerned.

In response, voters, shareholders and consumers should become increasingly prepared to take risks, break with the status quo, set a new bar of awareness vis-a-vis man-made risk, and integrate a willingness to do something meaningful about it. We no longer have the luxury of presuming these risks are someone else's problem, for they are now determining how we all live our lives. Being governed by man-made risks implies, however, that we have the power to do something about it, but doing so will require thought leadership, the devotion of many more resources to combat these issues, and a sustained effort aimed at combatting them - at all levels of society. Man-made risk is everyone's problem, is on all of our doorsteps, and will require our best effort to combat its ill effects.
RICHMOND, Va. - Josh Radnor casually peels off a form-fitting vest as he walks the 60 or 70 yards from the set of Mercy Street to his dressing room trailer.

Inside the trailer, it's air-conditioned. Call it Mercy Street II.

Getting out of a Civil War-era costume on a blazing hot summer day in the capitol of the Confederacy comes as a relief, says Radnor (above), though he adds, "It's not as uncomfortable for the men as it is for the women."





He's right about that. Tara Summers (above), who plays the driven, skilled and sometimes devious nurse Anne Hastings on Mercy Street, has already changed from a full-length, tight-bustled dress into light and comfortable modernwear.

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"Much more comfortable," says Summers as she works on a bottle of water.



Mercy Street, PBS's ambitious and intense drama about an Alexandria, Va., hospital that treats both Union and Confederate soldiers in the early months of the Civil war, will return in January for its second six-episode season.

On this hot day, several months of filming are about to wrap up. Several cast members have finished and left already, including Mary Elizabeth Winstead (above with Radnor), who plays the central character of abolitionist nurse Mary Phinney.

Winstead fans who don't want to wait for January can watch her now in CBS's weird sci-fi satire BrainDead.

Today Gary Cole is wrapping, and when he finishes his last scene, he'll get a rousing round of applause from the crowd. The veteran actor, recently known from CBS's The Good Wife and HBO's Veep, plays James Green Sr., a wealthy Virginia entrepreneur whose hotel has been commandeered by the Union and largely converted into the hospital where Hastings, Phinney and Radnor's Dr. Jed Foster work.

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Green must walk perhaps the trickiest line on a show that's riddled with unhappy choices. He must accommodate the federal government enough to keep a physical foothold on his property while not letting his Southern comrades suspect he has betrayed their cause.

"It's a character, and a family, where things have been one way for a long time and now that's all imperiled," says Cole. "Green is among those who think it will all be over in a couple of months and things will go back to normal. This season he's starting to see all that go right out the window."

Cole and his colleagues are running through the usual multiple takes of a scene in which Green is showing a visiting British official through the hotel. He and his wife Jane (Donna Murphy) (above) are trying to flatter the visitor, but alas, the chap is more interested in meeting Dr. Foster.

When he does, he asks a stupid question that draws a politely exasperated response.

"Dr. Foster does not suffer fools," says Radnor.

Like most Mercy Street scenes, these are being filmed at Laburnum House, an historic building several hours south of Alexandria. Ironically, Laburnum House has been part of a hospital complex, and Virginia Film Office director Andy Edmunds notes that it has been used for shows like Lincoln, Gods and Generals and AMC's Turn.

Almost the whole first season of Mercy Street was set here, and it's home base for the second season as well, though there will be field trips to places like a battlefield hospital.

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"It won't be Gone With the Wind," says Summers with a laugh, though she wouldn't mind. The British native grew up steeped in the lore of America's most famous Civil War film.

"I always wanted to be Scarlett O'Hara," she says. "From the time I was 4 and first saw the movie, I pretended to be her."

Anne Hastings isn't exactly the reincarnation of Scarlett - for one thing, she's considerably more dedicated to nursing than Scarlett turned out to be - but Mercy Street does conjure Gone With the Wind in several ways, including a large ensemble cast.

Actors and extras are scattered throughout Laburnum House, spilling out onto the front steps. Wounded soldiers on stained sheets and pillowcases work their smartphones as they wait for the next take to begin.

Stagehands wend their way through seemingly endless stacks of props and equipment, trying to find some place to set up a couple of small fans. With the lights kept low, the whole behind-the-camera scene looks and feels like an attic.

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The bosses are also here, co-creators Lisa Wolfinger and David Zabel.

"This began with Lisa working on a docu-drama," says Zabel, whose best-known TV work is a long run with ER. "I was consulting on dramatic elements.

"Then PBS asked if it could be a series. They've had a bunch of great British shows, they told us, and they'd like a great American show. We said sure.

"Since Ken Burns's Civil War series was the biggest show PBS ever had, I think they felt like this is a subject area where they could do it.

"Our show looks at the war from a different angle than most Civil War productions. It's not primarily set on the battlefield. It also includes both Union and Confederate characters, and their uneasy interaction."

Mercy Street had the thankless assignment of taking a handoff this past winter from the final season of PBS's beloved Downton Abbey, and its ratings were decent.

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PBS would love for more viewers this time around, and hopes to entice them by escalating everything that was set up in the first season: the romances, the scheming, the feuds, the family tension.

"I think everyone has hit their stride," says Zabel. "We're at the point where I'm crossing out dialogue because there are scenes where the characters don't even need it."
Donald Trump is bad for business. This isn't just a fearful prediction of how the economy would fare if a compliant Congress enacted his nativist and isolationist rhetoric. Rather it is what Trump's emergence might mean for business people who want to enter public service. This is especially true for Democratic business people, who currently face an unusually strong head wind when they try to bring their knowledge of the private economy to elected office.

It's a lesson I learned the hard way. In my campaign for Congress, many Democratic primary voters assumed and worried that someone with a superficial similarity to Trump -- a business person self-funding his campaign -- might share Trump's values and world view.

I don't blame my opponents for helping voters draw those comparisons: They saw an advantage and took it. And while I do not think I lost simply because of Trump's looming presence in the minds of Democratic primary voters, it certainly made my campaign more difficult.

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Stereotypes notwithstanding, the notion of elected Democrats with a background in business is not farfetched. While most Democratic elected officials have backgrounds in law or the public sector, business leaders have achieved electoral success. Leaders like Mark Warner of Virginia; Bob Kerrey and Ben Nelson from Nebraska, each of whom served as Governor and Senator; Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo; and Representative John Delaney from Maryland, the only member of Congress who was the CEO of a publicly traded corporation.

The question is whether the Democratic Party will continue to have a place for experienced progressive business leaders as elected officials, or will mindless comparisons with Trump make it almost impossible? I believe Democrats will make a huge mistake if Trump's candidacy leads them to reject candidates with business backgrounds, particularly with economic issues at the center of the public policy debate.

Just as diversity makes our country stronger, the same is true for a political party. Elected officials with a business background bring a unique set of skills and experience that can help Democrats govern successfully and solve vexing questions around middle class job creation and wage growth. These skills complement rather than mitigate the orientation of candidates from law and the public sector. Politically, business candidates help defeat many arguments Republicans use against us.

The stereotyping runs deep. Too many commentators and Democratic activists presume business candidates care about profits over people, loyalty to the status quo, want to "run government like a business," and do not have experience that will translate into the public sector.

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In reality, business candidates bring skills honed through training and experience that can help government succeed. We know how to develop and execute a strategy for the long term, prepare workforces for the future, extract efficiencies from scarce resources, create and work within budgets, and find novel solutions to nettlesome problems. We know that long-term investments are required to achieve larger goals, and that true success is only achieved if all stakeholders succeed.

Entrepreneurs, in particular, fight against and disrupt a hidebound status quo that resists competition to the disadvantage of consumers. In the process, they drive innovation and growth. People with business backgrounds integrate information from disparate sources to accurately forecast outcomes and successfully negotiate among players with initially divergent interests. In the retail sector, our laser focus on the consumer is particularly useful at a time when elected officials should put the interests of the citizen first.

Few would disagree that these skills and experiences are important in government. On the other hand, many Democratic activists are too quick to dismiss the people who have them. Instead, they fall back on baseless stereotypes of business candidates as ingrained as the stereotypes with which Republicans attack Democrats.

The Trump comparison with Democratic business candidates fails on a number of grounds. Trump exhibits few of these skills, having risen to fame mainly through a combination of inherited wealth and an uncanny facility for self-promotion. But the real problem with the Trump parallel is assuming that other business candidates share his world view.

The tools of business can be used to pursue dramatically different outcomes. Where Trump would build a wall along the Mexican border, Democratic business candidates embrace diversity and a growing population. Where Trump believes essentially all of government is a failure, Democratic business candidates bring inventive ideas to help government deliver services more efficiently and effectively to the individuals and families that need them. Where Trump has a misogynist and demeaning attitude toward women, Democratic business candidates embrace women and men alike as breadwinners and family leaders. Where Trump believes we can turn back the clock on our energy polices, Democratic business candidates see an advanced energy economy that will grow jobs and preserve our environment.

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Trump's resistance to keeping his promise to veterans groups stands in stark contrast to the selfless generosity I find among business leaders when raising money for non-profit organizations or contributing the fruits of our success. Trump's divisive rhetoric and appeals to the dark side of human nature is completely counter to my experience that success depends on bringing together as many people as possible.
South and North Korea flag

North Korea is likely to be one of the worst headaches, or maybe nightmares, for the next president. He or she "must find a way to neuter Mr. Kim's outlandish and frightening peril," intoned the Washington Post.

Of course, four successive presidents have sought to do so. Yet nothing they tried worked. Experience suggests that "neutering" Pyongyang is beyond the power of the U.S. president, at least at a cost Americans are willing to bear.

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The U.S. should try a different approach. Washington should withdraw from the Korean vortex. Then the Democratic People's Republic of Korea would be primarily a problem for its neighbors, who have the most at stake.

Washington was blissfully unconcerned about the Korean peninsula until the end of World War II. Earlier relations ended when Japan swallowed the Korean kingdom. Missionaries and independence activists remained busy in America making the case for a free Korea. But the peninsula's status didn't much matter to the U.S. government.

Tokyo's defeat changed that. Although Korea did not directly figure in World War II, that land could not be left with an aggressive empire that was being dismantled. Which put America in the position of joint occupier alongside the Soviet Union. Out of the Cold War came two separate, antagonistic countries, the Korean War, and an American security guarantee, backed by permanent troop deployments.

Yet Washington's military presence became an anachronism long ago. In the 1960s the South Korean economy finally took off. Today the Republic of Korea outmatches the DPRK on every measure of national power save military, and the latter deficiency is a matter of choice. With twice the population and around 40 times the GDP, the South could do whatever is necessary to deter and defeat its northern antagonist. Seoul doesn't do so because America continues to spend the resources and risk the lives of its citizens on the ROK's behalf.

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That made sense during the Cold War, but no longer. Without such a global struggle the peninsula no longer is important let alone vital for U.S. security. A war there would be costly in economic and tragic in human terms, but the burden would mostly fall on surrounding nations. Most important, the South is well able to defend itself, at least from any conventional threat. The U.S. is militarily stretched, economically embattled, and fiscally endangered. It no longer can afford to subsidize the defense of prosperous and populous friends.

Absent its military commitment to the ROK America would of no concern to the latest Kim scion to rule over the impoverished land to the north. As it is, scarcely a week goes by without a new insult or threat emanating from Pyongyang directed at America.

For instance, Kim Jong-un was recently quoted expressing his "great satisfaction" with the test of the mid-range Mudusan missile, which offers a "powerful means of attack" to help protect the DPRK from "hostile forces," including the U.S. As a result, he explained, "We have the sure capability to attack in an overall and practical way the Americans in the Pacific operation theater," apparently meaning to target Washington's many bases.

Even more dramatic have been tests, most recently in April, on a long-range missile capable of hitting North America. The weapon probably isn't capable of being aimed at anything in particular, but further tests likely will improve its accuracy. This work has no value for a conflict on the peninsula or even nearby. It is useful only for threatening the U.S.

At the same time the DPRK is thought to be continuing to expand its nuclear capabilities. The Institute for Science and International Security recently estimated North Korea's arsenal at 13 to 21 weapons. It may be adding four to six weapons a year.

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Yet North Korea's threats do not occur in a vacuum. Pyongyang is targeting America with weapons as well as rhetoric because America is over there. Kim does not spend his time denouncing Mexico or threatening to turn Toronto into a lake of fire. He doesn't vilify Europe at every opportunity. Brazil and Nigeria don't make Kim's enemies list. If Washington wasn't threatening his nation with war, backed by forces based only a few miles south of his country and around the region he wouldn't waste his breath on America. Which creates yet another reason for the U.S. to bring home its forces.

This doesn't mean Kim is a victim or innocent, of course. His grandfather, Kim Il-sung, took power courtesy Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers of history. This Kim sought to conquer the South, which resulted in millions of dead Koreans. He went on to create a suffocating totalitarian state with a personality cult that Stalin would have admired. Kim's son and successor, Kim Jong-il, was, if anything, more callous, presiding over the mass starvation of his people while developing nuclear weapons and spewing threats far and wide. Kim Jong-un has continued these traditions, though with the Stalinist touch of treating those closest to him with bloody brutality.

Nevertheless, in this case Kim fils is behaving rationally. The U.S., which enjoys an overwhelming military advantage and imposes regime change whenever convenient, does threaten his rule. Washington's attack on Moammar Khadafy's regime, which had negotiated away its missile and nuclear programs, demonstrated that American officials cannot be trusted. The North never could build a conventional force capable of resisting U.S. attack. A nuclear deterrent is the most obvious and perhaps the only answer, and it is most effective if frequently brandished.

Which raises the obvious question whether Pyongyang would behave so provocatively if America was not on the scene. No one should expect a kinder, gentler Kim to emerge. But his "byungjin" policy of pursuing both nuclear weapons and economic growth faces a severe challenge, especially since sanctions continue to limit the DPRK's development. With the U.S. far away he would have more reason to listen to China, which long has advised more reforms and fewer nukes. He also might be more amenable to negotiate limits on his missile and nuclear activities, if not give up the capabilities entirely. Since nothing else has worked, an American withdrawal would be a useful change in strategy.

Of course, members of Washington's foreign policy establishment, who seem drawn to conflicts like moths are attracted to lights, would be horrified. But Americans would be better off if their leaders sought to avoid rather than join other nations' conflicts.

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It's been a big summer for Yiddish theater.

First came Paula Vogel's brilliant play Indecent at the Vineyard Theater, which told the back story to staging the provocative God of Vengeance, a masterwork by Sholem Asch. Hailed in Europe, it was a hit off-Broadway on the Yiddish circuit, but provoked such outrage on Broadway, its producer and cast were charged with obscenity.

Then came the second staging of the 1923 Yiddish operetta classic The Golden Bride (Die Goldene Kale), now at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. (The first was in December 2015.)

Nominated for two Drama Desk Awards, the enchanting production, by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, has meticulously reconstructed the rags-to-riches script. A pitch-perfect 20-member cast performs the beautiful score, a mix of klezmer, waltz, opera and Russian ballads, played by an excellent 14-piece orchestra, under the baton of Zalman Mlotek.

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The story revolves around Goldele (an extraordinary Rachel Policar), a poor girl in a Russian shtetl, in love with Misha (Cameron Johnson). When she comes into a legacy, the village suitors pursue her with zeal. But her wish is to marry the man who can find her long-lost mother.

Surrounding Goldele are various members of her close-knit village, including Khanele (Rachel Zatcoff) who has fallen for Jerome (Glen Seven Allen), Goldele's American cousin. They provide much comic relief, as does Kalmen (Adam B. Shapiro). Act 1 focuses on the traditional life of the shtetl, as well as the villagers' perceptions of America.

By Act II, both Goldele and her family are in New York. It's the Roaring Twenties and the contrast between old world and new is stark, in dress and language. And yes, there are some silly moments throughout. But what's so touching is how the production bridges the chasm, fusing Jewish music and American rhythms with themes that underscored the conflicts immigrants faced.

The Golden Bride is a time capsule, culturally and politically. Deftly staged by directors Bryna Wasserman and Motle Didner, this energetic musical is charming and poignant. The setting is Jewish, but the story speaks to everyone.

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Sung in Yiddish, there are simultaneous superscript translations in English and Russian.

With music by Joseph Rumshinksy, lyrics by Louis Gilrod and libretto by Frieda Freiman, The Golden Bride opened at Kessler's Second Avenue Theater in 1923 and ran in Yiddish-speaking communities till 1948.

Thankfully, Folksbiene has rescued this gem from obscurity. Running through August 28, don't miss this rare glimpse of the past.

Or, a fitting compliment to the period: New York's Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway at The Museum of the City of New York. The smart, informative exhibition, with more than 250 artifacts, details the remarkable phenomenon that was the Yiddish Theater. It's history and glories, legendary founders, Boris Thomashefky (his grandson is conductor Michael Tilson Thomas) and Jacob Adler, and its innumerable artistic contributions are noted.

Not only did Paul Muni, John Garfield, Fanny Brice and Jerome Robbins crossover from the Yiddish theater, which imported modernist elements from Europe, but its influence on American theater was huge. Boris Aronson, a pioneer in set and costume design, later revolutionized Broadway, winning six Tonys for scenic design in a celebrated career.
Vietnamese naval soldiers stand as they patrol at Truong Sa Dong island in the Spratly archipelago January 7, 2013. A group of anti-China protesters plan to gather on March 14, 2013 to mark the anniversary of the 1988 naval battle between China and Vietnam near Spratly reefs, in which 64 Vietnamese sailors were killed. Both Vietnam and the Philippines have previously complained about Chinese activity and even harassment in contested parts of the South China Sea. China's claim is by far the largest, forming a vast U-shape over most of the sea's 648,000 square miles (1.7 million square km), including the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all claim territory in the sea, which covers important shipping routes and is thought to hold untapped oil and gas reserves. Picture taken on January 7, 2013. REUTERS/Quang Le (VIETNAM - Tags: MILITARY POLITICS ANNIVERSARY CIVIL UNREST)

PERTH, Australia -- On July 12th the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines in its case against China in the South China Sea. The world watched and commented, even as China declared the finding void. But somehow Vietnam, the one nation that, after the Phillipines, could have cheered the loudest has stayed subdued. Why?

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When the ruling came out on the South China Sea, Bill Hayton at The National Interest commented that, "it is a victory for evidence over sentiment." Hayton said that the claims of China have been driven by emotion based on historical events and treatment going back to the 19th century. "Those misunderstandings and emotions will not easily go away," he wrote.

Anti-China protester Nguyen Van Phuong chants slogans during a protest along a street in Hanoi July 1, 2012. (REUTERS/Nguyen Lan Thang )

For Vietnam, this is a strategic and an emotional victory, but not an unqualified one. The attitude in Vietnam over territorial claims is as strong as in China, and similar to Hayton's reading of China, public sentiment is fueled by a strong sense of grievance, both over direct issues of sovereignty and China's calculated provocations, along with a feeling of historical grievance against China for 1,000 years of occupation.

Vietnam, however, reacted far stronger to supposed violations of sovereignty when China landed civilian aircraft on airstrips on two reefs, Subi and Mischief, in defiance of the ruling -- rather than to the ruling itself.

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The Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Le Hai Binh said of the incident:

Those actions conducted by China have seriously violated Vietnam's sovereignty and are unlawful and cannot change the fact[s] about Vietnam's sovereignty over the Hoang Sa and Truong Sa [known as Spratly and Paracel in China] archipelagoes.

Conversely, the immediate reaction from Vietnam to the international tribunal ruling was less strident and more balanced. Binh said:

In this spirit, Vietnam strongly supports the resolution of disputes in the East Vietnam Sea through peaceful measures, including diplomatic and legal procedures, without using or threatening to use violence, in accordance with international law, including the 1982 UNCLOS.

According to the website Vietnam Right Now, a source known for views very different to the government's in the country, "The statement reflect[s] Hanoi's concern at the possibility of an aggressive backlash from an aggrieved China, as it seeks to compensate for a major legal and diplomatic blow to its territorial claims."

In the case of the South China Sea, China had been thwarted by a smaller power, and The Hague ruling should have set Vietnam's propaganda departments and its newspapers into nationalist frenzy. Instead, things stayed quiet to begin with, and media quoted the MOFA spokesman or simply reported the outcome. There was no fanning of nationalist sentiment.

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For Vietnam, this is a strategic and an emotional victory, but not an unqualified one.

Surely, it was almost a victory for Vietnam also -- no one has supported the Philippines through this battle more than Vietnam. Yet the reaction from its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and newspapers has been diligent, but uninspired.

China's Complicated History in Vietnam

The Vietnamese government is always under pressure to "stand up" to China, both from activists and the wider and the more apolitical public. This has happened a succession of times since 2011 when Chinese aggression in the region started to grow. Typically activists would march around Hanoi's central Hoan Kiem Lake each Sunday morning, often beginning at the Chinese embassy, while being assiduously filmed by security services. This was allowed so as to "send a message" to Beijing, before protests were inevitably shut down after a few weeks.

Blaming the government for not doing more is a good beginning grievance upon which to build, but not one to end on. The government knows this and so remains leery of allowing too much anti-China sentiment as it works to strengthen relations with the country. Crackdowns on protests are inevitable.

China and Vietnam have been trying to revamp ties since 2015 when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Vietnam. Xi spoke at the Vietnamese National Assembly, and was the first foreigner to do so. The visit was widely hailed as a "reset" in the relationship of the two nations, and resulted in 12 bilateral agreements and over $150 million in Chinese investment promised to schools and hospitals in Vietnam, with an additional half billion for infrastructure.

Xi Jinping and Vietnam Communist Party Secretary General Nguyen Phu Trong toast after a signing ceremony of bilateral agreements in 2015. (HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images)

Ties between the two countries had cooled -- to put it mildly -- in 2014 after China moved its oil rig into Vietnam's Exclusive Economic Zone. The move set off protests across the country that resulted in the trashing of what turned out to be Taiwanese factories and deaths.

Though Vietnam has moved closer to the U.S., managing its relationship with China still matters. Since Vietnam and China share a border, immense trade and an ideology, there will always be an element of business-as-usual to Hanoi-Beijing ties behind the scenes, even as anger rages over the sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. The shared border means their security forces collaborate on some trainings and the nations watch each other carefully for signs of democratic foment or unrest.

But both nations also fully claim the Islands of Spratly and Paracel in the South China Sea (also called Hoang Sa and Truong Sa in Vietnam), while the other four claimants in the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all have partial claims, which certainly makes relations a little more difficult.

What happens next in the South China Sea won't change: it's still up to China.

At this juncture the best bet is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN. The "paper tiger" hasn't been the answer yet, but Hanoi hopes it might still be, despite Cambodia's intransigence to the group.

Professor Carl Thayer, a former Southeast Asia regional specialist at numerous Australian defense education institutions, expected that, "Vietnam will focus its attention on getting some form of unity in ASEAN particularly as it will be chairing a ministerial meeting later in the year. Vietnam wants to advance its interests through ASEAN."

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Vietnam will find this effort difficult, as, "The disparate group of countries that have been threatened or dismayed by China's expansionist claims have found it hard to form up a united front," David Brown and Huy Duong wrote in the Asia Sentinel.

This statement has reigned true to the point that Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen even went so far as to say he would oppose any ASEAN statement supporting The Hague's recent ruling.

Map showing the overlapping claims by country on the South China Sea. (Reuters/RM)

Indonesia and Singapore, however, have expressed displeasure with China's recent actions, with Indonesia going so far as to arrest Chinese fishermen in late May of this year. Chinese aggression has increasingly irritated Indonesia. After the ruling, the country published its own defense plan and strengthened security around its South China Sea islands.

As more countries become frustrated with Chinese aggression and claim to islands in the South China Sea, the U.S. has begun to push each nation to resolve the issue through international communication, and follow international rulings, rather than make security moves or power plays.

"In the future, we encourage other South China Sea claimants, including Vietnam, to seek similar resolution of maritime disputes through arbitration as well as by negotiation among the parties," U.S. Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) (who has long argued for lifting the embargo on weapons sales to Vietnam) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said in a joint statement.

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At this point arbitration may not be an option, but for the meantime what happens next in the South China Sea won't change: it's still up to China.

Earlier on WorldPost:
Route of truck used in the Nice terror attack, July 14, 2016. Map courtesy Wikipedia

For the first time since the Islamic State (IS) announced its worldwide caliphate on June 30, 2014, it appears that the tide is finally starting to turn against it. The pattern of its terrorist attacks in Europe and North America however suggest that it is already developing a new strategy to attack the west even if it becomes stateless.

Over the course of the past year IS has lost between 1/3 and 1/4 of its territory. Iraqi forces consisting of the regular Iraqi Army and various Shite militias have taken back Tikrit, Ramadi and Falluja and largely regained control of the major urban centers in Anbar province; the heart of Iraq's Sunni Triangle.

Further north, Iraqi and Kurdish forces are tightening the noose around Mosul. Iraqi forces have captured the Qayyarah West Airfield (formerly FOB Endurance) a major air base just 50 miles south of Mosul. The base is expected to serve as a logistics hub and forward air base for the final drive on Mosul. Additionally, a large pocket stretching from Baiji to Hawijah has been cut-off from Mosul. It appears that IS militants in that area are abandoning their positions.

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In Syria, The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast and the Syrian army in the southwest are both slowly advancing on the Islamic State capital of Raqqa.

The notable progress notwithstanding, the Islamic State is still a long way from being defeated. It is likely that the anticipated sieges of both Raqqa and Mosul will stretch well into 2017 and it is conceivable even longer. Nor is a victory by any means certain. The political consensus among the various Shite factions in Iraq remains fragile. So too does the relationship between the Kurdish and Iraqi governments. Iranian interference in Baghdad remains a wild card.

The situation in Syria isn't much better. The Free Syrian Army is on the verge of losing its position in Aleppo to the, Russian supported, Syrian Army while the continuing hostility of Turkish President Erdogan's government to Syria's and Turkey's Kurdish population further complicates the U.S.'s attempts to build an effective anti-ISIS coalition. How the attempted coup in Turkey may affect Erdogan's commitment to fight Islamic State is anyone's guess?

Already however there are growing signs of how Islamic State will adapt should it lose control of all or a significant portion of its core territory. First, it has been steadily expanding its footprint in Europe. There is no question that it's organization there is substantially larger than it was in 2014. European intelligence agencies believe that there may be between 1,000 and 2,000 jihadists in Europe with battlefield experience under IS. IS claims that it has infiltrated over 5,000 militants into Europe and that it has "dozens of cells" spread throughout the continent. One intelligence agency estimate puts IS's European strength at about 20,000 jihadists and committed supporters

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Secondly, it is expanding its involvement in criminal activities in Europe. There have been consistent reports, for example, that Islamic State is becoming heavily involved in the smuggling of marijuana from the Balkans into western Europe. The skill set required to run a subversive organization is not that different that the one needed to run a criminal enterprise. The smuggling networks that are used to bring in armaments and militants can be just as easily be used to traffic in drugs and illegal immigrants.

Thirdly it is steadily switching from offensive military operations where it was directly attacking Iraqi and Syrian military forces, as it did in 2014 and 2015, in favor of a combination of a scorched earth defensive posture and aggressive insurgency tactics. In Iraq, where this strategy is most obvious, it has fought a long dragged out, street by street, urban campaign in the Sunni dominated cities that it held. Its intent has been to slow the Iraqi advance as long as possible while inflicting the maximum amount of damage to both the Iraqi attacking forces and to the cities it was defending.

The result is that in defeat it is leaving behind an urban wasteland that will require billions of dollars to rehabilitate. Dollars which the Baghdad government does not have and which it will move reluctantly to spend rebuilding Sunni areas. In the process, even in defeat, Islamic State is laying the groundwork for more Sunni-Shia confrontation in Iraq and creating an environment where it will continue to find support within Iraq's Sunni community.

Finally, Islamic State has returned to the campaign of indiscriminate urban violence that characterized its strategy from 2003- to 2007 and it is steadily expanding a semblance of that campaign into Europe. So far the European campaign has relied on a combination of small, 5 to 10 militants, groups armed with automatic weapons and rudimentary improvised explosive devices (IED) and "lone wolves" which have been responding to Islamic State's exhortations of violence against western nations, to attack soft targets.

Moreover, unlike its terrorist attacks in Iraq, where there was often a second, immediate follow up attack against first responders, its attacks in Europe have not yet shown this degree of sophistication. Although there is so evidence that the Brussels attackers were planning something similar. A two tiered attack, one designed to kill both soft civilian targets and then first responders, take more coordination and a greater degree of planning than Islamic State has been able to organize in Europe. As its capabilities grow however, such "two tiered-attacks" against both civilians and first responders will appear.

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What would a defeat of the Islamic State look like? It won't be like any previous war. There will not be an "instrument of surrender" duly executed by the representatives of a vanquished foe. There will not be a surrender ceremony like the one on the USS Missouri or a rail car in Compiegne or their 21st century Middle Eastern equivalents. There will be no peace conference, or armistice negotiations, no victory parades.

The fact is that there will be little to mark the defeat of the Islamic State because even if we retake all of the territory that IS currently controls we will never really be sure that we have won. Instead Islamic State will simply morph into something else as it adapts to being a stateless organization; a government without a country.

In this sense, the terrorist attack that took place in Nice on July 14th is symptomatic both of what the Islamic State is evolving into and what it may become if it is ever stripped of its territorial domains.

For a militant jihadist organization like Islamic State the control of physical territory is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, control of a territory affords opportunities to exploit resources, from antiquities to oil to other valuables. It affords opportunities to levy taxes, and to control social life, from schools to mosques to courts, to an unprecedented degree. It also garners the prestige of being a sovereign nation, albeit one that no other nation chooses to recognize or deal diplomatically with.

On the other hand, for IS controlling a nation state is also an immense disadvantage. First it calls for administrative skills that jihadist organizations typically don't possess. Running a country means that you are responsible for the provisioning of basic services. That means you need to run power plants and sewage treatment facilities. It means water needs to come out of the faucet and busses need to show up on time. It means food and fuel and medicine need to be secured and made available.

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Moreover, controlling a state also means that you have to defend it. Jihadist organizations rarely have the kind of defensive capabilities that are needed to combat the offensive arsenal of a modern military, much less that of a superpower. You can kill a lot of people with a truck bomb, but it's hard to take out an F-16 in the same way, not unless you can drive your truck bomb next to it on the tarmac.

Going forward Islamic State doesn't really need to control a nation state and if fact would be better off without it even if it means temporarily shelving its narrative of establishing a worldwide caliphate. It might earn less money without controlling territory, but it would also have a lot fewer administrative demands it would have to finance. Moreover, as it expands into more lucrative criminal activities it can more than make up for the financial opportunities it loses when it is evicted.

The loss of its territorial domain would be a blow to Islamic State's prestige, but even that would hardly be an insurmountable one. At this point, the Islamic State "brand" has been established. It is known and recognized worldwide and it has more than three dozen franchises around the globe. It's sophisticated use of social media to build that brand has been nothing short of cutting edge. Like any brand, it needs to continue to defend and expand it, but it's brand is less dependent on controlling physical territory today than it was in 2014.

The attack in Nice is symptomatic of how Islamic State is expanding its insurgency into Europe and it offers some important lessons. First, the attacker was a lone wolf. It does not appear that he had any direct links to the Islamic State. He was not a former jihadist militant. He was not recruited by IS nor does it seem that he was aided in any way. Encouraging such attacks is a key aspect of IS's social media campaigns. In these situations, intelligence is almost non-existent. There is little planning, travel or chatter to tip off security personnel of a possible attack

Secondly, it does not seem that the attacker was a particularly devout Muslim or one that was particularly committed to jihadism. Rather, it seems he was a maladjusted, dysfunctional, petty criminal who found in radical jihadism a justification for his actions. In other words, this is not a case of a Muslim that was radicalized as much as a case of a radical that was Islamized.

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When the Soviet Union collapsed western pundits were quick to proclaim the "end of ideology." Secular, democratic, capitalism had won and authoritarian, militaristic communism had lost. But the anti-western ideology that rejects the basic tenants of modern 21st century society, secularism, democracy, equality and capitalism, didn't go away. It simply morphed into something else and found a new ideological framework in which to express itself.

It's tempting to see the spread of Islamic jihadism as simply the most current chapter in a Christian-Islamic rivalry that has dominated Europe and the Middle East for more than a millennium. Except the enemy of jihadist fundamentalists is not Christendom, its western society. The enemy is the values that define modern, 21st century life--democracy, equality, free markets, and secularism.

In the 1970s and 80s the rejection of western society and its values by terrorist groups like Direct Action, or Baader Meinhof often expressed itself in radical leftist and Marxist terminology. Today, the modern expression of "anti-westernism" is increasingly finding expression and justification in the fundamentalist jihadist critique of western society.

Just as in Nice, the backgrounds of many of the jihadists implicated in the half dozen terrorist attacks that have occurred in Europe in the last 18 months suggest that we are dealing not with Muslims who have been radicalized but with criminals and malcontents who have been Islamized. As Islamic State expands its criminal activities and penetrates deeper into Europe's criminal underworld it will find itself with ready access to precisely this kind of person.

Thirdly, terrorism is not just about guns. A truck in the hands of one man killed almost as many people in Nice as nine heavily armed gun men did in Paris. Nor was this the first time that a vehicle was used as a weapon. In late 2015 IS called on its followers to use vehicles in precisely this way. Nice was at least the fourth such incidence in the last six months. There is no shortage of modern conveniences which can be used as a weapon of violence.

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Terrorists use the media to communicate with their followers, recruits and potential targets. The Western media is only too willing to be used.

ISIS desires to create a caliphate over which it exercises total control. Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas and the rest have somewhat less ambitious goals of conquest, but each uses shocking, deadly acts to build their brand as ruthless fighters to whom resistance is allegedly futile. Their actions have limited consequences if they cannot get their message out.

Terrorism is ISIS' communications strategy of choice. Unfortunately, as it seeks to inform, Western media encourages terrorists through its choice of coverage and the language it uses. The media has fallen into patterns of reportage of deadly incidents that convey a message other than the intended one. This has the effect of encouraging terrorists.

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It should be noted there are brilliant, courageous members of the media who daily put their lives at risk covering conflicts around the world. At least 1197 journalists have been killed in the last 25 years, with seventy-three killed in 2015 alone. Daniel Pearl (The Wall Street Journal) and David Bloom (NBC) are two of those most well-known victims. This article is not about them, and is in a sense a tribute to them.

THE MEDIA ENCOURAGES TERRORISTS BY PUBLICIZING CLAIMS OF "RESPONSIBILITY"

The media should never report, "ISIS claims responsibility for the attack." First of all, nothing about these attacks is responsible. They are cowardly, attacks on non-combatants. The concept of responsibility exists in a different dimension than terrorism.







The use of the term "guilt" suggests that it was a crime, which it was. "Admitting guilt" is what criminals do. "Claiming responsibility" is a nice sanitized term that implies reasoned action. We all want to be responsible, right? Terrorist are responsible to nothing but their ideology. They are guilty of terrorizing us. The media should tell it like it is.

THE MEDIA ENCOURAGES TERRORISTS BY TAKING THEIR WORDS WITHOUT QUESTION

The media plays into the hands of the terrorists by allowing itself to be easily duped by claims of involvement in attacks. All it takes is one spokesperson to say "We did it" for the reporters to be running to their smartphones to lodge the story. Where's the proof? The media should demand to see actual evidence of everything the terrorists say.

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Proof. Evidence. Phone logs. Pictures. Video. Before you believe a terrorist's words, make them prove it. There's a two source rule for reporting. The media should insist on two sources and original documentation.

THE MEDIA ENCOURAGES TERRORISTS BY PUBLICIZING THEIR IMAGES OF "TERRORIST PORN"

Andy Warhol famously said, "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." ISIS wants round-the-clock publicity. Its intent is to terrorize society twice for each attack.







Thus, every newscast about a terrorist atrocity furthers the terrorist's clause. Endless repetition enhances the image they want to portray to the world.

If ISIS puts out a video, they want us to see it. So don't show it. Its as simple as that. And don't repeat their names, either. Terrorists rely on Western media to spread their message, create fear and recruit followers. the Western media should deny them an effective media platform. I acknowledge using the truck driver's photo as the featured image for this article. I was looking for an image that conveyed the concept of terrorism in a non-exploitative way, and that is the image I chose.







There is an opposing school of thought that believes if we don't see exactly what they are doing, we won't feel strongly enough to be wiling to fight them. Personally I have enough faith in the power of words to be able to imagine horrific scenes without seeing a head oddly misplaced on a body. You can get through life and be anti-terrorist without viewing that image, which can never be unseen.

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Granted, people want to know what happened, but is our society enhanced by endless repetition, and the showing of images of terrorist porn; of bodies that are not intact? This writer thinks not. Adults can find it on the internet if they want. The media should not make it easy for them, just for the sake of viewers, clicks or page views. Writer and former British Member of Parliament Louise Mensch wrote recently of reports of torture at the Bataclan nightclub in France. Nobody needed pictures to get the idea.

THE MEDIA SHOULD AVOID SENSATIONALIST COVERAGE OF TERRORIST ATTACKS

Studies have shown that sensationalist media coverage of terrorist acts results in more such acts being committed.







To hear politicians and pundits, terrorists have every one of us in their sights, and they are living next door. In truth, the odds are infinitesimal that any of us will ever face a terrorist attack. For example, eighty four people were killed in Nice, France last week. Meanwhile, 736 Americans were killed in auto accidents over the same period. Terrorism is not new to the world. There were terrorist bombings in New York in 1919. But we survived then, and we'll survive now.

A REAL LIFE EXAMPLE OF WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

It is not clear at this time whether the man who killed 84 people in a truck was motivated by either politics or religion, but the media has labeled the event terrorism and accepted ISIS' statement that it praised the attack as proof that it was guilty of the attack. Reporter Jim Naureckas of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), a media watchdog, makes these points in an excellent analysis. His thesis is that the claim of terrorism was based on the driver's ethnicity and not evidence.

The media narrative thus adopts the destructive claims of the Donald Trumps and the Newt Gingriches of the world who blame Radical Islam for Terrorism for all that ails the world. They fail to acknowledge that the vast, vast majority of victims are Muslims, themselves. Its not about religion. Its about power.

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Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren believe that it is self-defeating to blame all Muslims for the attacks even if the perpetrators are also Muslim, as we need the support of Muslim countries to battle the scourge of terrorism. The solution cannot be imposed from Washington or London or Paris. Islam must heal Islam.

HOW CAN THE MEDIA SHOW THE EFFECTS OF TERRORISM WITHOUT SHOWING IMAGES OF DEAD BODIES?

Photo:2016 Nice attack shoes abandoned By Jesmar (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons
"Where do we go from here?" asks Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at the Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967. I ask the same question as I sit in Paris, the city in which I was born at about the same time of King's speech, and listen to the latest news from Nice, Dallas, Minnesota, Louisiana, Istanbul, and Baghdad. Where do we go in a world in which so many innocent humans are being slaughtered by other humans? King answers his own question by saying that we move forward by linking justice, power, and love and understanding that "justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love." President Obama adds, in his recent speeches, that what stands against love is our failure to recognize our common humanity. We will not find justice and peace, in other words, until we insist on our human capacity to empathize, listen to each other, and see ourselves in the other.

Our common humanity is evident everywhere. It is seen in Istanbul when the colors of the French Flag were displayed on the Bosphorus Bridge to show solidarity with the French after the Nice attack. It is seen in the hundreds of peaceful rallies in the U.S. that occurred immediately after the latest violence in Dallas, Minnesota, and Louisiana. It is seen in the thousands if not millions of refugees who have been welcomed in countries such as Canada and Germany and it is evident in the daily stories that go viral on the internet of strangers helping strangers. Humans have a remarkable capacity to care for each other. The work of primatologist Frans de Vaal and evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Hrdy affirms that humans are, by nature, empathic, cooperative, altruistic, and social. Yet our modern "me, myself, and I" culture that privileges the self over community and the right to own guns over human rights encourages us to forget our humanity. We forget that Muslim, Jewish, and Christian parents want the same thing for their children; that Black. Latino, Asian, and White teenagers want the same thing for themselves and their parents; that White Police Officers and people of color want the same thing for their communities. We forget that we all want the same thing which is to live in caring communities with excellent schools, to be seen, heard, understood, taken seriously, listened to, respected, and able to live a comfortable life with our friends and family members. We forget that we all want equity, justice, opportunity, possibility, and love. We forget, in other words, that we all want for ourselves, our parents, and our children to be seen and treated as human beings. In a "We are Human" Campaign that the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (pach.org) conducted, we asked police officers and community members across the state of California (Oakland, Richmond, Stockton, and L.A.) and students, faculty, and administrators on the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi about their fears, hopes, experiences of trust, and favorite memories. What we heard was that a common fear was losing a loved one; a common hope was finding a partner and having children or having their children find happiness and success. Across race, gender, class, religion, and nationality, people spoke of trusting their mothers, fathers, spouses, siblings, and best friends and their favorite memories of togetherness with their family and friends. When asked the question "if you really knew me, you would know..." men and women from different communities and parts of the world said that they are caring people who want to help others and make the world a better place. The answer to King's question is that we must remember what we know already which is that we are human and thus have extraordinary capacities for care and empathy. Love must win but not, as King warned us, a "sentimental and anemic love," a "demanding love" or a love that insists on our own humanity and the humanity of others if we are to live in a more just and humane world.
The U.S. Defense Department's announcement that South Korea is on board with THAAD (the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense anti-missile system)--despite China's objections--provides further evidence that the U.S. must stay the course on its special relationship with the Republic of Korea.

THAAD will be deployed as

"a defensive measure to ensure the security of the ROK and its people, and to protect alliance military forces from North Korea's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile threats."

North Korea's response? An attempted launch of a submarine-based ballistic missile.

As we honor the upcoming anniversary of the armistice ending the Korean War on July 27, 1953, and as our national political parties meet at their respective conventions, it is imperative to remember how our relationship with South Korea benefits us militarily and economically.

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For more than six decades, the U.S.-ROK alliance has served as an anchor of stability and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula and in the Asia-Pacific region. The historical cornerstone of the relationship is our military alliance, forged in the Korean War and founded on the 1953 United States-Republic of Korea Mutual Defense Treaty. Since then, U.S.-ROK relations have grown to encompass shared political, economic and cultural values. Some critics claim that South Korea is not adequately shouldering its defense burden. Is the ROK a "free rider" under the U.S. security umbrella? On the contrary, South Korea spends more of its economic resources to defend itself than any of our NATO allies--despite Russia's growing assertiveness and the Middle East's dangerous security situation. Mindful of the risks from North Korea, Seoul's defense spending amounts to 2.6% of GDP, more than the United Kingdom, which is at 1.9% just shy of the 2.0% NATO guideline, and much higher than Germany (1.2%) and Japan (1%). Others question whether the U.S. would be just as secure without this military commitment. But an increasingly bellicose North Korea would be emboldened by even a slight paring down of the U.S.-R.O.K. alliance, threatening another conflict on the peninsula that would again have wider geopolitical implications. And China's strategic interests likely would lead it to become involved in any future contingency. It is also worth noting that South Korea has shared this burden in blood, serving as one of our most stalwart supporters in military actions around the globe, fighting alongside U.S. forces from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Shared Prosperity

The U.S.-Korea relationship is also based on shared prosperity. The Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) serves as an economic growth engine for both countries and a counterweight to current arguments against free trade promulgated by some on the right and the left.

The U.S. International Trade Commission estimates in a June 2016 report that the KORUS FTA has relatively large, economy-wide positive effects on national income in the U.S., more than other U.S. bilateral free trade agreements. In addition, the Commission highlights the consumer benefits, particularly for middle and low-income groups, from free trade agreements such as access to less expensive and a wider variety of products, a particular feature of our trade with Korea. Some criticize the KORUS FTA because of the rise in the U.S. goods and services trade deficit with Korea since implementation in 2012, to $18.7 billion in 2015. However, that is a smaller deficit than the U.S. has with Germany, Mexico, Japan and China. A major driver of U.S. trade deficits, in actuality, is our relatively high consumption and low savings rates, rather than a mercantilist policy by our trade partners. Significantly, Korea has recycled a portion of these trade surpluses into holdings of $112 billion in U.S. Treasury and government agency securities, helping our government finance its deficit. And often overlooked is our surplus in services trade with South Korea, amounting to $9.4 billion in 2015, propelled by a 33% increase in these exports since 2010. Although globalization has meant fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs, a phenomenon driven in large part by China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, investment by Korean firms in the U.S. has doubled since the pre-FTA era. The top twelve Korean companies alone generated 38,833 jobs in the U.S. in 2015, three times more than in 2012. And Samsung Electronics, which currently employs 15,000 in the U.S., announced in June a plan to invest $1.2 billion over four years in a U.S.-based Internet of Things R&D initiative. U.S.-South Korean military, economic and people-to-people relations today are broader, deeper, and stronger than ever. We have few allies with whom we have a greater mutual understanding, shared interest, and appreciation. Now is not the time to gamble on undermining the anchors of this alliance.

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Turkish academics Sunday firmly denounced Fridays failed coup attempt, Anadolu reported.

In a statement, the Turkish Inter-University Council said it strongly condemns the recent coup attempt to overthrow the democratically elected legitimate Government of Turkey.

Serving as an active voice of freedom and democracy, our universities will never accept this attempt targeted towards our national will and democracy.

The council called on all universities, academics, and students in Turkey to support the future of our nation and to stand against unacceptable and shameful attempt towards our nation and our national will, and our established democracy.

The failed coup is said to have been organized by followers of U.S.-based Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the government through supporters within the Turkish state, particularly the military, police, and judiciary, forming the so-called parallel state.

Friday night saw military elements make a vile attempt to overthrow Turkeys elected government, according to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Around 160 people were martyred in the ensuing violence.

Some 2,839 military personnel involved in the coup attempt have been arrested, and 20 pro-coup soldiers, including some senior officers, were killed in the attempt to overthrow the government.

Turkey accuses Gulen of being behind the coup and called for him to return to Turkey to face trial.
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US-based expatriate cleric Fetullah Gulen is the number one suspect in the two investigations launched by Istanbul prosecutors following Fridays failed coup attempt, judicial sources said Sunday, Anadolu reported.

A total of 2,300 security forces members are accused of attempting to overthrow the Turkish government by force and being members of an armed terrorist organization, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity, due to restrictions on speaking to the media.

Meanwhile, in a separate investigation, 132 Istanbul judges and prosecutors are charged with being members of an armed terrorist organization, the sources said, adding that three prosecutors each would be leading the investigations.

The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutors Office also reportedly started legal proceedings against eight senior military officers who fled to Greece in an army helicopter following the failed coup.

The officers are accused of stealing a military vehicle and armed looting.

In a related development, Turkeys Supreme Court has ordered the dismissal of 140 members over alleged ties with the coup attempt.

The Court decided to launch a disciplinary investigation into the members, who were issued detention orders by the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutors office on Saturday, the body announced Sunday.

Saturday's dismissal decision was taken as a precautionary measure pending the outcome of the investigation, it said.

Of the 140 members, 11 were detained Saturday.

The attempted takeover is said to have been organized by followers of U.S.-based Fetullah Gulen, who is accused of a long-running campaign to overthrow the government through supporters within the Turkish state, particularly the military, police, and judiciary, forming the so-called parallel state.

Friday night saw military elements make a vile attempt to overthrow Turkeys elected government, according to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Around 160 people were martyred in the ensuing violence.

Some 2,839 military personnel involved in the coup attempt have been arrested, and 20 pro-coup soldiers, including some senior officers, were killed in the attempt to overthrow the government.

Turkey accuses Gulen of being behind the coup and called for him to return to Turkey to face trial.
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We work towards an equitable,

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Turkish police have detained the remaining pro-coup soldiers at Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport on Saturday, Daily Sabah reported.

Security forces fired warning shots near the airport on the Asian side of the city after the coup plotters resisted arrest, the official said, adding arrests were being made.

Meanwhile, seven people, including a colonel were detained at a military air base in the central Anatolian province of Konya.

The same official said the situation in Konya was "under control" after coup backers there also resisted arrest.

"This is why we have been asking the people to stand guard and remain aware," he said
At the height of the attempt to overthrow Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, the rebel pilots of two F-16 fighter jets had Erdogan's plane in their sights. And yet he was able to fly on, Reuters reported.

The Turkish leader was returning to Istanbul from a holiday near the coastal resort of Marmaris after a faction in the military launched the coup attempt on Friday night, sealing off a bridge across the Bosphorus, trying to capture Istanbul's main airport and sending tanks to parliament in Ankara.

"At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan's plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul. They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him," a former military officer with knowledge of the events told Reuters.

"Why they didn't fire is a mystery," he said.

A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has ruled the country of about 80 million people since 2003, could have sent Turkey spiraling into conflict and marked another seismic shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprisings erupted and plunged its southern neighbor Syria into civil war.

A senior Turkish official confirmed to Reuters that Erdogan's business jet had been harassed while flying from the airport that serves Marmaris by two F-16s commandeered by the coup plotters but that he had managed to reach Istanbul safely.

A second senior official also said the presidential jet had been "in trouble in the air" but gave no details.

Erdogan said as the coup unfolded that the plotters had tried to attack him in the resort town of Marmaris and had bombed places he had been at shortly after he left. He "evaded death by minutes", the second official said.

Around 25 soldiers in helicopters descended on a hotel in Marmaris on ropes, shooting, just after Erdogan had left in an apparent attempt to seize him, broadcaster CNN Turk said.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim had also been directly targeted in Istanbul during the coup bid and had narrowly escaped, the official said, without giving details.

Flight tracker websites showed a Gulfstream IV aircraft, a type of business jet owned by the Turkish government, take off from Dalaman airport, which is about an hour and a quarter's drive from Marmaris, at about 2240 GMT on Friday.

It later circled in what appeared to be a holding pattern just south of Istanbul, around the time when a Reuters witness in the airport was still hearing bursts of gunfire, before finally coming in to land.

Gunfire and explosions rocked both Istanbul and Ankara through Friday night, as the armed faction which tried to seize power strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in the capital. At one point it ordered state television to read out a statement declaring a nationwide curfew.

But the attempt crumbled as forces loyal to Erdogan pushed the rebels back and as the Turkish leader, at one point appearing on broadcaster CNN Turk in a video call from a mobile phone, urged people to take to the streets to support him.

More than 290 people were killed in the violence, 104 of them coup supporters, the rest largely civilians and police officers.

The aerial aspect of the plot appears to have centered on the Akinci air base around 50 km (30 miles) northwest of Ankara, with at least 15 pilots involved under the orders of a rebel commander, according to the former military officer.

The head of the armed forces, Hulusi Akar, was held hostage at the base during the coup attempt but was eventually rescued. Jets from Akinci piloted by the rebels roared low over Istanbul and Ankara repeatedly during the chaos of Friday night, shattering windows and terrifying civilians with sonic booms.

Fighter jets taking off from another air base at Eskisehir, west of Ankara, were scrambled to bomb Akinci and try to stop the rebels. However, the rogue aircraft were able to keep flying through the night by refueling mid-air after a tanker plane was commandeered, the first senior official said.

The tanker aircraft was taken from the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, which is used by the U.S.-led coalition to bomb Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The commander of Incirlik was detained on Sunday for complicity, the official said.

MASTERMINDS

Three senior officials in Ankara said Akin Ozturk, head of the air force until 2015 and a member of High Military Council (YAS), the top body overseeing the armed forces, was one of the masterminds of the plot. He was among thousands of soldiers detained, pictured on Sunday in handcuffs wearing a striped polo shirt at Ankara police headquarters.

Ozturk was due to be retired this August at a meeting of the YAS, which convenes twice a year. According to his biography, still on the military's website, he was born in 1952.

The second mastermind was thought to be Muharrem Kose, a former legal adviser to the chief of military staff, the same three Ankara officials said. They described Kose as a follower of Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric whose network Erdogan has blamed for carrying out the coup attempt.

Kose was removed from his post in March for misconduct but had not been discharged from the armed forces, one of the officials said. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

"There were serious preparations ongoing for a very long time. The two people in question seem to have been the brains behind the coup attempt," the official said, declining to be identified because the investigation is still continuing.

Erdogan and the government have long accused Gulen's followers of trying to create a "parallel structure" within the courts, police, armed forces and media with the aim of seizing power, a charge the cleric has repeatedly denied.

"NOT FULLY PREPARED"

Erdogan, his roots in Islamist politics, has always had a difficult relationship with the military, which long saw itself as the guardian of secularism in Turkey, carrying out three coups and forcing a fourth, Islamist-led government from power in the second half of the 20th century.

Coup plot trials saw hundreds of officers jailed while Erdogan was prime minister, as the government used the courts to clip the wings of the armed forces. The allegations were later discredited and convictions overturned, but the actions damaged morale and fueled resentment.

Yet the coup plotters appear to have overestimated the support they would find within the military ranks.

"It was outside the chain of command which was the biggest handicap for the coup plotters," said Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and a former Turkish diplomat.

"They had an insufficient portfolio of resources. They were grossly under-equipped to achieve their strategic objectives ... There was definitely quite a degree of incompetence compared to how coups were done here in the past."

At one point they tried to silence CNN Turk, forcing the evacuation of the studio. When it came back on air, anchorwoman Nevsin Mengu described the soldiers as young and with "only fear in their eyes and no sign of devotion or determination".

The former military officer said the coup plotters appeared to have launched their attempt prematurely because they realized they were under surveillance, something corroborated by other officials in Ankara.

"They weren't fully prepared. The plans were leaked, they found out they were being monitored and it all apparently forced them to move faster than planned," the ex-officer said.

They also underestimated Erdogan's ability to rally the crowds, his appeal for supporters to take to the streets bringing people out in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere even as tanks took to the streets and jets screamed overhead.

Sertac Koc, press adviser to the mayor of Kazan district where the Akinci base is located, said local residents started noticing the high number of jets taking off as events unfolded.

"When they saw jets hitting parliament in Ankara and people in Istanbul, they got organized among themselves and marched to the base to try and stop them," he told Reuters by phone.

"They tried to block traffic to the base by parking their vehicles, burning hay to block the jets' vision, and in the end they attempted to cut the power to the base," he said.

Seven people were killed when the rebel soldiers opened fire, Koc said, among the dozens of civilians killed across the country in one of Turkey's worst nights of bloodshed.
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Imperial Valley News Center

Secretary of State John Kerry's Call With Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu

Washington, DC - Secretary Kerry spoke this evening with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

The foreign minister provided an update on events in Turkey, and made clear the Turkish government remains in control of state institutions. The foreign minster thanked the United States for its support.

The Secretary reiterated U.S. support for the democratically elected government in Turkey, for the rule of law and for the need for authorities to take all necessary precautions to safeguard civilian life and property as they respond to this attempted coup.

Secretary Kerry also urged restraint by the Turkish government and respect for due process -- and its international obligations -- as it investigates and uncovers additional information about those involved. He made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.

Finally, both ministers discussed Turkey's importance as both a NATO ally and a key member of the coalition to defeat Da'esh, and stressed the need to stay focused on ensuring operational support to those efforts continue unabated.
Imperial Valley News Center

USDA Funds 81 Distance Learning and Telemedicine Projects in 32 States

Washington, DC - Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will fund 81 Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT) projects in 32 states. These projects will help connect rural communities with medical and educational experts in other parts of the country, increasing access to health care, substance misuse treatment and advanced educational opportunities.

"Using technology for educational opportunities and medical care can provide services that are often unavailable in rural areas," Vilsack said. "USDA's Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program helps communities better meet the needs of their residents. For example, opioid and other substance misuse disproportionately affect rural areas, and telemedicine is proving to be an effective tool for treating patients when experts otherwise would be unavailable. Hospitals, schools and training centers across the country are successfully using telecommunications to deliver specialized care to area residents, and we are proud to bring these capabilities to 81 additional communities."

USDA is awarding $23.4 million in grants to support 45 distance learning and 36 telemedicine projects.

Some of the awards will help communities provide services to address opioid misuse, a problem that is especially prevalent in rural areas. Secretary Vilsack is leading an interagency effort to address the rural opioid crisis. On June 30, Vilsack hosted a town hall meeting in Abingdon, Va., to address how the crisis is affecting rural America and parts of Appalachia, and while there he announced funding for five DLT projects in rural Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia to respond to the issue.

One of the recipients announced today, the Southern Hills Counseling Center in Jasper, Ind., will receive a $73,000 grant to implement a telemedicine system to improve the availability of mental health services in several remote Indiana counties. The network will give health care professionals the ability to connect in real time with urban-based mental health specialists. Additionally, the counseling center will be able to connect to rural hospitals that serve this isolated community, providing psychiatric diagnoses and support for hospital emergency departments.

In Chippewa Falls, Wis., the Cooperative Educational Service Agency No. 10 has been selected to receive $134,000 to extend distance learning capabilities to students at 12 rural K-12 schools in west-central Wisconsin. This project builds upon a USDA-funded distance learning network connecting rural schools in Wisconsin with those serving the Kenaitze Indian Tribe in Alaska. The schools share teacher resources and educational content, and provide access to classes from Chippewa Valley Technical College in Eau Claire, Wis.

In Marietta, Ohio, Marietta Memorial Hospital has been selected to receive a $185,000 grant to provide telemedicine services to rural areas in southeastern Ohio and northwestern West Virginia. The hospital plans to create the first telemedicine system in the region, which has high rates of poverty, shortages of health care providers, and high rates of heart disease, lung cancer and other chronic diseases. The project will link 14 hospitals and clinics, including facilities in counties designated for special aid through USDA's StrikeForce for Rural Growth and Opportunity Initiative.

USDA Rural Development has provided $213 million for 634 DLT projects in rural areas nationwide since 2009. USDA's Rural Utilities Service, which administers the DLT program, also offers infrastructure programs that bring broadband, safe drinking water and improved wastewater treatment facilities to rural communities.

Since 2009, USDA Rural Development has helped bring high-speed Internet access to nearly 6 million rural residents and businesses; invested $31.3 billion in 963 electric projects that have financed more than 185,000 miles of transmission and distribution lines serving 4.6 million rural residents; helped 1.1 million rural residents buy homes; and funded nearly 7,000 community facilities such as schools, public safety and health care facilities. USDA also has invested $11 billion to start or expand 103,000 rural businesses. For more information, visit www.usda.gov/results.
Imperial Valley News Center

DHS Secretary Johnson Inspects Convention Security Operations in Cleveland

Cleveland, Ohio - Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson traveled to Cleveland with U.S. Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Administrator Peter Neffenger, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Executive Associate Director Peter Edge to review the operational security and contingency planning in preparation for next weeks 2016 Republican National Convention.

As with other past presidential nominating conventions and events of this size, Secretary Johnson has designated the Republican and Democratic conventions as National Special Security Events (NSSE), which allows for enhanced cooperation of federal, state, and local partners in establishing a safe and secure environment.

While in Cleveland, Secretary Johnson inspected the Multi-Agency Coordinating Center (MACC), where he received an overview of security planning for next weeks convention. Staffed by representatives from participating law enforcement and public safety agencies, the MACC will serve as the central 24-hour communications and coordination hub throughout the event.

Secretary Johnson also visited the Republican National Convention Center Complex to review security preparations in and around Quicken Loans Arena. At each location, Secretary Johnson received detailed briefings from a multi-agency security team led by the Secret Service  with significant contributions from TSA and ICE HSI, among others  and met with Department employees participating in a variety of security operations.

To support these security operations, the Department is dedicating nearly 3,000 personnel from more than two dozen components and subcomponents, including the Secret Service, the TSA, ICE HSI, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the National Protection and Programs Directorate, and the U.S. Coast Guard. These personnel will work closely with federal, state, and local partners, including the Cleveland Division of Police, to ensure the safety and security of next weeks convention.

As always, DHS reminds citizens to be vigilant at public events, and If You See Something, Say Something. The message is simple: if you see something that doesnt look right  an unattended bag or package, a person behaving in a suspicious manner, a vehicle that seems out of place  report it to the authorities.

Learn more about the If You See Something, Say Something campaign, and see how you can help to keep our nation safe.
Imperial Valley News Center

Department of Justice to Conduct After-Action Review of Police Response to Orlando Nightclub Mass Shooting

Washington, DC - The Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) announced it will conduct a comprehensive after-action assessment of the Orlando Police Departments (OPD) response to the mass shooting that took place on June 12 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

I commend Orlando Police Chief John Mina for his leadership in asking for this assessment, said COPS Office Director Ronald Davis. The lessons learned from this independent, objective and critical review of such a high-profile incident will benefit not only the Orlando Police Department and its community; it will also serve to provide all law enforcement critical guidance and recommendations for responding to future such incidents.

Chief Mina has proven to be a tremendous leader of the Orlando Police Department, said U.S. Attorney A. Lee Bentley, III of the Middle District of Florida. His decision to seek an independent review of the law enforcement response to the Pulse nightclub shootings is another example of his effective leadership. The results of this review should help not only the Orlando Police Department, but also other law enforcement agencies forced to deal with terrorist attacks.

Through its Critical Response Technical Assistance program, the COPS Office will bring in a technical assistance provider and use subject matter experts to assess OPDs preparation and response to the mass shooting, strategies and tactics used during the incident, and how the department is managing the aftermath of the mass casualty event.

The Critical Response Technical Assistance program was designed to provide targeted technical assistance to law enforcement agencies dealing with high-profile events, major incidents or sensitive issues of varying need. The program has been used in a number of other cities, including Minneapolis, Minnesota; San Bernardino, California; Ferguson, Missouri; Tampa, Florida; and Pasco, Washington. Previous after-action assessments have provided valuable guidance on lessons learned and serve as an important tool to help the law enforcement profession advance and grow.

The COPS Office, headed by Director Ronald Davis, is a federal agency responsible for advancing community policing nationwide. Since 1995, COPS has invested more than $14 billion to advance community policing, including grants awarded to more than 13,000 state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies to fund the hiring and redeployment of more than 127,000 officers and provide a variety of knowledge resource products including publications, training, and technical assistance.
A Chinese day trader reacts as he watches a stock ticker at a local brokerage house on August 27, 2015 in Beijing, China. (Photo : Getty Images)

The performance of China's economy in the first half of the year has been steady and the country is set to meet its main full-year development targets, Premier Li Keqiang said on Friday.



"[China's] new economy is vibrant, new business forms are booming, and new growth momentum is accumulating," Li said during his keynote speech at the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting Summit in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.



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The remarks came shortly after China's key macroeconomic data was released earlier in the day. Official data revealed that China's GDP grew by 6.7 percent year on year in the first half of 2016 to reach 34.06 trillion yuan ($5.08 trillion)



"The data shows that the Chinese economy will not head for a hard landing, and there is a growing trend that the services industry has become the locomotives for China's economy," Qian Jun, a professor of finance at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said in an interview with the Global Times published on Saturday.



Qian added that the figure is also good news for the global economy, which faces uncertainties following Brexit and the fragile recovery of the U.S. economy.



China is confident of achieving its main development targets for this year and maintaining medium-high economic growth rates to bring the economy to medium-high levels of development, said Li.



Economic growth in the second quarter of the year was slightly faster than official estimates, holding steady from the first quarter and raising hopes that the economy has entered a period of relatively slower but steady growth, according to the Xinhua News Agency.



Overall, June activities are much stronger than expected and China is on track to achieve its growth target for this year, said Zhu Haibin, chief economist of JP Morgan China.



Tom Rafferty, an economist at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, told the Global Times that it will be a challenge to identify where growth will come from in the coming months.



"The greatest concern is the ongoing slide in private-sector investment," he said.



However, Sheng Laiyun, a spokesman of the National Bureau of Statistics, said the stabilization of the Chinese economy is set to continue.



He elaborated that major indicators are operating in a reasonable zone while supply-side structural reform and economic restructuring continue to advance.


Suspected Human Smuggler Arrested at Border Patrol Checkpoint

Pine Valley, California - Early this morning, U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested a 31-year-old woman after she attempted to smuggle two foreign nationals through the Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 8 near Pine Valley.

At about 3 a.m., agents encountered the woman as she arrived at the checkpoint driving a 2012 Kia Optima sedan. After agents interviewed the woman, they conducted a search of the vehicle and discovered two male Mexican nationals laying down inside the trunk.

The agents arrested the men, who were in the U.S. illegally. The driver was also arrested and is currently facing federal human smuggling charges.

In response to this incident, Patrol Agent in Charge David BeMiller said, Campo Station agents did an outstanding job detecting this human smuggling case leading to the rescue of two individuals and now the driver faces criminal prosecution.

From October 1, 2015, to May 31, 2016, Border Patrol agents in San Diego Sector have apprehended 20,782 people.

To prevent the illicit smuggling of humans, drugs, and other contraband, the U.S. Border Patrol maintains a high level of vigilance on corridors of egress away from our Nations borders. To report suspicious activity to the U.S. Border Patrol, contact San Diego Sector at (619) 498-9900.
United States Files Lawsuit to Recover Monetary Damages Associated with 2013 Mountain Fire in San Bernardino National Forest

Los Angeles, California - A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks nearly $25 million in damages from the owner of a Mountain Center residence and the propertys caretakers for alleged negligence that led to the 2013 Mountain Fire, which burned for more than two weeks and scorched over 27,500 acres, more than half of which was in the San Bernardino National Forest.

The civil complaint alleges negligence and violations of California law as being the cause of the fire that started on July 15, 2013, and burned a large swath of the San Jacinto Mountains, for a time threatening the town of Idyllwild and forcing over 5,000 residents to evacuate. An investigation determined that the fire started when an electrical discharge inside of an improperly maintained electrical junction box shot sparks and hot material out of the box and onto dry ground vegetation below, according to the lawsuit.

The Mountain Fire started on property known as Gibraltar West that is owned by Tarek M. Al-Shawaf, who is the lead defendant in the lawsuit. The complaint also names as defendants James D. Nowlin and Donna L. Nowlin, who were the caretakers employed by Al-Shawaf.

The defendants had a duty to properly inspect and maintain their electrical equipment, electrical wires, and electrical junction boxes to ensure that they were safe, properly secured, and clear from dangerous conditions, the complaint alleges.

Property owners and their agents have a responsibility to ensure that property under their control is maintained in a safe fashion, said United States Attorney Eileen M. Decker. In addition to endangering countless lives, including those of firefighters who battle these large-scale blazes, the failure to properly manage the property and the electrical equipment on the property in this case cost taxpayers approximately $24 million dollars.

The United States Forest Service expended considerable resources to suppress the Mountain Fire, including deploying more than 3,000 firefighters, 250 fire engines, 20 helicopters and 10 airplanes. The complaint specifically alleges that the Forest Service spent more than $15 million to fight the fire, that the fire caused more than $9 million in damages to natural resources, and that more than $300,000 had to be spent to perform emergency rehabilitation. The damages to the United States include, but are not limited to: mitigation, rehabilitation, and reforestation of burned areas; loss of and damage to timber, habitat, wildlife, watershed, earth, scenery, and environment; aesthetic values; loss of use and recreation; soil damage; and erosion, according to the lawsuit.

The federal lawsuit comes after the Forest Service made demands that Al-Shawaf and the Nowlins pay for the costs and damages associated with the fire. The defendants have not paid any of the money demanded by the government.

While the lawsuit alleges that the Forest Services suffered losses of nearly $25 million, the defendants could also be ordered to pay intangible environmental damages for harm caused to the San Bernardino National Forest, as well as interest and penalties.

This matter was investigated by the United States Forest Service and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention.

This case is being handled by Assistant United States Attorney Garrett Coyle of the Civil Division.
CBP Looking To Fill Positions At El Paso Port Of Entry - Hiring Seminar To Help Job Seekers Apply

El Paso, Texas - U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations is currently seeking applicants for CBP officer positions at 22 locations around the country including the El Paso port of entry.

This is an opportunity for area residents who want to work for CBP but not leave the community they already call home, said CBP Director of Field Operations Hector Mancha. CBP officer positions specifically designated for El Paso do not become available often so now is the time to act.

In an effort to assist area job seekers CBP recruiters are conducting a hiring seminar July 26. Trained CBP officers will be available to discuss the steps applicants need to take to successfully submit an application. They will help applicants navigate the federal application process paying specific attention to being prepared to complete applications using accurate information, employment dates and similar items normally required when applying for a career. Minimum job requirements and resume building tips will also be covered.

The hiring seminar is being held at Park University/East campus located at 1330 Adabel Drive in El Paso. Sessions are scheduled for 8 a.m., 1 p.m., and 6 p.m. and run three hours. Space is limited so those wishing to attend should register in advance by calling 915-834-8849 or 915-478-6758.

The current CBP officer vacancy closes July 31.
Marking the Second Anniversary of the Shootdown of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

Washington, DC - Two years ago today, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, taking the lives of 298 innocent people from 11 countries. Our sympathy and thoughts remain with the families and friends of the MH 17 victims.

In October 2015, we welcomed the findings of the Dutch Safety Board in its final report on the cause of the MH 17 crash. This report validated that MH 17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile. Our own assessment has not changed  the missile was fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.

The United States continues to work with the Joint Investigation Team and law enforcement authorities. We have full confidence that these professionals are conducting an impartial, credible, and comprehensive investigation that will form the basis of an independent prosecution to bring the perpetrators of this tragedy to justice.
Consumer Reports Calls on Tesla to Disable and Update Auto Steering Function, Remove Autopilot Name

Washington, DC - Consumer Reports is calling on the automaker Tesla to disable the automatic steering function in the Autopilot driving-assist system available in its Model S vehicles until the company updates the function to confirm that the driver's hands remain on the steering wheel at all times.

Tesla should also change the name of the Autopilot feature because it promotes a potentially dangerous assumption that the Model S is capable of driving on its own, Consumer Reports said. The auto company is under intense scrutiny for how it deployed and marketed the Autopilot system after a series of crashes. Federal safety officials are investigating a fatal crash involving a Tesla and a tractor-trailer in Florida.

By marketing their feature as Autopilot, Tesla gives consumers a false sense of security, said Laura MacCleery, Vice President of Consumer Policy and Mobilization for Consumer Reports. In the long run, advanced active safety technologies in vehicles could make our roads safer. But today, were deeply concerned that consumers are being sold a pile of promises about unproven technology. Autopilot can't actually drive the car, yet it allows consumers to have their hands off the steering wheel for minutes at a time. Tesla should disable automatic steering in its cars until it updates the program to verify that the drivers hands are kept on the wheel.

Specifically, Consumer Reports is calling for Tesla to do each of the following:

Disable the Autosteer function of the Autopilot system until it can be reprogrammed to require drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel

Stop referring to the system as Autopilot as it is misleading and potentially dangerous

Issue clearer guidance to owners on how the system should be used and its limitations

Test all safety-critical systems fully before public deployment; no more Beta releases

Consumer Reports contacted Tesla about these concerns, and the company sent this response via email:

Tesla is constantly introducing enhancements, proven over millions of miles of internal testing, to ensure that drivers supported by Autopilot remain safer than those operating without assistance. We will continue to develop, validate, and release those enhancements as the technology grows. While we appreciate well-meaning advice from any individual or group, we make our decisions on the basis of real-world data, not speculation by media.

Tesla also defended the safety record of the system, writing that 130 million miles have been driven on Autopilot, with one confirmed fatality. The company underscored that its beta software development process includes significant internal validation.

Last week, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent a letter to Tesla requesting detailed information about Autopilot, including any design changes and updates to the system, as well as detailed logs of when the system has prompted drivers to take over steering. The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating whether Tesla failed to tell investors about the crash in a timely fashion.

MacCleery said automakers must commit immediately to name automated features with descriptive, not exaggerated, titles, noting that these companies should roll out new features only when they are certain they are safe. Consumers should never be guinea pigs for vehicle safety beta programs, she said. At the same time, regulators urgently need to step up their oversight of cars with these active safety features. NHTSA should insist on expert, independent third-party testing and certification for these features, and issue mandatory safety standards to ensure that they operate safely.

The most serious of the Autopilot crashes happened on in Florida on May 7. According to the accident report, Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Ohio resident, died in a collision with a tractor trailer that was making a left turn in front of his Model S. Tesla later acknowledged that the car was in Autopilot mode at the time. On June 30, Tesla published a blog post on the accident, stating neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. That crash has prompted investigations by NHTSA, and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Consumer Reports has owned three Teslas (2013 Model S 85, 2014 Model S P85D, and 2016 Model X 90D), and has seen first-hand how such beta software is transmitted wirelessly into the cars. When software in a desktop computer or handheld electronic devices is labeled as beta, it is typically means that functionality is not fully developed and is still being fine-tuned.
Virginia Man Sentenced to 102 Months in Prison for Attempting to Travel to Syria to Join ISIL

Washington, DC - Joseph Hassan Farrokh, 29, of Woodbridge, Virginia, was sentenced Friday to 102 months in prison for attempting to provide material support and resources to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a designated foreign terrorist organization.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin, U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente of the Eastern District of Virginia and Assistant Director in Charge Paul M. Abbate of the FBIs Washington Field Office made the announcement

With this sentence, Joseph Hassan Farrokh will be held accountable for attempting to travel overseas to join ISIL and to provide material support to the designated terrorist organization, said Assistant Attorney General Carlin. The National Security Divisions highest priority is countering terrorist threats, and we will continue to work to stem the flow of foreign fighters abroad and bring to justice those who attempt to provide material support to designated foreign terrorist organizations.

Farrokhs state of mind and conduct in this case were egregious and go to the heart of the safety of our community and the nation, said U.S. Attorney Boente. This office will continue to pursue those that travel to fight against the United States and our allies, as well as those individuals that recruit others on behalf of ISIL in the homeland.

Joseph Farrokh admitted to attempting to travel to Syria to join and fight with ISIL in support of its oppressive, violent and criminal agenda, said Assistant Director in Charge Abbate. Thanks to the relentless work of agents, analysts and prosecutors, together with the essential contributions of our partners in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, we were able to disrupt those plans and bring him to justice. The FBIs highest priority remains preventing terrorist attacks and combating terrorism here in the U.S. and around world.

U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia imposed todays sentence and also ordered Farrokh to serve 10 years of supervised release.

According to the statement of facts filed with the plea agreement, Farrokh conspired with Mahmoud Amin Elhassan, 25, also of Woodbridge, to travel from the United States to Syria in order to fight with ISIL. As part of their plan, Farrokh would travel first, followed by Elhassan at a later date. Farrokh and Elhassan spoke in detail about their potential travel, including discussing the different routes each would take to travel to Syria. Farrokh also provided $600 to Elhassan to aid in Elhassans future travel to Syria. Both men spoke openly with each other about supporting ISIL and supporting violent jihad and on Oct. 2, 2015, Farrokh stated that he had no patience and wanted to go right away and chop their heads.

According to the statement of facts, in an effort to conceal their plans to support ISIL, Farrokh and Elhassan communicated using apps they believed were safe from law enforcement detection. In the summer of 2015, Farrokh and Elhassan talked more seriously about going to join ISIL and concluded that they needed someone to help them do so. Elhassan contacted like-minded people all over the world and the men pursued two separate plans to travel to Syria to join ISIL, but neither plan worked out.

According to the statement of facts, Farrokh and Elhassan conspired with other persons they believed would help facilitate their travel to Syria. Over the course of many meetings, the men discussed in detail their travel plans and efforts to avoid law enforcement detection, including Farrokh shaving his beard and flying out of Richmond International Airport, where they believed there would be less security. Farrokh and Elhassan agreed that Farrokh should tell his family that he intended to travel to Saudi Arabia to study.

According to the statement of facts, on Jan. 15, 2016, Elhassan picked up Farrokh at his home in Woodbridge and drove him to a location approximately one mile from the Richmond airport. Farrokh then took a cab to the airport, checked in for his flight, cleared security and was arrested as he was approaching his departure gate.

The FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gordon D. Kromberg and Dennis M. Fitzpatrick of the Eastern District of Virginia are prosecuting the case with Trial Attorney D. Andrew Sigler of the National Security Divisions Counterterrorism Section.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Delivers Remarks at the League of United Latin American Citizens National Convention

Washington, DC - Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Delivers Remarks at the League of United Latin American Citizens National Convention:

Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for that warm welcome. Before we begin, I know that were all still thinking about the devastating attack in Nice, France. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those lost and wounded. And the Department of Justice has reached out to our French counterparts to offer any assistance we can provide.

Its a pleasure to be here and it is a privilege to join so many outstanding leaders, passionate advocates and devoted public servants for this inspiring gathering  hosted by a truly inspiring organization dedicated to the idea that every American should be treated equally.

Of course, Im mindful that we convene today in the shadow of several tragic incidents that have tested that idea, reminding us that for too many Americans of color, equal justice under the law too often seems like a promise unfulfilled; we also gather in the wake of the tragedy in Dallas, where we saw a city that has been a leader in community policing initiatives suffer the loss of five brave officers at the hands of an assassin. I want you to know that the Department of Justice is working tirelessly in a number of ways to restore trust between law enforcement and the communities we serve. Our Civil Rights Division is partnering with police departments across the country to ensure constitutional policing and to help build stronger communities. Our Community Relations Service is working with a range of stakeholders to resolve conflicts and promote reconciliation. Our Office of Community Oriented Policing Services is working in a variety of ways to promote and implement the recommendations from the Presidents Task Force on 21st Century Policing to ensure that local law enforcement officers can serve residents fairly, safely and effectively. And our Office of Justice Programs is providing peer-to-peer resources and technical assistance to local law enforcement and communities. This is vital work  work that I know the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) is also dedicated to advancing. From your efforts to engage with local law enforcement agencies to your work to help at-risk youth stay on a path of opportunity and achievement, you are at the forefront of our national initiative to make equal justice a reality for every American.

That leadership is consistent with LULACs proud legacy as a trailblazing organization committed to breaking down barriers of prejudice and building bridges of opportunity. When this organization was established in 1929, Latino Americans were the targets of discrimination in private business and public life. But in the face of exclusion and dehumanization, your founders stood tall and said, We are Americans too. Their action at a time of hardship and injustice represented an extraordinary leap of faith that Americas promise of liberty and equality could be extended to all Americans. And your actions since that time have vindicated their courage. In the decades since your founding, you have helped countless Latino Americans access quality education, find good jobs, secure decent housing and receive adequate health care. You have marched for Latino rights in the streets and argued for them in the courts  including in several landmark decisions that became important precedents for Brown v. Board. You have battled generations of prejudice and demonization bigotry  from the No Mexicans Allowed signs that were once common throughout the United States, to the outbursts of anti-immigrant sentiment that still too often poison our politics and infect our discourse. And you have fought to ensure that Latino Americans can fully enjoy their most basic right as American citizens: the right to vote.

That right is fundamental to the strength of our country and the health of our democracy. As our Constitution makes clear in its very first words, the United States is a nation built on the conviction that self-government  by We, the People  is the surest safeguard of freedom and the soundest foundation of prosperity and it is the right to vote in fair and free elections that makes self-government possible. Of course, in 1787, We, the People had a much narrower definition  a definition that largely excluded people of color. As Congresswoman Barbara Jordan said in 1974, I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through long years of fierce conflict and determined struggle, that definition of We, the People has been gradually expanded  perhaps most effectively through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law  one of the most important civil rights laws of our nations history  finally gave the federal government meaningful power to enforce every Americans right to vote. With the stroke of a pen, centuries-old injustices were met with righteous action and an era of legally sanctioned discrimination was brought to a close.

But while the Voting Rights Act was undoubtedly a watershed in the history of Americas march toward universal suffrage, it was not the end of that journey. After all, it wasnt until 1975 that American Indians, Alaska Natives and Latino and Hispanic Americans were fully included in its protections. Voters with disabilities gained protections in 1984 and 1990, while members of the armed forces and Americans overseas received enhanced protections in 1986 and 2009. And there is still so much work to do: Americans with criminal records are still too often disenfranchised for years because of their past misdeeds. Since the 2008 election, there has been a surge in state bills and laws that would curb access to the voting booth. And three years ago, the Voting Rights Act itself was significantly weakened by the Supreme Courts decision in Shelby County v. Holder.

That decision did great damage. It seriously undermined Section 5 of the VRA, which required jurisdictions with the most troubling histories of voter discrimination to receive federal approval, or preclearance, before they could change their election rules. Section 5 was in many ways the heart of the Voting Rights Act and its neutralization was a serious blow with far-reaching consequences. First and foremost, the Department of Justice can no longer block voting restrictions before they take effect. For example, in 2011, the state of Texas passed a restrictive voter ID law that requires voters to produce documents that more than half a million Texas voters simply do not have. Seven federal judges have reviewed this law and seven federal judges have found that it violates the Voting Rights Act  three of them before Shelby County and four of them after. The case is currently before the full Fifth Circuit, with a decision due any day. But because of Shelby County, Texass law remains in force while we wait for a final decision  and it is not the only one. Because of Shelby County, other states have also enacted laws that restrict voting rights. And these laws have the potential to distort elections by making it harder for voters  especially low-income and minority voters  to access the ballot box.

Shelby County had other consequences as well. It has forced the Justice Department to rely much more on local groups and individuals to alert us to potentially unlawful acts, since jurisdictions no longer have to self-report. In the past, we have also relied heavily on election observers  specially trained individuals who are authorized to enter polling locations and monitor the process to ensure that it lives up to its legal obligations. Unfortunately, our use of observers is largely tied to the preclearance coverage formula that the Supreme Court found to be unconstitutional in Shelby County and so our ability to deploy them has been severely curtailed. Rest assured, we will continue to monitor elections to the extent that we can, but because of Shelby County, we will be sending out fewer people with fewer capabilities this November.

The kind of harm we see  in places that pass restrictive laws that we now spend years fighting on the back end, instead of preventing on the front end; the harm that comes when we dont have the same number or kind of eyes and ears in polling locations that we did before cannot be undone. And in the year 2016, in the United States of America, it should not be tolerated. Nor does it have to be. In its ruling, the Supreme Court made clear that Congress has the ability to establish a new system for determining which jurisdictions are subject to preclearance  a step that would restore Section 5 to its full effect and restore our capacity to protect. I have repeatedly urged Congress to embrace this opportunity. And today, once again, I call upon the peoples branch to stand up for the peoples voice. In a nation of the people, by the people and for the people, no eligible citizen should be denied the right to vote, no matter who they are or where they live. And the representatives of the people should guarantee that right  not tomorrow, not after the election, but right now.

Now, the good news is that even without Section 5, the Voting Rights Act remains a potent tool. Its other provisions remain in effect. And there are many other important voting rights laws that our Civil Rights Division is using to ensure and to widen access to the ballot. We entered into an agreement with the State of Alabama to ensure its compliance with the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to provide eligible citizens with the opportunity to register to vote through motor vehicle agencies. Our action eased the way to vote for the more than one million Alabama residents who interact with the state motor vehicle agency annually. We have also made certain that communities in Virginia establish accessible polling places for voters with disabilities. We have secured access for Latino voters in Napa County, California, to the Spanish-language ballots and assistance to which they are legally entitled. We have worked to ensure that uniformed service members deployed at home and abroad are able to send in their absentee ballots in plenty of time for them to be counted  because the men and women fighting to defend our rights should never be denied theirs. When others bring cases, we join the fight there as well: since the beginning of 2014, we have filed briefs in private lawsuits in 14 different states that address issues ranging from district lines and registration opportunities to ID rules and language access. And as we prepare for the first presidential election since the Shelby County ruling, we are mobilizing all of the resources left at our disposal to monitor the process as thoroughly and effectively as possible.

We will continue to advance these efforts, but we cannot move forward alone. We will be leaning on our comrades in arms, our fellow soldiers in the fight. More than ever, we need people like you to be our eyes and ears. We need you to alert us to any irregularities in the registration or voting process. And we need you not only to defend the right to vote, but to exercise it. Because even as we challenge laws that would disenfranchise so many of our fellow Americans, we must ask why so many of our fellow Americans effectively disenfranchise themselves by choosing not to vote. Little more than half of voting-age Americans participated in the 2012 presidential elections and in the 2014 midterms, the number fell to just 36 percent  the lowest turnout in 70 years. As President Obama has said, Even if we dismantled every barrier to voting, that alone would not change the fact that America has some of the lowest voting rates in the free world.

This is an issue that transcends partisanship. No matter our political beliefs, each of us has an interest in a lively and robust democracy where everyone participates. And I would urge the American people to recall just how precious the ballot really is. Today, there are still millions of people around the world who can only dream of casting a legitimate ballot; countless others have wielded that right, only to see it crushed by force or stripped away by violence. And though too many Americans have been excluded from the polls for too much of our history, our history has also brought us heroes who gave so much to tear down those obstacles, to end those injustices, to challenge the United States to make good on the promises set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We stand on the shoulders of those who have fought and died for that right overseas  many of them before their country fully recognized them as citizens. And many of us here tonight are the children of those who marched and bled to enlarge that right here at home. So many tried to silence them by force; how can we silence ourselves through inaction?

Our votes do more than select a candidate or choose a leader. With our votes  with the steps we take and the ballots we mark  We reaffirm our commitment to one of our most basic convictions as Americans: the idea that each of us can and should make a contribution to our common life; that one persons voice is as worthy as the next; that each of us owns America and that in the final analysis, we are all created equal. When we go to the polls on Election Day  when we wake up early to vote before work or school; when we stand at the polls with our fellow citizens; when our turn comes and we step forward to mark our ballot  we do so not as Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, black or white, Latino or Asian. Rather, we do so as Americans  diverse in our beliefs and opinions, but united in our devotion to this great democracy. As it is written on the Great Seal of the United States, E Pluribus Unum: Out of many, one.

Today, as we gather to reflect on the gains we have made and to chart our course forward, let us remind ourselves that we are stronger when we act as one nation and one people. Let us choose to honor our privileges and to meet our responsibilities. Let us resolve not only to defend our most basic right as Americans, but to cherish it, to honor it, to exercise it  in protection of liberty, in defense of democracy and in pursuit of justice.

I want to thank all of you here today at LULAC for working to safeguard the right to vote throughout your proud history. I want to thank you for always challenging our nation to be more open, more inclusive and more equal. And I want you to know that the Department of Justice will remain your staunch ally and faithful partner in that noble work  the work that has driven our progress in the past; that animates us in the present; and that promises to help us realize a brighter future.
NASA, USAID Open Environmental Monitoring Hub in West Africa

Washington, DC - NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have opened a new environmental monitoring program in West Africa that will enhance the role of space-based observations in the management of climate-sensitive issues facing the world today.

SERVIR-West Africa, based in Niamey, Niger, is one of four NASA-USAID sponsored centers operating in developing regions of the world. This SERVIR center is the newest facility for a growing global community of scientists and decision-makers who are using publicly available data from space to manage climate-sensitive issues, such as food security, water resources, land use change and natural disasters.

"NASA is deeply committed to Earth science and the value it provides people around the globe. Im proud to say SERVIR is now serving more than 40 countries," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who took part in the facilitys official opening Thursday. "Together with USAID, we are continuing the effort to bring space-based science down to Earth for real time, real world uses that are changing peoples lives where they live."

Teams of scientists at SERVIR-West Africa will draw on a continuous stream of space-based climate, weather and other data from NASAs constellation of Earth observing satellites, sharing timely information with policy makers, government agencies and other stakeholders in Ghana, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Niger to address critical regional issues, such as food security and fresh water availability.

There is an immediate demand to connect available science and technology to development solutions in West Africa, said Alex Deprez, director of USAIDs West Africa regional office. SERVIR-West Africa will engage scientists across the region to partner with each other to address the greatest challenges in the region. What we seek in the long term are African solutions to African problems.

SERVIR-West Africa will be funded by USAID and NASA and implemented by a subsidiary of the Permanent Inter-State Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS), the Agriculture, Hydrology and Meteorology (AGRHYMET) Regional Center, headquartered in Niamey. This center will implement this program together with a consortium of West African partners serving the region with support from Tetra Tech Incorporated, headquartered in Pasadena, California.

SERVIRs global network of leading regional knowledge centers also includes the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development in Nairobi, Kenya, serving eastern and southern Africa; the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu, Nepal, serving the Hindu-Kush-Himalaya region; the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Bangkok, Thailand, serving the lower Mekong region of Southeast Asia; and other partners dedicated to environmental management through the integration of Earth observations and geospatial technologies.

SERVIR is a joint NASA-USAID development initiative that operates internationally in partnership with leading regional organizations to help train developing countries in the use of data from space to become better stewards of the planet and its resources, while also meeting the societal needs. Programs in each region focus on issues and needs most critical to their local populations.

A global collaboration network is fundamental to SERVIRs success. Beyond the sponsorship and active participation of NASA and USAID, collaboration spans a number of other U.S. government agencies and projects, as well as partnerships with government agencies in the regions in which SERVIR operates, joint research with universities and non-governmental organizations, and capacity building with a host of specialized groups.

SERVIR was developed in coordination with the Group on Earth Observations, an alliance of more than 100 nations and organizations collaborating to build a global Earth-observing system to benefit society's needs. Named for a Spanish term meaning "to serve," the program was initiated in 2005 by researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, which continues to house the SERVIR Science Coordination Office.

NASA uses the vantage point of space to increase our understanding of our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records. The agency freely shares this unique knowledge and works with institutions around the world to gain new insights into how our planet is changing.

For more information about SERVIR, visit:

http://www.servirglobal.net

For more information on NASA Earth science, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/earth
Developments in Bahrain

Washington, DC - Secretary of State John Kerry: "The United States is deeply concerned by the decision of a Bahraini court to dissolve the opposition Al Wefaq political society and liquidate its assets. This ruling is the latest in a series of disconcerting steps in Bahrain, including the Government of Bahrain's revocation of Sheikh Isa Qassems citizenship and the arrest of human rights activist Nabil Rajab.

"We take note of the governments prior outreach to the opposition, reiterate our disappointment that the opposition boycotted parliamentary elections in 2014, and appreciate the very real security threats facing Bahrain.

"However, the governments recent steps to suppress nonviolent opposition only undermine Bahrains cohesion and security, as well as the regions stability. These actions are inconsistent with U.S. interests and strain our partnership with Bahrain. They also contradict the governments stated commitments to protecting human rights and achieving reconciliation with all of Bahrains communities.

"We call on the Government of Bahrain to reverse these and other recent measures, return urgently to the path of reconciliation, and work collectively to address the aspirations of all Bahrainis. This is the best way to marginalize those who support violence, and bring greater security and stability to the region. For our part, the United States will continue to support steps by all sides to advance a political dialogue."
Zimbabwe Man Who Started 'Pak Bean' Rivalry Had This to Say After Pakistan's Defeat
Zeiss VR One Plus Headset (Photo : Twitter )

Google seems to be working on a stand-alone virtual reality (VR)/augmented reality (AR) device in its R&D labs. However, it is likely that the company was not only developing new headsets for its mobile VR platform Daydream. The Alphabet company was also reportedly working on a secret project that included a high-end VR headset that is more like Oculus Rift or HTC Vive than smartphone-based Samsung Gear VR.



Advertisement

Recode reported the news about Google's VR/AR headset to take on Rift and Vive. About 50 Google employees were working on the standalone headset at Google's X research lab, according to PC Magazine. The tech giant was considering using a non-Android operating system.



It seems that the project had been stopped. However, Engadget then published a new report based on solid sources that Google was still working on a VR/AR headset that did not require a PC or smartphone to work.



The new Google headset could be a stand-alone device. Another tenable option would be a hardware box that is between a VR headset module and a full desktop/laptop.



The headset will also reportedly be designed for AR applications and not as a VR-only device. That would be possible after the past experiments with its Glass smart glasses.



Google-funded startup Magic Leap is also working on an AR/VR headset. CEO Rony Abovitz recently reported that the lightweight headset will be unveiled soon.



It is possible that Google and Magic Leap are teaming up to develop their new wearable tech. The Magic Leap device works on little computing power. Abovitz told Fortune the system copies how human eyes and brains work together and converts the mind into the display.



In related news, although Google Glass was known as expensive geek wear, it is becoming popular as a workplace device. Members of Boeing's research and technology division have reportedly used the high-tech Google goggles to build aircraft wire harnesses, according to The Verge.



The factory workers must use a PDF assembly guide to connect electrical systems via a bird's nest of wires. Google Glass units improve the process. Boeing reports production time has dropped one-quarter and error rates have been cut in half.



The aircraft manufacturer has been using AR glasses since 1995. However, today's lower costs and boosts in computer power have solved the 90s' size, battery, and network problems.



Here's video on Google's Daydream VR headset:






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The family of Cathriona White, the former girlfriend of Jim Carrey, have received death threats in the wake of her death.

White, a make-up artist from Ireland, was found dead in her Los Angeles home in September. A post-mortem found the 30-year-old died from an overdose of various prescription drugs. Her funeral was held in Tipperary and Carrey, 54, was a pallbearer.

The Los Angeles county coroner's office published a report into Whites death at the beginning of July which included details of notes she had left at her home. The contents of the notes were widely reported in the press.

Weve had a terrible few months since Cathrionas death. Theres been death threats and angry letters, Cathrionas stepfather Brian Sweetman told The Sunday Mirror.

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.

Were just glad its reached a conclusion and that the truth has finally come out.

After the report was released, Carey criticised the fact such details has been made public.

When I came to Hollywood to make it as a comedian, I soon learned that the details of my private life would be handed out to the media like free dinner vouchersm, he said in a statement. I never dreamed that the people I love most in the world would also be on the menu. What a shame. Regrettably, Jim Carrey.

The coroner's office said it is legally obligated to publish post-mortem reports as part of the public record. A spokesperson said Carrey's lawyer had been was contacted prior to the details being released to the public.

Anyone in need of confidential support can contact the Samaritans 24/7 for free on 116 123 or visit www.samaritans.org.
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The brother of the Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been arrested for her murder.

Waseem Baloch, 25, was arrested by police in Dera Ghazi Khan late on Saturday night and has apparently confessed to killing her in the name of "honour".

Qandeel, 26, established herself as a household name in Pakistan for posting bold, sometimes risque photographs and videos and challenging social norms in a conservative Muslim country.

The Dawn newspaper said her younger brother Waseem confessed to drugging and strangling her in a press conference, saying that she brought dishonour to the Baloch name.

She wasn't aware I was killing her, Waseem said. I gave her a tablet and then strangled her.

City police chief Azhar Akram said Waseem, who runs a local phone shop, fled to Dera Ghazi Khan with two of his friends after killing her and they are currently trying to track down the friends to find out if they were involved.

Notable deaths in 2016 Show all 42 1 /42 Notable deaths in 2016 Notable deaths in 2016 Debbie Reynolds was an American actress, singer, businesswoman, film historian, and humanitarian. She died on December 28 in Los Angeles Rex Notable deaths in 2016 Actress Carrie Fisher died on December 27 aged 60 Rex Notable deaths in 2016 Comedian and Actor Ricky Harris died on December 26 aged 54 Rex Notable deaths in 2016 British singer George Michael died on 25 December aged 53 Getty Notable deaths in 2016 Rick Parfitt OBE was an English musician, best known for being a singer, songwriter and rhythm guitarist in the rock band Status Quo. He died on December 24 in Marbella, Spain Rex Notable deaths in 2016 Lord Jenkin of Roding died at the age of 90 on the 21 December PA wire Notable deaths in 2016 Rabbi Lionel Blue died on the 19 December Rex Notable deaths in 2016 Zsa Zsa Gabor died on December 18 Getty Notable deaths in 2016 Leonard Cohen died on 7 November Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Grand secretary of the Orange Order Drew Nelson died on 10 October aged 60 after a short illness PA Notable deaths in 2016 Aaron Pryor, the relentless junior welterweight died Sunday, Oct. 9, at the age of 60 at his home in Cincinnati after a long battle with heart disease AP Notable deaths in 2016 Polish Director Andrzej Wajda died on October 9, aged 90 Reuters Notable deaths in 2016 Stylianos Pattakos has died following a stroke on 8th October. He was 103 years old. AP Notable deaths in 2016 Dickie Jeeps, was an English rugby union player who played for Northampton. He represented and captained both the England national rugby union team and the British Lions in the 1950s and 1960s. He died on 8th October. He was 84 Getty Notable deaths in 2016 Duke of Westminster Billionaire landowner the Duke of Westminster, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor has died on 9 August, aged 64 Rex Features Notable deaths in 2016 Christina Knudsen Sir Roger Moores stepdaughter Christina Knudsen has died from cancer on 25 July at teh age of 47 Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Caroline Aherne The actress Caroline Aherne has died from cancer on 2 July at the age of 52 Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Christina Grimmie Christina Grimmie, 22, who was an American singer and songwriter, known for her participation in the NBC singing competition The Voice, was signing autographs at a concert venue in Orlando on 10 June when an assailant shot her. Grimmie was transported to a local hospital where she died from her wounds on 11 June Getty Notable deaths in 2016 Kimbo Slice Former UFC and Bellator MMA fighter Kimbo Slice died after being admitted to hospital in Florida on 6 June, aged 42 Getty Notable deaths in 2016 Muhammad Ali The three-time former heavyweight world champion died after being admitted to hospital with a respiratory illness on 3 June, aged 74 Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Sally Brampton Brampton who was the launch editor of the UK edition of Elle magazine has died on 10 May, aged 60 Grant Triplow/REX/Shutterstock Notable deaths in 2016 Billy Paul The soul singer Billy Paul, who was best known for his single Me and Mrs Jones, has died on 24 April, aged 81 Noel Vasquez/Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Prince Prince, the legendary musician, has been found dead at his Paisley Park recording studio on 21 April. He was 57 Notable deaths in 2016 Chyna WWE icon Joan Laurer dies aged 45 after being found at California home on 20 April Notable deaths in 2016 Victoria Wood The five-time Bafta-winning actress and comedian Victoria Wood has died on 20 April at her London home after a short illness with cancer. She was 62 Notable deaths in 2016 David Gest The entertainer and former husband of Liza Minnelli, David Gest has been found dead on 12 April in the Four Seasons hotel in Canary Warf, London. He was 62-years-old PA Notable deaths in 2016 Denise Robertson Denise Robertson, an agony aunt on This Morning for over 30 years, has died on 1 April, aged 83 Notable deaths in 2016 Zaha Hadid Dame Zaha Hadid, the prominent architect best known for designs such as the London Olympic Aquatic Centre and the Guangzhou Opera House, has died of a heart attack on 31 March, aged 65 2010 AFP Notable deaths in 2016 Ronnie Corbett British entertainer Ronnie Corbett has passed away on 31 March at the age of 85 2014 Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Imre Kertesz Hungarian writer and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz, who won the 2002 Nobel Literature Prize, has died on 31 March, at the age of 86 REUTERS Notable deaths in 2016 Rob Ford Rob Ford, the former controversial mayor of Toronto, has died following a battle with a rare form of cancer. The 46-year-old passed away at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto on 22 March Notable deaths in 2016 Joey Feek Joey (left) passed away in March after a two-year cancer illness. She was part of country music duo, Joey + Rory, with her husband Rory (right) Jason Merritt/Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Umberto Eco Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco died 19 February 2016 aged 84 EPA Notable deaths in 2016 Harper Lee Harper Lee, the American novelist known for writing 'To Kill a Mockingbird', died February 19, 2016 aged 89 2005 Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Vanity Vanity, pictured performing in 1983, died aged 57 REX Features Notable deaths in 2016 Dave Mirra The BMX legend's body found inside truck with gunshot wound after apparent suicide aged 41 Notable deaths in 2016 Harry Harpham The former miner became Sheffield Labour MP in May after many years as a local councillor. He died after succumbing to cancer, at the age of 61. Notable deaths in 2016 Dale Griffin The Mott the Hoople drummer died on January 17, aged 67 REX Notable deaths in 2016 Rene Angelil Celine Dion's husband and manager Rene Angelil has lost his battle with cancer on 14 January, aged 73 2011 Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Alan Rickman Legendary actor Alan Rickman has died on 14 January at the age of 69 after battle with pancreatic cancer. He is largely regarded as one of the most beloved British actors of our generation with roles in Love Actually, Die Hard, Michael Collins, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and an illustrious stage career 2015 Getty Images Notable deaths in 2016 Maurice White The Earth, Wind & Fire founder died aged 74. The nine-piece band sold more than 90 million albums worldwide and won six Grammy awards Notable deaths in 2016 Lawrence Phillips Former NFL star found dead in prison cell on 13 January in suspected suicide, aged 40 AFP/Getty Images

Quandeel has been compared to Kim Kardashian-West and has divided opinion for appearing on television to speak about female empowerment while dressed in non-traditional clothes.

Qandeel, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, rose to fame after auditioning on Pakistan Idol and went on to generate a large social media fan-base. She often spoke out about the opposition she faced and just last Thursday tweeted: I will not give up. I will reach for my goal & absolutely nothing will stop me.

Dr Mushtaq Ahmed, who was among the team that conducted Baloch's autopsy said: Apparently the lady died of suffocation but final opinion on her death would be possible only after report of chemical examination comes. She might have been given some poisonous substance before being strangled.

Honour killings are common in Pakistan and it is estimated that nearly 1,000 women are killed by close relatives in Pakistan each year for defying conservative attitudes towards love and marriage.
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The direct rail link between London Victoria and Gatwick airport has been revealed as the UKs most delayed train service, notching up more than 8,100 late services in just the last six months.

The premium-priced service is operated by the embattled Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), which is also under fire after it announced last week it was axing 341 Southern trains a day as part of an emergency timetable introduced in an attempt to improve poor punctuality.

The UKs five worst routes are run by GTR, with the second worst service  the London to Brighton route  operated by Southern, which saw 34,352 trains (32.8 per cent) at least five minutes late in the last six months.

Research by the Sunday Times found that 33.9 per cent of Gatwick Express trains had been over five minutes late since January 2016.

In addition, more than 2,659 trains, or 11 per cent of all trains on the line, were over 30 minutes late or cancelled.

GTRs Thameslink service between London and Brighton saw 27.4% of its trains late by at least five minutes and 26.2% of trains on its London to Bedford route were also late by at least five minutes.

Despite the poor service, David Brown, the chief executive of GTRs parent company, the Go Ahead Group, has seen his pay and bonus package soar to 2.16m, which union bosses described as a national disgrace.

In addition, dividend pay-outs to shareholders in Go Ahead rose to 37m in 2015, up from 35m the previous year.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan is among those calling for the government to strip GTR of its Southern franchise, saying he was appalled by the unceasing misery being suffered by passengers who pay thousands of pounds for tickets.

Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains Show all 8 1 /8 Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531468.jpg Mike Brodie Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531469.jpg Mike Brodie Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531470.jpg Mike Brodie Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531471.jpg Mike Brodie Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531473.jpg Mike Brodie Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531472.jpg Mike Brodie Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531474.jpg Mike Brodie Railroads to freedom: The drifters living and dreaming on America's freight trains 5531475.jpg Mike Brodie

The rail minister, Claire Perry resigned on Friday after earlier saying she was ashamed of the chaos on Southern routes and that the situation feels like a failure.
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Millennials will spend more than 40,000 more on rent by the age of 30 than their parents, according to a report carried out by the Resolution Foundation.

Those born between 1981 and 2000 are likely to pay 53,000 in rent before they reach 30, whilst baby boomers  those born between 1946 and 1965  typically spent 9,000.

The Resolution Foundation, which describes itself as a non-partisan and award-winning think-tank, attributes the disparity in rental costs to rising house prices, changing tenure patterns and cuts in housing subsidy.

The world's least affordable cities for housing Show all 10 1 /10 The world's least affordable cities for housing The world's least affordable cities for housing Hong Kong The world's least affordable cities for housing Sydney The world's least affordable cities for housing Vancouver The world's least affordable cities for housing Auckland The world's least affordable cities for housing Melbourne The world's least affordable cities for housing San Jose The world's least affordable cities for housing San Francisco The world's least affordable cities for housing London The world's least affordable cities for housing San Diego The world's least affordable cities for housing Los Angeles

By the time they reached 30, almost two-thirds of baby boomers owned their home. That figure drops to 42% in the millennial generation.

The report was published as part of an 18-month investigation into intergenerational fairness. It highlights the relationship between a reduction in home ownership and the concentration of wealth among the elder generations.

The analysis into the impact of rising housing costs on UK living standards emphasises it is low and middle income households who have felt the squeeze the most.

It warns rising housing costs are projected to wipe out much  if not all  of the two decades of income growth for many households.

Laura Gardiner, a senior policy analyst for the Resolution Foundation, told The Guardian: The nations housing crisis is perhaps the most visible example of growing inequality between generations. Young people today are paying a heavy price for decades of falling homeownership.

The report into generational variation acknowledged its findings are consistent with wider political debate. Just this week, Prime Minister Theresa May underlined the need to combat a housing deficit. She recognised that without building more houses, young people will find it even harder to afford their own home.

The Resolution Foundation suggested the Prime Ministers proposals would find support across cities and rural areas alike. It highlighted housing is often seen as the number one problem for government to address.

Importantly, a survey carried out by British Social Attitudes showed the housing crisis was an intergenerational preoccupation. It concluded baby boomers support for house construction in their local area had almost doubled in recent years to 56%.

Gardiner welcomed that older generations are just as concerned about young peoples struggle to own their home, and support for house-building is growing across all age groups.

She stressed a change in policy was crucial because the struggle of young people to own their home is only going to get worse.
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In years gone by, sex workers might have been viewed by society as people to be pitied, mocked or even judged, with whispered stereotypes about fallen women dominating discourse. But recent cultural shifts have seen the tide turn towards viewing sex work as a human rights issue with workers safety the core concern. Now, it appears the UK may be on the cusp of making the historic decision to decriminalise prostitution.

Last summer, Amnesty International caused outrage around the world when the human rights organisation voted to give their backing to a decriminalisation model which would mean it is no longer a criminal offence to sell sex.

Earlier this month, the hotly anticipated interim report from Parliaments Home Affairs Select Committee about sex work in the UK also came to the conclusion that decriminalisation is the best way to protect workers.

When I meet Laura Watson, spokesperson for the English Collective of Prostitutes at the organisations headquarters in Camden, a few days after the Home Affairs committees announcement, she is relieved but cautiously optimistic. She tells me: Obviously theyre just recommendations as its an interim report, rather than a final report but its from a prestigious institution, the most prestigious in Parliament when it comes to Home Affairs issues. So this is very positive news.

Her view isnt universally shared, however, with many politicians and activists fiercely opposing decriminalisation as they fear it could legitimise the sexual exploitation of thousands. They argue that sex work isnt comparable to other kinds of work, and that to treat it as such dehumanises people and condones power dynamics which are inherently exploitative and abusive.

Yet tensions are growing about the sustainability of current legislation as a messy legal landscape appears to exist in which sex workers, who the laws claim to protect, are finding themselves hauled before the courts and put behind bars to the tune of around a hundred women in the UK every year.

Although having sex for money isnt illegal itself, under UK laws a lot of the associated activity is a criminal offence, such as soliciting for customers on the street or running a brothel.

Ms Watson has seen first-hand how the laws can criminalise women and undermine their safety through her work with the English Collective of Prostitutes which advocates for sex workers rights. She says that while recent progress in debates around sex work are positive, the changes need to make it on to the statute books, and fast. In the meantime, she says, sex workers are still at risk.

She says a major concern is police officers unfairly using sex workers criminal records to contact them and blackmail them into having sex with them, in exchange for not getting further convictions.

She says: We know that police officers are harassing women all the time. Some go after women looking for free sex in exchange for not arresting them. Cases have come to light where officers have been found to be using police records to look up sex workers details and harass them.

They searched police databases and then contacted women that showed up as sex workers and said Were not going to come after you if you give us sex."

In April, a constable from Sussex Police was jailed for 15 months after pleading guilty to obtaining the records of workers from police databases and then harassing women.

Women with immigrant or refugee status can be especially vulnerable, particularly from deportation orders. Under immigration laws, European nationals have to show that they are economically self-sufficient in order to be deemed exercising treaty rights and therefore be able to stay in the UK. But as it is a grey area whether sex work counts as official economic activity, many women risk losing their right to remain.

Ms Watson says: We are defending a few women at the moment, mostly from Romania, who are facing deportation orders on the grounds that theyre not economically independent, because sex work isnt properly accepted as a job.

Nowhere in law states sex work isnt a job, but nowhere states that it is. So its down to the individual immigration officer to decide each time.

For the Romanian women facing deportation this means they have to risk their safety while evading police: Violent men in the area where the women live have been threatening them, and the women cant go to the police in case it shows up in police records that they are on deportation orders and they could get deported immediately. In the meantime, nothing is being done to stop the violent men.

Ms Watson says another serious issue which sex workers in the UK have to contend with is confiscation orders, which enable police to confiscate their money and jewellery, while also freezing their bank accounts, upon arrest if they suspect the women may be living off the proceeds of crime. If a sex worker is convicted, her money and jewellery become state assets; shared between police, tax bodies and the Home Office.

In 2013, it was revealed in parliament that more than 12 million has been seized from sex work since 2002. Of this, just over 2 million went to police forces.

She says its completely disgusting and a clear conflict of interest that police forces can profit from convictions against workers: When they raid brothels, they dont ask Are you being coerced, are there underage girls here?, they ask How long have you been here, how much money do you have. It just shows what theyre interested in.

Sex workers should be given paperwork from the police to enable them to draw out up to 250 of their own money from the bank but Ms Watson says cases the English Collective of Prostitutes have been involved with show this doesnt always happen. She says: A few days ago we got a call from a woman who had been arrested- the police took her money, her jewellery and froze her bank accounts and left her with nothing.

She has two small children and she needs to pay her bills, her rent. They didnt give her the paperwork to draw out money from the bank and weve had to spend the last few days fighting on her behalf for them to finally give her it.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA 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. 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

Another concern is how current legislation makes it a criminal offence to know a brothel is being run, even if you are not the person running it. Ms Watson says the union are working with a woman who is currently in prison for conspiring to run a brothel as she was working as a sex worker at a property along with other women. Evidence reported in court was that she had opened the door multiple times and was seen wearing clothes on the premises, rather than just her underwear thereby implying she was culpable and aware of how the brothel operates. The union are hoping to appeal the case.

The Home Affairs Select Committee is expected to release its final report in the coming months. It is not yet known what their final recommendations will be, or how much appetite there is among MPs to enact any changes which are suggested. Regardless, how society and legislators view sex work appears to be undergoing historic change and gathering unprecedented momentum.
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Angela Eagle has dismissed concerns her own constituency Labour party is revolting against her over her bid to replace Jeremy Corbyn as party leader.

Shortly after the Wallasey MP announced her candidacy, her own constituency announced that a no-confidence motion against her would be put on their next meetings agenda.

However, the National Executive Committee has suspended all constituency Labour meetings while the leadership election is underway, meaning that unofficial gatherings can occur but any votes or decisions may not be binding.

Appearing on The Marr Show, Ms Eagle was asked: Youve said that Jeremy Corbyn has lost the support of MPs and therefore should go. If you lose a vote of confidence in your constituency party, will you stand down?

Ms Eagle did not refute concerns that appetite for such a vote was there, but instead insisted any motions to that effect would not be binding.

She said: The constituency parties have been suspended for this entire election. There are no official meetings going on.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 27 October 2022 98-year-old D-Day Veteran Bernard Morgan, whose story is among those featured on the giant poppy wall, during the launch of The Royal British Legion 2022 Poppy Appeal, at Hay's Galleria in central London PA UK news in pictures 26 October 2022 A meerkat explores a pumpkin in the enclosure at Wild Place, Bristol, where some of the animals are having pumpkin treats as part of their environmental enrichment PA UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA 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. 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

The formal period in which Labour MPs can declare their support for leadership candidates begins tomorrow. Former Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Owen Smith is also making a bid to replace Mr Corbyn.
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Australia has called for a free trade deal with Britain as soon as possible, in a Brexit boost for Prime Minister Theresa May.

Ms May spoke to her Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull on Saturday, who expressed his desire to open up trading between the two Commonwealth countries as a matter of urgency.

The new PM described the call as "very encouraging" and insisted it showed leaving the European Union could work for Britain.

She tasked newly appointed International Trade Secretary Liam Fox to begin exploring options and he has told the Sunday Times that he is "scoping" around 12 other deals.

Ms May said: "I have been very clear that this Government will make a success of our exit from the European Union.

"One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe.

"It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal.

Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images

"This shows that we can make Brexit work for Britain, and the new Secretary of State for International Trade will be taking this forward in the weeks and months ahead.

"Britain is an outward-looking and globally-minded country, and we will build on this as we forge a new role for ourselves in the world."

On Friday, Ms May told Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon she would not trigger Article 50 to leave the EU before getting UK-wide agreement, a potentially difficult objective given Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in the bloc.

But Dr Fox claimed numerous non-EU countries had already asked Britain for a trade deal and said he was "scoping about a dozen free trade deals outside the EU to be ready for when we leave"  potentially in January 2019  amid reports that he was preparing to fly to the United States next week.

He told the Sunday Times: "We've already had a number of countries saying, 'We'd love to do a trade deal with the world's fifth biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU'."

Press Association
Alleged UFO over Shanghai.

The Chinese government has remained silent about the true nature of a massive unidentified flying object (UFO) that allegedly hovered above Shanghai on July 2 and was photographed and frantically talked about on Chinese social media sites.



Reports claimed hundreds of persons saw the huge UFO with multi-colored lights hovering over the city for some 10 hours beginning 8:00 p.m. on July 2. The UFO disappeared by early morning of the next day.



Advertisement

Some witnesses said it was a starship from another world while others claimed it was a Chinese secret weapon being tested. Still others said the UFO reminded them of the starship from the Hollywood movie, Independence Day.



Some social media posts described the UFO as a red circle thing, hovering far away. Other posts claimed it hovered behind clouds while flashing red and yellow lights for several hours.



Skeptics, however, believe the UFO to be nothing more than an "LED kite" being flown; lightning or a lenticular cloud shaped like a saucer or a plate. They also said that if the UFO were indeed over the city for 10 hours as claimed, the Chinese military or police would have seen it also. Nothing, however, has been heard from the city or central government about this incident.



Chinese media reports quoted a witness identified only as Yeng saying he used a telescope to observe the UFO. He told media about seeing bright flashes of red, yellow and blue lights emitted by the UFO. He claimed he was with friends on Songhu Road in Shanghai when they spotted the UFO hovering in the night sky.



Yeng said he first thought the UFO was a star, "but the stars are not so big; but (I) believe it was not a plane. The object was suspended in the sky and did not seem to move."



Another witness claims he saw the UFO at about 4:00 a.m. He took photos of the object but regretted he was unable to take clearer images because it was dark at the time. He noted, however, that the UFO disappeared before dawn.



Another witness refuted suggestions it was a cloud, saying this couldn't be so because the UFO was very bright and didn't move.


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Nicola Sturgeon has said Scotland is in a strong position to block Britains exit from the European Union, in the wake of comments made by Prime Minister Theresa May after the pair met in Edinburgh.

Ms May had said that Article 50 would not be triggered until a UK-wide approach had been agreed.

Asked by the BBCs Andrew Marr whether this meant Scotland had now effectively been given a veto on the UK leaving the EU, Scottish First Minister Ms Sturgeon said: That appears to be an interpretation that some people but on the Prime Ministers remarks. Certainly from what she said after the meeting that puts us in a very strong position.

It puts me in a strong position, of course it puts a responsibility on my shoulders to think through what the options are.

 What is Article 50?

Ms Sturgeon has consistently said she will not allow the UK to take Scotland out of the EU against its wishes, the country having voted overwhelmingly to remain during last months referendum.

We are in uncharted territory and when you are in uncharted territory with basically a blank sheet of paper in front of you, you have an opportunity to think things that might have previously been unthinkable, she said.

Scotland did not vote for any of those consequences. We voted by a significant margin to avoid those consequences and stay in. That gives me a mandate to try to protect our relationship with the EU. If that is not possible within the UK well then I have been very clear that the option of a second independence referendum has to be on the table.

6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Show all 6 1 /6 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you More expensive foreign holidays The first practical effect of a vote to Leave is that the pound will be worth less abroad, meaning foreign holidays will cost us more nito100 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you No immediate change in immigration status The Prime Minister will have to address other immediate concerns. He is likely to reassure nationals of other EU countries living in the UK that their status is unchanged. That is what the Leave campaign has said, so, even after the Brexit negotiations are complete, those who are already in the UK would be allowed to stay Getty 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Higher inflation A lower pound means that imports would become more expensive. This is likely to mean the return of inflation  a phenomenon with which many of us are unfamiliar because prices have been stable for so long, rising at no more than about 2 per cent a year. The effect may probably not be particularly noticeable in the first few months. At first price rises would be confined to imported goods  food and clothes being the most obvious  but inflation has a tendency to spread and to gain its own momentum AFP/Getty Images 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Interest rates might rise The trouble with inflation is that the Bank of England has a legal obligation to keep it as close to 2 per cent a year as possible. If a fall in the pound threatens to push prices up faster than this, the Bank will raise interest rates. This acts against inflation in three ways. First, it makes the pound more attractive, because deposits in pounds will earn higher interest. Second, it reduces demand by putting up the cost of borrowing, and especially by taking larger mortgage payments out of the economy. Third, it makes it more expensive for businesses to borrow to expand output Getty 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you Did somebody say recession? Mr Carney, the Treasury and a range of international economists have warned about this. Many Leave voters appear not to have believed them, or to think that they are exaggerating small, long-term effects. But there is no doubt that the Leave vote is a negative shock to the economy. This is because it changes expectations about the economys future performance. Even though Britain is not actually be leaving the EU for at least two years, companies and investors will start to move money out of Britain, or to scale back plans for expansion, because they are less confident about what would happen after 2018 AFP/Getty Images 6 ways Britain leaving the EU will affect you And we wouldnt even get our money back All this will be happening while the Prime Minister, whoever he or she is, is negotiating the terms of our future access to the EU single market. In the meantime, our trade with the EU would be unaffected, except that companies elsewhere in the EU may be less interested in buying from us or selling to us, expecting tariff barriers to go up in two years time. Whoever the Chancellor is, he or she may feel the need to bring in a new Budget Getty Images

If the UK were to leave the EU, and Scotland attempted to rejoin after voting for independence, it would have to agree to less favourable conditions, such as joining the euro and the open border zone. Ms Sturgeon has previously said Scotland could remain in the EU while England and Wales leave it, but this is legally complex.

Recommended Read more Boris Johnson says Brexit vote does not mean leaving Europe

There are opportunities, she added. Things have changed fundamentally. There is a mood there and what I encountered in Brussels was a warmth, an openness and a great sympathy to the position that Scotland finds itself in.

Nobody was saying to me, and I certainly wasnt assuming, that it would be easy and there are significant challenges along the way. But there was a certain openness that the Scottish government has not found previously in Brussels and certainly didnt encounter during the 2014 independence referendum.

Earlier in the programme, Labour leadership candidate Angela Eagle had said that, like Scotland, London hadnt voted leave, and nor had Liverpool or Manchester.

I would point out gently to Angela Eagle that there is a different between Scotland and Liverpool and London, Ms Sturgeon said. Scotland is not a region of the UK, Scotland is a nation and if we cannot protect our interests within a UK that is going to be changing fundamentally, then that right of Scotland to consider the options of independence has to be there.
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The new Brexit minister has suggested that new EU migrants who head for Britain could be sent home to avoid a spike in immigration ahead of a withdrawal from the bloc.

David Davis, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union told the Mail on Sunday Braitain may have to deal with" a potential increase in those travelling to Britain, adding that "there are a variety of possibilities.

He said: We may have to say that the right to indefinite leave to remain protection only applies before a certain date".

However, he said that such judgements would have to be made in "reality" and "not speculation".

He stopped short of guaranteeing the status of EU nationals already in the country. Mr Davis said: We will get a generous settlement for EU migrants here now and a generous settlement for British citizens in the EU.

He rejected concerns foreign nationals could be used as leverage by Britain in negotiations.

If you do it all together nobody is a bargaining counter. It is based on the presumption that they [the EU] will be rational about their own citizens interest, which they will be, he told the newspaper

Introducing the new Cabinet Show all 23 1 /23 Introducing the new Cabinet Introducing the new Cabinet 372399.bin REUTERS Introducing the new Cabinet 372397.bin GETTY IMAGES Introducing the new Cabinet 372612.bin PA Introducing the new Cabinet 372398.bin GETTY IMAGES Introducing the new Cabinet 372396.bin GETTY IMAGES Introducing the new Cabinet 372395.bin GETTY IMAGES Introducing the new Cabinet 372394.bin EPA Introducing the new Cabinet 372625.bin PA Introducing the new Cabinet 372631.bin GETTY Introducing the new Cabinet 372640.bin Getty Introducing the new Cabinet 372641.bin Lee Durant Introducing the new Cabinet 372651.bin Photoshot Introducing the new Cabinet 372657.bin PA Introducing the new Cabinet 372667.bin REUTERS Introducing the new Cabinet 372673.bin EPA Introducing the new Cabinet 372677.bin REUTERS Introducing the new Cabinet 372678.bin Getty Introducing the new Cabinet 372680.bin Getty Introducing the new Cabinet 372684.bin Photoshot Introducing the new Cabinet 372685.bin Alex Huckle-Alpha Press Introducing the new Cabinet 372686.bin EPA Introducing the new Cabinet 372687.bin Getty Introducing the new Cabinet 372688.bin Getty

Elsewhere, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has reassured the people of Gibraltar the government will take "whatever action is necessary" to safeguard the overseas territory amid fears of Spanish incursion following the vote to leave the EU.

Citizens on 'The Rock' voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union and its Chief Minister has called for an opt-out of Brexit so it can keep access to the single market and the free movement of people. And within hours of the EU referendum vote being declared Spanish ministers once again tried to lay claim to the territory.

Mr Johnson met with Chief Minister Fabian Picardo to tell him Britain will would never let Gibraltar pass into Spanish control without the consent of the people.

Following the London meeting, Mr Johnson said: "I was delighted to meet Chief Minister Picardo. I reassured him of both our steadfast commitment to Gibraltar, and our intention to fully involve Gibraltar in discussions on our future relationship with the EU.

"The people of Gibraltar have repeatedly and overwhelmingly expressed their wish to remain under British sovereignty and we will respect their wishes.

"We will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of another state against their wishes.

 Who is David Davis?

"Furthermore, the UK will not enter into any process of sovereignty negotiations with which Gibraltar is not content.

"We will continue to take whatever action is necessary to safeguard Gibraltar, its people and its economy including maintaining a well-functioning Gibraltar-Spain Border."

Press Association contributed to this report
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Education Secretary Justine Greening said she was open-minded about the possibility of allowing new grammar schools, in her first interview since joining Theresa Mays new government on Thursday.

But Ms Greening, the first comprehensive school-educated Education Secretary in the countrys history, also suggested that if selective state education were to be expanded, it it might not be through old-fashioned grammar schools.

Speaking to the BBCs Andrew Marr Show, she said there could be room for selection within the new landscape of education, which has been significantly transformed by the Conservatives expansion of free schools, in which schools can be set up independent of local authority control.

The setting in which schools find themselves has actually changed quite dramatically, she said. It's gone from really being a binary world in many respects, to being an education world where there are many different schools now that have many different offers.

 Who is Justine Greening

I think we need to be prepared to be open-minded, she said. I've been in this job two or three days, I'm not going to make some big sweeping policy pronouncement, I'm going to take a very measured, sensible approach in this role. And I recognise that this is an important debate so of course I've got lots of things in my in-tray, I will work my way through them very, very carefully over the coming weeks.

Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images

The education debate on grammar schools has been going for a very long time but I also recognise that the landscape in which it takes place has changed fundamentally and I think we need to be able to move this debate on and look at things as they are today and maybe step away from a more old-fashioned debate around grammar schools and work out where they fit in today's landscape.

Prime Minister Theresa May is thought to be a supportive of new selective schools within the state system, and her new chief of staff Nick Timothy has also backed new selective schools in the past.
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Iain Duncan Smith was driven around by a 7,000 chauffeur donated by a banker during the EU referendum campaign, The Independent has learned.

The premium car service, donated by a company of which merchant banker Lord George Magan is a director, ferried the former Work and Pensions Secretary around while he kept to his busy media schedule.

The revelation comes after Mr Duncan Smith delivered a speech in May  while he had access to the chauffeur  in which he claimed the European Union had become a friend of the haves rather than the have-nots.

Mr Duncan Smith's parliamentary register of interests lists the use of a car and driver between 3 May and 12 June 2016 and states that it was donated by St James Company. The total value of the service was estimated at 7,175.58.

Lord Magan, a former Conservative Party treasurer, is listed as one of two directors of St James Company, Companies House records show. The other director is his wife Lady Wendy Magan. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on their part.

According to The Sunday Times Rich List, Lord Magans wealth has been between 60m and 200m. His late father Brigadier Bill Magan was a former director of MI5.

The peer was reported to have made around 20m from the sale of his private equity fund Hambro Magan to Natwest Markets in 1996. In 2004, the Financial Times described the firm founded by the peer as one of London's first corporate finance boutiques and the leading one of its time. Companies House also lists donor St James Company's accounts as being overdue, having been required by 31 March 2016.

Mr Duncan Smith was one of the key faces of the Leave campaign, having quit his role in the Cabinet ahead of the EU referendum.

He resigned after a row over disability benefit cuts, arguing that David Cameron's government had been balancing the books on the backs of the most vulnerable in society, and has not returned to the Cabinet under the new Prime Minister Theresa May.

The Independent made attempts to contact both Mr Duncan Smith and Lord Magan for comment, but did not receive a response.
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Jeremy Corbyn appointed an MP to the Shadow Cabinet without telling her and while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, it has been claimed.

Thangam Debbonaire, who was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, made the allegations in a post on social media. She wrote: Dear everyone who has asked me what my problems are with Corbyn's leadership, Here is my experience.

Mr Corbyn appointed me and press released this without my knowledge or consent while I was in the middle of cancer treatment. He then sacked me the next day when he realised he had given away part of someone else's role. But didn't bother to tell me that either.

 Corbyn disappointed with NEC's regulations for Labour leadership election

By then my office had been besieged by press and the story was out that I was shadow minister. I decided to make the best of it and to serve. I worked on his arts policy while I was still having treatment but in Bristol. When I went back to Westminster, I discovered that he had sacked me but hadn't told me and did not have any ideas for how I was supposed to explain it to Bristol West members or constituents.

(Facebook (Facebook)

Ms Debbonaire, who represents the Bristol West constituency, was diagnosed with breast cancer six weeks after winning the seat in the May 2015 election. She began treatment shortly after and began working part time to balance treatment with constituency duties, before returning to the House of Commons in March of this year.

She said that MP Maria Eagle intervened following her surprise sacking from the front bench and told Mr Corbyn he could reappoint her in order for her to continue in the brief, which she did until resigning following the EU referendum. After her resignation, she joined 171 other MPs in a non-confidence vote against him.

She added: The reason I then voted no confidence in him as leader is because I have no confidence in him as leader. See above. Plus I had found out from other front bench women how unwilling and unable Corbyn is to communicate with, listen to or work with anyone outside his narrow group.

Ms Debbonaire said that she profoundly wished that she would not have to discuss the issue publically but had decided that people have a right to know the truth about what Corbyns leadership is like.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 25 October 2022 King Charles III welcomes Rishi Sunak during an audience at Buckingham Palace, where he invited the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party to become Prime Minister and form a new government PA UK news in pictures 24 October 2022 Rishi Sunak celebrates with Tory MPs outside the Conservative Campaign Headquarters after becoming the new leader of the Conservative Party Reuters UK news in pictures 23 October 2022 The Green Man at October Plenty, Borough Market's annual Autumn Harvest festival, in London, which returns for the first time post pandemic PA 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. 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Tensions are escalating within the Labour party as Angela Eagle and Owen Smith are both mounting leadership challenges. Mr Corbyn has pledged to continue in the role despite opposition from MPs, as he retains support among party members.

A spokesperson for Mr Corbyn told The Independent: "There was some miscommunication over Thangam's appointment as shadow minister for the arts, but at no point was she sacked."

The Independent has approached Ms Debbonaire for comment.
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Education Secretary Justine Greenings claim to hugely care about social mobility has been questioned by people who say it is at odds with her voting record.

In an interview on the BBCs Andrew Marr show, the newly installed minister said social mobility had characterised her personal life as well as her political life as the first Education Secretary in history to have gone to a comprehensive school.

But some have pointed to the Conservative MPs voting record suggesting it contradicts such a claim - she has never defied the party whip when voting for swingeing welfare cuts.

Ms Greenings voting record on educational and welfare reform issues, which can be seen the TheyWorkForYou website, show she has repeatedly voted for ending financial support for students to stay on at school after 16 and to increase tuition fees - despite acknowledging the vital role education plays in social mobility.

She has also voted against schemes to guarantee jobs for young people who had been unemployed for a long time.

How Justine Greening voted on the key issues around social mobility:

How Justine Greening voted on Education

Consistently voted for greater autonomy for schools

Consistently voted for raising Englands undergraduate tuition fee cap to 9,000 per year

Consistently voted for academy schools

Consistently voted for ending financial support for some 16-19 year olds in training and further education

Consistently voted for university tuition fees

Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images

How Justine Greening voted on Welfare and Benefits

Almost always voted for reducing housing benefit for social tenants deemed to have excess bedrooms (which Labour describe as the "bedroom tax")

Generally voted against raising welfare benefits at least in line with prices

Consistently voted against paying higher benefits over longer periods for those unable to work due to illness or disability

Almost always voted for making local councils responsible for helping those in financial need afford their council tax and reducing the amount spent on such support

Almost always voted for a reduction in spending on welfare benefits

Almost always voted against spending public money to create guaranteed jobs for young people who have spent a long time unemployed

(Source: TheyWorkForYou.com)

Defending the record of her party on the programme, Ms Greening said: This is about so much more than just the money - driving more and better opportunities for young people, making the best of Britains talent isnt just the right thing to do it is also the smart thing to do for our economy.

Others have criticised her claims, saying social mobility will not improve with public spending cuts and suggested she was using her comprehensive background to deflect criticism.

In her first speech as prime minister outside Downing Street on Wednesday, Theresa May said she was putting social mobility at the heart of her premiership.

She said she wanted to fight the burning injustice of inequality in the UK and she had a mission to make Britain a country that works for everyone.
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Scotlands First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has strongly dismissed Angela Eagles claim that Scotlands position in the United Kingdom is comparable to London and Liverpool.

Appearing on the BBCs Andrew Marr Show, Sturgeon was asked whether she thought Scotland should have a veto over the invocation Article 50  the process by which the UK would leave the European Union. Ms Sturgeon responded by claiming she is in a strong position.

She then continued to criticise comments made earlier in the programme by Labour leadership hopeful Angela Eagle: I heard Angela Eagle at the start of your program say Scotland has just got to accept the UK-wide vote in the same way London or Liverpool accept it.

EU referendum - in pictures Show all 18 1 /18 EU referendum - in pictures EU referendum - in pictures A woman in a wheelchair with British and European Union flags shows her support for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union on the day of the EU Referendum in Gibraltar Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures A polling station being used in the EU referendum at Batley Town Hall in the constituency Labour MP Jo Cox PA EU referendum - in pictures People arrive to vote in the EU Referendum at the Library where British MP Jo Cox was shot and fatally wounded last week in Birstall EPA EU referendum - in pictures A man arrives to vote at a polling station for the Referendum on the European Union in north London REUTERS EU referendum - in pictures Voters queue to enter a polling station at Trinity Church in Golders Green in London Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures British Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha Cameron leave after voting in the EU Referendum at Central Methodist Hall, Westminster Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn cast his vote at a polling station at Pakeman Primary School in Islington Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures Chelsea pensioners arrive at a polling station near to the Royal Chelsea Hospital PA EU referendum - in pictures A woman wearing an "I'm In" t-shirt, promoting the official "Remain" campaign, leaves a polling station in London AFP/Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures People queuing outside a polling station on Amott Road in London PA EU referendum - in pictures Scotland's First Minister and Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP), Nicola Sturgeon and her husband Peter Murrell, react as leave after casting their votes at a polling station at Broomhouse Community Hall in east Glasgow AFP/Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures A man wearing a European themed cycling jersey leaves after voting at a polling station for the Referendum on the European Union in north London REUTERS EU referendum - in pictures Ukip leader Nigel Farage arrives to cast his vote at Cudham Church of England Primary School in Biggin Hill, Kent PA EU referendum - in pictures Justice Secretary and prominent 'Vote Leave' campaigner Michael Gove poses with his wife Sarah Vine after voting in the European Union referendum at their local polling station in Kensington Getty EU referendum - in pictures Nuns leave a polling station after voting in the EU Referendum in London EPA EU referendum - in pictures People arrive to cast their ballots in the EU Referendum in Gibraltar. The United Kingdom and its dependant territories are going to the polls to decide whether or not the the United Kingdom will remain in the European Union Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures A man driving a van covered in stickers urging people to vote for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union drives outside a polling station on the day of the EU Referendum in Gibraltar Getty Images EU referendum - in pictures A sign on a gable wall in Belfast's, Loyalist Tigers Bay urging voters to leave the EU using scripture from Revelation 18:4, as voters head to the polls across the UK in a historic referendum on whether the UK should remain a member of the European Union or leave PA

Well, can I point out gently to Angela Eagle that there is a difference between Scotland and Liverpool and London. Scotland is not a region of the UK. Scotland is a nation and if we cannot protect our interests within a UK that is going to be changing fundamentally, then that right of Scotland to consider the option of independence has to be there.

Eagle, who has launched a challenge to Jeremy Corbyns leadership of the Labour Party, was asked whether she would legally block a second Scottish independence referendum if she were Prime Minister.

Recommended Read more Theresa May rules out second referendum on Scottish independence

She stated: London voted to Remain and we are in a situation where were leaving. Liverpool and Merseyside voted to remain, so I think that its important that we actually get the terms of leaving right and we have got to have an all-party agreement on that.

Scotlands First Minister, however, maintained Scotland voted by a significant margin to avoid leaving the EU, which Sturgeon believes gives her a mandate to seek to protect that relationship we have with the EU.

The Scottish leader refused to admit a second Scottish referendum may face legal challenges and asserted she was in a strong position and that a second referendum has to be on the table.

Recommended Read more Angela Eagle dismisses no confidence vote from her own constituency

She emphasised Brexit will be damaging for jobs, for investment and for universities and, importantly, there is warmth, openness and great sympathy for Scotland in the EU.

Despite her combative tone, Ms Sturgeon was keen to emphasise her meeting with Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday was very cordial and constructive and welcomed that the new Prime Minister was prepared to listen to options".
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Owen Smith, Labours former shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, will officially launch his delayed bid for the Labour leadership today.

The unusual choice of a Sunday morning to begin a leadership campaign was forced on him after he had decided at short notice to postpone the announcement on Friday, out of respect for victims of the atrocity in Nice.

He wanted his campaign to begin in his Pontypridd constituency, and on Monday morning will need to be back in London. All three potential candidates in the impending Labour leadership election have been invited to a lunchtime hustings in front of fellow MPs.

After the hustings event is over, Mr Smith and the former shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle will come under intense pressure from fellow MPs to come to an agreement under which one of them withdraws from the contest to back the other, to maximise the chance of defeating the incumbent, Jeremy Corbyn.

Recommended Read more Owen Smith delays Labour leadership challenge to Jeremy Corbyn

Mr Corbyns relations with fellow MPs have deteriorated to a point where 172 of them  three quarters of the total  backed a vote of no confidence in him, but he retains substantial support among party members and supporters who gave him an overwhelming victory in last years leadership contest.

Speaking at his launch, Mr Smith is expected to put himself forward as the unity candidate at a time of deep peril for the Labour Party.

He is expected to say: The Labour Party must pull through this crisis and unite, we owe it to the millions of people across Britain who look to the Labour Party to provide hope and optimism for their lives.

So now it falls to a new generation of Labour MPs to step forward and secure Labours future. I am the only person in this race than can do that.

Explaining why he is holding the launch in Pontypridd, he is expected to say: This is the constituency I grew up in, where I went to school, where my kids go to school and I am deeply proud to represent Pontypridd in Parliament.

It is in this town that my politics, my socialism, is rooted. I was 14 when the Miners Strike began and we had friends and family who were at the heart of that terrible year-long strike. For me it was an awakening, a moment when I saw what solidarity and community really meant and how politics can make  or break them.

Mr Smith has less political experience than Angela Eagle, who was the first to commit to challenging Jeremy Corbyn, and who in 1997 was the youngest member of the incoming Labour government.

She is also well regarded by leading party activists because of the way she chaired Labours National Policy Forum before the last election  but Mr Smiths backers say her support for the Iraq war in 2003 and other military initiatives would fatally undermine her chance of winning a leadership election. Jeremy Corbyns ally, Diane Abbott has scathingly described Eagle as the Empire Strikes Back candidate.

Mr Smith, who was elected an MP for the first time in 2010, was not involved in the decision to go to war in Iraq, but did work as a special adviser to the former Cabinet minister, Paul Murphy, who backed the Iraq war.
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The Brexit minister has warned that EU citizens may be blocked from staying in Britain permanently even if they arrive before the country leaves the union.

David Davis said a "generous settlement" would be negotiated for EU migrants living in the UK and British citizens living in Europe.

But he warned this could attract a surge of EU citizens moving to Britain "in a big rush to try to grab a set of advantages that we are putting in place for people who have come here expecting us to remain with the European Union forever".

As a result, he said those who arrive after a set date yet to be decided could be blocked from being given an indefinite right to stay in Britain, he said.

Mr Davis also reasserted his belief that the EU would grant Britain access to the single market as well as a suspension of free movement rules, something which European leaders have so far ruled out.

His comments come as he also insisted Scotland cannot have a veto over any deal to leave the EU, despite Theresa May suggesting all of the UK should agree a unified approach.

Mr Davis dismissed suggestions made by Nicola Sturgeon that Scotland could stay in the EU while the rest of the UK leaves.

Speaking on Sky's Murnaghan show, Mr Davis said the UK will be left with a land border with the EU in the Republic of Ireland that will create difficult issues, and it would be a mistake to create another border in the north too.

He said: "I don't think that works. One of our really challenging issues to deal with will be the internal border we have with southern Ireland, and we are not going to go about creating other internal borders inside the United Kingdom.

"The aim here is to try to address the concerns of people who are basically Remain people, who say 'well we are worried about inward investment, we are worried about trade with Europe, we are worried about all sorts of things'.

Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images

"And we will try as best we can - they can't have a veto because there are 17.5 million people who have given us a mandate, they have told us what to do, we can't disobey it - but what we can do is to try to do what we can to minimise any disruption or turbulence or problems."

He also suggested that Article 50, the legal process through which the UK would officially set the clock ticking on its two-year Brexit negotiations, would be triggered "early next year".

His remarks paint a different picture of Brexit than that presented by the new Prime Minister, who has said she will try to build consensus before launching formal negotiations.

On Friday, Mrs May told Ms Sturgeon she would not trigger Article 50 before getting a UK-wide agreement.

Mr Davis, who is part of a triumvirate of Brext-backing new Cabinet ministers alongside Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and the International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, has admitted that "even within government there'll be tensions" over the exit strategy.

Earlier, Australia called for a free trade deal with Britain as soon as possible in a Brexit boost for the Government.

In a Saturday phone call, Mrs May spoke to her Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, who expressed his desire to open up trading between the two Commonwealth countries as a matter of urgency.

Mrs May said: "I have been very clear that this Government will make a success of our exit from the European Union.

"One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe.

"It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal.

"This shows that we can make Brexit work for Britain, and the new Secretary of State for International Trade will be taking this forward in the weeks and months ahead."

PA
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A former campaign manager for Boris Johnson who claimed Michael Gove was unfit to be Prime Minster has been appointed Security Minister as Theresa May finalised her new government with a string of junior ministerial appointments.

The Prime Minister announced 69 junior government and whips roles on Sunday morning, including Ben Wallace, the MP for Wyre and Preston North who led Mr Johnsons campaign for Conservative leader, as Minister of State for Security at the Home Office.

In a biting attack over Twitter earlier this month, Mr Wallace jokingly threatened to castrate the former justice secretary in a wry reference to the hit TV series Game of Thrones.

Following comments made by Mr Gove expressing an affinity with the series character Tyrion Lannister, The Times Sam Cotes asked Twitter users which GoT character they thought Mr Gove had become after announcing his entrance into the Conservative leadership contest.

Mr Wallace responded: He is actually Theon Greyjoy or will be by the time I am finished with him - referring to a character who is castrated during the course of the series.

Mr Wallace has also denounced Mr Gove as untrustworthy, saying things started to go wrong when he joined Mr Johnson's leadership campaign as well as accusing him of leaking stories to the press, particularly when drink is taken.

Writing in the Telegraph he said: For me this wasnt new. When I was a government whip and Michael was the chief whip, the office leaked like a sieve.

Important policy and personnel details made their way to the papers. Michael seems to have an emotional need to gossip, particularly when drink is taken, as it all too often seemed to be.

"UK citizens deserve to know that when they go to sleep at night their secrets and their nations secrets arent shared in the newspaper column of the prime ministers wife the next day, or traded away with newspaper proprietors over fine wine."

Mr Gove shocked fellow Conservatives by announcing his decision to stand in the party leadership race in June. He had been expected to back Mr Johnson, becoming an ally to the former London mayor during the lead-up to the EU referendum on 23 June.

Mr Gove was sacked as Justice Secretary during Ms Mays appointment of ministers to her new administration. He was eliminated from the Conservative party leadership contest in the second round of voting by backbench Tory MPs.

Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Show all 27 1 /27 Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Andrea Leadsom Andrea Leadsom has been appointed Secretary for Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Priti Patel Priti Patel has been appointed International Development Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Alun Cairns Alun Cairns will stay on as Welsh Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Karen Bradley Karen Bradley is now Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Rex Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Greg Clark Greg Clark has been appointed Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? James Brokenshire James Brokenshire has been appointed as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Stephen Crabb Stephen Crabb has resigned as Work and Pensions Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Theresa Villiers Theresa Villiers will not return as Northern Ireland Secretary. She was reportedly offered a role by Theresa May, but turned it down, saying it was not one she felt could take on Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Chris Grayling Chris Grayling has been appointed Transport Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Damien Green Damien Green has been appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liz Truss Liz Truss has been appointed Justice Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Patrick McLoughlin Patrick McLoughlin who was Transport Secretary has been appointed Tory Party chairman and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Justine Greening Justine Greening has been appointed as Education Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Gavin Williamson Gavin Williamson is to become the new Government Chief Whip Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Jeremy Hunt Jeremy Hunt will continue as Health Secretary Getty Images Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Nicky Morgan Nicky Morgan lost her job as Education Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Gove Michael Gove has been sacked as Justice Secretary Reuters Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? John Whittingdale John Whittingdale left his job as Culture Secretary EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Oliver Letwin Oliver Letwin, the Chancellor for the Duchy of Lancaster, has been sacked from his role in the cabinet PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Philip Hammond The former Foreign Secretary has been made Chancellor EPA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Boris Johnson Leading Brexit campaigner is given the role of Foreign Secretary Getty Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Amber Rudd Leading Remain campaigner takes Theresa May's old job of Home Secretary PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Michael Fallon Stays as Defence Secretary AP Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? Liam Fox The former Defence Secretary is named as head of new Department for International Trade PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Davis The former shadow Home Secretary and leadership rival to David Cameron is named Secretary of State for Leaving the European Union - aka Brexit minister PA Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? George Osborne Gone as Chancellor - and fails to secure any new role in May's government GETTY Theresa May's Cabinet: Who's in  and who's out? David Mundell The Conservative Party's only Scottish MP retains his role as Scottish Secretary Getty Images

Sundays reshuffle saw a number of Conservatives retain their posts, including welfare reform minister Lord Freud and the schools minister Lord Nash.

In one of the more high-profile appointments, Sir Alan Duncan was announced as Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office,returning to government after being removed in 2014.

A Remain supporter, he previously mocked Mr Johnson's credentials to be the next Prime Minister while referencing former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi during Prime Minister's Questions.

The full list of junior ministerial positions confirmed on Sunday:

Ben Wallace MP as Minister of State for Security at the Home Office

Baroness Williams of Trafford as Minister of State at the Home Office

Sir Alan Duncan MP as Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Baroness Anelay of St Johns as Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development

Earl Howe as Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence and Deputy Leader of the House of Lords

Nick Gibb as Minister of State at the Department for Education

Edward Timpson as Minister of State at the Department for Education

Robert Halfon as Minister of State at the Department for Education

David Jones as Minister of State at the Department for Exiting the European Union

Baroness Neville-Rolfe as Minister of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Lord Freud as Minister of State for Welfare Reform at the Department for Work and Pensions

Gavin Barwell as Minister of State for Housing, Planning and Minister for London at the Department for Communities and Local Government

George Eustice as Minister of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Rory Stewart as Minister of State at the Department for International Development

Simon Kirby as Economic Secretary at HM Treasury

Lord O'Neill of Gatley as Commercial Secretary at HM Treasury

Sarah Newton as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office

Baroness Shields as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport

Tobias Ellwood as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Alok Sharma as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Mark Lancaster as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence

Harriett Baldwin as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence

Sam Gyimah as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice

Phillip Lee as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice

Lord Nash as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education

Caroline Dinenage as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education

Lord Bridges of Headley as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Exiting the European Union

Robin Walker as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Exiting the European Union

Mark Garnier as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for International Trade

Margot James as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Nicola Blackwood as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health

David Mowat as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health

Lord Prior of Brampton as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health

Caroline Nokes as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions

Richard Harrington as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions

Paul Maynard as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport

Andrew Jones as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport

Andrew Percy as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government

Marcus Jones as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government

Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Wales Office

Michael Ellis as Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (and Assistant Whip)

Lord Dunlop as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Scotland Office and the Northern Ireland Office

Guto Bebb as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Wales Office (and Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury))

Kris Hopkins as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office

Therese Coffey as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Lord Gardiner of Kimble as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

James Wharton as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for International Development

Chris Skidmore as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Cabinet Office

Tracey Crouch as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport

Rob Wilson as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport

Lord Ashton of Hyde as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (and a Lord in Waiting)

Robert Buckland - Solicitor General

Lord Keen of Elie - Advocate General for Scotland

Rt Hon Anne Milton - Deputy Chief Whip (Treasurer of HM Household (Deputy Chief Whip)

Mel Stride - Government Whip (Comptroller of HM Household)

Julian Smith - Government Whip (Vice Chamberlain of HM Household)

Rt Hon David Evennett - Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury)

Stephen Barclay - Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury)

Guy Opperman - Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury)

Robert Syms - Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury)

Andrew Griffiths - Government Whip (Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury)

Jackie Doyle-Price - Assistant Government Whip

Graham Stuart - Assistant Government Whip

Heather Wheeler - Assistant Government Whip

Chris Heaton-Harris - Assistant Government Whip

Mark Spencer - Assistant Government Whip

Christopher Pincher - Assistant Government Whip

Steve Brine - Assistant Government Whip

Rt Hon Lord Taylor of Holbeach - Lords Chief Whip (Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms)

Earl of Courtown - Deputy Chief Whip (Captain of The Queen's Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard )

Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen - Baroness in Waiting

Baroness Goldie - Baroness in Waiting

Baroness Mobarik - Baroness in Waiting

Other appointments were:

Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen as spokesperson on Cabinet Office business in the House of Lords

George Hollingbery as the Prime Minister's Parliamentary Private Secretary

The following ministers have left the government:

Mark Francois - appointed by the Prime Minister to conduct a review into the use of reserves in the Army.

George Freeman - appointed as Chair of the Prime Minister's Policy Board

Sir Desmond Swayne

Hugo Swire

Julian Brazier

James Duddridge

Charlie Elphicke

John Penrose

Andrew Selous

Justin Tomlinson

Baroness Verma

Additional reporting by PA
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte plans to send former president Fidel Ramos to start diplomatic talks with China over territorial dispute. (Photo : Getty Images/Jes Aznar)

Newly elected Philippine President Rodrigo R. Duterte has asked former president Fidel Ramos to head the country's negotiations with China over its territorial claims on the South China Sea. The move came in the wake of an international tribunal ruling recognizing the Philippines' claims.



Duterte said that Mr. Ramos was one of the individuals he planned to consult on how he should follow up on the ruling of the tribunal at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that China has rejected the tribunal's decision.



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According to the news agency, Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin has lambasted the international arbitration tribunal after delivering its rejection of China's territorial claims in the South China Sea. The senior Chinese diplomat called the proceedings as "manipulated by foreign powers" and "biased," and even questioned the tribunal's integrity and competence.



Liu contended that the five members of the tribunal lacked knowledge about Asian culture and were effectively employed by the Philippines, which filed the case against China. The arbitrators unanimously decided to invalidate China's claims over waters within a "nine-dash line" that covered most of the South China Sea.



The verdict, according to the report, also disallowed China to claim broad zones for exclusive economic use. It also criticized China's activities currently going on in the disputed waters, including its construction of man-made islands.



Duterte said at a testimonial dinner held in his honor that he would like to ask Ramos to head to China and start a back channel, the WSJ wrote in a more recent report. The dinner was also attended by Ramos.



However, the 88-year-old former president and former military commander told reporters that he did not receive a formal offer from Duterte. He did not indicate whether he would accept.



The WSJ also recalled that Ramos was one of the founders of the Boao Forum headquartered in Hainan, China. The Forum aims to promote economic dialogue in Asia.



Meanwhile, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang stated at a press briefing that China welcomes Duterte's intentions about sending an envoy. He also stressed that China wishes to resolve the issues on South China Sea through bilateral negotiations instead of legal arbitration.



Here is a video on a report of Duterte asking Ramos to head bilateral talks with China:






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Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron has indicated that the calamitous environment of British politics presents an historic opportunity to build a new political party or alliance on the centre-left, involving both the Labour Party and his own MPs.

With Labour experiencing a moment of peril  as one leadership contender described it last week  and bitter in-fighting leading to growing speculation about a split, the Lib Dem believes there is now a timely chance to create a new opposition to the Conservatives  either through an alliance, a grouping of MPs or the creation of a new party.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Mr Farron, who has committed his party to fighting the next general election on a platform of derailing Brexit, said hed had off camera conversations with other progressive politicians during the EU referendum campaign. Asked whether he was open to creating a new political party in Britain, Mr Farron said: I think we write nothing off.

My job is to defend the Liberal heritage of our movement but, I think wed be betraying the legacy of Gladstone, Grimond, Charles Kennedy and others if we were to just defend our tribal interests when we have a historic opportunity to find a polar alternative to the Conservatives, which could make the 21st century one which is a lot more progressive than the 20th was.

His remarks come after the Green MP Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett, the partys leader, wrote to the leaders of centre-left parties in Britain and urged them to club together in the event of a snap election following the appointment of Theresa May as Prime Minister. The letter, which was sent to Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Farron and Leanne Wood, leader of Plaid Cymru, said: There is an urgent need to make a stand against any austerity and the slashing of environmental legislation, human and workers rights that may come with Brexit.

When asked who might form part of this progressive alliance, Mr Farron said he had talked to Ms Lucas directly. But he dismissed the use of letters to communicate with potential collaborators. The Liberal-SDP alliance was not formed on the basis of a bunch of letters press released to newspapers. It was about getting to know one another and looking at what was in the interests of progressive politics. I suspect thats the kind of thing were talking about now, he added. But where I absolutely have common ground with Caroline Lucas and others is on the issue of electoral reform.

Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Show all 12 1 /12 Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Brexit protest: Thousands march in London A woman poses with a home-made European Union flag as Remain supporters gather on Park Lane in London to show their support for the EU in the wake of Brexit PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Remain supporters demonstrate in Parliament Square PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Tens of thousands of people gathered to protest the result of the EU referendum PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London A majority of people in the capital voted to remain in the European Union Reuters Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Protesters chanted: What do we want to do? Stay in the EU PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London The march follows a similar rally in Trafalgar Square that was cancelled due to heavy rain  but which tens of thousands of people turned up to anyway Reuters Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Britain voted to leave the European Union in a referendum by 52 per cent to 48 per cent Reuters Brexit protest: Thousands march in London But support for the Leave campaign in urban areas and among young people was significantly lower Rex features Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Marchers gathered at Park Lane at 11am and marched towards Parliament Square PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London Some protesters held up baguettes in a display of affection for our continental neighbours PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London The disparity between different parts of the country has promoted a four million signature petition calling for a second referendum and even a renewed push for Scotland to cede from the UK PA Brexit protest: Thousands march in London The events organiser, Kings College graduate Kieran MacDermott, wrote: We can prevent Brexit by refusing to accept the referendum as the final say and take our finger off the self-destruct button" Reuters

The whole current scenario reminds us that the Labour and Tory parties in particular are completely and utterly false and uncomfortable coalitions. Youve got the far left and the soft left of the Labour party and in the Tory party youve got English nationalists versus pragmatists and even some liberals within the Tory party. In any other democracy in Europe those people wouldnt be in the same party as one another  and quite a few would be in the same party as us.

My sense is that one of the many outcomes of the referendum is the fact that progressives have rather enjoyed one anothers company on the campaign trail there are loads of people out there who you realise in this most calamitous and febrile set of circumstances you share a lot more in common with them than the fact you want to be in the European Union. So realignment is a real, real possibility.

But, he added, it is too early to tell if the election would be contested with such an alliance. A form of any kind of movement does depend upon what happens in the Labour party, Mr Farron said. The main situation will be how members of the Labour party relate to Liberal Democrats. We have to respect whats going on in the Labour party at the moment and see what happens. My genuine sense is that I cant see a happy ending for them.

Mr Farron, who believes his party could be the gel that holds any centre-left movement together, added: My job is not to be a home wrecker my job is to be a home provider, a home builder.

Asked whether hed opened talks with members of other parties, Mr Farron refused to name any specific individuals but replied: You saw who I shared a platform with during the referendum. We talked to those people off camera, shall we say, and those conversations are things I think we should continue.

On Friday Mr Farrons party, which suffered huge losses at the general election in 2015, hailed its best night of local election results in a decade, after the Lib Dems picked up four council seats in town hall by-elections across the country, taking seats off Ukip and the Conservatives in Newquay and North Norfolk respectively. Gains were also made at the expense of independent candidates in Cornwall and Wiltshire.

Internal figures released by the Lib Dems suggests that approximately 15,000 people have joined since the EU referendum.
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Here are the latest updates:

----

Police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are investigating the shooting of numerous police officers.

Three officers are dead, and three are wounded, one critically. One suspect is also dead.

Tensions are high in the Baton Rouge. Earlier in July, the city was the scene of a deadly encounter between a black man, Alton Sterling, and white policemen. The circumstances of the Mr Sterlings death caused widespread outrage. He was shot by police officers after being pinned to the ground and bystanders captured the violence on video. The US Department of Justice is currently investigating the death.

It also sparked a wave of protests across the country, including in Dallas, Texas. At one of the protests in this city, a gunman opened fire on white officers assigned to the protest, killing five of them.

The killings triggered outrage in the US and further inflamed already tense relationships between some African Americans and the police. The high powered weapons used in the incident also reignited the debate on Americas relaxed gun laws.
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Three police officers have been killed and three others wounded in another deadly shooting in the US targeting law enforcement, this time in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Police were responding to reports of a suspicious person armed with an assault rifle on Sunday morning. When they arrived on the scene, the gunman opened fire.

The suspect in the incident was killed as officers returned fire, and he has been named by local media as Gavin Long, a former marine sergeant who was shot dead on his 29th birthday.

One of the officers was listed as critical and another in fair condition. The status of the third wounded officer is unknown.

The shooting unfolded at 9am just one mile away from police headquarters in the area of Airline and Old Hammond highways. Roads were closed off in both directions between Goodwood Boulevard and Interstate 12.

Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Show all 21 1 /21 Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A law enforcement helicopter is seen near the scene where police officers were shot in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A Baton Rouge Police officers patrol pours water on his head on Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge East Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge President Obama speaks at a press conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington. Obama remarked on the shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in which three officers were killed and three more wounded by armed suspects Getty Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off Airline Highway near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A police helicopter flies near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge East Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off Airline Highway near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A law enforcement helicopter is seen near the scene where police officers were shot in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Law enforcement vehicles block access to Airline Highway REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A police helicopter flies near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road near the site of a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road near the site of a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers arrive near the site of a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Authorities talk to the driver of a car near an area where several officers were shot while on duty less than a mile from police headquarters AP

According to radio traffic, the first officers to arrive were unable to work out where the shooting was coming from.

Almost six minutes pass after the first shots are reported before police say they have determined the shooter's location. About 30 seconds later, someone says shots are still being fired, and officers can be heard making urgent calls for backup from an armoured personnel carrier.

President Barack Obama condemned the shooting on Sunday afternoon.

"For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault," he said.

"These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop."

 Baton Rouge Gunman

The president added that he's given the full support of the federal government to Governor Edwards, Mayor Holden, and the Baton Rouge Police Department.

"We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement, he said. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one.

Airline Highway has been the site of protests following the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling on July 5. Footage of the incident, which showed at least one officer shooting Sterling at point blank range, ignited protests and outrage across the country.

In the days following Sterling's death, and another fatal police shooting of a black man in Minnesota, a gunman shot and killed five police officers in Dallas at an anti-police brutality protest.

Those shootings were the subject of a series of social media postings by Cosmo Setenpra, identified by CBS News as an alias used by the Baton Rouge shooter, Gavin Long.

Long described the Dallas shooter Micah Johnson as one of us, and when discussing the shootings of Sterling and Philando Castile wrote: Power doesnt respect weakness. Power only respects Power.

His last post under the assumed name was at around 1am on Sunday morning, in which he wrote: Just bc you wake up every morning doesn't mean that you're living. And just bc you shed youphysical body doesn't mean that you're dead [sic].

Last week, police arrested four suspects deemed as offering a credible threat against law enforcement officials. One 12-year-old suspect was arrested after breaking into a store and stealing eight handguns. A second 17-year-old suspect reportedly said that he wanted to kill police officers.

Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee for president, mourned the fallen Baton Rouge officers in an overtly political message on Sunday.

We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today, Mr Trump wrote on Facebook. How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.
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Police investigating the shooting of multiple officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have entered a standoff situation with one of the three suspects, according to local media reports.

One of the masked gunmen involved in the deadly shooting of at least three officers has been killed, while another is reported to be at large.

More follows
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Two officers of the three police officers fatally shot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana have been identified.

Following the shootout that left three cops killed and three others wounded on Sunday morning, local media and families of the victims identified the fallen officers.

Police also announced that one suspect has been killed and two other persons of interest have been arrested.

Montrell Jackson

Facebook (Facebook)

Jackson, 32, was a 10 year veteran with the Baton Rouge Police Department. Jackson and his wife gave birth to his son in March of this year.

Jacksons friend Darnell Murdock says that he loved being a police officer.

"It motivated him to go out and change people's lives. He was on (the force) to help people, to make you have a better day," Murdock told The Advocate. "He was humble, kind and sweet. He wasn't on there to write tickets. I don't understand how this could happen to someone like him."

Jackson left a Facebook message on July 8 following the recent police shooting of Alton Sterling and the Dallas sniper attack that killed several police officers.

Im tired physically and emotionally. Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments but hey whats in your heart is in your heart.

I still love you all because hate takes too much energy but I definitely wont be looking at you the same. Thank you to everyone that has reached out to me or my wife it was needed and much appreciated. I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform, I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.

Ive experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core. When people you know begin to question your integrity you realize they dont really know you at all. Look at my actions they speak loud and clear. Finally I personally want to send prayers out to everyone directly affected by this tragedy. These are trying times. Please dont let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better. Im working in these streets so any protesters, officers, friends, family, or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer. I got you.

Matthew Gerald

Handout (Handout)

Gerald, 42, graduated from the police academy in March, and began patrolling on his own just 12 days ago. He was a former Marine and former Black Hawk crew chief in the US Army, WAFB reports. He leaves behind a wife and two children.

Brad Garafola

Handout (Handout)

Garafola, 45, was the sheriff's deputy and with the department for 24 years. He leaves a wife and four children.

Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Show all 21 1 /21 Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A law enforcement helicopter is seen near the scene where police officers were shot in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A Baton Rouge Police officers patrol pours water on his head on Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge East Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge President Obama speaks at a press conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington. Obama remarked on the shooting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in which three officers were killed and three more wounded by armed suspects Getty Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off Airline Highway near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A police helicopter flies near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge East Baton Rouge Police officers patrol Airline Hwy Getty Images Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off Airline Highway near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A law enforcement helicopter is seen near the scene where police officers were shot in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Law enforcement vehicles block access to Airline Highway REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge A police helicopter flies near the scene of a fatal shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road near the site of a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road near the site of a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers arrive near the site of a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Police officers block off a road after a shooting of police in Baton Rouge REUTERS Police officers shot in Baton Rouge Authorities talk to the driver of a car near an area where several officers were shot while on duty less than a mile from police headquarters AP



This story is developing, check back for updates.
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Even as a carnival atmosphere reigned in parts of downtown Cleveland close to where the Republican Convention opens on Monday, tensions were rising as police commanders took new steps to ramp up security and officials sparred over laws allowing protestors to carry guns.

The Governor of Ohio, John Kasich, declined to act on a last-minute appeal from the leader of the citys police union, Steve Loomis, to suspend laws allowing citizens openly to carry guns for the duration of the gathering where Donald Trump will be the main attraction.

Shudders went through the area on Sunday afternoon when an Ohio man showed up in the newly spruced-up Public Square, a main plaza a few blocks from the Quicken Loans Arena, the venue for the Convention, brandishing both a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun.

Steve Thacker, 57 had apparently come thinking he was going to be part of a larger pro-guns rally by a group called Northeast Ohio Open Carry, but it turned out he was the only one who showed up. What I'm doing today is a statement about the right to bear arms, he said later.

(a (a)

Elsewhere, hawkers were already setting up stalls selling buttons, T-shirts and flags variously celebrating Mr Trump and scorning his likely rival in November, Hillary Clinton. Some groups had taken to the skies, renting small planes trailing banners with assorted messages including one saying Ms Clinton belonged in prison.

Various protests are expected in Cleveland in the coming days even though they will all be kept a safe distance from the Arena itself. But there is anxiety they could turn ugly if those opposed and in favour of Mr Trump becoming the Republican nominee and possibly the US president clash.

Police Chief Calvin Williams noted that it seems everyone is coming to Cleveland to have their say. He told a TV interviewer he had heard that anarchists, separatists, anti-Trump protesters, everyone is coming to Cleveland to protest or exercise their First Amendment rights.

Convention hats are a steal on the streets of Cleveland (David Usborne)

He also revealed that the city has amended some of its security plans to put up extra street barriers as a direct response to the lorry massacre in Nice, southern France, last week. The shootings of police officers in Dallas two weeks ago and on Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has also led policy to review security arrangements.

Things that happen around the country and around the world do affect to some degree how we respond here in Cleveland, Mr Williams said during an interview on CBS News.

Mr Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmens Association, told Fox News, meanwhile, that he would be asking Governor Kasich for exceptional measures to keep guns away from the convention venue for the whole week. He said he would also be insisting that police officers in the area patrol in groups of two or more and are never on the streets alone.

But the office of the Governor said banning guns was not a possibility. That even though there is a list of some 72 other items that protestors will be forbidden from bringing, from knuckle-dusters, to hammers and even mattresses and lightbulbs in case they can be used as weapons.

Law enforcement is a noble, essential calling and we all grieve that weve seen attacks on officers, his office said, before adding: Ohio governors do not have the power to arbitrarily suspend federal and state constitutional rights or state laws as suggested

In a news conference, Chief Williams attempted a reassuring note saying his officers will be trying to educate people on what they should and should not be doing with guns if they carry them,

We try to get across to people, if you carry that weapon, you have that right to do it, but you also have responsibilities to the general public and people around you to make sure that everybody else is safe, he said.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson insisted meanwhile that city officials aren't strangers to unrest and demonstrations and protests and that the city is prepared even if tens of thousands show up to make their mark on the convention.

Mr Loomis meanwhile used his TV appearance to argue that sympathy to the Black Lives Matter movement including from the White House has encouraged violence against police.

The president of the Untied States validated a false narrative and the nonsense that Black Lives Matter and the Media are pressing out to the public, he argued. The president has blood on his hands and it will not be able to come washed off.
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A group of armed men seized a police station in Armenia's capital Yerevan along with an unknown number of hostages on Sunday morning, the country's security service said.

Negotiations were underway to resolve the situation peacefully, the security service said, accusing the hostage takers' supporters of spreading false rumours on the internet that an armed uprising against the government was underway.

Armenian news agencies reported that the armed men were demanding the release of Jirair Sefilian, an opposition leader and former military commander, who was arrested in June.

Sefilian has strongly criticised Armenia's President Serzh Sargsyan and is unhappy about the way the government has been handling a long-running conflict between pro-Armenian separatists and the breakaway Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Agencies reported that the armed men were demanding that President Sargsyan quit and that both some policemen and some of the hostage takers had been wounded. Reuters could not immediately confirm either assertion.

The security service said law enforcement agencies were working as normal to uphold public safety. TV images of the scene showed a heavy police presence with armoured vehicles blocking off the road to the police station.

The security service said the hostage takers' supporters were spreading what it called "disinformation" about the seizure of other buildings as part of an armed uprising.

"The National Security Service officially announces that such information is absolutely untrue," it said.
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A teenager who claimed she was raped in the New Years Eve attacks in Germany said she discovered she was pregnant soon after the attack.

The 18-year-old alleged she was held down and raped in the middle of a crowded square outside Cologne Station during the mob attack.

Her story was detailed in testimony to a parliamentary inquiry from the Cologne Lobby for Young Women.

Hundreds of women were sexually assaulted outside the citys main station on New Years Eve but this is the first details of a rape claim said to have resulted in a pregnancy.

Head of the Lobby for Young Women Frauke Mahr told the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament, according to the Local, how the woman was jostled between two men then pushed to the ground.

Ms Mahr said: Eventually she ended up on the ground with a man on top of her. She could see his face. She could see another girl lying on the ground a few metres away and tried to signal to her to close her eyes, but the man turned her head away.

A police officer pulled the man from her and she is reported to have run off in panic.

After being treated in hospital for severe injuries, she later discovered she was pregnant.

Although the teenager could not be certain the pregnancy was as a result of the attack, she decided to have an abortion. She is still having counselling, according to the Lobby for Young Women, but had chosen not to report it to the police.

At least one other woman had contacted the Lobby for Young Women claiming to have been raped in similar circumstances, according to Ms Mahr.

Police believe up to 2,000 men were involved in the New Years Eve attacks in Cologne and other major German cities including Hamburg and Frankfurt, with more than 1,200 women thought to have been victims of sexual assault.

The majority of the attackers are believed to have been asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, who had entered Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkels open-door policy.

Only 120 suspects have been identified so far by police and just four men convicted.

In February, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia launched an inquiry into how such a large number of sexual assaults and other crimes were able to happen in one night.
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A final text message sent by the Bastille Day killer minutes before he carried out the deadly attack on Nice suggests he may not have been acting alone.

The message from Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, which was sent to an unidentified recipient at 10.27pm on Thursday evening, appears to be asking an accomplice to provide more weapons ahead of his assault.

Bring more weapons read the text from Bouhlel, according to Nice Matin.

An earlier text read: Its good. I have the equipment.

Bouhlel, a French Tunisian, sent the message moments before he ploughed his lorry into crowds on the seafront Promenade des Anglaises killing 84 people, including 10 children.

His mobile phone, driving licence and bank card were found in the cab of the lorry by investigators after he had been shot dead by police marksmen.

According to French television channel BMF TV, the last text message was ambiguous but appeared to be a demand for more weapons and ended with a reference to C although who or where that was remains unclear.

Surveillance camera footage of the area in Nice has revealed Bouhlel carried out a number of reconnaissance trips ahead of his attack.

He was spotted at the wheel of a hired lorry driving along the Promenade des Anglaises on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the Thursday massacre.

In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman arrives with a toy and a bouquet of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman reacts as she places flowers in front of the memorial set on the 'Promenade des Anglais' where the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People gather to view the floral tributes near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday, in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Floral tributes are laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A child's toy is placed among the floral tributes laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Investigators continue at the scene near the heavy truck that ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores who were celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Crime scene investigators work on the 'Promenade des Anglais' after the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert examines dead bodies covered with a blue sheet on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert evacuates a dead body on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice, after a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts as he sits near a French flag along the beachfront the day after a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Discarded items are left on the beach, not far from the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bullet holes in the windscreen of the lorry that was driven into the crowd at high speed Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks through debris on the street in Nice, France, the morning after a lorry ran into a crowd, killing at least 84 and injuring 50 Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Rescue workers help an injured woman to get in a ambulance AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Celebrations of Bastille Day were targeted by the lorry driver AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People cross the street with their hands on thier heads as a French soldier secures the area after at least 84 people were killed along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A paramedic attends one of the dozens of people injured in the Nice Bastille Day attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Soldiers march on street where the lorry crashed into the crowd REUTERS In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man sits next to a body seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bodies are seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Children were among the 84 killed in the atrocity, with around 50 more hospitalised Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (2nd L) speaks to the media in Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks with his hands up as police officers carry out checks on people in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack With injured people laying in the street police and onlookers react near to a truck in Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers, firefighters and rescue workers are seen at the site of the attack AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers speak with a soldier after a truck that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police shine a light into the cab as they approach the driver's cab of a truck, in Nice AP

The promenade was packed with holidaymakers and locals enjoying the firework display to mark one of Frances biggest days of celebration.

Bouhlel drove his large white lorry onto the pedestrianised route and mowed down all in his way only halted when police shot and killed him.

More than 300 people were taken to hospital after the attacks, of those 85 remain in hospital and 18 people are in a life-threatening condition, according to the French health minister Marisol Touraine.

The 31-year-old delivery driver was not known to French intelligence services before the attack and was identified by his fingerprints.

But the Isis terror group has claimed Bouhlel was a soldier acting on its behalf.

And French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said it was without doubt that IS was involved in the attack.

Frances interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who has called up 12,000 extra police reserves alongside the 120,000 police and soldiers already in place, said Bouhlel appeared to have been radicalised only recently.

Six other people have been held in connection with the atrocity, while a seventh - Bouhlels estranged wife  has been released from custody.

Hajer Khalfallah, he mother of his three children, was released on Sunday.
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The police never did anything while her husband beat her up, but now she is under arrest as some kind of a terrorist for something that her husband, someone she hated, had done? A neighbour of Khalfallah Lahouaiej-Bouhlel expressed her disbelief.

The wife of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the mother of three children by a man who murdered 84 people in Nice, has been under arrest by the police since Friday morning following a raid at her home.

But fellow residents of the block of flats in the northern suburb of Nice say they cannot believe that Mrs Lahuaiej-Bouhlel, a woman who in the past had worked in an international hotel, who did not appear to be a devout Muslim, and did not wear a headscarf, could have been the accomplice of an abusive former partner she was seeking to divorce.

Isis claimed on Saturday that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a supporter who had acted in response to calls to target the citizens of the coalition that is fighting the Islamic State. The organisation, however, habitually claims credit for an array of acts of terrorism and no evidence has so far emerged to show it had links with the 31-year-old delivery driver and chauffeur .

Meanwhile, a day after insisting that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had no terrorist links, the French government said he must indeed have had such links.

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel (French Government)

Prosecutor Francois Molins had stated on Friday that the killer was totally unknown to intelligence services...and was never flagged for signs of radicalisation. But prime minister Manuel Valls said today that he was in one way or another linked to Islamists and interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve stated he must have been radicalised very quickly.

Five people have been arrested since the killings, three on Saturday and two on Friday including his estranged wife.

 The victims of the Nice attack

But those who knew Mohamed and Khalfallah Lahuaiej-Bouhlel continued to dispute that he was motivated in his violence by religious zeal.

Another neighbour of his wife said: He, Bouhlel, used to drink heavily and he used to take drugs, he was also a womaniser. All this led to arguments and he would strike his wife, that is why they separated.

The killers father, Monthir Bouhlel, claimed that his son suffered from psychological problems and was sometimes unstable. He had some difficult times, I took him to a psychiatrist, he took his treatments and he said he had a serious mental illness.

For four years, from 2002 to 2004 he had problems, he had a nervous breakdown. He would get very angry, and would break things for no reason, he was put on medication. But the one thing he did not get angry about was religion, he did not go to mosque, he drank.

Lahuaiej-Bouhlel was a petty criminal who has had many brushes with the law. Corentin Delobel, the lawyer who represented him when he received a suspended sentence in March on a charge of assault, said: I could not say he is a terrorist, hes an Islamist. Hes radical. It could have been you or me.
The Young and the Restless (Y&R) spoilers for July 18  23: How Adams trial ends? Jack finds out Phyllis is cheating, Victoria is shocked, Hilary makes an unpredictable move

The cast of 'The Young and the Restless' pose in the press room during The 42nd Annual Daytime Emmy Awards at Warner Bros. Studios on April 26, 2015 in Burbank, California. (Photo : Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

"The Young and the Restless" (Y&R) will feature eventful episodes airing in the week of July 18 - 23. The show will see how Adam's trial concludes, Chelsea initiate a revenge plan, Hilary and Devon reconcile and Jack suspects Phyllis might be having an affair. Here are the details about the next five chapter of "The Young and the Restless" (Y&R). Read on to find out what happens next.



Advertisement

[Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for "The Young and the Restless" (Y&R) episodes airing on July 18 - 23. Do not read further if you don't wish to know more about it.]



The week on "The Young and the Restless" (Y&R) opens with drama revolving around Adam's trial. According to Soap Central spoilers, Adam's trial comes to an end when he decides to surrender. As noted by We Love Soaps, Adam is sentenced to 30 years in prison. In the meantime, Dylan forces Victor to tell the truth and Chelsea puts everything on the line to save Adam. She urges Victor to help Adam. Chelsea seeks revenge from Victor. She finds out who his ally is. As for Victor, he fights for his freedom. Nikki confides in him that she trusts him.



At the hospital, Hilary's condition deteriorates and she finds Devon by her side. She appreciates Devon's efforts and her love for her husband resurfaces. In the meantime, her treatment continues but Dr. Neville is not allowed to come near her. It is said that Hilary makes a daring move that no one saw coming.



Elsewhere, Phyllis is still torn between Jack and Phyllis. She informs Jack that she is leaving for Montreal but Jack finds out the truth that Phyllis never took the Jet. When Ashley finds out that Phyllis lied to Jack, she jokes that Phyllis might be cheating on him. However, Jack becomes suspicious of Phyllis and wonders if she is really having an affair. Later, Jack makes a huge decision.



In addition, Victoria receives shocking news. Cane is given Brash & Sassy and things get tensed between Cane and Billy. Paul confides in Nikki. Sharon finds it tough to keep her secret when Mariah refuses to help her. And Chloe plans her next move.



"The Young and the Restless" (Y&R) airs Monday through Friday on CBS. Stay tuned for more spoilers and updates.






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The Nice terror attack has killed six members from the same family, it has emerged.

Christophe Lyon had travelled to Nice with his wife Veronique, 55, son Mickael Pellegrini, 28, and his in-laws Francois Locatelli, 82, and Christiane Locatelli, 78.

They had travelled from Longwy in north-eastern France to watch the Bastille Day fireworks display on Nices Promenade des Anglais. While there, they met up with Christophes parents Gisele, 63, and Germain, 68.

In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman arrives with a toy and a bouquet of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman reacts as she places flowers in front of the memorial set on the 'Promenade des Anglais' where the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People gather to view the floral tributes near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday, in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Floral tributes are laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A child's toy is placed among the floral tributes laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Investigators continue at the scene near the heavy truck that ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores who were celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Crime scene investigators work on the 'Promenade des Anglais' after the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert examines dead bodies covered with a blue sheet on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert evacuates a dead body on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice, after a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts as he sits near a French flag along the beachfront the day after a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Discarded items are left on the beach, not far from the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bullet holes in the windscreen of the lorry that was driven into the crowd at high speed Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks through debris on the street in Nice, France, the morning after a lorry ran into a crowd, killing at least 84 and injuring 50 Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Rescue workers help an injured woman to get in a ambulance AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Celebrations of Bastille Day were targeted by the lorry driver AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People cross the street with their hands on thier heads as a French soldier secures the area after at least 84 people were killed along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A paramedic attends one of the dozens of people injured in the Nice Bastille Day attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Soldiers march on street where the lorry crashed into the crowd REUTERS In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man sits next to a body seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bodies are seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Children were among the 84 killed in the atrocity, with around 50 more hospitalised Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (2nd L) speaks to the media in Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks with his hands up as police officers carry out checks on people in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack With injured people laying in the street police and onlookers react near to a truck in Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers, firefighters and rescue workers are seen at the site of the attack AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers speak with a soldier after a truck that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police shine a light into the cab as they approach the driver's cab of a truck, in Nice AP

All six of his family members were killed when a 19-tonne lorry was driven into a crowd of spectators. Isis has claimed the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhel, a 31-year-old Tunisian with a French residence permit, was a follower of the jihadist group.

Michael, Christophes son from a previous relationship, taught economics and social studies at the Lycee des Recollets in Longwy. The director of his college had said Michael was overjoyed to be celebrating Bastille Day in Nice.

The schools website states: "The large Recollets family has just lost one of its own. Mickael Pelligrini, teacher of economics and social science has left us. We join the family in their enormous pain and distress.

Christianes older sister, Jacqueline, told French newspaper Liberation that her sister had just sent her a postcard: She asked about my health. In the end, she was killed by a jerk.

Christophe used to be in the French army and is now a truck driver. His in-laws had been enjoying a post-retirement holiday and had just arrived in Nice from Marseille.

At least 84 people, including 10 children, were killed in the massacre, with another 202 injured. 52 people, including 30 children, are still in hospital.

France has begun three days of mourning and the French police have arrested seven people in connection with the attack.
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Tensions between Turkey and the US have escalated following the attempted coup against the Erdogan administration, with the country's leader demanding the extradition of a US-based cleric accused of orchestrating the violence. Another senior official has directly blamed the United States.

The Obama administration has strongly denied any involvement or responsibility in recent events in the country. In a phone call to his counterpart in Turkey, US Secretary of State John Kerry said: Public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations."

The warning came after Turkey closed its airspace, thereby effectively grounding US warplanes which have been targeting Isis forces in neighbouring Syria and Iraq.

Earlier today, Turkey's justice minister Bekir Bozdag announced that some 6,000 people have now been detained in a government crackdown on suspected opponenents and dissenters following the coup.

In a television interview Minister Bozdag said: "The cleansing [operation] is still continuing. Some 6,000 detentions have taken place. The number could surpass 6,000."

 Turkey failed coup: People stand up to military

At the centre of the controversy stands Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

In a televised speech on Saturday, President Erdogan said Turkey had never rejected a US extradition request for terrorists. Addressing Washington, he requested the handover of Gulen and said, If we are strategic partners, then you should bring about our request.

Addressing Barack Obama on Saturday, the Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said: Any country that stands behind him is no friend of Turkey, is engaged in a serious war with Turkey. Today, after this coup attempt, Im once again calling on you, Im saying: Extradite this man in Pennsylvania to Turkey now."

Suleyman Soylu, Turkey's labor minister, went further than Erdogan, suggesting the U.S. was behind the coup. "The US is behind the coup attempt. A few journals that are published there [in the US] have been conducting activities for several months. For many months we have sent requests to the US concerning Fethullah Gulen. The US must extradite him," he said.

Gulen has condemned Friday night's coup attempt by military officers that resulted in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left dozens dead. Erdogan's government said Gulen directed the coup all the same.

Although he didn't outline any threat, Erdogan's emphasis on US-Turkish counterterrorism cooperation raised the prospect of a prolonged closure of the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey if he didn't get his way. The Pentagon said it was trying to get permission to resume air operations from the base, while adjusting mission operations in the meantime.

In their second call in as many days, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavosoglu told Kerry the government was in control of state institutions.

Kerry reiterated U.S. support for Turkey's democratically elected government, according to the State Department readout, and urged authorities to respect the rule of law and safeguard civilian life as they respond to the coup attempt. Kerry also said Turkey needed to respect due process as it investigates those it believes were involved in the plot.

Earlier, on a visit to Luxembourg, Kerry told reporters the U.S. would entertain an extradition request for Gulen if the Turks provided evidence of wrongdoing. Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government, but Washington has never found the claims compelling.

We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen, Kerry told reporters. And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately.

Gulen is understood to maintain significant support among some members of the military and mid-level bureaucrats. His movement called Hizmet includes think tanks, schools and various media enterprises. Gulen and Erdogan only became estranged in recent years.

A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey was preparing a formal extradition request with detailed information about Gulen's involvement in illegal activities. He said the coup attempt was seen as one more thing to add to an already extensive list.

In a statement, Gulen said he condemned, in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey and sharply rejected any responsibility or knowledge of who might be involved.

At a news briefing Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, the cleric noted that he has been away from Turkey for more than 15 years and would not have returned if the coup had succeeded. He cited greater freedoms in the United States as a reason.

In brief, I don't even know who my followers are, the frail-looking cleric said through an interpreter. You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup.

In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters

The coup failed after appearing not to have been backed by the most senior ranks of the military. Turkey's main opposition parties, too, condemned the attempted overthrow of the government. Prime Minister Benali Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the overnight violence. He said 2,839 plotters were detained.

Kerry said the U.S. had no indication beforehand of the coup attempt, which began as he and Russia's foreign minister were in a Russian government villa in Moscow, locked in negotiations over Syria.

If you're planning a coup, you don't exactly advertise to your partners in NATO, Kerry said. So it surprised everyone. It does not appear to be a very brilliantly planned or executed event.
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President Erdogan has been warned not to use the failed coup in Turkey as a blank cheque to bypass democratic principles.

Six thousand people have been arrested over the uprising amid growing fears the government will use the attempted putsch as a cover for cracking down on legitimate dissent.

High-ranking soldiers and 2,700 judges are among those to have been detained following clashes in which 265 people were killed.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that parliament will consider introducing the death penalty to deal with those believed to have committed traitorous acts against the state.

Mr Erdogan spoke to his supporters in front of his Istanbul residence on Sunday evening.

Recommended Read more Erdogan is using this failed coup to get rid of secularists in Turkey

His speech was punctuated by frequent calls of "we want the death penalty" from the large crowd, to which Mr Erdogan responded: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get."

Adding that they will be in contact with Turkey's opposition parties to reach a position of capital punishment, he said: "We will not delay this decision for long. Because those who attempt a coup in this country must pay."

Turkey has not executed anyone since 1984 and capital punishment was legally abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union.

In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters

And Turkey's prime minister, Binali Yildirim, said that life was returning to normal and urged supporters to remain on the streets to show their support for the government.

He also issued a stark warning to opponents: Another calamity has been thwarted. However, our duty is not over. We shall rapidly conduct the cleansing operation so that they cannot again show the audacity of coming against the will of the people.

Addressing tens of thousands on the sreets who were chanting We want the death penalty! We want the death penalty!, Mr Yildrim told protestors: We got your message. The necessary will be done.

Speaking to television channel France 3, Frances foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault urged Turkish leaders to rule within the boundaries of the law.: [The coup] is not a blank cheque for Mr Erdogan. There cannot be purges, the rule of law must work.

He added European ministers meeting on Monday in Brussels would reiterate that Turkey had to conform to Europes democratic principles.

The coup, which was launched on Friday night by members of the military, has also increased tensions with the US, with Turkey's leader demanding the extradition of a US-based cleric accused of orchestrating the violence.

On Sunday, President Erdogan vowed to clean all state institutions of the virus of Fethullah Gulen supporters.

He said Turkey, through the justice ministry and foreign ministry, would request the extradition of the cleric, who is based in the United States, and his backers.

Earlier, Mr Yildirim warned Barack Obama that any country that stands behind him is no friend of Turkey, is engaged in a serious war with Turkey.

Today, after this coup attempt, Im once again calling on you, Im saying: extradite this man in Pennsylvania to Turkey now, he added.

Suleyman Soylu, Turkey's labour minister, went further than Erdogan, suggesting the US was behind the coup. The US is behind the coup attempt. A few journals that are published there [in the US] have been conducting activities for several months. For many months we have sent requests to the US concerning Fethullah Gulen. The US must extradite him, he said.

At a news conference on Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Mr Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force, he said.

As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Mr Gulen, but Turkey would have to present legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny.

The countrys Justice Minister, Bekir Bozdag, has also warned that the number of those likely to be arrested will continue to rise. The clean-up operations are continuing, he said.

On Sunday, the commander of the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey that is used by the US and other coalition partners was detained for complicity in the attempted coup, a government official said.

Incirlik is used by the United States and other coalition partners in the fight against Isis militants in Syria.

Those air operations were blocked, at least temporarily, by the Turkish government following the coup, but the US secretary of state John Kerry said operations had not been disrupted.
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The reclusive cleric blamed by Turkeys president for the failed coup in Turkey claims the uprising by the countrys military may have been staged by the government.

In a rare interview, Fethullah Gulen, who is in exile in the US, denied all claims he was behind the coup and instead made the counter-claim that Turkeys president had orchestrated the revolt.

He told The Guardian: I dont believe that the world believes the accusations made by President Erdogan.

There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup and it could be meant for further accusations [against the Gulenists].

Recommended Read more Tensions between US and Turkey rise after coup attempt

Gulen, who now lives in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, leads a popular movement called Hizmet which split from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over a corruption scandal in 2013.

He claimed he only knew a minute fraction of his followers still in Turkey and so could not confirm or deny their potential involvement in the attempted coup.

Speaking through an interpreter, he said: "You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup.

They could be sympathisers of the opposition party. They could be sympathisers of the nationalist party. It could be anything.

In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters

Mr Erdogan has demanded the US extradite Mr Gulen, resident in the country since 1999, over the failed coup.

The US Secretary of State John Kerry said they would consider the extradition if Turkey could prove there was wrongdoing by Mr Gulen.

Mr Gulen, who is in his mid-70s and frail, has been a critic of Mr Erdogans regime but said he has no plan to return to Turkey even if the coup had been successful as he feared being persecuted and harassed.

He said: This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here.

Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important.

The Erdogan government has in retaliation launched a broad campaign against the Hizmet movement, seizing businesses and closing media organisations.

 Erdogan: Turkey coup bid 'an act of treason'

Mr Gulen said: It appears that they have no tolerance for any movement, any group, any organisation that is not under their total control.
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Frances foreign minister has said Turkey may no longer be a viable partner in the fight against Isis in Syria, while Syrian state media has claimed the failed coup in the country was fabricated by President Erdogan to tarnish the military's reputation.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault raised concerns over Turkey's ability to fight Isis amid growing political instability in the country following the attempted coup against Mr Erdogans regime.

He said: There are questions that are being asked and we will ask them. [Turkey] is partly viable but there are suspicions as well. Lets be honest about this.

 Violence between protesters and police in Turkey

He said he would raise the issue at a meeting in Washington next week convened to discuss action against Isis.

Following his comments, a French diplomatic official said Mr Ayrault did not mean to question Turkeys viability in the fight against Isis and said that they would remain a crucial coalition partner in the fight against the terror group.

A Syrian government newspaper has said the coup was fabricated by President Erdogan in an attempt to "avenge the military and strip it of its remaining support."

Mr Erdogan supports insurgents in Syria who are trying to force President Bashar Assad from power.

In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters

Tensions have also risen between Turkey and the US following the attempted coup, as Turkey closed its airspace thereby effectively grounding US warplanes which have been targeting Isis forces in neighbouring Syria and Iraq.

Some senior Turkish officials have directly blamed the US for the coup. The Obama administration has strongly denied any involvement, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying to his Turkish counterpart in a phonecall: Public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.
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Shocking pictures have emerged of civilians attacking soldiers in Turkey after an attempted military coup failed to unseat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

As the soliders involved in the coup surrendered following a night of violence that left at least 265 dead, supporters loyal to the government rounded on the rebels.

Mobs in Ankara and Istanbul were seen climbing on tanks and beating soldiers before forces loyal to the government detained those who attempted the coup.

The uprising began late on Friday when military personnel drove armoured vehicles into Istanbul and Ankara, blocking roads and taking over bridges.

Amid the attempted coup, the president called on Turks to take to the streets in a show of support for the government.

At least 265 people have been confirmed dead and more than 1,000 wounded following the violent clashes in Turkey after a faction of the countrys military attempted to overthrow president Erdogans government.

So far, more than 6,000 people have been detained byauthorities in connection with the coup, including 2,700 judges who were sacked following the uprising.

Meanwhile, president Edogan has said the Turkish parliament may vote to reintroduce the death penalty.

Recommended Read more How the events in Nice and Turkey will distort perceptions of risk

The president denounced the failed coup as an act of treason and warned coup supporters they will pay a heavy price for their treason to Turkey.

Those who stain the military's reputation must leave, he said.

The process has started today, and it will continue just as we fight other terrorist groups.

In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Show all 17 1 /17 In pictures: Turkey coup attempt In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Erdogan attends the funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque on July 17, 2016 in Istanbul, Turkey Burak Kara/Getty Images In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge with their hands raised in Istanbul on 16 July, 2016 Gokhan Tan/Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A civilian beats a soldier after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 REUTERS/Murad Sezer In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Surrendered Turkish soldiers who were involved in the coup are beaten by a civilian Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wave flags as they capture a Turkish Army vehicle Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey, 16 July, 2016 Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's Bosphorus Brigde Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt A Turkish military stands guard near the Taksim Square in Istanbul Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Pierre Crom/Twitter In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square AP In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Murad Sezer/Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish soldiers detain police officers during a security shutdown of the Bosphorus Bridge Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish Army armoured personnel carriers in the main streets of Istanbul Getty In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Chaos reigned in Istanbul as tanks drove through the streets EPA/TOLGA BOZOGLU In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks to media in the resort town of Marmaris Reuters In pictures: Turkey coup attempt Supporters of President Erdogan celebrate in Ankara following the suppression of the attempted coup Reuters

The government has repeatedly blamed the influence of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, the founder of the Gulen movement, for the coup and has said the overthrow attempt was carried out by a clique of supporters within the military.
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When you rent a car, the standard 21st-century travel rule  book online in advance for the best rate  applies. But the internet is full of traps for the unwary. Intense competition and price-comparison websites can make a toxic combination - as many people who have spent much more than they expected on hiring a car will testify.

The car-rental landscape is complex. Large companies such as Hertz (hertz.co.uk), Avis/Budget (avis.co.uk) and Europcar (europcar.co.uk) own millions of vehicles worldwide, and in addition have franchise networks of independent operators. They are supplemented with many smaller enterprises - from a Greek garage with a couple of elderly 4x4s and a beaten-up Fiat, to expanding companies such as Goldcar of Spain.

Some of their bookings come through firms such as Holiday Autos (holidayautos.co.uk) and Rentalcars.com; the next layer is price-comparison websites such as TravelSupermarket (travelsupermarket.com) and Skyscanner (skyscanner.net), which search for the best deal. On a test booking I was delighted to see an online offer for a car for 3 a day in Spain, though search as I could it proved elusive.

The best quote I could find for a 48-hour deal from Malaga airport was a very reasonable 35. It also had the only refuelling policy that works from the customers point of view: out full, back full. The two alternatives - pay for the tank deals, or out empty, back empty policies - invariably benefit the company.

So is there a catch? Well, yes. The car-hire firm will demand a credit-card deposit of 850 at pick-up, and says: The deposit will be returned after the rental, as long as all conditions have been met. If you are lucky enough to have a cushioned credit limit that can cope with a hold of over 700, be warned: The car-hire company cannot be held responsible for any difference between the amount paid and the amount refunded.

The subtext to this is that I would expect to be pressurised into buying an expensive collision-damage waiver. Even if I present a policy from one of the growing number of insurers who sell excess waiver policies, such as Carhireexcess.co.uk or Insurance4carhire.com, the local rental-car operator may insist on a credit-card deposit as well.

Make sure also of the location of the office  sometimes cheaper companies are some miles from the airport, with no easy transport.

With stiff additional charges often levied for drivers with less than three or four years experience, additional drivers, baby seats and sat-navs, you may prefer to revert to global chains, which have offices in the UK you can yell at if things go wrong. Use a price-comparison site, by all means, but once you have established the approximate price level, see what firms such as Avis and Hertz will offer if you book direct. Ensure you compare like with like by bundling in all the necessary charges.

Finally, some car providers require you to do some tricky pre-planning. Until a year ago, travellers with the standard photo driving licence had an accompanying green piece of paper, known as the counterpart, on which all motoring misdeeds are written. This allowed car-rental companies to check your driving record. But the green counterpart is now waste paper, with a complicated new system to verify your record.

First, go online to the right part of the DVLA site (bit.ly/DVLApp). Fill in your driving licence number, national insurance number and postcode, then click on the Share your licence information tab followed by Create a code. You get an alphanumeric code, which some car-rental firms say you need to supply when you rent a car; you may need to print it out and take it with you. The code is valid for 21 days.

Before deciding to rent abroad - or, indeed, to take your own car - it is worth assessing the risks of driving in your destination.

The good news is that the past decade, fatalities have fallen by one-third thanks to safer cars and closer adherence to traffic laws. The bad news: in some parts of Europe, death rates are still way too high.

The latest figures (for 2013) from the UN Economic Commission for Europe show that the UK was second only to Sweden in the standard indicator for road safety: fatalities per 100,000 of population. The roads in Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Germany and Malta are around one-third riskier than those in Britain. Turkey, France, Italy and Canada suffer death rates above 50 per cent worse than the UK. Things get progressively more dangerous in Portugal, Belgium, Greece and Croatia. And the country where a crash is least likely to be fatal? One with no maximum speed limit: Germany.

To help drivers to nearby countries stay safe and keep the right side of the law, the AA sells a Euro Travel Kit for 29.99 (theaa.com/shop). It contains a set of headlamp beam converters, a universal bulb kit, a hazard warning triangle, a reflective emergency jacket (to protect drivers if they break down and leave the vehicle), a first-aid kit and a breathalyser (as required by France). The kit also contains the AAs European Drivers Handbook, with detailed information on the different rules of the road, including road signs and legal requirements.

Before you can go cruising down Route 66, you may need an International Driving Permit  available for just 5.50 from the Post Office. So says the Post Office. Well, if you are cruising down Route 66 you definitely wont need an IDP, but you will for Egypt, India, Japan and Thailand. For a complete list, see bit.ly/IDPermit.

The Foreign Office provides useful advice for motoring in nations beyond Europe; just search FCO and the name of the country. For Sri Lanka, for example, you are told to obtain a recognition permit at the AA in Colombo before you can drive around the island, and that There have been cases where security forces have opened fire on vehicles that dont stop when asked.
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Why? Three weeks on from the European Union referendum and the question still squats over everything, demanding an answer: why did so many people vote to leave the European Union on 23 June?

One of the most significant aspects of Theresa Mays speech outside Downing Street last week upon being installed as Britains new Prime Minister was a handbrake turn in Conservative rhetoric.

Out went the optimistic Cameron-style talk of an economy that was steadily recovering and delivering broad-based prosperity. And in came a pledge of economic and social reform; revolution, even.

If youre from an ordinary working class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realise, said May. We will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us.

The startling similarity of the message to Ed Milibands 2015 Labour election manifesto has been widely noted.

So what changed? Well, Brexit obviously.

 Theresa May Gives Maiden Speech Outside Downing Street as new PM

May and those around her apparently believe the vote to Leave was not really a reflection of optimism about Britains future outside the European Union, but a howl of pain and frustration from left behind parts of the country.

This is certainly the most popular narrative among researchers, intellectuals and pundits in the wake of the 23rd June political earthquake: the idea that years, even decades, of pent-up anger over inequality of income, opportunity and power were what drove the massive Leave vote.

But if this was indeed an economic vote of protest, what precisely was the economic grievance?

Wages, say some. Statistical work by the labour economists Brian Bell and Stephen Machin suggests that areas where average wage growth have been weak for the past two decades were more likely to vote Leave.

Jobs, say others. Separate research by the Resolution Foundation has found a strong correlation between relatively low employment levels in an area and a tendency for that area to Leave.

But de-industrialisation is the real answer, others insist. Two Italian economists, Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig, say that the UK areas that swung to Leave were also areas that had experienced the biggest import shock over the past quarter century, with local manufacturing workers thrust into brutal competition with Chinese firms.

The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Show all 6 1 /6 The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Brexit The big one. Theresa May has spoken publicly three times since declaring her intent to stand in the Tory Leadership race, and each time she has said, Brexit means Brexit. It sounds resolute, but it is helpful to her that Brexit is a made up word with no real meaning. She has said there will be no second referendum and no re-entry in to the EU via the back door. But she, like the Leave campaign of which she was not a member, has pointedly not said with any precision what she thinks Brexit means Reuters The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address General election This is very much one to keep off the to do list. She said last week there would be no general election at this time of great instability. But there have already been calls for one from opposition parties. The Fixed Term Parliaments Act of 2010 makes it far more difficult to call a snap general election, a difficulty she will be in no rush to overcome. In the event of a victory for Leadsom, who was not popular with her own parliamentary colleagues, an election might have been required, but May has the overwhelming backing of the parliamentary party Getty The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address HS2 Macbeth has been quoted far too much in recent weeks, but it will be up to May to decide whether, with regard to the new high speed train link between London, Birmingham, the East Midlands and the north, returning were as tedious as go oer. Billions have already been spent. But the 55bn it will cost, at a bare minimum, must now be considered against the grim reality of significantly diminished public finances in the short to medium term at least. It is not scheduled to be completed until 2033, by which point it is not completely unreasonable to imagine a massive, driverless car-led transport revolution having rendered it redundant EPA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Heathrow expansion Or indeed Gatwick expansion. Or Boris Island, though that option is seems as finished as the man himself. The decision on where to expand aviation capacity in the south east has been delayed to the point of becoming a national embarrassment. A final decision was due in autumn. Whatever is decided, there will be vast opprobrium PA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Trident renewal David Cameron indicated two days ago that there will be a Commons vote on renewing Britains nuclear deterrent on July 18th, by which point we now know, Ms May will be Prime Minister. The Labour Party is, to put it mildly, divided on the issue. This will be an early opportunity to maximise their embarrassment, and return to Tory business as usual EPA The 6 most important issues Theresa May needs to address Scottish Independence Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are in no doubt that the Brexit vote provides the opportunity for a second independence referendum, in which they can emerge victorious. The Scottish Parliament at Holyrood has the authority to call a second referendum, but Ms May and the British Parliament are by no means automatically compelled to accept the result. She could argue it was settled in 2014 AFP/Getty

Other explanations fly around too, more related to social cohesion than living standards. Many claim that the referendum was essentially won on the issue of opposition to immigration. Its noted that areas with the biggest change in the number of foreign-born residents in the preceding 15 years were some of the ones with the highest Leave votes.

Yet there are problems with all of these narratives. If stagnant wages were the key driver, why did these disgruntled places not vote in larger numbers for Ed Milibands economic reform programme in the 2015 general election? Similarly, if there is such anger at Tory welfare cuts, why is Jeremy Corbyns unambiguously anti-austerity Labour Party so weak in the polls today?

Similarly, de-industrialisation is hardly a new phenomenon. Why would a mass protest vote only materialise now? Scotland has seen its share of heavy industry disappear since the 1980s. Yet it was strongly pro-Remain. Wales, as a region, voted to leave, having struggled economically for many years. Yet Northern Ireland, which has had easily the worst economic performance of any region of the UK over the same period, voted overwhelmingly to Remain.

If the issue is a post-crash squeeze on incomes, why did young people, who have suffered disproportionately since the 2008 financial crash, apparently vote heavily in favour of continued EU membership while a majority of the over-50s, whose incomes have held up relatively well, vote against?

The immigration story is complicated too. Areas with the highest levels of foreign-born population  including London - were also the ones with highest Remain votes. Clacton, the seaside constituency with that has returned the countrys only UKIP MP, has a very low share of foreign-born residents.

Recommended Read more Australia seeking free trade deal with UK following Brexit vote

The inequality explanation is tricky to sustain too, given the nationwide distribution of income across the population has not actually shifted much in recent years. If its about wealth, why did (as the Resolution Foundation has also found) areas with high levels of home ownership incline towards Leave?

Seeking a single over-arching cause of the Brexit vote is, in truth, a wild goose chase. Theres no real reason why people voted in the way they did. All these factors probably played some part to some extent and these analysts and politicians might be like the proverbial blind men describing different bits of the elephant.

Binary referendum questions can accommodate all manner of grievances, hopes and motivations in either box. And, on top of that, theres the filter of local politics and institutional allegiances.

Its also possible that a great many people simply did not understand the full implications of their vote. One of the strongest correlations with a leave bias identified by the Resolution Foundation was actually relatively low levels of graduates in an area. Large parts of the tabloid media did little to inform their readers.

Theres a danger of politicians and pundits latching on to the explanation for the Brexit vote that fits their existing pre-occupations, or existing preferred policy solutions.

Recommended Read more Theresa May signals Article 50 delay over Scotland

Last week, before he was fired as Chancellor, George Osborne was talking about how the vote underlined the importance of his cherished Northern Powerhouse agenda.

Boris Johnson, before he dropped out of the Tory leadership race, was trying to talk down the importance of immigration as a motivator of Leave voters, apparently eyeing an EU trade deal that would allow the continuation of free movement.

Mays new stated economic approach sounds appealing to me personally, but its possible shes making the same mistake of projecting on to the referendum result the message she was already inclined to read.

Yes, the people have spoken. But its a fallacy to assume that they spoke with a single voice.
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Why has France become such a persistent target for jihadist assault?

There is a temptation, both inside and outside the country to suggest that France, and successive French governments, may be partly to blame. This hides a darker reality.

The truck attack which slaughtered 84 people in Nice was the third mass killing in France in 17 months. There have also been a cluster of other, smaller incidents which were broadly jihadist in nature.

A senior police officer and his wife were murdered in their home in a western Paris suburb last month. A truck driver beheaded his boss and rammed a chemical plant near Lyon 13 months ago.

There was also a man who tried to attack a police station near Tours with a long knife; a man who was shot dead when he approached a Paris police station wearing a fake explosives belt; another incident in which a motorist rammed and injured pedestrians; a man who shot himself in the foot after kidnapping and murdering a young woman. He was planning, it is believed, to attack a church south of Paris.

 The victims of the Nice attack

In several incidents  including the attack in Nice  there are reasons to question the sanity and doubt the coherent political motives of the attackers. Were they sincere jihadists or depressive psychotics?

This distinction is misleading.

There are plausible reasons to explain why France is under persistent attack. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, about 4,700,000 people, many of whom are non-practising.

France is the biggest single foreign recruiting ground for Isis. About 2,000 young French men and women have travelled to join the caliphate in Syria and Iraq, some of them rising to senior positions.

France has a violent and complex history of entanglement and colonisation in North Africa and the Middle East. Since the 2005 suburban riots, little has been done to make second and third generation Muslim youths feel French.

Frances ostentatiously secular state has generated conflicts with even moderate Muslim opinion: the ban on head-scarves in schools; the public ban on burkas; the aggressive anti-clericalism of Charlie Hebdo.

The existence of a powerful, xenophobic far-right, and racist elements on the centre-right, builds tensions with their anti-Muslim, not just anti-Islamist, rhetoric.

There are also grave doubts about the quality of Frances security and intelligence services. A damning parliamentary report last week pointed out that France has four internal security services (including one for Paris alone) but no central anti-terrorism agency.

A botched attempt by former President Nicolas Sarkozy to rationalise this mess made things worse by scrapping much of the plodding, grass-roots, internal intelligence-gathering which Britain boasts that it has perfected.

In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman arrives with a toy and a bouquet of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman reacts as she places flowers in front of the memorial set on the 'Promenade des Anglais' where the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People gather to view the floral tributes near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday, in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Floral tributes are laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A child's toy is placed among the floral tributes laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Investigators continue at the scene near the heavy truck that ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores who were celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Crime scene investigators work on the 'Promenade des Anglais' after the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert examines dead bodies covered with a blue sheet on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert evacuates a dead body on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice, after a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts as he sits near a French flag along the beachfront the day after a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Discarded items are left on the beach, not far from the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bullet holes in the windscreen of the lorry that was driven into the crowd at high speed Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks through debris on the street in Nice, France, the morning after a lorry ran into a crowd, killing at least 84 and injuring 50 Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Rescue workers help an injured woman to get in a ambulance AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Celebrations of Bastille Day were targeted by the lorry driver AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People cross the street with their hands on thier heads as a French soldier secures the area after at least 84 people were killed along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A paramedic attends one of the dozens of people injured in the Nice Bastille Day attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Soldiers march on street where the lorry crashed into the crowd REUTERS In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man sits next to a body seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bodies are seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Children were among the 84 killed in the atrocity, with around 50 more hospitalised Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (2nd L) speaks to the media in Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks with his hands up as police officers carry out checks on people in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack With injured people laying in the street police and onlookers react near to a truck in Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers, firefighters and rescue workers are seen at the site of the attack AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers speak with a soldier after a truck that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police shine a light into the cab as they approach the driver's cab of a truck, in Nice AP

None of this entirely explains or encompasses the nature of the threat now facing France  and not just France. It would be foolish for any western country to believe that they are sheltered from another Nice. The best internal intelligence in the world could not have foretold that Mohamed Bouhlel would flip from minor crime, domestic violence and road rage to callous mass slaughter.

One of Frances foremost experts on the Arab world and jihadism, Gilles Kepel, warns that the western world faces a new and unpredictable form of jihadist offensive. He traces a decision made by Islamic State two years ago to turn away from well-organised and well-funded attacks such as 9/11, or even the 13 November assault on Paris.

This new jihadist software, he says, centres on random attacks by disturbed or floundering individuals who are influenced  often outside direct Isis control  to make sense of their failed lives by killing miscreants. The preferred means, specifically listed by Isis propaganda, are not guns or explosives but banal, everyday weapons such as stones or knives or cars or trucks.

France, Mr Kepel suggests, has been picked as the softest initial target for this strategy. The aim is to create widespread panic and racial suspicion  the conditions for a non-Muslim v Muslim civil war, and not just in France.

Beyond a few fanatics, France, both Muslim and non-Muslim, has resisted the engrenage (spiral) of hatred which Isis seeks.

For how long?
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Turkeys failed army coup is a victory for Islamist, not liberal, democracy. Under Islamist democracy, Turkey had more journalists in jail than in China, Russia and Iran. Its religious affairs department recognises only one religion: Sunni Islam. Since other faiths are not recognised by the Turkish State, they have no legal status.

If the army had won, its victory would have been a victory for Turkeys secularism, religious tolerance and multi-faith coexistence. Now that Islamists have won, Turkey would see a faster roll-back of secularism from its public life, and widespread persecution of its Alevi activists, whom President Erdogan publicly blames for the coup.

The removal of the army from Turkeys politics may have been desirable, but there is little doubt that it is the 80-year-old traditions of secularism, unremittingly protected by the army, which have created the ground for democracy to flourish. With Erdogans victory, that ground is now more likely to be occupied by an Iranian-type illiberal democracy.

Randhir Singh Bains

Essex

After Nice, we mustn't continue this vicious circle

Following the Nice attack, Theresa May called for a tough response and Francois Hollande vowed to avenge the innocent lives lost in Nice by extending military intervention in Syria and Iraq. It is just shocking that even after 15 years of waging a war on terror, we continue along this warpath, despite the world becoming increasingly dangerous. If we don't break this cycle of violence then just as we drop more bombs in the Middle East, further retaliatory attacks will take place at home. Sadly, this will become our norm in the same way that war has tragically become the norm for people living in countries which were invaded and destabilised.

Mirza Ali

Essex

How do we solve the single market conundrum?

We must have access to the single market, say the Remainers (an argument outlined in John Rentouls piece For the first time in Britain, we have a Prime Minister who intends to make us poorer). But how does it differ from a free trade pact?

The United States of America is a single market for goods and services. In contrast, the North American Free Trade Area is essentially about goods. It neither makes provision for the free movement of labour, nor would any American or Canadian politician dare advocate such a provision. The free movement of labour is, of course, a bedrock principle of the EU single market.

Just as non-EU migrants view themselves as British rather than English, so those from the EU will opt for a European identity rather than a British one. Thus the free movement of labour spawns an ever closer political union.

Staying in the single market will satisfy the City but it will eventually have profound consequences.

Yugo Kovach

Dorset

It is possible for Scotland to retain links to the EU and be part of the UK; here is how. We can form a British Isles Single Market (BISM) made up of the UK, Scotland and if wished, Ireland. We can continue a common travel area that extends to the Irish Republic as it does at present. We establish a joint border force for our external borders, as is the case at present with Ireland. Our nations will all use the Pound, contribute to the BISM's budget, adhere to budgetary requirements, under the control of BISM Central Bank. Scotland would gain full fiscal independence. EU/EEA migrants could be accepted in Scotland, after having passed through the common border, but only get National Insurance numbers in Scotland or Ireland. And in return Scotland could access the EU's single market too, applying EU standards to Scotland's trade with the EU. There would be a type of shared citizenship similar to post-Maastricht EU citizenship for the British Isles, alongside Scottish, Irish and UK passports. A common parliament could be established.

It might sound far-fetched but consider the alternatives with two hard borders, the Good Friday agreement in danger, full and acrimonious independence and loss of much of Ireland's market for the UK.

Andrew Reid Wildman

Loughton

More important than ever to guard against bias

A report by the London School of Economics reveals that three-quarters of newspaper reports in the first few months of Jeremy Corbyns leadership either distorted or failed to represent his actual views (Corbyn views misreported by newspapers, report finds, 17 July). Fewer than 10 per cent of articles were found to be positive about Corbyn.

Its a good thing that the LSE has done this long overdue research, and crystallised the facts which have long been known or suspected by many. The bad thing is that it just goes to show how the press still has such power over the prospects of our political leaders.

The press destroyed Gordon Browns reputation. It then went on to destroy Ed Miliband. It has peaked in an orgy of hostility towards Jeremy Corbyn, while the smarmy and cruel David Cameron has been treated throughout with kid gloves. Inevitably a large percentage of the electorate will to some extent or another be influenced by relentless character assassination, and the votes of some people will be entirely based on how they have been influenced by newspapers.

If the Independent cannot be a shining example of fairness in this matter, then it is left to social media to fill the gaps and present the truth, and that is something used less by the older generation  the generation that votes in the highest numbers  than by anyone else.

This report should be serious food for thought.

Penny Little

Great Haseley, Oxon

Don't forget May's record

As the former Home Secretary becomes Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition fights to keep his job, I cant help thinking back to the 15th June last year: the day that Jeremy Corbyn made the ballot for the Labour leadership. That same afternoon, Corbyn was one of a small number of MPs to join a demonstration protesting the abuse and mistreatment of women detained without charge or trial at Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre and calling for that centre to be closed. The rally was addressed by former and current detainees (the latter speaking by phone) whose harrowing stories are generally unheard and who have lived without the democratic freedoms many of us take for granted. Now is not the time to forget the many vulnerable women and men hurt by the policies of Theresa Mays old department nor to lose sight of the solidarity that matters more than a pink bus.

Emma Jones

Abingdon

Making plans for Nigel

It's impossible not to disparage

The disaster called Nigel Farage

He entices the floaters

By lying to voters

Then just walks away from the damage.

James Churchill

Baslow
The president arrived in Rwanda on Saturday and participated in the unofficial talks by the head of states on means to boost the financial resources of the African Union

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi on Saturday participated in unofficial talks by African Union head of states on how to boost the organisation's financial resources, after arriving in Kigali for the 27th AU summit.

During a speech to leaders El-Sisi said for the Africa 2063 vision to be fulfilled, African countries should start gradually increasing the financing of AU activities, according to a statement released by the presidency.

El-Sisi added that the economic situation of each African country should be put into consideration during the financing process.

Egypt is one of the four largest African contributors to the AU's annual budget, Egypt's ambassador to Kenya, Ambassador Mahmoud Talaat, wrote in an editorial for Kenyan daily The Star earlier this week.

This year's summit is dubbed "the African Year of Human Rights," and will have a special focus on the rights of women.

The 10-18 July summit will also address issues including an African free trade zone agreement and AU commission elections.

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A recent poll published by the BBC suggested the majority of Brits dont think Islam is compatible with Western values. This is a thoroughly concerning finding considering how there are nearly 3 million people living in the UK who describe themselves as Muslim. But how incompatible are their views with Western values in reality? It's especially important to ask this after acts of atrocity like the Nice attack.

The core Western values of democracy, freedom and justice can be seen as the bedrock of its civilisation  and for practising, informed Muslims, freedom and democratic values are anything but new to them. Islam from its very outset advocated for complete freedom, justice and democratic values.

Many are quick to point out that today, many Islamic nations seem to have fallen back into the Dark Ages. But it was Islamic injunctions which first spurned the great advancements made during the Islamic Golden Age from the 8th to the 13th century. The reason many so-called Islamic countries have gone backwards socially or politically is a direct consequence of failing to faithfully follow Islamic injunctions. This is because they have allowed themselves to follow the ideology of hardline clerics, rather than truly Islamic teachings.

From the outset, Islam has always advocated for a democratic form of governance, leaving it to the people to decide how and by whom they should be led. So any Muslim demanding that sharia law should be imposed in this country is not only entirely ignorant of Islam but insolent towards the freedom and opportunities Western countries offer. Ironically, of course, they are able to spout their false ideology because of those very freedoms.

 US Muslim leader addresses Isis after Orlando shooting - 'You do not represent us. You are an aberration

To illustrate Islams support for a democratic government, verse 4:59 of the Holy Quran clearly outlines the basic and main requirements for democracy. The people must take their vote as a responsibility and thus choose the most appropriate and suitable person to lead them. The Quran then in turn exhorts those in authority to exercise justice.

Further, it promotes dialogue and consultation to gauge public opinion and decide matters fairly as illustrated in 42:39. Muslims in the early era of Islam had this sense of responsibility.

So when Islam itself supports a democratic form of governance and also requires Muslims to obey those in authority among them (4:60), any Muslim speaking against the West while living with its freedoms is acting deliberately against the recommendations of their religion. Those who really feel Islam isnt compatible with Western values ought to educate themselves on Islams true teachings, even if some so-called Muslims wont.

If we take justice to be one of the Western values to be proud of, those unaware of Islamic teachings would be surprised to hear how the Quran strongly exhorts to absolute justice on more than one occasion (5:9, 6:153, 7:30), saying, Allah loves the just (49:10). The Quran is so clear on the importance of fair-mindedness that Harvard University declared this verse as one of the greatest expressions of justice in literature.

But what about freedom? Here we find similar values. Those asserting that Islam restricts freedom are grossly mistaken, or simply deceived by the oppressive political regimes in the Middle East. Its important not to confuse the religion of Islam with oppressive political and dictatorial rule.

How, when the Prophet of Islam said it was forbidden to compel anyone in matters of faith, can his followers then have the authority to impose their beliefs on others? Time and again Islams teachings uphold religious and personal freedoms. If dictators in the Middle East or radical Muslim preachers oppose the Prophet Mohammed in their words and actions, then theyre solely to blame. It doesnt mean Islam is incompatible with freedom or human rights. It means that these hate preachers and unjust rulers who claim to be Muslims are at odds with not only Western values, but the true requirements of their faith.

In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Show all 30 1 /30 In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman arrives with a toy and a bouquet of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A woman reacts as she places flowers in front of the memorial set on the 'Promenade des Anglais' where the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People gather to view the floral tributes near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts near bouquets of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores and injuring more who were celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday, in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Floral tributes are laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A child's toy is placed among the floral tributes laid out near the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Investigators continue at the scene near the heavy truck that ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores who were celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Crime scene investigators work on the 'Promenade des Anglais' after the truck crashed into the crowd during the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice EPA In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert examines dead bodies covered with a blue sheet on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A forensic expert evacuates a dead body on the Promenade des Anglais seafront in the French Riviera city of Nice, after a gunman smashed a truck into a crowd of revellers celebrating Bastille Day Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man reacts as he sits near a French flag along the beachfront the day after a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores celebrating the Bastille Day in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Discarded items are left on the beach, not far from the site of the truck attack in the French resort city of Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bullet holes in the windscreen of the lorry that was driven into the crowd at high speed Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks through debris on the street in Nice, France, the morning after a lorry ran into a crowd, killing at least 84 and injuring 50 Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Rescue workers help an injured woman to get in a ambulance AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Authorities investigate a truck after it plowed through Bastille Day revelers in the French resort city of Nice, France AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Celebrations of Bastille Day were targeted by the lorry driver AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack People cross the street with their hands on thier heads as a French soldier secures the area after at least 84 people were killed along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A paramedic attends one of the dozens of people injured in the Nice Bastille Day attack In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Soldiers march on street where the lorry crashed into the crowd REUTERS In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man sits next to a body seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Bodies are seen on the ground after at least 84 people were killed in Nice, when a truck ran into a crowd celebrating the Bastille Day national holiday Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Children were among the 84 killed in the atrocity, with around 50 more hospitalised Reuters In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve (2nd L) speaks to the media in Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack A man walks with his hands up as police officers carry out checks on people in the centre of French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack With injured people laying in the street police and onlookers react near to a truck in Nice AP In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers, firefighters and rescue workers are seen at the site of the attack AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police officers speak with a soldier after a truck that ploughed into a crowd leaving a fireworks display in the French Riviera town of Nice AFP/Getty Images In pictures: Bastille Day Nice attack Police shine a light into the cab as they approach the driver's cab of a truck, in Nice AP

The Prophet Mohammed declared all men were free  no one being superior to another except by way of righteous conduct. He further took great steps to abolish slavery and liberate women across the Arab world whose status as chattel was widespread. This was long before similar battles were won in the West against unjust slavery and for the liberation of women.

In other words, Islam isnt just compatible with Western values; it started to espouse and establish them long before western democracies. Islamic and Western values are one and the same, and they have been for longer than you could possibly imagine.
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As a botched attempt at an undemocratic military coup took place in Turkey on Friday night, confusion reigned, jets flew overhead, and military vehicles took to the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. Soon, however, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered a live FaceTime address to the nation, calling on people to take to the streets to overturn the coup and defend democracy. The result left 265 dead, 1,440 wounded and the return of Erdogans democratically elected government.

This reads like a peoples success story: unlike the jubilant crowds that met the tanks in Turkeys 1960, 1971 and 1980 coups, this time, the Turkish public responded with a firm no. Turkeys opposition parties  usually vehemently opposed to Erdogans AK Party  hurriedly rallied to denounce the coup attempt and state their commitment to democracy on Saturday. Many international heads of state, the UN, and NATO called for the continuation of Turkeys democratically elected government. The peoples will had triumphed over militarism.

But while the Turkish government congratulates itself and its loyal 51 per cent for a historical night of defending democracy, this feels far from a victory for Turkeys secular and minority groups. Secular Turkish Muslims, non-Muslims, non-Sunnis, Kurds, LGBT individuals, dissenting journalists, academics, and others who wish to see Erdogan step down through due democratic process after 12 years of rule fear that Fridays events will only sow deeper division in Turkish society.

 Thousands welcome Erdogan

No one wants the instability and civilian oppression that martial law brings, but many Turks have long been hoping in vain for a truly democratic government, one that, in the true definition of the term, listens to the 49 per cent who happen to disagree with the Islamist and authoritarian direction of the ruling party. It has now long been the case in Turkey that, when the word democracy is used by the state, the calling card is coming out: it directly means their sustained electoral majority, and this justifies whatever is next to come. Democracy has become shorthand for a majority with homogenous values having the right to decide the fate of a diverse and increasingly demoralised minority.

Yesterdays show of democracy was therefore not only questionable in label, but its aftermath looks set to be, too. The governments heavy-handed clampdown has already begun. A remarkable 2,839 army members, and 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been detained within 24 hours: assuming all arrests are based on solid impartial evidence, it is an intelligence feat of astounding accuracy and speed, which Turkeys recent failures to detect terrorist plots suggests unlikely. The sheer numbers bear the hallmarks of a purge, as any unlawful arrests fall through the cracks. Erdogan has also regained some international sympathy, while bolstering a domestic support base that had temporarily waned due to tensions about Syrian refugees.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes Show all 8 1 /8 Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes Just a week before he was elected President, he called Erdogan Amberin Zaman, the Turkey correspondent for 'The Economist', a "shameless militant woman disguised under the name of a journalist" after she had asked an opposition leader whether "Muslim society is able to question" the authorities. "Know your place," Erdogan said. "They gave you a pen and you are writing a column in a newspaper. "And then they invite you to a TV channel owned by Dogan media group and you insult at a society of 99 per cent Muslims," he said he said according to Today's Zaman newspaper. Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes Turkish people are pictured chanting slogans during an anti-government protest on Taksim square in Istanbul, on 29 June, 2013. The protests were sparked by brutal police action against a local conservation battle to save Istanbul's Gezi Park, and soon turned into nationwide demonstrations against the government. Amid the protests - the worst in Turkey for years - Erdogan accused demonstrators of being "arm-in-arm with terrorism," according to Reuters. "This is a protest organized by extremist elements. We will not give away anything to those who live arm-in-arm with terrorism," he said. GURCAN OZTURK/AFP/Getty Images Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes During last years protests, activists used social media to organise and disseminate information. Several dozen tweeters were arrested following the protests, according to local media reports. Erdogan responded by calling the technology a "menace". "There is now a menace which is called Twitter," Erdogan said. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society," BBC New reported. Vladimir Astapkovich/RIA Novosti via Getty Images Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes Not helping to allay accusations of authoritarianism, after Turkish police detained 49 people, including well-known business people and those close to the ruling party, Erdeogan ominously told reporter that Turkey "is not a banana republic" that can be affected by unnamed "operations", according to Today's Zaman newspaper. People who are backed by the media and certain funders cannot change this country," he said. "People backed by certain dark gangs both inside and outside Turkey cannot mess with the country's path. They cannot change conditions in Turkey. Turkey is not a country that anyone can launch an operation into. The [Turkish] nation will not allow that. The AK Party, which is governing this nation, will not allow this." Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes Friends and relatives of the miners who died in an explosion at the Soma mine are pictured praying following the burial in Soma cemetery of the last body to be recovered from the mine in May 2014. At the time, the then-Prime Minister badly misjudged the Soma mining disaster, in which 301 workers died. He told the relatives of dead and dying miners that "these types of incidents are ordinary things", following allegations that the government had ignored safety concerns about the privately owned mine, the Guardian reported. In his defence, Erdogan recounted in a separate speech a list of mining disasters which occurred abroad, including a British disaster in 1862, and one in America "which has every kind of technology". Oli Scarff/Getty Images Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes Palestinians pictured attending Friday noon prayers in a destroyed mosque that was hit by Israeli strikes, in Gaza City. As Prime Minister, Erdogan has condemned Israel, accusing it of deliberately killing Palestinian mothers and warned that the it would "drown in the blood it sheds." Speaking to thousands of supporters during a rally in Istanbul ahead of the 10 August election, Reuters reported him as saying: "Just like Hitler, who sought to establish a race free of all faults, Israel is chasing after the same target." "They kill women so that they will not give birth to Palestinians; they kill babies so that they won't grow up; they kill men so they can't defend their country ... They will drown in the blood they shed," he said. AP Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes Amid the worst protests in Turkey for years which had spread across dozens of cities last June, Erdogan accused demonstrators of being "arm-in-arm with terrorism," according to Reuters. A demonstration to halt construction in a park in an Istanbul square grew into mass protests against a heavy-handed police crackdown and what opponents called Erdogan's authoritarian policies. "This is a protest organized by extremist elements," Erdogan said before departing on a trip to North Africa. "We will not give away anything to those who live arm-in-arm with terrorism," he said. Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images Recep Tayyip Erdogan's most controversial quotes The Turkish President's craziest quotes In March 2014, Erdogan accused a 15-year-old boy who died from injuries sustained in last year's anti-government protests of being linked to terrorism. Berkin Elvan, who became a symbol of anti-government protests, had gone to pick up bread when he was hit with a teargas canister - sending him into a nine-month coma before he passed away. In a speech broadcast on state TV, Erdogan said of Berkin: "This kid with steel marbles in his pockets, with a slingshot in his hand, his face covered with a scarf, who had been taken up into terror organisations, was unfortunately subjected to pepper gas. How could the police determine how old that person was who had a scarf on his face and was hurling steel marbles with a slingshot in his hand? ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images

The frightening violence of Erdogans supporters in their so-called caretaking of democracy on Friday night; the rhetoric of democracy and majoritarianism that Erdogan uses interchangeably without qualm; and the pursuit of vengeance over mercy in the aftermath marks this failed coup as the start of darker days for Turkish democracy.
Advocates for patients suffering from rare diseases are warning that Brexit could negatively impact Irish patients, including children, receiving specialised care in the UK.

Dr Niamh O'Brien, whose nine-year-old daughter Lucy attends Sheffield Children's Hospital, said: "It's a huge fear. One of the first things that crossed my mind when Brexit happened was, how will this affect my child?"

Lucy suffers from a rare bone disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta and has been attending Sheffield for specialist care since birth. Because of extended waiting lists in Crumlin Children's Hospital, she may need to attend Sheffield for further surgeries.

"So many people in Ireland go to the UK for specialist care. There's so many academic, medical and research ties between the UK and Ireland. It's a very worrying time from that point of view,"said Dr O'Brien.

"There's a huge amount of cost in going abroad so if you had to go even farther for treatment and you're going somewhere where you'd have absolutely no support for families who already have enough challenges, I think it would be scandalous."

The chair of the Genetic and Rare Diseases Organisation, Avril Daly, echoed her concerns, listing potential obstacles such as non-EU healthcare funding, questions over the freedom of movement for patients, and the loss of EU research funding to specialised areas as issues which may inadvertently affect the large network of Irish patients attending specialized clinics and seeking clinical trials in the UK.

Ms Daly, who is also on the board of the European Rare Diseases Organisation, said: "In general, it's very worrying. We don't know where we are now. Patients in Ireland receiving treatment in the UK are very concerned. The last thing they need is this kind of stress, but at the moment we're not getting clarity."

She also pointed to the recent move to establish the European Reference Network (ERN), facilitating a cross-border directive to enable patients to get access to expertise regardless of where they live in Europe, which was signed into law in 2014.

"The ERN would allow for free movement of patients across the EU, so the reality is EU citizens all have the same rights and same access to healthcare. This is particularly important if your country does not provide the relevant healthcare, especially for those with rare diseases. It was a great thing for EU citizens," said Dr O'Brien.

The UK won 17pc of the EU's health research budget between 2007 and 2013 through Horizon 2020 and it has been reported that the UK is currently involved in about 40pc of all adult rare diseases trials in the EU.

However, with Brexit, Ms Daly said this progress may be compromised.

"What we will say is nothing will change immediately. If people are receiving care in the UK, that is not going to change for the moment, but what happens after Brexit remains to be seen. We hope there will be a mechanism to enable the continuation."

In response to concerns raised over the future of UK care for Irish patients, a spokesperson for the Department of Health said: "The terms of a British exit from the EU are unknown at this stage. It is expected to take a minimum of two years of negotiations between all EU member states, including Ireland, to agree a new arrangement between the UK and the EU, and the Department of Health will be fully involved in these negotiations."

The department is undertaking "a full audit of the possible impacts, risks, opportunities and contingencies arising over the longer term, in the phases preceding and following the UK's withdrawal from the EU" in advance of the North-South Ministerial Council Health and Food Safety ministerial sectoral meeting scheduled for autumn 2016".

"Ensuring that there is minimum disruption in the area of health and that essential services are maintained will be our key priority," the spokesperson added.
The Velasco building in Dublin  one of the few options if youre after new-build offices

Prime office rents in Dublin have returned to their 2006 peak of 60 per sq. ft - and now have the potential to reach 65 per sq. ft by 2018, new research from Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) suggests.

According to the latest Perspective on the Dublin Office Pipeline report, which JLL has just published, rents for Grade A city centre buildings have already rebounded - effectively doubling from the bottom of the market, which was reached in the final quarter of 2012.

Based on current and projected levels of supply and demand for office space, the firm's research predicts prices per square foot of 62 in 2017 and 65 for 2018 and 2019.

While JLL's head of research Hannah Dwyer said prime office rents in the capital had already experienced a period of what she termed "unprecedented growth", she qualified her remarks by noting that the rent levels now being achieved varied between 55 and 60 per sq. ft and were "very building specific".

"Rents achieved are based on location, specification and lease flexibility," Dwyer said.

"Our forecasts suggest that rents will remain steady with some evidence of further growth in exceptional cases as new pipeline comes on stream," she added.

According to JLL, there is currently some 3.5 million sq. ft of office space under construction across Dublin. With 41pc of that space already pre-let, just 2.1 million sq. ft now remains available for letting.

For an occupier looking for a new-build office in 2016, there are just two options available, in the Velasco building on Lower Grand Canal Street and 21 Charlemont at Charlemont Place.

Separately, CBRE's latest market review shows that the level of Dublin office take-up for the second quarter of 2016 is down 35pc on the same period last year.

According to the report, 65 individual lettings amounting to a combined 37,199 sq. m (400,406 sq. ft) of office leasing activity took place up to the end of June, bringing the total office leasing activity so far this year to 89,641 sq. m (964,887 sq. ft). In the first six months of 2015, more than 122,000 sq. m (1,313,197 sq. ft) of office space was taken up in the capital.

In a statement accompanying the latest figures, CBRE noted that the year-on-year decrease "masks a number of large deals which are currently under way and due to sign" in the third quarter.

Commenting on the overall demand for office space in Dublin, CBRE office agency director Alan Moran said: "Although it remains to be seen to what extent the Brexit result will impact on demand for office accommodation in the capital in the medium term, the overall volume of demand for offices rose quarter-on-quarter to 247,000 sq. m (2,658,685 sq. ft) at the end of the second quarter."

In terms of the rents now being achieved, CBRE's findings differed slightly to that of JLL.

While they noted that prime headline values of 60 per sq. ft were now being quoted for a number of buildings in Dublin's Central Business District (CBD), CBRE's market review said there was no "firm evidence" of this having been achieved.

As a result, it said it was leaving its prime rent series unchanged at the mid-year point, at 57.50 per square foot.

The firm noted that potential occupiers of office space were obtaining better terms for refurbished accommodation as opposed to new buildings in the current climate, and that this was easing rental pressures to some degree.

CBRE said prime office investment yields had remained stable during the second quarter of 2016 at 4.65pc.
Farmers and landowners will be protected in the event of walkers and tourists falling or getting injured on the country's most popular walks and trails.

The Government is moving to urgently introduce a new national indemnity scheme after a high profile court case saw farmers consider shutting their gates to hillwalkers.

Two pilots of a protective scheme are currently in operation on popular walks in different locations. Successful running of the programme will lead to a new national indemnity scheme being rolled out before the end of the year, officials at the Department of Rural Affairs have told hillwalking associations.

It means the State will take up the worry of allowing walkers to access trails through farmers' lands in upland areas such as the McGillycuddy Reeks, Croagh Patrick and the Wicklow Way.

It follows a landmark court decision in favour of a walker who fell in the Wicklow Way.

Farmers warned the judgement could result in them preventing hillwalkers from accessing their lands in some of Ireland's most scenic areas.

They had also previously called for indemnity to lie solely with hillwalkers amid concerns that they would be made liable in the case of serious injury.

Costs of running such a case were of huge concern to the Irish Farmers' Association.

The Sunday Independent understands a plan has already been agreed and drawn up by officials in the new Department of Rural Affairs.

It was previously worked on by the Department of Environment before this year's general election. However, it has not yet been outlined how the plan would be introduced.

This means the practicalities of how payments would be made by the State have yet to be drawn up and the Government is still mulling this over with the State Claims Agency.

It is expected that the newly proposed national indemnity scheme will be implemented by the end of 2016

Talks have been ongoing between the department and major stakeholders on mountains for more than five years as concerns grew that farmers could be subjected to massive pay-outs to injured walkers.

Mountaineer Frank Nugent was one of the first Irishmen to reach the summit of Mount Everest. He is now chairman of the Irish Uplands Forum and said a roll-out of a national indemnity programme was important to protect landowners in areas such as the Wicklow Way or the Twelve Bens in Connemara.

"Most of those areas, the land there is private so a scheme like this would take all of the worry away from the farmer," said Mr Nugent.

"The Occupiers' Liability Act makes it very clear that landowners should not be responsible for people coming on to walk.

"We would absolutely welcome the implementation of the scheme because we have been proactive in trying to get a scheme introduced.

"We have always realised the value of the Occupiers' Liability Act but the problem with the act is that it doesn't prevent someone from suing the farmer. That means they need legal representation and straight away that costs money."

An experienced climber was awarded 40,000 last April in a "game-changing" ruling after a fall on a wooden boardwalk. Hillwalker Teresa Wall's claim for damages against the National Parks and Wildlife Service, which is responsible for designated walking routes and paths around the country, came after a fall on a rotten boardwalk. She suffered a gash on her right knee that required seven stitches.

The judge said it was clear from photographs produced in evidence that the boardwalk had been made up of second-hand wooden railway sleepers that were badly rotted. Staples were protruding from the sleepers and chicken wire was loosely hanging over the boardwalk. She added that reasonable care had not been taken to maintain the boardwalk and make sure it was in a safe condition.
CRH boss Albert Manifold is Irelands best-paid CEO with a basic annual salary of 1.4m  but with options and bonuses, hes looking at 8.2m a year

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) is to appeal directly to the Supreme Court a High Court decision restraining it from using certain material that was seized during a dawn raid of CRH subsidiary Irish Cement.

Mr Justice Max Barrett ruled in April that the CCPC was not entitled to access, review or use material in a crh.com email account of CRH executive Seamus Lynch that was unrelated to Irish Cement.

The CCPC had seized the entire inbox and while some of the material was likely to be relevant to the investigation, Judge Barrett said that on the balance of probabilities there would almost certainly be material that was not covered by the terms of the CCPC's search warrant.

Now the CCPC has been granted leave by the Court of Appeal to take the matter directly to the Supreme Court.

It would not comment further on the case.

The legal battle sprung out of an investigation into alleged abuse of a dominant position by Irish Cement in the supply of bagged cement in Ireland, which the CCPC is continuing, notwithstanding the High Court ruling.

The investigation saw a premises at Platin, Co Meath, raided by a CCPC team on the morning of May 14 last year.

Before the case came to court CRH said it was co-operating fully with the investigation but wanted certain material back.

Among the documents seized was one headed "estimated cost of Ecocem", the High Court heard.

Ecocem is a rival of Irish Cement.

Bypassing the Court of Appeal means the matter will likely see a final resolution quicker than would otherwise have been the case.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and Gross National Product (GNP), as they are presently calculated, will remain the Central Statistics Office's primary measurements for economic growth.

GDP and GNP as measurements of economic growth came under fierce criticism last week after the CSO reported revised findings that 2015 GDP had risen by 26pc, dramatically outpacing gains in employment and household spending.

The figures suggested Ireland's economy expanded in size by almost 63bn in nominal terms during the year. Critics said the measurement did not provide an accurate picture, with famed economist Paul Krugman referring to the findings as "leprechaun economics".

The CSO said last week that a "high-level cross-sector consultative group" will be put together following the negative reaction to the figures, to look at how the organisation can better serve those who use its data.

High-level users including representatives from the Department of Finance, the Central Bank and academia have been invited to take part. The deadline for forming the group is July 29.

But a senior CSO official told the Sunday Independent that GDP and GNP, and the methodology used to reach them, are required by EU legislation and will remain the headline indicators of economic growth produced by the CSO.

"A large proportion of our outputs are driven by EU rules. We legally have to produce them," said the CSO's Jennifer Banim.

"The methodology and data behind these figures is sound. But we do acknowledge the difficulty that the jump [in GDP] has caused some users of the data."

The Department of Finance has said it will not raise its growth forecasts and policy plans based on the findings.

"The Department will continue to plan the Budget based on 5pc growth this year and about 4pc next year," a spokesperson said.

"The Minister has clarified also that in terms of the Budget we will continue to base our plans on the figures in the Summer Economic Statement."

Minister Noonan has given his support to the CSO's approach. "The Minister for Finance made it clear that he is not critical of the CSO's approach," the spokesperson added.

"He also clarified that the inclusion by the CSO of additional activities in the calculation of GDP to bring it to a level of growth at 26pc for 2015 were all legitimate from the CSO's point of view. They were in accordance with best international practice and would be fully endorsed by Eurostat."
European Ombudsman Emily O'Reilly was in Dublin to advise Central Bank chiefs on the need for greater transparency and improved communication - only two days after the banking regulator was publicly rapped by Ireland's Information Commissioner.

Emily O'Reilly - who heads the EU's powerful public interest watchdog - held a 45-minute meeting with Central Bank deputy governor Sharon Donnery before addressing a meeting of 50 high-level bank officials, including directors, board members and senior communications executives.

The meeting, on May 20, took place only 48 hours after Information Commissioner Peter Tyndall had criticised the banking authority's failure to comply with Freedom of Information legislation.

Speaking at the launch of the Office of the Information Commissioner's annual report on May 18, Peter Tyndall said: "We've had great difficulty in dealing with the Central Bank over the extent of our jurisdiction." His office disagreed with the bank's interpretation of the act.

"I'm sorry we've reached this point," he said. "We know what the legislation is and we will have to make a determination on that point."

O'Reilly's meeting with Donnery was followed by an hour-long Q&A session attended by bank chiefs, then there was a working lunch attended by Governor Philip Lane and his deputies Donnery and Cyril Roux.

The visit by the European Ombudsman was at the invitation of the Central Bank. It was billed by Central Bank executives as an opportunity for O'Reilly to "talk to our communication team about the importance of transparency and communication as we expand our transparency measures and to meet our senior officials who are also members of the Governing Council and Supervisory Board of the ECB", according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

At the May meeting, O'Reilly reiterated her complaints over the ECB's refusal to release the famous Trichet Letter, which threatened to cut off emergency funding to the Irish banking system at the height of Ireland's bank crash.

The ECB delayed making a 2010 letter public for four years. The letter was sent to former Finance Minister Brian Lenihan by then ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet.

At the time, an Irish journalist's public access request was refused by the ECB to "protect Ireland's financial stability".

However, O'Reilly became involved in a very public spat with the ECB by ruling that its reasons for refusing access were no longer valid, three years after the initial request. The ECB was forced to publish the letter at the end of 2014.
Rights lawyer Malek Adly was arrested in May after publicly objecting to Egypt's recognition of two Red Sea islands as belonging to Saudi Arabia

Egypt's Lawyers Syndicate has filed an official demand that authorities allow detained lawyer Malek Adly to outfit his solitary prison cell.

Sameh Ashour, the syndicate head, told Ahram Online that he had demanded the prosecution and the interior ministry allow Adly's cell to be adequately equipped and he be allowed his full rights.

Adly's wife, Asmaa Ali, has released several statements saying that her husband has been kept in solitary confinement since his arrest in May on charges of spreading false news and harming national unity and society peace.

Ali has said that her husband is not allowed to leave his unlit, unventilated prison cell. His health is deteriorating, she has said, because his family have not been allowed to provide him with a bed or a mattress, and he has to sleep on the ground.

The well-known human rights laywer was arrested in relation to his opposition to the government's decision to recognise two Red Sea islands, administered by Egypt, as belonging to Saudi Arabia.

Hundreds were arrested during and after protests objecting to the government's decision.

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It's 8am Tuesday, and the majority of the retail world is only on its way to work, but in Brown Thomas on Grafton Street, it's showtime.

Stephen Sealey, Brown Thomas's group general manager arrives into a room packed with style commentators, media influencers and fashion editors who know their Gucci from their Givenchy from half a mile away.

Designer handbags with four figure price tags that normally occupy this corner of the ground floor have been temporarily put away to make space for a high octane catwalk show with 90 looks.

Lavish gowns from new Australian label, Maticevski, crystal embellished denim dresses from Christian Dior, pearl studded Gucci heels and Vetement jeans made from recycled Levis cost 1,000 a pair - and there's a waiting list. Sipping a coffee with Sealey after the show, I introduce the subject of Brexit.

"Our view is just carry on. It's difficult to predict what the consequences will be. It might give a knock to the economy but for us, it's very simple, we need to buy 'die for' pieces, pieces that people cannot live without."

And what are the pieces that we cannot live without, I enquire?

"Well, I think you saw 90 of them in the show," says Sealey, with a smile.

"I see Brexit as just another part of the changes which are going on in the business," he adds. It's to do with the demise of disposable clothing and there is a trend for "a greater interest in experiencing luxury.

"Everyone is going OMG, but what you have to remember is that during 2012 and 2013, we traded at these exchange rates.

"The euro has weakened, it is great for the US and we are seeing a lift in tourists from the Middle East so it is swings and roundabouts."

Sealey acknowledges: "You've got all sorts of uncertainties. I mean, we saw the uncertainly in this country around the formation of Government. Brexit is another level of that and what we have to do is focus on making Brown Thomas a destination that people want to come to and that means a great environment, great service and products that you look at and say 'wow, I've got to have that', and that's the biggest thing that we need to do."

Outside BTs, the scaffolding wrapping around the store's exterior is about to come down after a 2m facelift. The work on the facade is part of a 35m investment over three years and the store is weeks away from the 'reveal' of its 11.5m project that has yielded an additional 9,000sq feet of space on its second floor.

However, new visual merchandising and luxury fitting rooms aside, what the Irish business world is really curious about is what the retail group is doing with its website.

Brown Thomas is replatforming at a cost of 2m.

It was brought forward, Sealey confirms, because of the growth of online sales and the launch date is September.

Sealey promises a much better user experience in terms of navigation, better filtering, movement, the introduction of customer reviews of beauty products - which will be moderated but not edited - as well as lots more videos.

"Currently when you search, it brings you to the product but the new website will take you to a page with three options - the product, editorial about the about the product and related video content," Sealey explains.

Customers chasing down clothes, for example jeans, will be able to pre book an appointment, load their selected options and sizes online and when they go into store, the items will be waiting for them in a changing room to try on.

Sealey views this engagement as the future of personal shopping and it is slated to be available through the website in the autumn.

"I am confident that when our new website launches, it will be a world class website. It will not be a poor second to Net-a-Porter," he says.

Some products sell a lot better online than others, it's the nature of the beast. "The best performing categories are actually kitchen electricals," says Sealey.

"Beauty has got a high percentage of online sales, particularly brands like MAC and Charlotte Tilbury which trade considerably larger than other beauty brands online - and they are key exclusives at BTs along with Jo Malone, Tom Ford and Nars.

"Accessories perform well online and ready-to-wear performs less well because I think people do really want to touch it, feel it but the website serves a real purpose in allowing people to look at the breadth of the range we've got and the price points.

"We do know that for every one product we sell online, we will sell four in store within five days of the customer viewing that product online.

"And we will sell 20pc of them the same day as the customer views it online.

"You see ultimately, I don't care particularly where the customer buys. The person who is important to me is the customer and therefore, they can buy online, they can buy in this store, they can buy it in BT2 in Dundrum. It's our job to provide the stuff that the customer wants in the easiest way."

An Isle of Wight native who came to Ireland 19 years ago after Breege O'Donoghue of Penneys recruited him from the London retail scene, Sealey moved here to take up the position of buying controller at Penneys.

Three years later, he moved to Brown Thomas as buying director, a position he held for nine years and during that time, BTs introduced Chanel, Hermes and built up the Prada and Gucci boutiques between 2002 and 2005.

After working at opposite ends of the Irish retail scene, Sealey points to a common theme - "it's about having the right product at the right time at the right price".

Sealey confirms there has been "this move away from obvious logos, and even Michael Kors, on some of their products, put the logo on the bottom inside, so there is a move away from that. I think there is a bit of a kickback to overt branding.

He holds dear the belief that you "buy to the heart of a range, with an edit that's right for your customer", and at present, 90pc of the population is within an hour of one of the group's six stores (Brown Thomas and BT2 in Dublin, Cork , Limerick, Galway, Dundrum and Blanchardstown) so there are no plans to open any more.

BT2 will close on Grafton Street without job losses. The shops were too close and brands such as top French label, Maje, contemporary crowd pleaser, COS, and Ted Baker are making the transition across Grafton Street to the mothership, the new-look second floor which Sealey assures "will look fabulous".

When it comes to the bottom line, the company won't be paying out rent for BT2 or face laying out finance doing up a property they don't own.

"If the landlord is making more money than you are out of a store, it's not a good place to be," he says matter-of-factly.

Married with one adult daughter, Sealey came to his management job at "probably the darkest hour possible, in September 2009, so it was tough".

His approach has always been to achieve a series of small slices "and if you add a slice of this and a slice of that, they all mount up".

Sealey says BTs has grown its sales every year from 2009. Profits have grown every year and the Chinese, with their love of designer handbags certainly helped during the tough years, with Mandarin-speaking staff being recruited for the Grafton Street store.

"The Chinese are still coming and year-to-date, their spending is a little bit down. I think there are a number of factors including a few clouds on the horizon with the Chinese economy.

"There is an increase in surveillance at Chinese airports. "You hear tales of luxury handbags being abandoned in the baggage reclaim areas in Chinese airports because customs are levying heavy fines. On the other hand, there is still the fact that the Chinese people know that if they buy from us, or in Europe, it is genuine product and it's not fake."

The British shoppers are still coming but they don't have their sterling strength.

However, on a positive note, the Americans appear to be making up for them and currency movement is in their favour.

Sealey confirms they are starting to see the emergence of Middle Eastern customers, "partly linked to our equine business in Ireland".

Any plans to have Arabic speaking staff, I ask?

"It's actually on our wish list so we continue to adapt and adopt according to our customer. That's what any retailer's got to do," he says.

Dublin has been awash with big boats but cruise ship business doesn't always translate into sales of luxury goods, the BT boss concedes.

"For us, the tourist business is the icing on the cake rather than the large part of the cake. It was very useful to grow it during the recession, because it enabled this business to keep on a growth path - but our primary thing is to engage with our local customer obviously."

So how is business at the moment?

"Business is OK and if I look at our growth over two years, I am very pleased. We are seeing strong growth in our Dundrum store, a lot of it driven by new beauty brands. We are seeing a good growth in Limerick, based on the investment we put into that store. The rest of the business is OK but it's nothing spectacular."

BTs will officially publish its 2015 figures next November. In the meantime, Sealey acknowledges that last year was a very good year, adding "when you come up against strong increases, it can be difficult to file strong increases on strong increases".

In addition to being managing director of the Brown Thomas Group, Sealey is also a director of Arnotts and the Henry Street store is also owned by the Weston family. Asked about plans going forward for the northside store, Sealey says: "Arnotts has a strong management team lead by Donald McDonald. They will continue to develop Arnotts as an iconic brand."

Galen Weston famously bought Brown Thomas as a gift for his Dublin-born wife, Hilary. The Westons are "very engaged in the Brown Thomas Group and their daughter, Alannah, is deputy chair of the Selfridges Group, and is very involved in the business, Sealey confirms.

Alannah has played a large part in the refurbishment plans for the Grafton Street store and is very passionate about sustainability so water only comes served in glass bottles and the store group is trying to reduce plastic in the business.

The store's plans for a new LED lighting imitative and re-wiring project will reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by almost 3,000 tonnes a year which is reduction of 39pc.

"It's great being part of a family business with family values." says Sealey.

"That is a good thing. It means you can do the right thing, you can take the long term view. If we were owned by a venture capital company, we wouldn't be spending 2m on restoring the facade of the store, it might just have been given a lick of paint."
More bang for your buck: Roisin Rooney of The Flower Barrow in The Quays shopping mall in Newry. Picture; Gerry Mooney

South of the border shoppers who travel north can save up to 50pc on selected items in their weekly groceries bill.

As the Brexit debate continues, the gap between the pound and the euro has widened significantly in recent weeks. Yesterday, the euro was trading at 83p against sterling.

Expand Close Sinead McKernan, manager of Chapelle jewellers in The Outlet, Banbridge, has noticed an increase in shoppers from south of the border. Photo: Gerry Mooney / Facebook

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Whatsapp Sinead McKernan, manager of Chapelle jewellers in The Outlet, Banbridge, has noticed an increase in shoppers from south of the border. Photo: Gerry Mooney

But retailers in Northern Ireland said the latest trek north is "more a trickle than a flow" and there has been no major exodus from major population centres like Dublin.

However, increased numbers of those living relatively close to the border are travelling to towns like Newry and Banbridge, for routine purchases such as food and alcohol.

A comparison between Tesco prices in Dublin and Banbridge show a range of items cheaper in the north.

Retailers in the north are hoping the new currency gap will entice consumers from further afield, to make more big-ticket purchases such as electronics and furniture.

A number of outlets in Newry and Banbridge currently have posters in their shop windows stating the exchange rate they have on offer for the Euro against sterling.

Roisin Rooney, who works for The Flower Barrow outlet in The Quays shopping centre in Newry, confirmed increased interest from the South in recent days.

"Shoppers can definitely get better value. Their money goes much further. Let's hope it continues," she said.

Meanwhile, Sinead McKernan, manager in the Chapelle jewellery store in The Outlet, Banbridge, also reported a modest growth in footfall brought about by cross-border shoppers.

"It's definitely worth their while for people to travel north because everything works out cheaper.

"There has definitely been an increase in numbers over the past couple of weeks, but it's still not like it used to be," she told the Sunday Independent.

She said competitive pricing for items like diamonds and jewellery would always be a particular draw.

Gordon Thomson, manager of Savoy Tailors Guild, said the gap in the two currencies is definitely attracting more customers from the Republic.

And Jimmy Nevin from the Naul, County Dublin, who made the journey northwards, commented: "To make this whole thing worthwhile you really need to buy in bulk.''

Traditionally grocery prices in the North have been significantly cheaper than those in the Republic.

A comparison of some Tesco prices this week confirmed the continuing gap between North and South.

For example, Kellogg's Special K in the North costs 3.58, and in the South costs 6.49.

Ritz crackers in the North were priced at 1.19 compared with 2 in the Republic.

Kettle Chips would set you back 2.37 in Northern Ireland compared with 2.49 in the South.

Fairy Liquid costs 1.19 up North, compared to 2.19 in the Republic.

Back in 2009 shoppers from the Republic flocked to Northern Ireland when at one stage the euro neared parity with sterling. That outflow of business caused major problems for retailers in border towns such as Dundalk.

A recent survey from Irish Revenue and Customs chiefs indicates the cost of alcohol and tobacco has climbed in the South over the past year, while the price of identical products in Northern Ireland has fallen.

However, the cost of petrol, diesel, and home heating fuel had declined significantly on both sides of the border, following a drop in international oil prices.

Over the past year the price of a bottle of vodka in Dublin was unchanged at an average of 20, while in Newry it fell from 13.48 to 13.03. The only change in excise or duty over the past year was a 50c increase on a pack of 20 cigarettes in the Republic.

But despite the fallout from Brexit, so far there has been no major consumer hit to border towns such as Dundalk.

Paddy Malone of Dundalk Chamber of Commerce says business in the town hasn't been massively impacted by the Brexit vote last month: "It's not like 2010 and 2011 when it was absolutely catastrophic for us. It's nothing as bad as that."
Clerys department store in Dublins O'Connell Street, which closed last year amid widespread controversy and with the loss of 460 jobs

A little over a year ago, a number of Clerys staff staged a sit-in at the landmark Dublin store that had been their workplace. They had lost their jobs after the company behind the store was abruptly put into liquidation.

The closure of the venerable old lady of O'Connell Street attracted intense negative publicity, with Irish businesswoman Deirdre Foley at the centre of it all.

The Sligo woman (who British trade magazine Property Week labelled an 'Alpha Female' in 2013 - shooting is listed as one of her hobbies on her company's website) had until then had a relatively low profile compared to peers such as Johnny Ronan, Michael O'Flynn and Sean Dunne.

A first-class honours commerce graduate from NUI Galway, Foley joined KPMG in 1992 and qualified as a chartered accountant.

Later she worked with Derek Quinlan, the tax collector turned property player who amassed a glittering portfolio that included Claridge's and the Savoy hotels in London, as well as multiple properties on Dublin's leafy Shrewsbury Road.

Then she went out on her own as the chief executive of D2 Private, a real estate investment and finance company - active in the Irish market since around 2006 - that bought Clerys in tandem with London-based Cheyne Capital Management, via a joint venture vehicle called Natrium.

Expand Close Deirdre Foley, the chief executive of D2 Private, which bought Clerys in tandem with another company / Facebook

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Whatsapp Deirdre Foley, the chief executive of D2 Private, which bought Clerys in tandem with another company

Her side of the story goes like this.

In January last year, Gordon Brothers, the Boston-based investor that bought Clerys out of receivership less than three years earlier, began looking for a buyer. They hired IBI Corporate Finance - one of the top deal-making firms in town - to help out.

A number of parties were interested but Natrium ultimately prevailed. The deal was completed in the early morning of June 12, 2015.

Natrium bought OCS Investment Holdings, the parent of OCS Operations, which was the company behind the retail arm Clerys. A separate company, OCS Properties (OPL), owned the O'Connell Street property - a corporate arrangement that is legal, but has attracted much criticism.

As part of the deal, a number of OCS directors sought to resign and Natrium appointed experienced insolvency practitioners Jim Brydie and Eamonn Cooney to become the directors of OCS Operations.

Brydie has previously sworn an affidavit saying their expertise in insolvency was the reason they were appointed.

Shortly after the sale, the shares in the Clerys operating business - OCS Operations - were transferred to Jim Brydie for 1.

That day, Brydie and Cooney wrote a letter to OCS Properties Limited (OPL) - the company that owned the Clerys building. The letter, marked private and confidential and delivered by hand, is now available on the Department of Jobs website.

It says OCS Operations' lease on the Dublin property had expired as of March but that it had remained in situ with the knowledge and consent of OPL.

"It is clearly in both the company's and OPL's interest that the company's occupation of the property is reflected in a formal lease governing its terms. Accordingly, please confirm by return if OPL is willing to grant a formal lease to the company of the property and for what terms," it continues.

A three-sentence reply from Foley was sent the same day on behalf of OPL.

"Dear Sirs, We have received your letter of today's date requesting confirmation by return as to whether we are willing to grant you a further lease of the property known as Clerys Department Store and Warehouse (the property) currently occupied by you under an expired letting agreement."

"We are writing to inform you that we are not prepared to grant you any further lease or letting agreement of the property and await hearing from you regarding your plans to vacate.

"A formal Notice to Quit will be served in due course, if necessary."

Brydie asked the High Court the same day for the company to be placed into liquidation, having come to the conclusion that it was insolvent.

The petition was granted and Clerys was gone amid a massive outcry.

Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton commissioned a report, which concluded that "while the transaction that produced this result may have been lawful, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it would be preferable if it were not."

The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) began investigating too, and that's the root of the current court action that saw Foley heckled by a former Clerys employee last week.

The WRC is a statutory body that came into being last year. It is now responsible for the functions of the Labour Relations Commission and the National Employment Rights Authority.

It began examining whether an offence had been committed under the Protection of Employment Act 1977, which says that when an employer decides to impose collective redundancies, they have to begin consultations with employee representatives at least 30 days before the first dismissal takes effect.

The then Tanaiste and Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton told the Dail that Clerys workers were not afforded their basic entitlements in that regard.

"The people who are shamed and disgraced by what has happened in this case are those who took part in the arrangements to do this," she added.

WRC inspector James Kelly arrived at D2's offices on Harcourt Street in Dublin on May 19 this year, with gardai in tow.

He believed documents relevant to his investigation were being held there, and in particular was interested in a computer "that may have been operated by Deirdre Foley or [D2 employee] Mark Redmond".

The seizure of the computer is at the heart of the current court proceedings. Foley claimed in a sworn statement that the inspectors had accessed legally privileged material, and they had forwarded material from the laptop while trying to erase the evidence of doing so.

She believes the inspectors are "engaged in a far-reaching exercise in accessing information and materials which have no relevance to their investigation and which exercise is not supported by their statutory powers."

As far as Foley is concerned, she and D2 are not the proper subjects of the WRC investigation into whether an offence was committed.

She says OCS Operations was the Clerys workers' employer - not her. She also says the decision to put the company in liquidation can only have been made by the people in a position to do it - the directors of OCS Operations, Brydie and Cooney.

The Protection of Employment Act says that when an offence is proved to have been committed under it "with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of, any director, manager, secretary or other officer of the body corporate or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he as well as the body corporate shall be guilty of that offence."

Foley says she never held any of those roles at OCS Operations.

She also believes the negative publicity she has received is "both unmerited and distressing".

On foot of the seizure of material on May 19, she and D2 brought legal proceedings against the WRC seeking, among other things, to restrain the WRC from exercising any further powers in respect of D2 and Foley in investigating the Clerys redundancies.

WRC inspector James Kelly rejects Foley's version of events, and a bitter war of words has broken out between both sides in court.

The High Court has heard that he believes the description outlined above was "utterly misleading and did not in fact occur", saying that he believes Cooney and Brydie did not make their decisions at arm's length from Foley and that the decision to wind up Clerys was made prior to June 12.

He said Foley and D2 "continue to be selective in the provision of information to this Court and although they purport to explain the transaction and make the claim that it is bona fide and above reproach, they have of necessity, concealed information which would seriously call into question the position being adopted."

He said the deal was brought about "by virtue of events [that] were not bona fide but the transaction was arranged and carried out and brought into effect by virtue of secret meetings and events that were not bona fide from a commercial perspective and were highly inappropriate and these events were organised and arranged under the auspices of a plan called 'Project Clock'".

In response, Foley said that there was "no credible basis to support such an allegation".

"The suggestion of secret meetings, and the implication of something improper, is far-fetched," she said in a sworn statement.

"It is normal business practice for parties considering an acquisition to retain legal and other commercial advisors, which in this case included KPMG and A&L Goodbody Solicitors, to advise on, and carry out due diligence as part of the transaction... it is absolutely normal for such commercial parties engaged in a transaction such as this to enter into confidential discussions."

Other parties including Redmond, Cooney and Brydie, and Eamonn Richardson of KPMG who was appointed liquidator of OCS Operations, also rejected allegations of impropriety.

However, it has been accepted in court that these issues are not central to the case at hand, which is about whether the WRC was entitled to act the way it did when it entered D2's offices last May.

The WRC says that it has acted in a proper manner at all times - and that Foley's side were trying to "mischaracterise the investigation".

It says directors' packs bearing a D2 watermark and containing financial details about Clerys had been supplied to Brydie and Cooney by D2 prior to the takeover, and that this was one of the reasons why they sought to enter D2's premises.

They were allowed to do so under a provision of the Workplace Relations Act 2015 that allows an inspector entry to a premises other than dwelling where he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that records or documents relating to the employment of persons are kept, they argue.

Foley's side claims they exceeded their powers, with her barrister Remy Farrell SC comparing it to "traffic wardens dropping on ropes from helicopters," saying that D2's office had nothing to do with the employment of Clerys workers.

The High Court will make its decision in due course.
THE countrys travel agents association is calling on the Government to introduce new laws to protect consumers after online travel site Lowcostholidays went bust.

The holiday plans of more than 15,000 Irish people have been disrupted after the online travel website closed on Friday afternoon.

It now means that people currently on holidays will be forced to pay for their hotel again  or be forced out  despite having already paid Lowcostholidays for the accommodation.

Customers who have already booked their holidays for the coming weeks and months will also be told their accommodation has been cancelled.

Although all confirmed flight tickets will remain valid, some holidaymakers who used the online agent to reserve their accommodation will be at a loss.

For those who booked packages online with Lowcostholidays, their reservation will be covered by the Commission for Aviation Regulation and the body will release details today on how people can make a claim.

However, holidaymakers who booked accommodation only with the site will have to fork out the total amount again  and then attempt to get their money back from their bank or credit card company.

The Irish Travel Agents Association (ITTA) has branded Irelands travel laws as historic and pre-internet age, and has called on the Government to address the issue immediately.

Every time we speak to a new minister, they say they will look at it, but they never do, ITTA president Pat Dawson told the Irish Independent last night.

They have no interest in bringing forward legislation.

Our travel legislation is outdated, its well over 30 years since it was introduced.

Mr Dawson said they have requested a meeting with new Transport Minister Shane Ross, although they have not yet received a response from his office.

The head of Irish travel agents has now called for an investigation into how the company went bust in the middle of the peak holiday season.

The maximum amount of money was paid to them over the last number of weeks. It was scurrilous they were still taking money on Friday. Its totally unacceptable, he added.

Shauna Lee, from Blanchardstown, Dublin, said last night that she paid Lowcostholidays more than 2,200 for her dream holiday  just two hours before they went bust.

She said: Were devastated and we dont know if we will be able to go on holidays anymore.
Brown Thomas is on the hunt for Arabic-speaking staff. Photo: Mark Condren

Brown Thomas is on the hunt for Arabic-speaking staff as Middle Eastern customers flock to Ireland for stud visits and shopping.

Brown Thomas general manager Stephen Sealey said the group is starting to see an emergence of Middle Eastern customers, partly linked to Ireland's world-class equine industry. Arab-speaking employees are "on our wish list", he said.

Brown Thomas has a track record in capitalising on foreign buyers, previously hiring Mandarin speakers to help seal the deal on sales to Chinese customers who have a huge appetite for items such as designer handbags and couture fashions. Sales at the company have grown every year since 2009.

Business from Americans is also on the up, said Mr Sealey, helping to offset a fall in British spending caused by the decline in sterling.

He ruled out opening new stores in Ireland, as 90pc of the population live within an hour of a Brown Thomas or BT2 store.
With 190 staff and annual billings of 145m a year, Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) is one of the top marketing communications groups in Ireland and services a wide range of blue-chip clients in different sectors, providing them with everything from media buying and planning right through to more complex e-commerce applications and platforms, performance-based marketing and outdoor advertising services.

Owned ultimately by the Japanese agency group Dentsu which reported global revenues of nearly 7bn in 2015, it also employs over 47,000 people in 140 different countries.

Its Irish operations include media agencies Carat and Vizeum as well as three digital businesses - ISOBAR, iProspect and Amnet, the latter being a relative newcomer to the stable and focuses solely on programmatic advertising. It also includes the out-of-home (OOH) businesses Posterscope and PML Group.

"They are all at different stages of their development.," says Liam McDonnell, CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN), the holding company for all seven businesses in Ireland.

"Carat is a very mature business and is a strong global brand with a solid client base and won Media Agency of the Year this year at the Media Awards this year.

"Vizeum is our second media agency brand and is also doing very well but both businesses have had to reinvent themselves in recent years because the market has changed so dramatically and it's going to change even more over the next 10 years, such is the pace of change in this industry."

The omnipresence of digital with the marketing mix, of course, is driving a lot of the changes taking place across the advertising industry as advertisers seek out audiences wherever they may be and this is reflected in DAN's 145m annual billings for 2015, says McDonnell.

"About 44pc of our business is now digital," he says. "We would love to grow that to 100pc by 2020. Of course, I don't think we will ever be 100pc digital but it's certainly what we aspire to and in many ways it's become a mind-set for us."

He points out that while the prevalence of digital businesses like Google and Facebook has been good for the economy, a lot more could be done to harness digital's potential across the wider economy.

"There's still a huge opportunity for us as an industry to add value to the Irish economy in terms of our digital capabilities and the opportunities far outweigh any threats.

"The reality is that digital is going continue to grow and we know that digitally mature businesses are anything up to 25pc more profitable that those that are not. So, there's a huge opportunity for Ireland and the economy," he says.

"I know we have all the big players like Google and Facebook here - and it's great to have them - but sometimes I think we hide behind them and boast that our digital industry is up there with the best.

"But it could be so much better because there's huge untapped potential amongst our own indigenous companies. And I think our industry can play a huge role in making this happen."

A key trend within the global industry in recent years has been the acquisition binge most groups have embarked upon. While organic growth is a key metric for most agency groups, growth by way of acquisition has also played a considerable role in bolstering the numbers.

Although not quite up there with the likes of WPP or Publicis Group in terms of size, Dentsu has been playing catch-up and last year the acquisition-hungry company bought 36 different businesses around the world.

So far this year, it has snapped up another 20 agencies in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Denmark and Taiwan.

Acquisitions in Ireland have also loomed large in recent years, including the purchase of Lucidity Digital, which was rebranded as ISOBAR, in 2014 and the purchase of the OOH company PML Group towards the end of 2015. If the right opportunity presented itself again in Ireland, McDonnell says he would have no hesitation in looking at it.

"We want to grow our business and we need to grow it. We see this happening organically, through diversification and through acquisitions. We are ultimately owned by a Japanese company that can give us access to low cost capital if we need to make an acquisition but it has to be for the right reasons.

"Culture is hugely important to us and that has to work out.

"It's not just about buying a business and pegging it on to our existing businesses. The culture has to be right and in this industry, that can be difficult. We've had conversations with lots of different people over the years and for various reasons they didn't go any further," he says. "But we are always on the lookout," he concludes.
When a sniper killed five police officers in Dallas last week, multiple Facebook and Twitter users streamed the shootings.

Facebook started ramping up its live video product earlier this year. "Facebook Live enables you to share your experiences and perspectives in real time, with the people who matter to you," the social network gushed.

And it's not the only one at it. Twitter has Periscope, its own video streaming tool which promises to let users experience the world through someone else's eyes.

But they got something they didn't bargain for: sometimes seeing the world through someone else's eyes is a traumatic experience.

This is especially so when those people are committing crimes or involved in disturbing events. The eyewitness accounts that technology has made possible - whether live, or recorded - can make for difficult viewing

In June, a terrorist started streaming live video after he killed a French police officer and the officer's partner. In the broadcast, he wondered what to do with his hostage - the couple's three-year-old son - and pledged his allegiance to Isil.

On July 5, footage emerged of an unarmed Alton Sterling being subdued and shot by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Less than two days later, Diamond Reynolds used Facebook Live to broadcast a video of her fiance Philando Castile dying behind the wheel of his car. He was shot by police in Minneapolis, having been pulled over for a broken tail-light.

When a sniper killed five police officers in Dallas last week, multiple Facebook and Twitter users streamed the shootings.

Now this probably isn't how social networks envisaged people using live video streaming. And they've been fairly quick to respond. Facebook has deleted the video of the French terrorist, while the clips from videos by Diamond Reynolds and those who filmed the Dallas ambush now carry an alert that says: 'Warning - Graphic Video. Videos that contain graphic content can shock, offend and upset. Are you sure you want to see this?'

Live streaming can be pitched as an important step in empowering citizen journalists. They can capture injustices and hold institutions to account in ways never before possible. It's a reverse panopticon effect: instead of the watchful eye of the state on the masses, the masses can now look back - and hit the record button when they don't like what they see.

This poses an ethical question for anyone with a smartphone who witnesses a shooting, or a fire or any potential tragic event. They have a choice. Run for cover? Help? Or get the phone out and start broadcasting?

But while live video may force eye-witnesses to ask themselves difficult questions, it's a minefield for media.

First, they need clear guidelines around how they use user-generated footage. And many do. The BBC, the Guardian and the Online News Association all have guidelines around social news gathering and user-generated content. They stress that contributors shouldn't endanger themselves, nor others, and neither should they infringe any laws.

Second, they need to be aware that every time they rely on user-generated videos, live or recorded, they are implicitly reminding the audience that news breaks best on social channels and the most immediate and impactful visuals come from a bystander with a phone, rather than a cameraman with a shoulder-mounted camera.

Sure, there will always be a place for professional journalists - whether broadcast, print or online - to add the context, interpretation and intelligence to the facts. After all, it's one thing to see handheld footage of American riot police baton-charge a rally in Baton Rouge. It's entirely another to understand the background to the Black Lives Matter movement, and how it has evolved since the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman.

Regardless, live video is eating away at the power of broadcast news. Now, when news breaks, it breaks on social channels. Broadcast is history.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Live streaming also offers media outlets interesting ways to develop news stories.

Following the Orlando nightclub shooting on June 12, BBC News used Facebook Live to vox pop a crowd of hundreds who lined up outside an Orlando blood bank to donate blood.

Covering the same story, the New York Times used Facebook Live to stream a Q&A with Norman Casiano, who was shot in the back during the attack at the club. The clip has been viewed over 1.5 million times and has amassed tens of thousands of likes and shares.

So perhaps media outlets need to be thinking if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Lawyers vote on whether to keep Sameh Ashour as head of the Lawyers' Syndicate after a proposal to withdraw confidence from him and the board

Egypt's lawyers have started voting on whether they hold confidence in the Lawyers' Syndicate's current head, Sameh Ashour, and its board. The vote comes after a group of lawyers campaigned for withdrawing confidence from Ashour.

Lawyer Montaser El-Zayat, leading the campaign against Ashour, told Ahram Online that the objection is mainly based on the syndicate head's "inability to protect lawyers."

According to El-Zayat, the syndicate head approved the 2014 Constitution's Article 198, which he argues allows the arrest of lawyers during their work.

"Lawyers are already being humiliated in police stations. Two lawyers were killed in police stations last year, and 400 lawyers are currently imprisoned," Al-Zayat says. He also claims the syndicate is suffering from financial corruption.

In February 2015, two police officers were arrested and accused of killing lawyer Karim Hamdy inside a police station in Cairo's low-income district of Matariya.

Meanwhile, several lawyers have over recent years been arrested and face charges, including the recent arrest of rights lawyer Malek Adly who has been detained in solitary confinement since May.

Syndicate head Ashour refused to comment to Ahram Online until after the vote result scheduled to be announced late Sunday.

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Whether it's building a pub or starting an education and technology company, think it through and share your idea.

Don't be precious about it. The more you share it, the more perspectives you get on it and the more opportunities you get to hone your pitch. Map out a plan. Visualise it. And back yourself. The same approach applies with a career change or taking yourself out of unemployment.

It's OK to be introverted - some of the smartest people are. What I've learned is that it's better and easier to be yourself and authentic - you use up less energy. When you're comfortable in your own skin it's easier for people to believe in you, because you're being consistent.

If you're setting up or running a business, ask yourself the question: "If funding wasn't an issue, what would I do?" This usually challenges your idea and your perception that funding is holding you back. It usually isn't. The money is out there - Enterprise Ireland, local enterprise boards, banks, EU grants, venture capitalists, savings, family and friends. You can have a website, Facebook/Twitter presence and connect with people globally for free from your laptop.

When it comes to growing your business, try writing 18-month plans. Visualise where you want the company to be in 18 months' time. How many employees, what products will you have, how many markets will you sell in, what will your turnover be? Stick in the many steps you need along the way to make that happen. When do you hire your second employee? When do you take office space? When do you make your first sale?

Hire the extroverts, hire the out-of-the-box thinkers, the risk-takers, those who are risk-averse. Hire the ones that drive you crazy. Try to get the right blend. This will benefit your business because it will be more representative of society and who you're working for - your customers. Not every customer is like you, and your personality might not always be the best for every role in your business.
Tom Hiddleston has said his relationship with Taylor Swift is "not a publicity stunt".

The British actor has enjoyed a whirlwind romance with the US pop star, with the two taking trips together to Rome and Australia. He also attended a July 4 party at her house in Rhode Island, where he was pictured wearing an "I heart T.S." t-shirt.

The relationship has attracted some critics, who argued that it could be a publicity stunt.

But Hiddleston, 35, told the Hollywood Reporter: "Well, um. How best to put this? The truth is that Taylor Swift and I are together, and we're very happy."

He added: "That's the truth. It's not a publicity stunt."

Swift, 26, split from her boyfriend of 15 months, DJ Calvin Harris, shortly before she was pictured with Hiddleston.

The actor, who is currently filming Thor: Ragnarok, is nominated for an Emmy for his role in the popular BBC series The Night Manager.

On his first-ever Emmy nomination, he said: "I didn't have any expectations, and suddenly my phone started blowing up a couple hours ago. This is the most wonderful surprise."
Adverts for Idris Elba movie Bastille Day have been pulled in France following the Nice attack.

Bastille Day, which stars Elba as a CIA agent trying to foil a bombing in France, was released in an estimated 233 cinemas Wednesday, just a day before the truck attack that unfolded in the southern city during celebrations of the actual Bastille Day, the countrys national holiday.

At least 84 people were killed, including more than 10 children, after the driver ploughed through the Promenade des Anglais late on Thursday night, before being shot dead by police.

France's leader President Francois Hollande has condemned the attack, describing it as of "an undeniable terrorist nature".

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Accordingly, Studiocanal, which financed, sold, and distributed the film in France, has pulled all of its billboard and digital advertising. Cinema chains will decide whether to take down front-of-house promotion, and Studiocanal executives have also offered French cinemas the option of pulling Bastille Day from their theatres entirely, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Release of the movie, directed by James Watkins, had already been postponed following the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last November (16), as the plot begins with a fatal bomb attack on the French capital.

The film, which also stars Cinderella star Richard Madden, was released in Britain in April and is also currently playing in Italy. Although cinemas were closed Friday in Nice, they were open in the rest of France.

The country will now observe three days of mourning starting Saturday. Focus Features has U.S. distribution rights to Bastille Day but has yet to release it.
There's racism in Ireland, some of it very nasty, but not on the scale that foreign immigrants have experienced in Britain, with a 400pc increase in reported hate crimes since the recent Brexit vote. We're a much smaller country, of course, and I think generally more outward-looking, with a more instinctive openness towards other cultures and influences, especially those of Europe and America.

So the vile abuse to be encountered in Racist Britain, made by Channel 4's Dispatches strand, seemed both quite alien and profoundly depressing, even if most of it was coming from the kind of thugs you'll also find venting their twisted sense of disenfranchised grievance on our own streets or spewing bile in slogans or tweets.

But having outlined the scale of the abuse, the Channel 4 report never came up with anything we didn't already know. For that, we had to watch BBC2's extraordinary three-hour film, Exodus: Our Journey to Europe, shown over three successive nights and with most of its footage coming from camera phones given to selected Syrian refugees as they made their perilous trek across Turkey and into Europe.

Among them was radiantly hopeful 11-year-old Isra'a from Aleppo. "I'm not scared", she said as she contemplated the dinghy trip arranged by smugglers from the Turkish port of Izmir to a Greek island. Her father, whose restaurant had been razed to the ground by shelling, had paid the traffickers 12,000 to take eight adults and eight children on a journey that would have cost them 22 each if they'd been permitted to travel by ferry.

They barely made it across the choppy waters, though the main concern of Isra'a was for her mobile phone. "If, God forbid, the dinghy sinks", she said while holding up a waterproof bag, "the phone will be safe". And her young cousin remarked: "Nothing is scary. In Syria the shells were dropping on us and we got used to it. How could we be scared by some waves?"

The film followed Isra'a and her family as they made their tortuous trip up through Europe, the determinedly upbeat Isra'a cheerfully announcing "I like rain" as they slogged though Macedonia.

And as we got to know other individuals and families along the way, we were reminded that these were not the faceless refugees of Nigel Farage's poisonous propaganda but people like you and me - and many of them not poor, either, but forced by the likely prospect of imminent death to abandon all that they owned and cherished and trust in the humanity of strangers.

This film should be seen by everyone - not, of course, that it would mean anything to Farage and his ilk, who have their own hateful agenda.

Middle eastern conflict was also at the heart of Peacekeepers: The Irish in South Lebanon (RTE1), an absorbing documentary co-produced and directed by John Higgins and Shane Brennan and providing a satisfyingly clear account of our UN involvement in the region since 1978.

The film introduced us to members of the 47th Infantry Group as they embarked on their six-month stint, and very personable and articulate they were, too. But it also interwove a history of our four decades there, with vivid recollections from former Irish peacekeepers and arresting reminders of those who had been killed while carrying out their dangerous duties.

I had vowed a few weeks back not to waste any more of my time on the half-hour travel selfies that go by the name of Follow Donal (RTE1), but this week he was in Lisbon, from which I've recently returned and a city that I've come to love.

So what would be the relentlessly chirpy food blogger's take on it? Having used up all his "Wow!" exclamations in Budapest, Amsterdam and other European capitals, he fell back here on "cool". Lisbon was "a pretty cool-looking place", he excitedly revealed, while a bridge across the Tagus merited an ecstatic "How cool is that!"

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He had hired local food blogger Didi to help him in his culinary quests. Didi looked cool, too, but didn't get much of a look-in, this being Donal's show and the camera hardly ever leaving his grinning face. Which is probably why I got no sense at all of the Lisbon that I find so unique and entrancing.

Channel 4 could be on to a winner with The Job Interview, which is like First Dates, only with no romance and added humiliation. Still, this week's first episode began rather sweetly, with boss Rod and assistant Lorraine of south Wales company Low Cost Vans interviewing candidates for the job of customer sales adviser - which basically involved sitting at the end of a phone line and having to cope with complaining clients.

The job finally went to single-mum Jody, who couldn't stop chattering, rather than middle-aged unemployed Ian, who seemed really nice and was favoured by the similarly middle-aged Rod. And though Lorraine got her way, Rod later rang Ian to offer him another job.

A mother-and-daughter team running a luxury leisure centre were less endearing as they sought an assistant manager and treated the candidates with smirking condescension, but you watched all the same.

Daftest viewing of the week was Trainspotting Live (BBC4), which ran interminably over three nights. Hosted by the ever-gesticulating Peter Snow and by Dr Hannah ("I'm a mathematician") Fry, it comprised three hours of locomotives being spotted and identified and discussed throughout the length and breadth of Britain. I'm going mad, Ted.
The offices of the beleaguered suicide charity Console were raided by gardai as the criminal investigation into the lavish spending and alleged governance breaches by its founder, Paul Kelly, intensified.

Detectives attached to the Office for the Director of Corporate Enforcement arrived at the Celbridge HQ on Thursday night without warning and with a search warrant, and are understood to have retrieved computers, files and other records.

The agency - which also led the inquiry into Anglo Irish Bank - is investigating multiple allegations of breaches of company law and false accounting at the suicide bereavement charity.

Gardai decided to swoop on Console's headquarters, which used to be Mr Kelly's family home, on the same day as a liquidator was appointed to the charity and the announcement that its suicide phone line and counselling services are being taken over by Pieta House. Informed sources said that investigators wanted to secure the internal computers and records that might be relevant to their inquiries.

The investigation by the office for the Director of Corporate Enforcement is one of seven currently under way and is probing whether any criminal breaches of company law and corporate governance took place at the charity.

An internal audit for the HSE claimed that the charity appointed directors without their knowledge, and accounts were altered when applying for state funds.

The appointment of the liquidator, Tom Murray, on Thursday was the culmination of a scandal that has raged for weeks over how Console's CEO Mr Kelly, his wife Patricia and their son Tim, who were directors, racked up huge spending on credit cards registered to the charity.

Read more: 'Why did everyone sit on their backsides after Prime Time?' - Former interim CEO of Console David Hall criticises reaction to charity controversy

Read more: Pieta House to take over services of scandal-hit Console following HSE agreement

Concerns about Console were first raised in a Prime Time documentary on June 23. In the fallout, businessman and campaigner David Hall was brought in as interim chief executive and within days he asked the High Court to freeze the charity's accounts and assets. Details from the internal HSE audit revealed how Mr Kelly, his wife and son accounted for spending of almost 1m over three years, in salaries, cars and on credit cards for clothes, groceries and foreign travel.

Last weekend, it emerged that a horse owned by the Kellys was stolen from its Longford stables in the aftermath of the scandal, by men pretending to be gardai. The horse was bought last year for 37,500 and a trade-in pony. It is understood that gardai have identified a number of possible suspects.

After three weeks of turmoil, last Thursday marked the end of the road for Console. The High Court heard it was "hopelessly insolvent". Mr Hall told the court it had debts of 294,000, and had been loss-making for years, even though the accounts might have shown otherwise.

There were more twists to the saga yesterday, when the HSE appeared before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

It emerged that in 2008, a HSE executive was appointed chief executive with Console, with the agreement that his old job would be left open for him. He left Console after 12 months or so and is back working for the HSE.

Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry said: "My understanding is somebody in a quasi-secondment applied for a job in Console, got it, was CEO for a period, now they are back with the HSE...What I am asking is did the internal audit consult at any time with this person now that they are back in the HSE and at the end of a phone to you guys." The answer was no.

Sinn Fein TD David Cullinane said there was a nine-year gap between the first concerns raised about Console in 2006 by a former staff member and the internal HSE audit which revealed the massive scale of spending. He said an official in the National Office of Suicide Prevention wrote a memo highlighting "deficiencies" in Console's governance and accounting, and in 2011 further concerns were raised with Department of Health.

The PAC heard that in 2011, a staff member in the Oireachtas told a principal officer in the Department of Health about Mr Kelly impersonating a doctor in the late 1980s, after which the civil servant invited Mr Kelly to the department to discuss it. "It was ascertained at that meeting that Mr Kelly had impersonated a doctor in Dublin hospital in the late 1980s. The Probation Act was applied at that point. Mr Kelly gave the explanation of it being a prank in his student days." She said there was no record that the department had informed the HSE.

This weekend, Tommy Morris, a former parliamentary assistant, confirmed he was the "staff member" but he insisted that he also briefed the principal officer on Mr Kelly's association with previous charities and how the charity should be audited.

Tony O'Brien defended the HSE. He said it was not "the regulator of charities" and had properly audited Console. The HSE's national director for mental health, Anne O'Connor, said the HSE had brought in Console and signed it up to a formal management process. When funding increased in 2013, the HSE got greater oversight of Console, and last year began an internal audit that took a year to complete, largely because of the "considerable resistance" from Mr Kelly.
Marta Herda (29) at the Central Criminal Court where she pleaded not guilty to the murder of Csaba Orsos. Photo: Collins Courts

Security guard Gavin Nolan was used to seeing boy racers speeding along Arklow's harbour during his night shift. Shortly before 6am on March 26, 2013, he heard "pedal-to-the-floor stuff".

When he went outside, he expected to see a car, but there was none there. A few moments later, he saw a woman running. She was saturated and screaming.

This was Marta Herda. The Volkswagen Passat she was driving went into the water from the harbour at the South Quay. She escaped through the driver's window.

A colleague, who was in love with her, was in the passenger seat. He couldn't swim and after she emerged from the water she ran for help.

His body was found on a nearby beach that afternoon. He had drowned and Ms Herda is now on trial for murder.

The 29-year-old was arraigned before the Central Criminal Court earlier this month, charged with the murder of 31-year-old Hungarian waiter Csaba Orsos that Tuesday morning. The Polish waitress, with an address at Pairc Na Saile, Emoclew Road, Arklow, Co Wicklow, has pleaded not guilty.

The trial, which will enter its ninth day tomorrow, has heard that both worked at the Brook Lodge hotel in Aughrim.

A number of witnesses testified that the deceased was in love with the accused but that she didn't feel the same way.

The jury was shown a card he sent her in May 2012 in which he said that she was the girl he was looking for and that he wished to share his life with only her.

He said he was ready to do anything for her and that he could change his bad habits. He said he could promise to be "the best husband".

His final words were: "I'm mad about you."

The jury was also shown a video of Mr Orsos's birthday celebration in July 2012. Ms Herda could be seen sitting next to him as he blew out the candles on his cake.

Ms Herda gave two voluntary statements to the gardai on the day of the incident. She said the deceased had fallen in love with her, but that she was never his girlfriend.

"It was 24 hours a day. He came to my place, to my friends' places," she said.

She said he used to text her and put things on Facebook and that he used to sit beside her at work and wanted to hold her hand. "People think this funny but not for me," she said. "The second year, it no longer funny."

She said he had followed her for the two years she had known him and that she would frequently see his car outside her home.

She said that she went to a friend's house in the early hours of that Tuesday and had a couple of glasses of wine with him. That friend, Viktor Szentesi, had driven her home in her car before walking home.

"Csaba come to my car. He wanted to talk," she said, adding that he had wanted her to take them to the beach.

"He was screaming at me," she said. "He say, 'Motherf**ker Viktor'." She said she drove down Main Street.

"He was feeling my left leg," she said. "I was afraid."

She said she remembered hitting the accelerator. "I feel I have enough of this," she said. "I drive to water. I cannot take this anymore."

She recalled being under the water. "I screamed his name. I saw ladder and got out," she said.

"When I drove into the water, I wanted this all to stop," she said.

"I didn't want to tell the guards," she explained. "You must remember that in Poland people don't like police."

She had earlier been taken to hospital suffering from hypothermia and told a paramedic: "He shouldn't have been there."

Her triage nurse, Claire Best, also testified."From the moment I went in to Marta, I felt that I would end up here today," she said.

She asked Marta if she had been hurt. "She said she didn't give him a chance," said Ms Best. "That he didn't think she would do it and she knew he couldn't swim."

She confirmed under cross-examination that the words, 'He didn't believe I'd do it', were not in the notes she made that morning.

A number of months passed before Ms Herda was arrested and interviewed.

It was then she was asked if she had driven deliberately into the water.

"No. I would never want to hurt anyone or even to destroy my car," she replied.

She said she could have been killed herself, that she had a family and wanted to have children.

"I didn't want to do that, but I don't want all this happened," she said. "It was horrible and scary in this car. I don't want to see him anymore."

It was put to her that she had said Mr Orsos had come to her house, but that CCTV footage showed her driving through Arklow alone.

Her call records were also put to her; they showed that she phoned the deceased three times that morning, the final call being at 5.35am.

She was also told that the postman noticed that the deceased man's front door was open later that morning.

She agreed that she had probably called him to come out to her.

The trial heard technical evidence that the hand brake had been used on the quay and that the driver's window was the only one open.

She was asked why it was open when it was snowing. She said that she did not know.

"Would you agree that Csaba Orsos is dead because of your criminally dangerous act?" she was asked.

"He is dead because of his love for me," she replied.

The trial continues before Mr Justice McCarthy and a jury of eight men and four women.
Michael McGuirk (45) of Captains Road, Crumlin, Dublin, who was sentenced to nine years at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court for his role in a robbery in 2009.

THE father of a young man serving life in prison for the brutal murder of two Polish immigrants has been jailed for 10 years for his part in a tiger kidnapping.

Father-of-five Michael McGuirk (45), of Captain's Road, Crumlin, Dublin, was part of a gang who netted 250,000 from a tiger-kidnapping robbery in October 2009.

McGuirk, who pleaded guilty to his involvement in the crime, is the father of David Curran (21), who is serving life in prison for the murder of Polish nationals Pawel Kalite and Marius Szwajkos, who were stabbed in the head with a screwdriver.

McGuirk's trial heard how terrified bank official Nicola Hall woke in the middle of the night to find armed raiders in their home.

The gang separated the couple from each other and photographed them with a gun put to their heads.

Horrific

Mr Jones and two children, aged three and six, were bundled into the back of a freezing, dirty van and driven away while Ms Hall was ordered to go to her work at the Bank of Ireland branch in Inchicore, Dublin as normal the next morning.

The bank official was told the children would be mutilated and her husband shot.

"If there was any idea of hell, this would be it," she told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

Sentencing McGuirk, Judge Desmond Hogan said: "There's no doubt about it, this is a very, very nasty crime, bordering on the horrific."

The judge noted McGuirk was not one of the men who entered the house, but he was the one who called Ms Hall to tell her where to find her family after the money was delivered.

"What an ordeal these people went through," Judge Hogan commented. "It was a very well-planned operation."

The court heard on the night of the kidnapping, Ms Hall and the children were asleep in bed.

Mr Jones, a taxi driver and a former member of the Defence Forces, arrived home to his house in Lucan at 1am and which point he was set upon by three masked men at his front door.

Ms Hall was woken up by a man leaning across the bed holding a hand over her mouth.

One of the children got out of bed and asked who the strange men where.

The couple were able to convince the child that it was all just a game  a pretence that has been maintained to this day, the court heard.

Mr Jones told how he and the children were put in the back of the van.

The children were forced to go to the toilet inside the vehicle as they were not given the dignity to go outside, he said.

Meanwhile, Ms Hall left the house at 8.20am and drove to work where she tried to behave as normal until the bank vault's time lock came off at 11.30am.

She put 210,000, 6,000, $10,500 and a number of other foreign currencies worth 18,000 in a bag.

After Ms Hall left the bank her phone rang.

The raiders told her to drive her jeep to a location and leave it there with the keys in the ignition.

Mr Jones and the children were held in the back of the van for five hours.

As soon as the driver left, one of the children squeezed through a small gap in the front of the van and alerted a passerby.

A 999 call was received from an anonymous caller at 1pm to say a man and two children were tied up in a van.

This call was traced back to a phone box in Templeogue which was forensically examined and fingerprints taken.

When McGuirk was later arrested, it was found fingerprints matched those on the phone box and a partial DNA profile was found on the handbrake of the van.
Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathy travelled to Moscow on Sunday for a three-day visit to look into resuming flights between Egypt and Russia, state-owned MENA agency reported.

According to MENA, Fathy is heading a delegation to review ways to resume flights, which were suspended by Moscow after the downing of a Russian passenger jet in Sinai last October.

The ministers visit comes only days after the speaker of Egypts parliament, Ali Abdel-Al, said during an official visit to Russia that Egypt was now expecting steps to be taken by the Russian side towards resuming flights, after Egypt had fulfilled 85 percent of Russias demands regarding aviation safety.

The Airbus A321 was heading to St. Petersburg from Sharm El-Sheikh on 31 October, when it crashed in Sinai, killing all 224 people on board.

Following the crash Russia suspended direct flights to and from all Egyptian airports, while the United Kingdom and Germany suspended flights to Sharm El-Sheikh airport. The flight suspensions have hit Egypt's tourism industry hard.

An affiliate of the Islamic State in Sinai claimed responsibility for the attack, and Russia's investigative committee later officially classified the plane crash as a terrorist attack. Egypt's official investigative committee has yet to issue a verdict on the causes of the crash.

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A brother of double killer David Curran was stabbed to death in Dublin yesterday.

Paul 'Paulie' Curran McGuirk suffered serious stab wounds at Seagull House, on Rutland Avenue in Dolphins Barn, at around 4pm on Saturday.

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He was rushed by ambulance to St Jamess Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

Gardai last night arrested a man and a woman, both aged 18, in connection with the attack.

They are currently detained at Crumlin and Sundrive Road Garda Stations under the provisions of Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act 1984.

The young man was a brother of David Curran, who is serving life for the brutal murder of two Polish immigrants, in a case that shocked the nation in 2008.

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David Curran was just 17 when he stabbed Pawel Kalite (28) and Marius Szwaijkos (27) to death with a screwdriver outside their home on Benbulben Road, Drimnagh.

He claimed he was off his head on drink and drugs when he attacked the men, believing his father had been attacked by Mr Kalite.

Today's fatal stabbing in Crumlin was wrong. Another family left grieving.Those involved must face justice. @DubCityCouncil @DublinSinnFein  Cllr. Daithi Doolan (@DaithiDoolan) July 16, 2016

Currans family home was later set alight in an arson attack while his mother and siblings, including Paul, were inside. They managed to jump out a window to escape the blaze.

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Paulie Curran was not suspected of being involved in serious crime and gardai in Sundrive Road station are investigating if his death is linked to a localised dispute among "low-level drug dealers".

Tributes were paid to Curran on social media last night and this morning.

Friend Paddy Maughan wrote: "You were like an older brother to me Paulie Mc Guirk Curran. The time you got me out of the garda station anal (sic) love you bro rip never forget about you your (sic) one in a kind the laugh we used to have rest in paradise."

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Local councillor Daithi Doolan (SF) tweeted: "Today's fatal stabbing in Crumlin was wrong. Another family left grieving. Those involved must face justice."

While Curran is not believed to have serious criminal convictions, his father Michael McGuirk, was part of a gang involved in a 240,000 tiger kidnapping in October 2009.

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His trial heard how terrified bank official Nicola Hall woke in the middle of the night to find armed raiders in their home.

The gang separated the couple from each other and photographed them with a gun put to their heads.

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Her husband John and two kids aged three and six were taken, while Ms Hall was forced to go to the Bank of Ireland in Inchicore where she worked. The gang escaped with the large sum of cash.

McGuirk was later arrested when his fingerprints and DNA were found on a phonebox and van. He was jailed for ten years for the offence.

David Curran is currently serving life for the double murder.

It is unlikely that either man will be released for Paul Curran McGuirk's funeral.

Gardai are continuing to examine the scene of yesterday's stabbing. It is preserved for a technical examination and the office of the State Pathologist has been notified.

The post mortem is scheduled to take place on Sunday morning.

Gardai wish to appeal for witnesses or to anyone who can assist with the investigation to contact them at Sundrive Road Garda Station on 01-666 6600, The Garda Confidential Telephone Line 1800 666 111 or any Garda Station.
The Joint Agency Task Force has already carried out several operations, including one simultaneous raid on 14 targets over the downloading of indecent images of children. AFP/Getty Images

A new cross-border police and customs agency set up primarily to tackle Provo smuggling and racketeering, and all cross-border crime, has begun work.

The 'Joint Agency Task Force' has already carried out several operations, including one simultaneous raid on 14 targets over the downloading of indecent images of children.

The cross-border task force was set up in the wake of representations by the British Irish Parliamentary Assembly after the Sunday Independent revealed that Provo fuel smugglers were causing major environmental damage, including dumping toxic waste in the drinking water supplies in the border counties.

A proposal to set up the agency was passed by the inter-parliamentary body in March last year and accepted by both governments.

Last November, the Irish and British governments agreed measures under a programme called A Fresh Start for "a concerted and enhanced effort to tackle organised and cross-jurisdictional crime".

A number of investigations on both sides of the border were co-ordinated, with the main opening operation against 14 targets on either side of the Border suspected of downloading child pornography.

Twenty-two homes and premises were raided and seven men were detained and questioned on either side of the border and are expected to come before the courts.

The agency carried out a series of operations in April, which was designated as a 'month of action' to tackle rural crime. This involved the deployment of 'targeted high-visibility operational resources on both sides of the Border, with 16 crossborder vehicle checkpoints taking place along the open land-border'.

In a joint statement from the Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald and her NI counterpart, Claire Sugden, they welcomed the establishment of the joint force, the first such agency to be set up since the foundation of the State.

The agency has already seized drugs, cash, vehicles and 'high-end' plant equipment and made three arrrests in relation to these seizures.

Two stolen mechanical diggers were recovered.

Read more: Former Provos dominate 10 gangs running 3m-a-week cigarette racket

The new agency is also targeting human traffickers exploiting migrant workers who are forced into employment in agricultural businesses along the Border.

Previous investigations in Northern Ireland found that former loyalist and republican paramilitaries were involved in what is effectively slave labour of trafficked immigrants.

Welcoming the establishment of the crossborder task force, Tanaiste Ms Fitzgerald said it would "maintain a priority focus on tackling cross-border organised crime, including that linked to paramilitarism, given its insidious and corrosive impact on society".

Ms Sugden said she was committed "to maintain and strengthen relations between our jurisdictions, particularly in light of the outcome of the EU referendum.

"In that context, it is clear that there will be specific issues for justice to be worked through. It will be a priority for me to ensure that the excellent levels of co-operation continue."

The Inter-Parliamentary Assembly voted in favour of establishing the cross-border agency after a delegation of members visited the south Armagh area to see the operation of diesel 'washing' plants and examine the environmental damage being done by the dumping of thousands of tons of toxic waste into rivers and lakes in the area.

One of the locations they visited was a fuel-laundering plant operated by members of the south Armagh IRA which has been pumping waste, including cancer-causing hydro-carbon by-products from extracting dye from diesel, into the main drinking water supply of the Fane River system for two decades.

In February last year, the Sunday Independent retrieved a water sample from one of the toxic waste outlets and had it tested by a laboratory in Dublin, which found that the toxicity levels were up to 8,000 times above the EU standards for discharges into drinking water systems.

In March last year, Louth County Council passed a motion condemning the IRA's involvement in "environmental terrorism". An attempt by Sinn Fein to remove the reference to the IRA was defeated.
The number of retired teachers 'hogging' jobs desperately needed by newly qualified graduates continues to rise, provoking fury among those who have recently left college.

As another school year ends, out-of-work and underemployed younger teachers are increasingly frustrated that so many of their colleagues are refusing to free up desperately needed jobs.

Latest figures obtained by the Sunday Independent show 560 retired teachers were employed during the 2014/2015 school year.

This comprised 320 retired primary teachers and 240 retired secondary teachers in the community and comprehensive sector. This was up on the previous year, when 537 retired teachers were allowed fill existing teacher vacancies.

Figures show 302 were in the primary sector and 235 were second-level teachers.

In the latest school year, up to the end of November 2015, a total of 3,270 teaching days were worked by 368 retired teachers.

Of these, 234 were primary educators, with 134 given jobs in the second-level system.

Many of these retirees have long service and are on generous public service pensions.

There are also claims that "an old boys and girls network'' is in operation in some schools, allowing retired members of staff to top up their pensions by getting regular work, such as providing cover for maternity leave.

The anger among newly qualified teachers is fuelled further by the 'two-tier' pay system in the profession.

This continues to discriminate against those currently starting out in their careers.

The Department of Education has issued various circulars and information notes over the past few years, requesting that unemployed teachers be prioritised in the selection process.

The Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) has again stressed that recently qualified graduates should always be given preference when substitution opportunities arise.

However, some school managements insist there are occasions when it can be difficult to source a registered teacher of a particular subject at short notice.

The person selected usually knows the principal or other members of the school management on a personal basis. Difficulty in finding a suitable candidate to fill a particular slot at short notice may explain the hiring of retirees in some cases, according to a TUI spokesman.

He said an ongoing priority for the union is the precarious employment status and "income poverty" of new and recent entrants. In one circular issued by the Department of Education, it outlines how school principals must retain a list of unemployed registered teachers, who are available for substitute work at short notice. In "exceptional occasions" when they have had to employ a retired teacher, this must be reported to the board of management, it states.

Gemma Tuffy of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) says it currently has hundreds of members who are working on a casual basis, while desperately seeking a secure job.

"Many of these are young and recently qualified, and have spent five to six years training to become teachers, attaining the required bachelors and masters degrees," she said. "They are committed to teaching as a career, but are struggling to make ends meet."
A man, woman and child have survived after shots were fired at a house over the weekend.

The incident took place in the Tollnamona Court areas of west Belfast in the early hours of Saturday morning.

The PSNI say that they received a report that a number of shots were fired through the front window and door of the house at around 2.40am.

A man, woman and child who were upstairs in the house at the time of the shooting were not injured.

Police investigating shooting incident at house in Tollnamona Court, W Belfast around 2.40am. No injuries reported. Info to Musgrave on 101.  PSNI (@PoliceServiceNI) July 16, 2016

Detective Sergeant Keith Wilson said: We are currently working to establish a motive for this incident and I would appeal to anyone with any information to contact detectives at Musgrave on 101.

Sinn Fein councillor Emma Groves has condemned the shooting.

"An elderly couple and their grandchild was in the home at the time of the shooting and thankfully no one was hurt," she said.

"Anyone with information about this incident should bring it forward to the PSNI."
A man in his 30s was rushed to hospital after he fell from a cliff path on Howth Head in Dublin.

The Irish Coast Guard confirmed that they received a call from Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB) control room on Saturday advising them that the man had fallen off the path.

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The Irish Coast Guard Cliff Rescue team from Howth along with Howth lifeboat were dispatched to the scene.

The Irish Coast Guard Helicopter Rescue 117 from Waterford was also tasked but stood downbefore reaching the destination.

The rescue team found the man who had fallen four meters off the Cliff Path near Drumleck Point.

Working with paramedics the team were able to ecvacuate the casualty on a spinal board 200 meters to a waiting ambulance.

The man was conscious and breathing and had suffered a head injury. He is being treated at Beaumont Hospital.

The Coast Guard said it wanted to remind people of the dangers of going away from the main path along Howth Head.

By remaining on the path you get to enjoy the best views and keep yourself safe, it said.
Gerry Adams is facing his biggest challenge to date as leader of Sinn Fein in the Republic, sources close to the party say.

A growing number of party workers want Mr Adams to step aside and assume a position such as 'honorary vice president' so the party can expand in the Republic.

A call by the chairman of a Cavan Sinn Fein cumann for Mr Adams to step down was described by sources yesterday as "very significant". It is the first time that a long-time member of the party has called on Mr Adams to resign.

It is believed among party members that the call by the Virginia-Mullagh cumann chairman, Tommy McNulty, who is originally from Co Tyrone, is being seen as the start of a move to get Mr Adams to retire.

Mr McNulty's call for Mr Adams to step aside, the first from a serving party member in the Republic, was contained in a letter he wrote to the Irish News in Belfast after Mr Adams gave an interview in which he said he had no intention of retiring as leader. Mr Adams has been president of Sinn Fein since 1983.

In his letter, Mr McNulty said he had been present at the 1986 Sinn Fein Ard Fheis when Mr Adams and other figures from the North assumed control over the party. He wrote: "I supported that transition of leadership because I knew that the years ahead needed the leadership of the Northern men and women under Mr Adams to steer the republican movement from conflict to peace.

"This has now been successfully achieved, due in no small measure to Mr Adams and his team and the top of the party.

"But just as there was a time for change in 1986, there is a time for change again in 2016. Sammy Davis Jnr once famously said that one of the great secrets of life was 'knowing when to get on the stage and knowing when to get off it'. I believe the time has come for Mr Adams to get off it."

Sources close to the party said it is the first time such a direct call has been made from a long-serving member in the Republic.

It signals that the party in the Republic is 'fed-up' with the domination by Mr Adams's Northern-based leadership, who are out of touch with events south of the border. One source said there is "exasperation" over Mr Adams's insistence on "hogging" media time to speak for the party on almost any subject.

Mr McNulty said there was a view within the party that it was time for Mr Adams to assume a role of "honorary vice president" or take on an "ambassadorial role" for the party.

Speaking in Dublin yesterday, Mr Adams rejected the call and said he was launching a "party consultation process".
Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar held a meeting with the disgraced former charity boss Paul Kelly in 2014 but insists that he was "not aware" at that time of allegations of fraud.

Mr Varadkar confirmed to the Irish Independent that the meeting, which took place when he was Health Minister, was organised at Kelly's request.

The former CEO of Console wanted to discuss his plans to open a counselling service in Blanchardstown.

The meeting took place on October 13, 2014 in Mr Varadkar's constituency office.

Yesterday, the Dail's Public Accounts Committee heard that concerns were first raised by the National Office for Suicide Prevention (NOSP) in late 2014.

Several months later, the HSE began an audit of Console, which was finally wound down this week after being dogged by controversy.

Mr Varadkar insists that he had no knowledge of any alleged wrongdoing at the time of the meeting.

Nor did he have any role in approving funding for mental-health charities or service providers.

"I was not aware of allegations against Mr Kelly of fraud or malfeasance and I did not receive any formal briefing about it from the Department of Health or the HSE," Mr Varadkar said.

However, he added: "I was aware that the HSE was carrying out an audit."

The charity closed this week, with debts of almost 300,000.

Its functions are being transferred to Pieta House. The move brings to an end weeks of confusion surrounding the future of Console, its staff and clients.

Already this week, former Health Minister James Reilly has had to defend his handling of allegations in relation to Kelly as far back as 2011.

It emerged that a former Fine Gael parliamentary assistant, Tommy Morris, had approached Dr Reilly with concerns about Kelly.

He said that Kelly had masqueraded as a doctor in a hospital during the 1980s.

Mr Morris has claimed that the scandal at Console could have been "halted" if there had been proper intervention.

But Dr Reilly has insisted that he took all appropriate action by referring Mr Morris to a principal officer in the Department of Health, who in turn interviewed Mr Kelly.

Read more: HSE only started to become concerned about Console after it increased its funding in 2013 - HSE chief

Read more: 'Why did everyone sit on their backsides after Prime Time?' - Former interim CEO of Console David Hall criticises reaction to charity controversy
He has blustered his way across America, crowing about his celebrity and business genius, inciting hatred and xenophobia along the way.

A year ago, Donald Trump's bid for the Republican presidential nomination was a joke in America, his double-eyed squint behind the podium a reminder of his arrogant antics in the boardroom of The Apprentice.

Watching Trump rally the faithful was oddly riveting. There were no limits to his outlandish pronouncements, his bragging and empty assertions. While his political rivals stuck dutifully to their scripts, 'The Donald' thumbed his nose at the teleprompter, magnificently winging it. At one point, he introduced the size of his penis into the debate.

The media lapped it up, political experts espoused and scoffed. Most found it all very amusing. No one seriously thought he could ever make it.

But now, just days away from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, Donald Trump has the Republican nomination in his grip. His unconventional campaign has flummoxed the political establishment, puzzling pundits on both sides of the political divide. Along the way he obliterated 16 rivals, some of them established Republican stalwarts, won contests in 37 states and secured a broad coalition including both Republican moderates and right-wing evangelicals.

Most improbably, he did it with no political experience, no real campaign operation, no fundraising network, no ground game for voter turnout or serious support from the Republican Party leadership.

So how did a 70-year-old billionaire - ridiculed widely as an arrogant buffoon - convert celebrity and riches into a genuine shot at the presidency?

And if Trump is all the things the political establishment says he is, then why are millions of Americans taking him seriously?

No Republican candidate has ever made such a populist pitch to the economic anxieties and resentments of Americans as Trump has. He did not luck his way into this nomination. Vowing to "make America great again", Trump tapped into the mood and needs of many white Americans who feel left behind and neglected, awakening feelings that, until now, they had suppressed.

"He trashed his way to the summit by understanding what many intelligent people utterly failed to see: the decline of American institutions and mores, from Wall Street and the Senate to cable news and the Twitterverse, made the candidacy of a celebrity proto-fascist with no impulse control not just possible, but in some ways inevitable," wrote veteran American journalist George Packer recently. "It shouldn't have been such a surprise."

Trump has exploited what Republican elites have long refused to grasp - the authentic distress of millions of middle-class voters who are suffering from the effects of globalisation, free trade, revolutionary technology and low-wage immigrant labour. It is no accident that Trump is doing best in the Rust belt - states stretching from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin - and other areas where steel and other heavy industries have disappeared. The decline in manufacturing and the rise of offshoring have decimated towns across the country, leaving many Americans in dire economic straits. Trump put his ear to the ground and felt the rage.

In 2008, Sarah Palin - another darling of the white working-class - did the same. Just as many white women and men across America identified with Palin's plain-spoken anger despite her gaffes so, too, do millions of working-class men delight in Trump's swaggering profanity and tell-like-it-is persona. To whites who feel powerless, Trump's rants are like an electric charge.

These marginalised Americans who feel excluded from the Obama recovery are genuinely aggrieved. For years they have been falling through the cracks, and Trump, cleverly exploiting them, has brought them into the light.

These voters have been left behind - by robotic technology, by Obama, by the Clintons, by Wall Street, by impoverished schools, by the Republican Party and the rest of the Washington elite. Truth be told, they have also been left behind by the likes of people like me - educated professionals living in urbanised bubbles. America, as these people once knew it, has drifted away from their grasp. Now, they believe, with a candidate combining a tycoon's success with celebrity culture, they have a chance to "take it back".

"There is no excuse for supporting a racist, sexist, xenophobic buffoon like Donald Trump," Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research told the New Yorker magazine recently. "But we should be clear: the workers who turn to him do have real grievances. The system has been rigged against them."

Trump's rise also coincides with a decline in the share of the white electorate in the voting population, which has dropped from 89pc of the voting public to 72pc. But in order to win the election, Trump must buck a demographic tide, as the country's non-white population swells. The Republican nominee is trying to amass historically large margins of these voters, but their importance is receding year by year.

"Whites are becoming a minority in the country by the 2040s," Professor Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia told the Review. "This has generated fear that produced Trump's proposal for a wall, a ban on Muslims, and a slogan that harkens back to the old America - 'Make America Great Again.'"

The prospects for white Americans outside prosperous cities are genuinely bleak, not merely a talking point. Life expectancy for whites in rural areas has been declining at an alarming rate. A recent study by two Princeton economists revealed a shocking epidemic of deaths among middle-aged white Americans from alcohol, opioids and suicide. Most of these deaths were in areas where Trump enjoys strong support. And Trump, in part, has clawed his way to the nomination by promising voters in these decimated areas that he will restore them to a rightful place in American society.

Trump's rambling speeches feature hostile rhetoric against immigrants, Muslims and 'Crooked Hillary'. But he has also cleverly addressed the fears and anxieties of working-class voters. He regularly laments how the United States has become a second-tier nation next to countries like China and Japan. Campaigning in areas where anger about the economy runs deep, he has been relentless in his attacks on international trade agreements and companies that outsource jobs. In western Pennsylvania, he recently said free-trade policies were moving "our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas" and unless steps are taken, "the inner cities will remain poor, the factories will remain closed", while the "special interests will remain firmly in control". That's not how Republican presidential candidates usually talk.

Trump has promised that the isolationist theme of "America First" will be the "major and overriding theme of my administration". The phrase America First carries eerie echoes of the 1930s, when Americans like Charles Lindbergh spoke with admiration of Adolf Hitler's Nazis and warned against waging war abroad. It was an era when some argued democracy had failed, that trade deals were a trick, and that strong leaders needed to take charge. Although most experts have stopped short of calling 'Trumpismo' a fascist movement, some point out that 1930s ultra-right ideology has some parallels with the real-estate mogul's themes. Both ridiculed feckless elites in coarse language, and blamed economic hardship on other countries and minorities. The Nazis blamed the Jews for Germany's troubles. Trump blames Mexicans and Muslims.

As the University of Maryland's Jeffrey Herf wrote in an essay in the American Interest: "Trump says what they want to say but are afraid to express. In cheering this leader, his supporters feel free to say what they really believe about Mexicans, Muslims and women."

Trump may have rallied the white have-nots, but he has nothing in common with them. The son of real-estate developer Frederick Trump, Donald's early years were marked by extreme privilege with private schools, limousines and a 23-room house with white columns that Donald shared with his four siblings. There is much to suggest that in his early years, Trump was a mirror - albeit smaller - version of the bombastic, egoistic candidate who has confounded the political establishment today. He himself fully admits that as a child he was very "rambunctious".

"When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I'm basically the same," Trump once told a biographer. "The temperament is not that different."

In his 1987 bestselling book, The Art of the Deal, the tycoon explores several pivotal childhood experiences that he considers as critical to shaping his future success, including the time he punched his music teacher in the face. "In the second grade, I actually gave my teacher a black eye - I punched my music teacher because I didn't think he knew anything about music, and I almost got expelled," Trump wrote. "I'm not proud of that, but it's clear evidence that even early on, I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a very forceful way."

"Who could forget him?" said Anne Trees, a former teacher. "He was headstrong and determined. He would sit with his arms folded with this look on his face - I use the word surly - almost daring you to say one thing or another that wouldn't settle with him."

"He had a reputation for saying anything that came into his head," said Donald Kass, a former schoolmate. "We would laugh at him and tell him he was wrong, and he'd say he was right."

At 13, Trump's father sent him to the New York Military Academy in an attempt to straighten him out, a place where Trump says he learned how to channel his "aggression into achievement". But even here, Trump could not escape trouble. Once struck with a broomstick during a fight, he tried to push a fellow cadet out a second-floor window, only to be stopped when two other students intervened.

On the presidential campaign trail, Trump's rallies have had more than a whiff of violence about them. At an event in Iowa earlier this year, Trump told his supporters, "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? . Seriously.. I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees."

In June 2015, after announcing his run for the presidency, he castigated Mexico for sending "rapists" to the United States. Following the mass shooting in San Bernadino, California, by a husband-and-wife team sympathetic to the Islamic State, Trump issued a call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

His crowning in Cleveland proves that there is real pain among voters in America right now, but it remains to be seen whether a larger majority will view him as the right response to heal it.

A Trump victory in November is unlikely, say experts, who argue that the numbers are just not on the billionaire's side. "I think his chances are about 30pc," said Sabato. "That's comforting to his many opponents.

"Trump received 14 million votes in the GOP primaries. About 135 million will vote in November. He's behind in most of the key states."

Trump's base remains mostly the white working-class, especially men. In 2012, Obama beat Mitt Romney by five million votes. For Trump to win, he needs all of the people who voted for Romney, in addition to five million more. And these voters must be from the critical swing states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Already polls are showing Trump to be losing some of the people who voted for Romney in 2012 - especially Republican women, many of whom have been turned off by his sexist remarks.

Recent weeks have also seen a dramatic reversal of fortune for Trump as the candidate's numbers dipped drastically within nearly every demographic. Internally, his campaign seems on the edge of implosion with reports of Apprentice-type firings of key aides and the shocking revelation that his campaign has only $1.3m in the bank. In recent months, the Washington Post - now barred from the Trump campaign trail - and the New York Times have published a litany of searing exposes detailing Trump's difficulty in paying his bills; his paltry donations to charity; his flirtation with Russian oligarchs, his disparaging treatment of women; and the allegations that 'Trump University' was a thinly-veiled scam.

On the cusp of the real campaign - pitted against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - Trump is joining the big leagues. Now he will have to act as a real politician, to do all that he hates - to act more 'presidential', to stay on-script, to embrace the dreaded teleprompter. It will require what he has often lacked: self-discipline. But even if he loses in November, the unlikely movement he has stoked among working-class voters will have a lasting and possibly damaging legacy on the political landscape.

The resentment against trade agreements and immigrants that Trump has masterfully manipulated to win their votes will remain, and likely grow. Unless the political establishment can win back the affection of these alienated Americans, Trump, in his inimitable arrogant style, may still lay claim to a victory - even if he isn't the next president.

Top Trumpisms

'I will build a great wall - and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me - and I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.'

The stand-out line during an inflammatory speech in June 2015 to announce he was throwing his hat into the race for the White House.

'When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending the best. They're not sending you, they're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bring crime. They're rapists And some, I assume, are good people.'

Another nugget from the speech that announced he was throwing his hat in the presidential ring.

'All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me - consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected.'

A much-quoted line from his 2004 book, How to Get Rich.

'I don't think Ivanka would do that [pose for Playboy], although she does have a very nice figure. I've said if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her.'

There is frequently a sexual undertone when Trump talks about women, including these televised words about his daughter, which he subsequently called a joke.

'The only card [Hillary Clinton] has is the woman's card. She's got nothing else to offer and frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5pc of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the woman's card, and the beautiful thing is, women don't like her.'

Trump mocked his Democrat rival in May when she talked about the power of the 'Woman's Card'.

'If Hillary Clinton can't satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?'

The pithy put-down was made on Twitter by a US college student and retweeted by Trump. He later deleted the tweet.

'He [Saddam] was a bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were a terrorist, it was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism.'

Trump offering an alternative view on the reviled dictator earlier this month.

'It's freezing and snowing in New York - we need global warming!'

His critics have condemned his environmental views and this 2012 tweet is often held up as an example of his glib approach to the issue.

'Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!'

Trump was roundly derided for this Brexit-related tweet for seemingly being unaware that Scotland had overwhelming voted in favour of remaining in the EU.

'The Donald', more than most, understands the power of the soundbite - and he has been delivering those virtually every day since his campaign began. In his universe, the mantra appears to be the more outrageous the better, and he has a long history of causing offence.
'Fremantle Harbour was probably O'Connor's greatest triumph, as his proposal to build it within the entrance to the Swan River (pictured) was regarded as almost impossible'. Photo: Robyn Mackenzie

This little island has a long history of emigration. Many a family in this country town have at least one child living abroad, whether just across the water or further afield.

Such is the case with my late brother's friend, Finbarr, who lives in the major port city of Fremantle in Western Australia.

He tells me that if you wander down the beach to watch the sunset, you will also see a bronze statue of a man on horseback in the ocean, looking back over his shoulder at Fremantle Harbour.

You might assume this mythical sight is connected to the Aboriginals, who have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on Earth. Their creation myth teaches that ancestor spirits made the world, before changing into trees, the stars, rocks, watering holes and so on - making nature, and not man-made objects, sacred.

Yet that statue of a man on horseback almost submerged in the sea is actually an Irishman. Charles Yelverton O'Connor found fame and glory as an engineer in Western Australia during the succession of gold rushes that caused a population explosion in its barren and dry desert centre.

Fremantle Harbour was probably O'Connor's greatest triumph, as his proposal to build it within the entrance to the Swan River was regarded as almost impossible. But his work on the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme - perhaps the world's longest water main - was his downfall.

For a vicious campaign, motivated by political agendas and individual greed, plagued O'Connor towards the end of the project. A typically libellous article in the Sunday Times in 1902 accused "this crocodile imposter" of corruption.

Mental illnesses caused by overwork and worry, along with many health problems - including cirrhosis of the liver - meant O'Connor never got to see his engineering wonder at work when it was completed in 1903. Because on March 10, 1902, O'Connor mounted his favourite horse and rode out into the Indian Ocean - where he shot dead both horse and himself. The statue stands on the spot he committed suicide.

But they say that the real cause of O'Connor's demise was a curse placed on him by local Aboriginals for destroying their environment. Specifically, by blasting away the limestone bar across that part of the Swan River, which was a source of food for tens of thousands of years before European settlement.

The fact that O'Connor died near where their tradition says that the spirits of the departed leave the coast to travel over the sea to the island of the dead, lent credence to this belief.

Perhaps it is true O'Connor was cursed - but not by the Noongar people. For the statue seems symbolic of a culture driven demented by its destructive fever for gold, which fuelled a rush to ransack the natural world.

Leaving one Irishman with many monuments to his name - but his sanity all at sea.
The nine Muslim Brotherhood members were sentenced in absentia meaning that if they turn themselves into the authorities a retrial will be granted

A Cairo criminal court handed death and life imprisonment sentences in absentia on Sunday to nine members of the now banned Muslim Brotherhood over violence related events that took place in Giza governorate in 2013.

On Sunday, the court sentenced six people to death and three others to life imprisonment over their participation in violent attacks referred to as the Omraneya events in November 2013.

Life in prison sentences carry up to 25 years in jail, according to the Egyptian penal code.

They were referred to court after prosecution accused them of illegally gathering, protesting, cutting off roads, and possessing firearms.

The prosecution also charged them of committing assaults, including murdering a child and the attempted murder of others.

The nine convicts were tried in absentia, and thus given the maximum penalty for their crimes.

If they turn themselves into the authorities, they can appeal their initial death and life imprisonment sentences.

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It seems only right that Galway will be European Region of Gastronomy 2018. The food scene in Ireland's friendliest little city and surrounding county has been making remarkable strides and offers some of the most diverse, creative and thoroughly Irish eating you can hope to experience.

Key to its success is the dynamic team behind last year's phenomenal Food on the Edge symposium, which saw many of the world's best chefs gather in a Spiegeltent in Eyre Square for two days of Ted-style talks about 'the future of food'. It sounds lofty and esoteric but was the very opposite, with much reality-rooted soul-searching about today's chefs' role in sustainable eating for all.

The conference returns this year (October 24 & 25, foodontheedge.ie) with a line-up that includes Massimo Bottura, officially the world's best chef (or at least according to the World's Best Restaurant list) alongside industry heavyweights such as Pierre Koffman, the man who shaped the kitchen skills of Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White. There's a suitable smattering of Irish talent done good at home (Danni Barry, Dylan McGrath) and abroad (Robin Gill, Trevor Moran), and some unmissable returnees (Mark Best, Nathan Outlaw). Early-bird tickets are on sale until July 31 at 350 for two days. Or follow proceedings for free on Twitter @foodontheedge.

Again, it seems only right that Galway should pull off such an ambitious feat. This city has always had an imagination way bigger than its proverbial boots, mucky with agricultural roots. It's that marriage of cosmopolitan inspirations with pride in excellent local producers such as Gannet Fishmongers and the Friendly Farmer that gives Galway's food scene its signature style.

Perhaps it's the welcome shown to talented blow-ins such as Jess Murphy, the Kiwi chef-restaurateur of Kai fame, or Daniel Rosen, the New Yorker mastermind behind BoyChik doughnuts, or Junichi Yoshiyagawa of Kappa-Ya, or Francophile Sheena Dignam of Galway Food Tours. Perhaps it's the wonderlust of key scenesters: Aoibheann MacNamara and her Ard Bia (above) team with their gra for all things Eastern; the Nordic leanings of JP McMahons' Aniar and Enda McEvoy's Loam; the North African-Mediterranean street food of Brother Rabbits (whose owner, Eoin Coyle, also happens to run a snail farm on the Long Walk, as you do); the pizza-to-make-mamma-proud of the Dough Bros. Whatever it is, it's pure Galway, and deliciously so.

Bites..

Taking the Biscuit

Finding seaweed in your shortbread sounds like finding a fly in your soup - until you taste The Galway Food Company's Connemara Seaweed All Butter Shortbread. An acquired taste that you may just get hooked on. Try with chowder, cheese or a cuppa. thegalwayfoodcompany.com

Ring the Changes

Top female chefs, restaurateurs, food writers and academics - including Trish Deseine (above), Danni Barry and Regina Sexton - gather in Galway this week for Athru 2016, the first Irish culinary conference on gender roles in professional kitchens and the hospitality sector. athru.net

Galway's Hooked

Any visitor to Galway can see that the city is sold on Galway Hooker Irish Pale Ale (crisp, flavoursome and very sessionable) but their Irish Stout is also worth a try, being big, balanced and rich with bitter mocha notes. 4.5pc ABV, 3.30/500ml
It feels like breaking omerta to criticise the work of another journalist, and yet it's hard not to weigh in on the recent furore surrounding Vanity Fair writer Rich Cohen's interview with Margot Robbie.

The interview between the US writer and the Australian actress was slammed as 'sexist', 'xenophobic' and more than a little bit creepy when it was published online last week.

According to Cohen, Australians are "throwback people"; Australia is just like America - "only different"; and Margot Robbie "can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character". If, like me, you have difficulty understanding the latter abstraction, the writer follows it up with: "As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means..."

Admittedly, reading Cohen's interview is akin to discovering someone's marijuana-inspired experiment with Beat poetry on a crumpled-up piece of A4 paper. Still, he deserves some kudos for avoiding the celebrity-interview-by-numbers approach.

In case you haven't noticed, celebrity interviews follow a very specific formula that invariably start on a cold January morning in New York's Meatpacking District or a sunny April afternoon in the Chateau Marmont. Otherwise, the celebrity is late. It doesn't really matter how late they are - or how profusely their publicist apologises. Tardiness makes for a good opener.

When they eventually arrive, it is absolutely crucial that they 'stride in' to the room. Celebrities don't walk; they stride. This is the law. Failing that, journalists must observe an utterly inconsequential aspect of their interviewee's behaviour and use it to frame their piece.

It's 3pm on a blustery November morning and Jane Doe is not late. Instead she is brushing her hair/chatting on her phone/staring out the window as she contemplates the existential despair of telling 30 journalists, one by one, what it was like to work with Brad Pitt...

This style of opener is designed to make the reader believe that the journalist was privy to the celebrity's inner world and not, in fact, one of dozens of hacks who waited in a queue outside a hotel suite for a glorified meet-and-greet.

It also gives the writer an opening to seamlessly segue into a paragraph describing what this exalted being looks like in the flesh. Strangely enough, celebrities don't wear red-carpet couture gowns on Wednesday afternoons. Even so, it is important to forensically deconstruct this apparent peculiarity.

The actress's hair is almost always 'pulled back' into a low-slung pony while her face is 'scraped clean' of make-up. And yes - you guessed it - she still looks radiant. Her outfit is worthy of its own paragraph, too. If she is wearing anything other than 'off-duty' jeans and a sweater, then her attire should be described as 'exquisitely tailored'.

Facial features should also be described at length, using language worthy of a Shakespearian sonnet. Blue eyes are 'aquamarine'. A nose that is even slightly bigger than average is 'aquiline'. Lips are 'pillowy'. Most importantly, actresses aren't small or slight. They are 'gamine'. At least Cohen rewrote the script by comparing Robbie's beauty to "a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance".

He also avoided commenting on her eating habits, which is yet another tedious celebrity interview cliche. If there is food within a 20-metre radius of a female celebrity, then it must be mentioned - but only if she 'picks at' it or 'pushes it around her plate'.

Otherwise the interviewee will write this paragraph on the interviewer's behalf by 'wolfing down' fries and a hamburger and declaring that she "eats like a horse!" This statement is designed to increase the interviewee's likeability, even if it just makes the interviewer consider the prevalence of bulimia in the equine population.

Meanwhile, the reader begins to wonder exactly how many times the interviewee has undergone liposuction. This is perfect timing because it's here that we transition into the subject of cosmetic surgery.

It would be refreshing if celebrities could just tell us who the doctor is and find out if they do mates' rates. Unfortunately, there is strict protocol around this question, too - and only two possible stock answers to choose from.

Generally the actress, a woman who has survived the bloodthirsty Hollywood casting system, will claim that needles make her squeamish. Alternatively, if her forehead is shiny enough for the journalist to see his/her reflection in it, she may concede that she "wouldn't rule it out" or would "never say never".

Her beauty tips come next, but don't go rushing for your notebook because she's only going to sensationally reveal that she 1) drinks gallons of water and 2) always takes her make-up off before she goes to bed...

Yes, there's a lot to call out in Cohen's interview, but you certainly couldn't call it predictable.
Kate O'Connell: I had two children by the time I entered politics, and I had my third last October. Having children does not give you a monopoly on caring about the future. In some ways, having children can be a real asset to your political experience - for instance, if you have a child with special needs or developmental difficulties, it can sharpen your focus when legislating regarding others in similar circumstances. In other ways, the logistical nightmare of scheduling the lives of three children, alongside committee meetings and the Dail schedule for the week, can be an exercise in political/parental gymnastics.

Now that I'm a TD, I am duty-bound to represent the will of the people who elected me. You make sacrifices as a parent all the time for the good of your kids - and I think, perhaps politics could benefit from that sort of approach.

Politics, like parenting, is a vocation. Sometimes it's loud and dirty and you wonder why you ever bothered - and then other days everything goes to plan, you manage to help someone out, and you feel like it was all worthwhile.

Mary Mitchell O'Connor: There is nothing that will ever eclipse the sense of fulfilment I get every day from my two sons, Conor and Steven.

My life changed forever when they came into the world. The love I feel for them never leaves me. They are my greatest achievement. And now blessed with a new grand-daughter, I feel all that love again, even when I look at her photo from afar. Her mother, my beautiful daughter-in-law Maeve, also holds a very special place in my heart.

My boys did not change me in the political sense. What they have done is provided me with support, advice and frankness when required.

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Josepha Madigan: Having children does not confer any special status on me over a woman who has no children.

I became a mother many years before I became a politician but I believe that every life experience, including having children, shapes your opinions in life.

Maria Bailey: It has changed me for the better as a person firstly, [and] as a politician you continue to grow, adapt, improve and strive to do more.

As a mother, all I want is for my children to be happy, healthy and love life. They have made me appreciate life far more and it has made me far more determined and driven. I suppose it also makes you more focused on issues that will affect the next generation coming through, for example, college fees. And certainly, in my generation, where we are burdened with negative equity and big mortgages with the burden of childcare on top of that, you worry about how you can afford to send your children to college to give them that equal opportunity.

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They are the areas you really want to focus on as a parent and a politician.

I know Richard Bruton is trying to tackle the cost of third-level education but I also want to focus on the cost of childcare too, to make it more affordable so that it is worth parents' while to go back to the workplace.

Kevin 'Boxer' Moran: I don't think having children changes your politics. You go into politics, regardless of whether you have children or not, wanting to make the world a better place. Even if you don't have children, you probably grew up in a family where there were children, brothers and sisters for example, and you learned all about what that involves. But no, the only thing that has changed for me is that [with the demands of the job] I don't get to see my children enough. But I went into this job to look out for all walks of life, regardless of whether I have children or not.

Pat Buckley: It's an excellent question. Yes, having children has absolutely changed me- and for the better.

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You do find strength from your kids and you also go into defence mode because you always want to protect them.

I think you will not be spoken down to when you have kids, you won't take it, because you are setting the marker for them.

It hasn't really changed my politics, though. In Sinn Fein, we are all about social inclusion and equality so I have a duty to fight for better childcare and education anyway - but my kids are an inspiration.

So, actually, yes - having children does change your politics, in a way. You are not just representing yourself anymore, although you never have, but you see the world through your kids' life experiences. For example, is there or is there not a community centre in the local area, and you fight for better education, services... mental health services too, because you see that can affect them too and that service is all about giving the kids information and coping skills because you know they will be coming up against a lot of problems and barriers as they go through life.

Stephen Donnelly: I would refute the argument made in the UK that having children makes you a better politician. Yes, it has made some people better politicians, but so have lots of other life experiences.

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On the other side of things, there are many life experiences I don't have anymore that would also make me a better politician. For example, if I didn't have children I would be able to travel more, I would have more time for work, I would have more time to talk to people in my constituency.

But having children, I hope, has made me a better politician in other ways too. You get to see the apparatus of the state as it engages with children. For example, you see the education system first-hand because your children are in it; you are in children's hospitals more too, so in terms of pure experience, it has helped me.

And it has helped me to really understand what Irish childcare costs mean to families and how destructive they are, because you are experiencing them. So you get a better understanding of the state and wider society through how your own children experience it and also how the non-state apparatus, such as childcare, works. But if I didn't have children, it would also mean I would have more time to dedicate to the job. A chunk of my week is spent with my children, and politicians who don't have children probably use part of that time working.

For me, as a parent, it also helps me to empathise with parents who need support for their children. During the election campaign, the doors I came away from that made me most upset and angry were after talking to parents who had children with special needs who were on waiting lists for up to five years and who hadn't received the help they need from the State.

For me as a parent, I could feel that anger because you project yourself onto that situation and say what if it was my kids? I need to stress that this comment is purely about me personally, I am in no way suggesting politicians who don't have children can't empathise with parents, I mean that it, purely on a personal level, has helped me myself to empathise better.

Fiona O'Loughlin: I talk about issues that impact mothers and fathers on a regular basis regardless of whether I am a mother or not. Last week, for example, I was debating the cost of third-level education and in the Dail speaking about working families and childcare. So even though I don't have children myself, I don't feel it precludes me from the conversation.

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Issues such as childcare costs and education are issues that have a very big impact on society and I feel I have as much understanding as anyone else because a lot of my working life involved children too, through teaching, and in working with people with intellectual disability through Special Olympics.

I also believe I empathise with the challenges parents have as I have 10 younger brothers and sisters and 16 nieces and nephews, as well as friends and neighbours who have children.

I would not like to feel that my voice is worth any less on the issues that impact families than that of a mother.
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Brendan OConnor Opinion The jig is up as Feis fixing has former winners like me reeling

As the holder of the Marie Cranny Perpetual cup for Extempore and Public Speaking (Under 15s) in Feis Maitiu in, of all years, 1984, I would like to use this platform to say this feis-fixing scandal has sullied my legacy, and that of all other holders of the cup down the years (you had to give it back at the end of the year).
My Week: Conor McGregor*

Monday: I wake up. Although, of course, I have not actually been asleep. No, no, my friend. Not in the way that other, mere mortal people sleep. Instead I have trained myself to metaphysicise; I have transmorgorified, I have metamorphisitised, I have fundamentally reimagined a way of resting my body, so that I am consciously wrestling with the inner movements of my muscles, even as my body believes it is sleeping. And while I do dat, my amigo, I am also full of the most beautiful feelings and emotions. My woman, my girl, the future first Lady of Ireland and myself, did go and promenade the town last night, with a pint of Guinness and my very good friend and training partner, Artem "The Russian Hammer" Lobov.
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Dan O'Brien Opinion While we catastrophise about Covid, we ignore risk of running out of cash

We Irish view the world in an increasingly strange and unhealthy way. We catastrophise about Covid in a way other European countries do not. We focus on how bad the effects of the virus could get, on how many more restrictions might be imposed by Government and how helpless we are in the face of the virus.
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New hospital for a tenner may come at too high a price

The Taoiseach is under a lot of pressure  the kind of pressure that leads to costly mistakes. It perhaps explains why he has been saying things that are not quite true. Micheal Martin is in a tight political corner. From all sides hes being told he has to get the contract signed for the new National Maternity Hospital.
Not for nothing was Barbara Bush known as 'The Enforcer'

Barbara Bush, tougher than her husband and known to her family as 'The Enforcer', is probably the most popular of all ex-US first ladies of recent times. Jackie Kennedy is remembered across the globe for elegance and tragedy, but she was not loved. Rosalynn Carter worked hard and was a noted campaigner on issues of mental health, but she has suffered in retrospect because of her bitterness at his defeat by Ronald Reagan, who is widely perceived to have been as great a success as Carter was a failure. The brittle Nancy Reagan was an essential support to her husband, but was thought to care little for anyone else. Hillary Clinton was loathed by those who thought her a careerist. The likeable Laura Bush did a lot of useful work but lacked her mother-in-law's commanding personality. And although Michelle Obama had rock-star status, that has diminished as she and her husband embrace luxury and celebrity. Betty Ford is probably the closest rival, having been far more effective and formidable than her husband Gerald, the 38th president, and still having a posthumous reputation for her prowess as a campaigner on addiction, not least because so many of the famous troop to the Betty Ford Clinic.
US and Egyptian officials have been meeting frequently in recent months to strengthen their cooperation in the fight against terrorism

The USs Naval Forces central commander arrived in Cairo on Sunday to meet with senior Egyptian officials to discuss shared security interests between the two countries, the US Embassy in Cairo announced.

In an official statement, the embassy said that Vice Admiral Kevin M. Donegan, who assumed command in September 2015, is set to meet with Egyptians officials to "discuss U.S.-Egypt collaboration and the long-standing partnership between Egypt and the US in fighting terrorism and promoting security and stability in the region."

The statement did not mention which Egyptian representatives the US official is going to meet.

A series of mutual visits have been ongoing between Egyptian and US security officials in recent months to discuss ways of strengthening cooperation to fight terrorism in the region.

The United States provides Egypt with $1.3 billion in military aid annually, with the 2016 package including $150 million in economic assistance.

In May, Egypt received an initial shipment of 762 mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles from the United States, which will be used in army operations in North Sinai.

Egypt's security forces have been fighting a decade-long Islamist insurgency in parts of North Sinai that spiked following the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

In its fight against terrorists in parts of North Sinai, hundreds of Egyptian security personnel have been killed by roadside bombs, with the Egyptian army announcing successful preemptive strikes against the militants in comprehensive joint military and police operations.

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It was apparent from shortly after the start of the attempted July 15 coup in Turkey that it would fail.

Turkey's democratic culture is shallow, but it is nevertheless resilient. The country has lived through numerous coups before and there is almost no appetite for a return to those times.

As elements of the army moved onto the street and sought to take key installations, the absence of even tacit support in any segment of society was striking.

Turkey's divisive but politically unrivalled president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is despised by a sizeable minority of Turks. However, only a very small number would see the suspension of civilian rule as a price worth paying for removing him from office. Similarly, many of Turkey's opposition politicians despair at the quasi one-party state that Turkey is becoming under Mr Erdogan's crudely majoritarian leadership, but they all still spoke out against the attempted coup on Friday night.

It is difficult to understand what those undertaking the coup hoped might happen in the absence of any sign of public or political support for military intervention, let alone any demands for such intervention. To whom were they hoping to transfer power if they had managed to wrest it from Mr Erdogan?

One plausible theory is that they had no long-term plan but moved in any case ahead of a rumoured August purge of government opponents from the military.

There have been multiple previous coups in Turkey. There were three armed interventions beteen 1960 and 1980 and a so-called "postmodern coup" in 1997. These took place at a time when a sufficient body of public and elite opinion accepted that Turkey's political institutions were fragile enough to justify reliance on the army as a last line of defence against a breakdown of social or constitutional order.

That thinking no longer prevails. If anything, coups are now seen by a majority of the electorate as the epitome of disorder. In part this reflects Mr Erdogan's remarkable success at framing Turkey's 21st-century political narrative to suit his self-interest. He presents his political career as a series of battles in which he has successfully defended majority rule against individuals, groups and institutions he claims have sought to usurp it.

The coup plotters seem to have spectacularly failed to grasp this political dynamic on Friday. As a result, they were doomed to be cast as anti-democratic traitors around whom no one would rally. Moreover, some of the symbolism of their actions was perverse. For example, they bombed the parliament building in Ankara in the name of an intervention ostensibly motivated by concerns about the erosion of Turkey's democratic institutions.

If the underlying reason for the coup's failure was its lack of public and political support, there were also more operational reasons. Put bluntly, it is difficult to seize the levers of power in a modern state. A few examples will illustrate this point. First, the army wasn't unopposed; one of the defining early images on Friday night was a stand-off in Istanbul's iconic Taksim square between the army and police. Second, the coup plotters failed in their attempt to take over a key satellite station. They never controlled the airwaves and so never controlled the narrative. Instead, their initial setbacks were amplified on television and social media, creating a powerful sense that the coup's failure was just a matter of time.

Third, there was never enough fear to keep the public in their homes. On the contrary, the government successfully called people out on to the streets in a show of defiance. For a military intervention to have prevailed against that kind of public mobilisation, soldiers would have had to be willing to kill large numbers of people, which, mercifully, they were not.

Looking ahead, the key question is what the institutional and constitutional implications of the failed coup will be. The short answer is: more power for Mr Erdogan. Within hours of the coup's failure, there were thousands of arrests in the military and the judiciary. These were less shocking than they might seem; the government has been rooting out its opponents across the state for many years now. That process will continue and perhaps intensify in the wake of the attempted coup.

Mr Erdogan defends these purges as essential to the protection of Turkish democracy. The reality is that the process is destroying an already weak system of checks and balances, eroding Turkey's long-term political and institutional capacity.

Nowhere is the absence of checks and balances more stark than in the office of the presidency as it has evolved under Mr Erdogan. Constitutionally, it is a largely ceremonial position, but since his election in 2014 Mr Erdogan has ruled as if Turkey were a presidential rather than a parliamentary democracy. He craves a new constitution to formalise and extend his de facto powers, but in two parliamentary elections since he became president he has failed to secure the super-majority that is needed to initiate a constitutional reform process.

That could now change. Nationalist feeling is running high and Mr Erdogan is already claiming that his years of warnings about the threats of coups have been borne out.

Some of his opponents' hostility towards him is likely to be tempered by the fact that his elected administration has been so directly challenged by the army. He may well calculate that this is a perfect time to push through his plans for an executive presidency.

Had the coup attempt lasted longer or reached further into the state, he might have simply suspended the constitutional order and unilaterally claimed executive powers.

But that is an unlilkely scenario. More plausible is the idea that Mr Erdogan might trigger a snap general election and have his Justice and Development Party (AKP) campaign on a platform of democracy and national unity. In the wake of what has just happened, there is a high likelihood that he would achieve his super-majority, triggering a constitutional overhaul that would confirm his dominant role in Turkey for many years ahead.

Aengus Collins is Chief EU Analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. He was based in Istanbul from 2007 to 2011
The sea is the same sea. I wake to the vivid ultramarine and the great southern sky. There are people taking the early morning air on the promenade. But it is not possible to say life is returning to normal, not when everybody has forgotten what normal means. Terror insinuates itself into the consciousness. We cannot shake our hands in rage at the terror of the 'lone wolf' as we might at an aircraft dropping bombs or an artillery man firing from across a front line. Terror walks among us, it slips a filter of mistrust across our eyes. So this morning I walked the Nice promenade. I nodded and smiled at citizens of many nations. We shared the stillness and the warm sun, and we looked into each other and beyond to the new world in which the public space can erupt in madness at any time. The same sea. The same sun. Nothing has changed. All is changing.

The night before I was crossing town by car. The taxi driver had seen the truck ploughing through the crowds. "It was horrible, horrible. I saw it all. The bodies were everywhere. My town! In my town can you believe? It happens everywhere but you never think here. Then it comes." I could see his eyes in the mirror. The man should have been at home with his family. He was traumatised and exhausted. But there was a living he had to make. And what would he do at home trying to explain to his wife what he had seen. "I cannot explain it," he said.

Can anybody? My first experience of terrorism was in Belfast in the 1980s. But there were certain rules. Large-scale killings of the opposing confessional group were mostly a thing of the past. Atrocities like Enniskillen captured headlines but terror was more about the relentless destabilisation of individual assassination. Neighbours watched and reported the movements of policemen, UDR men, Sinn Fein councillors, Catholics in flashpoint areas, businesspeople who supplied services to the security forces. "Each neighbourly murder", as Seamus Heaney called them. The primary purpose of terror is to instil fear. We live with suspicion of those with whom we share the same geographical space.

Yet in the North it was possible to mitigate this fear. The politics might have been a dialogue of the deaf for a long time but it was dialogue of a kind. It allowed a generation of politicians to come through who would eventually make peace. Civil society was strong. There were always more active peacemakers and advocates of co-existence than there were active haters. In that terrible week in March 1988 of Gibraltar, Milltown, the murder of the Corporals Wood and Howe, I experienced the dramatic escalation of communal fear caused by sustained acts of terror in a short period of time. Yet the centre held. Enough people had a stake in the future to disdain a return to the madness of the early 1970s.

The challenge offered by the lone wolf attackers like Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel is very different. He has captured the headlines, inserting himself into the narrative of terror in an explosion of rage. We know that he was a social outcast who drank and beat his ex-wife.

He fits the profile of so many modern terrorists for whom radical Islam provides the perfect home for their personal grievances and an alibi to act out their anger against others.

In France at the moment there is a bitter debate about whether such men are radicalised by fundamentalism or simply use it as an excuse to expiate their violent resentments.

I am inclined to believe that Salafism is a perverse gift for angry, alienated, confused and, sometimes, mentally disturbed young men.

Some believe the theology but most are drawn by a desire for belonging. They need a simpler view of a world in which they exist without power, a context in which cruel violence has religious justification. The loser becomes briefly powerful and is willing to die and destroy others for this momentary spasm of glory.

Michael Stone in Belfast acted in the name of the UDA/UFF but he was ostensibly a lone wolf, a rare one. Paramilitary structures militated against the kind of individual atrocities carried out in Nice.

Modern France has no paramilitary armies but it has plenty of alienated young men. Who needs an AK47 or Semtex when you can hire a truck and mow down civilians?

The state has floundered in its response to the terrorist threat. Political complacency has led to security failures. There has been neither the coordinated intelligence response or emphatic outreach in Muslim communities that followed the 7/7 attacks in Britain, for example. At times it can feel that France's idea of itself - the home of all colours and faiths united by language and the values of the Enlightenment - is a palliative, a delusion that allows the politicians to bumble on blindly, ever deeper into the mire. France is France, eternal and glorious, and it will triumph. I am not so sure about that. President Hollande has not told us what victory will look like. Does it mean an end to all terrorist violence? A society in which the rage of and resentment of the forgotten suburbs is ameliorated?

In the North, and in Britain post 7/7, lessons were learned. The greatest challenge for French intelligence and police is securing the trust of those who can supply them with information, not information after the fact when everybody is upset and willing to talk, but before dangerous men like Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ever get the chance to act. Of course, it is not a guarantee against violence of the kind inflicted here in Nice. But the dividends of trust can be enormous.

The most unsettling thing about the multiple crises of the last year or so is the sense that nobody in power is in control.

Momentum lies with the killers. The consequence is rising public fear. With presidential elections next year, the possibility of the far right National Front gaining power becomes more real. Hollande has little time left to prove at least competence in facing the threat posed by terror.

I was still absorbing the horror of Nice when Twitter began erupting with news out of Turkey.

Jets flying low over Ankara and troops blocking the bridges over the Bosphurus. In these weeks when anything happens at any time I shouldn't have been surprised.

But a coup in Turkey just felt so incredibly like a hark back to the dark ages of the seventies and eighties.

As I made my way to Istanbul, more than ever a citizen of a confused world, I heard the coup was failing; nearly 200 people dead; crowds in the streets; a soldier beheaded in public.

This is the unravelling history of our age.

It is fascinating and frightening and it belongs to us all.

Fergal Keane is a BBC Special Correspondent
Turkey stands at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. As such, it has been a central player in Western strategy over the past several years.

It is Nato's largest continental army in an age of Russian revanchism; a powerful force in the Syrian civil war; and at the crux of Europe's migrant crisis. It is therefore likely that, had last Friday's plotters succeeded in ousting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Western countries would have come to terms with the new regime, much as they did with Pakistan's junta after 1999 and Egypt's after 2013.

Nato's history, after all, is littered with dictatorships. But it is evident that Erdogan has survived.

Erdogan had presided over an extraordinary period of Turkish foreign policy.

His aggressive intervention in Syria failed to dislodge Bashar al-Assad, but emboldened jihadists - while Syrian Kurds grew ever stronger. His relations with both Russia and Israel collapsed in violent acrimony. And his advocacy for the political Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood wrecked ties with Saudi Arabia and Egypt. As Erdogan cracked down at home, Europe and Nato squirmed. Turkey's cautious military was aghast but appeared impotent.

However, Russia's successful intervention in Syria last autumn, and the arrival of a new prime minister in May, appeared to trigger a course correction.

Turkey buried the hatchet with Tel Aviv and Moscow, stunned Syrian rebels by hinting at normalising ties with Assad, and continued to move closer to Saudi Arabia's new king. Rapprochement with Egypt, Iraq and Iran began to look plausible. The irony of last Friday night is that all this is surely not radically different to what a military government might have chosen.

Can these policies survive? We may see a period of even more erratic leadership as Erdogan reorients himself. The army is likely to be convulsed by sweeping purges that could trigger fresh crises.

Crucially, however, every one of Turkey's major partners has an interest in continuity. The EU will be desperate to protect the migrant deal agreed four months ago. The US and Russian foreign ministers, John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov, increasingly agree that the focus in Syria ought to be on Isil, not Assad, and will be eager to secure Turkish agreement to a peace deal. Of course, one problem is that the US's extensive military support for Syrian Kurdish rebels linked to Turkey's own Kurdish insurgents has not gone away, and may well get worse as Isil is squeezed further.

At the same time, we are now likely to see a prolonged period of heightened repression. Erdogan has spent years undermining human rights. What does this mean for us? For one thing, it's a death knell for Turkey's already dim prospects of accession to the EU. For Nato, in the short-term, relations will be disrupted by the inevitable mayhem in the senior ranks of Turkey's military.

But the alliance's longer-term concern will be over Erdogan's posture towards Moscow. It will be eager that he does not now swing from the risky brinksmanship of last year. A more authoritarian Turkey sitting at the heart of regional diplomacy would be an apt reflection of our disordered times. The Western political, economic, and security order appears to be under stress. But it is that stress which will draw Turkey and its Western partners back together.

Shashank Joshi is a Senior Research Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI)
'Well done to Aisling OSullivan and to The Abbey and to Mr Murphy (pictured) for keeping us all on our toes!'

Sir  Joseph Haslams letter (Sunday Independent, July 10) derides Tom Murphys play The Wake for its crude and filthy language and actions used, and The Abbey for performing this type of so-called art.

Aisling OSullivan was exceptional as Vera, putting every ounce of herself into what is an extraordinarily difficult role. Vera is a lonely, exiled prostitute living a marginalised life in New York. Her return home only highlights the greed of her sane family and the people of her home town. In fact, she tells them that she is the only one who is certified sane; the Xanax she keeps is not for herself but for the animals who visit her.

She is disconnected therefore to her body; she too, like the hotel she has inherited, is property to be used as a cash nexus and her value as a woman and a human being lies between her legs.

For me, the whole point of the play was to expose the superficiality of those who sit in judgement on the moral high ground whilst ignoring the mote in their own eyes. They too readily saw her as a hole also and dismissed her as a human being in order to get her to sign over the hotel. It wouldnt have hit home in an authentic and raw sense if Vera had worn knickers. I didnt mind at all, in fact I have one myself, and as for the dry-ride she mimicked with a bottle of whiskey (not wine) and the language, Ive seen and heard worse on a Friday night outside the chippers.

Well done to Aisling OSullivan and to The Abbey and to Mr Murphy for keeping us all on our toes!

Fidelma Mahon

Edenderry, Co Offaly

Our own worst enemy is us

Sir - In my ripe old age, I've discovered that we are our own worst enemies. The saddest thing I've learnt is the mental attitude of people, one to another.

Long-term friendships can be and are broken up for very trivial reasons. The only hope any of us can have is love and understanding overcoming selfishness and greed.

There was a time when it was said that cod were so plentiful in the sea that you could nearly walk to America on their backs.

Selfishness and greed have altered that so that cod are now very scarce and the females are so small that they reproduce less.

Modern farming has been intensified to feed the masses and in the process has decimated our wildlife. Slurry has contaminated our water so that frogs are very scarce.

Silage cutting has killed our leverets and small birds. The corncrake has disappeared. Eels have disappeared from the River Lee. Previously, when I tried to catch a trout the eels got my bait first. Hares and frogs are still plentiful, but only in paces where silage is not cut and where slurry is not spread.

Grasshoppers are sprayed out of existence. Butterflies have disappeared. I saw just one Red Admiral this year. The bee population is decimated. Beekeepers are now losing their bees in enormous numbers.

We do not now see a large flock of birds following the plough anymore.

The two main sources of honey in this country are the blackberry briar and clover.

Fences are now being replaced with a single strand of electric fence and the clover is not welcome in silage.

Vegetable growers used to scuffle between the rows but now use sprays to control the weeds with chemicals.

The use of sprays has increased to the detriment of our insect population upon which we depend for pollination, not to mention our own health.

It's easy to be honest with other people but it is not so easy to be honest with yourself.

When are we going to learn to love and live together in peace?

Michael Kiely

Ovens, Co Cork

The heroism of Jadotville

Sir  I was very happy to read the article, Irish Congo war heroism will be finally recognised by Jim Cusack (Sunday Independent, July 10).

It is indeed time that these brave men of the Irish Defence Forces were recognised for their heroic actions in what was indeed one of the most heroic and successful defence actions in military history.

The success of the action, its planning and the subsequent unbelievably low casualty rate amongst the defenders should place the battle of Jadotville high in the annals of successful military engagements.

I have just one point of contention with Mr Cusacks excellent article.

He mentions another heroic action, that being the successful defence of Rorkes Drift in the Anglo-Zulu war. Mr Cusack states that all 150 defenders in this action were killed. This was not the case and again the casualty rates among the defenders was quite low, with only 17 killed and about 15 wounded.

The defence of Rorkes Drift is also notable for the 11 Victoria Crosses awarded to the defenders, the most to a single regiment in a single action ever.

Derek Griffin.

Glasnevin,

Dublin 9

Luba warriors or Baluba warriors?

Sir  In the article about the Irish Army in Jadotville, it states that they were surrounded by 3,000 to 5,000 Luba warriors and French, Belgian and Rhodesian mercenaries.

I was a schoolboy at the time and, if my memory serves me correctly, they were surrounded by thousands of not Luba but Baluba warriors.

Martin Aherne

Loughrea, Co Galway

Bravery of the Munsters in 1914

Sir  The awarding of a special unit citation to the survivors and families of the 150 Irish soldiers who in 1961 fought off 3,000 Congolese rebels and mercenaries supported by artillery and fighter jets at Jadotville is long overdue and most welcome.

Fifty-five years is a long time to be waiting for recognition of their bravery from an Irish government.

The report by Jim Cusack (Sunday Independent, July 10) was very interesting to read.

However, to state that the British soldiers who defended Rorkes Drift in 1879 were all killed is incorrect.

Not wishing to take from the bravery of these men and those at the Alamo.

It was disappointing to read that the action of the Irish soldiers at Jadotville had not been compared to the performance of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers, an Irish regiment of the British army, at Etreux, Northern France on August 27, 1914.

They fought a rearguard action against between six and nine battalions of the Tenth Reserve Corps of the German army, overwhelming odds to say the least and only surrendered when their ammunition was expended.

This action of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers allowed I Corps of the British army, under the command of the then General Douglas Haig following the Battle of Mons on August 23, 1914, to withdraw in good order and 10 miles separated the German army from the British army by the time the Munsters had surrendered.

Surely an action to be compared with?

Dr Tadhg Moloney

Gouldavoher, Limerick

John Giles, thanks for the memories

Sir  It was Sunday, November 1, 1959, behind the school goal at Dalymount Park.

I saw the ball coming for me at speed and nearly felt like ducking but, no, this was heading for the Swedish net.

John Giles had just scored his first senior goal for Ireland and we all knew, 40,000 of us, that something special was happening. Imagine 40,000 in Dalymount Park.

He was one month older than me that day and, as they say, the rest is history. Fifty seven years ago and its still so clear.

Good luck, John, in your retirement and thank you for the years playing and the TV work.

It was special.

Brendan Grist

Dublin 8

Charity bosses pay needs explaining

Sir  Reading Michael Cogleys article in your Business section last Sunday (Sunday Independent, July 10, Charity bosses pay: the haves and have nots), I see only one CEOs salary, that of Adi Roche, Chernobyl Children, showed nil euro, and all the rest were over 100,000.

Until someone explains to me very clearly as to why these people are paid these six-figure amounts, I, for one, will not give another cent to any charity in this country.

End of story.

Brian McDevitt

Glenties, Co Donegal

Anita Reeves was a real inspiration

Sir  I read of the death of Anita Reeves with great sadness.

She contributed to a book I edited in 2003 on the theme of the Outsider, and so too did her young son Danny.

Sometimes acting can seem unimportant, trivial, even unnecessary, but it is none of those things. It is a daily reminder to us all that everyone has a part to play.

Everyone, no matter how different, or just seemingly different, has something to offer, something to say and they should be listened to.

Wise words from a truly wonderful woman and great actor. She inspired and encouraged those of us lucky enough to have crossed her path.

Anita will be sadly missed, especially by her family, and we remember her with great affection.

Alice Leahy

Director of Services

Alice Leahy Trust

Time to row in behind Kenny

Sir  Your Editorial (Who will lead?, Sunday Independent, July 10) was well and truly answered on Monday evenings RTE News.

Like a real stalwart on the battlefront, Taoiseach Enda Kenny impressively declared his intention to rule into the future.

Appearance-wise, his determination and ability to do so seemed indisputable; and, as for experience, few will deny he went through the mill. Within reason, he has admirably justified his leadership.

Gene Kerrigan can withdraw his remarks on Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney arguing about which of them gets to choose the new carpets and curtains.

Both should stop the bickering, act responsibly and be a bonding factor on the more erratic, less experienced Independents.

A solid, cohesive government is needed now more than ever.

Brexit is going to make it a trying time over the next two years and how the Government handles it now can seal Irelands future in the European Union.

Our most immediate and important discussions will be with Britain  where they have just installed a new Prime Minister, Theresa May, to replace David Cameron.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has proved his skill in dealing with Europes Iron Lady, Angela Merkel, hopefully having won her as an ally.

He can be equally successful with the fledgling UK prime minister.

It is up to the Government to act as a unified block behind their leader and loyal to the people who elected them.

James Gleeson

Thurles, Co Tipperary

The instructions from Merkel

Sir  Enda of the endless error really went to see Merkel to receive further instructions,and not to make demands of Ireland being a special case, as he says.We are only a special case insofar as he continues to embarrass us with weak leadership.

He always makes me feel as if we are in the observation ward of the EU,with his little hand stuck out in front of him to receive some placebo to bring home and wave at us, Chamberlain-like.

Robert Sullivan

Bantry, Co Cork

Need for action on water services

Sir  Water charges, they havent gone away, you know, or words to that effect, were uttered by Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar recently on Newstalk Radio and since endorsed by others, including the European Commission.

Mr Varadkar added that paying for it is the best way to encourage people to conserve.

A recent article in the Irish Independent was headed, Forget floods as drought set to be next climate disaster. Although Ireland is prone to heavy and continuous rainfall, droughts have occurred. It is recorded that there were eight periods of drought in the last two centuries, the latest being in the 1970s. Was this the occasion when the level of Blessington Lake lowered so much that the broken arch of a bridge was revealed and grass began to grow on the uncovered shoreline? More recently, did not the shrinking of the Roundwood Reservoir help to solve a murder case?

So far Blessington has met the citys demands but is there now talk of tapping into Lough Ree on the Shannon, just in case?

To my mind, water is collected in reservoirs, treated, filtered, pumped and piped  a process leading to product. The Terrible Trio of the Anti-Everything Party seem to be the main protagonists calling the shots on the question of water charges.

Some time ago on TV, one of the trio, Ms Coppinger, had the effrontery to criticise the responsible citizens, obeying the law and their civic duty by paying their bills. Has she not considered that the taxes paid by these dupes are contributing to her generous Dail remuneration?

However, no matter how divergent ones views are from others, there is always an area of agreement. I think it is highly irresponsible of local authorities to give all to private enterprise matters concerning the health and welfare of the citizenry, namely, disposal of waste and clean water.

Patrick Fleming

Glasnevin

Dublin 9

Realities of life for ordinary people

Sir,  Dan OBriens article on Globalisation (Sunday Independent, July 10) shows once again that the Wests political elite are very much out of touch with the reality of life for ordinary people.

I am not angry with what is an inevitable consequence of free trade and the movement of people.

If less skilled jobs pay less, well, I can see that for myself and decide to upskill. This is called maturity, or living in the real world.

What I resent is paying my taxes and having no say in how they are spent or, more likely, wasted...

Paying for people who never work and are allowed to live off the state/taxpayer, and seeing this repeat for three and four generations, unchallenged.

Paying for such people to have free medical care, and free transport, while I pay for everything.

Paying over 1,500 social insurance contributions, yet having to pay 60 to see a doctor.

Writing to the Revenue Commisioners regarding the Property Tax  and not even getting an acknowledgement, never mind a reply.

Being told my political choices are populist/right-wing/fascist.

Being told Dublin cant have a directly elected and accountable Lord Mayor because the people could vote for anyone (I thought that was the point of democracy).

Seeing our main street a national disgrace for the last 30 years.

Watching drinkers and drug addicts getting priority treatment in A&E wards.

Being constantly lectured on how society is unfair, usually by politicos who think everything should be free.

Paying for the third highest-paid head of government in the EU.

Paying vast salaries and pensions to senior civil servants and advisors who never seem to be held to account.

My hope is to see a Taxpayers Party emerge in time for the next general election in order to represent the most unrepresented group in the State. As an opening policy, a 30pc pay cut for all politicians and their advisors would be a good start. Then I might just begin to believe that we really are all in this together.

Gerry Kelly

Rathgar, Dublin 6
A man waves a Turkish flag in front of Ataturk Airport during an attempted coup in Istanbul. Turkish Airlines have since resumed flights from the airport. REUTERS/IHLAS News Agency

Turkish Airlines resumed flights from Istanbul's international airport yesterday following a failed coup attempt while some foreign carriers cancelled weekend flights.

The closure of Istanbul's Ataturk Airport last Friday caused the diversion of 35 airplanes and resulted in 32 cancelled flights. A spokesman for Turkish Airlines said normal schedules had now resumed, though delays were to be expected. BA said it was halting all flights to Turkey yesterday and one today as a precaution.

*****

Turkey's state-run news agency says authorities have detained 10 members of Turkey's highest administrative court as the government appeared to press ahead with a purge of judiciary officials with alleged links to Fethullah Gulen.

Arrest warrants were issued for 48 administrative court members and 140 members of Turkey's appeals court.

*****

Five warships which reportedly set sail during the attempted coup have returned to their military port in northwest Turkey. The five frigates and one corvette arrived at the military naval installation at Golcuk yesterday. The report said it was not clear whether Navy Fleet Commander Admiral Veysel Kosele, whose whereabouts were not known, was aboard one of the ships.

*****

The Greek government says a Turkish Blackhawk helicopter will be returned to Turkey "as soon as possible" but it will examine the asylum demand made by eight military personnel who were arrested after landing yesterday.

A spokeswoman said: "The government is in contact with the Turkish authorities for...the return of the military helicopter as soon as possible."

As for the eight military passengers, "we will follow the procedures of international law". Greek police say that the eight arrested Turks include two majors, four captains and two sergeants first class.
The five defendants were found guilty of killing a judge's son in 2014

A Mansoura criminal court on Sunday sentenced five supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi to death for killing a judge's son in 2014.

The court sentenced to death three defendants who were present in the court while the other two were tried in absentia.

The prosecution accused the defendants of murder and joining an illegal group.

The victim, the 26-year-old son of judge Mahmoud El-Sayed El-Merly, was shot dead in the garage of his house while he was on his way to work in August 2014 in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura.

Mahmoud El-Sayed is a senior judge in the Cairo appeals court who oversaw a number of high profile cases in the past five years including, the Mubarak regime corruption cases.

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a policeman checks a soldier beaten by the mob after troops involved in the coup surrendered. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

Policemen stand on a military vehicle after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

Policemen stand atop military armored vehicles after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

Turkish people holding flags are driven in a car, backdropped by Istanbul's iconic Bosporus Bridge, Saturday, July 16, 2016. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the nation Saturday that his government is in charge after a coup attempt brought a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire across the capital of Ankara. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

Turkish soldiers secure the area as supporters of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbul's Taksim square, early Saturday, July 16, 2016. Turkey's prime minister says a group within Turkey's military has engaged in what appeared to be an attempted coup. Binali Yildirim told NTV television: "it is correct that there was an attempt." (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

A man is carried from the Bosphoros Bridge after being shot. Photo: PA Getty

TAKING TO THE STREETS: People on a tank in Ankara. More than 160 people were killed, including many civilians, after a faction of armed forces tried to seize power using tanks and attack helicopters. Rebels seized a major bridge in Istanbul and the headquarters of the Turkish parliament came under attack. REUTERS/Tumay Berkin

Forces loyal to Turkey's government fought yesterday to crush the last remnants of a military coup attempt which collapsed after crowds answered President Tayyip Erdogan's call to take to the streets and dozens of rebels abandoned their tanks.

More than 160 people were killed, including many civilians, after a faction of the armed forces tried to seize power using tanks and attack helicopters.

Tanks and helicopters strafed the headquarters of the Turkish parliament in the capital, Ankara, and rebels seized a major bridge in Istanbul.

Erdogan accused the coup plotters of trying to kill him and launched a purge of the armed forces, which last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago.

"They will pay a heavy price for this," said Erdogan, who also saw off mass public protests against his rule three years ago.

"This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army."

A Turkish broadcaster reported that a purge of the judiciary was also under way. One government minister said some military commanders were still being held hostage by the plotters. But the government declared the situation fully under control, saying 161 people had been killed and 2,839 had been rounded up, from foot soldiers to senior officers, including those who had formed "the backbone" of the rebellion.

Read more: We are in charge, president says, as Turkey coup bid collapses with dozens dead

Read more: Turkey Coup: How social media played a crucial role in crushing coup

A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has ruled the country of about 80 million people since 2003, would have marked one of the biggest shifts in the Middle East in years, transforming a major US ally while war rages on its border.

However, a failed coup attempt could still destabilise a Nato member that lies between the European Union and the chaos of Syria, with Islamic State bombers targeting Turkish cities and the government also at war with Kurdish separatists.

Erdogan, who had been holidaying on the southwest coast when the coup was launched, flew into Istanbul before dawn yesterday and was shown on television outside Ataturk Airport.

Addressing a crowd of thousands of flag-waving supporters at the airport later, he said the government remained at the helm, although disturbances continued in Ankara.

Erdogan, a polarising figure whose Islamist-rooted ideology lies at odds with supporters of modern Turkey's secular principles, said the plotters had tried to attack him in the resort town of Marmaris.

"They bombed places I had departed right after I was gone," he said. "They probably thought we were still there."

Erdogan's AK party has long had strained relations with the military, which has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism although it has not seized power directly since 1980.

His conservative religious vision for Turkey's future has also alienated many ordinary citizens who accuse him of authoritarianism.

Police used heavy force in 2013 to suppress mass protests demanding more freedom.

However, he also commands the admiration and loyalty of millions of Turks, particularly for restoring order to an economy once beset by regular crises. Living standards have risen steadily under his rule, and while the economy has hit serious problems in recent years, it grew a greater-than-expected 4.8pc year-on-year in the first quarter.

Still, the violence is likely to hit a tourism industry already suffering from terrorist bombings and a row with Russia that had appeared to have been settled. Business confidence is also vulnerable.

In a night that sometimes verged on the bizarre, Erdogan frequently took to social media, even though he is an avowed enemy of the technology when his opponents use it and frequently targets Twitter and Facebook.

Erdogan addressed the nation via a video calling service, appearing on the smart phone of a CNN Turk reporter who held it up to a studio camera so viewers to the network could see him.

He said the "parallel structure" was behind the coup attempt - his shorthand for followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric whom he has repeatedly accused of trying to foment an uprising in the military, media and judiciary.

Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, once supported Erdogan but then became his nemesis. He denied accusations he played a role in the attempted coup and said he condemned the action in the strongest terms.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations," Gulen said in a statement.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States had not received any request to extradite Gulen.

The purge appeared to go beyond the military. Citing a decision by the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, broadcaster NTV reported that authorities had removed 2,745 judges from duty.

Gunfire and explosions had rocked both Istanbul and Ankara through the night after soldiers took up positions in both cities and ordered state television to read out a statement declaring they had taken power. However, by dawn the noise of fighting had died down considerably.

About 50 soldiers involved in the coup surrendered on one of the bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul after dawn yesterday, abandoning their tanks with their hands raised in the air. Reuters witnesses saw government supporters attack the pro-coup soldiers who had surrendered.

Earlier, about 30 pro-coup soldiers had surrendered their weapons after being surrounded by armed police in Istanbul's central Taksim square.

They were taken away in police vans as a fighter jet repeatedly screeched overhead at low altitude, causing a boom that shook surrounding buildings and shattered windows.

Neighbouring Greece arrested eight men aboard a Turkish military helicopter which landed in the northern city of Alexandroupolis yesterday, the Greek police ministry said, adding that they had requested political asylum.

The coup began with warplanes and helicopters roaring over Ankara and troops moving in to seal off the bridges over the Bosphorus that links Europe and Asia in Istanbul.

Turkish maritime authorities reopened the Bosphorus to transiting tankers after shutting the major trade route from the Black Sea to the Aegean for several hours for security and safety reasons.

In the early hours of yesterday, lawmakers were hiding in shelters inside the parliament building, which was being fired on by tanks. Smoke rose up from nearby, witnesses said.

An opposition deputy said parliament was hit three times and that people had been wounded.

A senior Turkish official said later attacks on the parliament had "largely stopped".

A Turkish military commander also said fighter jets had shot down a helicopter used by the coup plotters over Ankara.

Momentum turned against the coup plotters as the night wore on.

Read more: How it unfolded: A Timeline of events in Turkey's failed attempted coup

Read more: Exclusive: 'It was terrifying, our balcony doors started shaking and we heard gunshots' - Irish model caught up in Turkish military coup

Crowds defied orders to stay indoors, gathering at major squares in Istanbul and Ankara, waving flags and chanting.

"We have a prime minister, we have a chief of command, we're not going to leave this country to degenerates," shouted one man, as groups of government supporters climbed onto a tank near Ataturk airport.

Kerry said he phoned the Turkish foreign minister and underlined "absolute support for Turkey's democratically elected, civilian government and democratic institutions".

European Council President Donald Tusk called for a swift return to Turkey's constitutional order, saying tensions there could not be resolved by guns.

Erdogan has had often prickly relations with the EU, which worried about some of his actions, including raids on Turkish media. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Paris "hopes that Turkish democracy will emerge reinforced by this test and that fundamental liberties will be fully respected".

At the height of the action, rebel soldiers took control of TRT state television, which announced a countrywide curfew and martial law.

An announcer read a statement on the orders of the pro-coup faction that accused the government of eroding the democratic and secular rule of law.

Turkey would be run by a "peace council" that would ensure the safety of the population, the statement said.

TRT went off the air shortly afterwards.

It resumed broadcasting in the early hours of yesterday.

Turkey is one of the main backers of opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in that country's civil war. It is host to 2.7 million Syrian refugees and was the launchpad last year for the biggest influx of migrants to Europe since World War Two.

Turkey has suffered numerous bombings and shootings this year, including an attack two weeks ago by Islamists at Ataturk airport that killed more than 40 people, as well as attacks staged by Kurdish militants.

After serving as prime minister from 2003, Erdogan was elected president in 2014 with plans to alter the constitution to give the previously ceremonial presidency far greater executive powers.

Use your smartphone to stay safe

The Department of Foreign Affairs' travel advice is available at www.dfa.ie/travel and it updates the security status regularly, operating a 'traffic light' system of advice from "take care" to "high degree of caution", up to advising against "all but essential travel".

You can also receive updates by following the Department of Foreign Affairs' Twitter on @dfatIrl and @dfaTravelWise. But perhaps the best way to stay informed is through the department's special TravelWise smartphone app.

You can download it for free on iTunes and the app is available offline, allowing access abroad without roaming charges. It has lots of information and users can add the area in which they are travelling in order to receive alerts for that particular location.

The 'no go' areas and what to do in the event of your flight being cancelled

In the aftermath of last Friday night's unrest and recent terrorist attacks, the department is advising that "vigilance is required in tourist areas such as Taksim Square in Istanbul and locations close to police and military installations, which may be targets for terrorist attacks".

Irish citizens in Turkey are advised to avoid large public gatherings and all demonstrations and follow the instructions and advice of the local authorities. They also urge caution if using public transport, in particular the metro systems in Istanbul and Ankara.

Meanwhile, the threat from ongoing instability near the Iraq and Syria border areas means that Irish citizens are warned against travelling to the provinces of Hatay, Kilis, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa and Mardin, the border provinces of Hakkari and Sirnak and the Siirt, Tunceli and Diyarbakir provinces.

In instances like Friday night's attempted military coup, disruptions and delays to public transport, including international and domestic air travel, can be expected so passengers are advised to stay in touch with their carrier airlines/tour operators. However, it's useful to have a back-up plan in place should your flights be compromised. There's a double daily flight from Dublin to Izmir with Aer Lingus and Falcon Holidays flies to Dalaman once a week. Check with the airline or travel agent to confirm the status of these flights. Before travelling, the department recommends you obtain comprehensive travel insurance which will cover all overseas medical costs, including evacuation, and repatriation of remains.
Scene of the Truck crash on the Promenade Des Anglais in Nice on Friday night after Eighty Four people lost their lives when a lone man driving a Large Truck drove through the Bastille Day Celebrations in the City. pic Kyran OBrien.

Scene of the Truck crash on the Promenade Des Anglais in Nice on Friday night after Eighty Four people lost their lives when a lone man driving a Large Truck drove through the Bastille Day Celebrations in the City. pic Kyran OBrien.

A young Irishman said he was deeply upset by the horror he witnessed as a hate-filled lorry driver cut down scores of victims on the promenade in Nice.

Philip Ezergailis (23), who grew up in Moycullen, Co Galway, had just finished his degree studies in Ireland and was working in Ma Nolan's Irish pub near the seafront in the French city.

"I was with a group of friends on the promenade where we had watched the fireworks," said the Irishman.

The truck appeared and was mowing down crowds of adults and children as the driver drove the vehicle through the crowd, he said.

"I remember seeing bodies flying everywhere. It was terrible. Then a lad passed us on a motorbike following the truck," he said.

He said he and his friends took refuge on the beach beside the prom.

"There were girls running screaming down to the water," he said.

When he emerged back onto the promenade, he was deeply shocked by what he saw.

Expand Expand Previous Next Close Scene of the Truck crash on the Promenade Des Anglais in Nice on Friday night after Eighty Four people lost their lives when a lone man driving a Large Truck drove through the Bastille Day Celebrations in the City. pic Kyran OBrien. Scene of the Truck crash on the Promenade Des Anglais in Nice on Friday night after Eighty Four people lost their lives when a lone man driving a Large Truck drove through the Bastille Day Celebrations in the City. pic Kyran OBrien. / Facebook

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Whatsapp Scene of the Truck crash on the Promenade Des Anglais in Nice on Friday night after Eighty Four people lost their lives when a lone man driving a Large Truck drove through the Bastille Day Celebrations in the City. pic Kyran OBrien.

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"I looked down on the ground in front of me and I saw what I thought were four dead bodies. But then I realised it was just one person," he said.

He and some of his friends eventually managed to get back to Ma Nolan's pub which was turned into a makeshift sanctuary for men, women and child fleeing the devastation.

Philip's work colleague Andrew Fitzpatrick (31) from Adare, Co Limerick, was working in the bar and said the doors of the pub were locked for the safety of those inside. But anyone who asked to be admitted was brought inside.

"There were a few Irish in the pub along with a lot of French and Spanish people who were frightened. There were schoolchildren brought into the pub as young as seven or eight years old," said Andrew.

The pub is jointly owned by Irishman Teddy Nolan and a French business partner. The business partner, Christophe, made a speech inside the pub asking people to remain calm.

"The police and the army came into the pub. They eventually advised people they could leave in small groups," said Andrew.

"The people were escorted out in groups of 10," he said.

Several staff came into work the next day but left after a while because of their distress, he added.
A man wrapped in a Turkish flag walks past a military vehicle in front of Sabiha Airport, in Istanbul, Turkey. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Irish holidaymakers in Turkey have been advised to exercise a high level of caution amid a failed coup that has seen more than 260 people killed.

Almost 3,000 soldiers have been arrested following the bloodshed caused by the unsuccessful bid by elements of the Turkish military to oust President Tayyip Erdogan from power.

There were violent clashes in the capital Ankara, as well as Istanbul, as Mr Erdogan urged the people to resist the coup.

Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan called for restraint and respect for the democratic institutions in Turkey but said his first concern was for the safety of Irish people in the region.

Travel industry sources estimated the number of Irish holidaymakers in the country at as many as 300.

The Department of Foreign Affairs was last night continuing to monitor developments in Turkey and warned that the situation in Ankara and Istanbul remains tense.

Mr Flanagan advised Irish travellers to avoid all non-essential travel to the country and to consider the ongoing fluid and unsettled situation locally. "My first concern is for the safety of Irish people travelling to Turkey and those who are already in Turkey.

"Many thousands of Irish people holiday there each year," said the minister.

"Until the situation is calm, we are strongly advising Irish citizens planning to travel to Turkey to avoid non-essential travel."

Mr Flanagan's department confirmed no Irish people were caught in violent scenes on Friday night and early yesterday morning as military officials briefly took over the country, promising to remove the controversial Turkish president and restore democracy later.

Read more: Turkish Coup: Tips for Irish holidaymakers travelling in the region

However, Irish people are continuing to face severe disruption, with Irish flights to and from Istanbul cancelled yesterday.

A Turkish Airlines flight to Dublin from Istanbul was cancelled yesterday with the city's airport remaining shut until 9pm last night.

Two outbound flights from Dublin were also cancelled yesterday.

A spokesperson at the Department of Foreign Affairs advised passengers to make alternative arrangements to get home and follow the advice of tour operators or airlines.

"Irish holidaymakers tend not to go to Istanbul but to places like Izmir and Bordrum in the south west, so Irish travellers are located at a substantial distance from these issues," they said.

"Nonetheless, vigilance is required in tourist areas such as Taksim Square in Istanbul and locations close to police and military installations, which may be targets for terrorist attacks.

"There has been serious disruption to public transport, including international and domestic air travel.

"Passengers are likely to experience disruption and delays, and are advised to stay in touch with their carrier airlines or tour operators."

The Irish embassy in Ankara is providing consular assistance on the ground in Turkey.

"We have had enquiries coming in but it is mainly to do with the travel concern and disruption," the spokesperson said.

Sunway travel agents, which sells holidays in Turkey, said that they were in contact with the Department of Foreign Affairs and were monitoring the political situation there.

"Everything is business as usual in the popular resorts. Places like Kusadasi and Izmir will be unaffected by the ongoing situation," said a spokesperson. They also warned tourists to stay away from areas like Taksim Square where trouble may flare.
The exiled Muslim cleric accused by Turkey's president of orchestrating a failed coup has said he had no knowledge of the plot.

Fethullah Gulen told reporters at his Pennsylvania compound he knew only a "minute fraction" of his legions of sympathisers in Turkey, so he could not speak of their "potential involvement" in the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup. They could be sympathisers of the opposition party. They could be sympathisers of the nationalist party. It could be anything," Mr Gulen, who has lived in the US for more than 15 years, said through an interpreter.

The reclusive cleric, who very rarely speaks to reporters, talked about the failed overthrow attempt shortly after Mr Erdogan demanded that the United States extradite him.

US secretary of state John Kerry said the Obama administration would consider an extradition request but Turkey would have to prove wrongdoing by Mr Gulen.

Looking frail, Mr Gulen, who is in his mid-70s, sat on a sofa in a large reception room outside his living quarters, with an aide taking his blood pressure before the news conference.

He said he would not have returned to Turkey even if the coup had succeeded, fearing he would be "persecuted and harassed".

"This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here. Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important," said MrGulen, who lives on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Centre in Saylorsburg, an Islamic retreat founded by Turkish-Americans.

He has criticised Mr Erdogan, his one-time ally, over the Turkish leader's increasingly authoritarian rule.

The Erdogan regime has launched a broad campaign against Mr Gulen's movement in Turkey and abroad, purging civil servants suspected of ties to the movement, seizing businesses and closing some media organisations.

In the United States, a lawyer hired by the Turkish government has lodged numerous accusations against a network of about 150 publicly-funded charter schools started by followers of Mr Gulen, whose philosophy blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and inter-faith dialogue.

Nobody associated with the US schools has been charged with wrongdoing.

On Saturday, Mr Gulen denounced Mr Erdogan over what he called the government's "repression and persecution" of Mr Gulen's followers in Turkey.

"It appears that they have no tolerance for any movement, any group, any organisation that is not under their total control," he said.

Given the chance to deliver a message directly to the Turkish leader, Mr Gulen demurred.

"If I were to send him a message, he would probably consider it as a slur and reject it," he said. "But I have always prayed for myself and for him. I have prayed to God to lead us to the straight path, to the virtuous path."

About 150 supporters of Mr Erdogan protested outside the compound on Saturday, chanting and waving signs.
Crowds jeered the French prime minister as he joined other officials in Nice to remember victims killed during the lorry rampage on the city's promenade.

There were angry scenes as boos broke out and people shouted at Manuel Valls when he arrived at the Monument du Centenaire ahead of a minute's silence.

Families of the dead and injured gathered alongside emergency services, who were applauded and thanked by members of the crowd.

Following the silence, for which thousands of people flocked to the Promenade des Anglais, there was applause and a rendition of the French national anthem as many of those singing defiantly raised their fists in the air.

Mr Valls was booed again as he walked to a nearby garden where flowers were laid in tribute.

Eighty-four people were killed when Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a hired lorry through crowds gathered to celebrate Bastille Day on Thursday.

The French-Tunisian father of three was killed by police after his rampage.

On Monday people threw rubbish on the spot where he was shot in a bid to show their disgust.

Explaining the anger towards Mr Valls, one French woman said people feel a stronger prime minister is needed as the country tries to defeat extremism.

Nice resident Isabel, who declined to give her surname, said she did not boo but understood why tensions are running high.

"They want him (Mr Valls) to resign because he didn't put enough police on on the day," said the 60-year-old. "I was there (on Thursday) and didn't see police.

"It's terrible to say but we need a stronger prime minister with laws against radicalism.

"I am very sad. It (the attack) has broken families apart for nothing."

The city's former mayor Christian Estrosi has said he asked for extra security ahead of the Bastille Day celebrations but was refused.

Eighteen of the 85 people still in hospital are in a life-threatening condition, the country's health minister said on Sunday.

There has also been anger at the length of time it is taking to identify victims.

So far 35 bodies have been identified, and 12 more are due to be presented to families on Monday, said the secretary of state in charge of help for victims, Juliette Meadel.

With France into its third day of national mourning, information about driver Bouhlel continues to emerge.

He had scouted out the promenade before the attack, CCTV footage showed, and he is said to have sent texts to possible accomplices asking for more weapons.

A police official would not confirm the reports, but it is believed one of the eight people detained during the investigation had received messages from the 31-year-old.

Seven people remain in custody following arrests during the weekend.

Bouhlel is believed to have been radicalised recently, with former neighbours saying they were shocked by his actions. They claimed he was not a devout Muslim and could not have been an extremist who Islamic State (IS) described as one of its "soldiers".

Bunches of flowers and candles left on the promenade, many at the exact spots where people were killed, have swelled in number.

The minute's silence was observed by Government offices across Whitehall, including 10 Downing Street - as well as by Prime Minister Theresa May during her visit to Wales.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd was updating MPs on the situation in Nice with a statement to the House of Commons.

The French tricolour flag continued to fly at half mast over Downing Street.
Donald Trump and his running mate yesterday presented themselves to America as the Republican team that will take on Hillary Clinton and her Democratic sidekick for the US presidency in November.

Billionaire businessman Trump announced Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate, adding an experienced politician with deep Washington connections to the party presidential ticket.

Trump's choice of Mr Pence was aimed in part at easing some Republicans' concerns about his temperament and lack of political experience.

Pence spent 12 years in Congress before being elected governor and his demeanour is as calm as Trump's is fiery. While some conservatives are sceptical of Trump's political leanings, Pence has been a stalwart ally on social issues.

Yet Pence is largely unknown to many Americans. And his solidly conventional political background runs counter to Trump's anti-establishment mantra.

After yesterday's official unveiling in New York, the two men will head to Cleveland, Ohio, next week for the Republican National Convention.

As Pence arrived for a private meeting with Trump on Friday, he told reporters he "couldn't be more happy for the opportunity to run with and serve with the next president of the United States".

Read more: Trump running mate Mike Pence 'man of honour'

Read more: Unflappable Mike Pence could help Donald Trump stay cool

The governor has been a long-time advocate of trade deals such as NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership, both of which Trump aggressively opposes. Pence has been critical of Trump's proposed temporary ban on foreign Muslims entering the United States, calling the idea "offensive and unconstitutional".

The reaction to the Pence choice from Republican officials was overwhelmingly positive - no small feat for Trump, given how polarising he has been within his own party.

"It was a pick that clearly shows he is pivoting to the general election," said Republican chairman Reince Priebus.

"He is choosing a person who has the experience inside and outside Washington, Christian conservative, very different style that I think shows a lot of maturity."

Pence, 57, served six terms in Congress before being elected governor and could help Trump navigate Capitol Hill. He is well-regarded by evangelical Christians, particularly after signing a law that critics said would allow businesses to deny service to gay people for religious reasons.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's campaign moved quickly to paint him as the "most extreme pick in a generation".

"By picking Mike Pence as his running mate, Donald Trump has doubled down on some of his most disturbing beliefs by choosing an incredibly divisive and unpopular running mate," said John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chairman.

Clinton spent Friday holding meetings in Washington about her own vice-presidential choice. Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a favourite of liberals and one of the Democrats' most effective Trump critics, and Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, were seen in separate cars that left Clinton's home.

Housing secretary Julian Castro also met Clinton.

Reuters
The Egyptian president met with a number of African presidents on Sunday during his participation in the AU summit in Rwanda

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi discussed the importance of having an African free trade area in the closed session of the African Union summit held on Sunday in Kigali, Rwanda, the Egyptian Presidency said.

The closed session included discussions on the African free trade area as well as developments involving the UN and UN Security Council reforms and the election of members of the African Union commission, according to a presidency statement.

Regarding the African free trade area, the El-Sisi stated that Egypt was looking forward to the success of the talks, hinting at the previous success of the summit of the three African economic regional free trade areas, the "Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, Southern African Development Community and Eastern African community," that took place in Sharm El-Sheikh in June 2015.

The African presidents agreed to delegate the African Union commission to prepare a vision for the free trade area that will be up for discussion in the upcoming summit in Addis Ababa in January 2017.

Sisi meets with African presidents

Earlier on Sunday, El-Sisi met Congolese President Joseph Kabila, discussing bilateral relations.

El-Sisi and Kabila agreed to give a "push forward" to Egyptian-Congolese cooperation especially in the field of the health sector where Egypt would share its experience in treating Hepatitis C.

The two presidents also spoke about joint projects in the solar energy field.

El-Sisi also met with his Sudanese counterpart Omar El-Bashir as they held talks about bilateral relations between Egypt and Sudan, especially in the economic and commercial realms.

El-Sisi also met Somali president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, reasserting Egypt's full support to Somalia and the unity of its territory, as well as the country's development.

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People look at flowers and light candles laid to honour the victims of the lorry attack, on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, southern France (AP)

Two more people have been arrested over the Bastille Day lorry attack in the French city of Nice which killed at least 84 people.

A man and a woman were detained in Nice on Sunday morning, according to an official with the Paris prosecutor's office, which oversees national terrorism investigations.

The official provided no details on their identities but said five people detained previously remain in custody.

Authorities are trying to determine whether lorry driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years, was acting alone in Thursday night's deadly attack.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, although people close to the attacker noted no signs of radicalism, just anger.

AP
Other examples beyond France include that of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 in a Florida nightclub last month. Photo: Loren Elliott/The Tampa Bay Times via AP

We know now that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who killed 84 people and injured many more on Thursday evening in Nice, was 31, getting divorced and living in a working-class neighbourhood euphemistically described in the French press as "mixed".

He was an immigrant, as are most of his neighbours.

One described him as a 'bledard' - a hick from the old country, in his case Tunisia.

Taciturn, Bouhlel scared the neighbours and was prone to angry outbursts. He beat his wife and was recently convicted of an assault on a motorist.

He had a record of petty crime and a possible history of depression, but no known links to radical ideologies or networks.

French investigating authorities have various theories about the attack. An inquiry into "terrorist mass murder" has been opened, but prosecutors admit that for the moment there is no evidence of ideological motivation. Yet there has been a claim of responsibility from Isil - albeit a slightly half-hearted one - and there is evidence of premeditation.

The use of a vehicle, the target, and the fact that the attack took place on the highly symbolic Bastille Day all suggest a jihadi operation.

Bouhlel certainly matches the classic profile of French violent Islamic extremist in many ways - though he is a relatively recent arrival rather than born in the country of immigrant parents, as is more usually the case.

He was a young male petty criminal. He was also not devout, all witnesses so far agree. He did not fast during Ramadan, ate pork, drank, and was never seen at any of the local mosques.

This lack of piety among militants may seem confusing. It is, however, the rule rather than the exception. It was true of the dozen or so French and Belgian young men involved in bombings and shootings earlier this year, and of Mohammed Merah, who committed the first major attack in France in 2012.

Other examples beyond France include that of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 in a Florida nightclub last month.

This apparent paradox has prompted a keen debate among experts. The argument is not purely academic and has major policy implications. In France, it has been bitter.

Olivier Roy, a well-known French scholar currently at the University of Europe in Florence, suggests those drawn into violent activism are already "in nihilist, generational revolt".

This is why so many are criminals, or marginal. Extremist Islam gives them a cause and frames anger and alienation in the way hard left ideologies did for some in the 1960s and 1970s. The new militants are thus not victims of "brainwashing" by cynical and fanatical recruiters. This is the Islamisation of radicalism, Roy says, not the radicalisation of Islam.

Many disagree. Some say Roy naively ignores the impact of recent decades of intolerant and reactionary doctrines on Muslim communities in the west. Others suggest he underestimates the historical impact of western colonialism as well as that of more recent western policies in the Middle East.

The case of Bouhlel will now be picked over by the academics as intensely as by counter-terrorist experts and detectives. All will be focusing on the range and extent of his contacts with other people. Again perhaps counter-intuitively, the more numerous those associations, the more worrying this attack may be.

There are various possibilities. Bouhlel may be a genuine loner and suffering serious mental illness. His act may have no ideological element at all. This, however seems unlikely.

A second possibility is that Bouhlel, already angry and violent, was inspired to ally himself with Isil, and then was directed, to commit his deadly attack.

As in the case of Mateen, this would indicate the continuing power of the group's to call out to and influence the easily led. In this case it almost certain he will have some contacts with others involved in hardline Islamic activism in Nice or its surroundings. This scenario is more alarming, suggesting the possibility of more attacks to come.

Finally, Bouhlel could have been part of the continuing series of attacks on France run by Isil from Syria since 2014. These have taken various forms, but all have involved recruits being tasked with strikes by more senior leaders in the organisation. If true, this would indicate that Isil has continuing capacity for ambitious terrorist operations in Europe despite the pressure the group is under. And that would be a highly concerning prospect.

Observer
Isil has claimed responsibility for the truck attack that killed at least 84 people celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice on Thursday. Police yesterday arrested three more people there in connection with the seafront carnage carried out by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

"The person who carried out the operation in Nice to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State," the Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said.

Expand Close The name of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel is seen on the intercom of his apartment building in Nice, France. The French-Tunisian attacker killed 84 people as he drove a lorry through crowds, gathered to watch a firework display during Bastille Day Celebrations. The attacker then opened fire on people in the crowd before being shot dead by police. Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp The name of Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel is seen on the intercom of his apartment building in Nice, France. The French-Tunisian attacker killed 84 people as he drove a lorry through crowds, gathered to watch a firework display during Bastille Day Celebrations. The attacker then opened fire on people in the crowd before being shot dead by police. Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images

"He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State."

French authorities have yet to produce evidence of the 31-year-old Tunisian, shot dead by police in the attack, turning to radical Islam. Nevertheless, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after the claim that a transformation may have happened fast.

"It seems that he was radicalised very quickly - in any case these are the elements that have come up from the testimony of the people around him," Cazeneuve said.

Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel's sister said he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005.

Other relatives and friends interviewed in Nice doubted he had Islamist leanings.

Read more: Islamic State claim responsibility for Nice truck attack as French police arrest five

In the days before the attack, it is said Bouhlel persuaded friends to send 100,000 in cash back to his family in their hometown of Msaken, 12 miles from Sousse, where a gunman massacred 38 holidaymakers in June last year.

"Mohamed sent the family 240,000 Tunisian Dinars (100,000) in the last few days," the attacker's brother, told one reporter in Tunisia.

"He used to send us small sums of money regularly like most Tunisians working abroad. But then he sent us all that money, it was a fortune."

Bouhlel had been in France for 10 years and lived locally. He drove at the crowd in the Riviera city on Thursday night, zig-zagging along the seafront Promenade des Anglais for 1.8km until police eventually shot him dead.

Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Michael Smurfit, the honorary consul for Ireland to Monaco, said he felt an atmosphere of eeriness as people tried to come to terms with what had happened.

Speaking about the new wave of fear in the aftermath of several attacks on France, he said: "This latest horrific attack on the French people and the many other nationalities is sadly a pattern of a long series of such attacks.

"When someone is willing to die in order to inflict harm on others, it is quite impossible to stop, especially with a religious base. We will all have to learn to live with this fact, for sure this is just the beginning."
Could a single deranged individual cause the same carnage as we saw in Nice on the streets of Ireland? Stock Image: PA

Members of the Muslim community in Ireland are concerned that lapses in security here could lead to a lone wolf-like attacker emerging in Ireland.

The Republic is probably at the bottom of the league of targets for extreme Islamists, due to its neutrality and blasphemy laws, but indoctrination is taking place in Ireland and online by extreme Islamists that all Christian or non-faith Europeans are 'kuffar' and legitimate targets.

One senior figure in the main Sunni community here said that there are recent concerns that the process of 'radicalisation' could push some young men with mental or emotional issues over the tipping point and into a murderous rampage like that in Nice.

Sources in the community point out that many of the suicide or lone wolf attackers in Europe were never previously interested in religion and many were drifting into crime before being recruited into Isil.

This extreme version of Koranic teaching is taught or shared among what mainstream Muslim sources say are small number of prayer groups mainly in Dublin. They do not have a mosque.

Garda sources say that while a number, believed to be between 30 and 40, joined the Islamist groups in Syria there has not been any sign of men returning with the intention of mounting attacks here.

The main activities of the 'Wahabist' elements appears to be raising money and providing fake documentation for the terrorists, sources say. One man who was suspected of both recruiting and raising funds was found with 5,000 in cash.

Muslims are the most law abiding immigrant group in Ireland. Figures released last week by the Courts Service showed that out of requests for 7,490 interpreter services only 118 were for Arabic. The majority of interpreter services were for Eastern European languages with some 5,754 in total.

Many of the devout members of the community feel anger about elements being allowed into the country who they believe could bring their reputation in Ireland into disrepute.

Gardai are aware of one man, of Algerian origin, who came here several years ago after he was suspected of a fatal stabbing of another Muslim man in London. Although he was deported from Ireland for criminality, he returned and made a young Irish woman pregnant which will allow him to apply for and be granted Irish citizenship. The fear now is that he is moving towards jihadism.

One of the common factors in lone wolf attacks is that the perpetrator is someone who has moved from an aimless and often criminal background into the mass murder mode, in the belief their acts of violence will propel them into salvation.

Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Tunisian-born man who carried out the mass murder attack in Nice, was described as a career criminal who drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs. An associate said Bouhlel never prayed or attended a mosque, and hit his wife - with whom he had three children aged five, three and 18 months - and was in the process of getting a divorce.

Garda sources say that a small number of young Muslim men fit this life pattern and are a source of concern.

Following attacks in other European cities and the Dublin gang feud attack at the Regency Hotel in February, the Government announced the setting up of a new 50-plus strong armed response unit in Dublin. There have, however, been delays in setting this up after members of the Garda Representative Association threatened court action over the selection process.

There are also a considerable number of gaps at management level in the Gardai after Government granted permission for only around half the near-200 posts due to be filled. Commissioner Noirin O'Sullivan told a public meeting with the Policing Authority last month that filling these posts was 'critical' for the performance of the Gardai.

While the Government gave the go-ahead for the promotions up to assistant commissioner level there appears to be a further hold-up and no announcements of new appointments had been issued by yesterday.
Dia de los Muertos: What to know about the celebration of life

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By John Staed

Other rankings of South Carolina, nearby Georgia colleges

Best Liberal Arts Colleges (national)

No. 40 Furman University (SC)

No. 64 Wofford College (SC)

No. 105 Presbyterian College (SC)

Best Baccalaureate Colleges, South

No. 3 - Erskine College (SC)

No. 12 - Claflin University (SC)

No. 15 - Coker College (SC)

No. 17 - University of South Carolina-Aiken

No. 25 - Anderson University (SC)

No. 30 - (tie) Lander University (SC)

No. 30 - Newberry College (SC)

No. 45 - Toccoa Falls College (GA)

Third tier

Emmanuel College (GA)

Limestone College (SC)

Fourth tier

Benedict College (SC)

Vorhees College (SC)

Best Business Programs (national)

No. 25 University of Georgia

No. 42 University of South Carolina

Best International Business School

No. 1 University of South Carolina

Programs to Look For

First-year experience

University of South Carolina

Learning Communities

University of South Carolina

Undergraduate research/creative projects

Furman University (SC)

Writing in the Disciplines

Clemson University

National Universities with students having the least debt

University of Georgia - 40 percent of graduates with debt, averaging $14,343

Great Schools, Great Prices

Liberal Arts Colleges

No. 31 Wofford College (SC) $17,149 average cost after receiving grants

Universities with master's programs

No. 1 The Citadel $13,510

Top Up-And-Coming Schools

("Leading the pack on improvements and innovative changes")

National Universities

No. 11 (tie) Clemson University, University of South Carolina

Liberal Arts Colleges

Furman University (SC)

Universities-Master's

No. 13 Winthrop University (SC)

Baccalaureate Colleges, South

No. 2 (tie) Anderson University, Claflin University (SC)

Best programs at engineering schools with doctorate programs

No. 57 Clemson University

Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs

No. 26 The Citadel (SC)

Best National University, third tier

South Carolina State University - Among schools ranked Nos. 134-190

Clemson University kept its No. 22 ranking among national public universities in the 2010 U.S. News & World Report America's Best Colleges publication.

The annual rankings, released today, also list the university as No. 61 among all national universities. The University of South Carolina was ranked 110th in that category.

Asked about the ranking, Clemson freshman Mikayla Spitler of Fort Hill said she bases her view on one criteria.

"As long as it's better than USC, that's all I care about," she said. "Then I can continue to bug my brother about that."

Spitler, 19, a biological sciences major, said her brother attends the University of South Carolina.

The University of California-Berkeley was ranked first, as it was last year.

Ranked just above Clemson, at No. 21 among national public universities, was the University of Georgia.

Clemson also was listed as:

? tied for No. 11 with Emory University in Atlanta among "Top Up-And-Coming Schools,"

? among top schools for "Writing the Disciplines," which includes schools that make writing a priority in instruction and across the curriculum, according to U.S. News.

? tied for No. 57 with four schools for "Best Programs at Engineering Schools Whose Highest Degree is a Doctorate."

Clemson President James Barker said the ranking placed the school in company with other highly regarded universities.

"The ranking is a tribute to the faculty and students who are the core of the university, to the staff who provide those faculty and students with the support they need in order to be successful, and to all alumni and friends whose financial support helped us protect academic quality during a challenging year," Barker said through a news release.

"Clemson showed improvement in many individual ranking categories, including record high retention and graduation rates, higher SAT scores, and increased faculty resources," he said.

Bill Bowerman, president of the Clemson faculty senate, said no matter what the rankings, Clemson continues to improve academically.

"You can tell with the students we are getting," Bowerman said. "This year we've got just an amazing freshman class."

"We've made incredible strides," Bowerman said. "A lot of the students are finding value in Clemson and their education here."

Clemson has raised tuition this summer to offset state budget cuts, but continues to draw students from South Carolina and from out of state. The school received a record-high 16,281 undergraduate applications this year.

USC was ranked 11th, along with Clemson, for making innovative changes, and its Moore School of Business international business program was ranked No. 1 for the 13th year. The business school was ranked 42nd overall among public universities.

In a statement, USC President Harris Pastides said the rankings recognize efforts of faculty and staff to offer students an exceptional educational experience.

"The U.S. News guide comes as colleges and universities throughout the United States are striving to offer the best possible education in a time of declining resources," Pastides said. "These rankings are proof that Carolina students will have a solid foundation for their futures."

Not everyone in education supports the annual ranking issue.

Lloyd Thacker, founder of The Education Conservancy and author of "College Unranked," said there's little correlation between college ranking measurements and student outcomes.

"The rankings imply a degree of precision and authority that's simply not supported by the educational data," Thacker said. "I think educational institutions should be judged by not by where they stand in the rankings but by their stance on the rankings."

Thacker is a former college admissions officer.

"There's no such thing as one best college," he said in an earlier interview.

Bowerman said more students continue to seek a Clemson education despite the economic recession. Classes, which started Wednesday for the fall term, include the school's largest freshman class, with about 3,375 on campus and 449 in the Bridge program, in which students start at Tri-County Technical College and then transfer to Clemson.

Tim Drake, president of the staff senate at Clemson, said the fact that Clemson has maintained its ranking in a budget-cutting environment is a positive outcome.

"Personally I'm very pleased that we've maintained that ranking in light of what Clemson and South Carolina have been going through budgetarily with increased teaching loads and losses of faculty and staff to retirement," Drake said. He said Clemson's ranking shows that program put in place in recent years are paying off.

While Clemson maintained its position in the rankings, its ultimate goal is to crack the top 20 by 2011. It was No. 38 in 2001.

The school drew national publicity earlier this summer when a Clemson researcher who once provided some of the university's data on the rankings, Catherine Watt, suggested the university gamed the system to improve its standing. That was denied by Clemson officials, who said their educational goals are first, and the rankings are a byproduct of those goals.

The researcher also suggested that Barker had ranked other schools lower than Clemson to boost the school's score. Scoring sheets released by Clemson showed that in 2008 Barker did rank other schools below Clemson, including Harvard University. Barker said he thought Clemson's undergraduate experience was the best in the nation, which was the reason he gave his school the only ranking of "strong."

With the focus on improving the quality of education for students and staff at Clemson "in some ways the rankings are a sort of a barometer of what we're doing right," Drake said. "To hold it steady in this (budget) climate is a good thing."
Ryan's on Clemson Boulevard closed Thursday and won't be vacant for long, said Ward Stone, an owner of the property.

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By Mike Ellis and Nikie Mayo of the Independent Mail

The parent company of Ryan's has declared bankruptcy for a second time, prompting the closing of buffet restaurants in Anderson, Seneca and 79 other locations across the country.

Facing a debt of more than $245 million, Minnesota-based Buffets Inc. and its subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week.

Chapter 11 bankruptcy permits the company to reorganize itself. The reorganization will help the corporation eliminate $245 million in outstanding debt and another $30 million in annual interest payments, the company said in a news statement.

As part of that reorganization, the company is closing 81 "underperforming" restaurants, including the Ryan's on Clemson Boulevard in Anderson and the one in Seneca.

A manager who declined to give his name for publication confirmed Friday that the Ryan's on Clemson Boulevard had closed Thursday. A sign posted at the Seneca restaurant indicated that it was also closed. By Friday night, both Upstate locations had been removed from the corporation's list of open restaurants.

Another Ryan's location in Anderson, on S.C. 28 Bypass, will remain open.

It's not clear how many employees will be affected by the closing of the restaurants. The manager of the closed Anderson restaurant said employees were invited to apply for work at other Ryan's locations.

Buffets Inc. CEO Mike Andrews said in a prepared statement that the decision to declare bankruptcy Wednesday was "the culmination of the strategic alternatives review that our board of directors initiated in May 2011."

The company will close about 16 percent of the 494 restaurants that it operates in 38 states, including some in South Carolina and Georgia. Along with Ryan's, the company's restaurant brands include Old Country Buffet, Home Town Buffet and Fire Mountain.

"The decision to close those underperforming restaurants, though difficult, resulted from a comprehensive, store-by-store analysis of financial performance, occupancy costs, market conditions and long-term strategy for our reorganized restaurant portfolio," Andrews said.

Ward Stone Jr is the owner of Anderson Gold LLC, which owns the property and building on Clemson Boulevard.

"They weren't making money," he said.

Stone is confident something else will move in soon.

"It's probably one of the best pieces of property in Anderson," he said.

The Clemson Boulevard business is directly across the street from Golden Corral, another buffet restaurant.

Ryan's Family Steak Houses first bought the property on Clemson Boulevard in 1990 for $81,180, according to Anderson County property records.

The company sold the building and land in 2006 for $1.4 million. It was sold to its current owners, Anderson Gold, in 2010 for $1.5 million.

The property has a market value of $2 million, according to county property records.
MIKE EADS/INDEPENDENT MAIL More than 100 NewSpring members attend the late morning satellite service at Ravenel Elementary School in Seneca. They watched Interim Senior Pastor Clayton King, pictured on screen, preach Sunday from the Anderson campus about the need for the church's members to re-engage on a personal level with others, especially those from different paths of life.

By Mike Eads of the Independent Mail

SENECA  NewSpring Church moved forward Sunday, one week after the dismissal of founder Perry Noble, with the usual slate of services streamed from its Anderson main campus to 30,000 members at satellite locations around South Carolina.

Interim Senior Pastor Clayton King, who succeeded Noble last week, said at the end of Sunday's 11:15 a.m. service that NewSpring would carry on.

"We are moving forward with the Good News.  People need to hear it," King said as he dismissed members from the late morning service.

Noble was fired from NewSpring this month by the church's governing board as the result of concerns about his alcohol use and his "posture toward his marriage."

The Clemson congregation met Sunday at Ravenel Elementary School in Seneca, their temporary home while members contribute to a building fund for a permanent site for the campus.

Congregants were greeted with Christian rock songs televised from the church's Anderson campus, followed by a taped message from Executive Pastor Shane Duffey about plans for NewSpring. He said he spoke with Noble over this past week and said the man who founded NewSpring as a Bible study group in 1998 has pledged his support to both Duffey and the church.

Duffey encouraged anyone who has questions about Noble's exit to look at his Facebook comments at http://bit.ly/29ZHfd3 or to express their concerns to the church leadership.

"We want you to work through it in any way you need to do it," Duffey said.

Clemson Campus Pastor Cliff Craig offered encouragement to the more than 100 members in the Ravenel audience. He also provided updates about the summer programming for students and the building fund. He welcomed new faces interested in learning more about NewSpring and offered them baptism in the portable pool off to the side in the school gymnasium.

"I honestly believe our campus is going to keep getting better and better and better," Craig said.

King gave an energetic sermon, calling for everyone to "come to the table"  an allusion to the Gospels  and get to know one another face-to-face, rather than relying on social media.

"Don't just come here (NewSpring) to consume a service; come here to meet people.  This is not an exclusive club," King urged members.

Church officials declined to comment further for this article, as did attendees to Sunday's late morning service at Ravenel.

Follow Michael Eads on Twitter @MikeEads_AIM
A Bahraini court on Sunday ordered the kingdom's main opposition group Al-Wefaq to be dissolved, a judicial source said, after authorities accused it of "harbouring terrorism."

The administrative court in Manama also ordered the Shia movement's funds to be seized by the government, the source said.

The ruling comes despite appeals by the United Nations, United States, and rights groups for the legal process against the bloc to be dropped.

Al-Wefaq was the largest in parliament before its lawmakers resigned in protest at the crushing of 2011 protests calling for an elected government.

Washington has labelled the crackdown on it "alarming".

The court accused Al-Wefaq, which draws most of its support from the Shia majority, of "inciting violence and encouraging demonstrations and sit-ins which could lead to sectarian strife in the country."

It said that the bloc had "criticised the performance of the state authorities -- executive, judicial, and legislative."

On June 28, Al-Wefaq's defence lawyers withdrew from court proceedings in protest at the government's push to accelerate the process, which was initially set for October 6.

The court already suspended all of Al-Wefaq's activities on June 14, ordering its offices closed and assets frozen.

The justice ministry, which had requested dissolving Al-Wefaq, accused the bloc of providing a haven for "terrorism, radicalisation and violence" and opening the way for "foreign interference" in the kingdom's affairs.

That was an allusion to Iran, which Sunni-ruled Bahrain accuses of fomenting unrest among its Shia majority.

Al-Wefaq draws most of its support from the Shia majority in Bahrain.

Despite repeated appeals from its US ally for "reform and reconciliation", Bahrain has carried out an intensifying crackdown on leading Shia figures.

Al-Wefaq chief, Shia cleric Ali Salman, is serving a nine-year jail term for inciting violence after a court in May more than doubled his sentence.

His arrest in December 2014 sparked protests in Bahrain, already rocked by a Shia-led uprising that erupted in February 2011.

Last month, Bahrain stripped the kingdom's top Shia cleric Sheikh Isa Qassim of his nationality, prompting street protests in his home village of Diraz, west of Manama.

Amnesty International had urged Bahraini authorities to halt its "intensified crackdown on the rights to freedom of expression, association and movement".

The London-based rights watchdog said it was "deeply concerned" by the decision to suspend Al-Wefaq.

Tiny but strategic Bahrain lies just across the Gulf from Iran and is the home base of the US Fifth Fleet.

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Film fraternitys silence over Salman Khans rape remarks proved their hypocrisy in a lot of ways. While a majority of celebrities had outraged over Tanmay Bhatts snapchat on Lata Mangeshkar, when it came to Bhais insensitive remarks, keeping mum was an option that was widely chosen.

Though some actors stood in defense of Khan, actresses like Renuka Sahane and Anushka Sharma condemned it. However, apart from all the reactions that we saw, actor Irrfan Khan had the most epic one.

Instead of choosing a side, Irrfan Khan said, Kya Salman ka rape hua? (Was Salman raped?)

In order to showcase that he is least interested in making a comment, journalists could not question further and so he justified that skipping the question is better because the issue is stale and Sultan has already released.

Smart move, Mr. Khan!
1. After a battle with Nepali filmmaker, Shirish Kunders is Kriti back on YouTube and makers plan to make it into a full feature film

Twitter

Shirish Kunder's short film 'Kriti' starring Manoj Bajpayee, Neha Sharma and Radhika Apte is back on YouTube and the makers are now planning to convert it into a feature film.

2. Pakistan's social media celebrity Qandeel Balochs brother has been arrested in Punjab province

AFP and Facebook/QandeelBalochOfficial

One day after news of Qandeel Baloch being strangulating to death for "dishonouring" the family' reputation broke, Qandeel's younger brother Waseem was arrested in Dera Ghazi Khan. He later confessed that he had drugged his sister before strangling her to death.

Mid-Day

Salman wrote, Katrina Kaif welcome to Facebook and wishing you a very Happy Birthday. and Katrina actually took to FB to send across a reply. She wrote, Thank you Sultan. Aww, this is cute!

4. Talking about film's focus on the male protagonist, Anushka Sharma revealed why she turned down Imtiaz Ali's Tamasha.

Pinterest

After months of film's release, Anushka Sharma revealed why she had rejected Tamasha. She said that the film focused on the male protagonist and she had to let it go. When she was further asked whether she regretted the decision of rejecting 'Tamasha,' she said that she hasnt seen the film but she did say that had she done the film, she would have been praised as Imtiaz is a good director!

Talking about Sania Mirza and her controversial interview with a senior journalist after she was asked questions on motherhood, Twinkle Khanna tweeted, "Like the embarrassing aunt we all had who pestered us about 'settling down'-I guess the nation has found a new bua!"




Ranveer Singhs made history with his onscreen portrayal of Peshwa Bajirao. The role that was surely not a cakewalk showed that Ranveer's is a versatile actor.

Pinterest

His role as Bajirao also proved that he does all it takes to get into the skin of the character. Out of many things that he did before stepping into Bajiraos shoes, he had locked himself in a hotel room for three weeks so that he could focus completely on building the character. He also watched a lot of Marathi movies in order to perfect his Marathi accent. Not many know that he watched Russell Crowe-starrer "Gladiator" only to get an idea of how big scale films are made.

He won awards and industry could not stop praising him for playing Bajirao and all that validation was well deserved.

After wrapping up the shoot of Aditya Chopras Befikre, Ranveer is back to Mumbai and according to a TOI report, he has moved into his new bachelor pad in Goregaon.

Ranveer is now gearing up for his next film, that is Sanjay Leela Bhansalis Padmavati. Along with his assistant, personal trainer, key members of his team and Bhansali himself who are helping him with the preparations for the role of Alauddin Kilji, strict instructions have been given by Ranveer to not allow any visitors till he is preparing for his role.

This sincerity from Ranveers side is a proof that he is gearing up for yet another award-winning performance and yes, we are super excited to see him with his bae Deepika once again!
The release of Irrfan Khans upcoming film Madari is just around the corner and it looks like he has found an interesting way to promote it!

Fixing interviews and meeting politicians is never a cakewalk and there is a long and tedious process that one has to go through before they receive a nod.

However, to explain it to the general public on how reaching out to politicians on Twitter can just be a smart move, Irrfan Khan tweeted to three of the most active politicians on Twitter and the responses prove that if intent is right, nothing is difficult.

Jagran

First, he tweeted to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochnay the. Can I meet you @ArvindKejriwal?  Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016

Dhanyawad @ArvindKejriwal , Monday and Tuesday we are in delhi, aap samay bataye hum pahunch jayenge.  Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016

.@irrfan_k Tuesday 11 am, my office.  Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 16, 2016

Thanks again, will see you on Tuesday @ArvindKejriwal  Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 17, 2016



Later, he sent out tweets to Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi in Delhi.

Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochnay the. Can I meet you @OfficeofRG?  Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016

@irrfan_k Happy to meet.

Pl DM your number  Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) July 16, 2016

Thank you @OfficeOfRG , I have responded.  Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016

And finally, when he tweeted to PM Modi, he too responded back saying,

Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochnay the. Can I meet you @PMOIndia ?  Irrfan Madaari (@irrfan_k) July 16, 2016

@irrfan_k Currently the PM is occupied with the upcoming Parliament Session. Please send a letter with details.  PMO India (@PMOIndia) July 17, 2016
greaterkashmir.com/Representational image

In a show of bonhomie, locals defied curfew to help perform the last rites of a Kashmiri Pandit woman in old city on Saturday. The residents of Sheikh Mohalla in Maharaj Gunj rushed to help Deepak Malhotra and his family to perform the last rites of his mother, who passed away this morning, a police official said.

1. After Apple, Modi Now Woos Tesla To Make The World's Best Electric Cars In India

twitter.com

Tesla motors on Saturday said that India will "definitely" be a market for their next generation low-cost sustainable model-3, with the Union road and transport minister Nitin Gadkari asking the iconic company to outline their proposals for entry into the Indian market. During a visit to the Tesla factory, Gadkari offered to promote joint ventures between the global leaders in electric car manufacturing and the Indian automobile companies with a view to introducing pollution-free road transport in India, especially commercial and public motor vehicles.

2. Watch: Zakir Naik Supports Taliban's Decision To Destroy Buddha Statues, Calls Buddhists 'Drug Addicts'!

At a Chennai event in 2002, controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik was asked a question by about the Taliban's fatwa to destroy Bamiyan Buddhas after they termed the status "un-Islamic". The Taliban dynamited and destroyed these iconic 6th century statues in March 2001 as part of a campaign to remove all non-Islamic art from Afghanistan. Zakir Naik began his explanation by stating that this act by the Taliban was "educating the Buddhists". Claiming to have read Buddhist scriptures, Naik said that Buddha had never asked for statues of himself.

3. Modi Ignores Kejriwal At Meeting, But The Internet Will Never Let Them Forget Their Namosecond Handshake!

Today Modi ignored Arvind Kejriwal exactly like a teenager ignores 18+ warning before a porn site  Ra_Bies (@Ra_Bies) July 16, 2016

Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal had an awkward Saturday morning - PM Narendra Modi looked like he really did NOT want to shake his hand at a government event. While videos from the Inter-State Council showed the PM at his affable best with other Chief Ministers (even those representing non-BJP states), he tensely gripped the AAP Supremo's hand for half a second before stepping away. The subtle dismissal wasnt ignored on Twitter, which is Kejriwals second favourite ground to fire salvos like coward and psychopath at Modi.

4. Pakistani Christian Man's Hands Allegedly Chopped Off Because He Refused To Convert To Islam

jihadwatch

Pakistani Christian Aqeel Masih reportedly was attacked, and had his hands cut off after refusing to convert to Islam. The petrol pump worker said he was taken from LDA quarter, Lahore, and then whipped and tortured.

5. You'll Have To Bring A Designated Driver To Hyderabad Pubs Or They'll Kick You Out!

BCCL

Bars in the city will soon have to identify a "designated driver", tag the person with a sticker and not serve him/her alcohol. If anyone is driving, then drinking at a bar will no more be an option in Hyderabad as police initiative "designate a driver" begins next week in order to curb drunken driving. But the excise department and Bars Association members have raised objections, saying that such a move creates problems, including confrontation and possible fights inside bars.
Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal had an awkward Saturday morning - PM Narendra Modi looked like he really did NOT want to shake his hand at a government event.

WATCH: Inter State Council meeting took place today in Delhi, PM Narendra Modi met Chief Ministers of states.https://t.co/P8zZzFIhuA  ANI (@ANI_news) July 16, 2016

While videos from the Inter-State Council showed the PM at his affable best with other Chief Ministers (even those representing non-BJP states), he tensely gripped the AAP Supremo's hand for half a second before stepping away.

The subtle dismissal wasnt ignored on Twitter, which is Kejriwals second favourite ground to fire salvos like coward and psychopath at Modi.

Warning: sad Bollywood song  put up speakers for maximum impact

Sure brings back memories, doesnt it?

Today Modi ignored Arvind Kejriwal exactly like a teenager ignores 18+ warning before a porn site  Ra_Bies (@Ra_Bies) July 16, 2016

Cant tell if troll account or real? Me neither

Yesterday Modi ji said he wanted to call in to #TalkToAK. I refused and then that coward and psychopath totally ignored me.  Arvind Kejriwal (@KejriTrolls) July 17, 2016

Cry me a river, Kejri, Kejri...

https://t.co/EgkNSlyY9O

Reaction of Kejriwal after PM Modi ignored himpic.twitter.com/q39Tqe7DZu  Rashmi Ranjan (@rohitranjan) July 16, 2016

That one hurt

What Modi did to Kejriwal here is exactly what my salary does to me pic.twitter.com/0Vr39LnNzz    (@PriyancaBajaj) July 16, 2016

The worlds fastest Namo

Usain Bolt would have been put to shame after seeing the speed by which Modi did handshake with Kejriwal in Inter-state council meet.  Sherry Paaji (@meterDownn) July 17, 2016

Better than Manmohan Singhs famous Thik hai?

World's shortest handshake ever..:P

Kejriwal ji- Hello

Modi- thik hai thik hai pic.twitter.com/alvUlY3ush  Paresh Rawal (@Babu_Bhaiyaa) July 16, 2016

Someone #DidTheMath

Modi handshake with kejriwal for 0.0009 nano second.. https://t.co/TJHF8RJXXE    (@sumeetk92) July 16, 2016

The cold shoulder (and handshake) was the only anomaly at the otherwise happy event

Modi appreciated Congress-ruled Karnataka for reducing kerosene consumption, cited the increase in the share of central taxes from various states, as well as increased Aadhar card enrollment as a tool of good governance.
France's foreign minister warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday against using his country's failed coup as a "blank cheque" to silence his opponents.

"We want the rule of law to work properly in Turkey," Jean-Marc Ayrault told France 3 television, warning Turkey's government against "purges".

His remarks came as Turkish authorities continued a crackdown over the coup, arresting over 6,000 people accused of involvement in the putsch or of supporting the coup plotters.

Ayrault said the events of the past two days had raised questions about Turkey's "reliability" in the fight against Islamic State.

Turkey is a member of the US-led coalition that has been carrying out airstrikes against the group in Syria.

"There's (the question of) reliability on the one hand and, indeed, an element of suspicion on the other," he told France 3 television.

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News of Qandeel Baloch's death was a shocker for most of us. While there were speculations that claimed involvement of Qandeel Baloch's brother in the murder, in a police complaint, Qandeels father too had informed that her brothers killed her for money.

Qandeel's father had further stated that she was in Multan to celebrate Eid with the family and after he and his wife went to sleep on the rooftop, Qandeel was sleeping in a room where Waseem strangled her to death.

Now, according to an agency report, Qandeel Balochs brother has been arrested in Punjab Province for strangulating her to death. Even though her sudden death was shocking but what will make you cringe in disgust is how he described Qandeels murder.

Justifying how Qandeel had beendishonouring the family reputation, her brother isn't guilty of what he did.

Facebook/Qandeel Baloch Official

In his confession, he described how he drugged Qandeel before strangling her to death.

According to a report by Dawn, her brother had valid reasons to kill her: She brought dishonour to the Baloch name because of her risque videos and statements that she used to post on social media.

Referring to the controversy surrounding Qandeels selfies with Mufti Abdul Qavi (Her controversial pictures had also led to the suspension of Mufti Qawis membership from the Ruet-e-Hilal committee), he said



There were other issues as well...Like the Maulvi issue. She wasnt aware I was killing her. I gave her a tablet and then strangled her! I have no regrets"

Now, arrangements are being made to send Qandeels body to her hometown of Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan for burial.

(With agency inputs)
At a Chennai event in 2002, controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik was asked a question by about the Taliban's fatwa to destroy Bamiyan Buddhas after they termed the status "un-Islamic".

emaze.com

The Taliban dynamited and destroyed these iconic 6th century statues in March 2001 as part of a campaign to remove all non-Islamic art from Afghanistan.

Zakir Naik began his explanation by stating that this act by the Taliban was "educating the Buddhists". Claiming to have read Buddhist scriptures, Naik said that Buddha had never asked for statues of himself.

Naik did admit that this act, of the Taliban did cause grief among million of Buddhists around the world.

However, it was what he said next that was disturbing - he compared statues, a manifestation of Buddhist faith to expensive drugs.

beyondheadlines.in

"For millions of human beings in the world, drug is god for them". He also called Afghanistan, and its Buddhist statues the "property" of the Taliban. "Who are we to object?"

The statues were among the most famous cultural landmarks of the region, and the site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site along with the surrounding cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamiyan Valley.

Well, it might upset Naik to know that 15 years after Taliban dynamited the world-famous Buddhas of Bamiyan, the giant statues were resurrected with 3D light projection technology in the empty cavities where they once stood in Afghanistan!

Japan and Switzerland, among others, have pledged support for the rebuilding of the statues. Both Standing Buddhas - 115 ft and 174 ft tall - were carved out of sandstone cliffs and stood at one point painted and gilded. They managed to survive for more than 1500 years, before the Taliban's 1996-2001 reign, in which they committed this act of "cultural terrorism".
This is Major Gaurav Arya's response to a Kashmiri youth who had made a scathing reply to his open letter to Burhan Wani. Read here in full:

Dear Anyone in Kashmir,

Thank you for writing to me. I understand your angst, as I hope you will understand mine.

The army of any nation is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel, but a broadsword. That's just the nature of armies anywhere.

I reiterate....if anyone even touches a child, a woman or an elderly person he should be put behind bars and the keys thrown away. He can be from any arm or department of the government. Not for one moment am I advocating violence for violence's sake.

Facebook

I have served in Kashmir and I understand your perspective even if I don't fully agree. I am witness to full scale violence by militants who were not even Kashmiris. I have seen Afghans and Pakistani Punjabis in the Valley, raping and killing. I have seen young kids being put to death by militants just because their brothers and fathers were suspected to giving information to the army. What I did not see was one bandh, one protest or one condemnation. Many Kashmiris even failed to acknowledge that these things happened. All their attention is forever on the security forces.

It gives us no pleasure to put an entire state under AFSPA. Neither does it give us any pleasure doing cordon and search at 3 am.

My letter was directed at Burhan Wani and his ilk...those who pick up arms against the state.

Please read up on statistics. More people die in Bihar and UP due to violence than in Kashmir. There are more custodial deaths in UP and Bengal. All this does not make it all right. My issue is not with the Kashmiri youth's having a complaint with India and that complaint finding its expression in protests. My issue is with Pakistan deliberately fanning strife in Kashmir. My issue is with Hurriyat getting daily wage labourers to throw stones at security forces and putting women and children in front as shields. You say that kids are killed. I ask, what's a 5 year old doing outside when stone pelting is going on? Why was he brought outside? You make it sound like someone entered a house, deliberately chose a 5 year old and said "Great...lets shoot him". No. These kids are brought outside so that when there is teargas, firing and confusion the kid gets hit in the chaos and Hurriyat can then have a funeral photo op.

BCCL

Before 1989, there was no militancy in Kashmir. There was political discontent but there was no violence. Violence in Kashmir coincided with the end of the Afghan jihad and the withdrawal of the Soviet forces. Please read about Operation Topac. Gen Zia-ul-Haq started terrorism in Kashmir. He used legitimate political discontent and did in Kashmir what he did in Afghanistan....money and weapons. He succeeded in Afghanistan but failed in Kashmir. Do you know why? Because Soviets were an invading force in Afghanistan but Kashmir has been part of India for thousands of years...before there was a Pakistan and before there was a UN Resolution.

If you want violence to end in Kashmir, give it 2 years. Knock at the gates of the Supreme Court and trust me, justice will be swift like in the case of Manipur. But then your patrons wouldn't like that, would they? Finding justice like all Indians do...that would be a nightmare for the Generals in Rawalpindi. And there will be no funerals of 5 year olds. The last thing Pakistan wants is peace in Kashmir. They have fed opium to their citizens for 70 years and have neglected the entire population of Pakistan in pursuit of the Kashmir dream. They have no other agenda. How can they be loyal to Kashmiris if they cannot be loyal to Punjabis, Sindhis, Mohajirs, Pashtuns and Baluchis?

The solution is within the framework of the Indian constitution. It may not be attractive to Pakistanis because they have mangled their own constitution so many times that's it's a joke. But it should be attractive to Kashmiris. We all find peace in our constitution and so will you.

Major Gaurav Arya (Veteran)
Ties Emerge Between Clinton And Mysterious Turkish Cleric



By Chuck Ross



July 17, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Daily Caller " - A newly-released email and lobbying documents filed with Congress reveals new ties between Clintonworld and members of a network operated by a mysterious Islamic cleric from Turkey.



Connections between Clinton and acolytes of the imam, Fethullah Gulen, could muddle the complex relationship between the U.S. and Turkey, a key NATO ally, if the former secretary of state wins the White House. Turkeys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has mounted an aggressive crackdown against Gulen and his followers, known as Gulenists. Erdogan, who was once allied with Gulen, has even personally asked President Obama to extradite the 74-year-old guru, who has lived in self-exile in Pennsylvanias Pocono mountains since 1999. Erdogan has accused Gulen of attempting to undermine the Turkish government. Gulens followers control many Turkish institutions, including the media, courts, and police force. In addition to muddying that complex geopolitical dynamic, a 2009 email recently released by Judicial Watch provides yet another example of access being provided to a Clinton campaign and Clinton Foundation donor. In the April 1, 2009 message, a Gulen follower named Gokhan Ozkok asked Clinton deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin for help in connecting one of his allies to President Obama. Ozkok is founding board member of the Turkish Cultural Center and part of a network of businesses and non-profits affiliated with the Gulen movement, also known as Hizmet. Ozkok served as national finance co-chair of the pro-Clinton Ready PAC. He gave $10,000 to the committee in 2014 and $2,700 to Clintons campaign last year. He is also listed on the Turkish Cultural Centers website as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the non-profit arms of the Clinton Foundation. Hes given between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton charity. Another link between Gulenists and the Clinton orbit was revealed in a lobbying registration disclosure filed last month with the Senate. It shows that a Gulen-aligned group called the Alliance for Shared Values hired the Clinton-connected Podesta Group to lobby Congress on its behalf. The group seeks to lobby for the promotion of peace, tolerance and interfaith dialogue. The groups executive director is Alp Aslandogan, a former professor at universities in Texas. He has also donated to Clintons political endeavors, campaign finance records show. The Podesta Group is a natural choice for those seeking influence with Clinton. The firm was co-founded by John Podesta, Clintons campaign chairman, and his brother Tony, a major Clinton campaign bundler. Through various non-profit groups, both Gulenists promote the clerics teachings, which are relatively moderate and pro-Western. They are also involved in the Gulen movements money-making endeavor: a vast network of taxpayer-funded charter schools. Those schools, which number more than 150, have been a source of controversy for the Gulen movement. Federal investigators have reportedly investigated some of the schools for using work visas to bring Turkish citizens to the U.S. to teach. In some cases, taxpayer funds were used to pay immigration and legal fees for family members of teachers who worked at the facilities. Funds allocated to the schools have also been funneled to contractors controlled by Turkish nationals with connections to the Gulen movement. A 2011 New York Times article focused on suspicious ties between Gulenist schools operating in Texas under the name Harmony Public Schools. Harmony contracted with a company controlled by a pro-Gulen non-profit called the Cosmos Foundation. In 2002, Aslandogan purchased property that was later sold to Harmony. He also founded the Texas Gulf Foundation, which has also been awarded taxpayer-funded contracts to provide services to Gulen schools. Aslandogan did not return a request for comment. Nor did Ozkok, who has affiliations with Gulen-connected education firms Sema Education and Apple Education Services. The partnerships between the schools and contractors allow taxpayer funds to remain within the Gulen network. Teachers at the schools, many of whom are not fluent in English, are also used to help finance Hizmet, according to one former teacher at a Gulen institute. The teacher, who is now a government whistleblower, told 60 Minutes in 2012 that Turkish teachers are required to return a large portion of their salary to the Gulen network. She said that her Turkish husband, who taught at one of the schools, was required to return 40 percent of his salary. Accusations of visa fraud and other impropriety, which Gulenists largely deny, have contributed to an increased profile for Gulen, who ended up staying in the U.S. permanently after coming here for medical treatment. Erdogans campaign to rid Turkey of Gulens influence has also thrust the recluse onto the public spotlight. On top of his efforts to crackdown on Gulenists within the Turkish media, judiciary and police, Erdogan has sought to exert influence over Gulen in the U.S. During a 2014 visit with President Obama, Erdogan, who served as prime minister prior to his presidential term, reportedly asked Obama for Gulens extradition. The Turkish government has also retained the law firm Amsterdam & Partners in an effort to undermine Gulen and Gulenists in the courts as well as the media. The connections between the Gulen movement and Clinton are not the first to be revealed. They also add to questions about what it is the Gulenists want from Clinton and whether the Democrat has rewarded their financial support with favors. Last year The Daily Caller reported that numerous Gulen followers have donated to Clintons various political campaigns and to her family charity. One Gulen movement leader, Recep Ozkan, donated between $500,000 and $1 million to the Clinton Foundation. As senator from New York, Clinton gave a keynote address at the Turkish Cultural Centers annual banquet. The email to Abedin, which is the first piece of communication showing that a Gulen follower had direct access to Clintons staff, sought a favor. Please tell Madam Secretary that it would be great if President Obama can include a 15 minutes [sic] meeting with Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the Organization of of [sic] the Islamic Conference (OIC), in his trip to Turkey, wrote Ozkok. It is unclear if Abedin forwarded Ozkoks request to Clinton or anyone else in the Obama administration. But Ihsanoglu, who is an ally of Gulens and lost to Erdogan in the 2014 presidential election, did meet with Obama in Istanbul several days after the email. There, Obama reportedly extended an invitation to Ihsanoglu to visit the White House. The academic visited in June 2009 and reportedly asked Obama to create a U.S. ambassador to the Muslim world. Some terror watchdog groups flagged the meetings, pointing to Ihsanoglus past praise of the terrorist group Hamas and for Sudanese president and U.S. foe Omar al-Bashir. But Ihsanoglu does not appear to be a radical firebrand like so many Islamists in the Middle East. As for the Podesta Group, the lobbying firm has connections to several controversial companies seeking to peddle influence at Clintons State Department. Daily Caller investigations have revealed that the Podesta Group has represented Uranium One, a Russia-controlled uranium company that had ties to Canadian mining magnate and Clinton Foundation philanthropist Frank Giustra. The Podesta Group also lobbied Clintons State Department on behalf of BAE Systems just as the U.K. defense contractor was facing stiff government sanctions for illegal arms trading. The Associated Press has sued the State Department for records pertaining to discussions to let BAE Systems off with a slap on the wrist for its infractions. Clintons favorite lobbying firm also started working last year for Islami Bank Bangladesh, a Bengali bank that has been linked to terrorist groups. And earlier this year, Tony Podesta, the Clinton bundler and Podesta Group principal, was hired by the Saudi government. (RELATED: Followers Of A Mysterious Islamic Cleric Have Donated Heavily To Hillarys Campaign And Charity) Did Erdogan STAGE the coup? : US-based Turkish cleric facing extradition over botched rebellion claims president orchestrated plot to justify a clampdown on civil rights
Turkey Accuses US Of Being Behind Military Coup - Demands Extradition Of Cleric Gulen



By Tyler Durden July 17, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Zero Hedge " - When earlier today we reported that Turkey has closed the airspace above, and suspended all US-led air missions out of the giant Incirlik airbase (which houses some 50 US nuclear bombs), we said that there is speculation the "airbase may be held "hostage" by Ankara as a bargaining chip ahead of demands for the extradition of Erdogan's arch enemy, Fethullah Gulen, currently a resident of the state of Pennsylvania." A few hours later this was partially validated when during a televised speech, Turkish President Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Muslim cleric he accuses of being behind Turkey's failed coup attempt. Erdogan demands US extradite 'head of terrorist' referring to Gulen while the crowd shouts 'death penalty for Feto'! pic.twitter.com/DjFVoxZVXy  Mutlu Civiroglu (@mutludc) July 16, 2016 At roughtly the same time, Turkey's Minister of Labor went one step further, and accused America of being behind the coup on live Television, as it was harboring Gulen. BREAKING: Secretary of Labor Suleyman Soylu live on news channel Haberturk: "The US is behind this coup" pic.twitter.com/khqdbUw7re  Turkey Untold (@TurkeyUntold) July 16, 2016 To be sure, as we wrote first thing this morning, Gulen, who is currently residing in Saylorsburg, Peynnsylvania, said he condemned the coup in the strongest terms. Gulen, as those who have followed recent Turkish history know, is Erdogan's quasi-imaginary bogeyman nemesis; Erdogan has repeatedly accused Gulen of plotting a "parallel state" whose intention is to overthrow Erdogan, and has used that strawman narrative as justification to expand his powers and to push for a shift from a parliamentary to a presidential regime. Gulen wrote in his blog that "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations." None of this mattered to Erdogan who said as Turkey's strategic partner, Washington should meet the demand for the extradition of Pennsylvania-based Fethullah Gulen. He also added that Turkey had never turned back any extradition request for "terrorists" by the United States, implying it is the US imperative to extradite the man Erdogan accuses of starting last night's failed coup. As Reuters adds, Turkey's foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said on Saturday he had made clear in a call with U.S. counterpart John Kerry that followers of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen were behind a coup attempt, and yet strangely enough, "had not directly discussed the cleric's possible extradition." The revisionist narrative spun by the Turkish government, goes as follows: a faction of the armed forces, deemed by the government as loyal to Gulen, tried to seize power using tanks and attack helicopters overnight. As we learned previously, one hundred and sixty-one people were killed, including many civilians, in the ensuing violence. Allegedly up to 3,000 soldiers have been arrested, a paltry figure in comparison to the total size of the Turkish army, recently estimated at 315,000 personnel. Cavusoglu said the military now needed to be "cleansed" of Gulenist influence. "Once this cleansing is finished our military will be stronger, our soldiers will be stronger, providing better support and coordination to NATO," he said. In an indirect hint that the Incirlik airbase may indeed be held hostage, the minister said soldiers at the base in southern Turkey, used by the U.S. military to conduct air strikes against the Islamic State, had been involved in the coup attempt and that arrests had been made. "Once these operations are completed, we will continue our fight against Daesh (Islamic State) with either coalition nations, or within the NATO framework, and resume our cooperation with NATO," Cavusoglu said. But not sooner, and perhaps the delay may last as long as it takes for the US to respond to the extradition request. Or maybe not. As AP adds, a Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey "has been preparing a formal application with detailed information about Gulen's involvement in illegal activities. After last night we have one more thing to add to an already extensive list." And, more to the point, no formal extradition request has been made yet. Which means that Erdogan may be merely doing more of what he is so good at: populist pandering while using foreign scapegoats to further cement his authoritarian status. Furthermore, the truth is that Erdogan has little to gain from the extradition of Gulen, who has absolutely zero responsibility for what is increasingly likely a self-orchestrated coup. As we said earlier today, it benefits Erdogan far more to keep Gulen in the US - where he can use him as a perpetual scapegoat to "justify" his relentless power-grab - than to bring him home where his trial (and execution) would eliminate one of the biggest pretexts Erdogan has to be openly paranoid in public, and demanding ever more power. U.S. HASN'T RECEIVED EXTRADITION REQUEST FOR GULEN: KERRY: CBC. It won't: Gulen much more useful as an offshore bogeyman  zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 16, 2016 John Kerry responded that the Obama administration it would entertain Gulen's extradition request, but he said Turkey's government would have to prove Fethullah Gulen's wrongdoing. Visiting Luxembourg, Kerry said Turkey hasn't yet requested that the United States send home Gulen, who left Turkey in 1999. "We haven't received any request with respect to Mr. Gulen," Kerry told reporters. "We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen. And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately." "I'm confident there will be some discussion about that," Kerry added. We are confident that once the initial bluster passes, there will be no formal extradition request, and even if there is, Gulen will stay in his home in rural Pennsylvania: after all Erdogan has absolutely nothing to gain from such a move. Meanwhile, in other news, Turkeys Third Army Corps, Akin Ozturk, who was appointed as head of the Turkish air force in 2013, has been detained and will face treason charges, Reuters reports, citing a Turkish official. Local media have named Ozturk as the likely leader of Friday nights coup attempt in Ankara. Also detained by the Turkish police was Alparslan Altan, a member of the Constitutional Court and most senior judicial official among the scores detained so far in the wake of the attempted military coup, CNN Turk reported. Copyright 2009-2016 ZeroHedge.com See also Turkey detains 'coup plotters' at base used by US: Reports: Turkish authorities have reportedly detained a senior air force general and other officers accused of backing the failed coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria. U.S. Troops at Turkish Air Base on Highest Force Protection Level: U.S. troops at Turkeys Incirlik air base were at the highest force protection level, known as "condition Delta," after power was cut off at the base and the Turkish government closed the airspace around the site in the hours following a foiled military coup attempt, a U.S. official told ABC News today.
Eight Turkish military officers who fled to Greece by helicopter after a failed coup were charged on Sunday by a prosecutor with illegal entry and violating Greek airspace, their lawyer said.

The men, who have sought asylum in Greece, arrived by military helicopter on Saturday after sending a distress signal to authorities at the airport in the northern city of Alexandroupolis.

They were prosecuted for illegal entry into Greece, their lawyer, Ilia Marinaki said, adding that they will appear in court on Monday.

She added that they remained under arrest and had not made contact with their families.

The asylum seekers insist they took no part in the putsch and fled to Greece to save their lives "when policemen started shooting against them".

Marinaki added that the soldiers -- all married and in their forties -- feared for the safety of themselves and their families.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara had asked Athens to send the officers, including two majors, back following Friday night's challenge to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rule by discontented soldiers in which more than 250 people died.

Erdogan spoke late on Saturday by phone with the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and thanked him for his stance during the failed uprising, according to Greek government sources.

Tsipras had early Saturday expressed his "support for the democratically elected" Turkish government.

According to Athens News Agency, the Greek Prime Minister told Erdogan that the procedure for the Turkish asylum seekers will be swift but in line with international law and human rights treaties.

Greek government sources estimate that the procedure will take up to two weeks.

Early Sunday, the Blackhawk helicopter the asylum seekers had used was flown back to Turkey.

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Coup d'etat Attempt: Turkey's Reichstag Fire?



We are witnessing the consolidation of a new form of authoritarianism with a populist streak.



By Ayse Kadoglu July 17, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Open Democracy " - On the evening of July 15, 2016, a friend called around 10:30pm and said that both bridges connecting the Asian and European sides of Istanbul were closed by military barricades. Moreover, military jets were flying over Ankara skies. As someone living on the European side of Istanbul and commuting to the Asian side to my university on a daily basis and spending many hours in traffic in order to do that, I immediately knew that the closure of both bridges was a sign of something very extraordinary taking place. To confirm the news about the military jets over Ankara, I called my parents in Ankara. They answered the phone in a panic. I could hear military jets from the other end of the phone. Not surprisingly, my 86-year-old parents had experienced military coups in Turkey before. As I was talking breathlessly with my Dad, my Mum murmured from the other line calmly but firmly: this seems like a coup d'etat. From that point onwards, all hell broke loose especially in Ankara and Istanbul. The death toll in less than 24 hours after the coup attempt in Turkey is over 200. There are thousand of people who are wounded. Twitter and facebook became inaccessible during the early hours. The tv channels started broadcasting live from Ankara and Istanbul: yet, they were not sure what was going on at the outset. Shortly after, the military released a statement saying that the military has seized all power in Turkey through the state tv channel TRT. That is when I could not stop my tears, for memories flocked back of the September 12, 1980 coup d'etat when a similar announcement was made. I had experienced that coup as a student in one of the most politically active universities in the country, the Middle East Technical University. The memories, as for many people of my generation, were painful. Last nail in the coffin of critical thought Within two hours, Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was live on FaceTime on Turkish CNN (CNN Turk). His face could be seen on tv screens as it appeared on the phone held in the hand of the CNN Turk anchor. He issued a statement in this manner and urged the people to go to the public squares and the airport and defend the nation. Soon afterwards, there were echoes of calls to prayer from multiple minarets although it was not prayer time. I read later that there were also calls for action by Imams against the military urging people to take to the streets. Joining the echo of the calls to prayers were the loud noises of military jets flying over Istanbul skies. The combination of these sounds made me think that yes, these were the sounds of the funeral of free speech, critical thinking, and any other remnants of liberal democratic process in Turkey. I realized in fear and agony that whether the coup was successful or not, one thing was certain: there would no longer be room in Turkey for people who can listen, read, analyze, and think critically. With the siren-like echoes of calls to prayer and military jets, Turkey was becoming a land only for true believers. This did not happen suddenly. With the crackdown on media, academic freedoms, random arrests, and the increasing violence in the southeast provinces, citizens in Turkey have been facing major limitations on their basic freedoms for the past few years. The attempted coup d'etat of July 15 is like the last nail in the coffin. Lying dead in the coffin was the courage to use ones own understanding (as in Sapere Aude) that relentlessly resisted the rising tide of categorical thinking typical of true believers. Sight of a parliament in ruins The damage that was inflicted on the parliament building in Ankara was huge. Many of its major halls and corridors are in ruins. The sight was reminiscent of the Reichstag fire in Germany that took place on February 27, 1933, about a month after Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor. The similarities are not limited to the visible damage of both parliament buildings. The Reichstag fire was also a last nail in the coffin of the possibility of basic freedoms as well as critical thinking in Germany. On the evening of the Reichstag fire, Chancellor Hitler was relaxing at a dinner party in Joseph Goebbels home. The fire was soon blamed on a demented Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe who had a record of crimes of arson. The reality behind the Reichstag fire was not even clarified during the Nuremberg trials. Still, there was a lot of evidence that pointed to the responsibility of the Nazis behind it. But what was important was not so much who set fire to the Reichstag but rather what came out of it. On the day following the Reichstag fire, juridical order was suspended by the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State (Verordnung des Reichsprasidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat). The decree involved the suspension of seven sections of the Constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. The decree authorized the government to take complete control in the federal states and impose the death penalty for a number of crimes. In fact, Goering wanted to hang the arsonist on the spot right after his arrest. Today, I heard one journalist ask the Prime Minister on live television whether they were thinking of bringing back the death penalty in the aftermath of the attempt at a coup d'etat. The Prime Minister responded by saying that they will consider every need for extra preventive measures. He also seemed to praise the violent mobs who took to the streets to oppose the coup d'etat. The Decree following the Reichstag Fire led to emergency measures that created a state of exception. It suspended the personal liberties listed in the Weimar Constitution, including the rights of personal freedom, freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, freedom of organization and assembly, and privacy of communication. The Decree was followed by the Enabling Act (23 March 1933) which enabled the cabinet to enact laws without the participation of the Reichstag. In sum, it led to the consolidation of the Nazi regime (See: Ayse Kadoglu Necessity and State of Exception: Turkish State's Permanent War with its Kurdish Citizens in Riva Kastoryano (ed), Turkey Between Nationalism and Globalization, Routledge, 2013). There are already signs of the suspension of the juridical order with dozens of members of the Council of State and Court of Cassation taken into custody in less that 24 hours after the coup etat attempt. I could not help but remember the days when the expression consolidation denoted the consolidation of democracy and the issues surrounding it in the literature on democratization in Turkey. After July 15, we now talk about the consolidation of a new type of authoritarianism in Turkey. Some call it competitive authoritarianism (See; Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, Rising Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey, Third World Quarterly, 19 February 2016). Fascism: conservatism made popular and plebeian There is no doubt that we are witnessing the consolidation of a new form of authoritarian regime with a populist streak. I cannot help but remember a quote by Barrington Moore (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1966 [1993], p.447): fascism is inconceivable without democracy or what is sometimes more turgidly called the entrance of the masses onto the historical stage. Fascism was an attempt to make reaction and conservatism popular and plebeian, through which conservatism, of course, lost the substantial connection it did have with freedom.
Turkey's Attempted Coup

By Gwynne Dyer

July 17, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - Turkey's democracy is dead. It was dying anyway, as President Recep Tayyib Erdogan took over media outlets, arrested political opponents and journalists, and even re-started a war with the Kurds last autumn in order to win an election. But once part of the army launched a coup attempt on Friday night, it was dead no matter which way the crisis ended.

It wasn't a very competent coup attempt. The first rule of coup-making is: arrest or kill the person you are trying to overthrow. The coup leaders should have been able to grab Erdogan, who was on holiday at the seaside resort of Marmaris, but they didnt.

They didn't shut down the internet and social media either, so Erdogan was able to use his cellphone to get a message out on FaceTime, calling on his supporters to defy the soldiers on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. They didn't even shut down the broadcast media that sent Erdogan's call out to the public.

It was three hours before they occupied the offices of TRT, the state broadcaster, and they were chased out again by Erdogan less than an hour later. They didn't ever try to shut down the private television networks, which have a much bigger audience.

The second rule of coup-making is: act as if you mean it. This usually means that you have to be willing to kill peoplebut the colonels behind the coup (the generals were all vetted by Erdogan's people) were reluctant to use large amounts of lethal force.

This is laudable, in human terms, but if you are trying to overthrow the rule of a ruthless man who aspires to absolute control, it is a very bad mistake. They took control of Istanbul airport, but they were chased out again by Erdogan's supporters because they were not willing to shoot themand Erdogan flew back into the city.

Maybe the coup-makers were just too short of troops to grab control of everything they needed to make the coup work. Maybe, also, they were afraid to order their troops to carry out a massacre because Turkey's is a conscript army, and many of its young soldiersbasically civilians in uniform for one yearmight simply refuse to kill their fellow citizens in large numbers.

At any rate, they didn't use massive violence in Istanbul, and so they were soon in retreat. But there can be no happy ending to this episode.

Democracy would obviously have been dead if the rebels had won. Almost exactly half of Turkey's voters backed Erdogan in the last election, so a military regime would have had to stay in power for a long time. It would not have dared to hold a free election and risk Erdogan returning to power.

It would have been equally dead if the coup had partially succeeded and the army had really split, for that would have meant civil war. Mercifully that possibility has now disappeared, but democracy is dead in Turkey even though the coup has been defeated.

A triumphant Erdogan will seize this opportunity to complete his take-over of all the major state organizations and the media, and become (as his followers often call him) the "Sultan" of Turkey. That is a tragedy, because five or ten years ago Turkey seemed well on the way to being the kind of democracy, with free media and the rule of law, where a coup like this was simply inconceivable.

When Erdogan won his first election in 2002, promising to remove all the restrictions that pious Muslims suffered under the rigidly secular constitution, it seemed a reasonable step forward in the democratization process. He kept his promises about that, but gradually he went further, trying to Islamize the country against the strong opposition of the half of the population that favors a secular state.

Luckily for Erdogan the Turkish economy was booming, so he went on winning electionsand he worked steadily to concentrate all power in his own office. He removed any officials who were not his avid supporters, attacked the freedom of the media, and committed Turkey to unconditional support for the Islamist rebels in neighboring Syria.

The rebel army officers may have been trying to stop all that, but it was a terrible mistake for which they will suffer severe punishment. So will anybody who is even suspected of having sympathized with them, and Erdogan will emerge as the all-powerful "Sultan" of a post-democratic Turkey.

The coup leaders made the same mistake as the Egyptian liberals made when they asked the army to overthrow the elected president there in 2013. Egypt had a president whom they feared and hated, but they also had a democracy which provided a peaceful means of ousting him.
Home Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter 29 Pages Revealed: Corruption, Crime and Cover-up Of 9/11 By Kristen Breitweiser July 17, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " HP " - First and foremost, here is what you need to know when you listen to any member of our government state that the newly released 29 pages are no smoking gun  THEY ARE LYING.



Our governments relationship to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is no different than an addicts relationship to heroin. Much like a heroin addict who will lie, cheat, and steal to feed their vice, certain members of our government will lie, cheat, and steal to continue their dysfunctional and deadly relationship with the KSA  a relationship that is rotting this nation and its leaders from the inside out.



When CIA Director John Brennan states that he believes the 29 pages prove that the government of Saudi Arabia had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks, recognize that John Brennan is not a man living in reality  he is delusional by design, feeding and protecting his Saudi vice.



When Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Anne W. Patterson, testifies  under oath  that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is an ally that does everything they can to help us fight against Islamic terrorism, recognize that her deep, steep Saudi pandering serves and protects only her Saudi vice.



Read the 29 pages and know the facts. Do not let any person in our government deny the damning reality of the 29 pages.



And as you read the 29 pages remember that they were written during 2002 and 2003.



President Bush did not want the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia investigated. President Bush has deep ties to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its royal family and only wanted to protect the Kingdom. President Bush wanted to go to war in Iraq  not Saudi Arabia. So, 29 full pages that said Saudi and Bandar instead of Hussein and Iraq was a huge problem for President Bush.



It is well documented that the Joint Inquiry received enormous push-back against its investigation into the Saudis. In fact, former FBI Director Mueller acknowledges that much of the information implicating the Saudis that the Inquiry investigators ultimately uncovered was unknown to him. Why does Mueller say this? Mostly because Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquirys investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquirys investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort.



Notwithstanding the lack of cooperation from the FBI and the pressure from the Bush Administration to thwart any investigation of the Saudis, the Joint Inquiry was still able to write 29 full pages regarding Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. No other nation is given such singular prominence in the Joint Inquirys Final Report. Not Iraq. Not Iran. Not Syria. Not Sudan. Not even Afghanistan or Pakistan.



The 29 pages have been kept secret and suppressed from the American public for fifteen years  not for matters of genuine national security  but for matters of convenience, embarrassment, and cover-up. Executive Order 13526 makes that a crime. Neither James Clapper nor Barack Obama want to release a statement about that.



The only thing James Clapper and Barack Obama are willing to say about the delayed release of the 29 pages is that they stand by the investigation of the 9/11 Commission. This punt by President Barack Obama is repulsive. President Obamas deference to the 9/11 Commission  who themselves admit that they were unable to fully investigate the Saudi role in the 9/11 attacks  depicts Obamas utter lack of interest, engagement, or support of the 9/11 families. Frankly, it re-victimizes the 9/11 families by not acknowledging the truth, blocking our path to justice, and the very vital assignment of accountability to those who should be held responsible. Most alarmingly, Obamas silence keeps us unsafe because instead of calling for an emergency session of Congress to immediately name the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, President Obama continues to downplay, belittle, and ignore the truth leaving us vulnerable to terrorist attacks that are still to this very day being funded by our ally the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.



To be clear, the 9/11 Commission did NOT fully investigate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Staff Director Philip Zelikow blocked any investigation into the Saudis. Zelikow even went so far as to fire an investigator who had been brought over from the Joint Inquiry to specifically follow-up on the Saudi leads and information uncovered in the Joint Inquiry. I will repeat  the investigator was fired. In addition, Zelikow re-wrote the 9/11 Commissions entire section regarding the Saudis and their connection to the 9/11 attacks. Former 9/11 Commissioners John Lehman, Bob Kerrey, and Tim Roemer have all acknowledged that the Saudis were not adequately investigated by the 9/11 Commission. Thus, for any government official to hang their hat on the 9/11 Commissions Final Report  when Commissioners, themselves, have admitted that the Saudis were not fully investigated, is absurd and disgraceful.



For example, one glaring piece of information was not mentioned in either the 9/11 Commission or the Joint Inquirys 29 pages  the information regarding Fahad Thumairy and Khallad bin Attash found in both an FBI report and a CIA report that are now declassified. Both reports indicate that Fahad Thumairy  a Saudi Consulate officialhelped bring Khallad bin Attash into the United States in June of 2000 so he could meet with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi. Thumairy escorted bin Attash  a known al Qaeda operative  through INS and Customs at LAX evading security and any possible alarm bells. Again, this information is found in both a CIA and FBI report.



Four months after Khallad bin Attash met with the two 9/11 hijackers in Los Angeles, the USS Cole was bombed and seventeen U.S. sailors were killed. Khallad bin Attash, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi were all named as co-conspirators in the bombing of the USS Cole.



Where is the information regarding bin Attash and Thumairy? Has it ever been investigated? Had our intelligence agencies capitalized on the known connection between Thumairy and bin Attash, they would have been able to thwart the bombing of the USS Cole. In addition, they would have had access and the ability to weave together nearly all the pieces of the 9/11 attacks  more than nine months before the 9/11 attacks happened.



But as history shows, Saudi Consulate official Fahad Thumairy was not investigated and 17 sailors in addition to 3,000 others were killed.



Im sure that Barack Obama, John Brennan, Anne Patterson, and Philip Zelikow would all consider Thumairys operational and financial support of Attash, Mihdhar, and Hazmi as within the threshold of being an ally of the United States. I, and the rest of America, would not.



I know summer is a busy time. I know that next week is the Republican Convention. I know that Congress is out of session for two months. And I know that ISIS attacks continue in Nice, Orlando, San Bernardino, Belgium, Paris, and more. Just like I know that Donald Trump picked Mike Pence as his running mate and that there was a coup in Turkey. For an Administration looking to dump some insanely incriminating evidence and have nobody take notice  doing it yesterday when Congress was leaving for their two month summer recess was probably the best day anyone could have imagined.



But, the world is an unstable, crazy place. And, while I used to think I was safe because my government was looking out for me and making decisions that were in my best interests and that of other citizens, I now know better. For fifteen long years, I have fought to get information regarding the killing of my husband from the U.S. government. I have fought, pleaded, and begged for the truth, transparency, justice, and accountability because my husband and 3,000 others were brutally slaughtered in broad daylight. And our government has done nothing but block, thwart, impede, and obstruct that path to truth, transparency, accountability, and justice. Even going so far as to gaslight us to this very day by denying the plain truth written on the plain paper of the 29 pages.



Please read the 29 pages. Look at the facts and evidence. And then watch the venal way various members of our government and media play spin-master on those facts  telling you to deny the very harsh, sobering reality found within those 29 pages. I hope their gaslighting disgusts you as much as it disgusts me.



Note that these 29 pages merely detail the Saudi connection to the 9/11 attacks in San Diego. They briefly touch on the Phoenix information, as well. Though more notably, the 29 pages do not include information found in the more than 80,000 documents that are currently being reviewed by a federal judge in Florida  80,000 documents that neither the 9/11 Commission, the Joint Inquiry, the Clinton, Bush, or Obama White House, nor the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia wants us to know about.



More than anything, please know this: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provided operational and financial support to the 9/11 hijackers. That is a fact. And, the U.S. government has been covering up that fact for fifteen years  even to this very day. And that is a crime.



Corruption, greed, and vice, specifically as it pertains to protecting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is not a one-party problem. It spans both democratic and republican administrations. Blame President Clinton, President Bush, and President Obama  as well as, all of their officials and appointees. They are ALL to blame for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks, helping to facilitate the 9/11 attacks through their own abject negligence, using the 9/11 attacks to further ill-begotten gains and goals, and covering-up the 9/11 attacks by not coming clean with the American public for fifteen years. (9/11 widows Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg, Lorie Van Auken, and Patty Casazza all sign their names to this blog) Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load. What's your response? - Scroll down to add / read comments Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter For Email Marketing you can trust Donate



Please read our Comment Policy before posting - It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH. Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.
MH-17: Russia Convicted By Propaganda, Not Evidence By Paul Craig Roberts July 17, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - Today is the second anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and we still do not know the explanation. Washington and its European vassal politicians and media instantly politicized the event: The Russians did it. End of story. After 15 months of heavy anti-Russian propaganda had imprinted the message on peoples minds, the Dutch Safety Board issued its inconclusive report. By then, it was irrelevant what the report said. Everyone already knew that the Russians did it. I remember when pre-trial media accusations resulted in dismissed cases. Anyone declared guilty prior to presentation of evidence and conviction was considered to have been convicted in advance and unable to receive a fair trail. Such cases were dismissed by judges. Washingtons story never made any sense. Neither Russia nor the separatists in the Donetsk region had any reason to shoot down a Malaysian airliner. In contrast Washington had enormous incentives as Washingtons propaganda machine could place the blame on Russia and use the incident to compel European governments to accept Washingtons sanctions placed on Russia. It worked for Washington. Washington successfully used the incident to wreck Europes political and economic relationships with Russia. Four months into the anti-Russian propaganda campaign, a website called Bellingcat, claiming to be an open source site for citizen journalists, but which could be a MI-5, MI-6, or CIA front, issued a report that the Buk missile was fired by a Russian unit, the 53rd Buk Brigade, based in the Russian city of Kursk. This allegation exposed the propaganda for what it is. Whereas it is possible that separatists unfamiliar with the Buk weapon system could accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner, it is not possible for a Russian military unit to make such a mistake. Moreover, it is unclear why separatists or the Ukrainian government would have any reason to use Buk missiles in their conflict. The separatists have no air force. The Ukrainians attack the separatists at ground level with ground attack aircraft and helicopters, not with high altitude bombing. The Buk missile is a high altitude missile. The only way the separatists could have acquired Buk missiles is by overrunning and capturing Ukrainian positions that for unfathomed reasons had deployed Buk missiles. It seems to me that if a Buk missile was present in the conflict area, it was moved there for a reason unrelated to the conflict. A European air traffic controller said that MH-17 and the airliner carrying Russian President Vladimir Putin were initially on the same course. Possibly Washington and its vassal in Kiev thought MH-17 was Putins plane and destroyed the Malaysian flight by mistake. In order to avoid the consequences of such a provocation, the Russian government would deny that Putins plane was on a similar course. Even the Western presstitute media reports that separatists found the Malaysian airliners recorders, or black boxes, and turned them over to the investigation and that the recorders had not been tampered with. If the separatists were responsible for the attack, why would they hand over evidence against themselves? Why does Kiev refuse to release the communications between Ukrainian air traffic control and MH-17? Why was a civilian airliner routed over a combat zone? The Dutch report does not answer these questions. Washington prevented all answers that conflict with its propaganda. Only Washington, whose presstitutes can be relied on to control the explanations for Washington, and Washingtons vassal in Kiev had anything to gain from downing the airliner. Whether intentional or an accident, the downing of MH-17 was used to blacken Russia and to convince the EU to go along with Washingtons economic sanctions and military moves against Russia. As the Romans always asked: Who benefits? The answer to that question tells you who did it. 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 .
Its Time To Take Power Back

Britain Faces the Biggest Crisis of Democracy in its History By Nafeez Ahmed July 17, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " The Canary " - Welcome to prime minister Theresa Mays new regime: it represents perhaps the most authoritarian, racist and austerity-obsessed government in British history. Britain is now being run by an unelected leader presiding over a draconian surveillance-state, hell-bent on accelerating war on the poor and vulnerable, at home and abroad. And if that wasnt bad enough, the official opposition to this regime is falling apart. The fight to reclaim our democracy must be ramped up. Now. Austerity on steroids May launched her premiership on Wednesday with a grand speech that would not have sounded out of place if spoken by a leader of the Labour Party. But even though she sacked George Osborne, she has already made clear she has no intention of reversing the former chancellors core policies. In fact, while Osborne had begun to slow down his own commitments to austerity as the economy failed to meaningfully improve, May refuses to back down from the governments commitment to: ]] continue with its intention to reduce public spending and cut the budget deficit. May has given lip-service to building a better Britain that works not for a privileged few but for everyone  but plans to continue brutally cutting public services and even basic welfare benefits that are hitting the poorest, hardest. As an MP, the new PM has supported the discredited bedroom tax, voted against higher benefits for people who cannot work due to disability or illness, and voted against public spending to create guaranteed jobs for young people. She doesnt want to increase tax against people with incomes over 150,000, voted against a bankers bonus tax, generally voted to reduce taxes on giant corporations, and overall wants to strangle the power of workers by neutering trade unions. Police-state And thats just one element of what May stands for. In her previous incarnation as home secretary, the new PM presided over the controversial Preventing Violent Extremism (Prevent) programme, which as The Canary exclusively reported appears to have been influenced by far-right anti-Muslim extremists with ties to neo-Nazis. The programme disproportionately targets ordinary Muslims, and singles out those who criticise government foreign policies and Prevent itself. Added to that, there is Mays notorious Investigatory Powers Bill. So far, covert mass surveillance has continued without any legal basis. If Mays Bill is passed, the intelligence services will have wide-ranging legal authority to hack and infiltrate all electronic systems for the purposes of spying. That means covertly installing malware on computers, using keyloggers to monitor all your keystrokes, tapping into telecommunications cables, installing malware on smartphones and so on. Particularly worrying is that bulk surveillance  that is, surveillance of groups, communities and whole societies  can be justified on three simple grounds: national security; preventing or detecting serious crime, and threats to the economic well-being of the UK. In other words, basically anything. A Corbyn-led Labour party, for instance, could be construed as threatening the profits of corporate lobbies with a stranglehold over the government. If anyone has doubts about the dangerous implications for democracy, check out this essay by British intelligence expert Robin Ramsay, delivered to various Labour party branches in 1996. He uses a wealth of declassified documents to show how Britains national security state has for decades sought to subvert and manipulate the British left, including the Labour party  even using surveillance down to the level of trade councils and union branches. Kill the environment Sources inside the Tory party have told Paul Goodman, editor of ConservativeHome, that May plans to fold the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) into the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). The DECC has already been watered down under David Cameron, focusing less on tackling climate change, and more on shilling for the shale oil and gas industry. But this would ring the death-knell on DECCs environmental credentials, making the department entirely subsidiary to more important considerations of big business and corporate power. The new PMs contempt for the environment is further obvious from her own voting record. She has generally voted against measures to prevent climate change, supported selling off Englands state-owned forests, opposed regulations on fracking, and never even bothered voting on financial incentives for low carbon electricity generation. Deport the foreigners Wherever you stand on Brexit, its primary campaign promise was proper immigration controls. Even Nigel Farage promised that the Vote Leave campaign was not targeting Europeans who had already made their homes in Britain. But May took that further by effectively threatening to deport the three million EU nationals already living in Britain  the same policy advocated by the neo-Nazi BNP. The alarming undertones of this shouldnt be underestimated. In times of economic crisis, as we saw in the 1930s, fascism invariably rears its ugly head. Im not racist, I just like making jokes about black people Mays lurch to the far-right is mirrored in her selection of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary. But the former Mayor of London, now the face of Britain on the world stage, has a long history of openly racist statements. Heres a brief round-up from The Mirror: Visiting Uganda, Johnson cheerily said to UN workers and their black driver: Right, lets go and look at some more piccaninnies. (The Observer, October 5 2003) He also wrote: The Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag waving piccaninnies. (Daily Telegraph, January 10 2002) Of Tony Blairs trip to Africa he said: The pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief. (Daily Telegraph, January 10 2002) And he defended colonialism for boosting Africas economy saying: Left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain. (Spectator 2 February 2002) More recently, Johnson declared that US President Obama has an ancestral dislike of Britain because he is part-Kenyan. Although he has apologised for some of his previous racist jokes, he has never retracted this appalling statement. In case its not blindingly obvious: if you think making jokes about black people is okay and non-racist because youre joking, youre racist. The new colonialism Adding insult to injury, Mays new trade secretary is none other than the disgraced former Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, who was forced to resign from the Cabinet in 2011. Fox had allowed his friend Adam Werritty to masquerade as an official government advisor, while taking vast amounts of money from special interest groups eager to capture government defence policy. One vehicle for these interests was Foxs Atlantic Bridge, a sham charity  later investigated and exposed by the Charity Commission  with close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the main lobbying arm behind the Tea Party movement in the US, funded by Big Oil, Big Guns, and Big Pharma. As trade secretary, Fox is well-placed to apply his expertise in corruption and subterfuge to molly-coddle the web of imperial power exposed in a new report by British charity, War on Want. The report, The New Colonialism: Britains scramble for Africas energy and mineral sources, reveals that a network of British firms now controls over $1 trillion of oil, gas, coal, diamonds, gold and other resources across Africa through mining operations. The British government facilitates these operations with trade policies that oppose African efforts to regulate and protect their economies from foreign corporate power. The result? While reaping massive profits for British corporations, local democracies and worker rights have eroded. Fox is already plugged into this web of power. One donor to his joint ventures with Werritty is Mick Davis, who was CEO of the transnational mining firm, Xstrata Plc, until its merger and absorption by Anglo-Swiss giant Glencore in 2013. Glencore Plc is one of the main firms exposed in the War on Want report. Messing up Brexit As if this wasnt bad enough, the Brexit plan is not going to mean less austerity because were out of the EU. The priority of Mays government is to protect Londons big financiers. Mays new chancellor, Philip Hammond, has insisted that austerity remains the right answer to the 2008 financial crash, but promises a new phase for the economy. What does that mean? In the words of the Financial Times, the new chancellor has: promised to defend the interests of the City of London in the EU exit negotiations, admitting there was no room for complacency Although he said other EU countries had an interest in a strong City, he added: We need to ensure access to the EU single market for our financial services industry in London. Observers in the City recognise that the chancellor is not implying a shift away from austerity. Sources at major bank, BNP Paribas, said that Hammonds comments didnt mean fiscal prudence would be abandoned, but merely revised in terms of timelines. Market analyst Jasper Lawler of CMC Markets agreed Hammonds appointment would reassure big financiers previously worried by Mays earlier suggestions that she might reduce austerity. David Davis, Mays Brexit Minister, is also no enemy of austerity. Whatever his shambolic plan to leave the EU will be, he is committed to empowering corporate finance in the UK. His MP voting record is similar to that of his new boss. He consistently opposes public spending to create jobs, wants reduced corporation tax, likes astronomical banker bonuses, and wants to weaken trade unions. Davis Brexit negotiations wont be about a better Britain for all of us: theyll be about a better Britain for banks and corporations. Shambolic opposition As this new regime consolidates itself, the opposition is in increasing disarray. The Labour party faces an escalating mutiny against its own democratically-elected leader. And ironically, one of the chief mechanisms is to suddenly rig the rules so that the partys new membership has to pay 25 just to vote in the leadership elections. The chief instigators of the coup against Jeremy Corbyn, whatever you think of him, invariably fail to offer any meaningful alternative to the mix of policies being pursued by the Tories: hawkish military interventionism, support for mass surveillance, fundamental agreement that austerity is the only option, to name a few. To make matters worse, the entire media-industrial complex has united against the incumbent opposition leader. A new study from the London School of Economics Department of Media and Communications warns that the British media can no longer meaningfully call itself a watchdog of political power. It has, instead, become a bloodthirsty attackdog against the main opposition leader. This systematically biased reporting, based on snarling and barking at a politician that happens to challenge the status quo, say the authors, is unworthy of a democracy. So we now find ourselves in the extraordinary position of watching British democracy crumble before our eyes. An emboldened Tory regime is preparing for a future of intensifying privatisation, austerity for the poor, welfare for the wealthy, extreme nationalism, institutional racism, and arrogant militarism abroad. The most popular opposition leader in decades is facing an unrelenting onslaught not only from those in his own party who barely differ from the Tories they claim to oppose, but also from the entire establishment media. The Tory machines ability to pursue an agenda at odds with the interests of the vast majority of the British public is therefore more powerful than ever. This means that the fight to take back British democracy from regressive vested interests must be stepped up, now. Apathy is not an option. Apathy is what got us here in the first place. Call to action Now is the time to take action: action to get educated about our politics, our economics, our societies, our different communities, our environment. Action to get engaged in all these areas at a grassroots level  no, not just stepping out to the polling booth now and again, or even just joining a party. Action by engaging critically and constructively with the institutions that claim to represent us at multiple levels  whether through turning up, joining, writing, speaking. Action to show our faces at obscure meetings where vested interests would rather we dont appear. Principled, ethically-consistent action designed not merely to show a broken system that we will not be ignored, but even more importantly to showcase the vision and values we stand for. Along with action that creates change outside those institutions, and forces them to look and listen. Action to change realities at a local level here and now, so we can begin empowering our communities in a way we never thought possible before: growing our own food, collectively; pooling our resources and developing local community investment funds; forming local collectives to facilitate the education of our children; and challenging the increasing encroachment of unaccountable state-corporate power in all areas of life. We must begin mobilising both within and beyond the existing system. These actions wont change our predicament overnight, but they are the baby steps we must take to begin rebuilding British democracy from the ground-up. Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an award-winning investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author. He is International Editor at The Canary. He writes the 'System Shift' column at VICE's science magazine Motherboard, and is the creator of INSURGEintelligence, a crowdfunded public interest investigative journalism project.
Even if you love him and tell him often, that doesnt mean your relationship isnt suffering. In fact if thats all you do than you are in deep trouble. There are certain behaviors that create emotional barriers between you and your spouse that can destroy your chances of a happily ever after.

Eliminating these 4 behaviors is crucial if you want to have a successful relationship with your spouse.

1. Alienation

This is a habit that more relationships face than you may realize. When you withdraw yourself from conflict, ignore an issue that has occurred, or use the silent treatment, you are essentially taking yourself out of the relationship. Couples fight. The marriage you think is perfect is not. Ignoring the small issues thinking that it will make you and your spouse better in the end is a dangerous thought. Alienation can be a controlling mechanism, which in the end manipulates your spouse creating an unhealthy and unhappy marriage.

If you both have the desire to communicate and strengthen the relationship, then you must put your spouse first and remove the toxic negative habits that you have formed.

2. Accusation

Especially when you do not have all of the facts, calling out your spouse or placing blame on your partner can deteriorate the trust that took so much effort to build. Be sure to think before you speak and rephrase the accusation so that you may have a conversation about it rather than a fight. Learn to give your spouse the benefit of the doubt rather than assuming they cant do anything right.

3. Invalidation

Being rejected by the person you love can be emotionally traumatizing. Objectifying someone and focusing on their flaws, negative assumptions and prejudices are common ways to unintentionally invalidate your spouse. I know you love your spouse. You arent likely doing it to get even or tear him down, but not knowing you are doing it is almost worse because you cant set a goal to stop it. Ones self-esteem is destroyed by this act. You are considered more of a bully than a lover if this continues. Acknowledging the times in your marriage where you felt invalidated or when you invalidated your spouse is the first step. The hard part is choosing to live better; choosing to work on this weakness together in order to strengthen your relationship.

4. Defensiveness

Do you normally think you are the victim? Constantly saying, I didnt do it or Why are you blaming me? and especially over exaggerating the situation when it could be handled within minutes is a sign that you are taking the conflict too personally. As mentioned before, accusations are one of the behaviors that are very dangerous in relationships, but assuming you are being accused whenever the smallest of arguments arise is just as bad if not worse. This action is unproductive and overall destructive. After all, do you want to be right or be loved?

Even if these behaviors do not occur frequently, they are markers that can predict whether a relationship has the potential to succeed against all odds, or crash and burn. Take the time and effort to work on your own pattern of communication with your spouse to ensure a lifetime of happiness and emotional security.
A popular political thug in Akure, the Ondo State Capital, Mr. Adeleye Fayehun (aka Ade-Basket) has been arrested by police for allegedly assaulting a 44 year-old pregnant woman, Mrs. Adenike Adeolu.

Fayehun, who is also into timber business was said to have beaten the woman to a coma over timber transaction business.

The Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO),Femi Joseph who confirmed the arrest said the suspect, Fayehun, had been placed under custody for interrogation.

Joseph added that the confessional statement of the suspect had been taken by the police.

He said The case has been reported and we have already begun investigation into the matter.

DAILY POST gathered that the husband of the victim, Olusanya Adeolu, accompanied by sympathizers reported the case to the police at the Akure Area Command shortly after the incident.

Adeolu said the suspect Ade-basket joined by some hoodlums believed to be his boys battered her wife to a state of comma.

Adeolu alleged that the culprit had been terrorising residents of Akure and had been threatening to deal with his wife over timber business, which according to him he wanted to monopolize.

He said the issue got to this level when the suspect (Fayehun) collected a sum of N800,000 from some forest agents which was illegal.

It was this collection that warranted the timbers union meeting summoned at a hotel along Ondo road and my wife decided to join them during the session, being a member of the union.

Speaking on her sick bed, Mrs. Adeolu narrated how Fayehun stood up during the meeting after raising issues and slapped her.

According to her, two other men who were his accomplices also joined to maltreat her, to a point that she became unconscious.

Source: Daily Post
Some governors elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on Saturday vowed to give the Senate the Turkish-treatment if it ever attempts to impeach President Muhammadu Buhari.

Some soldiers of the Third Army Corps in Turkey, in an attempt to seize strategic locations across Ankara, the nations capital on Friday, told people to stay indoors so that they could depose President Recep Erdogan.

The rifle-wielding soldiers were however, confronted by thousands of unarmed civilians, who came out in support of President Erdogan and his government.

The world was left in awe of brave Turks, who defied the soldiers by climbing atop tanks and lying in front of military vehicles in an effort to take back control of the country.

Basking in the euphoria of the failed coup attempt in Turkey, Chairman of the Progressives Governors Forum and Imo State Governor, Owelle Rochas Okorocha, fired a warning shot to the Senate at the flag off of the campaign of the partys candidate in the September 10 governorship election in Edo State, Mr. Godwin Obaseki.

Okorocha, speaking against the background of alleged threat by a few senators to move against Buhari, said the generality of Nigerians were solidly behind the president and would not tolerate any attempt by a few people to hound him out of office.

The Imo governor maintained that Nigerians would resist any attempt to impeach President Buhari.
We earlier reported that Pakistani social media celebrity, Qandeel Baloch was strangled to death by her brother today.

It is the latest honor crime in Pakistan, a country where religious extremism drives people to kill even family members to preserve their honor.

Muhammad Wasim has been arrested by police for the murder of his sister and he told journalists at a press conference that his motive was the videos she had posted on Facebook recently.

Baloch was widely regarded as Pakistans Kim Kardashian and was seen by many as controversial.

Wasim admitted to strangling his sister and went on to say he had no regrets over his actions.
President Muhammadu Buhari has shrugged off suggestions that his public rating and acceptance among majority of Nigerians has nosedived over a year after he was overwhelmingly voted into office.

He insists that the generality of Nigerians still believe in him as they did pre-2015 presidential elections.

The president also faulted the assumption that his government focused all its attention on the anti-corruption war to the detriment of governance.

Buhari, who spoke in an extensive interview with the magazine, African Leadership, pointed out that there is nowhere in the world where transition from an old order to a new one has ever been easy.

It would be recalled that a national survey by the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), entitled The Buharimeter Report, had indicated that there were gaps between campaign promises, public expectations, government policies and actions.

These need to be aligned properly going forward, the report said, adding Attempts sometimes by the presidents party to disown certain promises made during the elections will not serve the government well.

What is required is to focus on achieving the promises by prioritizing them and carrying Nigerians along if there are challenges along the way, it added.

But President Buhari debunked these findings by the CDD in the African Leadership interview, insisting that he has neither lost the goodwill nor alienated the masses.

Yes, I was elected by an overwhelming majority of Nigerians, and I am ever grateful for the opportunity I have been given to serve.

However, I dont consider the result of the so-called survey a slip in my public rating and acceptance. I appreciate the high expectations of Nigerians and as an administration we are working assiduously to deliver.

We came in with a mantra of Change and the zeal to give a new lease of life to governance. Our zeal has remained the same and we are always prepared to make the difference.

You will recall that when I was being sworn in, I emphasized that as a government, three key areas will be the priorities. The first is the need to rebuild the economy. I also pledged to fight insecurity while the third and equally important area is the fight against corruption, he said.

The president also pleaded with Nigerians to be patient with his administration, saying: Nigeria will soon be back on track.

According to him, Before now, we have been having sleepless nights in Nigeria with Boko Haram having field days in tormenting people, most especially in the North-Eastern part of the country. So far, we have shown resilience in stopping these people and yet many criticize the approach we are using.

What I think our people should know is that a process of change is difficult as it requires endurance and patience. China, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and other great Asian countries had at different times passed through processes of change. They are far better off today.

And some of these countries were at par with Nigeria in terms of development some five decades ago. We are attempting to do the same here to say let us stop building individuals, let us stop making those who serve in government get stupendously wealthy at the expense of ordinary Nigerians they had sworn to serve.

Rather, we should concentrate on building strong institutions. Let us introduce economic prosperity by bringing in more investors to catalyze a sense of competition to grow our economy. Let there be law and order in our ways.

President Buhari also asked Nigerians to continue to exercise patience, assuring that his government will not rest on its oars until it brings succour back to them and to the country.

On the worsening state of power supply in the country since he took over, the president said the nation will overcome the problem under his administration

He said: Let me assure you that we will surmount the challenge of power supply. We have mapped out a mix of electric power generation sources inclusive of thermal, solar, hydro, nuclear, coal and windmill.

The idea is to adapt and embed these sources to areas that they are easily adaptable to. But more than that, we will reinvigorate and conclude the power sector privatization process and thereby ensure the whole value chain in the sector is populated by the private sector.

On speculation that he has abandoned governance for only anti-corruption war, Buhari said: it is not true that the fight against corruption is distracting my attention from the task of governance. You can sit back and review what we have done in the past one year and come up with your judgment. That will certainly assist you and other concerned Nigerians to reach the right conclusions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan may meet in August, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by the RIA news agency.

Putin called the Turkish president and said he hoped Russian tourists would be protected in the aftermath of Friday night's failed coup attempt in Turkey, the Kremlin said in a statement on Sunday. The statement added that the two leaders would soon meet face-to-face.

Despite an agreement last month to resume bilateral cooperation, relations between the Kremlin and Erdogan remain strained over the Syria crisis and Turkey's shooting down of a Russian fighter jet in November.

Erdogan apologised to Putin in June over the downing of the plane, which was taking part in the Kremlin's military campaign in Syria. The Kremlin had responded to the incident by imposing restrictions on trade with Turkey.

The Kremlin said on Sunday that Putin called his Turkish counterpart after rebel soldiers used tanks, attack helicopters and fighter jets to try to topple Erdogan on Friday night, attacking parliament and the intelligence headquarters in Ankara while seizing a bridge and surrounding the airport in Istanbul.

The statement quoted Putin as telling Erdogan that Russia found anti-constitutional acts and violence unacceptable and was hoping for the restoration of order and stability in Turkey.

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Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State has called on Nigerians to continue to have faith in President Muhammadu Buhari in his resolve to reposition the country.

Speaking during the official flag-off of the governorship election campaign of the All Progressive Congress (APC) in Benin City, the state capital, the governor said for the first time, we have seen a president calling on senior military officers, ministers and governors to account for their stewardship.

I urge you to have confidence in President Buhari. He inherited a house that had been bastardized for 16 years, even the money meant for Defence was converted to pit latrine and one of those who collected part of the money for election is running for Edo governorship election.

The problem then was that Boko Haram members were attacking churches and mosques which shows that they were just terrorists. This money was therefore appropriated to protect churches by a Christian president but what happened, the Christian president took the money and gave it to some people to use for politics, he said.

Mr. Oshiomhole called on the anti-graft agencies not to exclude anyone who benefitted from the arms money.

We know that corruption would fight back and it is already fighting back. That was the reason we went for a tested and dogged General to lead the corruption fight and he is winning the war. Now, we are hearing some people talking of impeachment or no impeachment. Nigerian people unconditionally have resolved to support democracy and President Buhari, he said.

While urging the people to support the partys flag bearer in the September 10 governorship poll, Godwin Obaseki, who, according to him is the brain behind his achievement, Gov. Oshiomhole said for 10 years of the Peoples Democratic Partys rule, the state was stagnant, but in seven years, APC has changed the state to a modern one.

Presenting the partys flag to Obaseki, the APC National Chairman and first executive governor of Edo State, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, urged people of the state not to give up the eight years of development to the PDP 10 years of holocaust.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Sunday to purge the "virus" within state bodies, during a speech at the funeral of victims killed during the coup bid he blames on his enemy Fethullah Gulen.

"We will continue to clean the virus from all state bodies because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state.

"We knew this and told all relevant authorities," he warned thousands of mourners at the Fatih mosque in Istanbul.

During a passionate speech, the president paid tribute to the "martyrs" of democracy, insisting that the people were stronger.

"They may have tanks but we have our faith. We will not leave the squares ... but we will continue defiantly.

"I said this yesterday, the people's demand for democracy cannot be swept aside. This is your right."

During the attempted coup, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives in Istanbul and Ankara, according to government figures.

More than 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military said.

Despite fears in the West and the United States that Erdogan would wreak revenge, he said: "Don't forget this, we are not vengeful."

The remarks appeared to be in response to US President Barack Obama's call for all parties to "act within the rule of law" and for leaders to "avoid actions that would lead to further violence or instability".

A Turkish minister said Sunday more than 6,000 people had been arrested and the number would rise.

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The year is shaping up to be one of the best ever for the master of macro mayhem.
Saudi authorities executed a murderer in the holy city of Mecca on Sunday, the first death sentence to be carried out since before the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Fahd al-Hasni, a Saudi, was put to death after being convicted of stabbing dead a fellow citizen, the interior ministry said in a statement published on the official SPA news agency.

Most people executed in Saudi Arabia are beheaded with a sword.

It was the 96th execution of the year in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom, which imposes the death penalty for offences including murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy.

The last execution in the Gulf country took place on May 29, more than a week before Ramadan began.

There were no beheadings during the fasting month and the following Eid al-Fitr feast.

Rights group Amnesty International says the kingdom carried out at least 158 death sentences last year, making it the third most prolific executioner after Iran and Pakistan. Its figures do not include secretive China.

The London-based watchdog has said that the rate of executions this year is "higher than at the same point last year".

Murder and drug trafficking cases account for the majority of Saudi executions, although 47 people were put to death for "terrorism" offences on a single day in January.

They included prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, whose execution prompted Iranian protesters to torch Saudi diplomatic missions triggering the severing of relations between the Middle East's leading Sunni and Shia powers.

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In 17 giorni sono stati uccisi 17 bambini ad Idlib, in Siria. Uno ogni giorno. E il drammatico allarme lanciato da Save the Children, stando alle rilevazioni effettuate fino al 22 agosto. Secondo gli ultimi dati resi disponibili dallOrganizzazione mondiale della sanita (Oms), almeno 39 incidenti hanno coinvolto strutture sanitarie dopo lescalation della violenza iniziata alla fine di aprile.

Il rapporto

A causa dei continui rischi per le strutture sanitarie, le strumentazioni pesanti e i registri dei pazienti sono stati spostati per garantire che non vengano distrutti dai combattimenti in corso, spiga lOng. In meno di tre settimane sono stati registrati oltre 70.000 nuovi spostamenti. Dal primo maggio di questanno, sono stati registrati piu di 590.000 nuovi episodi di evacuazione, con famiglie sfollate tre o quattro volte in pochi mesi. Le immagini satellitari  prosegue la nota ripresa dal Sir  mostrano che almeno 17 villaggi sono stati quasi completamente rasi al suolo, comprese le aree residenziali e commerciali, abitate da civili. Siamo profondamente preoccupati per i crescenti rischi per i bambini ad Idlib, afferma Sonia Khush, direttrice nazionale in Siria di Save the Children. Essi  denuncia  sono particolarmente esposti alle armi esplosive e sono stati coinvolti nelle violenze in corso nelle ultime settimane. Secondo i rapporti dei nostri partner, ad Idlib in 17 giorni, e stato ucciso almeno un bambino ogni giorno. Circa 40.000 bambini sono stati costretti a spostarsi, spesso non per la prima volta, nelle ultime tre settimane. Le scuole  aggiunge Khush  sono chiuse e le strutture sanitarie corrono enormi rischi nel continuare a operare. Il conflitto in Siria non e finito e i bambini di Idlib continuano a soffrire.
But speaking from his unrelated French visit, Kerry eagerly defended the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in keeping with the highly optimistic tone that the Obama administration has been striking ever since the negotiations wrapped up. The New York Times suggested on Thursday that that optimism remained strong at the one-year mark, but that the administrations celebration was severely muted by the lack of progress in other areas of Iran policy.

The initial hope on the part of the White House was that the diplomatic opening between the two countries would promote a moderating trend within the Iranian regime. But this has not come to pass, and many commentators on the Iran nuclear deal have taken the Obama administration to task over this issue on the occasion of the anniversary.

For instance, Struan Stevenson, the president of the European Iraqi Freedom Association and an ardent supporter of the Iranian resistance, published an editorial in UPI decrying the notion that the nuclear deal was a diplomatic breakthrough and calling attention to various indicators of ongoing hardline behavior on the part of the Iranian regime.

Stevenson insisted that at this one-year mark we now know that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is far from moderate despite having been embraced by many Western policymakers and some Iranian citizens as a meaningful alternative to his hardline predecessor and the higher ranking officials who enforce the fundamentalist character of the clerical government.

Stevenson points out that Rouhani has been known to use religious rhetoric to justify the regimes barbarity and has concordantly overseen a steep increase in executions, with approximately 2,500 Iranians having been hanged since Rouhani took office in 2013. Yet Stevensons article alleges that the Rouhani administration and the regime as a whole have been subject to relatively little criticism from Western executives as they focus narrowly upon the nuclear issue.

Some other media have begun to suggest that even this narrow focus will not allow policymakers to go on ignoring an apparent lack of moderation within the Iranian regime. Although Rouhani received some credit from Irans Western adversaries for seriously pursuing a nuclear agreement, critics of the regime insisted that that approach was necessitated by the economic pain the regime had suffered and the consequent importance of securing sanctions relief.

This interpretation has been underscored by a growing list of instances in which Rouhani has demonstrated an aversion to moderation not only in domestic affairs but also in dealing with the very entities with which he had concluded nuclear negotiations. Iranian propaganda against the West has apparently surged in the months since the nuclear agreement was implemented, signifying that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is taking steps to forestall what he sees as Western infiltration. And the Rouhani administration has contributed to this trend, for instance by ordering expanded ballistic missile development and accusing the US of obstructing Irans post-sanctions recovery.

Around the time of the deals anniversary, Rouhani evoked further hardline sentiments by warning that Iran would be able to return to previous levels of nuclear development in a very short period of time, as soon as it considered the US to have violated the deal. These remarks, which were quoted in a report by the Eurasia Review seem to be aimed at pressuring the US to help Iran to improve its economic outcomes, perhaps by lifting sanctions that remain in place because they are unrelated to the nuclear issue.

As well as calling into question Rouhanis moderate credentials, such commentary may raise further doubts about Kerrys defense of the nuclear agreement, which focuses on the idea that by constraining Irans nuclear program it has made the world a safer place. This sentiment has been directly contradicted by Western lawmakers and experts who think that the deal provides insufficient guarantees of Iranian compliance while leaving the door open for Iran to pursue the development of nuclear weapons delivery systems and other parallel components.

In other words, critics feel that by not taking action on Irans overall illicit behavior, the nuclear agreement actually legitimizes the clerical regime and makes the world less safe from its most unsavory ambitions. This type of argument was made, for instance, by Representative Mike Pompeo in an editorial at Fox News. He says that Irans worsening hardline behavior means that the JCPOA is not protecting American interests and that, as a result, Congress must act to change Iranian behavior, and, ultimately, the Iranian regime.

Without explicitly endorsing this message of regime change, the USA Today commented upon the anniversary of the nuclear agreement by expressing the familiar conclusion that Irans overall behavior had grown more assertive. Although the article claims that Iran has been generally abiding by the nuclear agreement, it says that the economic effects of that agreement have been very modest in the case of the Iranian population as a whole, but have had a much stronger impact on the hardline Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the driving force behind a series of anti-Western provocations.

The IRGC has also helped to shape Iranian foreign policy so that it remains severely at odds with Western interests, as by privileging the defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad ahead of the international goal of defeating the militants affiliated with the Islamic State. And as the USA Today also points out, these self-serving regional priorities have allowed Iran to drive deeper wedges between itself and other Middle Eastern powers, chiefly Saudi Arabia.

Those divisions have become so deep and so contentious that a highly-placed member of the Saudi royal family, former intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal, saw fit to appear at the NCRI rally in France on Saturday and explicitly endorse the goal of regime change in Iran.

Many of the commentators on the one year anniversary of the JCPOA have stopped short of calling for such an outcome from alternative Western policies. But many have also pointed in that direction by emphasizing the idea that Iranian behavior has grown worse and that rapprochement has proved unworkable. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, for instance, Aaron David Miller of the Woodrow Wilson Center declared that Irans increasing aggressiveness in the midst of expanding macroeconomic opportunities constitutes an ominous trend line for anyone concerned about Irans growing role in the Middle East and its continued interest in one day attaining nuclear weapons.

But whether motivated by the desire for regime change or simply by a more general and short-term goal of constraining Irans worst behavior, a number of US lawmakers have taken it upon themselves to push back against the nuclear agreement over the past year. And they continue to do so on the occasion of the anniversary.

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reported on Thursday that the House of Representatives had passed a bill aimed at preventing the White House from repeating a deal made in April, in which the Department of Energy arranged to buy 8.6 million dollars worth of heavy water from Iran, in order to help the Iranians to remain beneath the cap set by the JCPOA. Although a non-radioactive substance, heavy water is the byproduct of nuclear activities and can be used in the production of a nuclear weapon.

Some of the Obama administrations detractors described the deal as an instance of directly financing Irans nuclear activities using American taxpayer money. As such, the bill to obstruct future such deals passed by a vote of 249-176. It remains to be considered by Senate, where Republican-Democrat margins are much narrower, and it also faces the threat of a presidential veto. But it is also precedes two other bills that the House will shortly be voting on which would undercut the nuclear agreement.

And the Washington Free Beacon reports that Congress is in the process of pursuing legislation related to a parallel issue of Iran policy, namely the payment of 1.7 billion dollars by the US as settlement of a longstanding debt, which some detractors believe was actually a form of ransom paid to help secure the release of four Americans who were held in Iranian jails just prior to implementation of the JCPOA. The legislation in question would force the Obama administration to reveal more information about the circumstances leading to that payment, and would also prevent any other such payments of taxpayer money to Iran or other state sponsors of terrorism.

None of these congressional efforts promises to directly cancel the JCPOA, but in light of recent Iranian threats they certainly increase the probability of the deal being cancelled on the Iranian side. Indeed, the New York Times observes that the agreement faces serious threats from both sides. Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor indicates that the threat from the Iranian side is made worse by the fact that Iran is now facing the inevitable disillusionment over its high expectations for financial recovery.

At the same time, the West is facing its own disillusionment in light of the expectations introduced by the White House regarding moderation in the Iranian regime. And it is clear that for many commentators on the anniversary of the nuclear agreement, this is sufficient reason to reevaluate the essence of the agreement and of Western policy toward Iran.
Experts believe many people may carry a secret ginger gene which boosts the risk of skin cancer by as much as 21 years.

Generally associated with red hair and freckles, new evidence has shown that a variant of the MCR1 gene is carried by an estimated one in four people in the UK, leaving them open to an increased threat of cancer caused by exposure to ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun.

The revelation may cause concern for a greater number of people in Ireland, which has an above average representation of people with red hair. Although the worldwide percentage stands between one and two percent, this rises to six percent amongst the Irish population.

Lead researcher Dr. David Andrews from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, England, explained: It has been known for a while that a person with red hair has an increased likelihood of developing skin cancer, but this is the first time that the gene has been proven to be associated with skin cancers with more mutations.

Unexpectedly, we also showed that people with only a single copy of the gene variant still have a much higher number of tumour mutations than the rest of the population.

This is one of the first examples of a common genetic profile having a large impact on a cancer genome and could help better identify people at higher risk of developing skin cancer.

According to scientists from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Leeds in England, the MCR1 gene results in a greater risk of skin cancer because of a specific vulnerability to UV rays, and although this discovery mostly concerns people with red-hair and freckles, who have two copies of the MCR1 gene in their DNA, it also leaves people with different colored hair, yet who still carry one copy of the gene, more susceptible to developing skin cancer.

Experts warned that these carriers may not realise they are at risk as they will not automatically look like easy burners. Their natural hair color can range from brown to blond but they will still be prone to sun damage.

The MCR1 gene variant has previously been shown to be a deliberate genetic adaption that allows people with red hair, freckles and/or pale skin to absorb more vitamin D. The adaption is believed to have originally evolved in Ireland and Scotland where the cloudy and dull weather did not allow people enough opportunity to absorb the much-needed vitamin.

Our researchers show that red hair gene drives up skin cancer mutations - comparable to extra 21 yrs of sun exposurehttps://t.co/1oInCg7c6S  Sanger Institute (@sangerinstitute) July 12, 2016

Read more: Scientists confirm redhead gene evolved due to lack of sunlight

One of the main problems with the gene variant, however, is that it makes skin more likely to burn in the sun, with even a single copy of the variant shown to increase the chance of gene mutations associated with the most dangerous form of the cancer, malignant melanoma. The research found there is an average of 42 percent more dangerous mutations developed through sun exposure with the gene, with results estimating that these people will develop cancer-promoting mutations at the same rate as someone 21 years older.

The new evidence has been met with words of warning from cancer charities, eager to encourage those with redhair, freckles, or pale skin to protect themselves from skin damage.

This important research explains why red-haired people have to be so careful about covering up in strong sun, said Dr Julie Sharp, head of health and patient information at the charity Cancer Research UK.

It also underlines that it isnt just people with red hair who need to protect themselves from too much sun.

People who tend to burn rather than tan, or who have fair skin, hair or eyes, or who have freckles or moles are also at higher risk.

For all of us the best way to protect skin when the sun is strong is to spend time in the shade between 11am and 3pm, and to cover up with a t-shirt, hat and sunglasses, Sharp advised.

And sunscreen helps protect the parts you cant cover; use one with at least SPF15 and 4 or more stars, put on plenty and reapply regularly.

Red Hair Gene Drives Up Skin Cancer Mutations https://t.co/763q0pmsiO pic.twitter.com/pAB6DgRhUq  ScienceDaily (@ScienceDaily) July 13, 2016

This is the first time a link has been shown between the MCR1 gene and the development of mutations that cause skin cancer. Published in the journal Nature Communications, the new study analysed datasets of skin tumor DNA sequences collected from more than 400 people and confirmed that the number of mutations developed as a result of UV rays are linked with the ginger gene.

"All people, not just pale redheads, should be careful in the sun, said Professor Tim Bishop, joint lead author and director of the Leeds Institute of Cancer and Pathology at the University of Leeds.

This is the first study to look at how the inherited MC1R gene affects the number of spontaneous mutations in skin cancers and has significant implications for understanding how skin cancers form.

It has only been possible due to the large-scale data available. The tumours were sequenced in the US, from patients all over the world and the data was made freely accessible to all researchers.

This study illustrates how important international collaboration and free public access to datasets is to research.

Read more: Redheads' secret of Tir na nOg makes them look younger

H/T: The Irish Times
Over 13,000 people (not including suicide victims) died in America from gun violence last year. Thirty thousand more were injured.

Five brave police officers and two innocent black men added to that total these past weeks in Dallas, Minnesota and Louisiana. It has become a similar refrain week after week.

We have since learned that the Dallas assassin we will not name had plans for an even bigger massacre, and had quantities of bombs and explosives in his home. The protest march last Thursday evening just happened to give him the opportunity to get white police officers in his sights.

All together, 43,000 people were killed or wounded by guns last year. Thats a lot of families and neighborhoods grieving; a lot of wasting of young lives.

Ninety percent of blacks are shot by blacks, while 82 percent of whites are shot by whites, not quite the statistics that former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani would have you believe.

In Dallas, the open carry gun law meant that several of the demonstrators had rifles on their shoulders. Police reported great difficulty in distinguishing them from the real shooter.

Mayor of Dallas Mike Rawlings spoke about that. He is a gun owner, but he has appealed for common sense laws that would ban open carry.

Dublin-born Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas also appealed for a ban on semi-automatic rifles, arguing they were for use in war, not in cities against civilians.

Like every attempt to slow the dangerous growth in gun freedoms, their pleas were quickly ignored.

It seems more and more the Second Amendment has taken on the inviolability of one of the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt have your guns, your semi-automatic rifles, your explosives -- no matter the cost in lives and the highest murder rates from guns in the world.

Playing God for so many Americans is the National Rifle Association, which has careened way out of control on this issue and brought the entire country with it. They are as powerful as the tobacco lobby of old.

They say all is fine and good to have access to guns in any way at any venue (except at the GOP convention next week, by the way) and there is no obligation whatever to curb their usage.

That is truly nonsense. The First Amendment gives rights to newspapers and editors to print free speech, but if they maliciously damage someone they can be sued for libel. There is no absolute right.

There are natural limits. There are an estimated 360 million guns in America, one for everyone in the country, with 60 million left over.

It is a hugely lucrative business, the selling of guns, and no wonder the NRA is ensuring the politicians have their snout in every gravy plate that passes their way courtesy of the NRA.

In generations to come people will ask the question we now ask about slavery. What were they thinking?

Our generation has turned America into an armed camp, each killing more numbing until the next one, and ridiculous but successful efforts to ensure that even terrorists who are on the watch list can freely buy guns here.

If we look crazy to the rest of the world it is because we are, and there seems no way back.

But they said the same about slavery until the election of Abraham Lincoln who ended the disgusting practice. Someone needs to step up now to do the same.

No shot with the GOP. Donald Trump is on record to expand gun rights, while Hillary Clinton wants to regulate them.

If she is elected she must make gun control her top priority. America has suffered enough from the gun blight.

The dead bodies in Minnesota, Louisiana and Texas are stark reminders yet again of a powerful evil.
We all live inside of stories. Where we were born, who we were born to. How our own stories turn out can depend a lot on where they begin.

Your family has a story too, as does your town and your nation. The Irish national story is a sweeping epic of colonialism and resistance, of exploitation and forbearance.

It's a tale to rivet anyone who hears it, and thanks to our great writers, it's told all over the world now.

Our story reminds us that our Irish ancestors often came to this country in various states of distress. Some were given American wakes in the 19th century and not expected to be seen again.

Some arrived in disease-filled coffin ships packed tight in their narrow berths and fainting from malnutrition and often heartbreak. And some came, it must be remembered, with light hearts, having finally wrested the opportunity to thrive in a land of freedom so unlike the one they'd been forced to flee.

The long story of the English conquest and exploitation of Ireland had run for centuries. It shaped how they saw we saw own country, it shaped how they saw its future, and it shaped so many of their decisions to leave.

I grew up on the shore of Lough Swilly in Co. Donegal. It's the deepest fjord in Europe and the locals call it the lake of shadows. Since the light on the water there changes from minute to minute, it gave me my first lesson in aesthetics, but there were other shadows out there on the water.

Out on that lough 400 years earlier on September 14, 1607, Hugh O'Neill, the earl of Tyrone and Rory O'Donnell, the first earl of Tyrconnell, and about 90 of their followers left Ulster for mainland Europe. Their Irish story had run out. It was the last farewell of the old Gaelic aristocracy, an event that became known as the Flight of the Earls.

That full stop ruptured the fabric of Irish history and society. How they lived and loved and who they were to Ireland for centuries was lost to us, and is as irrecoverable as Atlantis now.

Another more powerful nation had imposed its national narrative and even the language that I'm now writing in upon us. They would make no room for the Irish story they were attempting to eradicate.

In Ulster this week bonfires are being lit from Co. Antrim to Co. Down to commemorate long ago battles that matter little to the larger European narrative now. For the loyalist community they matter enormously, however.

Those burning pyres, on which they place cartoon effigies of the people and stories they reject, are an opportunity to renew their self image, a way of retelling the story of who they are to themselves.

There were the victors, there were the vanquished. The old score cannot change no matter how much the world changes around them.

Some stories reach out to the world for connection, and some reject the world and send out warnings instead. Which story you're a part of will shape how you live alongside your neighbors, and the respect you afford them or the respect you withhold.

So stories are powerful, and they have to be esteemed, because they live on inside us, because people are stories too.

Most people pay attention to their own stories and often pay little or none to others. Parallels that might help them understand something foundational about human life can be overlooked if the other stories seem to threaten the dominance of one narrative over another.

Last week it looked like America's national story was coming apart at the seams. Competing and often mutually excluding stories were instead rubbing each other raw.

In the vacuum that has opened between them our nation has unwittingly given the floor to a group of isolated, dispossessed and powerless young men who all appear to be harboring murderous resentments and easy access to assault weapons.

Their targets are often the most vulnerable, outliers like immigrants and gays. It's an old playbook, attack the weakest to undermine the strongest.

It appears to be working. A dangerous crack opened in American civic life last week.

In a time when we need to hear that America's story is one of cooperation with all and a welcome to all, when history is asking us to reach out rather than shelter in place, some of our loudest leadership is talking about building walls rather than bridges.

They are dividing us by race and religion rather than uniting us. They are elevating some and denigrating others.

The story they are telling is disruptive to our unity. Last week was a preview of where they will take us if their story wins.
Knock Shrine and Ireland West Airport will welcome the first trans-Atlantic flight from Boston with Aer Lingus to the airport on Friday, July 15.

The flight, according to a release from Ireland West Airport, represents another milestone for the airport and the region as it will be the first ever trans-Atlantic service operated by Aer Lingus from Boston to Ireland West Airport.

The special flight, which will be supported by the Archdiocese of Boston and led by the Archbishop of Boston Cardinal Sean OMalley, will depart Boston on Thursday, July 14 and return to Boston from Ireland West Airport on Thursday, July 21. The highlight of the visit to the west of Ireland will be the re-dedication of Knock Shrine, which will take place on Saturday, July 16.

The Archdiocese of Boston is blessed and strengthened by the faith of the Irish Catholic community here and also that of our many friends and relations in Ireland, OMalley said in a statement.

We look forward to parishioners from the archdiocese and people from many walks of life coming together as we journey in pilgrimage to the Shrine at Knock for the rededication of Our Lady's Basilica. We look forward to this journey of faith with gratitude for all who are working to provide the very helpful direct transport from Boston to Knock.

Father Richard Gibbons, rector of Knock Shrine said, I am delighted and looking forward to welcoming Cardinal O'Malley to Knock for the rededication of the Basilica of Our Lady, Queen of Ireland on the 16th July. Cardinal O'Malleys visit with pilgrims from across the U.S. shows the possibilities of pilgrimage growth and the strategic importance of Ireland West Airport to the future of Ireland's National Marian Shrine. The success of the Shrine's Witness to Hope project to date, which includes the promotion of the shrine at home and abroad, will help renew people's faith in a loving and merciful God. We look forward to deepening our relationship with pilgrims from the U.S. and in particular with those of our own diaspora.

Joe Kennedy, chairman of Ireland West Airport said, We are looking forward immensely to welcoming this historic flight with Aer Lingus from Boston next week, which is yet another milestone in the relationship between the airport and Aer Lingus. This follows on from the hugely successful charter program from New York in 2015 and is a further stepping stone in securing regular trans-Atlantic services for the region into the future.

New York attorney Brian ODwyer, international chair of Ireland West Airport added, This is a further important step in opening the west of Ireland to tourism and to travel from the Irish in the diaspora. I congratulate both Aer Lingus and the staff of the airport for making this possible. I am particularly grateful to Cardinal OMalley for his unwavering support for this project on behalf of the west of Ireland and his leading presence in this special trip.
Just a short time ago, Irish food writer Trish Deseine responded to a column on the scarcity of women chefs at the very top of the profession, especially obvious when it came to divvying out food awards.

Deseines article, drawing on her own experiences over close to two decades in the professional food world, attracted much comment and a lot of it was negative.

This did not go unnoticed by other women in the Irish food world.

Following an introduction by Deseine, Jess Murphy, chef/proprietor of Kai restaurant, in Galway, had attended the inaugural Parabere Forum, in Bilbao, in 2015, an international conference designed to strengthen the role of women in food.

Assembling a few like-minded souls, Murphy resolved to do similar in Ireland and Paraberes founder, internationally-renowned food writer Maria Canabal, agreed to attend.

Next week, some of Irelands leading female chefs, restaurateurs and other culinary figures will assemble in Galway to attend Athru 2016 (July 18 and 19), a conference aimed at empowering women working in professional culinary arts.

Jess Murphy, chef and proprietor of Kai restaurant in Galway with her husband David.

We started off discussing three, four issues, says Murphy, then we realised there are so many more and many arent even gender specific, they are common problems.

"The only difference is for once we are looking at these problems from a female perspective first rather than the more usual male perspective.

Despite the modern mania for all things food, the restaurant industry is experiencing a chef shortage crisis on a global scale.

In Ireland, it is estimated we will require 5,000 new chefs each year until 2020 to meet demand though the colleges only produce 1,800 chef graduates annually.

Then consider figures for female head chefs in relation to male head chefs: 22% and declining in the US, 18.5% and declining in Britain.

A figure from 2014 puts the Irish number at 14%.

Is the hospitality industry missing a trick by not encouraging more women into the industry?

Or does the old canard still prevail, that women are better off at the domestic stove, leaving the pro stuff to the men?

Mary Farrell, Executive Chef at Mortons, in Ranelagh, is also a serial academic holding several degrees, currently a PhD researcher at DIT prone to underpinning her observations with research: The problem isnt necessarily in the education system, because women are on a par with men or higher and there are plenty of women at the lower end in the profession but the higher up you go, it changes.

"It is a gendered world and women have a mountain to climb to get there, they have to prove themselves beyond the standards expected of men.

The gender pay gap, says Canabal, in the industry globally, is 28%, the biggest pay gap of all industries. The UK is 19%. When you see this, why should a woman go and work in kitchens?

"The industry and male chefs have a lot to gain if this gender inequality changes because they can attract talent.

We have a constitution based on Catholic social teaching, says Farrell, and the role of the woman was enshrined in it and our perception of women as domestic care workers and domestic cooks holds true to this day.

"So for many professional chefs, a woman is still associated with domestic roles even though she is a fellow professional.

" My research is to open it up and see what the problems are, not to point the fingers at specific individuals. Its about creating a better work environment for both men and women.

The professional kitchen has always been an intimidating place, traditionally based on a ranked brigade system designed by army officer-turned-chef, Georges Auguste Escoffier.

Its a male dominated industry, very masculine, says Canabal.

Escoffier took the military as his model, follow the orders, never answer back, just say, yes chef. It can be a boys club and ladies are not often invited to the parties; when they are, they are not always invited to dance.

Chef Louise Bannon, considered one of the best pastry chefs in the world by Rene Redzepi, has worked in multiple Michelin Star restaurants in Ireland and Europe, including Redzepis Noma.

Working in high-end kitchens is a tough environment, everyone is under a lot of stress, especially the head chef, he can take his temper out a lot. Ive worked in kitchens like that and you either have to accept it or do something else.

"Some chefs just cant control that impulse but that doesnt make it acceptable. Some male chefs direct it more at women, others direct it equally at men and women but, either way, its still not acceptable.

Dubliner Anna Haugh, formerly head chef of Gordon Ramsays London House, is now Executive Head Chef at Bob Bob Ricard, in Londons Soho.

Anna Haugh

Ive always compared myself to a short skinny man, they have similar issues to women.

"Im not talking about kitchens with an openly sexist presence, but in a regular kitchen it is assumed women are the same as a short skinny man.

"But if you, a woman or short skinny man, can show you are a little firecracker, commanding your space, showing you can do it, you are taken seriously, eventually.

Part of the reason for more women not succeeding in the kitchen is we have so few role models, women chefs who young women can aspire to being.

"I was very lucky, though, in my first job, in LEcrivain, that I worked with several, strong empowered women, including Sallyanne Clarke.

"They were very shaping for me. I watched them handle strong men, manage them without being aggressive. In fact, they were the same to everyone, great examples of leaders.

Most of my experiences in the kitchen have been very good and that is down to me wanting it to be that way, Ive been really focused, Ive wanted to be as good as I can be.

"The men who succeed in this industry are like me, to succeed you need drive  this isnt a creche, the pressure is huge, even in a supportive environment.

"How do you command peoples attention, getting them to listen to you and stay focused? I am feminine up to my ears, but you need to be able to command a kitchen just as much as any man would.

But still there remain doubting Thomases. One such Thomas is English Michelin-starred chef Tom Kerridge, who in 2014 questioned whether women can survive in the upper echelons, whether they had the ability to dig deep  under pressure, whether they had sufficient fire in the belly.

Michelin-starred chef Tom Kerridge

Its really hard to not respond to that without anger, says Murphy.

First of all, I think its a macho notion and thats as damaging for men as it is for women. It is misinterpreting men.

"Dont forget, men are our husbands, brothers, children, friends  to come out with that comment is very damaging for both sides of the gender.

"Without my husband Dave there would be no Jess Murphy anyway. Dave is an engineer who has given me his career, following me all over the world to help me achieve what I want.

"Ive wanted to be a chef since I was ten years old. Talk about fire in the belly? I had it and Ive still got it and Dave doesnt feel threatened.

Athru will also feature male speakers and the emphasis on gender equality does not exclude men.

The brigade system may work as it does for the army, instilling fierce discipline and bonding under extreme conditions but, as many former soldiers will confirm, it doesnt always bear any relation to the regular life.

Ive seen male chefs taking a half day off when their wives had babies and then theyre back at work thats wrong! says Jess, we need a balance between both worlds, a realistic block of 40-50 hours a week, rostered a month in advance, so chefs can really plan their lives outside the kitchen.

Pamela Kelly, head chef at Market Lane, oversees 24 chefs in one of Corks busiest restaurants: Any organisation that sets out to improve aspects of the hospitality sector for people, regardless of gender has my full support.

"The change is happening, maybe not as fast as some people would like, but kitchens are evolving to encourage healthier work-life balances.

And finally we come to the F-word.

I dont believe you can achieve gender equality without embracing feminism and it is still very much a term that is feared in Ireland, says Deseine.

There is a still an outdated, stereotypical image of the movement that needs to be left behind. But its not just enough to call yourself a feminist simply because you believe in gender equality.

"You must recognise that women are disadvantaged in our society and then act to change that by changing the causes. My biggest hope for Athru would be that it will enable women not to be afraid of feminism.

A lot of people are scared of the word, feminism, says Murphy, but it means gender equality... A lot of my peers, men and women I respect, are coming.

"Even if one of us comes up with a single idea to make our lives in the hospitality industry a little bit easier and to get more chefs back in the kitchen, then everybody will benefit.
The US-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS) group has resumed air strikes from a Turkish air base that were suspended after a failed military coup d'etat, the Pentagon said on Sunday.

"After close coordination with our Turkish allies, they have reopened their airspace to military aircraft," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.

"As a result, counter-ISIL coalition air operations at all air bases in Turkey have resumed," he added, using an acronym for the IS group.

"US facilities at Incirlik are still operating on internal power sources, but we hope to restore commercial power soon. Base operations have not been affected."

The Turkish authorities on Saturday imposed a security lockdown at the Incirlik air base in the southern province of Adana used by US and other coalition forces in the fight against jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday put down the bloody coup attempt, but it raised concerns in the West about the stability of the country and its continued role in the anti-IS coalition.

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Monday, July 18th, 2016 (12:01 am) - Score 1,158

Doncaster-based ISP Origin Broadband will today introduce a new brand identity and this is also being supported by a refreshed website design, as well as a tweaked range of broadband and phone packages that appears to include some sharp price hikes.

The packages will also include a new all in one N300 N16 router, which can be delivered at no extra cost. On top of that Origin says that there are no install costs on any product and they will provide 24/7 UK customer support 365 days a year. Furthermore the ISP has pledged that its broadband products will not apply any traffic management, fair use or peak time restrictions.

Origin claims that their new packages will include new ways to save money, with customers having the option to save over 130 by paying in advance. However the press release isnt clear about precisely what has changed from the old services, aside from the price rises and changes detailed below.

Oliver Bryssau, Origin Broadbands MD and co-Founder, said: A new brand identity has been on the cards for a while; our previous branding no longer represented who wed grown into as a company. Weve designed our new identity with our customers and our culture in mind  its bright, young, and forward-thinking.

At the time of writing the full details of Origins new packages arent clear, although we note that the standard cost of line rental is now 17.99 per month and thats a rise from the old charge of 16.40 per month (note: other ISPs have introduced similar hikes). However its important to remember that there are no install costs for these services, although the price list does add an odd caveat of unless full provide (no further details are offered to clarify precisely what this represents).

Similarly the old packages also allowed customers the option to save money by pre-paying for 12 months of line rental for 109.99 (9.17pcm equivalent) or 199.99 for 24 months (8.33pcm), while the new 12 month Line Supersaver has been hiked to 172.49 (14.37pcm) or 299.99 (12.49pcm) for 24 months. In fairness, thats still better than the biggest ISPs, but its also a big hike.

As for their broadband bundles, Origin offers a range of unlimited up to 17Mbps ADSL and up to 38Mbps FTTC (Fibre) broadband packages that can be either paid monthly or in advance. However its not clear if these are total prices (broadband + line rental) or just reflective of the broadband side. We should find out more today when everything is live.

Line or Line & Broadband  Monthly Deals:

* Line Rental only (12m term);

17.99pm. 0 install (unless full provide). * Origin Broadband + Line (12m term) (ADSL);

17.99pm. 0 install, 0 router charge. * Origin Broadband Fibre + Line (18m term) (FTTC, 40/10);

21.58pm for first three months, 31.58 thereafter. 0 router charge. * Origin Broadband Max + Line (18m term) (FTTC, 40/10);

27.99 for first six months, 37.99 thereafter. 0 router charge. * Evening + Weekend Calls (1m term)

3.49pm * Anytime Calls (1m term)

5.99pm * Anytime + International Calls (1m term)

7.49pm Line & Broadband  Saver Deals:

* Line Supersaver (12m term);

172.49 for 12m in advance. 0 install (except Full Provide). * Line Supersaver (24m term);

299.99 for 24m in advance. 0 install (except Full Provide). * Origin Broadband + Line (12m term) (ADSL);

172.49 for 12m in advance. 0 install, 0 router charge. * Origin Broadband + Line (24m term) (ADSL);

299.99 for 24m in advance. 0 install, 0 router charge. * Origin Broadband Fibre + Line (18m term) (FTTC, 40/10);

429.99 for 18m in advance. 0 install, 0 router charge. * Origin Broadband Max + Line (18m term) (FTTC, 80/20);

499.99 for 18m in advance. 0 install, 0 router charge.

UPDATE 3:48pm

Apparently there is an install fee of 48 for new lines (this is what they mean by Full Provide), thus the 0 install really only applies to migrations (not quite akin to the claimed no install costs on any product). On top of that the included router is an ASUS DSL-N16.

Weve also had it confirmed that, when paying in advance, 12/24 months line rental is indeed the same price as 12/24 months ADSL & line rental. The broadband will only be provided for the period covered by the supersaver, but if the customer was then to take out another supersaver, the same pricing would still apply.

Now were just waiting until the new brand and website go live.
France's foreign minister warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday against using his country's failed coup as a "blank cheque" to silence his opponents.

"It was important to condemn the coup in Turkey. That is the least we can do," Jean-Marc Ayrault told France 3 television.

But he also warned Erdogan against using the abortive putsch as a pretext for clamping down on his opponents.

"We want the rule of law to work properly in Turkey," Ayrault said, warning: "This is not a blank cheque for Mr Erdogan."

This view was echoed by Ayrault's Austrian counterpart, Sebastian Kurz, who said Erdogan should not "misuse" the coup as "a carte blanche to do whatever he wants."

Their remarks came as Turkish authorities continued a crackdown over the coup, arresting over 6,000 people accused of involvement in the putsch or of supporting the coup plotters.

"There must not be a purge. Those who dealt a blow to democracy must be be prosecuted within the framework of the rule of law," Ayrault said.

EU foreign ministers meeting Monday in Brussels would drive home that point, he said.

Questioned about Turkey's reliability in the US-led coalition against the Islamic State group, Ayrault described the NATO member as a "great country" and ally but said the events of the past two days did "raise questions."

"There's (the question of) reliability on the one hand and, indeed, an element of suspicion on the other," he said.

The foreign ministry later insisted Ayrault had not meant to question Turkey's dependability in the fight against IS, which has been blamed for several major attacks in both Turkey and France in the past year.

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The Tunisian who rammed a truck into Bastille Day crowds in Nice, killing 84 people, sent a text message just before the attack about the supply of weapons, a source close to the investigation said Sunday.

In the message, 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel "expresses satisfaction at having obtained a 7.65mm pistol and discusses the supply of other weapons", the source said.

The driver, who was shot dead by police after his deadly rampage, took pictures of himself at the wheel that he shared by SMS, the source added.

Over 200 investigators are working on identifying the recipients of the messages, one of the officers told AFP.

Six people are still being held for questioning over the third major attack in France since January 2015.

Among the six is a 38-year-old Albanian, who was arrested on Sunday morning on suspicion of supplying the pistol that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel used to fire at police trying to block his route.

Police later found the gun in the truck, along with two replica assault rifles and a dummy grenade.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel's estranged wife was released on Sunday after two days of questioning.

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Turkish security forces clashed with coup plotters resisting arrest at Istanbul's second airport, and at an air base in central Turkey, an official said on Sunday.

Security forces fired warning shots near the Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asian side of the city and the coup plotters did not return fire, the official said, adding arrests were being made. There were also clashes at an air base in Konya in central Turkey, the official said.

"The situation is under control," the official said.

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Three police officers were shot to death and three others wounded in Baton Rouge on Sunday, less than two weeks after a black man was killed by police in the Louisiana capital, sparking nationwide protests.



The officers in Baton Rouge were responding to a call of a man with a gun when shots were fired. Two Baton Rouge police officers and one sheriff's deputy were killed.



One gunman is dead and police believe he was the only one involved in the attack, Mike Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said in a press conference.



"We do not have an active shooter scenario in Baton Rouge," Edmonson said.



It was not immediately clear whether there was a link between the shootings and the recent unrest over the police killings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota.



Police did not give any information about a possible motive.



President Barack Obama condemned the "attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge" and vowed that justice would be done.

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Colorful Tokyo is a coloring book and travel guide by former Sheboygan resident Laura Lahm. She lives in Seattle with her family and is business manager and creative director for the books and contracts with illustrators to create the drawings. Credit: Photo courtesy Laura Lahm/Colorful Cities

SHARE Laura Lahms coloring books double as travel guides. She goes to all the featured sites, taking photographs for reference before choosing which locations to include. Photo courtesy Laura Lahm

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Sheboygan  If coloring can take you places, Laura Lahm wants to be your tour guide.

The 1986 Sheboygan North High graduate has found a unique specialty in coloring books that double as travel guides, encouraging colorers young and old to explore their worlds.

In her previous job as a global business manager for Microsoft, Lahm would seek out landmarks in the cities she traveled to  not just the tourist traps, but the neighborhood treasures often taken for granted, too.

"I have traveled all over the world, whether for business or pleasure, and I love it," she said, "but you can still be in your own city and not have been to a ton of places."

In 2013, she channeled her passions into a new endeavor and released her first book, "Colorful Seattle." The book doubles as a travel guide, with the first few pages featuring a map of the city and a description of locations on the coloring pages. Want to color the Space Needle? Turn to page 17. Looking to paint the Seattle Great Wheel or Washington State Ferry? Head to pages 19 and 20.

"The City of Seattle is super-unique. What struck me is, we have some books about the city, but there were hidden gems that people just didn't see," Lahm said. "I have still yet to meet anyone who has been to every place in the Seattle book."

Since then, Lahm created two additional coloring travel guides, "Colorful Portland" and "Colorful Tokyo," a city she visited frequently for work.

"That book in particular is a great way to show the very different culture for kids and people who don't live there," Lahm said.

Lahm, who lives in Seattle with her family, is business manager and creative director for the books and contracts with illustrators to create the drawings. She travels to all the sites featured in the books and takes photographs for reference before choosing which locations to include.

Lahm said she occasionally likes to rip a page out one of the books and go exploring with her kids  and she hopes the books inspires others to "get off their duff and go exploring."

"I absolutely love to get out colored pencils," she said. "What I try to do  even with my kids today  is go to one of these locations, rip out a page, and decide what to do with it. I like to say, 'We provide the lines, but you provide the art.'"

The coloring pages are not designed with any age group in mind, and Lahm said she's heard from both young and old who have enjoyed the books.

"I started doing these books before the whole coloring for adults craze started," she said. "The books aren't necessarily geared toward adults, they are just for people."

The "Colorful Cities" books, which are printed in Eau Claire, are high quality with thick pages so markers will not bleed through. They are available for purchase online at colorfulcities.com or on Amazon.com.
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Although homicides and nonfatal shootings declined in Milwaukee during the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2015, the midyear totals remain higher than any other year in the past decade, a new report shows.

When accounting only for firearm violence  312 fatal and nonfatal shootings from January through June  the city has seen a 13% decrease compared to the first six months of 2015. But compared to the same time period in 2014, there was a 7% increase, according to the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission's midyear report.

In total, 53 homicides occurred in the first half of the year, 21 fewer victims than in the same period last year. Nonfatal shootings victims also declined 10% from 298 to 268 in the same time period.

"There is no higher priority for city government than reducing violence," Mayor Tom Barrett said in a news release. "Yes, the numbers this year are better than last, but our city is still seeing more victims in 2016 than we saw during the past ten years."

City officials are paying particular attention to the eight intimate-partner homicides in the first six months of 2016  double the number seen at this time last year.

Intimate-partner violence also led to eight nonfatal shootings during the same time period, compared with only one during the first half of 2015, according to the report.

All of those incidents involved individuals with a prior history of intimate-partner violence in either current or prior relationships.

The rise in lethal intimate-partner violence in Milwaukee has coincided with a statewide rise in domestic-violence homicide. Intimate-partner violence often is considered a subset of domestic violence, which can include violence against other family members or roommates.

In the first half of this year, 39 domestic violence homicides were recorded in the state, nearly 70% higher than average, according to End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin.

"This is a rate that we haven't seen in our history," said Tony Gibart, the group's public policy and communications coordinator.

The organization took the unusual step of releasing midyear statistics after local advocates called attention to the number of deaths, he said.

"We don't know the exact cause of the increase," Gibart said.

However, he noted it follows statewide policy shifts in gun ownership, including removal of the 48-hour waiting period for handgun purchases.

Use of  or threats with  a weapon and having a gun in the home are warning signs of lethal abuse, according to End Domestic Abuse.

End Domestic Abuse has highlighted several strategies to prevent domestic violence from turning deadly, such as the use of a lethality assessment by front-line police officers. The assessment is a simple form containing 11 questions officers should ask victims. Milwaukee County law enforcement agencies were trained on it in December 2014.
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Milwaukee will host the 2019 convention for LULAC, a national Latino civil rights organization, the group decided in a Saturday vote.

The League of United Latin American Citizens chose Milwaukee over three other contenders  Los Angeles; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Corpus Christi, Texas, where the organization is based.

The convention, which will take place in late June or early July, is expected to bring in 17,000 to 20,000 people over five days.

In convincing LULAC members to vote for Milwaukee, the city ran a social media-heavy lobbying campaign that included the Twitter hashtag #SayYesToMilwaukee and numerous social media commercials, including one shot with Milwaukee Bucks players, said LULAC Vice President for the Midwest Darryl Morin.

"It came down to the level of support we were seeing from Milwaukee's corporate community, institutional community, and nonprofit community," Morin said.

Past LULAC conventions have hosted high-level officials, including presidents, and LULAC's 2016 convention in Washington, D.C., which wrapped up Saturday, featured presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Morin said presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had been asked to speak at the convention but did not respond to the organization's invitation.
State Sen. Julie Lassa (D-Stevens Point), a member of the board of the Wisconsin Econmic Development Commission, was among those critical of a short-lived proposal to limit what board members could say about the agency. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

An imaginary conversation:

"You know, we've still got a problem at WEDC. There's just too much information available to the public. What do we do about that?"

"Well, last July, they tried to gut the open records law so the pesky public would have had less access to what we're doing, but that was like poking a stick into a hornet's nest, and they had to abandon that."

"Right, but then they got the clever idea of taking advantage of a Public Records Board's change in defining what's public to deny a records request by the Wisconsin State Journal regarding WEDC."

"Yeah, but then it happened again: The hornets got upset and the records board had to backtrack on that change. So what do we do now?"

"Hey, I've got it: a gag order!"

"Are you nuts?"

"No, no, it'll be great! We'll put a gag order on WEDC board members so they can't talk to the public about what's going on at WEDC without permission, and we'll add a threat of disciplinary measures if they do. It won't shut off all public access but it certainly will send a message."

"Let's do it!"

And then an adult walked into the room and quashed another swell proposal.

No, that conversation didn't actually happen, but something like it could have happened because the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. really did propose a gag order on the agency's board members  and then quickly backpedaled after negative reactions from, guess who, board members. On what planet would this have been considered a good idea for a taxpayer-supported agency?

This proposal didn't deal with access to public records as last year's attempts did. But the gag order would have sent a chilling message to board members who scrutinize the agency, as state Sen. Julie Lassa (D-Stevens Point), a member of the WEDC board, told the Journal Sentinel  not to mention on the agency's relationship with citizens.

Which of course flies in the face of Gov. Scott Walker's directive earlier this year on the need for state agencies to be more open with the public. Walker's order is aimed at speeding up state responses to public records requests, better tracking them and giving clearer guidelines on how much they should cost and how long they should take to fulfill.

The governor's office also announced the creation of a new Agency Performance Dashboards website, which reports on each cabinet agency's performance in key areas. I've checked and the dashboard does not have a measurement for gag orders.

Given Walker's order, why would anyone at WEDC think muzzling board members was a good idea? Does government transparency have no meaning for them? What exactly are agency officials afraid that the public will learn?

Of course, the agency had problems with auditors over its financial controls and some failed loans. There were questions that went to the core of the WEDC mission and whether it was a good idea for a state agency to be handing out dollars to businesses run by campaign donors.

Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna), who criticized the gag order proposal and then praised the decision to drop it, got it right in a tweet: "This is a bad idea. We need transparency at WEDC more than ever. The public deserves it."

Yes, it does. Sadly, that's something too many government officials don't seem to fully understand. I'm wondering what the next conversation will be like.

Ernst-Ulrich Franzen is the Journal Sentinel's associate editorial page editor. Email: efranzen@jrn.com; Twitter: @efranzen1
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We were surprised to read some of the comments in two recent opinion pieces regarding We Energies and want to share some facts and perspective that were omitted from both commentaries.

First, we have worked closely with our industrial customers to help lower their energy costs and grow their businesses in Wisconsin. We collaborated with these customers and the Public Service Commission to develop options that allow Wisconsin companies to pay wholesale prices for power linked to factory and production expansions.

The market pricing option is working well in growing Wisconsin jobs. A key indication of the program's success is that the participating companies have created more than 1,400 additional jobs here in the state.

Our residential customers also are seeing lower energy bills. The We Energies combined natural gas and electric bill for the average residential customer is now lower than it was 12 years ago and we have proposed to not just freeze electric rates, but to lower electric rates in 2017.

As the Journal Sentinel reported last month, from May 2015 through April 2016, a typical residential customer paid an average of $143 per month for a combined We Energies natural gas and electric bill. The average residential customer bill has not been that low during that same time frame since 2004-'05.

In fact, We Energies residential natural gas customers paid less to heat their homes this past winter than during any winter since 2000.

The most recent column was correct about one point. Many industrial customers were supporters of our Power the Future Plan that successfully pulled the state out of the power reliability crisis that threatened the ability to conduct business in the state.

In recent years, we also addressed the challenge of meeting stricter environmental regulations by adding emission controls at our power plants, converting our less efficient coal plants to natural gas and investing in clean energy resources.

Since 2000, we have added nearly 50% more power capacity to our customers' system while cutting more than 80% of the combined emissions of nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter and mercury.

While these upgrades came with a cost, it is a cost that other states and other utilities are now just beginning to pay as they catch up to meet federal environmental regulations while still meeting customer power demands.

We expect that our electric rates will be even lower next year while we continue to invest in needed system upgrades that contribute to We Energies being named the most reliable utility in the Midwest for five years running.

We will continue to do our best to manage our costs while continuing to provide safe, reliable and affordable energy to all of our customers.

Kevin Fletcher is president of We Energies and Wisconsin Public Service.
Rocky Marcoux should be retained, a group of community leaders argue. Credit: Journal Sentinel files

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Everyone recognizes and acknowledges the downtown renaissance  you can't miss it as you look across the skyline and see the cranes transforming Milwaukee. What is less recognized  but equally important  is what downtown development means for the rest of the city and the success and investment occurring in the neighborhoods throughout Milwaukee simultaneously.

City Development Commissioner Rocky Marcoux has played a key role in our city's unprecedented growth and development, and we believe he should continue to lead the Department of City Development for another four years in Mayor Tom Barrett's administration as it works to ensure that prosperity extends to every neighborhood in the city.

A healthy downtown is essential to a healthy city. The $5 billion in new and proposed private development in and around downtown is bringing thousands of new jobs to city residents  including job training and new career paths for previously unemployed city residents  and generating millions of dollars in revenue to support essential services such as police and fire for the entire city. In addition, projects such as the Lakefront Gateway and the new arena will bring more people, more customers, more businesses, more workers, more residents and more private investment to our city  all of which will benefit all of Milwaukee, not just downtown.

Just as impressive as the development that is occurring downtown are the significant investments in neighborhoods throughout the city. A vibrant downtown and healthy, robust neighborhoods are not mutually exclusive, and, in fact, are complementary assets.

Through strategic investment and careful management, the Menomonee Valley has become a national model for how to revitalize abandoned industrial land. Over the last decade, the Valley has brought thousands of new, family-supporting jobs to city residents and transformed a blighted valley into a vibrant destination.

Building on the success of the Menomonee Valley, Marcoux and the city are working to bring the same type of development to Century City  the former A.O. Smith/Tower Automotive site. The city is working closely with neighborhood residents and investing millions of dollars in the site, attracting outside private investment, new businesses and new jobs.

All Milwaukee residents deserve to live in high-quality housing. Under Marcoux's leadership, the city has built more than 6,000 new affordable housing units across the city. The vast majority  5,400  were investments outside of downtown, spanning 13 of 15 aldermanic districts from 2004 to 2015. In addition, more than 1,400 building permits have been issued for new single-family and duplex developments since 2005. The department also has taken a strong leadership role in tackling the foreclosure crisis, putting 2,000-plus properties back in private hands and returning more than $78 million in value back to the city tax rolls.

Throughout the city, you will find countless new developments that were only possible through the direct involvement and leadership of Marcoux and the department he leads. A few of the more recent examples include: Pete's Market at Martin Luther King Drive and North Ave., the Freshwater Plaza at 1st St. and Greenfield Ave., and St. Ann's Intergenerational Center at 24th St. and North Ave. The department also has invested in excess of $1 million in each of the last three years on commercial properties spanning hundreds of sites across every single aldermanic district in the city.

We are at a critical crossroads. We are achieving once-in-a-generation development downtown and in our neighborhoods. At the same time, we all agree that more must be done to ensure that the benefits of new development and city investment extend to all parts of Milwaukee. While reasonable people may disagree on the best way to accomplish this, delays in confirmation and the absence of leadership causes investors, businesses and residents to lose confidence and seek investment and occupancy outside of the city. We strongly encourage the Common Council to reconfirm Marcoux without any unnecessary delay.

This commentary was submitted by Peter Feigin, president, Milwaukee Bucks; Theresa Gadzik, Voluptuous Secrets; Ellen Gilligan, president & CEO, The Greater Milwaukee Foundation; Linda Gorens-Levey, partner, General Capital; Gary Grunau, president, Grucon Group; Ralph Hollmon, president & CEO, The Milwaukee Urban League; Jeffrey A. Joerres, Incito Capital; John Kersey, executive vice president, Zilber LTD; Ted Kellner, executive chairman, Fiduciary Management; Michael Lovell, president, Marquette University; Sheldon B. Lubar, chairman, Lubar & Co.; David Lubar, CEO, Lubar & Co.; John McWilliam, owner, SCATHAIN; Alex Molinaroli, chairman, president & CEO, Johnson Controls; Clifton Phelps, JCP Construction; Jalin Phelps, JCP Construction; James Phelps, JCP Construction; Tom Schneider, executive director, COA Youth & Family Centers; Angela and Bennie Smith, Daddy's Soul Food and Grille; Kyle Weatherly, principal, Vliet Street Capital; Elizabeth Weirick, CEO, Milwaukee Downtown; Michael Weiss, partner, General Capital; and Greg Wesley, partner, MWH Law Group.
By of the

Roads remain closed in northern Wisconsin following torrential rains and flooding last week that caused almost $30 million in damages.

Six counties, the Bad River Tribe and the Department of Natural Resources submitted initial damage assessments over the weekend that totaled $29,612,481.

Iron County was hit the hardest, with $11,510,000 in damage to public infrastructure. Ashland and Bayfield counties suffered more than $5 million in damage to roads, bridges and trails, according to state emergency management officials.

While the state Department of Transportation is expecting to reopen U.S. Highway 2 in Ashland County on Monday, other roads may remain closed for days and weeks with detours posted.

Highway 13 remains closed between Mellen and Ashland; two sections of Highway 63 are closed in Bayfield County as well as parts of Highways 122 and 169 in Iron County; and Highway 35 in Burnett County.

A total of 280 homes were reported damaged, including 140 in Ashland County and 112 in Sawyer County. Ten homes were destroyed on Bad River tribal lands.

Officials expect the damage estimates to grow as more assessments are completed.

Journal Sentinel staffer Hannah Schwarz contributed to this report.
The second imported wheat deal in 2016 comes amid legal action against corruption in domestic wheat procurement

Egypt purchased Saturday an additional 300,000 tons of imported wheat in a public tender on a free-on-board basis with a separate freight offer, the General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) said on its website.

The state grain buyer GASC said the cargos are expected to be shipped from 21 to 30 August, giving a breakdown of the second imported wheat deal in 2016 as follows:

 120,000 tons of Romanian wheat from Amerroba at $174.33 per ton.

 60,000 tons of Romanian wheat from Cerialcom at $174.99 per ton.

 60,000 tons of Russian wheat from Aston at $175.05 per ton.

 60,000 tons of Russian wheat from Louis Dreyfus at $176.25 per ton.

Last week, GASC announced the purchase of 180,000 tons of Ukrainian and Russian wheat with an average price of $173.03 per ton.

The wheat tender comes after the Egyptian government decided to allow up to 0.05 percent ergot, a common grains fungus, in imported wheat shipments.

International firms will check the purchased wheat in ports prior to shipment to Egypt, to ensure adherence to international standards, Al-Ahram Arabic news website reported, citing GASC vice chairman Ahmed Youssef.

Youssef said that a technical committee, comprised of a number of Egyptian ministries, excluding the Ministry of Supply to ensure impartiality, will also check the wheat upon arrival to Egyptian ports.

Egypt has enough strategic reserves of the commodity to last until mid-January 2017, Minister of Supply Khaled Hanafi said last month.

Egypt has procured five million tons of domestic wheat, around 25 percent more than the targeted amount for this year.

On Thursday, Egypt's general prosecutor ordered the detention of silo owners involved in local wheat procurement corruption, as well as members of the governmental committee tasked with receiving the wheat.

According to a statement from his office, top prosecutor Nabil Sadek also imposed a travel ban on the defendants who face charges of "seizing public funds, forging official documents, and undermining the Egyptian economy and the national security of the country."

The statement by the general prosecutor's office referred to investigations conducted by the public funds prosecutor that revealed that local wheat procured by the government in documents was never delivered.

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Madison  Over the past two years, taxpayers shelled out $2.5 million in wages for nearly 400 prison workers to wait at home while they were investigated for alleged misconduct, records show.

Most of these workers were found to be at fault in some way. A few weren't. But they were all paid to do nothing for an average of 54 days and often despite some seemingly simple cases to sort out.

Seventy-two workers were paid at least $10,000 apiece while on leave, and one probation and parole agent was ultimately fired after being paid $79,725 while apparently on leave for nearly two years, according to records released to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

At times, workers waited on paid leave for weeks or even months and in the end received only a written reprimand. In other cases, investigators were deployed to look into a minor matter while more serious probes dragged on.

Those paid to stay home ranged from a female worker who reported being groped by an inmate to a psychologist accused of hanging out in his underwear with interns to workers who had criticized the Department of Corrections on social media.

"There has to be a better process," said Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton), pointing to the way serious and trivial offenses were seemingly grouped together. "It's pointless to put someone on paid leave for months and months and months when they haven't done something seriously wrong. ... It really gets to the heart of what the problem is with the process."

The documents, which show a unit of five investigators and corrections supervisors trying at times to investigate dozens of workers on paid leave, raise questions about whether taxpayers' money is being used efficiently.

"We're talking about limited resources. Do you want to spend time and money on something like this or actual criminal activity occurring? I'd say the latter," said Paul Secunda, an employment attorney and Marquette University Law School faculty member. "You're trying to save money by not having many investigators, but you end up being inefficient in processing these cases."

The state also potentially racks up overtime when another worker must be paid to fill the shoes of an employee on leave, Secunda said.

"This is a state where you watch every dime," Secunda said. "This is problematic."

The state prison system has been shifting its system for disciplining workers over the past five years. In 2011, Gov. Scott Walker and GOP lawmakers repealed most collective bargaining for unionized corrections officers, upending the traditional discipline and grievance system.

Newly appointed Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher is reviewing the process in light of a new law by Walker and lawmakers overhauling the state's civil service system, agency spokesman Tristan Cook said. Litscher is seeking to prioritize investigations falling under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act and to speed up the overall discipline process, he said.

"Secretary Litscher's overarching goal is to decrease the amount of time that staff are on administrative leave," Cook said.

Key findings

The state Department of Corrections took seven months to fulfill the open records request made by the Journal Sentinel for all the employees placed on paid leave between January 2014 and the beginning of 2016. The records showed that during that time:

 397 employees, or just over 4% of the agency's 8,980 employees, were paid $2.5 million in wages while on leave from the state Department of Corrections. At the state's troubled prison for juveniles, Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls  a facility that has been under criminal investigation for 18 months  37 workers received $308,000 while on leave.

 At least 18 employees were paid more than $20,000 while on leave.

 Of the employees put on paid leave, about 140 were ultimately fired; some 100 resigned or retired; about 50 were suspended or demoted; more than 35 received a written reprimand; and 17 others received no discipline. Several dozen others were on medical leave or still had an open investigation or "no known outcome" of the investigation, according to the documents.

Cook said that putting an employee on leave doesn't automatically lead to more overtime from other workers since prisons are supposed to be staffed to handle that. Litscher, however, has already had to raise worker pay to try to address staffing shortages in state prisons.

If law enforcement agencies are investigating a prison worker, they may also ask the agency to suspend the internal investigation until the criminal probe is done.

"DOC is not able to impose discipline until its personnel investigation is completed, so this may have the effect of lengthening an employee's administrative leave," Cook said.

The Department of Corrections hasn't provided most names of the employees it placed on paid leave, the allegations against them, or the findings of the investigation. But it's possible to identify a few cases.

Facebook investigation

In one, seven disgruntled prison workers posted a series of gripes and obscene put-downs on Facebook on August 13 of last year and talked about attending the agency's recruitment booth at the local county fair to share their negative views of their jobs with recruits.

"I suggest if you see people stopping at those booths you listen real close to the spiel they will spin on how great and rewarding corrections is," wrote Dave Elliott, then a corrections officer at Waupun Correctional Institute. "Then maybe tell them about lack of off time, low wages, being forced overtime, no representation in the workplace...they should be told the other side of the story."

In response, then Corrections Secretary Ed Wall posted an online agency message condemning the Facebook comments as "overt actions designed to undermine our department," saying the posters showed a "total disregard for their fellow employees."

Later that month, the agency's small unit of five special investigators, who are paid roughly $30 an hour, were assigned seven separate investigations into each employee's comments that would last three months each. Investigators took days to review social media posts and unrelated emails and interviewed the seven on paid leave, their co-workers and their supervisors, according to investigation logs.

Elliott and the six other employees collectively were paid more than $75,000 while on leave. One employee, who had simply posted "Damn fools" on the thread, received more than $9,000 to stay at home. The investigation wrapped up in November and resulted in one termination, no discipline for two of the employees, and written reprimands for the other four.

Dan Meehan, a former corrections worker and union leader, said of a female corrections official that he'd like to "punch that smiling parade Marshal bitch in the face." No one else on the thread "liked" his comment. It was referred to police, but Meehan was not charged  in part because in that same post he said that he had never hit a woman and never actually would.

While on paid leave and under investigation, employees remain at home or near a phone during the hours they would normally be at work.

"It put a lot of strain on my family," said Elliott, who ultimately got a note in his personnel file and a job reassignment. "We didn't know what was going on or what would happen. I wanted to be at work.

"I kept asking investigators, 'Why aren't we at work? We could be saving other officers from having to work a double shift.'"

Todd Lockwood, one of the correctional officers who was investigated and retired shortly after the investigation concluded, said he believed the scope of the investigation was meant to send a message: Don't criticize the department.

"You have staff and youth getting assaulted at Lincoln Hills and you're worried about what somebody's saying on Facebook?" Lockwood said.

In another case, officials at Lincoln Hills decided no investigation or discipline was warranted after then-chief psychologist Vincent Ramos admitted to superiors that he'd made crude remarks to a female co-worker about the breasts of a teenager with mental illness.

A female co-worker reported that Ramos had said the girl's breasts looked "worn out, used, and abused."

Instead of discipline, Ramos was given additional training and asked not to call female staff and inmates "honey" and "babe."

Months later, prison officials did follow through on allegations that Ramos took photos of psychology interns in his hotel room while in his underwear. That investigation lasted a month and Ramos was fired in December 2015, but not before receiving $10,000 while on paid leave.

"Everything is wrong about that from the beginning," Erpenbach said of that case. "That shouldn't take a month; that takes 10 minutes. There's absolutely no justification for that."

In another investigation, two Lincoln Hills workers spent nearly a year on paid leave after they attempted to subdue an inmate engaged in a fight and the teenager ended up with a fractured arm. During that time, investigators also probed allegations that, in separate and unrelated cases, the employees used excessive force with inmates.

Travis Taves was paid almost $40,000 over nearly a year. His co-worker Timothy Johnson was put on leave for 10 months before he resigned, after receiving nearly $45,000 while under investigation.

In a much different case at Lincoln Hills, a female employee was groped by a teenage inmate and then was put on paid leave for five weeks while the agency investigated prisoners' claims that the victim had invited the touching. She was paid more than $3,500.

The female employee wasn't interviewed by investigators until nearly two months after reporting the groping. To the victim's frustration, the investigators interviewed nine inmates but no staff members.

"Why is it that my partner or even Denise (Dillenberg, who witnessed the taunting of the victim by inmates) have not been talked to about any of these supposed allegations?" the employee told investigators. "I'm a little flabbergasted that nobody's been talked to."

The investigation was dropped weeks later after an inmate threatened to level false allegations against another staff member, and said he would trump up baseless charges in a similar fashion to what was done to the female employee.

Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
Sarah Lloyd (left) and W. Michael Slattery (right) are running in the Democratic primary for the 6th Congressional District, held by Republican Glenn Grothman. Credit: Handout

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Visit our election section for complete coverage of the 2016 spring and fall local, state and national elections.

By of the

The two candidates in the Aug. 9 Democratic partisan primary election for Wisconsin's 6th Congressional District seat are both rivals and friends. Sarah Lloyd and W. Michael Slattery walked together, with Russ Feingold, in Fourth of July parades in Oshkosh and Omro.

Lloyd, of Wisconsin Dells, and Slattery, of Maribel, know each other through their involvement in the Wisconsin Farmers Union and Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative. They also crossed paths while campaigning at June Dairy Month breakfasts in the district.

Both Lloyd and Slattery work on family farms. Strengthening local and agricultural economies is at the core of their campaigns.

The candidate who receives the most votes in the primary will move on to challenge incumbent U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican, for a seat in Congress in the Nov. 8 general election. Independent Jeff Dahlke of Mequon also is running.

The 6th District sprawls across east-central Wisconsin from Sheboygan to Wisconsin Dells.

Lloyd, 44, separates herself from Slattery by telling voters that only she has experience in public office. She served two terms on the Columbia County board of supervisors from 2004 to 2007.

As a supervisor on health and human services and nursing home committees, she gained an understanding of how federal Medicare and state Medicaid programs affect the lives of urban and rural people, Lloyd said.

Slattery, 70, said his varied experience in international trade and finance before turning to farming in 1999 makes him a more qualified candidate to represent the district in Congress.

He worked for 12 years, from 1982 to 1993, in a loan office of Japan's largest bank inside the World Trade Center in New York City. He subsequently worked for six years for a large U.S. finance company in Tokyo.

The two friendly rivals criticize Grothman for contributing to a Republican strategy of obstructing action in Congress on Democratic proposals. As a consequence, Congress has not taken action to beef up the Social Security trust fund or Medicare, they said.

"The public is not satisfied with this stalemate in Congress," Lloyd said.

Slattery describes Grothman as a career politician who moved to Congress after 23 years in the state Legislature.

"Career politicians are divorced from the needs of citizens," he said.

Lloyd works with her husband, Nels Nelson, on his family's 400-cow dairy farm in Columbia County. She also works for the Wisconsin Farmers Union and the Wisconsin Food Hub Cooperative to help farmers build their businesses and gain access to better markets.

She served on the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board from 2008 to 2014.

In 2013, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack appointed Lloyd to a three-year term on the National Dairy Board, where she represents Wisconsin dairy farmers.

Why should urban residents vote for her?

"We're all in this together," Lloyd said. "We need to build an economy that has good jobs with wages that support working families so they can pay good prices for farm products. We can do this by investing in education and technical training so workers have the skills they need for jobs."

And Congress can do more to aid local economies by investing federal dollars in roads, bridges and renewable energy, Lloyd said.

Slattery shares that goal. He also wants Congress to help modernize water and sewer systems.

Slattery and his wife, Nancy, grow corn, soybeans, winter wheat and alfalfa on the Manitowoc County farm they have owned since 1999. They also raise Holstein steers, lambs and chickens.

If elected to Congress, his international finance experience would give him a unique set of credentials to weigh in on trade deals and treaties, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, Slattery said.

"These agreements are always negotiated primarily in the interests both of U.S. global companies and their foreign operations," he said.

He believes free-trade agreements have resulted in job losses here.
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By of the

For the second time in two years, former state Sen. Gary George is looking to unseat Wisconsin congresswoman Gwen Moore from the 4th District, which she has represented for more than a decade.

A convicted felon and veteran lawmaker who lost a 2003 recall election, George said Moore has shown little or no leadership on a host of issues that concern her constituents  from crime and job creation to education funding and the student debt crisis.

"She has a power to be a voice...to stand up on the bully pulpit and speak out on those issues....That's what I did in the Senate, and that's what I think the people deserve," said George, whose criminal conviction prohibits him from holding state office, but not a federal post.

Moore said she has brought millions of dollars into the district for projects related to transportation, manufacturing and more over the years. And she said her seniority will benefit constituents in upcoming battles over gun control and Republican efforts to slash the social safety net.

"The currency of power up here is not just money, it's seniority," said Moore, who serves on Financial Services Committee and House Committee on Budget, among other posts. "I've developed a cachet in relationships with lots of members, and I intend to cash in on that."

She was first elected to Congress in 2004.

The two will face off in the Aug. 9 Democratic primary. It's likely to be a tough slog for George, who took just 29% of the vote to Moore's 71% in the 2014 primary.

Moore also has the cash to weather the challenge. Her campaign raised almost $120,000 last year and nearly $130,000 in the first quarter of 2016, according to the Federal Election Commission.

George would not say how much he's raised, but it's less than the $5,000-plus that would trigger FEC reporting requirements.

The winner will face two challengers in the Nov. 8 general election: Independent Robert R. Raymond and Libertarian Andy Craig. The district is heavily Democratic.

Looking ahead, Moore said she intends to push back on Republican efforts to cut Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid and other safety net programs.

She hopes to see legislation requiring background checks for firearm purchases. And, in response to concerns about police shootings around the country, she said, she's working on a bill that would provide additional funding for departments that voluntarily implement de-escalation training for officers.

She would lobby, she said, for a new stimulus package to spur the economy.

And on poverty, she endorses the so-called "10-20-30" proposal that would require 10% of government resources to go to census tracts where 20% of residents have lived in poverty for 30 years or more.

If elected to Congress, George said, he would immediately call for more federal resources to address what he describes as the "out-of-control crime wave in Milwaukee."

He envisions a surge that would put in place more police, U.S. marshals, FBI agents and "the National Guard if necessary" in an effort to deter homicides, shootings, carjackings and other crimes.

George said he would be much more visible and vocal about the challenges confronting Milwaukee residents  lead poisoning, lack of jobs, underfunded schools and poverty, among others  and would work for more federal resources to address them.

A Bernie Sanders supporter, he blasted Moore for accepting money from Wall Street and insisted  after first skirting the question  that he would not do so.

He said Moore has become part of the "insider class" in Washington.

"She is a friend of the administration, but where is the constituents' benefit?" said George.

George, who has lived for years in the Town of Grafton, said he has moved to a condo on N. Prospect Ave. that is held in the name of his mother.

He said his family "still has an interest" in the Grafton home.

George was recalled from his state Senate post in October 2003 and a month later was indicted on two counts: defrauding the government and accepting kickbacks. He was convicted in 2004 of one felony count of conspiring to defraud the government.

He served about three years in prison and lost his license to practice law, but it has since been reinstated.

George said he was targeted for recall because of his opposition to the Potawatomi Casino. And he continues to assert his innocence on the fraud charge.

"But that was a long time ago, and I paid my price," George said. "And the people believe in second chances, and that's what I'm asking for."

An earlier version of this story incorrectly included Republican Weldon Carnahan among the candidates who will appear on the ballot in the November general election.
This photo of a Syrian refugee girl was taken by Syrian-born pediatric neurologist Tarif Bakdash.

"She's looking at me."

The doctor speaks softly, staring at the photograph he took in late March of a Syrian refugee girl in Jordan, 2, maybe 3 years old. Her dark, expressionless eyes bore into his.

And for a moment, Tarif Bakdash's thoughts drift far from his Brookfield apartment and his hectic life since the medical mission to the Zaatari refugee camp.

From Jordan, the neurologist flew to Germany, where he met with more refugees and heard stories of their perilous exodus from Syria, crossing the Aegean to Greece on flimsy, rubber boats.

From Germany, he flew home in early April. His stay was brief.

Shortly before the mission, Bakdash had resigned from his job at Children's Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin, yearning for a position that would allow more time to help refugees from his homeland.

So, four days after coming back, he hit the road again, journeying to interviews in six cities: Spokane, Wash.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Springfield, Ill.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Little Rock, Ark.; and St. Paul, Minn. Those added to five interviews he went to before the trip to Jordan.

Back in Brookfield, he has job offers and a decision to make.

Journey to Jordan Published July 10, 2016 July 10 : Mission to heal

Anguished over the civil war wrenching his homeland, Tarif Bakdash leads a medical mission to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan.

: Anguished over the civil war wrenching his homeland, Tarif Bakdash leads a medical mission to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. July 13 : Four days in Zaatari

Members of the mission come face to face with the suffering of Syrian refugees and learn what they can and cannot change.

: Members of the mission come face to face with the suffering of Syrian refugees and learn what they can and cannot change. July 17: To change a life

Haunted by the images from the refugee camp, Bakdash struggles from 6,000 miles away to help his fellow countrymen. For stories, blog posts, photos and videos from the March mission to Jordan look back at our Reporter's Notebook.

Yet there he sits in his apartment, transfixed by the nameless refugee girl, whose face seems to contain the essence of Zaatari, a temporary home that feels to many refugees neither temporary, nor home.

Her brown eyes look old, he says, too old for the baby fat on her cheeks and fingers. They look like the eyes of an adult.

Bakdash makes the photo of the little girl the profile picture on his Facebook page. He makes her photo the wallpaper on his laptop.

He makes it so that her eyes stare at him all day.



Months after returning to Wisconsin, the doctors, nurses and others who accompanied Bakdash often wonder about the refugees they met in Jordan.

Neurologist Thomas Chelimsky pictures the woman with the bloodshot right eye, his last patient at the refugee camp, and his most complex. She could no longer move the eye.

She was about 40 years old, and at first he could not identify her medical condition. He asked her questions and after a few minutes, the diagnosis came to him: cavernous sinus thrombosis, a blood clot at the base of the brain caused by an infection. It is both life-threatening and rare.

Chelimsky filled out a slip for her saying she was in urgent need of an MRI scan of her brain. Then the clinic closed for the day. She became someone else's patient and he, another foreign doctor, headed home.

"She did not appear scared when I told her what I thought was going on," Chelimsky says. "She seemed quite inwardly healthy, able to handle this, like a mom who has seen much more difficult things in her life."

Mark Hoffman Registered nurse Jennifer Nitschke-Thomas (right) assists Syrian refugee Wesal Al Kurdy, who had a stroke and required physical therapy.

Jennifer Nitschke-Thomas, one of two nurses on the mission, remembers the 60-year-old woman who'd had a recent stroke and was now on her own. The woman's son was still in prison in Syria. Her daughter had been kicked out of the refugee camp.

The woman had very limited motion in her right arm and hand, making it hard to cook or perform the simple tasks of daily life.

"She had no other family to take care of her," says Nitschke-Thomas. "She just seemed devastated, without support."

Stacey Volkman, a social worker from Froedtert Hospital, remembers a little girl she knelt beside. Around the girl's head Volkman placed a string of beads.

"There looked to be so much sadness in her eyes. But the more I thought about it, I began to wonder if it was just me projecting my feelings onto her," Volkman says. "The war has been carrying on for so long, how could she know the Syria before the war, and the traumatic upheaval?"

For Bakdash, there is the nameless girl in the photograph.

And then there is Sandy Al Mekdad, an 8-year-old girl whose dilemma keeps churning through the doctor's mind. Without surgery, her tethered spinal cord will deteriorate, leaving her permanently paralyzed.

But the surgery cannot be performed at the camp, and her family cannot afford to pay an outside hospital. Jordanian hospitals do not treat refugees unless they know someone will pay.

So, 6,000 miles away, Bakdash tries to solve the problem that has stymied Sandy's father.

He contacts a neurosurgeon he met during his visit to the University of Jordan. Bakdash explains the girl's condition and asks: Can you help her?

The surgeon is willing to try.



The big picture feels overwhelming, even to Bakdash. After five years of civil war, his country is in danger of losing a generation.

Of the 4.8 million refugees who have fled Syria, more than 2.5 million are under the age of 18. And the children who remain appear ill-prepared for the future task of rebuilding their country.

According to a United Nations report, there have been more than 4,000 attacks on schools; more than 2 million Syrian children no longer attend school.

Helping a single child Syrian-born Tarif Bakdash, a pediatric neurologist, talks about the case of 8-year-old Sandy Al Mekdad, a Syrian refugee he met while on a medical mission to Jordan who he has continued to try to help from the United States. (Video by Mark Hoffman)

One in four children is at risk of developing mental health disorders, the U.N. says. Girls are increasingly vulnerable to child marriages, domestic and sexual violence; boys increasingly risk "recruitment into armed groups" and "dangerous child labor, including scavenging for explosive devices."

So far, the United States has provided a haven for relatively few refugees from the Syrian civil war, although the numbers have been increasing. In the last five years, just over 7,000 Syrian refugees have entered the U.S. More than half have of them have come since January. In the early years of the war, the numbers amounted to a trickle  23 in 2011, 41 in 2012 and 45 in 2013.

During those same three years, the U.S. admitted more than 41,000 Iraqi refugees (though in the early years of the Iraq War the numbers were much smaller).

The American response to refugees fleeing the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia was similarly lopsided. Between 1990 and 2003, the U.S. welcomed 143,000 refugees from Bosnia, but 1,116 from Rwanda.

The difference was likely due to several factors, including America's strategic interest in Europe and lack of equivalent interest in central Africa, says Carl Bon Tempo, author of "Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War." Also the process of screening, interviewing and transporting refugees was simpler in the Balkans than it was in Rwanda.

"One of the things that happened in the post-9-11 years is that this process has begun to take a lot longer," Bon Tempo says.

Syrians face another challenge. Unlike other refugee groups, "There's not somebody in there lobbying for them," says Claudena Skran, author of "Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime." "And there's the additional problem. They do have somebody lobbying against them."

The "against group" includes the 30 state governors, Wisconsin's Scott Walker among them, who have opposed accepting Syrian refugees.

But as Skran, a professor at Lawrence University, sees it, "refugees are the most screened group coming into the United States. They pose very little security threat. The real security risk is leaving people on their own in refugee camps. The real risk is not doing anything."



Syrian healthcare has been so ravaged by the Civil War that medical residents and even veterinarians have been working as doctors in some of the hospitals. To help them, doctors from outside Syria have used the instant messaging system Viber to collaborate on cases. Medical teams inside Syria send photos, vital signs and descriptions of patients; doctors outside the country assess the information and provide advice on treatment.

The exchange below is an example. Keep in mind that a healthy blood pressure is 120 over 80. A hemoglobin level of 8 is not good. It means the patient has lost a considerable amount of blood.

I have a patient who was stabbed in the eye and the nose and the chest over the seventh (rib).

Syrian Doctor I sutured him. There's no injury inside the chest or belly. He's intubated..

Syrian Doctor Blood pressure 64 over 37.

Syrian Doctor I gave him 1 unit blood during surgery, 1 liter of liquids. Gave him another unit liquid. No urine output.

Syrian Doctor Blood pressure improved, 75 over 41.

Syrian Doctor Gave him another liter of liquids and gave him antibiotics.

Syrian Doctor What's his hemoglobin.

Outside Doctor 8.

Syrian Doctor

Some days Bakdash finds no good news, just a paralyzing sense of helplessness.

"They killed one of our doctors," he says one afternoon in mid-April.

Bakdash points to the photograph of a bombed-out gray car that had belonged to a doctor working at one of the underground cave hospitals inside Syria.

Hasan Al-A'raj, the health director of Hama and the only cardiologist left in the city, had been working at a hospital dug into the side of a mountain. He'd left the hospital in his car around noon to interview potential paramedics and drivers for an emergency response program, according to the Syrian American Medical Society.

Al-A'raj drove just 100 meters from the hospital before his vehicle was struck by an air-to-surface missile, killing him instantly. He left behind a wife and five children, ranging in age from 1 to 17.

"I never met him, but I can imagine just how important his work has been," Bakdash says. "Every health care provider we lose hurts hundreds if not thousands."

Two weeks later, an airstrike hits a hospital in Aleppo, killing at least 50 people and injuring 80 more.

Among the dead is a man named Muhammad Wassim Mo'az, the last pediatrician in Aleppo.

In a New York Times commentary, one of the man's colleagues describes the task of staffing a hospital in a city so heavily bombarded "that even the stones are catching fire."

"Doctors and nurses are trying our best to put on a brave face for our patients. We know that for the community we serve we represent a last hope, the final defenders of life in this city," writes Osama Abo El Ezz, Aleppo coordinator for the medical society.

"But we are also among the fallen. We have all lost medical brothers and sisters to barrel bombs and missile strikes, but we keep working through the night. We have seen neighbors and friends die in front of us. We are exhausted and there are not many of us left, but we continue our 20-hour shifts."



Such descriptions remind Bakdash that the safety he has enjoyed at American hospitals is a luxury.

In Syria, so many doctors have fled or been killed that medical residents now work as doctors. Veterinarians are treating patients in some hospitals, according to both the medical society and Physicians for Human Rights.

Each time Bakdash reads about the death of another Syrian doctor, or about the desperate conditions in the hospitals, "I always feel the urge to go," he says.

But he cannot leave his aging parents, who now live just down the road from him in Brookfield.

So, he continues his weekly 6 a.m. Skype sessions, assisting the psychologist who runs the only mental health clinic still operating in northern Syria. He watches the father try to wrap his son's flailing arms in a hug. He listens to the mother who reports her daughter's medicine is reducing seizures, but also making the girl angry. From thousands of miles away, Bakdash offers advice on medications and other treatments.

On other days he talks to Milwaukee schools about his homeland's civil war and sits for radio interviews  and he feels embarrassed because it never seems like enough.

In May, Bakdash joins a group of outside doctors who use the instant messaging system Viber to assist the embattled medical personnel inside Syria.

Bakdash's cellphone becomes an hour-by-hour record of desperation. The tiny screen carries bloody photographs of the wounded along with the pleas of their Syrian caregivers. Bakdash looks at the photographs and vital signs and tries to help the medical staff when he can. Often, though, cases involve life-threatening trauma and require urgent surgical decisions that fall outside his expertise.

Instead, the messages become a way of tracking the war, keeping the horror of it front and center in his life.

"Three people died in Aleppo," he says one day, "three children."

He shares a photograph of a girl who was crushed, a large portion of her skull now a cavern. In a few places clumps of black hair can be seen matted with blood.

"The two hemispheres were entirely absent," a medical technician had messaged, describing missing portions of her brain, then adding a note of bewilderment: "Don't know what kind of weapons can do this."

Bakdash stares hard at the photo, trying to estimate the girl's age. Only by looking at a second photo is he able to guess from the size of her hands that the girl is probably a teenager.

The medical technician had sent a second message a short time later, asking: "Is there hope for her, or should we let her go?"

There was no hope, Bakdash explains.

The girl died.

From Viber message This photo shows a rocket that struck a civilian in Syria. The image was sent to Syrian-born pediatric neurologist Tarif Bakdash by a physician in Syria.

One day Bakdash receives a photograph of a man's torso with the tail of a rocket jutting out.

Before doctors operate they worry whether the rocket could still detonate. As it turns out, there is no risk, says Richard Stevens, a weapons expert from the group CAT-UXO, who later examines a photo and X-ray of the patient. The rocket is missing its warhead.

It is unclear whether the Syrian medical team knew this when they began surgery. They succeeded in extracting the rocket from the man's abdomen.

The man survived.



Want to help? Here's how Here are some groups active in efforts to help Syrian refugees  and others in need around the globe. In most cases, donations can be made through the groups website. The Syrian American Medical Society Foundation, based in Canfield, Ohio, is a non-profit humanitarian organization that supports hospitals and ambulances and provides shipments of medical supplies and equipment. The societys volunteer physicians deliver medical care to residents inside Syria and to refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. Phone: (866) 809-9039. Website: , based in Canfield, Ohio, is a non-profit humanitarian organization that supports hospitals and ambulances and provides shipments of medical supplies and equipment. The societys volunteer physicians deliver medical care to residents inside Syria and to refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon. Phone: (866) 809-9039. Website: www.sams-usa.net/foundation/ Save the Children, is a non-profit humanitarian organization, which provides, among other things, food, clean water, shelter and emergency care to refugees and those inside Syria. Phone: 203-221-4000. Web site: , is a non-profit humanitarian organization, which provides, among other things, food, clean water, shelter and emergency care to refugees and those inside Syria. Phone: 203-221-4000. Web site: www.savethechildren.org UNHCR is the United Nations Refugee Agency. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency provides emergency supplies and long-term assistance to refugees. Phone: 41-22-739-8111. Web site: is the United Nations Refugee Agency. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the agency provides emergency supplies and long-term assistance to refugees. Phone: 41-22-739-8111. Web site: www.unhcr.org/en-us/ The International Red Cross helps people in areas affected by armed conflict. Phone: 41-22-730-21-71. Web site: helps people in areas affected by armed conflict. Phone: 41-22-730-21-71. Web site: www.icrc.org The Salvatorian Mission Warehouse, based in New Holstein serves scores of missions in dozens of countries, shipping containers of food, clothing and medical supplies. Phone: 920-898-5898. Web site: , based in New Holstein serves scores of missions in dozens of countries, shipping containers of food, clothing and medical supplies. Phone: 920-898-5898. Web site: www.salvatorianmissionwarehouse.org/

In his public talks, the doctor grows more direct, dispensing with subtlety. He tells a high school history and psychology class that it is not enough to pray for the Syrians.

"Praying without action," he says, "is worthless."

He takes the students at Morse-Marshall High School through the numbers  the dead (470,000), those living in besieged areas (800,000), the decline in average lifespan in Syria since the war (from 76 years to 55).

Then he shows them a photograph, dead children laid out in rows. Many have been disfigured by bombs.

"Where's the head?" he demands, pointing at the image of a child who has been decapitated. "Tell me, where is the head? Where is the head?

"This is real."

He shows another photograph of a little girl with her arms raised above her head. He explains that when the girl saw the photographer's camera she thought it was a weapon. She knew to surrender.

After Bakdash finishes, three students linger behind, asking about the possibility of accompanying the doctor on his next trip to Jordan.



Mark Hoffman Brookfield pediatric neurologist Tarif Bakdash examines 8-year-old Sandy Al Mekdad who has condition known as a tethered spinal cord. She now suffers from incontinence and leg pain. The defect can be corrected by surgery,but the procedure cannot be done inside the camp. Photo Gallery: Easing refugees' trauma

Late in May, Bakdash checks back with the father of Sandy Al Mekdad and with the neurosurgeon at the University of Jordan to find out what is happening with her surgery.

He learns that the neurosurgeon has been unable to reach Sandy's father. It is often very difficult to reach refugees in the Zaatari camp. Many do not have cellphones, though Sandy's father, Mahmood Al Mekdad, does.

Bakdash makes sure the father and surgeon have correct phone numbers for each other. Finally they talk, and the doctor agrees to examine Sandy.

An appointment outside the camp, however, is no simple matter.

The father must receive approval to leave the camp temporarily from a Jordanian nonprofit inside Zaatari. Then he must stand in line to receive permission from U.N. officials.

The line is long, often 300 people. But the father is determined.

He says he will line up at 2 in the morning.



With three job offers to choose from, Bakdash makes his decision.

He is going to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, where he will teach and treat patients. The university, one of the places he visited before the trip to Zaatari, is granting him six weeks of time off; he intends to spend it on more medical missions.

the patient with the 4 th vertebral fracture, I will send him to turkey. Is that ok ?

Syrian ICU Doctor make sure he is stabilized so the spine is stable

ICU expert in the U.S. he needs a CT of the back with mostly surgical intervention

ICU expert in the U.S.

Although the trip to Zaatari was brief, just four days, Bakdash sees the fruits of it long after his return.

Following news reports on the journey to Zaatari, a nonprofit group contacts Bakdash. Salvatorian Mission Warehouse in New Holstein arranges to send a large container with 10,000 pounds of medical products, clothing, food and hygiene supplies to a refugee camp in Turkey.

"If this goes OK, then we will try for other refugee camps," says David Holton, the warehouse director.

A local public radio station interviews Bakdash, and afterward one of the listeners sends clothing for him to donate. People email the doctor, interested in doing mission work to help the refugees.

In June, a Madison group called Open Doors to Refugees invites Bakdash to speak at a benefit that raises $1,600. He presents his slide show, warning the small crowd of 60, "Some of these photos are going to be tough."

He shows them the rows of dead children.

"We lose people night and day," he says. "We have bullets in the heads of kids. We have bullets in their backs, shrapnel in their eyes. You name it...

"These are kids. They're being killed. You don't bring these kids here, most of them will probably end up like this.

"Do we have a responsibility? Oh, you bet we do."

He shows them the photo of the little refugee girl from his Facebook page, "a picture that keeps haunting me," he tells them.

"Look at her eyes. She is looking at you."



At 2 in the morning, his alarm sounds. The doctor wakes, flicks on the light and shuffles into the living room in his pajamas to call Syria.

It is the holy month of Ramadan, and, to accommodate his schedule of eating before each 18-hour fast, Bakdash must wake much earlier for his weekly Skype sessions with the mental health clinic.

On this morning in late June, there are technical problems and he cannot use Skype to see the patients. Unwilling to give up, he calls by cellphone, chatting with the psychologist who runs the clinic, while children wail in the background.

It is hard enough to practice medicine from 6,000 miles away, with only a few minutes to view and speak with each patient on Skype. By phone, the task is more difficult still. Bakdash picks up bits and pieces:

A boy, a year and a half old with seizures and developmental delays. Bakdash changes the child's medications, getting rid of one that can cause liver damage in very young children.

A 5-year-old boy, who suffers from drop attacks, seizures in which he crashes to the ground. One such fall resulted in a skull fracture. Bakdash advises the psychologist to increase one medication.

A 15-year-old girl who has been experiencing abnormal facial movements when she is upset. She is to be married soon. Bakdash believes the problem's origin may be psychological rather than physical. It would help if he could see her. Instead, he must ask the parents to record her when she has an episode and bring the footage when they return.

After the patients depart, the 39-year-old psychologist, Musab al-Jaweesh, confides in Bakdash. The clinic is struggling financially. The Canadian nonprofit agency that was supporting its work is unable to do so any longer. Although the Syrian American Medical Society has agreed to step in, the process of transferring funds is not so simple and the money has yet to arrive.

In the meantime, Jaweesh has kept the clinic going with his own money. The electricity cuts off so often that he needs to buy a generator. Keeping medications on hand is sufficiently risky that he pays two bodyguards to protect the clinic.

Bakdash listens sympathetically, suggesting that the psychologist may have to close the clinic until money arrives.

"I can't," Jaweesh says. "I can't close it."



Family photo Tarif Bakdash (center) with his parents Fouad (left) and Nawal (right).

Bakdash's departure is set. In the third week of July he will leave for Mississippi, taking with him his parents, though both would rather be returning to Syria.

His mother and father came to America in 2012 when conditions in their country were growing worse. They expected to stay only a few months. It has now been four years and they miss their homeland terribly.

"We have roots," his father, Fouad Bakdash, explains.

His mother, Nawal Bakdash, says simply, "I want to die in Syria."

She has no illusions about the country she would find on her return. Just thinking about Syria reminds her of her college years when she majored in English literature and developed a fondness for the poet T.S. Eliot.

"I studied 'The Wasteland,'" she says. "Now my country is the wasteland."



About these stories A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter and photographer accompanied the team from Wisconsin on the mission to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. In cases where scenes were not witnessed by a reporter, they are based on detailed interviews with participants. In addition to multiple interviews with Tarif Bakdash, details of his past were verified through interviews with past colleagues, old emails, medical board records in different states and an interview with his parents. Bakdash allowed a reporter to watch him conduct several Skype sessions with a mental health clinic inside Syria and to read Viber messages sent from hospitals inside Syria. Interviews were also conducted with experts familiar with the situation inside Syria and with others familiar with immigration law. International reporting for this project was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The funders have no involvement in or influence over the reporting, editing or presentation of the articles, photos and videos that are part of this project.

Six thousand miles away in Jordan, Mahmood Al Mekdad, waits in line and receives U.N. permission to leave Zaatari. Then he takes his daughter to see the surgeon in Amman.

Bakdash calls to find out what happened.

After examining Sandy, the doctor at the University of Jordan agreed that she needs surgery. She will still require an approval from a Jordanian medical relief agency.

Almost three months after meeting the girl, Bakdash has found a doctor willing to perform the operation.

The surgeon says he will charge no fee.

For one child, one of millions of refugees, there is hope.

International reporting for this project was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

twitter.com/majohnso markjohnson@journalsentinel.com
'This is the right time to exhale': David Stearns ends seven-year run

The 37-year-old cited a desire to spend more time with family in stepping back to an advisory role, but the New York Mets are sure to be interested.
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Maan News Agency |  

GAZA (Maan)  The Hamas movement organized several demonstrations in the besieged Gaza Strip Saturday morning, rejecting Friday nights attempted military coup in Turkey and expressing joy at its failure, while the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority also came out in support of the Turkish governments triumph of democracy.

Demonstrations started in the Khan Younis area of the southern Gaza Strip, where participants raised Turkish flags and posters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In Gaza City, a demonstration was held near al-Tayaran junction, and another in Palestine square. Another demonstration is expected to be held later Saturday afternoon in the northern parts of the besieged coastal enclave.

Among the participants of the demonstrations were leaders of the Islamic political movement including Ismail Radwan and Mahir Sabra, as well as youth participants of the Hamas-run summer camps in the area.

Radwan said demonstrations in support of Turkey and Erdogan will continue, because Turkey stood with the Palestinians and supported their cause, referring to last months rapprochement deal between Israel and Turkey. Despite the deals failure to end the decade-long blockade of Gaza, Hamas leaders praised Turkey for its official and popular efforts to ease the Gaza blockade.

Radwan continued by praising the Turkish people for preserving the democratic choice in their country, drawing parallels between the current Turkish government, and the Hamas government in Gaza which was democratically elected to rule the besieged coastal enclave in 2006.

The Gaza Strip has suffered from an Israeli military blockade following Hamas victory in general elections and the violent conflict between Fatah and Hamas that ensued, leading to Hamas taking control of the government through an armed struggle.

Israeli and Turkish diplomatic relations fell apart after Israeli forces in 2010 attacked the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara  the first Freedom Flotilla, resulting in the deaths of ten Turkish activists attempting to deliver much-needed humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip. The incident sparked international outcry and severed diplomatic ties between the two countries.

The rapprochement deal which normalized diplomatic ties between Israel and Turkey allowed aid to arrive in the Gaza Strip this month via Israels Ashdod port as part of the brokered deal. The Turkish government has held long-term support for Hamas, while acting as a vocal critic of the Israeli blockade on Gaza.

Erdogan has defended the Hamas movement in the past, stating that the group is a legitimate political party and Israels label of Hamas as a terrorist group  along with the majority of Palestinian political factions  is aimed at eroding Palestinian democracy. Turkey was also one of the first countries in the world to officially recognize an independent Palestinian state.

Meanwhile, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki telephoned his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu on behalf of President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah on Saturday, congratulating Turkey on the triumph of democracy and the defeat of the coup plotters and their failure to convulse the stability of the Turkish republic, according to a statement released by the Palestinian Authoritys Foreign Ministry.

According to the statement, al-Maliki said that the Palestinian people, president, and government stand by our friends: the Turkish republic, president, people, and their democratically-elected government.

The Turkish foreign minister responded by expressing gratitude to Palestine on behalf of the government of Turkey and the Turkish president, applauding the Palestinian leadership for their honorable attitude.

Via Maan News Agency |  
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By Mustafa Habib | Baghdad | (Niqash.org) |  

It is slowly becoming clear that the extremist Islamic State group is returning to its roots, setting off bombs to kill innocents in crowded places, to cause chaos. Then it plans to take advantage of the unrest.

The extremist group known as the Islamic State has lost major amounts of territory over the past six months and in terms of its stated goal of creating an actual state that will remain and expand, it is certainly failing. However, this has also meant a change of tactics. Rather than acting like an army that fights other armies, the Islamic State, or IS, group is returning to the tactics of the organisation from which it was born, Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Since February 2016 the number of terrorist-style bombings per day has increased quickly, says senior Baghdad police officer, Karim al-Muhamadawi. Over the past year the number of suicide bombings and detonations of improvised explosive devices had been decreasing, he told NIQASH; analysts think it was because the IS group was busy running its own areas. There was only one or two explosions every day. But now things have changed.

There are around six to ten explosions every day at the moment, al-Muhamadawi says, and even that number is going up, especially after the IS group were pushed out of Fallujah, their main stronghold near Baghdad.

Locals in Baghdad say they are worried about even going to the market now; just this week, there was another bombing at a busy Baghdad market.

Reports by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior also indicate an increase in the number of roadside bombings targeting army and police. There had been a hope that once the IS group had been weakened in the cities it was holding, it would no longer be able to carry out these kinds of attacks.

The question for most Iraqis now is this: Who is carrying out these attacks in areas populated mostly by Shiite Muslims? After all, the IS group is a Sunni Muslim organization and many neighbourhoods in cities like Baghdad became dominated by one sect or another, for safetys sake, after the conflict in the mid to late 2000s.

Our investigations have found that there are sleeper cells inside cities, al-Muhamadawi explains. They are composed of ordinary people who do ordinary jobs  like construction or carpentry. Some of them are even government employees.

These cells work to gather intelligence about suitable targets.

They collect information on residents in different areas and make sure they know what size security forces are in the area, then they help the IS group choose targets and timing, al-Muhamadawi says. The spies dont actually do any of the military work.

As an example, al-Muhamadawi says that two weeks ago police arrested a senior member of the IS group in the southern Baghdad neighbourhood of Dora. He was a 26-year-old who pretended he was Shiite Muslim, hanging pictures of Shiite Muslim religious figures around his house, so as not to cause suspicions.

The tactics now being used by the IS group are almost certainly deliberate, sewing sectarian discord and weakening the political system in Iraq.

The terrible bombing in the bustling Baghdad district of Karrada recently, that claimed 292 lives in the truck bomb blast and the ensuing fire, saw almost the whole city in mourning over the Eid holiday. An attack in a multi-sectarian area like Karrada cannot help but cause neighbours to become suspicious of neighbours. Iraqi social media has seen a greater exchange of accusations and sectarian slurs too.

More recently an attempted suicide bomb attack at a Shiite Muslim shrine in Balad, in Salahaddin, north of Baghdad, has been compared to the Al Qaeda attack on Shiite shrines in Samarra in 2006. This attack was seen as a major driver of the Shiite-on-Sunni sectarian violence that plagued Iraq between 2006 and 2008.

Before mid-2014 when the IS group were able to take over whole cities, Al Qaeda in Iraq had used precisely these tactics to cause chaos they could then exploit. Certainly, the political mess and long standing differences in Mosul helped the IS group to take over there in 2014.

Today there are other issues the extremist group can exploit. These include continuing abuses of the Sunni Muslim population in areas that the IS group has been pushed out of, hundreds of thousands of displaced Sunni Muslims living in difficult conditions, political conflicts between the ruling Shiite Muslim alliance, lack of reform, a change of government and fear of the Shiite Muslim militias fighting the IS group.

There is certainly a plan to ignite sectarian violence in Iraq, argues Kazem al-Shammari, an MP who is part of a cross-sectarian bloc in Parliament. And there are groups who participate in this plan just by doing what they do, creating sectarian trouble and sectarian fighting, just as happened in 2006. The Karrada bombing, the attack in Balad and the targeting of displaced peoples camps in the Dora area as well as the controversial statements being made by some politicians are all frightening indicators about the future of this country, he concludes.

Both the Iraqi President, Iraqi Kurdish politician, Fuad Masum, and the Speaker of Parliament, Sunni Muslim politician, Salim al-Jibouri, have issued statements along the lines that they too believe the aim of the recent attacks is to ignite another sectarian war in Iraq.

It is clear to everyone now that, although the Iraqi militarys ability to defeat the extremists has been proven, the ongoing fight against the Islamic State group is going to be different. It will be more political and related to the quality of intelligence that can be gathered.

The political issues will be related to transitional justice, security and service-related problems and how quickly the displaced can return to their homes. The intelligence-gathering issues lie at the heart of the matter though; the weakness of security forces in this area due to administrative corruption has resulted in a lack of ability to detect these so-called sleeper cells.

Via Niqash.org



Related video added by Juan Cole:

CCTV:  Life under the rule of ISIL
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment)  

President Tayyip Erdogan is taking advantage of the failed coup against him to purge the judiciary and security forces of anyone who is lukewarm toward or actively critical of him.

These steps are, of course, the opposite of the ones Erdogan should be taking he should be attempting to bring the country together in unity and to re-include in the polity those he has isolated and excluded in recent years. Instead, he is scapegoating and purging.

Erdogan characterizes this purge as against the secretive and cult-like Gulen movement, one element in Turkeys landscape of the religious Right. He blames the Gulen movement for the attempted coup, though its leader (in exile in Pennsylvania), Fethullah Gulen, denies the allegation.

Erdogan has suspended 2745 court judges suspected of ties with the Gulen movment. These judges cannot be shown to have been involved in the coup, but Erdogans secret police apparently suspect them of Gulen tendencies. This is a purge, not justice.

Erdogan pursued the purge in the ranks of the military, as well.

Erdogans pro-Muslim coalition that began coming to power in 2002 included a number of constituents on the religious Right. These were small town and rural Muslims who felt excluded by the secular elites of Ankara and Istanbul. Some were small organized groups such as the Naksibendi Sufi orders, others were vaguer circles of Muslim entrepreneurs.

One of the larger groups was the Neo-Sufi Hizmet movement. Sufi Islam centers on visits to tombs of saints in search of blessings, figurative interpretation of scripture, the warm heart of ecstatic worship, group chanting or dancing, search for union with God, and loyalty to the mystical leader. The Gulen movement updated Sufism for Muslim modernist purposes. In a modern society, some aspects of Neo-Sufism look a lot like a cult, including the demand for unquestioning obedience to the leader and forms of corporate solidarity.

Here is an entry on it (scroll down):

It appears that, rather on the model of Stalinist cell formation, the Gulen movement has focused on getting its members into key positions in the Turkish government, including the police, army and judiciary, and possibly the intelligence services.

Gulen is alleged to have told a gathering in 1999:

You must move within the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centres  You must wait until such time as you have got all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institution in Turkey.

The movement maintains that the tape was doctored, but that should be easy to prove.

They have also surreptitiously funded trips to Turkey for many in Congress.

They secretly gathered dirt on Erdogan and his associates, though the public just yawned at the revelations.

Since Erdogan broke with Gulen a few years ago, he has been convinced that the Hizmet members are still secretly positioned in the government and plotting against him. He sees the failed coup as a reasonable grounds on which he can polish off his critics and brand them as dangerous cultists. But democracies require loyal oppositions. Erdogan needs his critics, and they should not be prosecuted or fired if they havent committed a criminal act. (If someone is found to be acting criminally by posing or engaging in illegal wiretaps, then fine). Just firing people en masse for sympathies is contrary to every human rights norm it is the creation of thought crimes. That path is a slippery one, and Turkey has already lost its footing.



Related video:

Euronews: Turkey coup: mass arrests after uprising crushed, government says
JURIST Guest Columnist Andreas Kuersten, Law Clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF), discusses racial bias impact on black individuals, both in court and on the bench

The personification of justice is a blindfolded woman holding a scale and a sword. She cannot see an individuals wealth, social stature, education, or other personal attributes. Rather, in cases before her, she objectively weighs competing sums of evidence and, in line with how the scale tips, rightfully dispenses judgment.

This woman, however, is merely a representation of justice, not its actual incarnation. A torrent of studies over the years have exposed Lady Justice to be peeking out from under her blindfold, as ostensibly irrelevant qualities tip her scales one way or the other. Some of the most damning examinations have revealed the consistent impact of an individuals race in regards to their experience with the American justice system, and the outcomes it dispenses. Black individuals, in particular, experience a different dispensing of justice than white counterparts. For example, on average, a black male has an increased likelihood that he will be incarcerated, and that he will face a longer prison sentence [report, PDF] than a white male convicted of a similar crime.

Yet, examinations of the interaction of race and the law have tended to focus on when minorities are subject to legal process, not their treatment when administering it. In a recent study [report, PDF], however, Professor Maya Sen of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University turns attention towards how black judges rulings are treated when appealed. Sen engages this issue by looking at the rate at which the decisions of black federal district court judges are reversed by the federal appellate courts reviewing them, as compared to the reversal rate for their white colleagues.

Sens data consists of 1,054 federal district court judges, 945 of whom are white and 109 of whom are black  a fitting ratio given the substantially larger number of white federal district court judges than black. Each judges reversal rate was determined for the period from January 2000 to July 2012.

Across the aforementioned time span, Sen found that [o]pinions written by black [district court] judges are more likely to be reversed on appeal, and the effect is robust. More specifically, an opinion written by a black judge may have on average an approximately 10-percentage-point greater chance of being reversed than an opinion written by a white judge. Sen presents the difference in reversed cases between black and white judges as 2,800 over the roughly 12-year period examined in the study. That is, if blacks were reversed at whites comparably lower rates, approximately 2,800 black-authored decisions would have been upheld instead of having been reversed. In terms of individual judges, these results mean that each black judge on average had approximately 20 more cases reversed (out of an average of 196 cases appeals) than if he or she had been white.

Of course, there are numerous potential intervening factors that might help account for this disparity in reversal rates. On average, black judges may: have their decisions appealed more often than white judges; have their decisions on certain reversal-prone issues (e.g. civil rights) appealed more often than white judges; not be as good as their white colleagues in terms of education and experience; be comparatively more liberal than white district court judges and appellate court panels (the latter of which tend to be centrist in political leaning due to the presence of multiple judges); or rule differently than their white counterparts on specific issues (e.g. civil rights), and thereby be more subject to reversal just on these.

Sen, however, controls for each of these possible influences, and none of them are shown to impart a meaningful effect on the frequency of black judge reversals. Ultimately, given that appellate court judges generally know the race of district court judges through personal and professional interactions, Sen points to what she believes to be the likely mechanism behind the disproportionate reversal rate: appeals panels somehow implicitly rely on the race of the lower-court judge in reaching decisions. In light of the extensive research and findings regarding implicit bias against black individuals [report, PDF], such an explanation for the elevated reversal rate of the decisions of black judges would not be surprising.

This research has important implications for movements to diversify the federal and state judiciaries. Since President John F. Kennedy, US Presidents have endeavored to appoint minorities as federal judges, and similar initiatives have been undertaken at the state level. But, how much impact can this increased diversity have on the law if the decisions of minority judges are reversed at such an elevated rate?

Rather than demonstrating any futility in the advancement of minorities to judgeships, however, Sens data shows the importance of the complete permeation of the judicial structure, top to bottom, by diverse individuals. Her study presents preliminary data that the presence of black judges on appellate court panels might attenuate the high reversal rate for black district court judge decisions, particularly when black judges constitute the majority on such a panel. But, admittedly, the low numbers of black judges on appeals courts makes reliable results difficult to attain. Nevertheless, the elevation of minorities to all levels of the judiciary seems a more expedient way to combat implicit bias among judges rather than waiting for it to be rooted out from the neurological and societal soil from which it grows.

Sens study also illuminates interesting avenues for further research. Examinations of the reversal rates of other minority judges (Asians, Hispanics, women, etc.) would likely yield fascinating data. In addition, analyses of the qualitative aspects of opinions by black judges, and those of other minority and female judges, looking at whether they utilize different rhetorical styles or methods of legal reasoning than white, male judges would also be illuminating. Finally, studies focusing specifically on the reversed decisions of black judges and the reversing decisions of appellate courts could be useful in parsing out patterns contained therein, both in terms of the formers content and the reasoning used by appellate court panels to reverse.

Sens research is an important step in the broad examination of implicit racial bias throughout the American legal system. She shows that even those in such exalted positions as judges are not free from this pernicious influence. Sens data, and the studies that are likely to develop from it, have the potential to make meaningful contributions to the ongoing effort to finally pull the blindfold all the way down over Lady Justices eyes.

Andreas Kuersten is a law clerk for the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF), the countrys highest military court. His work has appeared in, among other forums, Forbes, Journal of Legal Analysis, and Journal of Law and the Biosciences. The views expressed herein are solely his and do not represent those of CAAF or the U.S. Government.

Suggested citation: Andreas Kuersten, Justice Unblinded, JURIST  Professional Commentary, July 16, 2016, http://jurist.org/hotline/2016/07/andreas-kuersten-justice-unblinded.php.
According to a judicial source, four men believed to be linked to Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who killed 84 people as he drove a truck into a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, have been arrested [BBC report]. One of the men was arrested on Thursday, while the three others were arrested overnight on Friday. Lahouaiej-Bouhlels estranged wife has also been detained by police. These new arrests have come as the development of a meeting between President Francois Hollande [official website, in French] and his top security advisors in Paris. Cautioning against a temptation to create deep divisions in the country, Hollande termed the attack a terrorist act and extended the state of emergency by three months [JURIST report]. France began three days of national mourning for Nice victims on Saturday.

At least 84 citizens were killed [BBC report] during Bastille Day celebrations in Nice Thursday as Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove a truck through a crowd. He was subsequently killed by Nice police. Thus far, Islamic State has claimed responsibility [ABC News report] for the attack, which followed a call by Islamic State (IS) spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani for IS followers to kill non-believers in the West through any means possible. The Bastille Day attack is the second most deadly in a string of terrorist acts in France, including the November 13 Charlie Hebdo attacks [BBC news archive], which claimed 130 lives, and the murder [BBC report] of two French police officials by a man claiming allegiance to IS.
UK Export Finance, the UK's export credit agency, is committed to funding trade deals with Egypt worth up to GBP 500 million, and has GBP 2.5 billion of financing available for projects in Egypt, according to a British embassy press release on Sunday.

The UK's trade envoy to Egypt, Jeffrey Donaldson MP, and UK Export Finance CEO Louis Taylor, arrived in Cairo on Sunday to meet with Egyptian officials and businessmen for talks on bilateral trade, the statement said.

The delegation will look at projects such as the Suez Canal Economic Zone, the Tahrir Petrochemicals project in Sokhna, and Smart Village in Alexandria.

"Taylor comes to Egypt with the promise that UK Export Finance can underwrite prospective UK-Egyptian trade deals with up to GBP 500 million in financing or insurance, money that could directly help the Egyptian government or businesses gain access to world-class good and services provided by British companies," the statement read.

UK Export Finance (UKEF) provides financing and insurance for British companies doing business overseas to make sure they get paid by importers.

"The UK is a global leader in many of the sectors for which Egypt has greatest demand, including transport and infrastructure, and UKEF can help Egyptian buyers access UK goods and services through its innovative, flexible and competitive financing terms, Taylor said.

The meetings will include with Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, Trade and Industry Minister Tarek Kabil, Military Production Minister Mohamed El-Assar, Investment Minister Dalia Khorshid and Petroleum Minister Tarek El-Molla.

London has created a new Ministry of International Trade to expand global commercial ties for the UK as it exits the European Union in the coming years, according to the statement.

"The past few months have seen many enquiries from British companies wishing to do business in Egypt and their interest highlights the significant opportunities that are available across a range of Egyptian commercial sectors," Donaldson said.

The volume of trade between Egypt and the UK is over GBP 1.5 billion, UK ambassador to Egypt John Casson said. British investments represent 40 percent of Egypt's foreign direct investment inflows.

Britain's interest is in helping Egypt build a strong, dynamic economy that provides jobs and opportunities for all Egyptians," Casson said.

"We are proud to be Egypt's biggest investor and of our trade worth over 1.5 billion per year. But we are hungry for more and to seize the opportunities that Brexit will give us to forge new opportunities," Casson added.



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The Bahrain High Civil Court on Sunday ordered al-Wefaq [party website], the main Shiite opposition group in the country, to be dissolved. The Bahraini court previously issued a three-month suspension of the group [JURIST report]. The court found that the group has engaged [Al Jazeera] in terrorism, extremism, and violence. The ban was pending this verdict to determine whether it will be required to dissolve or allowed to continue. The dissolution order requires al-Wefaqs assets to be liquidated and transferred to the state treasury. Additionally, the order has sparked criticism from many sources, such as UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, as being repressive and preventing political freedom [official statement].

The kingdom of Bahrain is considered an ally of the US but has faced growing international concerns about its human rights practices. A UN human rights adviser called [JURIST report] on Bahrain in June to ensure human rights are respected following protests triggered by the decision to strip Sheikh Issa Qassem, a prominent Shia religious leader, of his nationality. In February Bahraini authorities arrested [JURIST report] four US journalists covering the five-year anniversary of the nations 2011 uprising and formally charged them. Amnesty International [advocacy website] reported in February that nearly five years after Bahrains Day of Rage [BBC report], protests sparked [JURIST report] international concern over Bahraini government accountability in human rights, and the hope for reform has dwindled.
[JURIST] A South Korean senior prosecutor was arrested Sunday on bribery charges following investigations into his corrupt relationship with major online game company Nexon [corporate website]. Prosecutor Jin Kyung-joon was accused [NYT report] of taking the equivalent of USD $370,000 from Nexon founder Kim Jung-ju in 2005 to buy the companys unlisted Korean stock. Jin has allegedly garnered $370,000 selling back the Korean shares as well as $11 million selling back Nexons Japanese shares last year. Kim is being simultaneously investigated for using corrupt business methods and has promised to cooperate with officials. In addition, Jin is being investigated for intervening in a tax investigation against Korean Air in exchange for a contract agreement for his brother-in-law. Justice Minister Kim Hyun-woong, head of South Koreas prosecutors, has apologized to the people amidst growing concerns over the relationship between government and business leaders.

Jins arrest follows recent news of corruption investigations taking place worldwide. Earlier this month a federal judge in Buenos Aires froze [JURIST report] the assets of former Argentinian president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner who was charged with conspiring to sell USD $17 billion in futures contracts using an inflated dollar value for the countrys own currency. Also this month, a Chinese court sentenced [JURIST report] a former presidents top aide to life in prison after finding him guilty of taking bribes, illegally obtaining state secrets and abuse of power. Last month the Supreme Court of the Maldives upheld [JURIST report] the 13-year prison sentence of former President Mohamed Nasheed on terrorism-related charges.
Groups of activists in Vietnam were detained Sunday while protesting Chinas rejection [official statement] of the international ruling [text, PDF] regarding the South China Sea. The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) [official website] issued the ruling [JURIST report] on Tuesday, finding that between the Philippines and China, the parties in the lawsuit, China has no legal claim [PCA press release, PDF] for large portions of the South China Sea. Vietnam had previously issued a statement [JURIST report] urging a fair and objective ruling in the matter, favoring a decision for the Philippines. China, on the other hand, has long disputed [JURIST report] the PCAs jurisdiction over the matter. While not a party in the lawsuit, activists gathered in Vietnams capital [ABC report] due to their countrys competing claims to the South China Sea, and Chinas rejection of the ruling only contributed to existing anti-Chinese sentiment in the country.

Territorial disputes over the South China Sea have been an ongoing source of tension [JURIST op-ed] between China and its neighboring countries. China claims nearly the entire 3.5 million square-kilometer [JURIST report] South China Sea, a region believed to be rich in oil and minerals. China has come into territorial conflict over the region in the past not only with the Philippines [JURIST op-ed], but also with Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. The Philippines and China were involved in a stand-off [Al Jazeera report] around the Scarborough Shoal, a small cluster of uninhabitable islands 220 km off the coast of the Philippines which, according to international maritime law, fall into the Philippines economic zone. The standoff was triggered when Chinese vessels blocked the Philippine navy from arresting Chinese fishermen for alleged illegal fishing activities within the Philippines exclusive economic zones. The PCA in The Hague ruled in October that it has jurisdiction to hear the dispute [JURIST report] between the Philippines and China over parts of the South China Sea. For its part, China has refused to recognize PCAs jurisdiction on the case, even going as far as calling it a law-abusing tribunal. However, the case was interpreting the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) [materials], to which China is a signatory.
A total of 84 judges were also competing for 16 posts in the clubs high board

Judge Mohamed Abdel-Mohsen was elected Friday as the new head of Egypts prestigious Judges Club, snatching the seat from eight other contenders.

Abdel-Mohsen is the deputy head of the Court of Cassation. He was running on top of the youths electoral list.

The Judges Club is an unofficial, powerful body that represents over 90 percent of Egypt's judges.

A total of 84 judges were also competing for 16 posts on the clubs high board.

The elections were decided after a court order in June ruled that the election by-laws of the club, put into place by sacked Justice Minister Ahmed El-Zend, were void.

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KEARNEY - A Kearney man faces up to 100 years in prison for the grisly Halloween night stabbing of a former Odessa woman and her daughter in what he said was an effort to help a friend.

Wednesday, Aaron Manning, 27, pleaded no contest to two counts of attempted first-degree murder in Buffalo County District Court in the stabbings. Manning, who dressed in medical scrubs on Halloween night 2004, was armed with a scalpel and pretended to trick or treat the woman and girl's home, then attacked them.

In exchange for his plea, Buffalo County Attorney Shawn Eatherton dismissed two counts of using a weapon to commit a felony. District 10 Court Judge Terri Harder ordered Manning to undergo a presentence investigation and scheduled an August sentencing hearing.

The attempted murder charges are Class II felonies each punishable by one to 50 years in prison. Manning remains in custody at the Buffalo County Detention Center on $1 million cash bond.

Manning's attorney, P. Stephen Potter of Gothenburg, had intended to use an insanity defense in the case. However, Eatherton said the state's expert who evaluated Manning said Manning was competent to stand trial and that he was legally sane at the time the crimes were committed.

Because of the pleas in the case, Harder said there wouldn't be a hearing on Potter's insanity defense motion.

"I am convinced also that he is competent to enter these pleas," Potter said.

There was other evidence, Potter said, that Eatherton could provide that would show the woman's estranged husband had numerous contacts with Manning, and that the stabbings weren't spontaneous or a spur of the moment act.

"There's sufficient evidence to show premeditation," Potter said.

Eatherton said he offered Manning the plea to spare the victims the trial. Manning accepted June 10.

"This is an excellent result for the victims and the county. It spares the victims the trauma of the trial and reliving the horrible events of Oct. 31, 2004. It's also a benefit to society that the community knows the defendant is facing up to 100 years in the state penitentiary," he said.

During the hearing, Eatherton revealed additional details about the bizarre stabbing.

According to Eatherton, at about 10 p.m. on Halloween night 2004 the woman answered a knock at her front door and saw a man dressed in medical scrubs and wearing a surgical mask. As she turned from the door, Eatherton said, Manning pushed his way into the home and began slashing the woman.

Manning and woman struggled, the girl became involved in the struggle and the girl tried to call 911. However, Manning slashed the girl's neck, lower jaw and chest from behind and said, "I'm the Grim Reaper, baby."

The woman and the girl got knives, and Manning was stabbed once in the leg and once in the left cheekbone. The woman suffered a large cut from the middle of her collarbone up her neck, a slash along her jaw line and injuries to her left wrist. The girl suffered cuts to her jaw line and neck.

Manning eventually lost the scalpel, his surgical mask came off and the women were able to identify him. Manning then threatened that if they testified at an upcoming trial the woman and girl were involved in, he would be back to finish them off. Manning then fled, but returned after police had arrived and was arrested.

Eatherton said after Manning was treated for his injuries and arrested, the only statement he made to police was that he "did it to help a friend."

Manning sat calmly in his orange jail-issued jumpsuit, handcuffed and shackled, alternately glancing at Eatherton and closing his eyes as he listened to the details. The victims, as well as Manning's family, quietly wept.

"I believe the plea agreement is in his (Manning) best interest," Potter said after Eatherton read the case background.

Security was tight at the courthouse Wednesday. Eight Buffalo County sheriff's deputies stood in the hallway near the district courtroom, two deputies stood outside at the south entrance to the courthouse and a Kearney Police Department officer stood near the district court office entrance. Five additional deputies were inside the courtroom, along with Sheriff Neil Miller, and two deputies escorted Manning into the courtroom.

People attending the hearing also had to pass through a metal detector before entering the courtroom.

Miller said the heightened security was because of the nature of the case and for the safety of those involved.

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I could never go into that specialty. Theyre so passive aggressive.

Those residents are so catty.

Oh, them? They dont even know their patients names.

Those residents are such bros.

And so on.

I guarantee you that if youre in medicine  or even if youre not  it would take you no more than two guesses to figure out which specialty each of the above statements is describing. At some point during third year, I have heard each and every one of those sentences, and  full disclosure  have even made some of those statements myself, particularly during moments when Im tired, hungry, and sick of studying for shelf exams. Im not proud of it, but it is easy to slip into that mode. Why not, when everyone else is doing it?

Recently, these stereotypes have begun to gnaw at me more relentlessly. Im applying in pediatrics this upcoming fall, and as many of you know, the stereotype for pediatrics is that people are outwardly nice but inwardly judgmental: i.e., the epitome of passive aggressive. During first and second year, I connected with numerous mentors in this field, all of whom were, to me, kind, intelligent, and generous with both their time and their advice. But then I entered the hospital environment as a clerkship student, where comments like those listed above are rampant. And all of a sudden, I felt myself feeling anxious about soon being lumped in with the pediatric stereotype.

This topic of inter-specialty trash talking came up during a recent visit I made to Boston, where I met up with friends studying at other medical schools, who had heard similar comments during their clinical years. As one friend pointed out, every single specialty has a place in the hospital: No one can argue that OB/GYN is less important than pediatrics, or that medicine is less important than surgery. Why then do we pass judgment on specialties in such a way that everyone comes away with a derogatory name tag, pinned right alongside the MD on their badges? Shouldnt everyone feel happy and proud to have chosen the specialty they are passionate about?

As for me, I have found residents and attending physicians in every single rotation this past year with personalities I have loved and whose teachings I have benefited from. My general surgery residents went out of their way to tailor the rotation to my pediatric interests. My OB/GYN residents let me be hands-on with deliveries as early as my first week on the rotation. My medicine residents carved out time every single day to do chalk talks for me on various topics. My pediatric neuro attendings took us out to lunch once a week to bond as a team. All of these individuals share the common thread of being passionate about what they do each day and about educating the next generation of physicians. If anything, that should be the stereotype in medicine.

Hamsika Chandrasekar is a medical student who blogs at Scope.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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In his recent article Feed Me, Pharma, ProPublicas Charles Ornstein has been calling attention to studies showing that the prescribing decisions of doctors are linked to the amount of money that drug companies can bestow on them, usually in the form of meals, travel expenses, tuition support to attend courses, and so on.

I find nothing surprising about that, and Ornstein need not be so scrupulous when he clarifies that the researchers did not determine if there was a cause-and-effect relationship between payments and prescribing. To deny that perks have a causal effect on physician behavior invites improbable considerations.

In fact, the data suggests that doctors are particularly easy to manipulate. One of the researchers interviewed by Ornstein was surprised that it took so little of a signal and such a low-value meal [to influence doctors] A Chick-fil-A is all that it takes!

On the other hand, Ornstein clarified,

 the researchers dont think the meals themselves cause doctors to prescribe more of a drug, but rather the time they spend interacting with drug reps when they drop off those meals.

In other words, doctors are cheap dates for pharma. In response, patients [should] talk to their doctors and ask Is there a generic thats just as good?

A better solution, of course, might be for the health care system to stop subsidizing pharma, i.e., to curtail patent laws, ease import prohibitions, and give up third-party purchasing of drugs. These factors are much more responsible for the high prices of drugs than the behavior of doctors. But proposals to remove subsidies are usually deemed unconscionable: How could an industry operate without government incentives and guarantees?!

Besides, as Margalit Gur-Alie has pointed out, much of this attention seems out of proportion to the actual economic effect:

.@marcsfz1 Agreed. Generic prescribing is close to 90%. These are blatant efforts to divert attention to inconsequential shiny things  Margalit Gur-Arie ???????????? (@margalitgurarie) June 20, 2016

The diversion to shiny things, however, usually leads to some brilliant plan to protect Americans from the greedy and self-interested medical-pharmaceutical complex: more tinkering, more regulations, more prohibitions. Thats been the pattern for the last 100 years, a real success story for the doctrine of social progressivism, the political ideology at the root of the health care system. As Jeff Deist precisely put it:

Progressivism has been the overwhelming force in western politics for the last 100 years. Political progressivesdefined not by their party, but by their desire to remake man into a more obedient political animal, absolutely dominated the 20th century.

The agitation about pharma-fed doctors, then, like all previous agitations, is simply motivated by that irresistible urge to shape fellow human beings to fit into a mold of behavior that will satisfy the rational and scientific norms that progressives favor above all else.

But progressives are humans as well, and ProPublicas progressives somehow overlook that they, too, must be fed and are indeed fed by the familiar financial organs of progressivism: the Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Sandler Foundation and, most notably, the Carnegie Corporation which, as we saw previously, gifted us the Flexner reforms.

Should we cry double standard and ask for measures to restrict private funding of news outlets, which would ultimately restrict freedom of speech? Of course, not. We strongly believe that people ought to be free to pick and choose their source of information as they please. If ProPublica is not your cup of tea, you can go to Human Progress and be served Cato-style, courtesy of the Templeton Foundation. There are many other options, and one of my favorite is the Mises Institutes website which, not coincidentally, is free of any dependence on big foundation money  whether from the left or the right.

Why, then, do we so easily accept restrictions against freedom in health care? The usual answer is that doctors must be held to a standard of objectivity that patients are too ignorant to enforce. According to progressives, only the government can ensure proper respect for the good of sick people and curtail the evil of private interests.

The real reason, however, is that health care progressivism operates by doling out perks and subsidies to everyone: doctors, hospitals, patients, pharma, industry, administrators, bureaucrats, lobbyists, voters. The whole 18 percent of GDP is corrupted by this boondoggle. Weve all become hooked on the health care system, and theres more influence in that dependence than anyone could ever stuff in a sandwich handed out to a hungry cardiologist.

Michel Accad is a cardiologist and founder, Athletic Heart of San Francisco. He blogs at Alert & Oriented.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
Olympic National Park volunteer Rod Farlee shows off the craftsmanship of the Enchanted Valley Chalet, a three-story wilderness structure in danger of falling into the Quinault River. Tristan Baurick | Kitsap Sun

SHARE The 1930s-era Enchanted Valley Chalet in Olympic National Park's backcountry is again in danger from the eroding banks of the Quinault River. The chalet was moved in 2014, but the river has quickly eaten up much of the buffer. Tristan Baurick | Kitsap Sun House mover Jeff Monroe, of Sequim, discusses his plan to move the Enchanted Valley Chalet in Olympic National Park from the eroding banks of the Quinault River. Monroe moved the chalet about 100 feet in 2014 but it will need to be moved again or dismantled as the river closes in again. Tristan Baurick | Kitsap Sun Related Coverage Enchanted Valley Chalet plans elicit flood of comments

By Tristan Baurick of the Kitsap Sun

OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK  Rod Farlee can't see much in the gloom of the boarded-up Enchanted Valley Chalet, but his nose and hands tell him plenty.

"You smell it. So dry in here," he says, wandering the three-story chalet in Olympic National Park's backcountry, about 14 miles from the nearest road.

He runs his palm along thick timber walls made painstakingly smooth by broad axes and chisels nearly 90 years ago. His wiry fingers feel around joints, stair railings and window frames. They knock on log posts and beams, and attempt to wiggle into wall slats narrow enough to keep out the glacier-cold winters.

"The way this was built  it's just fabulous," Farlee says. "It's locked together tight."

Built in 1931, the chalet has held up well, but is  for the second time in two years  at risk of collapse. That's because the Quinault River is pushing its banks toward the chalet at a rapid pace.

In September 2014, Farlee helped spearhead an ambitious project that shoved the 64-ton chalet away from the Quinault. Movers relied on mule teams and helicopters to haul in equipment and the steel rails needed to slide the chalet about 100 feet from the riverbank.

They did it in the nick of time. The river had chewed off a section of the chalet's foundation and was flowing just under floorboards when the move began.

Erosion has only quickened, eating up 60 feet during the winter of 2014 and another 10 feet last year. On Monday, only 28 feet separated the riverbank from the chalet.

Odds are on the river catching up. If the recent rate of erosion holds, this year could be the chalet's last.

"Not on my watch," said Jeff Monroe, the Sequim housemover who orchestrated the 2014 move. He says he can do it again  this time moving it 450 feet to higher, harder ground, just beyond the crumbly gravel soil in the river's floodplain.

He and Farlee spent a few days this week hiking to the chalet to assess its condition and ground truth a moving plan they'll soon submit to park officials.

They know its acceptance is a long shot.

Last month, the park announced a process for determining the 'final' plan for the chalet. The options under consideration amounted to: a) do nothing and let nature take its course, or b) take it apart before it tips into the river. Another move was not an option on the table.

"Their options are not acceptable," Monroe said. "All of them result in the loss of the chalet."

Bending to outcry from preservationists and the chalet's many fans, the park service quietly added the move option last week. Monroe didn't learn of the change until he hiked down from the chalet.

"It's almost misleading to the public that that option was ignored," he said.

Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes said the option was initially ruled out to avoid giving people "false hopes."

"We were going to analyze it, but we didn't think it was likely or feasibly possible," she said. "But after hearing from people and the level of interest, we put it on the list."

Still, the lengthy, federally-mandated assessment process the park must follow puts a final decision somewhere around spring 2018. Depending on the river's mood this or next winter, the decision may come too late.

Monroe said he's ready to move the chalet now.

"All I'd need is a Huey (helicopter), four days and a box of Cheerios," he said.

The helicopter would be costly and would raise the ire of wilderness advocates. Besides being noisy and disturbing wildlife, they said the use of gas-powered machinery violates the 1964 Wilderness Act, which protects the "primeval character" of wild landscapes.

No matter, says Monroe. He could do the job with a mule team, a handful of volunteers and a heap of donations he knows would flow in if he and Farlee gave the word.

The rails used to slide the chalet are still in place, ready to be used in "leapfrog" fashion, moving from the back to the front of the chalet as it glides on a thin coating of soap. Monroe has upgraded his equipment with lightweight jacks and a small generator that could be disassembled and carried by mules. He could do the job with hand-cranked jacks, but the job would take weeks rather than days.

"About four gallons of fuel is all I'd need to get it done quick," he said.

The last move cost the park service more than $160,000. Money is tight at Olympic, which has cut staff and maintenance budgets in recent years, but liability concerns and federal contracting rules severely limit the use of volunteers and donated labor and materials. As much as Monroe would like to do the project at no cost to the park, he simply isn't allowed.

"We could get 20 volunteers but the park wouldn't let us, and you can't donate (materials) because they have to pay fair market rate," he said. "The more I got into this, the more I saw that common sense doesn't apply."

Monroe says he's had his answering machine filled with voices  some of them sobbing  urging him to save the chalet.

Hikers from California, Minnesota, New York and British Columbia pitched tents alongside Monroe and Farlee during their stay near the chalet this week.

"It's definitely a destination, and it has been for a long time," Monroe said.

Built before the park was established in 1938, the chalet was one of many wilderness shelters and lodges constructed in the early 1900s to capitalize on a growing desire to see the nation's last wild places.

The 10-room chalet was used as a backcountry hotel until World War II, when it was drafted into service as an enemy aircraft lookout. It was a ranger station and emergency shelter until 2013, when the river's encroachment made it unsafe.

The interior walls are notched with decades worth of hikers' initials and carved messages.

Brian Turner, an attorney for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, hiked up to the chalet on Monday to meet with Monroe and Farlee.

"It's locked up now, but the thing that surprised me is how much it's still a gathering place," said Brian Turner. "People come to look, to dry their socks on the porch  and they share stories and tips on their adventures."

The chalet was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. In 2014, the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation named it to the state's Most Endangered Historic Properties List.

Preservation groups are pitted against wilderness advocates over the chalet's future.

Montana-based Wilderness Watch and the local group Olympic Park Associates objected to the last move's use of a helicopter and other machinery.

The park service allowed some special exceptions to the Wilderness Act but they were careful not to push things too far. Wilderness Watch has hinted it would sue if any action is taken to fortify the structure or install a new foundation after its relocation.

"If the chalet just sits there, that doesn't violate the act," said George Nickas, Wilderness Watch's executive director. "But what runs against the law is taking action to rebuild it or make it permanent on the landscape."

The group won a lawsuit against the park in 2005 when the park rebuilt two collapsed shelters. It has a suit pending over Olympic's plan to rehabilitate or reconstruct five aging structures, including the 77-year-old cabin known as the Canyon Creek Shelter. Farlee's group, Friends of Olympic National Park, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation joined the suit on the park's behalf last month and plan to appeal if Wilderness Watch is successful.

Farlee doesn't see the chalet has a blemish on an otherwise pristine landscape. In his mind, it's an important reminder of why the land is protected.

"It brought people up here to see the waterfalls, the glaciers, the high mountain lakes and the elk herds," he said. "They realized this area really ought to be preserved."
Avianna Wilridge, 9, of Poulsbo runs through Evergreen Rotary Park in Bremerton wearing her rainbow colors at the 2016 Kitsap Pride festival on Saturday, July 16, 2106. LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN

SHARE Avianna Wilridge, 9, of Poulsbo runs through Evergreen Rotary Park in Bremerton wearing her rainbow colors at the 2016 Kitsap Pride festival on Saturday, July 16, 2106. LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN Isaiah Esquire of the Caravan of Glam show gets help with his entrance dance from audience members Haley Rutledge, left, and Christine Hodges, both of Bremerton, at the 2016 Kitsap Pride festival on Saturday, July 16, 2106. LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN Rochelle Ary of Gig Harbor from the Kitsap Aces puts a rainbow stamp on a youngster at the 2016 Kitsap Pride festival on Saturday, July 16, 2106. LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN Tia Dhanenes of Bremerton catches bubbles at the 2016 Kitsap Pride festival on Saturday, July 16, 2106. LARRY STEAGALL / KITSAP SUN

By Tad Sooter of the Kitsap Sun

BREMERTON  For a few moments, Kitsap's joyous pride festival fell silent.

The crowd of hundreds gathered in Bremerton's Evergreen Rotary Park paused Saturday to remember victims of the June 12 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, adding a solemn interlude to an otherwise jubilant afternoon.

Kitsap Pride organizer Michael Goodnow said the tragedy in Orlando, and a polarized political atmosphere, added gravity to the annual, which celebrates the county's LGBTQ community and the gay rights movement. This year's theme of "Solidarity Through Pride," felt especially meaningful, he said.

"It's become more of a rally, realizing that there's still work to be done," Goodnow said.

Kitsap Pride was still full of joy Saturday as it marked its 20th anniversary. Drag queens shimmied across a grass stage and out into the audience during a family-friendly "Caravan of Glam" show. Musical acts, headlined by former "The Voice" contestant Vicci Martinez, drew enthusiastic crowds. Rainbow symbols were everywhere: Emblazoned on flags, in face-paint and on children's tutus.

Goodnow said Kitsap Pride has grown immensely since it began as an informal gathering at Scenic Beach State Park, and later met at a farm in Southworth. The festival relocated to Evergreen Rotary Park in 2005, its "coming out" moment. Goodnow said the move to the downtown waterfront park made the event more accessible to the broader community, while maintaining a welcoming atmosphere.

"It's really peaceful," said Jennie Kline, who was visiting from Grays Harbor. "There's been a feeling of contention in so many of the prides I've been to this year. I don't have that feeling here."

Tacoma drag entertainer Roxy Renee Ross agreed there's been a different feeling at pride events since the Orlando shooting. Some supporters have been afraid to come out to festivals, but many more have rallied to the cause.

"I definitely think it's brought people together," Ross said. "I'm always trying to remind people we're all one family. We're all together. It's the only way we'll get through."

Demonstrations of solidarity at Kitsap Pride extended beyond the LGBTQ community. Attendees could hardly miss seeing a giant, inflatable elephant with the word "racism" emblazoned on its side erected in the park's amphitheater. Couches and chairs were arranged at the base of the elephant to create an outdoor living room. Organizer Jo Walter, with Kitsap Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and Kitsap Interfaith Network, said the elephant was a not-so-subtle representation of racism as the proverbial "elephant in the room."

Passers-by were encouraged to sit and discuss issues of race and equality. White participants could put on blindfolds to experience the "blindness" of white privilege.

The discussion of racism was a natural fit at Kitsap Pride, Goodnow said, noting the movements for gay rights and racial equality were intertwined.

"Equality is equality," Goodnow said. "You can't just fight for your own rights."

For information on Kitsap Pride, go to kitsappride.org.
Michael West writes:

The Big Four global accounting firms  PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and Ernst & Young  are the masterminds of multinational tax avoidance, the architects of tax schemes which cost governments and their taxpayers more than $US1 trillion a year.

Although presenting as the guardians of commerce they are unregulated and unaccountable; they have infiltrated governments at every level and should be broken up.

This is the view of George Rozvany, Australias most published expert on transfer pricing, which is one of the principal ways large corporations pursue cross-border tax avoidance. Rozvany stepped down last year as head of tax in Australia for the worlds biggest insurance company, Allianz. Formerly, he was an insider at Ernst & Young, PwC and Arthur Andersen.

The Big Four have, under a Rasputin-like cloak of illusion strayed from their original and critical role of verifying the accuracy of financial accounts for all stakeholders, to be accountants of fortune merely representing the accounting position for multinationals and developing aggressive international tax avoidance practices, he told michaelwest.com.au.

Rozvany is writing a series of books on corporate tax ethics. This is not a victimless crime, he says. While Western governments have been cutting back their aid to the most underprivileged in society, from the homeless to orphaned children in Africa, multinational companies have been diverting ever larger profits into tax havens.

The global community must also recognise the links between aggressive taxation behaviour, money laundering, corruption, organised crime and terrorism, of which the Brussels bombings and 9/11 are chilling reminders. This, unquestionably, is the financial sewer of humanity where the purpose for such money, no matter how malevolent, is simply hidden until used, Rozvany says.

At the heart of the issue is a conflict of interest. While the Big Four advise governments on tax reform, they make lavish fees advising their multinational clients how to avoid paying tax.

They are both architect and engineer, says Rozvany. They sell the (tax avoidance) schemes to the multinationals; and in the case of the LuxLeaks scandal last year, they arranged the deals in secret with government, to the detriment of all other sovereign nations and their taxpayers.

In the PanamaPapers scandal earlier this year, Panama City law firm Mossack Fonseca was singled out as the major culprit behind a global tax avoidance scam, says Rozvany, but who signs the financial statements for Mossacks clients? Who is guarding the guards? And by the way, if one enters a Mossack Fonseca office, one knows that one is entering an aggressive law firm not one pretending to be something else.

From a regulatory viewpoint, it makes perfect sense to split the accounting and tax functions of each of the Big Four to improve financial integrity and to split each of these firms again into two firms to create competition. International commerce will then have eight international audit firms and eight international tax firms from which to choose.
Stuff reports:

A new signature building for the University of Waikato isnt a sure bet yet  although there are already three suggested concepts.

Estimates are that a marae and multicultural complex could add up to around $60 million but it wouldnt happen fast.

Three concepts for a complex on the site of the old law school prefabs have been shown to the university and Maori communities. 

University chancellor Jim Bolger asked if there were financial parameters in place or are we still in starry-eyed optimism?

Quigley explained that a project of this scale could cost around $60m.

Last time I saw [chief financial officer] Andrew [McKinnon]s balance sheets he didnt have $60m, Bolger said.

He may have a bottom drawer that he hasnt told me about.

The university could have the necessary funds in a few years time, with some borrowing, McKinnon said.

A marae complex idea won support from council member Richard Jeffries and he said the Kingitanga was also keen to see an upgrade.

For the university that has by far and away the largest proportion of Maori students and Pasifika  I think its a really important kaupapa for us.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

A shower is possible early. Partly cloudy skies. Low near 35F. ESE winds at 10 to 20 mph, decreasing to less than 5 mph..

Tonight

A shower is possible early. Partly cloudy skies. Low near 35F. ESE winds at 10 to 20 mph, decreasing to less than 5 mph.
SHARE Clock and watch repairman Michael Sadler poses with Black Forest hand-carved cuckoo clocks Wednesday, July 13, 2016, in Maryville. Sadler recently relocated from Bloomington, Ind., and runs his Tennessee Clock Works business from a home workshop. (PAUL EFIRD/NEWS SENTINEL) Clock and watch repairman Michael Sadler shows a mariner's chronometer from the 1920s or 1930s on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, in Maryville. Sadler recently relocated from Bloomington, Ind., and runs his Tennessee Clock Works business from a home workshop. (PAUL EFIRD/NEWS SENTINEL) Clock and watch repairman Michael Sadler works on a Bulova 8AC wrist watch on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, in Maryville. The 1960s-era timepiece belonged to bluegrass musician Carter Stanley, brother of Ralph Stanley. Sadler recently relocated from Bloomington, Ind., and runs his Tennessee Clock Works business from a home workshop. (PAUL EFIRD/NEWS SENTINEL) Clock and watch repairman Michael Sadler shows an antique clock dial on Wednesday, July 13, 2016, in Maryville. Sadler recently relocated from Bloomington, Ind., and runs his Tennessee Clock Works business from a home workshop. (PAUL EFIRD/NEWS SENTINEL) Related Photos Tennessee Clockworks: timepiece repair in Maryville

By Ali James of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Ask for the time and chances are someone will reach for a cellphone or glance at their wrist and only see the number of steps on their fitness tracker.

High-tech gadgets have taken the place of the soothing ticktock of a wall clock or the simple wristwatch. But none of that is for Michael Sater, who puts his own stamp on the concept of saving time. He has been bringing each broken grandfather or mantle clock, pocket or wristwatch he sees back to life for the past 14 years.

Sater relocated his business, Indiana Clockworks, from Bloomington, Ind., to Maryville in November, and renamed it Tennessee Clockworks.

"We do pretty much everything from a grandfather/grandmother to cuckoo clocks, wall and shelf clocks, pocket watches to mechanical wristwatches," Sater said. And he doesn't mind simple jobs such as changing out batteries on electronic watches.

Clocks were once popular wedding gifts, and many of those are the same clocks he is being asked to repair now, Sater said.

"People are just not spending $2,000 to $3,000 on a grandfather clock anymore," he said. "I'm wearing a 1960s Hamilton watch, and it keeps perfect time. But everybody has their cellphone now, so even wristwatch sales aren't the same as they used to be."

Sater believes he was destined to restore clocks. Shortly and his wife, Cathy, got married, and she moved to Indiana, they were unpacking boxes when he discovered a mantle clock. It had belonged to her former husband, who had passed away.

"It was a Tambour mantle clock," Sater said. "I thought, 'Wow, that's kind of nice.' I opened up the back to look at the mechanics, and someone had taken it apart  perhaps to clean or repair it. They couldn't figure it out, so they had put all the pieces in a Ziploc bag and stuffed it back inside."

At the time, Sater was working as a computer technician at Otis Elevator Co., but he had always loved to tinker.

"I was the kid who always took the toaster apart," he said. "If all the parts were there, I bet I could figure out how to put that thing together. I jumped on the internet and did a little research and I got it (the mantle clock) to run."

Then after 13 years at Otis, he was one of a number of workers laid off.

"I thought I'd spread the word around a bit to see if anyone had a clock I could repair on the side," Sater said, and Indiana Clockworks was born.

The local newspaper in Bloomington ran an article on him and business immediately took off; the waiting list went from two to three weeks to six months for a repair.

"It was feast or famine over the years, but by and large, we did all right," he said.

Sater started off working from home, but eventually expanded into some classrooms in his old elementary school that had been redeveloped into commercial space.

"I had gone to school there, and my grandmother was actually a cook there in the first part of the 20th century," he said.

One room was a workshop, and they took down the wall of the neighboring classroom and his wife ran the shop. They sold antiques and gift items, as well as serving tea and coffee.

After two years, they decided that the repair business was doing much better than the retail, so they closed the shop. Sater operated the workshop from the basement of their home from 2004 until the couple moved here last year.

Since his wife is originally from Spartanburg, S.C., and they wanted to be able to see their grandson there, they decided that East Tennessee would be a good central location. Sater said they had done very little research before relocating, mostly relying on hope and faith that moving the business would work out.

"We did a little Google search for nice small towns in Tennessee," he said. After visiting Johnson City and the very last Foothills Fall Festival in Maryville to get a sense of the community, they settled on Maryville.

When it comes to clock and watch repair, Sater said he is one of the "very few games in town." Already he has been able to draw most of his business from Knoxville and the small nearby towns.

"It's been unbelievable the number of people who have contacted me, and said we're glad you've come into the area," he said.

Sater has a collection of clocks of his own, including a wall clock that was lying on the floor in a laundry room covered in soap. It's still running. And he has a cuckoo clock that is more than 100 years old, which he restored.

Since his new website went up in January, the work has been steady, he said.

"Actually, a lot of them were people that had already had someone else look at a clock or watch, but they couldn't get it fixed and contacted me in a last-ditch effort," he said. "There was a good many of them in which the movement had already been cleaned and oiled and it still hadn't run. I was able to get every one of them back into the hands of the owners in working condition."

After an initial flood of people bringing their clocks and watches in for repair during this past spring, word has spread about Tennessee Clockworks. In addition to making good contacts at local antique stores, Sater has found that online apps such as Nextdoor.com have spread positive recommendations in local neighborhoods.

"Somebody in Tellico Village put me on their neighborhood's page and I've been getting calls left and right," he said.

His workshop is considerably smaller than the one he had in Indiana.

"It's actually somewhat better in a smaller area," Sater said. "You always fill up the space that you have, and sometimes that can get out of hand. In a smaller area, you can keep up with junk building up."

"My website Indianaclockworks.com is still up and running," he said. "They can still send me their wristwatch, pocket watch or clock and I'll ship it back."

But the Saters are planning on staying in the Knoxville area.

"We are looking for an older house to buy and renovate," he said. "People ask me if we are staying. We are not going anywhere."

Sater has but one regret, he said.

"I wish I had been able to write down people's stories [of their clocks]," he said. "I could have put together a book."

A few years after Sater started repairing clocks, he was approached by a woman who had inherited a cuckoo clock from her grandparents.

"I got it fixed up and took her into the shop  you should have seen the smile on her face  you just can't describe it," he said. "I wound the hand to the hour and it started cuckooing, and tears just rolled down her face. She hadn't heard it since she was a little girl.

"To me that's all worth it," he said.

Sater charges about $400 to restore a mantle clock and more for a grandfather clock because he has to travel to the site to repair it.

"For the most part, you're dealing with a lot of sentimental value," he said. "Even restored, the clock might be worth no more than $200 to $250. ... It might be a family heirloom and they just love it. Sometimes a younger person may just pick it up from a garage sale and they love it so much that they want it fixed at whatever cost.

"A lot of people might not realize that parts to these old clocks are either still manufactured or they can be recreated," Sater said. "If there is a particular part in an obscure clock that is not still produced, there are many artisans that cut new gears or manufacture new parts from scratch. (Or) you can buy an old clock to rob a part out of it.

"Just because somebody has looked at it and hasn't been able to fix it doesn't mean it can't be fixed," he said. "If it ran at one time, it can run again. Anything and everything can be fixed."

Get more information about Tennessee Clockworks at tnclockworks.com or by calling 865-332-0209.
SHARE Darla Windle Wilson, outgoing president of the Sevier Family Association, fires a rifle during a ceremony honoring John Sevier on Sunday. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL) From left, Darla Windle Wilson, Ralph Martin, and Elizabeth Finchum, wait for the start of the ceremony honoring Tennessee's first governor, John Sevier, at his marker at the Knox County Courthouse on Sunday. The ceremony was held by the Sevier Family Association, an association for the descendants of John Sevier. Ralph Martin is with the Tennessee Sons of the Revolution. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL) Bob Jones and 9-year-old daughter, Christina Jones, attend a ceremony honoring John Sevier held by the Sevier Family Association at the Knox County Courthouse on Sunday. Descendants of Sevier held their reunion on Knoxville this weekend with visits to James White Fort, Marble Springs, Sequoyah Birthplace Museum and concluded at the grave of John Sevier at the Old Knoxville Courthouse. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL) Members of the Sevier Family Association and the Tennessee Sons of the Revolution gather for a group photo at the marker for Tennessee's first governor, John Sevier, on Sunday. (SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL) Related Photos Photos: John Sevier descendants bring reunion to Knoxville

By John Shearer of the Knoxville News Sentinel

Former military leader and statesman John Sevier was one of the first permanent white settlers to come to present-day Tennessee in the 1770s.

On Sunday, however, a few of his descendants were a little later arriving at the Knox County Courthouse lawn than expected due to parking issues and conflicting information on when an honor ceremony was to begin.

But the brief gathering that brought to a close the Sevier Family Association reunion still managed to end in perfect timing with a few harmonious shouts of "huzzah"  an early American term for hooray.

"We love coming back," said Darla Windle Wilson of Utah, the group's president, as the biennial event concluded in downtown Knoxville by the John Sevier family monuments and graves. "This is our family. This is our homeplace. This is part of our DNA. We will always be coming home."

Dozens of descendants and their families took part in the four-day reunion, attendees said. Included on the itinerary were visits to Fort Loudoun State Historic Park, the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, Sevier's Marble Springs homeplace in South Knoxville and  for the first time  the gravesite of Nancy Ward, an ally of Sevier's.

"We used to go to Gatlinburg and sit at the Gatlinburg Inn and have a ball," said Wilson of what the reunion was like before she and her father took leadership roles. "They would dress in suits and ties and pretty dresses. But what my family has tried to do is go back to the different sites that mean something to our family."

The visit to the courthouse lawn in downtown Knoxville on Sunday for the midday ceremony also included witnessing the ceremonial firing of Revolutionary War-era rifles by members of the local chapter of the Society of Sons of the Revolution and the Overmountain Victory Trail Association Inc.

A couple of the family descendants, including Wilson, also fired the loud-sounding guns as part of the reunion tradition.

"It is just part of our history and represents our freedom," Wilson said afterward.

About 15 or 20 other descendants  who actually trace their ancestry back to John Sevier's father, Valentine "the Immigrant" Sevier  attended the Sunday ceremony. Among them was Richard Price of Hamilton, N.J.

"This is a nice place for family to get together and pay our respects to the first governor of Tennessee," said Price, who was there with his mother, Marie Catherine Price, and son, Richie.

He said he was proud to be related to this man who was also a hero of the Revolutionary War's Battle of Kings Mountain.

Also proud of the family connection and hanging around Sunday for the final ceremony before starting his long drive home was Richard Gibson of DeLand, Fla.

"It's not something I achieved," said a grinning Gibson, who is also related to the Lotspeich family of Knoxville that operated a grocery here for years. "It's just more a wonderful family. Getting together every couple of years is a good thing."

The 2018 gathering is scheduled to be in the Johnson City area.
photos by the associated press Crews prepare the main stage of the convention floor on Wednesday at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, ahead of Monday's opening of the Republican National Convention. Donald Trump is set to be nominated for president and Mike Pence for vice president.

SHARE Carpenter Bill Kaim of Cleveland works on the convention floor Wednesday at Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. Political conventions typically provide a chance for parties to come together, particularly after bitter primary battles. But this year's presidential race has been hardly typical. Bob Ponstingle restores the clock tower at 9th and Euclid in downtown Cleveland, Ohio as part of the preparations throughout the city for the Republican National Convention Thursday, July 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar) Workers hang state flags on the side of a parking garage next to the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, Thursday, July 14, 2016, in preparation for the upcoming Republican National Convention. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar) Wesley Baesel, from Cleveland, removes the protective coating from a mirror covered camera stand, as preparations are made for the Republican National Convention, Friday, July 15, 2016, at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) Related Coverage Republican National Convention: RNC dispatches: View from convention floor

By Joel Ebert And Dave Boucher, USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee

Political conventions typically provide a chance for parties to come together, particularly after bitter, protracted primary battles.

But this year's presidential race has been hardly typical, especially among Republicans  including those from Tennessee.

With the Republican National Convention set to begin Monday, Donald Trump, the party's presumptive nominee, will have his work cut out for him to unite Republicans on the state and national level.

Tennessee's GOP delegates highlight the divide within the Republican Party that Trump will have to bridge in Cleveland, Ohio.

Related:

Tennessee has long history of roles in GOP conventions

East TN delegates didnt climb aboard Trump train all at once

Nashville could make hot spot for next convention

Five Tennesseans to watch at the Republican National Convention

Man in the Middle looks back on decades of GOP conventions

On one end of the spectrum are U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who is set to speak at the convention, and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, who, until recently, had been considered a potential vice presidential candidate and could secure a Cabinet position in a Trump administration.

On the other side, there's outspoken conservative state Rep. Andy Holt, R-Dresden, who had harsh words for Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

"And there you have it. Two of the most repulsive and divisive people in history are now running for president of the United States," Holt said. "God have mercy on us."

Although few Tennessee politicos have joined the Never Trump movement to try to formally stop his nomination, some  including Gov. Bill Haslam and U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander  have taken a more tepid approach.

Haslam has frequently criticized Trump for comments he's made, while Alexander has occasionally refused to call Trump the GOP nominee until that's formally done at the convention.

"Typically, conventions rally their troops, give them a bump up in the polls, then after Labor Day, real campaigns begin," said Tom Ingram, a longtime Tennessee Republican operative who worked for Jeb Bush and John Kasich during their presidential campaigns and has attended several conventions but will not be heading to Cleveland this year.

"The challenge this year, locally and nationally, is which candidate will project as the least unlikeable and untrustworthy," he said.

Ingram said whoever wins in November  Trump or Clinton  will immediately face the campaign's greatest challenge  "Repairing a lot of damage done this political cycle and reaching across all kinds of social, political, ethnic and gender lines to try to unify a seriously divided and polarized state and country."

State Sen. Mae Beavers, R-Mt. Juliet, who is the chairman of the state delegation, said she is confident the convention will bring Republicans together.

"That will go a long ways toward healing the party at the national and state level," said Beavers, who was one of the first in the state to publicly support Trump.

The divisions among Republicans on the state and national levels are hardly new.

In Tennessee, the divide includes a lack of trust between Trump supporters and establishment Republicans.

During a raucous state Republican Party meeting in April, Trump delegates accused party leaders of trying to steal delegates from the presumptive nominee.

Mark Winslow, who recently resigned from the Tennessee Republican State Executive Committee after saying the party's "soul rotted away," is skeptical the convention will unite the party.

"These four days can be a papering over of problems within the GOP or the start of a new relationship between the party and its grassroots," Winslow said. "It's up to the leadership to decide which path we choose.

"When people who were openly and vocally critical of the nominee were installed as his delegates because they are party loyalists, it's easy to see how Americans can agree with Trump when he claims that the system is rigged."

Trump won 94 of Tennessee's 95 counties in the March 1 presidential primary. But he received only about 39 percent of the overall vote, a point that further signifies the fracturing that Trump has to overcome before November.

On the national level, the ideological division among Republicans was clear in the candidacies of Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, said Vanderbilt University political science professor John Geer.

Geer called Cruz, who was a tea party darling, a purist, and Bush, who was supported by a more moderate base, a pragmatist.

Trump has only increased the divide among Republicans, Geer said.

"There may be some healing (at the convention)," he said. "But the divisions will remain. Trump rose on those divisions. They will not go away any time soon, especially as he exploits them in the coming weeks and months."

Beavers disagreed, saying she believes Trump would be able to unite the party.

"I believe Trump is that leader, and I believe most in (that) the party will rally behind him," she said.

Kent Syler, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University, said he will keep an eye on the energy level of those at the convention. He said the last two Republican conventions failed to excite people.

"It will be interesting to see the energy in this one," he said, noting Trump drew out record numbers of Republican primary voters. "The question now is can he translate that Republican primary energy to a general election, and this convention is really the starting point of that effort."

Syler said he doesn't anticipate the more moderate members of Tennessee's delegation to ruffle too many feathers during the convention. He said he anticipates a "truce" among Republicans, at least until the November election.

However the convention unfolds, the results will not only have ramifications on the Nov. 8 presidential election but also on elections for the statehouse, where Republicans have a supermajority.

"The kind of tea party Trump faction feels that it is their turn to try to win a race," Syler said. "The establishment obviously doesn't agree with the selection of Trump, and if Trump loses, the establishment will be saying, 'Hey, I told you so' and it's time to put the adults back in charge."
By Joel Ebert And Dave Boucher, USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee

As the Tennessee Republicans head to Cleveland to attend the Republican National Convention, here are five Tennesseans to keep an eye on as the week unfolds.

U.S. Sen. Bob Corker

Once considered a possible vice presidential candidate, Corker's star is clearly on the rise. In June, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman praised nominee-to-be Donald Trump for his comments on the historic Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. This month, Corker, 63, appeared with the real estate mogul at a campaign event in North Carolina. There's talk he's being considered for a Cabinet position in a Trump administration.

Related:

Tennessee has long history of roles in GOP conventions

East TN delegates didnt climb aboard Trump train all at once

Nashville could make hot spot for next convention

Man in the Middle looks back on decades of GOP conventions

Bridge over a troubled party? Tenn. GOP looks to Trump for unity at convention

U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn

The 64-year-old member of Congress, who was rumored to have been in consideration for Trump's VP pick, is slated to speak on the final day of the convention, the same day as Trump. That's prime placement for Blackburn, who also spoke at the 2008 and 2012 conventions.

Gov. Bill Haslam

Traditionally, a governor acting as a delegate at the national convention leads the party's delegation. But Haslam, 57, is a Rubio delegate in a state with far more Trump delegates, and therefore isn't Tennessee's delegation leader. Look for some interesting comments on Trump from Haslam, who has at times been critical of the party's presumptive nominee.

State Sen. Mae Beavers

The Mt. Juliet lawmaker is the state delegation's leader and one of the first in the state to publicly support Trump. Beavers, 68, is known for taking controversial stances on a host of issues and could do so again during the convention.

John Ryder

In addition to being a Trump delegate, the Memphis attorney also is the general counsel for the Republican National Convention. He already has outlined arguments as to why, he believes, the party can't change rules so delegates could buck their affiliations and vote for any other candidate for president. Ryder, 67, is expected to play an influential role at the convention.
Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Ryan Haynes, left, visits with Sam Maynard, a Trump delegate from Knoxville, at an event before Monday's start of the 2016 Republican National Convention. (VICTOR ASHE/SPECIAL TO THE NEWS SENTINEL)

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By Victor Ashe

CLEVELAND  More than 130 Tennessee Republicans arrived in Cleveland over the weekend for the GOP's national convention, which opens this afternoon.

Of the 58 Tennessee delegates, a majority are pledged to presumptive nominee Donald Trump, and the rest go to U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

At this point, neither Cruz nor Rubio have released their delegates from their legal pledge to back them when the convention votes on the presidential nomination.

Those delegates will vote for Cruz and Rubio by state law unless released, when they are free to decide whom to back.

The Tennessee delegation is housed 16 miles out of town in Eastlake, Ohio. Each delegate has paid $350 for transportation in Cleveland to and from the hotel and some meals. This morning, Gov. Bill Haslam and Tennessee's U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker host the delegates, alternates and their guests for brunch at Zocalo's, a popular Mexican restaurant in downtown Cleveland. The event concludes in time for delegates to reach Quicken Loans Arena when the 2016 Republican National Convention is gaveled to order at 1 p.m.

Susan Richardson Williams, a former University of Tennessee trustee and former TVA board member, is attending her ninth GOP convention, her first being the 1964 convention in San Francisco. Peggy Lambert, outgoing national committeewoman from Maryville, is attending her seventh convention.

Williams says that "Republicans will unite behind the nominee." She predicts Gov. Haslam will ultimately endorse Trump but admitted she has no firsthand knowledge. "He (Trump) will do well in Tennessee," she said.

State Sen. Mark Norris from Memphis hosted a reception at the delegation's Eastlake hotel, where he predicted "Republicans will unite behind Trump because they want to and have to. We must stand strong to defend liberty and this is the ticket of Trump and Pence to do it."

The convention will recess for an hour or more after convening today for its committees to take final action on a variety of issues, including the Platform Committee (of which I am a member) giving final approval to its documents. The convention will resume meeting this evening before adjourning.

On Tuesday, the Tennessee delegation has a boat cruise on Lake Erie.

Congressman Scott DesJarlais, R-South Pittsburg, has been added as an alternate to the delegation despite facing a seriously contested primary Aug. 4. He will be here some of this week.

On Sunday evening, Cleveland Browns owner Jim Haslam and his wife, Dee, hosted a thank-you reception at their home on Lake Erie for the Cleveland Republican convention host committee that raised the private funding for the convention in Cleveland.

I had lunch on Saturday with former Ohio state House Speaker Jo Ann Davidson, who is 88 and an icon of Republican politics in the state. She was speaker for five years (1995-2000) and still maintains an active pace in civic affairs.

Other Knoxville delegates and alternates here include Tennessee Republican Party Chair Ryan Haynes, Ted Hatfield, former Knox County Sheriff Tim Hutchison, Ken Gross and Karen Brown.
SHARE John J. Duncan Jr.

By Michael Collins of the Knoxville News Sentinel

WASHINGTON  If the District of Columbia becomes the 51st state, Tennessee will have helped pave the way.

Just don't expect Tennesseans in Congress to lend much of a hand.

Statehood has been a decadeslong goal for many leaders of the nation's capital for reasons succinctly summarized in the motto on the city's license plates.

"Taxation Without Representation," it complains.

The district's more than 670,000 residents pay federal taxes but have no real representation in the federal government. Their sole voice in Congreswss is Eleanor Holmes Norton, a delegate who serves in the House but isn't permitted to vote on the floor.

What's more, Congress has the power to review all bills by the D.C. city council and can prevent them from taking effect.

That can spell trouble for the liberal city when the GOP holds a majority in Congress. Just last year, congressional Republicans warned D.C. officials could go to prison if they implemented a marijuana legalization measure overwhelmingly approved by voters. Ultimately, Congress chose not to block the law.

Now, D.C. leaders are making another push for statehood. And they're looking to take the same route that Tennessee followed when it became the 16th state in 1796.

In November, D.C. residents will vote on a statehood referendum that would split the city in two. One part would be a new state called New Columbia. The other part would remain a small federal district that would house government buildings and monuments.

If the referendum is approved, D.C. would petition Congress for statehood. That's where Tennessee comes into play.

Because Tennessee was already a federal territory in the 1790s, Congress allowed it an abbreviated entry into the Union. Tennessee residents voted to ratify a constitution and pledged to begin a republic form of government. Congress then admitted the new state into the union without requiring a ratification vote by existing states.

If "the Tennessee model" worked for Tennessee, the thinking goes, it might work for D.C.

Not everyone, though, is on board. Opponents to granting D.C. statehood include Tennesseans in Congress.

"I'm very much opposed to D.C. statehood," said Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., R-Knoxville. "The District of Columbia was set up to belong to all Americans, and it has a special place, not only in the life of our country, but I think to all of the individuals who come here from all of the states."

In reality, Duncan said, D.C. is nothing but a city.

"It's a very important city," he said, "but it is a city. All other states are combinations of urban, suburban and rural areas, and they have all of these different aspects to them, all of these competing interests, all of these combinations that D.C. doesn't have."

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Maryville, makes essentially the same argument.

"Our nation was formed by states, and the district is a unique city  not a state," Alexander said. "The Constitution itself makes that distinction."

The most logical alternative to giving D.C. residents full representation in Congress would be to give the district back to Maryland, Alexander said. The district was created from land ceded by Virginia and Maryland.

"Just as Arlington and part of Alexandria went back to Virginia in 1846, most of the district could again become part of Maryland, leaving only a small area around key federal buildings and monuments," Alexander said.

Another option, he said, would be to keep the district as a separate entity, but allow its residents to vote in Maryland.

Rep. Phil Roe, R-Johnson City, isn't a fan of D.C. statehood either.

"We set the country up the way we did for a reason," he said. "I believe we can look further into the consequences of D.C. statehood, but I do not support D.C. becoming a state at this time."
SHARE Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., on Jan. 3, 2013. En esta imagen del 2 de septiembre de 2008, el ex senador republicano de Tennessee, Fred Thompson, realiza una senal de aprobacion durante una intervencion en la Convencion Nacional Republicana en St. Paul, Minnesota. Thompson fallecio el domingo 1 de noviembre de 2015 a los 73 anos de edad en Nashville, Tennessee, luego de que volviera a resurgirle un linfoma, informo su familia. (Foto AP/Ron Edmonds, Archivo) This portrait President Andrew Johnson, provided by the National Park Service, was made by John Wood Dodge in 1865, the year Johnson took office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His hometown of Greeneville, Tenn., is celebrating his 200th birthday this year. Johnson was the first president impeached by Congress and has been rated by historians as one of the nation's worst presidents, largely over his handling of Reconstruction after the Civil War. (AP Photo/National Park Service) Joe Carr Related Coverage Republican National Convention: RNC dispatches: View from convention floor

By Joel Ebert, USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee

Tennessee has a rich history of being involved in Republican national conventions, dating back to the years of Andrew Johnson.

In 1864, when the third Republican convention was held in Baltimore, Johnson was named President Abraham Lincoln's vice presidential nominee.

More recently, Tennesseans also have had prominent roles in the party's national conventions.

During the 2012 convention in Tampa, Fla., U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who served as co-chairman of the national party's resolutions committee, delivered a speech during which she said the GOP will be known as the "Great Opportunity Party."

Related:

East TN delegates didnt climb aboard Trump train all at once

Nashville could make hot spot for next convention

Five Tennesseans to watch at the Republican National Convention

Man in the Middle looks back on decades of GOP conventions

Bridge over a troubled party? Tenn. GOP looks to Trump for unity at convention

That same year, then-state Rep. Joe Carr made national headlines when he suggested he agreed with a Missouri Senate candidate's controversial remarks about rape and pregnancy.

Blackburn also spoke during the 2008 convention in St. Paul, Minn., as did former U.S. Sen. Fred Thompson, who ran for president that year.

In 1976, U.S. Sen. Howard Baker Jr. delivered a keynote speech at the convention in Kansas City, Mo., and was considered a possible vice presidential pick for Gerald Ford.

Eight years later, Baker, who would later serve as chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan, was the RNC chair for the convention in Dallas.

This year, several Tennesseans are playing key roles in the convention and the lead up to it. Blackburn is once again scheduled to make a speech at the convention.

Memphis-based attorney John Ryder has been serving as the general counsel for the RNC and already has outlined arguments as to why he believes the party can't change rules so delegates could buck their affiliations and vote for any another candidate for president.

U.S. Sen Bob Corker, who was once a vice presidential contender for Donald Trump, likely will play a role in the convention, given that he's offered praise and criticism of Trump, who could tap him for a Cabinet position if he wins in November.

A.B. Culvahouse, who grew up in East Tennessee but now lives in Washington, D.C., has played a crucial role in the vetting process for those being considered for vice president.

With 58 delegates and 55 alternates in the state's delegation, there will be no shortage of Tennesseans in the news as they gather for four event-filled days in Cleveland.
SAUL YOUNG/NEWS SENTINEL Black Lives Matter protesters gather in prayer at Krutch Park on July 10 before marching through downtown to protest police brutality. The event was organized by a handful of area high school students and grew to more than 100 participants.

SHARE CAITIE MCMEKIN/NEWS SENTINEL Children stand on the corner of Gay Street and Summitt Hill Drive as protesters participating in a Black Lives Matter rally block the intersection on July 8. The rally was in response to recent fatal shootings of black Americans by police officers.

By Andre Canty

On Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, there are signs that say "Black Lives Don't Matter to Black People" up and down the road near churches, mortuaries and schools. It serves as a response to "Black Lives Matter" by assuming that black people don't care enough for each other, giving a monolithic view and generalization to de-legitimize the movement to address systemic racism led by young people. These signs also emerged after the community violence shootings in December that have continued on. That phrase is the cousin of "All Lives Matter," which is brought up only in the wake of racial violence, again as a distraction.

The shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling earlier this month told an all too familiar story. Two black men killed by state violence and on camera. This is one year removed from the death of Sandra Bland, who was found hanged in a Texas jail after being arrested following a traffic stop.

For the last four years, countless black bodies have been taken away without punishment. These men, women and children go through a vetting process for their deaths to graduate from a tragedy to an injustice. They have to be the most angelic beings on Earth for unjust deaths to be viewed as crimes and our anger to be righteous.

When Mike Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, everything about Brown and Wilson's identity wasn't revealed until people were out in the streets. There are split screens on TV debating on whether a black life taken should be considered a crime. The debate itself is an injustice.

Black-on-black crime is one of the most sinister red herrings to distract from organizing against racial violence. It is to suggest that only black people kill within their race and it couldn't be further from the truth. People of all races commit violence within their own race. The FBI stated that 90 percent of black people have killed black people and 82 percent of white homicides are committed by other white people. It is sickening to put out the narrative that only one race commits its own self-destruction and therefore cursed themselves to be viewed and treated as inhuman.

Black youth are not inherently more evil than anyone else. It's truly a myth, a gross misrepresentation to fuel and justify black death. It's now more widely called community violence. The real issue lies within how punishment is administered. When one black person kills another, the suspect is often arrested, tried and sentenced with hardly any debate as to why it happened. Hardly anyone has ever provided a split screen for a gang member on TV or established a GoFundMe account for the murderer.

Community violence is the child of institutionalized racial violence. You put a people in an environment without equal access to quality education, health, jobs, healthy food, etc., and what else would it lead to?

There are people in the current movement who have been concerned about violence in their neighborhoods but don't see mass imprisonment as the solution. Some had been actually organizing to address community violence locally before July, and will continue to do so. They say parents need to be in the house, but they can barely be in the house with a $7.25 minimum wage, so they work two or three jobs. Adequate jobs are part of the solution for them to be at home more.

Mentoring programs and places of sanctuary are essential as well. We don't have to live in an extreme binary condition where mentoring and organizing for social justice can't co-exist.

One can be against police brutality and against police deaths. Violence only begets violence. The shootings in Dallas were horrific. However, some have used the action of one man to indict an entire group and through that, an entire people.

Dylann Roof killed nine people in Charleston and at first was described as a lone wolf on drugs instead of a racist. The man who killed one officer and two civilians last year at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last year has been mostly forgotten. Larry Gordon, a white inmate, killed two officers in Michigan on July 12 and it's hardly been noticed. When anyone of color commits a crime, that person is somehow part of a conspiracy enacted by that person's race or religion.

The man who has been brought up as a red herring the most is Martin Luther King Jr. This mythical King has been co-opted to bring up community violence when he hardly ever spoke up about it. King fought against racism. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, King said, "We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality."

When people were hanged, were gangs to blame? When John Lewis was beaten in Selma, was it because he was wearing sagging pants? Was King assassinated because of rap music (which, of course, didn't exist then)?

The movement now is to continue what the civil rights movement started. It's a call for justice. As Jesus said, "I have not come to change the law of the Prophets, I come to fulfill them." So, too, have we come to fulfill what those before us started.

Andre Canty works in development and communications for the Highlander Education and Research Center.
By Mike Miller

This week's gathering in Cleveland will be my 14th and last Republican National Convention, spanning the past 52 years. As always, I will be looking for "convention moments," defining occurrences large and small that remain etched in memory throughout the history of these political assemblies.

It started for me with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 in San Francisco's old Cow Palace, with just three networks televising primarily in black and white beneath a billowing cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke. I remember former President Dwight D. Eisenhower denouncing "divisive columnists and commentators."

It will end with the convention of Donald Trump in Cleveland's eco-friendly Quicken Loans Arena (the Q) before a dazzling array of traditional and new media platforms representing generations of technological change.

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I have experienced the dynamic impact of satellite transmission technology, the arrival and growth of cable news networks, the internet, and now the digital and other platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Xbox, Instagram, Snapchat, Flipboard et al.

I covered that 1964 convention and the 1968 one in Miami Beach as a correspondent for the News-Sentinel and other Scripps-Howard newspapers. In 1972, again in Miami Beach, I switched to working for the GOP. I have served seven times as media operations director, three times as overall operations director and once (2012 in Tampa) as chief operating officer. For this one, I am a senior adviser.

An epic "convention moment" was Ray Charles closing out the 1964 convention in Dallas playing and singing "America" on a baby grand piano hoisted to the podium (stage) for the finale. On one side of the piano stood President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan. I stood pressed against the opposite side, helping to hold back an aggressive Sam Donaldson of ABC, who wanted a closer look.

A favorite was Kansas City in 1976, the last of the truly contested conventions. The air was electric on opening night when a test vote proved that incumbent President Gerald Ford had survived the challenge of then-California Gov. Reagan. Disappointed Reagan supporters brought in air horns and blew them to bring the convention to a standstill.

Other convention moments:

n Elizabeth Dole in San Diego in 1996, hopping down the podium steps in heels with a pin-on wireless microphone to walk among the delegations. When the mic promptly failed with a loud pop, a technician handed her a wireless hand-held and she never missed a beat. Her husband, Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas, was the nominee that year.

n George H.W. Bush delivering the speech of his life ("I am that man") in the New Orleans Superdome in 1988. That oration helped vault him from 17 points down to neck and neck in the polls with Democrat Michael Dukakis. Bush cruised to victory in November.

n A near loss of electrical power during the final hour in the Houston Astrodome in 1992. Former President Ford was speaking and President Bush 41 was on the way. Ford cut his speech short and the house band played while we solved the problem. I doubt if Bush knows to this day how we scrambled to keep the lights on that night.

n A man named Reese Schonfeld in Kansas City in 1976 who told me he could "rub two cameras together and create a network." That was my first glimpse of the new satellite technology. Schonfeld later became a co-founder of CNN and its first chief executive.

n And then there was Clint Eastwood (Tampa 2012) talking to an empty stool as if it were President Barack Obama. When Eastwood requested a stool, the providers thought he was going to sit on it.

My colleagues scoff when I say this convention is my last. They have thrown a few retirement parties for me but I kept coming back. I turn 80 this year.

I am grateful to Reince Priebus, our outstanding Republican national chairman, for naming me COO in 2012 sight unseen on the recommendation of three-time convention CEO Bill Harris.

My theory has been that I best served the party by pressing for maximum access and adequate facilities for the news media. The San Diego Union newspaper described me in 1996 as the "Man in the Middle," between the media's excessive demands and the party management.

The only sure way I know to reach the voters who will decide the presidency in November is through the news media in its various forms. That's what a national political convention is all about.

Mike Miller, a former correspondent for the News Sentinel and Scripps-Howard Newspapers, is senior adviser for the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Paul Moseley/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service Dallas Police Honor Guard members stand alongside Sr. Cpl. Lorne Ahrens' casket while three more arrive to replace them during the funeral service for the Dallas officer, killed with four other officers in a June 7 shooting ambush. The service took place at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, on July 13.

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There's a virtual war on cops. It has been ginned up by grotesquely distorted accusations of anti-black police racism, and the tragic irony is that a thoroughly denounced, less proactively aggressive police force has resulted in more murderous misery in already beaten-up black neighborhoods.

This virtual war began to take on aspects of the real thing when a mentally demented, hateful black sniper in Dallas shot 12 policemen, killing five. That was followed by screeching protesters in another setting throwing concrete at police.

The Dallas horror, planned for some time, had been preceded only a few days earlier by fatal police shootings of two black men. Nationwide protests against police racism were generated by videos that, without question, were dramatically disturbing. But they did not supply all the details needed for a final verdict or demonstrate whites would not have met the same fate.

After all, in 2015, police shot 494 whites compared to 258 blacks, and while blacks are just 13 percent of the population, they commit far more crimes than whites. Here is a point too many analysts miss, but not Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank whose just-published book is titled "The War on Cops." She observes that blacks commit 57 percent of all murders and 40 percent of all police shootings. Black murders are mainly committed by blacks, and the annual number is around 6,000, more than whites and Hispanics together.

Lots of statistics could be piled on these, but what they add up to is that police on a daily basis are confronting far more blacks in difficult, threatening situations than whites. It should not be surprising to any intellectually honest person, then, that they shoot more blacks as a percentage of the total than whites. Precious few of those shootings have been proved unjustified, and various reputable studies say they are not racist, including a recent one by a black economist at Harvard.

But protestors are not convinced, numerous pundits do not seemed convinced and President Barack Obama has not seemed convinced. In a memorial speech in Dallas, he said many positive, heartening things, such as the nation being less divided than it sometimes seems, that police have tough jobs and that much is being asked of police when "we ask too little of ourselves."

But he repeated his core charge that there are all sorts of racial biases embedded in the criminal justice system, not only feeding misbegotten attitudes but leading to wrong solutions.

We all know most blacks are law-abiding people who contribute mightily to this nation. We know racism still afflicts them. We know there are bad cops out there, just as there are bad people in any large group.

However, if this particular discussion leaves out mention of black crime rates, an essential part of the context is missing. For instance, you get all kinds of federal interventions in local police forces that do more demonizing than teaching of tactics that, if the teachers knew anything, might help.

What's needed is more attention to interracial cultural problems that happen to be hitting blacks especially hard. One is single-parent homes that make it far more likely children will later involve themselves in crime. Re-establishing family is no easy matter, but showing more respect for cops is. From 1993 to the present day, gun homicides in America came down by almost half, and one reason among several was almost certainly more and improved policing.

Right now, owing largely to government-abetted outrage over police shootings (including the one in Ferguson, Missouri, in which the Justice Department found the officer guiltless), police seem to have become less proactive, Mac Donald says.

Last year and the first quarter this year, homicides have been increasing significantly in the nation's largest cities, meaning large numbers of black deaths. Respect for cops is needed. Don't black lives matter?

Jay Ambrose is a columnist for Tribune News Service. He may be reached at speaktojay@aol.com.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is promising to rid Turkey of people involved in Friday's failed coup attempt, as authorities continued to carry out arrests of those allegedly responsible.

"At every level of government, the period of cleaning this virus will continue," Erdogan said Sunday. "Like the cancer virus, it spreads all around the government," he added.

Turkish security forces fired warning shots and made arrests near the Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, one of two international airports serving Istanbul, officials said.

There were also clashes at an air base in Konya, a major city in the central region of Turkey. "The situation is under control," an official said.

Around 6,000 people have been detained. State-run media reports an aide to Erdogan is among those detained after the coup attempt.

Erdogan said authorities will continue to pursue supporters of exiled Islamist cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has blamed for the coup attempt.

Gulen, who has been living in the United States since before Erdogan came to power, condemned the coup and denied he had anything to do with the military revolt.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag demanded on Saturday his extradition from the United States.

Minister Bozdag says Turkish authorities are accelerating arrests of people, which have included judges, military officers and soldiers. Those in custody include the commander of the Third Army Corps, General Erdal Ozturk, who could face charges of treason.

Other high-ranking military officials flew to neighboring Greece by helicopter and requested political asylum. Turkish media reports say some of those who fled are believed to be among the architects of the coup.

Speaking Sunday to people who called for the death penalty outside his home in Istanbul, Erdogan said the use of capital punishment cannot be delayed, saying "We cannot ignore this demand." Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004, but Erdogan said he would discuss it with opposition parties.

Meanwhile, thousands of people attended funerals Sunday in Istanbul and Ankara for those killed. Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died.

Reports about how many people were killed in clashes during the coup attempt varied, but by late Saturday 265 were reported dead, including many civilians. Conditions remained tense in Istanbul, Ankara and some other provincial cities, and there were reports of sporadic continuing violence.

Turkish media reported intense clashes at a large military barracks outside Ankara that was believed to be a stronghold of the coup plotters.

Thousands of Turkish citizens packed Ankara's Kizilat Square, downtown Istanbul, and the coastal city of Izmir late Saturday to shout their support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government.

Crowds waved flags at the late-night rallies and chanted their determination not to let anything or anyone divide the country.
A black street vendor in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shot to death by white cops while subdued. A black motorist in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shot to death by a white cop while reaching for his driver's license and registration after telling the cop that he had a "permit to carry" and had a weapon with him. Five white cops assassinated by a black sniper seeking revenge for many past transgressions by cops killing blacks.

These three incidents cannot be discussed in isolation. What happened in Dallas should never have happened. The murders of five cops in that city was senseless and shameful. But so were the murders in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights. None can be mourned in the absence of the others; nor will scapegoating white cops or the Black Lives Matter movement solve the problem. We need to talk to each other, not past each other.

There is a serious divide in this country between black people and the police specifically and many white people in general.

It is not often that I find myself in agreement with Newt Gingrich, but when he said, "It is more dangerous to be black in America," he was right. He said that it has taken him a long time "to begin to get a sense of this. If you are a normal white American, truth is you don't understand being black in America. You instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk."

There is an assumption by white Americans that a black man with a gun is going to do something violent to them. At the same time, too many black parents feel obliged to have "the talk" with their children to warn and protect them from cop violence. My mother gave me the talk as a young boy. I would overhear grown folks telling newcomers in town to never allow cops to search their trunks in a traffic stop without their presence. Invariably, they would warn them that the cops would "find" a gallon of moonshine that the driver did not know was there.

Leon Wolf, managing editor for conservative website Redstate.com, wrote that "police often interact with minority communities in different ways than they do with the white community." On MSNBC's AM Joy, Wolf said that people who live in white middle-class suburbia didn't believe stories about police brutality in minority communities because it was inconsistent with their experiences with police.

President Barack Obama has called for a national conversation on the subject of community policing to try to build bridges to heal our troubled land. But much of the conversation is not helpful. Former Illinois U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh, in the wake of the Dallas shootings, tweeted, "There is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out Black Lives Matter punks. Real America is coming after you." As a "real" American, what does Walsh's use of the word "real" really mean? Was he trying to incite a race war?

Too many radical right-wing politicians and others want to blame Black Lives Matter for the violence we see too often on the news. But the data bear out that blacks are nearly three times more likely to die at the hands of a cop than whites. Black drivers are 31 percent more likely than whites to be pulled over and three times more likely to be searched. But according to Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani, an organization that points out these realities and calls for accountability must be racist.

Who can forget the vicious beating that Rodney King suffered at the hands of white cops in Los Angeles that was caught on film? Yet an all-white jury found the cops innocent of all charges in that gross miscarriage of justice. Then people were astounded when a jury containing blacks found O.J. Simpson innocent of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown and a friend. Personally, I believe Simpson was guilty, but given the racial history in Los Angeles, the jury set him free.

If we as Americans are ever to be free of these racial divides, we must stop approaching issues in terms of liberal vs. conservative, right wing vs. leftwing, and start thinking moral vs. immoral, what is right and what is wrong, commons sense vs. ideology. Only then can we hope to find common ground.
New financial disclosures were filed last week and, if you accept the proposition that the candidate with the most money usually wins a given race, they established clear frontrunners in most of Tennessee's contested August primaries for seats in the Legislature and Congress.

But just maybe this is a summer for new exceptions to the general rule that money wins. In at least one legislative campaign, the biggest spender has become a clear underdog  Rep. Jeremy Durham, R-Franklin, who has spent $88,232 so far and has a cash balance of $122,147 versus just $13,247 in spending and a $28,312 balance for challenger Sam Whitson.

But then already-embattled Durham was hit with the equivalent of a $1 million attack ad with the release of a tawdry tale of his sexual exploits in Legislatorland. The guy now known as "Pants Candy" suspended his campaign on Thursday.

The "money wins" truism will be more interestingly tested elsewhere across the state.

In congressional races, the test will come in three decidedly different Republican primaries, the rest being foregone conclusions with well-financed incumbents assured of keeping their seats.

Consider the convoluted 13-candidate GOP primary in the 8th District for a seat being vacated by Rep. Stephen Fincher, who made his curious exit with more than $2 million stashed in a re-election campaign account. Money will surely be a factor there and if the cliche is true, then perennial candidate George Flinn, a self-financing multimillionaire, is the leader. But don't bet on it. Big-time political donors, who like to go with a winner, certainly aren't.

In the 4th District, challenger Grant Starrett is substantially outspending incumbent Rep. Scott DesJarlais, relying on self-financing and out-of-state donors, as DesJaralis eagerly points out. In the 6th District, challenger Joe Carr is being even more dramatically outspent by incumbent Rep. Diane Black, who can rely on both self-financing and traditional PAC support.

But both incumbents are understandably nervous in a year that seems to indicate a "throw-the-incumbent-bums-out" inclination within GOP voter ranks, as evidenced by Donald Trump's victory in the presidential campaign.

Former state Rep. Carr has enough name ID from his respectable showing, despite being dramatically underfunded, against U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander in 2014, to cause alarm in what will probably be a low-turnout August election. Black is thus skipping the Republican National Convention to campaign at home and spending more than $500,000 so far on TV ads.

Starrett is, like Carr, attacking an incumbent as entirely too liberal and part of the Washington establishment. Unlike Carr, he has enough money to get that message across, though lacking name ID. He's paid for three TV ads so far; DesJarlais has paid for none so far  a cause for concern given that DesJarlais won by just 38 votes in the 2014 primary.

In legislative campaigns, virtually all incumbents have more money than their primary challengers and nothing to compare with Durham's debacle to deal with. So, if the "money wins" rule holds true, they should emerge victorious.

A Knoxville example is in House District 18, where Rep. Martin Daniel faces three challengers, including former Rep. Steve Hall, whom he defeated in a close 2014 race. This time, Daniel as an incumbent has more contributions than all opponents combined ($40,285) and has added almost as much in self-financing. Easy prediction: Daniel prevails with more money, despite controversies in his freshman term, especially with three opponents to split up the anti-incumbent vote.

Perhaps a better test is in Senate District 4, where state Rep. Jon Lundberg, R-Bristol, is blessed by PAC donations and stashed funds from past years when unopposed for re-election to his House seat. As a semi-incumbent, he has a lopsided financial advantage over three opponents in seeking the Senate seat vacated by retiring Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey.

Big donors, mostly PACs these days in legislative races, like to bet on winners in the vast majority of cases. Incumbents are usually a safe bet.

One might ask which comes first: The incumbency chickens or the donation eggs?

Usually, it doesn't matter. They both win. But every now and then, the nest gets disturbed.

More from Tom Humphrey on "Humphrey on the Hill:"
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As a retired physicist, I was interested to read your article about the proposed purchase of the Tennessee Valley Authority's Bellefonte nuclear plant by Phoenix Energy of Nevada, which proposes to install its induction-heated energy system in place of the plant's nuclear reactor. Other readers have commented favorably on this.

After reading a presentation from the company on its website and considering its claim that no further fossil or nuclear energy input is needed after a "small amount" of input at startup, it is clear that this is basically a perpetual motion scheme that has no chance of succeeding.

The claim that only 15 percent of the plant's electric output is needed to keep it operating is ridiculous. This is like an electric car company claiming that its vehicle can use 15 percent of its motor power to drive a generator that keeps its battery charged, and that you can drive around forever using the other 85 percent without ever having to reconnect the car to the electrical grid.

The company's website is no doubt impressive to naive investors. It is not necessarily being deceptive. The inventor and company management may be equally naive and think they have a revolutionary new power system. After spending millions, they will start up the plant using power from the grid to supply their induction system. The plant will sit there running smoothly and looking successful, but the inductive system will still be connected to the generator output and drawing energy from the grid to make up for losses in the turbines and generators. Soon it will be discovered that the generators are supplying no extra current to the grid because they have to be set to just match the grid voltage. The company will go bankrupt, leaving the investors (and perhaps TVA) holding the bag.

Bill Schwenterly, Knoxville
China has already spent a massive amount of money to rapidly build artificial islands as well as residential facilities for workers and government crews on the islands. The country has also put a floating hospital to sea and launched several submarines in the area in recent months.

The next day, China tested two new airfields it has built in the Nansha islands in the South China Sea. State media showed civilian flights taking off from the airfields to further legitimize China's control over that part of the sea. It established four light houses in the sea a few days earlier.

The People's Liberation Army's Navy (PLAN) commissioned a new guided-missile destroyer, Yinchuan, on Tuesday, the day the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague ruled that China's claims to most of the South China Sea are invalid. The tribunal, constituted under the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS), ruled in favor of the Philippines, which had complained that China was claiming part of its territory.

China is expected to increase its military investment in the South China Sea and significantly raise its overall defense spending to affirm its claim to the region.

 Military Preparedness

"This trend in militarizing the South China Sea is expected to continue and indeed expand following the PCA ruling," said Lee YingHui, research analyst at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies.

The People's Liberation Army assured the nation ahead of the ruling that it stood ready to meet any challenge from the South China Sea. "The Chinese military has never been frightened," PLA spokesman Yang Yujun said in a news briefing.

Yang said that if foreign warships want to "make trouble out of nothing" in the South China Sea, then "of course we have ways to deal with it."

Some regional analysts think China has no need to be worried about any challenge in the key shipping and fishing region.

"China will continue to have relative military supremacy in the South China Sea for a long time to come, given the desolate state of the Philippine navy," Lee said.

"PLAN also enjoys home ground advantage over the U.S. navy in the South China Sea," Lee said, referring to the U.S. naval presence that, some believe, emboldened Manila to file the arbitration claim against the Asian superpower.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said Beijing has the right to impose an Air Identification Defense Zone (AIDZ) in the South China Sea region because it belongs to the country. The AIDZ will allow China to monitor and if necessary control flights over the martime region. Beijing, however, would need to increase defense spending to enforce an AIDZ.

 Defense Budget Slowdown

China surprised many international defense experts this year when it said its military budget would grow at a relatively slow pace of 7.5 percent, after five years of increases topping 10 percent. This was an apparent response to a slowing Chinese economy.

Many defense analysts, however, say the official budget does not reflect massive expenditure on military-related infrastructure, such as air and sea ports, frontier rail lines and the construction of new islands.

Regional defense experts say the arbitration ruling may lead other South China Sea claimants to ramp up their defense spending. Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines all claim portions of the waterway, which is rich in fish and believed to hold significant underwater mineral resources.

"As states squabble over sovereignty issues and increase spending to safeguard their own interests, it is the global defense industry that is the real beneficiary of the South China Sea disputes," said Jonathan Spangler, director of the South China Sea Think Tank in Taipei.
Samsung Electronics of South Korea has emerged as the top brand in Brazil's PC market, according to local media.



Based on its annual brand survey, the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo reported that Samsung ranked first, beating its American rivals: Apple and Dell.



Last year, Apple was the leader, while Samsung and Dell ranked second together.

Samsung's achievement came despite a slump in the local and global PC markets.



The sales of desktops and laptops in Brazil shrank 36 percent on-year to around 3 million last year. Market watchers struck a downbeat note on this year's revenue as well, mainly due to the downturn in the global PC market.



Nonetheless, Samsung officials said their aggressive marketing has paid off in Brazil.

For instance, they have pushed for the "Blue Medal" campaign using the image of synchronized swimming to publicize the function of linking laptops and smartphones.



Samsung also focused efforts on analyzing changes in the demands of Brazilian consumers and communicating constantly with them. (Yonhap)




Starbucks Coffee Korea CEO Lee Seock-koo speaks with employees at a company store in Seoul, July 14, 2014. The CEO toured 24 stores across the country from July through September that year to hear opinions from employees.

/ Courtesy of Starbucks Coffee Korea



By Lee Hyo-sik

Starbucks Coffee Korea has been placing top priority on fostering its "people business" to create the nation's most employee-friendly workplace.

The Korean unit of the world's largest coffee franchise has been recruiting baristas and other staff as fulltime employees, as well as helping them strike a work life balance and pursue their academic goals. For these and other employee-centered policies, Starbucks has been named as one of Korea's top 10 workplaces over the past several years.

"All Starbucks employees work fulltime and enjoy job security. There are no part-time or contract workers here," a Starbucks Coffee Korea spokesman said. "We call one another partners,' rather than addressing by ranks, to create a horizontal organization structure. Now there are 8,600 employees at our headquarters and 890 stores nationwide, a huge jump from 40 when we opened our first store in July 1999."

Starbucks has been offering its employees a wide range of educational opportunities when they want to obtain a barista certificate or pursue other areas of academic interests. A certain number of employees are also selected every year to go overseas, visiting coffee farms and the firm's global headquarters in Seattle.

"To shorten meeting hours, we took away all the chairs from meeting rooms. So, employees get together only when they have something to discuss. They now have more time to focus on their duties," he said.

Company CEO Lee Seock-koo is promoting "open" communication, according to the spokesman, who said he often makes unannounced visits to stores to hear directly from employees who brew coffee and meet customers.

"In 2014, Lee toured 24 stores nationwide for eight weeks to gather employee opinions about what is really needed to serve customers and make workers happier," he said. "He continues to do so these days and reflect what he hears in company policies."

Starbucks also runs a division dedicated to promoting employee's happiness and wellbeing.

Among its programs to bolster workers welfare, loud music is played at the company headquarters at 5:30 p.m. from Monday to Friday to alter staff it is time to leave office.

The team also chooses stores on a regular basis and manages selected shops on behalf of store staff so that they can take a break for a day and go on an outing together.

"Because of all of these employee-focused policies and corporate culture, Starbucks was chosen as one of Korea's top 10 workplaces this year by consulting firm Aon Hewitt," the spokesman said. "We will continue to do our best to maintain our status as one of the most sought-after workplaces."
South Korean travelers who were stranded at an airport in Istanbul following an attempted coup in Turkey arrived safety in the country Sunday.



Incheon International Airport authorities said 110 people who were held up in Turkey arrived on a Turkish Airlines flight earlier in the day.



Authorities said many were tired but happy to be back home. They boarded the plane at 9:50 p.m. Saturday and flew out of Istanbul Ataturk Airport.



One traveler said people were startled by gunfire, and when they heard news that the military took over the airport, many became apprehensive.



Another said explosions rocked the walls of the airport, and some people even cried in fear.



There were some 120 South Korean at the airport, but others took connecting flights out of the country.













Members of Turkey's military staged a coup late Friday (local time), but the uprising had been put down by the democratically elected government as of Saturday.



Seoul dispatched officials from its consulate general in Ankara to Istanbul to help its nationals leave the country safety.



It moreover said a quick response team made up of two foreign ministry officials and one police officer will be sent to Turkey later in the day to ensure the safety of South Korean nationals still in the country and help them in the case they need to be evacuated. (Yonhap)
"Steeled by Despair, Motivated by Hope"

President Park Geun-hye's autobiography has hit book stands in Mongolia again with renewed public interest, local media reported over the weekend, as she began her first official visit to Ulaanbaatar on Sunday.



The Mongolian version of her autobiography, titled "Steeled by Despair, Motivated by Hope," was republished by the Mongolian Association of Graduates in Korea (MAGIKO), a group of Mongolians who once studied in South Korea, on Tuesday last week.



Her autobiography is now on display in major book stores in the Mongolian capital.

It was first published in Mongolia in March 2013 to mark Park's swearing-in as South Korea's first female president. All 2,000 copies of the autobiography were sold out at the time, which put the book on the country's best-seller list.



Udriin sonin, a mass-circulation newspaper in Mongolia, reported that it was "no exaggeration" to say that there was no woman in South Korea who was more exalted than Park in terms of political stature. It also said Park's success is due to her "strong, decisive" character.













The Korean version of Park's autobiography was published in 2007.



It depicts her life as the eldest daughter of a former president who was assassinated in 1979, and a female politician in the male-dominated political arena. It also touches on her role as an acting first lady in the 1970s following her mother's shooting death in 1974. (Yonhap)
Police start investigation of violence against prime minister

By Lee Kyung-min

Residents in Seongju County vowed Sunday to extend their organized struggle against the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery there, shrugging off a police investigation of some residents who used violence during a rally, Friday.

Some 200 members from the public and private sectors in the county in North Gyeongsang Province set up an Anti-THAAD Struggle Committee, Saturday, to stage a long-term, systematic fight against the deployment of the anti-missile unit.

The committee members said they would continue rallies until the government withdraws the plan to deploy THAAD there. They also plan to wage a legal battle against the government for the "flawed" process of the site decision, which they claim was made without consulting the residents.

"Some 2,000 residents will visit Seoul Thursday to stage a rally at Gwanghwamun Square and the National Assembly in Yeouido," the committee said in a statement.

About 1,000 residents also held a candlelit vigil for two hours in protest near the county office. The office said the vigil will take place every night until the deployment decision is withdrawn.

Police in dilemma

Police said they are investigating some residents who used violence during a rally at the country's office on Friday when they threw raw eggs and bottles of water at Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn and Defense Minister Han Min-koo.












US to show anti-missile unit in Guam to Korean media today

By Jun Ji-hye

The United States invited a group of Korean journalists to Guam, Sunday, for a three-day visit to give them a close look at a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery there.

This was part of efforts to alleviate public concern here about radiation hazards from the anti-missile battery the U.S. and South Korean government have agreed to deploy in Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, by the end of 2017.

However, Seongju residents' anger and fear about risks associated with the advanced U.S. anti-ballistic missile shield are not being eased.

Since the Ministry of National Defense announced Seongju County as the location for a THAAD battery, the residents have been rising up in protest, claiming the electromagnetic waves emitted from the AN/TPY-2 radar can cause cancer, infertility and hurt their watermelon crop.

The radar in Guam is the same model as the one to be deployed in Seongju; and this is the first time that the U.S. has allowed the media to tour a THAAD unit.

The U.S. military will give a full explanation to the journalists about the missile system showing that it poses no health risk, a ministry official said.

He added that the two countries are also willing to have Seongju residents visit the Guam installation if they want to check the radar's safety themselves.

But Washington has yet to allow Korean journalists to directly observe the measurement of electromagnetic waves, reportedly refusing to disclose data from the THAAD unit on Guam.












National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun speaks during a ceremony marking the 68th Constitution Day at the National Assembly, Sunday. / Yonhap



By Kim Hyo-jin



National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun renewed his call Sunday for a revision of the Constitution by 2018.



Noting that the current Constitution does not reflect social changes made since its last amendment in 1987, Chung urged Assemblymen to step up the push for a revision.



"Ruling and opposition party leaders should start intensive discussions about a constitutional revision to reform the national system," he said during a ceremony marking the 68th Constitution Day.



"The Constitution should be adjusted to reflect the current situation so it can maintain authority and efficacy as the supreme rule.



"I hope a new Constitution can be proclaimed before the 70th Constitution Day (on July 17, 2018)," he said.



His call for constitutional revision is expected to re-ignite debate over the issue as it has currently been placed on the back burner due to the government's controversial plan to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in the southeastern farming county of Seongju.



In June, Chung triggered a national debate over revising the Constitution in his inauguration speech, vowing to change the current five-year single-term presidential system during the term of the 20th parliament, begun in May.



The nation's current presidential system, introduced in 1987, has resulted in presidential terms being conducted in an imperial style and has contributed to endless political and social conflict, according to analysts.



Supporters of the constitutional revision want to change the current single five-year presidential term to a four-year term that would allow for a serving chief executive to be re-elected to a second term, and introduce a power-sharing system between the president and prime minister.



Although the call has gained steam in the Assembly, Cheong Wa Dae and the government have remained opposed to the idea, expressing concerns that the move will divert attention from President Park Geun-hye's key agenda of revitalizing the sluggish economy and reform in the labor, finance, education and public services sectors.



The ruling Saenuri Party took a cautious stance on the issue, raising doubts over the feasibility of a revision.



"We agree with the need to revise the Constitution but the move led by the Assembly will hardly gain momentum," said Saenuri Party floor leader Chung Jin-suk.



The minor opposition People's Party agreed with Chung, urging President Park to step up resolving the long-running issue.



"The President should be leading the talks," Rep. Son Kum-ju, a party spokesman, said. "It's time to discuss a constitutional revision in a way to guarantee public rights, reduce polarization, and realize a future welfare state."



During the speech, Chung reiterated a plan to reduce the privileges of lawmakers, saying, "The 20th Assembly will give up all the unnecessary perks to meet public standards."



The speaker has led the move to reduce the privileges of lawmakers including immunity from apprehension or prosecution  parliamentary rights stated in the Constitution  saying that it will help alleviate the deep-rooted mistrust the pubic harbors toward the legislature. A parliamentary advisory committee to discuss the details will be launched this week.



The speaker also called on the government to shift polices on North Korea, saying the Assembly will help resume dialogue with the isolated country.



"I urge the government, which relies solely on sanctions, to change its hard-line policies toward North Korea to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula," Chung said.



"The six party talks have been stalled for over seven years. The Assembly will seek opportunities for dialogue. I plan to open dialogue between parliaments of the participants of the six party talks."
Young activists stage a rally in front of the War Memorial of Korea in Yongsan, Seoul, Sunday, to protest the South Korean and United States' plan to deploy a U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery in Seongju County. / Yonhap



By Jun Ji-hye

South Korea and the United States have detected increased activity at North Korea's Punggye-ri nuclear test site, according to intelligence sources, Sunday.

Sources said the activity has been increasing, especially after July 8 when Seoul and Washington officially announced their decision to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery here.

"A number of trucks and personnel have been continuously detected at the site since July 8," a source said on condition of anonymity. "South Korea and the United States are monitoring developments there."

The source said the allies are considering every possibility, including another nuclear test  after a fourth one on Jan. 6.

The assessment is in line with 38 North's report last week that North Korea is showing "high-level activity" at the test site.

"Based on imagery alone, it is not possible to determine whether this activity is for maintenance, excavation or preparation for a fifth nuclear test," the U.S.-based website monitoring Pyongyang said.

"Nevertheless, it is clear that North Korea is ensuring that the facility is in a state of readiness that would allow conducting future nuclear tests should the order come from Pyongyang."

Another official said that while the pick-up in traffic may be related to the North conducting routine maintenance work, it could be a sign the reclusive country may be moving to carry out another nuclear test.

The South Korean defense ministry believes that the Kim Jong-un regime is technically ready for a fifth test at any time, once its leader decides to give the go ahead.

Three days after the allies' deployment announcement, the North threatened to make "merciless" retaliatory strikes against Seoul and Washington from the moment the THAAD location was selected.

On Jan. 6, the North conducted its fourth nuclear test, despite warnings from the international community. This led the United Nations Security Council imposing its harshest sanctions yet on the Kim Jong-un regime in March.

North Korea detonated its first device in 2006, followed by others in 2009 and 2013.
/Courtesy of Twitter



By Lee Han-soo

"Boshintang," which translates as dog soup, is disappearing from Korean culture.

It was popular on "Boknal," known as "dog day," one of three traditional days on which Koreans eat a specific food to counter the summer heat.

But with the rise of pet animals and global condemnation over cruelty, the culture is disappearing.

Although activists are praising the result as a win for animal rights, store owners are not so happy.

"Summer is when we sell the most boshintang," said a restaurant owner in an interview with the Asia Economic Daily, a Korean newspaper. "We used to have a lot of customers in the early 2000s but now no one comes to eat boshintang."

The owner complained that many people protest outside his restaurant, accusing him of animal cruelty.

"Dog for eating and pet use is totally different," he said. "It's similar to other animals in the food market."

Experts speculate that widespread pet ownership is behind the fall of boshintang.

According to research by the Animal and Plant Quarantine Agency, about 21.8 percent of Korean households have pets.

"Maybe in the past there was little to eat and our ancestors ate dogs for essential nutrition," Jung Hea-min, 21, a college student, told the Asia Economic Daily. "However, this is no longer the case. We now have other foods that can substitute for boshintang for the nutrition once needed."
President Park Geun-hye shakes hands with her Mongolian counterpart Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj before their summit in Ulaanbaatar, Sunday. The two agreed to seek a free trade pact to expand bilateral economic cooperation, according to Cheong Wa Dae. / Yonhap



By Kim Hyo-jin



South Korea and Mongolia have agreed to seek a free trade pact to expand bilateral economic cooperation, according to Cheong Wa Dae, Sunday.



The agreement was reached during a summit between President Park Geun-hye and her Mongolian counterpart Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj in Ulaanbaatar. Park is currently in the capital city for a two-day official visit after attending the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) that ended Saturday.



To pursue a bilateral economic partnership agreement (EPA), the two nations agreed to initiate joint research on it as early as late this year. The EPA, similar to a free trade agreement, focuses more on industry and investment while enhancing free trade of commodities and services.



The presidential office expected the EPA to bolster mutual trade and investment, deepening the bilateral ties opened in 1990.



Through the envisioned EPA, the two sides hope to boost their trade volume that has declined in recent years. Their trade, which stood at $411 million in 2011, dipped to $292 million last year largely due to Mongolia's economic downturn.



"South Korean investors have been reluctant in reaching out to Mongolia due to uncertainty," said Kang Seog-hoon, the senior presidential secretary for economic affairs. "But now with an institutional framework, the deal will bring significant changes."



The South Korea-Monglia EPA will mark the latter's second EPA following one with Japan, signed in February 2015 after four years of research, but the presidential office expects the negotiation process between Seoul and Ulaanbaatar to take less time.



Mongolia has sought to diversify its economic relations, reaching out to countries including the U.S., South Korea, and Japan in a bid to change its heavy reliance on China and Russia.



During the summit, the two leaders also decided to help South Korean companies participate in 14 infrastructure projects and observed the signing of 20 memoranda of understanding (MOU) to support the joint efforts. The projects, estimated at about $4.49 billion, range from electricity and railroads to urban development.



Of the 20 MOUs signed, several will allow South Korean companies to participate in constructing power plants, energy transmission networks and producing renewable energy, the official said.



Both countries signed an MOU, pledging a joint effort in combating desertification by managing a 3,000-hectare plantation in the Gobi desert and creating an urban forest near Ulaanbaatar.



The heads of state also discussed ways to promote stability on the Korean Peninsula based on the strong stance toward denuclearizing North Korea.



"During the summit, I once again expressed my appreciation to President Elbegdorj for his support for South Korea's policy against Pyongyang's nuclear development, and for inter-Korean unification," she said during a joint press conference.



She also said the two sides will work closely together to better handle North Korean provocations, believed to be the biggest threat to regional stability.
Colombian Ambassador to Korea Tito Saul Pinilla, second from left, attends the "Implementation of the FTA between Colombia and Korea" seminar at the Trade Tower in Seoul on July 14. / Yonhap

By Rachel Lee

Colombian Ambassador Tito Saul Pinilla held a seminar to promote the Latin American country in Korea, the first Asian country to sign a free trade agreement (FTA) with it that entered into force on July15.

About 120 representatives from key Korean companies were present at the "Implementation of the FTA between Colombia and Korea" designed to explain the different business sectors of Colombia with an introduction of products that have high potential when exported here. The highlights were agriculture and agro-industry.

"The FTA between our countries will provide more opportunities for us to connect, grow and develop," the ambassador said.

He believed that the trade deal was of a great importance for many reasons.

For his country, the agreement with Korea was the "strongest step to diversify trade in Asia," opening up new opportunities to develop its agricultural sector.

Korea is a major importer of these products, he added. The FTA will also give Colombian companies access to raw materials and capital goods produced by the Republic of Korea, which will enable them to increase their competitiveness.

"There are good opportunities for Korea as well in coffee, flowers, beef, sugar, bananas, fruit, vegetables  as well as jams and jellies, juices, cookies and candies," the envoy said.

According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, tariffs will be eliminated immediately for 4,000 export items. About 2,700 items will get lower tariffs.

For Korea, cars and cosmetics are among those anticipated to benefit most. The current 35 percent tariff on cars will be scrapped within 10 years and cosmetics within seven to 10 years.

Colombia is the third Latin American country to sign an FTA with Korea after Chile and Peru. Korea and Colombia officially signed the deal in February 2013. Korea's exports to Colombia totaled $1.1 billion last year, while imports marked $800 million.

Colombia is a rapidly growing market in Latin America. Its population of 47.6 million is the third largest in the region while its $377.9 billion GDP is the fourth largest. The country attained 3.1 percent economic growth in 2015, following 4.9 percent in 2013 and 4.4 percent in 2014. The country also boasts abundant natural resources. It is the fourth-largest oil producer in Latin America, second-largest in nickel and the sixth in natural gas.

"We expect to become a member of the OECD by 2017. Also we have a regional countries group known as Pacific Alliance (Mexico, Peru, Chile and Colombia) that is working very efficiently. Our middle class is growing very fast and is also one of the most educated in the region," he said.

"The new environment that is being created in Colombia, with peace and the increased feasibility of major growth of our GDP, will impact the development of this new chapter in relations between our countries," the ambassador said.



"The outlook for the outcome is very promising. It will be a more productive economy, more trade, investors and investments in our country. There will be access to more resources and more ways to make the most of them."
Argentine Ambassador to Korea Jorge Roballo, right, attends a reception to mark his country's 200th anniversary of independence at the Millennium Hilton Seoul on July 11.

/ Courtesy of the Embassy of Argentina

By Rachel Lee

Korea is a priority for Argentina in maintaining close political and economic relations, which will extend to cultural fields, Argentine Ambassador to Korea Jorge Roballo says.

At a reception in Seoul last week to mark his country's 200th anniversary of independence, the envoy said the new government, led by President Mauricio Macri, has put great importance on Korea in further deepening cooperation on already strong bilateral relations established in 1962.

Roballo said the two nations will host the next round of the "Mechanism of High Level Political Consultations" in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, sometime this year. The "Joint Economic & Commercial Committee Meeting" will occur in Seoul by the end of the year.

"We are delighted to see that several Korean companies are included among those foreign investors who have shown interest in the new floating opportunities," he said.

The ambassador highlighted "fruitful meetings" between the two countries this year  Argentine Vice President Gabriela Michetti visited Seoul in May and met Korea's Prime Minister, Hwang Kyo-ahn, to expand practical cooperation.

"The meetings held in that opportunity and the outcomes achieved led to a step forward in the consolidation of our partnership with Korea, deepening the political dialogue, developing more economic cooperation and extending support in new fields such as culture, education, environment and science and technology," Roballo said.

Minister for Modernization Andres Ibarra also visited recently to meet his Korean counterpart Hong Jun-sik, the Interior Minister. The two agreed to work on e-government and set dates for Korean technical experts to visit Buenos Aires.

The push for independence began in May 1810, as citizens gathered to break relations with the Spanish crown. After six years, Argentine obtained independence.

"During the last two centuries we have matured as a nation and as a society," Roballo said. "We have gained the wisdom that age and experience bring, yet we have kept, and still keep, the strength and idealism of a young and potentially prosperous republic."

Two-way trade between the two countries reached $1.75 billion last year, according to the embassy. South Korean exports to Argentina totaled $1.05 billion and included electronic goods, machinery and mobile phones.

Argentina is Latin America's third-largest country and is rich in natural resources.
ASEAN-Korea Centre Secretary General Kim Young-sun, right, poses with Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement President Jung Kyung-won at the ASEAN-Korea Centre in Seoul on July 12.

/ Courtesy of the ASEAN-Korea Centre

By Rachel Lee

ASEAN and Korea have agreed to cooperate in the robotics industry to boost their economies.

The ASEAN-Korea Centre signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Korea Institute for Robot Industry Advancement (KIRIA) at the ASEAN-Korea Centre on July 12. The two organizations will work on implementing investment and trade promotion products and human resource development in the industry.

"This MOU with the KIRIA, the only governmental organization in Korea devoted to cultivating the intelligent robot industry, will serve as a stepping stone for the ASEAN-Korea Centre to broaden the fields for cooperation between ASEAN and Korea into more value-added industries," an ASEAN-Korea Centre spokesperson said.

At the "Investment and Market Research Mission Program" in Singapore from July 17 to 20, a Korean delegation of five businesspeople from related fields is expected to gain a view on the robotics industry there and explore investment opportunities.

The ASEAN-Korea Centre said major ASEAN nations such as Singapore and Thailand are expected to experience a huge increase in demand for robotics because of growing populations and a developing manufacturing sector.

Asia is becoming more influential in the robotics industry, with anticipated growth of about 18 percent by 2018.
The United Kingdom



London Lord Mayor pushes UK barrow



London Lord Mayor Jeffrey Mountevans is in Korea to promote his country amid growing concern that Brexit could restrict foreign direct investment.







"This visit is about building closer economic and commercial ties with Korea and how we want to be the regional partner of choice," Mountevans said.







During the trip, from July 16-20, Mountevans and a business delegation will meet Korea's Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, Yoo Il-ho, and attend several events. These include the launch of British fintech company xNTree and a tour of Samsung Heavy Industries on Geoje Island in South Gyeongsang Province.







"The world's attention has been very much on the U.K. since we voted to leave the European Union," Mountevans said. "I want to reassure the government and businesses of Korea that the U.K. remains open for businesses. As well as being the leading financial center in the world, we are also the No. 1 country for foreign direct investment into Europe. The government, U.K. firms and I will do all we can to ensure that we maintain this position."







The Lord Mayor of the City of London represents City businesses and helps the City Corporation advise the government on what is needed to help the financial services sector function well. The Lord Mayor frequently travels to represent the City and has the status of a cabinet minister when outside it.





COSTA RICA



Candidate for next UN leader named





Costa Rica has picked a candidate for the post of United Nations Secretary General to replace Ban Ki-moon.







The Costa Rican Embassy said Christiana Figueres, a diplomat with over 35 years' experience, will contest the election. Figueres was executive secretary for two consecutive terms of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2001.







The Costa Rican government has been one of the countries advocating "equal representation for women" in the U.N. leader election, the embassy said.







"Costa Rica included in the resolution that was approved in September 2015 an invitation to member states to present women candidates for the position of the secretary general," a spokesperson said. "For the government of Costa Rica, it is imperative to recognize the great capacity, competence and commitment of women in all areas."







The U.N. Security Council will this week start informal secret ballots to choose a candidate to recommend to the General Assembly. That process is expected to be completed by October. A dozen candidates so far are vying for the job.




French Ambassador to Korea Fabien Penone, third from left, poses with representatives from Asiance, a winner of the Creative Next, at a reception to mark his country's Bastille Day at his residence in Seoul on July 14. Luxury Business Institute also won the competition organized by Business France to promote innovation and

creativity of France's small- and medium-sized firms around the world.



/ Yonhap
By Stephen Costello

South Korea is isolating itself. In a tragic twist, the attempt by the last two presidents to involve Korea in everything, anything, except the hard business of talking to North Korea, has had the opposite effect. China is considering reducing its interest in Korea. Japan during the Shinzo Abe years can afford to deal with South Korea as a subcategory of managing its relations with Washington. Korea remains a vibrant market, and a resilient society, but most of the region and the world expect little of its leadership. Assessments of Seoul from Washington are particularly negative.

Controversy and domestic divisiveness have inevitably followed the South Korean government's decision to agree to deploy THAAD missile batteries in un-populated areas. The decision has never been primarily about the defense of South Korean territory from incoming North Korean ICBMs. After all, the first missile fired by the DPRK into South Korea will spell the end of that regime, and possibly the end of the state. Among all the rationales confidently attributed to the Kim Jung Il leadership, suicide has never been one of them. The decision's political usefulnessis now more clear. The anger of many residents of Seongju, the first site chosen to host a THAAD missile battery,is just the beginning of the public backlash. Foreign Minister Yun was reportedly not in favor of the deployment. It is unlikely these residents, as well as constituencies in the National Assembly and among the public opposed to the deployments, misunderstand the capabilities of the system, or its potential to do environmental damage. What theymay suspectis that the system makes them and Korea less secure.

Overall, missile defenses without diplomacy are a bad deal. Look at the US experience during the last 15 years. As a result of increased military spending, other necessities are neglected. The US has wasted $40 billion on an ideological symbol, according to a new report by the well-respected Union of Concerned Scientists. The missile defense project at Ft. Greeley, Alaska was known at the time to be impractical. Compare that to the $300 million the Clinton administration was forced by US Republicans to bargain and threaten for in order to support a deal that really worked. For that relatively small sum, the DPRK's plutonium and missile production was halted for eight years, before the Bush administration ended it. In place of that working deal, the US under Bush based its new, post-Clinton foreign policy on missile defense, using the flawed July 1998 report of the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, generally known as the Rumsfeld Report, to support its case. This effort led to that $40 billion mistake.

The diplomatic repercussions are more important.

Sanctions and isolation as tools of policy are neutral. Sometimes they are appropriate. But for both the US and South Korea, it is the context of their government's refusal to resume credible negotiations with North Korea that renders both military defense and "containment" actions, and sanctions and isolation policies, suspect. To state just one obvious anomaly, successful negotiations would be far cheaper, as we have seen during the 1990s. They could also deliver parties greater and more dependable security. The fact that the North Koreans and Chinese remember the deals that were made in 1994 by the US and in 2000 by the ROK, and were then unilaterally abandoned by the US in 2001 and by the ROK in 2008, is central to contemporary views in several capitals. That such memories are misremembered or ignored by today's authorities in Washington and Seoul is a sad and telling data point, suggesting a lack of strategic understanding and political courage.

The diplomatic isolation of South Korea, and in parallel its being misunderstood and reduced to an anti-communist and anti-North Korea cartoon by policy specialists, is the real cost of miscalculations by the Park government. Korea's relationship with China is complex and evolving, and it is long-term. Yet China has been treated by the Park administration as part of a badly-conceived effort to isolate North Korea. The larger trade, regional security and power relationships between the two have been eclipsed. The global diplomatic effort by Seoul to peel off various allies of North Korea has been equally misconceived. The Seouladministration may feel it must cast the Kim regime in the DPRK as "crazy" or "irrational" or immune to reason, but without contacts or an ROK interest in talking, such claims smack of an excuse to avoid diplomacy.

In Alter Egos, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle Over American Power, the new book about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton by Mark Landler, there are detailed discussions about how policy was debated and steered regarding Libya, Cuba, Syria, Egypt and Israel. There is extensive detail on how the US President, beginning barely one month into his first administration, asked for broad reassessments and new thinking about how to approach Iran. Landler is a professional, and this is some of the best insight we are likely to have before the November election. But Korea is absent. It is referred to a handful of times as a point of disagreement, or leverage, in Obama's relationships with Chinese leaders. But as a policy matter it doesn't come up.And there Korea's isolation is clear. If Landler thought there was a story to tell about Korea policy, he would surely have pursued it.

Among the best online journals of US foreign policy is ForeignPolicy.Com. It now features a well-written report by Dave Hazzan, but it could have been by many other specialists. The title is "Is South Korea Regressing Into a Dictatorship?" Although the answer is no, the fact that this is how Korea looks to policy professionals is a very disturbing sign.

Stephen Costello is a producer of AsiaEast, a web and broadcast-based policy roundtable focused on security, development and politics in Northeast Asia. He writes from Washington, D.C. He can be reached at scost55@gmail.com.
By Oh Young-jin

Oh Young-jin is The Korea Times' chief editorial writer. He can be contacted at foolsdie5@ktimes.com and foolsdie@gmail.com.
Physiologist Na Heung-sik is a developer of a rat model of chronic neuropathic pain and atopic dermatitis. He is also the most popular medical professor at Korea University for excellent teaching. / Courtesy of Korea University



Done right, teaching can revolutionize medical schools and change lives'

By Jung Min-ho, Kim Eil-chul

Teaching is one of the most underrated skills required for professors. Most universities in Korea evaluate their performance based largely on research and other academic activities such as attending conferences.

So it is little wonder that good college professors are rare. With little incentive to hone their teaching skills, many professors choose not to; those who start out with a passion for teaching often lose motivation.

Medical schools are no exception. And students suffer as a result. They spend too much time and effort memorizing "dead knowledge" they won't recall after tests. Na Heung-sik, senior physiology professor at Korea University, lamented at the situation.

"I don't teach physiology. I try to show my students the interesting aspect of it," he said in an interview.

"Teaching in higher education is a mess, to say the least. Many professors don't make serious efforts to improve their teaching skills, saying students are old enough to find their own ways to learn. But the reality is that few students in Korea ever have the chance to do so."

Na is the only professor to win the Seoktap Lecturer Award, the highest teaching honor granted by the school, 15 times since he first won in 2006. His classes are always packed, not just with medical students but also with those from other departments.

"All information I need for teaching is already out there," he said. "The hard part is delivering information in ways that students can and want to understand."

But that task is easier said than done. Throughout his career, he has tried to develop better ways to teach by adding interesting images and examples to his lecture. He considers his students as his best teachers when it comes to improving his teaching skills. After reflecting upon their reactions and questions, he changes his methods and materials whenever he feels necessary.

"The key is to make students understand the principle concepts of the subject," Na said. "For example, I ask them questions such as what are the most important organs in the body?' The answer is quite obvious, if you look closely at an anatomical chart. The more important the organs are, the more they are protected by bones and other organs. With that in mind, look at where the brain, heart, lung, genitals and digestive organs are.

"Knowledge acquired in a logical order and through interesting stories hardly fades away even after a long time, which is great for students. I often come across students who ask expert-level questions, and surprisingly, many of them have little science background."

The aim is to make ordinary students great and make the great ones greater. Done right, he believes education can revolutionize medical schools and change many lives.

The physiologist, whose main interest is chronic neuropathic pain and atopic dermatitis, has loved his work as a medical researcher. "But at one point, I realized there would be nothing more valuable than improving students' life prospects through education," he said.

Na said he himself was a beneficiary of a good teacher. "My biology teacher in middle school helped me develop an interest in the subject. He encouraged us to think analytically instead of telling us what to memorize for tests."

Inspired by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concept of trust-based banking, Na developed a trust-based learning system in 2006 and has used it in his classes since.

"In the system, students are required to work together for cooperative tasks, and at the end of the class, I randomly pick one student from each team and the chosen one must take an oral test and every team member gets the same score he or she gets," he said. "The method has been successful in terms of boosting their cooperation and overall performance and I expect the method to spread to other departments and eventually the whole school."





Na smiles during an interview with The Korea Times. / Korea Times photo by Jung Min-ho



A professor who wants to be a kindergarten teacher

In three years, Na will retire as a medical college professor, but not as a teacher. "I will work at a kindergarten to teach children science," he said.

Over the past 20 years, he has given lectures at elementary, middle and high schools across Korea, from big cities like Seoul to small towns in countryside.

"It was an opportunity to see the great potential of students," he said. "But I also realized that the current ways of teaching are too stereotypical. Many students had already lost interest in learning science probably because of wrong teaching methods.

"To maximize their potential, interest-driven education should start before they recognize learning as a competition. This is why I have much hope and passion for teaching preschoolers, who are like blank slates that can turn into anything they think of."

Na has built relationship with science teachers at elementary, middle and high schools through online communities for teachers and has started to teach students as a way of "donating" his talent. From an elite high school in Seoul to an elementary school of only 12 students in Hongcheon, Gangwon Province, he has taken almost every opportunity to stand in front of students

Inspired by his lecture, some students have chosen to pursue their dreams at the Korea University College of Medicine. Last year, 10 students there said they had attended his lecture during their middle or high school years.

"I will continue to be a science ambassador, teaching the important value of life and the environment," Na said.





The Seoktap Lecturer Award which he received, the highest teaching honor granted by the school, are displayed in his office. He is the only professor to win the award 15 times since he first won in 2006. / Korea Times photo by Jung Min-ho



Developer of animal model of chronic neuropathic pain and atopic dermatitis

Na is the developer of a rat model of chronic neuropathic pain, which has been adopted in the "Textbook of Pain," the world's most authoritative textbook on the subject.

"There has not been a single day that I did not enjoy my work since I graduated from medical college in 1981. The lab has been my playground," he said. "Research is still 80 percent of what I do every day."

He is also the developer of a rat model of atopic dermatitis, which is a type of inflammation of the skin. The condition could profoundly undermine a person's quality of life, especially as attempts to relieve the itch by scratching worsen the problem, creating a vicious circle. It typically starts in childhood, with the severity changing over time.

Na found many things in common between chronic pain and atopic dermatitis, and he developed a new drug for the condition in 2014 in cooperation with Ewha Womans University pharmacy Professor Park Hye-young.

He said he will continue to work with experts from different academic fields to develop more effective and safer atopic dermatitis treatments as well as pain relievers.
By Robin Rhee

For generations women have fought for equality. The experiences of some of the women in my family reflect the journey.

My grandmother was the youngest of four daughters born in rural Canada. She was an outstanding student in the one room school which ended at eighth grade. There was no opportunity for her to attend high school but when her teacher resigned and a replacement could not be found she was hired as the teacher.

She saved her money and went off to train as a seamstress/designer. After she was married she and her husband moved to the U.S. Both of them worked hard and began to buy farms. She was in charge of the business side of their endeavors and her husband handled the day-to-day operations of three large farms. It was her dream that all three of her daughters would go to college but only the youngest, my mother, was interested so she was sent to boarding school to prepare for college entrance.

My mother majored in chemistry and physics, an unusual major for a woman at that time. In her senior year she and her classmates, wearing their caps and gowns, marched in a suffragette parade and women won the right to vote shortly after. Upon graduation she was hired to teach in a high school near her home town.

When she married she knew that she would no longer be able to teach since married teachers were not allowed in schools. As luck would have it the high school in her home town could not find a chemistry/physics teacher so they bent the rules and hired her.

My father took over the family business, the highly technical job of raising seed potatoes. When he died at a very young age, my mother had to take over the business but the company which had contracted to buy the crop put her on probation for a year since they had never dealt with a female grower.

A man wanted to buy one of the farms but my mother repeatedly told him it was not for sale. One year, about two weeks before harvest, he dumped loads of rocks to block the only entrance and force her to sell.

She secured a right of way, brought in a crew and heavy equipment and built an alternate road. People called it her Burma Road, a reference to the Burma Road of World War II, and the harvest was completed on time. She had no further problems.

I was never asked if I wanted to go to college. It was expected so I was sent to boarding school beginning with eighth grade. I earned a B.A. and an M.A. and taught in an independent college preparatory school for nearly 30 years. In the beginning it was no secret that women were paid significantly less than their male counterparts. And when I was expecting a baby it came as a shock that there was no maternity leave policy and I was given just two weeks. Thankfully all that has changed now.

When my elder daughter went for her first interview for medical school she asked for directions to the restroom and was told she would have to go across the street to the nursing school. When she began to practice medicine patients would sometimes tell her they had enjoyed talking to her and ask when they would see the doctor.

My second daughter became a real estate agent after college. Very successful and recognized nationally, she has done business with male agents who thought they could take advantage of a woman, but that was before they met my daughter. She is treated as an equal because she expects to be.

My granddaughter graduated from college and went on to earn her R.N. She works in oncology and experienced no equality problems until she was expecting her first child. She was given less maternity leave than her husband's paternity leave. Go figure!

I have a great granddaughter who has just entered pre-school and I wonder what the future will hold for her.

Currently women are paid 79 percent of what their male counterparts are paid. Analysts estimate that equal pay for equal work will not become a reality until 2059.

It is often said that women have to be twice as good as men to be thought of as equal. Perhaps Madeleine Albright, the first U.S. Secretary of State, said it best: "There's plenty of room in this world for mediocre men but no place for mediocre women."

The writer is a former weekly columnist for The Korea Times and currently resides in Centerville, Ohio.
By Tong Kim

The strategic situation on the Korean peninsula is getting more complicated because of a recent chain of ill-advised actions and reactions by the relevant adversaries including the two Koreas, the United States, and China. Tensions have escalated, threatening the uneasy peace in Korea, making it more difficult to seek any peaceful resolution to the North Korean issues of nuclear and missile development, and human rights abuses. Forget about unification.

During the last two weeks, two notable actions were taken, which brought about immediate reactions, signaling more bad news for the Korean peninsula. First, Washington designated Kim Jong-un as a target to sanction for his responsibility for human rights abuses in North Korea. Then, the Seoul government announced its decision to deploy the THAAD system to South Korea. Pyongyang and Beijing reacted in strong terms.

Announcing the list that identified the North Korean leader and some of his subordinates as abusers of human rights, senior officials of the Obama administration said that with the new human rights sanctions in place, the United States now could address both issues  nuclear weapons and human rights  at the same time.

The sanctions prohibit the individuals on a blacklist from travel to the U.S., freeze their assets in the U.S., and deny them access to the international banking system. In reality, the targets will not be directly affected. They have no known assets in the U.S. and they would not miss travelling there. They can always use other individuals or entities to use third country banks.

The administration does not expect the new measures to affect the target's interests immediately. But it hopes that in the long run, it would have a restraining effect on the "low and mid-level functionaries to think twice before they decide on an act of cruelty or repression."

This hope is based on an assessment that "more and more people, including those within the regime, are conscious that the political situation in the North may change in their life times" and they will realize if they were put on the sanctions list, their lives would be disadvantaged. This could be a message to those "who run concentration camps or hunt down defectors" only in conjunction with a collapse scenario of the North Korean regime.

Pyongyang's reaction was quick and concrete. The DPRK called the U.S. human rights sanctions a defamation to "the dignity of the supreme leadership" and "a declaration of war." It tested another submarine launched ballistic missile. It toughened its belligerent rhetoric against the U.S. It officially closed the "New York Channel," the only remaining line of communication between Washington and Pyongyang until that point, pronouncing that any matters involving the U.S. will be handled according to the DPRK's "wartime law." The North gave up any hope of dialogue with the Obama administration.

Seoul's decision to deploy the THAAD system is more complete and more controversial. Aside from technical questions about the effectiveness of the system and its impact on the safety of people who live near its base due to radiation generated, it became a political issue at home in the South, and a contentious issue with China and the North.

Local residents in the county of Seongju, the designated site for THAAD deployment, have been staging demonstrations against the deployment with support of most of the national legislators representing North Gyeongsang Province, a power base for President Park. But, all politics are local.

Opposition parties have raised questions  about the secretive process by which the decision for deployment was made, the decision's legality, the limitations of the system's capability, its strategic impact on the overall security environment in the region, and its diplomatic repercussions. Many members believe the decision should be subject to review and approval by the National Assembly. One prominent politician is calling for a national referendum on THAAD deployment.

The Global Times, an official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, warned Seoul not to underestimate China's resolve against THAAD. It suggested to impose Chinese sanction against Seongju and its products, voicing that the Chinese army should target missiles at the new THAAD base, "to neutralize any potential threat."

China, along with Russia and North Korea, strongly opposes the deployment. China does not accept explanations from Seoul and Washington that the deployment aims only at the threat of North Korean missiles.

In the meantime, the artillery bureau of the KPA's General Staff, issued a warning that "the DPRK will take strong physical counter action" upon confirmation of the THAAD's location and "it will make the warmongers suffer from the nightmare of extreme uneasiness and terror." A spokesman for the Committee for the Reunification of the Fatherland of the DPRK called the THAAD deployment "an unpardonable treacherous act" by President Park, vowing to bolster Pyongyang's nuclear force.

As we can see, the immediate reactions to the two important measures  human rights sanctions and THAAD deployment  were disturbing. If the human rights sanction was designed based on a collapse scenario, it will have no practical impact on the current North Korean leadership. On the other hand, it will serve to increase attention to the serious level of human rights abuses that are hard to ignore from human conscience.

THAAD on the other hand has some military merit, despite its technical limitations against incoming missiles from the North. While it is not a perfect weapon, it can still contribute to the overall strengthening of a multi-layer missile defense system. China's opposition is based on its strategic perspective. China sees it as a tool of containment against it. Beijing thinks THAAD tilts the military balance of power in favor of the U.S. and its allies in the region. In a recent meeting, the leaders of China and Russia shared a view that THAAD deployment would undermine the stability of the region.

There are concerns in Seoul that China may pull back or slow down its implementation of UN sanctions against North Korea. China may retaliate against Seoul's THAAD decision by restricting trade or reducing Chinese tourists to South Korea. It may invite Kim Jong-un to Beijing to solidify a revived alliance that would include Russia to counter the expanding military capabilities of the U.S. alliances in the region. What's your take?

Tong Kim is a Washington correspondent and columnist for The Korea Times. He is also a fellow at the Institute of Korean-American Studies. He can be contacted at tong.kim8@yahoo.com.
Most people limit their exposure to bullfighting to old Ernest Hemingway novels. The thousands of men  and women  who make annual pilgrimages to Pamplona and other cities in Spain to run with the bulls are in the minority of humanity. You don't have to be an animal-rights activist to be absolutely creeped out by the masochistic danger that results from antagonizing angry, 2,000-pound bulls. Injuries to those who wish to experience the adrenalin high of running with the bulls has increased 5.1 percent annually since 1980, according to news reports.



While running with the bulls has always been stupid, what happened on Spanish television recently was horrifying. Victor Barrio, a 29-year-old bullfighter, was gored to death while millions watched. The young matador, who had performed a dance of death with bulls many times since 2010, either ran out of luck or finally met an opponent that was too fast and too inscrutable even for him.



Barrio's lungs were punctured as a horrified nation looked on. Though he was treated at the scene, his wounds were too extensive. By the time he reached the hospital, he was close to death, if not dead already. He was the first fatality among matadors this century. Bullfighting is a cherished part of Hispanic culture, rooted in a way that is difficult for others to appreciate. There's no chance that it will go away anytime soon. That's too bad because it should.



The bull, of course, is in a no-win situation. If the matador is to live, the bull must die. The matador engages in a dance to kill the bull, which is appalling all by itself. Occasionally, the bull "wins" and either kills or injures the matador. But the bull is then put to death for having defended itself. Apologists for bullfighting see something "redemptive" about the whole ritual while others just see it for what it is  naked barbarism.



This year's running of the bulls in Pamplona produced various injuries, some of them serious. Fortunately, there hasn't been a death at Pamplona since 2009. At Pedreguer, a 28-year-old was killed recently during a bull run through the streets of that city.



There is much ritual and national pride wrapped up in bullfighting. Still, that doesn't mean that a serious discussion about the place of such a barbaric spectacle at the center of Spanish life isn't long overdue.



This editorial appeared on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.




By Gwynne Dyer



Turkey's democracy is dead. It was dying anyway, as President Recep Tayyib Erdogan took over media outlets, arrested political opponents and journalists, and even re-started a war with the Kurds last autumn in order to win an election. But once part of the army launched a coup attempt on Friday night, it was dead no matter which way the crisis ended.



It wasn't a very competent coup atttempt. The first rule of coup-making is: arrest or kill the person you are trying to overthrow. The coup leaders should have been able to grab Erdogan, who was on holiday at the seaside resort of Marmaris, but they didn't.



They didn't shut down the internet and social media either, so Erdogan was able to use his cellphone to get a message out on FaceTime, calling on his supporters to defy the soldiers on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. They didn't even shut down the broadcast media that sent Erdogan's call out to the public.



It was three hours before they occupied the offices of TRT, the state broadcaster, and they were chased out again by Erdogan less than an hour later. They didn't ever try to shut down the private television networks, which have a much bigger audience.



The second rule of coup-making is: act as if you mean it. This usually means that you have to be willing to kill people  but the colonels behind the coup (the generals were all vetted by Erdogan's people) were largely reluctant to use lethal force.



This is laudable, in human terms, but if you are trying to overthrow the rule of a ruthless man who aspires to absolute control, it is a very bad mistake. They took control of Istanbul airport, but they were chased out again by Erdogan's supporters because they were not willing to shoot them  and Erdogan flew back into the city.



Maybe the coup-makers were just too short of troops to grab control of everything they needed to make the coup work. Maybe, also, they were afraid to order their troops to carry out a massacre because Turkey's is a conscript army, and many of its young soldiers  basically civilians in uniform for one year  might simply refuse to kill their fellow citizens.



At any rate, they didn't use massive violence in Istanbul (42 people were reportedly killed in Ankara), and so they were soon in retreat. But there can be no happy ending to this episode.



Democracy would obviously have been dead if the rebels won. Almost exactly half of



Turkey's voters backed Erdogan in the last election, so a military regime would have had to stay in power for a long time. It would not have dared to hold a free election and risk Erdogan returning to power.



It would have been equally dead if the coup had partially succeeded and the army had really split, for that would have meant civil war. Mercifully that possibility has now disappeared, but democracy will be dead in Turkey even if the coup is utterly defeated.



A triumphant Erdogan will seize this opportunity to complete his take-over of all the major state organisations and the media, and become (as his followers often call him) the "Sultan" of Turkey. That is a tragedy, because five or ten years ago Turkey seemed well on the way to being the sort of democracy, with free media and the rule of law, where a coup like this was simply inconceivable.



When Erdogan won his first election in 2002, promising to remove all the restricions



that pious Muslims suffered under the rigidly secular constitution, it seemed a reasonable step foward in the democratisation process. He kept his promises about that, but gradually he went further, trying to Islamise the country against the strong opposition of the half of the population that favours a secular state.



Luckily for Erdogan the Turkish economy was booming, so he went on winning elections  and he worked steadily to concentrate all power in his own office. He removed any officials who were not his avid supporters, attacked the freedom of the media, and committed Turkey to unconditional support for the Islamist rebels in neighbouring Syria.



The rebel army officers may have been trying to stop all that, but it was a terrible mistake for which they will suffer severe punishment. So will anybody who is even suspected of having sypathised with them, and Erdogan will emerge as the all-powerful "Sultan" of a post-democratic Turkey.



The coup leaders made the same mistake as the Egyptian liberals made when they asked the army to overthrow the elected president there in 2013. Egypt had a president whom they feared and hated, but they also had a democracy which provided a peaceful means of ousting him.



Erdogan's popularity would have dwindled with time. The Turkish economy is stagnant, his Syrian policy is a disaster, and the flagrant corruption of the people around him is getting hard to ignore. Sooner or later he would have lost an election. But like the Egyptian liberals, the officers who led the Turkish coup didn't trust democracy enough to wait.



Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries. Email to gwynne763121476@aol.com.




It's sad to see Chung Myung-whun, Korea's only classic music conductor worth billing as a maestro, called in for questioning for alleged misconduct  misusing funds to the tune of 100 million won at the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra where he worked as music director and defaming his colleague, former CEO of the orchestra, Park Hyun-jung.



Even sadder is the norm-defying, unusual behavior he displayed to the media during his hectic two-day schedule  going to and from prosecution's office and police station.



When presenting himself to the prosecution Thursday, he said, "I had trusted (SPO) employees but now it has turned out that they lied." The bizarre incident started when a group of SPO employees complained about Park bullying them and, in one case, sexually harassing a male subordinate in late 2014. Later, police found out that the accusations were groundless. Police also discovered evidence that raised the possibility that Chung's wife was involved.



In other words, Chung's remarks sounded like an admission that the police's discovery that exonerated Park was true.



But later he went back to his original position, reiterating that Park had violated the human rights of the SPO employees. Also, he raised his hands up in celebration after the prosecution's questioning.



He said, "It is not I but the prosecutors that deserve pity. They work long hours without a rest," expressing his concern about their working conditions. With all smiles on his face, he extended his invitation to concerts next month when he takes the baton at the SPO as a guest conductor at the opening of Lotte Concert Hall.



Some argue that Chung, the source of pride for the nation since it was considered as a barren land for classical music, should be spared from public embarrassment. Their rationale is that, in the classic music industry, a maestro deserves special treatment because "mistreating" him is like "spitting on our own face."



But when he faces serious accusations  embezzling a hefty sum of money and leading or condoning a defamation conspiracy, it is Chung himself who should take the cases serious and behave gingerly until he is fully cleared. If the accusations are true, he should admit to them, apologize and seek forgiveness from the one whose reputation is violated.



For that, Chung should cancel his appearance at the Lotte concerts and persuade his wife to come in for questioning as well. That is an example of noblesse oblige maestro Chung can set for the nation that his fans can appreciate as much as his music.




Residents should stop protests for protests' sake



Seongju, North Gyeongsang Province, where advanced U.S. missile interceptors will be deployed, has turned into a land of lawlessness.



Protesting residents pelted visiting Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn and his entourage with eggs and water bottles Friday. Hwang tried to deliver an apology for not informing the residents of the deployment in advance, and was forced to escape into the county office in the face of angry protestors, where he was holed up for six-and-half hours before he escaped. In the melee, a police commissioner got a cut above his eyebrow from a thrown water bottle. The residents have made it clear that they will not stop protesting until the government backs down on the deployment plan for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery in their town.



They are right to fear possible adverse health effects from electronic pulses from the radar that comes with the system and about a potential devaluation of their property as a result. But violent protests are not the answer and should not be used to challenge this national security decision.



They should let the government explain its THAAD deployment plan and have it vetted by experts, who would raise questions, if there are any. The government, for its part, should address them to leave no doubts. Depending on the situation, residents' concern about their devalued properties also can be tackled.



But their protests for protests' sake cannot be tolerated indefinitely.



The THAAD system is aimed at boosting our capability to cope with North Korea's missile attacks. On this account, the government and military should be entrusted for their integrity on their decision for the site selection.



Cliche as it may sound, it should be borne in mind what pain and sorrow the people without a nation are destined to suffer. To protect what the nation stands for, all its members should be ready to play their part.



Still, we are not ready to go to the length of calling the Seongju residents' protests a selfish act of "not-in-my-backyard" phenomenon, because their behavior is the result of our society's immaturity.



Society often harks only to the loudest of all  the strident minority gets its way at the cost of the silent majority.



Second, the people are left with few other options than protesting violently when their interest is in jeopardy. This dates back to a series of dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s when generals-turned-strongmen were in power, forcing their will on the people, leaving them with little recourse but mass protests. The nation  people and government  has not learned the better mutually acceptable way of resolving disputes.



Now, the Seongju case poses a new challenge for dispute resolution.



On this challenge, it should start with the government. THAAD deployment is a national security issue and the government should keep channels for dialogue open but act resolutely to maintain law and order, because the issue differs from the Sewol ferry sinking, the result of a systematic failure for which the government should take the blame. If the government shows any sign of confusing Seongju with Sewol, as shown by Prime Minister Hwang's ill-prepared visit, it would only cause the THAAD issue to become out of proportion. The test is still not finished.




LG Chem says it will supply lithium-ion batteries for NASA space suits. / Courtesy of LG Chem



By Yoon Sung-won

LG Chem will supply lithium-ion batteries for NASA space suits, the company said, Sunday.

The world's leading battery maker said the deal was a first for Korea.

"We have shown the excellence of our battery technologies before the global market as we passed the stability test by NASA, which holds a matchless position in the aerospace and space sector," LG Chem's battery business division president, Lee Woong-beom, said. "We will strengthen the partnership with NASA to provide batteries applicable to more diverse aerospace and space equipment."

An LG Chem official said the batteries will power life-support equipment in the space exploration suits, including oxygen supply, telecom and the radiation detector.

"Our batteries will work like the heart of such cutting-edge equipment," the official said.

LG Chem said the batteries will last about five times longer than silver-zinc batteries that are widely used for aerospace and military purposes.

In particular, the company said its batteries have passed NASA's internal short-circuit (ISC) stability test, achieving better results than other candidate batteries from Korea and Japan.

LG Chem said it applied its patented "stability-reinforced separator" technology to pass the test. This boosts the stability of a lithium-ion battery by coating the separator with ceramic material and increasing mechanical solidity to prevent internal short-circuit, the company said.

"The ISC device test has proved that LG Chem's battery has excellent energy density, stability and lifespan and thus is the most optimal option for NASA's space suits," a NASA official said.

According to data from international market researcher B3, the global lithium-ion battery sector is expected to grow to 169.3 gigawatt hours (GWh) by 2020, up from 90.3GWh this year. A battery capacity of 169.3GWh could supply about 2.8 million high-performance electric vehicles to run up to 320 kilometers on a full charge, LG Chem said.

The NASA deal has extended LG Chem's market coverage in next-generation applications, from electric vehicles and electric ships, to drones and space equipment.

LG Chem supplies batteries to more than 20 carmakers, including Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Renault, Volvo and Audi, and Chinese companies SAIC Motor, Great Wall Motors, FAW Automotive and Chery.

In June last year, LG Chem won a deal with Norwegian shipbuilder Eidesvik to provide lithium-ion batteries for the world's first eco-friendly hybrid ships.

The company also said it is expanding in the rapidly growing drone market with high-capacity batteries for flagship models produced by major manufacturers.
By Kim Tae-gyu

The Park Geun-hye administration gave the green light last week to stem cell studies using human eggs for the first time since its inauguration in early 2013, but the step has seemingly failed to make local scientists happy.

In particular, experts take issue with the decade-long ban on experiments with fresh human ova after the scandal involving former Seoul National University professor Hwang Woo-suk.

The National Bioethics Committee allowed CHA Medical Group to use around 600 human eggs by 2020 to establish cloned stem cell lines but they should be either frozen eggs or unhealthy ones.

"Leaders of stem cell research like the United States, Britain and Japan allow the use of fresh human eggs for therapeutic cloning," said Prof. Park Se-pill at Jeju National University.

"By contrast, we have been prohibited from doing so for the past 10 years after the 2005 scandal and that's why we are lagging behind. Without doing away with the restrictions, we won't be able to move forward."

In 2005, Hwang claimed to have extracted human stem cell batches from patients, which was then hailed as a scientific feat to help cure such degenerative disorders as diabetes and Alzheimer's disease.

But the work proved to be based on fabricated data and Hwang was found not to have built any patient-specific stem cell lines even after using more than 2,000 fresh eggs some of which were procured in ethically controversial ways.

After the unprecedented scientific scandal, which made Hwang an academic pariah, Korea introduced strict regulations on human stem cell studies and approved just one project in 2009  last week's endorsement marks the second.












The SLFP does not condone the continuation of the Emergency Regulations (The Public Security Ordinance) more than a day necessary

Read more
SpaceXs Dragon spacecraft is expected to dock at the International Space Station Wednesday morning, a few days after the companys second successful landing on land of a first-stage rocket booster.

The Hawthorne company launched its Falcon 9 rocket laden with supplies for the space station late Sunday night from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

About eight minutes after liftoff, the first-stage rocket booster returned to Earth at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral.

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That marked SpaceXs second rocket booster landing on land since December. SpaceX also has had three successful landings on a floating drone ship at sea.

The rocket was carrying almost 5,000 pounds of cargo, including a docking adapter -- a large metallic ring that will enable commercial crew spacecraft under development by Boeing Co. and SpaceX to dock at the space station.

The adapter will be one of two eventually on the space station. A second one is being assembled at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and will be launched on a future SpaceX mission, NASA said.

Last year, a SpaceX rocket carrying one of these adapters broke apart shortly after liftoff. The docking adapter had cost $32.4 million to develop, according to a recent report by NASAs office of inspector general.

samantha.masunaga@latimes.com

For more business news, follow me @smasunaga

UPDATES:

10:10 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

10 p.m.: This article was updated with details from the successful landing.

This article was originally published at 6 a.m.
Oscar Morales was working on a post for OKBaby, a vlog he and Kyra Sivertson began last year after they became parents, when his mother got the call from Nice.

Morales sister Aimee, a recent graduate of Crescenta Valley High School, was on a month-long European tour with her best friend. Now her mother, Korina McReynolds, was holding her hand to her heart.

Theyve been attacked, McReynolds tells her son, as the camera angle falls, recording only the floor.

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No, Morales says. How? No, youre joking, Mom. How?

I dont know.

Into the dead silence of the home, Aimees tearful voice can be heard over speaker phone:

It was fourth of July for them, Aimee says, and we went to see the fireworks and we were walking back and all I know Ahnyca grabbed my hand and everyone starts yelling and I Iook back and see my tour guides face and then I see people getting hit by the bus and I turn around again and there a lot of people on the floor and then theyre all dead.

At that moment, McReynolds knew nothing of the attack in Nice that left at least 84 dead after the driver of a refrigerated truck plowed through the crowd  it had not yet made the news. But in the video we see her attempt to calm her daughter, telling Aimee to take a deep breath and that she will have her on a flight home as soon as possible. Confining her own fear to a few choked sobs and anguished whispers to her son, McReynolds focuses on her daughter, talks her through a city she cannot see, a tragedy she doesnt yet understand. She asks Aimee if she has a phone charger, if she can see a safe hotel, if her tour guide is alive.

Dont hang up,  McReynolds says, at one point. I need you.

The eight-minute video, which begins with happy scenes of Aimee setting off on her adventure, ends with a shot of her safe in a hotel lobby and a call to pray for those who were not as blessed and lucky as Aimee, her friend Ahnyca and their families.

Morales put it together with transitional text and, when necessary, subtitles, but the footage is choppy, the camera frequently aimed at the ground, the wall, at table legs as Morales attempts to take in the news and comfort his mother  the camera on but forgotten.

It is a different kind of live-report television thats become increasingly common in these troubled times, and its difficult to watch, even knowing that the young women are safe. In the best version of every parents nightmare, McReynolds desperate calm instantly collapses the enormity of the event into a single series of maternal directives, which days later emanated from my own phone as my own teenage daughter showed me the video.

The world is a vast and confusing place, until moments like these shrink it so it fits into the palm of your hand.

And in this case, it quickly shrunk even further. My daughter Fiona, who had herself been in Nice in June, follows OKBaby because Oscar and Kyra went to her brother Dannys high school.

All I heard was, everyone is dead.  Korina McReynolds

It took me less than an hour to discover that Aimee Morales, who I had just heard sobbing amid unimaginable carnage, and Ahnyca Quesada, who may have saved her life, had in fact been in my sons class; one hot bright evening not that long ago, I had watched them graduate. One Facebook message later, I had McReynolds phone number.

She was driving back to Los Angeles from Montana, where Oscar now lives, in time to meet Aimee who was also on her way home from Florence, via London.

The attack had just happened, McReynolds says of the moments captured in the video. So we had no idea what she was talking about. Just that there had been an attack and people were dead. It wasnt even on the news, there were only a few tweets.

I dont even remember what I said when she first called, she says. In my mind, it went on for hours, but my son says it was just a few seconds. All I heard was, everyone is dead.

Some of McReynolds friends had expressed concern when Aimee and Ahnyca decided to go to Europe. The girls had originally wanted to backpack, but McReynolds decided an agency tour would be better. A lot of the kids were older, she says, on gap year; [the girls] were the only Americans. But the tour and the guide were amazing.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, she says, the group made its way to the beach and followed the shoreline to a hotel where they stayed until the police activity died down. Aimee called her mother every 10 minutes while her father got in touch with the American consulate.

Eventually the group, which was organized through Topdeck tours, made its way back to its hotel. The group was scheduled to leave for Florence in the morning; in Florence, counselors met with the group members, many of whom chose to continue their travels.

Aimee and Ahnyca, however, chose to come home. I left the decision to her, McReynolds says, though I really wanted her back. But she wanted to get home as soon as she could.

Home where her classmates, like my son, are going to the beach, working summer jobs, hanging out for a few more weeks with friends, attending college orientation. Where the attack is horrifying enough through the safety of a screen, where parents and families who watch count their blessings and look at school trips abroad with increasing wariness.

Aimee is calmer now, McReynolds says, but still deeply affected.

It happened right in front of her; Ahnyca pulled her out of the way, she says. She heard the truck hit people. Thats what she keeps saying to me. That she cannot stop hearing the sound of the truck running over all those bodies.

On Twitter: @marymacTV

After the Nice attack, an angry public wants to know: Why doesnt the violence stop?

Family frantic to find UC Berkeley student missing in terrorist attack in Nice, France

After Nice, its official: The campaigns about fear

Its been worn, memed and burned: How Donald Trumps Make America Great Again hat reflects a nations anger
For more than a year, the plan to put body cameras on thousands of Los Angeles police officers has been clouded by a divisive debate over a key question: How much video should be made public and when?

The LAPD insisted it would generally withhold the recordings unless required to provide them by a court. Chief Charlie Beck said he considered the video to be evidence that is exempt from public disclosure laws, stressing the need to protect the integrity of investigations and the privacy of victims.

But civil liberties groups, local activists and at least one police commissioner criticized the stance, saying withholding the footage undermines the accountability and transparency body cameras are supposed to bring to policing.

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This week, amid heightened scrutiny over police shootings across the country, the issue took on new life when the president of the L.A. Police Commission said it was time to reconsider the LAPDs stance. In addition, Beck said he would be open to releasing certain footage at the proper time in the proper framework and that LAPD officials have been closely monitoring a new approach taken by San Diego authorities.

Once you open that Pandoras box, whos going to decide whats going to be released?  Craig Lally, Police Protective League president

There, officials have recently started to release relevant portions of body camera footage from police shootings once the district attorney decided not to charge the officers involved. If charges are filed, however, the recordings would be considered evidence and withheld until they were made public at trial.

Supporters of broader access to police video welcomed a review of the LAPDs policy. An attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union called it long overdue. But, he added, officials would need to craft specific guidelines preventing the LAPD from sharing only footage that helped officers.

They cant just leave it to their discretion to release video if it exonerates officers and withhold it if its incriminating, said Peter Bibring, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Southern California.

But the president of the union that represents rank-and-file LAPD officers sharply rejected the idea of releasing any of the recordings. Craig Lally said he feared the decision to release certain footage would be influenced by public or political pressure, jeopardizing evidence that could be used in a trial.

Once you open that Pandoras box, whos going to decide whats going to be released? Lally said. Is it going to be the chief of police? Is it going to be the mayor? Whats the criteria going to be?

You cant go down that road, Lally added.

The LAPD has seen protests over several shootings by officers in recent years, including a deadly 2015 confrontation on skid row that was captured by body cameras.

Police say officers opened fire on Charly Keunang after he reached for a rookie officers holstered gun during a struggle. A bystander posted a dramatic video of the shooting online, drawing millions of views and putting international attention on the LAPD.

The district attorneys office is still reviewing whether to charge the officers who fatally shot Keunang. The footage from their body cameras has not been made public.

Across the country, law enforcement officials are having similar debates as more agencies embrace body cameras as a way to improve public trust in policing. Many agencies have resisted the idea of releasing footage. Last week, North Carolina prohibited police agencies from releasing videos captured by cameras in patrol cars or on officer uniforms without a court order.

But at a time when bystander cell phone videos showing shootings by officers can spark a firestorm of criticism, departments elsewhere are facing increasing pressure to make their own recordings public.

That scenario played out this week in Fresno, where police released graphic recordings of officers shooting an unarmed 19-year-old whose death had led to anti-police protests and allegations that the officers used excessive force. Fueling the criticism was a bystanders cell phone video that showed the final two shots fired, when the man was laying in the road.

The footage from the body cameras, however, showed more of the June 25 traffic stop that ended with Dylan Nobles death. The recordings revealed that Noble repeatedly ignored commands from officers, instead walking toward them with something  later determined to be a plastic container with clay  in his hand.

The decision by Fresno police to share the recordings publicly has been widely discussed by law enforcement officials and others paying close attention to the issue. California lawmakers have yet to approve legislation on the issue, leaving individual agencies to decide for themselves if or when to release footage.

In Los Angeles, the president of the civilian board that oversees the LAPD said he wants to reconsider the departments policy against releasing police videos. The department is in the midst of purchasing and rolling out body cameras to about 7,000 officers and is finishing a department-wide initiative to install dashboard cameras in patrol cars.

Police Commission President Matt Johnson said in a statement that the panel plans to review how other departments are handling what footage to release.

Our video release policy was never written in stone, and I believe now is a good time to revisit it, Johnson said.

Any change in the LAPDs policy, he said, needed to comply with state law and avoid interfering with reviews by the district attorneys office of police shootings and other controversial incidents.

Video, while an important piece of evidence, does not tell the entire story, Johnson said. I want to make sure that when video is released, it is done within a framework of releasing other evidence that helps complete the picture.

At least one other member of the five-person panel supported revisiting the rules, and a third said he wanted to hear whether Beck had reconsidered his views.

Beck said he has discussed the issue with police commissioners, the mayor and district attorney. There are still privacy concerns, particularly for crime victims, he said. And he doesnt want the public release of video to interfere with criminal or administrative investigations.

But Im not opposed to coming up with a way where we can satisfy more concerns here, he told The Times.

Robert Saltzman, a commissioner who expressed concerns about the LAPD policy when it was crafted, said that he agreed it was time to revisit the issue. A blanket refusal to release video undermines the attempts to build public trust by having the body cameras, he said.

I continue to think that its very important that we have a much more liberal policy regarding releasing the video, he said. Not releasing the video should be the exception, not the rule.

Steve Soboroff, another police commissioner and longtime advocate for the body cameras, noted that when the LAPDs policy was crafted last year, the chief said there may be circumstances in which he would consider releasing the footage. Now that the LAPD  along with other agencies  have more experience with the cameras, Soboroff said he was interested in hearing the chiefs definition of what those circumstances may be.

What are the circumstances under which release is appropriate, and is it broader now that weve had a year now see how its working? Or is it the same? Soboroff said.

Though the LAPD is poised to become the largest law enforcement agency in the country to use body cameras on a widespread scale, its not the only L.A. County department to roll out the technology. The Sheriffs Department also plans to equip deputies with the devices. While no policy is in place, a spokesman said the sheriff was committed to being transparent and plans to release videos when legally allowed.

Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey said her office is paying very, very close attention to the policies that different agencies are using for body cameras across L.A. County. Lacey told The Times that she was concerned that releasing recordings before her office has decided whether to file charges in a case could taint not only potential jurors, but witnesses. After that, she said, its up to the agency involved to decide what to do with the video.

Once the case is over with and once weve made a decision  thats going to be their call, she said.

But Bibring, the ACLU attorney, expressed concern about waiting until prosecutors were done. In Los Angeles County, the district attorneys office typically doesnt decide whether to file charges against an officer until several months  sometimes more than a year  after a deadly force incident.

When a community has been subjected to a police shooting, he said, they want answers in a matter of days  not years.

kate.mather@latimes.com

For more LAPD news, follow me on Twitter: @katemather

Click here for a Spanish version of this story

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Many of the victims of a shooting that wounded 14 people in Bakersfield early Saturday were teenagers, one as young as 13, according to witnesses.

Police on Sunday continued to look for three young men who detectives believe were involved in the attack.

The men, who were told to leave a Bakersfield house party, returned and opened fire into a crowd of more than 100 teenagers, injuring 14 people, authorities said.

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The shooting occurred about 1 a.m. in the 600 block of Stephens Drive and left two people in critical condition, said Ray Pruitt, a spokesman for the Kern County Sheriffs Department. All of the victims are expected to survive.

Pruitt described the suspects as black males between the ages of 16 and 19.

A girl who lives at the home where the shooting occurred was given permission to throw a party by her parents and promoted the event on social media, Pruitt told The Times.

See the most-read stories in Local News this hour >>

At some point, people who were not invited showed up, he said. The party swelled to at least 150 revelers and at some point, it got out of control, Pruitt added.

Authorities believe a verbal confrontation took place between two different groups in the backyard of the house, and several people were told to leave the party.

They did leave, and we believe it was those individuals who left the party that came back and opened fire on the crowd, Pruitt said, adding that investigators believe the shooting was gang-related.

The sheriffs department said the incident was initially believed to be a drive-by shooting, but Pruitt said investigators now believe the three males got out of a vehicle, walked up to the crowd outside the home and opened fire before fleeing in the vehicle.

Authorities also believe that at least one person in the crowd returned fire.

Pruitt said his department does not have a description of the vehicle, and deputies have been having difficulty getting victims and witnesses to identify the shooters.

Witnesses told the Bakersfield Californian that the injured included a 13-year-old and that 30 rounds were fired.

We just heard screaming, Julie Burton told the paper, adding the incident felt like the OK Corral.

The family who lives in the home where the party occurred also expressed shock at the violence.

Im sorry for what happened to the kids that was here last night!....My heart goes out to every mother, every child. My prayers are with you and your family, Alicea Wallace told KBAK-TV.

Vic Hager, 63, lives across the street from the house where the party and shooting took place.

In a phone interview with The Times on Saturday, he said there were at least 150 people at the party. Most attendees appeared to have been dropped off because the street was not filled with cars, he said.

The party got a little noisy, Hager said, adding that it wasnt out of line.

Pruitt, the sheriffs spokesman, said he was not aware of any noise complaints reported before the shots were fired.

Hager said he had just gone to bed about 12:30 a.m. when he heard what sounded like fireworks.

Then the pops got a little slower, and I realized it was a gun, and by the time I looked out my window, everyone was scattering, Hager said.

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Flights between Los Angeles International Airport and Istanbul have been suspended as a coup attempt plays out in Turkey, an airport spokeswoman said Saturday.

The move, which shut down two daily Turkish Airlines flights between LAX and Kemal Ataturk Airport, comes in response to a Federal Aviation Administration ban on commercial and private air travel into and out of Turkey.

Airport spokeswoman Katherine Alvarado said that Saturdays flights had been canceled and that it was unclear when the commercial flight route between L.A. and Turkey would reopen.

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The FAA ban was issued amid rapidly unfolding events in Turkey, where a coup launched Friday by factions of the military unhappy with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to be unraveling. A night of clashes between supporters and opponents of the coup left hundreds dead.

Turkey, a NATO member and important host to American military forces operating in the Middle East, is also a popular vacation destination among Westerners  especially the ancient, seaside city of Istanbul. It has also been home to violent unrest this summer: Just last month suicide bombers attacked Ataturk Airport, killing more than three dozen people.

peter.jamison@latimes.com

Follow @petejamison on Twitter

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About a hundred friends, former students and fans of legendary East Los Angeles educator Jaime Escalante gathered at Garfield High School Saturday to honor the Bolivian immigrant whose success with his calculus students inspired newspaper articles, books and the film Stand and Deliver.

Escalantes portrait will grace a commemorative Forever stamp, said Los Angeles Postmaster Ken Snavely. The U.S. Postal Service reviews thousands of applications each year and issues just 10 to 15 new stamps, and they rarely feature historical figures, Snavely said.

As the curtain fell to reveal Escalantes demanding, kindly scowl, his former students raised their phones to snap photos and wiped tears from their eyes, pursing their lips in smiles tight with pride. Escalante died from cancer in 2010 at the age of 79.

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I can never talk about about Mr. Jaime Escalante without tears, said Elsa Bolado, a former student of Escalantes in 1982.

Escalante, Bolado said, did not have magical teaching methods or tricks. He just made his students work harder than they ever had before, Bolado said.

His legacy was cultivating the American Dream in an overlooked, impoverished neighborhood when no one else would, said Bolado. She tries to carry on his legacy in her job as an elementary school principal. His portrait hangs in her office at Graham Elementary School in South Central Los Angeles.

Escalante gained national prominence in the aftermath of a 1982 scandal surrounding 14 of his students who passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam only to be accused later of cheating.

The story of their eventual triumph  and of Escalantes battle to raise standards at a struggling campus of working-class, largely Mexican-American students  became the subject of the movie Stand and Deliver and turned Escalante into one of the most famous teachers in America.

J. Carlo Marquez, Garfields current assistant principal, spoke of the schools continuing academic success as a lasting part of Escalantes legacy. About 90% of the schools senior class graduated this year, and about half of them have been admitted to state and private schools. Garfields Academic Decathlon team recently placed 7th in the state and 14th in the nation, Marquez added.

A multi-story mural of the educator towers over the schools central courtyard. Calculus teachers who come to the school know they have big shoes to fill, Marquez said. Although the school is located in a neighborhood where the less than four percent of the population has a four-year college degree, there are 75 students in the Advanced Placement Calculus program  drawn to the school by Escalantes name, Marquez said.

Four of Escalantes former students gathered around his portrait after the presentation and spoke of the lessons he had taught them.

Take problems step by step was a common one. Break down the problem, was another, said Jema Estrella, whom Esclante always teased for being an athlete. The most important advice Escalante gave them, each said, was you can do it.

He gave us confidence. And now when we run into problems, we dont shy away from them, said Rosa Gutierrez, Escalantes student in 1989.

Escalante taught at Garfield from 1974 to 1991. But he continued to loom large over his students lives even after they left his classroom.

During a conversation about Estrellas future her senior year, she recalls, Escalante veered off on a tangent and showed her a photo of the Parthenon.

He said, This is the most beautiful building in the world. You should go see this building someday, Estrella said. Now she is an architect.

One of Escalantes original students, Leticia Rodriguez, went to Princeton after graduating in 1982, then dropped out. She re-enrolled at Cal State L.A., then dropped out again.

She had prepared to live out her life as a housewife when she ran into Escalante at a scholarship dinner in 1989. When he heard she had dropped out of school, Escalante had just one question, Rodriguez said. Youre going back, right?

Rodriguez, knowing how little patience her former teacher had for excuses, told him yes. The next year, she re-enrolled in Cal State L.A. and went on to get her masters at Cal Poly Pomona.

These days, shes an electrical engineer at Honeywell.

He wanted us all to be engineers, Rodriguez said.

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Four suspects crashed a backyard graduation party in Artesia on Saturday night and opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others, authorities said.

The shooting occurred about 10 p.m. in the 18000 block of Alburtis Avenue, where authorities responding to the scene found three men suffering from gunshot wounds, said Deputy Lisa Jansen of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department.

One man was pronounced dead at the scene, and two other men were transferred to a local hospital, where they were listed in fair condition, Jansen said.

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Detectives still are investigating whether anyone at the party knew the men who opened fire, said sheriffs Deputy Katrina Flores. They opened fire after a confrontation or argument with the people at party, Flores said.

All three of the gunshot victims were attending the party, she said.

Authorities have not identified any suspects, and the motive for the shooting is unknown, Jansen said.

Saturdays incident was the third homicide in Artesia in the past 12 months, according to the Los Angeles Times Homicide Report.

frank.shyong@latimes.com

Twitter: @frankshyong

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Authorities are searching for the driver of a van involved in a fatal hit-and-run incident Saturday night in Lancaster, officials said.

A pedestrian was struck and killed as he crossed East Avenue I, near the intersection of 28th Street East, about 9 p.m., according to Lt. Joseph Fender of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department.

The driver of the van was headed east on the same road when he struck the victim and then fled the scene, Fender said.

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The pedestrian, described as an elderly man, was taken to Antelope Valley Hospital, where he died of his injuries, Fender said. The victims name and age have not been released.

Witness reports described the vehicle as a gold or burgundy GMC van that resembled an Astro, authorities said. The van appears to have front-end damage and may have a broken passenger-side headlight.

Anyone with information about the hit-and-run is asked to call Det. Ryan Bodily at the Lancaster Sheriffs Station at (661) 948-8466.
The Los Angeles Police Department will increase helicopter patrols and the screenings of 911 calls in the wake of the fatal shootings of three Baton Rouge officers, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Sunday.

Under the move, the LAPD will also shift Metropolitan Division officers to help back up patrol officers.

Today, we are adding resources to make sure that our Los Angeles Police Department and other public safety agencies are supported, Garcetti said in a statement.

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The boost in resources comes after two Baton Rouge police officers and one East Baton Rouge sheriffs deputy were shot and killed Sunday morning. Several other officers were also injured before the suspect, identified as 29-year-old Gavin E. Long from Kansas City, Mo., was shot by police.

I condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms. There is no justification for the taking of the lives of officers who were in their communities doing their job today, Garcetti said in a statement, calling the recent shootings targeting law-enforcement officers a horrifying trend.

The Louisiana killings follow the death of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man who was shot by police July 5. On July 6, Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black man, was shot by a police officer in Minnesota during a traffic stop. One day later, a gunman killed five police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas in apparent retaliation for the deaths of Sterling and Castile.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League issued a statement decrying the platitudes and rhetorical support for law enforcement and issued a call for more concrete action.

In just over one weeks time, this nation has seen its law enforcement officers targeted, hunted and murdered again, the league said in the statement. We cannot keep our neighborhoods safe if the men and women we ask to protect our communities face ambush around any potential street corner.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck called for more dialogue even as he condemned the violence against law enforcement officers.

The events that have triggered this national discussion about policing in America are necessary, but must be free of violence if meaningful change is to be achieved, Beck said in a statement.

Beck sent an internal video to officers Sunday following the deadly shooting in Baton Rouge, explaining the heightened safety measures the LAPD has taken to protect police as they respond to calls.

After the horrific news of what happened in Baton Rouge, I became extremely concerned for all of our safety  particularly yours, the chief told his officers in the 51-second clip, a copy of which was reviewed by The Times. I dont see any nexus to California yet, but I want to make sure that were as safe as we can be.

In addition to moving the departments elite Metro officers from crime suppression details to backing up patrol officers, Beck said 911 calls would be carefully screened to avoid rouse calls that could draw more officers to a scene.

Be careful, the chief said, a black mourning band covering his badge. Watch your back. Watch each other.

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UPDATES:

7:05 p.m.: This story has been updated with new information regarding LAPD Chief Charlie Becks comments to his officers.
At least three police officers were shot dead in Baton Rouge on Sunday morning, in what the towns mayor calls an ambush attack. Three other officers were wounded.

The attack took place less than two weeks after the death of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, at the hands of police sparked protests and triggered a Justice Department civil rights investigation. It also comes a little over a week after five police officers were shot dead during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, Texas.

What we know so far:

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- Baton Rouge police responded to a call around 8:30 a.m. At least one gunman shot at the officers when they arrived at a location less than a mile from police headquarters.

- A suspect is dead. Police initially believed there were multiple suspects, but later said the dead shooter is the only gunman.

For live updates, click here>>
What you need to know about the sovereign-citizen group to which Baton Rouge gunman Gavin Long belonged

The Washitaw Nation, the sovereign-citizenry group that Gavin Long declared himself a member of, was founded decades ago by a black Louisiana woman named Verdiacee Turner, who called herself Empress Verdiacee Tiari Washitaw-Turner Goston El-Bey. Its core tenet is that followers are descendants of the Ancient Ones, or black ones, who occupied the North American continent tens of thousands of years before white Europeans.

Turner, now deceased, developed an entire mythology around the idea that land sold by France to the United States in 1803 in the Louisiana Purchase was fraudulently obtained and actually belonged to her. In doing so, she falls into a long line of sovereign citizenry gurus who peddle fantastic realities and myths, said Ryan Lenz, a senior writer at the Southern Poverty Law Centers Intelligence Project.

The Washitaw group, which is made up of African Americans, is part of a larger movement of sovereign citizens in America  a phenomenon that has risen with the economic downturn and the influence of the Internet. Generally, they believe they are above all city, state and federal government laws. They dismiss governments as operating illegally, and they do not believe they have to pay taxes or respect law enforcement officials.

In 2010, two Arkansas police officers stopped a white sovereign-citizen extremist and his 16-year-old son during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 40. The father jumped out of the vehicle and opened fire with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing both officers. The following year, the FBI declared sovereign citizenry a growing domestic threat to law enforcement with extremists comprising a domestic terrorist movement.

Once you go down this perverse rabbit hole of curiosity and accept all of these fantasies as true, then when youre challenged on them, it becomes like a challenge to your fundamental reality, and then people start to lash out, Lenz said.

One of the Washitaws core beliefs is that governments have put them in chains and that theyre prisoners, he explained.

In the process of declaring yourself a sovereign citizen, by definition, you are no longer beholden to any government, Lenz said. That, of course, is not the way modern world is, and the concept of sovereign citizenry is by and large a complete fallacy.

The document that Gavin Long filed in court in 2015 amounts to pseudo-legal, meaningless paperwork, Lenz said.

According to sovereign citizens, once you do that, it becomes part of the official record and the government has been notified that you are no longer beholden to the laws, rules and regulations of that system, he said. There are no consequences of that. The consequences come when you believe that that mattered.

When you start to accept the fact that the federal government is a fictitious reality or a construct that has no real power over your freedom or liberty, you start to declare your freedom and liberty, Lenz said. When youre challenged on that, thats when things get dicey.

The Washitaw Nation holds an annual conference. It is not clear if Long attended its last event: a three-day event in June of spiritual readings, dancing and feasts in Monroe, La.
11:49 A.M. Black law enforcement organization leader: Country needs deep conversation about revenge killings of police

At a hastily arranged news conference Sunday, National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives President Gregory Thomas called for peace between police and communities across the country. He said the country needed to have a deep conversation about revenge against police for killings of black Americans.

While the motive of Sundays shooting in Baton Rouge, La., is unclear, Micah Johnson, the shooter in Dallas, had told police that his motives included revenge for black men killed by police.

We cannot let this be the order of the day. We dont need to have a copycat scenario, be it in Baton Rouge or anywhere across the country, Thomas said, speaking in Washington, D.C., where the organization was holding its annual conference.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will leave the world blind and toothless, said Thomas, paraphrasing Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had joined Thomas, said: This has no kinship to our civil rights movement. This is not about black and white; its about wrong and right, he added.
The Republican National Convention in Cleveland begins Monday amid heightened tensions over race, police violence and one of the most divisive presidential candidates in decades.

As party representatives try to prevent a floor fight over the nomination of Donald Trump, police and protesters are expected to fill the streets. Guns are likely to be in abundance as several organizations have said their members intend to legally carry arms.

If that sounds like a recipe for tumult, it wouldnt be the first time. A look back at some of the nations craziest conventions:

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1860: Democrats, Charleston, S.C.

The convention, held in one of the most pro-slavery cities of the day, revolved around deep divisions over whether the practice should be outlawed. Northern Democrats supported Stephen Douglas, who favored letting the settlers of each territory decide for themselves. But Southern Democrats wanted John C. Breckinridge, a stalwart defender of slavery. At the time, the country was on the verge of splitting in two. Breckinridge may not be for disunion, but all the disunionists are for Breckinridge, Douglas said. After 57 votes, neither candidate had secured the nomination, and the delegates decided in desperation to adjourn the convention and reconvene a month and a half later in Baltimore. In the end, both Breckinridge and Douglas ended up on the ballot in November, allowing the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to handily win the presidency.

1924: Democrats, New York

Known as Klanbake because of the heavy influence of the Ku Klux Klan, the convention was the longest in history, lasting 16 days and requiring 103 ballots before a candidate was finally nominated. Front-runners William Gibbs McAdoo, who was backed by the KKK and defended Prohibition, and Al Smith, who fought for the party to renounce the KKK, came head to head. For days, McAdoo supporters yelled Booze! Booze! Booze! while Smith loyalists chanted Klu Klux McAdoo! The party finally settled on a compromise candidate, John W. Davis, and approved a measure to denounce intolerance but avoided mentioning the KKK specifically. A celebration followed in New Jersey involving thousands of hooded Klan members who burned crosses and encouraged violence against blacks and Catholics.

1964: Republicans, San Francisco

Pandemonium ensued when moderates tried to block the nomination of Barry Goldwater, an arch-conservative who opposed the Civil Rights Act and supported aggressive military intervention in the Soviet Bloc. At the 11th hour, some moderate leaders tried to unite behind last-minute entrant William Scranton. On the convention floor, tensions escalated when a Goldwater conservative made a racist comment about Italian Americans. And when liberal candidate Nelson Rockefeller tried to deliver a speech, he was booed off the stage. Primary wins and popular support propelled Goldwater to an easy victory despite the opposition. In accepting the nomination, he declared: Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.

1968: Democrats, Chicago

At the height of the Vietnam War, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., thousands of antiwar protesters occupied Grant Park in Chicago near the convention hotels. Mayor Richard Daley called in more than 20,000 police and National Guard members. The situation rapidly spiraled out of control as police beat and gassed demonstrators in what is now known as the Battle of Michigan Avenue. The riot was caught on television and resulted in increased opposition to the war and mistrust of the political system. Chicago 1968 was in a class by itself, said Jack Rakove, a professor of history at Stanford University.

2004: Republicans, New York

Three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the city was on high alert. Hundreds of groups showed up to protest the nomination of George W. Bush. Nearly 2,000 people were arrested as police came under criticism for tactics that included detaining people for hours at the Hudson Pier Depot on the Hudson River. Most cases were dismissed or ended in acquittals. The city did not admit any wrongdoing, but wound up paying $6.4 million to 430 people who sued for rights violations, $6.6 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by 1,200 additional people, and $5 million in legal fees.

erica.evans@latimes.com
Shannon Sullivan was disheartened by the sign she saw posted in the Walt Disney World break room.

If guests ask whether alligators are in the water around the Magic Kingdoms Tom Sawyer Island, it told employees, the correct answer is: Not that we know of, but if we see one, we will call Pest Management to have them removed. Please do not say that we have seen them before.

I was very offended by it and I was pretty vocal about it, said Sullivan, a Disney College Program participant working in Magic Kingdom restaurants.

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She tweeted out a picture of the sign, which was typed on paper in several different colors.

Disney quickly removed the sign, which the company had not authorized to be posted. Around the same time, Sullivan was fired.

The Orlando Sentinel inquired about Sullivans termination Thursday evening. On Friday morning, Magic Kingdom Vice President Dan Cockerell paid a personal visit to Sullivan to offer her the job back. She will return to work until later this month, when her internship was originally scheduled to end.

When visitors ask about alligators, Disney said it has advised workers to acknowledge that parts of the theme-park resort can attract wildlife. They are also supposed to tell guests to notify security if they see any alligators.

Disney said it does not know who posted the sign and that no one else is being disciplined over the incident. Cast members were trying to do the right thing, the company said.

We do not want our Guests to be afraid while walking around Frontierland, the sign read.

Sullivan said she knew that sharing a picture of the sign on social media might get her in trouble. But she was bothered by the idea of misleading visitors. At this point it became my morals and my integrity and what I believe in, she said. I thought if I lose my job because of that, its worth it to me.

Sullivan said a manager confronted her Thursday about the tweet, told Sullivan that her College Program stint would end early and took her identification. She was escorted from the park.

Awareness of alligators has been heightened after one snatched 2-year-old Lane Graves from the shore of Seven Seas Lagoon last month, dragging him into the water and killing him. Since then, many guests have come forward with stories of Disney gator sightings. Emails obtained by the Orlando Sentinel this week showed Disney firefighters had been admonished for feeding alligators on the property.

After Lanes death, Disney roped off the waterfront. It also posted signs explicitly warning visitors of alligators and snakes.

Pedicini writes for the Orlando Sentinel.

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One thing the polls agree on: Voters dont like their choices

The eve of the GOP convention has brought a surfeit of new polls, and although they differ slightly on the standing of the two major candidates, they concur that voters dont like their choices.

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll, for example, finds 58% of voters are dissatisfied with the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Among those surveyed, 64% had an unfavorable view of Trump, while 54% felt unfavorably toward Clinton.

A new NBC News/Wall St. Journal survey offered a similar verdict: Trump was viewed favorably by 27% of those surveyed and unfavorably by 60%. That net negative rating of -33 points is the worst in the history of the poll.

But Clintons image is only somewhat better: 34% positive, 56% negative.

Despite the unpopularity of the two major-party presumptive nominees, third parties arent garnering a huge lot of support. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian nominee, and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, drew 8% and 5%, respectively, in the ABC/Washington Post survey when their names were offered to voters. They got 11% and 6%, respectively, in the NBC/Wall St. Journal survey.

The two drew roughly equally from both Clinton and Trump at this point, the polls found.

Rather than flocking to a third choice, many voters are being driven by negative feelings about the candidate they dont like, more than positive feelings about their own candidate. Thats particularly true for Trump, who leads a party still badly divided between his supporters and detractors.

Among registered voters who said they backed Trump, fewer than 4 in 10 in the ABC/Washington Post poll said they did so mainly because they supported him. The majority, 57%, said they mostly opposed Clinton.

On the other side, the picture is only slightly more optimistic: 44% who mainly supported Clinton, 54% who mostly opposed Trump.

One political figure Americans do like: President Obama. His job approval continues to stay above 50%, at some of the highest levels of his presidency. That has helped buoy Clinton, even as concerns over her handling of classified information in her email while secretary of State have pulled her downward.

As for who is winning, the new surveys all show a very close race: The NBC/Wall St. Journal poll has Clinton ahead 46%-41%. The Washington Post/ABC poll has her leading 47%-43%. Both leads are within the surveys margins of error.

Our own USC Dornsife/L.A. Times Daybreak poll, which tracks voter preferences daily, now has the two effectively tied, Trump 42%, Clinton 41%. The small lead that Trump had in the poll last week appears to have dwindled.

Similar verdicts come from new polls of swing states, which show close contests in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Virginia.
Brexit seemed like a warning. Many in the United States saw a terrifying picture of nativist populism prevailing against a nations better angels. Was this what America would look like in November? Would we wake up to find President-elect Donald Trump? But just as the panic set in, political commentators noted that although Brexit and Trump supporters might mirror each other in their virulent anti-immigrant stances and zealotry to take our country back, a key demographic difference sets the two nations apart: Britains voting population is 92% white, the U.S. only 67%. Americas racial and ethnic minorities, some argued, would form a firewall  one that the U.K. just doesnt have  to prevent the nativists from staging a virtual coup.

Comforting as that may seem, Americas demographic firewall has been under attack. And as we approach November, we find it severely weakened.

Ever since Barack Obamas election as president, and the surge of black, Latino, Asian and low-income citizens to the polls that propelled him to the White House, the Republican Party has worked feverishly to suppress the vote of minorities and the poor. The Supreme Courts 2013 decision in Shelby County vs. Holder, which crippled the Voting Rights Act, aided and abetted the GOPs efforts.

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Of course Republicans insist that disenfranchisement is not their intent. They claim, instead, that these laws are necessary to stop rampant voter fraud. But that assertion does not align with the facts. A GOP-sponsored database, Crosscheck, which is designed to cull through voter registration files from 28 states, analyzed 84 million records and found only 14 instances of possible voter impersonation. In Wisconsin, proven fraud actually amounted to 0.0007 percent of all votes. In fact, law professor Justin Levitt uncovered that from 2000 to 2014, there were only 31 instances of possible voter fraud out of 1 billion votes cast nationwide. Impersonating a voter to steal an election is not the issue. Disenfranchisement is.

Over the last few years Republican legislatures have moved to require specific types of voter ID that disproportionately affect minorities and the poor. In Texas, concealed weapons permits are acceptable, student IDs are not. Alabama rejects IDs issued by the public housing authority. As the NAACP has noted, nationwide, 25% of African Americans and 16% of Latinos, compared with 8% of whites, do not have the correct form of ID now demanded by Republican-dictated laws.

GOP lawmakers have also severely limited the ability to obtain an acceptable ID. Alabama shut down motor vehicle department offices in counties that had sizable African American populations. Only after a thunderous outcry did the Republican governor relent and agree to open the license bureaus  for one day a month. All this in a state where, by its own estimates, 250,000 to 500,000 registered voters lack a drivers license or other acceptable ID under the law.

In Texas, 15% of voting-age Latinos without government-issued photo IDs live in counties where there are no drivers license offices. In fact, as the U.S. Department of Justice noted, Texas has DMV offices in only eighty-one of 254 counties in the state, with some voters needing to travel up to 250 miles to obtain a new voter ID. Texas suite of laws, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, impacts more than 600,000 registered voters and 1 million eligible voters.

The results have been devastating across the United States. A recent study by political scientists at UC San Diego found that in elections held between 2008 to 2012 in states with strict voter ID laws turnout among Democrats in general elections dropped an estimated 7.7 percentage points, while Republican turnout dropped 4.6 percentage points. Even more telling, strong liberals voter turnout rates plummeted 10.7 percentage points, whereas the decline for strong conservatives was only 2.8%.

IDs, however, are just one quill in the arsenal. In Ohio, the literacy test made a stunning reappearance. Under Republican Gov. John Kasich, the state required voters to fill out absentee and provisional ballots by hand. If poll workers find any error, regardless of how minor, or if the ballot is completed in cursive, they throw out the vote. This process affected nearly 12% of those ballots in the 2014 and 2015 elections.

Kansas, meanwhile, suspended the voting rights of 30,000 citizens, illegally demanding documentary proof of U.S. citizenship. Tellingly, nine of the 10 regions with the highest percentages of suspended voters were urban.

In all, 36 GOP-controlled states have resurrected some form of poll tax, literacy test or other Jim Crow-like disenfranchisement mechanism. In their more candid moments, Republicans have even acknowledged that their intention is to diminish the power of Democratic voters.

In Ohio, the top elections administrator admitted that literacy tests and other new voter rules ... were not applied to white rural counties.

In Wisconsin, Republican state senators were just giddy at the prospect of snuffing out the votes coming from Milwaukee and Madison. In Florida, a leading Republican confessed that his party eliminated Sunday as an early voting day because thats when black churches bring their congregations to the polls. In Ohio, the top elections administrator admitted that literacy tests and other new voter rules, while vigorously enforced in Cleveland, Dayton and other cities, were not applied to white rural counties.

As the Brookings Institute has noted, minorities high turnout at the polls, especially that of African Americans, determined the outcome of the 2012 election. Their Republican-created absence could have the same effect in 2016, only with a very different result.

Four of seven key swing states in the upcoming election, as well as North Carolina, Indiana and Wisconsin, which were crucial in either 2008 or 2012, have Republican-sponsored disenfranchisement statutes in place. Weve already seen a dress rehearsal for what might happen in November. The midterm 2014 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections in Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and Alabama were all decided in favor of Republicans by a margin smaller than the number of disenfranchised voters in each state.

When the GOP launched its war against voting, of course it didnt know about Donald Trump. Party elites figured they were helping one of their own win the presidency  not a four-time bankrupt businessman and reality TV host, a man who has trolled so deeply in the underbelly of American society that Neo-Nazis and Klansmen openly embrace him. If the #NeverTrump movement is in earnest, if establishment Republicans are as horrified by Trump as they claim, then  ironically  they must work to reenfranchise the very people theyve worked to disenfranchise: African Americans and Latinos, overwhelming numbers of whom view Trump unfavorably.

To rebuild the firewall that protects us from nativism, Republicans in Congress must first support the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015, which identifies jurisdictions that have mounted discriminatory laws, and provides judicial and federal oversight to protect the rights of minority voters. Second, Republican governors and legislatures must undo their voter suppression laws. Though that might sound like political suicide, it is in fact an act of political courage  of putting country above party.

That type of fortitude is not unprecedented. In the face of an open revolt by Southern Democrats, President Truman signed an executive order desegregating the military. By doing so, he risked losing the 1948 election to either Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond or Republican Thomas Dewey. Likewise, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he understood that the Democratic Party would no longer control the South. But he did it anyway.

Should Republicans help racial minorities exercise the right to vote in November, their candidate will surely lose the White House. They should do it anyway.

Carol Anderson is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor and chair of African American Studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook
In an immaculate mid-century spread nestled in the canyons of Beverly Hills, a Hollywood actress plucks her sleepy infant daughter from the co-sleeper bassinet attached to her bed and settles in for a cozy breastfeeding session. Soon, the childs live-in nurse swoops in to bathe the baby.

Across town on L.A.s East Side, a Guatemalan immigrant clutching her 2-month-old son in a blanket makes her way through the parking lot at a generic brick building. Inside, she waits to receive her monthly voucher from the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, commonly known as WIC. Later, she will redeem it for infant formula and groceries.

I encountered both of these mothers in my research on breastfeeding in the United States. I know both women want the best for their babies: healthy childhoods and, later, adult lives filled with promise. Yet these two mothers  and those who fall between the extremes they represent  live in a nation where the fundamental ability to nourish their young with free, life-sustaining mothers milk has been turned into a luxury for the elite, or a hard-fought prize for the intrepid.

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Breast is best may be a national mantra but here is the reality: Although nearly 80% of U.S. mothers start off breastfeeding their babies, half will give it up entirely or supplement with formula after just a few weeks. Less than 19% of American babies receive the six months of exclusive breastfeeding recommended for optimal growth, development and health by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization and countless scientists, doctors and public health experts.

We now know that breast milk is not merely a foodstuff, but a mysterious and powerful human tissue  a constellation of complex nutrients, bioactive molecules, hormones, microorganisms and as yet barely understood compounds that have evolved over eons to ensure the survival of the human species. We also know that feeding babies infant formula instead of breast milk is associated with increased incidence of gastrointestinal and respiratory infection, as well as greater risk of obesity, type 1 and type 2 diabetes, leukemia and sudden infant death syndrome.

Unfortunately, there is a sharp socioeconomic divide when it comes to breastfeeding. Studies show a distinct correlation between parents income and education levels and a mothers likelihood of breastfeeding. Privilege helps a lot.

The actress I met, for example, gave birth in a hospital that has adopted the essential practices required by the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, a global program launched by the WHO and Unicef in 1991 to support breastfeeding. It doesnt automatically hand out free formula to mothers. It provides rooming-in maternity suites for mom and baby, so moms can breastfeed on demand. And it maintains lactation staffers for support; breastfeeding may be a biological process, but theres a learning curve involved.

Studies show a distinct correlation between parents income and education levels and a mothers likelihood of breastfeeding. Privilege helps a lot.

This affluent mom also could afford a renowned pediatrician who made breastfeeding a cornerstone of his practice (most U.S. doctors receive little education on human lactation in medical school). And with a nanny to assist her and the means to stay at home, she had the luxury of time to nurse for at least another six months after her baby started eating solid food, another AAP recommendation.

Such advantages arent as available to the immigrant mother in East L.A. The city has worked to increase the number of Baby-Friendly hospitals, but half of moms still lack access. (Nationwide, only 17% of births occur in these facilities.) And like the majority of American working mothers, the WIC mothers I encountered will likely get no paid time off after giving birth: The United States is the only industrialized nation (and one of just a few countries in the world) that does not mandate paid maternity leave.

Certainly, lactation educators at WIC also discuss the importance of breastfeeding, and many WIC mothers initially opt for the programs partially or fully breastfeeding packages. But few have time to make use of WICs free lactation support. The clinic I visited provides women with hospital-grade breast pumps to use at work, but many employers dont meet their legal obligation to provide nursing mothers with breaks and a clean, private space (other than a bathroom) for pumping. Few women protest, for fear of losing their jobs.

Its not surprising, then, that when WIC mothers have difficulty breastfeeding, they often resort to supplementing their efforts with the programs free formula. Then their own milk supply dwindles, and the switch to WICs fully formula feeding package becomes inevitable. The federal WIC program, whose single largest expense is the formula it provides free to mothers, now serves an astonishing 53% of American infants.

Breastfeeding is only marginally easier for working mothers at higher income levels in America. Back on the job after her short maternity leave, my ad-exec sister-in-law had to pump in filthy airport bathrooms between flights. My other sister-in-law, a nurse practitioner, pumped in a germy exam room, between patients. A salaried learned professional, she was exempt from the federal Fair Labor Standards Act that requires bosses to provide breaks and pumping space. Then theres my story: After my husband and I became parents, I opted to freelance from home, allowing me to breastfeed and save on childcare. It took five years to pay off the resulting debt.

Nations far less prosperous than the United States have successfully addressed breastfeeding inequity. Vietnam cracked down on formula advertising and upped maternity leave to six months, allowing all mothers to meet the WHOs breastfeeding guidelines. Taiwan made more than 75% of its hospitals Baby-Friendly, and its once-abysmal breastfeeding rates skyrocketed. India, Brazil and South Africa now treat breastfeeding as the important public health issue it is, with programs and policies that give children a chance to thrive. Its inconceivable that the United States would be content to give our children less.

Jennifer Grayson is the author of the recently published book Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand Facebook

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Will the GOP convention be a celebration of anger and exclusion

I have terminal cancer and I know my friends want to ask, Arent you dead yet?

Are political conventions an important part of our democracy? Or cynical infomercials for the powerful?
Last weeks terrorist attack in Nice, after similar tragedies in Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando and Istanbul, made two things painfully clear. Western societies, including the United States, have failed to blunt the growing threat of Islamist terrorism. And that means the 2016 presidential campaign will be fought under a shadow of fear. There will be more attacks between now and November; the only questions are when and where.

Voters who began the year looking for a leader who could raise median incomes are now searching for someone who can keep their families safe. And the two major candidates are offering starkly different approaches  two different brands of toughness: hot and cool, outraged and wonky.

Donald Trump, with his visceral sense of the nations mood, has bluntly voiced voters anger and fear.

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If we dont get tough  were not going to have our country anymore, he said after a New York-born Afghan American shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June. There will be nothing  absolutely nothing  left.

Trump has proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, restoring waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse in interrogations, and killing the spouses and children of Islamic State militants (which would be a war crime).

On Thursday he warned that allowing Muslim refugees into the United States could be the great Trojan horse of all time.

We have no idea  who they are, he said. They have no paperwork. (That claim is utterly false; most refugee applicants wait at least 18 months while they are investigated.)

As many national security experts have pointed out, Trumps proposed ban on Muslims would be counterproductive; it would alienate millions of people the United States wants to enlist in the war against Islamic State. It may even be a political loser for Trump. Although most Republicans agree with the proposed ban, most independents  voters he presumably needs in the general election  do not.

Still, Trumps white-hot rhetoric reinforces his image as a tough guy whos willing to do whatever it takes.

Hillary Clinton, with her decades of experience as a policy wonk, is sounding a tough note, too.

This is a war against these terrorist groups, the radical jihadist groups. Its a different kind of war, she said last week. We need to be smart about how we wage it, but we have to be determined that were going to win it.

If he chooses, [Trump] can use the [Republican National Convention] event to look more presidential, more deliberative, and readier to lead.

But her proposals are often cautiously hedged and wrapped in national security jargon.

Shes called for skillful diplomacy, for a new look at our visa programs, for building up a global counterterrorism infrastructure.

Clinton has proposed, essentially, to maintain President Obamas current strategy against Islamic State, but to do more and faster: more airstrikes, an intelligence surge and new measures to disrupt terrorists social media networks. Its worth remembering that shes often been more hawkish than Obama, even when she served inside his administration.

If her approach is less memorable than Trumps, in the end, its more sensible.

And voters have noticed. When asked which candidate they consider temperamentally suited for the presidency, Clinton wins in a walk. Even on the issue of terrorism, Trump doesnt appear to have an advantage.

In June, polls found that most voters thought Clinton could do a better job on terrorism, by a wide margin. More recent polls  taken when Clinton was in a general slump, probably because of the well-deserved shellacking she took from FBI Director James B. Comey over her private server  show the two candidates tied on terrorism. Even thats remarkable, though; terrorism should be an easy win for a GOP candidate. In 2008, on that issue, voters preferred Republican John McCain over Obama by a wide margin.

In the last few weeks, after his erratic, self-absorbed reaction to the Orlando tragedy was widely panned, Trump eased up on the bluster  a bit, anyway.

Now Trump has a golden opportunity to change the tone of his campaign for good: The weeklong nominating convention in Cleveland, at which hell be center stage.

If he chooses, he can use the event to look more presidential, more deliberative, and readier to lead, erasing some of the stature gap, the temperament gap, the qualified-to-be-president gap that has kept him behind Clinton for most of the year.

Theres at least one good reason, then, to keep an eye on the convention: Well be able to tell whether Trump is trying to evolve by how he chooses to talk about terrorism.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

Twitter: @DoyleMcManus

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trumps running mate stirred public concern after the 2001 anthrax letter attacks by asserting  without any scientific evidence  that the material had been genetically modified to make it more deadly.

The statement by then-Rep. Mike Pence, now governor of Indiana, suggested that a foreign source  likely Saddam Husseins Iraq  was responsible for the letter attacks, which killed five people, disrupted mail delivery and temporarily shut down congressional office buildings.

The FBI ultimately concluded that an Army anthrax scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, carried out the attacks. Ivins, based at Ft. Detrick, Md., committed suicide in July 2008 after his lawyers informed him that he would be indicted.

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Pence made his claims in June 2002, nine months after the first of two batches of anthrax-laced letters were put in the mail in Princeton, N.J.

Why has the FBI apparently concluded that the source of these anthrax attacks was domestic when there is significant evidence to suggest an international source for these materials? Pence wrote in a public letter to Atty Gen. John D. Ashcroft.

One of the contaminated letters, addressed to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), spilled dry-powder anthrax when an intern opened it on the sixth floor of the Hart Senate Office Building in October 2001. The building was shuttered for decontamination, and trace levels of anthrax were later detected elsewhere on Capitol Hill.

The material found in my office and in others on Capitol Hill was finely milled weapons-grade anthrax that had been genetically modified to increase its virulence, Pence wrote.

Pences claim of genetically altered anthrax was unfounded, according to scientists who analyzed the material recovered from the letters.

Thats just wrong. Thats simply wrong  and we knew at the time that it was wrong, said Johns Hopkins University scientist Steven L. Salzberg, who was part of the first team of scientists to analyze the material for the government.

As for Pences assertion that the pathogen was weapons grade, there is no set standard for what constitutes weapons-grade anthrax.

Messages left Saturday with Pences gubernatorial media aides and a spokeswoman for Trump were not returned.

The first indication that the mailed anthrax was not genetically modified came in early October 2001, when Ivins colleagues at Ft. Detrick determined that the infectious agent was treatable with all standard antibiotics.

Pence himself indicated as much during a news conference outside the Capitol on Oct. 27, 2001. He announced that he, his family and his staff would take the antibiotic doxycycline as a precaution.

C-SPAN footage shows that Pence introduced Dr. Greg Martin, a Navy infectious disease specialist, who said the mailed anthrax has been very sensitive to all of the typical antibiotics that can be used.

So we feel quite confident in the medications that we have that we will see no cases of anthrax out of the congressmans office, Martin said.

By early 2002, the work done by Salzberg and his colleagues provided definitive proof that the material had not been genetically altered, and the FBI shared this information with members of Congress and the Bush administration, current and former officials said.

We had the data from the genome back in January, February [2002], said Paul S. Keim, a Northern Arizona University geneticist who collaborated with Salzberg and became the leading outside scientist assisting the investigation. So we knew there were no genetic engineering things going on back then.

Asked about Pences claims, Keim said: He either was getting grossly bad information from somebody, or he certainly couldnt discern good information from bad information.

In his June 2002 letter to Ashcroft, Pence also said the anthrax spores had been coated with a chemical, an assertion that, by March of that year, had been disproven by scientists at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

The anthrax attacks, coming soon after the suicide hijackings of Sept. 11, 2001, spurred fears that the nation was facing a second wave of terrorism  fears heightened by the senders use of phrases such as Allah is Great.

The deadly mailings figured in the Bush administrations case for invading Iraq. Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited the anthrax attacks when he addressed the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, to seek international support for military action against Iraq.

Powell held a vial of white powder and said that a similarly small, teaspoon-size quantity of anthrax in one of the 2001 letters had caused havoc in Washington and killed two postal workers. Powell then suggested that Iraq had stockpiled enough anthrax to fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons.

In his letter to Ashcroft, Pence said the death toll from the mailings suggests that professionals in an organized, large-scale research facility were to blame.

Pence went on to allege  consistent with other early proponents of the Iraq war  that there was a connection between Husseins regime and Al Qaeda.

Dwight E. Adams, a biologist who headed the FBI crime laboratory from 2001 to 2006, said that Pences leap of genetic modification at that early stage baffles me.

He was out in the forefront, hyping this without facts, said Adams, now director of the Forensic Science Institute at Central Oklahoma University.

Adams and others noted that, as of June 2002, the FBI was continuing to collect samples of anthrax worldwide. Although at that point the mailings appeared to the bureau to have originated in the U.S., investigators had not yet excluded foreign involvement, as Pences letter suggested.

Salzberg, whose role in the investigation began when he was at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Md., said: I dont know where he was getting his information. If he made those statements without talking to someone with direct knowledge of the molecular biology and genetics  then that was irresponsible.

Scott Decker, a geneticist and retired FBI agent who managed scientific aspects of the case, said that genetically engineered anthrax was the first thing that we worried about, because of antibiotic resistance.

Asked if any evidence emerged to support Pences assertion, Decker said: None whatsoever.

david.willman@latimes.com

Twitter: @dwillmannews

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Hillary Clinton didnt ask activists dubious of her commitment to liberal causes for their vote Saturday. Instead, she asked that they keep holding elected officials, including me, accountable.

It was a message  delivered in a video to Netroots Nation, an annual conference dubbed the Woodstock for progressives  that acknowledged the deep skepticism among many present who would have rather seen Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders become the Democratic nominee for president.

Although liberal activists are dedicated to defeating presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump in November, theyre already laying the groundwork for what could be called a loyal opposition to Clinton, a permanent campaign intended to make sure that if she wins the White House, she follows through on the leftward tilt she adopted during the primary. Theyre planning to use public protests and political pressure to force action on their priorities, which include a $15-per-hour federal minimum wage and an expansion of the social safety net.

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Theres not going to be a honeymoon, said Joseph Geevarghese, who advocates for higher wages at Good Jobs Nation, a union-backed nonprofit.

The strident approach by liberal activists is rooted not only in wariness of Clinton but disappointment in President Obama, who some activists feel moved too slowly to address economic inequality while he fruitlessly sought compromises with Republicans.

Geevarghese said liberals feared they would lose their prized access to the White House if they tried to apply political pressure with public protests of the Obama administration. Thats not the plan if Clinton is elected.

Weve got to play an aggressive outside game, he said. Workers will be in the streets in early 2017 to hold Clinton accountable.

Activists interviewed here said theyll push for a Cabinet stocked with liberal appointees and a legislative agenda just as progressive as the Democratic platform that was finalized this month in Orlando.

If theres not strong accountability and strong pressure, things are not going to happen, said Raven Brooks, the executive director of Netroots.

This years conference came at a contradictory time for progressive activists.

While they feel a sense of pride over the unabashedly liberal ideas that have gained credence in the Democratic Party, such as free tuition at public colleges, emotions are still raw from the hard-fought primary, and its been less than a week since Sanders endorsed Clinton. Some volunteers are even holding out hope that Sanders could somehow emerge from the Democratic National Convention this month in Philadelphia as the nominee.

Even the mere presence of a Clinton sticker in the complimentary swag bag handed to Netroots participants touched a nerve.

Anthony Rogers-Wright, an environmental activist who supported Sanders, felt the sticker was a slap in the face, a heavy-handed message to get in line rather than a cheerful reminder that Democrats are uniting around their candidate.

Youre not going to get us to accept Hillary Clinton by shoving it down our throats, Rogers-Wright said.

Its clear that the excitement generated by Sanders wont be directly transferable to Clinton, whose last name became synonymous with centrist politics when her husband was president.

A lot of people are going to vote for Hillary, said Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of Code Pink and a frequent protester on Capitol Hill. But thats not where theyre going to put their energy.

Some activists will be turning their attention to congressional races or individual issues, such as banning fracking or fighting police violence.

The presidency is very important, but theres a hell of a lot of other stuff going on, said Haley Zink, 19, a Sanders supporter from the St. Louis area.

Other organizations focused on the presidential race are betting on an anti-Trump message instead of a pro-Clinton campaign.

MoveOn.org, a progressive group that originally backed Sanders, is laying the groundwork for a scorched-earth effort called Unite Against Hate that will paint Trump as a dangerous bigot. According to the groups research, its the best way to motivate young voters, single women and minorities who are repulsed by Trump but are less likely to turn out to the polls in November.

We need to make sure the stakes of the election are clear, and their influence is clear, said Justin Krebs, campaign director at MoveOn.org.

Maybe theyll put on a Hillary sticker. Maybe theyll put on an anti-Trump sticker, he said. Theres a lot of different banners people are going to be waving.

Clintons campaign has taken two approaches to try to appeal to progressives.

Officials have emphasized the earlier chapters of her biography, when she worked with the Childrens Defense Fund to fight racial segregation in schools.

Some people know that, said Marlon Marshall, director of state campaigns and political engagement for Clinton. Some people dont.

Clinton has also doubled down on liberal policies, such as making higher education more affordable. She originally suggested helping students attend college debt-free; now shes pushing for free tuition for students from families who earn up to $125,000 a year.

We are not going to get there unless we elect Hillary Clinton, Clinton policy advisor Ann OLeary said during a panel discussion, acknowledging that many in the audience probably supported Sanders in the primaries.

Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said Clinton has been notably consistent in pushing liberal issues after the primary, when some activists were concerned she would shift back to the middle.

The more Hillary Clinton keeps the volume up on big progressive ideas, the more energized theyll be, he said. Thats the real variable.

In Clintons video at Netroots, she pledged to introduce a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United court decision that opened the floodgates to more corporate money in political campaigns. Instead of the boos that greeted the mention of Clintons name during the primary, there was only applause.

Clinton may be an imperfect vehicle for many of our causes, but she is phenomenally better than the alternative, said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, which originally endorsed Sanders before throwing its support to Clinton.

Theres a lot to be excited about with Hillary Clinton, he said. Theres nothing to be excited about with Donald Trump.

chris.megerian@latimes.com

Twitter: @chrismegerian

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Two successive weeks of political conventions meant to frame the November choice for president kick off this week nearly obscured by violence and terror here and abroad.

That has driven a fierce imperative during both gatherings, the Republican convention, which begins Monday; and next weeks Democratic one: convince voters that the party nominee can be an effective leader in a world that seems distraught and divided.

The two presumptive nominees have offered voters very different responses to that need.

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Hillary is a weak person, Donald Trump said Saturday, referring to Democrat Hillary Clinton during a meandering introduction of his vice presidential pick, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in New York.

We are the law-and-order candidates, and were the law-and-order party. Were going to change things around.

Pence, following Trumps remarks, twice referred to Clinton with variations of the word weak.

While Trump talks of strength, Clinton pushes steadiness. Her campaign released a video referring to Trump as always divisive, not so decisive, as it recounted Trumps back-and-forth contradictions as he selected his running mate.

That came atop a television ad that showed Trump telling interviewer Chuck Todd that he got his military advice information from the shows, referring to Sunday news programs.

Hillary Clinton, a steady leader in an unsteady world, the ad concludes.

In marketing themselves to American voters, both candidates are operating from a posture of political weakness. Clinton and Trump are regarded negatively by a majority of Americans, meaning that both are trying to persuade voters who are, at least at this point, dissatisfied with their choice in November.

The lack of popularity on the part of either candidate could alter what has historically been the response to crisis: opting for the most experienced or publicly stable candidate.

In any other year that would be Clinton, a former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of State. But concerns about her character and the reality that she is seeking a third successive term for Democratsdifficult under any circumstances--appear to have blunted her advantage over Trump.

The New York businessman, whose inexperience with foreign policy and military matters might otherwise have disqualified him during such turbulent times, benefited during the primary season as voters turned away from experience and toward a tough-talking, if detail-free, alternative.

Unknown at the moment is what would happen if similar disruptions persist through election day. Will Trump seem like strong presidential timber or an indecisive rookie? Will Clinton seem appropriately deliberate or the personification of the policies that contributed to American fears?

Recent polls suggest that voters are split over which candidate would be better when it comes to protecting the country against terrorism. In a new CBS News/New York Times poll, 46% of voters chose each candidate. In a McClatchy/Marist poll last week, Clinton had a statistically meaningless 1-point advantage over Trump.

In both polls, Clinton was seen as far more prepared than Trump to serve as president. But that marker was not compelling enough to dictate voters choice: The two were tied in the CBS/Times poll, and Clinton had a mere 3-point lead in the McClatchy/Marist poll.

Their approaches as they try to surmount the political challenges to the outburst of violence here and abroad have diverged along the same lines seen elsewhere in the campaign.

Trump played to fear with an apocalyptic tone and few concrete solutions.

Another horrific attack, this time in Nice, France. Many dead and injured. When will we learn? It is only getting worse, he said Thursday on Twitter.

In a later Fox News interview, he reiterated his plan to ban Muslims from countries involved in terrorism from entering the U.S.he has not said which ones, or whether the list would include allies like Franceand said that we are in a world war scenario.

That was in keeping with his prediction earlier in the week, during an event in Indiana, that nearly a dozen U.S. cities were on the verge of exploding because of protests against police violence. He also asserted, without proof, that protesters had called for a moment of silence in honor of the gunman who shot five Dallas police officers this month.

For more on politics 

Clinton has taken a more diplomatic tone. The U.S. had to work with other nations to defeat terrorism, she said as she warned against unilateral actions that would feed terrorist recruitment. She used as a case study the Obama administrations extensive efforts to find and capture Osama bin Laden before he was killed in a U.S. raid.

Its a different kind of war, and we have to be smart about how we wage it and win it, she said Thursday during a telephone interview with CNN.

A ground war in Syria, of the sort that Trump appeared to be hinting at, would only boost the ranks of terrorists, she said.

They would love to draw the United States into a ground war in Syria, she said. They actually think the end times could be hastened, so weve got to be smart about this.

Both candidates face risk as they confront an environment churning with concern.

Clintons campaign has been operating like a cohesive machine, and she has confronted crises with a sense of surety and deliberateness. That can be reassuring to some voters. But to others, it can seem to telegraph a lack of urgency, even if there are no swift solutions to the problem at hand.

Trump has the opposite problem. In trying mightily to adjust to a presidential campaign, he has demonstrated a capacity for disarray that to some voters could suggest lack of readiness for the White House.

His vice presidential search, the most high-profile event of his general election campaign to date, has been a prime exhibit of those shortcomings.

He undertook a public vetting of his options, lofting what is usually a quiet process to reality-TV levels. He said on Fox News on Thursday night that he had not made a final decision, but his selection, Pence, said that he had been offered the job on Wednesday.

Trump planned to announce his pick Friday, but after the killings in Nice postponed the scheduled appearance in deference, he said, to the victims. But then he tweeted his choice at the same time he was to have made it in public.

When he finally announced Pences selection on Saturday, it came after a rambling speech in which he re-litigated his primary wins, highlighted Clinton positions that Pence shares, and made false claims about his own record.

The vice presidential choice technically had nothing to do with the worlds tumult; nor will Clintons, which will be announced within the week.

But the traits they illustrate are easily transferable, given the worlds turmoil. From now on, everything the candidates do will be viewed through the lenses of steadiness and strength.

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

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Updates on California politics

Live coverage from the campaign trail
Among the extremists expected in Cleveland this week: a white separatist organization whose leader is based in downtown Los Angeles, an anti-government activist who has called for patriots to attack Black Lives Matter activists and a black nationalist group whose members once were accused of plotting to kill a police chief.

Combine these groups, the presence of a divisive presidential candidate like Donald Trump and Ohios open-carry gun laws, and you get a potentially toxic cocktail.

Its absolutely a horrifying thought and  I am literally on my knees begging these folks to not bring these guns, said Steve Loomis, the president of Clevelands largest police union.

The true number of known extremist groups expected to be in Cleveland is hard to quantify, and civil liberties advocates have said additional demonstrators probably will show up without acquiring permits or announcing plans.

Here are the plans and history of some groups likely to show up at the convention.

Westboro Baptist Church

A Westboro Baptist Church demonstration takes place in 2014. (Getty Images) (Kevin Moloney / Getty Images)

The group is a small Kansas-based organization best known for protesting military funerals and its virulent anti-LGBT agenda. It has obtained permits to speak on two days outside the convention.

New Black Panther Party

Members of the New Black Panther Party march in Louisiana following the death there of Alton Sterling. (Max Becherer / AP) (Test)

The New Black Panther Party, a black supremacy group that had advocated for violence against law enforcement officers in the past but has no connection to the original Black Panther Party, has announced plans to stage several protests against Trump during the convention, the Anti-Defamation League has said.

Reports surfaced earlier this week that the group planned to bring firearms to the convention, but the organizations chairman issued a statement to Reuters saying he had not instructed members to carry guns.

Members of the New Black Panther Party have been accused of plotting violence at major protests before. Last year, two men affiliated with the group were sentenced to seven years in prison for plotting to acquire bombs to kill Fergusons then-police chief, Thomas Jackson, and St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch during the 2014 protests that enveloped Missouri after a Ferguson, Mo., police officer shot and killed Michael Brown.

There has been no indication that the New Black Panther Party supported the plot, according to a report in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

American Freedom Party

William Johnson, a leader of the American Freedom Party and self-proclaimed white nationalist, pauses for photos in his office on May 10, 2016, in Los Angeles. (Jae C. Hong / AP) (Jae C. Hong / AP)

Groups of white nationalists with ties to California also are planning to attend, according to the league. The American Freedom Party, a white nationalist organization whose president once was mistakenly listed among Trumps California delegates, may have members on the ground in Cleveland. While the group hasnt been known to be violent, President William Johnson has been clear about the organizations message.

I would like a separate white ethno-state. ... I think diversity and multiculturalism is a failure, and I think its going to destroy civilization, Johnson told The Times earlier this year when asked to explain his politics.

The Traditionalist Workers Party, a white separatist organization involved in a violent melee in Sacramento last month that left several people suffering stab wounds, also was slated to attend in Cleveland, but the group since has changed plans, said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism.

Blood and Honour USA

The racist skinhead group known to commit violent acts in the past and whose leaders have a base in Ohio, are expected to attend, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

The Oath Keepers

Heavily armed civilians with an anti-government group called the Oath Keepers patrol in Ferguson, Mo., (Jeff Roberson / Associated Press) (Jeff Roberson / Associated Press)

The Oath Keepers, a militarized group that patrolled Ferguson, Mo., with firearms during the protests following the police shooting of Michael Brown, is expected.

Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller speaks during a meeting in 2015. (Dallas Morning News) (Gregory Castillo / Dallas Morning News)

Pamela Geller, the sponsor of a Texas contest that erupted in violence after people were called on to draw the Muslim prophet Mohammed, rounds out the leagues list of planned attendees. Geller is perhaps best known for her vocal opposition to a Muslim community center that was set to be constructed near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Several other anti-Muslim commentators also are expected.

Anti-Black Lives Matter activist

Jim Stachowiak, a former campus police officer turned far-right activist who advocated for attacks against Black Lives Matter protesters at the convention in a since-deleted YouTube video, also likely will be on the ground in Cleveland, the Anti-Defamation League said. The league describes Stachowiak as a right-wing, rabidly anti-Muslim extremist who has been arrested several times.

Segal , the leagues director, said the combination of guns and extremism is always a concern, but he also said advance knowledge of the various groups plans could help police mitigate potential chaos.

Do I think its a bad idea to have the New Black Panther Party near the American Freedom Party? Yeah, Segal said. But I suspect thats not going to happen.

james.queally@latimes.com

Follow @JamesQueallyLAT for protest coverage at the Republican National Convention.
Californias two U.S. Senate candidates may not be as rich as some of Washingtons well-heeled politicians, but they arent exactly hurting.

Both state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris and Orange County Rep. Loretta Sanchez have a net worth that likely runs in the millions.

Harris and her husband, Los Angeles attorney Douglas Emhoff, live in a multimillion-dollar home in Brentwood. Sanchez owns an ocean-view home in Palos Verdes Estates, which she rents out.

Still, throughout most of their lives, both Harris and Sanchez have salted away retirement savings, bought homes and acquired other assets that wouldnt be considered outlandish for a successful career politician or professional in their 50s.

Neither appears to be a member of the exalted and equally vilified 1%, the wealthiest Americans, nor anywhere near as loaded as some members of Californias congressional delegation. Vista Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, a former car alarm mogul, tops the list with a minimum net worth of $254.7 million.

More on their level is the retiring Barbara Boxer, the Democratic senator Harris and Sanchez are vying to succeed. Her net worth is at least $1.1 million, according to disclosures she files with the U.S. Senate.

While both live much more comfortably than the average Californian, Harris and Sanchez insist their lives have been steeped in the experiences and everyday challenges of the working class.

Tough to estimate net worth

Rep. Loretta Sanchez speaks as her husband, Jack Einwechter, looks on as she campaigns for the U.S. Senate during the California Democratic Party 2015 State Convention in Anaheim. (Patrick T. Fallon / For the Times) (Test)

A precise net worth for Harris and Sanchez is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate based on Congress disclosure rules.

While members of Congress and Senate candidates file annual financial disclosures, they are allowed to provide broad ranges for assets and liabilities, meaning an item could either be at the low or high end of the range, or anywhere in between.

Lawmakers also are not required to disclose the value of property they own unless it earns rental income. While some do, they dont need to list expensive personal property such as luxury cars, jewelry or fancy boats.

That makes it hard to compare lawmakers wealth and income with the average person in California, where the median household income in 2014 was approximately $61,000 a year and the median sale price for a Southern California home in May was around $460,000.

The financial disclosures and other publicly available information do, however, provide a general picture of how Harris and Sanchez are living.

Election 2016 | California politics news feed | Sign up for the newsletter

A San Francisco condo and a home in Brentwood

As attorney general, Harris, 51, is paid an annual salary of $158,775. The Oakland native, who served as San Franciscos district attorney for two terms, has socked away between $411,000 and $1 million in personal savings, mutual funds and retirement accounts, according to a U.S. Senate financial disclosure form filed in August 2015.

Throughout most of her political career, Harris lived in a 938-square-foot condo in San Francisco that she bought in 1998. But her financial picture changed dramatically after she married Emhoff in October 2014.

Emhoff heads the Los Angeles office of the national law firm Venable. The form did not give his precise salary, but noted it was more than $100,000 in 2015. He also holds a partnership interest in the firm worth between $100,000 and $1 million, according to Harris annual state financial disclosure report filed in March.

The couple lives in a 3,500-square foot, Brentwood contemporary with three large bedroom suites, a spa-like master bathroom and a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard. Emhoff purchased the home though a family trust for $2.7 million in 2012, before the two were married.

Stock holdings in Emhoffs individual retirement account, which were funded prior to marriage, were sold shortly after Harris announced her Senate bid, according to financial disclosures. Those stocks included investments in companies such as Citicorp, Wells Fargo, Valero Energy, Walt Disney Co. and Monsanto.

Altogether, the couple had between $1.5 million and $4 million in assets in 2015, not including the two homes, and $200,000 to $500,000 in liabilities, according to the Senate disclosure.

Its unclear if Harris owns a car. A state Department of Justice security detail provides the attorney general with round-the-clock transportation. A spokesman for the Harris Senate campaign declined to say what type of car or cars she or her husband may own or lease.

A 1992 pickup truck and a home in Palos Verdes

Rep. Loretta Sanchez still owns the Toyota pickup she bought in 1992. (Phil Willon / Los Angeles Times) (Test)

Sanchez, 56, has represented Orange County in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1997 and earns an annual salary of $174,000. The congresswoman reported having between $52,000 and $130,000 in savings accounts on her financial disclosure filed in May. She is not required to report any savings she may have in a congressional retirement account.

Sanchez and her husband, attorney John Jack Einwechter, live in a modest 1,729-square-foot house near Chapman University in Orange. The 1962, three-bedroom ranch house includes a sizable, somewhat barren backyard. Sanchez bought the home in 2015 for $740,000.

The congresswomans biggest asset is a home in Palos Verdes Estates that she acquired after a divorce settlement with her former husband, Stephen Brixey, in 2004. Sanchez reported the home was worth between $1 million and $5 million. It has been rented out for the past 22 years and in 2015, she reported collecting between $15,000 and $50,000 in rental income from the property.

The 2,514-square-foot home sits high above the coast and has a second-story view of the Queens Necklace  Southern Californias curving coastline that runs from Palos Verdes to Malibu.

Before going into private legal practice, Sanchezs husband worked for the Costa Mesa firm Sourcing Solutions, which specializes in technological hardware. His annual income was not reported on the congresswomans 2015 financial disclosure. This year, he reported having sold Sourcing Solutions stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in 2015.

Sanchez owns two automobiles: a 2002 Ford Thunderbird and a Toyota pickup truck that she bought in 1992, her staff said.

Combined, the couple had between $1.7 million and $6.3 million in assets in 2015. That includes the home in Palos Verdes and the 2015 sale of her former house in Santa Ana. The couple reported having between $1 million to $2 million in liabilities.

Aides to both candidates stressed they each are well-rooted in the experiences of working-class families. Sanchez was raised by Mexican immigrant parents, attended public schools and relied on scholarships for her college education, her staff noted. Harris spent her career trying to better the lives of the most vulnerable Californians, her staff said.

The campaigns had similar lines for why the candidates wealth signaled nothing about the type of senator she would be.

Loretta, who at one point cleaned houses to help pay for her brothers college housing, has remained true to her humble roots. She represents what can be achieved in America, that if a person gets an education and works hard, he or she can be successful, said Luis Vizcaino, spokesman for the Sanchez campaign.

She attended California public schools, worked her entire career as a prosecutor on a civil servant salary, and her family didn't realize the dream of home ownership until she was 14, said Nathan Click, spokesman for the Harris campaign.

phil.willon@latimes.com

Twitter: @philwillon

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Updates on California politics
A Newport Beach man accused of gambling millions of dollars belonging to investors in his dental equipment company pleaded guilty Tuesday to wire fraud and was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison, according to U.S. District Court documents.

William Keith Knox, 55, was sentenced to 63 months behind bars and ordered to pay $4.815 million in restitution.

All other fines were waived because the defendant does not have the ability to pay a fine in addition to restitution, according to the documents.

Knox originally faced six felony counts of wire fraud, to which he pleaded not guilty. He was instead charged with one count after a plea agreement in February 2015 that stated prosecutors would drop all but one count in exchange for his admission of guilt, his attorney, Stephanie Ames, said Wednesday.

According to a federal grand-jury indictment in 2013, Knox raised $3.5 million from three investors on the pretext that the money would fund his business, Osseous Technologies of America.

Prosecutors believe Knox had more victims who were not included in the criminal charges, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Anh said after a court hearing in February 2015.

As early as 2010, Knox began asking investors for hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time, according to the indictment.

He would then withdraw the money from a company bank account and purchase a cashiers check that he would deposit in a gambling account at a Las Vegas casino such as Bellagio or The Venetian.

Federal prosecutors also accused Knox of eliciting investments by faking documents to make it seem like his company was on the verge of a lucrative deal or about to be acquired for millions of dollars.

Knox was arrested in November 2013 after the FBI recorded what it said was his admission of the scheme to one of the victims.

According to court documents, Knox said on the recording that he considered suicide when the con began to unravel and that he had been committed to a mental facility for a time because he told a therapist that he had thoughts about killing himself and his family.

He was recommended in court Tuesday to have the Federal Bureau of Prisons conduct a mental health evaluation on him and provide all necessary treatment.

Ames said the case is a perfect example of how addiction can destroy someones life.

He has a wonderful, loving family and had a very successful business, but unfortunately, his addiction took hold and resulted in a lot of victims and hurting his family, she said. They are working on rebuilding, and I believe they will be able to.

Erick Haynie, a Portland, Ore., lawyer who represented two of the victims, said the hearing Tuesday was very tense and emotional.

There was just a stillness in the room, he said. The judges ruling  sends a strong message that our society will not tolerate white-collar crime. It also marks a big first step toward healing for a lot of people.
Publisher and Newport Beach Harbor Commissioner Duncan McIntosh has purchased OC Weekly, the Costa Mesa-based publication said Friday.

The terms of the purchase from Voice Media Group were not disclosed.

McIntoshs Irvine-based Duncan McIntosh Co. owns the boating and nautical publications Sea Magazine, BoatingWorld and The Log, as well as journalism magazine Editor & Publisher.

McIntosh is known in the Newport Beach community for organizing the Newport Boat Show and the Lido Yacht Expo, in addition to his role as harbor commissioner, which he has held since 2010.

The sale marks the first time OC Weekly has had a local owner.

Purchasing the OC Weekly brings us full circle, McIntosh said in a statement. We started with a weekly newspaper in Newport Beach. Were very excited to be taking over a publishing icon in Orange County with such a great staff and a major presence online.

McIntosh did not immediately respond to a call seeking further comment.

Voice Media Group put the alternative weekly newspaper up for sale  along with several other publications  about a year ago as part of an effort to focus on its core products. OC Weekly was first published in 1995 and currently has circulation of 45,000.

Voice Media Group has sold the Village Voice of New York City, City Pages of Minneapolis and the Riverfront Times of St. Louis in the past year.

OC Weekly Editor Gustavo Arellano wrote in the papers announcement that McIntosh has promised to invest more money in the publication.

On our end, us Weeklings welcome anyone wholl let us continue our mission of desmadre [excess], Arellano wrote. And if we can get an office on a speedboat just outside international waters, Duncan, wed appreciate it  just sayin.
Assemblyman Tom Daly (D-Anaheim) has introduced a bill that would prevent any future sale of the Orange County fairgrounds.

Assembly Bill 1907, introduced Thursday, would repeal a law that allows the California Department of General Services to sell the 150-acre property or any portion of it.

The Orange County Fair & Event Center ranks among the best in the state and has clearly been a source of pride to people across Orange County, Daly said in a statement. And while Gov. [Jerry] Brown has made it clear that he does not support the notion of selling the land upon which the fair and event center sits and operates, the fact that this law exists means the door remains open to a future governor with a different perspective on the issue.

Theresa Sears, a member of the Orange County Fair Preservation Society, which opposes a sale, commended Dalys bill Friday. She noted that it came at the behest of two Orange County Fair Board directors, Nick Berardino and Ashleigh Aitken, who serve on a task force that monitors legislation.

Weve been supporting this notion ever since Brown pulled the plug, Sears said. We applaud Tom Daly for stepping forward, and the preservation society will do its part to help. Its been a long time coming.

In 2009, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed selling the fairgrounds to help ease the states budget deficit. The proposal was challenged and eventually scrapped by 2011 under Brown.

Allegations were made as to the legality of a sale, though two Orange County district attorneys office investigations concluded that no Fair Board members committed any wrongdoing.
News that the attacker who killed at least 84 people in France was a Tunisian citizen and a Muslim legally working in the country quickly became ammunition for American politicians suggesting that the United States also faces a serious threat from within.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, reiterated his call to ban Muslims from entering the country. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recommended that Muslims be deported if they believe in Islamic law.

But France and the United States are markedly different in their relationships with their Muslim immigrant populations, with several factors making the threat of organized Islamist extremism  as opposed to attacks by individuals who were simply inspired by the ideology  more likely in France. They include the countrys colonial history in North Africa, its insistence on assimilation and the greater isolation of its Muslim communities.

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In addition, Frances proximity to the Middle East increases the chances that young men may have traveled to Syria to join Islamic State militants and then returned to France with the intent to carry out attacks like the ones that took place in Paris last year. However, no evidence has emerged to suggest that was the case in the deadly assault Thursday in Nice, in which the assailant drove a truck through a crowd celebrating Bastille Day.

France does not collect census data on religious affiliation, but it estimates that Muslims make up 5% to 10% of its 65 million people, which would give it the largest Muslim population in Western Europe.

Many trace their roots to Algeria and Tunisia, both former French colonies. Their parents and grandparents arrived as immigrant laborers to help rebuild France after World War II  with more than 470,000 coming from Algeria alone by 1968. Over the next dozen years, that number reached 800,000.

Their arrival, however, had an ugly backdrop: For more than a century, the colonies were locked in a vicious fight with France for independence. Battling brutal repression by the French, the insurgents latched on to Islam as a organizing tool.

Algeria and Tunisia became the birthplace of some of the earliest militant Islamist groups. It is little surprise to experts that today Tunisia is the largest supplier per capita of Islamic State recruits to Syria.

By the time Algerian independence came in 1962  six years after Tunisian independence  Frances relationship with its Muslim immigrants from North Africa was showing signs of trouble.

As their construction and manufacturing jobs began to dry up, many recommitted to their religion as a way of restoring their sense of dignity, said Gilles Kepel, a French political scientist and Islam specialist. Ever since, social mobility has been severely limited.

France struggles much more than the U.S. to absorb its immigrants.

Muslims in France today  even second and third generation  are concentrated in their own enclaves, suburbs known as banlieues that are usually little more than a cement jungle of decrepit high-rises where frustration is the dominant feeling.

Clichy-sous-Bois was the epicenter of race riots in 2005, when two teenagers, the children of African immigrants, were electrocuted while hiding from the police in a power station. Though the suburb is only 10 miles from central Paris, it takes more than an hour to reach due to the absence of a rail link. Its cafes are more likely to serve Moroccan mint tea and merguez sausages than French cafe and croissants.

Children of immigrants identify as French and bristle at questions about their origin. But they also complain of not enjoying the same opportunities as other French citizens.

Muslims or people perceived as such do not have equal access to education, jobs, housing or even healthcare, Yasser Louati, a spokesman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, said in an interview via social media on Friday.

You cant tell generations of kids You dont belong here and be surprised they grow up like they dont belong here.

The divisions appear to be worsening. In 2011, a government-sponsored study found that the children of immigrants were twice as likely as their parents to report a sense of discrimination linked to origin, even though they speak French fluently.

The ideal of diversity espoused in the United States has not been embraced in France, where being seen as French means giving up the culture where you came from.

Kepel, the political scientist, has written that the French government sees Islam as an impediment to Muslims becoming fully integrated citizens.

It has discouraged  and in some cases banned  certain forms of religious expression in an attempt to promote assimilation and unity.

In 2004, the French Assembly passed a law prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in public schools. The controversy dates back to at least 1989, when a high school principal barred three girls from wearing the hijab on school grounds because it violated Frances tradition of secular education.

But critics say those policies have had the opposite effect, deepening a feeling among some Muslims that the government is anti-Islam and they will never be fully accepted.

The relationship between French Muslims and their countrymen has only become more fraught amid terrorist attacks claimed by Islamic State.

Bulos is a special correspondent.

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French police arrested two more suspects Sunday in connection with a truck attack that killed 84 people in this southern French resort, amid new reports that the 31-year-old assailant sent a mysterious text message asking for more weapons just before the rampage.

French prosecutors in Paris said the arrests of a man and woman in Nice raised to seven the number of people detained and questioned after Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove a 19-ton truck at high speed through a crowd along the citys packed seaside promenade.

After zigzagging along the road and sidewalk in an apparent effort to run over as many people as possible, he eventually was shot to death by police.

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Authorities at first believed Bouhlel, a deliveryman and father of three who was not on any terrorist watch lists, probably was acting alone.

But French Prime Minister Manuel Valls suggested Sunday that the driver might have had accomplices. He said investigators piecing together the events leading up to the attack think Bouhlel recently may have become radicalized with jihadist ideology.

 Mourners gather at a memorial in Nice, France.

Those who knew him have said he was not particularly religious. Ignoring Muslim codes of conduct, he was known to drink and smoke marijuana, did not attend mosque and often wore shorts.

We now know that the killer was radicalized very quickly, Valls told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche on Sunday. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Bouhlel began attending a mosque in April.

Islamic State issued an indirect claim of responsibility for the attack two days later, on Saturday, saying Bouhlel was a soldier, though French officials have not established any direct connection between him and the militant group.

Investigators examining the records of Bouhlels cellphone, which was found in the cabin of the truck he was driving, have found evidence that he may have had contact with known Islamic radicals in his neighborhood in Nice. According to French TV station BMF, they also found a cryptic text message  sent just minutes before he plowed the truck into the crowd  that read, Bring more weapons, bring five of them to C.

The attack in the French Riviera, in Frances fifth largest city, came on the countrys Bastille Day national holiday at the height of tourist season. It was the third major act of terrorism in France in the last 18 months, after an assault on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store in January 2015 that killed 20 and a series of attacks in Paris in November that killed 130.

Police studying closed-circuit TV images in Nice also have spotted Bouhlel at the seafront Promenade des Anglais twice in the two days before Thursdays attack, according to a report by Europe1 radio. He was seen driving through the area, the radio station said, presumably to case the broad palm tree-lined boulevard.

Cazeneuve has rejected criticism that police were poorly prepared for such an attack, though only 60 officers were on duty to protect the crowd of 30,000 on the night of the killings. He said the attacker had evaded police patrol cars blocking access to the boulevard by driving the truck onto the sidewalk.

Videos of the attack show people joyously celebrating the national holiday on the closed-off boulevard and the adjoining promenade, oblivious to the imminent danger before the white truck begins barreling through the crowd at a relatively high speed, swerving back and forth as it runs over groups of revelers.

The promenade and adjoining beaches were reopened Saturday, creating an incongruous atmosphere with beachgoers frolicking in the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean and mourners paying silent tribute to the victims on the nearby promenade. Thousands, many in tears, gathered around dozens of piles of flowers, cards and candles marking the spots along the roadway where many of the victims were killed.

Cazeneuve made an extraordinary appeal Sunday for patriotic citizens to volunteer to join the countrys security services and help provide relief for the security forces and reinforce security. The reserve force is made up of 12,000 volunteers ages 17 to 30.

I want to call on all French patriots who wish to do so to join this operational reserve, he said.

Valls said he feared terrorism would continue to beset France for a long time. The terrorism threat will be a fundamental and enduring problem, and other lives will be wrecked, he said.

Kirschbaum is a special correspondent.

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On his flight from Mexico back to the Vatican in February, Pope Francis made an unexpected comment about the Zika virus, saying that the outbreak  blamed for serious birth defects around the world  may justify the use of contraceptives.

A reporter had first asked if the church would allow an abortion as the lesser of two evils to avoid pregnancies complicated by the Zika virus. It is a crime, the pope responded. It is to throw someone out in order to save another. Thats what the Mafia does.

On the other hand, he continued, avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil, and, in extreme situations, the use of contraceptives could be justified, despite the churchs ban.

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He noted the widespread rape of nuns during the during the Congo civil war in the 1960s. Paul VI, a great man, in a difficult situation in Africa, permitted nuns to use contraceptives in cases of rape.

The church has not formally sanctioned contraceptive use, but with the August start of the Olympics in Brazil  the epicenter of outbreak  it has offered the possibility of a solution.

I think he understands its not helpful to tell Catholics, No, you cant do that.  Aline Kalbian, professor at Florida State University

I think he understands its not helpful to tell Catholics, No, you cant do that, said Aline Kalbian, a professor at Florida State University and author of Sex, Violence & Justice: Contraception and the Catholic Church. That doesnt really resolve their problem.

Pope Francis short statement has echoed around the world, following the spread of the Zika virus, a disease linked to microcephaly, a condition in which infants are born with abnormally small heads that limit brain development. The virus is transmitted through mosquito bites and sexual contact. The World Health Organization has advised anyone living in or traveling to countries with known outbreaks to avoid having sex or getting pregnant.

Previously present in parts of Africa and Asia, the outbreak began in Brazil in May 2015. Brazil has registered close to 100,000 infections and several thousand cases of microcephaly.

Since 2015, the disease has spread through South America, Central America and parts of the Caribbean. No cases have originated in the U.S., although over 1,000 travel-related cases in the country have been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC has recommended that pregnant women stay away from the Olympics. Those wanting to get pregnant should wait at least eight weeks after visiting Brazil before having sex. Men who show some symptoms of Zika virus  rash, fever, joint pain  should wait six months before having sex.

The CDC urges the use of a condom to avoid transmitting the disease.

Those type of recommendations can run afoul of the Catholic Churchs teachings that generally bar the use of contraceptives, such as condoms, birth control or the morning-after pill. The purpose of sex is procreation, in the churchs view, and contraceptives foil that design.

The church, however, has several key exceptions.

Since 1957, it has allowed birth control pills as a way to regulate heavy menstrual bleeding or irregular cycles. Pope Paul VIs 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae outlines how therapeutic means, such as contraception, can be used to cure diseases, even if procreation would be limited.

For example, men can undergo radiation treatment for testicular cancer, even if they are left sterile. Women can undergo a hysterectomy for uterine or ovarian cancer, said John Grabowski, director of moral theology and ethics at the Catholic University of America in Washington.

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The church does not sanction the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Theologians view using a condom to prevent infecting ones partner as just a way to facilitate sex, not to further life, Grabowski said. Abstinence is the churchs recommended solution.

The church does allow emergency contraceptives in the case of rape. Catholic hospitals are authorized to treat victims of sexual assault with contraceptives to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

The role of contraception after a rape is not to prevent life, but to combat violence, Grabowski explained.

Pope Paul VIs sanctioning of contraceptives during the Congo civil war is the best known example, although the truth of the decision is a bit hazy, he said.

Paul VI never gave any kind of formal approval allowing nuns in danger of sexual assault to use contraceptives, Grabowski said. Paul VI had made statements as a cardinal, but there was never a formal policy from the Vatican.

Kalbian said she also found no evidence of formal approval. Ive actually written about that incident and my first reaction was, wait a minute, this did not happen during the papacy of Pope Paul VI. It happened much earlier in the 1960s, probably under the papacy of Pope John XXIII, she said.

Kalbian contacted nuns in different orders to see if they had information, but she said no one had knowledge of an official directive.

Kalbian and Grabowski said they dont see Francis Zika comments changing church teachings. The teaching about contraception is intimately connected to the churchs teaching about heterosexual marriage, about premarital sex. All these things make up a holistic view of what sex is about and what marriage is about, Kalbian said. Its almost as if you start tinkering with one, then the whole edifice becomes kind of shaky, and I think that might be a problem.

The change they have seen is in the popes tone. Kalbian described it as very pastoral and compassionate, as evidenced by Francis recent apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia.

Most of these papal documents in the past about sexuality were more dogmatic and kind of harsh, but what you notice about Pope Francis, he was always very sensitive to the experience of individuals, and I think his response to the Zika virus was typical of that, Kalbian said.

tessa.weinberg@latimes.com

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The top military official at Incirlik Air Base has been arrested, along with other officers at the base  a major U.S. air operations center in the Middle East  in connection with an attempt by a military faction to overthrow the government of Turkey, authorities said Sunday.

The arrests came as huge crowds turned out for funerals of those killed in the uprising, with secular and nationalist leaders on Sunday joining military brass for prayers at mosques  a rare display of unity in a country riven by ideological divisions.

Hundreds of thousands filled squares in cities across the country in a show of defiance after the failed military coup that left 104 soldiers and 161 civilians dead and at least 1,440 people injured.

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The Turkish armed forces issued a statement Sunday saying the uprising was engineered by terrorist traitors embedded within the Turkish army who belonged to an illegal organization.

The coup plotters  have been neutralized as of now and will receive the heaviest punishment permitted by law, it concluded.

Turkish officials said the organizers of the uprising were given crucial aid from officers at Incirlik Air Base, a facility that hosts most of the 2,500 U.S. military personnel stationed in Turkey and is a key base for the U.S.-led coalitions ongoing air campaign to defeat the Islamic State militant group in neighboring Iraq and Syria.

Though the base reopened for air operations Sunday after a 24-hour closure, official media reported the arrest of the top Turkish military official at Incirlik, Gen. Bekir Ercan Van.

Van was among 10 soldiers arrested at the base, part of an operation Turkish officials say provided air-to-air refueling for F-16 fighter jets deployed by the leaders of the coup attempt Friday night and Saturday morning.

The F-16s were a crucial part of the coup attempt, used to intimidate government supporters in the streets. Turkish air force helicopters were used to shoot civilian government supporters and attack headquarters of police forces in the capital, Ankara, government officials said.

The extent of the coup and who planned it is still largely unknown, although Ankara has blamed followers of Fethullah Gulen, an aging cleric in exile in Pennsylvania accused by the government of engineering the coup attempt and attempting to run a parallel government.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for Gulens extradition from the U.S. and suggested parliament should lift a moratorium on the death penalty to deal with the cleric and those involved in the uprising.

In a rally Saturday, Erdogan publicly addressed President Obama, saying Gulen must be turned over to Turkey, and another official, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, said failure to do so was tantamount to an act of war. Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu said he believed Washington was behind the coup.

On Sunday, Secretary of State John F. Kerry said, We think its irresponsible to have accusations of American involvement, when were simply waiting for their request, which were absolutely prepared to act on if it meets the legal standard.

Speaking to CNN during a trip to Europe, he said he made it clear to his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, in three telephone calls since Friday night, that the U.S. was not harboring anybody. In one of those calls, Kerry also urged the Turkish government show restraint and respect for due process and international law as it pursues those who planned and staged the coup, according to the State Department.

Among those killed during the clashes was Erdogans campaign manager, Erol Olcak, along with his 16-year-old son, shot by soldiers as they held the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul on Friday night. Ilhan Varank, the brother of one of Erdogans chief advisors, also was killed at the Istanbul municipality headquarters during a confrontation with soldiers that lasted more than four hours.

Erdogan himself carried the coffin of Varank at a funeral ceremony for him and other victims in the Fatih mosque, about a mile from where they were killed. A crowd of thousands surrounded Erdogan, chanting for the execution of the coup plotters, and the president pledged that parliament would take steps to ensure a heavy price for the renegades.

Gulen appeared before journalists at his compound in Pennsylvania to deny any involvement.

As someone who has suffered under multiple coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt, Gulen said.

Gulen has lived in exile since the late 1990s, when a secular government allied with the military accused him of attempting to overthrow the government. Erdogan was at the time allied with Gulen, and Erdogan was jailed on similar accusations in 1999.

Gulens movement, called Hizmet, includes hundreds of schools, banks, trade associations and news outlets, many of which were the largest in the country until a crackdown began against them three years ago. Gulen was accused of trying to take control of the judiciary, police and national intelligence association, and over the last three years, about 4,000 Hizmet associates have been detained, many accused of belonging to a terrorist organization.

They include hundreds of journalists, such as Celil Sagir, who had been editor of the Todays Zaman newspaper until the government seized the publication this year.

Erdogan blames Hizmet for the coup attempt because he wants to use this as an opportunity to prove that Hizmet is an armed terrorist organization. For almost three years, he claimed it, but no one has bought it. Now he probably believes he got the opportunity to persuade people, Sagir said in an interview.

He insisted that despite the years-long campaign against Hizmet, the group had not resorted to violence, and the idea it would do so now with a coup makes no sense.

He said he and his Zaman colleagues have been publicly condemning the coup attempt and would have joined protesters in the street if not for the tense atmosphere. If I go outside and someone recognizes me  if someone says they are Hizmet, they will almost certainly be lynched right now, he said.

Aside from Hizmet, Ankara is sifting through the military to find who was behind the coup attempt.

The prime minister, Yildirim, has said more than 6,000 coup supporters have been arrested, including 2,800 members of the military and top officers in charge of some of the NATO allys largest divisions.

A military helicopter landed late Saturday at Greeces Alexandroupoli airport carrying eight Turkish officers. Ankara has asked Athens to extradite the men, saying they were part of the coup attempt, and while the helicopter since has been returned to Turkey, the officers have not.

It marked the first time Turkish military staff have sought refuge in Greece, a country with which Turkey has been at odds for centuries  they almost went to war in 1996 over an uninhabited islet in the Aegean and have been in contention for decades over the still-divided island of Cyprus.

A lawyer for the officers said the men have been charged with illegal entry into Greece, knew nothing about the coup and were ordered to carry some of those injured in the uprising in their helicopter for medical treatment. The officers have applied for political asylum.

Those arrested from the air force were just one part of a faction in the military identified by authorities as participating in the attempted uprising.

Gen. Akin Ozturk, who commanded the air force until August, has been arrested. And Gens. Erdal Ozturk, Adem Huduti and Ekrem Caglar, who commanded the 1st, 2nd and 3rd army divisions, respectively, have been detained, as has Rear Adm. Nejat Demirhan of the coast guard.

President Erdogans top military aide, Col. Ali Yazici, also has been detained. Yazici is normally with Erdogan at all times, but the night of the coup, he was in Ankara, and is alleged by the government to have participated in the hostage-taking of Fahri Kasirga, a top presidential aide.

Farooq is a special correspondent. Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Washington and special correspondent Maria Petrakis in Athens contributed to this report.

ALSO

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UPDATES:

3:15 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from the U.S. secretary of State.

This story was originally published at 12:10 p.m.
The 2016 Republican National Convention running Monday through Thursday in Cleveland could be, er, unconventional with a presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, known to go off script -- when he even uses a script.

Democrats are gathering a week later, at their national convention set July 25-28 in Philadelphia. Their presumed standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton, comes bearing baggage of her own, having recently skirted criminal indictment but taken heavy criticism from the FBI director over her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state.

"There is more uncertainty on the Republican side than I've seen in any convention in my lifetime simply because of the unique nature of their nominee, the divides within the party over the nominee and just the turbulence that often surrounds Donald Trump," said Christopher Borick, professor of political science and director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College in Allentown. "It creates an uncertain environment."

For Borick, the best bet on what to expect in Cleveland is loads of Clinton bashing.

"They'll say more general things about the party and the need for change and probably not be over-ecstatic in their praise of Donald Trump, but they will be unified in their opposition to Hillary Clinton," he said. "You always talk about the opposition, but you spend a lot of time talking about your candidate. In this case, it will be the inverse. It'll be much more talk about Hillary Clinton than their own candidate."

Borick said he'll be attending some events in Philadelphia but not going to Cleveland. Nor will the congressman who represents most of the Lehigh Valley region.

"I have no plans on going to the convention," said U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent, a Republican whose 15th Congressional District covers Lehigh and parts of Northampton counties. "I've stated that the nominee has to persuade millions of Americans, including me, that he's ready to lead this great country.

"I'm not persuaded."

Dent's colleague across the aisle, U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, is fully embracing Clinton's candidacy, and attending the Philly convention.

"I'll be there for the whole thing," said Cartwright, a Democrat whose 17th District covers the balance of Northampton County. "I've known Hillary Clinton since 1992. I was a delegate for Bill Clinton that year. I first met Hillary when we both went through the St. Joseph's Center in Scranton for severely disabled children.

"I'm very comfortable with her as the Democratic nominee, and I'm a strong supporter of hers for the White House."

Dent and Cartwright share a disdain for the presumptive nominee of each other's opposing party.

Cartwright called Trump erratic: "He would be dangerous for our country."

While not endorsing Trump, Dent said he's not supporting Clinton "under any circumstances." He believes FBI Director James B. Comey's rebuke of Clinton "disqualified her from being commander in chief."

As for who Dent will vote for Nov. 8, based on how the ballot is shaping up, he would only say, "We'll see."

Allentown-based attorney Jackson Eaton III attended 11 straight Republican conventions, on the media staff for either the Republican National Committee or the convention, from 1964 through 2004.

He's not going to Cleveland this year, but believes the threat of surprises or even chaos on the convention floor to have been quashed.

The rules committee for the GOP convention, dominated by Trump backers as well as national and state GOP officials, last week crushed a bid to let delegates back the candidate of their choice, The Associated Press reported. Instead, the convention will honor the tally of delegates won by Trump throughout state primaries that he needed to win the nomination on the first ballot.

"Now it appears as if the process is going to be more conventional, although the candidate may be less so," Eaton said. "The message that Donald Trump has made and his form of address and speech that he uses is unusual, but I think the process of what happens is going to be pretty much in line with what's happened with previous conventions, now."

While he expects to see Republican stalwarts speak in Cleveland like House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Eaton said the most unique aspect of the convention will be who's not there.

"I can't keep up with who's not coming," he said.

In any case, the Republican convention in particular should make for interesting television, said Borick, from Muhlenberg.

"I'm more interested in this convention than I've been in conventions in a long, long time," he said. "There's going to be things that we probably didn't expect to see."

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Carry the Fallen event with Anthony Doran, Greg Troxell

Anthony Doran, left, and Greg Troxell are shown at a previous Carry the Fallen Ruck March. The two men have organized a July 30, 2016, march from Alpha in Warren County to raise money for veterans and servicemen and women suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. (Courtesy photo)

Anthony Doran knows firsthand the trauma of post-traumatic stress disorder. As a combat veteran of the U.S. Army, he suffered from it. He also lost his older brother to PTSD.

That's why he helps organize the Carry the Fallen Ruck March, which raises money for veterans and active servicemen and women with PTSD.

The Active Heroes charity logo highlights the number 22. That's the number of veterans nationwide who take their own lives daily. (Courtesy photo)

To Doran, of Phillipsburg, the awareness the marches bring and the help they give is "dear to me and dear to my heart," he said.

The Saturday, July 30, event in Alpha outside Phillipsburg will start at 9:30 a.m. at the Alpha Pavilion, 797 Vulcanite Ave., with an opening ceremony. The approximately 8-mile hike will then step off at 10 a.m. and return to the pavilion around 1 p.m. for a picnic with goods donated by local restaurants and businesses.

Participants ruck-march while carrying weight that symbolizes the burden that many veterans carry after war or through PTSD. The purpose of Carry The Fallen is to reduce veteran suicide -- something that affects an average of 22 veterans and their families each day.

Money raised goes to the nonprofit Active Heroes charity, which recently built and opened a military retreat in Shepherdsville, Kentucky.

Organizers say the hikers move as a group at a pace that suits everyone. Participants are urged to bring a backpack with water, small protein snacks, and a first-aid kit.

The local component is known as Lehigh Valley Team Tenderfoot. It's in its second year and has raised the fourth-most amount of money worldwide for Active Heroes, organizers said.

Team Tenderfoot was started in 2014 by Greg Troxell, of Easton. He said a friend had introduced him to Active Heroes and stunned him with the figure that 22 veterans die from suicide daily.

Troxell said he felt the urge to get involved, participated in a Carry the Fallen event in Philadelphia and had organized one in the Easton area.

Troxell, an engineering consultant, said he is "just an American who loves his country" and wanted to do something for the people who protect it.

Doran and Troxell are friends and co-organizers.

Doran, who lives in Phillipsburg and grew up in Alpha and Phillipsburg, chose to have the event in Alpha for the first time. Team Tenderfoot is hoping to spread the word throughout the Lehigh Valley, looking for participants who will gain sponsors and march for charity.

Doran -- he is among three of four siblings who served in the Army -- works for Rutgers University's Vets 4 Warriors, a peer support program. The route for the march goes through Alpha with a police escort and along South Main Street in Phillipsburg, almost to the free bridge, before returning to Alpha.

The return will include a detour to the Alpha War Memorial, where marchers hope to meet up with veterans from the Korean War and Vietnam War who will help complete the journey, Doran said.

Doran and Troxell hope to get 80 to 150 participants and they said all ages are welcome. Troxell said his own children, ages 7 to 13, participate in the hikes.

Doran said Carry the Fallen has enabled him to meet others like himself, share stories and create bonds. "Walking therapy" is what he calls it.

"Anthony is just an inspiration to me," Troxell said.

Folks are invited to sign up here, help out or just come out to see the event.

More information about Carry the Fallen events can be found on the Active Heroes website.

Melissa Reph is lehighvalleylive.com's Student Achievement Award intern. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
police.jpeg

Police guard the emergency room entrance of Our Lady Of The Lake Medical Center, where wounded officers were brought, in Baton Rouge, La., Sunday, July 17, 2016. Multiple law enforcement officers were killed and wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city. (AP Photo)

( )

Police officers at any given time must be prepared -- even if it means responding to a call and realizing they are the ones under attack, said Bethlehem Police Chief Mark DiLuzio.

The need for greater vigilance comes more than ever following an increase in ambushes or "surprise attacks" on law enforcement across the United States.

Around 9 a.m. Sunday, three officers were killed and another three were wounded when gunfire erupted in Baton Rouge, La. Police received a call of a "suspicious person walking down Airline Highway with an assault rifle," and when officers arrived, they were shot at, CNN reported.

Victims were from the Baton Rouge Police Department as well as East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office, according to the New York Daily News. Officials by 4 p.m. Sunday thought the attack on the officers was the work of multiple gunmen, CNN reported.

At the time of publication, one suspect was dead.

The Baton Rouge shooting comes about a week after an ambush on Dallas police officers where a sniper killed five police officers, wounded seven more and injured two civilians. It ended on July 7 when a Dallas police bomb squad robot killed the gunman when negotiations failed.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and families of the Baton Rouge Police Department. #GoneButNotForgotten #PrayForBatonRouge #BatonRougePD Posted by Hackettstown Police Department on Sunday, July 17, 2016

And these incidents follow a December 2014 attack on two New York City police officers who were killed when a gunman walked up to their parked patrol vehicle and fired as the men sat inside.

Cpl. Bryon K. Dickson II, 38, in September 2014 was ambushed at the Blooming Grove station in Pike County. His accused killer, Eric Frein, is being held at the Pike County Correctional Facility awaiting trial on murder charges.

"The reaction of what happened today in Baton Rouge is one of sheer horror," DiLuzio said. "We are a democratic society. This isn't supposed to happen here."

Killed in the line of duty

On average, one law enforcement officer is killed in the line of duty somewhere in the United States every 61 hours.

To date, the three officers killed in Baton Rouge bring the total of amount of officers killed across the U.S. in the line of duty by a firearm to a total of 29 for 2016. The data is compared to 18 officers killed in a firearm-related death at this point in 2015, according to statistics from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.

A total of 124 law enforcement officers overall died in the line of duty in 2015 -- a 4 percent increase from 2014 when 119 officers were killed. Ambush attacks against officers were the second leading cause of shooting deaths in 2015, accounting for six fatalities nationally, according to the Memorial Fund.

Texas in 2015 had the highest number of fatalities, losing 12 officers. Eleven officers died in Georgia, nine in Louisiana and six in both California and New York. Thirty-three states lost at least once officer in 2015, according to statistics.

"Something is broken in our country," DiLuzio said. "And it needs to be fixed."

DiLuzio said officers already know when they put on their badge and go to work each day, there's a possibility they could end up having to use their service weapon or be shot at by a perpetrator.

But, after recent ambushes, officers now have to be alert to becoming a target for no reason other than their uniform. There can be no distractions, no calls taken lightly, no feelings of complacency and absolutely no hesitations, DiLuzio described.

Wilson Borough Police Chief Steven Parkansky agreed, saying officers need to constantly be aware of their surroundings.

"We always have stressed officers should be on top of their game, but they now have to up it even further," Parkansky said. "They really have to be aware of these situations -- a call for someone locked out of their car could be a potential ambush."

There also is the fear, Parkansky said, some ambush shooters could be copycatting the work of others.

"This is definitely becoming more of a problem for us," he said. "Situations are being sensationalized and leading to more copycats. We're one call away from somebody having a bad day or whatever and deciding they're going to get their five seconds of fame."

Slate Belt Regional Police Chief David Mettin was watching the aftermath of the Baton Rouge shooting on television and said he hasn't felt so disheartened in 29 years of service.

"I can't believe that we are watching this again," Mettin said.

In a statement, Washington Township, Warren County police said the department -- along with police officers across the country -- are "saddened and sickened by these cowardice acts on our nation's finest."

Several other police departments took to social media Sunday, expressing sorrow for the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Department. Posts were followed by hash-tags "GoneButNotForgotten" and "BatonRougePD."

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office. #GoneButNeverForgotten #BatonRouge Posted by New Jersey State Police on Sunday, July 17, 2016

Remain vigilant

Colonial Regional Police Chief Roy Seiple said undisclosed policies will be in effect to ensure the safety of the department's officers.

"The law enforcement profession is a noble one and will continue to be so," Seiple said. "Our officers will handle each situation as we always did with a high degree of ethical standards and professionalism. That being said, we will not turn our backs on any senseless killings especially those of our fellow officers. We will do the right thing regardless of political correctness."

"When every one else is running away, the officers running forward," he continued. "We will continue to do our jobs because it's not just what we do, it's our way of life."

Nazareth Police Chief Thomas Trachta served the New York City Police Department from 1986 to 2006 as an officer, organized crime detective and detective sergeant.

When he learned of the ambush on the two New York City officers in December 2014, Trachta then said he expected "surprise attacks" would get worse, before getting any better.

Trachta said following the Baton Rouge shooting, not much has changed in two years.

"It's increasing and it's getting worse," Trachta said, noting police officers across the country should remain armed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "It appears law enforcement across the country is under attack."

Bushkill Township Police Chief Mike McLouth said officers should listen to their guts and know if something doesn't seem right, it's not right. They should then await back-up assistance before responding or taking action alone, he said.

"Police are the last line of defense between good and evil," McLouth said. "If we (police officers) are taken out of the equation, what's left?"

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Alcohol was determined to be a factor in a single-vehicle crash into a utility pole Saturday evening in Mansfield Township, police said.

The female driver was injured at 9:23 p.m. when she lost control of a Honda SUV and stuck a utility pole along Route 57 -- just west of Watters Road -- in Mansfield Township, police said.

Upon impact, the utility pole snapped it into two pieces and was sheared off at the base. The upper portion of the pole appeared to be hanging by wires, according to a witness at the scene.

Power was shut off in the area by Jersey Central Power & Light and crews arrived to work on the power lines. Police shut down Route 57 in both directions between Port Murray and Watters roads.

The female driver, the sole occupant of the Honda, was taken to an area hospital for treatment of injuries by township rescue squad, according to police. Alcohol was later determined to be a factor in the crash and charges are pending against the driver, according to police.

Also responding to the scene was the Mansfield Township Police Department, Tri-County Fire Department, Mansfield Fire Department and Butler Park Fire Department.

Mansfield Township police continue to investigate.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
The Cavan & Leitrim Railway in Dromod will form part of Michael Portillo's adventures for the BBC's Great British Railway Journeys programme.

Portillo visited Dromod on July 1 with a BBC crew crew to film a piece on the Cavan & Leitrim Railway and the change in trains and their use from Victorian times to now.

The Cavan & Leitrim Railway was a narrow-gauge railway in the counties of Leitrim and Cavan which ran from 1887 until 1959. Unusually for Ireland, this 3ft gauge line survived on coal traffic, from the mine at Arigna.

It outlived most of the other Irish narrow-gauge lines, giving a further lease of life to some of their redundant engines.

July 1 also marked the first public outing of the replica 3ft gauge rail inspection bicycle built in secret by Cavan & Leitrim volunteers specially for Michael Portillo's visit.

This is a replica of the original inspection bicycle which sadly was scrapped in 1959 when the railway closed.

The wheels are originals acquired by Michael Kennedy over the years from different sources. Most of the construction work was carried out by Lawrence Breslan and Paul Gunning. It performed perfectly on the day and Michael Portillo clearly enjoyed it and thought it was great fun.

Owner of the facility Michael Kennedy told the Leitrim Observer the BBC got in touch with the volunteer organisation three weeks before the visit and they worked on the inspection bicycle and set up the area for the film crew.

Michael said the Cavan & Leitrim Railway will feature on the BBC programme as one of the stop-offs from the Dublin - Sligo line.

Michael said Portillo was impressed with the amount of restored items the organisation has acquired over their 25 years.

On July 2, the replica inspection bicycle got it's second outing and was tested again when well-known narrow gauge experts Andrew Waldron, Andrew Wilson and Danny Sheehan from England visited Dromod. They had much fun and went at breath taking speeds to truly test the skills of the bicycle.

The inspection bicycle now has two original 1930 saddles fitted.

The piece filmed for BBC on the Cavan & Leitrim Railway is expected to air in January 2017 and Michael hopes the publicity will help bring more visitors to the fascinating tourist attraction, which has restored trains, buses, airplane cockpits and much more from as far back as 1887.

The tour which is open every Saturday, Sunday and Monday and is run by volunteers tells many forgotten stories from the era of the narrow gauge train and includes a train ride along 0.4 km.

More details on the Cavan & Leitrim Railway including the stock it has for public viewing and plans for the future will feature in next week's Leitrim Observer.
The 3 million EU citizens currently resident in the UK must not be bartered over in this countrys exit negotiations with the EU. They must not be treated as political pawns, or like children caught up in their parents divorce. So said Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake as he introduced his EU Citizens in the UK (Right to stay) Bill to the Commons this week. The Bill has support from MPs from Labour, SDLP, SNP and Greens.

Im glad to see Lib Dems calling the Brexit vote for what it is  a disaster. Someone needs to point out that we are on the edge of a massive precipice and the tanking of the pound is just the start. Already business is starting to feel the pinch as investors delay investing in the UK. The collapse of the travel firm Lowcostravel is just one example of jobs being lost as a result of the Brexit vote. People havent yet even begun to experience the effects of Brexit and when they do, they need to see who was speaking out from the start.

Im very proud that it is our lot who are working to preserve the rights of people who are already worrying about their future. It is only fair that those who have made their lives here are allowed to stay and not have the goalposts moved. Imagine if you have moved here, fallen in love, established a social network, a family, a career, in this country. Would you like to be treated that way?

Here is Toms speech in full:

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a bill to grant EU citizens the right to stay resident in the UK following the UKs withdrawal from membership of the European Union; and for connected purposes.

On 24 June, 3 million EU citizens in the UK and 1.3 million British citizens in the EU woke up to an uncertain future because while the Brexiteers had pithy slogans aplenty, our Government had no plan for the long-term future of EU citizens in the UK or the UK post-Brexit. EU citizens were unable to vote in the referendum and were therefore left without a voice during the campaign. They now find themselves without the protection of their EU citizenship rights in the UK. EU citizenship includes not just the right to live, work and study in the UK but, for example, the right to participate in local, regional and European elections.

The current Prime Minister gave an assurance that there would be no immediate change, but this now carries little weight, given that we will have a new Prime Minister tomorrow. His assurances are therefore time-limited and have an imminent sell-by date. He has offered no protection for the rights of EU citizens and Brits abroad in the future. By calling and then losing the referendum, the current Prime Minister pulled the rug out from under the feet of these citizens. He needs to get that rug out of the removals van that is parked outside No. 10 and put it back before he departs. EU citizens need certainty about their long-term future in the UK, and they need this assurance now, before their futures are used as bargaining chips in our negotiations with the EU.

The Prime Minister has just appointed a new EU commissioner to replace Jonathan Hill, rather than leaving that to his successor. He should also act now while he still has time to secure the rights of EU citizens by unconditionally granting the right to stay to all EU citizens who were resident in the UK on 23 June. He can never make full amends for triggering a chain of events that will lead to economic and diplomatic disaster for the UK, but this would help to restore a modicum of credibility in the dying day of his premiership. If he fails to do so, there are three ways in which EU citizens rights could be safeguarded in the future.

First, a legal challenge might rely on an appeal under article 70.1(b) of the Vienna convention on the law of treaties. However, as Professor Douglas-Scott pointed out in an article for the UK Constitutional Law Association entitled What Happens to Acquired Rights in the Event of a Brexit?, there is no consensus among lawyers about the application of the convention to EU citizens living in the UK. Neither does there seem to be much scope for protecting the position of EU citizens in the UK or Brits abroad through customary international law. EU citizens might have to wait years before any rights that they might have under the convention could be tested in court.

Secondly, the Government could negotiate an agreement with EU member states to allow the right to remain on a reciprocal basis for EU citizens living in the UK and British citizens living in the EU. The problem with that approach is that it turns EU citizens into bargaining chips. Such a negotiation does not yet have a start date, and the House has already condemned it, by 245 votes to two, as wrong in principle. To barter over the future of EU citizens and Britons in the EU would be to treat EU citizens as if they were children in a divorce settlement. That would be humiliating to the individuals concerned and their families, and it would demonstrate a shameful lack of political judgment on the part of the British Government. It would also be a very weak negotiating strategy, because there is a good chance that EU member states are likely to act to guarantee the rights of British citizens unilaterally.

Unless a future UK Government intended to hold EU citizens hostage in order to achieve concessions in other areas of the negotiations, such as access to the single market, there would be nothing else to negotiate. In his evidence to the Home Affairs Committee this afternoon, I am sure that the Immigration Minister will be pressed further on this issue. There were signs over the weekend, given comments by the Foreign Secretary at the NATO summit and reports on Saturday, that the Governments position might be softening.

The third approach, which is that proposed by my Bill, would be for the Government to legislate now to secure the rights of EU citizens unilaterally, thereby providing desperately needed certainty for all EU nationals living here. We must make EU citizens feel welcome and safe in Britain. This reassurance would also help the 1.3 million British people living in the EU, help to secure the future of the 9% of NHS doctors who work in the UK and are from the EU, and help to ensure that Britain remains open and welcoming.

Yesterday, I met the campaign organisation New Europeans, which is a voice for EU citizens in the UK, and other charities and non-governmental organisations representing migrant communities. New Europeans has gathered more than 2,000 signatures on a letter to the Prime Minister asking for the issue to be resolved now. I also draw the Houses attention to early-day motion 259 on the status of British citizens resident in the EU and EU citizens resident in the UK, which makes the same call.

As I have mentioned, following a debate on a Labour motion, the House showed by a clear majority of 245 votes to two that it favoured sorting out the situation of EU citizens living in the UK immediately. Thanks to New Europeans, in the next few days I will also be meeting the EU Commission in the UK and ambassadors to EU member states in London to discuss the issue.

It is quite clear that many EU citizens no longer feel welcome in Britain and that many are leaving. I met someone earlier this morning who said exactly that: he and his partner feel that the only thing to do is to leave the UK, and they will be doing so shortly, even though they have lived here for more than 20 years and paid significant tax during that time. They no longer feel welcome. Numbers of race hate crimes and xenophobic attacks have increased since the referendum. In London alone, where more than 800,000 EU nationals live, there have been three race hate crimes every hour. These threats and acts of discrimination will continue unless and until the Government make it clear that they will ring-fence the rights of EU citizens who were living in the UK before 24 June. Providing such clarity is the purpose of the Bill, and I commend it to the House.
Welcome to the Golden Dozen, and our 463rd weekly round-up from the Lib Dem blogosphere  Featuring the seven most popular stories beyond Lib Dem Voice according to click-throughs from the Aggregator (10  16 July, 2016), together with a hand-picked quintet, you might otherwise have missed.

Dont forget: you can sign up to receive the Golden Dozen direct to your email inbox  just click here  ensuring you never miss out on the best of Lib Dem blogging.

As ever, lets start with the most popular post, and work our way down:

1. Labour moderates  its now or never. Forget Angela Eagle and fight for yourselves by Stephen Tall on Stephen Tall .

They need to choose an inspiring candidate and fight for them.

2. On the prospect of a new party by Chris Sargeantson on Terrible Pie.

Working together is one thing, but one pro EU anti Brexit party may not be liberal at a time we need liberal values to be articulated.

3. Welsh Assembly Remuneration Board to change rules to accommodate Neil Hamilton by Peter Black on Peter Black.

What do you do when an AM doesnt even live in the country and commutes from an English mansion?

4. Lib Dems on the rise  gaining seats on local councils by Rob Stickland on Rob Stickland.

Did someone mention 4 by-election gains in one night?

5. Lessons from Tooting and the perils of low intensity blandness by Mark Pack on Mark Pack .

We need a new strategy for fighting parliamentary by-elections.

6. 3 things Ive learnt about the possibility of a progressive alliance by Lucy Salek on In pursuit of nuance.

What Lucy found at an event that was supposed to build common ground.

7. Andrea Leadsom decides to apologise and play the victim by Jonathan Calder on Liberal England.

Did Andrea read this and decide to stop down as Jonathan asked?

And now to the five blog-posts that come highly recommended, regardless of the number of Aggregator click-throughs they attracted. To nominate a Lib Dem blog article published in the past seven days  your own, or someone elses, all you have to do is drop a line to [email protected] You can also contact us via Twitter, where were @libdemvoice

8. Why we all knew that referenda were foreign rubbish by Tony Greaves on Liberal Lord.

But Cameron went and did it anyway.

9. Regrexit by Wera Hobhouse on Weras Blog.

Wera meets a voter experiencing buyers remorse.

10. On the freedom to travel and unified continents by Maria Pretzler on Working Memories.

As we seem to be on the verge of closing our borders, a fascinating look at the benefits of free travel.

11. Know nothing arrogance, or Machiavellian machinations by Cicero on Ciceros Songs.

Mrs. May has squared the circles of her party, at the cost of irritating all the UKs international partners.

12. Southern Rail failings: a staff member writes by David Boyle on The Real Blog.

David is getting 100,000 readers for his blogs on Southern Rails catastrophic service. My Facebook feed is full of friends suffering from Southerns incompetence. Reading this post from David, you get the impression that the company who manage the Southern franchise could do a lot better if it just treated its staff properly.

And thats it for another week. Happy blogging n reading n nominating.

Featured? Add this to your blog post!



<a href="https://www.libdemvoice.org/top-of-the-blogs-the-lib-dem-golden-dozen-463-51338.html"><img src="https://www.libdemvoice.org/images/golden-dozen.png" width="200" height="57" alt="Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice" title="Featured on Liberal Democrat Voice" /></a>

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
The alarm call at 4:30 was pretty brutal. I suppose it was my own fault. I could have been sensible and not have drunk large quantities of wine at a wonderful dinner with friends and got home before 12:30, but you only live once and all that.

So, I felt a little weary heading off to London for the Social Liberal Forums annual conference.

The event took place in the Resources for London building  definitely worth going to if you are planning a similar event. Its a super space with halls and breakout rooms all on one floor. Our Mary Reid has a leading role in organising this event every year and she always does a brilliant job. Everything is run with efficiency and the programme is planned so that there is enough time for socialising and networking.

The theme of the day was Inequality Street, looking at the various types of inequality in our country, why its so bad and how we deal with it. It was based around the 2009 book The Spirit Level, which showed that the countries with the highest levels of inequality also had the highest levels of all manner of social problems.

The day started with a minutes applause to remember two great social liberals weve lost this year  Eric Avebury and David Rendel.

The vote to leave the EU meant a significant re-jigging of the programme to give us an opportunity to discuss the implications of the vote and what we should do about it. Investigative journalist Shiv Malik, Jonny Oates, David Howarth, Lindsay Northover and Sal Brinton shared their thoughts with us.

Malik, co-author of Jilted Generation: How Britain has bankrupted its youth, spoke about the generational divide, making the point that younger people had much more open and tolerant attitudes and were likely to stay that way, despite the fact that they have more financial struggles. He said it was no wonder they were angry when the Brexit vote had just pulled the rug from under them when they were already under financial pressure.

Lindsay Northover covered the international perspective. She said that while Mays appointment of the 3 Brexiteers was a masterstroke in covering her own back, tensions would soon develop. She said that the US wouldnt bother much with us any more, and would prioritise relations with Germany as a way into the EU. She added that the new countries of the commonwealth were not particularly interested in us  and all thought that we should stay in the EU. Her conclusion was that we cant take Brexit lying down. We need to change public opinion and show Leave voters that the things they are worried about can be addressed in another way.

Jonny Oates looked at the issue of progressive alliances and said that we had to build bridges. He talked about the need to understand why people had voted Leave. We need to challenge the economic model we have of corporates enriching themselves and not caring about their workers.

David Howarth said that the Leave majority will have disappeared within 45 months as older voters die and new, younger voters come on to the electoral roll. This would happen even if nobody changed their opinion from Leave to Remain. Its quite frightening to think that by the time we actually leave the EU, most people will actually want to stay. Thats a compelling argument for some sort of second vote. He was also very clear about not pandering to that element of the Leave vote that was xenophobic and racist and was resoundingly cheered.

Sal Brinton looked to international examples of liberal parties who had done well on an anti-establishment platform. We know that the Canadian Liberals sensationally took power last year, but that was after a huge reorganisation where they didnt let anyone over 35 on their committees. South Africas Democratic Alliance and the Netherlands D66 have both done well positioned as anti-establishment parties. In terms of progressive alliances, Paddys scheme is more along the lines of candidates from different parties signing up to a set of principles and fighting an election on them. Candidates who shared those values could be funded by the umbrella grouping. Its not about forming a new party or anything like that. She added that we had to be careful not to reinforce the political binary by entering a formal alliance, SDP style.

Vince Cable carried on the Brexit theme in his William Beveridge lecture. He joked about his own defeat: I was evicted by a candidate who told everyone it was Cameron or Chaos.

He said that unless we solved the political crisis in our country and across Europe, pursuing egalitarian policies would be very difficult. Progressive parties have lost 25% of their support in the last decade. He said that the movement had become disparate and inchoate, and its working class base no longer existed. In this country, failure in office  e.g. Labours embracing of the rich and Iraq and the rise of the politics of identity had contributed to the decline.

We need big ideas, not just tactics, ways to develop models of ownership to fairly distribute the rewards of enterprise. He gave the examples of Finland and Sweden where they have high levels of pre-tax inequality that the tax system balances out.

There were a number of breakout sessions, all of which I wanted to go to. I chose social security and ended up being asked to go on the panel. Here we are with chair Mathew Hulbert:

We discussed the principles of a fair and dignified social security system, the implementation of Universal Credit and how its fallen short of what it was initially supposed to do which was to eliminate the poverty trap. I had been concerned by Theresa Mays comments on Downing Street. A lot of what she had said sounded very good but she made it clear that it only applied to people who were working. My worry is that we need to look after those who cant work and who will find the labour market even more difficult as a result of Brexit. I also said that we need to vigorously campaign to get the benefits freeze lifted. We will soon see prices rise as a result of sterling tanking and we cant leave people to deal with that with no rise in income.

There were other sessions on inter-generational inequality, housing, health (with Norman Lamb). I want to find more about this Redline Voting organisation which is about shareholders, including pension trustees, only investing in companies which meet certain social, economic and environmental criteria.

The day ended with a discussion on whether equality could win ond where you balance liberty and equality with Neal Lawson from Compass, Karin Robinson from Democrats Abroad.

The whole day was excellent with lots to learn and much food for thought. My e-reader is that bit heavier with recommended books from The Spirit Level itself, to Paul Addisons book about the development of the post war consensus: The Road to 1945: British politics and the Second World War and a book mentioned by Bill Kerry of the Equality Trust in his talk, Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis by Max Rashbrooke.

I cant recommend SLF Conference highly enough. Keep an eye on their website for details of next years event  although we should let Mary put her feet up for a bit before having to think about that.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
A year ago today, Tim Farron woke up to his first day as Lib Dem Leader.

In that year, he has been the voice for refugees, the first leader to go to Calais and Lesbos and the Macedonian Border, constantly making the case for the UK to do more to help these desperate people.

The UK Government is not yet doing enough but Farron dragged Cameron into doing more for unaccompanied refugee children

Its a pity that the Remain campaign didnt make more use of him in the media during the referendum. His positive points would have been a very effective balance which may have encouraged people to pay attention to the warnings of the consequences of Brexit which now seem to have been under-stated.

It would have been easy for him simply to refuse to back air strikes in Syria, but he was convinced that intervention was necessary, subject to certain conditions. I didnt agree with him on that decision, and I am struggling to see what good we have done in Syria as a result, but I respect the way in which he articulated his position at the time. He did so with the best of liberal, humanitarian and internationalist principles. My emotions were very mixed at the time  although I disagreed with him, I was very proud of the way he made his case.

On the night he was elected, he made a stonking speech to a rally in London, Its inspiring, joyful and motivating. At that time, 17000 people had joined the Liberal Democrats (and within days of his election that exceeded 20,000) and this year another 17,000 people have joined in the wake of the EU Referendum.

His challenge for the coming year is to be very clear that Liberal Democrats believe our future is in the EU. MPs and Peers should not vote to trigger Article 50, an irreversible step which would harm the very people that Liberal Democrats fight for  the poorest, most vulnerable and isolated. He needs to continue to make the case for Britain to stay in the EU or rejoin if we had left. That is our position for the next General Election. As the country realises what its about to lose, he needs to encourage those changes in public opinion. Former Liberal Democrat MP David Howarth told the Social Liberal Forum conference yesterday that within just 45 months, the Leave majority would disappear as the older generation who voted Leave die and the 16 and 17 year olds who would have voted to Remain come on to the electoral roll. We need to ensure that those voices are heard. We have a unique position  we are the only UK wide political party advocating staying in the EU (and in Scotland we want to stay in the EU and UK) and we need to get out there and communicate that on radio, tv, regional and national media, on doorsteps and on streets.

Its a very simple message and we need to follow the example of one N Sturgeon. Look what happened to her party in 2015. Certainly they started from a much larger base, but way back in 2001, they were sinking into irrelevance in Scotland. In 2007, they were able to capture the mood of the country for change. At that time, they had a simple message, and the resource to deliver it. One of Tim Farrons key challenges is to make sure we have the money to make an impact in a snap election. If we get it right, the rewards for us and the country could be significant.

Part of that is to speak to those people who voted Leave out of concern on housing and pay. We need to tell them what we are going to do to help them, and thats around building more houses, tackling low pay and giving resources to areas where population has increased to help them expand provision of public services. A big government investment would cost a lot less than the amount we will lose by leaving the EU.

We can show that we can stay in the EU and deal properly with the concerns that people have  a real best of both worlds. And, who knows, we could keep the UK together as well.

We certainly have a mountain to climb, but there are some good indications. Two polls this week have shown an increase in support for us. Today ComRes has us on 9%.

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 39% (+1)

LAB: 29% (-1)

UKIP: 14% (-1)

LDEM: 9% (+1)

GRN: 4% (-)

(via ICM / post-Wednesday)  Britain Elects (@britainelects) July 17, 2016

Earlier in the week, IPSOS MORI had us on 11%, ahead of UKIP:

Westminster voting intention:

CON: 36% (+1)

LAB: 35% (+1)

LDEM: 11% (+2)

UKIP: 8% (-2)

GRN: 4% (-)

(via Ipsos Mori / 09  11 Jul)  Britain Elects (@britainelects) July 13, 2016

The Tories may well decide to go for a snap election to totally fragment their opposition and give themselves a large majority. Theres a window of opportunity for them, before things get really tough, where they might be tempted to get unassailable power in the Commons and destroy their biggest opposition party. That would be an even bigger disaster for the country, particularly if we end up with a whole load of UKIP. We need to make sure that doesnt happen.

So we need Tim Farron to keep doing what he did on the night he was elected. We need more speeches like this:

Remember that brilliant ending:

Our vested interests are the people in our street, our town, our village. Our vested interest is your vested interest. Our liberal voice is your liberal voice. So lets together make our liberal voice stronger. If you care about human rights join us. if you think you shouldnt have your emails snooped on join us. if you think everyone deserves a decent home join us. if you think its wrong to demonise immigrants, the young, the poor, foreigners, Brussels, the English, the Scotsjoin us. If you are fed up of self-satisfied politicians ambitious for themselves and unambitious for their country then guess what? You are a liberal. Embrace that diagnosis. It is an utterly decent and British condition. So join us, join us today. Liberals of Britain, if you want a better Britain then you need to do something about it. Come and be part of the most joyful, inspiring and worthwhile come back in political history.

If you agree with Tim, join us if you havent already.

The whole transcript of Tims speech is here.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
THE Impact trade union has requested that Limerick City and County Council cancel a series of interviews after staff expressed upset at the transparency of the process.

Limericks local authority was seeking to promote around four staff from within its ranks for a new shared services centre being set up as part of the Housing Assistance Payments (Hap) scheme.

The centre, which will operate out of the Granary building in Michael Street, is for the Hap project being piloted in Limerick and will serve the entire country.

But interviews were cancelled suddenly after Impact  which represents the majority of indoor staff at the council  intervened.

In what was an unprecedented move, Mark Leahy, the chairman of Limericks Local Government Branch, made contact with the unions headquarters in Dublin, before the interviews were called off.

An internal email  seen by the Leader  states: Impact was contacted by a lot of its members to express their unhappiness in relation to the shortlisting process and the criteria for the selection of candidates to be called for interview this week.

One staff member  speaking on condition of anonymity  said: Numerous staff of long-standing experience were not given the chance to compete for interview. They were basically told by the council that even though they had 20 years experience, they were not going to be even listed for a more senior position. A lot of people were very hurt: they felt at least they should have been given the opportunity to be interviewed.

The staffer added that the council tried to justify the selection of candidates on the basis that Hap is somehow special and different. This is not the case, he said, claiming IT, finance and customer service skills are the only requisites.

The Limerick Leader understands around 30 people formally complained to Impact over the process. Many more among the councils 800-strong staff were also known to be upset.

Mr Leahys email continues: While this decision is obviously upsetting and disappointing for those candidates (and Impact members) who were preparing for interview, Impact Union considers this was the correct decision having regard to the overall situation and having regard to the genuine concerns expressed by so many.

The member added morale in the authority is at an all time low.

There is a huge emphasis on spin, and trying to put forward a fence that everything is wonderful. But in actual reality, the quality of service being delivered is reducing, the staff member  who has decades of experience  told the Limerick Leader.

He added the use of Special Purpose Vehicles by the council is also damaging morale among the workforce.

The issue [about the postponing of the jobs] is just the tip of the iceberg. We have never really had to have a union in the place, but it is necessary now, he added.

A spokesperson for Limerick City and County Council confirmed the interviews were put on ice.

This matter is currently being reviewed. The comments by Impact have been noted, and the interviews will be proceeding later in the year, the spokesperson added.

A spokesperson for the Impact trade union was unavailable for further comment. Its anticipated the interviews will take place later this year.
IT WAS STANDING room only in the beautiful chapel in the former home of the Sisters of Mercy, Doon on Saturday.

The convent officially closed on July 1 and the auction of its contents commenced at noon. Over 500 gathered for the sale of 630 lots made up of a huge range of glass, china, furniture, brass, religious antiques and collectables.

PJ OGorman, auctioneer, remained tight-lipped on the turnover on the day but it is safe to say the contribution of the Sisters of Mercy to Doon and surrounding parishes has been priceless. Last year, they celebrated their 150th anniversary of coming to Doon.

It was the closest thing that Mr OGorman will come to being a priest as he had the chapel congregations complete attention.

Ably assisted by his daughter, Maria OGorman Skelly, they started at 12pm and finished at 7.30pm to a warm round of applause.

Once I heard that I said to myself the people enjoyed it. The atmosphere was unreal. Both aisles were full.

I auctioned the Christian Brothers contents in Doon in 2000 so it is a great honour to be able to say that I did both of the religious orders that were in Doon for so long  and they both went well, said Mr OGorman.

It was one of the longest auctions in his 51 years of experience.

Over 500 attended throughout Saturday. Many in attendance were former pupils who travelled from near and far. The sentimental value of the lots was through the roof.

Mr OGorman said one elderly gentle man purchased a choir stall  which go along the wall in a panel and each nun has their own seat.

It is gorgeous, fantastic craftsmanship. There was great local interest in that and the man who bought it said his grandfather made it. There were a lot of touching stories, said Mr OGorman.

The most expensive lot of the day was a book of illustrations of the Stations of the Cross for 1,600. A pine confessional, which attracted much interest in the run up to the auction, went for a bargain 180.

Other stand-out lots were a Victorian pipe organ 1,200; Victorian armchair 500; set of eight Victorian dining chairs 900; Ganter Brothers grandfather clock 500; pine robing table for holding vestments 540; Victorian extension table 700; Victorian mahogany sideboard 550; pair of angel statues 300; Victorian long bench 300; Victorian open book shelf 650 and brass candle holders 300. There was good value to be had on the day and men and women returned home with a piece of history in tow. Only a few minor lots were left unsold.

When Mr OGormans gavel came down for the last time it marked more than the last bid being accepted, it felt like the end of an era. Soon the convent will be empty and plans are being put in place to ensure it continues to be an important part of the parish.

The seven Sisters of Mercy, who have left for new locations, will always be welcome in Doon. A Mass of thanksgiving was said by Archbishop Kieran OReilly in June for the nuns and their predecessors.

It all began in 1865 when the Sisters of Mercy arrived in the east Limerick village from Kinsale convent.

They came at the invite of then parish priest, Fr Patrick Hickey as he saw his flock ravaged by post famine poverty, devastation and emigration.

One hundred and fifty one years on the last word should go to current parish priest, Fr Tony Ryan. He said their physical legacy can be seen in the site they gave for the community centre, the land for the GAA field and a site for Scoil na Trionoide Naofa.

What cant be seen is their contribution to individuals, education and local life.

They have touched the lives of all our people. They are loved and respected by young and old. The good they have done is known to God alone, said Fr Ryan.

See page 18 for more
LIMERICK hurley makers are hoping that every effort will be made to limit the spread of ash dieback disease, to save the hurley.

Sean Kelly MEP hosted a unique seminar on the future of the hurley stick and the threat of the ash dieback disease, at the Munster GAA headquarters in Castletroy on Friday.

Ash Dieback is a chronic fungal disease of ash trees in Europe characterised by leaf loss and crown dieback in infected trees. The disease impinges on the production of ash trees used which are used to make hurleys.

Around 115 cases of ash dieback were recorded across 19 counties in Ireland by January 2016, according to Department of Agriculture findings, Mr Kelly said.

Department of Agriculture research up to January 2016 suggests that there are currently 115 plantations with positive samples of ash dieback over 19 counties including Limerick, Carlow; Cavan; Clare; Cork; Galway; Kildare; Kilkenny; Leitrim; Longford; Mayo; Meath; Roscommon; Sligo; Tipperary; Waterford; Westmeath; Wexford; and Wicklow.

A study by tree ecologists at Keele University in the UK, published in the Journal of Ecology earlier this year, also warned that ash dieback and the emerald ash borer posed a serious risk for European ash trees.

Ash dieback spores can be transported by the breeze as far as 10 miles in distance and can survive on woodland ground for up to five years. We know all too well how difficult it is to deal with in Ireland," Mr Kelly added.

However, some ash trees are more resistant to the fungus and research is ongoing in the UK to determine which trees would be better for future planting and more resistant to the fungus, which could be useful, according to MEP Kelly.

Mr Kelly was joined by other speakers at the seminar including the Minister of State for Food, Forestry and Horticulture, Andrew Doyle TD and John Turley - a leading hurley maker.

Like many in the business, Pallaskenry-based hurley maker DJ Daly sources wood from abroad.

I bring my ash in from Europe. I have tried a lot of different countries but I just bring it it in from one country in Europe now - I get good supplies, DJ explained.

All the ash coming into the country now, the bark must be taken off it which makes it more expensive as well. The disease is carried by the wind or even by people walking in forestry. Not every ash tree will get it - some are tolerant to the disease. One tree might get it and the one next to it might not, he added.

Bruff-based hurley maker Willie Bulfin said that while his business hasnt been directly affected by the disease, he has noticed a delay in ash coming into the country.

We make all the hurleys by hand so we dont mass produce, Willie explained.

 The bigger the amount you would want, the more affected you would be. We would be affected from the point of view that it is a bit slower getting the ash. We get the ash from two lads who either source if from Ireland or Britain. To be fair, what we are getting is every bit as good as what we were always getting.
THE long-running effort to build a new public swimming pool in Newcastle West took a number of different twists this week.

At a public meeting in the town, Minister of State for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Patrick ODonovan revealed that the local authority swimming pool funding programme had closed in 2014. And he stressed that there could be no pool without the backing of Limerick City and County Council and their ongoing financial support.

But, he said, the council wants further clarification and wants certain questions addressed.

I dont think that is unreasonable, he said.

But there was confusion among those attending Mondays meeting as to what exactly this would entail. Was it an entirely new feasibility study? A cost-benefit analysis? Or an examination of the impact the proposed pool would have on any private or public pools in the area?

Meanwhile, Vincent McCormack, the owner of Killeline Leisure Centre, declared that the feasibility report, carried out in 2013/2014 and published last year, was now out of date. And he revealed that he had secured a two acre site next to the centre and was interested in developing a new pool, open to the public on a pay as you go basis, as part of a public private partnership.

We need a new feasibility study taking our offering into account as well, he said.

However,the Desmond Complex Pool Committee chairman, Mike Duane was standing by the report which favoured a new pool at the Desmond Complex at a cost of approximately 5m.

We have taken into consideration there already is a private pool. The two could co-exist. A leisure centre is different from a public swimming pool. They have a very different clientele, he said.

John Cussen, who had been a trustee of the old, open-air Dean OBrien pool built in the 1970s, told the meeting the council had now taken over the site.

They said they would take it over. If we didnt agree they would compulsorily take it over, he explained. The facility was signed over for nothing, he continued. But at the meetings it was emphasised we expected Limerick City and County Council to back a pool project. We didnt get that commitment.. We fought our case very strongly.. We felt if there wasnt commitment there was good will.

"I would be very disappointed if the council didnt back a new pool at least in principle. Im not getting that from councillors tonight. What we are getting is division, he said.

Councillors gave their own take on the situation. It would not be easy to sell the idea of a new pool to the other 39 members of the council, Cllr Liam Galvin argued, given that the council was already bank-rolling a pool in the area to the tune of over 100,000 (Askeaton pool).

We havent a snowballs chance in hell, Cllr Jerome Scanlan said and he felt the public-private partnership option should be looked at.

We have only one report, Cllr Seamus Browne said. Whats wrong with it?

We were told this would be profit making from the start. You are telling us something different than what we were told, Cllr Michael Collins said, challenging Minister ODonovan. We are being put in the firing line tonight. We have nothing to offer.

What we need to do is move this further on, Cllr John Sheahan, the new chairman of the Newcastle West Municipal District said. We need to get the project for a swimming pool shovel ready.

Acknowledging that there was an issue over location and a new proposal had now emerged, he argued that all parties should be brought together.

Can we all get around the table and then put the pressure on the department?, he said and offered to host that meeting by the end of July.
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All roads lead to Ballinamuck this August, as the past pupils of Kiltycreevagh National School gather together to celebrate.

Opened in 1902, Kiltycreevagh NS, located just north of the village of Ballinamuck, closed 90 years later in 1992, having amalgamated with Gaigue school.

According to Kathleen Dunlevy and Colm Harte, past pupils and organisers of the reunion, the idea has been mooted for quite some time, but is only now coming to fruition.

Rather than hosting one event, the organisers decided to make a weekend out of it, to offer the best of Longford to their former schoolmates, some of whom are travelling great distances to attend.

The event will kick off on Friday, August 12 at the '98 Memorial Hall, Ballinamuck, where past pupils will have a chance to greet each other, before the launch of a special, commemorative book, put together by Kathleen for the occasion.

The book is with the printers at the moment, Colm explained. It includes articles by a number of past pupils and quite a collection of photographs.

It will be a reference in that regard and hopefully it will bring back memories of people who are not with us anymore.

The book will also feature a list of names from the roll books and some of the history of the area as well as stories written by pupils, as asked for by the Folklore Commission in 1937. The book will be launched by one of the last students to enrol in the school as well as one of the oldest past pupils.

There will be some music and light refreshments served at the launch, before attendees adjourn to Dillon's Bar and Bistro afterwards for a night of music and song.

The weekend will continue on Saturday morning, August 13 with a boxty morning and a trip down memory lane from 11am until 12 noon. This will be followed by a historical tour of the village and its surroundings.

Holy Mass will be celebrated in St Patrick's Church at 5pm, before a banquet at the '98 Memorial Hall at 6pm. There will be a bar and music on the night and tickets cost just 30. Members of the public are also invited to attending the dancing later in the evening to the wonderful Eamon Jackson Band. Admission to this part is just 10.

Finally, the weekend will be rounded off on Sunday, August 14 back at Dillon's with music and a sing-song.

A nostalgic weekend and an entertaining one is guaranteed, and the organisers are extending an invite to all past pupils to attend this celebration of the school.

For more information on any of the events, email kittycreev@gmail.com.
Looking to stay up to date about all of the news stories and local headlines that are important to Long Islanders? We've rounded up the top coverage for all of the important topics from multiple sources around Long Island, so you can be sure you've got the most recent update on the top stories for Long Island. Have an idea for a news story? Email us at news@longisland.com

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Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > Changing Rights of Minorities in France

by Meghna Kajla

Citizenship in France and Debate on group Rights

The term used citizenship/rights will be interchangeable for both.

As T.H. Marshall explicates, citizenship is evolving and its a combination of three rights: civil, political and social. It is the combination of these three rights that makes citizenship. How does France define citizenship? The Republican French model of citizenship is based on the mixture of jus sanguinis and jus soli. (Steiner N., 2009) The country has come to be known with the assimilationist and liberal conception of citizenship. Assimilationist, liberal and universal conception of citizenship require citizens to give up their first languages and cultures to become full participants in the civic community of the nation-state. (James A. Banks)

France clearly explains citizenship on the basis of Frenchness, Lacilite and civic solidarity. It tries to categorise citizenship into three broad categories: French, French natives and foreigners. The citizenship is given by naturalisation and those of French natives are the people of Muslim origin. So the citizenship has been given according to their last names: if the last name is Islamic they are French Muslims; this is a separate category.1

So France tried to convert all the immigrants into one French identity. This indicates that citizenship is directly related to the assimilationist approach. This makes the particularities present in the society and marks the universalistic notion of citizenship. This debate on particu-laristic and universalistic notion of citizenship can be located in the South Asian region. (Jayal) The debate between group rights and individual rights gets a lead from giving rights to different minorities. The rights of minorities can be seen as recognition and representation. Individual rights assume the individual as a rational being and equal, it fails to see the social construction of a human being. Michel Rosenfield states: The French model is thoroughly individualistic and leaves no room at constitutional level for recognition or deployment of group or national identity. (M. Rosenfield, 2002) The liberal state does not give recognition to the groups; rather it approaches citizenship on individual basis, leaving no room for community, culture, ethnicity, religion. The history of divergence of the state and church gives secularism the basis to secularism in Europe. So there are causal factors for the rights of minorities as being different from the French. It is on this basis that France does not give rights to Muslim minorities. The state believes in radical secularism of divergence between the state and church. It does not give religious rights, ethnic rights to groups.

It is in France that the controversy over foulard was highly debated. The debate is whether these are individual rights on wearing clothes or do they speak of religious sentiments? This debate over group rights and individual rights is of much relevance to our research. The multicultural citizenship argues that certain marginalised groups should be given citizenship. As Kymlicka argues, group rights should be viewed as a form of external protection against majorities, rather than internal restriction of individual rights. The state of France recognises that if the practice of religion is private, the showcase of religious symbols should be private. Young also emphasises that certain groups are excluded; those who are not judged as capable of adopting the general point of view and adherence to equal treatment, necessarily privilege certain cultures and lifestyles over others. (Nick Stevenson 2003, p. 48) The claim made by Muslims for their religion to the state can be individual rights as well. As with the changing post-war era, the national citizenship rights have changed to human rights. (Soysal 1997) It is only through collective group rights that one has come to achieve the nation.

It is this debate on how the national rights have turned into human rights. They are individual and so should be the rights of minorities as individual and not group rights.

Muslim Minorities in France

The debate over the displaying of religious practice in France is highly contested. One cannot wear or showcase their sentiments in public. It is on the path of citizenship that the minorities and their cultures are assimilated into Frenchness. The diversity in population on the basis of ethnicity and religion has been curbed in France at the national level. So with the break of the 2005 riots in the suburb of Paris, it came to limelight that the distinctions are differences present in the society. The state failed in its assimilationist policy and the world for the very first time saw the intolerance among the people of France. To talk about the Muslims in France, it is the largest minority having about 6-8.5 per cent. This is the highest population of Muslims in any European country. The Muslims have migrated from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey.2 It is very difficult to know about the population of Muslims, as France does not provide statistics on the basis of ethnicity and race. So the data is according to the last names and also their origin.

The citizenship of France has been divided into the three categories, where the Muslim identity is only visible by their last names. These immigrants were workers from slave trade, as France was the coloniser of Algeria. The immigrants were brought to France as labourers and were given a status of French by acquisition but later in 1947 the assimilationist policy of France turned them them into French Muslims. They settled in the suburbs of Paris where most of the riots have occurred. The Muslims have created mosques and they have about 1500 Muslim organisations. With this one can see that the Muslims have been accommo-dated as President Sarkozys view on funding mosques became controversial. According to Alec Hargreaves,3 it has also been regarded that Muslims have changed and assimilated in the French society, they more or less accept the norms of the society. In fact they have changed in relation to Frances socio-cultural society.

Riots in France

There have been a series of anger in the population of France. It is mostly in the Muslim- dominated areas. It can have many causal factors. It could be due to their economic and social status in the society. The Muslims in France are living in ghetto-type compounds and there has been constant police surveillance in the area. The history of riots in France dates back to 2005. It was a suburb where young boys jumped into an electricity substation for fear of being caught by the police because there was checking going on in the suburb. Threatened with being caught by the police, the teenagers jumped into the substation and died.

The statistics provide a data on how the Muslims in France are employed, problems they face at the time of interview and how they qualify for an interview.4 It can be seen from this analysis that Muslims receive low response in regard to their CVs accepted and call for interview. This makes the rate of employment within the Muslims quit low. The society in a manner does not accept Muslims as part of their community. The debate on whether the nationalist model of citizenship should prevail or there should be multiculturalism has been already explained.

The riots did not stop after the 2005 riots, a state of national emergency was imposed. It is the state of emergency which is important for us in reconfiguring the rights of minorities. I will elaborate on the same later in the paper. The Charlie Hebdo magazine printing a cartoon of Mohammed, this was accompanied with the killing of writers of the magazine in 2015. The act of blasphemy has been considered only on the Christian ideology and not Islamic. A similar debate occurred in the Dutch society, after the cartoonist drew a cartoon of Mohammed in a paper. This was seen as an attack on Islam. A similar sentiment has been seen in France after Charlie Hebdo. But the society rose with placards of Je suis Charlie. The Paris attack of November 13 at five locations shook France. The effects can be seen with the imposition of the emergency for six long months. It is this power of the state to impose emergency that needs to be analysed and problematised. The nationalist model of France failed in assimilating cultures.5 The Paris attack can be seen in relation to many aspects of the society. The state can look at it from many aspects, including Muslim minorities in France and the wave of immigration due to the ISIS war on Syria. The debate in the world over the migration wave has taken the centre-stage due to the human rights and hospitality6 practised by states. As Germany allowed a certain number of refugees, other countries have allowed refugees or asylum seekers to pass through.

Theoretical Debate on the Rights of Minorities

The minorities in every country are considered as bare life.7 The concept of bare life stands on the practice of the state of inclusion and exclusion of citizens. The inequality in the majority and minorities of any state, till they are not represented equally, results in the minorities continuing to be a victim of bare life. The republican state of France manages to ascertain separation between the church and state, the public and private. This raises the debate on not allowing schoolgirls to wear foulard and scarf in 2004. The display of religion was condemned by the state policy. It is since the debate on Muslim minority from the headscarf that they are considered as minorities in their own nation. The rights of these minorities are being reconfigured and also with the policies of the state changing. This gained a lot of debate in world affairs. There have been incidents and cases on which the Muslims have been targeted. Starting from the Charlie Hebdo, 2005 riots, this change redefined the way Muslims were being treated. The 2004 foulard debate and 2005 riots changed the rights of Muslims. The Paris attack seems to be the most shocking attack in France; this has changed a lot of what is happening in the society. After having been drawn into the scenario of migration and minorities in France, the Muslims have been looked at from a very different perspective. Not only with the French people but the state has been trying to redefine the whole notion of citizenship. At the time of emergency the state redefined and reconfigured the rights of minorities. To borrow the concept of bio-politics8 from Foucault, he describes the micro power of the state to study a human body precisely. He has elaborated this in his lectures delivered at the College de France. The concept of bio-power comes with neo-liberalism as the state policy.

What is bio-politics? It is the microphysics of the human body, a detailed study of the human body. This idea gave rise to the new art of government in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A series of Foucaults concept can be devised like surveillance, governmentality. Governmentality9 is a new art of governance with the help of different administrative bodies of government. It is with the neo-liberalist state that the practice of bio-politics comes into being. Foucault states: Police state entails precisely an objective or set of objectives that could be described as unlimited, since for those who govern in the police state it is not only a matter of taking into account and taking charge of the activity of groups and orders, that is to say of different types of individuals with their particular status, but also by taking charge of activity at the most detailed, individual level. This new art of governance, called govern-mentality by Foucault, is about the constant and detailed surveillance of the state over its citizens. These were the techniques that gave power to the state over the citizens. This idea of governmentality can be related to the way the state uses its power over the citizens to make them feel protected. This protects some from the others. The division of self and the other, where the self gives power against the other. This idea of Foucault will be used in the way the rights of Muslim minorities are being reconfigured in France. The Paris attack over five locations leaving 130 people dead and several injured came as a shock to France as such an attack was never faced by the state.

It is for various reasons relating to security that the state pushes the surveillance and police to the front. There are those citizens who have to be protected and some about whom the state does not seem to care much (minorities). The Muslims living in France are the bare life, to use Agambens term. It is the state that decides for some to be included and others to be excluded. Most cases come from the minorities being excluded and the majority gets included. France disregards to recognise itself as a multicultural state. It tried to make the population fall into the straight line of equality. This was an artificial divide, according to some scientists, because the society and its contradictions are really impor-tant at the time of driving policies. It is on this basis that the Muslims of France have more or less tried to adapt and evolve with the French society but claims of inequality have nevertheless been made. The state, as Foucault describes, takes particular care about its citizens and it is in this that there are certain citizens whose status is accommo-dated, redefined for the comfort of others.

The state reconfigures the rights of Muslims in France on the basis of the power that it exercises over its citizens. It is not in terms of legitimate force10 that it is exercised but a different kind of power which is, in Foucaults term, reproductive.11 The subjects give power to the state in order for the state to become powerful. It is through the unseen power and its various techniques that the state uses to reinforce the concept of security. The subjects give power to the state and in return the latter defines various laws to protect the subjects. The state has a relationship of the protector with its citizens. The certain laws defined by the state tend to be equal before law but the differentiation occurs at the time of the state of emergency, where state has the power to suspend laws and govern in its own way. I will not go into details of the civil and political rights of an individual, which gets suspended along with the emergency. It is the state that reconfigures the rights of the state. As can be seen in France after the Paris attack, Muslim houses have been raided because of the Islamophobia present in the society. In what terms are the rights reconfiguring? La police de recherche etdintervention.12 It is raiding the Muslim houses, interrogations are taking place and every Islamic person is being viewed from a very secluded eye, the police is constantly outside their houses. There is anger in the society and the suburb has police as souvenirs.13 It is in this manner that the rights of Muslims living in France are being reconfigured.

The term reconfigured means to re-structure or re-model differently. It is with this that the basic rights of Muslims living in France are reconfigured. The issue is different whether it will be done for the French as well or not. This will be done in terms of the security threat that the state faces. It has to be seen from the perspective of Muslims living in France. This will also affect the migration that has been taking place at the international level. With Germany accepting migrants and the state of France not accepting refugees by giving a statement of security threat to the nation, also creates a debate on human rights and calls the cosmopolitan notion of citizenship into question. (Soysal) Muslims and their rights are being reconfigured with changes being brought about in their daily lives. There had been troubles with employment and education-related issues and when such an attack is tackled by the state, it tries to ensure the security and governance at the micro level. So have the Muslim citizens the same rights and do they also practise them? Have the rights been reconfigured? The rights, as can be seen from the newspapers, media and magazines, have been listed out by the state to ensure that no other attack of the same sort takes place. The rights of Muslims are not the same not only after the attack but it leaves a taboo for Islam in the society.

Debate on Policy

The debate on rights depends on the govern-ments ruling. If the leaning of the government is towards the Right, then the policies enunciated by the same will be changing the horizon of rights accordingly. The local elections in France were just round the corner after the Paris attack. The Right-leaning party will be nationalist and strict with the immigration policy and also towards the minorities as one party, the National Front of Jean Marie La Pen, behaves in that way. It will act as a pressure on the Parti Socialist of Francois Holland, the present President of France elected in 2011, and force it to carry out restrictive and strict policies towards the immigrants. The National Front party had sent shock waves by not accepting immigrants in 2003 when Sarkozy was the Interior Minister.

The history of Muslims in France dates back to the days of colonialism and it is the effect of slave trade for which France has to accommodate them. The elections won by the National Front in December 2015 was a sign of aggression among the people of France regarding the Jihadist and Islamophobia being experienced in the society. It is also to be seen that the people have voted because of the Paris attack and Je suis Charlie taglines. The party coming to power effects the policies and functioning of the state.

The French society has been a multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multicultural society but the idea of citizenship modulated by the state leaves no room for debates and adjustment to the diversity. But the policies adopted by the state have always been on the path of liberalism and the debate is on whether the liberal states should be accommodating immigrants. (Seyla Ben Habib) The debate that liberal states have always been accommodative to unwanted labour can be correctly located in the case of France where it has always accommodated the minorities but with its own policies. (Joppke)

Conclusion

The rights of the minorities in every state are reconfigured by the state especially when there is a threat perceived by the state from outside or inside. Foucault highlights the power of governance given to the state by the citizens themselves. It is the state which further recon-figures certain rights the minorities can exercise as seen in France. The state of emergency is another excuse to exploit the minorities as the civil and political rights of minorities are curbed. It is through this state mechanism of emergency that the state further exercises its power. It is not today that the debate over French Muslims will be over but whenever there arises a threat to the state, it will again reconfigure their rights. After being reconfigured do the rights of the minorities remain permanent or are they temporary? The social conditions of the minorities do not change for long and leave a taboo but do the legal rights remain permanent? As they can be raided after two years for the same cause and interrogated, their right to privacy in this manner remains curbed. The surveillance and taboo with the French Muslims will stay on as it did after 9/11.

References

Foucault, M. (2004), The Birth of Bio-politics, Lectures at the College de France.

Levevy, G.B. and Madood, T. (2009), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship.

Willes, E. (2007), Headscarves, human rights, and harmonious multicultural society: Implications of the French ban for interpretation of Equality.

Stevenson, N. (2003), Cultural Citizenship.

Steiner, N. (2009), International Migration and Citizenship Today.

Rosenfield, M. (2009), The identity of the constitutional subject; Selfhood, citizenship, culture and community.

Retrieved: December 14 2015, French Politics and Society, Vol. 15, No 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 67-70.

Retrieved: December 14, 2015, Changing Parameters of citizenship and claims-making: Organised Islam in European Public Sphere, Vol. 26, No 4 (Spring 1997), pp. 507-597.

Retrieved: December 13, 2015, Diversity, Group Identity and Citizenship Education in Global Age, Educational Researcher Vol. 37, No 3 2008, pp. 129-139.

Retrieved: December 13,2015, The choice of ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 7-31.

Retrieved: March 23,2010, Why Liberal states accept unwanted immigration, Vol. 50, No. 2 (1998). p. 266-293.

Bibliography

Marshall T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class and other essays.

Miller, D. (2000), Citizenship and National Identity.

Agamben, G. (1998), Homo sacer Sovereign Power and Bare life.

Foucoult, M. (2004), The Birth of Biopoltics, Lectures at the College de France.

Browen, J.R Pluralism and Normativity in French Islamic Reasoning, chap 13.

Stevenson, N. (2003), Cultural Citizenship.

Steiner, N. (2009), International Migration and Citizenship Today.

Levevy, G.B. and Madood, T. (2009), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship.

Willes, E. (2007), Headscarves, human rights, and harmonious multicultural society: Implications of the French ban for interpretation of Equality.

Rosenfield, M. (2009), The identity of the constitutional subject; Selfhood-citizenship, culture and community.

Retrieved: December 13, 2015, Religious Expression in Public Schools: Kirpans in Canada, hijab in France. (1997), pp. 545-561.

Doi: 10.1080/01419870.1997.9993974.

Retrieved: December 13, 2015, The Return of assimilation? Changing perspective on immigration and its sequels in France, Germany and United states, (2001), pp. 531-548.

Doi: 10.1080/01419870120049770.

Retrieved: December 13, 2015, National models of integration in Europe: A comparative and critical analysis (2011 Sage pub), pp. 1-20.

Doi: 10.1177/0002764211409560.

Retrieved: December 14 2015, French Politics and society Vol. 15, No 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 67-70.

Retrieved: December 14, 2015, Changing Parameters of citizenship and claims-making: Organized Islam in European Public Sphere Vol. 26, No 4, (Springer 1997), pp. 507-597.

Retrieved: December 13, 2015, Diversity, Group Identity and citizenship Education in Global Age, Educational Researcher, Vol. 37, No 3, 2008, pp. 129-139.

Doi: 10.3102/0013189X08317501.

Retrieved: December 13,2015, The choice of ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 7-31.

Retrieved: March 23,2010, Why Liberal states accept unwanted immigration, Vol. 50, No. 2(1998). pp. 266-293.

Footnotes

1. This category of Muslims in France is highlighted in the paper written by Patrick Simon The choice of ignorance: the debate on ethnic and racial statistics in France. Spring 2008 pp. 7-31.

2. This is the data collected through http://www.euro-islam.info/country-profiles/france. I am relying on this data for the number of Muslims in France.

3. Alec Hargreaves writes on France ethnicity, racism and culture. He writes in his book Multi-ethnic France that Muslims of France have tried to adjust according to society of France and they have done this very exceptionally.

4. Identifying barriers to Muslim integration in France, Claire L. Adidaa, David D. Laitinb, 1, and Marie-Anne Valfortc.

5. Christophe Bertossi, National models of integration in Europe, Sage Publications, 2011.

6. Hospitality by Derrida. It gives a sense of how to accommodate the migrants by the state. The should welcome refugees, migrants and later on the legal basis should give accommodation. The states should not close doors.

7. Giorgio Agamben: the concept of bare life refers to the Roman law, which barred any human, who committed certain crime his rights of being a citizen will be scarepped. He could be killed by anybody.

8. The birth of Bio Politics Lectures at the College De France 1978-1979 The concept of bio-power of Foucault tries to make sense of security, population and territory. Bio-power is the new rationality of government. Though the term first appeared in The will to knowledge

9. Governmentality is an idea of Foucault, He conceptualises a police state form of governance in the eighteenth century.

10. Max Webers concept of legitimacy that a state has authority to use force.

11. Foucault describes reproductive power by describing the relationship as not dominating rather the subject produces power and the state reproduces power. It is a mutual and positive relationship.

12. Le Canard enchaine, Joounal Satriqueparaissant le mercredi, December 9, 2015. It gave a detail on how the raids, interrogations after the Paris attack.

13. Courier international.com N 1310 du 10 au 16 decembre 2015.

The author is an M.Phil scholar at the Delhi Universitys Department of Political Science. Here is the paper she wrote for her course work in M.Phil at the University.
Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > Reforming the Direct Tax Reforms in India

On April 29, 2016, Indias Income Tax Department released tax statistics after a gap of almost 16 years. Till 2000, the Tax Department used to publish All India Income Tax Statistics but the publication was discontinued for some unknown reason. No explanations were given by the authorities for the discontinuation of this publication despite numerous demands made for its release by Indian economists and researchers.

According to media reports, the government released this data after French economist Thomas Piketty, the author of the bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, highlighted the need for greater data transparency to carry out research on income inequalities in India. During his trip to India in January, Piketty also called upon wealthy Indians to pay more tax so as to reduce the levels of income inequality in the country.

The Data

The Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has uploaded a total of 84-page aggregate direct tax statistics on its official website. In its official release, the Tax Department said the key objective of publishing these data statistics was to encourage wider use and analysis of Income Tax data by departmental personnel and academicians. There is no denying that reliable and timely tax statistics are necessary not only for academic research and public debate but can immensely help in formulating appropriate tax policies.

The time-series data between fiscal 2001 and fiscal 2015 contains valuable information such as the total number of taxpayers (individual and corporate), the number of permanent account numbers (PAN), actual direct taxes collection, number of effective assessees and administrative costs. One hopes that the Indian tax authorities will now periodically put all direct and indirect tax statistics in the public domain. Since most tax returns are nowadays filed electronically, aggregate data could be made available to the public within weeks. In this regard, the Indian tax authorities can seek guidance from the other G-20 countries.

Direct and Indirect Taxes

For those who are not familiar with the taxation system in India, let me explain. In India, taxes are broadly classified into two categoriesdirect and indirect. Direct taxes are applied directly on individuals and corporations and collected from them. Income tax, corporate tax and wealth tax are prime examples of direct taxes.

On the other hand, indirect taxes are collected by the government from an intermediary and are applied on the manufacture or sale of goods and services. Sales tax, value added tax, service tax, excise duty and custom duty are prime examples of indirect taxes.

By and large, direct taxes are considered to be progressive because they are based on the ability to pay; besides they help in reducing income and wealth inequalities, while indirect taxes are considered to be regressive because every consumer (rich or poor) pay the same price for the purchase of a commodity. The indirect taxes hit the poor more than the rich because the poor spend a large share of their income on consumption. Unlike direct taxes, indirect taxes are easier to collect with less administrative costs.

The Alarming Statistics

The facts revealed in income tax statistics are shocking, to say the least. Any observer of the Indian economy would find it difficult to believe the extent of poor tax collection in India.

Below are some really startling direct tax statistics:

 Only one per cent of Indias population paid tax on their earnings in fiscal 2013. India has a total population of 1.2 billion but only 12.5 million paid tax in fiscal 2013.

 In 2015-16, only 51 million (about four per cent) filed income tax returns. It is important to note that the number of actual taxpayers is much lower because many have declared their earnings below the tax threshold. Over half of the tax returns have zero tax liability. For instance, 16.2 million paid zero tax in fiscal 2013 while 28.7 million filed tax returns.

 In fiscal 2013, there were only 18,500 assessees (individual and corporate) who paid income tax in excess of Rs 10 million. Out of them only 5430 individuals paid tax of Rs 10 million or more.

 In 2009-10, the share of direct taxes was 60.78 per cent of total taxes but it fell to 56.16 per cent in 2014-15. It is projected to drop further to 51.05 per cent in 2015-16. Whereas the share of indirect taxes is rapidly increasing since 2010.

 Only three Indians paid tax of Rs 1 billion or more in fiscal 2013. Only eight individuals paid tax between Rs 500 million-Rs 1 billion during the same year.

 In terms of share of direct taxes in the Indian economy, the direct tax-GDP ratio was 6.3 per cent in 2007-08 but is projected to fall to 5.47 per cent in 2015-16, the lowest in this decade. Overall, the growth rate in collection of direct taxes is lower than the growth rate in nominal GDP.

 Just two Indian States, Maharashtra (39.9 per cent) and Delhi (13.1 per cent) account for 53 per cent of Indias total income tax. The maximum growth in tax collection has been witnessed in smaller States (Sikkim, Mizoram, Nagaland and Kerala) between 2008-09 and 2014-15.

All the above statistics paint a not-so-rosy picture about the status of direct tax penetration and collection in India.

Several conclusions can be inferred from these statistics. First, the wealthy Indians and big corporations are not paying adequate direct taxes. And there is a complete mismatch between the growing number of dollar millionaires and billionaires in India and tax revenue receipts. Instead of relying on the salaried class (who constitute the biggest segment of taxpayers), the government should target the super-rich for better tax compliance and widening the tax base.

Second, our tax administration is still not free from corruption and abuse of power. Despite two decades of reforms in tax administration, there is a widespread public perception that tax bureaucracy is corrupt and inefficient. Third, domestic tax evasion is rampant but it has not received much attention from successive governments. The present government claims to be focused on bringing back dirty money stashed abroad but, at the same time, strict legal, administrative and political reforms should be undertaken to stop the tax evasion taking place within the country.

Need for Comprehensive Reforms

These statistics call for a fundamental rethink in Indias tax policy framework if the country wants to move away from a regressive to a progressive tax regime. Over the years, the successive governments have launched a number of direct tax reform measures.

There is no denying that some eight million new taxpayers have been added in the last five years. Besides, numerous steps have been undertaken to make the tax administration more transparent and efficient.

Nevertheless, these statistics underscore that the current tax reforms fall short of the avowed objective of raising substantial financial resources to meet the countrys social and developmental needs.

With such a low tax collection, India cannot achieve its growth potential, leave aside the country becoming a superpower by 2020. India cannot build world-class public infrastructure and eradicate poverty from external financing (commercial or concessional) alone. The fulfilment of basic needs of the masses requires substantial financial resources. Domestic resource mobilisation through progressive taxation should play the lead role in achieving these developmental goals.

In the post-liberalisation period, the policy-discourse on reducing the Budget deficit has been predominantly centred on curtailing government spending rather than enhancing tax revenues and broadening the tax base. These statistics call for a balanced approach.

While the proposed Goods and Services Tax (GST) is expected to broaden the base of indirect taxes, comprehensive administrative and legal reforms are required to curb massive evasion of direct taxes in India. Perhaps the time has come for reforming the direct tax reforms.

Kavaljit Singh is the Director of Madhyam, a policy research institute (website: www.madhyam.org.in) based in New Delhi. He can be contacted at e-mail: kavaljit.singh@gmail.com
Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > The Black Day

by Samit Kar

In his recent address in the Man ki baat aired through the public broadcasting system all over the country, Narendra Modi described June 26 as the Dark Day in the history of India. This year, this day happened to be the 41st anniversary of the day of the declaration of the Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975. The Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, twitted on this day to remind the countrymen how Indira Gandhi on the alibi to restore public order had tried to continue her stint as the Prime Minister beyond five years in the wake of the historic judgement of the Allahabad High Court. The learned High Court observed that owing to severe malpractice in the 1971 Lok Sabha election in the Raibareiley constituency in Uttar Pradesh, the election of Indira Gandhi as an MP was nullified. But considering the nationwide growing unpopularity of her party, she feared to face the repoll and instead declared Emergency to extend her tenure and continue to be the Prime Minister.

The 20-month long Emergency period found India experiencing the worst form of draconian rule putting aside all democratic rights of the countrymen. A spate of arrests of several prominent leaders was made in order to make her the one and only leader of our country. People began to ridicule and say, there is only one male member in the Union Cabinet and the name is Indira Gandhi. Then All India Congress Committee President D.K. Barooah said, Indira is India and India is Indira, and we are proud to be her rubber stamps. Her son, Sanjay Gandhi, began to amass a tremendous amount of exta-constitutional power and many of the severe misuses of power during the Emergency period were his handiwork. The charter of 20-point programme declared at this time was his brainchild. The main brunt of the onslaught was meted out to all the major political parties save the members and leaders of the CPI who were then the ally of Indira Gandhi. Other Left parties were by and large beyond the purview of assault of Indira Gandhi barring a few exceptions. For example, the vocal parliamentarian of the CPI-M elected from the Diamond Harbour constituency, Jyotirmoy Bose, was put behind bars.

Some Professors joined Satyen Sen, then Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University, to garland Sanjay Gandhi when he visited the University. But at that time he was not holding any government position. Later, some Professors, who garlanded him, became the most trusted aides of Anil Biswas, the head of the West Bengal unit of the CPI-M. The nexus between the top Left leaders and the Congress party led by the Nehru-Gandhi family was always very cordial. In the event of the marriage of Indira and Feroze, the Left leaders were known to be the witnesses. Though Jyotirmoy Bose was jailed at the instance of Indira Gandhi in 1975, he was not a prominent leader in the party echelon. Moreover, there is a widespread belief, Indira got the approval of some senior leaders of the CPI-M to arrest him as some of his startling accusations against her put the Prime Minister on the wrong foot. Bose, a former Major of the Indian Army, used to have a personal Research Team to expose Indiras misdeeds and severe corruption. As a consequence, utterly revengeful in character, Indira stated publicly that Bose should not be in Parliament in future. However, the historic victory of the CPI-M-supported Janata Party led to her own removal from the Lok Sabha until she could make her re- entry through her victory from the Chikmagalur constituency in Karnataka.

Like the infamous torture and brutality on the Opposition in the Emergency period, the treatment meted out to the CPI-M members and supporters at the grassroots in West Bengal, Kerala and the newly formed Tripura was very harsh. The emergence of the party, primarily in these States was largely possible due to the consolidation of marginal groups comprising small peasants, plantation workers, industrial workers, refugees, school teachers till then very lowly paid, students, youth and poor and low middle class men and women. The call of socialism in search of a better future cemented the marginal groups to launch a strong anti-Congress movement towards the formation of the new alternative. Therefore, most of the political parties formed at the Central or State levels could germinate due to the incessant anti-Congress movement especially against the authoritarian Indira and inept Manmohan regime. The beginning of the long movement had the kick-start on June 26, 1975, 41 years from now.

Narendra Modi called this day the Dark Day in the annals of the history of our country. During the days of the Emergency, Arun Jaitley was a firebrand student leader studying in the Commerce stream in Delhi University. He and hundreds of students were beaten up by the goons of Sanjay Gandhi and police of the Indira Government. When the Janata Government was founded in March 1977, Arun Jaitley and other student leaders showed the cruel marks on their body due to brutal torture in the victory celebration rally held at Boat Club in New Delhi. More than 11,000 local leaders and supporters of the CPI-M were rendered homeless by the goons and police of Siddhartha Sankar Ray. The birth of the entire West Bengal CPI-M happened due to staunch anti-Congressism. It is not an easy task now to melt the great divide. The day of June 26 is indeed a Dark Day in our memory lane. But it also gave the glorious opportunity in the ushering in of many major political parties and leaders who emerged from the famous Sarvodaya Movement headed by Jayaprakash Narayan from Champaran in Bihar until it spread like a prairie fire across the country leading to the installation of the first non-Congress Government led by Morarji Desai and Jagjivan Ram as his Deputy. Every dark tunnel is succeeded by endless light. No wonder the Dark Day bloosomed into a Sunny Day.

The author is a former Sociology Faculty in the Presidency University, Kolkata.
Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > Bloodbath at Dhaka

The killing of dozens of people by terrorists at Dhaka is not an aberration, but the product of a committed mind that has been brainwashed by fanaticism. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is quite right when she says that this is not Islam, yet the Muslims all over must introspect why their co-religionists are striking all over and at regular intervals. Dhakas Information Minister Hasanul Haq has blamed Pakistan for the attack. This may well be true, but there has to be evidence. Otherwise, the criticism will be considered a part of the inimical attitude by Dhaka towards Islamabad.

First in Paris, then Brussels and now Dhaka, the message is always the same. Non-believers have no space if they do not accept Islam as the one religion nearest to God. True, this mocks at ideologies like secularism and democracy. But if the discipline of Islam is to be accepted, there is no place for dissent. The madrassas all over the world teach the tenets of Islam and make you remember the Koran by heart. But there is little place for science or technology.

India is probably the only country which has compulsorily introduced science in madrassas. But the mullahs and maulvis are not happy with this and wherever they canin remote parts of the countrythey do away with teaching in science. Of course, there are exceptions like former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Pakistans A.Q. Khan. They represent the brilliant mind behind the finished product they brought before the wider world. But the weapon they are able to keep on the anvil can be lethal and destructive.

I recall when I interviewed the Bihar-born Dr A.Q. Khan he warned me that if you ever drive us to the wall, as was the case when East Pakistan seceded, we will use the Bomb straight away. In fact, I have heard some people saying in Pakistan that they would use the Bomb first and destroy India. But I argued with Khan that you might destroy Northern India but that would also be the end of Pakistan. India would still be able to rebuild the country with the resources available in the south.

It is strange that A.Q. Khan remains a hero in Pakistan, although he has sold the nuclear knowhow at an exorbitant price to countries from North Korea to Iran. It is a frightening scenario, but thanks to Khan, a dirty nuclear Bomb is a possibility anywhere in the Islamic world. Imagine also some terrorists getting hold of the Bomb. They can hold the world to ransom.

What happened at Dhaka was indiscriminate killing at the posh Gulshan restaurant in an exclusive part of the city earmarked for diplomats. Suppose those same terrorists had at their disposal a dirty Bomb? What could have been the consequences? Instead of a few dozen casualties the numbers of those killed would have been in hundreds of thousands and stretching across the border.

This should make the governments in South Asia conscious of the fact that terrorism is not now confined to distant places in Syria and Yemen. ISIS is already present and it claims to have local support. To build a dirty Bomb it is not necessary to hijack finished nuclear weapons. All that is required is access to any civil nuclear facilities, either power reactors like Kanupp in Karachi or research centres at Trombay near Mumbai. There cannot be any foolproof ban on the procurement of key strategic materials needed for the Bomb.



Countries in South Asia have to come together on this specific issue and devise suitable steps so that this region doesnt become a hunting ground for nuclear adventure. This will also involve a concerted drive against the fundamentalists. For example, persons like Hyderabad-based Owaisi who are trying to win headlines by taking a stand which is palpably wrong but probably acceptable in the eyes of fanatics.

I wish the media wouldnt give him the publicity he is getting because his eyes are fixed on the space he gets in the media. But then it is also understandable that the media cannot ignore the provocative statements he makes. If we look back at the subcontinents history the seeds of separation were sown by two Lahore-based newspapers, Zimidar representing the Muslims, and Pratap, the Hindus. They incited both communities and made Hindus and Muslims feel they belonged to two separate nations.

I recall that the feeling of being different came to be cultivated at the Law College, Lahore, where l was studying. The common kitchen eventually was divided into Hindu kitchen and Muslim kitchen, just like they started selling Hindu paani and Muslim paani at the railway station. Fortunately, most students were not affected by this. At the Law College dining room Muslim students would get food from their kitchen, Hindu students would in turn get food from their kitchen. But we all sat and ate together.

I feel that even though we did not bother about the separation of the kitchen, yet it gave birth to the idea of division and this ultimately led to partition of the subcontinent. But we never imagined that there would be forced migration of populations. We, who decided to stay in Sialkot city, now part of Pakistan, thought that we would be in a minority, just as Muslims would be in India. But both will be living peacefully. This did not happen because the bureaucracy on both sides was also divided on the basis of religion.

We in Sialkot experienced how the Muslim police connived at the looting and killing of non-Muslims because similar was the case in East Punjab. In the process we killed one million people of each others communities. Till today there is no accountability and I personally think that non-Muslims in India should offer an apology to the Muslims on the other side, just as they should do the same to us.

This may not make amends for the horrors, but at least it might begin a new chapter of healing. The terrorists who are the product of those terrible times may then be condemned by the people themselves and they would not be able to get the backing they need. Then the happening in Dhaka will be recalled with horror and humiliation.

The author is a veteran journalist renowned not only in this country but also in our neighbouring states of Pakistan and Bangladesh where his columns are widely read. His website is www.kuldipnayar.com
Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > History and Legacy of International Working Mens Association After 150 (...)

by Marcello Musto

On September 28, 1864, St. Martins Hall, in the heart of London, was packed to overflowing with some two thousand workers. They had come to attend a meeting called by English trade union leaders and a small group of companions from the Continent. This meeting gave birth to the prototype of all the main organisations of the workers movement: the International Working Mens Association. Quickly, the International aroused passions all over Europe. It made class solidarity a shared ideal and inspired large numbers of women and men to struggle for the most radical of goals: changing the world. Thanks to its activity, workers were able to gain a clearer under-standing of the mechanisms of the capitalist mode of production, to become more aware of their own strength, and to develop new, more advanced forms of struggle for their rights.

When it was founded, the central driving force of the International was British trade unionism, the leaders of which were mainly interested in economic questions. They fought to improve the workers conditions, but without calling capitalism into question. Hence, they conceived the International primarily as an instrument to prevent the import of manpower from abroad in the event of strikes. Then there were the mutualists, long dominant in France. In keeping with the theories of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they opposed any working-class involvement in politics, and the strike as a weapon of struggle. The third group in importance were the Communists, opposing the existing system of production and espousing the necessity of political action to overthrow it. At its founding, the ranks of the International also included a number of workers inspired by utopian theories, and exiles having vaguely democratic ideas and cross-class conception who considered the International as an instrument for the issuing of general appeals for the liberation of oppressed peoples.

Securing the cohabitation of all these currents in the International, around a programme so distant from the approaches with which each had started out, was Karl Marxs great political accomplishment. His political talents enabled him to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable. It was Marx who gave a clear purpose to the International, and who achieved a non-exclusio-nary, yet firmly working class-based, political programme that won it mass support beyond sectarianism. The political soul of its General Council was always Marx: he drafted all its main resolutions and prepared almost all its congress reports.

Not Only Marx

Nevertheless, despite the impression created by the Soviet Unions propaganda and by the majority of the ideologically driven scholars who wrote on the International, this organisation was much more than a single individual, even one as brilliant as Marx.

The International was a vast social and political movement for the emancipation of the working classes; not, as it has often been written, the creation of Marx. It was made possible first of all by the labour movements struggles in the 1860s. One of its basic rulesand the fundamental distinction from previous labour organisationswas that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. The orthodox, dogmatic view of Marxs role in the Inter-national, according to which he mechanically applied to the stage of history a political theory already forged in the confines of his study, is totally divorced from the historical reality. Marx was essential to the International, but also the International had a very positive impact on Marx. Being directly involved in workers struggles, Marx was stimulated to develop and sometimes revise his ideas, to put old certainties up for discussion and ask himself new questions, and, in particular, to sharpen his critique of capitalism by drawing the broad outlines of a communist society.

From late 1866 on, strikes intensified in many countries and formed the core of a new and important wave of mobilisations. The first major struggle to be won with the Internationals support was the Parisian bronze workers strike in the winter of 1867. Also successful in their outcomes were the iron workers strike at Marchienne, in Belgium, the long dispute in the Provencal mineral basin, and the Geneva building workers strike. The scenario was the same in each of these events: workers in other countries raised funds in support of the strikers and agreed not to accept work that would have turned them into industrial mercenaries; as a result, the bosses were forced to compromise on many of the strikers demands. These advances were greatly favoured by the diffusion of newspapers that either sympathised with the ideas of the International, or were veritable organs of the General Council. Both categories contributed to the development of class consciousness and the rapid circulation of news concerning the activity of the International.

Across Europe, the Association increased the number of its members and developed an efficient organisational structure. More symbolically significant still, at least for the hopes it initially awakened, was its new mooring on the other side of the Atlantic, where immigrants who had arrived in recent years began to establish the first sections of the International in the United States. However, the organisation suffered from two handicaps at birth that it would never overcome. Despite repeated exhortations from the General Council in London, it was unable either to cut across the nationalist character of its various affiliated groups or to draw in workers born in the New World. When the German, French and Czech sections founded the Central Committee of the International for North America, in December 1870, it was unique in the history of the International in having only foreign-born members. The most striking aspect of this anomaly was that the International in the United States never disposed of an English-language press organ. At the beginning of the 1870s, the International reached a total of 50 sections with a combined membership of 4000, but this was still only a tiny proportion of the American industrial workforce of more than two million.

Developments across Europe

In Europe, the situation was very different. For all the difficulties bound up with a diversity of nationalities, languages and political cultures, the International managed to achieve unity and coordination across a wide range of organisations and spontaneous struggles. Its greatest merit was to demonstrate the crucial importance of class solidarity and international cooperation.

The most significant moment of the Inter-national coincided with the Paris Commune. In March 1871, after the end of Franco-Prussian War, the workers of Paris rose against the new government of Adolphe Thiers and took power in the city. Henceforth, the International was at the centre of the storm, and gained enormous notoriety. For capitalists and the middle classes, it represented a great threat to the established order, whereas for workers it fuelled hopes for a world without exploitation and injustice. The labour movement had an enormous vitality and that was apparent everywhere. News-papers linked to the International increased in both number and overall sales. The insurrection of Paris fortified the workers movement, impelling it to adopt more radical positions and to intensify its militancy. Once again, France showed that revolution was possible, clarifying its goal to be building a society different from that of capitalism, but also that, to achieve this, the workers would have to create durable and well-organised forms of political association. The next step to take then, as stated by Marx, was understanding that the economic move-ment of the working class and its political action are indissolubly united. That led the International to push for the foundation of a key instrument of the modern workers movement: the political party (although it should be stressed that the understanding of this was much broader than that adopted by communist organisations after the October Revolution).

When the International dissolved itself in 1872, it was a very different organisation from what it had been at the time of its foundation: reformists no longer constituted the bulk of the organisation and anti-capitalism had become the political line of the whole Association (including new tendencies like the anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin). The wider picture, too, was radically different. The unification of Germany in 1871 confirmed the onset of a new age, with the nation-state the central form of political, legal and territorial identity.

The initial configuration of the International thus became outmoded, just as its original mission came to an end. The task was no longer preparing for and organising Europe-wide support for strikes, nor calling congresses proclaiming the usefulness of trade unions or the need to socialise the land and the means of production. Such themes were now part of the collective heritage of the organisation. After the Paris Commune, the real challenge for the workers movement became how to organise to end the capitalist mode of production and overthrow the institutions of the bourgeois world.

In later decades, the workers movement adopted a consistent socialist programme, expanded throughout Europe and then the rest of the world, and built new structures of supranational coordination. Apart from the continuity of names (the Second International of Karl Kautsky, from 1889-1916, the Third International of Lenin, from 1919 to 1943, or the Socialist International of the German Chancellor Willy Brandt, from 1951 till today), the various Internationals of socialist politics have referredalthough in very different waysto the legacy of the First International. Thus, its revolutionary message proved extraordinarily fertile, producing results over time much greater than those achieved during its existence.

A Dispersed Heritage

The International was the locus of some of the most famous debates of the labour movement, such as that on Communism or Anarchy. The congresses of the International were also where, for the first time, a major transnational organisation came to decisions about crucial issues, which had been discussed before its foundation, that subsequently became strategic points in the political programmes of socialist movements across the world. Among these are: the indispensable function of trade unions; the socialisation of land and means of production; the importance of participating in elections, and doing this through independent parties of the working class; and the conception of war as an inevitable product of the capitalist system.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, everything that had to do with socialism was wrongly associated with the Soviet Union and, therefore, hastily dismissed. Everywhere, the moderate Left embraced completely the agenda of neoliberalism and treated Marx as a skeleton of the past to be hidden in the closet. At the same time, what was left of the radical Left abandoned references to the dense theory of the classical labour movement and opted for instant book thinkers who did not provide much more than empty slogans that were, after a few years, quickly forgotten. In different ways, both social-democrats and neo-Marxists contributed to the general trend which held that socialism belonged to eternal oblivion.

With the most recent crisis of capitalismthat has sharpened even more than before the division between social classesthe political legacy of the organisation founded in London in 1864 has regained relevance, making its lessons today more timely than ever. The literature dealing with alternatives to capita-lism, which all but dried up after 1989, is showing signs of revival in many countries; and after 2014 there have been, all over the world, dozens of conferences and publications of articles, books and special issues of journals commemorating the 150th anniversary of the International.

At a time when socialist ideas have finally been liberated from the chains of Soviet ideology, a more faithful account of their genesis may well have important implications for future studies on the history of the labour movement, and for the contemporary struggle of the working classes.

Marcello Musto is an Assistant Professor of Sociological Theory at York University (Toronto). One of his latest books is entitled Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > Neoliberalism: Its Reality Exposed

by S.G. Vombatkere

Neoliberalism is free-market fundamentalism. The central dogma of neoliberalism is economic growth, achieved by:

 increasing competition through deregulation (watering-down of social, welfare, health, labour and environmental laws), and opening domestic markets to foreign competition; and

 severely limiting the role of the state by privatisation of state assets and liberalisation of economic policies, simultaneously increasing corporate influence and involvement in gover-nance.

This agenda of economic growth has become the focus of economic thinking and is institu-tionalised in countries across the globe with impetus imparted by the economic clout of the IMF, WB, WTO. The reason that this was accepted by countries across the globe is that it admirably suited the elite-politician-corporate nexus which governs all countries, including democracies.

Neoliberalism is personal (corporations are legal persons) profit-at-any-cost from capital-intensive economic growth, reckoned using economic parameters like GDP growth and per capita consumption. This model of economic development promotes debt, global trade and consumerism, subordinating or negating democracy, equity, social justice and freedom. Indeed, Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, speaking at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002), said: Let us face an uncomfortable truth. The model of development that we are accustomed to has been fruitful for a few and flawed for many. A path to prosperity that ravages the environment and leaves a majority of humankind behind in squalor will soon prove to be a dead-end road for everyone.

But the IMF-WB continues to advocate neoliberal economics, which is maximum market freedom and minimum state intervention. In effect, the government maintains the interests of the ultra-rich, who control the government to confine itself to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. Thus the governments functions are gradually taken over by private enterprise which is prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services with the aim of achieving corporate freedom from democracy. [Ref. 1]

Indias New Economic Policy

Over the decades the IMF-WB, as the worlds foremost lending agencies and purveyors of knowledge, have heavily influenced Third World governments. Beginning in the 1970s, the WBs global training and outreach programmes targeted opinion-makers and decision-makers like Central and State legislators, bureaucrats, technical specialists, journalists, teachers and civil society leaders. They were trained in WB Institutes and partner institutions, including reputed Western universities, in subjects related to economic development. [Ref. 2]

The WB thus trained influential persons to generate debt and manage it through the IMF-recommended structural adjustment, because debt is an efficient tool [which] ensures access to other peoples raw materials and infrastructure on the cheapest possible terms. [Ref. 3]

Democratic processes were bypassed and governments influenced at various levels, and public opinion moulded towards a radical change in beliefs and perceptions about the nature of public goods and the balance between government responsibility and private-sector opportunity. All this constituted coercive introduction of neoliberal policies.

Indias New Economic Policy, formulated by Dr Manmohan Singh as the Union Finance Minister in 1991, was specifically about the IMF-WB-orches-trated economic reforms including structural adjustment effected by a slew of measures like currency devaluation, liberalising the economy, removing subsidies, privatising public assets, relaxing environmental and labour laws, and deregulating and lowering standards to encourage foreign investment. The NEP-1991 was effectively furthered by the thousands of WB-trained opinion-, decision- and policy-makers in govern-ments and educational institutions. The NEP-1991 was pursued with dedication by successive Indian governments over nearly three decades under PMs P.V. Narasimha Rao, A.B. Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. Currently, PM Narendra Modis government is aggressively accelerating the same economic policy and widening the economic gap, with unpredictable social consequences.

Opposition to Neoliberalism

The effects of neoliberal policies, led by the IMF-WB-GATT, were debt crises, severe environmental degradation and crashing Third World economies. More specifically, it caused reduced public spending on health and education, currency collapse, growing unemployment, rising food and fuel prices, and falling wages. Spontaneous worldwide peoples campaigns opposed the displacement of popu-lations due to mega-projects and consequent environmental degradation. In India, hundreds of large, medium and small dams in the Narmada river valley, constructed with WB loans, were questioned by the Narmada Bachao Andolan.

Besides these grassroots movements on all continents, intellectuals also consistently critiqued the neoliberal policies but these critiques were rarely, if ever, given half-decent coverage in the corporate-owned main-stream media. Chile was an extreme case, where opponents of neoliberalism were liquidated in their thousands. [Ref. 1]

Neoliberalism in India

Successive Indian governments over nearly two decades under PMs Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and now Modi, have moved towards a closer political relationship with the USA under successive Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. Politics between and within countries is increasingly driven by economic considerations, and the cutting edge of the strategic India-US relationship, declared as civilian nuclear and defence cooperation, is finally based upon congruence of economic policy.

This policy remains firmly founded upon economic reforms advocated and subtly enforced by the IMF-WB-GATT trinity, as built into Indias NEP-1991. It also led to India joining the WTO in 1995 without discussion in Parliament. Thus, Indias economic policy position is currently dictated by the IMF-WB-WTO combine, which is largely under the USAs control.

Corporate control of government functions in the USA has for long been blatantly obvious. In India, beginning with the introduction of the NEP-1991, the effects of neoliberal policies have become starkly obvious in the last decade. Neoliberal economics has enlarged the economic gap between growing numbers of Indian dollar-billionaires and the less-than-Rs 20-per-day vast majority.

Neoliberalism is Alive and Well

In India, neoliberalism has grown strong roots, and Big Money has entered governance, beginning with influencing the election process itself and into all democratic processes, to influence the executive, legislative and even the judicial functions of the state.

The Radia tapes scandal and the ongoing Essar/Ambani tapes episode, which alleges corporate collusion with the executive, the legislature and the judiciary to bypass constitutional processes, are very scary, to say the least. Since it spans a period of about 15 years, including PMOs beginning with PM A.B. Vajpayees period, it is evident that regardless of the party in power, corporates influence governments in their own interest, and the public or national interest in governance remain a poor second.

Umpteen evidences of neoliberal policies can be provided, but three examples are quoted here.

One, Budget. In the Budget 2015-16, Rs 5.49 lakh crores was written off as revenue foregone by the government against corporate income tax, excise duty and customs duty. If that is what the present NDA-2 Government did, in the period 2005-06 to 2014-15 of UPA rule, the total revenue foregone was Rs 42 lakh crores, of which customs duty revenue foregone on gold, diamonds and jewellery alone was Rs 4.38 lakh crores. At the same time, merely Rs 34,700 crores was allocated for the MGNREGA, and many poor people, who had managed to get the guaranteed employment, have not been paid their miserable wages for months.

Two, Finance. Vijay Mallya was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2002 with the support of the Congress and JD(S), and for a second term in 2010 with the BJPs backing. His debts are estimated to exceed Rs 4000 crores with the public sector banks, which have kindly assisted him by restructuring his loans, providing fresh loans of public money to pay the interest on earlier loans on which he had defaulted. And he is among the smallest of several corporate captains who are defaulters, together forming the bulk of the growing NPAs of the public sector banks. This is evidence of the politician-corporate nexus across political parties. However, the same public sector banks frequently announce auction-sale of properties of persons who have defaulted on loans of one or two lakhs.

Three, Transportation. On June 16, 2016, as part of economic reforms, the NDA-2 Government approved the National Civil Aviation Policy to increase air connectivity, make it easy for new airlines to operate abroad, permit European and SAARC country airlines to function in India, and plan new airports. It also made air travel cheaper in India. When air travel is the least fuel-efficient transportation mode, and even cheap air travel is possible only for those who are already well-off, investment in this sector clearly favours the wealthy. Cheaper and more fuel-efficient transpor-tation modes to serve the majority receive less investment and attention. In the railways, heavy investment is planned for high-fare bullet trains, when ordinary trains for ordinary people remain wholly inadequate. In UPA times (2013), the government announced that bulk diesel consumers like railways and state transport corporations would have to purchase diesel at market-determined rates, while diesel purchased at fuel outlets (for private car owners) would continue to receive subsidy, displaying the tilt away from greater public good while keeping the wealthy happy.

Over at least the past two decades, there are literally hundreds of ongoing peoples movements all over India, protesting against one or other proposed, ongoing or completed infrastructure project, or against State and Central governments policies and laws which actively violate, deny or dilute peoples constitutional rights and freedoms in favour of corporate interests. The foregoing examples are barely representative.

It is noteworthy that Dr Manmohan Singh was a WB employee before he became the Union Finance Minister and later the Prime Minister for two full terms. Also, when he first assumed office as the PM, he immediately nominated Montek Ahluwalia, who joined him from the IMF as his Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. The present RBI Governor, Raghuram Rajan, was the Chief Economist in the IMF. This is adequate demonstration how the neoliberal agenda has been very effectively imposed on India.

However, even though neoliberalism is alive and well in India and apparently in the rest of the world too, clouds appear to be gathering on the horizon.

From the Temple of Neoliberalism

An internal study group of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently reported that their decades-long advocacy and practice of neoliberal economics have serious failings. The Report is titled Neoliberalism Oversold?, with the boldfaced sentence: Instead of delivering growth, some neoliberal policies have increased inequality, thereby jeopardising durable expansion. [Ref.4 ]

The Report recognises that a major effect of neoliberal economics has been to heighten economic inequality between and within nations. As Benjamin Dangl wryly puts it, They were only about 40 years late. [Ref. 5]

While the Report claims benefits of the neoliberal ideology (there is much to cheer in the neoliberal agenda), it admits that it has not delivered on the following aspects:

 benefits in terms of growth are difficult to establish, the costs of increased inequality are prominent, and

 increased inequality hurts the sustainability of growth.

Forbes article by Tim Worstall [Ref. 6] decries the arguments of failure of neoliberalism by quoting Financial Times: .... the article is more a reflection of the vigorous debates under way inside the IMF than an official take-down of the free market policies the fund has long advocated.

One observes that the holy grail of hitherto unassailable Hayek-Friedman economic growth has been questioned from within the temple of neoliberalism itself. Even if one admires the atmosphere of vigorous debate within the IMF and the courage of the analysts of Neoliberalism Oversold?, one cannot help surmising that questioning what was unquestionable for 40-plus years is a step towards take-down of [IMFs] free market policies, especially in the light of 40-years-long well-argued criticism, and intellectual and grassroots objections to free-market policies.

It is curious that Worstalls supportive article, dated May 28, 2016, predates the IMFs Neolibera-lism Oversold? which is dated June 1, 2016. Notwithstanding that the IMF has admitted to certain failings of neoliberalism and not to its failure, the failings that it has admitted to are so central to the success of neoliberalism that it is tantamount to admission of failure.

Benefits and Costs

The free market has long been touted as the best means to create growth and lift people out of poverty. Accordingly, the benefits claimed in the Report are:

 global trade has rescued millions from abject poverty, and

 privatisation of state-owned enterprises has

in many instances

emphasis supplied led to more efficient provision of services and lowered the fiscal burden on governments.

The claimed benefit of rescuing millions from abject poverty is disputable because governments have long been manipulating statistics to show decreasing levels of poverty so as to provide an attractive investment climate which will improve economic growth. The second claimed benefit is qualified by the phrase in many instances, which implies that in many other instances, privatisation was not successful if not actually harmful. Also if, as admitted, benefits in terms of growth are difficult to establish, how can efficient provision of services ...  by privatisation of state-owned assets be claimed except for specific instances?

A telling sentence in the Report speaks of uncertain benefits and certain costs: Although growth benefits are uncertain, costs in terms of increased economic volatility and crisis frequency seem more evident. And as Benjamin Dangl puts it, Instead of delivering growth, the report explains that neoliberal policies of austerity and lowered regulation for capital movement have in fact increased inequality and this inequality might itself undercut growth. [Ref. 5]

Further, in a masterly understatement, the Report says: ... the benefits of

some

policies that are an important part of the neoliberal agenda appear to have been

somewhat

overplayed. emphasis supplied It also goes on to say, ... there is now strong evidence that inequality can significantly lower both the level and the durability of growth, even while the economic gap between the one per cent haves and the 99 per cent have-nots widens, and social tensions mount.

The Report states in the very first paragraph, that the phrase neoliberal agenda [is] a label used more by the critics than the architects of the policies. That the authors of the Report use the phrase repeatedly throughout the text indicates that the thrust of the Report is admission of the failings of the neoliberal agenda. Perhaps they claim its benefits (there is much to cheer in the neoliberal agenda) to maintain their credibility within the IMF and ensure the not unfavourable internal review of the Report. However, the fact that the Report has seen the light of the day does credit to both the authors and IMF.

Is the Neoliberal Ideology Unravelling?

The present commentary is written in the hope that governments, economists, teachers and proponents of the neoliberal free-market economy, and the politician-corporate nexus, which drives the neoliberal agenda, will begin to understand that the growth-at-any-cost ideology cannot be sustained from the points of view of democracy, social justice, economic inequality, environment (as a source of material resources and a sink for wastes), ecology and climate change. They also need to understand that continuing in the current direction is self-defeating.

Ben Geier opines: Neoliberalism ... is not going to be overtaken by another ideology overnight. But the IMF paper signals that the system is starting to tear apart at the seams. [Ref. 7]

There are undoubtedly many who may pray that neoliberalism will drop dead tomorrow. They are sure to be disappointed, because it will not. Not even in the next year. Neoliberalism is a system fathered by its high priest, Milton Friedman, based upon an economic paradigm which was created by the input of enormous energies, and which grew and matured over decades. It resulted in huge benefit to very few and enormous harm to the vast majority of humans, with irreversible damage to the environment and all other living species.

The publication of the Report Neoliberalism Oversold?, from the very temple of neolibera-lism, may be the writing on the wall indicating the terminal decline of neoliberalism. It gives hope to those who believe that democracy, social equity and justice, and freedom are vital for a sustainable future. When and how it will finally collapse is in the womb of time, but that is a small consolation for the many millions who have died, suffered and continue to suffer the irreversible ill-effects of inequality due to neoliberalism.

For their part, the 99 per cent clearly understand that freedom will never be presented on a platter by the one per cent power structure, for no system will be tamely surrendered by those who profit from it. The 99 per cent will certainly renew efforts to grasp freedom with both hands and claim it for their own. But what the 99 per cent will do with that freedom, and what sort of economic system will emerge from the turbulent transition is also in the womb of time.

References

1. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine; The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 2007.

2. Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalisation, Yale University Press, 2005.

3. Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

4. Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani and Davide Furceri, Neoliberalism Oversold?, Report of IMF Finance and Development, June 2016, Volume 53, Number 2, pp. 38-41.

5. Benjamin Dangl, After Empowering the 1% and Impoverishing Millions, IMF Admits Neoliberalism a Failure, <http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06...> ; Counterpunch, June 1, 2016.

6. Tim Worstall, The IMF Has Not Rejected Neoliberalism Nor Austerity: Rather, Theyve Examined Them, May 28, 2016. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/timwors...>

7. Ben Geier, Even the IMF Now Admits Neoliberalism Has Failed, http://fortune.com/2016/06/03/imf-neolibera lism-failing/

Major General S.G. Vombatkere, VSM, retired in 1996 as the Additional DG Discipline and Vigilance in Army HQ AGs Branch. He is a member of the National Alliance of Peoples Movements (NAPM) and Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). With over 480 published papers in national and international journals and seminars, his current area of interest is strategic and development-related issues.
Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2016 > SCs Arunachal Verdict, Kashmir on the Boil

EDITORIAL

Once again the judiciary has come to the rescue of the democratic forces.

As was aptly mentioned in The Times of India today, the five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court yesterday ordered reinstatement of the Nabam Tuki-led Congress Government in Arunachal Pradesh pulling the rug from under the Kalikho Pul Governmentit was a unanimous decision of the Bench that dealt a heavy bow to the Centre, which is still smarting from the setback it suffered barely two months ago when the SC struck down Central rule in Uttarakhand, clearing the way for the Harish Rawat-led Congress Govern-ment to return.

The latest SC judgement doubtless amounts to a severe indictment of the Arunachal Pradesh Governor, J.P. Rajkhowa, for his unwarranted steps devoid of any constitutional backing.

The SC verdict, which upholds democratic principles and values in both letter and spirit, is definitely a setback to the BJPs nefarious designs at least in the North-East for the present. There were strong fears that after Arunachal the ruling party at the Centre would play the same game and destabilise the State governments of Manipur, Meghalaya and Mizoram. Hopefully the SC verdict would help stall all such attempts.

Meanwhile the events in the Kashmir Valley have caused serious concern among all democrats including informed observers. Following the encounter killing of the young Kashmiri militant, Burhan Wani, the insurgency has taken a new turn. With three more killed in fresh violence and firing in different areas the death toll has risen till this point in time to 36 and is bound to rise further. Reports also disclose that there are till date 20 patients who have suffered pellet injuries in the eye. As Happymon Jacob, Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament Studies at New Delhis Jawaharlal Nehru University, observed in a perceptive article in The Hindu,

The writing on the wall has been clear to those who cared to read it: that Kashmir would soon bounce back to the days of home-grown insurgency, with religious radicalisation acting as a force multiplier this time. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in New Delhi, in its impatient race for power in Srinagar, did not care to read the signs, and when told, it didnt care to listen.

When he was enjoying his stay in Africa recently, the PM remained totally unconcerned about the Kashmir situation. (What a contrast with US President Barack Obama who cut short his visit to Europe on learning of the developments in Dallas!) However, on his return to New Delhi, Modi did issue a statement calling upon the security forces to desist from the disproportionate use of force. But one wonders if it was a case of too little too late.

Unless immediate measures are taken to tackle the fast-deteriorating situation, it would be most difficult to bring the Valley back to normalcy. For that to happen military means must give way to political dialogue. Are the authorities in charge listening?

July 14 S.C.
5 Best Gold and Silver Junior Mining Stocks in 2016

The following five junior mining stocks are 10 baggers, through just the first half of the year. These are the best performing junior mining stocks on the Toronto Stock Exchange, as they have posted gains of 1,000% or more over the past six months!

These junior gold and silver miners are generating significant wealth for investors that had the courage to buy when there was blood in the streets. An investment of $100,000 in any of these stocks six months ago would be worth over $1 million today!

Gold and silver corrected and consolidated for over 4 years, leaving many gold bulls questioning their investment thesis. But precious metals bottomed in December of 2015, with gold bouncing off the $1,045 level and silver bottoming around $13.65.

Both gold and silver have been off to the races during the first half of 2016. Gold is up nearly 30% and silver up 42%! As we predicted, mining stocks have been the best performers, offering leverage of more than 4 times the gains seen in gold and silver bullion.

Larger mining stocks often outperform during the early phases of a bull market cycle in precious metals. This is because institutional money pours into the safer, larger cap mining stocks at a much faster pace than speculators jumping into junior mining stocks. But after this initial move, quality junior mining stocks tend to catch up and surpass the gains of their larger counterparts. Starting from a much smaller base, their have the potential for much higher percentage gains.

But you have to do you research and select junior miners very carefully. You also have to go against the herd and be willing to buy when others are fearful. Smart gold investors understand economic cycles very well, such as the one below. With stocks and real estate and frothy levels, 2016 has been the ideal time to buy beaten down mining stocks at deep discounts.

Despite these massive gains in gold and silver mining stocks, I believe they still have much higher to go. I am not looking into any magical crystal ball, but simply comparing the duration and magnitude of past bull market cycles to the current one. No matter if you are looking over the past 15 years or back to the 70s, the data suggests this bull market in gold and silver is in the early innings.

The chart below shows the HUI gold bugs index vs. the price of gold. The ratio has averaged around 0.32 over the past 15 years. Anything above this level suggests that gold stocks are overvalued relative to gold. Anything below this ratio suggests that gold stocks are undervalued relative to gold. While the current ratio has doubled from lows around 0.10, it is still well below the median line at 0.32. This suggests that gold stocks remain undervalued relative to gold and should continue offering strong leverage for the foreseeable future.

Once this ratio climbs above 0.32, gold stocks will no longer be offering such clear value. They may continue to outpace the gains in gold, but at a slower pace until the ratio climbs above 0.50. At this point, investors may want to consider booking paper profits in mining stocks and allocating these funds towards physical gold and silver bullion. Using this strategy, I believe the average investor will end up with significantly more physical bullion and total wealth than via purchasing bullion alone and holding it. This is why we recommend a large allocation of mining stocks during the early phases of a precious metals bull market cycle.

Top 5 Junior Gold and Silver Stocks for 2016

So, if you are ready to start investing in junior mining stocks, here are some of the top performing junior gold stocks and junior silver stocks in 2016. I imagine many of the stock picks on this list will also make the list of best junior miners for 2017. The gains listed here are over the past 26 weeks, as of July 15, 2016.

#1) Rupert Resources (CVE: RUP or RUPRF) +3,500%

Rupert Resources is a Canadian based gold exploration and development company that is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. Rupert holds an option to acquire the Pahtavaara gold mine, mill and and claims to a land position of 124km2 in the highly prospective Central Lapland Greenstone Belt in Northern Finland for a total consideration of US$2.5 million.

Pahtavaara is located some 35km by road from the town of Sodankyla. The deposit was discovered in 1986 and since operations commenced in 1996 the mine has produced 350,000oz of gold, with peak annual production of 37koz/a. The operation is currently on care and maintenance but subject to its decision to exercise its option over the property, Rupert Resources intends to commence a comprehensive exploration program to extend reserve life from the current estimate of 1.5 years to over 5 years and delineate further resources from the enlarged licence area before recommencing production.

#2) Gold Mountain Mining (CVE: GUM) +1,200%

Gold Mountain Mining Corporation is exploring and developing the 100% owned Elk Gold Project, located in southern British Columbia, 45 km southeast of Merritt. The Elk property is a significant past-producing gold asset with excellent infrastructure. A Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) completed in 2012 reported that the project has good potential to support a viable open pit mining operation.

#3) West Red Lake Gold Mines (CNSX: RLG or OTC: HYLKF) +1,200%

West Red Lake Gold Mines Inc. is a Toronto based company focused on gold exploration and development in the prolific Red Lake Gold District of Northwestern Ontario, Canada. The Red Lake Gold District is host to some of the richest gold deposits in the world and has produced over 30 million ounces of gold from high grade zones, including 18 million ounces from the nearby Red Lake Mine and Campbell Mine operated by Goldcorp. West Red Lake Gold has assembled a 3100 hectare property which has a 12 kilometre strike length and 3 former producing gold mines.

#4) Silver Bear Resources (TSE: SBR or SVBRF) +1,020%

Silver Bear Resources is focused on the development of its wholly-owned Mangazeisky Silver Project, that includes the high grade Vertikalny deposit (amongst the highest grade silver deposits in the world) located 400 km north of Yakutsk, Russian Federation. With the support of its key Russian shareholders, Silver Bear is entering its second phase construction with the objective to target silver commissioning by the end of 2016.

#5) Colorado Resources (CVE: CXO or CLASF) +1,060%

Colorado Resources Ltd. is currently engaged in the business of mineral exploration for the purpose of acquiring and advancing mineral properties located in British Columbia and is also seeking opportunities in Southwest USA and Latin America. Colorados current exploration focus is to continue to advance: the KSP property optioned from SnipGold, located 15 kms along strike to the southeast of the past producing Snip Mine; its 100% owned North ROK property, located 15 kms northwest of the Red Chris mine development, both located in northern central BC.

Summary  How to Maximize Profits from Gold and Silver Miners

These are the five best junior mining stocks so far in 2016. Is it too late to buy them? Will they continue higher at such a blistering pace or are the gains over?

This is precisely the type of research that I perform gold subscribers. I will update this list on a periodic basis, perform due diligence on each company and make buy/sell recommendations for Gold Stock Bull Premium Members. You can try our service for just $95 by clicking here.

We work hard at uncovering undervalued silver stocks with the potential to generate huge returns for investors. Below is a picture of me touring a silver mine in Mexico that I ended up recommending to subscribers after meeting with management. You can benefit from our hard work and research, simply by subscribing here for less than $1 per day.

By Jason Hamlin

http://www.goldstockbull.com/

Jason Hamlin is the founder of Gold Stock Bull and publishes a monthly contrarian newsletter that contains in-depth research into the markets with a focus on finding undervalued gold and silver mining companies. The Premium Membership includes the newsletter, real-time access to the model portfolio and email trade alerts whenever Jason is buying or selling. Click here for instant access!

Copyright  2016 Gold Stock Bull - All Rights Reserved

All ideas, opinions, and/or forecasts, expressed or implied herein, are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a recommendation to invest, trade, and/or speculate in the markets. Any investments, trades, and/or speculations made in light of the ideas, opinions, and/or forecasts, expressed or implied herein, are committed at your own risk, financial or otherwise. The information on this site has been prepared without regard to any particular investors investment objectives, financial situation, and needs. Accordingly, investors should not act on any information on this site without obtaining specific advice from their financial advisor. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




Erdogan Reign of Terror Following Failed Coup Plot

Hes back in Ankara, military forces loyal to his regime crushing remnants of Fridays rebellion. His first order of business is solidifying power, eliminating opposition and hardening dictatorial rule. It's just beginning.



Security forces retook control of state-run broadcaster TRT after rebels seized it. Turkish Airlines resumed flights to and from Istanbuls Ataturk airport after suspending them yesterday. Various international airlines halted their own as a precaution.

Harsh crackdowns against coup plotters and supporters began. According to Erdogan, over 2,800 military personnel were arrested, ranging from soldiers to high-ranking officers.



Rebellion failed to gain traction, more a tempest in a teapot than revolution. All government ministries and facilities remain in regime control.



Turkeys Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), its highest judicial authority, suspended 2,745 judges and removed five of its members, according to state-run Analolu news agency. Turkeys justice ministry runs it.



Arrest warrants were issued for 140 Constitutional Court members and 48 Council of State administrative court judges. Erdogan vowed harsh punishment against coup plotters and their supporters.



A White House statement said Obama assembled his national security and foreign policy team on Saturday to discuss developments in Turkey.



In an unprecedented show of solidarity, all parties represented in parliament issued a joint declaration of anti-coup unity.



Instability in Turkey adds uncertainty to an already troubled region. How it affects Obamas war on Syria and overall Middle East policy remains to be seen. Hardening of despotic rule seems certain.

By Stephen Lendman

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

He lives in Chicago and can be reached in Chicago at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.



Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday through Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national topics. All programs are archived for easy listening.

 2016 Copyright Stephen Lendman - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




Trump/Pence Dog and Pony Show Kick-Off

Politics in America combines image-building with deception. Its more about theatrics than substance, voters left uninformed about issues mattering most. The fate of the nation and world hang in the balance.



On Saturday in Manhattan, the Trump/Spence train left the station, aiming for triumph in November, not derailment.



Introducing Indiana Governor Mike Spence to a national TV audience, Trump called him my partner in this campaign.

Together for the first time publicly, Trump combining Clinton bashing with praising his running mate. What a difference between crooked Hillary Clinton and Mike Pence, he blustered. Hes a solid, solid person.



Pence played the role of dutiful junior partner, calling Trump a good man, a fighter, a legendary businessman and patriotic American.



More mumbo jumbo followed, the same stuff weve been bombarded with for months, continuing through Novembers election to select one of the two most reviled presidential aspirants in US history.



Most voters reject them both, want alternative choices theyre not getting except from independent parties too weak to unseat duopoly power - one-party rule with two right wings.



Trump and Clinton are mostly alike, differing largely in rhetoric and style on most issues - Killary by far the most dangerous, choosing war over diplomacy, shunning peace and stability.



Trump admitted choosing Pence to solidify party unity, calling himself an outsider, saying I dont want to be one anymore.



Republicans meet next week in Cleveland, Democrats the week after in Philadelphia. Mass protests are expected to greet delegates at each event.



Americas political process serves monied interests exclusively at the expense of governance of, by and for everyone equitably.



Conventions rubber-stamp it - a deplorable display of power politics, popular needs, concerns and rights entirely ignored.

By Stephen Lendman

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com

His new book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.

http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html

He lives in Chicago and can be reached in Chicago at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.



Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday through Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national topics. All programs are archived for easy listening.

 2016 Copyright Stephen Lendman - All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.




COLLINSVILLERufus Dale Martin, one of the parties being sued, has filed an answer to a $20 million lawsuit in connection with a traffic crash on Figsboro Road April 6 in which a Ford Ranger was struck by a Comcast bucket truck. Two people were injured.

Elmer Hale  father, guardian and conservator of Cody Layne Hale, incapacitated, is suing Comcast of Connecticut/Georgia/Massachusetts/New Hampshire/New York/North Carolina/Virginia/VER LLC (referred to as Comcast LLC), c/o CT Corporation System, registered agent, of Glen Allen; and Rufus Daniel Martin, 441 Flatrock Drive, Martinsville.

Elmer Hale was appointed conservator and guardian of Cody Layne Hale by order entered by a Henry County Circuit Court judge on April 20. (Conservator is someone appointed by a judge to oversee the affairs of an incapacitated person, according to Nolo, an Internet legal site.)

Trooper A.M. Metzger of the Virginia State Police has said that the accident happened about 4:45 p.m. April 6 in the 3600 block of Figsboro Road. A Comcast bucket truck, driven by Martin, was traveling north on Figsboro Road and a 2003 Ford Ranger, driven by Cody Layne Hale of Martinsville, was traveling south. The bucket truck ran off the road to the right, lost control, crossed the center line and struck the Ranger, Metzger has said.

Hale and a passenger in the Ranger  Rachel Bernice Lester of Martinsville  were flown by helicopter to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, Metzger has said.

Martin was charged with driving while intoxicated, second offense; refuse blood/breath test, second offense; and reckless driving.

When it was filed in Henry County Circuit Court on April 29 , the lawsuit alleged that Cody Layne Hale suffered catastrophic and devastating injuries, including severely injured internal organs requiring surgery to repair; broken hips and legs, shoulder injuries and, most alarmingly, a head injury leaving  (him) in a comatose state from which he has not yet recovered. (He) has had multiple head and brain surgeries and it is not yet known whether he will ever regain consciousness and it is not yet known what extent of recovery he will have even if he regains consciousness.

On May 25 in Henry County General District Court, the commonwealth nolle prossed (discontinued prosecution of) the three charges against Martin.

Henry County Commonwealths Attorney Andrew Nester said in an email that he requested that the cases be nolle prossed. According to a document he provided, that was done because: Martin was arrested the same day as the accident (April 6) and charged with these underlying cases, and the commonwealth anticipates additional charges against the defendant that arise out of this motor vehicle crash. Specifically, two people received significant injury as a result of this motor vehicle crash. The prognosis, and future recovery, of these injured persons will dictate the specific additional charges levied against the defendant by commonwealth.

The document from Nester also says, among other things, Considering principles of fundamental fairness to the defendant and the commonwealth to have all the cases litigated at once, and with full respect to judicial economy, the commonwealth would prefer to have all of the cases, both current and any future charges, heard by a single Court in a single setting.

In his answer to the lawsuit:

-- Martin denies the allegation that he was an employee of Comcast LLC on April 6, 2016. (However, Martin admits in his answer that he was working on behalf of Comcast LLC on April 6, 2016.)

--Martin denies the following allegations: That on April 6, while in the course of his employment with Comcast LLC, Martin was operating a Comcast LLC bucket truck type motor vehicle over and along the Figsboro Road, Route 108, in Henry County  headed north, at about the same time Cody Layne Hale was operating a Chevrolet S10 pickup truck headed south. That as the bucket truck operated by Martin approached the southbound pickup truck operated by Hale, Martin lost control of the Comcast truck he was operating and ran off to the right side of the road and then crossed the center line of the highway. That the Comcast truck operated by Martin crashed into the S10 pickup truck operated by Hale. That the crash occurred in the proper lane of travel for Hale.

--Martin denies the allegation that the collision was a direct and proximate result of the negligence of Martin, which said negligence is attributable to Comcast LLC as Martin was operating the motor vehicle in the course of his employment and such vehicle was negligently entrusted to him by Comcast LLC.

--Martin denies the allegations that the collision was a direct and proximate result of the negligence of the defendants in that  Martin failed to keep his vehicle under proper control, failed to maintain the vehicle operated by him in the proper lane of travel and he was driving while intoxicated and so negligently operated the Comcast bucket truck so as to cause or allow the same to collide with the S10 pick-up truck operated by Cody Layne Hale.

--Martin denies the allegations that: Comcast LLC negligently retained  Martin as an employee with the full knowledge and awareness that he not only had a problem with the consumption of alcoholic beverages but also that he had an alcohol problem and a history of driving while consuming alcoholic beverages.

--Martin denies the allegation that as a direct and proximate result of the defendants that Cody Layne Hale suffered the various injuries listed in the lawsuit.

Martins answer also says he reserves his right to amend his answer to raise any and all affirmative defenses that are made known to him through continuing investigation and discovery or at the trial of this case and no such affirmative defenses are hereby waived, including, if applicable, the affirmative defenses of contributory negligence and the acts of the plaintiff and of another or others not under the control of the defendant combined as the sole proximate cause of the alleged injuries and damages.

According to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School, affirmative defense is a defense in which the defendant introduces evidence, which, if found to be credible, will negate criminal or civil liability, even if it is proven that the defendant committed the alleged acts.

Martin is demanding a jury trial. He also is requesting the court to dismiss the lawsuit against him and to award him the costs incurred by him in this defense and for all such further relief as this court finds appropriate.

As of Friday morning, Comcast LLC had not filed an answer to the lawsuit.
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MARTINSVILLE  Zeb Talley, the newly-appointed interim superintendent of the Martinsville schools, wants to ensure that teachers are happy and have the resources they need to help students learn.

Teachers are the most important factor influencing a childs learning, he said.

They need to be able to try new and creative things as part of their teaching methods, added Talley, who also is principal of Patrick Henry Elementary School and a 40-year employee of the city school division.

Its not a matter of whether all kids can learn. Its a matter of giving kids the opportunity to learn, he emphasized.

Resources are limited, so they must be used wisely, Talley said.

As part of making sure that resources are used wisely, some teachers may be moved to different schools where they can best use their skills, he said.

Right now, teachers are not happy, and parents are not happy, because were (the schools) not accredited fully under the state Standards of Learning (SOLs), Talley said.

And, the community wants us to do better, he said, noting that education affects economic development  in deciding where to locate or expand, companies take into account how well the local schools educate kids who may be among their future employees.

Along with examining where resources should be placed, Talley said he is consulting with Henry County schools Superintendent Jared Cotton to see if there are ways in which the two school divisions can cooperate to improve the education of all local students.

Improving schools ultimately is a community effort, he indicated.

Together, all of us can correct this status of (the city schools) not being accredited, Talley said.

Last week, the Martinsville School Board appointed Talley as interim superintendent after approving the retirement of former superintendent Pam Heath, who had served in that role since 2010.

In hiring a new permanent superintendent, the board will conduct a nationwide search for applicants, according to Chairwoman Joan Montgomery.

Talley has said that he plans to apply for the job.

Talley earned a doctorate in educational leadership and policy studies from Virginia Tech, a masters degree in educational leadership from Radford University and a bachelors degree in social studies and history, with a minor in religion, from Elon University.

Prior to becoming Patrick Henrys principal, he was co-principal of Martinsville Middle School.

He also is the pastor of a church in Danville.

Under his employment contract with the school board, as interim superintendent, Talley will have full authority over all Martinsville City Public Schools personnel, including the hiring, firing and reassignment of staff members.

Talley will continue as Patrick Henrys principal with the board understanding that his interim superintendents duties will prevent him from devoting exclusive attention to his duties as principal, the contract states. To the extent that the duties of principal and superintendent conflict,  the duties of superintendent take precedence.

Heath received an annual salary of almost $135,000. As a school principal, Talley is paid about $92,000 per year. Under his contract, he will receive no increase for serving as interim superintendent, but the school board is able to give him periodic performance bonuses of amounts that it determines appropriate.

The contract calls for Talley to remain as interim superintendent until Heaths successor is hired. If he is not hired to replace her, he must remain Patrick Henrys principal for at least a year, the document shows.

In a Friday afternoon interview in his office at the school on Church Street Extension, Talley reiterated points that he made following his appointment as interim superintendent.

Describing the schools as the communitys servant, he pledged to return every phone call that he gets from students, parents, teachers and others regarding concerns they have about educational matters.

Talley also requests that parents who recently have taken their kids out of the Martinsville schools, and enrolled them elsewhere due to concerns they had about educational quality, consider re-enrolling them in the city schools.

He did not recall how many parents have taken their kids out, but he said he plans to make contact with all of them.

He believes that many parents will re-enroll their kids. He said that ones with whom he so far has spoken have said they would re-enroll their children if improvements in instruction and communicating with parents are made.

Also, Talley pledged that relations between the school division and Martinsville City Council will improve. The council provides an annual allocation of funding to the schools.

He feels energized about the coming school year, he said.

I cant wait until the teachers and kids return to classes, Talley added.

Aug. 10 will be the start of the new school year for students.
SPRINGFIELD -- Boston, Worcester and Springfield are the first three cities getting looked at by Futurecity, a British group seeking to integrate the arts into development in cities elsewhere around the world.

The news conference announcing the effort was just one of the local business news events of the past week.

Here are five business stories you might have missed:

1) Futurecity founder says Springfield has 'authenticity by the bucket load'

On Friday, founder Mark Davy and his team toured the city, visiting landmarks like the Springfield Museums at The Quadrangle and Union Station. He's been doing similar tours in Boston and Worcester.

2) Seen@ the Westfield Chamber's 39th annual pancake breakfast

The event, hosted annually at South Middle School, started as part of the downtown sidewalk sales.

3) AIC will no longer require SAT or ACT scores from prospective students

American International College would rather look at a students's four-year high school record.

4) MGM Springfield made major announcements in Holyoke this week. Executives from the under-construction casino detailed plans Monday to train and recruit a work force.

Holyoke is getting $500,000 up front from the $1.28 million in neighboring community impact payments Morse negotiated to receive from MGM over the course of 15 years. It and Holyoke Community College are putting the money toward HCC's new culinary center in the Cubit building downtown.

MGM Springfield says it will need about 1,000 gaming employees from security to dealers to technicians who maintain the slots.

And,

5) Springfield Union Station: Peter Pan Bus Lines in negotiations to operate from restored transit hub, hopeful of deal

The $88.5 million rehab project on Union Station will be completed in December. The 90-year-old station is expected to reopen in January.
WRENTHAM A 35-year-old Woonsocket, R.I. man was killed Saturday afternoon when the motorcycle he was riding collided with a vehicle. The 15-year-old passenger he was carrying at the time was seriously injured, Massachusetts State Police said.

Investigators said after a preliminary investigation, it appeared that a 46-year-old man, driving a Subaru Outback, turned onto Route 1 northbound from a side street, then turned left across the adjoining northbound lanes. That was when the motorcycle driven by Joseph Carter of Woonsocket struck the car. Both Carter and his passenger were thrown from the bike. Carter was transported to Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro, where he was pronounced dead.

The passenger on Carter's motorcycle was transported to Rhode Island Hospital where he was admitted in serious condition.

Neither the driver of the Subaru nor any of his three passengers were injured.

The State Police Accident Reconstruction Section and Crime Scene Services were dispatched to the scene to conduct an investigation.
CHELMSFORDState Police detectives attached to the Middlesex District Attorney's Ofice are investigating an officer-involved shooting that took place in Chelmsford Saturday night.

The Boston Globe reported that the shooting took place in the area of 55 Graniteville Road after a chase that started in Tyngsboro and continued into Chelmsford, State Police spokesman David Procopio said.

Procopio said the State Police were not involved in the shooting but were called in to investigate the incident. He did not say which police department took place in the shooting, nor the condition of the person shot.
An update to this story was published on Monday morning at the link below.

This story has been updated to add comments from Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni.

CHICOPEE - A 15-year-old boy shot in the abdomen Saturday has died and a 42-year-old homeowner has been arrested in his death.

Jeffery Lovell, 42, 120 Boucher Circle, has been charged with murder. He is being held in the Chicopee Police Department jail without right to bail, Michael Wilk, public information officer for the Chicopee Police Department, said.

Lovell is being accused of shooting the teenager through the door of his house at about 12:56 p.m., Saturday.

Police initially received a call of a breaking and entering into the home in the Fairview section of the city. When they arrived, they found the teenager on the ground suffering from a gunshot wound to his abdomen, Wilk said.

"It was determined that three parties went to the residence believing it to be (the home of) a friend. One party, the victim, was banging on the outside door, when the homeowner shot through the door, striking the male," Wilk said.

Investigators found the victim and a friend were drinking alcohol at a nearby home. The two friends were confused while walking in the neighborhood and believed they had arrived at the home of another friend, said James Leydon, spokesman for Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni, said.

Lovell, the homeowner, tried to communicate with the victim, who was still knocking on the locked door, Leydon said.

"When a pane of glass broke, the suspect fired a single shot, striking the victim," Leydon said.

When Chicopee Police arrived they immediately started providing emergency medical care and the 15-year-old was rushed to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, where he was treated but died later, Wilk said.

The teenager's name has not been released until all his family can be notified, Wilk said.

"This was a tragic and avoidable incident that resulted in a young man losing his life. My sympathy and thoughts are with the victim's family and his friends," Gulluni said.

"We offer our condolences and sympathies to the family," Wilk

said.

Chicopee Police detectives are working with the Massachusetts State Police CPAC unit assigned to Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni's Office to investigate the case, Wilk said.

Gulluni thanked the State Police assigned to his office, the Chief of the Office's Homicide Unit and Assistant District Attorney Eduardo Velazquez for their work on the investigation.

Lovell will be arraigned in Chicopee District Court on Monday.

On his Facebook page, Lovell has a picture of him aiming a gun as the main picture. He also has posted several things supporting the Second Amendment.
CHICOPEE  The victim of a Saturday afternoon shooting at Boucher Circle was a 15-year-old, alleged "intruder," who was shot by a homeowner, according to Officer Michael Wilk of the Chicopee Police Department.

Chicopee police responded to reports of a possible breaking and entering at roughly 12:50 p.m., according to Wilk.

Within a short period of time, the homeowner called police to tell them that he had shot the alleged intruder through a door pane in his kitchen, according to Wilk.

When police arrived at the scene, they discovered a 15-year-old male victim who had suffered a gunshot wound to the abdomen.

Wilk says that when the male was taken to Baystate Medical Center he was "in serious condition."

Wilk gave no update on the condition of the victim, who was last said to be in "critical condition" during an earlier update.

Wilk also confirmed that the homeowner is currently being charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and with serious injury.

Detectives are still investigating the incident.
CISA hosts tour of Agri-Mark lab

The Agri-Mark dairy laboratory in West Springfield

(Don Treeger)

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. -- The former head of technology for the Agri-Mark dairy cooperative has been sentenced to more than two years in prison in connection with the theft of $1 million.

54-year-old Ronald Rup Jr. of Essex Junction was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Brattleboro after pleading guilty to wire fraud in November, reports the Vermont-based WCAX News.

Rup admitted to purchasing technology equipment on a company card between 2012 and 2014, then selling the items to a Texas tech company for less than half their value and pocketing the cash.

At the time, Rup's lawyer said his client committed the crime to cover a costly divorce settlement. Agrimark said an internal audit uncovered the theft and the company was reimbursed by its insurance provider.

The Agri-Mark dairy cooperative is one of the largest suppliers of milk in the Northeast, and produces items including Cabot cheese. Agri-Mark operates plants in Vermont, New York, and West Springfield. Its 1,200 member-owners operate farms throughout New England and New York, producing 300 million gallons of milk a year.
HOLYOKEA Holyoke man was critically injured Saturday night when he was shot several times as he left his Chestnut Street apartment.

The commander of the Holyoke Police Crime Investigation Bureau, Lt. James Albert, said police received a call from Holyoke Hospital at about 11:40 p.m. reporting a gunshot victim had just shown up in the emergency room. The victim was apparently brought to the hospital by family or friends, who left as soon as the victim was out of the car.

Holyoke Hospital was temporarily placed on lockdown status for security reasons. Albert said that is the hospital's usual practice when gunshot victims come to the ER. Doctors at Holyoke Hospital did what they could to stabilize the victim before he was transferred to the trauma unit at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield.

Albert said the man was shot several times in the abdomen. He was apparently in front of his apartment building when the shooting began, but police do not know if he changed locations after being hit or if he stayed in one place. Albert said no blood trail was seen on the pavement.

Albert said police have no known motive or suspects at this time.

A Toyota Corolla parked near the building sustained gunshot damage in the front, the part of the car facing north. However, Albert said several spent shell casings were found near the doorway to 298 Chestnut St.

Albert said he has called in Massachusetts State Police detectives attached to District Attorney Anthony Gulluni's office and the State Police Crime Scene Services unit to aid in the investigation.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Holyoke police detective bureau at (413) 322-6940.
HOLYOKE - A man shot multiple times late Saturday night remains in critical condition while Holyoke Police Department continues to investigate the crime.

"We are talking to people and we are following up leads," Holyoke Police Lt. James Albert said.

Police are still unsure of the motive for the shooting, he said.

"Unfortunately we are not getting a lot of information from the public and it would help," Albert said.

Anyone with any information about the crime, no matter how insignificant they think it may be, is asked to call the Holyoke Police Detective Bureau at 413- 322-6940. Those wishing to remain anonymous can call the "Tips Line" at 413- 533-8477. People can also use the anonymous text-a-tip by texting the word CRIMES (2-7-4-6-3-7) and then typing the word SOLVE into the body of the message followed by the tip, he said.

The victim was shot multiple times in the abdomen outside 298 Chestnut St. He was brought to Holyoke Medical Center by a friend and walked into the emergency room. Holyoke Medical staff stabilized the victim and he was transported to Baystate Medical Center, Albert said.

The man was reportedly shot at about 11:40 p.m. near his home. Police found several spent shell casings near the location. A Toyota Corolla parked near the building also had been damaged from gunshots.

Massachusetts State Police detectives attached to Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni's office and the State Police Crime Scene Services unit is assisting Holyoke Police in the investigation.
KSRTC will set up a group booking system for devotees coming in groups to book a bus. This way, they will be able to journey together. A group must be 40 members.
For decades now, Montana has issued state content standards  requirements for what students are supposed to know in certain subject areas. But those standards dont dictate how students learn, what materials are used and which subjects educators emphasize. Local school districts set curriculum, and teachers often have flexibility within that.

MATT HOFFMAN [email protected] and CHELSEA DAVIS [email protected]

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/state-proposes-new-science-standards-for-schools-but-how-kids/article_1478b5db-9925-5180-aecc-af6885b13623.html
Lael Jefferson, 12, and her mother Takeisha pack their bags in preparation for their trip to the White House. However, unlike the thousands of tourists who visit the White House every day, the Jeffersons are going as invited guests.

This one in a lifetime opportunity came along when Takeisha and Lael decided to put their culinary skills to the test and enter into the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge, but they had no idea of the adventure that laid ahead of them.

A military youth, Lael, was awarded the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge winner for the State of Alabama, which saved her a spot at the table at the Kids State Dinner hosted at the White House by the First Lady Michelle Obama, July 14, 2016.

The Healthy Lunchtime Challenge is a collaboration between the First Lady and the Public Broadcasting Service to challenge kids ages 8 through 12 to formulate healthy recipes and compete for a chance to attend the Kids State Dinner

Its truly an honor to be named the 2016 Healthy Lunchtime Challenge winner of Alabama  and to be able to represent the state in the nationwide recipe challenge as a military brat. It is awesome to represent military families like mine in the United States Air Force, said Lael.

The competitors recipes were reviewed by a panel of judges, who then selected three finalists from each state or territory. The selected recipes were chosen based on healthy nutritional value, taste, creativity, originality and affordability. A narrative description of the recipe was also required. The second round had the finalists recipes prepared by professional chefs and then judged again following the previous criteria.

Laels recipe, a green spinach chicken salad wrap and a fruit salad mixed with honey, stood out above all the rest and was served during the Kids State Dinner, along with the chosen dishes of other winners.

Flashback to June 8, the day the Jeffersons received the big news. Takeisha received an email that read in bold letters, Do not tell your winning chef. She read this line several times before the reality of what it meant finally set in.

She said it took everything she had not to scream in excitement, but her and her husband, Master Sgt. Oshawn Jefferson, Air Universitys Air Force Center for the Strategic Leadership Communication communications education manager, were under strict instructions to keep the win under wraps until Laels initial reaction to the news could be caught on video for later use.

Soon after, the anticipation was too much to handle and the Jeffersons grabbed a video camera and gathered their children outside for a game. They were asked to demonstrate how they would react to an award announcement, but when it came time for Laels turn, the situation was very real.

She completely freaked out, she was so excited. She was almost in tears screaming, Is this for real! said Takeisha.

A chance to visit the White House and meet the First Lady alone is enough to be excited for, but the Jeffersons were looking toward future opportunities.

Laels father, Oshawn who has deployed six times during his military career, said that its clear that eating healthy is not an option to some children and hopes that this challenge will bring awareness to the issue

Its not just about the win for us. For many going to the White House, that would be the end of the story, but for us and her, its just the beginning, said Takeisha

Lael fully intends to use her new title as the Alabama Healthy Food Ambassador to its full potential by blogging her experiences throughout the whole process, as well as implementing healthy eating programs throughout the state.

As the Healthy Food Ambassador, I believe every child deserves the opportunity to eat healthy. Healthy eating is important, but the opportunity is even more important. I am calling on everyone to volunteer, donate, spread awareness and campaign to ensure that no child goes to bed hungry and has the opportunity to eat healthy, said Lael.

For a copy of Laels winning recipe click here.
If there is an award for the best boss in the world, Dan Price of Gravity Payments could win it. But if there's a prize for the best employee, his employees would definitely win it. When their boss gave them a raise they hadn't dreamed of, they decided to save up and gift him a car he had always dreamed of.

 Facebook

Last year in April, Dan Price, CEO of Seattle-WA based company Gravity Payments, made headlines when he gave his employees a huge surprise. Raising the minimum salary to $70,000, he gave them a dream raise. This meant that some employees saw their salaries being doubled. For this to happen, Dan himself took a paycut from $1.1 million to $70,000.

It meant a lot. And the employees knew it, which is why they decided to thank him in the most wonderful way. They saved for 6 months and pooled in to gift Dan a Tesla model S, his dream car.

The CEO took to Facebook to express his absolute shock and happiness:

The team shared a video of Dan reacting to the gift:

It was reported that the decision of a paycut was possibly the result of a lawsuit threat by his brother Lucas Price, co-founder of Gravity. Dan was accused by his brother of keeping his salary too high and violating Lucas' minority shareholder rights. The court ruled in favour of Dan.

Irrespective of the intention, the move was greatly applauded by the employees. We wonder what would happen if Indian bosses did the same. We would probably gift them a holiday package to Lonavla. Just kidding. Sri Lanka it is, boss.

Has your boss or employee ever done anything so special for you? A bonus, a gift, an out-of-the-way favour? Tell us in the comments box below!

H/t - Inc.com, Bloomberg

Photo  Gravity Payments (Main Image)

For more of this author's work, click here; to follow them on Twitter, click here.
ANKARA, Turkey  The Latest on the attempted military coup in Turkey (all times local):

7:05 p.m.

Turkish Prime Minister Benali Yildirim says 161 people have been killed as the country fought to overcome a military coup attempt.

Another Turkish official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with protocol, said that number included civilians and pro-government forces like police but excluded those behind the coup attempt.

Earlier, Gen. Unit Dundar said 104 coup plotters had been killed.

There has been no official update of the death toll for hours.

 Dominique Soguel.



6:30 p.m.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim says July 15 will be remembered as a festival for democracy, the day when those who carried out a coup against the people were hit by a coup themselves.

Speaking to parliament in their its session since the revolt Friday, Yildirim says These are not soldiers, they are ravenous terrorist butchers in uniforms. The prime minister warned Saturday that anyone who tried to harm the will of the people will be reminded of those coup plotters, whose lives have been snuffed out.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkeys main opposition party, used his speech to call for greater democracy in Turkey, and said the coup attempt had also shown the importance of freedom of speech.

Kilicdargolu says this event has united us on a common ground, and that common ground is our dedication to the republic and democracy. But democracy isnt just the law of the rulers, but the rule of law.



5:10 p.m.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she condemns the coup attempt in Turkey, saying democratic institutions must be respected.

Merkel told reporters at the chancellery in Berlin on Saturday that it was tragic that so many people paid for this coup attempt with their lives and urged an end to the bloodshed.

She said Germany stands on the side of all of those in Turkey who defend democracy and the rule of law.



6: p.m.

Romanias foreign ministry says border crossings between Turkey and Bulgaria have been reopened following the failed coup attempt in Turkey.

The ministry said it had been informed by European Union border agency Frontex on Saturday about the border situation between Bulgaria and Turkey.

Earlier Saturday, the Bulgarian foreign ministry said Turkey had closed three border crossings with Bulgaria. The border crossings from Bulgarian side remained open. EU-member Bulgaria has a 260-kilometer (163-mile) border with Turkey.



5:45 p.m.

One of Syrias most powerful militant groups has praised Turkey and its democratic institutions after the government quashed an attempted military coup.

The ultraconservative Ahrar al-Sham group said that by quashing the coup, Turkey confirms that it is the hope of the Muslim nation and oppressed people throughout the world.

The political faction of the group that is close to Turkey says the Turkish people will not be subdued anymore to tyranny and will not be ruled by the military. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans government has been among the strongest backers of Syrian rebels trying to remove President Bashar Assad from power.



5:20 p.m.

Hundreds of people waving Turkish flags have gathered outside of the parliament in Ankara to protest the coup attempt as legislators prepare to hold an emergency session.

In an unprecedented show of unity, all four parties represented in parliament are expected to issue a joint declaration Saturday condemning the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogans government.

The extraordinary session began with a minute of silence in honor of those who lost their lives during the coup, followed by the singing of the national anthem. Officials say 161 civilians or pro-government security forces were killed during the coup, along with an undetermined number of coup plotters.



4:55 p.m.

A U.S. defense official says that the Turkish government had closed the airspace around Incirlik air base for a few hours, but it has reopened. U.S. aircraft that were on missions could return to the base but could not take off until the base reopened.

The U.S. has Air Force A-10 attack planes based there for close air support missions over Syria and Iraq. The defense official, in Kabul, was not authorized to discuss the Incirlik situation by name.

Also, electric power at Incirlik has been interrupted. The reason is not clear.

 By Robert Burns, AP National Security Writer



4:45 p.m.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says the United States would entertain an extradition request for exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkeys president blames for a failed coup.

But Kerry adds Turkeys government would have to present evidence of Gulens wrongdoing that withstands scrutiny.

While visiting Luxembourg, Kerry says Turkey hasnt made a request to extradite the Pennsylvania-based Gulen. But he says he anticipates questions about Gulen, who has condemned the coup attempt.

Kerry says on Saturday the U.S. opposed any attempt to overthrow a democratically elected leader. He says change must come through a constitutional process.



4:20 p.m.

Turkeys state-run news agency says authorities have detained 10 members of Turkeys highest administrative court as the government appeared to press ahead with a purge of judiciary officials with alleged links to a U.S.-based Muslim cleric.

The Anadolu Agency said Saturday that arrest warrants were issued for 48 administrative court members and 140 members of Turkeys appeals court. Earlier, Anadolu said a body overseeing judges and prosecutors in Turkey has dismissed 2,745 judges across Turkey.



4:00 p.m.

Turkeys state-run news agency says five warships which reportedly set sail during the attempted coup have returned to their military port in northwest Turkey. The Anadolu Agency says Saturday the five frigates and one corvette arrived at the military naval installation at Golcuk on Saturday. The report said it was not clear whether Navy Fleet Commander Admiral Veysel Kosele, whose whereabouts were not known, was aboard one of the ships.



3:45 p.m.

The Greek government says a Turkish Blackhawk helicopter will be returned to Turkey as soon as possible but it will examine the asylum demand made by eight military personnel who were arrested after landing Saturday.

Spokeswoman Olga Gerovasili says: The government is in contact with the Turkish authorities forthe return of the military helicopter as soon as possible.

As for the eight military passengers, we will follow the procedures of international law. However, we give very serious considerations to the fact that (the Turkish military men) are accused, in their country, of violating the constitutional order and trying to overthrow democracy, she added.

Greek police say that the eight arrested Turks include two majors, four captains and two sergeants first class. This differs from Turkish sources that said they were two majors, a captain sand five privates.



3:35 p.m.

NTV television has shown footage of a Turkish colonel and other soldiers being taken into custody at military headquarters.

The video shows them being hand-searched by special forces police, their hands behind their heads. Some are later seen kneeling on the ground, their hands still held behind their heads.

According to Hurriyet newspapers online edition, some of the privates who were detained told interrogators they were not aware that they were part of a coup attempt. They had been told by commanders they were taking part in military maneuvers. Some said they understood that it was a coup attempt when they saw civilians climb on tanks.



3:15 p.m.

Turkeys state-run Anadolu Agency says all soldiers involved in the attempted coup at the military headquarters in the capital, Ankara, have been taken into custody.

The report says anti-terrorism police will now conduct a detailed search at the headquarters.



3:10 p.m.

Turkeys state-run news agency says a top body overseeing judges and prosecutors has dismissed 2,745 judges across the country.

Anadolu Agency says the emergency meeting of the Judges and Prosecutors High Council was held Saturday, hours after Turkish forces quashed an attempted coup.

The report said the meeting was called to discuss disciplinary measures against members suspected of links to the movement led by the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen. The government says the attempted coup was carried out by a clique within the military loyal to Gulens movement.



2:55 p.m.

Leaders of Turkeys religious communities have released a joint statement condemning the attempted coup.

The statement from representatives of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities declares our great sorrow over the terrorist attacks that disturb the peace of our great nation and of the world.

The signatories include the president of Turkeys Directorate of Religious Affairs, Istanbul Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos and the Chief rabbi of Turkeys Jewish community.



2:45 p.m.

Italys foreign minister says his Turkish counterpart has defined the coup attempt in Turkey as terroristic.

The Italian foreign ministry says in a statement Saturday that Minister Paolo Gentiloni spoke by phone with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

The statement said the Turkish minister, who spoke from the capital, Ankara, confirmed the failure of the attempt that he termed terroristic.

The statement also said the Italian foreign minister expressed satisfaction that popular mobilization and defense of the institutions prevailed in Turkey.



2:30 p.m.

Turkeys Dogan news agency is reporting that two majors, a captain and five privates have requested asylum in Greece after landing in a military helicopter.

Greeces defense ministry has said a Blackhawk helicopter carrying seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian landed in the city of Alexandroupolis earlier Saturday.

The passengers asked for asylum and were arrested for illegal entry into Greece.

The state-run Anadolu Agency has quoted Turkeys foreign minister as demanding the immediate return of the eight treacherous officers.



1:55 p.m.

NATOs chief says all alliance personnel and military units in Turkey are safe and secure following the attempted coup.

Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, said Saturday he had spoken to NATOs supreme commander, U.S. Army Gen. Curtis M. Scapparrotti.

He confirms that all NATO personnel and units in Turkey are safe and secure, Stoltenberg said in a post on Twitter.

The alliance chief also tweeted that he welcomed the strong support shown by the people and all political parties to democracy and to the democratically elected gov of Turkey.



1:35 p.m.

Gazas Hamas rulers have congratulated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for quashing an attempted military coup.

The Islamic militant group condemned the attempt as a vicious plot to overthrow Erdogan.

The Turkish leader has been a staunch supporter of Hamas and a fierce critic of Israel. Hamas supporters took to the streets in several places across the Gaza Strip to celebrate the coups failure, raising Turkish flags and posters bearing Erdogans image.

Turkey recently restored ties with Israel after a six-year lull following a deadly Israeli naval raid to stop an activist flotilla aiming to breach the Gaza blockade.



1:30 p.m.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu says Turkey has demanded the extradition of officers who went to Greece, NTV television reports.

Greeces defense ministry says seven military personnel and one civilian have landed there in a Blackhawk military helicopter and asked for asylum. They were arrested for illegal entry.

Turkeys state-run Anadolu Agency quotes Cavusoglu as saying that we have demanded the immediate return of the eight treacherous officers who fled to Greece by helicopter.



1:15 p.m.

Greeces defense ministry says a Blackhawk military helicopter carrying seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian has landed at the airport in the city of Alexandroupolis in northeastern Greece.

The passengers have asked for asylum. They were arrested for illegal entry into Greece.

The ministry says the helicopter gave a distress signal at 10:45 a.m. local time and landed six minutes later.



1:05 p.m.

The Turkish Cypriot leader says commanders of Turkish troops deployed in the breakaway north of ethnically divided Cyprus remain loyal to Turkeys military command and that the coup attempt has no effect on the Mediterranean island.

Mustafa Akinci told Turkish Cypriot broadcaster BRT on Saturday that authorities have taken a variety of precautionary measures to prevent provocations in the north and that military commanders are carrying out their duties within the chain of command.

Akinci says problems can only be resolved through democratic means.

Turkey maintains more than 35,000 troops in the north of Cyprus since 1974, when the island was split after Turkey invaded in the wake of a coup by supporters of union with Greece.



1 p.m.

The head of the Turkish community in Germany is condemning the coup attempt in his homeland but says the government should take it as an opportunity to open dialogue with opponents.

Gokay Sofuoglu was quoted Saturday by the Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper as saying it was significant that all parties, even though they usually argue, unanimously rejected the coup.

The government would be well-advised to see this as a chance to talk with others, Sofuoglu said. Because the parties have not talked with one another for a long time.

Germany is home to about 3 million Turks or people of Turkish origin, and thousands took to the streets in Berlin and elsewhere late Friday to protest the coup.

Meanwhile, countries are condemning the coup and expressing support for Turkeys government, including Afghanistan, Albania and Kosovo.



12:35 p.m.

Turkish Prime Minister Benali Yildirim says 161 people were killed in the countrys overnight military coup attempt. He says another more than 1,400 people were wounded in the chaos. More than 2,800 people have been detained.

He described the night as a dark stain for Turkish democracy and pinned blame for the coup on the parallel terrorist organization.

That term is used by authorities to describe the movement of U.S.-based Islamist cleric Fethullah Gulen.

They will receive every punishment they deserve, the prime minister said, noting the perpetrators were now in the hands of the justice system.



12:30 p.m.

Georgia has ordered its border with Turkey closed amid the instability from a military coup attempt.

Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili said the countrys security council on Saturday discussed threats that might arise to Georgia from the situation and said both land and air borders had been closed.

The former Soviet republic shares a 252-kilometer (152-mile) border with Turkey.



12:25 p.m.

Turkeys Anadolu Agency reports that authorities have issued an alarm to border gates and airports upon being informed that prominent members of the Gulen Movement, including journalists, might flee the country following the overnight attempted military coup.

The report says authorities discovered the plans after lists were found detailing the commanders and their deputies to be put in charge during the period of martial law if the coup had succeeded.

Turkeys acting chief of the general staff, Gen. Umit Dundar, said Saturday that the military is determined to purge members of the movement of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania, from the ranks.



12:10 p.m.

Countries are lining up to condemn the overnight military coup attempt in Turkey.

Spains acting foreign minister, Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo, tells Spanish national television that his government completely supports the Turkish government headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

He says we condemn all coups without reservation.

And the Gulf nation of Qatar, which has close ties to Erdogans government, said it supports all legal measures Turkeys government takes to maintain security and stability.

The official Qatar News Agency reported Saturday that the ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, has spoken with Erdogan by phone to express Qatars support.



11:55 a.m.

Turkeys Anadolu Agency is reporting that soldiers who have taken over the Chief of General Staff Headquarters as part of an attempted coup have requested negotiations to surrender.

According to a Turkish official at the presidency, that is the last base the coup supporters hold.

Turkey has announced that more than 1,500 soldiers have been arrested in the coup attempt overnight.



11:50 a.m.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is condemning the coup attempt in Turkey, calling on all parties to respect democratic order and avoid further bloodshed.

Steinmeier said in a statement Saturday that Germany is deeply concerned about the developments overnight.

He says he condemns any attempts to change the democratic order in Turkey by force.



11:45 a.m.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson says he has spoken to his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, to underline support for Turkeys democratic elected government and institutions after an overnight coup attempt.

The Foreign Office is advising Britons in Turkey to stay indoors, avoid public places, in particular demonstrations, and remain vigilant.

It says the situation now appears quieter in Istanbul, and the bridges across the Bosphorus are reopening. But there are reports of tank fire and small arms fire in Ankara.

British Airways says it is canceling all flights to and from Turkey on Saturday, but budget airline easyJet says it plans to run its scheduled flights, largely to Turkish resort towns.



11:30 a.m.

Turkeys acting chief of the general staff says 1,563 soldiers have been arrested in the attempted military coup overnight.

The newly appointed Gen. Umit Dundar says those who took part in the betrayal will not go unpunished.

He says those who sided with democracy and the rule of law thwarted the attempt.

Dundar says Turkeys military is determined to purge members of the movement of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who is living in exile in Pennsylvania, from the ranks.

Our people should have no concern, that the era of coups and juntas have come to a close, never to be opened again, Dundar says.



11:20

Gen. Umit Dundar, the newly appointed acting chief of the general staff, said more than 190 people died in clashes: 41 police officers, two soldiers, 47 civilians and 104 people described as coup plotters.

Dundar said officers from the Air Force, the military police and the armored units were mainly involved in the attempt.



10:45 a.m.

Iran says the attempted military coup in Turkey was doomed to fail.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as praising the brave defense by the people of Turkey of their democracy and elected government.

Zarif said the events in neighboring Turkey prove that coup detat has no place and is doomed to fail in our region.

And Pakistan has condemned the coup attempt, with an aide to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif saying in a statement that Pakistan hopes that peace and normalcy will be restored.

Pakistans main political parties have also praised the people of Turkey for foiling the coup.



10:35 a.m.

The exiled Syrian opposition has congratulated the Turkish people for halting an attempted military coup.

The Turkey-based Syrian National Coalition says in a statement that Turkey has protected its democratic institutions in the face of dark and desperate attempts that sought to take control of the popular will.

It says the Turkish people value democracy and will not let a group of putschists take it away in a desperate attempt to restore military rule.

Turkey has been one of the main backers of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad and is hosting some 2.7 million Syrian refugees.



10:05 a.m.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is seeking to contact his Turkish counterpart Saturday morning from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Thats according to Dunfords spokesman, Navy Capt. Gregory Hicks.

Dunford is in Afghanistan to meet with U.S. and Afghan troops and commanders. He compressed his schedule Saturday in order to be available for consultations with Washington about the situation in Turkey, which has troops in Afghanistan as part of the U.S.-led coalition.



10 a.m.

Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency has raised the number of dead in the attempted coup to some 90 with 1,154 wounded.



9:45 a.m.

Turkeys state-run news agency says some 200 unarmed soldiers have left Turkeys military headquarters in the capital Ankara and have surrendered to police.

It isnt immediately clear if those 200 are among 1,563 military personnel who have been reported detained across Turkey as the government cracks down on the attempted coup.

At least 60 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in violence.



9:40 a.m.

A senior Turkish official says a total of 1,563 military personnel have been detained across Turkey as the government cracks down on the attempted coup.

The official says most of those arrested lower ranks.

The official was communicating with the media on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.



8:35 a.m.

Turkeys state-run news agency says military chief of staff Gen. Hulusi Akar has been rescued in an operation launched at an air base in the outskirts of Ankara.

Anadolu Agency says the general is being taken to a safe location.

Broadcaster CNN-Turk said that Akar was taken hostage at military headquarters in Ankara and transported by helicopter to Akincilar Air Base.

CNN-Turk says Akar would now take over the command of the operation against the coup plotters.



8:20 a.m.

Turkeys Police Chief Celalettin Lekesiz says 16 coup plotters have been killed in clashes at Turkeys military police command.

In comments carried by the state-run Anadolu Agency Saturday, Lekesiz says 250 others have been arrested. He says clashes at the command are continuing but are about to come to an end.

The report says Gen. Memduh Hakbilen, the chief of staff of Turkeys command for the Aegean region, is among those arrested.



7:45 a.m.

State-run Anadolu Agency is reporting 754 members of the armed forces have been detained across Turkey in the wake of the attempted coup.

Anadolu says that at the Etimesgut armored units training command, in the outskirts of Ankara, some soldiers who took part in the coup attempt were arrested by fellow officers or soldiers and handed over to police.

Even as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the coup is being crushed and arrests made, it is not clear who is in control of military headquarters in Ankara. Erdogan has not left the Istanbul airport as dawn broke Saturday.



7:15 a.m.

An official in the presidents office says at least 60 people have been killed in the attempted coup.

The official also says 336 people, most of them soldiers, have been arrested across Turkey. Most of the dead are civilians.

The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he wasnt authorized to speak to the media.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, quoted by state-run Anadolu Agency, says security forces have achieved results in many places and defeated coup plotters. That includes the National Intelligence Agency, police and government buildings.

He says: There is nowhere they have they have proper control. God willing they will be defeated in the remaining areas and those in the air will be brought down.



7 a.m.

CNN-Turk is quoting Prime Minister Binali Yildirim as saying that commander of Turkeys 1st Army, Gen. Umit Dundar, has been appointed acting chief of military staff.

Earlier President Erdogan said he had no information concerning Chief of Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar, who was reportedly taken hostage at the military headquarters by coup plotters.



6:50 a.m.

CNN-Turk is showing images of dozens of soldiers giving themselves up to government forces on Istanbuls Bosporus Bridge.

Theyre walking among tanks with their hands held up.



6:45 a.m.

Turkeys state-run news agency says a military helicopter used by coup plotters has been shot down.

The Anadolu Agency says Saturday the helicopter was brought down in the Golbasi district, in the outskirts of Ankara.

The report says the helicopter was used to attack Turkeys satellite station Turksat.



6:40 a.m.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has addressed thousands of flag-waving supporters outside Istanbuls Ataturk Airport and tells them he is charge and coup wont succeed.

Erdogan says: They have pointed the peoples guns against the people. The president, whom 52 percent of the people brought to power, is in charge. This government brought to power by the people, is in charge. They wont succeed as long as we stand against them by risking everything.



6:30 a.m.

European Council President Donald Tusk says the EU fully supports Turkeys democratically elected government, in the wake of the attempted coup that left scores dead and wounded.

Speaking in Mongolia at the Asia-Europe summit meeting, Tusk says Turkey is a key partner for the European Union. The EU fully supports the democratically elected government, the institutions of the country and the rule of law.

He also called for a swift return to Turkeys constitutional order.



6:10 a.m.

Turkish broadcaster CNN-Turk is back on air after police apparently entered the building and arrested soldiers who had taken it over. CNN-Turk showed police taking away a soldier with his hands bound behind his back with wire.

The station also showed the moment five soldiers, who appeared to be conscripts, enter the building brandishing machine guns and telling employees to vacate the building.



5:50 a.m.

State-run Anadolu Agency says Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has called all legislators for an emergency meeting on Saturday.

Parliament Speaker Ismail Kahraman earlier said that a bomb hit one corner of a public relations building inside the parliament complex, injuring some police officers.

He said there were no fatalities and that all legislators were safe at a parliamentary shelter.

Troops loyal to the government are moving to crush the coup attempt, arresting some 130 anti-government forces. A helicopter was flying over the area where the parliament is located and shots were being fired.

A source at the presidency told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that 13 military officers who had earlier tried to forcibly enter the presidential palace were among those arrested.



5:30 a.m.

NTV television is quoting the prosecutors office in Ankara saying at least 42 people have been killed in attacks in the capital.

According to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, the number of soldiers who were arrested in the coup plot has increased to 130.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier said that the coup plot will fail.



5:10 a.m.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, speaking to state-run Anadolu Agency, says more than 120 people have been arrested in a coup plot.

He says: Things are getting better every minute.

Yildirim called on people to remain in the streets to support the government against coup plotters and appealed for patience.

He says a few air force planes flown by coup plotters still remain in the air. He has earlier ordered those aircraft shot down.



5 a.m.

A lawyer for the Turkish government says there are indications of direct involvement in the coup attempt of a cleric who is living in exile in Pennsylvania.

Robert Amsterdam said in a statement Friday evening that he and his firm have attempted repeatedly to warn the U.S. government of the threat posed by Fethullah Gulen and his movement.

He says that according to Turkish intelligence sources, there are signs that Gulen is working closely with certain members of military leadership against the elected civilian government.

The president of a group that promotes Gulens ideas denied the charges.

Y. Alp Aslandogan of the New York-based Alliance for Shared Values tells The Associated Press we categorically deny such accusations and find them to be highly irresponsible.

Earlier in the evening, the alliance said, we condemn any military intervention in (the) domestic politics of Turkey.



4:40 a.m.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says his general secretary was abducted by coup makers and there is no information on the chief of the military staff.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, speaking on NTV, says he has ordered the annihilitation of military planes used by coup plotters. He says military jets have taken off from an air base in Eskisehir, east of Ankara.

According to transcripts of the presidents remarks provided by his office, Erdogan said that he arrived in Istanbul from the holiday resort of Marmaris, which was also been bombed after he left there.

He says: Those who drive around in tanks will have to go back to where they came from.  The most important thing right now is that millions of Turkish citizens are on the streets at 4.30 a.m.

He says coup makers are a minority within the military.

According to Erdogan, Turkey has a democratically elected government and president. We are in charge and we will continue exercising our powers until the end. We will not abandon our country to these invaders. It will end well.
The chaos came amid a period of political turmoil in Turkey  a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group  that critics blame on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. Staying in power by switching from being prime minister to president, Erdogan has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

The government has also come under pressure from the millions of refugees in Turkey who have fled violence in neighboring Syria and Iraq, and a series of bloody attacks in Turkey blamed on the Islamic State group and Kurdish rebels.

Erdogan was on a seaside vacation when tanks rolled into the streets of Ankara and Istanbul. He flew home early Saturday and declared the coup to have failed.

"They have pointed the people's guns against the people. The president, whom 52 percent of the people brought to power, is in charge. This government brought to power by the people is in charge," Erdogan told large crowds after landing at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport.

The uprising appears not to have been backed by the most senior ranks of the military, and Turkey's main opposition parties quickly condemned the attempted overthrow of the government. Gen. Umit Dundar said the plotters were mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and the armored units.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the violence, and 2,839 plotters were detained. A source at the office of the presidency, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government rules, said the toll of 161 "excludes assailants"  which could mean the death toll is much higher.

Yildirim described the night as "a black mark on Turkish democracy" and said the perpetrators "will receive every punishment they deserve."

Turkey's NATO allies lined up to condemn the coup. President Barack Obama urged all sides to support Turkey's democratically elected government. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said he spoke to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and called for the Turkish people to respect democracy.

There have long been tensions between the military  which saw itself as the protector of the secular Turkish state  and Erdogan's Islamic-influenced AKP party.

Government officials blamed the coup attempt on a U.S.-based moderate Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Erdogan has often accused the cleric and his supporters of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Gulen, however, said he condemned "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey" and sharply rejected any responsibility for the attempted coup.

"Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force," he said. "I pray to God for Turkey, for Turkish citizens, and for all those currently in Turkey that this situation is resolved peacefully and quickly."

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations," he added.

Still, the government pressed ahead Saturday with a purge of judicial officials, with 2,745 judges being dismissed across Turkey for alleged ties to Gulen. Ten members of Turkey's highest administrative court were detained and arrest warrants were issued for 48 administrative court members and 140 members of Turkey's appeals court, state media reported.

The coup attempt began late Friday, with a military statement saying forces had seized control "to reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for law and order to be reinstated."

Fighter jets buzzed overhead, gunfire erupted outside military headquarters and vehicles blocked two major bridges in Istanbul. Soldiers backed by tanks blocked entry to Istanbul's airport for a couple of hours before being overtaken by pro-government crowds carrying Turkish flags, according to footage broadcast by the Dogan news agency.

The military did not appear unified, as top commanders went on television to condemn the action and order troops back to their barracks.

Erdogan, appearing on television over a mobile phone, had urged supporters into the streets to defend his government, and large crowds heeded his call. People faced off against troops who had blocked key bridges over the Bosporus that link the Asian and European sides of Istanbul.

By early Saturday, the putsch appeared to have fizzled, as police, soldiers and civilians loyal to the government confronted coup plotters.

In images broadcast on CNN-Turk, dozens of soldiers walked among tanks with their hands held up, surrendering to government forces. Discarded gear was strewn on the ground. Some flag-waving people climbed onto the tanks.

NTV television showed a Turkish colonel and other soldiers on their knees being searched and taken into custody at military headquarters. The Hurriyet newspaper, quoting investigators, said some privates told them they were not even aware they were part of a coup attempt but thought they were on military maneuvers.

Colonels and generals implicated in the rebellion were fired and loyal troops rescued the military chief who had been taken hostage at an air base on the outskirts of Ankara, the capital.

A Blackhawk military helicopter with seven Turkish military personnel and one civilian landed in the Greek city of Alexandroupolis, where the passengers requested asylum, according to Greece's defense ministry. While Turkey demanded their extradition, Greece said it would hand back the helicopter and consider the men's asylum requests.

Fighting continued into the early morning, with the sounds of huge blasts echoing across Istanbul and Ankara, including at least one bomb that hit the parliament complex. Television footage showed broken glass and other debris strewn across a lobby leading to the assembly hall.

CNN-Turk said two bombs hit near the presidential palace, killing five people and wounding a number of others.

Turkey is a key partner in U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group, and has allowed American jets to use its Incirlik air base to fly missions against the extremists in nearby Syria and Iraq. A coup against the democratically elected government could have made it difficult for the United States to continue to cooperate with Turkey.

Erdogan's Islamist government has also been accused of playing an ambiguous  even double-sided  role in Syria. Turkey's renewed offensive against Kurdish militants  who seek more autonomy and are implacable foes of IS  has complicated the U.S.-led fight against the Islamic State group.

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the Chatham House think tank in London, said it was not clear who was behind the attempted coup, but it appeared to have been "carried out by lower-ranking officers  at the level of colonel."

"Their main gripe seems to have been President Erdogan's attempt to transform his office into a powerful and centralized executive presidency," Hakura said. "I think in the short term this failed coup plot will strengthen President Erdogan, particularly in his drive to turn his office into a strong and centralized executive presidency."

Turkey's military staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pressured Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, a pious Muslim mentor of Erdogan, out of power in 1997.
CARO  The Michigan State Police (MSP) Caro Post will continue to accept applications through Wednesday for the Citizens Academy, which will start July 28 and end Sept. 15.

Space is limited, however several spots remain available for those wishing to attend stated Trooper Mark Swales of the Caro Post, in a news release. The eight-week academy will give citizens the opportunity to become familiar with the mission and operation of the MSP, understand the procedures troopers follow, increase their awareness of law enforcements role in the community, and get to know personnel at the Caro Post.

The academy will meet at the Tuscola County Medical Care Facility Business Annex, located at 1231 Cleaver Road in Caro, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. on Thursday evenings. A graduation ceremony will be held on Sept. 15. Individuals who are interested in attending the Citizens Academy should call Swales at 989- 673-2156 or email swalesm@michigan.gov to receive an application.

You must be age 18 or older to apply.
But he said Turkey's government would have to prove Fethullah Gulen's wrongdoing.

Visiting Luxembourg, Kerry said Turkey hasn't yet requested that the United States send home Gulen, who left Turkey in 1999.

Gulen has harshly condemned the attempted coup attempt by military officers that resulted in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left dozens dead. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government is blaming the chaos on the cleric, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government. Washington has never found any evidence particularly compelling previously.

"We haven't received any request with respect to Mr. Gulen," Kerry told reporters. "We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen. And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately."

"I'm confident there will be some discussion about that," Kerry added.

President Barack Obama on Friday urged all sides in Turkey to support the democratically elected government in Turkey, a key NATO ally.

In a statement issued after a meeting with his national security advisers Obama also urged those in Turkey to show restraint and avoid violence or bloodshed. Obama was to be briefed on the situation Saturday by his national security and foreign policy advisers.

Gulen is understood to maintain significant support among some members of the military and mid-level bureaucrats. His movement called Hizmet includes think tanks, schools and various media enterprises. Gulen and Erdogan only became estranged in recent years.

In a statement, Gulen said he condemned, "in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey."

"Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force," he said. "I pray to God for Turkey, for Turkish citizens, and for all those currently in Turkey that this situation is resolved peacefully and quickly."

Gulen sharply rejected any responsibility: "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations."

Reiterating American support for Erdogan's government, Kerry said the U.S. opposed any attempt to overthrow a democratically elected leader. He said a change of government should only come through a legal, constitutional process.

Kerry also said that U.S. military cooperation with its NATO ally has been unaffected by the turmoil. Turkey plays a key role in U.S.-led efforts against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

"All of that continues as before," Kerry said.

He said the U.S. had no prior indication of the coup attempt, which came as Erdogan was on vacation.

It appears not to have been backed by the most senior ranks of the military, and Turkey's main opposition parties quickly condemned the attempted overthrow of the government. Prime Minister Benali Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the overnight violence. He said 2,839 plotters were detained.

"If you're planning a coup you don't exactly advertise to your partners in NATO," Kerry said. "So it surprised everyone. It does not appear to be a very brilliantly planned or executed event."

Turkey plays a key role in U.S.-led efforts against the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
The Rev. Karen Oliveto was elected late Friday night at a meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, of the church's Western Jurisdiction. Oliveto is pastor of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco. She is the first openly gay bishop in the 12.7 million-member denomination.

The United Methodist Church is deeply divided over LGBT rights. Church law says same-gender relationships are "incompatible with Christian teaching." But several regional districts are openly defying the prohibition by appointing gay clergy and allowing same-sex weddings in churches. Some instances have led to trials under the church legal system.

Oliveto's election could draw complaints that will prompt a review under church law.
Nearly two dozen states have passed laws requiring companies to search for beneficiaries. Illinois is the latest to consider a version of the legislation.

The laws follow years-long audits and multi-state investigations of the top 40 insurance companies that revealed many of them held on to benefits, even when they knew the person insured had died.

More than 20 insurance companies settled with states.

Some companies are pushing back, against both the investigations and the laws.

Life insurance companies owned by Chicago-based Kemper Corp. are trying to block Florida's law, one of the nation's strongest, and are fierce opponents of Illinois' proposal, which was approved by state lawmakers but still needs Gov. Bruce Rauner's signature to become law.

In lawsuits against the Illinois State Treasurer and Florida's Chief Financial Officer, Kemper's subsidiaries have argued that under their contracts with policyholders, beneficiaries have to make a claim to receive benefits.

"If states can interfere with existing contracts, it is a bad precedent for consumers and the companies that serve them and violates the U.S. and state constitutions," Kemper said in a statement.

Most of the laws are modeled after a version drafted by the National Conference of Insurance Legislators and supported by the American Council of Life Insurers, an industry group whose members include MetLife, Nationwide and Prudential. The council is pushing for all states to adopt this "national standard" by 2017.

"Life insurance companies are committed to providing people the money they are owed," the council said in a statement.

It said most life insurers have "gone well beyond what the law requires" to identify deceased policyholders and locate their beneficiaries. "We also think it makes sense for everyone in the industry to do the same."

The laws require companies to cross check their databases against a federal database of the deceased, though they differ on when to start those checks. Florida's law requires companies to check policies dating back to 1992.

In Illinois, insurance companies would only have to check their active, or "in-force," policies. If a match is found, they would be required to use "good faith efforts" to search for beneficiaries.

The issue stems from insurance companies' practice of checking the Social Security Death Master File to figure out whether policyholders receiving annuities had died. If a match was found, the companies would stop payments. But they wouldn't perform the same checks against life insurance policies, waiting, instead, for beneficiaries to reach out to them.

In a small number of cases, beneficiaries were unaware of the policies, so companies would hold on to the benefit for years before forwarding it to the state as "unclaimed property," or would deduct monthly payments until the money was gone and the policy was canceled.

The practice of checking the Death Master File for annuities but not for life insurance policies wasn't illegal, but state officials, including insurance regulators, treasurers and controllers, found it deceptive.

California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said the companies "failed to pay billions in death benefits that were owed to beneficiaries."

Since 2011, companies including MetLife, American International Group and Nationwide have settled with states, paying out more than $5 billion to beneficiaries of unclaimed policies, according to estimates by the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. They've also forwarded more than $2.4 billion to states, which continue to search for beneficiaries.

"This is something that shocked me," said Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs, whose office pushed for legislation. "We think it's important that the last wishes of the deceased are honored."

Earlier this year, Roberta Berchtold, 62, of San Diego, was told by a nephew that Illinois was looking for her father's descendants because it was holding money from a life insurance policy. She thought the matter was settled two years ago, when the insurance company contacted her about a policy and sent her a check for $35,000.

Initially, she said, she worried it was a scam.

Her father died six years ago at age 83. She had copies of his life insurance policies and remembers the insurance company denying payments for two. "My father was a farmer, and a Depression-era person," Berchtold said, adding that because of the high mortality rates in the fields, farmers wanted to make sure their families were taken care of.

She figured then he had cashed out the policies, but now realizes that, somehow, the company didn't pay out on at least two, Berchtold said.

"I never really trusted them," she said.

Joseph M. Belth, professor emeritus of insurance at Indiana University, said the biggest issue is lack of transparency in the industry. He has argued that policyholders should receive annual statements, documents that beneficiaries can then use to claim what's owed to them. But his idea, he said, has been rejected by the industry and regulators.
BENTON HARBOR, Mich. (AP)  Hundreds of law enforcement officers have attended a celebration of life service for one of two bailiffs slain after an inmate tried to escape from a southwestern Michigan courthouse.

MLive.com reports (http://bit.ly/29PdTgS ) that about 1,500 people gathered Friday at Lake Michigan College's Mendel Center in Benton Harbor to remember 61-year-old Joseph Zangaro.

Zangaro and 63-year-old Ronald Kienzle were killed Monday in Berrien County Circuit Court in St. Joseph. Both were retired police officers.

A handcuffed Larry Darnell Gordon disarmed Deputy James Atterberry Jr. during a fight and shot him. Zangaro and Kienzle were shot in a public hallway.

A woman also was shot in the arm. Hostages were briefly taken before Gordon was fatally shot by other bailiffs.

Services will be held Monday at the Mendel Center for Kienzle.
Despite Flipping in Surf 4 Times in a Year, Marines Say New ACV Is the Future of Amphibious Warfare

Some Marine veterans familiar with the vehicle and its operations have worried about the reliability of the ACV.
The Turkish government on Sunday ratcheted up its crackdown on alleged plotters of the botched coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, detaining as many as 6,000 people, including military officers, and issuing dozens of arrest warrants for judges and prosecutors, according to government officials.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said in a television interview that "the cleansing (operation) is continuing. Some 6,000 detentions have taken place. The number could surpass 6,000."

Detention orders were for 53 more judges and prosecutors while 52 military officers were rounded up for their alleged roles in the failed coup, Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

Bozdag also said he was confident that the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey. The Turkish president has blamed Gulen and his followers for the failed military coup on Friday night, but Gulen has denied any involvement in or knowledge about the attempted coup. The U.S. says it will look at any evidence Turkey has to offer against Gulen, and judge accordingly.

Bozdag says "the United States would weaken itself by protecting him, it would harm its reputation. I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey."

Erdogan spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin after the failed coup attempt, Turkish officials told reporters.

Putin said Moscow stood by "Turkey's elected government" and expressed his good wishes to Turkey's people, a Turkish government statement added.

It said the two leaders -- who recently patched up relations following Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane -- also agreed to meet face-to-face next month.

The reports Sunday followed an intensive crackdown against the judiciary and the military in the wake of the botched coup Friday night.

Already, three of the country's top generals have been detained, alongside hundreds of soldiers. The government has also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities briefly, ended hours later when loyal government forces including military and police-- regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan.

At least 265 people were killed and more than 1,400 were wounded. Government officials say at least 104 conspirators were killed.

Still, the coup appears to have boosted Erdogan's popularity. Clapping, singing and dancing, thousands of government backers celebrated the defeat of the coup in public squares in Ankara and Istanbul into the wee hours Sunday, bolstering support for the man who's led Turkey for over 13 years.

Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

"It will allow him to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before," he said.

Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at a rally in Istanbul, said Sunday that "just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back."

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

-- The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins spoke Saturday on how division-rival Bostons recent acquisition of left-hander Drew Pomeranz could affect the trade deadline, telling Shi Davidi of Sportsnet, Im not so sure its going to increase the market drastically. Theres just more buyers than there are sellers at that position. The market was already set very high based on the alternatives. Atkins added that, given the lack of sellers, it was no surprise the Red Sox had to surrender top-flight prospect Anderson Espinoza to make a deal happen. As for his own teams plans as the Aug. 1 deadline nears, the Blue Jays arent focusing solely on acquiring rentals or controllable players, Atkins stated. Typically you pay for control, so that would mean probably giving up more prospect-level. Everythings a balance.

More from Toronto and one of its AL East rivals:
ANN ARBOR, MI -- A patient was transported Saturday to the University of Michigan Medical Center after suffering a medical incident while driving and crashing a vehicle into a traffic light pole in Ann Arbor, according to Huron Valley Ambulance.

The driver was in critical condition at the time of the crash, said Joyce Williams, HVA spokeswoman. The age and gender of the driver have not been released.

The crash occurred around 4:20 p.m. July 16 at the intersection of King George Boulevard and Eisenhower Parkway, according to Ann Arbor police officials.

Witnesses said the patient was driving slowly just before the vehicle jumped the curb and hit a traffic light on King George Boulevard. A witness believed the driver was having a cardiac episode and received CPR on scene.

Williams could not confirm that CPR was administered or release any information on medical treatments delivered on scene.

Ben Solis is an intern with MLive & The Ann Arbor News. Email him at bsolis@mlive.com and follow him on Twitter @bensolis1.
BAY CITY, MI -- When Nicholas Torka stepped aboard the replica Viking longboat Draken Harald Harfagre Sunday, it was like "coming home."

"When I heard this was coming in, I felt my blood boil, as if a part of my life was coming to me," said Torka, a Sanford resident.

Torka's mother recently spent months tracing back their family's line. While they knew they had strong familial roots in Scandinavia, they never thought that his mother's search would turn up their relation to the wife of legendary Viking ruler Ragnar Lodbrok, he said.

Draken Harald Harfagre drew long lines of people to tour the ship until the very end of the Bay City Tall Ship Celebration Sunday, July 17.

The expedition had cancelled their trip to Bay City and other Tall Ships Challenge stops in the Great Lakes because of unexpected pilotage fees estimated to cost more than $400,000.

The expedition later decided to soldier on to Bay City anyhow at an estimated cost of $10,000. The Viking longboat is scheduled to sail to Chicago following the Bay City celebration and then make stops in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Duluth, Minnesota, and Erie, Pennsylvania.

Whether they'll attend other Great Lakes stops is up in the air, said David Short, one of the ship's watch leaders.

A fundraising event for several local charities during the event was repurposed to help not only the charities, but also pilotage costs of Draken Harald Harfagre and Spanish ship El Galeon Andalucia.

Bay City Tall Ship Celebration head organizer Shirley Roberts said the amount raised at the event Saturday has not been tallied yet.

The allure of stepping aboard the Viking longboat was more than oohs and aahs, it was a lesson in Viking culture. David Short, one of the ship's watch leaders, said this is evident in the number of questions people bring aboard with them when they tour.

"People generally can't get their head around it," Short said. "It's a much different sailing vessel than the others here."

Short said the first round of questions usually pertain to where the crew sleeps and eats and how hard it is to row the Atlantic. But the oars, like in the times of old, are rarely used, he said. That famous symbol of the Vikings, the horned helmet? That's a misconception, too, he said.

"The idea of raping and pillaging and raiding -- they certainly were doing that, for sure, but they also used these for trading," Short said.

Bay City Tall Ship Celebration typically draws 85,000 to 100,000 people throughout the celebration. While this year's numbers haven't been figured out yet, Roberts said just by looking at the crowds throughout the weekend, she thinks the attendance numbers this year surpassed the last festivals.

"I'm very pleased with how the event went," Roberts said. "It was a success on all accounts."

The influx of people in downtown Bay City throughout the event rivaled the tall ships in terms of pleasant sights, Julie Kaczorowski said.

Although she's a Sebewaing resident now, the Bay City native said it makes her proud to see tourists enjoy the city's vibrant downtown.

"People sitting on park benches is a great sight," Kaczorowski said. "They've done so much in upgrades and renovations to the downtown. It's good to see so many people walking into stores and discovering what's here."
DETROIT-- Dozens of street marching bands from across the country gathered at Roosevelt Park on Saturday to rock out at the third annual Crash Detroit Festival.

The gathering, which seeks to bring music to underused spaces, doubled its turnout from five bands in 2013 to 10 on Saturday.

The party continues Sunday in Hamtramck.

"(We wanted) to create this community-centric, family, free festival where everyone can come out and enjoy what we do," said Antha Ann Schoenrock, member of the Detroit Party Marching Band and Crash Detroit committee.

Along with local bands, the festival included bands from Massachusetts, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas, all equipped with their own unique styles that brought hundreds of visitors to the all-day event.

"It feels like love," said guitarist Zach Frasier of the Jefferson Street Parade Band from Bloomington, Indiana. "It's a positive thing, and it feels good to be here. It makes me appreciate life in a lot of ways, and it makes me feel good that we're well received and people dig what we're doing."

The festival included two performance tents, where two acts performed at a time, allowing guests to rotate between the groups performing.

Youth Crash Corp, a band for kids started by Crash, performed early in the day.

There was also a tent where children could try out drums, clarinets and other instruments for themselves.

Fraiser said the festival could serve as an inspiration for young musicians, and for anyone to do what they enjoy.

"If (kids) want to play an instrument, they should play it," he said. "They should have the opportunity and be able to play.

"Schools should have (instruments) available for students. Not everybody is right-brained or left-brained in the matter of life, and I think that you're put into the world and you should be able to do what you love and there should be more venues for people to make a living doing what they love."

On Friday night, the bands performed all over Downtown Detroit to promote the Saturday event. The music brought people out of apartments and bars.

"We got to play at all the different venues, which was really great," said Nick Edelstein of the Black Sheep Ensemble group from Atlanta, Georgia. "Not only did we get to interact with the people, it was a really beautiful experience of sharing music with strangers.

"It takes a lot for us to get here, and when we get here and we're welcomed warmly like that, it really means a lot."

The event went well into the night on Saturday, with bands performing at least twice during the festival.

Kyra Gregor, who was visiting Detroit from Livingston County, was pleased with the variety of music as she danced to sounds and vibes from the different bands.

"I think it's great, it's funky and its great music to dance to," Gregor said. "I'm excited to have this vibe in this area."
LAPEER COUNTY, MI -- Deputies are looking for a man who broke into a Columbiaville home while a 16-year-old girl was there alone.

On Friday, July 15 around 2:26 p.m. Lapeer County Sheriff's deputies were dispatched to the 100 block of West Barnes Lake Road in Columbiaville for an occupied home invasion. The home is located about a quarter mile to the west of North Lapeer Road.

A 16-year-old girl was alone at the home, according to a news release from the Lapeer County Sheriff's Office. The teen told deputies she saw a red SUV pull in the driveway. The vehicle was parked facing the home.

The male driver got out of the vehicle, approached the front door, and rang the doorbell, according to the release. After no response, he walked around behind the house to the glass sliding door.

The suspect returned to his vehicle and backed it into the driveway closer to the house. He then walked to the glass sliding patio door in the back of the house where he gained entry, according to the release.

Immediately after entering the home, the suspect entered the bedroom where he ran into the teen.

The intruder asked the girl if a certain individual lived at the home, according to the release. Once the girl told him no, he apologized and left the house without event through the patio door.

The teen was not harmed during the incident and nothing is known to have been stolen from the home, according to the release.

The vehicle is described as a red SUV, possibly a Mercedes due to the emblem on the front, according to the release.

The male is between the ages of 20 and 30-years-old standing six-feet to six-feet four-inches tall with a stocky build. He was clean shaven and potentially bald, but the view was limited due to the gray form fitting hat with a brim he was wearing, according to the release.

The suspect was wearing silver in color jean type pants and a gray t-shirt.

The incident remains under investigation by the Lapeer County Sheriff's Office. Anyone who has information is asked to call Lapeer County Central Dispatch non-emergency number at 810-667-0292, or the Lapeer County Sheriff's tip line at 810-245-1374.

Amanda Emery is a police reporter for MLive-The Flint Journal. Contact her at aemery@mlive.com or 810-285-0792. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
Here are some area police stories you may have missed from Saturday, July 16.

Flint police investigate deadly domestic dispute

Pedestrian killed after hit by drag racers on Dort Highway in Flint

Woman dropped off at hospital in critical condition following shooting

Deputies looking for man who broke into house while teen home alone

Amanda Emery is a police reporter for MLive-The Flint Journal. Contact her at aemery@mlive.com or 810-285-0792. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
WYOMING, MI -- Police caught three teens they believe are responsible for BB gun damage to dozens of vehicles.

Wyoming police say three 16-year-old boys and one 14-year-old boy were taken into custody early Saturday morning.

Police tracked down the teens after receiving reports on Thursday and Friday nights about cars being struck by BBs. Witnesses had seen people in a red car firing BB guns at vehicles.

The damaged vehicles generally were parked in areas between Clyde Park Avenue and Burlingame Avenue, north of 28th Street.

Wyoming police on Saturday said they had received about 50 reports of damaged vehicles from residents, but they expected more to trickle in.

Anyone with suspicious BB gun damage to their vehicle should call Wyoming police at 616-530-7300.

E-mail John Tunison: jtunison@mlive.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/johntunison
Kigali (AFP) - Renewed fighting in South Sudan that has claimed more than 300 lives is set to dominate an African Union summit due to open Sunday in the Rwandan capital Kigali.

A shaky ceasefire has held since late Monday following the fighting that raged for four days in the South Sudanese capital Juba, leaving hundreds dead and forcing 40,000 to flee their homes.

The violence echoed the fighting that triggered the civil war and marks a fresh blow to last year's deal to end the bitter conflict that began when President Salva Kiir accused ex-rebel and now Vice President Riek Machar of plotting a coup.

The unrest has also plunged into doubt a peace deal struck in August 2015 between the two sides.

Speaking to the regional grouping IGAD in Kigali on Saturday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said a "critical stage" in the South Sudan crisis had been reached.

"Now is the time to send a strong message to the South Sudanese leadership," he said.

"The people of South Sudan have been let down by their own leadership. Their hopes and dreams have been tarnished at the expense of warring parties enriching and empowering themselves.

"We cannot and will not tolerate this. The engagement of all is needed to provide a framework that will address the current security crisis but also human rights," he added.

- Crises shaking continent -

South Sudan is just one of the crises shaking the continent that African leaders will address during the summit.

The AU will also seek to hammer out a solution to the crisis engulfing Burundi where a spate of killings have rocked the country since President Pierre Nkurunziza's announced in April 2015 that he would seek a third term.

Also on the crowded AU agenda will be the ongoing fight against the Boko Haram jihadist group that has its roots in northern Nigeria but has carried out attacks across the Lake Chad region.

Recent violent incidents in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also expected to feature in the talks.

Efforts to secure peace in the South Sudan and elsewhere, however, will be complicated by divisions over who should succeed Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, ex-wife of South African President Jacob Zuma, to become the AU's new commission chair.

Several countries on the continent have indicated that they do not back any of the leading candidates for the job, arguing that they "lack stature".

Now all three of the leading candidates -- Botswana's Foreign Minister Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi, her Guinean opposite number Agapito Mba Mokuy and Uganda's former vice president Specioza Wandira-Kazibwe -- look like they may fail to get a majority of votes from the African Union's 54 members.

If that happens the vote could be abandoned and re-run at the next AU summit in Addis Ababa in January 2017
The Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Mines and Energy, Hon. Alhaji Amadu Sorogho, has called on Ghanaians to bear with government over the high cost of electricity and help in finding a lasting solution to the current power shortages.

Hon. Sorogho pointed out that the country can no longer rely on the Akosombo hydro dam and as a result, made it imperative for government to look for alternative sources of power which comes at a relatively high cost.

There is no way we can enjoy sustainable energy at a cheap cost since it demands a lot of financial investment, Hon. Sorogho submitted in Accra yesterday at a round table discussions on finding a lasting solution to the power crisis in Ghana. The event was organised by the Institute of Green Growth Solutions in collaboration with Konrad Adenauer Stitung. It was themed, providing Lasting Solutions to Energy Conundrum.'

Currently 70% of the country's energy supply is derived from alternative sources such as the power badges in Tema, the Asogli Power Plant, import of electricity from the Ivory Coast among others, thus making electricity production and supply very expensive for government to continue to subsidize.

Speaking on the topic, 'The Way Forward for Sustainable Energy Demand and Supply in Ghana,' Hon. Sorogho said the key hindrance to finding a lasting solution to the energy crisis in the country is the over politicization of energy related issues, therefore, the first step in finding solution will be by taken away partisan politics from energy issues and treating the issue as national issue that needs urgent attention in order to find a lasting solution.

He also entreated Ghanaians to adopt the habit of energy conservation in order to avoid wasting the little energy available.

Mr Kwabena Yante, executive member of the Association of Ghana industries stated that renewable energy such the use of solar, wind and biogas to generate electricity should be to be adopted if the country hopes to make any strides in the fight against the recurrent power crisis.

Mr Yante stated that though industry has benefitted from the hydro dams, their power generative capacity has been exhausted and has shrunk to providing only 30 percent of the energy consumption of the nation.

He urged the private sector to take advantage of the opportunities provided by technological development in solar and wind energy production and invest in the sector of renewable energy production which can be sold to homes and government.

He said the financial sector must also be willing to invest money into private energy producing companies as they collaborate with government to find a lasting solution to the power crisis.

On his part Dr William Ahadzi, a Policy Analyst and Head of Research of the ruling National Democratic Congress stated that the government is committed to finding a lasting solution to the energy crisis and even hope to export power to our neighbouring countries.

Dr. Ahadzi said the government is focusing on implementing long term measures that tackles the problem through Public Private Partnership in the renewable energy sector.

He also stated that government is also researching and exploring the use of clean coal technology to generate electricity.
Barima Owusu Sekyere, Chief of Asaman, in the Afigya Sekyere East constituency, says the National Health Insurance Scheme, established by the Kufuor-led NPP government, to remove the constant fear of falling ill under the inhumane Cash & Carry system, has collapsed in his town.

According to the Chief, residents of his town, who in times past beamed with smiles after returning from the hospital, now have to pay exorbitant amounts of money, in the midst of the prevailing hardships and suffering, in order to access healthcare.

When as a government you only think of infrastructural development, without paying attention to the wellbeing of the citizenry, it is a cause for worry. President Kufuor instituted the National Health Insurance Scheme, which enabled residents to access affordable healthcare at the Asaman Hospital.

These days, you even have to buy paracetamol yourself, whereas in those days, under President Kufuor, you come home from the hospital with all the drugs paid for by the NHIS. Today, we have to pay for healthcare services, as well as pay for the drugs. This situation is unacceptable, the Chief of Asaman bemoaned.

Barima Owusu Sekyere made this known on Saturday, July 16, 2016, when the 2016 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, together with the NPP's parliamentary candidate for Afigya Sekyere East, Mavis Nkansah Boadu, paid a courtesy call on him at his palace.

Delving into the education sector which, he said, is also in crisis, Barima Owusu Sekyere recounted how students, right from the days of Kwame Nkrumah, were given allowances to help them through college. After completing school, the teacher is given everything in order to make him or her comfortable, so he or she can teach the children well.

Today, however, the Asaman Chief indicated that students in training colleges pay fees, have had the allowances cancelled, and even after completion, they have to write application letters. Which teacher, after completing training school, writes an application before he is employed in a school?

Barima Owusu Sekyere, therefore, reposed his confidence in the ability of the NPP flagbearer to return Ghana onto the path of progress and prosperity.

I know you can do it, and that is why the NPP overwhelmingly elected you as flagbearer. There is a saying which states that 'one goes before the Chiefs three times, if he is to be successful'. This is your third time, and we know that God and our ancestors will make sure you are victorious, he added.

To all NPP supporters and sympathisers, Barima Owusu Sekyere, urged patience and unity amongst their ranks in the run-up to this year's elections, stating that whatever God has written this year, no man can change it.

In concluding he reiterated his unflinching support for the NPP leader, adding that I bless you. In sickness or in health, I support you. It is he who embarks on a good journey who is encouraged and supported.

Ghana's problem is leadership

Still in the Afigya Sekyere East constituency, Nana Akufo-Addo paid a courtesy call on Nana Dr. Frimpong Anokye II, Chief of the Agona Traditional Area.

Revealing that the NPP flagbearer was his mate at the University of Ghana, Legon, Nana Dr. Frimpong Anokye II noted that the bane of Africa, and for that matter Ghana, has always been bad leadership.

Bad governance breeds problems and troubles in nations. Africa's problem is that of leadership. Wherever there is turmoil and hardship is any nation, then leadership is to blame, he said.

The Chief of Agona, thus, urged Nana Akufo-Addo to constantly trust God, as He is the only one who anoints Kings, adding that we pray for God's guidance for you, and I am certain that if you do God's will, His will for your life will also come to pass.

-starrfmonline
President John Mahama has challenged African leaders to develop the capacity of their state institutions to enable them generate reliable statistics on their activities.

The President contended that such moves would be essential if Africa is to achieve its targets in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

President Mahama made these remarks during a breakfast meeting on the sidelines of the 27th Ordinary Session of the AU Assembly of Heads of State in Kigali, Rwanda.

President Mahama, speaking in his capacity as a Co-Chair of the UN Eminent Persons on SDGs, said it is important that we build up the capacity of national statistical institutions because it is important to have real time statistics to be able to make the implementation adjustments that you have to as you go along in the implementation of the SDG's.

Addressing his fellow Heads of States, he also blamed the continent's inability to meet some targets under the Millennium Development Goals on the absence of reliable data.

President Mahama thus urged them to pay particular attention to improving the quality of statistics gathered by state institutions.

In the course of our advocacy work, all government must pay much attention to building the capacity of national statistics institutions at both the national and local levels in order improve the quality of statistics available.



By: Delali Adogla-Bessa/citifmonline.com/Ghana
As part of efforts aimed at providing opportunities for startups to acquire office accommodation at a cheaper cost, Workshed Africa Limited has launched it new office space at Spintex in Accra.

The idea is targeted at bringing startups from different areas together under an ecosystem that would provide opportunities to minimize cost of doing business while maximizing output.

Speaking to Citi Business News at the launch, the Team Leader of Workshed Africa Limited, Mr. Richard Bempong stated that renting an office space in Accra is a major challenge that hinders startups from expanding their operations.

According to him, startups are required to provide over GHS3,000 a month for a decent office space in the national capital to properly commence their businesses.

If you look at the cost of renting a decent office space in Ghana to start a business that would sustain you in the long run you would have to rent for over GHS3,000 per month. Multiply that by 12 months, he said.

He maintained that cost of renting a decent accommodation has negatively impacted on the profits of most start-ups, suffocating their businesses.

While we work to provide the accommodation, we actively and deliberately engage in projects that would create value for our members and society at large, he said.

Mr. Bempong stated that the company has chosen to focus majority of its social impact endeavors to helping build and promoting the burgeoning entrepreneurial movement in Ghana.

When creating Workshed, we envisioned a working area that could cater to the needs of young business people. Being young entrepreneurs, we were previously hit by harsh realities of setting up a business, prominent among these was high commercial rent rates and terms that are not startup-friendly, so we decided to create a solution, he stressed.



By: Lawrence Segbefia/citibusinessnews.com/Ghana
The timely intervention of the police prevented a bloodbath between youth of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the Walewale constituency of the Northern Region.

Supporters of the two main political parties clashed in Walewale township where two youth groups simultaneously launched their campaign activities.

These are the NPPs Bawumia Youth for Change and the NDCs Zaadiaya Youth group fronting for the Northern regional Minister who doubles as the partys Parliamentary candidate for Walewale constituency, Abubakari Abdullah affectionately called Abuba.

The NPP constituency Secretary, Simon Ali confirmed the bizarre situation and narrated that two supporters from their camp were injured.

According to him, one of the casualties who suffered from cutlass wounds is on admission at the Walewale government hospital while the other victim is nursing his wounds at home.

He accused their opponents of deliberately organizing a counter rally closer to the venue of the Bawumia Youth for Change campaign launch, hence the clash.

Mr. Ali said the party has since lodged official complaint with the police and anticipated justice will prevail.

He described the NPP as a law abiding political tradition but warned that the youth there will resist any acts of hooliganism as the political atmosphere charges.

Mr. Ali implored NDC leadership there to caution their supporters against political vendetta.

But NDCs Walewale constituency Communications Director, Imoro Abdul-Razak accused the NPP of causing the clash.

He claimed NPP supporters on motorbikes provoked their counterparts from the NDC who were in a convoy riding towards the Tamale stretch of the Walewale main road to usher in the regional Minister for their campaign launch.

Imoro Abdul-Razak posited that the NPP has clandestinely positioned its members to cause mayhem in the constituency anytime the regional Minister is in town.

He also served notice that the NDC youth are going to defend themselves anytime their counterparts from NPP launch their onslaught.

According to him, three NDC supporters got injured during the clash but said none of them is hospitalized.

Walewale, capital of the West Mamprusi district is the first entry point to the Northern Region from the Upper East Region.

President John Dramani Mahama last Wednesday began the last leg of his two days accounting to the people tour of the Northern Region there.

By: Abdul Karim Naatogmah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
17.07.2016 LISTEN

Accra, July 17, GNA - Impact Africa Summit, a network of groups in various disciplines, have honoured Professor Enyonam Yao Kwawukume for his immense contribution in the health sector, during the maiden 2016 awards.

Prof Kwawukume who received Ghana Health Laurente is the President of Family Health Medical School, the premier private medical school in Ghana.

The awards was organised by a network of partners such as; EnrgyUK, Diplomatic Council, Ghana UK-Based Achievement and International perspective.

The award citation read: 'Impact Africa Summit: Ghana celebrates you for your enormous contribution to the health sector of the country and your vision for the sector, that led to the birth of the Family Health Medical School; the premier private medical school in Ghana.

'At the time that the country's doctor-patient ratio is far below the internationally accepted ratio by the Commonwealth, your vision in adding up to efforts by government to produce more medical doctors for the country is worthy of recognition.

"Your impact on the health sector in Ghana is also notable through the Family Health Hospital, which you established in 1997.

'The hospital, which provides comprehensive healthcare services to Ghanaians also runs a nursing school, where health assistants (clinical) are trained, and is in the process of starting Diploma in Nursing and Midwifery courses.

'Your experience and knowledge has been imparted on many health professionals as a Lecturer and Head of Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the University of Ghana Medical School.

'Ayekoo Professor Enyonam Yao Kwawukume, 2016 Impact Africa Summit: Ghana Health Laureate!"

In creating a platform to celebrate the 'New African Personality' in Leadership and Governance, Education, Health, Agriculture, Media, the Impact Africa Summit would also spearhead a solemn discussion tailored towards the development of the African Continent, with the host country in perspective.

The Impact Africa Summit would be 'Country Specific', making stops from one country to the other.

Prof Kwawukume holds Mb ChB, FWAC, FGCPS, FACOG, Adm. & Mgt.

He is also Inaugural Professor and Chair, KK Bensti-Enchil, Chair, College of Health Sciences, UG Legon.

Prof Kwawukume was a former Head, Department of Obstetrics and Gyaenacology, School of Medicine and Dentistry, Korle Bu as well as the Past Chair, West African College of Surgeons, WACS (Obst & Gynae.).

He is the immediate past President of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Ghana (SOGOG).

The Laureate award given to Prof Kwawukume on July 7, saw his vision for the health sector as something that led to the birth of the Family Health Medical School.

Prof Kwawukume's vision was also recognised for adding up to government efforts to produce more medical doctors for the country.

In 2014, Prof Kwawukume received honorary Fellowship award from American College of Obstetricians and Gyaenacologists in recognition of his significant contribution to teaching and research in the area of obstetrics and Gyaenacology.

He was the first in the world to successfully perform bloodless myomectomy at caesarean section with a tourniquet and he continues to teach all doctors in Ghana, West Africa and the United States.

He is the co-inventor of the medical eligibility criteria wheel, which was adopted by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

He is the author of various standard text books in obstetrics and gynaecological, reproductive health and family planning which is used in the sub-region.

He described himself as a writer and has contributed weekly in the Mirror Publications for more than four years.

Apart from the many research works done and published, he is now developing a media to increase the growth of embryos (egg and sperms) for in vitro fertilization (IVF) popularly known as test tube babies and this would help infertile men and women achieve pregnancy.

He is accredited for successful IVF or test tube babies resulting in singletons, twins and triplets.

GNA

By George-Ramsey Benamba, GNA
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) Parliamentary candidate elect for the Chiana-Paga constituency, Lawyer Rudolf Nsowine Amega-Etego, has appealed to contenders who lost to him to rally behind him in order to retain the seat for the party in the November general elections.

Amega-Etego polled 4337 votes out of 9,339 total valid vote cast to beat incumbent Member of Parliament for the constituency and former National Coordinator Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) Abuga Pele the and Jonathan Nyaaba.

Mr. Amega-Etego described his victory as a victory for all driven by a movement for change.

Our constituency is virtually a deprived one, the constituency is lacking, so the focus will be on providing potable drinking water for the people and dug more irrigation dams for dry season farming.The focus will also be on education either build more schools or expanding the infrastructure of already existing schools and provide scholarship packages for needy but brilliant students to further their education.

We are going to see how we will get more health facilities for the people to cater for their health needs and also work hard to fix the deplorable road network in the area to make roads in the area more accessible Mr. Amega-Etego assured..



By: Fred Awuni/citifmonline.com/Ghana
The Electoral Commissions (EC) exhibition and registration exercise is likely to hit a snag in the Tamale Metropolitan Area because the recruits have threatened to boycott the exercise over the allowances meant for the 21 days.

According to them, their cheques revealed that their colleagues in other regions are to receive GHc720 whereas they will collect GHc400 at the end of the exercise.

They have given the EC a three day ultimatum to rectify the disparities or else they will lay down their tools in protest.

They further disclosed to Citi News that each of them at the end of a three day capacity building workshop ahead of the exercise collected GHc 30 contrary to GHc 60 paid to their colleagues in other districts within the Northern Region.

They described the development as unfair and demanded top up or else the knock on effect will be a boycott as declared.

The frustrated recruits are expected to accomplish the task in the three main Tamale central, Tamale north and Tamale south constituencies.

But the Tamale Metro EC Boss, Issah Naatogmah has downplayed their grievance and urged them to be patriotic.

He said they have even petitioned the EC headquarters for immediate redress to foil the intended boycott.

Issah Naatogmah assured them of better remuneration if there is upward adjustment of the allowances.



By: Abdul Karim Naatogmah/citifmonline/Ghana
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18.07.2016 LISTEN

The world sympathizes and cries with France for the continual loss of innocent lives in the hands of terror. Nigeria has also paid dearly from the atrocities of Boko Haram, one of the deadliest perpetrators of terrors in the world. Indeed, fighting religious and militia terrorists in Nigeria have occupied the last three Administrations. Each of these Administrations has been able to secure some reasonableness of peace against terrorists while paying dearly.

The common strategy in each case is the involvement and cooperation of their people, ethnic or their religious backings. Starting with religion, the present Nigerian Government leaders have come to realize the enormous and unnecessary importance accorded religious bodies. Religions assume some air of awe bestowed on them by God that must not be questioned by ordinary humans exactly like them. They claim special communication with God.

The present Nigerian leader, Buhari was a religious fanatic until he had a near death experience in Kaduna as they tried to assassinate him. If he was in government then, he could have blamed it on opposition. There must be other reasons that changed Buhari but that experience; a close brush with death was a major contributing factor. Buhari other policies will be for another day.

Boko Haram had chosen Buhari to negotiate for them during the Administration of Jonathan. Others from Buhari side of the North, including Adamu Ciroma, promised to make the country ungovernable. They did, by using Boko Haram to kill and maim Christians from the North and South. However, they did not end there as they were running out of victims, they turned on their own. By the time the world paid notice, Boko Haram became the third deadliest terrorist.

Guess who brought them to their knees? The same Buhari they wanted to use as negotiator. The lesson here for France and the rest of the world is enormous. Nobody is asking for the head of ISIS as negotiator or peacemaker. But their followers must be convinced through ideology and sound intelligence that their deadly acts are counter productive to turn against them. You cannot do that by alienating all Muslims and calling them names because you need them.

During the Administration of YarAdua, militia terrorists from the Delta were kidnapping, killing, destroying and reigning terror on their own people and even bombed the capital City. Ebele Jonathan comes from that areas and it was him that accomplished cessation of hostility after previous Administrations bombed the hell out of them, as the western countries conservatives call for today. The tough, no nonsense, approach cannot succeed without involving their people

Most sensible leaders use carrot and sticks against terrorists because they lead disenfranchised and marginalized people that have given up trying to move up the economic ladder without any measure of success. Terrorist leaders promise them virgins in heaven, just as Christian clergy promised slaves reward in heaven. The goal is the same; accept injustice on earth to gain bliss in the next life or fight to death and die as a martyr.

Terrorists would try many times to destroy our peace of mind but no matter how much we prevent their atrocities, they only have to succeed once. Most countries have been warned about the latest tactic that destroyed over eighty lives in France, that is why brick barriers are common whenever there are parades in many countries. Nevertheless, the devils succeeded this time to instill fear on the poor and the innocent.

Politicians want to win election and they are ready to say anything as quick and immediate solution to very big and complex problems. They know people are sick, tired and felt very vulnerable. Politicians appeal to our fears and emotions, not our brains. They promise what they know they cannot deliver and some people buy it. Otherwise, it does not make sense to promise to ban, alienate and make enemies out of those you need to fight terrorists.

Suddenly some of the leaders now realize that occupation of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Lebanon were mistakes after calling and encouraging the same for many years to look tough. Recently, Mr. Trump was even praising Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein as the ones that knew how to handle terrorists. Yet some of the conservatives call Muslims and their religion derogatory names. How can they support you in the fight against their abusers?

France needs to take advantage of its Muslim population instead of competing with Muslim terrorists. French Muslims have no economic ladders to move onto and they are isolated in poor segregated areas where they lament their situation in a rich country that has shunned and ignored them. Instead of pledging their trust to France, they are looking for promises in heaven made by selfish terrorists seeking power to head the world religion.

There is a big difference between United States and Europe. Every ethnic group has been able to assimilate into the American dream except the Native Indians and African Americans. Irish, Polish, Arabs and Asians immigrants have achieved American dreams even faster than the native-born Indians and African Americans. These immigrants standard of living in United States is higher than that in their home countries. The same is not true for Arabs in France.

It does not mean United States has accomplished their full potential, but it has done better than France and the rest of European countries. Of course the same is not true when it come to the nagging question of race in United States. No country can divide itself within and move to greater heights. United Sates was built on African American slavery and took the land from the Native Indians. The children of these two ethnic groups will rise and challenge the status quo.

So when African Americans say Black Lives Matter it does not infringe on the right of White Lives Matter that has always been the case since the beginning of America. It is those that have been classed as less than human or three-fifth human that are rising up to claim their full citizenship that Black Lives Matter Too! Just like any other life that has enjoyed the privilege since the days of Columbus undisputed.

When a country wants to fight terrorists, you do not want to divide yourselves for the enemy to take advantage of. Anywhere United States is around the world, it can boast of the natives and immigrants from that country. In the fight against terrorists, intelligence gathered by those familiar with that country is crucial to defeating the terrorists. Each time politicians ignorantly condemned European Union immigrants, Muslim, Blacks or Women intelligent people cringe.
18.07.2016 LISTEN

In his philosophical writings, St. Augustine of Hippo (354AD-430AD) came out with a concept known as efficacious grace and predestination. According to this concept certain individuals are predestined to receive grace. This means that those who will enter heaven have already been chosen per the above principle.

As people, have Africans already been condemned relative to development? The answer is a big no. In his article, African natural resources: solving the great conundrum, published in the prestigious NewAfrican webpage in January 2014, the great journalist, Baffour Ankomah, presented a dialectical analysis of African natural resources and poverty level on the continent. The reputable journalist asserted that Africa is the richest continent in the world by natural resources but ironically the poorest by bank accounts.

From my novice opinion, this is very true and the blame must be put on contemporary African leaders. We must raise the development of our countries above partisan party interest. The composition of our governments must be based on merits and taking into accounts ethnic, religious and regional integrations as well as rule of law.

We must discover our identity as Africans and deconstruct our education, economy and every aspects of our developmental endeavor from its colonial structures. The Singapores benevolent dictator, Lee Kuan Yew is an example of how a good leader could turn the fortunes of a country.

Tribal loyalty is a great enemy of Africa which the leadership must be concerned in dealing with it. In his book, From Third World to First, The Singapore Story: 1965-2000, page, 357, Lee Kuan Yew wrote that he was not hopeful about Africa.

In less than 10 years after independence in 1957, Nigeria experienced a military take over and Ghana a failed coup. I realized that their tribal loyalties were stronger than their sense of common nationhood, he stated. This was especially so in Nigeria, where there was a deep cleavage between the Muslim Hausa Northerners and the Christian southerners as well as the traditionalists.

In Ghana, without this north south divide, the problem was less severe, but were still clear tribal divisions. Unlike India, Ghana did not have long years of training and tutelage in the methods and discipline of modern government. Today, many African countries Such as Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya have long years of training but we are still lacking the discipline of the modern government.

People who lead a successful life always provide proper care for their aged parents while those who struggle in life accused their parents of witchcraft. A causal stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. (Friedrich Nietzsche).

There are some African leaders who continue to torture, imprison, and intimidate their fellow countrymen under the pretext of preserving their countries from western imperialism. One President has vowed to rule his country one billion years because the British colonized them for about 400 years. Leadership failure in Africa is a problem. The new Tanzania Leader, John Magufuli is a prime example of what a good leader can do.

How long are we going to blame the colonial masters for our woes? All that we need to change is our unpredictability. In his book, Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust, Slavery and the rise of European capitalism, John Henrik Clarke wrote that Pope John Paul III, asked the Indians and the Africans to forgive their captors and their enslavers.

This was in the Popes speech in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The pope said, Forgive all those who during these 500 years have been the cause, of the pain and suffering for your ancestors and for yourself. In the name of Jesus Christ and as pastor of the church, I ask you to forgive those who have offended you, the pope said in a message to the hemispheres autochthonous peoples.

It is true that slave trade and colonization did not help us as people. This notwithstanding, love is stronger than hate. The fact that many leaders on the continent subject their fellow citizens into servitude, negate our moral rights to condemn the most egregious holocaust in the world: slave trade and colonization.

We cannot go back to our past as people but can start something new for a better future. Ethnic cleansing, intimidation, torture and massacre cannot help us as people. Once we know our history then we know where we are going.

The British political theorist and philosopher, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), asserted that: people will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors. In his brilliant scholarly article: the ancestors and the nation-building, Aluta continua, Nana Kobina Nketsia VI, the chief of Essikado in the western region of Ghana stated that: although we are still reeling under the cultural imperialism, the ancestors are still waiting as we fight an illusory fight with ourselves we have sacrificed our ideologies on the unholy alters of Eurocentric convenience.

What we need to change on the continent of Africa is our changeability. There is still hope on the continent of Africa with right leadership. I am intelligent because I know that I know nothing (Socrates). I humbly stand for Corrections.

Nana Yaw Osei (Padigo), PhD Candidate, Psychology

College of Doctoral Studies

Grand Canyon University, Arizona, USA

Email: [email protected]
18.07.2016 LISTEN

On that portentous day (31st December 1981), J.J Rawlings took arms and succeeded in overthrowing the constitutionally elected government and capriciously imposing his despotic rule, albeit with the help of some gullible individuals.

It must also be pointed out that Rawlings supplanted power under the pretext of acting as a peripheral Panacea. However, Rawlings cunningly spent a little over nineteen years and bettered his life and that of his family.

According to one of his accomplices of 31st December 1981 Movement, he bamboozled onto the political scene with the sole objective of transforming his life.

According to the said accomplice, just before mounting the 31st December 1981 coup detat, RAWLINGS brought out a bulletproof vest to wear. When one of the soldiers asked why he alone was protected, he argued that he has only one in his possession and it cannot be shared amongst them. More so, he was the leader and if he died, so many things would go wrong.

To cheer them up he said, gentlemen, from now on you guys are going to prosper.

Apparently, ever since I became aware of the preceding statement, I have adjusted my views on Rawlings. For I have been mulling over his real intentions for usurping power.

Consequently, I have been harbouring a disputatious opinion that the despotic revolutionary, J.J Rawlings, may be a Machiavellian after all.

Interestingly, however, some prominent scholars assert that Machiavellians tend to take a more detached, calculating approach in their interaction with other people.

Besides, Machiavellians tend to believe most people are concerned Only with their own well-being and to depend too much on anyone else is foolish.

Moreover, Machiavellians believe that the best way to get by is to use deception, rewards, promises, Flattery and even punishments to manipulate others into doing their bidding. To them, power may be more important than love.

Scholars of Anthropology, however, postulate that in terms of big five personality traits, Machiavellians tend to be low on agreeableness and conscientiousness.

For example, some scholars and researchers have attempted to find a correlation between Machiavellianism and narcissistic personality disorder and Psychopathy. Consequently, Robert Altemeyer found a correlation between Social dominance orientation and Machiavellianism.

I hate to admit this, however, I cannot continue to hush up the admiration I used to have for J.J Rawlings during my secondary school days in the early 80s.

Of course, like many other students back then, I naively thought J.J Rawlings was a Messiah sent from the Heavens to intercede for the downtrodden, and how wrong I was. Indeed, I am among those admirers who have come to their senses.

Ironically, when Rawlings bamboozled onto the scene, he vowed to get rid of corruption and challenged Ghanaians to shoot him if he failed. Nevertheless, Rawlings did not even get rid of the rampant corruption within his erratic government let alone the entire nation.

Paradoxically, however, Rawlings goes about preaching probity and accountability, but fails to practice. For isnt it somehow ironic that someone who bamboozled onto the scene under the pretext of eliminating the widespread sleaze and corruption would turn to a fantastically corrupt former Nigerian president Abacha for a hard cash gift?

For more news on Nigerias former president Abachas alleged gift to J.J Rawlings, see: (Nigerias Abacha gave me $2 million and not $5 million-Rawlings: citifmonline.com/.../nigerias-abacha-gave-me-2m-not-5m-rawlings-conf... ; Abachas $2 million gift to Rawlings: Vitus Azeem is only after the truth,: www.ghanaweb.com/.../Abacha-s-2m-gift-to-Rawlings-Vitus-Azeem-is-o... ; Rawlings must return Abachas $2m gift-Nigerian journalist: www.ghanaweb.com/.../Rawlings-must-return-Abacha-s-2m-gift-Nigeria...).

Regretfully, the ever righteous Rawlings tempestuously murdered people with more than two cars, and how many cars does he own now?

Rawlings destroyed our educational system and then sent his children abroad to study in what he saw as a superior educational system. How pathetic?

He was at war with rich men and women in the country, however, nowadays, he is undoubtedly one of the wealthiest men in the country. How fair is that?

As a matter of fact, one can hardly understand why J.J Rawlings would continue to accuse his political opponents of corruption, notwithstanding the fact that, when Rawlings supplanted power, he was as poor as a church mouse. Safe to say, he has since transformed his life and that of his family exponentially in financial terms.

Sadly, Rawlings and his bunch of vampires callously murdered innocent people on infinitesimal and to some large extent pathetic reasons and just look at what is going on currently in our political landscape.

What leaves discerning Ghanaians with puzzlement is, with all his misdeeds and ultra-vires, he has the audacity to point accusing fingers.

It is also worth pointing out that with all the atrocities meted on to some innocent Ghanaians during his autocratic rule, he managed to cover his misdeeds with the repugnant indemnity clause. How bizarre?

K. Badu, UK.
you are here:
July 17, 2016

NYT Pampers Erdogan - Declares Secularism To Be Extreme

In its coverage of the coup attempt in Turkey the New York Times asserts that being a secularist is "extreme":

Turkeys politics was for decades divided between secularists and Islamists, but both Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Gulen have occupied a middle ground between these two extremes.

Secularism is:

the view that public education and other matters of civil policy should be conducted without the introduction of a religious element.

Secularism is the basis of all modern democracies. How is that extreme?

Erdogan as well as Gulen are Islamists. They both believe in the primacy of religion. (Though Gulen's alleged $25 billion charter school empire, his ties to the CIA and to the Clinton Foundation cast doubt on any claim that he is driven by religious morality.) Erdogan called the coup a "gift of god".

In the same piece the NYT also asserts that:

Mr. Erdogans Turkey has been a reliable American ally and partner in the fight against the Islamic State.

That will be news to the Pentagon. It took years for Erdogan to take any concern about the Islamic State serious. His country still has a mostly open border policy towards the Islamic State. He just stopped U.S. air operation against the Islamic State in Syria by closing the Incirlik airbase. A move designed to pressure the U.S. to deliver Gulen, who resides in Pennsylvania and is Erdogan's arch enemy, to Turkey. Is that really a "reliable ally and partner"?

Had the amateurish coup succeeded democracy in Turkey would have been suspended for some years. Now, that Erdogan has won. he is launching an astonishingly well prepared cleansing campaign. Thousands of soldiers, including many officers unrelated to the "coup", have been detained. Some 3,000 judges, a fifth of the judiciary, have been suspended. Hundreds of them, including supreme court judges, have been jailed. Independent news-sites get closed, editors are rounded up. Erdogan calls on his Islamist followers to occupy the streets. They attack Syrian refugees, Kurdish and Alevi neighborhoods. Democracy in Turkey is now lost for decades.

To pamper Erdogan by redefining moral norms, as the NYT does, will not better the situation of the Turkish people or of anyone else exposed to Erdogan's whims.

Posted by b on July 17, 2016 at 13:11 UTC | Permalink

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CNBCs annual rankings of the top 10 states for business marked its 10th year this week, and Texas fared well, but it wasnt the top state. That honor went to Utah, though Texas placed second and cumulatively over the past decade placed first.

CNBC special correspondent Scott Cohn, a longtime fixture of cable televisions top business news channel, took time Thursday to talk with the Reporter-Telegram about Texas, where it lags and what the future might have in store. What follows is a Q&A that has been edited for length.

MRT: According to the numbers, Texas lags in education (40th) and quality of life (37th). Why is that?

Cohn: Education has been an issue on and off for some time. We look at a lot of things in that category, including support for higher education, class sizes, per-pupil spending and things like that. Thats always been an issue. Some of it is inherent in Texas being a big state with a lot of people moving into it, but the situation has only gotten worse relative to the other states. Its slipped down to 40th place.

We weight the categories based on how the states are using them to sell themselves. Education is not one of the highest-weighted categories, and its not one of the lowest-weighted categories. But it ties into so many other things, including workforce, which is a big deal right now, and technology and innovation, which is also important. Its a critical area, and its where Texas fell short.

On quality of life, the two things that are typically an issue for Texas, and were again this year, are health and particularly the number of uninsured. We think of health as part of quality of life. Texas still leads the nation in uninsured.

In paying attention to what businesses say is needed to attract the widest universe of workers, we look at inclusiveness. Texas is one of five states that doesnt have a public accommodation law protecting anyone, other than disabled people, against discrimination. So, when we look at inclusiveness, thats an area where Texas falls short under our methodology.

Quality of life has been an issue, and its typically been the lowest category for Texas over the years, even as Texas has done so well throughout the 10 years that weve been doing this. Usually, the worst area is quality of life. This time around, it was education.

MRT: How much does the oil industry play into the rankings?

Cohn: It really speaks to how diversified Texas has become. Weve written about that  and how for Texas, its such a difference from the oil shock of the 1980s, where it was the only game in town. Now, the state is diversified enough where its tops in the economy category. We look at job growth, we look at state finances, we look at all those things we think might be affected by the falling oil prices, and Texas has just not really missed a beat. I think thats really a testament to how diverse the economy is and the reason Texas always does so well.

In this being our 10th year, we looked at the cumulative scores of all the states  and Texas had far and away the best cumulative score. The state was obviously benefiting a lot when energy was really booming and oil prices were high, but it hasnt really affected things at all. Thats just a real testament to the strength of the state.

MRT: What about the Permian Basin and the strength of its economy despite its dependence on oil production in the downturn?

Cohn: While I cant speak to many of the specifics of the Midland areas economy  and not directly related to top states, but it was tied into it  I was over in New Mexico a few months ago looking at the impact on the economy there.

They were part of the same boom that you witnessed in Midland. Its obviously cooled down a lot. Theres all these new hotels that are empty, and things like that. But at the same time, a lot of places there ... were cognizant of the fact that it wasnt going to go on forever and were socking money away. They were building up their reserves and doing things they wouldnt have been able to do in tough times in terms of public improvements and things like that.

Again, I cant speak directly to your economy in Midland, but clearly, Texas  and Ive been following the state for 10 years as part of top-states reporting  its never been a state in recent years to rest on its laurels or get complacent about high oil prices. There always seems to have been a feeling that this is not necessarily going to last, and those lessons learned in Texas 30 years ago are still being applied.

MRT: Where do you see Texas going, such as a new big industry, as it competes with other states?

Cohn: All that I can tell you is from what weve seen  and I cant tell the future any better than you can  health care is a big industry, and its big in Texas, and technology.

Part of the issue with the way the state has diversified is theres a technology sector that wasnt there 30 years ago, so that continues to grow. Texas is also a place for alternative energy, such as wind power. ... Look at the biggest companies in Texas. Theyre not necessarily oil companies anymore. Youve got ExxonMobil, but youve also got AT&T and all of these companies that are not oil companies, and thats a big difference from the past.

Now youve got a big, robust, diverse economy and a big, robust, diverse population. I think thats going to serve the state well in the future. The question really is how long this oil shock  if thats what it is  is going to last and if the state can continue to do what its been doing.

MRT: What do you make of Texas aggressiveness in trying to get other companies to relocate to Texas?

Cohn: Its something that weve seen a lot of states do. I dont think weve seen any state do it as effectively or as in-your-face as Texas. I dont know whether rankings like ours help that endeavor, but its certainly something weve watched over the years. (Former Gov.) Rick Perry was kind of the champion of this, going to other states and making himself the face of this effort to woo businesses away. The proof is in the pudding: Businesses are moving to Texas still, so thats certainly a positive for the state.

This whole war between states for jobs  which maybe we feed into, I suppose  is a mixed bag. Itll help a states economy when times are rough, and certainly there are lots of bragging rights attached to it, but theres still questions about the greater good of it.

MRT: How would you rate Texas corporate regulatory environment?

Cohn: It has a good reputation and does well in our rankings. We have a category called business friendliness ... and it usually does fairly well. So to that degree, if companies are looking for friendly regulations, Texas isnt the friendliest state on a scale of 1 to 50, but it does well. As you know, Texas sells itself on having fair regulations and a fair legal climate, no corporate income tax or personal income tax.

Its interesting to note that Texas is not anywhere near the best when it comes to cost of doing business. You have the franchise tax there; you have high property taxes and sales taxes that are on the high side.

But Texas does a good job of marketing itself, and if you want to attract employees to a place where theyre not going to pay any income tax, thats a pretty big draw and certainly the state has pushed that.

MRT: Bottom line: If you had a business, where would you put it?

Cohn: Every state has its own unique advantages  even the worst states have unique advantages  and every business has unique needs. So its a little bit tough when youre looking at all 50 states in a one-size-fits-all scale to say that every business should go to Utah or Texas or no business should go to Rhode Island, which is the bottom state. But in fact, there are reasons and arguments to be made for everyone.

A few years ago, Tesla was looking for where to put its big, giant battery plant. It chose to go to Nevada, which is not one of the top states for business, but Nevada had the right combination of incentives, workforce and proximity to the assembly plant in the Bay Area of California. So the rankings we do are not the last word. In fact, theyre the first word; (they) give you a sense of what the landscape is.

MRT: Any parting comments about CNBCs best states for business rankings?

Cohn: Theres a lot more than just the rankings. We put a lot into it. Putting this thing together is a process that starts in February every year, and it just came out, so you get a sense of how involved it is. We have fun with it on TV, but we take it all very seriously because of these kinds of conversations. We just hope we get people thinking about these issues. Theres a lot to look at.

Like Trevor on Facebook and follow him on Twitter at @HowdyHawes.

***

BY THE NUMBERS

The following are the categories, rankings and scores for Texas in CNBC's best states for business study. Rankings are out of 50 states, and the overall score is out of a possible 2,500, with total possible in parentheses. The categories have been sorted by rankings.

Rank Category Score

1 Economy 292 (340)

2 Infrastructure & transportation 239 (350)

7 Access to capital 44 (50)

8 Workforce 266 (400)

10 Technology & innovation 178 (250)

18 Business friendliness 90 (160)

21 Cost of living 45 (75)

23 Cost of doing business 193 (350)

37 Quality of life 138 (325)

40 Education 79 (200)

2 OVERALL 1,564 (2,500)
If you were hoping to pick up some oil and gas leases in New Mexico on Wednesday, youll have to wait a little bit longer.

The New Mexico Bureau of Land Management has rescheduled the auction for 9 a.m. Sept. 1, according to a BLM press release. It will take place at the Roswell Convention and Civic Center, 912 N. Main St., in Roswell, New Mexico.

Up for sale will be 36 parcels totaling 13,876 acres. Six parcels totaling 1,232 acres are available in Eddy County, while 30 parcels at 12,644 acres can be had in Lea County. Only oral bids will be accepted. The minimum acceptable bid is $2 per acre.

New Mexico BLM spokeswoman Donna Hummel told the Reporter-Telegram on Friday that the postponement is because of public concern over the federal agencys alleged lack of transparency. She said lease auctions are generally held in Santa Fe, but BLM decided to move this latest auction to Roswell to offer greater access for oil companies in West Texas to bid. The available leases are in the Delaware Basin.

Hummel, who spoke from the BLMs Santa Fe office, said that the delay will also help the land agency better anticipate and inform protesters who might assemble at the sale. She said about 150 protesters were at the June auction in Reno and disrupted the process by blocking traffic and other antics. She said the BLM is watching each sale carefully and planning accordingly to assure safe, secure and successful lease sales.

Leases are awarded for a period of 10 years, so long as oil and gas is being produced in paying quantities from the lease, the press release said. The revenue from federal leases, as well as any royalties collected from the production of those leases, is shared between the federal government and the state in which the lease is located. Fifty-two percent goes to the federal treasury, and 48 percent is returned to the state.

Like Trevor on Facebook and follow him on Twitter at @HowdyHawes.

Correction: This story has been corrected to indicate New Mexico BLM dealt with protesters at June's lease auction in Reno, not April auction in Santa Fe.
HOUSTON - Oil explorers have failed to pay $28.8 billion they owed to junk-bond investors this year, bringing the debt default rate among U.S. drillers to a record level, Fitch Ratings says.

Its a grim milestone for the industry that ran up a half-trillion dollars in corporate debt to pay for a shale drilling boom that produced more oil than the market could absorb. The glut is still bankrupting companies two years on.
Over nearly 45 years, the oil tanks at Milford Haven on Britain's west coast have stored dozens of crude varieties: from North Sea Brent to Nigeria's Bonny Light and almost everything in between. Now, for the first time, they are holding U.S. crude, too.

Trafigura Group is using Milford Haven, which can hold about 9 million barrels of crude and refined products in its 54 tanks, as a backstop in a supply chain stretching about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) from the oil ports of Texas to the refineries in north-west Europe, including the Rotterdam trading hub.

Since Washington lifted a 40-year-old ban on U.S. crude overseas sales in late 2015, Trafigura has been sending tankers across the Atlantic. Its recent pace of two to three 700,000-barrel-capacity Aframax tankers a month makes the trader one of the top exporters alongside BP Plc.

"It's a growing business for Trafigura," Ben Luckock, the company's global head of crude-oil trading, said in an interview at the terminal in southwest Wales. "We are in further discussions with a number of refiners for more U.S. crude."

The Advantage Avenue was the latest Aframax to make the Atlantic crossing, arriving in Milford Haven on July 8 with about 750,000 barrels of Eagle Ford shale oil loaded in Corpus Christi, Texas, according to ship-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.

Its journey is possible only because the shale boom reversed decades of decline in American oil output. The U.S. imposed a ban on most crude exports after the 1973 to 1974 oil embargo by Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries stoked fears about the nation's growing dependence on imports. Those concerns have eased as a new generation of drillers used hydraulic fracturing to blast apart shale rocks, lifting the nation's output to a 30-year high in June 2015.

Although output has dropped 12 percent in the past year as the industry was hit by the global price slump, U.S. exports rose to a record 660,000 barrels a day in May. Crude is flowing into Canada, China, Curacao, France, the Netherlands and the U.K., according to data from U.S. Census and the Energy Information Administration.

In addition to Trafigura, other independent traders such as Vitol Group BV and Gunvor Group Ltd. have exported U.S. crude. Gunvor used a similar technique to Trafigura for the export, relying on a terminal in Panama it co-owns as a back-stop for the shipment.

The Milford Haven site started life as an Amoco refinery in the 1970s, receiving shipments of crude and selling refined fuels into the local market. Puma Energy BV, in which Trafigura owns a 49 percent stake, purchased the facility a year ago, shut down the crude-processing plant and transformed it into a storage terminal. Trafigura also has a Mediterranean hub  nearly 6 million barrels of crude-storage capacity under long-term lease in tank farms operated by the Eilat Ashkelon Pipeline Co. Ltd in Israel.

The terminals allow cargoes to make a temporary stop if Trafigura doesn't immediately have a buyer. When future prices are higher than current levels  a structure called contango  a brief period of storage can even boost profits because the final value of the sale increases. The facilities also allow the trader to blend high-quality U.S. oil with other grades, tailoring the crude to meet the exact needs of refiners, or split cargoes into smaller batches.

Trafigura is benefiting from two trends to build its U.S. crude-export business. First, pipeline and railway fees to move oil from fields in Texas and Oklahoma to the ports of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico have become cheaper as U.S. production fell following the global price slump. The second is the discount of U.S. crude futures to international prices, which allows traders to make a profit moving oil from one shore of the Atlantic to the other.

"The level that seems to open the U.S.-to-Europe export arbitrage is about $1 a barrel between Brent and West Texas Intermediate," Luckock said.

Brent futures for September delivery traded 65 cents a barrel above the same contract for West Texas Intermediate at 12:19 p.m. Monday on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. The price difference, which reached a peak of $27.81 a barrel in late 2011, has narrowed as U.S. production declines. While the WTI discount has averaged 73 cents this year, it was wider than $1 for much of February and April.

The shipments from the U.S., together with an alliance with Russian state-owned Rosneft, have helped Trafigura to become the world's second-largest independent oil trader, handling 4 million barrels a day of crude and refined products.
LINCOLN  Clean Energy swooped into Texas last year with big plans to build the states largest solar farm, a $320 million project covering 2,400 acres in the Panhandle and capable of powering 40,000 homes  even on the hottest days.

But more than six months after construction was scheduled to begin, ceremonial shovels have yet to break ground on the Nazareth Solar project about 60 miles south of Amarillo. The problem: No one wants to buy the electricity.

The Texas solar rush was supposed to take off in 2016, but as Nazareth Solar shows, it remains far from achieving its promise. At least five major solar projects expected to come online in Texas by the end of 2017 have been delayed or canceled, while some industry giants, such as SunEdison, have filed for bankruptcy.

You havent seen quite the liftoff with solar yet in Texas, said Philip Moore, Lincolns vice president of development.

That liftoff was expected to come over the next couple years, but the string of delays and cancellations means the state may add only about half the anticipated 2,000 megawatts of installed solar energy by the end of 2017 (A megawatt can power about 200 homes). The roughly 300 megawatts of grid-scale solar power in Texas account for less than 1 percent of the states electricity generation, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees about 90 percent of power grid.

Despite natural advantages such as nearly 300 sunny days a year and plenty of open spaces to locate projects, Texas only ranks 10th in solar installation, even behind cold-weather states such as New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Rock-bottom natural gas prices, which have lowered the cost of traditional power generation, and a lack of state incentives make it nearly impossible for solar to compete dollar-for-dollar in the Texas marketplace  even with federal tax breaks, said Travis Miller, director of utilities research at Morningstar.

Solar cant even compete with wind, which had a big head start in Texas, and still costs roughly 15 percent less than solar, according to renewable energy developers. Texas leads the nation in wind power with an expected capacity by the end of the year of more than 20,000 megawatts  enough to power about 5 million homes when the wind is blowing.

In March, wind generated more than 20 percent of the states power for the first time in a month, more than coal or nuclear power.

At the current costs for solar, Miller said, its going to struggle to be competitive in Texas given the low cost of gas and the huge amount of wind generation.

Expanding solar, nonetheless, could prove critical for Texas as the combination of a growing population and the shuttering of older, dirtier coal plants in coming years could make it difficult to meet electricity demand. The state could lose as much as 9,000 megawatts of its generating capacity over the next few years as age and tougher pollution rules make it too costly to operate coal plants.

Dallas-based Luminant, the states largest power producer, has already warned that some of its coal plants could shut down.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has planned on the state adding some 15,000 megawatts of grid-scale solar capacity by 2030 to help replace coal plants and meet new demand, but its increasingly unclear how much of that will become reality. Hopes that costs would fall further, faster and make solar more competitive with other sources of electricity have yet to materialize.

Globally, funding for the solar industry has plunged to about $1.7 billion in the second quarter from nearly $6 billion during the same period in 2015, according to Mercom Capital Group, a clean energy consulting company. At least 100 solar companies have filed for bankruptcy or closed in the United States and Europe since 2009, including Austin-based HelioVolt, which shut down in 2014, according to Greentech Media, a market research firm.

One of the biggest setbacks for the industry came in April, when Sun-Edison, the worlds largest renewable energy developer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. SunEdison, headquartered in Missouri, took on $16 billion in debt as it kept adding massive projects before they became profitable. The company, which declined to comment, lost nearly $1 billion through the first nine months of 2015 alone.

SunEdison scheduled two major solar projects in Texas to begin operations this year, but both were delayed at least into 2017. One of them, Buckthorn solar farm in Pecos County, would, if completed, make Georgetown, a community of 60,000 people, the largest municipality in the nation powered solely by renewable sources.

Solar cities

In Texas, solar power has mostly grown outside competitive electricity markets, supported by municipal utilities looking to diversify electricity supplies and expand their use of green power for social and environmental, as well as economic, benefits. San Antonio and Austin, both served by municipal utilities, have led the way.

San Antonios electric utility, CPS Energy, has teamed with OCI Solar Power, the Texas-based subsidiary of South Koreas OCI Corp., which opened a solar panel manufacturing plant in the city in 2012. In April, San Antonio opened the 95-megawatt Alamo 5 solar farm in Uvalde County, west of the city, and later this year will bring its larger Alamo 6 and 7 projects online, which have a combined capacity of 216 megawatts.

These will allow San Antonio to get nearly 20 percent of its power from renewable sources by early next year, said Cris Eugster, executive vice president at CPS Energy.

We believe and our community believes clean energy needs to play a part, Eugster said. You dont have that same conversation going on in the deregulated markets (like Houston).

Austin is projected to surpass San Antonio as the states solar leader by the end of 2017, although there is bit of buyers remorse at the Austin Energy utility.

Austin will obtain 277 megawatts of power from two West Texas solar farms at prices that are a record low for solar in Texas, but will help keep the citys electricity rates above the state average.

Solar is getting cheap, said Austin Energy Vice President Debbie Kimberly, but its still more expensive than what youd see with gas-fired resources, so its a challenge.

Many sizes

While grid-scale solar projects are leading the way, solar power will need to come in other shapes and sizes to help meet growing electricity demand, including residential rooftop installations and distributed community solar farms.

In the Hill Country, Renewable Energy Systems, a British company, has launched a project to connect 15 different sites, each with installations of nearly a megawatt, to produce 15 megawatts of solar power. In Plano, Toyota Motor Corp. plans to build nearly 8 megawatts of rooftop and on-site solar at its new North American headquarters.

Houston developer Joey Romano recently completed a 1.5-megawatt solar project in Sealy because he was determined to build where Houstonians could come to see it.

The small solar farm is selling its power through MP2, a local retail electricity company, but, Romano admits, its more expensive than average electricity plans. Hes counting on people wanting to pay a little more to know theyre helping the environment and using locally generated energy  literally a farm-to-market approach to electricity.

Theres a movement were trying to build of taking more control of the power we use, he said. The if you build it, they will come strategy is kind of my deal.

Where solar shines

Top 10 solar states by cumulative solar capacity, including utility-scale, distributed and rooftop (as of March):

1 California 13,241 megawatts

2 Arizona 2,303 MW

3 North Carolina 2,087 MW

4 New Jersey 1,632 MW

5 Nevada 1,240 MW

6 Massachusetts 1,020 MW

7 New York 638 MW

8 Hawaii 564 MW

9 Colorado 540 MW

10 Texas 534 MW

---

Source: Solar Energy Industries Association
Kinder Morgan may boost its shrunken dividend and resume share buybacks after the sale of half its stake in a major U.S. natural gas pipeline helps whittle the company's $40.2 billion debt burden.

A key measure of Kinder's ability to pay debts may shrink more than previously forecast by the end of this year, thanks to a $1.47 billion deal announced on July 10 to sell 50 percent of the Southern Natural Gas pipeline network to power producer Southern Co., Kinder executives said during a conference call on Monday.

Shrinking the debt load will free up cash that could be used to expand investor payouts, repurchase shares or pay down additional obligations, Chief Financial Officer Kimberly Dang said during the call. The ratio of the company's debt to earnings before income taxes, depreciation and amortization probably will fall to 5.3 by the end of this year, below Kinder's previous target of 5.5, she said. Any future joint ventures will only involve proposed projects; stakes in existing assets won't be up for sale, Kinder Chief Executive Officer Steve Kean said.

The trigger for dividend increases and buybacks is a ratio of 5 or less, Dang said. Kinder, which controls a pipeline system large enough to circle the Earth three times, slashed dividends and canceled billions of dollars in expansion projects earlier this year as the collapse in petroleum and coal markets threatened demand for the shipping and storage services that are the company's lifeblood. The company's credit rating flirted with junk status as recently as December and shares are down more than 50 percent in the past year.

"We are a bit surprised that the company has placed a cash flow generating asset into a JV, so we can only assume there is a strategic rationale behind the move," Christine Cho, a Barclays analyst, said in a note to clients. Southern's growing appetite for gas at the expense of coal "should provide growth opportunities" for the pipeline network.

The company founded by Texas billionaire Rich Kinder has sought to dig itself out of a debt hole bigger than the economies of Latvia or Bahrain by curbing spending and selling stakes in existing and yet-to-be-built pipelines. The Southern Co. transaction followed a June 28 deal to sell half the $500 million Utopia pipeline project to private equity giant Riverstone Holdings LLC.

Southern, the second-largest U.S. utility by customers, initially approached Kinder about purchasing a stake in the 7,600-mile (12,000-kilometer) Southern Natural Gas system more than a year ago, before cratering energy markets spooked investors, Kean said during the call on Monday.

The agreement commits Kinder and Southern to expanding the SNG system and talks are already underway with third parties about such projects, Kean said.

"We would not have done it if it had not had additional opportunities to expand the system over the coming years," Executive Chairman Rich Kinder said during the call. The 71-year-old is also the company's largest investor with an 11 percent stake.

SNG connects gas fields across the U.S. Gulf Coast and Gulf of Mexico to markets in the Deep South including some where Southern operates power plants and supplies residential and industrial customers.

"They are a huge customer in a market where demand for natural gas is growing," Kean said.
Oil cycles topic for SIPES meeting

Members of the Midland chapter, Society of Independent Professional Earth Scientists (SIPES) will meet July 20 in the upstairs ballroom at Midland Country Club beginning with a reception at 11:15 a.m.

Jim Gibbs, a founder and chairman of the board of Five States Energy Company LLC will speak on Riding Oil Industry Cycles. He will address the highly cyclical nature of the oil and gas business, and the value and reward of persistence.

There is no charge for members, $20 for guests.

SPE Completions study group to meet

The Society of Petroleum Engineers Permian Basin Completions Operations Study Group will meet July 21 at the Petroleum Club from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

There will be a discussion panel including David Luna (Completions Engineer with XTO), Tyler Hunter (Completions Engineer with Apache), Imad Zaghmoot (Completions Engineer with BOPCO). The topic is based on a recent news release which reported that a Utica Shale horizontal well had been completed to a total measured depth of over 27,000 feet with over 18,500 feet of lateral and that it had been completed with 124 frac stages.

This event is sponsored by Packers Plus and SPE-PB.

Reservations can be made by calling 254-7059 or by email at Amy.Hall@CoreLab.com.

Pioneer receives final EFS Midstream payment

DALLAS  Pioneer Natural Resources Company has received the second, and final, installment payment of $500 million from Enterprise Products Partners L.P. for the sale of the companys interests in EFS Midstream LLC.

Pioneer agreed to sell its 50.1 percent interest in EFS Midstream to Enterprise in June 2015 for $1,030 million after debt repayment. The initial $530 million payment from Enterprise was received at the closing in July 2015. Pioneer expects to use the proceeds from the sale for general corporate purposes, including funding of the drilling program across the Companys extensive acreage position in the Spraberry/Wolfcamp play in the Permian Basin of West Texas.

BG Group to cut more than 150 jobs in Houston, close office

By Collin Eaton

Houston Chronicle

HOUSTON - A U.S. unit of BG Group, the British natural gas producer Shell purchased for more than $50 billion a few months ago, says its planning to cut more than 150 Houston jobs as it vacates its main local office.

The company, BG U.S. Services Inc., told Texas workforce regulators it will shed 118 jobs at the end of next month and then another 36 jobs at the end of September, at the 46-story skyscraper at 811 Main Street.

The local layoffs come as Shell and BG Group carry out plans to shed nearly 3,000 workers in an effort to reduce costs. Shell cut 7,500 jobs last year to cope with low energy prices.
Our latest forecast for the Texas economy indicates relatively healthy growth over an extended time horizon. Business cycles are inevitable, but the stage is set for growth outpacing most parts of the United States. Texas compares well with most areas in terms of the business climate, size of workforce, and other parameters, contributing to economic growth potential.

A primary reason for the states continued success is the increasingly diverse nature of the economy. Texas regularly wins Site Selection magazines Governors Cup, for example, which is awarded to the state with more major corporate location and expansion projects than any other state. To be counted, a project has to either involve a capital commercial investment of at least $1 million, 20 or more new jobs, or 20,000 square feet of new construction. During 2015, Texas had 702 qualifying projects, up from 689 in 2014 (in spite of the lower oil-price environment) and significantly higher than second place Ohio (with 517).

Major 2015 projects in Texas covered the spectrum of industries: petrochemicals, technology (including information services such as Facebook as well as data centers), distribution centers and other logistics, financial services, insurance, health care, food processing, automotive manufacturing, aerospace, steel, building materials, HVAC equipment, and numerous others. Expansion across a number of industries sets the stage for long-term economic growth.

The states resilience in the face of dropping crude oil prices is another reason Im feeling more positive about future prospects. The sharp decline in oil prices and resulting scaling back of drilling and exploration had a decidedly negative effect on the Texas economy, but the end of $100 oil was not catastrophic.

Oil prices have recently begun to move slightly upward due to a combination of global oil supply disruptions, rising oil demand, and falling domestic crude oil production. Although crude oil inventories remain high and prices may not rise significantly until later in the year, they are already trending high enough to spur some incremental drilling and completion activity. Looking to the future, once crude oil prices recover (which is inevitable due to expected global demand conditions), drilling activity in Texas will increase and be a catalyst for longer-term growth.

On a less positive note, we are going to have to deal with changes in the state population, which will not only expand by about 12 million through the forecast horizon, but also grow older and, most likely, sicker. Hispanics will be the majority, with the number of Asian Americans growing fairly rapidly, while the number of non-Hispanic whites begins to shrink. Public schools in the state will need to accommodate nearly twice as many students, many of whom will be more difficult and expensive to educate. The implications for infrastructure, education, health care systems, and social services are profound and in need of immediate recognition and attention.

Texas also needs to deal with unfunded pensions; restructure programs in crisis such as indigent health care, foster care, and child protective services; improve education at all levels, and make a dent in infrastructure shortcomings. Otherwise, the state will almost certainly face a future characterized by slower economic growth and the necessity of committing even more resources to public needs.

On balance, our most recent long-term forecast indicates the Texas economy is likely to continue to see moderate growth. Output (real gross product) is projected to more than double, expanding from about $1.5 trillion in 2015 to $3.5 trillion in 2040 (a 3.35 percent annual pace). Annual output in the services sector is expected to increase by about $564.9 billion between 2015 and 2040, with manufacturing up by some $338 billion.

Approximately 6.2 million net new jobs are expected to be added over the period, a 1.64 percent yearly pace which will put total wage and salary employment in 2040 at more than 18.5 million. Job gains will be concentrated in the services and trade sectors, and the numbers of jobs in all major industry groups are forecast to rise.

Despite the end (at least for now) of the oil surge, the Texas economy continues to expand at a modest pace, with employment gains in most months. While oil and natural gas exploration and production are down due to the current low price environment, the energy industry will be a source of economic growth over the long-term forecast horizon. All in all, I expect relatively healthy economic gains through 2040 and beyond. We have some business to take care of, and the better we deal with population changes and other challenges, the stronger the pattern of growth as well.

Dr. M. Ray Perryman is President and Chief Executive Officer of The Perryman Group (www.perrymangroup.com). He also serves as Institute Distinguished Professor of Economic Theory and Method at the International Institute for Advanced Studies.
Guilty pleas accepted and sentences imposed by district Judges Robin Darr, Elizabeth B. Leonard and Rodney W. Satterwhite:

July 5-8

Jamie Lee Aguirre, 33, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, adjudicate and revoke, three years TDCJ.

Andrea Renee Almodova, 33, abandoning/endangering a child criminal negligence, deferred adjudication three years, fine, 150 hours community service; abandoning/endangering a child criminal negligence, deferred adjudication three years.

Latasha Lynn Anderson, 41, theft of property, more than $1,500 but less than $20,000, 10 months state jail, restitution.

Dustin Chase Bidlack, 23, assault family violence by strangulation, 10 years TDCJ suspended for three years probation, fine, court cost, Project Adam, 100 hours community service.

Tomas Bonilla, 58, possession of a controlled substance as a lesser included offense of tampering with physical evidence, eight months state jail, drivers license suspended for 180 days.

Jason Allen Brister, 35, possession of a controlled substance in a drug-free zone, adjudicated, two years TDCJ suspended for five years probation, 30 days jail, fine, court cost, 150 hours community service.

Eugene Valentino Thomas Brown, 38, driving while intoxicated third or more time, 12 years TDCJ.

Jason Ralph Conklin, 33, theft of property more than $1,500 but less than $20,000, two years state jail suspended for five years probation, fine, restitution, 200 hours community service, mental health court program; possession of a controlled substance, two years state jail suspended for five years probation, fine, restitution, 150 hours community service, TAIP, drivers license suspended for 180 days.

Patrick Blake Constanzo, 27, possession of a controlled substance in a drug-free zone, deferred adjudication four years, fine, restitution, 200 hours community service, TAIP.

Christian Ray Corona, 18, obstruction or retaliation, adjudicate and revoke, two years TDCJ.

Ernesto Esparza Esparza, 35, driving while intoxicated, 10 years TDCJ suspended for five years probation, 30 days jail, fine, court cost, TAIP, drivers license suspended for one year, 150 hours community service.

Cody Parks Frazier, 30, terroristic threat causing fear of imminent SBI as a lesser included of stalking, 100 days county jail; aggravated assault with deadly weapon, adjudicate and revoke, five years TDCJ; driving while intoxicated third or more time, revoke, five years TDCJ.

Joashley Prado Gomez, 29, possession of a controlled substance, deferred adjudication three years, restitution, 200 hours community service.

Cynthia Christina Griggs, 52, driving while intoxicated a lesser included offense of driving while intoxicated with a child under 15, one year county jail suspended for two years probation, fine, court cost, DWI and parenting classes.

Juan Manuel Hernandez, 27, driving while intoxicated third or more time, 10 years TDCJ suspended for seven years probation, 30 days jail, fine, court cost, drivers license suspended for one year, 100 hours community service.

Corey Eugene Huffty, 32, evading arrest/detention in a motor vehicle, revoked, two years TDCJ.

Tyree Tabray Johnson, 36, driving while intoxicated third or more time, one year county jail suspended for two years probation, 10 days jail, fine, court cost, DWI classes, AA meetings, drivers license suspended for 365 days, 100 hours community service; theft of property more than $1,500 but less than $20,000, continue supervision, additional $1,000.

Daniel Ray Jones, 47, failure to comply with sex offender registration, four years TDCJ.

Mark Anthony Juarez. 18, theft of a firearm, deferred adjudication four years, fine, 200 hours community service, TAIP.

Marcelo Lopez, 44, three counts theft of metals less than $30,000, 10 months state jail.

Adrian James Lyles, 46, driving while intoxicated third or more time, three years TDCJ; assault on a public servant, five years TDCJ.

Janelle Dawn Mcanear, 36, possession of a controlled substance, deferred adjudication three years, fine, 150 hours community service.

Cynthia Janet Marquez, 31, theft of property more than $20,000 but less than $100,000, deferred adjudication seven years, fine, 200 hours community service.

Armando Rosalio Mancilla, 22, possession of a controlled substance, two years TDCJ.

Brandon Ivan Martinez, 18, possession of marijuana, deferred adjudication, two years community supervision, 50 hours community service.

Duke Hansford Medaries II, 26, theft of property more than $2,500 but less than $30,000, deferred adjudication, three years community supervision, restitution.

Luis Morales Jr., 25, possession of a controlled substance, extend supervision one year, cognitive behavioral therapy program.

Emily Marie Rodriguez, 27, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, deferred adjudication three years, restitution, 120 hours community service.

Leo Nathaniel Shockley, 30, prohibited substance in a correctional facility, adjudicate and revoke, three years TDCJ.

Jackie Thompson, 50, forgery of a financial instrument, seven months state jail, restitution; forgery of a financial instrument, seven months state jail.

Robert Lynn Vanhuss, 53, driving while intoxicated, 10 years TDCJ suspended for five years community service, fine, 30 days jail, 250 hours community service, AA meetings, interlock device, drivers license suspended for 365 days.

Jorge Armando Varela-Angel, 33, criminal trespass as a lesser included offense of burglary of a habitation, 45 days county jail.

Jeffrey Alan Wallis, 27, accident involving injury, deferred adjudication five years, fine, court cost, AA meetings, 100 hours community service.

Michael James Welch, 35, sex offenders duty to register life/annually, five years TDCJ suspended for three years probation, fine, 300 hours community service.

July 11-15

Adrian Alvarado Baeza, 19, possession of a controlled substance, extend supervision two years.

Elizaardo DeJesus Martin Garcia, 20, evading arrest/detention with a motor vehicle, deferred adjudication five years, 45 days jail, fine, 250 hours community service.

Patricicio Granados Jr., 44, sex offenders duty to register, 10 years TDCJ suspended for five years probation, fine, 300 hours community service.

Shavin Dwayne Hubbard, 40, sex offenders duty to register, two years TDCJ.

Valentin Alvarado Lomas III, 35, possession of a controlled substance, two years TDCJ.

Jose Gustovo Lopez, 31, driving while intoxicated with a child under 15, revoke supervision, nine months state jail.

Edgar Santos, 19, sexual assault of a child, deferred adjudication five years, fine, 300 hours community service, sex offenders program.

Blas Jordan Villarreal, 20, tampering with physical evidence, deferred adjudication four years, fine, 200 hours community service, TAIP.

Kevin Wayne Willingham, 37, forgery of a financial instrument, 18 months state jail; forgery of a financial instrument, 18 months state jail, restitution.

[TDCJ = Texas Department of Criminal Justice; TAIP = treatment alternative to incarceration program, CRTC = court residential treatment center; ISP = intensive supervision parole; SAFT = substance abuse felony treatment]
Dallas Police Chief David Brown began a news conference Monday morning with matter-of-fact updates on the investigation into last weeks ambush that killed left five officers dead and nine injured.

But as the questions poured in from reporters, the exhausted Brown got a little more opinionated and spoke more bluntly.

On expectations of police: Were asking cops to do too much in this country.

On joining the Dallas Police Department in the early 1980s when he returned from college to find his neighborhood devastated by the crack-cocaine epidemic: My friends who stayed here got involved in that. It broke my heart. So I thought Id get involved in doing something about it and become part of the solution.

On how the community can help: Were hiring. Get off that protest line and put an application in. Well put you in your neighborhood and help you solve the problems youre protesting about.

Brown had already received nationwide praise for his steely resolve in handling of July 7s tragedy. But after Twitter users heard his answers Monday, the hashtag #DavidBrownForPresident was born.

I have so much respect for Dallas Police Chief David Browna? #Quality #Leadership #ForPresident #DavidBrownForPresident #Dallas

-- Crystal Renaud (@crystalrenaud) July 11, 2016

Thank God for @DPDChief. Such resolute calmness with a backbone like steel! May God increase your kind in our land!#davidbrownforpresident

-- Pam Noblit (@PamNoblit) July 11, 2016

All I know is this.... #davidbrownforpresident ...Thank you for true leadership, @DPDChief , in spite of unbelievable pain.

-- Wynne Driskell Wages (@wynnewages) July 9, 2016

Browns a little late for the 2016 election cycle, but that wont stop his admirers.

I would take Chief David Brown for President over either candidate in a Texas heartbeat.

-- DK (@davekunz8787) July 9, 2016

I think I just settled on David Brown as my 2016 write-in candidate for President.

-- Jon McHenry (@jonmchenry) July 8, 2016

Dallas Chief of Police David Brown has my write-in vote for President this fall. #stopprotestinggetinvolved #werehiring #accountability

-- Catherine Pasquale (@Mamapas) July 11, 2016

The man can give a speech, says Twitter.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown for President. You want plain spoken? There it is, without insulting anyone/everyone who isnt like him.

-- Daffodil Goddess (@DaffodilGoddess) July 11, 2016

Wow, I would vote for Dallas Police Chief David Brown for President. This man has his you know what together. Saying the right things well.

-- Torrin Treu (@T_Twice77) July 11, 2016

And hes already won over some in the media.

David Brown for president

-- Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) July 11, 2016

David Brown for President

-- John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) July 11, 2016

If he needs a running mate, he may not have to look far.

Can Mayor Mike Rawlings and Chief of Police David Brown run for President and VP? Im penciling them in. #Dallas

-- tassjania lozano (@tassjania) July 11, 2016

That is, if Dallas can stomach letting him go.

.@DPDChief Im torn between David Brown for president and not wanting you to leave Dallas.

-- Rebecca Stevenson (@becki_stevenson) July 11, 2016

On Twitter:

@ahuguelet

---

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Some government officials and politicians are ...
A shooting early Sunday morning at a Titusville hospital has left two people dead and a community shocked.

Elderly patient, hospital employee shot, killed at Titusville hospital

Police say David Owens, 29, shot both women in a 3rd floor room

Owens was booked into the Brevard County Jail

There was still a police presence Sunday night at the Parrish Medical Center after police say a gunman, 29-year-old Dave Owens, shot an employee and an elderly patient. Police say they will remain at the hospital for as long as the staff needs.

Titusville Police and Brevard County deputies arrived at the Parrish Medical Center just after 2 a.m. Sunday morning after they received calls that a gunman was shooting on the third floor.

Nearby residents described the scene as chaotic.

On my way to work, I take U.S. 1, and there were cops everywhere, flashing lights, security guards scattered everywhere. It was insane, said Chase Gilbert, who works near the site of the shooting.

Police think Owens entered through the hospitals emergency wing and went to the third floor, where he shot and killed hospital employee Carrie Rouzer, 36, and 88-year-old Cynthia Zingsheim, a patient.

Now, they are investigating whether Owens had any relation or knew the victims.

The arrestee is known to us. He is a Titusville resident, and he does have a criminal history, but nothing that you would think would bring it to this degree, Tituville Police Chief John Lau said.

Security guards tackled Owens to the ground and held him there until officers arrived. Those security guards are being hailed as heroes.

Parrish Medical Center had a plan in place, and there is no doubt that their actions saved lives," Lau said. "No doubt.

Owens was booked into the Brevard County Jail on Sunday morning on two counts of murder.

Police will remain at the hospital to ensure the staff feels safe over the next few days. For many Titusville residents, Sunday's shooting hit very close to home.

To have it actually happen here is just insane. I dont understand why someone would do this. Its a hospital where the sick go to get better.

"Youre supposed to feel safe, Gilbert said.
After 13 months on the run, a former small-town police chief wanted for murder and armed robbery was captured in Tennessee on Sept. 27, 1929.

Had Tom Shook always been a crooked cop concealing his crimes behind a badge? If that was true, he sure had fooled a bunch of people during his eight-year career in law enforcement with different departments in North Texas. And the town council in Electra, the Red River boomtown northwest of Wichita Falls, would not had hired him as the new chief of police had he not come highly recommended.

Shook lasted no more than a year as Electras top cop. Whether he was fired or left of his own accord is unclear eight decades after the fact. It may be that the town elders got wind of his after-hours activities and elected to play it safe by terminating his employment or Shook simply resigned to pursue a life of crime full-time.

On the night of Aug. 10, 1928, the ex-chief stabbed to death a 42-year-old father of three. To save the sheriff the trouble of looking for him and to avoid any unpleasantness, Shook turned himself in before sunup.

The very next day, the grand jury indicted him on three separate counts: murder, armed robbery and burglary. The second charge stemmed from the blowing of a safe at an Electra movie theater on June 18 and the third concerned his alleged role in the robbery of the desk clerk at the Jefferson Hotel the following night.

The judge denied bail and had Shook transferred to the county jail in Wichita Falls to await trial. But he had no intention of sticking around for his day in court.

Two weeks later, the disgraced lawman and five other prisoners jumped the jailer as he served them supper. They knocked him out cold, took his keys and helped themselves to a safe containing the cash and personal property of their fellow inmates before heading out the door.

During Shooks yearlong absence, a jury gave one of his partners in crime eight years in the penitentiary for his part in the hotel holdup. Former Electra constable Ed Pryor was convicted on the testimony of the actual stickup artist, who swore under oath that the police chief and the constable had put him up to it and taken a third each of the loot.

Shook remained at large until September 1929, when he was arrested for the shooting death of a stranger in Decaturville, Tenn. Upon discovering their suspect was a fugitive from Lone Star justice, the authorities told the Wichita County sheriff to come and fetch him.

Shook was soon back where he had started and under a 24-hour watch to ensure his presence at his next court date. Within the month, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to five years for the armed robbery. But that was merely the warm-up for the big event.

The obliging judge consented to a change of venue for the murder trial and moved it two counties south to Graham. Meanwhile, the defendant tried to throw a monkey wrench in the judicial machinery by pressuring the constable at tiny Harrold to serve subpoenas on three imaginary witnesses. Shook figured the proceedings would have to be postponed until the nonexistent trio was found.

The clever scheme might have worked, if the constable had not come to his senses and thrown himself on the mercy of the court. The judge, not at all amused by the ruse, jailed him as a material witness and started the trial the week before Christmas 1929.

No one expected Shook to beat the murder rap, and for once he did not disappoint them. The only surprise was the punishment. A 30-year prison term for a capital offense was comparatively lenient considering the rogue cop was eligible for the death penalty.

By the next March, Shook had lost his appeal and taken up residence in Huntsville. But eight months later, he was back in the headlines with a sensational escape attempt.

Along with 27 other inmates, Shook was being transported by truck to a work site. At a prearranged bend in the deserted road, four desperate cons attacked their three gun-toting overseers. In the fierce struggle that ensued, two guards were overpowered and stripped of their pistols.

That left the lone shotgun guard, who patiently waited for an unobstructed target. When he finally got it, he put a load of buckshot in Shooks stomach. The guard freed by the blast from the ex-chiefs bear hug retrieved his weapon and killed both of the armed escapees with head shots.

With that the bold bid for freedom was over in the blink of an eye. As for the convict cop, he was according to the Dallas Morning News probably fatally wounded. Shook did spend several days at deaths door but eventually recovered to resume serving his lengthy stretch.

In the fall of 1934, Shooks 12-year-old daughter penned a personal appeal to the governor. Please grant my daddy a pardon, she wrote.

Miriam Ma Ferguson, always a sucker for a sob story, just could not resist. So in January 1935, Tom Shook strolled out the front gate 2 1/2 decades early.

Bartee Haile welcomes your comments and questions at haile@pdq.net or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549 and invites you to visit his web site at barteehaile.com.
MERIDEN  Four local students were honored with college scholarships at the seventh annual Eloise and William Woods Scholarship Reception Friday evening.



The Meriden-Wallingford NAACP Branch hosted the event at Hunters Ambulance, 450 W. Main St.



William Anti, Faith Williams, Abigail and Breanna Karabeinikoff each received scholarships. Anti and Williams graduated from Maloney High School in June, and will be attending Quinnipiac University and Gateway Community College in the fall. Abigail and Breanna graduated from Platt High School, and will be attending Southern Connecticut State University and University of Hartford.



The reception was created in 2007 in honor of Eloise Woods, the late 23-year chairperson of the Meriden-Wallingford NCAAP scholarship fund who died in 2005. Twenty students have received scholarships since the programs inception.



Scholarship recipients must reside in Meriden or Wallingford, said Lois Strayhorn, chairperson of the Woods scholarship.



Looking at the cost of college... what is given, can help them buy books and the other expenses they encounter, NAACP education committee member Eddie Joyce said. We think that they are grateful.



Abigails goal is to become a physical therapist. Breanna will be majoring in pharmacy.



Williams plans to transfer to a four-year college after receiving her associates degree. She hopes to pursue a career in broadcast journalism and was appreciative of the monetary award.



School isnt easy to pay for, Williams said. When you get the opportunity for someone that wants to help, it makes you really grateful for the people that are in your community.



Anti, who plans on majoring in business, expressed similar thoughts.



Im really happy to get it, he said. The help from them really means a lot.



blipiner@record-journal.com 203-317-2444 Twitter: @BryanLipiner






Looking for a chance to force Saudi Arabia to respond to allegations about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a Middletown man is working to build support that would allow the families of the victims to sue the country.



Brett Eagleson, whose father Bruce was in one of the World Trade Center buildings when it collapsed, said he and other relatives of victims want the opportunity to press the country on the issue in a courtroom, although he acknowledges insurance providers and other companies may try to recoup financial losses.



For the families, the most important factor is to get the truth, said Eagleson, who has gotten the states congressional delegation to sign on as co-sponsors to the bill.



U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-5th District, said in a statement she is proud to co-sponsor the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA.



This bill has a very simple premise  governments that harbor and subsidize terrorists should have to answer for their actions, she said. 9/11 families in our community have reached out to me with their strong support for this bill, because they want  and deserve  the chance to hold accountable all those who are responsible for the deaths of their loved ones.



A U.S. House Judiciary Committee subcommittee held a public hearing on the bill Thursday, but it remains unclear if or when the chamber might vote on the proposal after adjourning for summer break later in the day. The bill earned unanimous approval in the Senate in May, but also has detractors who worry about its foreign relations implications, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, among them.



The bill would make a change to the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, which greatly limits lawsuits against foreign sovereign nations, to allow lawsuits by or on behalf of American citizens who are the victim of terrorist attacks on American soil and sponsored by foreign countries.



Eagleson said the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, when terrorists flew planes into the Twin Towers and killed nearly 3,000, was such a world changing event that federal lawmakers should amend the act.



Bruce Eagleson, his father, was a Middlefield resident and manager for the Westfield Group, owner of the Westfield Mall, when he was in the south tower doing business for the company at the time of the attack. His family said he was trying to help others escape when the building collapsed. The 53-year-old had previously managed the Westfield Meriden mall for 12 years, overseeing its 1999 expansion and growth into the largest taxpayer and employer in Meriden. A plaque in his memory hangs near an entrance to the mall.



Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied any connection to the 9/11 attack, but many families of victims have accused the countrys royal family of financially backing al-Qaeda prior to the attack.



Eagleson said many victims families want to press the Saudi royal family on 28 pages from a 2002 report, released by Congress Friday, and other evidence that they believe demonstrates a link to the 19 hijackers, 15 or whom were Saudi nationals. Some families previously tried to sue Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009 declined to hear the case because of the 1976 act.



Ryan, President Barack Obama, and some foreign policy experts have warned that changing the 1976 act could hurt relations with Saudi Arabia and set a dangerous precedent for respecting sovereignty.



Eagleson said those arguments are driven by Saudi Arabias lobbyists, but he believes the bill is written to narrowly limit the incidents when it can be invoked. He also expressed disappointment that Obama and some congressional leaders arent behind the idea.



The only way for this bill to work is if all three branches stand behind the bill, he said, acknowledging that the U.S. would likely need to use sanctions or other measures to get Saudi Arabia to comply.



msavino@record-journal.com 203-317-2266 Twitter: @reporter_savino






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Family members of a UC Berkeley student studying abroad in Nice who has not been seen since a terror attack killed at least 84 people in the resort city are planning to fly to France to continue searching for him, relatives said Saturday.

Local officials, family and university staff have been unable to track down Nick Leslie, a 20-year-old junior in the schools College of Natural Resources. Thursdays deadly truck attack on Bastille Day injured more than 300 people, including three other UC Berkeley students.

Leslie was there for a four-week European Innovation Academy along with 85 other UC Berkeley students.

Were trying to get ourselves to France right now, said Conrad Leslie, Nicks father, Saturday morning. He said French officials have not released the names of those injured and being treated in local hospitals.

Were going crazy, Leslie said. Nick Leslies uncle has been searching area hospitals since the attack.

Leslie lived in Del Mar (San Diego County) before attending UC Berkeley, according to his Facebook page.

UC Berkeley students Diane Huang, 20, who suffered a broken foot, and Vladyslav Kostiuk, 23, who was treated for a broken leg, were discharged from hospitals, officials with the university said Friday. A third student, Daryus Medora, 21, was still in the hospital with a broken leg.

Were just hoping that Nick is safe and hes coming home, said Claire Holmes, an assistant vice chancellor, on Friday. He was very connected to the campus. A lot of people know him.

More for you Anguished family waits for news of UC Berkeley student missing...

A State Department spokesman said they are aware of reports a U.S. citizen is missing. Because of privacy considerations, the spokesman said he could not provide details.

In early July, Tarishi Jain, an 18-year-old UC Berkeley student, was killed in a terrorist attack at a restaurant in Dhaka, Bagladesh, just after she had started an internship in the city through a university program.

Hamed Aleaziz is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: haleaziz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @haleaziz
The fourth and final program of the 20th Cactus Pear Festival sizzled and popped with mostly American chamber music, including a significant premiere, Saturday night.

Cactus Pear is one[HD1] of five festivals rolling out Kevin Puts' "In at the Eye: Six Love Songs on Yeats' Poetry" this year.

The title comes from Yeats' "Drinking Song" and the line, "Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye."

The composition is a song cycle, and it featured baritone Timothy Jones here, who delivered the poetry stylishly and dramatically.

The four other musicians provided the foundation for each poem's message, a sense of dismay here, a lament for past glory there, symbolized by a fading flute passage.

The final poem swelled with uplifting polyphony. The Baltimore-based composer's new work is deserving of many future audiences.

The piece with the most razzle dazzle was "Firecracker" by Michael Daugherty. The 1991 piece engages seven musicians, led Saturday by oboist Rong-Huey Liu. Usually, the oboe is assigned lyrical, melodious passages, but in this work, the oboe is played as if is a lit fuse.

Daugherty meant "Firecracker" to be highly visual. The oboe portrays a spinning roulette wheel while the violin, cello, bass clarinet and flute/piccolo represent the flashing Las Vegas neon lights.

A tango floor show interrupts the gambling before the frenetic pace resumes, driven hard by percussion and the piano.

"Firecracker" was commissioned by Larry Rachleff for the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble before Rachleff later served several years as San Antonio Symphony music director, a period when festival founder Stephanie Sant'Ambrogio was San Antonio Symphony concertmaster.

The audience of about 475 people at Coker United Methodist Church was thrilled by the performance. The violinist was Eric Gratz, the current San Antonio Symphony concertmaster.

The concert began where the third program Friday night left off, with a work by French composer Francis Poulenc, his Sonata for flute and piano. Flutist Stephanie Jutt played the charming, tender sections with heartfelt sincerity while skillfully navigating the tricky fingering in other sections.

The husband-and-wife cello team of Anthony Ross and Beth Rapier definitely were on the same page for Gian Carlo Menotti's Suite for two cellos and piano. The third movement was an intriguing conversation between the cellists, underscored by inner-life emotions.

The cellists played with precision for the finale, going in and out of unison in Menotti's tongue-in-cheek music.

This festival's group of young artists, calling themselves the Oasis Octet, performed with remarkable talent a work, "Terminal Velocity," by Colin Sorgi, son of the Young Artists Program director Craig Sorgi.

As the title suggests, the music pulsated with speed and a heightened sense of drama.

The program ended with a spirited reading of Bela Bartok's Contrasts for piano and clarinet.

Interplay between Gratz' violin and the clarinet of Sam Almaguer delivered highly accented dance-style themes. The finale was filled with fun and mischief.

The program repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday at Boerne's First United Methodist Church. The

Young Artists Program concert will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday at First Presbyterian Church in downtown San Antonio.



dhendricks@express-news.net

Twitter: @davidahendricks
Dear Mr. Premack: My father is a widower, and has been getting chemotherapy for several months. The person who has been giving the therapy began a relationship with him. They have met for dinner, to shop, and she has come to his home. He has given her cash, paid some of her personal doctor's bills, paid for a trip she took, bought her a flat screen TV, paid for her prescriptions, and more. He's spent over $40,000. He finally realized what was happening and brought it to my attention. I am his only son and am agent under his power of attorney. How do I deal with this situation? - N.E.

Because you are agent under your father's Durable Power of Attorney, you have authority to act in his best interest. Before you act on his behalf, you should always try to get him to make decisions himself, participate in any discussions, or at least have him endorse any actions you feel are necessary.
As Republicans stream into Cleveland to nominate Donald Trump for president, they confront a party divided and deeply imperiled by his racially divisive campaign.

Trump has called for cracking down on Muslims and immigrants in the country illegally, stoked fears of crime and terrorism and repeatedly declared that the United States is in a war for its very survival.

But amid gloom about Republican prospects in November, Trump may have endangered the party in a more lasting way: by forging a coalition of white voters driven primarily by themes of hard-right nationalism and cultural identity.

Republicans have wrestled for years with the push and pull of seeking to win over new groups of voters while tending to their overwhelmingly white and conservative base. Now, Trump's candidacy may force them into making a fateful choice: whether to fully embrace the Trump model and become, effectively, a party of white identity politics, or to pursue a broader political coalition by repudiating Trump's ideas  and many of the voters he has gathered behind his campaign.

With his diatribes against Islam, immigration from Mexico and economic competition from Asia, Trump has amassed dominant support from restive white voters. His political approach would have Republicans court working-class and rural whites, mainly in the South and Midwest, at the grievous cost of alienating minorities and women, who often decide presidential races.

In his choice of running mate, Trump moved to further shore up his support among Midwestern whites. Passing over a throng of nonwhite Republicans recently elected to high office, he settled on Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, whose only demonstrated appeal is to conservative-leaning whites in the Rust Belt.

The coalition that carried Trump to the nomination he will formally claim at the Republican National Convention this week in Cleveland is likely to remain a powerful force on the right, even if he is defeated in November. But its continued sway within the party could suffocate Republicans at the national level, stifling attempts to expand beyond a dwindling base of aggrieved older voters.

A starkly different path forward for Republicans would involve rejecting that base and the ideas that Trump has used to assemble it.

In order to build a winning party again, some Republican leaders say, the party will have to disavow Trump's exclusionary message, even at the price of driving away voters at the core of the Republican base  perhaps a third or more of the party.

This approach would amount to a highly risky lurch away from the faction that made Trump the Republican nominee, and toward a community of female, Latino and Asian voters who have never been reliable Republicans. Should the effort falter, and Republicans fail to win a second look from these Democratic-leaning groups, they could find themselves stranded with virtually no base at all.

If they are divided over the proper course forward, Republican leaders agree that a wrenching struggle is coming.

House Speaker Paul Ryan predicted that the aftermath of the election would bring "a fight for the soul of our party," and said Republicans would have to reject the politics of racial resentment, which he called "a loser."

"Our job is not to preach to a shrinking choir; it's to win converts," said Ryan, who has endorsed Trump but criticizes his pronouncements with regularity.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., an outspoken critic of Trump who plans to skip the convention, said more bluntly that the party should be prepared to break with Trump and the voters who have cheered his pledges to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally and ban Muslims from entering the country.

"You've got to hope that, if this race keeps going the way it looks to be going, that it's enough of a jolt to wake people up and say we don't want to be relegated to second place in every future presidential campaign," Flake said.

With both paths forward carrying painful risks, some Republicans fear the party will chart its course next year much as it did after losing in 2008 and 2012: by simply muddling onward.

Flake invoked the Republican National Committee's so-called autopsy report after the 2012 campaign, which argued for minority outreach and immigration reform, as a sign of the futility of the party's predicament.

"We'll conclude we have to have a bigger tent and got to be more inclusive, particularly with Hispanics and other growing demographic groups," said Flake, looking ahead to the months after this November. "And then maybe some populist will rise up again and we'll go through the whole same process again."
Public comments on a redo of the citys iconic Brackenridge Park are done, and a theme emerges. Since the proposed master plan was unveiled, citizens have voiced concern over a proposal to substantially close the popular destination for family and friend get-togethers to parking. Folks would use a tram instead. Parkgoers would keep their cars in nearby garages.

We urge the citys consultants and its park officials to take these concerns to heart. If they cannot overcome fears that these trams  people movers  will be able to haul people and their picnic food, equipment and park toys, they should jettison these features from the recommendations they ultimately make to the City Council.

Effectively closing the park to most cars  closing some roads as well  has the whiff of targeted exclusion, some critics say. In a recent Express-News article, Brendan Gibbons reported that former City Councilwoman Maria Berriozabal told the master planners that parkgoers she talked to told her, Nos estan echando, senora. They are kicking us out.

This expresses a concern that these changes are about  or will have the effect of  keeping San Antonios Mexican and Mexican-American communities out. Brackenridge is popular with these communities year-round, but particularly for traditional overnight Easter stays.

Project leader Jim Gray of Rialto Studios told those attending public meetings that the intent is more public usage, not less. He said his firm is listening.

Good. Even if these concerns arent also expressed in the comments gathered by email, the city would do well to pay heed.

The master plan is a draft, the consultants and park officials insist. Early on, there were concerns that the city was not getting enough input, and the city then hosted six public meetings to get community feedback. The last of these occurred Wednesday.

The draft master plan calls for a grand lawn to be created from a central parking lot between North Saint Marys Street and the San Antonio River. The city would close entrances off Hildebrand Avenue, Tuleta Drive southeast of U.S. 281 and parts of St. Marys. Parking spaces along Avenue B would also be removed.

Brackenridge Park is one of the citys jewels. It is due for a refurbishing. But, if access  for everyone  cannot be assured, consultants and the city should go back to the drawing board.
A new poll by Forum Research says 65 percent of Canadians agree that a national referendum must occur before any changes are made to the way we elect our MPs. Only 18 percent said that giving Canadians a vote on the matter is not necessary and the remaining 17 percent had no opinion. In the polls summary, Dr. Lorne Bozinoff notes that the strong supportive majority spreads across all regions and socioeconomic groups. Yet Prime Minister Trudeau and his Liberal Government continue to come up with new ways to avoid letting Canadians vote on this important question.

In their latest attempt to avoid a referendum, the Liberals have told Canadians they are welcome to consult themselves. Instead of doing the right thing by giving Canadians a chance to vote in a referendum, the Liberals have told Canadians they can talk amongst themselves and let the government know what they think. Theyve even produced a 38-page booklet to help Canadians organize their own electoral reform discussions. Even if Canadians do wish to organize events like this, the Liberal Government has no obligation to legislate what is laid out in the responses. Consulting Canadians is never a bad thing, but no one has ever wanted to do a homework assignment that the teacher never intended on marking.

A referendum guarantees that Canadians  all Canadians  are heard and that our voices matter. Since the federal election saw the Liberals elected with less than 40 percent of the popular vote, its disingenuous to suggest that a majority of Canadians gave them a mandate to unilaterally change the electoral system. The notion becomes even more far-fetched when you consider that their campaign platform didnt bother to explain what their proposed alternative to the existing system would be.

As Ive asked before in this column; if the Liberals truly believe that Canadians will support their plan, why are they dragging their heels on calling a referendum? To be fair, Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef hasnt ruled out a referendum, but she has expressed that she doesnt feel a national vote is needed. She has also made comments suggesting she believes this issue is too complex for Canadians to consider. The aforementioned poll has made it clear that Minister Monsefs position is out of touch with 65 percent of Canadians. Rather than telling Canadians to consult themselves, maybe its time the Liberals stopped ignoring what has already been said.
'It just flipped': Busch details final season with Joe Gibbs Racing in 'Race for the Championship' In the latest episode of USA Network's "Race for the Championship," Busch describes the change at JGR and is introduced with a new team.
#SPC Group Deceased factory worker's family sues bakery giant SPC chairman The family of a young worker who died while working at an affiliate factory of food and beverage giant filed a complaint against the group's chairman on charges of violating the w...
Farmers cut ties with Organic Trade Association

Who are the 'organic traitors?'

(NaturalNews) Both houses of Congress have now passed a measure to repeal all state and local laws requiring the labeling of food ingredients made with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) , and President Obama has indicated that he will sign the bill into law.While it's no surprise that the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and Monsanto lobbied hard for this law, the shocking truth is that the Stabenow-Roberts bill  popularly known as the Denying Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act 2.0  could not have passed without the active endorsement of major organic food companies and trade associations. These groups' collusion with Monsanto has divided the organic food community, deepening a division between Big Organics and smaller organic farmers and companies.The DARK Act poses as a GMO labeling bill, but in fact it eliminates all state and local labeling laws , replacing them with a completely voluntary, non-enforceable program that requires consumers to scan QR codes with their smartphones or call 1-800 numbers to find out whether the food they are thinking of buying is made with GMOs. Even more shockingly, the bill defines "GMO" in such a way as to exempt 95 percent of foods made with GMOs, including all foods made with Roundup Ready or Bt corn and soy.Ninety percent of U.S. residents support mandatory GMO labeling laws such as those now in force in Vermont.Critics also accuse the DARK Act of being discriminatory."One-in-five Americans in the U.S. does not have smartphones," said Rep. James McGovern (D-Mass.). "That includes 50 percent of Americans who are low-income and living in rural areas, and over 65 percent of elderly Americans."According to the Center for Food Safety, the Dark Act could never have passed the Senate without active lobbying from organic companies and groups."It's important for the world to understand that it was the Organic Trade Association that killed our state GMO labeling laws by backing Monsanto's Stabenow-Roberts bill," said Maine organic seed farmer Jim Gerritsen, president of the farmer-controlled Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA).Following the DARK Act passing the Senate, OSGATA announced that it was withdrawing its membership from the OTA."The Organic Trade Association can no longer be trusted," Gerritsen said, "and it's clear that organic farmers can no longer condone this dubious trade association's troubling behavior."Critics note that many of the companies represented by the OTA are owned by parent companies that are themselves members of the GMA and oppose mandatory labeling laws.Groups and companies that lobbied on behalf of the bill and convinced Senators that the organics industry would accept it, include the OTA, Whole Foods Market and UNFI (the country's largest organic and natural foods wholesalers). The OTA effort was led by Board Chair Melissa Hughes of Organic Valley. Other OTA brands leading the effort include Smuckers and White Wave.According to the Organic Consumers Association, another individual who lobbied for the DARK Act was Gary Hirschberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm and chairman of Just Label It, which has been condemned as a GMO industry front group. Hirschberg has previously come under fire for hiring former GMA head lobbyist Scott Faber as head of Just Label It.Faber, who also took part in the negotiations on behalf of the DARK Act, is vice president of governmental affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.Some of these groups and individuals have denied supporting the DARK Act. Hirschberg says he did not take part in the negotiations, and that Just Label It does not support the bill. The EWG says it does not support the bill, despite Faber's own role in getting it passed. Faber has declined to comment.
All treatments at Barbara Ann Karmanos Institute and Wayne State University School of Medicine should be halted until investigations are conducted

Why is Dr. David H. Gorski, Fata's cohort, still licensed to bombard his healthy patients with mass doses of chemotherapy at Karmanos Cancer Center?

(NaturalNews) Just one year ago, Detroit area oncologist Farid Fata, M.D., was sentenced to nearly half a century in federal prison for bombarding and killing healthy patients with massive doses of chemotherapy , and for defrauding Medicare and insurance companies of more than $30,000,000. The insidious and deranged cancer doctor pleaded guilty to 13 counts of healthcare fraud as well as conspiracy, naming in court more than a handful of his co-conspirators  other fraudsters whose names have yet to be released, except to prosecuting attorneys for ongoing investigations.Although Fata's healthcare scheme is the biggest and most insidious ever recorded in U.S. history, thus far, Fata is the only one who has been charged. How can that be, when heto conspiracy. Last time we looked, by definition, conspiring involves more than one person. How long will Michigan and Detroit officials let other chemo-fraudsters dose healthy people before putting a stop to the multi-location racket that's ongoing at the cancer industrial complex known as Karmanos?Over the course of nine long years, Fata essentially killed over 500 people with his "European Protocol"  a completely self-fabricated overdose of chemotherapy he administered to healthy people in order to become rich and powerful, according to his own testimony, as he confessed in court. This included overdosing people even during their last days of life. Using aggressive intravenous treatments, Fata jacked up his billings and fraudulent claims to Medicare and insurance companies, solicited kickbacks from hospice centers for referrals of patients, and used those proceeds to administerunnecessary and expensive PET scans (positron emission tomography) that he billed to private insurers.Testimony from victims verifies all of this published, well-documented testimony. Fata was investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Eastern District of Michigan, who now hold the names of Fata's co-conspirators! Who are they? Doesn't the public have the right to know,, before they too get dosed with toxic chemotherapy for cancers that they mayeven have? How long will it take to release these names and halt the horrors?This diabolical medical racket must be stopped. We are witnessing unprecedented false cancer diagnoses combined with unnecessary deadly chemotherapy forin profit, and it's ongoing. Is the deranged Dr. David H. Gorski one of the named co-conspirators? David Gorski, a.k.a. "Orac," is the most insane blogger on the planet, the same multi-personality who despises natural medicine and goes on medical discussion chat boards to impersonate disease-injured families so that people will stop second-guessing chemotherapy, toxic vaccines and experimental pharmaceuticals for autism and breast cancer.Now the Fata scandal deepens. In fact, Karmanos cancer surgeon Dr. David Gorski has been linked to 'skeptics' kingpin James Randi, a long-time amateur magician, who was caught on tape soliciting sexual favors from an underage boy.Gorski may well be schizophrenic, considering all of the20,000 word rants he posts online daily, blasting natural medicine and pushing his own propaganda about chemotherapy and vaccines, using secret code words, multiple identities and encouraging others to do the same. Gorski still thinks nobody knows he is "Orac" and "Respectful Insolence," and he sets up phony email accounts and dozens of Twitter accounts so that he can abuse other people without being traced.When will the CDC, the FTC, the AMA, the state medical board and Michigan officials stop this mad man and others like him from practicing medicine and possibly murdering innocents, like Farid Fata did for nearly a decade? Stay tuned, and stay away from the Karmanos Cancer Industrial Complex, until we all know the truth! Meanwhile, look into natural remedies for cancer that have zero side effects
In a major departmental reshuffle in the United Kingdom, the government has decided to shut down the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), following a series of political events in the country, starting with Brexit and the appointment of a new prime minister.

The DECC will be merged into an expanded Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to be headed by Greg Clark, BBC reported.

Clark expressed excitement over the leadership opportunity, which he said could further the government's relationship with the business sector and can better deliver affordable and clean energy.

Andrea Leadsom has been appointed by new Prime Minister Theresa May as environment secretary.

The move to axe the department has been met with criticism, with former energy and climate secretary Ed Miliband calling the act "plain stupid."

In his Twitter, Miliband of Labour said the lack of the word "climate" in the title shows the priorities of the department and the government.

DECC abolition just plain stupid. Climate not even mentioned in new dept. title. Matters because depts shape priorities shape outcomes.  Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) July 14, 2016

However, some groups also see the move having a positive outcome. David Nussbaum, chief executive of World Wildlife Fund of U.K. said the new department can be a "real powerhouse for change."

The deparment's office will be the new headquarters of the Brexit ministry.

Crucial time for UK

The move to axe the DECC comes at a crucial time as the U.K. aims for the ratification of the climate deal inked in Paris in December 2015.

Also recently, the government advisers at the Committe on Climate Change released a report that the country was not prepared for possible extreme weather conditions in the future brought by global warming, as per Climate Change News.

Leadsom, a Brexit campaigner, also faces criticism as she once questioned whether climate change is real.

The Independent reported on several worrying moves by Leadsom in the past, including her support on fox hunting and backing government policy on selling off Britain's forests.
Aside from weather disturbances and runway traffic, New York's JFK Airport has found a rather uncommon reason for flight delays: Turtles.

About 400 diamondback terrapin turtles have been spotted in the airport property this year. These slow-moving animals wander from their Jamaica Bay swampland home to the sandy area near the airport runways, where they build their nests and lay eggs.

The Associated Press reported that while there is no information yet whether an airplane has ever hit a turtle, there were still delays of several minutes as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey struggled to remove the turtles from harm's way.

After being brought to safety, these turtles were measured, tagged and returned to a safe habitat. But that does not really stop them from coming back.

Usual July hike

This incident is not the first as groups of diamondback terrapin turtles usually make their way from Jamaica Bay to the airport in mid-July after their monthlong mating season.

The airport area has a lot of sandy nesting soil, which is an ideal habitat for the turtles, as per ABC New York.

For several years, it has been a natural behavior for the turtles to lay their eggs near and on the runways, but of course, it seems quite unnatural for the people in the fifth busiest airport in the United States.

In 2014, the airport installed plastic tubings to keep out the turtles, but that did not stop the more adventurous ones to still get in.

And it seems that adventure runs in the blood of these turtles, as the baby turtles--whose nests are placed in cages by terrapin researchers to keep safe from predators--find their own way back to the marsh after they hatch from their eggs.

Why the airport?

But while it is an interesting incident to witness, many people--scientists and researchers included--wonder what lures the diamondback terrapins to the JFK Airport.

A New York Times report in 2014 described a team of scientists who looked into the matter. They discovered that many of the terrapins are young, and in the age where they usually return to the beaches where they were born in order to nest.

The turtle population around Jamaica Bay had also been kept in check by raccoons, which are natural predators of the newborn terrapins. Dr. Russell Burke, a biologist at Hofstra University, hypothesized that something must have happened to the raccoons at JFK several years ago that led to the survival of those eggs that were laid in the area.

In fact, turtle population have increased since 2008, when several raccoons in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge died due to a distemper outbreak.

Diamondback terrapins (Malaclemys terrapin) are named for the diamond-shaped growth rings on their shell, according to Defenders of Wildlife. They are native to eastern and southern United States.

It is believed to be the only turtle in the world that lives exclusively in brackish water and in habitats like tidal marshes, estuaries and lagoons. However, their preferred nesting sites are sandy beaches.

They are currently listed in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Red List in near threatened status, with climate change and habitat destruction as their threats.
Two men accused of robbing a Northern California armored car are also suspected of carrying out a similar heist in Southern California.

Police also say one suspect confessed to fatally shooting a Los Angeles-area deli owner during a robbery last year.

The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reported Saturday that Sergey Gutsu, 24, is expected to be charged with the June 2015 homicide ofa 62-year-old owner of a San Dimas Quizno's sandwich shop.

Gutsu and Ivan Morales, 23, were arrested in Northern California's wine country Tuesday after an armored car driver was shot and wounded with an assault rifle and robbed of unspecified cash. An hour after the robbery in Sonoma County, police in neighboring Napa County arrested the pair after ramming their car. Gutsu is also charged with shooting at police in Napa County.

No injuries were reported after the duo's arrest, though Gutsu appeared in court Tuesday with a black eye.

The two are also suspected of robbing an armored car in Granada Hills in March. The two appeared in court Tuesday, but didn't enter pleas. Gutsu's attorney Jonathan Steele and Morales attorney Jeff Mitchell declined to comment.

Investigators declined to discuss how they connected Gutsu to the homicide of the deli owner. But Los Angeles Sheriff's Department homicide investigator Lt. John Corina said Gutsu confessed.

"He admitted to us that he did the murder,'' Corina said.
Bay Area politicians are suiting up and flying out for the Republican National Convention this upcoming Monday in Cleveland, Ohio, having either resigned themselves to the possibility of a Trump presidency or having been rooting for it all along.

Hilary Hagenbuch, the president of the San Francisco Young Republicans, is heading to the convention as an alternate delegate.

This election, this candidatewhat we have seen in the past several months makes it a little bit more exciting, she said.

She has expressed worry about security  a necessary force at Trump events, in which many protesters who feel his comments have been racist, unpresidential and sexist are bound to show up outside the convention center.

In fact, 123 permits were already granted for demonstrators inside the event zone. Although most of the protests have been peaceful, the heated interactions between Trump supporters and those who stand against him have escalated into physical altercations several times, including in the Bay Area when Trump spoke in San Jose.

Additionally, shootings in Dallas and the terror attack in France have put security for large-scale events on high alert.

I think thats inviting a lot of unnecessary hostility, animosity and chaos, Hagenbuch said, regarding allowing protesters to enter the venue. "Security risk is definitely on my mind whether its domestic protestors with different organizations or someone from ISIS...but I'm confident in the police department and confident in the secret service."

Police, however, have cautioned that they have been changing and enhancing their plans and feel that security will be locked down.
OAKLAND  Khris Davis helped ensure that Sonny Gray finally notched his first win since April.

Davis hit two homers, giving him three in two games since the All-Star break, as the As beat Toronto 5-4 Saturday on a sun-drenched afternoon at the Coliseum. The day also included Ryon Healys first major league home run, a three-run shot that also accounted for his first big league hit.

That helped make a winner of Gray (4-8), who snapped a career-worst seven-game losing streak and ended a dry spell of 12 consecutive starts without a victory, dating back to April 22. The losing streak was tied for the longest active one in the majors, and it marked the longest by an As pitcher since Tyson Ross eight-gamer back in 2012.

Most noteworthy in two games since the break is the As ability clear the fences. They hit just six home runs over their first 10 games of July but have gone deep six times in their first two games of the second half. Davis, who hit Nos. 21 and 22 for his season, is continuing the power-hitting pace he set in an impressive first half.

All three of the As homers came off knuckleballer R.A. Dickey (7-10), who had won three of his previous four starts. Gray went six innings and gave up three runs on six hits.

Toronto closed to within one run on Justin Smoaks leadoff homer in the ninth off Ryan Madson, but the As bagged the victory and will go for a sweep Sunday.

Starting pitching report

It was hardly a smooth ride for Gray, who managed to combat his command issues to post his fourth quality start in his past five outings. He walked four and needed 102 pitches to complete six innings, but it was enough to help him find the win column for the first time since April 22, which was also against Toronto.

It was rough going early on, as Gray threw exactly half of his first 50 pitches for balls. He allowed Josh Thole, the Jays No. 9 hitter, a two-run double in the second after getting ahead of him 1-2. Edwin Encarnacion then led off the third with a solo homer that cut Oaklands lead at the time to 4-3. But in the end, Gray had a W next to his name, giving him something positive to draw upon at the end of a laborious afternoon.

Bullpen report

Ryan Dull, John Axford and Madson iced the victory for Gray.

At the plate

Healys three-run shot to left in the second came on a 66 mile-per-hour knuckler from Dickey. The blast got a standing ovation from Healys cheering section of friends and family sitting on the third base side of the diamond. It came on a 2-2 pitch and put the As up 4-2. They wouldnt relinquish the lead. Earlier in the second, Davis connected for his first homer of the day, a solo shot. Then Davis would muscle up in the sixth, hitting a floating knuckleball over the wall to the opposite field, a solo homer that reached the seats in right-center and made the score 5-3.

In the field

Shortstop Marcus Semien made several nice plays in the field, including stopping a hard smash off the bat of Josh Donaldson that went for an inning-ending fielders choice and likely saved a run. Semien also committed a throwing error in the second, but even that play turned out well. When his high throw pulled first baseman Yonder Alonso off the bag, Josh Thole rounded third and broke for home and was caught in an inning-ending rundown. A late-game substitution paid off for the As in the ninth, as Tyler Ladendorf replaced Jed Lowrie at second base and ran down Darwin Barneys bloop in shallow center field for the first out of the final inning.

Attendance

A crowd of 27,510 showed up for Hello Kitty Bobblehead Day.

Up next

After having his start pushed back two days because of a blister, Rich Hill (9-3, 2.25) will oppose lefty J.A. Happ (12-3, 3.36) in Sundays 1:05 p.m. series finale.
An explosive detection canine has been found after it went missing from a suburban home early Saturday, according to police.

The dog, named Hako, escaped Saturday morning from the home of its handler in southwest suburban Alsip, according to the federal Transportation Security Administration. The home is located near the intersection of Pulaski and 119th St., authorities said.

Hako was found in nearby Crestwood, police said Sunday afternoon. No further details were immediately available.

According to the TSA, the dog is assigned to the Amtrak Police Department in the Chicago area.
A cancer survivor and the woman who helped save his life through a bone marrow transplant met for the first time Saturday, and as they are both lifelong Cubs fans, the emotional event took place at none other than Wrigley Field.

Josh Byrd, 31, of Chicago, was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in 2014, and doctors gave him a grim prognosis.

Without the transplant, they said there was a 95 percent chance it would come back," Byrd said. "She saved my life."

Stephanie Newton, 35, a mom of two from Tennessee, had been patiently waiting for the chance to help.

I know its very rare to find a match. Most people find matches from within their family, so that's why I just went ahead," Newton said.

She had signed up for the bone marrow registry through non-profit organization DKMS, and heard nothing for five years.

Registry representatives say finding a match is like winning the lottery, and the two of them hit the jackpot.

Both are lifelong Cubs fans, and more than a year after the successful transplant, the two met Saturday for a game.

"I had to tell all my friends he was a Cubs fan before the donation," Newton said. "It wasnt like my bone marrow made him that way.

They shared a moment, and their story, before taking the field.

It's pretty emotional," Byrd said of their meeting. "I had my glasses on but I didn't think I'd cry."

"There are still a lot of days where I worry about it coming back, he added.

To which Newton responded, "I'll always be here if anything happens, and he doesn't have to worry about it coming back, because you know, I'm in."

Byrd and Newton hope their story will encourage others to get their bone marrow tested and help save more lives.
After a violent coup attempt by the military in Turkey left at least 194 people dead and 1,440 wounded, the FAA has banned all flights between the U.S. and Turkish airports.

The travel ban has left many stranded in Turkey amid the unrest, and several worried and frustrated loved ones in Chicago and across the United States.

Zulfiqar Ali spent most of Saturday at O'Hare International Airport, trying to help his wife stranded in Turkey make her way home to Chicago.

"She came from Pakistan, it was a connecting flight from Istanbul to Chicago," Ali said. "First the flight was delayed, now it's canceled."

Ali's wife is stuck at the airport in Istanbul, he said, and she cannot walk. She's currently without her wheelchair or her cell phone, which deeply concerns the family.

"We are so worried about her safety. She is traveling for the first time," Ali said.

Outside the Turkish Consulate in Chicago, people demonstrated, holding up signs in support of Turkey's government and democracy.

"It was really heartbreaking, because Turkey is kind of like that peaceful country, accepting Syrians, accepting refugees," said demonstrator Selma Demir. "For that to happen is really, really mindblowing."

Those in Turkey said things have slowed since the failed coup, but the uncertainty remains.

"It is very calm here now," said Tayfur Yuncuoglu, who is visiting family in Turkey for a month with his wife. "Not many people on the streets."

But Yuncuoglu said even though the coup failed, he is still worried, despite being in Ankara, four hours from Istanbul.

"We are going to stay in and stay at home. You do not know what's going to happen."

It's unclear when the travel ban be lifted, as the FAA said federal officials are monitoring the situation and will update the restrictions as the situation evolves.
Friends and family of Nina Coe, a Middletown woman who has been missing since last year, gathered at a vigil on the town green Saturday night.

Coe was reported missing July 16, 2015 and her family has been looking for her ever since. They still hope for answers.

We really need the publics help. Someone knows something out there. And just think if that was your family member. We need closure, said Coes brother Michael Plourde.

Police said in March they suspected foul play because Coe had been in daily contact with family members until her disappearance and it was not like her to lose touch.

I want my sister back. If shes alive, I want her back. But Im sure shes not, said Coes sister Dale Ocelik.

On March 11, Gov. Dannel Malloy signed off on a reward up to $20,000 for anyone who provides information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is found guilty of a crime in connection with Coes disappearance. But months later there is still no information on what happened to her.

My family feels like her case is at the bottom of the pile now. But Nina is going to get justice no matter what, Plourde said.

Nina Coe is 5-foot-2, weighs 130 pounds and has brown hair and blue eyes. Police said she wears glasses and has a tattoo on one leg and a scar on the right side of her neck.

Anyone who thinks they have information on her case is asked to contact Middletown police at (860) 638-4140.
Wallingford native Lisa Oefinger ran in the inaugural GE 5K Petit Family Foundation Road Race nine years ago. After moving to San Francisco, Sunday was her first time back to race in this event.

It looks like its already so bigger than its been and I can see the energy, and the energy feels the same but it looks like its grown a whole bunch, Oefinger said.

In fact, the race has now raised more than a million-dollars for charities championed by the Petit Family in honor of Jennifer, Hayley, and Michaela Petit, who were killed in a violent home invasion in Cheshire in 2007. Dr. William Petit Jr. lived through the attack and established the Petit Family Foundation in his family's memory.

Ive heard Dr. Petit say many times that there is good in people and a lot of good people come out and support this event, said Race Director Bob Heslin, who added that the event has grown from a local road race to one that has attracted runners from 48 states.

Every year we hear about it on the radio, on the news, and its a nice thing to do, said Sharon Hernandez, a first time participant.

The Meriden woman decided the GE 5K was the perfect place for her to kick-off her new exercise routine.

Organizers said more than a thousand people registered for the run and walk. Many said the mission was more important than finishing first.

It doesnt matter what you run. Some people are going to run fast other people not so much but in the end were all here together, explained Oefingers cousin Pat Biancur of Wallingford.

Organizers said thats the goal. The foundation's favorite phrase is: Be the Change.

It allows all the runners number one to do something good for themselves, in terms of running and exercising and feeling good, be part of the Petit Foundation and help raise the money to help others, so they are part of the change, explained Dr. Petit.

Nine years after his wife and daughters were tragically taken, Petit is grateful the community continues to care.

Its a wonderful thing. Very emotional, Petit said.

I can be part of this much bigger thing. Something thats much bigger than me and be someone whos helping give back to the community, Oefinger said.

It was extremely sad what happened and its great that the Petit family has stepped up to help everybody in the community and whatever support they can give and people supporting them, said Bobby Ericksen of Meriden.
Dallas police are pushing back the day it will take down a memorial to five slain officers.

On Saturday, the department said the memorial in front of police headquarters will remain in place until Tuesday, July 19 at 5:00 p.m.

The reason: many officers have not had an opportunity to visit the memorial yet, according to a social media post from the department.

Two police cars, one from Dallas police and another from DART police have sat in front of headquarters since July 8. That was the day after a gunman shot and killed four Dallas police and one DART officer and injured many others. Well-wishers have covered the cars with teddy bears, cards, balloons, pictures, candles and other items.

Once the memorial is removed permanently, the items will be preserved in the Dallas public library's History and Archives Collection.
Unity, race relations, and interactions with police were some of the difficult topics taken on by hundreds Saturday morning at a community discussion forum in Downtown Dallas.

Hosted by Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, the forum was titled Moving Forward Together: Less Talk, More Action," and was aimed at gathering tangible ideas for change in the community after the ambush on police that killed 5 officers last week during a peaceful protest.

"When we get all the issues together, we must plot a strategy to address the issues, said Johnson.

The Democratic representative listed the goals for the forum as:

Getting commitments to end and decry all violence at all rallys and protests. Ensuring both protesters and police do not escalate violence at any legal protests that will continue to come.

Educating the public on the Dallas Citizens Police Review Board, its function, and how citizens can be a part of it

Ways to increase transparency and sensitivity training for officers now and in the future

Discussing the Open Carry law and ways to decrease guns on the streets

The event had a heavy African American presence, but drew citizens of all races, religions, and ages to participate. Several police officers participated as well including DART Lt. Don Hyder who served as a panelist.

Several members of the audience asked questions about ways to make mental health reform more of a priority and to continue opening up better conversation between police officers and the community to create a better understanding on both sides of the other.

Mayor Mike Rawlings spoke at the beginning of the forum echoing the words of President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush during the public memorial for the officers this week; calling for residents to do their part in making change and to work to understand one-anothers perspectives.

"It's not, do we want to chance, because I think we'd get unanimity on that, the question is: do each one of us want to change?" said Rawlings.

Johnson said she plans to take the input from residents back to Washington; in hopes that the call for change is actually answered.

"It won't be done overnight, change does not come that quickly, and it does not come without some cost, but we must spend the effort, she said.
Packing for two weeks is a challenge.

See those two stuffed suitcases? Either one of them has been with me in Cleveland, Boulder, Las Vegas, Iowa , New Hampshire, South Carolina, Houston, Indiana or DC.

All of those trips have been on the campaign trail. Eleven months. I can tell you, it has gone quickly and I have met so many great people along the way.

I remember last year at the first debate in Cleveland, thinking I'd be back within 12 months for the RNC convention. And here we are.

Like many of you, I too wonder how it will all turn out.

Sure, we have done the preparation, made the lists, called the delegation, reached out to the representatives, and put together a solid plan. But, in an election like we have not seen in decades, I've now learned to expect surprises.

I've also learned to expect lines. Lots of lines. Security checkpoints, traffic, sometimes in airports. So I'm bringing plenty of patience with me (that is a challenge for someone who moves at like 120 mph).

But somewhere along the way, I do plan to take a moment to soak it all in. I'm very fortunate to be an eyewitness to history.
A little more than a week after five officers lost their lives in an ambush on police officers toward the end of a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, city and state leaders are reacting to the fatal shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge Sunday.

Governor Greg Abbott spoke with Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards Sunday. According to Abbott's office they discussed their shared grief about the back-to-back similar tragedies in neighboring states. Abbott offered any assistance needed for Louisiana.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings released the following statement:

"Reports out of Baton Rouge this morning of three officers killed and others wounded are deeply disturbing. This must stop. Violence against our police officers under any circumstances is not acceptable and poses a grave threat to all of us. Those peacefully protesting police across the country must swiftly condemn this type of violence against law enforcement."

Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown tweeted:

Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge Police. @BRPD #PrayforBatonRouge  Chief David O. Brown (@ChiefDavidBrown) July 17, 2016

The Next Generation Action Network, which helped organize the Dallas protest where five officers were killed, released a statement Sunday expressing "sincere condolences for the lives lost in Baton Rouge.

The statement went on to read:

"While the facts are still coming in, we must emphasize there is no place for violence in our quest for justice and we condemn any and all vigilantism. We understand that people are on edge and frustrations are at an all-time high. However, violence is never the answer.

We must be a part of the solution. Now is the time for us get involved and to hold our elected officials accountable. They are supposed the voice of the people. They have the responsibility to speak with the people and implement community based solutions. Our elected officials must act immediately to put measures in place, to assure that ALL American lives are protected.

We must work together with law enforcement to bring about change to an obviously broken system."

A little more than a week after five officers lost their lives in an ambush on police officers toward the end of a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, city and state leaders are reacting to the fatal shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge Sunday.

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz released the following statement:

"This morning, the men and women of the Baton Rouge Police Department were the targets of senseless violence. Heidi and I are keeping all those involved and their loved ones in our thoughts and prayers.

This is a trying time for our country, and understandably, frustration is mounting. As we just saw in Dallas, this is a horrific act fueled by people who hate. Now more than ever, we must stand united and support the very people who put their lives on the line to protect us every day."

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick had this to say:

Today the nation is less safe than ever. We must stand as one to condemn these acts of violence."

In the last 2 weeks, over 20 officers were either killed or wounded by gunmen who shot them just because they were police."

As I stated on Fox News the day after the shootings in Dallas and again to the President on the ABC Town Hall, the violence against police must end now."

While we dont yet know the details or the motive for these latest police killings, we do know that we currently are living in an environment where police officers do not feel safe because of the heated anti-police rhetoric that is being heard far too often in cities across the country. We also know, as Dallas Police Chief David Brown, told us repeatedly last week, that on most days his officers do not feel they have the support of the community."

Again, I call upon the President to put blue lights on the White House, as has been requested by police, in show of support for law enforcement."

My prayers are for the fallen, the injured, and the families affected by this needless tragedy.

NBC 5's Own Noelle Walker also gave us a live update from Baton Rouge Sunday evening:

A little more than a week after five officers lost their lives in an ambush on police officers toward the end of a peaceful protest in downtown Dallas, city and state leaders are reacting to the fatal shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge Sunday.
The family of an Ohio woman who died in an Ohio jail almost a year ago filed a federal lawsuit this week, NBC News reported.

Ralkina Jones, 37, was found dead in a jail cell on July 26. She was arrested two days earlier by Cleveland Heights Police Department after having a fight with her ex-husband outside a bar.

The lawsuit  filed by Jones sister  against the city of Cleveland Heights, the police department and others, alleges police failed to check on her and properly provide her medication.

The medical examiner ruled Jones' death accidental.

According to the suit, Jones was over-medicated and went six hours without being checked on. Jones was taking five medications, according to jail records. No dollar amount was named in the suit.
A deadly shooting in Hawthorne left a father of four dead and another man hurt, closing the shopping center for the night on Saturday.

Investigators believe gunshots rang out inside and outside of the Updeh Cutz barbershop at Crenshaw and El Segundo boulevards at 4 p.m., the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said.

A man was killed in the shooting, Hawthorne police said.

The man's family identified him as a Raymond "Ray" Arnold, a father of four children from Watts in his 30s.

The other victim was only identified as a 29-year-old man. He was taken to the hospital for his injuries and was undergoing surgery. He was expected to live.

The El Segundo Crenshaw Shopping Center in the 12800 block of Crenshaw Boulevard was closed for the evening, police said at 7 p.m.

A gun was recovered from the scene, and police were looking for the shooters.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was assisting in the investigation.

A shooting had occurred a week before at the same location, investigators said.
French authorities detained two more people Sunday and released the estranged wife of the slain Nice truck attacker from custody as they tried to determine whether he had been an Islamic extremist or just a very angry man.

The Bastille Day carnage wrought by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel on the seafront of this southern Mediterranean city claimed the lives of at least 84 people and wounded 202, including many tourists from other countries.

About 85 people remained hospitalized Sunday, and of those, 18 including a child were still in life-threatening condition, Health Minister Marisol Touraine told reporters on a visit to the city.

The Paris prosecutor's office said only 35 bodies have been definitively identified so far, carried out by specialists with a judicial official present. That left 49 bodies still without identification. Touraine also said one of the hospitalized wounded still has not been identified.

A man and a woman were detained Sunday morning in Nice, according to an official with the Paris prosecutor's office, which oversees national terrorism investigations.

Shortly afterward, Bouhlel's estranged wife, who was arrested Friday, was released from custody, according to an official in the Paris prosecutor's office. She is the mother of Bouhlel's three children and was in the process of divorcing him.

In total, six people now remain in custody relating to the truck attack  but officials have provided no details about their identities.

BFMTV reported that Bouhlel had visited the scene of the crime twice in the lead-up to the attack. NBC News was unable to confirm that report.

Investigators are hunting for possible accomplices to Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years. He was killed by police after ramming his truck through crowds after a holiday fireworks display Thursday night.

Neighbors described the attacker as volatile, prone to drinking and womanizing. His father, in Tunisia, said his son did not pray or fast for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

But French authorities believe that something may have changed. Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that authorities "now know that the killer radicalized very quickly."

"(IS) is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks ... that is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack," he said Sunday.

A close friend of Bouhlel's ex-wife, however, tells NBC News he was not a radical Islamist but rather a violent man with nothing left to lose after his marriage fell apart.

Nice's famous Promenade des Anglais, the site of the slaughter, has reopened. Memorials for the dead have been set up on the westbound lane of the road where the victims were mowed down by Bouhlel. Some areas are still stained by blood.

Joggers, bikers and sunbathers cruised down the pedestrian walkway along the glistening Mediterranean Sea on Sunday, where well-wishers placed flowers, French flags, stuffed animals and candles for the victims.

The site is also becoming a platform for anger at the attacker. Pained and outraged epitaphs have been written in blue marker on stones placed where police shot him dead.

A woman asked if she could put a yellow potted plant there, unaware of the significance of the spot. A man nearby declared "Never here." An argument ensued, with other passers-by saying that his family deserved respect.

"Are you defending him?" the man said, incredulously.

Many families are angry and frustrated that they couldn't find information about their missing loved ones.

The prosecutor's office says the identification of the 49 bodies is being carried out according to an accelerated procedure established after the Nov. 13 attacks on Paris, using DNA or medical records provided by families.

The prosecutor's office says it is working as quickly as possible but would not give a time frame for how long the identification process could take.

The families of 12 victims were able to see the bodies of their loves ones Sunday for the first time  three days after the killings.

Many in France are also angry at police and authorities for not preventing the deadly attack, even though France was under a state of emergency imposed after Islamic State attacks last year in Paris.

Valls defended the government's actions but warned that more lives will be lost to this kind of violence.

"Terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time," he said.

A special church service was being held at a Nice cathedral Sunday in honor of the victims.

The Paris prosecutor's office told NBC News that a man and a woman were taken into custody. That brings to seven the number of people held since the bloodbath  including the attacker's ex-wife.
A Miami-Dade police lieutenant was suspended with pay following her arrest Sunday morning after allegedly breaking into the apartment of her ex-boyfriend, the county's former mayor, according to officials.

Police responded to the apartment of former Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Alvarez, located on Merrick Way in Coral Gables to investigate a possible domestic violence incident.

According to authorities, Lt. Evelyn Fernandez was inside the apartment without Alvarez's permission.

There was no forced entry into the apartment and according to the Alvarez, Fernandez does not have a set of keys, police say. Several items of property belonging to the Alvarez were damaged.

Fernandez, 44, was arrested and charged with one count of burglary to an unoccupied structure and one count of criminal mischief valued at over $1,000. She was released on bond and ordered to stay away from Alvarez, with the next hearing schedule for August 16th.

NBC 6 reached out to Fernandez for comment but she said she had to speak with her attorney first.

According to an arrest report, the two have been in a relationship for about 10 years.

Alvarez was arrested in April for allegedly grabbing Fernandez during an argument over a pet cat, according to a police report. Alvarez spent a night in jail and told reporters after his release that his side of the story hasn't been told.

Alvarez was voted out of office in a recall election in 2011 during his second term. He was elected mayor in 2004.
A 4-year-old child was shot at a home in Yonkers Saturday, police say.



The child was taken to a hospital in stable condition after the shooting on Willow Street. It wasn't clear if the child was shot inside the home or was outside at the time of the shooting.

According to a witness, multiple shots may have been fired. The witness said it appeared the child may have been hit by a stray bullet.

The child is expected to survive.



No arrests have been made.
A woman jogger was able to fight off an attacker who grabbed her and forced into a wooded area of a state park on Long Island, police said Saturday.

The woman was running at about 9 p.m. Friday on a jogging trail at Belmont Lake State Park when the attack occurred, police said.

She was knocked to the ground and then forced into a wooded area. She was able to fight him off and run to a spot where other people were located, police said.

State Park police from the Robert Moses Park responded to the woman's call but were unable to find the suspect.

The state Police Benevolent Association issued a statement after the attack criticizing the state for failing to employ more park police.

"Our position is the state doesn't have a sufficient number of state park police officers," the PBA stated. "While they're continuing to hire state park police officers, it is not enough. The state is budgeting at the expense of the public."
New York City police say a 17-year-old boy is accused of attempting to rape a 13-year-old girl in the Bronx.

Police say they arrested Garry Pinkney early Sunday on charges of attempted rape, robbery, burglary and a criminal sex act.

The alleged incident occurred on Thursday.

The Daily News reports that the suspect allegedly followed the girl into a building elevator and then into her apartment.

Police say once inside he allegedly produced a knife and demanded money. When she refused, police say he removed items from her bag and forced her into a sex act and attempted to rape her.

The victim was treated at a hospital.

It wasn't immediately known if Pinkney had an attorney who could comment on the charges.
What to Know Responding to reports of armed robberies, police encountered a man with a gun outside a housing project in Brooklyn.

Officers exchanged fire with gunman, who died from his wounds.

Witnesses told police that the man had robbed two people at gunpoint moments before the officers arrived.

Officers shot and killed an armed-robbery suspect at a housing project in Brooklyn Sunday morning, NYPD officials said.

Responding to several reports of armed robberies in the area of the Cooper Park Houses, officers arrived at about 7:45 a.m. at the complex on Debevoise Avenue in East Williamsburg.

They soon encountered a man with a gun, according to police. The man exchanged gunfire with the officers, investigators said.

Gun recovered at scene of this morning police involved shooting in Brooklyn. More info when available pic.twitter.com/Afj9Y6h2my  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) July 17, 2016

The man was later identified as Jermaine Johnson, 42, of 225 Park Ave. in Brooklyn.

Johnson was shot at least five times. He was then taken to the Woodhull Medical Center where he was pronounced dead at 8:38 a.m., according to police.

None of the officers was injured by the gunfire. Johnson's .40-caliber semiautomatic gun was recovered from the scene, investigators said.

[[387169501 ,C]]

Police said Johnson was involved in two armed robberies before officers arrived.
The attacks on public servants and the rule of law "have to stop," President Barack Obama said Sunday after another shooting spree targeting police killed three officers in Baton Rouge and wounded three others.

Obama said the motive for Sunday's attack, the second targeting police in less than two weeks, was unknown, but there was no justification for violence against law enforcement.

"The officers in Baton Rouge, the officers in Dallas, they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now  all of us  to be at our best," Obama said.

As the all-too-familiar scene unfolded in Baton Rouge, Dallas Police Chief David Brown tweeted, "Our thoughts and prayers are with Baton Rouge police." [[387185651, C]]

The city of Dallas is still mourning five slain police officers who were targeted in an ambush during a protest 10 days ago.

Hillary Clinton condemned the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge, saying, "There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities." [[387184961, C]]

Clinton said that violence must be rejected to "strengthen our communities."

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump demanded "law and order" while blaming the deaths on a "lack of leadership in our country." [[387184952, C]]

Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was "deeply disturbed" by the shooting in Baton Rouge and extended prayers for the fallen officers and their families. [[387184921, C]]

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards tweeted: "This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing. Rest assured, Every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice." [[387185011, C]]

In a statement issued Sunday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said there is no place in the United States for such appalling violence. She also is pledging the full support of the Justice Department as the investigation unfolds.

Reverend Al Sharpton added: "Praying for the families of the police officers shot in Baton Rouge as we await the full details. This senseless violence really must stop."

Law enforcement officials around the country also took to social media to pay tribute to their brothers in blue. [[387185041, C]]

Obama has spent most of the last week focused on defusing tensions and rebuilding trust between police departments and the communities they serve.

The shooting of the police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge were preceded by police shootings of two black men, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. Those shootings sparked protests around the country. Dallas police were defending protesters in that city when a black gunman, who authorities said "wanted to kill white people, especially white officers, opened fire on them.

Sterling's nephew, Terrance Carter, spoke to The Associated Press on Sunday and said his uncle would not want this.

The Associate Press contributed to this story.
A small plane crashed Saturday afternoon in Westwood, Massachusetts, injuring the pilot and his passenger.

Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration said the Piper PA-24 crashed at about 3:15 p.m. in a wooded area off Peartree Drive.

The plane was headed to Norwood Memorial Airport when it went down.

A woman attending a birthday party nearby said she saw the plane just before it crashed.

"I looked up and I saw the plane over the top of the house and it just looked like it wasn't flying well," said Deb Murphy of Norwood. "It looked kind of wobbly and it looked like it wasn't turning very well. A few seconds later, we heard the crash."

Authorities said the pilot and his passenger had to be extricated from the wreckage by area firefighters.

The pilot, a 65-year-old man from Newton, Massachusetts, was flown by medical helicopter to Boston Medical Center. His passenger, a 77-year-old man from Norwood, Massachusetts, was first transported to Norwood Hospital, then flown by medical helicopter to Boston Medical Center. Both were being treated for serious injuries.

The exact cause of the crash is under investigation by the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board.
A teen girl is in the hospital after she was shot while attending a Sweet 16 block party in the Oxford Circle section of Philadelphia.

The 15-year-old girl was attending a party along the 5900 block of Horrocks Street at 9:28 p.m. Saturday when a gunman opened fire, striking her in the buttocks. Witnesses told NBC10 they heard what they thought were fire crackers. They then saw the teen girl lying on the sidewalk.

I said, Do you know your name? and she said her nickname or whatever, said Kai Braxton, a witness. The paramedic said to put pressure on it. The lady was like, Take my sweater off! Take my sweater off! So I took her sweater off.

The teen was taken to St. Christophers Hospital where she is in stable condition. No arrests have been made.




Officials are searching for a teen diver who went missing in New Jersey Saturday.

The 17-year-old free diver went missing in the Shark River Inlet in Belmar, New Jersey around 5 p.m. Police and the Coast Guard are currently searching for the teen. A Coast Guard 29-foot Response Boat-Small rescue crew and an HH-65 Dolphin helicopter rescue crew are aiding in the search.

The Shark River Inlet is currently closed to maritime vessel traffic as the search continues.




Local and federal authorities are investigating the death of a truck driver killed when a load of pipes he was carrying fell onto him.



Police in Montgomery county said they were called shortly before 8 a.m. Friday to a commercial complex in Limerick, where a 62-year-old truck driver from Texas had arrived at a N.H. Yates Co. Inc., which was closed.



Limerick police said the truck operator began unloading a delivery of PVC pipes, but the load shifted and fell onto him. He was pronounced dead at the scene.



Police are investigating along with the Montgomery County coroner's office. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration said that because the truck driver was an independent owner/operator, the case would be a matter for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
A 28-year-old man is expected to face charges in connection with a parking lot shooting in Philadelphia's Mayfair neighborhood that left a man dead Saturday night.

Police said the suspected shooter and the victim got into an argument on the 7200 block of Frankford Avenue near Cottman, at some point during the night, and the argument turned physical. At some point, police said, the man pulled out a gun and fired two shots, hitting the victim once in the neck.

Responding officers found the victim, a 34-year-old man, lying in a parking lot, police said. Medics pronounced the man dead there.

Police said officers took the 28-year-old suspect into custody and recovered the gun they believe he used at the scene of the shooting. No other injuries were reported.

Police said the suspect is expected to face charges in the shooting, and that he remained in jail on Sunday morning awaiting processing.

The victim's identity has not yet been released.
A gunman entered a Florida hospital through the emergency room early Sunday, went to the third floor and fatally shot a patient and an employee apparently at random, police said.

David Owens, 29, entered Parrish Medical Center at 2 a.m. and used a handgun to fatally shoot 88-year-old patient Cynthia Zingsheim and employee Carrie Rouzer, 36, in Zingsheim's room, Titusville police said.

Owens left the gun in the room and was tackled by two unarmed security guards as he left, police said.

Authorities say they have found no motive for the shooting and no immediate connection between Owens and the women. All lived in Titusville.

The shooting "appears to be extremely random," Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said.

Owens has been charged with two counts of murder. He is being held without bail at the Brevard County Jail.

Court records show that in 2011, he was found guilty of battery on a police officer and a judge ordered him to undergo a mental health examination twice in 2012.

Records show other arrests for cocaine and marijuana possession and domestic battery were dismissed.

No one answered the phone Sunday at the Brevard County public defender's office, and it could not be determined if Owens has an attorney.

The hospital has reopened. Police are planning an afternoon press conference.
Several law enforcement officials told NBC News that the man shot and killed in the shootout with Baton Rouge police was identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, born 1987.

Three Louisiana officers have died and three others were injured early Sunday after what the city's mayor called an apparent ambush shooting.

Authorities confirmed the names of the three officers fatally shot: Montrell Jackson, 32, Matthew Gerald, 41  both of the Baton Rouge Police Department, and Brad Garafola, 45, of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office.

Two other officers from East Baton Rouge were injured. Nicholas Tullier, 41, is in critical condition and Brad Simmons, 51, sustained non-life threatening injuries.

Law enforcement officials initially said they believed that two others suspects were at large, but at a news conference Sunday afternoon State Police Col. Mike Edmonson said the deceased suspect was likely the only shooter.

A senior law enforcement official said that suspect wore black fatigues and was armed with a rifle. By 3 p.m. (CT) Sunday, state police said there was "no active shooter" situation.

Officials tell NBC News the investigation now spans four states: Louisiana, Texas, Missouri and California. It is being led by the Louisiana State Police.

The attack comes less than two weeks after the fatal shooting of a black man by police sparked protests in Baton Rouge, turning the city into the latest flashpoint in the ongoing debate over law enforcement tactics.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
It's been a crazy weekend, so tonight is a good chance to slow it all down. At the Irenic, the lovely music of Wye Oak will warm the room, or at Sycamore Den, catch Seattle's Brian John Appleby. If you want to keep the party going, however, the Pride festival continues all day at Balboa Park with headliner Paul Oakenfold. A retro triple bill brings the '80s nostalgia to Harrah's with Rick Springfield, Loverboy and the Romantics, and Miss Diana Ross plays a sold out show at Embarcadero Marina Park South. The Casbah will get a little wild with the Dickies and the Queers, and Saosin bring their post-hardcore sound to the Observatory. That's a lot to choose from on a Sunday night. Choose wisely.

Sunday, July 17:

San Diego LGBTQ PRIDE Festival 2016 @ Marston Point, Balboa Park

Wye Oak, Tushka @ The Irenic

Brian John Appleby, Austin Burns @ Sycamore Den

Rick Springfield, Loverboy, the Romantics @ The Events Center, Harrah's Resort Southern California

Diana Ross @ Embarcadero Marina Park South (sold out)

The Dickies, the Queers, the Widows, Records with Roger @ Casbah

Saosin @ The Observatory North Park

Hoquinai, Creature Canyon, Cerulean Veins @ Soda Bar

Rat Sabbath @ Bar Pink

Dennis DeYoung: the Music of STYX @ Belly Up

Tiago Miranda @ San Diego Civic Theatre

House of Shem @ Music Box

Summer Festival with Gustavo Romero @ The Auditorium at TSRI

Neville Page's Creative Process @ California Center for the Arts, Escondido

House of Blues Gospel Brunch @ House of Blues

Colour @ Tio Leo's

Diamond Rio @ Sycuan

Sam Vicari, Beth Anne Knight @ Lestat's

Dave Good's Jazz Jam @ Java Joe's (2 p.m.)

Bob's Blues Jam @ The Bancroft (3 p.m.)

Spirit Tribe @ The Bancroft (9 p.m.)

Reggae Sunday @ U-31

DM & DM, Inus, Hours, Mermort @ Whistle Stop

Jason Brown @ Humphreys Backstage Live (10 a.m.-2 p.m.)

Robin Smith @ Humphreys Backstage Live (8 p.m.)

The Plot in You, Erra, Sylar, Invent, Animate, Voidlines @ Soma

Big Bloom, Jet Trash, Evyn Oliver @ Kava Lounge

Reggae Sunday @ Spin

Rosemary Bystrak is the publicist for the Casbah, the content manager for DoSD, and writes about the San Diego music scene, events and general musings about life in San Diego on San Diego: Dialed In. Follow her updates on Twitter or contact her directly.
Representative Loretta Sanchez, senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, and former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy visited the Warrior Foundation Freedom Station in Golden Hill Saturday to discuss support for veterans.

The station provides temporary residence and medical assistance for service members making the transition to civilian life.

Active duty men and women can move in before leaving the military so when they retire they're already making the transition.

The organization supports seriously injured veterans returning from war, PTSD victims, those undergoing physical or occupational therapy and those who have been medically retired.

Several of my colleagues suggested that we come here today to take a look at what is happening with a foundation that is working directly [with] people who are still active in the military, Sanchez said. Im interested in the transition phase. That is where we seem to be losing our veterans.

"We need to have both the federal government and private insurers pay for that kind of care, Kennedy said about traumatic brain injury and PTSD, both of which are treated at the center. The brain is an organ of the body that needs reimbursement for its illnesses just like every other organ of the body, Kennedy said.

The Warrior Foundation is a non-profit and not affiliated with any other group.
Eater San Diego shares the top stories of the week from San Diegos food and drink scene, including a peek at Liberty Station's new breakfast-centric eatery and a guide to where to eat if you're headed to San Diego Comic-Con.

Breakfast Republic Launches in Liberty Station

North Park's popular morning-centric eatery will debut a second location in Liberty Station this weekend. This outpost features its signature menu of breakfast favorites, along with new features including extended hours and the addition of craft cocktails.

Where to Eat & Drink During Comic-Con

Whether you have a ticket to attend next week's epic fan fest or are just heading downtown to check out the scene, here's a map of 11 great spots for food and drink within walking distance of the San Diego Convention Center.

National Burger Concept Expands to San Diego

Fast-casual Grub Burger Bar is slotting its first Southern California location in Carmel Mountain, where it will open an eatery next month. The burger chain features daily-ground patties, fresh-baked buns and a beverage program that includes craft beer and spiked milkshakes.

'MasterChef' Contestant Opens Little Italy Gastropub

MasterChef season six contestant Nick Nappi is the executive chef behind Bar One, which just debuted on India Street this week. The casual gastropub is serving up a menu that ranges from housemade sausages to Italian-influenced small plates alongside classic cocktails, local wine and craft beer.

Gourmet Hot Dog Eatery Coming to Downtown San Diego

Dog Haus, a California chain that specializes in gourmet hot dogs and burgers, will open its first local outpost on Ninth Avenue later this summer. The spacious eatery will include an outdoor patio and large-screen TVs, with 30 craft beers on tap.

Candice Woo is the founding editor of Eater San Diego, a leading source for news about San Diegos restaurant and bar scene. Keep up with the latest Eater San Diego content via Facebook or Twitter, and sign up for Eater San Diegos newsletter here.


An "unpermitted" Black Lives Matter protest caused some traffic delays in Frederick, Maryland, Saturday night, police say.

Dozens of people marched into the streets carrying signs and shouting "Hey hey! Ho ho! These racist cops have got to go!" and "We are done with racist police!"

Demonstrators passed the city hall and ended at Carroll Creek. At the bridge, marchers paused to share stories about discrimination, according to the Frederick News-Post.

The protest against police brutality follows the fatal police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota in early July.

Frederick police said officers were on the scene to re-route traffic.

No protesters were arrested.

Frederick News-Post reporter Kelsi Loos posted the below videos:
The body of a southeast Washington, D.C., man was found during an investigation of complains of illegal dumping along Burbank Street, Southeast, on Friday, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Detectives said a park service employee found the body in the 400 block of Burbank Street, Southeast, around 2 p.m. Friday. Emergency personnel were called in, and it was determined the victim suffered blunt force injuries.

The body was transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, who identified the victim as Jerimi Stephan Meade, 29, of southeast Washington.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is heading to Cleveland, Ohio, Tuesday to promote D.C. statehood during the Republican National Convention, News4 has learned.

Bowser is scheduled to attend an event with the U.S. Conference of Mayors, in addition to hosting meetings on D.C. statehood. Bowser, who appeared last week on MSNBC's Morning Joe, is also expected to do several radio interviews.

Bowser has led a revival this year of the city's statehood effort -- something she promised during her 2014 campaign for mayor.

A newly active statehood commission has held several public hearings this year and is planning to ask District voters to endorse statehood in November.

If Hillary Clinton wins the White House (and possibly the Senate), Bowser intends to ask Congress to grant statehood to the District under the so-called "Tennessee Plan."

However, if Donald Trump is elected, many believe the statehood effort will falter. The key reason: it won't be in the Republicans' interest to grant statehood to the District and create almost two certain Democratic senators.
A pedestrian was struck and killed by a Prince Georges County, Maryland, police cruiser early Sunday morning, police say.

The officer was heading westbound on University Boulevard in the Langley Park area about 2:30 a.m. when he struck a male pedestrian in the roadway. The person was not in a crosswalk when they were hit by the cruiser, Prince George's County police said.

The officer immediately attempted to help the victim until medical personnel arrived, according to police. The pedestrian was pronounced dead on the scene.

Police said two other vehicles nearly struck the pedestrian before the officer struck him.

The victim and the officer have not been identified. Investigators are examining the scene about two miles west of the University of Maryland, College Park campus.
A body has been pulled from the Connecticut River in Middletown, according to fire officials.

Middletown police said crews responded to the western shore of the river between the Arrigoni Bridge and Harbor Park around 2:17 p.m. after a kayaker reported finding a body along the river bank.

The Middletown Fire Department and Police Marine Units recovered the body.

Fire officials confirmed the victim was a man.

The Middletown police Major Investigations Unit is investigating. The body has been tentatively identified but the name has not been released pending notification of next of kin and the autopsy.

This is an active investigation and anyone with information is encouraged to contact Middletown police at (860) 638-4140.
Police in North Reading, Massachusetts, are investigating a hit-and-run that left one person injured on Friday morning.

Authorities said a man was walking along the side of the road in the area of 280 Main Street when he was struck by a passing car. The car then fled the scene.

The victim was transported to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

Police are searching for the driver of the car which is described as a maroon colored, two-door convertible with a dark top - similar to a Mazda Miata or Mazda MX series. The car was last seen traveling North on Main Street (Route 28) toward Andover.

The driver of the car is described as a white man, approximately 6 feet tall with a medium build and partially gray hair. He was wearing a light blue short sleeved shirt with a collar.

Anyone with information is asked to call North Reading Police at 978-664-3131.
Massachusetts State Police are investigating an officer-involved shooting that took place in Chelmsford.

According to the Middlesex District Attorney's Office, a Tyngsborough police officer attempted to make a routine traffic stop after spotting a vehicle around 9 p.m. on Saturday evening. Authorities said the officer followed the driver down Route 3 where the man entered the parking lot of Sully's Ice Cream on Graniteville Road in Chelmsford.

When a Chelmsford sergeant approached the car, the suspect backed up and dragged the officer several yards. Authorities said the officer then struck a Chelmsford cruiser.

Fearing for the safety of that officer, a Tyngsborough officer fired his weapon, striking the man.

The suspect, a 27-year-old Tyngsborough man, was airlifted to a hospital in Boston where he was listed in grave condition.

The Chelmsford officer was taken to a nearby hospital after suffering non-life threatening injuires and was later released.

Per department policy, authorities said the Tyngsborough officer that used his weapon is currently on administrative leave.

This incident is still under investigation.
The recent attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is certainly affecting law enforcement officials in the New England area.

In Newton, Massachusetts, Police Lieutentant Bruce Apotheker, said he's deeply saddened to see three more law enforcement officers killed. And while there are still questions surrounding the details of this case, he said it's a scary time for police.

"When we signed up, we knew there were inherent dangers," Apotheker said. "We knew when we went to a domestic violence call, we may be injured. We knew when we stopped a motor vehicle out there on the street, we may get hurt and killed. But we never signed up for something like this where we're targeted."

Darnell Williams, President and CEO of the Urban League of Massachusetts said the recent killings of black men by police officer are a problem, but violence against police is not the solution.

I think it's very, very disturbing that we have police officers that are being targeted, Williams said. There's no reason whatsoever to target police officers to channel your frustrations. I think that is wrong. They are the first line of defense in terms of our safety for our nation.

Massachusetts state police released the following statement:

"We routinely remind our troopers - and did so as recently as last week - of the need to maintain a high level of situational awareness, not only for suspicious activity, but also for their own personal safety. We will reiterate that directive again this week."

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker also released a statement in wake of the shootings:

"We are saddened by the news of more violence in our communities and senseless attacks on our first responders who risk their lives for others. Our prayers are with the victims and their families in Louisiana, as well as for the safety of their fellow officers as this situation unfolds. "

Massachusetts State Police released a statement that read in part, "The Massachusetts State Police extend our deepest condolences to our brothers and sisters in Baton Rouge. We stand in solidarity and strength with every state trooper, police officer, sheriff's deputy, federal agent, marshal, and any other law enforcement professional in the United States. An attack on any of us is an attack on all of us."

Police in Boston also expressed their condolences to the Baton Rouge Police Department.

"On behalf of the Boston Police Department, I am extending our heartfelt condolences to our brothers and sisters in the law enforcement community effected by today's tragedy in Baton Rouge," said Boston Police Commissioner William Evans.

He added, "Although hundreds of miles away from Boston, the pain and suffering caused by the loss of these officers in the line of duty is felt deeply by the men and women of the BPD. This all too common trend we are seeing of violence against law enforcement officers who are out there each day serving and protecting neighborhoods across the country is alarming and disheartening; and as I have said before, now more than ever, we need to come together as a community in our shared efforts to prevent further tragedy."

Boston Police say they will continue their practice of sending officers out in pairs - something they have been doing since the Dallas shooting.
A humorous short story by Martin Strike, from Newbury

The sun rose to herald the start of a beautiful spring day. The snows and winds of winter seemed to have happened to a faraway world in a faraway time, and summer felt only the swoop of a swallow away. This was May, and for the residents of Newbury, it was the day of the spring fete.



Newbury was big on tradition, no more so than with on fete day. Horace had run a stall as the Guess your Age man there for years. Over time, he had got so good that if you handed him your uncle, a stoat or a steamed pudding, he could tell you their age with remarkable precision.

By 9am, he was already setting up his pitch as he always did, to the right on the bandstand, on the sunny side of a lime tree. As he pulled on his top hat and red velvet jacket embroidered with golden question marks, he could not help but whistle Camptown Races, his preferred tune for such happy moments as these.



Bloody Campton piggin races, muttered Alex, who loathed Horace and pretty much all of the other stall holders with a passion.

Alex was setting up next to Horace. His was the Hook the Duck stall. Every winter Alex diligently rubbed down the wooden ducks and gave them a fresh lick of paint, polished the hooks, and replaced any bamboo rods that were not gun barrel straight. He also bred the goldfish he would hand out as prizes for successful participants.



The crowds had always found Horaces age predictions remarkable, and their gasps and cheers as he correctly aged their jewellery, fossils and cousins would drift across Alexs much less popular booth while he stood wishing that a few might come across and have a go at his ducks instead.

It seemed that public opinion had turned against the issue of live goldfish as prizes in recent years, particularly since the Berkshire Wildlife Trust had started to pitch their display next to his, their tethered birds of prey always more focussed on his hanging bags of goldfish than the admiring fete goers who lined up to see them. But Alex was not going to be beaten by what he considered to be eco-fascists or indeed anyone else this year.



He seethed as he recalled previous fetes, with Horaces stall being as busy as a diabetes clinic after Easter Sunday, while his ducks were left untroubled and bobbing in their circular pool, the goldfish already looking forward to returning home to their pond later on.

And it seemed that every year Horace was in the sunshine, whilst he was shaded by the tree where it could still feel chilly in May. This year, as if to rub it in, Horaces beautiful daughter, Poppy, was to be May Queen at the head of the procession whilst his own son, Eric would be elsewhere, undertaking Community Service at a suitable distance away as deemed appropriate by the local magistrate.

Here, Old Father time! he called to Horace, seeing no harm in giving him a nickname, particularly a slightly desultory one.

Yes, Duck Egg? Horace replied entering into a gentle banter that Alex found unnecessary and vile.



My Carols baked some cakes for the tea stall  I got a fondant fancy for ya. Catch.

He threw over a slightly squashed cake that sat suffocated in the same type of plastic bag that his goldfish were decanted into.



Erm, thats very kind, said Horace in a tone that suggested he really did not want the sad looking package of sugar, caustic-looking yellow food colouring and melted icing.



Eat it! demanded Alex, softening this by adding: Shell cry if nobody likes them.



Oh dear, we cant have that, said Horace who unpeeled the unappealing confection from its plastic sheath and brought it to his mouth. Not used to lying, the words Mmm, thats delicious did not come easy for him.



Thatll be 50p, said Alex.



What? Oh, 50p  here you go, replied Horace rather thinking he had been lulled into believing the foul fancy to be a gift.



Hmm, said Alex rather disingenuously, pocketing the money and waiting for the drugged cake to take its effect.



The fete began and the crowds oiled in, many making their way straight to the Guess your Age station as usual. However, instead of the Horaces usual bang-on suppositions, the clouding and dyscalculiating effect of the adulterated fancy had kicked in.



Horace slurred out 208 for a Shetland pony, 42 for a lump of sedimentary limestone and 57 for a petri-dish of bacilli. An 82-year-old woman who had hoped her youthful appearance to confound him into stating her being no older than 77 was brought to tears when he declared her to be 2,748. Of course the crowd were horrified, and started to tut-tut, leave the queue and console themselves with a turn at duck-hooking, much to Alexs sniggering delight.



Horace, now alone at his stall and with mind spinning like a beasel at a flapper dance, put his head in his hands and garbled wtah aws in taht blodoy cake to himself.



Word of the Guess your Age mans charlatan conjectures spread around the fete like news of a bear approaching a honey party, with many potential attendees turning away from the entrance gate as dissatisfied fete goers stormed out.



In the beer tent, Poppy had undone the top buttons of her May Queens dress, slipped a carton of B&H under her bra strap and was now sharing gaudy stories and a few pints of Old Dogsbreath with a raucous jangle of beardy Morris Men when a child burst in.



Poppy! he shouted. Come quick  your Dads gone mad  hes making as much sense as a Dutchman singing Ten Green Bottles."



Poppy picked up her skirts and basket of puppies and legged it through the stalls and past lots of people  each carrying a small plastic bag and wondering what the hell they were going to do with its incumbent goldfish. She screeched to a halt in front of the lime tree where Alex stood supervising many duck-hookers with a huge pyramid of money built up behind him, while her father lay prostrate and dribbly, singing the last bars of Tien Groene Flessen.



Dad,  whats happened? She slapped him across the face in an attempt to break him from his stupor and noticed yellow crumbs on his face. She sniffed the sickly smidgens. Thats fondant fancy, she announced to those around her. Hang on, it's drugged with, let me think, she sniffed again  Swarfega, Three-in-One oil and Toilet Duck. She pointed accusingly at Alex and proclaimed It was him  you will find his hands grime-free and protected from chapping, his bicycle wheels dont squeak and I sense that his toilet is sparkling.



Hey  I know that man, said the sweetie van operator who had come to see what the fuss was all about. He threw spiders into my candyfloss machine.



I know him too, said the very tall man with one leg very much longer than the other. He sawed one of my stilts in two while I went to the loo.

Hes the one who threw my wellies into the canal, dismayed the man who had been overseeing the Throw-your-Wellie stand.

And hes the one who stole our batons from the van, piped up the Dagenham Girl Pipers in frenzied unison.



It turned out that everyone had a grievance against Alex: Kids had found dog pooh planted in the lucky dip, the metal hoop that needed to be steered around a mazy length of wire had been connected to the mains, and a firebomb had gone off in the tumbling ticket barrel of the tombola.



Get him! shouted everyone.



Alex turned to make a run for it, gathering slingshot speed from a revolution of the tea cup ride then passing through the long plastic tube of the dog agility display faster than any terrier. He threw a few coconuts at his chasers before jumping the tape and into the central parade field where the Newbury Classic Vehicle Society were displaying. Unfortunately for Alex, he did not choose the Italian Ferrari or German Porsche to demand a rapid getaway, but rather the British Austin Allegro, which sputtered at the weight of a second person aboard, misfired then conked out in an obstinate pique of smoke.

The Morris men jingled their way around him, an angry mob of linen, paunches and beer fumes. The accordionist changed tune and they began to rotate around him in an ungainly and hoppity dance, all interlocking their sticks at a pre-determined moment to leave Alex confined in a circular matrix of wooden struts.



They rolled him to the edge of the adjacent Kennet & Avon Canal as the fete goers cheered and the Dagenham Girl Pipers found their missing batons under his duck pool.

Over the tinny tannoy a countdown was conducted by a local celebrity that no one had ever heard of at the end of which Poppy, as May Queen, was allowed to boot Alex into the water with a painfully placed kick of her ceremonial DMs while the crowd threw his ducks and goldfish into the water after him.

Hey! I want a fiver on duck number 6, shouted a child.



And Ill have a monkey on 13, called another.



I tills feel scik, groaned Horace.



In no time all, every duck had been backed and the impromptu race was on; the first duck to fall over the weir some 500 yards downstream would be declared winner, with much money about to be raised for the fete to boot. Number 12 won, the ducks were all smashed in their plunge through the tumbling rapids while the goldfish settled in to their new home.



As for Alex, he was pulled from the fetid water coughing and spluttering like the Austin Allegro by his son Eric, who was scrubbing his graffiti off the bridge three miles downstream.

Looks like youve had a fete-ful day, Dad, Eric guffawed.



Alex just glared and shook a stickleback from his hair.

You can read more of Martin Strike's stories at thenewburyshortstoryteller.wordpress.com
Charity has received calls from people concerned about impact of vote

WEST Berkshire Citizens Advice Bureau has issued advice to anyone worried about what lies in store following the EU referendum vote.

The charity said it has received queries from EU citizens living locally about citizenship and nationality, following Brexit.

CAB has stressed that the vote to leave the EU does not mean any immediate changes to consumer rights, employment law or rules around immigration. It said it is reasonable to expect the Government to legislate in light of leaving the EU but it will be some time before that happens.

A new Citizens Advice webpage, giving people information about how Brexit might affect them, was published on June 24, the day the outcome of the referendum was confirmed. In the following week the information was viewed more than 65,000 times and the advice also reached 230,000 people on Facebook and 232,000 via Twitter.

West Berkshire CAB is encouraging people to seek advice if they are unsure about their rights or feel they have experienced discrimination.

Analysis of people seeking online help from Citizens Advice in the first 24 hours following the referendum result showed immigration was the top search term, with citizenship third. Brexit was the seventh most popular search.

The chief executive of Citizens Advice West Berkshire, Jan Rothwell, said: People have lots of questions about what leaving the EU means for their day-to-day lives. For some people it is as significant as what country they can call home.

For others it is about their rights at work or personal finances. It is important to remember nothing changes yet and that for the time being all rights remain the same.

It is likely to be several years before any changes to the law come into effect.
I really think weve enjoyed every minute of it"

IT was a case of love at first sight when Tom and Mary Thorn met at a British Legion dance in Kintbury, in 1955.

And last week the couple, who have been near inseparable ever since, celebrated their diamond wedding with friends and family from across the country.

Tom, aged 84, and Mary, 78, spent years working side by side as newsagents in Kintbury, before retiring in 1996.

Despite decades of working 12-hour days together, they say they still love one another as much as when they first met all those years ago.

Remembering their first meeting, when she was just 17-years-old, Mary said: I was at the British Legion dance in Kintbury with my sister, looking for boys, as you did.

And then Tom came in with his friends and I just thought he had to be mine, and weve been together ever since.

We married a year later.

Weve always worked well together.

It wasnt always easy  we first lived in a condemned house together but it was a wonderful time, we didnt mind one bit.

Sixty years on, the couple, who have two children and two grandchildren, still go dancing once a week in Thatcham.

We still enjoy going out and socialising, said Mary.

We dance and meet friends and enjoy ourselves, I think its important.

Offering her thoughts on the last 60 years, Mary said: Weve kept it interesting.

I really think weve enjoyed every minute of it.

I couldnt really pick a highlight to be honest, hopefully the highlight is still to come.

And Tom said he had a good idea as to the secret of a long and happy marriage.

Yes dear, he said jokingly.

That phrase will get round a lot of things.

The couple celebrated their special day together last Tuesday, with friends and family, at the Dundas Arms in Kintbury.
Spare Change: Hard-working farmer Louis Escobar was one of a kind

Louie performed the kind of job most try to avoid. And he did it with little, if any, complaint.
Reporter

Tim Mitchell is a reporter at The News-Gazette. His email is tmitchel@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@mitchell6).
One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021
UNESCO on Sunday listed Chandigarh's Capitol Complex and Sikkim's national park home to the world's third highest peak Mount Khangchendzonga among its World Heritage Sites, approving all three nominations linked to India this session.Sunday's approval comes two days after the ruins of Nalanda University in Bihar made to the elite tag at the 40th session of The World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul.This is the first time that any country got three sites inscribed in the Word Heritage List at a single session of the committee meeting, a Culture Ministry official said.The meeting had resumed for a day on Sunday, after being suspended a day earlier due to a failed coup bid in Turkey which claimed over 260 lives."Much awaited dream come true. CapitolComplex of Chandigarh now a WorldHeritage site. Thanks @UNESCO @RuchiraKamboj," India's Culture Ministry tweeted.Ruchira Kamboj is India's Ambassador to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)."Khangchendzonga National Park of India is now a WorldHeritage site. Thank you @UNESCO @IrinaBokova," it said in another tweet, tagging UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova.The Capitol Complex is part of the group of 17 sites - across seven countries (France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina, Japan and India) - designed by Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier which were included in the list by the Paris-based body.Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, had planned Chandigarh in the 1950s. It said the 17 sites spread over seven countries are a "testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past"."The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh (India), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Japan), the House of Dr Curutchet in La Plata (Argentina) and the Unite d'habitation in Marseille (France) reflect the solutions that the Modern Movement sought to apply during the 20th century to the challenges of inventing new architectural techniques to respond to the needs of society."These masterpieces of creative genius also attest to the internationalisation of architectural practice across the planet," it said in an official statement.In another major recognition, Sikkim's Khangchendzonga National Park - home to the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga - made it to the list.
Kanpur: Eager to shake off its conservative image, the RSS is looking to attract youngsters into its fold, especially IT professionals and engineers, and has launched a host of measures, including an offer of online membership.



The saffron outfit, which had recently eschewed its traditional attire of khaki shorts in favour of full pants, is also trying to inculcate in youngsters under the age of 18, "values" like "patriotism" and "nationalism" through its "Bal Bharati" and "Bal Gokul" programs.



This will help realise RSS's "dream of a better country", RSS Joint General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale said.



Similar programs have been started for college students as well.



Hosabale said such measures were being taken as the outfit was embracing modernity and concentrating on "quality improvement" to ensure that the current generation adopts its principles.



Similarly, it is eyeing IT professionals and engineers, and conducting weekly programs meant specifically to help inculcate "social consciousness" in them.



Hosabale, who was here for a key meeting of RSS's regional pracharaks, said this was being done as they play a big role in the development of the country.



Hosabale said the outfit has asked its swayamsewaks across the country to link up with those who apply for online membership in their respectrive districts, and bring them into the RSS fold.



RSS claims that nearly 47,200 people, a majority of whom are youngsters, have applied for its membership online this year. Last year, the figure was 31,800.
Strict curfew continued for the 10th day on Sunday in the Kashmir Valley after violent protests and unrest in the region increased the death toll to 41 following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Wani in a gunfight with the security forces on July 8.



"Curfew shall continue in all the ten districts of the Valley," a senior police official said.



"Security forces have been instructed to allow movement of patients along with their attendants."



"People going to the airport will not face any hardship as air tickets were being treated as curfew passes," the official added.



All vernacular and English dailies suspended publication for the second day on Sunday.



State government officials said newspaper owners were asked to suspend publications till July 19.



Cable television operations were allowed on Saturday evening after remaining suspended for a day.



The resumption of cable television operations was allowed after the operators agreed to take off all Pakistani TV channels and two private Indian channels.



Mobile phone internet and call operations remained suspended in south Kashmir areas for the eighth day while the same remained suspended for the second day in central and north Kashmir areas on Sunday.



Mobile phone operations without any internet facility are, however, continuing on post paid mobile phones provided by the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).



On Saturday an unruly mob torched a police picket in north Kashmir's Kupwara district after which Police opened fire resulting in the death of a youth.



Train services between north Kashmir Baramulla and Bannihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended.



All recruitment interviews scheduled for the next four days have been cancelled by the state public service commission (PSC).



All schools, colleges and universities in the Valley continued to be shut.



Senior separatist leaders including Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabir Ahmad Shah and others have been either placed under house arrest or taken into preventive custody to restrain them from participating in protests.



Separatists have appealed the people to continue the shutdown till Monday.



The shutdown in the Valley started on July 9.


Allahabad: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Sunday expressed shock over the hooch tragedy in Etah, which has so far claimed over 20 lives, and said Uttar Pradesh ought to have a ban on sale and consumption of liquor like his state.



Prohibition came into force in Bihar earlier this year in keeping with an electoral promise Kumar's Janata Dal (United) had made to the people, especially women.



"I felt shock and grief when I read the news about Etah in the newspapers this morning. The tragedy is yet another reminder of the various evils that have their roots in the consumption of liquor."



"I wish the state government here had taken a cue from the experiment in neighboring Bihar where we have banned sale and consumption of liquor," Kumar, who is also the JDU president, said at a rally in Phulpur, about 50 km from the city.



"We had promised the people of Bihar, especially women, that we will prohibit sale and consumption of alcohol if our party came to power. We kept the promise and the state is certain to reap the benefits. UP too can do the same. After all, it is not just Bihar which has opted for prohibition. Tamil Nadu has banned liquor only recently and Kerala may be heading in the same direction", he said.



The toll in the spurious liquor tragedy in Etah has climbed to 24, while the main accused was arrested on Sunday and 11 officials from excise department and police have been suspended.



Kumar said, "Prohibition has been in place in Gujarat ever since the state came into being. I would urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hails from that state, to consider ways and means of eradicating this social evil from the country."



The JDU president, who is looking at making inroads in Uttar Pradesh, which is headed for a multi-cornered contest in the Assembly elections, also spoke extensively about measures taken by him, like 50 per cent reservation for women in local bodies and free uniforms and bicycles to school-going girls.



Support of women is widely believed to have helped him win a third term in office despite having suffered a huge setback in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.



Kumar, whose party is hoping to bag a sizeable chunk of the votes of the Kurmi caste - to which he belongs - took a dig at the recent induction of Apna Dal MP Anupriya Patel in the Union Council of Ministers.



"As a local MLA, she must have played an important role in PM Modi's victory from Varanasi. But it took more than two years for recognition to come her way. I wonder whether it had something to do with the fact that a few days before the cabinet expansion, our party had organised a rally in Mirzapur, which she currently represents in the Lok Sabha", Kumar said.



The Bihar chief minister's address was preceded by speeches of party colleagues like former JDU president Sharad Yadav and KC Tyagi.
Swaraj said the Consulate General suggested the family that Chandan's mortal remains be buried as his wife Manisha alone can give consent for his cremation.

Gavai family tragedy in US - 1. CG New York has proposed to the family as follows :  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

a) Cremation of parents in New York

b) Burial of Chandan as his wife Manisha is in coma and she alone can give consent for his cremation  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

c) Death certificate for all three members of the family

d) Help in getting insurance money /3  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

Our Consulate will bear the expenses for cremation. /4  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

Mr Anand Gavai wants that money be given to him which cannot be done as he is a Dutch national. /5  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

Under Government rules, money cannot be given to a foreign national./6  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

All members of the family who are in US incl. Manisha's parents are agreeable to this proposal. We hope to resolve this accordingly. /7  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

Burial only till his wife Manisha recovers from coma. Once she gives consent, Chandan will also be cremated. https://t.co/4f8558P8bP  Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) July 17, 2016

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday said government would help a Kalyan-based family in arranging for cremating bodies of its three members killed in a road accident in Long Island in the US.38-year-old IT professional Chandan Gavai and his parents -- Archana Gavai (60) and Kamalnayan Gavai (74)-- were killed when the vehicle they were travelling in was hit head-on by a truck on July 4.Chandan's 32-year-old wife suffered life-threatening burns and is in comma. The couple's 11-month-old son survived the crash and is under treatment. The Gavai family members in India were finding it difficult to bring back the bodies for cremation due to high expenses involved.On Saturday, Swaraj had promised to help the family after she came to know of their difficulty.Swaraj on Sunday said India's Consulate General in New York has suggested the family to cremate Chandan's parents in New York. She said as per US laws, Chandan's body cannot be cremated as his wife is in coma and unable to give consent.The External Affairs Minister said the government will help the family get death certificates and insurance money for all the three deceased members. The family is from Maharashtra."Our Consulate will bear the expenses for cremation," Swaraj tweeted, adding "All members of the family who are in US incl. Manisha's parents are agreeable to this proposal. We hope to resolve this accordingly."Burial only till his wife Manisha recovers from coma. Once she gives consent, Chandan will also be cremated." Swaraj said one of the family members Anand Gavai wants the money be given to him but it cannot be done as he is a Dutch national. "Under Government rules, money cannot be given to a foreign national," she said.
Kareena Kapoor Khan is the one making headlines since Saif Ali Khan confirmed her pregnancy. After months of speculations and denial, the couple went official with the big news a while ago. Saif and Kareena are all set to welcome their first child together in December.The couple was recently spotted at the airport. While Kareena looked gorgeous in a white ensemble, Saif was seen in a casual t-shirt teamed up with a pair of denims. Kareena opted for a palazzo pants and looked utter-feminine. You just can't miss the glow on her face!Kareena impressed the fans and critics alike with her role in Udta Punjab, Saif Ali Khan's next film Rangoon is all set for release on October 14.(Image courtesy: Yogen Shah)
Congratulations on the success of Operation #SankatMochan undertaken 2 evacuate Indians from war-torn South Sudan @SushmaSwaraj @Gen_VKSingh  Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) July 16, 2016

Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar has hailed Operation Sankat Mochan -- initiated to evacuate Indians from South Sudan, which has been rocked by violence that has claimed hundreds of lives.The actor, who had earlier urged External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for speedy evacuation of Indians from South Sudan, tweeted: "Congratulations on the success of Operation Sankat Mochan undertaken to evacuate Indians from war-torn South Sudan Sushma Swaraj Gen VK Singh."A total of 156 Indian nationals, including 46 from Kerala, were brought back to India from violence-hit South Sudan on Friday on board a special IAF plane as part of 'Operation Sankat Mochan'. Sushma Swaraj and Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh led the operation.Earlier, the Airlift star had expressed his concerns for the Indians stuck on the foreign shores in a tweet: Sushma Swaraj Ma'am request for speedy measures and actions to evacuate Indians stranded in Sudan. Prayers with them.She responded then with a post Akshay Kumar ji - Pl do not worry. We are evacuating Indian nationals from Juba (South Sudan).The issue is close to Akshay's heart as he had starred in Airlift -- a film on the evacuation of Indians from Kuwait during Iraq's invasion of that country in 1990.
: A Mumbai-based NGO on Saturday demanded strict action against veteran Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor over his train 'stunts' while on a short commute for promoting a teleserial on Thursday.Sahas Foundation president Sayed Furqan Ahmed lodged a complaint with Railway Police Commissioner Niket Kaushik pointing out that the actor's actions set a bad precedent, were highly condemnable and punishable under the Indian Railways Act.Ahmed said it was disheartening to see Kapoor, an inspiration to youngsters with his on-screen image, behaving in an irresponsible manner, especially in view of the ever-increasing casualties among youth travelling on footboard, surfing or performing dare-devil stunts."He should apologise publicly not only to railway commuters but also the family members of the youth who have lost their lives... for, he inspired others to imitate him of leaning out of a running train and footboard travel, both causing deaths every year," Ahmed said in his plea to Kaushik.Besides, he added that enormous amount of tax-payers money is spent on promotions/advertising to spread awareness and deter youngsters from performing such evil acts resulting in unintentional suicides.He urged police take action against Kapoor and the organising agency to give a clear message on commuters' safety and save lives.On Friday, the Western Railway (WR) sought an explanation from the production house, Market Men Consumer & Events Pvt Ltd on Kapoor's stunts."Inspite of the terms and conditions to adhere strictly to safety and security during shoot, Anil Kapoor allegedly seems to be leaning from the footboard of a local train during a promo shoot on July 14," a WR official said, adding it was clearly observed from videos and photo uploaded on various social media networks.Last Thursday, Anil Kapoor undertook a short local train journey from Churchgate station accompanied by hordes of fans and mediapersons in tow, to promote his upcoming television action-drama series, 24: Season 2.An adaptation of the popular American TV series "24", it will mark his return to the small screen in the role of Jai Singh Rathod, to be aired on Colours channel from July 23.The official explained that by leaning out of the running train from the footboard, the actor could inspire youngsters to perform similar stunts.Beset with many such instances in the past when youngsters performing dare-devil stunts have been killed or permanently maimed, the railway authorities has regularly campaign for safety and security during train commutes.Besides his live action, Anil Kapoor also interacted with local train commuters and shared photos of his commute on social media sites.
Brother of Pakistani model Qandeel Baloch has been arrested for allegedly killing her in what appears to be a case of honour killing'. Muhammad Waseem is accused of strangling his sister to death at her residence in Multan on Saturday.



Waseem Azeem runs a local cellular phone shop and is one of the six brothers of Qandeel. He was not happy with the kind of things Qandeel used to post online and was critical of her social media presence.



The police announced Waseems arrest at a press conference in which Waseem confessed his crime.



Wsaeem was recorded saying, She was bringing disrepute to our familys honour and I could not tolerate it any further. I killed her around 11.30pm on Friday night when everyone else had gone to bed. My brother is not involved in the murder.



Baloch had been dominating the headlines after videos of her twerking to a song were deemed objectionable.



The actor-cum-model had earlier claimed that she was receiving death threats and had sought security for the same. However, when the ministry didn't respond to her application, she started planning to settle down abroad. Sources have said that her brother wanted her to quit modelling due to which she had escaped to Multan to stay away from her family.
Aam Aadmi Party will contest elections in Gujarat next year if people ask for it and Delhi might see the return of odd-even scheme are some of the many issues revealed by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal in his first live webcast "Talk to AK" on Sunday.



With an eye on the assembly polls in Gujarat, Punjab and Goa, Kejriwal slammed the Centre for trying to paralyse his government and compared the relation between Centre-state as similar to India-Pakistan.



Here are the highlights of what Kejriwal said during his two hour session which included a 47-minute monologue on the achievements made by his government after which he took questions from callers across the country.



On his government's priorities: Four focus areas of my government are - education, health, electricity and water.



On government schools: Deputy CM Manish Sisodia is working day and night to improve the condition of government schools the capital.



On corruption in school admissions: Neither I nor Manish have recommended a single person for admission into any school. My son still studies in Noida. We passed an order for fees to be refunded. If it can happen in Delhi, why not in Gujarat, Goa, Punjab and Chhattisgarh.



On education system: This is a warning. Don't mess around with the youth of the country. Don't mess around with the education system in the country.



On budget allocated for education: When we came to power we increased the education budget from 5000 to 10,000 crores. When the central govt came to power, they reduced it from from 82,000 Cr to 68,000 Cr , reduced it by 25% and then increased it by 5% to 71,000 Cr.



On farmer suicides: I pleaded with the PM for a one time waiver of loans of all farmers. If loans given to 10 -15 industrialists worth Rs 4000 Cr to 5000 Cr can be waived off, why not farmer loans. I have asked for implementation of the Swaminathan report and action be taken against hoarders of dal.



On contradictory claim that Modi is not letting him work and at the same time announcements of Delhi govt's achievements in full page ads: Work is done on the ground. Had we not faced these obstacles, the pace of our achievements would have been faster.



On frequent transfer of officers: 11 of our officers were transferred. Central Govt did not even consult us. They have the powers, they say. But why not consult the state government? Do you have to misuse the power? Am I a dictator? Am I a Tanashah? Democracy runs on dialogue.



On free wifi promise: PS Rajinder Kumar was appointed as the in charge of the project. After his arrest I have appointed a new person and you will hear from us very soon.



On complaints of corruption: Central Govt took over the ACB by using paramilitary. Today if anyone takes a bribe, I cannot do anything. We have sent 32 cases from the Delhi government and another 150 complaints from citizens to the ACB, yet there has been no action.



On mid-day meal scheme: We wanted to get Akshay Patra for midday meals. Yet the LG disallowed it.



On crunch in hospitals: DDA is not giving us land for hospitals at market rates.





On Centre Vs AAP: I apologised to the PM and requested him to stop the daily tussle.



On why Delhi government ads get published in other state newspapers: If we are doing good work in Delhi, the word should spread so that it attracts more investments.



On office of profit allegations: MLAs could not go beyond their area, they needed an authenticity. So we had to give them the position. We have spoken to top lawyers. They are of the opinion that it is not an office of profit as there is no pecuniary gain. I hope the EC takes a fair decision.



On increasing MLA salaries: MLAs were paid only 12,000 per month until we took over. We raised their salary to 50,000. The rest of the amount will be based on the work they do for constituency. If you don't pay them, you are opening the opportunities for corruption.





On solid waste management: It is Municipal Corporation of Delhi which is responsible for the city's cleanliness and that is under the control of the BJP. And they have made a complete mess of it which means we will take another two years to get things moving swiftly.



On referendum in Delhi: There is no provision of a referendum in the Constitution. What we can do is an opinion poll on whether statehood, police, DDA should be under the government or with the Centre and then move ahead.



On playing the victim card: I have only repeated the issues with the Centre again.



On AAP fighting elections in Gujarat: There is an atmosphere of oppression in Gujarat. Police is being used to file false cases against people associated with the Patidar movement. AAP does not fight elections, people fight elections. If people of Gujarat want to fight elections, then we will.



On arrest of AAP MLAs: I can show the court orders related to Commando Surinder and Akhilesh Tripathy's cases to prove how false the cases against them were. I have told my MLAs to be ready to go to jail , else resign. It is possible that we may even lose your life, this is the second freedom struggle. If we die, we will be called martyrs, if we win, we will be called courageous but if we run away, we will be called cowards.





On Principal Secretary Rajinder Kumar: It appears that he is honest. Had he not worked with me, he would not have been put in jail. That is the message the Centre wants to send out to officers of Delhi government.






New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Margaret Alva in her autobiography has claimed that Congress's first family has links to Agusta Westland scam middleman Christian Michel.



In the autobiography 'Courage and Commitment' Alva talks about Congress connections to Michel's father Wolfgang Michel.



In her book she also refers to the infamous tank scam in the 1980s where Sanjay Gandhi and his close aide former MoS Defence Production to South Africa CPN Singh allegedly connived to sell second hand by Indian armed forces. Then she raised objection, which led to Singhs removal. In her book, Alva claimed that she had been targeted for raising voice against Singh and Michel.



She stressed that she became a victim of political vendetta.



Meanwhile, Congress Randeep Surjewala leader denies charges. He said, "She was manufacturing new facts to popularize her book and questioned the timing, this coming just ahead of the parliament session."



The decision by then Narasimha Rao government to appeal against a Delhi High court order quashing the Bofors case linking Rajiv Gandhi had deepened Sonia Gandhi's suspicion over Rao, escalating friction between the two, says Alva.







Alva said following the decision, she was asked by a furious Sonia whether Rao wanted to send her to jail.



Alva, who held various positions in Congress before she was asked to resign in 2008 after her allegations that party tickets were "sold" in the Karnataka Assembly polls, appeared critical of Congress leadership for "centralised decision-making" system in the party.



(With PTI inputs)
The monsoon session of parliament is in many ways an almost new-look session.



First, it has a new team from the government , most carefully chosen either with an eye on UP polls, or more importantly, to get key bills like GST Bill. It also comes with some humiliation for the BJP having lost face in Arunachal this week and Uttarakhand earlier .



It also comes in the backdrop of ongoing turmoil in Kashmir and the brazen defiance by Pakistan . All this means it may not be a fair weather monsoon session for the government.



Sources say however the Prime Minister is keen to walk the extra mile to ensure he sends out the message that the growth agenda of the government is intact.



The bad press and corporate unhappiness over the Raghuram Rajan incident has worried the PM that this message may be lost. Sources say the PM has made it clear to his team that come what may, no matter how much extra mile it may have to walk, the passage of GST is crucial.



The Congress is caught in a bind. It wants to be difficult, wishing to pay back the government for attacks on the Gandhis over the Vadra land issue, Agusta and National Herald. Yet, after claiming that the GST was their brainchild. the Congress cannot be seen as resisting for long



Sources also say some kind of a trade-off has been arrived at. There is a possibility that the government would go a little soft on the Congress on issues like Agusta till the GST is cleared .



This session is likely to be influenced by two factors . One, of course, the upcoming crucial Uttar Pradesh elections which also decided the new team of PM Modi. But it's also the one in which parties like TMC, JDU, BSP and SP will run the House.



Th last session didn't end too badly with several bills being passed. But this time all eyes would be on whether the GST finally gets the nod.


Pema Khandu, son of the late Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, has been sworn in as the ninth Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh on Sunday after Nabam Tuki resigned as the leader of Congress Legislature Party (CLP) and stepped down from the post of CM.



The 37-year-old Pema, who became the youngest chief minister in the country doesn't have to take the floor test after governor Tathagat Roy said he was satisfied with Khandu's show of strength on Saturday where he paraded 45 MLAs to prove the government's majority.



Chowna Mein was sworn in as the Deputy Chief Minister and both the leaders were administered oath by the governor at Raj Bhavan in Itanagar.







Hours ahead of the scheduled floor test in the Assembly on Saturday, the Congress Legislature Party had elected Pema Khandu, in place of Tuki, who was restored to the Chief Minister's post earlier this week after the apex court verdict.



Tuki's resignation and his replacement by the Congress party was seen as a strategic attempt to win back rebels who had teamed up with Kalikho Pul to form a government in the state with outside support from the BJP.



The BJP however continued to defend its stand over the issue and said that Tuki's replacement is a vindication of the fact that the entire issue was an internal matter of the Congress party and that it had only provided support to form a minority government.



On Saturday the Congress confirmed that the rebels including the former CM Kalikho Pul are ready to back Khandu after they had challenged Nabam Tuki's candidacy.



Khandu had on Saturday asserted that he has the numbers to stake claim for a new government in the state.



"We have the support of 45 Congress MLAs and two independents in the state. We have staked claim to form the new government," Khandu had told CNN-News18.



Former CM Nabam Tuki too had confirmed that Khandu's entry is a move to keep the Congress party united and also that all the charges against him are "baseless".



Earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered the restoration of the Congress government in the state by quashing as "unconstitutional" Governor Jyoti Prasad Rajkhowa's decision to advance the assembly session.



The court had slammed the governor and told him that he cannot embroil himself in any "political thicket" or take "individual call" when an elected government enjoys majority in the House.



Former Chief Minister Kalikho Pul, who had unseated Tuki in February this year with the help of a faction of dissident Congress legislators and BJP members, claimed that he has got the support of 42 legislators in the 60-member house, whose effective strength is 58 now after two members resigned earlier.


Prague: Avast Software, maker of the world's most popular computer antivirus protection, doesn't see any obstacles to completing its $1.3 billion acquisition of AVG Technologies but it will probably delay its expected IPO until 2019.



Prague-based Avast, whose software has more than 230 million users, announced on July 7 that it plans to buy AVG for $25 per share, a 33 per cent premium to the previous day's closing price. It expects to complete the deal by around the end of September.



Avast CEO Vincent Steckler told Reuters that he saw no obstacles to completing the AVG deal but the work involved in integrating its competitor would probably push back any plans for a long-anticipated stock offering.



The company had previously said it could consider selling shares as early as 2017.



"We will really focus on building up mobile and building up the SMB (small and medium-sized business) and corporates and that is why there might be another acquisition eventually to help that area," Steckler said in an interview.



"So I would say this acquisition has delayed an IPO by a year-plus. 2018 would probably be the earliest it would be a consideration; 2019 would be much more likely."



Avast has long looked to tie up with AVG, another software company with Czech roots started around a quarter-century ago as the central European country shifted to free markets after decades of communism.



The purchase will give Avast heft as it competes with the likes of Microsoft, which at 15 percent is nearly neck-and-neck with Avast in global market share for antivirus applications, according to statistics firm Statista.



Steckler said this was the fourth time in three years that Avast had made an unsolicited offer for AVG, which will continue to run as a standalone brand after the acquisition.



The combined company, which will have more than 400 million users, would initially derive about 70 per cent of revenue from its consumer products, mainly paid subscriptions for its software and fees earned from search providers. The rest will come from the mobile and business offers, which it wants to grow faster.



"I think we need to get closer to 50-50 (revenue) split before we have a good story in the US stock markets," Steckler said.



Avast pulled a planned stock listing in 2012 due to market conditions. In 2014, CVC Capital Partners bought a stake in Avast that valued the company at $1 billion. Steckler estimated the value of the firm has since doubled.



Avast earned revenue of around $285 million in 2015, with a margin on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) of 69-70 per cent. The company forecasts revenue to grow 15-17 per cent in 2016.



Steckler said Avast's consumer business grew around 19 percent in the first half of 2016 while AVG's stagnated, although the rival has stronger mobile performance.



"We have got a (revenue) core to really stabilise the company and throw off a lot of cash, and then the future is basically mobile," he said.
Yangon: Myanmar's de facto premier Aung San Suu Kyi held landmark talks with senior rebel leaders on Sunday, as she strives to seal a ceasefire with a patchwork of ethnic minority militias that have battled the national army for decades.



Suu Kyi has made peace a flagship policy of her newly installed civilian-led government which replaced decades of brutal junta rule earlier this year.



It is a tall order in a country where the military, which is loathed and deeply distrusted by many ethnic rebel groups, still retains significant control.



A number of key rebel factions have yet to sign up to a national ceasefire agreement, something Suu Kyi's government hopes today's talks might change.



Zaw Htay, deputy director general of the president's office, told reporters the veteran democracy campaigner and her close associates were meeting with five leaders from the United Nationalities Federal Council.



The body represents both rebel groups that have signed up to the ceasefire agreement and those who have so far refused. "It will be like meeting family," he told reporters ahead of the meeting.



Among those present was General N'Ban La, from the Kachin Independence Organisation, the political wing of one ofMyanmar's most powerful rebel factions, which has yet to sign a ceasefire.



"It's a confidence building meeting, there can be many questions and answers from both sides," Hla Maung Shwe, a government advisor on the peace process told AFP. Media were ushered out after filming the initial greetings ahead of the meeting in the commercial capital Yangon.



Myanmar has been scarred by ethnic conflicts ever since its independence in 1948, with minority groups battling for greater autonomy against a central government that they believed has long ignored and abused them.



Suu Kyi has vowed to overturn that painful legacy with plans to hold a major peace conference later this summer. However, conflicts continue to rage in several areas between ethnic minority armed groups and the army, which operates beyond the reaches of civilian government, particularly in northern Kachin and eastern Shan states.



Some 240,000 people are displaced due to unrest and communal conflict across the country. More than a dozen rebel factions also plan to hold their own talks later this month in Kachin, with today's meeting seen as a crucial stepping stone towards persuading the hold-out groups to embrace the peace process.



Both Myanmar's military and rebel groups have a long history of rights violations linked to decades of conflict, including the use of child labour and drug trafficking. Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy government has spoken out in favour greater federalism for Myanmar's ethnic minorities.



But her hands are partially tied. Under Myanmar's junta-era constitution, the crucial interior, home and border ministries are still controlled by the army, giving the generals huge sway over whether the peace process is a success.
Dhaka: Acting deputy vice chancellor of a private university has been arrested here along with two others for sheltering militants who carried out Bangladesh's worst terror attack at a cafe in which 22 people were killed by suspected Islamic State militants.



"North South University's (NSU) acting pro-VC Gias Uddin Ahsan was arrested yesterday for renting out a flat to the attackers of Holey Artisan Bakery," said Masudur Rahman, deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP).



Ahsan is the dean of NSU's School of Health and Life Sciences, according to the private university's website.



Ahsan's nephew Alam Chowdhury and Mahbubur Rahman Tuhin, the manager of a house in Bashundhara Residential Area were also arrested.



He said five militants who carried out the attack on the cafe on July 1 had taken shelter in the flat owned by Ahsan.



The police official said the other associates of the attackers fled the flat after the attack. Several cartons were seized from the flat.



Police suspect the cartons were used to keep the grenades used in the attack that left at least 20 hostages, including an Indian, and two policemen dead. Security forces killed six persons in the raid at the cafe to free hostages.



Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, though authorities have dismissed the claim.



One of the militants killed by police was a student of NSU. His family said he had been missing for months. Ahsan's nephew Alam and manager Tuhin were tasked with renting the flat.



"But they did not follow the DMP instruction to collect tenants' info while renting the flat," Rahman said.



He said police's counter terrorism unit, which is investigating the attack, arrested the trio.



The unit's Deputy Commissioner Saiful Islam told bdnews24.com a person rented the flat in May. They suspect he is a member of Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).



Meanwhile, reports said Hasanat Reza Karim, who was a teacher of the NSU, was alo among the hostages. He was sacked reportedly for his links to banned Islamist organization Hizb-ut Tahrir.



His family has alleged that police did not release him with the other hostages and he has been unaccounted for since then.



After the Gulshan attack, police released a list of 10 youths missing for months, suspecting their links to terrorism.



Two of them - Mohammad Basharuzzaman from Rajshahi and Junnun Shikder from Jigatola in Dhaka were also students of NSU. One of the attackers involved in a second attack on Bangladesh's largest prayer congregation has also been identified as NSU student Abir Rahman.



The university came under scrutiny after the killing of blogger and Ganajagaran Mancha activist Ahmed Rajib Haider in 2013. All the persons arrested in connection with his murder were students of the Electronics and Electrical Engineering (EEE) at the university.
Ankara: A top army general has been detained over alleged involvement in a coup attempt aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government, an official said.



"General Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, has been detained," said the Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity.



Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, "The situation is completely under control following the military coup. The coup plotters will face the justice they deserve."



The Turkish army says it will wipe out members of parallel structure from the ranks of the military.



Acting Army Chief Umit Dundar warned that betrayal will not go unpunished. He said 104 coup plotters have been killed.



Meanwhile, Turkey's top judicial board has suspended 2,745 judges, including 541 court of first instance judges and 2,204 judicial court judges, over Friday's attempted coup.



On July 15, military rebels make a vile attempt to overthrow Turkey's elected government, according to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim. Around 165 people were killed in the ensuing violence.



Some 2,839 military personnel involved in the coup attempt have been arrested, and 20 pro-coup soldiers, including some senior officers, were killed in Friday night's attempt to overthrow the government.



(With input from agencies)
Ankara: Turkey's armed forces have said it "fully seized control" of the country and its president responded by calling on Turks to take to the streets in a show of support for the government.



A loud explosion was heard in the capital, Ankara, fighter jets buzzed overhead, gunfire erupted outside military headquarters and vehicles blocked two major bridges in Istanbul.



President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in an interview over FaceTime with the CNN Turk, dismissed the action as "an attempt at an uprising by a minority within our armed forces."



His office declined to disclose his whereabouts saying only that he was in a secure location.



"I'm making a call out to my people. I'm inviting them out to all our public squares. I'm inviting them out to our airports. Let us gather in our squares, at our airports as the people and let that minority group come upon as with their tanks and artillery and do whatever they wish to do," Erdogan said.



Soldiers blocked entry to Ataturk Airport where four tanks were stationed, according to the private Dogan news agency.



Two other tanks and a military vehicle were stationed in front of the VIP terminal. The report said the soldiers had entered the tower and stopped all flights.



The military said yesterday it seized control "to reinstall the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for the law and order to be reinstated."



The military statement went on to say that "all international agreements and commitments will remain. We pledge that good relations with all world countries will continue."



Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said that a group within the military has engaged in what appeared to be an attempted coup.



Yildirim told private NTV television: "it is correct that there was an attempt," when asked if there was a coup.



Yildirim didn't provide details, but said Turkey would never allow any "initiative that would interrupt democracy."



"We are focusing on the possibility of an attempt (coup)," Yildirim said.



"There was an illegal act by a group within the military that was acting out of the chain of military command. Our people should know that we will not allow any activity that would harm democracy," he added.



Military jets were heard flying over Ankara and Istanbul. Gunfire was heard outside Turkey's military headquarters in Ankara, while media reports said ambulances were seen out front.



"There are certain groups who took the arms trusted to them by the state and pointed them toward state employees," Yildirim said.



"We shall determine soon who they are. Our security forces have acted against these groups."
Saving Matelot RC

An imposing, concrete structure with a breathtaking view of the coastline, it has been the focal point of not only Catholic ceremonies over the years but community events such as school graduations, public discussions and other social gatherings.

But sadly, the church, which was rebuilt in 1968, under the stewardship of late parish priest, Father John O-Shea, is in dire need of a completely new structure, largely due to the effects of wear and tear and coastal erosion, particularly within the last decade.

In addition, Sunday Mass, which was normally held at the church, is now being kept at the Matelot RC School, just opposite to the church.

This church cannot be allowed to deteriorate and crash down into the sea, chairman of the Sangre Grande Regional Corporation Martin Terry Rondon told Sunday Newsday during a visit to the church on Thursday.

But theres another reason Rondon is intent on having the church rebuilt: he was born and raised in the community and has only fond remembrances of the influence the venerable structure has had on his life.

My church gave me all of my spiritual upbringing. I made my First Communion there and my Confirmation. I served as an acolyte for 13 years, he said.

Interestingly, the Matelot church, like the majestic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on Independence Square, Port-of-Spain, also is named after the Virgin Mary.

The Cathedral in Port-of-Spain, though, has, over the years, been able to accumulate millions of dollars for its refurbishment exercise.

Rondon is hoping that the same generosity will be extended to the people of Matelot by way of financial assistance.

Rondon, who is also the Toco/ Fishing Pond councillor, recalled the days when his staunchly Catholic mother would wake him up early on mornings to attend daily services.

Rondon claimed he served under 23 priests and had a good relationship with all of them. I learnt to pray the Rosary there and I also learnt Latin. That background has made me into the person I am today, he declared.

Now, Rondon is on a crusade for funding for the reconstruction of the historic structure and he makes no apologies.

This church is one of the main reasons I have decided to stay in politics - that and the highway that is coming to the area, he said.

At a visit to Winnipeg, Canada, under the aegis of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Caribbean Local Economic Development project (CARILED), several weeks ago, Rondon said he made a stirring appeal for assistance during an address to more than 1,200 parishioners in the St Marys of Immaculate Conception Church.

The response, Rondon said, was overwhelming.

They are ready to help, he said of the churchs parishioners.

On his return, Rondon sought advice from Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Harris on the way forward.

Harris suggested a committee be established to not only manage the funds but oversee the construction of the church, which Rondon estimates may cost more than $2 million.

The committee includes Rondon, architect/conservationist Rudylynn De Four Roberts, retired school principal Alcia Abraham, Matelot resident Melville Bethelmy and others.

Father Robert Christo, who is in charge of properties within the Catholic Archdiocese, is expected to function as the intermediary between the committee and the Archbishop. The first meeting of the committee is expected to take place some time this week.

In the interim, Rondon said the region will do its part to acquire money for the ambitious project: the annual harvest celebration at Matelot/Toco RC Church on August 14, is expected to yield significant funds.

The chairman said he also has written to other churches, groups and non-governmental organisations for assistance.

I have helped many people over the years and it is my time now, he said.

According to historical accounts, the Matelot RC Church may have had its beginnings in the late 1800s.

The Roman Catholic Church had appointed late priest Hyacinth Bariou to the Toco/Matelot parish in 1889 to carry out services for Matelot villagers, who found it difficult to travel to Toco to christen children and organise funerals.

Roughly three years later, Bariou acquired resources to construct a church at the site of what is now known as Sister Rosario Road, in honour of Rosario Hackshaw, a nun who served as principal of the Matelot Community College for many years.

Up until her departure some 15 years ago, Hackshaw also had lived in the churchs presbytery.

The church, which had an organ and choir, had a capacity to hold more than 200 people.

Decades later, with the passage of time and the effects of land slippage and coastal erosion, the church fell into a state of serious disrepair, which resulted in its reconstruction and reopening in 1968. The cornerstone for the new structure was laid by then Archbishop Anthony Pantin.

Bethelmy, 84, a former Ministry of Works employee, recalled he had worked on the construction of the church and presbytery prior to its August 1968 opening.

Fr O-Shea was a priest and he was also the contractor on the project, he said.

Bethelmy also recalled that the church had taken just one year to build.

I dont know where he (O-Shea) got the money from but we had the labour from residents, he said.

The spacious structure, Bethelmy said, did not resemble the original church nor did it fit the conventional mould of Catholic places of worship.

Nevertheless, Bethelmy said it was outfitted with a marble altar and traditional church trappings and served the parishioners well for many years.

It was a community church, he said., adding that it had only ceased operations in April.

Rondon said in the weeks and days before its closure, the church had to be cleaned everyday.

The bat dung is the main thing here, he said.

Indeed, the pungent odor of bat dung permeated the air within the shoddy structure, which also bore evidence of cracked walls and rodent infestation.

Large strips of wood from the roof and other debris also was strewn all over the churchs discoloured floor and wooden benches.

Shrubs could also bee seen protruding from areas within the structure.

Despite its dilapidated condition, Rondon said the church has never been vandalised. The chairman said he has already solicited the help of the regional corporation, army and National Commission for Self-Help to demolish the structure once a determination is made on the churchs construction.

Rondon said when completed, the new church will be a smaller structure, able to seat 100 persons, with accommodation for a priests quarters.

He said the existing presbytery will also be demolished and replaced by a retaining wall to prevent further land slippage.

I am going at it full pace ahead on this project. All I am praying for is health and strength, he said.
Help for Venezuelan families

Pastor Calbert Mark of the Open Bible Venezuela, ITNAC, and Salt and Light Productions, a biblical theatre production team, have joined together on a drive to raise US$10,000 for Venezuelan families in need.

Mark, in a telephone interview with Sunday Newsday explained that they want to target families who are most in need. He explained that Open Bible has more than 18 churches and they help out both needy church members and people in communities.

Among the areas being targeted are Tucupita, Valencia, Anaco, Cuman?, San Felix and Ciudad Bolivar, where Mark is based.

Mark, who has been a pastor in Venezuela for 23 years, reported that the real crisis with the food shortages began two to three years ago. He said that people have to form long lines to get whatever they want, adding that not everyone is willing to do that and there are some people who purchase extra products to sell on the black market.

For example, he said, a product being sold legitimately for 100 bol?vares was being resold for 2,000 bol?vares on the black market.

For the current drive they plan to provide basic products such as rice, oil, meat, corn flour, macaroni and butter.

Last month this country sent 170 tonnes of food and toiletries via plane to Venezuela and was scheduled to send a further 600 tonnes via sea.

Asked about reports that Venezuelans were so desperate for food they were rummaging through garbage for foodstuff, Mark said that he had not seen that.

People getting things. He explained that most government workers do not have to line up for food because government arranges to have food distributed at their jobs.

People who have contact with government will get things. He pointed out that some government workers who attend his church bring whatever extra they have to the church and distributes it to those in real need.

People are surviving. I believe why they are surviving because they seeing the hand of God. If God hand was not on Venezuela things would have been worse. In spite of the crisis God has not forgotten his people.

A lot of people are turning to God. Once you turn to God he will never let you down. I believe the trial in Venezuela is for people to turn to God and to unite and stop being selfish. If we come together and stop being selfish and greedy we can come out of crisis.

People will survive if people unite and come together we can change things around, he stressed.

He said that prayer changes things and together with 100 other pastors they have been praying around the clock for Venezuela.

Peoples hearts are being touched and are willing to help each other. He said that once people call on God, He will make a way when there seems to be no way. Mark also compared himself to the biblical Joseph who assisted the Hebrews during a time of famine.

Whatever I get I see myself like Joseph for the people. How God used Joseph to have a strategy to help the people. He said there are people with access to goods but instead of sharing it they are selling it at black market prices. He pointed out that in contrast, needs are being met at his church because members are sharing with each other.

Those who selling black market need to stop. That will help a lot, he stressed.

ITNAC founder Avonelle Hector- Joseph said the group has been working in Venezuela for two months and have faced challenges because the government does not want to accept aid per se. She explained that they are now trying to find a way to circumvent the challenges and bring relief. She said the short term goal is for US$10,000 to assist 1,000 families.

Hector-Joseph explained that they would have liked to collect foodstuff and send to Venezuela via a boat, but there is no guarantee that it would reach the people and it may be confiscated.

On the reports of the food crisis she said that it was difficult to reconcile that this was the Venezuela which represented a place to go on vacation and shop for cheap products.

Its just a few miles away from us and we cannot ignore it, she stressed.

When disasters hit places like Haiti, Kenya and Chile, Hector- Joseph said ITNAC had sought funds to assist citizens there and have been generous with their giving. Sadly, with Venezuela, some people have made mean statements and blamed the people for their state.

People do not plan for this things to happen, whether political or otherwise. Today for them, tomorrow could be you, she stressed.

The population of Venezuela is 30.4 million, and while their combined efforts cannot reach all of them, Hector-Joseph said it could not be said that they cannot reach any of them.

On Trinidadians assisting Venezuelans through the drive, Mark expressed hope that God would touch peoples heart and they would have compassion to help.

He said they will have to pray to give Trinidadians a heart of compassion and noted that Jesus had a heart of compassion and was moved by the multitudes.

When people have a heart of compassion they will want to give, he opined.

Donations can be made via the ITNAC Republic Bank account # 510009446803. For more information please call 394-2042 or 742-1879 or email dexmus@ gmail.com.
Family honours

In an unusual move, Dr Jackie Sabga, wife of the incoming president Howard Sabga, asked for permission to address the gathering at this special time. Firstly about Rotary Club and then about my husband Howard, of whom I am very proud. And for the first time in the clubs nearly 60 year history, a wife was introducing her spouse to his fellow Rotarians.

Dr Sabga is a medical practitioner, chairman of the Trinidad & Tobago Cancer Society, chairman and medical director of Vitas House, Board member of the Palliative Care Society, a mother of two, and wife for 19 years to Howard Sabga, a Board member of the Young Mens Christian Association, of the Lady Hochoy Homes, and of United Way; and director of BCL group of companies and of Ansa Auto.

This organisation, as I understand, was formed around 1905 when a gentleman, Mr Paul Harris in Chicago decided to bring together three other like-minded colleagues on a regular basis to strengthen the bond of colleague- ship, morals, values, friendship, camaraderie, and service.

In a rapid fashion this organisation grew and became international.

Because good things travel far, The Rotary Club has maintained over the decades their commitment to humanitarian deeds, friendship and integrity. It is not then ironic or coincidental that my husband Howard fit right in here at this organisation.

About ten years ago I wrote my own eulogy, yes its odd, but the words arent...you see I described a man that fit the mould of an ideal Rotary president very well, so bear with me as I read a few lines. He is a real live version of the culmination of all that is great in life, the epitome of humble, loyal, loving, dedicated, inspiring , driven..

and I could go on and on, because there are no words to describe my husband. Howard taught me everything , and I mean everything.

I thought I loved deeply, he taught me to love more. I thought I had lifes lessons worked out, he taught me that every day is a lesson, and that every day we need to help people, and that every day we need to thank God for the day, and despite whatever we had as problems, they paled in comparison to other peoples.

He taught me that every day someones life should have been made better for having crossed our paths or we havent accomplished what we set out for in a day, he taught me the true meaning of selfless, because that is what he is -- all love and ever so selfless. He taught me that when I thought I had nothing left to give of myself, that by his love I could open up a reserve tank and give more. He taught me what an absolute privilege it is to stand beside someone in health, in sickness and adversity and in death, and he never lets me forget this! Service before self.

So you see, you have chosen well. Howard embodies the criterion of a true Rotarian. I wish him, his team and this organisation an incredible year. Thank you for allowing me these previous minutes. And yet another piece of history was written at the Rotary Port-of- Spains (PoS) 59th Hand Over Ceremony.

This time when outgoing president Daran Bahadoorsingh recognised his father Dr Krishna Bahadoorsingh, who had been president from 1975-1976 as a Paul Harris Fellow. Dr Bahadoorsingh, whose father, Jang, was the first generation in the club, joined in 1971 and resigned in 1978, only because the clubs Tuesday lunchtime meetings conflicted with his obligations as a Senator.

Daran  the third generation in the Rotary PoS-- said: It was my father who encouraged me into Rotary when I permanently returned to Trinidad 20 years ago, and Ive been a Rotarian ever since.

It is for his service, dedication and continuous contributions to the club over the years that I would like to ask him to join me and be recognised. Two other individuals were recognised as Paul Harris Fellows by the outgoing president -- Angelique Najjar, partner in service to past president and long standing Rotarian, Labib Najjar. Angelique has been very involved in the club over the years, welcoming us into their home on many occasions to hold Rotary related meetings or even fundraising events.

Angelique used to take it upon herself to call, round up and meet with the other partners in service and encourage them to get involved in our projects, providing assistance in which ever way they could. Having this kind of support is crucial to our continued success and we would like to send a message to the more recent partners that this sort of commitment needs to be revitalised and encouraged. It is for her dedication and help over the years that we would like to bestow this honour on Angelique, Daran said.

And Parasram Ramoutar, an international journalist for over 40 years who writes and broadcasts extensively for radio, television and newspapers here in TT , the region and beyond including India, with his focus being on the Indian diaspora here in the Caribbean was also recognised.

Daran said, Parasram attributes his educational and subsequent professional success to the opportunity Rotary afforded him. In 1970 via the Rotary Club of Port-of-Spain, he was granted a Rotary Foundation Educational Award for study at the Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, Canada, to study journalism. The rest as they say is history. It is now my pleasure to recognise this exemplary professional and product of Rotarys life changing work as a Paul Harris Fellow. The Paul Harris Fellow recognition, named after Paul Percy Harris, the Founder of Rotary International in 1905, acknowledges individuals who contribute or have contributions made in their name of US$1000 to The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International. Rotary clubs may honour individuals as Paul Harris Fellows who meet the high professional and personal standards set forth by Paul Harris.

It was established in 1957 to show appreciation for and encourage substantial contributions to what was then the foundations only programme, the Rotary Foundation Fellowships for Advanced Study, the precursor to Ambassadorial Scholarships. There are now well over a million Paul Harris Fellows across the world.
US: We See

No Signs

Putin Will

Use Dirty Bomb
(Newser)  Efraim Zuroff is the "most hated Jew in Lithuania," and proud of it. Zuroff, known as the last Nazi hunter, gained that reputation through his efforts to get Lithuania to "admit its complicity" in the Holocaust, he says. Collaborating with occupying Nazis, Lithuania killed 90%by some accounts moreof the 250,000 Jews who who lived in the country in 1941, including Zuroff's great-uncle. But still, "not a single Lithuanian sat one day in jail," Zuroff tells writer Stav Ziv. Writing in Newsweek, Ziv explores Zuroff's efforts to hold Lithuania accountable for its role in the Holocaust and tells the story of the unlikely partnership between Zuroff and Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite that resulted in the 2016 book, Our People: Journey With an Enemy. The book not only cemented Zuroff's "vile reputation in Lithuania" but also, "in some quarters  made Vanagaite the country's most despised daughter," Ziv writes.

Zuroffwho grew up in New York, but has lived in Israel for more than 40 yearsis seen as a "freelance Nazi hunter." He directs the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In some cases, he is able to bring war criminals to justice; other times he just exposes them or advocates for investigations. Sometimes collaborators stand trial but avoid conviction or punishment. Zuroff's critics say he is driven by his ego; and others say the time for prosecuting war criminals from the 1940smany dead or oldhas passed. But, he tells Ziv, "the passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers." The book, Our People, chronicles Zuroff and Vanagaite's 2015 road trip of Holocaust mass murder sites in Lithuania. He calls the journey "emotionally horrifying." She says of the book, I have lost already a couple of friends because  they think Im betraying my people, betraying my country." Read the whole story here. (Read more Holocaust stories.)
(Newser)  "If a Guest asks if we have gators in the water around Tom Sawyer's Island (or any other bodies of water), the correct and appropriate response is, 'Not that we know of, but if we see one, we will call Pest Management to have them removed.' Please do not say that we have seen them before." So read the sign in the employee break room at Walt Disney World, where 2-year-old Lane Graves was killed last month. "I was very offended by it and I was pretty vocal about it," says Disney employee Shannon Sullivan, who tweeted a photo of the signand promptly lost her job, reports the Orlando Sentinel.

Disney says it didn't authorize the sign, and quickly took it down. But "at this point it became my morals and my integrity and what I believe in," Sullivan says. "I thought if I lose my job because of that, it's worth it to me." Yet after the Sentinel asked Disney about her firing on Thursday, she magically had a job again Friday morning. (Just miles from where Lane died, Disney firefighters were feeding alligators.)
(Newser)  Turkey's justice minister says some 6,000 people have been detained in a government crackdown on alleged coup plotters and government opponents, reports the AP. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag says that "the cleansing (operation) is continuing. The number could surpass 6,000." Bozdag also said he was confident that the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed Gulen and his followers for the failed military coup on Friday night, but Gulen has denied any involvement in or knowledge. The US says it will look at any evidence Turkey has to offer against Gulen, and judge accordingly. Bozdag says "the United States would weaken itself by protecting him, it would harm its reputation. I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey."

The Turkish government has also issued dozens of arrest warrants for judges and prosecutors and detaining military officers. Already, three of the country's top generals have been detained, alongside hundreds of soldiers. The government has also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send conspirators to trial. The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities, ended hours later when loyal government forces including military and police regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan. At least 265 people were killed and over 1,400 were wounded. Government officials say at least 104 conspirators were killed. Still, the government crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions. Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure," said the director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute. "It will allow him to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before," he said. (Read more Turkey stories.)
(Newser)  A gunman entered a Florida hospital through the emergency room early Sunday, went to the third floor and fatally shot a patient and an employee apparently at random, reports the AP. David Owens, 29, entered Parrish Medical Center at 2am and used a handgun to fatally shoot 88-year-old patient Cynthia Zingsheim and employee Carrie Rouzer, 36, in Zingsheim's room, Titusville police said. Owens left the gun in the room and was tackled by two unarmed security guards as he left, police said. Authorities say they have found no motive for the shooting and no immediate connection between Owens and the women. All lived in Titusville.

The shooting "appears to be extremely random," Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said. Owens has been charged with two counts of murder. He is being held without bail at the Brevard County Jail. Court records show that in 2011 he was found guilty of battery on a police officer and that twice in 2012 a judge ordered him to undergo a mental health examination. Records show that other arrests for cocaine and marijuana possession and domestic battery were dismissed. No one answered the phone Sunday at the Brevard County public defender's office, and it could not be determined if Owens has an attorney. The hospital has reopened. Police are planning an afternoon press conference. (Read more shooting stories.)
(Newser)  French authorities have arrested two more peoplea man and a womanin connection with the Thursday terror attack in which Mohamed Lahaouaiej Bouhlel drove a large truck through Bastille Day crowds in Nice, France. The man, a 37-year-old, is suspected of giving weapons to Bouhlel, 31, who was shot and killed by police during the rampage, the Telegraph reports. Just before the attack, according to reports, Bouhlel sent a text that read: "Bring more weapons, bring five of them to C." In another text, he says: "I've got the material." The latest people arrested were described as an "Albanian couple," per the Telegraph. With the latest arrests, seven people have thus far been detained for having a possible link to the attack, the Washington Post reports, though Bouhlel's ex-wife was released Sunday.

As authorities in France investigate the third major terror attack in that country in 18 months, additional details have emerged. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls tells a French newspaper, "We now know that the killer was radicalized very quickly." The Los Angeles Times reports Bouhlel started frequenting a mosque just three months ago; prior to that, acquaintances say he did things that don't jibe with Muslim codes, like smoke pot and wear shorts. Footage from security cameras in Nice shows Bouhlel driving along the Promenade Des Anglais on the two days before the attack. Beaches in Nice have re-opened, per the Post, "creating a jarring contrast between the tourists frolicking in the gentle Mediterranean surf and the blood-stained pavement above." (Read more Nice, France stories.)
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Ankara:

Turkish authorities wrested back control of the country today, after crushing a military coup by discontented soldiers seeking to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that claimed more than 250 lives.



After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan triumphantly addressed thousands of supporters in his home Istanbul district after yesterdays chaos in the strategic NATO member of 80 million people.



The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric who is Erdogans arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid concerns over the extent of the retribution.



Turks woke up early today to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.



The situation is completely under control, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkeys top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.



Describing the attempted coup as a black stain on Turkeys democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.



General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters have been killed. Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters hopes.



During a night where power hung in the balance, large crowds of flag-waving supporters of Erdogans ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime.



We should keep on owning the streets tonight no matter at what stage (the coup attempt is) because a new flare-up could take place at any moment, Erdogan warned on Twitter on today.



Yesterdays putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul.



Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets.



Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd.



Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.



As protesters poured onto the streets, an AFP photographer saw troops open fire on people gathered near one of the bridges, leaving dozens wounded.



Soldiers also shot at protesters angrily denouncing the coup bid at Istanbuls iconic Taksim Square, injuring several.



There was chaos in the city as angry crowds jeered the passing tanks, with much smaller numbers welcoming the troops.



US President Barack Obama stressed the vital need for all parties to act within the rule of law as Turkey rounded up the coup plotters.



While condemning the coup bid, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the plotters had to be dealt with under the rule of law.



Turkeys General Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, has been detained while Alparslan Altan, one of 17 judges on the constitutional court, was taken into custody.



Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the coup bid.



Brothers, I must say that this is now being cleaned up, said Erdogan said in his speech in the district of Kizikli on the Asian side of Istanbul.



The presidents critics have long accused him of undermining modern Turkeys secular roots and of sliding into authoritarianismbut he was believed to have won control of the military after purging elements who opposed him.



Turkeys once-powerful military has long considered itself the guardian of the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.



It has staged three coups since 1960 and forced out an Islamic government in 1997.



Erdogan immediately pinned the blame on the parallel state and Pennsylvaniaa reference to Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him.



The United Statesyou must extradite that person, he said to cheers from the supporters.



But the presidents former ally categorically denied any involvement in the plot, calling the accusation insulting.



Yildirim took aim at the United States for hosting what he called the leader of a terrorist organisation.



Speaking in Luxembourg, US Secretary of State John Kerry invited Turkey to hand over any evidence it had against Gulen.



Meanwhile, Turkey demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.



And Istanbul authorities sought to get life back to normal with the bridges reopening to traffic and Ataturk International Airport -- shut down by the plotters gradually reopening.



But the US government said it has suspended all flights to Turkey, and banned all airlines from flying to the United States from Turkey due to uncertainty after the coup bid.



Turkish authorities also imposed a security lockdown at the Incirlik air base in the southern province of Adana used by US and other coalition forces in the fight against jihadists in Syria, the US consulate said.



The US military command in Europe has ordered American forces across Turkey to take maximum protective measures.

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Ankara:

Thousands took to the streets of Turkey in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after authorities crushed a military coup that claimed at least 265 lives. After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan triumphantly addressed flag-waving supporters in Istanbul following Fridays chaos in the strategic NATO member of 80 million people.

The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who is Erdogans arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.Turks woke up yesterday to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.

The situation is completely under control, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkeys top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.Describing the attempted coup as a black stain on Turkeys democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.

General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters has been killed. Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters hopes.During a night where power hung in the balance, supporters of Erdogans ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime.

Yesterday, thousands of jubilant supporters again mobilised in response to Erdogans call to fill Turkeys squares, massing in Taksim in central Istanbul, the presidents home district of Kisikli, Ankaras Kizilay Square and in the coastal city of Izmir, AFP correspondents said.

Fridays putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul.Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets.

Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd.Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.

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Itanagar:

Arunachal Pradeshs newly appointed Congress Chief Pema Khandu today took oath as chief minister. Governor Tathagata Roy administered the oath at the Raj Bhavan at noon.

Khandu had replaced Nabam Tuki as CLP chief on Friday to gain numbers to prove majority in the state assembly.

However, Governor on Saturday cancelled the floor test after Khandu reached Raj Bhavan along with 44 supporting MLAs to stake claim to form new government.

Earlier, Nabam Tuki submitted his resignation as CLP leader. Governor had rejected Tuki's plea to defer the floor test on Friday.

Tuki was reinstated as the Chief Minister by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

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Mumbai:

The Monsoon session of Maharashtra Legislature beginning here tomorrow, is likely to see opposition Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) training guns on "tainted" ministers in the Devendra Fadnavis Cabinet.

The session comes in the backdrop of resignation by then Revenue Minister Eknath Khadse after a string of allegations against him, including one regarding 'illegal' purchase of MIDC land in Pune.

The BJP-led government will miss Khadse's presence in Legislative Council, as being Leader of the House in Council then, Khadse managed to keep the opposition in check in the Upper House, with his experience, a Congress leader said.

The presence of aggressive Congress MLC and former Chief Minister Narayan Rane in the Council will add to the government's woes in the Upper House. It will also have to deal with Leader of Opposition in the Council, Dhananjay Munde, who was re-elected to the post recently.

The government will also have to face the opposition onslaught on issues of agrarian crisis, including relief measures during the recent drought in many parts of the state. Senior Congress and NCP leaders held a joint meeting recently, where leaders from both parties chalked out a strategy to raise various issues, including that of the "tainted" ministers, during the three-week long session.

"Whenever the issue of corruption came up, BJP always took the high moral ground. So I was surprised when (Chief Minister) Fadnavis inducted corrupt faces in his Cabinet. Most of the inducted ministers are facing grave corruption charges. BJP claims it is a party with a difference. But the induction of tainted ministers has exposed them," NCP spokesperson Nawab Malik said.

It will be difficult for the government to explain why was a leader of Khadse's stature asked to resign merely on the basis of allegations, he said. Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil alleged that Fadnavis was protecting corrupt ministers. "How will people get justice from these tainted ministers?" he asked.

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Washington:

The US has rejected accusations that it was behind the failed military coup attempt in Turkey and said such public insinuations are harmful to our bilateral relations. Secretary of State John Kerry called his Turkish counterpart yesterday to offer US support in the wake of a failed coup and protest claims that US had backed it.



Kerry made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations, State Department Spokesman John Kirby said.



During the call, Kerry reiterated US support for the democratically elected government in Turkey, for the rule of law and for the need for authorities to take all necessary precautions to safeguard civilian life and property as they respond to this attempted coup, he said.



Kerry also urged restraint by the Turkish government and respect for due processand its international obligations -- as it investigates and uncovers additional information about those involved, Kirby said.



Finally, both ministers discussed Turkeys importance as both a NATO ally and a key member of the coalition to defeat Daesh, and stressed the need to stay focused on ensuring operational support to those efforts continue unabated, he said.



Earlier, Turkeys labour minister Suleyman Soylu had reportedly suggested the United States was behind the revolt, which triggered fighting that left at least 265 dead.



Meanwhile in a travel advisory, the State Department warned US citizens of increased threats from terrorist groups throughout Turkey and to avoid travel to southeastern Turkey. In light of the July 15 coup attempt and its aftermath, we suggest US citizens reconsider travel to Turkey at this time, the travel advisory said.

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New Delhi:

In a bid to improve customer experience in the worlds second largest mobile market, telecom regulator Trai is planning to start consultation on quality benchmark for voice and data services in a fortnight.

According to sources, the regulators efforts to address the Quality of Service (QoS) norms is likely to come in the form of a consultation paper that would address both voice and data aspects. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) in its frequent call drop test found most operators fail to meet service quality benchmark.

At present, the tolerance limit for call drops is 2 per cent which means 98 per cent calls made on a network in a quarter should be completed and not get disconnected automatically.

Telecom operators have contested the tests and said they are compliant to benchmark at overall circle level and that Trais test does not give correct picture of their network performance.

Though the sources did not disclose further details, Trai Chairman R S Sharma had earlier said the regulator will look at monitoring network performance at tower level for which a system is in the works.

With regard to data services, Trai had, earlier this month, launched an application to help consumers check real-time Internet speed on their handsets and report the same to the regulator. Trai will leverage the data collected from subscribers to fix new QoS norms for data services.

Trai, while launching the application, had said telecom operators claim they cannot guarantee minimum speed as Law of Physics does not allow them to do so.

In 2014, Trai had issued norms under which it asked the operators to indicate minimum download speed that can be provided to consumers.
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi today implored all opposition parties to support the passage of crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill in the monsoon session of Parliament that starts tomorrow. The meeting was the last ditch effort to ensure smooth proceedings of the upcoming session as opposition is expected to block the reform.

"GST is of national importance. Issue is not which government gets credit. Important Bills, including GST will be taken up in the monsoon session and I hope for meaningful discussions and outcomes," he said at the all-party meeting called by the government.

"All of us represent both the people and parties and let's keep national interests above everything else," he added.

Prime Minister Modis appeal was followed by discussions between government representatives and leaders from main opposition party Congress. GST bill, which promises to revolutionise Indias tax regime, has already found support amongst West Bengals Trinamool Congress and Bihars Janta Dal United-led Government.

The tax reform, biggest since independence, aims to replace a slew of central taxes and levies in 29 states, transforming the nation of 1.2 billion people into a customs union.

Starting from tomorrow, the monsoon session will have 20 working days and will conclude on August 12. A total of 25 bills including crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill are expected to come up for passing and consideration during the session.

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New Delhi:

The Opposition would seek to corner the government for its attempts to destabilise states ruled by it and the Kashmir unrest in Parliament, but also offer merit-based support to measures like the GST Bill which Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said was of national importance.

At an all-party meeting here a day ahead of the Monsoon Session from tomorrow, leaders of several opposition parties spoke of developments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand signalling their intent to train guns on the government, with Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad saying the states no longer trusted the BJP-led government at the Centre.

Modi, who joined the meeting later, thanked all parties for speaking in one voice on the developments in Kashmir and sought their support in the passage of the GST bill, saying it was of national importance and urging them to keep national interests above everything else, sources said.Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar told reporters after the two-hour meeting that Parliament was a mahapanchayat where all issues could be raised.

He said the government will talk to all parties to evolve a consensus on the GST.

Our legislative business, including GST, is a priority. We want to see to that we pass the GST bill with consensus. We are going to take every party on board, he said.

Kumar downplayed the attacks of Congress, the Left and some other parties on the government over the Arunachal issue, saying different issues can be debated.

We have assured all parties that there will be open-mindedness and we are ready to discuss all issues, he said.

Speaking to reporters, Azad accused the government of using all tricks to destabilise opposition-ruled governments and took potshots at Modi over his talk of cooperation between the Centre and states by pointing out that even a BJP ally like Akali Dal has attacked it over undermining states.

Though he did not refer to GST directly, he said the Congress will offer support to bills on merit.We have not taken any decision that we have to stop a bill. We will support on merit. We will support any bill which is in support of people, progress and growth, he said.

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Kolkata:

As embattled Congress MLA Manas Bhuniya refused to resign as PAC chairman despite pleas by his party colleagues, the state Congress leadership has decided to approach the high command to look into the matter and take suitable action.

The party MPs and state Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury, who would be in Delhi for the monsoon session of parliament starting tomorrow, will urge the high command to take appropriate action against such anti-party activity, a senior Congress leader said on the condition of anonymity. Indiscipline should not be tolerated in the party, he said.

The leader said the high command was aware of the pleas as well as a resolution adopted by 39 Congress MLAs appealing Bhuniya not to step into the trap of the TMC and resign from the post.

In an apparent warning to Bhuniya, state Congress chief Adhir Chowdhury on Friday had said he would not tolerate any indiscipline in the party.

Lashing out at both Chowdhury and Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Abdul Mannan for conspiring against him and humiliating him, Bhuniya had advised Chowdhury to keep calm and let him work as PAC chairman for one year.

Bhuniya alleged that Mannan had deliberately misguided the party and that he and Adhir were trying to project him as an anti-party activist.

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New Delhi :

Indian Journalists Union (IJU) takes out protests against the alleged clampdown on media in Kashmir Valley.

In a statement issued here today, IJU President S N Sinha, its Secretary-General Amar Devulapalli, International Federation of Journalists Vice-President Sabina Inderjit and Press Council of India members K Amarnath and Prabhat Dash, said that prohibiting publication of newspapers and confiscation of printed copies was illegal and unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court had ruled that prevention of printing and distribution of newspapers amounted to pre-censorship.

Local newspapers failed to hit the stands for the second consecutive day today in curfew-bound Kashmir. No dailies English, Urdu and Kashmiriwere available as the newspaper- owners decided not to publish them after authorities yesterday allegedly raided some media houses and seized their printed copies.

The J&K Police action in name of volatile situation in the Valley is an attack on the freedom of the media and unacceptable in a democracy..., The IJU demands that the police should desist from such illegal and unconstitutional actions immediately and allow the press to function unhindered, the IJU statement said.

The IJU has already written to Chairman of Press Council of India, Justice (retd) C K Prasad, to take suo motu cognisance of the illegal action of the state police and initiate suitable action to protect the freedom of the press.

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Amritsar:

Mild tremors were felt here and at a few adjoining areas in Punjab today, officials said. The tremors were felt at 5:24 PM. However, there was no immediate report of loss of life or property, they said.

However there were no reports of any casualties or damage. Intensity of tremors was light.

Light tremors were also felt in some parts of South Gujarat. According to the Met Department, the tremors were felt at 9:24 am. The epicenter of the earthquake was 14 km from Surat city. No damage was reported.

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Lahore:

A Pakistani cleric, who got suspended from the membership of a top religious body after selfies with Qandeel Baloch, the Internet sensation murdered by her brother in a case of honour killing, today said the incident is a lesson for others.

Those who intend to or humiliate clerics must learn from Qandeel Balochs fate, Mufti Abdul Qawi said. Qawi was last month embroiled in a scandal with Qandeel after she uploaded her pictures with him during a meeting.

Qandeel, 26, was killed yesterday by her brother for what he said was dishonouring the family by posting risque videos and posts on Facebook.

Reacting on the killing of social media celebrity, Qawi, who was suspended from governments Ruet-e-Hilal Committee membership following the selfie controversy with Qandeel, said: Those who have humiliated clerics must seek repentance and should ask forgiveness from clerics as well as Almighty Allah.

I had forgiven Qandeel for what she had done against me. I have never had any hatred for her, he told Express Tribune newspaper. Qandeel had ridiculed Qawi on various TV channels and tried to imply that he was crazy about herself.

Qawi said: I had met Qandeel in an effort to bring her the path of righteousness. I was asked by some people why you met Qandeel. I told them we should hate sin but not a sinner.

The cleric further said: People should realise that religious clerics are the pious face of Islam and they should not dare to play with their reputation or try to malign them otherwise they will face the curse of God.

I had convinced Qandeel to repent on her sins and asked her to come towards the right path. I had even offered her a marriage proposal in her new life, Qawi said.

Qandeel had received threats from the supporters of Mufti Qawi for allegedly trying to disgrace him. Following that she had requested security from the interior ministry which she was denied.

Meanwhile, members of the civil society today held a demonstration at Liberty Chowk Lahore and condemned her killing.

Demonstrators raised slogans like Stop Violence against Women. Some of the slogans read: We Failed You Qandeel, No Country for Bold Women, No Honour in Killing.

The protesters demanded exemplary punishment for the killer, action by the media regulatory authority against TV channels who assassinated her character and posthumously disrespected her by broadcasting images of her body.

Awami Workers Party General Secretary Farooq Tariq said Qandeel joined thousands of women in Pakistan and around the world who were raped, mutilated and murdered by men.

He said Qandeel was punished for transgressing the norms that were fundamental to a patriarchal order. Some 1,100 women were killed in Pakistan last year in the name of honour.

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Istanbul:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan broke down in tears while speaking at the funeral of an old friend in Istanbul killed during the coup, images from Turkish television showed.

Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son were shot dead on the Bosphorous bridge in the city during Fridays attempted coup.

They had been on the bridge to protest against the putsch launched by a group within the military, according to local media.

Erdogan told the crowd of hundreds chanting Allahu akbar, God is greatest: Erol was an old friend of mine.

Unable to control his tears, Erdogan then said: I cannot speak any further. Condolences to our nation. He concluded: May God have mercy on your soul. Olcak had worked with Erdogan and the ruling Justice and

Development Party (AKP) and had been described as masterminding Erdogans presidential campaign in 2014 by Turkish media.

The ceremony on the Asian side of the city was also attended by Ahmet Davutoglu, the former prime minister.

Earlier in the day, Erdogan attended the funerals of other victims in Fatih mosque. In total, 161 civilians and regular troops were killed, according to government figures. The military said another 104 coup plotters were also killed.

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Aleppo:

Opposition-controlled parts of Syrias battered northern city Aleppo came under total siege on Sunday, after government forces severed the last route out of the east.

An estimated 300,000 civilians live in rebel-held neighbourhoods of Syrias second city, the UN says, and there are fears that they could face starvation.

The rebels have failed to thwart a major Russian-backed army offensive around Aleppo, which has been devastated by Syrias five-year conflict. On Sunday, regime fighters descended on the Castello Road and fully cut it, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The eastern neighbourhoods are now completely besieged, he told AFP.

The Observatory also reported that five civilians were killed today in regime air strikes on the rebel-held neighbourhood of Al-Maysar while 16 rebel fighters died in the regime advance on Aleppo.

The city is divided roughly between government control in the west and rebel control in the east. The Castello Road had been used by rebels but also by shopkeepers bringing in produce for residents and by villagers visiting relatives in the city.

Aleppo is now 100-percent besieged, one rebel from the Aleppo Revolutionaries group told AFP. He said the army had reached the road and was setting up sandbag barriers.

Facebook pages run by Aleppo-based activists urged civilians to stay away from the route to avoid being arrested or wounded.

Sieges by both the regime and its opponents have had a devastating impact on other areas of Syria, including the town of Madaya where aid groups say dozens of people have died from starvation and malnutrition.

The United Nations says that nearly 600,000 people are living under siege in Syria, most of them surrounded by government forces. Eastern Aleppo has not been designated by the UN as besieged, but residents complain of food shortages and shopkeepers have begun rationing their products.

A leading opposition group warned last week that hundreds of thousands of civilians in the city were at risk if the Castello Road was cut.

Anas al-Abdeh, head of the Istanbul-based opposition National Coalition, said his group feared that if the Castello route is totally cut off, more than 300,000 civilians will starve.

Fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have tried over the past two years to cut the strategic road as part of a campaign to retake all of Aleppo.

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Mumbai:

Opposition parties on Sunday boycotted the customary tea party hosted by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on the eve of beginning of the monsoon session of state Legislature over the gang-rape and murder of a minor girl in Ahmednagar district.

While the Leader of Opposition in Legislative Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil demanded resignation of Fadnavis, who heads Home ministry, on moral grounds over the incident, the Leader of Opposition in Legislative Council Dhananjay Munde asked for a high-level inquiry into the incident.

We have a chief minister who also holds Home portfolio. He refuses to acknowledge that law and order situation in the state is deteriorating under his tenure. He did not even have time to go and visit the bereaved family. He should immediately take moral responsibility and resign, Vikhe Patil said.

Alleging laxity on the part of police officials in arresting the accused, the NCP leader Munde sought fast track hearing of the case and capital punishment for the accused.

The 15-year-old girl was brutally raped and murdered allegedly by three men in Kopardi village on Wednesday. All the accused have been arrested by police.

Appearing unfazed Fadnavis said he had never seen an Opposition without any issues. Slamming the Congress and NCP for the criticism over the rising price of Tur dal, he said the Opposition did not read the governments proposed Price Control Order (PCO), which he said specifically mentions that the maximum price of Tur dal shall not exceed Rs 120 per kg.

Earlier, there has been 125 per cent increase in area under sowing of pulses, cereals and oilseeds. The government will distribute Tur dal to the poor under BPL category through ration card, Fadnavis told reporters at Sahyadri state guest house here.

He evaded a direct reply on his war of words with Rural Development Minister Pankaja Munde who was recently divested of Water Conservation portfolio in a cabinet rejig.

We both know how to use twitter, he said. Munde, sulking after the portfolio was taken out fromher by Fadnavis, had refused to participate in a global water leaders meet in Singapore by virtue of not being Water Conservation Minister anymore. In his tweet, Fadnavis had prodded Munde to attend the event.

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It can be frightening to realize that others will treat your bright idea as exactly what it is: just an idea. No one pays a dime for a great idea. Plenty of people are willing to put their money down for a tested and proven solution to humankind's problems. This is a more complex way to say "something that can make money."

Whether you're a first-time inventor or an entrepreneur who's tasted failure more than once, you know it takes confidence to show others your startup's rough sketch. While I won't tell you why you shouldn't pitch your bare-bones concept, I can offer several ways to make your idea more acceptable to potential investors and customers.

Related: 4 Tips to Help Turn Your Big Idea Into an Actual Product

1. Put it in numbers.

Numbers will convert more people than an hour of a perfect sermon. Here's what I mean:

"There's $70 billion trapped in waste in Africa. Our startup aims to recycle that into cash." This sounds more appealing to prospective investors than, "We want to clean the streets of Nigeria."

The typical investor itches to hear how much she or he will get in return for each dollar committed. Not everyone you approach will ask you the question outright. But the most successful fundraising startups know to tell investors just want they need to hear.

When you think about how to sell your idea, use figures -- attractive and honest ones at that -- to convey your message.

2. Present the problem first.

Most people won't act unless they have a sense of imminent danger. Simply telling them how cool your startup idea is won't stir them into disrupting the status quo.

Suppose your big idea is an app that gets more people to read than to binge on Netflix. Telling investors that your app will interrupt people's movie sessions every 30 minutes and encourage them to study might not win your case. This tactic might: Show them the future generation's potential to lead us into recession because they failed to take important economic studies seriously.

A problem-tackling approach to marketing relies on the fundamental belief that the customer will buy if the problem is painful enough. You can use this same technique to win over investors and advocates for your startup idea.

Related: More than Money: 4 Tips to Find the Right Investor for Your Startup

3. Give it a great name.

Your brand starts with a title. Naming your idea shows you're serious about the work. Don't let your idea get stuck behind a terrible name. If your idea sounds like a joke to investors, it's probably because the name didn't give you a head start.

Most aspiring entrepreneurs take this aspect very lightly. They think their incredible idea should be able to stand on its own. But this stage could be the most vital for your future's startup.

Related: What's in a Name? In Branding, Pretty Much Everything

4. Develop a road map.

Don't pitch your idea to investors without tracing a road map on your hand. Don't laugh: Nothing's worse than blankly staring into space when this issue pops up during your pitch.

A well-thought-out growth strategy, including a sound marketing approach will sway investors. Your road map should outline the steps you'll take in the following stages, identifying potential obstacles and how you intend to overcome them.

Ideation: If you're shopping for investors, you've already passed this stage. You might need to retrace your steps to this early phase if your potential investors have a justifiable reason for passing on your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Pitching: Your internal strategy should describe how you'll evaluate leads to find the right investors. Pitching your idea to the wrong investors will broadcast that you've started on a wrong footing.

Funding: Take your fundraising strategy very seriously. Let investors see that even if they say "no," you have a realistic plan to raise the needed capital for your brilliant idea.

Prototype: Once you secure funding, how long will it take you to develop the first prototype? You should be able to present a feasible timeline that investors can work with.

Marketing strategy: Without this component in place, don't bother sweating the rest. Most investors won't back a startup without a compelling story and a plan for sharing it -- and that includes an online marketing strategy.

Revenue model: Investors want to see how you intend to recover their money and build on that collateral many times over.

Exit strategy: Even the most brilliant ideas fail. While you might see giving up control of your idea as the last option, investors need to know there's a contingency plan if you fail to save your company. That might be an IPO, an outright sale or something else.

Related:



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
TORONTO, July 15, 2016 /CNW/ - Restaurant owners are bracing for higher prices for cheese, yogurt, ice cream and butter with today's news that industrial milk prices will rise by another 2.76% on Sept. 1. This is the second price increase in seven months and comes on top of a 2.2% increase that took effect Feb. 1, 2016.

"Continually jacking up prices for restaurant owners and consumers is not a long-term solution when Canadians are already paying among the highest prices in the world for dairy products," says Pierre Cadieux, Restaurants Canada's Vice President Federal/Quebec. "Cheese is being priced off the menu and another price increase is only going to further drive down demand."

Representing an industry that buys $2.7 billion worth of dairy products a year, Restaurants Canada is pushing for long-term solutions to the problems created by Canada's outdated supply management system.

"We understand concerns around producer margins, but we need solutions that will increase volumes rather than always increasing prices," says Cadieux. "Today's announcement is yet another indicator that the current system is not working for producers or end users."

The increase was announced late this afternoon by the Canadian Dairy Commission.

Restaurants Canada (formerly the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association) is a growing community of 30,000 foodservice businesses, including restaurants, bars, caterers, institutions and suppliers. We connect our members from coast to coast, through services, research and advocacy for a strong and vibrant restaurant industry. Canada's restaurant industry directly employs 1.2 million Canadians, is the number one source of first jobs, and serves 18 million customers every day.

SOURCE Restaurants Canada

For further information: Media Contact: Pierre Cadieux, VP Federal/Quebec, cell 613-325-3298 or [email protected]; Jill Holroyd, SVP Communications and Research, 1-800-387-5649 ext. 4217, or [email protected]
The anti-corruption agenda of President Muhammadu Buharis administration has earned him popularity among the international community, the...

The anti-corruption agenda of President Muhammadu Buharis administration has earned him popularity among the international community, the Ambassador of France to Nigeria, Denis Guaer, has observed.Guaer in Abuja said that the determination of Buhari to fight corruption had been historical and commendable.Buhari presented the fight against corruption as his main priority objective and I think it is probably the main reason why he was elected. It is also the reason why he has become immediately so popular also abroad within the international community.Everybody is thinking this president is really willing this time to confront the problem of corruption. I think Buhari is really trying and trying very hard; it appears to me as a historical effort to fight corruption.Guaer also decried the humanitarian crisis caused by Boko Haram insurgency in the north-eastern part of the country, saying the insurgency was partly due to corruption.This brings us back to the question of corruption also. In the whole northern part of Nigeria, public services are in a very bad shape.Education and healthcare are in very bad shape and this is a problem of governance; resources have to be rededicated to restore public services in the whole northern Nigeria.That is difficult now because unfortunately the revenues of Nigeria are down because of the oil price and destruction of oil pipelines, he said.He expressed concerned about reports that people were starving in Internally Displaced Persons camps, saying the whole international community must come to the aid of Nigeria.Concerning France, we are financing some humanitarian aid programmes with the International Organisation of Migration, International Committee of the Red Cross, Action Against Hunger and Doctors Without Borders.So we are bringing in some humanitarian aids bilaterally directly and also through the European Union.The main aid goes through the European Union, which is the main financier internationally for humanitarian aid, he said.
Istanbuls most senior soldier has been charged with treason as eight leading members of the plot to overthrow the government fled to Gre...

Istanbuls most senior soldier has been charged with treason as eight leading members of the plot to overthrow the government fled to Greece.General Erdal Ozturk who commanded the Third Army Corps has been detained and is facing treason charges for his role in the aborted coup.His men attempted to seize strategic locations across Istanbul last night when they were confronted by thousands of unarmed civilians who came out in support of President Recep Erdogan.Erdogan has suggested the ringleaders could face the death penalty even though Turkey abolished capital punishment as part of its attempts to join the European Union.Turkish officials have said 161 civilians have killed and 1,440 wounded.Almost 2,900 troops have been arrested, including at least two generals.Eight soldiers landed in Alexandroupolis today and tried to claim asylum in the EU state, after a coup in neigbouring Turkey that left more than 250 people dead.Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu immediately demanded that the captain, two majors and five privates were returned immediately to Turkey where they would face punishment.Two majors, a captain and five privates have landed in the EU nation in a military helicopter today, according to Turkish Dogan news agencyGreece claimed it would have to consider international laws before returning them, although it promised to send the helicopter back.However, Mevlut Cavusoglu has said that Greece has now promised to return the treacherous soldiers to be punished in Turkey.The news comes after Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildrim said the nation would consider bringing back the death penalty to deal with them, after it was abolished in 2004.The blackhawk helicopter landed in Greece today after a night of violence in Istanbul, where more than 1,500 people were injured.Some 104 plotters were killed, while more than 200 people  at least 41 of them police officers and 47 civilians  fell as martyrs.Footage shows Greek officials leading the men out in handcuffs after they were arrested for illegal entry into Greece.A spokeswoman for Greece, Olga Gerovasili, today said that they are in contact with Turkish authorities and will arrange the return of the military helicopter as soon as possible.As for the eight military passengers, she said: We will follow the procedures of international law.However, we give very serious considerations to the fact that (the Turkish military men) are accused, in their country, of violating the constitutional order and trying to overthrow democracy.Greek police say that the eight arrested Turks include two majors, four captains and two sergeants first class.This differs from Turkish sources that said they were two majors, a captain sand five privates.Last night, the army had told people to stay indoors so that they could depose President Erdogan, but they were met by civilians who confronted them, defending the government.Ordinary Turks confronted rifle-wielding soldiers, climbed atop tanks and laid in front of military vehicles in an effort to take back control of the country.President Erdogan called on people to take to the streets, leading to reports of groups of soldiers surrendering at several key locations in Ankara and Istanbul, including Bosphorus Bridge.(Reuters)
Controversial senator, Dino Melaye, on Saturday flew to Lagos, and later posted photographs of himself walking freely on Bourdillion Ro...

Dino on bourdillon street in lagos now,walking down the street. Waiting for noise makers. Eyin da? pic.twitter.com/KspMeB8Ox6 July 16, 2016

Controversial senator, Dino Melaye, on Saturday flew to Lagos, and later posted photographs of himself walking freely on Bourdillion Road where former Lagos Governor Bola Tinubu lives.Mr. Melaye posed for photographs with a street sign indicating his location to be Bourdillion Street in the upscale Ikoyi area of Lagos.The photographs, posted on the senators social media pages, was accompanied with a message, saying Eru Obodo (the river is never afraid of those swimming in it).Mr. Melayes trip to the nations commercial capital and his actions in the city, appeared to have been calculated to dare Mr. Tinubu, perhaps the nations most powerful politician.The senator had on Tuesday clashed with Mr. Tinubus senator wife, Remi, telling her he was not afraid of her husband and could beat her up without any repercussions.Mr. Melaye said he hit back at Mrs. Tinubu after she called him a dog and a thug.Senators, who witnessed the dirty clash, hinted that Mr. Melaye threatened to beat and impregnate Mrs. Tinubu and that nothing would happen.But on Thursday, Mr. Melaye said he did not threaten to impregnate Mrs. Tinubu because she has already arrived menopause.Mr. Tinubus spokesperson, Sunday Dare, on Wednesday dared Mr. Melaye to beat Mrs Tinubu and wait for the consequences. He described the Kogi West Senator as a disgrace to the Senate.But on Saturday, Mr. Melaye announced his journey to Lagos via his Facebook account.Through his updates, he suggested he had received threats not to enter Lagos and doing so on Saturday was a daring move by him.In the first picture he uploaded, he indicated he had just arrived Lagos. He was pictured, clad in white attire, moving around the Murtala Mohammed International Airport.Just landed in Lagos, he captioned the photo, adding, waiting for those who said I should not enter Eko.Then, he posed for another picture in which he beamed with smiles at the arrival lounge of the airport.In Lasgidi. Eru o bodo (a river is never afraid of the swimmer), he said.Melaye walking freeMr. Melaye had on Thursday said he reacted furiously to Mrs Tinubus insult because he was not a coward.He later moved to Bourdillion Road, saying, This is Dino walking freely on Bourdillion in Lagos. I walk down the street right now.Referring to those he suggested threatened him not to come to Lagos, he added, eyin da (where are you)?He also posted another photograph of himself again walking on the pedestrian lane of Bourdillion Road, and wrote, Agba Akin kin so jo (the warrior entertains no fear).
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has questioned the Director General and 24 other officials of a Federal Government parastat...

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has questioned the Director General and 24 other officials of a Federal Government parastatal under the Foreign Affairs Ministry over the questionable withdrawal of the sum of $219,000.00 (about N66 million) from the account of the Nigerian Technical Cooperation Fund, NTCF.The money, which was meant to provide some development projects for some African countries in the 2013 fiscal year, is jointly managed by the African Development Bank and the NTCF and domiciled in the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.It was learnt that the head of the parastatal, who is from Borno State, connived with 24 other Nigerian officials in the parastatal and illegally siphoned the amount for personal use, thereby triggering petitions to the EFCC from aggrieved insider staff of the agency. Based on the series of petitions fired by insiders, the EFCC immediately dispatched operatives, who posed as auditors and spend days to scrutinise the accounts of the agency. It was clear to use that the money in question had been withdrawn by the officials but what we want to know is on what the money was used for, one of the sources close to the investigation, told our correspondent in Abuja.Having established a prima facie case of illegal withdrawal, we invited the DG and the 24 staff and they were interrogated between Tuesday and Thursday and all of them made useful statements to the commission. They were all admitted to administrative bail having accepted to refund the money to the last kobo and we have asked them to report back on Thursday, an EFCC source confirmed last night.It was however gathered that some influential politicians from Borno State, where the DG hails from, have attempted to prevail on the EFCC to tamper justice with mercy and grant the man what they term soft landing.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti State has described Governor Ayodele Fayoses call on the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahi...





The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti State has described Governor Ayodele Fayoses call on the Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to arrest the partys Chairman, Olajide Awe, as a deliberate plot to distract the attention of Ekiti people from various criminal allegations against the governor as he battles credibility crisis occasioned by EFCC dragnet that has exposed him as unworthy leader.Publicity Secretary, Taiwo Olatunbosun, said in a statement on Sunday in Ado-Ekiti that the party would have kept quiet over the governors call, but decided to react for the purpose of the innocent public who had become victims of Fayoses unconscionable mischief to get away with his many misdeeds.Arguing that several of APC members listed for arrest were victims of trumped-up charges to take them out of circulation, Olatunbosun said of interest was Awe, who was not in his town on the day that violence that led to the death one man erupted.This is the same way Sola Adenijo, Olanbiwonnu Metilo, Niyi Adedipe and several others were implicated over Omolafe Aderiyes murder and they are still in jail over offences they knew nothing about just because Fayose had the support of President Goodluck Jonathans lawless administration to brutalise the opposition in Ekiti State.The personal assistant to the late Omolafe, Gbolahan Okeowo, had since approached the court, swearing to an affidavit that he was forced by Fayoses Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Ajayi Owoseni; and media aide, Lere Olayinka, to implicate the innocent men in the murder of his boss, Olatunbosun explained. He urged the governor to disband his alleged killer squad and submit members for prosecution over alleged crimes they committed.Berating the governor for the hasty manner he urged the police to arrest APC members, Olatunbosun said his action could not be unconnected with reports that he was manipulating other murder cases involving him in courts to get a clean bill from all murder allegations in order to justify trials of APC members over false accusation of murder.The APCs spokesman reminded Fayose that all the cases he listed in his letter to the IGP were already in court, while some of the accused had been granted bail.Accusing the governor of mischief to cover his tracks, Olatunbosun said:It is evidently clear that Fayose is trying to cover something, but we are assuring him that no matter how much he tries, the long arms of the law will catch up with him and his team of criminals.He is jittery and afraid of his pending doom resulting from his alleged involvement in serial killings across the state. Fayose is looking for cheap distraction now that APC is asking for prosecution of his partners in crime, particularly the criminals in his government.We also wish to remind Fayose that it is high time he handed over for prosecution, his thugs quartered in the government house on whom many petitions have been written for shooting and maiming members of the opposition.The governor should note that it is not going to be business as usual as he cannot cow or blackmail the Nigeria police after he cowed the judiciary and legislative arms of government to submission in the state with the active connivance of the last PDP-led Federal Government.
Fire has razed down no fewer than 44 shops at the popular Farm Centre GSM market in Kano metropolis on Friday. Eyewitness and one of th...

Fire has razed down no fewer than 44 shops at the popular Farm Centre GSM market in Kano metropolis on Friday.Eyewitness and one of the shop owners told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Kano yesterday that the incident happened around 5:30p.m. when most of the traders had closed for business.According to the witness, the fire which destroyed phones and other valuables worth millions of Naira, was said to have been caused by a spark from a converter supplying power to some of the shops. The source said though no life was lost, no fewer than 44 shops were destroyed by the inferno.When contacted, the Director of the state Fire Service, Alhaji Mustapha Rulwan, confirmed the incident.He said a total of 44 wooden shops were razed by the inferno.We received distress call around 5: 20pm and we immediately mobilised our personnel to the area.
Nigeria's Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, and his ministry has been sued by the Socio-Economic Rights Accountability Project, S...

Nigeria's Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, and his ministry has been sued by the Socio-Economic Rights Accountability Project, SERAP, for failing to reveal the names of the country's treasury looters.A number of weeks ago, the Minister issued a statement which reveals the amount of money the Nigerian government had recovered from treasury looters, but failed to name the culprits.SERAP sued Lai Mohammed after sending a Freedom of Information request to him to release the names of the looters, which he ignored.In the suit filed filed at the Federal High Court, Ikoyi on Friday, SERAP said it wants Mohammed "to widely disseminate, including on a dedicated website, information about the names of high ranking public officials from whom public funds were recovered since May 2015, and the circumstances under which stolen public funds were returned."No date has been fixed for the hearing of the suit.
Suspected Niger Delta militants invaded the palace of Goriola Oseni, the Oniba of Iba, in Iba local council development area of Lagos stat...

Suspected Niger Delta militants invaded the palace of Goriola Oseni, the Oniba of Iba, in Iba local council development area of Lagos state on Saturday and abducted the monarch after shooting one of his wives and killing a guard.According to the eldest wife of the king, the incident happened as Oseni was about having dinner around 8pm.She said they were together in one of the rooms when they heard noise from the sitting room.Thinking it was the children who were playing, the woman, who was simply identified as Alhaja, said she went to caution them only to see strange faces.I was in the room with the King. He wanted to eat but decided to take his bath first, she said.Suddenly, we started hearing noise from the living room, and it was the children who were there watching television. So, he said can I hear that the children have started with their noise again? As we came out to caution them, we were confronted with strange faces.The woman said the strangers inside the living room were four, adding that she later discovered that others had surrounded the compound.She explained that the attackers, who were communicating in Pidgin English, tried to identify their target.She said they moved close to him and asked: Na u b the king abi? U b the king no be so?After being convinced that, that was the person they were after, they reportedly grabbed him in the attempt to whisk him away.Alhaja said she resisted by holding the trousers of two of the kidnappers, and not even the shots they released into the air, would make her loosen her grip, until one of them hit her hard.The tallest among them hit me on the face, and barked: U b witch?. At that point, I let go of their trousers, and started pleading with them not to harm him. They forcefully dragged him away.The only things that the militants reportedly left with were four phones belonging to their victim.Sunday Okanlawon, the security guard on duty, was said to have been shot dead during the operation. One of Osenis wives was also shot, but unlike Okanlawon, the woman is said to be recuperating in hospital.People thronged the palace to sympathise with the family of the monarch.Security personnel also mounted strategic places in the community, which had people in groups discussing in hushed tones.Speaking to TheCable, a middle aged man, who refused to disclose his identity, said the incident left everyone in shock.This is strange, really strange. I am an indigene of this town. I have lived here all my life. I am still in shock over what happened last night, he said.This is an abomination. To abduct a whole king from the palace? The only problem we usually have in Iba is cultism, and maybe sometimes robbery, and the king abhors such. He usually advises the youths of the community to shun violence We have been hearing of the activities of militants in some surrounding communities, but we didnt expect them to take this dimension. These people are calling for war.Commenting on the incident, Dolapo Badmos, police public relations officer (PPRO) in Lagos, said efforts were in place to secure the release of the monarch.She said militants, who have been displaced in pipeline vandalism, have taken to kidnapping, but that security agencies will not allow them make life unbearable for the citizens.Badmos said many suspects have been arrested, saying the Lagos command of the police is collaborating with its Ogun counterpart to check the activities of militants.This is a new trend being employed by the hoodlums who are originally pipeline vandals tagged militants, she told TheCable.Its because their vandalism activities have been curtailed that they resorted to using targets mode of kidnapping. The command has been arresting them and rescuing victims. The latest case will not be different.The command is liasing with our Ogun state counterpart to ensure we put an end to this menace.Lately, militants have raiding south-west communities surrounded by water.Many residents in Ikorodu have fled as a result of activities of the dissidents who operate unchecked.
Few days after a female pastor in the Redeem Christian Church of God, Eunice Olawale, was brutally killed by suspected Muslim extremist...

Few days after a female pastor in the Redeem Christian Church of God, Eunice Olawale, was brutally killed by suspected Muslim extremists, a group of another Muslim youths on Friday attacked St. Philips Catholic Parish, Baki Iku, close to Zuma Rock in Niger State.Information gathered from eyewitnesses said, they were destroying the Church properties: the doors and the windows. Some soldiers managed to get there later but a lot of harms have been done to the building, while the Christians ran away in different directions to avoid being killed.It should be recalled that Alhaji Kabiru Sokoto had on Christmas day four years ago (December 25 20111) detonated a bomb that killed over 200 Catholics and passersby at St. Theresa Catholic Church, Madalla, close to St. Philips that was destroyed. Rev Fr. Luka Sylvester Gopep, the Vicar-General of the Diocese confirmed the incident.He said, "Sometime around 2pm, some Muslim youths in their hundreds left their Mosque after their Friday Jumat prayer and rushed to the Church premises, climbed the wall and destroyed everything in the Church: the windows, the alter, musical instruments, the chapel."The security man in the church premises was beaten to pulp. Some women who were holding a prayer meeting were chased away. The seminarian who is resident in the premises was also beaten up and chased away."
The National Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC) yesterday said that Nigeria cannot expect to reap the fruit of good education if ...

The National Leader of All Progressives Congress (APC) yesterday said that Nigeria cannot expect to reap the fruit of good education if it fails to invest in the education of her youths.The former Lagos State Governor stated that poor funding of tertiary education has had adverse effect on the skills of graduates produced by tertiary institutions in the country and on the quality of training they receive.Asiwaju Tinubu said this at the conferment of Honourary Degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris causa) on him by the Nigerian Turkish Nile University at its fourth convocation in Abuja yesterday.The award was received on behalf of the former Lagos State Governor by, Bamidele Opeyemi.The institution also awarded the same Honourary Degree of Science, (Honoris causa) to the Chairman South East Council of Traditional Rulers and Chairman FUT Minna, His Royal Majesty, Eze Dr. Eberechi Dick, JP.It graduated 124 students.Out of the 124 graduating students, 10 bagged first class in various degrees.Udeme Emmamel Daren Enonte of Computer Science Department emerged the best graduating student.According to Asiwaju, Nigeria cannot expect to reap the fruit of good education if it fails to invest in the education of her youths.The resultant effects have been the graduation of unemployable graduates. These have impacted negatively on their contribution to national growth and development.The university said it would offer 100 per cent education scholarship to all first class students as well as best graduating students of all departments of the institution.The Vice Chancellor, Prof. Huseyin Sert, said that the university decided to recognize Asiwaju Tinubu and Dr. Dick, because of their contributions to mankind development and the society.He charged graduands to go and contribute to the development of global economy.Also, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, assured the gathering that the National Assembly would continue to make laws that will bring huge investments to the sector. He was represented by the Chairman, House Committee on Education Amin Suleiman.
Former Presidential aide, Reuben Abati has weighed in on the correlation between Nigeria and the failed Turkey coup.

Former Presidential aide, Reuben Abati has weighed in on the correlation between Nigeria and the failed Turkey coup.Turkey is about five hours away from Nigeria by air, about 2, 634 miles from here, but the night there was a coup attempt in Turkey, July 15, with soldiers shutting down parts of Ankara and Istanbul, youd think Ankara is a city somewhere in Nigeria and Istanbul is an extension of our country. Commentaries kept flying up and down on Nigeria social media space, with the coup attempt in Turkey becoming a trending topic.And yet the strongest connection between Nigeria and Turkey is probably trade, tourism, socio-cultural affinities, and the fact that many Nigerian travellers now find it easier and cheaper to travel through Turkey to other European capitals, with Turkish Airlines making all the profit and no Nigerian airline on that route!Still, if Turkey finds itself in a bad shape, as it has, that is not likely to affect the already sorry fortunes of the Naira or the forbidding cost of food items in Nigerian markets. On Friday, many Nigerians stayed awake and projected their own worst fears unto the Turkish situation.By way of summary, there was among the Nigerian commentators an all-round condemnation of any attempt to upturn the Constitutional order either in Turkey or anywhere else in the world. When it was reported that a former Turkish President had remarked that the coup will not stand, because Turkey is not Africa, (former President Abdullah Gul actually said Latin America), there was also a feeling of outrage. How dare he make such a racist comment in the midst of such a serious situation?When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took to Facetime on his mobile phone to get himself onto television, and he pleaded with the Turkish population to take to the streets to resist the coup makers, and his call was heeded, not a few commentators at this end wondered if Nigerians would have answered such a summon to patriotism and whether or not religious and ethnic sentiments or the fear of being shot to death would not have kept the people indoors. Concerns were also expressed about the fate of Nigerians living in Turkey in the event of a blowout at the crossroads of Europe. By Saturday morning, the coup had failed. Erdogan was significantly back in control. About 200 persons had died, and over 2,000 persons were recorded as injured. As I monitored the situation in Turkey and the reactions in Nigeria, I was struck by how so much can be learnt from the strong interest that the failed coup attempt has generated among educated Nigerians.Nigerians know what it means to have a constitutional order derailed by military intervention. Between 1960 and 1999, Nigeria moved from one form of military rule to another, characterized by obstinacy, and absolutism, experiencing only short spells of civilian rule. Similarly, the military in Turkey have since 1960 intervened directly at least four times (1970, 1971, 1980, 1997). And in all instances, the Turkish coup plotters always claimed that their role was to restore order and stabilize the country. This is a rhetoric that is quite familiar to Nigerians. Every military coup is justified on messianic grounds. In the latest onslaught in Turkey, the plotters claim they want to establish a Peace Council.Between 1993 and 1999, Nigerians fought the military to a standstill, insisting on a definite return to civilian rule and the institutionalization of democracy. Sixteen years later, the democratic spirit is well established among the people, if not the Nigerian leadership elite. The people have seen what a demonstration of people power can achieve: they used it to get the military out of power, they relied on it to insist that the Constitution be respected and obeyed when a President died in office and certain forces did not want his successor to get into office, and again, they have seen people-power at work in removing a sitting government from power. Right now in Nigeria, to toy with this power of the people in any form is to sow the seeds of organized mass rebellion.Not surprisingly, in the past few years, every display of the peoples supremacy in other parts of the world has attracted either interest or a copy-cat instinct among Nigerians. First, there was the Arab Spring, which resulted in calls for the Nigerian Spring, which later found expression in the politically motivated Occupy Nigeria protests of January 2012. And now from Turkey, the major point of interest for Nigeria has been in my estimation, how the people took to the streets to confront soldiers. The coup failed in Turkey because it lacked popular support. Turkey has for long been considered an embarrassment in Europe. A successful coup in 2016 would have put the country in a worse shape and done further damage to the countrys reputation. The people stood up for their country, not President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.They stood up for an idea: The idea of democracy. The three major political parties disowned the coup. Mosques called on the people to go to the streets and fight for democracy. Even Erdogans critics, including the Kemalists and the Glulenists, denounced the coup plotters. The images that came across were images of the police confronting the soldiers and disarming them (This was intriguing- can anyone ever imagine the Nigeria police protecting democracy: they would have since collected bribe from the coup plotters, there is massive corruption in Turkey too but their police fought for the nation). Ordinary citizens lay down in front of the coup plotters tanks and asked to be crushed; brave citizens disarmed the soldiers and took over the city squares.It is the kind of bravery that Nigerians find surreal. The coup attempt in Turkey comes at a time when the civil society in Nigeria is beginning to lose the spirit to stand in front of tanks, and guns: the people have been battered to a point where their strongest protection is their power of the ballot and so the average Nigerian endures suffering, convinced that when again it is time to vote, no one can rob him or her of his power to choose. But the situation in Turkey reminds us of the kind of danger that any democracy, with troubled foundations can face, hence Nigerians ask if they too can be as courageous as the Turkish have been, with both Turks and the much abused Kurds, and other divided groups, uniting, momentarily, on one issue.Not that Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan deserves the victory over the coup plotters, though. Outsiders, including Nigerians, consider him a bad guy; and even if he is still popular and blindly followed by the majority of his people, his 13-year record in office falls far short of standards. He came to office on the wave-crest of popular appeal. In Istanbul where he was a city mayor at a time, he remains immensely popular, and he is also probably the most popular leader, not in Europe, but the Arab world. Thrice, he and his party, the AKP, won nationally organized elections. But success soon got into Erdogans head, as he descended into the lower depths of arrogance and dictatorship. He started having issues with neighbours and allies.He became undemocratic, shamelessly alienating civil society, the press and the judiciary. He is so temperamental and intolerant of criticism and alternative views, he is now surrounded mainly by sycophants and relatives. In his attempt to dominate everything and everyone, he became known as the buyuk usta, that is the big master, and of course, he now lives in a $615 million Presidential palace with 1, 150 rooms! In addition, he wants to acquire US-style executive Presidential powers and he is busy battling, real and imaginary enemies.He may have been saved by the peoples rejection of the coup attempt, but perhaps Erdogan has been saved more by his own cleverness. The coup attempt against his government was an amateur, unorganized effort. It lacked the support of the military command, which Erdogan had cleverly subjected to civilian control, and among whom he had built centres of personal loyalty. Over the years, he weakened the military and strengthened the police and the intelligence services. The coup plotters over-estimated their capacity and misread the peoples mood.Their failure may embolden Erdogan and even make him more authoritarian: he is already sounding off about being in charge and dealing with the coup plotters (over 2,000 of whom have already been rounded up and arrested, even judges have been fired). But Turkey is in a very bad shape. Resentments run deep. There are deep fears about threats to the countrys secularism, and attempts to Islamicise the country. A paranoid Erdogan could worsen the situation. Both the United States and the European Union should take a keen interest in what happens in Turkey after the coup attempt, to ensure that rather than dig deeper into authoritarianism, Erdogan would see the need to run a more open, inclusive and democratic government.The coup may have failed, and democracy may have won, but whatever issues led to a group of ill-prepared soldiers taking the law into their hands cannot be wished away. To tell the truth, Recep Erdogan acts very much, in all respects, like an African leader in Europe - that probably explains the keen Nigerian interest. The key lesson, all told, is that the importance and survival of democracy relates to the importance of civic virtue, this is why leaders must rely not just on the peoples commitment to an idea, but must seek to make democracy work for all the people.
A former National Publicity Secretary of the Arewa Consultative Forum and spokesman for northern delegates in the last National Conference...

A former National Publicity Secretary of the Arewa Consultative Forum and spokesman for northern delegates in the last National Conference, Anthony Sani, has said President Muhammadu Buhari should not be blamed for recent religion-inspired killings in the country, adding that the president cared for the South as he cared for the North.Sani was reacting to allegation by the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, that Buhari, as the nations commander-in-chief should be blamed for the unprovoked killings of Christians.He said the president had shown through his appointment of officers that he saw every part of the country as one.A former National Publicity Secretary of the Arewa Consultative Forum and spokesman for northern delegates in the last National Conference, Anthony Sani, has said President Muhammadu Buhari should not be blamed for recent religion-inspired killings in the country, adding that the president cared for the South as he cared for the North.Sani was reacting to allegation by the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, that Buhari, as the nations commander-in-chief should be blamed for the unprovoked killings of Christians.He said the president had shown through his appointment of officers that he saw every part of the country as one.But my response still stands. I have not bothered to analyse the appointments by religion because of my attitude that it does not matter the colour of the cat provided it can catch the rats.But I read the submission by one Senator Adeyeye who said there are 18 Christian ministers and 18 Muslim ministers.He also said while it is true that the appointments for security heads favour the North, since only the Chief of Defence Staff and Chief of Naval Staff are from the South, in the case of portfolios for development it favours the South; considering only agriculture and education ministers are northerners.He also said there were more Christian senators.In any case, when the time for accountability comes, Nigerians would rate the regime on issues of real concern to ordinary Nigerians and not how the regime was able to balance appointments by religion, by ethnicity, by region, by gender and by age.
Governors of the All Progressives Congress (APC), yesterday, warned that Nigerians will resist any attempt to re- move President Muham- ma...





Governors of the All Progressives Congress (APC), yesterday, warned that Nigerians will resist any attempt to re- move President Muham- madu Buhari from office.The governors, under the aegis of Progressive Governors Forum, spoke on a day an attempted coup in Turkey claimed 161 lives and over 1,440 were injured in the incident while 2,839 suspected coup plotters were arrested.Last week, there had been reports of threat by the Senate to impeach Buhari.The threat came amid the face-off between the Presi- dency and the Senate following the decision of the Minister of Justice and At- torney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, to charge Senate President Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Senator Ike Ekwer- emadu, and two others for alleged forgery of the 2015 Standing Order of the Senate that was used to elect them.Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State spoke on behalf of the APC Governors Forum, yesterday, at the flag-off of the cam- paign of the candidate of the party in the September 10 governorship election in the state, Mr Godwin Obaseki, saying the peo- ples power is behind Buhari.We know that corruption will fight back and it is fighting back. And that is why we went for a tested army general to lead the corruption fight. They will fight back but they will be crushed. We reaffirm our confidence in the President, we dont want any impeachment, we stand for democracy.The coup was resisted in Turkey, that is how Nigerians will resist any attempt to impeach the President, Oshiomhole said.The anti-corruption war must go on, Nigerias econ- omy will be repositioned and the people will be wit- nesses to prosperity. Peace is already returning to the North East. It will return to the Niger Delta and Nige- ria will be prosperous again.
President Muhammadu Buhari on Sunday, joined President Barrack Obama and other world leaders in vehemently condemning the abortive coup at...

President Muhammadu Buhari on Sunday, joined President Barrack Obama and other world leaders in vehemently condemning the abortive coup attempt in Turkey by a group of rebel army officers and men, which resulted in the reported death of more than 100 people.Reacting to the tragic events in Ankara, Istanbul and other centres, in a statement by Senior Special Assistant to the President (Media & Publicity), Mallam Garba Shehu, President Buhari said he was deeply saddened by reports of a violent attempt to dismantle constitutional authority and disrupt the democratically elected government of Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.The removal of a democratic government by force is no longer acceptable. Violence can never solve any problem but only complicates them and sets back the progress of democratic societies.The President also notes that President Erdogan is one of Nigerias close international partners and sincere supporters in its current war against terrorism, adding that all should resist the destabilization of democratic countries through coups detat in the 21st century.According to the President, democracy provides peaceful options of changing governments through the ballot box. The ballot box doesnt require violence to remove any government perceived to have lost its popularity and public support. Despite its limitations, democracy is still better and more durable than a violent change of government.The President praises the courage and immediate response of ordinary citizens who in face of guns and tanks defied the rebel soldiers and forced them to abandon their mad quest for power.President Buhari calls on the President of Turkey to pursue reconciliation and offers Nigerias support to the government and people of Turkey in their hour of trial.
Detained former National Security Adviser (NSA) Colonel Mohammed Sambo Dasuki (rtd) has dragged the federal government before an Abuja Hig...

Detained former National Security Adviser (NSA) Colonel Mohammed Sambo Dasuki (rtd) has dragged the federal government before an Abuja High Court, challenging his incarceration in the custody of the Department of the State Service (DSS) since December last year without trial.Dasuki in the fresh legal action is praying the court to order his immediate release from the claws of the federal government security agents either conditionally or un-conditionally.The suit marked FCT/HC/ABJ/CV/2005/2016 instituted on his behalf by his two lead counsels Messrs Joseph Daudu SAN and Ahmed Raji SAN was brought pursuant to Order 11, Rule 1, 2 and 3 of the Fundamental Rights Enforcement Procedure Rule 2009.Dasuki who claimed that his fundamental right to freedom of liberty and dignity to life has been grossly violated by the federal government with his detention, prayed for an order of the court to compel the federal government to pay him N15bn as general damages and compensation for his alleged illegal detention and incarceration in violation of his rights as enshrined in the 1999 Constitution.He also prayed the court to compel defendants in the suit to jointly and severally tender a public apology to him to be published in two national dailies for the violation of his rights.Defendants in the court action are the Department of State Security Service (DSSS), National Security Adviser (NSA), Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).Besides, Dasuki sought court declaration that he is entitled to his rights to dignity of human person, personal liberty, fair hearing, freedom of movement, private and family life and to acquire and own properties as enshrined in the 1999 constitution.He also wants the court to declare that his arrest and continuous detention since December 29, 2015 in the custody of the DSSS and NSA by officers of the federal government without allowing him access to his medical personnel, members of his family and without charging him to court within the time prescribed by law is wrongful, unlawful, un-constitutional and a violation of his right granted by the countrys constitution.In a 43 paragraph affidavit in support of the originating summon, the applicant claimed to be a retired army officer, decent with no criminal record, lawfully resident in Nigeria and had served the country in various capacities.He averred that on July 16, 2015, the agents of the federal government unlawfully invaded his houses in Abuja and Sokoto and that during the invasion, his properties mainly cars and monies were unlawfully carted away.In the affidavit deposed to by one of his sons, Abubakar Dasuki, the applicant claimed that in protest against the unlawful invasion and detention, he instituted a court action at a federal high court for the enforcement of his right.Upon receipt of the court process, the affidavit claimed that the federal government quickly charged him to court in charge number FHC/ABJ/CR/319/15 in September 2015 and that he was granted bail by the court.Dasuki said that upon his bail, he applied for court permission to travel abroad for medical attention and that the court granted him approval on November 3, 2015 but he following day, the security operatives in brazen defiance of the court permission, laid siege on his house and dis-allowed the trip.He claimed that in spite of his life threatening ailment and persuasions, his house was kept under the siege during which he was not allowed to move out or receive any member of his family and visitors.Dasuki recalled that on December 1 2015, the DSS operatives arrested him and that the following day, he was moved to EFCC custody from where he was on December 13 arraigned in an Abuja high court in the charge FCT/HC/CR/43/2015 where he was also admitted to bail.The applicant claimed that he was on December 15, 2015 arraigned in the third court in the charge FCT/HC/CR/42/2016 where he was also granted bail.Upon his release on bail at Kuje prison on December 29, 2015, Dasuki averred that he was re-arrested by the operatives of the DSS and had since been kept in solitary conferment, thereby impairing his ability to provide for his family.The affidavit indicated that the concern and apprehension of his family became compounded when president Muhammadu Buhari in his maiden Presidential media chat of December 30, 2015 said that Dasuki will not be released because of the weight of charges against him and that he may likely jump bail.The applicant claimed that unless the court comes to his rescue by protecting him and order his immediate release, his right to life, human dignity, personal liberty, privacy, family life, freedom of movement and right to own properties already impaired and violated by the defendants will continue to be impaired and put in jeopardy.Meanwhile, hearing in the matter has been slated before Justice Peter Kekemekun after the yearly vacation of the FCT high court.
Uche Secondus, former acting chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), says his party is in support of President Muhammadu Buharis ...

Uche Secondus, former acting chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), says his party is in support of President Muhammadu Buharis anti  corruption campaign, but due process and rule of law must be followed.In an interview with Punch, Secondus alleged experiences over the last one year of the current administration have revealed that Buharis aim is to kill PDP.Secondus said the EFCC has turned itself to the judge, jury and a court, becoming a law unto itself.There is absolute absence of the rule of law in the pursuit of this anti-corruption crusade, he said.We in the PDP are in total support of the anti-corruption fight but we believe that due process and the rule of law are not being followed.We are not in a garrison command structure, a person can be invited or arrested if he resists but the rule of law must be followed.We know there are ex-governors who are ministers now, why are they not probing them? Why are they not inviting them? It is absolutely wrong.The partiality is obvious now, and Nigerians know, the world now knows that the agenda of this government is to kill the PDP.Secondus said it was wrong to say that the PDP feels comfortable with corruption and had no interest in fighting it.This is wrong, absolutely wrong. Let me ask this question, if the PDP had no interest in fighting corruption, would we have set up the EFCC, ICPC (Independent Corrupt Practices Commission) and all other institutions? he asked.All these institutions were set up by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo who headed a PDP-led government.
Turkish authorities on Sunday pressed on with a ruthless crackdown against suspects in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Er...

Turkish authorities on Sunday pressed on with a ruthless crackdown against suspects in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with 6,000 people including generals detained in action that has sparked international concern.World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned the attempted putsch but also urged Turkey to respect the rule of law in its aftermath, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some coup plotters when arrested.Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Sunday that around 6,000 people had been detained and the number would rise.The clean-up operations are continuing, he was quoted as saying by the state-run Anadolu news agency.According to the government, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives when a group within the army sought to overthrow the authorities by seizing key strategic points in Istanbul and Ankara late Friday.Over 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military has said.The botched coup bid was the biggest challenge to Erdogans rule in his 13 years as prime minister and now president. But he successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.Thousands responded late on Saturday to a new call by the president to pour into the squares to celebrate the victory of democracy with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks reported in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.Europe Minister Omer Celik urged people to stay on the streets, writing on Twitter that the vigil for democracy continues.Respect rule of lawThe Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, accusing the plotters of acting on behalf of Erdogans arch enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.Turkish television has shown images of captured suspects forced to lie face down on the tarmac after their arrest while AFP photographers have seen suspects roughly led away pursued by angry mobs.NTV television said 34 generals of various grades had been detained so far. They include senior figures like Erdal Ozturk, commander of the third army and the commander of the Malatya-based second army, Adem Huduti.In an operation early Sunday, authorities detained the commander of the garrison in the western town of Denizli, Ozhan Ozbakir, along with 51 other soldiers.Turkey also detained a senior air force general and other officers accused of backing the failed coup at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria.Brigadier air force general Bekir Ercan Van was detained along with over a dozen lower ranking officers on Saturday at the Incirlik air force base in southern Turkey.Former chief of staff Ilker Basbug told Dogan news agency that Turkey should make a distinction between the coup planners and young soldiers of 20 years old who may have been mistaken.The crackdown is however not restricted to the military and Anadolu said prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for a total of 2,745 judges and prosecutors across Turkey.The entire investigation is being led by Ankara prosecutors and those arrested are suspected of belonging to Gulens group, which Turkey dubs the Fethullahci Terror Organisation.Gulens supporters say their group which they call Hizmet (Service) is entirely peaceful.Obama has warned Turkey there is a vital need for all parties to act within the rule of law in the aftermath of the coup.French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault warned Erdogan against using the failed putsch as a blank cheque to silence his opponents.However there was no such concern from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who called Erdogan to wish for a speedy restoration of strong constitutional order.Erdogan and Putin, who were feuding over the shooting down of a Russian jet until last month, will meet in the first week of August, Anadolu said.Extradite GulenFridays putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets. Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul.Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.Erdogan has pinned the blame on Gulen, an erstwhile ally he accuses of running a parallel state, and called on Obama to extradite the reclusive preacher to face justice.Mr President, I told you myself, either deport or hand over to us this person who lives in 400 acres of land in Pennsylvania, he told a triumphant rally in Istanbul late Saturday, carefully not referring to Gulen by name.In an interview with Haberturk television, Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu went even further, saying, The United States is behind the coup and adding it had now to handover Gulen.But Gulen has categorically denied any involvement in the plot and suggested it could have been staged by Erdogan himself.Meanwhile, Turkey has demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.The suspects are still in Greece, but the chopper itself is now been flown back to Turkey, a Turkish official said.Istanbul authorities have sought to get life back to normal but Washington on Saturday warned citizens against travel to the country due to uncertainty after the coup bid.AFP
HILLSDALE -- A Washington Township man robbed a deli at gunpoint Sunday, police said.

Patrick McLoughlin, 21, of Washington Township. (Hillsdale Police)

Patrick McLoughlin, 21, wore a Halloween mask and waved a black handgun while demanding money from the cash register at Wilkes Delicatessen, Hillsdale Police said in a press release.

The clerk, a 60-year-old woman, handed over about $100 in cash, police said. McLoughlin fled.

The clerk gave Sgt. Dan McLaughlin a description of McLoughlin. Police arrested him shortly after.

Police also found the cash, the handgun and the mask.

McLoughlin was sent to Bergen County Jail in lieu of $25,000 bail.

The Westwood, Washington Township and Emerson police departments assisted in the investigation.

Myles Ma may be reached at mma@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MylesMaNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
It's been more than a week since Dallas police used a police robot to take down the man they say gunned down five officers, a groundbreaking tactic that's drawn greater attention toward the robotic technology that's been used by law enforcement agencies throughout the state for decades

Camden County's Sheriff's Department's expertise with the radio-controlled robots date back to 1997, and has become an engrained, crucial tool in disarming suspects, clearing buildings and vehicles after bomb threats and protecting officers, said Chief Warrant Officer John Fetzer.

Each of the department's three robots vary in size to take on different tasks and are operated by its technical services and bomb unit, working in hand with their SERT, or Sheriff's Emergency Response Team. They don't just get the job done, said Fetzer, they get it done quick -- saving taxpayer funds and ending potential community threats in the process. He said barricade situations that could last anywhere from 6 to 12 hours are resolved in less than two when they arrive on scene.

Fetzer said it's because the robots bring a wide-ranging toolkit. Not only do they provide the ability to get a visual look inside a situation, they make it possible to facilitate clear communication and deploy non-lethal methods of apprehending a suspect, including gas and bean bags.

"There are so many advantages and really no drawbacks," said Fetzer. While their robots are equipped with explosive means to breech a doorway to gain entry into a building, he said they've never been used to lethally take down a suspect, like in Dallas.

On the contrary, Fetzer said the robots have only ever prevented an escalation of a threat and has saved the lives of suspects and officers alike. They're deployed about two dozen times on average every year, but three cases stand out to him in particular as clear examples of the robots' capabilities:

A son saved

It was a freezing afternoon in January when the Sheriff's department's SERT team was called to a home on the 400 block of Addison Avenue in Haddon Township -- a normally quiet neighborhood where homes are often separated by just a few feet -- just after noon.

Inside the single-family home, then 48-year-old James Williams Jr. was under the influence of alcohol as well as a prescription drug. He had access to a high-powered scoped rifle, a shotgun and several pistols.

Officers knew Williams had a history of attacking police, including once with a sword, and began to set up a perimeter around the home, locked down the nearby Strawbridge Elementary School and brought in a crisis negotiator.

Williams' father had run out of the house in just shorts and a t-shirt prior to police arriving and told them his troubled son would not answer the phone to speak to them. He added the sight of officers could trigger him to attack. Once the SERT team was able to confirm Williams was awake and moving around, they sent in the robots.

Two entered the home and positioned to give the team a visual on Williams, who had fired several rounds randomly into walls in the home. At least one struck a neighbor's house.

Williams refused to engage with the negotiator speaking to him through the robot, but had pushed and yelled at it. The team had to work quickly, knowing that school was about to let out for the day. The entire neighborhood had also been been shut down, with a reverse 911 call warning residents to stay inside until the situation was resolved.

With no negotiations possible, they used the robot to deploy oleoresin capsicum, or OC, gas to force him to surrender. Instead of backing down, however, he shot at the robot and was later seen on its video feed going out to a screened porch to smoke a cigarette and drink a beer. More gas was deployed, and Williams eventually relented. Officers weren't sure they could safely enter the home to take him into custody however until the robot's video feed showed Williams had put down his weapons.

A suspect apprehended

About two years before, on Dec. 17, 2013, the SERT team was again deployed in frigid temperatures as they responded to a home on Liberty Avenue in Mount Ephraim.

In the early morning hours, a violent scene had occurred. Authorities said Adam Kirk, a 43-year-old Woodbury man, broke into his ex's home and shot her new boyfriend, a 42-year-old Mount Ephraim man, in the arm with a shotgun. The boyfriend and the woman's four children fled the home as the woman fought with Kirk, who attacked her with a knife before she was able to fight him off and shut herself in a bathroom. Kirk then barricaded himself in a bedroom as police arrived soon after 2 a.m., and rescued the woman, who sustained only superficial cuts.

Her boyfriend was taken to Cooper University Hospital for treatment and both survived the attack, news reports at the time stated.

But what initial reports didn't include was the pivotal role a robot played in deescalating the situation.

Kirk had piled furniture in front of the bedroom door and was armed and agitated when the SERT team arrived on scene. With no other way to reach him, a robot was sent inside the home to begin negotiations. After a lengthy back-and-forth with a highly trained negotiator, Kirk finally surrendered at about 5:38 a.m.

He was charged with two counts of attempted murder, weapons charges and four counts of endangering the welfare of a child, but he is alive, said Fetzer.

"Our goal is to preserve life," he said.

An ambush prevented

Five years earlier in Winslow Township, Fetzer said a bomb robot wasn't just able to save the life of an emotionally disturbed man, it more than likely prevented an attack on officers.

It was June 14, 2008 and their team was called to a home on Eastmont Lane in Winslow Township at about 10 p.m. A 70-year-old man with a grudge against authority, and who reportedly believed he had cancer, was barricaded in an upstairs bedroom with numerous weapons, including a M1 rifle, three .22 caliber weapons and two 357 Magnums.

The first robot to try and make entry was too big to get around clutter in the home, so a second, smaller one was sent it to give officers a look inside. Upon seeing the robot, the man -- who had been keeping an eye on the stairs from a crack in the bedroom door -- went down to the first floor of the house where he stood naked, brandishing a handgun and yelling in a foreign language. Through the robot's speaker, a negotiator was able to eventually convince the man to drop his weapon -- at which point he also began petting the robot like a dog -- and surrender to authorities.

Fetzer said that judging by the weapons the man had arranged on the bed, and the way the man was lying in wait in a tactical position for officers to come into the home, it's likely the man planned to ambush police. By sending in the robot he believes they were able to prevent a deadly shoot out.

"There is no doubt in my mind cops would've been shot," he said.

Michelle Caffrey may be reached at mcaffrey@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @ShellyCaffrey. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Richard Marranca is spending time in Henry David Thoreau's world. As a writer and professor, it's a wonderful place to be.

At a conference about the 19th century writer, Marranca was re-reading him, preparing to give a talk about the naturalist. He taught a class about nature writing at Rutgers University, has taught mythology at Montclair State University. Marranca, 56, is tenured at Passaic County Community College where he teaches creative writing and world literature.



Marranca's latest book, "The New Romantics: Ten Stories of Mystery, Passion, Travel and Vampires" (Oak Tree Press, $12.95) a collection of short stories reveals his love of the ancient world and travel. In "Roxana & the Naked Philosopher an Alexander Romance" Marranca writes of an older man spending time with a younger woman in the royal tent.

"Yet the world was beautiful, I could find joy conversing with a cook or conqueror, an old washerwoman or the starry Roxana. I felt inspired by a crawling beetle, skull or flower, I could pray and fast and inhale the azure opium of the sky, I could make new friends in a dynamic world, and learn about butterflies and Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Sogdians, Trojans, and Sirens whose song lures men to cutting rocks."



At work on another collection, including a story featuring a laid off librarian time traveling back to the Library at Alexandria, Marranca, of Roselle Park, chatted with New Jersey Authors.

Some of your stories are set in exotic places. Where have you traveled and how does it inform your writing?



I took my first trip with my family when I was 7, to Italy and Switzerland. I have been to Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Turkey, Jordan, Jerusalem, Morocco and Egypt, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic.

It's always something new and exciting especially if you travel with the sense of spontaneity. I love to see all the sites and the history and just the surprise of being somewhere and a lot of travel turns out to be the source of epiphanies.

When I travel, everything is an epiphany. Everything is just, wow, it is exciting. ...Writing and travel have those qualities; everything is so new. Writing comes to plot points writing and travel have those qualities everything is so new.

And you learn more about yourself. Even though you think you learn about another place, in many ways you spend a lot of time being alone and you learn about yourself, more than the actual place you are going to.

Richard Marranca's short stories are engaging whether set in ancient lands or modern Baltimore.

Why do you write?



I like the ancient quality of writing -- it doesn't take much technology.

I tried a few things like filmmaking and painting, but writing was the best way for me to tell a story. Stories bring the writer and reader on a journey that, hopefully, continues after the story is done. Whatever I write, whether fiction or essays or poetry, has very similar themes such as nature, journey, compassion, the exotic and so on.

What are you working on now?



It sounds like I m an obsessed writer. My friend and I are working on a collection of fantasy and science fiction. Best thing about growing older you don't really care what anybody thinks and you go back to what ignited your first love.

Where did you get first library card?



Roselle Public Library. My mother and father always read me stories. I just remember it was fun to visit. I took out a lot of adventure stories I loved archaeology and history and I took those out, adventure stories.

What is the some advice about writing you give to your students?



To develop an authentic voice and not rely on cliches and to look at the things they truly find important and to give that a lot of space and trust themselves and to find that beginners' mind and to develop a philosophy and develop it more and bring that onto the page and rewrite five, 10, 20 times -- whatever it takes.

What's the goal with writing for you?



I suppose if I were to boil it down to two. I just love Allen Ginsberg; being a typical beat he said you write to find your consciousness, you write to find yourself. And I like that and I think that the ultimate thing is if you can astonish the reader that is really good. The notion is to educate and entertain. For myself it is writing to find myself. That's my Allen Ginsburg answer and then to educate and entertain.
NEWARK -- A demonstration led by Newark's mayor demanding port jobs for city residents is scheduled to proceed Monday, after a state judge refused a request to block it by the Port Authority, which had cited logistical and safety concerns in the wake of anti-police violence around the country.



Mayor Ras Baraka plans to lead a motorcade of up to 100 vehicles through Port Newark to demand more city residents get the lucrative longshoreman jobs and other jobs generated by the port.



The motorcade is scheduled for 10 a.m. at Port Newark, the main hub of the Port of New York and New Jersey, which, along with container and bulk cargo terminals in Elizabeth, Jersey City, Bayonne, Brooklyn and Staten Island, make up the Port of New York and New Jersey, the East Coast's busiest shipping port.



Baraka has been aggressive in trying to maximize revenues for his cash-strapped city from the Port Authority, which has long-term leases on city property occupied by Port Newark and Newark Liberty International Airport.

Baraka is also among those who have publicly called for the hiring of more Newark residents as longshoremen, though the Port Authority has little direct influence in filling those jobs. Rather, those jobs go to members of the International Longshoremen's Association union, who are hired by private companies after undergoing background checks by the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor.



On Friday, Superior Court Judge Walter Koprowski Jr. in Newark ordered the Port Authority and Newark Police departments to work together to devise a safety plan for the motorcade.



The order states that, "the parties agree to engage in good faith negotiations pursuant to the Port Authority's permit process for expressive activity."



"The Port Authority retains the right to place in the permit reasonable time, place and manner restrictions which will be applicable to this demonstration," the order continued. "Further ordered that the City of Newark and any other defendants agree to comply with the Port Authority's rules and regulations for expressive activity at Port Newark for this demonstration."



In the order, Koprowski reserved the right to reopen the matter should negotiations break down.

A spokesman for the Port Authority said the bi-state agency would comply with the order.



"The City will have a permit for the protest," the spokesman, Steve Coleman, said in an email Sunday. "It will be a motorcade and they will not be getting out of their vehicles. The permit allows up to 100 cars but they have told us it will be far less. We do not anticipate any major disruption to port operations although we have notified all stakeholders. We do not comment on PAPD deployment for any operation that we handle."



The protest dispute arose amid broader, ongoing tensions between the Port Authority and the city, whose largely working class, minority residents breath the emissions from port trucks that traverse residential neighborhoods that abut the port, carrying goods from China and other export nations to stores and consumers throughout the region.



On Sunday, a city spokesman dismissed the notion that the demonstration would pose a safety threat to police officers.

"The PA wanted to stop the march but not because of the anti-police climate, no matter what they might say," Baraff stated in an email. "After all, the Newark Police are supportive of and protective of demonstrators. That said, the PA took the city of Newark to court to try to stop the demonstration, but a judge ruled that the demonstration could continue, but that our police and the PA police needed to meet over the weekend to work out details. That has occurred."



But the safety of officers is a deep-seeded concern for the Port Authority Police, which lost 38 officers in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. That attack has been been evoked repeatedly in the wake of the Dallas shootings on July 7 that left five officers dead, the highest police death toll in any one incident since the 2001 Trade Center attack.



The Port Authority raised its concerns even before the killing of three officers Sunday morning in Baton Rouge, La., the location of one of two shootings of black men by police that prompted the otherwise peaceful demonstration in Dallas where police were shot by a sniper.



On Sunday, the Port Authority Police Benevolent Association released a statement saying it was "shocked and saddened" by the Louisiana shootings, in which one suspect was also killed.

"Every decent, law-abiding American should be shaken to their core by the current assault on law enforcement," read the statement, issued by PAPBA President Paul Nunziato. "We ask our political leaders to come together and speak as one in an effort to once again united this great nation toward the goal of safety and security for all. We also ask these same leaders to unequivocally condemn those who espouse violence as a means to settle their grievances."

Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.




randolph.png

Three men were shot early Saturday morning, officials said.

(Google Maps )

JERSEY CITY -- Three men were shot early Saturday morning on Randolph Avenue, officials said.

The shooting was reported just after midnight near Carteret Avenue, city spokeswoman Jennifer Morrill said.

When police arrived to the neighborhood, a 23-year-old Randolph Avenue man and a 30-year-old man from Pennsylvania man told the officers they were shot in the leg. The victims said they did not know who shot them, Morrill said.

Both men were treated for non life-threatening injuries at Jersey City Medical Center-Barnabas Health, she said.

Over an hour later, a 34-year-old Armstrong Avenue man was dropped off at the hospital. Morrill said the victim was "extremely uncooperative with police and hostile towards medical staff."

In May, shots were fired at the same intersection. No one was injured in the shooting, but two cars were struck with bullets.

Saturday's shooting remains under investigation.
Hudson County has agreed to continue participating in a program allowing county correctional officers to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants - and advocates who oppose the program are not happy.

On Friday, Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise announced that the County Department of Corrections will continue participating in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Priority Enforcement Program for Jails.

Previously, the county had a two-year agreement to participate in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement program, commonly called 287(g). This agreement expired on June 30.

According to a statement by Hudson County, DeGise requested that the new agreement have no set time limit so it could withdraw from the 287(g) portion of the program in case the PEP's "standards changed or if it's impact came to be viewed as a net negative regarding the operation of local law enforcement." ICE agreed to this request.

Groups that opposed the county's participation in this program urged local government not to continue the agreement after the expiration date.

"We are disturbed by the decision," said Chia-Chia Wang, organizing and advocacy director for the immigrant rights program at Newark-based American Friends Service Committee.

She said more than 30 organizations signed a letter addressed to DeGise, the Hudson County freeholders and the director of corrections, urging them not to sign another agreement.

The Rev. Eugene P. Squeo, pastor at St. Patrick and Assumption All Saints in Jersey City, called the decision to renew, "a poor decision on the part of county officials," adding that, "it allows ICE to deputize county employees, and it puts those county employees on the front line of immigration enforcement. I don't think the county has any business being in the immigration enforcement business."

According to statistics provided by Hudson County in a press release, from Oct. 1, 2015 to June 29, 2016, Hudson County Corrections encountered 599 foreign born inmates. Of those, 64 individuals, or 0.78 percent, were flagged by county corrections officers. And of those 64 people, 10 were deported, with the rest either remaining in ICE custody, getting involved with immigration proceedings not detained by ICE, or going into county custody pending criminal charges.

Currently, one ICE-trained county corrections officer per each of the three shifts at the jail is charged with carrying out the 287(g) reviews, according to Hudson County's statement. Four corrections officers are currently trained by ICE.

The decision to renew this program was made after an almost month-long review that included meetings with immigration activists, ICE officials and the freeholders, according to a statement.

The nature of PEP, which governs 287(g) operations in jail, swayed DeGise's decision to continue the program. According to the county's statement, PEP "significantly narrows the category of individual who may be 'flagged' for an ICE 'detainer' by local corrections officers to only those who pose a threat to public safety."

"In the end, I've become convinced that the Homeland Security Department under President Obama has set guidelines for this program are humane and reasonable," said DeGise in a statement. "They allow us to assist in removing to ICE custody the tiny handful of individuals convicted of significant criminal offenses or who otherwise pose a threat to public safety. Our corrections officers are not police officers or sheriff's officers; they do not actively operate outside the confines of our jail. I do not believe their continued involvement in this program will chill any racial or ethnic group's willingness to interact with police in their communities."

According to Squeo, while PEP program is supposed to set priorities so that criminals with extensive records will get deported, "what seems to be true more often than not is that those that get ensnared in the program are either those who have had minor offenses or non-violent crimes," he said.

Wang said the 287(g) program allows Hudson County officers to issue immigration detainers - a document that immigration custom enforcement uses to hold people, primarily immigrations, up to 48 hours.

"People may be stopped for traffic violations, stopped at a crime scene, maybe booked into jail for a variety of reasons - those (immigrants) will be affected by 287(g) as well," she said.

Wang says that in fiscal year 2015, Hudson County used immigration detainers four to 10 times more than any other local law enforcement agency in the state, including other county jails.

Wang said groups have made Open Public Records Act requests for the county's records regarding the ICE program, but the county has not fulfilled any of those requests.

She also alleges the county has a lucrative contract with ICE, which pays the county to house hundreds of federal prisoners in the Hudson County jail in Kearny. The county is budgeted to receive $18 million from ICE for that program this year.

According to census figures, 42 percent of Jersey City residents are foreign born, with that number going as high as near 60 percent for the whole county, Wang said.

The program doesn't take into consideration the number of years an immigrant has been in the United States, or if that individual has US citizens who rely on them, Squeo said.

"Immigration should be left to ICE," Squeo said. "The county should be looking after the public welfare of its citizens."

Squeo added that the county's involvement in ICE sends a mixed message to the immigrant community, contrasting with its "immigrant friendly" image.

"I think it tarnishes Hudson County's pro-immigrant image, and sends fear into our immigrant communities," he said.
JERSEY CITY -- The city has received $400,000 in grants to continue developing the city's largest municipal park and to cleanup a chunk of land to build affordable housing on the south side of the city.

The grants, each $200,000, were awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as part of the brownfields program.

One of the grants will go toward the remediation of land near Communipaw Avenue and Woodward Street, which the city hopes to acquire in efforts to expand the newly opened Berry Lane Park.

The grant would be used by the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency to cleanup the lot -- the former home of an industrial property -- which city spokeswoman Jennifer Morril said is not contaminated with chromium,

The $38 million, 17.5 acre park, too, sits on a former industrial sight and opened last month. Chromium was cleared from the land prior to the park's opening. The park is already scheduled to have new features added, including a skate park and restrooms.

The second grant will be used for cleanup at site near the Dwight Street and Ocean Avenue intersection. After the Redevelopment Authority completes the work, 64 affordable housing units will be built by a non-profit developer, the EPA said.

"Cleaning up brownfield sites allows abandoned and contaminated land to be revitalized as parks, affordable housing, and businesses," EPA regional administrator Judith A. Enck said in a statement. "EPA's funding will help create jobs while protecting the health of area residents and improving the environment."

The New Jersey Sierra Club praised the EPA's grant because "Jersey City has a toxic legacy with chromium contamination."
AVON-BY-THE-SEA -- The Coast Guard and local authorities were searching Saturday for a 17-year-old boy reported missing in the Shark River Inlet, officials said.

A friend told authorities the teen went missing as he was freediving in the area, according to Petty Officer Seth Johnson, a Coast Guard spokesman. The Coast Guard deployed a 29-foot response boat and a HH-65 Dolphin helicopter rescue crew after being notified by local police around 5 p.m.

Johnson said divers were also searching the inlet, which was closed as authorities combed the area. Belmar and Avon-by-The-Sea police were assisting in the effort.

Lt. Brian Polite, a spokesman for the State Police, said troopers with the Marine Services Bureau were also working with local authorities. Avon-by-The-Sea police were not immediately available to comment.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
There is still plenty more time for summer vacation.

Whether you are taking a trip to the Jersey Shore for some beach time or traveling with family to other vacation resorts, don't forget to secure your home.

Here are five simple tips from local police departments for protecting your home from burglars:

1. Lock up!

If you're leaving your home, for 10 minutes or several days, make sure you lock up and keep your lights on.

Gloucester Township Police Department advises to double check all the doors and windows prior to leaving and assure they're locked and secure.

You can also use light timers in different areas of your house so it appears someone is home.

Also, remove any spare keys hidden around your residence.

2. Stop mail and newspaper delivery

While you're gone, make sure to have mail delivery temporarily stopped. Or have someone you trust check your mail for you.

According to Gloucester Township Police, an overflowing mailbox or piled up newspapers is a clue that you're not home.

Or, if you have a mail slot, secure it shut. Visit your local post office and complete a form to temporarily stop your mail from being delivered to your home.

"Don't let the mail or newspapers pile up -- it shows that no one is home," Pennsville Township Police Chief Allen J. Cummings said.

3. Keep your local police department informed

"Contact your local police and advise them you're going away and provide some details so the patrol units can check on your house," Cummings said.

Gloucester Township authorities remind residents to let your department know how long you plan to be away for and give them a list of emergency contacts, just in case.

4. Don't tip off criminals on social media or the internet

Do not share any Facebook statuses about your vacation plans or when you're going to be out of town, police said.

Anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account may read that information.

Also, keep your voicemail generic without saying you are going to be gone for a period of time, Gloucester Township Police said.

5. Ask your neighbors to keep an eye out

Find someone you trust on your street or in your area that can keep an eye out while you're gone.

Authorities advise residents to keep someone in the loop so that if an emergency or break-in occurs, they can contact you and police.

For any concerns or suspicious activity, contact your local police department.

Brittany Wehner may be reached at bwehner@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @brittanymwehner. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
PHILADELPHIA -- One 7-year-old is biking a 65-mile trek from the Ben Franklin Bridge down to the Jersey Shore, 6abc reports.

Skylar Goose Hunter took off with another 2,500 bikers Sunday morning for the annual Irish Pub Tour de Shore, according to reports.

6abc reports that Hunter, who also completed a 58-mile trip in May, is the youngest bike rider to tackle the trip ending in Atlantic City.

Bikers must complete the tour -- a fundraiser aiming to bring in $1 million for programs in the Delaware Valley for children and families in need of fallen first responders -- by 1:30 p.m.

Brittany Wehner may be reached at bwehner@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @brittanymwehner. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
The small band of protesters was dwarfed by the soaring twin bell towers of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

They didn't take up much space on the grand and expansive entrance way, graced by Pope John Paul II in 1995.

And they didn't have much of an audience, either. Sunday Masses at one of North America's most ornate and imposing cathedrals don't draw like they used to.

The irony wasn't lost on the people from Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church (OLMC) in Montclair, who came to the Archdiocese of Newark's cathedral last Sunday to protest the closing of their little neighborhood church.

"We get more people at Mass than they do," said Marguerite De Carlo. "Why don't they shut this down?"

She was being facetious, of course. But the anger is genuine and growing. So they decided to make their voices heard - and take their cause public - at the home parish of Archbishop John J. Myers, who made the decision. Today, they will take to the streets of Montclair, as part of their annual festival, beginning at noon.

MORE: Recent Mark Di Ionno columns

The archdiocese announced in May that OLMC would close and merge with Immaculate Conception in Montclair to form a new parish, to be named St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, after she is canonized in September.

It is part of a survival trend: Since 1999, the archdiocese has closed 35 churches, merging them with others to create 18 new parishes.

But OLMC was not a failing parish. It was financially and spiritually healthy, say its members.

"We are not going quietly,'' said De Carlo. "It's time for people to see this archdiocese is not about the good of the people or advancing our faith. It's about its own monetary advancement."

The parishioners have hired lawyers for both civil and canon law matters.

"We found something that's going to shake this whole thing up," said parishioner Raffaele Marzullo.

"The archdiocese hasn't filed the proper paperwork with the state to keep the church (OLMC) certified as a corporation," said Frank Cardell, who was the OLMC business manager until its finances were turned over to Immaculate Conception.

Still, he continues the fight.

"We're working on a decertification," he said. "They can't merge us if they don't control us as corporation."

Sr. Kate Kuenstler, an independent canon lawyer with a national group called FutureChurch and its "Save Our Parishes" initiative agrees.

"This is troublesome (for the archdiocese)," said Kuenstler, who has worked on hundreds of cases in 42 American dioceses and four countries. "In civilian law, they can't form a new corporation (of the merged churches) if they don't own the name of the existing corporations."

The OLMC parishioners also plan to file a lawsuit against the archdiocese over its "We are Living Stones" capital campaign, which began last September.

"We're saying it was fraudulent," said Cardell, credited by parishioners for leading its financial resurgence. "It was presented to us as a fundraiser to help save parishes when they knew all along they were going to shut us down.

"This doesn't just affect us," he said. "There are other parishes on the chopping block while they're out raising money."

James Goodness, the director of communications for the archdiocese declined to comment.

According to the archdiocese website, OLMC parishioners pledged $99,730 to the campaign, $55,076.94 of which has already been received. Of the $90 million the archdiocese was attempting to raise from its 219 parishes, $40 million was to be returned for local use.

De Carlo, who led the "We are Living Stones" initiative at OLMC said simply, "We should get our money back."

The church also had an $80,000 surplus, raised from feasts, festivals and collections. The archdiocese turned that money over to the pastor at Immaculate Conception.

"They took all our books and records and money and made new bank accounts," Cardell said. "In the meantime, they haven't even filed an official decree saying our church is being dissolved, and under Canon Law, we can't appeal until the decree is filed."

The archdiocese said the decision was made based on several variables, including church attendance and sacraments administered.

But the parishioners say it comes down to money and land value.

The church is two blocks from the Bay Street Station of Montclair. New condos, retail stores and parking decks have been built, older apartment buildings have been refurbished and a hotel with a rooftop restaurant is planned.

The church property is assessed at $962,000. Montclair property is typically assessed at 84 percent of market value, meaning that even if the church sold for $1.15 million, it would still be a bargain in the redevelopment-rich area.

"If a bishop is functioning merely as a CEO and sees a sellable church as a franchise, then it's all about making a profit," Kuenstler said. "But that shows a real lack of understanding of a church as a place of community of the faithful, and of heritage and culture. A bishop is supposed to function as a spiritual leader, not as the sole corporate stockholder."

Kuenstler, like the parishioners, is perplexed by the decision to close a profitable church that carries no debt to the archdiocese and has been recently upgraded.

"Usually, a bishop takes a church that has diminished assets and folds it into a financially healthier church," she said. "Not the other way around."

Not only did OLMC have an $80,000 surplus, the parishioners funded $250,000 in repairs and replaced the heating systems in all three buildings on the Pine Street property.

"For a little parish, that's pretty darn good," said Cardell. "We're making money. Does that sound like a church you'd want to shut down?"

Robert Russo, the former mayor, a current councilmember and Montclair's longest serving public official, thinks not.

Though not a parishioner, he sponsored a unanimous resolution asking Myers to reconsider.

"This is an up-and-coming area," said Russo. "You'd think they'd want to keep the church open to attract more people. We offered our help, we asked for a one-year reprieve. We got no response. Not even a letter."

Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.
TOPSHOT-MARATHON-PALESTINIAN-BETHLEHEM

Participants run along Israel's controversial separation barrier, which divides the West Bank from Jerusalem, in the biblical West Bank town of Bethlehem during the 4th Palestine Marathon on April 1, 2016. (Thomas Coex | AFP/Getty Images)

HEBRON, West Bank -- Nadav Bigelman stood in the blistering sun on a deserted street that forms a buffer between the tiny community of right-wing Jewish settlers here and the exasperated Palestinians who want to throw them out.

This standoff is not one among equal combatants. It is pure military domination, the powerful ruling the weak. This was once a bustling street, full of Palestinian shops and homes.

The Israeli military evicted them, over their objections, for security reasons.

"I am ashamed of my country," said Bigelman, who patrolled Hebron as an Israeli solider in 2008 and 2009. "I truly believe this occupation will end. I don't know how and when. But I truly believe that."

View the Israeli occupation of the West Bank through the eyes of a disillusioned soldier, and the first casualty is the moral clarity that Israel's supporters in America tend to form from thousands of miles away.

In this Feb. 25, 1998 photo, a Jewish settler from the settlement of Kiryat Arba kisses the grave stone of Baruch Goldstein, the U.S.-born settler who massacred 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron four years ago before being bludgeoned to death by other Palestinians. (Rick Bowmer | Associated Press)

There is plenty here on both sides to turn your stomach.

Bigelman pointed to a spot nearby where an Israeli infant in her stroller was shot in the head in 2001 by a Palestinian sniper using a telescopic sight. He chose his target deliberately, an Israeli investigation concluded, allowing the baby's mother to live.

But only a few blocks away is the scene of even worse horror -- the mosque where Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler, opened fire on a crowd of Muslims in 1994, killing 29 worshippers and injuring 125.

We stopped at Goldstein's tomb in Kiryat Arba, a heavily fortified Israeli settlement just outside of Hebron. An inscription read, "He gave his life for the people of Israel, its Torah and land."

While our heads were spinning over that, a settler confronted us and said that Goldstein had done the right thing.

"If the Arabs make trouble, we kill them," said the settler, Ofer Ohana. "This is our country. We must keep them afraid."

***

Hebron sits 19 miles south of Jerusalem, and is the largest city in the occupied West Bank, with 215,000 Palestinians and fewer than 1,000 Jewish settlers. It is sacred land to Muslims and Jews, and each community has deep historic and religious roots.

Near the Jewish settlements, the Israeli military presence is overwhelming, with checkpoints everywhere guarded by soldiers who look barely older than adolescents carrying American-made M-16s.

On some streets near the settlements, Palestinians are barred altogether. The military refers to those areas as "sterile zones" as though Palestinians are some sort of germs.

An Israeli firefighter is seen inside a burnt bus in Jerusalem on April 18, 2016. A bus exploded in the heart of Jerusalem, wounding at least 15 people who appeared to have been in an adjacent bus that was also damaged. The explosion raised fears of a return to the Palestinian suicide attacks that ravaged Israeli cities a decade ago. (Mahmoud Illean | Associated Press)

In other areas, they can walk only, no cars. On still others, they can't use their front doors because the street outside is off-limits, so they use back doors or walk along rooftops to a safer zone. Long stretches of these border zones feel like ghost towns, emptied entirely to create a secure buffer.

The settlers here are more militant than most Israelis, many driven by religious zeal that brooks no political compromise.

"This is the land of the Jewish, that's all," said a middle-aged woman, an ambulance driver, who stopped us to talk. "It's right in the Torah. The idea of Palestinians is a myth. There is no nation of Palestine."

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows better than to say that openly, but his policies seem animated by that same view. His determination to steadily expand the Jewish population in the West Bank snuffs out any chance for a peaceful solution to this crisis.

In the 2015 election, under pressure from the right, he stated explicitly that he opposed the creation of a Palestinian state.

"Anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel," he said.

He tried later to walk that back. But the facts on the ground are unforgiving.

Since 1993, the year the Oslo Accords were signed, the settler population has tripled, with estimates now ranging from 350,000 to more than 400,000.

Under Netanyahu, the pace of new construction has picked up, especially in the most sensitive areas.

"What I see is much more emphasis on construction in the most problematic settlements, which are the potential deal-breakers for a two-state solution," Hagit Ofran, director of Peace Now's Settlement Watch project told the New York Times.

Most world leaders consider these settlements to be illegal. It is one thing for a military force to occupy land captured in war. It is quite another to move in civilians to settle that territory permanently. And that is precisely what Israel is doing.

"I do not intend to evacuate any settlements," Netanyahu said in 2015.

Several large settlements are just outside Jerusalem, where low prices are a lure in the face of a housing crunch. But settlers with a hard ideological edge, like those in Hebron, are spread across the West Bank in a patchwork, all of them protected by a heavy Israeli military presence.

To build a viable Palestinian state from this seems impossible. And that is a source of despair among both Israelis and Palestinians who want to find peace.

* * *

I went to Hebron in March with my daughter, a college sophomore, as guests of a group called Breaking the Silence. It's made up of former Israeli soldiers who served in the West Bank and oppose the occupation, having seen its blemishes up close.

"I served in the military because I love Israel, and I'm doing this work because I love Israel," says Avner Gvaryahu, a spokesman for the group who served as a paratrooper in a special operations unit from 2004-2007.

So, we saw this through their lens. We studied the sins of Israelis, not those of the Palestinians.

Still, I learned quickly that a visit to Israel can give you a gut understanding of the horror of Palestinian terrorism.

One night, we met an old family friend for dinner in Jaffa, the ancient port city that is now part of Tel Aviv, strolling on the waterfront afterwards. Two nights later, a Palestinian terrorist went on a stabbing rampage on that very spot, killing an American veteran, and wounding 10 more, including a pregnant woman.

We hear of these attacks all the time, sure. But it's different when it comes that close to your daughter. If you wonder why extremists win elections in Israel, that should help explain it.

A few days later, we had another close call. We sat with a tour guide near the Damascus gate in Jerusalem, discussing the region's history over a bunch of maps, and sipping Turkish coffee for a full hour in the early afternoon before stepping through the gate ourselves. That evening, a Palestinian gunman opened fire on two police officers guarding the gate. We missed the shooting by about three hours.

The next day, we got on a bus for our trip to Hebron, passing through the famous security wall that cordons off the occupied territories.

The wall is enormous, more than twice the height of the Berlin Wall, and topped with barbed wire. Its route was drawn with the arrogance of a superior military power, in many places dipping into Palestinian territory and separating Arabs from their crops and relatives.

But it has dramatically reduced the number of attacks. And after our close calls, I felt unexpected sympathy for those who built it.

I wouldn't dare pretend to have a solution to this crisis. Even if Israel withdrew from the territories, the two sides would have to strike a deal on Jerusalem, and the Palestinian demand for the right to return to the homes they lost in 1948.

Israelis note that when they withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinians responded by electing Hamas in the legislative elections of 2006.

The next year, Hamas began firing Katyusha rockets at Israeli cities. In the year 2007, roughly 2,800 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza, by Israel's count.

So as bad as the occupation is, it is not the only problem. Israeli repression and Palestinian violence have become the chicken and the egg, a cycle that feeds itself.

"Palestinian terrorism is horrible, and it's something I fought against and put my life on the line for Israelis over," Gvaryahu says. "But we can't forget there is violence on the Israeli side, and sometimes it's committed by Israeli soldiers. That's is also part of the dynamic."

* * *

In the closing months of his presidency in 2000 and 2001, Bill Clinton came close to brokering a peace deal. Israel agreed to withdraw from most of the West Bank, and to compensate Palestinians for what they kept by swapping land within Israel proper.

But negotiations ended in failure, with key differences remaining on Jerusalem and the right of return. Both sides said after talking in January 2001 that peace was never closer at hand.

It was a missed opportunity of historic dimensions, and now all sides agree that hopes for peace have withered.

Still, we found inspiration on both sides of this divide, a humanity that has to keep some hope alive. History is full of surprises.

In Hebron, we visited a young Palestinian man, Abed Salayma, who was building an illegal kindergarten in his neighborhood. He didn't want the young kids he knew to face the daily danger of passing through a military checkpoint on their way to a school that was farther away.

Life under the boot of Israeli military is a constant humiliation. He can't travel more than a few blocks without passing a checkpoint. Soldiers search his home for no reason, with no warrant. One time, his mother was arrested, an incident that still stings.

"Sometimes they kick all of us out of the house," he says. "We got used to it. But this time was a bit different. He grabbed me and pushed me against the wall, and my sister she was filming that and he took the phone and erased everything."

When the soldiers grabbed him, his mother resisted, so they blindfolded and handcuffed her, he said.

As the reason for all this? Mistaken identity. He was released the next day. His mother, he said, had to pay a fine of 7,000 shekels, or nearly $2,000.

The kindergarten was a small two-room building, almost ready for opening. He and his friends smuggled in paint and rugs at night, knowing they would never get permission to build this school openly.

The authorities are apparently hoping that Palestinians living this close to the settlers will abandon the neighborhood, and often deny permission for even repair work on homes, according to Salayma and the former soldiers.

Some settlers add their own touch: Graffiti spray- painted on a gate next door to the kindergarten reads, "Gas the Arabs."

The constant squeeze has succeeded. At least half of Salayma's neighbors had given up and moved.

"Basically any kind of rehab is not allowed," he said. "It's like a forced evacuation, but gradually and over time."

How many people have the kind of patience it requires to respond to this repression by building a kindergarten at night?

Some Israeli settlers in the West Bank expressed their opinion of the Palestinians with graffiti saying, "Gas the Arabs." (Tom Moran | The Star-Ledger)

The former soldiers were an inspiration, too. The settlers in Hebron know them by now, and hate them for bringing outsiders in to see what it happening. They throw rocks at their buses. They leave them waiting at checkpoints. Conservative politicians condemn them, and say they are terrorist sympathizers.

But these guys have the iron conviction of American civil rights leaders in the 1960s. They are not going to back down. Their patriotism is not about blind obedience; it is about endless work to help Israel live up to its best ideals.

"We love Israel, and we hate the occupation," Bigelman says. "But I'm fighting to change that, waking up every day to make a different reality so that my children will not have to live in the same situation.

"This place is important to me. I sleep and dream in Hebrew. This is where I was born and grew up and will die. This is my home. And I need to make my home better."

A few months after that conversation, I was safely at home and saw a story in the paper about Kiryat Arba, the settlement where our trip to Hebron began, where the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein is buried.

A Palestinian man had scrambled over a security fence at the settlement, broken into a home, and stabbed a 13-year-old Jewish girl as she slept in her bed. It was the latest in a series of attacks that had left 30 dead since October. Investigators counted 18 stab wounds.

The girl was related to Uri Ariel, Israel's minister of agriculture and rural development, who vowed that Israel would respond by tightening its grip.

"It has to be clear that in the absence of a partner, that there will be Israeli sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea," he said. "We have to employ very tough deterrence measures, such as expulsion of families, ending monetary aid, seizing money."

The outlook, then, is for more repression, and more violence.

Which is the chicken, and which is the egg? I don't know. And in the end, does it even matter?

More: Tom Moran columns

Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
The following exchange between former New Jersey governors Brendan T. Byrne and Tom Kean took place via telephone last week.

Q: Some terrible tragedies have helped bring us together. Do you see any sign the killing of five Dallas police officers could have that impact?

GOV. BYRNE: In terms of bringing the country together, I haven't yet seen that the killing of the Dallas police officers is having a great impact either way.

GOV. KEAN: Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go before we come together. We desperately need people of good will who can talk to each other with mutual respect.

Q: President Obama responded by saying, among other things, that we are not as divided as the media sometimes suggests. Compared to, say, the '60s and '70s, when we had civil rights protests, the Vietnam war and Watergate, do you think that's accurate?

BYRNE: We are not as divided as media has made it seem. I don't think we're any more divided than we ever have been.

KEAN: We might not be as divided as the country was in the '60s and '70s, but we're divided in different ways. People now don't seem willing to consider other points of view. We desperately need people who can help bring us together as a nation. In the '60s and '70s we were able to find some of those people. Right now I don't see them.

Q: Should we be treating the suspension of many New Jersey transportation projects as a crisis?

BYRNE: No. Instead, we should be putting more money into the Transportation Trust Fund. We could fund it as much as needed if we weren't so afraid to raise taxes like the gas tax.

KEAN: Yes, it's a crisis. No jobs are going to come here unless we have a reliable source of transportation funding. When I recruited CEOs and their companies to New Jersey, roads and mass transit was always one of their concerns. And until they were satisfied, they wouldn't commit to moving their corporation. We had a good deal - raise the gas tax a moderate amount and get rid of one of our death taxes. We should've done that and moved on.

Q: Gov. Christie has given his office more discretionary power to withhold aid for municipalities who don't satisfy spending criteria. Is this prudent fiscal management, or an overreach?

BYRNE: This is all a question of how you manage spending. That's harder for mayors of some municipalities than others. Maybe the state should be a little more forgiving.

KEAN: I can support more power for the state government over municipalities, but with more power comes more responsibility.

Q: Hillary Clinton won't face charges for using a private email server as secretary of state. Could that issue still hurt her in November, or is it something most voters don't care about?

BYRNE: I don't think most voters care about it. A lot of things have been overestimated in this campaign, and nobody cares a whole lot.

KEAN: It's just another problem for Hillary Clinton's credibility. When you put these problems together, between 50 and 60 percent of the American public don't trust her. I believe this will be a continuing problem for the Clinton campaign. By November she's got to find a way to restore the trust of the American people. It's not going to be enough to simply be against Trump.

Q: A number of prominent Republicans have said they won't attend the nominating convention this month. Is that a problem for Donald Trump?

BYRNE: As a Democrat, I'm happy to know that Donald Trump is on the side of the Republicans in this campaign, because I think Donald Trump has a lot of problems.

KEAN: No, that's not a problem. But it will be a problem if a number of prominent Republicans refuse to support him as the campaign moves toward November.

Follow NJ.com/Opinion on Twitter @NJ_Opinion. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
If there was any lingering doubt about the role of Naloxone as a life-saving tool, a pair of near-tragic incidents blew it away forever.

Earlier this week, Hightstown police carrying drug-reversal kits containing the emergency medication revived two people, in two separate incidents, in one work shift.

Called to a home at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Officers Kenneth Larsen and Daniel Abbatemarco discovered a 37-year-old man in cardiac arrest, with evidence of heroin use nearby.

They performed CPR and administered a dose of Narcan - the medication's brand name - before the man was taken to the hospital. Alive.

Responding to another call not nine hours later, the same two cops and another, Officer Philip Esposito, found a 26-year-old man unresponsive and gasping for breath. Again, the officers sprang into action, giving the man oxygen and then Narcan before sending him to a local hospital, where he regained consciousness.

It could have been your son or your daughter starring in these real-life scenarios. Your next-door neighbor, your favorite teacher. In just one New Jersey county, Gloucester, police have administered Narcan successfully 95 times in one year.

And the outcomes could easily have been different.

"Narcan has saved thousands of lives in New Jersey - people who otherwise would have died of an overdose if someone hadn't been prepared and trained with the antidote," Gov. Chris Christie said in April.

He was speaking at a training session for friends and family members who might one day be called on to administer the antidote to loved ones who had overdosed.

Earlier this year, the Attorney General's office began looking into the soaring price of Narcan, both in the Garden State and nationwide, It's a wise move.

For its all miraculous lifesaving abilities, the antidote is useless if the people who need to administer it can't afford to keep it on hand.

As of October 2014, every police patrol vehicle in Mercer County has carried Naloxone as part of a program overseen by the county prosecutor's office. Money from the state Attorney General's office funds the initiative.

No one chooses to be addicted to heroin, or to any opioid drug. No one wakes up one day and says, "I think I'll risk my marriage, my college education, my job - my life - for the momentary joy of one more hit."

That's why we call it addiction.

In New Jersey, victims and their families grapple with the one-two punch of a cheap supply of goods - as little as $2 on the streets for a small bag - and a lethally potent purity rate.

Acting Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri, who worked on equipping county police units with naloxone two years ago, says the heroin coming into our state is up to 62 percent pure, among the highest levels in the country.

In Hunterdon County, Prosecutor Anthony P. Kearns III and Chief of Detectives John J. Kuczynski helped launch the initiative START - Steps to Action Recovery and Treatment - a program aimed at giving drug users help if they find themselves back in the grip of addiction.

And the community there is getting involved by offering training on the use of Narcan. One session held in May was organized in honor of the memory of Briana Hoppel, who was 17 when she died in 2014.

Follow NJ.com/Opinion on Twitter @NJ_Opinion. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
CLEVELAND -- Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump ended days of speculation Friday morning when he announced he had chosen Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for his running mate.

Trump picked Pence over two other finalists that he has been considering in his high-profile search for a vice president: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Pence, a former congressman, is known as one of the most conservative governors in the U.S. He has also held opposite views from Trump on a number of issues, including trade.

But proponents of the Pence pick say it could help unify the GOP, which has been divided over Trump's candidacy.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton's campaign denounced Pence for his record, calling him "the most extreme pick in a generation and was one of the earliest advocates for the tea party."

Trump bypassed Christie even though the governor has been one of his closest advisers and most loyal supporters the last few months.

Christie has been friends with the former Atlantic City casino magnate for more than a decade and was the first mainstream Republican official to endorse Trump. In turn, Trump picked the governor to run his transition team.

As for Gingrich? The former speaker has been positioning he and Trump as maverick candidates and said that the choice between he and Pence was "a choice between having two pirates on the ticket and a pirate and a relatively stable, more normal person."

So as Trump prepares to formally accept the GOP's nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this coming week, do you think he made the right decision? Vote in the informal, unscientific poll below.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
The bulldozers that should be repairing New Jersey's roads and bridges are gradually shutting down, and any hope of improving our bus and rail service is on hold.

The political crisis Trenton -- the mess left in the vacuum created by our absentee governor -- is now actively damaging our economy, killing jobs and slowing growth.

The core problem is that Christie will not a sign a gas tax increase unless it is accompanies by even larger tax cuts. That's nuts, and helps explain why the state's credit rating has dropped so steeply on his watch.

The tax cuts would dig into the general fund, already rated as the nation's second most out of whack, after the budget of Illinois. Because any increase in the gas tax would be siphoned off to a separate fund covering only transit projects.

What would New Jersey have to cut from the general fund to cover the huge new tax breaks the governor wants? Education funding, already frozen for five years, would have to take a big hit because it is by far the largest piece of the state budget, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the total.

And last week, Senate President Steve Sweeney made it clear that deep tax would also demolish his hopes of replenishing the state's pension funds with a Constitutional amendment mandating full annual payments.

"How can we possibly do both?" Sweeney asks.

The infuriating part of this story is that Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto (D-Hudson) has been so remarkably reckless. Unless he finds a way to reverse course, this crisis is certain to deepen.

After Christie demanded his tax cuts, Sweeney crafted a plan that met the governor at least halfway, and had bipartisan support.

Along with a hike in the gas tax of 23 cents a gallon, that plan included a phase-out of the estate tax the governor had demanded, along with a new deduction for charitable giving, and income-tax cuts for middle-class retirees and the working poor.

That plan would have cut taxes by about $1 billion a year by 2022. We can't afford even that. But given the governor's bottom line, Sweeney's strategy was at least rational.

Enter Prieto. Instead of embracing that plan, he pushed a much larger tax cut through the Assembly, one that would reduce the sales tax and cost almost twice as much per year. That bill was drafted in a few hours, after a last-minute meeting with the governor. Somehow, Prieto's deluded followers in the Democratic Assembly followed him over this cliff in a midnight vote on deadline, many of them without having even read the bill.

Ask Prieto how he'll cover the costs, and he offers nothing but magical thinking. He says the economy will grow, producing new revenue, a claim manufactured from thin air and supported by no economic study.

His real plan, it seems, is to reverse course and raise taxes as soon as Christie leaves office. "You have to adjust if it's not sustainable," he said on Friday. "Everything would be on the table."

Sweeney privately offered the governor a few ideas for breaking this stalemate this week, and hasn't heard back. But he says he will not agree to anything like the deep tax cuts the Assembly approved.

Again, Sweeney is the adult in the room, giving us a glimpse of what he might bring to the table as governor, should he run as expects. He faces steep odds in this budget fight, but we should all be wishing him luck.

One thing is clear: Prieto plan kills any chance that New Jersey can make full pension payments and start digging out of its fiscal hole. Unless he reverses course, that Constitutional amendment is dead.

More: Tom Moran columns

Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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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.
By Emily Flitter

NEW YORK, July 17 (Reuters) - Donald Trump, who often says he only likes winners, tells one grand tale of loss: In 1990, he nearly went bankrupt and was forced to ask dozens of banks to whom he owed money to change the terms on their loans and forgive some of his debts.

It was, the real estate developer admits in his 1997 book "The Art of the Comeback," the darkest period of his professional life. In his telling, it's a story of redemption, of resilience, and proof of his exceptional negotiating skills and shrewd thinking.

Six people who participated in the loan workout negotiations have a different recollection, raising questions about a key part of the personal narrative that many of Trump's supporters have found compelling as he campaigns to be the next president of the United States on Nov. 8. On the campaign trail he has portrayed himself as a survivor and a master negotiator.

Trump says his comeback began when he recognized a downturn in the real estate market and quickly asked banks to renegotiate his loans. "That decision was perhaps the smartest thing I did," he wrote.

The six bankers and lawyers involved in the talks say the bailout wasn't based on any overture Trump initiated with the banks - and the terms of the deal were dictated by what was best for the banks, not Trump.

Three of the participants say Trump didn't acknowledge he had a problem until his lenders reviewed his books, realized he was on the brink of collapse, and summoned him for debt restructuring talks.

While much has been written about Trump's financial troubles at the time, there has been little examination of his description of the bank negotiations in "The Art of the Comeback," including his assertion that he chose to initiate those talks.

Trump's spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined to comment for this story.

WARNING SIGNS

Following the U.S. stock market crash of 1987, a global recession hit New York real estate. New construction stalled, and several big developers declared bankruptcy.

Story continues

As the real estate market slumped, Trump ran out of cash.

At the beginning of 1990 he owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump's loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank but became lead counsel for the negotiations.

At the time, Trump was not considered a major developer, but he was a New York celebrity. His affair with the actress Marla Maples and his divorce from his first wife Ivana Trump made national news headlines, and his first book, "The Art of the Deal," was a bestseller.

He didn't have a large portfolio of real estate in New York, with the notable exceptions of his 5th Avenue building, Trump Tower, completed in 1983, and the Plaza Hotel, which he bought in 1988 after borrowing heavily from Citibank.

He also owned three casinos in Atlantic City, having made a financial bet that he could revive the East Coast gambling destination. And in 1989 he added part of an airline to his portfolio, again turning to Citibank for a loan to help finance the acquisition of bankrupt Eastern Airlines Shuttle. He turned it into Trump Shuttle.

LOOKING AT THE BOOKS

In 1989, in response to growing concerns about the economic downturn, the Federal Reserve began asking big banks to review their exposure to the sinking real estate market.

At the beginning of 1990, a credit specialist at one of Trump's biggest lenders decided to take a look at the bank's book of loans to him.

The decision was prompted in part by the Fed's questions, as well as concerns within the bank about its exposure to the real estate market. The credit specialist, who did not want to be identified, concluded at the time that Trump was "about to go into bankruptcy."

"The banks were onto the problem before he was onto the problem," the specialist told Reuters.

Pomerantz said some of the banks became aware of the magnitude of Trump's financial problems when, on a single day, he drew down every cent of a $100 million line of credit one of the banks, Banker's Trust, which was purchased by Deutsche Bank in 1999, had given him to meet his obligations.

Reuters was unable to independently confirm this.

"He did not come to the banks and say 'I have a problem.' That did not happen," said Pomerantz.

Pomerantz, who says he is not a member of any political party, argued in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that Trump's record in real estate was not a good way to measure whether or not he would be a good president.

In "The Art of the Comeback," Trump says he began loan workout talks in March 1990 when he informed his bankers he might miss a payment on his casino debts.

"If I had waited just six months longer to renegotiate terms with the banks, I might have lost everything," he wrote. "I would have had to stand in line with a whole bunch of other moguls who were trying to do the same thing."

MAKING A DEAL

Soon, in boardrooms of banks and law firms around Manhattan, Trump's deputies and lawyers began a series of meetings with representatives of the 72 banks, which had billions in outstanding loans, according to Pomerantz.

During the same period, Trump was separately renegotiating a series of loans on his Atlantic City casinos. One of the bankers involved in those negotiations, Ben Berzin, said Trump seemed unaware of the depths of his financial troubles even after the banks had stepped in.

"There was a period during these negotiations when he was still spending money like a drunken sailor," Berzin said, recalling the uproar among the bankers when, in a TV interview in the summer of 1991, Trump displayed a large diamond engagement ring he had given Maples. Media reports said the ring cost $250,000, and Pomerantz said the bankers complained about it to Trump in their next meeting.

At one point, Trump invited all of the bankers to a Broadway show that Maples had a role in, according to Berzin and a banker who took part in the larger talks with the 72 banks. Both said they believed Trump was trying to curry favor to win better terms in the workouts. Berzin attended the show but the other banker did not.

Trump described Berzin in "The Art of the Comeback" as a "jerk" who would "scream at people at the top of his lungs about nonsense." Berzin said he was irritated by Trump's characterization and denied ever raising his voice in a meeting.

BANKING ON "TRUMP THE SALESMAN"

In his book, Trump says he told representatives of the 72 banks he would declare bankruptcy and "tie you guys up for years" in the proceedings unless they staked him $65 million to keep his businesses running until the real estate market recovered. He also wanted them to agree to defer all loan payments until that time.

"The banks more than capitulated - they enthusiastically agreed to my proposal," Trump wrote.

The bankers and lawyers interviewed dispute this. Though it was true that a personal bankruptcy would have made it harder for the banks to collect what Trump owed them, he had little leverage in the talks, they said.

He, too, would have been seriously hurt in a bankruptcy, especially since he had personally guaranteed so much of what he had borrowed. In Pomerantz's analysis, he would have been able to hold on to little else beyond his home and his pension plan.

During the 18-month process of negotiations and asset sales, Trump also asked for more time to develop his business ideas, like his plan to turn hotel rooms at the Plaza Hotel into condominiums, according to one of the bankers, who declined to be identified.

That proposal was vetoed. While he did receive a $450,000-a-month allowance from the banks to keep his business operations going, it was structured and executed on the banks' terms, several of the negotiators said.

The banks decided they could recover more of the $4 billion they were collectively owed if they sold Trump's holdings one by one, waiting until the market recovered, rather than taking possession of the assets, four participants in the talks said.

These individuals said the banks agreed to forgive Trump's personal liabilities in exchange for his help in selling the properties. The proceeds of the sales would then be split among the banks.

Trump agreed that the banks could take away all his personal property, including his beloved Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, if he failed to execute the agreement.

"We had to be sure he would pay attention," Pomerantz said of the liens on Trump's personal holdings. "We would meet with him every Friday morning. He was under very strict restrictions by the banks."

Trump worked with the bankers to sell his assets, even when he disagreed about the timing of the sales, most notably when Citibank eventually sold The Plaza.

The banks did not recover 100 percent of what they were owed and several lenders vowed never to work with Trump again.

(Reporting By Emily Flitter, editing by Paul Thomasch and Ross Colvin)
Hodinkee Kevin Rose 2

Moving is always a life change. But moving from San Francisco to New York City? There might be some culture shock involved.

Kevin Rose, a former startup founder and venture capitalist and the current CEO of respected watch blog Hodinkee, recently switched coasts, and he has mostly good things to say about the East.

"It's been a blast," Rose said. "There's a handful of cities that I would consider living in in the US, and obviously New York is one of them."



Rose says the Big Apple has a "faster pace" overall. The biggest change he's noticed? Work culture.

"In San Francisco, the startup environment is one of longer duration of work," Rose said. "We tend to work into the night and be a little bit more hardcore like that, whereas New York seems to be more about hustle and a little faster pace."

As for the startup and tech scene itself, Rose said New York's relative anonymity comes as a welcome relief.

"The nice thing about being in New York is that no one is trying to pitch you their startup," Rose said. "[In San Francisco] there were just entrepreneurs everywhere looking for money and in every coffee shop. Not that that's a bad thing  everyone is trying to build something awesome and succeed  but just as someone who has been doing that for so many years in a row, I think everybody needs a break."

new york

Rose is staying away from the New York tech scene for now. "I'm not actively doing any angel investing," he said.

Other differences between New York and San Francisco? Well, it's "nice to have actual seasons," and there's "a lot more jeans and T-shirts in San Francisco for sure," Rose says.

One area New York does lack in: the culinary department.

"San Francisco has better produce, better food," Rose said. "My wife and I are huge foodies, so it's been an adjustment."

NOW WATCH: These are the watches worn by the smartest and most powerful men in the world





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MUNSTER  Peoples Bank's new chief executive officer wants to keep the community bank independent, reinvest in Northwest Indiana and continue to grow one of the Region's largest financial institutions.

"What it really boils down is we want to remain independent," CEO Ben Bochnowski said. "Community banks are going away left and right. Everything gets to the question of making sure that we stay here for our community and our customers."

Bochnowski, whose immigrant great-grandfather John Bochnowski founded the bank more than a century ago after arriving in East Chicago with $13 in his pocket, became CEO in late April after years of being groomed for the role. He succeeded his father, David Bochnowski, who has stayed on as executive chairman.

The younger Bochnowski, age 36, takes over the bank at a time of rapid growth.

Four years ago, Munster-based Northwest Indiana Bancorp developed a five-year strategic plan that called for 12 branches and between $630 million and $650 million in assets by the end of 2017. Today, it already has 16 branches and $850 million in assets, and more than $1 billion in assets under management.

All growth is local

Bochnowski hopes to grow Peoples Bank to 20 branches. Peoples Bank is building a new branch at the intersection of Ridge Road and Cline Avenue in Highland to replace the older one it acquired nearby when it bought First Federal Savings and Loan Association in 2014. It also acquired Liberty Savings Bank, and the growth through acquisition has helped boost loans by about $100 million last year and increased return on investment by 70 percent over the last three years.

Lending has been booming, and Peoples originated $321 million in loans last year, including $228 million for commercial projects. The bank is looking at building new branches in fast-growing areas, especially in Porter County and south Lake County. Bochnowski said Peoples would consider further acquisitions but wasn't actively looking for any.

"We're interested in organic growth," Bochnowski said.

The new branch in Highland will reflect a shift in the bank's focus. To cater to shifting customer demand, the new Highland branch will feature only two teller lines instead of the eight at the branch it replaces. The rest of the space will be offices so that people people can meet with bankers about mortgages or financial planning.

"It's modern and focused on the customers," he said. "The branch represents what we're trying to do to engage our customers."

Nationally, in-person transactions at bank branches are declining 10 percent a year as more people embrace online and mobile banking. Peoples Bank is focusing more on big-picture goals such as helping customers apply for mortgages and save for retirement or their children's college, Bochnowski said.

The new larger bank branch will employ eight to 10 people. Peoples Bank, which now employs 215 altogether, also has been adding staff at its corporate headquarters in Munster, where it's planning to renovate 5,000 square feet of unfinished space on the second floor.

"We're bursting at the seams in our corporate headquarters," Bochnowski said.

Working for a bigger family

Bochnowski, the fourth in his family to run the publicly-traded community bank, used to do homework after school while sitting in his dad's office at 9204 Columbia Ave. The two now have offices next to each other.

"Banking is not the family business," he said. "We don't own Peoples Bank. It's the family trade. We're a public company. You could buy a share of our company. That's how we get capital. It's money that goes into the local economy to grow Northwest Indiana. We make sure companies can expand and hire more people, and people have homes to raise their family in, and developers can build new homes."

Peoples Bank increased its dividend to 28 cents per share earlier this year. The bank has a 3.65 percent rate of return on investment, compared to an average of 2 percent in the industry.

"We're doing pretty well," Bochnowski said. "We're generating returns while growing the company and investing in Northwest Indiana."

Peoples Bank also aims to stay on top of the latest technology to remain relevant to customers. It was one of the first local banks to develop a mobile app and mobile check deposit, and it actively monitors industry trends so it can offer what customers will come to expect.

"The way people use money hasn't changed for the last several hundred years," Bochnowski said. "People use money to do things they can't on their own, whether buy a house or expand a business."

He points out the word bank comes from the Italian word bancario, which was the bench they'd sit down on to lend money 5,000 years ago. So what banks do today is not a new concept.

"What's different is how people interact with the bank," he said. "It took people 30 years to adopt online banking, and far less time to take up mobile banking. We need to stay in tune with those changes, but we still provide capital for people to grow their business, build their homes and grow the economy."

Bochnowski said his first few months as CEO have been fun, but he never forgets that he's responsible for 215 employees and thousands of customers. He said they're the ones who have helped make Peoples Bank so successful.

"A lot of people reached out to congratulate me, and I do appreciate all the support, but it wouldn't be possible without all the commitment and talent we have at Peoples Bank," he said. "We have a team that's ready to tackle the next step, and grow and change with our customers. As the Region changes, we'll grow with it."
A new graduate certification program at Calumet College of St. Joseph took students and faculty across the world to Madrid this summer.

The Global Management Certificate program, established to support the growing need of managers to understand multiple cultures, rules and norms, is a post-graduate program that provides in-depth study of global economics, management, leadership and communication.

Steve Varela, assistant professor of international management and the program's director, said it gives students a chance to hone their cross-cultural skills by not only experiencing cultures distinctly different, but also having to perform in the foreign context, under the direction of an international faculty team.

"We were honored to be courted by the Escuela de Organizacion, or EOI, in Madrid to partner on this project," Varela said.

"We saw that our missions are similar and with our continued focus on educating leaders about culture and the global workforce, we wanted to capitize on this great opportunity."

Varela said participants included students from the Domincan Republic, Spain and the United States, with ages ranging from 21 to 30, and experience ranging from fresh college graduates to experienced attorneys seeking an advantage in the global marketplace.

Calumet College associate business professor Desila Rosetti said EOI is one of Europe's first schools of business administration. The first group of students consisted of two recent graduates of the business management program at Calumet College  Angelique Cassell, 21, of Hammond, and Nik Schultz, 22, of Schererville, along with 10 students from the MBA program in Madrid.

The program included four weeks of online activities and two weeks of in-country face-to-face instruction delivered by an international faculty.

Varela said this first program consisted of experts in Asian marketing from New Zealand, international corporate finance from Taiwan and American faculty with expertise in leadership, management and global negotiation.

Schultz said the certificate allows him to have one more certification that will separate him from other job applicants. He hasn't quite decided what type of job he will apply for, yet. He said the two weeks in Madrid allowed him and Cassell to apply what they learned in the online program.

"We also have had an opportunity to visit museums and churches and other buildings," he said in an interview through FaceTime while in Madrid.

"Every day we have free time in the morning to travel around because class starts at 3 p.m."

Schultz said the experiences in Madrid and the courses on international leadership and human resources will be helpful in the future. "We will know how to deal with people from other cultures," he said.

Cassell, who also were interviewed on FaceTime while in Madrid, said she is applying for an assistant administrator position at a company in Munster.

"I had not been out of the country before," she said.

"This has been a lot of fun, a very eye-opening experience. People have welcomed us here, and we've built relationships with the people here. All of the Madrid students spoke excellent English and were very friendly."

The program concluded July 1, and the Americans returned to the U.S.

Madrid student Guillermo Ayuso, who responded by email, said he enrolled in the certificate program because he wants to work outside Spain in the future.

"I want to have an international view of the world," he said. "I want to be able to understand and work outside of my own culture, being able to communicate, negotiate and work effectively with people from all over the world."

Ayuso said he thought the coursework was interesting and informative, and the mixture of reading and activities, whether individual or in a group, were great to learn.

"The information is extremely useful for the future. I have really enjoyed the American company, both the students and the faculty. Having studied in the U.S. before, I have always felt comfortable with the style of teaching and their methods," he said.
NEW YORK  To mark the 15th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, the 9/11 memorial museum is staging an art exhibition that in some cases uses actual remnants of the day of terror in works that convey both grief and tenderness.

Scorched and torn business papers from the collapsing towers and radio transmissions from the fiery pit are part of the collection titled, "Rendering the Unthinkable: Artists Respond to 9/11," which opens Sept. 12.

Thirteen artists contributed paintings and a sculpture, as well as works on paper and video.

In one video clip, a young woman washes her fire chief father's shirt  soiled from three days spent working in the smoking World Trade Center rubble.

Brooklyn resident Christopher Saucedo created his papier-mache artwork, "World Trade Center as a Cloud," as a way to remember his firefighter brother, whose remains were never found.

Other artists lost friends or witnessed the attacks.

Monika Bravo, a native of Colombia living in Brooklyn, had filmed a thunderstorm passing over the city on Sept. 10, 2001, from her studio on the 92nd floor of the north tower. The footage is now condensed into a piece dedicated to a fellow artist who died a day later in the same tower.

"Through the lens of art, we reflect on the raw emotion we all felt on that unforgettable Tuesday morning 15 years ago," said Alice Greenwald, the memorial museum's director. The artists are not asking "that we revisit the horrors of that day but that we try to make sense of what was left in its wake."

Some works incorporate papers, in many pieces, that were blown out of the disintegrating skyscrapers and landed as far away as Brooklyn across the river. They included a rumpled sheet in Japanese and an application for a marketing job written days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The exhibition was assembled by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum that oversees two reflecting pools bearing the names of the nearly 3,000 people who died that day in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The display is the first in the museum's special exhibition gallery where various 9/11-related topics are planned in the future.
CROWN POINT  Superintendent Teresa Eineman is finally able to take off one of her school hats.

Since the March 1 resignation of Matt Ruess, Crown Point School Corp. chief financial officer, Eineman has worn the CFO hat along with her superintendents chapeau while she fielded applications and selected the new CFO. Ruess, who originally was recruited for the job by Eineman, left to enter the private sector.

Eineman announced at the School Boards meeting last month the hiring of Kathleen Dowling, who was the CFO at Griffith Schools and previously worked for East Chicago. She also worked for the Highland clerk-treasurers office and the Lake County treasurers office.

Ms. Dowling is a precious gem we discovered in our search for the best and brightest throughout Indiana, Eineman said. She has the knowledge, skills and disposition to become a sage in the eyes of her peers. In our eyes she is the keeper of dreams, expected to maximize the value of each dollar for the benefit of our 8,400 students.

Eineman said she received a lot of applications for the position, but most of them did not have experience in school finance.

I am excited to be a contributing member of this outstanding leadership team, Dowling said. Our hard work and dedication are first and foremost for the benefit of children. I can think of no one better I can work for as a team.
ST. JOHN  The town appears uncertain just what to do about its political sign ordinance.

The Town Council voted a couple of months ago to repeal the section of the sign ordinance dealing with political signs after Councilman Christian Jorgensen said it probably was illegal in light of a court decision on a similar political sign ordinance in Gilbert, Arizona.

Before the section can be repealed, the ordinance has to go through the process of being considered by the towns Plan Commission, which makes a recommendation to the council. Until the process is completed, the council agreed not to enforce the current ordinance.

The revised ordinance made its first appearance at Wednesdays commission meeting, and it remains a work in progress as the commission voted to defer it to the commissions study session on Wednesday. Town Attorney David Austgen said he is waiting for more information from Police Chief James Kveton, who is on vacation.

The councils decision to repeal the political sign ordinance was tied to an incident in November when more than 40 signs put at three polling places by the St. John Homeowners PAC calling for voters to fire City Manager Steve Kil, Councilman Mark Barenie and Council President Michael Forbes were confiscated by Kil for allegedly being placed without the property owners consent.

Kil was eventually charged with conversion, but the PAC claimed his actions two days before the election might have had an impact on the results since Forbes narrowly won re-election.

Joe Hero, a leader of the PAC and a frequent critic of town officials, said at the public hearing on the repeal that a revised ordinance should stipulate that any town employee who illegally removes political signs should be terminated and any employee that helps should be forced to resign.

Hero had received a letter that outlined where the town code specifically prohibits political signs being posted on utility poles and can only be placed along the parkway or public right of way with the permission of the property owner.

Austgen said he had to look at the whole ordinance, not just the political signs portion. He said political signs are permitted, but the goal of the changes is to make sure all signs are treated the same.

The remaining regulations work, subject to some more information Im still getting for possible replacement or change in the ordinance, he said. The intent is to delete political from the regulations.

Commission member James Maciejewski said the proposed changes seemed to include eliminating regulations for temporary signs that were not political signs. He asked if that section could be kept and the rest repealed. Austgen said some of the regulations were redundant and language later in the ordinance referred to temporary signs.

Some commission members said they would like to see the proposed replacement language before voting, and commission member Robert Birlson said he didnt even have a copy of the old ordinance.
DYER  Concerned about the amount and speed of traffic traversing streets in their subdivision, a dozen residents of Hearthstone presented a petition with suggestions ranging from speed bumps to more stop signs at a recent Town Council meeting.

Caryn Belcik said drivers cut through Flagstone Drive and Deer Creek Drive as a way to get from Calumet Avenue to Schererville-based theaters, big box stores and attractions such as SkyZone on Eagle Ridge Drive, and even through to Indianapolis Boulevard.

Google maps shows this route, said Kay Harts, one of the residents who also brought their children to the meeting. We dont feel safe letting our children play in the front yard.

Among the problems are drivers going around school buses that have the safety arm extended, the loss of mailboxes and trees in front of homes to vehicles speeding through and being sworn at by drivers while trying to enter their own driveways. In addition, Deer Creek is a half-mile long street with no crosswalks, the residents said.

This is a public safety issue which the Dyer Town Council has already been made aware of via pleas by our residents at a number of meetings, Belcik said, reading from the petition signed by residents of 123 homes in the 145-home subdivision.

A Town Council study session on April 8 where this was to be discussed was canceled, she noted.

At Thursdays meeting, town officials said there are a number of issues involved in addressing this problem.

Thats a public road, said Council President Mary Tanis, indicating that the streets are not part of a private subdivision.

The state of Indiana doesnt allow some changes to such roadways including the addition of stop signs, said Bill Enseln, town attorney. Red light cameras are also illegal in Indiana, he said.

Councilman Joe Cinko asked if stop signs could be installed if they are warranted.

Stop signs are not allowed to control speed, noted Tom DeGiulio, town administrator. Speed bumps or speed tables require structural changes, cause problems for snow plows and create more accidents, he said.

We need to change behavior. We need to collect better data DeGiulio said. He recommended a conservative approach that includes a new traffic study, adding crosswalks with the towns striping program and trimming trees that block speed signs.

He also said the current speed limits need to be enforced.

Police Chief Dave Hein agreed.

We are out there. The Town Council has given us more police officers, said Hein, adding that hes working with Schererville Police Chief David Dowling on solutions.

In other business, the Dyer Town Council passed an ordinance establishing penalties for those residents who fail to convert to radio read water meters. There are 68 addresses on the list and letters will be mailed out Aug. 1 detailing the penalties. They have 90 days to have the meter changed.

In the 4-to-1 vote, Councilwoman Cathy Lareau voted no. She cited some peoples concerns about the medical implications of radio waves.
EAST CHICAGO  The City Council has approved a resolution to allow property zoned heavy industrial at 240 E. Columbus Drive to be used as a child care facility.

Owner Joyce Read had filed a petition for the use variance so she can relocate her New Horizons Child Care from 3924 Main St.

Read plans to buy the property on Columbus Drive from the School City of East Chicago.

Marino Solorio, city planning and economic development director, said the school city's technology center had been there previously.

"It's much more space than I have now," Read said.

Solorio said the city is requesting Read contact the Indiana Department of Transportation because Columbus Drive is a state route, in hope that some crosswalks or yellow lights might be added so drivers know to slow down with children in the area.

Councilwoman Gilda Orange, D-6th, asked if the ground at the new location is safe considering the area had been zoned industrial.

"She will have to do her proper due diligence when and if she wants to put in her swing set," Solorio said.

Solorio said he does not anticipate a problem in that regard for Read as long as the ground is covered.

The council voted 7-0 to approve the resolution. Council members Myrna Maldonado, D-1st, and Kenneth Monroe, D-at-large, were not present.

A condition required in the resolution is that Read construct a fence that would enclose an outdoor playground on the property.

In other city business news, Solorio told the council the Black Diamond tattoo shop followed required procedures prior to opening at the corner of Chicago and Tod avenues.

At a June 27 meeting, Council President Juda Parks said Evil Ways Tattoos had to come before the City Council and the Planning and Building Departments before it opened and he questioned why the new business did not have to do that.

Solorio said an ordinance approved in February 2013 moved the regulation of tattoo parlors from the council to the Board of Safety, so such businesses do not need to come before the council.

"Both tattoo parlors have followed the same procedure," Solorio said.

Solorio said a sidewalk sign that was outside the Black Diamond shop has been removed and the business has been informed such signage that blocks the right of way is illegal.
While speculation is running rampant about what a proposed plan to develop large parts of Gary would entail, administration officials said they are mainly looking at implementing plans that have been put together with the community over the past several years.

We are just trying to implement what is already in place, said Joseph Van Dyk, executive director of the citys redevelopment and planning department.

The city hopes to have a partner in bringing those plans to life.

MaiaCo LLC, is one of two entities that responded to a request for proposals sent out by Garys Redevelopment Commission seeking a redevelopment partner. Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is part of the group.

The other proposal came from former mayoral candidate and frequent administration critic Jim Nowacki. Nowackis handwritten proposal was deemed non-responsive by Van Dyk. He said the proposal didnt contain any supporting documentation and didnt lay out the financial capacity or resources Nowacki would provide as a partner.

MaiaCo proposes to partner with the citys redevelopment commission to revitalize Gary. This purportedly would be done by acquiring property needed to carry out plans that some residents have complained never come to fruition.

I hear it all the time, said Van Dyk in regard to residents complaints about this lack of action on the citys plans.

Some of those plans were mentioned by Van Dyk at a recent meeting of the city councils planning committee, including the 2004 University Park Plan, the 2005 Gary Green Link, the 2008 Gary Comprehensive Plan, the 2009 Vision for Broadway, and the 2010 Smart Growth Ordinance.

In the meantime, Van Dyk said the city is negotiating terms and performing background checks on the MaiaCo proposal.

We have a lot to negotiate still, Van Dyk said.

Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson said she would like to see something in place with the group by Sept. 1.

MaiaCo referred all questions to city officials.

Residents want transparency

Concern from the community was raised about the proposal when one of Daleys partners in the group was featured in a video, talking about tearing down a large part of Gary and rebuilding it. Some residents felt they were being shut out of the process in how the citys future will be shaped.

City officials also were not pleased when they found out about the video. Van Dyk said the partner, renowned architect Peter Ellis, had a different approach to development than city officials, and officials will no longer be working with him.

And some people, like resident Carolyn McCrady, said there has not been enough transparency concerning a project that could transform the city.

We cant say yea or nay because we dont know what they (the city and MaiaCo) are planning, she said.

McCrady said she has heard the group is proposing to make a presentation to the community when they have the plan ready, but she added that the community should be engaged in the proposal prior to that point. She suggested that the community may want to hold a referendum on any proposal.

Van Dyk said that there is a difference between an agreement being made with a partner, and putting a plan in place and acquiring property. He said there will be community engagement and that part of the proposal calls for a communication component.

We have a great opportunity for transformational change, and the only way to do that is to reflect what the community hopes for, he said. This doesnt work if residents are not engaged or if they dont buy in.

McCrady and others said they have heard former Gary Mayor Scott King may be involved, but King said, I have nothing to do with it, when contacted Thursday.

The challenges of development

The request for proposal put out earlier this year said the commission was seeking a partner to perform predevelopment activities that could include site assembly, marketing and property acquisition:

Firm will be willing to invest up front capital to advance redevelopment projects and will possess the ability to identify, market and leverage Garys underperforming assets such as vacant land, infrastructure capacity, and untapped partnership opportunities.

Van Dyk and others have said that site acquisition is made difficult because the average city lot size is small and the largest city-owned parcels are either contaminated brownfields or wetlands. There is very little contiguous land now available for development according to Van Dyk.

The MaiaCo proposal anticipates the firm funding the acquisition of as many as 3,500 parcels via tax sale within the first 12 months of the implementation of the strategy. Van Dyk said the commission would continue to own the parcels, a significant portion of which he anticipates would consist of vacant land.

Van Dyk also said that some of the buildings on the parcels could be rehabbed as part of any final plan.

Ellis, on the video, spoke about concentrating on the Broadway area of the city, but Van Dyk said a focus area has not been settled on yet.

Any geographic designations will come out of the agreement that is ultimately reached, he said.

Van Dyk, however, said the areas would not include the lakefront, beach or Marquette Park areas.

In addition to the MaiaCo proposal, Freeman-Wilson said she has received inquiries from other private partners interested in doing smaller development efforts within the city. Van Dyk said they received some additional inquiries when they put out the request for proposals earlier this year, and he expects the city will be seeking other partners in the future.

The city already has linked up with various government and private partners in helping to redevelop Gary, and previously worked with Daley during a land parcel survey done in conjunction with the University of Chicagos Harris School of Public Policy. Daley is a distinguished senior fellow with the school.
MERRILLVILLE  A moment of silence was just the beginning.

Although no voices were heard at the start of last week's Town Council meeting, Merrillville officials and the public were thinking of those who were lost through deadly gunfire throughout the nation. It's not the only way the community will remember them.

Town Council President Richard Hardaway announced Merrillville will host a vigil at 6:30 p.m. Thursday to mourn those killed during recent shootings and show support of police officers.

Trying to heal a wounded country, Hardaway said of the program that will take place at Town Hall, 7820 Broadway.

Hardaway referenced several incidents, including the shooting deaths of five officers in Dallas, the fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota and the killing of two bailiffs by an inmate trying to escape a western Michigan courthouse.

Hardaway said Merrillville hasn't been vocal after the tragic events that have affected the country. Clerk-Treasurer Eugene Guernsey said Merrillville wants the community to unite to take a stance against gun violence.

Hardaway said incidents in the nation have started a variety of movements, but the upcoming event in Merrillville won't focus on a specific group.

Jesus saved all men, Hardaway said, That's what we should be thinking today.

Several local faith-based organizations will participate in the event, and there will be a balloon release at the conclusion of the vigil.
Party Chairman Reince Priebus says hes confident that the Republican National Convention that begins on Monday and culminates with Donald Trumps acceptance speech Thursday evening will turn the page on a stormy and divisive presidential primary season - one notable for Trumps ability to alienate minorities, women and even party regulars.

Party officials, the Secret Service and Cleveland police reportedly are bracing for what some fear could be the most explosive national convention since the Democrats disastrous gathering in Chicago in 1968, complete with angry protests inside and outside Clevelands Quicken Loans Arena.

Related: Trumps Choice of Mike Pence Should Make Fiscal Conservatives Happy

Scores of prominent Republicans, including governors, senators and former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, are boycotting the convention, which has been roughly cobbled together with mostly members of Trumps family and a B list of public figures scheduled to speak. As late as Sunday morning, the Trump campaign still hadnt announced the keynote speaker for the four-day extravaganza.

Yet the eternally optimistic Priebus has visions of Trump and his vice presidential running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, rallying the party together this week with brilliant, inspiring, and even conciliatory speeches that will unite the party heading into the fall campaign against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

I want the convention to show the unification process continuing, Preibus said today on Fox News Sunday in one of several talk show appearances. And for me - and Im serious -- I think Thursday night is a real big deal for our party. Trump delivering that consistent, measured, pointed message. The balloons drop. The band plays. Donald Trump running for president . . . Thats where we need to be.

Theres no doubt that plenty of red, white and blue balloons will cascade down from the ceiling before the convention is over and that there will be plenty of oohs and ahs over the sleek convention set design and music.

Story continues

But GOP campaign officials goal of reintroducing Trump in a friendlier, more thoughtful and unifying light will be a tall order - especially since it has been hard for Trumps handlers to keep him on script. And the convention comes at a time of great turmoil and uncertainty, as Americans continue to reel from a spate of terrorist attacks and violence in the U.S. and Europe. Just today, three police officers were killed and three other law enforcement officers were wounded in a shoot-out in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a town with mounting racial tensions.

Related: Why Trumps Choice of Pence for Vice President Could Backfire

Just four years ago, Priebus issued a stinging post mortem of Republican Mitt Romneys loss to President Obama in the 2012 presidential election. Priebus said that the GOP had become far too insular and needed to reach out to Hispanics and other minority voters.

Trump this year soared to victory in primary contests by doing precisely the opposite of what Priebus recommended. He denounced some illegal immigrants from Mexico as rapists and criminals; he vowed to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to tighten security; he proposed barring Muslim immigrants from this country unless they were fully vetted to prevent terrorism; and he allegedly offended Jewish Americans with seemingly anti-Semitic tweets and comments.

As Trump travels to Cleveland to formally accept his partys nomination, polls show him with the highest negative ratings of any major presidential candidate in modern times. Clinton is only slightly more popular than Trump in the polls, but she runs well ahead of him among women, Hispanics, blacks and other minorities.

When Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace noted Trumps glaring deficits and said, You cant win with numbers like this, Prieibus sheepishly responded, Well, thats true. But we also have a long way to go and we have to improve those numbers, and were planning on doing that.

Related: Trump Dances on the Grave of the Never Trump Movement

Trump is certain to present himself at the convention as a tough, no-nonsense businessman with solid judgment and the utmost contempt for Clinton and Obama - someone who can lead the country through tough times. He claims he could defeat ISIS and other terrorist threats in short order. He has promised to use his business skills to renegotiate major international trade agreements that he says have hurt U.S. workers and industry. And he promises to that NATO and other U.S. allies will pay a bigger share of regional defense costs rather than relying so much on the U.S.

In the wake of racial unrest and the massing killings of police officers in Dallas and now Baton Rouge, Trump has also declared, I am the law and order candidate, echoing a theme of former President Richard M. Nixon that proved highly effective against the Democrats. And he has said that if he is elected president, he would ask Congress to formally declare war on terrorism. Congress hasnt approved such adeclaration since the start of World War II.

Trump has never held a government office before and prides himself as a Washington outsider, a position voters seem to want in a new president. For all his tough talk, he has provided remarkably few and skimpy details of how he would achieve his ambitious goals. His critics both inside and outside the party say that if his clumsy handling of his choice of Pence to be his running mate is an example of his executive and political skills, voters should be concerned.

Related: 10 Things You Should Know About Mike Pence

Trump reportedly agonized over his decision to select Pence, a conservative Midwestern politician and former House member, over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia. Even after he had publicly disclosed his choice of Pence, Trump fretted that the governor wasnt exciting enough and might not mesh well with his campaign. According to reports, Trump as late as Thursday night asked his senior campaign advisers whether there was some way he could withdraw his offer.

Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign manager, strongly disputed those reports during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. He insisted that the late Thursday night conversations were strictly about the timing and logistics of formally announcing the choice of Pence. Trump said that Pence was his first choice and chosen primarily to help unify the party. He said he delayed the announcement out of consideration for the tragic killings in Nice.



There was never any doubt about choosing Pence, Manafort said. What we were talking about Thursday night was because of the tragedy in the world, postponing his announcement which was scheduled for Friday morning.

Trump made the announcement on Saturday during an event in New York City where Pence and his family had been holed up in a hotel room for two days waiting for a final decision. Asked by Wallace whether voters should trust a politically inexperienced Trump to become president amid all the chaos in the world, Manfort replied, All the chaos is exactly the reason why voters should trust Donald Trump.

Related: Trump to GOP Leadership: Sit Down and Shut Up

The world today is a mess because of a failure of U.S. leadership that Obama and Clinton as secretary of state put in place when they took office in 2009, he added. Donald Trump is not just a businessman. Hes a person who understands the issues, hell have a team in Washington that understands the problems. And as he says on the campaign trail, the mess has been created by the people in Washington. Theyre the ones that have got to be removed from power.

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
VALPARAISO  Downtown walking tours, bean bag games and feasting on grilled hot dogs and hamburgers were on tap at the Porter County Museums annual Block Party on Saturday.

Museum staff and volunteers stood behind the grill and the serving table to treat visitors to summertime picnic food at the event on the museums front lawn. This years theme, Camp Out, paid homage to the museums new exhibit about Camp Good Fellow, which operated in the Indiana Dunes from 1941-76.

Inside the museum, kids created camp crafts, including braided lanyards, while outside youngsters and the young-at-heart played bean bag toss and relaxed in the shade of pop-up tents.

Outside, meat sizzled on the grill and campers topped off their meals with homemade smores.

Groups burned calories after their feast as museum director Kevin Pazour led walking history tours of the courthouse square.

This tour is designed around all the Poke-stops, Pazour joked, referencing the popular new phone app game Pokemon Go. It might be a great way to engage the millennials.

Lenny and Jeanne Antrim, of Valparaiso, lined up for the tour.

Were always interested in this kind of stuff, and were retired, and its a beautiful day, said Lenny Antrim.

Megan Telligman, the museums interpretation and communication coordinator, said the turnout at just 2 p.m. was even more than last years total and attributed some of that to better weather.

Last year it was at least 90 degrees, said Telligman. Also, downtown Valpo is very busy this summer, so were benefiting from that. That, and I think were just getting the word out.

On the sidewalk, Olivia Seastrand, 4, stacked up colored blocks.

Im making a castle, said Olivia.

Olivias dad, Brandon Seastrand, said his daughter took a YMCA tour of the museum a few days ago.

Shes been talking about it for two days straight, said Seastrand, of Valparaiso.

The family came down to the museum to have a meal and see what she was talking about.

Seastrand said his daughter soaks up information like a sponge.

She led us around like a tour guide, Seastrand said.
A birthday, anniversary, engagement or wedding all have a place in The Times.

So do other special moments, featured on the Celebrations! page in the Lifestyle section every Sunday.

Laura Lane, digital producer, has overseen this #RegionProud initiative since it started last September as a partnership between Centier Bank and The Times Media Co.

Theres no charge for you to submit a milestone for display at www.nwi.com/celebrations and possibly in print on the weekly page. The submission form is linked at the top of site online. An announcement must be submitted by Thursday to run on Sunday, and photos may not exceed 3 MB in size.

What are we looking for? Last Sunday we featured the First Presbyterian Church of Hammond marking 125 years, Judy Gardner of Merrillville celebrating 75 years and Crown Point Scouts gathering on the nations birthday.

Its always a mix, and its all whats special to you.

Lane said she receives a few photos a week, down from a high during graduation season. Heres a summer reminder that this is available to you and your family.

Celebration announcements dont have to just be about birthdays, anniversaries, engagements and weddings, Lane said. We get a slew of others, including announcements regarding kids who have become Eagle Scouts, retirements, friendship and more.

An upcoming birthday in your family? A class or family reunion? Send us a photo. Same with any other milestones. Contact Lane at (219) 836-3780 or laura.lane@nwi.com with any questions.

And be sure to check out the Celebrations! page each week, along with a growing gallery thats updated online and shared on The Times Facebook page every Wednesday.

Share precious photos

The 1907 photo of Garys first horse-drawn carriage stood out in our recent IN Business magazine.

Im pleased to highlight it here, thanks to Marlene Pajor, who shared it with us. I encourage you to share precious photos of Region history as Indianas bicentennial year continues.

We have a home for them at www.nwi.com/history, and often historical photos are printed on Page 2 or other places.

Frank Baker sits in the cab of the horse-drawn carriage in front of Pennsylvania Station at the corner of Broadway and 18th in 1907. At the time, there were only three buildings on Broadway between U.S. Steels Gary Works, then under construction, and 7th Avenue.

We know all of this because Pajor shared a newspaper clipping, published around 1939, that featured the photo and a story on Baker.

Baker was quoted as saying he received $2 per hour driving tourists and charged an additional $3 to take the top off the cab so passengers could get a better view of the Indiana Dunes being transformed into a massive steel mill and a major new city.

What a find. Let us know about other special photos of Region history and what they are about. Well be glad to show with all readers.

Just contact Doug Ross, history and politics editor, at doug.ross@nwi.com or (219) 933-3357, or librarian Pat Kincaid at patricia.kincaid@nwi.com or (219) 933-3383.

Thanks for reading us. Please contact me with any questions about The Times or our many publications.
In a chaotic year of anti-establishment populism and charges of rigged systems, through the smoke and dust churned by great anxiety, fear and loathing, in walks Evan Bayh.

In a stunning turn of events matching Bayhs February 2010 bombshell that prompted him to retire from the Senate just as the Tea Party embers were flaring and an Obamacare vote stood just over the horizon, Democratic Senate nominee Baron Hill bolted the ticket Monday. It set the stage for Bayh and his $10 million war chest to return to Hoosier electoral politics.

With the challenges facing Indiana and our country, I can no longer sit on the sidelines and watch as partisan bickering grinds Washington to a halt. Hoosier families deserve more, and Ive decided to run to take their cause to the U.S. Senate, Bayh said.

Bayh explained that when Hill made a decision to drop out, My first words to him were Baron, frankly, I dont know what to say, Bayh related. If he was willing to do that, I felt like I had an obligation to do the same. I did a lot of soul searching and thinking and so here we are.

If you believe that Baron Hill voluntarily exited this Senate race after spending more than a year running, then I have a Delaware beach condo to sell you.

While national media reported that the next Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer had convinced him to return, Bayh said, Look, none of those people matter to me. The people of Indiana matter to me. None of those national people matter to me. Theres no way they talked me into this. Thats crazy.

It is the same seat that U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh used to author two of the 26 Constitutional amendments and Title IX. The same seat that Sen. Dan Coats refused to defend with young Bayh in the wings in 1998, that commenced his lobbying career. The same seat that Coats returned to in 2010 after Marlin Stutzman and John Hostettler failed to find money traction, and the same seat that Bayh fled a few weeks later, setting off the devastating Bayh dominoes that would force the Indiana Democratic Party out of its Ohio and Wabash river warrens, reducing it to a party of Lake, St. Joseph and Marion counties and a handful of college and university towns.

Evan Bayh had rescued the party from oblivion in 1986 and returned it there in 2010 to the point that by 2014, the atrophy was so severe that only a handful of Democratic legislators and mayors existed south of U.S. 50.

The Washington Post reported that the hyper-ambitious, always-privileged and ever-calculating son of a senator was perennially nervous about taking tough votes or courageous stands.

Now that he wants to return to the Senate, the Post added, Considering his disposition, (Bayhs) decision to jump into the race in July speaks volumes about the growing confidence on the left that Democrats are going to have a red-letter year in congressional elections because of Donald Trump.

Other than his first race for governor in 1988, Bayh has won a series of landslides for reelection and then his two Senate races. But he faces U.S. Rep. Todd Young, who has raised $3.7 million. Young will tell voters that after retiring in 2010, Bayh didnt return to Indiana but became a K Street lobbyist in Washington.

While Bayh has a 1,000-square-foot condo in Indianapolis, he owns about $6 million worth of homes in Georgetown and Florida.

The enrichment didnt begin in 2010. According to Open Secrets methodology of parsing Bayhs Senate financial disclosure forms between 1998 and 2010, Bayh saw his average net worth rise from $1.54 million to $6.89 million, an increase approaching 350 percent.

This was fueled not by the senators $174,000 salary, but wife Susan Bayhs corporate board income, inspired by her influential husband sitting in places like the Senate Banking Committee.

We are not trembling, said Young campaign manager Trevor Foughty. After he cast the deciding vote for Obamacare, Evan Bayh left Indiana families to fend for themselves so he could cash in with insurance companies and influence peddlers as a gold-plated lobbyist.

In the television age of Indiana politics, only seven men have held the two U.S. Senate seats in Indiana. For 50 years, there was either a Bayh or a Lugar in the upper chamber.

Evan Bayh came out of the ether to restore a dynasty.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump made history when he used Twitter to announce Indiana Gov. Mike Pence would become his running mate. But then, this election has been one for the history books from the start.

The shuffling began when Lt. Gov. Sue Ellspermann resigned March 2 to pursue a new job as president of Ivy Tech Community College, a job she began on July 1.

She was replaced by Eric Holcomb, a former chief of staff for Sen. Dan Coats who had been vying for Coats' seat in the Senate.

And now Holcomb, who has been lieutenant governor for less than five months, is hoping to be elected governor in November.

U.S. Rep. Susan Brooks used Friday's deadline to withdraw her candidacy for re-election so she could run for governor.

Munster native Todd Rokita, the former secretary of state now in the U.S. House of Representatives, also announced Friday he would rather run for governor than Congress.

House Speaker Brian Bosma had been talked about as a potential gubernatorial candidate, but he withdrew his name from the running shortly after Trump's announcement Friday morning. As leader of the House, Bosma is one of the most politically powerful people in the state.

And that's just on the Republican side.

Among Democrats, there also have been changes, but not as many.

Former U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, in an uphill battle against U.S. Rep. Todd Young for Coats' seat in the Senate, withdrew so former U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh could seek his old seat.

Bayh announced at the last minute in 2010 he would not run for re-election.

So let's read the tea leaves for what all these moves could mean.

Trump-Pence

With Pence as his running mate, Trump gains someone whose strengths are a bulwark against Trump's weaknesses, at least where it comes to being seen as conservative.

Pence is a social conservative. Anyone who didn't believe him when he said so hasn't paid attention to what Pence did in the U.S. House of Representatives or what he has done in the governor's office.

Whether that's a strength or a weakness depends on your perspective. But to gain votes from social conservatives, Trump needed someone like Pence.

Pence also has the knowledge of how Congress works  and the necessary connection with Speaker Paul Ryan  to help Trump understand how government works. It's one thing to be on the outside interacting with the government as a private citizen and another to be on the inside, seeing how the machinery really works.

But Pence has helped polarize Indiana. After the right-to-work law passed and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act went through, then quickly was amended under pressure from the business community and others, a movement to oust Pence began even before it became general knowledge that Democrat John Gregg would run against Pence again. Signs in yards proclaimed, "Fire Pence."

And now Pence, if elected, would be just one step away the Oval Office.

Indiana has a long history of offering vice presidents, although only one truly Hoosier president was elected. We'll see where history will take us this year and beyond.

Senate race

Evan Bayh's entry in the Indiana U.S. Senate race means it's now seen as a virtual dead heat. What happens in the presidential race could well affect the balance of power in the Senate.

Here's the scenario: Trump, who has made bombastic remarks that women and minorities have taken as insults, might be defeated in November. Hillary Clinton, who has her own negatives, would then be elected.

And if a Democratic wave happens, Bayh and four other Democrats could be elected to the Senate. That would return the Senate to Democratic control as well as giving Indiana two Democratic senators.

So Bayh's prospects against Republican Todd Young depend on the presidential race almost as much as it does on his name recognition as a moderate senator and governor in the past.

As a bit of historical trivia, Bayh could become the second person in the history of the U.S. Senate to twice succeed the same person. Coats held the seat before Bayh when Bayh was first elected to the Senate.

One other repeat: Bayh worked for a lobbying firm before seeking to run for the Senate again. Coats did the same thing.

Governor's race

For Democrat John Gregg, it could have been worse. Gregg, who has been campaigning as being more like former Gov. Mitch Daniels than Pence is, could have faced the real thing. Fortunately for Gregg, Daniels decided to stay at Purdue and not seek his old job.

But for now, Gregg and his running mate, Christina Hale, face uncertainty regarding who their Republican opponents will be. Here's the chance for Gregg and Hale, a Michigan City native, to emphasize their own policy initiatives and what they stand for. Running against Pence's record doesn't matter as much now that Pence is out of the running.

Before Pence was tapped to become Trump's running mate, the governor's race was a virtual dead heat. We'll have to wait to see who the state's Republican leaders  including Valparaiso's Chuck Williams  select to see how this race might shake out.

Either way, 2016 has become one for the history books. We just have to wait and see what history will be written after the Nov. 8 election.
Its the feeling of a grape being squeezed to the point just before it squishes.

Follow that up with sudden weightlessness in which a seat belt is the only thing between you and flying up into an airplane ceiling, then a stomach-churning drop back toward the floor when gravity kicks in.

Mix those sensations with the dread of knowing youre flying into a place where people want to kill you, and a harrowing picture emerges of what our combat servicemen and women can go through when flying into war zones aboard C-130 military transport planes.

I got a taste of such a gut-wrenching flight, minus the active war zone, last weekend while flying with the U.S. Navy Blue Angels in their Fat Albert C-130 during a practice run for the Gary Air Show.

It reminded me of all our troops endure and begged a perplexing question: Are the rest of us doing our part to deserve such sacrifice?

My flight with the Fat Albert crew was all part of a public relations initiative during which the Angels demonstrate the range of tactical abilities aboard C-130s.

Though akin to a flying bus, the planes must handle like an Indy race car with pinhook maneuverability to fly troops or precious cargo safely in and out of active combat zones.

Im a two-feet-on-the-ground kind of guy and get a little dizzy just looking down a two-story flight of stairs. So my Fat Albert flight packed a punch.

At one point  and thank God I didnt have a window seat for this  the plane was traveling about 370 mph at a mere 50-feet above the Lake Michigan surface. For some context, a typical airliner often cruises at about 40,000 feet above ground.

The low, fast flight capabilities of the C-130s help the planes elude enemy radar, effectively blending into the ground without crashing.

My skipping lunch that day was a good call for all aboard Fat Albert.

During a few moments of the flight, the plane either rapidly climbed or fell in elevation, creating an environment of zero-gravity, or the squeezing pressure of two to three times my body weight.

Such tactical twists and turns become necessary when C-130s must quickly soar away from enemy fire.

The dizzying stew of sick this began to brew was about all I could take.

Yet our combat troops and their flight crews regularly experience such sensations, all while repressing the terror of facing enemies with fatal intentions.

The Fat Albert experience made me want to do more to deserve such sacrifice.

It also begged the important question of what our military servicemen and women must think of the domestic war of sorts rearing its ugly head in our nation.

A civilian sniper shoots police officers with impunity in Dallas.

Another gunman opens fire in an Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub, killing 49 people with hate as his central motivating factor.

Supporters of political factions bloody each other during what should be peaceful gatherings promoting free speech.

Even without the violence, our political discourse tumbles into a cesspool of uncivil name-calling and insults in local, state and national campaigns.

Meanwhile, apathy continues its siege on our political process as a mere fraction of our citizens care enough to cast votes for future leaders.

Our warriors dont strap into a C-130 and fly into war zones to defend our right to kill, maim or insult one another on the home front.

Theyre not facing enemy bullets so we can throw in our towels on fundamental rights to vote, speak and be as we want.

When theyre dipping, diving and experiencing zero gravity, shouldnt they have a different picture in mind of what theyre fighting for?
Sunday marks two years since the chokehold death of Eric Garner while in police custody on Staten Island. Rev. Al Sharpton gathered with members of his National Action Network Sunday in Harlem to continue their call for justice. NY1's Matt McClure reports.

It's an emotional anniversary for the family of Eric Garner.

"That connection that you have with your parent, nobody can ever take that away from you," said his daughter Emerald Garner.

Garner's widow, Esaw, and daughter, Emerald, gathered with supporters at the weekly rally at Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network in Harlem Saturday.

Sunday is the second anniversary of Eric Garner's death while in police custody on Staten Island.

The milestone comes following the recent deaths of Phillando Castille and Alton Sterling  two Black men who also died in police custody.

Sharpton had just returned from speaking at Sterling's funeral in Louisiana.

"We are not anti-police, we are anti-wrong!" said Rev. Al Sharpton.

The central message of the rally was justice  and change.

"Is it going to take a thousand more deaths for something to happen, for a change to happen?" Emerald Garner asked.

Esaw Garner told me that when she sees other deaths similar to her husband's those at the hands of police and caught on tape - she says it makes her feel discouraged, like not enough progress is being made.

"I'm not going to say that everything that we've done in the past two years has been in vain, but I'm feeling like it's redundant," Garner said. "Like we're marching and it's still continuing to happen."

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, the Garner Way Foundation  which raises awareness against racial injustice  held a Unity Fest in Prospect Park.

Family members called for healing in the community.

"With all of us doing the right thing, we're going to see how we can make this a better world, how we can heal," said Gwen Carr, Garner's mother.

"You have to love your loved ones today because tomorrow you don't know what it brings," said Garner's sister Alicia.

Garner's family honored Beyonce for inspiring new generations through her music.

Beyonce's mother-in-law, Gloria Carter, was on hand to accept the award.

And Garner's family says they'll keep pressing on until justice is done.
The NYPD says police officers shot and killed an armed man in Brooklyn this morning.

Police responded to a call about a gunpoint robbery at the Cooper Park Houses on Debevoise Street near Jackson Street in East Williamsburg a little before 8 a.m.

Uniformed officers from @NYPD94Pct responding to 911 calls for a gunpoint robbery in vicinity of 20 Debevoise Ave. encountered an armed male  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) July 17, 2016

Investigators say the responding officers opened fire after the man pointed his gun at them.

They hit him once in the torso.

The man was rushed to Woodhull Hospital, where he died.

Police say this gun was recovered at the scene. On twitter, the NYPD said the suspect fired at officers.

The officers exchanged gunfire w/ the suspect, who was armed with a handgun. He was shot & transported to Woodhull Hospital, where he died.  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) July 17, 2016

The two officers were taken to Elmhurst Hospital for observation. Neither one was hit by gunfire.

Our preliminary investigation reveals the male suspect committed two gunpoint robberies moments before the police responded.  NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) July 17, 2016

Stay tuned to NY1 for more information on this developing story.
Police say they've arrested a teenage boy who tried to rape a 13 year-old girl in the Bronx last Thursday.

17 year-old Garry Pinkney, allegedly followed the girl into her building, near Jennings Street and Intervale Avenue in Foxhurst.

After coercing the girl to let him into her apartment, police say Pinkney pulled out a knife and demanded money.

He then forced the girl to perform oral sex on him and then tried to rape her.

He left with the victim's book bag.

Pinkney faces multiple charges including attempted rape, criminal sex act and robbery.
Alexandra Elena Lamm, a daughter of Dr. Carin I. Lamm and Dr. Steven Lamm, both of Manhattan, is to be married July 17 to Peter Garner Weinberg, the son of Ann Kirschner and Dr. Harold J. Weinberg, also of Manhattan. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove is to officiate at the Liberty Warehouse, an event space in Brooklyn.

The bride, 27, is entering her fourth year as a doctoral student in counseling psychology at Fordham. She graduated magna cum laude from Colgate. Her father is the medical director of the NYU Langone Preston Robert Tisch Center for Mens Health. Her mother is the director of the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Center at Morgan Stanley Childrens Hospital, part of NewYork-Presbyterian.

The groom, also 27, manages advertising partnerships for LinkedIn, the professional networking service, in Manhattan. He graduated summa cum laude from Middlebury College. His father is the director of general neurology at NYU Langone. His mother is special adviser to the chancellor of the City University of New York.

The couple had planned to marry June 5, but that was not to be.

Earlier, they had met with the rabbi who was to officiate, and he asked if either had any concerns. Ms. Lamm wondered how Mr. Weinberg would react if she became ill, saying he had not seemed very sympathetic when she had a cold.
Alix Michelle Olian, the daughter of Terri R. Olian and Robert M. Olian of Highland Park, Ill., was married July 16 to Kevin Francis Burke Jr., a son of Mimi H. Burke and Mr. Burke of Rye Brook, N.Y. Rabbi Wendi S. Geffen officiated at the Standard Club in Chicago, where the couple also received a blessing from the Rev. Michael OKeefe, a Roman Catholic priest.

The couple met at Harvard, from which they graduated cum laude, and where the bride also received an M.B.A. with distinction, in May.

Mrs. Burke, 27, is a senior associate in the New York office of McKinsey & Company, the management consulting firm. Her father is a partner in and a co-chairman of the environmental practice at the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin, and is a trustee of the Highland Park Public Library. Her mother is a director of Community Partners for Affordable Housing, in Highland Park.

Mr. Burke, 29, is a senior associate for consumer and retail investments at Sycamore Partners, an investment firm in New York. His mother is a residential sales agent in the Rye, N.Y., real estate office of William Raveis. His father is a senior managing director, specializing in loan syndication, sales and trading, in the New York office of Antares Capital.
gen jacoby

WASHINGTON, DC  America's most advanced missile-defense system, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), is heading to South Korea, and while that has Russia, China, and North Korea peeved, US leaders are committed to the deployment.

During a July 13, Hudson Institute discussion on US missile-technology preeminence, US Army Gen. Charles Jacoby, former commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), stressed the importance of deploying THAAD to protect the Korean peninsula and US interests, despite it upsetting near peers like Russia and China.

"Certainly the Russians and the Chinese and other stakeholders understand that in South Korea besides being a wonderful ally, significant economic engine for growth throughout the world, that there are tens of thousands of American citizens living there, there is still US forces there, they are playing a defense role and they are at risk everyday to a host of threats that now include the potential for ballistic missile carried weapons of mass destruction," Gen. Jacoby said.

"We cannot not act."

Earlier this month, on the heels of bilateral sanctions by Seoul and Washington, plus layers of UN sanctions, the Pentagon agreed to equip South Korea with the THAAD.

"North Korea's continued development of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction require the alliance to take this prudent, protective measure to bolster our layered and effective missile defense," US Army Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of US forces in South Korea, said in a statement.

The pressure to deploy America's most advanced missile-defense system began after the Hermit Kingdom tested its fourth nuclear bomb on January 6 and then launched a long-range rocket on February 7.

"If we are still defending with bows and arrows when the conflict escalates we are not going to create the deterrent effect that we need to to keep peace on the Korean peninsula," Gen. Jacoby said.

Story continues

"The truth of the matter is, THAAD was really the logical choice and after intense debate and trying to assess what the complexities of the environment might hold to include the perceptions that the Chinese might have, we really can't get in a world where we refuse to defend ourselves."

brennan

Similarly during a discussion at the Brookings Institution on identifying emerging security threats, CIA Director John Brennan said that the deployment of THAAD to the region was an "obligation" on behalf of the US.

"We have certain obligations to our partners and the region so that the appropriate steps are taken to reassure our friends, partners, and allies of US commitment to the security of that area," Brennan told Business Insider.

He added: "This is something that  I think the president has demonstrated  that we are trying to deal with these issues in a manner that is not going to lead to any escalation of tensions."

Currently, the US maintains approximately 28,500 troops in South Korea.

NOW WATCH: Meet THAAD: Americas answer to North Korean threats





More From Business Insider


Christina Marie Conroy and Adam Alexander Kost were married July 15 at St. Dominic Roman Catholic Church in Oyster Bay, N.Y. Msgr. Steven R. Camp performed the ceremony.

Mrs. Kost, 32, is a senior litigation associate in the New York office of the Atlanta law firm King & Spalding. She graduated from Boston College and received a law degree from Fordham.

She is a daughter of Sharlene A. Conroy and James J. Conroy of Syosset, N.Y. The brides father retired as an associate director in energy and power project finance at the United States investment and banking division of the Macquarie Group, an Australian investment and financial services firm. Her mother is a registered public health nurse in the office of children with special needs at the Nassau County Department of Health in Uniondale, N.Y.

Mr. Kost, 33, works in New York as a senior associate in the financial services advisory group at KPMG, the accounting and consulting firm. He graduated from the University of Richmond and received an M.B.A. from Baruch College.
Fiona ONeill Reeves and Christopher Scott Liddell-Westefeld were married July 16 at Old Engine 12, a restaurant and event space in a former firehouse in Washington. Officiating was Howli J. Ledbetter, a friend of the couple who received permission to do so from the District of Columbia Superior Court.

The bride, 31, who will keep her name, is a special assistant to President Obama and the director of presidential correspondence at the White House. She graduated from Duke.

She is the daughter of Richard Reeves of Los Angeles and New York, and the late Catherine E. ONeill. The brides father, the author of 20 books, including a trilogy about Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan, also teaches longform nonfiction writing at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. Her mother retired as the director of the United Nations Information Center in Washington, and founded the Women's Commission for Refugee Women in New York.

The groom, also 31, is the senior adviser to the deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration in Washington. He graduated from the University of Iowa.
Jennifer McCouen Albinson, the daughter of Sharon Jones Albinson and Robert David Albinson of Chevy Chase, Md., was married July 16 to Justin Cohan-Shapiro, a son of Carol J. Shapiro and Bruce D. Cohan of New York. Lindsay Schroll Carson, a friend of the couple who was appointed a temporary marriage commissioner by Alameda County, Calif., officiated at Sardine Lake in Sierra City, Calif., near the halfway point of the couples current hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2,650-mile trek from Mexico to Canada.

The bride, 33, and the groom, 29, are both on a leave of absence at McKinsey & Company, the management consultancy, for which they have been working in San Francisco, she as a senior associate and he as a project manager.

The bride graduated magna cum laude from Princeton and received an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

The groom, 29, graduated with distinction from Stanford, and also received an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Its all the things I long to be, its the black man I aspire to be: expressive, confident, not holding back, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or race, said the stylist, Ibrahim Kamara.

Have a great week.

Your Weekend Briefing is published Sundays at 6 a.m. Eastern.

And dont miss Your Morning Briefing, weekdays at 6 a.m. Eastern, and Your Evening Briefing, weeknights at 6 p.m. Eastern.

Want to look back? Heres Fridays Evening Briefing.

What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes.com.
ISTANBUL  I HAVE lately been a frequent critic of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his increasingly authoritarian government. But a military regime, like the kind a group of coup-plotters tried to bring about on Friday night, would have been not only illegitimate but also far more repressive and bloody. The people of Turkey, including many of Mr. Erdogans political opponents, rightly rejected that.

So has democracy carried the day in Turkey? Its still too early to tell.

There are many lessons to be taken from this astonishing episode. First of all, this is not the old Turkey anymore, where tanks could take the streets and the military could scare people into bowing down, as it did in 1960, 1971, 1980 and again in 1997, when its leaders decided that elected governments were not in line with the countrys founding vision. No, this time people took to the streets and confronted the rebellious soldiers. Perhaps more decisive was the fact that a majority of the military, the police and other state institutions didnt go along with the plot.

There was another striking aspect of the long night: It disproved some of Mr. Erdogans paranoid narratives. For years the president, an Islamist, has accused secular forces of plotting to undermine or overthrow him. But when the tanks rolled out, the opposition parties, business associations and mainstream news media all took a clear stance against the attempted takeover.

In fact, it was CNNTurk, a television channel that belongs to the media group that Mr. Erdogans supporters attacked two years ago for insulting the president, that played a major role in helping him. In the heat of the moment, Mr. Erdogan, speaking from an undisclosed location, appeared on CNNTurk screens via his iPhones FaceTime app. He called on the people to resist and this, many believe, was a decisive moment in averting the coup.
SAYLORSBURG, Pa.  Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish cleric whom President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has accused of inspiring the coup attempt against his government, gave a rare interview on Saturday at his compound here in which he denied involvement in the coup, but compared Mr. Erdogans administration to that of the Nazi SS.

My message to the Turkish people is never to view any military intervention positively, Mr. Gulen said, speaking to reporters through an interpreter, because through military intervention, democracy cannot be achieved.

While decrying the coup attempt, Mr. Gulen also acknowledged that he could not rule out involvement by his followers, saying he is unsure who his followers are in Turkey.
As Republicans stream into Cleveland to nominate Donald J. Trump for president, they confront a party divided and deeply imperiled by his racially divisive campaign. He has called for cracking down on Muslims and undocumented immigrants, stoked fears of crime and terrorism and repeatedly declared that the United States is in a war for its very survival.

But amid gloom about Republican prospects in November, Mr. Trump may have endangered the party in a more lasting way: by forging a coalition of white voters driven primarily by themes of hard-right nationalism and cultural identity.

Republicans have wrestled for years with the push and pull of seeking to win over new groups of voters while tending to their overwhelmingly white and conservative base. Now, Mr. Trumps candidacy may force them into making a fateful choice: whether to fully embrace the Trump model and become, effectively, a party of white identity politics, or to pursue a broader political coalition by repudiating Mr. Trumps ideas  and many of the voters he has gathered behind his campaign.

With his diatribes against Islam, immigration from Mexico and economic competition from Asia, Mr. Trump has amassed dominant support from restive white voters. His political approach would have Republicans court working-class and rural whites, mainly in the South and Midwest, at the grievous cost of alienating minorities and women, who often decide presidential races.
Senior members of Congress and their aides used to give me a hard time for paying too much attention to Representative Mike Pence, an amiable conservative from Indiana who wore his staunch ideology and evangelical Christianity on his sleeve.

More than a decade ago, they dismissed him as a loony lightweight, a naive true believer doomed to failure in the realpolitik world of Capitol Hill give-and-take. They snickered as he and other perceived gadflies on the right fringe pressed for a ban on earmarks, pet projects that greased the congressional skids and were loved by members of both parties. He irritated his own partys leaders by proposing extreme budget cuts and complaining about deficit spending even after catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina breaks my heart, Mr. Pence, a former radio host who often produced a good sound bite, said back when he was heading a rebellious conservative group in 2005. But we must not let Katrina break the bank for our children and grandchildren.

As time passed, it became clear that Mr. Pence wasnt so much out of sync as he was out in front of the rise of the hard-right Republicans who hold such sway in the House today.
The children were playing among themselves, and they had their back to the road, she said. They did not hear the truck until just one second before it hit. It went up on the sidewalk; it struck Yanis and the mother of one of the other children with them. The mother also died.

There was no first aid nearby. Finally, Mr. Coviaux picked up his little boy and began walking with him until they found a person with a car who agreed to take them to the hospital. When they passed some firefighters, they stopped and asked them to try to revive him. But the child was dead.

He was my parents only grandson, the only grandson in the family, Anais Coviaux said softly. She explained that her brother and his wife were too distraught to speak. Yanis loved people, she said. He especially liked Sundays when all the family was gathered, and he would say, Mamie and Papi, we are going to have a party.

Later, Mr. Coviaux said in an email that every single person that Yanis met in his short life fell in love with him.

The entire family gathered on the promenade Saturday to view the last sights he had seen.

It was important for us to come to the place he died to pay him a tribute, Anais Coviaux said, because we could not bear to say goodbye to him. We left a picture of him and flowers.

Identifying children and examining them has been difficult because of the level of trauma and because some were brought to the hospital without relatives, said Sylvie Serret, a child psychiatrist at the Lenval Foundation hospital, which treated at least 30 injured children on Thursday night.
Additionally, The Daily Show will be presented from Cleveland (where the Republicans are meeting) and from Philadelphia (where the Democrats are gathering) during these weeks and is enlisting its team of correspondents to file satirical reports from the road. TBSs Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, hosted by that Daily Show alumna, is also producing dispatches from the conventions for its regular Monday shows and adding an episode on Wednesday.

Other late-night shows that thrive on current events, including ABCs Jimmy Kimmel Live!, HBOs Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, TBSs Conan and Comedy Centrals The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, will surely keep an eye on the conventions as well.

[ In Cleveland and Philadelphia, art will be cropping up all around the convention centers ]

While these programs are scrutinizing speeches, delegates and party officials, looking to deliver laughs as rapidly as possible, they also have the opportunity to establish their hosts as the comedic conscience for this political era  to own that role as Jon Stewart did over 16 years as host of Comedy Centrals The Daily Show.

The competition will not be simply about having the best one-liner or viral video prompted by Donald J. Trumps or Hillary Clintons acceptance speech. These shows are trying to define themselves and claim their turf in an increasingly fragmented category.
donald trump

Donald Trump's support among one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country has plunged to one of its lowest points yet.

A new poll released Sunday, from NBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Telemundo, found that 76% of registered Latino voters supported Clinton, compared to just 14% who reported supporting Trump.

And 82% of Latino voters said they view Trump unfavorably.

Part of Trump's negative image among Latinos is almost certainly rooted in his harsh rhetoric about immigration, a top issue for many Latino voters who see it as a litmus test for how candidates perceive the Latino community.

Among a series of inflammatory remarks, Trump has said that Mexico isn't "sending their best" to the US, and he has promised to deport the more than 10 million immigrants living in the US without permission.

Trump's low standing among Latino voters presents one of the largest barriers to his presidency  his low level of support among the group of voters is unprecedented.

Whit Ayres, top Republican pollster, told Business Insider during the Republican presidential primaries that whichever candidate won would need around 40% of the Latino vote to clinch the election.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) carried just 27% of the Latino vote in 2012, according to exit polls. That's a far cry from former President George W. Bush's support among Latinos in the 2004 election, in which he topped off at about 44%.

The Trump campaign appears to subscribe to the belief among some Republicans analysts that a candidate could win without wooing Latino voters. Instead, some analysts have argued, a candidate needs only to increase turnout among white, working-class voters in states with a lower minority population.

Trump has argued that he may be able to do just that in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio. But most public-opinion surveys show that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee isn't breaking through in those states.

Story continues

Latinos don't appear to be the only minority voting group that's been alienated by the real-estate mogul.

A recent round of state polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania found Trump with roughly 0% support among black voters in the two states.

NOW WATCH: We dug up everything you need to know about Trumps VP pick





More From Business Insider


It was business as usual on Saturday evening in the grand old guts of the Seagram Building in Midtown Manhattan, where Pecko Zantilaveevan, the executive chef of the Four Seasons restaurant, was overseeing the roasting of 102 ducks for dinner service.

But Mr. Zantilaveevan, who has worked at the restaurant for the last 20 years, had nearly emptied his deep walk-in refrigerator, with not a raw bird in sight, and he would not be ordering more.

After 57 years, it was the restaurants last night of dinner service in the building, more than a year after it became public that its lease would not be renewed.

Its like attending a wake, George Nettles, a first-time visitor to the restaurant, said as he finished a whiskey sour by the host stand.
Even Silicon Valleys biggest social media companies are now getting into artificial intelligence, as are other tech behemoths. Facebook is using A.I. to improve its products. Google will soon compete with Amazons Echo and Apples Siri, which are based on A.I., with a device that listens in the home, answers questions and places e-commerce orders. Satya Nadella, Microsofts chief executive, recently appeared at the Aspen Ideas Conference and called for a partnership between humans and artificial intelligence systems in which machines are designed to augment humans.

The auto industry has also set up camp in the valley to learn how to make cars that can do the driving for you. Both technology and car companies are making claims that increasingly powerful sensors and A.I. software will enable cars to drive themselves with the push of a button as soon as the end of this decade  despite recent Tesla crashes that have raised the question of how quickly human drivers will be completely replaced by the technology.

Silicon Valleys new A.I. era underscores the regions ability to opportunistically reinvent itself and quickly follow the latest tech trend.

This is at the heart of the regions culture that goes all the way back to the Gold Rush, said Paul Saffo, a longtime technology forecaster and a faculty member at Singularity University. The valley is built on the idea that there is always a way to start over and find a new beginning.

The change spurred a rush for talent in A.I. that has become intense.

Its ridiculous, said Richard Socher, chief scientist at the software maker Salesforce, who teaches a course at Stanford on a machine intelligence technique known as deep learning. The number of people trying to get the students to drop out of the class halfway through because now they know a little bit of this stuff is crazy.

The valleys tendency toward reinvention dates back to the regions initial emergence from the ashes of a deep aerospace industry recession as a consumer-electronics manufacturing center producing memory chips, video games and digital watches in the mid-1970s. A malaise in the personal computing market in the early 1990s was followed by the World Wide Web and the global expansion of the consumer internet.

A decade later, in 2007, just as innovation in mobile phones seemed to be on the verge of moving away from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia, Apple introduced the first iPhone, resetting the mobile communications marketplace and ensuring that the valley would  for at least another generation  remain the worlds innovation center.
A protest on Saturday afternoon attracted fewer than a dozen people, who huddled on the side of the road under a tent to escape the blazing sun and flashed signs at passing cars. They were mostly white; the protesters at large demonstrations shortly after Mr. Sterlings death had been nearly all black.

Louisiana has lately taken a harder line to defend its police officers, who this year will become a protected class under the states hate crimes law.

The killing of the officers on Sunday occurred as hundreds of police officers trained in crowd-control tactics braced for protests outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Cat Brooks, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, cautioned against criticizing activists after the attack on Sunday in Baton Rouge.

I think anytime that theres a loss of life  black, white, police officer, otherwise  its cause for us to take a moment and be sad about that life, she said. And I think we have to be really careful about where these shootings of police officers steer the conversation. I think its absurd to insinuate that a movement that is doing nothing more than demanding that the war on black life come to an end is in any way responsible for these police officers getting shot.

Stephen Loomis, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmens Association, has urged people not to bring their guns anywhere near Clevelands downtown during the convention because officers are in a heightened state.

In Cleveland on Sunday, Steve Thacker, 57, of Westlake, Ohio, stood in the citys Public Square holding a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle  allowed under the states open-carry law  as news broke that several officers had been killed in Baton Rouge. When asked about Mr. Loomiss comments and the Baton Rouge shooting, Mr. Thacker said that despite the attack, he wanted to make a statement and show that people could continue to openly carry their weapons.

I pose no threat to anyone. Im an American citizen. Ive never been in trouble for anything, said Mr. Thacker, an information technology engineer. This is my time to come out and put my two cents worth in, albeit that it is a very strong statement.
 The slain officers were identified as Montrell L. Jackson, 32, and Matthew Gerald, 41, of the Baton Rouge Police Department; and Brad Garafola, 45, an East Baton Rouge Parish sheriffs deputy.

 The hospitalized officers are Nicholas Tullier, 41, a sheriffs deputy who was in critical condition on Monday; Bruce Simmons, 51, a sheriffs deputy who underwent surgery for wounds that were not life-threatening; and an unidentified Baton Rouge police officer, 41, who also had injuries that were not life-threatening.

 The gunman was identified by the authorities as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Mo. Mr. Long, an African-American, was a former Marine who had served from 2005 to 2010, and he had been deployed to Iraq in 2008, according to military records. He had received a national defense service medal and a reward for good conduct.

 Mr. Long is believed to have been the only gunman, the police in Baton Rouge said at a news conference, despite earlier reports of two others being at large. On Monday, the state police said Mr. Long had set out to ambush the officers.

 A video on a site registered under the name of the gunman, Gavin Long, urges a bloody response to police killings of black men.

 President Obama called for restraint at a time of extraordinary tension. This has happened far too often, he said at the White House on Sunday afternoon. We dont need inflammatory rhetoric. We dont need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or advance an agenda. We need to temper our words and open our hearts, all of us.
WASHINGTON  President Obama condemned a shooting on Sunday in Baton Rouge, La., that killed three police officers and wounded three others, calling for Americans to focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further.

We need to temper our words and open our hearts  all of us, Mr. Obama said in a five-minute statement from the White House briefing room.

While he said the motive of the gunman was not yet known, he added that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement.
The tensions at the 2016 Republican National Convention are not like those typically seen at the partys divided gatherings: Theodore Roosevelt challenging the hierarchy in 1912; or the moderates versus conservatives  Dwight D. Eisenhower against Robert A. Taft in 1952, or, 12 years later, Barry M. Goldwater and Nelson A. Rockefeller; then Ronald Reagan taking on President Gerald Ford in 1976.

Republicans meet in Cleveland on Monday to anoint their presidential nominee amid deep schisms. Never have so many of the partys prominent governors, senators, House members and, most conspicuously, former presidents and presidential candidates, avoided the quadrennial forum. But ideology is secondary.

Donald J. Trump, the presumed nominee, has rolled over the partys right-wing activists, mainstream moderates and policy-centric lawmakers such as Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, or Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

The discussion among Republicans in Cleveland and around the country is about the future of the party: Is this election an aberration, or could Republicans go the way of the Whigs a century and a half ago? Even if Mr. Trump turns out to be a unique phenomenon, one reality strikes analysts: There is a real gap between Republican voters and Republican leaders, said Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University who specializes in political parties.
What They Think About Trump: Full-throated support. Our job is to convince people that Mr. Trump is the best possible candidate and that Hillary Clinton is the worst possible candidate, said Tim Selaty, director of operations for Citizens for Trump.

What They Are Planning: To celebrate Mr. Trumps accomplishments and his policies, including at a rally where Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser who remains close to him, is expected to speak. The coalition may march along the citys designated route for protests, but it has not completed its plans, Mr. Selaty said.

Source: Times interview and Citizens for Trumps website

_____

Code Pink

What It Is: A grass-roots organization led by women, it was started in 2002 to oppose the war in Iraq. Its members have held protests outside the White House, at the Capitol, and during Democratic and Republican conventions.

What Its Members Believe: They oppose the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, the use of torture, the war in Afghanistan and the prosecution of whistle-blowers. They also advocate for the human rights of Palestinians.

What They Think About Trump: Averse.

What They Are Planning: The group will host a beauty pageant aimed at showcasing opposition to Mr. Trumps nomination, and members plan to attend several events and protests.
CLEVELAND AND THE SURROUNDING SUBURBS WERE HIT HARD BY THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS AND THIS IS THE LATEST DEVELOPMENT IN THE RECOVERY. A RECYCLING CENTER FOR THE REMAINS OF BLIGHTED HOMES EMPTIED, AND ABANDONED BY FORECLOSURE OR HOMEOWNERS SIMPLY WALKING AWAY UNABLE OR UNWILLING TO MAINTAIN THEM. IN SOME AREAS OF CLEVELAND A QUARTER OF THE HOMES ARE NOW VACANT. KIM FIELDS: There were more families, more homeowners now its very distressed its not very clean and I dont want to live like with bars on my window I dont, and I want people to come over and not say oh my god look at the house next to you, thats not what I want them to see, thats not what I want to see when I walk out of my house. VO: KIM FIELDS LIVES IN THE WOODLAND HILLS NEIGHBORHOOD ON THE CITYS PREDOMINANTLY AFRICAN-AMERICAN EAST SIDE. SHE BOUGHT HER FIRST HOME HERE IN 2001, JUST A FEW BLOCKS AWAY FROM THE HOUSE WHERE SHE WAS BORN. VO: FOR MOST OF THE COUNTRY THE RECESSION AND THE HOUSING CRISIS ENDED 7 YEARS AGO, BUT HOME PRICES HERE ARE STILL FALLING. HOMES ARE WORTH ON AVERAGE 70 TO 80% LESS THAN THEY WERE 15 YEARS AGO. KIM FIELDS: This house has been vacant since 2014 I believe.//And theres another property there. So one two three four.. THERE ARE 6000 EMPTY HOMES ON THE EAST SIDE OF CLEVELAND. ERIC LOFTON LIVES DOWN THE BLOCK FROM FIELDS, NEXT TO ANOTHER RECENTLY EMPTIED HOUSE. FIELDS: this was a decent looking house too cause I saw the guy taking care of it. Eric: All new kitchen Kim: Are you serious, are you serious. Eric: The Bank still owns this property. They paid them to move out. And when they came over I told the guy someone is going to go in there as soon as they see them moving. They should have let the family just stay in, and then at least it would have been occupied wouldnt have broken in. I am talking about not even an hour after they left someone was over here wiping the house out. Cleaning it out. //Hot water tank, water furnaces, everything gone. Stainless steel sinks were here. All of it gone. Its really bad, the whole area we dont get a break. (SOME NAT HERE ABOUT HER CLEANING UP THE NEIGHBORHOOD) IT was much more stuff back here but when we did our community cleanup in april Community members helped to pick up 75% of the stuff, there was so much stuff in here // thats what they do they just come and pull their trucks up here and dump. (trim) *****[00:12:50] Coming home every day and just riding down my street and seeing some of the houses that were so beautiful. And look at them just look at them now. RICHARD: (MVI_0076 8:54) I would like to think that the banks have a moral responsibility but it doesnt seem they work on moral responsibility// RICHARD GOUDREAU IS WITH HARVARD COMMUNITY SERVICES CENTER, A LOCAL NONPROFIT. (NAT) THE CITY HAS BECOME SO OVERWHELMED BY THE VACANT AND BLIGHTED HOMES ITS NOW FALLEN ON GROUPS LIKE GOUDREAUS AND CITIZENS TO HELP ENFORCE THE LAW. (NAT) EACH WEEK HE JOINS ACTIVIST ANITA GARDNER ON A TOUR OF EMPTY AND BLIGHTED HOUSES. (NATS) THEY INSPECT THE HOMES EXTERIOR FOR VIOLATIONS AND FOLLOW UP ON COURT ORDERED REPAIRS. (NATS) ANITA: [00:12:16] Most black communities are targets. Easy targets because we dont get together we dont holler loud enough we dont scream loud enough. And then when we do were violent. Or it was our fault. We dont know what were talking about. If someone told you you could have the american dream, were like everyone else we want a house. RICHARD: (MVI_0076 8:54) These were all middle income, middle class worked at the steel plant, ford chevy chrysler, and the parts plants, those jobs left, the predatory lending came in, it was just a perfect storm of everything right in this area, and this is what you have left//people are just walking away from the properties. Just wholesale walking away. (CRASH) CHERYL: were still working to get families back into homeownership. But every house cant be saved. SHERYL STEPHENS IS IN CHARGE OF DEMOLITIONS FOR THE COUNTYS LAND BANK. ITS A NON PROFIT ENTITY TASKED WITH ACQUIRING BLIGHTED PROPERTIES AND HOPEFULLY FINDING A PRODUCTIVE USE FOR THEM. OFTEN THAT MEANS TEARING THE STRUCTURES DOWN FIRST. (CRASH) CHERYL STEPHENS: We went from one hundred and fifty demos in the first year to last year we did it approximately eight hundred fifty. And this year were on track to do nine hundred fifty two thousand more.//When we started there were approximately twenty nine thousand thirty thousand or structures that were functionally obsolete vacant and blighted and condemned that we needed to demolish across the county //the Cuyahoga land bank and its partners have eliminated over 6000 properties in this process. CHERYL STEPHENS: So there are multiple reasons why we tear houses down. First of all the population of Greater Cleveland has been reduced over the last 20 years. // Now// the official count is below 400000 people. The number of structures we have in the city are in excess of the population numbers. ****VO: IT CAN COST $40 TO $90,000 TO REHAB A HOME AND MAKE IT LIVABLE FOR A FAMILY, SOMETIMES AS MUCH AS THE PRICE OF BUILDING A NEW ONE SOMEWHERE ELSE. BUT ONLY ABOUT $10000 TO DEMOLISH IT. EACH BLIGHTED STRUCTURE REMOVED ALSO HELPS BRING UP THE PROPERTY VALUES OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD. [00:00:00] In Ohio we have a very modest housing prices. And with low housing values its not the same as in New York City or Chicago or San Francisco. Where a structure and the plot of land its own are worth so much more. I mean the vacant partitions are selling for and were transferring them to non-profits for like $100 or if youre an adjacent property owner for a hundred dollars countywide AT THAT RECYCLING PLANT THEYRE RECEIVING THE REMAINS OF UP TO TEN HOMES A DAY, DESTINED TO BE TURNED INTO GARDEN MULCH OR BURNED FOR FUEL. SCOTT HINKLE IS THE OPERATIONS MANAGER. (SCOTT EXPLAINING THE PROCESS) We demo houses...goes across the belt. We have anywhere between 7 and 9 guys separating the concrete and wood. SCOTT: When youre pushing it down a hill and you see a toy or something that wasnt cleaned out, well you think there was someone living in it at one point. And it it makes you think// this was once in a neighborhood where someone lived, now what is going to happen to the neighborhood. And then you think its actually coming together its better the house is going down, the crime is going down, now the homeless people are not going go to be you know squatting there, the drug addicts. We need this, we needed this a long time ago. FOR KIM AND HER NEIGHBORS EACH HOUSE TORN DOWN IS BITTER SWEET. A DANGER AND EYE SORE TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD GONE, BUT HOMES THAT ONCE HELD FAMILIES ARE GONE TOO. THE WEALTH GAP BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE HOUSEHOLDS REVERSED ITS TREND AND GREW IN THE YEARS FOLLOWING THE RECESSION. THE EFFECTS OF THAT COULD LAST FOR GENERATIONS... [00:09:30] Every day. I find a new house. Last summer. There was people living in the house of a kids playing on the lawn. And now I go by there in the doors open and use trash on along there is no curtains. Theres broken windows there because what happened. No its still happening. And its not going to stop. For a while. And I dont know whats going to make it stop.
SEOUL, South Korea  A top South Korean prosecutor was arrested on Sunday on charges of taking millions of dollars in bribes from the owner of Nexon, a leading online game maker, in a case that the countrys news media has portrayed as the epitome of corruption among its elite.

The prosecutor, Jin Kyung-joon, a vice ministerial-level official, is the most senior prosecutor arrested while in office in modern South Korean history.

His case has rocked the country for months, with public grievances running deep over growing income inequality and the way justice is pursued here. The local news media has reported it as the latest example of how some of the countrys business and government elites promote one anothers interests through collusive ties.

On Sunday, Justice Minister Kim Hyun-woong, who is in charge of prosecutors, apologized to the public, saying he was embarrassed and despaired over Mr. Jins corruption and crime.
A policeman stands atop of a military armored vehicle after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer

By Ayla Jean Yackley

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Maritime authorities shut Istanbul's Bosphorus Strait to transiting tankers on Saturday "for security and safety" reasons, shipping agent GAC said, after what the government said was an attempted coup by a faction in the military.

The Bosphorus is one of world's most important chokepoints for the maritime transit of oil with over three percent of global supply - mainly from Russia and the Caspian Sea - passing through the 17-mile waterway that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. It also ships vast amounts of grains from Russia and Kazakhstan to world markets.

On Saturday, forces loyal to the Turkish government fought to crush the remnants of a military coup attempt, following violence and clashes in Ankara and Istanbul.

Shipping agent GAC said some cargo carriers such as bulkers were still being allowed to travel through the Bosphorus which divides Istanbul into European and Asian sides.

A Reuters witness reported seeing no traffic at the southern mouth of the strait at daybreak.

Several Russian oil trading sources said they had not yet received notifications from shipping agents regarding traffic disruptions.

A spokesman for Russia's pipeline monopoly Transneft said the main Black Sea port of Novorossiisk was operating normally and had enough tankers near the port to continue loading operations uninterrupted until July 25 regardless of what happens in the Bosphorus.

Turkey is also shipping significant volumes of oil from the Caspian Sea region and countries such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan via its territory directly to its export terminals on the Mediterranean like the port of Ceyhan bypassing Bosphorus.

A BP-led group operating oil and gas pipelines running from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia said there have been no disruptions to shipments.

"As of this morning, there were no disruptions, both pipelines are working normally," BP-Georgia said.

A source at Azeri state energy company SOCAR also told Reuters oil shipping to Ceyhan was uninterrupted.

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Iranian Mehr news agency said Iran had temporarily stopped exports of petrochemical products to Turkey due to border closure between the two countries.

Oil shipments through the Turkish Straits has decreased over the past decade as Russia shifted flows towards the Baltic

ports. The Baltic ports currently operate well below capacity, which means Russia could divert flows away from the Black Sea in case of prolonged disruptions.

Only half a mile wide at the narrowest point, the Turkish Straits are among the world's most difficult waterways.

About 48,000 vessels transit the straits each year, making this area one of the world's busiest maritime chokepoints, according to the U.S. government.

Commercial shipping has the right of free passage through the Turkish Straits in peacetime, although Turkey claims the right to impose regulations for safety and environmental

purposes.

(Additional reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Olga Yagova in Moscow, Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi; writing by Dmitry Zhdannikov in London, editing by David Evans)
She eventually threw him out and was no longer in touch with him, Mr. Garino added.

Although they have not put forth specific evidence, French officials say Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel appeared to have taken the path to extremism very shortly before the attack.

In an interview published on Sunday in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, said the kind of terrorism seen in Nice was hard to anticipate, noting that the killer had radicalized very quickly.

Daesh provides unbalanced individuals with an ideological kit that gives their acts meaning, Mr. Valls said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. The investigation will have to prove it, but that was probably the case for the attack in Nice.

There were reports on Sunday that Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had spent time researching his route on the waterfront promenade where the attack unfolded, as he was caught on surveillance cameras driving the truck in the area on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Agence France-Presse and other French news media, quoting anonymous police officials, also reported on Sunday that Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel had sent a text message shortly before the attack in which he appeared to ask for more weapons, but it was unclear whom the message had been for and what exactly it had said.

Mr. Lahouaiej Bouhlel used an automatic pistol to shoot at the police officers who tried to stop him on the promenade; several fake weapons were also found in his truck after he was fatally shot.
Instances of wanton violence by deranged attackers  whether in Nice or in Orlando, Fla.  are swiftly judged to be the work of terrorists. These judgments occur even when there is little immediate evidence that the attackers had direct ties to terrorist groups and when they do not fit a classic definition of terrorists as those who use violence to advance a political agenda.

A lot of this stuff is at the fringes of what we would historically think of as terrorism, said Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a professor at Dartmouth College. But, he said, the Islamic State and jihadism has become a kind of refuge for some unstable people who are at the end of their rope and decide they can redeem their screwed-up lives by dying in the name of a cause.

Mr. Benjamin said this also led the news media and government officials to treat violence like the Nice attack differently from other mass attacks, like shootings at schools and churches that have been carried out by non-Muslims.

If there is a mass killing and there is a Muslim involved, all of a sudden it is by definition terrorism, he said.

The spectrum of terrorism is widening and now includes attacks loosely inspired by the Islamic State, those carried out by its affiliate groups and attacks directed by the groups leadership. All have drawn public condemnation and concern, but the plots organized and executed by the Islamic State usually prompt greater concern from the authorities.
LUXEMBOURG  Signs of testy relations between Turkeys embattled government and the United States continued Sunday, as Secretary of State John Kerry denounced any suggestion of American involvement in Fridays coup.

We think its irresponsible to have accusations of American involvement, Mr. Kerry told CNN Sunday

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has accused Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric now living in Pennsylvania, of orchestrating the violence, and Mr. Erdogan demanded that Mr. Gulen be extradited. Mr. Gulen has denied the charge, and Mr. Kerry said the Justice Department would examine any evidence Turkey presented as part of an extradition request.
TEHRAN  Less than a year before new elections, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran is confronting a major scandal involving inflated salaries for the managers and executives of state-run companies.

In recent weeks, the Iranian news media have been publishing payment slips showing many top managers of state-run companies earning what for Iran are astronomical bonuses and salaries, often hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

Mr. Rouhani was elected in 2013 promising to end corruption in government and revive the economy by completing a nuclear deal and ending sanctions. With sanctions still largely in place, however, the economy remains moribund.

Now, having cleaned house after supplanting the corruption-riddled administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and putting his own people at the top rungs of state-run enterprises, Mr. Rouhani finds himself increasingly vulnerable as the disclosures of inflated salaries multiply.
The United States has a significant operation underway at Incirlik, including A-10 attack planes, KC-135 refueling tankers and surveillance aircraft, including armed drones. The Air Force has said that American refueling aircraft at Incirlik handled roughly one-third of all refueling operations for the air war over Iraq and Syria.

Use of the base increases the length of time that American and other allied warplanes can remain over Iraq and Syria. The manned and unmanned strike missions from Incirlik, as well as the surveillance missions from there  all located hours closer to the fight than aircraft in the gulf  have made a big difference, according to American officials.

At Diyarbakir, another Turkish base, the Air Force has been staging small numbers of American troops to recover any downed pilots or flight crews.
ISTANBUL  Standing atop a bus outside his mansion in Istanbul on Saturday night, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, victorious after putting down a coup attempt by renegade factions of the military, told his followers, We only bow to God.

The symbolism was stark. The informal rally harked back to his days as an up-by-the-bootstraps populist and Islamist leader who often spoke from the tops of buses. And his message, cloaked in the language of Islam, underscored how much Turkey has changed in recent decades.

Members of the military, once the guardians of the countrys secular traditions who successfully pulled off three coups last century, were being rounded up and tossed in jail, and other perceived enemies were being purged from the state bureaucracy.

The Islamists, meanwhile, were dancing in the streets.



That is where, Mr. Erdogan said on Sunday, they would remain.
Aaron K. Chatterji is an associate professor at Duke Universitys The Fuqua School of Business.

The week after Independence Day 2016 will remembered as a time when the conversation about race in America stormed into the foreground once again, with fatal police shootings of African-American men in Louisiana and Minnesota and the murder of five police and transit officers in Dallas by an African-American Army veteran. The ensuing protests and heated discourse on cable news and op-ed pages, all during a particularly contentious Presidential campaign, reminded us of the vexing divisions that still fester all across our nation.

While we expect to hear from our political leaders during these challenging times, we have not traditionally expected much from our corporate leaders, particularly on controversial social issues like race relations. But that seems to be changing. CEOs have become activists, as my co-author Michael Toffel and I have described here and here, weighing in on issues not directly related to their bottom line, on same-sex marriage, gender equality, transgender rights, and guns. The preliminary findings from our research are that this kind of activism can increase willingness to buy a company's products among consumers sympathetic to the cause.

Even in light of the recent spate of CEO activism however, the statements of business leaders in the aftermath of the shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota was still notable. Several leading technology companies and executives, including Apple's Tim Cook, Dropbox's Drew Houston, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (the video of the Minnesota shooting was broadcast using his Live product) quickly tweeted out statements expressing solidarity with those angered by the police shootings. Some companies, including Twitter, Pandora, and Square, used the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

This activism immediately produced significant backlash and calls for boycotts, particularly in light of the Dallas shootings, as critics accused the companies of taking sides (the wrong one in their view) on a hot button issue. Given some recent examples of CEO activism on race issues, (Starbucks' Howard Schultz's Race Together campaign and Sam's Club CEO Rosalind Brewer calls for greater workplace diversity come to mind), this response should not have been surprising.

Story continues

These cases suggest that wading into race and other social issues can be tricky and almost always generate at least some backlash from consumers. So why do I think companies are doing it and why do I expect to see even more in the future?

First, business-to-consumer companies in particular are trying to personalize their brands to build stronger connections with us. But we are crafting our social connections differently nowadays. For example, opinion research shows that large percentages of Americans are mostly friends with people who share their political beliefs. Moreover, recent data indicates that "negative partisanship", or bad feelings about those with different political views, has increased dramatically. In this kind of polarized environment, differences over nearly anything are more likely to be viewed through a political lens. Our political identities have become a much more important component of who we are. So as we increasingly sort into tribal networks of like-minded individuals, it is becoming more difficult for our favorites brands to gain our trust while staying out of politics.

Second, there is genuine conviction among many corporate leaders about these social issues, in some part shaped by a new wave of business education that has emphasized the social responsibility of business and thinking beyond simply maximizing shareholder value. Moreover, a new younger generation of corporate leaders is emerging that are not only demographically predisposed to social liberalism, but are typically clustered in progressive urban areas around San Francisco, Boston and New York. Predictably, much of the CEO activism has come from the left side of the political spectrum, on cultural and social issues, as opposed to economic issues where the sensibilities and priorities of business leaders can line up differently.

Finally, the advent of social media has transformed the landscape of activism for all of us. I like to say that social media is like a microphone that is always on. So silence is ever more conspicuous. When these events happen, we immediately check our social media accounts to see how other people are reacting, perhaps for new insights, but more likely to see who agrees with us and who does not. When battle lines form, silence can be viewed as implicit support for whatever position we don't agree with, creating a nasty communications problem for normally cautious corporates.

Taken together, a hyper-partisan and hyper-plugged in America portends more CEO activism and more backlash. The most astute CEO activists will speak authentically on selected issues that matter to them personally, and make a measurable impact on their audience. The very best corporate communications teams will red flag tweets that could go viral for the wrong reasons and avoid a hullabaloo you would have definitely read about. And many of us will be keeping track, as we dedicate our hearts, minds and wallets to the companies and causes we support.

See original article on Fortune.com

More from Fortune.com
Sundays fatal shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge, La., and those July 7 in Dallas are a painful reminder of the death of Orange County sheriffs Deputy Brad Riches, killed in a targeted shooting in Lake Forest in 1999.

Our hearts go out to the Baton Rouge Police Department, Orange County Sheriffs Department Undersheriff Don Barnes said Sunday. Its unfortunate that only one day after the last police officer is put to rest in Dallas, were in mourning again for three officers killed in the line of duty. Its a tragedy.

Barnes, who has served in the Sheriffs Department for 28 years, said that while deputies never know what will happen when they respond to a call, the shootings have made it obvious there are deliberate efforts targeting law enforcement.

We lost Deputy Brad Riches in 1999, who was targeted for no other reason than having a badge and wearing a uniform, Barnes said. We all know about that kind of loss and what it takes from you. We have still not gotten over that.

In June of that year, Riches was on routine patrol, driving through the parking lot of a 7-Eleven store. Without warning or provocation, a man carrying an AK-47 assault rifle opened fire on Riches while he sat in his patrol car.

Riches, who graduated from Dana Hills High School in 1989, began an emergency radio transmission, but he succumbed to the more than two dozen assault rifle rounds that were fired at him.

Five hours after the shooting, deputies and investigators arrested 39-year-old Maurice Gerald Steskal, a Lake Forest man who had walked into the mini-market with an assault rifle and told the clerk that his intention was not to rob the store, but to use the weapon against police.

Riches, 34, was the first Orange County deputy since 1958 to be fatally shot while on patrol. Steskal, who was known as a Bible-reading, marijuana-smoking ex-convict with a lifelong hatred of police, is on death row.

Barnes was serving as a deputy in Lake Forest at the time Riches was killed.

Brads murder affected me and our entire department forever, as will the tragic events that occurred in Dallas and Baton Rouge forever change those departments, their families and the communities they serve, Barnes said. You never recover, really. We become secondary victims.

Barnes said the Sheriffs Department put out several messages in the past weeks about deputies operating in a heightened sense of awareness.

We have reinforced with our personnel the need to be vigilant and to be aware of our surroundings, he said. But we have to couple that with our responsibility to the public. The threat has changed: Not only do we have targeted attacks at law enforcement, but were dealing with worldwide terror incidents that occur close to home.

Our responsibility to protect the public has become immense.

Barnes said the partnership with the community has never been more critical.

We have to build on that partnership to keep the community safe, he said.

Barnes said that when news of the shootings in Baton Rouge broke Sunday morning, the Sheriffs Department and municipal agencies evaluated the situation to determine whether there was an immediate threat in Orange County.

All indications at this point are that it is isolated to Baton Rouge, he said. Orange County law enforcement with the municipal agencies will remain diligent to protect the public.

Last week, the Orange County Fire Authority put out an alert for firefighters to stay vigilant in support of law enforcement.

OCFA firefighters will be wearing black mourning bands in support of the Baton Rouge police officers, said fire Capt. Steve Concialdi. All of our firefighters hearts are breaking for the families of the police officers that were killed and for their fellow officers.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregister.com or on Twitter:@lagunaini
CBRE Group has completed the sale of the 8,872-square-foot, two-story Swift & Swift office building in the Old Towne Orange Plaza Square for $4.45 million. The buyer was not disclosed. CBREs Peter Wells, Taylor Friend and Justin Hill represented the seller, Swift & Swift. The accounting firm has occupied the building, originally a bank, at 10 Plaza Square since 1962. The building still contains two original walk-in vaults. CBRE also secured the purchase of Swift & Swifts new location at 1006 E. Chapman, the former home of the National Marine Manufacturers Association, where the firm will continue to operate and serve their clients.

Bixby Land Co. has begun work on CERRO, a redesigned mid-rise office building near the San Diego I-5 Freeway at Crown Valley Parkway in Mission Viejo. Formerly known as Mission Heritage, Bixby bought the building in December 2015 for $15.6 million. Renovations should be complete later this summer. Bixby has signed five-year leases with Realty One Group and Everest Escrow for a combined 8,857 square feet in the 71,421-square-foot building. Paul Root of Madison Street Partners represented the tenants, while the building is represented by Simon Dillon, Justin Hill and Jason Katz of CBRE.

Bixby also has signed Brandtailers to a five-year lease at Avalon, an office building in Newport Beach. Brandtailers, a creative agency currently based in Irvine, has leased 3,585 square feet and will take occupancy in the building later this year. Terms of the lease were not disclosed.

A 2,206-square-foot office building at 2900 Bristol St. in Costa Mesa has been sold for roughly $1.15 million. Irvine-based Wind Water Realty represented the seller. The seller will remain as a tenant after signing a lease with the new owner. The building is part of The Waters at Creekside office park which features seven private offices, an X-ray room, kitchen area, two open space areas, and a front lobby.

PEOPLE IN REAL ESTATE

Irvine-based Pacific Hospitality Group has named Robb Walker vice president of operations for its Meritage Collection, the companys lifestyle and luxury hotel portfolio. In his role, Walker will oversee operations for six hotels and resorts in Hawaii and California. He has more than 30 years experience in the hotel industry and previously served as senior vice president of operations at SilverBirch Hotels and Resorts.

Adrienne Brandes, a luxury property specialist with a duel market presence in Newport Beach and Aspen/Snowmass, Colo., has joined New York City-based real estate firm Douglas Elliman. Douglas Elliman Real Estate operates four offices in Aspen and Snowmass Village.

Yaron Shaham has joined McGlinchey Staffords Irvine office and commercial litigation practice group. Shaham has more than 15 years of experience defending mortgage lenders and servicers, banks, and financial services in mortgage and foreclosure-related litigation. Previously, he was chair of the Orange County Bar Association, Financial Practices Group. Since opening its office in 2013, McGlinchey Staffords Irvine practice has grown to eight attorneys.

GOOD WORKS

Habitat for Humanity of Orange County will build five affordable homes this summer on McFadden Avenue in Santa Ana. The project is being funded with help from members of the Pacific Southwest Distributors Association. PSDA members at a recent conference held in Indian Wells were asked to donate the plumbing, HVAC, and gas materials for the homes in Santa Ana. Companies participating include Fluidmaster, Delta and Weld-On.

COMING UP

Connect Orange County on July 28 will host more than 500 commercial real estate and business executives from across the region to talk development, investment and whats next for Orange County. Featured speakers include: Bill Halford, Bixby Land; Tom Bak, Trammell Crow; Emile Haddad, FivePoint, and David Moore, Irvine Company Retail Properties. The event will take place at the Balboa Bay Club. Find more details at oc2016.connectconferences.com.
Liberal attorneys general from 17 states have put a big red bulls-eye on the chest of big oil. Their bizarre claim is that for years energy companies fraudulently covered up their knowledge that greenhouse gases from fossil fuels cause catastrophic climate change. The most recent chapter of this witch hunt is a remarkable subpoena filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, which would require ExxonMobil to turn over 40 years of internal company documents. It also demands that ExxonMobil produce all of its internal communications with conservative-leaning think tanks.

This is nothing more than an old-fashioned, political mob shakedown of a deep-pocketed industry for money. The attorneys general are hoping for a repeat of the multibillion-dollar tobacco company settlement in the 1990s. The big, obvious difference here is that tobacco companies sell a product that is dangerous to ones health. The oil and gas companies sell energy that makes all modern life possible.

Worse, the AGs want to use the steel-heeled boot of government to get energy companies to stop giving money to free-market institutions with which the Left doesnt agree. But they are permitted to donate to the Sierra Club, the Wildlife Federation and the Center for American Progress. The goal is to silence any opposition to the climate change industrial complex.

The way to create a scientific consensus on an issue is to muzzle anyone who dares disagree with the scientific consensus. If these science police had been around several hundred years ago, wed all be forced to believe that the earth is flat.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman hinted that hed like to see criminal prosecution and jail time for the energy company executives, saying, Financial damages alone may be insufficient.  The First Amendment does not give you the right to commit fraud.

The end-game here could hardly be more sinister. The AGs are following the example set by the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to bleed and bankrupt oil and gas producers in America, as they are doing now to the domestic coal industry.

All the while, there has been no factual basis for these allegations, just conjecture and speculation. First, there is no evidence that the companies produced global warming research. Second, theres no evidence they covered it up. Third, there is no evidence that this research (if it happened) confirmed or denied global warming. Fourth, there is no consensus among leading scientists about whether global warming is happening, why it is happening or what its effects might be (whether positive or negative) on the planet.

Moreover, unlike the tobacco company litigation, where smokers got cancer and heart disease, who is the victim here of the purported fraud by the energy companies?

While these AGs are using their position of power to intimidate big oil, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and others have been busy creating millions of energy-related jobs, helping the U.S. become the largest energy producer in the world, driving down the cost of energy and adding to U.S. growth. Without the energy companies and the shale oil and gas boom of the last decade, the U.S. would not have escaped the Great Recession. But in Washington, no good deed goes unpunished.

Now for the ultimate irony of these AG witch hunts: Oil and gas companies are reducing their greenhouse gas emissions already  in part because of fracking and the new boom in natural gas, carbon emissions have rapidly declined in over the past decade. So where is the fraud?

Whats more, because natural gas burns cleanly, and because of its availability, affordability and abundance, it is more and more the fuel that powers the engine that drives our economy. The more we burn, the more emmissions trends decline (see chart). ExxonMobil and all the other energy producers should be honored for environmental cleanup, not demonized.

So fracking is reducing greenhouse gases, and yet the state AGs who say that global warming is an imminent crisis threatening the future of the planet are trying to stop the energy companies they are suing from fracking. States like New York, which has banned fracking altogether, Maryland, which has implemented a moratorium through 2017 and California, where local governments have prohibited the practice, are thus depriving themselves and the rest of the market of greater access to clean energy.

All of this suggests that maybe it is the AGs who should be sued for fraud. Were pleased to report that ExxonMobil is, fighting back. The company admirably called the bluff of these AGs and filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts attorney general and the U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general, charging that the AGs are guilty of harassment. In recent days, the Virgin Islands AG dropped the subpoena.

Heres hoping that the rest of these shakedown artists drop their witch hunts, too.

Editors note: ExxonMobil is not currently a contributor to the Heritage Foundation. However, its last contribution amounted to 0.05 percent of the Heritage Foundation budget.

Stephen Moore is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the co-author of the book Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy. Timothy Doescher is a research associate at the Heritage Foundation.
The FBI is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest of a man who is accused of killing his wife in North Carolina. The man has ties to Southern California.

A federal warrant for murder was issued for Jason Earl Armstrong Jr., 27, on July 8. He is suspected of killing his wife, Iris Armstrong, on July 1 inside their home on the Fort Bragg Army Base in Fayetteville, N.C., according to a release by the Charlotte Division of the FBI.

Armstrong, considered armed and dangerous, has ties to Orange County and Los Angeles, as well as the states of Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, Louisiana and Arizona, the release stated.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said Armstrong is believed to have family and associates in Southern California.

He is described as having black hair, brown eyes, 5-foot-11 to 6-foot tall and weighing 150-160 pounds.

Armstrong was seen on surveillance video using his wifes debit card shortly after her wifes death, according to the release. The FBI says if you know where Armstrong is or see him, do not approach him. Call 911 or your local FBI office.

The FBI Charlotte Division, Fayetteville Resident Agency is leading the investigation with help from the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division.

Staff writer Scott Schwebke contributed to this report.
We are writing to you as brothers and ministers in the Lord who have had the grace of friendship, prayer and worship together in our respective faith communities. Our hearts are heavy after the senseless loss of precious lives in Louisiana, Minnesota and Dallas. Every human life has inestimable value. We pray for the families of those who have lost their loved ones, whether those protecting and serving others at a nonviolent protest in Dallas or those caught up in racial and structural injustice. This is a moment of personal concern for Bishop Kevin Vann, who was a neighbor and friend to many in Dallas for a number of years, and who is in regular communication with Bishop Kevin Farrell in Dallas.

As Christians, we suffer with those who suffer, grieve with those who grieve, and stand in solidarity with those most vulnerable. In an atmosphere of anger, mistrust and hatred, we must recover the ability to weep with those who weep, to comfort those in pain and to make space for those who need healing. It seems our society is often fractured by a negative view of diversity rather than celebrating the beauty of each member of the human family and recognizing that we are all one body and one heart. Bishop Farrell wrote after the Dallas shooting, Our community has to be a stained-glass window, where we all come together in peace and harmony. Indeed, we must find a way to halt what Dr. Martin Luther King called the descending spiral of violence. He wrote:

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

What is the love that can drive out violence? As Christians, we proclaim that love came into the world in the Word made flesh  Jesus the Lord. There is a love that casts out fear. There is a love that is willing to make room for others. There is a love that does not insist on its own way. This love can freely assert that all of our lives together matter and are created in the image and likeness of God. This declarative, inclusive statement stands on its own and must be said, given that there was a time in our American history when we declared that all men are created equal while counting enslaved blacks as three-fifths of a person. Such an acknowledgment can be made  and must be made  while simultaneously valuing and mourning the loss of those persons working in law enforcement, whom we count on daily for our security and safety, as well as the loss of the most vulnerable and oppressed members of our society. There is a love that worked a miracle for the centurion as well as a man living in the tombs whose demons were legion.

We refuse to pit one community against another, to scapegoat individuals or whole communities, and we also refuse to abandon the preferential option for the poor, the defenseless, the outcast and the downtrodden. There is a fear that these tragedies will lead to a chilling effect on nonviolent witness to the truth and a backtracking on so many of the good strides that police departments have made in community policing. May it not be so.

In California, we are engaged in significant efforts to pursue criminal justice reform, to move more toward restorative justice and a system that better respects the dignity of the human person. We have a long way to go to protect all life at its beginning and end  and at every stage in between. In Orange County, bridge-building efforts are not just across black and white divides, but also Latino, Vietnamese and many other communities. We are beautifully diverse, and we are better together. We hope our efforts in recent years to pray and worship together in one anothers communities have helped to build some of these bridges, and we look forward to building many more.

Dorothy Day once said, I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least. There is no room for prejudice among the people of God, but there is all the space in the world for one another. Lets redouble our efforts to walk in the path of Dr. King, Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, who summed up so many of the great saints in saying, If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. There is a love that walks the way of the cross in hope of the resurrection.

Please know of our prayer, our love and our commitment together to the Lords ministry for our brothers and sisters in our communities.

Pastor Mark Whitlock

Irvine

Christ Our Redeemer African Methodist Episcopal Church

Bishop Kevin W. Vann

Garden Grove

Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange

A time for leaders

I have been around long enough to have voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960. It was a time of greatness and leadership. President Kennedy faced down the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis, declared we would put a man on the moon and proposed legislation that would later become the 1964 Civil Rights Act. These were bold actions that inspired Americans and gave us confidence in our leadership.

I dont see or feel any of this today. We have become a nation divided without the leadership to move ahead, uninspired and seemingly pitted against each other. The racial divide is so tenuous that officer-involved shootings of black suspects, whether justified or not, immediately result in riots and vengeance against police.

Our first black president offered messages of hope and change, of healing, of one America. Sadly, we have a president and Congress locked into their ideology and unable to do the business of the people.

We have had many highs and lows as a nation, and this is a low. But the good news is, this is America. Well figure it out. There is too much good in our citizenry to permit any one issue or politician to define us.

Bob Long

Laguna Niguel
Critics of the stepped-up security presence at American airports since the 9/11 terrorist attacks have always said that while it looks good, it isnt really making travelers much safer.

Now, more and more, it doesnt even look good.

After a series of scandals marred the image of the Transportation Security Administration, a congressional committee investigated the TSAs efforts to head off employee misconduct. The result is a new report from the staff of the House Homeland Security Committee whose title does further wonders for the agencys reputation: Misconduct at TSA Threatens the Security of the Flying Public.

The big worry for Southern Californians may be an item on pages nine and 10 of the 29-page report, noting that the nations largest airports had the highest rates of misconduct by TSA employees in 2015, as well as the steepest increases in misconduct from 2013 to 2015. Los Angeles International is one of those airports, along with Newark (N.J.) International and Boston Logan International.

But this is a problem everywhere, which is troubling because everywhere is where we all fly and where we need security-checkpoint officers to be on the ball.

The eye-popping statistic is a 28.5 percent increase in reported misconduct by TSA workers nationwide from 2013 to 2015, when the annual number of allegations climbed to 17,627, equating to about one for every three full-time employees. Thats on top of a nearly 27 percent increase from 2010 to 2012.

The biggest category of misconduct was neglect of duty, which doubled in the two years ending in 2015, to 1,206 incidents nationwide.

Neglect of duty is described as inattention to duty resulting in a loss of property or life; careless inspection; negligent performance of duties; failure to exercise due diligence in performance of duties; failure to follow procedures. Another of the eight categories of misconduct that saw increases is integrity and ethics, which covers accepting bribes and other criminal conduct.

Try not to think about any of that the next time you watch security officers screen your fellow passengers.

The misconduct in question ranges from salacious (federal air marshals spending government money on hotel rooms for romps with prostitutes) to brazenly criminal (a TSA officer in Oakland allegedly helping to smuggle 100 kilograms of marijuana over a two-year period) to downright dangerous (an officer in Orlando taking bribes to smuggle Brazilian nationals through a checkpoint without questioning).

The House report says that while allegations of misconduct have been rising, the TSA has taken fewer disciplinary actions against employees. And a faulty disciplinary system contributes to low employee morale.

The picture is of what Homeland Security Committee Chairman Scott Perry, R-Pa., called the failure of TSAs big-government, bureaucratic response to misconduct.

As the House report says, Employee misconduct of all types corrupts TSAs core mission to protect the traveling public and poses serious security vulnerabilities.

The TSAs job is to make airline passengers not only feel safer but also actually be safer. Clearly it is not doing that vital job well enough.
Barack Obama came to office with a promise of fundamentally transforming the United States. Through what one admirer calls a profound course correction engineered by relentless government activism, Obama has, indeed, transformed the country and shifted it to what now passes for the Left agenda on Americas role in the world, the environment, gender issues, labor rights and untrammeled executive power over both Congress and local governments.

As he leaves office, Obama is already being consecrated as a great president whose direction will naturally be followed by his successor. Given his greater popularity  his rankings have been rising for months  the far less popular Hillary Clintons pitch will be to portray herself as something like Obama-plus. The transformation is about to hit its peak.

This progressive triumph is occurring despite mediocre economic growth, rising inequality and diminished global status. But its a record that cant be successfully challenged by a GOP that has seen fit to nominate such a noxious candidate. With Trump at the top of the ticket, the Republican Party could also lose the Senate, and thus the Supreme Court, losing the last restraints on the full monty of the progressive agenda.

Trumps ugly presence is sure to swell the Democratic base  minorities, millennials, unmarried women, highly educated professionals  even as the unstable billionaire captures a larger share of older, working-class, white voters. Hillary, as the American Prospect has argued, inherits a party dedicated to microtargeting its voter base, rather than seeking to reach out to a perceived dying white suburban and small-town middle America. Harold Meyerson, the incisive editor of the Prospect, calls this the first post-middle-class election.

A diminished white middle class is OK for a Democratic Party made up of college-for-free Bernie bros, urban hipsters, greens, racial minorities, feminists, public employees and gay activists. These groups wont really challenge the real winners of the Obama years  the Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs, who are willing to genuflect to the green and social agenda of the party, but can be even more sure, under the many-times-purchased Hillary, that their path to unreasonable, even dangerous, wealth and power will continue unimpeded.

What happens next

So hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen, and get ready for peak transformation. Hillarys election will mark the longest period of uninterrupted Democrat rule since FDR. Daniel Greenfield of FrontPage Magazine writes, It will be the single greatest opportunity for the Left to transform America since the days of the New Deal. What under Obama has been largely rhetorical, and often thwarted, will now become very real in your neighborhood.

A Democratic Senate and progressive Supreme Court guarantees the continuation of government by executive decree. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, will go on an unprecedented rampage. First, coal will be sentenced to death, which, while perhaps necessary, will leave places like West Virginia and Wyoming devastated. Next, they will try to destroy both natural gas and oil. This means more pain in more of the country  the Great Plains, Texas, Louisiana, Alaska and parts of many states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and even parts of inland California. These regions drove much of the national recovery in the years after the 2008 crash. Now they could be leading the country into prolonged slow growth or even recession.

The green tsunami will also hit other parts of the real economy  agriculture, logistics, home building and manufacturing. In the past few years, foreign companies, notably from Germany, have moved to the U.S. to take advantage of much lower energy prices. Now, EPA policies, as we can see in the test market of California, will force up prices with mandates for often expensive and unreliable renewable fuels. Today, companies in places like California can simply flee elsewhere in America for lower costs and less tortuous regulations. Under peak transformation, they will have nowhere to hide but outside the countrys borders.

Government regulations proposed by Obama will bring federal power down to the most local level. Disparate impact rules could force suburban communities to accept often high-density, subsidized housing, and even be precluded from denying subsidized residence to felons. This will be done whether or not an area has had any record of discriminating against minorities. A Latino family, having escaped the barrio to an upper-middle-class neighborhood, can now be forced by data-driven U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development social justice warriors to bring the barrio back to them. So much for upward mobility.

Get ready for ever more intrusions by a re-energized crew of racial and gender activists. Obama sometimes had the influence to constrain the worst PC abuses, but Hillary, already distrusted by much of the partys expanding Left base, will be forced to kowtow to their wishes. The campus lunacy of safe spaces and microaggressions will now be expanded to the town square. For two years, political correctness will reach its apogee, uncontested in the courts, embraced by the bureaucracy and most of the media.

The counterrevolution has been postponed

These issues could well have been addressed and debated this year if the Republicans had nominated a normal humanoid. Trump removes 2016 for would-be rebels and makes 2018 the next year of decision. As we know from the 2010 and 2014 elections, there is still a strong center-right element in America, perhaps even a majority. It is now hopelessly divided, but peak transformation could patch the GOP Humpty Dumpty together again.

Key here are demographic and economic factors. The economy is already tepid, and events in the rest of the world  China, the Middle East, Europe, South America  do not inspire confidence. Hillary Clinton wont be able to stimulate the economy by slowing the flow of regulations because she will be in thrall to the coastal progressives. Her thumb will be heavy, in particular, on the countrys goods and energy-producing heartland.

The suburbs, too, can expect more assaults, which could prove politically dangerous as well. The green and social justice warrior campaign to densify and racially profile suburbs, as Thomas B. Edsall points out in a recent New York Times column, has already cost the Democrats in suburban New York. An attempt to fundamentally transform the already diversifying suburbs will put the party at odds with places where 80 percent or more of metropolitan America now lives. Middle-class families may prove not quite as pliable as college students, cowed by teachers and animated by theory, or by those who benefit, either psychically or financially, by dictating how our communities operate.

Negative feedback from the mounting national debt, which has soared under both Obama and his failed GOP predecessor, and the unwieldy Obamacare, characterized by rising premiums and an increasingly weakened health care industry, will start to bite by 2018. Main Street businesses, already in retreat, will not welcome another onset of the regulatory tide already drowning them.

Even millennials, as they begin to enter en masse their late 20s and early 30s, may finally start focusing on how to achieve a middle-class standard of living, particularly for housing and caring for their young families. Much of this will take place not in the largely childless core city Democratic hotbeds but rather in faster-growing, sprawling Sun Belt cities and suburbs, where the progressive echo chamber is less omnipresent and concerns for raising children are greater.

Many of these millennials will work from home, and not be so interested in having a government snooping around their workplace. Others will chafe, as occurred with the boomers, against taxes and regulations that now discourage entrepreneurial ventures. Declining trust in government institutions, including among the young, may eventually wean some from the party of an ever bigger, ever more centralized state.

All the conditions for an even larger and more ethnically, as well as geographically, diverse Brexit rebellion are in place. But for the countertransformation to work, it takes more than just a match, but something more resembling a brain.

Until that organ is somehow located, a big win in 2018 could falter into irrelevance, as it did in 2010 and 2014. Still lacking is some coherent response to the concerns that drive the Obama transformation. What is needed is a pro-growth, rational program that does not pander to either social regressives or the remnants of big money Republicanism. The pressing need for an alternative vision cannot be filled by mediocrities or madmen, but rather by people possessing both purpose and sensibility.

Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.
SACRAMENTO  The latest debate over policing understandably has become an emotional one, following the horrific murder of five police officers in Dallas and the deeply disturbing videos of police officers shooting men to death in Minnesota and Louisiana. Some conservatives say theres a war on cops and are demanding a return to law and order, while many liberals believe theres a police war on minorities and have led protests that sometimes look more like riots.

In a free society, the public has a right  actually, a duty  to look closely at how the government and its employees behave. Here are some crucial policy issues that neither side is discussing:

Police unionization protects bad officers and stifles reform. The current unionized system makes it nearly impossible to discipline, fire or remove problem officers. Thats no surprise, given the clout of police unions, which get their way from members of both parties in the state Capitol. A recent study from the Chicago Police Department finds that a tiny percentage of officers cause the preponderance of lawsuits and settlements there, which confirms this point. If agencies could more easily get rid of a handful of officers, there would be fewer problems.

I compare the situation to public education. Because of union-backed work rules, there are some bad teachers, who are nearly impossible to remove from the classroom. Hence, districts engage in the dance of the lemons, as administrators shuffle around poor performers. The vast majority of teachers are good, professional people, but such a bureaucratic system is immune from reform. Its similar in the world of law-enforcement agencies.

Secrecy aids and abets the worst actors. We all know sunshine is the best antidote to corruption and other ills. Because of union muscle-flexing at the state Capitol, its been a non-starter for civil libertarians to secure even modest oversight laws of police agencies. In 2006, the California Supreme Court ruled in the Copley Press, Inc. v. Superior Court decision that police disciplinary proceedings are not public, thus barring the public and media from learning about allegations of misconduct. Efforts to alter that ruling have been beaten back repeatedly. Problem officers can continue to wreak havoc without anyone outside the department knowing about it.

Cops increasingly view the people as cash cows. After the Ferguson, Missouri, riots, most on both the left and right were focused on the shooting incident that sparked the fracas. But, a federal Department of Justice report explained why so many residents of the mostly African-American suburb were so upset (even before the race-baiters came to town). As Bill Moyers reported last March, DOJ found that the city exhorts police to maximize revenue via stops, citations and arrests, and in some cases punishes them for failing to meet targets.  Hunger for revenue influences how officers act, resulting in excessive uses of force  with Tasers and dogs  violations of free speech and unreasonable stops or arrests, according to the DOJ.

Drug war and militarization ramp up the hostility. This cash cow phenomenon is driven by the drug war. In a free society, police are not supposed to be an occupying army, but a trusted part of the community. The drug war has militarized local police and created an antagonistic situation  a siege mentality especially in poorer and minority neighborhoods.

Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed, the late San Jose Police Chief Joe McNamara wrote years ago in the Wall Street Journal. An emphasis on officer safety and paramilitary training pervades todays policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didnt shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed.

There are other issues, too. Our nation has too many picayune laws police must enforce. The 3 percent at 50 pension scheme in California incentivizes officers to retire early, thus depriving departments of older, less-aggressive officers.

The videos arent going away. It really is time for soul searching by police authorities, who are so accustomed to getting their way at the Capitol they forget the words emblazoned on the side of many squad cars: Protect and Serve. Right now, the best way to serve the public is to look deeply at the policies at the heart of the current unrest.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute, based in Sacramento. He was a Register editorial writer from 1998 to 2009. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
SAN FRANCISCO  San Francisco police say they arrested three people after a news crew was attacked covering a protest in the city and Oakland police reported that 50 demonstrators briefly shutdown a freeway Friday night.

Police say protesters demonstrating in the citys Mission District attacked the news crew about 9:30 p.m. after it refused demands to stop filming. An SFPD spokesman said none of the KTVU crew suffered serious injury and police arent sure the reason for the demonstration.

The protesters were arrested on suspicion of battery and resisting arrest, said Sgt. Michael Andraychak.

KTVU reported Saturday that protesters shouted expletives about the station and mainstream media before clashing with police

A small fire was started in the street, but quickly extinguished by police.

Oakland Police reported that protesters at an unrelated demonstration briefly blocked I-980 around 6:15 p.m., but no arrests were made and the freeway was quickly cleared and traffic continued to move freely. The protesters did block on-ramps to the freeway at the height of the evening commute.

The demonstrators were protesting recent fatal police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota where officers shot and killed two black suspects, prompting renewed demonstrations over relations between police and communities of color.

San Franciscos police chief resigned in May after officers shot and killed three minority suspects in a six-month span. None of the suspects had a gun.
Sundays fatal shooting in Baton Rouge and the recent police killings in Dallas are a painful reminder of the brutal death of Orange County Sheriffs Deputy Brad Riches, slain in a trageted shooting in Lake Forest in 1999.

Our hearts go out to the Baton Rouge Police Department, said Orange County Sheriffs Department Under Sheriff Don Barnes. Its unfortunate that only one day after the last police officer is put to rest in Dallas, were in mourning again for three officers killed in the line of duty. Its a tragedy.

Barnes, who has served in the Orange county Sheriffs Department for 28 years, said while deputies never know what will happen when they respond to a call, the recent shootings have made it obvious there are deliberate efforts targeting law enforcement.

We lost Deputy Brad Riches in 1999, who was targeted for no other reason than having a badge and wearing a uniform, Barnes said. We all know about that kind of loss and what it takes from you. We have still not gotten over that.

In June of that year, Deputy Brad Riches was brutally murdered in Lake Forest. Riches was on routine patrol, driving through the parking lot of a 7-eleven store. Without warning or provocation, a man carrying an AK-47 assault rifle opened fire on Riches while he sat in his patrol car.

Riches, who graduated from Dana Hills High School in 1989, began an emergency radio transmission, but succumbed to the more that two-dozen assault rifle rounds that were fired at him.

Five hours after the shooting, deputies and investigators arrested 39-year-old Maurice Gerald Steskal, a Lake Forest man who walked into the mini-market with an assault rifle and told the clerk that his intention was not to rob the store, but to use the weapon against police.

Riches, 34, was the first Orange County deputy sheriff since 1958 to be fatally shot while on patrol. Steskal is on death row.

Barnes was serving as a deputy in Lake Forest at the time Riches was killed.

Brads murder affected me and our entire department forever, as will the tragic events that occurred in Dallas and Baton Rouge forever change those departments, their families and the communities they serve, Barnes said. You never recover, really. We become secondary victims.

Barnes said the Sheriffs department put out several messages in the last weeks about deputies operating in a heightened sense of awareness.

We have reinforced with our personnel the need to be vigilant and to be aware of our surroundings, he said. But we have to couple that with our responsibility to the public. The threat has changed, not only do we have targeted attacks at law enforcement but were dealing with worldwide terror incidents that occur close to home.

Our responsibility to protect the public has become immense.

Barnes said no more than ever the partnership with the community is critical.

We have to build on that partnership to keep the community safe, he said.

Barnes said when the news broke Sunday morning, OCSD and the municipal agencies evaluate the situation to determine if there is an immediate threat to Orange County.

All indications at this point are that it is an isolated to Baton Rouge, Barnes said. Orange County law enforcement with the municipal agencies will remain diligent to protect the public.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2254 or eritchie@ocregiter.com or on Twitter:@lagunaini
Police departments and federal police agencies shifted to high alert Sunday, as they do after a terror attack, in the wake of a shootout that took the lives of three police officers in Baton Rouge, La.

What sparked that shootout  and whether its connected to rising racial tension sweeping the country  isnt clear.

The early morning gun fight, which also left three other officers injured, one critically, comes ten days after a racially motivated gunman mowed down five officers in Dallas. And the Dallas shooting came days after separate incidents in which police in Baton Rouge and a suburb of Minneapolis shot and killed African American men. Those shootings followed several other high profile deaths of African American men at the hands of police and sparked national protests of police brutality against African Americans.

For local agencies, the motivation wasnt as important as the fact that police  again  were dead in the streets.

The Orange County Sheriffs Department issued an advisory to at least 200 deputies presently on patrol in contract cities and unincorporated areas of the county, telling them to remain vigilant, said Sheriffs Lt. Lloyd Downing.

I dont think anything will happen here but we want to let them know whats going on, Downing said.

Los Angeles-area police agencies expressed sorrow over the fatal shootings and said they were remaining vigilant.

Were aware of the incident (in Baton Rouge), (and are) obviously and monitoring it, said Officer Mike Lopez, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, early Sunday. Its a sad day for law enforcement families.

Lt. Charles Payne of the Riverside Police Department said Sunday morning that the shooting was tragic and terrible, but he didnt want to comment further until he better understood the developing situation.

He said there were no immediate plans to make any adjustments in staffing or procedure, but that officers would be following the situation closely and making adjustments if they felt there was a threat.

As far as our staffing or anything like that, well make adjustments if we feel theres potential for an incident happening in our own city,

On Sunday, news media and politicians were quick to describe the shootings as racially motivated. Early Sunday, Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told several national media outlets that the officers were attacked and died following an ambush.

But others, including people who said they had witnessed the incident, said the shooting started before police arrived, casting doubt on the theory that the deaths were racially motivated.

Brady Vancel, a construction worker who was at the scene, told WAFB9 in Baton Rouge that he saw men shooting at each other when arrived to a residential construction project, and that he ran into that house to dodge bullets before police were on the scene: This was not a come at police situation.

Police in Baton Rouge said early Sunday that they believe three shooters were involved. One of those shooters, an individual they did not identify, was dead and two others were being sought. Police were quick to say the situation remained fluid and they did not offer detail or speculate about a possible motive. They did not identify the race of the dead alleged gunman or the races of the police, whom they would not publicly identify pending notification of next of kin.

Whatever the motive in Baton Rouge, the incident highlighted frayed nerves and was linked by people of all political backgrounds to the July 7 shootings in Dallas and the earlier deaths in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis.

Donald Trump, expected to be named the Republican candidate for president this week in Cleveland, went to Twitter early Sunday to blame the White House for the shootings in Baton Rouge:

How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country?

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive nominee for the Democrats, didnt issue a response early Sunday as the investigation was underway.

President Barack Obama issued a statement that condemned the Baton Rouge shootings, regardless of motivation:

We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no cause. The officers in Baton Rouge; the officers in Dallasthey were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us nowall of usto be at our best.

Today, on the Lords day, all of us stand united in prayer with the people of Baton Rouge, with the police officers whove been wounded, and with the grieving families of the fallen. May God bless them all.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch noted that federal authorities from agencies such as the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, were on the scene.

For the second time in two weeks, multiple law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty. There is no place in the United States for such appalling violence, and I condemn these acts in the strongest possible terms.

As they did after the shooting in Dallas, many of the leading voices in the Black Lives Matter movement were quick to denounce the shootings in Baton Rouge.

DeRay Mckesson, a well-known leader of Black Lives Matters, told the New York Times on Sunday: The movement began as a call to end violence. That call remains.

Regardless of motivation  or the races of the shooter or the victims  Baton Rouge, like many cities, includes different demographics in its police force than youd find on its streets.

The police force in Baton Rouge is about 70 percent white in a city thats about 37 percent white and roughly 50 percent black.

In Dallas, the force is about54 percent white while the city is only about 29 percent white.

As police-related violence has made headlines in the United States, the world might be shifting its view on our country.

This month, after Dallas but before Baton Rouge, at least three countries  Baharain,the United Arab Emirates and the Bahamas  issued travel advisories, telling their citizens to be avoid the United States or be wary while visiting here.

Staff writers Erika Ritchie, Alex Groves and Barbara Gazzar contributed to this report.
Donald Trump has found a new way to hurt Republicans  this time, on the occasion of Bernie Sanders last-minute endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

One of the established partys typical tasks going into a general election campaign is to play up the political differences within the opposing party. A nominee whos out of sync with his or her base can be portrayed as too extreme for America, too mainstream for his or her party, or both  as Mitt Romney found out in his campaign against Barack Obama.

So Sanders reluctant embrace of Clinton offers the GOP an opportunity to cast Clinton as the uninspiring leader of a party thats too far to the left. Unfortunately for Republicans, Trumps candidacy has complicated what should be an easy way to use Sanders against Clinton. After all, Sanders case for his candidacy turned on his principled, outsider status. Despite his long tenure in Congress, Sanders effectively contrasted his anti-corporatist, anti-insider message with Clintons. Although he took care to stay respectful, he gave Republicans ammunition for the moment when Sanders either had to endorse his rival or provoke a painful floor fight at the nominating convention.

Sure enough, RNC chairman Reince Priebus has come out swinging with what the party establishment would like to be a big theme of the campaign. In a Tweet, Priebus said Sanders hollow display of left-wing solidarity flew in the face of his crusade against Hillary Clintons judgement and character to serve as president.

As firm of ground as Priebus might have been on under different circumstances, in reality, Priebus himself has embraced Trumps candidacy despite open recriminations among many conservatives and establishmentarians alike. For someone who may still have a convention floor revolt on his hands in Cleveland  precisely over Trumps fitness to serve  Priebus is a heck of a messenger on the topic of hollow solidarity.

Not that Priebus has much choice, of course. I think something different and something new is probably good for our party, as he had to tell CNN. Look, I dont think anyone predicted what happened. So, look, were here. Were going to get behind the presumptive nominee. In fact, embracing Trump is easier for Priebus than it is for the candidates Trump defeated, several of whom have had to execute baffling, awkward 180s from searing criticism to formulaic support.

On the other hand, even if Priebus wanted to turn on Trump, hes uniquely poorly suited to do so. If anyone lacks the authority and legitimacy to reject the preferences of Republican primary voters  who did, after all, hand Trump a big victory  its the party chairman.

Thats especially true of a chairman like Priebus, who helped respond to Romneys loss with an infamous plan to reboot the GOP sales pitch in virtually the opposite way Trump has endeavored to do. His post-Romney postmortem report, drafted with senior Jeb Bush adviser Sally Bradshaw, focused on softening the partys free-market, small-government talking points while embracing a so-called path to citizenship model of comprehensive immigration reform. To the partys horror, Trump has focused his candidacy around nationalistic, sometimes mercantilist policies on trade and international job markets  and, of course, the prospect of halting illegal immigration with a massive wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

So Priebus, like the rest of the established party, has lost key credibility around the claim that Hillary Clintons character and judgment render her unfit to serve. Its an astounding sign of just how great a credibility deficit their support of Trump has created that the Hillary Clinton running for president his time does so laboring under graver misdeeds and improprieties than ever. As a candidate, she should be at her weakest. Thanks to Trump  and the GOPs inability to explain away his more outrageous flaws as a nominee  Clinton instead is at her strongest.

To be sure, its still early yet. Its possible that Donald Trump will raise enough money and raise enough of a stink against Clinton that he will fare about as well as Romney  who, as Trump himself observed, also faced a fundamentally winnable race. But even if Trump prevails, the GOP figures who rallied around him will face a harsh reckoning from inside and outside the party. Conservatism, populism and the Republican party itself will long outlast Donald Trump, even if his turbulent tenure atop the GOP heap ultimately results in a season of purges that wipes out many of Trumps failed opponents and failed supporters alike. And if Trump indeed loses? Not all of his reluctant or helpless supporters will wind up in exile. But those who found themselves attacking president-elect Clinton in the way they could have attacked their own candidate, back when it could have made a difference, wont be long for this political world.
On the night of May 18, a group of about 10 Jewish students gathered at UC Irvine to watch Beneath the Helmet, a film about young Israeli soldiers.

Outside, another group of students, as many as 50 by some estimates, gathered to protest the screening, saying the movie glorifies the Israeli army, which the protesters view as occupiers. Shouting, Long live the intifada! and slogans against Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the protest eventually brought a response from UCI police.

Two months later, the confrontation continues to draw attention from people around the world who believe long-running tensions at UC Irvine mirror  so far, in a nonviolent fashion  the Middle East.

How it plays out could say a lot about the state of religious tolerance and free speech at UCI and other schools in California.

On movie night, the Jewish students said they felt intimidated and physically trapped by the protesters. They eventually were escorted to their cars by police.

The protesters counter by saying they only expressed opinions and didnt harass anyone.

Last week, the Orange County District Attorneys Office said it found no indication of criminal wrongdoing that night, ending a review launched at the request of UCI police.

Meanwhile, the schools separate investigation into whether the confrontation violated UCI policy or a recent University of California statement against anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance remains open.

Though both sides remain frustrated, the incident is the latest in a string of confrontations that has led some to view UCI as a place thats unwelcoming to Jewish students, and others to view it as a place where Islamophobia is tolerated.

The movie night conflict has been covered by newspapers in Israel. It also has been written about by many pro-Palestinean websites. And with every new post, and every shift in the story, people from around the world reach out to UCI to express an opinion.

We have gotten hundreds of calls and emails, said UCI spokeswoman Cathy Lawhon.

TEST CASE?

If all sides can agree on one thing, its this: The movie night incident could be a test case for the University of Californias recent statement condemning anti-Semitism.

In March, the Board of Regents adopted the statement at the request of Jewish organizations who pointed to an increase in anti-Semitic incidents at campuses throughout the UC system.

It was adopted after much debate, several revisions and strong objections from pro-Palestinian groups who complained the statements main goal was to stifle opposition to Israeli policies.

Among other things, the regents document says:

Harassment, threats, assaults, vandalism and destruction of property, as defined by university policy, will not be tolerated within the university community.

Some Jewish leaders believe the movie night clash met those standards. And they are asking UCI officials to review what school rules and policies might have been broken and whether students should be disciplined.

We are trying to use this as a springboard to get the university to lay out a plan to implement the regents statement, said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a UC Santa Cruz lecturer and director of the AMCHA Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks acts of anti-Semitism nationwide.

This incident needs to be dealt with.

But our focus is not on this incident, she added. Instead, its on understanding that this incident is part of the pattern and that pattern needs to be addressed in a proactive way.

Liz Jackson, staff attorney for Palestine Legal, an organization that offers legal advice to pro-Palestinian supporters, says movie night was about free speech, not harassment.

And Jackson argues that the schools response  to call for a criminal investigation  was an overreach that could stifle expression in the future.

It should never have been referred to the D.A., Jackson said. The chilling effect of even a referral is severe.

With the district attorneys decision to not file criminal charges, the issue is fully in the hands of school officials.

On May 19, the day after movie night, UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman issued a campuswide letter saying the university supports freedom of speech but that the incident crossed the line of civility.

But its unclear what might happen even if the school investigation finds that some students speech jumped from expression to harassment. The document adopted by the regents doesnt spell out specific punishments, or a specific protocol to follow while investigating conflicts.

UC Regent Norman Pattiz, who was involved in crafting the statement, said he also wants to see how this plays out.

We would like this thing get resolved at the campus level, he said. (But) if it is in fact behavior that goes beyond protected speech, then something probably ought to be done about it.

We didnt craft and unanimously adopt a principles statement to simply make a statement and do nothing about it.

Lawhon, the UCI spokeswoman, noted that the referral to the D.A.s Office was routine and emphasized that the school asked the district attorney to review the overall incident and not the actions of individual students.

She did not know when the school might finish its separate investigation.

LONG-RUNNING TENSION

Jewish leaders say movie night did not occur in a vacuum.

Even in an era in which one of the countrys two major political parties is backing a presidential candidate who would ban Muslims from entering the country, pro-Palestinian advocacy is a growing cause on college campuses around the country. Student councils on every UC campus except UC Santa Barbara, for example, have approved resolutions to divest from Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, according to Palestine Legal.

This is what happens at college. You have to confront people who have different worldviews than your own. Its scary sometimes. But its college, Jackson said.

But some argue that in the campus debate over Palestinian rights and Israeli domestic politics, free speech too often morphs into hate speech.

When I was a kid, people called me a dirty Jew, said Pattiz, the regent who helped craft the intolerance policy. When they expressed their anti-Semitism, that was the frame of reference. Today, (its) youre a Zionist pig.

The Board of Regents report addressed discrimination against Muslims, gays and others, denouncing intolerance in all forms. But the report also responded to the idea that expressions of anti-Semitism are more coded and difficult to identify.

In particular, opposition to Zionism often is expressed in ways that are not simply statements of disagreement over politics and policy but also assertions of prejudice and intolerance toward Jewish people and culture.

Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.

Which raises questions about Anti-Zionism Week, an annual event at UCI that, over the years, has included various levels of verbal conflict.

Many college campuses across the country host a weeklong series of pro-Palestine programs. Most include an apartheid wall, symbolic of the Israeli West Bank barrier the Israeli government built following a Palestinian uprising. At UCI, members of the Muslim Student Union call it Anti-Zionism Week and sell T-shirts with the phrase UC Intifada.

To me, that means death to Israel, said Leore Ben-David, West Coast campus coordinator of the Zionist Organization of America, who visited UCI during its Anti-Zionism Week last spring.

UC Irvine is the most hostile, anti-Israel campus I have encountered. I work on 40 campuses on the West Coast, Ben-David added.

Last year, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, a Jewish human rights organization, said in an 18-page report that anti-Semitism has been a serious problem, singling out UCI for a string of incidents dating back more than a decade.

In 2006, the Hillel Foundation of Orange County created a task force to investigate alleged anti-Semitism at UCI. Its findings: The acts of anti-Semitism are real and well-documented.

And in 2010, the Zionist organization named UCI as a campus that permitted bigotry. That year, 11 Muslim students from UCI and UC Riverside were arrested for disrupting the speech of an Israeli speaker on campus. Eventually, 10 people were sentenced and the schools Muslim Student Union was temporarily suspended.

Today, many students say expressions of anti-Semitism are mostly experienced during Anti-Zionism Week  and a pro-Israel commemoration day sponsored by Jewish students, which is regularly protested by pro-Palestinian students.

Its not an anti-Semitic campus, said Trevor Nassi, 21, the most recent student president of Chabad of UCI and a new graduate.

Theres no anti-Semitism on a daily basis, he added. Thats what Jewish moms get wrong.

To help dispel UCIs reputation as unwelcoming to Jewish students, five Jewish UCI groups in 2011 put together a video titled UCI Jewish Life  What the Media Doesnt Show You  The Real UCI. The video extols programs, services, Shabbat dinners and other social events as well as trips to Israel and elsewhere.

UCI is very misinterpreted, said Lisa Armony, executive director of Hillel of Orange County, the local chapter of a Jewish student organization.

In last few years, weve seen a change for the better. Largely because the administration has taken this issue very seriously and has taken steps to promote a more civil climate.

During the past two months, dozens of organizations on both sides of the debate have signed on to public letters to UCI Chancellor Gillman  some urging him to investigate, others telling him to stop.

At minimum, the university has a responsibility to take prophylactic measures which include educational measures to ensure theres a nontoxic environment on campus, and if violations are found, to punish any and all wrongdoers, said Aron Hier, campus outreach director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Hier and others said they are watching closely for the universitys resolution.

Theres a certain amount of frustration the longer this investigation takes, Hier said.

Peoples patience is running thin.

Contact the writer: rkopetman@ocregister.com Twitter: @RoxanaKopetman
In the aftermath of heinous terrorist attacks in Nice, Frances Prime Minister Manuel Valls made a jarring comment: The times have changed, and France is going to have to live with terrorism.

Mr. Valls, upset at the most recent attack on his homeland, undoubtedly feels like most of his countrymen  afraid, frustrated and grief-stricken. Those sentiments are natural, but acceptance of terrorism as commonplace  or a hazard of life in 2016  is egregiously unacceptable.

We cannot and should not live with terrorism  in France, in the United States or anywhere.

Now that terror attacks seem like weekly occurrences, there is a tendency to allow ourselves to become numb to the news of new assaults. But we mustnt become desensitized to these barbaric attacks on humanity, because it dulls our resolve and thus our collective commitment to winning the war on terror and eradicating those perpetrating these actions.

Sadness has been the most common response to the long list of recent terror attacks, but Nice feels different  and it should. Citizens in France and throughout the world should be angry and demand that political leaders act more aggressively and strategically in addressing radicalization and terrorism.

The first and foremost role of any government is the security and protection of its citizenry.

What Mr. Valls comment underscores is a scary proposition: that Western governments are not well equipped to fully grapple with the asymmetrical war terrorists are waging against the West and its culture.

Even Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, acknowledged to Bill OReilly on Fox News on Thursday evening that there is not enough cooperation and information-sharing among Western nations. And presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump told Mr. OReilly that, if he were president, he would seek a formal declaration of war from Congress to combat ISIS.

But we should not wait for a new president to do what is necessary now.

President Obama should once again call upon Congress for a formal declaration of war against ISIS. And, much like his admirable hosting of police and civil rights leaders this week to address racial disparity domestically, President Obama should convene a meeting of Western leaders to coordinate efforts to dismantle ISIS globally. This global coalition should not only wage war on ISIS land holdings and leadership, but also engage in sophisticated digital warfare to stop these terrorists from spreading their propaganda digitally.

A formal declaration of war and new levels of Western collaboration should serve as a starting point and symbolize that the West is united and committed against this common enemy of radical Islamic terrorism like never before.

The times have certainly changed, but we should not be lulled into accepting that terrorism is here to stay. The war on terror is winnable, but only with renewed commitment and resolve.
When it comes to water and agriculture, California is upside-down. Thats what historian Carey McWilliams wrote in his 1949 book, California: The Great Exception. Most of the water is in the northern part of the state, and most of the best land for farming is further south.

But this contrariness of nature worked to humanitys advantage in two ways, McWilliams wrote, because it stimulated inventiveness and technological achievement, and because the long dry season is an enormous agricultural asset.

That assumes you agree that abundant food production is a good thing, a view that in recent years has become unfashionable in places like Venezuela, Zimbabwe and San Francisco.

Rep. Devin Nunes described a stunning meeting he had with representatives of the Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental activists in the summer of 2002 about the future of the San Joaquin Valley. Their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production, he said. From Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side, productive agriculture would end, and the land would return to some ideal state of nature.

That plan was moved forward when the Central Valley Project Improvement Act was passed by Congress in 1992. Under the law, 260 billion gallons of water on the Valleys west side had to be diverted away from human uses and out to the environment.

Then a series of lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act secured protected status for smelt in 2008 and salmon in 2009, and that was enough to force the virtual shutdown of two major pumping stations that moved water to the Central Valley. Another lawsuit resulted in the San Joaquin River Settlement, later enacted into law by Congress at a cost of over $1 billion to taxpayers, which diverted more water away from the Central Valley in an attempt to create salmon runs.

Farmers struggled to get by with groundwater, but in 2014, new California regulations limited that, too.

In 1949, Carey McWilliams observed that, if the Central Valley were a state, it would rank fifth in the nation for agricultural production. Today it has poverty and unemployment rates that would be right at home in the Great Depression.

And thats why members of Congress from the region have repeatedly introduced legislation to adjust federal law in ways that would allow water to be restored to the Central Valley. The legislation passed the House several times only to die in the Senate.

Last year, Rep. David Valadao introduced it again, calling it the Western Water and American Food Security Act of 2015. President Obama immediately threatened a veto, but in May, Valadao attached the bill as an amendment to an energy bill already passed by the Senate, and the House passed it.

Recently the Western Water amendment was stripped out by House and Senate negotiators who feared a presidential veto.

Now Valadao has attached the water language to the bill that will fund the Interior Department for the next fiscal year. Northern California Democrats tried to remove Valadaos water provisions, but were outvoted.

The White House has issued another veto threat, saying the bill limits the federal governments ability to protect endangered species  not only the smelt, but also the greater sage grouse and the lesser prairie chicken.

Before any more communities are destroyed, you may want to call your U.S. senators and tell them you support the language from the Western Water and American Food Security Act, and youd like to see it enacted into law as part of the Interior Department funding bill, H.R. 5538.

Tell them youre from the human species and the Central Valley is critical habitat.

Susan Shelley is an author, a former television associate producer and was two-time Republican candidate for the state Assembly.
The family of publican Matt Farrell are heartbroken after a man was acquitted of the publicans manslaughter during a burglary of a pub nearly three years ago.

The family of publican Matt Farrell are heartbroken after a man was acquitted of the publicans manslaughter during a burglary of a pub nearly three years ago.

By Declan Brennan

Eddie Wing (31), with a previous address at Roscrea, Co Tipperary had pleaded not guilty to the unlawful killing of 64-year-old Mr Farrell and to burglary at the Gaelic Bar, Daingean, Co Offaly on April 1, 2009.

During the burglary Mr Farrell suffered heart failure after he was beaten, bound with a dog lead and left to die.

It was day eight of the trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. The jury of seven men and five woman had spent just over four hours over two days considering the verdict.

Members of the Mr Farrells family cried out when the verdict of not guilty was read out.

Speaking outside the court after the verdict. Matthew Farrell, son of the publican Matt Farrell commented, Family and friends are all disappointed. We thought a guilty verdict would come and it didnt so were all heartbroken. What can we do only move on from here now?

Describing his late father, he said, He was well liked around Daingean. He was well loved. He was great. Everyone respected him. He ran the pub and he used to get on very well with everyone and we all loved him family as well.

Asked about the impact of his death on his family he remarked, We went through a lot the last three years so its been very hard the last three years, just dealing with it. Its not a natural death so to deal with that was very hard. Its been a long time.

Asked whether gardai would continue with the investigation into his fathers death, Matthew Farrell stated, I dont know if they can or not. They probably have to wait for if something else comes to light.

SEE ALSO

Man acquitted of manslaughter of Offaly publican Matt Farrell

Matt Farrell manslaughter trial hears accuseds DNA was not found at the scene

Jury hears Garda evidence in Matt Farrell manslaughter trial

Jury hear from accuseds prison cellmate about alleged confession to killing Offaly publican

Trial opens of man accused of manslaughter Offaly publican
Like a lot of young 20-somethings, Maria Regalado was drifting.

She was passionate but somewhat lost. Working full time but somewhat broke. Full of yearning and ambition but somewhat directionless.

She had stalled out in school, had a job but not a career and was even planning to move back home with her parents.

Then came Donald Trump. And now Maria has found purpose  and identity  as an activist, sounding her voice on Omaha street corners to protest police shootings or Trumps invective about Mexicans and immigrants.

Last week, for example, she went to Lincoln to support the Black Lives Matter rally. A week earlier, she marched at a west Omaha protest and held a sign that said: DARK SKIN IS NOT A CRIME!

Maria is one of many young people who have been swept into political activism by an unusual election year and some controversial police shootings. In addition, for young people in the Latino community  or Xicanos as she prefers to say  immigration has been a galvanizing force.

But Marias own evolution to that activist role did not occur in a vacuum or all at once.

It happened over the past two years, amid a cascade of events that have made race a national focus and political protest a regular tool. Maria has been shaped by movements from Black Lives Matter to the teachers uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico. Recent incidents of violence  from last months mass shooting in Orlando to the police shooting of an 18-year-old Latino man in California  have affected her.

Actually, though, the seed of activism was planted years ago, when Maria was a child.

In 2006, pro-immigration groups marched and rallied in cities across the United States to push Congress to do something about immigration policy. Demonstrations were being planned in Omaha, Lincoln and Grand Island.

Marias mother, Denise, was born in Nebraska; her father, Tomas, had come to the U.S. illegally but eventually got legal status. But they saw this fight as their own and joined a crowd in downtown Omaha estimated to be between 8,000 and 12,000 people. Maria was 12. She remembers that April day. Her mother had said something like: Put on comfortable shoes, mija. Were going to be walking for a while.

Marias parents and three siblings, including an older brother in a wheelchair, joined the throngs marching up Douglas Street to the federal courthouse. Businesses shut down. Marchers left work. Even the Catholic church got involved. Omahas then-archbishop, Elden Curtiss, issued a statement calling for an immigration fix that was humane. An observer quoted in The World-Herald voiced hope that the peaceful demonstration would transform into political action.

Maria doesnt remember any of that. She does remember yellow police tape and counter-protesters behind it yelling slurs. She also remembers the positive energy from the crowd and strangers who became friends by sharing the same cause. She remembers bumping into a classmate, Marisela, who looked as wide-eyed and shocked as Maria felt.

It was a lot to take in, Maria said.

More marches were held, including one to the west Omaha offices of then-U.S. Rep. Lee Terry, a Republican, and U.S. Sen. Ben Nelson, a Democrat. But nothing happened. Congress deadlocked into the kind of partisan inertia all too familiar today.

Meanwhile, Marias family bounced from rental home to rental home as her fathers jobs changed. They moved from South Omaha to north Omaha and then to Crete, Nebraska, and then to Corpus Christi, Texas, where Maria finished high school.

The many moves added to a sense of dislocation Maria felt as the Nebraska-born daughter of an immigrant and a native Nebraskan. Maria had always checked the box for white on school forms. English has been her dominant language. When she finally got to Mexico, at age 18, for a first-time meeting with her fathers side of the family, Maria was taken aback when some Mexicans referred to her and her siblings as gringos.

At the same time, Maria felt right at home on that visit. And she felt something begin to change within her: a sense of identity and a pride in who she is.

She also went from using the English pronunciation of Maria to the Spanish version.

Thats the way my name is supposed to be pronounced, she said.

After the trip, her parents returned to Omaha where Tomas got work at an energy company. They just bought their first house in South Omaha.

Maria stayed in Texas to attend community college for a time, but in 2013, homesick and short of cash, she came back to Omaha, too. She worked as a receptionist for one company, then as an administrative assistant at the energy company that employs her father. Last year, she became a leasing consultant with a property management company. She moved into an apartment near 180th Street and West Center Road.

The Black Lives Matter movement struck a chord, and Maria began following stories of blacks and Latinos killed by police officers. Then Donald Trump began his campaign with head-swiveling rhetoric about race and nationality.

When Trump talked about Mexico exporting its criminals and rapists, Maria thought of her Mexican-born father who had come to the United States at age 16 to pick apples and worked hard ever since. When Trump talked about building a wall to keep Mexicans out, Maria thought of how the border already effectively kept her and her Mexican relatives apart.

When Trump made plans to come to Omaha in May, Maria suddenly saw her place with crystal clarity.

She made a poster, writing in big letters: NO hate, NO racism, NO Trump! She gathered with strangers at the corner of Locust Street and Abbott Drive, which was at least a mile from the Trump rally site, in a hangar behind Eppley Airfield. And for several hours, she stood in the 88-degree heat.

She found a protest group on Facebook and joined it. A month later, she organized a rally near Omaha Police Headquarters to protest how officers had treated some of the anti-Trump people. She said 30 people showed up and chanted, We will not be silenced.

And there have been other protests since then.

She feels less lost than she was a year ago. She is saving to return to college in the fall. She plans to both work and study and speak out.

I refuse to go unheard, she said. And I know there are others like me.
Some home care workers who serve elderly and disabled Medicaid patients say they are being paid more slowly than before, and the delays are affecting their ability to pay bills.

They also say that a company hired to do background checks for Medicaid-provider certification is sluggish.

Home care workers in Iowa also have complained about slow payments, according to the union that represented them until recently. In Nebraska, some of the workers have asked the Nebraska Association of Public Employees for help.

The problems are a disincentive to go into home care, which involves doing such tasks as laundry, cooking and house cleaning for patients, driving them to doctors appointments and performing other services that help patients remain at home instead of going into higher-cost nursing homes. The workers will become increasingly important as the number of elderly Americans grows. Some rural areas already are struggling to find enough of them.

Nebraskas Medicaid director, Calder Lynch, acknowledges there have been challenges over the past eight months. He said new federal overtime rules affecting these workers have been problematic but that his agency is getting on top of the situation. He also said the background-check contractor is performing better now.

Home care provider Brenda Vosler said she received approval from Maximus, the Virginia-based contractor doing background checks for Nebraska Medicaid, in early June. She went to work for her client, 58-year-old Doug Miner of Lincoln, who is in a wheelchair and has kidney and respiratory problems.

Vosler said she turned in a pay request in the second week of June and still hadnt received her first paycheck as of mid-July. Miner said she spends 24 hours a week helping him with meals, cleaning the kitchen, getting him to doctors and assisting him with showers.

I gave her some of my money, Miner said. I need to get her to stay here.

Sandra Peterson of Lincoln said she has been a home care provider off and on for 20 years. She and other workers in Lincoln said they used to get paid in seven to 10 business days after submitting paper work and now are getting paid in 15 to 20 business days. Its problematic because we dont know if we can pay our bills on time, said Peterson.

Connie Owens said she needs money in her account more promptly. And the clients expect us to be there, Owens said. How are we going to get there if we dont have money for gas?

The jobs under the Medicaid waiver and personal assistance programs typically pay about $9 an hour to a few dollars more, depending on the program, services provided and other factors. Some of the providers are certified nurse assistants and some arent.

Stephanie Beran, assistant ombudsman for the Nebraska Legislature, called home care workers complaints legitimate. Weve gotten a large volume of complaints, Beran said Thursday. Its become kind of a systemic problem.

There are about 5,500 independent home care providers in Nebraska, the state Department of Health and Human Services estimated. Other home care providers work for agencies, such as Caretech and Caring Senior Services in Omaha. Some larger home care companies, such as Right at Home, predominantly serve private-pay clients rather than Medicaid clients.

Beran said home workers are doing incredibly important work, and I think its important to keep them happy. Whats so heartbreaking about some of this is, theyre just a number.

Independent providers rely on themselves, although some get billing assistance from area agencies on aging, such as Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging in Omaha and Aging Partners in Lincoln. These clients are dependent on the providers, Beran said. Otherwise they might end up in a nursing home.

Lynch said a couple of situations converged to put additional stress and demand on the Medicaid system. The Affordable Care Act contains new regulations for screening of such health care workers, he said, so the state human services department hired Maximus to conduct background checks beginning last December.

Also last year, federal court cases involving overtime for home care workers were resolved and went into effect in October. The states Medicaid program had to come into compliance and began processing overtime pay for them in January, he said.

It took time to develop staff capacity and policies, Lynch said. Workers are now submitting weekly time sheets so overtime can be calculated, and Nebraska Medicaid still relies heavily on paper, he said. He brought on more staffers to deal with the situation.

It has added time to payouts, he said. And we recognize that.

Efforts to improve continue, he said, including eventually shifting from a paper-driven system to one that makes better use of technology.

Maximus had some bugs in the rollout of that software late last year and early this year, Lynch said. Problems have been addressed with lingering issues that were working through individually at this point, he said.

The average processing time for Maximus is just under 30 days, he said, and the Maximus contracts target is 30 days. Lynch said he would prefer the turnaround time be two to three weeks.

Beran said when she talked with Maximus representatives in June, Maximus admitted there had been confusion over whether the state or Maximus was supposed to send notices to providers of the need to recertify. Lynch said this was, in fact, clarified a couple of months ago and Maximus is sending the notices, preferably by email. But to providers without email accounts, the notice will be sent by mail, he said.

Maximus referred questions to the state health and human services department.

The number of Americans ages 70 and older increased from 21.1 million in 1990 to 27.8 million in 2010, a 32 percent jump. And that number is expected to rise by 38 percent, to 38.2 million, in 2020, said David Drozd of the UNO Center for Public Affairs Research.

Although area agencies on aging in Omaha and Lincoln said they dont have severe shortages of home care workers, the challenge of getting enough has begun in places such as Kearney and North Platte.

We do have a very difficult time in finding folks, said Rod Horsley, executive director of the South Central Nebraska Area Agency on Aging in Kearney. His agency sometimes recruits home care workers in churches and nursing homes, where employees might want more work, he said. With baby boomers aging, he said, the need for home care providers will only increase.

Caitlin Connolly, home care fair pay coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, said turnover is high among independent home care workers. She called the work isolating, and its oftentimes very daunting.

There is no water cooler or office lounge where you can ask someone, Did you figure out how to fill out this time sheet?  Connolly said.

Area agencies on aging provide some assistance. The Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging reviews billing sheets from metro-area home care workers in the Medicaid waiver program but not in the personal assistance services program. Rachael Scoles, Medicaid waiver coordinator for ENOA, said many of the billing sheets contain errors that ENOA helps correct before sending them on to Lincoln.

But some of those sent on to Lincoln still have errors, Scoles said, and payments are delayed. The bulk of errors are attributable to providers, she said, but some are data entry errors committed by personnel in Lincoln.

In Iowa, the department of human services privatized some Medicaid programs in April and now three companies manage the independent home care workers. At the end of June, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees contract to represent those workers expired.

Danny Homan, head of AFSCME in Iowa, said last week that many home care workers have complained about late pay since the program was privatized. He said people were going without pay for up to two or three months.

Were going to try to still do what we can for these people, even if we dont represent them, Homan said. These people do Gods work.

Amy Lorentzen McCoy, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Human Services, said the situation should normalize this month as workers undergo more training, update their addresses and questions over payment rates are answered. The state wants them paid on time so that they can continue to provide these important services   she said in an email.

Mike Marvin, executive director of the Nebraska Association of Public Employees, has met with some of the Lincoln home care workers. Marvin, who doesnt represent them, said he hoped to help them form an advocacy group and to seek legislation that would help them get paid in a timely manner. He said unionizing the workers isnt his aim for the short term.

These poor people who do the home care, Marvin said, they are just abused to beat the band, as far as Im concerned.

Lynch said he knows they are important workers. They help people stay in their homes and they provide lower-cost service than nursing homes, he said. For the long haul, he said, he hopes to modernize the states Medicaid system so it serves everyone better.

Its a huge priority for me.
A 32-year-old northeast Nebraska man was found dead at the scene of a one-vehicle rollover accident early Saturday in Knox County.

Dana J. Ziegenbein of Pierce was found pinned beneath a 2004 Ford F-250 pickup truck about 7 a.m. in the southwest part of the county, according to a Nebraska State Patrol spokeswoman. Ziegenbein was eastbound on 872nd Road when the truck left the road and hit a bridge about a half mile west of 522nd Avenue.

Ziegenbein, who was not using a seat belt, was ejected when the truck rolled several times before coming to rest in a tree line.

The accident is under investigation.

Contact the writer: 402-444-1272, kevin.cole@owh.com
NEBRASKA CITY  Brick wall by brick wall, Kent Schwartz has been resurrecting the history of this Missouri River town over the past decade.

Theres a Drink Coca-Cola sign here that looks like it belongs in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Up Central Avenue, there are signs advertising SELZ Royal Blue Shoes and Argo cornstarch, products of both yesteryear and today.

And nearly covering the side of a tavern is a bright yellow and blue Cremo cigar sign. Only 5 cents, it says.

Schwartz, 55, comes to this naturally. He grew up in Columbus, Nebraska, where both his father, Clayton, and brother, Cory, were sign painters for years.

Kents painting talents have taken him to jobs at Omahas Durham Museum and to Hollywood, where he worked on the movies Teen Wolf and Bachelor Party.

Eleven years ago he and his wife, Erin, moved to Nebraska City to raise their two children. The local chamber of commerce called, looking for a sign painter. A long-running project was born.

Now you can hardly look around the local business district without seeing a Schwartz mural.

I just love researching the history, he said.

Schwartz spends several hours at the library seeking designs of old signs and backgrounds of local businesses to produce new signs in that old style.

So far hes painted 13 billboards on the brick walls of businesses.

The largest details the history of the community, from a unique frontier swinging gate pontoon bridge, which once carried horse-drawn buggies across the Missouri, to the towns status as the home of Arbor Day, the born-in-Nebraska City spring holiday that promotes tree planting.

His works have been financed by the John, Paul, Anton and Doris Wirth Foundation, launched by a family of local farmers, which funds several area projects.

These murals will fade, but theyll be around for my grandchildren, Schwartz said. Then the next guy can repaint them.

Hes about to launch a new project: a mural honoring local military veterans that will sit in a minipark along Central Avenue, Nebraska Citys main downtown street.

Schwartz said he has received several photos of local military veterans from families hoping their vets will be included in the mural. The artist said hell do his best as he works to complete the mural this summer.

People are emotionally involved in that one, Schwartz said. I want to include as many people as I can from town.

Floyd Newmeister, who operates a hardware store in Nebraska City, said that Schwartzs murals have been a big hit in a town known for its apple orchards, its outlet shops, Arbor Lodge and the Lied Lodge and Conference Center.

You see a lot of people stopping and taking pictures, Newmeister said. Its quite an attraction.

***

A somber commemoration is coming Aug. 6 to Falls City.

That is the 50th anniversary of the worst aviation accident in Nebraska history.

A group of Falls City residents have taken it upon themselves, for a second time, to organize a memorial event of sorts to remember the 42 people who perished when a Braniff airliner, on a Kansas City-to-Omaha route, plunged to earth during a violent thunderstorm.

There were no survivors from Flight 250.

A lot of people saw the fireball, said Jo Ann Auxier, the curator of the Richardson County Historical Museum.

I remember that it was 4-H fair week, but we just kind of canceled out the fair, recalled Elaine Schawang, who was a teenager at the time. They turned the city auditorium into a morgue.

Schawang and her husband, Kenny, now live across a gravel road from the crash site, about 11 miles northeast of Falls City, which sits in the far southeast corner of Nebraska.

A decade ago the son of a co-pilot came to town, hoping to lay some flowers at the site and learn more about the tragedy.

Our pastor said these people are still hurting  you need to do something about this, Schawang said.

So she and others, including the pastor, Nile Buch, organized a memorial service and arranged to erect a stone memorial at the crash site, listing the 42 who died. A piece of the crashed, twin-engine plane sits partially buried in the dirt nearby.

About 16 members of victims families attended the event in 2006. Some broke into tears when they recounted the impact of the 1966 accident.

So now, on the 50th anniversary, Falls City will hold another commemoration for family members and others.

The Aug. 6 event begins with coffee at 9:30 a.m. at the Richardson County Historical Museum, at 1401 Chase St., in Falls City. That will be followed by a trip to the crash site for a short memorial service.

Afterward there will be a luncheon back at the museum. Among the speakers: Steve Pollock of Nashville, Tennessee, who wrote a book, Deadly Turbulence: The Air Safety Lessons of Braniff Flight 250 and Other Airliners, 1959-1966.

The book focused on disasters in the early years of air travel, with special focus on the Falls City crash and the influence of severe weather.

We want to help the families as much as we can, Auxier said.

A footnote: Among the experts who have probed the Falls City crash is Dr. Ted Fujita, a University of Chicago professor who created a scale to measure the intensity of tornadoes, the Fujita scale.

Contact the writer: 402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com
Now that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has taken herself to the woodshed, its worth asking what her brief bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome says about our systems ability to withstand four years of a Trump presidency.

Short answer: It is not a good omen.

As the idea of a President Trump has evolved from laughable to unlikely to oh-my-God-this-might-actually-happen, a debate has raged in Washington.

The debate is not over the mans fitness for office  few people privately will make the case that Donald Trump is qualified or temperamentally suitable to be commander in chief  but over how much damage he might do.

Some say Trump could be more disruptive than any previous leader, including propelling the nation toward fascism.

But an anti-alarmist caucus responds that the U.S. system is stronger than any single person  that we could rely on the Constitution, on long-established checks and balances, on watchdogs in the press and elsewhere, and on leaders who would stand up for the rule of law.

For example, Trump has endorsed the torture of terrorism suspects and the punitive bombing of their innocent families. But if he tried to implement such illegal measures, the reassurers argue, military officers and civilian bureaucrats would refuse to obey. If he tried to round up and deport 11 million people without due process, judges would object. Congress, too, would check executive overreach.

I would like to believe this argument, but a time like this brings home how much the U.S. system relies not just on laws but also on habits of abiding by them: on an ingrained respect for norms, for democratic give-and-take and for civility.

That respect has been ebbing in recent years as partisanship has grown more poisonous. Republicans would argue that President Barack Obama has pushed the envelope with executive orders that have ignored congressional intent and undercut the separation of powers. But when judges declared that Obama had gone too far with his attempt to legalize millions of illegal immigrants, he stood down.

What if a president decided to ignore such a decision? What if he had appointed an attorney general, a budget director, a border chief or other bureaucrats eager to abet such defiance?

Imagine, for example, that judges told a President Trump that he could not turn the Southwest border region into a police state, which the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union forecast in a recent Post op-ed would be the result of Trumps plan to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Imagine that Trump and his administration continued building camps, anyway. Given the contempt Trump has expressed for the judiciary and the ignorance he has displayed of the Constitution, that scenario is not so far-fetched.

At such a moment, laws could not save you; only people could. Would members of Congress, career civil servants and others stand up to Trump and for the rule of law?

On the first question, the evidence from Trumps party is not encouraging. Republicans who months ago were clear about the danger that he represents have abjectly fallen into line, albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm. If House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., cannot disavow a candidate he has accused of racism, why would we think he would be firmer when that espouser of racism lived in the White House?

The second question  could Trumps opponents stay true to their own values?  is where the Ginsburg episode is discouraging. Like Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., with his playground taunts during primary season, Ginsburg let Trump drive her to behavior she must on some level have known was wrong, tactically as well as ethically.

The derangement is understandable. Trump is corrected by fact-checkers but just restates his fictions more loudly. He insults war heroes and pays no apparent price with veterans. Lies, conspiratorial insinuations, name-calling and behavior that would knock most candidates out of contention  concealing his tax returns, for instance  do not appear to harm him.

How to respond? If you pretend, as Ryan has, that Trump is an ordinary Republican leader, just one speech away from acceptability, you end up looking like a sap.

So the temptation is to match insult with insult, or (as some protesters did during primary season) violence with violence.

But engaging Trump at the insult game only reinforces his implicit argument that the talents of a reality-television star are sufficient for a president. And a judge embracing partisanship and abandoning judiciousness reinforces another cynical Trump view: that the system is rigged and all our leaders are dumb or venal.

Trump brought the worst out in Rubio and Ginsburg. What will it look like if he draws out the worst in our country?
Coordinate street repairs

Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert is working on changes to the policy of grinding up city streets into dirt roads and looking at several measures that would reduce homeowners costs to replace these streets with ones up to code (After complaints, Omaha street policy grinds to a halt, July 11 World Herald).

Perhaps she and the City Council should look closely at how the Public Works Department repairs the city streets that are up to code. For instance, 72nd Street between Ames and Crown Point Avenues has had lane restrictions in both directions three times over the past year.

First, workers were out last spring addressing all of the ruts and potholes from the winter. They tore up large areas of the outer lane areas and put in a somewhat smoother patch of asphalt.

A few weeks ago, workers were out again, replacing the gutters in both directions. Just last week (less than three weeks after the gutter repair), lanes were again restricted as workers completely resurfaced lanes in both directions.

As a driver who uses that stretch multiple times in a day, I couldnt agree more that the road needed resurfacing. Im just confused as to why the Public Works Department couldnt coordinate its efforts into one project instead of three, thus saving time, not to mention taxpayer dollars.

This happens all over the city, and it seems as if some organization between contractors could save the city money that could be used for those streets not up to code that need replacing.

Melissa McCoy, Omaha

A tragic end to a promising life

The senseless, tragic and violent death of Seth Rich shocked us all (Seth Richs goal was to try to save the world  July 12 World-Herald).

Seth was a young man full of promise with a passion for politics. In my Senate re-election campaign, Seth was known as a staffer who took on difficult tasks and could be counted on to complete them. His colleagues then and now knew and respected both his passion and reliable work ethic.

We will miss and remember this remarkable young man.

Ben Nelson, Omaha

former U.S. senator and Nebraska governor

Questions about Costco plant

Regarding the proposed Costco chicken-processing plant near Fremont, the Missouri Valley Group Sierra Club has several questions that we feel should be answered before any final decisions are made.

 Has an environmental impact study been done? Such a study should address such things as water pollution problems that may be caused in the immediate area as well as downstream.

 What would happen to the property if or when Costco decided to evacuate the property?

 Will the plant workers be treated fairly and with respect? Sierra Rise, an online Sierra Club community working to create a world with justice and sustainability, recently cited a three-year Oxfam America study about the treatment of U.S. poultry workers who are often denied bathroom breaks and denied the opportunity to speak up about worksite safety and working conditions.

It is important to view the whole picture before granting final approval of a new, large chicken processing plant.

David E. Corbin, Omaha

vice chair, Missouri Valley Group Sierra Club

Wasting the states money

Am I the only person who finds it a waste of $62,500 of state money to create a slogan that states Nebraska. Good life. Great Opportunity (The Good Life is embraced as part of states new brand, July 13 World-Herald)?

Nebraska Nice was bad enough.

Perhaps the next time we need a new slogan, it can be a contest open to school children throughout the entire state. They certainly come up with some great comments for the comical pictures that are in The World-Herald.

Offer a $100 prize and a little recognition. It would mean a great deal to a young scholar. The excessive money that was spent this year could go to a more useful cause.

Katherine Braunlich, Omaha

Learning from his mistake

Thanks for the interesting article about Randall Ritnour, the former prosecutor from Gage County (Ex-prosecutor opposes death penalty after Beatrice Six, July 9 World-Herald). He has came to the same conclusion that the Legislature did last year  that the death penalty is not in the best interest of the state of Nebraska. The Beatrice Six case changed him from an ardent supporter of capital punishment into an opponent. Innocent lives matter.

I wholeheartedly agree with him when he says that executing murderers is not worth the life of one individual. Mistakes can be made. Nebraskas death penalty system was broken.

Retaining the bipartisan solution to replace the death penalty with mandatory life without parole will get my vote in November. I urge others to vote to do the same.

Angie Wingert, Omaha

Beware of the convenience fee

Im an old guy, but this was news to me. In renewing my auto registration, I used my bank card instead of writing a check. I was charged $2.95 as a convenience fee.

Douglas County does not get the remuneration. The company providing the machines on which you swipe your card receives the fee.

Folks, save some money and write a check.

D. Shelby Brightwell, Omaha

A great experience at the VA

With the unfavorable experiences some have had with the VA that have been in the news lately, it was not surprising that I was apprehensive when I was to receive health care from the VA Nebraska-Western Iowa Health Care System in Omaha. However, my experience was nothing but positive.

The VA personnel were very helpful in arranging timely appointments, providing a VA health ID, informing me how to use the MyHealtheVet web portal and answering my questions. MyHealtheVet stores all of my medical records online and other very helpful information. I felt the staff truly cared in seeing that I was provided the health care I needed.

During the Vietnam War, I was exposed to Agent Orange, so I am now on the Agent Orange Registry. Some of my Air Force friends have been diagnosed with the presumptive diseases from Agent Orange, like Parkinsons, and some have died.

The Veterans Affairs officer of Douglas County, Benson Elmore, guided me to gather the necessary information to obtain a service-related hearing loss benefit. The VA audiology department was very helpful in testing my hearing and obtaining the hearing aids I needed.

The VA Nebraska-Western Iowa Health Care System should be congratulated and is deeply appreciated for the service it provides to veterans.

Gaylan C. Abood, Omaha

A way Clinton can win Bernie supporters

Not all of Bernie Sanders supporters are excited about supporting Hillary Clinton, and she should be worried about that. What she needs to do to get my support is simple  support the carbon tax plank of the party platform.

Putting a price on fossil fuels, whether as a tax or as a revenue-neutral fee refunded to all households, is absolutely essential to stop climate change. As climate scientist James Hansen often says, As long as there are cheap fossil fuels available, somebody will burn them.

Frances Mendenhall, Omaha

The party of gimme, gimme, gimme

In a campaign speech the other day, Hillary Clinton stated that the Republican Party was being transformed into the Trump Party. Well, under Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party is being transformed into the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Party.

Klaus P. Lindner, La Vista

Now thats a commitment

Having family in Nebraska, I read The World-Herald. I greatly enjoyed the July 9 article Nebraska couple who met on a blind date in 1935 celebrate 80 years of marriage.

I am very happy for Harrison and Varedo Huwaldt, who have reached the rare milestone of eight decades of marriage. I am pleased that he is age 100 and she is 99. They are indeed part of an elite group, which very few can match.

My late father, John William Marples Sr., was married in 1935 in Franklin, Nebraska. However, after 11 years, his first marriage dissolved. Some years passed before he met my late mother, Gloria Riedl, on a blind date (the same means by which the Huwaldts met). They were happily married until my dads death.

I congratulate the Huwaldts of Randolph, Nebraska. They have indeed set a good example of longevity and are proof that not all marriages are treated as disposable.

James A. Marples, Longview, Texas
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  A former Marine dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition set out to ambush police in Baton Rouge, authorities said Monday, a day after three law enforcement officers were killed in the attack.

Three other officers were wounded Sunday, one critically. The gunman was identified as Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, who was black. He turned 29 on the day of the ambush and was killed by a responding SWAT team officer from about 100 yards away.

The gunman's "movements, his direction, his attention was on police officers," State Police Col. Mike Edmonson said. He would not elaborate but said the shooter was definitely "seeking out" police.

Edmonson showed overhead maps of the area to explain how Long sneaked up behind police officers and shot them at close range.

Edmonson said one deputy  the one who's critically injured, fighting for his life right now"  had spotted the gunman's car and was about to run his license plate when the gunman shot the deputy.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards said Monday that Long "came in here from somewhere else to do harm to our community."

He said "this was "a diabolical attack on the very fabric of our society. This is not hyperbole. It is not an overstatement. There is nothing more important than law and order."

The governor said killing police officers "doesn't accomplish anything, it's not constructive. It's just pure unadulterated evil."

In online posts, a man using an alias of Long's said protests alone do not work, and that people must fight back after the deaths of black men at the hands of police.

Documents show that Long sought to change his name last year to Cosmo Setepenra. A website using that name links to online books about nutrition, self-awareness and empowerment. The man describes himself as a "freedom strategist, mental game coach, nutritionist, author and spiritual advisor."

In a video posted July 10, the person making the post says he's speaking from Dallas after five police officers were fatally shot there during a protest of the deaths of black men in encounters with law enforcement. The man also discusses protests in Baton Rouge and what he perceived as oppression.

He says: "You've got to fight back. That's the only way a bully knows to quit." In an earlier video, the man says that if anything ever happens to him, he doesn't want to be linked to any groups and mentioned once belonging to Nation of Islam.

In documents seeking the name change, Long also referred to himself as a member of a black separatist group known as the Washitaw Nation.

The attack unfolded less than two weeks after Baton Rouge police fatally shot a black man in a confrontation that reverberated nationwide.

Edmonson also confirmed that investigators have interviewed people with whom the shooter had contact in Baton Rouge. He would not say how many or give details and stressed that the interviews do not mean that those people were involved in the shooting. He urged anyone else with information about Long to come forward.

FBI Agent Jeff Sallet said federal investigators were actively trying to figure out if Long had any associates or support for his plan to come to Baton Rouge and kill police.

Sallet said the agency was committing all resources necessary to identifying any co-conspirators or facilitators and bring them to justice."

The shooting less than a mile from police headquarters added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police. It was the fourth high-profile deadly encounter in the United States involving police over the past two weeks. In all, the violence has cost the lives of eight officers, including those in Baton Rouge, and two civilians and sparked a national debate over race and policing.

Long served in the Marines from 2005 to 2010, reaching the rank of sergeant. He deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, according to military records.

While in the military, Long was awarded several medals, including one for good conduct, and received an honorable discharge. His occupational expertise was listed as "data network specialist."

On Monday morning, businesses around the shooting scene began to reopen. Customers bought coffee and breakfast sandwiches at a B-Quik convenience store. Next door, workers prepared for the day at a car wash where the gunman had been cornered.

Buildings at the scene were scarred with at least eight bullet marks. Investigators examined a hole in a window at a fitness-supply business, and wood covered another window that was shot out.

Long attended classes at the University of Alabama for one semester in the spring of 2012. A school spokesman said university police had no interactions with him.

He was also briefly enrolled at Clark Atlanta University during the 2012-13 academic year, the school said.

Long sought to change his name last year in a document filed in May 2015 with the recorder of deeds in Jackson County, Missouri. He also said he was a member of the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah, or the Washitaw Nation.

The group describes itself as a sovereign nation composed of blacks descended from ancestors who settled in North American before Columbus, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The name-change document ends: "Standing firm on the Ancient Principles of, LOVE, TRUTH, PEACE, FREEDOM AND JUSTICE."

The shooting began at a gas station and convenience store where, according to radio traffic, police answered a report of a man with an assault rifle and were met by gunfire. For several long minutes, they did not know where it was coming from.

The radio exchanges were made public Sunday by the website Broadcastify. The recording lasts about 17 minutes and includes urgent calls for an armored personnel carrier called a BearCat.

The store was an ideal target for someone wanting to catch police off-guard because uniformed officers constantly go there during morning hours, said Frank Cooper, who works at a garage just yards from the shooting scene.

"It's a convenient place for them to stop and get their coffee and buns," Cooper said.

Brady Vancel, who installs floors, was arriving for work at a group home when he heard gunfire. Despite the danger, he began walking toward the noise and saw a man in black with an assault rifle running across a grassy field directly toward him.

"He saw me and went the other way," said Vancel. "I was in shock, and he was acting impulsively. I'm just glad he didn't shoot me."

Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were trying to determine where Long obtained the guns.

Of the officers who survived the shooting, one was released from the hospital Monday. Two others remained hospitalized, one in critical condition.

Two of the slain officers were from the Baton Rouge Police Department: 32-year-old Montrell Jackson, who had been on the force for a decade, and 41-year-old Matthew Gerald, who had been there for less than a year.

The third fatality was Brad Garafola, 45, and a 24-year veteran of the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office.

All three of the slain officers lived in Denham Springs, a racially mixed city outside Louisiana's capital.

Autopsies on the officers were planned for Monday, and the coroner expected to release preliminary findings later in the day. An autopsy on the suspect was scheduled for Tuesday.

Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the death of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white Baton Rouge officers after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video.

It was followed a day later by the shooting death of another black man in Minnesota, whose girlfriend livestreamed the aftermath of his death on Facebook. The next day, a black gunman in Dallas opened fire on police.

Copyright 2016 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A mercury-boiling heat wave is expected to settle into Nebraska and western Iowa this week, and agencies that help the needy will be needing help.

Thursday brings the metro areas best chance at breaking triple digits so far this summer, with highs forecast in the upper 90s and heat index values of 105 degrees to possibly 110 degrees, said Josh Boustead of the National Weather Service.

AccuWeather, The World-Heralds weather consultant, is even more bullish on the intensity of the heat wave, projecting highs in Omaha on Thursday in excess of 100 degrees.

Local social service agencies are gearing up for increased need.

A week ago we put out a call for bottled water, and were going to need even more, said Mike Saklar of the Siena-Francis House, an Omaha homeless shelter. Weve been approaching near-record numbers at the shelter. It seems like every week were near an all-time high.

Bottled water and other items can be dropped off at the mens shelter dock at 1111 N. 17th St. For a list of other shelter necessities, go to www.sienafrancis.org and click the Helping Out tab.

Weve been approaching near-record numbers even as far back as May, Saklar said. With the heat and humidity this coming week, its going to be brutal outside.

Today and Tuesday will see high temperatures near the daily average of 88 degrees, said meteorologist Ed Vallee of AccuWeather. The blast furnace, humidity choking heat arrives on Wednesday, with a predicted high of 98.

On Thursday were expecting a high temperature of 102 with very high humidity, Vallee said. The lows at night are only going to be in the low 80s. Thats not much relief.

Omaha hasnt seen triple digits since 2013, on a spring day that saw an odd spike in temperatures. Omaha reached 101 degrees on May 14  the only time the mercury reached triple digits that year.

Omahas last searingly hot summer was in 2012, when the city saw triple digits in June, July and August, with the peak temperature of 106 degrees on July 25.

The Salvation Army has opened its community cooling centers for people who need a break from the extreme heat, as long as it lasts. The Kroc Center at 2825 Y St. is open from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. North Corps at 2424 Pratt St. and the Lied Renaissance Center at 3612 Cuming St. are open 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., said Susan Eustice, a Salvation Army spokeswoman.

Hours vary at the Council Bluffs Salvation Army quarters at 715 N. 16 St. Its advised to call ahead, at 712-328-2088.

We open these cooling centers in part to try and take the pressure off the area shelters, Eustice said. The last heat wave we had well over 200 people take advantage of our facilities. We try everything we can to help ease the crowded situation at the shelters.

The Salvation Army is in great need of donations of new fans and bottled water, or money to purchase these items, Eustice said. Fans are given to qualified individuals through the Summer Fan Program.

Bottled water and new fans can be dropped off at the new Burrows Center at 6101 Northwest Radial. They will also be accepted at the Lied Renaissance Center.

The unusually hot temperatures come during an extended warm period that has most climate scientists expecting that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The climate phenomenon El Nino and long-term global warming have both contributed to this years temperature spike, climate scientists say.

This latest high-pressure weather system is expected to sit over the central Plains states through the weekend, Vallee said. Even when that system moves on, high temperatures the following week are expected to be in the low 90s.

It will be like a big dome of high pressure sitting over the central Plains, Vallee said. It will be really sunny, and thats what brings the temperatures up. Once we get past that point, the extreme heat should be off, and we may even see some rain.

Contact the writer: 402-444-1272, kevin.cole@owh.com
4 TN fishermen arrested by Sri Lankan Navy

Chennai

oi-PTI

Rameswaram (TN), July 15: Four Tamil Nadu fishermen have been arrested by Sri Lankan Navy for allegedly fishing in their territorial waters off Katchatheevu islet, a Fisheries Department official said today.

Fisheries department Assistant Director K D Gopinath said the naval personnel of Sri Lanka arrested the four, all hailing from Pamban, while they were fishing off Katchatheevu last night. Their boats were also seized.

The fishermen and their boats were later taken to Thalaimannar in Sri Lanka for further proceedings, he added.

With this, the number of fishermen arrested for allegedly fishing in Sri Lankan waters has gone up to 48 since July 3, Gopinath said.

The incident comes a day after more than 2,000 fishermen from Rameswaram were chased away by the island nation's authorities for allegedly fishing in their territorial waters.

Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on July 6, requesting him to take steps to secure the release of Indian fishermen and their boats seized by the Sri Lankan Navy.

PTI

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, July 15, 2016, 17:10 [IST]
In line with tradition, portals of Kedarnath Dham to close on Oct 27, Badrinath on Nov 19

Heavy rains lash North India; 9 killed

Dehradun

oi-Shalini

Dehradun, July 17: Heavy rains in Uttarakhand claimed at least nine lives and caused immense trouble, reminding people about 2013 massive flash-floods that had claimed several lives.

SDM Badkot Rajkumar Pandey informed today that "Two persons died late last evening in Nandgaon village near Badkot in Uttarkashi district when a tree fell on their house following heavy rains in the area."

MeT office Director Vikram Singh said "15-year-old Akash Ram was also got seriously injured in the incident, he said.With two more deaths reported from Uttarkashi the toll in the current spell of rains in Uttarakhand which started on Friday night rose climbed to three."

"A woman was killed yesterday morning as the bus she was travelling in overturned after being hit by the overflowing waters of a canal in Haldwani in Nainital district. Heavy rains are likely to continue in the state for another 24 hours making things worse especially in Udhamsingh Nagar, Haridwar and Dehradun districts where extremely heavy rains are expected at a couple of places during the period, MeT office Director Vikram Singh said, Singh said.

River Alakananda crosses the danger level mark, triggering panic among nearby residents, in the flood-hit state.

According to reports, The Dehradun Meteorological Centre had issued an alert for "heavy to very heavy rains" during next 24 to 48 hours in the entire region of the state and also informed that according to the State Disaster Management Department, the Ganga at Haridwar had reached a mark of 293.05 metres which was just about a metre below its danger level.

Heavy rains in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand caused landslides and around 22 roads were blocked in many villages.

The state's meteorological centre also issued an alert by announcing, "Residents should be on alert and people living in low lying areas should move to safer places."

Char Dham Yatra suspended

The Char Dham Yatra also remained suspended due to frequent landslips caused by incessant rains in the state on Saturday.

Around 150 kanwarias, devotees of Lord Shiva, were stranded on their return from Gaumukh when two bridges between Gaumukh and Gangotri were damaged by the rising water in the River Bhagirathi.

"Eighty kanwarias were rescued and were brought safely to Gangotri", Uttarakashi District Magistrate Dipendra Chaudhary said.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister Harish Rawat has asked the respective district administrations to take efficient measures for safety and security of residents and pilgrims.

A media report stated that "at least three persons were killed in rain-related incidents in Bihar, while the flood situation remained critical in Assam. Heavy rain in Karauli district of Rajasthan has led to a deluge-like condition there."

Heavy rain in the national capital (Delhi) on Saturday left commuters in trouble as several parts of the city were waterlogged.

OneIndia News
J&K: Curfew relaxed for 12 hours in Bhaderwah, educational institutions likely to reopen on Monday

Tailor murder: Curfew in Udaipur, situation under control, says DIG | VIDEO

Curfew continues for 10th day in Kashmir

India

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Srinagar, July 17: Strict curfew continued for the 10th day on Sunday in the Kashmir Valley, police said.

"Curfew shall continue in all the ten districts of the Valley," a senior police official said.

"Security forces have been instructed to allow movement of patients along with their attendants."

"People going to the airport will not face any hardship as air tickets were being treated as curfew passes," the official added.

The death toll in the ongoing violence reached 41 after an unruly mob torched a police picket in north Kashmir's Kupwara district on Saturday. Police opened fire at the mob resulting in the death of a youth.

All vernacular and English dailies suspended publication for the second day on Sunday.

State government officials said newspaper owners were asked to suspend publications till July 19.

Cable television operations were allowed on Saturday evening after remaining suspended for a day.

The resumption of cable television operations was allowed after the operators agreed to take off all Pakistani TV channels and two private Indian channels.

Mobile phone internet and call operations remained suspended in south Kashmir areas for the eighth day while the same remained suspended for the second day in central and north Kashmir areas on Sunday.

Mobile phone operations without any internet facility are, however, continuing on post paid mobile phones provided by the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).

Train services between north Kashmir Baramulla and Bannihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended.

All recruitment interviews scheduled for the next four days have been cancelled by the state public service commission (PSC).

All schools, colleges and universities in the Valley were also shut down.

Senior separatist leaders including Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabir Ahmad Shah and others have been either placed under house arrest or taken into preventive custody to restrain them from participating in protests.

Separatists have appealed the people to continue the shutdown till Monday.

The shutdown in the Valley started on July 9 following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Wani in a gunfight with the security forces on July 8.

IANS
Jharkhand CM calls on Goel, Prabhu

India

oi-PTI

Ranchi, July 17: Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das today called on Union Minister Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu and Minister of state for Energy and Coal, Piyush Goel in Delhi to discuss issues related to the state.

During the meeting with Goel, Das urged him to direct DVC to end the five-hour power cut in Dhanbad, Hazaribagh, Giridih, Ramgarh, Chatra, Bokaro and Koderma districts of the state as resentment has been prevailing among the people of those district affecting the law and order, according to an official release here.

The Chief Minister also urged Goel to ensure quick repair of machines following breakdown and deployment of adequate employees to ensure uninterrupted power supply during nights.

Besides, he also appealed to him to instruct DVC to allow work of Jharkhand State Electricity Board employees where DVC did not have their staff.

Goel assured him to take up the issues with officials concerned. Responding to Das's appeal to set up Railway Zonal Office at Ranchi, the Railway Minister assured him to appoint a Nodal Officer, who will visit the state every fortnight to function as a bridge between the Railway Ministry and the state government.

It has been decided to form a Task Committee involving the officials of the Union government and state government.

The Railway Minister asked Das to issue environment related clearance for construction of railway bridge in the state, the release said.

Das also urged the Railway Minister to run Ranchi-New Delhi Rajdhani Express, Ranchi-Mumbai (LTT Super fast Express), Hatia-Yashwantpur, Ranchi-Alipurdwar (Guwahati Express) and Hatia-Pune express daily.

Das was accompanied by Chief Secretary of Jharkhand, Rajbala Verma and other top officers of the state government.

PTI
Protest to mark six months of institutional murder of Rohith Vemula

India

oi-Oneindia

By Maitreyee Boruah

Hyderabad, July 17: The world might have forgotten the tragic death of Rohith Vemula, but his family and friends are still fighting to get justice for the Dalit research scholar.

Six months after the 26-year-old committed suicide inside the campus of the University of Hyderabad (UoH) on January 17, his friends and family will host a protest rally at the university campus on July 17 (Sunday).

"Please join us for the protest at the University of Hyderabad to mark the six months of the institutional murder of Rohith Vemula and 31 years of the Karamchedu massacre," said a post on the Facebook page of the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (UoH).

The Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (UoH) is the main group spearheading the protest movement demanding justice for Rohith.

The protest has been jointly organized by the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice (UoH), SC/ST Teachers' Forum and other concerned teachers.

Rohith's tragic death has become a rallying point for all those who have long been saying that there exists a systematic discrimination of Dalit students in the higher educational institutions across the country.

"It has been six months since Rohith's suicide, but till now none of the accused has been arrested. Instead those who were seeking justice were arrested, lathicharged, jailed and suspended. Despite these clampdowns the movement has not stopped, it only got intensified," said a friend of Rohith on the condition of anonymity.

The family and friends of Rohith allege that the 26-year- old committed suicide because of the harassment he faced at the hands of the university's vice-chancellor Appa Rao and senior BJP leaders, including former Human Resource Development (HRD) minister Smriti Irani.

Recently, Radhika Vemula, mother of Rohith, said Irani should be arrested. The former HRD minister has been named as an accused in the complaint under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act.

OneIndia News
Terrorism is now part of everyday lives for long period of time: French PM

26 patients on life support after Nice attack: French Health Ministry

International

oi-IANS

By Ians English

Paris, July 17: At least 26 people, including five children, who were injured in the truck attack in France's NIce on July 14, are currently on life support, French Ministry of Health said in a statement on Saturday.

After a 31-year-old Tunisian man drove a truck ramming into crowds of people celebrating the French national day and killed at least 84 people, a total of 303 people have been sent to different hospitals in Nice and five cities nearby, a news agency quoted the ministry as saying.

According to the ministry, 121 patients wounded in the attack, including 30 children, are still being treated in hospital. 26 of these 121 wounded people are currently on life support.

IANS


Canada urges Turkey to avoid summary justice after failed coup

International

oi-PTI

Montreal, Jul 17: Canadian Foreign Minister Stephane Dion pressed Turkey to handle the aftermath of a coup attempt according to "fundamental principles of democracy."

Speaking on the television network Radio-Canada after a phone call with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Canadian diplomatic chief said it was "important to avoid collect punishment" against those who organized the aborted coup that sought to seize power from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"Democracy has been saved," Dion said yesterday, after Turkish authorities wrested back control of the country Saturday.

"We must be discerning to ensure that those on trial have the chance to prove innocence or express their point of view according to the fundamental rules of justice we must aim to respect."

Turkish authorities crushed the putsch bid by discontented soldiers in a chaotic night of violence that left at least 265 dead. With the coup defeated, Turkey rounded up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm that the country could reestablish its death penalty, which Dion said Canadians are against "in all circumstances."

Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the coup bid. Though he praised Erdogan's swift return to control, the Canadian minister said "the use of military force was completely unacceptable." Canada has advised its citizens against travel to Turkey since Friday.

AFP
In Turkey, freedom is in danger

International news brief: Series of earthquakes rattle Hawaii and more

Egypt media jumps the gun on Turkey coup

International

oi-PTI

Cairo, Jul 17: Egyptians woke up on Saturday, July 16 to find some newspapers announcing the Turkish military's ouster of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even as the strongman loathed by Cairo quashed a coup attempt.

"The Turkish army topples Erdogan," declared a red banner on the front page of the state's flagship Al-Ahram newspaper. "Recep Tayyip vanishes," said the subhead.

[Turkish military coup is fine, but Erdogan seems to have called for it]

"Army controls Turkey and deposes Erdogan," the private Al-Watan announced, labelling yesterday night's attempted coup by an army faction as "military disobedience".

Erdogan is a main backer of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president whom the army deposed in 2013. Several Brotherhood leaders are in exile in Turkey, having fled a bloody crackdown against Islamists following Morsi's overthrow.

Erdogan regularly attacks what he calls Egypt's "coup", infuriating Cairo.

Some Egyptian media personalities could not contain their glee as news of the attempted coup percolated overnight.

"Good evening, good viewers everywhere! This is a special episode," announced Ahmed Moussa, a pro-government talkshow host on the private Sada el-Balad channel.

"First, what is happening in Turkey is not a coup. Not at all! It is a revolution from within the Turkish military. And whenever the Turkish military conducts a revolution, it always wins!" he beamed.

The coverage in the Egyptian media and the premature announcements of Erdogan's ouster prompted ridicule on social media.

"The coup is victorious in the pages of Egyptian newspapers," wrote one Twitter user.

Egypt's presidency, meanwhile, has remained mum on the coup attempt, while the foreign ministry released a statement on consular efforts to help Egyptians in Turkey.

AFP

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Sunday, July 17, 2016, 10:13 [IST]
Pakistan off the FATFs grey List: What this means

Pak committing atrocities against people in PoK, will have to bear consequences: Rajnath Singh

Why is 'Mr. Bean controversy trending on Twitter after Zimbabwe beat Pakistan?

Qandeel Balooch killing: She was drugged before murder

International

oi-Jagriti

Lahore, July 17: Internet sensation and Pakistani model Qandeel Baloch was drugged before being strangled to death, this has been revealed by her brother.

Police arrested Qandeel's brother Waseem from Dera Ghazi Khan late Saturday, reported the Dawn.

"She brought dishonour to the Baloch name" due to risque videos and statements that she posted on social media," said Waseem.

"There are other issues as well... Like the maulvi issue," he said, in a apparent reference to a recent controversy surrounding Qandeel's selfies with Mufti Qavi," added he.

"She wasn't aware I was killing her. I gave her a tablet and then strangled her," Waseem was quoted as saying during a press conference after his arrest.

The actor cum model was killed by her brother in the name of honour by her brother Muzaffarabad's Green Town area early Saturday.

The internet sensation had earlier claimed she was receiving death threats and had also sought security.

OneIndia News
Pak arrests 4 top leaders of banned JuD, LeT on charges of terror funding

Why South India must be concerned about terrorists from West Bengal

Snap trade with India; ban Bollywood films, demands Hafiz Saeed

International

oi-Jagriti

Lahore, July 17: Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief and 2008 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed has asked Pakistan government to snap trade ties with India.

Not only trade but he also sought a ban on Bollywood films in Pakistan in the wake of killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

Burhan Wani was killed along with two other terrorists on July 8 in an encounter at Bumdoora village of Kokernag in Jammu and Kashmir by a joint team of police and Army.

"We don't need potato and onion trade with India," he told a press conference at JuD headquarters in Chauburji in Pakistan".

"Pakistan should call its ambassador back from India and expel its from Islamabad," PTI quoted the LeT founder as saying. He claimed that Pakistan is an advocate of Kashmiris and this gesture will give Kashmiris a boost.

Pak declares Burhan Wani as 'martyr'

Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on July 15 declared slain Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a "martyr" and said July 19 will be observed as black day to express solidarity with people of Kashmir.

Curfew was imposed in the valley on July 9 to control large scale violence following the death of 22 year old Burhan Wani.

OneIndia News

(With inputs from PTI)

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Sunday, July 17, 2016, 12:11 [IST]
Thousands rally for Turkey president after coup fails

International

oi-PTI

Ankara, Jul 17: Thousands took to the streets of Turkey in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after authorities crushed a military coup that claimed at least 265 lives.

After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan triumphantly addressed flag-waving supporters in Istanbul following Friday's chaos in the strategic NATO member of 80 million people. [Turkey Updates: Turkey military chief rescued, 1,563 detained]

The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who is Erdogan's arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.

Turks woke up yesterday to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.

"The situation is completely under control," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkey's top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.

Describing the attempted coup as a "black stain" on Turkey's democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded. General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters has been killed.

Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters' hopes. During a night where power hung in the balance, supporters of Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders' orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime.

Yesterday, thousands of jubilant supporters again mobilised in response to Erdogan's call to fill Turkey's squares, massing in Taksim in central Istanbul, the president's home district of Kisikli, Ankara's Kizilay Square and in the coastal city of Izmir, AFP correspondents said.

Friday's putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul. Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets.

Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd. Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.

AFP
Turkey detains 'coup plotters' at base used by US: reports

International

oi-PTI

Istanbul, Jul 17: Turkish authorities have reportedly detained a senior air force general and other officers accused of backing the failed coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a key air base used by US forces for raids in Syria.

Brigadier air force general Bekir Ercan Van was detained along with over a dozen lower ranking officers yesterday at the air force base of Incirlik in Turkey's southern Adana province, newspapers including the Hurriyet daily said. [Turkey Coup Updates]

They were now being interrogated by investigators, the reports added. A Turkish official told AFP yesterday that Ankara suspected Incirlik was used to refuel military aircraft "hijacked" by the coup plotters on Friday night.

The base has become a key hub for US forces after Turkey last year agreed to allow the United States to use Incirlik to carry out lethal raids against jihadists in Syria. But the Turkish authorities imposed a security lockdown on the base in the wake of the coup, allowing no movement in or out, the US consulate in Adana said.

Meanwhile, operations from the Incirlik air base were suspended because of the closure of the airspace used for the missions, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.

AFP
Turkey rounds up plotters after thwarting anti-Erdogan coup

International

oi-PTI

Istanbul, Jul 17: Turkish authorities rounded up dozens of senior military personnel and judges in a ruthless crackdown today, after thousands massed in the streets nationwide overnight to denounce a coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned the attempted putsch but also urged Turkey to respect the "rule of law" in its aftermath, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some coup plotters when arrested.

According to the government, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives when a group within the army sought to overthrow the authorities by seizing key strategic points in Istanbul and Ankara. Over 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military has said.

The botched coup bid marked the biggest challenge to Erdogan's rule in 13 years as prime minister and now president. But he successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.

Thousands responded late yesterday to a new call by the president to pour into the squares to celebrate the "victory of democracy" with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks reported in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir. Europe Minister Omer Celik urged people to stay on the streets, writing on Twitter that the "vigil for democracy" continues.

The Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, accusing the plotters of acting on behalf of Erdogan's arch enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.

The government has already said that almost 3,000 soldiers had been detained on suspicion of involvement in the putsch which raised fears of chaos in the strategic NATO member state of almost 80 million.

5 reasons why a military coup was staged in Turkey

Turkish television has shown images of captured coup plotters forced to lie face down on the tarmac after arrest while AFP photographers have seen suspects roughly led away pursued by angry mobs. NTV television said that 34 generals of various grades had been detained so far.

They include senior figures like Erdal Ozturk, commander of the third army and the commander of the Malatya-based second army, Adem Huduti. In an operation early Sunday, authorities detained the commander of the garrison in the western town of Denizli, Ozhan Ozbakir, along with 51 other soldiers, according to the state-run Anatolia news agency.

AFP
PM Modi says GST issue not about who gets credit, seeks support

New Delhi

oi-PTI

New Delhi, July 17: The Opposition would seek to corner the government for its "attempts to destabilise" states ruled by it and the Kashmir unrest in Parliament, but also offer "merit-based" support to measures like the GST Bill which Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said was of "national importance".

At an all-party meeting here a day ahead of the Monsoon Session starting on Monday, leaders of several opposition parties spoke of developments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand signalling their intent to train guns on the government, with Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad saying the states no longer trusted the BJP-led government at the Centre.

Modi, who joined the meeting later, thanked all parties for "speaking in one voice" on the developments in Kashmir and sought their support in the passage of the GST Bill, saying it was of "national importance" and urging them to keep national interests above everything else, sources said.

Addressing the meeting, Modi said important bills, including the GST, are to be taken up during the session and expressed the hope that there would be meaningful discussions and outcomes, officials said.

"Referring to introduction of GST, the Prime Minister noted that the issue was not about which government would get the credit for this, but what is important is the passage of the bill," they said.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar told reporters after the two-hour meeting that Parliament was a "mahapanchayat" where all issues could be raised.

He said the government will talk to all parties to evolve a consensus on the GST.

"Our legislative business, including GST, is a priority. We want to see to that we pass the GST bill with consensus. We are going to take every party on board," he said.

Kumar played down the attacks of Congress, the Left and some other parties on the government over the Arunachal issue, saying different issues can be debated.

"We have assured all parties that there will be open-mindedness and we are ready to discuss all issues," he said.

Speaking to reporters, Azad accused the government of "using all tricks" to destabilise opposition-ruled governments and took potshots at Modi over his talk of cooperation between the Centre and states by pointing out that even a BJP ally like Akali Dal has attacked it over "undermining" states.

Though he did not refer to GST directly, he said the Congress will offer support to bills on merit.

"We have not taken any decision that we have to stop a bill. We will support on merit. We will support any bill which is in support of people, progress and growth," he said.

Ananth Kumar said the government has lined up 16 bills for passage in the session.

Growing incidents of terror attacks in different parts of the world and their implications for the country, foreign policy, floods in states like Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand were listed by him among the issues to be discussed in Parliament, the Parliamentary Affairs Minister said.

"The meeting was very fruitful. All the parties desired smooth functioning of Parliament and assured of their cooperation. Congress too assured support to legislative proposals based on merits," he said.

Asked about some chief ministers like Nitish Kumar raising the issue of role of governors at the Inter-State Council meeting here on Saturday, he said these were not discussed.

Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia played down the talks between his party and the government to break the impasse over the long-pending GST bill and said they wanted the government to share with them a written draft over the demands made by the party.

"We can give a response only after we receive a written draft from the government," he said as he rejected the contention that the Congress was blocking the bill, saying GST was "a baby given birth" by his party.

He also referred to the Kairana issue, suggesting that it was aimed at stoking communal tension and said his party will take it up during the session.

CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury said the BJP and the Congress were indulging in "match-fixing" on the GST issue and asked the government to follow the parliamentary spirit as Atal Bihari Vajpayee dispensation did and consult all parties.

Top Comment

The nation will never forgive the congress for its efforts to derail the progress by delaying GST.RGK

He and Naresh Agrawal of Samajwadi Party demanded an all-party meeting over the GST bill with the SP leader saying his party may oppose the bill if it is not consulted.

Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitely besides Kumar were among 45 leaders from 30 parties who attended the meeting.

PTI

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Story first published: Sunday, July 17, 2016, 21:13 [IST]
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Coming in September: Central and Eastern European Gaming Conference 2016

Published July 17, 2016 by Mike P

The inaugural 2016 CEEGC conference and awards will be hosted in Budapest this September, bringing together attendees to discuss regulatory topics.

Coming this September will be the first-ever Central and Eastern European Gaming Conference (CEEGC). Scheduled for 20 September 2016, professionals working throughout the global gambling industry will travel to Budapest to listen highly regarded keynote speakers and participate in networking events.

Specialist Speakers

Hungarys Budapest Hilton Budapest City hotel will play host to inaugural conference that will attract more than 150 industry leaders along with 20 speakers. Ahead of the event, CEEGCs website is sharing written previews in advance to help attendees become acquainted with the intricacies of each topic that has been planned.

Jan Rehola is one of the organised speakers and works as a lawyer and consultant with BetOnSkill, while Nadya Hambach is also on hand share her legal perspective from being renowned as Bulgarias leading gaming lawyer. Generally, there is a strong presence among legal and compliance experts, BetOlimp chief marketing officer Mark McGuinness will be there to discuss customer challenges.

Geographic Focus

CEEGC attendees have been drawn to the event on the promise that it will focus on recent legislative changes made to Eastern European gaming markets. The most prevalent examples include Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and other nearby countries.

In discussing the geographic challenges, the talks will be broken into four categories. Eastern and Northern Europe will come first, with Central Europe and the Balkans scheduled for the afternoon. A fifth discussion has been planned to discuss more specific industry topics, such as the emergence of Bitcoin, e-sports popularity, and forex and binary options.

Jan Rehola in the Spotlight

Jan Rehola is scheduled to participate on the panel entitled Focus on recent developments in Eastern Europe, with Rehola on hand to share his specialist insights on the Czech Republics new gambling act. For the four years, Rehola worked in gambling regulation for the countrys finance department.

In the present, Rehola is working with BetOnSkill, which is a dedicated gambling consultancy firm set up to assist with regulatory compliance and other matters. He will be primed to explain how the Czech market has gradually opened up since being restricted to a handful of operators. Rehola will also be able to outline the new opportunities moving forward.

CEEGA Awards

The Central and Eastern European Gaming Awards (CEEGA) will also be hosted during CEEGC. An informed panel of professionals will oversee CEEGA, with awards due to be handed out to gambling operators, software suppliers, and services providers working in different fields, including sportsbooks, casino sites, poker sites, social gaming, and others.
In planning an upcoming conference and nonviolent action aimed at challenging the institution of war, with the conference to be held at American University, I can't help but be drawn to the speech a U.S. president gave at American University a little more than 50 years ago. Whether or not you agree with me that this is the best speech ever given by a U.S. president, there should be little dispute that it is the speech most out of step with what anyone will say at either the Republican or the Democratic national convention this year. Here's a video of the best portion of the speech:

President John F. Kennedy was speaking at a time when, like now, Russia and the United States had enough nuclear weapons ready to fire at each other on a moment's notice to destroy the earth for human life many times over. At that time, however, in 1963, there were only three nations, not the current nine, with nuclear weapons, and many fewer than now with nuclear energy. NATO was far removed from Russia's borders. The United States had not just facilitated a coup in Ukraine. The United States wasn't organizing military exercises in Poland or placing missiles in Poland and Romania. Nor was it manufacturing smaller nukes that it described as "more usable." The work of managing U.S. nuclear weapons was then deemed prestigious in the U.S. military, not the dumping ground for drunks and misfits that it has become. Hostility between Russia and the United States was high in 1963, but the problem was widely known about in the United States, in contrast to the current vast ignorance. Some voices of sanity and restraint were permitted in the U.S. media and even in the White House. Kennedy was using peace activist Norman Cousins as a messenger to Nikita Khrushchev, whom he never described, as Hillary Clinton has described Vladimir Putin, as "Hitler."

Kennedy framed his speech as a remedy for ignorance, specifically the ignorant view that war is inevitable. This is the opposite of what President Barack Obama said recently in Hiroshima and earlier in Prague and Oslo. Kennedy called peace "the most important topic on earth." It is a topic not touched on in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. I fully expect this year's Republican national convention to celebrate ignorance.

Kennedy renounced the idea of a "Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war," precisely what both big political parties now and most speeches on war by most past U.S. presidents ever have favored. Kennedy went so far as to profess to care about 100% rather than 4% of humanity:

"... not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time."

Kennedy explained war and militarism and deterrence as nonsensical:

"Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn."

Kennedy went after the money. Military spending is now over half of federal discretionary spending, and yet neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton has said or been asked in even the vaguest terms what they'd like to see spent on militarism. "Today," said Kennedy in 1963,

"the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles--which can only destroy and never create--is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace."

In 2016 even beauty queens have shifted to advocating war rather than "world peace." But in 1963 Kennedy spoke of peace as the serious business of government:

"I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war--and frequently the words of the pursuer fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task. Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament--and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude--as individuals and as a Nation--for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward--by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home."

Can you imagine any approved speaker at this year's RNC or DNC suggesting that in U.S. relations toward Russia a major part of the problem might be U.S. attitudes? Would you be willing to wager your next donation to either of those parties? I'd be glad to accept it.

Peace, Kennedy explained in a manner unheard of today, is perfectly possible:

"First: Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable--that mankind is doomed--that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade--therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable--and we believe they can do it again. I am not referring to the absolute, infinite concept of peace and good will of which some fantasies and fanatics dream. I do not deny the value of hopes and dreams but we merely invite discouragement and incredulity by making that our only and immediate goal. Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace-- based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions--on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace--no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process--a way of solving problems."

Kennedy debunked some of the usual straw men:

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Brussels-based American journalist's take on Brexit

My guest today is Gilbert Doctorow, an American journalist based in Brussels.

Joan Brunwasser: Welcome back to OpEdNews, Gilbert. We last spoke several months ago: Brussels-Based Journalist on Belgian Terror Attacks. I can't help but think that your perspective would be helpful for those of us trying to figure out what happened in the UK regarding the vote to exit the EU. Can you get us started?

Gilbert Doctorow: The vote to leave the EU resulted from a great many different factors, but I would like to highlight two groupings of factors: splits within the ruling elites of the UK and a split between the elites and the UK population at large.

The UK was a late joiner of the EU because of its historical traditions as a "balancer" of forces on the Continent rather than a permanent member of a predominant bloc. Once inside the EU, the British were unenthusiastic about the gradual attempts by federalists on the Continent who sought to turn what was a common market into a political union or United States of Europe. They were foot-draggers. Thus, they were the most significant Member State to refuse to join the common currency.

British disenchantment with the EU grew significantly in the new millennium and particularly after the financial crisis of 2008, which revealed the foundation of sand on which the Euro and the Europe-wide banking system rested. The leadership of the EU institutions at this point was particularly weak and and grey, unable to produce any creative solutions that would allay British doubts about where the Union was headed.

The Tories were torn over the issue of remaining in the EU and some of its leading politicians quit the party to join UKIP [UK Independence Party]. To stem this hemorrhaging, David Cameron made the holding of a referendum on the issue one of his campaign pledges in the last general election. But the party remained split as became very clear when a significant number of his cabinet members spoke out in favor of 'leave' before the referendum.

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End Times -- Take Your Pick

(Image by Michael Collins) Details DMCA



(Washington, DC) In 2016, we have a choice between Scylla and Charybdis, cancer and the plague, teen Dance Moms and the 800 Club. Hillary and the Donald are each so repellant in their unique way, it's hard to imagine making a choice. The choice becomes even more difficult if you see each candidacy as a sign of the End Times. (Image: Maxwell Hamilton& DonkeyHotey)

When we discuss the dreadful choices for president, my friends tolerate my observations about Clinton's warmonger behavior and the threat she poses to the survival of the species. After all, I argue, as Secretary of State she helped formulate and execute the "Assad must go" strategy that kicked off the assault on the nation of Syria (aka, the Syrian civil war). The body count for Syria is now at 250,000 citizens. Add the 100,000 dead Libyans from that "civil war", another Clinton special, and you're talking about some very serious carnage.

Just when I think I've provided an indisputable rationale for not voting for Clinton, I get a sober and somewhat condescending look followed by the words "Supreme Court Justices."

Donald Trump's prospective choices to replace justices are somehow a more important factor in casting their vote than Clinton's trail of death and destruction (I never actually say this since these are my friends.) I also have to follow the old maxim: the poor workman blames his tool. In this case, my tool is an inadequate argument.

Enter the End Times

A better argument against a vote for Clinton is the very accurate position that both she and Trump are fully capable of ushering in the End Times. I'm not talking about the Book of Revelations or any other religious nonsense. End Times means exactly what it says -- time has run out for human society as we know it due to the vastly increased risk of a nuclear war resulting from the election of either candidate.

If most of us are dead and the survivors face a nuclear winter, does it really matter who gets selected for the United States Supreme Court? Seriously, who cares?

Over 1400 mayors of cities across the United States share my notion of the secular End Times. The U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Indianapolis approved a resolution calling for reduced tensions between NATO and Russia in very specific terms:

"The largest NATO war games in decades, involving 14,000 U.S. troops, and activation of U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe are fueling growing tensions between nuclear-armed giants, and according to former Defense Secretary William Perry: The probability of a nuclear calamity is higher today, I believe, that it was during the cold war." U.S. Conference of Mayors, June 24-27, Indianapolis, IN (Also see, AntiMedia coverage)

Clinton has a specific proposal to commence the final countdown to the end. One of her policies for the Middle East includes a U.S. declaration of a "no fly" zone over Syria. A declaration clearing the skies over Syria would require telling the Russian air force to cease their attacks on ISIS, Al Nusra (Al Qaeda in Syria), and the Saudi supported Salafist terrorist organizations.

Her proposal would present a military challenge to the world's other nuclear superpower. Russia has already strenuously objected to the movement of NATO missiles closer to its border, a policy Clinton fully endorses. What might the response be to President Clinton's imperious command that they cease operations in Syria?

Surely, I thought, Clinton is just blowing off steam in the primaries. Wrong. The Intercept just reported that the Democratic Party Platform Committee turned down a platform plank stating that the "Democratic Party does not support direct U.S. military intervention against the Assad regime, including the imposition of no-fly zones or safe zones." Clinton supporters rose on unison to make sure that the resolution was withdrawn arguing that a President Clinton should not be bound by such a resolution. No, she should be allowed, they imply, to take us right up to the brink of nuclear war by attempting to humiliate a nuclear superpower that is doing the work we should be doing in Syria.

Clinton is a threat to humanity. But, what about Trump?

Amidst his Hitler Light proposals about U.S. Muslims and ranting about a wall that will never be built, there seem to be glimmers of rationality in his foreign policy statements. Trump says there is no need for a new cold war and that there is plenty of room for cooperation and trade with Russia. Does this get him off of the End Time hook? Absolutely not.

For those who haven't noticed, Trump is a relentless bully and has been one since at least the 1980s when he tried for years to frighten tenants into moving out of rent-controlled apartments he owned in midtown Manhattan. He constantly labels himself as a very tough negotiator who seeks to crush his opponents. He wants to create a U.S. military "so strong, nobody's gonna mess with us." He sought advice on terrorism policies from the National Rifle Association and says about terrorists, "you have to take out their families" to win the war on terror.

What happens when Trump decides he's been crossed or affronted by China or Russia? Will he take the humiliation and avoid approaching Defcon 1, imminent nucler war. Or, will Trump engage in his ridiculous bullyboy negotiating tactics by doubling down in any major confrontation he faces?

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Reprinted from Paul Craig Roberts Website



Flag at half mast in Netherlands for flight MH17

(Image by HereIsTom) Details DMCA



Today is the second anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, and we still do not know the explanation.

Washington and its European vassal politicians and media instantly politicized the event: The Russians did it. End of story. After 15 months of heavy anti-Russian propaganda had imprinted the message on peoples' minds, the Dutch Safety Board issued its inconclusive report.

By then, it was irrelevant what the report said. Everyone already knew that "the Russians did it."

I remember when pre-trial media accusations resulted in dismissed cases. Anyone declared guilty prior to presentation of evidence and conviction was considered to have been convicted in advance and unable to receive a fair trail. Such cases were dismissed by judges.

Washington's story never made any sense. Neither Russia nor the separatists in the Donetsk region had any reason to shoot down a Malaysian airliner. In contrast, Washington had enormous incentives as Washington's propaganda machine could place the blame on Russia and use the incident to compel European governments to accept Washington's sanctions placed on Russia.

It worked for Washington. Washington successfully used the incident to wreck Europe's political and economic relationships with Russia.

Four months into the anti-Russian propaganda campaign, a website called Bellingcat, claiming to be an open source site for citizen journalists, but which could be a MI-5, MI-6, or CIA front, issued a report that the Buk missile was fired by a Russian unit, the 53rd Buk Brigade, based in the Russian city of Kursk. This allegation exposed the propaganda for what it is.

Whereas it is possible that separatists unfamiliar with the Buk weapon system could accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner, it is not possible for a Russian military unit to make such a mistake.

Moreover, it is unclear why separatists or the Ukrainian government would have any reason to use Buk missiles in their conflict. The separatists have no air force. The Ukrainians attack the separatists at ground level with ground attack aircraft and helicopters, not with high altitude bombing. The Buk missile is a high altitude missile. The only way the separatists could have acquired Buk missiles is by overrunning and capturing Ukrainian positions that for unfathomed reasons had deployed Buk missiles.

It seems to me that if a Buk missile was present in the conflict area, it was moved there for a reason unrelated to the conflict.

A European air traffic controller said that MH-17 and the airliner carrying Russian President Vladimir Putin were initially on the same course. Possibly Washington and its vassal in Kiev thought MH-17 was Putin's plane and destroyed the Malaysian flight by mistake.

In order to avoid the consequences of such a provocation, the Russian government would deny that Putin's plane was on a similar course.

Even the Western presstitute media reports that separatists found the Malaysian airliner's recorders, or black boxes, and turned them over to the investigation and that the recorders had not been tampered with. If the separatists were responsible for the attack, why would they hand over evidence against themselves?

Why does Kiev refuse to release the communications between Ukrainian air traffic control and MH-17? Why was a civilian airliner routed over a combat zone? The Dutch report does not answer these questions. Washington prevented all answers that conflict with its propaganda.

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Over on iTunes, you can find a short course (8 lectures in total) on the age-old mystery: How did Hannibal and his elephants cross the Alps during the Second Punic War? The course was presented by archeologist Patrick Hunt in the Continuing Studies program at Stanford University, back in 2007. Heres the description for the course:

Hannibal is a name that evoked fear among the ancient Romans for decades. His courage, cunning and intrepid march across the dangerous Alps in 218 BCE with his army and war elephants make for some of the most exciting passages found in ancient historical texts written by Polybius, Livy, and Appian. And they continue to inspire historians and archaeologists today. The mystery of his exact route is still a topic of debate, one that has consumed Patrick Hunt (Director of Stanfords Alpine Archaeology Project) for more than a decade. This course examines Hannibals childhood and his young soldierly exploits in Spain. Then it follows him over the Pyrenees and into Gaul, the Alps, Italy, and beyond, examining his victories over the Romans, his brilliance as a military strategist, and his legacy after the Punic Wars. Along the way, students will learn about archaeologists efforts to retrace Hannibals journey through the Alps and the cutting-edge methods that they are using. Hunt has been on foot over every major Alpine pass and has now determined the most probable sites where archaeological evidence can be found to help solve the mystery.

This course on the great military leader will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities as well as our specialized list of courses on Ancient history, literary and philosophy.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Are, youll definitely want to check out the courses offered by Stanford Continuing Studies (where I also happen to work). The program also regularly offers online courses, for students living anywhere on this planet.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. Its hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks for your support!
The American Red Cross says more than a dozen people have been displaced in two fires in southwest Washington.



The first fire ignited Sunday shortly after midnight in the 4000 block of Northeast St. John's Road in Vancouver. The Red Cross said the fire at an apartment building displaced seven adults and many pets.



Hours later, Clark County Fire & Rescue responded to a blaze in the 12000 block of Northeast 184th Street in Battle Ground that displaced four adults and three children.



The Red Cross said it's assisting with basic needs, temporary housing and information about recovery services.

-- The Associated Press
By David Sarasohn

There will be lots of people missing at the Republican national convention in Cleveland this week. The party's last two presidents and last two presidential nominees found themselves unable to make it, and many of its senators, congressmen and governors - especially those whose stomachs get queasy at the idea of sharing a ballot with Donald Trump this November - checked their datebooks and discovered that they had other plans.

Still, the Oregon delegation will be there.

We're plucky that way.

But while they're up for going to Cleveland, they may not have unmixed excitement about checking into Trump Tower.

"Trump is a better choice than Hillary Clinton," says Kevin Mannix of Salem, a former state legislator and GOP nominee for governor and attorney general, in Cleveland as a delegate for John Kasich - Mannix's third choice after Scott Walker and Marco Rubio. "I'll leave it at that."

Even less excited is state Rep. Bill Post, R-Keizer, a Ted Cruz supporter elected an at-large delegate on a pledge to vote for the winner of the Oregon primary, won by Trump after both Cruz and Kasich withdrew. "I believe the nation has lost its moral compass," he explains, "and the result is Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton."

At least there is the excitement of not knowing what's going to happen. "This year, up is down and sideways," says former state senator Bruce Starr of Hillsboro, another Kasich delegate. "Who exactly is the Trump voter? It's hard to know. I'm done predicting."

Going to a convention to nominate a presidential candidate who was unimaginable a year ago is an unusual experience for a politico, even when conventions have become highly scheduled television shows with the delegates as extras. "I know," explains Post about the gathering, "it's basically one big party with a formality attached."

It's enough to stir a certain nostalgia for past times, when conventions were gatherings of party leaders making choices based on what they knew about the candidates and who had the best chance to win. "In the old days," muses Mannix, "(Kasich) would have been a great choice."

These days, Kasich says he won't even be at the convention - despite the awkwardness of being the governor of the state where it's happening. His most likely involvement will be if he has to call out the National Guard.

The Oregon delegation isn't exactly expecting to deliver the state to the nominee in November. "Oregon's a pretty blue state," notes Starr. "If a presidential candidate is in Oregon, I'm not sure why."

So far in this campaign, Oregon has seen one speech by Trump in Eugene before the primary, and one closed fund-raising event for Hillary Clinton in Portland last summer. The conventions may be the last time any Oregonians see either one.

Mannix agrees that Trump "will have more trouble in Oregon than in most other states," although he thinks Trump will draw support from blue-collar Democrats in places like Southeast Portland. "There is an anger out there among the public," he warns, "that we have to be aware of and respectful of."

Besides, there are other races out there besides the presidency.

"I'm going out there to represent Oregon," says Post, "to try to get some attention and resources sent to Oregon to win some more seats in the Oregon House.

"What the president does might affect me three years from now. What the Legislature does can affect you 90 days from now."

It will be an unusual convention; as Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post pointed out, the speakers include as many members of the Trump family (six) as U.S. senators. But even with a federal budget-sized list of Republicans finding someplace else to be this week, a lot of people will be there.

"I'm a networker, and I get a chance to build relationships with people around the country," says Starr, "and to celebrate what it means to be a Republican."

There is a complication, of course, that the presumed Republican nominee seems to be rejecting parts of what people thought it means to be a Republican.

"There are certain things I disagree with," Starr concedes. "The jury's still out to a certain extent. Ask me a year from now."

Still, there are some unambiguous attractions to traveling to Cleveland this week.

"I get to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," says Post excitedly. "That's after 30 years in rock and roll radio," before he got into political commentary.

So maybe, in this unsettling year and unnerving campaign, there's only one attitude to bring to the Republican convention, and maybe to the Democratic one in Philadelphia next week:

Rock on.

David Sarasohn's column appears on the first and third Sundays of the month. He blogs at davidsarasohn.com.
Saadat.JPG

Upon resigning her position from Portland's Community Oversight Advisory Board, Kathleen D. Saadat wrote a report in which she decried the city's lack of support. Saadat is seen here in a 2012 file photo.

(Courtesy Clark College)

A pair of Chicago academics leading a Portland group charged with overseeing police reform want out. It should be no surprise. The dysfunction of the Community Oversight Advisory Board, birthed to ensure that the Portland Police Bureau meet a federal mandate to change its ways of treating compromised citizens, has been a spectacle marked by chaotic public meetings, board-member resignations and simmering frustrations fueled by City Hall's deaf ear. Things devolved so much that the board chose to meet last week, with the academics' support, in a sequestered location so it could live-stream its proceedings to a room in the Portland Building reserved for the unruly public. Luckily, it changed course at the last minute.

http://media.oregonlive.com/opinion_impact/photo/agenda-2013jpg-da8a3522a991b9c6.jpg

Editorial Agenda 2016



Get Oregon centered

Better leadership in education

Make Portland a city that works

Build Oregon prosperity

Protect and expand personal freedom

Get pot right

_______________________________

It would not be unreasonable to expect the withdrawal request last week by Dennis Rosenbaum and Amy Watson, appointed to guide and oversee the board's work as part of a U.S. Justice Department settlement with Portland, to derail momentum on police reforms. Instead, it only amplifies the June resignation of the board's chair, Kathleen Saadat, and the 2015 resignation of former Oregon Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz, while underscoring division within the remaining 10 members of a once-15-member panel.

Ironically, bias-tinged theatrics at the board's meetings have established a new low in Portland's otherwise celebrated civic engagement. At one meeting, an angry citizen correctly pointed out that a board member had branded him a skinhead online when, in fact, he explained that he was a Jew with a history of kicking skinheads and neo-Nazis silly. The aggrieved citizen, who described himself as mentally ill, became abusive and profane in spewing invective at the board, derailing the meeting altogether and hijacking any semblance of public process. The board member's apology for the online smear, however, was issued later and directed only at the board, not the unruly citizen, making matters worse.

The relationship of Rosenbaum and Watson to the board was described in their request to the Justice Department last week as so damaged that it "prohibits restoration" following more than a year of "ambiguity, disrespect and willful undermining" of their ability to run the board,

reported. The academics made clear they felt that certain board members in Portland were trying to usurp their power. Separately, their support of a board meeting that would have excluded the public shows their worry the board was mired in backlash and carried with it the misplaced belief the board could find a way forward if only left alone. No matter. Board meetings this year have in some instances showed less constructive engagement than enabled infantilism.

The board needs to own its dysfunction, surely. But running beneath it is a greater failure: City Hall's crippling indifference to recommendations made by the board to improve the practice of policing in Portland.

No one makes it clearer than Saadat, who wrote in an "exit report" at the time of her resignation that "There is no identifiable person or entity at the City level for providing the support that the (citizens advisory board) needs" and that "the manifestation of commitment to the success of (the citizens advisory board) is not evident in the behaviors of the responsible entities, i.e., the City and the Portland Police Bureau." Separately, Rosenbaum and Watson complained they had "taken the brunt" of board frustration about a lack of support by the Justice Department as well as the city, Bernstein reported.

Oregonian editorials

reflect the collective opinion of The Oregonian editorial board, which operates independently of the newsroom.

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and Len Reed.

To respond to this editorial:

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Work in a vacuum is its own spiritual defeat. Mayor Charlie Hales; the beleaguered on-leave former police chief, Larry O'Dea; and Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who selected the board's members, are implicated in the meltdown. Exhibit A: The unanswered written plea in April from the board asking the city to drop a rule allowing a police officer involved in a fatal shooting to wait 48 hours before being asked about it. Yes, there are union complications associated with removing the rule. But no, such a letter cannot be ignored. Leaving the plea unaddressed sends this message: You don't count.

Rosenbaum and Watson suggest that Portland hit the pause button. They argue the board should not meet until the city, the Justice Department, the Portland Police Association and the Albina Ministerial Alliance reconvene to amend the settlement agreement of which they are regretfully a part, Bernstein reported.

But getting on with police reform will take more than a break and releasing Rosenbaum and Watson from their leadership roles, even as they continue to serve the board by conducting audits and reporting to the Justice Department and the city on how things go.

City Hall, and with it the police bureau, must show it takes reform seriously. The board was smart on Thursday night, when it met in public and voted to request the assistance of a court-appointed monitor to help it succeed. While Portland didn't want such an outsider early on, the example set by a monitor in Seattle suggests a sure way forward. Portland, always trying to blaze a path of its own, would do right in this instance to look beyond itself and simply get the job done.
By George Will

WASHINGTON -- Neither the unanimous decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, nor China's rejection of it, was surprising. The timing of it was, however, as serendipitous as China's rejection is ominous. Coming as Republican delegates convene on Lake Erie's shore, the tribunal's opinion about the South China Sea underscores the current frivolousness of American politics, which is fixated on a fictitious wall that will never exist but silent about realities on and above the waters that now are the world's most dangerous cockpit of national rivalries.

China's "nine-dash line" aggression -- asserting sovereignty over the South China Sea -- is being steadily implemented by the manufacture and militarization of artificial "islands" far from China's mainland, and by increasingly reckless air and naval actions in the region. China is attempting to intimidate the six nations (the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia) whose claims conflict with China's. China has threatened these nations', and others', freedom on the seas, fishing rights, oil exploration and more.

In 2013, the Philippines took its case to the Court of Arbitration, whose jurisdiction China pre-emptively rejected. The Philippines has now won most of its claims but has achieved nothing unless the United States leads regional powers in enforcing this decision. The Hague has no navy.

International law fulfills important functions but often is most successful when least important: It arbitrates disputes about rights and duties among likeminded nations that acknowledge its underlying norms. When, however, a rising nation's interests and aspirations conflict with those norms, trying to restrain this nation with those norms is like lassoing a locomotive with a cobweb.

So, although it was prudent for the Philippines to bring this case, and although the court conscientiously measured China's claims and behavior next to the pertinent precedents, the court's correct legal decision makes the world more dangerous: China now knows that only force can achieve its ends. We are, as Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has said with notable understatement, in a "long-term competitive situation."

The projection of U.S. power to the far side of the Pacific depends on alliances and cooperation -- including access to bases -- with Australia, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and others. China's aim of dominance in the region can only be achieved by weakening the U.S. allies' confidence -- particularly that of the Philippines, which seems susceptible to China's promises of development projects -- in U.S. resolve. And confidence in U.S. skill at calibrating the pressure requisite for countering China's ambitions without provoking a Chinese miscalculation in a region where U.S. military assets, especially naval, still dominate.

Two U.S. carrier groups have visited the region this year. China is developing and deploying a modern nuclear submarine fleet, land-based aircraft and anti-ship ballistic missiles, and other means of pushing back the U.S. presence. Chinese military aircraft have made dangerous approaches to U.S. military aircraft. A Taiwanese naval vessel accidentally sank, with an anti-ship missile, a Taiwanese shrimp boat. Accidents happen. And intentional acts can have unintended consequences. A single assassination loosed the cascade of events that produced the war that was devouring Europe 100 years ago.

At the start of the turn of the 20th century, the world's most formidable challenge was to integrate into the international system a rising, restless, assertive Germany. This did not go well. Early in the 21st century, China poses a comparable challenge. If this does not go well, the differences might be arbitrated by weapons undreamt of a century ago.

This week, the Republican Party will formalize its judgment that the Navy, the nuclear launch codes and other important things should be placed in the hands of someone not known for nuance, patience or interest in allies and collective security. Americans, dismayed by two consecutive commanders in chief -- the recklessness of one and the inconstancy of his successor -- must now decide whether, and if so how and by whom, they want U.S. power to be projected.

In the South China Sea, says Secretary Carter, America must steel itself for "a long campaign of firmness, and gentle but strong pushback." This will require freedom of navigation assertions, involving naval and air operations that challenge, among other things, China's expansive claims to sovereignty over islands and waters far from its mainland.

If the next president does not conduct such operations with steady, measured skill, the result could be the collapse of America's position in the world's most populous, dynamic and perhaps dangerous region, or war. Is any of this on anyone's mind in Cleveland?

George Will's email address is georgewillwashpost.com.

(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group
By Ruth Marcus

WASHINGTON -- Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's admittedly "ill-advised" remarks about Donald Trump weren't only bad for the justice and her reputation. They were bad for the Supreme Court and, consequently, for the country.

Ginsburg was correct in her scathing assessment of Trump -- and correct to express her "regret" for voicing it publicly. But the damage to the court's image and reputation is already done.

The good news for the justices is that their institution is held in higher regard, for what that's worth, than the other two branches of government.

The bad news is that this support is at an all-time low. According to polling last September by the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of the court, while 50 percent viewed it favorably. By contrast, in January 1988, just 13 percent had an unfavorable view of the court, and 79 percent saw it favorably.

Embedded in this declining assessment is a significant partisan divide: 38 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners viewed the court favorably, compared with 64 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Interestingly, not so long ago, this ideological gap was reversed: in 2008, 80 percent of Republicans viewed the court positively, versus 64 percent of Democrats.

Why does this matter? Why should the justices care? After all, the court is empowered to say what the law is, whether or not the public is happy with its performance and its pronouncements. The justices enjoy life tenure.

Yet stature and public acceptance matter. The court has no independent power, of purse or of sword, to enforce its rulings. The court "cannot buy support for its decision by spending money, and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees," a three-justice plurality noted in the 1992 abortion ruling declining to overrule Roe v. Wade. "The court's power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception."

It is naive to imagine that justices don't have political views, or strong political preferences. Of course they do. It is the rare justice who ends up on the court without having ties to politics and politicians.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in arguing that he needn't recuse himself from a case in which Vice President Dick Cheney was a party after the two went on a hunting trip, "from the earliest days down to modern times justices have had close personal relationships with the president and other officers of the executive."

But there is a difference -- a big one -- between having a pre-existing political relationship or predilection that the public might reasonably presume (no one would mistake Ginsburg for a potential Trump voter) and one that is so strongly held that the justice feels impelled to make it public.

That approach is not mere window-dressing. Judicial silence is the tribute that the imperative to appear impartial pays to reality.

Some people will read this and snort: The justices are political animals like all the others; they decide based on their political views, not on the law.

This dismissiveness ignores and obscures the distinction between ideology and partisanship. Broadly speaking, Republicans and Democrats have differing conceptions of the role of the judiciary, the meaning of the Constitution, and the proper approach to its interpretation; it is no surprise, and no tragedy, that judges appointed by Republican presidents tend toward one set of reasonably predictable conclusions and those named by Democratic presidents another.

But there are, or should be, limits to this linkage. Ruling on the reflexive basis of partisanship is different from a decision guided by ideology. That is one reason the court's 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore was so disturbing. The five-justice conservative majority adopted a one-time-only expansive reading of the Equal Protection Clause that conflicted with their usual narrow interpretation. This was a liberal jurisprudential approach in cynical service of a conservative political outcome: handing the election to George W. Bush.

In this context, Ginsburg's remarks -- like Scalia's duck-hunting -- present a problem, and not just for her. They drag the court down to the level of other political actors, into the partisan muck. They reinforce the public's perception that this game, too, is rigged -- more than it actually is. Evidence of its independence: this term's surprise rulings upholding affirmative action and abortion rights.

Judges aren't the neutral umpires, mechanically calling balls and strikes, of Chief Justice John Roberts' imagining. But they can aspire to that ideal, and should -- on and off the bench.

Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcuswashpost.com.

(c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group
Search Plane.jpg

Two airplanes from the Oregon Wing of the Civil Air Patrol searched for a missing Cessna aircraft that was reported downed near Brookings on July 5, 2016.

(Oregon Wing of the Civil Air Patrol)

Updated 7:30 a.m., Friday, July 22: Divers found the plane off the coast near Brookings. One body has been recovered.

GRANTS PASS -- John Belnap would have experienced a "black hole" of darkness within moments after taking off from Brookings on the moonless night of July 4, when his Cessna 172 crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

The relatively inexperienced pilot from Grants Pass had some instrument training, but two veteran pilots with more than 75 years of experience between them doubt his ability to navigate safely in those conditions.

They believe it's almost certain that Belnap, licensed to fly since 2014, experienced what's called spatial disorientation, the same condition that caused John F. Kennedy Jr. to spiral into the Atlantic off the coast of Martha's Vineyard, Mass., exactly 17 years ago today.

"As soon as he got offshore, he's looking at a black hole," said Robert Katz of Dallas, Texas, a flight instructor and 35-year pilot who tracks plane crashes across the nation. He contacted the Daily Courier after reading of the Belnap crash. "No useful horizon at all. You don't see a thing. There is no doubt in my mind this pilot became spatially disoriented."

Belnap, 46, his son Max, 17, and friend Ryan Merker, 17, are presumed dead. The Belnap family, including wife Cheryl and three other children, had met John Belnap for Fourth of July festivities in Brookings.

Aside from personal effects and the nose wheel of the plane, the main wreckage has yet to be found from the crash, approximately a half-mile from shore at Lone Ranch Beach northwest of Brookings.

Once the wreckage is found, the National Transportation Safety Board will attempt to determine an official cause.

One of the few clues of the doomed flight came from a resident above Highway 101.

Debra Itzen of Brookings was tending to her horses when she saw the plane go right over her house at 11:15 p.m., only about 150 feet off the ground, headed for the ocean. She likely heard the crash off in the distance, but unable to see anything, she dismissed a "crunching" sound she heard to Fourth of July fireworks and didn't learn of the crash until the next day.

Itzen said the Cessna flew low and slow, but with no signs the engine was straining, sputtering or stalling.

Chances are Belnap was straining to figure out up from down by then.

Spatial disorientation, commonly called vertigo, causes people to lose their bearings. It's a conflict in the brain between what the eyes see and what the body feels.

"You get it as soon as you lose your horizon," Katz said.

"You suddenly realize, 'I don't know what direction I'm facing. I don't know if I'm going up or down, turning right or left,'" said Larry Graves, Josephine County airports manager and lifelong pilot. "It's a fact, you can't tell where that airplane is going unless you're trained and have recent experience flying the plane on the instruments."

Belnap did have some instrument training. Anyone with a pilot's license, even at the "visual flight rules" level that Belnap was at, has to get three hours of training solely on the instruments.

He also had a smartphone application called ForeFlight with GPS, with some of the same capabilities as the standard "six-pack" of instruments on Cessna -- air speed, attitude indicator, altitude, vertical speed, heading and turn coordination.

Jonathan Jenson, a fellow nurse anesthetist at Asante Three Rivers Medical Center who co-owned the Cessna with Belnap, said his friend was conscientious and safety minded. Belnap was well aware of the dangers, having lost his father and two younger siblings in a small plane crash in Arizona in 1982.

"He and I had those conversations many times, you have to learn to trust the instruments," Jenson said. "My guess is he would have done that. When you find yourself in instrument conditions, you turn and rely on the instruments."

Katz and Graves believe no matter the trust, and knowledge of the instruments, Belnap was a long shot in those conditions to keep the plane in the air. It takes 450 hours of instrument time to even qualify to take the test to be instrument-certified, Katz said.

"Three hours is just enough time combined with an iPad to fool a pilot into thinking he can handle this scenario," Katz said. "Instructors fail to demonstrate to students the reality of just how fast the situation will deteriorate because (they feel like) it is 'unpleasant' for the student to experience."

Graves said with no recent instrument experience or training, spatial disorientation can quickly cause a life-or-death situation.

"It's a very difficult and challenging thing to do, especially if it catches you off guard," he said.

Graves said he wouldn't have made the flight from Brookings to Grants Pass that night, "and I've been flying for 40 years. I avoid those situations when I can."

Making a turn over the ocean while gaining the required altitude to clear mountains later in the flight would have made the task even tougher, he said.

"One of the most difficult things to do under instrument conditions is to maintain a constant turn rate," Graves said.. "You have to suspend your disbelief. You have to disregard what your brain is telling you and focus on the instrument panel."

Belnap had flown at night before, Jenson said. He flew to Salinas, Calif., every month for work as a nurse anesthetist, often landing at night, but in a heavily populated, well-lit area.

Hours before the crash, Belnap talked to Jenson about not making the flight if weather conditions were poor, but they didn't talk about darkness.

"The fact that it was a new moon made this one challenging," Jenson said in retrospect. "Whether that had anything to do with it, we may never know. I still think the plane was mechanically sound. I've been over it and over it."

Katz said spatial disorientation would have been a problem on the entire flight path to Grants Pass, which is mostly mountainous wilderness.

To add more context, Graves said flying just from Cave Junction to Grants Pass at night is a total instrument-only flight, and "you can't fly it successfully looking for visual references."

For Katz, it's a classic example of overconfidence in an ability to fly, an especially challenging endeavor.

"In an airplane, what you see and feel is in conflict. Flying an airplane is like balancing on the head of a pin.

"Human beings do not have the natural capacity to maintain a physical sense of balance without a stable visual reference -- either the natural horizon or an artificial horizon" via the attitude indicator, Katz said.

He said spatial disorientation probably happened extremely quickly to Belnap.

"This totally preventable scenario has occurred so many times throughout history that the NTSB has the investigation process down to a science," Katz said. "The circumstances are almost identical to the JFK Jr. incident.

"I study these incidents every day. Pilots are not learning from the mistakes of others."

-- The Associated Press
Ammon Bundy and his followers occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County as a "base for political operations'' to stake claim to the federal property, his attorney Marcus Mumford and brother Ryan Bundy argue in newly-filed court papers.

"The specific steps and lengths to which these defendants endeavored, including the establishment of a perimeter, the changing of the sign and renaming of the facility, the taking over of routine maintenance and cleaning, and the managing and control of the property all show that this was no random or spontaneous act of dangerousness or recklessness, but that it was a careful attempt by citizens acting in good faith... and in lawful protest of their government's actions,'' the attorney wrote.

Mumford described his client Ammon Bundy and his brother Ryan Bundy as political activists known for their strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and views challenging federal control of public land.

The 28-page motion is a request for the pretrial release of Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy, who have been in custody for five and a half months. But it could very well serve as their defense brief for trial, set to start Sept. 7.

Attached to the brief is 58 pages of statements from supporting witnesses. Among those are a Burns bartender who said business was good in town during the refuge takeover; a fifth-generation Harney County rancher who visited the refuge and said he heard Ammon Bundy lead prayer services, even calling for the safety of FBI agents and other federal officers; and the former Harney County fire chief who resigned during the occupation and stood in support of the Bundys.

Read Ammon Bundy/Ryan Bundy's motion for pretrial release

Read Ammon Bundy's declaration

The Bundys are among 26 defendants indicted on a charge of conspiring to impede federal officers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from carrying out their work at the refuge through "intimidation, threats and force.'' The occupation lasted 41 days, from Jan. 2 through Feb. 11.

Shortly after the Bundys' arrest, a federal magistrate judge rejected their argument that the refuge takeover was a peaceful protest and ordered them detained. The judge found they were among the key players who took over the federal property in Harney County with a show of force, breaking the law from "day one,'' and then ignored orders to leave the refuge for nearly a month.

Prosecutors have described the heavily armed guards that were posted at the entrances to the refuge during the takeover, and the seizure by FBI agents of more than 50 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition left behind after the occupation ended.

The Bundy brothers have pleaded not guilty to the conspiracy charge. Seven of the defendants have pleaded guilty to the federal conspiracy charge; an eighth is scheduled to enter a guilty plea Tuesday.

The Bundy brothers admit they were part of the occupation, and, contrary to Ammon Bundy's recent balking in court, acknowledge their roles in setting up, organizing and leading it, Ammon Bundy's lawyer wrote. But the Bundys contend their actions were not criminal, since they were "engaged in a deeply important and passionate political dispute.''

One of the statements included as an exhibit to Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy's joint motion for pretrial release in the Oregon standoff case. This signed statement was from the owner of The Narrows RV campground near the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. (Court document)

The Bundys' "lawful exercise of constitutional and statutory rights'' cannot be an unlawful conspiracy, Mumford wrote, as they were exercising their rights to free speech, assembly, and the right to bear arms.

Ammon Bundy, according to his lawyer, never carried a personal firearm during the refuge occupation, and "consistently advocated for civic involvement, speech, and responsible protest.''

The statement directly contradicts federal court documents, in which an FBI agent said a .40-caliber handgun was seized from Ammon Bundy when he was taken into custody on Jan. 26.

Mumford quoted from President Barack Obama's speech in Cuba in March, in which he said, "citizens should be free to speak their minds without fear - to organize, and to criticize their government and to protest peacefully.''

The Bundys were attempting what's called an "adverse possession claim'' to the refuge - the occupation of land to which another person has title with the intention of possessing it as one's own, the motion said.

Ammon Bundy never became a member of any militia group and does not consider himself part of the "sovereign citizen movement,'' his attorney said.

He claims that Ammon Bundy began visiting with the Harney County ranchers Dwight Hammond Jr. and son Steven Hammond independently, and then participated in the Jan. 2 protest in Burns of the Hammonds' return to prison for arson.

After the protest, Ammon Bundy did propose there should be an "organized and focused'' expansion of the demonstration at the refuge, and it should be "principled, non-violent and lawful,'' Mumford wrote. A local sheriff's deputy was present at the Jan. 2 gathering in the parking lot of the Safeway in Burns where Ammon Bundy proposed the idea of occupying the refuge, his attorney wrote.

Ryan Bundy was among the group that first traveled to the refuge on Jan. 2, not Ammon Bundy, according to the document. After the initial group made sure there were no federal officers present, the two brothers and others began "staking a claim'' to the property, the lawyer wrote.

Part of a statement from former Harney County fire chief Chris Briels in support of the Bundy brothers, included as an exhibit to Ammon Bundy's and Ryan Bundy's motion for pretrial release. (Court document)

Under Ammon Bundy's leadership, the occupiers called themselves the "Citizens for Constitutional Freedom,'' the motion said.

Before his arrest on Jan. 26, Ammon Bundy contends he never received any "formal demand'' by anyone claiming ownership of the refuge property, or learned of any criminal allegations or warrant issued against him, his lawyer wrote.

Part of the motion criticizes the courts' continued detention of the Bundy brothers. Mumford argued that there's no evidence the Bundy brothers would be a danger to anyone if released.

Both have strong ties to their local communities, and their families are involved in church, school and extra-curricular activities.

In his own words, Ammon Bundy wrote that he'd never spent a night in jail before he was charged in the refuge case and doesn't travel out of the country. He's owned a fleet maintenance business since he was 23 years old, but has lost over half of his clients, and half of his employees since he's been in custody, he said. He lives with his wife of 15 years, and six children , ages 1 to 13, in Emmett, Idaho. They have an apple orchid of 250 apple trees, and run a "you pick'' operation in the fall.

If released before trial, he said he has no reason to flee.

"I refuse to be a fugitive,'' he wrote. "I love my family, my life, my country and my freedom too much.''

He said the refuge prosecution case is his "great opportunity'' to show the overreach of federal agencies.

"The exposure in this case will bring to light how federal agencies are discrediting and disregarding all three (government) branches' powers and usurping their powers as their own,'' Ammon Bundy said.

Any concern that Ammon Bundy or his brother Ryan Bundy would engage in future protests while on release pending trial also is baseless, the motion said. Both are among seven Oregon standoff defendants also charged with federal conspiracy, assault and other charges stemming from the 2014 standoff with officers outside their father's Bunkerville ranch in Nevada.

"This is the first time they have been held to answer for serious criminal charges, and all evidence indicates that they take these charges and this controversy seriously, that they respect this Court and the law and that they have a strong desire to defend themselves and vindicate their principles through legal process,'' the motion said.

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonian
The Portland Timbers support group, the Timbers Army, had a special welcome for the Cascadia Cup rival Seattle Sounders on Sunday.

Providence Park was roiling as the final strains of the national anthem hung in the air.

As cheers exploded, a red-and-black tifo was rolled out -- "Legends Never Sleep," a play on the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie franchise.

After the three narrative panels were raised, the likeness of Freddy Krueger rose up. The display was punctuated with a banner reading "Sweet Dreams."

Take a look.

-- Molly Blue
ISTANBUL -- The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with the justice minister saying Sunday that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers.



In addition to those mentioned by Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, dozens of arrest warrants have been issued for judges and prosecutors deemed to be government opponents.



The government has also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.



"The cleansing (operation) is continuing. Some 6,000 detentions have taken place. The number could surpass 6,000," Bozdag said in televised comments.



The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities, ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan.



Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets into the early hours Sunday in half a dozen cities after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Erdogan, Turkey's top politician for 13 years.



It was an emotional display by Turks, who rallied in headscarves and long dresses, T-shirts and work boots, some walking hand-in-hand with their children. Rather than toppling him, the attempted coup that left some 265 dead and 1,440 wounded appears to have bolstered Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.



The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."



"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at the rally in Istanbul, said Sunday morning.



Gen. Umit Dunda said the dead included at least 104 conspirators, describing them as mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and armored units.



Officials claimed the conspirators were loyal to moderate U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen, a staunch democracy advocate who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey. He strongly denies the charges.



Funeral ceremonies and prayers for those killed in the coup were held in Ankara and Istanbul on Sunday, where relatives beside themselves with grief. Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died in an attempted military coup.



Sela prayers are traditionally recited from mosques during funerals, though they are also performed to rally people, as they were all night Friday during tense coup hours.



A government official said autopsies have been completed on 165 people, including 115 reclaimed by their families. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.



Forty policemen, including twin brothers, were killed when the renegade soldiers attacked a special forces station in Ankara.



The victims also included Erdogan campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year old son Abdullah, killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul on Friday night.



Photojournalist Mustafa Cambaz also took to the streets, following calls by the president for people to oppose the coup attempt. Cambaz, who worked for the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper, was killed by gunfire in Istanbul.



The elder brother of one of Erdogan's chief advisers was also killed in gunfire while protesting the coup in front of the Istanbul Municipality building. Ilhan Varank died during clashes that lasted five hours.



The wide reach of the government crackdown raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a tumultuous region swept by conflict and extremism.



Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.



"It will allow him (Erdogan) to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before and find strong public support within the country," he said.



Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve."



Security forces on Sunday rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged coup links. The state news agency Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for their alleged involvement with the group reportedly responsible for the failed coup.



The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." The agency said 58 homes of prosecutors and judges have been searched.



Officials say 2,745 judges and prosecutors across the country have been dismissed.



The coup attempt began late Friday with tanks rolling into the streets of the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul as Erdogan was on vacation. Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night. It quickly became clear, however, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government. In a dramatic iPhone interview broadcast on TV, Erdogan urged supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.



In an unusual show of unity, Turkey's four main political parties released a joint declaration denouncing the coup attempt, as did Turkey's NATO allies, including President Barack Obama.



Before the weekend's chaos, Turkey -- a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group -- had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.



Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen but at a news conference Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.



"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.



U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny."

The top U.S. military officer Sunday said U.S. officials were surprised by the attempted overthrow of the Turkish government.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an interview with The Associated Press that he was pleased by the response of top Turkish military leaders to the coup attempt led by a minority of officers.

Dunford was in Afghanistan when the coup attempt was made.

Flights resumed late Saturday into Istanbul's Ataturk Airport after being halted for nearly 24 hours but Turkish Airlines said Sunday it had to cancel 196 flights because of a backlog of traffic.



-- The Associated Press
A longer version of this article is also available online from Reveal, The Center for Investigative Reporting.

By Jennifer LaFleur, Reveal, from The Center for Investigative Reporting

The USS De Haven sailed from Hawaii's Pearl Harbor on May 5, 1958, carrying 240 men deep into the Pacific on a secret mission.

Gunner's mate Wayne Brooks had only a vague idea of their destination. But within a few days, he would experience an explosion so immense and bright that he could see his own bones. He and his crewmates had been assigned to witness Operation Hardtack I, a series of nuclear tests in the Pacific.

Atomic Veterans Day

In 2005, the Oregon legislature passed a resolution designating July 16th as Atomic Veterans Day. That date was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the United States' first atomic test - code-named Trinity - set off in New Mexico as part of the Manhattan project.

The De Haven, a destroyer, was one of dozens of ships assigned to the operation at Enewetak Atoll, Bikini Atoll and Johnston Island. It would be their crews' initiation into the ranks of hundreds of thousands of service members now known as "atomic veterans."

What seems like a story long tucked away in history books remains a very real struggle for those veterans still alive, the radiation cleanup crews who followed and their families - many of them sick and lacking not just the federal compensation, but also the recognition they believe they deserve.

As they closed in on Enewetak on May 12, Brooks spotted a far-off flash in the distance: a nuclear blast.

The next morning, a countdown blared from the De Haven's PA system. A nuclear test - code name Koa - was set off from a barge in the lagoon of Enewetak Atoll. Its blast would release at least 75 times the power of the bomb that killed more than 130,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

Brooks, a slender Texan who now lives in Gaston, had enlisted in the Navy a year earlier at 17. That morning, he manned his gun station on deck. He had no special goggles or clothing. He and the other sailors wore long-sleeved shirts and tucked their pant legs into their socks. They did as they had been told, turning away from the blast site and putting their hands over their eyes.

The flash was so bright that even 20 miles from the blast, Brooks, now 76, said, "When you put your hands over your eyes, you saw your bones in your hands and in your fingers."

Shockwaves moved across the water. When the ship began to rock, Brooks uncovered his eyes and turned back toward the blast site. He saw a mushroom cloud rising into the sky.

"It seemed like a fire was burning inside a cloud," He said.

Three days later, Brooks witnessed another blast. The shot, detonated 500 feet underwater, sent a column of water hundreds of feet into the air. The De Haven, only 3 miles from the explosion, shook "violently with a loud cracking," and Brooks recalled rivets popping from their metal moorings.

His story is not unique. In the aftermath of World War II and during the height of the Cold War - between 1946 and 1962 - the U.S. detonated more than 200 above-ground and undersea nuclear bombs. Over three months, Brooks would witness 27 of them.

In the decades since, Brooks has suffered throat and lung problems, rashes and prostate cancer. Like other atomic veterans, he blames his ailments on his radiation exposure.

Watch a video about America's atomic vets.

Brooks has applied multiple times for the special VA compensation reserved for atomic veterans. He was denied each time on the grounds that his pains and diseases are not among those that qualify.

Many atomic vets feel, as Brooks does, abused, neglected and forgotten by the government and a country that exposed them to unforeseen risks.

"We were used as guinea pigs - every one of us," Brooks said.

The estimated number of service members who participated in the tests varies from source to source, but could be as high as 400,000. Brooks is among the fortunate: Even with his health challenges, he still is alive.

One of the few studies of atomic veterans looked at about 3,000 participants in a 1957 Nevada test shot code named Smoky. Released in 1979 by the Center for Disease Control, it found that they had more than twice the rate of leukemia than their peers - eight cases versus 3.5. Other studies have been inconclusive.

The atomic testing program included a wide range of experiments. Thousands of service members were on ships in the Pacific. Thousands more crouched in trenches carved into the Nevada desert. Pilots and their crews flew planes into mushroom clouds. Others were underwater in the ocean as blasts were detonated, swimming as frogmen or in submarines.

During the nuclear testing era, troops were exposed to detonations to see how they would react to a nuclear attack and whether equipment still would function.

All of the atomic vets were sworn to secrecy. Until the secrecy was lifted decades later, they could not tell anyone, even their doctors, about their experiences.

Scientists had known from the earliest days of building the atomic bomb that radiation posed risks. Research found increased rates of certain cancers among the survivors of the Japanese bombings. It also showed that the children of survivors were more likely to have smaller heads and physical disabilities.

But there never was a coordinated attempt to study or track the health effects of radiation on the atomic vets or their children.

"They never used the knowledge that they could have gotten from us," Brooks said.

Brooks is a gentle man who ties back his long gray hair in a ponytail. He still speaks with a West Texas accent. He belongs to the National Association of Atomic Veterans, a group trying to help others get compensation and push for recognition. He also coordinates quarterly meetings of local atomic veterans at the American Legion hall in Tigard, where they share their experiences and support one another. But their numbers have dwindled.

One of the members was Jim Bunting. He died in December at 76, after a series of health problems. But he attended an atomic veterans barbecue a year ago at the American Legion hall .

A thin man with sharp blue eyes and a trim mustache, Bunting got around with the aid of a cane. He wore a blue jacket covered with military patches, including one from the National Association of Atomic Veterans.

Bunting became an atomic veteran when he witnessed the largest above-ground nuclear explosion on U.S. soil: Shot Hood, a 74-kiloton blast in the Nevada desert. More than 3,000 personnel were there, two-thirds of them Marines. Like Bunting, then 18, many were on temporary assignment from Camp Pendleton near San Diego.

Before dawn on July 5, 1957, Bunting and his fellow Marines clambered down into trenches. He remembered that day vividly.

He said he crouched in a trench 3,500 yards from the detonation site. He was given dark glasses to wear. As nearly every atomic vet was told to do before a blast, he put his arms over his eyes. When the flash came, he saw the bones in his arms.

After the blast, Bunting and other Marines were ordered out of the trenches.

"We played war games right up to ground zero, where the sand had melted into glass," Bunting said. "We could feel the crunching beneath our feet. Anyway, that was about the size of it. It was a hell of a firecracker, we thought, hell of a firecracker."

The health problems came later.

"I've had a heart attack, three strokes, an aneurysm, abdominal aneurysm operation, which went to my feet later on," Bunting said at the barbecue. "I couldn't walk for two years."

Bunting did not apply for atomic veterans compensation because he knew his conditions were not eligible, even though studies have linked radiation exposure to heart attacks and strokes.

But he wanted atomic veterans to get recognition. He died of congestive heart failure without seeing that happen.

Illnesses strike family members

Navy veteran Lincoln Grahlfs, 93, was one of the first atomic vets. Now he is one of the oldest. He is sharp and commanding. After retiring from a long career teaching college sociology, he went back to school to earn his Ph.D. For his dissertation, he researched what happened to atomic veterans.

Grahlfs was the lead quartermaster on a seagoing tugboat. He was stationed in San Francisco when the Navy asked for volunteers to participate in an atomic test.

"My commanding officer said a guy would have to be crazy to volunteer for that service," Grahlfs said.

Too few volunteers stepped up, so Grahlfs and others were ordered to the Marshall Islands. He was assigned to Operation Crossroads, a series of tests conducted 70 years ago around Bikini Atoll.

He was the helmsman, steering a 146-foot-long wooden-hulled tug toward an atomic blast code named Able. The bomb exploded on the morning of July 1, 1946, about 10 miles away. He and his crew were told when the countdown started to put their arms over their eyes. He had no special glasses.

Grahlfs still had his arm over his eyes when the pressure wave hit.

"It's hard to describe. It was really like something slamming into you," he said. "When I felt the pressure wave, I took my arm down and started looking. Already, there was a mushroom cloud. Beautiful peach-colored, and that was it."

But that was not the end of it. Within a few hours, Grahlfs' tugboat and others were ordered into the highly radioactive lagoon where the bomb had been detonated. Empty ships placed varying distances from the blast to test their resilience were ablaze. He and his crew helped put out a fire on the USS Independence.

He knows that he is fortunate to be alive, despite health problems that include several bouts with skin cancer and prostate cancer over the years.

But his bigger concern is what his exposure might have done to his children and grandchildren.

Grahlfs' daughter suffered from endocrine problems throughout her teenage years and died of a malignant brain tumor in 1996 at 46. One son has bipolar disorder. Another has Addison's disease, a rare adrenal condition. His granddaughter was born with a deformed foot.

"That's a pretty full plate for somebody who never had any history of any of these things in my family," Grahlfs said.

Why, he asks, has the government never studied what radiation exposure may have done to families? He works with the National Association of Atomic Veterans, often taking calls from others vets trying to get help for themselves and others.

"When my daughter was dying, I simply told her that I will not stop fighting for justice for these veterans until I die," he said, "and I've kept my promise so far."

The children and grandchildren of other atomic vets have reported immune disorders, cancers and reproductive problems. Veterans and their families have pushed for a federally funded study of the generational effects of the testing era.

Leading the charge was Pat Broudy, the widow of atomic veteran Charles Broudy, who died of lymphatic cancer in 1977, at 56.

"We have a lot of kids that are terribly affected by their ... father's exposure to radiation," Broudy told a federal advisory committee in February 1995. "I've testified in 15 congressional hearings on this issue."

Congress eventually called for a feasibility test to see whether a study of the families of atomic veterans could be done. Researchers concluded in 1995 that it would be too difficult to find subjects and connect them to their parents' exposure levels.

Early days of nuclear testing

The U.S. nuclear weapons testing program began July 16, 1945, part of the Manhattan Project that led up to bombs being dropped on two Japanese cities less than a month later.

Code named Trinity, the blast went off at Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico.

Many credited the two bombs dropped on Japan for ending World War II and the U.S. military's subsequent atomic tests for preventing World War III.

"We designed and developed nuclear weapons as a deterrent," said John Hopkins, former associate director for the nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, who retired in 1993. "The idea (was) that if we did our job well, it would be a credible deterrent to our opponents. In that sense, if we did our job well, they would never be used."

Soon after the war ended, the U.S. ramped up its nuclear testing program - flexing its strength before the Soviet Union. The first post-war test was Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Testing continued, returning to U.S. soil in Nevada in 1951.

Blasts were designed to study what a nuclear weapon would do to a wide range of subjects - humans, buildings, animals, even fabrics.

Several tests included animals - sheep, monkeys, pigs, horses, goats, actual guinea pigs - to see how they would be affected by the blast. They did not fare well, remembers Walter Kennedy, who was an Army sergeant based out of Fort Lewis, Washington.

Kennedy, who now lives in Gaston, was assigned to put animals into trenches before the Nevada tests. After the blasts, he a drove a front loader, dumping dirt over their charred carcasses.

"I didn't like it," he said. "But that was my orders to do it, and I did it because ... when you get an order, you got to do it whether you like it or not."

Kennedy, now 84, participated in five atomic tests. He has no idea why the animals were exposed, he said, but he knows what happened to them.

"Oh, they died. They never got out of the holes," he said. "I come in the next day and covered them up. Those animals are still buried right there where they were buried at when I first put them in the ground."

View a map of America's atomic testing between 1946 and 1961.

Concerns about radiation grew more widespread as the tests continued. Top scientists and politicians began to push for a ban on atmospheric testing. In 1963, the Partial Test Ban Treaty - signed by the U.S., United Kingdom and Soviet Union - stopped all but underground nuclear testing.

But testing continued underground. The U.S. conducted more than 800 such tests after 1963.

It was not until 1996 that all testing by detonation, even underground, was banned.

Today, the U.S. Department of Energy tests weapons using complex computer simulations. It also evaluates nuclear weapons by studying the impact of shooting high-speed projectiles at tiny plutonium targets.

Health problems appear

As the years after the tests passed, many individuals - both military and civilian - who worked in connection with the atomic testing program reported health problems. Residents who lived downwind from the Nevada tests reported thyroid problems, central nervous system tumors and multiple cancers.

Health effects of radiation can take years to appear. As some atomic vets began getting sick, they risked violating their secrecy oaths and started to speak up.

In 1988, Congress passed legislation to compensate radiation-exposed veterans who developed any of 13 types of cancer. Over the years, others were added to the list. Today, 21 cancers, known as presumptive diseases, are covered.

Veterans with these presumptive diseases do not have to prove the cancers were caused by radiation exposure, but they do have to prove they participated in nuclear tests. They are eligible for a monthly VA disability stipend that can range from about $130 to nearly $2,900. Spouses of veterans who died of presumptive illnesses also are eligible for compensation.

Veterans with other diseases - such as tumors of the central nervous system, thyroid problems and cancers not on the presumptive list - must prove their illnesses are connected to radiation exposure. Proving that connection often is difficult.

Because of the secrecy around the nuclear tests, some veterans do not have documents showing they participated in the tests. In addition, many of the documents that did exist were destroyed in a fire at a military records facility in St. Louis more than four decades ago.

Congress passed legislation in 1990 to compensate residents who lived downwind of atomic blasts, uranium miners and on-site participants in atomic tests. The program, administered by the U.S. Department of Justice, awards a lump sum of $50,000 to $100,000 to applicants with any of 20 cancers if a doctor attests that the disease was caused by ionizing radiation. Some atomic veterans are eligible for this program, but any who receive it have to pay back prior VA compensation for the same health condition.

Not all veterans are aware they are eligible for any compensation.

Frank Farmer didn't know he could get compensation until 2003, when he spotted a notice on the bulletin board at the American Legion hall in Lebanon.

The notice read, "Wanted: atomic veterans," he said. "I told my wife, 'I think that's me.' "

Farmer said he's one of the lucky ones. The 80-year-old has had tinnitus and a rash ever since he was in the atomic blasts. He was aboard the USS Hooper Island during Operation Hardtack I. He gets monthly compensation of about $600 for his hearing loss.

Thousands of other veterans died without compensation.

Howard Pierson was a young Marine at Camp Pendleton in 1957 when he was bused to the Nevada desert to witness Shot Hood from a trench.

Decades later, in 1999, Pierson was diagnosed with lung cancer. In less than two years, he was dead.

"I don't think he had any idea that having participated in that test, when he was 19 years old, that would cause him to die at an early age of 62," said his widow, Debra Pierson.

Debra Pierson, who works in veterans services for Larimer County, Colorado, remembers her husband mentioning the tests. She suggested he apply for compensation.

The application was denied. Lung cancer was not a presumptive illness at that time.

But Debra Pierson wasn't going to give up. In July 2000, she took her husband's case to the Board of Veterans Appeals, a review panel within the VA. Once again, the claim was denied.

In 2002, two years after Howard Pierson died, lung cancer was added to the presumptive list. By default, Debra Pierson became the beneficiary of her husband's compensation payments of about $1,250 per month.

But she felt strongly that the case should be retroactive to the date her husband applied - not the date when lung cancer made it on the presumptive list. She went back to the review board and asked for an earlier effective date, but that request was denied.

Years later, Debra Pierson consulted a doctor who reviewed her husband's records and wrote to the VA stating that he thought Howard Pierson's cancer was connected to radiation exposure.

While the board still denied retroactive payments, it said a "clear and unmistakable error has been found" in not ruling previously that Howard Pierson's cancer had been service connected.

"To me, that's still a win," Debra Pierson said.

The process was arduous and complicated, even for someone who makes a living helping veterans apply for benefits. She hopes what she learned can help others.

"I believe that even though I never served in uniform, the fact that I took my husband's claim all the way up to the Court of Appeal for Veteran Claims makes me understand the process of the system a little bit better," she said. "I'm a little bit more likely to talk a veteran into continuing the claim, though they are ready to give up."

But that doesn't make up for the loss of her husband, whom she called "Howdy."

"I didn't get to spend our golden years with my husband," she said. "He didn't get to hold his first grandson. He didn't see ... our son serve in Iraq."

Reveal asked the VA for the total number of radiation compensation claims, the number granted and the number denied since the 1988 law was passed.

It provided the number of claims since Oct. 1: 520. It also said 115 were pending as of May 17.

But some atomic veterans did not pursue medical treatment or compensation because they had taken oaths of secrecy when they served. The veil of secrecy was not lifted officially until 1996.

Veil of secrecy lifted

Following a 1993 investigation by the Albuquerque Tribune, President Bill Clinton created a committee to look into U.S. human radiation experiments.

Reporter Eileen Welsome's six-year investigation revealed the names of 18 Americans who in the 1940s were injected with plutonium without their knowledge by government scientists.

The committee was asked to look into not only plutonium injections, but also other radiation experiments. Atomic veterans were not included in the study at first.

Then, as the committee solicited public input, "overwhelmingly, the single largest group of people who responded right from the beginning were atomic veterans or their families," said Ruth Faden, the committee's chairwoman.

When the committee's findings were released in October 1995, Clinton publicly apologized for the radiation experiments, and the veterans' veil of secrecy was lifted soon after, in 1996.

The announcement was lost in other news on that day: A Los Angeles jury announced the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Beyond compensation, many atomic veterans want to be recognized for their sacrifice.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan issued a proclamation making July 16 National Atomic Veterans' Day. But it was a one-time event. Oregon is one of a few states that recognize Atomic Veterans' Day each year.

Year after year, bills have been introduced in Congress to create a service medal for atomic veterans. None have made it out of committee. Similar bills were introduced once again in in early June in the House and Senate.

Pushing for change has been a challenge for a group whose members are aging and dying. The youngest remaining atomic veterans are in their 70s. Many more are in their 80s and 90s.

Now, the push has been taken up by a younger group of veterans who never witnessed the atomic blasts but were exposed to their aftermath.

Marshall Islands cleanup

Decades after Wayne Brooks witnessed his last atomic tests in the Marshall Islands, troops returned to ready some islands to be returned to the Marshallese. Of the 8,000 personnel who worked on the cleanup from 1972 to 1980, nearly 2,700 were Army engineers such as Steve Harrison.

Going to a tropical island sounded like a plum assignment to Harrison, who now lives in Keizer. His buddy volunteered, so he did, too.

"We were the 'Rock and Rebar Crew,' " said Harrison, now 58. "That's what they called us because we picked up concrete blocks, rebar, anything man-made."

They scraped tons of dirt from island surfaces and gathered up debris. They often worked in T-shirts and shorts.

Radioactive materials were mixed with cement and buried in a blast crater on the island of Runit. Later, the crater was sealed under an 18-inch-thick concrete dome.

Just as the atomic veterans experienced illnesses years after their exposure, the cleanup veterans now are beginning to get sick.

"One of my buddies there just recently came down with lung cancer," Harrison said. "There were (a) number of guys, though, that are sick with different kinds of cancers, skin rashes, and they're all being denied by the VA.

These new atomic veterans have taken their plight to Congress.

U.S. Rep. Mark Takai, D-Hawaii, introduced the Atomic Veterans Healthcare Parity Act in November, which would extend atomic veteran compensation to cleanup crews. In April, Sens. Al Franken, D-Minn., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., introduced similar legislation.

The veterans also share the belief that they have been neglected.

"We were told that it was just going to be cleaning up the islands of debris," Harrison said. "They told us that it would be basically like going to the dentist and getting an X-ray done, but then they didn't talk about the six months, 24 hours a day that we're exposed."

Editor's note: Jennifer LaFleur's father, Lee LaFleur, was a Marine in the 1957 Shot Hood in Nevada. He died in December 2012.

Oregon atomic vets
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Workers hang signs in preparation for the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena on Sunday in Cleveland. The convention begins Monday and continues through Thursday.

(Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

CLEVELAND -- Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus is banking on this week becoming a turning point in the GOP quest for the White House.

After Donald Trump's somewhat clumsy introduction of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, during which Trump spent most of the time talking about himself and "crooked" Hillary Clinton, Priebus said Sunday that he expects Trump to debut his presidential side during this week's convention in Cleveland.

"I think Thursday night's a critical night for him, delivering a great speech, the balloon drop, the people in this country saying, 'I can see Donald Trump being in the White House. I think he's presidential,'" Priebus told ABC's "This Week" on Sunday.

The Trump-Pence pairing was designed in part to bring together fractious elements of the Republican Party on the eve of its national convention.

Yet the usual trappings of a presumptive nominee's most significant announcement were missing in the Manhattan hotel ballroom where a few hundred supporters gathered Saturday morning. Nowhere in sight were "Trump/Pence" signs, for example, and Trump's decision had been tweeted the previous day, stealing any sense of surprise from the event. Choosing a venue in a state Trump has little chance of winning also broke with traditional politicking strategy.

Trump and his new running mate appeared on stage together only briefly before Trump disappeared and Pence gave a speech that closely hewed to the populist themes that Trump has voiced, describing himself as "really just a small-town boy." He praised Trump effusively as "a good man," a fighter, a legendary businessman and a patriotic American.

"The American people are tired," Pence said in remarks that included many of the same talking points that until recently he was using in his bid for re-election. "We're tired of being told that this is as good as it gets. We're tired of having politicians in both parties in Washington, D.C., telling us we'll get to those problems tomorrow."

Trump returned for a round of photos with the Trump and Pence families.

The lack of hoopla contrasted with Mitt Romney's introduction four years ago of running mate Paul Ryan on the deck of a Navy battleship, the USS Wisconsin, off the shore of swing-state Virginia. With cheering, flag-waving crowds and a soaring patriotic soundtrack, the pair faced the nation for the first time flanked by a massive red, white and blue banner displaying their new campaign logo.

The underwhelming rollout of the GOP ticket continued when Pence flew back home to Indiana without Trump. A few hundred people greeted him at a suburban Indianapolis airport hangar bereft of any "Trump-Pence" signs. He spoke for only a few minutes, telling the crowd that he and his family were headed home for "pizza night."

Priebus told "Fox News Sunday" that he expects Trump to bring a message of unity to this week's convention, also working to attract women, young people and minorities into the party. Some have questioned whether Pence's strong conservative stance on social issues might alienate demographic groups that lean Democrat.

Priebus described Trump and Pence as being "somewhere in the middle of each other" and says Trump plans an engagement tour soon to attract Latino voters.

Priebus also said "there is no religious test on the table," despite Trump's statement in December calling for a temporary ban of foreign Muslims from entering the U.S. until elected leaders could figure out "what is going on."

Priebus told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday that Trump is calling for a temporary ban on immigration from countries that harbor and train terrorists until the U.S. has a better vetting system.

The proposed ban is an example of where Trump differs from his pick for vice president. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence immediately called Trump's proposal in December unconstitutional.

Priebus says the selection of Pence shows Trump didn't want to surround himself with "yes people."

-- The Associated Press
In 1931, a visit to the Sea Lion Caves was a risky endeavor. The site was in the midst of being developed, and few people had ever been inside.

But while on an automobile expedition along Highway 101 - then known as the Coast Highway, still under construction - Oregonian reporter Edward M. Miller and a small party gained access to the caves, offering a rare look inside the still-wild landform.

The story, published June 28, 1931, was part of a larger article on the Heceta Head section of the Oregon coast, in anticipation of the completion of the Coast Highway two years later. You can access the full article - along with the rest of the Oregonian archives - at Multnomah County libraries or online databases but here's Miller's adventure into the Sea Lion Caves, edited for length.

(And just a quick note: Because of the way the story was archived, several words of the first section are illegible.)

HECETA HEAD AREA ON COAST HIGHWAY UNFOLDS SCENIC BEAUTY

By Edward M. Miller

Automobile editor, The Oregonian

Old Brigham, the sea lion, raised his ugly whiskered mug toward the summit of his high-rimmed cave and roared like a fool. In mighty wrath - one could not blame him - he wobbled about the rock upon which his harem was gathered, casting angry glances in the direction from whence the human intruders had crept, through a gloomy passage into his surf-beaten precincts.

His black eyes flashed above the whiskers as he barked and raved, [illegible] his extensive family to beware of the strange creatures that were trespassing into their cavernous [illegible]. Brigham was the biggest of them all, a great hulk that reminded one of a tremendous new gunnysack filled with great restless cabbages, in which was attached a small but [illegible] head and two inefficient flippers.

Brigham was most unhappy. Back and forth across the semi-globular rock which sprang from the sea water to comprise his immediate kingdom, Brigham flopped himself toward the waters as if wondering whether to take refuge in the sea or to stay with his harem and stick it out, regardless of consequences. He chose to remain and to howl, for which we admired him greatly.

Sea Lion Resents Intrusion

A photo from a June 28, 1931 article in the Oregonian, detailing a trip to Heceta Head and the Sea Lion Caves on the Oregon Coast. The original caption reads: "Lovely Heceta Head bay with Heceta light in the distance. Photo taken from Devil's Elbow."

Not that Brigham need have worried. 'Twould have been sacrilege to harm Brigham, or the members of his family, or his numerous warring companions. We were intruding, and we knew it. Nature's tireless sea had carved a great cave in the depths of the sheer cliffs and it was here that Brigham's ancestors, perhaps centuries ago, had taken their wives and their young to have and to hold. Who were we to molest his time-honored rights?

Happenstance had decreed that our De Vaux motorlog party should be among the first to descend into Brigham's stronghold. The old codger's home, ten miles north of, Florence, on the central Oregon coast, has been accessible only with difficulty because of lack of highway; and because of lack of a trail down the 235 feet of abrupt bluffs. As a consequence only an adventurous few persons in the past have taken their lives in hand to shinny down to the rocky sea's edge to the mouths of the Sea Lion caves.

This primeval seclusion is soon to be a thing of the past. Big things are taking place in Brigham's country, things of which he has had no inkling unless the tremors of the dynamite blast of the road crews, high overhead, have penetrated through the immense thickness of the cavern walls. Within a year thousands of motorists will be passing through Brigham's Heceta Head country. Brigham, himself, and his companions are due for a generous visitation from these thousands.

Trail to Connect With Caves

Men today are building a trail down to the caves. It is a very steep trail; and last week, when we dropped down from the cliffs, we were forced to make a nervous way over an uncompleted bridge that spanned an inhospitable arm of the frothy sea. That accomplished, we entered a cave and sneaked in to watch Brigham's crew. In due time our footsteps will be followed by thousands, at 35 cents a head, and the privacy of a sea lion will nothing more than so many words.

Motorists from all over the United States will visit the Heceta Head country when they learn of the gorgeous beauty of the place and hear of the remarkable highway that soon will sheer a path through the stubborn cliff and across the deeply recessed ravines and streams. Today, at Heceta Head, construction crews are working on the most spectacular road project of the entire Pacific coast. A single mile of highway, plus the 660-foot length of a bridge, will cost more than one-third of a million dollars.

For six miles the winding road is demanding a foothold on those bold hills that jut so confidently into the sea. The cliffs drop so sharply into the sea that crews, in various places, are drilling their powder holes and forcing their tractors almost directly above the surf. Next summer, when the road is completed, motorists will look down to the foaming sea from a height equivalent to that of a 15-story building.

Sea Lion Caves Visited

To gain the Sea Lion caves, two miles south of the Heceta head lighthouse, the De Vaux party left the car at the present road and hiked down a three-quarter-mile trail to the sea. Three men - J.G. Houghton, R.E. Clanton, former master fish warden, and J.E. Jocobson, Florence, control the property and are building a safe trail to the caves. This trail employs several flights of steps on the steepest part and a bridge 15 feet above a frothing arm of the sea. Still uncompleted when the party made its visit, the men nailed a ladder to one end of the bridge that we might scamper across. Skittish business but no casualties.

A photo from a June 29, 1931 Oregonian article about a trip to Heceta Head and the Sea Lion Caves on the Oregon coast. The original caption reads: "The rugged coastline between the Sea Lion Caves and Heceta Head."

Entrance to the cave, an aperture of 10x14 feet, was found in the rocky cliff 50 feet above sea level. Into this dark crevasse the party walked, soon to be greeted by a strange sign.

We saw a stage - a distant stage on which the sea lions were disporting themselves. First view came when the party was a city block distant. The rocks on which they were moving restlessly was below our line of vision; illumination (for we were in almost total darkness) came from a second entrance, this one at sea level.

Slowly the party worked down to the lions, moving silently as possible, that the animals not be frightened. En route we stumbled over a mummified sea lion.

Soon old Brigham scented us (he is called Brigham because of his many wives) and began howling. But he held his ground as the party came up within 200 feet, there to be halted by the sea that was rushing in.

Brigham's home was a small rock island. To the west extended a 350-foot passage to the sea, the waters and light rushing in from this opening. To the [north] was the 240-foot aperture through which the party had come. To the south was a third opening, a long shaft extending for more than 1000 feet through rock to sunlight.

Dome Has Huge Chamber

Most startling feature was the huge dome which surmounted Brigham's rock. This dome, oddly colored with a sulphurous-yellow substance, rose at least 100 feet above Brigham's perch. So huge is this great chamber that the Portland civic auditorium, I believe, could be placed inside.

Added to the din of the sea and the roars of the sea lions - we saw about a dozen of them - were the cries of sea parrots. They were perched about the cave or flying in and out, their red feet tucked flat against their black bodies.

To visit the Sea Lion caves is an experience, I believe, that will be remembered during a lifetime. A resort is planned above the caves; likewise an elevator that will take 100 feet from the climb. The trail will be ready by July 4. Persons planning to visit the caves must time their visits to reach the site at low tide.

--Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB
The meaning of the Second Amendment has been interpreted to mean that the private ownership of guns shall not be infringed. The right to life is also guaranteed in the Constitution. Clearly the right to life is a superior right to that of owning a gun.

After the massacre in Orlando, the Democrats tried to introduce legislation that would prevent people on the no-fly list from purchasing a gun. They also wanted a universal background check before any purchase. Opinion polls show most Americans support these measures but they were not brought to a vote. Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, said, We do not take away a citizens rights without due process!

It seems to me there is a higher constitutional right here. The victims have lost their constitutional right to life without due process. This reality is ignored.

It is time to frame the gun debate along the lines of the victims of gun violence, not the Second Amendment. It seems to me that any other threat to so many American lives would be addressed immediately with congressional hearings and other appropriate agencies doing studies.

A plan to study gun violence by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was proposed in 1995, but it was defeated by those who thought this was just a step to introduce more gun control laws. The CDC was expressly forbidden to gather information regarding gun violence. Counselors were and still are forbidden to ask clients if they own or have access to a gun.

Rep. Jay Dickey, the chief opponent of this study, has now changed his mind and, along with Mark Rosenberg, the chief proponent of this study, are working together to make it happen. Their focus is not on Second Amendment rights but on the lives lost by gun violence and they are asking the question, What can be done?

Years ago, when car accidents resulted in 50,000 deaths a year, the CDC engaged in a study that resulted in seat belts and other safety measures on cars. Since the introduction of these safety measures, car fatalities have decreased substantially.

In 2013, there were 33,169 deaths from guns. About one third were homicides and a little less than two third were suicides. The remaining few were accidental or for unknown reasons. In addition to these, police killed 1,000 in 2015 and the rate for 2016 is exceeding that rate in 2015.

The number of Americans killed in gun homicides on Christmas Day 2015 was comparable to the number of people killed in gun homicides in an entire year in places like Australia or Britain. The 27 people killed by guns in America that day was equal to the total number of people killed in gun homicides in an entire year in Austria, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Estonia, Bermuda, Hong Kong and Iceland, combined.

Nancy Kafer, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, pointed out that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which is the federal agency charged with ensuring that the American gun trade complies with federal and state laws, and with tracking down illegal gun activity, is woefully underfunded and understaffed, primarily due to some members of Congress who keep it that way.

There are 139,000 gun shops in the United States. The ATF has so few inspectors that these vendors do not have a visit from the ATF for as long as eight years. Increasing funding and staffing would allow the ATF to monitor the sale of firearms more effectively. This could be done without changing any law or violating the Second Amendment.

Coupled with a study about gun violence, we would be making great strides toward a solution.

So I beg Congress to authorize the CDC to conduct studies about gun violence and let them take the study where it will. The study I am sure will reveal information that we are totally unaware of today and would direct us in a way that will reduce gun violence. Please feel free to send this article to friends and our representatives and senators.

Norbert Bufka is a Midland resident and occasional contributor to the Midland Daily News. He can be contacted at norbert609@sbcglobal.net.
I was honestly a little surprised to read Ron Parmeles recent article advocating that Michigan maintain or expand its electricity monopoly (Regulation is the best energy policy for Michigan). I dont remember having ever seen an article extoling the virtues of market monopolies, especially for an essential service like electricity. I am concerned that his policy suggestions would harm Michigans businesses and residents.

Though the title of his piece refers to the regulation of energy in Michigan, he is really discussing competition in the purchase of electricity. Despite what Parmele states, the Michigan Public Service Committee would still have authority over the production and distribution of energy in a competitive environment.
BLOOMINGTON  As new residents of Bloomington, Alanna Oster and her sons became better acquainted with the community on Saturday as they searched for a tall man with a stovepipe hat.

We just moved to Bloomington from southern Illinois a few weeks ago. Weve been out touristing and looking for Abe Lincoln, said Oster.

Their search spread through downtown Bloomington, the David Davis Mansion State Historic Site, Franklin Park and Illinois Wesleyan University for the annual Lincolns Festival. The festival continues until 4 p.m. Sunday with presentations at the Bloomington Public Library and Civil War reenactments at IWU Ames Library lawn.

Oster and her sons Josiah, 4, and Elias, 5, watched horses trot at a Civil War camp set on the south lawn of the Ames Library. The boy's eyes were glued to two actors who rode horses and sparred with swords.

Well start homeschooling this year and these are the kinds of activities that are becoming more and more important for their education, said Oster.

Thirteen-year-old Tony Winters of LeRoy stood on the sidelines, taking pictures of the horses.

Im dressed as a Civil War trooper. Except I wouldnt have this modernized camera, said Tony. Ive been doing reenactments ever since my mom would carry me around in a woven basket as a baby.

Tonys grandparents, Raymond and Kathy Schaefer of LeRoy, sat under a canvas tent full of authentic Civil War-era pieces. The couple told festival visitors about chores and food preparation from the 1800s.

Unfortunately, when I think of Lincoln, I think of the war that dominated his terms. He always had to deal with pending war and it was a turbulent time, said Raymond Schaefer.

Kathy Schaefer said the couple comes to the festival to share history with the community.

Its a lot of work to do this but it brings a lot of joy. Its hands on for the kids and I want them to understand what life was like in those days. I dont want people to forget the history, she said.

In nearby Franklin Park, visitors played games, watched reenactments, rode in a horse-drawn carriage and enjoyed live music.

On the grounds of the Burr House Bed & Breakfast on the southwest corner of Franklin Park, Cindy and Pete Avery of Normal set up a tent selling historic goods and telling stories.

Its a very nice event. Its an opportunity for families to get out and have fun while learning about history. Im big on education so I encourage kids to grab a book about history, said Cindy Avery. People can learn about the clothing, trading and cooking from a certain time period and each small topic can be a springboard to a deeper investigation of history.

The couple sold handmade soap, snacks, jewelry, candles and toys.

Jude Vincent, 12, of Pontiac tested a ball and cup toy on display.

I like old-timey stuff from the 1800s or the whole era of Columbus. I like seeing Civil War reenactments, said Jude.

Jude came to the festival for the second time with his aunt, Kathy McLean of Pontiac. Last year they enjoyed learning facts about Civil War embalming practices and troop reenactments.

Im a big fan of Lincoln, said McLean. Ive always liked his philosophy.
BLOOMINGTON  Three Pantagraph-area men will represent Illinois' 18th Congressional District at this week's Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Chris Gramm of Bloomington, Jim Fisher of Hudson and Brian Thielen of Chenoa will serve as the district's delegates and vote on measures including the presumed nomination of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.

Bloomington-Normal will also be represented by a group from Illinois State University. Seven students and Political Science Professor Thomas McClure will visit the GOP convention, and 10 students will join Professor Erik Rankin at the Democratic National Convention from July 25 to 28 in Philadelphia.

Delegates were chosen in the March 15 primary election. Breitbart News Editor Mike Flynn of Quincy and former McLean County Recorder Lee Newcom of Bloomington finished first and second in polling but died after the primary; they were replaced by the highest-polling alternates, Fisher and Thielen.

All five men were identified on the ballot as supporters of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who dropped out of the race in May. Gramm, who introduced the senator during a March 14 event at Peoria Civic Center and hosted an event for Cruz's wife, Heidi, said he intends to vote for the Texan regardless.

"That was what I signed up for, he said.

Fisher agreed.

All of those votes were for me to go vote for Ted Cruz, so thats what Ill be doing, he said.

Both men said they collected signatures to get on the ballot and ran for delegate positions at the request of the Cruz campaign.

Like Fisher, Gramm said he has never been to a convention before, so Im not certain to expect, but I am looking forward to it.

I'll be going along with the crowd and see if I cant learn something, Fisher said of visiting Cleveland for the first time.

Gramm and Fisher will carpool to Cleveland, and both said they're familiar with Thielen as well.

Thielen could not be reached for comment.

Each of the ISU students attending the conventions is part of a special summer class taught by Rankin. ISU students last attended both conventions in 1970, according to a news release.

Were excited about (the trip) because this falls under one of our prime directives being civic engagement, Rankin said. Its one thing to read in a book about a convention, but its different being there."

Rankin said ISU did not ask the students that they had to be members of the party (whose convention they would attend), but it kind of fell along those lines. Rankin is a Democrat, and McClure a Republican.

Students that are not political science majors are going as well (as some in the department), Rankin added.

So far, the students have applied for entry into the class, were assigned books to read and wrote a 10 to 12-page paper on changes in their party's platform. The students will volunteer for the political parties and journal while on site, then write another 10 to 12-page paper when they return.

Ten students were accepted for each convention, but three dropped out after it became clear Trump would be the Republican nominee, Rankin said.

The students are all paying for themselves. The university is only paying for transportation while the students are there... (and) my salary to teach an extra class, Rankin said. He did not estimate a total cost to ISU.

Students at the Republican convention will stay at Case Western Reserve University, and students at the Democratic convention will stay at Temple University. Rankin said the trip wouldn't have been possible without their help.

Rankin said he's excited to attend his first Democratic National Convention.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for these students that (ISU) is investing in, he said.
Many local residents have heard something about Abraham Lincolns so-called Lost Speech, delivered in downtown Bloomington on May 29, 1856.

Yet most folks dont know the story about the time when the Lost Speech was purportedly found. That was in the 1890s, and for a few decades after its apparent reemergence the no-longer-lost Lost Speech began appearing in Lincoln biographies and published collections of his writings.

Confused? OK, lets start at the beginning!

One could make a strong case that the single most important event in local history  at least from a national perspective  was Abraham Lincolns keynote address before some 1,100 delegates and supporters of the State Convention of the Anti-Nebraska Party of Illinois.

That mouthful may not sound like a big deal, but members of this Anti-Nebraska Party were there to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its threat to spread slavery into northern territories.

Disparate Anti-Nebraska groups  abolitionists, anti-slavery Whigs like Lincoln, disaffected Democrats, German immigrants, and even nativist Know Nothings  fused to form the Republican Party and halt slaverys westward extension.

That evening in late May 1856, at Majors Hall on Front Street, Lincoln became the unassailable leader and moral voice in this new political movement. More than one observer called it the finest speech of his life. And since there was no known transcription of what he said, it became known as Lincolns Lost Speech.

Until the 1890s, that is. That was when Henry Clay Whitney, a former colleague of Lincolns on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, announced that he had taken notes during the entire 90-minute speech. He then cobbled together these 40-year-old jottings into what he claimed was a reasonable 8,000-word or so reproduction of the immortal address.

The Lost Speech was no longer lost! Or so it seemed. Whitneys version first appeared in the September 1896 issue of McClures Magazine, a popular periodical of the day.

Although this rediscovered Lost Speech is now generally regarded more as a work of imagination rather than historical fact, Whitney was no charlatan. He settled in Urbana in 1854 and practiced law, and there he met Lincoln. The two men struck up a friendship and Whitney often accompanied Lincoln on the circuit. In fact, the two even traveled from Danville to Decatur and then north on the Illinois Central Railroad to Bloomington for the May 29, 1856, political convention.

The evening before his speech, Lincoln spoke from the Pike House, a popular hotel at the corner of Center and Monroe streets in Bloomington. He told those gathered that he had prepared a speech for the convention. Yet he did not read from a prepared text the following day at Majors Hall, and so it appears the speech was never written out, at least by him.

Whitney or no Whitney, we do know some of what Lincoln said that evening thanks to contemporary newspaper accounts. The most thorough report comes from the June 5, 1856, Weekly Courier of Alton. [Lincoln] was here ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose slave power, the Courier reported. Lincoln also declared that the Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts.

Additional detailed coverage appeared in the Belleville Weekly Advocate. Lincoln, according to the Advocate, criticized National Whigs, a term for members of his former party who, in the name of national unity, were willing to aid and abet slaverys expansion into northern territories heretofore free.

OK, we know some of what Lincoln said that night. But why was no full transcription made by one of the many newspapermen in the audience?

The story goes that the power of Lincolns oratory caused mesmerized reporters to throw down their pens and live, as Lincolns law partner William Herndon put it, in the inspiration of the hour.

Perhaps. Yet others find such an explanation a mite too fanciful.

The truth of it is the great mass of the leaders felt that Lincoln made too radical a speech and they did not want it produced for fear it would damage the party, recalled Eugene F. Baldwin, a Peoria newspaper editor and publisher writing in 1908. Lincoln himself said he had put his foot into it and asked the reporters to simply report the meeting and not attempt to record his words and they agreed to it.

Regardless, Whitney claimed he kept his head and took notes all the while, though he was no stenographer and didnt know shorthand. Whitneys greatest ally in the ensuing debate was Joseph Medill, a Chicago Tribune editor who attended the Bloomington convention.

I have carefully and reflectively read it, Medill said in defense of Whitneys Lost Speech, and he has reproduced with remarkable accuracy what Mr. Lincoln said, largely in his identical language and partly in synonymous terms.

Yet despite Medills assurances, Whitneys text is patently problematic on several fronts. First, it failed to incorporate contemporary newspaper accounts given by both the Courier and the Advocate. In other words, the precious little of the Lost Speech that is indeed verifiable does not appear in Whitneys version.

Detractors also note that Whitneys book, "Life on the Circuit with Lincoln," makes no mention of taking notes during Lincolns Lost Speech, this despite its publication four short years before the rediscovered Lost Speech saw the light of day.

Others were bolder in their criticism of Whitney. Not only is his restoration devoid of Lincolns style and phraseology, but its trustworthiness is evinced by two or three anachronisms, concluded John Nicolay, one of Lincolns trusted White House secretaries who attended the Bloomington convention. The claim that this Lost Speech has any historical value whatever is simply absurd.

On May 29, 1900, a number of eyewitnesses to the Lost Speech, including John M. Palmer, a leading Illinois Democrat who became an anti-Nebraska leader, and George Schneider, a Bavarian-born newspaper editor from Chicago who represented German Republicans, gathered in Bloomington for the 44th anniversary of the Anti-Nebraska convention. Palmer, Schneider and others were unanimous in their dismissal of Whitneys rediscovery. Many now living heard the great speech, they declared in a joint statement, and, where Mr. Lincoln was so well known and loved, all his friends consider the speech still lost.

One of the greatest takedowns of Whitney comes from Isaac Newton Phillips, a Bloomington attorney and later court reporter for the Illinois Supreme Court.

Whitney employed many phrases and sentences of Lincolns in his alleged reproduction, Phillips acknowledged in 1901. Yet wherever the speech departs from the phraseology known from other evidence to be that of Lincoln it drops into the very dishwater of sheer mediocrity.

Concluded Phillips: It is high time this bald literary fraud had been given its quietus.
SPRINGFIELD  When Republicans convene in Cleveland beginning Monday to make Donald Trump the partys presidential nominee, only a handful of GOP members of the Illinois General Assembly will be there.

The real estate mogul and reality TV star has largely received a tepid response from the Republican establishment in the Land of Lincoln, with elected officials from U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk and Gov. Bruce Rauner on down the line keeping their distance and skipping the Republican National Convention.

As Rauner and his fellow Republicans seek to cut into the Democrats supermajorities in the Illinois House and Senate this fall, they will be watching for what impact Trumps presence at the top of the ticket will have on down-ballot races.

State Sen. Jason Barickman of Bloomington appeared on the March Republican primary ballot as a delegate candidate for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Barickman said that if Rubio had won the nomination, he would be making the trip to Cleveland, but he planned to stay home otherwise.

Hes never been to a national convention, he said, but with two small kids at home he tries to limit his time away.

Barickman does have some concerns about Trump becoming the partys standard-bearer.

He campaigned in the primary on a message of anger and divisiveness, and that is not a message thats going to resonate with the general election, Barickman said.

As the campaign moves forward, he hopes to see Trump become a voice for Republicans and conservatives, something he hasnt always been thus far.

I hope that he becomes the leader that our party needs to have, Barickman said.

State Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, a former chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis of Taylorville and former U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood of Peoria, also will be skipping the convention. He last attended in 2008 and said he made up his mind not to go this year well before even the primary, adding that attending costs a lot of money.

Butler said that despite some misgivings about Trumps rhetoric and policy positions, he respects the will of Republican primary voters.

I wish he would change his tone on some issues, Butler said. Theres things Im going to disagree with him on, but I respect the will of the people.  Im a Republican, and Im going to support our party.

One Republican lawmaker who will be in Cleveland is state Sen. Chapin Rose of Mahomet, who was elected in the March primary as a delegate for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Rose said he believes Trump will do well in November throughout downstate Illinois, noting that he and Cruz each received more votes in Macon County than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Rose said that when you walk around Decatur, Illinois, and hit the coffee shops in Sullivan and Shelbyville and Paris and talk to people and ask them, Are we heading the right way or the wrong way?  most will reply, The wrong way.

As for Trumps impact on state legislative races, lawmakers and observers say it could vary widely by region.

While his presence on the ballot might help Republicans in southern Illinois, it could hurt them in the Chicago suburbs, said Chris Mooney, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois.

The key likely will be which candidate and party inspires more voters to come to the polls  or to stay home, Mooney said.

Its not about changing peoples minds, he said. Its about motivating your people to come out to vote and demobilizing the opponents voters.

Butler, who is running unopposed in November, said he thinks factors other than the top of the ticket will determine who wins state races.

The races in Illinois are going to be a lot more about whats going on under the Capitol dome, he said.
If fixing school funding had a due date, Springfield's answer likely would be, "The dog ate my homework."

But it appears some time in detention turned some heads in the right direction, with Gov. Rauner announcing last week that he was convening a bipartisan panel to propose an overhaul of how the state distributes money to public school districts.

It's a welcome idea whose time came years ago, but the current idea at least is a step forward. Illinois residents are sick and tired of inactivity in Springfield  at least on the things that matter. The panel will start meeting in August with the goal of providing a proposal by Feb. 1, just before the General Assembly starts its spring session.

As outlined, the 25 members will be nominated by the four legislative leaders and Rauner, who each will provide five names. Education Secretary Beth Purvis will serve as chairman. Panel members include Sen. Jason Barickman, R-Bloomington, and Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill.

Education is a fundamental right in America, Rauner said in announcing the panel. Its the way that people raise their quality of life, their standard of living, their incomes. Education has got to be the priority, and low-income kids deserve the opportunity for a good education just as much as any other young person.

We agree, and having the appointees named by the leaders and Rauner means politics come into play from the get-go. But perhaps the members will be able to overlook their overlords and instead realize they've been trusted to do the people's work and find a way to provide a fair and equitable funding formula for of the state's students, not just those who live in well-heeled districts.

To be successful, panel members also must allow themselves the flexibility to look at the best overall solutions  not just the ones outlined by the demands of interest groups. We suggest they take another look at the Vision 20/20 proposal, which arose a few years ago, written and studied by an impressive coalition of education stakeholders who used sensibility rather than culpability to make their suggestions.

As we've written before, the current school funding formula, adopted in 1997, is unfair and needlessly complicated and relies too heavily on local property taxes. It allows some schools to spend as much as $30,000 per student while others spend as little as $6,000. The formula basically treats schools with high poverty rates and other demographic challenges the same as rich schools that dont face those challenges.

A study last year from The Education Trust found that Illinois has the widest funding gap between high-poverty and low-poverty districts.

Education is one of the top priorities for any lawmaker at any level in any state. Illinois should be doing a much better job of making sure its students get the education they deserve.

The panel has been given an work-study assignment. Let's hope they get more than a passing grade.
SPRINGFIELD  Gov. Bruce Rauner said Friday the United States has been "at war with Islamic terrorists for decades" and likely will be for decades to come.

The Republican's remarks at a state convention of the American Legion came a day after a man drove a truck into a crowd at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice, France, killing 84 people.

"This is a brutal war. It's going to be very difficult," said Rauner, one of many U.S. governors who sought temporary bans on Syrian refugees entering their states after terrorist attacks in November in Paris.

"We need to remind everyone in our communities to stay vigilant, stay aware," he said. "There are thousands of terrorists in America  they're in America; they're in Europe; they're around the world  seeking to hurt innocent people to pursue their own goals. We've got to stop them."

The governor said state security officials are reviewing procedures for handling motor vehicle attacks like the one in Nice, which also injured more than 200 people.

"These terrorists are creative in terms of how they hurt innocent people, but we've got to stay vigilant, remind everyone in our communities to stay aware, stay safe, communicate with law enforcement," Rauner said.

Master Sgt. Matt Boerwinkle, a spokesman for the Illinois State Police, said the agency "is working very closely with state and federal agencies to review our terrorism response policies and procedures."

"We ask all Illinoisans remain vigilant as we keep the citizens of Nice, France, in our thoughts and prayers," Boerwinkle wrote in an email.

The driver in Nice has been identified as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who has been living in France legally for about 10 years, according to The Associated Press. He has a record of petty criminal offenses but no known ties to terrorist groups, according to reports.

In a statement on Facebook, Rauner said he and first lady Diana Rauner "stand in solidarity with the victims and their families."

"Our thoughts and prayers are with all those affected by this horrific attack," said Rauner, who ordered that flags be flown at half-staff through sunset Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters at the Legion convention, Rauner declined to say which presidential candidate would do a better job dealing with the threat of terrorism. The governor has routinely avoided weighing in on the presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Rauner used his appearance at the convention to sign a bill allowing those who've served in National Guard and Reserve units to have a special veteran's designation on their driver's licenses regardless of whether they've served on active duty.

The governor said the legislation, sponsored by state Sen. Pam Althoff, R-McHenry, corrects an oversight in a previous law.

State Sen. Jason Barickman, R-Bloomington, who served in the Illinois Army National Guard from 1992 to 1998, sponsored similar legislation this spring and was a co-sponsor of Althoff's bill.

"It's important that we recognize all who have answered the call to serve our nation in the military," Barickman said in a written statement. "This new law will help make sure National Guard members and reservists are able to take part."
BLOOMINGTON  Chicago Police Officer Eibar Fuentes hopped on a motorcycle on Saturday, riding 200 miles to Springfield with hundreds of police officers and law enforcement supporters.

This is my first year doing this ride. It really helps the families of fallen officers and I wanted to experience that, said Fuentes.

The annual Memorial Park Motorcycle and Fun Car Run is hosted by the Illinois State Police Heritage Foundation. By the end of the day, at least 500 people were expected to have joined the charity ride.

All proceeds from the fundraising event go toward a memorial project for fallen ISP officers at a park in Springfield.

"In terms of places to gather, there isn't one. It means a lot to us to be able to create a memorial wall because we've lost several officers over the years," said Tim Good, ISP master sergeant.

The long line of motorcycles traveled along Route 66, making stops at Downers Grove, Dwight, OFallon and Carlinville. The group stopped in Bloomington for a lunch provided by Chucks Harley-Davidson.

Everyone always has a great time. Im a strong proponent of law enforcement, always, said Winnie Feken, owner of Chucks Harley-Davidson, 2027 Ireland Grove Road.

ISP Director Leo Schmitz said he has seen support for police officers grow now more than ever.

Im proud of my people. I'm proud of what they do every day, saving lives, said Schmitz. To see people come out and wave to us on the ride, its humbling.

Schmitz said the ride is a morale booster for officers.

"This is for the people who made the ultimate sacrifice and for those who lost loved ones. We will be there for them forever," he said.

Clare Pfotenhauer, former deputy chief public information officer for ISP, said once the memorial wall is built in Springfield, families of fallen officers will have a place to go to rejoice their life.

Since 1922, more than 65 ISP officers have died in the line of duty.

We could never properly sympathize with the families and now we will all have a place to go to pay our respects, said Pfotenhauer.

Jack Garcia, retired first deputy director of ISP and chairman for ISP Memorial Park, said every penny raised from the event will go toward the memorial park.

We appreciate this event because it shows our ability to interact with the people we serve, said Garcia. At the end of the day, our goal is to serve and protect.

In a separate weekend event, Illinois Chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors (COPS) hosted a 340-mile bicycle ride for Illinois law enforcement, family members of police and other supporters. The ride from Alton to Woodstock honored officers who have died in the line of duty.

Proceeds from the bike ride help pay for support programs for individuals affected by the loss of a co-worker, family member or friend in law enforcement.

Donations to the organizations can be made at www.isphf.org and www.ilcops.org.
"Game Of Thrones" Season 7 predictions grow as "GoT" continues "The Winds Of Winter" with filming in Iceland. George R.R. Martin, in fact, colors his heroes grey, as will be felt in the "Game Of Thrones" of Season 7 weather and in Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) betraying the King Of The North.

HBO's "Game Of Thrones" Season 6 ended explosively with "The Winds Of Winter." After the comparison between rebirths of Daenery Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and the R+L=J Tower Of Joy revelation, "Game Of Thrones" Season 7 predictions grew abundant.

TV Guide cites "Game Of Thrones" Season 7 predictions to include betrayal by Sansa Stark of the King Of The North. In "Game Of Thrones" Season 6, Jon Snow with help from Sansa Stark became King Of The North even while Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) conquered the Iron Throne at King's Landing.

23 #Emmys nominations.

The most of any drama series this year. #GameofThrones pic.twitter.com/ugrWZXKIH5  Game Of Thrones (@GameOfThrones) July 14, 2016

However, according to the media outlet, "Game Of Thrones" Season 7 predictions say Sansa Stark may renege on alliance with the King Of The North in. At the same time, Cersei Lannister may call on Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbaek), after humiliation by Daenerys Targaryen, Yara (Gemma Whelan) and Theon (Alfie Allen).

Interestingly, the development of major "Game Of Thrones" Season 6 Westeros characters is precisely what George R.R. Martin calls the grey heroes. "When I look at the world, I see that most real living breathing human beings are grey," Bustle quotes George R.R. Martin.

If Sansa Stark does betray the King Of The North in "Game Of Thrones" Season 7, this is the grey that George R.R. Martin describes. Based on this indication by George R.R. Martin, whatever alliance Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow may forge in "Game Of Thrones" Season 7, they will not be black or white in living up to it.

The HBO "Game Of Thrones" Season 7 premiere is tagged for June 2017. What are your favorite Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Cersei Lannister, Sansa Stark "Game Of Thrones" Season 7 predictions?
Children with autism and other developmental disabilities tend to wander in unsafe environments, a dangerous scenario that sometimes leads to accidents or worse -- their death. This problem is the primary reason behind the creation of the new bill called Kevin and Avonte's Law.

The bill, which was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate this week, was named after 9-year-old Kevin Curtis Willis and 14-year-old Avonte Oquendo, who both suffered from autism and died when they wandered. Curtis Willis drowned in the Raccoon River in central Iowa in 2008, while Oquendo drowned in the East River in New York City in 2014, according to ABC7.

The Purpose Of Kevin And Avonte's Law

Through Kevin and Avonte's Law, the U.S. Justice Department will provide grants to law enforcement agencies and non-profit organizations. The grants will be spent on education and other programs including training, emergency protocols, giving additional information and resources to first responders, and creating location technology programs that will keep tabs on autism patients who wander ou into unsafe locations, Autism Speaks listed.

Kevin and Avonte's Law was introduced by a bipartisan group of senators such as New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, Iowa Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. The U.S. House of Representatives should vote for the bill's approval for it to become a law. The president will then sign it into law.

Autism Children's Attraction To Water

A 2015 study found that 27 percent of children with developmental disabilities such as autism wander away from safe locations annually. That same year, 31 people with autism died after wandering to unsafe environments, 1011 Now reported.

Another study published in 2012 by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that 24 percent of autistic children were in danger of drowning after going missing and 65 percent were vulnerable to traffic injuries and accidents. According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, autistic children wander away when they get overly stimulated by sights, sounds, or other people's activities.

When this happens, the desire to escape propels autistic children to wander away to small or enclosed spaces. Another reason why they wander is because they are interested in a specific location such as bodies of water.

Some autism patients are drawn to water because it soothes and relaxes them. Others get distracted by water's appearance and are "fixated visually" with its patterns, according to neurological conditions specialist and consultant Robyn Steward, BBC reported.

Autistic children's tendency to wander doesn't just harm the patients; it also stresses out their parents and families. Children with autism are drawn to roadways, highways, bright lights, trains, and heavy equipment as well.
The U.S. National Whitewater Center previously claimed that its sanitation system is adequate after an Ohio teenager died last month due to a brain-eating amoeba infection from the water park. Now, the rafting and kayaking center is changing its tune and has admitted about how its faulty sanitation system encouraged the growth of waterborne illnesses.

Eighteen-year-old Lauren Seitz of Westerville, Ohio died a week after returning from a rafting trip at the Whitewater Center in June, CNN reported. Seitz acquired the Naegleria fowleri, or brain-eating amoeba after the raft she was in overturned in the rapids.

Algae In The Water Bred Brain-Eating Amoeba

According to the Whitewater Center, the algae in its waters stimulated the growth of organic matter in there including the brain-eating amoeba, The News & Observer reported. The algae made the sanitation system inadequate when it comes to removing threats from waterborne illnesses.

Whitewater Center spokesman Eric Osterhus said algae aren't usually deemed as unsafe, but the organisms "create an environment that allows the organisms to grow and avoid the disinfection systems currently in place," the news outlet added. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said recently that the water park's sanitation system don't have enough chlorine, which acts as disinfectant.

The CDC said that the Naegleria fowleri amoeba in Whitewater Center is the highest level they have found in a natural setting. Samples obtained by the CDC found that the center contains 13 times more particles including algae and sediment.

If a recreational water system is really properly chlorinated, it shouldn't contain that many particles in it. Whitewater Center's water is also turbid or cloudy, which makes the park's sanitation system ineffective.

Ignored Complaints

Visitors of Whitewater Center complained about the algae in there and the water's "gross" and "scummy" quality, The News & Observer added. One visitor said the water from the center would not come off the skin easily and requires scrubbing off with a brush to get rid of it.

The Whitewater Center has been closed since June 24. Mecklenburg County officials said they are planning to treat the park's water with chlorine and drain it into the Catawba River, The Charlotte Observer reported.

Dr. Jennifer Cope, an infectious disease physician at the CDC, said the brain-eating amoeba isn't acquired through swallowing contaminated water. It enters the body through water forced up the nose and then travels up the nasal passages to the brain.

The brain-eating amoeba causes primary amebic meningoencephalitis, or PAM, where the brain's tissue gets infected and usually ends in death 18 days after nasal ingestion, the CDC wrote. Symptoms appear five days after nasal exposure and include fever, nausea, vomiting, and headache.
Students and the entire campus community at Michigan State University will soon have a hard time fulfilling their nicotine fix. MSU will start banning cigarettes and other tobacco products in the campus vicinity starting on August 15.

The university's ban covers the whole range of tobacco products such as cigarettes, e-cigarettes or vape, hookahs, and chewable tobacco, among others, the Detroit Free Press listed. The campus community will not be allowed to use those tobacco products in MSU's buildings, dormitories, lawns, sidewalks, and even in personal vehicles sitting on the university's parking lots.

Commitment To Better Public Health

Jason Cody, MSU's spokesman, clarified that the university isn't pushing tobacco smokers to quit their habit, but "they'll have to make arrangements," the news outlet added. However, the MSU still stands in its commitment to helping improve public health.

The ban also signifies the university's promotion of the "healthiest environment possible," according to Dr. David Weismantel, MSU's university physician. For MSU, the restrictions serve as a reminder that tobacco products are unhealthy and pose serious health risks to people.

Lorenzo Santavicca, president of MSU's student government, said the university previously allowed students to smoke 25 feet away from buildings. However, the students disregarded this ruling completely, and so the stricter ban is implemented.

Students and people caught smoking on MSU's property will be given a civil infraction ticket from the MSU Police Department. That ticket will cost $150 for a first offense.

Student smokers could also receive a punishment as severe as suspension. Employees who smoke in the campus would be reported to human resources.

Officers from the MSU Police Department, however, will still help students locate the appropriate areas to smoke. MSU Police Public Information Officer Doug Monette said their main goal is to educate the campus community about a healthier environment.

Other Colleges That Banned Tobacco Products

Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island also adopted a campus-wide tobacco-free policy this month, Providence Journal reported. As of April 4, 2016, there are around 1,483 campuses that are 100 percent smoke-free. In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 16.7 percent of smokers in the United States are aged between 18 and 24.

Some campuses in the U.S. that have banned smoking are the University of Michigan, Alabama State University, California State University (both Northridge and Sonoma), Berkeley College, and University of Tampa. For the complete list of smoke-free and tobacco-free colleges and universities in the country, go to Americans for Non-Smokers' Rights.
The Two Obligations of Good Religion

by John Beckett

the Denton Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

July 17, 2016

Introduction: Why Are You Here?

Why are you here this afternoon?

There was a time when no one would think to ask such a question, and certainly not in a place like Texas. When I was growing up, if it was Sunday, you went to church. Some of my friends at school went to Baptist churches, some went to Catholic churches, and a few went to some odd churches I had never heard of. There were the Seventh Day Adventists who went to church on Saturday. I always felt sorry for them, because they never got to watch Saturday morning cartoons. There was a small Jewish community and I never did quite understand that their Shabbat started on Friday evenings and not on Saturday mornings, but I knew they had weekly services the same as everyone else. Call it worship or call it mass or just call it Sunday go-to-meeting, everybody went to church. Its what was expected and its what people did.

Not anymore. Church attendance in the United States peaked in the late 1950s and its been on a steady decline ever since. Today, nobody asks me where I go to church or if I go to church unless I bring it up. The idea of church attendance as an obligation  something you do whether you feel like it or not  is gone among all but the most pious of Americans.

Look around the room. Everyone whos here chose to be here. You could be at home with the newspaper. You could be at the movies. You could be chasing Pokemon. But you chose to be here.

Why are you here?

I imagine there are as many reasons as there are people, maybe more. But I also imagine that if we listed every single reason why people chose to come to DUUF today or any other day, most of them would fall into two broad categories.

Some of us are here because we want to make the world a better place. We stand on the side of love, we believe black lives matter, we support all kinds of families, we want to leave a clean and healthy planet for our childrens children  and we arent afraid to stand up and say it. We want our church to be a lighthouse that shows the world a better way to live.

Some of us are here because we have a spiritual need. Were dealing with a serious illness, a job loss, a death in our family, or the death of a dream. We wonder why were here in this world, how we should live while were here, and what happens after were gone. We have a spiritual practice and we want someone to practice with, or perhaps were looking to start a spiritual practice and we need some guidance. We want our church to be a refuge that comforts us in times of trouble and that helps us in our search for truth and meaning.

These are the two obligations of good religion: to heal the world and to heal ourselves. To be focused on the world out there and the world within. To feed others and to remember that we need to eat too.

The Outer World and Right Here Right Now

When I tell someone Im a Unitarian Universalist, one question inevitably comes up: so, what do yall believe? As though religion is all about which unprovable propositions you accept and which you reject. That idea  that religion is about what you believe  is a modern, Western, Protestant idea and its an idea that hasnt been particularly helpful. For most people in most of the world throughout most of history, religion has been  and remains  about what you do, who you are, and whose you are.

Though Unitarian Universalism has roots in Protestant Christianity, we are part of that second group. We like to say deeds not creeds. We recognize many sources of wisdom and inspiration  were united by our commitment to UU values and by our desire to build a better world not in some far off afterlife but right here right now.

And so we do. We proudly hung that big yellow Standing on the Side of Love banner on the side of our building for months. Our minister officiated the first legally recognized same sex marriage in Denton on the steps of the old courthouse on the square, and we opened our doors for a free wedding chapel shortly after marriage equality became the law of the land. Our members have served in city government and worked to ban fracking. Our CUUPS group picks up roadside trash every other month. And there are many, many more examples of Denton UUs working to make the world and our little corner of it a better place right here right now.

Other people see what were doing. Even if theyre perfectly happy with their religion, they learn something. They learn that not all religious people are judgmental. They learn that some people can be deeply devoted to their religion without thinking their way is the only way. And if someday they find they can no longer believe what their church tells them they have to believe, they know theres another church ready to accept them for who and what they are.

We practice good religion here at Denton UU, and we serve as a lighthouse for those who need us and those who share our values.

The Inner World and the Big Questions of Life

But we do not live by social action alone. I think every minister and every worship committee lives in mortal fear of doing a Save the Whales service and having a first time visitor walk in who just found out they have cancer. Even if they really like whales, at that moment they want to hear the love of Jesus, or the wisdom of Socrates, or the compassion of the Buddha.

In these troubled times we can offer words of comfort. We can provide physical support  we can give people rides to doctors appointments and bring them food when theyre not up to cooking for themselves. We can take turns looking after the sick so their family caregivers can have a night off for a change. And in those times of grief when theres nothing we can do and even the kindest of words ring hollow, we can sit with the suffering, hold their hands, and let them know that however bad as it is, theyre not alone.

But when we do these things, and sometimes when we just see them, a crack opens in our personal facade of invulnerability. We realize that could be us who just got a diagnosis of cancer. That could be us dealing with a the loss of a job, the breakup of a marriage, or the death of a family member. And we know that some day death will come for all of us.

Do you believe in life after death? If you do, or if you think you do, what does that afterlife look like? Does everyone go there? We are Universalists, after all. If youre like most Americans, you may not have given it a lot of thought. How do we think about these things? When do we think about these things?

The time to contemplate these questions is not when death is staring you in the face, but on a sunny day in July when all is right in your world and death seems a million years away. In times of stress we fall back on what is familiar, or on what we were taught when we were very young and some of us were taught some things that were unpleasant and not in alignment with the UU values we hold today.

Death and what comes after is not the only Big Question of Life. Why are we here? What in life is good and virtuous? What is contemptible and should be avoided? How can we balance living fully in the moment with building a better world for tomorrow? What is truly of value to us and what is of ultimate value?

Among some UUs  and a lot of other folks  theres a reluctance to engage these questions. Theres a t-shirt I see occasionally that says some questions are too important for answers.

I respect the humility in that sentiment. Philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people have struggled with the Big Questions of Life for thousands of years. Many of these questions arent simply beyond our current knowledge, theyre beyond our capacity to know. Assuming we have certainty when we do not has been the source of countless problems, most notably fundamentalism. But many of the people wearing these shirts seem more interested in proclaiming our lack of answers than in actually engaging the questions.

The Old Testament tells the story of Jacob, who wrestled with an angel all night, refusing to let go until the angel blessed him. In the end, the angel gave him his blessing but also put his hip out of joint. In the church where I grew up, it was said that while Jacob was rewarded for his persistence toward a worthy goal, the injury was a punishment for arrogance.

Like most good stories, this one has many possible meanings. Blessings  wisdom, enlightenment, magic  do not come easily. The blessings of the really important questions do not come from simply acknowledging their presence. Their blessings come when we wrestle with them: when we propose answers, when we try them on and see how they fit. Their blessings come when we weigh the various answers for strengths and weaknesses, and when we think about what they might mean. Their blessings come when we read and study and meditate and contemplate, and when we discuss our thoughts with others.
Patna: Despite global criticism and widespread mockery of the Bihar education on the social media in the aftermath of the fake toppers and the involvement of Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) in the whole scandal, a defiant Education Minister Ashok Kumar Chowdhary on Saturday in Patna praised the condition of education in Bihar saying a few bad apples were trying to give bad name to the state that has a glorious history of producing world-class graduates in various faculties.

The Congress leader who was speaking at the award ceremony of students and teachers organized by the Private School Association said that the Nitish government was committed to improve education in Bihar and that is why proper actions were taken against all those involved in the recent 'ToppersGate' in a matter of hours.

"Due to the mistakes of a handful of people, the students of Bihar have to pay the heavy price for it. That is why within 72 hours of the toppers scandal coming into light, the government took strict measures against all those who were found to be responsible for it," Chowdhary said at the Sri Krishna Memorial Hall adding a large chunk of the Bihar population was uneducated and efforts were being made to give them quality education so the state could join the 21st century.

On the occasion, four students of 10th and 12th class were given a cash award of Rs. 11,000 each for topping in their schools and an additional 3000 students were honored for security special place in the board exams.

Animal Husbandry Minister Awadhesh Singh, Land Reform and Revenue Minister Dr. Madan Mohan Jha and a number of senior bureaucrats, teachers and principals of private schools were present on the occasion.
Patna: A day after an anti-India group calling itself Popular Front of Bihar (PFB) took out a rally in Patna chanting pro-Pakistan slogans while showing support for known anti-national elements like Asaduddin Owaisi and Zakir Naik, members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its student wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) in Patna on Saturday took out a protest rally demanding immediate arrests of the those who participated in yesterday's rally and charges filed against them under sedition laws.

{gallery}newsimages2016/jul/071616{/gallery}Angry BJP workers burnt the flag of Pakistan and accused PFB, Owaisi, and Naik of being sympathizers of dead terrorist Osama bin Laden and ISIS that has unleashed a reign of terror in the Middle East and Europe.

Blaming Nitish Kumar of encouraging anti-national activities by expressing support for known terrorists like Ishrat Jehan and rabble rouser Kanhaiya Kumar of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the protestors said that they would not tolerate such blatant anti-national sentiments being fanned by Pakistani agents who, with help from Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) President Lalu Prasad Yadav, have turned Bihar into a terrorist haven.

"Whenever there is a terror attack in India, the root of the perpetrator is traced back to Bihar. This is solely because of the encouragement to such anti-national elements by people like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar who care about their vote banks than the security of the nation," the ABVP protestors said.

Former Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar Sushil Kumar Modi also slammed Nitish Kumar for ignoring the issue of terrorism in Bihar.

"Never in the history of Patna have Pakistani agents taken out anti-India rally in full view of the law enforcement officials. This is a serious matter and the Chief Minister must not take it lightly," the BJP leader said.

Accusing Kumar of having a history of being a sympathizer of terrorists, Modi said that earlier the Chief Minister had called terrorist Ishrat Jehan 'a Bihar ki Beti' and had refused to order questioning of Indian Mujahideen founder Yasin Bhatkal during his arrest from Bihar in 2012.

Meanwhile, the Patna police arrested one Mohammed Taufiq who was one of the many who was seen chanting pro-Pakistan slogans in Patna on Friday.

Speaking to the media, Patna Superintendent of Police (SSP) Manu Maharaj contradicted earlier reporting that the Friday rally by the PFI was sanctioned by the district administration.

"This outfit did not have the proper permission to take out the rally. We have registered an FIR in the case and are investigating it from various angles," Maharaj said adding video footage of the rally has been sent to a forensic lab in New Delhi and proper actions would be taken once the results are received by the Patna police.
Film crew are on the scene for filming of "The Polka King" at select houses on Harvard Street in Pawtucket Friday. A scene was being filmed in the backyard of the home at left.
Democracy, only solution to regional woes: Iran President

07/15/16

Source: Press TV

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the solution to regional problems does not lie in the use of force but rather in respecting democracy, adding that the era of military coups has come to a close.



Iran's President Hassan Rouhani gives a speech in Kermanshah on July 17, 2016.

(photo by

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani gives a speech in Kermanshah on July 17, 2016.(photo by Islamic Republic News Agency



Rouhani made the remarks in an address to a huge crowd of people in Iran's western city of Kermanshah on Sunday, a day after Turkey said it had largely crushed an attempted military coup against the government.

"We live in a region, where some still think that they can transfer power through coups or overthrow a government elected by people's votes with the use of military tanks, artillery, aircraft and helicopter," he said.

They "have failed to realize that the era of coup is over, and that coups and tanks are not the solution. They must come to the understanding that the solution to problems is democracy and respecting the votes of the majority," he added.

Rouhani said, "Today is the day when issues can be settled at ballot boxes, and people can make their voice heard" through their votes.

The botched coup began late on Friday, when a section of the military blocked Istanbul's iconic Bosphorus Bridge and strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in the capital, Ankara.

Tanks, helicopters and soldiers clashed with police and people on the streets of the two main Turkish cities while explosions and gunfire rang out.

Thousands heeded a call by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to take to the streets in a bid to foil the coup, which was blamed on Fethullah Gulen, an accusation "categorically" rejected by the US-based cleric.





Iran's President Hassan Rouhani arrives in Kermanshah on July 17, 2016.

(photo by

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani arrives in Kermanshah on July 17, 2016.(photo by Islamic Republic News Agency



In his remarks, Rouhani also touched on last year's nuclear agreement between the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 group of countries, saying the Iranian nation "cut off the hands of aggressors and the US as a result of the JCPOA."

In the nuclear negotiations, Iran managed to consolidate its right to use peaceful nuclear energy, he added.

Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia - plus Germany signed the JCPOA on July 14, 2015 following two and a half years of intensive talks.

Under the deal, all nuclear-related sanctions imposed on Iran by the European Union, the Security Council and the US would be lifted. Iran has, in return, put some limitations on its nuclear activities.
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Its hot outside and we want to get wet. And with miles of inviting beaches and the ubiquitous backyard pool, Southern California is awash with opportunity to cool off.

But the sparkling pools, lakes, rivers and ocean that beckon us carry serious risk, and every year fun outings turn into sad tragedies.

This summer is no different. Tragedy has already struck multiple times. For example:

 In Murrieta, 13-year-old Alex Pierce was severely injured June 3 at a pool party for a middle school band and choir. After a monthlong fight for his life, the teen was taken off life support this month after a test declared him brain-dead.

RELATED: Murrieta drowning shines spotlight on pool safety rules

 In the past month alone, four drowning deaths have been reported in San Bernardino County, three of them children, according to Safe Kids Inland Empire. Five children have drowned since Jan. 1.

 There have been 10 drownings in Riverside County in 2016, the Riverside County Fire Department reports.

 There have been 15 drownings in Orange County, according to the Orange County Fire Authority. Nine victims were 50 or older.

The odds of surviving a brush with drowning are better with children. In Orange County the first half of this year, 12 children age 14 or youner got into trouble and one drowned. By comparison, in 10 close calls involving people at least 50 years old, nine led to death.

With the older crowd, there are an awful lot more of them swimming alone, said Al Murray, a Tustin councilman who chairs the Orange County Task Force on Drowning Prevention, created last summer to promote safety and uniform countywide reporting.

When older swimmers have a heart attack or experience some other emergency, Murray said, there is no one to rescue them.

All of this comes as summer is just getting warmed up.

We still have the hottest months ahead of us, said Michelle Parker, coordinator of Safe Kids Inland Empire, a program directed by Loma Linda University Childrens Hospital that aims to prevent child deaths from various causes, including drowning.

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LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH

But while children are more likely to survive, the danger pools and other bodies of water pose to youngsters remains a huge concern.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drowning is a leading cause of injury death across all age groups of children  and the No. 1 cause for babies to 4-year-olds.

And drowning statistics tell only part of the story. Experts say many children survive but suffer debilitating injuries that are difficult to bounce back from.

Chris Thunig knows all too well how brutal recovery can be.

In May 2015, Thunig was working on a project in the backyard of his Tustin home, near the pool. It was late in the day, he said. The sun was about to set. The kids were inside.

At some point, Thunig said, then-1 1/2-year-old son, C.J., slipped outside unnoticed  and fell into the pool.

Thunig was jolted by the chilling scream of his daughter. Oh my God, C.J. is in the pool.

THINK AGAIN

Thunig turned to see his son floating, face down. He jumped in, pulled him out.

C.J., he said, was blue in the face.

At the time, Thunig didnt know CPR. But he tried anyway. Thunig would find later, in a CPR class, that somehow, instinctively, he performed the procedure correctly for the most part.

But the prognosis wasnt good. Upon arrival at Childrens Hospital of Orange County, his vitals were awful, Thunig said, and doctors warned his condition was very serious. The toddler had suffered a severe brain injury.

Thus began a long, painful recovery. And its far from over. Thunig, however, said he takes comfort from the remarkable progress C.J., who turns 3 next month, has made.

Were on our way to having a healthy child with some issues we hope to fix in therapy, Thunig said.

He cant walk, but he can stand with help. C.J. cant put a sentence together, his father said, but he has learned to speak a few words. For now, though, he continues to breath with the aid of a trach tube through his neck and eat with the aid of a G tube through his abdomen.

People who think it could never happen to them should think again, Thunig said.

WITHOUT A SPLASH

And it all happened so fast.

Unlike what you see on TV and in the movies, there was no noise, Thunig said. It was completely quiet, not even a splash.

Thats typical. The Hollywood image of someone yelling loudly and frantically splashing is rarely how someone drowns, said Todd Leitz, spokesman for MySafe:LA, an advocacy group that promotes safety through education.

It often happens without a sound, without anybody even realizing it, Leitz said.

Parker, of Safe Kids Inland Empire, said children may struggle  but underwater.

Were talking about people who dont know how to swim, Parker said. And theyre not able to keep themselves buoyant to make a splash.

LOSING TRACK OF TIME

With that in mind, Parker recommends a deliberate strategy for poolside gatherings of children. She suggests designating a pool supervisor to do nothing but watch swimmers.

It cant be the same person throughout the party, she added, saying people get tired.

We are all susceptible to becoming distracted, to losing track of time, she said.

And if the pool watcher is drinking, said Dr. Paul Lubinsky, associate director at the pediatric intensive care unit at Childrens Hospital of Orange County (CHOC), he or she wont be able to pull a child out of the water.

If the supervisor is getting drunk, that doesnt help, Lubinsky said.

Parker termed the watching strategy the single most important component of the ABCs of pool safety, the A standing for active adult supervision.

LIKE A STARFISH

She said B stands for barriers  such as fences around pools and self-latching gates  and C denotes classes for adults and children alike.

For children, swim lessons are important. And theyre available all summer throughout the region.

An example is the two-week sessions held at Riverside City Colleges Cutter Park Pool. There, dozens of goggle-wearing kids, from babies to early teens, splashed and kicked and practiced back floats on a recent July morning.

Put your hands and legs out like a starfish, instructor Karen Saucedo told four youngsters between ages 3 and 6. Keep your tummy up.

PANIC IN THE POOL

Jessica Henderson, manager of RCC swim lessons, said classes aim to teach techniques but also ease kids fears.

Our goal here is to make them comfortable, Henderson said, adding if they are they will be less likely to drown.

At least one student seemed to be comfortable.

Watch this, bouncy, chatty 3-year-old Mary Monville of Riverside shouted. I can go underwater without my goggles.

NOT A FAN

Lubinsky, however, warned against relying too much on lessons.

Im not a fan of drownproofing children, he said. It gives them a false sense of security. No one is drownproof.

When a child falls in water, he or she doesnt expect it  and often isnt able to apply what he or she learned, Lubinsky said.

Lessons have been shown to help, though.

In March, 2-year-old Andrew Callahan quietly fell into a pool at his grandmothers Murrieta home. A student of a water safety program, the boy floated on his back  as he had been taught  and his father rescued him without incident.

BREAKING RIBS

Classes are crucial for adults, too, experts say  to learn CPR.

Experts said its simply not enough to wait for paramedics. Whether CPR is administered while emergency responders are en route, they say, can mean the difference between life and death, or life with a severe injury.

Dr. Shamel Abd-Allah, chief of pediatric critical care at Loma Linda University Childrens Hospital, said even if no one at the pool knows CPR someone should attempt to perform chest compressions.

Its better to break a few ribs than to not do CPR, Abd-Allah said.

UNFORGIVING

There is no time to waste. The body does the best it can to conserve oxygen, he said. Blood will be pumped more toward vital organs, such as the brain.

But in short order, oxygen will be cut off.

From a physiological standpoint, Abd-Allah said, the brain is the least forgiving organ when the heart stops.

As for where water tragedies occur, most are reported in a swimming pool. In the Inland region, for example, six of 10 Riverside County drownings this year occurred in pools.

And in Orange County, with its abundance of popular beaches, two-thirds of drowning close calls took place in pools.

Thats not to say people dont drown in the ocean. They do.

TODDLERS AND SURF

Spencer Parker, ocean lifeguard specialist for the Los Angeles County Fire Departments lifeguard division, said there were five drownings at county beaches in 2015 and there have been two so far this year.

In the summertime we typically dont have a lot of drownings because we are so heavily staffed, Parker said. Springtime, for us, is probably the most challenging part of the year for the lifeguards because we still have some very large swells, and our staffing is not up.

The relatively small number of ocean drownings contrasts with immense crowds. Los Angeles Countys 73 miles of beaches drew 3 million sun seekers over Fourth of July weekend, he said.

Fortunately, said Lubinsky, the CHOC doctor, its rare for a very young child to succumb to the surf.

And the reason for that may offer a lesson in pool safety.

We dont see toddlers drown at the beach, Lubinsky said. Why? Nobody lets their toddler wander off at the beach.

Staff writers Aaron Claverie, John M. Blodgett and Tom Sheridan contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: 951-368-9699 orddowney@pressenterprise.com
Several trucking companies have settled a $5 million class-action lawsuit brought by nearly 400 big-rig drivers who contend they should be classified as employees, not independent contractors.

The settlement marks another turn in what has been a bitter dispute between truck drivers, backed by union organizers, and the companies that employ them to haul goods from the local ports to warehouses throughout the Southern California.

Hopefully, this sends a message that some of the schemes these companies use to evade responsibility are not going to work, said Laboni Hoq, litigation director for the Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, one of two nonprofits that brought the lawsuit. Workers know their rights and they are going to pursue them. The industry has to change. Workers are not going to continue to put up with this.

Filed in 2013, the lawsuit brought by union organizers and truck drivers across the region  including San Bernardino, Orange County and Los Angeles  accused the companies of labor violations that shock the conscience.

The company owners controlled the schedules of drivers and forced them to spend their own money on trucks and maintenance costs, while denying the drivers  who sometimes work 18 hours a day, six days a week  basic rights of employed workers, such as lunch breaks and reimbursement for costs, according to the lawsuit.

Named as a defendant in the case is Erick Yoo, who is described in the suit as controlling a family network of trucking enterprises that include QTS Inc., LACA Express and WinWin Logistics. Yoo is also accused of trying to evade paying the workers by filing for bankruptcy in 2015.

Lawyers for Yoo could not be reached for comment.

Officials in the trucking industry have long contended that many drivers prefer to work as independent contractors for the flexibility and the ability to own their own small businesses.

It has become more difficult to earn a living as a contractor, however, due in part to recent congestion issues at the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles  it takes longer for drivers to get in and out of the ports, which cuts into their profits  and the push toward cleaner-burning diesel trucks, which are more expensive. This has ramped up efforts to unionize drivers, leading to lawsuits over wage theft allegations and strikes at port terminals, rail yards and trucking companies.

An estimated 12,000 drivers serve the twin ports. Over the past three years, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have helped organize more than a dozen truck driver strikes at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, sometimes slowing down work there.

Contact the writer: rachel.uranga@langnews.com or @racheluranga
A fire tore through a mobile home park in Lake Elsinore Saturday afternoon, displacing 21 people and several animals from five homes.

The incident was reported at 2:11 p.m. in the Briarwood Mobile Home Park, a Cal Fire/Riverside County news release states.

What began as a fire at a single-home quickly spread to neighboring structures. When fire crews arrived, two homes were fully engulfed in flames and another was beginning to catch fire. Active power lines were knocked down and dangling in the street.

By the time all the fires were subdued nearly two hours later, five homes were either destroyed or damaged, the release states.

The incident is under investigation. No details on the cause of the fire have been released.

The American Red Cross was called in to assist the 15 adults and six children forced from their homes. Animal Friends of the Valley also responded to help care for the pets.

It took 31 firefighters to knock down all of the fires. Resources were on the scene for about four hours.
Sundays shooting that killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, coming 10 days after five Dallas police officers were slain, left Inland law enforcement officers saddened and more aware than ever about the risks they face on the job.

Operating conditions were not changed Sunday, said representatives of agencies reached Sunday.

Lt. James Patton of the Corona Police Department said the department has been on heightened alert since the July 7 shooting in Dallas, and Sundays violence is yet another reminder that officers need to be cognizant of their own safety.

Its just more of an awareness officers safety and surroundings and the calls were responding to, he said.

There also has been a heightened awareness in Colton since the Dallas shooting, said Sgt. Shawn McFarland, who was the departments day shift commander Sunday. He said it was too soon to see if the Baton Rouge incident would result in operational changes.

While the motive behind the Baton Rouge shooting was unknown, the city has been tense since police killed a man July 5. That incident and another killing by police of a black man in Minnesota sparked protests nationwide, including in the Inland area  and in Dallas. The five police officers there were killed during one such protest.

I am extremely saddened by the events that occurred today and have been happening in the last couple of weeks, Fontana Police Chief Bob Ramsey said in an email Sunday. I understand frustrations are heightened as a result of the shootings by police officers; however violence is never the answer.

He stressed the importance of communicating and building relationships with the community, and training officers to be safe.

Our officers understand that every time they put on a uniform they can become a target for those that operate outside the lines of justice and civility, Ramsey said. Our officers are trained to always work in a heightened state of awareness with officer safety being important.

He said his departments mission is to serve the community with the intention in going home safely at the end of the shift.

Sgt. Joe Feola of the Banning Police Department said the Baton Rouge shooting got officers talking, not necessarily about how to do things differently, but about things that should be done already. He said officers shouldnt become complacent and should always think about safety.

We should always have a heightened alert, he said.

San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said his officers would watch out for one another with an added layer of vigilance after the shootings.

Lt. Charles Payne of the Riverside Police Department said Sunday morning that the Baton Rouge shooting was tragic and terrible.

Payne said there were no immediate plans to make any adjustments in staffing or procedure, but that officers would be following the situation closely and making adjustments if they felt there was a threat.

As far as our staffing or anything like that, well make adjustments if we feel theres potential for an incident happening in our own city, he said.

Spokesmen for the Riverside County Sheriffs Department and Redlands Police Department declined to comment. The Sheriffs Department intends to release a statement Monday.
Re: At least 60 dead after truck rams Bastille Day crowd in Nice [News, July 14]: I am sure that after the terrorist act in Nice, France, the Democrats will demand that we ban assault trucks.

I wonder if Hillary will attack the Teamsters Union like she does the NRA.

Michael A. Pacer

Pomona

BLM a terrorist organization

The advocacy of violence against police officers by the Black Lives Matter movement and their attempt to make martyrs out of thugs, as in Ferguson, convinces me that they are a terrorist organization that does far more harm than good for African Americans.

Harry ONeil

Murrieta

Leave people be

According to an East Idaho news report, a transgender woman was found in a changing room, filming an 18-year-old girl in a Target. Of course, this very recent event has rekindled the spark of the haters of transgender bathroom laws. Its not new.

But here is some food for thought. Yes, this woman did, in fact, film someone in a dressing room. Yes, she is transgender. Yes, the whole situation is just plain gross and worrying. That being said, how does this specific situation justify taking away bathroom privacy and safety laws for all other transgender people in our communities?

What gives us the right to generalize an entire people group like that? With all of the police brutality and #BlackLivesMatter hoopla going on, people tend to get snarky if you generalize all policemen. Yet is that not what the main idea of this trans-hating ordeal is? A few wrongdoers here and there cannot and should not represent an entire group.

All in all, to haters of transgender bathroom laws, I hope you realize that there are perverted people out there, no matter what. Whether theyre transgender or not, theyll find a way to film you in bathrooms and dressing rooms anyway. Get over it, and stop blaming people you dont know.

Naomi Garcia

Riverside
Americans are having a discussion on race. Whether they like it or not.

The past two years have seen repeated outpourings of anger and frustration sparked by the deaths of people such as Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner and Sandra Bland, either at the hands of police or while in police custody. And there has often been a divide in the way people of color see such events and the way in which the white community has reacted.

But in the days following a bloody week in which graphic videos surfaced of fatal police shootings in Baton Rouge, La., and Falcon Heights, Minn., followed by a sniper killing five Dallas police officers and wounding nine other people, something seems to have changed.

Its still easy to find polarizing views. Contrast former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani calling the Black Lives Matter movement inherently racist, on CBSs Face the Nation, with the story of Dr. Brian H. Williams, the black surgeon who worked on the Dallas shooting victims. Williams told reporters of his conflicting feelings regarding police officers because of the numerous times hes been stopped, once ending up spread eagle on the hood of a squad car.

But there also have been moves to more seriously address the concerns of the African-American community. Addressing the killing of Philando Castile, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton said if Castile had been white he probably would not have been shot.

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump called the deaths of Castile and of Alton Sterling, in Louisiana, terrible and senseless. The Congressional Black Caucus announced that Republican leaders had agreed to a long-sought bipartisan committee to address police relations with the African-American community. And on Thursday night, ABC aired an hour-long town hall meeting in which President Barack Obama discussed issues of race and policing.

Jody David Armour, a USC law professor who specializes in race issues, said he thinks the videos showing the deaths of Sterling and Castile, coupled with the five police officers killed in Dallas, have changed peoples perspectives.

I would say theyve clarified it, Armour said. We cant help but feel the pain of Alton Sterlings family or Philando Castiles little girl in the back seat and his girlfriend. On the other hand, we cant look at the five officers families and the grief that theyre going through and not mourn their loss. Rarely has there ever been this kind of juxtaposition. Youre able to perceive things simultaneously from two different perspectives.

That, Armour said, may help to narrow the gap between divergent viewpoints.

Mary Texeira, a professor of sociology at Cal State San Bernardino, grew up in South Central Los Angeles and remembers the 1965 Watts Riots, when the black community exploded over the way it was treated by a largely white police force. She too thinks the Sterling and Castile videos have made a change.

People cant ignore what is happening., Texeira said. You have to be soulless to ignore that pain and ignore that suffering. Im thrilled the crowds (at recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations) have been racially mixed. It is now white people and Latinos and Asians getting out and saying, Enough is enough.

Texeira teaches a course on race each quarter that draws up to 300 students. Many of her white students, she said, are surprised by the curriculum.

I think there has been a purposeful disconnect, she said. The white community has not been taught whats been going on with people of color. We have been sold this idea that if you try hard enough you can pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and to stop whining.

No one wants to believe there are entire communities that have just been thrown away, she added. Even many black people dont want to believe that because they too have achieved the American dream.

Derek Bordeaux, 40, of Santa Ana, has been a community activist on race issues. He said even when people outside of communities of color look seriously at racial divides, there is often still a disconnect.

A lot of people sympathize but they dont get it, Bordeaux said, talking about his own experiences of being stopped by police. They dont understand how often it is, how demoralizing it is. In my opinion, instead of trying to understand, support the ones going through it.

He said he and others in his community often feel the police are there to contain rather than protect them. The incidents that have been highlighted on videos are nothing new, he said.

Terrance Stewart, 35, is a UC Riverside graduate and a community organizer with the San Bernardino-based Inland Congregations United for Change. The organization has supported local Black Lives Matter events. Stewart, who lives in Riverside, said the citys policing may be better in many respects than in some other areas, but its not without its problems.

Stewart said the 1998 shooting of Tyisha Miller, a black woman, was an impetus for change in the department.

We have had a taste of it ourselves, Stewart said of the conflict between police and the black community. Now, he said, Theres a lot of love and multiculturalism. We could almost be an example.

Local Black Lives Matter demonstrations have been peaceful. But there are problems too, Stewart said. Hes had his own run-ins with police. He was living in the universitys family housing area two years ago when there was a spate of robberies. Police confronted him when he was taking out his trash, he said. Another time he called 911 when he saw a man collapse on the street near his home.

Again, he said, the police who arrived on the scene had a confrontational attitude.

They questioned me why was I there, he said. I was saving a mans life and I still left feeling bad. I think Riverside is cool. But Im never safe from being harassed.

Stewart said he thinks the conversation needs to focus on one question: How do we talk to each other and not be afraid of each other?

The Rev. Ray Turner is pastor of Temple Mission Baptist Church in San Bernardino. He said the divide is probably greatest between police agencies and minority communities. He thinks the recent police shooting videos have affected everyone and create an opportunity for better understanding.

I think its going to cause all of us to back up and take a look at ourselves, Turner said. Weve got to work together.

Changes in policing, he said, need to come from within.

I have relatives in law enforcement, Turner said. The problem on the law enforcement side is they dont police their own. Until that culture changes, youll never get to the root of the problem.

USCs Armour said very often problems in policing are viewed too narrowly.

People have been saying, The problem boils down to a few bad apples, for too long, Armour said.

He pointed to Department of Justice reports that found widespread problems in the police departments of Ferguson, Mo., where Michael Brown was killed and in Cleveland, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot after waving a toy gun. The solution, he said, is not as simple as greater integration of the police force.

Look at Balitmore, he said, referring to Freddie Grays death while in police custody, half of those officers were black. It isnt just getting more people with the same pigmentation in the department. You can have black officers engage in anti-black violence against other blacks. Whether the officer is black or white, they may have the same low esteem for black lives.

Cal States Texeira said closer ties between police and minority neighborhoods are critical.

The problem is not the police, Texeira said. The problem is policing, the way we define the job of law enforcement. It should be to be a part of the community and not be removed from the community. Not to wear mirrored sunglasses and keep your window rolled up and wear your body armor. Weve got to make the police a part of the community and not just having the perception of being an invading army.

I see cops in Yucaipa, she said, referring to her home community, and they dont patrol the way they do in my old neighborhood of South Central. They smile. They wave. You dont have to be black or brown in order to effectively be part of the community.

The Black Lives Matter movement has often taken heat from critics who see it as anti-law enforcement. Some have seen the Dallas shootings as a result of the emotions stirred up by the groups demonstrations, even though the shooter, Micah Johnson, reportedly told police he was angry at the group.

Many, such as Armour, have said its not an either/or situation.

It isnt that blue lives dont matter, Armour said of those in uniform, its that black lives matter too.

He said he sees hope for better dialogue moving forward. The recognition of a serious policing problem by people such as Trump and former Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, are important, he said.

Thats a jaw dropping admission coming from some flag carriers on the right, Armour said. I dont think were quite out of the woods yet, but weve come a long way.

Contact the writer: mmuckenfuss@pressenterprise.com or 951-369-9595
During the past school year, art students at Redlands High School painted dog banks to be stationed at local businesses to raise money for homeless animals.

The Redlands Humane Society began the fundraising project in the late 1980s.

A couple of years ago, a staff member at one of the businesses painted one of the sad dog banks. Since then, Rose Estupinan, secretary for the Redlands Humane Society and office manager for the Redlands Teachers Association, asked the Redlands High School Art Club to paint all the dog banks.

Now 20 painted banks are rotated among local businesses, including Foamy Car Wash, Redlands Tire Pros, A la Minute, Crackerjacks, Gourmet Pizza Shoppe, Wildflowers flower shop, Redlands Animal Hospital, Taco Shack in Redlands and Kays Cafe in Highland.

The Redlands Humane Society, which is more than 100 years old, is a volunteer organization. Its focus since the 1990s has been its Operation Second Chance program.

The society has cats and dogs of many breeds available for adoption but does not operate a shelter. All animals are in volunteer foster homes until they are adopted.

Redlands Humane Society animals can be seen 6-8 p.m. Thursdays during Redlands downtown Market Night, at Orange and State streets.

Those interested in having Redlands Humane Society dog banks at their businesses may email redlandshumane@yahoo.com or call 909-792-6199 and leave a number.

For information on fostering animals or other volunteer opportunities, go to redlandshumane.org.
Two Orange County residents suspected of drug-related crimes were arrested Saturday, July 16, at the Pechanga Resort and Casino in Temecula.

Rudy Torres and Karina Melgoa, both residents of Santa Ana, are being held at the Southwest Detention Center on suspicion of possession of a controlled substance, a Riverside County Sheriffs Department news release states.

At 5:24 a.m., deputies responded to the casino, located in the 45000 block of Pechanga Parkway, in response to reports of drug activity at a vehicle inside the parking structure.

During a preliminary search, deputies found a large amount of methamphetamine and heroin in Torres clothes, the release states. A subsequent search of the vehicle uncovered 183 grams of methamphetamine and various drug contraband.
Vice President Paa Kwesi Amissah Arthur, has presented assorted books, laptops and desktop computers to the Aboom Methodist 'B' Primary School, his alma mater, to help improve teaching and learning in the school.



Vice President Amissah-Arthur who made the donation at the 65th anniversary celebration of the School in Cape Coast called for an increased community participation and supervision in education to enhance effective teaching and learning.



He said serious community involvement in education would go a long way to improve the falling standards of education and so Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) and all relevant stakeholders should therefore play their roles for effective results.



The celebration was on the theme: Equal Opportunity to Education for national Development.



He said Government would ensure the delivery of quality and accessible education at all levels for the benefit of Ghanaians and has therefore put in place programmes and policies to keep every school going child in the classroom.



He said such interventions, which includes school feeding, free education, distribution of free uniforms, shoes and books are meant to cushion parents to give their wards better opportunities in life.



He noted that most parents are withdrawing their responsibilities and urged them not to renege on their roles to their children.



The wellbeing and development of your children must be the topmost priority, he said.



The Vice President, told the parents that the world has become very competitive and that every parent must endeavour to educate their children for them to get to greater heights in life.



Mr Stephen Amoah, Cape Coast Metropolitan Director of Education said Ghana Education Service, is working to ensure equal opportunity to quality education for all pupils and expressed the need for stakeholders to play their roles to make it a reality.



He said though girl -child enrolment and the number of girls who complete basic schools had improved significantly over the past years, there is still room for improvement.



Osabarima Kwesi Atta II, Omanhen of Oguaa, expressed worry over the fallen standards of education in the Central Region, which he said had reduced the number of students from the Cape Coast Metropolis who enrol in the many renowned senior high Schools in the area.



He also expressed concern about the poor attendance of parents at the event and urged them to show interest in their childrens education.



He advised the students to aspire to higher heights and work hard towards achieving them.



Mr George Kweku Ricketts-Hagan, Regional Minister, also an old student said, educating the child at the school is a collective responsibility and therefore parents and other stakeholders must not leave everything on the teachers.

Source: GNA









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Featured Video
Anti-Corruption: Nigeria Can Involve The People, Provoke Moral Outrage



His Excellency, former President of Ghana, Flt Lt (rtd) Jerry John Rawlings, was twice head of state of Ghana. In this no-holds-barred interview with EMEKA ANUFORO, he speaks on a range of issues, including Nigeria under President Muhammadu Buhari, corruption in Africa, his country, Ghana, and the way forward for African countries.



On things that destroy the moral fabric of societies



In the first place, I think that things have gone astray since the collapse of the bipolar world. I keep talking about Pope John Paul II castigating the dominant Western economic philosophy when he called it the savagery of capitalism.



The conduct of affairs internationally has pretty much gone out of hands. But some of us appear to be immune to it or appear to be getting used to it. All the things you dont expect to happen in a healthy government, in a democratic context, are happening: the greed, the impunity, the selfishness being displayed. And it is even worse with us in the so-called developing world in terms of the monetisation of values. The very moral fabric of integrity is broken. I am saying that there was a dramatic moment when this turning point could actually be felt.



That was when George Bush Jnr moved into Iraq. That cynical moment turned a very important human value upside down in the sense that, from that moment, as they stepped in and decided to just move into the capital and literarily destroyed so much human life and natural habitat, I told the world in one sentence that, the right of might now supersedes the might of right. So, others began to take a cue. I do recall that when Bush and Blair made their presence felt, like this is going to be a new world order under our leadership, I think they attempted to crack a whip on Africa because things are not going well on this black continent either.



President Mugabe was to be their first victim, if you remember. His name was the one poisoned the most. Two people were sent down there to go and ask him to get out of office: Obasanjo and Kufuor, who were then in office. The Southern Region leadership told them to get out. Fantastic, beautiful!



They needed a culprit. If they couldnt have Mugabe, then someone else. That was how Charles Taylor was picked up. I am not saying that Charles Taylor to an extent didnt deserve what he got or completely ignorant of the Liberian brutalities. But Obasanjo had gone to the US at that time for whatever reason, but not even the State Department would receive him unless he produced Charles Taylor. Remember at that time, Charles Taylor was living in Nigeria and he set off, attempting to go to another country, when he was arrested at the border and handed over.



Now, generally speaking, and you know, a whole lot of nasty things were going on following the Bin Ladins insurgency on September 11 with his allied Taliban forces. That moment brought another face in the history of humanity across the globe and has reshaped the Americas home security and international policy. All of a sudden, America decided to start chasing people up.



They erred in some ways. Instead of chasing, arresting and bringing to justice, they used the words: We would hound and kill. The word justice was lost and it appeared every statesman or woman had to use the same language, otherwise they would lose their political influence. If a world like that is going to talk about pursuing people, so-called terrorists, and kill them, without justice, we also take the cue. I am saying so much went wrong, so much impunity. The world is still in search of true Justice.



It is no surprise President Carter, many years down the line, should castigate the US and say America had lost its moral standing. That is why the world at that time, even the USA, was so excited that the world simply wanted, was craving for some international political morality with such a passion. If you remember, the world held on to people like Mandela. But that was earlier.



When somebody like Obama emerged, didnt you see how the world was excited about him? He clearly represented the new spirit, the refreshing spirit that the world was looking for, and especially to be a leader in the US. He has been doing his bit. But the point is that the wrongdoings, the manner in which things have gone astray since the collapse of the bipolar world, much of that has taken a life of its own in various ways.



On Ghana and corruption



Not too long after I left office, I was giving a talk in Tanzanian and I said the world was going to see an exponential growth of terrorism. I had left office and the western media and western governments were desperately whitewashing the image of Ghana in spite of the atrocities and the corruption that was going on in my country after we had left office.



Ghana had become a captive state, being whitewashed. You see how they orchestrate things? This is what I want you to wake up to. Now, it might interest you to know that, while they were whitewashing, making these claims and things were also falling apart, as late as just a few months ago, BBC now claims that terrorism had risen by 84%, creating a false impression at that time. This is the power of the Western media.



They kept whitewashing the image of my country in order for it to serve as the role model for the rest of Africa. It is shocking and mindboggling to know that, some perceived celebrated companies in Ghana and Africa with so much media hype and political patronization, were just nothing but a package of mirage. It is no wonder Ghana is so corrupt today.



Remember when I said the world would see a multiplier effect of terrorism, I knew what was going on in Ghana; I knew what was going on in Africa: the way the global situation was affecting us; our country was suffocating but leadership seemed immune to the realities.



Meanwhile, I am repeating what the Pope says about the savagery of capitalism. Where is it going to lead to and what was going on for him to describe this kind of scenario? Corruption could get worse. Even as a party, we used to win elections with the force of conviction. The one who came after I left office just capitulated and decided to use the money factor.



On Nigerias decision to change things



Out of this growing darkness, Nigerians of all people seem to have decided that enough is enough and they voted for a man with the qualities to deal with the problems of Nigeria. For me, this is one of the greatest gifts that your country has offered us. Hold on to it and support it to restore the foundation of integrity in your national affairs. You can do things the corrupt way. But I believe it is better to do things the non-corrupt way. The non-corrupt way is healthier, more stable and takes away anxieties. It can achieve a lot more; even take you to the moon.



So, a lot of these things just destroyed the moral fabric of our societies. For me, it is just a sweet sensation to think that Nigeria came out of that construct, showing us that that kind of corrupt environment that seemed to have solidified can be turned around, can be reversed. I am just hoping that it can inspire the rest of West Africa. Im not saying is a single effort of an individual but rather a sense of responsibility of every individual to take ownership of integrity and accountability but somebody must take the lead. We had a taste of that.



On his relationship with Abacha



It is unfortunate that Abacha should also be caught up in such practices like a few of his predecessors. But he was one hell of a nationalist and very patriotic. Abacha saved the country. Some of you may not know this. But I also had my fingers on things. Some may not want to hear it. But the departure of that gentleman called Abiola, the one who passed away, saved Nigeria from a probable explosion.



Shonekan couldnt handle the situation and Abacha stepped in. There is also something else we shouldnt lose sight of. When I am talking about the possibility of an explosion, its about the circumstances and the personalities involved. Abiola plus Shonekan (who was a man of integrity) could not even be seen to hold it. Does it surprise you that Nigerians, I think either through some national instinct or wherever the perception came from, some think that they needed retired generals who cannot be intimidated by the military? That was how come characters like Obasanjo could come back or for that matter, this gentleman, President Buhari, who cannot be intimidated by the military.It has its value, but I think it is a transition that we are all going through or you are going through.



On his anti-corruption and alleged $5million gift from Abacha



The point I want to make here is around that period, we were preparing for constitutional rule. We needed funds for some activities and we got contributions from few places. The interesting thing is that I never went to, or asked Abacha for any contribution. And this is something that impressed me about the man. I didnt ask him for a penny. But he obviously understood certain situations, our situation, and graciously sent me a small suitcase of money. I think there were two cars or three that came to the Air Force station to look for me. I was going for fly at that afternoon.



So, I was at the Air Force Station when a gentleman came over there and when he said he had a message from Abacha, I cancelled my flight and they set out to wait for me. I drove after them to the caste. As we got out of the car and we were about to move up, this elderly gentleman, Gwarzo he is called, had one of his assistants try to bring out a suitcase from the boot of a car. I had an idea of what it could be. So I said: Leave it, shut your boot and lets go upstairs first and talk. He said he had brought something from Abacha. I said two things: I hear you people dont provide assistance without the world hearing it with a twist.



He just kept quiet looking at me. I said two: Dont think that when you bring this, whatever it is, that would shut me up from criticizing if I think you are wrong, or if I disagree. He then opened his mouth and said Sir, we need you more than you need us.I am quoting him. He didnt speak much. He was a very noble, quiet looking and elderly man. He was respectable looking. In fact, what he said simply disarmed me. So I said it was okay. He could send for the parcel. His assistant then went and brought in the parcel: 2million dollars: new notes packed in plastic bags, fairly heavy. We left it in the sitting room.



We finished with some niceties and he left. I informed some of my close comrades of the parcel from Abacha. I gave away about 350,000 dollars to two people for urgent disbursements. One of our senior colleagues who was in charge of an exercise drew down certain amounts.We went on like this until the suitcase was exhausted. Later when Abacha died and your country instituted an investigation into his assets, I read in one of your newspapers that Mr. Gwarzo, this fine gentleman, allegedly said that he brought me 5million dollars. I am glad I still have that suitcase. It shocked me a bit that such a fine respectable man could make such a claim. The amount he mentioned shocked me. That he could tell such a lie.



My colleagues knew about it. I didnt know why I should be keeping these things secret. Moreover, I didnt have any personal account to be putting these things into anyway. Besides we needed to use them for some national needs.



But lo and behold! Many years down the line when I fell out with some of my colleagues and they decided to get poisonous, two of them wrote a book on district assembly elections and the decentralization programme, and inserted in somewhere, when it was absolutely not necessary, something about Gwarzos supposed $5million just to poison my name. I just feel sad that Gwarzo should do this. I am prepared to be subjected to polygraph test. May be thats what he needs also.



When General Abubakar took over, I told him to watch out. That that report in the papers about $5million was $2million and not $5million. He didnt make any comment. He didnt say anything. Obasanjo took over I thought I should straighten it out with him. The comment he made was: Yes, that is how they behave. When they are given something to take somewhere, they will take the majority, the bigger share. That was the comment Obasanjo made.



I wasnt used to those things. Otherwise, I could have called Abacha. I dont even think I even called him over that. Maybe I should have called him to say thank you for the $2million and then he would have called his people to order. You see what I mean? I wasnt used to money being thrown up and down. Money was not my thing. Yes, we were poor enough as a country, but we were working day and night to making sure we put the country on a solid foundation for economic explosion. We had our pride and our dignity was not out for sale.



I recall that in the early days I didnt have any money in the account and somebody gave me a million dollar cheque. I just threw it on the workshop table. Eight years later, one of our comrades reminded me about the cheque and said we would need the money for something and I asked him to go look for it.



The mischief that our people get involved in hurt me. When I was a kid my grandmother used to say: A liar is more dangerous than a thief, and we could never understand it. It didnt make sense to us, because as kids we were always denying something or telling fibs about something, and nobody gets hurt or anything. But you get whipped for stealing and more. When you grow up to my situation today then you wake up to what my Granny was saying, how liars are the most vicious and cowardly creatures. They can destroy a whole image and reputation.



That was why Chinua Achebes counterpart, Ayi Kwei Armah, wrote The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born. When I grew up, I realized he was wrong. The beautiful ones are born. They are there, but the platform is so dirty they dare not step on it to campaign to be leaders, because they would be slammed down with some of the nastiest fabrications. Nobody wants to have their name spoilt, so politics becomes a monopoly. No wonder he said the beautiful ones were not yet born.



But no, when I got in, I said no way. I brought the beautiful ones all on board when I came back the second time. That was how come we succeeded so beautifully. We provided a leadership of credibility and integrity. These are the hallmarks I stand for.



How to strengthen institutions to keep beautiful ones alive



A lot depends on the leader, his sensitivity, his will, his strength and determination, because the vast majority of the people are suffering from the decay. They want to see a change for the better. I think that the number one should be bold enough and identify the right people to take over and move to those institutions in an effective and efficient way. Put your foot down, because those institutions are manned by human beings; and if those human beings lack the character, the strength and the spirit to be able to defy that which is wrong, then we cannot defend freedom and justice. The leader has to give a clear signal, sense of direction and the passion to drive the change. When I was in office, I spent 30-40 per cent of my time watching out for corrupt or corruptible indications or behaviour or lifestyles. I wouldnt tolerate it. It is so easy. It brings the best out of your people. They would do 70 per cent of the work for you.



I can understand Buharis style. It is okay. Let it be. My style was to provoke the needed consciousness and invite the involvement of our people so that you had moral outrage from the general populace. So, even in your villages and workplaces, you cant misbehave and get away with it. I dont have to have a policeman there. We dont have enough policemen. But the moral outrage of the society is dynamite. It is a weapon waiting to be used and utilized. The people were policing themselves for the just course. Do you get me? Do you get me, my brother? Thats what I meant by positive defiance.



Some may end up being intimidated by it, sadly. But no, it is there to help you. After all, that is what you have in those countries, those developed countries. They have not destroyed their moral outrage.



Halting Ghanas slide on the corruption table



All I can do is speak up. I find myself in a situation where I have moral responsibility and no executive authority. I would have wished that my moral authority could have the same influence. But that is not the case, corruption has infiltrated our institutions and their leaders so badly today that they use some kind of lens to demonstrate that you can keep your moral authority, but this is executive power at work.



So all I can do is to critique and advocate for my people. I cant hide it. And I believe that was how I won the respect from the larger populace, from both sides of the political divide. I have remained principled. My wife is still standing where she is, cut off from our party that she was very responsible in building up because it became corrupted from Mills time.



We now fight on the terms of the opposition or the main opposition party. Fortunately for them, they have a leader who is not known for messing around with material things. The situation is so bad. So unfortunate! This is why Buhari has to alter things. You have got to make it. He doesnt have much time and cant afford for inertia to set in or for the momentum to go down.



On remarks by Kofi Annan that some African leaders were tempting the military



The point is that in waging a campaign in the international community, bringing pressure to bear to keep the military in the barracks, our hope was that the quality of democracy would also have improved.



I like to think that you can use good governance to prevent military intervention. Quite frankly, our parliaments do not appear to be strong enough to impeach Presidents who are getting out of hand. That is one way of preventing a coup. That is a legitimate way of doing it, an institutional way of doing it. But too many of us appear to have been compromised and our principles also compromised. So we seem unable to make a move against an erring government and a government that is becoming very corrupt and endangering situations. So I am not surprised he said what he said. I am not surprised at all.



We left behind an exemplary institution or institutions  the Armed Forces. But they made sure they corrupted it in order to survive because they could not measure up to the standards that we left behind. That is as far as that is concerned.I could have said this, but if I had done so it would seem that I was calling for it. People would misinterpret it. Now that Kofi Annan himself has said it, I hope people will see through the situation.



Corruption has warped our development process and programme. I am not just taking about the materialistic or monetary corruption, but the extent to which your very culture, the moral standing of a society can be so.A few months ago I said in one of our universities that it appears you cannot get ahead by doing the right thing anymore. When you have to do it the right way, you wont succeed. Instead, you should be prepared to cut corners, offer bribes or do some foolish things before you get along. Im glad some of our local companies got blacklisted by the UN and other donor agencies for such unhealthy moral practices. When you have reached that stage, that level, then you know that things are bad. I dont want to create the impression of no hope because things are bad.That is why, for me, I am holding on to you people, Nigeria, to turn things around. Buhari is God-sent.

Source: guardian.ng









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
Vice President K. B. Amissah-Arthur is likely to be the talk of the town after he was spotted in a locally made vehicle for an official duty.



Earlier this week, the second gentleman of the country acquired two Kantanka Onantefuo 4x4 vehicles to add to the pool of vehicles at the presidency.



The purchase of the two vehicles is in fulfilment of government's promise to support the Kantanka Automobile Company, a company owned by a Ghanaian to thrive indigenous company.



Following the purchase, many were in doubt as to whether the car would be used personally by the vice-president.



But Mr Amissah-Arthur has proved his critics wrong when he joined members of the Elwak Keep Fit Club for their annual Republic Day Health walk.



He arrived at the Elwak Stadium in his made in Ghana Kantanka Sport Utility Vehicle for the exercise which lasted nearly two hours.

Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/ Twitter: @Washman5/ Instagram: Washman007









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured Video
You dont need to be a genius to realise that One Nations policy platform is probably not all that considered in terms of facts. Its reactionary populism and it doesnt really need facts in order to function.

But nonetheless, Aussie Muslims have established a website intended to critique the statements and policies of Pauline Hansons party platform:

P R E S S S T A T E M E N T Aussie Muslims respond to #OneNation by launching https://t.co/ZrYOuvRdWy #FactCheckOneNation#auspol  Mariam Veiszadeh (@MariamVeiszadeh) July 17, 2016

There are some good points worth considering here, even if youre not a prospective One Nation voter and seek clarification on some of the issues often raised by the hard right. Like on sharia law, for example:

The vast majority of Australian law is Shariah compliant and in most instances exactly same as Shariah so there is no need for any imposition. This includes, but is not limited to; the rule of law, the adversarial system, the jury system, much of court etiquette, evidence law, maritime law, tort law, trust law, contract law, equity, power of attorney, mediation, legal ethics, criminal law, marriage, partnership, trade practices, consumer law, child support and the list goes on and on!

Or on the repeatedly claimed link between halal food and Islamic terrorism:

The Senate inquiry into third-party certification of food has heard there is no direct link between halal certification and Islamic terrorism. The evidence was given by both the Australian Crime Commission and Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the nations anti-money laundering intelligence agency, at the inquirys second hearing.

Its worth a gander.

As I said, factsheets alone arent going to sway the people who arent really voting on that basis. Thats not to say their vote is somehow less legitimate  many, many people vote for all parties for reasons aside from hard facts  but its worth reiterating again and again that the hate Hanson whips up doesnt have a huge basis in reality.

Source: Twitter / One Nation Fact Check.

Photo: Getty Images.
26-year-old social media star Qandeel Baloch, known in her native Pakistan for her daring posts and pro-female empowerment stance, has been murdered by her own brother, in what Al Jazeera are reporting as an honour killing.

Baloch, real name Fauzia Azeem, died in her home town of Multan, and police on Saturday said that her father Mohammed Azeem filed a case against his son Waseem Azeem, who fled but was later captured.

Appearing in a press conference, with his face covered, Waseem told journalists that he killed for honour and had no regrets.

Qandeel Baloch, who began her career by appearing on Pakistani Idol, was a popular and divisive figure in conservative Pakistan, often appearing on television in revealing, non-traditional clothes to talk about feminist concepts.

Her final Facebook post, on July 4, said:

I am trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people who dont wanna come out of their shells of false beliefs and old practices.

Tributes for Baloch have come from around Pakistan, with vigils held in Lahore and Karachi and everyone from media figures to prominent religious leaders condemning the killing.

Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, who has made documentaries about honour killings, spoke to Al Jazeera about the epidemic of violence against women, saying:

Im very shaken up today. Activists in Pakistan have been screaming hoarse about honour killings; it is an epidemic, it takes place not only in towns, but in major cities as well. What are we going to do as a nation?  Its upon the lawmakers to punish these people. We need to start making examples of people. It appears it is very easy to kill a woman in this country  and you can walk off scot free.

Senator Shery Rahman accused the countrys conservative government of sitting on vital amendments in the Pakistani Criminal Procedure Code that would address crimes against women, and hoped that this killing would spark change.

Source: Al Jazeera.

Photo: Facebook.
Yesterday brought us the awful news that Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch had tragically been murdered by her brother in an honour killing, in her family home near Multan.

Baloch, a model and reality star, was known for her posts regarding intersectional feminism; she was a champion of ending the stigmatisation of female sexuality and empowering women in a country that is extremely conservative with the idea of female independence.

While she became an icon in the West for her bravery in standing up against societal and cultural norms that restricted her as a woman, she was obviously incredibly polarising in Pakistan and often was in the middle of controversy and headlines.

Her brother, who fleed after strangling her in her sleep and was arrested the following day in the neighbouring district of Muzaffargarh, has now spoken openly about his motives.

At a press conference overnight, Wasim Azeem stated that his sisters videos were objectionable and intolerable, and that he was not ashamed of what he had done:

Yes of course, I strangled her. I am not ashamed. We are Baloch and as Baloch we cannot tolerate this. Money matters, but family honour is more important. I was determined either to kill myself or kill her. I am not embarrassed at all over what I did. Whatever was the case, it [Qandeels actions] was completely intolerable.

He also explained his actions step-by-step for the press:

She was on the ground floor while our parents were asleep on the rooftop. It was around 10.45pm when I gave her a tablet  and then killed her.

His father Muhammad Azeem, who turned his son in to police, has told press that he believes Wasim was acting on the instruction of his older brother, Aslam Shaheen. Both brothers have now been charged with murder, and local police said they would be seeking the maximum punishment for Wasim.

However, in Pakistan, an honour killing mean that the incident can be tried as a private offence, which allows the offender to be pardoned by the victims family. Every year, hundreds of women are murdered in honour killings for testing the conservative norms of love, marriage, dress, temperament, etc.

Pakistani newspapers have published odes to and memorials of Qandeel Baloch, and calling for a legislative end to honour killings in Pakistan.

APOLOGY

Yesterday when reporting the murder of Qandeel Baloch, we titled the story Provocative Social Media Star Murder By Her Own Brother. We acknowledge that the use of the word provocative was completely inappropriate given the context of the story, and we have removed the headline out of respect for both Qandeel Baloch, and our readers who were distressed by the headline. We unreservedly apologise for our mistake.

Source: Telegraph.

Photo: Instagram.
SYDNEY: If youre reading this on your phone in bed, and havent yet looked out the window, then we have news for you: its foggy as shit this morning.

EVERY OTHER PLACE IN AUSTRALIA: Sydney is experiencing extraordinary levels of fog this morning, so we really hope youre not flying in today. Multiple flights have been cancelled.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge amidst this mornings fog, thanks for the pic @jrad87! #9Today pic.twitter.com/H1d9sH6bHP  The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) July 17, 2016

As someone who crossed the Harbour Bridge this morning, I can confirm that from it, you cannot see shit. It basically felt like someone had built the bridge but forgotten to do anything about the city.

Check out this somewhat bizarre gif from Nine News:

LIVE from Sydney Harbour Bridge as heavy fog plagues the city. #9News pic.twitter.com/tODCpATvLp  Nine News Sydney (@9NewsSyd) July 17, 2016

All ferries in Sydney have been stopped (although the latest reports said that the Parramatta river service was now back up and running), with Transport NSW advising commuters to seek alternative transport. We recommend your bed.

Good morning Sydney you misty beauty. ?? #anzacbridge #sydney #fog A photo posted by Anna Freeland (@annamaree.freeland) on Jul 17, 2016 at 3:01pm PDT

Good news: its expected to clear up by midday.

Photo: Getty / James D. Morgan.
Pauline Hanson has called for Indigenous activist Murrandoo Yanner to sit down and discuss the issues affecting Aboriginal communities, following yesterdays verbal altercation at the Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair.

In a video posted to Facebook, the senator describes how she believes Yanners reaction wasnt called for, considering the support shed previously received from well-known Indigenous artist Ken Thaiday.

She says shes really ashamed to see what happened with Murrandoo Yanner on the steps, and his abuse of me.

What follows is a call for cooperation, with the senator seemingly banking on their mutual distrust of politicians to convince Yanner to talk shop.

Murrandoo, please, lets work together on these issues that are important to me, important to the Aboriginal people. I think the perception about me was wrong, and Im here to support the Aboriginal community and Torres Strait Islanders. Im your representative. Please contact me. Lets work together. I think we can make a big difference.

Pauline Hanson responds to abuse at Cairns Indigenous Art Fair A response to yesterdays abuse I received at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair. #PaulineHanson #Auspol #OneNation #MurrandooYanner Posted by Pauline Hansons Please Explain on Saturday, 16 July 2016

Its as humble a response as could be expected given the circumstances, but some of the claims made are still somewhat questionable.

Referencing the positions shes held for twenty years is a bold move, considering thats right around the time she was utterly ragging on Asian immigration.

Of course, in the original outburst, Yanner hit out at the fact shes now moved on from Asian immigrants to a distrust of Muslims.

Well see where this one goes, yeah?

Source: ABC.

Photo: Pauline Hanson Please Explain / Facebook.
Imagine a Republican National Convention where there was discussion on free trade. Imagine Republicans discussing plans on how to address poverty that clings to families from generation to generation. Imagine the GOP reaching out minorities and others who have rebuffed the party in recent years.

This is Paul Ryan's dream for the RNC, and in a lengthy interview with NPR, the one-time vice president candidate talks about his vision for the Republican Party and his grudging endorsement of Donald Trump. From NPR:

Ryan says he chose to endorse Trump in the interest of party unity. He did this while still criticizing many of Trump's statements. Ryan even said Trump's attack on a Mexican-American judge was "the textbook definition of a racist comment." He plainly received no assurances that Trump will change. In our talk, the most Ryan could say was that "I believe he's going to endeavor, to try" to change. Asked twice if Trump would be a "good president," Ryan would not answer yes or no. He contends only that Trump would be better than Hillary Clinton.



This back-and-forth endorsement of Trump also was noted by the New York Times in a profile on Ryan that appeared July 12 as one of the things Ryan has struggled with since he became Speaker of the House.

You can watch the interview above or through NPR's website. The Wall Street Journal also takes a look at how Ryan is dealing with a Trump-oriented Republican Party.
A volunteer firefighter who stopped on his way home to assist at the scene of a house fire has been hospitalized after he was injured in the ensuing response.

Citing local officials, FOX 43 says the firefighter, Hunter Umbenhauer, and his brother, Tyler Zimmerman, were driving home when they stopped to help residents at the 302 Iona Road home in Lebanon around 10:30 Friday night.

The station says the people inside the home did not seem to be aware of the fire at first.

Umbenhauer was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation and his current condition is not known, the station says.

The cause of the fire is under investigation, and the Red Cross is assisting a displaced victim.
SAYLORSBURG -The Turkish embassy gave embattled cleric Fethullah Gulen paperwork that outlined an assassination plot against him about three months ago, and the plan stems from Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Gulen's spokesman said.

The plan included a detailed map of Gulen's 26-acre compound in Saylorsburg, Monroe County, with triangulation lines overlaid, outlining potential points of attack, Y. Alp Aslandogan said.

The plot could be a veiled threat, or a serious plot to end the 75-year-old Gulen's life, said Aslandogan, a day after a failed military coup erupted in Turkey, which claimed the lives of 265 people and injured 1,440. Legions of Turkish government supporters believe Gulen masterminded the attack from his Pennsylvania mountain enclave.

Gulen, a reclusive Islamic scholar, preacher and social advocate, has lived in exile in the Pocono mountains since 1999. He suffers from diabetes and heart disease and rarely goes outside, said Aslandogan, executive director of New York-based Alliance for Shared Values, which backs Gulen's teachings.

Gulen did make a rare appearance at a press conference Saturday morning to speak out against the accusations lodged against him, as dozens of protesters started to line up outside the compound, called the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center, to denounce him.

Gulen denied all coup involvement, and released the following statement:

"I condemn, in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey. Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force. I pray to God for Turkey, for Turkish citizens and for all those currently in Turkey, that this situation is resolved peacefully and quickly.

As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations."

The demonstrators, who drove from Connecticut, Delaware and beyond, believe Gulen should be extradited to Turkey, and tried as a terrorist. They stood in the sweltering heat for hours, chanting "Obama, send him home," and "a terrorist lives here."

Other impassioned protestors spoke in Turkish over a bullhorn, in the middle of a wooded, mountain road lined with state police who kept traffic moving safely behind the group, which stood in one lane of the road.

Erdogan supporter Nejdetzafer Saydam, who drove from Manchester, Conn., to attend the demonstration, said Gulen does not practice the peace he claims to preach.

"Mr. Gulen claims to be a religious leader, but he is not. He claims to represent the people of Turkey," Saydam said . "What he has done with his movement is cause a lot of problems for the Turkish government. We want him to be turned over to the Turkish authorities and we would like for him to go back to Turkey and stand trial for everything he has done and all the trouble he has caused."

A Turkish government lawyer has stated there are indications of Gulen's direct involvement with the coup, according to an Associated Press report.

But U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Turkey has yet to ask for Gulen's extradition, but if the country does, the U.S. will consider any evidence officials offer of his wrongdoing.

That's because there is no evidence, according to Aslandogen.

Erdogan has accused Gulen and his sympathizers with various labels for years, he said. In 2013, when there was a corruption investigation, he accused members of the judiciary of being sympathizers. By using that accusation he strengthened his control over the judiciary, he said.

Gulen, who is a poor man who only owns the books that lines several buildings that dot the retreat, is supported by the foundation that runs the worship center, Aslandogen said. Gulen simply is an easy target for Erdogan, he said.

Other Turkish groups, including the Kemalists, disagree with Erdogan's government. But the Kemalists are larger and make up about 29 percent of the Turkish population, he said.

Gulen sympathizers make up about 1 percent of the population, Aslandogen said.

"Those other groups, like Kemalists (and a smaller religious faction), are not convenient targets, because one of them is a pretty big and the other one is a religious minority," Aslandogen said. "So his next movement becomes a convenient target to go after, because they have no defender, they are relatively small and nobody comes to their defense."

Gulen isn't poor by any means, Erdogan supporter Aladdin Taskin, who traveled from Wilmington, Del., to attend the protest.

Gulen, who, along with supporters, has established 1,000 schools in more than 100 countries, including the U.S., is worth about $50 billion, Taskin claimed.

He and his sympathizers run universities, hospitals, charities, a bank and a large media empire, according to an Associated Press report.

Gulen's actions led to the loss of innocent lives, and he needs to be held accountable, Saydam said.

"We want him to be turned over to the Turkish authorities. We would like for him to go back to Turkey and stand trial for everything that he has done and all the trouble he has caused in Turkey," he said.

Protestors who attended the demonstration in Saylorsburg said they will stage a similar event at the White House at 2 p.m. on Sunday.
laquerre cropped.png

Maxine Y. Laquerre, 40, of Belling, Massachusetts, was charged Friday with aggravated assault after police say she kicked an officer during her arrest.

(Southern Lancaster County Regional Police Department.)

A Massachusetts woman is facing charges after police in Lancaster County say she was causing a disturbance and threatening at children at a campground before kicking an officer during her arrest.

Maxine Y. Laquerre, 40, of Belling, Massachusetts, was charged after the Friday night incident at the Outdoor World Campground on the 2100 block of Millersville Road in Pequea Township.

According to the Southern Lancaster County Regional Police Department, the incident occurred like this:

Police were called to the campground around 8:20 p.m. Friday where Laquerre was reported to be swearing at and threatening random children at a playground and causing a disturbance at a bathhouse.

She was intoxicated and uncooperative with police, and during her arrest, she kicked one of the officers.

Laquerre was charged with aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia. She was committed to Lancaster County Prison on $100,000 bail.
Trump Clinton

By Kyle C. Kopko and Christopher Devine

Veepstakes speculation is rampant as we approach the national conventions for both major political parties.

Media reports have detailed the wide array of options available to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as they decide who will be their number twos for this campaign, and perhaps for four or eight years to come.

The choice of candidates depends on each candidate's goals -both for the remainder of the presidential campaign and after Nov. 8.

On Friday, Trump named Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, an old-school conservative, as his Veep pick. We're still waiting to find out who Clinton will tap for her running-mate.

I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 A.M.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2016

Political observers widely agree that the most important characteristic to look for in a running mate is the ability to serve as president in the event of unforeseen circumstances, like a president's death, incapacitation, resignation or impeachment.

However, when campaign staff and trusted political advisers vet potential running mates, they are certain to also weigh political considerations.

That is, whether a given running mate will help or hurt the presidential ticket, with voters in general or with a key voting group. Particularly if the campaign is at a competitive disadvantage, its strategists may look to the running mate as a potential "game changer."

The electoral advantage most commonly associated with vice presidential candidates is geographic.

In other words, they are expected to deliver their home state or region in the Electoral College. But do they actually deliver?

Usually not.

In our book, "The VP Advantage: How Running Mates Influence Home State Voting in Presidential Elections," we employed a multi-method approach to empirically test the purported home state advantage. We used both state-level election returns since 1884 and individual-level survey data since 1952 in our analysis. Ultimately, we found no evidence of a general vice presidential home state advantage, on average.

Based upon the data, it is unlikely that Hillary Clinton's or Donald Trump's running mate will deliver a crucial battleground state, like Ohio or Virginia. Instead, the presidential candidates would be wise to select a respected running mate who can effectively serve as vice president.

Survey data and internal campaign polls from 1960 even cast serious doubt on the "fact" that Lyndon Johnson delivered Texas and the Southfor Democratic presidential candidate John Kennedy that year. Although presidential candidates typically receive an electoral advantage in their home state, our findings for vice presidential candidates suggest a conditional relationship.

Such advantages are most likely to occur in less populous states where a running mate has significant elected political experience within that state. The vice presidential candidacies of Maine's Edmund Muskie (1968) and Delaware's Joe Biden (2008, 2012), both political "institutions" in their small home states, serve as perfect examples.

How about demographic appeal, then? Will a running mate deliver votes from a targeted demographic group - say, based on gender or religion - if she also belongs to that group? To find out, in a recent analysis we tested whether women (1984 and 2008), Catholic (1972, 1984, 2008, and 2012), and Jewish (2000) voters were more likely to vote for a presidential ticket that included a vice president from the same demographic group. Once again, running mates failed to deliver as expected.

True, voters more positively evaluated vice presidential candidates who belonged to their demographic group. But this did not change votes. Women, for instance, were no more likely than in other years to vote for a ticket featuring a woman as running mate, and the same generally goes for religious minorities.

While there's a great deal of speculation that Hillary Clinton will select a Hispanic running mate, partly in hopes of increasing her vote share among Hispanics, this evidence suggests that she should not expect such an advantage. Of course, she may perform better among Hispanics for other reasons, namely opposition to Donald Trump's candidacy.

So, are vice presidential candidates electorally irrelevant? No, far from it.

Campaigns could use a running mate as a means to reinforce a campaign theme or foster party unity. Ted Cruz selecting Carly Fiorina as his seven-day running mate, for example, reinforced Cruz's campaign brand of a political outsider who would shake up Washington.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan used his vice presidential pick to attempt to unify the warring factions of his party and pick up uncommitted delegates at the Republican National Convention. It backfired when he announced Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania would be his running mate, which provoked a strong reaction from Sen. Jesse Helms and other conservatives.

Gerald Ford got the nomination that year. Four years later, Reagan considered the possibility of inviting Ford back to the ticket as his running mate in what some dubbed a co-presidency. Instead he offered the vice presidential slot to his relatively moderate primary opponent, George H.W. Bush.

Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that running mates have a modest, but measurable influence on presidential vote choice.

In our book, we used data from the American National Election Studies and found that evaluations of presidential candidates are three times more influential than evaluations of running mates, when explaining voter choice.

Remember, voters must choose between presidential tickets, and not just presidential candidates.

That's why VP candidates have some level of influence on voters, albeit small relative to the presidential candidates. This means a vice presidential candidate may strengthen or weaken overall evaluations of the ticket to the extent that he or she is very appealing or very unappealing to voters.

The major takeaway from our findings is this: If a running mate is exceedingly popular or unpopular relative to the presidential candidate, then they could marginally influence vote choice at a national level.

Typically, this does not happen. When vetting running mates, most campaigns take a "do no harm" approach and ensure that the vice presidential pick will not detract from the presidential candidate.

Most vice presidential candidates are not exceptionally popular or unpopular. Many are simply unknown to voters.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example, political science research has estimated that Sarah Palin may have cost John McCain as many as 2.1 million votes in 2008 due to her unpopularity among moderate voters.

At the same time, however, Palin energized the conservative base and motivated some voters to support McCain who otherwise would have stayed home on Election Day.

What does all of this mean for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016? Given that both candidates have historically high unfavorable ratings after winning exceptionally divisive party nomination campaigns, a vice presidential candidate could influence voters more in 2016 than in a typical election year.

If Clinton or Trump select a running mate who is also unpopular, while the other selects one with high or even neutral favorability among voters, the latter could make a positive and meaningful contribution to the overall ticket.

Perhaps, then, this is the year that vice presidential selections will make a difference - not by delivering a key state or voting bloc, but by enhancing the popularity of a presidential ticket that desperately needs the help.

Kyle C. Kopko is a political science professor at Elizabethtown College in Lancaster County. Christopher Devine is a professor of political science at the University of Dayton. This piece first appeared at The Conversation.
The state Turnpike Commission has agreed to provide $66 million over the next eight years to help fund one of Montgomery County's largest transportation projects: expanding highway access through an interchange that could benefit Norristown.

The interchange will give drivers access to the cashless tolls on and off both the Valley Forge and Norristown exits, two of the busiest in the state.

The full project, part of the Lafayette Street Extension approved in 2014, has a price tag of $100 million. That will be funded through 2024 by federal funds, primarily, with Montgomery County kicking in 20 percent to cover costs.

The first phase of construction includes extending Lafayette Street in Norristown into Plymouth Township.

Construction is underway with the widening of Ridge Pike between Ross Street and School Lane and the rebuilding of Fairfield Road and Diamond Avenue, which eventually will connect to Lafayette Street. Next year, Lafayette will be widened to ease congestion in the area.

Officials said they are hoping to spur economic development in downtown Norristown and provide jobs to 2,600 people in the area.

"The interchange is the critical piece to connecting downtown Norristown into the highway system and bringing an economic renaissance to the county seat," said Montgomery County Commissioner Joseph C. Gale.

JJaafari@philly.com @JosephJaafari
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Chris Sharma, Klemen Becan climbing the Mont-Rebei project

17.07.2016 by by Planetmountain

The third video of Chris Sharma and Klemen Becan on what is destined to become one of the hardest multi-pitch sport climbs in the world (250m, 9a) at Congost de Mont-Rebei in Spain.

"This is one of the most impressive lines I've ever put up and its gonna be amazing when it finally goes!" Chris Sharma and Klemen Becan take us into a "a whole new world", a sort of no man's land that "makes all other sport climbing areas pale in comparison", namely the stunning Congost de Mont-Rebei in Spain where the American put up his seven pitch project 6c, 9a, 8b+, 8c, 8c, 7b and 8c+.



At present temperatures are way too hot to continue attempts, but as soon as conditions improve the two will return to try the first free ascent of the 250m line that is destined to become one of the most difficult multi-pitch sport climbs in the world.




Dan Colman Atop Dinner Break Counts on Day 5

July 16, 2016 Mo Nuwwarah Editor

The 2016 World Series of Poker Main Event has headed to a one-hour dinner break with just 127 players left in the event, and it's Dan Colman sitting atop the chip counts with 7.995 million.

Colman, of course, has experienced major success here at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino before, winning the $1 Million Big One for One Drop in 2014 for over $15 million. That was part of an epic $22 million year for Colman, and he'll again be the talk of the poker world if he can continue to crush in the Main Event.

Colman, who came into the day second in chips with 3.711 million, moved into the lead early in the day when he eliminated Joseph Potts on a completed board of . Potts moved all in on the river with for two pair, but Colman held for top set on the flop.

More recently, Colman came out on top of a big confrontation with two-time bracelet winner Dan Heimiller. Three players checked a flop of , and a on the turn prompted a bet of 275,000 from Colman. Heimiller jammed in his whole stack of 1.755 million, and Colman eventually called with for a flush. Heimiller held and needed to fill up, but the river missed him.

A pair of Canadians, Michael Niwinski (7.355 million) and Griffin Benger (7.08 million) trail Colman in the counts, followed by James Obst (6.08 million) and Vojtech Ruzicka (6 million).

Niwinski, featured here on PokerNews, made a full house for a big pot and then got in with a combo draw against an opponent who had top two on his rush to the top. He also eliminated Todd Brunson with against Brunson's .

Players joining Brunson on the rail in the six hours before dinner included Mukul Pahuja (138th), David Pham (152nd), Sorel Mizzi (157th), Johnny Chan (180th), and Shaun Deeb (221st).

Play resumes at 7:45 p.m. local time.

As the 2016 WSOP rolls on, be sure to stay tuned to PokerNews for continued coverage, brought to you by our sponsors, 888poker.

Want to stay atop all the latest in the poker world? If so, make sure to get PokerNews updates on your social media outlets. Follow us on Twitter and find us on both Facebook and Google+!
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By Grant Smith and Chris Kahn

NEW YORK (Reuters)  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump trailed Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by 12 percentage points in a Reuters/Ipsos poll making him the clear underdog ahead of next weeks Republican National Convention.

Forty-five percent of likely voters supported former Secretary of State Clinton, 33 percent supported Trump, the wealthy businessman, and the remainder supported neither, according to the July 11-15 online poll.

The survey showed little change from Tuesday, when Clinton had led Trump by 13 percentage points.

Clinton has been ahead in the poll since early January. Trump only approached her level of support in May, after his last two remaining rivals quit the race and he became the presumptive Republican nominee.

Trumps favorability has dropped since then, as his campaign began to focus on the Nov. 8 general election.

Trump has faced criticism in recent weeks over his now-defunct Trump University venture, which is accused of making false promises, and over his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The poll results were mostly gathered before Thursday nights deadly truck attack in Nice, France, and before Trumps announcement on Friday that Indiana Governor Mike Pence would be his vice presidential running mate.

The poll results suggest that Clintons use of personal email for government business while secretary of state and her handling of classified information have not damaged her support among likely voters.

But other polls show a closer race.

The CBS News/NY Times telephone poll has the candidates tied at 40 percent each, while a McClatchy/Marist telephone poll has Clinton leading by just 3 percentage points, 42 percent to Trumps 39 percent.

Trump may get a bump in the polls following next weeks convention in Cleveland, where the party is expected to rally behind him as the nominee. In 2012, support for Republican nominee Mitt Romney rose about 5 percentage points following the convention that year.

The Democratic convention is set for the following week, opening July 25 in Philadelphia.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 1,186 likely voters across the continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points.

(Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Jonathan Oatis)
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We are at the point where actual terrorism (unless youre Muslim) is not terrorism, but activism  exercising your First Amendment right of free speech  is. Thats the world as Republicans know it.

Weve seen it from Bill OReilly and Rudy Giuliani and others, and Fox News Charles Gasparino just told us Friday that Multiculturalism, of all things, is at the heart of a lot of this stuff (terrorism). In other words, if we were just all white people, or at least acted like white people, there wouldnt be any terrorism.

You know, except for people like the Bundys and those other well-armed, anti-government patriot groups. But thats the thing: Republicans say those guys are just patriots.

Just think about that for a minute: Occupy and Black Lives Matter are terrorists, but the Bundys are not.

And Republicans who claim to be against an intrusive federal government not only want federal agencies to spy on Americans; they want them to spy MORE.

A new CREDO ACTION petition tells us,

In a blatant attempt to intimidate peaceful protesters and discourage First Amendment protected activities, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents are reportedly visiting the homes of peaceful activists and community organizers in Cleveland, Ohio, and asking about their plans for the Republican National Convention.[1]



This type of behavior is not new. The FBI and DHS have conducted ongoing surveillance of nonviolent social justice activists and political organizations for years. They have engaged confidential informants, infiltrated groups, interrogated organizers and used social media to create dossiers on activists with Black Lives Matter, School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), Occupy Wall Street and anti-Keystone XL pipeline groups.



Despite these revelations  and demands for an investigation from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee/Defending Dissent Foundation and more than 60 civil society organizations  Congress has so far refused to fulfill its oversight duty and rein in these attacks on our civil liberties.

So how is it peaceful activists are terrorists, but people like the Bundys and their supporters, are not? There is no logic beyond the fact that if it is a progressive or liberal cause, it is terrorism. If it is conservative, it is patriotic.

CREDO points to some of the questionable activities engaged in by the FBI and DHS:

The FBI infiltrated SOAW for 10 years with confidential informants using counterterrorism authority  despite acknowledging the group had no relationship to terrorism.

It engaged in similar counterterrorism surveillance of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

DHS used social media to prepare detailed reports about peaceful Black Lives Matter protests for situational awareness.

FBI agents interrogated Keystone XL pipeline activists, cultivated informants, and created dossiers.

The petition says,

Fulfill Congresss oversight role by investigating the FBI and DHS surveillance of activists and political organizations. The U.S. government should never subject Americans to surveillance for exercising basic Constitutional rights.

The Weimar government of Germany before Hitlers assumption of power, tended to forgive conservatives too for breaking the law in the name of patriotism. So this is something the world has seen before.

We are in real trouble if exercising your First Amendment rights makes you a terrorist, but toting a gun around and seizing federal property and threatening federal agents, does not.

Notes:

[1] FBI and Police are Knocking on Activists Doors Ahead of Republican National Convention, The Intercept, June 23, 2016.
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From the party of traditional marriage comes this hilarious new logo, about which wits and pundits have been quick to share some Twitter titter. Slate calls it a a penetrating new logo and with very good reason.

Here is the logo, shown above. Yes. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. Somebody did not put a lot of thought into it. At lest, not as much as viewers.

Former Michigan Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) was quick to notice:

What is the T doing to that P? https://t.co/tDvYm2QJYi  John Dingell (@JohnDingell) July 15, 2016

I would suggest it is doing pretty much what Trump did to Pence nationally, when he introduced him. But Dingell wasnt alone in drawing attention to Trumps new object of derision, a Dingells observation induced this response:

@Acosta I'm Cornholio. I need TP for my bunghole Seriously, please tell me someone in the GOP realized this. SMH pic.twitter.com/zTeuMT4Tef  Yancy Evans (@gallandro1) July 15, 2016

No. No. The GOP did not realize this.

Alan Grayson more closely followed Dingell in his tweeted response:

This logo accurately represents what Trump Pence will do to America. pic.twitter.com/HQisP8QVzb  Rep. Alan Grayson (@AlanGrayson) July 15, 2016

And Bloombergs Matt Negrin tried to give the logo a less NSF appearance:

in case any news outlets want to use the Trump-Pence logo, i made it safe for TV pic.twitter.com/mxozHMzam6  Matt Negrin (@MattNegrin) July 15, 2016

One response to Negrins tweet was not to be put off: Trump Pence. Put another way TP, WHICH WE KNOW IS TOILET PAPER. In other words, a couple of a** wipes. Fitting.

So yeah, Trump stepped in it again. Obamas logo it is not, and Trump even managed to out-do Jeb Bush, taking the opposite tack of Jebs attempt to draw attention away from what he is. Rather, Trump seems to be embracing it.

It is hardly a surprise that after being unveiled Friday, the new logo was replaced Saturday minus the violation of Pences P.

Trump has never seemed to take his campaign seriously, and the unintentional comedy of his logo rollout certainly hasnt helped change that perception. In that spirit, we will let Full Frontals Samantha Bee have the last word, and laugh:

Breaking the mattress of America. pic.twitter.com/M4Cq62YS2c  Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) July 15, 2016
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The president of the Cleveland Police Union will reportedly ask Governor Kasich (R-OH) to ban all open carry of weapons during the Republican convention.

Cleveland Police union asking OH governor for temporary end to legal open carry of weapons w Republican Convention here  Ed Gallek (@edgallekfox8) July 17, 2016

Fox8 reported, Police Union President Steve Loomis says he will ask Ohios governor to ban all open carrying of weapons in Cuyahoga County for this week.

Loomis told Fox8 that lawyers were working on the request now.

Donald Trump already banned guns inside of the convention, an act that has prompted cries of outrage and hypocrisy given that the Republican Partys subservience to the NRA is the reason we currently sell guns legally to suspected terrorists.

PoliticusUSAs Jason Easley asked, Republicans argue that mass shootings and acts of terror can be prevented if more people have guns, but if this true why has Trump made the Republican convention less safe by banning guns?

Now police also want to ban open carry. They want to do that for a reason. Guns kill people. After the shootings in Baton Rouge during which three officers were tragically killed, officers are even more worried. Law enforcement shouldnt have to fear that citizens will be carrying weapons of war.

Louisiana has very lax gun laws, and as such is a sort of trial run for the America Republicans envision.

Louisiana allows people over 17 to legally open carry guns and prohibits local governments from regulating firearms.  igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) July 17, 2016

Things will be heated at the convention, given Donald Trumps divisive language of hate. Add this to the mix and open carry doesnt seem like such a hot idea  federal judge authorized a new plan allowing protesters at next months Republican National Convention in Cleveland to demonstrate in an area that will be readily visible to convention goers.

Lets face it, the Republican narrative that guns protect people is being debunked by actions on a tragic daily basis. The average citizen isnt trained well enough to handle a gun in public (not referring to hunting, etc). There is no need for it; this is what law enforcement is for.
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Donald Trump is obviously bothered by Senator Elizabeth Warrens (D-MA) very accurate attacks on his fitness for office.

This Sunday morning, Trump tweeted that he hoped former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton picked goofy Elizabeth Warren sometimes referred to as Pocahontas as her running mate, because she would be nothing today if she hadnt lied about her heritage.

If Goofy Elizabeth Warren, a very weak Senator, didn't lie about her heritage (being Native American) she would be nothing today. Pick her H  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016

I hope that Crooked Hillary picks Goofy Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas, as her V.P. Then we can litigate her fraud!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016

Donald Trump is one of those white people who thinks that anyone who has a heritage other than white gets special treatment. He literally thinks that Elizabeth Warren got ahead because she is part American Indian.

This is not true. The Atlantic pointed out in 2012, when this false attack first started, that Warren never sought to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education:

Warren, who graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and got her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, did not seek to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education, according documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Boston Globe. On the application to Rutgers Law School she was asked, Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students? No, she replied.

So this whine is inaccurate and thus even more petulant than the rage against affirmative action.

The New York Times called this attack on Warren straight from the Republican cookbook of fake controversy. They also noted, For the Cherokee Nation, Warren is Indian enough; she has the same blood quantum as Cherokee Nation Chief Bill John Baker.

False controversy is false, so naturally Donald Trump, who relies on Breitbart and Drudge for his news, is using this stale, debunked attack.

This kind of resentment is exactly why our country is so divided right now; Trump plays on the feelings of white people who feel screwed over and left behind. He points the fingers at minorities, suggesting that they get everything, they stole from the white people.

Billionaire trust fund baby Donald Trump feels that Elizabeth Warren, born to middle class parents, got ahead because she claimed to be a minority  not because of hard work or exceptional discipline. But in fact, Warren was the first in her family to get a college degree. She didnt inherit millions, unlike Donald Trump.

Former Harvard law professor Sen. Warren has credits on her resume that Donald Trump cant even fathom. For example, she helped create and oversaw as an interim director the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren has attacked Trump by pointing out facts about him, and thats why he is so rabid about her.

On his Pence pick, she tweeted:

Of COURSE @realDonaldTrump  a guy who calls women fat pigs & bimbos  picked a VP who is famous for trying to control womens bodies.  Elizabeth Warren (@elizabethforma) July 16, 2016

She called him out on being against financial regulations, Donald Trumps position is to roll back all of the financial regulations passed after the financial crisis, which PolitiFact rated as Mostly True (thats a rating Donald Trump rarely gets from fact checkers).

Donald Trump claimed on Meet the Press that Warren lied when she says I want to abolish the federal minimum wage. That got a Mostly False, with a nod that Warren had gotten the better of Trump.

And thats why Trump is pouting this morning. Warren has Trumps number.

In late June, the Democratic Senator did an interview with the View during which she explained why she was calling Trump out earlier than others, Oh my God, that man is not ready to be president of the United States. That man is dangerous. That man holds a bunch of views that are really horrible views.

Cue the wailing, racist whine from Donald Trumps Twitter account. So presidential.

Donald Trump is afraid of Elizabeth Warren, so he resorts to racist taunts fit for a playground bully.
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Donald Trump humiliated himself with a disgraceful attempt to blame the shootings that took the lives of three Baton Rouge, LA police officers on President Obama

Trump posted on Facebook:

Trump also tweeted:

We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police. Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016

Trump wants America to believe that this is an easy problem to solve. In Trump World, all one has to do is tell cops to stop killing African-Americans, and telling people to stop shooting police officers. Its simple. America doesnt need criminal justice reform, or better policing policies, or common sense gun reform.

The nation doesnt need to have an honest conversation about policing and race. In Trumps view, no hard work is required.

As president, Trump would wave his leadership magic wand, and make it all better.

Make no mistake about it, Donald Trump was trying to use the police shootings in Baton Rouge, LA to boost his presidential campaign. Trump is all about spreading fear. His entire message is centered around the idea that America is going to hell in a handbasket and needs a strongman/pseudo-dictator to keep the country safe.

Obama didnt cause the shootings in Baton Rouge. The truth is that no one, but the person who carried out this attack, really knows the motive. Trump is demonstrating that he will say and do anything to divide the country.

The US remains a country of law and order. Donald Trump cant win on the issues, so he is trying use division and fear to win the White House. A real leader doesnt exploit tragedies for political gain. A true leader doesnt offer magic solutions that he cant deliever.

Trump isnt a real leader and his attempt to use the Baton Rouge police shootings for his own advantage is a humiliating disgrace that shows why he sould never be president.
MINNEAPOLIS  The father of a 2-year-old boy who was killed last week in a drive-by shooting has been charged.

Twenty-five-year-old Melvonte Peterson of Brooklyn Center was charged Friday with illegally having a firearm and drive-by shooting.

Authorities say he returned fire at a black Chevrolet Impala on July 8 after its driver pulled next to Peterson's van in north Minneapolis and fired shots.

Police are still seeking the person who fired the shots that killed Le-Vonte King Jason Jones and injured 15-month-old Melia Queen Melvina Jones.

Peterson was in custody Friday and it was not immediately clear if he had an attorney to comment on his behalf.
Minnesota delegates are bracing for a contentious Republican National Convention next week as a small group of activists seek to block Donald Trump from being the party's nominee.

Aaron Miller, a delegate bound to Trump, said he expects this convention to be among the most interesting the party has had in years. He said he is hopeful that Republicans can come together and unite behind Trump.

"The only concerns I have is that if the portion of the party that is 'Never Trump' decides not to participate in the process. I hope this convention is a uniting convention and not a divisive convention," he said.

The convention begins Monday in Cleveland. An estimated 2,470 delegates and 2,302 alternates will travel to Ohio for the four-day event. The convention is expected to culminate with Trump becoming the party's official nominee.

But some conservatives are trying to block nomination of the New York real estate developer. Those efforts suffered a major blow this week when the Republican National Convention's rules committee rejected a proposal to let delegates vote for any candidate  regardless of their state's primary or caucus results. The committee voted down a proposal that would have allowed delegates to "cast a vote of conscience."

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Still, supporters of that effort are vowing to push ahead, trying to collect signatures from 28 members of the convention's 112-member rules committee. If that happens, the proposal could be brought to the floor for a vote by the full convention.

Are Minnesota's delegates really bound?

In the case of Minnesota's 38 delegates, 17 are bound to Marco Rubio, 13 to Ted Cruz and eight to Trump. Miller said some delegates are openly questioning whether the state party can require them to be bound to a candidate. One issue is that Rubio's name may not even appear on the convention ballot. The convention rules require a candidate to have won at least eight states. Unless delegates vote to change the rules, only Cruz and Trump will have their names on the ballot.

Miller said he believes Minnesota delegates have a responsibility to vote for the candidate they said they would on the first ballot no matter what.

"I told the folks that elected me exactly what I was going to do, and I am going to stick by my word," the Byron Republican said.

Other delegates aren't so sure. Delegate Brian Davis was elected as a Rubio delegate. The Rochester Republican said he also supported Cruz and how he votes at the convention "depends on who is on the ballot. It depends on the final rules that are voted on."

Davis declined to comment on whether he would vote in favor of the so-called "conscience clause" if it came to a vote of the full convention.

Delegate Joel Hanson, of Winona, was elected to be a Cruz delegate. He said he plans to stay true to his commitment to vote for Cruz. As for whether he would be willing to support the conscience clause, Hanson said, "I don't like to deal with hypotheticals. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."

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'Nobody had their conscience violated'

As far as Minnesota Republican Party Chairman Keith Downey is concerned, there shouldn't be any debate among the state's delegates over whether they are bound to vote for a specific candidate. He said all the delegates were required to sign paperwork vowing to vote for the candidate they were elected to represent.

"Nobody had their conscience violated. They all willingly signed that document," he said.

Downey added that there is nothing that would prevent the state's Rubio delegates from casting a vote for the Florida senator. And even if a Minnesota delegate decided to go rogue and vote for someone else, Downey said the state will submit the previously agreed upon delegate totals, which were determined as part of the state's binding agreement with the national party.

"The voice of those 114,000 Republican caucus attendees will be reflected by our vote at the convention," Downey said.

Miller, who also serves as Republican Party of Olmsted County chairman, said he has been chosen to serve as a whip for the Minnesota delegation during the convention. He doesn't support the conscience clause effort.

He added, "'Never Trump' is a losing effort."

Republican delegates brace for the unexpected

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No free ride for national delegates
Minnesota is sending 38 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland next week. Three of those delegates are from southeast Minnesota, along with one alternate delegate. Here is what they had to say as they pack their bags for Ohio.

Chuck Bradford

Age:51

Occupation:Firmware engineer

Hometown:Mantorville

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Bound alternate delegate for:Ted Cruz

Can you remember the moment you realized you wanted to get involved in politics?

"It was back during Reagan's first campaign when he came through Iowa. With just about everything he said, I said, "I agree with that." Everybody was down on the country, and I didn't get that as a high school kid. I still thought America was great."

Why did you want to be an alternate delegate?

"One of the reasons why I wanted to be an alternate and still go out there was some of the opportunities that are available at the national convention for networking, sharing of ideas (and) just sitting down with other like-minded people."

What are you most looking forward to at the RNC?

"It sees like every convention has a little bit of surprise. Maybe not to the level of drama that this one is shaping up to have, but there is always the surprise element a bit. So I'm looking forward to the unknown."

What will you do if Trump isn't elected on the first ballot?

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"I would go back and I would look at how my state voted and how my district voted. I'd have to look at that and then I would look at does it seem like one of (the candidates) has momentum. I would try to support the people that I was asked to represent in Cleveland with their voice and what their wishes would be as well as what I think would be best for the party and the nation."

Brian Davis

Age:58

Occupation:Physician

Hometown:Rochester

Bound delegate for:Marco Rubio

Can you remember the moment you realized you wanted to get involved in politics?

"No, not precisely, but listening to my parents and older sister discuss the issues of the day at the dinner table had an influence. Along these lines, there are a few books I've enjoyed and would recommend: 'With No Apologies' by Barry Goldwater, 'Freedom to Choose' by Milton Friedman, and 'Common Sense' by Thomas Paine."

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Why did you want to be a delegate? "I am a supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz. I was elected as a national delegate from the First Congressional District to represent Sen. Marco Rubio."

What are you most looking forward to at the RNC?

"Effective security for the attendees."

What will you do if Trump isn't elected on the first ballot?

"Keep voting for one of my preferred candidates as allowed."

Joel Hanson

Age:26

Occupation:Legislative assistant with Minnesota Senate

Hometown:Winona

Bound delegate for:Ted Cruz

Can you remember the moment you realized you wanted to get involved in politics?

"I know in third grade  that would have been the 2000 election for president  that was the first time that I ever actually paid attention to politics and was pretty passionate. I was the designated point man in my third-grade class for the election. I spearheaded the mock election on Election Day."

Why did you want to be a delegate?

"To have a hand in shaping democracy and impacting the Republican Party in what I think could be a very major way. Really, that's been my driving force."

What are you most looking forward to at the RNC?

Probably just the atmosphere. For this next week or so, the eyes of the world are going to be on Cleveland. Being able to be part of that and the atmosphere surrounding that is what I'm most looking forward to."

What will you do if Trump isn't elected on the first ballot?

"I would vote to represent my delegate slot."

Aaron Miller

Age: 47

Occupation:Account executive for biotech company

Bound delegate for:Donald Trump

Can you remember the moment you realized you wanted to get involved in politics?

"Actually, yes. I met Vice President Bush when I was in high school I was one of the officers in our high school FFA, and he spoke at our convention. I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes visiting with him, and I think that sparked my desire to be involved."

Why did you want to be a delegate?

"Honestly, because I think this has the potential to be a contentious convention, and I want to be part of positive change. I think this is probably going to be the most interesting convention that Republicans have had in many years."

What are you most looking forward to at the RNC?

"I think that I'm most looking forward to being part of the platform and rules and being part of the process to elect a president in November. Just to be there and be involved in it is going to be pretty exciting."

What will you do if Trump isn't elected on the first ballot?

"I stood up in front of the congressional convention when I was running as a delegate and said I was running to be a Trump delegate and that I pledge my support to Trump. I won't waiver on that."
Turkey's pivotal roles as an ally in the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State group and a guarantor of refugee agreements are likely to remain intact for now after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emerged triumphant following a failed coup attempt.

However, looming tension over Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Islamic cleric blamed by Erdogan for the rebellion, could strain ties between Turkey and the United States, which says it would assess any Turkish extradition request. Gulen denies involvement in the unrest.

An expected purge of military factions responsible for the attempted putsch, however, could leave the armed forces in turmoil and overstretched. While trying to rebuild with loyalists, the military must continue to confront autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels in Turkey and control its turbulent border with war-torn Syria.

Turkey is a strategic US ally at the crossroads of the Asian and European continents and abuts Mideast conflict zones. It is a majority-Muslim country in NATO and a key partner in efforts to solve international challenges, including terrorism and mass migration, as well as being an important interlocutor with regional powers such as Iran and Russia.

U.S., European and other world leaders have condemned the assault on Erdogan's democratically elected government, while watching for further fallout from the uprising on Turkey, which was seen as a generally stable partner in a neighborhood plagued by upheaval.

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The United States is monitoring the situation closely, in part because it stages air strikes from Turkey's Incirlik air base against Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq. The Turkish government closed the airspace around Incirlik for several hours on Saturday following the coup attempt, although there was no indication of a long-term negative effect on US operations.

The uprising was launched Friday night with military jets overhead, tanks and soldiers in the streets and firepower that left at least 161 dead and 1,440 wounded, according to the government. It appears to have been led by air force, military police and armored units, but not the senior commanders of the military, who closed ranks behind Erdogan and put down the putsch early Saturday. Even opposition political parties condemned the attempt to oust the government.

Nearly 3,000 accused plotters already have been detained and new purges in the military are expected to remove any sympathizers among soldiers and officers. This continued internal turmoil could be a challenge for the armed forces as they battle Kurdish rebels and support the campaign against the Islamic State group.

On Saturday, Turkey's state-run news agency said the commander of the country's second army was arrested in connection with the coup. The second army is based in eastern Turkey to counter threats from Syria, Iran and Iraq.

"A new wave of purges in military will likely weaken overstretched security services... even if basic policies will remain same," said Howard Eissenstat, associate professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

Erdogan, an often combative figure, has been accused of increasingly autocratic conduct even though his government was democratically elected and he commands deep support among Turkey's pious Muslim class. The military has long seen itself as the guarantor of secular government in Turkey, and many in its ranks have bristled at both his tightening grip on power and the growing Islamic influence under Erdogan. The president had jailed or sidelined many of his military adversaries, but clearly others remained to launch the failed coup.

In the international arena, Erdogan recently sought to patch up disputes with Israel and Russia, and to lend stronger support to U.S.-led efforts against the Islamic State group after being accused of tolerating the flow of foreign extremists and weapons from Turkey into Syria. He also was key to an agreement with the European Union that provides for the safe, regulated passage of Syrian civilians between Turkey and Europe, which has received a massive influx of refugees.

While that pragmatic approach is likely to continue as Erdogan shores up international support after the coup attempt, the president has often lashed at out his Western partners, questioning their commitment to democratic values and alleging that Kurdish militants enjoy refuge in some European countries.

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The United States, emphasizing the importance of its alliance with Turkey's current leadership, expressed support for the democratically elected government as the violence unfolded. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was quick to speak with Turkey's foreign minister. That response contrasted with U.S. comments after the Egyptian military ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi following protests against him in 2013 - at that time, Kerry said the military was restoring democracy in Egypt.

Although many Turks are disgruntled over Erdogan's moves against civil liberties such as freedom of the press, and are fearful in the wake of a deadly IS attack on Istanbul's Ataturk Airport last month, the country appeared to reject the military rebellion. It endured three military coups between 1960 and 1980.

Yet Turkey could be poised for a fresh bout of polarization under Erdogan, who vowed that the coup plotters would pay a heavy price. Domestic tension and suspicion, in turn, could undermine the consistency or effectiveness of Turkey's international commitments and challenges, particularly when the military is involved.

"Bottom line is the relationship between the government and the military, no matter how loyal the generals may claim to be in future, is broken for good," Chris Kilford, a former Canadian military attache in Turkey and an expert on the Turkish military, wrote in an email to the AP.

---

Christopher Torchia was Associated Press bureau chief in Turkey from 2007 until early 2013.
WASHINGTON  Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's admittedly "ill-advised" remarks about Donald Trump weren't only bad for the justice and her reputation. They were bad for the Supreme Court and, consequently, for the country.

Ginsburg was correct in her scathing assessment of Trump  and correct to express her "regret" for voicing it publicly. But the damage to the court's image and reputation is already done.

The good news for the justices is that their institution is held in higher regard, for what that's worth, than the other two branches of government.

The bad news is that this support is at an all-time low. According to polling last September by the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of Americans held an unfavorable view of the court, while 50 percent viewed it favorably. By contrast, in January 1988, just 13 percent had an unfavorable view of the court, and 79 percent saw it favorably.

Embedded in this declining assessment is a significant partisan divide: 38 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners viewed the court favorably, compared with 64 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Interestingly, not so long ago, this ideological gap was reversed: in 2008, 80 percent of Republicans viewed the court positively, versus 64 percent of Democrats.

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Why does this matter? Why should the justices care? After all, the court is empowered to say what the law is, whether or not the public is happy with its performance and its pronouncements. The justices enjoy life tenure.

Yet stature and public acceptance matter. The court has no independent power, of purse or of sword, to enforce its rulings. The court "cannot buy support for its decision by spending money, and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees," a three-justice plurality noted in the 1992 abortion ruling declining to overrule Roe v. Wade. "The court's power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception."

It is naive to imagine that justices don't have political views, or strong political preferences. Of course they do. It is the rare justice who ends up on the court without having ties to politics and politicians.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in arguing that he needn't recuse himself from a case in which Vice President Dick Cheney was a party after the two went on a hunting trip, "from the earliest days down to modern times justices have had close personal relationships with the president and other officers of the executive."

But there is a difference  a big one  between having a pre-existing political relationship or predilection that the public might reasonably presume (no one would mistake Ginsburg for a potential Trump voter) and one that is so strongly held that the justice feels impelled to make it public.

That approach is not mere window-dressing. Judicial silence is the tribute that the imperative to appear impartial pays to reality.

Some people will read this and snort: The justices are political animals like all the others; they decide based on their political views, not on the law.

This dismissiveness ignores and obscures the distinction between ideology and partisanship. Broadly speaking, Republicans and Democrats have differing conceptions of the role of the judiciary, the meaning of the Constitution, and the proper approach to its interpretation; it is no surprise, and no tragedy, that judges appointed by Republican presidents tend toward one set of reasonably predictable conclusions and those named by Democratic presidents another.

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But there are, or should be, limits to this linkage. Ruling on the reflexive basis of partisanship is different from a decision guided by ideology. That is one reason the court's 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore was so disturbing. The five-justice conservative majority adopted a one-time-only expansive reading of the Equal Protection Clause that conflicted with their usual narrow interpretation. This was a liberal jurisprudential approach in cynical service of a conservative political outcome: handing the election to George W. Bush.

In this context, Ginsburg's remarks -- like Scalia's duck-hunting  present a problem, and not just for her. They drag the court down to the level of other political actors, into the partisan muck. They reinforce the public's perception that this game, too, is rigged  more than it actually is. Evidence of its independence: this term's surprise rulings upholding affirmative action and abortion rights.

Judges aren't the neutral umpires, mechanically calling balls and strikes, of Chief Justice John Roberts' imagining. But they can aspire to that ideal, and should  on and off the bench.
I have noticed this for a long time: every four years, when a Republican national convention is in prospect, national news outlets will do stories on strip clubs and prostitutes who are eagerly awaiting the Republicans patronage. Of course, the much-hoped-for scandal never happens, and when the convention is over there have been a few stories about disgruntled prostitutes and strippers complaining that Republicans are no good for business. But that doesnt prevent the same meme from cropping up four years later.

Thus, we have AFP: Strip Clubs Get Ready For Republican Convention.

On paper, the Republican Party classifies pornography as a major public health problem. But just in case delegates to the nominating convention here next week forget that, Clevelands strip clubs are going all out to get ready for the party, due to embrace Donald Trump formally as its presidential candidate.

The Daily Beast chimes in:

Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to Clevelands strip clubs in a generation. Possibly multiple generations. The top strip clubs in Cleveland, Ohio, are all preparing for the inevitable influx of horny, cash-flinging Republican out-of-towners who will drop by during next weeks GOP convention.

Right. Dont hold your breath waiting for the Daily Beast to run the follow-up on how Republican delegates werent so horny or cash-flinging after all.

Meanwhile, where are the stories about strippers and prostitutes gearing up for the bonanza of the Democratic convention? Heh. Just kidding. There are none. There never are. If you search democratic convention strip clubs prostitutes on Google News, the closest they can come is the Daily Beast on the GOP convention. This is a bad joke that recurs every four years, like clockwork. It is just one of a million small ways in which the mainstream liberal media put their thumbs on the scale in favor of their party, the Democrats.

UPDATE: A friend sent along this 1992 cartoon, which looks like it came from Playboy. To be fair, though, its theme is more bipartisan:
French police have arrested seven people in connection with Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlels terrorist attack in Nice, six of whom are reportedly still in custody. It has emerged that Bouhlel sent a series of texts to accomplices, or at a minimum to people who knew what he intended to do. The texts said things like Bring more weapons. Bringing in 5, and Its good. I have the equipment, according to French television.

The authorities are also investigating Bouhlels associates in Tunisia, where he grew up before moving to France as a young man. Bouhlel reportedly was thrilled by the 2015 Islamic terrorist attack at Sousse, where 38 tourists were murdered on the beach, and authorities are looking into whether Bouhlels friends were among those who assisted Seifiddine Rezgui Yacoubi, the electrical engineering studentwhat else?who carried out the Sousse massacre.

It also appears that Bouhlels brother may be a radical, if multiple selfies with shotguns are any indication. One of Mohameds brothersI am not sure whether it is the same onesays that Mohamed had a considerable sum of money, approximately $150,000 in the bank through selling phones. If Mohamed really did have that sort of cash on hand, the police no doubt will be interested in where it came from.

In short, while Mohamed Boulel seems to have been a disturbed individual, early claims that he was unconnected to the broader world of Muslim extremism are turning out to be untrue.
Tevi Troy, writing in the Washington Post, discusses the ways in which technology has changed, and continues to change, political conventions. Tevis piece is based on his fascinating essay in National Affairs about the evolution of such conventions.

Its sad that the contested convention vanished from the political landscape before modern high technology had taken hold. Imagine an old-style, multi-ballot convention taking place in our era of high technology  instant messaging, tweets, ability to record via cell phone meetings in smoke filled rooms and to transmit the recording instantly.

These days, conventions are dull affairs. However, Tevi points out that they would be duller still without modern technology:

[Until recently] if a candidate could secure a majority of delegates before the convention and clinch the nomination, he or she could enter the convention as the presumptive nominee and thus control all aspects of the convention, including the staging, speaker selection and platform committee. This approach has worked for the most part for the past 40 years. . . . But change is coming, or has already arrived. Cord-cutting, for example, is reducing the number of people watching cable television as young people obtain political news from other sources, including late-night comedy. In response, parties will have to use new technologies to design convention events that target specific viewing demographics. At the same time, the communications revolution means that it is not only the party and the networks that determine which images will make it into Americans living rooms.

But regardless of who supplies them, the images will never be as viewing-worthy as they used to be.

Last night, C-SPAN broadcast a chunk of CBSs coverage of the last contested convention  the Republican event in 1976 in Kansas City, where Gerald Ford narrowly edged out Ronald Reagan. I had watched this same coverage 40 years ago and was amazed by how much of it I remembered. Mike Wallace using the sons of Bill Moyers and Roger Mudd to spy on a rump meeting of pro-Reagan delegates from Mississippi (who needs high tech); John Connollys speech warning of, and more or less predicting, American decline (he didnt see the Reagan revolution coming); the competing Ford and Reagan demonstrations; the booing of a sweet pro-Ford delegate from Wisconsin; images of Reagan taking it all in from his hotel suite.

All the modern technology in the world cant make contemporary conventions as riveting as the 1976 GOP affair.

Technology was at the heart of another memorable event at that convention. When a pro-Reagan delegate marched past the New York delegation, Nelson Rockefeller, then the vice president of the United States, snatched the sign this delegate was carrying. When Rockefeller refused to give the sign back, the delegate ripped out the cord of New York delegations telephone, thus depriving delegation leaders of the ability to communicate with the Ford team.

CBS interviewed Rockefeller soon after the incident. He seemed amused and proud of himself for taking the pro-Reagan delegates sign (he handed it to me, Rockefeller said with a big smile). Reagan, watching in his hotel room, seemed amused, as well. Imagine the twitter wars this incident would spark today.

In the CBS interview, Rocky reminded me of Donald Trump. Same boisterous New York tone, same reliance on superlatives, same combative spirit, same propensity for showmanship, similar swagger, something of the same look.

There is also, I think, an ideological kinship. Ive heard Trump described as a Rockefeller Republican. If he isnt now , its very likely that he once was.
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has given reasons why it rejects last Wednesdays order by the Federal High Court, Lagos declaring as illegal the February 1, 2016 electricity tariff.

Justice Mohammed Idris had ordered the electricity sector regulatory agency to immediately rescind the multi-year tariff order (MYTO), as the process that led to a 45 per cent hike in electricity charges was illegal.

But, the acting chairman of the commission, Anthony Akah, described the court order as a major setback to the progress made so far in the electricity sector.

Mr. Akah, who was speaking in Abuja in his first official reaction to the court order on Friday, said although the commission respected the decision, it would challenge it.

This judgment, in our view, represents the reversal of the commercial foundation upon which contracts for gas, hydro, coal and solar feed-stocks for the production of electricity were predicated, he said.

It also extends to other service improvement contracts entered into by the operators for the development of electricity sector and the ultimate improvement in the quality of service delivery to consumers.

Mr. Akah said the commission had already instructed its lawyers to file for a stay-of-execution of the order, while a notice of appeal of the judgment had been issued.

The NERC chairman said the commission reserved the right to explore other legal avenues within the law to challenge the decision.

Urging investors and customers not to panic as the commission sought a resolution to the issues, Mr. Akah said NERC remained committed to the provision of the right regulatory framework to promote private investment in the electricity supply industry.

We are going to study the full judgment, and based on the interpretations in it, would react appropriately. The electricity sector is a very complex industry which thrives on regulatory certainty.

The MYTO 2015, which the court order declared illegal, provided a long-term pact to prospective investors to determine in advance what the tariffs would be, Based on it, a lot of improvement and progress in the sector were recorded, because most people based their investment decisions on it.
The Presidential Fact-Finding Committee on the Abducted Female Students of Government Secondary School, Chibok, has asked the federal government to take advantage of foreign support, backed with hi-tech equipment, to locate the abducted girls and rescue them.

It also called for the beefing up of arms and ammunition of the military as well as the strengthening of security agencies in the theatre of operation.

The committee made the recommendations in its 50-page report submitted to the government and which was obtained exclusively by PREMIUM TIMES.

The 27-member panel chaired by Ibrahim Sabo, a retired brigadier general, was inaugurated by former President Goodluck Jonathan on May 6, 2014, to, among other things find out the circumstances leading to the abduction of the 276 female students of the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State on April 14, 2014 by Boko Haram terrorists.

The establishment of the committee followed claims and counterclaims about the circumstances and the actual number of students abducted by the terrorists.

The panel submitted its report to then President Jonathan, but its details have never been made public.

In the report, the Committee, which sat for five weeks, said altogether 276 students out of the 395 female students that registered for the WAEC examination were abducted by the terrorists.

It further stated that while 57 of the students escaped from the insurgents after the abduction, the remaining 219 were unaccounted for.

It said five of the 57 students that escaped were found in the bushes near Damboa.

It said at the time the girls were abducted the school was relying on extant security arrangement and had only two guards while there was no electricity because its only generator had broken down.

The panel said intelligence available to it at the time it was submitting its report to government showed that the girls were in different camps in and around Sambisa Forest, which covers an area of 60,000 square kilometres with scrubby semi desert tangle of low trees and bushes in the corner of the North-east zone.

The abducted girls have been split into groups under the watch of separate syndicates as confirmed from various sightings of the insurgents at different locations, it said.

Another batch of girls is believed to have been transported by canoe to an Island around the Lake Chad.

Insurgent attacks on communities and markets situated in Hyuum, Askira Uba LGA, Klakaisa and Shaawa villages of Damboa LGA in search of food and other supplies, indicate that some of the girls could be within the area.

The Committee suggested two ways of rescuing the girls, namely negotiation and military operation.

It explained that the negotiation initiative would require dialogue with hostage takers through trusted intermediaries and conflict mediators while the military option would involve the deployment of counter-terrorism and/or hostage rescue team, which would undertake a surgical strike storming the locations where the hostages are held.

It listed the advantages and disadvantages of the two options.

The Committee told the government that in determining which option to adopt, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach should be carefully examined in the context of the hostage crisis and new developments.

The negotiation initiative is inclusive while the military option is exclusive to the team that would be involved in the rescue operation, the Committee said.

While citing the successful release of the 52 US officials who were held hostages for 444 days at the US Embassy in Tehran, Iran from 1979 to 1981, the Committee listed the advantages of the negotiation approach to include a greater likelihood of rescuing the girls alive and safe from harm and the provision of an opening to broader discussions and understanding that will eventually lead to a peace agreement.

On the other hand, the Committee said by adopting the military option, Nigeria would have, among others, complied with the internationally accepted norms of non-negotiation with terrorists; boost morale within the country and among the security agencies; and send a strong message to the insurgents that the government was not weak.

It however noted that the constraints of the option were insufficient number of mobilized troops; inadequate combat equipment (power, mobility and communication); porous/unmanned borders with Cameroun, Chad and Niger Republics, which provide the insurgents the advantage of safe haven, access to mercenaries and weapons; and time constraints in the procurement process for combat equipment.

While stating that most of the people it interacted with during its fact-finding work did not consider the military option advisable in order to protect the abducted girls, the Committee however said should the government decide to adopt the approach, a thorough assessment of the strength and capability of the military and the Boko Haram insurgents must be undertaken.

It suggested that the assessment of the military should be in the areas of personnel, equipment, the terrain, logistics and state of preparedness of the rescue team at the conflict site and in geographical location for possible reinforcement.

For the insurgents, it said, there should be an appreciation of their supply route, personnel, fire power, camouflage tactics and guerrilla war strategy. 

The Committee said from its findings the insurgents are armed with sophisticated military hardware such as Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs), Anti-Aircraft (AA) guns, Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), among other weapons.

It said, The sophistication of their equipment has emboldened the insurgents leading to an increase in the frequency and intensity of their attacks. The Nigerian military and other security agencies should be provided with additional and superior weapons to counter the insurgents.

The Committee also recommended that the military should review its rules of engagement to appropriately counter the insurgents.

It asked the government to also fully co-opt the Youth Volunteer Group, otherwise known as Civilian JTF and the Shuwa tribe into the search and rescue of the Chibok girls.
The National Judicial Council has sacked two judges, Justice Mohammed Yunusa of the Federal High Court, Lagos Division, and Justice Olamide Oloyede of the High Court of Justice, Osun State, for alleged misconduct.

The two judges were suspended from office on July 15 during a meeting of the Council, led by the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Mahmud Mohammed and recommended for compulsory retirement to President Muhammadu Buhari following allegations of abuse of office.

A statement from the NJC signed by its Director of communucations, Soji Oye, said Mr. Yunusa was sacked for issuing illegal court orders restraining the office of the Attorney General of the Federation, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, and the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission, from carrying out investigation into alleged financial misappropriation by public officers, including Senator Stella Oduah.

The statement said the council made the decision after investigating a petition by the Civil Society Network Against Corruption which informed it (the council) about the alleged abuse of office by Mr. Yunusa during his decision in cases involving Mrs. Oduah; Nigerias telecom mogul, Mike Adenuga; Executive Secretary of Nigerian Health Insurance Scheme, Martins Thomas; and three others  Jide Adelakun, Shamsudeen Abogu and John Adonimere.

According to the NJC, its findings revealed that Mr, Yunusa acted against rule 3 (1) of the Code of Conduct for official Judicial Officers when he claimed ignorance of the provisions of the Money Laundering Act by stopping the EFCC from carrying out investigation into alleged cases of financial misappropriation.

That Hon. Justice Yunusas decision restraining the anti-graft agencies from carrying out their statutory functions in the first six cases mentioned earlier is contrary to the Judgement of the Court of Appeal in A.G Anambra State Vs. UBA which His Lordship quoted but did not apply in his rulings, the statement said.

The councils decision for Mrs. Oloyede to retire is based on its findings that she failed to uphold the dignity of her office.

The Hon. Judge failed to conduct herself in such a manner as to preserve the dignity of her office and impartiality and independence of the Judiciary when she wrote a petition against the Osun State governor and his deputy to the members of the State House of Assembly and circulated same to 36 persons and organizations.

The Petition was said to contain political statements, unsubstantiated allegations and accusations aimed at deriding, demeaning and undermining the Government of Osun State, the person and character of the Governor (as one who is cruel, a liar and a traitor), his deputy and aides.

The petition contained statements calculated to incite the residents of Osun State against the State Government and its elected Officers. Hon. Justice Oloyede crossed the fundamental right of freedom of speech and created a negative perception of the Nigerian Judiciary to the Public, the Council stated.

The allegations are contrary to Section 292 (1) (b) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended and Rules 1 (1) and Rule 5 of the 2016 Revised Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The council said its decision to punish the judges was based on its powers, as enshrined by the 1999 constitution.
Philanthropist and entrepreneur, Bill Gates, will use the platform of the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture to lay out his vision of how to create a better world for all when he addresses the issue of Living Together, the theme of this years lecture.

The lecture, holding Sunday (today) is hosted in association with the University of Pretoria at their Mamelodi campus. It is dedicated to the Mamelodi families who lost loved ones during the apartheid years. The lecture honours their contribution to the struggle for democracy.

Speaking in a pre-recorded video message, Mr. Gates said he was honoured to have been invited to contribute to the conversation on how to create a better world.

Mr. Gates highlights the need for a new social pact across the globe to end protracted conflict, overcome intolerance and prejudice, improve access to healthcare and education, and reduce poverty and inequality.

The Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture is the Foundations flagship programmes to honour its founder, Nelson Mandela, and to raise topical issues affecting South Africa, Africa and the rest of the world.

It encourages both local and international dialogue  often about difficult subjects  as a means to address the multiple and complex challenges that face the world today.

The lectures are addressed by speakers who have made a significant contribution in their field of expertise.

Mr. Gates said the founding President of a democratic South Africa would be remembered for generations to come for his courage, his vision and his relentless pursuit of equality and justice.

He said Mr. Mandelas legacy lives on as a reminder that its possible to solve big challenges.

Previous speakers in the lecture series have shared thought-provoking insights about how we can create a better world envisioned by Nelson Mandela. Im privileged to add my voice to the conversation this year. For hundreds of millions of people life is better today than it was a generation ago, but there is so much more we can, and must do, to make that a reality for people everywhere, he said.

Explaining the choice of Mr. Gates, Nelson Mandela Foundation board member, Nikiwe Bikitsha said, Gates has a significant impact on the issues facing the poor and marginalised. I look forward to engaging with Gates views on how we continue to work collaboratively to improve the lives of all people through the extraordinary efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Ayo Ajayi, director of the Africa Team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said, Bill coming for the Mandela lecture and the AIDS conference is an indication of how important both South Africa and Africa is to the foundation. The Mandela lecture will show Bills thinking about the role Africa can and is already playing in its own development. We hope the lecture will stimulate more debate about philanthropy in Africa and Bills approach to development.

Professor Tinyiko Maluleke, Advisor to the Principal and Vice Chancellor: University of Pretoria said, Partnering the Nelson Mandela Foundation in hosting the 2016 Lecture is a special honour for the University of Pretoria. We are especially delighted that this event will take place at our Mamelodi Campus, located in Mamelodi, a township with impeccable struggle credentials. In hosting this lecture, the University hopes to make its own contribution in keeping alive the memory of the greatest statesman in South Africa and one of the greatest in the world.
A suspected member of an eight-man robbery gang in Lagos has said his desire to drive a commercial bus lured him into armed robbery.

Abdullahi Olanrewaju, 30, said he was a commercial bus driver plying the Agege  Oshodi route before joining the robbery gang, according to a statement issued by the Lagos State Police Command on Sunday.

But all of a sudden, the bus developed faults, and the owner had to sell the vehicle off. Since then, things have been very difficult for me, said Mr. Olanrewaju, who hails from Ita-Amoju in Kwara State.

I met other gang members at a beer parlour in Akerele Wahabi area in Agege. I told them I was a bus driver and they promised to buy a new bus for me.

When they refused to buy the vehicle for me, they promised again that they would introduce me to one business that can make me become rich. I never knew it was armed robbery they wanted to introduce to me to.

The police said Mr. Olanrewaju was arrested over the weekend during a robbery operation at Abeje and Onibeju Streets, off Capitol road in Agege Local Government area of the state.

The police, who were led to the scene of the robbery by Inspector Anthony Inege, said one of the victims who managed to escape through the window alerted them that armed men were operating in their building.

On sighting the police, the robbers opened fire on them, the statement said.

Mr. Olanrewaju said he met with seven other members of the gang at midnight at Markaz Road, in the Agege area.

We operated from one building to the other. Although, I didnt follow them inside but I was placed on standby outside. My job was to keep all the looted items including money.

The suspect said they went for the operation with four, loaded, pump action guns and jack knives in case of any security operatives intercept them.

He said they had planned to rob all the houses on the two streets but were only able to visit five before the police arrived.

We collected a lot of money, mobile phones and jewellery to mention a few, he said.

When we sighted the police approaching, we had no choice than to shoot them. We opened fire on them and they retaliated immediately.

But when we noticed that we were about to run out of bullets, we decided to take to our heels. Unfortunately for me, while other managed to escape the police arrested me because I was unable to join the waiting vehicle.

The police said the robbers made away with two pump action guns, N549,500, and other valuables.

One of the robbery victims, who did not want his name in print, said Mr. Olanrewaju led the other robbers to their house.

That was the man who pointed gun at everyone of us threatening to shoot us if we fail to cooperate with them, the victim said of Mr. Olanrewaju.

They had to destroy my door room with sledge hammer before they could enter my room.

Another victim, who lives on Onibeju Street, confirmed the allegation that the suspect led his colleagues to their building.

It was a bad midnight for all of us, he said.

In fact, he hit one of our neighbors with the pump action. The man in question has been hospitalized receiving treatment.

The victims of the five buildings they visited on Ibeje and Onibeju streets, besieged RRS headquarters to identify the suspect as the gang leader who threatened to waste their lives.

The items recovered from the arrested suspect were one cut-to-size pump action, a jack knife, two laptops, 14 handsets, wrist watch and Two Thousand and Six Hundred Naira (2,600).

Dolapo Badmus, the Lagos State Police Public Relations Officer, said the suspect is helping the police with investigation in order to arrest the fleeing robbers.
Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose has urged President Muhammadu Buhari to stop acting like the grandfather of corruption in Nigeria by shielding his men from probe, just as he asked Nigerians to demand the release of the authentic report of the Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement in the Nigerian Armed Forces.

He described the claim by the federal government that the probe panel only looked into procurement and contracts awarded by the military between 2011-2015 because documents regarding procurement from 2007 to 2010 were not available as a clear indication of his support for corruption.

In a statement issued on Sunday by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, Governor Fayose said It is now obvious to the entire world that anyone that is in President Buharis good books can never be adjudged as corrupt even if such a person is caught

looting the entire money in Nigerias treasury.

The governor said it smacked of sheer hypocrisy and nepotism for anyone to accept that fraud could have been perpetrated on procurement and award of contracts in an establishment without the involvement of the director of procurement.

There are many petitions relating to defence from 2007 that are been discarded, the question is why? There are several petitions against APC leaders that are not being looked into, the question is why?

Fghting corruption and targeting only opponents of the president is in itself corruption, he said.

He continued, Buharis Minister of Interior, Major General Abdul rahman Dambazau (rtd) was Chief of Army Staff between 2008 and 2010 and the current Chief Of Army Staff, Major General Tukur Buratai served as Director of Procurements, Defence Headquarters, from 2012 till May 2015.

It is a fact that the committee in its terms of reference said it queried all procurement from 2007 to 2015. Even the Press Release issued was titled; Third Interim Report of the Presidential Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement from 2007 to 2015.

First paragraph of the committee report also indicated that it used 2007-2015 as reference, stating that the committee analyzed procurement contracts awarded by or for the Nigerian Army between 2007

and 2015.

Questions Nigerians must now begin to ask President Buhari and his government are; where is the report of Presidential Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement relating to 2007 to 2010? Who doctored the committee report and why?

Lai Mohammed said the Committee would commence the audit of procurement from 2007 to 2010 as soon as the necessary documents are available, it is necessary that Nigerians are told who the custodians of the documents are. Why were documents on procurement from 2011 and 2015 available and those of 2007 to 2010 not available?

Early this year, we were told that an ally of President Buhari and chieftain of the APC, Brig. General Jafaru Isa (rtd) refunded N100 million of the N170 million he allegedly received from ex-NSA, Sambo Dasuki.

Jafaru Isa who was a member of the 19-man Buhari Transition Committee was released after he was allegedly assisted by the Presidency to refund N100 million to the anti-graft commission and since then, nothing has been heard about the case. He was not charged to court like others.

It took the Ministry of Defence and the Code of Conduct Bureau only one week to clear Buratai but others from the opposition party would be languishing in prison while EFCC go about fishing for evidence against them.

Like I and other well-meaning Nigerians have maintained, fighting corruption is a good idea but the moment documents of probe panels and being doctored to shield those seen as the Presidents men, the entire purpose of the corruption fight has been defeated.

The international community must therefore prevail on President Buhari to stop acting like the grandfather of corruption in Nigeria by making the anti-corruption war all-inclusive instead of this clear persecution of his perceived political enemies, and the first step to demonstrate that will be the immediate release of report of the Presidential Committee on Audit of Defence Equipment Procurement covering 2007 to 2015.
President Muhammadu Buhari has joined President Obama and other world leaders in vehemently condemning the abortive coup attempt in Turkey by a group of rebel army officers and men, which resulted in the reported death of more than 100 people.

Reacting to the tragic events in Ankara, Istanbul and other centres, President Buhari said he was deeply saddened by reports of a violent attempt to dismantle constitutional authority and disrupt the democratically elected government of Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.

The removal of a democratic government by force is no longer acceptable. Violence can never solve any problem but only complicates them and sets back the progress of democratic societies.

The President also noted that President Erdogan was one of Nigerias close international partners and sincere supporters in its current war against terrorism, adding that all should resist the destabilization of democratic countries through coups detat in the 21st century.

According to the President, democracy provides peaceful options of changing governments through the ballot box. The ballot box doesnt require violence to remove any government perceived to have lost its popularity and public support. Despite its limitations, democracy is still better and more durable than a violent change of government.

The President praised the courage and immediate response of ordinary citizens who in the face of guns and tanks defied the rebel soldiers and forced them to abandon their mad quest for power.

President Buhari called on the President of Turkey to pursue reconciliation and offered Nigerias support to the government and people of Turkey in their hour of trial.
A former presidential side, Doyin Okupe, has just sent the statement below to PREMIUM TIMES explaining what he told operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, who recently quizzed him over the several millions he received from the office of the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki.

Mr. Dasuki is being prosecuted for allegedly mismanaging $2.1billion earmarked for buying equipment for the Nigerian military as it fights insurgency in the North-East.

Read full statement below.

MY RESPONSE TO MEDIA REPORTS ABOUT EFCC SUMMONS

I am constrained to issue this statement in response to certain publications contained in some National dailies about my recent summons by the Economic and Financial Crimes commission, EFCC

In my interactions with the EFCC, I have been asked to explain only three issues so far:

1. Why I received N50m from the office of the National Security Adviser at the onset of my appointment, and what I used the money for.

2. Why I was paid N10m monthly by the Office of the National Security Adviser.

3. Why I received another sum of N50m from the NSA in October 2014.

These are the ONLY subject of interrogation with the commission so far. My explanations were as follows:

1. The initial N50m was approved by the President to be paid to me from His Security vote. N10m was to furnish my rented living apartment and another N10m for my office.

The balance N30m was approved as take off grant for my office.

2. The N10m I received from the Office of the National Security Adviser monthly was to run my office, pay salaries of staff, including overheads, pay expenses for our numerous press conferences, pay for publications in newspapers, magazines, local and foreign, television programs, bulletins, and media consultants who assist and facilitate our work. I had about 23 staff, 11 were graduates out of which 5 were Masters degrees holders. Details were submitted to EFCC

3. The second N50m was approved again by Mr President when I reported to him that the monthly allowance has been cut from N10m to N5m and that I was no longer in a position to keep running a 1hr NTA network program called INSIGHT which was aired 9-10am every Friday and some other days of the week. We paid NTA about N1.2m monthly for airtime. Two presenters were paid N600,000 monthly. We paid for tapes and Editing per program. Besides we also pay honorarium for guests either directly or inform of hotel bills for those outside Abuja, or transportation. This cost averagely N500,000 weekly or about N 2m monthly. All in all we spent about N4m monthly on the program. Mr President promised to help with the expenses. About a few months later when we had incurred some debts, the NSA sent me a sum of N50m which was to cover the cost of the program for 12 months(12N4m=N48m)

The News paper Trial

I saw strange figures like N 162m fraud, N85m fraud in the Media. Also mention was made of some alleged dubious payments of N13m and N65m from contracts supposedly obtained from chachanga LGA in Niger state.

The Fact however is that my company Romix soilfix was one of the over 20 construction companies who were duly awarded contracts for rural roads some 5yrs ago by the Niger state govt. Due to lack of funds, contractors were paid irregularly thus making the job to drag on for long. The job is still on going. The relationship of this to my service as Senior Special assistant to President is still not clear.

My Health status.

I confided in the officers of the commission about my health situation for them to understand why where and how I sleep was important to my overall well being.

Without clearance or authorization by me this information was revealed to the media. I woke up to hear it on radio broadcast nationwide and was published in many newspapers. This is a sad development and a definite breach of the confidence I reposed on the commission as an institution of government.

I was born with sinus bradycadia, a non disease based slowness of the heart. It precluded me from vigorous exercise from childhood but I have by Gods Grace been able to live a normal and active life. With age the slowness grew worse and life threatening. I sought medical help and went through a procedure at the Arrhythmia cardiac Research center in Atlanta, where this defect was corrected. Its just a year ago and I am still under satellite monitor from the USA. This is what I revealed to the EFCC and they made it a public issue.

I have been in public service in more than 20years. Because of my pedigree, I have by deliberate policy avoided anything that will bring shame to me and my family.

In spite of my high level involvement in politics and government, I have never done directly or indirectly any federal government contracts. In the whole of this world, I have only two houses. One in Lagos and another in my home town. I have no house elsewhere including Abuja.

It is a pity that the situation in the country is so bad that everybody believes that there are no men with honour in politics or government. It is not true. I have submitted all my personal and company accounts to the EFCC. I have nothing to hide.

I am proud of who I am and how far the Lord has taken me. My present travails and trial will become a good testimony for me and my family in Jesus Name.

Dr Doyin Okupe

Former Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs ( 2012-2015)
A Port Harcourt-based lawyer, Gaius Ogan, has dragged the Rivers State government to court over the inaccessibility of court rooms in the state for lawyers with disabilities.

Mr. Ogan said court rooms were public buildings and their inaccessibility to disabled lawyers pose a threat to their livelihood.

Joined as respondents in the suit are the Rivers State Government, Rivers State Governor, and Rivers State Deputy Governor.

Others are the Speaker, Rivers State House of Assembly, Deputy Speaker, Rivers State House of Assembly, Chief Registrar, Rivers State Judiciary, Attorney-General, Rivers State, and Chief Judge, Rivers State.

Mr. Ogan told PREMIUM TIMES that his grouse was that public buildings such as court rooms were constructed without consideration for the accessibility of persons with disabilities.

There are no functional lifts and a number of architectural barriers in the court premises such as the non-ergonomic design of staircases, amongst others, make access to courts a nightmare and livelihoods almost impossible, said Mr. Ogan, who is the Coordinator of the Association of Lawyers with Disabilities In Nigeria, Rivers State Chapter.

The hearing of the case is scheduled for July 25 at the Rivers State High Court.

Mr. Ogan said the culpable negligence of the Government of Rivers State and her alter egos over the years in building a society on the assumption that persons with disabilities do not exist had resulted in heightened ableism.

Banks, markets, car parks, churches and even court premises (our supposed temples of justice) are inherently inaccessible, he said.

In his suit, the lawyer is seeking an order that the respondents, jointly and severally, pay him N70 million as general damages for loss of income and opportunities, and negligence to the plight of persons living with disabilities.

He is also seeking an order of court for an additional N5 million as exemplary damages from the respondents.

An order directing the respondents to install, where necessary, functional lifts in all courts in the states and to ensure that the state courts have no architectural barriers to inhibit the applicants right of ingress and egress in these courts to earn his livelihood or do anything in pursuance of his social and economic development.

An order that the respondents place the applicant on an employment that is sedentary while they remove the architectural barriers complained of.

In addition to adopting the reliefs, Mr. Ogan prayed the court to, if the respondents are unable to offer him employment, award him N10 million to enable him establish a medium scale business as an alternative source of livelihood.

Mr. Ogan said he would rely on the provisions of the Constitution and the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (Ratification and Enforcement) Act to prove that his (and by extension all lawyers living with disabilities) fundamental rights to life and the derivative right to livelihood, freedom of movement and right to be treated with dignity, right to equal access to public properties and services, amongst others, had been infringed.

He requested that lawyers with disabilities be given State employments as these architectural barriers will take very long time to remove.
A truck fell on a car along old Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway late Saturday killing two occupants of the smaller vehicle and critically injuring four others.

The incident occured at the Wasimi end of the road when the truck driver with registration number SRA 546XA overtook a Nissan saloon car with registration number Lagos: SZ 171AAA, witnesses say.

A witness said the truck, loaded with granite, hit the median and lost control, before falling on the car.

The newly-promoted Assistant Inspector General of Police, Abdulmajid Ali, who is the immediate past Ogun State commissioner of police, accompanied by former Chairman, Abeokuta North Local Government, Habeeb Ajayi, joined in the rescue operations.

The Ogun State House of Assembly speaket, Suraj Adekunbi, was also at the scene to help.

Two of the four survivors, were rushed to Federal Medical Centre, Idi-Aba, Abeokuta while the others were taken to the Ifo General Hospital.
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.




WASHINGTON, July 17, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Monday, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the nation's largest pro-Israel organization, will begin its 11th annual Washington Summit. The event, which runs through Tuesday, is expected to draw nearly 5,000 attendees.

This year's Summit features briefings and remarks from a host of prominent experts and leaders including Col. Richard Kemp (British Army ret.), Lt. Col. Oliver North (USMC, ret.), Maj. Elliot Chodoff (IDF, res.), Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, venture capitalist Jon Medved, and Rev. Kenneth Meshoe, President of the African Christian Democratic Party of South Africa.

During the Summit's gala event, attendees will hear from CUFI founder and Chairman Pastor John Hagee, and Dr. David Jeremiah, Senior Pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will deliver remarks live via satellite. Later that day, attendees will go to Capitol Hill to lobby their elected officials in support of a strong US-Israel relationship.

"We find ourselves at a point in history when it is crucial we stand in solidarity with Israel. The Iran deal, terrorism and global anti-Semitism are creating an increasingly urgent need for Christians to say, 'For Zion's sake I will not be silent.' Our annual Washington D.C. Summit reminds Israel, our Jewish brothers and sisters, as well as members of Congress that America supports a strong and secure Israel," Hagee said.

All public events at the Summit can be viewed on Daystar.

With more than 3 million members, Christians United for Israel is the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States and one of the leading Christian grassroots movements in the world. CUFI spans all fifty states and reaches millions with its message. Each year CUFI holds hundreds of pro-Israel events in cities around the country. And each July, thousands of pro-Israel Christians gather in Washington, D.C. to participate in the CUFI Washington Summit and make their voices heard in support of Israel and the Jewish people.

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160509/365118LOGO

SOURCE Christians United for Israel

Related Links

http://cufi.org


WASHINGTON, July 17, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following statement was released after reports that police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were killed and injured. It is attributed to National League of Cities (NLC) CEO and Executive Director Clarence E. Anthony:

"Today, we learned that an unspeakable act of violence was committed against officers with the Baton Rouge Police Department. Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims' families, the public safety community, and the residents of Baton Rouge as they face the pain and heartbreak of yet another tragedy in their city.

"Cities stand united with Baton Rouge, law enforcement, and the city's leaders  including Mayor Kip Holden and the Metropolitan Council  during this difficult time. While the facts of this incident are still emerging, one thing is clear: it is time to take action and confront this epidemic of gun violence that's killing our brothers, sisters and fellow members of our communities."

The National League of Cities (NLC) is dedicated to helping city leaders build better communities. NLC is a resource and advocate for 19,000 cities, towns and villages, representing more than 218 million Americans. www.nlc.org

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081022/NLCLOGO

SOURCE National League of Cities

Related Links

http://www.nlc.org


LONDON, July 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

Telefonica has released the most comprehensive digital index ever developed, which assesses 34 countries worldwide on the extent of their digital development. Whilst the USA tops the Index with a total score (96.3/100), it is Canada, the UK, Colombia, Australia and Chile that lead in outperformance relative to their GDP Per Capita.

Telefonica Index on Digital Life Global Rankings and Scores 2016 (PRNewsFoto/Telefonica)

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160714/389598-INFO )



The 'Telefonica Index on Digital Life' has revealed that the strength of digital life varies strongly across the world. It challenges the rudimentary way the digital economy is currently measured by taking a more holistic view of the different socio-economic components that combine to establish digital life within a particular economy. The comprehensive Index formula uniquely takes into account three components, informed by 50 different pre-existing sets of public data relating to digital life across the world:

1. OPENNESS: The ease of information flow within a particular economy (open access to technology and systems)

2. CONFIDENCE: The extent to which users engage with and trust the digital world (Incl. education and privacy)

3. ENTREPRENEURSHIP: How economic activities prosper in the digital environment (the freedom to innovate)

The Index suggests that bottlenecks exist in the global landscape, obstructing certain countries' ability to achieve a successful digital ecosystem on behalf of citizens. Telefonica has also published recommendations for governments and policy makers to improve bottlenecks and leverage strengths surfaced by the Index. The policy recommendations emphasise:

1. Regulatory conditions that affect market structure, open innovation and customer choice.

2. Legislation to encourage customer experience, freedom of expression, privacy and security.

3. Policies to support innovation, e-skills, cultural attitudes and the start-up ecosystem.

Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete Lopez, Executive Chairman of Telefonica, said of the Index launch: "To unleash the full potential of the digital economy, we need forward-looking, fairer public policies and a better cooperation between all stakeholders, public and private. Without this, we risk a digital divide, which could not only threaten economic progress, but also the lives of citizens globally.

"Recent reports estimate that a 10% increase in digitalisation of the economy could increase GDP per capita growth rates by 40%. We need institutions, governments, unions, enterprises, policy makers and citizens to realise the full potential of the digital world for the benefit of society."

To download the full report, please visit: http://indexdigitallife.telefonica.com/

SOURCE Telefonica
WASHINGTON, July 16, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- During an appearance on CNN, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir addressed the recent release of the '28 pages' that had been redacted from the 2002 Congressional Joint Inquiry. "The only surprise in the '28 pages' is that there was no surprise," said Minister Al-Jubeir. The Foreign Minister highlighted the fact that while many who have pointed to the '28 pages' for more than a decade as proof of Saudi government involvement in 9-11, the report in fact states that no conclusions were reached nor was the Joint Inquiry in a position to make such claims.

The report states: "It should be clear that this Joint Inquiry has made no final determination as to the reliability or sufficiency of the information regarding these issues that we found contained in FBI and CIA documents. It was not the task of this Joint Inquiry to conduct the kind of extensive investigation that would be required to determine the true significance of any such alleged connections to the Saudi government."

According to Minister Al-Jubeir, "For 13 years, people like (former) Senator Bob Graham from Florida have said that the 28 pages have damning evidence regarding Saudi Arabia's complicity in 9/11. Meanwhile the report says we don't know if the links are valid. We cannot investigate these things. We can't come to conclusions." Minister Al-Jubeir further said, "And when the appropriate agencies, the 9/11 Commission and the FBI and CIA investigated those leads and came out with their conclusions they said that 'there's no there there.' Yet, these people continued to mislead the public for 13 years."

In 2004, the 9/11 Commission concluded, "We have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization [Al-Qaeda]." In 2005, the CIA investigation that looked into the content of the '28 pages,' clearly stated: "There is no evidence that the Saudi government or members of the Saudi royal family knowingly provided support for the attacks of 11 September 2001 or that they had foreknowledge of terrorist operations in the Kingdom or elsewhere."

Earlier, Minister Al-Jubeir said, "It is time to close this chapter and move on to strengthen efforts to defeat the terrorists who are threating your people and ours."

SOURCE Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, Information Office

Related Links

http://www.saudiembassy.net


NEW YORK, July 17, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Thai Direct, an authentic Thai meal kit company, delivers fresh authentic Thai ingredients with 20 minute recipes. The company aims to ride the food disruption trend by offering the authentic Thai cuisine option. The starting price is $19.99 per meal for two servings per month. The subscriptions will range from 3 to 12 month periods. Customers can also choose to buy the products with no subscriptions. Packages include two people, family and party (6+). Thai Direct's recipes, curated by real Thai home cooks, will be provided in the form of hard copies as well as online videos. In addition, they will offer other products including Thai pantry kits (free for 6 + month subscribers), frozen Thai sticky rice and frozen Thai Jasmine rice (non-flavor, lemongrass, cilantro and coconut flavor options). Currently Thai Direct is raising funds on Kickstarter for launching its beta in NYC. Follow the Kickstarter link for their campaign information https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1728100051/thai-direct

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160717/390360

Related Images

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This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com. For more info visit: http://www.newswire.com.

SOURCE Thai Direct
IJCAI is a scholar festival for AI researchers and practitioners, it is also one of the most important academic conference in the AI industry. Over 1700 top experts in this industry joined in the conference this year. Being the only Chinese guest speaker, Pinpin Zhu, the president & CTO of Xiaoi, was invited to deliver a speech on the global bots economy, as well as the development of Xiaoi.

In recent years, the emerging of AlphaGo from Google, or Watson from IBM, as well as the opening of bots platforms of Facebook, Telegram and other companies, has brought bots economy to the public. However, Xiaoi started the industrial application of bots from as early as 2006. This low-profile Chinese company had shared the benefits of AI with over 500 million people. Pinpin Zhu said that bots were going from single usage to platforms. Bots were widely applied on Xiaoi's platform especially as VCAs. Take a Chinese bank as an example, the number of its customer service agents had reduced from 3339 to 14 after the launch of bots from Xiaoi. Xiaoi also provides service to SMEs and developers through its cloud platform and robot operating system. Pinpin Zhu expressed his wish to extend bots application to legal and health care industry in the future in his speech.

After his speech, Pinpin Zhu was involved into a panel together with other 7 top experts in AI, including R&D leader Peter Norvig from Google, founder of COGITAI Peter Stone, chief scientist of cognitive computing from IBM Research Guruduth Banavar and etc. They led an exciting discussion around the core challenges and opportunities of AI.

Xiaoi shared its industrial application of AI in the US market for the first time in this IJCAI16, which had impressed AI experts and research institutes greatly. Medias including MIT Technology Reivew, The Verge, Techcrunch, Wired interviewed Xiaoi's personnel on Xiaoi's booth. The chairman of next IJCAI, Professor Chengqi Zhang, invited Xiaoi to IJCAI 17 in Melbourne on site immediately.

The Enterprise Business Development Leader of PWC, Mark Veyret, spoke highly of Xiaoi's success business model after a detailed introduction of Xiaoi. He said that similar companies in the US were start-ups with about 3 years' experience, while Xiaoi had over 15 years' industrial experience, with highly recognized international companies as its clients, which was a great competitive advantage for Xiaoi.

Another thing to notice was that many AI talents from renowned universities and companies were attracted to Xiaoi's booth. They expressed their strong will to work for Xiaoi in China.

It is worth mentioning that two papers co-written by Xiaoi and Fudan University were selected by IJCAI16, one of them was on the automatic construction of knowledge base in a large scale, the other was on natural language Q&A, and both had solved great challenges in respective areas.

Xiaoi had developed the biggest Chinese structured encyclopedia, CN-DBpedia, in association with Computing Science School of Fudan University. They had completed a research on the deep learning in natural language processing, and established an online natural language Q&A system facing billion scale knowledge graph.

Being a company that focuses on smart machine technology research and development, Xiaoi has set up a complete framework which includes semantic understanding, knowledge representation, learning system, inference and prediction, upper application, etc. It provides virtual/physical smart robots, SaaS/PaaS platform and multiple industrial solutions in various fields, and can convey cloud-based, powerful smart interactive service capabilities to enterprises, developers and devices.

Xiaoi's smart machine service is available on omni-channels, from web, APP, WeChat, to Weibo, QQ, phone, etc. Its business covers industries such as communication, financee-governance, e-commerce, smart appliance and transportation. Xiaoi provides services to hundreds of large and medium enterprises, government branches, thousands of SMEs and developers. "China will play a significant role in the future AI market", said Mark Veyret.

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160717/390344

SOURCE Xiaoi
If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this





Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here
Mumbai, July 14 : Directed by Gurvinder Singh, "Chauthi Koot", the first Punjabi language film which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, 2015, is set to release pan-India on August 5.

The film was screened in the 'Un Certain Regard' section at the Cannes Film Festival.

Set during the Sikh separatist movement during the 1980s, "Chauthi Koot" has been adapted from two stories written by Waryam Singh Sandhu called "Chauthi Koot" and "Hun Main Theek Haan".

The film was shot mostly around Amritsar and Ferozepur in Punjab.

Among other accolades, the film was screened in over 13 international and Indian film festivals and won the best film award in the India Gold section at MAMI, 2015 along with the 2016 National Award for the best feature in the Punjabi language.

The film has been produced by Kartikeya Singh under his banner The Film CafA along with France based Catherine Dussart of Catherine Dussart Productions and National Film Development Corporation (India).

"I'm happy that 'Chauthi Koot' is finding mainstream release in India, not just in Punjab but outside the linguistic boundary of Punjab. Because cinema is a universal language that speaks of humanitarian concerns, it knows no limitation of the spoken language," the director said in a statement.

"I'm sure the film will speak to the audience across the country, as it addresses concerns not just limited to Punjab and its history, but reflects the tumult across the world in today's time, and the human endeavour to continue to live a life of dignity and simplicity in the face of turbulence," he added.

The Film CafA will be releasing and distributing "Chauthi Koot" in over 50 screens in Punjab and nearly 30 screens in the major cities across India with English subtitles.
Srinagar, July 15 : A policeman was killed when a militant hiding in a protesting mob threw a grenade and opened fire on police as authorities clamped a strict curfew across the Kashmir Valley fearing violence post the first Friday prayers after the killing of militant leader Burhan Wani.

Two protesters were shot dead and at least a dozen of them injured in firing by security forces as more violence and arson were reported from across the valley reeling under a blanket curfew for the seventh day.

A police spokesman said here that a crowd of hundreds attacked a police station in Kulgam district of south Kashmir -- the worst hit region in the latest unrest -- after midday congregational prayers.

As policemen lobbed tear gas canisters to disperse the stone-throwing mob, a militant hiding in the crowd first hurled a grenade and then fired from an AK-47 rifle at the policemen. A policeman was killed and six others were injured in the militant-and-mob attack.

Police said the mob later tried to set ablaze municipal and sub-district office structures in Kulgam. Security forces opened fire on the crowd and a bullet killed one of the protesters.

In north Kashmir, police said, street clashes erupted in at least a dozen places. An angry mob threw rocks at an army post located at Drugmulla in north Kashmir's Kuwpara district, some 100 km from here.

Unable to disperse the stone throwers, security forces opened fire, killing one of the demonstrators. He was identified as Mushtaq Ganie, 13. Three more protesters were injured in the Kupwara firing.

Four persons sustained pellet wounds in firing by police in north Kashmir's Sopore area. The injured were brought to Srinagar's SMHS hospital where the condition of one of them was stated to critical.

With the latest deaths, the toll in the ongoing unrest has gone up to 41. Most persons died in south Kashmir where Wani - the poster boy of Kashmir's new age militancy - belonged to. More than 1,500 people have been injured - most of them with pellet bullets - in the unending street violence.

In Nathnusa village, also in north Kashmir's Kupwara district, guerrillas threw a grenade at paramilitary troopers, injuring four of them.

Violent clashes were also reported from old Srinagar and some other parts of the city with masked protesters at many places carrying Pakistan's green flags and hurling stones at police and paramilitary forces.

No Friday prayers were offered in Srinagar's biggest mosque - Jamia Masjid - known for its weekly stone pelting unrest after every Friday prayer.

However, prayers were offered in other mosques of the valley after which people held special funeral prayers for the dead killed in the ongoing unrest.

The rest of the violence-ravaged valley was calm as curfew remained in place. Authorities suspended all internet and mobile phone connectivity in the valley to prevent the spread of passion-stoking rumours and posts on social media by anti-social elements.

Life in the valley remained crippled for the seventh day due to the curfew and separatist-sponsored shutdown.

The separatist groups have extended their shutdown call for until Monday, asking people to come out against civilian killings by security forces. This means that normal life will remain paralyzed on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Ankara, July 16 : Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday the attempted military coup the previous night to overthrow the government constituted a "black stain for Turkish democracy".

In a televised address to the nation, Yildirim called the coup plotters terrorists, but said the nation has answered their attempt effectively, the Guardian reported.

Yildirim said that 161 people were killed and 1,440 injured in the coup attempt.

Some 2,839 members of the armed forces, ranging from ordinary soldiers to high-ranking officers, have been detained, the BBC quoted the Prime Minister as saying.

Yildirum said the police and security forces risked their lives to restore order.

"Turkish law will now deal with coup plotters, they will be punished accordingly," the Guardian reported quoting Yildirum as saying.

Asked if re-introducing the death penalty was an option for dealing with coup plotters, Yildirum said the Turkish government will consider legal changes, the daily noted.

"The nation will never forget these people who committed treason," he said.

"The first stage of the coup is over," the Prime Minister added.

Yildirum is set to hold a parliamentary meeting later in the day.
Chennai, July 17 : Actress Amyra Dastur, who made her southern movie debut with Tamil film "Anegan" last year, has now started shooting for her maiden Telugu film "Raju Gadu" with Raj Tarun.

"It has been a week since she started shooting. She plays a bubbly character and has donned a completely 'desi' look. It's a situational comedy and Amyra will get to portray her comic side," a source from the film's unit told IANS.

The film is being helmed by Sanjana Reddy, who is making her directorial debut with the project.

Although Amyra had signed two Telugu films earlier this year including a project with filmmaker Puri Jagannadh, she had to let go of the offers for Jackie Chan's "Kungfu Yoga".
Ankara, July 17 : Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in exile in the US, has implied that the failed coup attempt in Turkey could have been orchestrated and staged by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself.

In a brief statement from his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen, who has been accused by the Turkish government of instigating Friday's coup attempt and whom the Turkish government asked the US to "send back", on Saturday said the use of force was not the way to effect change in Turkey, Efe news reported.

"There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup," said Gulen, who once again denied any involvement in the failed coup that has left more than 160 persons dead.

During the coup attempt, Erdogan claimed, the rebelling soldiers received orders from Pennsylvania, referring to Gulen's residence in the US.

Gulen said he rejected all military interventions, as he had personally suffered after the coups of the 1990s.

"After military coups in Turkey, I have been pressured and I have been imprisoned. I have been tried and faced various forms of harassment," the Guardian quoted Gulen as saying.

The Turkish President on Saturday urged the US not to protect Gulen, while US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed to have received no extradition petition or legitimate proof of the cleric's role in the incident.

Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan, has been living in self-imposed exile in the US since 2013, when Erdogan accused him of promoting corruption scandals against his government.

Since then, the government has included the influential cleric on its list of most wanted terrorists and sought his extradition for judicial trial that could result in life imprisonment.
Manakpur Sharif (Punjab), July 17 : The landscape of 'Green Revolution' state Punjab has always been known for its golden harvest. But with the efforts of an artistically-minded entrepreneur couple, there will be a splash of colour in the agrarian state as well.

Bringing in a new concept to the state, serial entrepreneur Anuja Lath is offering art residency to artists at her three-acre farmhouse near Chandigarh.

The 'Aura Art Stay' had its first brush with artistic talent recently, with established and fresh artists from the region making a splash on the stone-lined wall in one portion of the well-maintained farmhouse at a day-long graffiti workshop.

"Being from the art background ourselves, we wanted to provide a natural canvas to artists to give vent to their creativity. The art residency programme is a new concept in this region and we are trying to make it a success," Anuja, who along with her husband Atul Gupta conceptualised the project, told IANS here.

"At the graffiti workshop, we provided 1,500 square feet of wall space where over 20 art lovers expressed their childhood on the walls using enamel paint and cans of spray paint. The session started at around noon where artists spread out armed with chalk to first make their sketches followed by colour rendering. The session was assisted by the Aura Art Stay team to provide uninterrupted work environment to the artists," Anuja pointed out.

The art residency programme, which offers residency for up to 12 artists per month, is open to artists of all hues -- from the established ones to those dabbling in the world of art for the first time.

"The art residency intends to hold similar workshops in the coming weeks, going by the overwhelming response and requests from the attendees and those who missed it (graffiti workshop). The future workshops may cover a wide range of genres like pottery, painting, sculpture, serigraphy, etc," Anuja said.

Freelance artists Devinder Pal Singh, who brought his teenage son for the graffiti workshop, told IANS: "The art residency is an interesting concept. This has not been done in this region so far. It will provide a new platform for the artists."

The Aura farmhouse, where the couple and their family reside, is a 30-minute drive from Chandigarh, which was designed in the 1950s and 60s by French architect Le Corbusier.

The art residency rooms, including the 'Beatles room', 'Picasso' and others, offer stay to in-residence artists with a common kitchen and lounge facilities. The residency offers large outdoor spaces to work in, as well as a small but well-equipped studio to paint, sketch, sculpt or potter around.

A product of the Government College for Art in Chandigarh, Anuja was the co-founder of the Pugmarks design studio along with Atul in 1986.

(Jaideep Sarin can be contacted at jaideep.s@ians.in)
Shimla, July 17 : A World Bank-funded Himachal Pradesh Horticulture Development Project is being implemented in the state with an outlay of Rs 1,115 crore, mainly to protect apple cultivation, a government spokesperson said on Sunday.

The project spread over seven years would focus on providing new technologies to horticulturists for increasing crop productivity and capacities.

To protect the fruit crop, mainly from the hailstorms, the state government has increased subsidy on anti-hail nets to 80 per cent.

The spokesperson said for strengthening marketing facilities, 10 fruit yards and collection centres have been made operational in the state in the past three and a half years with an expenditure of Rs 27.45 crore.

Himachal Pradesh is one of India's major apple producing states, with more than 90 per cent of the produce consumed in the domestic market.

Himachal Pradesh's fruit economy is worth around Rs 3,500 crore a year, with apple alone contributing 89 per cent to this figure, mostly in Shimla, Kullu, Mandi, Lahaul and Spiti, Kinnaur and Chamba districts.

A Horticulture Department official said growers are taking to apple plantation on a large scale even in the remote district of Lahaul-Spiti.

Overall area under apple cultivation has increased to 1,09,553 hectares in 2014-15, he said.

He said the government has started weather-based crop insurance scheme to protect growers' interests.

Initially, the scheme was launched in six blocks for apple crop and four blocks for mango crop. The coverage under the scheme has since been extended in view of the scheme's popularity.

In the last fiscal, the scheme was implemented in 36 blocks for growing apple, 41 blocks for mango, 15 blocks for kinnow, 13 blocks for plum and five blocks for peach crops.

In addition, 17 blocks have been covered under add-on cover scheme to protect the apple fruit crop from hailstorms.
Ghuman (Punjab), July 17 : Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Sunday called for strengthening cultural bonds amongst states to promote social cohesion and harmony in India.

Addressing a big gathering here in Gurdaspur district after inaugurating the newly constructed Baba Namdev Ji college, Badal said communal harmony and brotherhood across the country was the need of the hour.

The Guru Granth Sahib, which was the "lighthouse of socialism and secularism", could guide the entire country along the path to communal harmony, he said.

Setting up of Baba Namdev Ji University College here by the Punjab government was a step towards further strengthening the state's cultural ties with Maharashtra, Badal said.

Baba Namdev, a poet-saint from Maharashtra who lived from 1270 CE to 1350 CE, is greatly revered in Punjab.

Badal said the Punjab government has also given a facelift to the memorial of great patriot Rajguru, who attained martyrdom along with Bhagat Singh during the colonial rule, in his native town in Maharashtra.

These initiatives were aimed at further strengthening the bonds of love and affinity between peoples of Punjab and Maharashtra, he said.

Badal said Baba Namdev was a great spiritual ambassador who spent 19 years of his life in this town of Punjab and spread the message of equality of human beings and oneness of God.

He pointed out that the tenth master of Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh, spent last days of his life in Sri Huzur Sahib in Nanded in Maharashtra.

For centuries people from the two states have been visiting these holy places of immense religious importance due to which a strong bond has developed amongst them, the Chief Minister said.

The gathering was also addressed by Union Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, former Union Minister Sharad Pawar and others.

Prabhu lauded the Punjab government for constructing the state-of-the art college which, he said, would help in further cementing the bonds between people of Punjab and Maharashtra.

This historic step taken by the state government would help in perpetuating the glorious heritage of Baba Namdev, he said.
Ankara, July 17 : At least eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece with a military helicopter in Saturday's failed coup attempt will face trial in a Greek court, Anadolu Agency reported on Sunday.

The coup supporters will face accusations of "illegal entry" and "damaging the friendly relations between Turkey and Greece", Xinhua news agency quoted Lia Marinaki, a lawyer of the soldiers, as saying.

The lawyer said the soldiers will appear in court later on Sunday.

The Black Hawk helicopter the soldiers used in the escape was returned to Turkey, the report said.

Early on Saturday, the military helicopter landed at the Alexandroupoli airport near the Greek-Turkish border, and the soldiers who asked for political asylum were arrested by Greek police.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey "requested the immediate surrender of the traitor soldiers who fled to Greece".

"They will expedite the extradition process," he said.
New Delhi, July 17 : While the bill for the introduction of Goods and Services Tax across the country remains a priority, the Government has listed around a dozen bills pending introduction, consideration and passage during the Monsoon Session of parliament, starting on Monday.

Two bills are pending passage in the Lok Sabha, while seven bills are pending in the Rajya Sabha, including the GST Bill.

Here are the bills listed by the government:

*The Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Ordinance, 2016 - The bill replaces an ordinance. It introduces a uniform entrance examination for all medical educational institutions for undergraduate and the postgraduate courses.

*The Dentists (Amendment) Ordinance, 2016 - The bill will replace an ordinance promulgated on May 24 to amend the Dentists Act, 1948. It seeks to introduce a uniform entrance examination for all dental colleges for the undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Bills pending in the Lok Sabha:

*The Indian Trust (Amendment) Bill, 2015 - The Lok Sabha has to pass this bill again with amendments made by the Rajya Sabha. The bill amends certain archaic provisions in the Act of 1882, which allows trusts to invest surplus income in certain categories/areas, including certain specified securities in the UK, Karachi and Rangoon.

*The Enforcement of Security Interest and Recovery of Debts Laws and Miscellaneous Provisions (Amendment) Bill, 2016 - The bill is presently lying with a joint committee of parliament. It seeks to amend four laws -- Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002 (SARFAESI), Recovery of Debts due to Banks and Financial Institutions Act, 1993 (RDDBFI), Indian Stamp Act of 1899 and Depositories Act of 1996.

Bills pending in the Rajya Sabha:

*The Whistle Blowers Protection (Amendment) Bill, 2015 - The bill was passed in the Lok Sabha in May 2015 even as opposition parties sought sending it to a parliamentary panel. The bill seeks to amend the Act to incorporate necessary provisions to strengthen safeguards against disclosures which may prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of the country and security of the state, among other things.

*The Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill, 2016 - The bill establishes the National Compensatory Afforestation Fund under the Public Account of India, and a State Compensatory Afforestation Fund under the Public Account of each state. It has been passed by the Lok Sabha.

*The Regional Centre for Biotechnology Bill, 2016 - The bill seeks to provide legislative backing to the regional centre after India entered into an agreement in 2006 with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) regarding establishment of the Regional Centre for Biotechnology Training and Education in India to serve the member-countries of UNESCO. It has been already passed by the Lok Sabha.

*The Goods and Services Tax Bill (The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-second Amendment) Bill, 2014) - Being pitched as the most important legislation for the session, this bill seeks to introduce Goods and Services Tax in India. The government has been talking to the opposition parties to get it through, after failing to take it through the Upper House in the previous sessions. It was passed by the Lok Sabha in May 2015.

*The Enemy Property (Amendment & Validation) Bill, 2016 - The bill seeks to amend the Enemy Property Act, 1968, to vest all rights, titles and interests over enemy property in the Custodian. The bill has been already passed by the Lok Sabha.

*The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2012 - The bill seeks to amend the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, and adds a new category of persons called "adolescent". An adolescent means a person between the age of 14 and 18. The bill seeks to prohibit employment of adolescents in hazardous occupations as specified, like mines and hazardous processes.

*The Homeopathy Central Council (Amendment) Bill, 2015 - The Act establishes the Homoeopathy Central Council to regulate and enforce standards with regard to homoeopathy colleges and homoeopathy practitioners. The bill seeks to disallow admissions in homeopathy medical colleges which do not conform to the prescribed educational standards.

Bills for Introduction:

*The High Courts (Alteration of Names) Bill, 2016 - The bill facilitates change in the names of Bombay High Court as Mumbai High Court and Madras High Court as Chennai High Court' respectively.

*The Institute of Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2016 - The bill amends The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961, for incorporation of new IITs at Tirupati (Andhra Pradesh), Palakkad (Kerala), Dharwar (Karnataka), Bhilai (Chhattisgarh), Goa, Jammu (Jammu and Kashmir) and conversion of Indian School of Mines (ISM) at Dhanbad (Bihar) to an IIT under the law.

*The National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research (Amendment) Bill, 2016 - The bill includes NIT, Andhra Pradesh, in its First Schedule.

*The Use and regulation of DNA-based technology in Civil and Criminal Proceedings, Identification of Missing Persons and Human Remains Bill, 2016 - Regulates the use of DNA analysis of human body substances, profiles and establishes the DNA profiling board and a national DNA data bank.

Apart from these, the government has also listed discussion and voting on Supplementary Demands for Grants (General) for 2015-16.
New Delhi, July 17 : The BJP and the Congress on Sunday criticised Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's maiden interactive session 'Talk to AK', terming it a marketing gimmick.

"It was a pre-scripted and pre-managed show where the Chief Minister spoke one-sidedly for over 50 minutes and set his agenda for Punjab and Goa," Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) Delhi unit chief Satish Upadhyay told IANS.

"He doesn't talk about Delhi and all the questions and answers were pre-planned," he alleged, adding: "It was a complete marketing gimmick on the money of Delhiites."

Senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi took to Twitter to fire salvos to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader.

"Tall claims of cleanliness and screening, still so many corrupt party members! Is screening bad or were corrupt knowingly allowed?" he wrote in series of tweets.

"Your appointment of 21 MLAs holding office for profit clearly contravenes constitution. How can you claim to be clean?"

Singhvi also questioned the Delhi government's decision to give reservation to Punjabi-speaking teachers, asking: "is it benefitting the people of Delhi?"

He also wondered why anyone in AAP "who voices disagreement with you (Kejriwal) shown the door"?

Kejriwal on Sunday held an interactive session with people across the country through social media, phone calls and text messages, in a programme titled 'Talk to AK'.

The programme was moderated by noted music director Vishal Dadlani.
Srinagar, July 17 : Curfew and a separatist-called shutdown continued for the 10th day on Sunday, crippling normal life across the restive Kashmir Valley with the government ordering schools and colleges to close for one more week amid an information blackout due to a ban on local newspapers.

Police said no fresh violence was reported from the valley which has been battling the deadliest unrest in years triggered by the July 8 killing of top Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

"The situation in the valley remained more or less under control," a police spokesperson told IANS.

But the continuous restrictions, which were imposed immediately after Wani's killing, along with his two militant aides, have paralyszed normal life in the valley. Shops and businesses remained shut even as at some places, grocers had partially opened their shops in the morning.

People complained that their stocks of groceries and other food items have dried up. The valley is suffering severely due to a shortage of essentials, including medicines.

The government on Sunday extended the school and college summer vacations for one more week till July 24. The education institutions were scheduled to reopen on Monday after more than two-week summer and Eid vacations.

"The summer vacations in the schools and colleges of the valley have been extended by one week," Education Minister Naeem Akhtar announced here.

The decision was taken in view of the ongoing unrest in the valley that has left more than 40 people dead in the last 10 days of street violence.

Amid the information blackout forced by the government, no newspaper could hit the stands for the second day on Sunday. The government has asked newspaper owners to suspend publications till Tuesday.

But their online editions continued.

Cable television operations were allowed on Saturday evening after remaining suspended for a day. But Pakistan-based TV channels and two private Indian channels were not allowed through cable TV.

Mobile phone internet and call operations remained suspended in parts of the valley. Mobile phone operations without any internet facility are, however, continuing on post-paid mobile phones provided by the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).

Train services between Baramulla and Banihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended.

All recruitment interviews scheduled for the next four days have been canceled by the state Public Service Commission.
Washington, July 18 : Three police officers were killed, and several others were injured on Sunday in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the US state of Louisiana.

One suspect was shot dead and two other suspects might still be on the run, according to the local police.

The injured police officers, who are with the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, have been rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center for treatment, Xinhua news agency quoted Kip Holden, mayor of Baton Rouge as saying.

He did not say how many officers were wounded and how was their condition, according to the local English daily The Times-Picayune.

Holden said that he was still gathering details on the total number of officers who were injured by the shooting that broke out around 9.00 a.m. local time in the city, and was unable to provide any information on the gunman or gunmen. But there are reports that one suspect was killed and possibly two more were being sought by the police.

Holden described the shooting as "a nightmare" all over again in the city as two police officers shot and killed a 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling, earlier in July, triggering a wave of protests across the nation.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards also condemned the shooting, saying, in a statement, that shooting was "an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing".

He promised to take measures to bring the shooters to justice.

This is the second serious shooting incident that killed police officers in the country in less than two weeks after a gunman killed five police officers and hurt seven others in Dallas, a city in the US state of Texas.
I feel that our mixture of accountability and a consultative approach dedicated to customer success and satisfaction, especially with our commitment to Microsoft Technology, fosters more long-term relationships with clients. - John Peace, COO

Accountnet Inc., a leading consulting firm and provider of cloud-based financial management solutions, announced that it has been named to Accounting Todays VAR 100 List for 2016. Accounting Today magazine is the leading provider of online business news for the tax and accounting community, offering breaking news, in-depth features, insightful editorial analysis, and a host of web-related resources and services. Each year, the publication releases its VAR 100 list, ranking the top 100 accounting software resellers.

Manhattans top Microsoft VAR, Accountnet is an authorized Gold Certified member for Microsoft Dynamics (highest member) and is actively involved with the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners (IAMCP). The new Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) accreditations are much more stringent than the previous Microsoft Gold Partner status accreditations and promise to better represent organizations that have demonstrated the highest, most consistent capability and commitment within a specific business solution area, such as the cloud. Accountnets Silver Cloud Solution Provider competency is unsurpassed. Additionally, in recognition of our industry leadership and successful engagements with customers, Accountnet was recently nominated and selected to be a part of Microsofts Power BI Red Carpet Program. This is an invitation-only program for Microsofts partners that play an important part in the growth of Microsoft Power BI.

Microsoft Power BI leverages the cloud, Excel, and Office 365 to allow business users to analyze and visualize data using self-service.

The Power BI Red Carpet Program gives Accountnet special support services, including access to Microsoft services and offers related to Power BI. Using these services and offers, we can serve customers of all sizes in meeting their analysis needs by helping them understand their data and visualize it beyond reports and interactive charts, thereby helping them make faster and more accurate business decisions.

In just the past five years, this Wall Street-based company established itself as the Microsoft Financial Application specialist for cloud-based financial management solutions, as well as a leading provider of Midsized to Enterprise Work Flow and Approval solutions and turnkey Extended Relationship Analysis (ERA) processing of Chart of Accounts with Currency Tracking (COA+C). Accountnets partnership with Microsoft, the industry-leading best-in-class cloud accounting ERP for mid-market companies, is reviewed by organizations and firms daily and continues to follow a road map as more and more businesses move their financials to the cloud, taking advantage of powerful automation, insight, and performance.

Accountnet has also been named to the Bob Scotts Insights Top 100 VARs for 2016. The Top 100 resellers are chosen from organizations specializing in the sale and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and accounting software. We want to congratulate this years class of Bob Scotts Top 100 VARs, said Bob Scott, executive editor of Bob Scotts Insights. This selection represents recognition of leaders in this important field.

Were very proud of our continued success and were excited to make the VAR 100 list, said John C. Peace, COO of Accountnet. I feel that our mixture of accountability and a consultative approach dedicated to customer success and satisfaction, especially with our commitment to Microsoft Technology, fosters more long-term relationships with clients.

If you are evaluating accounting software, or looking for Dynamics GP or SL support and training, contact Accountnet at 212-244-9009, visit our website, or follow us on twitter @DynamicsNewYork
Villa Punto de Vista

Villa Punto de Vista, a 10-bedroom luxury private villa situated on 2 1/2 acres of tropical reserve in Costa Rica, will be featured in the upcoming broadcast of Life's A Beach on Travel Channel. Life's A Beach focuses on real-life stories of people who left their workaday life to pursue their dream of owning a slice of heaven in a beach paradise. Viewers get an inside look at the fascinating tips and tricks these beachcombers use to create these magical lifestyles.

Villa Punto de Vista will be featured on an episode entitled Love At First Sight, airing Sunday, July 17 at 11:30 PM, 10:30 central on Travel Network. The episode will also be repeated on Monday, July 18 at 2:30 AM, 1:30 central. Check your local listings.

It is not surprising that the producers of Life's A Beach would choose to visit Manuel Antonio and more specifically, Villa Punto de Vista for this episode. Playa Manuel Antonio was recently named the second best beach in Central America and the 15th best in the world by TripAdvisor, while Villa Punto de Vista received the 2016 Conde Nast Johansens Award in the best villa or serviced apartment category.

Luxury, Comfort, and Attention to Detail

The villa was created with the idea of delivering all of the personalized attention of a private villa combined with the size and infrastructure needed for events such as weddings or corporate retreats; usually the domain of larger, more impersonal hotels. Villa Punto de Vista, with its unparalleled panoramic views surrounded by tropical flora and fauna, features a stunning architectural design eco-consciously using as many recycled and locally sourced materials as possible.

An Ideal Setting

Villa Punto de Vista sits atop a bluff overlooking the blue waters and the white sands of Playa Manuel Antonio on Costa Ricas central Pacific coast. All around is the tropical splendor of Manuel Antonio National Park with its lush rainforests, beautiful waterfalls and dazzling wildlife, like toucans, sloths, squirrel monkeys, and parrots. Nearby, visitors can find great attractions and activities such as zip lining, hiking, sailing and a visit to an aromatic vanilla plantation, not to mention the unbelievable dining in many local restaurants.

Viewers can tune in to Travel Channels Lifes A Beach on Sunday, July 17th to discover more about Villa Punto de Vista and Manuel Antonio.

About Villa Punto de Vista

Villa Punto de Vista, Costa Rica is a luxuriously appointed, 10-bedroom, fully staffed private villa (for groups of 12  27 persons). The villa is situated on a lush, 2.5 acre, tropical reserve embraced by remarkable wildlife and perched above the warm turquoise waters of Manuel Antonio Bay. Villa Punto de Vista is rented to only one party at a time, so it is exclusively yours.

For more information, visit http://www.villapuntodevista.com or call 1.888.890.8687 (Toll Free).
PM Trudeau says Canada will work to fight terrorism

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada is thinking of "our friends in France" and will work to fight terrorism."We had a terrible attack last night and our hearts go out to the victims and their families," Trudeau said Friday while in Calgary to attend the Stampede."Canada stands with France as a steadfast ally and we will work with the international community to fight terror to ensure that we live in a peaceful world."At least 84 people were killed when a truck full of weapons plowed into a crowd of Bastille Day revellers in the French resort city of Nice late Thursday.There were no reports of Canadian casualties.Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said the federal government has no information that would necessitate a change in Canada's terror threat level, which is currently at medium.Still, Goodale urged Canadians to stay vigilant and alert."Canadians can rest assured that when the security and intelligence sector receives credible warnings on a specific threat, they work with the appropriate government partners to ensure the safety of Canadians," Goodale said in a statement.Goodale noted that while in Paris in January, he signed a declaration with his French counterpart, Bernard Cazeneuve, to work together on terrorism, organized crime and irregular migration.
B.C. MP Jenny Kwan calls on Liberals to end Operational Bulletin 202

Jenny Kwan, second from left, Rodney Watson, a U.S. Army veteran and resister, and others are calling on the federal Liberal government to undo a Conservative policy that makes it illegal for American conscientious objectors to remain in Canada

U.S. war resister Rodney Watson



After spending the last seven years living in sanctuary in a Vancouver church, U.S. Army veteran and war resister Rodney Watson joined New Democrat MP Jenny Kwan on Saturday to renew his appeal for resisters like him to be legally allowed to stay in Canada.Watson and Kwan were joined by members of the B.C. NDP in calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to reverse a policy implemented by the previous Conservative government. It classified war resisters as criminals that were not eligible for residency in Canada under a policy called Operational Bulletin 202."This is not a game, this is not a joke for me at all," Watson said from First United Church. "I can see it in your eyes that you have far more compassion in your heart for than Stephen Harper had, or ever had for any war resister."About 200 U.S. soldiers who fled the Iraq war came to Canada, and the policy reads that because deserting the military is a crime, war resisters may not be eligible for asylum.Now, Kwan, MP for Vancouver East, is calling on the Trudeau government to do away with the policy saying it is unfair to people like Watson."He served in the Iraq war and when he left, he was being recalled to go back, and what he saw was something that prevented him from going back," she said "He is a conscientious objector, he believes strongly in having done the right thing in refusing to go back."Watson said he deserted because of racial hatred he witnessed against Iraqis during his first tour of duty.He has a son with a Canadian woman, but says he has never seen the boy outside of his makeshift church home."His first steps were in this building while I was in sanctuary, I haven't been able to go to school to see his first day at school," said Watson.Canada is estimated to have accepted around 50,000 conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, including Dr. Michael Klein, who was recently awarded the Order of Canada.(CBC)"It was a much more compassionate time," he said. "We received landed immigrant status at Dorval airport in 20 minutes.""We were embraced in Canada, we've made our life here, our children were born here, and we made contributions, we cannot understand why things have changed so dramatically."The federal government did not provide comment to CBC News about calls to do away with Operational Bulletin 202, but there is a September 16 deadline to decide if it will continue to pursue American conscientious objectors living in Canada.
Why are we even wasting the time with these pipeline projects?Northern Gateway Pipeline haltedIn a move overturning a 2014 decision, the Federal Court of Appeal shot down the progress of the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline.The June 30 decision cited inadequate consultation with First Nations groups, whose land would host the pipeline in British Columbia, as well as the former Conservative government rushing the process in order to approve the build.As a result of the decision, the project now returns to the House of Commons, where it will be decided whether further public consultation  including engagement with First Nations  will be mandated as a condition for approval, or whether the project gets axed altogether.In its decision on Northern Gateway  a proposed pipeline that would ship around 525,000 barrels of crude oil out of the Industrial Heartland, starting in Bruderheim, to Kitimat, B. C., the Federal Court of Appeal noted a rushed consultation process under the Conservatives.When they did announce approval of the project in 2014, it came with 209 conditions, including community consultations and environmental assessment, but the appeals court ruled that fell short of whats necessary to move forward. We conclude that Canada offered only a brief, hurried and inadequate opportunity in Phase 4  a critical part of Canadas consultation framework  to exchange and discuss information and to dialogue, the decision reads. The inadequacies  more than just a handful and more than mere imperfections  left entire subjects of central interest to the affected First Nations, sometimes subjects affecting their subsistence and well-being, entirely ignored.Northern Gateway president John Carruthers said the company is still fully committed to the pipeline.Neil Shelly, executive director of Albertas Industrial Heartland Association, said local industry wouldnt be impacted as much as other regions of the province, as many Industrial Heartland-based companies focus more on product transportation, as well as refining and upgrading.Its not as big an issue as it would be for, say, the producing companies in the Wood Buffalo-Fort McMurray region, he explained.Shelly did, however, note the delay of the pipeline could result in certain setbacks for the region, as well as for the economy and environment.I think longer term, strategically for Alberta and the country, were going to have to develop export pipeline systems, Shelly said. Its just the safest and most cost-effective way to move our oil products.He went on to say that regardless of the decision, he hopes it is made with Canadas best interest in mind.Its yet to be seen exactly how theyre going to play this out, Shelly said. Were just hoping that any ruling they put together is based on science and logic, not on rhetoric and reactionary views such as no oil through pipelines.It may take some time, but hopefully the rest of the country and other countries will realize the importance of the resource in Alberta, he concluded.
Datta Phuge shot into the global limelight in 2013 when he bought a shirt made with more than 3kg of gold and worth $250,000 (186,943).A money lender based in western Pune, Mr Phuge was called "the gold man".Four persons have been detained for questioning. Police suspect a dispute over money led to the murder.The police said some 12 people attacked Mr Phuge, 48, in Pune on Thursday night.One of the suspects had invited Mr Phuge and his 22-year-old son to celebrate a birthday at an open ground in Dighi area when the men attacked him with stones and a sharp weapon.Police said the son had witnessed his father being murdered and had been spared by the alleged killers."However, we are investigating how Mr Phuge reached the open ground where he was murdered," Dighi police station inspector Navnath Ghogare told the Press Trust of India news agency.
It occurs to me, as I witness the world in turmoil: Why do all the female newscasters, pundits, commentators and experts appear with their arms bare?

Why arent the male broadcasters showing their biceps?

Men bear arms. Women bare arms. Despite the way it sounds, there is something unequal about this.

So how about if we swapped it around and started revealing whats beneath those conservative jackets and button-down collars?

Just as serious female journalists are now broadcasting in form-fitting dresses, lets encourage the men sitting next to them to show whats underneath all that constrictive fabric. Male broadcasters could also choose to go strapless on more casual occasions, at those times theyre covering a story that doesnt involve tragedy (if those still exist). A spaghetti strap top would look great on Chris Cuomo, for example, and stunning on Lester Holt.

And since we certainly wouldnt want to be accused of taking our female journalists and broadcasters any less seriously because we put them in teeny-tiny sleeveless dresses -- irrespective of the topic, occasion and season -- we therefore could not be accused of treating our newsmen with any less respect should we encourage them to elicit viewer interest.

Which male broadcasters bare arms would you want to see? Wolf Blitzer? Bill OReilly? Anderson Cooper?

Essentially, Im hoping to imagine a new lineup of erotically objectifiable men. As my pal, humorist Roz Warren puts it, If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, cant Anderson Cooper strip down to his undies when he tells me about it?

Another friend says there are men whose guns we would actually like to see on the nightly news. Me, Id tune in to any station, however politically unamiable, if it advertised Alexander Skarsgard: Tonight at 9.

No, Im not asking for women to cover up (too many places have insisted, and continue to insist, women do that). I'm saying if we trust women with strong, sinewy arms to tell us the truth, why not trust men with strong, sinewy arms?

I want to see Mark Shields and David Brooks sleeveless on PBS, or maybe they just wear those shirts where the sleeves are cut off, like Larry the Cable Guy.

The bodies of our finest female broadcast analysts clearly make an important statement, and we hope their male counterparts will become as free to express themselves by exposing their own assets. The hypocritical double standard, no doubt a lingering inheritance from our Puritan ancestry, only prevents us from having an intimate rapport with men on the screen.

Do we consider men such delicate, shy, defenseless creatures that they depend upon us to keep them free from the prurient and prying eyes of the public so that we can focus on whats truly important when they deliver, in all their humble trustworthiness, the news of the day?

If a lack of body fat, a firm neck, visible shoulder muscles and elbows sharp enough to cut meat are replacing erudition, dignity, authority and gravitas for broadcast journalists, then give us David Muir in a crop top, Hari Sreenivasan in a muscle T and John Oliver in a varsity shredder tank.

Live at 11.
G'day! It's Murray here. I've put together a little quiz to test your musical knowledge. Think you can score top marks in Murray's Magic Music Quiz? Give it a go now!
The Rev. Rob Scofield is serving First Baptist Church in Fremont as their interim minister.

The scope of Scofields call is more than that of the usual interim minister. He returned to school to receive the training necessary to be called an intentional interim. This term carries with it the task of leading a congregation in discernment as members think, discuss and pray together about what their current mission is and ask for vision of what that mission may be in the future.

An interim minister is simply called to keep the machine running. An intentional interim is called to examine every facet of the church, Scofield explained.

Examining those facets, in his words, from A to W. From administration to worship.

For this purpose, he returned to school for training at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin, Texas. At First Baptist there are meetings and discussions going on, lots of them, as the church ponders what its next move might be as well as the more traditional task of whom to call to lead them.

First Baptist Church is a valued partner in the life of Fremont, both sacred and secular, as it was one of the first churches to offer day care services to the community and has been a leader in outreach since its very early presence in Fremont in 1869.

It is a mainline Christian church, a downtown church as they are often called, currently housed in a building built in 1922 that has had many additions and improvements in the almost 100 years since it was constructed.

Scofield and his wife, Barbara, have joined to minister to the needs of the church and the community. Barbara Scofield is in Fremont for the month of July until she returns to her teaching position at Washburn University in Topeka, Kan. She comes to Fremont once a month during the year. Her mother and sister both live in Topeka so its a good place to be while her husband is on one of his interim assignments.

He has served three such assignments since his retirement from full-time ministry, including one in Bartlesville, Okla., that lasted 2  years.

The two met while attending The University of New York in Albany, N.Y. It was in the days before cell phones and dorm students had to stand in line to be issued access to a telephone line to their room so that the appropriate charges could be billed to them.

Barbara was the girl ahead of me in line that day, Rob Scofield remembers.

They dated, became active in Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, married, graduated, and then Rob Scofield went to seminary.

Through the influence and encouragement of a professor at NYU Albany, Scofield applied for and received a scholarship to Bright Theological Seminary a few blocks from Texas Christian University in Dallas. Barbara worked at TCU until she was offered a full scholarship at the college where she went on to earn her masters degree.

Scofield was ordained in May 1981, served in many churches across the country, until he returned to the church in which he was ordained and served there until his retirement in 2008.

The church had decided that it needed to move to a different location. Its location at that time was across the street from Barbaras work at the University of Dallas, and convenient to both of them. He retired, she changed jobs.

They entered a new phase of their lives. They have a daughter, Lynn Elizabeth, who lives in Tulsa, Okla. Lynn has a degree in environmental engineering whose specialty is water resources.

We are looking at every option out there and seeking where God wants us to be and who God wants us to be, the pastor said about the work being done at First Baptist. The congregation is very open to examining its call, work and mission. There are good members here, gifted, people. The church is a place where all sides of an issue can come together to worship, where the focus is on God. That doesnt mean that during this process we forget the poor, orphan, imprisoned and the widow. The Bible tells us to do these things.

Barbara Scofield gave the program at American Baptist Women recently where she spoke on how life changes our perspective on events in our past and how, with Gods help, we can gain new perspectives and learn from those events. Whether in biblical times or in the present, she sees that its prayer that opens our hearts and minds to new interpretations of the events that have shaped us.

I think, she concluded, that prayer is how we get to know God and how God changes us.

The pastor is encouraged by the hopes and dreams of the members of First Baptist Church.

The church is changing and I have great hopes for that change, he said.

Scofield quoted his theme verse: I can do everything through him who gives me strength, Philippians 4:13.

Churches are missional, he said.

First Baptist is on its way to finding its mission in the community and the world.
TOLOnews.com, July 14, 2016

By Anisa Shaheed

Documents uncovered by Rahmatullah Nabil, former chief of Afghan Spy Agencythe National Directorate of Security (NDS)  shows that the money provided by the U.S government to the Pakistani military for fighting terrorism is in fact spent by Pakistan's Inter-service Intelligence (ISI) for promoting and supporting terrorism.

The documents also show that Pakistan strikes only those insurgents who threatens its interests.

Nabil called on President Ashraf Ghani to provide clear definitions of Afghanistan's friends and enemies so that the Afghan security and defense forces may direct their war in line in line with the correct discriptions.



Cartoon by Michael Ramirez Cartoon by Michael Ramirez

Nabil, by disclosing the intelligence documents, claims that Pakistan's ISI systematically supports the terrorist groups.

He says that Pakistan has over the years been funding terrorist organizations, particularly the Haqqani network, from the money they receive from the United States.

July 2014 (Pakistani military intelligence)

There are a number of other documents that reveal involvement of Pakistani military in supporting terrorism in Afghanistan.

Document (4): This document discussed the attack on Kabul Airport which was carried out during President Hamid Karzai's government.

On July 2014, an official letter from central office of ISI in Islamabad was sent to MI-422 office in Swaba, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in which it directed the office to thank that the people that succeeded in plotting the attack on Kabul Airport (now Hamid Karzai International Airport) and gave 2.5 million Pakistani rupees to for every one of the following: Haji Khalil Haqqani, Haji Hakim Woluswal, Qari Zahir Shah and Mawlawi Hakim. Moreover, the office was directed to donate 1.5 million Pakistani rupees to the families of those that were involved in the attack.

A day before the letter was issued, insurgents attacked Kabul International Airport from under a construction building.

The ISI April 2015

The office was also directed to talk about details of an attack on Ministry of Borders and Tribal Affairs in Kabul and that it should be done by the Haqqani network. They had to present their report about their tasks at 3pm on July 23.

Document (5): The ISI 945 office in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in an official note dated April 6, 2015 to the central office in Islamabad wrote that: Officials of 945 office, in a meeting with Toryalai, the head of the network and his co-fighters on April 5, 2015, were tasked to kidnapped and kill Afghanistan's Shia leaders in Herat, Kabul and Farah. In addition, they gave 2 million Pakistani rupees to the participant in that meeting.

"Also it was specified that the relevant department of office 945 should prepare the required weapons and other equipment by Toryalai through the COD Akora Khattak and give them the weapons by the mentioned date. In the note it was mentioned that 23 people from Toryalai's group who were busy with military training in Cherat had completed their training.

Document (6): The central office of ISI located in Quetta in a tentative note to central office of IW in Islamabad and 945 office in Rawalpindi, presented the result of visit by a number of officers to the office with Quetta Shura of Taliban as follows:

March 2015

From ISI site office to central office in Islamabad and Rawalpindi

"The members of Taliban's Quetta Shura held a meeting about the peace process with Afghan government in which key commanders of the shura attended. They talked on mutual interests and policies as already given to them. In addition, the relevant officials gave needed directions to members of the council about the process. It is pertinent to mention that the note has mentioned that the advisory board (945, CID) forwarded all those terms and preconditions as directed from GHQ. After that the Shura's decision will be mutual then will be forwarded on a priority basis."

From ISI regional office in Peshawar to command center in Rawalpindi:

Enaam Rabbani, an ISI official reported to central office in Rawalpindi:

"Based on the orders of the central ISI office, the office directed its agents to transfer Atta Mohammad and Hafiz Loqman, two commanders of Haqqani network under leadership of Maulavi Zar Mohammad to Pakistani military base in Datta Khail are of Miran Shah in North Waziristan. The two commanders were finally transferred in police uniforms to a Pakistan army base," read the document on an ISI official letterhead.

ISI March 2015

From the central office to site office in Nawshera

Pakistani army colonel Ghulam Abbas writes: "The central ISI office has directed the 945 and 935 units to transfer all Haqqani network militants to Miran Shah, Topchi and Mir Ali under the cover of the army."

ISI letter August 2014

From regional office in Peshawar to central command center in Rawalpindi:

A Pakistani colonel writes: "I want to inform you that a meeting was held between Hafiz Gul Bahaduri of Hafiz Gul Bahadur group with the commander of Afghan Taliban Maulavi Hamdullah. The main purpose of the meeting was to provide rented houses to leaders of Afghan Taliban in Hayat Abad and Tahkal of Peshawar who have been deployed from remote regions of Miran Shah. In addition, armored vehicles and guards should be provided to secure their lives and activities."

According to Nabil, Pakistan officially support terrorist groups to reach their objectives in the region and the world, but by using US money.

He says that tens of thousands of Madrasas operate in Pakistan and are only involved in brain-washing, terrorism and extremism.
LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan -- Helmand is one of the most active battlefields in Afghanistan.

News reports from this southern province are mostly about Taliban suicide attacks and ambushes against government soldiers and offices. Sometimes the killing of a large number of insurgent fighters or their leaders being targeted makes the headlines.

For decades, this vast region -- bordering Pakistan and located close to Iran -- has been the global epicenter of opium production.

But while Helmands residents and its government grapple with its current problems, its rich archeological heritage showcasing its status as a midway point between India and Iran is rapidly declining.

Locals now fear that without a robust government strategy and international assistance insecurity, illegal excavations, and pillaging will lead to the complete destruction of many archeological sites spanning at least three millennia.

Helmands crown jewel, a once-massive mud-built fort locally called Qala-e Bost, is slowly being washed into the muddy waters of the nearby confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab rivers. The forts prized 11th-century arch, which still appears on the 100 afghani bank note, speaks volumes on the inadequate government and international support and clumsy efforts at preservation.

The government is mainly preoccupied with fighting [the insurgents] and reconstruction and rehabilitation, to a limited extent, said journalist Mujtaba Mohammadi. Unfortunately, the authorities have done little to preserve Helmands rich cultural heritage.

Mohammadi, who is writing a book on Helmands history and archeology, said some civilians displaced by fighting are squatting in many sites.

More damaging are the illegal excavations [by treasure hunters]. Sometimes it is difficult to believe the amount of damage and destruction such activities cause, he said. It is very disheartening to see that the government is not paying any attention.

Kabul has been pressing UNESCO to help preserve Qala-e Bost.

But a few years ago Kabul demolished a centuries-old fort and prison to build police barracks just a few kilometers away from the site in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

Government bureaucrat Ali Shah Mazlumyar is tasked with preserving the regions heritage as the regional representative of the Afghan Culture and Information Ministry.

With little or no resources, his only job seems to be observing the slow-motion destruction of archeological monuments.

Helmand River is gradually eating into Qala-e Bost, he noted. More importantly, everything that is wrong here during the past 40 years of war is contributing to the destruction of our national heritage.

Still, all is not lost for Helmand. Sharifullah Dost, a local writer and researcher, said that a little investment into Helmands archeological sites could attract domestic and international tourists.

He said he wants Kabul to approach UNESCO with a robust plan to preserve and promote Helmands heritage.

When we claim to be a 5,000-year old nation, we must preserve our heritage to back such claims, he said.

Abubakar Siddique wrote this story based on Mohammad Ilyas Dayee's reporting from Lashkar Gah, Helmand.
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What do groups of 50 to 100 employees need to know?

This is the time when groups of 50 to 100 employees are facing real challenges as they face benefit compliance issues and deadlines.

As part of the Affordable Care Act, groups of under 100 employees are now in the "small group" market for fully insured plans. Most employers don't understand the difference and what options they have to circumvent some of these differences.

Probably the most annoying feature of small-group products is the way the plans are rated. Rather than a composite rate for each tier of enrollment, small group plans are age rated. So each individual is rated based on their respective age, rather than all single employees being charged the same rate. Dependents are rated in the same fashion. This creates challenges for payroll departments, and budgeting and forecasting costs.

However, there are positives to being in the small group market. The most important is guaranteed issue. That means the insurance company may not refuse to cover your group, regardless of the number of pregnancies, or high-cost claims. The rate structure is essentially the same for all groups in the geographic area for the same plans.

Further, the companies have relaxed participation requirements, in many cases down to 25 percent of the group. So if an employer with under 100 employees can only insure 25 of the eligible employees, they will not be rejected. In the past, 70- 75 of those employee would need to be covered.

Large group has enjoyed the following advantages over small group:

Rate negotiation: The group has the ability to negotiate rates with the carrier. This is typically the function of the broker/consultant who understands the market forces that will be effective tools in negotiation. Longer term rates can be an option. Small group rates are fixed.

The ability to customize benefits: While small-group plans are essentially limited to "off the shelf" product, large groups can choose to customize their plans' deductibles and copays and even some of the benefit provisions.

Dedicated account management teams: This is an important asset for large groups as the account managers are familiar with the specific group and the employer is not bounced around between the random CSR answering the 800 number.

Partial Self-Funding: Total Self-Funding is reserved for the largest of groups. But groups in the 50-plus range can enjoy some of the cash flow and benefit concessions in the partial self-funding market.

In partial self-funding arrangements the employer is charged against their claims accounts for claims up to a specific deductible amount for each individual. Typically, this can be $15,000 to $50,000 per individual.

The employer also purchases aggregate stop-loss insurance. This means that a factor is assigned and the group knows they are not responsible for any claims over this assigned limit, regardless of the number of individual claims that meet the specific stop-loss threshold.

In partial self-funding, the employer typically pays a level premium based on expected paid claims or maybe even at the higher aggregate limit. Then, at the end of the calculation or run-off period, the employer is either refunded the excess premium, pays an additional charge, or if they had funded at the limit, then there is simply no refund.

One of the biggest benefits to the employer in self-funding is to understand how the population is actually using the health plan. The plan can be tailored to meet the employees' needs, but also designed to discourage wasteful usage. Further, self-funded plans are free from some of the legislated burdens of fully insured plans.

Of course, there is always more risk with a partially self-funded plan, particularly for groups of over 100. If they wish to return to the fully insured market and have had poor loss ratios, they may be charged a much higher premium, or carriers may simply refuse to quote. This risk is inherent in all large group situations.

Because underwriting is completed during the request for proposal phase and, in fact, some stop-loss carriers will require health statements from each employee, the process can be rather lengthy and uncertain.

Business owners understand that there are positives and negatives with any changes. The trick is understanding how to make the most of those changes for your particular situation. With proper advice and guidance, employers can find a way to comply with the new laws and continue to provide valuable employee benefits to attract and retain good employees.

Margaret R. Beck is a licensed insurance broker. She can be reached at 225-8583.
SHARE FILE - In this Feb. 4, 2007, file photo, Prince performs during halftime of the Super Bowl XLI football game in Miami. A judge says a Minnesota law firm may have potentially relevant information for determining who should inherit Prince's estate. Prince died in April of an accidental drug overdose, and no will has been found. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)

By STEVE KARNOWSKI, Associated Press

MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  A Minnesota law firm may have "potentially relevant" information for determining who should inherit Prince's estate, a judge said in an order released Wednesday that didn't hint at what that information might be, though one expert said it's probably not a will.

Carver County Judge Kevin Eide gave permission to Minneapolis law firm Henson & Efron, which formerly represented Prince, to privately share its information with Bremer Trust, the special administrator overseeing Prince's estate.

The order, dated July 6 but not released until Wednesday, said Henson & Efron "might possess confidential information potentially relevant to the determination of the appropriate beneficiaries" of the musician's estate. It gave no details about that information.

Prince died in April of an accidental drug overdose. No will has surfaced for how to divide his fortune, which the special administrator has said could be worth up to $300 million. The court hasn't ruled on whether his siblings and half-siblings or other potential relatives should be designated as his heirs, or whether a handful of people who've made unverified claims that Prince might be their father have valid claims to his estate.

Attorneys for Bremer Trust and Henson & Efron didn't immediately return calls seeking comment.

Judith Younger, an estate law professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who isn't involved in the case, said whatever the new information is, "it's probably something less than a will." Any lawyer holding a valid will for Prince would have been legally obligated to produce it sooner, assuming they knew they had it, she said.

It's possible that Prince once had a will but revoked it, it could be a draft will that was never executed or it could have been something as simple as a conversation involving Prince's lawyers, Younger said. But she added that it's hard to see how anything like that could have a legal effect if it wasn't properly written and executed.

"It's very strange, isn't it? Very mysterious," she said with a laugh.

Eide's order allows the trust company and the law firm to discuss the information, which Eide said is considered confidential under attorney-client privilege and other protections, but any resulting submissions to the court must be filed under seal.

It wasn't immediately clear how long Henson & Efron represented Prince, who changed lawyers frequently throughout his career. But the firm represented him in his 2006 divorce from Manuela Testolini Nelson.
This July 12, 2016, photo shows large homes atop a bluff at Rocky Point, where a small stone structure is seen at lower left, in Lunada Bay in the tiny, seaside city of Palos Verdes Estates, Calif. The days are numbered for the "Stone Fort," created by a territorial group of surfers known as the Bay Boys, erected illegally decades ago as part of their sustained battle to keep rival wave-riders from some of the best breaks in Southern California. The city, under pressure from the California Coastal Commission and others, Tuesday, July 12, 2016 ordered the structure torn down amid complaints that its only purpose is as a staging area from which the Bay Boys can gather to harass other surfers. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)

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By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press

PALOS VERDES ESTATES, Calif. (AP)  The days appear numbered for the "Stone Fort," a venerable edifice that was illegally erected decades ago by a group of surfers and became a beachhead in their ongoing war to keep outsiders away from some of the best waves in Southern California.

Under pressure from the California Coastal Commission, the City Council in tony Palos Verdes Estates voted unanimously Tuesday to have the concrete-and-stone structure torn down.

A public hearing is scheduled in September to discuss how to do it, but the city manager in the seaside community of multimillion-dollar homes and priceless views says jackhammers are the likely solution.

The impressive structure is made of rock walls and sits on the beach just above the tide line at the base of towering cliffs. Its amenities include a table, bench, fire pit, shaded patio and a place to store boards and kayaks.

Critics have claimed in a lawsuit that a murky group of local surfers known as the Lunada Bay Boys use it an observation point to spy on arriving outsiders then harass them when they reach the shore.

The lawsuit indicates most members of the Bay Boys are middle-aged men and longtime residents of Palos Verdes Estates. Members, however, make a point of not advertising their affiliation in public or on T-shirts or surf gear.

Many residents deny the group exists at all, and no one identified themselves as a Bay Boy at the council meeting.

Surfer Magazine recently listed the Lunada Bay beach as one of five places to avoid  no matter how good the waves break.

"To get there you'll have to duck rocks chucked by the Bay Boys," the magazine said while mocking the wealthy locals. "And your car windows will get waxed. And your tires might get slashed. You'll endure chest-thumping and lip-quivering threats shouted from the beach shack the Boys inhabit near the shore."

While calling for the removal of the fort, council members cited liability issues, including concerns that an outsider might fall from one of the fairly treacherous pathways to the breakwater while toting a board.

But the fact is that the Stone Fort has been under assault for months by an increasingly agitated group of outsiders who say the Bay Boys use it as a staging area to keep others off the beach and away from the primo waves.

The class-action lawsuit filed against the city and several residents in March by a pair of outsiders describes the Bay Boys as more thugs than surfers. It accuses them of running out-of-towners over with their boards in the water and even taking their wallets, wetsuits and surfboards.

Police say the fort is almost always deserted by the time officers respond to complaints about the treatment.

The Coastal Commission, noting the structure was built without a permit, told the city to either remove it or apply for a permit with the promise of ending the harassment and providing better access to the beach.

Locals say waves along the beach can be spectacular but only occur about 30 days a year in the winter. When the surf is up, everyone wants to be there and that's when the Bay Boys get busy.

"They tend to be aggressive in keeping other surfers out or intimidating people who look like they are going to surf," 15-year resident Cliff Filepe said as he walked his dogs along the bluffs, noting that he has never been bothered by the group.

"I don't know that they bother anybody who just wants to stand around here, but they consider the surfing their territory," he said.
SHARE Marc Anthony McClendon Date of birth: Oct. 15, 1985 Vitals: 6 feet 1 inch; 190 pounds; brown hair, brown eyes Charge: Assault with a deadly weapon David Anthony Frey Date of birth: March 3, 1994 Vitals: 6 feet 2 inches; 160 pounds; brown hair, brown eyes Charge: Willful cruelty to a child Jeffrey Micah Brown Date of birth: Jan. 14, 1988 Vitals: 5 feet 9 inches; 195 pounds; brown hair, brown eyes Charge: Violation of probation Jacob Naden Bishop Date of birth: June 29, 1995 Vitals: 5 feet 10 inches; 155 pounds; brown hair, brown eyes Charge: Vandalism of $50,000 or more

By Staff Reports

Shasta's Most Wanted, featured in the Record Searchlight in cooperation with local law enforcement agencies, targets people who have failed to show up in court for sentencing after being convicted.

As of Friday a total of 647 arrests had been made through the Most Wanted program since it began in September 2013. Authorities say they have seen an increase in criminals failing to appear in court since the onset of Assembly Bill 109. Also known as prison realignment, the state program shifted certain state prison inmates to county supervision.

Redding Police Chief Robert Paoletti said court appearances have been going up since the rollout.

Five new people are added each week. Those caught will be held until at least their next court appearances. Shasta County Secret Witness is offering a reward of up to $250 for information leading to an arrest. Tips can be provided anonymously at 530-243-2319 or at www.scsecretwitness.com/home/submit-a-tip.

Anyone with information also can call SHASCOM at 245-6540. The feature appears Sundays in the Record Searchlight's Northern California section and on Redding.com.
Nathan Solis/ Record Searchlight A day after the Quartz Fire burned up 20 acres in the Redding neighborhood burned trees show how close the fire was to homes.

SHARE Courtesy of Janet Roberts A helicopter makes a water drop on the 20-acre fire off Quartz Hill Road on Saturday afternoon. Photo courtesy of Janet Roberts Flames and smoke can be seen behind homes from the fire off Quartz Hill Road on Saturday afternoon. Greg Barnette/Record Searchlight A helicopter makes a water drop on the fire that burned 20 acres of vegetation Saturday afternoon off Quartz Hill Road. Related Photos Quartz Hill Road fire gives neighbors scare

Updated at 12:01 p.m.

The Quartz Fire, which burned 20-acres and threatened several structures on Saturday is now being watched by fire personnel.

Redding Fire Chief Gerry Gray said no homes or structures were damaged as the quick-moving fire spread. One fire fighter was taken to the hospital for heat exhaustion, but was released, said Gray.

The fire will not officially be given the out designation until 24-hours has passed, said Gray.

Original story

A 20-acre wildfire that broke out Saturday afternoon off Quartz Hill Road burned grass, brush and trees and closed the road between Benton and Terra Nova drives, fire officials said.

The blaze started as a three-quarter acre vegetation fire about 2:30 p.m., which quickly spread to 20 acres. Structures were threatened, but there are no reports of any being damaged.

Tony Bowser, 35, who has lived in the area for about a year and a half, said the fire came racing up to his home on River Park Drive.

The flames were really tall, he said. Honestly I cant believe either of these houses are standing here.

There were no evacuations ordered for residents on River Park Drive, but Bowser said he had his kids in the truck, ready to go if need be.

I was afraid it was going to jump River Park, Bowser said about the fire.

But instead, the neighbors banded together, and turned on their hoses and sprinklers, ready to battle the flames.

We know our neighbors really well so we were working as hard as we could just to put any amount of water on the ground that we could, he said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation.

Quartz Hill Road is still closed off to traffic in the area of the Lake Redding Estates subdivision.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection assisted city fire crews and an air tanker dropped retardant on the flames. Fleeing the flames, bark beetles spread out in the neighborhood of River Park Drive.

Helen Roberts, 64, has lived in her River Park home for about 13 years, and said its the first time a fire has ever come that close to her house. She said she was impressed by the response of the fire department, and the neighbors, who helped out immediately.

It was pretty scary. Im just glad everyone is OK, she said.
SHARE

Kent Snider Jr., Redding

Regarding the article "Obama urges greater respect, understanding after shootings."

President Obama began his first term in office by accusing a white Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officer of acting stupidly, even while admitting he didn't have any evidence of it, when he arrested Harvard Professor Henry Gates for resisting while responding to a neighbor's call about a possible break in at the professor's home.

Then he accepted a Nobel Peace prize that the secretary of that committee in 2015 lamented, "The committee thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn't have this effect."

He's violated the constitutional rights of conservatives by allowing the IRS to obstruct their participation in the political process. He's made healthcare more expensive for the working class. And in the case of our veterans, made it so inaccessible that some have died waiting for treatment. He's had to send American troops back into Iraq after taking the credit for ending what, as a senator, he described as "a dumb war."

President Obama supported the nonexistent "Hands Up Don't Shoot" narrative in order to cause people of color in this country to believe that, while he made the most of the chance to make it in this world, there is no way in heckdom that they will be able to overcome such deep-seated repression.

Now that he has them all riled up about the "inherent racist America," with the help of calls from radical racist groups like the New Black Panthers who are calling for retribution and to "kill the pigs," the law of unintended consequences has kicked in and he has to dial it back.

I don't think a beer summit is going to solve this one, Mr. President.
Andreas Fuhrmann/Record Searchlight

People on the Sundial Bridge watch a fire Monday that burned near Hilltop Drive on the Arboretum Loop of the Sacramento River Trail.

SHARE Greg Barnette/Record Searchlight California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Capt. Aaron Hathaway gets ready to hike into a canyon July 9 with inmates from Sugar Pine Conservation Camp, as mop-up operations continued on the Fiddler Fire. Jenny Espino/Record Searchlight A fire Saturday burned part of the VFW Hall in Redding. The fire started in a garbage container to the rear of the building and caused minimal damage, fire officials said. Minutes later a second fire started 75 feet away along the railroad tracks near the YMCA and Gironda's restaurant. A person is being questioned by Redding police in connection with the fire.

By Sean Longoria of the Redding Record Searchlight

It's been a busy month for local firefighters.

On Saturday, Redding firefighters dealt with at least four separate fires across the city: Two small fires downtown  one of which burned a building  a larger fire that scorched about 20 acres in northern Redding and a fire that someone set, which burned 2 acres just near the Redding Airport.

Meanwhile, three separate fires earlier this month blackened approximately a combined 11 acres near popular trails at Redding parks while a 6-acre fire shut down a busy Redding street for several hours one evening.

Elsewhere in the county, firefighters faced the largest wildfire of the summer so far that burned 441 acres, injured one person and burned two buildings in the rugged terrain of southwestern Shasta County.

Officials said arson is to blame for that Fiddler Fire, the fire near the airport and the two small fires at Minder Park in Redding.

Arson is a growing problem, one that at least in Redding is taking up valuable time for fire investigators that could be used to try to curb arson in the first place, Redding Fire Chief Gerry Gray said.

Fires have dropped in Redding so far this year by nearly a fifth  228 fires so far  compared to the same time period in 2014. Gray credited the drop to the easing drought.

But Redding fire investigators are working 20 active arson cases, nearly double the normal caseload, Gray said.

"It squeezes away any opportunity we have to do public education," he said.

That's on top of some 49 other fires whose cause investigators deem "undetermined" because they can't rule out all but a single cause, Fire Inspector Craig Wittner said.

Oftentimes a fire may seem that it was started intentionally or otherwise suspicious, but if the evidence or witnesses aren't there, investigators can't pinpoint arson as a cause, Wittner said.

"Fire investigation can be a difficult crime to prosecute because your evidence has burned up or left the scene," he said.

For those cases that do reach a courtroom, Redding sees all its cases result in either a conviction or a plea deal, Wittner said. That has to do with the "overwhelming" amount of evidence his department provides to prosecutors in each arson case, he said.

Redding's arson increase isn't carrying over to the local unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which saw a drop from about 71 arsons in 2013 down to about six so far this year.

Fire Capt. Specialist Darren Stewart credited that drop in part to successful public relations campaigns and Cal Fire's dedicated law enforcement division, which aggressively pursues arson suspects.

"The department will do what it takes to apprehend these individuals," including spending "hundreds of thousands" of dollars or putting dozens of people on a case.

In the case of Zane Wallace Peterson, those resources went toward solving a murder. Peterson is accused of starting several fires in 2013, including the Clover Fire, which killed a man, razed about 60 homes and burned 8,000 acres in the Happy Valley area.

Cal Fire also recently arrested Daniel Lee Bentley, 36, who's pleaded not guilty to starting the Fiddler Fire that burned 441 acres, two buildings and injured one person southwest of Igo earlier this month.

When it comes to finding arsonists in the first place, agencies rely on witnesses.

"If you see something, say something," Wittner said.

That's especially true for fires near homeless camps, where people staying in the camps are more reluctant to talk because they might be labeled as a snitch, Wittner said.

"Their information is helpful as well and we consider them just like the rest of our citizens in that their safety is paramount to us as well," he said.
People place flowers on the Promenade des Anglais at the scene of Thursday's truck attack, prior to a minute of silence in Nice, southern France, Monday, July 18, 2016, to honor the victims of the Bastille Day attack. (Claude Paris / AP)

NICE, France  There is mounting evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the Tunisian-born truck driver responsible for the deadly carnage in Nice last week, had recently absorbed extremist ideas and had become radicalized, French authorities said Sunday.

The image of a religious extremist is at odds with the portrait that neighbors and family members initially painted of a man who ignored even the most basic rules of Islam, eating pork, drinking alcohol and shunning the mosque.

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Many of those who knew him said in the days after Thursday's Bastille Day attack that Bouhlel was a difficult person, describing him variously as aloof and hostile, even violent at times. In March, he received a suspended sentence for a road-rage incident  not enough to put him on the radar of France's security services.

But officials said Sunday that the 31-year-old had apparently undergone a rapid conversion to radical Islam and carefully planned the attack that claimed the lives of at least 84 people, including 10 children, raising the question: how did a delivery driver go from petty crime to carrying out an act of mass slaughter in the space of a few months?

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Hours after the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack Saturday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said authorities "now know that the killer radicalized very quickly."

Neither IS nor the French government have provided tangible evidence of a link between the group and Bouhlel. But Valls told the newspaper the Journal du Dimanche in an interview Sunday that the extremist group "is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks."

"That is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack," said Valls, warning that "terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time."

While authorities have said little publicly about their investigation, a French security official told The Associated Press on Sunday that Bouhlel sold his car just before the attack, which ended only when he was killed by police.

Bouhlel rented the refrigerated truck on July 11, purchased a pistol and was seen on closed-circuit TV footage visiting the promenade in the following days, according to the security official, who wasn't authorized to be publicly named speaking about an ongoing investigation.

On July 14, France's national day, Bouhlel sent text messages to people who may have been accomplices, the official said. One of those who received text messages was among eight people taken into custody after the attack. The official wouldn't comment on the content of the text messages or confirm reports that they included a request for more weapons.

At least two of the three people detained Sunday are suspected of helping Bouhlel obtain the pistol found in the truck, the official said.

Most of those taken in for questioning, including Bouhlel's estranged wife, who has since been released, described him as violent and unstable. While they all said he had long been indifferent to religion, some described a recent and very rapid conversion to radical Islam, the official said, noting that the attack appeared clearly premeditated.

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Experts say that Bouhlel would have moved in an environment where he would have been exposed to the extremist ideology preached by the Islamic State group and others.

According to Yasmina Touaibia, a political scientist at the University of Nice, the region is home to more than a dozen informal mosques known to spread radical and fundamentalist ideas. Along with Paris and Lyon, it has become one of the main recruiting grounds for jihadis who have left France to fight in Syria.

A lawyer for one of those detained by police said his client hadn't recognized any signs of radicalism in Bouhlel.

Jean-Pascal Padovani said his client had known Bouhlel casually and consumed drugs with him in recent months. "(Bouhlel) wasn't really a soldier of God who went to Syria and came back to France," Padovani said. "He was a depressed person who used terrorism to justify this act."

Brigitte Erbibou, a psychologist who has long worked in Nice, said Bouhlel's reported lack of religious conviction may not have precluded a sudden embrace of extremism, noting that people who have resorted to violence in the past can apply that instinct in other situations.

"This quick flip to violence in the name of a political ideology becomes legitimate," she said. "The instructions of IS are to act wherever one is, by whichever means one can, so this (attack) matches exactly the recommendations of IS."

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Sudden, extreme violence isn't the reserve of religious extremists, of course. There are grim parallels to the case of Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who crashed his plane into a mountain not far from Nice last year, killing all 150 people on board.

Investigators found Lubitz had researched how to lock his fellow pilot out of the cockpit before the crash and even briefly simulated the fatal descent on an earlier flight.

Both the Germanwings pilot and the driver in Nice received treatment for psychological problems in the past. Bouhlel's father said after the attack that his son had been prone to violent episodes.

"Each time he had a crisis, we took him to the doctor, who gave him medication," Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel told BFM-TV.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that the challenge of finding and stopping people like Bouhlel was "worse than the needle in the haystack."

If someone is an extremist of "one or two days vintage" it's easy to cause mayhem, he said on CNN.

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Associated Press
Workers in Istanbul demolish the Halit Pasa Residence hotel on July 20, 2016. According to the state-run Anadolu news agency, the hotel was allegedly the meeting point of the plotters who planned the failed July 15 coup. (Lefteris Pitarakis / AP)

ANKARA, Turkey  Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogan's immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity.

Tens of thousands marched through the streets in half a dozen Turkish cities late Saturday, waving flags and singing songs in an emotional outpouring of support for the long-time leader as security forces rounded up military personnel it branded coup supporters and launched a purge of judges seen as government opponents.

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Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve," and the government said it would take steps toward extraditing a U.S.-based cleric it accused of fomenting the uprising.

The government threat of further crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself in its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a tumultuous region swept by conflict and extremism.

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The coup attempt began late Friday with tanks rolling into the streets of the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul as Erdogan was enjoying a seaside vacation. Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night.

It quickly became clear, however, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government. In a dramatic iPhone interview broadcast on TV, Erdogan urged his supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

The unrest claimed at least 265 lives, according to a tally compiled from official statements. Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the process of putting down the coup attempt. Turkey's acting chief of the general staff, Gen. Umit Dundar said at least 104 "coup plotters" had died.

Before the weekend's chaos, Turkey  a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group  had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

By Saturday afternoon, when tensioned eased, an atmosphere of celebration broke around as Turks answered official calls to rally in the squares to protect Turkish democracy. Thousands gathered in major cities singing and waving Turkish flags while others held prayers in support of Erdogan and chanted "God is great."

Supporters of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hold a demonstration against the failed coup at Istanbul's Taksim Sqaure on July 16, 2016. (Tolga Bozoglu / EPA)

In Istanbul, crowds gathered at Taksim Square, where a man stood on an iconic monument with a Turkish flag draped on his chest.

Government supporters marched through Ankara as cars honked in apparent approval. Some gathered outside parliament and amid the burnt cars outside the presidential palace. One man took a selfie with a Turkish police officer standing atop an abandoned tank.

"We are here for democracy, so the country lasts," retired soldier Nusret Tuzak said at the Ankara gathering.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks on CNN-Turk via a Facetime call on July 15, 2016. (Burak Kara / Getty Images)

By late Saturday afternoon, flights had resumed into Istanbul's international airport after being halted for nearly 24 hours. Mostly national carriers were flying into Istanbul, but other airlines preferred to wait another day to test the precarious security situation. Late Saturday, the usually buzzing airport was eerily quiet with some stranded travelers sitting on the floors of the largely empty terminals.

In an usual show of unity, Turkey's four main political parties released a joint declaration during an extraordinary parliamentary meeting Saturday, denouncing the coup attempt and claiming that any moves against the people or parliament will be met "with the iron will of the Turkish Grand National Assembly resisting them."

Turkey's NATO allies lined up to condemn the coup attempt. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg urged all sides to support Turkey's democratically elected government.

Erdogan's survival has turned him into a "sort of a mythical figure" and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute.

"It will allow him (Erdogan) to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before and find strong public support within the country," he said.

Government forces arrested 2,839 accused coup supporters, Yildirim said. Dundar, the general, said the plotters were mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and armored units.

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Anadolu Agency said the government dismissed 2,745 judges across Turkey. Two constitutional court judges were also detained over their alleged role in the coup attempt, according to a Turkish official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

Officials accused the judges and the coup plotters of being loyal to moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen, a staunch democracy advocate who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey. At a news conference in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

People wait at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport after their flights were cancelled July 16, 2016. (Tolga Bozoglu / EPA)

Ankara recently classified his movement as a terrorist organization. Washington, however, has never found any evidence particularly compelling previously against the cleric.

In a televised speech Saturday, Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen, saying Turkey had never turned back any extradition request for "terrorists" by the United States. A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey was preparing a formal extradition application.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny."

Gulen himself condemned the coup.

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"Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force," he said. "As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations."

People inspect damage on July 16, 2016, after the Turkish parliament building in Ankara was bombed by rebel jets on July 15. (Adem Altan / AFP/Getty Images)

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the Chatham House think tank in London, said the attempted coup appeared to have been "carried out by lower-ranking officers."

"Their main gripe seems to have been President Erdogan's attempt to transform his office into a powerful and centralized executive presidency," Hakura said. "In the short term, this failed coup plot will strengthen President Erdogan."

Turkey's military staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pressured Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, a pious mentor of Erdogan, out of power in 1997.

A Turkish military helicopter at Alexandroupolis airport after landing there on July 16, 2016, carrying eight officers seeking asylum after a failed coup bid the night before. (AFP/Getty Images)

Turkey has allowed American jets to use its Incirlik air base to fly missions against the Islamic State group in neighboring Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon said U.S. warplanes stopped flying those missions from Incirlik after the Turkish government closed its airspace to military aircraft during the attempted coup. U.S. officials were working with Turkish officials to get permission to resume air operations as soon as possible.

Associated Press
Workers in Istanbul demolish the Halit Pasa Residence hotel on July 20, 2016. According to the state-run Anadolu news agency, the hotel was allegedly the meeting point of the plotters who planned the failed July 15 coup. (Lefteris Pitarakis / AP)

ISTANBUL  Following a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government moved swiftly Sunday to shore up his power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying it has detained 6,000 people.

The crackdown targeted not only generals and soldiers, but a wide swath of the judiciary that has sometimes blocked Erdogan, raising concerns that the effort to oust him will push Turkey even further into authoritarian rule.

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Friday night's sudden uprising by a faction of the military appeared to take the government  and much of the world  by surprise.

The plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but it ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military, and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded, the government said.

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On Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life has returned to normal.

"Another calamity has been thwarted," Yildirim said in Ankara after visiting state TRT television, which had been seized by soldiers supporting the coup. "However, our duty is not over. We shall rapidly conduct the cleansing operation so that they cannot again show the audacity of coming against the will of the people."

Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve." Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was legally abolished in 2004 as part of the country's bid to join the European Union.

Even before the weekend chaos in Turkey, the NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly heavy-handed rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissent, restricted the media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Speaking to a large crowd of supporters in front of his Istanbul residence Sunday evening, Erdogan responded to frequent calls of "We want the death penalty!" by saying: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get."

Grief-stricken relatives in Ankara and Istanbul buried those killed in the coup attempt, and prayers for the dead were read simultaneously at noon Sunday at Turkey's 85,000 mosques. Erdogan attended a funeral for his campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, Abdullah Tayyip Olcak. The president wept and vowed to take the country forward in "unity and solidarity."

The government's announcement that 6,000 people had been detained  including three top generals and hundreds of soldiers  suggested a wide conspiracy. Observers said the scale of the crackdown, especially against the judiciary, indicated the government was taking the opportunity to further consolidate Erdogan's power.

"The factions within the military opposed to Erdogan who did this just gave him carte blanche to crack down not only on the military but on the judiciary," said Aykan Erdemir, a former lawmaker from the main opposition party and now a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "The coup plotters couldn't have helped Erdogan more."

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The rapid suppression of the putsch was greeted by Turks across the political spectrum with opposition parties joining to condemn it. In a half-dozen cities, tens of thousands marched throughout the day after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Erdogan, Turkey's top politician for 13 years.

At nightfall, flag-waving crowds rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere.

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," said Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at a morning rally in Istanbul.

The failed coup and the subsequent crackdown followed moves by Erdogan to reshape both the military and the judiciary. He had indicated a shake-up of the military was imminent and had also taken steps to increase his influence over the judiciary.

This month, parliament approved a controversial bill to reform two Turkish high courts, which allows the government to dismiss hundreds of administrative and high appeals court judges and allow Erdogan to replace them with judges loyal to him. Parliament passed the bill even as authorities were grappling with a deadly triple suicide bomb attacks at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport.

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The opposition had appealed the legislation to the high court unsuccessfully, but Erdogan has not yet signed it into law. Two Constitutional Court justices were among the thousands of members of the judiciary it had detained Saturday.

It is not clear how the post-coup purge will affect the judiciary, how the government will move to replace the dismissed judges and prosecutors, or where the trials for those detained would be held.

The government alleged the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of trying to overthrow the government.

Gulen, who lives in Saylorsburgh, Pennsylvania, espouses a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy. He is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey, where the government has labeled his movement a terrorist organization. He strongly denies the government's charges.

At a funeral in Istanbul, Erdogan vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen's supporters. He also called on Washington to extradite Gulen.

At two weekend news conferences, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

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"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.

Gulen even raised the possibility the coup attempt had been staged, saying it had "all the signs of a movie scenario," in order to purge the military of Erdogan's opponents.

In recent years, the government has moved to purge the police and judiciary of Gulen followers. The military, founded on secularist ideals, has been a staunch opponent of Gulen.

Gulen told reporters he did not fear extradition.

"This doesn't worry me at all. But I'm not going to do anything that will harm my dignity or that will go against my dignity," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny." So far, officials have not offered evidence he was involved.

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Ziya Meral of the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, a civilian think tank affiliated with the British Defense Ministry, said the motives of the plotters remain unclear, but the allegations against Gulen were dubious.

"I am more inclined toward a network within the armed services who were disturbed about where Turkey is heading," she said.

The allegations will only add to the pressure on the U.S. government and signal new uncertainty in U.S.-Turkish relations.

The putsch attempt led to a temporary halt to air operations by the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group in neighboring Syria and Iraq from Turkey's Incerlik air base, but the Pentagon said Sunday that Turkey has reopened its airspace.

A Turkish government official said that the commander of the base, Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, was among those detained.

The state-run Anadolu Agency also said authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Erdogan's top military aide, Col. Ali Yazici, although it wasn't clear what role he may have played.

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The agency said 70 generals and admirals, including former Gen. Akin Ozturk, an air Force commander, were detained. Of the generals and admirals brought before court, 11 were put under arrest as of Sunday night and the rest are awaiting processing.

Security forces arrested a group of alleged plotters who had been holding out at one of Istanbul's airports Sunday, a Turkish official said. In addition, Anadolu reported that seven people, including a colonel, were detained at an air base in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

Gen. Umit Dunda said at least 104 conspirators were among those killed, describing them as mainly officers from the air force, the military police and armored units.

Security forces rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged links to the coup. Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for alleged involvement with the group responsible for the coup.

The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." The agency said 58 homes of prosecutors and judges have been searched.

Officials also said 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

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Another 149 police were detained in Ankara, according to Anadolu, citing the office of the city's governor.

Associated Press


LINCOLN, Neb.  Corinne Schipull, of Algona, was named to the Deans List/Explore Center List of Distinguished Students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for the spring semester of the 2015-16 academic year.
The fare for the inaugural flight is Rs 1 and the tariff for the first three months is Rs 999.

Air Carnival is set to take off on its maiden flight on Monday.



Manish Kumar Singh, chief executive officer, Air Carnival, said the first flight would be on the Coimbatore-Chennai Madurai sector.

The fare for the inaugural flight is Rs 1 and the tariff for the first three months is Rs 999.

The airline will have daily services on 10 sectors, including three return flights from Chennai to Coimbatore and two return flights from Chennai to Madurai. It will fly ATR72-500s on these short-haul routes.

Air Carnival will start with one aircraft and add two more by October 2016.

Once the new aircraft are inducted, the airline will expand services to Bengaluru, Tirupati, Hubli and Thiruvananthapuram.

Singh said the airline will target routes no airline was servicing.

Air Carnival is contemplating a service between Coimbatore and Tirupati and another one between Chennai and Mysore.

The promoter CMC group will infuse about $12-15 million initially to acquire five aircraft.

Once we stablise, we will look at raising money from investors, said Singh, who is confident the airline will break even in 30 months.

This is the right time to start operations because demand is high and the price of fuel has declined, Singh said.

The airline is targeting 80-85 per cent load and its target customers include first-time travellers, businessmen and leisure travellers.

We need to target all types of travellers for the load we are targeting, Singh said.

Air Carnival is the sister concern of the CMC (Coimbatore Marine College) group of institutions.

S Irudaya Nathan, founder and director of the CMC group, established Air Carnival Charter Services in New Delhi in 2013.

The south is becoming a hub for regional airlines. AirAsia, Pegasus, Fly Easy, Air Carnival, TruJet and Air Costa are all based in the south.
Government tenders could soon go to bidders who promise to train highest number of youth.

The Narendra Modi-led government has begun a pilot study by asking some of the key infrastructure departments to put such a clause in their advertisements for new projects.

The measure is part of the governments efforts to ensure that employment picks up in tandem with the planned expansion of state-financed capital investments in the economy.

The ministry of road transport and highways, for instance, has inserted the clause in its latest tenders and the ministry of railways plans to do the same.

The former has made it mandatory for every company that gets a highways contract to train at least ten persons for every Rs 1 crore spent on the project.

The contractors will be required to train a specific number of people in technology of road construction, said Sanjay Mitra, secretary of the ministry of road transport and highways.

The training will be a short-term affair which will run as long as a project is executed.

A road project usually takes about a year to complete. The contractor, however, will not be bound to offer jobs to such trainees.

To ensure that young people sign up for training, government will offer them a stipend of Rs 15,000 per month.

Other ministries are also mulling ways to introduce similar clauses in their tenders.

A ministry of railways official said such training will be particularly relevant in the poorer districts with fewer technical institutions.



The skilled workforce would then be able to tap into better employment opportunities.

Commenting on the trendsetting advertisements, Nitin Gadkari, minister for road transport and highways, said he has asked highway contractors to train local unemployed youth in highway construction as well as up-skill both unemployed local youth as well as those already working under contractors.

Officers in his ministry said the approach to train youth with employable skills was being taken for the first time.

Its somewhat similar to the emphasis by governments of many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including the US, to justify spending from the exchequer.

The Indian government has so far never asked contractors to pick up a liability to train youth.

Lawyer Suman Jyoti Khaitan was of the opinion that it would not be a problem for the ministries to put in such conditions in their tenders.

The rules for issuing tenders by ministries are spelt out in the General Financial Rules, issued periodically by the department of expenditure in the finance ministry.

A government official said since there was no mention of labour content in those rules, it was possible to bring in additional yardsticks.

However, at some stage a department is certainly going to ask for clarifications, he said.

While the road ministry has put in a specific percentage of training to accompany the spending, the government expects each ministry to lay out its own yardsticks.

A senior government official said it would be difficult for a ministry or department to have less ambition in projected employment compared with others.

This is expected to make them stretch the envelope to squeeze in more training hours from each project that is commissioned.

The employment component is also expected to be included in other expenditure proposals that are sent to the Cabinet.

While the recent package of Rs 6,000 crore for the textiles sector was the first where an explicit connection with jobs was spelt out, others are also expected to do so.

Textiles ministry officials said they used a multiplier of 70 jobs created for every Rs one crore of investment to convince the Union Cabinet to approve the project.

So along with the details of how much additional investment will be created by a project, Cabinet approvals will now also mandate specifying how much additional employment will be created from such public expenditure.

The employment yardstick will also be applied in the bilateral or multilateral trade agreements signs from now. Arvind Mehta, additional secretary, ministry of commerce, said it is likely to be an important consideration for the government to decide if a free trade agreement (FTA) is worth the cut in import duties.

In most cases, India has higher tariffs than its counterpart nations. Work on the India-Australia FTA has progressed to the point where the government expects to sign the document in this financial year and it is expected to be the first such document where this consideration will be spelt out.

The Modi government has reasons to be concerned that employment creation in the formal sector has been persistently weak.

The 27th Quarterly Employment Survey by the ministry of labour shows formal job creation was only 272,000 in the one-year period till September 2015.

Of this, 114,000 has been in apparel sector.

Photograph: Reuters
Three indigenously-developed 155 mm 'Dhanush' artillery guns have been handed over to the Indian Army by the Jabalpur-based Gun Carriage Factory.

"Three 155 mm howitzers (Dhanush) have been handed over to the army recently for user's trial," GCF's Joint General Manager and PRO Sanjay Shrivastava told PTI today.

The GCF is an ordnance factory, which received its first order of 500 transport carts in 1905.

"Another consignment of three guns is being readied and these howitzers too will be delivered to the army shortly," Shrivastava said.

The gun, a towed howitzer with a strike range of 38 km, has been developed by Ordnance Factory Board, Kolkata, after going through the design and voluminous documents running into over 12,000 pages which were delivered to India under the first phase of Transfer of Technology as part of the Bofors gun deal in the late 80s, another official said.

The army had demanded the six howitzers following successful summer and winter trials of the artillery gun. The trials saw some 2,000 rounds being successfully fired from the gun in different climatic conditions like in snowy, desert and hostile areas in the country, he said.

The army had been looking for a total of 114 Dhanush guns from GCF to augment its firepower, he further said.

According to the official, the army needs a huge number of howitzers of different types, and Indian firms, some with the help of foreign manufacturers, are in the race to fulfill the demand with the gun's variants.

Costing around Rs 14 crore a piece, Dhanush, (aka 'Desi Bofors') is comparable to most current generation weapon systems which are in use by different countries, he said.

Along with electronic gun-laying and sighting systems and other features, the indigenous gun has an enhanced 11-km range as against the 27-km range of the imported Bofors.

The Indian Army had stationed a special team of officers at the GCF to help monitor the progress, coordinate proof resources and provide guidance regarding the qualitative requirements vis-a-vis the gun system from the user's perspective, the official said.

"A team from the 506 Army Base Workshop, close to CGF, had constantly provided technical inputs which it acquired by repairing Bofors gun for over two decades," he said.

The Swedish Bofors company (now owned by Britain's BAE System) could not complete the ToT for the 155 mm howitzer with 39 calibre to India, as the deal got embroiled in a major political row over alleged kickbacks in 80s.

Subsequently, the OFB struggled for a long time to produce the howitzer indigenously despite the fact that it has manufactured and supplied several components or spare parts to keep the Bofors howitzers operational in India, especially during Kargil war.

The army had been desperately looking for 155 mm howitzers for more than a decade now. It had roped in an Israeli company Soltam to upgrade the imported, Russian-made 130 mm gun to 155 mm at GCF. But the project, after the upgraded gun's trial, ran into hot water, the official claimed.

Four years ago, the Defence Acquisition Council decided to look for artillery guns within the country and asked the OFB to start manufacturing howitzers.

Towards that end, former Defence Minister AK Antony flagged off a 155 mm gun manufacturing facility at GCF on September 22, 2012.

"The project has received support and active cooperation from other ordnance factories, PSUs such as SAIL, BEL, and many private sector companies. Their support has made the project a huge success," the official added.

The move had come after four international howitzer firms -- Soltam, Denel, Singapore Technologies Kinetics and Rheinmetall -- were blacklisted by the Ministry of Defence over allegations of graft.
The violence in Kashmir refuses to quell as one more person died on Saturday over the protests being held against the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. On Saturday, the Mehbooba Mufti-led government launched a clampdown on media in Kashmir, where curfew has been imposed, by seizing newspapers and banning publication till at least July 20.

Here are the latest updates from the Valley.

1. About 2,000 additional Central Reserve Police Force personnel are being rushed to violence-hit Kashmir valley. About 60 battalions (about 1,000 in personnel each) are already stationed in the state as part of counter insurgency grid.

2. One person was killed and two injured after security forces opened fire on a crowd when they attacked a police post in Kupwara district of north Kashmir.

3. Police raided printing presses of local newspapers in Srinagar and seized English and Urdu newspapers. Police raided the printing press of the States leading English newspaper Greater Kashmir at Rangreth and arrested the press foreman and two other employees.

4. Cable operations were also suspended late on Saturday night after authorities issued directions to the operators to stop beaming some channels. Later in the afternoon, the cable operations resumed minus Pakistani news channels.

5. Strictest curfew has been imposed in all the 10 districts of the Valley to prevent any escalation in the protests and street violence. Over 3,200 people including 1,500 security personnel have been injured in the street violence in the last one week.

6. Except BSNL, the entire mobile telephony has been suspended in Kashmir.

PHOTOGRAPH: Umar Ganie/Rediff.com
In the midst of his bitter fight with the Centre on a range of issues, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Sunday accused the Modi dispensation of turning its ties with Delhi government into an "India-Pakistan" type situation and said absence of obstacles would have helped him achieve four times of what has been done so far in the city.

In the first edition of his 'Talk to AK' show, seen as an attempt to increase Aam Aadmi Party's national connect, Kejriwal touched upon a number of contentious issue including appointment of 21 Parliamentary Secretaries, arrest of a top bureaucrat by the Central Bureau of Investigation and transfer of officers even as he taunted the prime minister saying, he was the "only corrupt chief minister in the country in the eyes of" Narendra Modi.

The Delhi chief minister, in the nearly two-hour-long programme that began with a monologue followed by a question and answer session, alleged that the Centre was trying to "break" the Aam Aadmi Party government and that Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah was micromanaging the CBI, adding, "but every dog has his day and all these will soon come to an end.

Kejriwal, the AAP national convenor, indicated that the party may contest the next assembly polls in Gujarat, alleging that an "atmosphere of suppression" was prevailing there and people wanted to overthrow the BJP regime.

Justifying his government's spendings on advertisement, he insisted that it spent only Rs 75 crore not 526 crore in the last fiscal and accused the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of spreading rumours on the issue, saying it has no parallel in the world in spreading rumours.

"If they would not have made this India-Pakistan situation, then work done by us would have been four times.

"I had told him (PM), forgive me if I have committed any mistake, but please end this irritants. A lot of work has been done. But if not for obstacles, the amount of work would have been four times.

"The assembly passed 14 bills, including on time-bound services delivery, which had the clause of automatic compensation. It's been eight months since this passage of this bill.

"Remember the Ramlila version of Jan Lokpal Bill? It's been eight months that we passed it and since then the Centre's approval is awaited," Kejriwal said.

Flanked by his deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and music composer Vishal Dadlani -- the moderator for the programme which is seen as Kejriwal's answer to PM's 'Maan Ki Baat' radio address, Kejriwal alleged that Delhi has become the "victim" of Centre's confrontational attitude as AAP MLAs are being arrested on "false charges".

"In the PM's eyes there is only one corrupt CM in the country. They want to break us. They enter into settings with other parties.

"Have first information reports been filed against Robert Vadra or Sonia Gandhi or Shivraj Singh Chouhan? They are not scared of me, they are scared of my honesty. The full police force is after us," he said.

"The Centre is working like the British used to treat the freedom fighters. I have told MLAs this is the second freedom struggle," Kejriwal said.

"They are not probing the CWG scam. I have told my MLAs to be ready to go to jail. If Rajendra Kumar was not in my office then I can challenge that he would not have been arrested.

"The message to officers is do not work for us. Amit Shah is micromanaging CBI. But every dog has his day. All these will soon come to an end," he said.

Warning the Centre not to "mess" with the student community, he said if the current "trend" continues then there may be a "danger" for the country in the future.

"The Centre led by BJP reduced the education budget by 25 per cent. From 82,000 crore to 68,000 crore. The country will be ruined if youth don't study," he said.

Referring to a letter to him by former Gujarat BJP MLA Yatin Oza in which the latter alleged that Amit Shah had struck a deal with All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi ahead of the 2015 Bihar elections, the Delhi chief minister aid if the claims are true, then it was very dangerous.

"Oza is a senior lawyer who was very close to Shah. If what the letter says is true then it's very dangerous. In Gujarat there is an atmosphere of suppression. There are cases of treason against teachers.

"People have decided to teach them a lesson. We will contest elections in Gujarat if people want. The response we received was tremendous. We will replicate our good work in Punjab," he said.

"In Punjab, there will be a crackdown on illegal agencies taking people abroad. We will form a board to manage the issues of people who want to go abroad," he said.

On the issue of transfer of 11 top officials of Delhi government out of the city, he said the city dispensation must be discussed on such crucial matters and added that his government will bring officers from outside.

"Officers from my office has been transferred. Probably for the first time in India's history officers have been transferred from CMO without permission. Your intention is to stall governance in Delhi.

"We will bring officers from outside by giving adverts. The Delhi government has 39 posts at the secretary level. 20 posts are empty. This is the level of shortage and despite that they transfer.

"They want to paralyse us but we will go strong. Will bring out ads in few days inviting experts from across the country," he said.

Severely critical of functioning of the Anti Corruption Branch, Kejriwal said "Last year, on June 8, the Centre had sent paramilitary forces in taking over the ACB.

"Today if I spot anyone taking bribe in front me, I won't be able to do anything. We have sent 32 cases in the last one year to it, and people have forwarded 150 complaints but no action has been taken. It has only worked to catch Manish Sisodia, Kapil Mishra and to file an FIR against me."

On the issue of appointment of parliamentary secretaries, he said he has "full faith" on the Election Commission which was examining the issue and claimed that MLAs holding the post in Punjab and Gujarat were earning in crores.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation on Sunday listed Chandigarh and Sikkim's national park home to the world's third highest peak Mount Khangchendzonga among its World Heritage Sites, approving all three nominations linked to India this session.

The approval is besides the archaeological site of Nalanda Mahavihara (NalandaUniversity) in Bihar entering the list at the 40th session of The World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul.

The meeting had resumed for a day on Sunday, after being suspended a day earlier due to a failed coup bid in Turkey which claimed over 260 lives.

The Paris-based body listed Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier's works -- including the Indian city of Chandigarh which he planned in the 1950s -- among its World Heritage sites.

It said the 17 sites spread over seven countries are a "testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past".

"The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh (India), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Japan), the House of Dr Curutchet in La Plata (Argentina) and the Unite d'habitation in Marseille (France) reflect the solutions that the Modern Movement sought to apply during the 20th century to the challenges of inventing new architectural techniques to respond to the needs of society.

"These masterpieces of creative genius also attest to the internationalisation of architectural practice across the planet," it said in an official statement.

In another major recognition, Sikkim's Khangchendzonga National Park -- home to the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga -- made it to the list.

The Khangchendzonga National Park includes a unique diversity of plains, valleys, lakes, glaciers and spectacular, snow-capped mountains covered with ancient forests, including the worlds third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga.

"Mythological stories are associated with this mountain and with a great number of natural elements (e.g. caves, rivers, lakes, etc.) that are the object of worship by the

indigenous people of Sikkim. The sacred meanings of these stories and practices have been integrated with Buddhist beliefs and constitute the basis for Sikkimese identity," the statement said.

A World Heritage Site is a place (such as a building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, or mountain) that is listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as being of 'special cultural or physical significance'.

Image: Mount Khangchendzonga. Photograph courtesy:
Reaching out to the opposition, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday sought its cooperation in the passage of GST bill even as it asserted that government will be targeted over developments in Arunachal Pradesh and Kashmir during Parliament's Monsoon Session starting on Monday.

As sparks are set to fly in Parliament over a range of issues, Modi also urged all the political parties to keep national interests above any other considerations. "We represent both the people and parties and there is a need to keep national interests above anything else".

At an all-party meeting convened by the government a day before Parliament meets, Congress said it will support bills but based on merit but offered no assurance on the GST, saying it can take a stand only after the government gives it a "written draft" over concerns raised by it.

Noting that important Bills including the GST will be taken up during the session, Modi expressed the hope that there would be meaningful discussions and outcomes.

"The issue is not about which government would get the credit for introduction of GST but what was important is the passage of the Bill," he said.

With the continuing protests in Kashmir following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani expected to generate heat in Parliament, Modi commended political parties for speaking in "one voice" over the issue.

"Various parties have given statements on Kashmir events which benefitted the country. This has sent a right message and I thank all the parties for the same," he said.

Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said there should be a discussion in Parliament on the tense situation in Kashmir and that the government should provide an answer.

The government's unsuccessful NSG bid, floods in some states, agrarian crisis and terrorism were among the other main issues raised by opposition leaders at the meeting.

Azad accused the government of using every trick to destabilise states ruled run by other parties and referred to Arunachal developments and various chief ministers targeting the Centre at the Inetr-State Council meeting on Saturday.

Though he did not refer to GST directly, he said the Congress will offer support to bills on merit.

"We have not taken any decision that we have to stop a bill. We will support on merit. We will support any bill which is in support of people, progress and growth," he said.

Another Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia said his party can take a stand only after it receives a written response from the government as he played down talks between its leaders and Union ministers over the GST.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said the government will talk to all parties to evolve a consensus on the GST.

"Our legislative business, including GST, is a priority. We want to see to that we pass the GST bill with consensus. We are going to take every party on board," he said.
Pema Khandu was on Sunday sworn in as the new chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh heading a Congress government, a day after the party pulled off a dramatic success winning back all its rebels by choosing a new leader, marking the culmination of fast-paced political developments.

Chowna Mein was sworn in as the deputy chief minister. Son of late Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, Pema, 37, who became the youngest chief minister in the country and the ninth in the tiny northeastern state, and Mein were administered the oath of office and secrecy by Governor Tathagata Roy at the Rajbhavan in Itanagar. Dorjee Khandu had died in an air crash in 2011.

Addressing a press conference shortly after he was sworn in, Pema said an expansion of his ministry would take place only after the governor returned to the state. Roy, who is governor of Tripura, is holding additional charge as Arunachal Pradesh governor.

Pema said he would inculcate a 'Team Arunachal spirit among elected leaders irrespective of party affiliations for overall development of his state. "All elected leaders of the state would be made a part of the development process cutting across political lines."

From assisting his father in politics to working for social transformation, Pema has come a long way to occupy the coveted post. Hours ahead of the scheduled floor test in the Assembly yesterday which Chief Minister Nabam Tuki was directed by the governor to take, the Congress Legislature Party had elected Pema, in place of Tuki, in a dramatic turnaround. Tuki was restored to the chief minister's post on Wednesday by the Supreme Court.

Pema then staked claim to power on the basis of the support of 45 party MLAs along with two independents. In a volte-face, ousted chief minister Khaliko Pul also returned to the party fold with 30 dissident MLAs, a move that stunned the Bharatiya Janata Party which had supported his government.

In the 60-member House with an effective strength of 58, Congress now claims the support of 47 MLAs, including two independents. Eldest son of the family, Pema, a graduate from Delhi's prestigious HinduCollege, had an early entry into governance after his father's demise.

Pema, who hails from Tawang, first entered the Arunachal Pradesh assembly in 2011 to fill the vacancy caused by his father's death.

His election as MLA from Mukto (ST) constituency was uncontested and he was soon included in the state government as Cabinet minister for water resources development and tourism in the Jarbom Gamlin ministry.

He also became the cabinet minister for rural works department and tourism since November 21, 2011 in Nabam Tuki government and thereafter served the state as cabinet minister for tourism, civil aviation and art & culture.

He was re-inducted as the urban development minister on June 1, 2014 in the Tuki government after the general elections.

He quit as minister in October last year and had sided with dissident Kalikho Pul.
Following an attempt to overthrow his government, Turkish President Recep Erdogan has ordered the arrest of over 2,000 people.

Image: Supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan wave Turkish national flags and shout slogans as they stand around the Republic Monument in Taksim Square in Istanbul. Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters

Turkish President Recep Erdogan has described the attempted coup as a gift from God as it will allow him to cleanse the army.

The hard-line Islamist leader managed to cling onto power after making a dramatic appeal over FaceTime for his supporters to confront the military who attempted to seize strategic locations in Istanbul and Ankara.

Erdogan, who was in Marmaris on the Mediterranean coast at the time rang a journalist who put him live on air to make his dramatic appeal for support.

Image: Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan makes a speech protected by bodyguards in Istanbul. Photograph: Murad Sezer/Reuters

After returning to Istanbul overnight on the Turkish government Gulfstream IV jet, Erdogan addressed jubilant followers as his security forces launched their purge on elements accused of disloyalty.

Erdogan made a brief public appearance amid a phalanx of heavily-armed bodyguards, he said: They will pay a heavy price for this. This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army.

At least 265 people were killed in clashes between the armed forces and police. Scores of civilians were among the dead.

Image: Supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan gather at Taksim Square in Turkey. Photograph: Kemal Aslan/Reuters

Rebel leader General Erdal Ozturk, who commands armed forces in Istanbul has been arrested and charged with treason. The state-run news agency Anadolu said the commander of the Second Army, which guards the borders with Iraq, Syria and Iran has also been detained. nGovernment forces arrested 2,839 accused coup supporters.

Erdogans survival has turned him into a sort of a mythical figure and could further erode democracy in Turkey, said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at The Washington Institute. It will allow him (Erdogan) to crack down on liberty and freedom of association, assembly, expression and media in ways that we haven't seen before and find strong public support within the country, he said.

Image: A man poses on an armored vehicle with portraits of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan parked outside the parliament building in Ankara. Photograph: Baz Ratner/Reuters
Congress chief ministerial candidate for Uttar Pradesh Sheila Dikshit on Sunday narrowly escaped with minor injuries after a makeshift platform on an open mini-truck collapsed during a roadshow in Lucknow.

The 78-year-old Congress veteran lost her balance after the plank she was standing on gave way when the cavalcade was on its way to the party headquartes on Mall Avenue from the Amausi airport.

Dikshit was extended a helping hand by other leaders present there and later shifted to a car, a senior party functionary said. This was her first visit to the state capital after

Congress declared her as its chief ministerial candidate for the crucial 2017 polls, considered a do-or-die battle for the party.

Congress chose Dikshit, a Brahmin, as its face for the polls considering "her strong credentials as chief minister of Delhi for three consecutive terms" to enable the party regain support of the electorally-sizeable community.

The Brahmin community, a traditional Congress vote bank, had shifted its allegiance to Bharatiya Janata Party in the advent of the Mandir-Mandal politics.

A large chunk of Brahmin votes had gone to Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party in the past when she gave tickets to many candidates belonging to that community, whose support determines the poll outcome in several seats in central and eastern UP.

Newly-appointed Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee chief and actor-turned-politician

Raj Babbar accompanied Dikshit during the road show which started from the airport, braving intermittent smart showers.

The Congress has also announced coordination and campaign committees for Uttar Pradesh which will be headed by Sanjay Singh and Pramod Tiwari respectively.

The new team took over formally at the Congress headquarters later in the day.
DES MOINES  Ready or not, Iowans, youre once again a focal point in a presidential election.

Experts and campaign workers of both political persuasions agree what early polls appear to suggest: Iowa will be a closely contested, high-profile battleground state as the nation decides whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be its next president.

That toss-up status will bring all the requisite attention: candidate visits, television ads, campaign staffers knocking on doors  in some cases, its already here.

Iowa is a battleground state, and this year, neither party will take a chance with Iowas six electoral votes. That could be the margin of victory, Steffen Schmidt, a political scientist at Iowa State University, wrote in an email interview with the Lee Enterprises Des Moines Bureau.

Schmidts view of the presidential race nationally is more optimistic for Republicans than election forecasters, many of whom  at this early stage in the campaign, at least  project a decisive victory for Clinton.

Polls, prognosticators

Forecasters are nearly unanimous in thinking the race for Iowas six electoral votes will be close. ABC, NBC, the Washington Post and NPR all classify Iowa as a toss-up state. Only the Crystal Ball, a well-regarded project of Larry Sabato and the University of Virginia Center for Politics, lists Iowa as leaning Democratic.

Theres a tendency to assume Iowa is a Democratic state because Obama carried it by 10 points in 2008 and six points in 2012, the Posts Chris Cillizza and Philip Bump wrote. But, as of today, Iowa has a Republican governor, two Republican (U.S.) senators and three (out of four) Republican members of Congress.

Most early polls have shown a close race in Iowa between Clinton and Trump. Two new polls published this past week showed Clinton ahead by a small margin in one and Trump ahead by a similarly small margin in the other.

The polls are showing that Iowa has been a toss-up for a month at least, state Republican Party chairman Jeff Kaufmann said. For the first time in a while, this may very well go down to the wire in Iowa.

He really expects Iowa to be a battleground state, Kaufmann added. I expect it, and I know that the RNC and the DNC both expect it, just in terms of the resources that I already see pulling into the state. Were seeing tens of thousands of dollars, and that will move to millions of dollars that will be coming into this state.

Follow the money

to Iowa

While Trumps campaign is yet to show signs of investing in Iowa, the Clinton campaign, both state parties and the national Republican Party are putting their money here.

Clinton has had paid staff on the ground in Iowa for weeks, and the Iowa Democratic Party just last weekend opened five new campaign offices across the state. The Clinton campaign and state party will work to ensure those offices are filled with volunteers who make all those phone calls and knock on all those doors.

We have a great organizing team on the ground. We are talking to voters every day, said Tova Yampolsky, a regional organizing director for the Democrats in Des Moines. Iowas a big battleground state  we feel this is going to make a difference.

Trumps campaign thus far has not matched Clintons staffing in Iowa. Even in placing second in the Iowa caucuses in February, Trump relied on drumming up support with big events and media coverage, successfully eschewing the traditional Iowa campaign staples of organizing and advertising.

Since becoming the Republican Partys presumptive nominee, Trump has enlisted the help of the state and national party structures in Iowa.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request seeking comment for this story.

Chris Carr, political director for the national Republican Party, said that partnership has been natural because Republicans have kept staff in Iowa for the past four years in an effort to build a long-term organization.

One reason why it really helped, the marriage of the RNC and the Trump campaign, is we were totally opposite, Carr said. We were the organization with all the bodies.

Thats why Clintons early staffing edge is not a big deal, said Luke Martz, a Republican political consultant and Muscatine native who was Iowa field director for Mitt Romneys 2012 campaign and now works in Wisconsin.

Martz said the Republican Party organizations can make phone calls, knock on doors and garner absentee ballots for Trump and other Republicans for now, but eventually, the Trump campaign will need its own staff in the state to avoid overloading party workers.

The party cant be working on stuff like exclusively worrying about yard signs and putting on events when they have (other) important things to do, Martz said.

TV time

Another signal that Iowa is important to a candidate is television advertising, and Clinton already is on the airwaves here, as is at least one outside group supporting her.

In June, Clinton made an eight-figure, six-week ad buy in Iowa, which was part of an eight-state investment. The ads also ran in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, all of which are rated as toss-ups or lean Democratic by forecasters.

And Priorities USA, a pro-Clinton Super PAC, included Iowa markets in its recent $20 million ad buy.

The Trump campaign also is moving slower than Clinton on the TV advertising front. Trumps campaign has not paid for a television advertisement since early May, a few weeks before he became the partys presumptive nominee, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
CLEVELAND  Iowa Republicans are ready to rock and roll in Cleveland.

A delegation of 30 Iowans plus alternates is gathering with hordes of other Republicans from around the nation this week to conduct their partys national convention  a history-making confab on the shores of Lake Erie that is expected to officially declare New York billionaire Donald Trump as the 2016 GOP presidential candidate under the watchful eye of the worlds media, passionate demonstrators and air-tight security.

Delegate Linda Upmeyer, a Clear Lake Republican who is speaker of the Iowa House and making her first trip to a national convention, said she looks forward to interesting discussions, great speeches  especially Iowa Sen. Joni Ernsts prime-time address to the convention Monday  and the fun and excitement of a major political event.

I think its going to be super interesting and I think its going to be exciting, said Upmeyer, who hoped to stop by Clevelands Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but expected much of the week will be spent doing the work of a delegate.

I expect there to be a lot of commotion, said Cecil Stinemetz, a delegate from Urbandale also attending his first national political convention.

I expect there to be a lot of paid protesters, disrupters outside. Inside I dont know. I guess what Im expecting is some chaos, some maneuvering, some mics being shut off, those kinds of things. I hope it doesnt happen, but thats kind of my expectation, added Stinemetz, who is among a minority of delegates who want to open the convention to nominate a candidate other than Trump.

Cleveland at times has been derided as the mistake on the lake, and Iowa party officials say that would be the case this week if Republicans dont come together in solidarity behind Trump and running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, in preparation for a tough general-election battle against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Even though many of the Iowa delegates backed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz  who won the Iowa caucuses but was eventually bested by Trump  generally they are falling in rank behind state party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann and Gov. Terry Branstad, who warn the state could jeopardize its first-in-the-nation status in a dump Trump convention melee.

Donald Trump won fair and square. You cant take that away from him, said first-time delegate Randy Feenstra, a state senator from Hull. I hope we come out of there and were coalesced and we can move forward in a positive manner.

Cedar Rapids delegate David Chung, a GOP activist and Cruz backer making his second convention sojourn, said all bets are off, anything could happen if delegates are declared to be unbound by the convention rules, but he expects Trump will emerge as the partys presidential nominee.

I think he will need to reach out to the conservatives in the Republican base to bring them along to gain their support in order to win, said delegate Sandy Salmon, a state representative from Janesville. I think probably a lot of conservatives are struggling to warm up to Donald Trump and Im kind of one of those.
Reading, math scores down in 1st test since COVID. How Indiana did.
DUBUQUE  On the morning of Saturday, Oct. 10, 1987, a fisherman discovered the body of a young white male, later identified as 14-year-old Kenny Joe Johnson, lying on the sandy beach area near a floodgate in Dubuques isolated Maus Park.

The fisherman found the boy rolled in a 5-foot-by-9-foot piece of yellow-orange nylon carpet dumped at the park.

An autopsy report stated the teen died by manual strangulation and also had been sexually assaulted. He also had a small amount of alcohol in his system.

Johnson had behavioral problems, which likely stemmed from a learning disability that wasnt always handled appropriately. He originally resided in the Davenport area but had been court-ordered to the Hillcrest Family Services program in Dubuque about one month prior to his death.

On Sept. 22, 1987, Johnson began his short stay at Hillcrest House. He started classes at Central Alternative High School in early October, and a few days later, on Oct. 8, he got into a dispute with a teacher.

Instead of reporting to the principals office at 9:30 a.m., the teen ran away. It was the third time he had run away in the two weeks that hed been in Dubuque, and it was the last time anyone saw him alive.

In the days and weeks after the slaying, police followed up on hundreds of leads and implored anyone who knew anything about the case to step forward.

Despite searching nearly three decades, investigators still havent been able to establish a clear picture of the teens whereabouts in the two days leading up to his death.

Investigators said the way Johnsons body and evidence of his assault had been haphazardly disguised provided them with insight into the killers personality.

They speculated the killer was a loner who had poor interpersonal relationship skills and had trouble making friends. Police theorized that even with antisocial tendencies, the killer had difficulty coping with the murder and probably told someone.
When John Helmer went to work for Newco Services more than 35 years ago, he had no idea he would one day own that business  and several others.

'My wife and I moved back to Merkel in 1980 after our first daughter was born,' said Helmer, owner of AJ Enterprises in Abilene. 'I was fortunate to be hired by Mr. (Hollis) Newberry, and I learned a lot from him.'

The company name comes from his first two initials.

Today, Helmer, 59, not only owns the Abilene shop, which does mechanical work on all vehicles, including work on school buses for 11 school districts, but he also owns four other shops in Merkel and Coleman.

'My stepfather was a mechanic, and at an early age, I began to help him,' said Helmer, father of three daughters. 'He was a mechanical genius and could repair and build anything. I developed my love of mechanic work and began my trade from him.'

Helmer said he has 'been blessed' to learn from several other mechanics who also mentored him.

'In April 1990, I decided to go into business for myself,' said Helmer, who opened his first shop at 1101 Energy Drive in south Abilene. 'In November 1999, we moved to our current location at 402 S. 11th St.'

Helmer would operate the Abilene shop exclusively until 2012, when he purchased Carquest/Traweek's Auto Parts, and opened a four-bay repair shop. In 2013, he purchased a second Carquest parts store in Coleman, and then added D&R Automotive Repair in the fall of 2015.

'All of our shops are Tech-Net professional shops, with a nationwide warranty program,' said Helmer 'Our parts stores carry all major brands.'

Mark Belitz, who went to college with Helmer and has worked with him since the late 1970s, said he believes the success of Helmer's businesses lies with the fact that Helmer is willing to invest in the right tools for the job.

'Especially with the school buses, this business requires a lot of diagnostic technology most shops aren't willing to invest in,' Belitz said. 'Not so with John; things have really changed a lot in the last ten years, and he is great about keeping our equipment up to date.'

Helmer said his first exposure to working on school buses came when he was working for Newco Services.

'Bus repair is a year-round job,' he said. 'During the school year, when buses come in for repair, they are a priority as they need to get in and out quickly. Most major repairs, and annual system inspections, are done during the summer months.'

A few years ago, the Blue Bird Bus Co. approached Helmer to see whether he was interested in his business becoming a warranty center. Today, AJ Enterprises is the only authorized Blue Bird Bus Co. warranty center in the region.

'Because of our extensive knowledge and experience with bus repair, Blue Bird wanted us to be a warranty center,' said Helmer. 'Today, we work on 11 districts' buses, including Wylie, Merkel, Jim Ned, Cisco, Baird and Cross Plains.'

Helmer said most school districts have maintenance crews who handle the day-to-day maintenance, and small repairs, however, due to the expense involved in the tools and equipment, as well as the specialized training and experience necessary, major repairs are funneled to his Abilene shop.

'Wiring and electrical systems for buses are very unique,' he said. 'Buses also have several special systems (lights, signs, etc.); and with buses becoming more computerized, specialized equipment is required to diagnose and repair them.'

Helmer said the issue of liability insurance on bus repair can also present problems for school districts because of the cost involved.

Helmer describes himself as 'driven, fair, and a hard worker,' but relies heavily on the 18 employees at his five locations to get the job done.

'Even though I'm more of a manager today than I was years ago, I'm not afraid to get in there and help in any way I can,' he said. 'My employees are vital to the success of my business, and I consider them more family than just employees; we are very close knit. Our customers are also part of our family, and we enjoy getting to know them and develop relationships in our community.'

Helmer said his greatest pleasure in working on school buses is knowing his crews are doing their best to ensure school kids 'have a safe ride to and from school.'

'Technology is rapidly changing, and staying current on all the changes  and keeping our tools up to date  is key,' he said. 'My techs and I have attended numerous trainings, classes and seminars, as well as on-the-job training. We are committed to knowing everything we need to know to repair our customers' vehicles right the first time.'

Helmer said he considers himself just a 'community-minded, down home boy' who loves his family, loves to hunt and fish, and loves to race cars in his spare time.
Incident reports released Saturday by the Abilene Police Department:

Possession of a controlled substance and public intoxication, 3900 block of South First Street, Saturday

Police arrested a 44-year-old man after responding to a report of someone sleeping in a car. Upon arrival, the man appeared intoxicated and was taken to the Taylor County Jail. At intake, jailers discovered a pen cap containing a substance that eventually tested positive for cocaine.

Theft, 1300 block of Barrow Street, Friday

A 44-year-old woman on suspicion of shoplifting from a local business after employees observed her attempting to leave the business with stolen items. Upon arrest, police discovered the woman had two prior convictions for theft.

Assault, 1900 block of Denton Street, Saturday

Police arrested a 33-year-old man after responding to a domestic disturbance call. A female victim, who was the man's girlfriend, said he attempted to strangle her during a fight.

Public intoxication, 900 block of Sammons Street, Friday

A 65-year-old man was arrested after police discovered him passed out beside the roadway. It appeared he had fallen off the bicycle he was riding.

Shoplifting, 4300 block of Buffalo Gap Road, Friday

A 17-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of shoplifting from a local business. A witness reported seeing the woman steal a $160 pair of sunglasses from the business.

Possession of a controlled substance, 1300 block of North Eighth Street, Friday

A 27-year-old woman was arrested after a routine traffic stop, when police discovered a bag containing a crystalline substance that ultimately tested positive for methamphetamine.

Criminal trespass, 3000 block of Bickley Street, Friday

A 22-year-old man was arrested after he refused to leave a residence he had been asked to leave by a female victim.

Driving while intoxicated, 400 block of South First Street, Friday

A 24-year-old man was arrested and subsequently taken to jail when he failed a field sobriety test after a routine traffic stop.

Possession of marijuana, 2200 block of Kirkwood Street, Saturday

Police arrested a 21-year-old man after a routine traffic stop. Upon arrival at the drivers' window, officers smelled what they believed to be marijuana, and a subsequent search of the vehicle revealed a quantity of marijuana under the driver's seat.

Assault, 700 block of North Sixth Street, Thursday

A 46-year-old man reported being attacked by another man while he was walking with his girlfriend. The victim had visible injuries from the attack, and told police he wanted to press charges.

Credit card abuse, 5500 block of Capital Avenue, Thursday

A 52-year-old man reported to police that someone had made unauthorized charges using his debit card. He has canceled the card, and there are no known suspects at this time.
Interactive Map: Ethnicity of Abilene Neighborhoods 

When it comes to local elections, municipalities have four basic options to determine how representatives are elected.

At-large

At-large elections are exactly what they sound like: representatives  council members, school board trustees, etc.  are elected by the city or jurisdiction as a whole. Members voted into their seats in an at-large election are expected to represent and serve the entire constituency.

Single-member

Single-member district elections divide voters by geographic boundaries, and those voters in that particular area vote to elect a single member to serve them. Districts should have equal populations so no district has a larger voting base than another. As many seats are on the elected board amount to the number of districts.

Mixed

Some municipalities use both methods to elect their officials. For instance, a city may decide to elect its mayor at-large but have each council member be elected from a particular district of the city. Or the city could have half its council members elected at-large and the other half elected by district.

Cumulative

Another election alternative is called cumulative voting. In this system, voters can cast as many votes as there are seats on the board or council. Candidates run for a specific seat as in single-member districts, but voters can use all their votes on one candidate or distribute their votes among several.

Sources: National League of Cities, Texas Politics Project
The USA TODAY NETWORK, of which the Reporter-News is a part, has talked to Trump and Clinton supporters nationwide. Read what Trump backers have to say about their candidate online at elections2016.usatoday.com Monday as the Republican National Convention starts. In one week, read why others are choosing Clinton.

Kymberly Martin, owner of Mad Coffee in Abilene, was initially a 'huge' Ted Cruz supporter.

But Martin, 47, has perked up when it comes to Donald Trump, convinced he is 'the right guy for the country right now' because of his business background and his refusal to 'bow to political correctness.'

'Political correctness is tyranny with polite words,' Martin said. 'He refuses to let it sway him. You don't get to be a billionaire without breaking a few eggs. He knows what he's doing.'

Trump 'knows how to run a business, he knows how economies should work, and he knows how to hire the right people to get the job done instead of thinking he knows best on everything,' she said.

'He speaks his mind,' a level of honesty some might find 'shocking' in someone seeking higher office.

By contrast, she sees Hillary Clinton's career as '40 years of service, riddled with scandals and lies and unethical behavior.'

'That's all she's done is politics,' she said. 'She knows no other life other than being a politician. And that's not a good thing. And all the scandals. Plus she's seriously unethical, no integrity.'

Martin said that President Obama himself described Clinton best when he said that 'she'll say anything but do nothing.'

'All she wants to do is win,' she said.

A president, she said, needs 'strength of will,' a quality she believes Trump has.

'It's got to be a strong person, and they can't be following polls all the time,' she said.

The next president needs to 'get the country back on track as far as following the constitution and making the economy strong,' she said.

The Democratic Party thinks that the Constitution is a 'living document' that can be changed depending on current trends, Martin said.

'Instead of sticking to the basics, they're out of control with regulations and laws and trying to legislate morality and people's thoughts,' she said.

As far as the overall tone of the election, Martin said that she was concerned because there was a 'large contingent of people that expect free stuff, and they vote.'

'They vote on their emotions not on facts,' she said. 'What made America strong in the first place was our democracy and our constitutional republic. And seriously, I think you have half this country that pays very little in federal taxes and they get subsidies  and they like the free handouts. Nobody wants to vote to pay taxes, you know?'

Getting rid of the Affordable Care Act should be a priority, she said, as should be paring of massive departments such as the EPA and Education.

'All of those are bloated, they don't really help anything,' she said. 'The states, we're sending all of this money to the federal government, and they may give some of it back to the states. But if they're not happy with that state, they can withhold it. It's tyranny.'

As far as health care goes, a free market approach is better, she said.

'It needs to be a personal choice,' she said. 'We don't buy our car insurance through our employer, why do we buy our health insurance through our employer? That's just stupid. We should be able to shop it around across the state line, or wherever. But let the market figure it out.'

Having the government control health care simply isn't ideal, she said.

'The government is good at some things like defense and maybe some infrastructure, but they aren't very good at actually running an economy,' she said. 'It gets bloated.'

On foreign policy and other matters, she said Trump is 'smart enough to hire really smart people that know what they're doing, rather than try to wing it and think he knows best on everything.'

Obama, in Martin's opinion, 'thinks he knows everything and ignores the advice of advisers.'

A Trump presidency, she said, will probably result in a number of angry people 'because their handouts were shut off.'

'But you know, that's all right  that's where you get innovation, when people have to actually fend for themselves and take care of their own responsibilities instead of counting on big daddy to handle everything and give them what they need,' she said. 'That's when you have all sorts of innovation and inspiration.'

Martin is sure Trump will make the economy better.

'And if the economy's better, that means jobs,' she said.

Trump is admittedly 'not very smooth politically,' she said.

'He's not a politician, so he ruffles feathers, and that's OK,' Martin said. 'If we can't handle that, if everybody has to say things to make everybody feel good, nothing good comes of that. There's no right against being offended in life, but people act like there is.'

Meet Kymberly Martin

Age: 47

Occupation: Business owner

Married: Yes

Kids: Yes

From: Abilene, Texas

Party: Republican

Voting for: Donald Trump

Quote: He (Trump) knows how to run a business, he knows how economies should work, and he knows how to hire the right people to get thejob done instead of thinking he knows best on everything.  He speaks his mind, he doesnt bow to political correctness, and hes honest.




BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  Police in Louisiana say that several officers have been shot in Baton Rouge while on duty.

The shooting happened early Sunday, less than 1 mile from police headquarters.

Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Coppola did not know the extent of the injuries or give the precise number of officers injured. He says they were rushed to a local hospital.

He said that authorities believe the 'scene is contained,' meaning that a shooter was unlikely on the loose.

Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video and circulated widely on the internet.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  Police in Louisiana say that several officers have been shot in Baton Rouge while on duty.



The shooting happened early Sunday, less than 1 mile from police headquarters.



Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Coppola did not know the extent of the injuries or give the precise number of officers injured. He says they were rushed to a local hospital.



He said that authorities believe the 'scene is contained,' meaning that a shooter was unlikely on the loose.



Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video and circulated widely on the internet.

Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden has told news outlets that four officers have been shot, and two are dead. CNN is reporting that seven officers have been shot and three are dead.
Friends, we live in a dangerous world.

Daily, it seems, we read about another shooting, another act of violence, more lives snuffed out because of ignorance, prejudice or poor choices. Sometimes, we may feel the impulse to 'crawl into a hole and pull it in over us,' as the saying goes. The urge is strong to hide, to seek safety at all costs.

I don't believe that hiding is the answer.

In fact, I'm not real big on passivity. Instead, I firmly believe that the answer to violent crime is to call together people of vision and goodwill to stand shoulder to shoulder. I am convinced that we are all stronger when we stand together than any one of us is in isolation.

On July 6, with Chad Mitchell, lead pastor of Mission Abilene at my side, I declared that violent crime in our community will not be tolerated. Even more importantly, I shared a plan for the way forward because as a member of the Abilene City Council, I own the responsibility for addressing one of the most important issues that our city is facing right now. As a part of the Stop the Violence movement, we will implement the ACT initiative: ACCEPT responsibility for the current state of crime in our city; COLLABORATE with all the stakeholders in our community to develop solutions; and TAKE action to heal the wounds that violent crime has caused.

Pastor Mitchell has called for construction of a Forevermore Memorial Park to honor our heroic first responders and those who have lost their lives to violent crime. We intend to create a living, civic monument that will also help us educate future generations about the tragedies that violence brings in its wake. The Forevermore Memorial Park also will stand as a permanent declaration that violence will not be tolerated in the city of Abilene.

Each community has both residents and citizens. I make a distinction between the two, because, in my view, residents may enjoy the benefits of community without giving anything back; but citizens are those who actively benefit the community. Abilene needs more citizens. I urge our citizens to step forward and ACT: accept the responsibility, collaborate with neighbors and take action.

Please do not interpret this call as an indictment of our fine police department. I have the highest confidence in Chief Stan Standridge and the APD as they work each day to keep our city safe. But the responsibility for the safety of our community doesn't stop with these dedicated professionals; it is up to our citizens  you and me  to ACT. British statesman Edmund Burke's dictum is often quoted: 'The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.' This has never been more true than it is today in Abilene.

We have placed a survey on the city website: www.abilenetx.com/survey. I ask you, please, to complete this assessment, which will be used as a tool for understanding and will also stimulate further conversations. Our first ACT meeting will be held at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Mission Abilene campus, 3001 N. Third St., to discuss in detail ways to work together to make Abilene all it can be.

Will you join us? Will you own the issue? Will you be one of those who does something?

Anthony Williams has been a member of the Abilene City Council since 2001.
The flaring up of racial tensions in recent weeks  five police officers killed in Dallas, videotaped fatal police shootings of civilians in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, La.  has created alarm, rage and grief across the country. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found 69 percent of Americans say race relations are bad  almost on par with the discontent during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Some critics wonder why President Barack Obama, America's first black president, hasn't been able to bring about peace, and some accuse him of exacerbating racial tensions. What should Obama do?

Joel Mathis. When it comes to race in America, there's still work to do.

That seems obvious to most African-Americans, certainly, as well as anybody sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. For example: A new study from Harvard this week shows that when both blacks and whites are stopped by cops around the country, blacks are more likely to be pushed around, or have weapons drawn on them, or be subject to the use of pepper spray  and overall were more likely to be subject to use of force, even when compliant with an officer's instructions.

That's how things still work in the country Obama leads. One form of justice for African-Americans, another for whites. Other examples abound.

Obama's critics seem to believe in another story. That yes, there was a time when racism was a big, malignant force in the country, but then the civil rights movement happened, the Voting Rights Act was passed, and everybody lived happily ever after. There might be pockets of racism here or there, but that most complaints about racism amount to 'race hustling'  a power grab  and that any real remaining racism is practiced by blacks and directed at whites. It is, at best, a cynical point of view, one that denies the truth of lives lived and stories told by African-Americans.

So when Obama acknowledges how the world looks from an African-American point of view, then, his critics believe he is being divisive, that he is pandering and that he is, yes, 'race hustling.' They are wrong.

In fact, the president has often acknowledged racial progress in America. 'Race relations are better since I graduated. That's the truth,' he told Howard University graduates in May, but he added: 'I am not saying gaps do not persist. Obviously, they do. Racism persists. Inequality persists.'

I lament the deaths in Dallas, Minnesota and Baton Rouge. But Obama did not create racial strife in this country. He simply acknowledged a problem that was there all along. Pretending the problem doesn't exist won't make it go away.

Ben Boychuk. Who is pretending the problem doesn't exist? Nobody. Conservatives know it's bad out there. They also know that cops who abuse their authority are a problem.

Look, when six in 10 Americans say race relations are bad and have only gotten worse  only 38 percent said the same a year ago  that's a problem. Obama surely did not create racial strife, but he hasn't helped alleviate it, either.

The president is divisive. He has been from the moment he took the oath of office. He set the tone of his administration during his first Oval Office meeting with Republican congressional leaders: 'I won.'

Yes, he did. Yet Obama has never understood that governing demands more than a mere assertion of his will. At its best, the president's rhetoric can reach great heights. But that's all it is  rhetoric.

The president proved it again Tuesday, when spoke at the memorial for one of the murdered police officers in Dallas. He delivered a generally uplifting and unifying speech  until he decided to utter one of the most manifestly ridiculous lines to tumble forth from the lips of a U.S. president not named Jimmy Carter: 'It's easier for a teenager to get his hands on a Glock than a computer  or even a book.'

No, it isn't. Not at all. That is a laughable lie.

But the president said it, and at a funeral no less.

When we talk about healing racial divisions, the difference between liberals and conservatives is really a difference between culture and politics. Liberals have long looked to government to ensure not only equality of opportunity but also equality of outcome. Conservatives believe that equality of outcome is incompatible with freedom.

Obviously not everyone 'lived happily ever after' after Congress passed landmark civil rights legislation more than half a century ago. But it isn't 1965 anymore. There's always going to be work to do.

'I've seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change,' Obama said in Dallas this week. 'I've seen how inadequate my own words have been.'

Then maybe it's time to give the divisive language a rest and meet the people where they are.

Ben Boychuk is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Joel Mathis is associate editor for Philadelphia Magazine. Email them at bboychuk@city-journal.org and joelmmathis@gmail.com.
As a criminal justice professor, in my Introduction to Criminal Justice classes, I have always taught my students if you have a bad experience with a police officer, don't argue or put up a fight. Having an argument with an officer alongside the road solves nothing and changes nothing. But complain, hire an attorney, protest, sue, videotape those 'rogue' officers and bring their unacceptable behavior to light.

Abuse of police power should not be tolerated, by the public or by their department.

I always have taught my college students to respect law enforcement, whether they were hoping to become law enforcement officers or are just taking a class wanting more knowledge about some aspect of the criminal justice system. Many lively discussions have ensued in my Police Ethics classes with students (some of whom are police officers) discussing potential ethical scenarios.

I firmly believe in our justice system. I'm not saying it's infallible, but I do believe it works. Shooting those who literally give their lives to protect and serve is not acceptable. Period. Ever. No excuse. As a nation we need to support those who protect us.

No one is above the law or should take the law into their hands. And, this is not a time to discuss gun control issues. Shooting the actors in the system does not fix the problems; it only causes more problems, and leaves our society in chaos.

And yes, I am viewing this situation professionally but also on a personal level.

So, please, don't assassinate my husband. In return, my husband will remain respectful, ethical and polite even when you cuss him out, spit on him and threaten your kids with him. But, who, along with his fellow officers will give his life for you?

As a deputy's wife, I take the assassinations in Dallas personally. As a criminal justice professor, I believe the whole situation was exacerbated by poor communication to the public by the police departments with officers under investigation. I firmly believe all our officers should be the best of the best and all law enforcement should be held to a high standard. All law enforcement departments need to hire not only the best, but deal with problem officers immediately and as publicly as possible so people feel their trust is well-placed.

At one point, I started to change my Facebook page to blue in support of Blue Lives Matter. But, then I thought about it and decided against it. All lives matter. It is not supposed to be we vs. them. All law enforcement officers work for and with the people. They exist to uphold the laws we all vote for. The 'thin blue line' needs to be cut.

The mentality of we vs. them is one of the problems. Law enforcement officers are here to protect and serve everyone. We all need to work together to protect our constitutional rights and laws.

My husband is a Taylor County deputy. His life matters, as does yours.

Lydia M. Long, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of criminal justice at McMurry University.
GRAFTON  Increased safety measures are now in place at two dozen intersections in Worth County, including one where two women were killed last month.

Worth County Engineer Richard Brumm said rumble strips are now in place at all hard-surface roads with stop signs. Twenty-four sets of strips were added in the past two weeks.

In addition, flashing LED lights were added to the stop signs at 390th Street and Thrush Avenue.

That intersection about three miles west of Grafton has been the site of multiple crashes in recent years. Often, those crashes involved vehicles running the stop signs on Thrush, a north-south road.

On June 24, a northbound car carrying Lahoma Counts, 86, of Mason City, and Evelyn Mallo, 85, of Clear Lake, ran the stop sign, hit another vehicle and then caught fire in the ditch.

Counts and Mallo were killed. The driver of the other car, Sam Bergan, 18, of Hanlontown, was treated at a local hospital.

His father, Larry Bergan, says his sons injuries include a fractured L1 vertebrae in his lower back, abrasion on his lung and fluid in his abdomen

Several residents, including Larry Bergan, criticized the board for not acting fast enough to make safety improvements at the intersection.

Officials disputed that characterization, saying theyd been discussing the updates since Supervisor Merlin Bartz brought it up at the May 16 meeting.

We had decided to do that long before they came to the meeting and before those two ladies were killed, said Board Chairman Dave Haugen.

Before ordering the work, the board asked Brumm to come up with a list of other locations that also needed rumble strips so the work could be done cheaper and more efficiently.

Ultimately, they settled on putting strips at 24 intersections.

Signs warning cross traffic does not stop arrived in the days after the June 24 crash. The quote for the work was delivered to the board at the June 27 meeting.

The last LED lights were installed last week.
Since the May defeat of Samuel Garcia in his fourth bid to serve on the Abilene ISD Board of Trustees, an effort has been initiated to consider single-member districts to elect AISD representatives. Three residents spoke during public comment at a June meeting. The board has promised to look further into the idea.

The idea of single-member districts is not a new one in Abilene.

The timing, however, is right to talk about it again. Two local boards show little of the city's diversity.

All seven members of the City Council are male, and six are white.

There is not a minority member of the Abilene ISD board, though the largest student group in the district now is Hispanic (43 percent).

There are two women among the 14 in this group. The city's male-to-female ratio is about equal.

Factor in our five Taylor County leaders  county judge and four commissioners  and we have one minority man and two white women among 19 members of three leadership groups.

That is not much diversity.

City Council eligibility for six seats is split north side/south side (the Texas & Pacific tracks), but all residents vote for each place. All school district residents vote for all seven seats on the board of trustees.

Only nine minority members have served on the City Council since Joe Alcorta, a Hardin-Simmons University Spanish professor was elected in 1972. Others are Leo Scott, Versie Brown and Anthony Williams (African-Americans), and Liz Herrera, Juan 'Carlos' Rodriguez, Paul Vasquez, Carol Martinez and Victor Carrillo (Hispanics).

On the positive side, a minority has held the Place 3 seat since 1996  Martinez, Carillo and, presently, Williams, since 2001.

Only five have served on the AISD board the past 30 years They are Rodriguez and Samuel Garcia (Hispanics), Elmer Wright, Val Brailsford and Kelvin Kelley (African-Americans). Kelley was appointed.

We believe, at the very least, that serious discussion is justified. And now.

One idea floated is to start with the City Council, which already has three north-side and three south-side seats.

We believe, however, that we should start with the school district. There is more urgency.

Before we go further, let's be clear. A potential change in how our representatives are chosen is not an indictment against those who have or currently are serving. For the most part, our elected leaders have been capable.

But our representatives have too much in common  specifically race, where they live and church and university affiliations.

This is about doing the right thing, and the right thing is make sure there is equal access to a seat at the table.

If the single-member district approach is taken  and it can be as easy as a school board decision to go this route, the district would be divided into areas of roughly equal populations, yet not by carving up recognizable ethnic areas. That would accomplish nothing.

An outside firm would have to be hired to ensure expertise and objectivity.

At a minimum by law, the Abilene ISD would need five districts. It also could be six, or seven but not fewer than five.

We would prefer five district-elected and two at-large members on the school board.

As of June, there were 53,444 eligible voters in the Abilene ISD. Obviously, the number eligible voters within a district would vary since population would determine boundaries.

Selling points for single-member districts, however, are the greater chance of a minority being elected and an unrepresented area of the city gaining a voice.

Would single-member districts ensure diversity? No. The Taylor County Commissioners Court is divided into four precincts, yet each member is a white male.

It still would be up to people to run for a seat on the school board, prove to voters that he/she is the best person for the job and then the public to vote.

Would single-member districts ensure a happily-ever-after? Absolutely not.

The public has great responsibility in this process. In fact, it may be a greater role than it is today. The people have to follow through given an opportunity. The door only is opened.

However, seeing someone who lives down the street or someone who looks like they do sitting on the school board may encourage minorities to seek election and residents to vote. We hear 'it won't matter anyway' too many times.

What better model for our youngsters, to see someone like them in a leadership position.

We understand, too, that community is harder to define these days. Your 'community' could be single dads or moms with youngsters who communicate via social media, membership in an organization, school group or church, political affiliation or a fondness for food truck dining. Do we even know our neighbors a few houses or apartments down?

Would a single-member district plan further fragment us? Not if the members work together for the good of the entire school district by making sure decisions are reached with the understanding of how everyone would be affected.

Five, six or seven people from different areas of the city could find it difficult to come to agreement. It could take time to understand the importance of compromise and learn the art of listening. Still, we see that as an exercise in working for the greater good  something that seems to be sorely missing in our country today.

Are we being too idealistic? Perhaps, but representative democracy is our goal.

Would single-members district hurt the Abilene ISD by chasing more people into alternative education (private or charter schools, home schooling) or out of the city limits? A historic term for that is 'white flight.' That's a byproduct of change we don't want, but it's one that we already may have.

We can take the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' stance here. Our current system may not be broken but, frankly, it's wearing out and fast. Our district is changing each year but we're electing representatives the same way we did decades ago.

Superintendent David Young, an AISD graduate who came back to Abilene from the Pampa ISD, whose board members are at-large electees, has spent his first year in part tweaking the school district's hired leadership to best fit the needs of the AISD today.

We believe the single-member district concept better fits today's needs from the public side.

Let's take advantage of this opportunity to make Abilene more inclusive.
Today in history: On July 17, 1938, Douglas Corrigan flies from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn to Dublin in a 1929 Curtiss Robin aircraft. He had flown it there from California. He was denied permission to fly over the Atlantic, as Charles Lindbergh had done 11 years earlier. He took off for the West Coast, then turned 180 degrees and disappeared into the clouds. Twenty-eight hours later, he landed in Dublin, saying, 'Just got in from New York. Where am I?' He was dubbed 'Wrong Way' Corrigan.
YEREVAN -- Gunmen affiliated with an Armenian opposition group have freed three of seven hostages at an occupied Yerevan police station as a standoff with security forces enters a second day.

The occupation started when at least a dozen gunmen stormed the station in the citys southern Erebuni district at dawn on July 17, killing one police officer and wounding six other people.

The gunmen are demanding the release of Zhirayr Sefilian, the leader of the Founding Parliament opposition movement, who was arrested last month for allegedly plotting an armed revolt.

They also want President Serzh Sarkisian to step down.

The hostage takers and the police officers they are holding have reportedly been supplied with food and medication.

Earlier, a first deputy chief of the Armenian national police force, General Hunan Poghosian, told reporters that those still being held include two senior police commanders.

Their releases were part of ongoing negotiations, the National Security Service (NSS) said in a statement.

The officer killed during the storming of the station was named as a police colonel, Artur Vanoyan.

The Armenian Health Ministry on July 18 raised the casualty figure from four to six injured.

Aravot.am reported that one of the gunmen told the website by telephone that the group had freed the first two hostages at Sefilian's request, relayed to them by another Founding Parliament member who was allowed to visit them late on July 17.

But he added that negotiations would continue for the time being.

Varuzhan Avetisian, a spokesman for Founding Parliament, announced that "they are starting a rebellion" and an attempt to overthrow the government while also trying to secure the "release of political prisoners."

The group has released a video on Facebook calling on Armenian citizens to take to the streets against the government.

The Facebook video showed several men in flak jackets and armed with Kalashnikovs as well as several hostages being held inside the police building.

"We are doing this for you. People, take to the streets!" one of the gunmen said in the video while also calling for the release of all political prisoners."

WATCH: Armed Attackers Storm Yerevan Police Headquarters

The gunmen's call for public unrest reportedly has met with silence.

Police have cordoned off the area near the police station, with armored vehicles blocking off the road to the police station.

The law-enforcement agencies fully control the situation and are taking all necessary measures to resolve it, the NSS said in a statement.

President Serzh Sarkisian held consultations with security officials to decide how best to handle the situation, his office said, saying he had been told that the siege was completely under control.

Residents of nearby apartment buildings said they heard several explosions early in the morning and gunshots were also reported afterwards.

Meanwhile, opposition lawmaker and outspoken government critic Nikol Pashinian visited the police station and spoke with the attackers twice during the night.

Pashinian, the leader of the newly established Civic Agreement opposition party, said one of the attackers inside the police station had a serious head wound.

He also said a policeman, who was feeling unwell, was released by the hostage-takers.



The Founding Parliament group frequently stages street protests in Yerevan demanding Sarkisian's resignation.

The group is particularly critical of the way the government has been handling a long-running conflict in Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Sefilian and six of his supporters were arrested on June 20 after the authorities initially said they were preparing a plot to seize several government buildings and telecommunication facilities in Yerevan.

He was formally charged with illegal acquisition and possession of weapons. Sefilian says the case against him is politically motivated.

Just days before his arrest, Sefilian announced plans to set up a new opposition movement called the National Resistance Committee. He said the new movement would try to topple the government with the help of the people and the army.

Sefilian was arrested in 2006 over calls for "a violent overthrow of the government."

He was released in 2008.

In 2015, Sefilian was arrested again along with several of his supporters on suspicion of preparing a coup, but released shortly afterwards.

With reporting by AFP and AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin says the world faces the most dangerous decade since World War II and predicted that the historical period of the West's "undivided dominance over world affairs" is coming to an end.

Speaking on October 27 at a conference of international policy experts in Moscow, Putin said the decade ahead is "probably the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important...since the end of World War II."

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.

Putin laid the blame for the situation at the feet of Western countries, which he said have cast aside the norms of international affairs in order to maintain dominance and hold down countries they see as "second-class civilizations."

The Russian leader also said he had no regrets about sending troops into Ukraine and sought to explain the conflict as part of the efforts by Western countries to secure their global domination.

Putin claimed in his speech to the Valdai Discussion Club, a think tank, that the West had helped incite the conflict and also seeks to stoke a crisis over Taiwan in an attempt to enforce global dominance.

Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, triggering the biggest military conflict in Europe since World War II and driving relations with Western countries that back Ukraine and its drive to be part of the European Union and NATO to their lowest depths since the Cold War.

Putin cast the conflict in Ukraine as a battle between the West and Russia for the fate of the second-largest Eastern Slav country. It is partly a "civil war," he said, as Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kyiv has flatly rejected both of those ideas.

The goal of what Russia refers to as a "special military operation" is to take the eastern Donbas region, Putin said, adding that in his view the region would "not have survived" on its own had Russia not intervened militarily in Ukraine.

WATCH: A local official told Russian conscripts "You are not cannon fodder" in a video published online recently. The men responded by angrily shouting that, actually, that's exactly what they are.

But the war has gone far beyond the Donbas region, with Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, and other nonmilitary structures, killing tens of thousands of Ukrainians across the country.

Putin used the speech largely to rail against the West, saying it has nothing to offer to the world "except its own domination," and the goal of globalization "is neocolonialism to dominate the world." He said Russia is only trying to defend its right to exist in the face these Western efforts.

Putin also asserted that more and more nations refuse to follow Washington's demands and Russia will never accept the West's attempts to dominate the world.

Citing gay pride parades and the acceptance of transgender people in Western countries, Putin also defended "traditional values" and said "nobody can dictate to our people how to develop and what society we should build."

He also said Russia has never considered the West an enemy and has many things in common with it but will continue to oppose the diktat of Western neoliberal elites.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Putin's speech presented no new ideas.

"We don't believe that Mr. Putin's strategic goals have changed here. He doesn't want Ukraine to exist as a sovereign, independent nation state," Kirby said.

Answering questions from journalists after his speech, Putin reiterated the Kremlin's assertion that Ukraine plans to use a so-called dirty bomb on its own territory. The claim has been dismissed as false by Ukraine and its allies, who say Russia may have raised the matter because it plans to use such a bomb in Ukraine as a pretext for escalation.

"It was me who ordered [Defense Minister Sergei] Shoigu to inform by phone all his colleagues about it," Putin said, adding that Russia does not need to use dirty bombs in Ukraine.

Putin also said he supported plans by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit Ukraine's nuclear power plants for inspections.

"It must be done as soon and as openly as possible because we know that Kyiv authorities are now working to cover up such [dirty-bomb attack] preparations," Putin said, without giving any exact information proving the claim.

Ukraine invited IAEA inspectors to visit its nuclear facilities after the Kremlin made its unsubstantiated claim about the preparation of a dirty bomb -- which would use the explosion of a conventional warhead to spread radioactive material or chemicals over a wide area.

Ukraine said it would welcome inspections because it had "nothing to hide."

According to Putin, Russia has never talked about the use of nuclear weapons in the war with Ukraine despite his own promise to defend Russian territory with any means at our disposal" and saying his words were "not a bluff."

"We see no need for [using nuclear weapons in Ukraine]," Putin told reporters. "There is no sense for that, neither political, nor military."
Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek has long been considered one of the most influential leftist intellectuals alive today. Foreign Policy magazine ranked him among the top 100 global thinkers in 2012. His fiery rhetoric and forthright Hegelian Marxism have also attracted controversy, prompting some to call him the most dangerous philosopher in the West. He recently published a book on the migrant crisis and Europes current existential dilemmas, titled Against The Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror, And Other Troubles With The Neighbors.

In an interview in his native Ljubljana last month with Red Zone, a program produced jointly by RFE/RLs Georgian Service and Georgian public television, Zizek outlined his views about the current ideological state of left-leaning parties in the West, the connection between democracy and the market economy, and the refugee crisis that saw more than 1 million people arrive in Europe last year.

Here are selected excerpts from the interview:



On the perceived failure of the Western political left to offer an alternative solution to economic and political crises



Slavoj Zizek: This is the great failure of the left today, even when capitalism obviously is more and more in some kind of a crisis. I mean, I remember [that] all the time, when I was young, when welfare state capitalism -- at least in Western Europe and the United States -- was functioning relatively well, the left was saying, you know, wait a minute, there will be crises, we should just, like Lenin in Switzerland, wait and prepare.

OK, then there was a crisis. And what happened? Nothing. The left was not able to offer not even a minimal serious proposal.



On what Zizek describes as an emerging authoritarian alternative to a market economy based on democratic political values



Zizek: Democratic capitalism is in crisis and we are slowly approaching an alternative -- what is poetically called "capitalism with Asian values," which has nothing to do with Asia but is a more authoritarian one. And again, it's not just China or Singapore -- it's Russia, it's Turkey. Even in places where democracy is still formally alive, it's becoming more and more irrelevant as we see with this TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership -- a proposed trade agreement between the European Union and the United States) and other commercial agreements, which are incredibly important. They set the frame for what governments can do, but without any democratic consultation -- they're half-secret, and so on.



On the situation with migrants and refugees, and the role of countries in the Middle East



Zizek: Wait a minute -- there are, just beneath the crisis region, south of Syria and Iraq, [countries like] Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, [the United Arab] Emirates... Extremely rich Arab countries, [and] they simply don't accept any refugees, although they are mostly [Muslim] Sunnis, religiously speaking the same language and so on. So it is as if Europe nonetheless accepted millions of them, and now we are guilty for not accepting even more of them. There is a certain -- totally catastrophic -- game going on here.



On the European lefts response to the migrant crisis



Zizek: Big capital is always politically correct, open, multicultural, and so on. And what I'm fighting for is...of course, I don't in any way support racism and so on, but obviously, this work of just attacking ordinary people, [calling them] racists and so on, this obviously is extremely counterproductive. Leftists who play this game, they're doing it for its extremely narcissistic economy. They want to feel well, you know, oh my God... [they are saying] I'm the only pure one, look, the countries falling apart into madness, but I am...No. What did you do? You are part of this madness and so on.
WASHINGTON -- The hoots and jeers began the minute the movie ended and the lights went up on the seventh floor of the Newseum, a Washington museum dedicated to the free press. The film was a semifictionalized look at the story of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who helped to uncover a massive tax fraud and later died in a Moscow jail.

In the front of the room, a handful of Russian opposition activists shouted, Shame! at the director. In the back, out of the spotlight, was the events organizer -- a fast-talking, nattily dressed man in a dark blue, double-breasted suit standing at a small table, sipping bottled water and quietly watching the commotion.

The June 13 showing was the film's premiere. Other screenings had been canceled in Europe following protests by critics who say it is a crude attempt to smear Magnitsky's name and that of the Western financier who employed him, William Browder.

That it was shown at all was a small coup for Rinat Akhmetshin, the man at the back of the room who for nearly 20 years has worked the shadowy corners of the Washington lobbying scene on behalf of businessmen and politicians from around the former Soviet Union.

"I call him skilled because -- though I am certain that they exist -- I know of no Russian gun-for-hire who managed to run his campaigns so successfully, running circles around purportedly much more seasoned Washington hands, says Steve LeVine, a veteran Washington reporter who explored some of Akhmetshins past work in his 2007 book The Oil And The Glory.

Barely registering in U.S. lobbying records, the 48-year-old Akhmetshin has been tied to efforts to bolster opponents of Kazakhstan's ruling regime, discredit a fugitive former member of Russia's parliament, and undermine a Russian-owned mining firm involved in a billion-dollar lawsuit with company information allegedly stolen by hackers.

But his most recent campaign has a qualitatively new dimension, thrusting him to the center of an issue that helped send U.S.-Russia relations to lows unseen since the Cold War: Magnitskys death in 2009, the alleged persecution by Russian officials he blew the whistle on, and the eponymous U.S. law that punished alleged Russian rights abusers and infuriated the Kremlin.

You undermine Browder, you undermine Magnitsky. You undermine Magnitsky, you undermine the sanctions, says one U.S. government official who has followed the Magnitsky saga closely but wasnt authorized to speak publicly on it. Then you undermine the entire sanctions regime.

The Paper Trail

A bespectacled 48-year-old who holds dual Russian-American citizenship and is known to ride around downtown Washington on a retro orange bicycle, Akhmetshin has managed to fly largely under the radar in past campaigns. There are only a handful of records in the congressional lobbying database bearing his imprint.

But a small paper trail in U.S. court records offers an illustrative sampling of his work.

In 1998, he founded the Washington office of an organization called the International Eurasian Institute for Economic and Political Research to help expand democracy and the rule of law in Eurasia.



His earliest clients included members of Kazakhstans opposition, who were angling against the longtime rule of President Nursultan Nazarbaev and his ruling elite. Years later, he ended up in a public-relations effort to undermine a former Nazarbaev son-in-law before he fell out with the regime and fled the country.

In 2011, Akhmetshin was accused of helping to organize a smear campaign against former Russian Duma deputy Ashot Egiazaryan, who had sought political asylum in the United States in the face of criminal charges in Russia related to a business dispute.

A lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in Manhattan charged that the campaign sought to persuade U.S. officials to revoke Egiazaryan's asylum status and force him to return to Russia, where he was involved in a heated dispute with a billionaire businessman over a Moscow hotel project.

Akhmetshin was not the target of the defamation lawsuit, but in court filings, lawyers allege he was enlisted, along with another Washington public-relations company and private investigators, to help publish articles in a Jewish newspaper accusing the deputy of anti-Semitism.

He also fought to keep his e-mails and computer files from being released to opposing lawyers.

Some of my clients are national governments or high-ranking officials in those governments, Akhmetshin said in an affidavit in August 2012. My government clients have highly sensitive discussions in my e-mails concerning the location or relocation of American military bases in areas within the former Soviet Union.

More recently, Akhmetshin was caught up in a particularly nasty $1 billion legal fight concerning a potash-mining operation in central Russia. While a Dutch court was the main venue, the dispute spilled into U.S. courts when lawyers for one of the companies accused their counterparts of organizing a scheme to hack their computers and other communications.

The man who masterminded the scheme was Akhmetshin, according to a suit filed in November in New York state court that also accused him of being a former Soviet military intelligence officer who "developed a special expertise in running negative public-relations campaigns."

In a related filing in federal district court in Washington, where lawyers sought to force him to turn over records and e-mails, Akhmetshin confirmed he was helping in an advisory capacity but denied the hacking allegations.

He also revealed his compensation rates. He said he was paid $45,000 up front; in a later declaration, he stated his normal billing rate was $450 an hour.

In an e-mail response to RFE/RL, Akhmetshin denied that he ever worked for Soviet military intelligence, something he would have had to declare when he applied for U.S. citizenship.

I am an American citizen since 2009 who pays taxes, earned his citizenship after living here since 1994, and swore an oath of loyalty to the United States of America, he wrote.

Russian Children, American Adoptions

Congressional lobbying records list other clients for Akhmetshin -- for example, the Azeri Democracy Initiative Foundation, registered in 2006 and 2007.

The newest client, called the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation, was incorporated in Delaware in February and registered in lobbying records on April 3. But the initial entry was signed by Akhmetshin only two months later, on June 11, something that experts in lobbying laws and disclosures describe as unusual.

Its address is  shared co-working space on the fifth floor of a downtown Washington office building, just a few floors down from Baker Hostetler, a major U.S. law firm that represented the defendant in the Egiazaryan lawsuit.



Baker Hostetler is also the lead firm defending an offshore company called Prevezon that U.S. prosecutors have alleged received some of the $230 million in errant funds that Magnitsky uncovered. Prosecutors are trying to seize millions of dollars in assets in the United States and elsewhere, a case that is currently on appeal on a technical question.

Records list Akhmetshin as the lead lobbyist for the foundation, along with another man named Robert Arakelian, who could not be located for comment.

The disclosure form indicates no sources of foreign funding for the foundation. Nor does it indicate the issues the foundation intends to lobby on.



In fact, the only indication of its purpose comes from a related, largely unfinished website that states its main goal is to to help restart American adoption of Russian children. That is a reference to the Russian adoption ban the Kremlin pushed immediately following the adoption of the Magnitsky Act in 2012.

Akhmetshin has paid at least one visit to Congress in connection with new human rights legislation that builds on the earlier Magnitsky Act. Along with Ron Dellums, a former U.S. congressman from California and longtime Washington lobbyist, Akhmetshin visited House member offices on May 17 to meet with Dana Rohrabacher, another California congressman viewed as one of the most sympathetic U.S. officials to Russian causes.

According to The Daily Beast, the two told congressional officials said they were lobbying on behalf of Prevezon. But Dellums told RFE/RL that his involvement focused on resuming Russian adoptions by U.S. parents.



I dont know anything about the other stuff -- Prevezon or anything else, Dellums said.

Moscow, meanwhile, has made no secret of its desire to undermine the Magnitsky Act and has waged open war against Browder as part of that effort. Browder had been barred entry in Russia even before Magnitskys death, and in 2013 he was convicted in absentia by a Russian court for tax evasion. Magnitsky was posthumously convicted on similar charges. A Council of Europe investigation concluded the conditions leading up to his death amounted to torture.

State-run Russian TV has aired investigations about Browder and the countrys top prosecutor has linked Browder to an investigative documentary exploring the shady business practices of the prosecutors sons.

But the most potent weapon to date may be the film that premiered at the Newseum, by Russian-born filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, whose previous films were critical of the Kremlin.

In the film, called The Magnitsky Act: Behind The Scenes, Nekrasov uses actors to reenact Magnitsky's arrest and death in a notorious prison. He then professes to find discrepancies in the narrative, ultimately suggesting that in fact it was Browder who masterminded the original tax fraud and that Browder lied about the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's death.

Browder, who is American-born but now lives in Britain, has aggressively fought to keep the film from being shown anywhere; a Norwegian film festival pulled the film after legal threats from Browder. A screening in April at the European Parliament was canceled after protests from Magnitsky relatives and a German lawmaker.



Browder, who had appealed to the Newseum not to show the film, charged that the screening was a part of an intense lobbying campaign to remove Magnitskys name from the new legislation before Congress.

The Putin regime has embarked on a very ambitious and well-resourced international campaign to discredit me and Sergei Magnitsky in order to try to repeal the Magnitsky Act, Browder told RFE/RL. They work through their embassies, law-enforcement agencies, as well as through private individuals with strong government connections.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington called Browders allegations precarious and unfounded.

The Screening



The June 13 event featured an open-bar reception beforehand and, in a notable choice for such a controversial event, traditional movie snacks -- popcorn, chocolate-covered caramels, and bottled water.



Invitees to the screening received notice via e-mail that included a disclaimer suggestive of a lobbying effort: This event complies with congressional gift rules so that Members and staff of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives may attend. A handful of congressional staffers did attend, along with at least one State Department official.

Who exactly is funding the films production, promotion, or the ongoing lobbying effort isn't entirely clear. Nekrasov has said the film is financed through grants from arts and film councils in Norway, where hes partnered with a production company.

Nekrasov told RFE/RL he had originally planned to pay for the June 13 screening -- which the Newseum said cost at least $12,500 -- himself, but the bill did not materialize and already in D.C. I was told it'd been taken care of.

Akhmetshin, meanwhile, told RFE/RL in an e-mail on June 29 that he didnt pay for the event but rather that Potomac Square Group, a Washington public-relations company that in the past had circulated news articles critical of Browder to reporters, did.

Potomac Square Group was working on my instructions to pay for the event, and I understand that my client Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation will reimburse PSG for the expense, Akhmetshin said.

Chris Cooper, one of Potomac Square Groups principals, confirmed his company had been compensated by the foundation.

Akhmetshin said the foundation had no connection to Nekrasov, has given Nekrasov no money, and that no funding or direction for the foundation comes from the Russian government at any level or its officials. That would trigger reporting requirements under federal lobbying laws.

He also said the foundations stated goal -- to resume Russian adoptions by American parents -- can be best obtained by Congress revisiting the Magnitsky Act and, in particular, its name.



That's an issue not reflected anywhere in the lobbying disclosure records. In the meantime, revisiting, or even watering down, the Magnitsky Act would directly benefit another client of Akhmetshins who is also not listed on these or other lobbying forms: Prevezon.

Prevezon and the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation overlap in another way. In an e-mail sent in April to a Warsaw-based NGO that was hosting a speech by Browder, Russian Natalia Veselnitskaya identified herself as a lawyer working on behalf of the foundation and sought permission to attend, according to officials with the NGO, called the Open Dialog Foundation. Veselnitskaya is also a lawyer for Prevezon.

Akhmetshin did not respond to follow-up e-mail queries on whether Prevezon was the funding source for the foundation.

The day after the screening, Nekrasov and his film crew watched in person as a House committee voted to pass the updated Magnitsky legislation. And they met with Rohrabacher.

Movies And Motorcycles



At the end of the screening of the nearly two-hour film, organizers planned a discussion moderated by Seymour Hersh, the renowned U.S. investigative journalist known for blockbuster scoops. The taunts from opposition activists eventually gave way to a brief question-and-answer session that mainly featured audience members criticizing Nekrasov.

Before the screening, Hersh explained to RFE/RL that he had seen the film a few months prior at Akhmetshins behest and was intrigued enough by it that he agreed to host the discussion free of charge.

Hersh said he knew Akhmetshin through mutual acquaintances. He said he had allowed Akhmetshin to park a couple of antique motorcycles in the driveway of his Washington-area home -- motorcycles he said Akhmetshin had bought thinking they dated from World War II but in fact were of German manufacture and had been painted over to look like Soviet motorcycles. Akhmetshin confirmed he had a motorcycle parked at Hershs house.

At the conclusion of the June 13 event, as the discussion turned loud and rowdy, Hersh tried to get in a final word.

This is the new truth, he said.
WODEN  Bruce and Robin Wubben sat at a table on the bar side of Wubbens Bar and Grill.

They didnt get up to help any customers. Or cook a hamburger in the kitchen. The phone rang once, but it wasnt a customer calling to order a meal to go.

Instead, the Wubbens sat and relaxed after running the bar and grill for a little over 12 years. They closed the business on July 2.

Still, Robin said they had a few customers poke their head in the door and ask if they were closed.

A majority of their customers made their way into the restaurant during its last week.

The Wubbens served more than 1,000 meals. Normally, they serve closer to 600.

Everybody and anybody. People we hadnt seen in forever came in for one last meal at Wubbens, Robin said.

Those customers are what she will miss most.

Its been fun. We love this place, Robin said.

So much so, she said, that it had become their home.

Our grandkids think we live here, Bruce said. Only four of their grandkids have ever been out to their farm.

When we see them, theyre here, Robin said.

When we take our naps in the back, they think we sleep here, Bruce said of their recliners in the back room.

Those naps, Robin said, helped to keep them going through 15-hour days.

The restaurant opened at 7 a.m. The Wubbens served breakfast and lunch, then had a short break before preparation for the dinner service began.

It wears you down, Robin said.

The Wubbens three daughters could see just how worn down they were.

Theyre mainly the ones to push us to close, Robin said.

Now, Bruce and Robin said they will have more time to relax and see their grandkids.

They will also be going back to work. Just not for 15 hours a day.

Now were looking forward to a normal life and a 40-hour-a-week job, Robin said.

Still, they will miss the restaurant.

Our customers are great. Thats what kept us going, Robin said.

Those customers will miss the Wubbens as well.

Very much so, Kim Peterson said after walking out of the restaurant for the last time on June 29.

Peterson, the pastor for St. Johns, Immanuel and Good Hope Lutheran churches, was at the restaurant with other area Lutheran pastors.

The weekly meal at Wubbens followed Bible study at St. Johns every Wednesday.

Everyone likes coming here. Theyre always friendly and have good food, Geoffrey White, the pastor at Kanawha Lutheran Church, said.

I dont know what were going to do now, Peterson said. Were going to miss it.

Robin said the bar and grill is for sale.

I have mixed feelings. I love what I do. I love this town, but I cant do it anymore, she said.
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For the second campaign-finance reporting period in a row, Levar Stoney far outraised his opponents in the Richmond mayoral race, reporting a fundraising haul in June of $113,060.

Stoney, a longtime aide to Gov. Terry McAuliffe and his former secretary of the commonwealth, also has already spent twice as much as any of his opponents, reporting $103,600 in expenses so far. The bulk of that covered the cost of staff members and consultants, according to data compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project.

City Councilman Jonathan T. Baliles reported the second-highest fundraising total in June, with $53,852 in donations.

Following Baliles were former Venture Richmond Director Jack Berry, $51,372; former Councilman Bruce W. Tyler, $40,125; and former Del. Joe Morrissey, $30,488.

Coming in at the bottom end were Richmond City Council President Michelle R. Mosby, who reported raising $4,996; Bobby J. BJ Junes, who reported raising $100; and Lawrence Williams, who did not report raising any money for his campaign.

On Saturday, four of the candidates attended the Rosedale Community Yard Sale and Anthem LemonAid event.

Stoney, Berry, Tyler and Mosby mingled with attendees, explaining their platforms and answering questions.

The event, held at Christ Ascension Episcopal Church on Laburnum Avenue, also was attended by several other candidates for local office.
More than a week after officials at Luther Memorial School abruptly announced it was closing because of funding problems, many associated with the 160-year-old private Christian school on Richmonds North Side are still reeling.

Parents are wondering where they are going to send their children for the upcoming school year. Teachers are trying to figure out where they will work. Students are dealing with leaving friends behind. And alumni are struggling with the fact that a touchstone in their lives is disappearing.

And most everyone wants to know what happened and whether the school will ever come back.

I cant fathom it closing after 160 years, Marie Buff, a kindergarten teacher at Luther Memorial from 1988 through 1997 who remained active after leaving, said last week. Theres got to be an opportunity to keep it going. I dont know what that is at this point.

Answers to the most pressing questions have not been forthcoming as the board of the schools foundation deals with the fallout of its July 8 decision and works to find new schools for teachers and students.

Among the questions being posed by those with ties to the school are: When did the board realize there was a financial problem? Why werent teachers and parents given advance notice that closing the school might be a possibility? Why did the board not solicit donations to save the school?

David Voss, president of the schools foundation, did not respond to a request for an interview last week or a list of emailed questions.

Blair Grigg, Luthers principal, was not available for comment Thursday because she is no longer employed at the school, though the board had told parents her last day would be Friday.

Another lingering question: What will happen to the school property on Robin Hood Road in Richmond, and could Virginia Commonwealth University be interested in buying it?

The school sits directly behind Childrens Hospital of Richmond at VCUs Brook Road campus, and the playground is just a few feet from construction on a major expansion project.

VCU spokeswoman Shira Cantor said last week that potential real estate matters are not something we can really speculate or comment on.

Despite the uncertainty, parents and alumni believe that board members did what they believed was right and are doing all they can to help those most affected by their decision.

A common refrain is Theyre probably feeling worse about this than I am.

I would really hate to second-guess because I didnt have access to all the information they had, Stacy Sirois, president of Luther Memorials Parent Teacher League, said last week. So I guess, to some degree, I just have to trust that they made the best decision they could based on the circumstances.

***

According to a timeline of events detailed in a letter Voss sent to parents July 8, the board was notified July 5 that Grigg was resigning, along with Deane Collie, the assistant head of the school.

On July 6, the foundations board met to review the resignation letters, plan its next step, and assess the financial health of the school as well as projected enrollment numbers for the 2016-17 school year. The school has not said how many students were enrolled this past school year, but several parents estimate it was about 130, down from more than 200 several years ago.

On July 7, a sub-team of the foundations board met to consider several models that would make it possible for Luther Memorial to open for the coming school year.

That team came up with some ideas, including drastically cutting costs and reducing the number of classes. The findings were presented to the full foundation board the morning of July 8.

But seeing that the money wasnt there to guarantee that Luther Memorial would survive the entire year, the board voted July 8 to close the school.

***

The decision has sent Sirois and other parents scrambling less than two months before classes were set to begin.

Sirois, who lives in Hanover County, said last week that the parents group was not given a warning on the schools closing and that members found out in the email sent the evening of July 8.

The decision, she said, left her sad and shocked. Her two children, 9-year-old Clara and 7-year-old Louisa, are upset but resilient, she said.

But with about six weeks to go before school starts, Sirois focus is on finding where shell send them to school next year. Shes thinking about home-schooling for a year to have more time to better plan the next step.

One major consideration for parents is deciding what school environment their child is best suited for. That means choosing between public school or a private school that fits with their personal philosophies.

Parents who choose to stick with a private school may have a problem.

An important tool for sending students to private school is scholarships that help offset the cost. But parents say that given how close the start of school is, most private schools have already exhausted their scholarship pool.

The schools 20 or so teachers face big challenges as well.

Most public school districts have already set their rosters for the next school year and, barring any surprise resignations, arent likely to have teacher jobs available right now.

Roxanne Buff, Maries daughter, taught kindergarten and worked in admissions at Luther Memorial from 1988 to 1992. She left the position to take a job in the Goochland County school system and now teaches kindergarten at Springfield Park Elementary in Henrico County.

Roxanne Buff said that for teachers who find work in public schools, making the transition from a Christian school will be tough for a number of reasons. Those include avoiding issues of religion that may come up and being in a much bigger environment.

You walked in there and you knew this place was more than a school, she said. Yes, they gave them academics. Yes, they gave them the religion. But there was a caring environment down at Luther. You knew the people you worked with, the kids that went there, the families that went there. It was special.

***

Special is a word used over and over again to describe Luther Memorial. So is institution.

Luther Memorial was founded in 1856 by Bethlehem Lutheran Church as its day school on Sixth Street near Clay  now part of the Richmond Coliseum area. At the time, classes were held four days a week, and monthly tuition cost 50 cents for members and $1 for nonmembers.

In 1924, the school was moved to Grace and Ryland streets, the current location of Bethlehem Lutheran, where it operated in two rooms. Luther Memorial eventually grew to include three rooms on the main floor of the parish house of the church, whose membership has been an active force in the school over its history.

In 1956, the school purchased land at Robin Hood Road and Brookland Parkway, where it has operated until now. The current lower-school building opened in 1962 and the upper-school building in 1968.

In about 2007, the school separated from Bethlehem and became an independent recognized service organization by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to be operated under the auspices of local Lutheran churches.

Throughout its long history, the school has served as a linchpin for generations of students and their families.

Fran Hermann Garretts father was born in 1914 and started at Luther Memorial in 1920 when the school was on Clay Street. He was one of 10 siblings to attend.

Garrett followed her father to Luther as a first-grader in 1945.

She remembers the school then as a two-room school where a fourth-grade teacher would make misbehaving students stand against the chalkboard with their nose pressed up against a chalk circle.

In those days, children would play dodgeball on the tarred roof of the school. Errant throws would send balls onto Ryland Street, where, she said, they would spend hours playing hopscotch.

Garrett graduated from Luther Memorial in 1952 and later sent her three daughters there.

Her oldest daughter, Cheryl Garrett Goddard, graduated in 1976.

Last week, Goddard and two former schoolmates, Cindy Moss Mistretta and Kim Beard Kacani, got together to look at some memorabilia and talk about what Luther meant to them.

Garrett was the three womens room mother.

For more than an hour, they spoke about how close they and other classmates remain decades after leaving Luther. They talked about how the school helped shape them and taught them the values they still hold dear. They talked about favorite teachers, playing on school teams, and the childhood fights that at the time seemed insurmountable.

Mostly, they talked about the great sense of family and community that Luther provided.

Theres an intangible there, Mistretta said.

Like many others, the three women stand by the board and say members did the best they could.

I think that would have been a gut-wrenching decision, said Kacani, whose daughter was a third-grader at Luther Memorial last year.

Im not going to judge. Im going to look in the mirror and say, What could I have done better? and How can I move forward and honor that place and that moment? 

Frank W. Greenday, who graduated in 1973 and is a lifelong friend of the three women, said he hopes there will be a way to revive the school in some form. Even if that means coming back with fewer classes or being in another building, he said, whats important is that the mission continues.

I havent given up, he said. In my mind, there will be a Luther again. I really believe that.

Whether Greendays wish comes true or not, he and many others involved with Luther say they will find some way to keep Luthers spirit alive.

They vow to move forward with a 160th anniversary celebration later this year and to make sure the lessons or memories are not forgotten.
One motorist is dead and two drivers are behind bars following two unrelated high-speed chases this weekend in the Fredericksburg region, authorities say.

One chase unfolded Saturday morning about 9. Virginia State Police say the driver of a Ford F250 pickup was eluding police when he struck a motorcycle on State Route 3 in Stafford County. After hitting the motorcycle, police say the truck sideswiped a 2009 Chevrolet pickup.

The motorcyclist, 30-year-old Joshua Mugabi Dombo of Fredericksburg, was thrown from his motorcycle, state police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said in the release. He was taken to Mary Washington Hospital where he later died, Geller wrote.

Neither driver of the pickup trucks was injured, according to the release.

Deputies from the King George County Sheriffs Office charged a 16-year-old with homicide and eluding police, according to the release. He is not being named because he is a minor.

It was the second high-speed chase in the Fredericksburg area in less than 24 hours. Friday night, another chase landed a Winston Salem, N.C., man in the Rappahannock Regional Jail on three counts of attempted capital murder of a law enforcement officer.

According to the Virginia State Police, a trooper spotted a stolen SUV being driven south on Interstate 95 in Stafford County at about 6:15 p.m.

The trooper tried to pull over the 2001 Nissan Xterra, but the driver took the Centreport Parkway exit, sped through a red light and then continued back onto I-95, according to a press release.

The SUV raced down the interstate, at times going 95 miles per hour, according to state police reports. At mile marker 128 in Spotsylvania County, the SUV rammed two police cars that had been positioned to stop the vehicle, police said.

The driver lost control of the vehicle, which spun onto the median before stopping at the 124 mile marker, according to the release.

Troopers arrested Marc K. Siehler Jr., according to the press release. The 19-year-old was not injured in the incident, police said, and the troopers were also unharmed.

Officers found a 2009 Honda motorcycle inside the vehicle, police say. It had been reported stolen from Baltimore County, Md., according to the release.
BLACKBURG  Virginia Tech is talking to large pharmaceutical firms about cooperating with the university on research projects and opening offices inside Roanokes new health care innovation district.

Michael Friedlander, founder of Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and a driving force behind the citys growing health care industry, said that sort of partnership is only a concept, but affirmed that conversations are underway.

City Manager Chris Morrill said Roanoke currently doesnt have a major pharmaceutical company. Landing one would be the kind of payoff that city and university officials promised when they unveiled grand plans for a new health care hub in March.

That would be huge, Morrill said. It moves us closer to being that health science center on the east coast that we want to be.

Speaking to a crowd of entrepreneurs at a Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council event on Thursday at The Inn at Virginia Tech, Friedlander said the university is in the middle of at least three very active explorations with the goals of partnering with pharmaceutical groups and convincing them to come to Roanoke.

Friedlander demurred when pressed after the event for details on these potential candidates, simply reassuring that theyre big.

Were having those kinds of conversations, he said. Well see where they go.

While far from concrete, Roanokes pharmaceutical ambitions underscore the lofty goals attached to the so-called health sciences and technology innovation district.

But Friedlanders vision for the hub, about a mile long and generally following South Jefferson Street between the Roanoke Public Library and the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, is a lot bigger than one pharmaceutical company.

He said the goal is to have more startups spin out of Techs research labs. He wants more investors taking bets on local entrepreneurs, and more established companies opening offices in Techs backyard.

Friedlander said hes not just pursuing drug researchers, but also medical device inventors, coders working on software and anyone else in health sciences and technology .

His hope, he said, is that companies will see the intellectual value of dropping their own researchers in the middle of a dense ecosystem, surrounded by others in the field.

Like being in Boston and Cambridge and running over to [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and Harvard to hear all the talks by their researchers, theyll see the value for their people being here, Friedlander said.

Pharmaceutical companies are early targets largely because of dynamic changes in their industry .

Especially in neuroscience, Friedlander said many firms are shutting down their own research and development centers because theyre realizing drugs can take decades and billions of dollars to develop without guarantee theyll work.

Instead, he said many companies are forming partnerships with universities willing to invest in longer-term research that enables scientists to work on projects and publish papers  without immediate financial payoff.

Those partnerships allow universities to perform more of the research theyre built to conduct. They also allow companies to avoid expenses involved in developing drugs entirely in-house.
WASHINGTON

The most significant reinforcement of our collective defense any time since the Cold War, President Obama called it. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was still an achievement: The recent NATO summit in Warsaw ordered the deployment of troops to Eastern Europe, the alliances most serious response yet to Russias aggression and provocations on its western frontier.

The post-Ukraine economic sanctions have been weak; the declamatory denunciations, a mere embarrassment. Theyve only encouraged further reckless Russian behavior  the buzzing of U.S. ships, intrusions into European waters, threats to the Baltic States.

NATO will now deploy four battalions to front-line states. In Estonia, they will be led by Britain; in Lithuania, by Germany; in Latvia, by Canada; in Poland, by the United States. Not nearly enough, and not permanently based, but nonetheless significant.

In the unlikely event of a Russian invasion of any of those territories, these troops are to act as a tripwire, triggering a full-scale war with NATO. Its the kind of coldblooded deterrent that kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War and keeps it now along the DMZ in Korea.

In the more likely event of a little green men takeover attempt in, say, Estonia (about 25 percent ethnically Russian), the sort of disguised slow-motion invasion that Vladimir Putin pulled off in Crimea, the NATO deployments might be enough to thwart the aggression and call in reinforcements.

The message to Putin is clear: Yes, youve taken parts of Georgia and Ukraine. But theyre not NATO. That territory is sacred  or so we say.

This is a welcome development for the Balts, who are wondering whether they really did achieve irreversible independence when the West won the Cold War. Their apprehension is grounded in NATOs flaccid response to Putins aggressive revanchism, particularly in Ukraine. Obama still wont provide Ukraine with even defensive weaponry. This follows years of American accommodation of Putin, from canceling a Polish-Czech missile defense system to, most recently, openly acquiescing to Russias seizure of a dominant role in Syria.

And what are the East Europeans to think when they hear the presumptive presidential candidate of the party of Reagan speaking dismissively of NATO and suggesting a possible American exit?

The NATO action takes on even greater significance because of the timing, coming just two weeks after Brexit. Britains withdrawal threatens the future of the other major pillar of Western integration and solidarity, the European Union. NATO shows that it is holding fast and that the vital instrument of Western cohesion and joint action will henceforth be almost entirely trans-Atlantic  meaning, under American leadership.

The EU, even if it doesnt dissolve, will now inevitably turn inward as it spends years working out its new communal arrangements with and without Britain. Putin was Brexits big winner. Any fracturing of the Western alliance presents opportunities to play one member against another. He can only be disappointed to see NATO step up and step in.

After the humiliating collapse of President Obamas cherished Russian reset, instilling backbone in NATO and resisting Putin are significant strategic achievements. It leaves a marker for Obamas successor, reassures the East Europeans and will make Putin think twice about repeating Ukraine in the Baltics.

However, the Western order remains challenged by the other two members of the troika of authoritarian expansionists: China and Iran. Their provocations proceed unabated. Indeed, the next test for the United States is Chinas furious denunciation of the decision handed down Tuesday by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague  a blistering, sweeping and unanimous rejection of Chinas territorial claims and military buildup in the South China Sea.

Without American action, however, The Hagues verdict is a dead letter. Lecturing other great powers about adherence to international norms is fine. But the Pacific Rim nations are anxious to see whether we will actually do something.

Regarding Iran, we certainly wont. Our abject appeasement continues, from ignoring Tehrans serial violations of the nuclear agreement (the latest: intensified efforts to obtain illegal nuclear technology in Germany) to the administration acting as a kind of Chamber of Commerce to facilitate the sale of about 100 Boeing jetliners to a regime that routinely uses civilian aircraft for military transport (particularly in Syria).

The troop deployments to Eastern Europe are a good first step in pushing back against the rising revisionist powers. But a first step, however welcome, seven and a half years into a presidency, is a melancholy reminder of what might have been.
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A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.
With the Republican National Convention about to start on Monday, most of Western Virginias GOP officeholders say they support presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump  that is, if theyll say anything at all about the partys colorful, controversial frontrunner.

Pundits have argued for months about whether Trumps rowdy campaign will ultimately help or hurt down-ticket candidates and the Republican Party as a whole. In the Roanoke and New River valleys, recent comments from Republican officeholders seemed to echo the partys national struggle: How to close ranks with a candidate whos roused millions of supporters to a fever pitch  but at the same time to keep some distance from the more problematic aspects of Trumps message.

As a Southern boy, I dont say things the way he says things, U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, said earlier this month, confessing that some of Trumps statements made him cringe.

But speaking hours after Trump came to Capitol Hill to meet with House Republicans, Griffith, who will be running for a fourth term in November, said that Trump was the countrys best choice for president.

I am going to support Donald Trump  You have one guy who might not say things the right way  and youve got Hillary Clinton, Griffith said.

Similar thoughts were voiced by others among the regions GOP elected officeholders.

However, a majority of the local, state and federal Republican officials contacted for this story did not respond to repeated messages during the past two weeks, or replied to say that they had no comment on Trump.

That included state delegates Nick Rush of Christiansburg, Joseph Yost of Pearisburg and Greg Habeeb of Salem as well as state Sen. David Sutterlein. Others who chose not to respond included all four Republicans on the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors, three of four Republicans on both the Pulaski County and Floyd County boards of supervisors and various constitutional officers.

As much as I would like to give you some thoughts on our upcoming presidential election I feel that Id be better served to remain quiet, Montgomery County Sheriff Hank Partin wrote in an email. I am a constitutional conservative at heart as well as a local Republican official and as such I will support the Republican Party ticket.

Trumps candidacy has divided the Republican Party nationally, but of the regions officeholders who responded, only Floyd County Supervisor Fred Gerald voiced opposition to the partys likely presidential nominee. It is the first time in his life, said Gerald, who represents the Indian Valley District, that he has found himself at such odds with his party.

From the comments hes made, I cant support him. I dont think hes fit to be the president of the United States, Gerald said, adding that he longed for a conservative independent candidate.  It seems to me like people are going to have to vote for the lesser of two evils. I think our countrys in trouble.

Andy McCready, chairman of the Pulaski County Board of Supervisors, liked that Trump is a political newcomer.

He realizes that Washington is part of the problem not a solution to our problems. The voters are fed up with the Washington mindset, McCready wrote in an email.

McCready, who represents Pulaski Countys Massie District, and Roanoke County supervisors Chairman Jason Peters appreciated Trumps business background.

He will bring some financial sense to the federal budget. As a businessman, he will surround himself with some of the best advisers and people to make our country successful, McCready wrote.

Peters, who represents Roanoke Countys Vinton District, said that as a businessman, I think hell bring some leadership in that aspect to the country.

Peters admitted being a little bit taken aback by some of Trumps comments, saying a derogatory tone is not the temperament I want to see in my president.

As Election Day gets closer, Peters said hed pay more attention to the details of Trumps candidacy and probably would support him. I guess hell be the nominee, so I guess so, Peters said.

The last thing I think we need is more division, Peters added.  We need somebody to bring us together as a country.

Al Bedrosian, a supervisor representing Roanoke Countys Hollins District, supported Ted Cruz earlier in the nominating process. But he said that hes comfortable backing Trump and hopes that social conservatives like him can help shape Trumps campaign. We have to help him make the right decisions, Bedrosian said.

You have to pick the one who has the most in common with you when you go vote, Bedrosian continued, and he would definitely have more in common with me than Hillary Clinton.

Roanoke County Supervisor Martha Hooker, who represents the Catawba District, said she thinks Trump could be the change the country needs.

I want to see more a conservative look at the way we do business for our country  He is definitely concerned about America first, and I think were ready for some new ideas, Hooker said.

Like others, Hooker said, Sometimes his rhetoric makes me nervous and uncomfortable. But overall, Im supportive of his ideas and Im certainly supportive of the Republican nominee.

Dels. Terry Austin and Chris Head, both Botetourt County Republicans, preferred Marco Rubio during the state primaries but now back Trump. They predicted that some of the rough edges of Trumps campaign would be smoothed in coming months.

I think his intentions are good when it comes to building our economy and bringing the U.S. economy back, Austin said.  I think hell have good advisers and surround himself with good people and learn to communicate accordingly.

Head agreed. Being the president is a completely different job from getting elected president, he said.  The job of being president is being a good executive and surrounding yourself with people who can get the job done and then holding them accountable to get that job done. I think Trump certainly has that skillset.

State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, who served as state chairman for the Cruz campaign, said that he was encouraged by Fridays announcement that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is joining the GOP ticket as Trumps vice presidential choice.

Pence, a former congressman and a popular figure among social conservatives, brings some sanity to a race that has been challenging for many in the party, Stanley said.

It allows us to believe that we can accomplish, through a Trump presidency, what we believe is right for our nation and our area, Stanley said.

U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, who has earlier voiced support for Trump, did not reply to a request for comment for this story. Last week, his staffer Beth Breeding wrote in an email that Goodlatte does not plan to attend the Republican convention in Cleveland and instead will be making stops in his district.

Of the Republicans who would discuss Trump, Griffith offered the most detailed thoughts about how the presumptive nominees positions fit with his own.

On Trumps proposed barricade across the Mexican border, Griffith said he would support it.

Walls historically have worked, Griffith said. He pointed to Israels fence along the boundary of the West Bank as an example of what might reduce illegal immigration.

Griffith said that he also agrees in principle with Trumps call for a ban on at least some Muslim immigrants. Griffith said that the governments present screening process for immigrants, though it can take years, does not seem thorough enough.

The congressman said that he would prefer that the United States, as the worlds richest nation, help refugees closer to their former homes, such as by sending U.S. money to help settle Syrian refugees in Jordan and Turkey.

We do have some obligation to help, Griffith said. But that doesnt mean we bring their troubles to our shores.

Griffith said that he disagreed with Trumps suggestions that South Korea and Japan should gain nuclear weapons. Countries that depend on the United States for defense should beef up their own forces  but stop short of nuclear armaments, Griffith said.

Of Trumps disparaging comments about women, Griffith said that he did not think it indicated a sexist mindset. In Trumps meeting with House Republicans, he praised the business expertise of his daughter Ivanka and how she has run various of his operations, Griffith said.

A man who is truly sexist would wonder why his daughter wanted to be in business, not promoting her to run his business, Griffith said.

Similarly, Griffith said that he did not see Trumps railing against Mexicans and Muslims as bigoted.

Hes not a well-schooled politician who says what you want to hear. He says what hes thinking. And that sometimes means hes going to step in a cow pie, Griffith said. But hes not anti-cow.
Inside a tan mobile home and a nearby junked Ford van, authorities allege, a Rockbridge County brother and sister repeatedly molested four children, ages 3 to 15.

What Commonwealths Attorney Christopher Billias calls a really disturbing and disgusting case could take an even more troubling turn.

The Rockbridge Area Department of Social Services  which, according to a recent internal review, failed to investigate some reports of child abuse and neglect  is under criminal investigation for how it handled earlier complaints about the home where, authorities say, the sexual assaults happened.

Child abuse reports ignored by Rockbridge social services, report finds Reports of child abuse and neglect did not just fall through the cracks at the Rockbridge Ar

Billias said Friday that the county sheriffs office is looking into that case and others handled by the agency. He declined to elaborate.

The countys prosecutor said he is very disturbed by the degree of the allegations, which include reports that a former supervisor shredded documents containing complaints made to social services, rather than have them investigated.

Obviously, we are looking into this and if we can bring charges we certainly wouldnt hesitate, Billias said.

Last week, a circuit court grand jury returned 20 indictments against Robert Eugene Clark, 38, and his sister, Samantha K. Simmons, 30. The charges include rape, sodomy, aggravated sexual battery, indecent exposure, child cruelty and taking indecent liberties with a child.

The offenses occurred between January and September 2015, according to court records, and involved children ages 15, 12, 8 and 3.

Investigators are aware of at least two complaints, made in 2014 and 2015, to social services in which callers raised concerns about the welfare of at least some of the children, according to Capt. Tony McFaddin of the Rockbridge County Sheriffs Office.

In both cases, McFaddin said, the social services department failed to take proper steps.

Citing the investigation, authorities declined to elaborate on the nature of the complaints or how they were handled.

But according to an article in the July edition of The Rockbridge Advocate, a monthly news magazine that first reported on problems within the social services department, the agency received a call from someone who said that the trailer was crawling with roaches, and that an adult had been heard yelling at children, threatening to knock their teeth down their throats.

Eventually, social services got involved and two of the children were removed from the trailer, The Advocate reported. The other two victims apparently did not live there.

An 8-year-old girl wound up in a group home for troubled children in Roanoke, where on May 31 she told an employee that she and her 3-year-old sister had been molested by Clark on numerous occasions, according to a search warrant recently filed in Rockbridge County Circuit Court.

Clark would force the children to watch pornographic movies, holding them on his shoulders so they could not get away, the 8-year-old girl told investigators. The grand jury charged Clark last week with nine felonies, included the rape and sexual assault of the two girls.

In June, the investigation widened to include Clarks sister. Simmons admitted to performing oral sex on two boys, ages 12 and 15, in a 1983 Ford van that was parked near the trailer where Clark lived, according to a second search warrant.

The vehicle did not run, Simmons told investigators, and was used as a party van where she would play truth or dare with the two juveniles, the search warrant stated. Simmons faces 11 charges, which include sodomy, taking indecent liberties with a child, aggravated sexual battery and child endangerment.

Both Simmons and Clark are being held in the Rockbridge Regional Jail.

At about the same time that sheriffs office was investigating the sexual assaults, a separate internal review of the social services department was underway.

In a report completed in May, the social services Piedmont Regional Office found 41 problems or shortcomings in the agency, which is charged with protecting low-income and troubled children in Rockbridge County and the cities of Lexington and Buena Vista.

Of utmost concern, the 38-page review stated, was evidence that a former supervisor fed reports of child abuse or neglect into a paper shredder before they could go to the Child Protective Services unit for assessment. The supervisor was not named in the report.

The review also examined 271 cases of alleged abuse and neglect of children that were reported to the social services department during a one-year period that ended in March. More than half  158  were screened out, or determined not to be worthy of investigation.

Susan Reese, head of the Piedmont Regional Office that conducted the review, called that an extremely high number of cases to be screened out.

The board of directors that oversees the Rockbridge area social services office has seen the report and is working to correct the problems, one of its members said last week.

We support the [findings] because it is a third-party review of the services we offer, Duaine Fitzgerald said.

We have been talking immediate and diligent steps to bring any deficiencies back to the quality of service that we believe the community we serve deserves, he said.

Fitzgerald declined to comment on specific cases, or to say how long the board might have been aware of problems in the agency.

While the review was in progress, the director of the agency, Meredith Downey, announced her plans to retire. A search is currently underway for her replacement, Reese said.

Meanwhile, the Roanoke-based Piedmont Regional Office has placed a specialist in the Lexington office to help work through the problems identified in the report, which include:

 Extremely low morale. Many of the agencys 30 some workers reported an atmosphere of bullying, harassment and intimidation by the former supervisor who is accused of shredding documents. Some employees said they so feared running into their boss in the office kitchen that they made a secret cooking and eating area in a storage room.

 Missed deadlines. In about 75 percent of the cases found to be valid, Child Protective Services workers did not complete a family assessment or a more detailed investigation within a state-mandated 45-day period.

 Altered documents. Some staff members told investigators that the former supervisor changed the dates on reports to make it appear that deadlines had been met.

 Lack of required training. Workers said they were often denied permission to attend training sessions held by the Virginia Department of Social Services.

 Slow response to emergency calls. When an urgent call would come in, the former supervisor would often say that it was too late in the day to start an investigation, and that law enforcement or school officials could handle the situation.

 No background checks. The agency failed to perform the required searches for criminal charges, driving offenses and other personal histories of job applicants, volunteers and staff members.

The report does not mention the situation that led to sexual assault charges against Clark and Simmons. But it does cite the unrelated death of a 3-month old child.

Earlier this year, the infant was assessed by the agency as high risk in an unfit home. But no services were offered, the report stated. In April, the girl was taken by family members to Carilion Stonewall Jackson Hospital in Lexington, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

Doctors found discoloration around the infants face and mouth that indicated she might have been lying face-down for a prolonged period of time. A man and a woman who were caring for the child gave conflicting accounts, according to court documents.

The death is being investigated by the sheriffs office, which is waiting for the results of an autopsy, Capt. McFaddin said.

Susan Lawrence, a family advocate in Rockbridge County who frequently works with social services and once ran a private preschool and worked as a teacher, said there have been problems with the agency for years.

Children are dead, Lawrence said. I dont think it gets any more serious than that.

And theyre dead because of a lack of accountability.

Lawrence said she is especially concerned about the children who never received sought-after services, including the 158 cases that were screened out over the past year.

What happened to all those kids? she asked.

Weve got kids who are being sexually assaulted, who havent been fed, who are living in filth, because somebody hasnt done their job.
Hours after the Supreme Court ruled favorably for gay marriage, the White House exterior was illumined in the gay pride rainbow colors. Recently the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association asked White House officials to also light up the building in blue to honor the five murdered Dallas police officers. Nope, not going to happen.

Mr. Obama may have spoken the oath of office, but seems to have a problem understanding the part about protect. If he cant support the men and women whose job it is to protect and serve, its time for him to go. Simple question for you Obama voters. Did you know you were voting for a guy who meets with Black Lives Matter protesters for three hours, but couldnt find the time to flip on a blue light switch?

Speaking of the Supreme Court, nice of Justice Ruth Ginsburg to show the basic flaw of courts making law. Having an unelected and unaccountable lifetime appointed justice spouting off on the current election is just plain wrong. No way in the world did the Founding Fathers envisioned a court with this much power and a Congress this timid to exercise their own power.

PS. The antigun crowd chant of, No fly, no buy means if I am on the no fly list I wouldnt be able to buy a gun. Being how the France terrorist attacker used a rental truck, does that mean if I end up on the no fly list, I cant rent a U-Haul truck? I know thats a ridiculous question, but no more than thinking another gun law will solve social issues.

Other rights cant be taken away without due process, so please explain why the 2nd should have an exception. Maybe that page was also deleted by Hillary.

J.B. Johnson, Britt
I find Rep. Steve Kings behavior baffling. This man votes against having on the $20 bill the bravest African-American woman, Harriet Tubman. Tubman not only made 13 or more trips into the South leading slaves to freedom at risk of tortured death, but she was also an army scout and spy for the union during the Civil War.

Tubman was an abolitionist who helped John Brown recruit men for the Harper Ferrys raid. And heres the kicker. King brags that some of his ancestors were abolitionists who worked to end slavery!

King proudly displays the Confederate flag on his desk, the flag those ancestors would have gladly burned. This flag represents those people who were quite willing to break apart the United States to preserve their gentile way of life that included keeping slaves, then later keeping those three-fifths of a human being in a state of oppression.

Displaying this flag in museums and inside the homes of some Southerners is understandable; however, I am completely baffled by a born-and-bred Iowan and an Iowa congressman elected by Iowans whose ancestors fought and died to maintain the Union and abolish slavery.

Did you know that six states celebrate Confederate holidays, 10 U.S. military bases are named for Confederates, and the South has its own Mt. Rushmore (Stone Mt. near Atlanta) displaying in high relief sculpture Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas Stonewall Jackson?

Maybe Steve King is a Southerner at heart and should move to the South.

Johanna Anderson, Osage
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 ...
And so all is well that ends well. Its been a busy week with lots of activities that kept most of us occupied.

There were a lot of meetings, trainings, workshops and of course the countless church gatherings happening throughout the country. At these meetings, peoples needs  whatever they were - were met.

At the church gatherings, people were fed, the spiritually malnourished were well nourished and their thirst for the things of God were well and truly quenched so that today we sit back and marvel at just how blessed we are. We say this because we should not take the peace and tranquility in Samoa for granted.

Looking at the horror in some places near and far where innocent lives have been taken by terrorism, war and strife, Samoa is indeed blessed. So lets acknowledge the hand of God Almighty over our lives, his blessings and mercies that are new every morning.

It doesnt mean that we have it perfect. Far from it. We still have plenty of challenges and problems to deal with. But thats the beautiful aspect about being refreshed, revived and recharged.

It gives us the ability to go again, be better and push harder against those barriers. We are here for such a time as this for a purpose, a God-ordained purpose to make a difference and be a blessing.

In Samoa today, the reality of life is quite difficult to accept. We live at a time defined by hardship, rise in petty crimes among so many other social challenges.

As this piece is being compiled, I am reminded about a young student from the Adventist College at Lalovaea who dropped into my office uninvited back in 2013. Laaloa Onesemo, 17, had come to see me as part of a school research and her topic was even more unusual, I thought. On a piece of paper I was handed were these words; Poverty in Samoa: Samoa experiencing poverty, which the Government is turning a blind eye on...

Now, in this place, I get to see hundreds of students every year. They range from primary school kids wanting to know what a newspaper is to PhD students from all over the world doing their thesis about one topic or another. Hardly anyone tackles the issue of poverty though. They are either scared or they cannot be bothered. Yet, here was a young girl in front of me, so passionate about wanting know about poverty in Samoa as if her future depended on it, it was refreshing.

Why did you become interested in this topic? At your age, shouldnt you be interested in the latest technological gadgets and the like? I asked.

I read your newspaper a lot, she said. I also follow the news about what the Government has been saying about the issue. I live at Vaitele and I see a lot of parallels and similarities with whats reported in your newspaper and what people are going through.

Well, seeing is believing!

Obviously young Laaloa knew something.

For the uninitiated, the greater Vaitele area, including Vaitele-uta and Vaitele-fou, is one of the fastest growing areas in Samoa. It is a hotbed of social chaos since you have so many people from all over the place crammed into quarter acre lots, creating all sorts of problems. Suffice to say, theft, robberies and sex crimes are among the most common challenges.

But this is expected. When you allow that many people to congregate on very limited land with no resources, you are asking for trouble. Coupled with high unemployment and the rigorous demands by family, culture and church, these people can hardly cope with everyday Samoan life, both financially and emotionally. Thus, trapped in that precarious dilemma, they become desperate and succumb unwittingly to committing the unthinkable.

The worry is that Vaitele is not the only place. A few minutes up the road from Vaitele-fou are Falelauniu and Tafaigata. On the other side, youve got Nuu and Aele. Elsewhere, youve got places like Moamoa-fou, Palisi-uta and many other dots of new settlements where people have moved to, or been forced to move to.

On east Upolu, we have Vailele-uta and nearby areas. But then you dont have to go far from Apia to look for places like this. Take a look at Taufusi, Sogi, some parts of Lalovaea and inner Fugalei for example.

They are a sad sight. All these places share the same problems and high on the list are unemployment, high crime rate and they are rapidly becoming over populated. Needless to say, poverty will become an issue, if its not already a problem.

Were not just talking about poverty of food; were also talking about poverty of opportunities. Which is why Laaloa is keen to understand why the government is turning a blind eye to it. Its a valid question. The answer, however, is complex. Say what you like but there is nothing being done by the government to really combat the issue of poverty. This is because in the eyes of the leaders of this country today, poverty just does not exist.

Which in a way is true. After all, no one has died in Samoa because of starvation yet. So our Government leaders choose to turn a blind eye.

Instead, theyre more interested to invest in concrete blocks so the birds on the trees and the clouds can sing their praises day and night while they go about their business.

Meanwhile, families living next to these concrete monsters  like the people of Sogi and Fugalei living next to the T.A.T.T.E. building  are yearning for help.

They are dying a slow death since their suffering has been ignored amidst the fascination to turn their neighbourhoods into the new concrete capital of the Pacific. Running amok around these buildings are beggars and young children asking people and visitors for money.

Nearby able-bodied men, who are unemployed and have nothing better to do, turn to a life of crime to keep up with the fast-paced world. Thats why they would beat anyone and everyone simply for a few gold coins and their mobile phone. They would break into any store to steal elegi and a few pounds of rice for their evening meal.

Is anyone paying attention? Maybe, maybe not! Who wants to think about poverty when you can enjoy the luxurious life? Who wants to worry about people going hungry when youve got a fridge full of all the expensive meat from around the world?

Now think about the future, think about Samoa in five years time. Think about these hotbeds of social chaos in 10, 20, 50 years time? What do you see?

If our opinion is sought, Im afraid we see nothing but poverty, judging from what we see. Its because our leaders of today have ignored the issue so much to the point they have failed to prepare people for what is up ahead.

That is why the interest shown by the young Laaloa was wonderfully refreshing.

At the time, it was inspiring to know that even amidst so much political hogwash being pushed out to brainwash our people, there are young people out there who have learnt to see beyond the rubbish, identify the real issues and see into the future. That gave me hope. It still does.

Hope by the way is something we should always believe in. It is something we should always cling to because without it, we lose our way and we get bogged down so much by the problems of today that we forget to enjoy our blessings.

Have a restful Sunday Samoa, God bless!
Dear Editor,

Here are the facts. Samoas suicide rate is about 30 per 100,000 people according to Faataua Le Ola. The stats make grim reading when compared to suicide rate in the U.S. of 12 per 100,000 people in a population of 232 million people.

I totally agree with Reverend Fuga of the A.O.G church that every action an individual decides to do is a personal choice and it comes straight from the heart. But we are talking here about people taking their lives in a population of more than 95% Christians which should be in the business of saving lives.

If we can take that into consideration, then naturally we should be asking the question of why its happening when the population in Samoa is full of Christians compared to other Christian countries like the U.S. with 71% Christians.

Im just looking at the suicide rate, not the economies and states social developments which makes the comparisons quite unfair.

So how successful is the Church and Christianity in Samoa if theyre actively playing their role (???) in the community?

Well, people commit suicide because of chronic depression. They dont want to die; they just want an end to whatever problems theyre facing.

So if 30 Christians in 100,000 decide to take their lives in a country of less than 190,000 Christians, then naturally, people should ask the question of why its happening when the place is full of Christian Churches.

If theyre in the community and theyre playing whatever role (????) in the community, then why is there pain and suffering in our community?

Why were these Christians depressed about life and why did they have that feeling of helplessness and unworthiness?

Well the stats speak for itself, if people cannot find justification for their existence in this world and the Church is right there, then whatever role the Church believes its doing in the community is just non existent and any claims of active service to Christianity should be shrugged off and should be viewed only as mere exaggerations.

Nothing is working at all, people are dying needlessly, you dont rebuke Corrupt politicians, you take money from the poor, you dont show charity to the poor and you dont even show any concerns about the level of integrity violations in the government.

Where is Christianity and where is the Church that was established by Jesus Christ on the day of the Pentecost?

Le Mafa P
Dear Editor,

Re: Foreigners influx feared

Small business is good for the economy. Whats not good is allowing foreigners to set up shop all over this small island then sink the local businesses.

We are all concerned those living in Samoa and outside Samoa.

While in Samoa I drove by a gated compound with the windows on the building boarded up and right away I knew Chinese live there because thats exactly how they live in China.

Five plus families own one business, which is why they can afford to open up more. How can local business compete with that?

Stella S
Love was certainly in the air at St. Therese Accommodation and Retreat, Leauvaa, on Friday. The beautiful surrounding of the place provided the perfect backdrop for Mataafa Anitelea and Bridie Ann Henson to begin their journey as husband and wife.

The pair exchanged vows before God and in the presence of their families and friends, to love and cherish each other until eternity. The bride, Bridie Ann Henson is 25 years old and she is a High-school teacher. She is the daughter of Kay and Russel Henson from Christchurch, New Zealand. The groom, Mataafa Anitelea Mataafa is the son of Mataafa Petelo and Atusamoa Mataafa. He is 32 years old and from the village of Lufilufi.

Speaking to the Sunday Samoan, Mataafa said this is an exciting time for them. Weve been together for quite some time and I am probably the happiest man on earth today, he said. Trust and unconditional love is the secret to the success of their relationship, he said. I met Bridie at one of our fun nights in Christchurch after the clubs, he said. She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, and she still is the most beautiful girl in my eyes. Ive been preparing for this day for four years and I am just grateful to the Man above for His guidance and for our families for making this day possible for us.

Mataafa described his wife as beautiful, gorgeous, warm, funny, loving and friendly.

She is not perfect but I know that she is perfect for me.

Mataafa proposed to Bridie about a year and a half ago. They could have had the wedding in Christchurch where they both reside, but Mataafa said he wanted Bridies family to have a taste of the Samoan culture. This is why he insisted to have the wedding in Samoa. Her whole extended family and friends from all around the world are here. And I wanted my family to witness this special day and I wanted Bridies family to see our country and experience our culture.

And I am happy not only because we have all our families and friends here, but also because I am now married to the love of my life, who is also my best friend.

The newlyweds were joined by their families and friends from New Zealand, Canada, Australia, England and Samoa at a reception held at the St. Therese Retreat and Accommodation.
Concerns from some members of the business community about the influx of Asian-owned companies taking over the retail sector are not lost on the government.

So assured the Minister responsible for the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Labour, Lautafi Fio Purcell.

Speaking during an interview with the Sunday Samoan, Lautafi said it is quite obvious that locals are disadvantaged going against foreign companies with bigger financial backing.

I feel for those (local business) people because its quite obvious, Lautafi said.

It doesnt take long for a Chinese shop to come in then (local) business goes out.

Ill be meeting with the Commerce sector to ensure there is a level playing field for our people. The Chinese or Asians come with the philosophy to sell at the lowest price and sell a lot of them so they make up for that profit margin.

Im seriously looking into the issue. The government wants to attract foreign investors to provide services and employment but at the same time we dont want to develop an environment where local business or entrepreneurs just cannot compete.

And the Minister said was honest enough to say he does not have the answers right now.

This is something Im hoping to discuss with our M.C.I.L. team during our inspection in Savaii this week, he said.

This is what I mean there is always a catch somewhere and its never a clear cut win  win all the time. But we try to minimize that negative (effect) on our people. From observation, Lautafi described Asian retailers as ruthless in business.

They are aggressive. They sell quite a lot and that is their philosophy. It always about looking for the next customer to come in and they work for 24 hours.

The Minister said local businesses dont operate on that model. They have set times and the latest they will open is 8pm.

But there is got to be a balancing act somewhere, he said.

I was reading the paper (Samoa Observer) and was just thinking of our meeting with the Price Control division. Im going to throw them a challenge to come up with a suggestion on ways that we can continue to promote people from investing but not at the expense of our people who also want to run their businesses.

Lautafi also believes that the locals can never compete with the foreign businesses because of financial backings.

One thing Im very sure about is the finance backing of our people is not much, he said.

But I dont know about the Asians whether there are bigger companies behind them and that is why I have asked the Ministry to ensure they scrutinize the permits and stick to whats in it.

With such financial backing, Lautafi said the locals could never compete.

Our people cant compete with those bigger shops, he explained.

An example is a shop in Savaii that used to be run by a Samoan. Its never packed, theres hardly any customer. The next time I went to Salelologa I saw that a lot of people going in and out of that shop and inside was a totally different person running it. According to Lautafi it was an Asian that was then running the shop and they were enthusiastic to sell things.

They are in your face suggesting things you should buy, he said. They are business orientated people. They make sure you will not go out of the shop without buying something and its part of their business ethics that draws people to their shops.

That is the philosophy that has not clicked on our people. As opposed to our shops you go inside and they look at you as if they dont want you there.

So what is your advice to local business people? This is the modern world. We have moved to trade services, said Lautafi. We need to look at ways we can improve our service, presentation and make people feel welcome to the shops.

Service can turn one person from another shop seeing that you are happy. The other thing is profit. Chinese go for the marginal profit but if you sell thousands of those goods, your profit becomes very big but our people want to sell one thing and get that much profit from it.

Lautafi added that the Asians are gifted business people and they have been doing this for thousands of years.

But our people are still learning to grow, he said.

It doesnt mean that our people should be disadvantaged because personally I still want to see more of our businesses up there.
The search for half a million tala allegedly stolen from the countrys biggest private employer is heading overseas.

This was confirmed by the Spokesperson for the Police, Maotaoalii Kaioneta.

He said a former employee of Yazaki Eds Samoa Limited accused of taking the money has fled the country.

The suspect is believed to be moving between New Zealand and Australia.

We have extended our investigation working with the authorities overseas, said Maotaoalii.

We cannot confirm exactly where the suspect is but we are continuing our investigation.

Asked how the suspect could have gone through Immigration without being stopped, the Spokesperson explained that there are reasons for that.

It depends on how quick it was in identifying and confirming the allegation, he said.

The quicker its reported to police the faster we get on to the investigation.

In most cases the activities have been done for years and they had only found out in the following year.

Maota also urged for companies and organisations to monitor their systems so they can identify theft at its earliest and report them. The close to half a million was alleged to have been misappropriated by a senior accounts officer in March last year. The employee was sacked following an internal investigation.

A similar incident happened three years ago where another employee of Yazaki allegedly stole a sum of US$100,000 (T$230,000).
REDONDO BEACH, Calif., July 17, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Optometry specialist Advanced Eyecare Center announces the addition of the Andy Wolf brand of eyewear to their in-house selection. Advanced Eyecare Center will be making this premier line of eyeglass frames available at their Redondo Beach location.

The Austrian eyewear designer Andy Wolf released two new lines called Love and Soul in the past year. These collections are now offered in addition to their White Heat line of stylish metal frames.

Andy Wolf Eyewear is well known for its high quality and durability matched by eminent style and compelling detail. Materials are of utmost importance in Andy Wolf frames, and only the finest metals and sustainably produced acetates are used. State-of-the-art, computer-driven machines create each frame, but its the human touch and attention to detail that sets Andy Wolf frames apart.

Each and every piece undergoes a rigorous quality check during and after the assembly process. Frequent visual inspections ensure that each frame is up to the high standards created by the company founder. This handcrafted ethos shines through in every pair.

The new Soul and Love collections bring a flair for design and creativity to the Andy Wolf line. They serve as a compelling counterpoint to the cooler, more metallic White Heat styles that have served as the anchor for the brand.

While clean lines and purist looks define the White Heat eyewear collection, the new styles in the Love collection take self-expression to new places for eyeglass wearers. The designs are bold, unique and colorful, with throwback inspiration taken from the looks of the wild 1970s. They also reflect the vibe and creative spirit of an independent eyewear label.

The Soul line features plenty of classic shaped frames in a sophisticated color palette thats ideal for more conservative looks. Andy Wolf also offers sunglasses that feature Zeiss lenses for premier protection from the suns UV rays while at the beach or driving around town.

Dr. Michael Hansen, optometrist at Advanced Eyecare Center, says, We are pleased to be able to make Andy Wolf Eyewear a part of our frame selection. Our clients now have access to some of the most stylish, cutting-edge looks on the market today.

Advanced Eyecare Center has locations in Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach, California. They are a trusted provider of optometry services and vision correction in the South Bay neighborhoods of Torrance, El Segundo, and surrounding areas as well as Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach.

Those in the public who would like to learn more about their eye care services or book an appointment may do so by calling (310) 321-6990 in Manhattan Beach or (310) 373-3191 in Redondo Beach. Additional information about their eye care services and locations are also available on their website at http://advancedeyecarecenter.net/.
The Supreme Court has slammed the behavior of a 40-year-old father who impregnated his 13-year-old stepdaughter.

In sentencing the man for two years and six months, Justice Lesatele Rapi Vaai said his behavior is shameful and he deserves a custodial sentence to teach him a lesson.

Whats more, Justice Lesatele said the punishment should send out a warning to other men that such disgraceful behavior is not accepted and the Court will not tolerate anyone who is convicted for the offense.

The name of the man and any detail that could identify him have been suppressed to protect the identity of the victim.

But the mother of the 13-year-old girl is married to the defendant.

The prosecution lawyer was Fuifui Ioane of the National Prosecution Office while the defendant did not have a lawyer. The man faced 36 charges of having sex with a minor and two counts of indecent assault. Upon entering his guilty plea, the Prosecution withdrew 18 counts of sexual connection, and proceeded with the remaining charges.

According to a pre-sentence report, the defendant told the Probation Officer that it was in 2013 when he noticed that the victim was flirting with him. He said this reached a stage where she told him she loved him.

The man admitted having sex with the girl multiple times until she became pregnant. During the hearing, it was revealed that the sexual relationship occurred in the evenings and nights at the house when the victims mother was absent for other commitments.

Justice Lesatele did not mince words in addressing the defendant.

He said a custodial penalty was appropriate for this kind of offence to send a message that the Courts of Samoa does not accept such behaviour.

Justice Lesatale also wanted to warn the wider community that child abuse is not accepted and that the laws of Samoa exist to protect young girls.

He expressed concerns about the mental and physical trauma the girl would have had to go through during the ordeal, especially when she was taken advantage of by a person who was supposed to look after her.

In doing what he did, the Court ruled that the man betrayed the trust of the young girl in him as a father figure. Justice Lesatele took five years as a starting point for the sentence.

The Court then deducted 18 months for his early guilty plea, the decision by the village council to punish him and the fact that he has expressed remorse and regret about what he had done.

In the end, the defendant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years and six months for each charge of sexual connection and six months for indecent assault but to be served concurrently.
Think a minuteThe 3M Company is exceptional among large corporations. To encourage creativity, 3M allows its researchers to spend 15 percent of their time on any project that interests them. One of their scientists named Art Fry decided to use his creative time to develop his own idea.

When Art read books, he used little pieces of paper to mark places in the book he wanted to read again later. But the pieces of paper kept falling out. Then Art remembered his coworker had made an adhesive they thought was a failure because it did not stick well.

So Art put this adhesive on a piece of paper and discovered it was not only a good bookmark, but also great for writing little notes and reminders to himself, which then could be taken off easily when you were done with them. Arts product, called Post-it, has become one of 3Ms most successful office products ever sold.

Many years ago F.W. Woolworth was a young store clerk when he tried to persuade his boss to have a 10-cent sale to clear out old merchandise. His boss agreed and the idea was a great success! This inspired Woolworth to open his own store with items priced at just 5 and 10 cents. He offered his boss part ownership if he would invest in this new business, but his boss refused for a number of reasons, including that it was too risky.

Well, Woolworth found a way to start his new business without his boss help. Not only was he successful in his first store, but he eventually owned a chain of Woolworth stores across America. Later his former boss admitted that he had lost at least a million dollars for each word he used to reject down Woolworths idea!

Even though Woolworth was young, he was not afraid to step out and put his own ideas into practice. He was willing to take risks, because someone in his childhood had taught him to believe in himself.

Have you developed your ability to dream? What about your children? Do you invest in their imagination and support their creative ideas? Do you encourage them to explore different activities to help them discover their natural talents? In fact, their imagination will likely help them succeed more than just information. Why not ask God to show you, and your kids, all that He created you to be? Just think a minute
Dear Editor

Thats the best way to describe it Mr Editor, Beggars cant be choosers - well said.

Despite Stuis delightful optimism and over inflated ego, Samoa hasnt improved a bit since independence some 50 years.

Samoas still relying on foreign aid, remittances and foreign loans and thats the truth.

The only remarkable achievement thats worth mentioning from this government is the size of the foreign debt, its not something to sing about though.

More than 10 years as the Prime Minister, the foreign debt is climbing steadily towards 1.5 billion dollars. He was quoted the other day saying that the government is spending approximately 84 million dollars per year to service foreign loans. Thats a huge amount of money being taken out of the economy every year. So how much do we need for next year since the foreign debt is still growing? Hes ungrateful about the services of Samoan overseas but without remittances, the economy would go belly up because of the amount of money theyre taking out of the country and economy.

Its a sign of impotence and incompetence because anybody can make loans and its easy to make loans. But not everyone can build an economy that can sustain itself with robust and competitive industries and a working population.

Maybe this economist should ask that Fijian soldier named Banimarama for some tips on how to create a vibrant economy.

Corruption and deception seemed to be the only skillset prevalent in the government of Stui and HRPP.

Where is the rest of Samoas intellectual class?

The hopes and future of Samoa depends on what you decide to do next.

Theres no hope in that upper class dwellers called faifeaus, they are supposed to be the messengers of hope and justice but theyre corrupt just like politicians. Faamalo atu i le afioga ia Nuuausala Sionaia, thanks for having the courage to speak up.

Intellectuals should help the common man understand the nuts and bolts of democracy and the evils of corruption in government.

Taxpayers money is not politicians or government employees private piggy bank.

Its the peoples money and we should expect honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability every time they handle those monies.

Workers have been jailed for dishonesty offenses in private companies but somehow politicians can get away with dishonesty violations in government eg, the O.P.C. Report 2010. Where is Justice Mr law man?

Le Mafa P
You already know to expect spectacular feats with fire at this years International Siva Afi Competition in September 1-3.

But get ready for some extra special moments to mark the landmark 15 years that the event has showcased fire knife dancing.

Its the second longest running fire knife dance competition in the world after the World Fire Knife Dance Competition in Hawaii, said Lene Leota proudly.

We began 15 years ago and each year, the show is a culmination of a years activities.

Lene is at a loss to estimate how many kids he has trained.

Hundreds maybe, a thousand? he mused.

But the annual three-night event in September is just the tip of the iceberg of what Leota and Clare do in addition to running a successful printing business.

Over the years, a strong, loyal base of sponsors and supporters has contributed to the longevity and success of the show.

They include sponsors, Radio Polynesia, Samoa Observer, Samoatel/Bluesky, Ace Hardware, Betham Freight, Funway Rentals, M and J Ah Fook, K1 Electricals and this year, Federal Pacific who now own the venue for the shows.

And speaking of support, the Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi never misses a show when he is on island, said Leota.

I think they (sponsors and supporters) appreciate the benefits that they get from a major tourism and youth event and the fact that we are trying to make a difference in kids lives.

We also acknowledge our sponsors every week at our dinner shows with their logos on our billboards.

Other activities during the year include the free fire knife workshops conducted weekly.

The reason these are free is because Lene doesnt want kids who cant afford to attend the workshops to be left out.

Then there are the dinner and a cultural show for locals and tourists; shows supporting community and government events, dance workshops and shows in villages in Upolu and Savaii, attendance at other fire knife competitions eg Hawaii and the satisfaction of knowing that five dancers they trained are contracted and working at Hong Kong Disneyland.

One of the things that gives Lene satisfaction is that participants in their weekly workshops come from all walks of life.

I love seeing them all enjoying themselves, said Leota, it doesnt matter if they are street kids, ex-patriate kids or from the local community. And there are no age limits. Our youngest participant, Malu Sapolu is not yet three years old, said Clare. The competition was first run in 2002 by Lene when he formed a fire knife dancing club  the Ailao Club.

Its purpose was to preserve and promote the art of Samoan fire knife dancing and to support the development of fire knife dancers living in Samoa.

As a fire knife dancer himself for many years, Lene was concerned that many of Samoas traditional and performing arts were being borrowed by other islands like Hawaii, Guam, Tahiti and New Zealand and claimed as their own.

They were thus limiting Samoas opportunity to capitalise on a growing, worldwide interest in traditional, performing arts.

One of the first projects was to take a group of Fire Dancers to the World Fire Knife Competition in Hawaii in May 2002. The one female of the group created history by not only being the first female to perform, but also by winning the Intermediate Competition.

Her younger brother won the Junior Competition in Hawaii the same year.

In 2003, realising there was no point training fire knife dancers if they had nowhere to showcase their talent, Lene started putting on shows covering traditional Samoan dancing.

These shows also help to provide many dancers with a valuable income. The village road shows have a dual purpose.

Firstly to inspire the village kids and give them hope of a future dance career if they are not good at school or do not excel in sports.

Secondly to illustrate to the dance group and fire knife dancers (who are mostly from the town area), the hardships experienced by kids growing up in remote areas.

Over the years, hundreds of fire knife dancers have been trained many of whom are working in Samoa or overseas and supporting their families.

Joint winners of the first competition in 2002, the then National Bank Siva Afi Competition were Hogan Toomalatai and Sakaio Pupualii both of whom now perform at Hong Kong Disneyland.

Also now performing there is Evi Seumanutafa, from Matautu uta and more recent additions to Hong Kong, Disneyland are Frankie Solomona and Tuai Atonio both of whom started their careers as juniors in the Ailao Club. Frankie returned to Samoa in 2015 to win the 14th International Siva Afi tournament, Lene said.

Background

The origins of siva afi (fire knife dancing) date way back according to Wikipedia. The siva afi was originally performed with the nifo oti (Samoan war club ) which is very dangerous as the steel of the nifo oti heats up and burns . The modern fire knife dance has its roots in the ancient Samoan exhibition called ailao - the

flashy demonstration of a Samoan warrior's battle prowess through artful twirling, throwing and catching, and dancing with a war club. The ailao could be performed with any war club, and some colonial accounts confirm that women also performed ailao at the head of ceremonial processions, especially daughters of high chiefs. During night dances torches were often twirled and swung about by dancers, although a war club was the usual implement used. Fire was added to the knife in 1946 by a Samoan knife dancer named Freddie Letuli, later to become paramount chief Letuli Olo Misilagi. Letuli was performing in San Francisco and noticed a Hindu fire eater and a little girl with lighted batons. The fire eater loaned him some fuel, he wrapped some towels around his knife, and the fire knife dance was born.

Additional information supplied by Lene and Clare Leota.
An investigation into a complaint lodged by the Associate Minister of the Ministry of Prime Minister, Peseta Vaifou Tevaga is still incomplete.

In response to an email from the Samoa Observer, the Director of the National Prosecution Office, Precious Chang said police are working together with the Associate Minister and her office.

Our office has requested further matters to be done as well as further documents and information from the Associate Minister and his lawyer before any determinations can be made as to whether there is a crime or not, said Ms. Chang.

At this stage it is still only an investigation based on a complaint brought to the police of an allegation. The M.P. for Faasaleleaga is awaiting a hearing of a criminal matter where he faces one count of forgery and another charge of fraud in relation to a document he alleged to have forged.

He denied the charges and the matter has been adjourned until September this year.

However, on Tuesday, Peseta said there has been no progress on a complaint he had filed against Police about the handling of the matter which led to the charges against him. I did not withdraw my complaint, he said. I have already spent a substantial amount of money on my lawyer and I will not withdraw it.

I still havent heard from Police since then (when filed complaint). They keep saying to me they are investigating it but there hasnt been any development to it. According to Peseta, it appears that Police are not making any progress. Its the same answer every time you ask, he said. They are investigatingI havent heard from the Police and the investigation and complaint is to do with a lot of the mess dealing with land, money and other things. You will find out when its all done.
Joyful applause and acclamation filled the Wesley Chapel at Faleula , as members of the Methodist Church celebrated the success of five newly-ordained pastors yesterday.

During the packed service attended by families, friends and church members at the president of the Methodist Church, Rev. Lafai Apineru encouraged the servants of God to always have faith.

The pastors had already graduated from Piula Theological College in the last five years but yesterday was another step in the right direction in terms of their calling to serve God and their parishioners.

One of the ordained Reverends, Rev. Taeono Latu Amani was extremely grateful that they have been

able to reach this milestone in their lives.

The glory belongs to our Heavenly father because without Him we wouldnt be here, he said.

To all of our families and friends and the Methodist Church, thanks for your support and prayers.

Rev. Siaki Haini acknowledged the hand of the Almighty and everyone who has supported them

through their journey.

It has been a long journey and I just want to thank God for all that He had done for me and my wife especially the church, he said.

We have been chosen to serve and nothing else but to rely on God to lead and guide us in everything. The ordination ceremony was part of the churchs annual conference.
A special committee has been approved by Cabinet to prepare an agreement for the abandoned Samoa Land Corporation headquarters at Tuanaimato that will house the Hope 4 Cancer clinic.

This was confirmed by the Minister of Public Enterprises, Lautafi Selafi Purcell on Thursday.

During an interview with the Observer, Lautafi said the agreement will outline the terms of the lease.

Every detail of the lease will be in the agreement, he explained.

They (Hope 4 Cancer) are keen to get here but before that, the agreements (needs to be arranged) and signed.

Plans by the government to turn the $4.5million headquarter into a hotel in the past years hit many hurdles and finally the plan was set aside.

But hopes were re-ignited for the abandoned headquarters this year when a number of officials from the Hope 4 Cancer Institute in Mexico came to Samoa.

The Medical Director of the Hope 4 Cancer Institute in Mexico, Dr. Antonio Jimenez met with the Minister of Health and local officials about the plans in June this year. The Director assured that their mission will to establish the centre will attract medical tourism.

The Minister of Public Enterprises was also asked whether the government has done its due diligence checks on the foreigners. In response, Lautafi said the contact person for the mission is the office of the Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. However, he pointed out that such initiatives are not new.

They want to come here because it is central for New Zealand and Australia, said the Minister.

Its closer for patients rather than going all the way to America. They have similar clinics in Mexico and some of them are Mexican.

According to Lautafi the project will open up new thinking for our people to explore natural therapy.

It could open up medical tourism, he said.

Patients who come here to get treatment are not poor people. They may stay here for six months and will spend quite some money in our country.
LOS ANGELES, July 17, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Blue light radiation from digital devices compromises eye health, reports Westchester Eyecare Center. Blue light radiation can cause discomfort and additional strain in the eye health of patients. Excessive blue light exposure affects vision and may make sustained focus difficult. People can still enjoy their digital devices with a few adjustments that reduce their exposure. Patients of Westchester Eyecare Center can learn more about protective eyewear and ways to limit exposure to blue light radiation at their South Bay eye care clinic.



Excessive blue light exposure has become a significant concern for optometrists and affected patients. As found in numerous studies, excessive blue light can result in excessive eye strain that can exacerbate eye health conditions and produce considerable discomfort. Overexposure from devices has been known to develop headaches and vision abnormalities in those exposed. Initial signs of excessive exposure are temporary blurry vision, dry or runny eyes or headaches. Continued blue light exposure in excess may lead to chronic problems. Blue light can penetrate to the retina of the eye and is recognized as harmful. Children have become significantly at risk as they access devices for long periods of time and they lack special protective pigments to filter some of the blue light as their eyes are continuing to develop.

Solutions to excessive blue light exposure include specialized protective eyewear and reduction in the amount of blue light exposure. Digital device users are recommended to blink more to maintain sufficient lubrication and to apply the 20-20-20 rule. Digital device users should pause their use every 20 minutes to stare at a point or object at a minimum of 20 feet away for 20 seconds or more. Westchester Eyecare Center offers corrective solutions and suggestions on how to reduce exposure to excessive amounts of blue light from digital devices.

Blue light penetrates into the retina and todays adults and children are more susceptible to blue light damage, said Dr. Jenn Tabiza. Lenses that filter out blue light are a solution, as is taking breaks from screen time, both reducing effects of eye strain from digital devices. Continue to enjoy digital devices but be proactive when it comes to blue light exposure.

Dr. Jenn Tabiza, board certified optometrist speaking Spanish, Farsi and English, offers optometry services to residents in and around El Segundo, Inglewood, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Playa Vista, Playa del Rey, Marina del Rey. Patients of all ages benefit from high-quality eye care at Westchester Eyecare Center. Services include eye exams, LASIK consultations, designer eyewear and computer vision solutions.

Call (310) 593-4240 to learn more about excessive blue light exposure or visit http://westchestereyecarecenter.com/ for more details on the full range of optometry services available at Westchester Eyecare Center.
GREENFIELD, Wis., July 17, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Laser therapy is a welcome addition to the range of veterinary services available, reports Greenfield Veterinary Clinic. The veterinarians at this animal hospital address common pet ailments and trauma with laser therapy. Laser therapy painlessly addresses chronic and uncomfortable conditions in animals. Diagnostic tests and x-rays precede the diagnosis, and then possible application of laser therapy, as a non-surgical alternative, may be suggested for the pets health. The goal at Greenfield Veterinary Clinic is to have pets return to an active and pain-free life.



There are an array of conditions that can be addressed with laser therapy. The cold laser in laser therapy stimulates cellular activity to improve health. It reduces inflammation, common in aging animals experiencing arthritis and other inflammatory conditions. Laser therapy is also used to treat multiple injuries, muscle sprains, fractures, wounds, nerve injuries and joint injuries. The therapy takes as little as 10 minutes on smaller pets and is completely painless. Pets with joint conditions and difficulty walking and running experience a positive change in their activity levels. Pets can benefit from this non-invasive alternative to manage and treat painful conditions. Experienced veterinarians help owners identify when laser therapy is applicable to their pets condition.

Laser therapy is a proven treatment available to pets at our clinic, said Dr. James Work. As an experienced veterinarian, I often see pets come in with painful conditions and trauma. Laser therapy provides a solution that can soothe pain, decrease inflammation and allows pets to get back to their old tricks. Pets can once again jump and move as they used to, depending on age and previous injuries. Laser therapy has been found to benefit both cats and dogs; helping with conditions related to the aging process. It is an alternative that is drug-free, surgery-free and, important to the comfort of a pet, pain-free.

Dr. Work, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Sarah offer veterinary care to pets and their owners in Greenfield, Greendale, Oak Creek, Hales Corners, Franklin, Cudahy and other communities within and surrounding the Milwaukee Area. Greenfield Veterinary Clinic is a full service animal hospital offering in-house lab work, laser surgery, ultrasound, endoscopy, dental services, x-rays and more. Laser therapy uses the latest proven technology to improve the well-being of animals at Greenfield Veterinary Clinic. The offices are open 6 days a week and pet emergencies are quickly addressed with a phone call. Affordable pet care is available but the CareCredit option offers pet owners a valuable opportunity to care for immediate needs of pets via monthly installments. Pets and their owners benefit from the experience of over 38 years of veterinary practice at Greenfield Veterinary Clinic.

Call (414) 282-5230 to schedule an appointment with an experienced veterinarian at the Greenfield Veterinary Clinic; to find out more about laser therapy visit http://greenfieldpetvet.com/ for more details.

http://greenfieldpetvet.com/services/pet-laser-therapy.html
FLORENCE, S.C.  In 2015, Carver Elementary School started using the Project Lead the Way curriculum to teach student in kindergarten through fourth-grade STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) concepts. Now, in 2016, the school is taking the work one step further and becoming a STEM magnet school.

Principal Chris Rogers said that since Project Lead the Way was implemented there has been great success with it and the school wanted to expand.

This year is going to be a year of focusing on making sure our curriculum is exactly the way we want it and exploring things to get our teachers trained in, Rogers said. We want to listen to our childrens feedback; we want to listen to our students and our teachers because they have different perspectives. We are very excited about our offering for this year and want to make it even better for the coming year.

What is a magnet school?

The magnet model is not widely used in the United States. According to the South Carolina Department of Education, there are just 146 magnet schools out of the more than 1,200 schools in the state.

Students attending magnet schools place an emphasis on specific areas, such as math or the arts.

Basically, it will be a direct focus in all that we do, Rogers said. For example, our third-grade teachers have already worked on units, taking the novels students will read and making them relate to STEM.

While Project Lead the Way does not always follow from subject to subject, grade to grade, magnet schools allow for a smooth integration.

It is a building-wide focus, not just one or two classrooms, Rogers said. When you say magnet, we are looking at attracting students that have a big interest in STEM and children who want to be focused on their academics in that direction.

How does it work?

Every grade level will be participating in the STEM projects going on in their classroom, Rogers said. There is a Project Lead The Way or an Engineering Is Elementary project each nine weeks that the children will be working on.

Classroom teachers and lab teachers will work together.

The teachers in the classroom have the Project Lead the Way lesson to do, Rogers said. The science lab teacher will have some smaller activities that relate to that. They are finding out more and more about the concept, building or whatever it is, that they are learning about; that way they will get to do some in the classroom and also in the lab.

Related arts teachers will also be looking for ways to integrate STEM concepts.

We want to incorporate music, art and P.E. into STEM in ways that those teachers find they can do that, Rogers said. For instance, if you are studying building you can relate to the different types of architecture and the different countries that use that, tying it all together.

Role reversal

In some way, being a STEM magnet school will change the way that the classroom is set up.

STEM turns teachers into facilitators and puts the learning back on the students, Rogers said. Instead of having teachers just standing in front of the classroom, they will be moving around the classroom during instruction. Students will be collaborating.

Attendance zone

In 2016, the magnet school will be available to Carver students only. In subsequent years, students zoned for other schools will be able to apply to attend.

For the 17-18 school year we are opening Carver up to where you can apply to come to the STEM program, Rogers said. We will have three STEM nights for parents to come in and see what their students are doing. On those nights, parents who are interested in having their student attend Carver can also come out and get information.
Is a 2.1 undergrad GPA just too much to come back from? (STEM) [ #permalink

I was debating whether to put this thread on this section of the forum or the one where I can ask Admission Consultants (where I will post this thread again just for good measure).



So where do I even begin...



I recently graduated college (class of 2016) and in a few years, an MBA is looking like a path I want to take. Unlike most college kids who begin college picking their own major, I had immigrant parents that aggressively pushed me into the pre-med track because their reasoning was "only way to be successful in life is to be a doctor". Having had them micro-manage my life (against my own will of course) during my adolescence resulted in me not having the backbone to stick up to them.



To make a long story short, I did poorly in my pre-med classes but parents pushed me (often using fear mongering and threats) to finish my science major because "that is the only way you will get a job in this economy!".



By the time I could grow a backbone to stand up to my parents, I was in my senior year of college and by then the major damage had been done. It is not that difficult to make a D in Organic chemistry, Biochemistry, Cell Biology, Microbiology, and genetics if you don't give it 100%. I made D's in those classes and repeated them, only to get Cs. I have some A's and a lot of B's on my transcript but bad grades in upper level science classes wrecked havoc on my GPA.



My college years were miserable and it led to me taking time to do a lot of reading on what I am meant to do. I thought back to my old self and realized that my ideal careers are in the business and corporate world as opposed to medicine, dentistry, or healthcare.



Now as a pre-med who graduated with a low GPA, my job options aren't that great but I am aiming for getting a b2b sales type of job to help get my door in the business world. I know I have many years of planning cut out for me if I want to get into a decent MBA program. My long term goal is to break into fields of business such as consulting and/or banking (doing more research on them) but I know that with my current college transcript, that will not be possible.



Looking back at it, I know that if I had majored in accounting, finance, or business then my college experience would have been much more enjoyable as those are the fields I want to get into.



What I do want to know is, is it possible to get into a decent MBA program with a 2.1 GPA? What will need to be done?



What can I do right now to put myself in a much better situation years from now?
They have been places where the bonds of close-knit communities seem tangible, where voices lift to shake rafters and where a spirit of togetherness provides palpable strength to those in the room.

But those visits were before the shootings at Emanuel AME Church, where worshippers welcomed a disturbed white man who soon turned his gun on them. Those visits were before shooting after shooting of blacks by authorities and a grisly shooting by a black man of five Dallas police officers. Those visits were before a recoil of hope that seems to be shrouding America and splitting it along racial lines.

A few weeks ago, I attended a service at a well-known black church in Jackson, Miss. Members in their Sunday best filled a modern sanctuary. A choir sang praise hymns, their joyful sounds were punctuated by organ music and the crisp snap of a snare drum. The pastor gave a riveting, moving sermon. There were testimonials and announcements  all of the features typical of the service.

But in peoples eyes, you could see something different. It wasnt fear, but it wasnt the kind of welcome that I experienced years earlier. More than anything, these eyes looked tired  tired of struggles that continued years after civil rights victories. These eyes wondered about the two white guys sitting at the back of the church. The eyes reflected an apprehensiveness caught in side glances that were far from those of normal curiosity.

After the service, the minister greeted us with the same reserve. But after a brief discussion and mention of a couple of mutual friends, you could see a hint of the old warmth upon realization that we were good guys, not unknown threats.

In Barack Obamas 2004 speech that launched him onto the world stage, the future president wondered whether the country would participate in the politics of cynicism or the politics of hope. He expanded the discussion in a 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, which helped to propel a presidential campaign that by 2008 had some people wondering whether America was entering a post-racial phase.

Now after too many shootings and too much violence, its obvious the country is retreating on race, not embracing it. A new poll in The New York Times highlights how 69 percent of Americans think race relations are generally bad. Six in 10 say racial divisions are getting worse, up from 38 percent just a year ago.

Is Obamas politics of hope being replaced by the politics of cynicism? His politics of hope was fueled by the vestiges of the civil rights movement that was at its height as he was a boy. But the tough realities of todays world, fueled by pervasive media, a Nixon-esque politics of fear and the countrys silence in confronting a past that sent a disproportionate share of minorities to prison, has changed expectations in political and social debate and interactions. Cynicism is on the rise.

I worry about an America where hope becomes timid, restrained, fearful.

I worry about an America where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is threatened by greed, America First isolationism and fear masked as patriotism.

I worry about an America in which presidential candidates talk about building walls and spend an inordinate amount of time trying to top the previous days insult.

I worry about an America that rejects deep policy debates for made-for-TV, simplistic soundbites.

I worry about an America that doesnt seem to dream anymore.

We can do better. In fact, we must. Our forefathers demand it. Our childrens promising futures hang in the balance.

Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com
There is currently a great global search for yield taking place. Both institutional and retail investors have return targets which must be met.

For example, institutions such as life insurance companies who collect insurance premiums, invest those premiums and payout on insurance claims must generate a certain return on their investments. Their actuaries and statisticians know well in advance what return must be earned in order to remain profitable.

Individual investors planning for retirement make return assumptions in their financial planning. Relatively small differences in return assumptions have a large impact on final results.

For example, a person planning on retiring in 15 years who saves $10,000 a year and earns 10% annually on their savings would have $317,000 at retirement. If they earned 5% annually they would have $215,000 at the end of 15 years.

The yield on U.S. Treasury 10 year bonds is currently 1.5%. The dividend yield of the S&P 500 is currently about 2%. The price level of the S&P 500 is currently not far from where it was 18 months ago.

An investor who saves $10,000 a year for 15 years and earns an annual return of 2% will have $173,000 at the end of those 15 years. The annual rate of return makes a big difference over time, and investors know that.

In much of Europe and Japan returns are even lower than the U.S. German and Japanese government bonds have negative yields all the way out past 10 year maturities. In other words, if you buy a 10 year German or Japanese government bond and hold it until maturity, you will earn a negative nominal return.

Low yields and returns mean that investors are increasingly taking on more risk in their search for attractive portfolio returns. To earn higher yields investors are increasingly moving out the risk curve. This increased risk taking was and is part of central bank monetary policy.

In the United States the U.S. Federal Reserve has called this induced risk taking their portfolio balance channel strategy. The U.S. Federal Reserve has helped to push yields on U.S. Treasury bonds so low that investors are forced into riskier assets in hopes that additional risk taking will create economic growth.

To date, stocks markets have certainly benefited from increased risk taking, the overall economy not so much.

Where this great global search for yield and return ends, nobody knows. Underlying financial ratios such as price-to-earnings, price-to-sales and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, a commonly used measure of a companys ability to make bond payments, are currently stretched by historical measures.

Central banks are very aware of the great run-up in asset prices that they have helped to create which have left yields and returns so low and financial ratios so high. It is becoming more and more evident that their policies are focused mostly on asset prices while hoping that economic growth will increase to support current market valuations.

Markets are currently trading very much off of central bank policy. As an example, markets sold off following the decision by British voters to leave the European Union. Central bankers quickly stepped in with pronouncements and language about continuing and additional monetary stimulus. Global stock markets are now largely higher now than they were before the vote.

In the view of the writer, anyone who believes that the most recent advance in markets is driven by underlying economic fundamentals and earnings is mistaken. It is all about continuing bond and stock purchases and liquidity injections by global central banks.

Keep this in mind as you reach for yield and return in your investment portfolio. No one can know when and how this all ends. It is unwise to expect markets to continue on the current path indefinitely without a major price correction or without global economic growth increasing substantially to support current valuations.

Nielsen has worked in capital markets for over 20 years with a focus on fixed income portfolio and risk management. He has an MBA from George Mason University and holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation. He currently works for Opportunity Bank of Montana.
The 17-mile waterway was closed to tanker traffic for several hours following a dramatic and bloody 13.5 hours which left 294 people killed and more than 1,440 wounded.

Turkish maritime authorities reportedly reopened the strait, which divides Istanbul into European and Asian sides, to all vessels later on Saturday. However, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty to deal with the military plotters, tensions remain high.

Shipping is understandably cautious with the Bosphorus one of the worlds key chokepoints for the transit of oil. More than 3% of global supply  mainly from Russia and the Caspian Sea  passes through the natural waterway which connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Ship tracking surveillance showed 10 tankers anchored off the coast of Istanbul on the southern side of the strait, presumably awaiting instructions on whether to sail through the narrow passage.

It follows a tumultuous 24 hours which saw tanks guarding key bridges in Istanbul, armed forces storm the capital Ankara and military jets buzzing overhead. The military faction declared a curfew and martial law but supporters loyal to Erdogan heeded the Turkish presidents call to pour onto the streets of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir in defiance despite explosions near Istanbul's central Taksim Square and the parliament building in Ankara.

Shipping agent GAC reported Saturday that only vessels with non-hazardous cargoes, such as bulkers, ro-ro, reefers and the like, were being allowed to transit the strait which is only half a mile wide at its narrowest point. Masters of vessels in the Turkish Straits and Marmara Sea are advised to stay in touch with VTS (Vessel Traffic Services) and act in line with their instructions, GAC said amid heightened security fears.

Some 48,000 vessels transit the straits each year; vast quantities of grains from Russia and Kazakhstan are shipped to world markets via the waterway as well as oil. Commercial shipping has the right of free passage in peacetime, although Turkey, itself a key commodity user including being one of top five gas consumers in Europe and a large grains importer, can impose regulations for safety and environmental purposes.

GAC Turkey has since advised that the situation is largely under control but reported that transportation is being affected negatively, especially in Istanbul and Ankara.



As a result of flight delays and cancellations at Istanbuls Ataturk International Airport, GAC Turkey urges ship owners or operators to check with [us] before sending crew to Turkey. Further, the clearance of the spare parts will be delayed until the operations at the airport is back to normal.

Among many countries condemning the failed coup was the UAE.



The UAE is keen to see a secure and stable Turkey. It welcomes the return of Turkey to its legitimate and constitutional track, which is an expression of the will of the Turkish people, UAE Foreign Minister Shaikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan said.
BILLINGS -- When Scott Dubbs started teaching science in Harlowton in 1980, Montana issued scant guidance on what kids should be learning.

I remember the days when there were no standards whatsoever, said Dubbs, though there were some education guidelines related to state accreditation of schools, he said.

It was what the textbook people said was important.

He learned to evaluate what content in textbooks kids needed to learn most and when to teach it.

During the past year, Dubbs, now the curriculum director at Lewistown, helped create new science standards for Montana that the Board of Public Education proposed Thursday.

The science standards closely resemble Next Generation Science Standards, a framework developed by a 26-state group in 2013. Sixteen states have adopted the standards.

Kids in Lewistown, Billings, Missoula and Victor all get the same high school diploma. They take the same standardized tests. And they all learn the same things in class  kind of.

For decades now, Montana has issued state content standards  requirements for what students are supposed to know in certain subject areas. But those standards dont dictate how students learn, what materials are used and what subjects educators emphasize. Local school districts set curriculum, and teachers often have flexibility within that.

A standard is an educational destination; curriculum is how students get there. But the road for each district can be very different. Large districts, like Billings, have more resources but also have more moving parts to keep track of, like more students and more elective classes. Some small districts might have only one teacher per subject. That can lead to stronger relationships with students, but there are fewer opportunities for collaboration with fellow teachers.

The proposed standards are grouped by elementary grade-level standards, then middle school and high school. Current standards only address what students should know by the end of fourth and eighth grade, and by high school graduation.

About two-thirds of respondents in an Office of Public Instruction economic impact survey said their district wouldnt have to change its curriculum to meet the new standards.

The proposed standards were created by committees of educators, administrators and community members. They will be open for public input, and are slated to be up for approval this fall. If approved, they're supposed to go into effect for the 2017-18 school year.

New state standards for health, physical education and the arts were approved Thursday. Math and English and language arts were updated in 2011. Science standards were last updated in 2006. Officials said that while there is no formal schedule for what standards will be updated next, social studies standards last updated in 2000 are a priority.

Meeting standards

Often, classroom materials  a textbook, videos, activity guides  drive curriculum.

Current accreditation standards say districts need to review curriculum materials every five years; that doesnt necessarily mean they get updated or replaced. Teachers often use supplementary resources, from newspaper articles to YouTube videos. Billings is behind schedule updating its science curriculum, but its policy allows teachers to use supplemental resources. The district has also been rolling out Project Lead the Way, a hands-on science, technology, engineering and math initiative.

Andrea Meiers, a former Laurel Middle School principal, leads the Alliance for Curriculum Enhancement, a group that helps 38 districts in Montana design curriculum. Many of them are small, rural districts that aim to utilize collective expertise. Her group works to help districts get past relying solely on textbooks. Instead, she encourages them to use a variety of resources.

"But now the problem is vetting those (other resources), she said.

The proposed standards are less resource-dependent, she said. Promotional materials for the standards pitch them as not just a series of isolated facts, but as encouraging students to apply concepts across disciplines.

Missoula County Public Schools recently adopted NGSS standards as a district.

"Science used to be really fact-based and regurgitating a lot of facts about things," said Jodi Smith, a Missoula teacher who helped lead work on new science standards for the district. "Now it's taking it to more of that critical thinking from students."

Districts, with their curriculum control, are often ahead of the curve adapting to standards.

"Comparing NGSS to the old MCPS documents, science teachers found there was a lot of overlap," said Robyn Nuttall, another Missoula teacher who worked on the curriculum overhaul.

Our teachers have already kind of been implementing the concepts of the Next Generation. We have to teach our current state standards, but there are a lot of things that the Next Generation Standards apply to, said Laurel superintendent Linda Filpula, whose district hasn't formally adopted the standards. Theyre very well aligned with what were doing.

Challenges

The state did determine that the standards would be a significant financial burden for many districts, whether for new materials or teacher training. The OPI set aside more than $500,000 for districts during the first three years of new standard implementation. The office requested an additional $100,000 in the governors budget.

Engineering standards in NGSS were excised from Montana standards, in part out of concern about the ability of small districts to adapt.

Dan Johnston, principal of Victors middle and high schools and leader of the Ravalli County Curriculum Consortium, said in an email that the consortium is in the process of reviewing and adopting fine arts and library media standards that were revised by the state in 2008. Science standards wont come under review until the 2017-2018 school year.

No matter what OPI does with the standards, local districts tend to be one to five years behind, depending on their adoption cycle, Johnston said.

No one is considering mandating a statewide curriculum.

Thats not the way it works in Montana, Dubbs said. We are so independent. We literally get on our horse and we do our thing.

There are benefits and downsides to that independence, said Dr. Lisa Blank, a University of Montana professor in curriculum and instruction.

With a decentralized education system, districts can set a locally-focused curriculum that makes sense for its students and teachers. But the tradeoff is a mile-wide, inch-deep curriculum that lacks a consistent progression of subject matter and emphasis across the state, Blank said.

Meiers, an advocate of Montanas local curriculum system, called the current science standards very broad.

I think we certainly need guidance on what a good education looks like, she said. (But) you have to go back through your own community and figure out what fits.

Accountability

The state checks in on districts through accreditation standards, which were last updated in 2013. New federal legislation also mandates that schools create an accountability system that includes standardized testing.

The rise of test-based accountability led to a push to teach to standards, Dubbs said.

Then everybody started going, if were gonna get tested on this, we probably do need to focus more on what the standard says and how were going to get there, he said.

But federal testing zeroes in on reading and math, not subjects like science, or the arts, health and physical education, for which new standards were approved Thursday.

"Assessment is what we value, Blank said. Math and reading have become quite central to curriculum, because its whats evaluated. Science is not a high-stakes assessment field, unlike math and reading. In the last decade, it has been math and reading every year in elementary, then in middle school one checkpoint in science in eighth grade, and one in high school.

Several administrators said collaboration would be key for implementing the standards once they're approved, especially for rural districts.

When youre in Podunk, MT, 100 miles away from anywhere, it really hard to have those conversations, Dubbs said. I think a lot of it is just trying to share as much as you can."
Deep under the waves of a long lost ocean there were whale-sized marine reptiles that, it's theorized, might have been attacked and eaten by a giant kraken. Meanwhile, a newly discovered giant scavenger from the same time may have made its living picking over the leftovers.

The idea of a kraken was originally proposed a couple of years ago at the meeting of the Geological Society of America by Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin. Now he has returned to the annual meeting with what he believes is more evidence of the kraken, including what could be the tip of its tooth-like beak, another example of a potential kraken murder case, and the earliest-known fossil of a scavenger crustacean that is today among those found devouring whale carcasses in the ocean depths.

The initial evidence for the kraken was very indirect: McMenamin found in 2011 signs that the remains of 14-meter (45-foot) ichthyosaurs at Nevada's Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park were arranged in patterns that resembled the work of a modern-day octopus -- which are known to fiddle and arrange bones as well as attack and kill sharks. He also asserted then, as now, that the Nevada rocks in which the ichthyosaurs were found are incorrectly interpreted as being made from shallow ocean sediments, when they are actually from much much deeper.

The kraken hypothesis was not warmly embraced by his colleagues, and McMenamin was going to let the matter drop until he came across an old issue of a journal in which there were photos of a museum display of the ichthyosaurs skeletons that had been removed from the park.

"It was laid out exactly as found in the field and there were rib cage constrictions," said McMenamin. "It was very strange. I'd never seen anything like it before. It looked like something had pulled bones out of place and placed them to one side."

So McMenamin returned earlier this year to Nevada with students in search of additional evidence. What they found was a small rock that they later realized might be part of a giant cephalopod beak -- a kraken's maw.

"It's the densest thing on the body of a cephalopod," McMenamin said. And so it's the most likely thing to be preserved in the fossil record. "We obtained a beak of a giant Humboldt squid and compared. That actually worked pretty well. We have direct comparison to modern Humboldt squid. They had very similar fractures and converging straia (lines)."

These are just more pieces in the kraken case, which is a tough one, as there are other explanations for the evidence.

"The problem with the kraken argument is it does not take into account all the other ways those vertebrae could have been re-arranged," said Spencer Lucas, paleontologist and curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. "For example, the body of the ichthyosaur had to decompose and collapse, and scavenging by various animals could have taken place. These processes could have rearranged vertebrae."

Several experts in the area were also asked to comment, but said they preferred not to. Still even Lucas isn't ruling a kraken out.

"I suppose the kraken argument is a possibility, but one of many, and a highly unusual one. What we need here is a more rigorous analysis that excludes the many alternatives to the kraken idea."

On the other hand, there is that scavenger fossil -- what's called an amphipod -- that was found by one of McMenamin's students. He's giving a second presentation about that find at the same meeting, arguing that it's the earliest known and a supergiant version of today's small crustaceans. That's a much easier case to make, and important to paleontologists, if not as racy as a kraken.

"The amphipod is an important addition to our knowledge of a group with a limited fossil record," said Lucas.
Tuesday nights until November at the Marsh on Valencia, political comic Will Dursts Elect to Laugh! aims to put the mock back in democracy, where it belongs.

Last week, the satirist began chronologically, starting when the Republicans had 17 contenders and going forward candidate by candidate, aided by images from an overhead projector. Moans from audience members responding to those images served as a kind of impromptu popularity meter.

Although there were some jokes about Sen. Bernie Sanders  whod that day endorsed Hillary Clinton  Sanders is treated with a lot more respect in the Mission District than Chris Christie. (If the New Jersey governor had heard the audience response to his image, he might have rued encountering a camera when he was wearing stretchy white baseball pants.)

Thats not to say its a one-sided bash fest. On Obama, at first: No matter what you thought of his politics, you had to admire his ability not to get involved with them. On the coming election: I dont know whats scarier, that one of these people is going to be president or that the American people get to decide.

Every seat was taken Tuesday, July 12, and the crowd seemed to relish laughing together at every topical joke. But although theres nothing nostalgic about Dursts material, I couldnt help noticing that most of the audience was significantly older than the neighborhood demographic, which is heavy on sushi-foraging Millennials. I dont understand that: Arent hipsters going to vote?

Liam Mayclem, who went to see Sting performing with Peter Gabriel in San Jose as the news of Nice was breaking Thursday night, July 14, says Sting told the audience, We need a new version of the world, one based on empathy, on solidarity, one based on our common humanity.

Traditional mens and womens room signs at Cal Shakes facilities, reports Regan McMahon, are augmented: We welcome gender diversity here: please use the restroom that best fits your gender identity or expression. To access a gender neutral restroom, please see our house staff for assistance. Arrows point to restrooms with urinals and without.

And if that seems complicated, another message from Cal Shakes is affixed to bags of Kettle Corn: Kettle Corn is delicious ... and LOUD! Cal Shakes asks that you be mindful of your neighbors when digging into this bag and eating during the performance. Is cellophane loud? Should the stuff be poured into laps before the performance starts? Or maybe signage could provide directions for avoiding crackle by sucking on the corn to moisten it before chewing?

The publication of Lorraine Romingers memoir, The Rangity Tango Kids, about growing up in a California farm family, was celebrated Thursday night, July 14, at Book Passage in the Ferry Building. Rominger, interim executive director of the Goldman Environmental Prize, was executive director of the San Francisco Film and Video Arts Commission under Mayor Frank Jordan. He was at the bookstore, and his official introduction of Rominger included generous praise for her role in his administration.

It was Rominger, for example, who took Jordan down to Beverly Hills to meet with producers and persuade them to shoot films in San Francisco. And it was Rominger, he said, whose push to bring Nash Bridges to town resulted in Don Johnson living here.

Although this wasnt a political event at all, when Rominger took the microphone, she couldnt help making a reference to civic matters. Twenty years ago, when Jordan was in office, she said, San Francisco was a better place because we had a mayor that really cared.

Donald is most famous for his semi-intelligible speech and his mischievous and temperamental personality. ... His anger is a great cause of suffering in his life. On multiple occasions, it has caused him to get in over his head and lose competitions. There are times when he fights to keep his temper in check, and he sometimes succeeds in doing so temporarily, but he always returns to his normal angry self in the end. ... He can sometimes come across as a bit of a bully. ... His love of bragging often leads him to overestimate his abilities, so that when he sets out to make good on his boasts, he gets in over his head, usually to hilarious effect.

Thanks to Gary Tobin for this Wikipedia description of Donald Duck. Meanwhile, Mark Buell notes that the anagram for the last names of the GOP candidates for national office is un PC temper.

Open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @leahgarchik

Public Eavesdropping

I love other

peoples moms.

Young woman on cell phone, overheard in downtown

Mill Valley by Robert Hurwitt
WASHINGTON -- It was just another week in Donald Trump's (white) America First campaign.

At least twice, Trump alleged that people have called for a "moment of silence" for the madman who killed five police officers in Dallas at a Black Lives Matter protest.

It was an incendiary accusation, bound to stir racial hatred. Like Trump's accusation that New Jersey Muslims cheered the 9/11 attacks, this, too, was categorically false. There was no sign of such calls, and a top Trump adviser couldn't corroborate the allegation.

Yet what was remarkable about the reckless accusation was how unremarkable his appeals to racist division have become. Days before and after this, Trump:

Snubbed the NAACP, saying he wouldn't appear at the group's convention.

Declared in response to racial unrest that "I am the law-and-order candidate" -- an echo of Richard Nixon's response to violence following the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.

Spoke at a rally where supporters answered mentions of President Obama with "he's a monkey" and to Hillary Clinton by saying "hang that b****."

There was also the deleted tweet by prominent Trump surrogate Carl Paladino, who said of the African-American attorney general: "Lynch @LorettaLynch." Paladino said it was a mistake, and maybe it was. Republicans trying to justify their support for Trump would like to believe each incident is a misunderstanding. But they can't all be.

As Republicans head to Cleveland to nominate Trump for the presidency, here, for easy reference, is a compilation of what they'd like to ignore.

Trump tweeted an image, previously posted to an anti-Semitic message board, of a Star of David atop paper money; he later objected to his campaign's decision to remove the image.

Trump told Jewish Republicans, "You're not going to support me, because I don't want your money."

He had supporters raise their hands in a loyalty pledge that the former head of the Anti-Defamation League called a "fascist gesture."

He said, "I don't have a message" for supporters of his who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist. The journalist had criticized Melania Trump, who said the writer "provoked" the attacks.

His "America First" campaign slogan was the name of the isolationist, anti-Semitic organization that opposed involvement in World War II.

Trump has banned news organizations such as The Washington Post from covering his events but credentialed the host of a white-supremacist radio show.

He repeatedly declined to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan in a CNN interview.

The Trump campaign chose a white supremacist as a delegate, then blamed a database error.

Trump retweeted a message from @WhiteGenocideTM, phony crime statistics that originated with neo-Nazis, a quote from Mussolini and a message from a supporter who embraces a "right-wing death squad" label.

Trump's campaign blamed an intern's mistake for tweeting an image of Nazi soldiers superimposed on the American flag next to Trump's likeness.

Trump said of a Black Lives Matter protester at his event: "Maybe he should have been roughed up."

He talked of paying the legal fees of a supporter who sucker-punched a black protester at an event.

He told reporters at another event to "look at my African-American over here."

Trump launched his campaign saying Mexico was sending "rapists" across the border. He called for mass deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants, "half" of whom are criminals.

He said the American-born judge in a fraud case against him could not be impartial because of his Mexican ancestry.

He tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl and wrote "I love Hispanics!" He kicked Jorge Ramos out of a news conference and said Univision "takes its marching orders" from Mexico.

He used broken English to mock Asians. He used a fake Indian accent. He referred to Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed Native American ancestry, as "Pocahontas." He asked a Texas-born Asian American at one event: "Are you from South Korea?"

He proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States. He spoke favorably of forcing those already here to register with authorities. When a turban-wearing protester was removed from one of his events, Trump said: "He wasn't wearing one of those hats, is he?"

Trump said last year that "I really don't know" if President Obama was born in the United States. He implied that Obama was responsible for the Orlando mass shooting. He let stand the remark by a questioner at one of his events who called Obama a Muslim.

There are many more, but this column is 750 words -- far shorter than Trump's catalogue of racial animus.

Dana Milbank is a columnist for The Washington Post.
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NICE, France  The Islamic State claimed Saturday that the man who attacked the seaside city of Nice was one of the groups soldiers. Frances defense minister promptly blamed the terrorist network for inspiring the assault, while its top law enforcement official said the attacker, who was not previously known to intelligence agencies, may have radicalized himself very quickly.

The attacker, Mohamed Bouhlel, carried out the assault Thursday evening using a 19-ton refrigerated truck and an automatic pistol. The death toll remained at 84, but the number of injured rose to 303, of whom 121 were in hospitals, 26 of them in intensive care.

France, traumatized by three major terrorist assaults in 19 months, began three days of national mourning Saturday.

The Islamic State had kept silent on the Nice attack until Saturday morning, when it declared, in a bulletin issued in Arabic and in English on its Amaq News Agency channel: Executor of the deadly operation in Nice, France, was a soldier of the Islamic State. He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations, which fight the Islamic State.

The claim must be greeted with caution, because there was yet no evidence suggesting that the driver was radicalized, or had even been exposed to the Islamic States propaganda.

After a husband and wife killed 14 people in San Bernardino in December, the Amaq News Agency described them as two supporters, making it clear that the Islamic State had not directed their actions. But after a gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., last month, having pledged loyalty to the group, it called him a fighter.

In a statement Saturday on its radio station, the Islamic State referred to Bouhlel as a soldier who had responded to the groups call to target states participating in the crusader coalition that fights the caliphate.

In 2014, the Islamic States spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, called on the groups followers to attack Westerners in retaliation for strikes by the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He has repeatedly singled out France, which is part of the coalition, as a main enemy.

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.

No evidence has emerged that Bouhlel got training or orders from the Islamic State, unlike the perpetrators of attacks in and around Paris on Nov. 13 and Brussels on March 22.

Bouhlel, 31, a native of Tunisia, had a history of petty crime going back to 2010. He received a six-month suspended sentence this year for assaulting a motorist but was not on the radar of French intelligence agencies. Indeed, he seemed more like a surly misfit  he beat his wife, until she threw him out  than a prospective terrorist.

The countrys top law enforcement official, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, said Saturday: The individual who committed this absolutely despicable, unspeakable crime was not known by the intelligence services, as he had not stood out over the past years  whether through court convictions or through his activity  for support of radical Islamist ideology.

But Cazeneuve added: It seems that he radicalized himself very quickly.
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Dozens of costume artists descended Saturday morning on San Franciscos Japantown Peace Plaza wearing intricate layers of makeup and elaborate handmade outfits  and basically adopting a new identity for the day.

Among the crowd were several Sailor Moons, a Goku from Dragon Ball Z, a Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy and, of course, a few Ash Ketchums from Pokemon.

The costume artists, known as cosplayers (short for costume play), came from across the Bay Area to take on the identities of their favorite fictional characters for the San Francisco Anime and Cosplay Festival in Japantown.

It was the sixth year for the event, meant to draw people to Japantown to celebrate anime and cosplay, which have taken off in Japanese culture, said Yoko, an event organizer who goes by just one name.

Alongside the impressively dressed fictional characters, hundreds of uncostumed people showed up to show their support and to meet and take photos with their favorite characters.

The point of cosplay, Yoko said, is to let people act out fantasies and make discoveries about their own identity along the way.

With cosplay, you can become anyone you want to become, Yoko said. You can do it for fun, but a lot of people end up finding their true selves in the process.

For the days event, cosplayers could dress in any way they liked, as long as its safe and family-friendly, Yoko said.

Mao Hanabi showed up in an ornate light pink dress that she described as Lolita Fashion, a Japanese fashion subculture with links to anime. As she posed for photos alongside a group of friends, Hanabi said she was drawn to anime and cosplay in part to connect with others.

I didnt fit in well with other groups of people, Hanabi said. But this has allowed me to make a lot of friends and form a community.

Kevin Schultz is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kschultz@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kevinedschultz
In the music industrys streaming battles, the fight extends to even the minutiae of copyright.

A new government filing by Apple proposes simplifying the highly complex way songwriting royalties are paid when it comes to on-demand streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal.

According to Apples proposal, made with the Copyright Royalty Board, a panel of federal judges who oversee rates in the United States, streaming services should pay 9.1 cents in songwriting royalties for every 100 times a song is played. This formula would replace the long passages of federal rules for streaming rates, which often leave musicians bewildered about how money flows in streaming music.

But even in this seemingly innocuous proposal, which was not made public but was obtained by the New York Times, Apples target is clear: Spotify, its archenemy in streaming music. The proposal would significantly raise the rates that Spotify pays, and the filing includes lines that are clearly directed at Spotify and its freemium model.

An interactive stream has an inherent value, Apple wrote, regardless of the business model a service provider chooses.

A spokeswoman for Apple confirmed the filing but declined to comment further.

Apple Music was introduced a year ago, and it has earned the support of many power players in the music industry  including Taylor Swift  because it does not offer a free version, but instead charges about $10 a month. Spotify, begun in Europe in 2008, has both free and paid versions. This has led to a relationship with record companies and music publishers, who say the services free tier does not pay enough in royalties and devalues their music across the board.

The battle over free music has extended to YouTube, which the music industry has been campaigning against for months, arguing that the service does not pay enough in royalties and that the availability of so much free music on the site has hampered the growth of paid services. Both Spotify and YouTube counter that they have paid billions of dollars to the music industry.

Last month, Apple said that Apple Music had 15 million subscribers, and Spotify reported that it had 30 million paid users and another 70 million who listen free, with ads.

Although Apple Music has a three-month free trial, the company has stood by its model of paid music. We agree 100 percent with artists that they should have the right to decide where their content is available  whether its free or when its free, when it should be paid or how much it should cost, Eddy Cue, Apples senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview this week with the Hollywood Reporter.

Apples filing was made as part of a proceeding by the Copyright Royalty Board to set statutory rates for downloads and interactive streaming services from 2018 too 2022. Spotify, Google, Pandora, Amazon and the Recording Industry Association of America were all expected to file their proposals by Friday, but the panel has not yet made the filings public.

Although the bulk of Apples proposal with the Copyright Royalty Board is confined to three paragraphs, it would have wide implications. Songwriting rates paid by interactive streaming services like Spotify are now governed by a byzantine system that includes a division between what are known as mechanical and performance royalties for the same songs. Apples proposal would cover all songwriting royalties with the same rate. (Royalties for recordings are accounted separately.)

What Apple does not say is that the statutory rates would not apply to its services. When the company introduced Apple Music, it struck deals with music publishers at rates that are slightly higher than usual.
NEW YORK  Two years after the choke-hold death of Eric Garner made I cant breathe a rallying cry for protests over police killings of black men, federal authorities are still grappling with whether to prosecute the white officer seen on a widely watched video wrapping his arm around Garners neck.

The legal limbo is playing out on the watch of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has come under persistent pressure in the city and elsewhere to bring Officer Daniel Pantaleo to justice. The New York City case turned out to be a forerunner to a series of videotaped police killings across the country that have fueled outrage and protests.

Before becoming attorney general, Lynch ran the U.S. attorneys office in Brooklyn, which initiated the review of Garners case after a state grand jury refused to indict Pantaleo in 2014, and she personally met with Garners family in that role. Questioned by Congress last week, she said the Garner investigation remains open but gave no indication of how or when a decision will be made.

Last year, the city agreed to pay $5.9 million to settle the familys wrongful death claim, but the push for a federal case has persisted. Garners siblings performed on a rap song called I Cant Breathe that was released to mark the second anniversary of his July 17, 2014, death, and his mother, Gwen Carr, has proposed converting a small park across the street from where he died into a playground named after him.

Whats in my heart is to keep my sons name alive, Carr said. This is my work for the rest of my life.

A resolution has been hampered by a behind-the-scenes disagreement over the direction of the federal investigation of Garners death in Staten Island, according to two people with inside knowledge. On one side are prosecutors in Lynchs former office in Brooklyn, who arent sure theres enough evidence to charge Pantaelo at the federal level. On the other side are their counterparts in the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division in Washington, who feel more confident in forging ahead.

Both people were not authorized to discuss the decision-making process and spoke on condition of anonymity.

For Garners family and its supporters, the cell phone video shot by a bystander capturing the last moments of his life has always been evidence enough.

Its been two years, the Rev. Al Sharpton said at recent gathering with Garners family. The fatal encounter was on video and weve not seen justice. So thats why people are questioning whats going on now.
SAN DIEGO  A man arrested for a string of deadly attacks on the homeless had a long history of crime and mental health issues and was himself living in subsidized housing for the homeless, it was reported.

Jon David Guerrero, 39, was arrested Friday by police who heard a homeless man screaming after he was attacked.

Guerrero remained jailed Saturday on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and arson. It wasnt immediately clear whether he had a lawyer.

Police said they have no doubt they nabbed the man responsible for five attacks since July 3 that killed three men. The victims  all homeless men  received serious upper-body injuries, and two were set on fire.

Police said they had not determined a motive for the attacks.

Guerrero grew up in the wealthy community of Coronado, across the San Diego Bay, known for its mansions and picturesque beaches. But since January he had been living in a rented one-room apartment in downtowns Alpha Square, a subsidized housing complex for the poor and homeless, KNSD-TV reported.

Guerrero has a history of criminal arrests and mental problems and spent time at a state mental hospital, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported, citing public records.

Guerreros criminal cases in San Diego date from 1999 to 2009. He pleaded guilty in 2008 to burglary, grand theft and possession of marijuana and narcotics paraphernalia. His mother, Kathleen Guerrero, wrote several letters asking the court to seek psychiatric treatment for him in jail, the paper reported.

In 2009, Guerrero was arrested again and pleaded guilty to robbery for repeatedly knocking down a homeless woman and stealing her bicycle. He then violated conditions of his probation and was ruled mentally incompetent and sent to Patton State Hospital.

His attorney at the time wrote that Guerrero hears good and bad voices when his medication wears off but on medication can lead a normal, productive and crime free life, the Union-Tribune reported.

Guerrero was arrested before dawn Friday after a 55-year-old man was attacked under a freeway bridge, suffering severe trauma to his upper body.

Police found Guerrero riding a bicycle nearby and uncovered physical evidence at the scene and at his downtown San Diego residence linking him to all the crimes, police said.
Connor Radnovich / The Chronicle 2015

A man was killed and another wounded early Sunday in a shooting after a fight on Geary Street, San Francisco police said.

The fight broke out about 2 a.m. among patrons leaving a bar on the 900 block of Geary Street, said Sgt. Michael Andraychak of the San Francisco Police Department. The altercation had subsided when a car pulled up, and a man got out and fired shots. One man died at the scene, and another was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
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SAN DIEGO  Hunter Pence will sit out Sundays Triple-A Sacramento game, a day after he exited in the third inning.

The Giants are being cautious with their right fielder whos coming off right hamstring surgery. Its possible Pence could play for Sacramento in New Orleans on Monday.

Hes feeling like he could play, but we thought it best he take the day off, manager Bruce Bochy said. Well see how hes doing tomorrow. Youve got to be careful. Slow-play is what we say all the time with these guys. Youre trying to stay away from setbacks.

Pence was removed from Sundays game in Round Rock, Texas, after hitting a third-inning single. The Giants said it was an issue of scar tissue in the wake of Pence getting hit by a pitch in the right leg in the first inning.

Monday, Bochy said Pence might have felt something in the hamstring while making a quick movement trying to avoid the pitch.

Thats the thing about injuries, Bochy said. You could go through your rehab, you could do yout sprints, your curves, all those things. But when you get in game speed and need to make a quick move, youre probably going to feel something. Thats probably what happened with him. But he said he got up today and felt pretty good, so thats good news.

Im sure hes texting (trainer Dave Groeschner) right now wanting to play. Im sure hes wearing him out.

Duffy to desert: Third baseman Matt Duffy (strained Achilles) is heading to Arizona to resume his rehabilitation. He has been hitting and taking grounders in San Diego. Hell try running Tuesday.

More than anything, its the aggravation and irrtitation of the Achilles, and its going to linger if we dont get it cleared it out, Bochy said. Thats why we backed him off here.

More from sickbay: Reliever Cory Gearrin (shoulder) also will be in Arizona and throw off the mound Tuesday. ... Matt Cain (hamstring) threw a bullpen session and was cleared to start Wednesday in Boston. ... Joe Panik (concussion) is starting his rehab Monday with Sacramento and could be activated for next weekends series at Yankee Stadium.

Plea to managers: MLB executive Joe Torre sent a memo Friday to managers (and GMs) to back off on arguing balls and strikes.

In the memo, obtained by the Associated Press, Torre wrote, "This highly inappropriate conduct is detrimental to the game and must stop immediately."

Torre added, Although disagreements over ball and strike calls are natural, the prevalence of manager ejections simply cannot continue. This conduct not only delays the game, but it also has the propensity to undermine the integrity of the umpires on the field."

Is it working? Heck no.

Hours after the memo was sent out, Bochy got ejected in the ninth inning Friday for arguing with umpire Mike Estabrook over his strike zone.

Oakland manager Bob Melvin got tossed Friday night, too.

Casillas balk-off: Not that its any consolation for Giants fans, but Santiago Casilla did something Saturday night in the Giants 10-inning loss thats rarely done. Since 1974, there have been 15 games ending on a balk, and Casilla was the only Giant in that span to end a game by balking.

Casillas blown save was the 18th for the Giants, tops in the majors. The Giants bullpen has blown seven of their past 11 save chances.

The previous game to end on a balk came June 18, 2015, when the Rangers Keone Kela balked home a run, handing the Dodgers a win.

Giants lineup: CF Span, LF Pagan, 1B Belt, C Posey, SS Crawford, RF Blanco, 2B Pena, 3B Tejada, RH Cueto.

Padres lineup: CF Jankowski, 1B Myers, RF Kemp, 3B Solarte, LF Dickerson, C Bethancourt, 2B Schimpf, SS Ramirez, RH Jackson.

John Shea is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jshea@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JohnSheaHey
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Los Angeles Clippers shooting guard J.J. Redick is selling his Austin estate.

The 10,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style mansion is set on more than one acre of land in the prestigious West Lake Hills community. It has six bedrooms, nine baths and a number of notable entertaining spaces, including a media room, two bars and a private office.

RELATED: Woodlands mansion with 3-story closet going to auction

Cami Wright Interiors designed the space, which has a curious wine storage room outfitted with brick-arch storage shelves. Other standout spaces are the dining area with a brick ceiling and the elegant grand foyer.

Outside, Hill Country panoramas can be enjoyed from the infinity-edge swimming pool. There's also a fully equipped, enclosed summer kitchen with a separate lounge. A cabana with a fireplace and tech connections offers a full view of the outdoor dining area, pool and the lush green background.

SEE ALSO: NFL star Adrian Peterson lists estate in The Woodlands for sale

Engel & Volkers Austin listing agent Kathryn Scarborough, who represents the sellers, says that the Redicks love Austin  they have friends there and enjoy the city. She explains that the family will stay in Austin but are searching for a home that better suits their current lifestyle.

The home has been featured on the cover of "Modern Luxury" magazine and has already been reduced from $5.3 million to $4.995 million.
Our most recent Smarty Pants turns its attention to words and specifically, the suffix -fy. You can be forgiven if the topic isn't what you're used to or not your cup of tea. But if you're intrigued by words, it can be satisfying (snuck in an -fy just then) and edifying (oh, there's another one).

Dictionary.com reminds us that -fy most commonly denotes to make or cause to be, in the cases of simplify" and "beautify," and to become, as with "liquefy." We have the Old French to thank for this word tool.

Your mission was to match the -fy word with its meaning. We hand picked our examples to seek a variety for our quiz, offering some everyday ones ("satisfy,") ("terrify") and some less-common ("ossify," "gentrify"). We decided not to hit you with "horrify," "terrify" and "mortify" in the same list. "Horrify" is defined as "to distress greatly; shock or dismay." Contrast that with "terrify": "to fill with alarm; make greatly afraid." That's splitting hairs, there. Then throw in "mortify," which means "to humiliate or shame." That's not exactly the same, but thrown in with the other two would have caused undue anguish. (Or don't you get that worked up when puzzling over Smarty Pants?)

As we noted, the all-knowing internet tells us there are 200-odd (!) words with this suffix. Let's use this opportunity to explore a few of the really curious ones.

For instance, say you're chemically inclined. There's such a word as "basify," which becomes logical when you learn it means "to raise the pH of a substance) above 7, thus making it alkaline or a base.

How about "tumefy"? "to make or become swollen. Or "micrify" ("to make small or insignificant.")

Hey, kids, "zombify" is out there, to horrify you! Would they want to be carnified turned into flesh)?

"Russify" is pretty curious. It's just what you think it would mean: "to make Russian." "Frenchify" is in there, too, if you prefer.

Here's one we dare you to work into conversation today: "scorify." Definition: "to separate gold or silver from ore by fusion with lead."

Not impressed yet? This one's is a real dandy (and "dandify" is a word, too): "opsonify". Bear with us; it's to facilitate phagocytosis of (a microorganism, as a bacterium) by treatment with opsonin." Oh, just forget that one.

Now that this blog has demystified the -fy suffix, we're done preachifying. Hope this wasn't stultifying and now, you're free to jollify ("celebrate noisily, often indulging in drinking.")
BLOOMINGTON  Three snow leopard cubs can now be seen by the public at the Katthoefer Animal Building at Miller Park Zoo, where the trio of females was born May 12.

The zoo is the only one in the country to have snow leopard cubs born in successive years. Only 10 cubs were born across America in the last year.

The cubs will be named at the zoo's major fundraiser, Zoo Do, on Sept. 24. They will stay at the zoo until next fall, when they will be transferred to other zoos to continue a national breeding program.

The cubs are the offspring of dad, Rilu, and mom, Hima, who also had two female cubs last year.

Snow leopards are an endangered species with less than 7,000 left in the wild in Central Asia.

The cubs born last year were hand-raised by zoo staff after Hima did not show maternal instincts. She is raising her current litter in a den box located in a different area of the zoo.

It is always ideal and preferred for the mother to take care of any baby at the zoo, said Tetzloff, who oversees a national breeding program for the animals.

Rilu and Hima are part of the Snow Leopard Species Survival Plan through the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, through which Miller Park Zoo is accredited.

Tetzloff has been Snow Leopard Species Survival Plan coordinator since 2007. The organization manages all snow leopards within North America at about 68 institutions.

Other cubs were born last year at zoos in Cleveland, Idaho Falls and Akron, Ohio.
ANKARA, Turkey  Rather than toppling Turkeys strongman president, a failed military coup that left more than 250 dead appears to have bolstered Recep Tayyip Erdogans immediate grip on power and boosted his popularity.

Tens of thousands marched through the streets in half a dozen Turkish cities late Saturday, waving flags and singing songs in an emotional outpouring of support for the longtime leader as security forces rounded up military personnel it branded coup supporters and launched a purge of judges seen as government opponents.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Fridays failed coup will receive every punishment they deserve, and the government said it would take steps toward extraditing a U.S.-based cleric it accused of fomenting the uprising.

The government threat of further crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself in its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a tumultuous region swept by conflict and extremism.

The coup attempt began late Friday with tanks rolling into the streets of the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul as Erdogan was enjoying a seaside vacation. Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night.

It quickly became clear, however, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government. In a dramatic iPhone interview broadcast on TV, Erdogan urged his supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

The unrest claimed at least 265 lives, according to a tally compiled from official statements. Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the process of putting down the coup attempt. Turkeys acting chief of the general staff, Gen. Umit Dundar, said at least 104 coup plotters had died.

Atmosphere of celebration

Before the weekends chaos, Turkey  a NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State  had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogans increasingly authoritarian rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

By Saturday afternoon, when tension eased, an atmosphere of celebration broke around as Turks answered official calls to rally in the squares to protect Turkish democracy. Thousands gathered in major cities singing and waving Turkish flags while others held prayers in support of Erdogan and chanted God is great.

In Istanbul, crowds gathered at Taksim Square, where a man stood on an iconic monument with a Turkish flag draped on his chest.

Government supporters marched through Ankara as cars honked in apparent approval. Some gathered outside parliament and amid the burnt cars outside the presidential palace. One man took a selfie with a Turkish police officer standing atop an abandoned tank.

We are here for democracy, so the country lasts, retired soldier Nusret Tuzak said at the Ankara gathering.

In an usual show of unity, Turkeys four main political parties released a joint declaration during an extraordinary parliamentary meeting Saturday, denouncing the coup attempt and claiming that any moves against the people or parliament will be met with the iron will of the Turkish Grand National Assembly resisting them.

Turkeys NATO allies lined up to condemn the coup attempt. President Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg urged all sides to support Turkeys democratically elected government.

Government forces arrested 2,839 accused coup supporters, Yildirim said. Dundar, the general, said the plotters were mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and armored units.

Anadolu Agency said the government dismissed 2,745 judges across Turkey. Two constitutional court judges were also detained over their alleged role in the coup attempt, according to a Turkish official, who spoke on customary condition of anonymity.

Officials accused the judges and the coup plotters of being loyal to moderate cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen, a staunch democracy advocate who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey. At a news conference in Saylorsburg, Penn., Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

Free and fair elections

Ankara recently classified his movement as a terrorist organization. Washington, however, has never found any evidence particularly compelling previously against the cleric.

In a televised speech Saturday, Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen, saying Turkey had never turned back any extradition request for terrorists by the United States. A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey was preparing a formal extradition application.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny.

Gulen himself condemned the coup.

Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force, he said. As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations.

Fadi Hakura, a Turkey expert at the Chatham House think tank in London, said the attempted coup appeared to have been carried out by lower-ranking officers.

Their main gripe seems to have been President Erdogans attempt to transform his office into a powerful and centralized executive presidency, Hakura said. In the short term, this failed coup plot will strengthen President Erdogan.
NORMAL  Nine-year-old Josslin Rood is positive her big sister Bekka will be a good teacher once she graduates from Illinois State University with a degree in elementary education.

Josslin, a fifth-grader at Prairieland Elementary School, saw her sisters teaching skills in action at last week's Mission to Mars educational camp at Thomas Metcalf School in Normal.

It was fun spending time with her. I dont get to see her as much as I used to now that shes in college, said Josslin, one of 100 Bloomington-Normal students in third through eighth grade at the summer program taught by 22 Illinois college students through the Golden Apple Foundation.

The youngsters learned about the surface of Mars, how to launch a rocket and create a parachute and build model space settlements.

It was really exciting seeing these kids from all different schools working together as a team. Science and math really brought everyone together, said Bekka Rood, a senior from Normal.

Rood, along with the other college camp counselors, is a Golden Apple Scholar.

The Chicago-based Golden Apple Foundation prepares education majors for challenging teaching environments, providing scholarships and intensive training. After graduation, the newly-licensed teachers must commit to teaching in high-needs school districts for at least five years.

Each summer, the foundation hosts an education program to train aspiring teachers and give them an opportunity to work with kids. This was the first summer ISU was selected as a training location.

Being in this program for four years has impacted me in so many ways. I think the extra hours spent in a classroom will set me apart from other teachers. The diversity really prepares me to be in the classroom, said Rood.

Golden Apple also provides students with workshops in finances, loan writing and career planning.

Scholars said a lot of the kids were timid at the beginning of the week, but by Friday were gushing facts about Mars.

Alden Wagoner, a fourth-grader at Northpoint Elementary, said his favorite part of camp was launching rockets on the Metcalf playground.

We had to press a bunch of buttons and flip switches just the right way to get the rocket to launch, said Alden, 9.

ISU middle-level education senior Nate Titus supervised a group of students as they dropped eggs into the lower courtyard of ISU's DeGarmo Hall. Parachutes and balloons protected the tightly-packaged eggs as they sailed down to meet a tarp representing the surface of Mars.

Titus of Bloomington said his Golden Apple experience has shaped his future as a teacher.

"I want my classroom to be student-oriented so they have a say in how and what we teach, said Titus. "At the end of the second day of camp, one of the kids said, 'Were done already?' That's an amazing thing to hear as a teacher; when they are learning and having fun."

Nancy Powell, director of summer instruction at ISU for Golden Apple, is amazed by the ideas and questions coming from the ISU scholars.

These scholars are responsible, creative, innovative and dedicated, said Powell. When you see them in action, they provide some very strong activities for students. They dont just tell them to do something, they ask them questions and encourage them to get thinking.
DECATUR  On July 16, 2010, Army Sgt. Jesse Richard Tilton, 23, died in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Frankfurt, Germany, from wounds he suffered three days earlier while saving the life of a fellow serviceman in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

His sacrifice was remembered on the sixth anniversary of his death Saturday, as were the deaths of two other soldiers who perished earlier in Iraq, at a fundraiser at the new home of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Richard Cairns, commander of Oren L. Davis VFW Post 99, presented plaques signifying life membership in the post to the families of Marine Pvt. Jonathan Lee Gifford, 30, killed on March 23, 2003; Army Cpl. Karen Nicole Clifton, 22, killed June 21, 2007; and Tilton.

Cairns, who is Clifton's maternal grandfather, said he is thankful the Sgt. Jesse Tilton Memorial Foundation chose the VFW as the charity to benefit from this year's remembrance.

This is going to help get us noticed, he said. A lot of people don't know we're up here and call us wondering where we are after they can't find us downtown.

Post 99, the oldest active VFW post in Illinois, relocated this spring to 3915 N. Cowgill Ave., near the corner of East Mound Road and North Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, from its longtime home in 900 block of North Water Street.

Cairns said proceeds from the benefit will help the post get a new kitchen up and running, resurface the parking lot to the west and add parking to the south. Other activities Saturday included raffles, food, live music and special appearances of a pink police car and fire truck from the Central Illinois Chapter of Pink Heals.

I didn't expect this many people to come out today, Mike Tarczan, director of the Tilton Foundation, said as he looked around a room filled with more than 100 people. This is phenomenal.

Previous events to remember the Army medic have involved motorcycle rides ending at Point Pleasant Cemetery in Long Creek, where Tilton is buried.

Accepting the plaque on behalf of Gifford was his sister, Valerie Gifford and her son Mason Gifford, 21, both of Decatur.

He looks like my brother, she said as she stood outside and watched him ride up on his motorcycle while Saturday's benefit was getting under way. He's all I have left.

Gifford, 40, explained that John Gifford, her father and Jonathan's, died in 2015 as did her mother, Carol Elizabeth Gifford. It's been a rough year, so this recognition for Jonathan is really nice.

Chris Clifton, 52, of Mount Auburn also said she was grateful to see her daughter remembered. I think it's great, she said.

Tilton's mother, Julie Magana, 56, of Long Creek had some distractions from Saturday's sad anniversary in the form of Army medics who served with her late son.

They included George Linares, 32, of Raleigh, N.C.; Charlie Auteberry, 27, of Longview, Ill.; and Kevin Strohmeyer, 29, of St. Louis. I'm pretty excited they're here, Magana said.

Strohmeyer did his best to say a few words about Tilton toward the end of Saturday's ceremony.

I was talking to George about (what to say), and virtually everything we could think of was sort of inappropriate, he said, prompting a rare moment of laughter.

Then Strohmeyer, his eyes filling with tears, concluded on a more somber note.

Jesse was extremely giving and loving and cared about helping people, he said. So much so he died doing that even.
WASHINGTON -- He cant do it, Republicans. Its time for you to admit that Donald Trump is incapable of even pretending to be an acceptable candidate for president. The question is which side of history you want to be on.

Are you going to stand with him as the balloons drop on the last night of the convention, knowing he shares neither your views nor your values? Are you going to work your hearts out this fall to put an unstable bully in charge of our national defense? Is party unity so much more important to you than trifles such as responsibility, duty and honor?

Leading Republicans should pay attention to what Sen. Mike Lee told a reporter for the conservative Newsmax website: What I am saying is Donald Trump can still get a vote from a lot of conservatives like me, but I would like some assurances on where he stands. I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender of the U.S. Constitution. That he is not going to be an autocrat. That he is not going to be an authoritarian. That he is not somebody who is going to abuse a document that I have sworn an oath to uphold and protect and defend.

Lee, who has not endorsed Trump, specifically mentioned the fact that he accused my best friends father of conspiring to kill JFK -- referring to Trumps scurrilous and unfounded charges about the father of Sen. Ted Cruz -- and also Trumps history of making statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant.

My only question for Lee is why Trump might still get his vote. I realize that Hillary Clinton is a Democrat, but no one has suggested that she might shred the Constitution or that she is a religious bigot. I thought the oath to protect and defend meant putting country before party.

To be sure, some leading Republicans are doing just that. Mitt Romney, the partys 2012 nominee, is one of the loudest and most consistent Never Trump voices. The Bush family, which incarnates the GOPs recent history, is boycotting the convention. My colleague George Will, a principled conservative if ever there was one, said last week he had left the Republican Party because of Trump.

But most GOP luminaries are like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has obvious reservations about his partys presumptive nominee but supports him nonetheless. McConnell said this week that people are looking for a level of seriousness that is typically conveyed by having a prepared text and Teleprompter and staying on message.

In other words, McConnell hopes Trump can at least pretend to be serious and stable long enough to make it through the general election campaign.

Asked Wednesday if he agreed, Romney said no. I think Mr. Trump has demonstrated who he is by virtue of what he said in the process to this point, he explained. What he says from this point forward may paper over that.

Ive had the same worry -- that Trump would appear to be more statesmanlike and fool voters into thinking he had changed. With every passing week, however, I become less concerned about this scenario. Trump is who he is.

Every time Trump gives a prepared speech in which he manages to stay on message, drawing praise from the party establishment, he negates it by reverting to his old self. His address on foreign policy a couple of months ago, for example, was wrongheaded but basically mainstream. This week, however, he has been ranting about how the United States needs to use waterboarding and other torture techniques against suspected terrorists.

And youre going to vote for this guy, Sen. John McCain? You, a former POW who was tortured by the North Vietnamese? You, the Senates most outspoken opponent of the practice?

McConnell said he hoped that Trump is beginning to pivot and become what I would call a more serious and credible candidate for the highest office in the land. Asked whether this was happening, McConnell replied, Hes getting closer.

But hes not, and McConnell surely knows it. So does House Speaker Paul Ryan, who will preside over the convention at which Trump is set to be nominated. So do many Republicans who, when I ask them about Trump, either sigh, shrug or run away.

We are talking about the presidency of the United States, Republicans. You are about to nominate and support a man you know to be dangerously unworthy. Some loyalty.
Here, on a Cascade Range morning, a dozen of us are gaping at a large pool of bubbling mud the color of mushroom soup gone very, very bad. A rotten-egg smell fills the air.

Who knows what that smell is? Ranger Todd Jesse asks. Sulfur, we answer. It seems like a good guess, because we are, after all, at a place called the Sulphur Works.

Hydrogen sulfide, Ranger Jesse corrects. He hands an infrared thermometer that resembles a Star Trek phaser to a 12-year-old boy in a Giants T-shirt. He tells the boy to point the thermometer at the boiling mud.

One hundred eighty-one degrees, Giants boy announces. We are uniformly impressed.

The interesting thing, says Jesse, is that this bubbling, malodorous, scalding hot pool sustains a form of life found on few other places on Earth  tiny microbes called extremophiles, which can withstand the mud pots intense heat and which are so scientifically important that NASA studies them because they might resemble life forms that once existed on Mars.

Thats Lassen Volcanic National Park  home to amazements that extend from California out through the solar system.

This is a big summer for Lassen. As the national park system celebrates its centennial, it is celebrating its own: It became a national park on Aug. 9, 1916. Were going to be having a lot of birthday cake, says Karen Haner, Lassens chief of interpretation and education.

No national park had a more spectacular birth than this one. Starting in 1914, the 10,000-plus-foot plug dome volcano began steaming and sputtering with increasing violence. And then, on May 22, 1915, it erupted big time, sending a column of ash 35,000 feet into the air and loosing avalanches of hot rocks and gas that incinerated the forests on the mountains slope.

Much of the spectacle was captured by local homesteader turned photographer B.F. Loomis; even today his images  on display in both park visitor centers  are thrilling and terrifying. Lassen became an international sensation, and, the following summer, a national park.

Max Whittaker/Special to The Chronicle

For a Bay Area resident, Lassens story is a little unsettling. You think, isnt it enough that we have to worry about earthquakes, wildfires and $3,000-a-month studios in the Mission? We have to worry about volcanoes, too? Yes. Lassen is the southernmost volcano in the Cascade chain, which includes Mounts Shasta, Rainier and St. Helens. And its still classified as active.

But unsettling also means fascinating, as you discover when you start exploring via the Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway, which runs south-north through the park. You can get your bearings at the Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center (thats Lassens name in the language of the Mountain Maidu people, who have lived in this vicinity for centuries).

Here you learn, among other things, that Lassen Park contains all four types of volcanoes known to geologists: plug dome (Lassen), composite (Brokeoff), shield (Prospect Peak, in the parks northeast corner), and cinder cone (Cinder Cone, also in the northeast corner).

The first example lies nearby: Brokeoff Mountain, remnant of mighty Brokeoff Volcano (a.k.a. Mount Tehama), a composite volcano that rose here hundreds of thousands of years ago. Today a 7.4-mile hike up the peak and back gives you sweeping views of the park.

From here, head north to Sulphur Works, and then on to Bumpass Hell, an even-more-impressive collection of mud pots, hot springs and fumaroles (vents in the Earth that release steam). The name? It comes from an unfortunate early pioneer, one Kendall Bumpass, who in 1865 stepped into one of the boiling pools, thereby losing his leg. The lesson: Stay on the boardwalk trail.

Next comes the parks signature peak. Lassen got its name from 19th century Danish emigrant Peter Lassen  a controversial figure because he devised a pioneer trail he alleged to be a shortcut that was in fact more or less a death trap. But the 5-mile trail up and down his namesake mountain has been rebuilt for the centennial, and its a must-see, among the easier truly spectacular trails anywhere in California.

As you hike up peaks and gaze at hot springs, you come to understand something else about Lassen. It has its own rhythm, more relaxed than at many national parks  simply because its not as busy.

People call us a hidden gem, says the parks Haner. Were not as well known as other national parks. Our visitation hovers at around 400,000 a year. You can come here and hike on a trail and not be in the middle of a crowd.

Eventually, the highway leads you to the parks northwest corner and Manzanita Lake, where campsites cluster among pines and a new village of cabins has been built  so inviting you want to move into one permanently. Nearby is the sweet little Loomis Museum, established by B.F. Loomis and his wife, Estella, with displays on Lassens explosive history along with good examples of the American Indian artwork Estella collected.

Most of these stops can be done in an enjoyable full day. If youre inclined to further exploration, take another day and head to the eastern corners of the park. To the southeast, Warner Valley has its own set of hydrothermal attractions, Devils Kitchen and Boiling Springs Lake, and is home to Drakesbad Guest Ranch.

To the northeast, another gem: Cinder Cone. The trail to the top of this 750-foot peak is short but harder than it looks, at least going up. As you ascend, your feet sink into the cindery path. Every step is an effort. You look up at the eerie, cocoa-brown cone rising above you and you think, Maybe this is actually Mars and Im Matt Damon and lets give up on the hike and head back down and tend the hydroponic vegetables.

Persevere, though, and at the summit you can look out past the cones crater to a park panorama that extends from the Fantastic Lava Beds below you west toward Brokeoff Mountain and Lassen Peak. All the effort was worth it. You think, you have to give credit to volcanoes. They may be temperamental, but they sure know how to build a beautiful park.

Peter Fish is a freelance writer. Email: travel@sfchronicle.com

If you go

Getting there

Lassen lies about 180 miles north of Sacramento, via Interstate 5 and state Highways 36 and 89.

Stay

Camping: The park has six campgrounds. Manzanita Lake, Summit Lake North, Summit Lake South and Southwest lie along Highway 89; Butte Lake is in the northeast corner of the park, Warner Valley in the southeast. Reserve at www.recreation.gov.

Manzanita Lake Cabins: Cabins sleep two to eight and start at $70 nightly. www.lassenrecreation.com

What to do

Day in the Park Festival: Celebrate Lassen Parks birthday with music and a barbecue on Aug. 6.

More information

www.nps.gov/lavo
LIFE magazine was on hand for the official opening of Disneyland on July 17, 1955.

Dreamed up by animator and studio head Walt Disney, the 160-acre park was built over orange groves in Anaheim, California and soon became a major tourist destination.
If fixing school funding had a due date, Springfield's answer likely would be "the dog ate my homework."

It appears some time in detention turned some heads in the right direction, with Gov. Bruce Rauner announcing last week that he has convened a bipartisan panel to propose an overhaul of how the state distributes money to public school districts.

It's a welcome idea whose time came years ago, but the current idea, at least, is a step forward. Illinois residents are sick and tired of inactivity in Springfield, especially on the things that matter. The panel will start meeting in August with the goal of providing its proposal by Feb. 1, just before the General Assembly starts its spring session.

As outlined, the 25 members will be nominated by the four legislative leaders and Rauner, who each will provide five names. Education Secretary Beth Purvis will serve as chairman. Panel members include Sen. Jason Barickman, R-Bloomington, and Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill.

Granted, having the appointees named by the leaders and Rauner means politics comes into play from the get-go, but perhaps the panel members will be able to overlook their overlords and instead realize they have been trusted to do the people's work and find a way to provide a fair and equitable education for all of the state's students, not just those who live in well-heeled districts.

To be successful, the panel also must set aside the sometimes highbrow wishes of teachers' unions, pension backers, bureaucrats and powerful suburban districts to allow themselves the flexibility to look at the best solutions overall, not just the best solutions outlined by the demands of interest groups. We suggest they take another look at the Vision 20/20 proposal, which arose a few years ago, written and studied by a wide variety of education stakeholders who used sensibility rather than culpability to make their suggestions.

As we've written before, the current school funding formula, adopted in 1997, is unfair and needlessly complicated and relies heavily on local property taxes. It allows some schools to spend as much as $30,000 per student, while others spend as little as $6,000. The current formula basically treats schools with high poverty rates and other demographic challenges the same as rich schools that dont face those challenges.

A study last year from The Education Trust found that Illinois has the widest funding gap between high-poverty and low-poverty districts, according to a recent Lee News Service report.

Education is a fundamental right in America, Rauner said during a news conference announcing the panel. Its the way that people raise their quality of life, their standard of living, their incomes. Education has got to be the priority, and low-income kids deserve the opportunity for a good education just as much as any other young person.

Education is one of the top priorities for any lawmaker at any level in any state. Illinois should be doing a better job overall of making sure its students get the education they deserve.

The panel has been given an work-study assignment. Let's hope they get a passing grade.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates  A court in Bahrain ordered the countrys main Shiite opposition group to be dissolved Sunday, deepening a crackdown on dissent in the strategically important Western-allied kingdom.

The order against al-Wefaq marks one of the sharpest blows yet against civil society activists in the Sunni-ruled island nation, which was rocked by widespread protests led by its Shiite majority demanding political reforms five years ago.

Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navys 5th Fleet, crushed the 2011 protests with help from its larger neighbors Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But ongoing, low-level and occasionally violent unrest continues to roil the kingdom despite reforms following the Arab Spring-inspired uprising.

The U.S. State Department swiftly condemned the decision.

The governments recent steps to suppress nonviolent opposition only undermine Bahrains cohesion and security, as well as the regions stability. These actions are inconsistent with U.S. interests and strain our partnership with Bahrain, Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.

In issuing its ruling, the High Civil Court accused al-Wefaq of multiple offenses, including objecting to the legitimacy of the countrys constitution and legislative authority, supporting violence, and expressing solidarity with persons convicted for instigating regime hate, a coup detat and demeaning the judiciary and executive bodies.

The ruling calls for al-Wefaqs assets to be liquidated and its funds to be transferred to the state treasury.

Al-Wefaq is one of Bahrains political societies, which are allowed under laws that technically forbid political parties. Its candidates claimed the largest share of seats in parliamentary elections in 2006 and 2010.

It boycotted the last elections in 2014, saying it wanted greater power-sharing, the release of political prisoners and a prime minister chosen by elected officials.

Brian Dooley, director for human rights defenders at Washingtons Human Rights First, blasted Sundays decision as the governments single most repressive act of the last five years.

Todays decision is a dangerous mistake, leaving no real outlet for peaceful grievance left in Bahrain, he said. The kingdoms government has told its people that from now on not only are you not allowed rights, youre not allowed to complain about it.
SRINAGAR, India  Authorities in Indias portion of Kashmir have shut down printing presses and temporarily banned newspapers from publishing in a sweeping information blackout after days of anti-India protests left dozens of people dead in the volatile region.

State government spokesman and Education Minister Nayeem Akhtar said the measures were aimed at saving lives and strengthening peace efforts. The government says 36 people  35 civilians and a police officer  have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, while local human rights groups and newspapers say at least 40 have died.

A strict curfew was in effect in troubled areas for the ninth straight day Sunday, with hundreds of thousands of people trying to cope with shortages of food and other necessities. Tens of thousands of government troops patrolled mostly deserted streets in the region, where shops and businesses remained closed.

Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim region, is divided evenly between India and Pakistan, but both claim it in its entirety. Most people in Indias portion resent the presence of Indian troops and want independence or a merger with Pakistan.

Since 1989, more than 68,000 people have been killed in the uprising against Indian rule and the subsequent Indian military crackdown. India and Pakistan have fought two wars over control of Kashmir since British colonialists left the Indian subcontinent in 1947.

Unwilling to take any chances, Indian authorities appear to be persisting with their clampdown to avoid aggravating tensions in view of Pakistans call for a black day on Wednesday to protest Indias handling of dissent in Kashmir.

On Friday, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed that his country would continue extending political, moral and diplomatic support to Kashmiris. He said he called for observing the black day to express solidarity with Kashmiris who are facing atrocities at the hands of Indian forces.

The largest street protests in recent years in Indias portion of Kashmir erupted last week after Indian troops killed the popular young leader of the largest rebel group fighting against Indian rule in the region.

Information has been thin, with most cellular and Internet services, as well as landline phone access, not working in the troubled areas, except for Srinagar, the main city in the Indian portion of Kashmir.

Police began raiding newspaper offices and seizing tens of thousands of local newspapers on Saturday, imposing a ban on their printing until Monday. They also detained scores of printing press workers.

Newspaper editors denounced the government action and termed it gagging and enforcing emergency on media.
ISTANBUL  Funeral ceremonies and prayers for those killed in Turkeys failed military coup were held Sunday in Ankara and Istanbul, where the grief-stricken relatives mourned.

God bless the society who resisted, said Lutfi Pala, a relative of one of the victims. Our wish is that such coups never happen in Turkey, but it happens. They are martyrs. May God rest their soul.

Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkeys 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died in an attempted military coup. Sela prayers are traditionally recited from mosques during funerals, though they are also sometimes performed to rally the people, as they were all night Friday during tense coup hours.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said 161 pro-government forces and civilians were killed in the coup attempt, and a general said 104 coup plotters died. A government official said autopsies have been completed on 165 people, including 115 reclaimed by their families. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government regulation.

Forty policemen, including twin brothers, were killed when the renegade soldiers attacked a special forces station in Ankara.

The victims also included the campaign manager for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Erol Olcak, and his 16-year-old son, Abdullah, killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters Friday night at one of the Bosporus bridges in Istanbul. Photojournalist Mustafa Cambaz also died following calls by Erdogan for supporters to oppose the coup attempt, killed by gunfire in the streets of Istanbul.

The elder brother of one of Erdogans chief advisers was also killed by gunfire while protesting the coup in front of Istanbuls Municipality building. Ilhan Varank died during clashes that lasted five hours.

Erdogan attended the funeral of Varank and five others at a mosque in Istanbuls Fatih neighborhood, accompanied by former president Abdullah Gul and a large security detail.

Addressing mourners, Erdogan vowed to purge all state institutions of supporters of a U.S.-based Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who his government blames for the botched coup. He said Turkey would request the extradition of the cleric, who has denied any involvement in the coup.

Erdogan was overpowered by emotion at the funeral and shed tears.

Erdogan vowed to take the country forward in unity and solidarity.
Xero's Shaun Burke sees "massive potential" for sales growth among the millions of small and medium-sized businesses in ''English-speaking'' southeast Asia, provided the cloud-based accounting firm can wean them off Excel and hand-written ledgers.

In Singapore alone, where Asia sales director Burke has been stationed for the past three months at Xero's first base in the region, some 30,000 new SMEs are registered each year.

But Xero's penetration in Asia, where it is targeting Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines, among others, is tiny. It's included in "rest of the world'', or the company's "new markets" outside its core markets of Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the US. ''Rest of the world'' accounted for just 3.4 percent of subscribers as at March 31. While revenue for "rest of the world" jumped 93 percent to $9.4 million last year, this made up just 4.5 percent of total sales.

"We've got a huge opportunity here in the tens of millions of SMEs across what we would consider English-speaking southeast Asia," Burke says. While mobile penetration is huge, with many people having two or three phones, "the adoption of cloud and integrated solutions at the business level is still something that's a little bit new here and I think from an accounting firm perspective, moving over to those technologies is a bit of a step change when some firms are still using Excel.

"We're training people in accessing cloud solutions, integrated solutions and then accessing Xero as part of that."

Unlike Xero's core markets, which have cultural similarities, Asia's cultures are diverse. The Asia Cloud Computing Association says the Asia Pacific (APAC) region's unique challenges to moving to the cloud include highly fragmented markets, diverse regulations, users with a preference for controlling their own IT assets, and essential technology such as broadband that "still have not yet fully penetrated some countries, inhibiting the growth of multi-tenant infrastructures."

The ACCA's 2016 cloud readiness index ranks Hong Kong No. 1 overall in the APAC region on measures such as international connectivity, broadband quality and privacy, while Singapore ranked second, ahead of New Zealand and Australia. The region's biggest nations, China and India, lag behind the field, with low scores for connectivity, data-centre risk, privacy and freedom of information.

Neither China nor India are near-term targets for Xero, with Burke saying they are "a larger step-change" beyond English-speaking southeast Asia although they are both "far too big to ignore" and "very interesting" for the company.

Consultancy firm Bain & Co last year estimated that China's cloud computing market was worth US$1.5 billion in 2013 but was forecast to grow at an annual compound rate of 40-to-45 percent to reach US$20 billion by 2020. Despite the success of consumer portals such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, China had to overcome hurdles including slow broadband speeds and penetration, and "cultural and business norms hinder cloud adoption", such as "heightened awareness of the vulnerabilities of information security".

The ACCA has previously identified China's so-called Great Firewall and the threat of theft of intellectual property as hurdles in the way of China's widespread adoption of cloud-based technologies.

The Philippines ranks ninth on the ACCA index, being marked down for connectivity and cyber-security. In the Philippines, says Burke, "there's places there where they're crunching the books, they're hand-writing in the ledgers."

Xero faces some old rivals in southeast Asia including Intuit, the California-based owner of the QuickBooks Online (QBO) accounting software, which estimates that 73 percent of its licence revenue will be from cloud-based subscriptions by fiscal 2017, and ASX-listed MYOB is a competitor too.

Burke says Intuit's QBO has been moving its existing customers to the cloud.

"In a funny, roundabout way they're probably doing a lot of marketing for the cloud proposition and then we come in as the better solution. It's kind of a double-edged sword for them, I imagine."

Xero's shares have fallen 9 percent on the NZX this year and last traded at $17.99. First NZ Capital is forecasting the company will reach positive operating earnings in 2018.

It has accounting firm partners in about 25 countries across the APAC region, including KPMG, Hong Kong's FastLane Pro, Moore Stephens and Mazars. Accounting firms and some direct customers straddle more than one country, says Burke.

"Lots of businesses won't operate in Singapore alone, they'll have something here, something elsewhere, I mean you could drive to Malaysia in 20 minutes." Malaysia introduced GST in April last year and the country is still learning how to implement it.

"So the bottom line is they've introduced a huge compliance aspect into the SME market that . . . will be great for Xero because, if GST is there and it's not 100 percent straightforward to implement for businesses that aren't used to it, what are you going to use? Xero."

BusinessDesk.co.nz

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SPRINGFIELD  When Republicans convene in Cleveland on Monday to make Donald Trump the partys official presidential nominee, only a handful of GOP members of the Illinois General Assembly will be there.

The real estate mogul and reality TV star has largely received a tepid response from the Republican establishment in the Land of Lincoln, with elected officials from U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk and Gov. Bruce Rauner on down the line keeping their distance and skipping the Republican National Convention.

As Rauner and his fellow Republicans seek to cut into the Democrats supermajorities in the Illinois House and Senate this fall, what impact, if any, Trumps presence at the top of the ticket will have on races down the ballot remains a major question.

State Sen. Jason Barickman of Bloomington appeared on the March Republican primary ballot as a delegate candidate for U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Barickman said that if Rubio had won the nomination, he would be making the trip to Cleveland, but he planned to stay home otherwise.

Hes never been to a national convention, he said, and with two small children at home, he tries to limit his time away.

But Barickman does have some concerns about Trump becoming the partys standard-bearer.

He campaigned in the primary on a message of anger and divisiveness, and that is not a message thats going to resonate with the general election, Barickman said.

As the campaign moves forward, he hopes to see Trump become a voice for Republicans and conservatives, something he hasnt always been thus far.

I hope that he becomes the leader that our party needs to have, Barickman said.

State Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, a former chief to U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis of Taylorville and former U.S. Rep. Ray LaHood of Peoria, also will be skipping the convention. He last attended in 2008 and said he made up his mind not to go this year well before even the primary, adding that attending costs a lot of money.

Butler said that despite some misgivings about Trumps rhetoric and policy positions, he respects the will of Republican primary voters.

I wish he would change his tone on some issues, Butler said. Theres things Im going to disagree with him on, but I respect the will of the people.  Im a Republican, and Im going to support our party.

Like Barickman, state Rep. Terri Bryant of Murphysboro was a delegate candidate for Rubio and is skipping the convention. Her decision has nothing to do with Trump, she said, adding that hes fine with me. He is very popular in my district.

Rather, Bryant is staying home to focus on her re-election campaign against Democrat Marsha Griffin of Jonesboro.

One Republican lawmaker who will be in Cleveland is state Sen. Chapin Rose of Mahomet, who was elected in the March primary as a delegate for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

Rose believes Trump will do well in November throughout downstate Illinois, noting that he and Cruz each received more votes in Macon County than presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Rose said that when you walk around Decatur, Ill., and hit the coffee shops in Sullivan and Shelbyville and Paris and talk to people and ask them, Are we heading the right way or the wrong way?  most will reply, The wrong way.

People think that it needs shook up, and I agree with them, he said, adding that Trump can do that in Washington.

Rose said he sees a big enthusiasm gap between Trump supporters and Clinton supporters that strongly favors the Republican.

As for Trumps impact on state legislative races, lawmakers and observers say it could vary widely by region.

While his presence on the ballot might help Republicans in Southern Illinois, it could hurt them in the Chicago suburbs, said Chris Mooney, director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois.

The key will likely be which candidate and party inspires more voters to come to the polls  or to stay home, Mooney said.

Its not about changing peoples minds, he said. Its about motivating your people to come out to vote and demobilizing the opponents voters.

Butler, who is running unopposed in November, said he thinks factors other than the top of the ticket will determine who wins state races.

The races in Illinois are going to be a lot more about whats going on under the capitol dome, he said.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- As the two-year anniversary of the death of Eric Garner approaches, a block party and barbecue were held in his honor in Tompkinsville Saturday.

The 43-year-old father of six from Port Richmond died in police custody in Tompkinsville on July 17, 2014. Officers were attempting to arrest him for allegedly selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.

Several neighborhood residents gathered inside Tompkinsville Park, near Bay Street and Victory Boulevard, between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. for free burgers, hot dogs, chicken and soft drinks.

Garner was known by many to barbecue for those in the community.

"This event is something to help the community heal from all the travesties going on these days -- all the killings and shootings," said the event organizer John McCrae, a long-time friend of Garner.

McCrae said the message of "unity" was displayed through the generosity of local businesses, adding, "We're doing something to involve the community -- and this isn't possible without donations from all the stores on these blocks."

The following businesses helped to fund the block party and barbecue: Shaolin Liquor; The Book Cafe; 99 Cents Only Store; Bay Beauty Supply; Metro PCS; Elegant Grill; Against the Grain Barber Shop; Craft House; Tompkinsville Pharmacy.

"I only hope [events] like these can help start the healing process for communities of people affected by shooting and killings involving police," McCrae said.
petit larceny

The individual sought for questioning in connection to a stolen iPhone. (Courtesy: NYPD)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Police are asking the public's help identifying a woman sought for questioning in connection with petit larceny within the confines of the 120 Precinct.

It was reported on Thursday, July 14, at around 6:50 p.m., an unidentified female removed an unattended black iPhone 5S from a self-checkout area inside of a CVS Pharmacy, located at 1933 Victory Blvd. in Meiers Corners, according to a written statement distributed by the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

The cell phone belonged to an 11-year-old male who had not given the unknown female permission or authority to remove the phone, police say.

Police released a photo of the woman sought for questioning in the incident that was taken from surveillance footage, the NYPD said.

The individual is described as a female, between her late 30s to early 40s, with long blonde hair.

Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577.

All calls are strictly confidential.
New Braunfels, TX (78130)

Today

A few showers this evening with numerous thunderstorms developing overnight. Low near 65F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

A few showers this evening with numerous thunderstorms developing overnight. Low near 65F. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
2016 SkS Weekly Digest #29

Posted on 17 July 2016 by John Hartz

SkS Highlights... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... He Said What?... SkS Spotlights... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus...

SkS Highlights

Using the metric of number of comments garnered, the two most popular articles posted on SkS during the past week were:

Toon of the Week

Quote of the Week

Every week, there are many new scientific studies published relating to climate change. It is a big field, a multidisciplinary field and a hot field.

But according to leading climate scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan  credited with discovering that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are actually a greenhouse gas, among other major findings  a new study this week showing that clouds already are shifting their distributions across the Earth, and in a way predicted by climate change models, stands out. And not in a good way.

The study was led by Ramanathans Scripps Institution of Oceanography colleague Joel Norris, though Ramanathan said he was not involved in the work and didnt know about it until shortly before publication. But Ramanathan said that the study basically confirms that theres nothing to prevent the world from reaching the high levels of warming that have long been feared  except for our own swift policy actions, that is.

My reaction was, my goodness, Ramanathan said. Maybe the 4 to 5 degree warming, certainly we were all wishing there was some certainty that would make it go away. So I consider the findings of this paper, the data shows major reorganization of the cloud system.

This matters because clouds are fundamental regulators of how much solar radiation makes it to the Earths surface (rather than being reflected back to space by white cloud tops), and how much infrared or longwave radiation escapes back to space once again.

The most singular of all the things that we have found': Clouds study alarms scientists by Chris Monney, Energy & Environment, Washington Post, July 14, 2016

He Said What?

Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the (US) House Science Committee, escalated his confrontation over the climate probes of ExxonMobil by issuing subpoenasto two state attorneys general and several nongovernmental advocacy groups on Wednesday.

Smith (R-Tex.) announced the action in a news conference on Capitol Hill, saying the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts were trying to criminalize the opinions of people and companies who hold alternative views on climate science.

Smith, joined by four Republican colleagues, demanded documents related to their discussions and investigations of Exxon. He harshly condemned what he called an attempt to suffocate the First Amendments rights of academic institutions, scientists and companies engaged in climate research.

"It is regrettable that two state attorneys general and several organizations continue to threaten legitimate scientific debate about climate change," Smith said during the news conference.

"The attorneys general have appointed themselves to decide what is valid and invalid regarding climate change. Attorneys general are pursuing a political agenda at the expense of scientists' rights to free speech."

State Attorneys General Subpoenaed by Rep. Lamar Smith for Exxon Fraud Probe by David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News, July 13, 2016

Coming Soon on SkS

Deja vu: as with tobacco, the climate wars are going to court (Dana)

(Dana) Reshuffle: UK DECC folded into new department headed by Greg Clark (Sophie Yeo)

(Sophie Yeo) Study links heatwave deaths in London and Paris to climate change (Robert McSweeney)

(Robert McSweeney) Guest Post by John Abraham

by John Abraham Cold and calculating: what the two different types of ice do to sea levels (Matt King)

(Matt King) 2016 SkS Weekly News Roundup #30 (John Hartz)

(John Hartz) 2016 SkS Weekly Digest #30 (John Hartz)

Poster of the Week

SkS Week in Review

97 Hours of Consensus: Greg Holland

Greg Holland's bio page

Quote derived from:
Shots heard early this morning in Yerevan; One Policeman Dead Says NSS

A group calling itself Sasna Dzrer (after the Armenian national epic Daredevils of Sasoun), has announced that the storming of a Yerevan police station earlier today is the start of an armed uprising in Armenia.

The group, made up of supporters and war buddies of opposition activist Jirayr Sefilyan, say that they have constantly tried to foment change in Armenia through peaceful means but that, in return, they have been politically persecuted and Sefilyan jailed on trumped up charges.

(Sefilyan was arrested on June 20 on charges of illegal arms trafficking and possession. Law enforcement claimed he and others were planning armed actions in Yerevan.)

In a Facebook video released earlier today, the group says it has taken over a police department building in the Erebouni neighborhood of Yerevan and has held it for the past three hours.

In the video, the group has demanded the release of all political prisoners, including Sefilyan.

Varuzhan Avetisyan, vice president of the Founding Parliament, an opposition political organization of which Sefilyan is a member, posted a communique (in Armenian) by the Sasna Tzrer group in which it calls for the people to rise up and join the rebellion. The group also calls for President Sargsyan to resign.

Louiza Grigoryan, apparently a resident in the area, has sent Hetq the following video taken at 5:30 this morning when shots were heard at the police station in Erebouni.

Update: One of the attackers has been confirmed wounded in the attack and seven police employees are being held hostage at the police station. This information was relayed by MP Nikol Pashinyan who recently visited the police station and talked to the attackers. Pashinyan says that the armed group will respond in kind if the police attempt to storm the station.

1:44 p.m. - The National Security Service (NSS) says that one police officer was killed and two injured in an early morning attack by armed men on a Yerevan police station. The NSS says that two of the hostages have been freed by Special Forces personnel.
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This was the most popular view, with 20 people expressing this belief. These were further divided into those with a "theocentric" (eternal solitude with God alone) or "anthropocentric" (believers are reunited with friends and family) view of heaven according to the previous work of scholars Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang. All the committed Christians in the study (16) believed in the theocentric view of heaven. Singleton found that the older participants were more expansive in their views, but were neither more certain in their beliefs nor more theologically precise. Furthermore, across all ages, heaven was the main focus: "Only a few very committed, orthodox evangelicals and Pentecostals argued for the existence of hell."
Emergency Services say paramedics treated a driver and small child on scene but neither were transported to hospital.

9.04am: Police say there's a two-car crash on McCaughey Street in Turner. They say the intersection is blocked near the shops.

Paramedics are treating people on the scene, but we're not sure how many.

That crash in Florey is actually on Barnard Circuit. Police were incorrectly told earlier that it was on Krefft Street. There is a report that the cars are wedged together and can't move.

And the crash on Isabella Drive in Gilmore is almost clear, with street sweepers on the way.

8.57am: There has been a three-car crash in Evatt. Motorists driving along William Webb can't access Owen Dixon Drive.

8.38am: Police have told us there's a two-car crash on Krefft Street in Florey, outside St Francis Xavier College.

8.27am: There is a report of a crash in Gilmore at the roundabout of Isabella Drive at Coyne Street

Police say one lane is blocked between Coyne Street and Hogben Street.

We're also told those powerlines down in Spence are clear.

8.00am: There is a report of wires down in Spence on Owen Dixon Drive both ways at Copland Drive.

It also appears that car fire in Holt is clear.

6.45am: There is a report of a car on fire in Holt affecting Britten-Jones Drive between Southern Cross Drive and Stockdill Drive in both directions.

Remember school is back today, so slow down in school zones with speed limits back in place from today.

If you see any accidents or have any info on the morning commute, let us know whenever it is safe to do so. Email morningblog@canberratimes.com.au or tweet us @canberratimes.

Calling all Dr Who fans, this Canberra collector is trying to break the Guinness World Record with his collection. The Bigger on the inside: Collecting Dr Who is on at the Canberra Museum and Gallery until November 20. Free entry.

The ultimate foodie festival, the Canberra Region Truffle Festival continues for another year until August.

Come to the National Archives and explore exquisite garments, sleek fashion shoots, designers, retailers and bloggers in Faith, Fashion, Fusion - Muslim Women's Style in Australia. Until September 4.

TODAY'S CARTOON

editorial cartoon for Monday, July 18.

Today: Mostly sunny morning. Slight (30% chance of shows in the late afternoon and morning. Max 16.

Tuesday: Partly cloudy. Medium (60%) chance of rain. Patchy morning fog. Min 9, max 18

Wednesday: Cloudy. High (70%) chance of rain. Light winds. Min 7, max 15.
It is anticipated there will about one or two home births each month.

Applications for the trial will open in October, with the first home births expectedin February.

The ACT government has announced a three-year trial of publicly-funded home births, which is expected to be used by about 24 pregnant women a year.

Expectant mothers in Canberra will soon have the option of giving birth at home as part of the first publicly-funded trial in the ACT.

"Pregnancy is an exciting time for women and their families and I'm pleased we can now provide women more choice when they have their baby," Health Minister Simon Corbell said.

"Philosophically, it's important that women are supported to give birth in the environment that's most suitable for them and which is safe for them, and for many women giving birth at home is an option that they would be like to be supported in having the choice to exercise."

The trial will be available to eligible Canberra women with low-risk pregnancies who live within a 30-minute catchment area of the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children in Garran.

"This has been a level of service provision that has been long sought after by many pregnant mothers in the ACT," Mr Corbell said.

"The ACT has been one of the few jurisdictions without such a service, and that's largely been due to complications with achieving sufficient insurance cover for the government to undertake the service. With those issues now resolved, we're in a good position to offer the service and I am delighted it will be offered to eligible mothers from October this year for a three-year period."
Rio Tinto may sell $US4 billion of the $US16 billion of non-core assets it owns over the next three years and its Australian coal, aluminium smelting and diamond businesses are among the unneeded operations, according to analysis by UBS.

The analysis comes ahead of the release of Rio's production report for the June quarter, when all eyes will be on its iron ore business in Western Australia.

New Rio Tinto chief executive Jean Sebastein Jacques. Credit:Julian Andrews

Iron ore is the most important driver of Rio's earnings and free cash flow, generating almost three-quarters of the company's earnings.

Analysts believe Rio's Pilbara division shipped 83.2 million tonnes in the June quarter, while 87.8 million tonnes were shipped when the company's Canadian iron ore assets were included.
If you live in inner Sydney, your vote for Lord Mayor this September will be worth half that of a business. A convenience store gets two votes; a bank gets two votes; an absent landowner gets two votes. Residents get one.

That a business has any vote at all is galling enough. So is the fact owning property is still a qualification as an elector, a century-and-a-half after most places dumped it? But most offensive to democracy is the fact an individual's voting power will be 50 per cent that of a business.

Ordinarily, Clover Moore would be facing an it's-time election. After 12 years in elected leadership, any incumbent would expect a sizeable vote against another term, even with the new team she announced over the weekend.

But if her Liberal opponent, Christine Forster, wins, her victory will be soured by an appalling gerrymander, among the worst in a long history of state government meddling to get the city council it wants.
While the temptation will be to provide incontinence aids to the bedwetters in the Liberal Party, to appoint Tony Abbott as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and to have cups of tea with the Senate crossbench, Malcolm Turnbull's first priority should be to fix the Federation.

This is also the first tangible step he can take towards diminishing the trust deficit. The message from the election, as it is from the Brexit vote, is that increasing numbers of citizens do not trust their leaders to act in their best interests. This applies to business leadership as much as to civic leadership. Ripping off employees and consumers is unconscionable.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull

Central to reform of the Federation is the role of the Senate, established under the Constitution as the States House.

Both Tasmania and the Northern Territory have experienced serious failures of governance and service delivery. Insecurity of basic services such as electricity, ongoing problems in Hobart and Launceston hospitals, along with structural issues in basic education bedevil Tasmania. As well as a revolving door installed in the NT cabinet room, the NT government has failed to deliver adequate housing, health and education in Indigenous communities, and struggles to deal with the social problems caused by alcohol.
The most inexperienced of the Australian formations was the newly-raised 5th Division, which arrived in France in June 1916. After just two weeks on the Western Front, it was assigned to the British IX Corps in French Flanders to take part in a diversionary operation against the Germans near the village of Fromelles. By making an attack in the area known as Aubers, it was hoped that German reserves would be pinned in the Lille area, preventing them from being drawn into the fighting on the Somme.

The AIF was inexperienced and seriously unprepared for immediate offensive action after arriving in France in March 1916. Compared with the Ottoman forces on Gallipoli, the Germans were a highly trained, well-equipped and experienced force. They had been fighting on the Western Front for more than two years and had every inch of no man's land zeroed-in with artillery and machine-guns.

The view across no man's land in November 1919 from the remains of a German pillbox that formed part of the Sugar Loaf defences. Machine-gun fire from this salient ripped into the Australian 5th and British 61st divisions in 1916. Credit:Australian War Memorial

This week marks 100 years since troops of the Australian Imperial Force fought their first major action on the Western Front during the First World War. After Gallipoli, the surviving soldiers of the AIF returned to Egypt, where they underwent a period of extensive reorganisation and training. Thousands of reinforcements from recruiting efforts in Australia allowed the AIF to expand from two divisions to four, while yet another was raised in Australia.

The terrain around the village of Fromelles in northern France is flat and featureless. When the soil is turned after each season of beans and peas, an iron harvest of shell splinters and oxidised rifle cartridges is brought to the surface as a reminder of a war now beyond living memory.

The attack was nothing short of a disaster. After a seven-hour supporting bombardment, assaulting troops of the Australian 5th Division and British 61st Division "hopped the bags" about 6pm on July 19. They were hoping the German guns had been silenced by artillery, but they were met by a fusillade of machine-gun fire from a fortified salient known as the Sugar Loaf, which ripped into the flanks of the assaulting waves.

The bombardment had deprived the attack of any hope of surprise  and it had also failed to silence the well-entrenched defenders. Two brigades of Australian infantry managed to fight their way into the Germans trenches but suffered heavy casualties throughout the night as they struggled to repel fierce German counter-attacks. The Australians were forced to withdraw the following morning; but isolated pockets of men who found themselves surrounded, and with little remaining ammunition by daylight, had no alternative but to surrender. By then, the Australians had lost more than 5500 casualties; 1917 of them were dead.

Fromelles was a brutal initiation to Australia's campaign on the Western Front. It was once considered a "forgotten battle" but to call it that today would be drawing a long bow. Fromelles is represented in the Australian War Memorial's galleries, where relics from the fighting are on display. These include the dress tunic of Lieutenant General Sir Richard Haking, the British commander who orchestrated the Fromelles attack, alongside the battle dress of Major Geoff McCrae, who wrote the following in a letter to his family before going into battle: "Today I lead my battalion in an assault on the German lines and I pray to God I may come through alright ... If not, I will at least have laid down my life for you and my country, which is the greatest privilege one can ask for." McCrae was killed that night. Also displayed in the galleries are the personal items of men who were buried by the Germans, and whose remains were recently found at Pheasant Wood.

There is also now a substantial body of written work on Fromelles. Charles Bean dedicated 118 pages to Fromelles in the Official History of Australia in the War of 19141918; here he described actions of each unit involved in great detail, including the German regiment. Since then, no fewer than 35 books have been written on Fromelles by participants in the battle, family researchers, journalists, and military historians. In recent years, more has been written about Fromelles than about virtually any other action fought by the Australians in France.

Despite this, "Fromelles" does not appear among the AIF battle honours awarded for World War I. This was because the Battles Nomenclature Committee grouped it with actions fought at Aubers Ridge, Festubert and Loos under the battle honour "Aubers". Committees made up of men from the 5th Division and its battalions, including soldiers who had fought at Fromelles, chose not to select "Aubers" from a list of battle honours, even when it was made clear that this was the most appropriate title for the action fought on July 1920.
There are lessons to be learnt from the golden sands of Jilgi in Far North Queensland.

The idyllic beach is fringed with mango trees and the Cape Grafton hibiscus collected by botanist Joseph Banks when the Endeavour captained by James Cook dropped anchor in 1770.

Yarrabah artist Michelle Yeatman with one of her pots with its distinctive coil patterns inspired by the shells she collects on the beach. Credit:Janie Barrett

In the distance lies Fitzroy Island, a former quarantine station for Chinese miners heading to the Palmer River gold rush that became part of the Anglican Aboriginal mission established at Yarrabah, an Aboriginal community near Cairns.
It's based on Lady Susan, a little-known Austen novella, published posthumously, probably unfinished and made up of letters. This structural inconvenience forces Stillman, who wrote the screenplay, to strike out on his own, using the book only as a blueprint  although one that comes equipped with a wealth of quotable dialogue.

Tone in Jane Austen is all-important, hinging on a delicate balance between the tender and the sardonic. Whit Stillman captures it perfectly in the trailer for Love & Friendship. In the film itself, the hinge creaks a bit.

The other complication is Lady Susan herself. While she's bright, beautiful and acerbic, she's also a figure of parody  a Georgian gold-digger so blind to her own flaws that she's the butt of most of the jokes. This means you have to look elsewhere if you want to find someone with whom to identify. And there are only a couple of candidates: Lady Susan's nice, put-upon daughter, Frederica (Morfydd Clark), who's also slightly dull, and Reginald deCourcy (Australian actor Xavier Samuel), one of Austen's eligible bachelors, who defies the warnings of friends and family and embarks on a flirtation with Susan (Kate Beckinsale).

Chloe Sevigny as Alicia (left) and Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan Vernon in Love & Friendship, based on a little-known novella by Jane Austen.

There's a lot of fun in all this and Stillman has all the right credentials to take full advantage of every nuance. I've been a fan of his since 1990, when his first film, Metropolitan, broke dramatically with the kind of dope-addled frathouse comedies in vogue at the time. An admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger, he chose as his targets a group of over-indulged, hyper-analytical Ivy Leaguers dithering over an excess of choices.

His follow-ups, Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), carried on in the same vein, eloquently demonstrating the sharpness of his wit, together with a brand of insouciance that jibes well with that of Austen herself. And he has done well with his cast. It's no stretch for Stephen Fry to carry off his cameo as the pompous husband of Susan's best friend, Lady Alicia (Chloe Sevigny), who's American and therefore immune to many of the restrictions and refinements of the British class system. And Tom Bennett is very funny as a classic Austen fool  rich, young and well-connected but desperately in need of a brain. Encountering peas for the first time, he spends one dinner blissfully rolling them around on his plate because he likes the patterns they make.

Then there's Beckinsale  dispensing her killer lines with an airy detachment wholly innocent of sarcasm. Elegant, imperious and completely self-absorbed, she's suffering the weariness of a life spent perpetually on the make. And now, recently widowed, she's on the move, having scandalised polite London society by having an affair with a married man, Lord Manwaring (Lochlann O'Mearain), who remains a figure of mystery, glimpsed only in the background.
As a lover of all things tahini and an unrepentant pickle fan, I havent yet found a way to order poorly at a Banzo establishment, on wheels or not.
When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull launched his government's "innovation agenda" in December, it was with the kind of zeal he typically reserves for matters of technology, transport and transformation.

"There has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian business," we were told, a variation on a theme he introduced when challenging for the Liberal leadership last September. "There have never been more opportunities on the horizon for Australians."

The policy suite, including incentives for start-ups, research and collaboration, might have been worthy and necessary, but as a key plank in the Coalition's re-election pitch, there is growing consensus it was a failure. The view inside and outside party ranks is that the PM's excitement was not shared by voters, particularly in marginal suburban and regional seats.

Perhaps the disaffection was best summed up by Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who was first elected to the seat of Canning in Western Australian just days after Turnbull seized the prime ministership. "Canning isn't going to be the next Silicon Valley," he complained to his local newspaper the Mandurah Mail after the campaign. "A lot of what we were campaigning on nationally just wasn't resonating with everyday Australians."
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has softened his rhetoric on the government's proposed superannuation changes, potentially laying the groundwork for a backdown to soothe ongoing anger inside the Liberal Party.

Mr Turnbull has previously pledged no changes to the "ironclad" suite of proposals on high-end superannuation savings, which conservatives inside the party have criticised as retrospective and argued were a weakness during the election campaign.

The Prime Minister has now signalled that he is listening "very keenly" to the concerns inside his party amid reports that Treasurer Scott Morrison is considering various concessions.

"The reforms are important, but in the implementation and transition, there is work to be done. There always is with tax changes. They will go through the normal cabinet and party room process," Mr Turnbull said on Sunday.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Credit:Getty Images Arrests have now reached 6000 as President Erdogan vows to wipe out the "virus" of dissenters from state bodies. [BBC] European leaders warned Erdogan that his victory over the plot to oust him did not give him a blank cheque to disregard the rule of law. [Reuters] 4. Cabinet reshuffle A week ago The Australian reported the multi-milionaire Malcolm Turnbull donated $1 million of his own cash into the Liberal party's campaign. Now the same publication says the figure was actually double that. This would amount to the largest political donation in Australia's history. The PM, clearly treating the public like adults as he promised, is refusing to confirm or deny the reports. [Pamela Williams] Strategists Mark Textor and Tony Nutt will be forced to face the partyroom to explain what happened to their strategy during the election campaign, which the Liberals won by a whisker and not without a serious scare.

Mark Textor, Credit:Louise Kennerley This will in effect avoid Malcolm Turnbull having to face the criticisms as they'll be offloaded to the Nutt-Textor duo, but it won't ease the serious fears some within his own party  in fact, this tactic will only go further to confirm those fear. Turnbull also reshuffles his Cabinet after key plotters like Peter Hendy and Wyatt Roy were evicted from their junior ministerial roles and their seats courtesy of their electors. Things to watch out for: if the Nationals pick up any extra spots in the ministry and if talented rising stars Matthew Canavan and Zed Seselja are promoted into Cabinet. [James Massola/Fairfax] Cabinet is set to decide ASAP whether former prime minister Kevin Rudd will receive Australian endorsement for his undeclared United Nations Secretary-General bid. Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison are expected to put forward objections. [Greg Sheridan/The Australian] Meanwhile, despite his win, Turnbull of old looks exactly like Turnbull of new  this time he's giving in to the right-wing of the party angry about the superannuation tax and concession perks being trimmed for the rich. [Fergus Hunter/Fairfax] Rebel backbenchers want loopholes for the wealthy. [Laura Tingle,Joanna Mather/Financial Review]

5. MH17 payout Malaysia Airlines has reached a compensation deal with families who lost loved ones on doomed filght MH17 which was downed over Ukraine two years ago, killing all 298 souls on-board. [Fairfax] 6. Sugar lurks in the 'fruit'-filled lunchbox Sugar Ever since I went paleo, I've been astonished by how many savoury foods contain hidden sugars. (Don't worry, I'm the YOLO, 80/20, holiday-calories-don't-count, not the Pete-Evans-type of Paleo!)
It is a title coveted by barristers that has triggered court spats and attempted leadership coups.

Appointments to the prestigious rank of Senior Counsel  or silk  are made annually and are a reliable source of controversy among the NSW bar.

A Sydney barrister has lost her legal battle against the Bar Association. Credit:Jessica Shapiro

Days before applications close on July 29 for the latest round of appointments, the Federal Court has ruled on the latest stoush involving a barrister whose silken aspirations were thwarted.

Sydney barrister Mary Walker, who specialises in mediations, took the NSW Bar Association to court after her application for appointment as silk was knocked back last year.
The outcome of a trial at 46 Queensland schools will determine how the state's youngest students are taught into the future, in what the Education Minister hopes will allay parents who feel their children are being pushed "too hard, too fast".

Former teacher Kathy Margolis, who quit the profession she loved in February, announcing the decision in what became a viral Facebook post detailing her disillusionment with the education system, has submitted a petition to the parliament calling attention to the "problems within our school system".

More funds for preschool places. Credit:iStock

It quickly ticked over more than 4000 signatures, with more coming every day, as more parents examine what their children are being taught.

"Teachers are being forced to teach an age inappropriate and crowded curriculum which is pushing students too hard, too fast," Ms Margolis wrote as the petitioner.
A man who allegedly stole a car from a petrol station then crashed it in Melbourne's south-east has been arrested.

Police believe the 31-year-old man stole the Jeep from a station on Heatherton Road in Clayton South on Sunday night.

Police are also investigating a separate petrol drive off from a nearby station, which was also on Heatherton Road, on the weekend.


Yet the caller still shared the sentiments of many, who believed the record numbers of rough sleepers were "not a good look for the city". A businessman said he was considering relocating his Collins Street store after more than three decades, while on Swanston Street a souvenir seller said five people sleeping in front of his shop were turning away tourists. A camp set up in Melbourne. Credit:Pat Scala At least 30 homeless camps have been set up around the central city, with tents and sleeping equipment erected in laneways, doorways, on footpaths, under bridges and in private properties. Drug use and the accumulation of rubbish and filth is often a concern.

A training college in Elizabeth Street said it spent $2000 on forensic cleaners and the replacement of a door due to the "bodily waste" deposited by rough sleepers who had breached a stairwell. Lord mayor Robert Doyle said the council had to call in the police after discovering "a little injecting room" set up in a blocked-off section of a CBD laneway. "We should be supportive of people that are vulnerable, but we shouldn't romanticise the situation," he said. "There are challenging, illegal behaviours that we shouldn't put up with, whether people are homeless or not." Melbourne City Council has been flooded with complaints about homeless people in the CBD. Credit:Eddie Jim

Elizabeth Street has become a problem spot, attracting larger gatherings of people with pets and extensive camps made of mattresses, desks, milk crates and trolleys. Violent confrontations have been reported between some rough sleepers, and passers-by have complained of being screamed at. "I have been abused and harassed on a fairly regular basis. I have had colleagues who had had the same experience" said one woman who emailed the council. The unprecedented surge of rough sleepers in the central city has been confirmed by a recent council count which found 247 people living on the streets  a 74 per cent increase in two years. Homeless services are linking this increase to the closure of a number of caravan parks and inner-city rooming houses that have been bought by developers. Launch Housing, the key agency charged with finding accommodation for homeless people in the CBD, is now calling on the state government to rent or buy about 200 properties to help make up the shortfall.

"I appreciate it's not a budget [issue] at the moment, but we can't wait another budget cycle," Launch Housing deputy chief executive Heather Holst said. "This is an emergency and I think members of the public are quite right to be concerned and upset." Premier Daniel Andrews said although the state government had invested heavily to tackle the problem of homelessness  particularly in relation to family violence  it was clear more needed to be done. "I think we all need to acknowledge that it is on the rise, we need to do more and for our part we are absolutely determined to do that," Mr Andrews said. State Housing Minister Martin Foley said he was open to discussing new ways to assist rough sleepers ahead of a wider housing affordability package later this year.

It is also expected that the state government's $152 million pledge for accommodation for people escaping family violence will make a significant dent in the numbers of people living on the streets. Nevertheless, the Salvation Army's Major Nottle warned that the current "entrenched" homelessness crisis could not be solved by a single government over a single term. He demanded a national and bipartisan strategy to tackle the roots of the problem in the suburbs and regional areas. It is not illegal to sleep in a public place, but some of the Melburnians who contacted the council urged it to simply "move on the homeless" out of sight. Loading Robert Kramer, 68, who has been sleeping rough in Enterprize Park, said he did not know what else to do. "Work's gone, there's not enough places, some of us can't work, so we come here."
A toddler found unconscious in a backyard pond has died in a Melbourne hospital.

The 14-month-old boy was pulled from the water at a Lovely Banks home in Geelong on Sunday at about 11.20am.

The child was taken to the Royal Children's Hospital on Sunday where he later died.

"Ambulance attended and the child was taken to hospital, however, he passed away this morning," a police statement released on Monday morning said.
Building giant John Holland has defended the steps it has taken to help workers who were exposed to asbestos at Perth's new children's hospital.

Workers were covered in a white substance after drilling into a roof panel on Monday afternoon.

Yet another scandal plagues Perth children's hospital. Credit:John Holland

The area was not isolated for 24 hours, with tests later confirming the dust was white asbestos called chrysotile.

"Workers were immediately offered the opportunity to have health tests and to have clothing and other items - including vehicles - tested," the company said in a media release on Saturday.
Rio de Janeiro: Brazil is revising its security for next month's Summer Olympic Games in the wake of the attack in Nice, France, that killed 84 people, officials said as they carried out the latest in a series of counterterrorism exercises.

This country, which has never suffered a terrorist attack, will host up to half a million tourists for South America's first Olympic Games, which start in Rio de Janeiro on August 5.

Preparations for the Rio Olympics have been trouble. Credit:Getty Images

Extra measures will be imposed including intensified searches, increased security on streets, restrictions on traffic on some routes, and an increased safety cordon around some venues, ministers said, without providing details.

The city had already planned to deploy 85,000 police, military and members of a Brazil-style national guard called the National Force on Rio's streets. But the scale of the carnage caused by the truck used in the Nice attack prompted Brazil to re-evaluate its security measures.
Amsterdam: Malaysia Airlines has struck a deal to settle damages claims for most victims of its MH17 flight that was shot down over eastern Ukraine two years ago, Dutch national broadcaster NOS has reported.

NOS cited Veeru Mewa, a lawyer representing Dutch victims.

Under the Montreal Convention, airlines must pay damages of up to about $A189,366 to victims' families, regardless of the circumstances of a crash.

All 298 passengers and crew, including 27 Australian nationals, were killed when the Malaysia Airlines flight was hit, with a report from the Dutch Safety Board saying it was brought down by a Russian-built missile fired from an area where Russian separatists were operating.
Berlin: The devastating attack in Nice, carried out by a Tunisian man living in France, came at a moment of political ferment in Europe and seems likely to give even more fuel to anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim movements that are challenging established parties across the region.

The third major attack in France in 17 months - a murderous truck ride by a disturbed loner claimed by the Islamic State as a "soldier" in its war on the West - was used by far-right movements and anti-immigration, populist parties within the political mainstream as fodder for their arguments that Islam poses a mortal danger to European societies. Curbing immigration, a rallying call for Britons who voted last month to leave the European Union, as well as for many supporters of Donald Trump in the United States, is the answer, they suggested.

"This is a war," Geert Wilders, the Dutch right-winger who is gaining in his country's polls, said on Twitter on Friday. "And it will not stop until we close our borders for Islam and de-Islamize our societies. No more terror. No more Islam!"

In France, next year's presidential contest is already in full swing. The unpopular incumbent, Francois Hollande, a Socialist, is facing intensifying questions about his handling of the nation's security and electoral challenges from both the centre-right and the far-right National Front, led by Marine Le Pen. On Friday, Le Pen said Hollande had done "absolutely nothing" of substance to protect France from Islamic terrorism.
Nizhneleninskoye, Russia: Trumpeted for the past decade as an emblem of Russia's destiny as an Asian as well as a European power, the huge steel bridge thrusts out from the Chinese side of the Amur River, stretching more than a mile across the turbid waters that divide the world's most populous nation from its biggest.

Then something strange happens: The bridge abruptly stops, hanging in the air high above the river just short of the Russian shore at Nizhneleninskoye, a remote frontier settlement nearly 6400 km from Moscow.

The Kimkano-Sutarsky Mine, which holds vast ore reserves and pushed for a bridge over the Amur River, in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast of Russia. Credit:New York Times

The gap between the bridge and the riverbank - left by Russia's failure to build its own, much shorter share of the project - exposes the reality behind the pledges of an ever closer Russian-Chinese partnership made when President Vladimir Putin met in Beijing last month with China's president and Communist Party chief, Xi Jinping. It was their 15th meeting.

United by a shared distaste for Western models of democracy, wariness of US power and eagerness to find new sources of growth, Russia and China have never been closer, at least at the leadership level. With each meeting, leaders produce numerous agreements for joint projects and pledges to support a Russian "pivot to Asia," an eastward shift in economic and political focus championed by Putin since his relations with the West soured over Ukraine in 2014.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico:--- Coast Guard rescue crews ended a four-day search Saturday for possible survivors of a migrant vessel, which reportedly capsized sometime between the night of July 9, 2016 and Monday morning in waters between the British Virgin Islands and the Caribbean island of Saint Maarten.

Search efforts by rescue crews yielded no signs of additional survivors.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those lost in this tragic incident," said Capt. Robert W. Warren, Commander of U.S. Coast Guard Sector San Juan.

Two Saint Maarten and two Cuban migrants who were traveling aboard the capsized vessel were rescued by a Good Samaritan vessel Monday in waters south of Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands and transported to Virgin Gorda, where they were transferred to island authorities.

Rescue units collectively searched over 70 operational hours and completed 20 search patterns covering approximately 10,538 square nautical miles, an area approximately the size of the state of Maryland.

Coast Guard watchstanders in Sector San Juan were notified by British Virgin Islands authorities and family members Wednesday morning of the vessel capsized at sea. One of the survivors reported that the migrant vessel had departed Saint Maarten the night of July 9, 2016 on a trip to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. The vessel was carrying 15 Cubans, one Colombian, a Dominican Republic national and two persons from Saint Maarten when it capsized after the vessel started taking on water.

An HC-130 aircraft from the 920th Rescue Wing's 39th Rescue Squadron with a team of Pararescue Jumpers from the from the 308th Rescue Squadron from Patrick Air Force Base flew in support of search efforts Friday, while a WC-130 aircraft from the Puerto Rico Air National Guard's 156th Airlift Wing searched Saturday. The Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard supported search efforts with a dash-8 maritime patrol aircraft, while Virgin Islands Search and Rescue units in the British Virgin Islands and National Park Service Rangers in Saint Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands conducted shoreline searches for possible survivors.

Coast Guard assets involved in the search:

* A HC-144 Ocean Sentry maritime patrol aircraft

* Fast Response Cutter Heriberto Hernandez

* MH-65D Dolphin helicopters from Air Station Borinquen

* A Coast Guard Auxiliary fixed-wing aircraft

Anyone with information on this case is asked to contact the Coast Guard Sector San Juan Command Center at 787-289-2041.
PHILIPSBURG:--- The pinning service of Chief Commissioner of Police Carl John which was cancelled by Minister of Justice and former Minister of Justice Richard Gibson Sr. due to financial constrains was done during the International Justice Day ceremony on Sunday. The officially pinning service was done at the St. Maarten Roman Catholic Church. John was given his pins since last year but refused to wear them because the pinning service was cancelled.

In press release Police Spokesman Ricardo Henson said that the Minister of Justice was granted the opportunity in the presence of those attending the service to officially honor the Chhief of Police Carl John by replacing his rank insignias of commissioner to Chief Commissioner of police. The Minister congratulated the police chief for the tremendous job that he is doing considering the limited means he has at his disposal and encouraged him to continue serve and protect the community of Sint Maarten in the best manner he can.

During his short speech to those attending the church service Chief Commissioner John stated that he gladly accepts this honor by the Minister of Justice on behalf of all the officers and other staff in the police force who on a daily basis go out and perform their duty. He said these are the persons that really deserve this honor.

The Minister did not only choose the right day but, the right place to honor him and for that he is very grateful. It is not about Carl John getting another star on his shoulder, but about accepting the responsibility of leading the Police Force of Sint Maarten to serve and protect the community the best way possible.

Finally the police chief thanked his family and asked them to continue to support him during the many challenges that he will encounter and congratulated all colleagues on International Justice Day

International Justice Day commemorated

The Ministry of Justice of Sint Maarten headed by the Minister of Justice the Honorable Edson Kirindongo, on Sunday July 17th commemorated and celebrated International Justice Day with a well attended church service held at the Roman Catholic Church on Front Street. The service was well attended by different department heads, such as the Royal Marechaussee, Customs, Coast, Police Department and other colleagues within the Justice Ministry, their families, friends and many members of the community.

During his speech the minister stated: I want sincerely thank you, for attending this church service this morning, as today we celebrate International Justice Day.

International Justice Day commemorates and it marks the importance of continuing the fight against impunity and bringing justice for the victims of crime in general, around the world. Those who commit crimes on a large or systematic scale should be held accountable.

It is without any doubt that since 10-10-10 the Ministry of Justice of Sint Maarten has made and is still making great effort to strengthen and improve the functional cooperation in justice-related matters with our counterparts on French Saint Martin, the Netherlands, Curacao, Aruba, BES islands and other island countries in the region, as an overall strategy to not only efficiently serve the people of Sint Maarten, but to also become a dependable partner within the Eastern Caribbean region and Dutch Kingdom.

I want to sincerely congratulate all Justice Ministries mainly in this region and around the world, in particular the colleagues working in the Ministry of Justice on Sint Maarten and their families on this very memorable day as I look forward for your continued support in the fight against crime.

KPSM Police Report.
Protesters wearing a former British Prime Minister Tony Blair mask, left, and former U.S. President George W. Bush mask pose for the media outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London, shortly before the publication of the Chilcot report into the Iraq war, on July 6, 2016. The long-awaited British inquiry into the 2003 invasion of Iraq was led by former senior civil servant John Chilcot. It took over seven years to prepare and runs over 2 million words. The report focused on the British decision-making process in the run up to the war. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
DUTCH QUARTER:--- Some 27 persons and or businesses were honored Saturday night for their years of contribution to the I Can Foundation who celebrated their 20th anniversary.

Among those that attended evening celebration are Acting Governor Reynold Groenveldt, Chairlady of Parliament Sarah Wescot Williams, MP Cornelius de Weever, MP Rodolph Samuel, Ombudsman Nilda Arduin Lynch and several persons from the business community.

Cassandra Debby Gibbs told her guests that her vision which came through her mediation was put into action some 20 years ago. She said while everyone taught it was when hurrican Luis hit the island in 1995, he love for children started way back. Gibbs said as bus driver, teacher and nurse she has the love for children at the center of her heart and if she is asked to do this over she will do the very same thing all over again.

Gibbs also thanked her staff, two of whom she honored, while her staff surprised her with a certificate of appreciation for the pay less job she is doing. The workers told the gathering that while Debby would pay her workers at the end of every month she herself does not have a salary.

Speakers of the night was Acting Governor Groenveldt, and MP Wescot Williams while those that were honored also shared their stories and the reasons they chose to support I Can Foundation.

The most moving speech was given from the first child that Debby opened her doors to at the age of 14. The young woman said even though she is from St. Maarten she was residing in Curacao and at age 14 she returned to St. Maarten with her brother who quickly got somewhere to stay while she remained homeless. She said when Debby heard of her, she immediately opened her doors to her, find a school for her and also taught her to speak the English language. The young mother who is now in her 30s said that she went abroad to study and is back on the island working as fire fighter, her message to the children at the I Can foster home is to never give up and to always follow their dreams.

Click here to view more photos
PHILIPSBURG:--- Member of Parliament Christopher Emmanuel congratulates the employees of the Maho Resort, with the favorable outcome of their court injunction against Maho resort and the Board of the WICSU/PSU.

After being informed by a group of employees on June 12th, of the pressing situation they were confronted with by both their employer Maho Resort and WICSU/PSU. Together with a labor professional, I met with the employees and informed them of their rights as workers and how they should proceed legally. In addition, through the chairlady of parliament I formally questioned the minister Emile Lee of VSA on the role of the labor department. As reported and confirmed by the management of Maho resorts, both the Labor Mediator, Mr. R. Boasman and WICSU/PSU

president Ms. Solagnier vetted and approved this process of termination.

The decision of the courts in favor of the employees, is a clear indication that they were not well represented by their union The Pelican saga is still fresh on the minds of the people. As a consequence as legislators, employee representatives and government, all stakeholders should ensure that the rights of the workingmen and women in this country are safeguarded.

MP Emmanuel noted, I look forward to the outcome of the developments pertaining to those employees who have signed to terminate their employment with Resort of the World to commence with a new operating company, some of which indicated they did so under duress. However he does hope that the management of the Maho group together with the employees can reach to a favorable agreement that benefits all parties. This to ensure that St. Maarten can continue to provide a quality tourism experience for our visitors! MP Emmanuel also indicated that as a member of parliament, he has been consistent and true when it came to the rights of the people, regardless to being in opposition or part of a coalition.
Local Ophthalmologist Discovers New Gene Mutation

The ability to drive a car, recognize friends and family in public and see words on your computer, cell phone or on a printed page are a few of the many activities in our daily lives that depend heavily on the normal function of the macula; the part of the eye that deals with fine focus. Dr. Kent W. Small, an ophthalmologist who practices in Glendale and Los Angeles, has made an exciting discovery on a gene that directly effects the vision loss for individuals with an eye disease called North Carolina Macular Dystrophy (also known as MCDR1). Macular dystrophy is a hereditary condition, which is a type of macular degeneration.

For Kent Small, M.D., the formidable, 28-year search for the gene mutations causing the rare retinal disease known as North Carolina macular dystrophy (NCMD) was highly personal and career-defining.

"My first academic position after leaving Duke did not work out so well because, against the wishes of my chairman, I went to Marshfield, Wisconsin, for two weeks to learn genetic testing methods from Dr. James Weber to help find the NCMD genes," recalls Dr. Small. "I made a commitment to the families with NCMD and became too deeply entrenched in the pursuit of this disease to ever give up. It consumed me sometimes at considerable cost personally, emotionally and financially."

But thanks to his collaboration with 12 affected families and 20 researchers - including Ed Stone, M.D., Ph.D., at the University of Iowa, who provided powerful, state-of-the-art genetic discovery technologies for the effort - Dr. Small finally got his answer. Mutations involving the genes PRDM13 and IRX1 were identified as the culprit. The first mutations in both genes were difficult to find, because they were located outside of genetic regions known as exons, which code for proteins and are where disease-causing defects are most likely to occur. Results of the long-standing research project were published recently in the journal Ophthalmology.

These findings are so significant that Dr. Small has been invited as a keynote speaker of the Global Ophthalmology Meeting on July 18, 2016 and an invited speaker at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting in October 2016In addition, Dr. Richard G. Weleber wrote an editorial in the Journal Ophthalmology of the American Academy of Ophthalmology in January issue of 2016 stating that this is "one of the most important studies in our field in the past several decades."

Dr Small began working on this disease 28 years ago when he encountered a patient at DUKE University with this disease at the Oteen VA Hospital. Early on his research was funded by NIH but the last 14 years it has been funded by himself and his non-profit organization. Within the last year, with the help of colleagues at University of Iowa and the Stephen Wynn Institute for Vision Research they were finally able to find and confirm the mutations causing the disease.

Eye with Macular Corneal Dystrophy

What's more exciting is that it opens the doors for future research on similar mutations. The gene affected is involved in the development of the human macula and opens a new pathway for research into future therapeutics. North Carolina Macular Dystrophy has several similarities to Age Related Macular Degeneration, the number one leading cause of blindness in the United States for individuals about the age of 65. Therefore, understanding the MCDR1 gene will shed light on and contribute to future discoveries on the development of treatment and management of age-related macular degeneration. MCDR1 and Age Related Macular Degeneration can be diagnosed after examination by your ophthalmologist. Dr. Small is one of the world's leading specialists on these diseases.

Dr. Small is very proud of his findings and expects to expand his research in the future and hopes that outside funding becomes available to offset his personal expenditures. Dr. Small has established a non-profit corporation to help fund his future research.
Man in custody responsible for defacing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on Sunset Avenue in Venice

LAPD have apprehended the man responsible for defacing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on Sunset Avenue in Venice

The Los Angeles District Attorney's office believes they have apprehended the man responsible for defacing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on Sunset Avenue in Venice.

Before the Memorial Day weekend, graffiti appeared on the wall, which has become an icon for the Venice and West Los Angeles neighborhoods regarding the service and sacrifice given to the United States by those in the armed services. The mural bears the title "You Are Not Forgotten" and lists the names of 2,273 soldiers who are counted as either prisoners of war or missing in action from the Vietnam War. It was painted in 1992 by artist Peter Stewart, who was inspired by a welcoming parade for Operation Desert Storm veterans.

The graffiti damage to the memorial mural stretched about 100 feet. "We were initially hopeful that the graffiti could be removed without damaging the memorial, but Metro's contractor says the damage is too extensive," reported Metro CEO Phil Washington. The mural is painted on the side of a Metro building. Washington's statement went to explain that the transit authority would "work with the community to gather historical photos so the wall can be restored."

The suspected tagger, Angel Castro, 24, was arrested on July 13. He's plead not guilty to one felony count of vandalism over $400. Castro has previously been convicted of robbery in 2015. Prosecutors will ask that bail be set at $85,000.

If convicted as charged, Castro could face up to six years in prison.

Volunteers helped cleanup the Vietnam War memorial wall in Venice after it was vandalized with graffiti.

If convicted as charged, Castro could face up to six years in prison.

The memorial, located on a black wall along Pacific Avenue, was painted by a Vietnam veteran in 1992 and has 2,273 names on it. It declares "You are not forgotten," which was covered up by the graffiti. Citizens all the way from Lancaster and other areas came together to repaint the phrase over the markings and cleanup the graffiti.

Venice is a residential, commercial and recreational beachfront neighborhood on the Westside of the city of Los Angeles.

Venice was founded in 1905 as a seaside resort town. It was an independent city until 1926, when it merged with Los Angeles. Today, Venice is known for its canals, beaches, and the circus-like Ocean Front Walk, a two-and-a-half-mile pedestrian-only promenade that features performers, mystics, artists and vendors.
Five Things to Do: 'Who you gonna call?' The SBSO with 'Ghostbusters'
Patricia Randolph's Madravenspeak: The Second Amendment: Looking into the mirror of cultural psychosis
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Algiers, July 17, 2016 (SPS) - The speaker of Algerian People's National Assembly (lower house of parliament), Mohamed Larbi Ould Khelifa, reiterated Saturday Algeria's support to Western Sahara in international fora, being fully convinced that it is backing a just cause.

Ould Khelifa, at an audience granted to the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic's ambassador to Algiers Bechraya Hamoudi Sidina, expressed "Algeria's willingness to continue support for Western Sahara in international fora."

"This is a constant position of Algeria: Parliament, government and people, coming from our faith in the just cause of Western Sahara and our experience in fighting colonialism," ould Khelifa said, according to a Lower House's statement.

The speaker underlined that Western Sahara conflict is a "decolonization issue according to United Nations resolutions and international decisions."

He stressed that Algeria's support to the struggle of Western Sahara people "is based on the unwavering principles governing our foreign policy."

For Algeria, it is a support to a just cause to allow Western Sahara people to exert their right to self-determination in line with international legality resolutions. (SPS)

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Depending on how old you are and how long youve lived in Wisconsin, youve likely heard the dismissive phrase When in doubt, Stout! Its an outdated reference to UW-Stout being a college choice of last resort.

Today, a more apt slogan is Theres no doubt, its Stout! as the universitys reputation for excellence in science, technology, engineering and math education grows along with its record in placing its graduates in jobs.

The campus also is an example of why state investments in higher education can pay dividends to communities, the economy and taxpayers.

A recent visit to the Stout campus in downtown Menomonie, about halfway between Eau Claire and the Minnesota border, was a reminder of the ways in which college campuses intersect with regional businesses while providing students with a broad-based education.

With 48 undergraduate majors and about two dozen graduate majors, Stout offers plenty of choices for students. Most settle into one of six career pathways  science and engineering, technology and communications, business and management, health and human services, arts and design, and education.

Because theres a blend of applied learning and liberal arts, students gets hands-on experience through internships and co-ops, industry projects, career conferences and campus facilities that feature twice as much laboratory space as traditional classroom space.

Examples include the UW-Stout Discovery Center, which features more than 50 industry projects, a digital fabrication workshop (or fab lab), a Manufacturing Outreach center, an affiliated business park and two of the largest student career conferences in the Midwest. Collectively, those two conferences are attended by 600 employers.

It all leads to students who graduate with a future: More than 97 percent of Stouts undergraduate students are employed or pursuing graduate degrees within six months of their graduation, and more than three-quarters are employed in their field of study.

That performance helps to explain why UW-Stout recorded the third largest enrollment increase in the UW System over the past decade, with a record enrollment of 9,535 in 2015 and an expected 2016 enrollment that appears on track.

Like most UW System campuses, however, Stout has trouble lurking below its seemingly productive surface.

Speaking to members of the Wisconsin Technology Councils board of directors, Chancellor Bob Meyer noted that cuts in state support for the UW System have encouraged other colleges  mostly outside Wisconsin  to poach Stout faculty members who are worried about their future.

About 60 faculty and staff out of 1,300 employees of all descriptions have moved on, which Meyer warned will hurt Stouts program quality if the cuts continue and talented faculty arent replaced.

Most recently, Gov. Scott Walker has said he wants to avoid further cuts to higher education and even restore some funding if there are measurable performance standards by which campuses can be judged.

Meyer said hes fine on UW-Stout living up to such metrics because hes confident the campus  which won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 2001  to continue to perform at a high level.

We value assessing our performance in a variety of areas, Meyer said. Therefore, we welcome the governors call for basing additional funding for the UW System on performance metrics. We hope, however, that one of the metrics includes accurate measurements of the success that graduates have in the workplace after leaving campus.

The Tech Councils May report on the economic value of higher education to Wisconsin noted a number of examples of how public and private campuses benefit business by delivering talent, expertise and research partnerships.

Without a doubt, a leading example for Wisconsin is UW-Stout.
STAMFORD  Friends and family of a 2-month-old baby who died after she was rushed to the hospital from an East Side day care last week have started a GoFundMe page to raise money for funeral costs and the parents lost wages for missed work.

Bella Redondo, who was born on April 24 and lived near downtown New Canaan with her parents and three siblings, died Tuesday of blunt-force trauma to the head, police said. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Is this any way to fight an epidemic?

The Zika virus, which if contracted during pregnancy can cause a serious birth defect of the brain, has been reported in at least 45 states, including Connecticut.

There is no treatment for the infection, neither in patients who are pregnant and those who arent though work continues on a vaccine.

Of course, that work could go more quickly if there was adequate funding.

Federal officials have known about the seriousness of the Zika virus for more than a year, yet important funding has been tied up in the worst kind of Washington impasse. In late June, a bill that would have earmarked $1.1 billion for Zika funding was sunk by a series of non-related riders. Democrats did not support the Republican-written bill, which came attached with provisions that cut funding from Planned Parenthood, as well as lift a ban on displaying the Confederate flag at military cemeteries.

What the Stars and Bars has to do with birth defects is beyond the scope of this column. Attaching riders to bills is not new politics, but in the case of an encroaching epidemic, doing so seems peculiar, at best.

President Barack Obama and health officials pushed for a vote for funding before Congress left on a long summer break, but they've had little luck so far.

The Zika virus is spread mostly by the bite of a particular kind of mosquito, though it can also be spread through sexual contact. Many people who are affected with the virus dont always exhibit symptoms. Those who do have symptoms generally complain of relatively minor issues such as joint pain and a fever that passes in a few days. But infection during a pregnancy can cause a serious birth defect of the brain known as microcephaly. Other effects of a pregnancy infection include, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hearing loss and slow growth.

U.S. physicians say that more and more women have voiced concerns about the virus in the last few months.

Dr. Tom Frieden, CDC director, recently told NBC news that the spread of the virus is a true crisis. This is already happening now.

In Connecticut, the first Zika virus case was reported in March, when a 60-year-old woman who had traveled to South America came back with symptoms later found to be caused by the virus.

Raul Pino, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, added the Zika virus to the lists of Reportable Diseases, Emergency Illnesses and Health Conditions and Reportable Laboratory Findings in February.

That means, according to Matthew L. Cartter, state epidemiologist and director of infectious diseases with the state Department of Public Health, that physicians and health care providers must report suspected cases of Zika to the state and to the local health departments. The state updates its Zika count online every week. As of the first week of July, 433 people had been tested, and 25 had been found to have the virus, including three women who are pregnant. Each person had traveled to and returned from countries where the virus was already present, such as the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico.

The state has 91 trapping stations in 72 towns, a third of them in Fairfield and New Haven counties, where most of the West Nile (another mosquito-born illness) cases were reported in years past.

In late June. U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, whose district encompasses much of New Haven and some of Fairfield counties, announced the state would receive a $320,564 federal grant to fight the virus. Thats welcome money, but its hardly enough.

For most of us, a bite from the wrong mosquito means a few sick days.

But shouldnt our elected representatives be concerned about viruss potential on future voters?

Susan Campbell is a distinguished lecturer at the University of New Haven. She can be reached at slcampbell417@gmail.com . This column was reported under a partnership with the Connecticut Health I-Team ( www.c-hit.org ).
PITTSBURGH  With college costs shooting through the roof and many parents unprepared for the burden of paying for it, high school students across the country are being forced to make choices about where they will attend college and how to cut costs once they get there.

One of the most significant findings in a new report by the Washington, D.C.-based College Savings Foundation is that for the first time this year a majority of high school students, 53 percent, plan to eliminate the dormitory expense altogether and live at home.

We are encouraged that high school students are planning ahead and thinking deliberately about their futures. They may be living at home during college, but that may help them achieve more financial independence later, said Mary Morris, chairman of the College Savings Foundation and CEO of Virginia 529 in Richmond, Va.

The 2016 survey of high school sophomores, juniors and seniors found that college costs are looming large in their minds, which has prompted many of them to seek more affordable educational choices.

More than half (54 percent) are choosing public college, up from 50 percent last year; and 20 percent are opting for community college. Nearly half (49 percent) now think of vocational and career schools in the same way that they think about public or private college, up from 42 percent last year and 21 percent in 2014.

Students and parents, in general, are becoming more price sensitive and also more concerned about the return on their college investment, said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Cappex.com, a Chicago-based website that connects students with colleges and financial aid. In a way, its better for the child to live at home while going to school than be forced to live at home after they graduate.

The concern is that students who dont live on campus may be missing out on part of the educational experience, he said.
A documentary about the life of Mark Duggan, whose death at the hands of police sparked the London riots in 2011, has been released this week  but a friend of Duggan still finds it too hard to watch.

The Hard Stop examines the death of black Tottenham man Mark Duggan in 2011, retelling the story with help from Mr Duggans friends Marcus Knox-Hooke and Kurtis Henville.

Mark Duggan was shot dead by police in Tottenham in 2011, during a hard stop  the term used to describe how officers pulled out in front of Duggans speeding cab, ready for confrontation.

Police claimed they had reason to believe Duggan was ready to shoot, despite the disputed gun being recovered 20ft away from his vehicle, encased in a sock, after being thrown away in panic.

Friend of Mark Duggan, Marcus Knox-Hooke, led a protest outside Tottenham police station following his death, which escalated into nationwide riots that saw hundreds of arrests as well as homes and business burnt down.

The Hard Stop documentary trailer

Marcus Knox-Hooke told London Live: For me, every time I watch it, its emotional. It just reminds me obviously of what happened to Mark, everything I went through.

When I go and do Q&As at the end of the film, I tend not to watch the film because it kind of clouds my mind.

When we first started out I said to [director] George that I wanted to do that kind of shed some light on who Mark was as a person.

I started to get frustrated because obviously he was filming us and it wasnt about us  its about Mark.

George invited us into an editing suite and showed us a rough cut of the film and it just blew me away. I said wow, yeah, this is proper.

In the beginning when and me and Curtis sat down, we said we need to do something in defence and shed some light on who he was as a person.

From the reaction of the crowds, I believe we have achieved that.

The Hard Stop has been screened around London this month,

Director George Amponsah said: The first time I went to meet Marcus and Kurtis, I didnt bring a camera or crew  I didnt have any form of recording device or even a notepad.

I just met up with them at Hammersmith Hospital, where Marcus was working at the time, and we sat down and I just asked Marcus, to begin with, to just tell me the story of what happened on the day that Mark was killed.

Ive never quite seen that willingness to be open and to show vulnerability, and that immediately got me hooked, and I just became fascinated to know more.

Kurtis Henville, who was also a friend of Mark Duggan, said: When I first watched it on a big screen, it just felt surreal to have our lives on the big screen, [the film] going into detail of what were going through as well. It was a rollercoaster of emotions.

The Hard Stop is in cinemas across London now.
A young man is injured in hospital today after he was shot in east London.

Gang police are investigating after the victim, aged in his 20s, was shot in the leg in Barking in the early hours of this morning.

Police and paramedics rushed to the scene of the shooting in London Road just after 6am.

A police cordon was put in place as officers remained at the scene searching for the firearm.

The road was sealed off between Abbey Road and the North Circular.

A Met Police spokesman said: "No arrest have been made. Enquiries are ongoing.

"Officers from Trident Area Crime Command and Barking and Dagenham continue to investigate."

Anyone with information is asked to call police on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
T hree police officers have been killed in an apparent ambush in Baton Rouge less than two weeks after the death of Alton Sterling at the hands of the city's law enforcement.

The cops were gunned down near the Louisiana city's police headquarters at about 9am. Three others were injured and taken to hospital for treatment, police said.

One suspect has been shot dead. Two others were feared to be at large but East Baton Rouge's Sheriff Department later confirmed the situation had been contained.

The incident comes 12 days after local man Mr Sterling was shot and killed after being pinned down by two Baton Rouge police officers.

The attack began at a petrol station on Airline Highway. The shooter was killed and fell nearby outside a fitness centre.

Police then used a specialised robot to check for explosives near the body.

Louisiana governor John Bel Edwards rushed to the hospital where the shot officers were taken.

He said: "Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice."

Police cordon off a road near the scene of the shooting / Reuters

A witness told US TV station WBRZ-TV they saw a masked man dressed in black shooting indiscriminately as he emerged from between a convenience store and car wash near Hammond Aire Plaza.

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Marquis Gibson, told NBC News he ran inside after hearing shot and seeing "officers were falling down and hiding".

Multiple police units were stationed at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Centre, where stricken officers are believed to be undergoing treatment.

Alton Sterling's family console each other at his funeral on Friday / AP

A police officer with a long gun was seen blocking the parking lot at the emergency room.

Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the death of 37-year-old Mr Sterling, a black man killed by white officers on July 5, after a scuffle at a convenience store.

The killing was captured on widely circulated mobile phone video. It was followed a day later by the shooting death of another black man in Minnesota, whose girlfriend live streamed the aftermath of his death on Facebook.

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The next day, a black gunman in Dallas opened fire on police at a protest about the police shootings, killing five officers and heightening tensions even further.
B ritish SAS sniper teams are being trained to stop speeding vehicles amid fears the UK could be targeted in an attack similar to the Nice atrocity.

Security fears have been raised for major public events such as London's Notting Hill Carnival after an Isis leader urged "lone wolf" attackers to target innocent people.

Now SAS snipers have been trained to stop vehicles in crowds by shooting through engine blocks with armour-piercing bullets, the Sunday Times reported.

Aides of Mayor Sadiq Khan are said to have particular concerns over the Notting Hill Carnival, where more than a million people head to celebrate the August bank holiday weekend every year.

The warning comes as two more people were arrested in connection with the atrocity in which 84 people were killed on Thursday night. A man and a woman were held by French police as the country called up 12,000 police reservists to boost security in the wake of the massacre.

Armed police are routinely deployed at major public events / Steve Parsons/PA

Speaking to the Sunday Times after the Nice attack, Neil Basu, the Metropolitan Police's deputy assistant commissioner, said: "Every terrorist incident that happens worldwide we look at to see what the latest tactics and methodology are, and we think about whether that could happen here."

Isis claimed responsibility for the attack perpetrated by suspected lone wolf attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel.

The terror group's official radio station, al-Bayan, has now warned that "crusader states" in the West are not safe. Other senior Isis figures have also warned that civilians and crowds in the West are legitimate targets/

In May, Isis chief Abu Muhammad al-Adnani said: "Know that inside the lands of the belligerent crusaders there is no sanctity of blood and no existence of those so-called innocents.

Know that your targeting [of] those who are called civilians is more beloved to us and more effective, as it is more harmful and painful and a greater deterrent to them. So go forth!
A masked mob of anarchists clashed with police as they swarmed on Boris Johnson's home during a protest.

Dozens of protesters set off smoke bombs and scuffled with officers guarding the new Foreign Secretary's Islington house during the disorder.

Anarchist group Class War, which organised the protest, had told supporters to bring "pitchforks, flaming torches and incandescent anger" in a post promoting the event on its website.

It read: "Boris, our senior diplomat, [is] the man whole stole our future. Now we really are all f*****.

"Do we just grin and bear it, or do we grin and fight back back?"

Clashes: Masked anarchists met in Islington for the march on Boris Johnson's home on Friday evening / Rex

Scotland Yard said three men were arrested during the angry clashes on Friday evening.

Mr Johnson was reportedly out at the time. But one protester told the Mail on Sunday that had he been home he would "probably be killed".

Several police officers were waiting for the protesters when they reached Mr Johnson's home shortly after 8pm. In pictures they are seen forming a human barricade outside his front door.

Boris says that Brexit "does not mean, in any sense, leaving Europe"

A Metropolitan police spokesman said three men were arrested following the clashes.

Two were held on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. Another was detained on suspicion of causing actual bodily harm.

The spokesman said: "We were aware of a planned demonstration due to take place.

"An appropriate policing plan was put in place."
T he family of a Londoner who drowned after a late-night swim in Ibiza today thanked friends as hundreds paid tribute to him.

Tom Jarvis, 22, vanished after heading into the ocean off the resort of San Antonio in Ibiza.

He was on holiday with friends when his disappearance sparked a major search operation at about 9pm on Friday night.

His body was found in a small sandy cove nearby on Saturday morning.

After news of his death broke, hundreds of distraught friends sent messages of condolence and tribute to the young management trainee at a kitchen and joinery firm from Romford.

Tragic: Tom Jarvis had turned 22 on Tuesday / Facebook

Bonni Hughes wrote on Facebook: "Heartbreaking. I can't believe it. You're going to be missed by so many. Rest in perfect peace, a true gentleman taken too soon."

Max Ballard added: "Such a shock, you brought smiles to so many people's faces Rip".

And Michelle Brewer said: "rest in peace tom, kindest, most heartwarming person I know".

Today his brother and sister thanked friends for the outpouring of grief after the tragedy, which happened just days after Tom's 22nd birthday.

His sister Hannah wrote: "I just want to say a massive thank you to everyone who made their condolences for the loss of my brother, the family appreciate the love everybody had for him.

"He always looked out for me, I couldn't wish to have anyone else as a brother. Thank you."

And his brother, Billy, added: "Thank you all for the messages. It's so nice to see how loved and popular Tom was. Love you always brother xxxxx".

The young man is also said to have worked as a part-time DJ and had been staying in a popular resort on the Mediterranean island.
Wisconsins cranberry growers saw a smaller yield and harvested fewer acres in 2015 but they enjoyed a 6.1 percent increase in value of total production from the previous year because of a price increase, a new report showed.

Thats always good news for our growers, said Tom Lochner, the executive director of the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association.

Cranberry production in Wisconsin, which accounts for 57 percent of the nations production, dropped 3.2 percent to 4.9 million barrels and the yield was down nearly 1 percent to 237 barrels per acre in 2015. But the price jumped 9.3 percent to $30.50 per barrel and that drove the value of total production to $146 million, according to the Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts 2015 Summary from the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Lochner also said a recent report from the Federal Marketing Order showed that inventories are not growing. Thats good news. We need inventories to absolutely decline, he said.

The news wasnt as good for the states apple and cherry growers in 2015, the report also showed.

State apple production dropped 5.5 percent to 51.5 million pounds, the price per pound also dropped 5.5 percent to 57.8 cents and that led to a 10.8 percent drop to $27.8 million in value of utilized production.

State cherry production dropped 24 percent to 9.3 million pounds and the value of utilized production dropped 36.6 percent to $3 million, the NASS report showed.

We had a couple of weather events affect the apples and cherries last year, said Amaya Atucha, an assistant professor in horticulture for UW-Madison and the state fruit specialist for UW Extension.

Weve had very extreme, unpredictable weather over the past four years that have been exacerbated last year and the year before that, she said. There were some damaging frosts that affected some apples and cherries while hail damaged some apples and pests cut into the cherry production. Put it together and it had a cumulative effect on fruit production.

Hail damage to apple crops in the western counties played a huge role in the drop in production, said Sara Eckers, the president of the Wisconsin Apple Growers Association. Those (apple production) numbers seem very reasonable considering 500 acres of apples in the Galesville area were wiped out by hail last year, Eckers said.

Nationally, apple production was down 15.4 percent but the value of utilized production was up 18.2 percent because the price per pound rose 33.1 percent to 34.2 cents, the report showed. Eckers couldnt explain why Wisconsins prices, among the highest in the country, dropped along with production.

The variations on the way people fill out the surveys could account for some of it, she said.

Although Wisconsin dominates cranberry production nationally, other states helped increase the countrys overall yield and production numbers each by 1.9 percent in 2015, the NASS report showed. But the value of utilized production nationally was almost 1 percent less than Wisconsins because prices rose less than a penny.

Wisconsins utilized production of fresh cranberries grew 12.1 percent and that helped national production jump 63.4 percent last year, the NASS report showed. But it still accounts for just 5.1 percent of the cranberry market. Processed production, which consists of freezing, drying or producing cranberry juice, dropped 3.8 percent in Wisconsin and less than 1 percent nationally.

The dried cranberry market has been very strong. But as you make more dried cranberries, you make more juice and the juice sales havent been moving as much as they have in the past, Lochner said.

This year, the vines looked good coming out of winter and the cranberry crop has enjoyed good weather through pollination, according to Lochner. Its still very, very early. But the growers are telling me we could have a pretty good crop here in Wisconsin, he said.

Lochner hopes that will not lead to a price drop. Hopefully we can market it, he said.

Apple growers are confident they are going to have a strong crop, too, although production is expected to be down again because of frost damage this spring. A number of places around the state had damage to varying degrees, said Tom Griffith of Door Creek Orchard in the town of Cottage Grove.

Frost damaged 25 percent to 30 percent of Door Creek Orchards crop, Griffith said. Part of his orchards Honeycrisp apples  the most popular variety among Wisconsin consumers  was affected as well as earlier ripening varieties such as Ginger Gold, Viking and Earliblaze, Griffth said.

Some (trees) have some fruit or none at all and others have apples with skin problems. They just look a little funky, Griffith said. Those will go to our cider production.

The orchard will sell Honeycrisp apples but the trees will be closed from consumers who want to pick their own, Griffith said.

Matt Sutter of Sutters Ridge Family Farm near Mt. Vernon said the weather has been kind to his orchard, which avoided the frost damage that hit some other area growers. Its getting a little dry but up until now weve had nice moisture. Were keeping our fingers crossed for no hail.

Eckers said that is the rallying cry of all of the states growers. They are revving up for retail, she said.
A woman who was just four years old when her mother was murdered in front of her has written a book about the ordeal.

Amanda Wright, now 41, has released Without a Mothers Love, after recovering from flashbacks and night terrors from the night she saw her mother murdered as a young child.

Amanda was in bed with her mother Susan Lowson on March 4, 1980, when Lowson was strangled to death by family friend John Dickinson, who then attempted to conceal the crime by setting fire to the house.

Amanda told London Live: I remember it vividly because I woke up to the alarm going off at the side of the bed.

It was ringing and as I woke up, I saw a man standing at the end of the bed and then he suddenly pounced over towards my mum.

He grabbed my mum, he was attacking her  it seemed to go on forever. I was screaming and crying asking him to stop, pleading with him, and he wouldnt stop. He kept telling me I had to be quiet.

Eventually he did stop, he came over to me and he pushed me down on the bed  his hands around my neck and put a pillow over my face.

I blacked out and when I came round, my mum was placed back on the bed next to me and there was a fire at the end of the bed.

We spent so much time together, so I had to deal with the loss of her, knowing what had happened to her, I had burns to my legs, I had to have skin grafts and physiotherapy, and move in with my nan and granddad.

It completely ripped my life apart. I then had flashbacks and night terrors, and found it really difficult to sleep.

Amanda, from Stevenage, told London Live that the support from her grandparents helped her to find the strength to write a book about the ordeal.

She said: For a long time I was reflecting on what happened and it was just so unbelievable  I just knew that this was an incredible story.

Fortunately, I had both sets of grandparents who were so supportive and, especially my maternal grandmother, she said: your mum would want to be happy, to carry on, do it for your mum and that gave me the strength.

Having her own children has helped Amanda to move on and she added that the capital has provided her with some happy memories.

She said: Now Im moving on from it  I was so fearful for so long. As a child, I seemed to be frightened of everything but as Ive got older, Im a responsible parent and I can deal with things a lot more rationally.

[I have] fantastic memories of London when I was a young adult  I was dating a young guy who lived in London, he was from Ealing, and we had some great times.

Wed go out nightclubbing, wed go to Earls Court gym, just go out in the evening and have a blast  I loved London so much.

Without a Mothers Love is out now in book stores and online.
B ritain is scoping free trade deals with a dozen countries outside the EU in time for Brexit on January 1, 2019, it was revealed today.

Theresa May spoke to her Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull during a phone call yesterday, in which he expressed his desire to open up trading between the two Commonwealth countries as a matter of urgency.

The new PM described the call as "very encouraging" and insisted it showed that she could make Brexit could work for Britain.

Liam Fox, the newly-appointed international trade secretary tasked with exploring new options for Britain, revealed that numerous non-EU countries had already asked for a deal.

He told the Sunday Times he was "scoping about a dozen free trade deals outside the EU to be ready for when we leave", amid reports that he was preparing to fly to the United States next week.

Newly-appointed: International trade secretary Liam Fox / REUTERS/Neil Hall

Dr Fox told the newspaper: "We can make Britain a beacon for open trade. Weve already had a number of countries saying: wed love to do a trade deal with the worlds fifth-biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU.

Fox said he would line up deals ready to sign the day the UK leaves  dubbed B-Day in Whitehall  by January 1, 2019, while Mrs May acknowledged that Britain could not sign any deals while it was still an EU member.

Boris says that Brexit "does not mean, in any sense, leaving Europe"

Hailing Australias attitude to a deal as proof Brexit could benefit Britain, she said: "I have been very clear that this Government will make a success of our exit from the European Union. One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe.

Meanwhile, Brexit Secretary David Davis said EU citizens may be blocked from staying in Britain permanently even if they arrive before the country leaves the union.

Who is David Davis and what are his plans for Brexit?

He said the Government may have to take a tough line with EU immigrants who come to the UK before Brexit happens, and therefore get the automatic right to stay permanently under free movement rules.

Mrs May has said immigration could rise in the short term if EU citizens feel they need to get to Britain before it leaves and can impose controls on European immigration.

Asked about a potential spike in immigration numbers, Mr Davis told the Mail on Sunday: "We may have to deal with that. There are a variety of possibilities.

"We may have to say that the right to indefinite leave to remain protection only applies before a certain date. But you have to make those judgments on reality, not speculation."

He stopped short of guaranteeing the status of EU nationals already in the country, a position for which Mrs May has received fierce criticism from across the political spectrum.

Mr Davis said: "We will get a generous settlement for EU migrants here now and a generous settlement for British citizens in the EU."

He is part of a triumvirate of Brexit-backing new Cabinet ministers, alongside Dr Fox and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, tasked with pulling the country out of the EU.

Elsewhere Mr Johnson, who will travel to Brussels for an EU foreign ministers summit beginning on Monday, insisted the country can now become "Global Britain".
S cotland could veto the process of the UK leaving the EU, Nicola Sturgeon has suggested.

The Scottish First Minister said her country is in a "strong position" to block Brexit.

After a meeting with Ms Sturgeon on Friday, new Prime Minister Theresa May said Article 50 - which formally triggers the withdrawal process - would not be triggered until a "UK-wide approach" had been agreed.

Asked by the BBC whether the comments mean Mrs May had given Scotland a veto over Brexit, Ms Sturgeon said: "That certainly appeared to be an interpretation that some put on the Prime Minister's remarks after the meeting...and certainly from what she said after the meeting, I think that puts Scotland in now in a very, very strong position.

"That's a position I am going to use as well as I can."

The SNP leader has previously said a second referendum on Scottish independence is now highly likely because voters north of the border rejected Brexit in the June 23 vote.

Ms Sturgeon has set up an expert group to look at the options for protecting Scotland's place in Europe.

She said it could be possible to find a solution where Scotland remains in the EU and the UK, while the rest of the country leaves the EU - a move Scottish Secretary David Mundell has described as fanciful.

She said: "My position is there might be. We're in uncharted territory, and when you are in uncharted territory with effectively a blank sheet of paper in front of you, then you have the opportunity to try to think things that might have previously been unthinkable and shape the future.

"I think there are opportunities. The positive outcome of the meeting I had with the Prime Minister on Friday was that she said she was prepared to listen to options the Scottish Government would bring forward to give effect to how Scotland voted and we will certainly bring forward options."

Her comments contradict remarks by some EU leaders, including Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who have suggested that if the UK leaves, Scotland leaves too.

PM: Scotland is very important

But the First Minister, who met with key EU figures during a trip to Brussels after the referendum, said Europe's attitude to Scotland has changed since the 2014 independence referendum.

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Asked if the EU may put aside its own rules and act politically to keep Scotland in, she said: "I do think that mood is there, and what I encountered in Brussels was a warmth, an openness, a great sympathy to the position that Scotland finds itself in.

"Things have changed fundamentally."
A petition calling for a second EU referendum received more support from Londoners than people anywhere else in the UK, it can be revealed.

The online campaign, signed by more than four million people, was backed by tens of thousands living in the capital, according to an interactive map hosted on the Governments website.

Despite Scotland and Northern Ireland overwhelmingly voting in favour of Remain, the petition received fewer signatures from those countries compared with London and parts of the south-east.

Divided up by constituency, the map is colour coded with areas where numbers are highest shaded in the darkest red.

The Commons Petitions Committee confirmed on Tuesday that the petition would be put forward for a debate in Parliament due to the huge number of signatures.

But it said the move does not mean it endorses calls for a re-run of the vote.

The London constituency with the most signatories was Hornsey and Wood Green with 24,076, closely followed by Hampstead and Kilburn with 22,831.

The London constituencies with the highest number of signatories 1. Hornsey and Wood Green: 24,076 2. Hampstead and Kilburn: 22,831 3. Holborn and St Pancras: 21,952 4. Richmond Park: 20,615 5. Battersea: 19,255

More than 18,000 people backed the campaign in each of the Streatham, Richmond Park, Dulwich and West Norwood, Battersea and Streatham constituencies.

Other areas with high levels of signatures across the UK included Manchester Withington, Edinburgh North and Leith, Cambridge, Oxford West and Abingdon and Brighton Pavillion.

Brexit supporter Oliver Healey set up the petition before the poll was held and complained it had been hijacked by the Remain side.

A screengrab taken from the petitions website

It had called on the Government to introduce a rule that, if the vote was less than 60 per cent to either side, based on a turnout less than 75 per cent, there should be another referendum.

The Commons Petitions Committee has pointed out that the Parliamentary debate, which will take place on September 5, does not have the power to change the law and will not end with the Commons deciding whether or not to have a second referendum.

A spokesman said: The petition  which was opened on 25 May, well before the referendum  calls for the referendum rules to be changed.

TODO: define component type apester

"It is now too late for the rules to be changed retrospectively. It will be up to the Government to decide whether it wants to start the process of agreeing a new law for a second referendum.

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Parliamentary officials said they have been forced to remove more than 77,000 signatures from the petition after discovering they were added fraudulently.
O wen Smith will today launch his Labour leadership bid with plans for a 200 billion "British new deal".

Attacking Jeremy Corbyn for being anti-austerity without bringing forward an alternative, Mr Smith will pledge to invest the money into the country's "failing" infrastructure.

At a rescheduled speech in his Pontypridd constituency, Mr Smith is to commit cash to housing, transport and "investing in people".

The former work and pensions secretary postponed his leadership launch in the wake of the terror attacks in Nice, France.

It will go ahead on Sunday and he will say: "It is not enough for the The Labour Party to simply talk about being anti-austerity. We have to set out a detailed plan for how Labour would replace failed Tory austerity with credible proposals for prosperity.

Labour hopeful: Welsh MP Owen Smith / PA

"That is why I'm proposing a British new deal. It will be a 200bn investment programme, to renew our failing infrastructure. Tackling our housing crisis, revive our transport systems, as well as investing in people, to give hope to the next generation."

Mr Smith's leadership launch will come after Mr Corbyn felt moved to tell his supporters not to abuse his challengers for the leadership amid rising intensity in Labour's civil war.

The Labour leader posted a code of conduct for the leadership election on his campaign website after challenger Angela Eagle warned that Labour risks becoming the "new nasty party".

Mr Corbyn called for the contest to be a debate about the party and the country and said he wanted it to be an example of "vibrant political discussion".

In the code of conduct, he went on: "As a candidate I will treat all with respect, behave with civility and expect all who support me to do the same.

"All Labour Party members and supporters should conduct themselves with a high standard of behaviour. This debate is about politics, not personalities, and no personal abuse of any nature will not be accepted.

Ms Eagle had called for action from the leadership on "abuse, misogyny, homophobia (and) anti-Semitism" affecting the party.

Her call came shortly after Labour's National Executive Committee suspended all local party meetings amid reports of intimidation, bullying and threatening behaviour, and just days after a brick was thrown through her own constituency office window in Wallasey on Merseyside.

The party has suspended its constituency party in Brighton and Hove and annulled the results of a recent election following accusations of abusive behaviour, an improper ballot and entryism by far-left activists.

Turning Mr Corbyn's "kinder politics" catchphrase against him, Ms Eagle said that Labour needed "a kinder politics in reality" and must not end up "in the gutter".

In an interview with the Sunday Mirror, Mr Corbyn hinted there may be a legal challenge to the recent decision on who can vote in the leadership election.

Noting that members who joined after January 12 have been barred from voting unless they pay a 25 charge, he said: "There may be a legal move but nothing has been decided yet. Not by me anyway.
A plane carrying Boris Johnson has been forced to make an emergency landing at Luton Airport after the aircraft developed a technical issue.

The RAF flight was grounded at the Bedfordshire airport as the new Foreign Secretary travelled from London to Brussels.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: There was a technical issue on the RAF flight on Sunday afternoon carrying the Foreign Secretary and his officials from London to Brussels that required the aircraft to land at Luton Airport.

The Foreign Secretary thanked the RAF crew for their professionalism and was grateful to Luton Airport for the brief, unscheduled welcome.

After a short delay the Foreign Secretary continued on his way to Brussels by alternative means.

The Foreign Office would not say how Mr Johnson got to Brussels after the emergency landing, saying it does not comment on travel plans.

A spokesman for Luton Airport said: "At 5.26pm an RAF aircraft landed safely at London Luton Airport after reporting a technical issue.

"Emergency procedures were put in place and all 16 passengers left the aircraft safely. Several scheduled flights were disrupted whilst the runway was cleared. The runway reopened at 17.59."
I dris Elbas new film Bastille Day has been pulled from cinemas in France in the wake of the lorry attack in Nice that left 84 dead and many more injured.

The film, which involves a terrorist plot to bomb Paris, was released in France on Wednesday.

The attack came on Thursday in Nice as locals and tourists celebrated Bastille Day. Islamic State has claimed responsibility.

According to Variety, production and distribution company Studiocanal pulled advertisements for the film on Friday out of respect to the victims, but on Saturday they asked cinemas to stop screening the film altogether.

TODO: define component type brightcove

Nice Terror Attack Tributes Around The World - In Pictures 1 /20 Nice Terror Attack Tributes Around The World - In Pictures A man reacts near bouquets of flowers near the scene Pascal Rossignol/Reuters Members of the Australian French community place candles during a vigil in central Sydney David Gray/Reuters Tributes laid at the French Embassy in London Lucy Young People hug outside the French Embassy in London Hannah McKay/PA Indian students from DAV Public School pray during a candle light vigil for the victims Raminder Pal Singh/EPA French President Francois Hollande arrives to attend a meeting at the Prefecture the day after the Bastille Day truck attack A man lights a candle outside the French Embassy in Moscow Sergei Savostyanov/TASS/Getty Italian President of the Chamber of Deputies Boldrini carries flowers to the French embassy to pay tribute An Elysee Palace staff member sets black ribbons on the French flag at the Elysee Palace in Paris Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA A man ties a black armband as country mourns at the Tour de France cycling race Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters A young woman lays a candle among flowers left by mourners outside the French Embassy in Berlin Sean Gallup/Getty People stand in front of flowers and candles placed near the site in Nice Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty A woman places flowers near the site in Nice Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty A woman places a bouquet of flowers as people pay tribute near the scene where a truck ran into a crowd Pascal Rossignol/Reuters People hug outside the French Embassy in London Hannah McKay/PA

Before the request, many cinemas in France had continued to show Bastille Day.

Luther actor Elba stars as a former CIA agent and Game Of Thrones actor Richard Madden plays a con artist in the James Watkins-directed movie, which sees the pair team up to stop a terrorist attack in the capital.

France is holding a three-day national period of mourning for the victims of the attack, and French president Francois Hollande has extended the state of emergency in place since the November 2015 Paris terror attacks.

The disruption to the film's release comes after its original release dates in the UK and Germany were delayed in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

It was released in the UK in April.
A 91-year-old pensioner is under investigation after filling in a crossword featured on artwork at a German museum.

The woman began writing on the Reading-work-piece by avant garde artist Arthur Koepcke in ballpoint pen, during a visit by senior citizens to Nurembergs Neues Museum.

Produced in 1965 and online from a private collection, the artwork features the phrase insert words and is worth 67,000.

Museum officials said they believe the work can be restored and that the woman has been reported for insurance purposes.

She is being investigated for damage to property but there are no signs of malicious intent.

The elderly woman told police she understood the English-language instructions written on the crossword as an invitation to fill in the clues, local media reported.

She added that the museum had not put up a notice instructing visitors not to write on the piece.

Her excursion leader Gerlinde Knopp pointed out that museum was full of interactive art, which could confuse visitors about what they are permitted to do there.
T urkey has detained 6,000 people in a government crackdown over a deadly botched military coup, it emerged today.

The sweep was carried out after at least 265 people died and over 1,400 were wounded during a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire during the attempted coup, which began on Friday night.

Three of the country's top generals have been detained, alongside hundreds of soldiers.

Turkeys justice minister Bekir Bozdag described the arrests of alleged coup plotters and government opponents as a clean-up operation.

He also said he was confident that the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey.

A Turkish soldier clashes with a police officer at the Taksim Square in Istanbul (EPA/SEDAT SUNA) / Sedat Suna/EPA

Meanwhile, Turkey's president reported that he had spoken with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who said Moscow stood by "Turkey's elected government" and expressed his good wishes to the Turkish people.

A statement from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's office said that the two leaders - who recently patched up relations following Turkey's downing of a Russian warplane - also agreed to meet face to face next month.

Mr Bozdag added that he was confident the United States would return Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey.

The Turkish president has blamed Mr Gulen and his followers for the failed military coup on Friday night, but Mr Gulen denies any involvement or knowledge.

The US says it will look at any evidence Turkey has to offer against Mr Gulen, and judge accordingly.

Mr Bozdag said: "The United States would weaken itself by protecting him. It would harm its reputation. I don't think that at this hour, the United States would protect someone who carried out this act against Turkey."

Prayers were being read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques to rally the country to defend its democracy and honour those who died during the coup.

The government has dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while investigators were preparing court cases to send the conspirators to trial on charges of attempting to overthrow the government.

Turkey coup - explained in 90 seconds

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities briefly, ended hours later when loyal government forces including military and police regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Mr Erdogan.

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets to defend democracy and support the country's long-time leader.

It was an emotional display by Turks, who rallied in headscarves and long dresses, T-shirts and work boots, some walking hand in hand late on Saturday and early on Sunday with their children.

Rather than toppling Turkey's strongman president, the attempted coup appears to have bolstered Mr Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.

Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at the rally in Istanbul, said: "Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back."

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve".

However, the government crackdowns raised concerns over the future of democracy in Turkey, which has long prided itself on its democratic and secular traditions despite being in a region swept by conflict and extremism.
I f youve found yourself caught up in BBC hits Peaky Blinders and The Night Manager and are looking for your new favourite show, here it is.

The Secret Agent is a new treat here to brighten (or, rather, darken) the next three Sunday evenings with a stellar cast, tension-ratcheting plot, and a surprising contemporary relevance.

Here are five things you need to know about the series.

1) Its based on a Joseph Conrad novel

The Secret Agent is based on Joseph Conrads novel of the same name. At the time of release in 1907 it marked a departure from his writings regarding boating and travel, 18 years on from his most famous work Heart of Darkness.

While it was unappreciated at the time (partly owing to its radical themes and questionable characters), it has since been regarded as one of his best novels.

2) Its a period drama  but dont expect Downton Abbey

Set in 1886, this a Victorian-era period drama  but dont go thinking itll be all frocks and facial hair.

The story revolved around a Soho sex shop owner, Verloc, whos sent undercover by the Russian embassy to infiltrate a group of anarchists. Hes manipulated by the Russians into planning a terrorist attack that will be blamed on the anarchists  and if he refuses, his identity as a spy will be revealed.

The Secret Agent- Trailer - BBC One

3) Its surprisingly relevant

Considering its based on a 109 year-old book, you might be surprised how little seems to have changed in a century.

Suicide bombers, terrorist cells, spies, security and intelligence services trying to thwart bomb attacks, Russia trying to flex its muscles around the world. Its so relevant, explains writer Tony Marchant, who adapted the series.

4) Its got a brilliant BBC cast

As with most recent BBC dramas, you cant help but watch and think, what a cast.

In the lead role as Verloc is the dependably brilliant Toby Jones, in nervous flighty mode. His wife Winnie is played by Vicky McClure, so powerful in both Line of Duty and This Is England.

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

Speaking of which, fellow This is England co-star Stephen Graham plays Chief Inspector Heat.

Elsewhere theres Ian Hart (Professor Quirrell to Harry Potter fans) as The Professor, the leader of the anarchist group, and Peaky Blinders David Dawson.

5) Its very London-centric  but it wasnt filmed there

Much of the series is centred around Soho in London  and while its set in Victorian times, it still sounds pretty recognisable, especially with lead character Verloc being a sex shop owner.

However, the series was shot in Scotland. The cobbled streets of Soho are actually Thistle Street Lane in Edinburgh, which has architecture resembling the Victorian capital.

BBC One, 9pm
If she were almost anyone else, Genele Laird would be looking for a good lawyer now, or asking the court to appoint one if she couldnt afford it.

She might be entering a plea, waiving her preliminary hearing, filing a witness list and otherwise preparing for a trial on four felony charges associated with her arrest outside East Towne Mall on June 21.

Instead, the black 18-year-old forcibly arrested by two white Madison police officers  after reportedly brandishing a knife and threatening people inside the mall  is doing a lot of talking, and, its hoped, reflecting on how her actions affected others, according to staff with Dane Countys Community Restorative Court, or CRC, to which Laird was referred by District Attorney Ismael Ozanne after a video of her arrest went viral.

Started a year ago as a pilot program in South Madison, the court doles out community-based restorative justice to young, first-time offenders charged with certain misdemeanors. The idea is to allow people ages 17 to 25 to avoid jail time and the negative stamp of an early criminal record if they accept responsibility for their wrongdoing and agree to help repair the harm theyve done through community service and, sometimes, financial restitution imposed by a panel of service providers and neighborhood residents known as peacemakers.

The program differs from the traditional court system in part by requiring offenders to sit down with their victims or their representatives, answering their questions and hearing firsthand how their actions hurt them.

The biggest thing we can do (to fight and help prevent crime) is ensure we are raising young people with empathy, Ozanne said. Thats what we help to foster with the CRC. Im not saying its going to be successful every time, but for many youthful offenders it can be.

Offenders also speak in the sessions, in which everyone faces one another in a circle, offering context and background that may help explain their actions and demonstrate their need for social services, such as counseling, housing assistance or job training. After a sentence is settled on, the program monitors offenders progress and connects them with services  a carrot that advocates say helps reduce repeat offenses and increase restitution compared with regular court outcomes.

Were asking defendants to confront and face the harm theyve caused and help repair that, said Ozanne, who referred Laird, a high school dropout who worked at the mall and had little contact with her family, to the restorative court program on June 23.

The program made an exception in Lairds case, since she faced potential felonies. The offenses also occurred outside the original South Madison target area of the program, although since early June the program has begun taking in cases countywide, according to special prosecutor and DAs office liaison, Barb Franks.

Ozanne referred Laird to the program with the agreement of the two officers she scratched, kicked and spat at during the arrest. He also got the OK of people inside the mall whom she reportedly threatened to harm before police were called: mall security officers and a food court employee she believed stole her cellphone.

In keeping with program rules, the victims inside the mall were offered the chance to take part in the circle sessions, but they declined, program coordinator Ron Johnson said. But input gleaned from from his interviews with them will allow their views to be represented, he said.

The two officers also could be invited to take part, Johnson said, depending on the outcome of a use-of-force review examining their actions during the arrest, which included Officer Andrew Muirs use of knee strikes, a punch to the side and shocks with a Taser in an effort to get handcuffs on Laird.

So far, Laird is doing well in the program, Johnson said.

Genele was able to meet all of the circle participants and tell her story, he said, adding more discussions still need to take place and a penalty determined. The outcomes from here on out are in the hands of the community, as represented by the peacemakers and other circle participants.

75 percent success rate

Lairds case is the 34th for the CRC, which formed in early June 2015.

Of the 30 cases processed through the end of the courts first year on June 10, 19 were completed and 11 are ongoing.

Of those 19 offenders  known as respondents in restorative justice parlance  14, or nearly 75 percent, successfully completed their sentences, known as repair harm agreements, allowing them to avoid a record.

(We can) hold (offenders) accountable but keep them from having criminal records that affect employment and housing and educational opportunities, said Ron Chance, program manager for the CRC in the Dane County Human Services Department, which administers the program.

Of the five offenders who werent successful, four decided not to do the program  participation is voluntary, for both offenders and victims  and one was terminated for non-compliance but was later reinstated after agreeing to return to the program.

Failing or quitting the program results in charges being reinstated or tickets being reissued if the offense was an ordinance violation. All four who declined to participate in the program had been cited with city or town of Madison ordinance violations and paid the fines instead, a State Journal records check showed.

To those who charge that restorative justice is a slap on the wrist, advocates note first offenders facing misdemeanors in the traditional court system typically just receive probation anyway; legally, judges are required to consider it as their first option.

The regular court system also typically requires payment of a small fine but little substantive interaction between victims and offenders, unlike that required by the CRC.

Its about making the offender part of the solution while elevating the voice of the victim and giving them a more active role, said Jonathan Scharrer, director of a long-standing, prison-based restorative justice program run through UW-Madisons Law School. Scharrer also helped set up the South Madison CRC.

An expanding mission

Originally covering just the Madison Police Departments South District, the CRC began working with town of Madison police in March and is in discussions with Fitchburg police now, officials said, in addition to taking limited countywide case referrals from the district attorneys office beginning June 1.

The CRC remains primarily aimed at young first offenders who face municipal ordinance violations or misdemeanor charges for five specific offenses: battery, theft, disorderly conduct, obstruction and damage to property. Two additional offenses, graffiti and solicitation of a prostitute, were represented in some first-year cases, records show.

Lairds case includes several felony charges, which Ozanne said he would reinstate if Laird failed to complete the program. Those offenses include discharging bodily fluids at a police officer, battery to a police officer, disorderly conduct while armed and resisting an officer while causing soft-tissue injury.

Program advocates described the expansion of CRCs mission, both in its accepted offenses and geographical reach, as typical for pilot programs.

We have had just a small handful of cases that have not exactly fit the criteria, but they have been very good cases for this program to take on, advisory board member Karen Reece said. We are actually taking the time to sit down and evaluate cases so that we can work out a process that really works  thats not cookie-cutter, and that is going to be effective for Dane County.

Ozanne said he was OK with sometimes sending more serious crimes to the CRC and with expanding its footprint across Dane County, with continuing support from area law enforcement and the broader community.

He described making the program available to qualified offenders throughout the county as a matter of legal fairness  notwithstanding the financial and logistical challenges to doing so.

We need to be able to offer this option to all youth 17 to 25 in our community, he said. Thats probably our biggest bang for our buck, but its not to say it couldnt also be used for higher-profile or more complex cases.

Weve always thought this was going to be a stair-step approach, Ozanne added. This is perfect timing for the discussion to occur as to what the CRC would need to cover the whole county. I cant overstate what I believe the benefit can be with this model, both for the community and truly to hopefully foster a stronger relationship with law enforcement in the community.

The programs annual budget now is $70,000, much of it for Johnsons salary. Johnson is the programs sole full-time operational staffer, with volunteers, often by design, filling many of the other roles in the program, which is based at Centro Hispano at 810 W. Badger Road.

Achieving closure

Johnson said he is surprised every time by what happens when victims and offenders sit down and face each other. So far, its always been a pleasant surprise.

A circle is an amazing display of humanity, Johnson said. Its basically a conversation. We talk about not only the issue of the crime but about the people involved and their history and what brought them to this point in their lives.

Its an atmosphere that is conducive to people opening up and going deep, he added.

Johnson cited one encounter he witnessed in the past year that appeared to be particularly cathartic.

The case involved damage done by a young man to the property of an older woman.

At first, the woman was just angry, Johnson recalled, and determined that the man would pay restitution  which he now is doing in one of the 11 ongoing cases from last year, Johnson added.

But as the conversation continued, the mood in the circle started to change, especially when the offender recounted abuse he had suffered as a child and other troubles growing up. The victim in the case then started crying, Johnson recalled, and she started talking about some of the abuse she had gone through in her own life.

So before it was over, the victim and (the offender) were both crying, got up, hugged each other, Johnson said. So they found some similarities, some relationship, right in the middle of their anguish.

Other times the sessions are more cut and dried. In a case in which a woman was owed some money for damages, the offender couldnt pay because he didnt have a job, Johnson said. So Johnson asked if the woman would lower the amount she wanted or agree to sidestep restitution altogether.

She said, Absolutely not. She said, I need my money. As a matter of fact, Ill help him get a job, and she did, Johnson said. So victims find the restorative process to be a good way to help them resolve conflict and stress, and also to address the whole issue of restitution.

Most CRC offenders over the past year have had to complete 15 to 30 hours of community service as part of their sentences at area nonprofits including the Goodman Center, the Tenant Resource Center, Heartland Animal Farm, Centro Hispano, St. Vincent DePaul, Fountain of Life and the Boys and Girls Club.

Other requirements for some offenders included writing letters of apology to victims, police and store clerks; writing research papers on youth violence and prostitution; and paying restitution ranging from $100 to $4,000. Most sentences took three months to complete.

So far, none of the offenders who completed the program has committed more crimes, officials said, with additional checks to be made every six months.
Some of the staunchest supporters of Dane Countys Community Restorative Court for young and generally low-level offenders in South Madison and beyond are members of law enforcement or work for the court system  not usually among those seen as being soft on crime.

Town of Madison Police Chief Scott Gregory said he understands those who question the tenets of restorative justice and said he was initially skeptical, too  but no more.

Im a person of personal consequences, and I wasnt sold when I initially saw the program, Gregory said. But I did some research and as I became involved with it, to me this seemed like the the best way to deal with these young people  to keep them out of the system, and help them become productive members of society.

The initiative requires sitting down with each offender and seeing what is really needed, agreed Madison Police South District Capt. John Patterson. It gives a better wraparound approach for each young person.

Beyond applying sanctions such as community service and restitution, the program matches offenders with services  such as helping them find a home, a job, counseling or a path back to school  and it gives each offender a mentor to help deal with any complications that may arise.

We try to hold (offenders) responsible for their decisions and actions, program coordinator Ron Johnson said. We also try to provide services to help them mend the bumps in their life but also in an effort to prevent them from re-offending.

Dee Dee Watson of the state Public Defenders Office called the program a breath of fresh air and applauded the Dane County District Attorneys office, Madison police and other partners for trying something different.

Theres a lot of justified frustration with the criminal justice system and how it has addressed crime, Watson said. Were very hopeful that the results (of the program) will be a reduction in recidivism and a reconnection (of offenders) with the community.

The CRCs $70,000 annual cost was built into the county human services departments base budget to ensure consistent funding, under a proposal by County Board Superintendent Shelia Stubbs, now on the CRCs advisory panel.

Stubbs and other supporters hope the CRC also can help improve Dane Countys deeply disproportionate arrest and conviction rates for black residents.

A 2014 study found African Americans make up more than 40 percent of the jail population, while making up only 6 percent of the countys population. Young offenders were a subset ripe for intervention, with black juveniles six times more likely to be arrested than white youth.

It is necessary and it is critical, Stubbs said about the program. Were at a tipping point in this community. We cannot continue to just do what were doing.

However, minority youth receive no special preference for participation in the CRCs core South Madison target area, officials said. Cases that fit the crime and offender criteria are automatically routed into the program, producing a racial breakdown among the 30 offenders processed over the past year of 53 percent black, 27 percent Latino, 17 percent white and 3 percent Asian. By gender, 53 percent of offenders were male and 47 percent were female.
Gov. Scott Walker plans to make clear in a prime-time speech Wednesday at the Republican National Convention that a vote for anyone other than Donald Trump is a vote for Hillary Clinton.

And Sen. Ron Johnson, who has for weeks said he wouldnt attend the convention, announced Sunday he plans to speak on Tuesday at Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus request.

Walker sent an email Sunday to supporters saying his speech is scheduled for 9:23 p.m. CDT Wednesday. The RNC said the nights theme will be Make America First Again.

Walker previewed his speech, saying he will express frustration at the recent decision by federal prosecutors not to charge Clinton for her use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

If she was still in office, she would have been fired or prohibited from access to classified information, Walker said. But now she wants to hold the highest office  once again proving that in Washington, there is one set of rules for the elite and another for everyone else.

Reiterating themes he used during his short-lived presidential campaign, Walker plans to make the case that voters do not want the status quo in Washington, D.C., and are tired of Washington insiders rigging the system for themselves.

During my speech I will remind the American people that a vote for anyone other than Donald Trump is a vote for Washington insider Hillary Clinton, Walker said.

Walker also gave a speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention when Mitt Romney was the nominee and Janesville Rep. Paul Ryan was his running mate.

Ryan, now House Speaker, is scheduled to speak Tuesday and talk about his recently unveiled A Better Way House agenda. The nights theme: Make America Work Again.

Johnson is also scheduled to speak Tuesday night. Johnson spokesman Brian Reisinger said the senator plans to spend the rest of the week in Wisconsin but agreed to speak at the convention in light of growing concerns about international Islamic terrorism.

Ron has decided to accept an invitation to talk with the American people about what we must do to keep our communities safe  just as hell be doing all week while traveling across Wisconsin, Reisinger said.

Priebus is scheduled to speak Thursday night, the last night of the convention, when Trump is scheduled to accept the presidential nomination.

Three other Wisconsin speakers are scheduled to take the stage during prime time on Monday. Democratic Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy and Duffys wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, are to speak on a night with the theme Make America Safe Again.

None of Wisconsins speakers are listed among the prime-time headliners. On Monday, the headliners are Trumps wife, Melania, retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn, U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, veteran Jason Beardsley and U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana.

Tuesdays headliners are Trumps daughter Tiffany, Trump winery general manager Kerry Woolard, Donald Trump Jr., U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and soap opera actress Kimberlin Brown.

Wednesdays headliners are Trumps son Eric, his assistant Lynn Patton, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, and Trumps vice presidential nominee Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
TORRINGTON, Wyoming -- Tears have dried up, but the nightmare continues as livestock carcasses are found on the prairie and live animals have to be put down because of injuries suffered during Mondays wind-propelled grass fire.

Fire fighters as well as ranchers with livestock on the range - about 15 miles north of Torrington - fought to get the best of the blaze that began with a lightning strike Sunday evening, and eventually consumed more than 20,000 acres between Wyoming Highway 159/Van Tassell Rd. and the Nebraska/Wyoming state line.

Shelly Kirchhefer, Goshen County Emergency Management Coordinator, said the fire affected six landowners. A few outbuildings were lost, along with tons of baled hay, and probably more than 100 head of cattle.

Following a helicopter flight over the area earlier Thursday, Kirchhefer said the fire is officially out. However, final numbers wont be available until the mapping is completed.

She said the fire burned a swath approximately 5 miles wide and 9 miles long, covering 21,114 acres.

I was awe stricken over how big it was, Kirchhefer said. It is tragic.

Even though the main fire has been conquered, Kirchhefer said Union Pacific representatives and local fire officials are determining the best way to mitigate hot coal dust along the railroad tracks that could cause another fire.

Possibly hardest hit was the George Ochsner place next to the highway about 15 miles north of Torrington.

Thursday afternoon Ochsner said friends, neighbors and total strangers have pitched in to help. The Ochsner home was in the direct path of the fire that started with a lightning strike Sunday evening about 3 miles west of the highway. It was contained that evening, but burst into flames again Monday when high winds hit the area, bringing the fire to life and pushing it eastward across the prairie.

The good Lord was with us, he said. It could have been worse.

Fire fighters from several communities, as well as family and friends, managed to save the Ochsner home and most of the outbuildings, but nearby stacks of hay bales were destroyed.

Ochsners daughter, Dixie Roth, said that she expects the death toll for their cattle will be close to 100.

People have been very generous, she said. Those who cant help here, have sent hay and food, and are helping in other ways.

Adding to the Ochsner predicament was a serious accident Monday involving their son, Rodney - A tanker truck and a quick attack truck collided in thick smoke near the Ochsner home. Ochsner, driver of the smaller quick-attack vehicle, was extricated from the vehicle and air lifted to Regional West Medical Center where he remains, receiving treatment for critical, though not life threatening, injuries. The tanker driver escaped injury.

Among the early Good Samaritans coming to the aide of the fire victims was First State Bank in Torrington, which is accepting monetary donations for the Prairie Center Community Relief Fund, to be distributed among the families impacted by the fire.

Bomgaars farm and ranch supply store in Torrington, in conjunction with the North Hills Baptist Church in Lingle, is collecting, and will help transport, fencing materials and other items for distribution to the stricken ranches.

On the government side, Darrell Jones, USDA Farm Service Agency supervisor in Torrington, said assistance is available through at least two federal programs.

The Emergency Livestock Assistance Program helps financially by covering some grazing losses, expenses of burying animals, and some coverage of lost feed on hand.

The Livestock Indemnity Program covers some losses of dead animals.

He said there is a potential for the Emergency Conservation Program to help cover fence replacement and repairs. This program has not been implemented yet.

Electrical services were disrupted late Sunday, but power was restored by 3 a.m. Monday, according to Wyrulec General Manager Ryan Schilreff.

He explained that some temporary replacement poles and line were installed and intermittent outages were experienced during that time. A few days will be required to assess damages and needs, but he doesnt expect permanent repairs to take long.

We had 15 men spread out up there making repairs, Schilreff said. They were out from 6:30 a.m. Monday until 3 a.m. Tuesday, and did a really good job. We dont have a huge crew, but in an emergency they keep going until the jobs done.

Personnel from more than a dozen fire departments and agencies responded to the fire that covered an area from County Road 104 to County Road 108 bisecting Wyoming Highway 159/Van Tassell Rd. in Wyoming, east to the Wyoming/Nebraska state line in the area of the corner of the county road marked with the Newell and Oberg sign and the Henry Road, about 21 miles north of Henry, south to about 18 miles north of Henry, on the eastern edge. Included were Kiowa, Lyman, Morrill, Mitchell, Scottsbluff, Gering, Harrison, Crawford, and the U.S. Forest Service in Nebraska, in addition to Torrington, Hawk Springs, Lingle, Fort Laramie, and Platte County in Wyoming. Three Sioux County road graders were also dispatched.
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ST. LOUIS  At peace with what lay ahead, Leon Bierbaum spent the final days of a well-lived life reminiscing with family and friends.

And in those last conversations, the unofficial Central West End mayor made his wishes known.

No service, no memorial, said Judy Bierbaum, his sister-in-law.

He didnt, she continued, pointedly, say anything about not having drinks to celebrate his life.

Which is why on Bastille Day patrons and former employees of Chez Leon, the Loading Zone and other St. Louis haunts owned, managed or frequented by Bierbaum, found their way to Rosies Place  tabbed the last dive bar left in the Central West End, by friend Tim Rice  to raise a glass to the Francophile who succumbed to cancer on May 2 (2016), the day before his 68th birthday.

The timing of the celebration  Bastille Day commemorates French independence  was not coincidental.

Bierbaums zeal for all things French extended to his namesake eatery  Chez Leon translates to Leons House in English.

That it was, said customers of the restaurant that occupied 4580 Laclede Avenue from 1999-2008 before relocating to Clayton where it closed permanently three years later.

Bierbaum, a fixture at the first seat at the bar, took care to personally greet every newcomer and regular who strolled through the door.

It was like you were walking into his home, recalled Rice, a Central West End resident.

The quintessential host, said Darrin Link, a former Central West End resident who drove from Springfield, Mo., to remember the mentor who introduced him to the hospitality business.

A bon vivant, Bierbaum embraced good manners, food, wine and clothes.

As most Washington University students gravitated toward flannel and jeans in the mid-1960s, Jay Reiter says his classmate  Bierbaum  continued to show up for class in a camel hair sport coat, neatly pressed slacks, shirt and tie.

Everything he did was precise, said Reiter. He wasnt a hippie, he looked like he walked out of Brooks Brothers.

Judy Bierbaum, married to Bierbaums older brother, Luther, said Reiter didnt overstate the case.

He was a Brooks Brothers man from his underwear to his ties, said Bierbaum, of Washington, Mo.

Born on a Marthasville chicken farm, Leon Bierbaum moved in his early teens to the Phoenix area with his parents. There, at a Scottsdale middle school, he counted director Steven Spielberg among his classmates.

Luther Bierbaum said his brother had always liked to cook. He threw great dinner parties.

After an early career with the Washington University library, the avocation became a vocation.

To Link, the devotion to fine dining was manifested in the three-course steak frites, veal scallopini and scallop dishes that, for gourmands, defined Chez Leon.

Gaunt with cancer, Bierbaum entertained a host of visitors at a South County hospice care facility during the last weeks of his life.

You dont have to come every day, he whispered to his brother one afternoon shortly before the end. Pause. But I like it when you do.

Joe Meives when he stopped by Bierbaums room he made a point of thanking his friend for introducing him to France, its food and culture on a long-ago trip, the first of many trans-Atlantic visits Meives has made in the years since.

Youre exaggerating, Bierbaum would tell Meives. But dont stop.

The hospice played beloved big band music and opera for Bierbaum as he gradually slipped away.

Bierbaum, said hospice worker Mark Rogers, was lucid to the end. Hed given up. But he was at peace.
CLEVELAND  Donald Trumps effort to unite a splintered Republican Party around his candidacy is about to take center stage in a city that is itself deeply fractured.

Once an industrial powerhouse, Cleveland is one of the poorest and most segregated big cities in America. Two out of five people live below the poverty line, second only to Detroit. Infant mortality rates in its bleakest neighborhoods are worse than in some Third World countries.

The citys mostly blighted east side is almost entirely black, the slightly more prosperous west side more mixed. And theres deep distrust between the black community and police, in part because of police shootings such as the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and a U.S. Justice Department report that found a pattern of excessive force and civil rights violations by the department.

Yet there are also islands of prosperity, created in part by a wave of college-educated young people moving into downtown neighborhoods, a trend that has reshaped the citys image and helped attract the Republican National Convention, which will be held Monday through Thursday.

Its a city full of neighborhoods and a city full of divides, said John Grabowski, a local historian.

Be tough

This is the place that in the 1970s  when the city was in default and a quarter of its population was moving out  embraced the slogan Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough.

Tough is a good way to describe Clevelands east side, where blacks from the South filled industrial jobs and settled during and after World War II. Its now marked by high crime and abandoned factories. Over half the children live in poverty.

Chris Brown, 41, a black man and lifelong Clevelander, admits he was part of the problem in his younger days.

I was a thug, almost. On a highway going nowhere fast, he said.

Caught selling drugs, he went to prison for three years. Afterward, getting by was a struggle until he started working at a commercial laundry four years ago.

Funded by civic leaders, foundations and local institutions, the laundry is part of a wider mission to stabilize east side neighborhoods by creating jobs. Built inside a former torpedo factory, it employs about 40 people, most of whom have done time in prison, and operates as a worker-owned cooperative. The employees can use their wages to buy a piece of the company and get a split of the profits.

Brown took advantage of its loan program to buy his first house on the east side, where 1 in 5 homes is vacant. Where we come from, there aint many guys like that, Brown said.

Those behind the cooperative, which also operates a greenhouse and a renewable-energy business, arent selling it as a solution to pervasive unemployment. But its a bright spot in an area desperately needing something positive, said plant manager Claudia Oates. It shows we work, we believe in work, she said.

The convention will mean more hotel sheets for the laundry to wash, but apart from that, Brown said, the money the event will bring into the city wont show up where he lives.

I dont know many black people whove got anything to do with the convention, he said. Nobody else I know is getting a job or money from the convention.

Downtown revival

Downtown is where delegates will spend their money at souvenir shops and sidewalk cafes.

Its also where millennials are moving into renovated warehouse apartments and new condominiums. Once a ghost town at night, its now home to 14,000 people.

In the two years since the GOP awarded the convention, vacant downtown storefronts have been filled with new businesses, and the Public Square underwent a $50 million renovation.

Health care and high-tech jobs are drawing young people, stabilizing the citys population at about 388,000 after a peak of over 900,000 in the 1950s.

Clevelands got a long way to go. Im not going to sugarcoat it, said Bill Mangano, a white man who bought a downtown apartment after growing up in the citys western suburbs. Were never going to be New York or Chicago, but we can carve out our own place.

Peter Karman, 27, a white man, left behind a two-hour commute in San Diego for a job within walking distance.

All of my family and friends asked, why Cleveland? he said. Here, he said, he can afford a lifestyle not possible in California, living in a downtown warehouse overlooking the Cuyahoga River.

The crooked river that caught fire during the 1950s and 60s from industrial pollution sparked an environmental movement resulting in the federal Clean Water Act.

But in Cleveland it was the citys racial boundary for many generations.

Blacks stayed east of the river and out of the white neighborhoods to the west, fearing unwelcome stares and police harassment.

Kevin Conwell, a black city councilman, remembers his parents warning him 40 years ago not to cross certain streets or risk having the police haul him back home.

People my age still tell kids not to go over there, he said. How do break you down that gap?

To this day, many of the east side neighborhoods are at least 90 percent black, according to census data. But over the past 15 years, more blacks are moving to areas once off-limits, creating neighborhoods that are more racially diverse yet still poor.

Overall, blacks make up about 53 percent of the citys residents, whites 37 percent, Hispanics 10 percent.

Whats holding back the neighborhoods now, Conwell said, are companies and unions that wont hire minorities and lenders that wont offer them home loans.

When youre not working, you tear youre neighborhood apart, she said. Thats your great divide.
They sleep sideways on the beds, all in a row, their heads and feet sometimes extending beyond the mattress edges.

There are 11 of them in this one Madison motel room  three adults and eight children.

"Most of the kids are little, so it works," said Patricia Rimmer, 34, the mother of six of the children.

Two nephews also are in her care. Their mother, Rimmer's sister, is not able to raise them right now, Rimmer said. Two of Rimmer's other sisters complete the group of 11. All are homeless.

The children range in age from 1 to 16. Three still wear diapers. Five attend Madison schools, including a girl at Sherman Middle School studiously doing her math homework at the only table in the motel room on this night in early June.

"I don't let them use homelessness as an excuse for bad grades," Rimmer said. "This cannot be a crutch for them."

The oldest child, a boy, will be a junior this fall at East High School. He chooses to sleep on the motel room floor.

Only a few of his friends know he's homeless. To others, he says he lives "up the street" or "just down the block."

Rimmer brought her family here in January from Chicago, though she had lived in Madison for 13 years until a couple of years ago. When she lost her housing in Chicago due to a lack of income, she decided to return to Madison, having always loved it here.

For the first three months, the family stayed at a motel. Then their money ran out. Now they get a room a couple of times a week when they can afford the $52 a night. Other nights, they sleep in Rimmer's Dodge Caravan, arms and legs splayed everywhere, their sleeping positions carefully choreographed to optimize space.

Occasionally they stay with a relative. But he has a wife and seven children of his own. When they all double up, that's 20 people in a four-bedroom apartment. If the landlord were to find out, the relative would lose his lease, Rimmer said.

This is a common situation among homeless families in the Madison School District, said Jani Koester, a teacher with the district's Transition Education Program. About three-fourths of homeless families with children are doubling up with others out of hardship and necessity, she said. Another 6 percent or so are living in hotels or motels.

Koester considers motels preferable to living on the streets or in a vehicle, but often less desirable than staying in shelters or doubling up. Motels come with a high financial cost that typically is unsustainable, she said, and families frequently are crowded far beyond comfort or safety. Especially when it comes to the brain development and motor skills of young children, not having space to spread out can be detrimental, she said.

"That proximity of being on top of each other creates its own level of stress," she said. "And then you have the added stress of needing to follow the motel's rules or getting kicked out. You're under even more scrutiny than if you're doubled up in an apartment, because you have a motel manager constantly scrutinizing you and other guests constantly evaluating you."

Rimmer currently is not working. Upon returning to Madison, she had to turn down a cleaning job that paid more than $10 an hour because she could not find affordable child care, she said.

To those inclined to judge her for the size of her family given her situation, she said she previously had earned $33,000 a year while living in Madison.

"Things change," she said. "Circumstances don't stay the same."

She loves being a mother and her children give her strength, she said.

One of her children receives a monthly Social Security Disability Insurance check, the family's primary income. A sister staying with them is a full-time cook, so she pitches in. A grandmother occasionally sends money.

"The fathers could help out a lot more than they do, but they are not in the best situations, either," Rimmer said.

She has submitted more than 60 applications for housing since January but nothing has come of them, she said. Her barriers include a 2007 eviction.

Through it all, she tries to stay upbeat.
Hes tough. Battle-tested. Does push-ups and wraps his fists in tape. If Missourians need a governor who can blow things up and make punching bags cower in fear, Eric Greitens is our man. But if the state is looking for someone to answer just a few serious questions, look elsewhere. Eric Greitens is in full retreat.

This editorial board invited the four Republican gubernatorial candidates for individual interviews to help guide our endorsement ahead of the Aug. 2 primary. The goal is to separate the candidates from the rehearsed phrases and performance pressures of a broadcast debate and dig deeper into where each stands on major issues. Three  Catherine Hanaway, Peter Kinder and John Brunner  are participating.

Greitens campaign initially accepted last month then canceled without explanation. Thanks for reaching out. We arent interested in a meeting with the Ed board at this time, spokesman Austin Chambers wrote in a July 7 email.

Thats a shame because Greitens might well be the smartest person in the pack. Before he was a Navy SEAL officer, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. Only 32 college students from across America qualify each year. That puts Greitens in an intellectually elite category that none of his opponents can match.

But try to get a sense of that intellectual side from his campaign videos. His misguided campaign directors seem to think that Missouri Republicans are too one-dimensional to embrace a candidate with deeper ideas. So they dumbed down his message. Instead of offering well-researched solutions to education, they present a video of Greitens shooting his assault rifle. When the other candidates talk about bringing jobs to the state, his campaign offers push-ups, punching bags and ISIS hunting permits.

Hanaway has her own video brandishing a shotgun. Brunner has attached the word Marine to every billboard, video and bumper sticker as if his name had been legally changed. Kinder touts his National Rifle Association A-plus rating like a mantra.

All very predictable, as if theyre ticking off items on a conservative checklist. But at least they are willing to engage in a give-and-take on more substantive issues that directly indicate how they propose to lead.

Greitens treats depth and substance like Kryptonite. Dont take our word for it. Visit the I Believe section of his campaign website, where he offers two- and three-sentence snapshots of his ideas, as if thats all it takes to solve the highly complex problems affecting the state.

We firmly believe theres more to Greitens than the Rambo character his handlers are presenting to Republican voters. We also believe those voters deserve more respect than he offers with militaristic, jingoistic ads that have no bearing on governing Missouri. Eric Greitens, youre better than this.
Can we be assured that the plant will not pollute our land or water supply so that we are not discovering something decades later like so many areas in Missouri?
The brutal deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, followed by the vicious killing of five Dallas police officers, have led to unprecedented tension between law enforcement and Black Lives Matter activists.

The Black Lives Matter movement, which seeks to prevent the untimely deaths of people of color, has an indisputably noble goal, but do police officers really pose the most serious threat to the lives of African-Americans, as we have been led to believe?

While statistics on police shootings do reveal that young black men are disproportionately the victims of police shootings, crimes simply do not break down on proportionate demographic lines. Blacks constitute only 13 percent of the population, but they represent a majority of the homicide and robbery arrests. Over the past decade, 40 percent of those arrested for killing police officers have also been black.

Some argue that a disproportionate number of black arrests does not mean that African-Americans commit more crime, but is merely a result of living in heavily policed neighborhoods. While this argument has some merit, studies based on anonymously self-reported crime data also find that blacks are disproportionately involved in violent crimes.

Given these disturbing disparities, it is unfortunate, but not entirely unreasonable, that African-Americans experience a higher likelihood of being killed in a police shooting than a white person.

If the mere disproportionate representation of black men as victims of police shootings is indicative of organized racism, why are Asians (adjusted for population) less likely than whites to be shot by police? Surely, no reasonable person would think that the police are more racist to whites than Asians.

Undoubtedly there are individual racist officers, like the San Francisco police officer who sent text messages referencing African-Americans as wild animals.

Discrimination against blacks, such as being pulled over more often for traffic stops, does exist, but it is a result of unconscious bias by well-meaning officers. As FBI Director James Comey pointed out, The two young black men on one side of the street look like so many others the officer has locked up. Two white men on the other side of the street  even in the same clothes  do not. And that drives different behavior. The officer turns toward one side of the street and not the other.

Police shootings are a serious problem in our society. According to The Guardian, In the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.

What is almost just as troubling as the shootings themselves is that the officers involved even in the most questionable shootings almost always go unpunished.

In 2014, a SWAT team that maimed an infant by throwing a flash grenade into a crib in a drug raid gone wrong did not face any criminal charges. In 2011, Officers Jay Cicinelli and Joseph Wolfe of the Fullerton police department beat a white homeless man to death under the pretext of arresting him. A jury acquitted both of them. Based on what we know so far, the shooting of Castile is beyond senseless.

Striving to hold rogue officers accountable is laudable. But to suggest that every police shooting of a man of color is racist is a great disservice to white victims of police shootings, African-Americans and law enforcement officers.

Blacks are six times more likely to be victims of homicides. Heather MacDonald, a conservative scholar, points out that 12 percent of white and Hispanic homicide deaths are due to police officers, while only 4 percent of black homicide deaths are the result of police officers. The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings is because most blacks are killed by fellow citizens, overwhelmingly black, and not police officers.

To make a serious dent in the mortality rate of young African-Americans, we have to answer some very tough questions: Why are blacks so over-represented in violent crime, both as offenders and victims? What can we do to address some of the most serious issues facing the black community, such as poverty, low school graduation rate and single parent homes?

The Baltimore Sun reported, Blood was shed in Baltimore at an unprecedented pace in 2015, with mostly young, black men shot to death in a near-daily crush of violence. How many of these lives could have been saved had we looked beyond the idea of homicidal racist cops out to kill young African-Americans?

Ash Murthy of Sunnyvale, Calif., is a software engineer and freelance writer interested in criminal justice. Michael Fisher is a senior police officer in Orange, Calif., and a former Virginia state trooper.
He disappeared with the money. Thats why the legend of D.B. Cooper endures.

He jumped out the back of a passenger jet with $200,000  the money strapped to his body  and if he didnt cackle as he leaped (So long, suckers!), well, he should have. He deserved that moment of satisfaction as he bailed out on civilization somewhere over the northwestern U.S. in 1971.

Raise your hand if a version of the D.B. Cooper moment exists in the recesses of your imagination, to be accessed, if only once and for a second, during trying times. Nothing criminal, of course, or dangerous, or even permanent. But plotting your well-funded escape and leaving them all to wonder? Could feel pretty good, if only for an hour or two. So long, suckers!

The FBI has spent these 45 years searching in vain for D.B. Cooper  long enough to finally acknowledge that the mystery may never be solved. As of last week, the agency announced Wednesday, it has redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities.

You cant blame investigators for giving up. Cooper would be about 90 today if alive. There are no new leads to follow. Decide for yourself what may have happened on Nov. 24, 1971:

That afternoon, a man in his mid-40s wearing a dark suit and black tie settled into his seat on a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle. He ordered a bourbon and soda and then, after takeoff, hijacked the plane, claiming he had a bomb in his attached case. He demanded $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes. After landing in Seattle to exchange the passengers for his loot and chutes, he ordered the plane to fly to Mexico City. Somewhere between Seattle and Reno he jumped.

In all likelihood, Cooper  he bought his ticket as Dan Cooper, but who was he?  did not survive his plot. He appeared to be an inexperienced sky diver: He made a foolhardy night jump into freezing wilderness in a business suit and loafers using a parachute that couldnt be steered. In 1980, a young boy unearthed a package of the money  $5,800 with serial numbers matching the ransom loot  on the banks of the Columbia River near the Oregon-Washington border. No trace of a body was found, but likely its out there, in the river or at the bottom of a lake.

Ah, but Cooper was clever: He hijacked a Boeing 727, whose rear retractable door could be opened in flight. He ordered the pilot to fly slowly, below 10,000 feet in altitude, along flat terrain west of the Cascades. As for the stash of found $20 bills: Had Cooper been dead on arrival and the cash was mere debris, a relic? Or did Cooper shrewdly place this fraction of his haul there to confuse investigators?

At most, one person has firsthand knowledge. The feds looked at more than 800 suspects over the years and eliminated them all.

News accounts, T-shirts, public events and such have kept the spirit of D.B. Cooper alive. Last year, fans of the TV series Mad Men noticed that Don Draper, the shows slippery protagonist, was the right age to be Cooper. He dressed, smoked and drank like Cooper, too. As the series finale approached, some viewers speculated that the New York ad man would be revealed to be D.B. Cooper. Alas, the Draper character turned out to be nothing more mysterious than the creator of a famous Coke commercial.

As for D.B. Cooper, he was the real thing: not a hero, but a criminal whose crazy, daring story appealed to many peoples escapist fantasies. Hes allowed a place in American mythology because he didnt hurt anyone and got away. The FBI says the trail ran cold. True, but who knows?

Maybe hes still out there all these years later, cackling, enjoying another D.B. Cooper moment.
The headquarters of Bahrain's main opposition party Al Wefaq is seen in this photo taken in Bilad Al Qadeem, west of Manama, on October 28, 2014. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed

DUBAI (Reuters) - A Bahrain court on Sunday dissolved the main Shi'ite Muslim opposition group al-Wefaq, accusing it of helping to foster violence and terrorism, in an escalation of a crackdown on dissent in the U.S.-allied Gulf kingdom.

The official Bahrain News Agency (BNA) said the court ruled that Wefaq had taken aim at "respect for the rule of law and the foundations of citizenship based on coexistence, tolerance and respect for others; provided an atmosphere for the incubation of terrorism, extremism and violence and for foreign interference in national affairs."

Its funds would be claimed by the state treasury, BNA said.

Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, has a Shi'ite majority but a Sunni Muslim-led government, mainly drawn from the ruling al-Khalifa family. Seen by other Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdoms like Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against Iranian influence, it put down Arab Spring protests in 2011.

It drew U.S. and U.N. criticism in June when it moved to strip a top Shi'ite cleric's citizenship and announced it was suspending Wefaq and closing its offices.

Close ally Britain expressed deep concern at Sunday's ruling. In a statement, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged Bahrain to guarantee political freedoms for all its citizens.

He called for a dialogue among all sides to "promote social cohesion and inclusivity, including political representation, for all Bahrainis. I understand there is a right of appeal."

A U.S.-based rights group said the latest ruling had left no outlet for peaceful grievances in the island monarchy.

"Todays decision is a dangerous mistake, leaving no real outlet for peaceful grievance," said Brian Dooley of Human Rights First. "The kingdom's government has told its people that from now on not only are you not allowed rights, you're not allowed to complain about it."

"DANGEROUS MISTAKE"

Bahraini Shi'ites complain of discrimination by the government. Since the authorities crushed street protests in 2011, demonstrators have clashed frequently with security forces, who have been targeted by several bomb attacks.

Bahraini authorities deny any discrimination. Bahrain has accused the opposition of undermining security and blamed the bombings on Iran and Lebanon's armed Shi'ite group Hezbollah. Iran and Hezbollah deny any involvement in Bahrain's unrest.

Dooley said U.S. President Barack Obama should respond swiftly by reimposing a ban on U.S. arms transfers to Bahrains military that the U.S. State Department imposed after the 20011 crackdown but lifted a year ago.

A State Department report delivered to Congress in June found Bahrain's national reconciliation efforts since 2011 had stalled, and it had not implemented recommendations to protect free expression.

(Reporting by Katie Paul; Editing by William Maclean and Mark Trevelyan)
Anti-government protesters hold posters of Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim during an anti-government protest organised by Bahrain's main opposition group Al Wefaq, in Budaiya, west of Manama, Bahrain May 17, 2013. REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed/File

DUBAI (Reuters) - A Bahraini cleric will go on trial next month on charges of collecting funds illegally and money laundering, the public prosecutor said on Saturday.

A source familiar with the case said the cleric was Shi'ite Muslim spiritual leader Ayatollah Isa Qassim, who had his citizenship revoked by the authorities less than a month ago.

The case has revived fears of fresh protests in Bahrain, where the Shi'ite Muslim majority complains of discrimination and demands a bigger share in running the country.

The United States and the United Nations have criticized the move, seen by local activists as part of a wider crackdown on dissent in the Western-allied kingdom, which has provoked a daily vigil outside Qassim's house that on some days swells to several thousand people.

The head of public prosecution, Ahmed al-Dosari, did not identify Qassim by name. He said in a statement posted on Instagram that the case would be heard at the beginning of August but gave no precise date.

It was not immediately possible to contact Qassim for a comment.

Bahraini media last month reported an investigation was underway into a bank account of some $10 million in Qassim's name to find the source of the funds and how they were being spent.

The move sparked a strongly worded statement from senior Shi'ite clerics, including Qassim, against any attempt to meddle with the collection of a Muslim tax called Khums, which is a pillar of Shi'ite Islam.

Bahrain in 2011 crushed an uprising by Shi'ites demanding reforms that would give them a bigger voice in governing the Sunni Muslim-ruled country, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based as a bulwark against Iran.

(Writing by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Mark Potter)
(Reuters) - Privately held wind power developer Deepwater Wind has proposed supplying Long Island with 90 megawatts of offshore wind energy, the company said on Thursday.

The 15-turbine project from Deepwater Wind, builder of the first offshore wind farm in the United States, would become the largest in the country when completed, the company said.

It said that depending on permitting, construction could start as early as 2019 with the project commencing operations in 2022.

The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) is expected to officially vote on the proposal next week, the company said in an email.

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a statement that at a meeting next Wednesday, the LIPA Board of Trustees would consider advancing the development of the wind farm.

"Our project is not just the best site for offshore wind in the country, its also the right solution to meet the South Forks energy demands in a clean and cost effective way, Deepwater Wind Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Grybowski said in a statement.

(Reporting by Swati Verma in Bengaluru; editing by Grant McCool)
In November 2010, Mike Pence gave a lecture at The Federalist Societys National Lawyers Convention, and I happened to be there for my first exposure to his oratory.

I remember the speech because it was an exercise in pomposity and sanctimony so insufferable that I walked out before he was done. Only now do I realize it was also a towering specimen of hypocrisy.

Pences subject that day was the presidency, a topic on which he had  I cant say has  uncompromising opinions. His mission was to instruct his audience on the proper characteristics and conduct of anyone holding the office. Though he largely avoided the name Barack Obama, it was clear he thought the 44th president is an affront to the Framers.

The presidencys powers are vast and consequential, its requirements  from the outset and by definition  impossible for mortals to fulfill without humility and insistent attention to its purposes as set forth in the Constitution of the United States, declared Pence, his gaze steely and his jaw firmly set. Of power, he said, Those who are entrusted with it must educate themselves in self-restraint.

A true statesman lives in what Churchill called a continuous stress of soul,  Pence informed his audience. And thats why you must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness.

Pence told a story to illustrate the humanity and humility of Calvin Coolidge. A sensibility like this  and not power  is the source of presidential dignity, and it must be restored, he said. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic but life itself.

It communicates that the president feels the gravity of his office and is willing to sacrifice himself, that his eye is not upon his own prospects but upon the storm of history, through which it is his responsibility to navigate with the specific powers accorded to him and the limitations placed upon them not merely by man but by God.

For those who feared Obamas presidency would bring about the destruction of America, Pence solemnly invoked the great generations that have gone before us: They are silent now, but from the eternal silence of every patriot grave, there is yet an echo that says, Its not too late. Keep faith with us. Keep faith in God. And do not, do not ever despair of this republic. 

I had interviewed Pence once and found him mild and affable, so the fire and brimstone surprised me. At the Federalist Society convention, he sounded like a politician slightly unhinged by Obama and trying to establish a reputation as a profound thinker.

But when Pence accepted the second spot on a ticket with Donald Trump, he made clear that he didnt believe a word he said. The address is full of lines that would disqualify Trump from a moments consideration.

Trump has not the slightest trace of the humility and dignity Pence once deemed essential, and its hard to imagine his being constrained by the limits of presidential authority. As for the Constitution, Trump thinks it contains an Article 12 and wants to censor the internet without regard for the First Amendment. Somebody will say, Oh, freedom of speech, freedom of speech, he snorted. These are foolish people.

Does Pence think Trump has ever endured stress of soul or even has a soul to be stressed? Does he think Trump has character, self-discipline and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic but life itself?

Pence warned us against any president who acts like, speaks like and is received as a king  a contemptuous description he used with Obama in mind. But no candidate has ever behaved with a more brazen air of royal prerogative than Trump. And a party whose principles have almost nothing in common with his views has meekly submitted to his majesty.

Does Pence think Trump would be a president who feels the gravity of his office and is willing to sacrifice himself? Does he believe Trump would exercise his powers with respect for the limitations placed upon them not merely by man but by God? Its enough to make a cat laugh.

If Pence would listen for the words echoing now from those patriot graves, this is what he would hear: OK, now despair for the republic.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte chats with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit just outside Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

By Sue-Lin Wong and Terrence Edwards

ULAANBAATAR (Reuters) - A key summit between Asian and European leaders in Mongolia ended on Saturday without direct mention of the South China Sea dispute in its closing statement, with diplomats describing intense discord over the issue between Europe and Asia.

China has refused to recognize Tuesday's ruling by an arbitration court in The Hague invalidating its vast claims in the South China Sea and did not take part in the proceedings brought by the Philippines. It has reacted angrily to calls by Western countries and Japan for the decision to be adhered to.

China had flagged ahead of the Ulaanbaatar get-together that it did not want the South China Sea to be discussed, saying it was not an appropriate venue.

The closing statement said leaders reaffirmed a commitment to promote maritime security, safety and cooperation, freedom of navigation and overflight and to refrain from using threatening force.

It also said disputes should be resolved via international law, the United Nations charter and U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS.

European Council President Donald Tusk told reporters he hoped the court's decision would create positive momentum in finding a solution to the dispute.

"Still, it's not so easy to agree with our Chinese partners when it comes to these issues but our talks were difficult, tough but also promising," he said.

On Friday, the European Union issued a statement noting China's legal defeat but avoided direct reference to Beijing, reflecting discord among EU governments over how strongly to respond to the court ruling.

While the European Union is neutral in China's dispute with its Asian neighbors in the South China Sea, Britain, France and Germany want to make clear that Beijing must uphold international law as it seeks a bigger global role.

But speaking with one European voice has become difficult as some smaller governments, including Hungary and Greece, rely on Chinese investment and are unwilling to criticize Beijing.

NO BILATERAL

The panel ruled Beijing's actions in the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually, had interfered with the Philippines' sovereign rights. Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims to the strategic waterway.

There was no bilateral meeting between the Chinese and Philippines foreign ministers, a Philippine diplomatic source told Reuters, though the Chinese initially requested a meeting at the beginning of the summit.

Chinese officials did not speak to foreign reporters during the summit. China's Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the summit and the South China Sea.

State news agency Xinhua quoted Chinese Premier Li Keqiang as saying on Saturday in Ulaanbaatar that the court's decision would have "no impact whatsoever" on Chinese sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea.

Li had told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the previous day that Japan should stop interfering in the issue.

Japan met with several countries including the Philippines and Vietnam and told them Japan would cooperate with them to enforce the decision, a foreign ministry spokesman said.

A diplomat from Russia, which has close ties with China and has supported its position over the arbitration case, said the West was hectoring.

"If you understand how the other side lives, you're more tolerant," he said. "The West always starts with teaching. Asians never do that."

A Mongolian diplomat said negotiations over the closing statement were "intense".

"The Europeans wanted lots on the South China Sea but the Asians didn't."

(Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (L) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov shake hands during a joint news conference following their meeting in Moscow, Russia, July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin

By David Brunnstrom and Andrew Osborn

MOSCOW (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday Washington and Moscow had reached a common understanding on the steps now needed to get Syria's peace process back on track.

But Kerry, after a day of talks in Moscow with his Russian counterpart, said more work was needed before those steps could be implemented, and that Russia and the United States still differed over the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Five years into a Syrian civil war that has killed thousands and forced millions to flee their homes, Russia and the United States are the most influential outside players in the conflict, but the objectives they are pursuing diverge.

Russia backs Assad and is giving military help to his campaign against rebel fighters, while the United States believes the Syrian leader has to go and is supporting some of the rebel groups who are fighting to unseat him.

At a news conference alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Kerry identified two problems that have damaged an internationally-brokered ceasefire in Syria: attacks carried out by the Nusra Front, al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, and what Kerry described as indiscriminate bombing by Assad's forces.

"We have agreed to steps that if implemented in good faith can address two serious problems I have just described about the cessation," said Kerry.

"It is possible to help restore the cessation of hostilities, significantly reduce the violence and help create the space for a genuine and credible political transition."

"The concrete steps we have agreed on are not going to be laid out in public in some long list because we want them to work and because they need more work in order to work."

The Russian foreign minister also said he and Kerry had made progress over Syria, after talks that started on Friday morning and lasted deep into the night.

"We have a common understanding about these concrete steps, which Russia and the USA - as co-chairs of the Syria Support Group - could take to enhance the effectiveness of our work," Lavrov said.

DIFFERENCES REMAIN

Kerry has been accused by some within the U.S. foreign policy establishment of being too willing to make concessions to Russia over Syria. But he stressed that Washington's policy has not changed "one iota."

"We still believe that Syria cant have peace while Assad is there. We have a difference with Russia on that," Kerry said.

Soon after flying in to Moscow late on Thursday, Kerry had talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin that focused on the conflict in Syria.

The Washington Post newspaper had reported that Kerry was bringing with him to Moscow a proposal for intelligence sharing with Russia over Syria and joint selection of bombing targets.

But a Kremlin spokesman said that Putin and Kerry had not directly discussed military cooperation between Moscow and Washington in Syria.

At the start of their talks on Friday morning, both Kerry and Lavrov said that the attacks in the French city of Nice underscored the need to join together in fighting terror.

Dozens of people were killed on Thursday when a gunman drove a heavy truck at high speed into a crowd in Nice who were celebrating Bastille Day, France's national holiday. French authorities said it was a terrorist attack.

Referring to what he described as the "incredible carnage" in Nice, Kerry said nowhere was there a greater hotbed for terrorists than in Syria. He said people all over the world were looking to world leaders to do everything possible to combat terrorism.

Kerry and Lavrov broke off their talks and took the short drive to the French embassy in Moscow, where they each laid a bouquet of flowers in remembrance of the victims in the Nice attack, and signed a book of condolences.

(Writing by Christian Lowe; Editing by Vladimir Soldatkin)
BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - Guards protesting over pay shut the eastern Libyan oil terminal of Hariga on Sunday, delaying two shipments of crude, a port official said.

A unit of Libya's Petroleum Facilities Guard (PFG) took the action because they said they had not been paid their salaries recently, the Hariga official said.

He said the protest had delayed two tankers, one of which was already docked at the port, with the second scheduled to dock later on Sunday. Hariga has an export capacity of about 120,000 barrels per day (bpd).

Libya's oil output has been sharply depleted by industrial disputes, insecurity and political strife since the country slipped into turmoil following the uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi five years ago.

Production has fallen to less than a quarter of a 2011 high of 1.6 million bpd.

Several major eastern Libyan terminals remain blockaded by the Petroleum Facilities Guard, a national force that is internally divided. Key units have shifted allegiances between different political factions.

Hariga has largely continued to operate smoothly, though the eastern branch of the National Oil Corporation (NOC) temporarily blocked exports there in May amid a dispute with the rival NOC based in Tripoli.

The PFG group that shut down Hariga is normally based south of the eastern city of Derna but traveled to the terminal on Wednesday to stage their protest, said Mohamed el-Harari, NOC spokesman in Tripoli.

There were "just a few people" among the protesters, he said. "The problem is that they put their hands on the terminal and they are stopping the loading. The authorities there are trying to resolve this."

(Reporting by Ayman al-Warfalli; writing by Aidan Lewis; editing by David Clarke)
South Korean Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn (R) arrives for a meeting with residents in Seongju where where a U.S. THAAD anti-missile defense unit will be deployed, South Korea, July 15, 2016. News1/Lee Jong-hyun/via REUTERS

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Koreans protesting against a plan to deploy a U.S. missile defense system in their district blocked a minibus carrying the prime minister for several hours on Friday, preventing him from leaving an office.

The government announced on Wednesday that the southeastern county of Seongju had been chosen as the site for a Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) battery aimed at countering what it sees as the threat from North Korea's missile and nuclear program.

But residents of the melon-farming area said they were not consulted and they do not want the missile defense unit, due to be deployed by late next year.

Protesters threw eggs and plastic water bottles at Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn as he spoke on the steps of the county office to apologize for not briefing residents earlier, TV footage showed.

Security guards used boards and umbrellas to shield Hwang and he was quickly taken inside the building.

When he tried to leave the compound, a crowd of several hundred with a tractor blocked his vehicle.

Hwang later got out of the bus and into a car but it too was trapped in the crowd, Yonhap news agency reported. He then moved to another car and left, Yonhap said.

Seongju residents refused to accept the government's explanation that the site was chosen because it would have no impact on the safety of residents and the environment.

China has also protested against the planned deployment of the THAAD system, which has a powerful radar it worries can see into its territory.

North Korea's military on Monday threatened to retaliate against the deployment of the system with a "physical response" once its location and the timing of its installation were decided.

Tension on the Korean peninsula has been high since North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and followed that with a satellite launch and a string of test launches of various missiles.

In South Korea, the prime minister holds a largely ceremonial role as the head of the cabinet in a powerful presidential system. He and the cabinet are appointed by the president who serves a single five-year term.

(Reporting by Jack Kim; Editing by Tony Munroe, Robert Birsel)
Houthi fighters react while riding on the back of a truck as they attend a tribal gathering in Sanaa, Yemen, July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Mohamed al-Sayaghi

DUBAI (Reuters) - United Nations-sponsored talks to end nearly 16 months of war in Yemen resumed in Kuwait on Saturday, delegates said, despite threats by representatives of the Saudi-backed Yemeni government not to attend.

A shaky ceasefire that began when the talks started in April has helped slow down the fighting but clashes continue in various parts of the country where Islamist militants have taken advantage of a security vacuum to launch a string of bombings.

The talks bring together the Iranian-allied Shi'ite Muslim Houthi movement and Yemen's internationally-recognised government, but have achieved little concrete progress in over two months.

Two delegates said only a ceremonial meeting was scheduled for Saturday night in the presence of the U.N. special envoy, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed. Both sides would get down to bargaining on Sunday.

The talks have given Yemen its best chance for peace after 16 months of war that have killed more than 6,500 people and created a humanitarian crisis. They were suspended at the end of June ahead of the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday.

Hadi's government is demanding the Houthis withdraw from areas they have seized since 2014 and hand over weapons they have captured from the army. The Houthis want to be part of a new government that would prepare for elections.

Hadi's government was angered by a proposal put forth by Ould Cheikh Ahmed combining both demands, and had threatened to stay away from the talks unless the U.N. envoy gave guarantees to drop any talk of a unity government before the Houthis withdrew from the cities they control, including the capital Sanaa.

But Ould Cheikh Ahmed managed to persuade the government to join the talks after promising to push for an agreement within two weeks, according to Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi, the head of the government negotiating team.

Saudi Arabia and its mostly Gulf Arab allies intervened in Yemen's civil war in March 2015 to confront what they say is an Iranian bid for influence on the Arabian Peninsula.

The Houthis have denied being backed by Iran and accuse Hadi's government of corruption and dependence on foreign powers.

(Reporting By Mohammed Ghobari, writing by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
A Tauranga woman will carry the flag for the Cook Islands at next months Rio Olympics.

Canoeist Ella Nicholas will be flagbearer during the the Olympic Games opening ceremony on August 5.
Tauranga kayaker Tim Taylor is receiving an accolade from fellow kayakers for exploits over the last few years that include setting a new 24 hour ocean kayak record and for the circum-kayak of New Zealand.

Tim broke the 29 year old former 24 hour record in April 2015, setting a new distance of 214km. The previous record was 194.1km.
FORESTPORT, N.Y. -- A man was killed Saturday when his vehicle veered into the opposite lane and hit another car head-on, the New York State Police said.

Jeffrey D. Smith, 45, of Deerfield, was driving a 1997 Toyota Camry south on state Route 28 in the town of Forestport.

Smith's vehicle entered the northbound lane of the road and hit a 2011 Honda Pilot head-on, state police said, though it was not clear what caused his vehicle to go into the opposite lane. The driver of the Pilot was identified as Alicia M. Gribbin, 38, of Sharon Springs.

State police said Smith suffered massive internal injuries and was airlifted by Mercy Flight to St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica where he was pronounced dead.

Alicia Gribbin and a passenger, John Gribbin, 42, were taken to St. Elizabeth Hospital by Old Forge Ambulance and Boonville Ambulance. State police said their injuries were not life-threatening.

Troopers are continuing to investigate the crash.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Organizers have announced plans for two separate demonstrations Monday, including one by the Black Lives Matter movement.

The first will take place at 9 a.m. outside the Everson Museum, 401 Harrison St. The group Project X said it would lead a peaceful demonstration, "Black Lives Matter...Less Talk, More Action."

Shaunna Spivey-Spinner, founder of Project X, said the demonstration was an attempt to show solidarity following the deaths of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and police officers killed in Dallas. The aim is also to highlight growing concerns in Syracuse regarding police and citizen conduct, community relations and social justice issues, she said.

Spivey-Spinner said the Black Lives Matter movement needs to be a "mobilization of all races in regards to one of the most under-served, misunderstood and disenfranchised populations: the communities of color."

Spivey-Spinner said the public was invited to participate.

A second event, a protest march, is planned for 4 p.m. Monday by Black Lives Matter Syracuse. That event will begin at the Jerry Rescue monument in Clinton Square.

The demonstration is in response to "ongoing murders of Black people" around the country, the group said, and members planned to march in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement around the world. Members will also be protesting "police brutality against Black residents here in Syracuse, and will present their demands at the march."
hoganairport.jpg

Hogan Airport in Esperance, New York.

(Google Maps)

ESPERANCE, N.Y. -- A small plane with four people on board crashed Saturday evening in Upstate New York, the Federal Aviation Administration said. .

The aircraft crashed at about 6:45 p.m. in a heavily wooded area in Schoharie County, FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said. She said the plane was destroyed by fire.

The site is located in the town of Esperance, New York, west of Schenectady.

Schoharie County Sheriff Tony Desmond said that the plane never left the ground before crashing near Hogan Airport about 1,000 feet from the facility.

No information on the names of the people on board was immediately available. But the sheriff said one person was taken to the hospital with serious injuries, and a coroner was called to the scene. However, no one has been pronounced dead.

The FAA said local authorities would release the names and conditions of the victims, the Albany Times Union reported. The paper said a single-engine Piper PA-28 was involved.

#BREAKING: Small plane with 4 people on board has crashed in Esperance. https://t.co/fOYlf62jGS  NEWS10 ABC (@WTEN) July 17, 2016

The National Desk contributed to this report.
Editor's note: Attorneys at Goede, Adamczyk, DeBoest & Cross, respond to questions about Florida community association law. The firm represents community associations throughout Florida and focuses on condominium and homeowner association law, real estate law, litigation, estate planning and business law.

Q: Our condominium is changing the paint color of the buildings. The documents provide 'the Association shall determine the paint scheme.' Who needs to approve the change?

 T.C., Treasure Coast

A: Material alterations are generally defined as a modification of the common elements that palpably or perceptively varies or changes the form, shape, elements or specifications of a common element in such a manner as to appreciably effect or influence its function, use or appearance. Arbitration decisions have determined that changing the paint color is a material alteration. Florida Statutes provide that 75 percent of the association's voting interests must approve a material alteration unless the documents provide otherwise. So the question is whether the specific language in your documents permits the board to change the paint color absent a vote of the membership as 'the Association'. To answer the question, I would need to further analyze the declaration and the bylaws. Often, the documents provide that the association acts solely through its board of directors unless there is a specific membership approval requirement. Other times, the documents provide the default approval mechanism is a majority of a quorum of the membership. So it is possible the board alone could approve the paint change, but you would first need to have the remainder of the documents analyzed under Florida law.

Q: The pool safety rules in our community are clearly posted and the rules are strictly enforced during the busy seasonal months. During the summer, however, there is an understanding that rules will not be enforced and we have had injuries because of jumping, diving, and horseplay. Could an injured party sue the association as a result of piecemeal enforcement?

 R.O., Stuart

A: If an individual is injured at the community pool, there is a fair chance the injured party would seek damages from the association regardless of whether the association is actually at fault. That being said, when someone uses the pool with posted signs and warnings, there is an inherent assumption of risk involved. In other words, the individual recognizes there are dangers associated with swimming pools and further dangers associated with jumping and diving in direct contravention of the posted signs. The question is really whether the association has assumed a duty not only to post rules, but also to monitor and ensure adherence to the posted rules. There is case law that indicates an association generally has no duty to have a fully staffed lifeguard at a community pool, but when the association does employ a lifeguard, the association thereafter owes a duty of care. The determination of whether any such duty was breached is a very fact specific question, so I would recommend consulting with a licensed Florida attorney to discuss your exposure based on the specific facts.

If there is exposure, and if there is a lawsuit, the condominium may have insurance to cover such a claim. If so, the deductible would be a common expense and insurance would likely provide legal counsel to defend the claim. In the worst-case scenario, if there is no insurance, or if the claim is denied by the insurance carrier, any judgment against the condominium needs to be addressed. The association could either levy a special assessment to pay off the judgment, or F.S. section 718.119 provides that each owner is liable to the extent of his or her share of the common elements, which would permit an individual owner to obtain an individual release from the judgment in the event the entire judgment is not satisfied.

Steven J. Adamczyk Esq., is a shareholder of the Law firm Goede, Adamczyk, DeBoest & Cross. Visit www.GADClaw.com or ask questions about your issues for future columns, send your inquiry to: question@GADClaw.com. The information provided herein is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The publication of this article does not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader and Goede, Adamczyk, DeBoest & Cross, or any of our attorneys. Readers should not act or refrain from acting based upon the information contained in this article without first contacting an attorney, if you have questions about any of the issues raised herein. The hiring of an attorney is a decision that should not be based solely on advertisements or this column.
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Roy M. Whitehead, Fort Pierce

Letter: Americans should follow Britain's example and take back our country from unelected bureaucrats

There is an old adage that says, "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." Over the next few months, American voters, if rational thinkers, will be pondering whether it is true.

It is reasonable to assume the election of Hillary Clinton, "the devil you know," will be a continuation of the current administration: ballooning national debt and entitlements, and the proliferation of new rules, regulations and laws not by legislative action by our elected representatives, but by presidential executive orders and unelected faceless bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

This will continue the country's march down the road to socialism and ongoing economic stagnation, with small businesses and working taxpayers bearing the brunt.

The other alternative may be a parallel of the vote by Britain to exit the European Union taking back control of its destiny rather than leaving it in the hands of unelected officials in Brussels. In essence, this is putting the fate of the country in the hands of "the devil you don't know," which is what American voters will do if Donald Trump is elected president.

Many millions of voters are distraught over the direction America is going and want change. They are aware of its future if Clinton is elected but have no certain knowledge of what a Trump administration may bring. However, like the majority of Britons, many Americans are willing to take the chance and make the change on the assumption that it can't be worse and could be better.

Britain is leading the charge to return to democracy and national self-determination rather than being dictated to by faceless unelected bureaucrats. America should follow its lead and demand that our elected representatives in Congress do their job and retake control of our country before it's too late.
Ernest Lyons, the former editor of the Stuart News from 1945-1975, was an avid outdoorsman. He spent a lot of his time on the St. Lucie River and Indian River Lagoon and wrote columns about the tranquil waters and beautiful scenery.

During Lyons' tenure at the Stuart News, one of his columns predicted the danger of releasing water from Lake Okeechobee into our local waterways.

'At long last, South Florida Water Management District plans to begin an 'experimental release' of around 1,000 cubic feet per second of fresh Lake Okeechobee water from St. Lucie Canal into the St. Lucie River. All South Florida rivers require a reasonable amount of fresh water. Too much is disastrous,' Lyons wrote.

Many of Lyons' columns articulate the unique experiences that people can only find on the waters of the Treasure Coast.

Lyons' full column:

Remembering when lagoon had pure, cool fresh water

THERE was never anything more beautiful than a natural South Florida River, like the North and South Fork of the St. Lucie and the winding cypress-bordered Loxahatchee.

THEIR banks of cabbage palms and live oaks draped with Spanish moss and studded with crimson-flowered air plants and delicate wild orchids were scenes of tropical wonder, reflected back from the mirror-like onyx surface of the water.

EVERY BEND of their serpentine lengths brought new delights. Here would be clumps of fragile white spider lilies in bloom, there an alligator easing down, an otter swimming or an anhinga, the snake bird or water turkey, drying its spread wings on a dead snag. If its wings werent dry enough to fly, the water turkey would plunge into the river and swim off under water.

THERE were pileated woodpeckers pounding away on dead pines, egrets and herons, occasionally flocks of wild turkeys thundering over. But the most wonderful thing was the water itself, pure, sweet, cool fresh water. For miles down from the headwaters you could lean over and drink your fill. Water the way God made it. No Chlorine. No chemical additives. No salt.

IN THIS marvelous fresh water there was an incredible population of black bass and blue gills and all other finny tribes of the freshwater. There were catfish, gars and mudfish, and that strange fish with green bones called the Chinese pike or sleeper,  also snook and tarpon which had come up from the brackish into the fresh water zone.

THERE had always been fresh water in the upper zones, furnishing some of the most marvelous sport fishing conceivable. The fresh water was constantly replenished by a steady flow from saw grass swamps and cypress lakes, as well as by thousands of little trickles in the banks from a high ground water level. True, the tides pushed the fresh water back and diluted it with a brackish mixture in the lower zones, but there was always enough more fresh water coming in so that the headwaters held their own.

DRAINAGE canals, mostly for agricultural purposes, cut the throats of the upper rivers. During the periods of heavy rainfall, muddy waters gushed down and turned the formerly clear streams into a turbid, silted mess. During dry spells, gated dams held back water for irrigation. The ground water table was lowered. Salt marched upstream, turning the formerly fresh waters brackish and eventually so salty fresh water fish could not procreate.

THE MARVELOUS fresh water fishing expired, majestic cypresses along the banks of the Loxahatchee began to die. The banks are still beautiful, but just a shadow of what they had been.

WHAT brings all of this to mind is that, at long last, South Florida Water Management District plans to begin an experimental release of around 1,000 cubic feet per second of fresh Lake Okeechobee water from St. Lucie Canal into the St. Lucie River. All South Florida rivers require a reasonable amount of fresh water. Too much is disastrous.

NOW, if they can devise ways to reintroduce steady flows into the North and South Forks and the Loxahatchee, some paradises might be restored.

Read or hear more columns from Lyons
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By Editorial Board

OOPS: What messages did Gov.-elect Rick Scott and members of his transition team share among themselves by email before Scott took office?

All such communication is, after all, a matter of public record.

The answer is, we may never know ? at least not completely. The governor's office acknowledged recently that the email accounts of Scott and his transition team were deleted shortly after Scott took office. Apparently, the private company handling emails for the transition team is responsible for deleting the electronic messages.

The governor has asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate and determine whether the emails can be recovered.

Let's hope so.
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By Stephanie Nelson, Cera, Your Newsweekly Contributor

Supervisor of Elections Leslie Swan reminds Indian River County residents that they must be registered to vote by Aug. 1 in order to be eligible to vote in the Aug. 30, 2016 Primary Election. In accordance with Florida Statute 97.055, the registration books close on the 29th day before each election. Once the registration books are closed, voter registration and party changes may be accepted for the purpose of future elections only.

Florida is a Closed Primary State: All registered voters, regardless of party affiliation, are eligible to vote in universal primary contests, nonpartisan races and on ballot questions. Since Florida is a Closed Primary State, only voters registered within a candidate's respective party are eligible to vote in partisan races. Therefore, it is important to verify your party affiliation prior to the Aug. 1 registration and party change deadline.

To be eligible to vote in this election, voters must be at least 18 years of age, a US citizen, a legal resident of the State of Florida and Indian River County. Persons who have been convicted of a felony or adjudicated mentally incapacitated with respect to voting must have their right to vote restored before they are eligible to vote.

Voter registration applications are available at the Supervisor of Elections office, public libraries, county offices, city halls or state agencies that provide public assistance. Applications are also available on the Supervisor of Elections website at VoteIndianRiver.com. Completed applications must be signed, dated and returned to the Supervisor of Elections office by the close of business on Aug. 1, 2016.

It is important to keep your voter information up to date. The information you provide determines your voting precinct and voter eligibility. Registered voters may check their status at VoteIndianRiver.com. To do so, click "Am I Registered?" on the website. Then, insert your last name, birthdate and the house number of your address and follow the online instructions.
Microsoft will bet you a new laptop that it can upgrade your (compatible) PC to Windows 10 Time is running out to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. After July 29th, Windows 7 and 8.1 users will have to pay to get Microsoft's latest operating system. Microsoft has rather infamously been urging PC owners to take advantage of the free offer. However, so far over 350 million people have decided to take the plunge to the latest version of Windows. Winbeta

U.S. to allow foreigners to serve warrants on U.S. internet firms The Obama administration is working on a series of agreements with foreign governments that would allow them for the first time to serve U.S. technology companies with warrants for email searches and wiretaps -- a move that is already stirring debates over privacy, security, crime and terrorism. Brad Wiegmann, a senior official at the Justice Department, discussed the administration's efforts during a public forum on Friday at a congressional office building in Washington, D.C. The first such agreement is being assembled with the U.K., he said. The WSJ

VR is a revolution in control more than immersion Holopoint is a VR archery game, and it's almost impossible to explain why it's so good without sounding like a wanker. It doesn't look like much. You're in a dojo, and some blue cubes straight out of My First Unity Project hang in the air around you. You shoot arrows at those, holding your bow in one hand and drawing back the arrow with the other. Sometimes they shoot at you. Eventually some holographic samurai show up and wade slowly toward you from all sides, feet sliding across the floor in a mismatched animation. You shoot these also. Eurogamer

Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from images at 15MB/s We are pleased to announce the open source release of Lepton, our new streaming image compression format, under the Apache license. Lepton achieves a 22% savings reduction for existing JPEG images, by predicting coefficients in JPEG blocks and feeding those predictions as context into an arithmetic coder. Lepton preserves the original file bit-for-bit perfectly. Dropbox

Forget Iron Man: skintight suits are the future of robotic exoskeletons Children with a rare neurological disease were recently given the chance to walk for the first time thanks to a new robotic exoskeleton. These devices -- which are essentially robotic suits that give artificial movement to a user's limbs -- are set to become an increasingly common way of helping people who've lost the use of their legs to walk. Robohub

Sandia storing information securely in DNA Experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider generate 15 million gigabytes of data per year. That is a lot of digital data to inscribe on hard drives or beam up to the "cloud." George Bachand, a Sandia National Laboratories bioengineer at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, is exploring a better, more permanent method for encrypting and storing sensitive data: DNA. Sandia

Google had an Oculus competitor in the works -- but it nixed the project Google recently shut down an internal project to create a high-end standalone virtual reality headset akin to devices from Facebook's Oculus and HTC, according to sources familiar with the plans. The decision likely stems from Google's effort to streamline its more ambitious projects, an ongoing slog at the company. In this instance, Google is shifting more resources behind mobile VR... Recode

Samsung in talks with BYD to buy stake in electric-car maker Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest maker of phones and memory chips, said it's in talks with BYD Co. about investing in the Chinese electric-car manufacturer. Details including the size of the investment will be disclosed when they're confirmed, Samsung said Friday in an e-mailed statement. The investment in BYD, backed by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., would bolster Samsung's semiconductor business for cars, the South Korean company said. Bloomberg

A smaller version of Raspberry Pi 3 is coming soon A smaller version of the popular Raspberry Pi 3 will go on sale in a few months. Raspberry Pi is developing a new version of its Compute Module, a single-board computer that plugs into specific on-board memory slots. The new Pi will be more like a mini-computer inside a computer, and it won't come with a power supply. PCWorld

Inside the playlist factory When he's choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future's "Jumpman" (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark. Or sometimes he's at home in his one-bedroom apartment on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, walking around in his living room with new Gucci Mane blasting from a Beats Pill. BuzzFeed

Tearing apart the Nintendo Playstation The mid 90s were a weird time for video game hardware. There were devices that could play videos from compact disks. Those never caught on. Virtual reality was the next big thing. That never caught on. The Sony PlayStation was originally an add-on for the Super Nintendo. That never caught on, but a few prototype units were produced. One of these prototype 'Nintendo Playstations' was shipped to a company that went into bankruptcy. Hackaday

TR's VR journals, part one: setting the stage Over the past couple months, I've been places. I've dangled from the side of a rock wall hundreds of feet above crashing waves. I've set foot on a shipwreck deep beneath the ocean and hung out with a humpback whale. I've laid waste to pallets of unsuspecting fruit with a pair of katanas. I've led a research mission on an alien world full of exotic life forms. I've been to Taipei to look at a bunch of new PC hardware. (OK, that last one actually happened.) The Tech Report

Crossover for Android runs on Chromebooks! Sometimes, you find yourself staring at something you could never have imagined being possible based on its humble beginnings. The Wright Brothers pilot the airplane for 12 seconds; then, Neil Armstrong lands on the moon. The first microcomputer kit is made available in 1975; then, 120 million computers are sold in the world so far this year! Codeweavers

HTTPS is not a magic bullet for Web security We're in the midst of a major change sweeping the Web: the familiar HTTP prefix is rapidly being replaced by HTTPS. That extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and that it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. And on today's Web, everyone wants to see what you're doing. Ars Technica

'Pokemon Go' isn't very good but it will be huge anyway The thing no one warns you about when you decide to become a Pokemon trainer is the humidity. It's hot and muggy on my first day hunting down Pikachus and Geodudes in Brooklyn, and my already clammy hands are getting even sweatier from the heat of my phone -- Pokemon Go runs hot. Vice
Stick a fork in it: Chipotle is done.

While the chain is still open for business, it appears that it has lost its mass appeal with consumers.

According to new survey, Chipotle continues to struggle to get customers to dine at its establishment.

The financial company Morgan Stanley surveyed a total of 2,000 customers in June, with 720 of the participants reporting to eat at Chipotle. According to the survey, 13 percent of people reported that they do not plan on going back to the establishment for a meal.

While this might seem like a small number, 13 percent of customers also said that they have reduced the amount of times they eat at Chipotle. This means that about 25 percent of customers surveyed are visiting less or stopped visiting Chipotle altogether.

Based on this report, Morgan Stanley analyst John Glass revealed on Friday that a full recovery for the chain could take much longer than previously expected.

A similar survey the company conducted back in January revealed that 15 percent of people asked would not return to the restaurant, which goes to show just how slowly it is taking to build up consumers' trust.

Chipotle Mexican Grill was once a popular fast food restaurant adored by millennials and pretty much everyone who enjoys tacos and burritos. Part of its appeal was the ability to see orders be made in front of the customer while casually dining. Of course, it also prides itself for having "food with integrity," meaning it uses naturally-raised meat and chicken, organic produce and dairy without added hormones.

However, Chipotle faced some food safety problems last year, after foodborne illnesses like E. coli, salmonella and norovirus spread in across its locations in the U.S.

It's pretty clear that these foodborne illnesses have killed  and continue to kill  the appetites of consumers.

After the results of the latest survey, Glass downgraded the rating on Chipotle's stock. The company's shares are down 1.7 percent.

The analyst said that it could be years before Chipotle is back at its once-healthy place business-wise.

This news comes after another survey was released on Tuesday that revealed that concerns about food safety is now low, but 13 percent of people said they were still "very worried" about it.

This survey was conducted by William Blair and included 800 participants who were asked about their Chipotle eating habits and if they were concerned about the safety of the food since November 2015.

The report found that approximately 45 percent of participants reported to eating at the Mexican chain less, with 26 percent revealing they haven't gone back since the E. coli outbreak.

Meanwhile, Chipotle is attempting to win back its customers by offering new menu items and a rewards program.

It might take more than this to get the chain back into the hearts and stomachs of America.

Source: CNBC

Photo: kennejima | Flickr

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Herbalife and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have come to an agreement. In exchange for $200 million, the nutrition and weight management company will not be known as a pyramid scheme.

The settlement announced on Friday finally puts an end to the ongoing investigation of the company over serious allegations regarding how the business operates.

Although the settlement seems to be a victory for the company, it does not mean that Herbalife comes out of the mess in the best light. The fine that must be paid under the settlement is partially for misrepresentations made to its sellers, and it must fully restructure its business and be more transparent when it comes to compensation for its distributors and retail sales.

Even so, the company's shares increased by 18 percent in early trading.

To understand how it reached this settlement, it's important to first take a brief look at what happened to get here.

Who Is Herbalife, And What Is Its Business Model?

Herbalife sells popular protein shakes, nutrition, weight management and fitness products, but instead of selling these in stores like GNC, the products are sold via independent distributors worldwide. Distributors make money both on their sales, as well as when recruiting other distributors who then work for them. This is known as multilevel marketing (MLM).

The problem is that research and analysis of the company's operations found that Herbalife was not in effect following the MLM model but a pyramid scheme instead.

The FTC's definition states that, in a pyramid scheme, the company promises "consumers or investors large profits based primarily on recruiting others to join their program, not based on profits from any real investment or real sale of goods to the public. Some schemes may purport to sell a product, but they often simply use the product to hide their pyramid structure."

The Problem

This model could mean the company promises its recruited members that they have the ability to move up the ladder and make a substantial living with the company, yet only a few distributors make it to the top of the pyramid to reap the big pay checks. Most instead lose money.

Distributors often lost money after buying inventory that they could not sell.

According to a report by Walter H. A. Vandaele, Ph.D. of Navigant Economics, LLC, only an estimated 2 percent of distributors are eligible for performance payments. It is possible to make it to the top, if that employee sticks around. The report found that 64 percent of the highest level members were in that position for 10 years or less.

The FTC Investigation

In 2012, investor and hedge fund manager William Ackman called out Herbalife and accused it of operating as a pyramid scheme, as well as not even having underlying sales. He had bet $1 billion against the stock and led the crusade against the company and Herbalife's rich investor Carl Icahn.

The FTC got involved when it started an investigation against the company in March 2014. It then issued a Civil Investigative Demand (CID), which is like a subpoena, only the company could be required to both produce documents and be interrogated or give testimony under oath.

The FTC's complaint stated the following:

Most Herbalife participants earn little or no profit, or even lose money, from retailing Herbalife products.

In the absence of a viable retail-based business opportunity, recruiting, rather than retail sales, is the natural focus of successful participants in Defendants' business opportunity.



Thus, participants' wholesale purchases from Herbalife are primarily a payment to participate in a business opportunity that rewards recruiting at the expense of retail sales.

Herbalife responded at the time, welcoming the inquiry and said it would cooperate. In May, it began negotiations with the government to come to an agreement.

The Result

It appears that negotiations worked out in favor of Herbalife, which dodged a major business bullet as its shares continue to increase.

Herbalife will now hand over $200 million, which will eventually go back to the pockets of employees who lost money after buying the company's products in bulk, as well as rework the way it compensates its employees, including eliminating paying distributors for recruiting others.

"This settlement will require Herbalife to fundamentally restructure its business so that participants are rewarded for what they sell, not how many people they recruit," FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez said. "Herbalife is going to have to start operating legitimately, making only truthful claims about how much money its members are likely to make, and it will have to compensate consumers for the losses they have suffered as a result of what we charge are unfair and deceptive practices," she said.

The company agreed to pay the Illinois attorney-general $3 million as part of another agreement.

"The settlements are an acknowledgment that our business model is sound and underscore our confidence in our ability to move forward successfully, otherwise we would not have agreed to the terms," Herbalife's CEO Michael O. Johnson said.

Herbalife believes many of the allegations against it are incorrect, but the settlement is "in its best interest."

Source: The Wall Street Journal

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Telecom carriers from the United States are offering support to the relatives and friends of those affected by the Nice terrorist attack.

In the wake of the terrible Bastille Day terrorist attack in Nice, France, voice call providers such as AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and Google are allowing their subscribers to make calls and send texts in and around the region for no charge whatsoever.

Until July 16, Verizon subscribers have free wireless and landline voice calls from the U.S. to France.

AT&T's subscribers (prepaid or postpaid) get free wireline as well as mobile voice calls until July 17. The carriers opened up a support account where all subscribers can donate $10 to the Foundation for France. Should you want to contribute, simply text "NICE" to 20222.

Customers enrolled in the GoSmartMobile, Walmart and MetroPCS plans from T-Mobile may contact their friends and family "in the Nice area" until July 17.

Sprint also has an offer running until July 17. The carrier provides zero cost calls and texts directed to France whether they come from Virgin Mobile, Boost or Sprint customers.

Google is another important member of the support list. The search engine company announced that users "from anywhere in the world" are able to call to France from Google Voice, Project Fi and Hangouts, for no extra charge.

The company's virtual assistant, Google Now, also got a new card that contains the latest news coming straight from the French authorities. Google Now is available for iOS and Android.

It is far from the first time when big players in tech are taking concrete measures to show their human side.

Back in April, after the devastating earthquake that hit Ecuador, the four major U.S. carriers and Google started to offer American clients free calls and texts to the country. The group also provided free service to those affected by the earthquakes in Japan previously.

Facebook already has its own mechanism to help its users in the form of Safety Check.

The company says that the service was switched on four times during the past five weeks. The most notable events that triggered Safety Check were the mass shooting at the Orlando night club and the June 28 bombing of Turkey's largest international airport. The Orlando club shooting was the first time when Safety Check was switched on U.S. soil.

"We hope the people in the area find the tool a helpful way to let their friends and family know they are OK," says a Facebook spokesperson.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Researchers have found that the happy hormone serotonin can boost levels of calcium in the blood and milk of dairy cows.

Serotonin is considered a happy hormone because it alleviates mood, helping keep depression at bay. In a study published in the Journal of Endocrinology, the researchers detailed how daily infusions of serotonin increased calcium levels in the blood and milk of Holstein and Jersey cows, respectively.

Milk is in demand because it is a rich source of calcium. Unfortunately, this demand can take its toll on dairy farms, especially with about 5 to 10 percent of dairy cows in North America suffering from hypocalcaemia, or low levels of calcium. Risks of hypocalcaemia are particularly high right before and after a cow gives birth.

Aside from simply affecting the level of calcium found in milk produced by cows, hypocalcaemia is a major health threat to dairy cows because it is associated with problems in the immune and digestive systems. The condition then also poses a problem for dairy farmers because they rely on regular pregnancies and high milk yield for profitability.

Several studies have been carried out to find a treatment for hypocalcaemia but there is little research done toward preventing it. Serotonin was found to have a hand in maintaining calcium levels in mice, so researchers from the current study focused their work on examining the hormone's effects on dairy cows.

The researchers infused 24 cows with a chemical that converts into serotonin for the period running to the subjects giving birth. Half of the cows were Holstein and the other half were Jersey. Calcium levels in both the blood and the milk of the cows were measured for the duration of the experiment.

Based on their findings, the researchers saw that serotonin was able to improve calcium levels in the Holstein and Jersey cows. However, the hormone affected the dairy cows differently, with Holstein cows having higher calcium levels in their blood but lower calcium in their milk and the reverse for Jersey cows.

Additionally, the serotonin treatment did not affect the levels of other hormones, how much the cows ate and how much milk was produced, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison's Laura Hernandez, who led the research team.

The researchers' next step is to investigate the molecular mechanism that guided serotonin in improving blood calcium levels for Holsteins and milk calcium levels in Jerseys to determine if serotonin infusions can be used as a way to prevent hypocalcaemia in dairy cows.

Samantha Weaver, Rupert Bruckmaier, Austin Prichard, Thomas Crenshaw, Elizabeth Endres, Matthew Akins, Stefanie Newhouse, Peter Crump and Tonia Peters also contributed to the study.

Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture | Flickr

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Amazon seems to have accidentally spilled the beans on the upcoming PlayStation 4 Neo, briefly listing the price and release date of the 4K-ready console.

We already knew the PS4 Neo was coming this year, but had no specific timeframe to go on. If Amazon's Spanish arm is right, however, the console will hit the scene on Oct. 13. The retailer also revealed the price of the device, and it's a surprisingly affordable 399.99 (roughly $440 based on conversion rates, although euro prices include tax). Given the top-notch specs we heard about, we were expecting a much heftier price tag.

Amazon likely posted the listing by accident, as it promptly deleted the pricing info. At the time of writing, the listing only shows the Oct. 13 release date, but no additional info.

Nevertheless, the folks over at VG Leaks were quick on their feet and grabbed a screenshot of the original listing, pricing details and all. The fact that Amazon Spain deleted the info shortly after posting it adds even more credibility to the claim. Moreover, the retailer is already selling the existing PS4, so that Oct. 13 release is for another PlayStation console that might as well be the Neo (or perhaps a PS4 Slim?)

The PlayStation 4 Neo is not designed to replace the existing PS4, at least not at this point, but rather to complement it. The PS4 Neo would come as the top-end option, but it would still be tied to the PS4 as it doesn't have its own games. Sony will sell the PS4 Neo and PS4 side by side, so consumers will have more choices.

The higher-end PS4 Neo is expected to offer significant advantages over the current PS4, taking things up a notch in the CPU and GPU departments and enabling users to play games in an upscaled 4K resolution. This means that gamers will be able to get ultra-crisp visuals even without a 4K Ultra HD TV. The upgraded PS4 Neo should also deliver some considerable performance improvements over the regular PS4.

Sony is expected to take the wraps off the PS4 Neo at the Tokyo Game Show 2016 in September, so an October release would make sense. Without any official information from the company, however, nothing's set in stone. As always, it's highly advisable to take leaks and reports with a dose of skepticism.

Are you excited about the PS4 Neo? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Things are getting a little intense in the manga, and now it looks like Fairy Tail is set to give fans one-two punch of excitement, with the manga's publisher, Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine, poised to announce that Fairy Tail will bring "important news" when it drops its 35th issue on July 27.

So far, there hasn't been any indication as to what the announcement will be, except that whatever it is will be revealed once the latest issue releases.

However, even if the announcement leaves us in the dark for the time being, we can still hazard a guess or two based on what we know about the current state of the manga. To start, we can surmise that the news has to actually be something "important" and Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine isn't just simply throwing the word around in order to attract attention and raise expectations. Why? Because author Hiro Mashima launched the series in the 35th issue of Weekly Shonen Magazine in 2016, and the issue in which the news will be coming in will mark the manga's 10th anniversary. It wouldn't make much sense for the series to mark a momentous occasion on throwaway news that could come at any other time of the year, right?

With that in mind, what will the announcement be? The most likely topic is either an update about the anime project or the state of the manga.

Back in March, Hiro Mashima took to Twitter and revealed that a new anime project was in the works, but there hasn't been much news about it since then. As things stand, the anime is still somewhat close to the source material, since the last part of the series that was adapted was the Tartaros arc and Fairy Tail Zero (if you count spin-offs). Therefore, the anime would just need to cover the Guild Reformation arc (if that is even its formal name) and the early stages of the ongoing war between Fairy Tail (along with the other mage guilds in the Kingdom of Fiore) and the Alvarez Empire, before it catches up in full.

However, the announcement of an anime, series, movie or otherwise, is less likely than one about the state of the manga, since as mentioned before, fans already know about the existence of the anime project. Therefore, it would be a waste of time to make a further announcement about something that fans already know is coming.

On the other hand, an announcement about the state of the manga is more likely. As stated earlier, Fairy Tail is in the midst of a war against the Alvarez Empire, that will no doubt influence important factors of the world based on what transpires during the encounter. As of writing this, the most recent chapter has some of the main cast preparing to march on their guild, which has become occupied by the Alvarez Empire, thanks to a special magic that one of its most powerful members cast. Even worse, that same magic has resurrected some of its strongest combatants after they were thought to be dead.

Quite honestly, this screams of a final battle, especially when considering the backstories of Natsu and Zeref. The only thing that could trump that battle, would be one between Natsu and Acnologia  whom the former has sworn revenge against following the death of Igneel at the hands of the latter.

Mashima, who is also the creator of the hit series Rave Master, has no doubt struck gold with Fairy Tail. Since its debut, the manga has spawned two anime TV series that aired from 2009-2013 and 2014-2016, various manga spin-offs; a movie  with a second already green-lit; various video anime adaptations (OVA); a stage play that ran in Tokyo from April 30-May 9; as well as several video games.

In the meantime, whatever this announcement is, we'll just have to until July 27 to find out. The manga and anime are just the two most likely topics to cover, but knowing Mashima's penchant for throwing unexpected curveballs, the announcement could be about anything.

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Did NASA cut a live feed from the International Space Station (ISS)? Some people who believe so quickly took to social media, charging the space agency with a coverup of astronomical proportions. However, NASA officials have now answered those allegations, although questions remain surrounding the recent events of July 9.

A video posted on YouTube was purported to show an unidentified flying object (UFO) passing into view of cameras attached to the world's most advanced space station. Soon after the object is seen on the film, the video is cut. This quick change resulted in a flurry of social media posts, claiming NASA was attempting to hide the presence of alien beings.

The strange object seen in the video recording passed from space down toward Earth. No detail is seen on the object recorded in the latest video, as only an irregular white/gray blob is visible. Even proponents of the idea that this is a recording of an alien spacecraft have acknowledged it may show nothing more spectacular than a meteor falling to Earth.

"Remember a ufo is an unidentified flying object. This could well be a meteor or the like. What made it interesting was the camera cut off when the ufo seemed to stop," Streetcap1 wrote on the caption to the original video.

Officials from NASA state that no unidentified objects were seen from the ISS, and explain that most similar "objects" seen turn out to be nothing more than internal reflections within the space station, or lights positioned outside the orbiting outpost.

"Reflections from station windows, the spacecraft structure itself or lights from Earth commonly appear as artifacts in photos and videos from the orbiting laboratory, just as reflections often appear in pictures taken on Earth," a spokesperson from the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA said.

As the ISS orbits around the Earth 16 times each day, the outpost regularly falls out of touch with Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) used to relay data between the space station and controllers on the ground. The station also frequently loses contact with the ground, as equipment failures and other glitches occur. When this occurs, NASA officials stated, the agency normally cuts the feed to a video slate or blue screen.

Bright objects fall to the Earth on a regular basis, as meteors and space debris tumble toward our planet. As these objects enter the atmosphere, they glow as the objects pass through the air  a phenomenon we see on the ground as shooting stars. These events can resemble the light seen in the controversial video which was viewed nearly 2.3 million times in the first week following the release of the recording.

The same YouTube user, who placed this latest video online, previously claimed seeing another UFO near the ISS in 2014. Since that time, the user has posted several videos showing unusual lights in space, as well as vaguely geometric shapes on the moon.

Given the large number of people working for NASA, the chances that such a magnificent discovery as the presence of alien life could be kept a secret would likely be small.

 2022 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Google sees the future of technology in virtual and augmented realities (VR and AR) and reports are speculating that a new hardware may be underway.

No, it's not Cardboard (we already have that) and no, it's not Daydream either  that's the consumer version; we're talking about something bigger.

If you're thinking it's Google-backed Magic Leap, the up and coming device that augments reality with the virtual world, no, it's not that too.

So a new piece of tech, then? Yes, and no.

First and foremost, it's a wildly speculative rumor so please pass the salt. While reports claim that sources either have a good connection with the company or are very aware of the covert projects under development in the company, it's more likely unverified until someone from Google (with a name) actually speaks up; it's all been coming from anonymous tips.

As such, the first of these rumors surfaced when Recode reported that Google, or more specifically, research lab X  a separate entity still under parent company, Alphabet  purportedly scrapped an ongoing project "to create a high-end standalone virtual reality headset." The supposed device would be comparable to ones manufactured by HTC and Facebook-owned Oculus Rift.

A team of 50 people is said to have been previously working on the project to create a dedicated OS "unique from Android" before it got shut down by the company. The publication suggested that "the decision likely stems from Google's effort to streamline its more ambitious projects"  as widely evident in its budget-friendly Cardboard tech.

Meanwhile, Engadget picked the story up and made a few discoveries of their own.

The publication's own sources reaffirmed what the previous report claimed, though, more specifically, only part of it was scrapped  only the dedicated OS part of the project was killed but the reported standalone headset is still ongoing.

"[S]ources within the company say that a Google team is still working on a dedicated headset that blurs the line between virtual reality and augmented reality," the publication clarifies.

Assumingly, as sources revealed, the company has been making a few rearrangements within the company to accommodate continuing efforts to produce the Daydream headset while at the same time, work on the company's end goal VR project.

"[Daydream]'s a stepping stone towards a grander hardware push," as Engadget puts it.

The rumored headset will work without the need for a PC or phone and most likely, offer more support for AR than VR, combining its built-in screens with the physical world: a sort of mix between the two different worlds of virtual goodness.

Concerned companies Google, X and Alphabet have yet to comment on these speculations but as always, we'll keep you posted.

Photo: Fabrice Florin | Flickr

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The cover of French photographer Rehahn Croquevielle's photobook "Vietnam - Mosaic of Contrasts" / PHOTO COURTESY OF REHAHN CROQUEVIELLE



A French photographer who has spent more than two years living and traveling in Vietnam -- all the while accumulating more than 30,000 pictures of the countrys people and landscapes -- has released a collection of his best works.

Rehahn Croquevielle, 35, said the photobook, which is his first, is meant to show the world the country and people that have fascinated him for years.

I have been to over 30 countries, but I chose to live in Vietnam. The people, the landscapes, the quality of life... I love everything -- or almost everything -- here.

I have not seen many photobooks on Vietnam. Many talk about war or food, but we do not pay enough attention to Vietnam's habitants, the photographer, who wished to be addressed as Rehahn, said as he explained why he focused the book on people.

Entitled Vietnam  Mosaic of Contrasts, the book features 150 photos categorized into four themes: childhood, lifestyle, the elderly, and landscapes. Most of them were taken during Rehahns visits to distant and mountainous areas across Vietnam, which he paid for at his own expense.

Rehahn said that although Vietnam is like a mosaic whose diversity would need hundreds of books to be chronicled, he was most inspired by the poor, the elderly, children, and Vietnams hill tribes.

The innocence of children has all faces, all expressions [], while for old people, wrinkles accentuate looks; they bear witness to the past and experience, he said of his favorite subjects.

Rehahns connection to Vietnam started many years ago when he was a volunteer for Enfants du Vietnam, a French organization that works to support needy children in Vietnam.

In 2007, he came to the old town of Hoi An in the central province of Quang Nam to visit two fatherless girls whom he was sponsoring.

Four years later, he moved to Hoi An, leaving behind his printing company in France. In Hoi An he now runs an ice cream bar with one of his Vietnamese friends, but still spends lots of time riding his motorbike around the country.

Rehahn said with the success of his first book, which has sold more than 350 copies since it came out last month, he planned to publish more in the future like a sequel to Mosaic and another book entitled Vietnam from the sky.

The book is now available for purchase at his website http://www.rehahnphotographer.com

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A M'Nong ethnic girl with her elephant featured in one of the photos on display at Rehahn Croquevielle's debut exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City.

A French photographer has launched an exhibit in Ho Chi Minh City featuring daily life images of Vietnamese minority ethnic communities.

Rehahn Croquevielle said he wants to show the world another side of Vietnam and the colorful cultures of different ethnic groups across the country.

His debut exhibition, Precious Heritage, uses 35 of his favorite images from "Vietnam, a Mosaic of Contrasts", a photo book he published last year.

The highlight is the world-famous series of photos portraying 6-year-old Kim Luan from the MNong ethnic group with her pet elephant in Buon Ma Thuot in the Central Highlands.

Croquevielle said he captured the scenes by chance and was mesmerized by the fact that the happy little girl was not intimidated by the giant animal.

He said the photos tell a lot about the old custom of raising elephants as pets among minority ethnic families in Vietnams Central Highlands.

He said many ethnic groups in Vietnam are losing their cultural traditions as only the elderly are trying to preserve them.

The exhibition is open for free at Vin Gallery at 6 Le Van Mien, Thao Dien, District 2, until March 21.

Then it will be taken on tour to Versailles, Toronto, San Francisco and London.

Croquevielle said a portion of the proceeds from photo prints will go to the Christina Noble Children's Foundation, which is having several projects to support poor children in Vietnam.

Some photos of Vietnam by Rehahn Croquevielle:
One education challenge for children in rural Vietnam is how hard it is to get to school every day. Photo courtesy of Fotohearts

Two young men in California are running a free photo service to raise money for students in poor communities in Vietnam.

Thuyet Nguyen and Sonny Bui, alumni of the University of California, Los Angeles, founded the site Fotohearts last May to provide free graduation photos to UCLA students in return for donations.

A post on the university's news website Daily Bruin said Nguyen and Bui met in 2012 and found that they shared the same passion and love for photography and their Vietnamese heritage.

As passionate photographers, we believe we can do wonderful things behind the camera and help the community along the way, said a statement on the groups website.

Nguyen said he came up with the idea of combining photography and philanthropy after two trips to Vietnam in 2010 and 2013.

Thuyet Nguyen (L) and Sonny Bui, who founded Fotohearts that lets them give back with the passion for photography. Photo courtesy of Fotohearts



He said he noticed children in rural areas did not have enough school supplies and many of them dropped out.

According Fotohearts Facebook page, the group is also receiving applications from students in central Vietnam to provide scholarships to.

They will continue to provide free graduation photos next year and plan to expand the project to other campuses in the United States.
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8,000 new bikes, 750 cars hit Vietnamese streets every day Vehicle sales jumped in the first six months, putting more pressure on the country's inadequate infrastructure.

1.2 million Vietnamese move to cities every year: report Rapid urbanization has created multiple difficulties, including traffic gridlock, inundation and pollution.

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A French gendarme boat patrols waters near the beach two days after an attack by the driver of a heavy truck who ran into a crowd on Bastille Day killing scores and injuring as many on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, France, July 16, 2016

The pebbly beaches of Nice can all but disappear beneath a carpet of bronzing bodies on a normal July weekend.

By the early afternoon on Saturday, 36 hours after a gunman drove a truck into a waterfront crowd killing 84 people, numbers were way down.

"Normally we are packed. We have far fewer clients and that's what the terrorists want," said one worker, William, trying to rent out loungers for 19 euros a day at the southeastern city's Galion private beach.

No one was expecting business as usual so soon after the horrific Bastille Day attack. But business has been weak all summer. "It's the worst season I've seen for a long time, I'd say 10 years," he added.

Security fears have been hurting France's vital tourism industry, typically responsible for about 7 percent of GDP, since a series of Islamist militant attacks began in January 2015, most of them in the capital.

Fewer than two dozen of Galion's 250 deck-chairs were occupied on Saturday afternoon. There was a similar scene about 50 meters along the sea front at the Plage Ruhl.

This time last year, manager Marie-Jose Malacarne was taking 15,000 euros a day. This Saturday she doubts she will take more than 3,000.

"Its true and I'm afraid. In summer with this lovely weather, normally we are full. I think we'll see a bit of a drop. Seventy percent of our clients are foreigners," she said.

Nice says only Paris attracts more visitors in France. Its beaches, restaurants and Riviera ambience account for 40 percent of the Cote d'Azur region's tourism and, in a normal year, attract 5 million people.

A French gendarme boat patrols waters near the beach two days after an attack by the driver of a heavy truck who ran into a crowd on Bastille Day killing scores and injuring as many on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice, France, July 16, 2016.

Tourism typically provides a living for about 40 percent of its 343,000 inhabitants.

But this is not a typical year. Authorities closed the market in the city center Cour Saleya district for security reasons after the truck attack.

"There's no ambience, there's nobody, we're not happy, said waiter Ouadi at La Civette cafe. "The clients are gone ... Hopefully next week activity will pick up again."

Back at the Galion beach, British visitor Mike Bramah said he was determined to come out almost as an act of defiance.

"We weren't not going to come," he said, as a coastguard vessel patrolled the cobalt blue waters of the Baie des Anges in front of him.

"First you can't let these things put you off and second there's probably more security here than anywhere else right now."
A Turkish flag is seen next to the dome of Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, July 16, 2016.

The United Nations Security Council failed on Saturday to condemn the violence and unrest in Turkey after Egypt objected to a statement that called on all parties to "respect the democratically elected government of Turkey," diplomats said.

The U.S.-drafted statement, seen by Reuters, also expressed grave concern over the situation in Turkey, urged the parties to show restraint, avoid any violence or bloodshed, and called for an urgent end to the crisis and return to rule of law.

Statements by the 15-member Security council have to be agreed by consensus.

"We proposed different language that respects democratic and constitutional principles but the Americans refused to engage," Egypt's U.N. Ambassador Amr Aboulatta told Reuters.

Diplomats said Egypt asked for a call for all parties to "respect the democratically elected government of Turkey" to be removed from the draft statement, saying the council is "in no position to qualify, or label that government - or any other government for that matter - as democratically elected or not."

After the United States and Britain objected to the proposed change to the text, Egypt proposed that the council call on the parties in Turkey to "respect the democratic and constitutional principles and the rule of law," diplomats said.

Negotiations on the text ended at this point, diplomats said.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said that it was "surprised that its proposed amendment was not taken up, and with the claim that it is obstructing the release of the statement."

Turkish forces loyal to President Tayyip Erdogan largely crushed an attempted military coup on Saturday after crowds answered his call to take to the streets in support of the government and dozens of rebels abandoned their tanks.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is a former general who overthrew elected President Mohamed Mursi, of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, in 2013 after mass protests against Mursi. Turkey provided support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
A man wrapped in a Turkish flag stands next to military vehicles in front of Sabiha Airport, in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016.

The United States urged Turkey on Saturday to exercise restraint after a failed military coup sparked a government crackdown, and warned its NATO ally that public suggestions of a U.S. role in the plot were "utterly false" and harmful to relations.

President Barack Obama urged parties on all sides of the crisis to avoid destabilizing Turkey and follow the rule of law after the coup attempt against President Tayyip Erdogan.

The coup attempt complicated U.S.-led efforts to combat Islamic State. Turkey closed its airspace to military aircraft and power was cut off to Incirlik air base, which U.S. forces use to launch air attacks against the militant group.

U.S. officials were working with Turkish officials to resume air operations quickly, the Pentagon said.

Secretary of State John Kerry told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that authorities should respect the rule of law during their probe of the coup.

He also said "public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," the State Department said.

Turkey has long been a key U.S. ally but relations have been strained in recent years and Erdogan's government has accused U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen of being behind the coup attempt.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said any country that stands by Gulen will be considered at war with Turkey, and Erdogan urged Washington to deport the cleric.

Kerry said the United States was willing to help Turkey as it tries to identify those involved in the coup attempt, but made clear it would only act if there was evidence against Gulen.

"We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr Gulen, and obviously we invite the government of Turkey ... to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny and the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments appropriately," he said.

Gulen has condemned the coup attempt and denied any involvement in it.

Obama conferred with his national security and foreign policy advisers on Saturday morning and reiterated his support for the "democratically-elected, civilian" government of Turkey.

"While we have no indications as of yet that Americans were killed or injured in the violence, the president and his team lamented the loss of life and registered the vital need for all parties in Turkey to act within the rule of law and to avoid actions that would lead to further violence or instability," the White House said.

Obama noted the United States needed continued cooperation from Turkey in the fight against terrorism.

Forces loyal to Erdogan largely crushed the last remnants of the coup on Saturday as he launched a purge of the armed forces to tighten his grip on power.

Turkey scrambled jets throughout Friday night to resist the coup launched by a faction within Turkey's military that saw rebels piloting military aircraft.

The Incirlik air base near Adana in the southeast of the country was running on internal power sources after a loss of commercial power to the base, the Pentagon said.

"U.S. officials are working with the Turks to resume air operations there as soon as possible," said Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook. "In the meantime, U.S. Central Command is adjusting flight operations in the counter-ISIL campaign to minimize any effects on the campaign."

Threat to coalition fight

Erdogan has cooperated with Washington in the fight against Islamic State, but relations have been rocky with U.S. criticism of Erdogan's increasing authoritarianism, Turkey's support for Islamist opposition groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the slow pace in sealing Turkey's border with Syria to foreign fighters.

The closing of the airspace over Incirlik effectively grounded U.S. aircraft and drones that have been instrumental in the campaign to crush Islamic State in Syria, including supporting drives by Syrian Kurds and moderate Arabs, who are being advised by U.S. special forces, to seize the militant-held city of Manbij and Raqqa, the "capital" of the caliphate declared by Islamic State.

"Clearly the variable here is how long the closure will last," said Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If we're unable to fly from Incirlik, it will have a significant impact on the air campaign."

A Turkish presidency official in Istanbul said the move was temporary and aimed at preventing rogue aircraft from targeting civilians and government buildings.

"This is a short-term measure which won't have significant effect on coalition operations," the official said. "We have discussed this measure with our colleagues in Washington as well and they understand our concerns."

A prolonged closure of Incirlik's airspace could force the United States to divert aircraft based in the Persian Gulf to the Manbij and Raqqa offensives, constraining the air power available to support Iraqi and U.S. forces involved in operations against Islamic State.

It could also complicate the Pentagons ability to resupply and aid U.S. special forces inside Syria.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip addresses the crowd following a funeral service for victims of the thwarted coup in Istanbul at Fatih mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, July 17, 2016.

Turkey widened a crackdown on suspected supporters of a failed military coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000, and the government said it was in full control of the country and economy.

Overnight, supporters of President Tayyip Erdogan rallied in public squares, at Istanbul airport and outside his palace in a show of defiance after the coup attempt killed at least 265 people.

With expectations growing of heavy measures against dissent, European politicians warned Erdogan that the coup attempt did not give him a bank cheque to disregard the rule of law, and that he risked isolating himself internationally as he strengthens his position at home.

Broadcaster NTV cited Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag as saying that more arrests were expected on top of the 6,000 people already detained.

Authorities have rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters, ranging from top commanders to foot soldiers, and the same number of judges and prosecutors after forces loyal to Erdogan crushed the attempted coup on Saturday.

Among those arrested is General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base from which U.S. aircraft launch air strikes on Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, an official said.

"Control across Turkey has been restored and there are no clashes at the moment," a senior official said, adding that although a few groups of coup plotters were holding out in Istanbul, they no longer posed a risk.

"There are still a few important soldiers on the run and being sought. I believe they will be captured shortly," the official told Reuters.

The crackdown appears to intensify a longstanding push by Erdogan to root out the influence of followers of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Erdogan accuses followers of Gulen, who was once an ally but is now his arch-enemy, of trying to create a "parallel structure" within the courts, police, armed forces and media with an aim to topple the state.

The cleric denies the charge and says he played no role in the attempted coup, denouncing it as an affront to democracy.

A gift from god

Erdogan promised a purge of the armed forces even before the coup attempt was over. "They will pay a heavy price for this," he said. "This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army."

Relatives mourns over the coffin of Oner Cankatar who got killed in a thwarted coup during a memorial service at Fatih mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, July 17, 2016.

At a rally late on Saturday, his supporters demanded that the coup leaders be executed. "Let's hang them!" chanted the crowd in Ankara's central Kizilay square. Erdogan told them that parliament may consider a proposal to bring back the death penalty, which has been abolished.

Erdogan's critics say he will use the purge to create a pliant judiciary, eliminating any dissenting voices in the courts.

Some European politicians have expressed their unease about developments since the coup attempt.

"We want the rule of law to work fully in Turkey," said French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. "(The coup attempt) is not a blank cheque for Mr Erdogan. There cannot be purges, the rule of law must work," he told France 3 television.

Ayrault said European Union ministers would reiterate on Monday when they meet in Brussels that Turkey - which has applied to join the bloc - must conform to Europe's democratic principles.

European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Erdogan would move Turkey away from the core values represented by the EU and the NATO defense alliance - of which it is a long-standing member - if he decided to use the attempted coup to restrict basic democratic rights further.

"He would strengthen his position domestically, but he would isolate himself internationally," Oettinger, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Some European politicians are also expressing concern about the future of a deal between the EU and Ankara that has helped to slow numbers of migrants crossing from the country to neighboring Greece.

'Necessary measures'

Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek took to Twitter to attempt to reassure investors that the Turkish government was in full control of the economy before financial markets opened on Monday.

He said it had decided on "all necessary measures" after consulting with the central bank and treasury. He did not specify the measures.

Supporters of Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan shout slogans on the back of a truck during a pro-government demonstration on Taksim square in Istanbul, Turkey, July 16, 2016.

"The macro fundamentals of our country are solid. We are taking all necessary precautions. We are strong with the support of our people and strengthened political stability," he said on Twitter, adding that he planned to hold a conference call with global investors on Sunday.

The central bank said it would provide unlimited liquidity to banks.

Erdogan supporters waving Turkish flags also thronged the central Taksim square in Istanbul - scene of mass anti-government protests three years ago - and a smaller crowd gathered outside the gates of the his vast presidential palace complex in the capital.

For at least eight hours overnight on Friday violence shook Turkey's two main cities. But the coup attempt crumbled as Erdogan rushed back to Istanbul from a Mediterranean holiday and urged people to take to the streets in support of his government against plotters he accused of trying to kill him.

The violence shocked the nation of almost 80 million, once seen as a model Muslim democracy, where living standards have grown steadily for more than a decade and where the army last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago.

It also shattered fragile confidence among Turkey's allies about security in the NATO country, a leading member of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State. Turkey had already been hit by repeated suicide bombings over the past year and is struggling to contain an insurgency by Kurdish separatists.

U.S. President Barack Obama has also urged parties on all sides of the crisis to avoid destabilizing Turkey and follow the rule of law.

Fears of crackdown

A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has ruled the country since 2003, would have marked another seismic shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprisings erupted and plunged Turkey's southern neighbor Syria into civil war.

Two of the eight Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece in a helicopter and requested political asylum after a failed military coup against the government, are brought to prosecutor by two policemen in the northern Greek city of Alexandroupolis, Greece, July 17, 2016.

But the failed attempt could still destabilize the U.S. ally, which lies between Europe and the chaos of Syria.

Gulen said the attempted overthrow may have been staged to justify a crackdown.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations," Gulen said in a statement.

Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington was willing to help Turkey as it tries to identify those involved, but made clear it would act only if there was evidence against Gulen.

Kerry also warned that public suggestions of a U.S. role were "utterly false" and harmful to relations after Turkey's labor minister suggested there had been U.S. involvement in the plot.

Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party has long had strained relations with the military, which has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism although it has not seized power directly since 1980.

His conservative religious vision for Turkey's future has also alienated many ordinary citizens who accuse him of authoritarianism. Police used heavy force in 2013 to suppress mass protests demanding more freedom.

Erdogan commands the admiration and loyalty of millions of Turks, however, particularly for raising living standards and restoring order to an economy once beset by regular crises.
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The death of Alton Sterling, a black man killed during an altercation with Baton Rouge police on July 5, has prompted a swift federal response, and that help is welcome as the city sorts through the aftermath of an incident thats drawn international attention and deepened Baton Rouges racial divide. But ultimately, the most important work in healing Baton Rouge will have to be done by residents themselves  the people who live in the city as neighbors, and who have been touched most deeply by the divisions complicating the communitys future.

East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Kip Holden, Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie and East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore III helped pave the way for the federal probe of the shooting, a useful way to help assure residents that the case will be reviewed impartially.

Republican U.S. Rep. Garret Graves of Baton Rouge and Democratic U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond of New Orleans responded by cosponsoring legislation to provide better training and tools for police, another promising development.

President Barack Obama convened a panel of leaders in Washington to discuss issues raised by Sterlings death, as well as the subsequent shooting of a black man by police during a traffic stop in Minnesota, and the killing of five Dallas police officers by a gunman angered by events in Minnesota and Baton Rouge. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and State Police Superintendent Mike Edmonson attended Obamas meeting.

The roots of the problems we saw this week date back not just decades, but four centuries, said the president, referring to the countrys checkered racial past. That history includes Reconstruction, the post-Civil War period when federal officials oversaw Louisiana communities because they were deemed too dysfunctional to run themselves.

Echoes of that dysfunction resound today. In New Orleans, both the police department and the local jail are under federal consent decrees because of chronic concerns about unconstitutional practices. Baton Rouge spent decades under a federal consent decree because of similar concerns in its public schools, and its police department is under a consent decree aimed at improving diversity in the ranks.

Such challenges remind us that federal remedies for local problems are problematic in themselves, and should be used as a solution of last resort. The federal probe of Sterlings death, while necessary, cannot absolve those of us who live here from the ultimate responsibility for confronting what happened, how it happened, and what might be done to ease tensions between police and those theyre sworn to serve. Thats in the best interest of both law enforcement and the community at large.

Other questions loom in the days ahead. How effective is Baton Rouges existing system of internal review for police shootings? Would the city benefit from an independently funded and operated police monitor such as the one in New Orleans? And how can cooperative initiatives between police and troubled neighborhoods, such as the citys BRAVE program, be strengthened to improve public trust?

Fulfilling the citys promise obligates those who love Baton Rouge to find the answers. Sterlings death was a tragedy. A bigger tragedy would be our failure to advance the common cause of a community where everyone can feel safe.
After such a long election, people are punch-drunk on coverage and it's not therefore getting the critical eye it might otherwise receive. That allows anti-Turnbull people to present the result as a disaster that took the government from a decent majority to a slim one. That's a rewrite of history if ever there was one.

Some people need to take a reality check. In September last year, the Liberals were set to lose something like 38 seats. The polling for that type of result wasn't a short term dip, it was a long and deep baseline. Absent a circuit-breaker, the political oblivion at the end of that line left the party room with a lot more than a mere case of the jitters. They weren't jumping at shadows. They were bitten by a unrelenting and brutal reality. More of the same from Tony Abbott and the likelihood of a parliament with Labor holding an enormous majority over the Coalition was scaring them to death.

Malcolm Turnbull can say "I won fair and square". Credit:Peter Rae

If they hadn't moved to change leaders it would have confirmed for so many Australians that the party room just wasn't listening to the people. That's the fundamental point lost on some - leadership contests aren't about your factional interest or your personal benefit. They are first and foremost about who can best connect with the Australian people. If you don't listen to the people, it's a fair bet they won't vote for you.

Anyway, that's the reality. Less than a year ago under Abbott, the Coalition was looking at a wipe-out ... something like Labor 93, Coalition 52. If that seems crazy to you, you've got a very short memory. The mistakes made either by Malcolm Turnbull or the campaign team get some perspective when you consider the terribly low point from which he took over.
Anything that sounds too good to be true probably is, as the saying goes. Last week, Australia finally heard some of the detail behind a $200 billion high-speed-rail plan that would link Melbourne and Sydney in under three hours.

The Age revealed in March that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had agreed to discuss the rail plan with the company behind it, Consolidated Land and Rail Australia. The company, which has virtually no links to transport operators or bureaucracies in Victoria or NSW, promises to use land speculation to fund the rail line without a cent of taxpayers' money.

Many doubt a high-speed rail link between Melbourne and Sydney can be justified. Credit:Holger Mette

To do so, it would create eight new "smart cities" at stops along the rail route. The company's directors said they had taken out four-year options on cheap farmland along almost half of the corridor between Melbourne and Sydney. Once this farmland was rezoned into land for residential development in easy reach of a metropolis by fast train, the huge profit from its sale would fund a magnetic levitation rail line. The "smart cities" would have high-speed internet, renewable energy, low water use and affordable homes. The proposed first stage of the project would go from Melbourne to the Shepparton region.

Consolidated Land and Rail Australia has on its advisory board two former premiers, of NSW and Victoria, Barry O'Farrell and Steve Bracks. Mr Bracks has said there is scepticism about high-speed rail in Australia because it has been proposed so regularly with no result. The latest proposal, launched at a breathless media event with scant detail and an air of unreality, will add to that scepticism, because it is unlikely to succeed.
The theme of misguided anthropomorphism was explored in Karen Joy Fowler's award-winning 2013 novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which documents the unravelling of human relationships when a chimp, once treated as part of the family, is eventually, and inevitably, cast out. In writing his own take on the phenomenon, Jones admits he "pretty much" stole the structure of Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman. Trevor tells the story of a former showbiz chimp who lives with his widowed keeper and a life-sized cut-out of his most famous co-star, Morgan Fairchild. Trevor is getting on a bit and is not as adorable  or in demand  as he once was. "So it's like the chimp is Willy Loman. And, like Death of A Salesman, the play branches off into his daydreams and memories," Jones explains. "And in the case of his memories, Morgan Fairchild is a bit like the laughing woman; the sort of unattainable symbol of the prize you get if you live your life they way they told you to live; behave and the whole world will open up to you." She would have showers with him, they drank wine out of long-stemmed glasses...

Another, more successful chimp tells Trevor, "even if you're not happy, bear your gums so it looks like you're smiling and then the world will open up to you". Trevor believes that if he acts like a human long enough, he will be rewarded; that's Jones' hypothesis. But of course, it doesn't end well; even those not familiar with the real-life event will pick that up early. "His tragic epiphany comes when he realises that he is guaranteed nothing  and in fact was probably never respected and is just an animal they dressed up in costumes for a laugh," says Jones. "And that's when things get dramatic and scary." In the upcoming Australian premiere, being stage by Melbourne's Red Stitch, Trevor is played by Rory Kelly. For Kelly and the other actors, this creates an unusual on-stage dynamic, with actors having to "talk past" each other and even over each other at times; as Jones explains, everyone speaks English, but Trevor only hears a few words. "They're interacting without communicating and it's hard because they can't react completely naturally to each other. There's lots of overlapping dialogue and it becomes a bit of a delicate choreography."

Jones is accustomed to unconventional theatre  he made his name with Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, a "pirate puppet rock musical" (for adults), described as a raunchy, cabaret-style show. "Weirdly, Trevor is one of the most naturalistic plays I've written," he says. "I like to write plays that have a sort of high concept quality  something quirky or poppy about the conceit. I like a 'gimmick', although I don't call them that." He doesn't want to go to the theatre to see "humans being humans". "That's not enough for me for a play to be 'well-observed', you know? For people to say 'oh yes, I've been there'  that's not enough; I'm always trying to find something a little off-kilter. And funny. Hopefully funny." While Trevor is funny  "and poignant, tragic and absurd  absurd is the colour I like to paint with and if I can hit two out of four, not bad; all four would be great"  it's also a comment on the human condition, the fleeting nature of fame, and the distance between who we think we are and reality.

The disconnect between what Trevor wants to believe he is  an evolved human  and the reality that he is a wild animal is universal, says Jones. "It taps into our deepest fears that maybe we aren't talented, or ever were talented, and never will get the thing we worked so hard to get," he says. The actor as chimp is, of course a metaphor; we're all someone's monkey being asked to perform tricks for certain rewards. "And we all hope that we're getting through to the people we care about or work with  but in reality we have to accept there's this huge gulf of misunderstanding between all of us and we only actually all come together in fleeting moments," says Jones. "The rest of the time, we're all kind of walking through our own plays in life."
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will unveil a reshuffled frontbench on Monday afternoon that boosts the number of Nationals MPs in the ministry and is tipped to promote younger conservative talent.

The changes, driven by the loss of Assistant Ministers Wyatt Roy and Peter Hendy and the likely loss of Tourism Minister Richard Colbeck, will be announced after the Liberal party room and then Coalition party room meet in Canberra for the first time since the July 2nd federal election.

Several Coalition MPs told Fairfax Media they expected colleagues to vent their anger about the government's $6 billion package of superannuation changes contained in the May budget, with particular concern to be raised about a proposed $500,000 cap on non-concessional super contributions, which has been backdated to 2007.

Liberal campaign director Tony Nutt and pollster Mark Textor will also address the gathered MPs about the Coalition's campaign and, in the words of one, "they will have to show remorse" for the party's reduced majority.
A public sector union has urged the incoming government to change its enterprise bargaining policy, saying it has "destroyed morale" and failed to secure agreements.

In the wake of a pre-caretaker 71 per cent no-vote for the Australian Taxation Office's most recent workplace proposal, the Australian Services Union's tax branch secretary, Jeff Lapidos, said the government should soften its approach to enterprise bargaining.

Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Mr Lapidos said the current policy had failed to lead to an agreement, as well as "destroyed morale and distracted the ATO from its business".

"The government's policy has directed the tax commissioner to propose across the board cuts in employees' rights at work and conditions of employment," he said.
A man has been charged over a stabbing near Townsville on Saturday which has left another man fighting for life.

About 9.55pm, police were called to a Patrick Street home in Aitkenvale where officers found a man lying on the ground with multiple stab wounds to his chest.

A man is fighting for life after receiving multiple stab wounds to his chest in Aitkenvale on Saturday night.

The victim, 42, was transported to the Townsville Hospital in a critical condition.

A 44-year-old Aitkenvale man has been charged with grievous bodily harm and assault occasioning bodily harm.
Police are searching for two armed robbers following an overnight crime spree in Logan.

About 11.50pm Saturday, two men armed with a sawn-off shotgun and tomahawk fled a licensed premises on Kingston Road in Underwood with a sum of cash after threatening a male employee.

Police are investigating seperate crime sprees in Eagleby and Underwood on Saturday night and Sunday morning.

They fled in a dark blue Ford sedan which was located damaged in a nearby underground carpark about 12.30am.

Police were then called to the intersection of St Andrews Terrace and Beenleigh Road at Kuraby following a traffic crash, after which a bystander was assaulted.
Sadly, there are no prizes for mothering in the face of howling adversity.

If there were, Aboriginal mum Casey Tennyson would deserve a medal the size of her large, loving heart.

Djural Aldridge, 3, gets a kiss from mum Casey Tennyson at the Bubup Wilam Aboriginal child and family centre. Credit:Jason South

The solo parent of her three-year-old son Djural, the Palowa woman is also the fulltime foster mum of two Aboriginal boys, aged three and nine (who can't be identified).

Both came to her deeply traumatised by their early lives. One was born drug-affected, and both have complex health and disability challenges to navigate.
Cognitive neuroscientist Sharna Jamadar's grandmother never let illiteracy get in the way of thriving in a small NSW country town.

The Pakistani-born "brown granny"  so nicknamed by the town folk  was just one of the many "strong women" in Dr Jamadar's family who went a lot further than "where they came from".

Yet, when the 34-year-old embarks on a voyage to Antarctica later this year, she is going where few have gone before.

In December, Dr Jamadar, from Monash University, will join 77 other women scientists from around the world on Homeward Bound's 20-day journey to the South Pole, focusing on leadership and climate change.
A male motorcycle rider has been taken to hospital after a crash on Forrest Highway in Myalup on Sunday afternoon.

The Bunbury Mail reported the RAC Rescue helicopter, police and St John Ambulance attended the scene of the crash near the intersection of Riggs Road, about 15 kilometres north of Australind, around 3.30pm.
Soldiers involved in the coup surrender on the Bosphorus bridge. Credit:Getty Images The United States has sought close co-operation with Turkey in the fight against the Islamic State, while Europe has relied on Turkey to help stem the flow of refugees from war-torn countries of the Middle East to the Continent. "The whole night felt like doomsday," said Sibel Samli, an independent film producer in Istanbul. "People flocked to the markets to get bread, eggs and water. People were going to cash machines to draw out cash." A steamy Friday night was just getting going when the first hint came that something was not right: The military sealed off two bridges across the Bosphorus. Then, fighter jets and helicopters began flying low over Istanbul and Ankara, rattling residents enjoying a night on the town, and sporadic gunshots rang out.

Suddenly, Turks were transfixed by their mobile phones, or the televisions in bars and restaurants, trying to figure out what was going on. No one seemed to know where the President was. As rumours swirled that the military was manoeuvring to thwart a terrorist plot, or that a hijacked airliner was in the sky, many Turks, given their nation's history of military meddling in politics, began to wonder if a coup was afoot. Soon enough, they had their answer: Prime Minister Binali Yildirm spoke on television and said a renegade faction within the military was trying to mount a coup. And a military group issued a statement saying it had seized control of the country. A surreal evening And so began a surreal evening that stretched until daybreak as various factions fought each other for control of the country.

The night seemed to encapsulate the many dramas and conflicts that have roiled Turkey in recent years: street protests; the bitter fight between Mr Erdogan, an Islamist, and a onetime ally, Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom the President late in the night blamed for the coup attempt; and rising political violence and terrorism. Ms Samli had been sitting with friends at a rooftop bar of a chic hotel on the European side of Istanbul, when a helicopter passed low over their heads. "We didn't think anything of it at first because we knew the city was on high terror alerts following recent attacks," she said. "Then we started getting the calls and WhatsApp notifications about the start of a military coup. People were calling one another telling them to go home." The first signs that the coup might not succeed emerged as it became clear that the military failed to secure important government buildings, or to seize elected officials, normally the first actions of a putsch. Later it was learned that the conspirators had sought out Mr Erdogan at the seaside town of Marmaris, where he was apparently holidaying, but were too late. And then Mr Erdogan himself appeared, from an undisclosed location, and spoke to the nation on FaceTime.

The President relied on his power base of Turkey's religious conservatives. Mosque preachers joined his call to resist. "We will not let Turkey fall!" men shouted in the conservative Istanbul neighborhood of Istinye on Saturday morning, firing guns into the air. The most frightening hour was the one just before Mr Erdogan's jet landed in Istanbul after 3am. Fighter jets flew low over Istanbul, setting off sonic booms that felt like airstrikes. Gunfire crackled throughout the city and in Ankara, where soldiers seized civilian cars to use as barricades. Late in the night, as the sounds of war mixed with muezzins at mosques exhorting people to go into the streets and people chanting "Allahu akbar," or "God is greatest," Turkey's cities felt like besieged cities in Iraq or Syria. It was becoming clear, by the time Mr Erdogan landed in Istanbul, that those behind the coup did not have enough support within the military, even as the whole episode exposed deep divisions in the armed forces that had not been so apparent.

Younger Turks panicked after seeing older Turks, who have lived through coups and the street violence that has come with them, react with horror to the fighting "We had barely recovered from the Istanbul airport terrorist attack and now everyone has started talking about a civil war," said Esra Goksu, 32, an artist who lives in Istanbul. "Hundreds of people died for what? One man's ego? It breaks my heart. I don't recognise my country any more. I want to leave." An eerie silence After daybreak on Saturday, when it was apparent that the coup attempt had failed, central Istanbul was eerily quiet. There was little sign of security forces, which are usually out in force at any sign of trouble, sealing streets and lining up at intersections while backed by armoured vehicles. But there were signs of life, as workers hauled rubbish, shops and cafes began opening, and a group of religious men on mopeds motored down Istiklal Avenue, the city's main pedestrian street, waving the Turkish flag and chanting, "Allahu akbar!"
Nutson's Weekly Automotive News Digest - July 11-17, 2016: Mazda Diesel. Dim Headlight, GM Can Be Sued, Tesla Woes, VW Fix Nixed, Concurs St John's, PU Stamps







AUTO CENTRAL Chicago, July 17, 2016; Every Sunday Larry Nutson, Senior Editor and Chicago Car Guy along with fellow senior editors Steve Purdy and Thom Cannell from The Auto Channel Michigan Bureau, give you TACH's "take" on this past week's automotive news in easy to digest mega-tweet sized nuggets. If you wish to know more just click on the link that will take you to the full story as published here on The Auto Channel.

If you are a car and driving fan like we all are here at The Auto Channel, you can easily wish to "catch up" on these stories as well put them in context with the past 20 year's 1,985,187 automotive news, automotive stories, articles, reviews, archived news, video, audio, rants and raves. Just search The Auto Channel's Automotive News Archive.

Hey Boston TV viewers, you can now enjoy The Auto Channel TV Network "Free and Clear" on WHDT Channel 3 in Boston and on your local cable systems. Just added Naples Florida, along with all South Florida auto fans who can continue to watch The Auto Channel TV Network on WHDT-TV Channel 9 in West Palm Beach as well as cable channel's 17 and 438, channel 9 Miami. WHDN launched its full schedule (including The Auto Channel)of broadcasting in the Naples-Fort Myers market on digital PSIP channel 9.1 channel. Enjoy and thanks for the positive feedback and ratings. See You Next Week, LN.

The Past Week's Automotive News Highlights In Easy To Digest Chunks

July 11-17, 2016

* Mazda North America CEO Masahiro Moro told us, in a Detroit gathering of auto industry writers and analysts, that the company is getting close to deciding whether to offer a Diesel engine in Mazda's U.S. models. Original plans were for introduction back in 2014 but that got delayed for technical reasons. Now today in light of the VW Diesel scandal Mazda is not sure if the Diesel image is too tarnished or if it's just VW's. They think the later but Mazda is testing the regulatory changes that have come about and expects to decided one way or the other very soon.

* Having trouble seeing the road at night? Not a single small SUV out of 21 tested earns a good rating in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's headlight evaluations, and only four are available with acceptable-rated headlights. Government standards are based on laboratory tests, which don't accurately gauge performance in real-world driving. For 2017, vehicles will need good or acceptable headlights in order to qualify for the Institute's highest award, TOP SAFETY PICK+. The best-performing headlights in the small SUV group belong to a new model, the Mazda CX-3, and are available on its Grand Touring trim.

* GM's Switchgate is back in the news. A federal appeals court judge has ruled that the 2009 bankruptcy sale of the "Old GM" to the "New GM" doesn't bar the hundreds of lawsuits over accidents that occurred before the transaction that have been filed by car owners over the deadly ignition switch defect. This is a major setback for GM and will now allow due process in the courts to proceed by the affected GM car owners.

* Cars.com experts put five of the most popular compact SUVs through a series of tests to determine the best option for shoppers in its annual Compact SUV Challenge. The test resulted in the following ranking: 1)2017 Ford Escape, 2)2016 Kia Sportage, 3)2016 Honda CR-V, 4)2016 Toyota RAV4 and 5)2016 Hyundai Tucson. The Cars.com test included last year's winner, the Honda CR-V, the segment sales leader, the Toyota RAV4, and vehicles that have been remodeled since the 2015 test.

* Professional hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, shocked the automotive world just a year ago by remotely taking over the controls of a Jeep Cherokee and driving it off the edge of a parking lot. FCA engineers immediately fixed that vulnerability but the automotive world began scrambling to find and fix other vulnerabilities in vehicles. FCA announced this week it would join Tesla in offering bounties of anywhere from $150 to $1,500 to hackers who identify and report software vulnerabilities to the companies. Tesla is reported to have paid out 132 bounties from $100 to $10,000. Details at www.bugcrowd.com.

* Volkswagens plan to fix Audi, Porsche and VW 3.0-liter diesel engines was rejected by the California Air Resources Board this week in what is reported as a surprise (really?) to the company. The 3.0-liter engines were not part of the settlement agreement affecting the 2.0-liter engines weve talked about here recently. CARB officials claim VW submitted an incomplete, substantially deficient plan to return those vehicles to the claimed certified configuration. This issue effects about 16,000 vehicles of the half million total diesels caught cheating emissions tests. It could take until December to come up enough data to make a decision on the fix. Foot dragging at its best!

* Things are not getting any better for Elon Musk this week as the Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into whether Musk withheld vital information on a fatal crash involving Teslas Autopilot system prior to a $2 billion stock sale. The probe will determine whether the information was material to the sales event. The company says it has not gotten any communication or information from the SEC. A third Autopilot-related crash was reported in Montana this week but no one was hurt in that one. Another crash in Pennsylvania with a Tesla X on Autopilot resulted in the driver getting a Careless Driving citation. AndConsumer Reports is urging Tesla to disable the Autopilot system and rename it.

* GM, as part of their partnership with the ride service Lyft, will offer free Chevrolet Bolt electric cars to drivers who pick up more than 65 rides/week. The deal includes providing less busy drivers with a rental deal that includes insurance and routine maintenance. The Bolt is expected to compete directly with Teslas new Model 3 when they both are fully in the market next year. The Bolt will have a 200-mile range and up-to-date tech features including WiFi. GM invested $500 million in January to help Lyft get established.

* Recognized as one of the premier Concours events in the country, the Concours dElegance of America at St. Johns in suburban Detroit held a press event this week to preview the upcoming show and surrounding events on the weekend of July 29, 30 and 31. With 29 classes or special exhibits, over 300 cars are expected on the field Sunday from 10 AM to 4 PM, including vehicles from every decade like a 1901 Duryea and 1911 Oldsmobile Limited and Ken Lingenfelters 1996 Vector super car. Racing will be represented by a Rally Racing class. Car selection committee chairman Brian Joseph insists there will be something for everyone. Three days worth of events are scheduled, many free to the public. Details at: www.concoursusa.org.

* At last! The origin of pickup trucks can be traced back to the early 20th century, when automobiles first became popular in the United States. Originally used to haul cargo, these classic trucks have become nostalgic American icons. Announced earlier this year, at long last the US Postal Service new issue of four different forever stamps featuring a '65 Ford, a '48 Ford, a '53 Chevrolet and a '38 International Harvester are now on sale.
Being pulled over by the police can be a harrowing experience, but it becomes undeniably more distressing when the police can wrongly assume youre a criminal and take your cash from you as if its drug money. That can happen under the practice of civil asset forfeiture, and it might have just gotten a lot worse.

Its been reported that Oklahoma Highway Patrol (OHP) is currently using a device called the Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine (ERAD), which lets the police scan prepaid debit cards and seize the money on them if they suspect its from criminal sources. This isnt drug money taken away after a criminal conviction, this isnt a huge wad of cash you had sitting in your lap when you got pulled over, this is the police saying theres a criminal and seizing the money on your prepaid cards.

Prepaid debit cards are used by people who dont have bank accounts but want the convenience of paying for things with a card. Theyre typically used by low income Americans. You load the thing up with money, then you can use however much money you put on the card.

Theyre pretty common, with prepaid card companies reporting $220 million in sales in 2014 and a 50 percent increase in their use between 2012 and 2014. Furthermore, many people get paid by their employer using prepaid cards.

The OHP has been using the ERAD device for over a year, without most of the public knowing it, and there could be major constitutional problems at play here.

Matt Miller, managing director at the Institute for Justice, told The Daily Beast that many people use prepaid cards as if they are bank accounts, and an officer scanning your prepaid card is essentially getting access to what you use for a bank account. I think that's hugely constitutionally problematic, Miller said. There's a huge Fourth Amendment concern there, because you're just accessing someone's bank account without a warrant.

An Eighth Circuit court has ruled its not unconstitutional for law enforcement to swipe a card, but that issue could still be taken up by the Supreme Court if another circuit court disagrees.

To be clear, these devices cannot be used to seize money from traditional bank accounts, but dont worry, they tried to make that happen.

One of the things we recently discovered, just in the last couple of days in looking at the original contract documents, is that Oklahoma's Department of Public Safety, the Highway Patrol's oversight agency, actually tried specifically to get that ability, Brady Henderson, legal director at the ACLU of Oklahoma, told The Daily Beast.

Henderson said commissioner of Oklahomas Department of Public Safety held a press conference after it got out the Highway Patrol was using these devices, and he assured people that these devices cannot access bank accounts, but he never mentioned that they had tried to make that possible. It must have slipped his mind.

A representative from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol told The Daily Beast they could not comment on if the agency tried to get the ability to access traditional debit cards.

The department has temporarily suspended the use of these devices, but the commissioner seemed adamant that they must be used again in the near future. He claims theyre too useful for identifying fraudulent card use.

The commissioner also confirmed that law enforcement divisions in at least 25 states have ERAD devices. Miller explained that there is further evidence of the possible widespread use of these devices, as the Department of Homeland Security already has a training video focused on the ERAD device, meaning it could be a major program. Why the Department of Homeland Security is involved is anyones guess.

Miller compared the ERAD to the Stingray cellphone surveillance devices used across the country, which were deployed by police department years before anyone knew about them. Once one police department gets a new piece of technology, others tend to follow.

My suspicion is that as people move away from cash, law enforcement is trying to keep up, Miller said. Civil asset forfeiture programs can be highly lucrative for police departments.

One of the strangest things about police using this technology is it might not technically be legal, and that concern hasnt even been addressed yet. Henderson explained that its actually a felony in Oklahoma to take someones debit card, including a prepaid debit card, and do any kind of fund transfer without the card holders authorization. Every trooper who would then do that at the side of the road would be committing that felony, Henderson said. It's as if the Highway Patrol never thought about things like that.

A lawyer from Oklahomas Department of Public Safety said they do not believe using the ERAD would be a crime, because the funds are only seized at first and cannot be used until theres been a court order that allows that.

When those in charge of enforcing the law are the ones standing on shaky legal ground, the thin line between defending the law and breaking it is blurred.
In her new Forbes cover story, Silicon Valley sorceress Kim Kardashian flips through a binder of emojis, approving new images for her $1.99 Kimoji keyboard. In addition to graciously informing us that our desktops are outdated, worthless pieces of trash (I love my big computer, but I cant even tell you the last time I sat in front of it, she told the magazine), Kardashian divulges that she is really intrigued with the tech world. The tech world is feeling her too; released way back in December, Kimoji remains among the top 50 paid apps on iTunes. While we dont know exactly what kind of revenue this Kardashian brainchild has generated, Kims mammoth social media following would suggest that profits are in the millions.

As The Hollywood Reporter noted in their recent ode to Kimoji, emojis are a genius way to make money while simultaneously allowing your fan base to market your brand for youan endless, nausea-inducing feedback loop of celebrity self-promotion. Naturally, Kimojis success triggered an onslaught of copycat keyboards. In light of this market saturation, were here to help you decide which celebrity emoji keyboard has earned a spot on your smartphone.

Justmoji by Justin Bieber

Whether youre a diehard Belieber, Selena Gomez in a moment of weakness, or an EDM connoisseur with a taste for very expensive beats, every Justmoji downloader has one crucial thing in common: $2.99 to spend on a Justin Bieber emoji keyboard. For the price of a large piece of Canadian maple candy, you can peruse these images of Biebers favorite things, which include a Bible, Justin Biebers face, Justin Biebers abs, and Justin Biebers boxer-briefed crotch. Justmoji is the perfect emoji keyboard for anyone who doesnt feel weird sending their friends a cartoon rendering of a 22-year-olds junk. If youve ever wanted to ask someone Where Are U Now, but dont know where the umlaut is on your iPhone, this just might be the celebrity keyboard for you.

Kimoji by Kim Kardashian

Your waist is better-trained than a Victorian debutantes and your acrylic fingernails prevent you from doing simple tasks like opening your apartment door or extracting a single grape from a bowl of grapes. Youre a perfectly contoured blank slate on to which fans and critics can project their deepest fears and most fervent desires. You enjoy mimosas, Googling yourself, and long walks from your glam room to your walk-in closet. You own Yeezys. Lets be real, you probably downloaded Kimoji in December.

Fetty Wap Emoji

Your dream: Shot in your left eye during a badass gunfight

Your reality: Glaucoma

Your emoji keyboard: Fetty Wap emoji pack (available through the Moji keyboard)

MuvaMoji by Amber Rose and ChyMoji by Blac Chyna

You and your bestie are two sexually liberated ladies just trying to make it in a mans world; naturally, you communicate almost exclusively through MuvaMoji and ChyMoji. These two emoji keyboards cover your full range of feminine emotions, from feeling myself at the club to Im With Her to pregnant in a crop top. The combined power of Blac Chyna and Amber Rose gives you all the tools you need to seduce a Kardashian and/or remind your baby daddy what hes missing.

Rick Ross Emoji

When given a choice between lobster and steak, do you order the Surf and Turf? Do strangers sometimes come up to you and call you Channing Tatum? Do you have a more is more approach to accessories, facial hair, and year-round furs? Are pears the best fruit?

Sheenoji by Charlie Sheen

Are you looking for the perfect way to tell someone that they should get tested?

Wizmoji by Wiz Khalifa

Are you looking for the perfect way to tell someone that you smoke weed?

Gabbymoji by Gabby Douglas

Are you INCREDIBLE?
In the twelfth century BCE, civilizations across the Mediterranean came to an end.

The cause of this phenomenonknown to some as the worlds first Dark Ageis debated. Climate change, the ensuing collapse of social structures, and local uprisings all contributed the cultural apocalypse. Yet even as civilizations collapsed, a new group emerged: a shadowy group known as the Sea Peoples. They are almost unknown outside of academic circles, but this migrant group, which travelled the Mediterranean in search of homes and new lives, left a deep impression in the region. We dont know where they came from, and we dont know where they went, but over the course of the twelfth century they left enough of a mark to become ancient scapegoats for global catastrophe.

Almost everything we know about the Sea Peoples comes to us from Egyptian inscriptions. According to the Egyptian texts, they set up camp in Syria before proceeding down the coast of Canaan (including parts of modern Syria, Lebanon, and Israel) and into the Nile delta of Egypt. It was in Egypt that the Sea Peoples met their match. They were twice defeatedin 1207 and 1177 BCEby Merneptah and Rameses III. But, according to the Egyptians, in their wake there was destruction: the great civilizations of the daythe Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, and the Cypriots all crumbled.
PARIS  On the day she was murdered, Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch took to the Internet, where she once again uploaded the sorts of sultry images that had gained her thousands of followers.

Often referred to as Pakistan's Kim Kardashian, the similarly curvaceous 26-year-old, whose real name was Fouzia Azeem, posted the usual provocative photos of herself on Instagram and Facebook, this time sporting a tight black top and a glittery headband. Meticulously made up, her eyes are fixed on the camera, her lips the perfect shade of petal pink.

That night, just hours after she put the pictures up, Baloch was strangled in her family's home near Multan, allegedly by her own brother in a so-called honor killing.

"Yes of course, I strangled her," Baloch's brother, Muhammad Wasim, told reporters at a press conference shortly after his arrest.

"She was on the ground floor while our parents were asleep on the roof top," he continued, describing how he had given her a sleeping pill before killing her.

Wasim explained that his sister's "intolerable behavior" is what drove him to murder her, and that her racy persona was bringing "dishonor" to the family.

"I am not embarrassed at all over what I did," he said.

Wasim's nonchalant attitude and lack of remorse are all-too-common in Pakistan, where the country's Human Rights Commission recorded nearly 1,000 honor crimes against women in 2015. The real figure is believed to be significantly higher, due to underreporting.

The Human Rights Commission cites "domestic disputes, alleged illicit relations, or exercising the right of choice in marriage" as the main motivations for such killings, but cases such as Baloch's, in which a man believes that other actions of a female relative are somehow "dishonoring" the family name, also are alarmingly frequent.

Last September, for instance, a Sargodha man fatally shot two of his sisters for what he dubbed "bad character." And in the same month, another man gunned down three of his cousins in the name of "honor" in a village in Punjab province.

Scroll through Baloch's Instagram feed, and you won't find any Kardashian-esque nudes. There is some cleavage here, a bare thigh there, and numerous suggestive pouts. But compared to the risque images that clog the accounts of American social media celebrities, Baloch's photos are quite tame.

In socially conservative Pakistan, however, where female modesty is the de facto norm, critics of Baloch considered the pictures borderline obscene. And on her social media pages, words of support share space with harsh and, at times, aggressive attacks.

"What's ur goal? U want to [be] most insulted person in the world?" reads a recent comment on one of Baloch's pictures on Facebook.

"If u closely look at her face, u can see clearly she looks just like a prostitute," reads another.

Other commenters decry her "slutty, porn star behavior" and "disrespect" for her country, and many degenerate into full-on misogynistic abuse and bullying.

The controversy Baloch whipped up, however, went beyond her suggestive selfies and videos. She was also a provocative feminist, often speaking out against Pakistan's patriarchal social norms and calling herself a "one-woman army." Her photos and videos were her way of thumbing her nose at Pakistan's patriarchal society. By dressing as she wanted and flaunting her sexuality, Baloch believed that she was challenging the country's repressive religious and social status quo.

"At least international media can see what i am up to," she wrote in a July 4 post on Facebook with a link to a recent BBC radio segment about her. "How i am trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people who don't wanna come out of their shells of false beliefs and old practices."

"As a women we must stand up for ourselves," she posted on July 14, just a day before she was killed. "I believe I am a modern day feminist. I believe in equality I don't think there is any need to label ourselves just for sake of society."

Baloch created another firestorm when she posted selfies with prominent cleric Mufti Qavi back in June. "When Qandeel Baloch met Mufti Qavi: A guideline on how NOT to learn Islam," read the headline of the country's Express Tribune news site. And she was in the spotlight again in recent days when it was revealed she was previously married, and was currently estranged from her young son.

"I never accepted him as my husband in my heart or mind," Baloch said in a recent interview with the Pakistani news site Dawn, explaining how her parents had married her off against her will when she was a teenager. "How I spent a year and a half with him, only I know. And I only did it because of the child. Otherwise I wouldnt have spent even one month with him."

Baloch divorced her husband, whom she claimed was abusive with her, and set off to begin a modeling career before becoming an Internet sensation. She called her success an act of revenge on her country.

"This patriarchal society is bad," she told Dawn journalist Hufsa Chaudry. "Being a girl, think yourself, how difficult it is to move around as a woman in this society. How many men do you encounter who bother you?"

Less than a month before she was killed, Baloch approached authorities, asking for protection after some of her personal identification documents were leaked on social media. She had also been receiving death threats and was considering moving out of the country.

Despite her fears, Baloch continued to upload her provocative photos and her defiant feminist messages. In her last Facebook post before her death she wrote:

"No matter how many times I will be pushed down underI will bounce back. I will keep on achieving and I know you will keep on hating...DAMN but who cares."

Sadly for Baloch, her own brother cared enough to kill her.
BATON ROUGE, Louisiana  Three police officers are dead. Two more are wounded. And a sheriff's deputy is fighting for his life they were all being shot by a gunman who attacked the officers on Sunday.

The slain officers include a man who had only recently joined the force and a 10-year veteran with a reputation for heroism. Marine veteran Matthew Gerald had only been patrolling on his own for 12 days before he was shot and killed. Officer Montrell Jackson was once injured in the line of duty, according to The Advocate, trying to save a toddler from a burning building.

Meanwhile, a 41-year-old deputy is in critical condition and two others are being treated for non-life threatening injuries after they exchanged gunfire with a man, according to authorities at a press conference Sunday afternoon. The shots were heard across America, which is reeling with the second large-scale attack on police officers since five were murdered in Dallas. President Obama in a statement called it an attack on "civilized society."

Col. Mike Edmonson of the Louisiana State Police told reporters that police received a call at 8:40 a.m. of a man carrying a rifle around the B-Quik gas station and convenience store just a mile from the police station. At the same time, two officers on the scene radioed they observed an individual in all black with a rifle. Two minutes later, at 8:42, came a call of shots fired. At 8:44 units from the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office arrived and exchanged fire with the suspect, killing him. Part of the exchange was captured by an eyewitness.

Police did not immediately disclose any additional details about the suspect, but CBS and NBS News, citing law enforcement sources, identified the alleged gunman as 29-year-old Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri.

Immediately after the shooting, police asked the public to be on the lookout for men wearing all black or all camouflage. Hours later, police got a call from a Walmart store of two men wearing black t-shirts and camouflage shorts, according to The Advocate. The men, driving a car with Texas license plates, were apprehended at a gas station in Addis, southwest of Baton Rouge. It is not known if the men were arrested in connection to the shooting.

The Baton Rouge attack on police is the latest in a string of violence involving police that began when two white Baton Rouge cops shot and killed Alton Sterling, a black man who was selling CDs at a convenience store. A day later, a Hispanic officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop. The killings kicked off a mass mobilization of Black Lives Matters protests across the country, including in Dallas where black militant Micah Johnson killed five police officers in Dallas in apparent revenge for Sterling and Castile's deaths.

Last Friday, Baton Rouge police said they had broken up a plot to kill police officers with firearms stolen from a pawn shop.

The cycle of violence was almost too much to take, officer Jackson wrote in a haunting Facebook post days before he was killed.

Ive experienced so much in my short life and the past 3 days have tested me to the core, he wrote. I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.

President Obama denounced the second large-scale attack on law enforcement in as many weeks.

Calling it an "attack on all of us," Obama made his remarks just a week after he eulogized five officers murdered in Dallas. "I said that killer would not be the last person who tries to make us turn on each other, nor will today's killer," he said, adding, "That's up to us."

East Baton Rouge Sheriff Sid Gautreaux echoed Obama's sentiment at a press conference before the president spoke.

With Gods help we will get through this. To me, this is not so much about gun control as it is about whats in mens hearts. And until we come together as a nation and as a people to heal as a people. Iif we dont do that and this madness continues, we will surely perish as a people.
On the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, in a motel just outside of Manchester, I wrote the final paragraph of my book, Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Fuhrer. Until then, Goffstown, New Hampshire had not been renowned as a literary inspiration, but the Courtyard Marriott was all the muse I needed.

For the prior four years, I had been a time-traveling double agent shuttling between the heyday of vaudeville in the early 20th century and the knock-about spectacle known as the 2016 campaign.

Political journalists, of course, routinely write works of popular history. But my compatriots favor serious excavations like doorstop biographies of Millard Fillmore and re-examinations of the tariff issue in the 1892 presidential campaign. In contrast, I wrote Hustling Hitler, the story of my con-man great-uncle Freeman Bernstein, dreaming of Zero Mostel of the movie version of The Producers playing the title role.

Born in 1873 in Troy, New York, the son of an immigrant peddler, Freeman Bernstein was famous as a leather-lunged vaudeville agent, an ill-fated silent-movie producer, an inept horserace fixer, skilled card-sharp, artful jewel smuggler and, ultimately, the man who nicked the Nazis in a 1936 nickel deal. Variety lovingly chronicled the exploits of this Broadway character (who pre-dated Damon Runyon) calling him "The Pet of Times Square."

My attraction to Freeman Bernstein had little to do with family genealogy, a topic that normally interests me as much as Gregorian chants. But ever since I came upon my first news clip about my great-uncle (a 1937 Los Angeles Times story headlined, "Metals Broker Denies Bilking Hitler"), I was hooked. Especially since the Los Angeles Times article mentioned that Freeman Bernstein was arrested in Hollywood on a fugitive warrant from New York after he left Mae West's apartment at midnight.

Life lesson: If you can mention Adolf Hitler and Mae West in the first paragraph of a book proposal, you're probably in good shape.

I have covered the last ten presidential campaigns, following White House dreamers across the country. I even wrote a book, One-Car Caravan, about the early skirmishing for the 2004 Democratic nomination. But in reconstructing the life of Freeman Bernstein, I had no one to interview, since he died (broke, of course) in 1942.

Today's digitized newspaper archives allow a researcher to find specific names in publications that were never indexed. As a result, I unearthed about 2,500 clips on Freeman Bernstein and his vaudeville star wife, May Ward. Reading bygone newspapers like the New York World, the New York Sun and the Morning Telegraph, I realized thatdespite segregation and economic injusticethe first three decades of the 20th century were for many a glorious time in America.

Show business sparked from vaudeville (my great-uncle booked fledgling performers like Al Jolson and George Burns) to Broadway (George M. Cohan, Eddie Foy, and the Barrymores were all on stage in a typical week in 1912). Competitive newspapers trafficked in exposes, gossip, humor, and great writing. America radiated a sense of hopefulness, a collective belief that progress was on the march, which lasted until the 1929 stock market crash.

In short, I'm ready to go back, if I can take antibiotics with me.

Publishing a biography of a colorful grifter while covering the 2016 campaign has prompted many people to ask, "Was your great-uncle Freeman similar in nature to Donald Trump?"

Admittedly, Freeman did jail time while he was successfully fighting extradition from California over the Hitler hustle. It is true that he was banned from racetracks in three countriesand you had to work hard to be judged too unethical for Tijuana. Honesty also compels me to mention that Freeman Bernstein ran a very successful Irish Festival in Boston in 1929 under the unlikely name of Roger O'Ryan. Alas, my great-uncle (soon called "O'Ryanstein" in the Boston papers) was indicted for grand larceny after his Irish alter ego unaccountably disappeared with the gate receipts.

Despite this checkered legal and financial record (including two bankruptcies), Freeman possessed a big-hearted generosity of spirit lacking in a certain bilious billionaire.

After a rare big payday, my great-uncle flashed a $100 bill to pay for a $2 breakfast at a Times Square hotel. The moment the waiter handed my great-uncle $98 in change, a down-on-his-luck acquaintance asked to borrow $75. Without hesitating, Freeman gave him most of most of his current net worth. As Variety declared in its obit, "Bernstein had the native ability to borrow cash and his credit was considerable because when he was again in the chips he paid off."

Freeman embraced foreignersand, unlike Trump, not just rich ones or international beauty-contest winners. Whenever my great-uncle traveled (and he was politely escorted out of many countries), he relished the chance to try out his cons on new unsuspecting audiences.

But Freeman also could be fearlesstrying to get an actor out of Russia in the midst of Lenin's early purges and visiting Nazi Germany as an American Jew in late 1935. He even ran a circus tour in Outer Mongolia, accepting furs as the admission fee.

For the most part, my great-uncle steered clear of partisan politics. Sure, he tried to sell the 1916 Woodrow Wilson campaign on commissioning him to produce a full-length movie called Prosperity. And he arranged for the distribution of millions of copies of a Yiddish pamphlet boosting Herbert Hoover as a "Modern Moses" in 1928. But these were business propositionsnot Trumpian bids for power.

Freeman carried out his hustles with a smile on his face and the hope that his marks would come back for more. After he abandoned a vaudeville troupe in the Dominican Republic, the American vice counsel in Santo Domingo wired the FBI to arrest Bernstein when his ship docked in New York. The diplomat pegged Freeman perfectly as he warned the government agents not to believe "any suave story he may tell" because he "has a gift for making black look white."

Freeman Bernstein may have been a jail-bird, a bankrupt, and a con man. But he also had a code of honor, a beguiling honesty about himself and an appreciation of the foibles of his fellow man. He was willing to let the cards fall where they may, though he would have preferred to cut the deck. In short, I am proud to say that my grifter great-uncle, the Pet of Times Square, was nothing like Donald Trump.

Roll Call columnist Walter Shapiro is covering his tenth presidential campaign. He is also a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and a lecturer in political science at Yale. His new book, Hustling Hitler: The Jewish Vaudevillian Who Fooled the Fuhrer, is published by Blue Rider Press.
It was later in life, and in light of all the scandal generated by Princess Diana, Prince Charles and younger royals, that Princess Margaret reportedly said, ''They leave me alone these days. Today they have other fish to fry.''

With her drinking, partying, and alleged affairs with the likes of Mick Jagger and Peter Sellers, Margarets public imagewhich orbited from tragic to passionate to louche and unpredictablemade her, pre-Princess Diana, the most dramatic and scandal-generating Royal.

The Queens younger sister, she was not bound by the all-consuming duty and responsibility that the Queen, as head of the Commonwealth, was bound by. Think of Princess Margaret, and you think of her early thwarted love, lounging on Mustique, attending the ballet, and partying.

She mixed in society and showbiz circles, and she also knew shadier types like the ex-gangster John Bindon, whose mysterious relationship with her is one focus for Richard Stirlings stage play, A Princess Undone, which will premiere at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in the UK on October 19.

There are few British actressesbar her Dynasty nemesis Joan Collinsthat could be better chosen to play Margaret than Stephanie Beacham, who plays Margaret in Stirlings show.

It is set in 1993, the year Bindon (who reportedly could hang five half-pint beer mugs on his large penis) died.

In the play, Bindon comes to visit Margaret, as she considers what to do with a trove of letters that contains scandalous information pertaining to Charles and Diana, and yet more scandalous information pertaining to Margaret herself.

She was Diana before Diana, and it must have been difficult, Beacham told the Daily Mail. Its always difficult being second fiddle. She adored her sister, but she didnt have a place. She was president of this and that; she loved the good life; she loved being a princess. But she was difficult, and sometimes sad.

"Men arent called difficult," Beacham added. "A 'difficult' woman simply means that they are of a personality that can both delight and affrontand I think thats true of Margaret."

The source of Margaret's restlessness was sourced in her placing in the family. She was not-the-Queen, and from a young agewith the Queen groomed to take on the mantle of monarchwas forced to find a way to live a life in her sister's shadow, while still remaining loyal to her and the family.

The restlessness and drama of Margarets life was first crystallized by her falling in love with, and then having to renounce her relationship with, Group Captain Peter Townsend, her father King George VIs former equerry. Townsend was divorced from his first wife, and became involved with Margaret. They wanted to marry, but the religious mores of the time dictated against it, even if the British public backed Margarets personal desires above such religious and social strictures.

In 1955, Margaret put an end to fevered media speculation by releasing a statement, finally drawing a line under the couples relationship: I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage.

But mindful of the Church's teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others. I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in doing so I have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend.

In 1960, Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon), and from 1966, if you believe all the gossip, her extra-marital affairs with men began, some extremely famous like Jagger, Sellers, and David Niven.

This was the dawn of the era of Margaret, the royal diva, who swung wholeheartedly along with the Sixties.At a high society New York event when, reportedly asked by a hostess how the Queen was, that Princess Margaret was said to have replied, Which one? My sister, my mother or my husband? (Lord Snowdon has denied rumors he had gay affairs.)

In the 1970s, her holidays on Mustiqueand pictures of her with the much younger Roddy Llewellyncemented Margaret's image as shamelessly high-living, and caused scandal.

She once told Jean Cocteau, "Disobedience is my joy." Exceptionally grand, she expected to be called 'Princess Margaret' by her own children in front of visitors; and did not like guests to leave parties before she did. John Lennon called her 'Priceless Margarine.'

Boy, did she smokeup to 60 cigarettes a day. A section of her left lung was removed in 1985, even though the tissue was discovered was to be non-malignant. The Daily Telegraph summarized her years of illness, thus: "She suffered throat infections, laryngitis, migraine, gastro-enteritis, bronchitis, pneumonia and mild hepatitis."

Despite the advice of her physicians, she would not quit smoking. A stroke followed, then she burnt her foot badly stepping into a scalding hot bath in 1999. A series of strokes left her partially paralyzed.

The photograph of Margaret, in a wheelchair looking incredibly frail and certainly frailer than her mother, the Queen Mother when the latter turned 101 in 2001, was in stark contrast to Norman Parkinson's famous studio picture of her, the Queen, and the Queen Mother as a shimmeringly glamorous trio in 1980.

In the 2001 picture she is in a wheelchair, her arm in a sling, and half-covered in a blanket. The focus of Princes William and Harry seems to be on her, rather than the Queen Mother.

The Queen Mother would outlive her daughter. Margaret died, aged 71, in February 2002, the Queen Mother a month later. In the last days of her life, Margaret reportedly watched re-runs of Batman for comfort. She died peacefully in her sleep.

Observers wondered if the extravagant, sad, slightly crazy and health-wrecking rollercoaster of her life would have unfolded in the way it did had she been allowed to marry Townsend. Perhaps Stirling's play, and Beacham's performance, will convincingly interrogate thisthe intriguing combination of high-rolling fun, capriciousness, snobbery, family loyalty, and personal sadness that seems to have been Margaret's lot.

And the mischief. However impossible she sounds, one can smile at anecdotal tales such as Margaret insisting that at parties waiters be stationed every 50 feet with a bottle of Famous Grouse in hand to top her glass up.

When she dropped her coat at another function, the story goes that a man immediately offered to pick it up. Margaret's response: "No. I'll never remember where it is if you move it."
Growing up, Kayam Mathias said he was beaten 20 to 30 times a day.

"I grew to be numb to it, to quell the rage within and just not feel anything."

That didnt bother him so much, he said. He could take it.

"What I cared about was when my infant sister was beaten and there was nothing I could do about it. To hear her screams and be powerless  and that even if you tried to stop you couldn't, is a crushing thing to go through. It broke my spirit, man. I still remember her screams to this day.

Its been almost eight years since Mathias, now 22, left the Twelve Tribes, the controversial commune and religious sect he was born into, but the memories, and the anger at the way he and his family were allegedly treated is still fresh. He says heand other members of the sectwere regularly beaten by adults in the commune as a form of discipline.

"The first time I used an ATM or a vending machine was when I left," Mathias said. "I knew nothing about the world. It was all so strange and new and was like being born suddenly with an adult body, feeling like a child or an alien, but needing to act like an adult to survive.

This year, he finally decided to say something about it. In June posts began showing up on the Facebook page of the Blue Blinds Bakery, a quaint and well-reviewed business located in Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the first time since 2012. "[W]e have decided to use our Facebook page as an active evangelism tool," someone wrote on Thursday of last week. What followed was a couple of outrageously offensive screeds, including one that began, "As promised, let's talk about the blacks!"

"One of the most frequent questions we get is, 'Are you racist?' The answer is no," the author wrote. "But we do believe that slavery is necessary. There's a difference."

It was speculated that the post, which picked up steam this week among the Boston food community and has since been shared over 300 times, was the work of a hacker. It was actually Mathias. Hed set up the Facebook page years ago, he claimed, and still had access to it. The Daily Beast reached out to Mathias through the Blue Blinds Bakery Facebook page, and he was able to confirm his identity by forwarding us a photocopy of his passport. A member of Twelve Tribes confirmed that Mathias is an ex-member, who had access to the Facebook account.

It's time this ends, Mathias said, referring to the churchs alleged secrecy.

"We completely disavow all the stuff on that Facebook page 100 percent, without any exception, said a man, who identified himself as Zahar, who would not give his last name, when I called the bakery to ask if they indeed advocated for slavery. (Only Twelve Tribes members work at the bakery.) "If you want to know what we believe, we actually have a website.

Based on their website, prior reporting, and firsthand accounts, it appears that what they do actually believe isn't too far off.

The website Zahar referenced is TwelveTribes.com, the home of a group founded in 1972 by a man named Elbert "Gene" Spriggs in Chattanooga, Tennessee , that promotes a sort of hybrid of Christian fundamentalism, Hebrew Roots, and Messianic Judaism. The group has some 3,000 to 4,000 members in isolated, self-sustaining communes around the world that operate businesses like Blue Blinds, a chain of restaurants called The Yellow Deli, and a large construction business. It has dodged accusations of cult-like behavior ever since its inception.

"The group went from being this hippie thing that was kind of cool to turning into this cultist, religious, fucked-up kind of thing," a second former member told me. "It's like the frog-stew analogy. You throw a frog in cold water, and he doesn't realize he's getting hot until he's boiled to death.

***

According to former members of the Twelve Tribes, Spriggs, the groups leader, has allegedly preached that black people are destined for slavery and that homosexuals should be put to deathas transcripts of his past sermons appear to show. The half-dozen former members who spoke to The Daily Beast also allege a culture of systematic child abuse, subjugation of women, and psychological torment.

A couple of years ago, a German documentary uncovered video of children in a local branch being beaten so terribly that the government led a raid and took the children away. In the video, Wolfram Kuhnigk, an RTL journalist, filmed 50 instances of beatings on camera, as the Independent reported . One former member who appears in the film recounts being regularly beaten for such trivial offenses as pretending to be an airplane. According to the groups teachings, children are not permitted to engage in any type of playing or fantasy.

Its a pattern of controversial behavior that has persisted in stories about the group for decades. "There are so many teachings that keep you from being who you are. They keep you from being human, a former member named Joellen Griffin told the Boston Herald in 2001. "You get so absorbed in the teachings that you lose your emotions and your ability to respond to situations. They seem like a tight-knit family, but you just don't know all the misery behind those eyeballs."

In 1984, authorities in Vermont undertook a similar raid, liberating over 100 children from a Twelve Tribes compound, according to The New York Times . A judge determined that the raid was unconstitutional and the children were returned. Interestingly, as the San Diego Reader reported , the public defender at the time, Jean Swantko, joined the group soon after.

An investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2013 told similar stories of members who had escaped the group, as did an investigation last year by Pacific Standard , which reported that children were allegedly beaten multiple times per day. In 2001 the New York Post launched an investigation that resulted in some of the groups New York businesses being cited for violating child labor laws.

***

Despite in-depth investigations into several locations by newspapers and magazines, both current and some former Twelve Tribes members have repeatedly insisted in the press that they do not abuse their children.

Most are gross exaggerations of scandalous, isolated activity throwing all members of Twelve Tribes under the bus, the third ex-member, who also asked not to use his name because he had family still in the group told me. The fact is there have been untold scandals within the Twelve Tribes communities, but the actions or misdeeds of a few can by no means accurately or rationally surmise the beliefs, practices, or daily lives of the many individuals that make up the whole.

Every person has their story, he went on. Every family has their secrets, their dirty laundry, their bad habits or poor decisions. Everyone must find their way in this world and we don't do it perfectly all the time. We learn from mistakes, things are most often not as they first seem to be.

Thats no doubt the case when it comes to the Twelve Tribes, but according to many whove made their way out of the group, those mistakes have been adding up for a long time.

A man who answered the phone number listed on Twelve Tribes site refused to give his name and would not answer any questions. He directed me to the Blue Blinds Bakery for any questions about their Facebook page.

"We believe in corporal punishment, and we stand by that, but we do not believe in child abuse by any means," Zahar, the bakery employee, told me. "And we believe that a lot of the problems that you see in the world today probably could have been avoided if children understood cause and effect and understood consequences.

Internal documents from the group reviewed by The Daily Beast lay out the justifications for their treatment of children, including the use of wooden reeds for punishment and training.

The rod must be used to correct wrong thoughts, wrong words, and wrong deeds; thoughts are powerfulthere is no sin without thinking about it, Our Child Training Manual explains. Materials on the group's website lay out similar practices.

Train your child to submit willingly to his discipline; make sure he bends over submissively; guilt will not be removed unless he submits willingly.

Discipline is vital. If you dont discipline your child according to the Scriptures, you are not going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, it continues. When we see a child receive what we consider mistreatment from such parents, we must remember that God is in control and has chosen to place the soul life of that child under those parents, specifically.

The documents compare provisions against corporal punishment to the laws of totalitarian states, and deny the right of the government to intervene: The governments of such nations as Sparta, Hitlers Germany, and communist Russia have usurped the parents role, but today parental authority is being undermined in the USA through compulsory public education, child advocacy agencies, and child-abuse laws. Parents must not allow government to usurp their authority in those areas in which God holds the parents alone accountable.

Corporal punishment is rooted in the Twelve Tribes literal reading of the Acts of the Apostles, according to Zahar. "We're fundamental Christians and we take the Bible literally," he told me. "We follow the pattern of the early church, early Christians, and they shared everything in common. We believe that Christianity kind of went off that pattern of living together and sharing everything and actually taking care of each other. That's what we're trying to get back to, to the pattern in Acts II."

While he said they do not condone homosexuality, they also allege they do not believe in violence and would welcome an LGBT person into their home. As for the slavery question, he countered that the group has black members. In fact, he said one was working with him at the bakery as we spoke.

***

The second former member who spoke to The Daily Beast (and also asked to not use his name because of concerns about his family) said that corporal punishment is rampant. He told me he was hit 30 to 40 times a day growing up in the church.

"I remember getting whipped so hard I didn't know if I was going to survive. I couldn't breath, I was gasping for air.

"They used to teach that anyone in the group could spank any children, so some random, creepy motherfucker could grab you and beat your ass."

The former member, a construction worker who was born into the group, laughed when I asked him if the Facebook posts were consistent with the group's beliefs.

"That's pretty much spot on. Basically, if you want to show the world what they believe, get your hands on their teachings about black people, Jews, children, womenthere's about 50,000 of these 'teachings,'" he said.

Multiculturalism increases murder, crime, and prejudice, reads one such teaching on the groups website . It goes against the way man is. It places impossible demands on people to love others who are culturally and racially different. This is unnatural it forces people to go against their instinctive knowledge, like trying to love sodomites. They are told, You can't discriminate. Although discrimination is viewed as an evil sin, it is still within a person's prerogative (right) to segregate himself.

"Their teachings on black people are that they're supposed to be slaves, about how God cursed black people back in the day, said the same former member. It's crazy. Unless a black person is in the community, they need to serve white people. It's so racist it will blow your mind.

Copies of sermons given by Spriggs in 1998 and 1991, and reviewed by The Daily Beast, lay out the groups attitude on race. Martin Luther King and others have been inspired by the evil one to have forced equality, states one titled Cham and the Civil Rights Movement Unraveling the Races of Man. Slavery is the only way for some people to be useful in society. They wouldn't do anything productive without being forced to. They would be worthless fellows. (Cham is a reference to Ham, the son of Noah whom Biblical tradition credits with populating Africa.)

It goes downhill from there.

What a marvelous opportunity that blacks could be brought over here to be slaves so that they could be found worthy of the nations, read a second sermon. A good master would work by the sweat of his brow. If his slaves were lazy and disrespectful, he would beat them, which is what he was supposed to do.

It should be noted that the group does have black members, although they were not able to be reached by press time. When The Daily Beast reached out to the Twelve Tribes about the contents of the sermons, a spokesperson declined comment. The ex-members I spoke with explained this contradiction by noting that minorities who give themselves over to the Twelve Tribes are viewed differently than those who do not.

***

Women are meant to subjugate themselves to men, are allegedly required to wear head coverings that "serve as an outward symbol of her subservience to her man," and are infrequently allowed to talk, claimed one former female member I spoke with, who asked not to use her real name for fear of retaliation, and provided photos of herself today and during her time in the group. She said that when she was 14 years old, a boy her age kissed her innocently. From that point forth, they were separated on opposite sides of the country and not permitted to communicate, but nevertheless were sentenced to be married when they turned 18.

She told me that she first tried to escape when they were married. She was gone for three months, but she claims the group guilted her into coming back, saying her husband would burn in hell for eternity if she didn't. The pair was relocated to Florida, where family members outside of the group whod taken her in couldn't find her. Three months into their marriage, they were reprimanded for not yet having any children, she said. Previous reports on the group outline persistent pressure for young women to give birth to many children .

"There are a lot of good people there, but they don't understand, they're so brainwashed," the male former member told me. "They find themselves defending stuff that doesn't make sense."

One way for the group to ensure total loyalty, he said, is by divesting members of any ties to their former lives, requiring them to donate all of their possessions and money to the church. "My ex-girlfriend's dad died of cancer after he left the group. They realized hed had it for 14 years. If theyd caught it any time before that he might've lived, but they neglected his health for so long. They do not go to the doctor ever, unless there's some sort of catastrophic injury."

The Boston Herald story cited numerous instances of stillbirth, with women allegedly being refused medical treatment during labor. "In fact, stillbirths are so common that the cult's private burial ground in Island Pond, Vermont, includes several unmarked graves of dead children," the story reads.

Mathias said he took over the bakerys Facebook page in part to expose Twelve Tribes, but also as a means of explaining what his bizarre life inside the group was like.

For those who leave the Twelve Tribes, the assimilation process isn't just difficult practically speaking. As Mathias said, it comes with a lot of psychological stress.

"Having talked to people who have left, it's a five-year cycle of depression, self-loathing, doubt, hopelessness, and then finally acceptance and recovery. In my weird way, this is the acceptance stage," he said. "I'm putting everything that happened out there in the hopes that people will realize what's going on, but also as a way just to talk about it. Think about trying to have this conversation with a friend: 'Hey, so I was in a religious cult that abused me. I just left a few years ago.' It puts people off."

Attempts by The Daily Beast to reach Mathias family for comment were unsuccessful.

Chris Pike is another former Twelve Tribes memberhe belonged to the group for 14 years. He came to the community, like many others, through the Grateful Dead scene, and after a period of bereavement and loss in his life. While Twelve Tribes recruiters do prey on people in his position, he said, he was clear that it was his choice to join.

It doesnt need to be sensationalized. Its just screwed all on its own. But I also want a clearer picture portrayed of the community, he said.

Its not all demonized. Theres some of the nicest salt of the earth people there, and its not all creepy. Thats the delicate thing people dont realize. Why do people join in the first place? What do you think I was attracted to, beating children? Are you kidding me?

While the teachings instruct parents to encourage their children seven times before disciplining them, thats not always how it works, said Pike, who was a teacher himself for a time.

I can tell you everyone you come across thats a former member will tell you that just doesnt happen, its actually the opposite, said Pike. They spank seven times more than they encourage. Some parents are very good and do try, and then theres the ones that are not. Its all on an individual basis.

It has the potential to be that wonderful, but also has the potential to be that horrible. And it does.

Chris said hes exasperated by the coverage of the Tribes over the years, as it never leads to any real help. What he wants to see is someone step up and show a real path forward for ex-members. He particularly wants help for the children, he said, who are often lost, entering a world they dont know, with nothing to their names.

Im so tired of watching the media selling papers off the Twelve Tribes and theyre not helping. I hope somebody extends a helping hand and says, Hey, any philanthropic people out there want to help these people, because they need some help. They need some help, said Pike.

Theres got to be a landing strip. Theres got to be a cushionand theres not for these kids. We don't need Bible reeducation, we need a helping hand out of the mess so that we can build a solid support system to help the children and ex-members.

***

The former female member I spoke with, said one of her first memories was of being beaten so badly with a 2x4 that she went home black and blue from her neck to her kneecaps. She was four years old.

"I couldn't get myself to raise my kids the way they wanted me to. That's why I left, because of them. The way they brainwash you and stuffI probably would still be there if I didn't have children," she said.

Still, says the ex-member who is skeptical of media reports about the group, the despicable actions of a few do not fully represent the group as a whole. All six of the ex-members I spoke to, in fact, said there are many decent people involved.

Is the Twelve Tribes a religious sect full of manipulation, nepotism, elitism, haves and have nots in spite of their ideals of equality for all? Yes! he said. Does the Twelve Tribes have a leadership system full of egomaniacal religious fundamentalists? Yes! Have there been cases of child abuse within families of the Twelve Tribes? Yes...Does the Twelve Tribes have a system of belief regarding race that is misleading? Yes! Does it promote or practice hate against different races of the earth within or without? No! Do the teachings of the Twelve Tribes come from one man? Yes! Do all members of the Twelve Tribes adhere to said teachings? No!

Many of the members, he and others explained, want to live simple lives in the hopes of pleasing God in the way theyve been taught. But, he added, that gets complicated when theyre not encouraged to think on their own, or draw their own conclusions about life outside of the group.

Do members work without pay? Yes, it's a commune with a common pot. Everyone that moves in knows that. There's no secret there. Children born and raised know that it's just life. Food, clothing and shelter are provided for. Some Twelve Tribes communities are rich while others are very poor. Some members have access to computers, the Internet, social media, news etc while others don't.

Does the Twelve Tribes believe they are the harbinger of the return of Jesus? Yes! Are there current members of the Twelve Tribes that live in turmoil every day doubting, struggling against believing that what they're doing is right? Yes. Are there current members that wish they could leave but don't know how? Yes! Should Twelve Tribes be exposed for what it really is? Yes!
Last July, five Francis Bacon paintings were stolen from a Spanish bankers home in central Madrid. Thieves disabled the alarm system before slipping into a fourth floor loft belonging to 59-year-old Jose Capelo, who was in London at the time. They escaped with roughly $28 million-worth of portraits and landscapes by the late British artist, bequeathed to Capelo when Bacon died.

Neither the doorman nor Capelos neighbors noticed anything suspicious the day of the robbery. It was the kind of spotless, silent job romanticized in art heist movies like The Thomas Crown Affair.

Seven months passed before detectives uncovered any substantial information about the robbery. In February, British private investigators passed on an anonymous email with photos of one of the paintings.

When forensic investigators tracked down the camera used to photograph the paintings, they had found a suspect. In late May, Spanish police released a statement confirming that seven people had been arrested in connection with the heist. None of the suspects were named. And none of the paintings were recoveredor even publicly identified.

The case seems to have baffled both local police and international investigators. But thats because every element of the story is baffling.

How did an aging Spanish bankernot an art collector, nor a fixture in the art worldcome to possess five paintings by Francis Bacon, whose Three Studies of Lucian Freud set a $142,405,000 world record at auction in 2013? How did such a sophisticated robbery unravel with such an unsophisticated email, easily traced back to a bumbling crew of thieves?

Jose Capelo met Francis Bacon in the 1980s at a London party hosted by Sir Frederick Ashton, a choreographer for The Royal Ballet. The two were introduced by Barry Joule, a close friend of Bacon, who was 78 at the time and took a shine to the handsome, 35-year-old Spanish financier.

Capelo was temperamentally different from the other men Bacon had lovedall brutes, as he often described them to his longtime friend and biographer, Michael Peppiatt.

In his dishy memoir, Peppiatt recalls the artist happily relaying that Capelo was a refined man: The marvelous thing is that I usually only find brutes and with Jose, who speaks every known language, I can talk about all sorts of things. What luck, then, that Capelo was also terribly well hung, almost too well hung, Bacon gushed.

He was physically infatuated with him, said Peppiatt, speaking to The Daily Beast from his home in Paris. And Capelo was fascinated by Bacon's brilliance and aura, but there was a huge age gap between them.

Peppiatt frequently had lunches with Capelo and Bacon in London at the height of their love affair. He describes feeling like a chaperone on one such occasion, writing in his memoir that he tried to extricate myself from this tryst, but neither man will accept my bowing out, although that does not stop them from becoming totally absorbed in a lengthy, delicate billing and cooing.

Hed never seen Bacon fawn over a man as he did over Capelo.

All the acid that was so present before was suddenly gone from his system, said Peppiatt. Being in love [with Jose] probably wasn't good for his painting. It calmed and tamed him and made him curiously benevolent. He'd always had a benevolent streak, but the characteristic harshness was pacified.

But Bacons advancing age and poor health (he was asthmatic) ultimately deterred Capelo.

I suppose the whole thing was rather tragic, Peppiatt said of their romance.

In April 1992, Bacon set off to Madrid in hopes of rekindling things with Capelo, despite his deteriorating health and against his doctors orders. Four days after arriving, he was rushed by ambulance to the Clinica Ruber, a medical facility specializing in respiratory dysfunction.

He spent six days in intensive care before suffering a fatal heart attack. No one came to visit him, including Capelo, according to one of the nuns who looked after him. She told Peppiatt that Bacon expressed no desire to see anyone.

Capelo was even less forthcoming.

There was no way of getting in touch with him, Peppiatt said, and I know that even if I had reached him there would have been a blank wall. Jose is very reluctant to talk about the relationship.

Indeed, he denied most everything that was said about him and Bacon in a taped conversation between the artist and Barry Joule, in which Bacon said he bequeathed $4 million to Capelo in his will (Joule leaked their chat to the London Sunday Times in 2014, claiming Bacon gave him permission to publicize the tapes after his death).

In 2013, a 1987 painting titled Portrait of Jose Capelo went up for sale at a blue-chip Swiss gallery. Capelo also posed for a 1991 triptych that is housed in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art, though Bacon told Joule that Capelo asked him to paint over his face.

Speaking to the Times, Capelo insisted that these conversations were full of inaccuracies and full of things that are not true.

He insisted that he has never had any inclination to profit from that, referring to his relationship with Bacon. Why should I do it now? I dont want to be a part of that.

As for Joules claims, Capelo declined to comment beyond stating: I dont have that much respect for his opinion and his approach and his views...I think I have a right to my privacy and I want to keep it that way.

Two years after Bacon died in Madrid, Capelo bought the apartment that was looted last July, according to El Pais.

Much has been written about the self-destructive sadists and thugs Bacon was drawn tonamely, Peter Lacy and George Dyer, both of whom committed suicide. They were brooding, brutish muses who manifested in the raw, grotesque imagery that characterized Bacons work.

Yet we know little about the artists last serious lover. Had Bacon met with Capelo in Madrid before he was rushed to the clinic? Why did Capelo not visit him at his death bed? Was he simply respecting Bacons wishes, as the nuns who took care of him suggested? (Capelo could not be reached for comment for this article.)

In the wake of the robbery, their relationship is perhaps more shrouded in mystery than ever. Capelo himself has become a source of intrigue.

Its tempting to read into his strident declarations about not wishing to profit from their relationship. Was this a subtle dig at Bacons former lover John Edwards, who was in charge of the late artists estate after Bacon died (Edwards himself died in 2003)? Or a genuine sentiment from a pathologically private man?

The National Police in Spain could not be reached for comment on the ongoing investigation. Nor did the Bacon estate return repeated requests for comment about the five stolen paintings.

Their collective worth may seem insignificant compared to what Bacons other works have fetched at auction. But most of us care less about the numbers than the untold stories behind these paintings. And if Capelo has any say in the matter, those stories likely wont be exposed any time soon.
ALEX SLITZ / THE GLEANER Joseph Hicks, 5, sits along the Ohio River fishing with his grandfather, Leon Hicks, both of Henderson, during the Come on Down to the River event at Audubon Mill Park in Henderson Saturday.

SHARE ALEX SLITZ / THE GLEANER Lilly Gobin, 5, of Henderson, participates in a toy boat race during the Come on Down to the River event at Audubon Mill Park in Henderson Saturday. ALEX SLITZ / THE GLEANER Dawson Gordon, 7, of Henderson, reacts after casting a line at the bass fishing station during the Come on Down to the River event at Audubon Mill Park in Henderson Saturday. ALEX SLITZ / THE GLEANER Twin sisters Mila Thompson, (left), and Jordan Thompson, 4, of Henderson, sit in a wagon before participating in the fishing contest during the Come on Down to the River event at Audubon Mill Park in Henderson Saturday. ALEX SLITZ / THE GLEANER Owlivia, an Eastern Screech owl that has one eye, greets attendees at the Audubon State Park booth during the Come on Down to the River event at Audubon Mill Park in Henderson Saturday.

By Abbey Nickel, abbey.nickel@thegleaner.com / @abbeynickel

Young fishing enthusiast Gareth Wilson was able to check another Henderson fishing destination off of his to-do list on Saturday.

For the first time, the 5-year-old fished in the Ohio River on Saturday during Henderson's Come on Down to the River event. His dad, Scott, was by his side. "He was so excited this morning because he knew he was going to be able to fish in this river," his mother, Rhonda, said. "My husband has taken him all over to fish, but this is his first time here."

Rhonda and her daughter Annabelle, 7, watched Gareth and Scott from a distance as they worked their way up and down Henderson's riverfront.

"He doesn't know we're up here, if he did, he would want to go do all of the other activities right away," Rhonda laughed. "He likes to be busy."

The sixth annual Come on Down to the River event was presented by the Depot Community Room, which partnered with the Children's Advocacy Center. Proceeds from the event go toward the Children's Advocacy Center.

The advocacy center's mission is to promote the prevention of child abuse and family violence in all its forms, and to improve services for child abuse victims and their families.

The Come on Down to the River event was created to help highlight and educate others about Henderson's river city heritage.

"The goal is to get people down to the river," said Donna Spencer, events coordinator with the Depot Community Room. "We want to be able to show people how important it is to Henderson's history and development."

Some of the activities throughout the day included a youth fishing tournament, kayak races, duck decoy decorating, inflatables and a celebrity dunking booth.

"We've always wanted this to be a fun day for kids in Henderson," Spencer said.

Members of the bass fishing team from Henderson County High School assisted some of the youngsters with their fishing techniques.

Chad Lander was showing 7-year-old Jayden Posey the different parts of a fishing pole and how to use them properly.

"The main thing we have to get across is they need to hold the button and then release before they try to cast their lines," Lander said. "And then when they get that look on their face when they get it, that's priceless."

Posey was ready to show off what he learned after getting some advice from Lander.

"I bet if I try hard enough, I can cast a line all the way to Texas," Posey said.

And while the day was certainly focused around fun and games, organizers also remembered the impact the event could have in the months to follow. Come on Down to the River is one of the biggest fundraisers for the Children's Advocacy Center.

"After our grants, we still need between $40,000 and $60,000 every year in donations and fundraising just to stay open," RaeAnn Reinicke, officer manager and medical coordinator for the Children's Advocacy Center said. "Last year we raised $10,000 at this event, this year we hope to raise at least $15,000. This is an important day for us."

And for some families, the day was important to them, too.

"It's nice to come out and just spend time with him," Scott Wilson said as Gareth continued to fish on Saturday. "Whether or not he catches anything doesn't really matter. The people here have been so helpful with the kids and have been encouraging them to keep trying even if they don't catch anything. It's nice to see how happy these kids are."
Beth Smith / The Gleaner Nea Cowan high-fives her daughter Tinsley earlier this month at their home in Clay. Tinsley, who is 11 months old, was born deaf but is a candidate for cochlear inplants in both ears that would allow her to hear.

SHARE Beth Smith / The Gleaner Tinsley Cowan plays on the floor of her family's home in Clay.

By Beth Smith of The Gleaner

Tinsley Cowan is 11 months old.

The daughter of Clay residents Blake and Nea Cowan, Tinsley has her mother's eyes, her daddy's cheeks as well as gifts and challenges all of her own.

Tinsley's gifts include a keen sense of observation which allows her to focus on the tiniest of details, whether it's a facial expression, a hand gesture or a piece of colored lint on the floor she's determined to touch.

Her challenge is that she was born without hair in her ears, which transmits sound and plays a key role in a person's ability to hear.

Tinsley, who is the Cowans' first child, was born Aug. 13, 2015, after what her mother describes as a "normal pregnancy."

"After I had her, I was the only one awake when they came in and told me that she'd failed her first hearing test," Nea said. "I was still kind of loopy after just having a baby so it didn't register with me. They told me not to worry about it, that babies fail the first hearing tests all the time and that they'd do another one tomorrow."

"Then she failed the second one. I told Blake that something was wrong ... In your heart you just feel it."

The young parents  Nea is 25 and Blake is 24  were referred to an audiologist where Tinsley's hearing was tested again.

"She didn't have any response from either ear," Nea said. "That's when I had my confirmation that she was deaf. And it was so hard because my first thoughts were, 'How am I ever going to be able to communicate with her? What am I going to do? What about school? What about her family?' None of us knew sign language so we immediately started learning sign language."

The Cowans began a long educational process.

"It was really hard for some of the extended family to accept because it just came out of nowhere," Nea said.

But family and friends rallied and began learning the signs they needed to communicate with the baby girl.

Just shy of her first birthday, Tinsley can understand eight signs, Nea said. "It's amazing. She caught on and has done so well with it."

It was in the early days of her life that Tinsley's parents began researching cochlear implant surgery.

"The implants are the only route to get her any sound because they bypass that part of her ear," Nea said. "Not every child is able to get cochlear implants. You have to have a certain severity (of deafness) and anatomically you have to be ready for the implants. Everything else in her ears is perfect. She just doesn't have those little hairs."

The price tag for cochlear implant surgery is roughly $100,000 per ear.

"We were looking at coming up with $200,000," Nea said.

Remember how Tinsley has gifts of her own? Her parents are at the top of that list.

While the insurance policy which originally covered Tinsley through Blake Cowan's job as a lineman for Kenergy does not cover the surgery, this did not deter Tinsley's mom and dad.

Nea said "thanks to the Lord above," she was able to purchase insurance through her job at Kentucky Oral Surgery in Madisonville which will help with the cost of the implant surgery. The family will still have to pay roughly $13,000 for the surgeries to both ears. This does not include doctor visits, three therapy sessions a week and the travel back and forth to Louisville to see physicians there.

"It's turned into a big amount, so we decided to just start doing something," Nea said.

A family member, Michelle Carlisle operates a screen printing business so Tinsley's loved ones began taking orders for T-shirts with proceeds going toward the baby's cochlear implant surgeries.

"We were going to be happy with selling 200 shirts," Nea said. "But we've sold more than 700 shirts in three weeks. We are doing them all ourselves, hand by hand, one by one. We jokingly call it Tinsley's sweat shop because that's what it feels like."

"Mainly because that first night we were really sweating," Carlisle said.

Family and friends often gather at a building located in Clay, which will soon be known as Carlisle Custom Creations, and work steadily to fill all of the T-shirt orders.

"We have our own little assembly line," Nea said. "In our spare time, we're down here making shirts."

"Probably this fall we're going to organize a 5K run/walk (fundraiser), because we are constantly going to have medical expenses," she said.

"She'll have her first implant surgery in September," Nea said. "Then six to eight weeks after the surgery, they'll turn them on to see if they're working or not because there are no guarantees. They do think she's set up to have amazing results though. We feel very confident this will be a really good thing for her."

Nea said the family should know around Christmas time if Tinsley can hear.

The Cowan family said the goal isn't just about fundraising, but also about bringing awareness to deafness and the challenges faced by the hearing-impaired.

"I had no idea how little help is available to people in our situation," Nea said. "Especially in rural areas. You don't have sign language classes. You don't have a teacher who specializes in that. You don't have anything like that. So when she gets school-age, we were looking at having to board her at the Kentucky School for the Deaf in Danville Monday through Friday and bring her home on the weekends and that's it."

Nea said there is no way she and her husband would be willing to be separated from their daughter.

She said in investigating local education options for Tinsley, she discovered that even through the school system, the programs aren't designed for children whose only challenge is being deaf.

"So if this helps bring awareness to people, especially in this area, that we need programs, that we need things to help these children  it's worth it. Because she's not the only deaf child around here," Nea said.

While the family is pushing forward with fundraisers, education and just simply enjoying Tinsley as she grows, there are still things connected to the baby's deafness that bring heartbreak.

"We have a niece (close to Tinsley's age) and this past Christmas she was saying 'mama' and 'daddy.' It was hard because I have a 1 year old who can't say that. That's really hard. I can sign 'I love you' but to hear her say 'I love you' and know that she's heard me say that, would mean so much," Nea said. "So that's hard, and just the little words and things that most people take for granted. I think as a mom, it's made me appreciate the little things. I really appreciate every noise she makes."

Nea said family and friends have "banded together" in support of Tinsley, making the little girl's community a tight-knit clan.

"It's been great," she said. "We've had entire businesses buy shirts for their employees ... we've shipped shirts to New Hampshire, Virginia, Tennessee and Indiana."

Nea said the love of these people, a sense of humor and faith in God are carrying them through what will likely be a lengthy process.

For instance, Blake, a former Army calvary scout who completed a tour in Afghanistan and got out of the Army in 2013, told a group he works with, "I'm not going to have another kid, this one doesn't listen as it is."

And Nea's father, Greg Nixon, of Newburgh, Indiana, recalls a time when his wife was worried that the clamor of other children would awaken baby Tinsley.

"No it won't," he told her. "She can't hear it."

"You've got to have a sense of humor or you'll cry," Nea said.

Nixon said Tinsley's journey has touched many people.

"We hear so much and see so much with people shooting people or blowing each other up, hating and all of that, but there's still a tremendous amount of good people out there," he said. "There are a lot of people, who nobody knows who they are, who have bought T-shirts just because they want to contribute. It just helps reaffirm there really are a lot of good people. That's what's been incredible for me, seeing how many people whose lives she has touched."

Nea said they are still several thousand dollars from their goal. Anyone who would like to order a T-shirt can do so through Facebook by going to the Facebook page called Tinsley's Two Ears.
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By Frank ONan, Special to The Gleaner

I'm writing to endorse our friend, Dr. David Watkins, for re-election to the Kentucky state legislature.

David has served us well in Frankfort. He has been a strong, tireless worker for education for our kids and grandkids. Keep a friend in Frankfort.

Dr. Watkins treated me, with little pay, when hunger was more than a state of mind. His people still work to alleviate my suffering from several ailments.

Kentucky has some Democrats who recently became turncoats. For what? Perhaps to help multimillionaire Gov. Bevin destroy Medicaid and have thousands of workers on Workman's Compensation be re-evaluated by some doctor by phone from Texas. That is happening!

What about the 50,000 Kentuckians who, this spring, suddenly found that their medical insurance was in abeyance? "Frantic calls" were being made to the newly appointed people of the governor.

Bevin was selected by a primary plurality of about 80 votes. He must think that a mandate to attack the poor. This from a governor with a reported financial worth of $60 million and tentacles that are reportedly in banking and insurance from Connecticut to Louisiana.

Mr. Mills, a candidate for the legislature, was recently accused by his primary opponent of falsifying information about Dr. Buckmaster just before voting day. That left Dr. Buckmaster with no chance to refute that misinformation and in a close race. As a youngster, we called that "dirty pool."

The new governor has moved to remove members of boards across the Commonwealth. Recently, members of the Workman Compensation board were discharged, some say illegally. The arrogant Bevin then fired all the trustees from the board at the University of Louisville. The university president, James Ramsey apparently will now resign.

Here is the kicker: someone I'm well acquainted with was called on a conference call from a doctor in Texas in regard to his workman's comp. Keep in mind that for about 25 years this patient has had to depend on workman's comp for medication and benefits.

A work injury required him having metal pins put in his back and operated on a second time to correct that. His suffering has been continual from his young years through his declining years. Now some doctor in Texas, who he has never seen, is trying to re-evaluate his case.

To the people in Kentucky who have suffered injuries from mining, factory work, etc., I tell you, you might be re-evaluated by some out-of-state counselor appointed by the governor. Isn't this another instance of overreach by an arrogant wealthy Republican? Maybe all the board in Kentucky will see replacement members from Texas and other states.

Isn't it bad enough to see the price of medicine in some instances in a few years increase from $8 to $800? Well, we have an insurance executive as governor. Republicans control the State Senate. Bevin needs a few more turncoats or rubber stamps to control the House.

Down in Louisiana a few years ago, Huey Long put many state boards directly under his control. A sheriff couldn't hire his own deputies without approval from Long. Are we now headed in that direction in Kentucky? Power and wealth can undermine any form of government. Then there is greed.

Again, please keep David Watkins working for us.

Fran O'Nan is a resident of Henderson
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Should the Kentucky Retirement Systems pay the legal fees of its former chairman who is challenging Gov. Matt Bevin's unilateral decision to abolish and recreate the board?

Yes.

KRS and the retirees who depend upon it have a vital interest in knowing who is responsible for overseeing the system: the governor or an independent board.

It will be up to a court to decide the issue and it's reasonable for KRS to pay attorneys to assure the question is competently and thoroughly argued.

Like many of Bevin's targets, KRS has serious problems, some of them self-imposed. We agree with him that management has been too secretive about everything from employee salaries to investment management fees.

However, Bevin is dead wrong in trying to lay the systems' enormous financial shortfall purely or even primarily at the feet of management.

That's the direct result of underfunding by two decades of Republican and Democratic governors and legislators. They balanced the budget and funded their favorite projects by shortchanging the pension funds.

Bevin made it clear he won't continue that irresponsible approach when he proposed a bare-bones budget for the rest of state government in order to divert funds into the pension systems. He also deserves credit for backing legislative efforts to improve transparency that failed to pass.

But he stopped short of proposing new taxes or eliminating tax breaks to create new revenue to plug the $30 billion hole in the pension systems.

Instead, after the session, with a stroke of his executive pen, Bevin abolished the KRS board and reformed it to give himself control.

The governor expanded the board by four members, removed some appointed by former Gov. Steve Beshear, including chairman Thomas K. Elliott, even though their terms had not expired, and replaced them with his own appointees as well.

In the end, Bevin gave himself the authority to appoint 11 of the 17 members of his new board. The other six will continue to be elected independently by public employees and retirees.

"The governor has granted himself extraordinary new powers over a board that is supposed to be insulated from political interference," Jim Carroll, a spokesman for the retirees' watchdog group, Kentucky Government Retirees, said. The group urged the "legitimate board" to go to court to oppose Bevin's action.

The deposed Elliott and board member Mary Helen Peter  one of the independently elected trustees  filed a lawsuit contending that Bevin does not have the authority to remove Elliott. KRS has agreed to pay $50,000 of their attorney's fees in that case.

Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, son of the former governor, has asked to join in the challenge to Bevin's action while Republican State Treasurer Allison Ball has asked to join the case to challenge the $50,000 payment.

Until Franklin Circuit Judge Philip Shepherd rules on this case, it won't be clear which board is legitimate under the law.

What is clear is that Bevin has created a huge, unnecessary controversy that's diverting attention from the very real problems at KRS.

Without doubt, it would be better if the $50,000 going to defend Elliott's place on the board remained in the struggling trust fund to pay retirement benefits. But Bevin picked this fight, leaving KRS management few choices but to turn to the courts to determine who is in charge.

This editorial was written by the Lexington Herald-Leader.
Connecticut is receiving $3 million in federal funding to help build affordable housing.

The money is part of a $174 million allocation Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help increase and preserve the supply of decent and safe affordable housing for extremely low and very low-income households, including families experiencing homelessness.

Today, we offer another tool to help states confront a growing affordable rental housing crisis in this country, said HUD Secretary Julian Castro. The Housing Trust Fund will be an enduring resource designed to producing more housing that is affordable to our most vulnerable neighbors.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition applauded the award.

Today's announcement is not the end of our effortsit is just the beginning. We look forward to working with the administration and our state partners as we put these dollars to work building affordable homes for the lowest income people, the coalition said in a statement.
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BRIDGEPORT  David Rich sees faces and futures when he looks at the annual Point-in-Time homeless count.

If anything, the numbers stiffen his resolve.

Rich, the executive director of Supportive Housing Works in Bridgeport, wasnt surprised Tuesday when he saw volunteers found 408 homeless people in the city on Jan. 26.

Nor was Rich surprised when he read the new Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness report that found the states homeless population fell by nearly 4 percent in the last year and 13 percent compared to 2007.

Overall, this years Point-in-Time count identified 3,902 homeless people in the state, down from 4,038 last year.

Some of the biggest declines have been seen in chronic homelessness, the population that has been homeless for a year or longer, often with a serious illness.

Chronic homelessness is down 29 or 30 percent over last year, Rich said Tuesday night. Im going out on a limb here, but were going to end chronic homelessness by the end of the year. Thats my prediction.

The state has already ended veteran homelessness, according to federal guidelines.

In February, federal officials confirmed that Connecticut was the second state in the nation to functionally end veteran homelessness by housing all long-term homeless veterans and securing housing for any veterans newly identified as homeless in less than 90 days.

More Information Point-in-Time homeless count The Point-in-Time count of the state's homeless population on Jan. 26 found: 408 homeless people in Bridgeport with 60 families in emergency shelters or transitional housing. 191 homeless people in Norwalk with 20 families in emergency shelters or transitional housing 125 homeless people in Danbury with 11 families in emergency shelters or transitional housing. 287 homeless people in Stamford/Greenwich with 40 families in emergency shelters or transitional housing. See More Collapse

Even though we have a few veterans out there, Im confident we have the resources from the state and federal government to get them the necessary housing, Rich said. We still have to do our job to help identify our homeless veterans and find them housing.

Connecticut is part of the national Zero: 2016 initiative to end veteran homelessness and chronic homelessness by the end of the year.

Weve set high goals, and these statistics demonstrate that we are moving in the right direction, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said. Ensuring and delivering housing is critical to building stronger communities for everyone, everywhere.

Housing is key to economic development, and by building partnerships between the state, municipalities, and community nonprofit organizations, were tackling an issue that is critical to our future, Malloy said.

The Point-in-Time count found 45 veterans in emergency shelters across the state, fewer than half the number identified in 2015, most of whom are now engaged in Veterans Administration services and on their way to housing.

We cannot ensure that no veteran will ever be homeless again, said Deborah Deegan, acting director of the VAs West Haven Errera Community Care Center. The victory we have secured is to build a system through which we can reach every veteran experiencing homelessness quickly, and offer them appropriate housing in 90 days or less.

The Point-in-Time count also found 18.8 percent of homeless people in Connecticut had severe mental illness, 8 percent had chronic substance abuse and 3.6 percent had HIV-AIDS.

Ninety percent of the chronically homeless are mentally ill, Rich said. In Fairfield County, we have 125 documented chronically homeless, and we just got a $1 million grant from the federal government to help them. Im going to be really disappointed if we cant say that we ended chronic homeless in Connecticut by Dec. 31.

The next challenge for Fairfield County and Connecticut is reducing family homelessness. This years Point-in-Time count found 60 homeless families in Bridgeport.

Family homelessness is down a little bit over last year, but we have a lot more work to do, Rich said. By 2020, we hope we can say that weve ended family homelessness, too.

The full report is available at http://cceh.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/CT-Counts-2016.pdf
The market has been showing volatility since the summer of 2015 and has continued into 2016. The slowing growth in China, falling gas prices, uncertainty over the Federal Reserve's rate hike plans and geopolitical instability has made for scary headlines for investors for some time. Britains vote to exit the EU (Brexit) certainly doesnt help things.

Related: 8 Factors That Determine the Financial Health of a Business

On Feb. 11, the VIX volatility index, calculated by the Chicago Board Options Exchange, hit its highest since the markets dip last August, signaling an increasing volatile market. Following the Brexit vote, the index showed a decline which offers a bit of a stabilization, but the market will most likely be in flux until the timeline of Britains exit is hammered out -- which could take up to two years. The ups and downs are a snapshot of investor and money manager anxiety over how to employ strategies amid uncertain international and domestic economic systems.

Image credit: Tradinggods.net

Heading into the summer, the declining markets slowly rose but investors are expecting more of the same oscillation ahead -- an estimated 40 percent of investors in fact -- according to a Wells Fargo survey as reported by the Street.

Director of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement and Trust Joe Ready said, Clients look at the portfolio and they look at the markets and they just see up 300 points one day and down 400 points the next. This market whiplash is causing worry not just from investors but money managers as well. Continues Ready, I think it brings back nervousness and concern with the economy and if were going to go back to a recessionary period.

Early 2016 saw a depressingly low beginning entering into January, and even as the market has shown gains since March, the optimism is a cautious one. For some, last summer came too dangerously close to the 2008 recession. Investors are no longer wheeling but there hasnt been a predominant exhale either.

Related: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Investing All of Your Money

Charles Schwab chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders recently said, Sentiment has climbed back towards optimism. But the downside to volatility is that surprises can occur. The FED can decide to hike rates (though that is currently on hold), and it would be unwise to disregard China as still a potential market disruption, even as their government has stimulated its banks by adding more money.

A few months ago, I wrote on how BDCs stability and solid performance is good for the economy, and the 2016 YTD figures continues to support this. Throughout the turmoil within the market, BDCs have been performing in a substantially more stable pattern than the S&P shown in charts below:

Image credit: S&P Dow Jones Indices | YCharts

How BDCs and Saratoga have performed differently (and better) than banks and other money market professionals is mostly in part because we as professionals perform differently than banks and other money market professionals. This is due to our relationships with our clients. Because BDCs require customized financial engineering, BDC financial advisers can take on more than just term loans. BDCs are also known to fund shareholder buyouts or a dividend recap which would allow owners freedom of liquidity if needed. This flexibility has helped investors to focus on their long-term goals.

Related: What Entrepreneurs Get Wrong When It Comes To Investing

Investors are getting savvier in watching geopolitical atmosphere, the emerging markets, and translating that into how the U.S. market will perform, but in this current sea of economic volatility, there is inherent uncertainty. Having a trusted adviser during this time of duress isnt just about the numbers, its also about having peace of mind. Because investors often have a flight response to a badly behaving market, having a knowledgeable adviser keep a level head is invaluable to staying the course. This plunging response is often the first response for investors who go it alone and make an emotional decision based on the market. Even when the market feels volatile even if it isnt, a financial ally can curb emotional responses which often drives investors into bad decisions. It is important to remember that Investing in the market and a strong financial advisor is a long-term investment.

Sources

YTD S&P Performance Chart: https://ycharts.com/indices/%5ESPXTR/ytd_return

YTD BDC Performance Chart: http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-bdc-index

VIX Chart:

http://tradinggods.net/trading-gods-blog/vix-daily-update-volatility-plunges-second-day-brexit-fears-ease/

Related:

Investors And VCs: The Real Picture

In a Sea of Economic Volatility, Financial Stability Is Needed More Than Ever

The 4 Biggest Mistakes Inventors Make



Copyright 2016 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
NORWALK  Norwalk Hospital will host a Red Cross community blood drive to benefit patients in need on Friday, Aug. 12 from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Patio Room on the 5th floor.

Because the need for blood remains constant, the Red Cross urges donors of all blood types to give blood or platelets to help keep supplies ready to go, so they are ready for all patients when they need them the most.
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If you're looking to retire after serving our country, Connecticut may not be the right place to hunker down.

In honor of Military Appreciation Month financial website WalletHub investigated where military retirees are likely to have the best retirements. Unfortunately for Connecticut, that state is not here. The state placed within the bottom ten states for military retirees, along with neighboring Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York.

States were compared on three key metricseconomic environment, quality of life, and health carethat included factors such as housing affordability, job opportunities, homeless veterans, VA facilities, and more.

Connecticut was ranked the sixth worst state, placing 43rd in economic environment, 27th in quality of life, and 45th in health care. The state was also ranked fifth in fewest VA health facilities per 10,000 veterans, behind Mississippi, District of Columbia, Delaware, and Rhode Island.

Related: State-to-state comparison of veteran homelessness

Connecticut was followed by the District of Columbia, Indiana, Oregon, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. Topping the list were Alaska, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Florida.

Jason Burke, Director of Veteran and Military Affairs at Quinnipiac University, told WalletHub the choice of where to retire really comes down to two basic factors.

"First, it should be a place they want to live and work," Burke said. "If they are truly retiring from the workforce, they should consider a state that does not tax retirement pay. Overseas is an option as well."

Burke also suggested continuing work in the government sector, due to a likely easier transition into work.

"Continued government service would be optimal based on occurring additional service-time as well as salary not off-setting your retirement pay," Burke said. "I know of civilian companies that may low-ball a potential new hire based on their retirement pay income. It's not ethical but it happens."

Take a look at the slideshow above to see how Connecticut compares to the bottom and top states.

To read WalletHub's full report, including their methodology and more expert input, click here.
FAIRFIELD - What was originally believed to be a case of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is now being investigated as a homicide.

The infant, Adam Gregory Vasaturo Seagull, was called "little prince," "tootie muffin," and "little man" by his family.

His infectious smile brought immediate joy to everyone who had the privilege of experiencing it, his obituary read. As he would look at you with his beautiful brown eyes, your heart became bigger and fuller with love.

Deputy Police Chief Chris Lyddy confirmed Saturday the death of the 4-month old Shelton boy in March at an unlicensed home day care has been ruled a homicide. According to the state medical examiner, toxicology reports showed high levels of Benadryl in the infants system.

The investigator is being extremely diligent and to date, we have not been able to rule out anybody, Lyddy said. The unlicensed day care was run by Carol Cardillo at her home at 63 Edgewood Road and had been in operation for 11 years, Lyddy said.

A lawyer representing Adams parents, Matthew and Michelle, confirmed that the family is aware that the case is being investigated as a homicide. The lawyer, along with Adams grandfather, Lewis Seagull, said that they were not ready to comment on the development in the case.

The police announcement comes just days after the death of Stamford 2-month-old girl was also ruled a homicide. That child was rushed to the hospital from an East Side day care facility with severe head trauma.

Neighbors of Cardillo, the woman who ran the day care where Adam was found dead on March 22, were surprised to learn that the case was being investigated as a homicide.

Dimitri Gregorio, 19, was away at college in March when Adam died but heard the news through text messages from his mother, including images of first responders lining the normally quiet and uncluttered Edgewood Road. He has watched children coming to and from for years.

The family is very nice, the mother, the grandmothertheyre very nice, he said.

Cardillo did not return requests for comment by phone and at her home. A relative confirmed that she still resides there.

She was so sad, said Cliff, a neighbor of Cardills who asked that his last name not be used, of Cardillos reaction after the accident. (Intentional wrongdoing) is last thing that I would expect; its a wonderful family.

Police were called to the home March 22 just after 3 p.m., when Cardillo dialed 911 to report an unresponsive infant. According to Lyddy, Deputy Police Chief, Cardillo told police the baby had been given a bottle around noon and then put down in a play crib for a nap.

When she went to check on the baby around 2:55 p.m., she could not wake him up.

There were seven other children being cared for at the time, five toddlers and two other infants. There were four adults in the home at the time, according to the report.

The baby had not been sick, and there were no signs of trauma, Lyddy said, which led to the belief that SIDS was the cause of death. However, due to the fact that the death was untimely, the infants body was sent to the state medical examiners office for an autopsy.

The autopsy concluded the baby died from acute diphenhydramine intoxication. Lyddy said Cardillo has denied administering Benadryl to the baby.

The day care center has been closed since the incident, and any charges regarding the operation of an unlicensed day care center would likely come from state authorities, Lyddy said.

As for criminal charges in the babys death, Lyddy said, It is very much an active investigation.

He said it is possible that it could be determined the Benadryl overdose was accidental, but certainly, negligence would be a factor in administering a lethal dose of anything to an infant and could still result in criminal charges.

Its very important that parents check into day care facilities, Lyddy said. There are several ways to check if a center is licensed. The easiest is call 211, and you would be provided with a list of licensed day care facilities in your area.

He said parents should also check to make sure a facility has the proper child to staff ratio and that caregivers are properly trained in first aid, including CPR.
Update: According to the state's attorney, the case against Branko Belopavlovic was dismissed.

STAMFORD  A former hospital employee has been accused of using a doctors prescription pad to write himself scores of orders for narcotics.

Capt. Richard Conklin said police were notified in May that a Stamford Hospital security director questioned medical technician Branko Belopavlovic about dozens of prescriptions for controlled substances, including Oxycodone, Lorazapan and Codine. Conklin said Belopavlovic admitted filling the prescriptions in a note to the security director.

Conklin said Belopavlovic, 39, of Camp Street, Norwalk, was hired about eight years ago as a medical technician and has been ordering prescription pads for the doctor for more than three years. The pads were kept in a locked desk in the doctors office.

The police investigation revealed the doctor who hired Belopavlovic seemed to have written all of the prescriptions for him, Conklin said. However, the doctor told police he only wrote one prescription for Belopavlovic in the past three years, Conklin said.

Conklin said Belopavlovic filled his bogus prescriptions at CVS pharmacies in Stamford and Norwalk.

Craig Andrews, a spokesman for Stamford Health Medical Group, said the theft and misuse of prescription pads is taken seriously and the hospital launched an investigation when it was alerted to the issue.

Without mentioning Belopavlovics name, Andrews said the employee is no longer with the hospital. The hospital determined no patient was harmed by the employees actions, Andrews said.

Belopavlovic was charged with 40 counts each of narcotics possession and forgery. He was held on a $50,000 court appearance bond and arraigned on his charges at the Stamford courthouse on Friday.

jnickerson@scni.com;
Allen Tates contribution to Ill Take My Stand poses a challenge. He concludes his Remarks on Southern Religion by stating that the way the Southerner can take hold of his tradition is by violence. In a group of essays that has eschewed a direct, political solution to the damaging cultural effects of industrialism, Tate challenges his confederates to be activists. He writes at the end of his essay: Since he cannot bore from within, he has left the sole alternative of boring from without. This method is political, active, and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary.[1] How are we to interpret Tates surprising conclusion?

One could argue that Tates peculiar role among the Fugitives was to disturb whatever was regarded as settled among them.[2] If we take the volumes introduction as representative of their common thought, then it appears that the twelve agrarians agreed that a second secession was not the solution. Neither do they themselves provide any practical example of returning to work the land; their activism resides in their writing. So what can Tate seriously mean by urging violence and revolution?

Indeed, in his essay, Tate takes issue with the view that politics is sufficient to the human good. Why, then, does he end his remarks in tacit agreement with the fruitfulness of revolution, a view held by one he fundamentally criticizes, Thomas Jefferson? Tate observes that, due to his scientific frame of mind, Thomas Jefferson held that The ends of man are sufficiently contained in his political destiny. He writes that though this view was not formally endorsed by the antebellum Southerner, it is the assumption of the modern Southerner. Herein lies the Souths last defeat, a defeat which concedes to the false separation between science and religion: The South would not have been defeated had it possessed sufficient faith in its own kind of God. It would not have been defeated, in other words, had it been able to bring out a body of doctrine setting forth its true conviction that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics.[3] Given his locating of mans ends beyond politics, wouldnt Tate suggest that a sufficient religion offers a more likely means of recovery than revolution? To comment adequately on the concluding anomaly in Tates Remarks on Southern Religion requires an interpretive frame somewhat larger than his trenchant essay provides. This frame is found in the impressive body of his critical writings, his fiction, and his poetry. Tates work probes how the areas of history and tradition, science, politics, and economics, each bear an intrinsic relation to religion, the ground for all other cultural and intellectual expressions. In granting religion this foundational place, Tate parallels T.S. Eliots, Christopher Dawsons, and Josef Piepers thought. Only when we outline these recurrent topics in Tates thought can we properly assess just how surprising was his call to violence and revolution in 1930 even on his own terms. Moreover, the enduring insights of the essay offer a challenge not only to the post-World War I Southerner, but also to anyone aspiring to be, as Tate would later describe, the man of letters in the modern world.[4] Reading Tate invites us to consider: Is it the political activist or the poet whose voice makes us see the radical connection between culture and religion?

Before Tate in section II of his essay gives an account of two divergent views of history, the Long View and the Short View, he offers a kind of apology for writing about the topic of religion at all. Twenty years before his own conversion to Catholicism, the essay begins to outline the errors in his contemporaries treatment of religion.[5] His statements about the wrong approach to religion and the wrong approach to history are very similar. Both realms suffer from abstractions held to be authoritativefor instance, statistical proofs that religion encourages successbecause effects are able to be quantified and thus satisfy the modern mind. With an emphasis on function and a loss of particularity, religion and history have been reduced from their former plenitude. One of the results of consequence to poetry is the receding of images from the meaning of religion and history. For religion, this loss of image has meant a loss of mystery.

Tates opening rhetoric means to dispel any possible link between his purpose and that of the professional man of religionwhose proper business is to prepare the mysteries for others.[6] Previously, for some reason not clear to 1930, laymen who took up the mysteries as a gentlemanly pursuit had great respect for those who had authority to speak of the Higher Things. He states, We have none of that respect now. Tates springboard for what follows, an essay begun in a spirit of irreligion, is thus a blanket insult to contemporary clerics. Tate characteristically gets everyones attention, especially those who would be most pricked.

At the outset, Tates own approach to religious people and leaders is a calculated violation of all sound rules of rhetoric. As Aristotle teaches, the speaker must dispose the audience to trust him by his good will. But if Tate does not dispose men of religion to receive his argument kindly, his ungentlemanly manner gains him, the amateur, the ability to be heard at all. What would offend and be perceived as a violence is deftly transformed into respectful discourse about what is in itself unable to be articulated. He writes: Religion is not properly a discussion of anything; so any discussion of religion is a piece of violence, a betrayal of the religious essence undertaken for its own good, or for the good of those who live by it. The risk in his personal indecorum is that it will betray his own betrayal of religion. Tate speaks with respect but as an outsider to religion; this nonpartisanship, as it were, affords him the critical distance that makes him lookat firstlike any other unbelieving modern. His rhetoric garners both audiences, religious men and irreligious. Tate thus begins his essay in as startling a manner as he ends itwith a certain pretension in this incivility.[7]

The pretension is necessary because religion has fallen upon evil days. In his own mind it is a fairy story and a myth not able to be conveyed in the immediate, direct, overwhelming way it deserves. Why? Because the modern mind has lost the appreciation of this kind of imagery, that of myth. He announces that he must confine himself to First Principles in order to serve an experience of religion generally lost (and, I should add, lost to himself as wellexcept in his imagination).

Just as we think that Tate will embark on a Thomistic discussion of first principles, he conjures up the image of a horse, the animal who works the farm and who evokes the meaning of the land. Section I of his essay explores this image of a horse eating bluegrass on the lawn in order to pinpoint the thrust of American religion, i.e., the religion of how things work or what Tate calls the religion of the half-horse. The truly religious mind, the religion of the whole horse, sees the horse as he iscropping the bluegrassa particular that comes from his home state of Kentucky. While the visible horse can be understood to be one of a species, scientific categorizing is prone to abstraction. The particular horse is one instance of the abstraction of horsepower. Tate asks his reader to imagine that there is an actual horse, a complete and self-contained horse in spite of the now prevailing faith that there is none simply because the abstract and scientific mind cannot see him. This lone horse bears a great burden here. Tate asks his reader to see the horse as if it exists, even though the discussion cannot bring him [or religion] forth, in the same breath that he asks him to think religion real.[8] Tate relies on the imagination and specifically on the contemplation of a common thing, the horse, in order to show his readers, who have lost contact with the particularity of things, that it is the same act of imagination that enables the person access to the Higher Things. I suspect that this trust in imagination is the first step in Tates own religious journey.[9]

Tate seems to regret what has happened to religion, particularly with respect to the problem of evil. Keep in mind that Tate is writing before World War II. Tate speaks in this section of a mature religionnot likely to suffer disillusion and collapse. We see in this concern the suggestion of his own disappointment with a religion that could not deal with the traditional experience of evil which is the common lot of the race. In his novel published eight years after Ill Take My Stand and set in the antebellum South, Tates main character, Lacy Buchan, would give voice to this continuing critique of modern religion:

Is it not something to tell, when a score of people whom I knew and loved, people beyond whose lives I could imagine no other life, either out of violence in themselves or the times, or out of some misery of shame, scattered into the new life of the modern age where they cannot even find themselves? Why cannot life change without tangling the lives of innocent persons? Why do innocent persons cease their innocence and become violent and evil in themselves that such great changes may take place?[10]

To borrow a phrase from Walker Percy, these innocent people who become violent and evil, all of them members of Lacy Buchans family as he recalls them from the perspective of old age, are lost in the cosmos. Buchans reflections on the vulnerability and corruption of the antebellum Southerner shows that, despite their traditions, they share a common condition of the modern age, one with little mediation between themselves and fallen human nature. So, to return from this digression, Tate ends his section on the horse with characteristic irony: It is apparent that the image of the horse will work only in a limited number of logical distinctions; so I propose to discard it. Having used the image of the horse, as any modern would, Tate turns in another direction.

His argument from first principles has regarded the horse in divergent ways. (We might restate the first principles in Aristotelian terms, though Tate never does so explicitly: The whole-horse principle is that the end of a thing is the good of a thing; the half-horse principle is that the horse has meaning only as an instrumental good, as a means to some human purpose.) Only the religion of the whole horse is a realistic one since it predicts both success and failure. It is a religion consistent with the insight of a long-blind Oedipus, who cautioned us not to pronounce a man happy till we saw the end of his life.[11] Tate alludes to his contemporary, T.S. Eliot, who in The Waste Land has Tiresias show (with the young man carbuncular and the typist home at teatime) how mechanical lovemaking has become. The allusion hits home: Religion might still operate as a societal function, but it has lost its rending passion, its tragic eros, its sublime comedy.

History and Tradition

In reflecting on The Tennessee Agrarians in 1952, Richard Weaver shows that the definitive account of the difference between the North and the South did not occur until their collaborative written work: In sum, it was not until about 1925 that Southern intellectuals caught up with Lee and Jackson. The latter had known in 1862 that the one chance for the South was to carry the fight to the enemy. They fully appreciated the principleactually as old as warfare, that the best defense is a good offense.[12] Agreeing with Weaver, Louise Cowan points out that the core of poets who preceded the agrarian movement and who published The Fugitive were decidedly not standard Southerners, but were, in fact, fleeing from the high-caste Brahmins of the South, as John Crowe Ransom described them.[13] Donald Davidson explained that they were all clear about their disdain for sentimentality, their distaste for the conventional, and their hope to utilize in their work the best qualities of modern poetry.[14] Cowan writes, It was only through breaking with Southern literature, as it was then piously conceived, that they could find the genuine Southern tradition.[15]

But while they broke with a false piety to the South, they did not cut themselves off from the images of a common local experience. John Crowe Ransoms Antique Harvesters addresses the loss of memory in the attenuated agrarian order: The young men would be joying in the song / Of passionate birds; their memories are not long / Trust not but the old endure, and shall be older / Than the scornful beholder. He invites the New South to reclaim her past, figured as a Lady: True it is said of our Lady, she ageth. / But see, if you peep shrewdly, she hath not stooped. The harvesters reap memory, and though it is her servitors that have drooped, theythe poetshave been bequeathed one spot with special yield, because it has been drenched with the blood of heroes. The sons of the fathers shall keep her worthy of / What these have done in love.[16]

In Tates Ode to the Confederate Dead, the dry leaves of the graveyard are like the dead who fall / Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decisionTates reiteration of a trope as old as Homer. The Southern dead did not have to question the defense of their land and blood. The falling leaves that sough the rumor of mortality raise the specter of violence which alone seems capable of piercing through a smug modern forgetfulness. The autumnal images of the poem awaken complacent Southerners to the immoderate past, to a Stonewall at Bull Run. Tates question what shall we say who have knowledge carried to the heart? suggests the essential predicament of the inheritors of that tradition: Their experience is secondhand, intellectualized. The heart is stirred to understanding the heroic only when memory recasts itself imaginatively through a mimetic recovery of the casual sacrament in nature and of wars conscious, sacrificial violence.[17]

Through poesis their memory of the Souths defense of her land and her defeat would yield knowledge about the human things. In his personal rendition of their collaborative effort, at heart a commitment to poetry, Tate saw the Fugitives as an intensive and historical goup as opposed to the eclectic and cosmopolitan groups that flourished in the East. I think it important that we locate our consideration of this second portion of Tates essay, then, within his own emphasis on the unity of feeling, a communally earned poetry. Louise Cowan rightly observes that it is just such a communal sacrament of which Mr. Eliot himself has been deprived; and it is this quality in the work of the Fugitivesthat binds them together into a genuine school of poets. She goes on to say that this unity was quite different from a unity of theory such as most schools of poetry have had since the seventeenth century. It came from what Tate called, in his recollection twenty years later, a common historical myth.[18]

Tates essay about religion as it bears on the vanquished Southern agrarian way of life begins to clarify the close ties of history, tradition, and religion, a theme he would work out with more care in a talk given six years later, at the University of Virginia, What Is a Traditional Society?[19] Here, in Remarks, he reintroduces the religion of the half-horse as the Long View of History, a view which depends on abstraction. The Long View is condescending. The circumstances of time and place and the participants in them are dismissible because they are insignificant next to the looming conceptual categories and movements. To the holders of the Long View (for example, Hegel, Marx, and Spengler), particulars are useful only insofar as they contribute to paradigms, the substance of history. For instance, when the Greek and Roman worlds collapsed into each other to yield the category of Law, the Greek and Roman cultures lose any of the interesting differences which might, if contemplated, offer a deeper understanding of the human capacity for excellence.

The Short View, on the other hand, holds that the proper series for history to be placed in is the temporal or concrete series. Like Plutarchs Lives, the Short View is characterized by and concerned with particular men who, acting out their parts, made their choices in circumstances which bewildered them and which prompted them to make up stories with an obvious moral.[20] Men like Cicero could not fully account for their choices, but they could report a version which had an ennobling effect, both on others and on the men themselves. In this respect, the Short View most resembles the myth-making of religion. In his later essay, Tate describes the Short View as the historical imagination, which is the religious imagination manquean exercise of the myth-making propensity of man within the restricted realm of historical events. Men can rationally approve a historical myth when they would have to reject a more profoundly imaginative one: Men see themselves in the stern light of the character of Cato, but they can no longer see themselves under the control of a tutelary deity. Cato actually lived; Apollo was merely far-darting.[21] Borrowing from Eliot, Tate here calls this absorption of the classical historical imagination a lower myth. With sufficient perspective, the Old South is perhaps included as one of those historical circumstances which, seen in the Short View, can spawn a little myth, a figment of the historical imagination. Tate is quick to distinguish this lower myth from the religious imagination. Though not original, the minor myth has a kind of vitality:

The men of our early Republic were powerfully endowed with this faculty (the historical imagination). It is not the same as religion, if by religion we mean Christianity in the Middle Ages; nor is it the same as the religious imagination under any conceivable culture, for the religious imagination is timeless and unhistoric. The minor myth is based upon ascertainable history.[22]

The Short View, we might say, cooperates with the noble aspiration to model oneself and ones community after human excellence and beauty. As he stands on the University of Virginia campus addressing Phi Beta Kappa in 1936, Tate need not say much to demonstrate his point. But in 1930, Tate writes not altogether facetiously that the Short View, the one compatible with the historical imagination, has the added benefit of inviting a choice between, say, Adonis and Christ: The Short View holds that the whole Christ and the whole Adonis are sufficiently differentiated in their respective qualities (roughly details) and that our tradition compels us to choose more than that half of Christ which is Adonis and to take the whole, separate, and unique Christ.[23] Tate is not naive about presuming one can choose the worldview of someone from a bygone era. Tradition must be automatically operative before it can be called tradition. He rightly asks, Why should our tradition compel us to choose anything? Particularly in view of the all but accomplished fact that tradition is destroyed?[24]

By raising the possibility of an impossible practical choice, Tate points to the paradox of defending a religious point of view when the historical imagination no longer undergirds the tradition: It is irrational to defend religion with the weapon that invariably discredits it. I am trying to discover the place that religion holds with logical, abstract instruments, which of course tend to put religion in some logical system series, where it vanishes.[25] Then, the would-be defender becomes one with the Long View, trotting out reasons beneficial to societythe half-horse religion again. Where can Tate turn to lead his remarks toward a view consistent with a whole religion? Since defensive measures are destructive, are offensive ones called for? Violent ones?

This is the first essay of a two-part series. Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Republished with gracious permission from Political Science Reviewer (Fall 2001).

Notes:

[1] Allen Tate, Remarks on Southern Religion, Ill Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1930, 1980), 175.

[2] See Louise Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959)., 39; John Crowe Ransom, In Amicitia, in Allen Tate and His Work: Critical Evaluations, Radcliffe Squires, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), 11-22.

[3] Allen Tate, Remarks on Southern Religion, 174.

[4] See Tates essay of that name, taken from his Phi Beta Kappa Address, University of Minnesota, May 1, 1952, and reprinted in Essays of Four Decades (Wilmington: ISI Books, 1968, 1999), 3-16.

[5] See also Tates The Fallacy of Humanism in The Critique of Humanism, C. Hartley Grattan, ed. (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1930, 1968).

[6] Allen Tate, Remarks on Southern Religion, 155.

[7] Ibid., 156.

[8] Ibid., 157.

[9] Tate will articulate more fully the analogical and anagogical approach in The Symbolic Imagination: The Mirrors of Dante, reprinted in Essays of Four Decades, 424-446.

[10] Allen Tate, The Fathers (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1938), 5.

[11] Allen Tate, Remarks on Southern Religion, 159.

[12] Richard M. Weaver, The Tennessee Agrarians, in The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, George M. Curtis and James J. Thompson, Jr., eds. (Indianapolis, Liberty Press, 1987), 7.

[13] Louise Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 48.

[14] Ibid., 44.

[15] Ibid., 40.

[16] John Crowe Ransom, Antique Harvesters, in The Fugitive Poets, William Pratt, ed. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), 69-70.

[17] Allen Tate, Ode to the Confederate Dead, in The Fugitive Poets, 97-98.

[18] Louise Cowan, The Fugitive Group, xxi.

[19] Allen Tate, What is a Traditional Society?, Essays of Four Decades, 547-557.

[20] Allen Tate, Remarks on Southern Religion, 161.

[21] Allen Tate, What is a Traditional Society?, 551.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Allen Tate, Remarks on Southern Religion, 162.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid., 163.
LINCOLN (AP)  Nebraska wants to find out whether its glut of agricultural waste could be processed into a coal-like substance to be used as a renewable fuel for power plants.

The state Department of Environmental Quality last month awarded a Mexico, Mo., company a grant of more than $250,000 as part of that effort. The company, Enginuity Worldwide, said it can compress cow manure, spent cornstalks and other plant material into what it calls BioCoal. The product burns like regular coal, and the company said it could help power plants cut carbon emissions.

Federal data shows emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants represented about 37 percent of the total U.S. energy-related emissions in 2015 and that coal plants were responsible for 71 percent of that.

President Barack Obamas Clean Power Plan, which is tied up in litigation, calls for Nebraska to reduce its carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030, using 2012 levels as a starting point.

Enginuity President Nancy Heimann said its product is carbon neutral because emissions released from burning the biomass fuel would have been released anyway if the waste plant material were left in fields to decompose.

BioCoal cant compete on price with regular coal, but it wouldnt be sold as a one-for-one substitute. Instead, Heimann said, it will be marketed as a renewable fuel and a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Were not suggesting a replacement of all coal, because coal is a very effective way to make power, Heimann said. What were suggesting is this is just a tool in the tool box that mitigates carbon.

Lincoln Electric System spokeswoman Kelley Porter said the utility would be interested in evaluating BioCoal at some point in the future.
WASHINGTON  The most significant reinforcement of our collective defense any time since the Cold War, President Obama called it. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but it was still an achievement: Last weeks NATO summit in Warsaw ordered the deployment of troops to Eastern Europe, the alliances most serious response yet to Russias aggression and provocations on its western frontier.

The post-Ukraine economic sanctions have been weak; the declamatory denunciations, a mere embarrassment. Theyve only encouraged further reckless Russian behavior  the buzzing of U.S. ships, intrusions into European waters, threats to the Baltic States.

NATO will now deploy four battalions to front-line states. In Estonia, they will be led by Britain; in Lithuania, by Germany; in Latvia, by Canada; in Poland, by the United States. Not nearly enough, and not permanently based, but nonetheless significant.

In the unlikely event of a Russian invasion of any of those territories, these troops are to act as a tripwire, triggering a full-scale war with NATO. Its the kind of coldblooded deterrent that kept the peace in Europe during the Cold War and keeps it now along the DMZ in Korea.

In the more likely event of a little green men takeover attempt in, say, Estonia (about 25 percent ethnically Russian), the sort of disguised slow-motion invasion that Vladimir Putin pulled off in Crimea, the NATO deployments might be enough to thwart the aggression and call in reinforcements.

The message to Putin is clear: Yes, youve taken parts of Georgia and Ukraine. But theyre not NATO. That territory is sacred  or so we say.

This is a welcome development for the Balts, who are wondering whether they really did achieve irreversible independence when the West won the Cold War. Their apprehension is grounded in NATOs flaccid response to Putins aggressive revanchism, particularly in Ukraine. Obama still wont provide Ukraine with even defensive weaponry. This follows years of American accommodation of Putin, from canceling a Polish-Czech missile defense system to, most recently, openly acquiescing to Russias seizure of a dominant role in Syria.

And what are the East Europeans to think when they hear the presumptive presidential candidate of the party of Reagan speaking dismissively of NATO and suggesting a possible American exit?

The NATO action takes on even greater significance because of the timing, coming just two weeks after Brexit. Britains withdrawal threatens the future of the other major pillar of Western integration and solidarity, the European Union. NATO shows that it is holding fast and that the vital instrument of Western cohesion and joint action will henceforth be almost entirely trans-Atlantic  meaning, under American leadership.

The EU, even if it doesnt dissolve, will now inevitably turn inward as it spends years working out its new communal arrangements with and without Britain. Putin was Brexits big winner. Any fracturing of the Western alliance presents opportunities to play one member against another. He can only be disappointed to see NATO step up and step in.

After the humiliating collapse of President Obamas cherished Russianreset, instilling backbone in NATO and resisting Putin are significant strategic achievements. It leaves a marker for Obamas successor, reassures the East Europeans and will make Putin think twice about repeating Ukraine in the Baltics.

However, the Western order remains challenged by the other two members of the troika of authoritarian expansionists: China and Iran. Their provocations proceed unabated. Indeed, the next test for the United States is Chinas furious denunciation of the decision handed down Tuesday by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague  a blistering, sweeping and unanimous rejection of Chinas territorial claims and military buildup in the South China Sea.

Without American action, however, The Hagues verdict is a dead letter. Lecturing other great powers about adherence to international norms is fine. But the Pacific Rim nations are anxious to see whether we will actually do something.

Regarding Iran, we certainly wont. Our abject appeasement continues, from ignoring Tehrans serial violations of the nuclear agreement (the latest: intensified efforts to obtain illegal nuclear technology in Germany) to the administration acting as a kind of Chamber of Commerce to facilitate the sale of about 100 Boeing jetliners to a regime that routinely uses civilian aircraft for military transport (particularly in Syria).

The troop deployments to Eastern Europe are a good first step in pushing back against the rising revisionist powers. But a first step, however welcome, seven and a half years into a presidency, is a melancholy reminder of what might have been.
LOS ANGELES  The mills of justice grind slowly, but life plunges on, leaving lives blighted when justice, by being delayed, is irremediably denied. Fortunately, Californias Supreme Court might soon decide to hear  four years after litigation began  the 21st centurys most portentous civil rights case, which concerns an ongoing denial of equal protection of the law.

Every year, measurable injuries are inflicted on tens of thousands of already at-risk children by this states teacher tenure system, which is so politically entrenched that only the courts can protect the discrete and insular minority it victimizes. In 2012, nine Los Angeles students recognizing the futility of expecting the Legislature to rectify a wrong it has perpetrated asked Californias judiciary to continue its record of vindicating the rights of vulnerable minorities by requiring the states education system to conform to the states Constitution.

After 10 weeks of testimony, the trial court found the tenure system incompatible with the California Supreme Courts decision, now almost half a century old, that the state Constitution, which declares education a fundamental state concern, guarantees equality of treatment to all K-12 pupils. It shocks the conscience, the trial court said, that there is no dispute that a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers  perhaps more than 8,000, each with 28 students  are doing quantifiable damage to childrens life prospects.

Technically, California teachers are granted lifetime tenure after just two years. Actually, they must be notified of tenured status after just 16 months. (Thirty-two states grant tenure after three years, nine states after four or five. Four states never grant tenure.) When incompetent or negligent teachers gain tenure, dismissal procedures are so complex and costly that the process can take up to 10 years and cost up to $450,000. The trial court called the power to dismiss illusory. Each year approximately two teachers are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance  0.0007 percent of Californias 277,000 teachers.

Instead, school districts are forced to adopt what is called the dance of the lemons, whereby grossly ineffective teachers are shuffled from school to school. Another facet of the tenure system  the teachers last hired are the first fired when layoffs are required  reinforces the powerful tendency for incompetent teachers, who must teach somewhere, to accumulate in schools with the most teacher vacancies. These are disproportionately schools attended by low-income minority children.

Abundant research demonstrates that teacher quality is the most important school variable determining academic performance. This is why there is more variation in student achievement within than between schools. This variation is especially dramatic among students from educationally disadvantaged families. A single grossly ineffective teacher can deprive students of a full year of learning, with consequences that include lower graduation and college attendance rates, and lifetime earnings more than $250,000 lower than for pupils without a single incompetent teacher. Because teachers unions insist that financial appropriations are the all-important determinants of schools successes, they are perversely reluctant to acknowledge the importance of quality teachers.

The appeals court responded with a judicial shrug to the trial courts factual findings. It said Californias tenure system does not constitute a denial of equal protection because the identifiable class of people being injured have no shared trait. Oh? What about their shared injury? The injured pupils share a susceptibility to injury because of their shared trait of being economically disadvantaged. This trait concentrated them in schools that themselves have a shared trait  disproportionately high numbers of bad teachers.

The appeals court breezily said the injured were merely an unlucky subset of pupils, a random assortment produced not by the tenure laws but by the administration of them. This, however, is a distinction without a difference: The tenure laws purpose is to dictate outcomes by depriving administrators of discretion. Systemic results cannot be dismissed as random. Even if the tenure laws were neither written with a discriminatory motive nor administered with a discriminatory intent, the system is now known to produce  not invariably but with a high probability  predictable patterns of disparities.

Liberal and conservative legal luminaries, from Harvards Laurence Tribe to Stanfords Michael McConnell, have urged Californias Supreme Court to do what the appeals court neglected to do  apply heightened scrutiny to the tenure laws that prioritize teachers job security over pupils constitutional right regarding education. Californias Supreme Court will have national resonance if it affirms that public schools are established to enable children to flourish, not to make even dreadful teachers secure.
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Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, July 17, 2016

Members of the Pokemon Go Indonesia community flocked Bung Karno Stadium in South Jakarta at 7 a.m. on Sunday to catch Pokemon species.

From the stadium, they marched to the fX Senayan shopping mall bus stop and headed to Semanggi city park, then returned to the stadium to catch the species, said to include Doduo, Bulbasaur, Horsea and Pikachu, among others.

The community spokesperson Sulhan told The Jakarta Post that the stadium hosted many PokeStops, as did gyms. The former is a spot where players can get free items such as a Pokeball (a ball to catch and restore the species), while the latter is where players can train their Pokemon species and put them in battle. The stadium got even more crowded when players used Lure Module to attract more Pokemon species. And more PokeStops are available outside [the stadium], he said.

Pokemon Go Indonesia community members marched to several locations to catch Pokemon species.(-/Donny Fernando)

Sulhan said that they intentionally chose spots where PokeStop and gyms were located somewhat far from one other so that the players would need to walk to reach them. It is better to move than just stay at the same spot, he added.

Aside from catching Pokemon species while burning calories, this very first gathering of Pokemon Go Indonesia aims to increase engagement between its members.

I can meet new people and gain new friends, said one member, Ibnu. It proves that Pokemon Go players are cohesive, although we come from different teams. (kes)

(Read also: Jakarta administration wants to turn City Hall into Pokemon Go gym)
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Linkedin Nethy Dharma Somba (The Jakarta Post) Jayapura  Fri, July 15 2016

Local leaders have decried the results of selection for the Papuan Peoples Representatives Council (DPRP), claiming the process was manipulated.

Lembah Baliem, Wamena and Jayawijaya tribal chief Sadek Asso and Pegunungan Tengah Muslim Communication Forum head Ismail Asso on Thursday demanded the Home Ministry refuse to approve 14 newly selected DPRP members representing customary regions, pointing to strong indications of foul play.

Some of the figures announced by the selection committee were not even registered. How did the committee come up with the names? For example, one person was claimed to represent the customary region of La Pago, but he was never registered in the area. This deception contravenes the rights of the people of La Pago, Sadek told the media in Jayapura on Thursday.

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Linkedin Djemi Amnifu (The Jakarta Post) Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara  Sat, July 16 2016

The body of Yufrinda Selan, 19, who had been employed as a domestic worker in Malaysia, has been taken to her hometown in Tupan village, Timor Tengah Selatan regency, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), for burial.

Yufrinda was reported to have hanged herself in a room in her employers house in Malaysia. Her body has been taken by her family to their hometown, said Tato Tirang, head of the NTT Indonesian Workers Protection and Recruitment Agency (BP3TKI) on Friday.

Tato said Yufrindas demise added to the number of Indonesian migrant workers from the province who had died in Malaysia. As of Friday, 24 Indonesian migrant workers from NTT had died in Malaysia.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

With regard to tourism Belitung is the more popular part of the province of Bangka-Belitung, thanks to its pristine beaches and its role in the blockbuster movie Laskar Pelangi (The Rainbow Troops).

Bangka, however, will soon get a taste of the limelight with a new festival launched next week.

The Bangka-Belitung administration is gearing up for the Pesona Serumpun Sebalai Festival, a week-long festival to run from July 20 to 26.

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Linkedin Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak (The Jakarta Post)  Sat, July 16 2016

An avid social media user can easily find online communities built around certain products, mostly branded fashion apparel shaking up the virtual world.

Indonesian fans of retro-style products by US-based Authentic Fossil are no exception, with at least seven Facebook communities existing around the brand.

These forums  Fossil Addict, Fossil Lovers, Fossil Indonesia Addicted, Fossil Vintage, Fossil*Forever, Fossil Only and Authentic & The Lover Fossil  have tens of thousands of members, predominantly women.

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Linkedin Tama Salim (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

Connectivity will be the keyword going forward for both the Asian and European continents as both regions stand to benefit from greater cooperation with each other.

As an immediate beneficiary of good relations between Asia and Europe, Indonesia believes that the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) platform should play a greater role in addressing the common challenges that both regions face, says Vice President Jusuf Kalla.

Today, developing connectivity has become more important than ever, as Asia and Europe face common challenges such as the widening development gap between the richest and poorest within and between nations, Kalla said in his speech to the 11th ASEM Summit plenary in Ulaanbaatar on Friday.

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Linkedin Anggi M. Lubis (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

France and Indonesia relations in various sectors  from economy, education to energy  are expected to flourish in years ahead, with more frequent political dialogues expected to take place to better enhance cooperation between the two countries, a French envoy in Indonesia has said during commemoration of its national day in Jakarta.

French ambassador to Indonesia Corinne Brauze said in her remarks during the commemoration of Bastille Day on Thursday that her country and Indonesia prioritize not only economic, people-to-people and trade exchanges, but also political dialogue in supporting relations between the two countries, particularly with surfacing global challenges.

France and Indonesia had been carrying out such a dialogue consistently, where a number of meetings between each countries senior officials conducted along the years, she said.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

Despite the approach of the registration deadline for Jakartas gubernatorial election next year, Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama has yet to make up his mind over whether to run as an independent.

The Jakarta General Elections Commission (KPUD) has announced that it will accept candidate registrations from Aug. 3 to 7.

Nonetheless, Ahok insists that he has enough time before he has to declare his choice. This is still Shawwal [10th month of the lunar Islamic calender]. I will declare it after the month ends, Ahok said.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

The Jakarta administration has issued a notice urging civil servants in the city to ask for permission from their supervisors before assisting their children on the first day back at school on Monday.

The letter was issued following a letter circulated by the Culture and Education Ministry, calling on all civil servants to accompany their children to school.

Basically, the administration supports the ministrys campaign, said city secretary Saefullah on Friday.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

Actor and restaurant owner Marcel Chandrawinata takes his chefs on culinary trips abroad to improve their cooking skills.

The 29-year-old said he had recently taken his chefs to Malaysia, Singapore and Japan on food adventures.

If they dont go out, they wont grow. Chefs here are hesitant to share their recipes. Theyre more open overseas, Marcel told kompas.com recently.

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Linkedin Marcel Thee (The Jakarta Post)  Sat, July 16 2016

Beneath the saccharine pop and poor mans alternative rock that permeates the Indonesian music scene lies a subsection of artists whose minds stretch beyond the usual tried-and-tested music route, creating sound art that is intimidating and appealing.



Though the history of Indonesian experimental music is relatively young, there are a host of groups and musicians that, united-in-mindset, possess expansive sound and, while the artists themselves may scoff at the thought of a scene, theres no denying the basic idea shared by all  to demolish any preconceived ideas about how music should sound. For all intents and purposes, these acts have been dubbed as experimental, noise, or avant garde artists  a blanket description of their output.



In the way its presented, noise music serves up something atonal, or even something that can be considered anti music. People need to know that, in Indonesia, there are those who experiment with music and do so with a peculiar mindset, says Adythia Utama, a filmmaker whom directed a documentary on the subject and who himself has released noise music under the moniker Individual Distortion.



A description of these acts could be endless, considering the vast array of groups. Yet, it would be fair to at least try and paint a general idea of the varied sounds.



Outside the conventional songwriting system, from the harsh electronic feedback and ear-piercing hiss of acts such as Aneka Digital Safari, Theo Nugraha and Bergegas Mati; the traditional-spiritual ghostliness of Senyawa and Zoo; the menacing-beauty of drone groups Winternight and Delusi; the high-brow sound art of Husnaan and Sawi Lieu; the chaotic experimental punk of Sangsaka Worship; to the nostalgia-drenched low-fidelity of Duckdive  there is clearly a limitless pool of sound to draw from.



For these disparate artists, inspiration and approach also casts as wide a net; from Senyawas use of chants to evoke the old gods, to Duckdives nature-centered obsession.



I used looping pedals to create layers upon layers of melodies and textures to recapture the mood, to create new atmosphere inspired by nautical experiences, says Muhammad Gonzo Fahri, the one-man band Duckdive, who feels that his music works best for people that share his oceanic and nature-centered passions.



I think people who have experience in underwater activities might be able to relate more to the music I make, yet I dont think that others who havent had those kinds of experiences wont understand it. I just hope that my music can help them develop some sort of fascination or curiosity about nature. Maybe along the way theyll understand how significant nature can be. Duckdives music is basically a representation of nature inside our heads.



The best thing about experimental music is how evenly spread out it is. Unlike other sub-genres of underground music which stem mostly from Jakarta and Bandung, the most active experimental acts come from smaller cities, including Yogyakarta, Malang and Surabaya.



Rizki Aulia  who releases hypnotic electronica under the moniker Sawi Lieu and has played with Sangsaka Worship  considers evenness to be a part of the strength of experimental music. Without evoking any of the usual know-how needed to play conventional music, experimental music encourages pretty much anyone to create.



Noise music has really grown in Indonesia, he said, pointing out like-minded events such as the guerrilla concert series Jogja Noise Bombing.





TALENT IN ABUNDANCE



Morgan McKeller, an Australian who recently moved to Jakarta to run tape-label Tandem Tapes, said he had been taken aback by the sheer amount of experimental musicians here.



The first thing about the Indonesian experimental scene that stood out to me, when I began to scratch the surface, was the sheer amount and diversity of talent here. Before coming to Indonesia I was only aware of maybe two or three Indonesian experimental acts. After living here for less than a year, Im struggling to keep up with all the great experimental music out there, he says.



McKeller particularly admires Logic Lost which, according to McKeller skillfully drifts between beat-oriented electronica and more ambient sounds and Senyawa whom he said has something very raw, brutal and powerful about their sound but also a beauty and purity to it.



These local experimental acts tend to release limited edition albums in the form of CD-Rs and tapes on small labels or by themselves, selling them at shows, on websites and through independent distribution.



Local experimental acts are also released by foreign labels. Sawi Lieus worth-purchasing Pasaraya was released on US tape label Constellation Tatsu and Duckdives Interpolarity through Canadas Hobo Cult records.



There has also been a barrage of compilations released locally and internationally, such as Pekak! Indonesian Noise Music 1995-2015: 20 Years of Experimental Music from Indonesia, released by New Zealand independent label End of The Alfabet.



There is no vessel here for this kind of music, unlike abroad. You hardly even run into anyone who would want to play this type of music, said Adhythia, whose music has also been released abroad by foreign labels.



The biggest global push has thus far come in the form of documentaries.



In 2014, noise musician Danif Pradana teamed up Adythia Utama and Riar Rizaldi to produce Bising (Noise)  a documentary that was screened at prestigious film festivals across the country. Last year, Vice produced a documentary on Indonesian experimental music  prompting further interest in the scene.



Of course there is the rapturous success of Senyawa, who has toured abroad, playing major festivals. Their albums have been released by prestigious foreign indie labels.



Without belittling our own market, the global community tend to be more open-minded, curious and supportive with what we are doing here, says Duto Hardono, who runs the experimental label Hassana Press and releases music as Husnaan.



Yet, for these musicians, the limitless freedom that comes with creating experimental music is considered to be success in its purest form.



Ultimately this kind of music gives me the total freedom to record sounds the way I want, without boundaries, Gonzo said. There is only the thought of mysteries, thoughts that bring a sense of peacefulness. The meeting of subtlety and chaos on the album clearly projects the message. I hope it does.

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Linkedin Klaus Heinrich Raditio (The Jakarta Post) Sydney  Sat, July 16 2016

This year there have been three spats involving Chinese fishing vessels assisted by Chinas coast guard in Indonesias exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Natuna Islands. Apparently, Chinas nine-dash line in the South China Sea includes parts of Indonesias EEZ, which Beijing considers as its traditional fishing grounds.

To reassert Indonesias sovereignty over the Natuna Islands and the nations sovereign maritime rights in the islands adjacent waters, President Joko Jokowi Widodo sailed to the Natuna Islands on June 23.

One day before Jokowis visit, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi rejected Chinas stance that the two countries have overlapping claims over the waters around the islands. She made it clear that Indonesias maritime claim is consistent with international law and reiterated its stance as a non-claimant in the South China Sea disputes and therefore denies any claim of overlapping maritime rights with China.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

Indonesia is expanding trade opportunities in South Korea and this time, the move will excite Koreans taste buds.

Its a must for Kyungjin Lee to drink coffee every day after lunch. The South Korean journalist is especially fond of coffee from Java and claims that her taste is shared by many other Koreans.

That is why she was ecstatic when she learned that the Indonesian government was planning to open a coffee shop in South Korea in the next few months. It will be located on the Bojeong-dong Cafe Street, Gyeong gi province, near Seoul.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Denpasar  Sat, July 16 2016

A Finnish national, who had been in detention in Bali for a year, was extradited to Australia on Wednesday.

Samuel Pekka Juhani Kuuppo, 32, had been sought by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for the alleged sexual abuse of his fiance.

Kuuppo fled to Bali to avoid trial in Australia last year. He had been charged with sexually abusing his fiance, also from Finland.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jambi  Sat, July 16 2016

Police in West Tanjungjabung, Jambi, have arrested four suspects in connection with the killing of Yazid Siregar, 63, the older brother of regent Safrial MS.

One of the suspects has been identified only as NN, reportedly the second wife of the victim.

Local police are still hunting two more suspects, believed to be the actual killers.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

It was a busy yet halcyon afternoon when many people flocked to the Pluit Reservoir City Park in Pluit, North Jakarta, on Thursday.

A group of sweaty women were exercising at the parks extensive jogging track. A number of kids were flying kites up in the sky. Many hawkers selling various snacks from otak-otak (fish cake) to gorengan (fried snacks) were peddling to the visitors.

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Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Oslo  Sat, July 16 2016

Celia Fiesta Veloso conquered her fear and embarked on a world tour in search of support to help save her daughter, Mary Jane Fiesta Veloso, from the death sentence. Mary Jane, a Philippine national, is facing death by firing squad in Indonesia as punishment for drug smuggling.

The 56-year old Filipino woman refused to let poverty and a lack of education from holding her back from doing what she can to help her youngest daughter.

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Linkedin Bambang Muryanto and Nethy Dharma Somba (The Jakarta Post) Yogyakarta/Jayapura  Sat, July 16 2016

Yogyakarta Police arrested at least seven Papuan students for allegedly promoting separatism after the students were prevented from taking to the streets in the citys downtown.



The students were arrested in different locations in the city as they prepared to join the rally, which the authorities said promoted separatism. The seven students were named as Nus Tabuni, Obi Kagoya, Debi Kogoya, Obet Hisage, Terry Aud, Demianus Dabi and Adius Katligagal.



The students had planned to stage the rally on the citys streets in a show of support for the United Liberation Movement for West Papuas (ULMWP) bid for membership of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG). Local police, however, deployed a water canon on Jl. Kusumanegara, preventing the students from leaving their dormitory.



Emanuel Gobay of the Yogyakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH) said it was deplorable that the police had banned the students from staging a rally. Other students were beaten in clashes with the police, said Roy Karoba, a spokesman for the Peoples Unity for West Papua Liberation (PRPPB).



We were surprised at the polices attitude. They gathered in front of the dorm in the morning, later more police personnel were deployed to surround the dorm, Roy said on Friday. As their way was blocked by police personnel, the students displayed banners and chanted slogans at their dorm.



The police insisted on preventing the students from taking to the streets in a bid to avoid clashes with activists from Pemuda Pancasila, Forum for Children of Veterans and Military/Police (FKPPI) and Laskar Jogja, which strongly oppose the idea of separatism.



Farid Giant of Pemuda Pancasila in his speech asked the police to eradicate separatist movements in the country. We are not afraid of human rights. Combat those who commit treason against the Unitary Nation of the Republic of Indonesia, he said.



The Papuan students planned to stage the rally in connection with an extraordinary summit of the MSG in Honiara, Solomon Islands, which concluded on Thursday.



In a statement, the Foreign Ministrys director general for Asia-Pacific and African affairs, Desra Percaya, said the MSG had rejected full membership for the ULMWP.



On Friday, however, West Papuan lawyer and human rights activist Yan Warinussy dismissed reports that the MSG meeting had denied the ULMWP full membership status. There was no decision at the MSG summit, Yan said, adding that the ULMWPs status in the organization remained that of an observer, similar to Indonesias status.



Meanwhile, President Joko Jokowi Widodo called on his aides on Thursday to speed up comprehensive development in the countrys easternmost provinces.



Jokowi said the development should not be solely focused on building infrastructure, but also on creating a platform to enable steady economic growth.



In addition, Education and Culture Minister Anies Baswedan said on Friday poor educational access and facilities had partially led to the rising separatist movement in Papua. Anies made the comment after a meeting at the Office of the Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan.



The meeting was also attended by relevant ministers such as the National Planning Development Minister Sofyan Djalil and the Technology, Research and Higher Education Minister, Muhammad Natsir.



In the meeting concerning educational development in the Papua and the West Papua provinces, Anies said there were three acute problems faced in the regions: poor access, poor teacher quality and mismanagement by regional authorities.



Anies said he had urged ministries involved in the meeting to also speed up building infrastructure, because the geographical conditions in the provinces were not matched by adequate access.



If your happiness and basic welfare are well accommodated, you will not ask for many things, he said, when asked about the connection between poor education and separatism. (fac)

___________________________________

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Linkedin Tama Salim (The Jakarta Post)  Sat, July 16 2016

Outgoing US Ambassador to Indonesia Robert Blake is set to leave his post for retirement after 31 years in the US State Department and foreign service.

The veteran diplomat will return to the US next week knowing that, during his term, he witnessed his countrys deepening ties with Southeast Asias largest economy.

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Linkedin Kornelius Purba (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, July 16 2016

Immediately after the international arbitration court issued its verdict on the South China Sea (SCS), the Foreign Ministry issued a four-paragraph statement. The extra-cautiously crafted reaction was distributed to journalists and uploaded on the ministrys website.

Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi did not hold a press conference about the ruling from The Hague. There was general, uncharacteristic silence. None of the Cabinet ministers who often talk vigirously  but often with damaging effects  about the South China Sea dispute, such as Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister Rizal Ramli, or Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu, made any attempt to attract media attention.

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post)  Sat, July 16 2016

This is a response to the article, Public auction of real properties and plantations in the provinces of Coronel Portillo and Padre Abad, Department of Ucayali that was put on your website on June 23. Through your pages, Southeast Asian investors are being invited to purchase oil palm plantations in the Peruvian Amazon owned by the Melka commercial group.

However, they should be aware that the properties in question are highly controversial and subject to numerous challenges and complaints in the Peruvian courts, at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and by investment regulators. The Peruvian government has investigated these properties and already ordered the suspension of operations as the owners failed to secure the relevant authorizations prior to clearance of forest.

The RSPO itself has insisted on a suspension of operations as indigenous peoples have filed complaints accusing the company of taking their lands without their consent.

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Linkedin Angela Charlton (The Associated Press) Paris  Sun, July 17, 2016

French authorities have detained two more people in the investigation into the Bastille Day truck attack on the Mediterranean city of Nice that killed at least 84 people.

An official with the Paris prosecutor's office, which oversees national terrorism investigations, said a man and a woman were detained Sunday morning in Nice but provided no details on their identities. The official said five people detained previously remain in custody.

Authorities are trying to determine whether truck driver Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years, was acting alone in Thursday night's deadly attack.

The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack, though people close to him noted no signs of radicalism, just anger.

With scores still hospitalized, France's health minister is visiting Nice. (ary)
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Linkedin Hans Nicholas Jong (The Jakarta Post) Surabaya  Sun, July 17, 2016

The government has decided to resurrect its Return to Village Movement (Gerakan Kembali ke Desa) initiative as a follow up to the launch of its dana desa' village fund program.

The government expects the initiative to solve the problem of overpopulation in Jakarta, especially in relation to the the ever-increasing number of newcomer arrivals in the city after Idul Fitri, according to Social Affairs Minister Khofifah Indar Parawansa.

There was a Return to Village Movement in the past. But it was launched at a time when there was no village fund. Now the initiative is accompanied by significant village funds. One village receives Rp 1.2 billion (US$91,585) to Rp 2 billion, Khofifah said on the sidelines of an Idul Fitri gathering in Surabaya on Saturday.

As villages receive funds, they are able to develop themselves into economic centers. The redistribution of economic centers to each village can be initiated today, Khofifah said.

Jakarta saw a considerable population increase over the last two years. The population rose to 10.1 million people last year from 9.9 million in 2013, said Jakarta Deputy Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat.

The Return to Village Movement was first initiated by former East Java governor Basofi Sudirman in the early 1990s. (ary)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Associated Press) Istanbul, Turkey  Sun, July 17, 2016

The Turkish state-run Anadolu news agency says authorities have rounded up over 100 more judges and prosecutors and 60 more military officers for their alleged roles in the failed coup.

The reports Sunday followed an intensive crackdown against the judiciary and the military in the wake of the botched coup Friday night against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Officials say about 3,000 soldiers, including officers, are already in detention. Almost a similar number of judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

Still, the coup appears to have boosted Erdogan's popularity. Clapping, singing and dancing, thousands of government supporters celebrated the defeat of the coup in public squares in Ankara and Istanbul into the wee hours Sunday, bolstering support for the man who's led Turkey for over 13 years. (ary)
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Linkedin MIchael Rubinkam (The Associated Press) Ankara, Turkey  Sun, July 17, 2016

An exiled Muslim cleric whom Turkey's president has accused of orchestrating a failed coup denied any responsibility Saturday, saying he had no knowledge of the plot.

Fethullah Gulen told reporters at his Pennsylvania compound he knows only a "minute fraction" of his legions of sympathizers in Turkey, so he cannot speak to their "potential involvement" in the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup. They could be sympathizers of the opposition party. They could be sympathizers of the nationalist party. It could be anything," Gulen, who has lived in the US for more than 15 years, said through an interpreter.

The reclusive cleric, who very rarely speaks to reporters, talked about the failed overthrow attempt shortly after Erdogan demanded that the United States extradite him. US Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration would entertain an extradition request but Turkey would have to prove wrongdoing by Gulen.

Looking frail, Gulen, who is in his mid-70s, sat on a sofa in a large reception room outside his living quarters, with an aide taking his blood pressure before the news conference.

He said he wouldn't have returned to Turkey even if the coup had succeeded, fearing he would be "persecuted and harassed."

"This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here. Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important," said Gulen, who lives on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, an Islamic retreat founded by Turkish-Americans.

He has criticized Erdogan, his onetime ally, over the Turkish leader's increasingly authoritarian rule. The Erdogan regime has launched a broad campaign against Gulen's movement in Turkey and abroad, purging civil servants suspected of ties to the movement, seizing businesses and closing some media organizations.

In the United States, a lawyer hired by the Turkish government has lodged numerous accusations against a network of about 150 publicly funded charter schools started by followers of Gulen, whose philosophy blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Nobody associated with the US schools has been charged with wrongdoing.

On Saturday, Gulen denounced Erdogan over what he called the government's "repression and persecution" of Gulen's followers in Turkey.

"It appears that they have no tolerance for any movement, any group, any organization that is not under their total control," Gulen said.

Given the chance to deliver a message directly to the Turkish leader, Gulen demurred.

"If I were to send him a message, he would probably consider it as a slur and reject it," Gulen said, adding, "but I have always prayed for myself and for him. I have prayed to God to lead us to the straight path, to the virtuous path."

About 150 supporters of Erdogan protested outside the compound Saturday, chanting and waving signs. (ary)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Associated Press) Kuwait City  Sun, July 17, 2016

Yemen's government has resumed talks in Kuwait with Shiite Houthi rebels despite its earlier threats to boycott the process.

The state-run Kuwait News Agency, KUNA, reports that the parties participated in the U.N.-led talks Saturday evening, after a roughly two-week hiatus.

Previous peace talks have failed to bridge the gap between the internationally-recognized and Saudi-backed government of exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi and the rebels, who overran the Yemeni capital in late 2014.

The war in Yemen has killed some 9,000 people.

Hadi's negotiators are demanding the implementation of a UN Security Council resolution which stipulates the withdrawal of militias from all cities. The Houthis want a share of power in a transitional government.

KUNA quoted negotiators on Hadi's side as saying these are "last chance" peace talks. (ary)
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Linkedin Sarah El Deeb and Suzan Fraser (Associated Press) Istanbul  Mon, July 18, 2016

Following a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government moved swiftly Sunday to shore up his power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying it has detained 6,000 people.

The crackdown targeted not only generals and soldiers, but a wide swath of the judiciary that has sometimes blocked Erdogan, raising concerns that the effort to oust him will push Turkey even further into authoritarian rule.

Friday night's sudden uprising by a faction of the military appeared to take the government  and much of the world  by surprise.

The plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but it ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military, and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded, the government said.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life has returned to normal.

"Another calamity has been thwarted," Yildirim said in Ankara after visiting state TRT television, which had been seized by soldiers supporting the coup. "However, our duty is not over. We shall rapidly conduct the cleansing operation so that they cannot again show the audacity of coming against the will of the people."

Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve." Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was legally abolished in 2004 as part of the country's bid to join the European Union.

Even before the weekend chaos in Turkey, the NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against the Islamic State group had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly heavy-handed rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissent, restricted the media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Speaking to a large crowd of supporters in front of his Istanbul residence Sunday evening, Erdogan responded to frequent calls of "We want the death penalty!" by saying: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get."

Grief-stricken relatives in Ankara and Istanbul buried those killed in the coup attempt, and prayers for the dead were read simultaneously at noon Sunday at Turkey's 85,000 mosques. Erdogan attended a funeral for his campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, Abdullah Tayyip Olcak. The president wept and vowed to take the country forward in "unity and solidarity."

The government's announcement that 6,000 people had been detained  including three top generals and hundreds of soldiers  suggested a wide conspiracy. Observers said the scale of the crackdown, especially against the judiciary, indicated the government was taking the opportunity to further consolidate Erdogan's power.

"The factions within the military opposed to Erdogan who did this just gave him carte blanche to crack down not only on the military but on the judiciary," said Aykan Erdemir, a former lawmaker from the main opposition party and now a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "The coup plotters couldn't have helped Erdogan more."

The rapid suppression of the putsch was greeted by Turks across the political spectrum with opposition parties joining to condemn it. In a half-dozen cities, tens of thousands marched throughout the day after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Erdogan, Turkey's top politician for 13 years.

At nightfall, flag-waving crowds rallied in Istanbul's Taksim Square, Ankara's Kizilay Square and elsewhere.

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country," while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," said Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at a morning rally in Istanbul.

The failed coup and the subsequent crackdown followed moves by Erdogan to reshape both the military and the judiciary. He had indicated a shake-up of the military was imminent and had also taken steps to increase his influence over the judiciary.

This month, parliament approved a controversial bill to reform two Turkish high courts, which allows the government to dismiss hundreds of administrative and high appeals court judges and allow Erdogan to replace them with judges loyal to him. Parliament passed the bill even as authorities were grappling with a deadly triple suicide bomb attacks at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport.

The opposition had appealed the legislation to the high court unsuccessfully, but Erdogan has not yet signed it into law. Two Constitutional Court justices were among the thousands of members of the judiciary it had detained Saturday.

It is not clear how the post-coup purge will affect the judiciary, how the government will move to replace the dismissed judges and prosecutors, or where the trials for those detained would be held.

The government alleged the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of trying to overthrow the government.

Gulen, who lives in Saylorsburgh, Pennsylvania, espouses a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy. He is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey, where the government has labeled his movement a terrorist organization. He strongly denies the government's charges.

At a funeral in Istanbul, Erdogan vowed to "clean all state institutions of the virus" of Gulen's supporters. He also called on Washington to extradite Gulen.

At two weekend news conferences, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.

Gulen even raised the possibility the coup attempt had been staged, saying it had "all the signs of a movie scenario," in order to purge the military of Erdogan's opponents.

In recent years, the government has moved to purge the police and judiciary of Gulen followers. The military, founded on secularist ideals, has been a staunch opponent of Gulen.

Gulen told reporters he did not fear extradition.

"This doesn't worry me at all. But I'm not going to do anything that will harm my dignity or that will go against my dignity," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny." So far, officials have not offered evidence he was involved.

Ziya Meral of the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, a civilian think tank affiliated with the British Defense Ministry, said the motives of the plotters remain unclear, but the allegations against Gulen were dubious.

"I am more inclined toward a network within the armed services who were disturbed about where Turkey is heading," she said.

The allegations will only add to the pressure on the U.S. government and signal new uncertainty in U.S.-Turkish relations.

The putsch attempt led to a temporary halt to air operations by the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State group in neighboring Syria and Iraq from Turkey's Incerlik air base, but the Pentagon said Sunday that Turkey has reopened its airspace.

A Turkish government official said that the commander of the base, Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, was among those detained.

The state-run Anadolu Agency also said authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Erdogan's top military aide, Col. Ali Yazici, although it wasn't clear what role he may have played.

The agency said 70 generals and admirals, including former Gen. Akin Ozturk, an air Force commander, were detained. Of the generals and admirals brought before court, 11 were put under arrest as of Sunday night and the rest are awaiting processing.

Security forces arrested a group of alleged plotters who had been holding out at one of Istanbul's airports Sunday, a Turkish official said. In addition, Anadolu reported that seven people, including a colonel, were detained at an air base in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

Gen. Umit Dunda said at least 104 conspirators were among those killed, describing them as mainly officers from the air force, the military police and armored units.

Security forces rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged links to the coup. Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for alleged involvement with the group responsible for the coup.

The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." The agency said 58 homes of prosecutors and judges have been searched.

Officials also said 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

Another 149 police were detained in Ankara, according to Anadolu, citing the office of the city's governor. (bbn)

Fraser reported from Ankara. Dominique Soguel, Emrah Gurel, Bram Janssen and Cinar Kiper in Istanbul and Mucahit Ceylan in Ankara, Desmond Butler in Washington and Michael Rubinkam in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania also contributed.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sun, July 17, 2016

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to visit your favorite cartoon village? From July 13 to August 21, guests visiting the Ocean Terminal Forecourt at Harbour City, Hong Kong, will be able to visit Smurf village and find out.

Dubbed Were All Smurfs!, the area has temporarily transformed into Smurf village as part of The Smurfs Asian Art Tour.

Inside the village-like exhibition, there are 35 Smurf characters as well as six meter mushroom houses to enter. Visitors will also find a giant Smurf figurine, a comic display and culinary stops arranged to follow the animation theme. Children can also attend a summer school set throughout the exhibition period.

(Read also: Classic Nintendo Entertainment System returning to stores)

Thirty-six unseen artworks by Peyo, the creator of The Smurfs cartoon will be displayed a pop-up gallery called The Smurfs House of Stories. Models by local miniature artists Tony Lai and Maggie Chan will also feature in the exhibition.

In addition to the art tour, a global online charity sale named Yes I Smurf! has been organized in conjunction with UNICEF. (mas/kes)
Since Brexit, EU and UK students have had loads of questions regarding how the outcome will affect them and their university careers; so we searched far and wide to provide you with as many answers as it is currently possible to give.

First things first, for EU students currently studying in the UK: DONT PANIC.

Even if you now feel uncertain, and are experiencing any new animosity, you are welcome and respected at your university. Many universities have been releasing statements reassuring and supporting EU students.

Anne Chawk, senior student money advisor at Bedfordshire University said, We would also like to reassure those applying to Bedfordshire that EU students are very welcome, play a vital role in life at the university and are valued members of the student community.

Professor Sir David Greenaway, vice-chancellor of the University of Nottingham and chair of the Russell Group, has also spoken out against discrimination, stating: "Now more than ever we should ensure our campuses are places where diversity is welcomed, cherished and respected.

On to the next major issue: money. Loans for EU students will not be affected, at least not for a while. The government has said that EU nationals currently receiving funding will definitely continue to be financed.

Those applying for student financing in England and Wales for the 2016-17 academic year will also be fine, according to the Student Loans Company and Universities Wales.

However, EU students studying in Northern Ireland, have not yet been provided a solid confirmation of this same principle there.

Despite this only two UK universities have guaranteed that EU student fees will not exceed those set for students from the UK for the next five years.

Chawk has confirmed that Bedfordshire University will be one of those two: "We will also guarantee student loan finance for all students who are currently eligible, on the same terms offered by the Student Loans Company.

The availability of research funding has also been put in question. Lets not sugar coat it  EU investment at Russell Group universities has been significant, providing more than half a billion pounds a year. If ties are broken with the European research network, there is the possibility that this funding will cease, or at least be significantly reduced.

The NUS released a statement in which they revealed some UK universities have already reported European partners pulling out of joint funding bids due to the uncertainty about the future.

Also, with the expectation that numbers will drop following Brexit, Nick Hillman, the director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said that certain courses might no longer be viable without the funding that comes from EU students.

But the main message to take away at this moment in time is that nothing is certain and it is important to remain positive.

The benefits of going to university remain clear: university lets you experience a rich cultural and social scene, meet different people and study something you are really interested it, says Chawk.
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iStock/Thinkstock(TITUSVILLE, Fla.) -- Two people were fatally shot at a hospital in Titusville, Florida, early Sunday morning police said.



The Titusville Police Department tweeted that the victims were an "elderly female patient" and a "female hospital employee." The gunman's motive was unknown.



Initially, the Titusville Police Department tweeted, "Susp in custody after shooting at Parrish Medical Cntr, 951 N Washington, 2AM. Two deceased, scene secure, unk motive at this time."



According to Brevard County sheriff Wayne Ivey, the suspect and the victims did not know each other, nor does the suspect appear to have a connection with the hospital.



Security guards, who were unarmed, managed to detain the suspect before police arrived.



Police are unsure why the gunman chose to enter that specific patient's room.



According to ABC Orlando affiliate WFTV, the gunman, who wasn't immediately identified, was arrested at the hospital.



Titusville is about 40 miles east of Orlando.



Copyright  2016, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
South African man found dead in 'messy' Patong room, no foul play suspected

PHUKET: Police do not suspect foul play in the death of a 37-year-old South African man, whose body was found inside a disorderly room this morning in Patong.

patongdeathalcohol

By Darawan Naknakhon

Sunday 17 July 2016, 07:58PM

Police did not note any signs of a struggle.

Patong police were alerted by the owner of a four-storey residential townhouse building located on Piset Karanee Rd that a foreign tenant was discovered dead in the bathroom of the room he rented.

Police arrived to the scene, in room number one of two on the second floor of the complex, where they found the caucasian man lying on his side under the sink.

The man was not wearing any clothes and had at least one tattoo on his right arm, and investigators estimated that he had been dead for no less than three hours.

The man was named by police but The Phuket News is withholding his name until it can be confirmed that the next of kin have been notified.

Despite the chaotic state of the room, with belongings strung out in disarray, investigating officer Pol Maj Patapee Srichai said that he believed the mess was a reflection of the type of lifestyle the deceased lived.

Police did not note any bruises or marks on the mans body but took note of other signs* in the room that suggested the man died on his own.

Officers took statements from three Thai nationals, including the building owner, a tenant on the third floor and a woman who claimed to be the deceaseds girlfriend.

All three gave similar statements, revealing that the South African had been living in Patong for about two months, and had initially worked part time to cheer for customers at a certain tattoo parlor.

The building owner, who police named as Prasert Kraisanguan, told police that he had discovered the mans body after forcing open the door when the man did not answer door after knocking several times, which he reported as unusual behavior.

According to Prasert, the foreign tenant had owed him one months rent and was very loud at about 11pm on the previous night, July 16.

According to a statement given by a man who lived in the same building and claimed to be a former associate of the deceased, who police named as Mr Surachat , revealed that there was loud noises coming from the [foreign mans] room at about 9.30am on the morning [of July 17], but I did not think anything of it because loud sound was the usual.

Finally officers took a statement from a woman who they did not name, who revealed that she had been seeing the deceased for about two months.

She told officers that the deceased liked to drink alcohol, smoke marijuana and take valium pills and was very loud and jealous.

According to her statement, the two had a violent fight on July 14 when the man became jealous that she had gone out with a friend, and after the fight she stopped going to his room. However, she said that on July 15 the deceased came to see her on Bangla Road and promised to get his life together, stop drinking and earn money. She claimed that was the last she heard from him.

The body has been transported to hospital for further examination.

*Graphic details of the report have been omitted. If you are a family member of the deceased, or represent the South African government and need full details of the initial report, please email the editor [at] classactmedia.co.th








Young Myanmar man's 'member' mangled in Phuket shrimp farm turbine accident

PHUKET: A 17-year-old young man from Myanmar was unlucky-but-lucky that his sexual reproductive organ remained in tact after being slashed by the blade of an aeration turbine at a shrimp farm on the north of Phuket today.

Myanmarsex

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Sunday 17 July 2016, 03:34PM

At 11:30am on Sunday (July 17) Thalang Police recieved a call from Thalang Hospital's Emergency Room to notify them that a 17-year-old Myanmar national had been admitted with a deep gash on his penis.

The patient, who was named as "Mr Few" (or "Mr Feel" depending on transilteration variations; in Thai, ), was reported to be conscious and responsive albeit in excrutiating pain, bleeding steadily from his groin area when doctor's examined him.

A "good samaritan", who was not named, and had reportedly brought the young man to hospital in the back of his pickup truck, told hospital staff that he had looked after the shrimp farm in Ban Yamu of Thalang's Paklok sub district where the accident took place.

According to the man, Mr Few was a laborer who had been visiting friends as it was his day off and was swimming in the pond when the accident took placed.

Upon realizing what had happened after hearing loud screams, the man said he then rushed Mr Few to hospital.

Police are investigating claims, while doctors have yet to comment on Mr Few's long-term prognosis.
No truth to rumor that schools are putting litter boxes in bathrooms
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, applauds Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., left, during a campaign event to announce Pence as the vice presidential running mate on, Saturday, July 16, 2016, in New York. Trump called Pence "my partner in this campaign" and his first and best choice to join him on a winning Republican presidential ticket. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gestures while speaking to the media during his and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov news conference following their long talks in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 15, 2016. Lavrov and other Russian officials have called on their countrymen in Turkey to stay indoors amid uncertainty about whether a military coup is taking place. Lavrov made the statement early Saturday at a news conference with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
The brother of Pakistan's social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been arrested for drugging and strangulating to death the model for bringing "shame" to the family by posting risque videos and posts on Facebook, reigniting debate on a spate of honour killings that has plagued the country.

Image source: Facebook

26-year-old Qandeel's younger brother Muhammad Waseem was arrested in Dera Ghazi Khan district of Punjab Province late last night. He was later presented before media where he confessed that he drugged and strangled his sister.

Waseem, 25, said that he killed her as she brought "dishonour to the Baloch name" due to risque videos and statements that she posted on social media.

"There were other issues as well...Like the Maulvi issue," he said, in an apparent reference to a controversy surrounding Qandeel's selfies with Mufti Abdul Qavi, which hit the headlines last month.

Her controversial pictures recently led to the suspension of Mufti Qawi's membership from the Ruet-e-Hilal committee, a top religious body. "She wasn't aware I was killing her. I gave her a tablet and then strangled her," he said.

The actor-cum-model was strangled to death in her house in Multan's Karimabad area in the early hours on Saturday.

Qandeel's father, Muhammad Azeem, had lodged the FIR and named his two sons for killing her in Multan where she had come from Karachi to live with her parents on the occasion of Eid.

In his police complaint, Qandeel's father said Waseem killed her as he was against her working in showbiz.

The father alleged that Waseem had taken this extreme step at the behest of his brother Mohammad Aslam Shaheen.

City police chief Azhar Akram said the younger brother fled after the crime to Dera Ghazi Khan with two of his friends.

Police were searching for the friends also.

Qandeel came from a humble background and became a social media sensation. She had received threats from her family to quit modelling and stop her provocative appearances on social media. Her brother had been threatening her over her Facebook posts and videos, the police said.

Three weeks ago, she had written to the interior minister, the director general of the Federal Investigation Authority (FIA) and the senior superintendent of Islamabad asking them to provide security to her.

Her real name was Fouzia Azeem but she chose Qandeel Baloch as her pseudonym after stepping into modelling.

Qandeel became famous through her tireless self-promotion and suggestive "selfies" posted on social media and had amassed tens of thousands of followers.

Meanwhile, arrangements are being made to send Qandeel's body to her hometown of Shah Saddardin in Dera Ghazi Khan for burial.

Honour killing is common in Pakistan and every year hundreds of women are killed by male relatives for allegedly dishonouring the family.
The US has rejected accusations that it was behind the failed military coup attempt in Turkey and said such public insinuations are harmful to our bilateral relations.

Secretary of State John Kerry called his Turkish counterpart on Saturday to offer US support in the wake of a failed coup and protest claims that US had backed it.

"Kerry made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," State Department Spokesman John Kirby said.

During the call, Kerry reiterated US support for the democratically elected government in Turkey, for the rule of law and for the need for authorities to take all necessary precautions to safeguard civilian life and property as they respond to this attempted coup, he said.

"Kerry also urged restraint by the Turkish government and respect for due processand its international obligationsas it investigates and uncovers additional information about those involved," Kirby said.

Finally, both ministers discussed Turkey's importance as both a NATO ally and a key member of the coalition to defeat Da'esh, and stressed the need to stay focused on ensuring operational support to those efforts continue unabated, he said.

Earlier, Turkey's labour minister Suleyman Soylu had reportedly suggested the United States was behind the revolt, which triggered fighting that left at least 265 dead.

Meanwhile in a travel advisory, the State Department warned US citizens of increased threats from terrorist groups throughout Turkey and to avoid travel to southeastern Turkey.

"In light of the July 15 coup attempt and its aftermath, we suggest US citizens reconsider travel to Turkey at this time," the travel advisory said.
Dr. Chaim Waxman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University and Chairman of Behavioral Science at Hadassah College, delivered an electrifying presentation at the Center for Kehillah Development in which he revealed new findings that Orthodox drop- out rates are falling and retention rates are rising. Increasingly, Orthodox Jews are choosing to remain Orthodox, he told the crowd of avreichim at the CKD. After a decade of dire alarms over Orthodox drop-outs, trends have changed and Orthodoxy now has the highest retention rate of any denomination, followed by the Reform and then the Conservative.

Describing Orthodoxy as the most vibrant of the movements, Dr. Waxman said that the Orthodox community is going to increase in size dramatically in coming years for many reasons. It is not just that more Orthodox are remaining Orthodox, he explained, It is also that Orthodox birthrates far outpace those of every other Jewish denomination. His research indicates that Chassidishe Jew have 12 times as many children as the non-Orthodox, and even the Modern Orthodox have 4 times the number of children as the non-Orthodox. They are a community on the rise, Dr. Waxman observed.

According to Rabbi Leib Kelemen, founder of the CKD, this sudden growth in Orthodoxy requires urgent action. Read the handwriting on the wall, he said. Unless we help talmidei chochomim who havent yet taken leadership positions increase their knowledge of psak and communal leadership skills, the existing rabbonim could be overwhelmed by their growing communities and the growing number of new communities. Rabbi Kelemen said that some rabbonim already feel challenged to give enough personal attention to every member of their kehillos, and the ongoing Orthodox success-story could make instances like these more common. Rabbi Kelemen also warned that the need for a lot of rabbonim could tempt us to place people with weaker backgrounds into rabbinic positions, while the responsible strategy would be to help the biggest talmidei chochomim get the background and skills they need to assume communal leadership. We have giants in Torah who have tremendous maalos and beautiful middos, Rabbi Kelemen said, and many would be excited to take responsibility for the Klal. This is precisely the mission CKD has accepted  in Rabbi Kelemens words: To give chashuve avreichim the time and training they need to become quality leaders. Rabbi Kelemen said that CKD is currently accepting applications for their five-year learning fellowship, and he encourages qualified talmidei chochomim to apply at www.c4kd.org.

Dr. Waxman also shared data suggesting that the yeshivishe world is not just among the fastest growing, but also in some ways the most spiritually strong. When asked, How important is religion in your life?, 82.8 percent of the Ultra-Orthodox said Very Important compared to 77.4 percent of Modern Orthodox 44.3 percent of the Conservative, and only 17.2 percent of the Reform. When asked How certain are you about your belief in God?, 91.9 percent of the Ultra-Orthodox answered Absolutely Certain, compared to 87.4 percent of the Modern Orthodox, 47.5 percent of the Conservative, and 39.6 percent of the Reform.

In an astounding projection, Dr. Waxman indicated that current data suggest the possibility that the majority of all Jews in the world will live in Israel within less than 20 years. If that were realized it would be the first time this has happened since the destruction of Bayis Sheni. He pointed out that this could have major repercussions in halachah.

Dr. Waxman concluded his talk to the CKD avreichim by encouraging them to remain aware of trends in Jewish sociology: You are going to lead Jewish communities, and in that role you will need to know what is happening both inside and outside the Orthodox community.
An exiled Muslim cleric whom Turkeys president has accused of orchestrating a failed coup denied any responsibility Saturday, saying he had no knowledge of the plot.

Fethullah Gulen told reporters at his Pennsylvania compound he knows only a minute fraction of his legions of sympathizers in Turkey, so he cannot speak to their potential involvement in the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup. They could be sympathizers of the opposition party. They could be sympathizers of the nationalist party. It could be anything, Gulen, who has lived in the U.S. for more than 15 years, said through an interpreter.

The reclusive cleric, who very rarely speaks to reporters, talked about the failed overthrow attempt shortly after Erdogan demanded that the United States extradite him. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration would entertain an extradition request but Turkey would have to prove wrongdoing by Gulen.

Looking frail, Gulen, who is in his mid-70s, sat on a sofa in a large reception room outside his living quarters, with an aide taking his blood pressure before the news conference.

He said he wouldnt have returned to Turkey even if the coup had succeeded, fearing he would be persecuted and harassed.

This is a tranquil and clean place and I enjoy and I live my freedom here. Longing for my homeland burns in my heart, but freedom is also equally important, said Gulen, who lives on the grounds of the Golden Generation Worship & Retreat Center, an Islamic retreat founded by Turkish-Americans.

He has criticized Erdogan, his onetime ally, over the Turkish leaders increasingly authoritarian rule. The Erdogan regime has launched a broad campaign against Gulens movement in Turkey and abroad, purging civil servants suspected of ties to the movement, seizing businesses and closing some media organizations.

In the United States, a lawyer hired by the Turkish government has lodged numerous accusations against a network of about 150 publicly funded charter schools started by followers of Gulen, whose philosophy blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Nobody associated with the U.S. schools has been charged with wrongdoing.

On Saturday, Gulen denounced Erdogan over what he called the governments repression and persecution of Gulens followers in Turkey.

It appears that they have no tolerance for any movement, any group, any organization that is not under their total control, Gulen said.

Given the chance to deliver a message directly to the Turkish leader, Gulen demurred.

If I were to send him a message, he would probably consider it as a slur and reject it, Gulen said, adding, but I have always prayed for myself and for him. I have prayed to God to lead us to the straight path, to the virtuous path.

About 150 supporters of Erdogan protested outside the compound Saturday, chanting and waving signs.

(AP)
Two years after the chokehold death of Eric Garner made I cant breathe a rallying cry for protests over police killings of black men, federal authorities are still grappling with whether to prosecute the white officer seen on a widely watched video wrapping his arm around Garners neck.

The legal limbo is playing out on the watch of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has come under persistent pressure in the city and elsewhere to bring Officer Daniel Pantaleo to justice. The New York City case turned out to be a forerunner to a series of videotaped police killings across the country that have fueled outrage and protests.

Before becoming attorney general, Lynch ran the U.S. attorneys office in Brooklyn, which initiated the review of Garners case after a state grand jury refused to indict Pantaleo in 2014, and she personally met with Garners family in that role. Questioned by Congress this week, she said the Garner investigation remains open but gave no indication of how or when a decision will be made.

Last year, the city agreed to pay $5.9 million to settle the familys wrongful death claim, but the push for a federal case has persisted. Garners siblings performed on a rap song called I Cant Breathe that was released to mark the second anniversary of his July 17, 2014, death, and his mother, Gwen Carr, has proposed converting a small park across the street from where he died into a playground named after him.

Whats in my heart is to keep my sons name alive, Carr said. This is my work for the rest of my life.

A resolution has been hampered by a behind-the-scenes disagreement over the direction of the federal investigation of the Garners death in Staten Island, according to two people with inside knowledge. On one side are prosecutors in Lynchs former office in Brooklyn, who arent sure theres enough evidence to charge Pantaelo at the federal level. On the other side are their counterparts in the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division in Washington, who feel more confident in forging ahead.

Both people were not authorized to discuss the decision-making process and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Officials at the Justice Department declined to comment for this article.

Internal Justice Department disputes about the strength of such cases happen more often than you think, said David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who specialized in civil rights matters.

The nearly 100 U.S. attorneys offices in the country are mostly given great autonomy, but Washington attorneys dont hesitate to get deeply involved when a matter falls within the jurisdiction of their specialized divisions like civil rights, Weinstein said. The two sides usually work out differences on their own, but if not, Justice Department leadership can often get its way because whether they like it or not  all U.S. attorneys answer to the attorney general, he said.

The disagreements reflect the challenge of finding enough evidence to prove an officer willfully deprived a citizens civil rights, said Samuel Bagenstos, the former No. 2 official at the Civil Rights Division. Historically, the high legal bar has prevented prosecutors from charging most officers who kill unarmed men, including the one who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

These are hard cases to prove, Bagenstos said. That can create a lot of difficult conversations within the department about them.

For Garners family and its supporters, the cellphone video shot by a bystander capturing the last moments of his life has always been evidence enough.

Its been two years, the Rev. Al Sharpton said at recent gathering with Garners family. The fatal encounter was on video and weve not seen justice. So thats why people are questioning whats going on now.

Sharpton led a march through Brooklyn Saturday and vowed to keep marching against injustice until a culture of mistreating black people ends.

The video shows 43-year-old Garner, after being stopped by officers for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes, telling the officers to leave him alone and refusing to be handcuffed. Pantaleo responds by putting Garner in an apparent chokehold, which is banned under NYPD policy, as he was taken to the ground. The heavyset Garner, who had asthma, is heard gasping, I cant breathe. He later was pronounced dead at a hospital.

The medical examiner ruled Garners death a homicide caused in part by the chokehold. But police union officials and Pantaleos lawyer have argued that the officer used a takedown move taught by the police department, not a chokehold, and that Garners poor health was the main reason he died.

Under the circumstances, a federally protected civil right wasnt violated, Pantaleos lawyer, Stuart London, said this week. This was a simple street encounter where the officer performed his duties as he was trained.

The officer remains on desk duty as the New York Police Department awaits the outcome of the federal probe before deciding whether to discipline him on its own.

(AP)
One man was killed and three other pedestrians were injured early Saturday when an off-duty police officers SUV struck them in a trendy neighborhood in Brooklyn, police said.

Authorities said 28-year-old Nicholas Batka lost control of his vehicle and it mounted the sidewalk on a street in the popular Williamsburg section, striking two men and two women.

One victim, a 21-year-old man whose name was not immediately released, was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital. Batka and the three other stricken pedestrians were taken to hospitals in stable condition.

Batka was arrested later Saturday on charges including manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter and driving while intoxicated. No information was available on a lawyer who could comment on the charges.

Police spokesman Officer Brian Magoolaghan said Batka has worked in the departments transit bureau in Manhattan for one and a half years. He said Batka was suspended without pay pending the disposition of the case.

The New York Post quoted neighborhood residents as saying people were awakened by screams after the accident.

I was woken up with a huge noise. People were screaming in agony, Agata Winter told the newspaper.

Angela Zielinski, another witness, told the Post she confronted the driver.

Dude  you just hit four people, she recalled telling him. He stared at me with a blank stare.

Another witness, Kelly Convery, told the newspaper that Batka tried to drive away from the scene and when he couldnt, he moved to the vehicles passenger side.

Everyone saw him do it, she said.

Zielinski said she saw Batka show his police badge to people gathered around the vehicle.

(AP)
U.S.-Turkish tensions escalated Saturday after a quashed coup in Turkey, as the countrys leader bluntly demanded the extradition of a U.S.-based cleric he accused of orchestrating the violence. Another senior official directly blamed the United States.

After strongly supporting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when it seemed his government might topple and then opening the door to sending home the cleric, a stung Obama administration fired back at its NATO ally.

Public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told his Turkish counterpart, according to the State Departments readout of their telephone call.

The back-and-forth occurred against the backdrop of Turkey closing its airspace, effectively grounding U.S. warplanes that had been targeting Islamic State forces in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

At the center of the controversy stood Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

Gulen quickly condemned Friday nights coup attempt by military officers that resulted in a night of explosions, air battles and gunfire that left dozens dead. Erdogans government said Gulen directed the coup all the same.

In a televised speech Saturday, Erdogan said Turkey had never rejected a U.S. extradition request for terrorists. Addressing Washington, he requested the handover of Gulen and said, If we are strategic partners, then you should bring about our request.

Although he didnt outline any threat, Erdogans emphasis on U.S.-Turkish counterterrorism cooperation raised the prospect of a prolonged closure of the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey if he didnt get his way. The Pentagon said it was trying to get permission to resume air operations from the base, while adjusting mission operations in the meantime.

Suleyman Soylu, Turkeys labor minister, went further than Erdogan, suggesting the U.S. was behind the coup.

In their second call in as many days, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavosoglu told Kerry the government was in control of state institutions.

Kerry reiterated U.S. support for Turkeys democratically elected government, according to the State Department readout, and urged authorities to respect the rule of law and safeguard civilian life as they respond to the coup attempt. Kerry also said Turkey needed to respect due process as it investigates those it believes were involved in the plot.

Earlier, on a visit to Luxembourg, Kerry told reporters the U.S. would entertain an extradition request for Gulen if the Turks provided evidence of wrongdoing. Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government, but Washington has never found the claims compelling.

We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr. Gulen, Kerry told reporters. And obviously we would invite the government of Turkey, as we always do, to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny. And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately.

Gulen is understood to maintain significant support among some members of the military and mid-level bureaucrats. His movement called Hizmet includes think tanks, schools and various media enterprises. Gulen and Erdogan only became estranged in recent years.

A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey was preparing a formal extradition request with detailed information about Gulens involvement in illegal activities. He said the coup attempt was seen as one more thing to add to an already extensive list.

In a statement, Gulen said he condemned, in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey and sharply rejected any responsibility or knowledge of who might be involved.

At a news briefing Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, the cleric noted that he has been away from Turkey for more than 15 years and would not have returned if the coup had succeeded. He cited greater freedoms in the United States as a reason.

In brief, I dont even know who my followers are, the frail-looking cleric said through an interpreter. You can think about many motivations of people who staged this coup.

The coup failed after appearing not to have been backed by the most senior ranks of the military. Turkeys main opposition parties, too, condemned the attempted overthrow of the government. Prime Minister Benali Yildirim said 161 people were killed and 1,440 wounded in the overnight violence. He said 2,839 plotters were detained.

Kerry said the U.S. had no indication beforehand of the coup attempt, which began as he and Russias foreign minister were in a Russian government villa in Moscow, locked in negotiations over Syria.

If youre planning a coup, you dont exactly advertise to your partners in NATO, Kerry said. So it surprised everyone. It does not appear to be a very brilliantly planned or executed event.

(AP)
At 7:00AM Sunday morning 11 Tammuz, a hand grenade detonated in the hand of a driver of a military patrol along the northern border to Syria at the entrance to an outpost in the Mt. Hermon area of the Golan Heights. Two soldiers were killed in the mishap RL; lone soldier Sgt. Shlomo Rindenow zl 20, from Kibbutz Sdei Yoav (his biological family lives in New Jersey), who served in the 401st Brigade and First-Sgt. Husam Tafash zl, 24, from the Druse community of Beit Jon.

Three soldiers sustained various degrees of injuries and flown by helicopter to the Rambam Medical Center trauma unit. The wounded soldiers serve in the 401st Artillery Brigade. Earlier on Sunday, officials at Rambam reported one soldier in moderate-to-serious condition with shrapnel injuries over his body. The others have light injuries.

IDF Northern District Commander Major-General Aviv Kochavi has ordered an investigation to be headed by an officer of the rank of colonel. The exact circumstances leading to the accident are unclear at this time.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Before one reads on, one must realize in the eyes of the secularists and leftists in Israel, democracy is understood to be having tolerance for any hashkafa that does not contradict a left-wing anti-Torah agenda. Hence, if one does not identify with the latter, one is perceived as a threat to democratic fibers of the State of Israel.

Last week the shouts emanating from the leftist Meretz party were to void the appointment of incoming IDF Chief Rabbi Eyal Karim for having dared to permit attacking women in a time of war as the amei haaretz of that party interpreted a Torah essay by Rabbi Karim relating to Eishes Yifas Toar. They also blasted Rabbi Karim for daring to speak out against a toeva lifestyle RL.

The anti-Torah agenda of Meretz has found its new target for this week, one of the heads of the mechina yeshiva in Yishuv Eli, Yeshivat Bnei David. Meretz leader MK Zahava Gal-On is calling on the Defense Ministry and other state agencies to immediately cut all funding to Bnei David as one of its founders, Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, dared to speak out against Chief Education Officer Brigadier-General Avner Paz-Tzuk and the latters vehemently anti-Torah agenda which is being infused throughout the military. Levinstein explained how Paz-Tzuk continues working to remove authority from the IDF Rabbinate, placing this authority in his trusting secular anti-Torah lifestyle hands.

Ironically, just this past Independence Day, a few short weeks ago, the co-founder of Bnei David, Rabbi Eli Sadan, was awarded the Israel Prize for building the prestigious mechina pre-IDF institution whose talmidim today serve as the backbone of the most elite units in the IDF. However, the kipot srugot can no longer be tolerated as some of their officers dare to speak out using the G (G-d) work and contaminating soldiers with talk of belief in HKBH and a Torah lifestyle.

Gal-On explains A battle is taking place and the time has come to decide which side of the battle we are on in her reference to Rabbi Levinstein who dares to envision a Jewish moral army as opposed to Gal-Ons vision of a military that waves the flag of pluralism and embracing toeva and any and all lifestyles chas vsholom.

MK (Machane Tzioni) Ksenia Svetlova calls on the Defense Minister and Education Minister to act immediately in response to Levinsteins brazen statements. In her letter she writes Levinstein receives his salary from the Ministry of Education and the preparatory program he heads received allocated funds from the Ministry of Defense. It cannot be that he holds such a conference under your eyes, a conference to deal with the Conservative and Reform, and even worse, incite against the toeva and calling them perverts and thus setting the stage to harm them. He implies one may harm innocent people by saying a soldier cannot fight if he was not sure that he can rely upon the one at his side 100% and by this he is trying to erase the IDFs code of ethics.

Not to be outdone by his colleagues, MK (Meretz) Ilan Gilon, who adds It is frightening to think that the one with this dark thoughts has an influence on the IDF and anything connected to Jewish identity. Levinstein belongs to all of those wishing to see the State of Israel become a Halachic Taliban state in which women and gays are persecuted. This has no place in the IDF and on the background of his statements, and the recent statements of the incoming IDF Chief Rabbi, I suggest the Chief of Staff conduct an overhaul to determine just how these rotten stumps have planted their roots in the IDF.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Chareidi lawmakers headed by Deputy Education Minister Meir Porush are working to eliminate the regulation compelling schools receiving state funds to include secular subjects, referred to in Israel as core subjects. The cancelation of the speculate studies is part of the coalition agreement signed between Likud and Yahadut Hatorah to undo the regulation set into place by former Education Minister (Yesh Atid) Shai Piron.

Interestingly, Yesh Atid leader MK Yair Lapid addressed the chareidi effort with a letter to the Chief Rabbis, in which he calls upon them to oppose the move since by doing so, chareidi children will be less educated and this will negatively impact their efforts to one day earn a livelihood since English and math are essential in todays world. He warns that if Porush succeeds, there will be more hatred in Israel as well as more ignorance, stressing today many chareidi families want their children to have an education but they are not heard.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday morning 11 Tammuz visited the Hizme Checkpoint bordering the northern capital, the gateway from Jerusalem to Shomron.

The minister wished to get a first-hand look at the situation amid mounting complaints from residents of prolonged waits to pass the checkpoint daily traveling from the Shomron to Yerushalayim. It is added that often the wait can exceed a half hour and cars are backed up for kilometers, placing motorists in harms way as they are stuck in traffic opposite Hizme, easy targets for rock-throwers with nowhere to go.

Taking part in the visit was Mayor Nir Barkat, Binyamin Regional Council head Avi Roeh, Jerusalem Councilman Moshe Leon [who hold the local minhelet government portfolio in the council], IDF Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) Major-General Yoav Mordechai and representatives of Israel Border Police and the Border Crossings Authority.

The minister was told Palestinians who cross into Jerusalem via the Kalandia Checkpoint and the Hizme Checkpoint complain of the same prolonged delays. Lieberman explained he is visiting to see firsthand to make sure necessary action is taken to correct the unacceptable delays.

In a directly related matter, Betar Illit Mayor Rabbi Meir Rubinstein sent a letter to the Defense Minister and other officials citing the prolonged delays for residents of Gush Etzion entering the southern capital via the Tunnels Highway. In the letter Rubinstein explains most of the inspection booths are closed and thousands of motorists must pass through one or two booths, leading to unacceptably long delays.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
The prosecution is calling to freeze all assets belonging to former Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, who is in the middle of a trial for fraud, tax evasion and other white collar charges. The prosecution wishes to freeze assets in the name of the rabbi and his children amounting to NIS 20 million. Attorneys for the rabbi feel such actions would be nothing less than collective punishment and therefore, unacceptable.

The assets include eight apartments including in N. Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Bnei Brak and Beersheva. In addition, there is a bank account and investments amounting to NIS 1 million.

Charges against the rabbi include collecting NIS 8 million for various causes during his tenure as Chief Rabbi, of which he is accused of pocketing NIS 5 million. He also failed to filed income tax on monies earned during his tenure.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
5:09PM IL: Sirens were heard in the Tzfat and Elonei HaBashan areas a short time ago, signaling a missile attack into northern Israel. It appears a patriot missile was fired to intercept the incoming threat.

5:22PM IL: Channel 10 senior defense correspondent Alon Ben-David reports a drone that entered Israeli airspace from Syria was intercepted and shot down.

What was believed to be additional rockets were fragments from the unmanned drone and not multiple rockets fired into Israel as believed.

Bchasdei Hashem at present there are no reports of casualties.

The attached photos were posted to social media by local residents.

(YWN  Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
Three law enforcement officers were killed and three others wounded Sunday morning in a shooting near a gas station in Baton Rouge, less than two weeks after a black man was shot and killed by police here, sparking nightly protests across the city.

One suspect in the shooting was killed and law enforcement officials believe two others might still be at large, said Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriffs Office. The city was on high alert, officials said.

The shooting  just before 9 a.m., less than 1 mile from police headquarters  comes amid spiraling tensions across the city  and the country  between the black community and police. The races of the suspects and the officers were not immediately known.

Gov. John Bel Edwards rushed to the hospital where the shot officers were taken.

Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice, Edwards said in a statement.

The shooting took place at a gas station near a fitness center on Airline Highway, Baton Rouge Police Cpl. LJean Mckneely Jr. said. The slain shooters body was next door, outside a fitness center. Police said they were using a specialized robot to check for explosives near the body.

On Sunday afternoon, more than a dozen police cars with lights flashing were massed near a commercial area of car dealerships and chain restaurants on Airline Highway, not far from police headquarters. Police armed with long guns on the road stopped at least two vehicles driving away from the scene and checked their trunks and vehicles before allowing them to drive away.

That area was about a quarter of a mile from a gas station where almost nightly protests had been taking place against the recent police shooting.

Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Coppola told The Associated Press earlier that the officers were rushed to a local hospital. Coppola said authorities are asking people to stay away from the area.

Multiple police units were stationed at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, where spokeswoman Ashley Mendoza said five patients from the police shooting, all law enforcement professionals had been taken. A police officer with a long gun was blocking the parking lot at the emergency room. Of the two who survived the shooting, one is in critical condition and the other is in fair condition.

Officers and deputies from the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriffs Office were involved, according to Hicks.

Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video and circulated widely on the internet.

It was followed a day later by the shooting death of another black man in Minnesota, whose girlfriend livestreamed the aftermath of his death on Facebook. Then on Thursday, a black gunman in Dallas opened fire on police at a protest about the police shootings, killing five officers and heightening tensions even further.

Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets in Baton Rouge to condemn Sterlings death, including hundreds of demonstrators who congregated outside the police station. Authorities arrested about 200 people over the three-day weekend.

Michelle Rogers, 56, said the pastor at her church had led prayers Sunday for Sterlings family and police officers, asking members of the congregation to stand up if they knew an officer.

Rogers said an officer in the congregation hastily left the church near the end of the service, and a pastor announced that something had happened.

But he didnt say what. Then we started getting texts about officers down, she said.

Rogers and her husband drove near the scene, but were blocked at an intersection closed down by police.

I cant explain what brought us here, she said. We just said a prayer in the car for the families.

(AP)
By PTI: Guwahati, Jul 17 (PTI) In a series of joint operations, Army and Assam Police today killed three cadre of NDFB(S) and recovered arms and ammunition in Kokrajhar district.

Police and Army launched an operation after getting information of entry of some NDFB(S) cadre into Kokrajhar from Myanmar side, Additional Director General of Police of Bodoland Territorial Area Districts (BTAD), L R Bishnoi said.

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In Ultapani jungle, the security team was confronted by the militants, resulting in an encounter.

Two NDFB(S) cadre killed during the operation have been identified as Ritu Basumatary alias B Rugungsha and Rahul Basumatary alias B Rakhao, he said.

The security team has recovered two 7.65 mm pistols and its five live rounds, two NO 36 hand grenades, one AK-47 magazine, two letter pads of NDFB(S) and some other materials, Bishnoi said.

In a separate operation, a joint team of police and Army last night killed another cadre of NDFB(S) inside Khalasi jungle in Kokrajhar district.

A few cadre were carrying ration to the "Bhutan camp" of the organisation when an encounter took place, Bishnoi said.

"In the operation, Sudem Borgoyary alias Gorom was neutralised in the exchange of fire, whereas the other cadre managed to escape," he added.

Two pistols, two grenades, ammunition, cash, one extortion note of NDFB (S), one mobile phone, a solar panel, rice, dal and medicines were recovered from the spot, the ADGP said. PTI TR SUS DIP

--- ENDS ---
Goodbye Ed Vaizey, hello Matthew Hancock

Politics is a funny old game and the last month has seen many changes, but generally the broadband world has carried on as usual, but with the news that the Rt Hon Ed Vaizey MP is leaving DCMS and his role as Minister of State for Digital and Culture there is a possibility (or risk depending on viewpoint) of change. The new Prime Minister has appointed Matthew Hancock MP (@MattHancockMP) as the new Minister of State for Digital & Culture.

Whilst we are sure not everyone agreed with what the Rt Hon Ed Vaizey MP said and did with regards to broadband in his term, as the longest ever minister serving in the role this did mean the industry and campaigners had been able to build a working relationship and with regards to the broadband side of things the long term knowledge gained was very important.

Matthew Hancock MP joins at a time when the projects to push superfast coverage to 95% are all pretty much underway so the chance of forcing any change of direction there are unlikely given the 18 months left to run before the target should be reached, but there is a lot of work to be done on the Universal Service Obligation and working to ensure that superfast roll-outs continue so that the 96 to 97% coverage figures many are hoping will be reached in the couple of years happen rather than be forgotten in all the political turmoil this summer.

For the UK technology as a whole, there are wider issues that also need clarity and a strong minister to work with, since the IP Bill with its controversial Internet Connection Records (ICR) that will store metadata on internet use and the continuing confusion over end to end encryption has much of the industry concerned and if handled poorly could persuade high value tech firms to locate elsewhere.

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Each week, we round-up the share tips from the Sunday newspapers. This week, Midas runs the rule over the nation's once-favourite retailer Marks & Spencer and gives an update on Lloyds banking group.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times takes a look at Gulf Keystone Petroleum.

MAIL ON SUNDAY

The Bank of Englands decision to keep the base rate unchanged at 0.5 per cent surprised financial markets last week.

But the rate is still expected to come down to 0.25 per cent next month  or possibly even lower.

The idea is to boost the economy after the Brexit shock, but it is highly likely to lead to more disappointment for savers, who have been battling against ultra-low rates since the financial crisis.

In such an environment, dividend income can be important. The Midas experimental Dogs of the Footsie portfolio tracks the ten stocks with the highest dividend yields in the FTSE 100, as high yielders in theory deliver most rewards over time.

Marks & Spencer, the nations once-favourite retailer has had a terrible year, persistently failing to sell what customers want.

>> READ THE FULL MIDAS EXTRA COLUMN

Former chief executive Marc Bolland fell on his sword in January and new boss Steve Rowe has not delivered any miracles so far.

The shares were 540p a year ago, today they are 325p. The EU vote has done the group no favours, but it was already suffering and now yields 6.8 per cent.

Lloyds Banking Group, alongside insurers Direct Line, Legal & General and Standard Life, have been hit by worries about our economy and joins the Dogs with yields of at least 7 per cent (because yields rise as share prices fall).

Ironically, HSBC shares have risen since the referendum because it is an international bank that derives much of its profits from abroad, so it should benefit from sterling weakness.

However, the price is still lower than it was last November, reflecting concerns about the banks long-term prospects. It remains in the Dogs on a yield of 7.52 per cent.

Barratt Developments, Berkeley Group, Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey have all seen their shares fall by about 20 per cent since the referendum, as analysts worry about the impact of slower economic growth or even recession on the house market.

None of these firms has said they will cut their dividends following the Brexit vote, so they have joined the Dogs with yields of at least 7 per cent.

>> READ THE FULL MIDAS UPDATE COLUMN

SUNDAY TIMES

Gulf Keystone Petroleum bit the bullet last week and and unveiled a restructuring that will wipe out investors and leave creditors with an 86 per cent stake.

At this news the stock plunged to 3p, valuing the company at 31 million - down 99 per cent since it's 2012 high of 3.6 billion.

After the restructuring it will be left with $100 million of debt, down from $600 million, a further $95 million in cash, and an oil field that is pumping out more than 400,000 barrels a day.
By PTI: Meerut, Jul 16 (PTI) BSP aspirant from Burhana Mohammad Arif Zola has been rescued five days after he was reportedly abducted, police said today.

According to the police, Arif (40) had left his house on his own due to financial issues and returned because of increasing police pressure, but there was speculation that his relatives have paid a ransom of Rs two crore to his abductors.

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SSP J Ravinder Gaur said on July 12, Arif had left his house for Mehrauli, where he stayed for two days before leaving for Chandigarh first and then Panipat.

Seeing the news of his abduction on television, he feared arrest and arrived at his brother Irfans house in Delhi from where he informed his relatives of his whereabouts, he said.

The relatives informed the police following which they secured Arif from Delhi late last night, said the SSP.

Arif was brought to Meerut by a police team this morning.

He has reportedly told the police that on the day of the incident, two children had come to him and made him sniff a biscuit after which he fell unconscious.

Subsequently, the abductors took him to an unknown place. Last night, he somehow managed to give his abductors the slip and arrived at his brothers house in Delhi, said the SSP.

Arif was later questioned by police.

The news of his abduction surfaced on July 12. His car was found parked in Dabka village under Kankarkhera police station here. A mobile phone and the car keys were recovered from it.

Police had formed a 21-member team to crack the case. The police team had enquired at a few hotels in connection with the incident. PTI CORR RC ZMN DBS

--- ENDS ---
Ineos has now moved its international headquarters back to the UK, six years after the chemicals giant fell out with then prime minister Gordon Brown and relocated to Switzerland.

In 2010, the Labour government would not let the company defer a 350m VAT bill, prompting the move to just outside Geneva.

For the past few years, rags-to-riches billionaire boss Jim Ratcliffe has been investing heavily in the UK.

In March the Mail revealed that he was mulling a return.

Yesterday the tycoon said this has now happened and that he might also enter the car market, resurrecting the Land Rover Defender which was discontinued earlier this year by Indian owner Tata.
Linda Jackson, 57, is wary of predicting what might happen following the Brexit referendum result. She says: We have the ability to manage these situations, but until we know what its going to mean, who can say what we need to put in place? What we need to be is very agile.

She lives in Normandy  a 20-minute train ride from Paris or a 40-minute drive in her C4 Cactus  and she prefers to commute by car.

With fluent French, she rarely visits the UK, spending her weekends in France. Her employees still laugh at her love of tea, but she hopes that they think first and foremost of her skills, not her nationality.

A sense of history: Linda Jackson is the first Briton  and woman  to lead Citroen

She says: I love France, I love the French. Theyre very creative. At the same time Anglo-Saxon people are very good at being pragmatic and direct. The balance of the two is quite a nice mix. The French know I am very direct in meetings. I will get to the point. French people do tend to discuss the point at great length, and theyre very good at it.

She adds: Hopefully they dont think weve got a British woman. Hopefully they just think weve got a great boss.

Her directness is evident in Citroens response to the crisis sparked by Volkswagens use of software to cheat US emissions tests, which became a worldwide scandal. She says: What happened creates a lack of confidence across the industry, a lack of credibility.

Citroen makes 1.2 million vehicles a year  about half of those made by the wider Peugeot-Citroen, or PSA, group  and Jackson says: For the PSA Group, we have already adhered to all the regulations.

Indeed, ten years ago, I had already introduced a particular selective catalytic reactor to make sure that we had very low CO2 emissions.

She adds: What weve done is introduce a further test for real-time consumption, which is being managed by a third party.

On Brexit Jackson says We have the ability to manage these situations, but until we know what its going to mean, who can say what we need to put in place? What we need to be is very agile

All manufacturers test to agreed rules, which says so many miles per gallon. Weve taken it a step further. Well test the cars with passengers in, with luggage in, with a mixture of driving that would be representative of our consumers, sometimes rural, sometimes urban, sometimes motorway, and publish that.

We will progressively publish that from all of our models across all our brands. For us that is saying that we are being totally transparent.

This is what real-time consumption is and its important to create that transparent relationship and credibility for the industry.

She also has plans to introduce a CO2 emission calculator to the website. Consumer trust is at the core of her thinking.

She asks: What is the most important thing for us? Its our customers, and what they think of us. People want confidence in the brands they buy. We felt it was extremely important. Thats why weve gone out and been the first. If other manufacturers follow I think that will be great for the customer.

Jackson is confident in her ability. She has just won Autocars Great British Women in the Car Industry Award and plans to use it to encourage more women and young people into the industry. But she is strongly opposed to diversity targets.

She loved the industry from the moment she joined Jaguar and had a chance to see the lines, what cars they were making and how they generated a marketing campaign.

She says: Cars are a sexy product to sell, because people buy a car based on emotion 99 per cent of the time. You like the car, you want to personalise it  it says something about you. But she says it is a struggle to attract new talent as she worries theres a misperception its a very macho, very engineering-led world.

She says: Clearly I prove its not, because Im not an engineer. My background is in finance.

Sporty look: Citroen launched the C3 last month

Jackson, who has an MBA from Warwick University, says: Fifty per cent of my sales on average are to women. We all know that women make a lot of the decisions about which car to buy, so we need more women.

And we need to encourage young people with new experiences to come into the industry, because its changing.

She says she has never been discriminated against, and targets only make her uncomfortable. The crux of the issue is work-life balance, she explains, adding: My job is 180 per cent of my life. I spend a lot of time travelling, I spend a lot of time doing presentations, and its all about Citroen.

You have to recognise that it takes up an enormous amount of your time. It is hard work to manage a family at the same time as trying to move up a career path, travelling all the time and giving everything.

In Jacksons case, she was fortunate to have a very, very understanding husband. He died last year from cancer, but she says he always recognised that I loved my job and supported me in every way.

Her children are now grown up and live in the Midlands with their own families, and she jokes that it is easier for them to visit her in Paris than for her to go to the Midlands.

She has a rule that she doesnt send or reply to emails at the weekend, and doesnt schedule meetings before 8.30am or after 6.30pm.

She says: I think theres a lot to do about work-life balance these days, and thats relevant to everybody not just women.

Were starting to look at how we encourage working from home, but its only now really starting to evolve. I think thats one thing we need to improve in our industry.

Jackson is certainly not working from home herself. She explains: Im based all over the world. I travel a lot. The first market is China, so Im normally in China five to six times a year.

We have five other regions, so I go to each twice a year  to South America, for example, or the India Pacific region.

I have to be honest  I spend little time in the UK. Im based in Paris.

I probably spend 30 per cent of my time in the office and 70 per cent out meeting customers, going to visit different markets, going to visit my dealers as well. Every time I do a visit I try to see three or four dealers. So that is my life.
One of Britains biggest betting shop chains, Betfred, which also owns the Tote pools betting business, has plunged into the red due to a decline in its digital operations.

Accounts just filed for its parent firm for the year to September 27, 2015 show that customers at Betfreds 1,402 shops and online gambled 10.4 billion, resulting in a net turnover of 526 million.

Shopping around: Increased customer numbers and a higher stake per bet lifted turnover, but results were hit by increased UK gaming taxes and lower margins due to a series of unfavourable results

But betting taxes, machine gaming duty, the horse-racing levy and an 80.4 million exceptional write-down meant the privately-owned firm recorded a pre-tax loss of 82.4 million.

Increased customer numbers and a higher stake per bet lifted turnover, but results were hit by increased UK gaming taxes and lower margins due to a series of unfavourable results.
Uber, the company behind the taxi hailing app, faces its first legal action in the UK this week over whether its drivers are workers or self-employed.

The US-owned firm will appear in a case brought by law firm Leigh Day, supported by the GMB union, at the Central London Employment Tribunal on Wednesday.

In court: The US-owned firm will appear in a case brought by law firm Leigh Day, supported by the GMB union

It will decide if Uber, whose European headquarters is in the Netherlands, is acting unlawfully by not providing drivers with holiday pay or the National Minimum Wage.
A British manufacturer selling a one-type-fits-all mattress is launching its first television advertising campaign today.

The Hybrid mattress from Simba combines foam with a spring layer  and is delivered rolled up in a box.

The company is backed by Tom Teichman, Britains most successful investor in digital start-ups  including Moshi Monsters, Lastminute.com and Notonthehighstreet  and Innocent drinks founder Richard Reed.

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Innovative: James Cox, co-founder of Simba, is backed by investor Richard Reed, left

Created by Sir John Hegarty, of global advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, who has also backed Simba with investment through his new incubator The Garage Soho, the advert features a mattress being tested and a seductive voiceover alluding to the fact that beds are not just used for sleeping in.

US mattress giant Casper is expected to follow suit in a clamour for a share of the UKs 1 billion market with a multi-million pound campaign in August.

Reed, who invested through his JamJar Investments company this year, said: The UK mattress market is ripe for innovation. People dont want the hassle of multiple options when making a purchase.

But what you get when you walk into a bed store is confusing advice, fuelling the fear you wont get a good nights sleep and a lengthy purchase and delivery process.

There is a massive opportunity in the UK for Simba to lead on product innovation and to build a brilliant brand that people will trust and recommend.

'Not only is it British, but the clever design, packaged in a box with guaranteed next-day delivery, is what people want.

Simba co-founder James Cox said: We were first on the market when we started, but we knew it wouldnt always be that way.
The amount of money advanced to the UKs smallest firms through invoice finance has soared, according to the Asset Based Finance Association.

ABFA chief executive Jeff Longhurst said small businesses borrow against unpaid invoices for growth plans, to expand order books and to boost cashflow in order to help manage the risk of bad debts.

Such financing has risen in the face of the reluctance of conventional lenders to lend money to small firms. Following the Brexit vote, it has also proved an attractive way to hedge against currency fluctuations.

Margin: Badgequo managing director Kai Arter has locked in euro rates

The ABFA, which represents the industry in the UK and Ireland, said lending reached 711 million in the first quarter of 2016, a 63 per cent rise on the 435 million for the same period in 2015.

It claimed the amount advanced was the highest year-on-year increase since the recession.

Smaller businesses using invoice finance received an average of 52,000 in the first quarter, up from an average of 32,000 in the same period in 2015.

About 80 per cent of asset-based finance is invoice finance, while the rest is asset-based lending, in which in addition to debts, businesses can raise funding secured against a range of other assets they own, including inventory, property and machinery.

Following the EU referendum, Bibby Financial Services, the UKs leading invoice finance specialist, has seen a rise in enquiries, according to managing director Mark Lindsay.

The ABFA said lending reached 711 million in the first quarter of 2016, a 63 per cent rise on the 435 million for the same period in 2015

He said: A lot of people are asking how we feel the markets are likely to move because they are now looking to react to the market volatility around exchange rates and uncertainty around international markets.

One business Bibby is working with is 30-year-old cosmetics firm Badgequo, based in Keighley, West Yorkshire, which imports its products from China and then sells them to UK retailers as well as to 20 markets on the Continent.

Ahead of the Brexit vote, Bibby worked with Badgequo to fund a large purchase from its supplier, providing protection for the business from currency volatility.

This deal allowed the business to secure rates through to December, providing security and certainty to its planning and forecasts.

It has also been able to lock in a euro rate as many of its products are sold across the EU.

Badgequo managing director Kai Arter said: We have a substantial facility in place with Bibby and that covers trade financing, for buying the stock in from the Far East from our manufacturers.
More than 40 per cent of Britons say they would be prepared to earn less to fulfil entrepreneurial ambitions and work for themselves.

Just over a quarter of those would be content with a salary of 30,000 in return for working for themselves, and a further 16 per cent would settle for 40,000 a year from running their own small business. The average salary is 26,500.

Dream: Sarah Willingham points to work/life balance

The research, by loyalty scheme Nectar Business, found that 20 per cent of those wanting to start a business or become self-employed believe they will do so before 2021.

While crowdfunding is becoming a more popular way of financing a start-up company  cited by 14 per cent of would-be entrepreneurs  more traditional methods such as borrowing from banks and buildings societies (39 per cent) and loans from the Bank of Mum and Dad (32 per cent) are still key.

The study was carried out as part of the Nectar Business Small Business Awards scheme, for which the deadline has been extended to July 24. Judge Sarah Willingham, who is also a panellist on BBC2s Dragons Den, said: Its encouraging to see so many women keen to become entrepreneurs.

The research shows its not all about money, but the pursuit of turning a dream into reality and finding greater work/life balance  something I can definitely relate to.
By India Today Web Desk: Anushka Sharma recently opened up about her desire to act for Imtiaz Ali, saying he was one of the few directors who understood the man-woman relationship. She even came out as a fan-girl saying she got into the business of becoming an actor only after she saw the Kareena Kapoor-starrer Jab We Met, also directed by Imtiaz Ali.



ALSO READ: Anushka Sharma turned down Imtiaz Ali's Tamasha because of its focus on male character

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"I had never dreamt of becoming an actress but when I saw 'Jab We Met', I was so attracted to the film and to the character that Kareena played. I felt this was cool and something I could do... That happened because it was such a strong character. That's why Imtiaz is a very special person," said the PK actor in admiration for her current director.

She will be seen alongside Shah Rukh Khan, and Anushka thinks they already have a romantic blockbuster on the cards. "It's a great opportunity for me to work with the king of romance and a director, whose love stories are always so special and romantic," said an excited Anushka Sharma on her next project.

The actor is currently celebrating the unprecedented success of her film Sultan, with Bollywood superstar Salman Khan and will next be seen in Karan Johar's Ae Dil Hai Mushkil with Ranbir Kapoor, Fawad Khan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is expected to get a Diwali release.

--- ENDS ---
By Chef Jeneva Talwar: My self-confessed love for all things France and pastry led me to the renowned culinary school ENSP established by Alain Ducasse in Lyon, France. That's the place where I completed my chef's training in French Pastry and developed an undying love for baking. I then went on to work at Maison Pillet and Patisserie David in Bordeaux and developed the skill of curating interesting concepts in the world of pastry and menu planning.

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Also read: 5 delicious toppings to jazz up that slice of bread



At The Artful Baker, I conjure up some of the most fantastic-looking and tasting delicacies. The Parisian style outlet in itself will give you the feeling that you've just stepped into one of those quaint little bakeries around the bend of a street in Paris.

I am an ardent believer and a fan of artisanal, handcrafted bread and believes in adding a magic of human touch to the bread. Contrary to popular belief, making bread is not limited to just blending together flour, water and salt, and letting it ferment before baking it off. For the past few years, I have immersed myself in the world of baking and bread crafting. Inspired by my mentor at ENSP, what started as a fun experiment turned into an undying passion and an ongoing quest for that perfect loaf of bread - an artisanal-style loaf with chewy interiors and crispy, crackly crust.

There is a need to bring the culture of crafted breads to the fore. The trick lies in the craft and slow-rise, fermented dough, sourdough starters, the no-knead method, even regular quick-rise yeast dough, together with locally grown flours and a steam-filled oven, hot baking stones, and cast iron pots. After mastering the techniques, all bread lovers can effortlessly churn out boules, batards, and baguettes comfortably.

Also read: Worried about cancer-causing chemicals in your bread? Bake this easy 4-step bread at home



Delhi has a high percentage of people who are exposed to different cultures and appreciate the finer things in life. Good bread therefore has many takers and the cult of people who seek authentic European bread is ever increasing. This growing trend of people who are passionate about food suggests that popular interest in artisanal bread isn't just a phase, but it's a way of life. Right from the variations introduce gluten free, to sugar free and easily digestible, it is an exciting start of a new bread culture in India.

My passion helps me seek out new flours and flavours, spurred on by the current trend for choosing hand-crafted, good quality, local produce. People travel to farmer's markets and backstreet bakeries in search of the finest loaf but I bring it right to you with these two recipes!

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Irish Soda Bread

Ingredients:

300 grams rice flour

1 teaspoon kosher salt

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

70 grams currants

200 grams buttermilk

A small loaf of the traditional Irish soda bread. Photo: Mail Today

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Put a small cast-iron skillet in the oven to heat with the oven.

2. Make the dough. Whisk together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Add the currants and stir. Pour in the buttermilk. Stir together the dry ingredients and the buttermilk. Stir together the dough until it is all wet crumbles with no patches of dry flour. Pinch a bit between your fingers. Does it come together? If not, add a bit more buttermilk.

3. Gently knead the dough till it forms into a ball. Make an slash across the ball of dough one way, then the other way, to make a cross.

4. Bake the dough. Open the oven, pull out the oven rack, and put the ball of dough into the hot skillet. Cover the cast-iron skillet with another skillet, big enough to not press down on the dough. Bake for 20 minutes with the lid on. Remove the lid and bake until the top of the bread is browned and crusty. When you lift the bread and tap the bottom of it with your knuckles, the bread should have a hollow thump.

5. Allow the bread to cool to close to room temperature before breaking off a piece.

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Easy Breezy Bread

Ingredients:

1 cup cold water

2 teaspoons of dry yeast

2 cups flour. Plus extra for later

Whole-wheat, rye, or other type of flour (optional)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

This bread is so easy to make, you'll try baking it again and again. Photo: Mail Today

Method:

1. Pour 1 cup of water into a mixer bowl and sprinkle about 2 teaspoons of yeast. Let stand for a minute or two.

2. Add 2 cups of flour on top of the water-yeast mixture. (If you want to make whole-wheat, rye, or any kind of alternative-grain bread, use half bread flour and half other flours)Add a good 1 teaspoons of salt and sugar. You can also throw in any cheese, seeds, dried fruit, etc. you want in the bread at this point.

3. Attach the dough hook to your mixer and start mixing on low until the dough comes together. Turn the mixer to medium and knead for a good long time--8 to 10 minutes. If the dough sticks to the bottom or sides of the bowl, add a bit more flour, a handful at a time, until it doesn't stick anymore.

4. Pull the dough ball out of the bowl and shape it into a ball. Put back in the bowl, cover with a towel, and let rise until doubled. (This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on temperature, humidity, and the age of the yeast.

5. Punch the dough, remove the air. And shape it into a ball again, and put it back in the bowl to rise until doubled. This second rise is optional, but it gives the bread a tangier flavor.

6. Punch the dough down again, and shape it however you want. Or You can stick it in a loaf pan. Place on a baking sheet lined with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper.

7. Turn the oven to 450 degrees and preheat for 10 to 15 minutes.

8. Slash the top of the dough with a serrated knife.

9. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. You know the bread is done when it's a nice deep brown and it sounds hollow.



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Jeneva Talwar is the brand chef of The Artful Baker, Khan Market.

--- ENDS ---
In the videos of the event that went viral, Prime Minister Modi is seen giving only a flash of a second's attention to Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal.

By Mail Today Bureau: An awkward handshake on Saturday summed up the uncomfortable relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

In videos from the Inter-State Council meeting held in New Delhi that went viral, the PM is seen spending only a fraction of a second holding the AAP chief's hand even as he looked relaxed in the presence of other chief ministers, including those from non-BJP states.

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THE BITTER RELATIONSHIP

Kejriwal has been a bitter critic of the Prime Minister, often blaming him for all the ills plaguing the Delhi government. From questioning his educational qualifications to sending vitriolic tweets, the CM has not missed an opportunity to target Modi.

SMOOTH INTER-STATE COUNCIL MEET

The 11th meeting of the Inter-State Council- that looks at disputes between states and between the states and Centre- saw the presence of many formidable opponents of the BJP such as Nitish Kumar of Bihar and Mamata Banerjee from West Bengal. None of them allowed the friction to come in the way during the informal greetings at the allimportant event that came against the backdrop of the Arunachal controversy, with the BJP receiving a setback in the Supreme Court which reinstated the state's ousted Congress government.

Even Congress chief minister Harish Rawat, whose government in Uttarakhand was nearly toppled by the BJP, was seen greeting the Prime Minister with warmth.

MODI PLAYS THE RESPONSIBLE SIBLING

In his inaugural address at the conference, the Prime Minister even singled out Congress-ruled Karnataka for reducing the consumption of kerosene and getting 75 per cent of the savings from the Centre. "The government of Karnataka, while moving swiftly on this initiative, has sent its proposal to the Petroleum Ministry. This has been accepted and the grant has been disbursed to the state government," he said.

Modi also said that the states share in central taxes has gone up from 32 to 42 per cent, which meant availability of greater resources to the state.

"I am happy to share that the total amount received by states from the Centre during 2015-16 is 21 per cent higher than the amount received in 2014-15. Similarly, panchayats and urban local bodies will receive 2.87 lakh crore rupees during the 14th finance commission, which is substantially higher than last time," he said.

AADHAAR IMPACT

The Prime Minister also shared with the chief ministers that 102 crore Aadhaar cards have been distributed in the country of 128 crore people. Among adults, 96 per cent of the people now have Aadhaar cards.

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In his concluding remarks too, the Prime Minister said that the near total acceptance of Aadhaar as a tool to promote good governance and transparency will result in savings to the exchequer.

MODI DISCUSSES TERROR ATTACKS

He also discussed security issues and told the chief ministers that happenings across the world cannot be ignored, in light of the deadly terrorist attack in the French city of Nice. He stressed on the importance of a good CCTV network and maintaining a visible presence of police forces.

WATCH: Inter State Council meeting took place today in Delhi, PM Narendra Modi met Chief Ministers of states.https://t.co/P8zZzFIhuA ANI (@ANI_news) July 16, 2016

Also read:

Modi has a battalion of 'sycophants' like Pahlaj Nihalani, Smriti Irani: Tweets Kejriwal

Kejriwal strikes again, claims money spent on Modi's clothes more than AAP's ad budget



--- ENDS ---
By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 17 (PTI) Hinduja Group flagship Ashok Leyland will be setting up a bus assembly plant in Kenya with an investment of Rs 70 crore as part of its global expansion plans.

The new plant in Kenya will serve at least three neighbouring countries, besides catering to local demand. "We are setting up a bus assembly plant in Kenya through a wholly-owned subsidiary. This plant will have an annual capacity of 1,200 buses," Ashok Leyland Senior Vice-President (Global Buses), T Venkataraman told PTI. He said the setting up of the Kenya plant will begin this quarter itself. "This plant will also serve as an export hub for three neighbouring countries, besides meeting local demand in Kenya," he added. Amid tough global market conditions, the company has been working to enhance its international presence. The company already has a manufacturing facility at Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE, which was set up as a joint venture with the Ras Al Khaimah Investment Authority (RAKIA). The plant has an annual capacity of 2,000 vehicles and caters to demand of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) and African markets from the plant. Ashok Leylands overall commercial vehicles exports, however, have been in decline so far this fiscal, which stood at 2,226 units in April-June, down 34.16 per cent from the year-ago period. Besides conventional buses, Ashok Leyland has been focusing on new technology such as hybrids through its UK arm Optare Plc, in which it holds a 75.1 per cent stake. Optare operates a range of Low Carbon, low-floor, mid-sized and modern range of city buses in the UK, Europe and North America, among others. PTI RKL JM ARD ABM

--- ENDS ---

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An Assamese newspaper uses a photo of a Muslim girl performing martial arts during an event as part of National Girl Child Day, from 2014, on its front page portraying the girl as a terrorist.

Muslim girl performing martial arts during an event as part of National Girl Child Day in 2014. Photo: Screengrab from YouTube video

By India Today Web Desk: In the wake of a steady rise in the number of terror attacks being carried out around the world, and the Isalmic State claiming responsibility for almost all off of those, the argument that Islam breeds terrorism is being amplified by many on social media.

Are all terrorists Muslim?

Are all Muslims terrorists?



Known as a matter of fact, there are people who conveniently use the opportunity, a collective outrage against Muslims being on the rise, to misguide others into blind hatred. When media plays this card, it comes across as irresponsible journalism.

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An Assamese newspaper, Asomiya Pratidin, used a photo of a Muslim girl performing martial arts during an event held to celebrate National Girl Child Day, from 2014, on its front page of July 11 edition, and claims the teenager is a jihadi.

Press TV has a video of this 2014 event held in Hyderabad, where many Muslim girls were seen demonstrating their martial arts skills. Girls as young as 10 performed Vovinam, a Vietnamese martial art form, that day. See the video here:



Asomiya Pratidin's July 11 front page was tweeted by a lawyer, Aman Wadud, saying, "Hyderabad School girls performs martial arts on NationalGirlChildDay. Assamese Newspaper portrays them as Jehadis (sic)".

Hyderabad School girls performs martial arts on NationalGirlChildDay. Assamese Newspaper portrays them as Jehadis pic.twitter.com/jNiD4Xq0xa Aman Wadud (@AmanWadud) July 12, 2016





To cross-check, we went to Asomiya Pratidin's website and checked the e-paper dated July 11.

And there it was.

Photo: Screenshot from Asomiya Pratidin website



Now when all is said and done, wasn't it just a slight of hand?



--- ENDS ---
For one friend's birthday a few years in a row, I would purchase a gift certificate to my favorite store.

That's where I wanted to shop with my birthday money. Most purchases there would be a splurge for me. Any extra money I had at the time would go toward our two young daughters, certainly not for me.

But on my birthday, I'd splurge.

My mother sends me money on my birthday, with one caveat: Don't pay bills with this money. Buy something nice. I didn't think twice about where I would spend the money.

I wanted my friend to have the same experience. The owner was also a friend, and the staff knew the names of my children. They knew shopping for clothes to fit my lumps and curves wasn't always a thrilling experience.

They would steer me toward clothes that suited my body and personality.

I wanted my friend to experience the same personal service.

One year, before her birthday, my friend mentioned she'd rather not have a gift certificate to that store. My favorite store? My friend always complimented my clothes, my bling. Not that store? I couldn't imagine why.

"They treat me like a shoplifter."

What?!

The staff followed her around, she said, asking if she needed anything, what exactly was she shopping for, what kinds of clothes does she like to wear. The same kinds of questions a new staff member would ask me.

"They're trying to get to know you," I said.

"They're watching me."

My friend is thrifty, except in one area, purses. She splurges, often carrying a top-of-the-line, designer purse, not a rip-off you find on a street corner in New York. The real deal.

She did not, however, shop at this particular store unless she had a gift certificate, once a year at best.

"That's just what they do," I said. "They have the best customer service. They're trying to get to know you."

That's not how she saw it. We did not have the same experience.

Philando Castile, the Minnesota motorist shot and killed by a police officer, had been stopped 49 times since he got a learner's permit, according to a report by NPR. Only six of those stops were for violations that could be seen from the outside of the car  speeding or a busted muffler, for example. The other 43 violations came after he was pulled over.

I've been pulled over maybe five times since I started driving, all for reasons that were obvious to the officer before I was stopped: speeding, driving the wrong direction in a school zone, not having a current inspection sticker. I've never been stopped because I looked like a suspect in, say, an armed robbery.

All of my stops were clear violations, uncontested.

I do not have the same experiences Philando Castile had.

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate, spoke of his experiences last week after recent events, including the horrific ambush of police officers in Dallas. He'd been pulled over numerous times before being elected to the Senate in 2012. Scott recalled times he'd been pulled over after being elected.

" ... in the course of one year, I've been stopped seven times by law-enforcement officers," Scott said. "Not four, not five, not six, but seven times in one year as an elected official. Was I speeding sometimes? Sure. But the vast majority of the time I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood, or some other reason just as trivial."

Sen. Scott got so frustrated by the numerous stops, he traded in his nice car for something less obvious  or circumspect.

I do not have the same experiences as Sen. Tim Scott.

I also do not know what it's like to put on a police uniform and worry this might be my last day on earth. I do not know what it's like to run toward danger when others duck for cover.

We don't know. We cannot dismiss what we don't know.
TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Jayne Bean receives her office's order for lunch from Arrowhead Delivery driver Jason Spradling. Orders are placed and paid for online through Arrowhead's website and drivers pick up and make deliveries through an app on their mobile phones.

SHARE TORIN HALSEY/TIMES RECORD NEWS Brian Woodyard, general manager of Arrowhead Delivery, takes a customer's order and prepares to dispatch one of 13 drivers to pick up and deliver the order. The delivery service opened here in February and has partnered with 23 local restaurants. The service delivers in Wichita Falls seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Arrowhead Delivery driver Jason Spradling attaches the sign to his vehicle as he begins a day delivering food from numerous local restaurants. The company began two years ago in Abilene and opened in Wichita Falls in February of this year. Each uniformed driver carries insulated bags, a folding stand, and business cards. photos by TORIN HALSEY/ TIMES RECORD NEWS Arrowhead Delivery driver Jason Spradling picks up an order of food from Deli Planet to deliver to a client during the lunch hour.

By Judith McGinnis of the Times Record News

Cravings for dishes from home-owned local restaurants can now be satisfied with a click.

Arrowhead Delivery brings eats in Wichita Falls to doorsteps from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week.

"We go anywhere in the city limits and a few places outside," said Brian Woodyard, general manager of the Wichita Falls AD. "Right now we're partners with 23 restaurants."

Food orders come to AD central, an office in the Fritz Building, online. Customers go to wichitafalls.arrowheaddelivery.net, provide an address and ZIP code, make their choice from a partner eatery and the desired time of delivery. Quick orders can arrive within the hour they're placed, or the customer can plan for a later time or date. Anyone without computer service can call 940-355-0015.

Partner restaurants receive each order by fax. Orders are paid to AD ("cards or cash, no checks") and include a $5 delivery charge. Partners are paid weekly.

AD's "mobile waiters" make $5.25 an hour plus tips. Before each shift they pick up well-insulated carriers and manage the flow of orders with an app on smartphones.

"They really are waiters, professional and friendly, focused on customers' service. They're careful with each order," Woodyard said. "Each is checked at the restaurant to make sure what was ordered on the website gets delivered."

Arrowhead Delivery was founded in Abilene by Wes Roberts, who's quick to tell others he started the business out of "laziness."

"Wes used to work for Starbucks. He and his wife would come home at the end of the day tired enough they didn't want to go out for dinner," Woodyard explained. "With limited delivery choices available they did some research and decided AD would be a good idea."

Restaurant partners agree. Rebecca Rutledge, part-owner of Deli Planet on Sheppard Access Road, calls AD "heaven sent."

"We tried delivery but were in a limited area, the neighboring 10 mile radius and it was tough to hire and train people," Rutledge said. "AD offered us a win-win. We're delivering more now than we ever did before."

Rutledge says AD is perfect for locally owned "ma and pa" restaurants that have carefully tended budgets.

"We're not franchises or corporately owned. AD has been beneficial. They market you and share your menu on the website." Rutledge said.

Woodyard, who grew up in Abilene, began as an AD Mobile Waiter there when the company was young. Now in charge of the Wichita Falls branch, the list of service partners continues to grow.

"We're still hiring," said Elizabeth Woodyard, Brian's wife who works with the mobile wait staff. "They arrive to clock in, pick up their carriers, stands and signs. They work from their own phones, use their own cars and gas. We look for people who are outgoing, friendly and able to talk to clients." Good service earns better tips.

There are other rewards. Brian remembers one Abilene delivery to a senior woman who gave him a "big hug"

"She told me it was tough for her to get out and was very happy she could get something delivered besides pizza and Chinese."
SHARE

Larry Barton, Wichita Falls

Time to Uniform Up!

As a United States Army Vietnam veteran, an ex-officer with the WFPD and many years as a state law enforcement officer, I will offer a few comments as a follow-up to Officer John Cook's column.

Many people will never know the duties and obligations that come with putting on a uniform and taking an oath to protect a country or a community. The dedicated men and women I had the honor to serve with in the military/LEO field were of the highest integrity and dedication I have ever been associated with then or since.

Tough decisions have to be made instantly. Most of the time these decisions are absolutely correct. Some of the time they may come into question.

I will always respect our citizens' right to fully examine and demand professionalism. However, I will also invite them to thoroughly think the process out with time to really decide if they can do a better job. If they do, then it is time for them to take the oath, Uniform Up, Gear Up and get Rolling!
Colonie  A driver is dead after police said a car that was reported stolen crashed into a utility pole on Central Avenue early Sunday morning.

Colonie police said a 2004 blue Ford Freestar was traveling west on Central Avenue just past Route 155 when it struck the pole and overturned at 2:51 a.m. Sunday.
POESTENKILL  An intense fire destroyed the home of five people Sunday morning in Poestenkill, Assistant Fire Chief David Basle of the Poestenkill Fire Department said.

No one was in the home, located at the end of Vosburgh Road, when the fire started, Basle said.
Nice, France

The Islamic State claimed Saturday that the man who attacked the seaside city of Nice was one of the group's "soldiers." France's defense minister promptly blamed the terrorist network for inspiring the assault, while its top law enforcement official said the attacker, who was not previously known to intelligence agencies, may have "radicalized himself very quickly."

The attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, carried out the assault Thursday evening using a 19-ton refrigerated truck and an automatic pistol. The death toll remained at 84, but the number of injured rose to 303, of whom 121 were in hospitals, 26 of them in intensive care.

France, traumatized by three major terrorist assaults in 19 months, began three days of national mourning Saturday.

The Islamic State had kept silent on the Nice attack until Saturday morning, when it declared, in a bulletin issued in Arabic and in English on its Amaq News Agency channel: "Executor of the deadly operation in Nice, France, was a soldier of the Islamic State. He executed the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition nations, which fight the Islamic State."

The claim must be greeted with caution, because there was yet no evidence suggesting that the driver was radicalized, or had even been exposed to the Islamic State's propaganda.

After a husband and wife killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, in December, the Amaq News Agency described them as "two supporters," making it clear that the Islamic State had not directed their actions. But after a gunman, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, last month, having pledged loyalty to the group, it called him a "fighter."

In a statement Saturday on its radio station, the Islamic State referred to Lahouaiej Bouhlel as "a soldier."

In 2014, the Islamic State's spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, called on the group's followers to attack Westerners in retaliation for strikes by the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He has repeatedly singled out France, which is part of the coalition, as a main enemy.

No evidence has emerged that Lahouaiej Bouhlel got training or orders from the Islamic State, unlike the perpetrators of attacks in and around Paris on Nov. 13 and Brussels on March 22. The Islamic State has blurred the line between operations planned and carried out by its core fighters and those carried out by sympathizers inspired, only at a distance, to commit violence.

But Saturday, France's defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said: "I remind you that Daesh's ideologue, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, has for several weeks repeated calls to attack directly, even individually, Frenchmen, in particular, or Americans, wherever they are, by any means necessary." (Daesh is an Arabic name for the Islamic State.)

"It is murder, and Daesh's claim of responsibility comes later, as has happened in other recent events," Le Drian added. "Even if Daesh doesn't do the organizing, Daesh inspires this terrorist spirit, against which we are fighting."

Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, a native of Tunisia, had a history of petty crime going back to 2010. He received a six-month suspended sentence this year for assaulting a motorist, but was not on the radar of French intelligence agencies. Indeed, he seemed more like a surly misfit  he beat his wife, until she threw him out  than a prospective terrorist.

The country's top law enforcement official, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, said Saturday: "The individual who committed this absolutely despicable, unspeakable crime was not known by the intelligence services, as he had not stood out over the past years  whether through court convictions or through his activity  for support of radical Islamist ideology."

But Cazeneuve added: "It seems that he radicalized himself very quickly. In any case, these are the first elements that have come to light through the testimony of his acquaintances."

In Msaken, Tunisia, the attacker's father, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel, told Agence France-Presse on Friday night that his son had depression, but that he "had almost no links to religion."

"He didn't pray," the father continued. "He didn't fast, he drank alcohol, and even used drugs."

He said of his son, "From 2002 to 2004, he had problems that caused a nervous breakdown."

"He would become angry, and he shouted," he said. "He would break anything he saw in front of him."
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Albany

In April, the voters of the 20th Congressional District decided to send Josephine Moore to the Democratic National Convention.

In May, she found out how much it would cost to do her electoral duty, and decided to get a little creative.

The 41-year-old Schenectady writer and mother of two launched a GoFundMe campaign called "Send Josephine to the DNC!" to cover travel, food and what she was surprised to discover was very expensive lodging close by Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, where Democrats will gather on July 25.

More Information Follow the action This week and next, visit timesunion.com and the Capitol Confidential blog for regular convention reports and video from Cleveland and Philadelphia filed by Times Union state editor Casey Seiler. Produced by WMHT's "New York Now," listen to a daily "ConventionCast" podcast in which Seiler and Karen DeWitt of New York State Public Radio discuss the day's events and interview key New York figures at the gatherings. See More Collapse

As of Thursday, Moore had raised $1,100 toward her $1,600 goal. The support from 38 generous (and some anonymous) donors came almost entirely in donations of around $20. That's very much in keeping with the campaign finance strategy of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the candidate Moore will represent when the Democratic convention gathers on July 25.

While the Sanders campaign is trying to provide as much help as possible to get his delegates to the convention, many are finding it difficult to pay for the trip.

"Some are struggling," she said. "They don't know how they're going to be able to do it."

Moore isn't the only first-timer among this year's delegates from the Capital Region, where most residents live in the 20th District.

John Herrick has spent the past four decades in politics  attending endless fundraisers, stump speeches and party conclaves. "The only thing I haven't done is go to the national convention," said Herrick, the chairman of the Saratoga County Republican Committee. "So I thought at this stage in my political career it could probably be my last opportunity to do that."

Herrick is one of only six New York state delegates headed to the convention who backed Ohio Gov. John Kasich in his run for the presidential nomination. The Republican National Convention runs Monday through Thursday in Cleveland.

With Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton locked in as the major parties' nominees, the delegates in each city will be there to complete the technical business of placing them at the top of each ticket, but also to convey a message of solidarity after a divisive primary season.

Many of the new delegates are expecting the unexpected given the wild events leading to the convention.

"I don't really know what it's like to be a delegate yet," admitted Trump delegate Christine Benedict, who chairs the Albany County Republican Committee.

Although Trump has been controversial throughout his campaign, Benedict sees in his promise to "Make America Great Again" an echo of Ronald Reagan's administration.

"I think we're in a state of crisis in this nation," said the 64-year-old. "To bring it back you need someone very strong, and very opinionated and not afraid. And that's Donald Trump."

Some of the rookies have already gotten a foretaste of what they'll be up against  including leftover animosity from the primary.

Moore, the Schenectady delegate for Sanders, felt renewed frustration at Clinton's backers after the state delegates meeting at the end of June in New York City. She claimed the presumptive nominee's supporters ignored proper procedure by discounting the nomination of a Sanders delegate to lead the state delegation, and allowed non-delegates to take part in the voting process.

In Philadelphia, "I'm preparing myself for days of really just being disregarded," she said.

Moore largely kept out of the political world until this election. It was Sanders' message that drew her in and motivated her to take action. "I trust him fully," she said. " ... I also agree with him 100 percent on almost every issue."

Even so, she's still processing the Vermont senator's decision to endorse Clinton last week.

"We're still going to be fighting to try to make a little more progress on the (party) platform," she said.

Albany County Executive Dan McCoy, a Clinton delegate, suggested the time for Democratic intraparty fighting was over.

"Get behind  I almost said President Clinton," said McCoy. "If you truly want these platform (items), get behind her."

McCoy began his career as a firefighter and EMT in Albany. First elected as a county legislator in 2000, he served in Iraq as a member of the New York National Guard in 2005 and 2006 before winning his current post in 2012.

Fellow Clinton delegate and Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan understands the difficulty in abandoning the Sanders campaign, but hopes the convention will generate solidarity going into the general election.

Sign up for The Knick  Get the latest news and features with our afternoon newsletter.

"As in any party, you'll have people that are going to hold to the issues that are important to them," Sheehan said. "I understand the frustration and skepticism people have  because we've really had eight years of polarizing politics."

Sheehan, who became Albany's first female mayor in 2014, called it an honor to support another woman candidate aiming to make the same kind of history.

Republican delegates from the Capital Region seem far less concerned with potential conflict between delegates after Trump's landslide victory in April's New York state primary. The real estate mogul won 89 of the 95 delegates up for grabs in the vote.

Although a last-ditch effort by the so-called "Never Trump" movement to block him from winning the nomination on the first ballot remains a theoretical possibility, local delegates are confident that won't happen.

"Right now, unless there are some changes, it just looks like it's going to be Trump  but of course you're hearing all sorts of whispering," said Benedict, an Albany County legislator who served almost a decade as minority leader. "I'm prepared to make it just Trump and keep it that way."

Despite his support for Kasich, Herrick agreed a Trump nomination seemed unstoppable.

The decision to become a delegate for Kasich proved to be an easy one for Herrick after meeting the Ohio governor during his whirlwind pre-primary visit to the region in April  the same day Sanders and Trump descended.

"I just found the guy to be very nice and genuine," Herrick said of Kasich, who conducted a town hall-style event in Saratoga Springs with Sean Hannity of Fox News during his swing through.

While Democratic delegates were elected by name on the April primary ballot, Herrick and the other Republican delegates were chosen at the party's state convention, based on the results of the primary. Each of New York's 27 congressional districts will send three GOP delegates apiece. Trump won all three delegates in districts where he cleared 50 percent of the vote, but fell short of that mark in the 20th District  which means Herrick is headed to Cleveland.

The process in the Democratic Party was slightly different: Voters chose delegates during the primary as well as the presidential nominee they were pledged to. In the 20th District  one of many upstate regions where Sanders outperformed Clinton  the former secretary of state earned three delegates, while the Vermonter won four spots  including Josephine Moore.

Moore's online effort also introduced her to a carpool buddy who'll split gas money on the trip to Pennsylvania. In order to cut costs even more, she'll room with three other Sanders delegates.

"I just wanted to get help rather than put it on my credit card and pay for it for months," Moore said.

mkilgallen@timesunion.com  518-454-5305
Prohibition came into force in Bihar earlier this year in keeping with an electoral promise Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) had made to the people, especially women.

By Abhishek Rastogi: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today expressed shock over the hooch tragedy in Etah, which has so far claimed over 20 lives, and said Uttar Pradesh ought to have a ban on sale and consumption of liquor like his state.



"I felt shock and grief when I read the news about Etah in the newspapers this morning. The tragedy is yet another reminder of the various evils that have their roots in the consumption of liquor.

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"I wish the state government here had taken a cue from the experiment in neighboring Bihar where we have banned sale and consumption of liquor," Kumar, who is also the JD(U) president, said at a rally in Phulpur, about 50 km from the city.

Prohibition came into force in Bihar earlier this year in keeping with an electoral promise Kumar's Janata Dal (United) had made to the people, especially women.

"We had promised the people of Bihar, especially women, that we will prohibit sale and consumption of alcohol if our party came to power. We kept the promise and the state is certain to reap the benefits. UP too can do the same. After all, it is not just Bihar which has opted for prohibition.

Tamil Nadu has banned liquor only recently and Kerala may be heading in the same direction", he said.

The toll in the spurious liquor tragedy in Etah has climbed to 24, while the main accused was arrested today and 11 officials from excise department and police have been suspended.

Kumar said, "Prohibition has been in place in Gujarat ever since the state came into being. I would urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hails from that state, to consider ways and means of eradicating this social evil from the country."

The JD(U) president, who is looking at making inroads in Uttar Pradesh, which is headed for a multi-cornered contest in the Assembly elections, also spoke extensively about measures taken by him, like 50 per cent reservation for women in local bodies and free uniforms and bicycles to school-going girls.

Support of women is widely believed to have helped him win a third term in office despite having suffered a huge setback in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Kumar, whose party is hoping to bag a sizeable chunk of the votes of the Kurmi caste - to which he belongs - took a dig at the recent induction of Apna Dal MP Anupriya Patel in the Union Council of Ministers.

"As a local MLA, she must have played an important role in PM Modi's victory from Varanasi. But it took more than two years for recognition to come her way. I wonder whether it had something to do with the fact that a few days before the cabinet expansion, our party had organised a rally in Mirzapur, which she currently represents in the Lok Sabha", Kumar said.

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The Bihar chief minister's address was preceded by speeches of party colleagues like former JD(U) president Sharad Yadav and K C Tyagi.

-With inputs from PTI



--- ENDS ---
[July 17, 2016] Xiaoi shares bots economy on IJCAI16

NEW YORK, July 17, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- On the 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 16) which just came to an end, the world leading smart machine technology supplier and platform operator, Xiaoi shared its mature AI industrial application with international AI researchers for the first time. This Chinese AI company has provided smart machine services to over 500 million users globally. Being one of the top AI companies, it is also a major player who is pushing bots economy forward. IJCAI is a scholar festival for AI researchers and practitioners, it is also one of the most important academic conference in the AI industry. Over 1700 top experts in this industry joined in the conference this year. Being the only Chinese guest speaker, Pinpin Zhu, the president & CTO of Xiaoi, was invited to deliver a speech on the global bots economy, as well as the development of Xiaoi. In recent years, the emerging of AlphaGo from Google, or Watson from IBM, as well as the opening of bots platforms of Facebook, Telegram and other companies, has brought bots economy to the public. However, Xiaoi started the industrial application of bots from as early as 2006. This low-profile Chinese company had shared the benefits of AI with over 500 million people. Pinpin Zhu said that bots were going from single uage to platforms. Bots were widely applied on Xiaoi's platform especially as VCAs. Take a Chinese bank as an example, the number of its customer service agents had reduced from 3339 to 14 after the launch of bots from Xiaoi. Xiaoi also provides service to SMEs and developers through its cloud platform and robot operating system. Pinpin Zhu expressed his wish to extend bots application to legal and health care industry in the future in his speech.



After his speech, Pinpin Zhu was involved into a panel together with other 7 top experts in AI, including R&D leader Peter Norvig from Google, founder of COGITAI Peter Stone, chief scientist of cognitive computing from IBM Research Guruduth Banavar and etc. They led an exciting discussion around the core challenges and opportunities of AI. Xiaoi shared its industrial application of AI in the US market for the first time in this IJCAI16, which had impressed AI experts and research institutes greatly. Medias including MIT Technology Reivew, The Verge, Techcrunch, Wired interviewed Xiaoi's personnel on Xiaoi's booth. The chairman of next IJCAI, Professor Chengqi Zhang, invited Xiaoi to IJCAI 17 in Melbourne on site immediately.

The Enterprise Business Development Leader of PWC, Mark Veyret, spoke highly of Xiaoi's success business model after a detailed introduction of Xiaoi. He said that similar companies in the US were start-ups with about 3 years' experience, while Xiaoi had over 15 years' industrial experience, with highly recognized international companies as its clients, which was a great competitive advantage for Xiaoi. Another thing to notice was that many AI talents from renowned universities and companies were attracted to Xiaoi's booth. They expressed their strong will to work for Xiaoi in China. It is worth mentioning that two papers co-written by Xiaoi and Fudan University were selected by IJCAI16, one of them was on the automatic construction of knowledge base in a large scale, the other was on natural language Q&A, and both had solved great challenges in respective areas. Xiaoi had developed the biggest Chinese structured encyclopedia, CN-DBpedia, in association with Computing Science School of Fudan University. They had completed a research on the deep learning in natural language processing, and established an online natural language Q&A system facing billion scale knowledge graph. Being a company that focuses on smart machine technology research and development, Xiaoi has set up a complete framework which includes semantic understanding, knowledge representation, learning system, inference and prediction, upper application, etc. It provides virtual/physical smart robots, SaaS/PaaS platform and multiple industrial solutions in various fields, and can convey cloud-based, powerful smart interactive service capabilities to enterprises, developers and devices. Xiaoi's smart machine service is available on omni-channels, from web, APP, WeChat, to Weibo, QQ, phone, etc. Its business covers industries such as communication, finance,e-governance, e-commerce, smart appliance and transportation. Xiaoi provides services to hundreds of large and medium enterprises, government branches, thousands of SMEs and developers. "China will play a significant role in the future AI market", said Mark Veyret. Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160717/390344 To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/xiaoi-shares-bots-economy-on-ijcai16-300299717.html SOURCE Xiaoi

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Lawrence County Council approve transfer and appropriation requests

During Tuesday evenings meeting of the Lawrence County Council, budget transfers and additional appropriations were approved for county offices.
By PTI: Bhubaneswar, Jul 16 (PTI) Coming down heavily on Odisha government over the killing of five civilians during an anti-Maoist operation in Kandhamal, BJP today accused the ruling BJD of being habituated with forging understanding with naxals for electoral gains.

"In order to win elections, the BJD has always been entering into understanding with the Maoists. This is an old habit of Naveen Patnaik," BJP national vice-president Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, who returned after leading a three-member central team to Kandhamal, alleged at a press meet here.

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Describing the Kandhamal tragedy as a grim chapter involving killing of helpless and innocent people, the BJP delegation alleged that Naveen Patnaik government was not at all serious about the incident that took place in the tribal-dominated district on the night of July 8.

Justifying the claim, Sahasrabuddhe said neither the Chief Minister nor the tribal welfare minister visited the site of the incident or met the families of the victims though a week had elapsed since the tragedy. "Such an attitude is unfortunate and condemnable," he said.

The BJP leader alleged that there was an attempt to cover up and destroy evidence about the killings.

The arrested Maoist leader Sabyasachi Panda continued to control the outlawed organisation from jail, claimed Sahasrabuddhe, who was accompanied by BJP general secretaries Ramvichar Netam and Jyoti Dhurve to Kandhamal.

Demanding inquiry into the incident by a sitting judge of the High Court, he said such a probe is essential as the ruling BJD is trying to "cover up the incident".

Accusing the district administration of failing to protect people, Dhurve and Netam said the BJP delegation met the family members and relatives of the victims and also heard eyewitness accounts during their visit to Kandhamal.

Terming the incident as "inhuman and barbaric", the delegation members accused the BJD government of failing to bring development in the backward district, besides being unable to ensure safety and security of the poor people.

They said they would submit a report on the incident to the Prime Minister as well as party president Amit Shah.

Quick action needs to be taken to safeguard the interest of the people of Odisha, particularly those in backward areas like Kandhamal, they said. PTI AAM SKN NN IKA LNS

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By PTI: From Aditi Khanna

London, Jul 17 (PTI) Britains boarding school teachers have been ordered to address transgender children as zie rather than he or she to avoid offending them.

The official guidance issued by the UK Boarding Schools Association calls on teachers to address transgender pupils as "zie" to avoid offence, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

Staff have been told they need to learn a "new language" for a growing number of pupils who demand not to be addressed as he or she.

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Zie is considered a gender-neutral pronoun which has been gaining ground in its usage across Europe and British teachers are being advised to address children by their "pronoun of choice", including they or zie.

Elly Barnes, founder of charity Educate and Celebrate and author of the new guidelines, said that as more trans pupils "come out" in boarding schools, it becomes an imperative to "break the binary".

"Schools need to make sure that all students are treated equally and fairly according to the Equality Act," she told the newspaper.

"We need to educate adults to speak a common language because we grew up in a generation with no prior experience about the (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities)," she said.

New guidance also reminds schools in England, Wales and Scotland of their obligations under the Equality Act 2010 under which gender identity and "reassignment" is one of so-called protected characteristics. PTI AK AJR AKJ AJR

--- ENDS ---
Kansas City Internets Crime Aftermath

Artsy Alternative Newspaper Coverage

Golden Ghetto Weekend Tragedy

KCMO Urban Core Creativity

Kansas City Division Winning

Karlie Kloss is aboutand this morning her angelic hotness inspires our look at these Kansas City links to start the morning . . .And this is thefor right now . . .
New York: Three Police Officers Killed and Several Wounded in Baton Rouge Shooting









"Officers in metropolitan Kanas City, an elsewhere, put public safety above their personal safety. Kansas Citians have to yet experienced a Ferguson, a Baltimore or a Dallas. Good leadership has played a large part. We must be determined that law enforcement in metropolitan Kansas City feels our support . . ."

Shocking Sunday news reveals a clear and present danger to police throughout the nation . . .As always, we're focused on a local connection . . .From a denizen of the crime commission . . .And so . . . Tension between police and diverse communities continues in andeadly fashion that this nation hasn't seen in the modern era.Developing . . .
TKC OFFERS THIS EXCLUSIVE SUNDAY SPECIAL TESTIMONY FROM STREETCAR RYDERS REGARDING THE PERSISTENT PROBLEMS OF THE TOY TRAIN!!!

Kansas City's Streetcar Needs To Charge!!!

BRT Is Better For Kansas City

"Check out Cleveland's state of the art BRT system. Much better than Kansas City's Max bus, and much better than a streetcar. Cost $200 million for 9 miles compared to our Streetcar that cost $110 million for two miles."

The Kansas City Toy Train Is Always Late!!!

THE KANSAS CITY TOY TRAIN STREETCAR IS MUCH SLOWER THAN DRIVING, TAKING A CAB OR ANY COMPARABLE BUS LINE!!!

Thanks to consultant contracts, political bullying and crony capitalism, there is very little criticism of the Kansas City toy train in the mainstream media.Accordingly . . .While the cheerleaders of this project continue to tout numbers. . . We want to focus on the experience of users and some of their longstanding complaints . . .Take a look at the top complaints:Critics who want to see a modicum of effort toward toy train sustainability believe that streetcar needs to start charging riders in order to not only generate revenue but also to prove it's worth and value to riders as something more than a tourist indulgence.An important resource from the best and brightest of our blog community who argue for transit alternatives . . .Finally . . .At the end of line and along just about every stop, this complaint continues to resonate among Downtown denizens . . .The weekend crowds make for great pix and social media hype from the army of consultants employed via taxpayer subsidy but the reality is that unaffiliated ryders regularly complain about constant toy train streetcar delays and this might impact Kansas City's transit effort when the novelty wears off.Now, we should be clear that these gripes are from people who generally support public transit and would like to work toward solutions . . . The debate over ridership, costs, competing car traffic and the extension are far more brutal and speak to the ongoing contentious battle over the future of the streetcar that continues this Summer amid dueling petitions.You decide . . .
In a crucial step toward establishing a Greek Research and Innovation Foundation, Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos, Education Minister Nikos Filis, Alternate Education Minister Kostas Fotakis and the European Investment Bank's Vice President Jonathan Taylor on Friday signed a financing agreement at a ceremony at the National Research Foundation in Athens.

"Greece is turning a new page as the conditions are created to convert a vicious cycle of recession into a virtuous cycle of equitable growth, with the focus on the needs of society," Tsakalotos said. The recapitalisation of the banks, completing the first review and the disbursement of 7.5 billion euros in loans, as well as the reinstatement of the ECB waiver and the start of a discussion on relieving Greece's debt were the main factors of the government's road map for restoring confidence in the Greek economy and creating a clear corridor for attracting long-term investments, he added.

Filis said the agreement once again underscored the importance the government attaches to research and innovation.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
The President of the Greek-Italian Chamber of Commerce, Ioannis Tsamichas, said that 9.46 percent of Greek exports are absorbed by the Italian market, during his address of an event being held to pass the presidency of the Greek-European Chamber Union to

The President of the Greek-Italian Chamber of Commerce, Ioannis Tsamichas, said that 9.46 percent of Greek exports are absorbed by the Italian market, during his address of an event being held to pass the presidency of the Greek-European Chamber Union to the Greek-German Chamber of Athens.

He said that the product deficit is at 2.473 billion euros from 2.871 billion euros in 2010, whereas the value of Greek commercial exchange between Greece and Italy is at 7.721 billion euros compared to 6.411 billion euros in 2015.

Greece is also a basic destination for tourism, second in Italian vacation preference behind Spain for travel abroad. From 2005 until 2011 there has been an average of 1,640,000 Italian tourists traveling to Greece each year. Parallel to this, Greece maintains its position as a basic trade partner with Italy when it comes to the absorption of goods and services with transactions valuing 4.597 billion euros.

Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Dimitris Mardas said that collaboration between Greece and Italy has increased, while also making reference to the successful internet platform known as ProGreece.

The event was also attended by New Democracy Foreign Secretary Chief Ioannis Kefaloyiannis, Centrist Potami Deputy Spyros Danelis and other trade and government officials.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report
Buddhist Tourism Circuit' scheme proposal is likely to get a fresh impetus after Bihar's 'Nalanda Mahavihara' came under the umbrella of 'UNESCO World Heritage Site.' Along with this, tourist facilities of international standards can be expected too.

An 'Extended Dharmayatra' or 'Sacred Circuit Retracing Buddha's Footsteps' has been identified by the Ministry of Tourism.

By Baishali Adak: The proposed 'Buddhist Tourism Circuit' scheme is likely to get a fresh impetus following Bihar's 'Nalanda Mahavihara' being awarded the 'UNESCO World Heritage Site' tag on Friday. Already, Rs 1,500 crore have been sanctioned by the Government of India to promote religious tourism under three schemes - the Ramayana, Krishna and Buddhist Circuit.

The prestigious UNESCO title to Nalanda, a great 5th Century monastery, gives it a legally protected status under the Geneva Convention; plus, it entitles it to funds from 'UNESCO World Heritage Fund' for conservation and promotion.

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EXTENDED DHARMAYATRA BY TOURISM MINISTRY

An 'Extended Dharmayatra' or 'Sacred Circuit Retracing Buddha's Footsteps' has been identified by the Ministry of Tourism. This 10-15 day tour includes visits to: Bodhgaya (Nalanda, Rajgir, Barabar caves, Pragbodhi Hill, Gaya), Patna, Varanasi, Kushinagar and Piparva with a day trip to Nepal's Lumbini.

India receives thousands of Buddhist pilgrims annually from 30 countries including Vietnam, Loas and Thailand. RS Fonia, Joint Director General, Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), told Mail Today, "Nalanda will be developed as a star tourist attraction. Currently, the 23 hectares site has major encroachments, in terms of agricultural fields, settlements and pucca constructions. These will be removed. The whole area will be demarcated."

"Tourist facilities will be created here of international standards. This includes signages, facilitation centres, toilets, CCTV cameras, etc. The Nalanda Archaeological Museum, which houses 13,463 antique recoveries made from Nalanda and Rajgir excavated sites, will be upgraded further," he said.

It will be developed into an educational and research hub. Also, it will be maintained in the spirit of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, he added.

EASE OF CONNECTIVITY TO NALANDA

ML Srivastava, Vice-Chancellor, Nava Nalanda Mahavihara, added, "Plans are afoot to connect all the notified Buddhist sites by rail, road and air. Airstrips will be developed where there none, such as Bodhgaya. Flights will be launched. Talks are on with Pawan Hans. Three ministries - that of Tourism, Culture and Civil Aviation - are involved in this." Senior officials said that NK Sinha, Secretary, Ministry of Culture, is keenly looking into this, coming from the Bihar IAS Cadre and having been the DM of Nalanda himself years back. Nalanda is a part of the international 'Silk Route' platform as well.

FURTHER EXCAVATION OF NALANDA

Following the encouragement of the UNESCO tag, ASI will now go in for further excavation of the 'Ancient Remains of Nalanda Mahavihara.' Dr. RS Fonia said, "Currently, only 6 km of the core area of Nalanda has been excavated. However, the known limits of the ancient university extend over about 150,000 sq m."

"Although if the Chinese traveler, Hiuen Tsang's (Xuanzang) account of Nalanda is correlated with present excavations, almost 90 per cent of it remains unearthed. Numerous idols, murals, copper plates, inscriptions, seals have been found," he said.

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Also read:

Nalanda University is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site!

Nalanda University might not be awarded as World Heritage Site. Here's why

Revival of Nalanda University fails to uplift locals of Rajgir town





--- ENDS ---
A formal agreement to build the Dh120 million ($32.6 million) Novotel Sharjah Expo, an exclusive business hotel, was signed between Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi, chairman of Basma Group. and Gunther Hinterberger, managing director of Klampfer Middle East, a leading construction firm.



Also present at the signing was His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Sultan Al Qasimi, Deputy Ruler of Sharjah and Chairman of United Investment, and Khalifa Al Shaibani, Director-General of United Investment.



The Novotel Sharjah Expo is being developed under the directives of His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohamed Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah, and will serve as the official hotel of Expo Centre Sharjah, which boasts a busy calendar of events and activities throughout the year. The upcoming hotel is being seen as a new milestone for business and MICE tourism in Sharjah.



Speaking on the occasion, Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi said: Development is a continuous and cumulative process. It starts with a vision followed by directives and finally implementation.



The chairman of Basma Group said: We in Sharjah are constantly striving, under the guidance of His Highness Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Mohamed Al Qasimi, Supreme Council Member and Ruler of Sharjah, to improve our emirate in a way that makes it keep pace with changing times and represent a beacon of modernity and authenticity at the same time. It is this endeavor that spawned the idea to build Novotel Sharjah Expo.



Expressing his pleasure at being associated with the prestigious venture in the heart of Sharjahs business district, Hinterberger said: As a European company that has successfully scaled into the Middle East under the KBW Investments group portfolio banner, were extremely proud to have been awarded this key hospitality project in the UAE.



The Novotel Sharjah Expo, to be managed by Accor Hotel Services Middle East, will be integral to meeting the demand of the emirates tourism sector, he said. Klampfers history of consistent quality and efficient operations allows for a superior end product; a strong and suitable match for this large-scale undertaking in Sharjahs new hotel industry, he added.



Featuring world-class amenities, the luxurious business hotel is the latest addition to Sharjahs hospitality and tourism industry and will comprise 200 rooms that fall under three categories  standard rooms, club floor rooms and executive suites.



The Novotel Sharjah Expo is strategically located close to Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Dubai, as well as to the vital leisure areas in Sharjah. The hotel will feature a business centre with workstations and two meeting halls including a large meeting-cum-function hall of approximately 200-sq-m.

Pointing out that the new hotel is the fruit of a strategic partnership, Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi said that Novotel Sharjah Expo will meet a pressing need in the Emirate and be part of Sharjahs present and future plans.



He added: Boasting a smart and contemporary design, the hotel seeks to offer high-quality services to both businesspeople and tourists. It is true that it mainly aims to attend to the needs of visitors to the Expo Centre and business travellers, but it also targets leisure travellers and connects them to the most vital family leisure areas in the emirate.



"Novotel Sharjah Expo is poised to complement Sharjahs set of hotels, catering for the emirates progress in the fields of investment, tourism and economy and highlighting its bright cultural side," he added. - TradeArabia News Service
The Iranian government has signed a deal with Italy's highway agency Anas for the construction and management of a 1,200 km (745 miles) road project that will cost 3.6 billion euros ($4 billion), Anas said.



The first stretch of highway covering 350 km will be completed by 2022 at a cost of 600 million euros, Anas said.



The project is to build a road linking the Gulf port of Bandar Imam Khomeini to Bazargah on Iran's border with Turkey.



Italy has worked hard to secure lucrative deals in Iran following a deal last year to lift crippling sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limiting its nuclear activities.



Iranian President Hassan Rouhani made Italy his first stop in Europe in January as he sought to drum up investment in the Iranian economy, while Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi visited Tehran in April with a large business delegation.



Anas said the deal signed on Thursday with the Iranian Ministry of Roads was a follow-up to a memorandum of understanding initialled in February.  Reuters
Twitter moved swiftly to remove posts from Islamic extremists glorifying a truck attack in Nice, France, watchdog groups said Friday, in a rare round of praise for a platform that has often struggled to contain violent propaganda.



A spate of violence over the past several months has posed numerous challenges to social media companies. The unfolding military coup in Turkey was marked first by restrictions on social media, internet monitoring groups said, but the crackdown appeared to ease as the events unfolded and numerous citizens broadcast live video on Facebook and sent tweets.



US and French authorities on Friday were still trying to determine whether the Tunisian man who drove a truck into Bastille Day crowds on Thursday, killing 84 people, had ties to Islamic militants.



At least 50 Twitter accounts praising the attacks used the hashtag Nice in Arabic, according to the Counter Extremism Project, a private group that monitors and reports extremist content online. Many accounts appeared almost immediately after the attack and shared images praising the carnage, the group said.



The pattern was similar to what was seen on Twitter after attacks last year and earlier this year in Paris and Brussels. But Twitter, which once took a purist approach to free speech but has since revised its rules, took action much more quickly this week.



"Twitter moved with swiftness we have not seen before to erase pro-attack tweets within minutes," Counter Extremism Project said in a statement. "It was the first time Twitter has reacted so efficiently."



Rabbi Abraham Cooper, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Digital Terrorism and Hate project, also said Twitter had responded with unusual alacrity.



Twitter did not provide any information about account suspensions, but said in a statement that it condemns terrorism and bans it on its site.



Twitter, Facebook Inc and other internet firms have ramped up their efforts over the past two years to quickly remove violent propaganda that violates their terms of service.



Both companies continue to face major challenges in distinguishing between graphic images that are shared to glorify or celebrate attacks and those shared by witnesses who are documenting events.



Facebook's "community standards" dictate what types of content are and are not allowed on the platform. Those standards explicitly ban "terrorism" and related content, such as posts or images that celebrate attacks or promote violence.



Yet the company's policies around graphic images are more nuanced. Facebook, like most large internet companies, relies on users and eagle-eyed advocacy groups to report objectionable content to teams of human editors, who then review each submission and decide whether a post should be deleted.



At Facebook, those reviewers receive more specific guidance beyond the public community standards when it comes to deciding what to do with reported graphic images, a spokeswoman said. But she declined to elaborate on the company's criteria.



"One of the most sensitive situations involves people sharing violent or graphic images of events taking place in the real world. In those situations, context and degree are everything," Facebook said in a blog post last week.



NEW TACTICS



Internet companies have continually updated their terms of service over the past two years to establish clearer and in many cases stricter ground rules on what content is permissible on their platforms.



In response to pressure by U.S. lawmakers and counterextremism groups, Facebook and YouTube have moved recently toward implementing some automated processes to block or rapidly remove Islamic State videos and similar material.





That has not stopped Islamist militants from celebrating attacks online and even updating their tactics. Some Islamic State supporters used Twitter hashtags that were trending globally to celebrate the Nice attacks, such as #PrayForNice, #NiceAttack and #Nice, so that their tweets were shown to a wider audience, according to screenshots from the Wiesenthal Center.  Reuters
Bahrain's highest court dissolved the country's main opposition group Al Wefaq National Islamic Society and liquidated the group's funds, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television reported on Sunday.



In its ruling, handed out this morning by the High Civil Court following a case filed by the Justice, Islamic Affairs and Endowments Ministry, the court said Al Wefaq National Islamic Society must officially close down and have its assets and funds liquidated.



The funds would be claimed by the state treasury, the report said.



Al Wefaq was temporarily suspended on June 14, its assets frozen and offices shut down after being taken to court over a number of offences, it added.-Reuters
Iran is planning its first tender for utility-scale renewable-energy projects by year end as it begins a green power build out that could draw $12 billion of investment by the time its complete.



The nation wants to install 5 gigawatts of renewable energy in the next five years and an additional 2.5 gigawatts by 2030, Irans energy minister Hamid Chitchian told Bloomberg in an interview in London.



Iran, re-opened to investors following last years nuclear deal, has been courted by international green power investors at the same time it boosts oil production for export.



Were not going to use the money from oil in that sector at all, Chitchian said. All the investment will be done by the private sector, including local and foreign companies.



At least 150 trade delegations from around the globe have visited Tehran in the six months since economic sanctions were dropped.



While businesses and diplomats have clamored to tap the market of 78 million people, deals have been slow to materialize as banks and financial institutions exert caution to ensure the nuclear accord sticks. Western powers accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, a charge Iran always denied.



Tehrans government is seeking commerce with countries and companies offering the best financial terms rather than prioritising political and historical ties.



The energy ministry is already in talks with some of the worlds largest renewable-energy players including Vestas Wind Systems A/S and Siemens Wind Power, Chitchian said.



Vestas chief sales officer, Juan Aratuce, said last month that Iran could be an important new market for wind energy. Automaker Iran Khodro Company is negotiating with South Koreas LG International Corp. to jointly develop electric vehicles.



Foreign direct investment dried up during the sanctions but it is already starting to flow, said Mohammad Hassan Habibollahzadeh, Irans charge daffaires in UK. Many companies have signed agreements during the last few months. Electricity is considered to be one of the most important sectors, he added.



Most of Irans power plants are over 40 years old and need to be renovated and repowered, he said. The government is planning to invest a total of $50 billion in its electricity system in the next seven years.



The energy ministry has set 12 separate feed-in tariffs for renewables, depending on the type of technology and the size of the power plant. That system will be kept for projects under than 100 megawatts. The new tender system will be used for facilities with higher generation capacities.



According to him, Iran will tender 1 gigawatt of wind and as many as 3 gigawatts of solar, likely in several stages. It is also seeking to build biomass and geothermal plants and swap natural gas for electricity with Armenia, stated Chitchian.



Iran may also add solar to its system of energy swaps, which before sanctions were lifted allowed the country to traded crude for refined products. Under a so-called solar for service program, developers and land owners would split cash flows generated from power sales.



Iran currently supplies 80 per cent of its power from natural gas and wants to raise that figure to 90 percent by the end of next year.-Bloomberg
Turkish Airlines resumed flights from Istanbul's international airport on Saturday following a failed coup attempt while some foreign carriers cancelled weekend flights.



Forces loyal to Turkey's government fought on Saturday to crush the last remnants of a military coup attempt. Television images late Friday had shown tanks parked in front of the airport.



A spokesman for Turkish Airlines said flights had now returned to their normal schedule from Europe's third largest hub, though delays were to be expected.



Turkish budget carrier Pegasus said its flights were also experiencing minor delays.



The closure of Istanbul's Ataturk Airport late on Friday had caused the diversion of 35 airplanes and cancelled 32 flights, Turkish Airlines chairman Ilker Ayci told broadcaster CNN Turk.



British Airways said in a statement it was halting all flights to Turkey on Saturday and one on Sunday as a precaution.



"The safety and security of our customers and crew are always our top priority and we would never operate a flight unless it was safe to do so."



Over 2,500,000 British nationals visit Turkey every year according to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.



EasyJet said its advice from British authorities was to continue flying, although it was monitoring developments.



The attempted coup follows a series of bombings that hit Turkey this year, including a suicide attack in June that killed 45 people at Istanbul's main airport. They have weighed on international travel to the country.



The number of foreign visitors to Turkey fell by 28 percent in April, data showed on Friday, the biggest drop in 17 years.



The decline signals more pain for Turkey's economy, which is smarting from slowing exports and weak investment. Some economists have forecast that tourism revenue will drop by a quarter this year, costing around $8 billion.



German airline Lufthansa cancelled all its flights to Istanbul and Ankara on Saturday and pared back the number flights to holiday destinations Bodrum and Antalya.



TUI which owns the Thomson and First Choice holiday companies, said its flights to Dalaman, Antalya and Izmir were operating as normal.



Tour operator Thomas Cook said most German guests who had booked a holiday to Antalya or Bodrum had taken their flights on Saturday. It said flights from the UK were operating as normal but, given the circumstances, free cancellations or amendments were possible for customers due to fly to Turkey this weekend.



Russia also suspended passenger flights to the country on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, TASS news agency said.



Turkish and Russian officials had met this week to discuss the restarting of charter flights between the two countries and tourism security after relations soured following Turkey's downing of a Russian jet last year.



State airline EgyptAir also cancelled all flights on Saturday to Istanbul, the company said in a statement. The company, which has 14 flights to Istanbul per week, did not say when they were expected to resume.



All flights from Istanbul to Sofia for Saturday had been cancelled, according to Sofia airport's website.-Reuters
According to Kern County Sheriff's Office, 150 people attended a house party on Stephens Drive in South Bakersfield after a social media post was widely spread.

By India Today Web Desk: Fourteen people were wounded, two critically injured, after three young men opened fire at around 1 am after a party in Bakersfield, on Saturday.



AFTER PARTY



According to Kern County Sheriff's Office, 150 people attended a house party on Stephens Drive in South Bakersfield after a social media post was widely spread. Most of the visitors were 15- to 18-year-olds and many were uninvited.

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The parents broke up the party and the visitors - mainly - streamed into the front yard and street. Consequently, three people came up the street and opened fire on the crowd.

People were hit in the arms, legs and chest. The critically injured are expected to survive.Authorities say the attack may have been gang-related.

With inputs from agencies.



ALSO READ:

2 men open fire inside builders office in Maharashtra





--- ENDS ---
By PTI: Toronto, Jul 17 (PTI) A Canadian court has dismissed a drunk driving charge against a Sikh man because police officers did not return his turban for over three hours after it accidentally fell off while he was being arrested.

Charges of impaired operation and excess blood alcohol against Sardul Singh were dismissed because Peel Regional Police officers did not return his turban after it fell while he was being placed in a cruiser in Southern Ontario.

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Ontario Court Justice Jill Copeland, in a decision released last month, wrote that the failure to return Singhs turban while he was in custody constituted a Charter breach.

Copeland ruled that the breach of the defendants right to freedom of religion by police was a serious one and that Singhs breath sample evidence should be excluded because its admission into evidence would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

Peel police Chief Jennifer Evans, in a statement on Friday, was quoted as saying by The Canadian Press that she ordered a review of the decision and the officers actions after Singh was detained on December 10, 2014.

Evans said Peel Regional Police have had a directive in place since 2012 regarding the proper search and handling of religious items and a training bulletin has been issued internally to remind officers of this and other directives.

Peel police recognise "the proper search and handling of religious items are of great importance in keeping with the freedom of religious rights," Evans was quoted as saying.

"I am concerned by the negative impact that this incident and my officers actions have had on members within our community," she said.

"We have since reinforced the importance of this directive to ensure that this type of mistake does not occur in the future," she added.

Copeland said in her ruling there was no dispute that the removal of Singhs turban was an accident, but it was not returned to him for more than three hours.

"The evidence of the various officers who interacted with Mr Singh about the cause for this delay in returning the turban, and what steps were taken when in relation to the turban, contains numerous inconsistencies," Copeland wrote.

Peel police policy states the only exception to returning a turban is that if a prisoner is suicidal, or if continuous monitoring of the prisoner is not possible, then the turban shall not be returned for security reasons.

"Neither of those concerns is at issue in this case," Copeland wrote in her ruling.

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"I accept Mr. Singhs evidence that he felt ashamed at being without his turban, and that it made him feel vulnerable," she said. PTI ASK AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---
Drawing a comparison with the India-China boundary dispute, retired PLA General Luo Yuan says China won't accept arbitration on sovereignty issues such as the South China Sea.

By Ananth Krishnan: Comparing the South China Sea issue to the boundary dispute between India and China, a former People's Liberation Army General has said that Beijing would not accept any arbitration on issues concerning its territorial sovereignty.

General Luo Yuan, who is one of China's most well-known military strategists, said the South China Sea was a question of China's sovereignty, and was hence beyond the remit of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, which on July 12 ruled in favour of the Philippines by declaring that many of China's claims were not consistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

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While the tribunal ruled that some land features were not islands but rocks or reefs, which would not permit China to claim territorial waters around them according to UNCLOS, Beijing rejected the ruling by stating that it was not obligated to defer to UNCLOS on issues of sovereignty. The Philippines however argued the case was not about sovereignty but about the nature of geographical features.

Read: China vows to protect South China Sea sovereignty, threatens to set up air defence zone



'SOUTH CHINA SEA SOVEREIGNTY ISSUE'



Reaffirming China's stand, the retired General Luo, who is a senior research fellow at the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Academy of Military Sciences and is one of China's more influential hawks, said on Sunday, "The South China Sea is a sovereignty issue, so they have no right to issue a verdict."

General Luo drew a comparison with the India-China boundary dispute. "This is like the territorial disputes between China and India," he said, speaking at a Tsinghua University forum in Beijing.

"Similarly, the arbitrary tribunal does not have the right to resolve this dispute," he said.

Read: China rejects ruling on South China Sea, says 'farce is now over'



RESULT OF RULING



The tribunal's ruling has led some analysts to suggest it could have ramifications on some of China's other maritime disputes, prompting other countries such as Vietnam to similarly seek arbitration on whether China's claims are compatible with UNCLOS.

The ruling has no bearing on the India-China boundary dispute, which is over land and is being resolved by both countries through long-running bilateral negotiations.

The tribunal found that China's claim that it had "historical rights" within the nine-dash line, which covers almost the entire South China Sea, were inconsistent with what UNCLOS permits countries to claim as territorial waters, around only certain geographical features.

General Luo rejected this argument, saying the South China Sea was "like a dispute over property".

"They are not talking about inheritance rights, they are talking about distribution of property and who should get which portion," he said. "Those are two different things. Distribution of property is like a divorce case. You are talking about who should get which property or territory."

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Also Read:

Defiant Taiwan takes on Beijing, sends warship into disputed South China Sea

Beijing's South China Sea claims unfounded, rules The Hague tribunal

High stakes legal ruling looms in South China Sea dispute China holds combat drill in South China Sea

--- ENDS ---
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 17

Chandigarhs Capitol Complex was on Sunday declared by UNESCO as World Heritage at the 40th session of World Heritage Conference currently underway in Istanbul, Turkey.

Informing of the development, Indian representative Ruchira Kamboj said in a tweet, Proud to convey from Istanbul that UNESCO has just inscribed Capitol Complex of Chandigarh as World Heritage.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

Kamboj is India's Ambassador and Permanent Representative to UNESCO.

The site got inscribed as part of the UN bodys recognition of Le Corbusiers architectural works in different parts of the world.

UNESCO inscription was under The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier an outstanding contribution to the Modern Movement.

The Capitol Complex buildings include the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Punjab and Haryana Secretariat and Punjab and Haryana Assembly along with monuments Open hand, Martyrs Memorial, Geometric Hill and Tower of Shadow.

It hosted the International Yoga Day event on June 21, which was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

It is a moment of pride for our city as Capitol Complex gets the Heritage Status. The Administration ensures all the residents that we will conserve and preserve this Heritage Site and make the city a major international tourism destination," Adviser to the Union Territory administration Parimal Rai said.

A World Heritage Site is a place (such as a building, city, complex, desert, forest, island, lake, monument, or mountain) that is listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as being of 'special cultural or physical significance'.

Sikkim park also makes the cut

Apart from Capitol Complex in Chandigarh, UNESCO also listed Sikkim's national park, home to the world's third highest peak Mount Khangchendzonga, among its World Heritage Sites, approving all three nominations linked to India this session.

Today's approval is besides the archaeological site of Nalanda Mahavihara (Nalanda University) in Bihar entering the list at the 40th session of The World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul.

The meeting had resumed for a day today, after being suspended a day earlier due to a failed coup bid in Turkey which claimed over 260 lives.

The Paris-based body listed Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier's works  including Capitol Complex in the Indian city of Chandigarh which he planned in the 1950s  among its World Heritage Sites.

It said the 17 sites spread over seven countries are a "testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past".

"The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh (India), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Japan), the House of Dr Curutchet in La Plata (Argentina) and the Unite d'habitation in Marseille (France) reflect the solutions that the Modern Movement sought to apply during the 20th century to the challenges of inventing new architectural techniques to respond to the needs of society.

"These masterpieces of creative genius also attest to the internationalisation of architectural practice across the planet," it said in an official statement.

In another major recognition, Sikkim's Khangchendzonga National Park  home to the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga  made it to the list.

The Khangchendzonga National Park includes a unique diversity of plains, valleys, lakes, glaciers and spectacular, snow-capped mountains covered with ancient forests, including the world's third highest peak, Mount Khangchendzonga.

"Mythological stories are associated with this mountain and with a great number of natural elements (e.g. caves, rivers, lakes, etc.) that are the object of worship by the indigenous people of Sikkim. The sacred meanings of these stories and practices have been integrated with Buddhist beliefs and constitute the basis for Sikkimese identity," the statement said.  With agencies
Established on December 1, 1965, the BSF is a paramilitary force charged with guarding India's border with Pakistan and Bangladesh and has both peace and war time roles. It currently stands as the world's largest border guarding force, covering around 530 km of the Punjab border that is along Pakistan. The area of operation along the Punjab frontier is generally plain. However, at many places, the terrain is interspersed with rivers and nullahs. The major rivers flowing through the border areas are the Ravi and Sutlej. Thereby, a large chunk of the border belt is riverine which presents a huge challenge to tackle smuggling and infiltration.

IG, Punjab Frontier, Anil Paliwal, is an IPS officer of the 1994 batch from the Rajasthan cadre. In the Rajasthan Police, he worked as the IGP, Ajmer, Additional Commissioner, Crime, Jaipur city, DIG, Anti-Corruption Bureau, and SSP in various districts of Rajasthan. In the BSF, he has served on the Bangladesh border as IG, South Bengal Frontier, BSF. He joined Punjab Frontier on December 15, 2014. A mechanical engineer from IIT Kanpur, he also has a diploma in Urdu. He has a great interest in Indian languages and is well-versed in various languages like Punjabi, Bengali, Rajasthani, Gujarati and Urdu. The BSF, under his leadership, has made record recoveries of narcotics and made Pakistani smugglers feel the pinch of the BSF strength. During an interaction with The Tribune correspondent Nikhil Bhardwaj, the IG touched upon various issues pertaining to the border and efforts being made to tackle infiltration.

What role is the BSF playing on the border?

On the Punjab border, which is one of the most sensitive borders, the BSF is ensuring that cross-border crime, smuggling and infiltration do not take place and the border population is particularly able to do its agricultural activities properly.

What are the main challenges that the BSF is facing on border?

The BSF jawans have been facing challenges to stop cross-border infiltration and smuggling and to keep a tab on border crime. In operational challenges, the most challenging is the weather because in Punjab, there are extreme weather conditions like extreme cold, harsh summer and high humidity and jawans have to patrol in waterlogged or muddy terrains to keep a hawks eye on Pakistani smugglers.

Do you think there is a need to increase troops after the Pathankot and Dinanagar attacks?

In the recent past, some manpower has been increased and more is in the pipeline. In the times to come, there is a plan to increase manpower on Punjab borders.

What preventive measures have been taken by the BSF after the recent attack at the Pathankot airbase and Dinanagar?

The manpower at the border has been increased to a large extent. Even the riverine and nullah gaps and technological solutions have been applied for intruder alarms and also other earlier warning systems. Also, physical obstructions have been designed, especially for the riverine area. More night surveillance equipment has been deployed in the border like hand-held thermal imagers (HHTI).

Is drug smuggling rampant in border areas?

Drug smuggling is definitely a big challenge on this border and the BSF is tackling it in full earnest and has shown the capability to tackle it. In the years 2014 and 2015, there has been an all-time high seizure and this year also, big seizures have been made and Pakistani and Indian smugglers have been interdicted in an exchange of fire.

Many a time in the past, BSF jawans were found conniving with smugglers of Pakistan.

They were also nabbed and charged, Your comments.

Our internal vigilance has been playing an active role in this. Recently, we dismissed jawan Harpartap posted at Abohar after his connivance with smugglers came to the fore. The BSF also avoids posting new recruits to the station near to their home district. Still, if any jawans role is found doubtful, hes being posted out of Punjab.

What changes do you see with women manning the border?

In my eyes, women and men are equally performing operational duties at the border. If the menfolk are firing at smugglers, the womenfolk are equally resorting to firing. Yes, with the increase in the deployment of women jawans, it serves as a motivation for the womenfolk. In future, more women jawans are going to be deployed on operational duties.

What sort of technological advancements have taken place at border in the recent past to tackle drug smuggling and infiltration of terrorists?

Upgrading technology in terms of arms, ammunition and monitoring equipment is a constant process. The recent inclusion of advanced intruder alarms in the BSF has been proving effective and the interdiction of three smugglers at Ajnala was also made possible with those alarms.

Last year, a man smashed his XUV into the Attari border gate. Was any responsibility fixed in this?

The BSF has taken appropriate action against the BSF jawans found guilty, and for prevention, several barricades have been put up at the border.

What activities are being undertaken for the welfare of the BSF jawans and their families?

Apart from the routine welfare activities, the BSF also provides in-house training to the families of jawans in various trades like stitching. Various other welfare measures for better education of the children or personnel of the BSF have also been taken.

Last year, a trial run was conducted on advanced ground sensors to check the movement of unwanted elements on border. Has this project been implemented or is it still in the pipeline?

Yes, it is in process.

Eleven smugglers have been gunned down in six months, and only 24 in the past three years on the border. Is this a sign of rise in infiltration?

In the last two years, strict action has been taken against Pakistan smugglers and intruders. This has been made possible with the availability of advance intruder alarm system coupled with the increase of manpower on border.

What efforts are being made for confidence-building measures after attacks on Pathankot air base and Dinanagar?

The BSF and Punjab Police are jointly conducting patrolling to build confidence among the residents of the border areas as their security is of foremost concern to the forces. Other than that, the BSF officers and personnel are having formal and informal interaction with border population on a continuous basis and enhanced operation by the BSF has ensured full confidence in the minds of the border population.

A trial run was conducted on the all- terrain vehicle (ATV). Was the trial successful?

On Punjab border, 4x4 vehicles are effective for border patrolling and ATVs are not much concerned about the Punjab frontier.

There was a plan to increase the capacity of gallery at the Attari border.

Yes, the seating capacity of the gallery at the Attari border will be increased from 25,000 to 30,000. As construction is going on, it will be functional by January 2017.
Four persons including director general of Corporate Affairs were arrested by the CBI for accepting a bribe of Rs nine lakh outside a Delhi hotel.

By Tanseem Haider: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Saturday arrested four persons including director general of Corporate Affairs on charges of accepting bribe.

The main accused B K Bansal and Vishwadeep Bansal were arrested for reportedly seeking a bribe of Rs nine lakh fix violations committed by Mumbai-based Elder pharmaceuticals company. Sources said that the transaction reportedly took place outside a Delhi-based hotel.

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"Rs 56.2 lakh were recovered from Bansal after six different locations in Delhi were raided. While we recovered Rs 16 lakh from Vishwadeep who was the middleman," said an official.



DG SOUGHT BRIBE FROM MUMBAI-BASED PHARMA



CBI officials said that Bansal had been dealing with the Mumbai-based pharma company for last few days. He allegedly sought the bribe to fix the violations committed by the company.

Sources said that television actor and chief operating officer of Elder Pharmaceuticals Anuj Saxena approached Vishwadeep who acted as a middleman in the transaction. Saxena is among those named in the case.

An official said that the director general reportedly sought a bribe of Rs 50 lakh to not recommend an investigation by the Serious Fraud Investigation office on the report.



DG ARRESTED WHILE ACCEPTING BRIBE

The amount was later reduced to Rs 20 lakh after the parties negotiated. Bansal had received Rs 11 lakh earlier. The CBI sleuths arrested Bansal when he was accepting the remaining Rs nine lakh.

The accused were produced before a Delhi court. While Bansal was remanded to two day in police custody, Vishwadeep was remanded to five days. Two other accused identified as Vinod Singh and Gopal Krishnan were remanded to one day and two days of police custody respectively.

The police are currently investigating documents recovered from the accused.

Also read:



DA case: CBI recovers Rs 1.94 crore in cash from Mangalore SEZ commissioner's house



--- ENDS ---
Ramkrishan Upadhyay

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 17

With the Capitol Complex being declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO today, the decision has not only put the city on the world map but has also opened a new era of development for it.

The buildings, designed by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, which were under a threat of degradation, will now get world-class protection and funds for conservation. The Administration will have to maintain the buildings under the constant watch of UNESCO. It will also have to create a buffer zone around the Capitol Complex to protect it from the ill-effects of other areas.

Le Corbusier began work on the Capitol Complex in 1952. Located in Sector 1, the complex comprises three buildings  the Legislative Assembly, Secretariat and the High Court. All three buildings were constructed over a period of time till 1962.

The fourth building, the Museum of Knowledge, is yet to be constructed. The Administration began efforts to include the name of the city in the world heritage list in 2003. It succeeded in getting the name of the city included in the tentative list in 2007.

Two attempts were made in 2009 and 2011 to get the name included in the list but the Administration could not succeed for various reasons. Later, a team under former Chief Architect Sumit Kaur was formed to prepare a dossier in 2012. Sumit Kaur said the dossier was presented in association with France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Argentina and Japan, where works of Corbusier existed. The team had to work hard to ensure that the dossier presented the universal values of the works of Corbusier.

Monuments symbolise Corbusiers vision

There are various monuments in the Capitol Complex symbolising the philosophy used by Le Corbusier in preparing the design of the city. These monuments are the Open Hand, Path of the Sun (the Geometric Hill), Tower of Shadows and the Martyrs Memorial.

The Martyrs Memorial is dedicated to the martyrs of the country and comprises a square enclosure with one side elongated into a ramp by which one can mount the enclosing wall. The Geometric Hill is situated adjacent to the memorial. The Tower of Shadows is a demonstration of Corbusiers theories of sun control, consisting of a series of platforms oriented to the cardinal points and containing sun breakers on three sides. An officer said the Museum of Knowledge would be set up as per the original design of Le Corbusier.

Years to remember (inauguration)

High Court building 1956

Assembly building 1962

Secretariat building 1967

Team effort did the trick

Team effort and sound leadership helped script the heritage success story of the city. Officers worked in unison to make it possible. For Parimal Rai, Adviser to the Administrator, this is the second major achievement after the Smart tag for the city. He worked behind the scenes and collaborated with ministries. Home Secretary Anurag Aggarwal, Finance Secretary Sarvjit Singh and Chief Architect Kapil Setia were in touch with officials of the Corbusier Foundation in Paris and countries with whom the transnational dossier was prepared.

French Prez visited complex

The Capitol Complex drew international attention when French President Francois Hollande visited it in January this year to see Le Corbusiers works. The complex was again in the news when Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose it as the venue for the second International Day of Yoga celebrations on June 21.
Vikram Sood

AT times like this  of extreme and mindless terror of the ISIS kind as seen in Nice  there is a natural tendency to worry and look for similar trends in India. There is heavy media speculation about the ISIS threat to India, and when one sees events in Bangladesh, maybe some of this is justified. In any case, one would expect the security agencies to be closely watching the situation. This was not the act of a madman nor shall we insult the animal kingdom by calling it bestiality. Animals do not kill without good reason. Terror in Nice was an act of utter hatred where a man finds religion to be good enough cause to kill innocents, including children.

The ISIS phenomenon surfaced in all its brutal fury rather suddenly in June 2014. An organisation of this nature, with its terrorists turned out dressed like commandoes, riding SUVs and equipped with the latest weapons, did not just grow out of the Arabian sand. It was made to happen primarily by the Saudis and Qataris anxious to keep their Sunni control in the Islamic world and threatened by a rising Iran. Persons like Abu Bakr Baghdadi had been around in the region for some time and there was a well-known struggle for power in Syria between various factions and the Al-Qaeda. The ISIS was the multi-tasked terror outfit to bring about regime change in Syria and decimate the Al-Qaeda. It failed in both.

There are now reports that even the US and the UK were ferrying arms to the ISIS from Libya for use against Bashar Assad. Almost immediately after the ISIS burst on the scene, there were learned essays, articles, reports and even books about the ISIS and its threat to the world. Terror outfits take some time to mature and cannot sustain their activity at this level without some State support. Despite such wealth of knowledge and interactive maps showing locations and strengths, the ISIS remained unstoppable. Even in its origins, the ISIS seemed to have been able to telescope all its growth and various gestation periods into a few months. For both, the Al-Qaeda and the ISIS, the US is enemy number 1. Yet both say the US is too far to be targetted regularly. Europe is much easier, especially France, with its imperial past in the Middle East. No wonder the ISIS advisories urge their jihadists to operate within France. Terrorise them and do not allow them to sleep.... is representative enough. Europe and North America, with ill- adjusted immigrant Muslim populations, are more susceptible today. Many Muslims accept the explanation given by their mullah, and now on the Internet  despite being told they are from a superior religion  that they owe their misery to the kafir and his decadent way of life.

We have our own hatemongers and a recent example being the so-called televangelist Zakir Naik who is credited with the statement to the effect that killing of civilians was forbidden in the Koran, but according to some experts, it was necessary for reasons of state. Why has he not been curbed, but is instead allowed to continue with his hate-mongering? The killing of the terrorist Burhan Wani evoked considerable misplaced sympathy and he was described in the media as a rebel, or even a national leader. Wanis goal was to unfurl the flag of Islam on Delhis Red Fort and he called for Kashmiris to wage holy war. How does the Indian State compromise with this creed and how does any Indian ever think of Wani to be anything other than a terrorist?

Many have overlooked that over the past few years, there has been an intense effort at radicalisation in Kashmir. Money has been flowing in for Salafi madarsas, and there has been no accountability for this. There are only a few analysts who have the moral courage to write about this. Most usually become evasive, go into denial, or level counter-allegations. The Indian State must show consistency in its essential stand. If the Hurriyat is unacceptable as a representative of the people and known to be in cahoots with the Pakistanis, why is it allowed facilities normally available to loyal Indians? In fact, it gets much more and it repays by being hostile to the Indian State.

Most of us, in India and in the West, have been unwilling to describe the current threat in unequivocal terms. This threat is from radical, violent and narrowly interpreted Islam by some, which even moderate Muslims do not support. A solution will work only if the problem is correctly identified. Instead of giving the latter support, the moderates are usually abandoned and left at the mercy of the radicals because other interests prevail. Naturally, they seek compromises for their survival.

Terrorism of the ISIS variety, operating with large numbers, is highly unlikely in India. There is no ground support for them; we are not Arabs nor is there a Shia-Sunni divide struggle for power in India. However, if in case a lone wolf-type attack is sought to be attributed to the ISIS, it would be prudent to look for clues regarding Pakistani involvement. Pakistan is facing increasing international pressure for its involvement in jihadi activity and duplicity. The best way is to send a reliable jihadi from the LeT or JeM under an ISIS banner. Indians would not be able to blame Pakistan nor retaliate, the rest of the world, especially the US, would also not pin this on Pakistan. It is necessary therefore we get our narrative right and not get carried away by hasty, convenient narratives. Blind acceptance of an ISIS involvement will only increase Pakistani impunity.

All Indians have multiple identities based on our language, region and religion. All of us, led by the State, need to reinforce a common identity where religion is not the first criterion. The moment we put religion first, everything else gets skewed. While terror itself must be handled by the States security apparatus in the first place, solutions to problems have to be socio-political. Security, governance in its largest definition, and management of perceptions, where we are the weakest, is what we need first.

Terror of any kind, including the ISIS, is not unbeatable. As S Irfan Habib wrote in December 2015, an armed struggle against the ISIS had become inevitable and needed to be pursued relentlessly.

The writer is a former chief of RAW
Nitish Sharma

Tribune News Service

Ambala, July 17

Cabinet Minister and Ambala Cantonment MLA Anil Vij has requested Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar to constitute a joint committee comprising Army and Civil officials to study inclusion of four colonies - Dudhla Mandi, Gulab Mandi, Mali Pared and Himmatpura- in municipal limits (freehold property).

The colonies are situated on the land which is under the possession of the Army and residents of the colonies have been continuously facing the threat of being displaced from their houses. The Army carried out an anti-encroachment drive on Tuesday too.

In his letter to the CM, Vij has stated, PM Narendra Modi has assured a house to all by 2020 but families residing in these colonies for over 200 years are living under the threat of being displaced. On February 5, 1977, some civilian areas become municipality after being craved out of the cantonment but some colonies remained under the Cantonment Board. The Army has been serving notices on residents of these colonies to leave the land.

There is a need to include these colonies and some other properties under the Municipal Corporation area and 600 families have requested the same in written, he said.

Surender Tiwari, vice-president, Cantonment Board, said Since the land is under the possession of the Army, the people living there cant construct anything and even the board is not in the position of providing any facility to them. They are living in a poor condition and they dont even have the right to construct a toilet. We had requested MLA Anil Vij to raise the issue.

They are paying taxes to the board but they dont have the ownership rights of these properties. For the Army, these families have done the encroachment and are living here illegally while since the land belongs to the Army, the state government is not providing any facility to them, he said.

Tiwari said, The Defence Ministry has made it clear through a letter that if the state government provides it another land (having same cost) against this land, they would not have any objection in transferring the colonies into the civil area. A proposal is being prepared and affidavits are being collected from the families. We are hopeful that the matter will get resolved by the next financial year.
Shriniwas Joshi

When Vineet Chawdhry, Additional Chief Secretary, sent, in the Facebook, photographs of the food that tickled his taste-buds at Mani Ram Dhaba (MRD) adjacent to Jana Waterfalls near Naggar, I picked up the recently published book Kullu Cuisine compiled and edited by known writer Minakshi Chaudhry (see photo) and searched for MRD.

Another reason for doing so was that a blog says, There is a nice restaurant at the waterfall offering you local dishes. There are many names: Sanjha Chullah on way to Manikaran; Mamu ka Dhaba, Bhuntar; Siddu Market, Dhalpur; Shringi Vatika, Ghiyagi on the Banjar-Jalori Pass road; dhaba at Jalori Pass and a few names of sweet shops in Kullu Cuisine but not MRD.

The book, however, is a veritable treasure of local and international food available in Kullu district. Reading the book and enjoying tasteful photographs, we come to know that in Kullu, cooking is an artists affair. Neither too much shadow nor too much sun is there - neither excessive colours nor dominant flavours. It is joie de vivre to enjoy exotic culinary treasures in the soft climate of Kullu.

Soups of different flavours whet the appetite and then we have the Japanese cuisine based on rice with miso soup and an emphasis on seasonal ingredients at Chopsticks or Cosa Bella Vista at Manali. By the way, Bella Cosa in Italian means Beautiful House.

We get grilled fish here, raw too as sashimi or in sushi. Vietnamese food, considered as one of the most health-giving foods, is available at Lazy Dog at Old Manali. Myanmar Food at City Choice, Kullu, serves several Myanmar dishes, besides Mohinga, a traditional breakfast dish, considered to be the national dish of that country by many. For Korean Sushi and Black Curry, Kim chi Radish, Sticky Rice, Fresh Horse Radish, Aubergine Pickle and Dark Soya Sauce, a visit to Korean Kitchen or O-One at Vashisht is required. Besides these, one can have Spanish, Italian, Mexican and French food at Moon Dance Cafe, Valentino, Sunshine etc at Manali.

The book is divided into eight chapters  Himachali offerings, Kullu delights, The Chef Recommends, The Exotic, The Popular, The Oriental, The Surprise and From Farm to Kitchen. I have already detailed the flavours of The Exotic and from Kullu Delights, I pick up Minakshis green collection from the forest. First is Lingri. In north India, it is known as lingda. Its botanical name is pteridium aquilinum. It is in the form of stalks. The tips of the stalks coil around themselves like snakes. Tender stalks are used as vegetable. No special technique is required for cooking lingri. Wash it, remove the skin, cut it into small pieces and season it in oil with spices.

Soosh or Choonch is found along the running water. It was new for me till I went to Sipur and a colleague showed me the bed of Choonch there. Minakshi says that it has to be cooked like saag or made into tasty savoury chutney which is generally taken with rice. Bartheya, phaphra, jharka, sanchal and bichu booti are the other names mentioned in the forest wealth. Most of these are to be taken with caution and under the guidance of an experienced eye.

Among these, bichhu booti or uritica diocia often called stinging nettle is taken as tea. These days Mela Ram Sharma, a botanist, is taking tea made of stinging nettle leaves and speaks high of its effect on his aching legs.

It is said it is very effective in removing dandruff, correcting menstrual problems and checking prostate enlargement.

The Surprise chapter has cuisines from three countries  Turkey, Greece and Egypt. Why surprise? I do not know. But these foods are available at World Peace at Vashisht, Ever Green at Kasol, Valentino at Kullu and at Johnsons.

Published by the District Cultural Council and the Dussehra Committee, the books food specialist is Neeraj Chaudhry with three decades of experience in the hospitality sector and the photographer is Daman Sondhi whose work on Devtas and Dussehra of Kullu have received lots of acclaim.

TAILPIECE

Minakshi writes that jharka is a rare plant with elongated leaves and only experienced persons can locate it. Once found, its leaves are to be plucked keeping absolutely quiet. If someone says even jharka, its leaves go bitter.

 The writer is a retired bureaucrat
Tribune News Service

Mandi, July 17

One girl student died while 11 were taken ill after consuming food during a camp at Rewalsar, 25 km from here, on Saturday evening. The students had come here to participate in the National Cadet Corps (NCC) camp.

The deceased Kamna Devi (15), daughter of Balbeer of Sai Galu in Mandi, was admitted to the Zonal Hospital, Mandi, after she complained of stomach ache last evening. She could not survive.

The police said 11 students had been admitted to the Ratti health centre due to stomach ache, headache and fever. Some of them had been shifted to the Zonal Hospital. All of them were stable. Assistant Superintendent of Police Kulbhushan Verma said the case was under investigation.

Chief Medical Officer Des Raj Sharma said it was not clear that the death was because of food poisoning.

A team of doctors had been sent to the spot to find out the actual cause of the illness of the students and report was awaited.

Deputy Commissioner, Mandi, Sandeep Kadam, talking to The Tribune, said a magisterial probe had been ordered and action would be taken after the submission of the inquiry report.

A total of 443 students (boys and girls) from the district are taking part in the National Cadet Corps camp at Rewalsar.
Tribune News service

Srinagar, July 16

A civilian was killed in firing by security forces in North Kashmirs Kupwara district today even as the government imposed curbs on local newspapers in a bid to curtail protests.

Thirtynine civilians and a policeman have been killed in clashes since the killing of Hizbul militant Burhan Wani last week.

Showkat Ahmed Malik, 25, was killed and two persons were injured during clashes in Hutmulla Kupwara,100 km from Srinagar, as protesters attacked a police post. Ahmed was shot in retaliatory firing. There were reports of clashes and stone-pelting in other parts of the Valley, despite the curfew in all 10 districts.

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A mob carrying iron rods, stones and bricks torched a police post at Wullar Vintage Park in Bandipore district. Some police and security personnel, including an SI, were injured, police said.

The police, meanwhile, raided newspaper offices late last night and seized copies of Urdu and English dailies, including the Srinagar edition of The Tribune, even as these were being printed. Employees and drivers of vehicles carrying the newspapers were detained. They were later let off, said media houses.

Editors and owners called it an attack on the freedom of the press. Holding a protest in the afternoon, they apologised to the readers. Official sources said the curbs would remain in force for the next two days.

Meanwhile, despite curfew restrictions, residents of Maharaja Gunj gathered for the last rites of their Hindu neighbour. The family of Deepak Malhotra, whose mother passed away this morning, has not fled the Valley despite the turmoil. Maharaja Gunj has been under curfew since a week.
Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, July 17

As Pakistan has gone into an overdrive to internationalise the K-issue, separatist leaders in the Kashmir valley  which has been in the midst of a major unrest  also initiated a campaign to reach out to world leaders.

Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who heads a faction of separatist amalgam Hurriyat Conference, wrote a letter on Sunday which, his party said, has been sent to Prime Ministers of Pakistan and Turkey, King of Saudi Arabia, presidents of China and Iran.

The copies of the letter have also been sent to the United Nations Security Council, heads of UNSC permanent members, European Union, Organisation of Islamic Countries, South Asian Association of Regional Countries and the Association Southeast Asian Nations.

The letter, which requested the international community to intervene and urge India to take confidence-building measures, comes at a time when Pakistan has upped the ante on Kashmir amid an unrest in the region that was triggered by the killing of militant commander Burhan Wani.

At least 38 civilians have been killed as the Jammu and Kashmir Police and the Central Reserve Police Force made attempts to quell the protests that have continued across the Kashmir valley since Saturday last week.

India has strongly reacted to Pakistans attempts to internationalise the Kashmir issue even as Islamabad has shown no intent of backing down despite the United States appeal for reducing rhetoric and violence.

Geelani, who has been demanding Kashmirs accession to Pakistan, in his letter asked the world bodies and leaders to urge India to take six confidence-building measures which include acceptance of disputed nature of Jammu and Kashmir, rapid demilitarisation of population centres, repeal AFSPA and the Public Safety Act, release political prisoners, allow various international human rights groups to work in Kashmir and ensure free political space.
Ehsan Fazili

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, July 17

Amid strict restrictions across the Valley, one person was killed and two injured when the Army allegedly opened fire at protesters in Bandipore district of north Kashmir on Sunday.

Sources said a group of youths indulged in stone pelting at a camp of the Army at Sadarkote Bala, 35 km from here on the Srinagar-Bandipore road. One of the three injured in the incident died in a hospital at Hajin. Identity of the deceased was being ascertained.

An Army spokesman said details about the circumstances under which the incident took place were being looked into.

Meanwhile, strict curfew restrictions continued in all the 10 districts of the Kashmir Valley for the third consecutive day today to prevent any violent clashes between the protesters and security personnel.

Strict restrictions across the Valley have been continuing since Friday last (July 15) following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani and two of his associates in Kokernag area of South Kashmir.

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The restrictions, according to officials here, would continue till Tuesday, while the separatist organisations have jointly called to observe complete shutdown and protests against the series of civilian killings and injuries to hundreds of others during the past over one week.

The mobile and Internet services have been suspended to check rumours and prevent any trouble, a senior officer said. Only post-paid BSNL mobiles have been working in the capital city, while broadband services on landlines are functioning normally over the past one week, he added.

No newspapers for second day

All vernacular and English dailies suspended publication for the second day today after newspapers were seized in midnight raids on printing presses here on Friday. Editors decided not to publish the newspapers till the restrictions were lifted on the printing of these newspapers.

Meanwhile, the Amarnath yatra, which was suspended for the last three days from Jammu due to law and order situation in the Valley, has been resumed with at least 7,684 pilgrims started trekking to the holy cave shrine of Amarnath from the base camps of Pahalgam and Baltal today.
New Delhi, July 17

Expressing his concern over the deteriorating law and order situation in the Valley post the gunning down of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh urged the people to cooperate with the government in this hour of crisis while stating that some unwanted elements had been misguiding the Kashmiris.

General (Retd) VK Singh in a statement asked the people of the Valley to step out of the crowd and become a part of the epic-story of India.

Kashmir will always remain ours and there has been no change in thoughts since 1947 and neither will it ever come. In 2004, our Prime Minister said that the boundaries of India wont be altered anyhow, but the facility for inter-country transportation will be sanctioned. The early you accept the fact, the better the conditions will turn out to be, VK Singh said.

Cooperate with us so that we can help you. Whole world knows the power of India and knows that India has a very special recognition in future also. Do you want to be a part of this epic-story of India? Its my request, step out of the crowd and direct your future, he added.

Stating that everyone was well aware about the present situation in the Kashmir Valley, VK Singh expressed his dismay over some people calling Wani a martyr and mourning his death.

They have even put the Centre and state government on trial proving them guilty of forcefully suppressing the voice of the people of Kashmir. They are even pointing out that the military and police are the mouthpiece of the government, he said.

The people, who provoke them to participate in protests and riots, are answerable to the people of Kashmir, he added while reaching out to the youth.  ANI
Nenad Kresoja, who worked at a school in Croatia, is believed to have slit his wrist with a shard of a window at the hotel he was staying.

The Deceased has been identified as Nenad Kresoja and is believed to have slit his wrist. (Image for representation)

By India Today Web Desk: Delhi police recovered body of a 33-year-old Croatian national who allegedly committed suicide at a hotel in south Delhi's Mahipalpur area.

Nenad Kresoja, who worked at a school in Croatia, is believed to have slit his wrist with a shard of a window at the hotel he was staying, close to the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

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CASE OF SUICIDE?

Prima facie, cops are claiming that it is a case of suicide. An inquest has been initiated into the matter, claimed additional DCP (South) Nupur Prasad.

However, no suicide note was recovered in the room or in his possession, a senior police official said.

The incident came to light around 2.30am on Saturday when the hotel staff called up police after Kresoja was not spotted for a long time and did not respond to their phone calls.

The hotel staff had also knocked at his door many times. Forensic teams have inspected the scene, which was also visited by the Croatian ambassador here, an official said.

Kresoja was visiting the national capital on a tourist visa and had been to China and Nepal before arriving here. The body has been kept at a mortuary for postmortem. The exact cause and time of the death can only be ascertained after the postmortem report is available, the official said.

Also read:

Frustrated with demands, boy murders girlfriend in Delhi

Kidnapped Delhi boy Sonu returns from Bangladesh after six years





--- ENDS ---
Mohit Khanna

Tribune News Service

Ludhiana, July 17

The terrorist attack, in which a terrorist drove a truck through crowds celebrating French National Day in Nice, killing 84 innocent people and subsequent failed coup attempt by a unit of Turkish Army gave city industrialists the jitters. To top it all, crises in South Sudan has also added woes of exporters.

Ajit Lakra, president, Ludhiana Knitters Association, and head, Textile Division of Federation of Industrial and Commercial Organisation, said Certainly, the disturbing incidents occurring in European countries, especially in France and Turkey, will have its repercussion on the export industry of the city. Following the terror incidents, France has extended the state of emergency. In such scenario, the textile and hosiery material exported to France will go through a thorough check. There is a fear that delivery of the products will be delayed due to hectic clearances. The buyers have nothing to do with the problems being faced by exporter during the shipment. They want their products to reach on time. In case of delay, the exporters will face many issues. First, the credibility of the exporter will be questioned, and the buyer will push the exporter for bargain. India exports a lot of textile and hosiery to France and Turkey so doing business would be a challenge during the time of unrest.

Charanjit Singh Vishvakarma, president, United Cycle Parts and Manufacturers Association, said Though we are not big exporters of bicycles to France and Turkey, the repeated attacks are a cause of concern. First the conflict in Middle East caused losses, and now the unrest is spreading across Europe. It is not a positive trend.

Badish K Jindal, president, Federation of Punjab Small Industries Associations, said Middle East has already a conflict zone and terror attack in France and unrest in Turkey and Sudan add to woes of exporters. Not only will the export take a hit, the situation will also affect the international transaction. India exports a lot of products to South Sudan, further hosiery products are being exported to France and Turkey. Europe had always remained a preferred choice for the exporters, precisely because it has always remained peaceful. The increasing number of terror incidents is certainly a causing lot of apprehensions among exporters.
New Delhi, July 17

The Centre has called an all-party meeting on Sunday to seek the support of Opposition parties in the passage of pending legislations during the monsoon session of Parliament beginning Monday.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has also convened an all-party meeting today to ensure smooth functioning of Parliament.

The session will have 20 working days and will conclude on August 12.

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A total of 25 Bills, including crucial Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, are expected to come up for passing and consideration during the session.

The government has reached out to the main Opposition party for the passage of the GST Bill, while the Congress is also fine tuning its strategy on the legislation.

Ahead of the session, top Congress leaders met party chief Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi on Saturday and chalked out strategy on crucial issues, including the GST Bill.

Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad and other senior party leaders, including Anand Sharma and Jyotiraditya Scindia, attended the meeting.

This came a day after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar had a meeting with Azad and Anand Sharma.

The two ministers discussed all points to bring the Congress on board on the GST Bill.

The Opposition party is also expected to corner the government in Parliament on the recent Arunachal Pradesh issue in wake of the Supreme Court judgment reinstating the Congress regime in the state. ANI
Ahmedabad, July 17

Hardik Patel has hinted he may join politics if his community wants, following which all opposition parties in Gujarat are trying to woo the Patel quota agitation spearhead to join them, apparently with an eye on the state Assembly polls next year.

The 22-year-old firebrand leader, who is demanding inclusion of the Patel community under the OBC quota, had walked out of jail on Friday after being granted bail by the Gujarat High Court.

To a question that day on his chances of joining active politics, he had not ruled out the possibility.

People of my community will decide if I have to join politics or not. I will take the decision when my community tells me. Otherwise, I dont feel that we have to be in politics to do something for our nation and people, he said.

Following this, the Congress, the NCP and the AAP made a beeline for Hardiks inclusion in their partiessome openly inviting him while others did so by sending feelers.

The move by the parties is seen as an attempt towards electoral benefit, keeping in mind state polls due next year.

The Patidar community, to which Hardik belongs, is numerically strong in the state with 18 per cent population.

It has so far been a staunch supporter of the ruling BJP.

Despite hinting that he may take a the political plunge if his community says so, Hardik has kept his cards close to his chest on whether he will join politics in the near future, saying he is not a political leader but a social leader.

I will not join any political party. All these are speculations. You will come to know what I will do when the time comes, Hardik had earlier told reporters.

Though NCP is a small player in Gujarat, its president Jayant Patel was among the first to greet Hardik when he came out of the Lajpor jail in Surat.

The doors of our parties are open for Hardik Patel any day, said MLA Patel, who is popularly known as Bosky.

Surat Congress leaders had put up posters and were present to welcome Hardik when he came out of the jail.

We have conveyed to Hardik Patel and his team that any person who is agreeable to the ideology of the Congress party is welcome. We are also ready to discuss all their issues by meeting them, Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi said.

Also, AAP national convener Arvind Kejriwal, during his recent visit to Gujarat, had endorsed Hardik.

During a closed door meeting with MLA Nalin Kotadia, who has been booted out of the BJP for supporting the Patel quota stir, Kejriwal is learnt to have asked him to bring Patel quota agitation leaders to the Aam Aadmi Party.  PTI
Muzaffarnagar, July 17

A minor girl who was bludgeoned with a stone after being raped in Kidwai Nagar area of the city, died during treatment at a hospital here, the police said on Sunday.

The 8-year-old victim was playing outside her house when she was kidnapped and raped on July 15.

The accused, Tanzim, then allegedly bludgeoned her with a stone, leaving her with serious head injuries.

The accused, who was caught by locals, has been sent to jail by the police and a case was registered against him.

Meanwhile, with tension prevailing over the incident, the police was deployed in the area and also posted in the residence of the accused as a precautionary measure.  PTI
Ajay Banerjee

Eastern Ladakh, if left unattended, could prove to be Indias jugular vein in a future war. The Line of Actual Control with China is not marked, its perceptions are contested by both sides. In 1962, the area saw pitched battles, those at Rezang La, Srijap were well-contested. While India is ramping up, Beijing already has its infrastructure with roads and upcoming rly link. War may be a far cry, but both the armies are on their toes. The Tribune presents a five-part ground report series

It was in 2012 that India quietly changed its tactics and started accumulating a large number of forces in eastern Ladakh facing China. Four years later, the accretions and infrastructure-push is literally in full swing in the area with a 826-km frontier with China.

The Tribune visited key locations across the length and breadth of this strategic frontier, geographically defined by the military as the area from the Karakoram Pass in the north to Demchok in the south-east. Its here that a possibility exists for China and Pakistan to launch a collusive two-front war against India.

The Karakoram ranges in India, if occupied by China, can threaten New Delhis hold over Siachen as well as cut off the Depsang plains and Daulat Baig Oldie (DBO).

In the past four-five years, ground troops have been added to pre-positioned locations along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), or the de facto border, that is not marked on the ground. In the past 36 months, additions to mechanised forces and artillery guns have been made, backed by the T-72 Russian- origin tanks.

Another tank unit is slated to move to eastern Ladakh. This adds a new dimension to any future war in the area that is marked by an average height of 14,000 feet, where oxygen is scarce.

The force accretion is seven to eight times more than it was in 1962. History of the Conflict with China, 1962 produced 30 years after the war by the Historical Division of the Ministry of Defence, says eastern Ladakh had just four battalions, including the JK militia (later renamed as Ladakh Scouts).

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Lt Gen SK Patyal, Commander of the Leh-based 14 Corps, says: We have to defend our international borders, whatever it takes in terms of infrastructure and accretion, we are doing in the best possible manner.

Sources point out that more than 50 per cent of the troop strength in Eastern Ladakh came in the past four-five years. Battalions are tasked to be on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) for a two year tenure. The area of responsibility is documented for the next to take over. For example, an advance party of a battalion which is to take over in August-end arrived at a post near the LAC in May.

A back-up reserve has been created called the loop battalions. These are kept acclimatised for any need for induction at these rarefied-oxygen heights of 14,000 feet.

However, the biggest move is the tanks. The plateaus interspersed in the folds of the major mountain ranges  the Greater Himalayas, Karokaram, Ladakh and Zanskar  are ideal tank country, flat with ample places to hide in the folds of the valleys.

Colonel Vijay Dalal, who is commanding an armoured unit, says: We have to use additives and use winter grade diesel. In the winter, every night the tanks parked in garages are revved up a couple of times to prevent the parts from freezing.

During the 1962 India-China war, five of the US-built AMX-13 tanks were airlifted. In his book My Years with the IAF, former IAF chief PC Lal explains the great difficulty faced in modifying the AN-12 transport planes to airlift the tanks.

Not just the accretions, the fortified defences, new bunker-style positions, dot the mountain spurs along the LAC. New fortified roads that allow 50-tonne tanks to drive are showing up, maybe India is designing a battlefield to suit its strengths. At least numerically, the Indian move promises to hold back any aggression by China.

(To be concluded)
Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 16

Ahead of the monsoon session of Parliament, the Congress today scored a huge political victory over the BJP in Arunachal Pradesh by replacing its unpopular Chief Minister Nabam Tuki and staking the claim to government formation under Pema Khandu.

Pema, 36, the son of former Arunachal CM Dorjee Khandu, was elected leader of the Congress Legislature Party with all 45 MLAs attending the meeting supporting him in writing.

Kalikho Pul, the rebel Congressman who formed a government with BJPs support after Tukis government was dismissed following President's Rule, attended the meeting in which Tuki resigned.

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Khandu has submitted a memorandum bearing the signatures of all 45 Congress MLAs to Governor Tathagata Roy. He even offered to physically parade the MLAs, but the Governor said signatures would suffice. He has asked the Governor to invite the Congress, Randeep Surjewala, chief spokesperson for the party, said.

Consequently, the floor test scheduled for Tuki was cancelled today and no Assembly session took place. A fresh date will now be given by the Governor.

The Congress termed todays developments as a lesson for BJP president Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who have been weaving a dream of Congress-free northeast.

The Congress saved its government by quickly replacing Tuki, who was facing a bitter rebellion from 21 Congress MLAs in a House of 60. During parleys with rebels, Khandu emerged a consensus candidate and the Congress quickly got Tuki to step back. Asked why it didnt replace Tuki earlier as his replacement was all that the Congress rebels had been seeking, Surjewala said, Everyone is wiser in hindsight.

At present, out of 60 seats in the Arunachal Assembly, two are vacant and the House strength is 58. The Congress has 45 MLAs, plus two Independents backing Khandu. The BJP has 11.

Importantly, the Arunachal developments come while hectic negotiations are on between the BJP Government and the Congress on the pending Goods and Services Tax Bill.

Considering MoS, Home, Kiren Rijijus remark that the Arunachal developments were an internal affair of the Congress, there was talk in Congress circles over whether there was any deal vis-a-vis GST. Congress leaders denied this vehemently.
GSPaul

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, July 17

The Northern Railways will set up the states first solar power plant at a railway station in the holy city. Its foundation stone was laid by Union Railway Minister Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu here today.

He said the plant aimed at curtailing the Railways expenses and ploughing the savings back to provide better facilities to the passengers.

This 1 MW plant, worth Rs 8 crore will generate at least 14 lakh units of power in a year. It will be made operational by June next year. It will cater to the railway station, including the passenger hall, goods sheds, RPF barracks, residential colony, officers rest houses and office complex.

Prabhu said the plant would help the Railways save at least Rs 1 crore annually. He said the aim was to transform the railway stations of Amritsar and Ludhiana under the Centres project.

He said the ministry was planning to start a high-speed train connecting Amritsar with New Delhi.

Talking about the Amritsar-Ferozepur-Patti rail link, he said the work got delayed due to lapse on the part of the state government to contribute its share. We will soon start the civil work with the Centres funds, he said. Earlier, Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal said though Punjab had five prominent rail links, the Amritsar-Patti link via Ferozepur should be executed soon. Both Prabhu and Badal also paid obeisance at Golden Temple.

Majithia launches Solar Pind drive

Chandigarh: New and Renewable Energy Minister Bikram Singh Majithia, while launching the Solar Pind campaign here today, said the state would now install LED-based solar streetlights in rural areas.

Majithia said villages in the districts along the international border and those in the Kandi area would be covered on priority. In addition, 100 villages which have historical or religious importance will also be covered, he added.
Aman Sood in Patiala & Sushil Manav in Chandigarh

Its that time of the year again: Rani Kaurs family in village Lacchru is shifting to the first floor of their home. The kitchen moves to the first floor as the swollen Ghaggars spillover gushes in, the kitchen is flooded and the ration is ruined. This is the minimum we can do, says Rani.

Hundreds of villages dread the day the Ghaggar in spate crosses the Bhakhra Main Line (BML) canal through siphons at Khanauri in Punjab and the Bhakhra Main Branch (BMB) near Jakhal in Haryana. The river was considered a boon for the farmers of the area but has slowly become a death trap. Successive governments have failed to act. AK Gupta, engineer-in-chief in the Haryana Irrigation Department, says the Central Water Commission (CWC) has suggested a project that involves 25 barrages at various points in the two states where floodwater could be stored. However, it involves funds as land needs to be acquired, Gupta says. Lack of coordination between Punjab and Haryana, who are often seen pointing an accusing finger at each other on water issues, is harming the interests of the people in both the states.

The situation has come to such a pass that villagers on the Punjab side keep the basement of their house vacant to minimize the flood damage. Some have raised their houses almost 10 feet above the ground. Shops too are especially designed to keep off the floodwater. And the villages near the banks complain of a pungent smell and saline water is unfit for irrigation.

Despite precautions, flood causes enough damage, says Samana resident Harminder Singh. Years ago our cattle were washed away. The authorities took a week to send help, says Harminder.

On its side, Haryana has tried to build a concrete wall to save its villages from a river that has brought people living along its 350-km length in the two states to their knees. The Ghaggar basin gets frequently flooded because of a slope and the lack of horizontal drainage, says Kurukshetra Universitys Dr Jaglan.

No grooms, please!

The mismanagement has caused a social disruption too. Villagers in the Ghaggar catchment areas say they find problem in getting a match for their boys. My brother got married when he was 38 years old. Offers of his marriage were declined for years because we live in a flood-affected area. We have 17-acre fertile land, but the girls side was simply not interested as they argued about the safety and security of their girls. Finally we married him off in Chhattisgarh, says Baljeet Singh, from village Harchandpura, Patiala.

Patiala Deputy Commissioner C Ramvir Singh said: Villages where grooms do not get brides are usually the ones that are almost next to the Ghaggar.

An irrigation department expert said with time the sheet spread of the river has badly shrunk due to illegal encroachments and digging. The land prices are very low. Even during the property boom in Punjab when average agriculture land in far-off villages fetched Rs 60-70 lakh per acre, these villages had their land available for a mere Rs10 lakhs.

Pollution trouble

The Ghaggar emerges from Sirmour hills in Himachal and receives sewage and industrial waste from various towns in Haryana before entering Punjab where it further gets more waste inflow. The river runs its 165km course as it enters the state at village Mubarikpur and leaves it at village Bhunder. The water quality at the river entry point monitored by Punjab Pollution Control Board during January, 2014 is Class D (almost worst). This is because of domestic and industrial discharge in Himachal and Haryana.

In Hashimpur Mangta village near Patiala, the Ghaggar flows just 80 metres away from the nearest houses and villagers allege that that throughout the year contaminated water continues to pollute the Ghaggar. You can see how contaminants have spoiled the river, says a villager.

The PPCB officials say they have made arrangements to keep the river water pollution-free, a claim dismissed by villagers. These officials should come here in the winters to see for themselves how difficult it is to breathe near the river, says Bhupinder Chatha, a villager in Dharmherhi.
London, July 17

Britain's boarding school teachers have been ordered to address transgender children as 'zie' rather than 'he' or 'she' to avoid offending them.

The official guidance issued by the UK Boarding Schools Association calls on teachers to address transgender pupils as "zie" to avoid offence, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

Staff have been told they need to learn a "new language" for a growing number of pupils who demand not to be addressed as 'he' or 'she'.

Zie is considered a gender-neutral pronoun which has been gaining ground in its usage across Europe and British teachers are being advised to address children by their "pronoun of choice", including they or 'zie'.

Elly Barnes, founder of charity Educate and Celebrate and author of the new guidelines, said as more trans pupils "come out" in boarding schools, it becomes an imperative to "break the binary".

"Schools need to make sure that all students are treated equally and fairly according to the Equality Act," she told the newspaper.

"We need to educate adults to speak a common language because we grew up in a generation with no prior experience about the (lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities)," she said.

New guidance also reminds schools in England, Wales and Scotland of their obligations under the Equality Act 2010 under which gender identity and "reassignment" is one of so-called protected characteristics.

The Act reads: A child has protected characteristics of gender reassignment as soon as they make their intention known to someone whether that is at school, at home or elsewhere.

According to latest figures, roughly 10 per cent of the population in the UK identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual.

"Therefore it's important to 'make reasonable adjustments' It's a new language that's absolutely needed in schools.

We have, of course, restrictions within the English language but the more we use these pronouns the more they become part of the language.

If you're new to the 'trans' community, this is very new language," Barnes added.

Many schools in the UK have already introduced gender-neutral uniforms, including Brighton College in the private sector and roughly 80 state schools.

Single-sex private schools have also been told to remove the use of terms like "girls", "young women" or "young ladies" and replace it with more neutral terms like "pupils" or "students".

Now leading boarding schools, including the famous Eton boarding school, are also being told they should display an "equality pledge" for all visitors to read and sign at reception.  PTI
By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 17 (PTI) Director General Corporate Affairs B K Bansal, an additional secretary-rank officer in Ministry of Corporate Affairs, who was arrested by CBI in a bribery case was today remanded in two days of the agencys custody by a special court here.

CBI during its searches at eight locations in connection with the case claimed to have recovered over Rs 56 lakh from Bansal, while Rs 16 lakh were recovered from Delhi-based middle man Vishwadeep Bansal, the agency sources said.

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The duo along with two others were arrested yesterday evening in connection with the bribery case involving Rs 20 lakh.

The sources said Bansal, working in the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, was nabbed while receiving Rs nine lakh of the bribe amount which was second instalment of the agreed upon amount.

Bansal, Senior Administrative Grade officer of Indian Corporate Law Service (ICLS), was promoted to the post of Director General of Corporate Affairs (DGCA) last year.

A CBI spokesperson said a case was registered under provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 on the allegations that Bansal had been dealing with matters related to certain violations committed by Mumbai-based Pharmaceutical company Elder Pharmaceuticals.

The sources said the Chief Operating Officer of Elder Pharmaceuticals had allegedly sought assistance of the middleman, who was also working as their distributor in Delhi.

They said Bansal had allegedly demanded a bribe of Rs 50 lakh for not recommending investigation by the SFIO on the inspection report and finally the middleman negotiated it to Rs 20 lakh.

They said the accused officer had earlier allegedly accepted Rs 11 Lakh and was demanding the balance amount.

They said CBI laid a trap and the accused officer was caught while accepting the bribe of Rs nine lakh outside a hotel here. PTI ABS KIS SC KIS

--- ENDS ---
Paris, July 17

The man behind the truck attack that killed at least 84 people celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice had recently been radicalised, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in remarks published on Sunday.

Thursday nights attack in the Riviera city of Nice plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.

Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31 year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any links to Islamic State, which claimed the attack, but Valls said there was no doubt on the assailants motives.

The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly, Valls said in an interview with Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

The claim on Saturday morning by Islamic State and the fast radicalisation of the killer confirms the Islamist nature of this attack.

Officials said on Saturday that people questioned by police had indicated that he had undergone a rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion.

The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said that Bouhlel was one of the soldiers of Islamic State.

Valls, who said security services had prevented 16 attacks over three years, indicated that at play on Thursday was the groups modus operandi of cajoling unstable individuals into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible.

Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts ... this is probably what happened in Nices case, Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The group, which is under military pressure from forces opposed to it, considers France its main target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States, which is leading a coalition against it.  Reuters
Nice (France), July 16

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the truck attack in the French city of Nice on Saturday and the police arrested three more people after the carnage that claimed at least 84 lives as the country began a period of national mourning for the dead.

The person who carried out the operation in Nice, France, to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State, the news agency Amaq, which supports the militant Islamist group, said via its Telegram account. He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting Islamic State, the statement said.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

French authorities and media have yet to produce any evidence that the killer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was radicalised. The interior ministry said it was checking the claim.

The 31-year-old Tunisian, who lived locally, drove at a Bastille Day crowd on the waterfront of the French Riviera city on Thursday night. Authorities had been working to find out what his motives were. He was not known to French intelligence sources for radicalisation.

The arrests, which came on top of two others since the killing including the attackers wife, concerned his close entourage, police sources said. They were made in two different areas of Nice. A Reuters reporter saw about 40 elite police raid a small apartment near the central station.

The attack plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. The truck zig-zagged along the seafront Promenade des Anglais for 2 km as a fireworks display marking the French national day ended. It was eventually stopped when the police shot dead the driver. The attack is the third of its kind in France since the beginning of 2015. A state of emergency in place since 130 people were killed in and around Paris last November is to be extended for another three months. Bouhlel was known to police for petty crimes but was not on a watch list of suspected militants. He had one criminal conviction for road rage, having been sentenced to probation three months ago for throwing a wooden pallet at another driver.  Reuters

Violent depressive who never went to mosque
Dhaka, July 17

An acting deputy vice-chancellor of a private university and two of his relatives have been arrested in Bangladesh for sheltering Islamists who carried out the countrys worst terror attack at a cafe here in which 22 persons were killed by suspected Islamic State militants.

Professor Uddin Ahsan of the North South University (NSU) was arrested yesterday for renting out a flat to the Holey Artisan Bakery attackers.

Our Counterterrorism and Transnational Crimes (CTTC) unit arrested him (Professor)... he had rented out his apartment to the perpetrators of the attack, a police spokesman told newsmen.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

He said despite police directives, Ahsan did not furbished the tenants details to the nearby police station when he rented out the apartment in May this year.

Ahsan is the acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of the North South Universitys School of Health and Life Sciences, while the police said the two others were his nephew and the manager of the apartment complex he owned.

Another police officer said the anti-terrorism unit found sand-filled cartons at the flat. The police suspect the cartons were used to keep the grenades used in the July 1 attack that left at least 20 hostages, including an Indian, and two policemen dead. Security forces killed six persons in the raid at the cafe to free hostages.

One of the militants killed by the police was a student of the NSU. His family said he had been missing for months.

The police earlier said one of the two detained hostages of the restaurant, who were quizzed by security forces for their suspected terrorist links, was also a former faculty of the university who was earlier sacked for involvement with banned radical group Hizbut Tahrir.

The police said they gathered information that at least two NSU students went missing and they suspect that they were recruited by the militant outfits like the Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

The NSU is under the security scanner, Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid earlier this week said while the regulatory University Grants Commission (UGC) repeatedly visited the campus.

Officials said the university came under scrutiny after Islamists slaughtered blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in 2013.

The police subsequently arrested six NSU students for their suspected links to the murder.

Ahsans arrest came hours after a UGC team visited the NSU campus as part of a separate investigation into the links of its officials and students with terrorism.

Meanwhile, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan along with chiefs of police, elite anti-crime Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) today held a meeting with authorities of private universities against the backdrop of several of their students being linked to militant outfits.

Our minister (Khan) is presiding over the meeting joined by vice chancellors of all private universities....they are exchanging views, a Home Ministry officer said.  PTI
Washington, July 17

A gunman killed at least three police officers and injured several others in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday, the city's Mayor said as the country remained on edge in the wake of police shootings of black men and the killings of five Dallas officers.

The officers in Baton Rouge were responding to a call of shots fired when they were ambushed by at least one gunman, Mayor Kip Holden told NBC News. A gunman was shot but his condition was not clear, a Louisiana State Police official told NBC.

"One suspect is dead, law enforcement believes two others may be at large," the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)

A spokesman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office said police and sheriff's deputies were involved in the shooting incident. "Multiple officers from both agencies sustained injuries and were transported to local hospitals," he said in an email.

He said there were no firm numbers on the number hurt or the extent of injuries.

While the scene of the shootings was contained, police warned residents to stay away from the area, near Airline Highway, which is a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of protesters were arrested earlier this month.

Two nearby hospitals were on lockdown, CBS reported. Efforts to confirm the report were not immediately successful.

The reports come a week after a wave of protests against police violence in Baton Rouge and other cities after a 37-year-old African-American father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers.

At one of the demonstrations in Dallas, a gunman opened fire on white officers assigned to the protest, killing five of them.  Agencies
Ankara, July 16

The Turkish authorities today regained control of the country after thwarting a coup attempt by discontented soldiers to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

After the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year autocratic rule, Erdogan urged his backers to stay on the streets to prevent a possible flare-up. With at least 2,839 soldiers already detained in a relentless round-up over the coup plot, the authorities blamed the conspiracy on Erdogans arch enemy, US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

TV pictures showed dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands on their head, others forced to the ground in the streets. The situation is completely under control, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, flanked by Turkeys top general who was taken hostage.

Yildirim said 161 persons had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded. The toll did not appear to include 104 rebel soldiers killed overnight, bringing the overall death toll to 265.

During a night where power was in the balance, large crowds of supporters of Erdogans ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) marched out onto the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime. We should keep on owning the streets tonight, no matter at what stage (the coup attempt is) because a new flare-up could take place at any moment, Erdogan said.

TV pictures showed extensive damage to the parliament building in Ankara that was bombed by rebel jets. Yesterdays putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital and the countrys biggest city, Istanbul.

As protesters poured onto the streets, troops opened fire, leaving dozens wounded. There was chaos in Istanbul as angry crowds jeered the passing tanks.

Erdogan, who flew back from the holiday resort of Marmaris, denounced the coup attempt as treachery and said the plotters would pay a heavy price.

Turkeys once-powerful military has long considered itself the guardian of the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923. It has staged three coups since 1960 and forced out an Islamic government in 1997.

Erdogan pinned the blame on the parallel state and Pennsylvania  a reference to Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him. But the President's former ally categorically called the accusation insulting.  AFP
Istanbul/Ankara, July 17

Turkey widened a crackdown on suspected supporters of a failed military coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000, and the government said it was in full control of the country and economy.

Overnight, supporters of President Tayyip Erdogan rallied in public squares, at Istanbul airport and outside his palace in a show of defiance after the coup attempt killed at least 265 people.

With expectations growing of heavy measures against dissent, European politicians warned Erdogan that the coup attempt did not give him a bank cheque to disregard the rule of law, and that he risked isolating himself internationally as he strengthens his position at home.

Broadcaster NTV cited Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag as saying that more arrests were expected on top of the 6,000 people already detained.

Authorities have rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters, ranging from top commanders to foot soldiers, and the same number of judges and prosecutors after forces loyal to Erdogan crushed the attempted coup on Saturday.

Among those arrested is General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base from which US aircraft launch airstrikes on Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, an official said.

Control across Turkey has been restored and there are no clashes at the moment, a senior official said, adding that although a few groups of coup plotters were holding out in Istanbul, they no longer posed a risk.

There are still a few important soldiers on the run and being sought. I believe they will be captured shortly, the official told Reuters.

The crackdown appears to intensify a longstanding push by Erdogan to root out the influence of followers of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen. Erdogan accuses followers of Gulen, who was once an ally but is now his arch-enemy, of trying to create a parallel structure within the courts, police, armed forces and media with an aim to topple the state.

The cleric denies the charge and says he played no role in the attempted coup, denouncing it as an affront to democracy.

At a rally late on Saturday, his supporters demanded that the coup leaders be executed. Lets hang them! chanted the crowd in Ankaras central Kizilay square. Erdogan told them that parliament may consider a proposal to bring back the death penalty, which has been abolished.

Erdogans critics say he will use the purge to create a pliant judiciary, eliminating any dissenting voices in the courts. Some European politicians have expressed their unease about developments since the coup attempt.

We want the rule of law to work fully in Turkey, said French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. (The coup attempt) is not a blank cheque for Mr Erdogan. There cannot be purges, the rule of law must work, told France 3 television.

Ayrault said European Union ministers would reiterate on Monday when they meet in Brussels that Turkey  which has applied to join the bloc - must conform to Europes democratic principles.

European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Erdogan would move Turkey away from the core values represented by the EU and the NATO defence alliance  of which it is a long-standing member  if he decided to use the attempted coup to restrict basic democratic rights further.

He would strengthen his position domestically, but he would isolate himself internationally, Oettinger, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Some European politicians are also expressing concern about the future of a deal between the EU and Ankara that has helped to slow numbers of migrants crossing from the country to neighbouring Greece.

The coup violence shocked the nation of almost 80 million, once seen as a model Muslim democracy, where living standards have grown steadily for more than a decade and where the army last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago.  Reuters
The first look of Ram Charan's upcoming Telugu actioner Dhruva is likely to be unveiled on August 15.

By India Today Web Desk: Actor Ram Charan is currently busy shooting for his upcoming Telugu film titled Dhruva, which is the Tamil remake of Jayam Ravi's Thani Oruvan.

According to sources, the first look of Dhruva is likely to be unveiled on August 15, on the eve of Independence Day.



ALSO READ: Chiru 150-I'm unsure if I'll act in my dad's film, says Ram Charan



ALSO READ: Dhruva: Ram Charan turns vegan for his look in the upcoming film

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Reports also suggest that the Telugu actioner will only have three songs in the film, which is something unusual when it comes to mainstream Telugu films.

The audio launch of Dhruva is expected to release on September 2, on the eve of his uncle Pawan Kalyan's birthday.

Directed by National Award-winning director Surender Reddy, the film also stars Rakul Preet Singh playing the leading lady in the film. The makers have retained Arvind Swamy in Dhruva after his stellar performance as an antagonist in the original.

Produced by NV Prasad, the film has music by Hiphop Tamizha, who composed soundtracks for the original as well.

Ram Charan also has a yet-untitled project with Sukumar, which is likely to release after Diwali this year.

Meanwhile, Ram Charan is also producing father Chiranjeevi's 150th yet-untitled Telugu film, which is the Tamil remake of the blockbuster film Kaththi.

--- ENDS ---
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  The Latest on the fatal shooting of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (all times local):

7:25 a.m.

The coroner for Baton Rouge says his office will perform autopsies Monday on the three officers slain in an attack this weekend.

East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner Beau Clark says they autopsies will begin around 8 a.m., and he expects to release his preliminary findings, including the cause of their deaths, sometime this afternoon. Clark says an autopsy on the deceased suspect is planned for Tuesday.

In the Sunday attack, a former Marine dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition shot and killed three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police there in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide.

___

7:20 a.m.

Businesses around a shooting that killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are reopening as police continue investigating the scene.

Customers were buying coffee and breakfast sandwiches Monday at a B-Quik convenience store near where officers first engaged the gunman less than 24 hours earlier. Next door, workers prepared for the day at a car wash where the gunman was cornered.

Businesses on two sides of the scene of a gunbattle were riddled with at least eight apparent gunshots. Investigators examined a hole in a window at a fitness supply business as news crews worked nearby, and wood covered another window that was shot out.

Authorities say two city police officers and a sheriff's deputy died in the shooting Sunday morning, and the gunman was killed by law enforcement. Three other officers were wounded. The identities of the slain officers and two of those wounded are known. But the name of the third wounded officer hasn't been released. Baton Rouge police Sgt. Don Coppola said in a text message Monday that officials plan to release that name, "just not sure exactly when."

___

7 a.m.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch says she condemns the attack in Baton Rouge "in the strongest terms possible" and says federal law enforcement agencies are helping on the ground.

Lynch said Monday in Washington that "families are again mourning loved ones robbed from them by senseless violence. ... And all of us are again heartbroken at the news of yet another tragedy."

She invoked a Facebook post by slain officer Montrell Jackson. Days ago, he wrote that he received "nasty, hateful looks" while in uniform but also said, "Please don't let hate infect your heart."

In the Sunday attack, a former Marine dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition shot and killed three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police there in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide.

___

6:30 a.m.

State police say the gunman in the Baton Rouge shooting ambushed the six law enforcement officers and "certainly was seeking out police."

Col. Mike Edmonson made the comments Monday morning. The shooting on Sunday killed three officers and left three others wounded, one critically. Police say the gunman was a former Marine who was killed at the scene.

Edmonson says: "His movements, his direction, his attention was on police officers."

Edmonson also says investigators have interviewed people who had contact with the gunman in Baton Rouge, but he wouldn't say how many or give other details. He stressed that officials are still asking any others who might have had contact with shooter Gavin Long to come forward.

The shooting less than a mile from police headquarters added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police.

___

6:05 a.m.

Louisiana State Police have positively identified the shooter who killed three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge as Gavin Long.

In a Monday morning Facebook post, Louisiana State Police said they needed to withhold official confirmation of his name until they had positively ID'ed him through fingerprints.

Long, who's from Kansas City, Missouri, turned 29 on Sunday, the same day he opened fire, killing three and wounding three other officers. Police said Long was killed at the scene.

The shooting less than a mile from police headquarters added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police.

___

2:10 a.m.

A former Marine dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition shot and killed three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police there in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide.

Three other officers were wounded Sunday, one critically. Police said the gunman was killed at the scene.

The shooting less than a mile from police headquarters added to the tensions across the country between the black community and police. Just days earlier, one of the slain officers had posted an emotional Facebook message about the challenges of police work in the current environment.

President Barack Obama urged Americans to tamp down inflammatory words and actions.

The gunman was identified as Gavin Long of Kansas City, who turned 29 on Sunday.

___

11:05 p.m.

Authorities have opened up the area in Baton Rouge where three law enforcement officers were shot and killed.

The ground behind the convenience store and a nearby beauty supply store was still wet Sunday, apparently from being washed down by authorities following the investigation.

An Associated Press photographer on the scene could see what appeared to be two large blood stains on the concrete pavement on either end of the wall of the beauty supply store.

What appeared to be three bullet holes pierced the back of the corrugated aluminum wall of the beauty supply store on one end while two bullet holes could be seen entering the wall at the other end of the building.

Three officers were killed in the Sunday morning shooting.

__

11 p.m.

Slain Baton Rouge police officer Matthew Gerald celebrated his fourth wedding anniversary just two weeks ago.

WWL-TV (http://bit.ly/2a9jnF9 ) reports Gerald and his wife, Dechia, have a 3-year-old daughter together and that Gerald had adopted his wife's daughter from a previous relationship.

Family friend Skye Turner says Gerald was, "a good family man, good cop, loving husband."

WWL reports Gerald was a former Marine and Blackhawk crew chief in the Army and had joined the police department four months ago.

Gerald was gunned down Sunday along with two other officers.

___

10:30 p.m.

A neighbor of slain Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola says he was a family man.

Rhonda Smith said Sunday evening that Garafola was never seen without at least one of his four children, who range in age from 7 to 21.

Smith says Garafola was, "the epitome of a peace officer."

A gunman killed 45-year-old Garafola, who had been with the sheriff's office for 24 years, and two Baton Rouge police officers early Sunday before he was shot and killed.

___

9:30 p.m.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has used a speech in Australia to condemn the killings of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Biden told a crowd at a Boeing factory he is visiting in the city of Melbourne on Monday that the slayings were a "despicable act."

The vice president said the details of the shootings and the motive were not yet clear. But he called the slayings "an attack on our very way of life at home."

Biden is in Australia as part of a tour of the Pacific. He flies to Sydney later Monday to meet with the prime minister and business leaders.

___

9:15 p.m.

Some New Orleans-area law enforcement agencies are doubling up in response to a shooting that killed three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers and wounded three.

In suburban Jefferson Parish, Sheriff Newell Normand says two-officer patrols began Sunday evening and will continue until further notice. Spokesman Glen Boyd says in an emailed news release that members of the department's specialized investigations and criminal investigations teams will join those patrols.

New Orleans police spokesman Tyler Gamble says Chief Michael Harrison decided Sunday to send two single-officer cars out on every call.

WDSU-TV (http://bit.ly/29Nvzbe) reports that the Fraternal Order of Police also wants officers assigned patrol rifles and 12-hour shifts to maximize coverage.

Gamble says the department already has patrol rifles and officers trained to use them. He says Harrison is considering longer shifts.

___

9:05 p.m.

A state police spokesman says two "persons of interests" who were detained earlier Sunday have been released.

Major Doug Cain said late Sunday that the individuals from Addis were questioned and released but that the investigation was still ongoing. He said no charges were filed against them.

Cain said authorities are still looking to see if the man who opened fire on police in Baton Rouge had any help  "indirectly, directly here or at home."

A gunman killed two Baton Rouge police officers and sheriff's deputy early Sunday before he was shot and killed.

__

7:55 p.m.

A spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office has identified the third officer killed during a shooting in Baton Rouge as sheriff's deputy Brad Garafola.

Casey Rayborn Hicks told The Associated Press Sunday that the slain deputy was 45-years-old and had been with the sheriff's office for 24 years.

Garafola was one of three law enforcement officers shot and killed Sunday. The other two were Baton Rouge police department officers Montrell Jackson and Matthew Gerald.

Hicks also identified the injured sheriff's deputies as 41-year-old Nicholas Tullier an 18-year veteran, and 51-year-old Bruce Simmons, a 23-year veteran.

Hicks says that Tullier is in critical condition while Simmons has non-life threatening injuries.

___

7:30 p.m.

The father-in-law of a Baton Rouge police officer who was shot and killed describes him as a "gentle giant."

Lonnie Jordan spoke to reporters on the front lawn of Montrell Jackson's house in the rural Livingston Parish.

He said he heard about Jackson's death while at church Sunday morning when he received a text message.

Jordan described his son-in-law as a "gentle giant" -- tall and stout and formidable looking, but with a peaceful disposition.

Jordan said Jackson was "always about peace."

Jordan said his son-in-law had been working long hours since the death of Alton Sterling and the resulting protests. But Jordan said if the work was a strain, Jackson didn't let it show.

Montrell Jackson was one of three law enforcement officials shot and killed Sunday morning in Baton Rouge.

___

The family of a 32-year-old Baton Rouge police officer killed Sunday is mourning his death and called him a man of "God, family and the police force."

Kedrick Pitts, a 24-year-old truck driver and the younger half-brother of Montrell Jackson, said he was very close to his older brother.

He described his brother as someone dedicated to "God, family and the police force."

Pitts and other family members were gathered outside Jackson's mother's house in Baton Rouge to mourn the loss of Jackson.

Pitts said his brother "went above and beyond" and that he was "a protector."

He said his brother had been on the force for 10 years, having joined in 2006. He said he had risen to the rank of corporal.

He said Jackson has a wife and a 4-month-old son, Mason. He called Jackson a hard-working police officer who often worked seven days a week.

___

7:10 p.m.

A person familiar with the investigation has identified the second slain Baton Rouge police officer as Matthew Gerald, 41.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Gerald was one of three law enforcement officers killed by a gunman Sunday in Baton Rouge.

By Mike Kunzelman reporting from Baton Rouge.

___

6:45 p.m.

A friend of the family of a Baton Rouge police officer shot and killed Sunday confirms he posted an emotional Facebook message just days ago about the challenges of being a police officer.

Erika Green told The Associated Press Sunday that she is friends of the family of Montrell Jackson, the slain officer, and that she saw the message on his Facebook page.

A screenshot of the image has been widely circulating on the internet. The date was July 8, just three days after a black man was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, touching off a tense week between police and the city's African-American population.

It is no longer on his Facebook page.

In the message, Jackson says he is physically and emotionally tired. He says while in uniform he gets nasty looks and out of uniform some consider him a threat.

___

6:00 p.m.

The mother of Alton Sterling's son says she is heartbroken for the Baton Rouge officers who were gunned down and their families and is calling for peace.

In a statement issued Sunday evening Quinyetta McMillon says she is disgusted by the despicable act of violence that resulted in the officers' deaths and that all she and her son Cameron want is peace.

Thirty-seven-year-old Sterling, a black man, was killed by white officers on July 5 after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on widely circulated cellphone video.

___

5:47 p.m.

The gunman who fatally shot three officers in Baton Rouge briefly attended the University of Alabama.

University spokesman Chris Bryant said Sunday evening that 29-year-old Gavin Eugene Long, of Kansas City, Missouri, was a student for one semester in the spring of 2012.

Bryant says university police had no interaction with Long during that time.

___

5:30 p.m.

A Louisiana state representative has identified one of the three officers killed Sunday and said he had a 4-month-old child.

State Rep. Ted James Sunday gave the name of the dead officer as Montrell Jackson.

James said he knows Jackson and his family personally and spoke to the family earlier Sunday.

Jackson was one of three officers shot and killed in Baton Rouge Sunday morning. Three others were also wounded.

__

5:15 p.m.

Law enforcement officers have converged on a house in Kansas City, Missouri, that is listed for a man named Gavin Long. An Associated Press reporter said some officers had weapons drawn from behind trees and others were behind police cars and unmarked cars in the residential neighborhood.

An officer who did not identify himself and asked reporters to move away, saying that authorities were trying to ensure that there was no one in the house.

The small turquoise frame house with a front porch is in a lower income neighborhood in the southern part of the city.

__

4:27 p.m.

According to radio traffic, Baton Rouge police answered a report of a man with an assault rifle and were met by gunfire  and for several long minutes, didn't know where it was coming from.

The radio exchanges were made public Sunday by the website Broadcastify.

Nearly 2 minutes after the first "Officer down!" report, an officer on the scene is heard saying they don't know the shooter's location.

A statement that the location is known comes nearly six minutes after the first shots are reported.

About 30 seconds later, someone says shots are still being fired.

The recording lasts about 17 minutes and includes urgent calls for an armored personnel carrier called a BearCat.

It does not include word that the gunman is dead.

___

___

4:22 p.m.

A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation into the shooting deaths of three Baton Rouge police officers says the shooter has been identified as Gavin Long.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The official did not have any other details on Long.

-By Eric Tucker reporting from Washington

___

4:20 p.m.

President Barack Obama is calling on Americans to lower avoid "overheated" rhetoric and focus on unifying words following the fatal shooting of three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Obama is delivering a statement about the shooting from the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. He says as of now, the killer's motive is unclear. He says officials don't know whether the killer was targeting police or killed them down as they responded to a call.

Obama is noting that the shooting and other recent incidents in Texas and elsewhere come just before the Republican and Democratic conventions are set to begin. He says that's a time when rhetoric tends to get hotter than usual. Obama says the U.S. doesn't need "careless accusations" intended to score points but should instead try to "temper our words."

He says attacks like the one in Baton Rouge are happening far too often and constitute an attack on the rule of law.

___

4:15 p.m.

According to radio traffic, Baton Rouge police answered a report of a man with an assault rifle and were met by gunfire  and for several long minutes, didn't know where it was coming from.

Three law enforcement officers were killed and three wounded, one critically. Police say the suspect was shot and killed at the scene.

The radio exchanges were made public Sunday by the website Broadcastify.

Nearly 2 minutes after the first "Officer down!" report, an officer on the scene is heard saying they don't know the shooter's location.

A statement that the location is known comes nearly six minutes after the first shots are reported.

About 30 seconds later, someone says shots are still being fired.

The recording lasts about 17 minutes and includes urgent calls for an armored personnel carrier called a BearCat.

It does not include word that the gunman is dead.

___

___

4:10 p.m.

Hillary Clinton condemned the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge.

In a statement on Sunday afternoon the Democratic presidential nominee said, "There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities."

Clinton said that violence must be rejected to "strengthen our communities."

___

4:55 p.m.

A spokesman for the Louisiana state police says they believe the gunman who killed three officers in Baton Rouge was the only shooter but that officials are unsure whether he had accomplices.

Major Doug Cain said Sunday, "we are not ready to say he acted alone."

Cain says two people had been detained in another town called Addis, which is near Baton Rouge, and called them "persons of interests."

____

4:20 p.m.

The governor of Louisiana says the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge was unjustified.

Gov. John Bel Edwards told media Sunday afternoon that the gunman committed, "an absolutely unspeakable, heinous attack."

Edwards says the hatred has got to stop.

Three officers are confirmed dead in the attack outside a store in Baton Rouge about a mile from police headquarters early Sunday morning. Three others are injured. The gunman was fatally shot.

____

4:10 p.m.

Police say there is no active shooter in Baton Rouge where three police officers were killed Sunday morning.

Col. Mike Edmonson told media, "We believe that the person who shot and killed our officers that he was the person that was shot and killed at the scene.

___

3:45 p.m.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, responding to the police shootings Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, says there is no place in the United States for such appalling violence.

In a statement issued Sunday, Lynch says she condemns the shooting deaths of three officers and the wounding of several others "in the strongest possible terms." She also is pledging the full support of the Justice Department as the investigation unfolds.

The attorney general says Agents from the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are on the scene, and Justice Department will make available victim services and federal funding support, and provide investigative assistance to the fullest extent possible.

Lynch says everyone's hearts and prayers are with the fallen and wounded officers, their families and the entire Baton Rouge community in "this extraordinarily difficult time."

___

2:15 p.m.

A witness tells WAFB-TV (http://www.wafb.com/) that he saw a masked man in black shorts and shirt running from the scene where three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers were shot and killed.

Brady Vancel says the man looked like a pedestrian running with a rifle in his hand, rather than someone trained to move with a rifle.

Vancel says he'd gone to work on a flooring job on a street behind the gas station where authorities say the shooting occurred. He said he heard semi-automatic fire and perhaps a handgun.

He saw a man in a red shirt lying in an empty parking lot and "another gunman running away as more shots were being fired back and forth from several guns."

___

1:45 p.m.

Republican Donald Trump is blaming a "lack of leadership" for Sunday's shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Trump says in a statement posted on his Twitter and Facebook pages that "We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today."

Three officers are dead and three others wounded after the shooting less than one mile from local police headquarters.

Trump is placing the blame on a lack of leadership and is demanding "law and order."

He asks, "How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order."

The violence comes less than a month after a pair of police shootings prompted the assassination of five police officers in Dallas.

___

1:40 p.m.

The nephew of a Baton Rouge man shot and killed last week says he condemns the shooting deaths of three law enforcement officers.

Terrance Carter spoke to The Associated Press on Sunday by telephone from his work. He said the family just wants things to be peaceful and said his uncle, Alton Sterling, would not want this.

Authorities said that three law enforcement officers were shot to death early Sunday. Three others were wounded. One suspect was also shot and killed, and authorities are still searching for two more.

It was not immediately clear why the officers were shot.

__

12:15 p.m.

Police in Baton Rouge say a gas station not far from police headquarters is where three law enforcement officers were shot to death early Sunday. One suspect was also shot and killed.

Baton Rouge Police Cpl. L'Jean McKneely Jr. says the shooting took place outside and possibly inside the B-Quik convenience store on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge.

He says the suspect's body was found next door, outside of a fitness center.

Three other law enforcement officers were injured. Authorities believe two suspects may still be at large.

___

12:45 p.m.

A spokesman for the Louisiana governor says that the governor is at the hospital where police officers were taken following a shooting in Baton Rouge.

Richard Carbo told The Associated Press that Gov. John Bel Edwards was meeting Sunday with officers and their families.

The city is on high alert after three officers were shot and killed Sunday morning. Three others have been wounded in the Louisiana shooting.

A sheriff's spokesman in Baton Rouge said earlier that one suspect is dead and two others are believed to be at large.

__

12:20 p.m.

The White House says President Barack Obama has been briefed on the shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and has asked to be updated throughout the day as more details become available.

The White House has been in contact with local officials in Baton Rouge and offered any assistance necessary.

Obama spent most of last week focused on trying to reduce tensions and helping build trust between police and the communities they serve.

Obama attended a memorial service for five Dallas police officers last week and also led a nearly four-hour meeting featuring dozens of leaders from police organizations, community activists and elected officials.

He also spoke by telephone to the families of two black men shot in separate incidents in Baton Rouge and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota.

___

11:45 a.m.

Police in Louisiana say they are using a specialized robot to check for explosives near the body of a suspect who was shot and killed in Baton Rouge early Sunday.

The suspect is believed to have been involved in the shooting of law enforcement officers in the Louisiana city early Sunday. Three officers are dead and three are hospitalized with injuries. The shooting occurred less than 1 mile from police headquarters.

Baton Rouge Police Cpl. L'Jean Mckneely Jr. says authorities do not have an immediate indication that explosives are present.

___

11:25 a.m.

Authorities say three law enforcement officers have been killed and three have been injured in a shooting in Louisiana.

A sheriff's spokesman in Baton Rouge also said that one suspect is dead and two others are believed to be at large.

Spokesman Casey Rayborn Hicks issued a statement asking the public to report anything suspicious in the area to 911. Officers and deputies from the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office were involved in the Sunday morning shooting that took place less than 1 miles from police headquarters.

___

9:55 a.m.

Police in Louisiana say that more than one officer has been shot in Baton Rouge.

The shooting happened early Sunday, less than 1 mile from police headquarters.

Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Coppola did not know the extent of the injuries or the precise number of officers injured.

He said that authorities believe the "scene is contained," meaning that a shooter was unlikely on the loose.

___

This story corrects the name of the governor's spokesman to Richard
Turkish Airlines has been described as Turkey's most valuable brand for 2016, according to a leading London-based consultancy Wednesday.

According to Brand Finance's list of Top 100 Turkish Brands 2016, released Wednesday, the airline led for the first time with a brand value of $2.4 billion after flying to 289 destinations worldwide, 240 international and 49 domestic, with 323 aircraft.

The flag-carrier's value is up 11 percent since last year.

Turkish Airlines was followed by Turk Telekom, the leading communication and convergence technology company in the country worth $2.35 billion, down five percent since 2015.

White-goods manufacturer Arcelik was worth $1.98 billion, an increase of seven percent since last year.

Akbank ($1.58 billion), a Turkish lender and owned by the Sabanci Group, and Garanti Bank ($1.52 billion), one of the leading lenders in the Turkish market partly owned by Spains second biggest lender BBVA, took fourth and fifth places.

The top ten also included the countrys largest mobile operator Turkcell ($1.43 billion) and Isbank ($1.29 billion), one of the countrys biggest lenders.

Brewer and soft-drinks manufacturer Anadolu Efes ($1.15 billion) also featured as did Yapi Kredi Bank ($980 million), the Turkish bank partly owned by UniCredit. State-owned Halkbank ($958 million) was also on the list.

The combined value of the top 100 Turkish brands has decreased nearly 15 percent from last year to a total of $29.3 billion. This still remains lower than technology brand IBM, which ranks as the fifth most valuable brand in the world at $49.8 billion last year by Forbes.

The Turkish banking industry was a notable performer in the list with five bank brands ranked in the top 10.

Turkish banks combined brand value totaled $9.4 billion which is 32 percent of total value of top 100 Turkish brands.

Anadolu Agency
By PTI: Jamshedpur, July 16 (PTI) Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) occurs due to malfunctioning of the electrical system of the heart causing the heart to beat at a very fast rate, which can result in a reduction or even complete cessation of its ability to pump any more, Dr. Suvro Banerjee, a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist, said at a cardiac arrest awareness programme today.

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What makes the condition particularly unique, and therefore dangerous, was that the cardiac arrest leading to backout or death may happen all of a sudden, the prominent physician told a press conference here.

He said SCA often strikes people, who are unware of any possible symtoms and indications of heart diseases, and reminded that people who have had a heart attack in the past or have a history of premature, unexplained deaths due to cardiac arrest in the family or those with congenital abnormalities are especially at risk and should be evaluated without delay.

He was addressing the press conference as part of the awareness campaign by Apllo Gleneagles Hospitals, Kolkata, which has an information centre in the steel city.

Stating that former President of India, Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam and Dempo?s Brazalian striker Cristiano Junior had died of SCA, Dr Banerjee said Insertable Loop Recorder (ILR) and Electrophysological studies are some tests that can help us in this direction while an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) can help address the challenge of a SCA.

Asked about chances of survival due to SCA, he said it was only 5 per cent outside hospital.

He said the number of deaths due to SCA ranged between 2.5 lakhs to 4.5 lakhs per annum in US whereas we (in India) did not have any data regarding death caused by SCA.

The A leading healthcare services hospital in Eastern India, has taken initiative to raise awareness level among people of the steel city about the menace of which could prove fatal if ignored. PTI BS SUS SUS

--- ENDS ---
The economic crisis in Greece has led to an ongoing wave of emigration and a seemingly endless brain drain from the country.

Greece was hit harder by the 2007 financial turmoil than any other European country. What was called the Greek government-debt crisis resulted in the launch of the largest sovereign debt default in history in 2012. In subsequent years, the countrys politicians struck three bailout agreements with its international creditors and pushed for the implementation of harsh austerity measures that rocked peoples lives.

Greek government spokeswoman Olga Gerovasili, referring to the conclusion of the last bailout program review in the previous week, pointed out that 80 percent of the last bailout agreement in the summer has been completed and front-loaded loans are now being injected into the real economy. This will help reverse the economic climate in the second half of 2016, she said, stressing that with the review concluded, the government can turn its focus to people's daily lives and especially to fighting unemployment, which she described as the "great enemy".

Indeed, adult unemployment ballooned from 6.6 percent in May 2008 to 24.1 percent in March 2016, according to the Hellenic Statistical Authority. Many, especially the young, decided to leave the country. Recent research conducted by Greek economic geographers Lois Labrianidis and Manolis Pratsinakis for the London School of Economics shows that one in 18 families has a member who left the country after 2010.

The Greek neo-migrant is portrayed as around 30 years old, highly educated, and mostly emigrating for financial reasons. Moving abroad may be the best thing to do on a personal level. This is not a problem for those young scientists, but for the state, Lambrianidis said in a telephone interview.

Half of the migrants that left after 2010 were unemployed back in Greece. Finding better work conditions and better prospects, as well as stability, is also what 80 percent of the migrants look for in their European destinations, half of them particularly in Britain or Germany. Whats new is that 12 percent of these neo-migrants are more than 40 years old, something unprecedented in Greek emigration history.

Also, the vast majority of emigrants neither sends or receives money from the homeland. In that sense, migrant mainly provide subsistence for themselves, unlike earlier emigres.

This time, life abroad is far from ideal. Struggles flare up as they are getting settled as well as later on, and they revolve around the deteriorating the job market. Many times, immigrants also face discrimination.

You need to keep your eyes and ears open, Stefanos Koutsardakis, 35, says at a cafe in Kreuzberg, Berlin. He decided to come here to find work as a civil engineer over two years ago. He points to the difficulties immigrants should keep in mind. You mustnt lose your temper but should be cautious around past generations immigrants. You will encounter different people, cultures, and mentalities, he advised.

The recent immigration experience in Germany of 30-year-old Anna Petroulaki, a multimedia journalist, has been positive. I believed that I would find better working conditions than those in Greece although it was hard looking for a job and taking German lessons at the same time. But in these few months I was lucky and found work related to my degree.

Things were different for 37-year-old Sinodis Taptas, a translator and foreign language teacher. He decided to emigrate to Germany in 2015 in order to escape the crisis raging for the fifth consecutive year in my country, to go to the country where I spent a good part of my childhood. But later he decided to return to Greece, and explained: I quickly discovered that the German state no longer supports EU immigrants and even interferes in the labor market in ways that significantly reduce the employment opportunities for a graduate immigrant.

For those remaining or aiming for Berlin, there is support in tackling the initial hardships. For the last six years, Sofia Margariti has worked for the Protestant Churchs civil organization in Berlin as a social worker for Greek migrants. Along with her colleague Maria Aplada, they offer counselling to more than 20 immigrants on social state issues every week.

In the past, Greek migrants would easily find a job and a place to stay. But now, too many people have come to the city and it is very hard to find a home, Maria explains outside their office in central Berlin. Another issue that troubles Greek families is the completely different educational system and the future of their children. The language barrier makes navigation difficult and often in the end children are left without guidance. They may even spend one or two years without knowing what to do or just exit the educational system after 16.

People also often report being exploited by migrants of older generations, although since the minimum wage was recently established in Germany, things have got better, Sofia says. More and more since the economic crisis people feel the need to talk about their choice to come here. They know that they can survive here but they dont really want to be here, she explains.

There have also been complaints during the crisis about negative Germans comments on the debt crisis against Greeks at work or public services, Maria adds, but there has been support too.

The young academics seem to be stripping Greece of their valuable skills and dynamics. Could something be done to undo this brain drain?

We would need to have an economy producing complex products for scientists, and perhaps this way some would return. Greece needs to have a better role in the international division of labor and to be more competitive, says Lambrianidis.

But this will not happen soon. Another way is to try to exploit this human capital, facilitating every possibility of the Greek migrants to also work intermittently in Greece. This will transfer ideas, knowledge and expertise through effective partnerships with universities, research centers, and by private companies or by establishing their own businesses, he said.

For the time being, Greek emigrants are not optimistic. I am afraid that Greek people will face lots of difficulties before getting back on their feet. Things will change in the future but I believe its important to understand the causes of the crisis and try to work on that instead of blaming each other, Anna says.

Anadolu Agency
European leaders moved quickly on Friday to alleviate fears over the U.K. voting to leave the EU.

The EU is strong enough to find the right answers, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a news conference in Berlin.

She expressed deep regret over the decision of U.K. voters but said it was now important that EU member states maintain their unity to avoid uncertainty.

Therefore I have invited European Council President Donald Tusk, French President Francois Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for talks in Berlin on Monday, she said

U.K.-registered voters opted by a small majority to leave the EU in a historic referendum on Thursday, sparking worries across European capitals over the political future of the bloc.

Almost 52 percent of voters rejected their country's 43-year EU membership.

Leaders express confidence in EU

Leaders of EU institutions also expressed their determination on Friday to further develop cooperation among the 27 remaining member states, after the U.K.s decision to leave the bloc.

In a joint statement, leaders of the European Council, the European Commission, and the EU Parliament said: The union of 27 member states will continue. The union is the framework of our common political future.

European leaders expressed their hope that the U.K. would remain a close partner of the EU in future, but also called for a quick exit process to avoid speculation.

We now expect the United Kingdom government to give effect to this decision of the British people as soon as possible, however painful that process may be. Any delay would unnecessarily prolong uncertainty, they said.

EU was prepared for Brexit

European Council President Tusk told a news conference in Brussels that the EU had been prepared for a negative scenario and stressed there would be no legal vacuum after the Brexit decision.

There's no hiding the fact that we wanted a different outcome of yesterday's referendum, he told reporters.

It is a historic moment but, for sure, not a moment for hysterical reactions. I want to reassure everyone that we are prepared also for this negative scenario. As you know, the EU is not only a fair-weather project, he said.

Leaders to discuss Brexit next week

Tusk said leaders of the other 27 EU member states would have an informal meeting next week in Brussels, without the participation of the U.K., to discuss the details of the Brexit.

All the procedures for the withdrawal of the U.K. from the EU are clear and set out in the treaties, he said.

In order to discuss the details of further proceedings, I have offered the leaders an informal meeting of the 27 on the margins of the European Council summit. And I will also propose to the leaders that we start a wider reflection on the future of our union.

Tusk dismissed speculation about the future of European integration.

Today, on behalf of the 27 leaders, I can say that we are determined to keep our unity as 27. For all of us, the union is the framework for our common future, he stressed.

Foreign ministers to meet in Berlin

Meanwhile, EU heavyweight Germany has invited the six founding members of the European Union for talks in Berlin on Saturday.

The Foreign Ministry announced that external affairs ministers of France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg will discuss recent developments in the EU.

The ministry gave no further details about the agenda.

Germany had repeatedly stressed before the Brexit referendum that it wanted Britain to stay within the bloc.

Senior members of the German government had expressed worries that Brexit might trigger similar referendums in other EU member states, fueling nationalist movements and divisions among European states.

France regrets Brexit

Europes other major power, France, also expressed regret on Friday over the U.K.s decision to leave the EU.

President Hollande said the Brexit vote was "a painful choice that he already regrets.

Speaking after an emergency ministerial meeting on Friday morning to discuss the Brexit, Hollande said the outcome of the referendum would be a "grave test for Europe".

It is necessary "to become clearly aware of the loss of confidence of the people in what Europe represents," he stressed.

Hollande underlined the need for change and reforms within the EU and said France had a particular responsibility.

"Europe cannot be like before," he said.

Hollande also warned about growing support for populist movements across Europe.

Frances far right welcomed the outcome of the referendum in the U.K. Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, called for a similar referendum in France.

"Like a lot of French people, Im very happy that the British people held on and made the right choice, she told a news conference at her partys headquarters in Nanterre.

What we thought was impossible yesterday has now become possible, she said.

Le Pen argued that the referendum had shown that exit from the EU is possible and that neither the EU nor the euro was "irreversible".

"As I asked for years, it is now the time for a referendum in France and elsewhere in the EU," she said.

Greece calls for EU debate

Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias argued that the U.K. referendum results showed the failure of European policies and need for a democratic debate on the future of the EU.

"The results of the British referendum confirmed our insistence on the need for a democratic binding discussion on the future of the European Union, he said.

Kotzias argued that such a debate should bring changes towards democratization of European structures and making the EU serve the people.

The priority of the European leaders must be abandoning punitive logic and entrenchment policies and the cultivation of a culture of democratic dialogue and consensus," he also said.

Anadolu Agency
When it comes to big business, it is often linked to high politics, and vice versa big political issues often closely intertwine with the business interests of the elites.

For the entire twentieth century, the possession of large energy resources (mainly oil), eventually took the form of a powerful political influence. The case of the 1973 oil crisis is illustrative in this respect, when the OPEC countries (mainly the Arab countries) literally left the United States and some other Western countries without fuel, because they have supported Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Arab monarchies have used the oil card in a big political game of world scale; it was the political aspect of the issue. The economic side of the issue has been a sharp rise in price of black gold on the market (from 3 to 12 dollars per barrel). The Arab oil-exporting countries then received a double benefit.

Although it had been many years since then, the approaches of energy exporters have not significantly changed. Exporters are still trying to occupy most of the market and thus gain more profit and more political influence. And consumers naturally strive for greater diversification and enhancing the use of alternative energy sources. Ironically, the developed Western countries (Western Europe) have energy dependence on the country inferior to them in terms of development in almost all respects. Of course I am talking about Russia. Russian gas monopolist Gazprom, for years has been a convenient tool for pressure and blackmail in the hands of the Kremlin. Because of its gas dependence on Russia, the EU often cannot demonstrate a strong and consistent position on the issue of the Russian threat.

However, it cannot be said that the EU and other countries accept the energy dependence. They are almost constantly in search of alternative suppliers and energy transportation routes (of mainly gas). One of the options of diversification of gas supplies to Europe can be the "Southern Gas Corridor" project (that involves TAP and TANAP projects). The commissioning of this project will enable Europe to reduce its energy dependence on Russia, and to get more competitive prices. Based on the rate of economic growth in Europe, it can be said that, in the foreseeable future we will not see the growth of natural gas consumption in Europe. This means that Gazprom will have to agree to discount, and accept the reduction of its market in Europe. Of course in the current situation, this scenario cannot satisfy Gazprom and its Kremlin masters.

It is worth noting that the implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor project will also reduce Turkeys gas dependence on Russia. Against the backdrop of the Cold War between Moscow and Ankara, the project takes on greater significance in the eyes of the Turkish political elite. In addition, the project will transform Turkey into an important energy hub that promises it a greater economic benefits and energy stability.

Some people in the ruling circles of Russia are cautiously watching the steps towards the implementation of this major project, which runs bypassing Russia. They believe that the Southern Gas Corridor, in the long term, can put an end to the hegemony of the Russian gas in Europe. Thus deprive Russia of a tool of pressure on Europe and quite solid financial revenues. Part of the Russian elite is convinced that the weakest links in this chain are Georgia and Azerbaijan, so with enough pressure on these countries, they will be able to stop or significantly complicate the implementation of the project.

Armenias total military and political dependence on Russia suggests that military aggravation between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which took place in April 1-5 of this year, may be the result of Russias activity in order to impede the project.

This also can be attributed to sudden protests by environmentalists in southern Italy, who oppose the construction of the gas pipeline (TAP).

One should not lose sight of the fact that in Europe itself there are also quite a few opponents of the Southern Gas Corridor project. These elements can be observed mainly in the eastern European countries that have become EU members. These forces, representing part of the elite of these countries, are primarily defending their narrow corporate goals and objectives. Most of them are directly or indirectly connected with the gas business in their country or with the Russian gas lobby in Europe. Although their arguments do not withstand criticism, however it does not take away their activity.

Some circles in Europe (possibly closely related to Moscow) declare that the implementation of the Southern Gas Corridor project will lead to the fact that Europe will fall into dependence on Turkey. This argument is actively promoted and is being discussed in society. Such speculations are advantageous for Russian gas lobby and the Russian authorities.

I think the matter of Turkey's reliability and Europe's expected dependence on Turkey, if this country will become a gas hub, is worth considering in little more detail.

Firstly, Turkey, in the case of its transformation into a gas hub, will act as a transit country; Turkey does not produce gas and only deals with transit. If Turkey wants to use these features as a political tool against Europe, then it will have problems with both the European gas consumer countries, and with Turkeys eastern neighbor countries, which produce this gas. That is, Turkey runs the risk of suddenly ruining its relations both with Europe and with gas exporters, including its strategic ally Azerbaijan. Such a scenario sounds utopian to me.

Secondly, after the launch of the project, it will compete with Russian gas, and it is not in the interest of Ankara to create problems in this regard, thus "doing a favor" for a competitor, in this case for Gazprom.

Third, Turkey is a member of NATO and a candidate for EU membership with a democratically elected government. I find it inappropriate, in terms of reliability, to compare Turkey with the country, which invades the territory of neighboring states, partly occupying them, shoots down civilian airliners, blackmails its neighbors and grossly violates the norms of international law...

It is not difficult to understand where these insinuations are coming from.

However, the Russian gas monopoly in Europe is threatened not only by the project of the Southern Gas Corridor.

The Russian elite have focused all its attention on countering the emergence of alternative pipelines in Europe, but they have overlooked another threat posed by a small Middle Eastern country, the Emirate of Qatar. Qatar is world's largest exporter of LNG, has the world's largest fleet for LNG transportation.

Qatar has already started supplying LNG to Poland. Besides Qatar, the US as well supplies LNG to Europe. Moreover, both countries intend to increase the supply of LNG. Given that the demand for natural gas in Europe is almost not growing, LNG supplies and commissioning of the Southern Gas Corridor, will hit the Russian gas business hard. As a result of these processes, the ability of the Russian authorities to use gas exports as a pressure tool will come to naught, besides Russian budget will receive less billions of dollars, which are so important for the country in the conditions of low oil prices.

It is too early to talk about the final downfall of the Russian gas hegemony in Europe, but each year it becomes more and more real.

Ali Hajizade, political scientist, head of the project "The Great Middle East"
Top Turkish bureaucrats are set to visit the Russian capital of Moscow on Thursday to revive tourism between the two countries, Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement on Wednesday.

Russia invited the Turkish committee to discuss ways to cooperate on tourism and normalize relations between the two countries after months of strained ties following the downing of a Russian war plane that violated Turkish airspace in November last year.

Officials from the Turkish foreign ministry, interior ministry, culture and tourism ministry, and transport ministry will meet their Russian counterparts in Moscow.

The two sides will discuss measures to ensure security for tourists, the statement said. Preparations to restart the charter flights between the two countries will be on the agenda.

On June 30, Russia lifted a ban on tourist flights to Turkey following a telephone conversation between President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkish and Russian foreign ministers later met in the Russian city of Sochi on July 1 in an effort to boost the process of normalizing relations.

Putin and Erdogan are set to meet in the upcoming period, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus announced as he attended a TV program on Wednesday.

"Committees will be going and coming," Kurtulmus said. "We might be discussing over culture today, and talking about financial and commercial ties tomorrow [...]"

Kurtulmus said the news about a Turkish committee heading to Russia is a sign of the normalization process.

Anadolu Agency
A new exhibition in Canada, focusing on air battles during the First World War and featuring a section on Ottoman war pilots, has opened its doors to the public on Friday.

Titled Deadly Skies  Air War, 1914-1918, the exhibition will be held at Canadian War Museum in the country's southeastern capital Ottawa until Jan. 29, 2017.

The exhibition displays a uniform of Ottoman air pilot Captain Fazil who was an important airman during the WWI and tells his story.

Turkeys Foreign Ministry, the Turkish General Staff, Turkish Air Forces all supported the exhibition.

Stephen Quick, the director general of the Canadian War Museum said in a statement: Deadly Skies reveals some surprising insights into what was a brand new form of warfare through nine dynamic, fascinating stories.

Go beyond the dogfights and immerse yourself in the lives of nine people, from both sides of the conflict, who experienced the first air war, the museum said on its website.

Their stories  told with more than 80 authentic artifacts woven into an innovative graphic novel presentation  provide insight into the history and consequences of the first air war, the statement added.

Anadolu Agency
Around 250,000 Muslims turned out to pray at East Jerusalems Al-Aqsa Mosque for the third Friday of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month.

Since dawn, Palestinian worshipers from Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied West Bank began converging on Al-Aqsa, which for Muslims represents the worlds third holiest site.

The Israeli Authorities, for their part, stepped up security in the area, deploying thousands of policemen and erecting roadblocks at the entrances of Jerusalems Old City.

They also deployed a helicopter and a surveillance blimp to monitor activities in and around the flashpoint religious site.

Only men over 45 and children under 12 -- along with women of all ages -- were allowed by the Israeli authorities to enter occupied East Jerusalem without entry permits.

Around 300 Palestinian residents of the blockaded Gaza Strip were also allowed -- for the second time this Ramadan -- to enter Jerusalem on Friday.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the Jewish state in a move never recognized by the international community.

Anadolu Agency
Hagia Sophia reverberated to a muezzins call to morning prayer from inside the 6th century Istanbul landmark for the first time in 85 years on Saturday.

The building in the citys historic Sultanahmet district broadcast the azan from its minarets following Fridays Laylat al-Qadr, or night of power, marking the first revelation of the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad.

The broadcast of the morning call to prayer from within Hagia Sophia is likely to reignite the controversy over the use of the building, which was designated a museum in 1935 under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Republic of Turkeys first president.

Although the prayer call has been played from Hagia Sophias minarets for the last four years, the muezzin has always chanted from a prayer room in the museum grounds rather than from inside the former mosque and cathedral.

Built as an Orthodox Christian basilica during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I in 537, the famous domed structure, known as Ayasofya in Turkish, was converted to a mosque following Sultan Mehmet IIs conquest of the city in 1453.

In recent years there have been calls to return the building to Muslim worship. Last month, the Greek government complained about the reciting of the Quran in Hagia Sophia during Ramadan -- criticism the Turkish Foreign Ministry described as unacceptable.

The azan call was televised in a Saturday program featuring Mehmet Gormez, the head of the Religious Affairs Directorate.

Gormez used his appearance to describe the terrorist attack on Istanbuls Ataturk airport, in which 44 people and three attackers died, as part of a war waged on Islam.

He said Islam was among the victims of terrorism. The slaughtered ones are not only our lives but also the highest values that have been brought to humanity by Islam, he said.

Anadolu Agency
An experimental vaccine for the Zika virus has been approved for human trials, the Food and Drug Administration said Monday.

Created in a partnership between drug companies Inovio Pharmaceuticals and GeneOne Life Science, the vaccine, GLS-5700, showed promise when tested in small and large animals.

The vaccine will be tested on approximately 40 patients and results will be announced later this year, the companies said.

Currently, there is no vaccine for Zika, a virus that was first detected in Africa but has spread rapidly through the Americas.

Related to the viruses that cause yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile disease, Zika is spread through mosquito bites or sexual activity. Although symptoms are relatively mild, health officials are alarmed by the disease because it is linked to devastating birth defects.

We are proud to have attained the approval to initiate the first Zika vaccine study in human volunteers, Inovio CEO J. Joseph Kim said in a statement. As of May 2016, 58 countries and territories reported continuing mosquito-borne transmission of the Zika virus; the incidences of viral infection and medical conditions caused by the virus are expanding, not contracting. We plan to dose our first subjects in the next weeks and expect to report phase I interim results later this year.

Inovio, based in Pennsylvania, and GeneOne Life Science, based in South Korea, have collaborated before on experimental vaccines for Ebola and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS.

Zika has been confirmed in nearly 40 countries in South America, North America and the Caribbean.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that it believes thousands of pregnant women could be infected by the virus in the coming months.

Scientists have also questioned whether the Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro should be moved or postponed due to the virus.

Anadolu Agency
President Recep Tayyip Erdogans congratulatory message to Russia could be a step toward normalizing relations between the two countries, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said Tuesday.

Speaking at an iftar, or fast-breaking, program with correspondents of the prime ministry, Kurtulmus said Turkey and Russia had deep relations -- economic, political and cultural -- and cannot discard each other.

Erdogan congratulated his opposite number Vladimir Putin on Russia Day, marked June 12 as a national holiday to commemorate the proclamation of Russias sovereignty.

In the message sent Sunday, Erdogan wished for the Turkish-Russian relations to rise to the level they deserve in the future, sources said.

"I hope a key step will have been taken in the process of normalization, with letters of our president and prime minister. This is also a declaration of Turkey's will for normalization of this process.

"God's willing, an improvement will appear in relations between Turkish-Russian that has begun with plane crisis and results will be taken," Kurtulmus said.

Diplomatic relations between the countries soured after a Russian SU-24 violated Turkish airspace and was intercepted and shot down Nov. 24 by Turkish F-16 fighters. The Kremlin ordered sanctions on food products, an end to visa-free travel and a boycott of Turkey by Russian tourists.

However, the deputy prime minister said Erdogans remarks did not mean Ankara and Moscow agree on political issues or will solve all regional issues.

"Our opinion differences on many issues including Syria may remain. But the bottom line is that it is essential to maintain peace between the two neighboring countries.

"I hope that a similar signal will come from the Russian side. Russia has already revealed attitudes of this kind," Kurtulmus added.

Anadolu Agency
The EU on Friday extended economic sanctions relating to Russias annexation of Crimea for a further year.

According to a statement, the sanctions on business deals with the peninsula will run to June 23, 2017.

The ban - first applied in July 2014 following the Russian takeover of the Ukrainian territory - applies to investment in Crimea, exporting and importing goods to and from the region and involvement in tourism.

Wider sanctions applied over Russias involvement in the conflict in the eastern Ukraine are due be extended next week until the end of 2016.

Anadolu Agency
Delhi Police Cyber Crime Cell arrested a former employee of Air India for hacking into the airliners website and selling tickets after redeeming miles of frequent flyer programme members.

By Nitin Jain: Delhi Police Cyber Crime Cell under the Economic Offences Wing today arrested a former employee of Air India for hacking the airliners website and fraudulently selling tickets. Anitesh Goswami, who hacked into the airliners website, obtained tickets by redeeming miles of members of the Flying Returns programme.

Goswami has been booked under offences of cheating, forgery and also under the Information Technology Act. He was arrested by a special team of officials who were investigating the incident. According to the police, suspects involved in the hacking were dynamic and frequently changed locations. Police officials said that Goswami who was the mastermind in the racket operated from Jodhpur.

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The Delhi Police arrested Goswami from a residence in Jaipur based on a tip off from an informant. The police also recovered a laptop, several mobile phones, and several documents from the possession of Goswami.



Here's what you need to know: Goswami, an IT expert with BCA degree, had worked in both Kingfisher Airlines and Air India. He was well versed with the online ticket-booking system and also knew the functioning of intranet and internet based systems of Air India. After understanding the ticketing and points or miles system of Air India, Goswami hacked into their Loyalty Plus programme website. After hacking and gaining access to the website, Goswmai obtained admin user rights. He used the admin rights in the internal Loyalty Plus system of Air India and also upgraded several other user IDs with admin rights. Using these IDs he verified hundreds of dormant accounts of Frequent Flyer members by uploading fraudulently prepared KYC documents. Goswami later used these membership accounts and the Frequent Flyer miles or points accumulated in them for booking airline tickets. These tickets were then sold to various travel and ticketing agents based in cities like Pune, Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai. Police officials said that before leaving Air India Goswami did a thorough study of the airliners ticketing system.

Also read:

Air India suspends pilot, 10 cabin crew members for indiscipline



--- ENDS ---
Turkey's opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) head has criticized EU's stance on Turkey's fight against terrorism.

Addressing his party's parliamentary group meeting in Ankara Tuesday, MHP leader Devlet Bahceli said Turkey had been used as EUs border police.

"EU has not kept its words on [proposed visa-free deal with] Turkey and tried to prevent [the countrys] fight against terrorism," Bahceli said.

About talks to reach a visa-free deal between the EU and Turkey, he said: "We say to EU, let the visa exemption be torn into pieces over your head."

He also criticized British Prime Minister David Cameron's comments on Turkey's EU membership, saying Turkey could possibly join the EU in the year 3000 with its current progress in the accession process.

"Turkey is not obliged to Europe and can solve problems on its own," he said.

The EU and Turkey signed a refugee deal on March 18, which aims to discourage irregular migration through the Aegean Sea by taking stricter measures against human traffickers and improving the conditions of nearly three million Syrian refugees in Turkey.

The deal also allows for the acceleration of Turkeys EU membership bid and visa-free travel for Turkish nationals within the Schengen area, on the condition that Ankara meets 72 requirements set by the EU.

While Turkey fulfilled most of the criteria last month, differences between Brussels and Ankara on anti-terror legislation have forestalled the visa-liberalization deal.

According to the EU, Turkey must revise its legislation and practices on terrorism in line with European standards" in order for visa liberalization for Turkish citizens to enter into force.

But Ankara has firmly rejected any such change, stressing that it is not realistic to expect such changes at a time when Turkey is fighting terror organizations such as the PKK and Daesh.

Backing Turkish government's rejection of changes to the country's anti-terror law, Bahceli said that Turkey's EU accession process should be brought to the table: "The ruling [AK] Party should demonstrate its capacity and courage.

"If the government will act on behalf of national conscience loyally and defend Turkey's historical rights fearlessly, our national movement will not refrain from supporting the government and would never leave the government alone due to its responsible and national sense of opposition."

Bahceli also criticized the European Parliament for supporting the YPG terrorist organization.

"So-called flags of the bloody organization YPG have been hung up on the dirty corridors of the European Parliament's building...What are these rags belonging to a terror organization doing inside the European Parliament? What kind of sense of civilization is this?"

Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) Co-Chairman Selahattin Demirtas recently visited the European Parliament, where he was seen posing for cameras in front of the YPG flag.

The YPG is the armed wing of the PYD -- the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, which is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met the leader of Palestinian group Hamas, Khaled Mashal, in Istanbul Friday.

Erdogan and Mashal discussed how to resolve the disagreements among Palestinians as well as Turkish humanitarian assistance, said a source from the Turkish Presidency.

The Turkish leader emphasized during the meeting that Turkey was keen on easing the distress of Palestinians, the source, who was not named due to restrictions on speaking with the media, told Anadolu Agency.

In April of 2014, rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah signed a long-awaited reconciliation agreement that called for the formation of a Palestinian unity government tasked with overseeing Palestinian legislative and presidential elections.

Although the unity government was unveiled two months later, it has yet to take on a governing role in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, while the relationship between the two factions remains beset by a host of longstanding differences.

Representatives of the two rival groups held a series of meetings in Doha in an effort to discuss means of implementing the agreement, but no breakthrough was made.

Anadolu Agency
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin will soon talk via telephone, Turkeys prime minister said late Monday.

Binali Yildirim's remarks came during a program televised live on state broadcaster TRT after Erdogan urged the restoration of traditional friendly ties in a letter to Putin.

"I suppose our president will have a phone call with Putin today, tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday," Yildirim said.

"The content of the letter is very clear. We express our regret. We say that we are sharing the pain felt by those who lost loved ones. We say that we will pay compensation, if needed."

Yildirim also said bilateral relations should return to normal. "The other side approves and confirms it," he added.

Following the downing of a Russian warplane in Turkish airspace last November, the Kremlin ordered sanctions on food products, an end to visa-free travel and a ban on Russian tourists taking package holidays in Turkey.

Yildirim also announced that a planned agreement between Turkey and Israel to normalize ties, expected to lead to an improvement of the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, will be formally signed Tuesday.

"This agreement took a long time. Our matter with Israel was apology and compensation, but our president did not narrow it down, he said. The fundamental center of gravity of the agreement is Palestine issue," he added.

Erdogan said late Monday that more than 10,000 tons of supplies will sail to Gaza from Turkey before the Eid al-Fitr religious holiday in early July, prompting Hamas to thank Erdogan for his efforts to ease the blockade.

The accord will pave the way for the restoration of bilateral relations more than six years after Israeli commandos stormed a Gaza-bound Turkish aid flotilla in international waters, killing nine Turkish activists and injuring another 30, one of whom succumbed to his injuries nearly four years later.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed and the lifting of Israels blockade.

In 2013, Netanyahu voiced his regret for the attack.

On Monday, months of talks between the two countries finally bore fruit, with Turkey announcing that a deal would be signed the following day to normalize relations with Israel.

According to the deal, Israel will pay a total of $20 million in compensation to the families of the Mavi Marmara victims.

Turning to Egypt, Yildirim said relations with Cairo will begin at the ministerial level.

"It may happen. There is no obstacle. Actually, we are ready. We do not have any reservations," he said.

Asked whether a Turkish minister will go to Egypt or a meeting will be held, Yildirim said, "Mutual. Egypt [ministers] will come, ours will go. Businessmen may come, cultural exchanges are possible, military mutual contacts may be reached. These are all possible, there is no problem."

Although there was a military coup against democracy in Egypt, Yildirim added, "Lets put it aside but on the other hand life goes on. We are living in the same region. We need ourselves."

Egypt's first democratically elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, was ousted by the military in a 2013 military coup following protests against his presidency.

He has since been handed life-in-prison and death sentences for "conspiring against Egypt" -- allegedly with Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanons Hezbollah -- and for escaping jail in 2011.

He has also been sentenced to a 20-year prison term for allegedly committing murder.

Morsi and his co-defendants, along with a number of independent observers, say the charges are politically driven.

Since Morsi's ouster and imprisonment, Egyptian authorities have launched a harsh crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood group -- killing hundreds and jailing tens of thousands.

Anadolu Agency
The foreign minister of Palestine on Tuesday welcomed plans to normalize diplomatic relations between Turkey and Israel after a six-year break.

"We are pleased with the Turkey-Israel agreement. We emphasize that the Turkey's efforts on Gaza should be carried out over Palestinian government," Riyad al-Maliki told Palestinian public radio.

Al-Maliki said Palestine welcomed Turkey's efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and lifting the blockade against it.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Monday that more than 10,000 tons of supplies will sail to Gaza from Turkey before the Eid al-Fitr religious holiday in early July.

Diplomatic relations between the Turkey and Israel were suspended in 2010 after Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara -- a Turkish aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip -- in international waters.

The attack on the six civilian vessels, which had been trying to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, resulted in the death of nine Turkish citizens and left another 30 injured, one of whom later succumbed to his injuries.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed and the lifting of Israels blockade.

In 2013, Netanyahu voiced his regret for the attack.

Anadolu Agency
Turkey and Israel separately signed a reconciliation deal on Tuesday aiming to normalize relations after a six-year hiatus, Turkish diplomatic sources said.

The agreement was signed by the Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu in Ankara at 11 a.m. local time (0800GMT) in a closed meeting.

Dore Gold, the Israeli Foreign Ministrys director-general, signed the agreement at a similar event in Jerusalem, the ministry said in a statement.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has indicated that Turkey and Israel would re-appoint ambassadors after the deal was approved.

According to Israel Radio, Israel's security cabinet is due to approve the deal on Wednesday but Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, both ministers with the far-right Jewish Home party, said they would reject the deal.

If approved, the agreement will be presented to Israels parliament, the Knesset.

Turkey and Israel reached an initial reconciliation agreement late Sunday. Diplomatic relations between the two countries were suspended after Israeli troops stormed a Gaza-bound aid ship in international waters in May 2010, killing 10 Turkish activists.

The Mavi Marmara was among six civilian vessels that had been trying to break Israel's blockade of Gaza when they were boarded by Israeli commandos.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Netanyahu voiced his regret for the attack.

On Monday, months of talks between the two countries finally bore fruit, with Turkey announcing that a deal would be signed the following day, normalizing relations with Israel.

According to the deal, Israel will pay $20 million in compensation to the families of the Mavi Marmara victims.

Also, 10,000 tons of supplies will sail to Gaza from Turkey on Friday, Yildirim announced on Monday.

Germany welcomed the reconciliation and Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer told a news conference in Berlin it would have positive impact on regional stability.

The rapprochement between these two important countries, two close partners of Germany, is a contribution to stability in the region, he said. We hope that yesterdays agreement will lead to a permanent improvement in relations. There is a big potential for a close cooperation between these countries, both in terms of economic and political cooperation.

Anadolu Agency
Russia and Turkey could soon resume dialogue regarding the Syrian crisis, as part of the normalization of relations between the two countries, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a joint press conference with his French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault in Paris, Lavrov said there was a "window of normalizing contact" with Turkey after Ankara presented condolences to the family of the Russian pilot whose plane was shot down for violating Turkish airspace in November 2015.

I believe we and our Turkish partners will resume cooperation to solve the Syrian crisis, Lavrov said.

He said he would meet Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu at the Black Sea Economic Cooperation conference in Russias Sochi on Friday.

"We had until recently very close contacts with Turkey on the Syrian issue, but they were interrupted for the reasons that we all know," Lavrov said.

The statement comes following phone talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday.

The two leaders discussed bilateral relations and cooperation on regional issues and humanitarian crises and agreed to restore cooperation, including in the spheres of trade, tourism and the fight against terrorism.

Both French and Russian foreign ministers also condemned Tuesday night's deadly terror attack at Istanbul Ataturk Airport, in which more than 40 people, including foreigners, were killed and hundreds of others were injured.

Lavrov and Ayrault agreed on the need to jointly fight against terrorism.

"At the moment we want to express our solidarity with the Turkish people, with all our friends, to express our sympathy and condolences to the relatives of the victims [] Boosting international cooperation is needed to combat terrorism," Ayrault said.

Lavrov for his part pointed to "gaps" in the fight against terrorism and called on the international community to unify on its combat against terrorism, against Daesh in particular.

Anadolu Agency
Russia is Turkeys eternal neighbor, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Sunday, as the nations put a seven-month diplomatic and economic freeze behind them.

Speaking at an event at the recently inaugurated Osmangazi Bridge crossing Izmit Bay, Yildirim said: Russia is our eternal neighbor therefore the temporary deterioration in our relations is not something any of us wanted.

He added: Our priority target is to remain friends with all the countries neighboring the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea; to use the opportunities with them instead of having crises; to increase our trading relations; to improve our cultural exchanges [and] tourism; and to boost mutual investments.

Turkey and Russia restored ties this week after falling out over the shooting down last November of a Russian warplane that had violated Turkish airspace at the Syrian border.

Turning to other recent events, Yildirim said 29 suspects had been arrested to date in connection with Tuesdays terrorist attack on Istanbuls Ataturk International Airport.

Details will be revealed in time, he said. Its true that foreign nationals were also among the suspects. We will take all the possibilities into consideration.

He also revealed Turkey will start work on another bridge linked Asia and Europe in March next year.

Construction of a bridge crossing the Canakkale (Dardanelles) Strait would begin on March 18, when the country honors the Ottoman soldiers who defeated the Allied naval attack on Gelibolu (Gallipoli) in 1915.

Anadolu Agency
Turkeys normalization of ties with Israel and Russia is based on principles of mutual interest and respect, regional cooperation, peace and security, Turkish presidents spokesman Ibrahim Kalin has said.

In remarks made in a column that appeared in the English-language Daily Sabah newspaper Saturday, Kalin said the thaw in ties with Israel and Russia would have significant consequences for Ankaras foreign policy and regional peace and stability.

He said the recent steps had the potential to help with the two protracted problems of Palestine and Syria as well as the fight against Daesh and PKK terrorism.

Ankara struck a deal with Tel Aviv government last week after a six-year hiatus over the latters storming a Gaza-bound aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters in May 2010 and killing 10 Turkish activists.

The agreement, according to Kalin, opens a new era between the two countries on two important areas: Turkish-Israeli relations and the situation in Gaza.

He said two countries would exchange ambassadors and restart economic and touristic relations.

The deal also paved the way for Ankara to send an aid ship carrying 11,000 tons of supplies for the people living in the Gaza Strip. The ship arrived at Israels Ashdod port Sunday.

Kalin said Turkey would continue to support the right of Palestinians to seek an independent state and end the Israeli occupation.

Turkey will continue to have relations with all Palestinian groups and help all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. By normalizing relations with Israel, Turkey will also have a higher chance to contribute to the peace process and prevent unnecessary tensions and loss of life.

This holds true for the highly critical and sensitive situation in and around Masjid al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, he said.

Turkey and Russia also restored ties last week after falling out over the shooting down last November of a Russian warplane that had violated Turkish airspace at the Syrian border.

Kalin said the key outcome of the new era between Turkish-Russia relations would be about the future of the Syrian war and the fight against terrorism.

He said Turkeys position on the Syrian war and the future of Bashar al-Assad was well-known.

A renewed effort between Turkey and Russia will have the potential to contain the situation in Syria. This will also help Turkey fight more effectively against Daesh terrorism coming from the Syrian lands, he said.

Anadolu Agency
Kremlin labeled absurd NATOs concerns about Russian threats at a time when Europe and the Middle East are facing terror attacks.

"It is absurd to speak about a threat emanating from Russia when dozens of people die in the center of Europe and hundreds of people die in the Middle East daily," presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday, according to the Russian News Agency.

"Only an absolutely short-sighted organization can distort accents in such a way," Peskov said.

The comments came as the leaders of 28 NATO member countries gathered Friday in Poland for a two-day summit.

Addressing a forum in Warsaw hours before the key summits kickoff, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance would take major decisions to address concerns of member states over a more assertive Russia.

Today, we will agree to enhance our forward presence in the east of the alliance. In Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and here in Poland, he said.

We will deploy, by rotation, a robust, multinational battalion in each of the countries. Making clear that an attack against one ally will be met by forces from across the alliance, he added.

Stoltenberg stressed that these measures were not aimed at a new confrontation with Russia: We do not want a new Cold War. The Cold War is history. And it should remain history.

He went on to say that NATO will continue to seek constructive and meaningful dialogue with Russia.

But, Peskov warned, of course, it will, perhaps, be hardly possible to find some ground for interaction," between Russia and NATO, if the alliance deploys new aviation groups and land force units, bringing them closer to the Russian borders and if the image of an enemy is intensively sought to unleash anti-Russia hysteria and implant Russophobia.

Asked whether Russia sees NATO as an enemy, Peskov said, "Russia is not looking for it; it sometimes states its presence, Tass reported.

Peskov said Moscow is closely following the NATO summit, adding, "We hope that common sense will prevail after all."

The spokesperson said that Russia has always been open to dialogue and is interested in cooperation, but only mutually beneficial [cooperation] that takes into account mutual interests.

Anadolu Agency
Turkey is in the process of giving citizenship to Syrians who have never been involved in any terrorism related activities and who are seen as useful to the country, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said on Monday.

Speaking at a press conference following a Cabinet meeting in the Turkish capital Ankara, Kurtulmus said: Our interior ministry has not yet completed the works on the issue of giving citizenship to Syrians. Our ministry is working on the issue in detail.

Kurtulmus said work is ongoing to pave the way for Turkish citizenship for Syrians who can be of use to Turkey, who have never been involved in terrorism, and who can create a bridge between Turkey and Syria.

Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earlier this month that millions of Syrians living in Turkey would have the chance to become citizens of the country that has given them shelter.

Around 2.7 million Syrians, who have fled the civil war in their country, are being sheltered at camps inside Turkey.

Syria has remained locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than 250,000 people have been killed and more than 10 million have been displaced, according to UN figures.

The conflict in Syria has now driven more than 4 million people  a sixth of the countrys population  to seek sanctuary in neighboring countries, making it the largest refugee crisis in a quarter of a century, according to the UN.

Anadolu Agency
By PTI: Colombo, Jul 16 (PTI) Sri Lankan opposition party JVP today accused the Maithripala Sirisena government of failing to stop the large number of Indian trawlers and compromising on the fishermen issue on which the livelihoods of the people in Northern areas depend.

"These are the resources of our northern people. They have no other livelihoods such as employment in big factories," Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the JVP who is also the chief opposition whip in parliament, said in Jaffna.

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He said the government was incapable of stopping the large number of Indian trawlers who breach the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL) and do fishing in Sri Lankan waters.

"Not only they (Indians) do illegal fishing they destroy the environment," Dissanayake said referring to bottom trawling techniques used by the Indians.

"We now understand that the government is to allow certain days of a month with an exclusive zone for the Indians to do their illegal fishing. This must be stopped," he added.

Several days ago the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in answer to Dissanayake in parliament has said that the government was looking at alternate ways to stop bottom trawling by the Indians.

He said the views of Sri Lankan fisher community would be sought in arriving at any solution.

The issue of poaching by both sides, mostly by the Indians in Sri Lankan waters, has been discussed at very highest levels between the two governments.

The JVP also remains opposed to the proposed Economic and Technology Cooperative Agreement (ETCA) between the two countries. PTI CORR SUA SUA TRK

--- ENDS ---
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu paid his respects Tuesday at one of two war cemeteries in Myanmar where Ottoman soldiers captured by the British during World War I were buried.

Cavusoglu traveled to the central Magway Region to visit the Thayet War Cemetery after holding talks Monday with Myanmars leaders, State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Htin Kyaw, during an official visit to political capital Nay Pyi Taw.

The ceremony at the cemetery, attended by a Turkish delegation and Thayet Districts administrator Aung Cho Oo, began with a minute of silence for the Ottoman prisoners of war, who were captured during WWI campaigns in the Middle East and forced into physical labor in Myanmar.

The Turkish flag was then hoisted as the countrys national anthem played, before Cavusoglu placed a wreath on a memorial monument and offered a prayer.

He then signed a guestbook at the memorial burial grounds, commemorating the brave martyrs who fought and died in prisoner of war camps in Myanmar trying to defend and protect our dear nation during World War I.

It is our duty to pay a visit to the martyrs buried at the Thayet Turkish Cemetery. Even if they are buried thousands of kilometers away from home, it is our duty to make the memory of our self-sacrificing martyrs live forever, he read.

Our martyrs who lived here have made the roads, railways, dams and national parks, and have contributed toward the development of Myanmar whilst being held captive, he said, adding that they had formed the foundation of relations with Myanmar and fostered its friendship with Turkey.

They spent their lives away from home, from their families and loved ones to fight courageously and not even be able to be buried in their nation. I bow in respect to the memory of our dear martyrs, Cavusoglu stressed.

A member of the local Muslim community then recited verses from the Quran.

After the ceremony, Cavusoglu told Anadolu Agency correspondents that the Turkish governments maintenance efforts at the war cemetery through the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) were the countrys duty to those interred at the site.

Underlining that there are cemeteries worldwide where those who fought for Turkey have been buried, Cavusoglu said TIKA seeks to reconstruct such memorial sites in the manner they deserve.

It is unfortunate that we could not come to visit this cemetery until this day. With this visit, we hope to inaugurate a beginning by raising the flag and offering a prayer for our martyrs, he said. After seeing this cemetery today, I once again feel pride in my nation, my country and my people.

Cavusoglu also visited the local Tha Har Ya library constructed by TIKA, surveying some of the books on its shelves.

The foreign minister traveled from Myanmar to Sri Lanka later in the day.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has ruled out any changes to Turkeys anti-terrorism laws.

In remarks made during his address to parliamentarians in Justice and Development (AK) Party groups meeting in Ankara Tuesday, Yildirim said Turkey is in a struggle for the country's unity, solidarity and perpetuity.

"Under these circumstances, it is out of question to change our anti-terror laws. Even if this costs visa-free travel, let it go."

The EU and Turkey signed a deal on March 18, which aims to discourage irregular migration through the Aegean Sea by taking stricter measures against human traffickers and improving the conditions of nearly three million Syrian refugees in Turkey.

The deal also allows for the acceleration of Turkeys EU membership bid and visa-free travel for Turkish nationals within the Schengen area, on the condition that Ankara meets 72 requirements set by the EU.

While Turkey fulfilled most of the criteria last month, differences between Brussels and Ankara on anti-terror legislation have forestalled the visa liberalization deal.

According to EU, Turkey must revise its legislation and practices on terrorism in line with European standards" in order for visa liberalization for Turkish citizens to enter into force.

But Ankara has firmly rejected any such change, stressing that it is not realistic to expect such changes at a time when Turkey is fighting terror organizations such as the PKK and Daesh.

Turkish premier also highlighted Turkey's fight against the terrorist group PKK since last July. "The state took every necessary measure to provide peace and security of its people," Yildirim said.

The PKK  listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the EU  resumed its 30-year armed campaign against the Turkish state in July 2015.

Since then, over 500 security personnel, including troops, police officers, and village guards, have been martyred, and more than 5,000 PKK terrorists killed in operations across Turkey and northern Iraq.

- German motion rejected

The premier also talked about the German parliament's recent approval of a non-binding resolution recognizing Armenian claims of "genocide" during the 1915 events.

"When you look at the history books, you cannot see Turkey with anything related to genocide," Yildirim said. "Our ancestors ruled for 619 years with friendship and toleration, and never let any sect or religion to fight against each other."

Adopted by the lower house of the German parliament on June 2, the non-binding resolution accused the Ottoman government of 1915 of allegedly carrying out systematic genocide against Armenians, as well as other Christian minorities.

Turkey denies the alleged genocide, but acknowledges that there were casualties on both sides during the events taking place in World War I.

According to Turkey's viewpoint, deaths of Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 occurred after some sided with invading Russians and revolted against Ottoman forces. A subsequent relocation of Armenians resulted in numerous casualties.

Turkey describes the 1915 events as a tragedy for both sides.

Ankara has repeatedly proposed the creation of a joint commission of historians from Turkey and Armenia plus international experts to tackle the issue.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan congratulated his Russian counterpart on Russia Day, marked on June 12 as the national holiday commemorating the proclamation of Russias sovereignty.

Presidential sources told Tuesday Anadolu Agency on condition of anonymity due to the restrictions on speaking to media, that Erdogan sent a congratulatory message to Vladimir Putin on the occasion of Russia Day.

In the message sent on Sunday, Erdogan wished for the Turkish-Russian relations to rise to the level they deserve in the future, sources said.

Separately, Prime Ministry sources said Prime Minister Binali Yildirim also sent a congratulatory message to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev on Russia Day.

Following the downing of a Russian fighter jet on Nov. 24 after it had violated Turkish air space despite multiple warnings from the Turkish military, relations between the two countries soured rapidly, kicking off some Russian economic measures against Turkey, including a ban on food imports.

Anadolu Agency
Turkey's Cansuyu Charity and Solidarity Organization has said it will build wells in Niger as the country faces serious water shortages and drought.

"We will launch various campaigns to build water wells in Niger, Mesut Ceylan, the associations Africa representative, told Anadolu Agency.

He said the people of Niger are suffering because of a lack of drinking water. Many citizens of the Muslim-majority country are forced to stand in long queues to get water, especially during Ramadan, he added.

This needs to be solved urgently. For example, people should prioritize vocational training in order to stand on their own feet.

We will take the necessary initiatives with institutions and organizations related to this issue, Ceylan added.

Cansuyu Charity and Solidarity Organization has also distributed over 1,000 food aid packages to Nigerians during the holy month.

Over the past years other Turkish aid agencies have built many wells and donated humanitarian aid to Niger.

Turkish International Cooperation Agency (TIKA) has dug water wells in 30 villages in the West African state.

Niger, one of the worlds poorest countries, was ranked 188th by the UNs Human Development Index in a 2015 report.

Anadolu Agency
The Turkish Red Crescent has provided aid worth 2 billion Turkish liras ($600.8 million) to Syrian refugees since 2012, the institutions head said Wednesday.

In an interview with Anadolu Agency, Turkish Red Crescent Chairman Kerem Kinik said that the group has been trying to make the lives of around 3 million Syrian refugees easier.

The Turkish Red Crescent has been helping 3 million Syrian refugees who live inside Turkey and also has been working to help around 7 million Syrian displaced immigrants outside the country, he said.

Kinik said that the institution has 200 employees at the four Syrian-Turkish border gates. They work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to provide Turkish aid to Syrians.

Kinik added that the Turkish Red Crescent continues to provide assistance in countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chad, Ecuador, and Libya.
Turkish army howitzers have destroyed 17 Daesh targets in northern Syria, military sources said early Wednesday.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, the sources said the Daesh targets had been preparing to launch missile rockets to Turkey.

The sources added that a total of 10 terrorists were "neutralized" and that weapons depots and shelters were among the 17 targets, and were covered with fire by an air operation from anti-Daesh coalition forces as well.

Turkey has been under indiscriminate rocket attacks from neighboring Syria since mid-January. In the Kilis province alone, the local governor has confirmed that a total of 20 people have been killed and almost 70 others wounded by rockets which fell inside Turkish territory.

On a separate note, the Turkish army early Wednesday destroyed two targets in northern Iraq that belonged to the terrorist group PKK.

According to a Turkish General Staff statement, the two targets were destroyed along with terrorists in it Tuesday afternoon in the Avasin and Bazian regions.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, now on an official visit to Sri Lanka, said Wednesday in capital Colombo that the island-nations security and stability were of "high importance" due to its "strategic geography".

"I believe this visit will lead to a new phase in our relations," Cavusoglu asserted.

As part of his visit -- the first-ever visit to Sri Lanka by a Turkish foreign minister -- Cavusoglu met with his Sri Lankan counterpart, Mangala Samaraweera.

At a joint press conference held after the meeting, the Turkish FM called for stepped-up bilateral cooperation.

"The great distance between our two countries should not stop us from cooperating in numerous fields," he said.

"Sri Lanka is extending a hand to both Syrian and Iraqi refugees," he added. "This is highly appreciated."

"We are determined to strengthen our ties with Sri Lanka," Cavusoglu went on.

Ankaras top diplomat added: "We have agreed to boost economic relations in numerous areas, including energy, security, tourism, education, culture and health, with a focus on humanitarian issues."

Samaraweera, for his part, said Sri Lanka appreciated Turkeys ongoing humanitarian aid efforts, noting that the two countries had signed memorandums of understanding aimed at bolstering cooperation in the fields of economy and technology.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called U.S. President Barack Obama to express Turkey's support in the aftermath of Sunday's massacre in the U.S. city of Orlando that left dozens of people dead, sources at the Turkish presidency said Wednesday.

According to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media, Erdogan said the Orlando shooting "once again" revealed the need for the international community to be together in the struggle against terrorism.

The Turkish president also said Islam must not be associated with terrorism, adding that terrorism was "one of the greatest crimes against humanity."

The two leaders agreed to maintain cooperation and consultation on any topic related to the Middle East, particularly Syria.

Meanwhile, during his address to foreign ambassadors and Foreign Economic Relations Board members at the Presidential Palace in Ankara late Wednesday, Erdogan said: "Terrorism is a common problem of humanity."

He added that Turkey had been "always open" to cooperation against terrorism.

"Let's take up a position against terrorists regardless of their identity, discourse, roots and faith," he said.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim also called U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, and condemned Orlando shooting, and said Turkey shared their grief.

U.S. citizen Omar Mateen killed 49 victims and wounded 53 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

The massacre is considered by many to be the deadliest shooting in American history.

Anadolu Agency
Turkey's Permanent Delegation to the EU Friday rejected the European Parliament's Turkey Progress Report over its request for recognition of so-called Armenian "genocide".

The report, which the EP passed in April by 375 votes in favor and 133 against, arrived at Turkey's Permanent Delegation to the EU on Friday.

According to diplomatic sources from the delegation speaking anonymously due to restrictions on speaking with the media, the report was rejected over its remarks calling for recognition of the 1915 events as so-called "genocide".

Turkey also returned a previous report in spring 2015 for the same reason.

"Turkey will reject the European Parliament Progress Report on Turkey to be voted on Thursday if it includes any mention of an Armenian genocide," Turkeys then-EU Minister Volkan Bozkir said.

Turkey denies the alleged Armenian genocide, but acknowledges that there were casualties on both sides during the events during World War I.

In Turkey's view, the deaths of Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 occurred after some sided with invading Russians and revolted against Ottoman forces. A subsequent relocation of Armenians resulted in numerous casualties.

Turkey describes the 1915 events as a tragedy for both sides.

Ankara has repeatedly proposed the creation of a joint commission of historians from Turkey and Armenia plus international experts to tackle the issue.

Anadolu Agency
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated Turkeys goal of self-sufficiency in defense as he launched a new warship on Saturday.

Speaking at the launch of the TCG Burgazada, an indigenously produced corvette, at the Istanbul naval shipyard, Erdogan said Turkey would soon be in a position to make our own aircraft carriers. Turkey, especially, cannot stall on defense industry and military issues because of our strategic geographical location.

The president has previously said Turkeys defense industry will be self-sufficient by 2023, the centenary of the declaration of the republic.

The Burgazada is the third Ada-class corvette produced under the MILGEM project. The first was the Heybeliada, launched in 2008.

The ships, which are named after the Princes Islands off Istanbul, are designed for search and rescue, patrol and anti-submarine warfare duties and are armed with a 76 millimeter gun, missiles and torpedoes and carry a Seahawk helicopter.

The ships have a displacement of 2,400 tons, a maximum speed of more than 29 knots (33 miles an hour) and a range of 3,500 nautical miles.

Erdogan also performed a welding ceremony on the TCG Kinaliada, another MILGEM corvette that is due to be completed in May next year.

Defense Minister Fikri Isik said Turkey was among the top 10 nations in military ship production.

Turkey's domestic production rate in the defense industry increased to 60 percent from 24 percent, he said. Reducing dependence on foreign arms imports is a key goal of the Turkish defense industry.

Also present at the ceremony, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the government had invested $30 billion in the defense industry over the last 14 years.

Turkey is in a fire circle and many oppressed nations wait for our support, he said. Thus, we have to improve our defense and deterrence capability. When we do that, we need to use local and national resources.

Anadolu Agency
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said that the recent Gulshan attack had dented the image of Bangladesh on the global stage.

By Sahidul Hasan Khokon: Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina lamented that the Gulshan terror attack had dented the country's prestigious position at the global stage which was earned through resisting militancy, terrorism and development activities.

"We're marching towards development and have taken the country to an esteemed position. Bangladesh is now experiencing what other parts of the world is experiencing," she said.

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Hasina made the remarks at a press conference on Sunday at her official residence Gonobhaban after she returned from her three-day Mongolia tour.

YOUTH FROM ELITE FAMILIES TOO JOIN TERRORISM

She said that although there was a perception that mostly madrasa students and children from poor families got involved in militancy, now it is seen the children from elite families too are indulging in terrorism though their demands hardly remain unfulfilled.

"The children of rich families are indulging in terrorism with a lust for having Hur-Pori hereafter," she said.

Bangladesh will work closely with its allies to combat terrorism. The perpetrators must be found out anyway she said.

Hasina also said that some sort of international conspiracy is going on with Bangladesh.



TERRORISM IS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON



The premier, however said that the attacks did not affect Bangladesh's image alone as terrorism appeared to be a global phenomenon with even developed nations like the US and France being victims of terror strikes.

"We will have to move forward with self confidence and spontaneous peoples vigil will deter the militants," Hasina said urging people to keep an eye particularly on the activities of youths in their neighbourhoods.

When asked about her government's stand in accepting foreign assistance in combating terrorism she said, " We all need to assist each other as terrorism is a global phenomenon".

MUTUAL COOPERATION IS VITAL TO COMBAT TERRORISM

"We need mutual cooperation. We need to share intelligence about the sources of their (militants) finance, weapons and modus operandi," she said.

"Many a times terrorists take shelter in neighbouring countries and hence it is important to have good relations with them and seek their support in such matters. We have very cordial relations with the West Bengal government," the PM said.

The premier said she urged world leaders to find the root cause of such attacks during the ASEM summit a day after her return home from Asia-Europe Meeting Summit in Mongolia with its focus being the threat of terrorism worldwide.

The premier however declined to divulge details of the investigations into the back-to-back attacks, which police earlier said were carried out by homegrown Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).

Also read:

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It will not stop here: Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina fears more militant attacks



--- ENDS ---
Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday gave his backing to the redevelopment of Istanbuls Gezi Park - a project that sparked nationwide protests in 2013.

One of the issues that we have to be brave [about] is Gezi Park in Taksim, Erdogan said at a meeting on Istanbuls heritage. We will construct that historical building there.

He said the square should house also an opera house.

The Gezi Park protest spread across the country in June 2013, leaving eight protesters and one police officer dead and dozens injured. Hundreds were arrested.

The barracks - Topcu Kislasi - were originally built in 1780 and destroyed in 1940.

Referring to the recent vote by the German parliament to recognize the deaths of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as so-called genocide, Erdogan suggested creating a museum display of past German, French and American misdeeds within the replica of barracks which can be called either history museum or city museum.

On June 2, the Bundestag passed a resolution accusing the Ottoman government of carrying out so-called genocide against Armenians.

Turkey acknowledges there were casualties on both sides after some Armenians sided with the invading Russians but refutes allegations that the Armenian deaths in 1915 amounted to genocide.

Ankara has repeatedly proposed the creation of an international commission of historians to resolve the issue.

Anadolu Agency
Turkey condemned the life sentence handed down by Egypt Saturday to former President Mohamed Morsi, said an official statement.

We express our deep concern and condemn the life imprisonment given to President Morsi who has remained in prison since 2013, said a statement posted on the Turkish Foreign Ministry website.

We believe that this decision will not contribute to Egypt's peace and stability.

Morsi, along with 10 co-defendants, were accused by Egypts army-backed authorities of spying for Qatar and leaking classified documents to the Gulf statelet during his single year as president.

A court on Saturday sentenced Morsi to life on charges of "leading a terrorist group"  in reference to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was blacklisted by the Egyptian authorities in late 2013.

The court, however, cleared Morsi of charges of spying for Qatar, which was a main backer of Morsis administration while he was in power.

Egypt's first democratically elected leader, Morsi was ousted by the military in a 2013 military coup following protests against his presidency.

He has since been slapped with life-in-prison and death sentences for "conspiring against Egypt"  with Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanons Hezbollah  and for breaking out of jail in 2011.

He has also been sentenced to a 20-year jail term for allegedly committing murder.

Morsi and his co-defendants, along with a number of independent observers, say the charges are politically driven.

Since Morsi's ouster and imprisonment, the Egyptian authorities have launched a harsh crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood group  killing hundreds and jailing tens of thousands  while relations between Cairo and Doha have nosedived.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish army howitzers have destroyed six Daesh targets in northern Syria, military sources said Sunday.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the media, the sources said the Daesh targets had been preparing to launch rockets to Turkey.

The sources added that a total of eight terrorists were "neutralized" and that Katyusha rockets and mortar shells were among the six targets, and were covered with fire from an air operation by anti-Daesh coalition forces as well.

Turkey has been under indiscriminate rocket attacks from neighboring Syria since mid-January. In the Kilis province alone, a total of 20 people have been killed and almost 70 others wounded by rockets which fell inside Turkish territory.

Anadolu Agency
Dissidents within Turkeys opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) secured Sunday vital changes to party rules that will allow them to hold a leadership vote next month.

The rebels have been fighting to remove Chairman Devlet Bahceli, who has led the party for nearly 30 years, following the partys poor showing in last Novembers general election.

Sundays meeting at an Ankara hotel saw 659 delegates secure the right to hold a leadership election - easily passing the 594 threshold - at an extraordinary conference on July 10. The rules had previously barred a change of leader at an extraordinary meeting.

Four potential candidates to replace Bahceli - Meral Aksener, Sinan Ogan, Umit Ozdag and Koray Aydin - appeared together at the meeting, which was overseen by a court-appointed board of trustees.

The rebels had attempted to call a party congress earlier this year but were blocked by the leadership, leading to a legal case that finally resulted in Sundays meeting.

The revolt among members was sparked by the Nov. 1 general election that saw the MHP narrowly enter parliament as the party with the least number of seats - 40 in the 550-deputy Grand National Assembly.

Party officials loyal to Bahceli dismissed Sundays decision as "null and void" and claimed just 495 delegates had participated.

One, speaking on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to the media, told Anadolu Agency the party would not "even bother to take their objection to the court".

Bahceli said no one should recognize what he called an illegal meeting "under any circumstances".

Anadolu Agency
The Turkish Foreign Ministry on Sunday denied claims that Turkish security forces killed Syrian civilians attempting to cross the border.

In a statement, ministry spokesman Tanju Bilgic said the allegations do not reflect the truth.

He added: Our security forces are acting within a completely legal framework while intervening on border incidents and illegal crossing attempts.

The U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed eight Syrians were killed Saturday night as they attempted to cross the border north of the Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughur. Opposition groups in Syria claimed 11 were shot.

Anadolu Agency
PKK terrorists attacked a kindergarten with improvised explosive devices and Molotov cocktails in Turkey's eastern Van province on Sunday, a security source said.

No teacher or schoolchildren were present at the time of attack since Sunday is normally an off day at schools in Turkey.

According to the source, who spoke to Anadolu Agency on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media, terrorists detonated their explosives inside the nursery building in the provinces Ipekyolu district.

A large section of the nursery was destroyed, while a fire also broke out after the explosion.

Police later neutralized a bomb found in the schoolyard, the source added.

The PKK  listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and EU  resumed its 30-year armed campaign against the Turkish state in July 2015.

Since then, over 500 security personnel, including troops, police officers, and village guards, have been martyred, and more than 5,000 PKK terrorists killed in operations across Turkey and northern Iraq.

Anadolu Agency
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday urged the international community to ensure an honorable life for refugees suffering xenophobia and discrimination across the world.

In a statement released for World Refugee Day, Erdogan said such an honorable life "is the political and moral responsibility of the international community.

"Otherwise, the efforts of Turkey with a few countries will not be enough for a solution to the [refugee] issue," he added.

Erdogan said Turkey continually took action, in contrast to the international community's inaction, hosting more than three million refugees and making sacrifices to provide them with a decent life.

"I hope World Refugee Day reminds the international community of its responsibilities and the conscientious values it should have," the president said.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Turkey was a hope for oppressed people and vowed the country would not turn a deaf ear in the face of screams.

"We did not ask those who wanted a hand from us their language, religion or race; we extended our hand. Today and tomorrow as well, we will stand beside them," Yildirim wrote on his Twitter account.

A record 65.3 million people around the world were displaced by war and persecution in 2015, the UNs refugee agency said Monday.

Of these, nearly a third - 21.3 million people - were forced to seek sanctuary abroad.

Anadolu Agency
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that the "parallel state in Turkey had been broken into pieces like a "glass palace".

"We saw and are seeing the fate of the betrayal gang, which was called the parallel state structure," Erdogan told NGO representatives during an iftar (fast-breaking dinner) in the capital, Ankara.

Headed by Fetullah Gulen, a U.S.-based preacher who runs a network of schools and commercial enterprises in Turkey and around the world, what is known as the parallel state allegedly represents a clandestine group of Turkish bureaucrats and senior officials.

These have been accused of being embedded in the countrys institutions, including the judiciary and the police, in an attempt to overthrow the government.

Erdogan said non-governmental organizations "strongly" supported Turkey in its fight against terrorist organizations and the parallel structure.

"I expect you [NGOs] to be in solidarity also in other fields," he added.

Anadolu Agency
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday slammed the European Union for failing to fulfill its end of the bargain regarding the EU-Turkey readmission deal, saying that Turkey may also hold a referendum to determine if they should continue with negotiations or not, while he harshly criticized the bloc for being untrustworthy.

Speaking at the graduation ceremony of Fatih Sultan Mehmet University in Istanbul, Erdogan said that Turkish citizens are not eager for visa-free travel, and that it is the EU who is after Turkey over fears on what would happen if Syrian refugees arrive at their borders, in response to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who said earlier that Erdogan would need to make an explanation to Turkish people if the deal fails.

"When 60,000 people gathered in Edirne, they got very anxious, and started wondering about whether all those people would cross into Bulgaria or Greece," Erdogan said.

"But in the meantime we are hosting three million refugees. Why? Because we care about people, unlike you. You have no such concerns. All this readmission agreement and other stuff just shows how untrustworthy you all are. You are not keeping your promise'' he added.

''Britain has always expressed that it was on Turkey's side over EU membership, what happened now?'' Erdogan asked, and continued by saying that the readmission deal has proved Europe's hypocrisy.

The president also said that the EU does not accept Turkey's accession on purpose.

''The EU does not accept Turkey's membership because the majority of our citizens are Muslims'' he said and continued by adding that they cannot prove otherwise.

He noted that one of the former French foreign ministers had told him this openly while they were having a trilateral meeting with former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Source: Daily Sabah
Turkey did not expect the U.K.s decision to leave the EU, Turkeys president has admitted on Friday.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended a fast-breaking iftar dinner hosted by the All Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (TUMSIAD) and wished the best to the U.K. after a historic referendum on Thursday, in which voters opted to leave the EU.

We, along with the whole world, were expecting yes for the referendum result, Erdogan said.

U.K. voters opted to leave the EU in a historic referendum on Thursday, sparking worries across European capitals over the political future of the bloc.

Almost 52 percent of voters rejected their country's 43-year EU membership.

Erdogan stressed that Turkey has always given its due importance to the acceleration of Turkey's EU membership bid but the bloc has always been delaying the process.

Double standards are no longer hidden. They have put more obstacles on Turkeys path. They have been keeping Turkey waiting at their door for 53 years.

During his speech, Erdogan also criticized EU's asylum procedures.

The EU blocs bad humanitarian and immoral approach to immigrants has led to a serious debate about the trustworthiness of the European Union, he said.

The EU and Turkey signed a refugee deal on March 18, which aimed to discourage irregular migration through the Aegean Sea by taking stricter measures against human traffickers and improving the conditions of nearly 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.

The deal also allows for the acceleration of Turkeys EU membership bid and visa-free travel for Turkish nationals within the Schengen area, on the condition that Ankara meets 72 requirements set by the EU.

Although Turkey fulfilled most of the criteria last month, differences between Brussels and Ankara on anti-terror legislation have forestalled the visa-liberalization deal.

Erdogan said the EU was being Islamophobic vis-a-vis Turkey.

I am saying now that the EUs approach to Turkey is Islamophobic, Erdogan added.

Turkey began its EU accession talks in 2005.In 1963, Turkey and the European Economic Community (the EUs former name) signed an association agreement.

Anadolu Agency
The move, intended to reach out to people across the country, comes at a time when his Aam Aadmi Party is gearing up for Assembly elections in a number of states including Goa, Punjab and Gujarat.

By India Today Web Desk: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is holding an interactive session, titled 'Talk to AK' today. People can ask him questions over phone or through social media. The viewers can also connect with the Delhi CM by sending text messages. Arrangements were made at Delhi Secretariat from where Kejriwal is interacting with the people.

The move, intended to reach out to people across the country, comes at a time when his Aam Aadmi Party is gearing up for Assembly elections in a number of states including Goa, Punjab and Gujarat.

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Here are the live updates



Delhi CM Kejriwal's 'Talk to AK' begins.

You should be ready for scrutiny when you are in public life.

I have given interviews to the media from time to time, but I often find questions of the people are different from the media.

You can only face the people if you are honest from within.

For the last 1 year there is an AAP government in Delhi. We have always said there is no dearth of money in politics, there is a dearth of intent.

We are saving a lot of money in government programmes. The work of Rs 100 is being completed in Rs 60-70

The government has launched a dedicated website - 'talktoak.com' - through which people can ask questions directly. They can also ask questions by dialing 011-23392999.

If 'Talk to AK' gets good response from people it will be held every month, an official said.



"We have received thousands of questions through messages and social media in the last few days. The Chief Minister will answer people's questions. Music composer Vishal Dadlani will moderate the hour-long session," a government spokesperson said.

To a question on whether the programme is on the line of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's monthly radio programme 'Maan ki Baat', he said it is a different programme where Kejriwal will take people's questions directly.

"For a long time, the media team of the Chief Minister was working on the project. He is expected to start the interaction by speaking about the AAP government's performance over the past year and a half and thereafter he will take questions from people," another official said.

--- ENDS ---
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has reiterated Turkey's determination in fight against terror organizations.

Speaking after iftar (Ramadan fast-breaking dinner) with the Justice and Development (AK) Party's executive board members in Ankara on Friday, Yildirim was referring to the EU's demand of a change in Ankara's legislation on terrorism in exchange for visa liberalization for Turkish citizens.

"There is nothing more important than Turkey's unity, togetherness, and territorial integrity," he said.

No deal or EU's visa exemption can change our determination in the fight against terrorism, he added.

Turkey and the EU signed a refugee deal on March 18, which aims to discourage irregular migration through the Aegean Sea by taking stricter measures against human traffickers and improving the conditions of nearly 3 million Syrian refugees in Turkey.

The deal also allows for the acceleration of Turkeys EU membership bid and visa-free travel for Turkish nationals within the Schengen area, on the condition that Ankara meets 72 requirements set by the EU.

Although Turkey fulfilled most of the criteria last month, differences between Brussels and Ankara on anti-terror legislation have forestalled the visa-liberalization deal.

Anadolu Agency
Turkey will normalize relations with Israel if Tel Aviv compensates families of Turkish victims killed in the 2010 aid flotilla attack and lifts its embargo on Gaza, Turkish foreign minister has said.

In remarks made at an iftar fast-breaking dinner organized by the Womens and Democracy Association in the Turkish resort city of Antalya late Sunday, Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey and Israel were continuing their negotiations for normalization of bilateral ties.

But Cavusoglu made it clear that Ankara would not make any concessions to Tel Aviv on two of its conditions.

One of these [conditions] is compensation for the families of our brothers who lost their lives and fell martyrs, he said, while referring to the incident in 2010 when nine Turkish citizens were killed by Israeli forces in an attack on the Mavi Marmara.

The second one is lifting of the embargo on our Palestinian brothers, who for years have been under persecution, living in difficult conditions under embargo, where infrastructure has been destroyed as a result of attacks, he added.

Cavusoglu recalled that Turkey previously said: We will normalize our relations if our conditions are fulfilled, adding: We have made no compromise on these two conditions [before] and we will not [do that now].

The minister said that normalizing ties with Israel does not mean for Turkey to remain silent when our Palestinian brothers are wronged.

He vowed Turkey would continue to deliver humanitarian and development aid to Palestinian.

In 2010, six civilian ships in a humanitarian aid flotilla were attacked in international waters by Israeli forces.

The vessels had been trying to break Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Nine Turkish citizens were killed and 30 other people injured; one person died nearly four years later after being critically injured in the attack.

Turkey had demanded for an official apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed in the attack as well as the removal of Israels blockade on Gaza in the aftermath of the attack.

In 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to then Turkish premier and now current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the attack, while in recent months the two countries have been engaged in talks aiming at normalizing ties.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim will make a statement about reconciliation negotiations with Israel on Monday, sources at the Prime Ministry told Anadolu Agency Sunday.

According to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media, Yildirim is due to make a statement at 1 p.m. local time (1000 GMT) regarding the stage at which negotiations with Israel have reached.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a phone call with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas late Sunday on a recent push for normalization in Turkish-Israeli ties.

Erdogan told Abbas Ankara reached a deal with Tel Aviv on improving humanitarian conditions in Gaza, according to Turkish presidential sources who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to media.

Abbas said his government welcomed the developments, the sources added.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim is due to make a statement Monday at 1 p.m. local time (1000 GMT) regarding progress in the negotiations with Israel, sources at the Prime Ministry told Anadolu Agency.

In 2010, six civilian ships in a humanitarian aid flotilla were attacked in international waters by Israeli forces.

The vessels had been trying to break Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Nine Turkish citizens were killed and 30 other people injured; one person died nearly four years later after being critically injured in the attack.

Turkey had demanded an official apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed in the attack as well as the removal of Israels blockade on Gaza in the aftermath of the attack.

In 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to then Turkish premier and now President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the attack.

In recent months, the two countries have been engaged in talks aiming at normalizing ties.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish and Israeli delegations met in Rome over the weekend to finalize the reconciliation deal between the two countries, and Ankara has succeeded in receiving an apology from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, compensation for the Mavi Marmara raid victims and the lifting of the Gaza blockade after six years of diplomatic struggle.

A senior Turkish official told Daily Sabah early Monday that Turkey reached an agreement with Israel to normalize bilateral relations on Sunday in Rome, Italy.

Under the agreement, Turkey will deliver humanitarian aid and other non-military products to Gaza and make infrastructure investments in the area. Along with new residential buildings, Turkey will complete the construction of a 200-bed hospital in Gaza.

The senior Turkish official said that concrete steps will be taken to address the energy and water crisis in Gaza as part of the deal. The amount of electricity and drinking water to Gaza residents will increase and new power plants will be constructed.

The Turkey-Israel agreement will make it possible for Turkey to launch major projects in the West Bank including the Jenin industrial zone.

The Turkish official also said that there are no references to Hamas in the agreement and added that Turkey will continue supporting the Palestinian state and the people of Palestine.

"The agreement represents a diplomatic victory for Turkey, which assumed a principled and determined stance after the Mavi Marmara attack," he said.

Later on Monday, Netanyahu called the US Vice President Joe Biden. The US State Department released a statement regarding the call. "Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel called the Vice President today to thank him for encouraging normalization talks between Israel and Turkey. The Vice President congratulated the Prime Minister for progress toward reconciliation with Turkey, noting the significant positive security and economic benefits for both countries and the wider Eastern Mediterranean region," the statement read.

According to Israeli media outlets, Israel's security cabinet is set to convene this week to approve the deal. A senior Israeli official also said Sunday that Turkey and Israel have reached a deal to normalize relations.

Ankara has yet to make an official statement regarding the timing of the deal's approval. Prime Minister Binali Yldrm is expected to hold a press conference tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. regarding the details of the deal.

Israel agreed to pay compensation to the victims of the Mavi Marmara raid in addition to apologizing, leaving the Gaza blockade as the only obstacle in the way of reconciliation between Turkey and Israel. Turkey wanted humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip to be uninterruptedly guaranteed and insisted on solving the infrastructure and energy problems there.

After the Mavi Marmara raid, the Israeli government took a step toward reconciliation on March 24, 2013, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under the encouragement of U.S. President Barack Obama, apologized for the mishandling of the raid during a conference call with then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Israel also agreed to pay compensation to the families of the victims.

Having reached a consensus on lifting the Gaza blockade, Israel will reportedly write up a historic reconciliation deal with Turkey.

Turkey was a key regional ally of Israel until the two countries cut ties in 2010 following an Israeli raid on a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza that resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish and one American activist while it attempted to break the blockade.

Amid an exhausting sequence of talks between Turkey and Israel, President Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yldrm met the leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, Khaled Mashal, in Istanbul on Friday.

Erdogan and Mashal discussed how to resolve the disagreements among Palestinians as well as Turkish humanitarian assistance, a source from the presidency said.

During the meeting, Erdogan emphasized that Turkey is keen on easing the distress of Palestinians, the source, who was not named due to restrictions on speaking with the media, told Anadolu Agency.

In April of 2014, rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah signed a long-awaited reconciliation agreement that called for the formation of a Palestinian unity government tasked with overseeing Palestinian legislative and presidential elections.

Although the unity government was unveiled two months later, it has yet to take on a governing role in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, while the relationship between the two factions remains beset by a host of longstanding differences.

Representatives of the two rival groups held a series of meetings in Doha in an effort to discuss ways of implementing the agreement, but there was no breakthrough.

As Turkish-Israeli relations are coming back to life under the influence of the reconciliation deal, Russia, a country that has been in a fierce diplomatic battle with Turkey recently, declared its support for the Turkish-Israeli thaw.

President Vladimir Putin gave his backing to the Turkish and Israeli efforts to reconcile after nearly six years of frosty relations.

"The fewer problems between governments, the better," Putin said after meeting with Netanyahu, according to the state TASS news agency, and added that he views reconciliation between Turkey and Israel as "exclusively positive."

Putin spoke after hosting Netanyahu in Moscow for talks that focused on boosting bilateral ties and trying to resolve the situation in Syria.

Source: Daily Sabah and Anadolu Agency
Turkish soldiers in the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, will remain there for one more year, parliament agreed on Monday.

Minister of Defense Fikri Isik gave a brief speech at the Grand National Assembly, saying that Turkey has already extended its peacekeeping mission in Lebanon nine times.

Two Turkish Armed Forces officers and Turkish naval forces have been serving at UNIFIL base of Nakura, South Lebanon, Isik said.

It is the ninth time Turkeys parliament has extended participation in UNIFIL since it initially approved the mission in Sep. 2006. The new mandate will come into force in September this year.

UNIFIL was established in 1978 as Israel withdrew from Lebanon. The peacekeeping for is intended to provide security and help the Lebanese government rebuild its authority.

Almost 10,600 troops from 40 countries are part of the UNIFIL mission.

Anadolu Agency
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said 14,000 tons of supplies will be sailed to Gaza from Turkey before the Eid al-Fitr religious holiday early July.

Speaking at an iftar, fast-breaking, meal in the Turkish capital Ankara on Monday, Erdogan said a planned normalization of relations with Israel would see basic necessities such as food, footwear, [and] clothing sent from Mersin port in Turkey.

Diplomatic relations between the two countries were suspended in 2010 after Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara -- a Turkish aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip -- in international waters.

The attack on the six civilian vessels, which had been trying to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, resulted in the death of nine Turkish citizens and left another 30 injured, one of whom later succumbed to his injuries.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed, and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Netanyahu voiced his regret for the attack.

Russian relations

Regarding the crisis between Turkey and Russia, Erdogan went on to say: We had a crisis [over the Nov. 2015 downing of a Russian warplane].

We tried to solve our problems. I believe the letter sent to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will help increase our relations in favor of both countries.

In that letter, I expressed my deep regret over the incident and also reminded him of regional cooperation possibilities we might lead. I believe that we can leave the current ill situation, which affects both countries, to normalize the ties rapidly."

The Turkish president sent a letter to his Russian counterpart calling for the restoration of traditional friendly ties, Turkeys presidential spokesman confirmed on Monday.

Following the Nov. 2015 downing of the Russian warplane in Turkish airspace, the Kremlin ordered sanctions on food products, an end to visa-free travel, and a ban on Russian tourists taking package holidays in Turkey.

Anadolu Agency
At least 41 people were killed, 130 injured Tuesday in a triple suicide bombing and gun attack at Istanbul's main Ataturk airport, in the latest deadly strike to rock Turkey's most-populated city, which had many similarities with the deadly attacks carried out in Brussels in March.

Flights partially resumed in the airport on Wednesday morning, while many of the schedule flights were cancelled or delayed.

The assessments show that three suicide bombers carried out the attacks in three different spots at the airport, Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin said in a statement released after the attack.

Prime Minister Binali Yldrm said that initial indications suggest the Daesh terror group was behind the attack but the investigation is still underway.

A health official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to restrictions, said to the media that six injured were in a critical condition.

The blasts occurred at the entrance of international flights terminal, domestic flights terminal, and the parking lot.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said that one of the terrorists opened fire on people with an AK-47 automatic rifle and then blew himself up.

PM Yldrm said the air traffic has returned to normal after the attack.

The President met with Prime Minister Binali Yldrm and Chief of Staff Gen. Hulusi Akar at the presidential complex upon receiving news of the explosion in Istanbul. Prime Minister Binali Yldrm, Deputy PM Numan Kurtulmus, Transportation Minister Ahmet Arslan and Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Betul Sayan will travel to Istanbul.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged an international "joint fight" against terror after the attack, the fourth deadly bombing in Istanbul this year alone.

According to a Turkish official who spoke to Daily Sabah on the condition of anonymity, security forces fired shots at suspects at the international terminal's entry in an effort to neutralize them.

Eyewitnesses said that they saw some 30 ambulances enter the airport. The wounded, among them police officers, were being transferred to Bakrkoy State Hospital.

Prime Minister Binali Yldrm was briefed by Interior Minister Efkan Ala and Istanbul Governor Vasip Sahin and has ordered the formation of a crisis desk. Yldrm also arrived at the airport to follow up with the investigation.

The Turkish airport attack also follows coordinated suicide bombings at Brussels airport and a city metro station in March that left 32 people dead.

Security experts have said that there are striking similarities between Istanbul airport attack and the recent attacks in Brussels airport.

Brussels airport tweeted its condolences, saying: "Our thoughts are with the victims of the attacks at @istanbulairport.

"We wish them, their relatives & all airport staff strength & courage."

Meanwhile, United States Ambassador to Ankara John Bass has sent a tweet condemning the attack. "Horrified by tonight's attack at Ataturk airport. We mourn with the families of those lost, and pray for speedy recovery for those wounded," he said. Meanwhile, the U.S. President Barack Obama was also briefed on the attack.

There have been no claims for the responsibility of the attacks.

11 people were killed in an attack at Istanbul's city center three weeks ago. The attack, claimed by the PKK-affiliated Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), followed two suicide bombings that hit tourist-heavy areas of Istanbul this year, which were blamed on Daesh.

Located just outside Turkey's biggest city, Ataturk airport served more than 60 million passengers in 2015, making it one of the busiest in the world.

Source: Daily Sabah
Turkish police have seized on Tuesday a cache of mortar shells, belonged to terrorist group PKK, in southeastern Srnak province's municipality building during anti-terror operation.

A total of 19 mortar shells and one gun were seized by the anti-terror police officers during a raid to the building of Srnak municipality governed by the pro-PKK Peace and Democracy Party (BDP).

The cache was later destroyed in a controlled explosion.

Southeastern municipalities administered by the HDP and their regional affiliate, Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) have been accused of aiding and abetting the PKK's urban war strategy. Heavy equipment belonging to the municipalities was allegedly provided to PKK terrorists, according to reports.

There have recently been claims against BDP municipalities say that the party provided assistance to the PKK by using municipal bulldozers to assist with digging trenches and establishing roadblocks, as part of the PKK strategy to claim control over cities.

In Siirt province, a DBP municipality reportedly dug up roads to enable PKK terrorists to plant mines, and then repaved it afterward, so that the PKK could detonate the mines when military vehicles passed.

Some locals have voiced dissatisfaction with these municipalities. Some municipalities including for their alleged attempts to punish those locals who had not voted for them.

Source: Daily Sabah
Leaders from around the world expressed sadness and anger Wednesday, after an overnight terror attack on Turkeys central airport in Istanbul left at least 36 victims dead and 147 others injured.

In an early morning statement, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak condemned the suicide bombers, describing the attack as a heinous act, and called on Muslim countries to unite in combating terror.

Malaysia stands firm and ready to unite with all countries in the fight against the scourge of terrorism," he said, offering his condolences to the families of the victims, and extended Malaysias assistance to Turkey.

I strongly urge Muslim nations to unite and increase cooperation, especially in condemning and combating the acts of terror by those who blaspheme the name of Islam, he said in Facebook and Twitter postings.

Three suicide bombers were also killed in the bomb blast at Istanbuls Ataturk International Airport, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said early Wednesday.

In the U.K. late Tuesday, Prime Minister David Cameron shared his countrys support for Turkey.

Appalled by attack in Istanbul tonight. Thoughts and prayers with all those affected, he said.

The foreign minister of France, Jean-Marc Ayrault, tweeted that he was shocked, and that the French consulate in Istanbul is ready to work with Turkey.

Belgium, which recently suffered a terror attack, also condemned the deadly attack and empathized with the victims.

Our thoughts are with the victims of the attacks at Istanbul's airport. We condemn these atrocious acts of violence in Istanbul, Prime Minister Charles Michel said.

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama was scheduled to land in Turkey for an official visit just prior to the attack, prompting Foreign Minister Ditmir Bushati to strongly denounce the blast.

Strongly condemn terrorist attack in Istanbul Airport. Our thoughts are with the victims and their families, he said.

Meanwhile, Bert Koenders, the Dutch foreign minister, called his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, and extended condolences.

Greeces Foreign Ministry also shared its support for Turkey.

Disgusted and appalled by the new terrorist attack in Istanbul. We stand by our neighbors, our friends, against terror, it said.

Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjorn Jagland wrote via Twitter that the EU stands by Turkey.

Our member state Turkey suffers another deadly terrorist attack. We stand by you in these troubling times, he said.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that he was shocked when he heard the news.

Our thoughts go out the people of Turkey. Germany stands by them.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini described the deadly attack as another tragic terrorist attack in Turkey. The EU stands by the Turkish people. Our heart is with them all.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also condemned the attack and called for a global fight against terrorism.

Terror rears its ugly head yet again in our friend and neighbors airport. Extremist violence is a global threat; we must confront it together, he tweeted.

Through Canadian Foreign Minister Stephane Dions Twitter account, Canada condemned the attack, saying it stands with Turkey.

On Saudi Arabias official news agency SPA, Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud expressed his condolences to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Australian government condemned the terror attack and said it stood in solidarity with Turkey.

Our government cannot but express our shock and worry in that a number of innocent people lost their lives to the terror attacks at the Istanbul's Ataturk airport," its foreign ministry said in a statement.

Pakistans Foreign Ministry expressed its condemnation of the attack.

"We offer our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to the bereaved families and to the brotherly people and government of Turkey. We also pray for the speediest and fullest recovery of those wounded in this despicable attack. We stand in strong solidarity with the fraternal people of Turkey in their fight against terrorism. There is no doubt that this scourge would be decisively defeated with Turkey's iron will and unshakeable resolve."

Anadolu Agency
Turkish reconciliation with Israel will not change Ankaras relationship with Palestine, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said Tuesday.

This deal does not mean that Ankara will change its policy on Palestine, he said during a book fair in capital Ankara.

Our stance on the Palestinian issue, its independence, the two-state solution and the improvement of living conditions for people in Gaza and the end of occupation is obvious. It has not changed and will not change.

On Tuesday, Turkey and Israel signed an agreement to resume diplomatic relations six years after the Mavi Marmara incident that saw the two states break off ties.

Ten Turkish activists were killed in May 2010 when Israeli commandos stormed the aid ship as it attempted to deliver supplies to Gaza in breach of Israels blockade of the Palestinian enclave.

Under the reconciliation deal, Turkey will supply aid to Gaza and initiate projects to restore the areas battered infrastructure.

One aid ship is due to set off for Gaza on Friday and Kalin signaled that more would follow. He added that a team of technicians would arrive in Gaza this week to start work on the electricity and water networks.

The deal paves the way for the necessary steps to be taken quickly to bring a sigh of relief to the people of Gaza, Kalin said.

In further attempts to restore relations overseas, Kalin said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. Russia imposed a range of sanctions against Turkey following the downing of a Russian fighter jet that violated the Turkish airspace last November.

Erdogan sent Putin a letter Monday calling for the restoration of traditional friendly ties. Kalin said an important step had been taken to normalize relations and the countries had opened a new page in which problems regarding bilateral ties and regional issues such as Syria, Ukraine and Crimea will be handled through dialogue and negotiation.

Erdogans very humane approach in expressing condolences to the family of the Russian airman killed had been embraced by Russia, Kalin said, and the normalization process would proceed on this basis.

He extended the possibility of Turkey paying compensation to the flyers family but said such a request had not yet been made.

Anadolu Agency
By PTI: Mumbai, Jul 17 (PTI) Actor Irrfan Khan will meet Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at his office on Tuesday.

The 49-year-old "Piku" star, who plays a common man in his upcoming film "Madaari", requested Kejriwal to meet him as he has some questions for the CM.

"Desh ka ek aam nagrik hoon. Aap se kuch sawaal pochnay the. Can I meet you @ArvindKejriwal?," Irrfan posted on Twitter.

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To which Kejriwal replied, "Tuesday 11 am, my office."

After getting confirmation for the appointment, Irrfan posted, "Thanks again, will see you on Tuesday @ArvindKejriwal."

The reason for meeting is still unknown. The actor tweeted similar post to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhis official Twitter accounts.

Irrfans "Madaari" is slated to release on July 22. PTI SSN JCH PSH

--- ENDS ---
A terror attack on an airport in Istanbul that targeted innocent people, once again shows the dark face of terrorist organizations, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.

Erdogan strongly condemned the attack at Ataturk Airport that killed 31 victims and injured 147 others late Tuesday.

We expect that a resolute stance against terrorist organizations should be adopted by the world and especially Western countries with their parliament, media and non-governmental organizations, Erdogan said in a statement while stressing that Turkey would continue its fight against terror groups.

Turkey will continue its fight against all terrorist organizations at all costs until the end of terrorism, he said.

Erdogan also stressed that Turkey has enough power, wisdom and potential to fight terrorism and warned of consequences if all nations fail to join a global effort to defeat it.

All the bad terrorist scenarios, acts -- even we fear to bring them into our minds -- will come true one by one if all countries do not carry out a joint fight against terrorist organizations, he said.

The president offered his condolences to the victims families, praying to Allah to grant His Mercy on the deceased and grant the injured a speed recovery.

Victims were transferred to several hospitals where they are being treated following the attack.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said an attacker opened fire using an AK-47 assault rifle at the international terminal before detonating a suicide bomb.

Gov. Vasip Sahin said law enforcement was evaluating the possible involvement of up to three suicide bombers.

Preliminary findings pointed to a terrorist group as being responsible, according to Bozdag -- information he said needed additional confirmation.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish and Russian leaders held a phone call Wednesday, discussing bilateral relations and cooperation on regional issues and humanitarian crises, according to a statement issued by Turkish presidency on the same day.

During the conversation, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin emphasized the importance of normalizing relations between the two countries.

"Mr. President and Mr. Putin pointed to the importance of holding cooperation in the face of political, economic and humanitarian crises in the region as well as taking necessary steps to revive the bilateral relations," read the statement.

Putin also condemned the deadly terror attack at Tuesday's Istanbul Ataturk Airport, in which more than 40 people, including foreigners, were killed and hundreds of others were injured. Putin offered his condolences to Turkish nationals.

The two leaders also expressed resolve on joint fight against terrorism and vowed further contacts.

Earlier on Wednesday, a presidential source, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media, said Erdogan and Putin had a "very positive" conversation.

Diplomatic relations between Turkey and Russia soured following the downing of a Russian warplane that violated Turkish airspace last November, prompting Kremlin to order sanctions on Turkish food products, an end to visa-free travel and a ban on Russian tourists taking package holidays in Turkey.

Erdogan sent Putin a letter Monday calling for the restoration of traditional friendly ties.

Ties returning to normal

Putin said later Wednesday that the letter sent by Erdogan had laid the foundation for resolving the two nations seven-month crisis.

Mr. President and Mr. Putin pointed to the importance of holding cooperation in the face of political, economic and humanitarian crises in the region as well as taking the necessary steps to revive the bilateral relations, the statement said.

Putin also condemned Tuesday nights terror attack on Istanbuls Ataturk International Airport, in which dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured, and offered his condolences.

Turkish Presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin said an important step had been taken to normalize relations and the countries had opened a new page in which problems regarding bilateral ties and regional issues such as Syria, Ukraine and Crimea will be handled through dialogue and negotiation.

A Turkish official who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media said the leaders would meet before Septembers G20 meeting in China.

They will also meet during the summit in Hangzhou, the official said.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that steps taken toward the normalization of relations with Russia and Israel were based on a win-win principle.

We never thought of a one-sided step, Erdogan said while speaking at an iftar, or fast-breaking, dinner in Ankara.

All steps taken were based on the win-win principle, he said. In other words, both Turkey and Russia must win, both Turkey and Israel must win.

Earlier Wednesday, Erdogan had a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, emphasizing the importance of normalizing relations between the two countries, more than seven months after Turkey downed a Russian jet that violated its airspace despite several warnings.

Erdogan described the conversation with Putin as beneficial for both countries.

The Turkish president also said he is going to meet Putin ahead of a G20 summit due to be held in China in October, and on July 1, Turkeys Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavsoglu will meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Sochi.

We decided to quickly take steps regarding tourism, Erdogan said, adding that from now on, Turkeys borders will be open for Russian tourists as well as Russian borders for Turks.

Diplomatic relations between Turkey and Russia soured following the downing of the Russian warplane. That prompted the Kremlin to order sanctions against Turkish food products, an end to visa-free travel and a ban on Russian tourists taking package vacations in Turkey.

In addition, Turkey announced this week that it had signed an agreement to normalize relations with Israel more than six years after Israeli troops stormed a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in international waters, killing 10 Turkish citizens.

Erdogan said he hoped the deal would be beneficial also for Palestinians and that the first ship with humanitarian aid would head to Palestine on Friday.

The president's remarks came about 24 hours after a deadly attack at Istanbuls Ataturk Airport and Erdogan said Turkey would never abandon its goals and ideals in the face of terror attacks.

Turkeys real disaster are not these terror acts, but it would be the abandonment of its goals and ideals. These are what we will not abandon, he said. We will not leave our people face-to-face with such a catastrophe, Erdogan said, while expressing condolences to all martyrs in Turkey due to terrorism, including the Istanbul attack on Tuesday in which 42 people were killed and more than 230 others wounded by three assailants armed with automatic assault rifles and explosive vests. Turkey blames the Daesh terror group for the suicide attacks.

Those who killed innocent victims at the Ataturk airport had prepared their place in hell and had nothing to do with Islam as the Quran says killing an innocent person is like killing all mankind, Erdogan said.

What was the sin of those civilians? he asked, while saying that among the victims there were Turkish and foreign citizens, children, women and the elderly.

Turkey is passing through a severe test as a country that is the target of the world's most bloody terrorist organizations, Erdogan said, but he has not the slightest doubt that we will get through terror organizations.

He added: Sooner or later, we will get through that.

Erdogan also thanked world leaders, including Putin, U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who telephoned him or sent condolence messages.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish and Russian foreign ministers met in the Russian city of Sochi Friday in an effort to boost the process of normalization of bilateral ties.

Mevlut Cavusoglu became the first Turkish minister to visit Russia since the Nov. 24 crisis began when Turkey downed a Russian plane that violated its airspace.

Cavusoglu held a private meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Rus Hotel, where the Black Sea Economic Cooperation meeting is taking place.

In remarks made to the media before the meeting, Cavusoglu highlighted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's letter and phone call to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, moves which he termed as positive.

"We have been ordered to follow topics discussed during conversations between the two presidents in order to take the relations on a desired level," he said.

The two top diplomats, who last met on Dec. 3 in Belgrade during the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe meeting, later held their private talks, which lasted 36 minutes.

After the meeting, Cavusoglu answered journalists' questions and evaluated the agenda.

"We had a meeting with Mr. Lavrov [on] how to handle the process from now on and how to implement the decisions that were taken," Cavusoglu said.

Cavusoglu said mending relations between Turkey and Russia would also have effects on the Syria crisis, which has entered its sixth year.

"Rejuvenating the two countries' dialogue is also important for the future of Syria," Cavusoglu said. "In order to avoid negative circumstances, it is necessary to achieve a ceasefire in Syria and send humanitarian aid."

When asked if there is a schedule on lifting the Russian ban on Turkish products and travel, Cavusoglu said the bans were being lifted "even before" the letter from Erdogan or the phone call with Putin.

"We were the only country, even during this seven-month term, to oppose sanctions against Russia in NATO," Cavusoglu said. "We did not lift the visa-free travel to Russian citizens. We will be happy to host them in the near future."

Anadolu Agency
A Turkish aid ship carrying 11,000 tons of supplies for the Gaza Strip left the southern port of Mersin Friday afternoon.

The Lady Leyla sailed south for the Israeli port of Ashdod carrying 2,000 tons of rice, 5,000 tons of flour, 3,000 tons of sugar, 500 tons of cooking oil, and 10,000 food packages in addition to 100,000 pieces of clothing, 20,000 shoes, and 10,000 toys from the Turkish Grain Board and the Turkish Red Crescent (Kizilay).

The Panamanian-flagged vessel is expected to dock within 30 hours.

The humanitarian mission departed Turkey following this weeks reconciliation deal between Ankara and Tel Aviv to end a six-year freeze in relations.

The supplies aboard this ship are a sort of present from the Turkish people to their brothers and sisters in Gaza ahead of the upcoming Eid al-Fitr, Development Minister Lutfi Elvan said at a ceremony in Mersin to mark the ships departure. They are a present from our children to Gazan children.

Eid al-Fitr is the festival marking the end of Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Elvan thanked Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan for leading the process which led to the restoration of ties between Turkey and Israel, and subsequently the aid being sent today. He also extended his thanks to the Turkish aid agency AFAD, the Turkish Red Crescent, and the Foreign Ministry for their help and coordination.

Deputy Prime Minister Veysi Kaynak said that Turkey would continue to help the Palestinian people in the areas of education, health, development, and information technology.

"God willing, all these projects will be completed at the earliest thanks to the [reconciliation] deal, Kaynak said, adding that Palestines largest hospital  which is being built by The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA)  would be opening soon.

"The end goal is to ensure that the Palestinians live happily and freely in their own country, and enjoy the same rights as everyone else, he said.

Mersin Governor Ozdemir Cakacak said that the aid being sent to the Palestinians was not only a show of support, but an indication that we are always with them.

We hope that the pain and tears in Palestine will end soon, he said.

Palestinian Ambassador Faed Mustafa praised Turkeys continued help and support to the Palestinian cause since the beginning.

"Turkey has given us much support during the establishment of the State of Palestine. And later on the Gaza issue. Turkey continues to be our number one supporter, he said.

Diplomatic ties between Turkey and Israel were suspended after Israeli troops stormed a Gaza-bound aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters in May 2010 and killed 10 Turkish activists.

The Mavi Marmara was among six civilian vessels of an international humanitarian aid convoy trying to break Israel's blockade of Gaza when Israeli commandos boarded it.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed, and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced regret for the attack, and this week months of talks bore fruit. Under the reconciliation deal, Israel agreed to Turkish humanitarian projects in Gaza as well as the payment of $20 million in compensation to the families of the Mavi Marmara victims.

Anadolu Agency
Efforts by Turkey to press Daesh in Syria and Iraq may have triggered a terror attack by group on the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, various experts in Washington told Anadolu Agency.

On Tuesday night, three terrorists opened fire at the international terminal of the airport before detonating explosives, killing 44 people and injuring more than 200.

The attack took place amid Ankaras efforts to mend ties with Russia following the downing of a Russian fighter jet that violated Turkish airspace in November.

Turkey also said this week that it would normalize relations with Israel after a six-year break following the 2010 deadly attack by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara ship that killed 10 Turkish citizens. The ship was part of an aid flotilla heading to Gaza Strip to end the Israeli blockade of the territory.

Many experts have opined that the Istanbul attack might have links to those diplomatic efforts but American experts point to Turkeys efforts against Daesh in Syria and Iraq.

The most likely motive is the escalation of Turkish efforts to contain and suppress ISIS, said Steven Heydemann, an international relations professor at Smith College in Massachusetts.

He said as Daesh has already chosen its path of terror and confrontation against Turkey, it will not be able to push Ankara to adopt a more accommodating posture toward Daesh.

The Turkish military has been shelling Daesh targets in Syria ever since the group conducted a string of suicide bombings in Turkey last year and has launched rockets into southern Turkish cities near the Syrian border.

Turkey has also been training northern Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces near Mosul and earlier this year Turkish Special Forces were involved in a clash between peshmerga and Daesh militants.

According to Turkeys military, Turkish artillery has killed hundreds of Daesh militants in Syria while law enforcement has identified more than 6,000 foreign fighters  thousand of which have been deported -- as they attempted to travel from Western countries and use Turkey as a transit hub on their way into Syria.

Aeron Stein, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council think-tank characterized the terror attack this week as one of the most high profile attacks internationally because it targeted an international airport serving as one of the busiest air traffic hubs between Europe and the rest of the world, particularly Africa and Asia.

Stein dismissed speculations that Daesh attacked Istanbul in retaliation for Ankaras recent efforts to reconcile with the Israeli and Russian governments.

Turkey has been taking steps to crackdown on ISIS for quite some time now. It shelled ISIS positions on a daily basis and it hosts coalition which is fighting ISIS, he said, noting that the bombing would not have an effect on Turkeys diplomatic endeavors.

Stein warned that Turkey might incur more attacks from Daesh that Turkish security forces will try to prevent but he noted that no security apparatus could stop every single terror attack.

The attackers have been identified as a Russian national from Dagestan in the north Caucasus region, an Uzbek citizen and another from Kyrgyzstan, according to a Turkish prosecution source familiar with the investigation but who spoke on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media.

The Turkish SETA Foundations Washington D.C. office expert, Kilic Bugra Kanat, told Anadolu Agency that the attack would force Turkish authorities to be vigilant in screening foreigners from various Asian countries but it may lead to broader security cooperation between Ankara and Central Asian capitals in order to stop the flow of foreign fighters.

Kanat linked Daeshs attack in Istanbul to the group losing territory to Iraqi forces and Syrian rebel groups in both countries.

Tactically Daesh is trying to control a territory, unlike other terror groups. When it loses territory it launches an insurgent attack inside that territory. When this effort also fails then they resort to disruptive terror attacks, he said. As Daesh is pressed in Iraq and Syria and given Turkeys efforts in degrading Daesh, the militant group wants to target Turkey.

Middle East Institute Senior Fellow Robert Ford, who also served as the last U.S. Ambassador to Syria, also disagreed with claims that the attack in Istanbul was somehow tied to Turkeys recent efforts to mend ties with Israel and Russia.

Ford said the attack targeted the Turkish economy and has a lot more to do with Turkeys efforts as part of a coalition led by the U.S. to defeat the militants.

Noting that the attack in Istanbul was conducted in two stages -- first by firearms, then suicide bombings -- Ford said it was a common tactic used previously by al-Qaeda in Iraq but implemented for the first time by Daesh in Turkey.

Anadolu Agency
Millions of Syrians living in Turkey will have a chance to become citizens of the country that gave them shelter, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Saturday.

Speaking in the southern Turkish province of Kilis, which borders Syria and hosts more than 120,000 Syrians, Erdogan said that many of the Syrians now in Turkey want to become citizens of the Republic of Turkey.

"There are steps our Interior Ministry has taken on the issue, he said.

"We will give the chance to [acquire] citizenship by helping out these brothers and sisters by monitoring through offices set up by the ministry," Erdogan said.

Around 2.7 million Syrians who have fled the civil war in their country are being sheltered at camps inside Turkey.

Referring to the Syrian crisis, which turned violent in 2011 when regime leader Bashar al-Assad cracked down on peaceful protesters, Erdogan said the Syrians had been prevented from governing themselves.

"The organization called Daesh is, in fact, a puppet put forward with this aim. The organization called the PYD, [and] the YGP are subcontractors which were empowered for the same purpose.

Stating that just as Daesh does not represent Muslims, the PYD and YPG likewise do not represent Kurds, Erdogan said those groups "are tools used for dirty designs on the region by those who hold their leashes in their hands."

About Turkey's attitude toward Syrians, Erdogan said: "Even today we are defending the same principles that we defended six years ago. We are saying the same things."

Syria has remained locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than 250,000 people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced, according to UN figures.

The conflict in Syria has now driven more than 4 million people  a sixth of the countrys population  to seek sanctuary in neighboring countries, making it the largest refugee crisis for a quarter of a century, according to the UN.

Anadolu Agency
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday strongly condemned bomb attacks in Iraq.

In the name of country and our nationals, I strongly condemn the bomb attacks that happened in our friend and brother Iraqs capital Baghdad, he said in a statement.

A car bomb hit Al-Karada, a busy shopping district in central Baghdad, in the early hours of Sunday, killing more than 150, while another attack killed five at a market in Al-Shaab neighborhood.

The Al-Karada attack was claimed by Daesh.

Erdogan said Turkey would always side with the Iraqi people and was ready to provide assistance.

He added: We view each of the Iraqi people as our brother, whatever their origins and beliefs are... The country which will best understand the pain and ordeal caused by the bomb attacks in Iraq is Turkey.

On Tuesday, terrorists killed 45 people at Istanbuls main airport in an attack blamed on Daesh. This organization is an organization that has waged a war on Islam and Muslims using the name of Islam and epithet of Muslims, Erdogan said.

The president called for a strong united front against terrorism. Support of terror organizations cannot be explained on any grounds, he said, adding his condolences to the relatives of those killed in the Iraq attacks, Iraqi President Fuad Masum and Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi.

Anadolu Agency
A Turkish aid ship carrying 11,000 tons of supplies for the Gaza Strip arrived at Israels Ashdod port on Sunday.

Turkish diplomats and Israeli Foreign Ministry deputy spokesperson Oren Rozenblat were present at the port as the Panama-flagged Lady Leyla docked.

The ship carries 10,000 toys and 10,000 packages of food and aid for children in Gaza.

Five tons of flour and 2,000 tons of rice aid from the Turkish Grain Board, as well as sugar aid from the Turkish Red Crescent, will also be delivered.

The ship set sail on Friday following a reconciliation deal reached between Turkey and Israel on Monday after a six-year hiatus.

Diplomatic ties between the two countries were suspended after Israeli troops stormed the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara aid ship in international waters in 2010, killing 10 Turkish activists.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed, and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced regret for the attack.

On Monday, months of talks between the two countries finally bore fruit, with Turkey announcing that a deal would be signed, normalizing relations with Israel.

Under the deal, in addition to agreeing to Turkeys humanitarian presence in Gaza, Israel will pay $20 million in compensation to the families of the Mavi Marmara victims.

Anadolu Agency
The first truck from a Turkish aid convoy arrived on Monday evening to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, which links Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

The crossing represents the blockaded strips only outlet for commercial goods.

Mounir Ghalban, crossing director on the Palestinian side, told Anadolu Agency that the first aid-laden truck had arrived to the Israeli side of the crossing and was now making its way into the Gaza Strip.

Ghalban went on to note that a total of 10 trucks from Turkeys "Lady Leyla" aid ship -- which docked at Israels Ashdod Port yesterday bearing 11 tons of humanitarian aid -- were expected to enter the strip on Monday.

In a statement, the Israeli Defense Ministry confirmed that the first aid truck contained a shipment of toys and diapers.

The remainder of aid from the ship, he added, would enter Gaza after the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which will end on Thursday.

The aid includes flour, sugar, rice, cooking oil, clothing, and toys for children, among other things.

Turkish Ambassador to Jerusalem Mustafa Sarnic noted the importance of delivering the aid to Gaza on the last day of Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month.

Stressing that the assistance was just the beginning, Sarnic said: "It [the aid] will continue. From now on, we will do our best to solve [Gazas] energy problem. There is also a water issue, which we will work to resolve."

The ambassador went on to note that a delegation from Turkey's Energy and Natural Resources Ministry would soon hold talks with Israeli officials in this regard.

Last week, Turkey and Israel agreed to normalize diplomatic relations following a six-year hiatus.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said that Tel Aviv had met all of Ankaras preconditions for normalizing ties, which were severed in 2010 after Israeli commandos stormed a Gaza-bound Turkish aid vessel.

The attack resulted in the death of nine Turkish activists and left another 30 injured, one of whom succumbed to his injuries nearly four years later.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey had demanded an official apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed, and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his regret to Turkeys then-prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the incident.

Under the terms of last weeks agreement, the two countries will exchange ambassadors and Israel will pay $20 million in compensation to the families of the 2010 flotilla attack victims.

Israel has also agreed to Turkeys request to maintain a humanitarian presence in the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Anadolu Agency
By PTI: Colombo, Jul 17 (PTI) Six undergraduates at the Jaffna University have been hospitalised after clashes erupted between the Sinhalese and Tamil student groups at the campus, authorities said today.

The University of Jaffnas science faculty was shut today for a week after violent clashes between student groups yesterday during a welcome party at the campus, held for first year students, police said.

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Clashes erupted after the performance of Kandyan dance by Sinhalese students, who are a minority in Tamil-dominated Jaffna University.

The majority Tamil students had opposed the performance of the traditional dance.

Riot Police have been deployed and the security was beefed up at the university following the clash, police said.

Jaffna police chief Sanjeev Dharmaratne said statements will be recorded from students when the faculty will be reopened.

"We urge the government to start an inquiry. This was a very unfortunate situation," Channa Jayasumana, an academic from the University Teachers Association said.

Meanwhile, the student union, Inter University Students Federation said that attempts were being made to portray the incident as a communal clash.

The Jaffna University was a hot bed of Tamil nationalism and a breeding ground for the LTTE during the 1980s.

LTTE fought a three-decade-long battle in the north and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka for a Tamil homeland before it was defeated in 2009. PTI CORR SUA AKJ SUA

--- ENDS ---
Turkey is keen to develop peaceful and friendly ties with everyone, including Russia and Israel, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Monday.

In remarks made following a Cabinet meeting in Ankara, Yildirim said: From Russia to Israel, Egypt to Syria, Iraq to Iran, EU countries to the U.S.A., we are determined to develop peaceful, friendly and practical ties with everyone. We will keep doing this.

He said Turkeys policy to normalize ties with countries neighboring the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea regions had produced concrete results.

We are returning to old days with Russia and have begun process of normalization. We [also] started the normalization process with Israel thanks to a deal. We are reaping the first benefit [of normalization with Israel] in Gaza, he said.

Ankara struck a deal with the Tel Aviv-based government last week after a six-year hiatus over the latters storming a Gaza-bound aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters in May 2010 and killing 10 Turkish activists.

The deal paved the way for Ankara to send an aid ship carrying 11,000 tons of supplies for the people living in the Gaza Strip. The ship arrived at Israels Ashdod port Sunday.

Also last week, Turkey and Russia restored ties after falling out over the shooting down last November of a Russian warplane that had violated Turkish airspace at the Syrian border.

Yildirim said the deal had revitalized the countrys tourism sector.

Visitors from Russia have started to come to Turkey, he said.

About Turkeys EU membership, he said: New chapters have been launched and we had a chance to discuss issues on a better basis.

Last Thursday, a new chapter on budget policy was opened as part of Turkeys EU accession process.

Chapter 33 is the second chapter opened in the last seven months, after the chapter 17 on economic and monetary policy was opened in Luxembourg on Dec. 14, 2015.

The EU launched accession talks with Turkey on Oct. 3, 2005.

On Syria, Yildirim said: Syrias normalization is possible but everybody needs to make sacrifices. Strategic partners and the coalition partners have to heal Syrias wounds and should take more responsibilities.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-battered country, according to the UN.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, however, put the death toll from the six-year conflict at more than 470,000 people.

Anadolu Agency
Two lawmakers and a mayor from the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) attended the funeral of a PKK terrorist on Monday.

Photographs showed Dirayet Tasdemir and Berdan Ozturk, who represent the eastern province of Agri for the party, and Rohat Ozbay, the mayor of Dogubeyazit, at the burial of Adem Ozkan, who was one of five terrorists killed attempting to launch an attack on a gendarmerie base in neighboring Van province on June 28.

They were seen among mourners carrying a coffin draped in PKK colors at the funeral in Dogubeyazit near the Iranian border.

Members of the HDP have previously been criticized for attending PKK funerals and making supportive comments about the terror group.

Anadolu Agency
A military helicopter crashed in Turkey's Black Sea province of Giresun on Tuesday, leaving seven personnel, their wives and children dead, the army said.

In a statement on its website the Turkish General Staff said the Sikorsky helicopter was returning to the province after visiting two gendarmerie bases to celebrate the end of Ramadan when it crashed near Tohumluk, a village in the mountains to the south of the coast.

Seven out of our comrades, their wives and children unfortunately lost their lives and eight others injured were immediately referred to hospitals in the region, the statement said.

The cause of the crash, at 5.15 p.m. (1415GMT), is unknown.

Speaking to media at Giresun State Hospital, Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli blamed the crash on dense fog and bad weather conditions, ruling out an attack.

He said the fatalities had been caused by the impact of the crash. None of our martyrs and injured had burn scars, he added.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim also said bad weather conditions and poor visibility may have contributed to the crash. We have no clear information. There are reports that there are injured and dead, he said in Izmir, western Turkey.

The helicopters occupants had been to the Giresun-Alucra and Gumushane-Kozagac gendarmerie commands for Eid al-Fitr celebrations before returning to Giresun. The first day of the holiday traditionally sees people visit their families.

The premier and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan both telephoned Gen. Hulusi Akar, chief of the general staff, in the wake of the crash.

The army did not provide further information as to the identities of the casualties.

An investigation team is expected to arrive on Wednesday.

Anadolu Agency
Daesh is a dagger stabbed into the chest of Muslims, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday following a series of bombings in Saudi Arabia blamed on the terror group.

Speaking at an event in Istanbul to mark the end of Ramadan, Erdogan highlighted to price paid in Muslim blood in terror attacks committed by groups such as Daesh and the PKK.

This organization called Daesh is a dagger stabbed into the chest of Muslims, he said. Whoever supports this organization through sectarian fanaticism or any other motive becomes a partner in the same sin.

On Monday, suicide bombers targeted Medina, Qatif and Jeddah. In Medina, four security guards were killed near the Prophets Mosque, which is the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad.

A day earlier more than 200 were killed in a bombing in Shia Muslim district of Baghdad and last week 45 people were killed when three terrorists attacked Istanbuls Ataturk Airport.

Erdogan also promised to go ahead with a plan to grant citizenship to Syrian refugees. He first mentioned the proposal on July 2, when it was greeted with protests on social media.

There are also qualified people among them, people who have a career, he said. Let us not take them, [and then] should they go to England, Canada or any other place? ... we do not discriminate.

The president cited the example of Meskhetian Turks who escaped the conflict in eastern Ukraine to settle in Turkeys eastern province of Erzincan.

Anadolu Agency
Fight against terrorism and measures aimed at minimizing security threats stemming from the Syrian conflict dominated Turkish presidents agenda during his remarks and talks with world leaders on the sidelines of the two-day NATO summit in Warsaw.

According to a source at the Turkish presidency, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met presidents of Ukraine, Finland, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Azerbaijan Friday, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron Saturday.

Erdogan also conversed with leaders of Canada, Italy, France, Lithuania and the U.S. as well as with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg during the summit, the source said.

Russia, Syrian war, terrorism, migration, refugees and cyberattacks were the focus of the two-day summit. Security and stability in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Black Sea and Baltic region were also discussed.

Erdogan expressed Turkeys expectations from NATO members and allies for putting an end to the Syrian war, solution of refugee crisis and the effective fight against Daesh and other terrorist organizations.

He said the fight against PKK terrorist organization and its affiliates in Syria was as important as the fight against Daesh terror group.

Erdogan and Merkel during their bilateral meeting discussed in detail NATO-related issues and Turkey-EU agreements.

The recent Armenian resolution approved by the German parliament was also a key point in the meeting. The Turkish president expressed Turkeys frustration and discomfort with the resolution, while the German chancellor vowed to show necessary sensitivity required for the move not to cast a shadow over bilateral relations. In June, German parliament had approved a resolution calling the deaths of Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as genocide.

Separately, Erdogan told Cameron he respected the vote of British people to exit from the European Union. He also conveyed his condolences to President Barack Obama over the tragic events unfolding in the U.S. during the course of the summit.

NATO chief told Erdogan that the alliance was aware of Turkeys sensitivities and assured the Turkish president that he was undertaking necessary initiatives for the allies to contribute more for Turkeys defense.

Anadolu Agency
Around 19 trucks carrying Turkish humanitarian aid arrived in the blockaded Gaza Strip on Sunday, according to a Palestinian border official.

The trucks, carrying nearly 800 tons of foodstuff, entered the Palestinian territory via Israels Kerem Shalom border crossing, Mounir Ghalban, who oversees the Palestinian side of the crossing, told Anadolu Agency.

According to Ghalban, the aid -- consisting of flour, sugar and rice -- will first be stored in warehouses run by Gazas Social Affairs Ministry before being distributed to the strips neediest residents.

On Thursday, nearly 50 trucks carrying 2,000 tons of Turkish humanitarian aid had entered the Palestinian territory.

In previous comments to Anadolu Agency, Yusuf Ibrahim, undersecretary of Gazas Social Affairs Ministry, said a total of 400 aid-laden trucks were expected to reach the strip within coming days.

Last week, the Turkish aid ship "Lady Leyla" docked in Israels port of Ashdod carrying 11,000 tons of humanitarian aid -- including food, clothing and toys -- destined for Gaza.

Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has groaned under a joint Israeli-Egyptian blockade that has deprived the enclaves roughly 1.9 million inhabitants of their most basic needs, especially food, fuel, medicine and construction supplies.

The latest influx of Turkish aid into Gaza comes within the context of a deal signed last week between Turkey and Israel in which the two agreed to restore diplomatic relations following a six-year hiatus.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said that Tel Aviv had met all of Ankaras preconditions for normalizing ties, which were severed in 2010 after Israeli commandos stormed a Gaza-bound Turkish aid vessel.

The attack resulted in the death of nine Turkish activists and left another 30 injured, one of whom succumbed to his injuries nearly four years later.

At the time, Turkey had demanded that Israel officially apologize for the attack, compensate the families of those killed, and lift its longstanding blockade of the Gaza Strip.

In 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his regret to Turkeys then-prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the incident.

Under the terms of last weeks agreement to normalize relations, the two countries will exchange ambassadors and Israel will pay $20 million in compensation to the families of the 2010 flotilla attack victims.

Israel has also agreed to Turkeys request to maintain a "humanitarian presence" in the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Anadolu Agency
A photographic exhibition of PYD and PKK terrorists being held at the European Parliament was criticized as unacceptable by a senior Turkish presidential aide on Tuesday.

Ibrahim Kalin, spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said the display served as a propaganda tool for the PYD, the Syrian affiliate of the PKK, which is listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the EU and U.S.

It is unacceptable to make propaganda -- under the roof of European Parliament -- about a terror group which targets Turkish citizens every day, Kalin told Anadolu Agency.

We have difficulty understanding what the European Parliament is aiming at by polishing an organic extension of the PKK, which is listed as a terror group by the European Union.

He said that if the event had been staged because the PYD is fighting Daesh in Syria we advise them to open exhibitions on Nusra Front, Hezbollah and the bloodstained Assad regime.

The exhibition features around 30 photographs showing PKK, PYD and YPG terrorists in northern Syria.

In one image, crowds carry a photograph of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who was convicted of terrorism and treason in 1999 and is currently serving a life sentence.

Kalin said that Turkey saw no difference between terror groups such as the Nusra Front, Daesh, the PYD or PKK.

The photographs were taken by Austrian anthropologist Thomas Schmidinger and the Brussels exhibit is hosted by Josef Weidenholzer, vice-president of the parliaments Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.

The pictures, which purport to represent important figures and historical events in the development of Rojava -- a name given to regions of northern Syria -- will be exhibited until July 15, according to Weidenholzers website.

Turkey has repeatedly criticized such displays as serving to promote terrorism.

In March -- prior to the Brussels attacks that killed 32 people -- the Belgian government allowed PKK supporters to pitch tents near the EU Council building on the eve of a Turkey-EU summit.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu criticized Belgium for showing double standards in tolerating terrorist groups, saying they should be treated in the same way as Daesh.

Terror organizations such as the PKK and the far-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) are active in Belgium and several PKK figures reportedly live in the country. There are also pro-PKK TV channels and last month Turkish officials protested about YPG flags hanging in the European Parliament.

Anadolu Agency
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim reiterated that Turkeys Syrian policy will not change while Bashar al-Assad remains in power in comments broadcast Thursday.

In an interview with the BBCs HARDtalk program, the prime minister reacted to speculation that Ankara was prepared to soften its stance on Assad leaving to bring the civil war to an end.

Surely things need to change in Syria but first of all Assad should change, he said in an interview in Turkey. Unless Assad changes, nothing changes in Turkey. Assad has the main responsibility for turning things this way.

Pressed by interviewer Zeinab Badawi on whether Assad could stay in power in the interim, Yildirim replied: Well, on one hand you have Assad and on the other you have Daesh. So which one do you prefer? Assad or Daesh?

If youre asking me which one, we wont prefer any. Both have to go because its trouble for the Syrians.

When asked if one should be prioritized over the other, Yildirim said destroying Daesh would not solve the situation in Syria.

As long as Assad is there, the problem wont be solved, he said. Well have some other terrorist organization coming up because its the attitude of the Syrian regime which created Daesh.

Its their method of rule in Syria which created that. Theyre deliberately sending their people to death.

Yildirim, who came to office in May, said more than 500,000 Syrians had been killed in the conflict, which began in March 2011, and more than 9 million displaced, 3 million of whom are in Turkey.

We welcome them as our guests, he said.

Anadolu Agency
A group within the Turkish military has taken illegal action outside chain of command in an attempted coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said early Saturday.

I am calling on our nation. Go to squares, let us give them the best answer, Erdogan said in a video message from a cell phone that was broadcast on a cell phone connection from what appeared to be a private residence. I do not believe this coup attempt will be successful. No coup-plotter in history has ever succeeded, he said.

Erdogan said there had not been any attempt against him and the Turkish presidency has said the president is at a secure location.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced a no-fly zone has been enforced above Ankara, adding that army commanders, including Chief of Staff Hulusi Akar, are on duty and at work to stop the illegal military action.

Yildirim said there was no doubt coup-plotters would fail, calling on them to return from their mistake and describing the attempt as idiotic and craziness.

Bombs struck near the Turkish Grand Assembly, witnesses said, injuring 12 people, two of whom are in critical condition. There are reports of airborne shelling at several locations in the capital, including the ruling AK Party headquarters, the presidential complex, and the General Staff.

MPs have converged on the Assembly and gathered under the statement Sovereignty unconditionally belongs to the Nation inscribed on the wall of the main session hall. They have reportedly moved to the bomb shelter of the complex after the airstrikes.

A Turkish army F-16 reportedly shot down a Sikorsky helicopter, and aircraft belonging to army continue to fly over the capital to repel any attacks on key buildings.

Meanwhile, reports of casualties have emerged. Seventeen police officers were killed in an airstrike by a helicopter controlled by coup-plotters on a police station in Golbasi, 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the capital of Ankara, the governor's office said.

Two workers at satellite communications agency Turksat's ground station in Golbasi were killed while trying to prevent coup-plotters from cutting off TV networks, Anadolu Agency reporters on site reported.

Another two civilian deaths were reported in Istanbul, where an attempt to take over the governors office has been repelled, Governor Vasip Sahin said, with many soldiers detained across the city.

All across Turkey, citizens have responded to the president's call by pouring into the streets, as shown on numerous videos and photos on social media.

One video from an unknown location showed citizens climbing on top of a tank, hoisting soldiers out of the vehicles and securing their weapons. Another showed a police station with soldiers placed under arrest.

The majority of media organizations meanwhile have continued to broadcast live despite attempts to silence them.

The soldier arrests come on the heels of Ankara Chief Prosecutor's Office opening an investigation into the coup and calling for soldiers' detention wherever they are spotted.

First Army commander Umit Dundar has said coup leaders represent a small minority in First Army command. There is nothing to worry about. We are taking necessary measures with the soldiers who have not joined them and are still acting within chain of command.

We are in control of the situation, Zekai Aksakall, Special Forces Commander said.

Third Army Commander Erdal Ozturk while on live television ordered his units to return to their barracks.

The coup attempt has effectively been repelled, Turkish National Intelligence Agency Nuh Yilmaz has said.

Erdogan identified the group as belonging to the FETO/PDY terrorist organization, which three years ago staged an unsuccessful overthrow of the government.

This is an insurgency against democracy and national will, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told the nation on live TV late Friday. We will not allow it. There will never be any compromise on democracy. The perpetrators will pay the heaviest price.

State-run broadcaster TRT, where coup-plotters forced an anchorwoman to read a military has taken over statement on air, has been freed and five soldiers have been arrested.

Turkish labor minister entered TRT headquarters in Ankara with citizens accompanying him.

We will understand who they are and their purpose soon and will do what is needed. Our nation should keep calm. We will never tolerate such illegal activities that interrupt democracy, according to Yildirim.

Soldiers were seen earlier blocking both bridges in Istanbul, and tanks were stationed outside the International Ataturk Airport.

The prime minister said police would retaliate and that what is necessary will be done even if it requires death.

Leader of opposition Nationalist Movement Party Devlet Bahceli has called the prime minister to express solidarity, calling the coup attempt unacceptable, ministry sources said.

Main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kilicdaroglu said: "This country was wracked with coups. We do not want to go through the same troubles."

Anadolu Agency
Turkish people took the streets across Turkey to protest against an attempted military coup in Istanbul and Ankara.

Speaking via video chat feature from a cellphone, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: I am calling on our nation. Go to the squares, let us give them the best answer.

Throngs gathered in public squares and streets to protest the military uprising in Ankara, Istanbul, Diyarbakir, Edirne, Denizli, Kayseri, Samsun, Hatay, Yalova, Manisa, Erzurum, Izmir, Zonguldak, Malatya, Eskisehir, Sanliurfa, Adana, Sakarya, Kirikkale, Nevsehir, Sivas and several other provinces.

People chanted slogans as "No coup" and "Soldier to soldier against terror".

In Ankara, people gathered in Kizilay Square located in the city center and tried to stop tanks by throwing stones and sticks.

In the southeastern province of Diyarbakir, people gathered at the AK Party's provincial office to show their support for the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In Kayseri, people gathered in front of the Kayseri Governor's Office to show their response to the military uprising by waving Turkish flags.

People chanted slogans in Kayseri as "We are all soldiers, we are all police".

Some streets were closed to the traffic and police took security measures in the province.

Meanwhile, adhans, or Islamic calls to prayer, are recited in a lot of mosques in Istanbul, Ankara, and some other provinces.

Anadolu Agency
Jihadi Jane is a fictional tale inspired by real-life incidents, and what goes on in the minds of Muslim women growing up in the West.

By Gouri Kapoor/Mail Today: Tabish Khair's latest novel is a nuanced study of the implications of western Islamophobia that has been on the rise ever since the 9/11 attacks. The book attempts to explain the reasons that are propelling Muslims in the West to trade their lives of comfort for one that entails suffering, deprivation and, very often, death itself in the name of Jihad.

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Also read: This stunning bookshop is actually a 100-year-old theatre and cinema hall!

Tabish's searching prose in this sense is an inquiry into what goes inside the minds of the Muslims in the West as they try to find a way to continue with their everyday lives while keeping their faith and also how that faith is sometimes manipulated by those in power, turning them into pawns to be used by them as per their convenience.

The cover of Tabish Khair's latest novel.

The plot of the novel is centred on two young British girls, Jamilla and Ameena, who undergo experiences of cultural alienation in British society. It is evident that Tabish has drawn his inspiration for the plot from real life events, one of them relating to the three schoolgirls who reportedly fled the country to join the ISIS in Syria.

Although he provides an account of his characters' lives in UK as meticulously as in Syria, he seems to be at his lucid best when doing the latter. Interspersed with the action of the novel are the two girls' self-transformations and their growing understanding of the "real" Islam and its ethics, which the reader already anticipates.

Also read: 5 things Amitav Ghosh said about climate change that'll shock you

Tabish deserves the credit for being as value-neutral as possible while trying to analyse the psychological underpinnings of fundamentalism and tries to look at the matter from various perspectives. These multiple perspectives include those of Jamilla's family, Ameena, her parents, and later even Hajjiye and Hasan. Apart from its brilliant suspense that keeps the reader guessing about Ameena's fateful life, the book is also appealing for the empathy with which Tabish has etched out his female characters.

The book, which focuses on Muslism women, also traces the implications of the 9/11 attacks.

Not only are we made aware of the racial discrimination faced by Muslim women, particularly those who wish to stay veiled while living in the West, but also how, once internalised by them, does it actually frame and affect their psyche. It is the trauma of living in a hostile cultural environment that turns Ameena into a religious fanatic with Jamilla and her family's politics acting as mere facilitators of that transformation.

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There is not just a push from the immediate environment in the direction of Jihad working on these girls, but also a pull - the allure of being a part of "the perfect Islamic state" - exercised by people like Hejjiye. The text documents how modern-day technologies, especially internet, are being used by the fundamentalists to further their cause.

Also read: Looking back in time: Amritsar's Partition museum will help us heal old wounds

The whole tale comes to us sieved through Ameena's consciousness, who is recounting the experiences of her Daesh days and the ones prior to that to the unnamed textual author. The structure of the novel is thus very much remindful of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where Ameena is the Kurtz who, in place of colonialism, discovers the horrific reality of religious fundamentalism, and Jamilla, like Marlowe, is the rightful inheritor of the legacy of that realisation that she wants to disseminate.

Like Marlowe, Jamilla too tells a lie about Ameena, a lie told because the truth is too convoluted. In talking about this grim, morbid reality of our times, the novel may come across as too cynical. However, it also has its moments of hope, and in reading those lies the value of this extraordinary work. The writer is a research scholar in the Department of English Literature at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad.

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A French police commander and his wife were killed Monday in an apparent attack claimed by Daesh.

The officer, who was named in French media as Jean-Baptiste Salvaing, 42, worked as an assistant chief in the town of Les Mureaux and was reportedly wearing civilian clothes at the time of the attack.

Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said the suspect stabbed Salvaing several times before entering his home and taking his family hostage in the town of Magnanville in the Yvelines department southwest of Paris.

Raid special forces arrived at the scene around 9.30 p.m. local time (0700GMT) in an attempt to negotiate with the suspect, but talks failed, according to Brandet, forcing them to storm the house at around midnight.

Special forces shot the attacker but found the policemans wife dead. They were able to rescue the couples three-year-old son. The toll is a heavy one, Brandet told reporters at the scene.

This commander, this police officer was killed by the individual [and] we discovered the body of a woman. The assailant, the criminal, was killed. Thankfully, a little boy was saved. He was in the house. Hes safe and sound. He was saved by police officers.

French media quoted the Daesh-linked Amaq News Agency as saying on its Telegram channels, Islamic State fighter kills deputy chief of the police station in the city of Les Mureaux and his wife with blade weapons near Paris.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said in a statement that an anti-terror probe had been launched into the attack. Cazeneuve expressed his infinite sadness at the death of the commander and his partner, who had worked for his ministry.

The attacker was neutralized by Raid forces, who showed great composure and great professionalism and who saved the couples little boy, according to Cazeneuve.

The inquiry opened by the justice authorities will establish the precise circumstances of this tragedy.

Versailles prosecutor Vincent Lesclous, who said he knew the slain commander, was cautious about drawing conclusions about the attack. The investigation is beginning.

We have no serious [indication] on the motivation behind this act."

The attacker

French daily Le Monde and RMC radio identified the attacker as Larossi Abballa, 25, a resident of the nearby town of Mantes-la-Jolie, where the female victim worked in the local police station and the police commander had previously worked before being transferred to Les Mureaux.

Abballa was a former prison inmate who was known to police for radicalism and already had a terrorism conviction. He had been sentenced to three years in prison in 2013 for criminal association aiming to prepare terrorist attacks for his role in a recruitment network of fighters linked to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Speaking at a press conference, Paris chief prosecutor Francois Molins confirmed the identity of the attacker.

Molins said the attacker told police during negotiations he had pledged allegiance to Daesh three weeks ago.

The prosecutor added Abballa had published on Facebook a 12-minute video during the attack claiming responsibility for it and sent it to 100 people. He also posted on Twitter with an account created six days earlier.

Molins said police have found a list of potential targets including the names of famous figures, rappers at the attacker's home.

He also confirmed that three men were arrested in connection with the investigation.

President Francois Hollande condemned the odious act and held a ministerial meeting in Ankara on Tuesday morning.

Light will be shed on the circumstances of this abominable drama whose investigation, under the authority of justice, will determine the exact nature, he said in a statement.

Speaking later on the sidelines of a meeting of the OECD in Paris, Hollande evoked an "unquestionably terrorist act." This couple was "assassinated with cowardice by a terrorist," Hollande said.

France faces a terrorist threat of great importance" against which "we have mobilized considerable resources," he added.

France has been under a state of emergency since last November, when 130 victims were killed in terror attacks in Paris.

The White House said President Barack Obama was aware of the attack and that American authorities have reached out to the French government to assist in the investigation.

This is obviously a concerning situation, and it's only enhanced by the fact that there are indications that the killer may have had a terrorist affiliation. So, U.S. officials have been in touch with French authorities, according to spokesman Josh Earnest.

The French attack occurs just two days after a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 53 other at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

Authorities said the shooter claimed allegiance to Daesh as the attack was in progress.

Anadolu Agency
Thousands of people have taken to the streets across France on Tuesday in answer to unions call to protest the governments controversial labor law.

Police said at least 21 individuals had been arrested in Paris for acts of violence and vandalism by late afternoon. Twenty-six people were injured  20 of these casualties were officers.

The protests came as part of a series of recent open-ended strikes in rail, energy and in other sectors amid demonstrations which have shook the country since March 9.

Unions have been demanding that the left-wing government scrap a contested labor bill  dubbed the El Khomri law after Labor Minister Myriam El Khomri  claiming it paves the way for fundamental changes at the expense of workers rights.

Rallies have been taking place in around 50 towns and cities across the country. The biggest protest started at around 1.00 p.m. (1100GMT) local time in the French capital.

Police said between 75,000 and 80,000 people participated on Tuesday's protests in Paris alone. The CGT, one of the three organizing unions, said 1.3 million demonstrators took action across France.

"Is the government deaf?," said the CGT in a statement but condemned the violence which peppered the event.

CGT leader Philippe Martinez said earlier that the Paris march would be the biggest show of strength in three months.

"This is not the end. The struggle is far from over," Martinez added.

So far this is the largest demonstration against the El Khomri law. On March 31, between 26,000 and 28,000 people took part in rallies in Paris according to police figures.

On Monday, 4.5 percent of employees of the country's SNCF rail company took part in an ongoing strike which began two weeks ago.

Pariss Eiffel Tower was closed to tourists on Tuesday as staff also joined the protest movement.

The French Senate began debating the labor reforms on Monday. Discussions are set to conclude on June 24.

Unions have already called for new protests on June 23 and 28.

Anadolu Agency
Details emerged Thursday of CIA torture techniques at overseas black site prisons, from newly declassified transcripts of detainees military hearings at the Guantanamo Bay Prison.

They shackle me completely, even my head; I cant do anything, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, a Saudi-born Palestinian also known as Abu Zubaida told the hearing in March 2007. And they put one cloth in my mouth and they put water, water, water.

Zubaida was captured by CIA in 2002 in Pakistan and was held at a CIA prison in Thailand until he was transferred to the Guantanamo prison in 2006.

I tell him, if you want to kill me, kill me, he said he told interrogators.

Accused of being a senior leader of al-Qaeda, Zubaida told the hearing that he was a rank-and-file member of the militant group who helped the fighters travel to training camps in Afghanistan.

Noting that when CIA agents realized they wrongly assessed Zibaidas role, they apologized to him. After that, all they said to me was, Sorry, we made a big mistake.

He was also been beaten and severely injured while at the site in Thailand, he said.

They didnt care that I almost died from these injuries, he said. Doctors told me that I nearly died four times.

He said he gave false information about al-Qaeda plots in order to stop the torture.

The U.S. disclosed the documents earlier this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and reported by The New York Times.

Particulars of CIA torture techniques were made public in a Senate report in December 2014 that was a 500-page summary of a document that ran 6,000 pages.

According to the Senate report Zubaida was the first detainee subjected to waterboarding and the notorious technique was performed 83 times on the detainee.

He is still being held at Guantanamo Bay prison.

Unlike the Senate report, which was based on government memorandums, the recent transcripts are first-hand accounts.

The hearings recorded testimonies from six other prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Mohammed presented himself as a senior man in al-Qaeda and admits to being an enemy combatant in the transcripts.

To avoid torture, he said he admitted that he knew people whose pictures agents showed him although he did not know them.

He said that after he was transferred to a CIA prison in a country whose name was redacted in the transcript, he was penetrated with a suppository.

Every time I said I didnt know they tortured me and dripped very cold water on my head when I was naked. They took me to another room and hung me from my hands and poured cold water on me while I was hung, Mohammed said.

Human Rights Watch sent a letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday urging him to take action before the end of his time in office to hold personnel accountability for CIA abuses.

The newly released documents underscore the brutality and illegality of the CIA program, Laura Pitter, senior national security counsel at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement posted on the groups website.

President Obamas failure to take concrete action to address these crimes will leave a stain on his legacy, undermine respect for the rule of law, and weaken U.S. effectiveness in advocating against torture globally, she said.

Anadolu Agency
British police have charged a 52-year-old man with the murder of Jo Cox, the Labour Party lawmaker who was gunned down in her electoral district Thursday.

Thomas Mair, who was arrested shortly after Cox was repeatedly shot and stabbed in the northern English town of Birstall, will face a number of criminal charges when he appears in court Saturday.

Detective Superintendent Nick Wallen, the West Yorkshire police officer leading the investigation, said in a statement early Saturday: "We have now charged a man with murder, grievous bodily harm, possession of a firearm with intent to commit an indictable offence and possession of an offensive weapon.

"Thomas Mair, 52, of Birstall, will appear at Westminster [in London] Magistrates Court today (Saturday 18 June)."

Police said an unnamed 77-year-old man who "bravely intervened" to assist Cox as she was attacked is in a stable condition in hospital after being injured in the abdomen.

The death of Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two, has shocked Britains political establishment and halted all campaigning just five days before voters go the polls to decide whether the U.K. should remain a member of the European Union.

Campaign events, street stalls, and rallies will remain suspended through the country Saturday. Britain Stronger in Europe, the group calling for a vote to remain in the EU, said in a message to volunteers that its canvassing would resume Sunday "not least in Jos memory".

A special election will be held in the coming weeks to fill Coxs vacant Batley and Spen parliamentary seat. Britains governing Conservatives and opposition parties have announced they will not contest the vote, giving Labour a potential free run to retain it.

Anadolu Agency
Iraqi forces have retaken the western city of Fallujah from Daesh, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said late Friday.

Fallujah is back home, Abadi said in a televised speech. Our goal is to protect the holy things of the people of Fallujah and to ensure the security of the civilians there... There is no place for you in Iraq. The Iraqi people are united against you.

Earlier Friday, officials said a number of government buildings in the city had been taken back from Daesh, which took the city in Anbar province in early 2014. An operation to recapture Fallujah was launched last month.

The campaign involves army troops, counter-terrorism forces, federal police units, the Hashd al-Shaabi -- an umbrella of Iraqi Shia militias -- and armed tribesmen.

Located along the Euphrates River about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of capital Baghdad, around 90,000 residents are believed to be in the city.

Iraq has suffered a security vacuum since mid-2014, when Daesh captured the northern city of Mosul and overran large swathes of territory in the northern and western parts of the country.

According to the UN, more than 3.4 million people are now displaced in Iraq -- more than half of them children -- while more than 10 million are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

Anadolu Agency
At least 15 civilians were killed Friday evening in barrel-bomb attacks carried out by regime helicopters in opposition-held parts of Syrias city of Aleppo.

A civil defense official in Aleppo, Ibrahim Abu Leith, told Anadolu Agency that regime helicopters had bombed the opposition-held residential neighborhoods of Katirci and Tarik el-Bab.

Dozens of civilians were also injured in the attacks, he said.

In recent days, regime helicopters -- along with Russian and Syrian warplanes -- have struck a number of marketplaces, hospitals and civil-defense centers in opposition-held parts of the war-battered city.

Russian jets have also struck the strategic Castillo Road, which represents the oppositions only means out of Aleppo, along with the Anadan, Hreytan and Kafr Hamrah areas.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-battered country, according to the UN.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, however, put the death toll from the six-year conflict at more than 470,000 people.

Anadolu Agency
A former U.K. foreign secretary has slammed Brexit supporters use of nonsense anti-Turkish rhetoric in Britains EU referendum campaign.

Jack Straw, who served as Britains top diplomat in 2001-2006, said he was surprised the issue had been used to argue against the U.K.s EU membership by politicians who were previously supportive of Turkey.

This is the first time that Turkeys EU application has ever been an issue for a vote in the U.K. and it was a surprise to me, not least because many of the people who are on the Brexit side are on record as being in favor of Turkish EU membership, Straw told Anadolu Agency in a telephone interview.

And I can read you out [statements] coming from Boris Johnson about that, he said, referring to the former London mayor who was previously supportive of Turkish EU membership but now argues it is a reason why Britain should vote for Brexit.

Supporters of a British exit from the EU have used Turkey prominently in their electioneering ahead of next Thursdays referendum.

Earlier this week Johnson and Michael Gove, the justice secretary, wrote an open letter to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron urging him to immediately block Turkeys EU membership.

Vote Leave, the officially recognized campaign group, has run a poster and social media campaign alluding to how far Turkeys borders would extend if it became a member.

Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU. 23 June is your last chance to vote on sharing our borders with Syria and Iraq, the poster reads.

Another Vote Leave poster campaign appearing on billboards across Britain in recent weeks claims, Turkey is joining the European Union above the image of a passport in the shape of an open door.

Straw, who supports Britain remaining an EU member, said: I think what the Remain people have been doing is to try and just damp this nonsense down.

And for the people on the Leave side its been a fairly unpleasant, with undertones about different religions, all of that.

He added that he believed the anti-Turkish rhetoric had since calmed down.

Straw is not the only politician to criticize the Leave campaigns tactics as the referendum draws closer.

Earlier this month former premier John Major said voters were being misled by the utterly false suggestion repeated more than once, not in a single offhand remark but in scripted, carefully prepared speeches, that we face the risk of 88 million Turks coming here.

Its nonsense. Nonsense on stilts, Major said.

But it is a message that has resonated with sections of the British electorate that are concerned about immigration.

In his Anadolu Agency interview, Straw would not be drawn on which way he believed the U.K. would vote in the referendum next Thursday.

The only prediction Ive got is I think its going to be tight, he said.

I mean, the pollsters are finding it hard to predict voting behavior and this is really difficult for everybody because people voting in a referendum do not follow their political party allegiances.

Normally, if this was an election for parliament, a third of the population are going to say theyre going to vote Conservative, a third or so will say theyre going to vote Labour, and then what youre arguing about is the other 40 percent.

And he said he thought U.K.-Turkey ties would be not damaged by a vote for Brexit.

The bilateral relationship [with Turkey] I think will remain very strong, so that will be okay. But I think if we were to vote to leave so much would be up in the air, it would be difficult to say. This would be traumatic not just for the U.K. but also for Europe.

Anadolu Agency
An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced former President Mohamed Morsi to life in prison on charges of spying for Qatar.

Morsi, along with 10 co-defendants, were accused by Egypts army-backed authorities of spying for Qatar and leaking classified documents to the Gulf statelet during his single year as president.

During Saturdays trial session, the court confirmed the death penalty against six defendants for allegedly spying for Qatar.

The court also slapped three defendants, including Morsi, to life in prison for spying to the Gulf state.

The former president and several other defendants were also slapped with a 15-year jail term each for allegedly leaking classified documents to Qatar.

Saturdays rulings are still subject to appeal.

Egypt's first democratically elected leader, Morsi was ousted by the military in in a 2013 military coup -- after only one year in office -- following protests against his presidency.

He has since been slapped with life-in-prison and death sentences for "conspiring against Egypt" -- with Palestinian group Hamas and Lebanons Hezbollah -- and for breaking out of jail in 2011.

He has also been sentenced with a 20-year jail term for allegedly committing murder.

The former president also faces charges of "insulting" Egypts judiciary.

Morsi and his co-defendants, along with a number of independent observers, say the charges are politically driven.

Since Morsi's ouster and imprisonment, the Egyptian authorities have launched a harsh crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood group -- killing hundreds and jailing tens of thousands -- while relations between Cairo and Doha have nosedived.

Anadolu Agency
A man charged with the murder of Labour Party lawmaker Jo Cox declared his name was Death to traitors, freedom for Britain in his first court appearance.

Thomas Mair, 52, refused to give his correct name and address during his brief appearance at Londons Westminster magistrates court Saturday morning.

He was arrested Thursday, shortly after Cox was repeatedly shot and stabbed in the northern English town of Birstall before a meeting with residents in her electoral district

Asked by the judge to confirm his name, the Guardian reported Mair said: My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.

Dressed in a tracksuit pants and a grey sweater, he remained silent when asked to confirm his address and date of birth.

Mairs lawyers confirmed his name on his behalf.

He will remain in custody until his next appearance Monday at the Old Bailey, Londons central criminal court.

Earlier police said an unnamed 77-year-old man who "bravely intervened" to assist Cox as she was attacked was in a stable condition in hospital after being injured in the abdomen.

The death of Cox, a 41-year-old mother of two, has shocked Britains political establishment and halted all campaigning just five days before voters go the polls to decide whether the U.K. should remain a member of the European Union.

Campaign events, street stalls, and rallies will remain suspended through the country Saturday. Britain Stronger in Europe, the group calling for a vote to remain in the EU, said in a message to volunteers that its canvassing would resume Sunday "not least in Jos memory".

A special election will be held in the coming weeks to fill Coxs vacant Batley and Spen parliamentary seat. Britains governing Conservatives and opposition parties have announced they will not contest the vote, giving Labour a potential free run to retain it.

Anadolu Agency
A mine-clearance program that uses rodents to detect remnants of war buried in the earth has cleared its first minefield in Cambodia, meaning villagers will now be able to safely farm the area.

Apopo, a Belgian NGO that runs the HeroRats program, announced early Saturday that 89,280 square meters of land were cleared, making the land safe for families to resettle and utilize the land for agriculture once again.

Cambodia is one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world. According to the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), an estimated 2,000 square kilometers (772 square miles) of land are affected by ordnance.

Apopo has pioneered the use of giant pouched rats -- an intelligent rodent that is both light of foot with a keen sense of smell -- trained to detect the scent of explosive material.

They are then harnessed up and deployed to sniff the ground in small grid sections. If they think theyve come across something suspicious underground, they scratch at the ground, which signals their handler to investigate further with metal detectors.

Apopo quoted local resident and landmine survivor Seany Oeurn as saying that her eldest daughter was shocked to hear that the landmines are still present in the field where I was injured. She believed that once the landmines are old then they become inactive."

"We were even more surprised when APOPO and CMAC found two active mines there the previous week. Now my family are finally safe, she added.

CMAC director-general Heng Ratana told Anadolu Agency on Saturday that while the HeroRAT program was still in the operational trial phase, we can say that its a remarkable success of the integration trial.

The rats are able to identify landmines in the real minefields and that is a remarkable success of the detection system of rats to help our deminers find the landmines, he said.

The field in question is located in Siem Reap province, and Ratana said more than 10 mines and other unexploded ordnance was cleared by the Apopo and CMAC teams.

The rat program is still in its trial phase, he said, but once wrapped up, it will be integrated into the countrys standard operating procedures for mine clearance.

The first HeroRATS arrived in Cambodia in April 2015.

Anadolu Agency
This video of Kamal Haasan impersonating Hollywood actors Marlon Brando, John Wayne and Robert De Niro, is the best thing you'll see today.

By India Today Web Desk: Actor-filmmaker Kamal Haasan, who was in the US to shoot for his upcoming comedy thriller, Sabash Naidu, returned to India last week.

Kamal Haasan visited the American Space Library in Chennai for a quick interview with Cultural Affairs Officer Andie De Arment.

In the interview, the Nayagan actor was asked to deliver some of the popular Hollywood dialogues. The perfectionist of Indian cinema impersonated Hollywood actors Marlon Brando, John Wayne and Robert De Niro and delivered their dialogues in style.

advertisement

Here's the video:



Notably, Kamal Haasan played the role of Velu Naicker in Mani Ratnam's Nayagan, which was inspired from Marlon Brando's Godfather.

Meanwhile, Kamal, 61, suffered the fracture after he slipped and fell in his Chennai office earlier this week.

Due to the injury, Kamal won't be able to attend the London Indian Film Festival this weekend, where he was to be honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award.

On the work front, Kamal will be next seen in a tri-lingual comedy film Sabash Naidu. The film is being directed by him after an unfortunate turn of events led to director TK Rajeev Kumar moving away from the project. The film will simultaneously be shot in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi.





--- ENDS ---
Lebanese Shia Hezbollah fighters on Saturday clashed with Syrian regime forces in the northwestern Syrian province of Aleppo.

Local and military sources speaking anonymously due to fears for their safety, told Anadolu Agency that Hezbollah militia in Nubul and Zahra forced young pro-Assad Syrians to go to Khan Tuman, southwest of Aleppo city, to fight against the regime.

The clashes began when Hezbollah fighters detained the young Syrians who refused to fight on the southern fronts, sources added.

Hezbollah denied the reports and claimed they were an attempt to boost the morale of groups linked to the U.S. and Israel.

We categorically deny such allegations and lies produced by a media machine, which is used to make lies and fabrications, Hezbollah said in a statement.

It attributed the reports to what it described as media outlets with links to local and Arab intelligence services "that are released with the aim of improving the low morale within the Takfiri groups backed by the US and Israel".

The statement went on to reiterate that Hezbollah has strong relations with the Syrian army and other allies on Syrian territory.

Arab and foreign media reported that Hezbollah fighters and regime forces exchanged fire in Aleppos northern countryside, resulting in casualties on both sides.

Hezbollah has fought alongside the regime of Bashar al-Assad since 2011, when Syria fell into a devastating war after the government cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.

The Shia group has not disclosed how many of its members have been killed in Syria but the U.K.-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reports that more than 1,000 Hezbollah fighters have died in Syria.

Anadolu Agency
A record 65.3 million people around the world were displaced by war and persecution last year, the UNs refugee agency said Monday.

Of these, nearly a third - 21.3 million people - were refugees forced to seek sanctuary abroad.

A report from the office of the Geneva-based UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the increase was driven by conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine, South Sudan and Burundi.

More people are being displaced by war and persecution and thats worrying in itself but the factors that endanger refugees are multiplying too, Grandi said in a statement.

People fleeing war are finding their way blocked by closed borders. Closing borders does not solve the problem.

The year saw unprecedented levels of migration to Europe as more than 1.1 million crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Africa and Turkey to seek refuge in the EU, leading to many EU states introducing border controls.

On average, 24 people were forced to flee each minute in 2015, four times more than a decade earlier, when six people fled every 60 seconds, the Global Trends report, released on World Refugee Day, said.

In 2014, 59.5 million were displaced.

According to the agency, three countries - Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia - accounted for 8.7 million refugees.

Anadolu Agency
NATO will take a more direct role in the fight against Daesh, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said Monday.

First by contributing AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System] and conducting training and defense capacity building for Iraq inside Iraq rather than in Jordan," Carter said at an annual conference of the Center for New American Security think tank.

"Hopefully that will be the start of more to come, he added.

Carter did not provide further details about the alliances role in the fight against Daesh but it was apparently discussed at a NATO ministerial meeting in Belgiums capital Brussels earlier this month and will be discussed next month at the NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland.

The top defense official said the alliance will also complement the European Unions efforts to deal with migrant and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea and the Aegean Sea.

He added that as a part of that effort the U.S. is sending a rescue and salvage ship with capabilities to give assistance to disabled ships, provide towing, diving, firefighting and heavy lift abilities.

More than 206,000 migrants or refugees have crossed into Greece and Italy since the beginning of 2016, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

In the past four years, 1.4 million refugees have crossed the Mediterranean according to IOM data and more than 8,100 refugees died during that same period.

Anadolu Agency
A Russian state television channel has broadcast footage that appears to show Russian warplanes carrying out airstrikes in Syria with the use of incendiary cluster munitions, according to the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an open-source intelligence outfit.

Late last week, English-language news channel Russia Today broadcast footage of of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu visiting Russias Khmeimim Airbase in Syria's northwestern Latakia province.

The footage shows Shoygu inspecting the base, along with images of Russian warplanes carrying out airstrikes in Syria using what appear to be RBK-500 ZAB 2.5SM incendiary cluster bombs.

After the footage was widely shared on the internet, Russia Today broadcast a re-edited version of it on Sunday, omitting the roughly five seconds of video that appeared to depict the use of cluster bombs in Syria.

On Tuesday, CIT, an open-source intelligence outfit based in Russia and Ukraine devoted to tracking Russian military activity, published an analysis comparing the original footage with the edited version.

Shortly afterward, Russia Today rebroadcast the original, unedited version of the footage.

Speaking on Russias RBC television channel on Tuesday, Russia Today spokesman Anton Vorontsev conceded that a certain part of the video had been cut, which, he said, had shown a Russian fighter pilot, who, it was feared, could be exposed to security risks as a result.

The original footage, Vorontsev said, was later rebroadcast once it was decided that it posed no threat to the pilot.

The use of cluster munitions is banned by an international treaty signed by 100 countries. Russia, however, is not a signatory to the convention.

Anadolu Agency
A phased settlement to the conflict in occupied Karabakh has been agreed, a senior advisor to the Azerbaijani president said Wednesday.

Novruz Mammadov said an agreement-in-principle was reached in St. Petersburg, Russia, following talks involving Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Serzh Sargsyan, president of Armenia.

The progressive settlement is, first, the evacuation of Armenian forces from five occupied provinces, then the evacuation from other two provinces [and] the determination of the corridor between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia, he said at a news conference broadcasted on Azerbaijani TV.

The sides have reached an agreement-in-principle.

Karabakh broke away from Azerbaijan in 1991 with Armenian military support and a peace process has yet to be implemented.

Since the end of war in 1994, Armenia and Azerbaijan have held talks under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europes Minsk Group.

Anadolu Agency
The European Rohingya Council has urged Myanmar's government led by Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to uphold democratic principles and the rule of law.

"The council and the Rohingya community are deeply surprised and saddened by Suu Kyi-led governments move in the footsteps of [the] previous Thein Sein led quasi-civilian government forcing Rohingya to self-identify as illegal immigrants by issuing so-called National Verification Card (NVC)," the council said in a written statement.

Identifying as illegal immigrants was a project that was "assumed by the Rohingya community as one of the genocidal tools pursued by previous military governments, the council said, and the current civilian government recently restarted the project of a stateless Rohingya in some cities in Rakhine State.

A small number of Rohingya took the cards reluctantly in hopes of relieving their suffering, according to the council, but the majority of Rohingya denies getting the cards, citing no reason for participating.

The officials and some media outlets portray Rohingyas refusal to participate in the genocidal project as government is doing whatever it can and the Rohingya are to be blamed," the council said.

The council believes that issuing the NVC was neither in line with democratic principles nor the countrys rule of law, and "this can never be a solution for peaceful co-existence of the communities in Rakhine State."

But by allowing Rohingya to gain a sense of belonging while restoring their rights of citizenship and ethnicity is the most promising solution for the peaceful co-existence and development of the country in general and the Rakhine State in particular," the statement added.

Since mid-2012, communal violence between ethnic Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine has killed approximately 57 Muslims and 31 Buddhists while some 100,000 people have been displaced in camps and more than 2,500 houses burned -- most of which belonged to Rohingya.

Rakhine is also home to other Muslims, including the Kaman who are officially recognized among Myanmars 135 ethnic groups, unlike Rohingya -- described by the UN as the world's most persecuted ethnic minority group.

Since her party's victory in elections in November, State Counselor Suu Kyi, who also serves as the countrys foreign minister, has been under tremendous international pressure to solve problems faced by Rohingya but she has had to walk a careful balancing act out of fear of upsetting nationalists -- many of whom have accused Muslims of trying to eradicate the country's Buddhist traditions.

Suu Kyi has, however, enforced the notion that the root of many of the impoverished region's problems are economic and encourages investment in the area, which the National League for Democracy hopes will lead to reconciliation between the Buddhist and Muslim communities.

Anadolu Agency
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has emphasized on the importance of Britain remaining in the EU for the sake of continued cooperation in the global fight against terrorism.

In remarks made in an interview to the British paper The Guardian in Brussels Wednesday, Stoltenberg said that while it was up to the people of Britain to decide on the EU referendum, What I can do is tell you what matters for NATO, and a strong U.K. in a strong Europe is good for the U.K. and its good for NATO.

We are faced with unprecedented security challenges, with terrorism, with instability and an unpredictable security environment, and a fragmented Europe will add to instability and unpredictability.

The NATO chief said there was a lot of cooperation between the EU and NATO in the fight against terrorism and people trafficking.

He said the U.K. was pushing and showing leadership in pursuing strong cooperation, both from inside NATO and the EU.

The U.K. is a kind of bridge between the EU and NATO, and also a bridge between Europe and the United States. And this is important for U.K., the U.S. and for NATO, he said.

The U.K. is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and one of the 28 members of the NATO alliance.

The country will vote on the EU membership on Thursday. Around 46 million British voters are registered to cast their votes in the referendum.

Anadolu Agency
All Greek Cypriots are trying to do is leave the current negotiation process hanging, Foreign Minister of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Tahsin Ertugruloglu has said.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Ertugruloglu said the whole negotiation process was based on inequality.

He referred back to the Annan Plan, which was a United Nations proposal to resolve the Cyprus dispute, through restructuring of the divided island as a federation of two states under the name "United Republic of Cyprus".

In 2004, a referendum proposed by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was held but reunification was rejected by the Greek Cypriot population.

"It does not suit the Greek Cypriot sides interests to say yes to a proposal such as the Annan Plan. They know that they wont approve an agreement which puts the Turkish Cypriots on an equal basis with them. They also know that saying no a second time will not benefit them either.

Therefore, their policy is to avoid going to another referendum, and just leave this process hanging, by suspending it now and then. We should not let this happen. It is clear that the current process is no longer sustainable, he said.

Despite attempts to prove otherwise, we are dealing with a process where the Greek Cypriot side is recognized as Republic of Cyprus, whereas the Turkish Cypriot community is being portrayed as an ethnic minority within this Republic, whose political identity and sovereignty are being refused.

We are not sitting on equal terms, he said.

He added that the proposal of uniting the island as a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation would carry the possibility of leaving the future of Turkish Cypriots at the mercy of the Greek Cypriot side if the sensitivities of the Turkish Cypriot side were ignored.

Ertugruloglu suggested including the guarantor states of Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom in the process, saying meetings should also be held with these countries.

Turkeys guarantorship is indispensable to us. It is something which is not even open to discussion, he said, adding that the telltale sign of guarantorship was Turkeys right to unilateral intervention.

We are the equal owners of the Cyprus Island. We are not a nation that will be brought under the yoke of the Greek Cypriots, or left at their mercy. Our only assurance and guarantor in this matter is of course our motherland [Turkey], he said.

The eastern Mediterranean island was divided into a Turkish Cypriot state in the north and a Greek Cypriot administration in the south after a 1974 military coup on the island was followed by the intervention of Turkey as a guarantor power.

Reunification talks between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities on the island resumed in May 2015, after having been stalled in October 2014 due to a dispute about gas exploration around the island.

The talks between Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus President Mustafa Akinci and Greek Cypriot administrations leader Nicos Anastasiades were last suspended in late May.

Anastasiades had canceled a meeting with Akinci after refusing to attend a dinner hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, upon being told that the Turkish Cypriot leader had also been invited.

He thus cut short his trip to Istanbul. Anastasiades also canceled a meeting set with Special UN Cyprus Envoy Espen Barth Eide.

The interrupted peace talks resumed on June 8.

Anadolu Agency
Abdullah al-Alimi, a leading member of the Yemeni government delegation to ongoing peace talks in Kuwait, said Friday that his delegation "did not come to Kuwait to form a unity government" with the Shia Houthi militant group.

"We came to Kuwait to ensure implementation of UN [Security Council] Resolution 2216, not to form a unity government," al-Alimi said in a series of tweets cited by Yemens official news agency.

"We are not here to reward those who undermined the political path process and violated Yemens national consensus," he added, referring to the Houthis and their allies.

"Our position is clear," al-Alimi asserted. "Were here to reverse the [Houthi] coup and its consequences and restore the political process by hammering out a new constitution before conducting elections."

He went on to cite six preconditions, which, he said, "would not be conceded the Yemeni people".

These include a complete Houthi withdrawal from occupied cities; laying down their arms; the restoration of state institutions; the release of captives; the exclusion of what he described as "obstructionists" from the political process; and the dissolution of non-state militias.

Yemen has been racked by chaos since late 2014, when the Houthis and their allies overran capital Sanaa and other parts of the country, forcing President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and his Saudi-backed government to temporarily flee to Riyadh.

In March of last year, Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies launched a massive military campaign in Yemen aimed at reversing Houthi gains and restoring Hadis embattled government.

This April, the Yemeni government and the Houthis entered into UN-sponsored peace talks in Kuwait aimed at resolving the conflict, in which, according to UN figures, more than 6,400 people have been killed and another 2.5 million forced to flee their homes.

Anadolu Agency
An attack has occurred in front of a hotel in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on Saturday afternoon, claiming the lives of at least 10 people, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.

"We condemn this terror attack that left at least 10 people dead and several others wounded -- according to initial reports -- as it targeted civilians during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan," it said.

Witnesses said at first an explosion was caused by a suicide car bomber at the entrance of a hotel, which led to an exchange of gunfire between security guards and the assailants who tried to infiltrate the hotel.

According to a source at the hotel, who requested anonymity, "two successive explosions took place inside the establishment and the attack left several dead and wounded."

The al-Shabaab militant group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

A medical source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that rescue teams had managed to carry seven injured out of the explosion site.

Somali special forces were immediately dispatched to the scene of the attack to evacuate the hotel that is mostly frequented by government officials.

Anadolu Agency
By India Today Web Desk: Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan are all set to welcome their first baby in December. The couple had taken off to the UK for a vacation a few months ago when speculative reports of Kareena's pregnancy began doing the rounds. Earlier, the Bajrangi Bhaijaan actor tried dodging all questions on her pregnancy for months.

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ALSO READ: Kareena Kapoor Khan's apt answer for all 'are you pregnant' questions

ALSO SEE: Post pregnancy announcement, Kareena Kapoor Khan makes her first public appearance

A couple of days back, Saif Ali Khan had officially announced that his wife Kareena is pregnant and then they went to Pataudi for a break. But now Saif and Kareena are back in town and were clicked by the cameras at Mumbai airport. The Jab We Met actor was seen flanting her baby bump and she looked graceful in her white suit. Here're the pictures:

There were reports that Kareena will be taking a maternity break. Kareena has finally rubbished all such reports and told Hindustan Times, "I'm pregnant, not a corpse. And what maternity break? It's the most normal thing on earth to produce a child. It is high time the media back off, and stop treating me any different than I ever was. Anybody who is bothered shouldn't work with me... but my work goes on as is, like always. Stop making it a national casualty. We are in 2016, not in the 1800s. Probably, even at that time, people were way more civilised and normal than the way the media is behaving and speculating now."

She added, "I'm just fed-up of people making it (her pregnancy) to be a death of some sort. In fact, it should be a message to a lot of people that marriage or having a family has absolutely nothing to do with my career."

On the work front, Kareena Kapoor Khan will next be seen im Rhea Kapoor's Veera Di Wedding.

(Picture Courtesy: Yogen Shah)



--- ENDS ---
While the news of the impending Brexit was received with shock and disappointment by all major European governments, the continents increasingly popular anti-immigration and Eurosceptic parties rejoiced, calling for EU referendums in their own countries.

These strong calls to leave the EU, or at least vote on it, have picked up solid momentum throughout Europe over the past few years, causing some to wonder if Britains decision to leave has been the first step in unraveling the entire European project.

France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Italy all are home to influential political leaders calling for EU referendums.

Frarewell

For all the patriots, for all those who love freedom, this day is one of joy, said Marine Le Pen, leader of Frances far right National Front during a press conference on Friday. It is not Europe that has died, its the European Union that is shaking and it is a rebirth of nations.

Le Pen has declared herself to be Madame Frexit and earlier this month in Vienna, she promised to call a referendum on Frances EU membership if elected.

France possibly has 1,000 more reasons to want to leave the EU than the English, she said.

Her far-right, anti-immigration party has skyrocketed in the polls and performed well in local elections, moving from the fringes to become one of Frances most influential parties.

In 2007, the party led by Le Pen received 10 percent of the vote. A poll published by French daily Le Monde earlier this month suggested Le Pen was at 28 percent support, ahead of all other political leaders, which would be enough to guarantee her a spot in a presidential election run-off in 2017.

French citizens did not want to leave the EU at this point, according to an Ipsos Mori poll from May, but the poll did suggest that 55 percent of French people wanted their own referendum.

A French exit would likely be messier than the Brexit. Unlike Britain, France is not only one of the founding countries but it has also adopted the euro currency.

A Dutch goodbye

Like France, the Netherlands are linked to Europe through the euro currency, have elections in 2017 and have witnessed a strong surge in popularity for Geert Wilders far-right, anti-Muslim Party for Freedom.

We want be in charge of our own country, our own money, our own borders, and our own immigration policy. If I become prime minister, there will be a referendum in the Netherlands on leaving the European Union as well, said Wilders in a statement on Friday.

Recent opinion polls in the Netherlands suggest there is strong support for an EU referendum and a Nexit in the Netherlands, a founding member of the EU. A survey by television channel EenVandaag this week said 54 percent wanted a referendum, although a poll two weeks ago by RTL Nieuws suggested 53 percent of Dutch residents thought the referendum was a bad idea.

Dutch voters will go to the polls before March 15, 2017 and the most recent polls have suggested Wilders is leading the race, although it is unlikely that he would gain the support to form a majority government.

Ciao, Italia

Italy, currently led by Matteo Renzis center-left government, is not due to go to general elections until 2018, but they could come earlier if Renzi fails to pass his own referendum on the Italian constitution in October.

The anti-establishment, populist and Eurosceptic Five Star Movement was founded in 2009 by Beppe Grillo, a popular comedian and blogger. Within seven years, it has risen to become Italys second most popular party.

While Italian referendums cannot change international treaties, the Five Star Movement has called for a non-binding referendum on whether or not the country should leave the eurozone. The movements leaders have not come out in support for Italy leaving but are strong proponents of what they call direct democracy.

Further to the fringes, but also surging in the polls, lies Italys far-right Northern League party, whose leader, Matteo Salvini, outwardly celebrated the Brexit.

Hooray for the courage of free citizens, tweeted Salvini, the outspoken Donald Trump supporter.

It will be the Dutch peoples turn, then the Swedes turn, then next year it will be the French, said Salvini, according to Euronews. The League offers Italians the hope not to be the last ones to notice that the house is burning.

Scandinexits

Far-right anti-immigration parties have also witnessed a sharp rise in polls in Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark.

Polls conducted this spring by Sifo suggested that Swedish voters would be much less likely to remain in the EU with Britain out.

The Sweden Democrats party with roots in Nazism, hailed the Brexit as a triumph.

Congratulations to Britains people on choosing independence! Now we are waiting for a #swexit, the party tweeted on Friday.

The Sweden Democrats have insisted that they have separated from a racist past but have been campaigning against what they deem to be their countrys generous immigration policy. In the 2014 elections, the party received 12.9 percent of the vote, but since then has seen a sharp rise in support with some polls calling it the most popular. Sweden will hold elections in 2018.

In Denmark, the Danish Peoples Party has also risen to power on an anti-immigration platform. In the 2015 elections, it became the official opposition party for the first time in its history.

While none of these parties currently govern, they clearly have momentum as seen in their growing popularity and the success of the Brexit campaign.

Regardless of whether or not they manage to call their own EU referendums, one thing is certain: the EU will be the subject of fierce political debate throughout Europe in the coming years.

Anadolu Agency
EUs founding member states have urged the U.K. to leave the union as soon as possible, which would then enable them to focus on reforming the bloc after Brexit.

Foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg made the joint call to the British government after a two-hour long crisis talk in Berlin Saturday.

Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said the British government should begin exit negotiations without delay, after majority of its citizens voted to leave the union Thursday.

We now have to turn the page. We would like to negotiate as soon as possible, Koenders told a joint press conference following the meeting.

We want negotiations in good faith, but at the same time Europe moves on. And that will not be as business as usual, he said.

Koenders underlined that after Brexit, EU members states wanted to focus on reforms and measures to address concerns of European citizens.

There are many concerns that our citizens havein terms of migration, in terms of jobs and growth, but also in security, he added.

No cat-and-mouse game

Luxembourgs Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn underlined that the U.K.s exit negotiations could only begin if and when the British government officially demanded it according to Article 50 of the EU charter.

He urged the U.K. government to invoke this article as soon as possible as it had promised to its British citizens before the referendum, and said for economic ties, it was important to have speedy progress in negotiations, and define a new framework of cooperation between the EU and the U.K.

I hope that there wont be a cat-and-mouse game here. Such a behavior would not suit Great Britain at all, it would not suit EU at all, he said.

Here there must be clarity. The people made their decision and now we should implement this decision, he said.

U.K. citizens voted to leave the EU in a historic referendum Thursday, where almost 52 percent of voters rejected their country's 43-year EU membership. The referendum sparked worries across European capitals for a domino effect in other members.

While EUs leading member states demand exit talks to begin as soon as possible, the British government is signaling that it would only start negotiations after October.

British Prime Minister David Cameron announced after the referendum that he would leave office by the time of his partys conference in October. He also said that the U.K. needed a new strong leadership to conduct exit negotiations with the EU.

Anadolu Agency
Mariano Rajoys Popular Party has emerged victorious in Sundays general elections in Spain but fallen short of a majority, with no obvious coalitions for a functioning government.

The results come days after the U.K.s EU referendum, which saw Britons vote to end their countrys 43-year membership to the bloc.

With more than 99 percent of votes counted, Popular Party has won more seats than it did in the inconclusive December, 2015 elections, but the deadlock remains.

Friends, weve won the elections and we will claim the right to govern because weve won the elections, a jubilant Rajoy told a cheering crowd.

Starting tomorrow we are going to talk to whoever we must to defend Spain.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the main opposition leader shut the door early. Pedro Sanchez of the Socialist Party, which has held on its second-place position with 85 seats despite losing five in the process, said he would not be supporting Rajoy and intends to lead a progressive government.

The Socialists have reaffirmed our position as the hegemonic party of Spains left, Sanchez said.

Meanwhile, a big surge in Spains far-left party United Podemos, predicted in exit polls and pre-election surveys, failed to materialize, results show.

The party saw zero change since Decembers elections, staying at 71 seats, even though they were widely forecast as the new main opposition.

The results have surprised us all, given the expectations, a somber Pablo Iglesias, the pony-tailed leader of Podemos told the media late Sunday night.

Rajoys conservative Popular Party is up 14 seats compared to Decembers election and will hold 137 in the new parliament -- still far from the 176 needed to govern.

The ruling party took many of their seats from the centrist Ciudadanos Party, which branded itself as an anti-corruption alternative. Ciudadanos won 32 seats, eight less compared to last year.

Many analysts point to the shock of Thursday's 'Brexit' vote as a likely cause of voters unpredicted shift away from change and towards familiarity.

Pacts will again be necessary to form a government and avoid a third election. Although the traditional parties had unexpectedly positive results, the 350-seat Spanish Parliament remains highly fragmented.

Also in contrast to general expectations that voter participation would drop in Sundays repeat elections, the turnout was higher at 69.8 percent on Sunday, Spains Interior Ministry reported, compared to 69.7 percent last December.

Anadolu Agency
The death toll from a powerful tornado has risen to 99 after extreme weather conditions battered Chinas eastern Jiangsu Province earlier this week.

State news agency Xinhua cited the government of Yangcheng city as saying Sunday that the storm Thursday left 846 others wounded, with 152 of them sustaining serious injuries.

A press release said 1,591 resident who were left homeless are being accommodated in temporary shelters in two counties, as workers repair damaged electric, water and telecommunication facilities in the area.

Rainstorms and hailstorms ripped through the coastal city Thursday, while a tornado toppled houses and hurled cement ships onto the shore.

Xinhua quoted Zheng Yongguang, an official at the China Meteorological Administration, as saying that the tornado was ranked as having an intensity of EF-4, the second strongest rating, with winds of 73 meters (240 feet) per second.

President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang had responded to the disaster by instructing authorities to make every effort to rescue the injured and minimize casualties.

Anadolu Agency
A senior Iraqi police commander on Sunday declared the western city of Fallujah fully liberated from the Daesh terrorist group after a more than month-long offensive.

In exclusive statements to Anadolu Agency, federal police chief Raed Shaker said Iraqi forces and the allied Hashd al-Shaabi -- an umbrella group of Iraqi Shia militias -- have managed to liberate the city from Daesh militants.

Security forces have imposed full control of Fallujah after fierce battles that inflicted heavy losses on [Daesh], he said.

He said that Iraqi forces were now clearing the citys northern districts from Daesh militants.

In April, the Iraqi army, backed by U.S.-led warplanes, launched an offensive to recapture Fallujah from Daesh, which overran the city in early 2014.

Iraq has suffered a devastating security vacuum since mid-2014, when Daesh captured the northern city of Mosul and overran large swathes of territory in the northern and western parts of the country.

According to the UN, more than 3.4 million people are now displaced in Iraq -- more than half of them children -- while more than 10 million are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

Anadolu Agency
More than 12,000 people have been tortured to death by the Syrian regime since 2011, according to a human rights group.

In a Sunday statement, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said that 12,679 people died of torture from March 2011 to June 2016.

Around 12,596 people were killed by government forces, including 163 children and 53 women, said the statement, issued to mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

According to the London-based watchdog, some 18 people were killed by PYD, the Syrian affiliate of terrorist PKK organization.

Some 29 people were also killed by Daesh terrorist group, including a child and 13 women, the statement said.

The rights group also cited that 19 people were also killed by Syrian opposition groups and 15 others by al-Nusra Front.

The Syrian regime is responsible for 99 percent of deaths due to torture at detention centers, the statement added.

SNHR director Fadl Abdel-Ghani said his group could not document any case of detention with a legal warrant.

The regime has committed crimes against humanity, he said, citing sexual assault, killing and involuntary disappearance as some of the practices by the Syrian regime.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity and disproportionate force.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed -- and more than 10 million displaced -- throughout the war-battered country, according to the UN.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, an NGO, however, has put the death toll from the five-year conflict at as high as 470,000.

Anadolu Agency
A planned agreement between Turkey and Israel to normalize relations after a six-year hiatus will lead to an improvement in the blockaded Gaza Strips humanitarian situation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday.

The accord, which will be formally signed Tuesday, will pave the way for the restoration of bilateral relations more than six years after Israeli commandos stormed a Gaza-bound Turkish aid flotilla in international waters, killing nine Turkish activists and injuring another 30, one of whom succumbed to his injuries nearly four years later.

"Under the deal, the sea blockade of Gaza will remain in place," Netanyahu was quoted as saying by Israeli state media. "This is a sensitive security issue and is not up for negotiation.

"The Gaza security blockade will remain in place  so as to prevent Hamas [which has governed the strip since 2007] from bolstering its military capacities," he said.

He added, however, that the expected deal with Turkey would allow the Gaza Strips war-battered water and electricity infrastructure to be rebuilt.

"Water shortages make life harder for those living in the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu said. "Solving this problem will be good for Israel."

The deal, he added, "will also protect [Israeli] military personnel now and in the future by ensuring that Turkey doesnt file lawsuits against them" for their roles in the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident.

Netanyahu went on to assert that Turkey and Israel were both "strong countries in the region", saying: "The suspension of [Turkey-Israel] ties has hindered cooperation between us."

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed, and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Netanyahu voiced his regret for the attack.

On Monday, months of talks between the two countries finally bore fruit, with Turkey announcing that a deal would be signed the following day to normalize relations with Israel.

According to the deal, Israel will pay a total of $20 million in compensation to the families of the Mavi Marmara victims.

Positive aspects

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Masud Ghnaim, an Arab member of the Knesset said the deal would have "positive aspects for the Palestinian people, especially to alleviate the suffering of our people in the Gaza Strip.

"The agreement is in the interests of the Palestinian people and a cause that Turkey has worked for since the beginning -- the lifting of the Israeli siege on Gaza," Ghnaim said.

"It is true the agreement does not speak explicitly about lifting the blockade, but there are clear and specific items on easing the siege," he added.

For example, he noted, "the agreement allows the passage of goods into Gaza and the establishment of a power plant and desalination plant and the construction of a hospital in Gaza".

Whats more, Ghnaim said, Israels promise to pay compensation to the families of the victims of the Mavi Marmara attack "is a clear and explicit recognition by Israel [of its] responsibility for the attack".

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for his part, at a meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin in Jerusalem, also welcomed news of the deal, describing it as an "important signal for the stability of the region".

In Washington, the White House hailed the development as an important milestone and important security and economic benefits for both countries and the world.

Anadolu Agency
Palestinian group Hamas late Monday thanked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for his efforts to ease the Gaza embargo.

The announcement came after a planned agreement between Turkey and Israel to normalize ties after a six-year hiatus, expected to lead to an improvement in the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

"We appreciate and thank President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's and Turkish people's support to our people in Gaza and their efforts to ease the blockade," said Hamas.

Erdogan said Tuesday more than 10,000 tons of supplies will be sailed to Gaza from Turkey before the Eid al-Fitr religious holiday early July.

The accord, which will be formally signed Tuesday, will pave the way for the restoration of bilateral relations more than six years after Israeli commandos stormed a Gaza-bound Turkish aid flotilla in international waters, killing nine Turkish activists and injuring another 30, one of whom succumbed to his injuries nearly four years later.

In the aftermath of the attack, Turkey demanded a formal apology from Israel, compensation for the families of those killed, and the lifting of Israels Gaza blockade.

In 2013, Netanyahu voiced his regret for the attack.

On Monday, months of talks between the two countries finally bore fruit, with Turkey announcing that a deal would be signed the following day to normalize relations with Israel.

According to the deal, Israel will pay a total of $20 million in compensation to the families of the Mavi Marmara victims.

Anadolu Agency
A recent terror attack at Turkeys largest airport that killed 42 victims and injured 239 others has the signs of Daesh involvement, the director of the CIA said Wednesday.

John Brennan said that while there has not yet been a credible claim of responsibility for the despicable attack on Ataturk International Airport, it bears the hallmarks of ISILs depravity.

Three assailants armed with automatic assault rifles and explosive vests stormed the airport, but were unable to pass security checkpoints.

Turkish officials have pointed to Daesh as being responsible for the deadliest attack on Turkish soil since a bombing at a pro-Kurdish rally in November killed more than 100 victims. Daesh is also suspected of being behind that attack.

The terror group has refrained from claiming credit for most, if not all, of its attacks in Turkey, in part to avoid backlash from those it is seeking to recruit, Brennan said at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

They carry out these attacks to gain the benefits from it, in terms of sending a signal to our Turkish partners, he said, and at the same time not wanting to potentially maybe alienating some of those individuals inside of Turkey that they may still be trying to gain the support of.

Turkey is part of a U.S.-led coalition of more than 60 nations intent on defeating Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

The coalition has claimed battlefield successes against the terror group, but U.S. officials have warned that as Daesh faces defeats in its territories it will seek to inspire sympathizers to carry out more terror attacks.

Russia separately began an air campaign against what it calls terror groups operating in Syria last September, but critics, including the U.S., allege that its main focus has been fighting rebels opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

There is "no doubt" Moscow is partially motivated "out of concern about the growth of ISIS and terrorist forces there, whether it be ISIS, or Jabhat al-Nusra, which is al-Qaeda in Syria, they are determined to crush those forces," Brennan said.

"At the same time though, they need to recognize that these forces have grown because of the problems that have existed in Syria, in the Syrian government," he added.

Without Russia's "active" involvement in brokering a political transition there is "no way forward" to achieve the goal long-sought by the U.S. and its allies, he said. "This is not going to be resolved on the battlefield.

The White House said earlier Wednesday that President Barack Obama will meet with Turkish officials early next month during a NATO Summit in Poland.

Anadolu Agency
U.S. President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he was heartbroken about suicide bomber attacks that killed 42 victims and injured more than 200 others at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul.

Obama made the remarks during a press conference in Ottawa, Canada at the so-called Three Amigos Summit -- a trilateral meeting among the heads of state of Canada, Mexico and the United States.

With Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto seated nearby and nodding his head in agreement, Obama called the attack on Tuesday terrible and said he expressed support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a telephone call earlier in the day.

The president placed that phone call to express his deep condolences on behalf of the American people, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters while headed to Ottawa aboard Air Force One, according to CNN. In the context of that call, he will offer any support that the Turks can benefit from as they conduct this investigation and take steps to further strengthen their security.

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Wednesday that indications are that the Daesh terrorist organization was behind the attack. The group has not yet claimed responsibility.

While not naming Daesh specifically, Obama had harsh words for those responsible.

Its an indication of how little these vicious organizations have to offer beyond killing innocents, Obama said at the press conference. Theyre continually losing ground, unable to govern those areas that they have taken over. They are going to be defeated in Syria, they are going to be defeated in Iraq.

Obama, who was speaking at the end of a meeting with the Mexican president, vowed to pursue and destroy all terror groups.

We will not rest until we have dismantled these networks of hate that have had an impact on the entire civilized world, he said.

Anadolu Agency
During the last 10 days of Kashmir unrest, according to the government, some 2,000 civilians and 1,500 security personal have got injured, and the most critical are being treated in the Army Hospital Srinagar.

Shafkat, a security officer is being treated for grave eye injuries that he incurred in a mob attack.

By Ashraf Wani: Insha, a 15-year-old is in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) in SMHS Hospital Srinagar, for pellet injuries in both her eyes which she incurred during the violent clash between protesters and security forces on July 9.

INSHA WILL NOT SEE AGAIN

Ninth grader Insha Lone will be living with a lifelong handicap, she will be staring at a blank world. Doctors at the premier SMHS hospital say she won't be able to see again, both her eyes have been perforated badly by pellets.

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The team of eye specialists from AIIMS who visited the hospital too are ruling out any miracle in her case.

NEITHER WILL THIS OFFICER

On the other hand, Shafkat Ahmed, a personal security officer of SSP Srinagar , who was chased by unruly protesters on July 14 as he was leaving from Parimpora Police station, and his vehicle was put on fire, was assaulted on face damaging both his eyes.

Shafkat is now being treated in ICU of 92 Army Base Hospital in Srinagar.

During the last 10 days of Kashmir unrest, according to the government, some 2,000 civilians and 1,500 security personal have got injured,

and the most critical are being treated in the Army Hospital Srinagar.

WHEN WILL THIS VIOLENCE END?

Brigadier M.S Tivetia commandant 92 Army Base Hospital said , "28 CRPF and police personal have been operated in Hospital, who had multiple injuries of stones and splinters". He said it took 8 hours for doctors to operate on one of the injured police personal who had multiple fractures on his face.

While the violence has started to abate a bit, the tension between the men in uniform and people who waged protests will take time to deescalate.

--- ENDS ---
A siege at a restaurant in Dhaka ended in the deaths of 20 foreign hostages, the Bangladeshi army said Saturday.

The overnight crisis ended around 12 hours after up to nine gunmen took over the Holey Artisan Bakery, which is popular with foreigners and middle class locals.

Brig. Gen. Naim Ashfaq said 13 people were rescued when commandos stormed the Spanish restaurant. Six militants were killed and one other detained in the raid.

Most of the victims were killed brutally with sharp weapons, Ashfaq said. He said the bodies had been taken to a military hospital for autopsy and the identities of the dead would be released as soon as possible.

The atrocity was claimed by Daesh though the Amaq media outlet linked to the terror group.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina congratulated the security forces on ending the siege. We dont want terrorism in Bangladesh, she said, adding: I dont understand their belief -- what kind of Muslims are they?

The hostage crisis begun at around 9.20 p.m. local time (1520GMT) Friday when militants armed with guns and explosives stormed the restaurant in the citys Gulshan neighborhood, which is home to several embassies and one of the most secure districts of the capital.

Police tried to make contact with the hostage-takers in an effort to end the crisis peacefully.

When a joint police and military force stormed the restaurant they were met by heavy gunfire and explosions.

Two police officers were killed and at least 10 others were in the incident, local TV reported.

The Daily Star, a local English-language newspaper, cited the father of one hostage who said that hostages who were unable to recite verses of the Quran were tortured.

Later Saturday, the U.S. administration condemned the attack in the strongest terms, confirming that the casualties include one American citizen as well.

"This is a despicable act of terrorism, and the United States stands with Bangladesh and the international community in our resolve to confront terrorism wherever it occurs," a White House statement said.

Offering condolences to the victims and a speedy recovery for the injured, the U.S. State Department reiterated that the U.S. supports the Bangladeshi governments efforts to combat terrorism.

"We remain in close contact with the government of Bangladesh and have offered our assistance in their efforts to bring to justice those responsible for these attacks," U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a written statement.

Anadolu Agency
In the wake a fatal stabbing of a local teenager, Israeli authorities on Saturday approved the construction of new settlement units in southern Israel-occupied West Bank, Israeli media reported.

According to Israeli Channel 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman approved the construction of 42 housing units in the southern West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba.

The settlement, located near the West Bank city of Hebron, is the same where a 13-year-old Israeli girl was stabbed to death last Thursday, reportedly by a Palestinian teen. The suspected Palestinian attacker was shot dead following the attack in the girls bedroom.

International law views the West Bank and East Jerusalem as "occupied territories," considering all Jewish settlement building on the land illegal.

About 500,000 Israelis now live in more than 100 Jewish-only settlements built since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. The Palestinians want these areas, along with the Gaza Strip, in which to establish their future state.

Palestinian negotiators insist that Israeli settlement building on Arab land must stop before a comprehensive peace agreement can be reached.

Anadolu Agency
Five people were killed and several others injured in an attack by Assad regime warplane in opposition-held parts of Syria's northwestern Aleppo province on Saturday.

According to Abu Leys, a local civil defense official, a regime warplane struck a residential area in Aleppos town of Salahaddin.

"Two families are still under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Rescue teams continue to search for survivors," he added.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the war-battered country, according to the UN.

The Syrian Center for Policy Research, however, put the death toll from the six-year conflict at more than 470,000 people.

Anadolu Agency
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said his government had taken unprecedented aggressive measures in the West Bank city of Hebron following the killing of two Israelis in Palestinian attacks this week.

"This includes cordoning off the entire Hebron district, revoking work permits from Bani Naim, the village six terrorists have come from; a massive reinforcement of our units, two brigades with emphasis on securing the roads," Netanyahu said at a weekly meeting of his security cabinet.

Hebron is home to around 700,000 Palestinians.

Two Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks in Hebron this week, including a 13-year-old girl who was fatally stabbed in the Kiryat Arba settlement. The suspected Palestinian attacker was shot dead following the attack in the girls bedroom.

Following the attacks, the Israeli government decided to reduce the monthly tax transfers it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. Israeli authorities also approved the construction of 42 new housing units in Kiryat Arba settlement.

The attacks followed a period of relative calm after six months of violence from October in which more than 200 Palestinians and around 30 Israelis or foreign nationals were killed.

Netanyahu said the Cabinet would be considering new measures to "strengthen" Kiryat Arba and other Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Under international law, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are occupied territories and all Jewish settlement building on the land is illegal.

About 500,000 Israelis now live in more than 100 Jewish-only settlements built since Israel occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. The Palestinians want these areas, along with the Gaza Strip, for the establishment of a future state.

Palestinian negotiators insist that Israeli settlement building on Arab land must stop before a comprehensive peace agreement can be reached.

Anadolu Agency
A former Israeli foreign minister said Sunday that she was summoned for questioning by British police over alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.

Tzipi Livni, whose allegations were backed by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, was reportedly called to answer questions over an Israeli operation in Gaza in 2008 and 2009 that led to around 1,400 Palestinian deaths.

The Haaretz newspaper in Israel, which organized a London conference Livni addressed on Sunday, said she was contacted by police on Thursday but the summons was cancelled following discussions between Israel and the U.K.

The British legal system is being abused, she told the conference, according to the newspaper. She added that Israeli politicians and military figures were being forced to participate in a theater of the absurd during visits to the U.K. Her comments are thought to relate to overseas legal threats against Israeli figures involved in military decision-making.

Livni was deputy prime minister and foreign minister during Operation Cast Lead, which saw Israel launched airstrikes and a ground invasion in Gaza following rocket attacks on southern Israel. She is now a member of the Israeli parliament, or Knesset.

In a statement, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said it viewed the request by the Metropolitan Police with great concern.

A police spokesman told Anadolu Agency: We do not confirm or deny who we may wish to speak to as part of any ongoing investigation. If you were to ask me if there is an ongoing investigation the answer is no.

Anadolu Agency
The death toll from Sundays massive car-bomb attack in Baghdad -- which was claimed by the Daesh terrorist group -- has risen to 204, according to Iraqi Health Ministry sources.

Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi declared three days of mourning in the wake of the attack, which occurred in the capitals central Al-Karada district at about 1.00 a.m. local time (2200GMT) on Sunday.

According to a health ministry source who spoke anonymously due to safety concerns, the blast left at least 185 others injured.

A medical source from Baghdads Health Department, who spoke anonymously due to fears for his safety, said the death toll had been revised upwards after a number of bodies were pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building.

"Eleven unidentified bodies are at [Baghdads] Kadhimiya Hospital, 27 at Karama Hospital and nine at Sheikh Zayed Hospital," the source said.

The bombing was swiftly claimed by Daesh, which overran vast swathes of territory in northern and western Iraq in 2014.

In a statement circulated online, the group said the bombing had targeted Shia Muslims. The statement could not, however, be independently verified.

Visiting the site in the wake of the attack, al-Abadi linked the deadly bombing to Daeshs recent territorial losses.

"The terrorists carried out this bombing after being crushed at the battle of Fallujah," he said, vowing to find and punish the perpetrators.

The city of Fallujah was recaptured from Daesh by Iraqi forces last week.

The Al-Karada district had been bustling with late-night shoppers when the blast -- Iraqs deadliest this year -- tore through a main street.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry, for its part, was quick to condemn the attack.

"We condemn this outrageous attack and wish mercy for those who lost their lives [We] hope the wounded recover quickly and we express our condolences to the Iraqi nation," it said.

The U.S. likewise denounced the attack.

"These attacks only strengthen our resolve to support Iraqi security forces as they continue to take back territory from ISIL," U.S. National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said, using an alternative acronym for Daesh.

Anadolu Agency
Egypts official state gazette on Monday reported that a court had ruled to include Mohamed Morsi -- the countrys first democratically-elected president who was ousted in a 2013 military coup -- to Egypts official list of "terrorists".

According to the gazette, the Cairo Criminal Court also ruled to include the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group -- of which Morsi is a leader -- on the states list of "terrorist entities".

The gazette also reported that 35 individuals, including Morsi, had been placed on the list for a period of three years.

Ismail Abu Baraka, a lawyer for a number of the individuals included on the list, told Anadolu Agency that all 35 had been convicted earlier of "collaborating" with Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, which is ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood.

He noted, however, that an appeal against the convictions had since been lodged with Egypts Court of Cassation, the countrys highest appeals court.

Abu Baraka went on to note that the court ruling calling for Morsis inclusion on the "terrorist" list had originally been issued in April "but defense lawyers had not been informed and did not attend the court session".

Egypt's first democratically elected president, Morsi was ousted by the military in a 2013 military coup after serving only one year in office.

He has since been slapped with multiple death and prison sentences for "conspiring against Egypt", spying for Qatar, "insulting" the judiciary and breaking out of jail during a 2011 popular uprising.

Morsi and his co-defendants, along with a number of independent observers, say the charges against him are politically motivated.

Since Morsi's overthrow three years ago, the Egyptian authorities have waged a harsh crackdown on his Muslim Brotherhood group, killing hundreds and throwing tens of thousands behind bars.

Anadolu Agency
A suicide bomber has detonated an explosive device outside police headquarters in the Indonesian province of Central Java, killing himself and injuring a police officer.

Local news website kompass.com quoted Central Java Police Chief Insp. Gen. Condro Kirono as saying that the explosion occurred at 7.35 a.m (0035GMT) Tuesday when police stopped a man who arrived on a motorbike from barging into the building.

"A member of the security personnel tried to intercept the attacker but he reversed, and tried to get away," Kirono said.

"During the pursuit by the police, the perpetrator detonated the bomb."

Police have said the device used was "low in explosive" and thus only killed the bomber and injured the officer.

Security forces are on high alert in Indonesia, where Muslims celebrate the end of Ramadan on Wednesday.

Talking to reporters Tuesday, President Joko Widodo called on people to be calm, but remain vigilant.

"People should not be afraid of such terror," he said, adding that he had instructed the national police chief to arrest the network behind the attack.

"We have seen a bomb [attack] in almost every country," Widodo said. "Violence in the name of anything, is not justifiable and should be cursed."

Anadolu Agency
Iraq canceled celebrations to mark the end of Ramadan on Monday, following a terror attack that killed more than 200 people in Baghdad.

We will not make a celebration in this year's Mubarak Ramadan festival due to respect for our martyrs and injured, President Fuad Masum said in a statement.

He called on the security forces to increase anti-terror measures and called for the return of parliament after Eid al-Fitr.

On Sunday, 204 people were killed in a bomb attack in Al-Karada. Another attack also hit the citys Al-Shaab, leaving five dead.

Daesh claimed responsibility for the Al-Karada attack and three days of national mourning were announced.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan phoned Masum to offer an eid greeting and repeat his condolences.

Anadolu Agency
A suicide bomber targeted the Saudi Arabian city of Medina on Monday as the kingdom was hit by two other terror attacks.

In Medina, Islams second holiest city after Mecca, the bomber attacked a security checkpoint near the Prophet's Mosque, a security source said on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on speaking to the media.

Two people and the attacker were killed, the source said, as people broke their fast on the last night of Ramadan. There was no official comment on the attack near the mosque, which is the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad.

In the eastern city of Qatif, two suicide bombers targeted a Shia Muslim mosque. There were no reports of casualties.

Another suspected suicide bomber targeted the U.S. consulate in Jeddah earlier Monday, the day Americans celebrated their independence.

In a telephone call to King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned the atrocious attacks, a presidential source said under condition of anonymity.

Erdogan offered his condolences and wished speedy recoveries for the injured as well as passing on his greetings for Eid al-Fitr.

Anadolu Agency
Kashmiri Muslims residing in the Sheikh Mohalla in Maharaj Gunj or Srinagar defied the prevailing curfew to help a Kashmiri Pandit perform the last rites of his mother.

By India Today Web Desk: Since protests broke out after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Vani was killed in an encounter, a curfew has been prevailing in various parts of the valley, including Srinagar.

The Indian Express reports that a group of Muslims in Srinagar's Maharaj Gunj, stepped out of their homes yesterday, defying the curfew, to help a Kashmiri Pandit, Deepak Malhotra, and his family conduct a ritualistic funeral for Deepak's mother, who passed away on Saturday morning.

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Kashmiri Muslims residing in Maharaj Gunj's Sheikh Mohalla carried the body of the woman to the cremation ground, a policeman said.

Deepak's family had stayed back in Kashmir during the Kashmiri Pandit exodus that happened in 1990.





--- ENDS ---
Twenty-five people were killed in a bomb attack in northern Syria on Tuesday, according to a local source.

The bomb in the Salihiya neighborhood of provincial capital Al-Hasakah exploded outside a bakery, the source said on condition of anonymity due to safety concerns.

No group has yet claimed responsibility.

Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since early 2011, when the Bashar al-Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy. Since then, more than 470,000 people have been killed, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research.

Anadolu Agency
Regional political actors on Tuesday condemned a string of suicide attacks that rocked different parts of Saudi Arabia one day earlier, killing nine people.

On Monday, three suicide bombers targeted the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, the Mosque of the Prophet in the western city of Medina; and a Shia mosque in the eastern Qatif region.

According to Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki, the first attack in Jeddah -- which occurred at 2:15 a.m. local time (23:15 GMT Sunday) -- left only the suicide attacker dead.

Later the same day, al-Turki said, security forces thwarted an attempt by a suicide bomber to enter the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, considered Islams second holiest site.

According to al-Turki, four security personnel were killed when they intercepted the bomber, who then detonated an explosive device.

The third attack reportedly occurred at roughly the same time when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a mosque in the Shia-majority Qatif region of Saudi Arabias Eastern Province.

The attacks have since been roundly condemned by numerous Arab and Muslim organizations and states, including Turkey, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon; the Gulf Cooperation Council; the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; the International Union of Muslim Scholars; Egypts Al-Azhar; Egypts Muslim Brotherhood group; and Palestinian resistance movement Hamas.

Shia states and organizations have likewise condemned Mondays triple attack, including Iran, Lebanons Hezbollah and Yemens Houthi militant group.

Anadolu Agency
Thousands of Muslims in Athens, who still await the Greek government's unfulfilled promise of constructing a mosque for the minority community in the capital, said their Eid prayers at open grounds and stadiums Wednesday.

Several people said their special Eid prayers at the SEF and OAKA, two stadiums for which the Muslim community was granted special permission by the Greek government to mark the special occasion.

While the Turkish minority in Greeces Western Thrace region and Turks in Athens said their Eid al-Fitr prayers Tuesday, thousands of other Muslims in Athens, including Pakistanis and Afghans offered their prayers Wednesday.

Muslims in Athens lamented the fact that the capital of a major European country still lacked a fully-functional mosque for its large minority capital. They regret being forced to say their prayers in small halls and rooms used as informal masjids. Several people just end up praying at open spaces such as pavements or parks in the capital.

There are two Ottoman era mosques in the Greek capital, one of which is now used as a museum, while the other remains under restoration.

In 2006, the Greek parliament had approved a plan to build a mosque in Athens for the estimated over half a million Muslims in the country.

In June this year, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras yet again promised that a mosque and a Muslim cemetery would be built soon in Athens.

Even human rights groups such as Amnesty International has criticized Athens for being the only European Union capital without a functioning mosque.

However, according to George Kalantzis, secretary-general responsible for religious affairs, the ongoing political and economic instability in Greece along with red tape involving Greek bureaucracy and pending court cases were responsible for the delay in the construction of the mosque.

Kalantzis said Greece had been wracked by political instability for the last 10 years. He explained that the Greek ministries of education, finance, infrastructure and environment need to coordinate and cooperate to execute the mosque project.

"[But] as you see, four ministers of four each ministries have been changed every two years," he said, pointing out the level of instability in Greece.

Some pending court cases also hamper the project.

"I think that the court will give the ruling in the coming months," Kalantzis said.

But while Greek officials continue to offer promises to build the much needed place of worship, Muslim community members are beginning to doubt their sincerity.

Ridvan Shargo, who has been living in Athens for the last 28 years, said: "It has been promised for a really long time but we see no developments. There are always excuses due to technical issues. Even in the time of Olympic games, they just dodged it...We really need a mosque here for our prayers and funerals."

Anadolu Agency
A fresh dispute between Serbia and Bosnia has broken out ahead of the anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide on July 11.

At the urging of NGOs, a group of 11 Serbian lawmakers has called for the National Assembly to adopt a resolution recognizing the genocide of Bosniac Muslims during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

More than ever, it is important to determine what the values of Serbia are, Anita Mitic, director of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, said. It looks like the policy of reconciliation is Serbian policy but we cannot be the leaders of that policy if we deny the genocide.

Serb paramilitaries killed around 2,000 men and boys on July 11, with another 6,000 hunted down and murdered over the following days.

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has said he will not attend the commemoration ceremony in Srebrenica this year after the towns mayor, Camil Durakovic, said those who would not accept the genocide were not welcome.

When he attended last years commemoration, Vucic was forced to flee after his party was attacked with stones and sticks.

This week, Bosnian Foreign Minister Igor Crnadak ordered his staff to stop cooperating with the events organizers.

If we consider Camil Durakovics declarations on Aleksandar Vucic, who is not welcome in Srebrenica, it is clear that this threatens one of the main priorities of Bosnian foreign policy, which is the improvement of good relations with neighbouring countries, he said.

Meanwhile, Serbian officials have called for an end to ties with Bosnia over the episode. Marko Djuric, who heads the Serbian office for Kosovo, accused the Bosnian member of the three-man presidency, Bakir Izetbegovic, of orchestrating anti-Serb sentiment and called on Vucic to cut links with Durakovic and Izetbegovic.

On Wednesday, Croatias parliament marked the genocide. Parliamentary Speakerr Zeljko Reiner said covering up the truth and to deny it may lead to a much larger war and hatred in the future.

The 21st anniversary of the genocide will see 127 victims buried in Potocari village, just northwest to Srebrenica.

Anadolu Agency
President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on Wednesday discussed the Azerbaijan Armenian conflict, and the Syrian and Ukrainian civil wars via telephone, the White House said.

According to the White House, the main reason for the call was to discuss Putins June 20 meeting with President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Serzh Sargsian of Armenia regarding the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

A statement by the Kremlin quoted by Russian media said the call was initiated by Putin to inform Obama about the results of the talks on Karabakh as the U.S. is co-chair of the Minsk group under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe but no detail were given out in both statements.

President Obama expressed his readiness to intensify efforts together with Russia and with France, as co-Chairs of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Minsk Group, to achieve a comprehensive settlement to the conflict, according to the White House.

The two leaders also discussed the Syrian civil war during the call, the White House said.

Obama expressed his concerns to Putin about the failure of the Syrian regime to comply with a cessation of hostilities truce in the country brokered by the UN earlier this year and extended by a U.S. and Russian agreement in April.

President Obama stressed the importance of Russia pressing the Syrian regime for a lasting halt to offensive attacks against civilians and parties to the cessation, the White House said.

A readout from the Kremlin quoted by Russian media said Putin asked Obama to encourage moderate Syrian opposition groups to disengage from the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front and noted the two leaders commitment to "build up coordination of Russian and U.S. actions in Syria in the military sphere."

The White House readout didn't mention military coordination but said "the presidents confirmed their commitment to defeating ISIL and the Nusrah Front."

Discussing conflicts in Eastern Ukraine, Obama urged Putin to take steps to end the significant uptick in fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Anadolu Agency
A total of 37 people have been killed in separate airstrikes in northwestern Syrias Aleppo and Idlib provinces since Thursday, according to a civil defense source.

Twenty two people were killed by Syrian regime and Russian airstrikes on residential areas in northwestern Syrias Aleppo province late Thursday, a civil defense source told Anadolu Agency Friday.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fears of being targeted, said the airstrikes hit six neighborhoods in Aleppo city, including Tariq al-Bab and al-Saliheen.

There were several women and children among the dead, the source added.

Separately, 15 civilians were killed and another 20 injured Friday by a Syrian regime airstrike in Idlib province, a civil defense source told Anadolu Agency.

Idlib provinces opposition-controlled Darkush town was targeted by a regime warplane, the source said anonymously due to security concerns.

On Wednesday, the Syrian regimes armed forces had declared a 72-hour ceasefire to be applied across all Syrian territory.

Anadolu Agency
The U.S. is reeling Friday from a week of violence that started with fatal police-involved shootings of black men and ended in a coordinated attack on police in Dallas that killed five officers.

We are hurting, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said during a press conference early Friday. We are heartbroken.

All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens.

President Barack Obama, who is in Poland to attend a NATO summit, said the U.S. was "horrified" by the "vicious, callous and despicable attack on law enforcement.

"I believe I speak for every single American when I say that we are horrified over these events and that we stand united with the people and the police department in Dallas," he said before later ordering flags on federal grounds to be flown at half-mast until July 12.

Presidential candidates also condemned the attack.

Hillary Clinton mourned for the officers "shot while doing their sacred duty, while Donald Trump called for "leadership, love and compassion" in the wake of shootings.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said, "Our worst nightmare happened. It is a heartbreaking moment for the city of Dallas.

Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott ordered state flags be lowered to half-staff to honor the victims.

The top prosecutor in the U.S. said at a press conference that the events this week left Americans with a feeling of helplessness, of uncertainty and of fear.

While these feelings were understandable, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said, the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence, she said. We must continue working to build trust between communities and law enforcement.

She also encouraged the continuation of peaceful protests. We must reject the easy impulses of bitterness and rancor and embrace the difficult work of finding a path forward together, she added.

Parts of downtown Dallas remained on lockdown Friday.

Violence erupted late Thursday at a Black Lives Matter rally in the downtown area, where 11 police officers were shot, most of them by sniper fire from elevated positions, according to officials.

Police arrested three suspects and engaged a fourth throughout the better part of the night, as reports of officers' deaths arrived one after another.

An active shooter situation went on for hours in a parking garage near El Centro College on Main St., where the fourth suspect was holed up, shooting at officers as they tried to negotiate.

The suspect told them that the "end is coming", that he would "hurt and kill more" officers, and bombs were planted "all over the place" downtown, Brown said.

"Negotiations broke down, we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect," he said.

The police chief said law enforcement "saw no other option but to use our bomb robot", a device sent in to the suspect and was detonated, killing him.

"Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger," the chief said.

Brown then went on share comments from the suspect, elicited before he died by a police negotiator who "did an exceptional job".

The suspect told officers he was "upset about Black Lives Matter" and recent police shootings, Brown said.

"The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers," Brown said.

The suspect, who remained anonymous throughout the briefing, said he was not affiliated with any group.

Media reports named the suspect as 25-year-old Micah Xavier Johnson, who had no criminal record or known links to terrorism.

A U.S. Army spokesman confirmed to independent army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, that the suspect was an army veteran. There has been no official corroboration.

A statement from the family of Alton Sterling, the 37-year-old black male who was killed earlier this week in an encounter with two police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, condemned the violence. "Regardless of how angry or upset people may be, resorting to this kind of sickening violence should never happen and simply cannot be tolerated, the family said in a statement. "Responding to violence with violence is not the answer."

Thursday's attack, described as one of the deadliest on law enforcement since 9/11, came on the heels of two fatal police shootings caught on video that took the lives of two black men on consecutive days.

Sterling, who sold CDs outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, was shot dead while pinned down to the ground by two white police officers.

Video footage from two different angles revealed the details of the shooting, prompting nationwide protests against police brutality.

Another video, this time a Facebook live stream, shed light on the aftermath of another fatal shooting, which killed 31-year-old Philando Castile at a traffic stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, unleashing growing resentment and frustration that boiled over in otherwise peaceful protests in several cities Thursday, including New York City, Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas, where they turned deadly.

A multi-faith prayer service is planned in the city for noon.

Anadolu Agency
Hate crimes rose sharply in the U.K. as the country held its EU membership referendum last month, new figures have shown.

Data released by the National Police Chiefs Council on Friday showed 3,076 hate crimes had been reported to police across the country between June 16 and June 30, which is an increase of 42 percent over the same period last year.

The reported incidents included cases of violence against individuals, harassment and verbal abuse, among others.

The figures appeared to corroborate concerns that ethnic and religious minorities were being increasingly targeted in the U.K. after it voted to leave the European Union in the June 23 referendum.

Incidents peaked on June 25, the day after the referendum results were announced, when 289 offences were recorded across the country.

The councils assistant chief constable, Mark Hamilton, said: We now have a clear indication of the increases in the reporting of hate crime nationally and can see that there has been a sharp rise in recent weeks.

This is unacceptable and it undermines the diversity and tolerance we should instead be celebrating.

Everyone has the right to feel safe and confident about who they are and should not be made to feel vulnerable or at risk. The police service has no tolerance for this type of abuse but we need to be made aware that these crimes are taking place so that we can investigate.

Also on Friday, London Mayor Sadiq Khan launched a campaign calling for city residents to stand together against racist and xenophobic offences.

I simply will not tolerate hate crimes of any form, anywhere in London. We must stand together and anyone who sees or is targeted by abusive behavior should report it to the police immediately, Khan said in a statement.

Anadolu Agency
The Israeli police have lifted a ban on the entry of Israeli settlers into occupied East Jerusalems Al-Aqsa Mosque complex after a 10-day hiatus, Israeli media reported Thursday.

According to Israeli public radio, police will allow Jewish settlers to resume visiting the flashpoint religious site "starting next week".

During the last week of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr (the three-day holiday that follows the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan), police had prohibited Jewish settlers -- and all non-Muslim visitors -- from entering the site.

The decision was taken late last month after a large number of settlers entered the Al-Aqsa compound, triggering three days of intermittent clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian Muslim worshippers.

In recent years, groups of extremist Jewish settlers -- typically under heavy police protection -- have staged forays into the mosque complex with increasing frequency and in growing numbers.

The visits come despite the objections of the Jordan-run Authority for Islamic Endowments, which is responsible for overseeing Jerusalems Muslim and Christian holy sites.

For Muslims, Al-Aqsa represents the world's third holiest site. Jews, for their part, refer to the area as the "Temple Mount", claiming it was the site of two Jewish temples in ancient times.

Some extremist Jewish groups have called for the demolition of the Al-Aqsa Mosque so that a Jewish temple might be built in its place.

In 2000, a visit to Al-Aqsa by hardline Israeli politician Ariel Sharon sparked what later became known as the "Second Intifada" -- a popular uprising against the Israeli occupation in which thousands of Palestinians were killed.

Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the city in 1980, claiming all of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state in a move never recognized by the international community.

Anadolu Agency
NATO will discuss a possible larger Black Sea presence in October amid worries over a more assertive Russia, the alliances Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday.

Addressing reporters on the first day of a two-day NATO summit in Warsaw, Stoltenberg said that several member states raised the need for an enhanced military presence in the Black Sea region.

We decided to ask our military planners to provide advice for our defense ministers in October, to look into whether we can or how we can increase our presence not only on land but also in the air and at sea, he said.

We will be more concrete about that at our defense ministerial meeting in October, he added.

NATO leaders agreed on Friday to station multinational troops in four member states  Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania  as a reassurance measure.

Deployments in Eastern Europe

Stoltenberg said four battalions would be deployed in these countries on a rotational basis.

These battalions will be robust and multinational. They demonstrate the strength of the transatlantic bond. And they make clear that an attack on one ally would be considered an attack on the whole alliance, he stressed.

The NATO chief announced that the battalions will be in place starting next year, with Canada leading the battalion in Latvia and the United Kingdom leading the forces in Estonia.

Stoltenberg said Germany will lead the multinational battalion to be stationed in Lithuania, and the United States will be the leading nation making the major contribution to the forces in Poland.

Eastern European countries have long called for a stronger NATO presence in their countries amid fears of a more assertive Russia.

Ballistic missile system

The secretary general also announced that a major project of the alliance, Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), was declared by the leaders on Friday as an initial operational capability.

This means that the US ships based in Spain, the radar in Turkey, and the interceptor site in Romania are now able to work together under NATO command and NATO control, he said.

Stoltenberg emphasized that the system would be entirely defensive and would represent no threat to Russias strategic nuclear deterrent.

The chief diplomat also expressed willingness to develop a constructive dialogue with Russia.

NATO poses no threat to any country. We do not want a new Cold War. We do not want a new arms race. And we do not seek confrontation, he said.

As we strengthen our deterrence and defense, we continue to seek a constructive dialogue with Russia, he added.

Stoltenberg said he will convene a new meeting of the NATO-Russia Council next week to inform Russia of the decisions taken at the Warsaw summit.

NATO-Russia relations soured further following Russias annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The UN General Assembly voted almost unanimously to proclaim the annexation illegal.

Along with many UN countries, including the U.S. and the EU, Turkey does not recognize Crimea as Russian territory.

Anadolu Agency
The quake occurred at 08:01 am today (IST) and tremors were felt within a radius of 10 kms from the epicenter.

By India Today Web Desk: An earthquake measuring 3.2 on the Richter scale was registered in Manipur's Chandel today.



The quake occurred at 08:01 am today (IST).

Tremors were felt within a radius of 10 kms from the epicenter.

MAJOR EARTHQUAKE THREAT DETECTED UNDER BANGLADESH, INDIA

A study published in journal Nature Geoscience has warned that a huge earthquake would probably turn urban areas in eastern India into "ruins" may be building beneath Bangladesh.

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Scientists said they have new evidence of increasing strain where two tectonic plates underlie the world's largest river delta.

They estimate that at least 140 million people in the region could be affected if the boundary ruptures; the destruction could come not only from the direct results of shaking, but changes in the courses of great rivers, and in the level of land already perilously close to sea level.

--- ENDS ---
NATO countries have decided to deploy AWACS surveillance aircraft to support the U.S.-led coalitions fight against Daesh in Syria and Iraq.

In remarks made at a press conference on the second day of the NATO summit in Warsaw Saturday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said: We are now agreed in principle that NATOs AWACS surveillance aircraft will provide direct support to the coalition forces.

This is a clear signal of our resolve to help tackle terrorism.

Stoltenberg also said the surveillance aircraft would operate in Turkish and international airspace.

The plan is to have the planes flying over international airspace and over Turkey. And that will enable them to look into the airspace over both Iraq and Syria, he said.

NATOs chief diplomat also emphasized the alliance would consider further reassurance measures to defend Turkey against all possible threats from Syria.

Turkey is the NATO ally most affected by the turmoil and violence to the south, he told reporters.

We are working closely with Turkey on how to expand assurance measures in Turkey, he added.

NATO has deployed Patriot and SAMP-T batteries in Turkeys southeast to defend Turkish territories from possible missile attacks from Syrian territories.

Training local forces

Stoltenberg said NATO countries also decided to begin a military training program for Iraqi local forces in Iraq, to enable them to more effectively fight against Daesh.

That is also important for Turkey. Because Turkey is bordering both Syria and Iraq. And everything we do to fight ISIL [Daesh], will also be of great benefit for Turkey, he said.

NATO allies have already begun providing military training to Iraqi forces in neighboring Jordan, but upon the request of the Iraqi government, they decided to move the training to Iraq.

Stoltenberg also announced that NATO would provide military and technical support to Jordan, Tunisia and Libya, to support these countries in their fight against terrorism.

In Tunisia, we are working to establish a new intelligence Fusion Centre. We will shortly begin providing support for Tunisian Special Operational Forces, he said.

And we continue preparations to assist Libya design security policies and structures which will help them unify and better defend their country against groups like ISIL [Daesh], he added.

Asked whether NATO would also provide military equipment to local forces fighting Daesh, such as Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq, Stoltenberg said this was not an issue on the agenda.

Carter-Isik meeting

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter met Turkish Minister of Defense Fikri Isik Saturday on the sidelines of the NATO summit.

Carter again strongly condemned the June 28 terrorist attack on Istanbul Ataturk Airport, according to a statement released by his office.

He vowed the U.S. will continue to work intensively with Turkey to counter the threat of terrorism, of any kind, with both nations' militaries standing shoulder-to-shoulder in Incirlik and elsewhere, the statement said.

The two leaders reaffirmed their unyielding resolve to deal Daesh a lasting defeat, and discussed the broad range of ongoing cooperative efforts to accelerate the terror group's defeat, it said.

Carter also expressed appreciation for Turkey's efforts to reduce international tensions in Europe and the Middle East.

Turkey-Poland military agreement

Turkey and Poland signed a cooperation agreement Saturday in the field of electronic warfare capabilities.

The letter of intent signed between Isik and his Polish counterpart Antoni Macierewicz on the sidelines of the NATO summit aims to develop capabilities of NATO allies in the field of electronic warfare.

The two countries would also develop projects to enhance electronic warfare capabilities of NATO and expect other NATO allies to join the initiative, Turkish defense ministry sources said.

Anadolu Agency
Hundreds of people lined the streets of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on Saturday to bid farewell to the recently identified remains of more than 120 people murdered in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

The bodies of the 127 victims began their final journey from the central Bosnian city of Visoko on Saturday morning on a truck covered with a large national flag and laden with flowers.

As the cortege passed through Sarajevo, many onlookers could be seen openly crying. People showered the truck with flowers and prayed for the victims.

The remains were then slowly taken to the nearby village of Potocari, just northwest of Srebrenica town, where the victims will be buried on Monday, which marks the 21st anniversary of the murders.

About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed after the Bosnian Serb army attacked the UN safe area of Srebrenica in July 1995, despite the presence of Dutch troops tasked with acting as UN peacekeepers.

The youngest victim among the 127 dead has been identified as Avdija (Emin) Memic who was 14 when he was killed. Memic will be buried along with his uncle Abdulrahman and his young cousin Halil, who was 16 when he died.

Every year, the remains of more than a hundred victims are identified and buried in Potocari village on the anniversary of the genocide.

However, hundreds of Bosniak families are still searching for missing people as a large number of victims were thrown into mass graves around the country during the Bosnian War.

Fatima Hubijar is a widow who attended Saturdays ceremony in Sarajevo with a photo of her missing son. She was mourning with tears in her eyes, hoping to bid farewell to her son one day.

"I come here looking for him. Whenever coffins come, I come ... but I cannot do it anymore, I've gotten old," Hubijar says.

Around 8,400 people remain missing after the war, according to the Institute for Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Anadolu Agency
Senior PKK terrorist group figure Fehman Huseyin, who was also known by his code name Bahoz Erdal, has been killed in Syria, a spokesman for the Syrian opposition brigade, Tel Hamis, told Anadolu Agency Saturday.

According to spokesman Halid el-Hasekavi, Huseyin's vehicle was blown up at 1730 GMT Friday when he was headed towards northeastern Al Qamishli city from Himo town in Syria.

At least eight people in the car, including Fehman Huseyin and his guards died following a long pursuit, the spokesman said.

Huseyin was in the red category of the Turkish Interior Ministry's most wanted terrorists list.

He was born in 1969 in Syria and had pursued medical education in Damascus. In early 90s, he joined the terrorist organization and used "Bahoz Erdal" and "Doctor Bahoz" as his codenames within the PKK.

Taking the helm of the organization's so-called military wing, People's Defense Forces, also known as the HPG, between 2004 and 2009, Huseyin is believed to behind attacks against Turkish military sentries in southeastern Turkey.

He is also said to have a say in the PYD group, a Syrian affiliate of the PKK, which was established in 2002 in Syria upon the instruction of the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.

The PKK  listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S., and EU  resumed its 30-year armed campaign against the Turkish state in July 2015.

Since then, nearly 600 security personnel, including troops, police officers, and village guards, have been martyred, and more than 5,000 PKK terrorists killed in operations across Turkey and northern Iraq.
As the death toll has risen in Kashmir, so has the fury that has mounted by the hour and spread throughout the disputed Himalayan region in the wake of the killing of a young Kashmiri militant commander.

At least 21 Kashmiri youths have been killed and hundreds injured after Indian forces opened fire during clashes that have continued into Sunday, despite the attempts of Indian authorities to temper the mood by imposing a curfew and heavily restricting phone and internet communication.

The protests have intensified all across Kashmir with people attacking police and security forces camps with sticks and stones and setting 10 of them ablaze.

People are coming out everywhere. There is not a region where people are not out on the streets and we are barely in control of the situation in many places while in most of south Kashmir I dont know if we have any control at all, a senior officer in the Indian police told Anadolu Agency on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to media.

The tension began as news emerged that the popular pro-independence militant Burhan Muzaffar Wani, 22, was killed in a gunfight with Indian forces in the Kokernag area of south Kashmir.

In small groups, people left from their villages across the south Kashmir to reach Wanis hometown Tral, where he was to be buried. Soon afterward, people also left for Tral from the capital city Srinagar and from north and central Kashmir, in cars and on motorbikes.

By the time Wanis body arrived in Tral at 2.25 a.m., more than 5,000 were already waiting and by Saturday noon, more than 200,000 people had arrived for the funeral prayers, making it the largest funeral held in Kashmir over the last two decades and reminding many of the early 1990s, when a slain militants funeral brought hundreds of thousands of people.

We had made preparation for the areas we expected trouble in, but this time people came out in far away and fringe places and we had not prepared for that. And we will need to find the reasons for that, SM Sahai, the intelligence chief for Jammu & Kashmir Police, told reporters in Srinagar.

By the time Wani was buried at 3 p.m., there were heavy clashes across Kashmir between civilians and Indian forces.

The overwhelming outpouring of grief and anger at Wani's killing has led to speculation that it could see homegrown Kashmiri militancy refocus, after it was mostly put down by 2002 and a return was written off by Indian authorities and experts.

Wani had been an anonymous 15-year-old when he left his home to become a militant but by the time his bloodied body returned to his hometown he had become a household name. He became the face for the Kashmiri militancy by using social media to publish photos and videos of the militant life, most recently using it to promise they would not attack a Hindu pilgrimage as the Indian state was their target.

He brought militancy back into the popular imagination from where it had fallen off over the past decade and made thousands of young people angry with India look up to him, a senior police officer told Anadolu Agency.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a senior resistance leader and religious figure told Anadolu Agency: The huge response to Burhans killing is a clear sign of what the Kashmiri people want.

The Indian-backed political leadership expressed grief at the civilian killings and appealed to the parents in Kashmir to stop their children from going out onto the streets.

We appeal to all the political stake holders and the parents to help the government in bringing back normalcy as soon as possible, government spokesperson and senior minister Naeem Akhter told reporters on Sunday.

Kashmir, a Muslim-majority Himalayan region, is held by India and Pakistan in parts and claimed by both in full.

The two countries have fought three wars -- in 1948, 1965 and 1971 -- since they were partitioned in 1947, two of which were fought over Kashmir.

Since 1989, Kashmiri resistance groups in IHK have been fighting against Indian rule for independence or for unification with neighboring Pakistan.

More than 70,000 Kashmiris have been killed so far in the violence, most of them by Indian forces. India maintains over half a million soldiers in the IHK.

A part of Kashmir is also held by China.

Anadolu Agency
Portugal are the winners of the Euro 2016 tournament after beating host nation France 1-0 late Sunday.

Portuguese superstar Cristiano Ronaldo left the pitch in the 25th minute after suffering a knee injury and did not return.

The match remained scoreless but French forward Andre-Pierre Gignac provided some late game drama when he hit the post just moments before the teams headed to extra time.

The additional minutes provided little highlights until Portuguese defender Raphael Guerreiro's free kick in 108th minute hit the crossbar. One minute later, however, Eder scored for Portugal to break the deadlock and secured the victory.

Runners-up in the Euro 2004 final in their home turf, Portugal finally managed to win its first major international trophy in France, making the hosts experience the same feeling twelve years later.

A hobbling Cristiano Ronaldo hoisted the trophy at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis.

Anadolu Agency
Thousands of people gathered at a memorial center in Bosnia on Monday to mark the 21st anniversary of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.

A memorial center in Potocari village  just northwest of Srebrenica town  was the focal point of remembrance for a large number of friends and relatives of the estimated 8,000 victims.

Coffins containing the newly identified remains of 127 victims had been taken to the site on Sunday before a collective funeral.

Tears and silence accompanied the scene as the green coffins were lined up side-by-side.

The youngest victim among the 127 dead had been identified as Avdija (Emin) Memic who was 14 when he was killed. Memic was buried with his uncle Abdulrahman and his young cousin Halil, who was 16 when he died.

About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed after the Bosnian Serb army attacked the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica in July 1995, despite the presence of Dutch troops tasked with acting as international peacekeepers.

So far 6,504 victims have been buried at the Potocari Memorial Centre. At last year's commemoration, 136 Srebrenica victims were interred at the site.

Speaking at the ceremony, Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Bakir Izetbegovic stressed the importance of justice for reconciliation:

"Justice must be achieved, because without it there is no reconciliation and prerequisites for forgiveness and confidence-building.

"Are we on the way to achieving this justice? Are we on the way to achieving justice for the victims and their families in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Their souls will not rest and the eyes of the victims will only close when you realize justice, or will not close ever," Izetbegovic said.

Every year, the remains of more than a hundred victims are identified and buried in Potocari on the anniversary of the genocide.

However, hundreds of Bosniak families are still searching for missing people as a large number of victims were thrown into mass graves around the country during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.

A total of 8,400 people remain missing since the wars end, according to the Institute for Missing Persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

-Turkey has never forgotten Srebrenica

Also attending Mondays ceremony was Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu who said Ankara had never forgotten Srebrenica:

"I  on behalf of my nation  condemn those who polluted innocence and buried [victims] in mass graves.

I offer my most sincere condolences to the families of our martyrs. We believe that Srebrenicawhere the dignity of humanity wandered will also be the place where human dignity will flourish and shine like srebr, like silver.

"Every conflict that was going on in the Balkans was also the pain that we [Turks] feel in our hearts because if Bosnia is not quiet, Turkey cannot sleep peacefully while Bosnia is crying," Cavusoglu added.

Cavusoglu also said that Turkey would always back Bosnia and the Balkans to achieve stability, peace and prosperity.

During his speeceh at the ceremony, the foreign minister also conveyed greetings from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

As part of the anniversary, thousands of people from all over the world attended an annual peace march. The walk began three days ago in Nezuk town near the Bosnian city of Tuzla and concluded at the cemetery in Potocari on Monday.

Since 2005, thousands of people have attended the Mars Mira (Peace March) which follows the same forest path that was used by Bosniak men and boys fleeing the Srebrenica genocide. The path from Srebrenica to Tuzla is commonly known as Death Way.

- War crimes -

Since last years Srebrenica anniversary, former Army of Republika Srpska general Zdravko Tolimir died on Feb. 9 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Tolimir, 67, had been sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1995 killings.

Ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, 70, was jailed for 40 years on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian War which left tens of thousands of people dead.

A week after Karadzic's verdict, the same UN tribunal acquitted Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj of three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of violations of the laws or customs of war.

A few weeks before Mondays 21st anniversary, recognizing the killings in Srebrenica as genocide had dominated Serbia's domestic agenda.

At the urging of some NGOs, a group of 11 Serbian lawmakers called for the National Assembly to adopt a resolution recognizing the genocide of Bosniak Muslims during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

However, a fresh dispute between Serbia and Bosnia has broken out after Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said he would not attend the commemoration ceremony in Srebrenica this year after the towns mayor, Camil Durakovic, said those who would not accept the deaths as genocide were not welcome.

Vucic was forced to flee last years ceremony after his party was attacked with stones and sticks.

Anadolu Agency
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged the Israeli government to stop its settlement policy to make way for a two-state solution in the Middle East.

The settlements are "in flagrant disregard of international law", Ban said while addressing a UN session Tuesday.

Shortly after the Middle East Quartet called on the Israeli government to halt construction on Palestinian territory, Israel revealed designs to build 560 new housing units in the West Bank and another 240 others in East Jerusalem.

"These actions constitute an undeniable contradiction to Israels official support for a negotiated two-state solution. I urge Israel to immediately cease and reverse these plans," he said.

Ban urged Palestinian and Israeli leaders to cooperate with the Middle East Quartet -- made up of the UN, the U.S., the EU and Russia.

U.S. envoy to the UN, Samantha Power, also expressed concerns about the Israels plans to erect more settlements on Palestinian territory in July.

"If implemented, this would be the latest step in what seems to be a systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions, and legalizations of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution," Power said. "Settlement activity is incompatible with a two-state solution and counterproductive to the cause of peace."

Turkey, represented in the UN session, also expressed reservations about a "deteriorating situation on the ground" regarding settlements and land seizure.

"The expansion of illegal settlements, as well as land confiscations, displacement of native communities, denying the Palestinians right to use natural resources, and prevailing culture of impunity erode the viability of two-state solution," according to Ankara.

In its report July 1, the Quartet said a two-state solution continues to be the "only way to achieve an enduring peace" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but current trends are "imperiling" its viability.

Anadolu Agency
A Frenchwoman sacked for continuing to wear a headscarf at work was discriminated against, the European Court of Justice said Wednesday.

Asma Bougnaoui lost her job with IT consultancy Micropole in June 2009 when she refused to remove her hijab after clients complained it made them feel uneasy.

The courts advocate general, Eleanor Sharpston, said in a statement that Bougnaoui's dismissal less than a year after being hired amounted to unlawful discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief.

There is nothing to suggest she was unable to perform her duties as a design engineer because she wore an Islamic headscarf, Sharpston said.

The courts opinion is not binding and a final judgment will be released later in the year but preliminary rulings are usually followed.

Bougnaoui took her case to the Court of Cassation last year, which requested an opinion from the European court. The Luxembourg-based court's verdict is binding on EU member states.

The case is the latest in France to focus on Muslim dress and practice. The hijab was banned in schools and public buildings in 2004 and the full face veil was banned in public six years later.

Anadolu Agency
Theresa May made a pitch to Britains most underprivileged people in her first remarks since becoming the countrys prime minister.

Speaking shortly after being appointed by Queen Elizabeth II on Wednesday afternoon, May committed her government to fighting against the burning injustice of inequalities experienced by ethnic minorities, women, and people from poorer backgrounds.

If youre from an ordinary working-class family, life is much harder than many people in Westminster realize, she said in a speech outside her new official residence at 10 Downing Street.

If youre one of those families, if youre just managing, I want to address you directly: I know youre working around the clock, I know youre doing your best, and I know that sometimes life can be a struggle.

The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives.

May committed her country to leaving the European Union following last months Brexit referendum result but said they will rise to the challenge because were Great Britain.

She continued: As we leave the European Union, we will forge a bold, new, positive role for ourselves in the world. And we will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us.

That will be the mission of the government I lead, and together we will build a better Britain.

May became leader of the governing Conservative Party on Monday, after her only remaining rival Andrea Leadsom  a junior treasury minister  withdrew from the contest.

She was appointed U.K. prime minister, replacing David Cameron, during an audience with Queen Elizabeth II earlier on Wednesday afternoon.

One of Mays first tasks will be to select her Cabinet. She was expected to announce most appointments on Thursday, although observers said she would announce some of the most senior positions  including a new minister for Brexit  later on Wednesday night.

Anadolu Agency
NATO and Russia reached no agreement on the Ukraine issue during a meeting Wednesday, said the alliances Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Stoltenberg's remarks came during a press conference in Brussels, following a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council.

"There was not a meeting of minds today. But both sides clarified their positions," Stoltenberg said.

He stated that the meeting was useful for exchanging views.

"We discussed some of the most important problems about the security of the Europe-Atlantic [region]. This shows the importance of the NATO-Russia Council," he added.

Stoltenberg said that NATO members maintain their support for Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty.

He announced that Russia submitted a proposal during the summit for security in Baltic airspace.

"I welcome Russia's desire to implement measures to reduce risk," Stoltenberg said.

A NATO summit held in Warsaw last week approved plans to station four multinational battalions in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland on a rotational basis as a reassurance measure against Russia.

These battalions will be robust and multinational. They demonstrate the strength of the transatlantic bond. And they make clear that an attack on one ally would be considered an attack on the whole alliance," Stoltenberg told reporters last week.

NATO-Russian relations worsened following Russias annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The UN General Assembly voted almost unanimously to proclaim the annexation illegal.

Along with many UN countries, including the U.S. and the EU, Turkey does not recognize Crimea as Russian territory.

Anadolu Agency
Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis said," We have requested senior advocate Ujjwal Nikam to take this case in fast track court. Also our government is providing full support to victim's family."

Fadnavis government has said, will provide all possible help to the victim family. Photo credit: Reuters

Criticising the stand taken by Opposition over Ahmednagar rape and murder case of minor, Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis today slammed and asked them to support viticm's family in this tough situation instead.

UJJWAL NIKAM TO TAKE UP THE CASE

Talking to media on the occasion of tea party prior to State Assembly's Monsoon Session CM said," We have requested senior advocate Ujjwal Nikam to take this case in fast track court. Also our government is providing full support to victim's family."

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ROWS TO SETTLE

Fadnavis also slammed Opposition leader Radhakrishna Vikhepatil and asked them to apologize to Cabinet Minister Ram Shinde for defaming his name over a photo which got viral on net. He had levlled an allegation saying the person standing next to Minister Ram Shinde is one of the accused in this case.

DRAMA NOT FAR BEHIND

But, in Kopardi today a high drama took place. NCP leader Chitra wagh first met family members of the victim and when MoS for Home Deepak Kesarkar came there, she presented her set of bangles to him as a sign of protest.

SPEEDY TRIAL AND MORE

MoS for Home Deepak Kesarkar assured family members of the victim a speedy trial.

NCP leader Dhanajay Munde who left the Annual Press Conference of Opposition before Monsoon Session early to meet the victim's family slammed Maha CM. "Being home minister of the state, CM should have visited here first before anyone."

Just prior to Monsoon Session of State Assembly, Opposition has got very strong issues in their hand to corner the Fadnavis government. It will be interesting to see how his government tackles it.



--- ENDS ---
Australia may have The Night Of, Mr. Robot, Stranger Things and UnREAL, but there are plenty of acclaimed dramas yet to premiere on any platform.

They include titles such as Preacher from the US, This is England 90 from the UK, Rebellion from Ireland, Soldat Blanc from France and Tannbach from Germany.

There are several Amazon Studio titles such as The Man in the High Castle and Hand of God amid industry chatter that it may set up in Australia.

This list includes new shows that have premiered internationally but with no confirmed broadcaster for Australia. Those yet to debut overseas (ie. Westworld, The Get Down, Lethal Weapon) or with a confirmed broadcaster (ie. Shades of Blue, Black-ish, Code Black etc.) have not been included.

NB: Clips may contain adult language and themes.

The Man in the High Castle

USA 2015

Amazon

A glimpse into an alternate history of North America. What life after WWII may have been like if the Nazis had won the war.

Stars: Luke Kleintank, Arnold Chun, Alexa Davalos

The A Word

UK 2016

BBC

The Hughes family work and love and fight like every other family. Then, their youngest son is diagnosed with autism and they dont feel like every other family anymore.

Stars: Morven Christie, Lee Ingleby, Greg McHugh

Preacher

USA 2016

AMC

After a supernatural event at his church, a preacher enlists the help of a vampire to find God.

Stars: Dominic Cooper, Joseph Gilgun, Ruth Negga

Animal Kingdom

USA 2016

TNT

The series centres on 17-year-old Joshua J Cody, who moves in with his freewheeling relatives in their Southern California beach town after his mother dies of a heroin overdose. Based on the Australian film.

Stars: Molly Gordon, Daniella Alonso, Ellen Barkin

This is England 90

UK 2015

The year is 1990, the rave scene has just entered England. The sound of the Stone roses lurks toward Shaun and the gang. This means that Woody and Lol are living in a domestic bliss, they are happy again. But this year will see huge changes in everyone. This is the year 1990. This is England.

Stars: Lyra Mae Thomas, Billy Braithwait, Chanel Cresswell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgtCSfOED6w

The Path

USA 2016

Hulu

A man who converts to a controversial following suffers from a crisis of faith.

Stars: Aaron Paul, Michelle Monaghan, Kyle Allen

The Detour

US 2016

TBS

Contemporary husband and father takes his family on a road trip.

Stars: Jason Jones, Natalie Zea, Ashley Gerasimovich

Hand of God

US 2014

Amazon

A morally-corrupt judge suffers a breakdown and believes God is compelling him onto a path of vigilante justice.

Stars: Garret Dillahunt, Emayatzy Corinealdi, Julian Acosta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rScD99ngJxk

Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands

UK 2016

ITV

Set in Scandinavia. Beowulf, a hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been under attack by a monster known as Grendel.

Murder in Successville

UK 2015

BBC

Each week D.I. Sleet is partnered by a celebrity guest as they investigate a murder in the titular town, which is in turn seemingly peopled entirely by celebrities.

Stars: Tom Davis, Liam Hourican, Luke Kempner

Upstart Crow

UK 2016

BBC

The life of William Shakespeare before he became famous.

Stars: David Mitchell, Gemma Whelan, Rob Rouse

Flowers

UK 2016

Channel 4

Dark comedy about the eccentric members of the Flowers family. Maurice and Deborah are barely together but yet to divorce. They live with Maurices batty mother and their maladjusted twin children.

Stars: Olivia Colman, Julian Barratt, Will Sharpe

Feed the Beast

USA 2016

AMC

Two friends open up a restaurant together.

Stars: David Schwimmer, Jim Sturgess, Evan Leone

Mum

UK 2016

BBC

Cathy is attempting to move on with her life after the death of her husband. Through a year of new beginnings she rebuilds her life surrounded by her sometimes problematic family and friends.

Stars: Lesley Manville, Peter Mullan, Lisa McGrillis

Brief Encounters

UK 2016

ITV

In the early 1980s the lives of four ordinary women, their husbands, mothers, families and community are turned around when they become Ann Summers party plan saleswomen.

Stars: Sophie Rundle, Angela Griffin, Sharon Rooney

The Windsors

UK 2016

ITV

Comedy soap opera re-imagining the lives of the British Royal Family as you have never seen them before.

Stars: Matthew Cottle, Celeste Dring, Louise Ford

The Aliens

UK 2016

E4

Nearly 40 years ago aliens crash-landed in the UK. They look like us, but are forced to live in a ghetto. Border control officer Lewis falls in love with one.

Stars: Michael Socha, Jim Howick, Michaela Coel

Soldat Blanc (White Soldier)

France 2014

A muggy Saigon, late 1945. Stationed at a military camp in French Indochina, two young menRobert and Andrebecome close friends as they share the boredom and excitement of waiting for their first mission. But when they discover that instead of freeing Indochina from foreign aggressors, they will be fighting natives struggling for independence, their friendship is jeopardised.

Stars: Abraham Belaga, Emile Berling, Mike NGuyen

Tannbach

Germany 2015

A story of one village in Germany at the end of WW2.

Stars: Heiner Lauterbach, Natalia Worner, Senta Auth

Naked Among Wolves

Germany 2015

Taking place at the Concentration camp Buchenwald at the end of March 1945, prisoner Hans Pippig discovers in a carrying case of an incoming prisoner a Jewish child. If reported the three-year-old is sure to die. On the other hand, a violation of the rules of the camp would threaten the long prepared uprising of the concentration camp prisoners against the SS.

Stars: Florian Stetter, Peter Schneider, Sylvester Groth

Hunters

US 2016

Syfy

The disappearance of a decorated FBI agents wife leads him to a secret government unit assembled to hunt a group of ruthless terrorists  shadowy figures that may or may not be from this world. Filmed in Melbourne.

Stars: Nathan Phillips, Britne Oldford, Mark Coles Smith

This post updates.
A Foreign Correspondent program previously promoted for Tuesday July 19 (The Labours of Mr Zhang) has been delayed by a week due to events in PNG.

Here is the new synopsis:

Eight or more students shot, universities boycotted, a prime minister fighting for his political life. Eric Tlozek looks behind the unrest afflicting Australias nearest neighbour, PNG.

You are brewing up popular resentment which is a recipe for revolution Its bound to explode  head of PNGs anti-corruption task force

As Prime Minister Peter ONeill marshals the numbers to fend off a no confidence vote in PNGs Parliament, the students who helped trigger the vote are mostly lying low.

We were running into the bush, they were shooting and they were like hunters looking for animals  Christopher, student protester

At least eight students were shot and wounded when police opened fire last month at a university protest in Port Moresby. Student protesters want Mr ONeill to submit to official questioning over corruption allegations  specifically that he had authorised a fraudulent $30 million payment from public funds to a law firm.

While Mr ONeill has denied the allegations, he has so far refused to be questioned by police.

Hes not respecting the law, he thinks hes above the law  Tracey, student

I have exercised my constitutional right  PM Peter ONeill

PNG correspondent Eric Tlozek was on the scene right after the shootings. He obtained interviews with wounded students in hospital and with protest leaders as they ducked between safe houses.

I got a bullet at the back and it penetrated to the stomach  Max, wounded student

Tlozek also meets the corruption-buster who, having been appointed by Peter ONeill, is now warring with him. Two years ago Sam Koims Task Force Sweep issued an arrest warrant for Mr ONeill  but the PM counterpunched by winning a series of court orders.

We gave him two hours and that two hours has been extended to two years  Sam Koim

Right or wrong, the allegations against the Prime Minister are serving as a lightning rod for popular discontent about broader corruption.

This is corruption that is depriving our people at the grandest scale  Sam Koim

***The program previously promoted for Tuesday July 19 has been delayed by a week due to events in PNG.***

9.20pm Tuesday July 19 on ABC
By PTI: From Fakir Hassen

Johannesburg, Jul 17 (PTI) To promote anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandelas vision of education for all children through using technology, a series of affordable mobiles and tablets pre-embedded with content on the life and times of the former South African President have been launched in the country.

The project by AG Media in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom Foundation is a Mandela Day initiative as millions of South Africans are preparing to a 67-minute community service tomorrow in memory of the globally-revered leaders 98th birth anniversary.

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All devices feature exclusive educational content and approved content never seen before about Mandela in the form of pictures, wallpapers, quotes and more.

The devices have been also pre-loaded with Madibas Journey App where users can explore Mandelas "inspiring journey".

By finding key locations on the phones mapping system, users can follow directions and immerse themselves in narratives from poignant moments throughout South African history.

Users will also be able to create a customised itinerary before embarking on their journey into Mandelas inspiring life.

In schools, where the Mandela Library project has already built a library, the devices will be donated on merit basis, like how many children attend the school and their needs.

AG Mobiles CEO Anthony Goodman said that encouraging learning and education among the children is the cornerstone of the Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom Education Project.

"Literacy is the key to all education. We are looking towards the future where technology will play an increasingly important part of our literacy campaign, not to mention the fact that access to technology often accelerates the learning process," Goodman said. PTI FH AQS PMS PMS

--- ENDS ---
The Ministry of Home Affairs has approved the deployment of an unconfirmed number of the Crack K9" dog teams. The exercise has been aptly named OP GOLDEN NOSE.

By Manjeet Negi: Can the parliament have a fedayeen attack, again? Can terrorists storm the inner house of parliament? Can a truck/car full of explosives be rammed into it? These were some of the questions the security agencies introspected upon before the Monsoon session begins. The Ministry of Home Affairs has approved the deployment of an unconfirmed number of the Crack canine dog teams. The exercise has been aptly named OP GOLDEN NOSE.

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The parliament attack by gun wielding terrorists like the one in 2001 can never be repeated again due to the multiple ring security system of the Parliament. But what multiple human security ring cannot prevent is somebody sneaking in explosives in innocent looking articles and placing it in unsuspecting areas like under the tables, in flower pots and other areas that can harm MP's. This is where the golden noses of highly trained crack canines come into play.

Even if somebody has so much as touched an explosive, they can be detected by these dogs. ITBP has been requested by the Parliament Security Services (PSS) to deploy their crack K9 units. Last year the deployment of ITBP dogs for parliament security created major ripples in the electronic chatter between terror groups and their foreign handlers.

ITBP dogs are one of the most highly trained in the world, that was taken note of by US Navy Seals and selected to assist in protecting any US president visiting India. Operation Golden Nose launched by ITBP will finish with the end of the Monsoon session. ITBP DIG R C. Baijwan on deputation to PSS, is supervising this operation along with an Assistant Commandant of ITBP.

--- ENDS ---
With whatever they could carry, they made their way through the streets, avoiding areas where gunfire was fiercest. They knew the United Nations compound was near, and that it would be safe. When they made it, Maria finally felt like the worst was over for her and her children.

We didnt have food for three days until UNICEF gave us these biscuits. Even I am living on this food, she says.

UNICEF provided the supplement to all children under 5 who could be reached. UNICEF took us in, and talked about how to care for our children. We were told to continue to breastfeed our children and were given blankets and drinking water to help us survive, says Maria.

When the conflict erupted, UNICEF and partners immediately began working to identify children who had lost track of their parents as families fled the violence and to begin the process of reunification.

In the United Nations compound, with food and shelter secured and her family by her side, Maria feels safe. But she does not know what to do next. Even with the temporary ceasefire put into action, she says she dreads the idea of going home.
The cops have arrested three people for their alleged involvement in the case.

On 13th of July, a 15-year-old minor was brutally gangraped and murdered by three people. This shocking case has happened in Kopardi village of Ahemadnagar district. The cops have arrested three people for their alleged involvement in the case.

The accused have been sent to police custody till July 25.



According to family members the minor girl had gone to her maternal grandmother's place which is just 1 km away from their home to get some spices. Her mother sent her brother to see look for her when she didn't return after a long time. Her brother identified her bicycle lying near a farm. He looked for her and called for her several times but didn't get any response.

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So, he along with his friends, went inside farm and saw three people running from spot while the minor was lying on the ground without clothes. His friends ran behind those people but they managed to escaped.

VILLAGERS PROTEST



As a mark of protest against the brutal gangrape, villagers of Kopardi staged a rasta roko.

Local MLA and newly inducted as Cabinet Minister Ram Shinde was gheraoed by locals when he visited victim's family on Saturday. Angry villagers asked him question about this incident.

Meanwhile, Opposition leader Radhakrishnan Vikhepatil has slammed Fadnavis government today. "CM is holding home portfolio but what he is doing? He didn't even visit the victim's family after so many days of incident. It shows that how much this government is serious about this issue. We demand that this case should be run in fast track court for."

Social worker and woman right activist Trupti Desai today visited victim's family in Kopardi village. She warned Maharashtra CM Fadnavis that if the family members don't get justice then she will stage a protest against his government in Mumbai.

ALSO READ:

From Facebook to Delhi hotel: Woman, teenage boy accuse each other of rape



--- ENDS ---
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to all political parties to allow the parliament to run "we want to run the parliament with cooperation of everybody. Everyone should make sure the parliament functions in the behest of the country."

The Prime Minister's pitch followed several talks between his BJP-led Central government and its main rival, the Congress party to settle differences over tax reform legislation stalled in parliament for years. Photo credit: Reuters

By Kamaljit Kaur Sandhu: A fiery opposition is ready to take on the BJP led NDA government. The all party meet called by the new parliamentary affairs minister Ananth Kumar set the mood for the monsoon session of parliament beginning Monday. While the government seemed to be in an optimistic mood over the possibility of passage of Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill, the enthusiasm was not shared by the opposition parties.

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NATIONAL INTEREST BEFORE ANYTHING

Meanwhile Prime Minister Narendra Modi appealed to all political parties to allow the parliament to run "we want to run the parliament with cooperation of everybody. Everyone should make sure the parliament functions in the behest of the country. Let's keep national interest before anything else." Also adding that if need be the parliament session would be extended to cover more ground work " if the work of the government increases we could extend the parliament session."

ISSUES TO BE DISCUSSED

The Prime Minister's pitch followed several talks between his BJP-led Central government and its main rival, the Congress party to settle differences over tax reform legislation stalled in parliament for years. But it is not just the bills, the monsoon session of parliament takes place, when there is chaos in valley, with number of civilian killed has risen to 40. Many are questioning the handling both the state and centre, where BJP has high stakes. While Congress will also raise pitch about Arunachal Government. Many of the non NDA allies have rallied behind the cause on Centre government interference. BJP is likely to face heat over the issues. Pressing issues like India's foreign policy, Price Rise, Floods like situation in various states in country will be raised.

"There is a lack of trust between the states and the Centre. How can you proceed in this context," Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said today.

MODI TRYING TO KILL DEMOCRACY?

His colleague Jyotiraditya Scindia meanwhile said Modi was trying to kill democracy in the country. Even as BJP has been trying to make a conciliatory note with Congress party, the largest opposition party, the grand old party continues to be defiant and is demanding a cap of pc on the tax rate proposed in the bill. Scindia further said, "We want a concrete draft proposal from the government on GST. If we know how they plan to address the three contentious issues, we can revert. We want a written draft on GST. Once the government decides to give us in written, we will give our feedback."

THERE ARE OTHER PARTIES APART FROM CONGRESS

More trouble was hinted by the left leader Sitaram Yechury tore into Modi government saying, the BJP has only bothered about taking views of congress party, while the government need to speak to all political parties including the left.

REFORMS & EXPECTATIONS

The proposed reform, India's biggest revenue shake-up since independence in 1947, seeks to replace a slew of central taxes and levies in 29 states, transforming the nation of 1.2 billion people into a customs union.

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The government has said it does not want to be bound to a particular rate written into the law as any future changes would require a further amendment of the constitution.

The meeting this morning was the first one in day. Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan has called all political parties for a meeting in the evening.

--- ENDS ---
By PTI: From Shirish B Pradhan

Kathmandu, Jul 17 (PTI) The agitating Madhesis groups in Nepal will not join the new government but help form the new coalition, a senior leader of the ethnic group, mostly of Indian-origin, said today.

Interacting with media here, Laxman Lal Karna, co-chair of Sadbhawana Party, said the party was not interested in joining the new government.

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He said that the United Democratic Madhesi Front that has been protesting against the constitution for last one year will, however, help in forming a new coalition government comprising Nepali Congress, the largest party in the Parliament, and CPN-Maoist Centre.

Nepali Congress and the Maoists tabled a no trust motion in the parliament last week against Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli, accusing him of not honouring his past commitments.

However, the Speaker of the parliament has not yet fixed date for discussion on the no-trust motion.

Karna said the Madhesi front will help in forming the new coalition as the Nepali Congress and the Maoists have assured to address their demands.

Karna said that Prime Minister Oli did not respond to their demands as a result of which they are compelled to help form the new coalition.

Madhesis launched a six-month-long agitation from September to February in which more than 50 people were killed. The agitation had also crippled the landlocked countrys economy as supplies from India were blocked.

The major demands of Madhesis include re-demarcation of the seven province model of federal structure, inclusiveness and proportionate representation of marginalised groups and ethnic minorities including the Madhesis, indigenous groups and dalits in all the state bodies.

"Our other demands include proportionate representation, inclusive representation for the Madhesis and other marginalised groups in various state mechanisms, and rights related to language and citizenship certificate," Karna, one of the members of the alliance, had said earlier.

The United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF), an alliance of seven Madhes-based parties, have accused Olis government of using excessive force to suppress their agitation demanding more constitutional representation. PTI SBP MRJ AKJ MRJ

--- ENDS ---
SHARE CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Canadian actress Cynthia Belliveau retired in Ojai. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Canadian actress Cynthia Belliveau, who retired to Ojai, is downsizing and selling her collection of art and jewelry, including a costume sketch by Oscar-nominated designer Donfeld. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Canadian actress Cynthia Belliveau retired to Ojai. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Canadian actress Cynthia Belliveau, who retired to Ojai, is downsizing and selling her collection of jewelry and art, including this work titled "Ventura Coast: by Juan Guzman-Maldonado.

By Anne Kallas, Special to The Star

Collecting art and traveling have always been complementary passions for Cynthia Belliveau, 53, a Canadian actress who retired to Ojai. But at a certain point, there's just too much.

"I'm a very creative person. I grew up that way  painting, making things, sewing my clothes  all that good stuff," she said

As a successful actress who had starring roles in a variety of Canadian television series, including "E.N.G.," "Wind at My Back" and "Caitlin's Way," Belliveau traveled a lot.

"I had a 20-year acting career. I had a great time and worked constantly. But it got to the point it just wasn't feeding me anymore. I didn't feel passionate about it anymore. I really believe that you don't want to carry things that you're not passionate about anymore," said Belliveau, adding that she collected much of the artwork during her various travels.

Eventually Belliveau settled in Ojai 12 years ago, which she discovered on a whim  moving to recapture the small-town feeling she grew up with in Stratford, Ontario.

"I just did it. I didn't know one single, solitary person and didn't have a job here. But I felt like it was the right place and the right thing to do. I love Ojai. I love how much simpler my life is here and the quality of my life here," she said. "Ojai is a healing place."

But a diagnosis of breast cancer made Belliveau re-examine her priorities.

"Last year was hugely transformative for me. I took a little different approach to cancer. Instead of going to war and fighting it, I kind of did the opposite. I loved cancer. I listened to it. I listened to my body and asked, 'How have I not been listening to you?'" she said. "It was through self-exploration and self-healing that I realized that the message really was about self-love and self-care  radical self-love."

Simplifying

And even though she is currently cancer-free, Belliveau decided she also needed to make some changes.

"Something wasn't working. One of the biggest things to come out of that was the need to make my life even more simple  to prioritize the things I do and how I want to live the rest of my life. I wanted to lighten my load considerably," she said.

So Belliveau decided to start selling her vast art collection through the online auction site Everything but the House.

"We auction off one-of-a-kind items from estate sales, helping families deal with the emotional process of downsizing their homes and cleaning out estates. We sell everything from a Chanel purse to a Picasso with all bids starting at $1," said Kathleen Ong, who works for the online auction site.

This will be the second sale this summer of items from Belliveau's collection, which includes artwork and other items  including an Italian gilt mirror, 1920s Italian jewelry described as mini mosaics, works of the Ventura coast by artist Juan Guzman-Maldonado and television costume sketches by Oscar-nominated designer Donfeld, who was born Donald Lee Feld.

The current sale runs online through July 19.

Selling, Buying

Santa Barbara-based appraiser Alice Karle, who has worked with clients throughout Ventura County, said she counsels people who want to start selling artwork or other collectibles to have an independent appraiser give them an idea of the value of their items.

"An independent third-party appraiser can evaluate items in a general range, giving them proper identification and value," said Karle, who teaches classes in appraising at Santa Barbara City College.

Karle, who did not consult on Belliveau's collection, noted that while items may look good online, there can be some question about their condition. She said seeing an item in person allows an appraiser to determine the condition of the item, which can vastly affect its value.

"Being an appraiser is a profession. A far as our practice goes, we do not ever purchase clients' property. We will offer marketing services," she said. A reputable appraiser will then recommend an appropriate purveyor of art and antiques depending on the item being sold.

Ong, of Everything but the House site, said, "EBTH works with our expert staff, who are specialists in various fields such as jewelry, antiques and art, as well as external professionals to authenticate items."

For information about Belliveau's auction, go online to https://www.ebth.com through July 19.

For information about Karle, call 682-2234 or go online to http://www.alicekarleappraiserfineart.com.
photos by JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Helen and Hank Kawecki are being evicted from their Thousand Oaks home. Neighbors Linda and Doug Emerson are leading an effort to help them.

Colleen Cason Columnist SHARE JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Ventura County Sheriff's Office Explorers help Helen and Hank Kawecki move their belongings. They are being evicted from the home they have lived in for decades. Neighbors Linda and Doug Emerson are giving the Kaweckis a place to stay. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Greg Webb, a deputy with the Ventura County Sheriff's Office, helps Helen and Hank Kawecki move items from the Thousand Oaks home they have lived in for decades. The Kaweckis are being evicted after their home was foreclosed on. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Helen Kawecki holds her dog, Spot, as the Ventura County Sheriff's Office Explorers help her move items from her home. JUAN CARLO/THE STAR Hank Kawecki cleans one of his bedrooms, trying to figure out what to sell or donate because he is being evicted from his home.

If generosity is infectious, then what happened one morning last week in Thousand Oaks verges on a pandemic.

A village of volunteers descended on the Hauser Circle home of Helen and Hank Kawecki. In their late 80s, the couple faces everyone's darkest fear.

The Kaweckis most likely will be evicted Monday from their home of 50 years after they signed it over to someone they had every reason to trust to watch out for them.

The usually sleepy lane was abuzz. Because the Kaweckis cannot afford to hire movers, a dozen or so Ventura County Sheriff's Office Explorers volunteered to hoist the furniture to a borrowed truck.

Deputy Greg Webb, who supervises the youth auxiliary, was on the phone connecting with a charity that would pick up the belongings the Kaweckis planned to donate.

Neighbor Dave Duganne already had volunteered a large truck he uses in his contracting business and offered to store excess belongings at his home.

Two detectives investigating possible criminal activity in this case were on hand to lend support.

"Regardless of how or why the Kaweckis are in this situation, it is unfortunate," major-crimes detective Cyrus Zadeh said.

Every epidemic has a so-called patient zero, the one who sets the outbreak in motion. In the Kaweckis' case, there are two sources of this contagion of charity: Doug and Linda Emerson.

The Emersons bought the home across the street from the Kaweckis just 18 months ago. They are far from the Southern California cliche of detached residents holed up in their detached residences.

"Mr. Emerson is a godsend," said Zadeh's partner, Sgt. Rick Harwood. "Doug and Linda are giving them the encouragement to get through," he said.

The Emersons got involved in January when a real estate agent knocked on their door and introduced her clients as their new across-the-street neighbors. The couple knew the Kaweckis planned to live in their home for the rest of their lives.

Doug Emerson, a retired chief financial officer at the East Side Union High School District in San Jose, went online and discovered loans taken out against the home were in default.

He and Linda helped the Kaweckis file a police report and connected them with the nonprofit senior legal aid service Grey Law of Ventura County.

Ed Elrod, Grey Law board chairman and a Ventura attorney in private practice, filed a lawsuit in Ventura County Superior Court, alleging Helen Kawecki's grandson Chadd Moore defrauded them of their home. Elrod also was able to get a formal notice attached to the property title that warns buyers that a lawsuit is pending.

After that, the sale fell through.

Elrod lost a heartbreaking court battle to stop the Kaweckis' eviction, although he was able to get the lockout date delayed a couple of weeks.

All of these volunteer hours are threatening to "crash my practice," Elrod told me. The Emersons have reimbursed Elrod $5,000 from their own pockets, but the suit will be complex and thus costly.

The Emersons also contacted a county social worker to help the couple find affordable housing. Until that is located, the Kaweckis and their poodle mix, Spot, are invited to stay with the Emersons.

Doug Emerson is not a man who much cares about getting or taking credit. And it's OK with him that Helen Kawecki feels her words are inadequate to express her gratitude.

"Doug and Linda are somebody God sent down here," said Helen, standing with the aid of her cane in the shade of the garage in the middle of all the commotion.

Even after two garage sales in as many weekends, the house is full of things that mean so much to the couple. Helen hopes to keep the mantel given to her by her daughter, who died two years ago of lung cancer.

And if the Emersons' latest offer of assistance pans out, Helen's mantel can stay put. Doug and Linda hope to buy the Kawecki home out of foreclosure and let them live there for the rest of their lives  rent-free.

After an offer like that, I'm fairly sure the Emersons might consider throwing in a kidney if the Kaweckis needed one.

As a journalist, I've seen the best and worst of people. But in all my years, I rarely have encountered such generosity.

I asked Doug why he and Linda have invested so much time and money into helping people they've known for less than two years.

He told me they are the nicest people he and Linda have ever met. When I pressed a little harder, he told me he grew up in a little farm town in Minnesota.

"If someone was sick, you milked their cows and did their chores," he said.

Every contagion has its own special way of spreading. In the case of the Emersons, it is transmitted from one open heart to another.

To help with the Kaweckis' legal and moving expenses, the Emersons started a crowdfunding account at http://www.gofundme.com/27m9zvn3.

Email Colleen Cason at casonpoint101@gmail.com.
SHARE ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR Hueneme High students Jonathan Huerta (left), Manuel Vega and Estevan Gutierrez test the strength of their pasta bridge during the culmination of the Engineering Innovations Summer Bridge Program at CSU Channel Islands on Friday. Their team took the top spot. ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR Hueneme High students Alexiz Romero (left), Chloe Smith and Jocelyn Gutierrez react as the bottom of their pasta bridge snaps during the culmination of the Engineering Innovations Summer Bridge Program at CSU Channel Islands on Friday. ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR Hueneme High student Juan Zarate waits for his team's pasta bridge to snap as he adds weight Friday at CSU Channel Islands. ANTHONY PLASCENCIA/THE STAR Hueneme High students Osvaldo Guerrero (left), Alepri Atanacio and Pedro Vasquez prepare to take their turn testing the strength of their pasta bridge on Friday.

By Jeremy Foster, Special to The Star

Jonathan Huerta smiled and then breathed to relax as he tested the design of a bridge he and two classmates from Oxnard's Hueneme High School engineered from dry spaghetti.

The 16-year-olds placed water bottles in a basket that would test how much of a load their bridge could bear. It held nearly half a pound before littering a small stage with noodles.

Huerta, Estevan Gutierrez and Manuel Vega  known collectively as Impasta  prevailed in Friday's contest among 17 teams of students who took part in the culmination of the university's Engineering Innovations Summer Bridge Program at CSU Channel Islands.

The program  an effort of the university, the high school and Oxnard Union High School District that's funded by grants from the Harriet H. Samuelsson Foundation and Bank of America  aims to get students excited about science, technology, engineering and mathematics. More than 50 students Hueneme High spent four weeks in the program at the Camarillo university, which also is designed to motivate them to go to college.

Gutierrez said has long thought of becoming an engineer, and the program cemented that thought into a plan.

"I've lived a little bit of the university life and culture and have learned how focused you have to be to succeed," he said. "I feel like I've grown so much through this hands-on way of learning."

Greg Wood, CSUCI associate professor of physics, led the students on the intensive course in physics.

"I really hope the students are more comfortable coming to Channel Islands University and see themselves being successful at a four-year college or university," Wood said. "I hope they see there are so many careers out there in the science and engineering fields."

Robert Kadin, who teaches at Hueneme High, said he hopes the Summer Bridge program will inspire students to become engineers.

"The entire country, especially right over here at the Navy base, is hurting for engineers," he said. "We have a lot of people retiring, and a lot of kids who love it but just need something to guide them."

Hueneme Principal Gary Mayeda said the program brings book learning and formal instruction into something concrete.

"That is what the crux of what engineering is," he said. "You have an idea, you look at it, you see where it fails, you see where the problem is, you fix it and test it again until it works right."

Students worked on their bridges for several days, met with professional engineers, visited museums and universities, and even went behind the scenes at Disney's California Adventure to see the real-world application of what they had learned in class.

Elizabeth Hartung, assistant provost at CSUCI, urged the students to "keep building bridges, writing code and working on problems that make your brains hurt but that feel so good when you get it right."
STAR FILE PHOTO Members of the public tour the proposed site for the Calpine Corp. power plant west of Santa Paula in June.

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By Kathleen Wilson of the Ventura County Star

The California Energy Commission has scheduled a new hearing on a power plant proposed for the Santa Paula area after a previous session resulted in a walkout over Spanish translation services.

The informational meeting is scheduled for July 28 at the Santa Paula Community Center, 530 W. Main St., Santa Paula. Doors will open at 5:30 p.m., but the hearing is scheduled to begin no earlier than 6 p.m.

More than 100 people walked out of the initial hearing in late June, citing inadequate Spanish translation. The commission has apologized for the problem and pledged to provide effective translation at the upcoming event for those who speak Spanish.

Calpine Corp. has proposed to build a natural gas-fired plant to provide electricity during periods of peak demand when the normal power system is inadequate. The commission is studying the proposal for what's being called the Mission Rock Energy Center.

Calpine, a power-generating company based in Texas, already owns the 10-acre property where the plant would be built off Mission Rock Road just west of Santa Paula. The site is now a storage yard for boats and recreational vehicles.

For more information, visit http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/alphabetical.html.
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It was just another week in Donald Trump's (white) America First campaign.

At least twice, Trump alleged that people have called for a "moment of silence" for the madman who killed five police officers in Dallas at a Black Lives Matter protest.

It was an incendiary accusation, bound to stir racial hatred. Like Trump's accusation that New Jersey Muslims cheered the 9/11 attacks, this, too, was categorically false. There was no sign of such calls, and a top Trump adviser couldn't corroborate the allegation.

Yet what was remarkable about the reckless accusation was how unremarkable his appeals to racist division have become. Days before and after this, Trump:

Snubbed the NAACP, saying he wouldn't appear at the group's convention.

Declared in response to racial unrest that "I am the law-and-order candidate"  an echo of Richard Nixon's response to violence following the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.

Spoke at a rally where supporters answered mentions of President Obama with "he's a monkey."

There was also the deleted tweet by prominent Trump surrogate Carl Paladino, who said of the African-American attorney general: "Lynch LorettaLynch." Paladino said it was a mistake, and maybe it was. Republicans trying to justify their support for Trump would like to believe each incident is a misunderstanding. But they can't all be.

As Republicans head to Cleveland to nominate Trump for the presidency, here, for easy reference, is a compilation of what they'd like to ignore.

Trump tweeted an image, previously posted to an anti-Semitic message board, of a Star of David atop paper money; he later objected to his campaign's decision to remove the image.

Trump told Jewish Republicans, "You're not going to support me, because I don't want your money."

He had supporters raise their hands in a loyalty pledge that the former head of the Anti-Defamation League called a "fascist gesture."

He said, "I don't have a message" for supporters of his who threatened anti-Semitic violence against a Jewish journalist. The journalist had criticized Melania Trump, who said the writer "provoked" the attacks.

His "America First" campaign slogan was the name of the isolationist, anti-Semitic organization that opposed involvement in World War II.

Trump has banned news organizations such as The Washington Post from covering his events but credentialed the host of a white-supremacist radio show.

He repeatedly declined to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan in a CNN interview.

The Trump campaign chose a white supremacist as a delegate, then blamed a database error.

Trump retweeted a message from WhiteGenocideTM, phony crime statistics that originated with neo-Nazis, a quote from Mussolini and a message from a supporter who embraces a "right-wing death squad" label.

Trump's campaign blamed an intern's mistake for tweeting an image of Nazi soldiers superimposed on the American flag next to Trump's likeness.

Trump said of a Black Lives Matter protester at his event: "Maybe he should have been roughed up."

He talked of paying the legal fees of a supporter who sucker-punched a black protester at an event.

He told reporters at another event to "look at my African-American over here."

Trump launched his campaign saying Mexico was sending "rapists" across the border. He called for mass deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants, "half" of whom are criminals.

He said the American-born judge in a fraud case against him could not be impartial because of his Mexican ancestry.

He tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl and wrote "I love Hispanics!" He kicked Jorge Ramos out of a news conference and said Univision "takes its marching orders" from Mexico.

He used broken English to mock Asians. He used a fake Indian accent. He referred to Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed Native American ancestry, as "Pocahontas." He asked a Texas-born Asian-American at one event: "Are you from South Korea?"

He proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States. He spoke favorably of forcing those already here to register with authorities. When a turban-wearing protester was removed from one of his events, Trump said: "He wasn't wearing one of those hats, is he?"

Trump said last year that "I really don't know" if President Obama was born in the United States. He implied that Obama was responsible for the Orlando mass shooting. He let stand the remark by a questioner at one of his events who called Obama a Muslim.

There are many more, but this column is 750 words  far shorter than Trump's catalog of racial animus.

Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank. He writes for The Washington Post Writers Group.
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The following editorial appeared Wednesday in The Orange County Register:

In a show of shocking imprecision, the White House recently released statistics on the number of civilians killed by U.S. military drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa during President Barack Obama's time in office.

The imprecision is evident in two ways, and it encourages practical and philosophical questions about the drone attacks that play a large role in America's war on terrorism.

First, there are the statistics themselves. They're an insult to the word "estimate."

According to the administration's first report of this kind, as few as 64 and as many as 116 noncombatants have been killed, along with between 2,372 and 2,581 enemy combatants, in 473 unmanned aircraft strikes aimed at suspected terrorists and their leaders.

That's quite a range: 64 to 116. Americans wouldn't accept such inexactitude in a calorie count; we certainly shouldn't accept it in a casualty count of apparently innocent people.

And an accurate number of dead civilians may not fall within that range, given that independent organizations that keep track of reports of U.S. drone strikes believe the real toll could be as high as about 800.

The website Long War Journal counts 207 civilian deaths in Pakistan and Yemen, the think tank New America counts 216 in those countries, and the news organization Bureau of Investigative Journalism says the range is 380 to 801.

Second, there's what the statistics say about those drone strikes.

Part of the supposed point of using armed drones is that compared with bombs from manned aircraft, they're more accurate at hitting small targets. Collateral damage is supposed to be minimized. Civilian deaths are supposed to be few  the strikes should be more humane.

But these numbers, especially the larger private estimates, suggest that advantage is overstated.

The implications are fodder for critics of President Obama's stepped-up use of drones. Maybe that's why the administration rolled out the numbers on the Friday before the Fourth of July.

Note that the numbers don't include civilian deaths from drone strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. They cover only places where the U.S. is not engaged in active hostilities.

To his credit, the president issued an executive order on the day of the data release making protection of civilians a priority for military planning. But good intentions won't satisfy those critics who say drone strikes, controlled by personnel at video screens thousands of miles away, sanitize the tragedy of civilian casualties.

While Americans debating how to fight terrorism may disagree on how many dead foreign civilians is too many, we shouldn't ignore the question of drone-strikes' big-picture effectiveness.

Do they debilitate the enemy and discourage would-be terrorists? Or does anger at the killing of civilians drive more young men and women toward terrorist recruiters? Isn't the killing of civilians what we're fighting against?

Last month, we called on Congress to give the president authority to use military force against the Islamic State. At the same time, we said U.S. leaders must clearly delineate our aims  as well as limits that keep military and police action within the bounds of American values.

They can begin to better define the U.S. mission by asking some hard questions about the vague, barely believable data released on July 1 and the drone strategy itself.


For the second year in a row, the TAO Group takes top honors in the Spy on Vegas.com Sexiest Server 2009 contest. LAVO cocktail waitress Vanessa Remijio took top honors and a check for $10,000 over 51 contestants representing the hottest spots in Las Vegas. Fellow LAVO server Danielle Brewer finished in the top 10.


Darren Criss held a belated birthday celebration Saturday night at LAVO Las Vegas. The Glee actor, who turned 24 earlier in the month, stopped at the red carpet and graciously signed autographs and took photos with fans before heading in for dinner in the private dining room with a group of 25 friends (Photo credit: Denise Truscello/WireImage).

Photo credit: Denise Truscello/WireImage.

After enjoying favorites from the kitchen the large group made their way to the club, taking over a section of VIP tables on the dance floor. Criss was surprised with a birthday cake from Gimme Some Sugar shaped in the form of his signature hot pink sunglasses. The group danced and partied to the sounds of DJ Skratchy.

Photo credit: Denise Truscello/WireImage.

Camille Winbush from the Secret Life of the American Teenager celebrated a belated birthday with a girls night at LAVO and a group of friends that included actresses Francia Raisa and Logan Browning. Winbush, who turned 21 earlier this month sipped cocktails and had a great time.

Photo credit: Denise Truscello/WireImage.

Electro rock band Pendulum stopped by LAVO after their show earlier in the night. They took over a VIP table on the stage and were surprised when DJ Skratchy played one of their songs and gave them a shout out.

Photo credit: Denise Truscello/WireImage.

Magician David Copperfield was spotted grabbing a late night dinner of Kung Pao Chicken with a female companion at TAO Asian Bistro.


Friday night, Connor Cruise (aka DJ C-Squared, and the son of Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman) brought his musical talents to Vegas and delivered a heart-pumping DJ set for a packed house at Hyde Bellagio (Photo credit: Shane ONeal).

Photo credit: Shane ONeal.

The 17-year-old rising star DJ has been scoring high-profile gigs across the country. When previously asked how his famous dad feels about his DJing, Cruise replied, He loves it! Cruise reportedly takes his DJing seriously and is hoping to continue long-term.

Photo credit: Shane ONeal.

Dressed in dark jeans, black Diamond Life tee, Supra kicks, and a matching Louis Vuitton belt and backpack, the young DJ captivated the lavish nightspot with an eclectic mix of artists and musical genres. Opening with an upbeat mix of Lykke Lis I Follow Rivers, Cruise continued late into the night with unexpected mashups including Aviciis hit Levels with alternative breakout Gotyes Somebody That I Used To Know while mixing in tunes like Whitney Houstons I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Adeles Set Fire to the Rain, Take Care from Drake, and the popular David Guetta and Usher collaboration Without You. Dancing as he spun from the DJ booth above Hydes dramatic fiREPLACE, Cruise overlooked a sea of club-goers dancing on tables as the famed Fountains of Bellagio sprayed high into the night.
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar says CM's should have a role in a Governor's appointment. Meanwhile, several opposition leaders have complained about Governors meddling in the state government's affairs.

By Mail Today Bureau: After the role of Governor in dismissing Congress government in Arunachal Pradesh government came in for criticism from the Supreme Court, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Saturday made a pitch for abolishing the post. Nitish made the remark at the meeting of the Inter-State Council chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday.

The Supreme Court had come down heavily on the role played by the Governor in Arunachal Pradesh in toppling the Congress government early this year. In the landmark judgment, the court had restored the government.

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ADD MORE TO A CM'S ROLE

Several opposition leaders have often complained that the Governors were meddling in the affairs of state governments though they agreed that it will be difficult to do away with the constitutional authority. The Bihar chief minister said that the CM of a state should have a role in the appointment and removal of the Governor.

"Existing federal democratic structure does not warrant continuance of the gubernatorial post. However, if it is not possible to do away with it, then our opinion is that provisions relating to the appointment of Governor must be clearly defined and made transparent," he said setting off a debate on the issue.

He said that the chief minister of a state should also be consulted and the criteria laid down by Sarkaria Commission should be followed in the Governor's appointment.

The propensity to change the Governor, whenever a new Government is formed must be curbed by making constitutional provisions, he said.

BIHAR GUV'S STATEMENT

An official statement from Bihar government said that the state's Chief Minister must be formally consulted before removal of incumbent Governor and, if required, Article 155 of the Constitution may be amended to provide for such consultation, he added, according to an official statement. The chief minister also referred to the Punchhi commission report on the Centre-state relations which had recommended that for the removal of the chief minister, the governor must give the leader of the house a chance to prove majority on the floor of the house.

In its judgment in the case pertaining to the dismissal of Nabam Tuki government, the SC bench had said that the manner of conducting the proceedings was violative of Article 163 of the Constitution.



Also read:

Bihar's toppers scam is a god-sent opportunity: CM Nitish Kumar

Amit Shah calls Nitish Kumar a 'vote katwa', says he will divide votes to benefit SP

--- ENDS ---
Town of Tan Tan. 1976.

South. Near the town of Erfout. Shadows of palmtrees on the ramparts of a village. 1976.

South. Erfout. In the medina (old district of the city). 1976.

Marrakech. Young Berber girls hiding and giggling. 1975.

Marrakech. In the medina (old district). 1977.

High-Atlas. Imilchil. Moussem. Women and men of the Ait Addidou tribe. 1976.

Rif Mountains. Chefchaouen. Street life. Walls are often painted in blue and white. 1975.

Asilah. In the Casbah (old district of the city). 1976.

Rif Mountains. Asilah. Street life. Walls are often painted in blue and white. 1975.

Moulay Odriss. Pilgrims camping in sites around the city during the Moussem, traditional feast of the month of September. Apart from wild horses races and folk dancing, it is an occasion for people to invoke supernatural powers to make temporal life more endurable. 1977.

Essaouira region. Moulay Idriss. Moussem. 1977.

Essaouira region. Moulay Idriss. Pilgrims with banners making their way to the Mosque during the Moussem, traditional feast of the month of September. Apart from wild horses races and folk dancing, it is an occasion for people to invoke supernatural powers to make temporal life more endurable. 1977.

Marrakech. In the medina (old district). A bread vendor. 1975.

Essaouira. Ramparts & fortified walls of the city.1975.

South. Near the town of Tan Tan. Nomads camp. 1976.

Region of the High Atlas. Msemir region. 1976.

Essaouira. Ramparts & fortified walls of the city. 1976.

Essaouira. Ramparts & fortified walls of the city. 1976.

High Atlas. Imilchil. Women & men of the Ait Addidou tribe. 1976.

Harry Gruyaert (born 1941) is a Belgian photographer known for his use of color in photography. Gruyaert studied at the School for Photo and Cinema in Brussels from 1959 to 1962. He then began freelance fashion and advertising work in Paris, while working as a director of photography for Flemish television.In 1969 Gruyaert made the first of many trips to Morocco. His total immersion in its colors and landscapes won him the Kodak Prize in 1976 and culminated in the publication of the bookin 1990.The pictures of Morocco taken by Harry Gruyaert are highly mysterious and time seems to be suspended. However, a strong energy is created by the vibrant colors and the positions captured in action just at the right moment.(Images  Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos)
It is the largest Korean investment in Ha Nam province to date.

On July 15, representatives of the company and Ha Nam Provincial Peoples Committee signed an agreement to develop the project.

The construction is expected to kick off in August and will be divided into two phases. The first phase will have a total capital of $147 million, while the remaining $153 million will be disbursed during the second phase.

According to a representative of SSC, the factory will be equipped with multi-polarization technology as well as other modern technologies aiming to economically manufacture energy-saving, high-brightness products.

Once the factory comes into operation, it will create 3,000 jobs. The revenue in the first year of operation is expected to reach $150 million and $200 million in the second year. The figure will increate to $400 million and $500 million in the third and fourth years, respectively.

Established in 1992, SSC specialises in manufacturing semiconductors and LED lighting equipment used to manufacture computers, television, and mobile phones. Its products are present in more than 60 countries over the world. Notably, its LED products rank make up one fourth of the worlds total market share.

Currently. the company has six factories in Korea, Japan, China, the US, and Germany.

In May 2015, Korean-invested KMW Vina Co., Ltd. began the construction of a $100 million plant producing telecom and LED lighting equipment, both for the local market and export, in Ha Nam.

Covering over 30 hectares at Dong Van 1 Industrial Park, the factory is expected to produce 220,000 telecommunications and radio engineering devices and 380,0000 pieces of LED lighting equipment a year, as well as create jobs for 5,000 workers.

The project will be implemented in 36 months and stay valid for 50 years.
Supporters of Tukish President Tayyip Erdogan lift up his portrait as they celebrate with flags in Ankara, Turkey, July 16, 2016. Photo source: REUTERS/Tumay Berkin

The United States, following consultations with officials from key NATO ally Turkey, had proposed a draft statement calling on "all parties in Turkey to respect the democratically elected government of Turkey."

But Egypt, currently a non-permanent member of the Security Council, objected, according diplomats. An Egyptian diplomatic source, however, denied that Cairo had blocked the resolution.

"This is a process that requires consensus," he said, adding that Egypt agreed to the "overall objective of the statement" that condemned the violence and called for restraint.

"We proposed to call on all parties to respect the democratic and constitutional principles and rule of law," he said, rather than the initial wording calling for respect for the "democratically elected government."

Egypt's relations with the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been particularly tense.

Erdogan supports the Muslim Brotherhood of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, who was deposed by the Egyptian army in 2013.

The Turkish leader has denounced that move as a "coup d'etat," drawing the wrath of the Egyptian general behind the ouster, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is now president.

During the UN debate, Egypt argued that it was "not for the Security Council to decide whether the government is democratically elected," and it demanded that the relevant language be deleted, a diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Despite US insistence, Egypt would not budge.

Turkey and several Security Council members including the United States worried the statement would have been too weak without wording explicitly supporting the Turkish government.

"So there won't be any statement," the diplomat said.

Such Security Council resolutions require unanimous approval from the 15-member group.

The brief draft statement had "condemned the violence and unrest in Turkey and stressed the urgent need for an end to the current crisis and return to the rule of law."

It called on all parties to "show restraint and avoid any violence or bloodshed."
A woman carries blue, white and red flowers and a French flag as a tribute to victicms two days after an attack by the driver of a heavy truck who ran into a crowd on Bastille Day killing scores and injuring as many on the Promenade des Anglais, in Nice. (Photo source: REUTERS)

In a statement via its Amaq news service, IS said one of its "soldiers" carried out Thursday night's attack which killed 84 people. The act was "in response to calls to target nations of coalition states that are fighting (IS)," said the statement.

The claim "is vague and does not allow us to know if the attack was commanded or only inspired by IS calls to hit France," said Yves Trotignon, former analyst with French anti-terrorist service DGSE.

David Thomson, specialist in militant groups and author of a book on French militants, noted the group usually distinguishes between "soldiers" and "sympathisers" in claims of responsibility.

Two years ago, IS spokesman Abou Mohammed Al-Adnani called on sympathisers in western nations to kill "disbelieving" Americans or Europeans - "especially the spiteful and filthy French" and citizens of other countries fighting the organisation.

Syrian-born Al-Adnani urged supporters to kill the enemy "in any manner" including "run him over with your car."

'NEVER' A WRONG CALL

Thomson said that even if IS had not necessarily directly commanded the attack, the group had never been found to make a false claim to date.

Thomson noted that "several times they have had the possibility of claiming an attack they were not behind - for example, the Egyptair crash" in May. "But they didn't do so, even as Egyptian authorities suggested Islamic extremists were to blame."

Thomson also highlighted IS reactions to other previous claims. In cases "initiated by their propaganda, a clear claim did not necessarily follow.

"For example, after the attack at San Bernardino" California in December, when a Muslim couple killed 14, IS reacted by "congratulating" the perpetrators of killings it said were carried out by "sympathisers".

Thomson added: "When a claim is made, in most cases the statement is followed by elements of proof - photos or videos allowing the establishment of a link between the terrorist and the organisation" of the attack.

For Thomson the Nice attack "could be similar to that of Magnanville," the stabbing to death of a senior police officer and his companion at their home west of Paris last month by a man who claimed IS allegiance.

Self-claimed militant Larossi Abballa had "minutes before his act asked his Facebook contacts to tip-off IS's media branches." The group thereafter saluted the murders by "a soldier of Islamic State."

Although Nice killer Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was not known to intelligence services and appears to have undergone rapid radicalisation his profile "does not rule out his being a jihadist," Thomson concluded.
Nguyen Thi Chi, general director of Duc Manh, recently told Tuoi Tre newspaper that the blocking of the parking lot was due to fire hazards that Big C refused to address.

We blocked the underground parking lot on July 7 because our earlier requests that Big C remove gas cylinders that they put in unrented areas went unanswered, she said. Also, the contract does not allow them to cook in many areas of the building.

Chi said the Danang fire department had many times asked Duc Manh to prevent activities that would easily lead to fires.

There are between 3,000-5,000 people in the building at any given time. Besides Big C, there are offices and apartments. If anything happens, the responsibility fall on me and no-one else, so I have to do something about the risks, she said.

She explained that the wastewater valve was closed because Big C Danang used 90 per cent of the buildings wastewater capacity, but based on the rented area they should only use one third.

Nguyen Nu To Nga, manager of Big C Danang, earlier said that the companys contract with Duc Manh stipulates that Big C Danang is going to rent Vinh Trung Plaza from the underground parking lot to the fourth floor for 40 years, starting from 2016, with subsequent amendments as agreed upon by the two parties.

On the other hand, Chi said that the contract was not made with Big C Danang, but with French company Vindemia.

We have asked Vindemia and Big C numerous times to stop production and processing inside the building because these activities are not specified in the contract, but to no avail. Now that Big C has changed owners, we do not know who we are going to work with in case something happens, she said.

She added that she let Big C operate for ten years in peace because she didnt know much about the law. Vindemia was the one to sign the contract. If they want to re-rent the space to someone else, they have to get our permission first. When this came to the managements attention, we requested Big C to show a document from Vindemia authorising them to use the space, which they could not produce, Chi said, adding that the change of ownership from Groupe Casino to Central Group further complicates the issue.

Big C Danang refused to provide Tuoi Tre with information on its relationship with Vindemia and Big C.
By PTI: New Delhi, Jul 17 (PTI) Emphasising on importance of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), the University Grants Commission (UGC) has asked varsities to offer it as a generic elective subject under the Choice Based Credit System.

In a letter to universities, UGC secretary Jaspal S Sandhu said that creations of mind such as inventions, designs for industrial articles, literary, artistic work, symbols, names and images etc are protected by lntellectual Property rights.

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The importance of IPR was first recognized in Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883) and the Berne Convention for Protection of Literary and Artistic Work (1886), the UGC officials letter said.

IPRs should be protected to encourage the creator and also striking a balance between the innovators and public interest by creating an awareness where creativity can flourish, the letter added.

"Keeping in view the importance of IPR which recognizes the work of the creator, you are requested to devise, through academic council, inclusion of the IPR as a generic elective subject under the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) in your esteemed university and the affiliated colleges," the UGC secretary said in his letter. PTI ADS SK BSA

--- ENDS ---
People chant slogans as they gather at a pro-government rally in central Istanbul's Taksim square on Jul 16, 2016. (Photo source: AP/Emrah Gurel)

After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan triumphantly addressed thousands of supporters in his home Istanbul district after urging people to take to the streets following Friday's chaos in the strategic NATO member of 80 million people.

The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric who is Erdogan's arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.

Turks woke up early Saturday to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.

"The situation is completely under control," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkey's top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.

Describing the attempted coup as a "black stain" on Turkey's democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.

General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters has been killed. Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters' hopes.

During a night where power hung in the balance, large crowds of flag-waving supporters of Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders' orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime.

On Saturday, thousands of flag-waving supporters again mobilised in response to Erdogan's call to fill Turkey's squares, massing in Taksim in central Istanbul, his home district of Kisikli, Ankara's Kizilay Square and in the coastal city of Izmir, AFP correspondents said.

CRACKDOWN CONCERNS

Friday's putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul.

Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets.

Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd.

Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.

As protesters poured onto the streets, an AFP photographer saw troops open fire on people gathered near one of the bridges, leaving dozens wounded.

There was chaos in the city as angry crowds jeered the passing tanks, with much smaller numbers welcoming the troops.

With the coup defeated, Turkey rounded up its backers, from rank-and-file soldiers to generals, fuelling concern over the risk of summary justice.

US President Barack Obama stressed the "vital need" for all parties to "act within the rule of law".

While condemning the coup bid, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also said the plotters had to be dealt with "under the rule of law".

Turkey's General Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, has been detained while Alparslan Altan, one of 17 judges on the constitutional court, was taken into custody.

Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the coup bid.

'EXTRADITE THAT MAN!'

The president's critics have long accused him of undermining modern Turkey's secular roots and of sliding into authoritarianism - but he was believed to have won control of the military after purging elements who opposed him.

Turkey's once-powerful military has long considered itself the guardian of the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.

It has staged three coups since 1960 and forced out an Islamic government in 1997.

Erdogan immediately pinned the blame on "the parallel state" and "Pennsylvania" - a reference to Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him, and said Obama had failed to listen to warnings.

"I told you that he was engaged in coup plots but I was not listened to. Now again today after the coup I say it again. Deliver this man who lives in Pennsylvania to Turkey," said Erdogan.

But Gulen "categorically" denied any involvement in the plot, calling the accusation "insulting".

Meanwhile, Turkey demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.

And Istanbul authorities sought to get life back to normal with the bridges reopening to traffic and Ataturk International Airport - shut down by the plotters - gradually reopening.

But the US government said it has suspended all flights to Turkey, and banned all airlines from flying to the United States from Turkey due to uncertainty after the coup bid.

Turkish authorities also imposed a security lockdown at the Incirlik air base in the southern province of Adana used by US and other coalition forces in the fight against jihadists in Syria, the US consulate said.

The US military command in Europe has ordered American forces across Turkey to take maximum protective measures.
Ahead of an African Union summit that begins Sunday, a key advisory body of the organization has condemned the International Criminal Court, saying its focus has been limited to Africa since its founding in 2002.

The Economic Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) does not speak for the AU. However, its statements echo the complaints of African leaders who have pushed for member countries to quit the Rome-based court, which has jurisdiction in 124 nations over alleged cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Last April, the AU charged the committee to come up with a joint position on the ICC. The committee is understood to have recommended that AU member states quit the ICC unless it meets three conditions, including giving heads of state immunity from prosecution.

That message was relayed in Kigali by ECOSOCC, which was chosen by civil society organizations across the continent.

ECOSOCC spokesman Joseph Chilengi told journalists in Kigali that the ICC is not independent, as it follows U.N. Security Council guidance. He argued that it would never indict North Americans or Europeans.

The European Union provides over 70 percent of the ICCs budget, something which also violates the Rome statute [that set up the court], which says that no one member state can pay more than 22 percent of the budget," Chilengi said. "And as we know, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Chilengi brushed aside a journalists point that the EU is not a state, saying that it behaves like one.

The ICC is funded by member states using a formula similar to the one used to fund the United Nations, which means wealthier states pay more.

Africa bias seen

Many people in Africa, including some African leaders, have argued that the ICC is biased against Africa. Of its 10 active investigations, only one is outside Africa. Kenyas government is among several in Africa that have considered leaving the ICC.

Those who oppose leaving the ICC say withdrawal would leave African nations with less protection against human rights abuses.

Chilengi warned against a proposed amendment to the Rome statute that set up the ICC, one that would affect the U.N. peacekeeping forces known as the blue berets.

The danger is this: If there is an amendment to the Rome statute that the blue berets will be allowed to arrest our leaders, then blue berets will not be allowed in member states, he said.

Human Rights Watch commented that to give heads of state that are signatories of the Rome statute exemption from prosecution at the ICC would run totally counter to the statute.

HRW spokeswoman Elise Keppler told VOA that Nigeria, Senegal and Ivory Coast oppose moves at the summit to promote the AU's withdrawal from the ICC and raised objections at the discussions this past week in the Executive Council meetings.

South Sudan 'catastrophe'

The summit also faces a crisis over recent deadly violence South Sudan, where the United Nations has warned that a "catastrophe" awaits if a fragile truce reached this past week in the capital, Juba, fails to hold.

At least 300 people in the city were killed between July 8 and 11, in fighting between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and his longtime opponent, First Vice President Riek Machar, before violence subsided.

It remained unclear how the 53-nation body would formally address the crisis in South Sudan, which is Africa's newest nation and is not an AU member. U.N. officials said conditions in the impoverished country have been dramatically worsened by the theft of 4,500 tons of food supplies earmarked for the nation's neediest civilians.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has in recent days pressed the U.N. Security Council to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan, along with targeted sanctions against those found responsible for the latest fighting. But no formal action has yet been taken by the 15-member body.

Decision on AU leadership

The summit is also expected to make decisions on the leadership of the AU Commission, after current Chair Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma of South Africa announced this month that she was stepping down.

Officials are considering three candidates, including two foreign ministers, one from Botswana and the other from Equatorial Guinea. The third candidate is a former Ugandan vice president, who also is a former U.N. special envoy on HIV/AIDS.
Prime Minister Hun Sen has announced that China will give Cambodia almost $600 million in aid to support election infrastructure, education and health projects  with a catch.

Sen's Chinese counterpart, Li Keqiang, agreed to accommodate Cambodia's aid request during the 11th biennial Asia-Europe Meeting, held this past week in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. China, a key ally of Cambodia and the Southeast Asian countrys largest donor, in return expects support in international forums, including in discussions over the future of the South China Sea.

Friday's announcement followed a landmark ruling at an arbitration court in The Hague, which found that China has no historic claims to areas of the South China Sea that are also claimed by the Philippines.

Sok Touch, dean of Khemarak University in Phnom Penh, said the close relationship between China and Cambodia was due to an alignment of interests, most recently with Cambodias tacit approval of Chinas actions in that disputed maritime region.

As we know, foreign policy has no friends or enemies, but only exists because of [states] interests. So perhaps [it] is because of the South China Sea that Cambodia receives $600 million, he said. Thats the first point, and the second point is that Cambodia needs grant aid money to develop the country.

Chea Vannath, a longtime analyst and Khmer Rouge survivor, welcomed the move by Beijing.

We are friends rather than enemies. China is a superpower and has been a great friend since [the reign of King Norodom Sihanouk], she said.

The money will be partly spent on organizing elections slated for 2017 and 2018.

Vannath, however, added that no amount of electoral aid can ensure free and fair elections, citing the jailing of opposition members, the recent slaying of government critic Kem Ley, and outstanding charges against the leaders of the Cambodia National Rescue Party.

All of this creates a political atmosphere where the preparation of free and fair elections cannot take place, she said.
Three new surveys Sunday showed Democrat Hillary Clinton with a consistent advantage over Republican Donald Trump, even as American voters view both of them unfavorably, ahead of the U.S. presidential nominating conventions.

The edge for Clinton, a former secretary of state seeking to become the first female U.S. president, ranged from four to seven percentage points over Trump, the billionaire real estate mogul set to claim the Republican nomination this week in the midwestern city of Cleveland, Ohio.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll shows Clinton ahead 47 to 43 percent, while NBC News and The Wall Street Journal pegged the race at 46-41 and CNN/ORC International at 49-42.

But both remain unpopular. The ABC/Post survey said 58 percent of voters say they are dissatisfied with their choice between Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, and Trump, the one-time television reality show host. It said 64 percent view Trump unfavorably, with 54 percent looking negatively at Clinton.



But the poll showed Clinton with a wide edge over Trump on whether they are qualified to be president, with 59 percent seeing her as qualified, compared to just 37 percent for Trump.



Trump heads to the Republican national convention after naming Indiana Governor Mike Pence, a social conservative with strong appeal to many traditional Republican voters, as his vice presidential running mate. Clinton says she will name her vice presidential pick next Friday, three days before the July 25 start of the Democratic convention in the eastern city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Unlikely candidate



U.S. political analysts considered Trump's candidacy something akin to a joke when he announced 13 months ago that he was running. But Trump, seeking elected office for the first time, caught the imagination of millions of Republican voters in months of state-by-state nominating contests. Trump says he wants to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the country and to build a wall on the country's southern border with Mexico to halt the flow of more migrants into the country.



The brash Trump bested 16 other Republican presidential candidates, many of them seasoned politicians who were current or former senators and governors. Some have subsequently endorsed him as the Republican nominee.

Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus said Sunday he believes Trump's nomination acceptance speech Thursday will give American voters a chance to view him as a plausible U.S. commander in chief.

Trump's wife Melania and his four adult children are set to speak at the convention, looking to present the man they know as the best choice to be the American leader when President Barack Obama leaves office next January after two terms in the White House.

Some Republican officials are also speaking for Trump, including House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, the party's top elected official in the United States.

But numerous other Republican leaders are ignoring the Trump victory party by staying away from the convention, including the party's last two presidents, George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. Bush, and its last two presidential nominees, Arizona Senator John McCain and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney.

Of the four, only McCain has endorsed Trump and Romney has denounced his candidacy.
How the Turkish government deals with the aftermath of the July 15 attempted military coup could have lasting implications for U.S.-Turkish relations, according to some U.S. foreign policy experts.

Turkey, as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, is a valuable ally of the United States. According to Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, however, if Ankara backslides even further on democracy, rule of law and human rights, Turkey could become an ally much more in the mold of Pakistan, which has little in common with Western values, and where bilateral frictions, mistrust and recriminations are commonplace, even though both countries depend on each other for regional stability.



After the failed coup attempt, many observers are concerned that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will further tighten his grip on power, purge the military and be more controlling of democratic processes in the country. While President Erdogans rule was widely seen as authoritarian in style, most of the international community nonetheless condemned the military coup attempt and declared support for Turkeys democratic institutions. But if Erdogan uses the coup as justification for further crack-down, this sympathy could evaporate.



Less than 24 hours after the attempted coup started, President Erdogan appeared on live television at a rally in Istanbul, declared he was in control of the government, and said he was ready to take on the Gulenists, whom he said have caused much pain to Turkey.

Erdogan then publicly asked U.S. President Barack Obama to extradite Fethullah Gulen to Turkey. Gulen is a 75-year-old Turkish cleric residing in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. If we are strategic partners, or model partners, do what is necessary, said the Turkish president. In response, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that U.S. authorities would investigate and issue a judgment against Gulen if Turkey submits evidence of wrongdoing.

Many arrests



In the meantime, thousands of military personnel, including flag officers, have already been arrested, more than 2,700 judges have been suspended, and some 140 arrest warrants have been issued against members of Turkey's Supreme Court.

As the coup attempt was unfolding, the West showed unequivocal support for Turkish democracy. Executive Director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership and former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker believes this [support] will give Erdogan some running room to establish order and security in the country following the coup attempt.

He also stated that Erdogan, who had already shown some very strong anti-democratic tendencies before this coup, will use it as a justification for cracking down on society even more. This type of repressive governance could potentially lead to a more restrictive environment in Turkey, less press freedom, less political openness.



Michael Rubin, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former U.S. Defense Department official, says the West is not going to be trapped by this stated support for democracy, if it the government cracks down.

Going after the judiciary, going after the press is not going to be acceptable. The Europeans, Americans and others can say that they stood up against an illegal coup. However, they support the rule of law  and it can be violated either by the coup plotters or by the president of Turkey, Rubin told VOA.



Volker does not think Turkeys overall strategic goals would change. He therefore does not anticipate any major foreign policy cleavages with the United States in the short term. However, if human rights and rule of law are abused by the government, in the long run, it will lead to frictions with the West.

Delicate diplomacy



In light of a turbulent election year in the United States, as well as increased terrorist activities in Europe, Western leaders may be inclined to be less critical of Erdogans authoritarian rule in order to maintain stability in the region. He may try to ride that wave of stability, admitted Rubin. However, the United States relying on a strongman in order to stabilize the region may be a short-term strategy.



Rubin believes U.S.-Turkish relations are already changing and not for the better. The United States is entering into a corollary situation to what we have with Pakistan. In that, we deal with anti-Americanism, which sometimes is incited by the government. At the same time, even though we recognize its a flawed ally, we do whatever we can to keep the relationship up regardless.



Shortly after Erdogan demanded Gulens extradition from America, Turkish authorities grounded almost all U.S. military flights from Incirlik airbase. From this airbase, the U.S. military conducts its air raids in neighboring Syria against Islamic State. These flights are now paused. Officials claimed the need to protect the safety of Turkish airspace until all military aircraft ,which may have been used during the attempted coup, are accounted for. In addition, the Pentagon reported that commercial power to the base was cut, and Incirlik was operating on an internal power supply.

While it may be too early to say what may be the implications for U.S.-Turkish relations of the failed coup detat in Turkey, steps such as these may suggest that Ankara has already started saber-rattling.
The electoral commission of Ghana has dismissed local media reports that the electoral body is not fully prepared to organize the anticipated November 7 presidential, parliamentary and local elections. This as parliament discusses an electoral amendment bill that will change the regular election date from December 7 to November 7.

In their recent deliberation, some parliamentarians expressed concern that the electoral commission might not be ready to administer the polls on November 7 following meetings with residents of their constituencies and other election stakeholders.

But, in an interview with VOA, Eric Dzakpasu  spokesman for the electoral commission  says the electoral body is implementing measures to ensure it is prepared to organize the polls.

The Electoral Commission of Ghana has been preparing feverishly to have the election conducted on the 7th of November. All our activities are geared towards having the election on the 7th of November so if parliament passes the bill, we are very confident that we will be able to conduct the election on the 7th of November, said Dzakpasu.

Correcting voter list

Last week, the electoral commission began expunging the names from the voter list those who registered using their National Health Insurance Scheme identification card following an order from the Supreme Court. The electoral body says it will now re-register the affected prospective voters.

We have rolled out the roadmap for the re-registration and the exhibition of the register of those whose names have been deleted. So, what we said is that from the 18th of July to the 28th of July all persons who were affected by the deletion would have the opportunity to register at the various district offices of the electoral commission. Then from the 5th and 7th of August , the register would be exhibited and together with the provisional register we have now, would be certified for the election if it is approved on the 7th of November, said Dzakpasu.

Opposition political parties have questioned the credibility of the electoral commission saying their demands, which include the compilation of a new voter register, have not been met. This, they contend could undermine the polls. At a recent conference, the chairperson of the electoral commission, Charlotte Osei, warned that a discredited electoral commission could be a disaster for the country.

Stakeholders involved



Spokesman Dzakpasu said the electoral commission is working with stakeholders including the political parties to address their concerns before the elections. This, following a meeting with the parties and their representatives at an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting in the capital, Accra, last Tuesday.

We rolled out all these programs and we had a unanimous approval. None of the political parties rejected any of the programs that we submitted. They even wanted a timetable for our election should it come on the 7th of November, and we have even submitted soft copies to them. So the relationship, if what went on at the IPAC is anything to go by, is very cordial and very understanding, said Dzakpasu.

Our activities, our procedures are time bound, they are regulated by the electoral laws and every activity is scheduled to take place at a particular point in time," he said. "We have explained to the Ghanaian public that we are focused and that if parliament approves of the election [date], as usual we shall conduct a free fair and a credible election on the 7th of November. The most critical thing we are left to do now is to clean the register and the exhibition marks a critical period in the cleansing of the register. That is why this years exhibition exercise has been extended to a period of 21 days, instead of the normal 14 days that we do the cleaning up and updating the register.
Every year, more than 300 million people from around the world visit Americas national parks.

They come to see stunning landscapes like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, walk among ancient sequoia trees and watch wolves, bison and bears in their natural habitats.

These national treasures, along with thousands of historic buildings, presidential homes, monuments and Civil War battlefields, are found in every state of the union, spread over 32 million hectares from Guam to the Virgin Islands to Alaska  412 sites in all. They are managed by the U.S. National Park Service, which is celebrating its centennial this year.

For the last 100 years, the National Park Service has been charged by the U.S. government to manage the very best of America; the very best places that represent both our natural and cultural heritage, says its director, Jonathan Jarvis. So, to be part of this organization and to be in the directorship is really a lifelong dream for me.

Jarvis has been with the National Park Service for 40 years and the director since 2009.

I like to say the National Park Service is the only federal agency with the responsibility to ensure the public actually has fun! he says. So we have a lot of places that are there for the enjoyment of the American people, and visitors from around the world.

History lessons

Jarvis says its also important for visitors to learn something ... whether it's to learn about nature or plate tectonics or climate change, but also about history.

That history includes places that tell stories of a darker side of America.

He gives the example of Manzanar National Historic Site in California, a place that tells about the confinement and internment of Japanese-Americans in military-style camps during World War II under an executive order from President Franklin Roosevelt.

Over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up at bayonet point and put into prison camps for multiple years during the war just because of their ethnicity, explains Jarvis. The Park Service has been charged with telling that kind of story."

An 'honor' to serve

Serving as the director of the National Park Service is a big job, says Jarvis  the agency has 22,000 employees and gets help from 400,000 volunteers  but there's no question it is an honor.

Its the best job in government, to be in this role, to serve the American people, people of the world and stewarding these incredible places, he says.

There are fires, volcanoes and floods, he points out. There are First Amendment activities, protests, marches and symbolic activities around issues like the Confederate flag and LGBT rights.

We participate in all of that," he says, "so that we can help this nation live up to its highest ideals.

Climate change is real

Another responsibility Jarvis says he must deal with is climate change.

While America's national parks are federally protected, they're not immune to the effects of warmer temperatures.

Jarvis predicts the glaciers in Glacier National Park to be gone within 20 to 25 years, and wildfires in the national parks and other public lands are burning "at least a month longer" than in previous years.

As a result of climate change, he says, "the forests are not even coming back in the same way."

In addition, were seeing species being forced to migrate and not necessarily having the corridors to connect between parks and protected areas across the landscape, he says.

Americas 'cathedrals'

Jarvis has a lot of support to help protect the parks, including from President Barack Obama, who recently spoke at Yosemite National Park.

Using the backdrop of a cascading waterfall, the president spoke of the natural beauty around him.

"Just look at this scene.  You cant capture it on an iPad, or a flat screen, or even an oil painting. You've got to come here and breathe it in yourself," he said.

"There's something sacred about this place, and I suppose that's why the walls of this valley were referred to as cathedral walls, because here at Yosemite we connect not just with our own spirit, but with something greater. It's almost like the spirit of America itself is right here," he added.

The commander-in-chief used the opportunity to remind everyone about climate change.

So as we look back over the last 100 years, theres plenty to celebrate about a national park system that is the envy of the world," he said. "But when we look to the next century, the next 100 years, the task of protecting our sacred spaces is even more important. And the biggest challenge were going to face in protecting this place and places like this is called climate change.

Make no mistake. Climate change is no longer a threat; it is already a reality," Obama added

From Civil War to civil rights

As the National Park Service heads into its second century, Jarvis says new national parks will be more representative of the contributions of women and minorities in the U.S.

So we've added new parks that tell the story of Harriet Tubman, of women's rights, of the LGBT community, of Colonel Charles Young and the Buffalo Soldiers, of Cesar Chavez, he said.

The Park Service director listed key goals for the future.

"Expanding our story, deepening that story with an existing portfolio, expanding the portfolio to be more representative, and then battling to protect these key natural resources, he said.

I hope that the Park Service thrives in its second century, that it is established on a sound foundation of financial support, he said. But really the key is the public support, that the public still views the National Park Service as essential.
Pema Khandhu was today sworn in as Chief Minister of the state and with this he becomes the third-youngest chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh.

By India Today Web Desk: Pema Khandhu was today sworn in as the ninth Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh. With this he became the third-youngest chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh. The youngest was Prem Khandu Thungon, who became the state's first chief minister when he was just 29 years old.

Chowna Mein was sworn in as the Deputy Chief Minister.

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Khandu, replaced Nabam Tuki who resigned after stepping down as leader of the Congress Legislature Party or CLP.

Khandu was chosen as the new leader of Congress Legislature Party after 44 party MLAs unanimously elected him in the place of Chief Minister Nabam Tuki, who was restored to the post only two days ago after the apex court verdict.

A total of 12 Ministers will be part of the new Arunachal cabinet.

PEMA KHANDU: THE NEW STAR ON THE NORTHEASTERN HORIZON

Khandu has emerged as the new star on the northeastern horizon when he was elected leader of the Congress in Arunachal Pradesh on Saturday in a dramatic turn of events for the beleaguered party fighting to save its government.

Son of late Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, who died in a chopper crash in 2011, the 37-year-old graduate from Delhi's prestigious Hindu College had an early entry into governance after his father's demise.

And in five years, he has emerged as the chief ministerial prospect after Supreme Court's intervention that changed the course of politics in the state with dissidents returning to Congress.



PEMA KHANDU's ENTRY INTO POLITICS

Khandu, who hails from Tawang, bordering China, first entered the Arunachal Pradesh assembly in 2011 to fill the vacancy caused by his father's death.

His election as MLA from Mukto (ST) constituency was uncontested and he was soon included in the state government as Cabinet Minister for Water Resource Development and Tourism.

He had joined the Congress in early 2000 and became Secretary of Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee in 2005 and President of Tawang District Congress Committee in 2010.

Khandu was re-elected unopposed from Mukto in the 2014 assembly elections.

Also Read

Nabam Tuki files fresh plea in SC against President's Rule in Arunachal

Change of guard: Pema Khandu to replace Nabam Tuki as Arunachal Pradesh chief minister



--- ENDS ---
For the past two days, the Promenade des Anglais has been remarkably quiet, despite the crowds of mourners.



Every few steps of a two-kilometer strip of the promenade has some kind of memorial - flowers, notes, or candles - marking the place where one of the 84 victims died.



But for a brief time on Sunday, the hush was shattered.



Next to the largest memorial, a growing pile of offerings surrounded by growing numbers of mourners, a protest of just a few people had dozens of people arguing loudly.



The protesters stood silently, holding a cardboard sign calling on the government to arm the citizens. It was well understood the protesters represented the growing far right movement in France, which fuels anti-Muslim sentiment that has followed recent terrorist attacks.



For some, the small protest was a sign of growing divisions in Nice and in the world. In the Riviera city, rifts between the Muslim community and others could be devastating, said Sylvin Henrick, a young man in dreadlocks and a Summer in L.A. tank top.



The government is trying to pit the people against Muslims, he says. It will amplify the divisions.



By some estimates, as much as 40 percent of the population of Nice is Muslim, while roughly eight percent of the entire country is Muslim. The largest single immigrant group in Nice is Tunisian.



After the protest dispersed, Marie Sophie Hett, a retired nurse, echoed sentiments of far right leaders who have been highly critical of the security on the night of the attack. While crowds celebrated Bastille Day with fireworks, 31-year-old Mohamed Bouhlel was able to plow a truck through a pedestrian area, despite barriers put up to prevent vehicular traffic.



And like the far right leadership, Hett generally blames the large population of Muslims for the violence.



Its true. They must arm the people, she says. We are human beings and we have had enough.

Arm against whom?



On the other side of the city, in a neighborhood largely populated by immigrants, Muslim residents say they feel ostracized by local French people after a terrorist attack. And every time it happens, it's worse than the time before.



No one knows what will happen to Arabs here, says Bel Haj, from Tunisia, who installs and repairs cooling systems. They look at us like we were the man driving the truck.



In the past year and half, terrorist attacks in France have killed nearly 240 people and wounded hundreds.



Ibrahim, a 29-year-old Tunisian painter who has lived in France for 15 years, pulls out a cracked mobile phone and plays a video of a Tunisian man weeping outside a hospital. The man in the video lost his wife and his small son in the attack. Our hearts are with the victims, says Ibrahim, sitting on a parked motorcycle. Islam is against all terrorists.



Bouhlel, the attacker, was also not much of a Muslim, he says. Before police shot him, ending his deadly rampage, he was known to be a petty thief, a brawler and to possess a medley of other qualities that dont fit with many people's notions of what an Islamist terrorist should be like.



Islamic State militants claim Bouhlel was acting on their behalf, but stopped short of saying he was acting on their orders. Several people connected to Bouhlel have been taken into custody during the weekend, but authorities have said he may have been acting alone.



That man was an idiot, says Qusai, a 25-year-old construction worker from Tunisia who has lived in France for eight years. He was not an Islamic state fighter. He was nothing.



The growing right



Meanwhile, life is getting harder for in this neighborhood, as politicians rile-up anti-immigration sentiment before presidential elections in Europe and the United States.



In France, as 2017 elections loom, Marine Le Pen is the head of the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim National Front, which has gained popularity as Islamophobia rises in the wake of the European refugee crisis.

The war against the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism has not started, it now must be declared urgently, she says in a statement reacting to the Nice attacks.



At the protest near the memorial, 20-year-old American-Congolese university student Bahati Nkera says it is no great surprise that fear of terrorism allows political groups to push forth their agenda.



Motioning towards the mourners, where toys are strewn among the mementos, he says, But its sad to see this happen right in front of a memorial for children.
Pakistani policy makers and legislators stand puzzled over the way the United States has lately conducted its relationship with Islamabad and extremely opposing views emanating from within the U.S. Congress about Pakistani counterterrorism and efforts to promote peace in Afghanistan.

Pakistan and the United States have long had uneasy relations. Ties have been strained recently over allegations that Pakistans counterterrorism operations focus only on militants linked to the anti-state Pakistani Taliban, and spare sanctuaries linked to Afghan militants, including the Haqqani Network terrorist group.

US Congressional hearing



Recently, the U.S Congress stopped the Obama administration from subsidizing the sale of eight F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, citing lack of cooperation in combating terrorist networks.

Pakistani officials are particularly furious at a Congressional hearing last week in Washington under the title Pakistan: Friend or foe.

Some lawmakers and witnesses during the proceedings of a sub-panel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee demand Washington cut off financial and military aid to Islamabad, accusing the Pakistan military of maintaining ties to Taliban and Haqqani militants fighting the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

They even recommended Pakistan be internationally isolated and declared a state sponsor of terrorism.

Senior Pakistani officials, however, have belittled the Congressional hearing and dismissed anti-Pakistan assertions as baseless concerns of a section of U.S lawmakers.

The hearing you have referred to was informal and was very thinly attended. Mr. Ted Poe, who was behind the idea of hearing, himself did not attend it. His negative bias against Pakistan is well known, so nothing positive could be expected, asserted foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Nafees Zakaria.

From the Pakistan-U.S. common perspective, he added, the two countries are long time partners and allies in their shared goal of defeating terrorism and have been cooperating in the anti-terror fight.

Owais Leghari, chairman of the parliamentary committee on foreign affairs, asserts that Pakistan is being increasingly blamed and turned into a punching bag because of setbacks the U.S. policy in Afghanistan has suffered.

I think these Congressional hearings are just ways to keep Pakistan under pressure, which are not helping the U.S. image in Pakistan at the grass root level, noted the ruling party lawmaker.

Pakistan needs to clear its soil of any terrorists that we have, and we have been able to do a much better job than all the global community put together in Afghanistan, noted Leghari.

He echoed views that members of a bipartisan Congressional delegation expressed after visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan earlier this month under the leadership of Republican Senator John McCain.

The influential Congressmen held comprehensive talks with Pakistan Army Chief General Raheel Sharif before they were flown in a military helicopter to North Waziristan, a tribal territory on the Afghan border that until recently was condemned as the epicenter of international terrorism and a source of fueling the Taliban-led insurgency.

They have cleared out that part of Pakistan... they are looking at securing the Pakistan border in a more substantial way. So, I want to help Pakistan, and they are doing the right thing and there is a lot of improvement to be made. But I would acknowledge it a step in the right direction, noted U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.

Pakistan has lately taken new measures to strengthen security along its 2,600-kilometer border with Afghanistan, including construction of new check posts at eight established crossing routes, saying it would help counter terrorist movement on either side. The project, however has enraged Afghan authorities who dispute the border being an international frontier.

But Pakistani officials dismiss the objections and say the construction of new facilities, including the main Torkham crossing, is progressing at a fast pace.

Some progress



Senator Graham also praised General Sharif, saying he has set a new attitude in the counterterrorism campaign and it is beginning to show some progress. Graham also disclosed the Pakistani general is opposed to any abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

The Chief of Staff of the Pakistani Army says I hope you leave your troops here, he told us that, because if you withdraw too quickly the place is going to fall apart and it will hurt us [Pakistan], he said.

This contradicts concerns often expressed in Kabul and echoed during Tuesdays Congressional hearing that Islamabad is supporting the Taliban, believing that continuing the war in Afghanistan will lead to a U.S. withdrawal and a collapse of the current Afghan government to set the stage for the Islamist insurgency to return to power.

We emphasized the importance, that we felt, of good relations between the United States and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. We also emphasized the need for progress in combating the Haqqani Network, which to a large degree is unmolested, enabling them to orchestrate attacks into Afghanistan, observed Senator McCain.

Despite skepticism and differences plaguing bilateral ties, officials and analysts in Islamabad appear confident Washington would desist from adopting any punitive policies towards Pakistan. The confidence, they say, stems from the countrys growing closer economic and political ties with China.

It is profitable for both the U.S. and Pakistan to maintain a manageable relationship despite their differences. In fact, the more pressure is on Pakistan, the closer China would be to Pakistan, says Masood Khan, head of Islamabads Institute of Strategic Studies.
Black nationalists. White supremacists. Anarchists. Nuns concerned about social justice. Pretty much anyone with a cause, extreme and otherwise, seems to be headed to the northern U.S. city of Cleveland, Ohio, this week to protest at the Republican National Convention (RNC).

It's not unusual for national party conventions to attract a wide array of activists. But authorities fear this time the demonstrations could get out of hand, since it comes at a time when the U.S. is seemingly being dragged into a widening racial and political divide.

"You have a perfect storm of issues involving race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, immigration, and sexual orientation," said Errol Southers, who heads the Homegrown Violent Extremism program at the University of Southern California. "I've never seen so many issues come to a head in terms of being confrontational."

Fifty-thousand people are expected to converge on the Midwestern city for the four-day event that begins Monday.



Trump protests

Many are coming to Cleveland simply because they don't like Donald Trump, the highly polarizing candidate who is expected to emerge from the convention as the Republican presidential nominee.

Tom Burke is with the Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC, an alliance of more than 40 groups holding protests against Trump's "racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attacks."

"I think it will go very peacefully and smoothly," Burke said. "I don't plan to be arrested. I'm not looking for a confrontation with the police. I just want to have a political rally."

But given the recent tumult in the country, many fear the protests could turn violent.

Trump supporters and opponents have repeatedly clashed outside the candidate's events in recent months. At times, Trump has encouraged, and even seemed to revel in, the fighting. He's even warned there could be riots if the convention doesn't go his way.

Extremist groups

The expected presence of extremist political groups from both sides of the political spectrum is also raising concerns.

White nationalists, who have been energized by Trump's candidacy, plan to attend the RNC. One such group, the Traditionalist Worker Party, said it will "defend" Trump supporters in Cleveland.

A coalition of white nationalist organizations had been planning a bigger, more organized presence at the RNC and hadplanned to come armed but have now backed off, according to Jeff Schoep, who leads the National Socialist Movement.

After discussing the matter internally, white nationalist leaders agreed to "abandon the idea and work on the next project," Schoep told VOA. "We're not going in, and we don't know of any groups that are."

But many self-declared white supremacists said they're planning to attend anyway.

"I'm pretty certain I'm going to go," said Arthur Jones, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who now heads the white supremacist America First Committee. "They're all going to descend down there, so it could get pretty rough."

Andre Anglin, who runs the Daily Stormer, a prominent white nationalist website, said many of his readers will also attend, though he hesitated to provide an estimate.

Guns allowed

Other groups are not only planning to attend, they're also planning to take advantage of Ohio's laws that will allow them to carry guns.

Under state law, protesters will be allowed to openly carry firearms without a permit within the outer ring of the convention zone, which is controlled by the city of Cleveland. (The inner ring is controlled by the Secret Service, which will prohibit weapons.)

Oath Keepers, a conservative group made up of current and former members of the military, says it will carry weapons into Cleveland, according to The New York Times.

The New Black Panther Party, a black nationalist group, told Reuters its members also will bring guns for self-defense. The New Black Panthers, which are modeled after the now-defunct 1960s black power organization, have in the past praised attacks on police.

The group's leader did condemn last week's killing of five police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, Texas, which have heightened fears of racial violence.

Law enforcement plans

Cleveland police in the past have been criticized for their use of force, but they have promised to use restraint and will not deploy military-style equipment unless it is needed when dealing with convention protesters.

About 4,000 law enforcement officials, including many from across the country, are expected to patrol the area.

The trick will be for them to protect protesters' right to free speech, even while making sure things don't get out of hand, says Southers, the ex-FBI agent.

"This is what democracy is supposed to look like. We're supposed to have debates and disagree," he said. "But we only need one individual to engage in a violent act for it to be problematic."
A former U.S. Marine has been identified as the gunman who shot and killed three police officers and wounded three others Sunday morning in the southern U.S. city of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Military officials say Gavin Long of Kansas City, Missouri, on his 29th birthday, was the masked gunman who opened fire on the officers with an assault rifle. He served in the Marines from 2005 to 2010, earning the rank of sergeant. Long was deployed to Iraq from 2008 to 2009.

Long was killed in a shootout with police after killing two Baton Rouge police officers - Montrell Jackson and Matthew Gerald - and one officer of the East Baton Rouge sheriff's office - Brad Garafola.

A fourth officer, a deputy sheriff, remains in critical condition after undergoing emergency surgery. Two other officers received hospital treatment for non-life threatening wounds.

Authorities offered no immediate evidence that police were targeted in the shootings. State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said the investigation is ongoing "with a lot of moving parts." He did not rule out the possibility the shooter had one or more accomplices who remain at large.

Speaking alongside Edmonson, Governor John Bel Edwards sought to assure Baton Rouge residents still grappling with the July 5 police shooting of a black man that sparked widespread protests in cities across the country. Long, Sunday's shooter, was black. One of the officers killed Sunday, Jackson, was black, the other two were white.

A friend described Jackson, who was 32, as a big "Teddy Bear" of a man. Jackson was a 10-year veteran of the police force and was a new father.

Gerald joined Baton Rouge's police force less than a year ago. He was 41 and had been a Blackhawk helicopter crew chef in the Army.

Garafola, the father of four, was a 24-year veteran of the East Baton Rouge sheriff's office. One of his neighbors said he was never seen without at least one of his four children, who range in age from 7 to 21.

Edwards did not address the earlier shooting death in his comments, instead focusing on Sunday's violence, which he called an "absolutely unspeakable, heinous attack." He also said the probe has the full cooperation of federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

President Barack Obama, speaking on national television, condemned the killings, saying such attacks "are "happening far too often." He called on Americans to "avoid divisive rhetoric" in the aftermath of the latest violence, which he earlier had described as "cowardly attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civil society."

Obama also noted that Sunday's shootings, and other recent deadly violence involving police in Dallas, Texas, Baton Rouge and in Minnesota, come ahead of both Republican and Democratic nominating conventions set to begin in the coming days. He said that convention rhetoric "tends to get hotter than usual," and urged candidates and their supporters to avoid "careless accusations" that could further heighten tensions.

Watch President Obama's statement:

Click here for the text of an earlier written statement by President Obama.



Authorities offered no immediate evidence that police were targeted in the shootings. And State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson later told reporters that investigators believe there was one shooter. But he also warned that the investigation is ongoing "with a lot of moving parts," and did not rule out the possibility that the shooter had one or more accomplices who remain at large.

Speaking alongside Edmonson, Governor John Bel Edwards sought to assure Baton Rouge residents still grappling with the July 5 police shooting of a black man that sparked widespread protests in major cities across the country.

Edwards did not address the earlier shooting death in his comments, instead focusing on Sunday's violence, which he called an "absolutely unspeakable, heinous attack." He also said the probe has the full cooperation of federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Superintendent Edmonson said events began to unfold Sunday at 8:40 a.m., when an unidentified caller told police someone was carrying a rifle as he walked along a main roadway in the city. Nearby, as police approached the suspect a short while later, gunfire erupted behind a storefront, where authorities believe the officers and the gunman were shot.



WATCH: Video from the scene

Baton Rouge was the scene of a fatal police shooting of a black man July 5 that sparked widespread protests in major cities across the country.



The shooting death of Alton Sterling was partially recorded on a cell phone and widely circulated on social media.

Sterlings death triggered intense protests that stretched for days in Baton Rouge. A day later, a Minnesota man was fatally shot during a traffic stop, and the following day five Dallas police officers were shot and killed by a heavily armed lone gunman. Before being killed by police, the Dallas shooter told police during a tense standoff that he was enraged by police killings.



Both Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Donald Trump issued brief statements, with Clinton saying "there is no justification for violence, hate [or] for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day."

Trump, writing on Twitter, extended condolences to police and their families, and placed blame for the attack on a lack of leadership. He did not elaborate, but in a separate tweet wrote: "We demand law and order."



A Look at Police Deaths
As he barreled his way toward the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump offended virtually every group of people imaginable -- from Muslims to women to disabled people to African-Americans.

It seems nearly all of those groups, and many others, are coming to Cleveland, Ohio, this week to hold protests at the Republican National Convention, which is expected to serve as Trump's coronation as the party's presidential nominee.

There will also be a sizable contingency of Trump supporters. The presence of both cohorts has many fearing there will be a continuation of the clashes that have regularly broken out at Trump events across the country.

Here is a list of some of the groups planning to attend the RNC:

Anti-Trump

The Coalition to Stop Trump and March on the RNC is an alliance of more than 40 groups that will be holding a rally Monday to protest "the bigot Trump and the Republican agenda." The coalition includes labor unions, student groups, Muslim organizations, immigrant rights groups and anti-war groups. A spokesman for the organization told VOA he expects a "few thousand" to attend.

Stand Together Against Trump was started by a group of young Cleveland-area professionals, mostly in the medical field, who will hold "peaceful and positive" protests against the Republican candidate and his campaign of "fear, racism, misogyny and xenophobia." They'll hold protests Monday and Tuesday, but it's not clear how big the events will be.

If there's a big political event in the U.S., you can be sure Code Pink will be there. The feminist anti-war organization is known for sneaking into events and causing high-profile disruptions. The group has repeatedly interrupted Trump campaign events. While it hasn't announced an organized convention presence yet, the group has received a protest permit, and it's almost certain they'll show up.

Black Lives Matter is a largely organic network of groups that protest police violence and racism against African-Americans. It is unclear how big of a presence BLM will have in Cleveland, but local organizers say they are planning several protests. Local Black Lives Matter branches have organized frequent protests in Cleveland, especially after the 2014 police killing of a 12-year-old African-American boy who was shot while playing with a toy gun in a park.

The New Black Panther Party, a black nationalist group, drew headlines earlier this week after its leader said members would take advantage of Ohio's gun laws that allow open carry of firearms outside the convention, but he later retracted that statement. The group is modeled after, but not associated with, the now-defunct Black Panthers, who frequently clashed with police in the 1960s and '70s.

The Panthers are one of several black power groups attending a four-day event in Cleveland called the National Convention of the Oppressed. The event will feature several prominent national civil rights leaders and intellectuals, including Cornel West and Marc Lamont Hill. The group has several events planned, including a Saturday "National March and Rally Against Racism, Injustice and White Supremacy."

Mijente is an adaptation of a Spanish phrase meaning "my people." The group is rallying under that name to build a massive barrier of fabric and other material to "wall off Donald Trump's hate and racism." The wall is in response to Trump's "insults, threats and his promises of mass deportation and building a border wall to separate neighbors," the group says.

Pro-Trump

Citizens for Trump and the America First Movement are working with a network of pro-Trump groups to hold a parade and rally on Monday to support the likely Republican nominee. Among the high-profile speakers is radio host Alex Jones, who the Southern Poverty Law Centers calls the "most prolific conspiracy theorist in contemporary America." Also speaking will be Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally and edgy political operative who has warned of a "revolution" if Trump is denied the nomination.

Oath Keepers, a group composed mostly of former members of the military and police, say they will carry weapons at the convention. The group says it aims to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Its members have shown up at recent Black Lives Matter protests, often wearing bulletproof vests and camouflage, and carrying assault rifles.

White supremacists have become emboldened by Trump's candidacy, and many have told VOA they plan on attending the Republican convention. But it is unclear how much of a collective presence there will be, since an alliance of white nationalists recently backed down on their threat to "protect Trump supporters" at the convention.

Other Groups

Anarchist and anti-fascist groups often make appearances at events hosted or attended by white supremacist groups, and the two sides occasionally engage in clashes. Tensions between anti-fascists and white supremacists spiked last month, after the two sides engaged in heavy clashes at a protest in Sacramento. The anti-fascist movement is mostly organic, organizes offline, and doesn't usually publicly announce its presence ahead of time, so it's unclear how big of a presence it will have at the convention.

Westboro Baptist Church is a small, anti-gay fundamentalist Christian group from Kansas. It's mostly composed of a single family and their friends, but it frequently makes big headlines with its shocking, over-the-top protests at military funerals and other high-profile events. The group has received a permit for a demonstration and also plans to use the "speakers platform" in downtown Cleveland.

Nuns on the Bus is a group of almost 20 Catholic activists who are stopping in Cleveland as part of their countrywide tour of the country. The nuns are promoting a "more inclusive America" and protesting wealth inequality. At the convention, they'll be handing out lemonade and asking passersby about what worries them this election cycle.
An unsourced map from a random website is insufficient documentation to overrule an international tribunals decision over the status of a small land mass in the hotly contested Spratly Islands, a top U.S. State Department official said on Thursday.

That edict came down one day after Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV produced what it called a U.S. government map from 2010 recognizing Taiping, also known as Itu Aba, as an island" and not a reef or rock.

The television producers, it appeared, were attempting to challenge Tuesday's United Nations arbitration court ruling on the legal basis for Beijings claim to disputed maritime territories in the South China Sea.

Article 121(3) under the Law of the Sea Convention, which informed the tribunal's decision, states that "rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own, under the laws definition, shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf."

You know, pulling in a random U.S. map from a website is not going to influence that, State Department spokesperson Elizabeth Trudeau told a Chinese reporter, explaining that the United States doesn't take a position on whether small islands around the world satisfy technical criteria of Article 121(3).

And even if it did, she implied, it is unlikely the U.S. government would endorse a map found on Singapore National Universitys website for its representations of maritime features.

For a land feature to be considered a territory with exclusive rights over surrounding waters, it must remain above water at high tide, the panel ruled earlier this week.

While China has carried out extensive land reclamation on many coral reefs, such improvements do not alter the features' legal status, which is based on their "natural condition" before such constructions, the court said.
Turkish officials continue to arrest judges and military officers in connection with the coup attempt, detaining more soldiers Sunday.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said around 6,000 people have been detained and "the number will increase." Those in custody include the commander of the Third Army Corps, General Erdal Ozturk, who could face charges of treason.

Other high-ranking military officials flew to neighboring Greece by helicopter and requested political asylum. Turkish media reports say some of those who fled are believed to be among the architects of the coup.

Thousands of Turkish citizens packed Ankara's Kizilat Square, downtown Istanbul and the coastal city of Izmir Saturday night to shout their support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government after a failed coup attempt by some of the country's military.

Crowds waved flags at the late-night rallies and chanted their determination not to let anything or anyone divide the country.

Reports about how many people were killed in clashes during the coup attempt varied, but the latest number available Saturday night was 265 dead, including many civilians. Conditions remained tense in Istanbul, Ankara and some other provincial cities, and there were reports of sporadic continuing violence. Turkish media reported intense clashes at a large military barracks outside Ankara that was believed to be a stronghold of the coup plotters.

Erdogan has accused an exiled Muslim cleric who once was one of his close allies of organizing the plot, and on Saturday demanded his extradition from the United States. The 75-year-old imam, Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in the United States since long before Erdogan came to power, condemned the coup and denied he had anything to do with the military revolt.

WATCH: Fethullah Gulen discusses Turkey attempted coup in impromptu news conference



US, Russian reactions



Russian President Vladimir Putin called Turkish President Erdogan on Sunday. In a statement issued by the Kremlin, Putin expressed "wishes for a speedy restoration of strong constitutional order and stability" in Turkey. The Kremlin said the two leaders also confirmed plans to meet "in the nearest future." Turkish state media said they will meet in the first week of August.

Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu late Saturday, a U.S. spokesman said in Washington. Kerry stressed the need for Turkey to respect the rule of law and citizens' rights as it investigates who was involved in the coup plot.

Kerry reiterated Washington's support for the democratically elected government in Turkey, but his spokesman said the top American diplomat also told his Turkish counterpart "that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to ... bilateral relations."

The U.S. State Department has also issued a statement warning Americans against travel to Turkey.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has denounced suggestions that Washington was involved in Friday's failed coup in Turkey.

"We think it's irresponsible to have accusations of American involvement," Kerry told CNN on Sunday.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric now living in Pennsylvania, of orchestrating the violence and demanded that Gulen be extradited.

Erdogan frequently refers to "masterminds" who he says are bent on breaking up Turkey, in what appears a veiled reference to the West in general, and more specifically, the United States. On Saturday, Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu accused Washington of being behind the coup attempt.

WATCH: Fethullah Gulen discusses Turkey attempted coup in impromptu news conference



In a phone call on Saturday Kerry told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations, according to a report of the call released by the State Department.

Kerry also told CNN that Turkey has made no formal request for Gulen's extradition, and that he'd asked the country's foreign minister to make the official request, saying that "the United States is not harboring anybody."

Gulen has denied being behind the failed coup and denied knowledge of who might be responsible.

IN PICTURES - Sunday's events



Crackdown continues



Meanwhile in Turkey, Erdogan promised to rid Turkey of people involved in the coup attempt. "At every level of government, the period of cleaning this virus will continue," said Erdogan. "Like the cancer virus, it spreads all around the government."

Around 6,000 people have been detained. State-run media reports an aide to Erdogan is among those in custody, and a warrant has been issued for the arrest of Erdogan's top military aide, Colonel Ali Yazici. It was not immediately clear what role, if any, Yazici had in the failed coup attempt.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag says Turkish authorities are accelerating arrests of people, which have included judges, military officers and soldiers. Those in custody include the commander of the Third Army Corps, General Erdal Ozturk, who could face charges of treason.

Other high-ranking military officials flew to neighboring Greece by helicopter and requested political asylum. Turkish media reports say some of those who fled are believed to be among the architects of the coup.

European leaders have expressed concern over the wide number of detentions, warning against actions that would damage constitutional order. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the rule of law "needs to be protected for the sake of the country," at a meeting with other EU foreign ministers in Brussels Monday.

Death penalty considered

Speaking Sunday to people who called for the death penalty outside his home in Istanbul, Erdogan said the use of capital punishment cannot be delayed, saying "We cannot ignore this demand."

His speech was punctuated by frequent calls of "we want the death penalty'' from the large crowd, to which Erdogan responded: "We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get.''

Erdogan said he would discuss it with opposition parties but that "We will not delay this decision for long. Because those who attempt a coup in this country must pay.''



Turkey hasn't executed anyone since 1984, and capital punishment was legally abolished in 2004 as part of its bid to join the European Union.

Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz said the reintroduction of the death penalty would be "absolutely unacceptable" in an interview with state media ahead of his meeting with his European counterparts Monday.

Funerals

Meanwhile, thousands of people attended funerals Sunday in Istanbul and Ankara for those killed. Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died.

Erdogan openly wept on Sunday at the funeral for his top campaign manager and his teenage son who were killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul on Friday night.

The president was overpowered by emotions and cried. He used a handkerchief to wipe away the tears and turned around as he continued to weep.

Reports about how many people were killed in clashes during the coup attempt varied, but by Sunday 265 were reported dead, including many civilians. Conditions remained tense in Istanbul, Ankara and some other provincial cities, and there were reports of sporadic violence.

US military operations

Turkey on Sunday also reopened its airspace to military aircraft, allowing the U.S.-led coalition to resume air operations against Islamic State militants.

Turkey had closed its airspace following the attempted coup.

Turkey, a NATO member, is a key partner in U.S.-led efforts to defeat the Islamic State group and has allowed American jets to use its Incirlik air base to fly missions against the extremists in nearby Syria and Iraq.
United States-led coalition airstrikes from Turkey are again being carried out against Islamic State after airspace in the country had been closed following Friday's coup attempt.

Air operations against IS were blocked temporarily by the Turkish government following the coup attempt.

Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook, using an acronym to describe IS, issued a statement saying Turkish authorities reopened their airspace to military aircraft on Sunday. "As a result, counter-ISIL coalition air operations at all air bases in Turkey have resumed."

Turkey, a major U.S. ally in the region, has allowed the U.S. to use Incirlik Air Base in the city of Adana to launch attacks against IS.

Cook said U.S. facilities at the air base are still operating on internal power sources and hopes commercial power will soon be restored.

Meanwhile, Turkish authorities have detained the commander of Incirlik Air Base, General Bekir Ercan Van, along with ten other soldiers and one police officer for their roles in the botched coup attempt.

The Turkish private DHA news agency showed video footage of the general in handcuffs as he was pushed into a van outside a courthouse.
Scores of demonstrators in Vietnam's capital who gathered to support an international tribunal's rejection of China's claims in the South China Sea were hustled away by police before their rally started.

The protesters were meeting Sunday at the landmark Hoan Kiem Lake - a common spot for demonstrations in Hanoi - when police forces descended on them.

Vietnam has a history of clamping down on protests, fearful the rallies could stir dissent.

The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration recently ruled against China in a case filed by the Philippines about China's historical claim to about 90 percent of the South China Sea, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

China refused to participate in any of the hearings and said it would not comply with any decisions by the tribunal.

Six governments have overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea: China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei.

China bases its claim on a so-called "Nine Dash line," which dates back to the 1940s and stretches deep into the maritime heart of Southeast Asia, covering hundreds of disputed islands and reefs, rich fishing grounds and oil and gas deposits.
Muhammad Waseem, brother and suspected murderer of Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, admitted that he killed her sister for posting bold pictures and videos on social media platforms.

By India Today Web Desk: Police arrested Muhammad Waseem, brother and suspected murderer of Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, late on Saturday.

Waseem admitted that he killed her sister for posting bold pictures and videos on social media platforms.

PAKISTAN'S SOCIAL MEDIA CELEBRITY



Qandeel, who became famous through her tireless self-promotion and suggestive "selfies" on social media, had amassed tens of thousands of followers and also earned the moniker--Pakistan's Poonam Pandey.

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According to Dawn, her videos had been viewed more than 830,000 times and garnered thousands of likes.

Qandeel's brother had been threatening her over her Facebook posts and videos, said the police. The brother fled after murdering Qandeel, whose real name is Fauzia Azeem.

QANDEEL WAS RECEIVING THREAT CALLS



Earlier, TV channels reported that Qandeel was shot by her brother but the police say she that she was "strangled to death" at her residence.

Three weeks before her murder, Qandeel wrote to Interior Minister and the Senior Superintendent of Police in Islamabad asking them to provide her security as she was getting threatening calls on her mobile number.

ALSO READ:

Who was Qandeel Baloch, and why was she killed?

'She deserved it': Shocking tweets show how many in Pakistan back Qandeel Baloch's honour killing



--- ENDS ---
Five Zambian political parties including the ruling Patriotic Front have signed new pledges committing themselves to ensuring that supporters desist from violence ahead of the August 11 general election.

The parties renewed their pledges after a meeting Friday in the capital, Lusaka, with officials of the Electoral Commission of Zambia and church groups. The other signatories were the United National Independence Party, the Peoples Alliance for Change, the Forum for Democracy and Development, and the Democratic Alliance.

The electoral commission sought to meet with all stakeholders as part of an effort to curb escalating violence, which prompted a suspension of campaigning for 10 days in the Namwala and Lusaka districts. The commission plans to lift the suspension Monday.

Despite the pledges, Zambia's main opposition party, the United Party for National Development, refused to commit to peaceful campaigning on the ground that its demands were not met during the meeting with the electoral commission.

The Rainbow Party and the United Progressive People also refused to sign the no-violence pledge.

Spokesman Chris Akufuna said the electoral commission's main goal for Friday's meeting was to win support from all parties and candidates for "a pledge for peace" during the remaining weeks of the campaign.

Those who declined to sign the no-violence pledge, Akufuna said, felt we needed an addendum ... [to] assure them of their rights and freedom in terms of assembly and association during the campaigns.

Objection to suspension

Public reaction to the suspension of campaigning in Namwala and Lusaka has been mixed, Akufuna said. One party that signed the new peace pledge, the Forum for Democracy and Development, has challenged the electoral commission's legal authority to suspend campaigning. The Constitutional Court plans to begin hearing the challenge next week.

FDD spokesman Antonio Mwanza said the commission's action was "extremely unreasonable" and resulted in "a blanket suspension that actually punishes the victims of violence and innocent people instead of ... the perpetrators of violence.

Akufuna said the commission had no comment because the case was now before the court.

There are some political parties that have supported our call in terms of suspending the political party campaigns [and] there are some political parties that feel we have violated their rights, their freedom of association, said Akufuna. The commission, as things stand, has said that the political party that has taken us to court is a stakeholder and is at liberty to seek legal interpretation in terms of the law in as far as it stands. So the commission is perhaps waiting for the ruling of the court.

In a separate development, the electoral commission reported the printing of presidential ballot papers for next month's vote is about 60 percent complete.
Turkish officials said Saturday that 2,839 soldiers and officers who attempted a coup late Friday had been arrested, as the president accused an exiled cleric of organizing the plot. Among the top military officers detained was the commander of the Third Army Corps, General Erdal Ozturk, based in Istanbul, who would face charges of treason. A number of high-ranking military officials have fled to neighboring Greece by helicopter and have requested political asylum. According to local media reports, some of them are believed to be among the architects of the coup. As many as 2,745 judges reportedly have been suspended for allegedly having links to the cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Turkish media also reported that 140 arrest warrants had been issued against members of Turkey's Supreme Court.

Gulen, who lives in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, has denied he was behind the plot. On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that Turkey had not made a formal extradition request for Gluen, but that the United States would consider complying with it if Turkey's government presented solid evidence of wrongdoing. Sources said the chief concern in Turkey at the moment was whether the detentions and purges would be confined to just followers of Gulen or would be expanded to opponents of the president. Prime Minister Binali Yildrim addressed the nation Saturday afternoon, calling the night a "dark stain for the Turkish state." Officials warned that those who backed the coup would not be easily forgiven. There were varying reports of the number of people killed in clashes, but officials said it was at least 265. On Saturday, the situation remained tense in Istanbul, Ankara and some other cities, with sporadic violence continuing. Turkish media reported intense clashes at a large military barracks outside Ankara, which was thought to be a stronghold of the coup plotters.

WATCH: Police Arrest Rogue Soldiers

The U.S. Defense Department released a statement Saturday saying that the Turkish government had closed its airspace to military aircraft, and that as a result, air operations at Incirlik Air Base had been halted. The statement said U.S. officials were working with Turkey to resume the flights, and U.S. Central Command adjusted flight operations to minimize effects on the air campaign against Islamic State.

Western intelligence and military officials were closely monitoring developments in NATO member Turkey, a key U.S. ally in the war against Islamic State terrorists. Turkey is also a supporter of the moderate opposition looking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. President Barack Obama and Kerry issued statements calling on all parties in Turkey to support the country's democratically elected government.

Obama also underscored the shared challenges that will require continued Turkish cooperation, including joint efforts of the two countries against terrorism.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told VOA the coup should be rejected and denounced.

"Any attempt to delegitimize and take over the government is an assault on the will of the Turkish people, because they elected that government through the ballot box and bullets should not be used in any fashion to take away that will. So we denounce it, and we ask all people to stand with Turkey and Turkish people," he said.

WATCH: Assessing the Damage After Attempted Coup in Turkey

Speaking to the people

Events began Friday when the army released a statement on Turkish television that it had "fully seized control" of the government to protect democracy and maintain human rights.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who conducted a FaceTime interview with CNN Turk late Friday, urged the Turkish people to go to the streets to protest the soldiers' actions. He said those behind the move were associated with Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan who has accused the president of corruption.

In a statement, Gulen condemned "in the strongest terms" the coup attempt. "As someone who suffered under multiple coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," he said.
By India Today Web Desk: Actor Amyra Dastur won the hearts of audience with an uncompromising performance in the Tamil film Anegan, which was directed by KV Anand.

Now, the actor is reportedly started shooting for her upcoming Telugu debut film titled Raju Gadu with Raj Tarun playing the lead role.



ALSO READ: Manamantha teaser-SS Rajamouli is all praise for Mohanlal's upcoming Telugu flick



A source close to the film's unit said, "It has been a week since she started shooting. She plays a bubbly character and has donned a completely 'desi' look. It's a situational comedy and Amyra will get to portray her comic side."

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Speaking about the project, the Anegan actor was quoted by The Times Of India as saying, "The reason I said yes to this film was the script; moreover the whole package is fantastic. I really respect Telugu cinema and the fact that people out here have a totally different style of working and are at par with Bollywood. Sometimes, they beat Bollywood with the kind of films they make."

Amyra, who was supposed to make her entry into Tollywood with Puri Jagannath's project last year, had to let go of the international project Kung Fu Yoga starring Jackie Chan.

The film is being helmed by Sanjana Reddy, who is making her directorial debut with the project.

--- ENDS ---
Spenco Medical has been a part of Wacos business scene since 1971, but North Carolina-based Implus was poised to buy all the companys assets in a deal that could have jeopardized 100 local jobs and relocated Spencos headquarters to the East Coast, according to company officials.

But four top executives of the company founded by the late Dr. Wayman R. Spence came to the rescue and closed a last-minute deal on Spencos footwear line and Silicore products that protect against blisters and burns. Now a percentage of the company will remain in Waco, and the executives say they hope to grow it from here.

Its business as usual, at least for the time being, said Brad Granger, vice president of business development and now a partner in Spenco Medical.

Implus acquired the assets of the Spenco insole and 2nd Skin first-aid products, which were very popular, Granger said. But he said he thinks the partners have enough left to keep dozens of employees on the payroll long-term, even after Implus takes over the balance of the assets and likely relocates them to North Carolina.

Granger said Implus acquired the most lucrative segments of Spenco Medical, which enjoyed revenues of about $40 million annually before the buyout.

Our part represents about $10 million of that total, but I fully expect us to become as big as we were before, said Granger, a 22-year employee of Spenco Medical who personally secured 118 patents for products in 48 countries, selling them to Spenco during his career.

Most of those are active, Granger said. Some stayed with us. Others went with Implus as part of the sale.

Spenco Medical ships products all over the world  everything from insoles to chair pads, first-aid products and specialty shoes. A total of 95 people are employed by the company, and they are involved in packaging, distribution, shipping, design and engineering, Granger said in an email.

The company relies on production facilities in Granbury, Dallas, England, China and Taiwan to produce the merchandise.

Until further notice, Spenco will work with Implus to jointly serve customers, said Jeff Antonioli, vice president of sales and marketing and one of the new owners. In addition to Antonioli and Granger, other new owners are Chief Financial Officer David McKown and Vice President of Operations Nancy Muhlman.

Spenco first entered the footwear market in 2010 with its Yumi sandal, which was designed for customers who traditionally could not wear flip-flops because of poor arch support. Since then, under Antoniolis leadership, it has introduced additional styles for men and women in shoes, sandals and slippers.

Silicore padding products, meanwhile, have become popular in the health-care industry for helping patients stay more comfortable.

They include pads for beds, chairs, the feet and wheelchairs, according to Spencos promotional material and website.

Since launching the footwear six years ago, the sales of Spenco shoes, sandals and slides have grown by double digits every year, Antonioli said. Were excited to take this portion of the business to the next level. We believe the potential for trend- relevant footwear that helps consumers maintain foot comfort and health is virtually unlimited.

But with the acquisition, Implus becomes the largest seller of insoles in the United States, Granger said.

He said the executives took action when they learned that Steve Smith, retiring CEO of Spenco Medical, was negotiating a sale.

We wanted to buy it all, but they were too deep into the deal to make that happen, Granger said.

Implus, in a news release, said Spencos insole business would be integrated into Implus current portfolio of insole brands that include Sof Sole, Airplus and Sof Comfort. Spencos insole assets include Total Support, Spenco RX and Polysorb. Its 2nd Skin medical adhesives include bandages and gels for burns, blisters and scars.

Companys history

Spenco Medical Corp. was founded in 1967 in Salt Lake City, Utah, by Dr. Wayman R. Spence, a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Following a nationwide search, he relocated it to Waco in 1971.

Other products included BIOSOFT Wrist and Ankle Weights that were used by Jane Fonda in her videos during the aerobics craze of the 1980s.

In 1984, Spenco nearly doubled the size of its Waco facility to keep up with growth and was sold to the Kimberly-Clark Corporation that year. In the spring of 1994, it became a privately owned company under the direction of Steve Smith, who launched another major facilities expansion.

In 2010, Spenco took its proprietary technology and expertise into the footwear world and launched the Total Support Sandal. By 2015, the company was celebrating the sale of more than 2 million pairs of its shoes around the world. It had seen its core business evolve into premium insoles and footwear products.
The National Association of Broadcasters Education Foundation recognized KWTX-TV, Channel 10, with its Service to America Television Award for the totality of its efforts and commitment to excellence in serving its community.

The award was presented to KWTX General Manager Mike Wright during ceremonies at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C.

The NABEF announcement of the award praised KWTX for its commitment to community.

Through a variety of programming, fundraising and primary support, KWTX-TV met the needs of the Waco area with invaluable community outreach, it said.When a local Boys and Girls Club began to literally fall apart, KWTX leapt into action, organizing a telethon to raise money for repairs. Their Food for Families program collected more than 1.8 million pounds of food last year alone, while an On Call event connected people with doctors by telephone to discuss the flu, health insurance and early cancer detection.

In addition, KWTX showed its gratitude to the men and women who serve with the production and airing of the We Cant Forget Vietnam documentary and its first law enforcement appreciation dinner for more than 200 police officers and their families. KWTX further proved its commitment to the community with a career fair exclusively for high school students and by spearheading Toys for Tots donations, which provided more than 3,000 children with Christmas gifts.

U.S. Congressman Bill Flores presented the Service to America Award to KWTX.

KWTX Televisions partnership with local organizations across our viewing area make possible programs like Food For Families, Toys for Tots and the YES! Expo Career Fair, Wright said.
Class acts

Baylor University announced recent high school graduates who are recipients of scholastic awards based on class rank and/or SAT/ACT scores for the 2016-17 academic year.

Area students who have received merit scholarships from Baylor are:

Hewitt  Elyse Meyer, Midway High, Presidents Gold; Benjamin Sepanski, Midway High, Presidents Gold.

Waco  Katherine Balaban, Teach Academy, Presidents Gold; Alexander Goodsuhm, Rapoport Academy Meyer High, Presidents Gold; Emma Hansen, Robinson High, Presidents Gold; Jonathan Keen, Live Oak Classical, Presidents Gold; Aaliyah Olvera, University High, Provosts Gold.

Texas Womans University in Denton released its deans and chancellors lists for the spring semester.

Named to the chancellors list are Bernadette Bruich, of Waco, a nursing major; and Emilyann Kinlaw, of Waco, a nutrition major.

Named to the deans list is Autumn Phillips, of Hewitt, a general studies major.

Wheaton College student Allie McDonald, of Woodway, received the Fadenrecht Memorial Scholarship from the education department at the schools honors convocation.

The Fadenrecht Memorial Fund provides funds based on merit for education majors.

Wheaton College is a co-educational Christian liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois.

Schreiner University in Kerrville has named Daisy Ramirez, of Waco, to the presidents list. She is the daughter of Efrain and Maria Ramirez.

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock announced that Kelsey Leech, of Whitney, was named to the deans list for the spring semester.

Stephanie Lefthand, of China Spring, graduated from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, on April 30 with a bachelors degree in business administration.

Erin Rich, a native of McGregor, received a Master of Arts degree in music from the University of Iowa at the close of the spring semester.

Applause

Penelope Volunteer Fire Department was recently awarded a military excess vehicle from the Department of Defense Firefighter Property Program and a grant, both administered by the Texas A&M Forest Service.

Our volunteers painted it and added a water tank, pump, whip lines, foam tank and bumper monitor, Penelope VFD President David Kucera said.

The $20,000 grant was for the purchase of a slip-on unit. A slip-on unit is designed to be a fast initial-attack firefighting unit.

The transformed truck replaces a 20-year-old vehicle that had smaller tanks. The service area of the Pene-lope VFD is mostly farmland and pasture, Kucera said.

In the past, we had several cornfield and cotton module fires, so this vehicle will give the department a great advantage when fighting those types of fires, Kucera said.

The truck also can perform high-water rescues as well as structure and vehicle fires.
Youd never know by looking at him that Gatesville resident James A. Dixon is 92. He could easily pass for 70-something. Between the hard work he has done all his life and the fact that hes a rancher, he has remained in great shape. But theres another secret to his health: he doesnt worry. Despite what he saw during World War II, Dixon was able to put it behind him and let go of worry. Its made a significant difference in his life.

Born in Coryell County, Dixon grew up where Fort Hood is now located. He went to elementary school in a two-teacher school and grew up during the Great Depression in the Cold Springs area. The family struggled to make ends meet.

In fact, when his father got sick, Dixon dropped out of the 10th grade and went to work in Temple to help provide for his four siblings. Within a couple years in Temple, Uncle Sam called and Dixon was off to the U.S. Army Air Corps.

In March 1943, Dixon was sent to Miami Beach for basic training, then to Tampa for Air Force ordnance training. He went to Battle Creek, Michigan to Kellogg Army Air Base, where he joined the 394th Bomb Group of the 9th Air Force in the 587th Squadron.

Encounter with the enemy

Dixon traveled by train to Boston to board a ship for overseas, landing in Glasgow, Scotland. From there, the group boarded troop trains to Chelmsford, England. It was the first time he encountered the enemy.

An announcement came over the radio from Axis Sally, the American propaganda voice of Nazi Germany. She said, Congratulations to Col. Halls bomb group. Well be over to greet you tonight, Dixon recalled. Sure enough, just as soon as they were settled in their tents, along came a German plane.

The resulting flak from anti-aircraft guns was falling on the tents, Dixon said. The men had to take cover in a foxhole. The plane was eventually knocked out, and they had no additional trouble until the Buzz Bombs, started coming, so-called for a distinct buzz sound.

One night I woke up and thought a plane was landing but buzz bombs hit the house behind us, he said. I said, Were at war! It had taken a bit for it to sink in.

Dixon handled the small arms and munitions for B-26 Bombers, which had to be loaded and unloaded by hand. They work the heck out of you in ordnance, he added. The troops were running missions into Germany until June 1944 and D-Day. After D-Day, as the Americans moved forward, Dixon and the 587th landed on Normandy and was busy placing steel mats just off the beach for airplanes to land.

As the war progressed, Dixon and the troops progressed too, first to Vin-Lo, France, then Orleans, France. We moved about four or five times, he said.

Preparing for Japanese invasion

His last move was to the border area of Belgium and France. Dixon was sent to London to attend school and prepare for the Japanese invasion. When he showed up at Dover College, someone informed him that the war was over. That was the best day of my life, he said.

When Dixon returned to his unit, they were gone and had moved to Wiesbaden, Germany. He caught up to the unit and found they had switched from B-26s to A-26s, preparing for the Pacific war. After he arrived, they told him he was going home and he was sent to Aachen, Germany.

As they were flying in, the landing gear wouldnt release. I said, Oh God, Im going to die a day after the war ended!  Dixon said. Finally, the crew got the landing gear down and they landed without further incident. Dixon and the men traveled by boxcars to Le Havre, France, where they eventually boarded a Liberty Ship for home. He recalled seeing a sign as he boarded that indicated Texas was 6,000 miles away.

Within a few days on the sea, they went through a terrible storm that made most everyone seasick  some 2,000 troops. We thought we were going to die, he said. Of course, everyone was so sick, they wanted to die. They weathered the storm and arrived in the New York Harbor. When Dixon saw the Statue of Liberty, he said, Thats the most beautiful site I ever saw in my life.

A medal earned

He was bused to New Jersey, and went to Camp Fannin in Tyler, Texas, for discharge as a corporal. He earned the EAME Campaign Medal with six bronze stars for serving in Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes, Rhineland, Central Europe and Air Offensive Europe.

He married Allene Fischer just two weeks out of the service. Theyve been married 71 years.

A Mason for most of his career and a long-time Scottish Rite member (32nd Degree) and Shriner, Dixon says America is blessed by God with wonderful people.

We are a wonderful nation, he said. Wed did our job as soldiers, but the Americans did, too, by providing the supplies vital to the war effort.

Voices of Valor, featuring stories about Central Texas veterans, publishes every Sunday in the Waco Trib. To suggest a story about a Central Texas veteran, email voicesofvalor@wacotrib.com. Voices of Valor is proudly sponsored by Johnson Roofing.
Whatever one thinks of his embattled and often erratic presidency, President Obama remains unrivaled as an orator. And Americas first black president put both law enforcement and the African-American community on notice during his 40-minute address at Tuesdays memorial service for five Dallas police officers slain by a Black Lives Matter sympathizer bent on cold-blooded murder during an otherwise peaceful protest regarding, ironically, police use of deadly force nationwide.

At one point, the president correctly challenged police departments across our land to strategically battle the plague of black lives lost at the hands of errant cops, most recently in Minnesota and Louisiana. At another, he pointedly reminded Black Lives Matter protesters that they all too conveniently overlook not only the perils that police face in their communities daily but also one societal burden after another dumped on the cops. Dallas Police Chief David Brown, who is also black, made the same point earlier regarding everything from mental health to loose dogs.

Yet Obama acknowledged a sad reality that condemns not only our elected leaders but also those of us who repeatedly ratify and re-elect them: I have spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency. Ive hugged too many families who have lost a loved one to senseless violence. And Ive seen how a spirit of unity, born of tragedy, can gradually dissipate, overtaken by the return to business as usual, by inertia and old habits and expediency. I see how easily we slip back into our old notions because theyre comfortable, were used to them.

Almost exactly 24 hours later, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and former judge who shared the stage in Dallas with the president, was back in Washington talking with the Texas press by phone when one of us asked what the Senates distinguished second-in-command was doing to answer the presidents impassioned plea for action at the memorial service. Cornyn said he had introduced a bill to make killing a police officer a federal crime.

A day later, Cornyn and Ted Cruz, Texas other Republican senator, introduced a resolution condemning the Dallas police killings, noting that, in Cruzs words, it is inspirational to see Texans coming together supporting our police officers and supporting those who risk their lives to keep us safe.

Few of us would argue against such legislation. But the real post-Dallas tragedy is that federal lawmakers are unlikely to pursue legislation that might bring healing amid the greatest racial strife some of us long in the tooth have seen since the tumultuous late 1960s and early 70s. A New York Times/CBS News poll last week revealed 69 percent of respondents believe race relations are poor  the worst since 1992 riots over the police beating of Rodney King. Many insist they werent surprised at the outbreak of racially motivated violence in Dallas.

That only deepens the tragedy of July 2016. The Republican Party, which controls Congress and seeks to bolster its role in national governance, is not only woefully out of step with our state and nations fast-changing demographics but its also falling short of what very wise party leaders stressed after the humiliating 2012 presidential election defeat: doing more to demonstrate that Americas minorities are actually important to the Republican Party, not simply the hired help of White America.

What to do? Republicans ought to seize the moment to think outside the political box. For instance, how about patching up the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965? It was correctly dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 but with justices admonishment that Congress make updated, overdue fixes to ensure the act is relevant in modern times. So far, the Party of Lincoln has ignored it. Some party operatives count crippling the Voting Rights Act a worthy Republican accomplishment because it makes it easier to suppress minority voters, who are often reliably Democratic. And thus the cycle of minorities favoring Democrats continues.

No less than U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican whose conservative credentials are beyond question, has been the lonely voice in trying to push his Republican colleagues to fix this. Ensuring that every eligible voter can cast a ballot without fear, deterrence and prejudice is a basic American right, Sensenbrenner said last spring. I would rather lose my job than suppress votes to keep it.

What else? Many African Americans deeply resent what they view as racism by Republican lawmakers showing a decided lack of respect for Obama as president. This arose recently in the Senates unprecedented refusal to hold hearings or an up-or-down vote regarding the presidents pick for the U.S. Supreme Court  ironically, a white moderate, a highly reputable jurist once embraced by many of these same Republicans and an obvious olive branch by Obama to his unforgiving GOP critics.

Some African Americans note how Republican refusal to consider Obamas nominee essentially treats the chief executive as a three-fifths president  an ugly historic reference to how slaves were regarded in census materials in the early days of the republic. Consider a letter in todays Trib from Norman Manning, a military veteran, truck driver and currently the only African American on the Waco school board, who accurately notes in his epistle that the first black family has endured hatred, racist comments and just plain disrespect. But they have endured all this with dignity and intelligence.

Confirming Merrick Garland to the high court ought to be a no-brainer for conservative Republicans in the Party of Lincoln. They should fear a Supreme Court pick by political chameleon Donald Trump as much as one by liberal Hillary Clinton. (Ironically, Obama has taken some political heat from the far left for not picking a minority nominee.) If Clinton wins in November and picks a more liberal nominee for the court, Republicans should blame their own leadership for the courts political drift.

Sadly, the prospect that Republicans might take even minor steps of outreach to minorities and particularly African Americans is unlikely. Frankly, theres no short-term political dividend for them to do so and their myopia prevents them from considering long-term benefits. Many Republican leaders instead will attend this weeks National Republican Convention in Cleveland to crown as their presidential nominee one who has only aggravated strained racial relations to the extent Republicans must once again rely mostly on white voters to prevail this fall. Good luck with that.

Republican lawmakers parting shot before leaving for Cleveland last week: ensuring defeat of legislation battling the Zika virus in Texas and elsewhere by craftily slipping into the bill an amendment reversing a ban on flying Confederate flags in military cemeteries.

Bill Whitaker is Trib opinion editor.
Recent events in Louisiana and Minnesota reflect a long and dark history between African-American males and police officers who patrol the communities where they reside. In too many cases, it boils down to a white male officer and an African-American male suspect who later becomes a victim.

This manifestation is the legacy of policing in the African-American community to the extent that the outcome becomes predictable and fuels a reaction from a cross-section of people who see images that suggest police officers dont value the lives of African Americans. In nearly every situation, the victim is without a weapon or the weapon is concealed and cannot be accessed during the interaction.

The question then becomes: Why are African-American police officers not involved in shooting unarmed African-American males at the rate that white officers are? This question is relevant, particularly because African-American police officers engage in police misconduct at a rate comparable to white officers and they treat African Americans equally as bad and in some cases worse than white officers do. The only difference seems to be that they dont shoot them.

This alone, in the eyes of the African-American community, lends credence to the notion race is the single driving force. It doesnt matter whether this is actually true because in America, when the specter of race becomes the focal point of social discourse, logic is set aside, emotion takes over and nothing seems to get resolved. A lot of times, things get worse. Just look at what happened in Dallas  an unspeakable retaliation aimed at white people in general and white police officers in particular. Now we are engaged in a national conversation on race relations. The discussion focuses on policing but its really about the legacy of race in America.

Whats clear is African Americans are not interested in research studies or what city and community leaders tell them. Theyre guided by personal experiences and the images that depict callous disregard for the lives of people who look like them. The community is stout in its belief that under the same set of circumstances with a white person, the outcomes are more ominous.

We need to fundamentally change the dynamics of policing in African-American communities. We need strict policies that better promote a representative bureaucracy. The idea of a representative bureaucracy, whereby the number of African-American police officers is proportional to the number of people living in the community they patrol, is the only acceptable remedy to address these issues.

The pain of policing in African-American communities has caused a collective and longstanding psychosis that has lasted for more than 100 years and cannot be cured with the status quo. Low-income communities are where many of the shooting incidents occur. These communities are devoid of trust and have little faith that police officers are there to protect them, much less help them. It is difficult to find an African American who has not had a negative experience with a police officer. Learning how to interact with police officers is tantamount to slaves learning how to interact with overseers. This level of social conditioning is normalized and stifles the development of children and is carried on from one generation to the next.

It may turn out that the rate of police-involved shootings of African-American men remains the same. If thats the case, the focus on race and policing in these communities must shift to other areas of structural and fundamental change. In the meantime, race is the one and only issue of concern.

Terrence Allen is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at The University of Texas at Austin.
Republicans, Democrats and legal scholars were right to call foul last week when U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lambasted the idea of a faker such as Donald Trump becoming president. While the gifted jurist created the same ire that her late friend and fellow justice, the equally outspoken Antonin Scalia, quite often provoked, critics outrage is justified. Our federal judiciary is the one remaining branch of government where Americans expect restraint, decorum and, above all, integrity.

Thats why we heartily cheer the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States, which correctly questions whether the reprimand and sanctions issued by the lower 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judicial Conference regarding Waco-based U.S. District Judge Walter S. Smith actually go far enough. We dont believe they do. Smith was penalized for not only making inappropriate and unwanted physical and non-physical sexual advances toward a court employee but also subsequently misleading 5th Circuit special investigators about it.

Its bad enough that Smith allowed false factual assertions to be made in response to the complaint, confounding the court investigators and adding to taxpayer cost of the inquiry. But Smiths allowing his private attorney in all this to quietly practice before his court is yet another serious breach of judicial ethics.

The 5th Circuit judicial conference decision last December was to suspend Smith from hearing new cases for a year  at full pay  and to order him to undergo sensitivity training. That might seem properly punitive to those who roam cloistered courthouse corridors, but Americans increasingly rankled by the ethical lapses of federal judges with lifetime appointments and six-digit salaries likely dont see it that way. It looks more like a federally subsidized vacation. Given other allegations against Smith, the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference demand for a far more complete and comprehensive investigation and re-evaluation of the sanctions given is a step toward reversing soaring skepticism about federal courts policing their own.

We have no idea what else investigators will find when they reopen their investigation of Judge Smith, 75, but the penalties so far dont begin to fit the findings already established. Judicial watchdogs should strive more earnestly to protect the integrity of our federal judiciary  and deal sternly with those who show repeated contempt for judicial ethics and everyday decency.
MCAD headache

I have always been told that there are only two things certain in life: death and taxes. The latter seems to be much on the minds of home and business owners. We have heard and read about the new property appraisals for the county and how outrageous they are, particularly downtown. I have an idea that probably wont stop the complaining but might lend some hard facts to the debate. I ask the Trib to research the process of how the McLennan County Appraisal District works. Sample questions:

How are the board members selected to serve and who selects them? Is it a paid position? What are their duties?

Who calculates the value of the property, the board or who?

How many residents challenge their values in a year?

How can home (business) values be affected by another property and its perceived value?

Who does the board report to or serve?

How are the schools, cities, community colleges and other taxing entities involved?

You can probably think of other questions. If so, send them in. If there is a problem or misunderstanding, lets fix it and improve the process. Waco needs new businesses and we need to make sure that they are welcome rather than raising their property values (and thus their taxes) as soon as they have completed construction. I believe the appraisal district board is made up of our neighbors and that they must be good folks faced with a tough job. Maybe we need to elect them.

So lets look at the big picture, figure out the right way to go about this. If we dont fix the problem (if there is one), then we have no room to gripe about the results. Lets be careful with what message we send those looking to relocate or move to the area and those who live in the area. Its also tough for those retired and living on fixed incomes to manage these increases. Lets not kill the golden goose that has come to our town.

Mike Hollingsworth, McGregor

Trashing Obama

I will be happy when President Obama is out of office. As a veteran and community activist, I am ashamed at the disrespect shown the president of the United States since he was elected. Twice. And elected  not selected or promoted.

Mr. Dan Dayton of West, thank you for throwing fuel on the fire of racism that is burning. I assume if your vehicle ran out of gas, it would be President Obamas fault because he was not there to assist you. This first black family has endured hatred, racist comments and just plain disrespect. But they have endured all this with dignity and intelligence.

So, yes, I will be happy when he is out of office and he and his family will not have to endure further evil comments. I have said this before: When in the military, you may not like the person wearing that brass but you better salute and say yes sir/maam. Its called respect. God bless because all lives matter.

Norman Manning, Waco
Saturday, the Van Buren Police Department arrested a 29 year old male who created a standoff situation with law enforcement.

According to the Van Buren Police Department, the male was charged with domestic violence assault, kidnapping, violation of conditions of release, criminal trespass, criminal threatening with a weapon, terrorizing, and creating a police standoff.

Other units involved were the Maine State Police Headquarters and their Tactical Response Team, Aroostook County Sheriff's Office, U.S. Border Patrol and the Van Buren Fire Department.

The name of the individual has not been released at this time.
By PTI: Kolkata, Jul 16 (PTI) Fabrics and garments firm Raymond will strengthen brand presence in the Middle East and South Asian countries as part of its overseas push.

"Our products get acceptance in 55 countries. Now we are aiming to make the brand Raymond even stronger in the Middle East and South Asia," Sudhanshu Pokhriyal, President suiting Raymond Limited said.

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He said the company recently opened an office in Dubai, which would look after the middle eastern markets.

The company was also supplying fabrics to leading garments manufacturers in the US, Europe and Japan, Pokhriyal said.

Talking about textiles division of Raymond, he said, it was contributing about 35 per cent to the overall revenues.

Pokhriyal said the divisions revenue in last fiscal was Rs 2,300 crore, which was expected to grow at 10 per cent year-on-year.

Regarding the suiting business, he said it was growing in single digit, which was mainly due to the sluggish economic growth.

The eastern region is the biggest for Raymond in terms of sales, the official said adding, largest portion of sales comes from the retail outlets and multi-branded outlets. PTI DC DKB ABK

--- ENDS ---
By Adila Matra: Senior journalist Saeed Naqvi laments the mistakes that were made in 1947. If in India, the Muslims feel alienated and 'other'ed now, it is because none of our leaders had the courage to say no to Partition. Naqvi's book, Being The Other: The Muslim in India confirms the downfall of secular India from 1947.

Naqvi quotes Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad as he pleaded not to go ahead with the Partition, cuts open the political plotting behind the Babri Masjid demolition, exposes the Congress-RSS collaboration and lists his experiences in reporting one riot after the another. "Partition cannot be undone," says the commentator, sitting cross legged in his living room. "But if you want to reach a resolution, you must look at it closely and learn from it."

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"We got ourselves entrapped in a triangle at Partition - New Delhi-Srinagar, India-Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim. Purpose of this book is to draw attention to this triangle," Naqvi says. Under the garb of secular India, Patel scripted the recipe for communalism by pushing for Partition. "When Jinnah merely used Partition as a bargaining chip, Patel pushed for it and neither Nehru nor Gandhi opposed Partition strongly. If the last viceroy was leaving India, why was Nehru so obsequiously asking him to stay back as the first governor general? This means we did not win our freedom, we were granted it sweetly. If they had asked for a Hindu India, there would have been space for argument but it was done so cleverly that every secular Indian was fooled," he says.

Also read: This stunning bookshop is actually a 100-year-old theatre and cinema hall!



Hailing from Awadh, the cultural pot of India, Naqvi grew up reading Urdu poets singing praises of Lord Krishna. "Awadhi was the language in which Tulsidas wrote Ramcharitmanas. But before him, Malik Muhammad Jayasi had written Padmavat in the same language. We hail from a Congress family. My great grandfather was a close friend of Motilal Nehru. That's my background, so no one can point fingers at me when I say Congress made a mistake during Partition," he says. "We placed all our eggs in Nehru. We thought he would look after us, but all we got from him were more accusations and branding" he adds.

In an interview with Balasaheb Deoras, the Sarsanghchalak of RSS in the 90s, Naqvi asks him about Urdu being a part of school curriculum. And Deoras accepts that the language is very much a part of Indian culture. But stances have changed. Life has become more challenging.

As Naqvi says, "After 9/11 and 26/11, there is declining sympathy among the majority population for Muslim youth who are falsely picked up as terrorists. It is presumed that they are guilty even if there is no evidence. There is no public outcry and with every such arrest, more people take up arms. It is a vicious circle. If injustice becomes the law, resistance becomes duty."

--- ENDS ---

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At Sultan's success press conference, Salman Khan said that he'll never give a permission to anyone to make a biopic on him.

By India Today Web Desk: Salman Khan is always in the news, but many times it's for all the wrong reasons. Over the years he has developed a reputation of being controversy's favourite child in the industry. Recently, the Bajrangi Bhaijaan actor was in news for his statement where he compared his gruelling shoot of Sultan to that of the condition of raped woman.



ALSO READ: #1YearOfEpicBajrangiBhaijaan - 5 reasons which made this Salman Khan film a huge success

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If there had been a biopic on his life, it would have covered all the major controversies and aspets related to his life. But there is a bad news for the fans who have been eagerly waiting for a biopic on Bhai's life. At Sultan's success press conference, Salman said that he'll never give a permission to anyone to make a biopic on him.

Salman said, "See, my life is very boring and biopics aren't made on boring lives. Several people will die in my biopic."

He further added, "I will never give permission to anyone to make a biopic on me because for that one will have to write it down and the only one who can write it down is me or my brothers or my sisters...that too at some bits. They also don't know everything. And no actor can play my role."

On the work front, Salman Khan was last seen in Sultan. The film hit the screens on July 6 this year.

--- ENDS ---
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Cogeco Communications Inc. operates as a communications corporation in North America. It operates in two segments, Canadian Broadband Services and American Broadband Services. The company offers Internet, video, and telephony services to residential and business customers through its two-way broadband fiber networks. It provides Internet services using modems, Wi-Fi gateways, and extenders either on a rental basis or as part of the Internet service package; video services on a subscription basis; home phone services using Internet protocol (IP); local and long-distance calling services; broadband Internet services; and IP based telephony services and other network connectivity services delivered over fiber optic connection to larger businesses. The company serves the primary service units, Internet, video, and telephony service customers. It offers cable operator services under the Cogeco Connexion name in Quebec and Ontario, and in the United States under the Atlantic Broadband brand. The company was formerly known as Cogeco Cable Inc. and changed its name to Cogeco Communications Inc. in January 2016. Cogeco Communications Inc. was founded in 1972 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Cogeco Communications Inc. operates as a subsidiary of Cogeco Inc.
Concord Medical Services Holdings Limited, together its subsidiaries, operates a network of radiotherapy and diagnostic imaging centers in the People's Republic of China. The company operates in two segments, Network and Hospital. Its services include linear accelerators external beam radiotherapy, gamma knife radiosurgery, head gamma knife systems, body gamma knife systems, and diagnostic imaging services. The company's other treatments and diagnostic services comprise computed tomography scanners. In addition, it provides clinical support services, such as developing treatment protocols for doctors, and organizing joint diagnosis between doctors in its network and clinical research, as well as helps to recruit and determine the compensation of doctors and other medical personnel. Further, the company offers radiotherapy and diagnostic equipment leasing, management services, and premium cancer and proton treatment services to hospitals, as well as teleconsultation and medical information technology services; and sells medical equipment. Additionally, it operates specialty cancer hospitals, which offer radiotherapy services, diagnostic imaging services, chemotherapy, and surgery. As of December 31, 2021, it operated a network of 16 cooperative centers based in 13 hospitals. Concord Medical Services Holdings Limited was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Beijing, the People's Republic of China.
Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. provides investor communications and technology-driven solutions for the financial services industry. The company's Investor Communication Solutions segment processes and distributes proxy materials to investors in equity securities and mutual funds, as well as facilitates related vote processing services; and distributes regulatory reports, class action, and corporate action/reorganization event information, as well as tax reporting solutions. It also offers ProxyEdge, an electronic proxy delivery and voting solution; data-driven solutions and an end-to-end platform for content management, composition, and omni-channel distribution of regulatory, marketing, and transactional information, as well as mutual fund trade processing services; data and analytics solutions; solutions for public corporations and mutual funds; SEC filing and capital markets transaction services; registrar, stock transfer, and record-keeping services; and omni-channel customer communications solutions, as well as operates Broadridge Communications Cloud platform that creates, delivers, and manages communications and customer engagement activities. The company's Global Technology and Operations segment provides solutions that automate the front-to-back transaction lifecycle of equity, mutual fund, fixed income, foreign exchange and exchange-traded derivatives, order capture and execution, trade confirmation, margin, cash management, clearance and settlement, reference data management, reconciliations, securities financing and collateral management, asset servicing, compliance and regulatory reporting, portfolio accounting, and custody-related services. This segment also offers business process outsourcing services; technology solutions, such portfolio management, compliance, fee billing, and operational support solutions; and capital market and wealth management solutions. The company was founded in 1962 and is headquartered in Lake Success, New York.
Royal Bank of Canada operates as a diversified financial service company worldwide. The company's Personal & Commercial Banking segment offers checking and savings accounts, home equity financing, personal lending, private banking, indirect lending, including auto financing, mutual funds and self-directed brokerage accounts, guaranteed investment certificates, credit cards, and payment products and solutions; and lending, leasing, deposit, investment, foreign exchange, cash management, auto dealer financing, trade products, and services to small and medium-sized commercial businesses. This segment offers financial products and services through branches, automated teller machines, and mobile sales network. Its Wealth Management segment provides a suite of advice-based solutions and strategies to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, and institutional clients. The company's Insurance segment offers life, health, home, auto, travel, wealth, annuities, and reinsurance advice and solutions; and business insurance services to individual, business, and group clients through its advice centers, RBC insurance stores, and mobile advisors; digital, mobile, and social platforms; independent brokers; and travel partners. Its Investor & Treasury Services segment provides asset servicing, custody, payments, and treasury services to financial and other investors; and fund and investment administration, shareholder, private capital, performance measurement and compliance monitoring, distribution, transaction banking, cash and liquidity management, foreign exchange, and global securities finance services. The company's Capital Markets segment offers corporate and investment banking, as well as equity and debt origination, distribution, advisory services, sale, and trading services for corporations, institutional investors, asset managers, private equity firms, and governments. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
Perhaps it's their eyes that draw us to them, full of innocence and ignorance about the true complexity of the human species. When we look at them we see a sense of wonder and naivety staring back at us.

So you ask yourself: How is it possible that the usually brutal and unforgiving animal kingdom could come up with such a cute and adorable species? They seem to love our company. They're capable of performing tricks that make us laugh. And, let's admit it. There are times we envy them because they are so simple and at one with nature.

But enough about the Greens and their loyal pack of part-time, inner suburban animal rights activists who have been spraying their contempt all over those depraved practitioners of that medieval pastime of greyhound racing.

The Baird government's bizarre "moral" decision to slap a total ban on the dish lickers in this state isn't just hypocritical, it also carries with it a supportive whiff of the notion that animals deserve the status of "personhood", that all birds and beasts are entitled to similar rights enjoyed by humans. Cuddly ones, anyway.
Nitish Kumar at present hold two bungalows, one the official Chief Minister bungalow at 1 Anne Marg and another bungalow at 7 Circular Road which was allotted to him in capacity as former CM after he resigned from CM post following his party's Lok Sabha poll drubbing in 2014.

By Rohit Kumar Singh: Former Bihar Deputy CM Sushil Modi has shot a second letter to Bihar CM Nitish Kumar over the latter holding two bungalows in his capacity as the Chief Minister of Bihar. Nitish Kumar at present hold two bungalows, one the official Chief Minister bungalow at 1 Anne Marg and another bungalow at 7 Circular Road which was allotted to him in capacity as former CM after he resigned from CM post following his party's Lok Sabha poll drubbing in 2014.

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Nitish since then has been staying at 7, Circular Road bungalow and did not shift to the official CM bungalow even after he became CM again in 2015 after dislodging incumbent CM Jitan Ram Manjhi and later again becoming CM after winning the Assembly elections in 2015.

'WASTAGE OF PUBLIC MONEY'



In his second letter, Modi has alleged that Nitish Kumar holding two bungalows was wastage of public money. Modi said that if Nitish was holding the official CM bungalow at 1 Anne Marg simply for official work, then Nitish should pass an order in this regard that 1 Anne Marg was now CM Secretariat and 7 Circular Road bungalow the official CM bungalow.

Further, attacking Nitish Kumar, Modi has cited the Jitan Ram Manjhi's case where he has been allotted a bungalow at 12 Strand Road in his capacity as former CM. Modi said if Nitish is holding two bungalows in capacity as former CM and incumbent CM, in that case Manjhi should also be allotted another bungalow as a sitting legislator also.

"Holding two bungalows as former CM and incumbent CM is like drawing salary and pension at the same time which is wrong," Sushil Modi said.

'DO NOT MAKE IT PRESTIGE ISSUE'



At the end of the letter, Sushil Modi has requested Nitish Kumar not to make the two bungalows as prestige issue and shift to the official CM bungalow and vacate the bungalow he is staying in at present.

Sushil Modi had written the first letter to Nitish on June 5 and sought a reply from him but instead it was the Building Construction Department that sent a reply to him. This prompted Modi to write a second letter to Nitish demanding him to vacate his present bungalow and shift to 1 Anne Marg.



--- ENDS ---
Andrew was only eight years old when he first saw online pornography, but even then he knew there was no going back.

"I was sort of shocked  but I was fascinated by it as well," the 23-year-old (who did not want his surname published) recalls of the hardcore film he watched on a computer at a friend's house.

Always on: Therapist Hugh Martin believes the internet has made pornography much more problematic than it was in the past. Credit:SMH

"It just seemed so real. I'd never really seen people naked before and here they were naked and doing things to each other ... I knew I could never tell my parents, but once I first saw it I knew there was no going back."

By the time Andrew was 14 watching porn had become his favourite past-time, constantly searching for something new on the internet which would give him a bigger high.
Police arrested a 35-year-old Millendon man with an arsenal of weapons in Stratton in the early hours of Sunday.

Police spokeswoman Susan Usher said police were stopping a Holden Rodeo near the intersection of Lewis Jones Cross and Toodyay Road on Roe Highway after watching the car speeding in an easterly direction.

An arsenal of weapons was found after a Millendon man was caught speeding in Stratton. Credit:WA POlice

During the search officers found a bolt action rifle with a fitted silencer, ammunition, a dagger and three meat cleavers and night-vision goggles alongside a sum of cash and a crack pipe.

The man is due to face Perth's Magistrate's Court on Monday on a range of weapons, drug paraphernalia and stolen property charges.
Claremont's iconic nightspot, Club Bayview, has to shut its doors for at least a month after several safety breaches.

The Western Suburbs Weekly newspaper said the club on St Quentin Avenue, which looks at a history of over 30 years, was raided by council officers last weekend amid a crowd of drinking and dancing patrons.

Many-a-messy party was being had at Club Bayview. Credit:nightcruiser.com.au

"This closure comes after multiple breaches resulting in 11 charges by the council to be presented to the courts for failure to comply with basic public safety requirements and multiple breaches resulting in several infringements issued by the WA Police Liquor Enforcement Unit over the last three months," council chief executive Stephen Goode said.

The closure was effected immediately.
As it happened: Baton Rouge police shooting, three officers dead

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The DMK leader expressed his concern after Ramkumar's father alleged that the cops might have slit his son's throat to prevent him from speaking the truth.

By Pramod Madhav: DMK leader M Karunanidhi has said that doubts are being raised over the manner in which Infosys techie Swathi's alleged killer of Ramkumar was arrested.

Karunanidhi expressed his concern after Ramkumar's father alleged that the cops might have slit his son's throat to prevent him from speaking the truth otherwise his son would have definitely denied the allegations that were levelled against him.

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POLICE SHOULD CLARIFY DOUBTS



Karunanidhi says Chennai Police should come forward and clarify immediately if they are framing innocents in a rush to nab the culprits at the earliest and to maintain their pride.



After remaining in police custody for 3 days, Swathi's alleged killer Ramkumar was taken back to Puzal prison following a medical fitness checkup.

Sources say that Ramkumar was questioned for 3 days without rest and on the last day, Swathi's friend Mohamed Bilal was also present during inquiry.

Apparently, the police were confused and unable to decode certain phone messages between Bilal and Swathi and wanted Bilal to clear their doubts.

CRIME SCENE RE-ENACTMENT NOT DONE



Ramkumar's lawyer states that a crime scene re-enactment was not done as the cops planned earlier. He said during preliminary investigation it was found that the fatal blow to Swathi's face could be done only by a left-handed killer and Ramkumar is right handed.

Also the man who is suspected to have killed Swathi had crossed Nungambakkam railway station 20 minutes before Swathi was dropped there by her father.

Such contradictions arising after eyewitness' confirmed Ramkumar as the killer has caused more worries to the investigating officers.

However, the bail petition filed by lawyer Krishnamoorthy a day after Ramkumar arrested by police was dismissed on Friday by a sessions Court as 'no representation' of the accused was present at the court. This was due to Ramkumar's kin openly stating that Krishnamoorthy filed the bail petition without their consent following which Krishnamoorthy decided to temporarily abstain himself from appearing for Ramkumar.

A magistrate has earlier recorded that Ramkumar is under extreme mental distress and advised the police to conduct the investigation carefully.

ALSO READ:

Infosys techie Swathi murder case: Ramkumar taken back to prison, bail plea dismissed

Why did you do this to my daughter? Swathi's father breaks down on seeing killer Ramkumar

--- ENDS ---
Faced with the most experienced and highly rated opponent, Vijender carved out a 98-92, 98-92, 100-90 verdict from the three judges to extend his record to seven wins from as many fights.

By India Today Web Desk: Star boxer Vijender Singh defeated Kerry Hope of Australia in a hard-fought bout to win the WBO Asia/Pacific Middleweight title at the Thyagraj Stadium Saturday evening.

Faced with the most experienced and highly rated opponent of his fledgling professional career, Vijender carved out a 98-92, 98-92, 100-90 verdict from the three judges to extend his record to seven wins from as many fights.

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Celebrities and people took to Twitter to congratulate the boxer on his title win.



Hearty congratulations @boxervijender, you have made whole nation proud with victory in WBO Asia Pacific championship #PresidentMukherjee&; President of India (@RashtrapatiBhvn) July 16, 2016

Congratulations @boxervijender for a hard fought and well deserved win. It was yet another display of immense skill, strength & stamina.&; Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 16, 2016

Saw a full mch of boxing after yrs.thks @boxervijender for mkg INDIA proud,it's just the start ur hrd wrk,dedication and sacrifice paid off&; Mahendra Singh Dhoni (@msdhoni) July 16, 2016

Many congratulations #VijenderSingh ,Thok Daala Tau !

Australia ka Hope fuss in front of our Tope @boxervijender pic.twitter.com/fZ3rNa4aE6&; Virender Sehwag (@virendersehwag) July 16, 2016

Congratulations Champ @boxervijender . What an evening! #VijenderSingh wins the WBO Asia Pacific Middleweight title + everyone's hearts :)&; Naveen Jindal (@MPNaveenJindal) July 16, 2016

Congratulations to the #RingKaKing @boxervijender for winning the great fight enjoyed a lot ????????&; Suresh Raina (@ImRaina) July 16, 2016

.@boxervijender was probably expected to win but this was the kind of event boxing needed in India.&; Harsha Bhogle (@bhogleharsha) July 16, 2016

Congratulations @boxervijender ??You deserve every bit of the WBO title??Great sporting news for India.

Made the nation proud?? #VijenderSingh

&; VVS Laxman (@VVSLaxman281) July 17, 2016

--- ENDS ---
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As angry stone pelters descended on the streets of Kashmir, leading to injuries on both sides, many on Twitter used the occasion for some dark humour.

By India Today Web Desk:

A number of people have been severely injured in violent protests in the Valley. Amid all this, some Twitter users decided to compare the actions of these stone pelters to bowlers.

Note: This is a collection of Tweets. We don't condone the violence happening on the streets of the Valley.







Right arm over the wicket, medium fast :) .. Bowler charging in from Dal Lake end , slight breeze in the air pic.twitter.com/xariE6Bnfo Kolahoi (@PawanDurani) July 17, 2016

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Bowling actions from the valley pic.twitter.com/5H8b9eE2Fd Rahul Raj (@bhak_sala) July 17, 2016

This one seems to be bowling pace like Malinga but his leg wants to do leg spin. pic.twitter.com/pTXGQfNm3E Manas (@Spooferman_) July 17, 2016

When you are batting in gully cricket & bowler trying to cross danger line " abey line ke piche se bowling kar " pic.twitter.com/vgxSch7XNL Sunil- The Cricketer (@1sInto2s) July 16, 2016





When you are a Paki by heart but still can't get Kumble out of you... pic.twitter.com/9ZcfG13Ynq Finger of India (@IndiaFinger) July 17, 2016

--- ENDS ---
Three juveniles charged with robbing same Paducah store twice in one day
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jul. 17, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 17, 2016 | 12:20 AM | PADUCAH, KY

Two people were arrested after a traffic stop early Friday morning in Paducah.



Paducah Police said they received a complaint call about 1 am about a car that was "all over the road" on Alben Barkley Drive. The officer pulled over the car and spoke to the driver, 44-year-old David Eisenhauer of St. Louis, MO. The officer said Eisenhauer smelled of alcohol, had glassy, blood-shot eyes and slurred speech. He also couldn't provide the correct name of his passenger, who was identified as 29-year-old Amber Strong, also of St. Louis.



Eisenhauer failed three field sobriety tests, and a search of the vehicle allegedly revealed several open containers of alcohol. He was arrested for DUI and careless driving.



Police say Strong gave consent to search her purse, and reportedly said the officer would likely find marijuana. Items found reportedly included a burnt marijuana roach, a plastic straw that officer suspects was for drug use, and a baggie with a substance that tested positive for methamphetamine.



Strong was arrested for possession of a controlled substance (methamphetamine), possession of marijuana, and possession of drug paraphernalia.



Eisenhauer and Strong were taken to McCracken County Jail.
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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Jul. 17, 2016 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Jul. 17, 2016 | 12:57 PM | PADUCAH, KY

Two McCracken County men face felony charges, after police say they went to a Paducah Man's home Saturday morning and threatened him with a gun.



The Paducah Police Department says officers responded shortly after 8 am to a report of a man with a gun at a home on Springwell Lane. Dispatchers told officers that 19-year-old Reico Newberry was threatening the resident, Andrew M. McReynolds with a shotgun.



When officers arrived, Newberry and 23-year-old Devonte Nance were reportedly attempting to flee in a vehicle. Newberry then fled on foot, and Nance was taken into custody. Officers said they found two handguns and a shotgun in the vehicle.



Newberry was found a short time later at his home on College Avenue. Police said he had changed clothes, but officers found the clothes he was wearing at the Springwell Lane home inside his home. Police said they later learned that Newberry had been sending text messages to McReynolds, threatening to come to his home and shoot him.



Both suspects were booked into McCracken County Regional Jail. Newberry is charged with fleeing or evading police, first-degree wanton endangerment, tampering with physical evidence, third-degree terroristic threatening and failure to notify the department of Transportation of an address change. Nance is charged with first-degree wanton endangerment.
In a bizarre incident, a woman reportedly murdered her 73-year-old father after she was tired of looking after him.

By Press Trust of India: A 73-year-old paralysed man was allegedly strangulated to death by her daughter who tried to pass off the murder as natural death in Rustumpet village here, police said today.

The alleged crime took place on Friday evening and the accused, Shahnaz, has been arrested for the murder of Mohd Jahangir, police said.

According to police, Shahnaz strangled her father to death as she was fed up of looking after him. Jahangir had recently suffered a severe attack of paralysis, Circle Inspector of Sangareddy rural police station, Narendar, said said.

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"Since there was nobody to look after him, his four daughters had decided to take care of him on a rotation basis, one month each daughter," he said.

DAUGHTERS TOOK CARE OF FATHER IN TURNS



According to the officer, this month it was the turn of Shahnaz, his youngest daughter. However, since she was frustrated with her fathers health and fed up of looking after him, she planned to eliminate him.

Shahnaz, who is married, stays in the Rustumpet village with her family.

"On Friday evening Shahnaz killed her father by strangulating him with a saree and later stepped out of the house, informing her neighbours that she is going to a nearby town Sadasivpet for some work and will return next day. She asked them to take care of her father, if he called them," Narendar said.

SHAHNAZ MISLED NEIGHBOURS



The next day, when she returned home, she told the neighbours that her father died a natural death.

However, police got suspicious and started interrogating her after they detected strangulation marks on the victims neck. During the questioning, the accused admitted that she had killed her father, following which she was arrested.

Further investigation is underway.

Also read:

Chennai: Man kills family, stays with the bodies for two days



--- ENDS ---
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 16/07/2016 (2294 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stephen Juba Park on Waterfront Drive was the setting for a temporary art installation Saturday to support Shoal Lake 40 and its decades-long campaign for clean drinking water.

A collection of the citys community groups led by 13 Fires Winnipeg presented the vision of local artist Leah Decter with her project, Reflect in Water, to draw attention to the inequities of life for the Ontario First Nation.

The First Nation was cut off from the mainland by an aqueduct a century ago to supply Winnipeg with fresh water.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Sixteen-year-old Rainer Bunn From Shoal Lake 40 First Nation shares his thoughts and concerns about what its like living without running water on his reserve holding art installation at Steven Juba Park Saturday. 13 Fires Winnipeg, Shoal Lake residents and friends take part in discussing the water issues facing the reserve at Steven Juba Park along the Red River Saturday.See Alex Paul story.July 16, 2016

The community has been under a boil-water advisory for 19 years. While efforts to build a permanent road, dubbed Freedom Road, to link the community to the mainland have won the support of all three levels of government since last falls federal election, life there is marked by disadvantages beyond the lack of potable water. Probably worst among them is the reality residents risk their lives falling through winter ice trying to cross Shoal Lake. In summer, when the channel is open, a ferry ride costs $10 one-way.

The plight of Shoal Lake 40 is the ongoing focus of various national awareness campaigns, but Saturdays event was an attempt to use art to reach ordinary Winnipeggers out for an afternoon stroll.

The park was decorated with blue broadcloth banners emblazoned with statements from Shoal Lake residents such as, Some days Ill have a shower and Ill get an allergic reaction, rashes and bumps and Municipal areas take for granted the fact they have clean drinking water at the expense of indigenous committees. My hope for the future is every First Nation has access to clean drinking water.

Each statement was signed with the name of the Shoal Lake resident who wrote it.

Stencils with the same statements were on hand to be sprayed like watermarks on the paths of the popular route for joggers and cyclists. Like invisible ink, visitors were invited to spray paint the stencils into the cement with non-potable water collected with permission and ceremony directly from the First Nation, located on the border with Ontario. The watermarks vanished under the hot sun, a symbolic gesture to show change take repeated efforts before it sticks, Decter said.

This is a huge collaborative project with Shoal Lake 40, 13 Fires, the Friends of Shoal Lake, the Peace Alliance of Winnipeg, the Museum of Canadian Human Rights Violations in Shoal Lak,e and its a Winnipeg Art Council Project, Decter said.

Freedom Road is the beginning of remediation of the problems in Shoa Lake, but there are larger problems there that are colonial consequences, issues that need to be resolved. Were working with the people at Shoal Lake to remind people just because Freedom Road in in process doesnt mean there arent other issues that need to be resolved.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS The Reflects in Water art installation, combines statements from people living in Shoal Lake 40 hanging on lines in Steven Juba Park Saturday for and event to discuss the water issues facing his reserve Saturday.See Alex Paul story.July 16, 2016

The message got through to some people taking in the Saturday sun.

I was reading the banners. They definitely make you think, said hair stylist and salon school instructor Jenna Waldner. She said shes taken part in work-related campaigns to raise funds for clean water systems in developing countries, and she said its shocking to think First Nations such as Shoal Lake live in the same conditions in a country like Canada.

Thats the point, said Rainer Bunn, a 16-year-old from Shoal Lake about to enter Grade 12 this fall in Sagkeeng First Nation, 100 kilometres north of Winnipeg.

His mother volunteered him to lead one of several talking circles planned as part of the art installation

This is great, he sai as he and a handful of other Shoal Lake members arrived for the event.

I like making connections with people, so this is a great opportunity for me.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Sixteen-year-old Rainer Bunn From Shoal Lake 40 First Nation shares his concerns about what its like living without running water on his reserve at Steven Juba Park Saturday. 13 Fires Winnipeg, Shoal Lake residents and friends take part in discussing the water issues facing the reserve at Steven Juba Park along the Red River Saturday.See Alex Paul story.July 16, 2016

The event, scheduled for Saturday afternoon only, was to wrap up with a feast at the nearby Thunderbird House on Main Street.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca
By PTI: grazing

Malda (WB), Jul 17 (PTI) A womans fingers were chopped off and her son was seriously injured after being attacked allegedly by their neighbour following an argument over the womans cattle grazing in the neighbours paddy field at Baisnabnagar in Malda district today.

A senior police officer said the woman and her son have been admitted to a hospital after lodging of an FIR against the neighbour Harun Seikh and seven other persons at Baisnabnagar police station.

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The seven persons had allegedly provoked Sheikh following which he had an altercation with the woman over her cattle grazing in his farmland, the officer said.

"Sheikh allegedly attacked the woman with a sharp-edged weapon when she argued," the woman alleged in her FIR with the police.

The names of the woman and her son were withheld by the officer.

Meanwhile, the attending doctors at Malda Medical College and Hospital said the woman had her two fingers chopped off while her son had knife wounds on his body. Both are in stable condition now.

The police officer said the neighbours are being questioned to know the exact circumstances.

The seven named in the FIR have not been arrested yet, the officer said.

Neither the woman in her complaint nor the police confirmed reports in

Some local TV channels purportedly showed that the woman was stripped and paraded around the village by the accused during the alleged attack.

However, the woman did not confirm the reports in her complaint.

"Such channel reports are baseless," the police officer said. PTI COR SUS IKA LNS

--- ENDS ---
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 17/07/2016 (2293 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg police have arrested three men in a fraud investigation with estimated losses exceeding $7,000.

Emmanuel Kwakwah, 31, Kofi Owusu, 28, and Allan Lochard, 19, each face five charges of fraud under $5,000, possession of goods obtained by crime under $5,000, and participation in a criminal organization.

Owusu faces additional charges of possession of forged documents and use of forged documents, while Lochard faces the same additional charges as well as possession of a forged credit card and possession of counterfeit mark.

All three suspects are from Montreal, but were arrested in Winnipeg on July 12.

The Winnipeg Police Commercial Crime Unit began the investigation on July 11 following reports that a group of men at a local shopping mall used forged documents and fraudulent credit cards to obtain cellphones from multiple retailers, police said Sunday, noting the men may have committed similar crimes in the past.

Investigators believe additional businesses may have been victimized in a similar manner by these suspects. Some of the activities may have preceded July 11, and we are looking to see if there are more instances related to this, said Const. Rob Carver.

All three suspects have been remanded into custody.

The investigation is continuing by members of the Commercial Crime Unit. Anyone with information regarding the incident is asked to call investigators at 204-986-6213 or Crime Stopper at 204-786-TIPS (8477).
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 17/07/2016 (2293 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The bid to make the boreal forest in eastern Manitoba a UNESCO World Heritage Site has hit a snag after an Ontario First Nation pulled out of the project.

The World Heritage Committee, meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, this weekend, has agreed to refer the Pimachiowin Aki nomination after hearing that the Pikangikum First Nation, one of the projects partners, withdrew its support last month. The World Heritage Committee decision to refer means the project has up to three years to submit additional information for it to look at.

William Young, a Pimachiowin Aki corporation board member who lives in Bloodvein First Nation, said the four Manitoba First Nations have already decided to move on without Pikangikum.

J.J. ALI / FILE The Pikangikum First Nation in Ontario has pulled out of a bid to have 33,400 square kilometres of boreal forest and traditional territory declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I was disappointed one of our partners withdrew, Young said on Sunday.

But it was good news that we received this morning. I was looking forward to a referral which we received.

We are redrawing the boundary lines we will have to review this whole project from the Manitoba side.

The project, which has been in the works for about a decade, would have seen 33,400 square kilometres of boreal forest and traditional territory be inscribed on the World Heritage List of sites.

Other World Heritage sites include the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; the historic centre of Vienna, Austria; Angkor in Cambodia; and Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The partners in the Pimachiowin Aki Corporation, founded in 2006, have been the Poplar River, Bloodvein, Pauingassi and Little Grand Rapids First Nations in Manitoba, the Pikangikum First Nation in Ontario and the Manitoba and Ontario governments.

In May, the committees advisory bodies released a draft decision recommending Pimachiowin Aki receive the nomination.

Gord Jones, Pimachiowin Akis project manager, said the referral has nothing to do with the provincial governments decision to review the route of Manitoba Hydros Bipole III project.

Premier Brian Pallister said last month the province sent a letter to Parks Canada, which was heading the delegation to the World Heritage Committee, letting them know a hydro transmission line could be built through the area someday.

Jones said he is pleased the body decided to refer the project instead of asking that the group start over.

And Jones said he is encouraged that as early as next year the area could be designated as a World Heritage site.

I was inspired by how many countries spoke in favour, he said, noting the countries included Finland and Tanzania.

They praised it highly. They felt it should be on the list.

Pikangikum Chief Dean Owen could not be reached for comment.

Pikangikum is located 100 kilometres north of Red Lake, Ont., on the Manitoba border.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 17/07/2016 (2293 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Theres something going on across the Pacific. The worlds second-largest economy is a bloated, gorged, debt-riddled dragon ready to burst at the seams.

Its going to crash, hard, and some economists are saying it will rival the Great Depression. In a recent interview with MarketWatch, renowned economist Andy Xie  formerly of the World Bank and Morgan Stanley, who now works independently  said this wont be like the 1997 Asian currency crisis or the 2008 U.S. subprime-mortgage fallout. It will be bigger and much more pronounced, Xie said.

On the heels of the Brexit crisis, this obviously isnt good news, but at least this crash isnt going to blindside the majority of the planet like the mortgage crisis and make a select few short sellers very, very rich. Were going to see this one coming because its been stacking up for years.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Some say Chinas economy will crash and the fallout will be huge.

Xie joined the ranks of Gorge Soros in sounding every alarm bell he could get his hands on. Soros, a noted investor who is one of the worlds 30 richest people, has a history of selling short and turning out correct. What Soros and Xie are saying is Chinas unprecedented growth has been propped up by bad credit, loose spending and bloated real estate and stock markets, just to name a few of the countrys economic problems. It has a laundry list of social ills  from an aging population to an abundance of men (one-child policy) and a mass population migration to its cities as its farmland dries up, partially because of the government steamrolling agricultural land to build hotels and other useless infrastructure.

Its also cooking its own GDP growth numbers in a bid to sustain a perception of expansion that has been unsustainable for years. Further, recent reports have pointed to another bubble within the country: China is pumping money into research and development and building office towers, expecting entrepreneurs. However, nobodys coming to set up shop and open business. Sound familiar? China has been doing the same thing with its real estate market, building ghost cities and counting the construction toward GDP. Its middle class bought a record amount of property, and when that started to sour, the government forced them to switch to the stock market, which has been on a roller-coaster ride ever since.

High government debt, economic inefficiencies, commodity bubbles from steel and iron ore to zombie investors and shadow banking practices. Here in Vancouver, were seeing it right before our eyes: an out-of-control property market the government has only recently decided to acknowledge is almost completely inflated by an outflow of Chinese money. Mainlanders have taken cash out of the country at unprecedented rates, as high as $46 billion a month in the past half-year alone.

As a Winnipegger, should you be worried? Well, yes. Chinas top two trading partners are the European Union  already on one leg after Brexit  and the U.S., which has seen modest growth lately, a lone bright spot in a weary post-2008 world. Canada, deeply tied to the its neighbours fortunes, will go as our American counterparts do, and our own third-largest trading partner is the Red Dragon. It remains to be seen how deep this wound will stretch and how big the blast radius will be, but chances are this will not be a hiccup or temporary shock wave. The real hurt is going to come in national economies that are already suffering, such as Japan, South Korea, India, Russia and Brazil. Places already looking like houses of cards, places where economic forecasting has been a sore point for quite some time.

So when is this crash going to come? Heres the really scary part: nobody knows. It could start this year, or it could take years. The longer the Communist party continues to prop its economy up and remain clandestine with its own internal figures, the larger its bubble will blow, the more advanced its crash will be and the lower the likelihood any inkling of a soft landing will remain. Chinese leadership has shown little in terms of progressive measures when it comes to reform. Their answer has been more debt, more government spending and more infrastructure expenditures to spur jobs and growth. This doesnt even account for the fact the country has long been known for having rampant corruption and graft running through virtually every sector of its society.

Imagine a dog, caged and fed a very small, internally regulated portion of food for many years. This was China up until 1978. Then, through a series of market deregulations such as opening the country to foreign investment, that dog was allowed to eat more and more. But unlike a democratic nation where the boom-bust-bailout economy goes through relatively small cycles, that dog kept getting its stomach filled. Someone came in and started stitching on more space for the dog to put food into and told it to continue eating. Call it nationalistic pride for being late to the economic party, call it stupidly naive. Whatever you call it, China has been doing it for years.

Since initial deregulation in the 1980s and 90s, all the way to 2005, Chinas GDP headed to the private sector in a mass exodus and now accounts for at least 70 per cent. The country has been gorging since 1978, posting GDP growth as high as 9.5 per cent on a yearly basis. It continues to eat and continues to grow, but theres no nutritional value to the meal its serving itself  its bad debt, its freewheeling credit, its unsustainable and its incredibly scary.

QILAI SHEN / BLOOMBERG FILES Chinas growth has been boosted by a bloated real estate market.

Could Xie and Soros be wrong? Sure. Could China manufacture one of the greatest, most remarkable soft landings in the history of mankind? Yes, anything is possible. But in 2016, realism rules, and reality is king.

Instability is the new stability, and if I were a betting man, Id be putting money on black, as far away from red as humanly possible.

Patrick Blennerhassett is a Vancouver-based writer and journalist. His latest book is A Forgotten Legend: Balbir Singh Sr., Triple Olympic Gold & Modis New India.
Depending on the time period examined, men are about six times as likely as women to be incarcerated. This is not because of discrimination: men are six times as likely as women to commit serious crimes. Whites are about twice as likely to be incarcerated as Asian-Americans, not because of discrimination against whites, but because whites have higher crime rates. Black men are about six times as likely as white men to be incarcerated, but this does not prove discrimination, either.

The data leave much to be desired, but what exists indicates that roughly a third of all victims of serious crime say the offender was black; roughly a third of those arrested are black; and roughly a third of those convicted are black.

So the legal system seems to be okay; its the patterns of daily life that are disturbing. The truth is brutally inconvenient.

Blacks are six times as likely as whites to be murdered, and 90 percent of blacks murdered are killed by other blacks. Thus, blacks are six times as likely to be convicted of murder as whites  not because of discrimination, but because so many murder victims are black and murder is nearly always intraracial. The brutal truth is basically the same for other crimes, though the numbers are different, and the racial link is weaker for robbery.

Why are black crime rates so high? I believe its because of past discrimination.

History provides numerous examples to show that if a group of people are forced to live outside the protection of a formal legal system for generations, as blacks most certainly were until 1970 as the most optimistic date, they exhibit high rates of violence even long after they do receive that protection. Its sort of like group PTSD. One of the best examples is white Southerners: white immigrants to the South tended to come from the lawless areas of the British Isles, and their descendants kept the violent habits they brought with them for generations.

More specific facts seem to support this explanation, as well. Blacks made tremendous progress in the 1940s and 50s, when so many escaped the Jim Crow south. They made tremendous progress nationwide once the civil rights laws largely removed continuing discrimination. But their progress has slowed more recently, I argue, because of the still extensive damage from past discrimination.

More sensitivity training for the police, for example, will not solve the legacy problems of poor education and restricted career paths (perhaps of their parents) that still affect probably a majority of blacks in this country. Yet our public dialogue attributes every single racial disparity to current discrimination, largely because so many experts and activists misinterpret the statistics.

Another brutally inconvenient truth: since blacks must be disproportionately arrested, they will have disproportionately many violent encounters with the police. Blacks are about four times as likely as whites to be killed by the police; but they are also about four times as likely to kill police officers.

According to the Washington Post, police have killed 536 people so far this year; of these, only 123 have been black. The news media have focused on just a few of these 536 victims, all of them black. Would Philando Castile have been shot if he were white? We have no idea, because we have no information on the whites or Hispanics the police have killed to compare his case with. Given our nearly total ignorance, it is extremely irresponsible of Gov. Mark Dayton to assert that Mr. Castile was a victim of prejudice.

The tiny handful of cases for which reports are publicly available are quite illuminating. Any fair-minded observer who reads the reports on either Michael Brown or Jamar Clark would agree that the officers who shot them legitimately feared for their lives. But there is no hard public information on 99.9 percent of police victims. Few police officers are ever indicted for murder  but is it because of a bias in favor of the police, or because the overwhelming majority of police officers fire only when justified?

We must insist there be a public report on every police killing; otherwise, we will keep shouting past each other.

Few police officers are ever indicted for murder  but is it because of a bias in favor of the police, or because the overwhelming majority of police officers fire only when justified?
WAUPUNOne of the ways Waupun Fine Arts is supporting the arts this summer is by featuring the talents of three Waupun area college students in the Waupun Fine Art Gallery on the second level of the Waupun Public Library.

The show runs through the month of July and the public is invited to the closing reception on July 27 from 5-7 p.m.

Two of the featured college students are sharing their passion for photography with a variety of subject matter and one student shares her talent for illustration and her passion for piano and her favorite composer.

Craig Vander Galien from the Randolph area, is a former graduate of CWC and attends Trinity College in Palos Heights, Illinois. Even though his major is not in the arts Vander Galien has a passion and talent for capturing his subjects at just the right angle and in just the right lighting. He uses his camera at incredible heights to capture many unusual images of city the Chicago.

Kathryn Coraggio is formerly from the Beaver Dam area, is a graduate of CWC and attends Winona University in Minnesota. Coraggio is a former recipient of the Beaver Dam Area Art Associations Bertha Proctor purchase award for a photograph that she took in the Horicon Marsh. The purchase award photo is in a traveling exhibit and just also happens to be on display right now on the lower level of the Waupun Library.

Hannah Dykstra is from Beaver Dam, is a former graduate of CWC and just graduated this spring with a degree in Art Education from Trinity College in Palos Heights, Illinoi. Dykstras senior exhibit featured her graphic novel about a Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich who she took an interest in while studying piano, another of Hannahs passions. Copies of her graphic novel are on display in the gallery and for sale at the library desk. Hannah also provides a link to her blog page in which she shares more of her graphic journey with the composer and his music.

More information about the show, WFAs Summer Concerts in the Park, and other ways that Waupun Fine Art supports the arts may be found at www.waupunfinearts.org.
As the Republican National Convention kicks off this week, conservatives opposed to nominating Donald Trump are still fuming about his candidacy and say their fight wont end in Cleveland  a position that could help put Wisconsin in the Democratic column in November.

There are many people in the never Trump movement who, if Trump successfully gets the nomination in Cleveland, are not going to drop their opposition because he hijacked the party, said Brian Fraley, a former Wisconsin GOP political director who has been one of the fiercest Trump critics in the state.

Fraley said he is considering voting for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. He also said Trump picking conservative Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for vice president shows he is worried about the anti-Trump holdouts, but it doesnt make Trump any less vulgar or any more trustworthy.

Even as some Wisconsin Republicans continue to stoke the anti-Trump furor, others have played key roles in stamping it out.

Last week the national movement to derail Trump at the convention fell far short of the votes needed to free delegates to vote their conscience.

Trump opponents couldnt even muster the 28 votes needed in the 112-member rules committee to send the proposed rule change to a vote among all 2,472 delegates.

Coming out of this convention, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president and as such he needs all Republican support, said Steve King, a rules committee member from Wisconsin. Whats the alternative? Its not a good one. Im not a big fan of dentists, but I go to the dentist and have them do their thing to me and I accept it.

King and fellow Wisconsin rules committee member Mary Buestrin struck a blow to the anti-Trump movement in the weeks leading up to the convention by sending a letter to delegates reminding them that the nominating process that Trump won was developed by the partys grassroots members.

Fraley said some anti-Trump members of the Wisconsin delegation, such as former RNC committeeman Michael Grebe and Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, deciding not to attend the convention also weakened the movement.

Last week RNC chairman Reince Priebus, of Kenosha, derided the anti-Trump forces as sore losers.

Steineke disagreed that the opposition to Trump among some Republicans is simply the usual discontent after a hard-fought primary battle.

I dont think this year is usual in any capacity, Steineke said. Most people recognize that both nominees on both sides are hugely unpopular with the general electorate, which is something we havent seen before to this magnitude. Hopefully we all learn some lessons from it.

Before the anti-Trump movement became a trending hashtag, Wisconsin conservatives were among the first Republicans to raise red flags about the brash billionaire who would go on to win the partys 2016 presidential nomination.

Members of the anti-Trump movement in Wisconsin trace its origin to Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Sherwood, declaring in early December he would not vote for Trump if he were the nominee. That was two months before the National Review devoted an entire issue to the case against Trump and #NeverTrump began trending on social media.

Wisconsin was the last state where Trump lost in the primaries on April 5. Wisconsin conservatives, especially the talk radio crowd, presented a unified front against Trump in the weeks before the primary, backing Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Trump further alienated himself from Wisconsin conservatives during his first campaign stop in Janesville, when he criticized Gov. Scott Walker, said the state had a lot of problems and suggested Republicans should have raised taxes to pay for roads and schools.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, described that week in Wisconsin as the moment when Trump could have been stopped.

That was the moment, and of course the reason it didnt happen was because it was Cruz, Sabato said. If that had been (Florida Sen. Marco) Rubio or (Ohio Gov. John) Kasich, it would have happened. Cruz was too unacceptable to too many people.

Trumps dominant victory in New York two weeks later paved the way for a win in Indiana that forced his final two rivals, Cruz and Kasich, to drop out.

The anti-Trump forces have continued to rail against the presumptive nominee. Milwaukee talk radio host Charlie Sykes, whose grilling of Trump during an on-air interview on WTMJ in late March drew national attention, remains steadfastly opposed. But WISN conservative radio host Mark Belling, who called Trump the biggest wussy of all time during the primary, recently announced hell support Trump.

Walker and House Speaker Paul Ryan, of Janesville, also have backed Trump after expressing early reservations.

The division was apparent in the latest Marquette Law School Poll, which found 46 percent of Republicans say the party is divided and will remain so in November, compared with 19 percent of Democrats who say the same about their own party. Only 5 percent of Republicans said their party is united, down from 12 percent a month earlier.

Democrat Hillary Clinton led Trump 43-37 among registered voters and 45-41 among likely voters, according to the poll. Only 80 percent of Republicans said they support Trump, compared with 93 percent of Democrats who support Clinton.

James Wigderson, a conservative columnist who wrote in December that Republicans should distance themselves from Trump, defended his opposition as not mattering in the national presidential election.
BARABOO  The sound of oom-pa-pa-mow-mow sung by a crowd of people of all ages filled the air around Baraboo when Country Music Hall of Famers the Oak Ridge Boys sang their biggest hit Elvira, as the headliners of the Sauk County Fair on July 16.

Even those in the reserved seating at the front of the stage were standing, dancing, singing, clapping and cheering as the sun went down behind the grandstands.

The concert was the culmination of the weeklong event, with most of July 15 and 16 highlighting farm animal shows and a meat auction from the hard-working kids of the countys 4-H and Future Farmers of America and their projects.

We had an awesome fair this year with perfect weather and the grandstand events, said Kelli Zink, Sauk County Fair Board treasurer. We had a really good meat sale and all the animal shows and prejudging went really well.

Zink said the portable horse stall fundraiser still has $10,000 more to raise.

The stalls are removable from the newest fair grounds horse building, built in 2014.

Zink is one of the donors of $1,000 who receive a plaque on a stall for their donation. Hers is dedicated in memory of her horse Dreams Come True, who she called Misty.

He was the best 4-H horse ever, Zink said. He taught 100s of kids in 4-H horse showmanship. He was 29 when he died the day after last Thanksgiving.

Zink said donations could be made by calling her at 608-477-2532 to ask for a donation form which can be mailed to the Sauk County Horse Project at P.O. Box 467, Baraboo 53913. Checks can be made out to the Sauk County Horse Project.

Halle Hickey of Baraboo has been training horses nearly all her life.

A junior at Baraboo High School, Hickey has lettered with the Wisconsin International Horse Association-sponsored Baraboo horse team since she was in the 6th grade.

Her 10-year old horse Boomer is Hickeys first training experience virtually on her own.

This is my first own horse, Hickey said. Ive had him for three years now, and hes come a long way. I can actually say Ive put in all the work. Ever since I was little, every year I rode a different horse. I learned from my mistakes and trainers from the past.

Cows and pigs

Among the 4-H students was Jordan Small of Prairie du Sac, who showed her Jersey cows, taking a blue ribbon in her class and a white ribbon in the combined cow and calve show.

Jordan started out her young life, strangely enough, afraid of animals. But once her uncle Rob introduced her to raising calves, her fear turned to joy.

She started with Jersey calves, said Jordans mom Roxanne Small. Theyre almost like little fawns. Theyre very small. She got working with them more and they started cooperating more.

I do like it, Jordan said. I like the animals I show because they can be friendly. And I just like showing because its fun.

Nick Marx, a senior at Sauk Prairie High School, and his sister Sammi both auctioned off their hogs Porky and Bubba, who were sold to The Meat Market in Baraboo and Wyttenbach Meats in Prairie du Sac.

This was Nicks third year showing hogs at the fair, and Sammis first.

The hogs were grown on their family farm outside Sauk City.

Sammi said she became interested in growing her own hog after watching her brother have fun doing it.

I watched him do it for the past three years, so I decided I wanted to join in, Sammi said. Theres a lot of camaraderie with the other kids here.

Nick said he plans to study civil engineering at UW-Platteville or Madison, but in the meantime hes active with the Sauk Prairie FFA and will continue to grow hogs for another two years.

Its a cool experience for most kids to get to do it, Nick said. If you live in the city you cant do this.

Nicks dad, Joe Marx, has been a lifelong farmer, but his mom, Michelle married into the farming life.

Its been a great experience for me, too, because Im a city kid, Michelle said.

Family tradition

Katie Yanke of Prairie du Sac has been showing cows at the fair since she was 8. That was seven years ago, and she plans to keep going in the Yanke family tradition.

We all get along really well, Katie said. Its fun because we dont have to worry about someone not doing their work. We all pitch in.

Older sister Beth Yanke was named last month as the 2016 winner of the State FFA Diversified Agricultural Production Proficiency Award. She is in her second year at UW-Platteville where she studies animal science with an emphasis on dairy cattle.

Beth will compete at the National FFA Convention in October in Indianapolis, where she will be competing with other FFA students in all 50 states.

She said the focus of her proficiency project was diverse fed agriculture production placement.

That covers everything from my dairy cattle to my steers, crops and everything we do on our farm, Beth said.
How Milwaukee built and lost Wisconsin's flagship the Denis Sullivan

Like many cultural institutions in Milwaukee, the tall ship was more passion project than profitable entity  one that could not survive a global pandemic.
By India Today Web Desk: Xiaomi is hosting a high-profile launch event in Beijing on July 27 where it will most likely launch the fourth-generation Redmi Note budget phablet. Also in line could be the Mi Note 2, successor to the popular mid-level Mi Note. The company will start selling tickets for the launch event from Monday, July 18, it has come to light. According to a Weibo post , a ticket to the event will cost 199 yuan (roughly $30 or around Rs 2,000).

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A new teaser image doing the rounds on the internet recently showed off a model holding the alleged Redmi Note 4 in his hand. The teaser showed off the rear panel of the phone in question, highlighting the phone's alleged dual-camera setup with a flash seated in the middle. The twin-camera setup is said to be the spotlight in the case of the Redmi Note 4, although multiple reports have also suggested that the Mi Note 2 may also carry a similar feature set.

As per the teaser image, the back of the Redmi Note 4 seemed to be all-metal with distinct antenna lines.



Also Read: Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 with two rear cameras spotted online

There have been several rumours that the Redmi Note 4 would be an oversized phablet, suggesting its screen size could be more than the usual 5.5-inch. Rumoured specs of the Redmi Note 4 include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor, with 3GB of RAM, 16GB of internal memory, and Qualcomm 3.0 fast charge technology support. Sadly, that's all the information we have about the Redmi Note 4 for now.

As for the Mi Note 2, it is reported to have a curved screen, Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 821 processor with 6GB of RAM and a dual-camera setup on the back. The alleged Mi Note 2 may also have as many as three different models: standard, high, and top-end.

Xiaomi may launch either of the two or both phones at its July 27 Beijing event. The company has been relatively tight-lipped about either as of now, so we suggest we take this piece of information with a pinch of salt.





--- ENDS ---




China News on Women





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Facebook's diversity leader accuses the educational system for the company's poor diversity ratings.

Facebooks diversity leader blamed our educational system and talent pipeline as a reason for the companys lack of diversity. According to recent diversity statistics, Facebooks workforce is composed primarily of men at 67 percent; of these, 83 percent comprise of tech-related jobs. And as much as 73 percent of senior leadership positions are occupied by men.

Maxine Williams, Facebooks Global Director of Diversity, said thatappropriate representation in technology results from access to necessary skills through the public education system.

But the numbers indicate that women in leadership are up by 4 percent nearly hitting 27 percent. And the number of African-American employees in non-tech related positions hiked from 3 percent in 2015 to 5 percent in a recent release. But the stats for racial distribution reveal that Caucasians make up 52 percent; Asians account for 38 percent; Hispanics amount to 4 percent, and African-Americans at 2 percent. Bi or multi-racial demographics were recorded at 3 percent.

But Williams opinion, however, isnt unanimous. Of those is Joelle Emerson, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises tech companies on issues of inclusion and diversity. I am kind of shocked that Facebook would continue to perpetuate a narrative that has been so thoroughly disproven by the data, Emerson said.

Data reveals an imbalance in the number of blacks and Hispanics that graduate with computer science degrees and the demographics in the tech industry belonging to those groups. In other words, about 9 percent of those who graduate from elite engineering programs are black and Hispanic. The two ethnical groups representation in major tech enterprises, however, is roughly 5 percent.

Williams believes high school programs should exert more effort into pushing computer science to students. She believes only 25 percent of U.S. high schools have computer science in their curricula. But Facebook took action to eliminate gender and racial under-representation in the technology industry.

The company launched TechPrep, an online program that offers educational resources in Spanish and English to try and sway students and parents towards computer science professions as well as children from diverse ethnical groups. The social media leader also created the Facebook University (FBU) program, which focuses on undergrads who are minorities.

Williams also insists that her company encourages its recruiters to look out for more diversity in the qualified talent pool.
Linda Anne Dunavant with her grandchildren

By: Mahesh Sarin

(Scroll down for video) It was a very sad day after a grandmother turned on her biracial grandchildren and killed them by setting fire to her home.

The grandmother of Covington, Tennessee, agreed to babysit the children for the night while her daughter went to a friends house nearby.

Police said that Linda Anne Dunavant, set her house on fire at around 3:00 a.m. She ran out of the home and sought medical attention.

Dunavant was airlifted to the Regional Medical Center, after suffering burn wounds.

However, according to her daughter, the evil grandmother did not tell anyone that her grandaughters were inside the home.

When the daughter heard firefighters, she ran outside and saw her motheras home on fire.

She ran to check on her children, 6-month-old Ameya and one and a half-year-old Jaleah. They were removed from the home, but they both died at the hospital.

Police arrested the grandmother after it was determined that she deliberately set her home on fire while the children were sleeping.

The fire destroyed the home in the 1700 block of Shoaf Street near Smith Avenue.

Dunavant was charged with two counts of first-degree felony murder, two counts of aggravated child neglect and aggravated assault, and two counts of aggravated arson.

Dunavant was also arrested in another case, in which she has accused the childrenas father of assaulting her by pouring charcoal fluid mixed with Kool-Aid on her.

He was arrested, but was released after it was determined that she was the one who sprayed the man with the liquid. In that case, she was charged with two counts of filing a false report.

People are calling the grandmother a racist, and they believe that she killed the children and filed a false report because of their race.
John Rice

By: Wayne Morin

A man filed a lawsuit against a delivery man who slapped his behind, causing his life to get ruined, according to court documents in Ireland.

Now, a judge in Dublin, has told 49-year-old John Rice, to move on with his life despite getting slapped at a Tesco supermarket by Alan Muddiman.

According to the lawsuit, Rice was slapped in the behind 6 years ago, while he worked as a security guard at Tesco. Rice quit work after the incident, saying that he was too traumatized.

He told the court that he suffered physically and psychologically from the slap. However, Judge Kevin Cross dismissed the claim.

Cross said that he believed the security guard will now blame the court for the terrible injustice, but he urged him to move on with his life.

Cross made the decision to dismiss the lawsuit after seeing a video of the incident, which revealed that Rice received a slight slap on the behind.
Luke McCarthy

By: Tanya Malhotra

A man was arrested on a charge of rape after being accused of raping women and drinking their blood, according to police in the United Kingdom.

Essex police said that they have arrested 28-year-old Luke McCarthy, after being accused of raping two women before forcing them to drink his blood and sucking their blood.

McCarthy has been charged with four counts of rape. McCarthy denied the allegations, saying that the sexual encounters were consensual.

According to the police investigation, McCarthy had a dog collar and cage in his bedroom, and he allegedly used them to abuse and humiliate his victims.

McCarthy used a razor to cut his chest and forced his victims to drink his blood before putting some in a bottle of vodka to keep it fresh.

McCarthy made a cut on one womanas leg and sucked her blood. The women made repeated trips to his house, where he handcuffed them and placed them in the cage.

He also punched the women in their faces. McCarthy demanded the women to call him master.
Michael Richard, Joni and Gavin Michael Stiles

By: Tanya Malhotra

(Scroll down for video) A police officer in Colorado, is mourning the loss of his beloved son.

The three-year-old child accidentally shot himself after getting hold of his fatheras gun and played with it.

The little boy was identified as Gavin Michael Stiles, He was the son Michael Richard and Joni Stiles of Steamboat Springs.

The parents called 911 at 8:36 a.m., and emergency workers rushed the boy to the Yampa Valley Medical Center.

Doctors were unable to save his life. Gavin Michael was pronounced dead at 11:04 a.m.

The shooting occurred at the familyas home, which the parents purchased just seven month ago.

Police did not say if the gun that the boy used to kill himself was a police issued weapon or the familyas private firearm.

Authorities are still investigating the incident, but so far, no charges have been filed against the parents who were home at the time of the incident.

Family members set up a GoFundMe page with a goal of collecting $10,000 to help them bury their son and for lost wages.

aThere was no life insurance policy because no one plans to lose a sweet baby so soon. To relieve some of the burden of planning and money and time lost from work in an already difficult time, we would like to collect money for them to help get them through this time,a the family member wrote on GoFundMe.

So far they already collected $20,595.
Lucky Teriyaki

By: Wayne Morin

(Scroll down for video) A businessman sat down on the floor crying and begging people for forgiveness after his restaurant suffered losses.

Skagit County Sheriff Will Reichardt vented his frustration on Facebook, after four deputies were allegedly told not to come back to the restaurant in Sedro-Woolley, Washington.

Reichardt said that when the officers finished eating their lunch at Lucky Teriyaki, the owners son told them not to come back.

He told the officers that the police presence was making customers uncomfortable.

Soon after the message was posted, the owner, Xuechuang Li, and his son, began getting death threats and people threatened to boycott the restaurant as a show of support for police unless they apologize.

Li, who was very upset, claimed that the entire incident was a misunderstanding. He blamed the incident on his poor English.

He said that a group of customers were uncomfortable with police officers so his son asked the officers if they were leaving.

Li said that his son did not intend to ban officers from their restaurant.

The father has closed his restaurant for the weekend as he was scared for his life.

He also met with police and apologized. He also offered free food to cops who are still willing to come into his restaurant.

Li pointed out that he is a supporter of the police force and that he had donated money to them a few time.

Police posted a note on Facebook that the matter was resolved to their satisfaction, but that did not stop the backlash and loss of business to the Li family.
Suwarti with her passport showing her as a woman

By: Feng Qian

(Scroll down for video) A woman pretended to be a man so she can marry another woman as being gay is still taboo is Indonesia.

The woman who was identified as Suwarti, was arrested after ahisa wife discovered that he lied about who he is, police said.

40-year-old Suwarti dressed as a man who went by the name Muhamad Efendi Saputra, and said that he was a police officer.

She dated a woman named Heniyati, 25, for a few months, before the couple tied the knot in a ceremony in Java.

However, a few months after they got married, the wife found a passport, showing that her husband was really a woman.

The horrified wife called police.

According to chief detective Muhamad Kariri, Suwarti admitted to the deception and is now facing up to 7 years in prison for charges including falsifying marriage documents and fraud.

Suwarti, who has a 17-year-old child from her previous marriage, admitted that he did not invite his family to the wedding. Instead, he paid people to be at the wedding so that his wife does not find out the truth.
HUNTINGTON, W. Va. (WSAZ) -- Hundreds of people in Huntington were at Saint Clouds Commons Saturday morning to support a fallen neighbor.

Saturday was the annual Sherry Shumaker Memorial Pancreatic 5-K run and walk.

Sherry Shumaker was an educator and Huntington resident who died after losing a tough battle with pancreatic cancer.

Saturday's event not only honored her memory, but also helped raised funds and awareness for pancreatic cancer research.

"It's not only a great addition to the fire department but it's a great addition to the community as a whole. State of the art, maybe one of the best stations in West Virginia so it's a proud day for south Charleston," Frank Mullens, South Charleston's Mayor, said.

All the funds raised Saturday will go to the sherry Shumaker memorial fund.

So far, they've raised more than $24,000 for pancreatic cancer research.
In the past few months, Mayor Charlie Hales has talked about changing the way the city of Portland tries to bring struggling, rundown neighborhoods back to life.

He calls it "place-making."

The mayor wants the Portland Development Commission, the city's urban-renewal agency, to select a handful of neighborhoods where it might shape new shopping districts, new places to live andmost of alla new sense of identity.

"Who else is in the place-making business?" Hales told WW in October. "Pick a few sites where you think you can make projects happen, and do the deals. We've got to rebuild those muscles."

It's part of an evolving agenda for a mayor who in his first year has yet to show many accomplishments. It's an idea that appeals to Portland's sense of neighborhood livability.

But as Hales should know, it's also a strategy fraught with risk. Look no further than Lents.

In 1998, the Portland City Council, led by then-City Commissioners Hales and Jim Franscesconi, told the PDC to focus on Lents, a poor and struggling neighborhood nicknamed "Felony Flats" that stretches east from Southeast 82nd Avenue to 122nd Avenue, and south from Southeast Powell Boulevard.

Hales, Franscesconi and the other City Council members, including Mayor Vera Katz, promised to rebuild Lents as if it were its own small-town Main Street, with jobs, housing, retail, restaurantsa pumping economic heart to an area mired in blight, crime and despair.

The city has spent $96 million since then. And as PDC officials acknowledge, the city has so far failed.

"We don't have a lot of successes to talk about on the commercial-revitalization front," PDC executive director Patrick Quinton says of Lents. "I think that's pretty apparent."

Meanwhile, the PDC bought up land, paid for housing and covered the cost of roads and sidewalk repairs. But it has also frittered away millions on redevelopment plans no one wants to build, relocating businesses that failed, spiffing up a no-tell motel, and building a forlorn, unused plaza in front of a pest-control company.

After all that, there are no more places today in Lents that make you want to get out of your car, walk around and spend your money than before the city began its grand experiment.

The city finds itself as the major landowner in Lents, sitting on 12 vacant acres. The PDC is even considering bringing in goats to graze on some of its property.

As Hales tries to revive his place-making strategy, WW used the Oregon public records law to trace 16 years' worth of spending in Lents to see what we got in return for that $96 million.

Lents residents already know.

"Most neighborhoods have main streets where you can go to the laundry, the grocery, to a clothing store, maybe a shoe store," says Judy Welch, former chairwoman of the Lents Neighborhood Association. "We don't have those. It never happened."





Piles of Plans

Much has changed in Lents since 1996, the year the city produced the first plan to transform the Lents Town Center from a dilapidated business district into "the region's showpiece."

Much has gotten better: Lents' population grew by 12 percent, while violent crimes dropped, as they did across Portland. The MAX Green Line opened four stops in the urban-renewal area in 2009.

But what hasn't changed is the hole in the center of everything.

The original plans called for a "town center" at the intersection of Southeast 92nd Avenue and Foster Road that consisted of a grocer, a community center, a bike-rental shop and a bookstorethe streets lined by banners and flower pots and the shop windows shaded by trees and awnings.

Instead, that intersection currently includes a fountain, a smoothie shop, a gas station and perhaps the neighborhood's only landmark, a nightclub and off-track betting parlor called New Copper Penny.

Over the past 16 years, the PDC has produced at least five more sets of studies for the so-called town center developmentat a cost of $3.5 million spent on consultants, appraisers, artist renderings and feasibility studies.

A portion of the tax money raised from the Lents area is dedicated specifically to paying for improvements. (For an explanation of how an urban-renewal area works, see sidebar below.)

The PDC often offers subsidies to developers to induce them to come to urban-renewal areas, but could never attract private investment of any significance in Lents.

John Southgate, who managed Lents' urban renewal for the PDC from 2002 to 2005, says a big problem is geography. "The main streets serving the Lents Town Center are essentially the on- and off-ramp for [Interstate 205]," Southgate says. "It was always going to be more of a slog than what we had in mind."

In most cases, urban-renewal areas launch when developers are banging on the door to get in on deals. Not so in Lents. The City Council dove in without one.

The reasons developers didn't build in 1998 are the same reasons they aren't interested now. Most people living in the area are renters, but retail developers are looking for homeowners. And Lents household earningsthe median income was about $44,000 a year in 2012also haven't turned developers' heads.

Lents resident John Notis recalls giving developers tours of the business district. "They get this look on their face," he says. "And you know it's not going to happen."

Yet the PDC kept coming up with increasingly elaborate plans. By 2009, the city depicted Foster Road sporting an upscale grocer, with a sign reading "Nature Store." In 2010, then-Mayor Sam Adams debuted an animated sequence in his State of the City speech. It showed a streetcar literally falling out of the sky onto the corner of Southeast 92nd Avenue and Foster Road. Today there is neither a streetcar nor a large grocer in the Lents Town Center.

The PDC's Quinton, who has led the agency since 2011, acknowledges the plans created false hopes of fulfilling the primary pledge of a town center.

"Expectations haven't been met," Quinton says. "After all this time, there should be something there."

Quintonwhose agency has charged taxpayers $16.5 million in overhead costs to manage the Lents urban-renewal effortsalso says the PDC and the city shouldn't be held accountable 16 years later for failing to follow the original plan.

"I don't think what you write in 1998 has to be true forever," he says. "The notion of success evolves."









The Chevron

The PDC spent $10.3 million to eliminate what it considers "blight" by buying up older buildings and clearing the lots. It's called land banking, allowing the city to have more control over future development.

As a result, the city has become the biggest single landlord in the business district, owning 40 percent of property in what's supposed to be the new heart of Lents, and the properties go off the tax rolls while the city waits.

Take what happened in 2008, when the PDC paid $1.7 million for properties on the southwest corner of Southeast 92nd Avenue and Foster Roadlots that housed Edmondson's Drapery and a strip club called the 92nd Street Club.

PDC records show the agency spent $20,000 on "relocation" for the strip club, $6,550 on environmental cleanup at the drapery, and $42,926 on demolition of the buildings.

The plan has called for locating an upscale grocer on the site. (New Seasons Market was in negotiations as recently as December 2012.) The problem is, the deal requires a fourth lot, which houses a Chevron gas station. PDC officials and station owner Jaginder Gill say the city hasn't offered to buy the property since Gill purchased it in 2007. The three adjacent lots remain vacant.

"It's representative of the way the PDC does things," says Nick Christensen, former chairman of the Lents Neighborhood Association. "They get three-quarters of the way done, and then they drop it and move on to something else."

Quinton acknowledges the PDC's mistake: He says the central business hub would have grown faster if the PDC hadn't bought the properties.

"Now it's a company town," he says. "That's not what you want. The residents should expect that their major landowner should do something with their land."









The Cockroach Plaza

The city has spent $7.9 million on the streets and sidewalks of Lentsmuch of it real progress, given that more than $1 million of the money was spent on paving the area's dirt roads.

It has also made a $2.6 million investment in sidewalks, bioswales and plazas that mostly run along empty lots and vacant storefronts.

The keystone to the Lents Streetscape Improvements is an unnamed, 2,000-square-foot plaza created by rerouting Southeast 91st Avenue. The gathering space, with tree saplings and a white picket fence, effectively created a courtyard for a 1915 Carnegie library building and the current business it holds, A&A Pest Control.

The exterminator's red sign promises to get rid of "Ants, Roaches, Bed Bugs, & General Pests." It shows a cartoon rat squashing a cockroach. The owner has declined to move.

"They got the cute patio in front," says Kay Barna, owner of nearby antique store Milk Creek Crossing. "I don't know what it achieved. Maybe they know something we don't know. I'm sure they do."

Quinton says the investments in streets and sidewalks were successful whether they attracted business or not.

"People care a lot about sidewalks in East Portland," he says. "If we had the money, I would do those over and over again."









Ararat Bakery

The PDC promised to bring jobs to Lents. Sometimes, that has worked: Bridgetown Natural Foods moved in 2010 from the inner east side to an industrial park on Southeast Foster Road, backed by $250,000 in loans from the PDC. This success for Lents came at the expense of another neighborhood, but the company grew by one-third and now employs about 180 people making granola bars.

Other times, the PDC has stumbled. In 2008, the PDC convinced Ararat Bakery to move from 111 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. to Southeast 92nd Avenue.

Moving Ararat to Lents accomplished dual goals for the PDC: It cleared the way for the Burnside Bridgehead development and created an anchor business for Lents that could appeal to Eastern Europeans, who make up 12 percent of the neighborhood's residents, according to 2012 census data.

The PDC gave Ararat owners Avetis Karapetian and Nelli Grigorian $653,000 in loans for building improvements and capital costs. The agency spent $2.1 million to purchase the 92nd Avenue building in 2009even though the PDC knew the bakery was already two months behind on rent in Lents.

Even before the PDC bought the Lents building, the new Ararat location had become better known for its second use as a nightclub. Police had investigated a rape allegation at the club, made an arrest for aggravated assault and checked a liquor-license violation.

Ararat defaulted on its loans in 2011. Total cost of the deal to taxpayers: $3.2 million.

The PDC still owns the building, leasing it to a carpet outlet, and is close to signing a deal with craft-beer startup ZH Brewing to open a brewpub in the former bakery space this year.

"Ararat didn't work," Quinton says. "People can say, 'What did that get us?' But the fact that we controlled that asset made it possible to go forward when ZH Brewing came to us.'"









Housing and Job Training

One area of success for the city's urban-renewal efforts has been in housing. The PDC spent $27.7 million for housing in Lentsby far its biggest expenditure in a single categorybuilding 1,144 units.

The housing hasn't been enough to help ignite a shopping district.

One of the original promises the city made was that an urban-renewal area would make Lents a wealthier place. The median household income in Lents fell 12.4 percent between 2000 and 2012, to $44,464. In the same period, median income citywide has declined 3.9 percent.

In 1999, the PDC spent $971,000 for job trainingspecifically, a building shop and classroom space in the basement of Marshall High School, located in the northwest corner of Lents near Southeast 91st Avenue.

For one year, the Lents Tech Manufacturing & Learning Center offered welding and technician training until railcar- and barge-builder Gunderson stopped funding it, PDC records show.

Classes were rare after that, and the entire facility shut down when Marshall closed in 2011.

The city also made $202,976 in loans and $402,406 in grants to Portland YouthBuilders, an alternative high school and job-training program. Last November, the PDC announced a $300,000 grant to fund a community centerincluding classes and job servicesfor the parents of children at Earl Boyles Elementary School.

Meanwhile, the number of jobs in Lents has dropped 6 percent since 2007. While those were tough recession years, it was a far steeper drop in jobs than occurred as a whole in the Portland metro area, which saw a 2.7-percent job loss during that time, according to the Oregon Employment Department.

The promise of jobs has left residents cynical. "We ask for a grocery store," says Cora Potter, a past chairwoman of the Lents citizen advisory committee to the PDC, "and they throw another job-training program at us."









Lents Little League

In 2009, the PDC spent $931,771 to move existing ball fields a half-mile north, to Lents Park, because it wanted to make way for a development that has never been built.

The PDC wanted the 3-acre site for a community center, an apartment complex and officesless than a block from a new light-rail station.

Developer Ed McNamara, an affordable-housing builder, agreed in 2010 to develop the site as an apartment complex with ground-floor retail. The PDC gave McNamara's team a $40,000 grant and a $22,586 loan (which it forgave) to develop plans that went nowhere.

McNamara, who is now Hales' top aide overseeing the PDC, says the deal fell apart because the agency was given conflicting instructions by the City Council. He says that will change.

"If people are going to invest," McNamara says, "we want to give them some clarity and some certainty about what's going to happen over the next five years."

Last year, the PDC suggested the empty field be used as a "U.S. Innovation Park," created by British firm BRE, to showcase green demonstration homes.









Dressing Up a No-Tell Motel and Other Storefront Improvements

No one disputes Lents has been cleaned up to some degree. The PDC spent $1.6 million to help business owners fix up their properties, part of hundreds of business grants it gave out: $39,025 (plus $200,000 in loans) to Standard TV & Appliance, $20,000 to Izzy's Pizza, $28,861 to Tidee Didee Diaper Service and $33,328 to Working Class Acupuncture.

Steve's Imports, an auto-body shop owned by anti-tax Damascus Mayor Steve Spinnett, received $83,840 from the PDC. Orozco Auto Wrecking had a $250,000 loan written off in 2008; Northwest Bumper Co. had the balance of a $533,500 loan forgiven in 2011.

"It's almost like every time somebody needs to paint their building," says Lents resident Potter, "they go to the PDC for a 75-percent discount."

But a standout is the Del Rancho Motel, which has received $31,279 in PDC grants for beautification and business expansion. Portland police say the Del Rancho is one of the five motels that keep them busy along 82nd Avenue. Since it received its last PDC grant in 2004, it has been the site of 105 reported crimes, including meth use and sale, child molestation and a rape.





What now?

Last fall, pink signs went up at two empty lots in Lents that read "What Would You Like to See?"

In 1998 and 2000, the PDC paid $365,000 for the lots, at 8930 SE Foster Road and 9316 SE Woodstock Blvd. Without ideas about what to do with the land, it last year found a Web startup, called What Would You Like to See?, to handle crowdsourcing.

The most popular suggestions are a "rotating art installation" and "inexpensive [office] space made from old cargo shipping containers." Someone has also suggested a "tunnel to the center of the earth." (One pink sign has since fallen down; the other is missing.)

Francesconi, currently running for chairman of Multnomah County, says he doesn't regret sending the PDC into Lents.

"Listen, I'm proud I championed that urban renewal should be in poor neighborhoods," he says. "The PDC should have concentrated more on singles and less on home runs."

Hales says his place-making venture will be different this time. "I can't do anything about the past," he says, "but I can take the cards we're dealt. Which is PDC owning a lot of land there in an improving real-estate market. You're going to see us move from talking about it to trying to make it happen."

Absent that, what are some paths to reform?

The city could admit failure and walk away. It could pause smaller projects until a major development gets under way.

Another way to jump-start development in Lents is simply to ramp up the level of government subsidy it's offering.

Quinton believes Lents is nearing a tipping point where developers will show more interest. "My prediction is," he says, "in a few years, we'll be talking about how to manage growth in the town center, as opposed to asking, 'When will it happen?'"

While Lents floundered, other parts of the city, such as Northeast Alberta, North Missisippi and Montavilla in outer Southeast, attracted the kind of amenities Lents residents can only dream aboutand with a fraction of the public investment Lents got.

The PDC can point to urban-renewal successes downtown and in the Pearl District, and even South Waterfront, despite its growing pains, that produced hundreds of millions of dollars in new taxable real estateand saw property values grow more than twice as fast as in Lents. Those urban-renewal districts benefited from proximity to high-income workers and shoppers.

"Urban renewal can't solve poverty problems," says former City Commissioner Erik Sten, who voted to send the PDC into Lents in 1998. "You had no consensus on 'What are we trying to do?' If the answer is, 'Help Lents,' that's not an answer."

Another way to make a difference: Hold the City Council accountable.

City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade has tried, sort of. She evaluated the PDC's performance in December 2012 and issued a glowing report on urban renewal, saying the system improved property values.

Her office looked at five urban-renewal areas.

But the city auditor never looked at Lents.





So how is urban renewal supposed to work?

The city draws a boundary around the area it wants to change. As far as other local governments are concerned, the amount of taxes they can collect from the area is frozen. As property values rise, all increases in tax revenuethe incrementgoes directly to urban renewal and not to schools, the county or other taxing districts. The more development the area spurs, the more money the city collects.

The Portland Development Commission can spend the money directly on the area or sell bonds and use the revenue to pay down the debt. The city is currently carrying $100.9 million in debt for the Lents urban-renewal area.

Portland has been using urban-renewal areas since 1961, in downtown's south auditorium area, when it built fountains and plazas and wiped out the city's traditional Jewish and Italian neighborhoods. In downtown, urban renewal has been successful: The Pearl District, for example, saw property values rise by $1.7 billion in 13 yearsmore than 441 percent. AARON MESH.

WWeek 2015
J/Boats News is a digest of worldwide events, regattas, and news for sailing enthusiasts and members of our J Community. Contributions regarding your racing, cruising or human interest stories on-board J's are welcome- please send to "editor@jboats.com".
The Yakima Valley Office of Emergency Management at the Yakima County Resource Center is photographed in Union Gap, Wash. Friday, July 8, 2016. (SHAWN GUST/Yakima Herald-Republic)
Boeing chief company historian Michael Lombardi stands in front of a World War II-era Boeing B-29 Superfortress at the Museum of Flight, a private nonprofit air and space museum in Tukwila, Wash., near Seattle, on Tuesday, July 12, 2016. (Bloomberg photo by Mike Kane)
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Will this failed military coup attempt wash away all the crumbling blocs built by the government against freedom of media, fairness of the judiciary, and accountability of those in charge that basically anchors the corner stones of a functioning democracy? That seems to be the exact expectation of the government in place in the name of democracy. The irony is deep and puzzling. Here is why:

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blames the Turkish born US based Sunni religious cleric Fethullah Gulens group as being behind Friday's failed military coup attempt. I am addressing those in Pennsylvania, he said, in an apparent reference to where Gulen is living in the US. The betrayal you have shown to this nation and to this community, that is enough. If you have the courage, come back to your country.

Erdogan had been in a marriage of convenience with the Gulen movement to consolidate power since he came to power fourteen years ago, but the partners fell out during the corruption scandal of December 2013. Since then, Erdogan has declared the Gulen movement a terrorist organization and announced an outright war against the group. "Since 2004, Erdogan helped the Gulenists to enter the military ... plenty entered the war academy," a retired military intelligence officer told Yedioth Ahronoth, speaking on condition of anonymity. "I saw the list (of people) that carried the (attempted) coup and the appointees for taking power across the country. They are all Gulenists." To this retired intelligence officer, this is the reason why Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar and other force commanders were easily taken hostage as these Gulenists are now well embedded in the military chain of command.

Fethullah Gulen and President Erdogan (Photo: AP, Reuters)

Erdogan himself pointed out that these Gulenists now seem to be fighting for their lives in the state institutions. The Supreme Military Council (YAS) was scheduled to meet to make the next round of appointments in two weeks, and they were already preparing either to force the Gulenists to retire or oust them. With this bloody scandal, they will only help to intensify and speed up that process.

Yet, when Erdogan and the Gulenists were partners, they orchestrated a legal case against hundreds of active and retired military personnel accusing them for planning a military coup to overthrow the Islamist based government. They nicknamed the case "Sledgehammer." While the courts acquitted all the charged military personnel after the breakthrough of the 2013 corruption scandal, and admitted that the accusations were based on forged documents, the Sledgehammer case detailed plans to bomb two Istanbul mosques and Ataturks mausoleum. The military did not do it then or today, but the Gulenist establishment did indeed bomb the Turkish parliament and the Bosporus three times on Friday night.

A military officer who was acquitted of these allegations said on condition of anonymity that the courts had actually collected critical information about the Gulenist establishment in state institutions. He points to an Izmir penal code decision from last week ordering the arrest of 17 military personnel for their role in planting forged evidence in these cases. "It would have took us couple of years to fight against these Gulenists through the judiciary, now they brought themselves out into broad day light. This is the only good side to this bizarre set of events from Friday night," he said.

Erdogan was on vacation in Marmaris when this all happened, but he flew back to Istanbul Ataturk airport soon after. He was greeted outside the airport as a hero. The military intelligence officer and other sources said that this coup attempt will help Erdogan boost his campaign to change the constitution and change the country's governance from a parliamentary system to a presidential one. Democracy has no name in this game plan.
CHARLESTON -- Injuries that Piersen Eaker suffered because of an incident at the day care he attended were "the result of being shaken violently," a doctor said Thursday.

The doctor also said it "would be impossible" for the retinal hemorrhages she found in the 22-month-old boy to be caused by a fall, which is how the day care owner says he was injured.

Melissa Ajunwa-Bohonos, an ophthalmologist at Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana, testified Thursday during the jury trial for Patricia L. Brant, who's accused of severely injuring the boy while he was in her care.

Brant, 44, is charged with aggravated battery of a child after the injuries to Piersen on Feb. 14, 2014, at Treasured Tots Day Care in Charleston, which she operated at the time.

On Thursday, Ajunwa-Bohonos said she examined Piersen the day after he was injured and found "multiple" retinal hemorrhages, or bleeding areas in the back part of the boy's inner eyes.

The doctor said the number and distribution of the injuries and the fact that there were hemorrhages in both eyes were "consistent" with being shaken and also eliminated other causes for retinal hemorrhaging.

She said the symptoms Piersen displayed were "classic for shaken baby syndrome."

During questioning by Assistant State's Attorney Tom Bucher, a member of the prosecution team, Ajunwa-Bohonos also said Piersen didn't have any earlier medical issues or trauma that could have caused the hemorrhages, leaving shaking as the only explanation, she said.

Bucher asked Ajunwa-Bohonos if Piersen's injuries were "consistent" with what Brant says happened, to which she replied that they were not.

According to earlier evidence in the trial, Brant says she left the room where Piersen and other day care children were located to use the restroom and returned to find him on the floor outside the playpen in which she'd placed him.

Brant described finding Piersen as sitting upright but slumped over, fists clenched, barely breathing and unresponsive.

During cross examination, defense attorney Todd Reardon asked Ajunwa-Bohonos if various types of falls could cause retinal hemorrhaging. She replied that they could, but not to the extent as those Piersen received.

Reardon also asked if she knew how much force an adult of Brant's size would have to exert to cause those kinds of injuries, to which Ajunwa-Bohonos said she did not.

"Because you're not a bio-mechanical engineer?" Reardon then asked.

"I'm an ophthalmologist," she replied.

The defense has indicated that during its part of the trial it plans to have a bio-mechanical engineer testify about the force of and possible injuries from falls.

Meanwhile, Thursday's witnesses also included Candis Eaker, Piersen's mother, who said she and her husband found their son "barely breathing" when they first saw him at Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center after his injuries.

Eaker said Piersen spent about three months at Carle and his leaving that hospital was followed by four months of treatment and rehabilitation at facilities in St. Louis and Chicago.

Now, Piersen can't speak or walk and needs tubes for breathing and eating, she also said.

"Somebody has be by his side 24 hours a day," Eaker said.

During Reardon's questioning, Eaker said she never told Brant about a time when she disciplined Piersen because he climbed some furniture. But she also said the family has a playpen at home and Piersen never tried to climb out of it.

Also testifying Thursday was Jodi Lanman, a day care licensing representative with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, who oversaw Brant's licensing requirements.

Lanman said Brant was in "good standing" and had no earlier reports on her record on Feb. 14, 2014. Brant told her she found Piersen outside the playpen when she reported the incident to her and when they talked two other times that day, she said.

During one of their conversations, Brant said she was having family troubles and described Piersen as "whiny" and "clingy," Lanman said. She added that Brant said Piersen cried most of the day and at times it was "ear-piercing."

Also Thursday, State's Attorney Brian Bower indicated plans to have Timothy Eaker, Piersen's father, and two physicians testify on Friday but that should end the prosecution's case.

The defense might be able to begin its case Friday but the trial is still expected to continue into next week.
Many of the tanks used during Fridays attempted coup in Turkey were significantly upgraded by Israel during the height of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

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Around 170 M60 tanks manufactured in the US were upgraded during the beginning of the last decade as part of a framework agreement under which Turkey also acquired rockets, UAVs and electric systems and intelligence information. Moreover, the Turkish government was engaged in discussions with Israel in a bid to acquire acquire a spy satellite, the Arrow system and Merkava tanks.

The close ties at that time between the two countries even prompted the Israeli ministry of defense to approve the sale of a package containing the world's most advanced tank upgrades - upgrades even the IDF couldn't afford.

Photo: Yoav Zitun

The unique Israeli knowledge and supplies transformed the obsolete capabilities of the tanks and brought them into the modern era by augmenting them with 120mm cannons, reactive artillery mechanisms and fire control systems.

The total sum of money involved in the deal, which got underway in 2002, amounted to $700 million. This was when the two countries enjoyed positive relations. However, by the time the upgraded tanks were completed on the production lines in Turkey, relations had already begun to suffer a serious deterioration.

Since the Turkish government received the upgraded tank capabilities from Israel, the tanks have been employed against the Kurds in Iraq during which they demonstrated their effectiveness against modern anti-tank weaponry and saved many lives of Turkish soldiers.
Two soldiers were killed on Sunday morning after a grenade exploded in the Golan Heights near them in the Hermon mountains. Another three soldiers, from the the 601st Combat Engineering Battalion, were taken to Rambam hospital in Haifa in serious and light-to-moderate condition.

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One of the soldiers who was killed was reserve soldier Staff Sgt. Husam Tafash from Beit Jann, a Druze village on Mount Meron in northern Israel. The other soldier killed was lone soldier Sgt. Shlomo Rindenow from the combat engineering unit, a lone soldier who lived on Kibbutz Sde Yoav in south-central Israel. His brother lives in Netzer Hazani in central Israel while his parents live in New Jersey. Rindenow was one of ten children. Both families have been notified. Some of the injured were reserve soldiers.

An initial investigation stated that around 7:10am on Sunday morning, the military patrol jeep came from a routine brush cleaning operation on the border with Syria. The jeep approached an IDF outpost on the foothills of Mt. Hebron. There was the an altercation ensued between the driver and the soldiers on the force. At a certain point, as the jeep got close to the outpost, the driver got out of the jeep, pulled the pin out of a fragmentation grenade, and walked towards the commander's door. He then went to the front of the jeep, and when the commander's door opened, the driver pushed his way inside and released the grenade.

Tafash (L) and Rindenow

Initial reports suggest that the explosion took place inside a military jeep when a grenade accidentally detonated. However the exact circumstances are still being investigated as soldiers and officers are being questioned.

Husam Tafash killed in the accident

The Land Forces Division and IDF Northern Command set up a special investigations unit headed by the Commander of the 3rd Division, Col. Yoav Yoram to look into the exact circumstances of the event. There was an initial fear that the explosion was the result of an IED. However, a partial story has emerged after speaking with the two soldiers who were lightly injured in the incident.

"We don't know if there was a previous argument between the driver and the force commander," the high ranking officer said. "the direct circumstances are that the explosion occurred as a result of a thrown grenade."

Injured soldier evacuated from Golan (:  ,  )

X

The manager of the trauma center at Rambam hospital, Dr. Hani Bahus, said, One of the wounded individuals is in moderate-to-serious-condition and is suffering from shrapnel wounds all over his body. He was taken into the operating room where therapists and orthopedic surgeons are taking care of him. The injuries have also been sustained in his upper body, he continued.

Bahaus also said that the hospital received three wounded soldiers from the event: "One of them is in moderate to serious condition and suffers from shrapnel wounds all over his body. He has been sent to the operating room and is being treated by other orthopedic surgeons amongst others. The other two have light injuries. They have blast wounds, and are in the hospital under observation."

MDA paramedics evacuate wounded soldiers from the scene (Photo:Photo: Elad Gershgoren)

The other two individuals, he said, were in light condition suffering from injuries from the blast and were being treated by a doctor. They are being hospitalized and are being observed. If nothing out of the ordinary happens, they should be able to be discharged within 24 hours.

Additionally, Sunday was the first day of a major training exercise in the Golan Heights which is supposed to end on Tuesday. There will be higher than usual numbers of security forces in the region. The IDF says that the drill has been planned for a long time as part of normal operating drills for 2016 for the purpose of maintaining the readiness of IDF forces.
Just days after celebrating three years in remission and her 65th birthday, Sharon Berger from London received the devastating news that her leukemia had returned. Now, Sharon has only six weeks to find a stem cell donor and is appealing to the global Jewish community for help.

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Sharon, who is currently undergoing chemotherapy in a London hospital, is most likely to find a match of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, like her.

This isn't the first time Sharon has to undergo a bone marrow transplant. She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in 2012, and was told that the only available cure was a stem cell transplant from an unrelated donor.

Sharon with her husband Stephen and their two grandchildren (Photo courtesy of the family)

This led her children Jonni and Caroline to kick off a campaign urging potential donors around the world to join the bone marrow donor registry, with thousands answering their call to "#spit4mum."

Succeeding in rallying the Jewish communities worldwide, the campaign led to a 1,100 percent increase in British Jewish recruits. The match, however, was found far from homein Israel.

Now, Sharon, her husband Stephen and their two children are gearing up for another fight. They launched a new campaign, reaching out to traditional media, social media, synagogues, Jewish organizations and youth movements.

"Her body has not responded to the anonymous matching donor which seemed to have saved her life, and now she needs another transplant," said son Jonni.

A recent study found that one in three patients who received a second transplant survived for at least five more years.

"This means that if we can find Mom another match in the next six weeks, there is a good chance that she will have a second chance at life post-transplant," Jonni said.

Jonni said his mother was "shocked, of course, and worried, because she's fully aware of the situation and knows how painful the side effects can be, but she's resilient and determined. She's prepared for the challenge. Let's hope the community can rise to the challenge too."

A British-based blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan has been combing the worlds combined stem cell registries for someone whose tissue type matches Sharons, but the search is proving difficult because of her combination of rare tissue types.

The UK-based charity said in a statement, "To join our register, you must be aged 16-30, in good health and weigh at least 50kg. We are particularly looking for people from Jewish and other ethnic minority backgrounds to join, as they are currently underrepresented on the donor register."
Shin Bet Chief Nadav Argaman revealed last week that there have been more than 40 women who carried out or attempted to carry out terror attacks in the recent wave of terror. Almost every single one of the women was doing it to restore familial honor, and in some of the attacks, male members of the family brought the women to the site of the attack.

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Argaman claims that these women are being sent to their deaths to atone for something they've done and to bring honor back to the family, along with money from the Palestinian Authority.

The head of the Shin Bet made these statements at his first situation report to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week. According to the information he presented, the crests of the wave of terror were connected to tensions on the Temple Mount. He warned that if things heat up on the Temple Mount, a new wave of terror might break. Argaman also added that Hamas is having a strategic crisis, and is unwilling to have a war at this time. He noted that there is wide ranging security cooperation with the Palestinians, and the PA is working intensively against Hamas in the West Bank.

Coordination with the PA security forces is helping to prevent attacks (Photo: Police Spokesperson)

Moreover, the Shin Bet director highlighted the importance of giving Israeli work permits to Palestinians in the West Bank, and said that these permits help calm the situation and prevent attacks. There are 120,000 Palestinians who work in Israel either legally or illegally, and these workers provide for one third of the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Another point Argaman reported; the Shin Bet and Israeli security services prevented 240 major terror attacks Between January and May 2016 including stopping 11 suicide bombers, 10 kidnapping attempts, and more than 60 attacks similar to the attack at Sarona Market. Most of the attacks were planned by Hamas.

Since the most recent wave of terror began in October 2015, there have been over 300 attacks (not including Molotov cocktail attacks) of which 180 were stabbing attacks, more than 90 were shooting attacks, and about 30 were car ramming attacks. The majority of these attacks were carried out by lone wolves.

Argaman went on to say that the reason for the decrease in the number of attacks over the past month is due to  amongst other things  the high number of attacks which were preemptively prevented, and a higher level of deterrence against lone wolf attackers.

There is no alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza... Except ISIS (Photo:EPA)

Nevertheless, despite the decrease in the number of attacks, the number of threats coming out of the West Bank is larger than before the escalation, a trend which points to the fact that the situation in the West Bank is highly combustible..

According to the report, Argaman also said that there is a feeling in the West Bank that Mahmoud Abbas's time as a leader is coming to an end, and that there is a currently a transitional period taking place towards a new leadership.

In regards to Gaza, Argaman says that the quiet being felt in that area is misleading

He also said that due to the economic and civil situation in Gaza, there is growing dissatisfaction with the Hamas leadership. However, despite the public criticism, the Shin Bet doesn't believe that there will be a public uprising against Hamas due to fear of the organization, due to the people's financial dependence on the organization, and due to the fact that the only other group with the manpower and resources to effectively rule the Strip is ISIS, a group which the residents of Gaza don't.
Following the failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish government has accelerated its crackdown on those allegly responsible, with Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag saying Sunday that 6,000 people had been detained in the investigation, including three of the country's top generals and hundreds of soldiers.

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In addition to those mentioned by Bozdag, dozens of arrest warrants have been issued for judges and prosecutors deemed o be government opponents. The government has also dismissed nearly 3,000 judges and prosecutors from their posts, while conspirators charged with attempting to overthrow the government await trial.

Turkish citizens celebrate the coup's undoing (Photo: AP)

"The cleansing (operation) is continuing," Bozdag said on television, stating that "Some 6,000 detentions have taken place."

The botched coup, which saw warplanes fly over key government installations and tanks roll up in major cities, ended hours lafter it began, when loyal government forces regained control of the military and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan.

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets into the early hours Sunday in half a dozen cities. Rather than toppling him, the attempted coup that left some 265 dead and 1,440 wounded appears to have bolstered Erdogan's popularity and grip on power.

A crowd gathers on the street to protest the attempted coup

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline "Traitors of the country" while the Hurriyet newspaper declared "Democracy's victory."

"Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government ... but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back," said Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at a Sunday rally in Istanbul.

Gen. Umit Dunda said the dead included at least 104 conspirators, describing them as mainly officers from the Air Force, the military police and armored units.

Officials claimed the conspirators were loyal to moderate US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of attempting to overthrow the government. Gulen, a staunch democracy advocate who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey. He strongly denies the charges.

Turkish Army soldiers surrendering (Photo: Gettyimages)

Funeral ceremonies and prayers for those killed in the coup were held in Ankara and Istanbul on Sunday. Prayers were read simultaneously from Turkey's 85,000 mosques at noon to honor those who died in an attempted military coup.

Speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, A government official said that autopsies have been completed on 165 people, including 115 whose bodies have been reclaimed by their families.

Celebrating in Istanbul (Photo: Yoav Zitun)

Forty policemen, including twin brothers, were killed when the renegade soldiers attacked a special forces station in Ankara.

The victims also included Erdogan campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year old son Abdullah, killed when renegade soldiers opened fire on protesters at the Bosporus bridge in Istanbul Friday night. The elder brother of one of Erdogan's chief advisers was also killed by gunfire while protesting the coup in front of the Istanbul Municipality building. Ilhan Varank died during clashes that lasted five hours.

Security forces on Sunday rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged coup links. The state news agency Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for their alleged involvement with the group reportedly responsible for the failed coup. The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the perpetrators of Friday's failed coup "will receive every punishment they deserve."

A mortar from the coup attempt in Turkey (Photo: Reuters)

The coup attempt began late Friday with tanks rolling into the streets of the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul as Erdogan was on vacation.

Explosions and gunfire erupted throughout the night. It quickly became clear, however, that the military was not united in the effort to overthrow the government. In a dramatic iPhone interview broadcast on TV, Erdogan urged supporters into the streets to confront the troops and tanks, and forces loyal to the government began reasserting control.

In an unusual show of unity, Turkey's four main political parties released a joint declaration denouncing the coup attempt, as did Turkey's NATO allies, including US President Barack Obama.

Before the weekend's chaos, Turkeya NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against ISIShad been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissidents, restricted the news media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen but at a news conference Saturday in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt," said Gulen.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present "legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny."

Flights resumed late Saturday into Istanbul's Ataturk Airport after being halted for nearly 24 hours but Turkish Airlines said Sunday it had to cancel 196 flights because of a backlog of traffic.
At 5:04pm on Sunday, a siren was sounded in the Golan Heights. The alarm was sounded after an unmanned aircraft was identified entering Israeli airspace from Syria.

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Following the identification of the aircraft, the Patriot missile defense system was activated, and two missiles were launched.

"Two Patriot air defence missiles were fired towards a drone which infiltrated Israeli airspace in the central Golan Heights. The drone returned to Syria," the Israeli army said.

Patriot missile fired near Safed (Photo: Safed Municipality)

IDF soldiers clearing debris (Photo: Avihu Shapira)

Missile debris (Photo: Avihu Shapira)

Following the incident, Air Force fighter jets were scrambled. Israel has often responded to errant mortar fire from the civil war in neighboring Syria on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights with tank and mortar shells and with air strikes, but the use of Patriot anti-aircraft interceptor missiles is unusual.

Missile's contrail (:  )

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Missile debris landed in the Golan Heights. There were no casualties or damage.
Armenian police said that about 20 armed supporters of a jailed opposition leader attacked a police station in Armenia's capital on Sunday, killing one officer, wounding three and taking several others hostage.

The attackers demanded the release of Jirair Sefilian, who was arrested last month, and the opposition group repeated its call for the government to resign.

Police cordoned off the area around the station in Yerevan's Erebuni district and said negotiations are being conducted with the assailants for them to give themselves up and the release of the hostages.
Amal Abu Saleh, 22, and Bashira Mahmoud, 48, Druze residents of Majdal Shams who were documented lynching a wounded Syrian being carried in an IDF ambulance in June of last year, have admitted to manslaughter under the terms of a plea agreement accepted on Sunday by the Nazareth District Court.

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According to the plea bargain, Abu Saleh will be imprisoned for seven years and Mahmoud will serve two.

The slain Syrian

In June 2015, dozens of residents of Majdal Shams ambushed an Israel Defense Forces ambulance carrying two lightly wounded Syrian nationals. While driving through the town, the ambulance was stopped by a number of ATVs and soon surrounded by an angry mob. The medical staff locked themselves inside the ambulance, and the accompanying military police told the rioters that the patients were soldiers. Rejecting the claim, the mob rushed the ambulance and smashed one of its windows.

The driver escaped the mob and drove to the nearby village of Neve Ativ, where it was seized again and the two Syrian patients were attacked. One of them was killed, and two IDF soldiers were wounded.

Scenes from the lynching ( )

X

Abu Saleh and Mahmoud were indicted for murder. According to the indictment, the victims, who were allegedly affiliated with the Islamist rebel organization Nusra Front, were attacked in revenge for attacks perpetrated by the organization against Druze communities in Syria.

Bashira Mahmoud (Photo: Mohammed Shinawi)

Amal Abu Saleh in court (Photo: Hassan Shaalan)

The lynching was partially filmed by one of the perpetrators. They are seen to be shouting, stomping the wounded men and beating them with a stick. In total, 30 suspects were arrested, though all but the two mentioned above were released.
Yigal Levinstein is not the only prominent Religious-Zionist rabbi condemning gays and lesbians: Chief Rabbi of Ramat Gan Yaakov Ariel, one of the leaders of Religious Zionism, stated at a conference in Ramla last month that the members of the gay and lesbian community are "disabled people suffering from a real problem that must be solved with psychological and pharmacological treatments."

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Ariel addressed Levinstein's statements on Sunday and stated that, though his style was blunt, Ariel identified with their content. "Our job is to strengthen the family," he said. "A normative family is a father and a mother and children. A non-normative family is not an ordered and proper family. It has psychological and other problems."

According to Ramat Gan's chief rabbi, pride in one's sexual orientation is unusual and presenting it as "progressive" causes many young persons to choose not to identify as straight. "Young boys going through puberty who are looking for their identityinstead of helping them to find their natural and normative identity, they push them to go in the opposite direction and ruin their lives.

Yaakov Ariel (Photo: Ilan Marciano)

"We must do everything to help them There are medications, psychological treatment, and ways like this and others, medical or spiritual or explanatory actions."

Ariel claimed that Pride parades are what are creating legitimacy. "Being proud of this and receiving public legitimacy?! This is creating the problem! Have mercy on them," he exclaimed. "There's no place for Pride parades. What are they proud of? We need to find the proper and true way to deal with this issue properly. When a person doesn't have a natural connection to the opposite sex, this is a disability. Let's make this clear. He can't establish a normative family. So the disabled need treatment, need helpall of this is correct, but pride? What's the pride of the disabled? What's there to be proud of?"

Yigal Levinstein

The rabbi explained his viewpoint: "A child needs to born to two parents, and the meaning is male and female. A child of two females, a child of two maleshe is not a normative child. A child like this doesn't have parents, and I'm not talking about the psychological side, which is problematic of itself."

Ariel condemned the murder of Shira Banki in last year's Jerusalem Pride parade. He called it "a serious crime," but he hurried to clarify that he did not mean to grant legitimacy to the Pride parade: "Judaism rejects this approach. I won't go into the question if this is congenital or this is generated during one's life. It's obvious that there are some of each. In lots of cases, it's the result of mishaps that took place in the family during childhood."

The late Shira Banki (Photo: YouTube)

The non-profit organization Kamoha  Gay Orthodox Jew, commented on Levinstein's pronouncements, as well: "In both Jewish and general history, same-sex attraction is not considered as unnatural attraction. Judaism saw male homosexual acts as one sin amongst many, similar to the other sins connected to sexual misconduct, and not as a sin against nature. Only in European society of the modern era did they begin to see it as something unnatural, and that spread to Judaism, too. The Torah does not define naturalness, and it's hard to speak in the Torah's name in this regard."

Ariel's remarks follow a difficult week for the LGBT community in which the Be'er Sheva Pride parade was cancelled and homophobic remarks from the incoming chief rabbi of the IDF were uncovered.
A group that monitors online extremist activity says al-Qaida's North Africa branch has reported the death of a Tunisian commander in Mali.

The SITE Intelligence Group quoted a statement from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb on Sunday, saying Abu Bakr al-Shinqiti was killed during a raid on a Malian army barracks near the border with Burkina Faso. The statement did not specify the date or location of the raid, nor did it report any Malian casualties.

On July 10, an official in Mali's Koro region near the Burkina Faso border said unidentified gunmen had killed two Malian soldiers in a raid on a military checkpoint.
CHARLESTON -- The past few days brought chances for first looks, or new looks, at farm machinery that was used a generation ago.

With about 150 pieces of equipment on the display, the annual East Central Illinois Antique Farm Equipment Club show was there for the young and old, show director Justin Thomas said.

"Our goal is just to bring back the previous years' farming and to give the new generation the experience," he said.

Also, he added, when older farmers see the equipment, it regularly leads to comments such as, "I bought one of those brand new."

The show took place at the Coles County Fairgrounds Thursday through Sunday and also featured tractor parades, kids' games and tractor pulls, including a new pull that Thomas said served as a club fundraiser.

Not only do visitors enjoy seeing the equipment, the show is also an opportunity for club members and area farmers to see one another, he also said.

"It's kind of like a gathering of the local ag community," Thomas said.

This year's event was the 18th annual show for the club, and for the last eight years the "Stacks and Packs" club car and truck show took place in conjunction with the farm equipment show.

The car show was part of Saturday's activities and serves as a fundraiser for the area Children's Advocacy Center, which works with children during abuse and neglect investigations.

The proceeds from the car show usually total about $1,000 and pay for items not covered by the organization's grant funding, Director Pam Riddle said. That includes travel expenses from covering the Charleston-based center's 10-county area, she said.

"It's amazing," Riddle said of the club's efforts. "It's growing every year."

The center once sponsored its own car show and then "decided to join forces" with the club, she added. Club member Tina Huston said the car show usually draws about 100 entries but on Saturday about 150 were expected.

Huston said the show helps people learn about the Children's Advocacy Center and gives car owners a chance "to see other vehicle bugs."

"It's a dying art," she said of what was on display Saturday. "You don't see a lot of vehicles like this."
President Reuven Rivlin and his wife Nechama met on Sunday with Uri and Mika Banki, whose 16-year-old daughter Shira was stabbed to death at last year's Jerusalem Pride parade. The president called for tolerance, particularly in light of the recent slew of homophobic pronouncements from prominent rabbis.

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The president said, "The statements heard from the mouths of rabbis leaders , and spiritual leaders have hurt me deeply. I would ask to repeat and remind everyone, 'Beloved is man, for he was created in (God's) image'; any man, regardless of religion, race, and sex. I am certain that the rabbis that so many pupils look up to, some of them members of the LGBT community themselves, will also find a way to clarify that they don't think differently."

Also present at the meeting were representative of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance (JOH), which was organized to mark the first anniversary of Shira's murder and before the Jerusalem Pride parade that is to take place on Thursday.

The first lady hugging Mika Banki (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

The president added, "Differences based on politics, religion, or sexual orientation do not justify violence and incitement. This is not the way of Israeli society."

Shira Banki

He continued, "Shira was murdered for the right of expression of every woman and man, to express themselves and their sexuality freely. The right of every man and woman to be who they are, to experience the greatest joys in love, to love whom the heart wants, love without borders, love that it is permitted and possible to openly express. We must promote a safe public space in which, even if there's disagreement, it's required to respect every person. We must differentiate between disagreement and violence, hatred, violent, hurtful, and destructive dialogue that at times also incites."

The Rivlins with the JOH representatives and the Bankis (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

Using the Hebrew word for "proud" as a stand-in for LGBT, which is common in Israeli parlance, he asked, "to stop the incitement against the proud community and all support that this incitement receives."

The president added that, since Shira's murder , introductory meetings have taken place between secular and ultra-Orthodox, rightists and leftists, men and women, "who united to learn, pray and act together in Shira's memory." He warned, "We have a lot of work to do. Shira's murder and the terrible terror attack in Orlando indicate that a real effort to educate on tolerance is needed and that great struggles are still before us. I congratulate the representatives of the Open House for their work on behalf of the proud community and for egalitarian, inclusive and tolerant discourse in Israel."

The president greeting Mika Banki (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

Uri, Shira's father, thanked the president for the meeting: "Such a clear, strong, firm, and public official statement for moderation, tolerance, acceptance of others, is something that the State of Israel needs today, maybe more than anything else. It's a statement that is really lacking in lots of places, and the statement that goes out from this house is clear and continuous. This is a statement that is not simple, and it has a price, and we say them from time to time, and for that we thanked the President and this house that maintains the state, and for everything that I as a citizen of the State of Israel expect from him."

The president replied, "Nechama and I are just representing Shira."

L-R: Sara Kala-Meir, Nechama Rivlin, Mika Banki, Reuven Rivlin, Uri Banki (Photo: Amos Ben Gershom/GPO)

The JOH's executive director, Sarah Kala-Meir, said "The parade last year evoked hard feelings; it was a year of mourning, but a year full of the desire to continue and to act. The parade doesn't come to protests and to fight bureaucracy, but rather to fight for people's lives. Because if there weren't a parade, people would not talk and wouldn't know that there's someone to turn to. The parade will take place on Thursday, and we'll all be there."

Responding to Kala-Meir, the president said, "It's important that there be a parade for whoever wants it, without there being someone who could stop it. Everyone who wants will be where they want in the State of Israel."
Reserve soldier Staff Sgt. Husam Tafash told his father he wanted to follow in his footsteps into a military career. After finishing his mandatory army service, Tafash returned as a reserve soldier and driver. On Sunday, Tafash set off a hand grenade, killing himself and lone soldier Sgt. Shlomo Rindenow from a combat engineering unit, who was standing nearby on guard duty.

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Rindenow had made aliyah two years ago from New Jersey. He came from a large family with nine brothers and sisters, five of whom also made Aliyah and served in combat positions. As a lone soldier, he had an adoptive family in Kibbutz Sde Yoav. Friends from the kibbutz described him as "a good-looking guy who always had a shy smile on his face."

Rindenow's brother Jeff also lives in Israel. He talked about the kind of child his brother was: "Shlomo was a kid who was all heart. He came to Israel a year early to volunteer with a special canine search and rescue unit."

Husam Tafash (L) Shlomo Rindenow

Jeff shared that he was still trying to make sense of his brother's death. "It's going to take us a long time to process this. His loved his engineering service and saw it as a challenge. We would see each other all the time, during holidays, Shabbat and birthdays."

Hundreds of people came to the northern Druze village of Beit Jann to offer their condolences to the Tafash family. Husam's father spoke about the effort he put into returning into the army only one month prior. "Husam was a standup guy, a very good-natured kid who like to help everyone."

The father said that Husam was planning on going away with his brothers and cousins when he was called up to the base. "He said he preferred to go on the mission than to go out, and that they would have fun next Saturday. He told them he needed to help out, so he packed up his bag and went to the base so that his friend would be able to leave."

According to an IDF investigation on the matter, the vehicle's driver found the grenade, held it and then exploded for a yet unknown reason. An initial suspicion was that the explosion was the result of an argument between Tafash and another soldier; however his cousin stressed that the brigade commander assured his family that it was ruled to have been an accident.

In addition to Tafash and Rindenow, the unit commander was moderately injured and two more soldiers were lightly injured.

The IDF Ground Forces and Northern Command set up a team headed by Commander of the 3rd Division Col. Yoav Yarom to look into the incident. The IDF is currently looking into Husam's background and interviewing the two soldiers who were lightly injured as to what transpired prior to the explosion, in addition to why Husam was holding a grenade to begin with, something that went against IDF protocol.

The IDF has already begun putting together conclusion from the event, drafting a decree stating that only authorized soldiers may carry grenades, perform daily checks on grenade stashes and to make sure combat soldiers carry their protective gear in a proper and secure manner.
Arizona News

Phoenix, Arizona - A Glendale man charged with multiple counts of child sexual exploitation was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release, following an investigation lead by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

Phillip Carnevale, 56, was convicted in state court of 10 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor in an investigation lead by HSI that began three years ago. After receiving a tip in August 2013, HSI special agents determined the defendant had emailed more than 70 images of child sexual abuse to numerous individuals.

During the execution of a state search warrant in the case, investigators recovered thousands of images and videos depicting child sexual abuse on devices belonging to Carnevale. In subsequent interviews with HSI special agents, Carnevale admitted collecting images and videos of children being sexually abused for more than 10 years. Moreover, HSI recovered emails written by Carnevale in which he discussed with other likeminded individuals his fantasy to kidnap children as young as 3 and hide them in an underground bunker to repeatedly sexually abuse them.

This lengthy sentence is a gratifying outcome for the HSI special agents who work tirelessly to identify child sexual predators and bring them to justice, said Louie Garcia, acting special agent in charge for HSI Phoenix. We know that criminals who distribute pornographic images of children often fuel the behavior of like-minded individuals who covet this despicable content. Tragically, these individuals actions often leave their innocent, young victims with permanent physical and emotional scars.

This investigation was conducted under HSIs Operation Predator, an international initiative to protect children from sexual predators. Since the launch of Operation Predator in 2003, HSI has arrested more than 14,000 individuals for crimes against children, including the production and distribution of online child pornography, traveling overseas for sex with minors, and sex trafficking of children. In fiscal year 2015, nearly 2,400 individuals were arrested by HSI special agents under this initiative and more than 1,000 victims identified or rescued.

HSI encourages the public to report suspected child predators and any suspicious activity through its toll-free Tip Line at 1-866-DHS-2-ICE or by completing its online tip form. Both are staffed around the clock by investigators. From outside the U.S. and Canada, callers should dial 802-872-6199. Hearing impaired users can call TTY 802-872-6196.

Suspected child sexual exploitation or missing children may be reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, an Operation Predator partner, via its toll-free 24-hour hotline, 1-800-THE-LOST.
Border News

Atlanta, Georgia - A Salvadoran MS-13 gang member and felon unlawfully present in the United States was removed from the United States Friday by officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).

Juan Otero-Navarro, 36, entered ERO custody Oct. 23 following his release from federal prison and was transferred to the Stewart County Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Otero was convicted in September 2015 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on a felony charge of illegally reentering the United States after a prior removal in May 2011. Otero was also convicted on felony forgery charges in Fairfax County, Virginia, in February 2011.

According to Salvadoran officials, Otero is currently wanted in his home country for identification fraud, resisting arrest and membership in an illicit group due to his MS-13 affiliation.

ERO Atlanta officers transferred Otero from the Stewart County Detention Center Thursday to Alexandria, Louisiana, where Otero was then removed Friday via an ICE Air charter flight to San Salvador, El Salvador. Upon arrival, Otero was transferred into Salvadoran custody.

Since Oct. 1, 2009, ERO has removed more than 1,789 foreign fugitives from the United States who were sought in their native countries for serious crimes, including kidnapping, rape and murder. ERO works with the ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Office of International Operations, foreign consular offices in the United States, and Interpol to identify foreign fugitives illegally present in the United States. Members of the public who have information about foreign fugitives are urged to contact ICE by calling the ICE tip line at 1 (866) 347-2423 or internationally at 001-1802-872-6199. They can also file a tip online by completing ICEs online tip form.

ERO coordinates the removal of criminals, foreign fugitives and others ordered deported. Last year alone, ERO removed 235,413 individuals from the United States. ICE is focused on smart and effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes its resources based on those who pose the biggest threat to national security, border security and public safety. ICEs civil enforcement efforts are based on priorities set by the Secretary of Homeland Security in November 2014
Border News

Douglas, Arizona - Customs and Border Protection officers at the Raul Hector Castro Port of Entry in Douglas, Arizona arrested a 33-year-old man from Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, in connection with a failed attempt to smuggle more than 200 pounds of marijuana into the United States Wednesday.

After officers referred the man for a secondary inspection of his Ford SUV, a CBP narcotics-detection canine alerted to the presence of drugs. Officers then removed multiple packages of marijuana found throughout the vehicles interior and exterior, to include the headliner, seats, doors and a front tire.

Officers seized the drugs and vehicle, and turned the subject over to Immigration and Customs Enforcements Homeland Security Investigations.
Border News

Hidalgo, Texas - A 2004 Chevy Cavalier entered the Hidalgo International Bridge shortly before 4 p.m. on Friday, at a high rate of speed, attempting to run the port and nearly striking a CBP officer.

In response to the immediate threat to the lives of fellow officers and travelers, a CBP officer fired with a service-issued shotgun. A CBP pursuit vehicle followed the Chevy Cavalier, which abruptly made a U-turn and struck the pursuit vehicle head-on. The 22-year-old female U.S. citizen driver of the Cavalier was secured by CBP officers, apprehended by McAllen police officers and transported by paramedics to a local hospital. The extent of injuries of the arrestee remains unknown. No CBP officers were injured. The incident is under investigation by McAllen Police Department, Homeland Security Investigations and CBP Office of Professional Responsibility.
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Washington, DC - The United States is deeply concerned about increasing pressure on the media in Lesotho, particularly noting the July 9 shooting of Lesotho Times/Sunday Express Editor Lloyd Mutungamiri. Journalists in Lesotho have expressed concern for their safety in the current climate of harassment and intimidation.

We welcome the statement by the Minister of Communications, Science and Technology condemning the shooting and encourage the government to investigate it fully and hold those responsible to account. Freedom of expression is a constitutional right in Lesotho and journalists must be able to do their critically important jobs without fear of intimidation, harassment, and violence.
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Washington, DC - Just as many of us might be resigned to clogged salt shakers or rush-hour traffic, those working to exploit the special properties of carbon nanotubes have typically shrugged their shoulders when these tiniest of cylinders fill with water during processing. But for nanotube practitioners who have reached their Popeye threshold and cant stands no more, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has devised a cheap, quick and effective strategy that reliably enhances the quality and consistency of the materialsimportant for using them effectively in applications such as new computing technologies.

To prevent filling of the cores of single-wall carbon nanotubes with water or other detrimental substances, the NIST researchers advise intentionally prefilling them with a desired chemical of known properties. Taking this step before separating and dispersing the materials, usually done in water, yields a consistently uniform collection of nanotubes. In quantity and quality, the results are superior to water-filled nanotubes, especially for optical applications such as sensors and photodetectors.

The approach opens a straightforward route for engineering the properties of single-wall carbon nanotubesrolled up sheets of carbon atoms arranged like chicken wire or honey combswith improved or new properties.

This approach is so easy, inexpensive and broadly useful that I cant think of a reason not to use it, said NIST chemical engineer Jeffrey Fagan.

In their proof-of-concept experiments, the NIST team inserted more than 20 different compounds into an assortment of single-wall carbon nanotubes with an interior diameter that ranged from more than 2 down to about 0.5 nanometers. Led by visiting researcher Jochen Campo, the scientists tested their strategy by using hydrocarbons called alkanes as fillers.

The alkanes, which include such familiar compounds as propane and butane, served to render the nanotube interiors unreactive. In other words, the alkane-filled nanotubes behaved almost as if they were emptyprecisely the goal of Campo, Fagan and colleagues.

Compared with nanotubes filled with water and possibly ions, acids and other unwanted chemicals encountered during processing, empty nanotubes possess far superior properties. For example, when stimulated by light, empty carbon nanotubes fluoresce far brighter and with sharper signals.

Yet, spontaneous ingestion of water or other solvents by the nanotubes during processing is an endemic but often neglected phenomenon with strong implications for the development of nanotube applications, the NIST team wrote in a recent article in Nanoscale Horizons.

Perhaps because of the additional cost and effort required to filter out and gather nanotubes, researchers tend to tolerate mixed batches of unfilled (empty) and mostly filled single-wall carbon nanotubes. Separating unfilled nanotubes from these mixtures requires expensive ultracentrifuge equipment and, even then, the yield is only about 10 percent, Campo estimates.

If your goal is to use nanotubes for electronic circuits, for example, or for fluorescent anti-cancer image contrast agents, then you require much greater quantities of materials of consistent composition and quality, Campo explained, who was exploring these applications while doing postdoctoral research at the University of Antwerp. This particular need inspired development of the new prefilling method by asking the question, can we put some passive chemical into the nanotube instead to keep the water out.

From the very first simple experiments, the answer was yes. And the benefits can be significant. In fluorescence experiments, alkane-filled nanotubes emitted signals two to three times stronger than those emitted by water-filled nanotubes. Performance approached that of empty nanotubesthe gold standard for these comparisons.

As important, the NIST-developed prefilling strategy is controllable, versatile and easily incorporated into existing methods for processing single-wall carbon nanotubes, according to the researchers
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Washington, DC - Today we mark with sadness the seventh anniversary of the death of human-rights defender and journalist Nataliya Estemirova, who was abducted and killed in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Her killers remain at large. Moreover, the abuses that she investigated  kidnappings, torture, and extra-judicial killings  continue with impunity in Chechnya. Across Russia, we see a pattern of attempts to intimidate and harm independent journalists, and members of the political opposition and civil society.

We once again call on Russian authorities to bring to justice those responsible for Nataliya Estemirovas murder, and to ensure that human-rights defenders, peaceful political activists and independent journalists can safely and freely pursue their work in the Russian Federation.
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Washington, DC - Quantifying the vital food supply for threatened and endangered fish has been complicated for scientists. But that may be changing. Through a Bureau of Reclamation prize competition, five ideas were selected that have merit and may lead to breakthroughs quantifying the drift invertebrates in river and estuary systems.

"Drift invertebrates are insects that drift through rivers and estuaries and are the basic building blocks in a river ecosystem," Commissioner Estevan Lopez said. "Knowing and understanding how these food sources are impacted by habitat changes will help biologists in the recovery and management of threatened and endangered fish species."

The two top-ranked solutions were submitted by Edem Tsikata, Ph.D. Tsikata has a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University and is currently working as a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. His top ranked solution proposed using commercially available digital holographic imaging equipment with modifications that would enable successful identification and quantification of invertebrates in rivers and estuary environments. This was the only submission meeting all the solution technical requirements stated in the prize competition. A team of federal researchers are now considering approaches to further develop, scale-up and test this concept.

Tsikata's second place solution proposed using high resolution sonar. Although not readily apparent that this solution could meet all the stated technical requirements, it demonstrated sufficient merit for Reclamation to further explore how it can make this concept work. He will receive $17,500 for submitting the two ideas. The ideas will be further explored and tested by Reclamation and other federal government entities.

Other solutions identified to have sufficient merit to be awarded prizes include:

Matt Vaillancourt submitted a design for an examination chamber where water could be collected and processed with the capability to electronically identify and quantify the various drift invertebrates in the water. A $5,000 prize has been awarded to secure a license that will allow the federal government to further develop, test and use this concept. Vaillancourt has a degree in mechanical engineering from California Polytechnic State University with an emphasis in mechatronics and is now working on projects that integrate complimentary technologies such as microcomputers, motion control, and 3D modeling.

Ted Ground submitted a design for a continuous sampling device that uses air bubbles to lift and concentrate invertebrates at the water surface where imaging and cataloging could occur with an array of cameras. Mr. Ground has also received a $5,000 prize to secure a license that will allow the federal government to further develop, test and use this concept. Ground has a Master of Science degree in Aquatic Biology from Texas State University and is currently an independent technical consultant working on a wide variety of aquaculture, water quality and natural resources related projects.

Michael May, Ph.D., proposed using an array of lensless cameras to search a volume of water backlit by a commercial flat-panel display. Lensless camera technology is low cost and has an infinite depth of focus. The federal government also secured a license to further develop, test and use this concept by awarding May a $2,500 prize. May earned his Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University and is currently the president of the technology and strategy consulting firm Dana Point Analytics.

The prize competition requested concept papers for new and improved methods and the theory behind the methods proposed. A total of 24 solutions were submitted for evaluation. A panel of federal fish biologists, ecologists and scientists from Reclamation and other collaborating agency experts evaluated the proposed solutions.

Reclamation collaborated with other agencies that have considerable interest in quantifying drift invertebrates including the NOAA-National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
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Washington, DC - After an extensive review process and passing a major development milestone, NASA is ready to proceed with final design and construction of its next Mars rover, currently targeted to launch in the summer of 2020 and arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021.

The Mars 2020 rover will investigate a region of Mars where the ancient environment may have been favorable for microbial life, probing the Martian rocks for evidence of past life. Throughout its investigation, it will collect samples of soil and rock and cache them on the surface for potential return to Earth by a future mission.

The Mars 2020 rover is the first step in a potential multi-mission campaign to return carefully selected and sealed samples of Martian rocks and soil to Earth, said Geoffrey Yoder, acting associate administrator of NASAs Science Mission Directorate in Washington. This mission marks a significant milestone in NASAs Journey to Mars  to determine whether life has ever existed on Mars, and to advance our goal of sending humans to the Red Planet.

To reduce risk and provide cost savings, the 2020 rover will look much like its six-wheeled, one-ton predecessor, Curiosity, but with an array of new science instruments and enhancements to explore Mars as never before. For example, the rover will conduct the first investigation into the usability and availability of Martian resources, including oxygen, in preparation for human missions.

Mars 2020 will carry an entirely new subsystem to collect and prepare Martian rocks and soil samples that includes a coring drill on its arm and a rack of sample tubes. About 30 of these sample tubes will be deposited at select locations for return on a potential future sample-retrieval mission. In laboratories on Earth, specimens from Mars could be analyzed for evidence of past life on Mars and possible health hazards for future human missions.

Two science instruments mounted on the rovers robotic arm will be used to search for signs of past life and determine where to collect samples by analyzing the chemical, mineral, physical and organic characteristics of Martian rocks. On the rovers mast, two science instruments will provide high-resolution imaging and three types of spectroscopy for characterizing rocks and soil from a distance, also helping to determine which rock targets to explore up close.

A suite of sensors on the mast and deck will monitor weather conditions and the dust environment, and a ground-penetrating radar will assess sub-surface geologic structure.

The Mars 2020 rover will use the same sky crane landing system as Curiosity, but will have the ability to land in more challenging terrain with two enhancements, making more rugged sites eligible as safe landing candidates.

"By adding whats known as range trigger, we can specify where we want the parachute to open, not just at what velocity we want it to open, said Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent and landing lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "That shrinks our landing area by nearly half."

Terrain-relative navigation on the new rover will use onboard analysis of downward-looking images taken during descent, matching them to a map that indicates zones designated unsafe for landing.

"As it is descending, the spacecraft can tell whether it is headed for one of the unsafe zones and divert to safe ground nearby, said Chen. "With this capability, we can now consider landing areas with unsafe zones that previously would have disqualified the whole area. Also, we can land closer to a specific science destination, for less driving after landing."

There will be a suite of cameras and a microphone that will capture the never-before-seen or heard imagery and sounds of the entry, descent and landing sequence. Information from the descent cameras and microphone will provide valuable data to assist in planning future Mars landings, and make for thrilling video.

"Nobody has ever seen what a parachute looks like as it is opening in the Martian atmosphere, said JPL's David Gruel, assistant flight system manager for the Mars 2020 mission. So this will provide valuable engineering information.

Microphones have flown on previous missions to Mars, including NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander in 2008, but never have actually been used on the surface of the Red Planet.

"This will be a great opportunity for the public to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time, and it could also provide useful engineering information," said Mars 2020 Deputy Project Manager Matt Wallace of JPL.

Once a mission receives preliminary approval, it must go through four rigorous technical and programmatic reviews  known as Key Decision Points (KDP)  to proceed through the phases of development prior to launch. Phase A involves concept and requirements definition, Phase B is preliminary design and technology development, Phase C is final design and fabrication, and Phase D is system assembly, testing, and launch. Mars 2020 has just passed its KDP-C milestone.

"Since Mars 2020 is leveraging the design and some spare hardware from Curiosity, a significant amount of the mission's heritage components have already been built during Phases A and B, said George Tahu, Mars 2020 program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "With the KDP to enter Phase C completed, the project is proceeding with final design and construction of the new systems, as well as the rest of the heritage elements for the mission."

The Mars 2020 mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. Driven by scientific discovery, the program currently includes two active rovers and three NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars. NASA also plans to launch a stationary Mars lander in 2018, InSight, to study the deep interior of Mars.

JPL manages the Mars 2020 project and the Mars Exploration Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about Mars 2020, visit:

http://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020
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Washington, DC - Friday, in a settlement agreement with the Navajo Nation, the United States agreed to provide funding necessary to continue clean-up work at abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation. Specifically, the United States will fund environmental response trusts to clean up 16 priority abandoned uranium mines located across the Navajo Nation.

The agreement also provides for evaluations of 30 more abandoned uranium mines, and for studies of two abandoned uranium mines to determine if groundwater or surface waters have been affected by those mines.

The work to be conducted is subject to the joint oversight and approval of the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The United States previously provided funding for evaluations at the 16 priority mines in a Phase 1 settlement executed in 2015.

This second phase agreement takes the next step in ensuring the cleanup of abandoned mines that pose the most significant risks to peoples health and initiates the evaluations of additional mines for future cleanup, said Assistant Attorney General John C. Cruden for the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division. Addressing the legacy of uranium mining on Navajo lands reflects the commitment of the Justice Department and the Obama Administration to fairly and honorably resolve the historic grievances of American Indian tribes and build a healthier future for their people.

Were very pleased to continue this vital work to address the legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation, said Acting Regional Administrator Alexis Strauss for the EPAs Pacific Southwest office. In the last decade, the EPA has remediated 47 homes, provided safe drinking water to 3,013 families in partnership with the Indian Health Service and conducted field screening at all 523 mines.

The Navajo Nation encompasses more than 27,000 square miles within Utah, New Mexico and Arizona in the Four Corners area. The unique geology of the region makes the Navajo Nation rich in uranium, a radioactive ore in high demand after the development of atomic power and weapons at the close of World War II. Approximately four million tons of uranium ore were extracted during mining operations within the Navajo Nation from 1944 to 1986. The federal government, through the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), was the sole purchaser of uranium until 1966, when commercial sales of uranium began. The AEC continued to purchase ore until 1970. The last uranium mine on the Navajo Nation shut down in 1986.

Many Navajo people worked in and near the mines, often living and raising families in close proximity to the mines and mills. Since 2008, federal agencies including EPA, the Department of Energy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Indian Health Service have collaborated to address uranium contamination on the Navajo Nation. The federal government has invested more than $100 million to address abandoned uranium mines on Navajo lands. EPA has also compiled a list of 46 priority mines for cleanup and performed stabilization or cleanup work at 9 mines. Further, EPA work cleaning up mines has generated 94 jobs for Navajo workers.

This settlement agreement resolves the claims of the Navajo Nation pertaining to costs of engineering evaluations and cost analyses, and cleanups, at the 16 priority mines for which no viable responsible private party has been identified, as well as the costs of evaluations at another 30 such mines, two water studies, and modest costs for pre-assessment of natural resources damages. In April 2014, the Justice Department and EPA announced in a separate matter that approximately $985 million of a multi-billion dollar settlement of litigation against subsidiaries of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. will be paid to EPA to fund the clean-up of approximately 50 abandoned uranium mines in and around the Navajo Nation, where radioactive waste remains from Kerr-McGee mining operations. EPA commenced field work with the proceeds from this settlement earlier this year.
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Washington, DC - The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota entered a consent decree of permanent injunction against Kwong Tung Foods Inc. (Kwong Tung Foods) doing business as Canton Foods; the firms president and owner, Vieta C. Wang; and vice president, Juney H. Wang, to prevent the distribution of adulterated noodles and sprouts, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

The Department filed a complaint on July 14, in the U.S. District Court for Minnesota at the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The complaint alleged that Kwong Tung Foods violated the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act by causing noodles and sprouts to be adulterated in that they have been prepared, packed and/or held under insanitary conditions whereby the food may have become contaminated with filth or have been rendered injurious to health. According to the complaint, the insanitary conditions included failure to exclude pests and rodents from the facility, failure to maintain equipment and failure to ensure adequate employee sanitation.

Kwong Tung Foods was repeatedly warned about the insanitary conditions at its Minneapolis food facility, said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Benjamin C. Mizer, head of the Justice Departments Civil Division. The Department of Justice will continue to work aggressively to protect consumers from adulterated food and enforce our nations food safety laws.

In conjunction with the filing of the complaint, the defendants agreed to be bound by a permanent injunction. As part of the settlement, the defendants represented that they have ceased receiving, preparing, processing, packing, holding, or distributing any type of food at or from any location. Under the permanent injunction, if the defendants seek to resume such activity, they must take specific steps to improve the firms manufacturing practices, and then receive written approval from FDA.

According to the complaint, in October 2015, FDA inspected Kwong Tung Foods facility, located at 1840 E. 38th Street in Minneapolis, and observed numerous insanitary practices, including the defendants failure to take necessary precautions to protect against contamination and maintain buildings in good repair. Specifically, according to the complaint, FDA observed evidence of live and dead pests and rodents in production rooms, a black mold-like substance and debris on production equipment, inadequate employee sanitation practices, and potential cross-contamination with major allergens. In addition, FDA observed condensate dripping onto finished bean sprouts, according to the complaint.

FDA inspected Kwong Tung Foods facility twice in 2014. As alleged in the complaint, FDA also observed failures to exclude pests from the facility and to adequately maintain equipment and employee sanitation practices.

Under federal law, food processors are required to comply with current good manufacturing practices provided by FDA regulation. The complaint alleged that the defendants violated the law by causing food to become adulterated while it was held for sale after shipment of one or more of its components in interstate commerce.

The government is represented by Trial Attorney Alistair Reader of the Civil Divisions Consumer Protection Branch and Assistant U.S. Attorney Bahram Samie of the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Minnesota, with the assistance of Associate Chief Counsel for Enforcement Jennifer Kang of the Food and Drug Division, Office of General Counsel, Department of Health and Human Services.
Kolkata: In a series of joint operations, the Army and Assam Police on Sunday gunned down three top NDFB(S) militants in Kokrajhar district.

On specific intelligence inputs on movement of hardcore NDFB(S) terrorists, Army challenged suspected individuals who were moving through dense jungles in the early hours today.

After coming under "heavy nondiscriminatory fire" the joint team retaliated with controlled fire and killed the three hardcore NDFB(S) militants, the officials said.

Two of them have been identified as Rahul Basumatary and Ritu Basumatary, officials said.

Four pistols, a large quantity of ammunition, hand grenades have been recovered from the slain militants.

Officials claimed that the surgical operation which was carried out under torrential rains, in thick foliage and undergrowth of the Assam jungles, is a major setback to the NDFB(S), which has been active in the area.
Patna: At least 59 children have been rescued and 13 traffickers arrested by the border guarding force Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) from Raxaul and Muzaffarpur railway stations in Bihar.

The children were freed late yesterday when the SSB launched a special operation with the help from NGOs and intercepted the traffickers at the Mumbai-bound Jansadharan Express train, a senior SSB official said.

A total of 59 children, aged between 9-16 years and hailing from East and West Champaran districts of Bihar and a few from Sitamarhi and Nepal were rescued from the clutches of the traffickers, the official said

"They were being trafficked to work in factories in Mumbai. Over 60 SSB personnel apart from NGO workers were involved in the operation. 13 people who were trafficking them have also been apprehended," the official said.

SSB is deployed in the area to guard the international Indo-Nepal border.
Patna: In an embarrassment for the ruling Janata Dal (United) and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in Bihar, party MLA Shyam Bahadur Singh was caught on camera dancing with alleged bar dancers at a function recently.

The video shows the JD(U) MLA not only dancing with the bar girls but also seen making provocative gestures.

The video was reportedly shot during a wedding ceremony where Singh was present.

This is not the first time, Singh is making headlines for his dance moves. In 2012, the Barhariya MLA was caught on camera dancing with girls at a marriage function in Gopalganj district.

A similar incident was caught on camera in 2010 where Singh was seen dancing with girls. The JD(U) MLA was shown on local TV channels gyrating with alleged bar girls and making gestures.

Surprisingly, Singh had then apologised for his action admitting it was a mistake from his end and said that 'It is upto Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to action on the matter'.

The JD(U) high command had issued a warning to the minister, but it seems the party MLA is in no mood to adhere to such warnings and mend his ways.
New Delhi: Buoyed by the restoration of its governments in Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, Congress on Sunday said it will target the Modi dispensation for "using all tricks" to destabilise opposition ruled states which no longer trusted the Centre.

The Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad also cited developments in Kashmir and India's failed bid for NSG membership as other issues on which his party will attack the treasury benches in the Monsoon Session of Parliament beginning tomorrow.

The Congress will extend merit-based support to bills which are pro-people and pro-growth, he told reporters after attending the all-party meeting called by the government.

Taking potshots at Modi over his call for cooperation between the Centre and states at the Inter-State Council meeting yesterday, Azad said even Punjab government in which BJP is junior partner, attacked it for "undermining" states.

Congress agreed with the Prime Minister's comments that states should share terror-related intelligence with the Centre, he said, adding BJP itself did politics over terrorism.

He also referred to the "abuse" of Governor's office to topple state governments.

"All tricks were used. States no longer trust the Centre," he said, referring to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's suggestion for abolishing the post of Governor.

He also referred to UP Governor Ram Naik's reported defence of arms training to Hindu right organisation Bajrang Dal's cadres.

"If government starts giving training to such organisations, then you can understand....Where does terrorism begin from," Azad said.

Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia played down the talks between his party and the government to break the impasse over the long-pending GST bill and said they wanted the government to share with them the draft legislation.

"We can give a response only after we receive a written draft from the government," he said as he rejected the contention that the Congress was blocking the bill, saying GST was "a baby given birth" by his party.

He also referred to the issue of alleged migration of Hindus from Kairana town in Uttar Pradesh, contending it was aimed at stoking communal tension. He said Congress party will take it up during the session.
Itanagar: After being sworn-in as the ninth Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh, Pema Khandu on Sunday said that differences which existed within the Congress party have been resolved as both teams, the Congress members and the rebels, are united under one roof.

"All the differences within, have been resolved under one roof, both teams are united and that team has decided I lead," he told ANI here.

The Chief Minister asserted that the expectations are high among the people since a lot of good work was done under his father and ex-chief minister, Dorjee Khandu's tenure and it is incumbent upon on him to resume the developmental work done by his father.

"Expectations of the public are high because before me, my father was the chief minister and a lot of good work was done under his tenure," he said.He further acknowledged his inexperience and said that he would carry out his work with the help of his experienced party members.

"In my team we have lot of experienced leaders. Although I would not claim that I am experienced, but I believe in team work and will work hard," he said.

Khandu was elected as the leader of Congress in Arunachal Pradesh assembly yesterday, after Tuki stepped down following the Supreme Court orders which resorted the Congress' rule in the state36-year-old Pema, the youngest chief minister of the country, replaced Nabam Tuki who resigned after stepping down as leader of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) hours before he was to seek a trust vote.

Chowna Mey took oath as the Deputy Chief Minister of the state.Khandu's father, Dorjee had died in a chopper crash in 2011, hails from Tawang area, bordering China.

Khandu joined the Congress in early 2000 and became the secretary of Arunachal Pradesh Congress Committee in 2005.Khandu was later re-elected without any opposition from Mukto in the 2014 assembly elections.
New Delhi: Delhi University teachers have decided to call off the boycott of evaluation of undergraduate exams in protest against the new UGC norms to ascertain their academic performance.

The Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) said the decision has been taken after the ministry and UGC officials agreed to set up a committee to resolve their demands.

However, a formal announcement of withdrawl of the boycott will be made after the decision is ratified in a General Body meeting of the teachers' body.

"The negotiations have begun and the administration has agreed to our minimal demands of setting up a committee to resolve our long standing demands.

"In order to create an atmosphere wherein negotiations are fruitful in order to press for final resolution of our problems, and in order to continue a sustainable movement to ensure resolution of pending matters, the DUTA Executive resolves to withdraw the boycott of evaluations and boycott of Staff Council Committees," DUTA President Nandita Narain said.

Teachers have been boycotting evaluation of UG examinations since May 24 in protest against amendments to UGC regulations that, they argue, will lead to job-cuts to the tune of 50 per cent and drastically decrease pupil-teacher ratio in higher education.

When the protest was started, the DUTA had boycotted evaluation for all years and later extended it to even the admission process. Teachers lifted the boycott of evaluation for final-year students on by June 16 and decided to rejoin the admission process on July 5.

The new gazette notification had increased the workload for assistant professors from 16 hours of "direct teaching" per week (including tutorials) to 18 hours, plus another six of tutorials, bringing the total up to 24 hours. Similarly the work hours of associate professors had been increased from 14 to 22.

The teachers argued that altering work-load norms would have led to massive retrenchment - to the tune of 4,500 - in teaching posts. That amendment has since been withdrawn. However, Narain says they will continue to fight against the API (Academic Performance Indicator) system of promotions for teachers "till it is completely withdrawn".

"We have written to the new HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar already seeking an appointment. We also want a proper roster system for appointments and a committee to look into the promotion policy that DU adopted with retrospective effect thereby, virtually stopping all promotions for eight years," Narain said.
New Delhi: The verdict of a federal appeal court is finally out and this time its in favor of dolphins, whales and other marine mammals that are badly tortured by the naval use of sonar. The court has completely banned the use of loud sonar pulses near coastlines and certain protected waters.

The court reversed a lower court decision which had granted for the Navy in 2012 to use low-frequency sonar for training, testing and routine operations in the oceans.

The court reversed a lower court decision which had granted for the Navy in 2012 to use low-frequency sonar for training, testing and routine operations in the oceans. Environmental groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2012, filed a lawsuit in San Francisco arguing the approval violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Sonar technology is used by military worldwide for exploring, navigating and mapping the ocean. But the excessive use of this technology has not only injured and killed a large number of marine life but also disrupted their feeding and mating.

(With ANI inputs)
Paris: France's foreign minister warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday against using his country`s failed coup as a "blank cheque" to silence his opponents.

"We want the rule of law to work properly in Turkey," Jean-Marc Ayrault told France 3 television, warning Turkey`s government against "purges".

His remarks came as Turkish authorities continued a crackdown over the coup, arresting over 6,000 people accused of involvement in the putsch or of supporting the coup plotters.

Ayrault said the events of the past two days had raised questions about Turkey`s "reliability" in the fight against Islamic State.

Turkey is a member of the US-led coalition that has been carrying out airstrikes against the group in Syria.

"There`s (the question of) reliability on the one hand and, indeed, an element of suspicion on the other," he told France 3 television.
New Delhi: The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) will contest assembly elections in Gujarat if "people ask for it," Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Sunday.

"The party does not contest polls. It's the people of the state who fight it. Even in Delhi, the people spent (their own) money to bring us to power," he said while responding to a query during his maiden "Talk to AK" interaction with the public.

"Similarly, if people of Gujarat want us to contest, we will fight assembly elections in the state," said Kejriwal, who is also national convenor of the AAP.

The party would hold a meeting in Gujarat in the next two or three months to decide its next move in the state, he said.
New Delhi: The stage is set for monsoon session of parliament beginning Monday with the government in an optimistic mood over the possibility of passage of Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill even as all eyes are on Sunday's all-party meeting.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has called an all-party meeting on Sunday, a day before the session begins.

After senior ministers including Arun Jaitley (Finance) met Rajya Sabha Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad and his deputy Anand Sharma on Thursday, the governments' floor managers and even others are optimistic that things would sail in smoothly in both houses of Parliament especially the upper house where the numerical strength of Congress has so far stalled the GST bill.

"We expect Congress leaders to speak up their mind on GST and other matters in tomorrow's all-party meeting. But we are hopeful," a key floor manager for the goverment told IANS.

That Congress has an upper hand and all eyes will be on its moves was evident when Biju Janata Dal leader Bhartruhari Mahtab said: "We expect less of acrimony. But on GST it all depends on Congress. A section of Congress also seems in favour of the GST."

There is no final word from the Congress yet on government's fresh proposals although government side claims the meeting between Jaitley and Azad and Anand Sharma went down well.

The Congress, which originally piloted the GST Bill, has said it is still in favour of the same.

The changes it has demanded include putting a cap of 18 percent on GST rate in the constitution amendment bill. The government apparently is willing to consider putting a cap in the main bill and not in the constitution amendment bill.

BJD leader Mahtab said "even regional parties will not mind if the 18 per cent cap is put only in the main text of the bill so that it can be changed if necessary".

However, lot of skirmishes are expected in both houses as during the session which ends on August 12 as there are many other issues wherein the government can find itself cornered like the violence in Jammu and Kashmir.

Other issues where the opposition and ruling sides can be seen at logger heads could be cases related to Ishrat Jahan and Lt.Col. Shrikant Purohit, and alleged attempts to "communalise" Uttar Pradesh politics.

This session also happens to be first since Prime Minister Narendra Modi carried out the reshuffle.

The real test of his new floor managers and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar will be in Rajya Sabha where there are over 40 pending bills including the GST.

In the recent biennial elections to Rajya Sabha in June, the BJP-led NDA strength has gone up to 74 with five additional seats while Congress has lost three seats and seen its tally go down to 60.

The government also needs two-third majority in the Rajya Sabha to pass the constitutional amendment bill to roll out GST. To muster 163 members in the 245-member house, the government will need support of all regional players, like the Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress, JD-U and others to vote to make it 163.

Among regional parties, Samajwadi Party has 19 members, AIADMK 13, Trinamool 12 and BJD 8.

Nitish Kumar's JD-U has 10, Lalu Prasad's Rashtriya Janata Dal has 3 and Mayawati-led BSP's 6, Communist Party of India-Marxist 8, CPI-1 and DMK 4.

Of the 10 bills expected to come up in Lok Sabha during the 20-day sittings are: the Consumer Protection Bill 2015, the Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Amendment Bill 2015, and the Lok Pal and Lokayuktas and Other Related Laws (Amendment) Bill.

The government will also have to replace an ordinance that was promulgated to amend the Enemy Property Act as well as another one on the National Eligibility-cum Entrance Test (NEET), government sources said.
Itanagar: Congress legislator Pema Khandu on Sunday took oath as the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh in Itanagar.

Congress legislator Pema Khandu, son of former Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, became the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh after incumbent Nabam Tuki resigned.

Tuki and Khandu met Governor Tathagata Roy on Saturday. Tuki tendered his resignation as the Chief Minister. Raj Bhavan spokesperson Atum Potom said the Governor had accepted his resignation.

Earlier, Tuki resigned as Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader, paving way for Khandu`s election.

Tuki, reinstated as the Chief Minister following a Supreme Court verdict on Wednesday, proposed the name of Khandu as the next CLP leader.

The proposal was supported by all the 44 legislators, including 15 Congress and 29 dissident Congress legislators who had joined the People`s Party of Arunachal (PPA) in February.

The 44 legislators also include former Chief Minister Kalikho Pul, who unseated Tuki and became the Chief Minister in February.

"It`s a big victory for the Congress in Arunachal Pradesh," Tuki said after leaving the Raj Bhavan.

"The recent crisis was started by the BJP. However, all their evil designs have failed as the Congress has been able to put its house in order. I hope it will be big lesson for the BJP," he said.

Khandu said: "Tuki has tendered his resignation and I have handed over to the Governor the list of 44 legislators supporting me as the Chief Minister.

"The Governor said he would go by the formalities and let us know about the next move."

Khandu, a graduate from Hindu College in Delhi, was inducted in the Tuki ministry in 2011 after his father died in a plane crash in Arunachal Pradesh.

He was later given the portfolio of Tourism and Water Resource Development department. Khandu, however, resigned from the Tuki cabinet in 2014.

Asked about his swearing in ceremony, Khandu said he was waiting a response from the Governor. "I hope the swearing in ceremony will take place in a day or two," he said.

After the return of the 30 PPA legislators to the Congress on Saturday, the strength of the Congress has become 45, which includes the Speaker, Nabam Rebia.

The Congress also said it has the support of two Independent legislators. The effective strength of the Arunachal assembly is 58 now.

Earlier, Governor Roy reinstated Tuki as the Chief Minister following the Supreme Court judgment and asked him to take the floor test to prove his majority support.

Tuki urged the Governor to defer the session by 10 days but Roy refused.
New Delhi: It's an amazing letter by an Indian Army veteran to terrorist Burhan Wani who was gunned down by security forces in Kashmir.

In his open letter, Major Gaurav Arya (Veteran) blasted terrorists, terror sympathisers and separatist leaders.

Here's FULL TEXT of the open letter

Dear Departed,

Ever since you were terminated in a forces-led operation in the Valley, 23 people have died. I dont know why they died. The majority were possibly overcome with grief and fury and wanted to avenge your death. That did not happen, for obvious reasons. A policeman was thrown along with his vehicle into a river and he drowned. I grieve with your family and with the families of all those who lost their lives. Despicable though you may have been, I cannot find it in my heart to blame your family.

You could have been an engineer, a doctor, an archeologist or a software programmer but your fate drew you to the seductive world of social media, with its instant celebrity hood and all encompassing fame. You posted pictures on the internet with your brothers, all you fine young Rambos holding assault rifles and radio sets. It was right out of Hollywood. Your rifles fire selector switch was set to safe and your weapon rested on your shoulder. I know its too late to advise you on such matters, but NEVER do that in an operational area.

The day you started with your social media blitzkrieg, you were a dead man. You encouraged young men of Kashmir to kill Indian soldiers, all from behind the safety of your Facebook account. Your female fan following was delirious. You were a social media rage. Unknown to you, there was probably some nerd with a laptop sitting in HQ XV Corps, tracking you 24/7. You died when you were 22. Had you survived this operation, you would have died when you were 23. Just a different date on the calendar, thats all. The intensity of violence and the result would have been the same.

I wish we had met and I could have explained to you (before killing you) that the old men of the Hurriyat Conference are like leech. They feed on the blood of men. They send young Kashmiris to face the Indian Army. What sort of a war is this, where lambs are sent to fight lions?

I would have shown you the sheer duplicity of the Hurriyat, with their sons living abroad, pursuing professions other than jihad. Name one relative of Syed Ali Geelani, the head of the Hurriyat Conference, who is fighting the so-called Indian occupation? His son Nayeem Geelani is a doctor in Rawalpindi, and lives under the patronage of the Pakistani ISI. Zahoor, his second son, lives in South Delhi. Mirwaiz Umar Farooqs sister Rabia is a doctor in the US. Mariyam Andrabi, sister of head of the radical Dukhtran-e-Millat, Asiya Andrabi, along with her family lives in Malaysia. Every Kashmiri separatist leaders daughter or son is rich and safe, outside Kashmir. Jihad is for other peoples sons.

And your parents son is dead. Dead from a 7.62 mm full metal jacket round to the head.

Kashmirs young and restless blame the security forces for killing them. But they never question the Hurriyat. No one asks Syed Ali Geelani why Burhan Wani is not from his family.

Pakistani media was ecstatic when Kashmiris celebrated Eid this year along with Pakistan and not with the rest of India. This was reported as a blow to the unity of India. This is the first time in the 1400 year history of Islam that Eid was declared, not by witnessing the Shawwal moon, but by looking towards Pakistan. Well done.

The Hurriyat has nothing to do with Kashmiris. This unrest, this bloodshed is just another business. If not, I would like to see the list of martyrs from the Hurriyat leaderships families.

The Hurriyat knows too well that Kashmir has fallen off the map of the worlds attention. No one cares and everyone knows that it is an artificially manufactured conflict. The Kashmir dispute exists because it is an inexpensive way for Pakistan to keep Indian forces bogged down in the valley.

You were a terrorist. You chose to wage war against India. Like for all other such perpetrators in the past, it didnt go too well for you. When you choose to fight against the Indian Army, know this; THEY WILL KILL YOU.

Your supporters now want blood. So be it.

Cheers!

Major Gaurav Arya (Veteran)
New Delhi: On the eve of the Monsoon Session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday urged all the political parties to keep national interest above any other considerations.

Speaking at an all-party meeting convened by the government and seeking the cooperation of the government in the passage of GST bill, he said, We represent both the people and parties and there is a need to keep national interests above anything else, and added, "The issue is not about which government would get the credit for introduction of GST but what was important is the passage of the bill."

With the continuing protests in Kashmir following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani expected to generate heat in Parliament, the PM commended political parties for speaking in "one voice" over the issue.

"Various parties have given statements on Kashmir events which benefitted the country. This has sent a right message and I thank all the parties for the same," he said.

Responding to suggestions from some leaders for increasing the sittings of Parliament, PM Modi said he welcomed the suggestion and urged leaders to ensure proper utilisation of the available time.

Meanwhile, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad, said that there should be a discussion in Parliament on the tense situation in Kashmir and that government should provide an answer.

The government's unsuccessful NSG bid, floods in some states, agrarian crisis and terrorism were among the other main issues raised by Opposition leaders at the meeting.

Azad accused the government of using every trick to destabilise states ruled run by other parties and referred to Arunachal developments and various chief ministers targeting the Centre at the Inter-State Council meeting yesterday.

Though he did not refer to GST directly, he said the Congress will offer support to bills on merit.

"We have not taken any decision that we have to stop a bill. We will support on merit. We will support any bill which is in support of people, progress and growth," he said, as per PTI.

Another Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia said his party can take a stand only after it receives a written response from the government as he played down talks between its leaders and union ministers over the GST.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said the government will talk to all parties to evolve a consensus on the GST.

"Our legislative business, including GST, is a priority. We want to see to that we pass the GST bill with consensus. We are going to take every party on board," he said.

(With Agency inputs)
New Delhi: China's envoy to India Liu Jinsong on Sunday sought to dispel rumours of a discord between the two nations over the issue of India's NSG membership and said that it's not a simple issue and needed more discussions.

Asked whether China is opposed to Indias membership in the Nuclear Supplier Group (NSG), Liu said, Indias membership in the NSG is not a low-hanging fruit. So, we need further discussion by parties concerned.

The issue is about the way of the entry of new members, the procedure that they will follow. China has never stated that it opposes the membership of any country, the envoy said in an interview with Suhasini Haidar of The Hindu.

He also rejected media reports that said China was the only country to oppose India's membership in NSG and said that at least eight or nine countries have concern over the procedure or criteria and credential of Indias membership.

But the MEA only mentioned one country but it didnt explicitly say which country. So China will not rush up to take up this hat, he added.

Asked if that means China doesnt oppose to Indias membership, he said, We attach great importance to NPT as the cornerstone of non-proliferation regime. I believe our Indian friends can understand Chinas position on this point.

He added that China stands with Indias plans to develop nuclear energy to put a cap on carbon emissions and seek development.

However, we believe this issue calls for in-depth discussion by all parties. So, on this issue, our principle is abiding by the rules and finally finding a way out, he added.
Srinagar: Strict curfew continued for the 10th day on Sunday in the Kashmir Valley, police said.

"Curfew shall continue in all the ten districts of the Valley," a senior police official said.

"Security forces have been instructed to allow movement of patients along with their attendants."

"People going to the airport will not face any hardship as air tickets were being treated as curfew passes," the official added.

The death toll in the ongoing violence reached 41 after an unruly mob torched a police picket in north Kashmir's Kupwara district on Saturday. Police opened fire at the mob resulting in the death of a youth.

All vernacular and English dailies suspended publication for the second day on Sunday.

State government officials said newspaper owners were asked to suspend publications till July 19.

Cable television operations were allowed on Saturday evening after remaining suspended for a day.

The resumption of cable television operations was allowed after the operators agreed to take off all Pakistani TV channels and two private Indian channels.

Mobile phone internet and call operations remained suspended in south Kashmir areas for the eighth day while the same remained suspended for the second day in central and north Kashmir areas on Sunday.

Mobile phone operations without any internet facility are, however, continuing on post paid mobile phones provided by the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).

Train services between north Kashmir Baramulla and Bannihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended.

All recruitment interviews scheduled for the next four days have been cancelled by the state public service commission (PSC).

All schools, colleges and universities in the Valley were also shut down.

Senior separatist leaders including Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, Muhammad Yasin Malik, Shabir Ahmad Shah and others have been either placed under house arrest or taken into preventive custody to restrain them from participating in protests.

Separatists have appealed the people to continue the shutdown till Monday.

The shutdown in the Valley started on July 9 following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Wani in a gunfight with the security forces on July 8.
New Delhi: Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan on Sunday said issues like the current situation in Jammu and Kashmir and terrorism were raised at the all-party meeting called by the government during the day.

The meeting comes on the eve of parliament's monsoon session beginning on Monday. The session will continue till August 12.

"Everyone has assured of letting the parliament function. Some issues that came up include the Jammu and Kashmir situation and terrorism. The government has said that they are ready to talk on every issue that is raised," Mahajan told reporters here after the all-party meeting convened by her at the Parliament House here.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi later arrived at the parliament building for dinner hosted by the Speaker.
New Delhi: Emphasising on importance of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), the University Grants Commission (UGC) has asked varsities to offer it as a generic elective subject under the Choice Based Credit System.

In a letter to universities, UGC secretary Jaspal S Sandhu said that creations of mind such as inventions, designs for industrial articles, literary, artistic work, symbols, names and images etc are protected by lntellectual Property rights.

The importance of IPR was first recognized in Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property (1883) and the Berne Convention for Protection of Literary and Artistic Work (1886), the UGC official's letter said.

IPRs should be protected to encourage the creator and also striking a balance between the innovators and public interest by creating an awareness where creativity can flourish, the letter added.

"Keeping in view the importance of IPR which recognizes the work of the creator, you are requested to devise, through academic council, inclusion of the IPR as a generic elective subject under the Choice Based Credit System (CBCS) in your esteemed university and the affiliated colleges," the UGC secretary said in his letter.
Delhi: The Ministry of Home Affairs has approved the deployment of crack canine dog teams named 'Operation Golden Nose' to prevent terror attack on Parliament.

As per India Today, even though there are multiple ring security system in place in the Parliament, somebody sneaking in explosives in innocuous articles and placing it in areas like under the tables or in flower pots, cannot be ruled out. In such a case, highly trained crack canines will come into play.

As per the report, even if someone has touched an explosive, that also can be detected by these dogs.

The ITBP has reportedly been requested by the Parliament Security Services (PSS) to deploy their crack K9 units.

ITBP dogs are said to be one of the most highly trained in the world.

The US Navy Seals had selected them to assist in protecting any US President Barack Obama's visit to India last year.

The operation will finish with the end of the Monsoon session and is being supervised by ITBP DIG RC Baijwan.
Pema Khandu to take oath as Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh at 12 PM today - Know details

Itanagar: Congress legislator Pema Khandu will take oath as the Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh in Itanagar at 12 PM on Sunday, latest reports said.

Congress legislator Pema Khandu, son of former Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu, is all set to become the next Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh after incumbent Nabam Tuki resigned.

Tuki and Khandu met Governor Tathagata Roy on Saturday. Tuki tendered his resignation as the Chief Minister. Raj Bhavan spokesperson Atum Potom said the Governor had accepted his resignation.

Earlier, Tuki resigned as Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader, paving way for Khandu`s election.

Tuki, reinstated as the Chief Minister following a Supreme Court verdict on Wednesday, proposed the name of Khandu as the next CLP leader.

The proposal was supported by all the 44 legislators, including 15 Congress and 29 dissident Congress legislators who had joined the People`s Party of Arunachal (PPA) in February.

The 44 legislators also include former Chief Minister Kalikho Pul, who unseated Tuki and became the Chief Minister in February.

"It`s a big victory for the Congress in Arunachal Pradesh," Tuki said after leaving the Raj Bhavan.

"The recent crisis was started by the BJP. However, all their evil designs have failed as the Congress has been able to put its house in order. I hope it will be big lesson for the BJP," he said.

Khandu said: "Tuki has tendered his resignation and I have handed over to the Governor the list of 44 legislators supporting me as the Chief Minister.

"The Governor said he would go by the formalities and let us know about the next move."

Khandu, a graduate from Hindu College in Delhi, was inducted in the Tuki ministry in 2011 after his father died in a plane crash in Arunachal Pradesh.

He was later given the portfolio of Tourism and Water Resource Development department. Khandu, however, resigned from the Tuki cabinet in 2014.

Asked about his swearing in ceremony, Khandu said he was waiting a response from the Governor. "I hope the swearing in ceremony will take place in a day or two," he said.

After the return of the 30 PPA legislators to the Congress on Saturday, the strength of the Congress has become 45, which includes the Speaker, Nabam Rebia.

The Congress also said it has the support of two Independent legislators. The effective strength of the Arunachal assembly is 58 now.

Earlier, Governor Roy reinstated Tuki as the Chief Minister following the Supreme Court judgment and asked him to take the floor test to prove his majority support.

Tuki urged the Governor to defer the session by 10 days but Roy refused.
New Delhi: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Sunday said government would help a Kalyan-based family in arranging for cremating bodies of its three members killed in a road accident in Long Island in the US.

38-year-old IT professional Chandan Gavai and his parents - Archana Gavai (60) and Kamalnayan Gavai (74) - were killed when the vehicle they were travelling in was hit head-on by a truck on July 4. Chandan's 32-year-old wife suffered life-threatening burns and is in comma. The couple's 11-month-old son survived the crash and is under treatment.

The Gavai family members in India were finding it difficult to bring back the bodies for cremation due to high expenses involved. Yesterday, Swaraj had promised to help the family after she came to know of their difficulty.

Swaraj today said India's Consulate General in New York has suggested the family to cremate Chandan's parents in New York. She said as per US laws, Chandan's body cannot be cremated as his wife is in coma and unable to give consent.

Swaraj said the Consulate General suggested the family that Chandan's mortal remains be buried as his wife Manisha alone can give consent for his cremation.

The External Affairs Minister said the government will help the family get death certificates and insurance money for all the three deceased members. The family is from Maharashtra.

"Our Consulate will bear the expenses for cremation," Swaraj tweeted, adding "All members of the family who are in US incl. Manisha's parents are agreeable to this proposal. We hope to resolve this accordingly.

"Burial only till his wife Manisha recovers from coma. Once she gives consent, Chandan will also be cremated."

Swaraj said one of the family members Anand Gavai wants the money be given to him but it cannot be done as he is a Dutch national. "Under Government rules, money cannot be given to a foreign national," she said.
Kozhikode: One of the missing youngsters of Kerala has sent a message to his family; the message is shocking indeed!

In the message, he has accepted that he has become a terrorist.

"People may call me a terrorist. If fighting in the path of Allah is terrorism, yes I am a terrorist (sic)," reads the message sent by one of the missing Kerala youngsters to his family, according to a report in TOI.

23-year-old Mohammad Marwan is one of the 15 youths missing from Kerala.

Mohammad Marwan sent the message to his family in the last week of June saying he is in West Asia.

Moreover, he has said he would return once his work with Islamic State, dreaded terror outfit, is over.

Help to Muslims in Kashmir, Gujarat and Muzaffarnagar

In the message, he promises to come back after he finishes work with IS to help the persecuted Muslims in Kashmir, Gujarat and Muzaffarnagar, the report added.

Quotes Quran

Quoting Quran, Marwan said, "Allah will ask what I was doing when the community was being persecuted".

"Didn't the Prophet taught (sic) us that the entire ummah is like one body? It is my religious duty to fight for the protection of the community," he added.

"Allah will ask what I was doing when the community was being persecuted".

Mohammad Marwan is among 15 youths from Kerala who are suspected to have joined ISIS.

The message was sent via the Telegram app in the last week of June.

Against US and Russia

"Here, Muslims, including little children, are killed in the bomb attack by the US and Russian forces," Marwan wrote.

"How can I sit comfortably at home when the Muslims are is attacked," Marwan added in the text message.
Srinagar: Curfew and a separatist-called shutdown continued for the 10th day on Sunday, crippling normal life across the restive Kashmir Valley with the government ordering schools and colleges to close for one more week amid an information blackout due to a ban on local newspapers.

Police said no fresh violence was reported from the valley which has been battling the deadliest unrest in years triggered by the July 8 killing of top Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.

"The situation in the valley remained more or less under control," a police spokesperson told IANS.

But the continuous restrictions, which were imposed immediately after Wani`s killing, along with his two militant aides, have paralyszed normal life in the valley. Shops and businesses remained shut even as at some places, grocers had partially opened their shops in the morning.

People complained that their stocks of groceries and other food items have dried up. The valley is suffering severely due to a shortage of essentials, including medicines.

The government on Sunday extended the school and college summer vacations for one more week till July 24. The education institutions were scheduled to reopen on Monday after more than two-week summer and Eid vacations.

"The summer vacations in the schools and colleges of the valley have been extended by one week," Education Minister Naeem Akhtar announced here.

The decision was taken in view of the ongoing unrest in the valley that has left more than 40 people dead in the last 10 days of street violence.

Amid the information blackout forced by the government, no newspaper could hit the stands for the second day on Sunday. The government has asked newspaper owners to suspend publications till Tuesday.

But their online editions continued.

Cable television operations were allowed on Saturday evening after remaining suspended for a day. But Pakistan-based TV channels and two private Indian channels were not allowed through cable TV.

Mobile phone internet and call operations remained suspended in parts of the valley. Mobile phone operations without any internet facility are, however, continuing on post-paid mobile phones provided by the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).

Train services between Baramulla and Banihal town in the Jammu region also remained suspended.

All recruitment interviews scheduled for the next four days have been canceled by the state Public Service Commission.
New Delhi: The Editors Guild of India today condemned the Jammu and Kashmir government for "unwarranted muzzling" of media in the state and termed as "unfortunate" the attempts "to shoot the messenger".

"It is extremely unfortunate that the state government, under fire for its poor management of the law and order situation in the Valley, has sought to shoot the messenger," a statement from the Editors Guild said.

It said the police were sent into the offices of the local media in Kashmir in the wee hours today and copies of the newspapers that had just been printed seized and printing presses shut down.

"Reports suggest that the journalists and other staff working in Greater Kashmir and Rising Kashmir were detained, harassed and their mobiles (phones) taken away by the raiding police parties," it said.

"We are also aghast to note that the media censorship will continue for a minimum of three days if not more," it added.

The statement said this is a direct assault on the freedom of the press in India and the Guild strongly condemns this unwarranted muzzling of the media.

"The Editors Guild of India requests the state government to immediately lift the censorship and refrain from any action to intimidate the press," it said.
Srinagar: The Jammu and Kashmir government on Sunday extended the summer vacation in schools, educational institutions in Kashmir Valley in the wake of protests over killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant.

As per the report, the vacation in school has been extended till July 24.

According to Greater Kashmir, government in an order had said earlier that all government and private educational institutions upto higher secondary level functioning in the Kashmir division and winter zone of Jammu division shall observe summer vacation from July 1st to July 17.

Curfew remained in force in Kashmir and normal life paralysed for the ninth day on Sunday in the wake of clashes following killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani that has left at least 41 people dead so far in the Valley.

Police and paramilitary personnel have been deployed in strength across the Valley for strict implementation of the prohibitory orders, a police official said adding that the situation so far across has remained peaceful.
Srinagar: A mob tried to storm an Army camp on Sunday in Bandipora district, shattering the day-long fragile peace in curfew-bound Kashmir even as the Centre rushed about two thousand additional CRPF personnel to shore up security in the Valley where violence since July 9 has claimed 39 lives.

Protesters attacked the army camp at Ajas in Bandipora district, forcing the security forces to open fire. Three persons were injured in the incident, police said.

Earlier, MLA Bandipora Usman Abdul Majid had claimed that one person was killed and three others were injured in the clash.

Curfew was in force for the third consecutive day while normal life remained paralysed in the wake of deadly clashes that have rocked the Valley following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani nine days ago, leaving 39 dead and over 3,160 injured.

Two persons were also injured in security forces action when a mob pelted stones in Eidgah area of the city.

The fresh violence came even as the situation in curfew-bound Kashmir was by and large peaceful during the day.

After restricting mobile telephone services, authorities have now snapped the landline connections to curb the violent protests.

"All 10 districts of Kashmir Valley continue to remain under curfew today as a precautionary measure for maintaining law and order," a police official said.

He said the decision to continue the curfew was taken to maintain law and order as one person was killed in fresh violence in Kupwara district yesterday.

Police and paramilitary personnel were deployed in strength across the Valley for strict implementation of the prohibitory orders, the official said.

Official said that a total of 20 fresh companies (100 personnel in each) are being rushed to the Valley which will be in addition to 2,800 Central Reserve Police Force personnel which were sent to assist the state police last week.

"Some of the fresh units will exclusively render the task of road opening parties in order to secure the movement of security forces convoys," a senior official said.

About 60 battalions (about 1,000 in personnel each) are already stationed in the state as part of counter-insurgency grid.

A youth suffered pellet injury during a protest this evening in Rainawari area here.

While landline telephone connections in three north Kashmir districts of Baramulla, Bandipora and Kupwara were snapped yesterday, the inter-exchange calls for all landline connections in the Valley were snapped.

Customers are not able to make calls to any phone outside their district.

While mobile telephony, except BSNL mobiles, is suspended across Kashmir for the past eight days, the broadband internet services have been curtailed across the Valley.

No police or civil administration official was willing to reply to queries related to restrictions on telephone services. However, government sources said the step has been taken to contain the violent protests.

"The protests and mob attacks are being mobilised using telephones. Very reluctantly we have decided to take this step in order to prevent any further loss of life or property," a government source said.

Mobile Internet services continued to remain suspended for the seventh day today while trains are also off the tracks in the Valley as a precautionary measure.

The fresh curbs come as the local newspapers failed to hit stand for the second day after authorities raided the printing presses of media houses on Friday night.

The state government today also extended the summer vacations for schools and colleges in the Valley by another week.

The educational institutions, which were scheduled to reopen tomorrow after 17-day break, will now reopen on July 25.

Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since July 9 following killing of Burhan Wani and two of his associated in an encounter with security forces a day earlier in Kokernag area of Anantnag district.

In the ensuing clashes with security forces, 39 persons including a cop have been killed while 3164 persons including 1500 security force personnel have been injured.

The separatists groups - both factions of Hurriyat Conference and JKLF - have been issuing strike calls, a practice reminiscent of 2010 summer agitation.

The separatists groups have extended the strike call till Monday evening.
Katni (MP): A 23-year-old tribal woman gave birth to a child on the porch of the district hospital here as she was allegedly not given medical attention on time, prompting the authorities to order a probe into the incident.

Rama Singh, wife of Ravendra, a resident of Kalwara Fathak area here, gave birth to the child on the porch at around 1 PM on July 15, according to eyewitnesses. A hospital official also confirmed the incident.

The doctors at the government-run medical facility were in a meeting at that time.

"I today ordered an inquiry to find out the truth in media reports which alleged the woman was not given medical attention at the time of need," Katni District Chief Medical and Health Officer (CM&HO) Ashok Chodha told PTI.

District Hospital civil surgeon Umesh Namdeo said on seeing the woman's condition, after she came to the hospital, they immediately called for a stretcher.

However, the women accompanying Rama insisted on delivering the child on the porch itself as the baby was coming out of the birth canal, he said, adding they covered the area with clothes.

"I think their decision was wise. There was a strong possibility the child may have slipped on the ground and sustained head injuries while getting inside the emergency room," he said.

The woman and the newborn were rushed to the maternity ward immediately after the delivery and both are fine now, Namdeo, a child specialist said.

"Yes, with other doctors I was in a meeting at that time. Another doctor, Rajendra Thakur and others staffers were in the emergency room, just a few metres away from the porch," he said.
Mumbai: A minor dalit girl was allegedly kidnapped, gangraped and then brutally killed in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra.

Her body was found in a mutilated state under a tree on Wednesday evening.

Three suspects have been arrested in connection with the case, police said.

On Saturday, hundreds of angry residents held road blockade and other protests in Karjat tehsil of Ahmednagar over the brutal torture, gangrape and murder of the minor girl.

The victim, a ninth standard Dalit girl, had on Wednesday gone to her grandmother's house, located little far away. The girl left on her bicycle but when she did not return after a while, her relatives began calling out to her. Later, they found her body in mutilated state lying under a tree.

Post-mortem was conducted in Karjat sub-divisional hospital and the body was handed over to the family.
Jaipur: VHP leader Praveen Togadia on Sunday said the protesters who pelted security personnel with stones in Kashmir Valley should be booked on sedition charges.

"The government should show courage and register cases against those who threw stones at police and army personnel despite curfew being in force in Kashmir.

"Those who were injured during curfew were treated in hospitals and on the basis of the hospital records, they should be identified and slapped with sedition charges as attacking police and army personnel amounts to waging war against India," the VHP International Working president said.

"The government should take strict action against those who disturb the peace in Kashmir. Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti should resign if she fails to take action against such elements," the VHP leader said, while demanding that Article 370 of the Constitution that grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir be scrapped.

The VHP leader went on term those not supporting India on the issue of Kashmir as "either traitors or Pakistanis".

Expressing concern on the alleged migration of Hindus from Kairana town in Uttara Pradesh, Togadia said VHP will conduct surveys in all villages across the country to ascertain the reasons behind their mass departure.

He also stressed the need for introducing a "common population policy" mandating two children per couple.

"If those having more than two children are denied bank loans, ration, services in hospitals and schools, it will have a strong impact on population control.

"This is a secular way of economic development, he said.

On terrorists attack across the world, Togadia said that leaders will have to recognise that it is Islamic terrorism.

"It is Islamic terrorism and leaders should gather courage to say this," he said.
Washington: A malicious gaming app called Pokemon Go Ultimate, the first "lockscreen" app has made its way onto the Google Play store, said software security company ESET.

The app when downloaded and run is not installed as Pokemon Go but as "PI Network", a report published in the Fortune said.

Anyone who ran that app would find their phone completely frozen, forcing them to restart the phone by removing the battery. After rebooting, the PI Network app seemed to disappear, but in fact continued running in the background and generating fake ad clicks, stated Fortune.

The Pokemon Go gaming app uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities of the device in conjunction with Google Maps to place virtual creatures in real world locations, which one then tries to find using your device as a guide.

Once in proximity to the placed creature, one then needs to use device's camera to view the creature and try to capture it.

ESET also spotted several other malicious apps, including Install Pokemongo and Guide & Cheats for Pokemon Go.

The plague of malicious tricks surrounding the augmented-reality game highlights the security risk posed by Android's relatively open app ecosystem.

Though the specific apps highlighted by ESET seem to have been removed from Google Play Store, a search found several apps named with variations on Install Pokemon Go.

The app, however, has been pulled off from Google Play, ESET reported. One can uninstall the app manually by going to their phone's application manager.

The Pokemon Go is available on Google Playstore and Apple's App Store in the US, Japan and Australia, Philippines, New Zealand, Britain and Germany and is coming soon to India, Singapore, Taiwan and Indonesia.
Lucknow: At least 21 persons died and more than a dozen were taken ill after consuming spurious liquor at Aliganj in Etah district of Uttar Pradesh, police said.

Many people also lost their eyesight due to the reaction after consuming the liquor on Friday night, according to report.

On Friday, at least five persons had lost their lives after consuming the illicit liquor. However, the death tragedy rose to 17 by Sunday morning.

Angry at the development, Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav suspended the SDM, District Excise Officer, Circle Officer and the Aliganj Station House Officer of the area.

The hooch tragedy occurred at Johari Darwaza area in Aliganj when locals consumed liquor at a late night get together.

However, they soon started vomiting, complained of nausea and blurred vision. They were rushed to a nearby hospital where five were declared dead.
Dhaka: Police in Dhaka on Saturday arrested three people, including a university professor, for failing to register information about tenants renting a property who later attacked a cafe in the city, killing 20 people.

Gias Uddin Ahsan, a professor at North South University in Dhaka, his nephew, and the manager of Ahsan`s apartment were arrested by Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) for failing to comply with rules forcing landlords to register information about their tenants with the police, Mohammad Masudur Rahman, a senior police official told Reuters.

The men will appear in court on Sunday, he said.

Five militants who were killed by police after they stormed the cafe on July 1 had rented the apartment along with another person in a nearby residential area in May and started living there from June, Rahman said.

"From here they attacked the cafe. There were other militants also who fled after the attack," he said.

"We also found evidence that they kept grenades and other explosives in the apartment. If we had been informed they were living there, then that brutal killing would not have been possible and we could also have arrested the other militants who fled."

Earlier this year, the DMP issued an order to all apartment owners to provide details of their tenants for a database to help police crack down on criminals and militants using rented accommodation as hideouts.

Bangladesh has suffered a series of attacks on liberal bloggers, university teachers and members of religious minorities over the past year. The government says two domestic militant groups trying to replace secular democracy with Islamic sharia rule are responsible for the violence.

Twenty people including 18 foreigners were killed before police stormed the cafe, rescued 13 hostages and shot five of the attackers dead.

Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said on Saturday that investigators had identified the masterminds of the attack and that the remaining perpetrators would soon be arrested.

Some of the assailants had attended prestigious schools or universities and had been reported missing, according to the police. One was the son of a politician.
Montreal: Canadian Foreign Minister Stephane Dion pressed Turkey to handle the aftermath of a coup attempt according to "fundamental principles of democracy."

Speaking on the television network Radio-Canada after a phone call with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, the Canadian diplomatic chief said it was "important to avoid collect punishment" against those who organized the aborted coup that sought to seize power from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

"Democracy has been saved," Dion said yesterday, after Turkish authorities wrested back control of the country Saturday.

"We must be discerning to ensure that those on trial have the chance to prove innocence or express their point of view according to the fundamental rules of justice we must aim to respect."

Turkish authorities crushed the putsch bid by discontented soldiers in a chaotic night of violence that left at least 265 dead.

With the coup defeated, Turkey rounded up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm that the country could reestablish its death penalty, which Dion said Canadians are against "in all circumstances."

Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the coup bid.

Though he praised Erdogan's swift return to control, the Canadian minister said "the use of military force was completely unacceptable."

Canada has advised its citizens against travel to Turkey since Friday.
Saylorsburg: U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose followers Turkey blames for a failed coup, said on Saturday the attempted overthrow may have been staged, and he urged the Turkish people not to view military intervention in a positive light.

"There is a slight chance, there is a possibility that it could be a staged coup," Gulen told reporters through a translator in Pennsylvania, where he resides. "It could be meant for court accusations and associations."

Gulen said democracy cannot be achieved through military action. He criticized the President Tayyip Erdogan`s government.

"It appears that they have no tolerance for any movement, any group, any organization that is not under their total control," he said.
Aankara: death toll from Turkey`s failed military coup has risen to more than 290, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday, adding that more than 1,400 people were wounded.

Of the dead, more than 100 were participants in the coup, the ministry said, adding that there was no doubt the coup had been staged by followers of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, has denied involvement in the attempt to overthrow the government, condemning it as an affront to democracy.

Turkey widened a crackdown on suspected supporters of a failed military coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000, and the government said it was in full control of the country and economy.

Overnight, supporters of President Tayyip Erdogan rallied in public squares, at Istanbul airport and outside his palace in a show of defiance after the coup attempt.

With expectations growing of heavy measures against dissent, European politicians warned Erdogan that the coup attempt did not give him a bank cheque to disregard the rule of law, and that he risked isolating himself internationally as he strengthens his position at home.

Broadcaster NTV cited Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag as saying that more arrests were expected on top of the 6,000 people already detained.

Authorities have rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters, ranging from top commanders to foot soldiers, and the same number of judges and prosecutors after forces loyal to Erdogan crushed the attempted coup on Saturday.

Among those arrested is General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base from which U.S. aircraft launch airstrikes on Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, an official said.

"Control across Turkey has been restored and there are no clashes at the moment," a senior official said, adding that although a few groups of coup plotters were holding out in Istanbul, they no longer posed a risk.

"There are still a few important soldiers on the run and being sought. I believe they will be captured shortly," the official told Reuters.

The crackdown appears to intensify a longstanding push by Erdogan to root out the influence of followers of U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Erdogan accuses followers of Gulen, who was once an ally but is now his arch-enemy, of trying to create a "parallel structure" within the courts, police, armed forces and media with an aim to topple the state.

The cleric denies the charge and says he played no role in the attempted coup, denouncing it as an affront to democracy.

A GIFT FROM GOD

Erdogan promised a purge of the armed forces even before the coup attempt was over. "They will pay a heavy price for this," he said. "This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army."

At a rally late on Saturday, his supporters demanded that the coup leaders be executed. "Let`s hang them!" chanted the crowd in Ankara`s central Kizilay square. Erdogan told them that parliament may consider a proposal to bring back the death penalty, which has been abolished.

Erdogan`s critics say he will use the purge to create a pliant judiciary, eliminating any dissenting voices in the courts.

Some European politicians have expressed their unease about developments since the coup attempt.

"We want the rule of law to work fully in Turkey," said French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. "(The coup attempt) is not a blank cheque for Mr Erdogan. There cannot be purges, the rule of law must work," told France 3 television.

Ayrault said European Union ministers would reiterate on Monday when they meet in Brussels that Turkey - which has applied to join the bloc - must conform to Europe`s democratic principles.

European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Erdogan would move Turkey away from the core values represented by the EU and the NATO defence alliance - of which it is a long-standing member - if he decided to use the attempted coup to restrict basic democratic rights further.

"He would strengthen his position domestically, but he would isolate himself internationally," Oettinger, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Welt am Sonntag newspaper.

Some European politicians are also expressing concern about the future of a deal between the EU and Ankara that has helped to slow numbers of migrants crossing from the country to neighbouring Greece.

`NECESSARY MEASURES`

Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek took to Twitter to attempt to reassure investors that the Turkish government was in full control of the economy before financial markets opened on Monday.

He said it had decided on "all necessary measures" after consulting with the central bank and treasury. He did not specify the measures.

"The macro fundamentals of our country are solid. We are taking all necessary precautions. We are strong with the support of our people and strengthened political stability," he said on Twitter, adding that he planned to hold a conference call with global investors on Sunday.

The central bank said it would provide unlimited liquidity to banks.

Erdogan supporters waving Turkish flags also thronged the central Taksim square in Istanbul - scene of mass anti-government protests three years ago - and a smaller crowd gathered outside the gates of the his vast presidential palace complex in the capital.

For at least eight hours overnight on Friday violence shook Turkey`s two main cities. But the coup attempt crumbled as Erdogan rushed back to Istanbul from a Mediterranean holiday and urged people to take to the streets in support of his government against plotters he accused of trying to kill him.

The violence shocked the nation of almost 80 million, once seen as a model Muslim democracy, where living standards have grown steadily for more than a decade and where the army last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago.

It also shattered fragile confidence among Turkey`s allies about security in the NATO country, a leading member of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State. Turkey had already been hit by repeated suicide bombings over the past year and is struggling to contain an insurgency by Kurdish separatists.

U.S. President Barack Obama has also urged parties on all sides of the crisis to avoid destabilising Turkey and follow the rule of law.

FEARS OF CRACKDOWN

A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has ruled the country since 2003, would have marked another seismic shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprisings erupted and plunged Turkey`s southern neighbour Syria into civil war.

But the failed attempt could still destabilise the U.S. ally, which lies between Europe and the chaos of Syria.

Gulen said the attempted overthrow may have been staged to justify a crackdown.

"As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations," Gulen said in a statement.

Erdogan called on the United States to extradite Gulen. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington was willing to help Turkey as it tries to identify those involved, but made clear it would act only if there was evidence against Gulen.

Kerry also warned that public suggestions of a U.S. role were "utterly false" and harmful to relations after Turkey`s labour minister suggested there had been U.S. involvement in the plot.

Erdogan`s Islamist-rooted AK Party has long had strained relations with the military, which has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism although it has not seized power directly since 1980.

His conservative religious vision for Turkey`s future has also alienated many ordinary citizens who accuse him of authoritarianism. Police used heavy force in 2013 to suppress mass protests demanding more freedom.

Erdogan commands the admiration and loyalty of millions of Turks, however, particularly for raising living standards and restoring order to an economy once beset by regular crises.
Paris: The man behind the truck attack that killed at least 84 people celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice had recently been radicalised, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in remarks published on Sunday.

Thursday night`s attack in the Riviera city of Nice plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.

Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31 year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any links to Islamic State, which claimed the attack, but Valls said there was no doubt on the assailant`s motives.

"The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly, " Valls said in an interview with Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

"The claim on Saturday morning by Islamic State and the fast radicalisation of the killer confirms the Islamist nature of this attack."

Officials said on Saturday that people questioned by police had indicated that he had undergone a rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion.

The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said that Bouhlel "was one of the soldiers of Islamic State."

Valls, who said security services had prevented 16 attacks over three years, indicated that at play on Thursday was the group`s modus operandi of cajoling unstable individuals into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible.

"Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts ... this is probably what happened in Nice`s case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The group, which is under military pressure from forces opposed to it, considers France its main target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States, which is leading a coalition against it.

SECURITY FAILURES?

Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and far-right over how President Francois Hollande`s Socialist government is handling security, Valls warned that there was no risk zero and new attacks would occur.

"I`ve always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It`s difficult to say, but other lives will be lost."

With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, French opposition politicians are ramping up pressure and seizing on what they described as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2 km (1.5 miles) through large crowds before it was finally halted.

After Thursday`s attack, a state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris was extended by three months and military and police reservists were to be called up.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazenueve on Saturday called on "patriotic citizens" to become reservists to help relieve exhausted security forces.

But the measures appear to have done little to temper concerns. Highlighting the "serious deficiencies" in protecting French citizens, National Front leader Marine Le Pen demanded that Cazeneuve resign.

"Anywhere else in the world a minister with such a terrible record - 250 deaths in 18 months - would have resigned a long time ago," she told reporters.

Christian Estrosi, a security hardliner and ex-minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy who is now president of the wider Riviera region, accused the government of failing completely in Nice.

"When the interior minister says there were enough police, it constitutes a blatant lie," he told i-Tele television. "He said there were 64 national policemen on duty. It`s false and the investigation will show it."

Valls has said there were no failures in Nice.
London: The majority of Britons are opposed to a second referendum on membership of the European Union and almost half believe new Prime Minister Theresa May should carry on without calling a general election, according to a poll published on Saturday.

A survey by ComRes for the Sunday Mirror and Independent newspapers found that 57 percent of those asked didn`t support a second referendum on Brexit against 29 percent who did.

A total of 46 percent thought May should not call an election while 38 percent thought she should go to the country to get support for her programme to take Britain out of the bloc it joined in 1973.

In June`s referendum, 52 percent of those who took part voted to leave the EU while 48 percent voted to stay, prompting calls among many shocked "Remain" supporters for a re-run. Four million people signed a petition to seek a second referendum. But May, who took over as prime minister after David Cameron resigned in the wake of the result, has ruled out a second vote, saying "Brexit means Brexit".

The ruling Conservative Party narrowly won the last general election in 2015 and May has said there should not be another one until 2020.

ComRes interviewed 2,097 adults online between July 13 and 15.
Islamabad: Pakistan has declared Hizbul commander Burhan Wani as a "martyr" and July 19 as black day under emotional pressure from the public, a former foreign secretary of the Islamic republic said.

"In the beginning, our reactions were low key. But the government came under pressure from people and media. If is difficult to try and cool it because of the emotive aspect of the issue," the Times of India quoted him as saying in Beijing.

"We must not allow the situation to go out of hand. But it depends on how India handles the situation," he was quoted as saying.

"Pakistan does not want to play up the situation. But we have an obligation to bring it to the notice of the international community, TOI quoted him as saying.

"Every Kashmiri on our side considers him (Burhan) a martyr," Khokhar said.

Burhan Wani along with his two associates was shot dead by security forces in Kashmir on July 8, triggering widespread protests in the state as thousands of people in the Valley took to the streets to protest against the killing.

The situation was brought under control after huge contingents of security personnel were deployed in the Valley to rein in the protesters.

Political parties from across the spectrum have condemned the violence and the attempts to project terrorist Burhani Wani as a martyr.

They also lauded the security forces for their role in calming the situation in Kashmir.
Kuwait City: A second round of the UN-facilitated peace talks between Yemen's warring parties resumed in Kuwait after a two-week break, government officials said.

The negotiations aimed at ending the civil war, bringing security and stability to the war-torn Middle East country were officially halted late last month and were scheduled to resume on Friday, Xinhua news agency reported.

The UN Special Envoy for Yemen Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed confirmed that the talks were held on Saturday evening with the presence of representatives from the two warring rivals.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Abdul-Malik Mekhlafi, who heads the government's peace negotiating team, said on Twitter that "the government decided to return to the peace talks after receiving written response from the UN envoy to our previous demands."

The upcoming talks will continue for about two weeks and will mainly focus on discussing withdrawal from cities, handing over government facilities, release of prisoners and lifting siege on cities, he said.

The Foreign Minister added that "we agreed with the UN envoy that the two-week duration of the negotiations won't be extended more and no other topics will be debated."

The delegation of the Shia Houthi rebels and their allies from General People's Congress Party arrived in Kuwait on Friday from Yemen.

Yemeni political observers said that the UN-brokered peace talks that kicked off in Kuwait City on April 11 failed to reach any tangible breakthroughs to end the conflict after more than two months of negotiations.

Delegates of the government strongly insisted that they represent Yemen's sole legitimate governing authority, and call for the full implementation of last year's UN Security Council Resolution 2216.

The resolution orders Houthi militias to withdraw from capital Sanaa and all other cities occupied earlier, hand over weapons and release political prisoners before forming a new sharing transitional government.

However, the Houthis have said that they represent the country's de facto rulers and urged to form a new transitional government before discussing withdrawal from cities and the other topics.
Baton Rouge (US): Three police officers were killed and three others wounded after a shooting in Baton Rouge, a sheriff's office spokeswoman said on Sunday.

One suspect is dead and law enforcement officials believe two others are still at large, the spokeswoman said.

Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, said in a statement that the public should call 911 immediately if they see anything suspicious.

The shooting which happened just before 9 AM (local time), less than 1 mile from police headquarters comes amid spiralling tensions across the city and the country between the black community and police.

The races of the suspect or suspects and the officers were not immediately known.

Baton Rouge Police Sgt. Don Coppola told The Associated Press earlier that the officers were rushed to a local hospital. Coppola said authorities are asking people to stay away from the area.

Multiple police units were stationed at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, where stricken officers were believed to be undergoing treatment at a trauma center. A police officer with a long gun was blocking the parking lot at the emergency room.

Officers and deputies from the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office were involved, according to Hicks.

An Associated Press reporter on the scene saw police vehicles with lights flashing massed about a half mile from the police headquarters on Airline Highway. Police armed with long guns on the road stopped at least two vehicles driving away from the scene and checked their trunks and vehicles before allowing them to drive away.

Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store.

The killing was captured on cellphone video and circulated widely on the internet.

It was followed a day later by the shooting death of another black man in Minnesota, whose girlfriend livestreamed the aftermath of his death on Facebook. Then on Thursday, a black gunman in Dallas opened fire on police at a protest about the police shootings, killing five officers and heightening tensions even further.

Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets in Baton Rouge to condemn Sterling's death, including hundreds of demonstrators who congregated outside the police station. Authorities arrested about 200 people over the three-day weekend.
Ankara: Three top commanders who were held hostage by the coup attempters were saved on July 16, Defence Minister Fikri Isik announced on Saturday night.

"Our commander of air staff, naval staff and the second chief of general staff were saved from the Akinci Base where they were held and are in good condition," XInhua news agency quoted Isik as saying to reporters in the capital Ankara, adding that it was early to say that the coup danger was completely over, while urging caution.

Meanwhile, the commander of gendarmerie forces Gen. Galip Mendi was also saved later.

In addition, a total of 72 coup plotters were detained during police operation at the Akinci Base in the capital Ankara.

Turkish President Recep Erdogan made a "thank you call" to parliament speaker and leaders of the two opposition parties on July 16.

The president thanked Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu and National Movement Party (NHP) leader Devlet Bahceli for not giving credit to the July 15 coup attempt during a phone conversation.
Istanbul: Turkish authorities rounded up dozens of senior military personnel and judges in a ruthless crackdown on Sunday, after thousands massed in the streets nationwide overnight to denounce a coup aimed at ousting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned the attempted putsch but also urged Turkey to respect the "rule of law" in its aftermath, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some coup plotters when arrested.

According to the government, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives when a group within the army sought to overthrow the authorities by seizing key strategic points in Istanbul and Ankara.

Over 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military has said.

The botched coup bid marked the biggest challenge to Erdogan's rule in 13 years as prime minister and now president. But he successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.

Thousands responded late yesterday to a new call by the president to pour into the squares to celebrate the "victory of democracy" with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks reported in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.

Europe Minister Omer Celik urged people to stay on the streets, writing on Twitter that the "vigil for democracy" continues.

The Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, accusing the plotters of acting on behalf of Erdogan's arch enemy, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen.

The government has already said that almost 3,000 soldiers had been detained on suspicion of involvement in the putsch which raised fears of chaos in the strategic NATO member state of almost 80 million.

Turkish television has shown images of captured coup plotters forced to lie face down on the tarmac after arrest while AFP photographers have seen suspects roughly led away pursued by angry mobs.

NTV television said that 34 generals of various grades had been detained so far. They include senior figures like Erdal Ozturk, commander of the third army and the commander of the Malatya-based second army, Adem Huduti.

In an operation early Sunday, authorities detained the commander of the garrison in the western town of Denizli, Ozhan Ozbakir, along with 51 other soldiers, according to the state-run Anatolia news agency.
Paris: French authorities on Sunday arrested a man and a woman in connection with the Bastille Day lorry attack in Nice that killed 84 persons, CNN quoted a prosecutor as saying.

The arrests were confirmed by Agnes Thibault Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the anti-terrorism prosecutor.

Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, drove a 20-tonne truck through hundreds gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks on the Mediterranean city`s waterfront on Thursday night.

Bouhlel was shot to death by police after he barreled down the crowded Promenade des Anglais for almost a mile on Friday, crushing and hitting people who had gathered to watch fireworks, CNN reported.

The Islamic State (IS) terror group has claimed responsibility of the attack.

On Saturday, French authorities arrested three people on Saturday and two on Friday for their suspected involvement.

The detained included Bouhlel`s estranged wife.

RAID -- a special operations unit of French police -- and the Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) of the judicial police participated in carrying out these arrests.

Earlier on Sunday, France called up 12,000 police reservists to boost security in the wake of the killings.

Initial investigations showed that the Tunisian perpetrator, who was killed by the security forces, was "radicalised very quickly", according to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
Caracas: Venezuela has opened its border with Colombia for the second time this month to allow people to cross over to shop for basic amenities.

Last week, 35,000 crossed over for the first time since the border was closed in August 2015 by President Nicolas Maduro after former Colombian paramilitaries attacked a Venezuelan military patrol and injured three soldiers, BBC reported.

The border across a pedestrian bridge connecting Tachira in Venezuela and Cucuta in Colombia opened on Saturday, a day earlier than authorities from both countries had previously announced.

Officials said the border was expected to remain open for about 12 hours.

Venezuela has suffered severe shortages for months as a result of the falling price of oil which is the country's prime source of income, the BBC added.

Last week, the government reopened the border for up to 72 hours and as many as 10,000 Venezuelans from different cities passed through, Xinhua news agency quoted Tachira state Citizen Security Secretary Ramon Cabez as saying on Saturday.

The Foreign Affairs ministers of Venezuela and Colombia are slated to meet to discuss reopening of the border on August 4.
Hanoi: Scores of activists were detained in Vietnam`s capital on Sunday as they gathered to protest against China after it rejected a recent international ruling that dismissed its claims to much of the South China Sea.

Anti-Chinese sentiment runs deep in communist Vietnam but the country`s authoritarian rulers move swiftly to tamp down expressions of public anger, fearful that allowing such protests might embolden criticism of their rule.

Activists had used social media to call for protests in Hanoi on Sunday in the wake of this week`s ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague which found there was no legal basis for Beijing`s claims to vast swathes of the South China Sea.

The case was brought by the Philippines but the ruling has been a boon for other regional countries like Vietnam who also have competing claims to the strategic sea.

Authorities in the capital Hanoi were ready for protests on Sunday.

Plainclothes security forces were out in force, blanketing much of the city centre and keeping a close eye on any crowds that might be gathering, an AFP reporter on the scene said.

Throughout the morning around 30 activists were swiftly bundled onto waiting buses and cars by security forces after they gathered to hold a protest near the city`s famous Hoan Kiem lake, a common spot for demonstrations.

Some chanted "Down with China invasion!" as they were led away to detention.

Later in the day a group of nine activists held a brief rally outside the Philippines embassy. One held aloft a banner that read: "Thank you Philippines. You have a brave government."

The group dispersed on motorbike before security forces arrived.

Activists posted pictures on social media of similar flashmob rallies in southern Ho Chi Minh City with protesters riding around the city on motorbikes holding banners criticising China.

Beijing lays claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, putting it at odds with regional neighbours the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, which also have partial claims.

China boycotted the PCA hearings, saying the court had no jurisdiction, and has reacted furiously, vowing to ignore the ruling and arguing it misinterprets international law.

Vietnam and China frequently trade diplomatic barbs over the disputed Paracel island chain and waters in the South China Sea.

China has encouraged patriotic citizens to visit the contested Paracels, which are known as Xisha in Chinese.

Such acts have deepened already simmering anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam while domestic critics accuse Hanoi of being too meek towards its giant northern neighbour.

At least three Chinese nationals were killed in 2014 when rioting broke out in Vietnam after Beijing sent an oil rig into contested waters.
Nice (France) The man who mowed through a crowd with a truck, killing 84 Bastille Day revellers in Nice on Thursday, had phoned home hours earlier and sent a `laughing` picture from the French city, his brother told Reuters.

During a visit to Nice on Sunday, French Health Minister Marisol Touraine said 18 people, including a child, were still in a critical condition, while about 85 people in total were in hospital.

The attack by delivery man Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel at peak holiday time on the Riviera plunged France into new grief and fear, just eight months after jihadist gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.

"That last day he said he was in Nice with his European friends to celebrate the national holiday," Bouhlel`s brother Jabeur told Reuters in their native Tunisia. In the photograph, "he seemed very happy and pleased, he was laughing a lot".

Reuters could not verify the existence of the photograph, which Jabeur declined to share.

The attacks, along with one in Brussels four months ago, have shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.

Two more people, a man and a woman close to Bouhlel, were arrested in Nice early on Sunday and another person in the afternoon. Four others arrested previously were still being held, but Bouhlel`s estranged wife was released without charge after being held since Friday.

In a pointer to a possible accomplice, one of these seven people still held by police had received a text from the killer thanking that person for providing a weapon, a source close to the investigation told Reuters.

Islamic State has claimed the attack, calling Bouhlel one of its soldiers, but authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31-year-old, shot dead by police, had any actual links to the militant group.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls said there was no doubting the assailant`s motives.

"The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly," he told newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

As of Sunday no evidence had been produced to show how he underwent that rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion.

Relatives and friends interviewed in Nice painted a picture of a man who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and according to French media even ate pork, behaviour that would be unlikely in a devout Muslim.

A report in the Nice Matin newspaper said investigators had found no radical material in his flat, although they were still looking at his telephone and computer.

Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel`s sister told Reuters he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005 and had sought medical treatment.

WHY FRANCE?

Islamic State, which is under military pressure in its Iraqi and Syrian strongholds, considers France a key target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States.

France is also home to Europe`s biggest Muslim population, and has been accused by some critics of sowing racial, ethnic and religious discord through strict adherence to a culture that allows no place for religion in schools and civic life.

Long and open borders also make it an easy target for attackers who want to melt away afterwards.

Valls defended France`s record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years, and said the modus operandi of cajoling unstable people into striking by whatever means possible was difficult to combat.

"Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts ... this is probably what happened in Nice`s case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and the far-right over how President Francois Hollande`s Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no such thing as zero risk and that new attacks would occur.

"I`ve always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It`s a difficult thing to say, but other lives will be lost."

With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, opposition politicians are seizing on what they see as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2 km (1.5 miles) through large crowds before it was finally halted.

A state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris has been extended by three months, and military and police reservists are to be called up.

But the measures appear to have done little to temper concerns. Highlighting the "serious deficiencies" in protecting French citizens, far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen demanded that Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve resign.

"Anywhere else in the world a minister with such a terrible record - 250 deaths in 18 months - would have resigned a long time ago," she told reporters.

Christian Estrosi, president of the wider Riviera region and a security hardliner, accused the government of failing completely in Nice.

"When the interior minister says there were enough police, it constitutes a blatant lie," he told i-Tele television. "He said there were 64 national policemen on duty. It`s false and the investigation will show it."

Valls has said there were no failures, although Cazeneuve acknowledged on Saturday that the truck had avoided the police vehicles blocking the way to the promenade by mounting a kerb.
YEREVAN, JULY 17, ARMENPRESS. Gunmen have stormed a Police HQ in Yerevan in the morning of July 17 and have taken hostages. Armenpress reports citing the official statement of the National Security Service of Armenia.

Meanwhile their supporters periodically spread misinformation on media outlets and social media as if they have started armed rebellion and seized buildings. The National Security Service of Armenia officially declares that this information has no grounds in reality. State institutions operate in an orderly manner and the law enforcement bodies implement their duties of protecting civil order and state security. Talks are being held with the armed group to ensure their peaceful surrender to the Armenian authorities. We reaffirm that this as any other unlawful act will be disrupted by the law enforcement, the organizers will be neutralized and will be held accountable according to the Armenian laws.
YEREVAN, JULY 17, ARMENPRESS. Goals and changes shouldnt be achieved by extreme measures, Rule of Law faction MP Mher Shahgeldyan told ARMENPRESS, commenting on the Yerevan Police HQ hostage situation.

We are concerned over the current situation, we were at the scene and will continue following the developments. Obviously, goals and changes shouldnt be achieved by such extreme measures, this may result in deaths. We support the peaceful solution of problems, and we hope that this issue will be resolved that way. It is very important to understand that on both sides are Armenians, the MP said.

In the morning of July 17 gunmen stormed a Police HQ in Yerevan and took hostages  demanding the release of Zhirayr Sefilyan, who was imprisoned a month ago, charged with illegal possession, transportation and acquirement of weapons and ammunition.

Police Colonel Artur Vanoyan has been killed by the gunmen during the ambush. Colonel Aram Hovhannisyan, Lt.  Colonel Hrach Khosteghyan, Corporal Gagik Mkrtchyan received gunshot wounds.

7 people are being held hostage. There are no wounded among the gunmen.

Deputy Police Chief Hunan Poghosyan said law enforcement agencies have necessary measures and are fully capable of neutralizing the gunmen.
Most read of the week
Venezuelans carrying groceries cross the Simon Bolivar bridge from Cucuta in Colombia back to San Antonio de Tachira in Venezuela, on July 10, 2016

Thousands of Venezuelans crossed Saturday into the Colombian city of Cucuta to buy food and medicine, taking advantage of another brief opening in the border that's been closed nearly a year.

Caracas authorized the temporary opening a week after some 35,000 Venezuelans poured across the border during a 12-hour opening of the pedestrian bridge that connects Tachira, Venezuela and Cucuta.

"Right now @GoberNorte is coordinating the passage of thousands of people," tweeted Yebrail Haddad, the government secretary of the Norte de Santander department, of which Cucuta is the capital.

The border opened a day earlier than authorities from both countries had previously announced.

The influx of Venezuelans comes during a 40-day freight truckers' strike in Colombia, heightening fears that shortages could hit major cities there as well, including Cucuta.

Venezuela has suffered crippling shortages for months, a ripple effect from the falling price of oil, the country's primary export. Critics also blame grave mishandling of the state-led economy.

Colombian Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas told reporters that security forces would guarantee the arrival of supplies for Cucuta's residents as well as Venezuelan shoppers.

"We have made a great effort to have enough supplies for the 15,000 Venezuelans who have reached and crossed the border today, and those expected tomorrow," Villegas said.

Colombian authorities checked those crossing the border before allowing passage, local government sources told AFP.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ordered the border shut in August 2015 after former Colombian paramilitaries attacked a Venezuelan military patrol and wounded three soldiers, causing a diplomatic row between the neighboring countries.
Jose Santana, 80, of Lincoln, died July 15, 2016. He was born February 25, 1936, in Tenamaxtlan, Mexico. He studied engineering at Christopher Columbus College in Mexico City. He came to the United States and studied law at the University of Nebraska. He became a naturalized citizen in 1961.

Jose was employed at Burlington Northern Railroad until his retirement in 1992. He married Rita Bahr on August 2, 1969. He and his wife Rita did much traveling throughout the U. S., including Hawaii. They also traveled to Puerto Rico, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and various islands. Traveling was one of Jose's favorite things in life.

Mass of Christian Burial will be held at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, July 20, at Cathedral of the Risen Christ, 3500 Sheridan Blvd, with Monsignor Robert Tucker celebrating the Mass. There will be a rosary at 7 p.m. on Tuesday at Butherus Maser and Love funeral Home, 4040 A St. Visitation will be from 12 noon to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, with the family receiving friends from 5-7 p.m. Memorials are suggested for masses. www.bmlfh.com.
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain opened "very fruitful" trade talks with Canada on Friday, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox told the Sunday Times newspaper as he prepares to renegotiate Britain's commercial ties following its vote last month to leave the European Union. In limited extracts of his interview, Fox said he would soon travel to the United States to ensure that Britain was not at the back of the queue in trade talks as President Barack Obama had suggested before the June 23 vote. He said was "scoping" about a dozen free trade deals outside the EU to be ready for when Britain leaves, some with countries that had indicated they wanted a quick deal and others with some of the world's major economies. "We can make Britain a beacon for open trade," he told the paper. "We have already had a number of countries saying 'we'd love to do a trade deal with the world's fifth-biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU.'" Earlier, Prime Minister Theresa May's office said Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had told her he would like to strike a free trade deal with Britain as soon as possible. The European Commission negotiates trade deals on behalf of its member states, meaning Britain has not had to forge its own deals since it joined the bloc in 1973. (Reporting by Stephen Addison; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Matthew Lewis)
By Ayla Jean Yackley and Dasha Afanasieva ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey widened a crackdown on suspected supporters of a failed military coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000, and the government said it was in control of the country and economy. President Tayyip Erdogan and the government accused the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally whom Erdogan accuses of trying to create a "parallel structure" within the courts, police, armed forces and media, of orchestrating the coup. Erdogan's supporters of gathered in front of his Istanbul home to call for the plotters to face the death penalty, which Turkey outlawed in 2004 as part of its efforts to join the European Union. "We cannot ignore this demand," Erdogan told the chanting crowd. "In democracies, whatever the people say has to happen." He said a "terror group" led by Gulen had "ruined" the armed forces, that its members were being arrested in all military ranks, and that a purge of this "virus" would continue. Gulen denied any connection with the coup. The president has called on Turks to stay on the streets until Friday, and late into Sunday night, his supporters thronged squares and streets, honking horns and waving flags. Pictures on social media showed detained soldiers stripped to the waist, some wearing only their underpants, handcuffed and lying packed together on the floor of a sports hall where they were being held in Ankara. One video posted on Twitter showed detained generals with bruises and bandages. Akin Ozturk, head of the air force until 2015 and identified by three senior officials as one of the suspected masterminds of the coup plot, was among those held. The Foreign Ministry raised the death toll to more than 290, including over 100 rebels, and said 1,400 people were hurt. The violence shocked the nation of almost 80 million, once seen as a model Muslim democracy, where living standards have risen steadily for more than a decade and where the army last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago. It also shattered fragile confidence among Turkey's allies about security in the NATO country, which is a leading member of the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State. Turkey had already been hit by repeated suicide bombings over the past year and is struggling to contain an insurgency by Kurdish separatists. ARRESTS With expectations growing of a heavy clampdown on dissent, European politicians warned Erdogan the coup attempt did not give him a blank cheque to disregard the rule of law, and that he risked isolating himself internationally as he strengthens his position at home. Broadcaster NTV cited Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag as saying more arrests were expected. By Sunday evening, authorities had rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters, ranging from top commanders to foot soldiers, and the same number of judges and prosecutors after forces loyal to Erdogan crushed the attempted coup on Saturday. Among those arrested was General Bekir Ercan Van, commander of the Incirlik air base from which U.S. aircraft launch air strikes on Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, an official said. Erdogan's chief military assistant was also detained, the broadcaster CNN Turk said. Saudi Arabia detained Turkey's military attache to Kuwait at Turkey's request, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV said. Security forces also clashed with remnants of the coup plotters at Istanbul's second airport on Sunday and at an air base in central Turkey, an official said, adding that arrests had been made and the situation was under control. On Saturday, Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu told the broadcaster Haberturk he believed Washington was behind the coup attempt. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry described suggestions of a U.S. role as "utterly false", and said on Sunday that Washington had had no advance intelligence of the insurrection. The Pentagon also announced on Sunday that operations from Turkey by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State had resumed after Ankara reopened its air space, which had been closed during the coup attempt. However, U.S. facilities at the Incirlik base were still operating on internal power sources after Turkey cut the mains power supply. Kerry said the difficulty for U.S. planes using the base may have been a result of Turkish aircraft flown in support of the coup using it to refuel. 'PARALLEL STRUCTURE' The crackdown intensifies a long-standing push by Erdogan to root out Gulen's influence. The cleric denied playing any role in the attempted coup, which he called an affront to democracy, and on Sunday told reporters he believed Erdogan had staged the putsch. Erdogan said Turkey would demand that Western countries return Gulen's supporters living there, and submit an extradition request for Gulen himself to the United States. Gulen said he would comply with any extradition ruling but was "not really worried" about one. Kerry said he had no evidence Gulen was behind the plot, and urged Turkish authorities to compile evidence as rapidly as possible for any extradition request. Even before the coup attempt was over, Erdogan promised a purge of the armed forces. "They will pay a heavy price for this," he said. "This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army." Erdogan's critics say he will also use the purge to eliminating dissenting voices in the judiciary. Some European politicians expressed unease. "(The coup attempt) is not a blank cheque for Mr Erdogan. There cannot be purges, the rule of law must work," French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said. He told France 3 television that European Union ministers would reiterate on Monday when they meet in Brussels that Turkey, which has applied to join the bloc, must conform to Europe's democratic principles. European Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said Erdogan would move Turkey away from the core values represented by the EU and the NATO defense alliance if he used the coup to further restrict democratic rights. "He would strengthen his position domestically, but he would isolate himself internationally," Oettinger, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. Some European politicians are also expressing concern about the future of a deal between the EU and Turkey that has helped to slow the numbers of mostly Syrian migrants crossing from Turkey to neighbouring Greece. STRAINED RELATIONS Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK Party has long had strained relations with the military, which has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism, although it has not seized power directly since 1980. He commands the admiration and loyalty of millions of Turks particularly for raising living standards and restoring order to an economy once beset by regular crises. But his conservative religious vision for Turkey's future has also alienated many ordinary citizens who accuse him of authoritarianism. Police used heavy force in 2013 to suppress mass protests demanding more freedom. During the attempted coup, calls rang out from mosques across the country, urging believers to take to the street to defend their country. Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek tried to reassure investors before financial markets opened on Monday. "The macro fundamentals of our country are solid. We are taking all necessary precautions. We are strong with the support of our people and strengthened political stability," he tweeted. The central bank said it would provide unlimited liquidity to banks. (Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Ece Toksabay, Tulay Karadeniz, Nevzat Devranoglu and Gulsen Solaker in Ankara, Orhan Coskun in Istanbul, Michael Nienaber in Berlin, John Irish in Paris, Julia Edwards in Washington and Greg Savoy in Saylorsburg; Writing by Nick Tattersall and David Dolan; Editing by David Stamp and Kevin Liffey)
Google CEO Sundar Pichai responded to accusations that the internet giant failed to pay enough taxes in Europe, saying that the company had respected tax laws (AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan)

Berlin (AFP) - Google CEO Sundar Pichai hit back Sunday at accusations that the global internet giant failed to pay enough taxes in Europe, and warned of the potential fallout from Britain leaving the EU.

As Google faces a raft of fiscal probes across the continent, Pichai told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper that the US company invested "very heavily" in Europe and employed 14,000 people there.

"As a global company, we find ourselves between the conflicting priorities of international tax law," he said, in remarks published in German.

"Based on the structure of existing tax law, most companies pay the bulk of their taxes in their home countries."

He said that Google respected the laws on the books, and that governments would have to take action if they wanted to ensure more revenues stayed at home.

"Only the further development of the global tax system by politicians can lead to better results," he said.

Asked about a Brexit or British exit from the EU following last month's watershed referendum, Pichai underlined the importance to Google of a "unified digital market" in Europe.

He said it was a "challenge" for a multinational company "to come to terms with different laws and regulations in each country".

"This complexity makes greater engagement difficult, which also plays out in investment," he said, stressing however that large companies were better able to deal with such issues than small firms.

European officials have raised questions about the tax liabilities of companies including Google, Amazon and Apple. Some firms have taken advantage of tax breaks offered from Ireland, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Google's offices in Madrid were searched in a tax probe in late June, just over a month after police raided the Internet giant in Paris in a similar investigation.

The European Union also filed new anti-trust charges against Google last week, piling pressure on the company over the alleged abuse of its market dominance.

Pichai said Google's Android mobile phone operating system was "among the most open computer systems ever invented" and insisted that most Android phones "have several apps that aren't from Google".
For a while, it looked as if presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and his fiery style might pose a serious drag on the rest of the Republican ticket, especially in the GOPs desperate effort to retain control of the Senate.

Endangered GOP incumbents sought to distance themselves from Trump, uneasy with his controversial attacks on Muslims and immigrants and his vow to shake up Washington. Many of them have found excuses to stay away from the Republican National Convention that begins in Cleveland on Monday.

Related: How Marco Rubio Could Save the Senate for the GOP

Trump may still prove to be lethal for down-ballot Republicans before the election campaign is over this fall. A lot depends on whether he can overtake presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in what already has become one of the nastiest and most contentious presidential campaigns of modern times. But for now at least, things look slightly less bleak for several incumbent Republican senators from key battleground states.

A new Quinnipiac University Poll of the Senate races in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio shows all three incumbent Republicans with substantial leads over their Democratic challengers.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who decided belatedly to seek reelection after dropping out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination, leads Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy, 50 percent to 37 percent, and holds a similar lead over another possible Democratic challenger, Rep. Alan Grayson.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) waged an aggressive effort to persuade Rubio to seek a second term, after Rubio had signaled repeatedly throughout his unsuccessful presidential campaign that he was fed up with the Senate and partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill. Republican strategists agree that Rubios decision to seek another term dramatically improves their partys chances of retaining control of the Senate.

Related: Trump to GOP Leadership: Sit Down and Shut Up

Story continues

In Ohio, Republican Sen. Rob Portman had trailed former Democratic governor Ted Strickland for months, but now has inched ahead and leads by seven points, 47 percent to 40 percent, according to the Quinnipiac survey. Portman has kept his distance from Trumps campaign and served as point man in the Senate to pass highly popular legislation last week to help combat a national epidemic of opioid addiction.

And in Pennsylvania, incumbent Republican Patrick J. Toomey is now leading Democrat Katie McGinty, a former state and federal environmental official, by ten points, 49 percent to 39 percent. Toomey is a champion of conservative GOP economics, but he has appealed to more moderate voters with his bipartisan proposals for tighter gun control measures.

Rubio, Portman and Toomey are among seven or eight incumbent Republicans that political analysts had defined as tossup contests. Other Republicans viewed as vulnerable this fall include Sens. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Mark Kirk of Illinois, who recently announced he would not endorse Trump for president.

One GOP seat that is likely to go Democratic is being vacated by retiring Sen. Dan Coates of Indiana. The Democrats chances of picking up Coates seat soared last week after former Democratic senator and Governor Evan Bayh announced his senate run.

Related: Trump, the Gift That Keeps on Giving to Democrats

"With the challenges facing Indiana and our country, I can no longer sit on the sidelines and watch as partisan bickering grinds Washington to a halt, Bayh said in a statement announcing his campaign. Hoosier families deserve more and I've decided to run to take their cause to the U.S. Senate.

Baron Hill, the Indiana Democrats former nominee for the seat, revealed last Monday that he would step aside to make way for Bayhs candidacy. According to CNN, Bayh will begin his campaign with nearly $10 million in campaign cash and substantial Hoosier voter good will from years as their senator and governor.

While Bayh has to be considered the odds-on favorite, he will be running against a popular and more centrist Republican, Rep. Todd Young, who beat a Tea Party opponent in the May primary.

Until now, the political prognosis for Senate Republicans wasnt particularly good, and Democrats viewed the 2016 election as a golden chance to regain control of the upper chamber after two years of GOP rule. Since January 2015, Republicans have held a 54 to 46-seat majority.

Related: Why Trumps Choice of Pence for Vice President Could Backfire

This year, Republicans must defend 24 seats compared to just 10 Democratic seats that are up for grabs. One of those seats is currently held by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who is retiring at the end of the year. Republicans view the open seat as a possible pickup.

The Democrats could regain control of the Senate and create a firewall against Trump and GOP threats to repeal the Affordable Care Act and other major Obama administration initiatives by picking up five seats without losing any of their incumbents. In an alternative scenario in which Clinton beats Trump and the Democrats pick up only four seats, a new Democratic vice president would preside over the Senate and could break a 50-50 tie vote in reorganizing the Senate.

Senate 2016

But Republicans are bent on spoiling the Democrats plans. And as the latest polling by Quinnipiac suggests, Trump so far has not been an impediment to GOP congressional victories this fall. All three GOP incumbents in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio are actually running somewhat ahead of Trump in their states, according to the Quinnipiac polling. The New York billionaire garnered between 41 percent and 43 percent support among Republicans and Democrats in those states in hypothetical matchups with Clinton.

"Many talking heads have suggested that with Donald Trump at the top of the GOP ticket, Republican Senate candidates might suffer," Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement. "But at least in these three key states, the Republican Senate candidates are running ahead of Trump and don't seem to be hurt by their shared party label."

Related: The Five Most Endangered Senate Republicans

Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist and chief author of the Crystal Ball political blog, cautions that its far too early to speculate on Trumps eventual impact on the Senate contests.

For example, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Marist poll showed Rubio with just a three-point lead over Murphy, 47 percent to 44 percent. I dont buy the Quinnipiac polls Rubio landslide, Sabato said on Friday, adding that the Quinnipiac poll sometimes has been an outlier.

There is every reason to think that Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Nevada will be very close, too, he added in an email. Analysts who draw conclusions in mid-summer about whether there will or won't be coattail in November very often regret it. That's one regret I don't intend to have!

Top Reads from The Fiscal Times:
MIDWEST CITY, Okla., July 17, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sweeney Chiropractic Clinic, a full-service chiropractic clinic in Midwest City, OK, recently earned approval to be a chiropractic provider for the U.S. Department of Labor. As a result, Dr. Steve Sweeney and his team can now handle federal employees' workers' compensation claims. The Midwest City chiropractor and his staff are promoting the new designation to ensure that local federal employees are aware of it.



"From what I have gathered, it is often difficult for federal employees to find local chiropractors who are official chiropractic providers for the Department of Labor. We are excited to offer this service to federal employees throughout the area," said Dr. Sweeney.

The process of becoming a chiropractic provider for the U.S. Department of Labor is rigorous. The agency has very specific rules in place regarding the types of injuries that may be treated under workers' compensation as well as the types of treatments that are covered. In the case of chiropractic care, the agency only covers manual manipulations of the spine. These manipulations only qualify when they are used to treat subluxations, or misalignments, of the spine. Further, the subluxation in question must be clearly evident on an X-ray, and the X-ray must have been taken shortly after the injury occurred. "The Department of Labor is very specific about these requirements," said Dr. Sweeney, "and they are satisfied that my staff and I can diagnose and treat spinal subluxations that occur due to workplace accidents."

Misalignments of the vertebrae of the spine are common work-related injuries. They happen in a variety of ways. By far, however, the most common cause of back and neck issues, including subluxations, is repetitive motion that causes undue wear and tear over time. Oftentimes, the injured party is not properly trained to minimize the risk of developing such injuries. Falls in the workplace are also common causes of spinal subluxations. The spine may also be injured from improper positioning at a desk or elsewhere and from improper, unsafe lifting techniques. "Thanks to our new designation as a chiropractor for the U.S. Department of Labor, we can now assist federal employees who need to file workers' compensation claims due to such injuries," said Dr. Sweeney.

Dr. Sweeney and the team at Sweeney Chiropractic Clinic provide a wide array of chiropractic and wellness services to the communities of Oklahoma City, Del City and Midwest City. In particular, the chiropractor specializes in performing a variety of spinal adjustment and manual manipulation techniques that are designed to treat specific types of subluxations. Additionally, the clinic offers therapeutic ultrasound, electric muscle stimulation, and massage techniques such as Active Release Technique (ART).

Sweeney Chiropractic Clinic is located at 211 South Sooner Road in Midwest City. Appointments may be made by calling (405) 672-4800. Visit their website at http://www.sweeneychiro.com/ for more information.
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 national symbol of Sicily is a strange amalgam of three legs protruding from Medusas head, adorned with snakes or wheat (and sometimes both). There is no consensus on the meaning of this other than the legs might be representative of the three-sided island, which sits just a few miles off the toe of the boot of the Italian mainland. For visitors to this beautiful island though, there is no strangeness about its plentiful sunshine, spectacular ocean views and culinary delights.

Traveling this spring with a small group led by Lincolnites Jane Griffin and Francesco Ciotti, who run and own Italianoforyou (www.italianoforyou.com), my wife, Jane, and I had the opportunity to discover and explore the history, culture and amazing natural wonders of Sicily.

This was the third trip we have made to Italy with Francesco and Janes travel company, and we have never been disappointed. Both speak fluent Italian (Francesco was born in Florence) and previously lived in the country for many years. Their tours have included just the right mix of outdoor and indoor activities, with excellent local guides when needed.

My wife and I arrived in the Sicilian capital of Palermo a couple of days before the actual tour began to give us an opportunity to adjust to the time change and do some exploring on our own. Sicily has been overrun, conquered, settled and claimed by many countries and cultures, including the Normans, the Greeks, the Romans, the Carthaginians, the Arabs and the Allies during World War II. The Mafioso has played a large role in its history, and the Corleone region was made famous by the "Godfather" movies. Sicily and other nearby islands are now becoming home to refugees from the war-torn countries of northern Africa.

Beginning in Palmero

Our first evening in Palmero we stumbled upon a little sidewalk cafe that looked inviting and thoroughly enjoyed our shrimp carbonara served by a waiter who had immigrated from the southeast African island of Mauritius. We ate and enjoyed a glass of wine while an accordionist played Volare. A fine multicultural welcome in true Sicilian tradition.

The next day we walked to the Royal Palace, which now houses the Sicilian parliament and the amazing Palatine Chapel. We made the right decision in selecting the self-guided audio tour of the chapel, which pointed us to many of the pieces of Byzantine, Islamic and Latin art, mosaics and statues -- and their significance -- that we never would have picked up on just a walk-through. We lunched nearby at the Villa San Giovanni Degli Eremiti restaurant on seafood salad, pasta, swordfish and veal. Plus wine, of course. Later in our Palermo stay we toured the beautiful church and grounds after which the restaurant is named.

That evening we journeyed to the nearby Mondello area to meet up with Jane, Francesco, their children, Sofia and Milo and Sofias friend, Jensen, who all accompanied us on the trip. We dined at the restaurant Al Gabbiano on a variety of seafood and a fine ocean view. The next day we experienced one of the hazards of wandering around a strange city on your own. We had a map that seemed to point us to the Museum of Modern Art, but it wasnt where it was supposed to be. We asked directions a couple of times, and after stopping for a quick refreshment and more directions, we finally found it after two hours of walking. It turned out to be about 10 minutes from the hotel.

The rest of our stay in Palermo included a tour of the Palazzo Alliata di Pietratagliata, a walled palace in the central city. After going through a door within a door from the street, we walked through a large courtyard and up some stairs to be greeted by the princess who lives there, and a servant with refreshments. The princess gave us a fascinating tour of one of the floors which included a huge ballroom with one of the most magnificent chandeliers that I have ever seen. No photos were allowed.

Later, we visited the Teatro Massimo, the third largest opera house in Europe, and watched the dancers rehearse for the ballet Cinderella. Another highlight was the amazing San Lorenzo Oratory, a small, tucked-away meeting room with exquisite, white stucco sculptures, highlighted in gold, adorning the walls. A reprint of the artist Caravaggios work, The Nativity, hangs on one wall. The original, valued at $20 million, was stolen in 1969 and never recovered. Many blame the Mafia.

We visited the towering Palermo Cathedral, a combination of Norman, Moorish, Gothic, Baroque and Neoclassical architecture reflecting the many additions and the multicultural history of Sicily. It holds within a myriad of elaborate and colorfully decorated chapels and altars, one of which conceals the restrooms. The sarcophagus of the Norman King Frederick II, father of Henry VI, is located there.

After a visit to the scandalous Piazza Pretoria, once known as the Square of Shame because of the naked statues, we had a farewell-to-Palermo dinner atop our centrally located hotel, (www.eurostarscentralepalace.com). The next day in the bright sunshine we headed west along the Sicilian coast, stopping at the former tuna fishing village of Tonnare di Scopello with its beautiful, rock-strewn harbor and ancient castles. Once a thriving port for family tuna boats, the industry collapsed in the late 1980s because of competition from massive, off-shore Japanese trawlers.

We kept moving west to the medieval town of Erice, isolated high on a cloud-shrouded mountain. Reached by cable car from the town of Trapani, its narrow, wandering streets housed tiny shops and restaurants. From there we went to the Salt Pans of Trapani on the west coast of Sicily where ponds hold the sea salt that is harvested for various uses. Included in this stop was a demonstration of a working 16th century windmill that still grinds the large salt crystals into consumable size. We feasted on fruit and vegetables that we could season with several flavors of salt, including orange, lemon and coriander. If you would like to order some of the wonderful product: http://www.salinedellalaguna.it/en/.

At the end of that long day we arrived at the restful and beautiful Baglio Oneta Resort and Wines (www.bagliooneta.it/en) near Marsala, which is housed in a 18th century fortress featuring views of the Mediterranean, Mt. Erice and sprawling vineyards. Before our departure the next morning we strolled the grounds admiring the many well-kept beds of colorful spring flowers.

On the way to Agrigento, in southwest Sicily, was Cave di Cusa, a limestone quarry with several pillars destined for the Temple Selinunte still poking out of the ground. Hannibal and his invading Carthiginians caused the workers to flee before the excavations were complete and they have been left untouched. On our way to the Valley of the Temples we enjoyed a delightful stop for lunch in the village of Tre Fontane. There we found the Tutto in Famiglia restaurant (www.ristorantetuttoinfamiglia.it) living up to its name as the entire family  father, son, daughter, mother  cooked, served and delivered our delicious pizza and calzones, and posed for a photo.

Cooking on a farm

A local guide provided us with the history of the partially-restored ruins at the Valley of the Temples. The temple area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a national monument of Italy. The next stop was the Azienda Agricola Mandranova (www.mandranova.com) a working farm where we learned how extra virgin olive oil is produced. Some of us took a cooking class with the owner and chef, preparing orange and fennel salad, spaghetti with sun-dried tomatoes, chicken and peppers, and an almond torte, as an elegant lunch for the rest of our group.

From the southwest coast of Sicily we drove across the heart of the island heading for the east coast resort town of Taoramina. On the way we had time to stop at the village of Caltagirone, famous for its beautifully crafted ceramics. There we stopped at Branciforti Ceramics (www.ceramichebranciforti.com) for a painting demonstration and purchased souvenirs for home before moving on to the Hotel Villa Belvedere (www.villabelvedere.it) in Taoramina.

Taoramina is perched high above the ocean and offers spectacular views of beaches, the ocean and Mt. Etna. One day we traveled in four-wheel-drive vehicles through thick forests close to the active volcano, which was still smoking from a recent eruption, and to the village of Zafferana, which came within feet of being inundated by lava in 1991. Our local guide, Rosario, with Sicily Legend (www.sicilylegend.com), had a fantastic grasp of the natural and cultural history of the area, which he imparted at length and with almost perfect English.

During our two-day stay in Taoramina we explored the winding streets and alleyways, frequented several fine restaurants, attended an evening opera and toured the magnificent Teatro Greco, an amphitheater first built by the Greeks, restored by the Romans, and now, the Sicilians. Standing high on the back steps you can see the Italian mainland and Mt. Etna, and are offered a spectacular view of the eastern Sicilian coastline.

As our visit was coming to an end, and we drove the three hours along the north coast highway to Cefalu near Palermo, the weary travelers began singing tunes learned in grammar school or in the 1960s each time we entered a tunnel. The teenagers ignored us and kept their headphones on. Cefalu, a beautiful beach town filled with medieval history, including a wash house and cathedral, proved to be a fine final stop on this great Sicilian adventure.
City and county officials have whittled a set of four alternatives for improving two busy north Lincoln intersections down to two.

Those two options arent necessarily going to be the final plans that move forward, said Kris Humphrey, city senior engineer and the projects manager. Were just working our way to the final design.

Work wouldn't start for at least six years, but the Railroad Transportation Safety District plans to remove the railroad crossings near the intersections of 33rd Street and Cornhusker Highway and 35th and Adams streets.

Sixty-five trains and as many as 20,200 cars and trucks pass through the two intersections each day, according to a recent study.

Last year, the RTSD hired Schemmer architectural and engineering firm to help develop a traffic plan for the area and identify possible funding sources.

City engineers and consultants recently completed a study that looked for ways to improve mobility and safety along the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad corridor between 27th and 48th streets.

The team used input gathered during public meetings in November and March to develop the four alternatives, and the RTSD Board of Directors chose two last month.

Its encouraging that the board recognized there is a need for the project, said Roger Figard, city engineer and RTSD director.

Under both scenarios, 20 or more businesses could be displaced. The RTSD would pay to acquire properties according to federal guidelines.

The first alternative calls for the following changes.

* Shift 33rd Street west, starting near Baldwin Avenue and extending over the BNSF tracks. Plans would include a new intersection at Cornhusker Highway and an extension to connect with the existing 33rd Street north of Cornhusker.

* Adams Street would no longer cross the BNSF tracks; instead, it would be extended west along a route parallel to and south of the tracks until connecting with the new 33rd Street.

* Cornhusker Highway would be widened to six lanes from Deadman's Run to east of 35th Street.

* The estimated cost would be nearly $54 million in todays dollars, or $73 million by 2023.

Humphrey said the property displacements could change as the project's design becomes finalized.

"It is very preliminary," she said.

The second alternative calls for a similar realignment of 33rd Street and a widened Cornhusker Highway but different plans for Adams Street.

* It would create a viaduct to carry westbound Adams Street traffic over the BNSF tracks and Cornhusker Highway.

* Eastbound Cornhusker traffic bound for Adams Street would be sent over BNSF tracks on a single-lane, one-way viaduct.

* The estimated cost is about $55 million in todays dollars, or about $74 million in 2023.

Construction would start by 2022 at the earliest, Doug Holle of Schemmer said during last months RTSD board meeting.

Humphrey said city engineers and consultants still must design the project and work to mitigate its environmental impacts, as well as guide it through state and federal reviews.

State, federal and railroad funding could help pay for the project, although the RTSD is expected to pay for about half.

Humphrey said the RTSD hopes to have agreements in place with the Nebraska Department of Roads and BNSF by this fall.

We want to make sure that we have all of our ducks in a row before we head down designing for this project, she said.
Azlin Armstrong was celebrating a friends birthday in an upscale Istanbul restaurant Friday night when her phone began vibrating.

Her friends' phones began vibrating too, all part of a group message, showing men in military uniforms atop tanks rolling onto the Bosphorus Bridge five miles away.

If the University of Nebraska-Lincoln junior and her friends didn't understand the chaos of a military coup unfolding around them, the atmosphere of the restaurant soon gave it away.

We were sensing that there was more tension, there was louder talking and everyone was getting a cab, Armstrong said.

When she stepped outside to hail a taxi, Armstrong said she felt a pit growing in her stomach.

The Bosphorus Bridge, where secularist soldiers attempting to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan shut off the connection between Turkey's Asian and European shores, was far enough away that Armstrong couldn't hear gunfire.

But heavily armed patrols now marched down the streets. People outside the restaurant were crying hysterically into their phones. Helicopters were everywhere, flying too close to the ground for comfort.

Armstrong said when she and friends finally did manage to get into a cab, they quickly learned it would be impossible to travel the three miles back to Robert College, where she teaches 8 to 14-year-olds in an English immersion program.

Traffic jams blocked streets while the civilian patrols in support of President Erdogan continued.

Pretty soon it became clear that we werent going back home that night, Armstrong said.

Luckily, the group was able to take shelter in a nearby hotel to avoid the unrest and catch a taxi the next morning to return to the dormitories at the preparatory school.

More than 24 hours after the attempted overthrow of Erdogan by the military, Armstrong said she and her friends are safe.

The Des Moines native said she plans to remain in Istanbul for the summer -- if she can. Robert College is mostly out of the fray, Armstrong said.

Robert College is like its own little bubble, she said. When Im there, its very different from being in the heart of Istanbul. Life there isnt like experiencing the conflict you see on the news.

Armstrong was monitoring the events through the weekend to determine whether or not she will stay in the country of nearly 75 million.

If more violence erupts at various government demonstrations over the next few days, she suspects her program could be cancelled. Should peace hold out, she thinks Robert College will keep the teaching staff on as planned.

Erdem Akalin, a UNL senior from Turkey, said he last visited his home of Bursa in December to celebrate Christmas with his family.

At that time, he said, there was no sign the military would move against the country's democratically-elected leader. While all of his friends and family are safe a couple hours outside of Istanbul, Akalin still worries about the possibility of civil war.

I think its coming, he said.

Akalin said hes opposed to both the current Turkish government and the military coup. While he would like to see changes in governmental leadership, he doesnt believe a violent overthrow is the best way to implement the changes.

Now, Akalin said, he expects a change in behavior from Erdogan.

I think our president is going to be stricter and hes going to be punishing, Akalin said. Hes going to be like a dictator and hes going to have more power, Im thinking.

Armstrong spent part of last summer in Turkey, too, and said it was nothing like her experience this time around.

I definitely didnt think Id be a witness to an attempted government overthrow.

This summer in Turkey will definitely be memorable, she said, but for reasons she never really expected.

That night was surreal, Armstrong said. I was sitting in the back of a cab stuffed with people and I thought, Im across the globe, experiencing a government overthrow... like, what?
Editor's note: This is the second of two Local View columns about the Nebraska Supreme Court Commission on Children in the Courts, which was criticized in a previous Local View, "Have billionaires captured Nebraska's judicial branch?" (LJS, June 12).

Part 1 described how the Nebraska Supreme Court Commission on Children in the Courts operates. But what improvements have come about for Nebraskas children as a result of the Commissions work? Here are just a few.

The Guardian ad Litem Subcommittee: The guardian ad litem is an attorney who advocates for the best interests and legal rights of a child involved in juvenile court. Several years ago, the Commission became aware that guardian ad litem practice was characterized by little uniformity and questionable effectiveness. After having studied the issues, this subcommittee recommended that all attorneys who serve as guardians ad litem for children in juvenile court proceedings undergo annual training requirements, and developed a curriculum for the basic training of guardians ad litem. The subcommittee also formulated practice standards to further clarify the role and duties of the guardian ad litem. Both the mandatory training requirements and the practice standards have been adopted as court rules by the Nebraska Supreme Court.

Improving Education Outcomes of Children in Foster Care Subcommittee: When the juvenile court changes the placement of a child that results in the childs transfer of schools, sometimes the data from one school district does not match the data from the others, including what credits a child has completed at a prior school. This subcommittee was formed to promote liaisons to eliminate this problem, to coordinate data regarding a child who transfers from one school to another, and to create an educational packet so that everyone in the childs case has information regarding the educational status of the child. The subcommittee developed the "Nebraska Juvenile Courts: Education Court Report" a standardized reporting form used at every review hearing to inform the judge about several aspects of the child's educational status.

The Case Progression Standards Subcommittee: Juvenile court cases progress in separate phases over a period of several months or more at which specific issues impacting the child or the parents are examined by the court at separate hearings held at each phase. In an effort to insure that permanency for children is not delayed unnecessarily, this subcommittee is exploring the viability of reducing the existing timelines between hearings in an effort to expedite the resolution of cases.

The Tribal and State Court Collaboration Subcommittee: Historically, mistrust and a lack of communication have impeded the ability of tribes and States to find common solutions for helping the children in their care. With this subcommittee, the Commission established a unique opportunity to bring States and tribes together, form partnerships, and create a climate of trust and teamwork to help both sovereigns protect the most vulnerable of our children.

The Parenting Act Subcommittee: The subcommittee is charged by the Commission to review and make recommendations for the implementation of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) Evaluation of the Parenting Act. The subcommittee is currently working on enhancing parenting mediation; reviewing parenting education programs; and providing education to the Family Law Section of the Bar. These efforts are all targeted at addressing the welfare of children in domestic relations cases, attempting to reduce parental conflict, and improving the outcome for children in the courts.

***********

The Commission also has supported initiatives to improve outcomes for children. One example is the Douglas County Separate Juvenile Courts implementation of "Youth Impact of Douglas County," a practice model designed to prevent children already involved in abuse-neglect cases from deeper penetration into the system with the filing of juvenile justice petitions, and to reduce recidivism, time in out-of-home care, and youth detentions. This model uses collaboration between prosecutors, parents, children, and case management to provide appropriate services to children and families to avoid new legal filings. "Youth Impact" is a unique public-private partnership that operates under a memorandum of understanding and includes support from the Nebraska Supreme Court and the judicial branch, NDHHS, county and state probation offices, and the Douglas County Attorneys office, and also includes support from private agencies.

Members of the Nebraska Supreme Court Commission on Children in the Courts serve without compensation. Instead, they are motivated by their desire to improve outcomes for children involved in court proceedings, and believe those children deserve nothing less than the very best of their combined experience, skill, and expertise.
Lack of Machine Guarding Found After Worker Fractures Three Fingers

OSHA cited the Ohio metal alloy manufacturer for one willful safety violation.

According to a news release, OSHA has issued one willful safety violation to Materion Brush after a worker had three fingers fractured when his hand got caught in the pinch point of a metal coiler. The agency has cited the Elmore, Ohio company for failing to ensure the machine had adequate safety guards.

"OSHA has specific guidelines to protect workers from dangerous machinery, chemicals and other hazards in the workplace," said Kim Nelson, OSHA's area director in Toledo. "Materion needs to re-evaluate its safety and health programs to ensure employees are being protected from job hazards."

Proposed penalties are $70,000.
(Bloomberg) -- Oil tankers are loading and unloading cargoes normally at Turkeys ports and sailing without interruption in the nations waters after forces loyal to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan crushed an attempted coup.

Shipments are continuing to arrive in tankers and by pipeline from neighboring countries, an Energy Ministry official said Sunday, declining to be identified in line with ministry rules regarding comments to news media. No energy cargoes have been halted since large tankers were barred for security reasons from sailing in the Bosphorus waterway near Istanbul for several hours on Saturday, a port agent said.

Turkey, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, is a crucial conduit of crude transport from Russia and Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea. Millions of barrels of oil travel through the nations waterways and pipelines daily. The country is also on the fringe of broader conflict in the Middle East, with Syria bordering its southeastern edge. Oil futures rose as much as 1.9 percent on Friday after the putsch began.

The coup has failed, said Robin Mills, chief executive officer of Dubai-based consultant Qamar Energy. There is no direct impact on supplies. It does elevate geopolitical concern a little bit.

Maritime Chokepoint

Brent crude, the global benchmark, was at $47.69 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange, up 8 cents, at 10:17 a.m. Hong Kong time. Prices rose 0.5 percent to close at $47.61 a barrel on Friday after rising as much as 88 cents to $48.25.

The Turkish Straits, including the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, are one of the worlds major choke points for seaborne crude transit, with about 2.9 million barrels of oil passing through daily in 2013, the latest year of available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Turkish maritime authorities stopped tankers larger than 200 meters (656 feet) from sailing in the Bosphorus on Saturday from sunrise until about 10:30 a.m. local time, the port agent said. Tanker traffic resumed after that, he said.

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Turkey is also home to pipelines that transport crude and condensate from nations including Iraq and Azerbaijan to the port of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean Sea in southern Turkey. BP Plc, operator of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from Azerbaijan via Georgia, confirmed that oil was flowing uninterrupted.

Kurdish Supply

Our facilities in Turkey are open and operating normally, BP spokesman David Nicholas said in an e-mail in response to questions. There are no disruptions to the flow of oil through the BTC pipeline.

Officials of Iraqs Kurdistan Regional Government didnt immediately respond to requests about the status of oil exports through a pipeline to Ceyhan from the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Iraqi Kurds shipped almost 500,000 barrels a day of oil to Turkey in June, according to a July 11 statement on the KRG website.

The Turkey coup attempt was quashed after hours of clashes in which tanks blocked roads, soldiers fought police and warplanes bombed the parliament in Ankara. Erdogans forces rounded up thousands of military officers and officials allegedly involved in the attempt, and almost 200 people were killed.

(Updates with Brent crude price in fifth paragraph.)

--With assistance from Khalid Al-Ansary and Firat Kozok To contact the reporters on this story: Bruce Stanley in Dubai at bstanley5@bloomberg.net, Rakteem Katakey in London at rkatakey@bloomberg.net, Firat Kayakiran in London at fkayakiran@bloomberg.net. To contact the editors responsible for this story: Nayla Razzouk at nrazzouk2@bloomberg.net, Alpana Sarma, Pratish Narayanan

2016 Bloomberg L.P.
The tragedies in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas have knocked the wind out of all of us these past weeks.

Every time I turn on the news there are fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and children losing loved ones in a wave of violence. Everyone is focusing on how bad it is in our country but I have a different view. It is time for all of us to stop yelling what is wrong with America and start singing what is right with America.

Sure, we have a lot of warts and wrinkles but we also have the most kind and compassionate people in all the world. Travel to any corner of the globe and ask any person where they would like to live and you will almost always hear the "United State of America." Ask any tour guide who are the nicest people to lead and they will echo, Americans. Every time I travel to a foreign country to enjoy their people, culture, food and history the most powerful part of my trip is stepping off the plane upon returning to the USA and being thankful that I live in this great country.

Yes, we have major problems. Yes, we have major issues that we must address. However, even in our grief and pain, it is comforting to know that we enjoy the greatest freedom on this earth. We have more opportunity and prosperity than any other nation on earth. It is time to show the world that America is a nation overwhelmingly filled with love, kindness and compassion. Despite all the bad this week, America is filled with so much good. Simply put, even when my eyes are full of tears from the pain of this week, I am still thankful and proud to be an American.

Steve Glenn, Lincoln
The human gut is a complex and amazing system, and the more we learn about it, the more amazed we are. It turns out
costco shopping mom cart

Costco's credit-card swap had customers threatening to cancel their memberships. Now Citi says the transitional struggles are coming to a close.

On Friday, Citi executives addressed the problems Costco members faced in June when the firm became the exclusive issuer of Costco co-branded credit cards, with the budget retailer switching from American Express to Visa as its card of choice.

With 11 million Costco members making the switch, Citi had a huge customer base to help transition  and, apparently, not enough customer-service representatives.

"We're working through that," CEO Michael Corbat said in a call with analysts, after reporting second-quarter earnings. "We're gaining on it. We're very focused on it. We've got a lot of resources deployed against it, and it's something we can fix in the short order."

According to Corbat, Citi faced "extremely high calling volumes" from customers with questions about card activation, statements, and payments.

costco shopping toilet paper

"It's got to be one of the largest portfolio-implementation transfers on a single day that's ever been attempted," said Citi CFO John Gerspach. "That's not to give us excuses  But again, it's a massive program."

Citis inability to respond to customer questions was one of the biggest problems in the Costco credit-card transition in late June, with members facing long wait times and dropped calls while waiting to speak with Citi customer-service representatives.

"Worst credit card transition ever  4 hours and counting on the phone with Citibank and they still can't get my cards to me," one Costco member wrote on Facebook. "Saving money isn't worth alienating your members ... seriously rethinking my patronage."

Other issues included customers not receiving the new Citi Visa card in the mail, not being able to use corporate American Express cards, charges being flagged as "fraud," and the transfer of rewards dollars being lower than expected.

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Now Citi says wait times are decreasing. With customers more easily able to talk with representatives, other problems are being addressed and resolved.

Despite the complaints, the company says the swap has been an overall success.

Citi reported more than 337,000 new account acquisitions to date since the switch  a number that significantly exceeded Citis expectations. Purchase sales on Costco Visa co-branded cards totaled $5.7 billion in the three and a half weeks following the transition.

NOW WATCH: Here are the 8 food items you should only get from Costco





More From Business Insider


libya oil

There's been some good news out of Libya recently.

In the beginning of July, Libya's two rival oil companies  the National Oil Corp., based in the western city in Tripoli, and its eastern counterpart, which sits in Tobruk  agreed to merge.

It's a complicated deal because of Libya's complicated government. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that the company will be moved to Benghazi in the east, something that the eastern side wanted, and will now report to the unity government in Tripoli and the parliament based in the East.

Then a few days later, the leader of Libya's parastatal Petroleum Facilities Guard, Ibrahim Jathran, announced plans to resume exports from the eastern oil terminals of Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, the largest and third-largest in the country, which have been closed since 2014. He added that exports will "be under the authority" of the Government of National Accord based in Tripoli, according to Bloomberg.

That means Libya is now aiming to reopen four of the biggest ports in the country (including the two mentioned above), according to Bloomberg. They have a combined export capacity of 860,000 barrels a day  a number that's greater than the total output of OPEC members Indonesia, Qatar, and Ecuador, according to figures cited by RBC Capital Markets.

screen shot 2016 05 31 at 2.12.14 pm

Theoretically speaking, this is all a positive sign for a country that's seen over a million barrels a day of oil shut in amid political and security challenges over the last year, keeping production stagnating around 330,000 to 400,000 barrels a day.



As a reference point here, although Libya has the largest proven crude-oil reserves in Africa, its production was the second-lowest among OPEC members.

However, both geopolitical watchers and market analysts have adopted a cautious posture in response to all the news, citing ongoing political and security issues, past events, and possible infrastructure damage.

Story continues

"While [the Jathran news] has led to speculation that the countrys output could quickly increase, historical evidence leads us to be more cautious," wrote RBC Capital Markets' Helima Croft in a note to clients on Thursday.

"Jathrans pledge of loyalty to the GNA government has led to speculation that the country's output could quickly double from around 350 kb/d. It should be noted that Jathran has made similar promises in the past, only to change his mind," she explained.

Moreover, she argued that even if Jathran doesn't reverse course, her team is "cautious about the durability of any increase as serious problems will likely persist." As she wrote in her note:

"General Hafter, commander of the eastern regional military, does not seem on board with the broader reconciliation, and Abdullah al-Thani, the head of the eastern regional government, issued a set of tough demands for unifying the oil sector. Al-Thanis demands included relocating the National Oil Company Head Quarters to Benghazi and a 40% revenue allocation to the east, both of which may be difficult for the GNA to meet."

Screen Shot 2016 07 15 at 10.28.01 AM

Notably, there were also several reports about attacks on various terminals a few months ago.

And this past week, Mohamed Elharari, a National Oil Corp. spokesman, told Bloomberg News that both Ras Lanuf and Es Sider "have come under attack, and most of Es Sider's storage tanks are damaged." (Although he also added that the Zueitina port is "completely functional.")

"While we are more constructive on the prospects for a reopening of the ports, we expect the process to be relatively slow. Technical constraints will be significant, with large-scale maintenance works required to prepare the ports for commissioning," argued a BMI Research team in a note on Thursday.

"It is probable that substantial damage to infrastructure has been incurred and this  alongside the stop-start nature of Libya's production  will likely weigh on growth."

Plus, both Croft and the BMI team noted that ISIS remains a risk, despite the group's recent defeats around Sirte.

libya smoke oil

As an endnote, one interesting thing about the recent developments in Libya is that markets more or less yawned off the news.

"Plans to restart exports have surfaced at various points over the last two years, but at no point has production been sustained. It is probable that the lifting of force majeure will place some downside pressure on prices, but we would expect the overall impact to be fairly limited, as extreme volatility in output has somewhat desensitised the markets to Libya," argued the BMI team.

"That the oil price has failed to move in response to these developments may point to a lack of faith in the process."

Screen Shot 2016 07 15 at 12.36.15 PM

NOW WATCH: This defunct oil rig in the middle of the ocean is now a cool hotel for divers





More From Business Insider


LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - Spain's Santander is examining a deal which would involve the bank taking on more than 300 branches and millions of customers from the Royal Bank of Scotland as part of a five-year process, Sky News reported, citing sources.

-- Source: http://news.sky.com/story/santander-eyes-restructured-rbs-branch-deal-10504364

-- Note (Stockholm: NOTE.ST - news) : Reuters has not verified this story and does not vouch for its accuracy. (London newsroom)
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico has postponed the bidding process for a planned wholesale telecommunications network by more than a month, the government said, in the latest upset to the project which has been plagued by delays since its inception.

In a statement on Friday evening, the Communications and Transport Ministry said proposals must now be submitted by Oct. 20, pushed back from the Sept. 8 deadline. The ministry said would-be bidders needed more time to secure financing for the project.

The venture, initially meant to be launched by 2014, is part of a telecommunications reform aimed at curbing the dominance of tycoon Carlos Slim's America Movil and broaden Mexico's cell phone network and penetration.

It offers the winner of the bid cheap use of high quality spectrum in the 700MHz band and a 20-year public-private partnership contract to build a 4G LTE mobile network that operators and virtual network operators can rent.

Terms of the bid were released in late January, including key deadlines in the process that the government decided to postpone in March.

The bid's winner will be announced on Nov. 17 and the contract signed by Jan. 27 at the latest, the ministry said.

(Reporting by Miguel Angel Gutierrez Editing by W Simon)
Rafael caro quintero

In the north-central Mexican state of Chihuahua, home of border city Ciudad Juarez, a once powerful kingpin has reportedly reappeared.

According to Mexican military and government sources, the recent appearance of large drug shipments and a spike in violence in the area are the result of the reemergence of one of the most powerful figures on Mexico's narco landscape: Rafael Caro Quintero, the "narco of narcos" and one of the US Drug Enforcement Administration's most wanted men.

There are conflicting reports about Caro Quintero's movements, but rumors of his return add a new wrinkle to an already complex criminal landscape.

'He intends to come here'

Caro Quintero was part of a trio of high-powered kingpins who dominated Mexican drug trafficking in the 1980s through the Guadalajara cartel, which eventually spawned the Sinaloa cartel and Juarez cartel, among others.

Their decision to kidnap, torture, and kill undercover DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena in 1985, however, brought the full force of the US government down on them, spurring a manhunt that even their network of corruption and influence could not halt.

He was soon captured and sentenced to 40 years in prison, to be served in Mexico. But he was freed in 2013, after just 28 years. "The argument was that according to their laws, he, Caro Quintero, should've been tried in state court, because for the most part homicides fall under state jurisdiction," Mike Vigil, a former DEA chief of international operations who worked in Mexico, told Business Insider.

"And they released him at like 3 o'clock in the morning, and after he fled into the darkness, then the supreme court came back and overrode ... the court of appeals, and said, 'No, it was proper,' because Kiki Camarena was a bona fide federal agent," meaning it was legitimate to try Caro Quintero in federal court, Vigil added.

Rafael Caro Quintero

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Caro Quintero has remained at large for nearly three years, until events in recent weeks led Mexican authorities to report that he was back, possibly joining with new allies to attack erstwhile compatriots.

"We have information that he intends to come here," Jorge Gonzalez, Chihuahua state attorney general, told reporters last week.

Caro Quintero "has wishes to occupy the spaces of the Sinaloa cartel and dispute [those spaces] with them," Gonzalez said. "This is the theory that is had today with intelligence data and that is what we are working on."

' Caro Quintero is used to enormous power'

According to Gonzalez, citing information from military sources, and to Mexican news magazine Proceso, Caro Quintero has joined with elements of the Beltran Leyva Organization, a former Sinaloa cartel ally that broke with Guzman in 2008, and with members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which is generally considered to be the Sinaloa cartel's only rival in terms of power.

It was with these new allies that Caro Quintero reportedly launched the recent attack on Guzman's hometown of La Tuna, in Sinaloa state's Badiraguato municipality (where Caro Quintero is also from), and with whom he intends to challenge the Sinaloa cartel's control in Chihuahua and the Golden Triangle, a high-drug production area that also includes parts of Sinaloa and Durango states.

Golden Triangle Mexico

A narcomanta  a banner used by cartels to make an announcement  that appeared in central Ciudad Juarez, allegedly signed by Caro Quintero, also announced his intention to begin a "cleansing" of the city and threatened Gonzalez, telling him had a week to resign.

Jockeying between rival criminal groups seems to be confirmed by rising violence in the city  16 homicides in the first six days of July, after a May that saw nearly double the killings recorded in the same month last year.

"He doesn't have the power to take over any of, like, the Sinaloa cartel. He just doesn't have the muscles," Vigil told Business Insider. But, Vigil added, "Rafael Caro Quintero is used to enormous power. I think he's trying to carve out even a small niche, take over possibly a state, where he can get back into the business and maybe build up from there."

"I think he's just trying to get back into the business, and carve out a small piece of geography ... with a good, solid pipeline into the United States," Vigil said.

'A frontal fight'

caro quintero

Other reports, however, indicate that Caro Quintero remains in league with Guzman and that the two are being challenged by rivals.

According to Mexico's Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN), Caro Quintero remained heavily involved in the drug trade during his time in prison, with Guzman (who was himself imprisoned from 1993 to 2001) acting as an intermediary for the jailed kingpin.

Caro Quintero's wife, who he met in prison, was recently implicated in his drug-trafficking activities by the US Treasury department.

According to CISEN sources cited by Reporte Indigo, Caro Quintero reportedly assumed a leadership role in the Sinaloa cartel after Guzman's recapture in January.

His current presence in Chihuahua is not to challenge the Sinaloa cartel, but to protect the position that cartel has established in the state, particularly in the heavily trafficked border city of Ciudad Juarez, where the Sinaloa cartel fought and won a bloody turf war with the Juarez cartel between 2008 and about 2012.

The conflict in Chihuahua "is a frontal fight that Rafael Caro Quintero has begun to realize, through the cells of the Sinaloa cartel, to halt the aspiration for control held by Isidro Meza Flores," said a CISEN source, cited by Reporte Indigo.

Meza Flores, aka "Chapito," is a Sinaloa-based trafficker who remained with the BLO when it split from Guzman's cartel in 2008 and is believed to have led the attack on La Tuna last month. Caro Quintero's own childhood home, not far from La Tuna, was also targeted in that attack.

'A target on his back'

Ciudad Juarez Mexico killing violence drug war cartels

Assuming that Caro Quintero is gunning for Guzman, however, there are some doubts about the extent of his ambitions.

"Why would [Caro Quintero] want to put a target on his back and increase the probability of being recaptured and extradited to the United States?" Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope wrote in Mexican newspaper El Universal.

"It's one thing to get over on the authorities and something very different to get over on the authorities and the Sinaloa cartel," added Hope, who noted that the military sources cited by Gonzalez and others, and where those sources got their information, remained unclear.

Juarez, Mexico

And, despite Gonzalez's reference to information from military-intelligence sources, other military units have disputed the Chihuahua attorney general's report.

The National Defense Secretariat said on Monday that it could not corroborate reports that Caro Quintero was operating in Ciudad Juarez or that he was in Chihuahua working to take over trafficking routes to the US.

"We are unaware" of a new group operating in the area, regional commander Hugo Humberto Pedroza Salazar said, according to Chihuahua-based news site El Diario.

"We remain on the margins and on the lookout," Pedroza Salazar added.

Not intimidated by anyone

While his current activities and ultimate ambitions are unclear, Caro Quintero's reappearance adds more complexity to a Mexican narco landscape riven by shifting alliances and hostilities.

Challenges to the Sinaloa cartel's power in multiple regions in Mexico have already caused more bloodshed, and a fight between erstwhile partners  Caro Quintero and Sinaloa vs. BLO and CJNG or Sinaloa vs. Caro Quintero, BLO, and CJNG  will likely only increase the violence.

"I don't think that Rafael Caro Quintero, being in the business for as long as he was and wielding as much power as he has, is intimidated by the Sinaloa cartel, or by any cartel, for that matter," Vigil said.

Mexico crime mass grave

And even if Caro Quintero had faded into obscurity after his early release, his freedom would still be an unwelcome development for US authorities.

"I find it very disconcerting that he was released, particularly knowing that the United States would love to get him here and try him for drug trafficking and obviously the killing of Kiki Camarena," Vigil, who worked in Mexico during his time with the DEA, told Business Insider.

"Because it was very, very, very egregious to DEA and to all law enforcement that the killer of a DEA agent would be released."

NOW WATCH: Forget 'El Chapo'  this is Mexico's most powerful drug lord





More From Business Insider


Storm warning.

The early forecast for the 2017 legislative session is cloudy with a chance of high winds and heavy thunderstorms.

Senators will be constructing a new two-year state budget under new leadership with anticipated revenue sliding and political pressure applied for another round of tax cuts.

It's a big political year for Gov. Pete Ricketts as he sets the stage for a re-election bid in 2018.

Lots of action on the stage and behind the curtain.

Unless current dynamics change, John Stinner is expected to be elected chairman of the Appropriations Committee, succeeding Heath Mello, who will be term-limited out of office at the end of the year.

Stinner has demonstrated both the readiness and ability to lead the committee, but there are big shoes to fill.

Mello has gained enormous influence in shaping the state budget and had acquired the power to shepherd it across the floor of the Legislature in a form so acceptable to him, other senators and Ricketts that there was not a single line-item veto.

Next year, a new speaker will succeed Galen Hadley, who also is term-limited this year. And he's a tough act to follow, too.

Hadley kept the ship moving, managing, reasoning with and sometimes admonishing members of the crew while throwing no one overboard -- although he might have wanted to a few times -- as he steered the ship safely to shore.

Not easy to do when it's sometimes a lot more pirate ship than cruise vessel and there are no majority party weapons to deploy.

So there will be new leaders and a redistribution of power.

Before term limits, and perhaps especially a decade or two before that, the wise -- and sometimes not so wise -- old veterans ran the show. Perhaps a half-dozen or so senators ruled the roost; now power is divided into 49 parts with a number of senators holding more of it, but no senators holding none at all.

There will be a dozen or so brand new senators in January and each of them will quickly discover that he or she can make a difference right away in a nonpartisan Legislature.

Just ask the members of the remarkable 2015 freshman class who defied expectations, exercised independent judgment and acquired influence almost from the opening bell.

So into this evolving legislative body comes a budget challenge that will be bumping into the political siren call of another tax cut.

The University of Nebraska will be caught in the middle of that vortex as it strives to improve, excel and grow.

The governor -- with Mello's help -- acquired politically popular property tax cuts in 2015 and 2016 and now he may want 2017 property tax cuts accompanied by income tax cuts in advance of his 2018 re-election bid.

But we won't know that for awhile.

Political friends and foes will be watching.

Some of them already have been keeping score of the veto overrides.

Ricketts, by all accounts -- including his -- performed more effectively in his second legislative session than he did in his first. Experience matters.

Time to get control of the ship of state matters. Time to form working legislative relationships matters.

But a wild card in all of that is the governor's calling out by name more than a dozen senators who are Republicans for not supporting him on some high-voltage issues. There is grumbling.

Year 3 could determine whether Ricketts will have any serious Republican primary opposition in 2018 and that, in turn, might signal a potential big-name Democratic challenger or two whether he or she might have an opening.

Recent history suggests that scenario is the pathway to the governorship for Democrats in Nebraska, although that pathway has narrowed -- perhaps substantially -- since Jim Exon, Bob Kerrey and Ben Nelson successfully pursued it. Nebraska has become far more difficult for Democrats, especially west of Lincoln.

When the 2017 Legislature adjourns, the governor will have navigated his third legislative session and it will be less than one year until the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary election.

Time to start making decisions -- perhaps after some polling.

***

A peek at campaign finance figures for legislative candidates as of June 20 offers clues, but no guarantees, about what might happen in November.

Sen. Sue Crawford of Bellevue ran virtually even with Michael Cook in the 45th District, but she's way ahead in funding resources entering July. It's nearly $41,000 in cash on hand compared to less than $2,000.

Lou Ann Linehan of Elkhorn, who won a multi-candidate primary race in the 39th District with 38 percent of the vote, demonstrated impressive fund-raising prowess. She gathered $127,000 before the May election.

Incumbent Sen. Al Davis of Hyannis ran behind Tom Brewer in the 43rd District with 46 percent of the vote, but moved toward July with about $44,000 on hand compared to $2,200 for Brewer.

Those numbers are interesting, but not predictive, and they do not include independent expenditures that may assist or target a candidate.

The most cash-on-hand for a 2016 legislative candidate resided with unchallenged Sen. John Murante of Gretna: $93,000.

***

After legislative redistricting following the 2020 census, Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy counties should hold a clear majority of the 49 seats in the Legislature.

In 2015, the three metropolitan counties contained 54.4 percent of the state's population, considerably more than the other 90 counties combined, and that urban percentage is growing.

Those are figures compiled by David Drozd at the University of Nebraska at Omaha's Center for Public Affairs Research.

***

Finishing up:

* Lincoln native Derek Chollet, who worked in the Obama White House and as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under Chuck Hagel, has authored a new book assessing the president's foreign policy legacy titled "The Long Game."

* One of my work colleagues stood up and bolted out a window one day last week in pursuit of a Pokemon creature.
1876: The Burlington Railroad installed patented air brakes on passenger trains.

Lancaster County Treasurer C.C. White gave notice that under a decision by the Nebraska Supreme Court a tax debt was worthless unless the personal property of the delinquent real estate owner had first been exhausted. Therefore he decided to levy taxes on personal property for real estate.

1886: The Ashland cutoff on the Burlington between Lincoln and Omaha was completed. This reduced time between the two cities from three hours to one hour and 40 minutes.

1896: Since some William Jennings Bryan Democrats were talking about covering the dome of the statehouse with silver, the rumor went out that a silver seal had replaced the gold seal formerly used in the governor's office.

1906: Adjutant General J. H. Culver was the choice of Gov. John H. Mickey and colonels of the two Nebraska troops to lead National Guard preparatory encampment at Fort Riley.

1916: Elliott E. Stinnette of Wauneta, 21, was believed the youngest government land homesteader within the Lincoln land office district. His application for entry papers for 80 acres near Wauneta was granted by Henry A. Meier, Lincoln-Lancaster County registrar.

1926: Gen. John McQuaig of Cleveland, American Legion national commander, and James F. Barton of Indianapolis, national adjutant, met with Lincoln Legion post officers and with Gov. Adam McMullen before continuing a tour of Nebraska.

1936: Nebraska farm income from the sale of crops, livestock and its products for the first five months of 1936 amounted to $100,138,000, compared with $71,365,000 for the same period in 1935, a government report said. Nebraska farm income from the sale of crops in the first five months of 1936 totaled $19,101,000. Livestock and livestock products yielded $81,037,000.

1946: Lincoln City Council organized a Board of Equalization with Breta Peterson as chairwoman. Duties of the board included the equalization of real estate assessments for 1946 city tax purposes.

1956: Nebraska farmers signed up for more than $80,179,878 in soil bank payments.

The Capitol Parkway (southeast diagonal) project was completed at a cost of more than $900,000.

1966: The State Game Commission purchased 10,300 acres of James Ranch land near Fort Robinson for a state park. An estimated $10 million expenditure in 25 years would develop the finest state park in the western United States, the commission said.

1976: A $500,000 cut in state funds to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln resulted in 30 job cuts.

Following a controversy over his qualifications for the job, Omaha State Sen. Eugene Mahoney was selected as the new director of the State Game and Parks Commission.

1986: Bryan Memorial Hospital planned to perform 12 heart transplants in 1986, at an average patient charge of $66,300, with $12,400 for pre-transplant care.

1996: John Joseph Joubert was executed at the Nebraska State Penitentiary for the murders of Sarpy County boys Danny Eberle and Christopher Walden.

Up to 6 inches of rain fell in Lincoln, swamping city streets and blocking U.S. 77 and other roads south of town.

2006: Davidsons Ethan Allen Store, fine furniture store in Lincoln since 1968 has closed. The recent unexpected death of Barton Johnson, store manager for 13 years led to the decision to close.
Subsidies paid to Welsh farmers look set to be protected if Wales secures the same level of funding for agriculture post-Brexit.

Speaking ahead of this weeks Royal Welsh Show, Waless rural affairs secretary, Lesley Griffiths, insisted she was committed to protecting subsidies.

Every penny of the EU funding Wales currently receives should be maintained going forward and I cant see how there would not be a new subsidy scheme, she told Farmers Weekly.

See also: New minister keen to get to grips with farming brief in Wales

Her assurance came after Ian Lucas, the Labour MP for Wrexham, questioned the future of subsidies in Wales during a Westminster debate.

He suggested leaving the EU offered a golden opportunity to assess the level of farm subsidies in Wales, to establish if that money could be more effectively and efficiently spent in other areas.

Every penny of the EU funding Wales currently receives should be maintained going forward and I cant see how there would not be a new subsidy scheme Lesley Griffiths, Welsh rural affairs secretary

Ms Griffiths said she had been made aware of his comments.

What I would say is that we were promised by Vote Leave MPs there would be no loss of funds if we left the EU. This is why it is important that we are part of the negotiations on the future funding structure for Wales.

The first minister has put teams in Cardiff, London and Brussels to negotiate on Wales behalf. Farmers can be assured that we are doing all that we can.

But she admitted there were many uncertainties which she could not give assurances on.

One of her priorities at the four-day Royal Welsh Show was to discuss with farming leaders on the trade implications of Brexit. I havent got all the answers which is why I want to hear their ideas and concerns, she said.

Business minded

The minister had also faced criticism in recent days over comments she made in the Senedd which appeared to suggest that she thought farmers were not the best business people.

Responding to that reproach, she insisted that her comments were taken out of context. However, she did concede that they were not without foundation.

I have been to farms and have seen how passionate farmers are about their animals and their land work.

They dont want to be doing paperwork. When I have asked farmers how the Welsh government could help them, a few have told me that it would be to improve their business skills.

Most sectors have CPD [Continuing Professional Development] and this is an area we are looking at.
A man has been arrested and charged over the theft of livestock worth 11,000.

The 22-year-old, who has not been named, is charged with stealing pedigree Suffolk sheep from a farm in Bilbster, in the Scottish Highlands.

He has been bailed to appear before magistrates in Caithness.

See also: Thousands of sheep thefts go unrecorded each year

Officers from Police Scotland swooped to arrest the man at his address following the incident.

All the stolen sheep were retrieved and returned to the farmer.

The mans arrest follows a crackdown by police, NFU Scotland and other farming organisations, on sheep worrying and livestock rustling.

Jim Whiteford, NFU Scotlands regional board chairman for the Highlands, said: This arrest is a positive step in stamping down on livestock thefts across the country.

The swiftness of the arrest should send a message to thieves that this will not be tolerated.

Mr Whiteford urged farmers and crofters to check their stock regularly and report any thefts and suspicious activity on 101.

According to NFU Mutual, rural crime costs Scotland an estimated 2m/year.

In 2013, 4,200 sheep were reported stolen from Scottish farms.
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CALEDONIA  A future restaurant-bar in a historic building is now under construction, with its historic status elevated.

Lou and Peg Larson have started interior work at what was originally the Ives Hotel, a two-story 1897 building at 4344 Douglas Ave., across the road from St. Ritas Catholic Church. Their working name for their future family restaurant and bar is Ives Station, which is what that part of Caledonia was originally called.

The couple own and operate another Douglas Avenue business, Peg & Lous Bar & Grill, 3113 Douglas Ave. They have had other local taverns, including Peg & Lous Junction Inn, 1436 Junction Ave., now called the Brass Monkey.

On May 1, The Journal Times announced the Larsons plans for the former hotel theyd bought for $169,900. But to have a chance of placing the building on the National Register of Historic Places, as they hope to do, they couldnt start construction until getting preliminary approval for that designation.

The Wisconsin Historical Society gave them the nod on July 1, Lou said, and they started construction July 5.

Now our architect will come in and do the drawings, he said.

Historic status would get the Larsons tax credits to help pay for the project, allow them to do an even better renovation or both. Along with the former hotel, the Larsons also bought two lots directly south of their building for a parking lot. Lou estimated the entire project could cost close to $500,000, although getting historic tax credits could supply up to 40 percent of that.

Restaurant concept

The Larsons have always had bars with food, but this one will be a restaurant with some bar business, Lou has explained. Their early food concept is for a basic family restaurant serving American food for lunch and dinner and a Friday fish fry. Lou estimated the dining room will be able to seat 50 to 60 people.

The handsome 119-year-old building attracted him, was for sale and was the impetus for a somewhat impulsive decision to plunge into the project, he said. Theyre doing the project through their company, Larson Investment Properties.

The building is laid out much like the iconic saloons of the Old West with a large front room and bar area, wooden floors, a 12-foot-high tin ceiling and a long staircase to the rooms upstairs.

Lou had planned to remove an interior wall that partially separated the future dining and bar areas. But when they tore off the drywall they found the original opening in that wall between the rooms, which had been closed. Now they plan to keep the wall and restore the original opening as it was.

They plan to convert the entire second floor to an apartment for themselves.

Lou expects the extensive construction required will mean an opening next spring. Along the way they will add old-fashioned touches in the decor to fit with the buildings longevity.

An example of that longevity, Lou said, was a small brass drink token an acquaintance found with a metal detector. One side says Ives Hotel.

The other side says, Good for 5 cents at bar.
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For every sheep, steer, goat or rabbit displayed at this years Racine County Fair there is a young person who grew in kind with the animal.

The first couple of years, when I took lambs, I was still pretty young, said Caitlyn Eulgen, a 2015 Waterford High School graduate. It was kind of sad to think youre never going to see them again.

Now 19, Eulgen has bid farewell to her share of animals after showing them at the fair. Eulgens father once bought one of her steers, and cracked wise whenever the family ate hamburgers.

Eulgen now attends the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, and is pondering a career in medical sales. The animals she raised now serve her goals.

Auctioning the animal helps me pay for a tremendous amount of my tuition for school, Eulgen said. Its just really fun to get involved and meet new people.

Eulgen now shows steers and swine. The steer she keeps at her uncles farm in Rochester, and the hog lives on a cousins farm in Burlington.

The animals on display at the fair are among the events more noteworthy attractions. The appeal is ambiguous  most fair-goers know what a sheep, steer or goat looks like and what constitutes a good specimen. It is less an appreciation of the animal and more an appreciation of a young person embracing a way of life.

Animals are always a big draw at the fair, Racine County Fair President Scott Gunderson said. When you see the young person who is connected to the animal, who has been raising the animal and has a real connection to the animal, I think people gravitate to that.

All in the family

Eulgen and Nicholas Popp both show animals at the fair through Cloverview 4-H, which is based in Waterford. Head, hands, heart and health encompass the Hs in 4-H.

Popp owns three sets of Andis sheep shears. The senior at Waterford High School is a three-time winner of the fairs Sheep Showmanship award in his age bracket, and received a set of shears as a reward for his efforts with each win.

I was the best at showing off my animal and having the best behaved animal in my age group, Popp said. Its about the showmanship and not the animal, is the way I look at it.

Popp keeps his sheep on his grandparents farm in Wind Lake. His older brother, Chad, showed at the fair and his younger brother, Alex, is showing this year for the first time. Eulgens older siblings also showed animals at the fair.

Nicholas mother, Penny, said is it is rewarding to watch her sons be in their element and excel at an activity that takes a great deal of work and patience. Chad has raised his sheep for the fair since the late spring.

They take ownership and pride of those animals when theyre at the fair, Penny said. They love to show them off.

Patience, hard work

Both Eulgen and Chad Popp said showing-off an animal takes more work than one thinks.

The animals dont like to cooperate, to start out with, Chad Popp said. You need to just be patient with them, and they eventually will work with you.

Eulgen said she reaches the point with steers where they readily follow her in an unfamiliar setting, and depend on her for everything. Responsibility and time management are among the skills Eulgen said shes learned while caring for her animals.

Both Chad and Eulgen have earned their share of awards, and Chad Popp said the feeling is indescribable.

At that point, it feels like it was all worth it, Chad Popp said.
RACINE COUNTY  The new county flag could soon be yours to have.

The countys Youth in Governance Committee plans to sell county flags to raise money for new Racine County Sheriffs Office Honor Guard uniforms. The committee approved a resolution to that effect earlier this month.

The 3-foot-by-5-foot flags  the typical size of a flag hung on a flagpole  will be sold for $75 each. The committee is looking to raise $15,000, said County Supervisor Monte Osterman, who advises the group.

New honor guard uniforms were identified as a need at the same time the Youth in Governance Committee was looking for its next project.

It just all came together at the same time, Osterman said.

Fly the flag

The committee created a new blue, gold and gray Racine County flag earlier this year. The flag has the words Racine County on top and the countys founding year, 1836, at the bottom. In the middle are three diamond-shaped blocks representing agriculture, recreation and industry.

The flags will be on sale at the Racine County Fair, set for July 27-31. Residents who want to purchase a flag can also email Osterman at Monte.Osterman@RacineCounty.com or call the University of Wisconsin-Extension office at 262-767-2929.

Students also will undertake a door-to-door, person-to-person effort, Osterman said.

Theyre fired up to do it, he said.

The fundraising effort is expected to last through the holidays, though the flags could be sold to raise money for other purposes later on, Osterman said.

I would anticipate that we would always have that initiative going in one fashion or another, even after were done raising money for the honor guard, he said.
NORTH CAPE  July 23, 2012, promised rain after a long, hot summer.

With an agricultural upbringing bred in his bones, Jim Waldron could feel the storm coming in the heavy, humid air.

Waldron grew up on a farm, 300 acres of corn and alfalfa and 150 cows kept by his family for nearly a century. He participated in Future Farmers of America while at Waterford High School, and at 26 was working on a farm near his familys acreage.

Farming wasnt work, he said. It was life.

Waldron whiled away the near-drought that year by driving a truck, delivering bales of hay and straw up north. With the rain coming that July day, the bales had to be covered with plastic tarps to keep dry.

Waldron stood atop a 16-foot high heap of big square bales, yanking a plastic sheet over the pile. He pulled the tie on one bale to flip and center it.

Suddenly the cord snapped. One misstep later, Waldron plunged backward off the pile. He landed flat on the hard, water-hungry dirt. His spine, at a spot about the height of his belly button, cracked.

He had lost the use of his legs forever.

I was awake the whole time, Waldron remembered about the fall. The guys who were with me kept touching my legs and asking me if I felt anything. I couldnt. All I felt was a hot spot in the middle of my back.

The road to recovery

Waldron recaps his fateful story, rolling his wheelchair through the family farm. He moves easily from barn to outbuildings. Two dogs trot next to his chair. A goat ambles past.

The ambulance came into the field and got me, he said. What a bumpy ride.

He was taken to a nearby grade school and transported to Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa via Flight for Life helicopter. He had surgery on his spine. A day later, his surgeon told him he would spend the rest of his life using a wheelchair.

The next morning, a nurse rolled a wheelchair to his hospital bed and asked Waldron if he was going to get up.

What else was I going to do? he said. You have to decide to move on. Lying in bed all the time just wasnt an option. It was time to figure this out.

Waldron began two months of physical and occupational therapy, relearning simple tasks most of us take for granted, such as taking a shower, going to the bathroom, getting dressed and tying his shoes.

Realizing you can never do anything the way you used to do it strips away all of your confidence, he said. You have to start over. It became all about small victories.

Back on the farm

By Labor Day 2012, Waldron was back on the family homestead. He moved in with his sister, Jackie Bratz, and her husband, Jeremy, who were running the farm. The three of them live in one of the houses on the farm.

The bad times came that spring, the first planting season since the accident. Staring out the window, I saw everyone else getting the equipment ready, starting to plant, being productive, he said. Those were the darkest times.

There have been ups and downs, said Bratz, who is director of the Racine County Communications Center. Sometimes we talked about it. Sometimes he would decompress in his room, probably trying to not think about it. There have been more than a few heartfelt conversations at the kitchen table.

Slowly, Waldron got stronger and healthier. He had surgery to ease severe leg pain. He stopped taking painkillers. He worked out almost every day. He started seeing a personal trainer once a week. He learned how to quickly disassemble his wheelchair and stow it in his truck. Best of all, he got back to the farm.

Using a special heavy-duty wheelchair, he went out among the cows. He helped with the chores. Last year he helped build a sand-filled, 150-stall barn for the cows.

The more time I spent outside, the better I felt, Waldron said.

An estimated 19 percent of farmers are unable to perform essential tasks due to a disability, according to AgrAbility, a national organization that assists disabled farmers.

Waldron is not one of them.

Waldron has adjusted the farms equipment, making it easier for him to use. He added hand controls for the foot pedals on the tractor and, this year, planted the farms corn crop. He modified a skid loader and climbs into it with no problems.

His side businesses are thriving  he sells crop seeds, planting technology accessories and agriculture equipment parts. He drives to trade shows and farms expos across the Midwest. He meets clients in their fields.

Regaining that sense of independence and feeling like I am useful is so important to me, he said. I dont want to weigh down the farm. I want to help raise the value.

The local farm community has nothing but respect and admiration for Waldron, said Jeff Ehrhart, who farms about 2,500 acres and lives in Dover, a few miles south of Waldrons house.

He has a real drive. Hes not sitting back and feeling sorry for himself, Ehrhart said. He rolls through the door of my workshop and when I ask him how its going, he always says 'good.'

Everything is a struggle for him, but he doesnt make it look that way. Nothing will get him down. Hes always out there working, looking for a new adventure, Ehrhart said. And this after suffering something that would make about 95 percent of us crawl into a hole.

Looking to the future

At 28, Waldron knows hell probably never escape the confines of his chair. That hasnt stopped him from planning and dreaming. He wants to expand his business, perhaps hire some employees, and help small farms get the best deals they can from big seed companies. He wants to build his own house and have a family.

Those are things the 24-year-old Waldron  the one who could walk and run  probably wasnt thinking about on that hot, humid July day almost four years ago.

In a way, this turned out to be a kick in the butt, he said. It pushed me in the right direction. I wish I could have learned that lesson without the chair, but sometimes thats not how life works.

Waldron grew up on a farm and, for the near future, will stay on the farm.

He fits in just fine, Bratz said. He does so much that you would never know he was in a wheelchair unless you saw the chair. But the farm is where his passion is.

Im doing what Im supposed to be doing, Waldron said with a smile, the sun shining on his face. Im exactly where I want to be.
Researchers from the group of Hidrobiologia at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM) were involved in an interdisciplinary study based on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations. This report predicts that climate change will cause significant increases in the frequency of episodes in which the temperature of physiological and ecological efficiency of trout populations in streams of Duero River basin will exceed the optimal range. Consequently, this situation will lead to thermal habitat reductions that could endanger the viability of trout populations.

The Brown trout (Salmo trutta) of the Iberian Peninsula is found in the southern boundary of its natural distribution and thus, it is more susceptible to thermal changes. In order to study how these changes can affect the survival of this species, an interdisciplinary study was carried out and climatological, hydrological and ecological aspects were studied with the aim of developing an accurate methodology to be easily applied at greater scale.

The Cega stream and the Piron stream were selected for this study. They are located at the left side of the Duero basin and both are representatives in this region. Thus, researchers carried out intensive samplings of the fish communities and their habitat in these two streams, a work commissioned by autonomous community of Castilla y Leon.

The climatic scenarios used in this study is called "Representative Concentration Pathways -- RCPs," which are simulations of models to develop climatic scenarios proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Specifically, they used RCP4.5 and RCP8.5.

The thermal thresholds of trout population in the studied streams are lower than the temperature of physiological efficiency described in other studies with more suitable conditions. According to forecasts, the average temperature of air in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula will increase in summer between 3C and 8C by the end of the 21 century. Consequently, this will also affect the water temperature.

The number of days in which water will exceed the thermal thresholds will increase up to 13.9 times in the Cega stream in the worst-case scenario, the number of times that the threshold will exceed 7 or more days in a row will increase up to 2.9 times and the length of the events above the threshold temperature will increase up to 9.2 times. These increases in the Piron stream will reach 8.5, 2.0 and 7.3 times the reference value respectively. According to researchers, this data "will mean a reduction up to the 56% of the thermal habitat of the trout population in the Cega stream and the 11% in the Piron stream in the worst-case scenario."

This situation can be aggravated and to become critical due to the flow reduction caused by climate change and water extraction for irrigated plots that has increased for the last decades. Groundwater discharges provide rivers with certain resistance to thermal change, forced by the atmosphere-water energy balance, but the discharge temperature can also be affected by global warming by raising water temperature.

Trout populations have a relative thermal plasticity in early stages of their development and this could allow them to evolutionarily adapt to climate change if the change is not very sudden since this plasticity is limited. However, this capacity can be insufficient and must be proved.
A University of Washington fisheries professor argues that saving biodiversity in the world's oceans requires more than banning fishing with marine protected areas, or oceanic wilderness areas. In a three-page editorial published in the journal Nature, he argues that this increasingly popular conservation strategy is not as effective as properly managing recreational and commercial fisheries. "There's this idea that the only way you can protect the ocean is by permanently closing parts of the ocean to fishing, with no-take areas," said Ray Hilborn, a professor in the UW's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. "You protect biodiversity better by regulating fisheries over the country's entire economic zone."

Marine protected areas have grown in popularity since the early 2000s. Recent examples include an area twice the size of Texas in the central Pacific established in 2014 by President Barack Obama, and a proposal to close 25 percent of the Seychelles' exclusive economic zone, an island nation off Africa's east coast.

Several environmental organizations have set a longer-term goal of making 30 percent of the world's oceans into no-take marine protected areas by the year 2030. But Hilborn believes this is not the best way to protect global marine ecosystems.

"If the problem is overfishing or bycatch, then fisheries management is much more effective than establishing MPAs because you regulate the catch over the entire economic zone," Hilborn said. "I don't see how anyone can defend MPAs as a better method than fisheries management, except in places where you just can't do management."

In countries with functioning fisheries management systems, Hilborn believes, conservationists and the fishing industry should work together on large-scale protection of marine biodiversity and sensitive marine habitats.

For example, changes in fishing practices that allowed "dolphin-safe tuna" have cut dolphin deaths in the eastern Pacific by almost 100 times between 1986 and 1998, the article notes.

"You could never have reduced dolphin deaths that much by simply closing part of the ocean to fishing," Hilborn said.

He argues that working with the fishing industry to modify what types of gear are used and when and where different species are allowed to be caught can make more of a difference than establishing new marine protected areas.

"In Alaska, for example, more than 50 percent of the continental shelf waters are closed to specific kinds of fishing gear and the entire shelf is covered by species-specific catch restrictions," he writes. "This is much more protection than could be offered by turning 30 percent of the region into MPAs."

Hilborn said he worries that marine protected areas are being created without specific objectives, lacking input from affected communities, and without analysis of the larger-scale effects. Closing one area to fishing will just shift the pressure to a different area, Hilborn said, or cause people to seek other, more environmentally harmful sources of food.

In early September, world leaders will meet in Hawaii for the high-profile World Conservation Congress, held every four years by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Hilborn hopes his article will prompt discussion about priorities for preserving the health of marine environments.

"The modern conservation movement is places too much emphasis on protected areas," Hilborn said. "The focus needs to shift. We can better protect biodiversity, and still provide food, by looking to fisheries management as the first defense."
Where is the world's greatest concentration of unique species of mammals? A team of American and Filipino authors have concluded that it is Luzon Island, in the Philippines. Their 15-year project, summarized in a paper published in the scientific journal Frontiers of Biogeography, has shown that out of 56 species of non-flying mammal species that are now known to live on the island, 52 live nowhere else in the world. Of those 56 species, 28 were discovered during the course of the project. Nineteen of the species have been formally described in scientific journals, and nine are currently "in the works."

"We started our study on Luzon in 2000 because we knew at the time that most of the native mammal species on the island were unique to the island, and we wanted to understand why that is the case. We did not expect that we would double the number already known," said Lawrence Heaney, the project's leader, who is the Negaunee Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum in Chicago.

Luzon is the largest island in the Philippines; at about 40,000 square miles, it's a bit larger than Indiana. According to the authors, Luzon has never been connected to any continental land--the species have been isolated, like the animals that live in Hawaii. But Luzon is much larger and at least five times older than the oldest island in Hawaii, and so has had time for the few species that arrived from the Asian mainland to evolve and diversify greatly.

On islands, scientists sometimes see a "sped-up" version of evolution--when animals are closed off from the rest of the world, in places where there are few or no predators or competitors, they are able to branch out into special adaptations, eventually forming new species. And not only is the island of Luzon isolated, but it's covered in mountains. The mountaintops form what scientists call "sky islands"--little pockets of distinctive habitat that the animals further adapt to. "The animals are isolated high on the scattered mountains, so they inevitably diverge. Given enough time, you begin to see huge biodiversity," explained Heaney. "In the process of trying to understand how that happens, we doubled the number of known species on Luzon."

Among the 28 new species discovered by the team are four species of tiny tree-mice with whiskers so long they reach nearly to their ankles, and five species of mice that look like shrews and feed primarily on earthworms. Most of the new species live in tropical cloud forest high in the mountains, where frequent typhoons can drop four or five meters (12 to 15 feet) of rain per year.

"All 28 of the species we discovered during the project are members of two branches on the tree of life that are confined to the Philippines," according to Eric Rickart, a team member who is based at the Natural History Museum of Utah. "There are individual mountains on Luzon that have five species of mammals that live nowhere else. That's more unique species on one mountain than live in any country in continental Europe. The concentration of unique biodiversity in the Philippines is really staggering."

Luzon also supports 57 species of bats; most live in the hot, humid lowlands. These include the golden-crowned flying fox, which is one of the heaviest bats in the world at up to two and a half pounds. Another, the lesser flat-headed bat, is so tiny that it can roost inside the hollow spaces inside bamboo stems.

"We also wanted to learn more about the conservation status of these wonderful animals," said Danny Balete, a Research Associate at the Field Museum who is based in the Philippines. "The Philippines is one of the most heavily deforested countries in the tropics; only about seven percent of the old-growth tropical forest is left. We learned that quite a few of the species are seriously threatened by habitat loss and over-hunting, but none are yet extinct." Luzon has a human population of about 50 million, including about 23 million in greater Manila, the country's capital. "Protecting all of these species from extinction is going to be a big challenge. The good news is that when the native forest is allowed to regenerate, the native mammals move back in, and the pest rats get kicked out."

Other co-authors of the paper are based at the University of the Philippines, the University of Minnesota, and Florida State University. Heaney, Balete, and Rickart are also authors of a book about the mammals of Luzon Island, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, that will be used in the Philippines as a college-level textbook. The team works closely with conservation organizations and the Philippine government, and many of their recommendations regarding expanded and new national parks have been adopted.

"Learning about the tremendous diversity of mammal species present on Luzon is crucial to conservation efforts," explained Heaney. "In order to be effective at conserving an environment, we have to know what's out there."
Peregrine Falcons, in their normal habitat on isolated cliffs, mate for life. But some 25 pairs now nest on Chicago skyscrapers and bridges, and city living has them in much closer quarters than they used before humans dominated the landscape. A group of Field Museum and University of Illinois, Chicago scientists investigated whether typical breeding patterns hold true for these new city-dwellers and, in a paper published in PLOS ONE, confirmed that even in the big city, the birds that prey together, stay together.

"Peregrine Falcons that now live in the Chicago region are living in very different conditions than you'd normally see for these birds, so we wondered if the falcons' mating habits had changed too. They're in much closer proximity to each other than they'd be in a more rural environment, and we thought they might be more promiscuous with more potential mates nearby," explains co-author John Bates, Associate Curator of Birds at The Field Museum. "Each spring this population also has migratory Peregrines passing through on their way to all parts of Canada, so we didn't know what we were going to find, but it turns out that almost all of the mated pairs in the city remain monogamous through the years."

Peregrine Falcons nearly went extinct in the US in the 1960s due to thinning of their eggshells caused by the pesticide DDT. However, historic egg collections at the Field and other museums provided evidence for the harm caused by DDT, and it was banned. In the decades since, reintroduction efforts have enabled Peregrine Falcons to make a comeback in the Midwest, with populations thriving in urban areas in twelve states. Ninety percent of the breeding pairs in the Midwest nest on buildings and bridges in the Chicago area.

To determine if these breeding pairs in Chicago remained faithful to each other, the scientists used a combination of field observations and DNA testing. The Chicago Peregrine Program, a group run by Field Museum scientist Mary Hennen, monitors the nesting falcons in the city and collects blood samples from the young each year when she measures and bands them. Many of the falcons they observe have ankle bands to identify them, enabling researchers to observe which falcons are nesting together. In addition to these observations, the scientists compared blood samples from falcon chicks and adults to determine parentage--DNA testing revealed that of the 35 broods tested, only one showed that the parents "cheated." Even this case the researchers believe what happened was that a male lost his mate and then that same season, paired with a new female who laid eggs that were not his.

"Whenever you have animals living in habitats that have been influenced by human development, you have to wonder how the animals' life histories will be altered," says Bates. "It's important to do studies like this one to see how birds are adapting to living in human environments, so that we can monitor changes through time."
Energy drinks combined with alcohol (AmEDs) were once available for purchase as a premixed beverage, until 2010 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that the combination was unsafe. However, the popularity of AmEDs continues to rise, fueled by private consumers and bartenders. There are a variety of risks associated with AmEDs, including a greater chance of binge drinking than with alcoholic beverages alone. This study investigated whether consuming high-caffeine energy drinks mixed with alcohol results in a greater desire to drink alcohol than alcohol alone.

Researchers invited 26 adult social drinkers (13 males, 13 females) to attend six double-blind sessions that involved drinking alcohol and energy drinks, alone and in combination. On each test day, participants received one of six possible doses: 1) vodka + decaffeinated soft drink, 2) vodka + medium energy drink, 3) vodka + large energy drink, 4) decaffeinated soft drink, 5) medium energy drink, and 6) large energy drink. After each session, the participants rated their desire for alcohol and their breath alcohol concentration was measured.

Results showed that alcohol alone increased the subjective "desire for more alcohol" compared to placebo doses. AmEDs increased the desire for more alcohol beyond that observed with alcohol alone. In summary, this study provides laboratory evidence that AmEDs lead to a greater desire to drink alcohol than the same amount of alcohol consumed alone, and are consistent with animal studies showing that caffeine increases the rewarding and reinforcing properties of alcohol.
RACINE  Maneehsa Easton goes goofy for police dogs.

How goofy?

Well, the Racine girl, who turned 8 years old on July 3, didnt want any presents for her birthday party.

Instead, she wanted her guests to donate the money they would have used for gifts to help support K9 units at the Racine Police Department, Racine County Sheriffs Office and Mount Pleasant Police Department.

Shes just really attracted to these animals, said Tracie Brisbon, Maneeshas mother. When they came out with a calendar of all the dogs, she carried it around with her and studied it like it was homework.

Maneeshas party was Saturday at the Racine Zoo and her big heart got some hearty thanks from Titan, one of four K9 units used by the Racine Police Department. Officer David Arvai brought Titan  whose birthday also was this week  and gave Maneesha and her friends an up-close and personal look.

She does a lot for the dogs, Brisbon said. The money she helps raise pay for the food that the dogs eat and the training they get.

Last Christmas, Maneesha gave treats to all the K9 units with the Racine Police, the Racine County Sheriffs Office and the Mount Pleasant Police.

I like the dogs because they are helping out the city, and thats something very good, said the soft spoken Maneesha, who also got her face painted Saturday. I just like them.

About 30 family and friends attended the party, held at the Safari Base Camp pavilion at the zoo. Kids and adults munched on pizza and snacks before Titan arrived.

The kids quickly gathered around the new guest, feeling the brown and black fur of the Belgian Malinois breed.

Hes so soft and fluffy, shrieked Maneesha.

Arvai, who has been on the force for 15 years, got Titan in 2012. He picked up the dog in Alabama and spent 10 weeks there training with him.

Every year Titan must pass certain state tests to continue to be certified for use in drug cases and other duties, he said. The tests are rigorous and can be pretty stressful, Arvai told the crowd. If he doesnt pass, they can simply take him off the street. But he has done awesome every year.

Titan, who is 6 years old, is one of four K9s the Racine Police have. The Racine County Sheriffs Office also has four, while Mount Pleasant has two. Police in Sturtevant and Caledonia are currently working to get their first K9 units.

Maneesha gave Titan a bright orange ball that Arvai can throw with a bright orange plastic arm. He showed the party guests how Titan obeys orders by slinging the ball about 100 yards and having him get it.

Titans work drew the attention on numerous zoo visitors who watched the show. Kristina Pearson, the zoos guest services supervisor, reminded them pets are not allowed in the zoo, but service animals and highly trained police dogs are.

Seeing the crowd, Maneesha quickly grabbed a decorated bucket and asked them for donations.

I am so proud of her, said Samatha Easton, Maneeshas older sister. She has a beautiful soul and a big heart. Maneesha loves the K-9 dogs and supports them in any way she can.
Todd says Indonesia is an important trade partner for New Zealand and is the countries 11th largest export market offers significant trading opportunities.

Our two-way trade currently sits at $1.6 billion, and were keen to explore ways to meet the target set by the two countries last year to boost trade to $4 billion by 2024, says Todd.

We will be looking to further broaden our trade connections, including through the Prime Ministers meeting with Indonesian President Joko Widodo and my own meeting with Indonesian Trade Minister Thomas Lembong.

Todd spoke with Minster Lembong at last weekends G20 meeting in Shanghai and both ministers committed to further develop their government-to-government and business-to-business links.

"With a population of 255 million, Indonesia offers significant opportunity to New Zealand exporters and we will be looking to capitalise on the Prime Ministers visit to open doors for New Zealand companies," says Todd.

While in Indonesia, Todd will take part in business forums in Jakarta and Surabaya.

The Jakarta business forum will focus on the benefits of regional economic integration, including between ASEAN and New Zealand.

The Surabaya business forum will aim to promote New Zealands economic relationship with East Java, Indonesias second most populous province.

I look forward to working alongside the New Zealand business delegation to showcase New Zealands commercial expertise in areas of priority for Indonesia, including renewable energy, food and beverage, aviation, education and tourism, says Todd.

Source: Todd McClays office.
For many animal shelter workers, helping pets in need isn't merely a job - it's a calling. And here's video to prove it.

Up until just recently, this pup named Prissy was living the sad life of a lonely dog, having been found abandoned without a friend in the world ... but then that all changed. Fortunately, she was rescued and brought to the Conway Area Humane Society, in New Hampshire, where she soon learned what it means to be loved.

On Friday, shelter manager Debra Cameron was about to pay a visit to Prissy's kennel, to see how she was doing following surgery to be spayed, when she happened upon the sweetest scene. There, laying on the floor alongside the tired dog, was Cameron's colleague Chrissy Ireland - comforting Prissy with the warmth of her company.
The Canadian government is focused on ratifying a trade agreement with the European Union despite Brexit, International Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland said, downplaying a report the government has begun talks for a bilateral trade deal with the U.K.

Freeland met with Britains new Secretary of State for International Trade Liam Fox on Friday in London. Though Fox said the two commenced very fruitful trade negotiations, according to a report in Londons Sunday Times, Canadas priority is to enact and ratify the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement in 2017 while the U.K. is still part of the EU.

We had a very positive conversation with the secretary, Freeland spokesman Alex Lawrence said Sunday in a statement, responding questions about Foxs comments. Freeland shared details about the trade negotiating team in her department, and the two committed to work together to ratify CETA as quickly as possible.

The EU has put its landmark free-trade accord with Canada on a slow track for approval, increasing the risk of a veto amid an anti-globalization backlash across Europe. The pact will now need the approval of each EU member states individual parliament, as well as both the European Council and European Parliament. The sides had initially hoped to avoid sending the deal to each national parliament for approval.

The pact still can be enacted provisionally once the EU Council unanimously approves and the European Parliament passes it with a simple majority, Canadian officials told reporters this month.

The EU is Canadas No. 2 trade partner after the U.S., and Canada is the EUs 12th biggest, according to the commission. EU-Canada trade in goods was 59.1 billion euros ($84.6 billion) in 2014, while services commerce totalled 27.2 billion euros.

Canada expects the deal to be enacted provisionally in 2017, with ratification by parliaments to take years. Brexit doesnt change the CETA ratification process and its possible that CETA will come into effect while the UK is still a member of the EU, the Canadian officials said. The impact of Britains departure from the EU on trade deals already provisionally enacted is still unclear.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this month he was very, very optimistic about the deal, while Freeland has voiced concern over rising waves of protectionist sentiment that threaten major trade agreements.

The pact would add 12 billion euros annually to EU economic output while increasing Canada-EU trade by roughly a quarter, according to EU estimates.

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ST. JOHNS, N.L.They were called fallen women, and through much of the last two centuries they toiled in church-run Magdalene laundries as penance for often-petty crimes, loose morals or for having no place to go.

Former workers in several countries, including Canada, say they endured long days of enforced silent labour for little or no pay. Some say they were physically and sexually abused, and told over and over again that they were worthless sinners.

Now, a researcher in Newfoundland says Canada should acknowledge its use of the secretive institutions for which Ireland apologized in 2013.

An apology would be phenomenal, said associate professor of sociology Rie Croll. Shes writing a book that includes little known Canadian allegations of slave labour and abuse in the now defunct reformatories.

In Canada, this seems to be perceived as a problem that existed elsewhere, said Croll, who teaches at Memorial University of Newfoundlands Grenfell Campus.

Theres more awareness in Australia and theres a growing awareness in the U.S.

The purported safe havens were named for Mary Magdalene, the biblical disciple who befriends Jesus of Nazareth, stays with him throughout his crucifixion and becomes the first to see him appear in resurrection.

Magdalene laundries are traced back to England in the Middle Ages, where they began as shelters for wayward women, Croll said. Roman Catholic church orders began operating them in the early 1800s, expanding to Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada before the last closed in Dublin in 1996.

Croll said there were Magdalene laundries through the 19th and early 20th centuries in many North American cities including Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.

They became longer term prisons, essentially, as opposed to refuges, Croll said. The only people who could release these women were priests and magistrates, judges or husbands and brothers.

Croll has spent years collecting the stories of former laundry workers, including two in Canada, who often kept quiet for decades. Church records are notoriously difficult to get, she said.

All of the former inmates have focused on (one) point  they were taken advantage of. They were exploited.

The Catholic Church says it was about saving fallen women, giving them a refuge, giving them a trade.

But Croll cites newspaper articles that mention the former Good Shepherd Industrial Refuge in Saint John, N.B., run by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd order of Roman Catholic nuns. A provincial act in 1896 incorporated it, allowing judges to commit vagrant or incorrigible Roman Catholic girls to serve out jail terms, or up to five years if she was under 14.

The newspapers document complaints by other laundries, claiming the church laundry was undercutting them on lucrative contracts using slave labour, Croll said.

She recounted the story of Chaparral Bowman, now deceased, who was born in the laundry in 1934 to a 13-year-old Maliseet girl who had been raped by white men.

A local Catholic priest told her parents the best place for her to be would be the laundry. She could have the baby and then she could come back home.

But Bowman said she herself worked without wages at the laundry from a young age until she escaped over a wall at 18. She described being sexually assaulted by both priests and nuns.

She also said she joined other workers and nuns who taunted and punched a woman, known as Delcina, whom she only later learned was her mother.

She was the lowest of the low  a pregnant girl who had fallen into sin, Croll said. Chaparral ended up carrying enormous guilt about this and never did really have a relationship with her mother.

Delcina was kept at the laundry for 14 years before she was released in poor health, Croll said.

She was used for labour as long as she could be used and then was discarded back on the street.

Croll said she died destitute in 1968, aged about 47. Her daughter, after escaping the laundry, battled addictions and worked as a prostitute before getting off the street with help from a psychiatrist and a loving man.

This helped her to unlearn her indoctrination by the nuns  the once deeply ingrained message that she was inherently bad and the product of sin.

Multiple requests for comment from the Good Shepherd Sisters of North America were not answered.

In a 2013 statement after an independent report found evidence of major abuses in their institutions in Ireland, the Good Shepherd Sisters called their laundries there part of the system and the culture of the time.

We acted in good faith providing a refuge and we sincerely regret that women could have experienced hurt and hardship during their time with us, said the Sisters, who were among four religious orders that ran Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.

The Irish government in 2013 itself apologized for its role as at least 10,000 women and girls were forced into unpaid labour in Magdalene laundries from 1922 to 1996. A related inquiry found several government departments had contracts with the laundries, and workers could be arrested without warrant if theyd run away.

Rachael Romero, one of Crolls interview subjects, wants an apology and back pay with interest for her ordeal in Australia. She was 14 when she spent a year starting in September 1967 at the Pines laundry in Adelaide, run by the same order of Roman Catholic nuns.

She had run away from home to escape her fathers beatings, she said from upstate New York where she is now an artist and teacher.

Romero remembers fences with barbed wire guarded by dogs, long days working in the hot, loud laundry, bullying by older workers and bland food with almost no fruit or vegetables. She was allowed minimal correspondence schooling, she said.

There was no talking. Complete silence all the way through the meals, although there was the nun who barked at us and told us what hopeless sluts we were, and no one would ever want us.

It was abusive.

Romero said she was released after a year to family friends. She was in her 50s before she ever spoke publicly about the laundry, and noted theres still a stigma in Australia.

Croll said details are sparse in Canada about how many women may have had similar experiences, and when.

A spokeswoman for Status of Women Canada said it is not reviewing the issue at this time.

Croll said she hopes more former laundries workers or their families will come forward.

We need to be sure that this doesnt happen again.

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Hes my hero and the reason I got back alive from Afghanistan, said Olivier Binette, a Canadian Forces veteran who served next to Patrick Pidgeon, the Loyalist Township firefighter killed fighting a blaze Saturday evening.

Remembered as a brave leader who put his life before others, Pidgeon succumbed to his injuries while fighting an apartment fire in Amherstview, in Kingston, Ont.

The 45-year-old husband, father and Canadian Forces veteran served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, in 2006 and in 2010, before returning to firefighting.

The two served in the same section in Afghanistan in 2010 for eight months  a time during which Binette saw Pidgeons selflessness and bravery when he saved his life after someone in a group stepped on an improvised explosive device.

Four of us Canadians, three Afghan national police and one interpreter were blown up, he remembers. Pidgeon saved my life. He got me to cover. He never wanted to admit he was a hero; he was too humble about it.

Pat was what you would refer to in the military as a hard charger, a true soldier and warrior, Dan Tee, another fellow Canadian Forces veteran, told the Star.

Tee was deployed to his first combat tour in Afghanistan when he was 19, under Pidgeons wing.

Knowing that Pidge, as we called him, would be in my section gave me a sense of security. I knew this wasnt his first rodeo and that when things went south he would know what to do, he said. Pidge was a leader, a big brother for the younger guys on his team and an amazing mentor.

I knew if I needed him or the other way around, we wouldve been there for each other, Binette said. Were brothers.

A GoFundMe page has been set up for Pidgeons family.

The OPP release says the fire was contained to a single apartment unit and that no one else was injured.

Theres no word yet on the cause of the fire. However, the Ontario Fire Marshals Office is leading the investigation, with help from the OPP and the Ontario Coroners Office.

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The high heels sinking into asphalt that was still curing was not the image Walt Disney dreamed of for the opening day of Disneyland.

The park was a triumph of industry and imagination  a $17-million marvel of post-war enthusiasm, where man-made mountains looked like they had existed since the dawn of time, and the 1890s frontier town looked like an image from a woodcut, with antiques sourced from across North America. Before it opened, the New York Times said amusement park was an inadequate term. It was a worlds fair for children, unique on Earth.

That is the legacy that endures 61 years later, but staffers  cast members in Disney parlance  can tell you that opening day on July 17, 1955, was marked by overcrowding, heat and snafus. They call it Black Sunday. A disaster.

It was a preview of sorts, meant for celebrities, press and various VIPS, with a live television broadcast. But tickets were counterfeited and the park was unprepared for the 35,000 that came.

Traffic jammed the freeway, and children were reported to be urinating in the parking lot because they had been trapped in their cars so long. Some rides werent ready, some broke down and vendors ran out of food. A plumbers strike in the weeks before the opening meant Walt Disney had to make a decision: the bathrooms were working, but not the drinking fountains. He was criticized for that, but he was right, Disney retiree Bob Penfield, 79, writes in an email.

Penfield, who had just moved to California from Iowa, was then 18, making $1.65 an hour. He was supposed to be in charge of the Peter Pan ride, but it wasnt finished, so he was working at the Carousel in Fantasyland, and saw a swell of children running over the drawbridge towards him. A little trivia is that 3 of those kids ended up working at the park, he writes. Disney had sourced the carousel from Torontos Sunnyside Park, and it was emblematic of all the small details that went into the park: he wanted only galloping horses, so their legs were broken  and the horses reformed into jumpers, a local California paper reported in a 15-page primer.

The orange groves, walnut and cypress trees of rural Anaheim had been torn away and the whimsical kingdoms of Disneys imagination had been built in a year with a backbone of steel, electricity and natural gas. The construction companys manager of operations said there had never been a project like it: Many of the items were constructed from artists sketches, he told the press.

Walt Disney said that the park would never be finished so long as imagination prevailed, but surely, he would have liked a few water fountains for opening day.

We still dont know what happened  whether someone printed up double the number of tickets, Disney exec Card Walker told AP in 1980. There were two mistakes, he said. They werent ready for the crowd, and they were trying to do too much with a television special on opening day.

Penfield said life at the park smoothed out later that summer, with more rides and attractions opening, and staff finding their groove. Attendance was steady. Walt Disney was often there on weekends, before the park opened.

He would sit with the employees for coffee, etc., Penfield writes. Always paid his way. Loved chili and hot dogs. Who doesnt. One thing that most people don't know about Walt is that he spoke Spanish pretty well. I talked to him numerous times, always got the impression that any question he asked you, he already knew the answer, but wanted to hear what you thought.

Penfield went to school to become a forest ranger, but he was hooked, and never left the park. He met his wife, Judy, there  the first woman to work in the Frontierland Shooting Gallery  and he worked his way up to project management, retiring in 1997, age 60. His name is written on a window on Main Street U.S.A., a hidden tribute reserved for few.

He still lives in Anaheim, and likes to visit the park, which is twice as big as it was then.

The cast members are very good, but I worry that the young ones don't know the legacy of Walt Disney and what he did, he writes. He was clearly a genius.

Penfield is the unofficial historian of Club 55, the name for the original cast members, who began in 1955. There are now 13 surviving, some in their 90s.

Most people think of the opening day as a mess, but a great day, he writes. Walt proved all the critics wrong.

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The future of robotic warfare could be nigh.

An engineering professor at Arizona State University is developing technology that would allow an Air Force pilot to control an entire fleet of drones using his mind.

Panagiotis Artemiadis runs the universitys Human-Oriented Robotics and Control Lab, where researchers seek to understand and improve interactions between humans and robots. The lab was awarded grants totalling $860,000 (U.S.) from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and U.S. Air Force in 2014 to build out the mind-control technology.

Ten or 20 years from now, instead of having big expensive aircraft or drones, you can have hundreds or thousands of inexpensive ones you deploy in an area, Artemiadis said. Even if you lose half of them, you can still achieve your goals.

And those drones can be controlled, at least in part, with the human mind, he said. The pilot wears what looks like a high-tech swimmers cap, equipped with 128 electrodes that detect brainwaves. The electrodes identify where thoughts originate in the brain and determine the pilots intended commands, and then those commands are communicated to the robots via Bluetooth.

A pilot can instruct a cluster of flying drones or terrestrial vehicles to move in a certain direction, spread out over a larger area, or circle around a specific target. To date, one subject has been able to control as many as four drones inside of the lab, Artemiadis said. The project will soon move to a 465-square-metres facility where researchers hope to increase that number to 20 and eventually into the hundreds.

Its a matter of getting good signals with cheap and portable electrodes. Once you have this, you can definitely do this outdoors if you want, Artemiadis said.

Before you picture X-Men-style warfare, Artemiadis said he does not expect mind control to completely replace pilots joysticks and computers  at least for the time being. Controlling robots completely with ones mind requires a high degree of concentration that may be difficult to conjure on the battlefield.

But Artemiadis added there ultimately may be applications beyond defence, such as humanitarian aid distribution, package delivery, or search and rescue operations.

We are adding more degrees of freedom and more capabilities, he said.

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ISTANBULFollowing a failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the government moved swiftly to shore up his power and remove those perceived as an enemy, saying Sunday it has detained 6,000 people.

The crackdown targeted not only generals and soldiers, but a wide swath of the judiciary that has sometimes blocked Erdogan, raising concerns that the effort to oust him will push Turkey even further into authoritarian rule.

Friday nights sudden uprising by a faction of the military appeared to take the government  and much of the world  by surprise.

The plotters sent warplanes firing on key government installations and tanks rolling into major cities, but it ended hours later when loyal government forces regained control of the military, and civilians took to the streets in support of Erdogan. At least 294 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded, the government said.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the coup had failed and life has returned to normal.

Another calamity has been thwarted, Yildirim said in Ankara after visiting state TRT television, which had been seized by soldiers supporting the coup. However, our duty is not over. We shall rapidly conduct the cleansing operation so that they cannot again show the audacity of coming against the will of the people.

Yildirim said those involved with the failed coup will receive every punishment they deserve. Erdogan suggested that Turkey might reinstate capital punishment, which was legally abolished in 2004 as part of the countrys bid to join the European Union.

Speaking to a large crowd of his supporters in front of his Istanbul residence Sunday evening, Erdogan responded to frequent calls of We want the death penalty! by saying: We hear your request. In a democracy, whatever the people want they will get.

Funerals were held for some of those who were killed in the coup attempt, including Erdogans campaign manager Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son, Abdullah Tayyip Olcak. The president, who attended the service, wept and vowed to take the country forward in unity and solidarity.

The governments announcement that 6,000 people had been detained  including three top generals and hundreds of soldiers  suggested a wide conspiracy. Observers said the scale of the crackdown, especially against the judiciary, indicated the government was taking the opportunity to further consolidate Erdogans power.

The factions within the military opposed to Erdogan who did this just gave him carte blanche to crack down not only on the military but on the judiciary, said Aykan Erdemir, a former lawmaker from the main opposition party and now a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies. The coup plotters couldnt have helped Erdogan more.

Even before the chaos in Turkey, the NATO member and key Western ally in the fight against Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, had been wracked by political turmoil that critics blamed on Erdogans increasingly heavy-handed rule. He has shaken up the government, cracked down on dissent, restricted the media and renewed fighting with Kurdish rebels.

The rapid suppression of the putsch was greeted by Turks across the political spectrum with opposition parties joining quickly to condemn it. In a half-dozen cities, tens of thousands marched throughout the day after officials urged them to defend democracy and back Erdogan, Turkeys top politician for 13 years.

At nightfall, flag-waving crowds rallied in Istanbuls Taksim Square, Ankaras Kizilay Square and elsewhere.

The Yeni Safak newspaper used the headline Traitors of the country, while the Hurriyet newspaper declared Democracys victory.

Just a small group from Turkish armed forces stood up against our government . . . but we, the Turkish nation, stand together and repulse it back, said Gozde Kurt, a 16-year-old student at a morning rally in Istanbul.

The failed coup and the subsequent crackdown followed moves by Erdogan to reshape both the military and the judiciary. He had indicated a shakeup of the military was imminent and had also taken steps to increase his influence over the judiciary.

This month, parliament approved a controversial bill to reform two Turkish high courts, which allows the government to dismiss hundreds of administrative and high appeals court judges and allow Erdogan to replace them with judges loyal to him. Parliament passed the bill even as authorities were grappling with a deadly triple suicide bomb attacks at Istanbuls Ataturk Airport.

The opposition had appealed the legislation to the high court unsuccessfully, but Erdogan has not yet signed it in to law. Two constitutional court justices were among the thousands of members of the judiciary it had detained Saturday.

It is not clear what affect the post-coup purge will have on the judiciary, how the government will move to replace the dismissed judges and prosecutors, or where the trials for those detained would be held.

The government alleges that the coup conspirators were loyal to moderate U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Erdogan has often accused of trying to overthrow the government.

Gulen, who lives in Saylorsburgh, Pa., espouses a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with democracy. He is a former Erdogan ally turned bitter foe who has been put on trial in absentia in Turkey, where the government has labelled his movement a terrorist organization. He strongly denies the governments charges.

In recent years, the government had already moved to purge the police and judiciary of Gulen followers. The military, founded on secularist ideals, has been a staunch opponent of Gulen, and so far officials have not offered evidence that he was involved in the coup attempt.

Speaking at a funeral in Istanbul, Erdogan vowed to clean all state institutions of the virus of Gulens supporters. He also called on Washington to extradite Gulen.

At two weekend news conferences, Gulen strongly denied any role in or knowledge of the coup.

As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt, he said.

He said he did not fear extradition.

This doesnt worry me at all. But Im not going to do anything that will harm my dignity or that will go against my dignity, he said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States would entertain an extradition request for Gulen, but Turkey would have to present legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny.

Ziya Meral of the Centre for Historial Analysis and Conflict Research, a civilian think-tank affiliated with the British Defence Ministry, said the motives of the plotters remain unclear, but the allegations against Gulen were dubious.

I am more inclined toward a network within the armed services who were disturbed about where Turkey is heading, she said.

The allegations will only add to the pressure on the U.S. government and signal new uncertainty in U.S.-Turkish relations.

The putsch attempt led to a temporary halt to air operations by the U.S.-led coalition against Daesh in neighbouring Syria and Iraq from Turkeys Incerlik airbase, but the Pentagon said Sunday that Turkey has reopened its airspace.

A Turkish government official said that the commander of the base, Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, was among those detained.

The state-run Anadolu Agency also said authorities have issued a warrant for the arrest of Erdogans top military aide, Col. Ali Yazici, although it wasnt clear what role he may have played in the attempted coup.

The agency said 70 generals and admirals, including former Gen. Akin Ozturk, an air force commander, were detained in the investigation. Of the generals and admirals brought before court, 11 were put under arrest as of Sunday night and the rest are awaiting processing.

Security forces arrested a group of coup plotters who had been holding out at one of Istanbuls airports Sunday, a Turkish official said. In addition, Anadolu reported that seven people, including a colonel, were detained at an airbase in the central Anatolian city of Konya.

Gen. Umit Dunda said at least 104 conspirators were among those killed, describing them as mainly officers from the air force, the military police and armoured units.

Security forces rounded up 52 more military officers for alleged links to the coup. Anadolu said a detention order has been issued for 110 judges and prosecutors in Istanbul alone for alleged involvement with the group responsible for the coup.

The suspects are being charged with membership in an armed terrorist organization and attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function. The agency said 58 homes of prosecutors and judges have been searched.

Officials also said 2,745 judges and prosecutors have been dismissed.

Another 149 police were detained in Ankara, according to Anadolu, citing the office of the citys governor.

Chanting, dancing and waving flags, tens of thousands of Turks marched through the streets into the wee hours Sunday in half a dozen cities tosupport the countrys long-time leader.

Turkeys NATO allies https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/07/16/world-leaders-voice-support-for-turkey-condemn-coup-attempt.html lined up to condemn the coup END attempt. Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg urged all sides to support Turkeys democratically elected government.

Turkeys military staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 and pressured Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, a mentor of Erdogan, out of power in 1997.

With files from The Washington Post, Bloomberg, Sarah El Deeb, Emrah Gurel, Bram Janssen, Cinar Kiper, Mucahit Ceylan and Jill Lawless.

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NICE, FRANCEFrench authorities investigating the truck attack that killed 84 people at a Bastille Day celebration in Nice detained two more people Sunday and released the dead attackers estranged wife as they tried to determine whether he had been an Islamic extremist or just a very angry man.

More than 200 people were also wounded in the carnage wrought by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel on the seafront of this southern Mediterranean city.

About 85 people remained hospitalized Sunday. Of those, 18, including a child, were still in life-threatening condition, Health Minister Marisol Touraine told reporters on a visit to the city.

The Paris prosecutors office said only 35 bodies have been definitively identified so far. Touraine also said one of the people hospitalized still has not been identified.

A man and a woman were detained Sunday morning in Nice, according to an official with the Paris prosecutors office, which oversees national terrorism investigations. The two are suspected of helping Bouhlel obtain a pistol that was found in the truck, according to a French security official not authorized to be publicly named speaking about an ongoing investigation.

Shortly afterward, Bouhlels estranged wife, who was arrested Friday, was released from custody, according to an official in the Paris prosecutors office. She is the mother of Bouhlels three children and was in the process of divorcing him.

The womans lawyer, Jean-Yves Garino, told BFM-TV that Bouhlel physically abused her and the rest of the family, and she eventually threw him out of the house.

It was hard, but she did it, Garino said, adding, she was no longer in contact with him.

In total, six people now remain in custody related to the truck attack, but officials have provided no details about their identities.

Bouhlel sent one of those people text messages just before the attack, the French security official said. The official would not comment on the content of the text messages or confirm reports that they included a request for more weapons.

Investigators are hunting for possible accomplices of Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian who had lived in Nice for years. He was killed by police after ramming his truck through crowds after a holiday fireworks display Thursday night.

Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has claimed responsibility for the attack, but its unclear whether Bouhlel had concrete links to the group. Daesh said he was following their call to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists.

The security official said Bouhlel sold his car just before the attack, which appeared premeditated.

All seven people taken in for questioning said Bouhlel was violent and unstable. While they all said he had long been indifferent to religion, some described a recent and very rapid conversion to radical Islam, the official said.

Neighbours also described the attacker as volatile, prone to drinking and womanizing. His father, in Tunisia, said his son did not pray or fast for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.

But French authorities believe that something may have changed. Prime Minister Manuel Valls told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper that authorities now know that the killer radicalized very quickly.

Daesh is encouraging individuals unknown to our services to stage attacks . . . that is without a doubt the case in the Nice attack, he said Sunday.

Nices famous Promenade des Anglais, the site of the slaughter, has reopened. Memorials for the dead have been set up on the westbound lane of the road where the victims were mowed down by Bouhlel. Some areas are still stained by blood.

Joggers, bikers and sunbathers cruised down the pedestrian walkway along the glistening Mediterranean Sea on Sunday, where well-wishers placed flowers, French flags, stuffed animals and candles for the victims.

The site is also becoming a platform for anger at the attacker. Pained and outraged epitaphs have been written in blue marker on stones placed where police shot him dead.

A woman asked if she could put a yellow potted plant there, unaware of the significance of the spot. A man nearby declared Never here. An argument ensued, with other passersby saying that his family deserved respect.

Are you defending him? the man said, incredulously.

Many families are angry and frustrated that they couldnt find information about their missing loved ones.

The prosecutors office says the identification of the 49 remaining bodies is being carried out according to an accelerated procedure established after the Nov. 13 attacks on Paris, using DNA or medical records provided by families.

The prosecutors office says it is working as quickly as possible but would not give a time frame for how long the identification process could take.

The families of 12 victims were able to see the bodies of their loves ones Sunday for the first time  three days after the killings.

Officials also have at last identified a 7-year-old boy in a coma whose picture had been circulated on social media after no relatives stepped forward immediately after he was injured in the attack.

The spokeswoman of Lenval childrens hospital in Nice, Stephanie Simpson, said the boy is Romanian and had been visiting Nice with his parents, who are missing.

Many in France are also angry at police and authorities for not preventing the deadly attack, even though France was under a state of emergency imposed after Daesh attacks last year in Paris.

Valls defended the governments actions but warned that more lives will be lost to this kind of violence.

Terrorism will be part of our daily lives for a long time, he said.

A special church service was being held at a Nice cathedral Sunday in honour of the victims.

More on thestar.com:

Fallout from attack unveils ugly side of Nice

Young families with children targets of Nice attack

Brazil beefs up Olympic security after Nice attack

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WATERFORD  Twice last month, Town of Waterford Police Chief Tom Ditscheit received phone calls from registered sex offenders.

The offenders asked very specific questions about the towns ordinance restricting where they could live in the town, Ditscheit said.

One of the two offenders was thoroughly conversant on the town ordinance, and was primarily verifying that there was no village ordinance, Ditscheit wrote in a memo to the Waterford Village Board.

The village does not have an ordinance restricting where sexual offenders can live in the village, but that might change relatively soon. The Village Board is considering adopting such an ordinance, and the effort has strong support from the people and the police.

It is my recommendation that the Village Board enact a sexual offender ordinance to protect citizens in areas where predators could easily re-offend, Ditscheit wrote in his memo, given to the Village Board on July 11.

The Town of Waterford Police Department provides police protection to both the village and town.

Also, village resident Eileen Diekow wrote a letter to the board asking trustees to consider adding a sex offender residency ordinance. She appeared at the July 11 Village Board meeting.

Such an ordinance would help community safety, property values, and would prevent the village from becoming a dumping ground for the county and any other adverse consequences for not having an ordinance, she wrote.

I feel that in todays society this topic and ordinance is very important to a growing community, and without one, the effects could be harmful, Diekow wrote.

Ditscheit agrees. He wrote that the town recently investigated a sex offender who, although prohibited from having contact with children, retrieved his mail every day at the same time a neighbors children were dropped off by a bus after school.

I bring up this one case to demonstrate that often abusers do not change even after being arrested many times, Ditscheit wrote.

Legal concerns

In 2009, the Village Board considered such an ordinance, but decided against it because of possible legal challenges, according to Village Administrator Rebecca Ewald.

That ordinance would have created either a 500- or 1,000-foot, sex offender-free buffer around private and public locations in the village where children are present.

At the time, officials expressed concern that restrictions larger than 1,000 feet might be too restrictive and challenged in court by sex offenders.

But since 2009 many communities surrounding Waterford have implemented or altered residency ordinances, Ewald said. For example, the City of Milwaukee increased its restriction to 2,000 feet.

The Village of Pleasant Prairie in Kenosha County also made its ordinance more restrictive, but was sued in federal court on June 6, Ewald said.

The Waterford board requested village staff and the village attorney to draft an ordinance that meet state requirements, Ewald said.

The board will continue to discuss the issue at its Aug. 8 meeting, Ewald said.
A 20-year-old college student was found in the roadside bushes of a small northern Indian city last week, raped and left for dead. In the days afterward, a shocking possibility came to light: Her attackers may be the same five men who had raped her three years earlier but were out on bail. They allegedly raped her again because she had been so steadfast in her case against them.

Heinous rape cases periodically find airtime in the Indian news cycle, but the outcry is often muted when the victim belongs to a lower caste. The unnamed girl in this case is a Dalit, a term used to describe the lowest rungs of Indias caste system. Casteism is outlawed by Indias constitution, but the practice is widespread, especially in smaller towns and rural areas. The five men whom the girls family blames for the rapes belong to the upper castes.

According to local media interviews with the girls family, two of the five accused were arrested in 2013 after the first incident of rape but were let off on bail.

Family members said the attack last week was retaliation for not withdrawing the case. Instead of settling the matter in court, the five men had wanted to do so out of court, the victims family members said. The accused wanted to pay about $75,000, a great deal of money in a country where the average annual income hovers about $1,500, but the victims family members said they repeatedly rejected the offer.

We had filed a case in the court for the arrest of the remaining three and rearrest of the two out on bail. We were getting constant threats from the accused to reach a compromise outside the court, but we remained firm. Thats why they have attacked her again, the victims brother told the Hindustan Times.

Rohtak, the place where the rape occurred, is outside Delhi, in a state known for its deeply chauvinistic attitudes and patriarchal prejudices  where male-dominated village councils often mete out their brand of misogynistic justice with impunity.

The victims family said this week that her attackers took her from outside her college, drugged her and raped her in a car.

The victim was interviewed in her hospital bed and could barely speak. She was able to tell a TV crew that she went unconscious during the rape but could not muster any more words. Her mother said she had relocated her family to Rohtak after the first rape for safety and better education prospects.

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MISTAKEN POINT, N.L.  A rocky stretch of coastline along the southeastern tip of Newfoundland that holds secrets about the origins of complex life has been declared a world heritage site by the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture.

Mistaken Point, so-named for its frequent disorienting fog, is home to the oldest-known evidence of early multicellular creatures.

The 565-million-year-old sea floor is embedded with the remains of ancient fossils, slowly exposed by the pounding Atlantic surf. Preserved in time by repeated volcanic ash-falls, the fossils include some of the earliest animal-like creatures ever discovered  a rare glimpse into what it was like when life got big.

The decision was announced in Istanbul after a hurried review by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee on Sunday. The annual meeting had been cut short by a coup attempt in Turkey less than 48 hours earlier, forcing the committee to fast-track its agenda.

More than 6,200 kilometres away, a small crowd gathered in the Edge of Avalon interpretive centre in Portugal Cove South, N.L. to watch a live online feed of the proceedings.

Everybody was going crackers, Richard Thomas, a geologist who led the provinces years-long effort. I was just sitting there dazed ... I thought this day would never come.

The rural fishing town, around a two-hour drive south of St. Johns, erupted in celebration, car horns blaring in a motorcade with blue-and-white balloons in honour of the United Nations official colours.

Our provinces natural heritage is recognized today on the international stage, Environment Minister Perry Trimper said in a statement.

Of 1000-plus world heritage sites around the world, there are now 18 in Canada. This will be the fourth in Newfoundland and Labrador and the first to be managed by the province.

UNESCOs website says the prestige of being declared a world heritage site often raises awareness of the importance of preservation and a country may also get financial assistance and expert advice from the World Heritage Committee to support preservation.

Another Canadian bid seeking UNESCO World Heritage Site status for Pimachiowin Aki, a large swath of boreal forest along the Manitoba-Ontario border, remains in limbo after the Pikangikum First Nation withdrew its support for the project over concerns about some UNESCO reports of the area.

We are all very disappointed that we encountered these challenges at such a critical time in the nomination process, after working on this project for 12 years, William Young of the Pimachiowin Aki Corporation said in a statement. We felt that we had no option but to seek a referral to give us all a chance to regroup and consider potential options.

The World Heritage Committee referred the nomination giving stakeholders three years to resubmit their bid after more fact-finding.

_

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CLEVELANDThe day before the Republican National Convention got underway in Cleveland, the fatal shooting of three police officers in Louisiana on Sunday added new concerns about security as huge crowds were expected to protest and the city police chief prepared officers to deal with the open carrying of weapons as allowed by state law.

Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich rebuffed a request by the head of the Cleveland police union to suspend that law during the convention, saying he doesnt have the authority to arbitrarily alter laws and constitutional rights.

Kasich, who has pushed programs to heal rifts between communities and police after several fatal police shootings, said those bonds must be reset and rebuilt.

Everyone has an important role to play in that renewal, said Kasich, who called law enforcement a noble, essential calling.

Authorities say three officers were killed in Baton Rouge, La., and three more injured in a shooting less than a mile from local police headquarters.

Sunday afternoon, hundreds of people lined a bridge leading into downtown Cleveland in a peaceful Circle the City With Love rally. Participants standing on opposite sides of the bridge from one end to the other held hands and stood in silence for several minutes.

Late Sunday afternoon, a few-dozen people began a noisy Shut Down Trump and the RNC march from east of downtown toward Public Square.

The morning started with Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams saying barricades have been placed at key streets and intersections in the citys downtown before the start of the convention to thwart the type of attack that occurred in France when a man drove a large truck into crowds, killing 84 people.

Things that happen around the country and around the world do affect to some degree how we respond here in Cleveland, Williams said during an interview on CBS News Face the Nation.

There have long been concerns about violent protests and clashes between those who support the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, and those who oppose the real estate mogul and his inflammatory rhetoric. But recent events, including a terror attack in Nice, France, last week and the fatal ambush of police officers in Dallas and Louisiana have heightened concerns about what might happen in Cleveland.

There have been reports that anarchists and black separatists also plan to protest in Cleveland during the convention, Williams said.

It seems, he said, that everyone is coming to Cleveland to protest or exercise their First Amendment rights.

An issue on the minds of many is the possibility that people might openly carry firearms during protests, marches and rallies given that Ohio is an open-carry state. Williams said during a morning news briefing that Cleveland police commanders will inform those who choose to open carry what their responsibilities are under Ohio law.

We try to get across to people, if you carry that weapon, you have that right to do it, but you also have responsibilities to the general public and people around you to make sure that everybody else is safe, Williams said.

A suburban Cleveland man drew attention Sunday afternoon when he stood in the citys Public Square with a semi-automatic rifle strapped over his shoulder and a .45-calibre handgun holstered on his hip. Other members of a northeast Ohio open-carry group were supposed to join him.

What Im doing today is a statement about the right to bear arms, said Steve Thacker, 57, of Westlake.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said Sunday during ABCs This Week that city officials arent strangers to unrest and demonstrations and protests and insisted that the city is prepared for an event that could draw tens of thousands of people.

The convention is a big moment for Cleveland, which is being hailed as a comeback city thanks, in part, to its revitalized downtown. The city also has drawn unwanted national attention because of high-profile police shootings and use-of-force incidents that helped lead to an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to reform the 1,500-member police department.

About one-third of those officers will be joining thousands of law enforcement officers from around the state and the country in providing security during the convention.

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The hoopla over the Scarborough subway has distracted us from a more urgent transit issue that surfaced this week. After a long run of record growth, ridership on the TTC is dropping.

Increasing transit ridership is a crucial city building goal. Getting people on transit reduces congestion, and ensures Toronto does its part to address climate change and air pollution.

Instead of addressing the ridership slump, however, city council is making the problem worse.

What is causing this drop in ridership? The TTC suggests many reasons that are mostly beyond the agencys control, including the slowly growing economy, the rise of precarious work (riders travel less if they only have a part-time job), and low gas prices.

These factors have an impact, sure. But you dont have to be a rocket scientist to know that fare and service levels are also critical: if you make the TTC expensive, uncomfortable and unreliable riders are going to take another way or travel less. Unlike the economy, fares and service levels are almost completely controlled by city council and the provincial government.

Service levels on the TTC are just not good enough. The broken air conditioners on Line 2 have turned the subway into an uncomfortable sauna. Riders can no longer rely on the TTC to get to their destination on time. Nearly 50 per cent of street cars are late, and those subway breakdowns that turn commuting into an epic sardine nightmare feel like the new normal.

Toronto now has the priciest monthly pass in Canada and it does not TTC provide a discount to low-income riders, unlike Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton, Brampton, Hamilton and many other Canadian cities. If you want evidence of the tight relationship between fares and ridership just look to the Union Pearson Express: the train ran virtually empty until Metrolinx buckled under public outcry and slashed the outrageous $27.50 fare to more reasonable GO-fare levels. Ridership has increased fourfold.

What the TTC needs to boost ridership is fair government funding. The TTC gets just 88-cents of government support a ride, the least amount of financial support in North America. More funding could pay for bread-and-butter service improvements and rider-friendly fares like a low-income pass and two-hour fare transfers.

What the TTC is getting is a budget crisis. The agency needs $178 million just to maintain current service levels for next year, and city council just slapped the TTC with a 2.6 per cent budget cut.

This is incredibly short-sighted. Budget cuts mean fare hikes and service cuts in 2017, which will only exacerbate the ridership problem. When you cut service or hike fares, you get less fare revenue, which creates a new budget crisis and so you cut service again. Its a vicious downward spiral to the bottom thats hard to escape.

Toronto has taken this race-to-the-bottom option before. Premier Mike Harris stripped provincial funding from the TTC in the 1990s, which led to fare hikes and service cuts. Ridership plunged to 385 million (its at 545 million today), and it took 15 years for ridership to return to pre-Mike Harris levels.

What our city needs is a race-to-the-top to a world-class, affordable public transit system and that requires all levels of government to commit to fair funding. In fact, the TTCs funding crisis is partly due to the Wynne Governments stubborn refusal to reverse Harris anti-rider decision.

City council has spent all week debating a $31-billion plan to build new transit lines in order to increase transit ridership. This week they also forgot about the riders they already have.

Jessica Bell is the executive director of TTCriders, a transit advocacy organization that serves as the voice for Torontos 1.8 million riders.

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Ottawas shameful foot-dragging on asbestos, the toxic mineral used as insulation in thousands of schools, apartment buildings and workplaces across the country, seemingly knows no end.

Though 55 countries, including Australia and Britain, have banned the substance in recent years, Canadian asbestos imports are on the rise. Despite international consensus that the carcinogen should be added to the United Nations list of hazardous materials, Canada is among the few countries to oppose the move.

The roots of our dangerous obstinacy are political. Successive prime ministers have defended the deadly mineral in the hopes of winning votes in rural Quebec, where asbestos mining was an important industry for more than a century. Only last summer, three years after the last of Quebecs mines shut down amid dwindling demand, did Ottawa finally acknowledge that asbestos, if inhaled, can cause cancer and other diseases.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada was at last moving to ban asbestos because its impact on workers far outweighs any benefits that it might provide. This welcome promise prompted fanfare from health advocates and vulnerable workers who know all too well how devastating that impact can be.

Yet in recent weeks the Trudeau government has cast doubt on its commitment to this necessary and overdue ban.

Asked for an update by the Globe and Mail earlier this month, the Prime Ministers Office hedged. Ottawa is reviewing its strategy on asbestos, including a potential ban, the spokesperson wrote.

The federal government has been studying this issue for more than a decade. How much more time does it need  and at what cost? A recent study found that in 2011 alone, nearly 2,100 Canadian workers were diagnosed with asbestos-related cancers. It pegged the financial cost of such illnesses at $1.7 billion per year. One would hope that statistics like these would add some urgency to the governments review.

More troubling still, at recent UN meetings the federal government has again expressed doubt that so-called chrysotile asbestos should be covered under the Rotterdam Convention, an international treaty on hazardous materials. Its rationale? It has not been proven that chrysotile asbestos causes cancer.

This type of asbestos accounts for approximately 95 per cent of the mineral found in Canada. Are we to understand that when Trudeau talked about a domestic asbestos ban, he meant only the 5 per cent that is non-chrysotile? If not, why is the government saying one thing about the health risks of asbestos at home and another thing internationally?

One hundred and fifty thousand Canadian workers are exposed to asbestos every year. Thousands of those workers will be diagnosed with cancer as a direct result of their exposure in coming years. Meanwhile, many poor countries, especially in South America, continue to import and use asbestos in their schools and homes. The federal government is either responsible for or complicit in all of this.

The scientific and international consensus is clear. Canada should ban the import and export of asbestos, fund a national program to remove the mineral from buildings, and support international efforts to discourage its use. The health of workers is too high a price to pay for a few votes in Quebec.

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Re: County littered with kitties, July 13

County littered with kitties, July 13

Norfolk County has exactly what it deserves. Bird lovers unite and condemn the source of the problem  people! If it is typical of most Canadian towns, cities or counties, there is a reluctance to fund any concrete aid to controlling feral cat problems before they become 25,000.

Cats are not native to Canada. They are house pets thrown away. I have worked and know so many who are working to help these neglected house pets before the kittens become feral, but it is against stupendous odds, heartbreak and financial difficulties because finding the money to neuter is a constant struggle.

Put the money where your mouth is, Norfolk County. Neuter them and feed them, set up a few sanctuaries and they will eventually die of old age. And Norfolk County could end up looking like decent people live there (since appearance seems to concern them so much).

When was anyone prosecuted for discarding a pet cat like so much garbage in Norfolk County? Perhaps if we start looking at these little animals as something we need to protect and go after those who neglect them in the first place, it would be a start to the end of feral cat problems.

Rochelle Hatton, Sudbury

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One of the best, most upstanding men I know is a black teacher, originally from Uganda. He is cultured, speaks impeccable English and French and wears a jacket and tie to school. Yet he is frequently stopped by police whose first question is inevitably, Whose car is this? Is he bitter? No, more sad, really, that this should happen so frequently. Police have a tough job and certainly they must stop many people of different races. He gets that and even sympathizes with police because he is a fair man and an empathetic man. However, if that stop is motivated purely by skin colour or is a trumped up failure to signal stop, then that must change. Is it too much to ask that my friend should expect fair and equitable treatment? There are no easy solutions, I know. Like people themselves, the issue is very complicated. Lets start with better screening of police recruits and, as a prerequisite to graduation, each recruit must spend a year working among the minorities within the city in which he/she chooses to work. Its amazing how quickly stereotypes fade when getting to know other people individually. This deeper understanding of the various ethnicities and races can only help make for a better police service.

Jonathan OMara, Whitby

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On Dec. 4, 1988, I stopped feeling ashamed about being a Southern Californian with literary aspirations who lived in Manhattan. California was a joke to literary New Yorkers; it was, as Joan Didion once put it, a place where it was easy to Dial-a-Devotion but hard to buy a book. On that fateful day, however, Carolyn See  a critic, novelist, nonfiction writer and Californian, who died Wednesday  cut through all the New York-centric pretense. She made it cool to be an outsider.

In The Washington Post, where she was a regular reviewer, she took aim at a coffee table book glamorizing a collection of 500 plastic purses amassed by Robert Gottlieb, the former editor in chief at Knopf and then editor of the New Yorker, and the most revered tastemaker in Manhattan. See wrote what every literary person thought but lacked the nerve to express: Mr. Gottlieb, somebody should have discouraged you from this project. Its okay to have a hobby, but the solemn scholarship in the introduction (which she quotes at length) reads like a bad term paper. And what does it mean when a famous editor signs off on a bad term paper? When we subscribe to The New Yorker, she asks, to what, exactly, are we subscribing?

Who dares to say such things?

Doesnt it seem strange, See continues, doesnt it take even the word weird back a whole giant step to its original meaning of fateful destiny, that it falls to an obscure lady in West-Coast Topanga Canyon (home of hippies, beehives, right-wing maniacs, aura-readers and even Charles Manson for a while) to get to tell the most august arbiter of American East-Coast style that hes nuts?

In her 27 years at The Post, See herself became an arbiter  but always one a reader could trust. She wasnt cowed by fame or seduced by hype. If a famous person wrote a good book, she said so. She didnt feel compelled to tear down established authors. Likewise, if she felt strongly about a small book (as she did with one of mine before we became more than epistolary friends), she championed it. During her 82 years, she wrote seven novels, which often dealt with California and touched many lives. Yet her nonfiction was what spoke to me most.

See and her two daughters, Lisa See, left, and Clara Sturak. (Family photo)

Her two major nonfiction books  Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America and Making a Literary Life have a common thread: dignifying the outsider and providing a road map to a better life. Dreaming is a black-comic memoir about escaping a booze-soaked childhood. Her dad, a hard-drinking journalist, got sober through Alcoholics Anonymous and married AA royalty  one of the people featured in the They Nearly Lost All biographies in AAs Big Book. But her own recovery had not 12 steps but one: get an education, even if you have to scrape by to do so.

Making a Literary Life shows outsiders a path to publication and warns them to lower their expectations. Writers need to surround themselves with people who give them unconditional support  the sort she received from her cherished companion, John Espey. But the books ending is bittersweet. Espey died in 2000, and See describes learning again to function alone.

As a UCLA professor, See mentored many writers, only some of whom were officially her students. She didnt sneer when I announced  in my 50s  that I was getting an MFA and that I wanted to write my thesis about her. She offered to help  as soon as she was discharged from the hospital where she had spent the previous two months fighting an infection. She had no time for journalism. But if I needed to interview her for a degree, she would drag herself out of bed.

We spoke for hours, beneath two huge, vertical black-and-white portraits of her daughters: Lisa See, a best-selling novelist, and Clara Sturak, whose vocation from a young age, her mother said, has been to help disabled people. They were painted in the 1970s by Don Bachardy, novelist Christopher Isherwoods longtime companion and a resident of Santa Monica, where See moved after Espey died.

Some things she said surprised me. The woman who stood up to the Manhattan literary establishment had once known fear. A publisher pressed her to write about Linda Kasabian, the Manson family member who turned states evidence in the 1970-1971 Tate and LaBianca murder trials. So she and her daughters visited Kasabian in her dusty New Hampshire cabin. I got scared to death because she was obviously so bats, See said. When Kasabian asked them to spend the night, they ran: We stopped at the first motel we could find and put chairs under the doors.

Yet Topanga Canyon, with its rattlesnakes and wildfires, does not radiate safety. Its scary to live up there, she said. But its capable of being very beautiful. Ive been wondering about that just in general, the beauty in savagery. I know now that my family when I was growing up was savage. Because we came from savage beginnings. Even though we came from two of the oldest families in America. We date from 1620. We may be the oldest failed family in America.

Dreaming charts these savage beginnings and takes a dim view of the religious language in AA that allowed her father to rise above them. Yet Making a Literary Life ends on an almost theological note: We live in a beautiful, sentient universe that yearns for you to tell the truth about it.

A sentient universe. What changed?

That does sound pretty theological, she said. But its not a stretch. You just go outside and look at the palm trees. Theyre breathing and theyre alive. Its not a question of faith. Its a question of noticing.
Summer school is no longer just for students who are required to enroll in remedial education.

National and local advocates say the hot months  which for many conjure images of beaches, pools and lazy days  exacerbate the achievement gap and lead to significant summer brain drain, with students losing academic skills while away from school.

So families are enrolling their children in academic-focused summer programs to stay on track or get ahead for the coming school year.

National Summer Learning Day an advocacy day celebrated last Wednesday  emphasizes the importance of keeping children learning during the long summer break. In 2009, experts from Johns Hopkins University determined that, regardless of family income or background, students lose more than two months of the math computational skills they learned during the academic year. In reading, students from low-income homes lose as much as three months of their skills, while middle-class students make slight gains.

In the District, more than 2,700 students in kindergarten through the seventh grade participate in the public school systems free summer programs at nine schools. And even more participate in other free, academic-focused summer programs run by nonprofits, charter schools and other organizations.

We know that these summer months are some of the most important months of the year for our young people, first lady Michelle Obama said in a video message commemorating National Summer Learning Day. In fact, research shows that if kids take a break from learning all summer, they not only miss out on new information and skills, they can actually lose up to three months worth of knowledge from the previous year.

Brittany McAllister, a third-grade math teacher at Seaton Elementary School in Shaw, also serves as a summer school teacher at Power Scholars Academy  a six-week summer program at Seaton Elementary hosted by the YMCA in collaboration with the nonprofit BELL organization. About 90 percent of the 130 students enrolled in the summer academy attend Seaton during the academic year.

McAllister said that rounding numbers is one of the hardest math concepts for third-graders to grasp. Students who attend the summer program typically have a much easier time during the school year understanding rounding than those who dont, she said.

The students had retained what they learned over the summer, and were able to carry it into the school year, McAllister said.

About 5,000 students throughout the country are enrolled in a Power Scholars Academy. There are two academies in the District, the one at Seaton and another at nearby Cleveland Elementary School. Taught by certified teachers, the programs include 90 minutes each of math and reading instruction each day. The afternoon is filled with science courses and extracurricular activities, including music, drama, leadership development and fitness.

I like to play the drums, said 7-year-old Christian Nanton, a rising second-grader who attends the program at Seaton. Ive been banging on things since Ive been born.

Janice Williams, the senior vice president of program development at the YMCA of Metropolitan Washington, said parents rush to sign up their children in the summer programs each year. Enriching options for students in the summer can be expensive, and these programs provide free supervision for children while also giving them meaningful academic experiences.

The children also look forward to the summer program, Williams said, asking their teachers during the academic year when their parents can enroll them.

If we can maintain that kind of excitement in our young people, then we will not have the problem of students dropping out, Williams said. All of these scholars know they are going to college.

To combat the summer brain drain, many D.C. charter and public schools offer extended school years so students have shorter summer breaks. In February, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) announced that nearly 4,000 students at schools in some of the citys poorest neighborhoods would move to extended-year schedules next fall. So instead of a long summer break, students would have more frequent breaks during a school year that runs 200 days across 12 months.

[The school year is about to get longer for thousands of D.C. students]

For older children this summer, the citys public school system is offering an enrichment program for 100 students in fifth through eighth grades at three schools.

This is the first year that the summer enrichment program has been held east of the Anacostia River to ensure even more equal access, said Michelle Lerner, a schools spokeswoman. The DCPS summer enrichment program is unique because students help design their learning experience in mini-courses that explore topics such as forensic science, theater production, ancient civilizations and mythology.
After an allegedly stolen SUV was stopped on Interstate 95 on Friday, something unusual was discovered. A second stolen vehicle was inside the first, the Virginia State Police said.

Authorities said they chased the SUV, a 2001 Nissan Xterra, south in the Stafford County area for about 13 miles as it reached speeds of 95 mph. Police said that after stopping the SUV about 6:30 p.m., officers found a 2009 Honda motorcycle inside.

State police said the Nissan was reported stolen from Winston-Salem, N.C.; the motorcycle was reported stolen from Baltimore County. Police said they arrested a North Carolina man in the incident.
This past week was a big one for Mount Pleasant, and those who live in and around the village should be concerned.

On Monday, the Village Board voted out Administrator Kurt Wahlen after concerns over a controversial Highway V water and sewer project that assessed property owners along the highway.

Residents who lived along Highway V were up in arms after they learned about assessments for a project they didnt want. They tried to fight it, but Wahlen argued his hands were partially tied because of prior agreements.

Those controversial assessments ultimately ended with several board members losing their seats in the April election.

Wahlen is the most recent scapegoat for angry constituents.

As Wahlen himself said before the Monday meeting, Elections have consequences.

The consequence for him was that he lost his job.

But the consequence for Mount Pleasant residents could be a lot worse, if the village goes back to its old ways.

In an interesting parting letter to the village board, Wahlen tellingly outlined the issues he encountered when he stared as administrator in 2013.

Several employees had filed complaints with the state Department of Workforce Developments Equal Rights Division, including one complaint involving violent threats by a supervisor. That complaint had not been addressed.

Another employee, who worked in the village Public Works Department, had been cited for drunken driving off duty and could not operate any village vehicle. Nothing was done in regards to that employee either.

There were troubling financial practices, with the village spending its reserves to meet its budget. That was done through a deceptive practice of using the South Shore Fire Departments rescue revenue account to balance the budget and the account was more than $1 million in the red.

The village stopped paying MuniCode to maintain the villages code of ordinances, which led to the code not being maintained.

Walgreens took Mount Pleasant to court over its property assessment and won a default judgment when the village failed to show up at the hearing.

Mount Pleasants auditors became so frustrated with the village, they walked off the job, costing the village shared revenue from the state because the audit was not done in time.

Those are just a few items on the extensive list that also included rescue squads breaking down, delayed road construction and personnel files scattered everywhere. Wahlen said problems were addressed, and in a January 2014 interview said village government was on the upswing  until the Highway V project.

Now Wahlen is out, the latest in a line of employees dismissed by the board, putting the village back in potential disarray.

Some village residents got their wish. Wahlen is out. But whats next?
The state officials weighing an effort by Prince Georges County to launch a new regional medical center have one common concern: Dimensions Healthcare System, the long-troubled nonprofit group that has operated hospitals in the county for decades.

Early this year, when Gov. Larry Hogan (R) balked at giving millions of dollars to keep existing county hospitals afloat while the new one is built, he wanted assurances that Dimensions would not play a role in running the new medical center.

State health-care commissioner Robert E. Moffit sought the same guarantee in May, when he refused to approve the new hospital and requested changes and more information by the end of the summer.

[More setbacks for long-delayed regional medical center]

Even Democratic state lawmakers who have championed the regional hospital project and forced Hogan to provide subsidies have made those funds contingent on Dimensions handing over hospital operations to the University of Maryland Medical System, which is heading the ambitious effort to build the medical center.

Everybody wants to phase Dimensions out of the system completely, said Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert). It has a bad track record. Its just a history of bad debt, a history of mismanagement and of not collecting bills.

But just weeks before their self-imposed deadline to submit a new plan to Moffit, UMMS officials say the details such as mechanics, structure, governance and branding of the new hospital system have not been defined. It would be premature to comment further, a UMMS spokesman said in an email, while negotiations are taking place.

Prince Georges politicians have said repeatedly that Dimensions will cease to exist once the regional hospital opens. But few, if any, know how that will happen. Thomas Himler, budget and finance director for County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D), said the parties goal is to have a memorandum of understanding executed when they submit their revised certificate of need application to the state by Aug. 31.

Were working on it, said Del. Barbara A. Frush (D-Prince Georges), a member of Dimensions board, adding that she thinks there will be a place for board members such as herself in the new governance structure. We have not made any monumental decisions.

[Delay in approving hospital project stirs worry in Prince Georges]

Hospitals in Prince Georges were run by the health department until 1982, when the government formed a nonprofit entity and leased Prince Georges Hospital Center, Greater Laurel Regional Hospital, Gladys Noon Spellman Nursing Center and Bowie Health Center to that group.

Community Hospital and Health Care Systems faced problems immediately. There were massive layoffs in 1983 and 1985, threats that their medical facilities would lose accreditation, nurses strikes and, in 1988, lawsuits over alleged negligence in the intensive care unit. Constant bickering among board members led to allegations of mismanagement from elected officials, ethics investigations and the ouster of several members.

In late 1986, the organization renamed itself Dimensions Healthcare System, part of an effort to give itself a fresh start, said former county executive Winfield Kelly, who headed the system for 18 years.

Kelly partnered with the private sector to build medical offices and made plans to build a pharmacy on the campus of the hospital in Cheverly. The facilitys maternity wing was renovated in an effort to draw higher-paying patients.

In the late 1980s, the company started making a profit, thanks to cost-cutting, an improved bill-collection system and the hiring of a private firm to manage day-to-day operations. Laurel Hospital, in particular, experienced a surplus.

But Dimensions soon fell behind again, lacking the funds to match its competitors in mounting money-generating operations such as in-vitro fertilization clinics.

Larger and more sophisticated hospitals in the District and Montgomery County continued to draw privately insured patients out of the county. The state froze and changed how it reimbursed hospitals for Medicaid in the late 1990s, and several affiliated HMOs went bankrupt, deepening the financial pressure. The company relied on regular infusions of taxpayer dollars from the county and state to survive.

Himler, who at the time was an aide to then-County Executive Wayne K. Curry (D), said he remembers taking calls from Dimensions telling him they couldnt make payroll.

In 1985, then-County Executive Parris N. Glendening (D) and the council called for an investigation into allegations of nepotism, unethical payments to board members and other misconduct. The Dimensions board formed its own review committee, which concluded that certain decisions had been unwise. But the report ultimately absolved board members of wrongdoing.

The issue was and continues to be the high amount of indigent care, said Kelly, who resigned following a public disagreement with then-County Executive Jack Johnson (D). All during those times, we tried to merge with another entity where there was additional revenue, because the hospital just couldnt carry itself without some sort of assistance.

Moffits May letter asked planners specifically about how the new hospital would be run differently.

The history of PGHC has been one of long-standing managerial and financial difficulties, Moffit wrote. One of the key objectives of UMMS involvement is to assure a turnaround and put the institution on a path toward permanent progress. Please provide detailed plans for incorporating the Dimensions system into UMMS.

The university system operates 12 health systems in the state. In the past, when it has taken over an existing hospital, the boards are often consolidated. In some cases, existing leaders continue to serve for some time.

There is no rule of thumb on how boards are reconfigured, Ben Steffen, executive director of the Maryland Health Care Commission, said in a statement. The state does not have any specific requirements regarding the configuration of a hospital board after acquisition.

The struggles of hospitals in Prince Georges are familiar to Hogan, 60, a native of the county whose father served as county executive from 1978 to 1982. He was working for his father in 1981 when the elder Hogan  the last Republican to serve as county executive  proposed selling the county hospital to a for-profit enterprise.

The idea was rejected by the majority-Democratic Prince Georges County Council, which instead created what eventually became Dimensions.

A spokesman for the governor said Hogan is eager to see the county health-care system succeed under UMMS leadership.

The system that was in place clearly wasnt the right one, spokesman Matt Clark said. Hogan is keenly interested in ending the systems reliance on state subsidies.
THE DISTRICT

Three wounded in I-295 shooting

A man and two women were shot and wounded early Sunday while riding in a van on Interstate 295 in Northeast, police said.

The man was unconscious and the women were conscious, said Sean Hickman, a D.C. police spokesman, but the severity of their injuries was not known. Police declined to say how many times they had been shot.

Police said the shooting happened about 4:18 a.m. while the three were riding in a van that was traveling northbound on I-295 near Benning Road, just a few blocks southwest of the Minnesota Avenue Metro station.

Police said they do not have any suspects and do not know whether the incident was a drive-by shooting.

 Michael Smith

MARYLAND

Man drowns at house party in Rockville

Montgomery County authorities are investigating the drowning of a 25-year-old Gaithersburg man early Sunday at a house party where several people were arrested on charges of underage drinking.

The man, Diego Padilla, was found unresponsive in a swimming pool shortly after 2:30 a.m. at the home in the 5800 block of Winegrove Court in Rockville. He was pronounced dead shortly after being taken to the hospital, police said. No foul play is suspected, they said.

Police who were attempting to investigate underage drinking at the party  which was hosted by two brothers who live there  were initially denied entrance, authorities said. After contacting one of the homeowners relatives, authorities were able to gain access.

Police saw several extremely intoxicated people outside the house and ended up citing 10 adults and one juvenile for being underage and in possession of alcohol, they said. The two brothers who hosted the party also may face charges.

Padillas death is under investigation. Anyone with information about the party is asked to call Montgomery County police at 240-773-5070.

 Michael Smith

Ofcers vehicle strikes and kills man

A pedestrian was struck and killed by a Prince Georges County police officer in Langley Park early Sunday, authorities said.

Police said the officer was driving west on University Boulevard and approached Riggs Road at about 2:30 a.m. when he struck a man. According to police, the officer immediately stopped to help until medical personnel arrived. The man died at the scene.

Investigators were at the scene for several hours and closed a half-mile westbound section of University Boulevard until about 9:45 a.m.

The incident is under investigation and the identity of the victim has not been confirmed. Police are trying to locate his next of kin, officials said.

 Mary Hui

Bicyclist dies after collision with car

A man riding a bicycle was killed Sunday in a collision in with a car in the Rockville area, Montgomery County police said.

The collision occurred about 1:20 p.m. at Veirs Mill Road and Turkey Branch Parkway, police said. They said the car was going east and the bicyclist was trying to cross Veirs Mill Road from south to north in the area of a marked crosswalk. The bicyclist was identified by police as Oscar Mauricio Gutierrez Osorio, 31, of Teaberry Road in Silver Spring.

He was transported to a hospital, where he died of his injuries, police said. The driver of the car was transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said.

 Mary Hui and Martin Weil
Joanne Lewis hugs her nephew Jacob Carrington, 6, as they pray for the boy's sister who was fatally shot July 4. (Clarence Williams/The Washington Post)

Family and friends of Deeniqua Dodds huddled under umbrellas Saturday night as rain poured on a vigil held just days after her death from a July 4 gunshot wound.

The Rev. Dyan McCray-Peters told a few dozen mourners that the rain signaled a higher connection to a 22-year-old who was remembered as a playful, dependable brother, sister and cousin throughout her short life.

Right now, God, we feel and hear this rain. Even the angels are crying for the loss of our loved one, McCray-Peters said during prayers.

Her family said that Dodds was born Gregory but was a transgender woman. D.C. police used both names in a news release about her homicide.

Dodds had been on life support at a hospital since she was shot just before 3 a.m. July 4 in the 200 block of Division Avenue NE. She was taken off life support Wednesday. Police have made no arrests.

Mourners placed flowers next to a photo of Deeniqua Dodds at a vigil in the Clay Terrace public housing project Saturday. (Clarence Williams/The Washington Post)

Mourners gathered in the Clay Terrace public housing development where she grew up with her aunt Joanne Lewis. The aunt placed two framed photos of Dodd near a tree where flowers were laid to remember her.

Several family members spoke of her generosity toward her four siblings and younger cousins, and of a playful person who always smiled.

I will never forget your smile as long as I live, Lewis said. But I know his day is coming that we will communicate . . . God is going to see to that.

Cousins Diamond Lewis, 17, and Tiana Young, 14, said Dodds would do anything to make sure they were cared for and having fun, like scraping together enough cash for a run to the ice cream truck. She also played the practical joker who would skulk around the house making scary noises when they were home alone.

Her friend and transgender activist Earline Budd said a bright light from a loving, supportive family was lost too soon.

D.D. wanted to live, thats all. What happened that night, it should not have been, Budd said in an interview.

Mourners held hands, prayed and sang We Shall Overcome as the rain poured, adding emphasis to family sorrow.

Im going to miss my daughter, wept her mother, Nadine Dodd. Im going to miss everything about my daughter.
People board shuttle buses at the closed Crystal City station during Surge No. 4, which involved Metros Blue and Yellow lines. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

For Metros next SafeTrack surge, which begins Wednesday, crews are returning to where they began  the Orange and Silver line tracks between East Falls Church and Ballston. If youll recall, the first safety surge in June involved 13 days of continuous single-tracking between the two stations; that work was on what is commonly the inbound track. The coming surge will last 12 days and will consist of single-tracking along the same stretch on the outbound track.

During the first round, commuters endured significant delays and crowded platforms and trains. Some area roadways saw increased traffic. Expect the same this time around. For those who blocked the experience out of your minds, heres a reminder of what it entails.

What is Surge No. 5?

Trains will share a track between the East Falls Church and Ballston stations, affecting an estimated 73,000 weekday riders. The surge starts Wednesday and lasts through July 31. Single-tracking translates into reduced service, so trains and platforms will be crowded  especially during peak hours. As theyve done for each of the previous surges, Metro and local officials encourage riders to use alternative means of transportation and to avoid traveling during peak hours.

If you choose to continue your normal commute and take Metro, you should expect significantly longer wait times at the following stations: Vienna (Orange), Dunn Loring (Orange), West Falls Church (Orange), Ballston (Orange, Silver), East Falls Church (Orange, Silver), Wiehle-Reston East (Silver), Spring Hill (Silver), Greensboro (Silver), Tysons Corner (Silver) and McLean (Silver).

Weekday service as follows:





 Orange Line trains between Vienna and Ballston will operate every 18 minutes.

 Additional Orange Line trains will operate between Ballston and New Carrollton.

 Silver Line trains will operate every 18 minutes.

 Orange and Silver line riders in Virginia should consider using Ballston for more frequent service.

Heres what you can expect at specific stations:

Wiehle-Reston, Spring Hill and Greensboro: Weekday Silver Line trains will operate every 18 minutes. Consider Fairfax Connector service as an alternative, or travel to the Herndon-Monroe Park and Ride for additional route options.

Tysons Corner and McLean: Weekday Silver Line trains will operate every 18 minutes. Consider Metrobus or Fairfax Connector service as alternatives, or travel to Herndon-Monroe Park and Ride for additional route options.

Vienna, Dunn Loring and West Falls Church: Weekday Orange Line trains will operate every 18 minutes. Consider Metrobus or Fairfax Connector service as alternatives. Shuttle bus service will be available to Ballston. Limited free supplemental shuttle bus service will be available between West Falls Church, East Falls Church and Ballston (morning and evening rush only).

East Falls Church: Weekday Orange and Silver line trains will operate every 18 minutes. Consider Metrobus service as an alternative. Limited free supplemental shuttle-bus service will be available between West Falls Church, East Falls Church and Ballston (morning and evening rush only).

Benning Road, Capitol Heights, Addison Road, Morgan Boulevard and Largo Town Center: Weekday Silver Line trains will operate every 18 minutes. Blue Line trains will operate at regular weekday frequency. Take the first available train when heading downtown. Transfer before Rosslyn for Orange and Silver line service to Northern Virginia.

Bus

According to Metro, additional weekday rush-hour service will be provided on the following routes: Metrobus 2A, 38B, 3Y, 5A.

Limited free supplemental rail shuttle bus service will operate between Ballston, East Falls Church and West Falls Church (6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. only).

Special weekday rush hour express Fairfax Connector shuttle bus service will operate between the Vienna Metro station and the Pentagon.

Additional Fairfax Connector weekday rush hour service will be provided on Route 599.

Larger buses will run on Arlington Transit routes 52 (Virginia Hospital Center/Ballston/East Falls Church) and 55 (Lee Highway/East Falls Church/Rosslyn).

The last evening trips of the Potomac and Rappahanock Transportation Commission Manassas Metro Direct and Linton Hall Metro Direct routes from the Tysons Corner Metro station will be delayed by 15 minutes to allow more passengers to make that connection.

You can also use alternative routes on Metrobus, Arlington Transit and Fairfax Connector. Some examples follow:

Metrobus

At East Falls Church:

2A  Dunn Loring to East Falls Church, Ballston

3A  East Falls Church to Annandale

3Y  East Falls Church to Rosslyn, Farragut West, Farragut North, McPherson Square

15K, 15L  East Falls Church to Rosslyn

26A  East Falls Church to NVCC Annandale

At Ballston:

1A  Vienna to Ballston

1B  Dunn Loring to Ballston (morning and evening rush only)

1E  Seven Corners to Ballston

10B  Hunting Point to Ballston

22A, 22C  Ballston to Pentagon

23B  Crystal City to Ballston (morning and evening rush only)

23T  Shirlington to Tysons Corner Center (AM/PM rush only)

25B  Ballston to Van Dorn Street

38B  Ballston to Farragut Square

West of Vienna:

5A  Dulles to Herndon-Monroe Park and Ride lot, Rosslyn, LEnfant Plaza. Supplemental service, Herndon to Rosslyn only.

Arlington Transit

ART 52  Ballston-Virginia Hospital Center-East Falls Church

ART 53  Ballston-Old Glebe-East Falls Church

ART 55  East Falls Church-Lee Highway-Rosslyn

ART 62  Courthouse-Lorcom Lane-Ballston

Fairfax Connector

Supplemental express service to Pentagon from:

Vienna Metro station

Reston North Park and Ride

Existing express service to Pentagon from:

Backlick North Park and Ride

Gambrill Road Park and Ride

Reston North Park and Ride

Saratoga Park and Ride

In some cases, lines and waits for shuttle buses have been long, so make sure to add extra time to your commute, no matter what mode of travel you decide to take.

Source: WMATA
Antwan Williams, 19, was pulling from his newly established real estate lexicon. A community land trust, he explained, is when a nonprofit organization is formed to manage a piece of property on behalf of the community.

Then, there are assets and stakeholders. And he quickly learned that he cant build anything for the city without getting community input.

Williams just completed the laborious process of helping to submit a $61 million proposal to redevelop the city-owned Crummell School in his Northeast Washington neighborhood into a recreation center, with some affordable-housing and retail components as well.

Its a project he and his older brother dreamed of, even advocated for, when they were kids in the Ivy City neighborhood looking for a safe place to play basketball. But the long-shuttered property has remained tangled in political fights.

Last year, Williamss brother, Percy, was shot dead at the age of 20 just a block away from the school, a killing that remains unsolved.

Antwan Williams, 19, and his friends advocate for a community center in their Ivy City neighborhood in memory of his brother Percy Williams, in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 29, 2016. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

Now Antwan Williams is determined to finish what they started as a way to preserve his big brothers memory and create a legacy of his own.

Once my brother got killed, we realized we had to do something for the neighborhood, something for the kids to be safe, something that the neighborhood can be proud of us for, Williams said. A local advocacy group, Empower DC, has helped the youth partner with an established development company.

The Crummell School, a registered historical landmark that opened in 1911, has been closed for decades, and residents in Ivy City  a largely poor and black 1.7-square-mile neighborhood near the Maryland border  have long wanted the city to do something with the building.

Growing up, the Williams brothers were part of Empower DC, participating in an after-school program for Ivy City youth where they pushed the recreation center. They met with community leaders, testified before the D.C. Council, and a then-12-year-old Percy was photographed with former mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D).

After Percy Williamss death, Empower DC said the city had failed the young man, and it created a handful of paid fellowships in his honor. Antwan Williams was hired for one, and six other young Ivy City residents, most of whom were friends with Percy, filled the other spots. One of the fellows had advocated for a recreation center alongside the brothers eight years ago.

[At 12, he pushed for a rec center in D.C. and got a photo with the mayor. He was fatally shot seven years later.]

[Percys] death changed me. It messed up my sense of security. It let me know you aint really safe unless youre at your house, said the fellow, Willis Little, 19. Lifes too short nowadays, you gotta do the right thing.

Percy Williams, according to his friends, was a towering presence and the leader of the group, encouraging everyone to hit their potential. He and his brothers had to grow up fast. He was the middle of three sons  Antwan is the youngest  born to a drug-addicted mother who died in 2010. They were raised mostly by their father, who had other children and died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer.

Ivy City is always going to be Ivy City, Williams said. Its always going to be my home.

Antwan Williams,who graduated from Roosevelt Senior High School in 2014, and the other fellows have been recruiting neighbors to attend community meetings about the Crummell School project and gathering neighborhood input. Theyve met with D.C. Council members and other officials.

In April, the D.C. Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Development called for developers to submit proposals to reimagine the Crummell School property, which is in the 1900 block of Gallaudet Street NE. The request called for respondents to include a community center. The city also wants the site to have some retail and, if theres housing, at least a portion of it needs to be affordable.

Last week, the city approved three proposals for consideration, including the one submitted by Empower DC. The city says it plans to make its selection in the fall.

Empower DC partnered for the project with WC Smith  the development company in the city that is behind the massive THEARC community center in Southeast Washington and the Villages of Parklands apartment complex near the center. DC Habitat for Humanity is also teaming with Empower DC and WC Smith. If selected, the community land trust would have ownership of 50 percent of the more than 2-acre property  including the Crummell School building  and WC Smith would take ownership of the rest.

Dallas-based Trammell Crow also submitted a proposal, and Stonebridge Carras and Jarvis worked together to submit one as well.

This community has gone far too long without recreation, said Council member Kenyan McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who represents Ivy City. Were not at the finish line yet, but were making progress.

A few years ago, the city had wanted to use the Crummell School site as an overflow parking lot for private buses serving Union Station.

Residents say the city has long used Ivy City as a dumping ground for projects other neighborhoods have rebuffed, and with the help of Empower DC they sued the city to prevent the buses from coming. In August 2015, after much litigation, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced that the city would craft a new plan.

[No overflow buses from Union Station will park in Ivy City, Bowser say. ]

That announcement came at a critical time for Ivy City, which, like much of the District, is undergoing a development boom. Luxury apartments, bars, fitness studios  even a rock-climbing gym  have opened, or are slated to open in the underserved neighborhood. But residents want to ensure that the Crummell School isnt used solely to attract new, wealthier residents, but rather to serve the people who have been waiting many years for its redevelopment.

[Ivy City: The next, cool D.C. neighborhood?]

It will only get my support if it gets what the community wants, McDuffie said.

Williams, Little and two others working for Empower DC  Tony Crews, 18, and Burke Davis, 20  say theyve all felt the changes in their neighborhood and want to galvanize their neighbors to feel invested in what happens to the Crummell School. They collect community surveys and pass out fliers while wearing their We Are Ivy City T-shirts.

It felt like we hadnt had enough awareness for our cause, Williams said. Even our neighborhood didnt want to come out to testify at the council, so we had to think outside the box.

Last month, the group released a polished music video filmed in their neighborhood called Ivy City Needs a Rec, in which they rap about how they want to be remembered and why the community needs this recreation center.

We believe unequivocally that these young people from Ivy City, a poor black neighborhood in Northeast D.C, know more about how to solve their communitys most pressing challenges than all the professors at Georgetown, than the mayor of the District of Columbia, than any of us in this nation, if we allow them to exercise leadership themselves, someone says at the start of the video.

They got $200 million for the streetcar, but they cant put a rec on my block, Williams raps later in the song.

Empower DC and WC Smiths proposal for the site would bring to the neighborhood a community center, a 1-acre park, 123 units of affordable housing, a community health clinic and retail. The final plan isnt exactly what Williams envisioned, but he said they had to make compromises.

We wanted it 100 percent for the community because we felt it was ours, he said. But we had to come to some agreements and meet people halfway.

The process seems to have helped focus these four recent high school graduates on their own next steps. Williams is starting to look into college. Crews, who at age 9 testified before the D.C. Council about a recreation center, said he is considering a career in community activism.

Id do this full time if I had a chance, he said.


Marcus Williams, 22, wants to challenge the judicial system with activism. Its a system that he knows all too well. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

The plan was to shut down the interstate.

It was five days after two white police officers had shot Alton Sterling dead as he lay pinned to the pavement, and three days after the outrage of this state capitals disenfranchised blacks had amassed around police headquarters, where officers were now arresting protesters in droves.

Marcus Williams, 22, and DeShay Carter, 25, didnt know much about activism.

They didnt really know much about each other, either. He was in barber school, she was looking for work.

But there was something about this constant stream of national attention, the righteous anger and hope and flurry of Facebook declarations, that suddenly made them think they could make something happen.

[Alton Sterlings relatives weather scrutiny, call for justice]

Marcus and DeShay decided to organize a march that they would lead onto the highway just as all the white people and state government officials were heading to work. They would gather first at the Walmart and walk from there.

They going to be calling police, news stations, DeShay posted on Facebook in her first-ever call to action, punctuated by emoticons and exclamation points.

They pooled their money, bought some lunchmeat and bread and water and stayed up late, filling a cooler with sandwiches. Exhausted but excited, Marcus drove DeShay home, and then crawled onto his bed and fell asleep in his clothes.



DeShay Carter, 25, lives with her grandmother in north Baton Rouge. (Abigail Hauslohner/The Washington Post)

* * *

The next morning, Williamss mother pounded on his door at 6 a.m. to wake him up. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and the sudden bout of worry from his mind.

How many people do you need to shut down a highway? he wondered. Probably a thousand. A thousand people with real guts. And two poor kids who nobody had heard of could pull that off?

He dropped his mother at work, then headed to Walmart. The posters he and DeShay made and the 12-packs of water they bought the night before sat among old clothes and garbage bags in the back seat.

[As arrests mount in Baton Rouge, protesters question police tactics]

Two police cars were near the entrance. They were waiting, Williams thought, to stop them before they started.

He pulled into the parking lot and looked around.

Nobody had shown up. It was just him.

Marcus called DeShay, who he had connected with over Facebook a few days before. No answer. He searched the store for others in the red, black and white clothes theyd assigned in their call-out: red for the innocent blood that was shed; black means we are together in unity and proud of the skin that we are in; and white to let the opposite race know that we come in peace.

After several minutes, he drove home.

* * *

When Marcus watched Alton Sterlings death on video, and then saw the protests that brought out his hometown police wearing their riot gear for the first time, he felt like a revolution was afoot, a revolution he had to be part of.

Police in body armor clashed with protesters in Baton Rouge on July 10. (Twitter/Elizabeth Thomas)

It wasnt just that Sterlings killers deserved to face justice, he said. It was the perpetual poverty, the discrimination, the cycle of incarceration in the state with the highest incarceration rate in the country  all of it needed to be challenged.

It was the crime and misfortune that led to the drive-by shooting that killed his 14-year-old brother in 2011. It was the night in 2013 when the cops knocked on his door and arrested him on charges of attempted murder  a crime he didnt commit  because two people who had beef with his brother said Marcus did it.

He did seven months in jail for that, until a judge dropped the charges.

Marcuss father killed himself when Marcus was 3 years old. His mother raised her five sons and two nieces alone, often struggling to get by. His older brother Richard is in prison.

Something had to give.

Marcus Williams returns to the yard in Baton Rouge where his 14-year-old brother was killed in a 2011 drive-by shooting. (Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)

* * *

DeShay called back at 10:30 a.m. She had slept in, and she was sorry.

Ill pick you up, Marcus said. It was too late to get a big-enough crowd to shut down the interstate. He had a new plan.

They would organize their own neighborhood, where sympathies for Sterling ran high.

Were going to march through these neighborhoods where people see us, and theyre going to join, Marcus told DeShay. So well keep marching, and more people will join and join.

A larger protest was getting attention down at City Hall. But downtown was the realm of the white folks, the place where the people in power resided, where police with batons and masks kept bumrushing the evening rallies, throwing nearly 200 protesters in jail.

Im not going where the crowd is at, DeShay said. Theyre just going to push that down. I cant afford to be pushed down on any more ground.

So they set up shop at the empty bus stop on Plank Road near the General Dollar store, across from a pawn shop. They placed the cooler in the shade, faced the road and held up their signs.

Does my skin color offend you? Does my life matter? read Marcuss sign. Black lives matter. #Justice for Alton Sterling, read DeShays.

A few cars drove by and honked in support. Some people extended their fists upward through open car windows. All right, bro! called a man on a bicycle, raising a fist as he peddled by.

Baton Rouge is a town divided. The black people fill the poor neighborhoods of the north, and the whites are concentrated in the south. There were barely any white faces at the schools Marcus attended  and barely any when he went to jail, either.



Williams, who attends barber school, cuts 16-year-old Jacolby Griffins hair. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Williams stands in the bedroom he once shared with his brother Chris in Baton Rouge. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

Where you guys walking to? one woman asked, pulling up beside them in a car. Foster, Marcus responded  the street where Sterling was killed. People will join us while were walking. But first they were waiting for enough people to gather.

The temperature was in the mid-90s, and the Louisiana summer heat radiated upward from the asphalt as the sun bore down.

Oh man, my back is sweating, Marcus said.

A series of passersby wanted to know why they werent at City Hall. Because theyre trying to shut us down in other areas, DeShay explained. Here was smarter.

* * *

They traded signs. They got more honks. They waited.

A white woman walked by and glared. Life is life! she barked at DeShay. God gave all of us life, darling.

DeShay looked at her sign. It doesnt even say Black lives matter,  she said. It says, Does my life matter? 

[Graphic: More than 520 people have been shot and killed by police in 2016]

DeShay lives alone with her grandmother, who raised her. Her mother, who has been absent for much of her life, lives in Alabama, and she spent some time in foster care in her teens. Her father was murdered when she was 6. They shot him 10 times just to get the car radio, she said.

Like Marcus  and like Sterling, who she vaguely knew  DeShay has had run-ins with the law. She was arrested for theft. For disturbing the peace. For throwing a pair of scissors at her then-boyfriend during a domestic dispute. That last time, the police locked her away for a few months, charging her with aggravated battery with a dangerous weapon. They charged her boyfriend with domestic abuse battery; the scars on DeShays lip are evidence.

Her grandmother took out a home equity loan to pay her $2,800 bond, she said. Now shes awaiting her next court date and is unemployed. Its hard to find a job now, she said.

When yall marching? asked a 23-year-old woman who introduced herself as Antoinette Mills. She saw their video messages on Facebook.

1 of 41 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  The scene in Baton Rouge after a police officer fatally shot a black man View Photos A video captured the shooting of Alton Sterling, 37. Outrage spread across the city. Caption A video captured the shooting of Alton Sterling, 37. Outrage spread across the city. July 11, 2016 Dakeria Anderson, 9, protests with the help of her sisters D'liyah, 6, and D'anyriah, 8, across the street from the Triple S market. The girls father, Dewayne Anderson, said that he had been protesting since the beginning and the girls wanted to know what it was all about. Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post Wait 1 second to continue.

Whenever they start coming, were going to take an urban walk, Marcus said.

But Im not touching downtown, DeShay added.

Yeah, Im not about to get arrested, said Antoinette, because she has a criminal record, too.

But after a while, Marcus got tired of waiting.

They say everyones at City Hall, he said.

Yall can go, but Im staying here, DeShay said, tensely. Whats going to happen downtown  its going to get broken up.

A woman who had come by told her not to be afraid to go to City Hall: Thats where theyre being heard at!

Im getting heard! DeShay said, her voice rising.

Were in the hood! the other woman said. They cant do nothing for us here!

A homeless man walked up and reached into the cooler for a sandwich. No one seemed to notice.

Marcus suggested he could go to City Hall and bring people back to the bus stop to rally the movement.

Were our own movement! DeShay shouted.

Stop being aggressive! the other woman shouted back. Now they were all shouting. The plan was falling apart, and so was a new friendship born of activist passion.

Theyre busting people from City Hall! DeShay yelled, her voice shrill. Thats what Im worried about. She walked over to the cooler, sat down and began to cry.

* * *

Marcus was frustrated. Today was their day to make a difference. Tomorrow hed have to go back to Rayz Barber and Styling College, where he is learning how to cut hair four days a week.

When he was growing up, his family moved all the time. When he was in elementary school and the family couldnt afford rent, they packed seven people into one bedroom at an uncles house. When he was in seventh grade, they moved after their house caught fire. When he was a teenager, they moved to escape their neighborhoods constant violence, for which his older brother  now in prison  seemed to be a magnet.



Henry Riley enters the front of his home in Baton Rouge. Williamss brother Chris was killed in a drive-by shooting when he was walking past this house in 2011. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

The family has spent two years in their latest house, a dilapidated one-story rental where the rumble from the interstate overhead is always audible. Built-in shelves display the familys treasures: two high school diplomas  one belonging to Marcus, another to his brother James.

Marcus wants to get out of this place, where he thinks the system is rigged against black success.

The schools are bad. Fathers like Alton Sterling get killed or sent to jail. Mothers raise kids alone. Jobs are hard to come by.

[Video: What was Alton Sterling like as a father?]

They take away your opportunities before youre 14, Marcus said. They set you up to fail.

* * *

After a while, DeShay brushed away the tears, picked up her sign and walked back to the curb.

Antoinette, her new comrade, had gone home and come back with better walking shoes and her own poster board and colored markers. The women knelt on the ground together and made signs. Then they faced traffic and hoisted them high.

DeShays new sign read: Its not about COLOR. Its about JUSTICE.

A police car slowed next to them. A white officer and a black officer looked at the signs. Then they smiled, waved and raised two fists in the air.

DeShay turned to Antoinette. Thats what you call history! she exclaimed. That makes me feel so much better. That gives me motivation! Thats a sign that Gods giving me that Im doing it right.

Two white men drove by in a black pickup truck. The men eyed them, and then both flashed the middle finger.

Next, there was a black mailman who smiled.

Then another white man, another middle finger. Then more black people with honks and fists.

A black woman missing a few front teeth leaned her bicycle against the bus stop and picked up a sign.

Thunder rolled in the distance. The City Hall protest was dying down, according to their Facebook feeds.

My feet hurt, DeShay said.

My feet hurt, too, said Marcus.

It began to rain.

They had put in four hours. So they folded the posters and decided to call it a day.

The rain was coming down harder as they shoved the cooler back into the car, on top of the clothes and an open Bible.

DeShay said she felt good: I feel like I built a train, took it apart, and built it again.

I hope we made a difference, Marcus said.

Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
We are not as divided as we seem, President Obama said at an interfaith service in Dallas for five officers slain by a gunman. His predecessor, George W. Bush, sat a few feet away, on a stage that featured blacks and whites, citizens and police officers, a Methodist reverend, a rabbi and an imam.

At times, it seems like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together, Bush said.

But words may not be enough to overcome those fraying forces. This has been a violent and tragic summer, and it follows a period of pronounced divisiveness in American political life. The promoters of national unity may be outgunned, both metaphorically and literally.

Tens of thousands of people will be arriving this weekend in Cleveland for what is poised to be a combustible Republican National Convention. Dozens of groups from across the political spectrum are expected to stage street protests. Water pistols and toy guns will be prohibited, but real guns will be permitted under Ohios open-carry law. Wags call this convention the Trumpocalypse.

The sense that America is more divided than it used to be is backed by hard data. Theres been a sharp spike in the contempt that partisans express for their opponents, according to Pew Research Center polling.More than 4 in 10 Democrats and Republicans say the other partys policies are so misguided that they pose a threat to the nation.

On many racial issues, whites and blacks see different realities. For example, African Americans were far more likely than whites to disapprove of grand jury decisions not to indict police officers in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and of George Zimmermans not-guilty verdict in Trayvon Martins death.

A separate Pew poll this year showed that 88 percent of blacks think more needs to be done to give blacks equal rights, while 53 percent of whites agreed. A recent CBS News-New York Times survey found that about half of white Americans but three-quarters of African Americans say police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person.

Barack Obama gained national fame in 2004 when, as a U.S. Senate candidate, he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention and talked of common American values:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, theres not a liberal America and a conservative America; theres the United States of America. Theres not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; theres the United States of America.

After his election in 2008, President Obama was not alone in believing Americans could come together. More than three-quarters of the public thought Obama would unite the country rather than divide it, according to a CNN poll. Six years later, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found a 55 percent majority saying Obama had done more to divide the country than bring it together.

Its one of the few regrets of my presidency  that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better, Obama said in January in his final State of the Union address.

Historically, Americans have come together, at least briefly, in times of crisis. There has been minimal evidence of that in this terrible summer of violence. America has experienced the worst mass shooting in its recent history as well as the most lethal attack on law enforcement since 9/11. Americans have also witnessed, in raw video feeds, the deaths of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, both shot by police officers.

After the Dallas attack, Trump initially used measured, statesmanlike language: Our nation has become too divided. Too many Americans feel like theyve lost hope. Crime is harming too many citizens. Racial tensions have gotten worse, not better. This isnt the American Dream we all want for our children, he said in a written statement released the morning after the five officers were killed.

He shifted within days to more-incendiary rhetoric. Speaking of protests by Black Lives Matter activists, he said several times, without providing any evidence, that hed seen people asking for a moment of silence in honor of the gunman who murdered the Dallas officers.

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday spoke in Springfield, Ill., the site of Abraham Lincolns historic House Divided speech of 1858. She said there is too much violence and hate in America and too little trust and common ground. And she turned confessional:

As someone in the middle of a hotly fought political campaign, I cannot stand here and claim that my words and actions havent sometimes fueled the partisanship that often stands in the way of progress. So I recognize I have to do better, too.

One common argument in academic circles is that polarization and distrust have been intensified by the Internet, which is awash in misinformation, funnels people into echo chambers, and provides forums for anonymous hate speech.

But the mainstream news media is hardly innocent when it comes to national divisiveness, because journalists typically find conflict more interesting than harmony. Theres a dominant polarization narrative that is driving coverage, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Research on cultural cognition indicates that people are tribal when it comes to certain issues, such as climate change, gun control, abortion and evolution. People tend to trust the news sources that confirm their beliefs. Those beliefs become statements of identity and community loyalty. When Trump said, I am not a great believer in man-made climate change, he was branding himself.

President Obama followed his Dallas appearance with a White House event in which he intentionally seated police officers and community leaders next to Black Lives Matter activists. Dubbed the White House Convening on Building Community Trust, the gathering featured the president, with jacket off and shirt sleeves rolled up, performing the role of discussion leader.

Later, Obama posted a summary of the event on Facebook, urging the public to have conversations and find solutions: Thats the path out of moments like these. Not to withdraw, or shout each other down, but to reach out to each other  even if its difficult  and find some common ground.

But common ground may be unreachable in some cases. Activists with legitimate grievances demand to see changes and social progress before they stand down. Many people feel that their values are under attack and need to be defended vigorously.

And some political leaders and media figures prefer to fire up their ideological bases rather than seek harmony or unity. Divisiveness can be a strategy or even a business model.

Theyre conflict entrepreneurs. They kind of thrive on the pathologizing of our politics, said Dan Kahan, a Yale professor of law and psychology who studies cultural cognition. Theyre a problem. But most people dont have an appetite for this. Most people dont want to ram their values down other peoples throats. They just want to put food on the table.

The president kept pushing as the week went on  and on Thursday participated in an emotional town hall discussion on race relations, broadcast on national television in prime time.

Nobodys more hopeful than me, Obama said. Im  Im  Im Mr. Hopeful when it comes to these issues. Ive said from the start were not as divided as we seem, and I think were going to solve it.
Kaiser Health News

Government spending has skyrocketed on compounded drugs that retail pharmacists custom make, drawing federal investigators attention for potential fraud and overbilling.

Spending on these medications in Medicares Part D program rose 56 percent last year, with topical creams and gels, among the costliest products, now priced at hundreds or thousands of dollars per tube. And over just four years, the federal workers compensation program saw its spending on compounded medications spike from $2.35 million to $214 million.

The increases, along with a sharp jump in the number of patients getting compounded drugs, may indicate an emerging fraud trend, said Miriam Anderson, who helped oversee a June report on Medicare spending by the inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department.

Some prescriptions may not have been medically necessary and others not even dispensed, according to the report.

The practice of compounding, which is done by mixing drugs in pharmacies or special compounding centers, is as old as the pharmacy profession itself. The specifically tailored medications are aimed at patients who cannot take commercially prepared treatments. Patients who cannot swallow pills can get liquid formulations, for example, or those allergic to certain dyes can get products made without them.

But use among Medicare beneficiaries and federal employees in workers comp insurance plans has recently soared, according to Andersons report and a separate Postal Service inspector generals study released in March. Similar run-ups in use and spending also have been noted by private-sector benefit managers.

In the Part D drug program, the number of beneficiaries getting compounded drugs has grown 281 percent since 2006 to nearly 280,000 in 2015. Spending on such drugs reached $509 million  up 625 percent since 2006, the HHS inspector general report noted, although that amount remained a tiny fraction of the Part Ds total drug spending.

Topical creams and gels, which are often used for pain, are among the fastest-growing category of compounded drugs. Part D spending on those rose 3,466 percent over the decade; the average cost per prescription hit $331, up from $40 in 2006.

New rules from the Labor Department went into effect July 1, aimed at slowing spending increases for the federal workers comp program. Among other changes, the agency will limit initial prescriptions to 90 days.

While legitimately prescribed compounded drugs can dramatically improve a patients quality of life, it is important to have proper controls around billing, John Voliva, executive vice president of the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists, said Monday in a statement. The HHS inspector generals report demonstrated that such controls are not in place, he said.

The scrutiny itself has been increasing since a 2012 meningitis outbreak linked to a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy that sold tainted injectable medications. Sixty-four people died.

In the wake of that case, some states tightened their oversight of the industry, particularly of pharmacies making products that must be sterile. Those drugs are not considered approved by the Food and Drug Administration, although the agency does get involved when it is concerned that a site might not be making medications properly or has started to mass-produce treatments rather than preparing them for individual patients.

At times, compounded drugs can be more cost-effective. When Turing Pharmaceuticals last year raised the price of a drug used for patients with compromised immune systems from $13.50 a pill to $750, Express Scripts, one of the nations largest pharmacy benefit managers, partnered with a compounding pharmacy to produce its own version for $1 a pill.

Some compounding we should be happy for, said Glen Stettin, senior vice president for clinical, research and new solutions at Express Scripts.

Still, sharp increases in spending prompted Express Scripts to crack down on what pharmacy-made products it will cover  which cut about 1,000 ingredients from the list. The company has since seen its clients spending on pharmacy-made drugs fall sharply. It also has been targeted by two antitrust lawsuits filed by compounding pharmacies in federal court.

Nationally since 2012, pharmacies have been required to report all ingredients they use to make a compounded drug. The idea was to provide insurers with more information about what they were being billed for and ensure there were no hidden elements.

The effect on drug prices is up for debate. Stettin and others said a few unscrupulous pharmacies began adding more ingredients so they could charge more.

They are [creating] combinations of things that have never been tested together, he said. We saw a diaper cream that was billed at $1,000, where a patient could get one over the counter for $2.50.

In California, federal investigators say a marketer for one pharmacy paid doctors to write prescriptions for compounded pain creams formulated to include a five-pack of the most expensive ingredients. Then the pharmacy could bill the state workers compensation program $3,000 per tube for creams that cost about $20 to make, according to a federal indictment filed in June.

Also last month, federal prosecutors in Florida unsealed an indictment against a doctor who allegedly was given kickbacks  including a $72,000 BMW  for sending prescriptions to a particular pharmacy, which then billed Medicare, the military program Tricare and other government health programs for compounded creams. Prices ranged from about $900 to $21,000 for a one-month supply, according to court documents.

Medicare has not detailed the actions it might take. The HHS inspector generals report does not make any recommendations, although investigators expect to issue a follow-up report that will.

Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service that is part of the nonpartisan Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Rev. Al Sharpton leads a march commemorating the two year anniversary of Eric Garner's death with Gwen Carr, Eric Garner's mother, in Brooklyn. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

NEW YORK

Sharpton criticizes bid to tamp down rallies

The Rev. Al Sharpton criticized efforts to mute the Black Lives Matter movement Saturday, saying a sustained protest is the only way to force change.

Its mind-changing time, Sharpton told listeners during his weekly address at the National Action Networks House of Justice in Harlem.

He urged others to ignore calls from critics to scale back or stop rallies organized by the group, speaking a day before the two-year anniversary of the death of Eric Garner. He said a series of unjustified killings by police officers demanded an outcry. Garner died in a police chokehold in the New York City borough of Staten Island on July 17, 2014.

Sharpton also deplored the killing of police officers in Dallas last week.

Dont paint us as anti-cop. We are not anti-police. Were anti-wrong, he said.

 Associated Press

FLORIDA

Sheriff: Escapee is armed, had help

The search for a Florida murder suspect who escaped by bolting from a courtroom went nationwide Saturday as a sheriff said it is believed that the man is armed and receiving help.

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Saturday that his detectives have information that indicates Dayonte Resiles has obtained a weapon and is getting assistance. Without providing details, Israel said Resiles had planned the escape.

He said search warrants are being served and the focus remains on South Florida, but Resiles could be anywhere. He said a nationwide alert has been issued. Rewards totaling $20,000 have been offered.

Resiles, 21, escaped Friday from the Broward County Courthouse. He was sitting in the jury box awaiting a hearing on whether he should face the death penalty in his upcoming trial when he escaped his shackles, jumped a courtroom barrier and ran past bailiffs. He shed his jail jumpsuit and ran outside in his shorts and a T-shirt. Israel said there is no video from outside the courthouse that shows how Resiles left the area.

Resiles faces murder charges in the September 2014 killing of Jill Halliburton Su, grand-niece of Halliburton Co. founder Erie P. Halliburton. Her body was found, bound at the hands and feet and stabbed multiple times, in the bathtub of her home in Davie, Fla.

 Associated Press

CALIFORNIA

14 shot outside party in Central Valley area

Attackers wounded 14 people, two critically, in a shooting after a party in Californias Central Valley.

It happened shortly before 1 a.m. Saturday in Bakersfield. Kern County Sheriffs Office spokesman Ray Pruitt told KNX-AM radio that parents allowed their daughter to host the party. She promoted it on social media, and about 150 people arrived  many uninvited.

The parents broke up the party, and the visitors  mainly 15- to 18-year-olds  streamed into the front yard and street.

Pruitt said three people came up the street and opened fire on the crowd. At least one person reportedly fired back.

People were hit in the arms, legs and chest. The critically wounded are expected to survive.

Authorities said the attack may have been gang-related.

 Associated Press

SpaceX to launch critical docking port for space station: SpaceX plans to launch another load of space station supplies for NASA, including a critical docking port needed by new U.S. crew capsules set to debut next year. The unmanned Falcon rocket is scheduled to lift off Monday at 12:45 a.m. Aboard the rocket is a replica of the docking port destroyed in a SpaceX launch accident last summer. This is port No. 2. NASA needs at least one and preferably two of these ports for crew capsules under development by both SpaceX and Boeing.

Minn. woman charged with beating, starving servant: Prosecutors have charged a Minnesota woman with beating and starving a woman she brought from China to work as a nanny. Lili Huang, 35, of Woodbury is charged in Washington County with five felony counts, including labor trafficking, false imprisonment and assault. Huang remains in jail after making her initial court appearance Friday. The Star Tribune reported that the 58-year-old victim was forced to work up to 18 hours a day doing child care, cooking and cleaning. She was found wandering in the street. A hospital exam found she had many broken bones.

Texas inmate kills female corrections officer: A male inmate killed a female corrections officer at a prison in west central Texas early Saturday, authorities said. Mari Johnson, 55, was found unresponsive about 3 a.m. near the kitchen area of the Robertson Unit, a prison in Abilene, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said. She was pronounced dead at Hendricks Medical Center in Abilene. The name of the inmate and details surrounding the killing were not immediately released.

 From news services
Presidential campaign ads love to tout candidates as political outsiders. Get ready for change, they say, our man is an outsider who will bust up the Beltway cronies and get government to work!

Its hogwash. Every president in American history previously did public service, most in elective office or the military. The two presidents who dont fit that description served stints as Cabinet members. Not only that, the same is also true of nearly every major presidential candidate.

In this regard, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a true outsider like no other. Okay, like one other  Wendell Willkie  but well get to that.

The fates of previous outsider nominees and our least-insider presidents offer insight into the challenges Trump faces.

(For this story, were defining major candidates as those who have carried states, because regardless of who takes the White House this November, Trump will undoubtedly earn electoral votes. While Texas billionaire Ross Perot got 18.9 percent of the popular vote in 1992, he never carried a state or earned an electoral vote. )

William Wirt ( Library of Congress)

William Wirt, 1832

William Wirt is known in D.C. lore as the statesman whose skull was stolen from the Congressional Cemetery in the 1970s.

But during his lifetime, Wirt was a prosecutor in Aaron Burrs treason trial, wrote a flowery biography of Patrick Henry  some say hes the true source of the phrase Give me liberty or give me death!  and served as attorney general under Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Before Wirt, the attorney general position was a piddly one; most continued working in private practice for income. Attention-loving Wirt is credited with bringing the appointment to prominence.

Still, this tenure and stints in the Virginia House of Delegates were his only political qualifications before he ran for president in 1832. Wirt was picked by the Anti-Masonic Party in what was the first nominating convention by a U.S. political party.

That November, he carried only Vermont with seven electoral votes. President Andrew Jackson easily won a second term.

Wirt died two years later. His skull was reunited with his skeleton in 2005.



William H. Taft, left, takes the oath of office as chief justice of the Supreme Court in 1921. (AP)

William Howard Taft, 1908

William Howard Taft had no elected-office experience when he ran for president in 1908, but he wasnt a stranger to government  hed served as solicitor general, an appeals court judge, territorial governor and as President Theodore Roosevelts secretary of war.

At the GOP convention in Chicago, Tafts main selling point to succeed Roosevelt seemed to be that Teddy himself had picked him. Democrats tried to capitalize on that, condemning Roosevelt in the party platform for using the patronage of his high office to secure the nomination of one of his cabinet officers. It didnt matter; Taft won handily.

But Roosevelt giveth and Roosevelt taketh away. Only four years later, angered by Tafts lack of interest in new nationalism, Roosevelt ran against him as a third-party candidate. The two men split the conservative vote, sending Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House.



President Herbert Hoover signs a farm relief bil on June 15, 1929. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Herbert Hoover, 1928

Herbert Hoover easily takes the cake as our most outsider president. Before becoming commander in chief, hed held relatively minor Cabinet positions as the secretary of commerce and the head of the U.S. Food Administration, but he had spent the bulk of his career as a mining executive.

Like Trump, Hoover touted his business experience and never had the full support of his party. Fortunately for him, his Democratic opponent, New York Gov. Alfred Smith, was even less popular with his party. Droves of Hoovercrats crossed party lines to elect Hoover.

Unfortunately for him, the Great Depression began not long after he took office. His mild attempts at slowing the economic collapse failed, and his support of Prohibition proved unpopular. Hoover was trounced by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.



Wendelll Willkie rehearses his report to the nation at a New York City radio statio on Oct. 26, 1942. (Murray Becker/AP)

Wendell Willkie, 1940

No other candidate resembles Donald Trump quite like Wendell Willkie. Like Trump, Willkie was a New York businessman who had zero government experience before becoming the Republican nominee. Like Trump, Willkie was a Democrat who switched parties and struggled to get full support from the GOP. And like Trump, Willkie had a reputation for fiery, improvised campaign speeches that drew huge crowds.

He was even well-known for his distinct hair.

Willkie rose to national prominence in the 1930s as a utility executive who opposed Roosevelts Tennessee Valley Authority legislation. The creation of a public utility was unfair competition, he argued. He spoke eloquently in radio debates and wrote persuasive op-eds, eventually accepting a buyout deal from government that made him look like a hero.

Columnists and Republican National Committee insiders soon suggested him as a presidential candidate; Willkie scoffed at the idea as late as June 1939, less than 18 months before the election. Even after throwing his hat into the ring, he didnt enter any state primaries or caucuses, putting himself forward as a compromise candidate at the convention in Philadelphia for deadlocked supporters of New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey and Ohio Senator Robert Taft.

The plan worked. No candidate won outright on the first ballot, but Willkie got more votes with every successive ballot, until the crowd began chanting, We want Willkie! We want Willkie!

Willkie campaigned on a pro-business, anti-New Deal platform. Though a longtime New Yorker, he emphasized his Indiana roots, seemingly developing a folksier demeanor overnight. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes joked that Willkie was just a simple, barefoot Wall Street lawyer.

Massive crowds followed him wherever he went. One rally in his home town of Ellwood, Ind., drew 170,000  the largest political event in history to that point. He struggled when reading pre-written speeches, but as an extemporaneous barn-raiser, he soared.

Willkie broke with GOP traditionalists in one crucial way: He supported arms sales to the United Kingdom and its allies in World War II. The strict isolationists at the core of the party never fully embraced him.

Indeed, his stance may have ended up helping Roosevelt. By late 1940, voters were more concerned with the coming war than with the inner workings of an economic policy theyd been living with for 7 years. If both candidates had similar views about entering the war, the logic went, why elect the guy with no experience?

Willkie changed his tune to an isolationist one closer to the election, but it was too late. Roosevelt won a third term, becoming the first president in U.S. history to do so.

Surprisingly, Willkie went to work for the Roosevelt administration only a few months after his defeat, meeting in London with British officials on Roosevelts behalf. This further alienated him from the Republican base, and a comeback attempt in 1934 was quickly squashed. A heavy drinker and smoker, Willkie died months later after a series of heart attacks.

Even given the lackluster returns for historys outsider candidates, that doesnt mean Trump cant or wont win this November. After all, every previous president has also been a man, so Trumps opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, is also betting on ending precedent
A tourist plays in mud during the Boryeong Mud Festival at Daecheon Beach in Boryeong, South Korea, on Saturday. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)

BRITAIN

May dismisses more Cameron supporters

British Prime Minister Theresa May has made more changes to the government, removing another key supporter of predecessor David Cameron from ministerial ranks.

Downing Street said that Ed Vaizey, arts minister and a friend of Camerons, had left the government. Ros Altmann, Camerons minister for pensions, was also dismissed, along with the business minister, Anna Soubry, a leading voice on the remain side during Britains recent European Union referendum campaign.

Some members of the old administration remain, including Jo Johnson, brother of new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. He keeps his role in charge of universities and science.

May took power Wednesday after Cameron resigned following Britains vote to leave the E.U.

 Associated Press

RWANDA

Sudans wanted leader goes to African summit

Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir arrived in Rwanda on Saturday to attend a summit of African leaders, defying an international warrant for his arrest after public assurances from Rwandan leaders that he would not be arrested.

The African Union summit on Sunday is expected to discuss the continents uneasy relationship with the International Criminal Court, which some say unfairly targets Africans.

Ahead of the summit, some African countries renewed efforts to quit the ICC en masse despite the opposition of some countries, such as Botswana. Nigeria, Senegal and Ivory Coast have been pushing back as well in recent days.

Bashir is wanted by the ICC for alleged atrocities in the countrys Darfur region.

Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said last week that Rwanda would not arrest Bashir.

 Associated Press

PAKISTAN

Social-media celebrity is strangled to death

Pakistani social-media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, who recently stirred controversy by posting pictures of herself with a prominent Muslim cleric, was strangled to death by her brother, police said Saturday.

Baloch, whose real name was Fauzia Azeem, shot to fame and notoriety with a series of social-media postings.

She had 40,000 Twitter followers and more than 700,000 followers on her official Facebook page. She danced in a racy  by conservative Pakistani standards  video for a popular rap song that immediately went viral. In postings and public comments, she presented herself as a symbol of female empowerment.

Most recently, she became embroiled in public scandal when she posted selfies with Mufti Abdul Qavi, a prominent cleric, in a Karachi hotel room during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Qavi was removed from the prominent committee that set the lunar calendar. Afterward, she reported receiving death threats.

Her parents told police that one of her six brothers strangled her to death as she slept in the familys home in Multan. The suspect remains at large.

 Associated Press

Syrian government regains control of coastal town: Syrian activists say government forces have regained control of a major town in the coastal province of Latakia two weeks after losing it to insurgents. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said troops regained control of Kinsabba on Saturday after an offensive under the cover of Russian airstrikes.

Bahrain to place Shiite cleric on trial: A Bahraini cleric will go on trial next month on charges of collecting funds illegally and laundering money, the public prosecutor said on Saturday. A source familiar with the case said the cleric was Shiite Muslim spiritual leader Ayatollah Isa Qassim, who had his citizenship revoked by the authorities less than a month ago. The case has revived fears of fresh protests in Bahrain, where the Shiite Muslim majority complains of discrimination.

Panamas Noriega to have brain tumor removed: Imprisoned former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is scheduled to have a benign brain tumor surgically removed later this week. Representatives of the 82-year-old Noriega are requesting he be allowed to prepare for Thursdays surgery at home to avoid infection. He has been imprisoned in Panama since he returned from serving sentences in France and the United States in 2011.

Partner of British author is charged with murder: The partner of British childrens author Helen Bailey has been charged with murder after police found Baileys body in the grounds of her home. Ian Stewart, 55, of Hertfordshire appeared in court on Saturday. Bailey was last seen walking her dog on April 11, and Stewart reported her missing soon after. Bailey created the Electra Brown and Daisy Davenport series of novels for teenagers and wrote a blog called Planet Grief after her husband of 22 years drowned during a holiday in 2011.

Finland sells lot of Soviet-era cars abandoned by migrants: Finnish customs officials say over 100 mostly vintage Soviet cars abandoned by migrants crossing the Nordic countrys border with Russia have been sold in a two-day auction that drew 1,300 car aficionados to the Arctic. The Finnish state reportedly netted 19,000 euros ($21,000) for selling 129 cars. The cars, sold mainly to collectors in prices ranging from one euro to a few hundred euros, were left by migrants earlier this year. Many were rusty Soviet-era Ladas and Volgas from the 1970s and 1980s.

 From news services
EVEN THOUGH it is against the law in Maryland for an adult to provide alcohol to underage drinkers, some parents nonetheless let teens host drinking parties at their homes. Maybe they think they are being cool. Maybe they rationalize that because their children are going to drink anyway, better they do it at home. Whatever their excuse, parents should know that in addition to facing fines and the possibility of jail, they now also run the risk of being sued if an underage drinker they host gets hurt or hurts someone else.

That is because of a landmark ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals that establishes civil liability for adults who knowingly and willfully provide alcohol to those under age 21. The court has generally followed the rule that people, whether drunk or sober, are responsible for their own conduct and in the past declined to hold bar owners responsible for the actions of drunken people. But in its July 5 ruling, the court said a different standard must be applied when children are involved. Underage persons are not solely responsible for drinking alcohol on an adults property because they are not competent to handle the effects of this potentially dangerous substance, Judge Sally D. Adkins wrote for the court.

The precedent-setting decision stems from two cases that now will be returned to the trial courts. One was brought by a Baltimore County woman who was seriously injured after getting hit by an 18-year-old driver who had been drinking at the home of a man he worked with; the other involved a Howard County woman whose 17-year-old son got drunk at a party at a friends house and was killed after getting a ride with another partygoer, who was also drunk. In both cases, court documents show the adults were fully aware of the illegal drinking and enabled it.

Pernicious, pervasive, and deadly, especially when motor vehicles are involved, is how the Maryland appeals court characterized the harm that alcohol poses to youths. It cited findings showing that among all fatally injured alcohol-impaired drivers, the percentage of such drivers who are age 16 to 20 has been about 25 percent since 1995. So lets hope Tim Maloney, the attorney representing the Howard County mother who lost her son, is right that this ruling, which brings Maryland in line with some 30 other states, will be a wake-up call in discouraging other parents from being a party to underage drinking. Said Mr. Maloney: This has been an epidemic in some communities, when these kids go out and get behind the wheel and someone pays the price. Those who enable them should pay, too.
WHEN SEN. Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton, he declared an ideological victory. His revolution lives on, he said, as he highlighted several issues on which Mr. Sanders has pulled Ms. Clinton left, and as he talked up the partys platform  by far the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic Party.

In fact, Ms. Clinton has managed to keep her basic message intact, and it is not Mr. Sanderss overheated call for populist revolution. Her center-left philosophy has more emphasis on left now than it did eight or 16 years ago. But more important than incremental differences on the ideological spectrum is the question of how the country can and should be governed. On that crucial issue, Ms. Clinton is still attempting to appeal to a broad swath of the country looking not for angry upheaval but calm competence.

Certainly, Mr. Sanders and the populist tone of this election year have had an effect on the Democratic ticket. On the good side of the ledger: Ms. Clinton emphasizes important issues such as income inequality, campaign finance reform and climate change with more focus than a Clintonian Democrat from the 1990s would. Mr. Sanders also pressed for the party to support carbon pricing, the best policy to cut carbon dioxide emissions, in the platform. On the other hand, Ms. Clinton felt as though she had to flip against the Trans-Pacific Partnership  a strong deal that would cement U.S. influence in the Pacific Rim. Ms. Clinton also had to compromise her college affordability plan, which had been based heavily on channeling aid to the authentically needy, to write off tuition for a lot more students.

Yet Ms. Clinton refused to surrender on a range of issues, from banning fracking, which neither she nor the party endorsed, to creating a single-payer health-care system, a dream on which the party will not run. Throughout the campaign, Ms. Clinton has stuck to her guns on foreign policy, which is more hawkish than Mr. Sanders and a good number of Democrats would prefer. Although Ms. Clinton has adopted some Sandersesque hyperbole about how the economy is rigged, she did not promise to unnecessarily break up the banks.

In other words, Ms. Clinton and the Democrats successfully rejected Mr. Sanderss core message: The country is an exploitative oligarchy so awful that nothing short of scrambling up the whole system will do. Instead, Ms. Clinton stuck with her approach of incremental, achievable change, and the party largely ratified it. She would modify the health-care system President Obama has labored to establish, rather than forcing the country through another, much more disruptive health-care transition. She would expand Social Security, but only for needy seniors, rather than wasting federal money handing wealthy people larger checks. By not banning fracking, she would allow cheap, domestically produced natural gas, which is much cleaner than coal, to continue serving as a bridge fuel to even-cleaner renewables.

Democrats have no doubt moved left over the past several years, but the party has been less volatile than the GOP. Ms. Clinton has maintained her message of working within the countrys political structures to tackle genuine issues the nation cannot ignore, and in ways that would be broadly acceptable to Americans. It is the message of a moderate liberal in the style of Mr. Obama, not the democratic socialist from Vermont.
Donald Trump named Mike Pence as his running mate Saturday, roughly 48 hours after everyone knew the Indiana governor was his pick. Regardless of the odd timing and zany rollout, there are a lot of reasons to recommend Pence as the best choice Trump could have made from his vice-presidential shortlist. Here are five.

1. Trump needs to reassure the GOP establishment.

For all of his bluster about how he will go it alone if the Republican establishment does not get behind him forcefully enough, it was clear in my conversation with Trump last week that he grasped the need to find a way to placate party leaders  and soon. In that conversation, Trump touted the unifying potential in picking a politician who had the approval of the establishment. He will have that in Pence.(Heres Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on rumors of the Pence pick.)

Pence is someone who spent time in the House GOP leadership before returning to Indiana to run for governor in 2012. He was seen as a possible future House speaker. He was widely rumored to be looking at the 2016 presidential race. He was viewed as a major rising star in the party by the establishment until he badly mishandled the debate in his state over what some call religious-freedom issues. His ultimate decision left no one happy with him  or it.

Even so, Pence is the sort of pick McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)  a Pence friend  can easily and enthusiastically get behind. And thats exactly what Trump needs.

2. Trump needs to reassure social conservatives.

Although Trump carried the evangelical Christian vote in a surprising number of states during the Republican primary process, significant doubt remains about whether he is really one of them  or is even committed to social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Trumps dismissiveness about his religious beliefs and his past positions on some of those divisive social issues have only stoked concern.

The Fix's Chris Cillizza explains why Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) was the best vice presidential pick of the candidates Donald Trump was considering. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

In Pence, Trump would be getting someone who is widely regarded as a front-line fighter for social conservatives; Pence often describes himself as a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order. He led the 2011 fight to defund Planned Parenthood in the House. (Worth noting: His backtracking on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act made some social conservatives skeptical of him.)

3. Trump needs the industrial Midwest.

If you look at an electoral map of the country, its very clear that unless Trump can find a way to make the Rust Belt competitive, he cant win.Remember that this is what the 2012 map looked liked  when Mitt Romney took just 206 electoral votes.

Without finding a way to put Ohio, Pennsylvania, and maybe even Michigan or Wisconsin in play, Trump would have to run the table of traditional swing states. There would be zero margin for error. Possible, but far from likely.

Putting Pence on the ticket does not suddenly guarantee that Trump wins in the parts of the Midwest that he needs. But putting a son of that region on the ticket should give Trump an effective messenger across that area. Pence can say, I get it, because Im one of you, in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Ohio and have real credibility.

4. Trump needs the Koch brothers.

Its no secret that lots of major Republican donors are sitting on the sidelines of the presidential race, concerned that Trump lacks the message discipline or core conservative beliefs that would make him worth their investment. And its also no secret that the two biggest players in Republican money circles are Charles and David Koch.

We are happy to talk to anybody and hope they understand where were coming from, and they will have more constructive positions than theyve had, Charles Koch told USA Today ahead of a June meeting with the Trump team.

Freeing up that Koch money  and some other major-dollar donors who would probably follow suit  is of critical importance to Trump, who is being badly outspent by Hillary Clinton and her super PAC allies.

Republican presidential contender Donald Trump introduced Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) as his running mate on July 16. Here are the key moments from his announcement. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

There are few politicians in the country more tied into the Koch world than Pence. Marc Short, Pences onetime chief of staff in Congress, is now an uppity-up in the world of the Kochs, and he is one of a number of former Pence staff members who work under the umbrella of the Koch brothers organization.

Pences close ties to the Kochs give Trump the best shot he is going to have to persuade some of the partys biggest fundraising wheels to jump onboard. (Worth noting: Matea Gold, The Washington Posts terrific campaign reporter, talked to a Koch spokesman who said the Koch network still had no plans to get involved in the presidential race.)

5. Trump needs some message discipline.

Trump is one of the least on-message politicians in modern political history. Pence is his exact opposite: relentlessly on message at all times, to the point of boredom and frustration. Pence is also deeply cautious (watch his brutally tepid endorsement of Sen. Ted Cruz before the Indiana primary) and almost always looks (and looks) before he leaps.

Pences precision and caution will not fundamentally alter Trumps I-do-what-I-feel-like approach to politics. But think about the alternative  as in former House speaker Newt Gingrich or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Both men have built political careers on their willingness to go off-script, to freelance, to tell it like it is.

Trump does not need another one of those on the ticket with him. He has enough of that trait himself to last a lifetime.
Thanks to Donald Trump, the Republican National Convention that opens here Monday will be like no other in the modern era  a gathering of a divided and nervous political party preparing to nominate a candidate who stormed through the nominating process after turning his back on a generation or more of conservative orthodoxy.

In many ways, what transpires in Cleveland will seem familiar. There will be the customary symbols of political conventions  a series of speeches, goofy hats and pins, balloon drops, and relentless attacks on the opposition party and its nominee. GOP leaders will attempt to project at least a patina of unity to the worldwide audience that will be tuning in.

Yet there will be no hiding the obvious  that an alternate reality forms the true backdrop for this convention, with many Republican leaders worried about what Trumps candidacy has done to break apart their coalition and what he might do to their overall fortunes in November.

The modern Republican Party has been shaped by many forces, the most important being the presidency and conservative philosophy of Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who cast modern conservatism in a positive and optimistic light and who moved the party sharply to the right after the debacle of Barry Goldwaters defeat and the presidencies of two later Republicans, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Other politicians, movements and events have shaped it since, to the point that Reagan might not recognize  or be welcome in  the party of today. After Reagan came the presidency of George H.W. Bush, which saw an end to the Cold War but foundered domestically. A backbench rebellion in the House, led by Newt Gingrich, helped shorten that Bush presidency but brought the GOP to power in Congress. After Gingrich came a second Bush presidency, that of George W. Bush, who after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, launched a disastrous war in Iraq that divided the country.

Here are some of the people who are speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland and some who've opted to skip the event. (Sarah Parnass,Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)

During President Obamas tenure in office, Republicans have experienced a grass-roots tea party revolt, grand successes in midterm elections that brought the party to a high point of power in the states and consecutive failures in the past two presidential elections that underscored long-term vulnerabilities of a predominantly white party in an increasingly diverse country.

Throughout this period of change, through victories and defeats, the Republican Party and its followers adhered to a set of small-government, pro-defense, socially conservative principles that were consistent and as coherent as any political coalition can muster. Now, in the course of one tumultuous year, Trump has shattered that consensus, exposing divisions that were either overlooked or ignored by the party establishment. As Ohio Gov. John Kasich put it in a recent interview, I think the party right now is trying to figure out what it is for.

Trump has changed, at least for now, much of what everyone believed it meant to be a leader of the Republican Party. He is anti-trade in a party of free traders. He wants to keep Social Security and Medicare mostly as they are, while others in the party are committed to entitlement reform. He has questioned Americas role in the world in a party long dominated by internationalists and, more recently, interventionists. He has spoken about the LGBT community in ways many Republicans do not. He has put the establishment on notice and ignored its advice when it suits him  which is most of the time.

The very fact Trump holds those views rankles many in the party. What adds to their discomfort is that  while espousing those views  he managed to win more states, more votes and more delegates than any of the other 16 Republicans running for president.

The ruptures caused by Trumps candidacy will be felt in Cleveland, if not always seen. What is left to be answered is whether Trumps impact is lasting. Or will his candidacy prove to be a brief, if unnerving, episode that fades quickly if he loses in November, allowing the party to return to some semblance of normalcy?

Those alarmed at the prospect of Trump at the top of the ticket in November despair at the state of the party. I think its incredibly divided, said Katie Packer, a GOP strategist who led a super PAC that tried to deny Trump the nomination. You have Republican-on-Republican aggression because people are arguing over politics versus principle. Do we stand by the party that weve all been loyal to, no matter what, or do we stand up and say, No, this behavior is unacceptable, and I want no part of it under any banner? Its put people that theyre used to being in the bunker with against one another.

But defenders of the presumptive nominee have another view of his impact on the party. Pollster Kellyanne Conway, who is now part of the Trump campaign, said the primaries highlighted fissures within the Republican coalition between what she called the political and voting classes and changed the balance of power between them. This is the year the voters took the party back, she said.

Conway, who worked during the primaries for a super PAC supporting Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said it was telling that Trump and Cruz finished as the top two candidates in a large field of experienced insiders. The Republican Party was veering dangerously close to cementing itself as the party of elites, she said. I would look at it as the haughty versus the rowdy in our party. . . . Im not assigning any negative attributes to that. Theyre [the Trump supporters] frustrated. Theyre fed up and they feel betrayed.

How splintered is the party? Over the past few years, a number of authors have published books examining the state of the Republican Party. Although they have different perspectives and range across the ideological spectrum, three of these writers, in recent interviews, came to similar conclusions: The party circa summer 2016 is in a predicament, partly of Trumps doing and partly the result of other forces, with no clear or simple way out.

I think its in bad shape. I think it was in bad shape before, said Matt Lewis, a conservative who writes for the Daily Caller and who wrote the book Too Dumb to Fail. Trump in some ways has just exploited the lack of coherence, of competence within the party. I think hes created chaos, but hes also exploited preexisting conditions.

In Lewiss analysis, the party has been unraveling in one form or another since the end of the Cold War. Anticommunism was the glue that bound together a coalition of conservative, moderate and liberal Republicans who often saw the rest of the world differently. I think now youve gotten to the point where there is a huge divide between the base of the party, which I think identifies with Donald Trump  its nativist and populist  and intellectual leaders like [House Speaker Paul] Ryan [Wis.], [Sen. Ben] Sasse [Neb.] and [Sen. Marco] Rubio [Fla.], who are more optimistic and forward-looking.

Geoffrey Kabaservice wrote Rule and Ruin, an examination of the decline and fall of the GOPs moderate wing in the period from the Eisenhower presidency to the early part of this century. In an interview, he noted that his admiration for the partys now withered moderate faction doesnt negate the reality that the period in which it was most dominant was when Republicans were doing terribly in election competitions generally.

Since turning to conservatism, Republicans have seen all their dreams come true, at least in Congress and state legislatures and governorships, he said. So in that sense, the party is doing great.

But as he was quick to add, that is only part of the story, the other half being the friction below the surface. Trump . . . seems an expression of very negative things going on within the party that are now coming into fruition, he said.

E.J. Dionne is a Washington Post columnist who critiqued the party from the perspective of a committed liberal. His book Why the Right Went Wrong examines the partys evolution from Goldwater to the present day.

One of the things Trump shows is that people vastly overread the tea party as some kind of pure libertarian anti-state movement and underestimated how many of its supporters were older, white Americans who were very angry about immigration, he said. Trumps advantage was that he was outspoken about immigration, in an extreme and sometimes racist way, where many of his opponents felt constrained talking about it.

He added that a key to understanding why the party has been so split by Trumps candidacy is what conservative intellectuals have been noting all year. The Republican Party relied for decades on white, working-class voters and delivered no material benefits to them, Dionne said. Oddly, a man who says he is a billionaire has become the avatar of a working-class rebellion inside the Republican Party.

The gulf between the Trump party and the more traditional Republican Party can be seen by the list of Republicans who have withheld their support from the presumptive nominee. They include the three Bushes  the two former presidents and Trump rival Jeb Bush, as well as the partys 2012 nominee, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has led the anti-Trump forces since last spring. Many other prominent Republicans will be absent from Cleveland this week while some there will be less than enthusiastic about the presumptive nominee.

Many Republicans fear a possible debacle in November. Optimistic Republicans still see a path to victory for Trump, given the anger that animates parts of the electorate as well as long-standing hostility toward Hillary Clinton. GOP congressional leaders are prepared to do whatever they must do to preserve their majorities should Trump falter in the late stages of the campaign.

No matter the outcome, however, Trumps candidacy has highlighted a party now debating what it actually believes. Vin Weber, a former House member from Minnesota and veteran strategist, said his concerns about the party go far beyond some of the offensive statements Trump has made.

Im as offended by that as anybody, he said. But, if this were just about the personality of Donald Trump, it would not cause me to say the party is in tough shape. . . . He is rejecting major, major policies that the Republican Party has stood for. . . . You have to ask that question: What is it that weve misjudged about what the Republican Party actually believes? 

Webers answer is that Republicans have let their hostility toward President Obama, rather than the principles of conservatism, shape what they think about issues. He worries that the anti-Obama sentiment that has bound the coalition together is morphing into anti-Clinton anger, and that raises the question of where the party actually stands on key issues.

Weber said a Trump victory in November could shatter the party. I think it will cause a fracturing of the party more serious that weve seen up to now, he said. I cant believe that the institutionalization of this phenomenon goes without severe consequences for the Republican Party.

Dionne argued that Trumps success should be a wake-up call to the Republican establishment that what the party long has preached has lost its resonance to many who have been voting Republican in recent years. While Trump should have shown Republicans that the old small-government ideology does not speak to a lot of people who support the party, the congressional party . . . has not moved off those old positions.

Conway said the success of the New York billionaire presents Republicans with a choice of what it will be in the future: Cementing your status as a party of elites or following Donald Trumps lead and become the party of the workers.

Kasich doubts that the party will break apart but nonetheless sees Trump as emblematic of a broader  and to him worrisome  shift in attitudes here and elsewhere. I am increasingly concerned about worldwide  not just in America but worldwide  growing nationalism, a movement towards anti-immigration, a movement towards anti-trade, a movement towards isolation. None of these things am I comfortable with for our country, not just my party, but my country.

The Republican convention will hardly resolve the differences that Trumps candidacy has revealed. They will continue to roil the party all the way through Election Day  and likely beyond.
The deadly shootings of police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday, coming after the coup attempt and subsequent roundup of plotters in Turkey over the weekend, which followed a devastating attack in the French city of Nice, all have combined to redraw the backdrop for the Republican National Convention, which opens here Monday.

In normal times, American political conventions command the attention of the world. They are carefully designed infomercials for the two main U.S. political parties and their presidential nominees. But they are only in part reality, and over the next two weeks, they will compete for attention with real and shocking events around the globe.

Television networks could be making split-screen decisions all week about where to focus their coverage and commentary. Judging by the home pages of news websites and newspaper front pages this weekend, its clear that politicians and their conventions will have no guarantee of prime space.

Because of events, Republicans this week and Democrats a week from now will be judged on far more than whether their conventions are well run and well produced, on whose video biography of the nominee is more compelling or whether the balloon drop works smoothly. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will be measured by more exacting standards than usual. Can either speak in language strong enough to break through the wall of polarizing rhetoric with which both political parties seem most comfortable?

Cleveland's residents are preparing for the beginning of the RNC, as tens of thousands converge onto the city under heavy security. (Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post)

That bar has now been raised significantly. Normal politics might not be enough for the moment. The question is whether Trump and Clinton can rise to meet it. The real-world backdrop presents both an opportunity and a danger for the candidates. Its questionable whether an electorate already highly dissatisfied with each candidate and the choice in November will judge the same old thing as adequate.

The rewards for success could be significant. Which candidate will be seen as more suited for the demands of the Oval Office in an uncertain time? Which candidate can voters imagine responding effectively to terrorist attacks? Who will be judged as equipped to bridge racial divisions and ease racial tensions? There will be nothing abstract about all these questions. The videos from around the world will be a constant reminder of the stakes of this election.

[Republicans hope to make Trump more likable]

Republicans had set a relatively low bar for their national convention: a quality acceptance by Trump, preferably one that sticks to the teleprompter; testimonials about the humanity and reliability of their presumptive nominee; some face time for rising stars, at least those who have decided not to skip Cleveland; no real disruption from the anti-Trump delegates; some unexpected glitz and glitter from the showman and his team.

But even with that low bar, Saturdays introduction of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as Trumps vice-presidential running mate should make the entire high command of the Republican Party and those in the rank and file who already had doubts about Trump extremely nervous. It was another demonstration that nothing is predictable about a campaign that is all about  and almost entirely directed by the candidate.

Saturdays rollout was a mash-up of problems, which were well documented in the coverage of the day. The setting in the New York hotel was minimalist. Trumps indifference to his running mate was glaringly obvious. The family tableau on stage at the end was awkward. And Pences homecoming rally in Indiana seemed an afterthought by a campaign that has shown it knows how to stage big rallies when it wishes to make a splash.

The choice of Pence is popular with the GOPs evangelical base and with many party leaders, who see him as a reliable politician, a true conservative and a loyal soldier. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called him the perfect pick as vice president on NBCs Meet the Press on Sunday.

(Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)

But if the selection of a vice president is designed to create energy and excitement heading into a convention, Trumps choice and the messy optics surrounding the decision-making and the unveiling have done the opposite. They helped to deflate the mood and dilute the value of what is one of a handful of critical events  the convention is another  over which the candidate has control.

The vice-presidential rollout also sent a fresh signal, if all the previous ones had been missed or ignored, that the party is in Trumps hands this week. So the mood in Cleveland on the eve of the convention is guarded rather than festive.

[Mike Pence and his record in Indiana]

Still, pumping excitement into the Quicken Loans Arena this week should be relatively easy for the convention organizers. The real challenge for Trump as he arrives here is that he has not yet crossed the threshold of acceptability for a majority of the country.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News found that just 39 percent of registered voters nationally judge Trump as qualified to serve as president. Overall, 58 percent say he is not qualified  with 49 percent saying they strongly believe he isnt. Even a quarter of self-identified Republicans say hes not qualified.

The responses to that question underscore Trumps core support: 60 percent of white men without college degrees say hes qualified, as do 66 percent of white evangelical Christians, 77 percent of conservative Republicans and 56 percent of rural Americans.

He has a cadre of passionate supporters, along with the grudging support from some Republicans who will back him only out of loyalty to the party or because they dont want Clinton as president. But that wont be enough to elect him as president.

There are other judgments the New York business mogul must try to reverse this week. By 2 to 1, Clinton is seen as more temperamentally suited to be president. By about 2 to 1, she is seen as better equipped to handle an international crisis. At the same time, she has only a narrow advantage (four points) on who would be trusted to handle a terrorist attack.

Republicans begin the week with uncertainty about their candidate and with external events adding an element of insecurity to their proceedings. With the country on edge, Trump has the best opportunity of his campaign to reach a wider audience with a broader message. But there is no way to predict how he will respond.
A liberal firebrand who could stoke the passions of the Democratic base. A Hispanic who could fire up one of the countrys fastest-growing population  and make history. Someone with governing experience who might also help with a key group where Democrats lag: white men.

With less than a week to go before presumed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is expected to select a running mate, these are among her choices. She has focused intensely on the task in recent days, according to multiple interviews with Democrats familiar with her thinking. And she is looking for the best partner in the White House more than the best campaign asset, they said. So while her highly anticipated announcement could telegraph crucial electoral calculations, it may signal even more how she plans to run the presidency.

The process, which comes to a head this week as Donald Trump and Republicans convene for their national convention in Cleveland, began to come into focus late last week. A day after campaigning in Northern Virginia with Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (Va.)  widely considered a front-runner despite his self-deprecating description of himself as boring  Clinton and top aides hunkered down at her Washington home Friday to evaluate a parade of a half-dozen other possible partners.

The takeaway from interviews with dozens of Democrats is that she has an array of options, and her ultimate choice will reveal a great deal about the president she intends to be. Clintons interviews with the contenders have been short on chit-chat, instead homing in on each candidates policy chops.

She has some good choices for whatever it is she feels she needs, said Mo Elleithee, a former Clinton campaign aide who is executive director of the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown University.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's short list of potential vice presidential candidates. Here's what you need to know about her. (Sarah Parnass,Osman Malik/The Washington Post)

[As GOP convenes, Clinton plans to launch major voter mobilization drive]

Among those who visited her home Friday were Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); Julian Castro, the nations housing secretary; and John Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado.

Warren is widely viewed as Clintons best shot at exciting the partys liberal wing, including supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the runner-up for the Democratic nomination. But even Warrens advisers are skeptical that Clinton would choose her, given her value in the Senate and the uncertainty of how the two would work together in the West Wing.

Castro and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, another oft-touted contender, could further engage Latinos in an election where many already feel alienated by Trumps immigration proposals and disparaging comments about Mexicans.

The dark-horse Hickenlooper has submitted financial records and undergone other aspects of the vetting process afforded top contenders, Democrats with knowledge of the process said.

He and two other contenders  Kaine and Tom Vilsack, a former Iowa governor and current agriculture secretary  could help counter Trumps popularity with the white male demographic. Each hails from a battleground state, and all have known Clinton for some time.

Clintons choice will come at a key moment of her campaign  and is likely to be seen through that lens. She is seeking to consolidate support among liberal Democrats after a bruising primary with Sanders, something she has attempted with overtures on domestic policy and with a spirited campaign appearance with Warren.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's short list of potential vice presidential candidates. Here's what you need to know about him. (Sarah Parnass,Osman Malik/The Washington Post)

[Clinton holds narrow lead over Trump on eve of conventions]

With many liberals already viewing her warily, Clintons vice-presidential selection could make her challenge even greater.

Potentially compounding that threat, Clintons campaign is also heavily pursuing centrist Republican and independent voters who might not be ready to support Trump. That might help explain the late addition to her vice-presidential list of James Stavridis, a retired admiral who has no political history but has been friendly with Republicans, including former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and who could help shore up Clintons standing in a race increasingly shaped by terrorism and foreign policy crises.

Indeed, Clinton has made clear to all her potential picks that national security issues are paramount, a signal that those without them have a higher bar to get the job, according to people familiar with the process.

[Trumps VP pick is a governor in search of his Republican identity]

Clintons pick could also reveal something about how she wants to be viewed. At every turn, her campaign has sought to contrast her temperament with that of Trump, casting her as a steady hand and him as too erratic for even Republicans to trust with the nuclear codes. With her choice of a running mate, Clinton is almost certain to seek to reinforce that contrast.

There are also external political calculations to consider. Three liberal-leaning senators Clinton has looked at  Warren, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Sherrod Brown of Ohio  would each, at least temporarily, cost Democrats a seat in the chamber just as the party is trying to regain control. Thats because Republican governors from their states would appoint their successors. In contrast, Kaines replacement would be named by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a staunch Clinton ally.

Some Democrats caution against assigning too much importance to any calculation but one: who Clinton would feel most comfortable governing with. Democrats who know her said she has seen White House operations run well and run badly and is measuring her possible choices with that in mind.

Shes been there, said Joe Trippi, a veteran Democratic operative, citing Clintons previous roles as first lady and secretary of state. She knows what that relationship needs to be. For her, it may literally be a matter of who she wants to work with.

That notion has been a key argument for Kaine, a former Virginia governor, mayor of Richmond and chairman of the Democratic National Committee who makes up in competence what he lacks in pizzazz.

A scandal-free former governor from a crucial swing state, Kaine could be a genial antidote for a nominee tarred by decades of controversy. Even Republicans have struggled to find ways to attack Kaine, a Harvard Law School graduate who is fluent in Spanish and who once volunteered as a missionary in Honduras.

In recent weeks, Vilsack has emerged as another leading contender cast from a similar mold. The Iowan has experience as governor of a battleground state and as agriculture secretary, which gives him entree to rural America. In his current post, Vilsack has traveled extensively overseas, and he shares Clintons interest in policy details.

Hes a solid, substantive policy guy, a little on the wonkish side, and sometimes plodding, said Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University and longtime Vilsack watcher. Hes someone from the dead center of the party and not an ideological warrior of any sort.

Vilsack also has the longest and possibly closest relationship with Clinton of any of the contenders. She served as a staffer with the late brother of Vilsacks wife on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate. And Clinton was a strong advocate for Vilsack during his first run for governor in 1998. He repaid Clinton as one of her most loyal supporters in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries before joining the Obama administration.

Hickenlooper, whose profile was elevated by his appearance outside Clintons home Friday, has been discreet about the vetting process and was not accompanied by any staff to their meeting. He and Clinton also met three weeks ago in Denver over coffee.

The assets Hickenlooper would bring to the ticket include a background as a successful small-business owner. He also has a quirky authenticity that could help a nominee who has trust issues. And he is a popular governor in another important swing state.

One disadvantage that could work against Hickenlooper is his celebrated aversion to negative campaigning. He is famous for running an ad in which he was fully clothed in a shower, talking about how much he dislikes negative campaigning.

So far, two of Clintons picks  Kaine and Warren  have gotten full-dress auditions, appearing alongside the presumptive nominee on the campaign trail.

Kaine joined Clinton last week at a community college in Northern Virginia. He remained mild-mannered and cheery even as he approached attack mode, asking the audience, Do you want a trash-talk president or a bridge-building president?

The atmosphere was far more electric last month at a rally in Ohio at which Warren joined Clinton in a blistering tag-team critique of Trump.

I do just love to see how she gets under Donald Trumps skin, Clinton said. She exposes him for what he is: temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified.

There probably is no one better positioned than Warren to stir the passions on the progressive wing of the party, where many are disenchanted about a Clinton presidency. And few have demonstrated more ferocity when attacking Trump. But there are several downsides to the selection of Warren, including questions about whether having two women on the ticket would exacerbate Clintons deficit with male voters.

Over the weekend at Netroots Nation, a gathering a liberal activists in St. Louis, there was a sense of resignation that the Democratic ticket probably wouldnt be as progressive as it could be.

There are a couple choices that would be electric, said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He ticked off the names of Warren, Brown and Jeff Merkley, a senator from Oregon who backed Sanders but does not appear to be under consideration.

Then you have people who seem okay once you Google them, like Tom Perez, Green said. Then there are people whod deflate all the air out of the balloon. . . . Thats Tim Kaine. He feels like the kind of brand that Democrats ran in 2014, when they couldnt get anybody to vote.

Bill McMahon, who blogs under the sobriquet DriftGlass, said Warren is better suited to become the lion of the Senate than a member of a Clinton administration.

Knowing Hillary Clinton, shell want somebody wholl reassure everyone and terrify no one, McMahon said.

Throughout Clintons search, the prospect of the nations first Hispanic running mate from a major party has loomed as a potential masterstroke, given the rapid growth of Latinos nationwide and their deep support for Democrats. Record numbers of Latinos  especially younger people  have registered to vote this year in Arizona, California and Texas and increasingly influence the politics of key swing states, including Colorado, Nevada and Virginia.

Should Clinton want a Hispanic running mate, three names are in the mix: Castro, Perez and Rep. Xavier Becerra of California.

In Becerra and Castro, Clinton has options that may seem most familiar to Americans: They are multi-generational Mexican Americans from California and Texas. Elevating Perez would more deeply contextualize and expand the countrys understanding of the Hispanic experience: Hes a Dominican American who was born in Buffalo.

Although Perez is not well known nationally, Clinton has become a fan, Democrats say. The labor secretary traveled with her last winter and impressed her with his energy and passion.

On the downside, Perezs only elective political experience was as a member of the County Council in Montgomery County, Md. A lawyer by training, hes more of a policy wonk than a politician. As a Senate staffer, he helped craft health-care reform legislation, and at the Justice Department under Obama, he defended the administrations civil rights policies.

Castro has been considered a contender for years, even before he gave a breakout keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. A former mayor of San Antonio, he took the housing secretary job in 2014 in a move widely regarded as an opportunity to earn national political exposure.

Becerra emerged as another option in the later stages of the Democratic presidential primaries. Having served in Congress since 1993, he is the most senior Latino House lawmaker, but he is considered a long-shot vice-presidential pick.

There are factors now weighing heavily against selecting a Hispanic. Given Trumps unpopularity and self-inflicted damage with the group, Clinton and her team may not feel the same urgency about courting Hispanic support.

Phillip reported from Washington and OKeefe from Cleveland. David Weigel in St. Louis, Karen Tumulty in Cleveland and Anne Gearan in Washington contributed to this report.
When a law student several years ago asked Justice Antonin Scalia about the path that would someday lead to a federal judgeship or perhaps even the Supreme Court, the answer sounded surprising.

Get involved in politics, he said.

The thing that separates all the smart lawyers who would like to become federal judges from the ones who actually become judges is most often political connections.

[Did Ginsburg cross line with comments about Trump?]

The Notorious RBG and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump traded insults. Heres a quick rundown of what the two have said. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Involvement in ideological causes, political campaigns and conservative or liberal organizations acts as a sieve. It separates out those who are chosen by the political elite for lifetime appointments.

And then Senate confirmation is supposed to instantly transform the recipient into a nonpartisan and objective trier of facts and interpreter of laws.

The entanglement of the judiciary and the political world was on full display recently with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgs now-regretted unloading on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

None of the current Supreme Court justices has run for political office. But  despite Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.s assertion earlier this year that we dont work as Democrats or Republicans  the justices backgrounds are hardly nonpartisan.

[Roberts says political wars damage Supreme Courts reputation]

Robertss legal skills were honed in the Reagan administration, and as a private lawyer, he was among the army of volunteers who descended upon Tallahassee in 2000 to protect George W. Bush in the Florida recount. Justice Elena Kagan is a veteran of the Clinton White House, and there was never a doubt she would play an important role in the Obama administration.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was championed during her rise through the judiciary by Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (N.Y.), and Justice Stephen G. Breyers painless trip through the confirmation process had much to do with his long association with Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.).

Justices spouses, of course, have no limits on their political activism. But more than one person has noticed that Virginia Thomass Facebook page features a large photo of her and her famous husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, as well as a call for her followers to rally around Trumps campaign.

Was it too much for Ginsburg and the others to say out loud what everyone is pretty sure they believe? There was little disagreement among legal ethicists that it was. Ethics rules for federal judges prohibit them from endorsing candidates, and while Supreme Court justices are not bound by them, Roberts has said he and his colleagues try to abide by them.

Ginsburg, too, in her statement of regret said, Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.

The condemnation of Ginsburgs remarks by Republican politicians and conservatives was unsurprising. More interesting was the split on the left, where most of the legal establishment resides. Reaction to Ginsburg launched a thousand op-eds and blog posts.

To the extent that the current flap tells us something interesting about contemporary norms regarding the Court, it is that many people think theres something important about maintaining the facade that the Justices are above politics, at least when they are considering actual cases, Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet wrote on the liberal blog Balkinization.

But I have a bridge to sell you if you think that the Justices (any of them) were above politics in . . . Bush v. Gore, or in many recent cases.

Other liberals viewed Ginsburgs break with convention through a desperate times call for desperate measures lens.

Imagine that you are a person with great influence, highly respected and with a powerful voice that commands enormous attention, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at University of California at Irvine.

Imagine that you see the country facing a choice that you believe has the potential of undoing all that you have worked for over your career and even worse, heading the country down a potentially destructive and very dangerous path . . . I applaud her for speaking out.

But the more typical responses were like the one Steve Sanders, an Indiana University law professor, wrote on the Huffington Post:

The Courts public image and approval have suffered in recent years. Ginsburgs comments bring us closer to the day when the Supreme Courts decisions may be seen by a critical mass of Americans as no more worthy of respect or obedience than the pronouncements of any other political actor.

Generally, the benefits of lifetime appointment and having the final say on some of the most important issues facing the nation are enough to keep the court from engaging with the political world. But the judiciary in this election year has been the subject of fire from politicians, especially those of the conservative hue.

[How the Bush-nominated chief justice became a target in GOP primaries]

During the Republican presidential primaries, Roberts was called out as a disappointment and even a mistake by candidates outraged by his votes that kept the Affordable Care Act in place.

And with the court having only eight members following Scalias death, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) bluntly warned Roberts and the rest of the court not to weigh in on whether Republican senators were doing the right thing in refusing to hold a hearing or vote on President Obamas nominee, Judge Merrick Garland.

Responding to Robertss remarks before Scalias death that the partisan battles over judicial nominees were politicizing the courts, Grassley said in a statement on the Senate floor: The confirmation process has gotten political precisely because the court has drifted from the constitutional text and rendered decisions based instead on policy preferences.

He added: Many of my constituents believe, with all due respect, that the chief justice is part of the problem.

The justices have been unified in staying out of the fight or even talking about whether the court is hamstrung with only eight members. The exception, not surprisingly, has been Ginsburg.

[Ginsburg says eight is not enough for the Supreme Court]

Eight, as you know, is not a good number for a multi-member court, Ginsburg said in a speech to judges and lawyers gathered for a conference of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

A tie vote on a case means the court might as well not have wasted its time, she said. That means no opinions and no precedential value; an equal division is essentially the same as a denial of review.

While her fear of Trump got the headlines, she also said in interviews that Garland was a high-quality nominee and that the Senate was shirking its duty by not holding a vote on him.

It is unlikely, as some have speculated, that Ginsburgs remarks were slips or that, at 83, she has shed the inhibitions of the office. She and Scalia always were the courts most outspoken members, willing to go whether the others would not.

It is also doubtful that Roberts or any other member of the court influenced her decision to issue Thursdays statement of regret. The justices just dont appear to work that way.

Ginsburg said she had made a mistake and considers the matter over. But perhaps she already had made her point to the young feminists who revere the Notorious RBG but, polls indicate, are not necessarily enthused about Hillary Clinton.
Fethullah Gulen is an Islamic scholar and cleric from Turkey. He left Turkey in 1999, and is now living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. (Claritza Jimenez,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

Fethullah Gulen is an Islamic scholar and cleric from Turkey. He left Turkey in 1999, and is now living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. (Claritza Jimenez,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

Fethullah Gulen, the reclusive Muslim cleric accused of inspiring Turkeys failed coup attempt, lives in exile in a gated compound in the Pocono Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania. The 74-year-old is said to be in fragile health. His popular movement embracing moderate Islam has bred a global network of organizations, publications, think tanks and schools, among them dozens of charter schools in the United States.

Before Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that the U.S. extradite Gulen to Turkey because of his alleged role in the coup plot, the charismatic preacher and the conservative leader were staunch allies.

On Saturday, Gulens supporters denied any link to the violence. In a statement on its website, the Alliance for Shared Values  the U.S. arm of Gulens movement, which is known as Hizmet  called the Turkish governments claims highly irresponsible and said that the group does not support the militarys attempt to take power.

We remain concerned about the safety and security of Turkish citizens and those in Turkey right now, the group said in a statement.

[Anger and joy erupt on the streets of Istanbul]

Rogue officers of Turkeys military declared martial law and attempted to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan overnight, but Erdogan a few hours later said his government is in control. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

In a subsequent interview with reporters in his home, Gulen suggested that the Erdogan government might be behind the coup.

I dont believe that the world believes the accusations made by President Erdogan, Gulen, surrounded by woven rugs and books, told the Guardian and other media outlets in a small prayer room. There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup, and it could be meant for further accusations [against the Gulenists]. He said he rejects all military interventions.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry told reporters that the United States would consider Gulens extradition to Turkey if there was evidence of wrongdoing by the cleric, who has maintained influence in Turkey through his followers in the judiciary and police. Turkish media reported Saturday that 2,745 judges had been removed because of suspicions that they have links to the Gulen movement.

[U.S. relationship with Turkey is only going to get more complicated]

Gulen has long advocated tolerance, peace and acceptance of religious and cultural diversity, his movements website says, drawing on the traditions of Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam that is generally viewed as moderate.

In a 2015 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, he denounced the Islamic State, calling for an end to violent extremism and advocating equal rights for men and women and education for Muslims.

The international community would do well to realize that Muslims are the primary victims of terrorism  both literally and symbolically  and they can help marginalize terrorists and prevent recruitment, he wrote.

1 of 63 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  The scene in Turkey after an attempted coup View Photos The nations military tried to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Caption The nations military tried to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. July 17, 2016 Women mourn near the flag-draped coffin of a relative in Istanbul, during the funeral of seven victims of the July 15 coup attempt. Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images Wait 1 second to continue.

But the Gulen movements expansion of power has led some skeptics to think that the cleric and his supporters are trying to use their influence to make Islam in Turkey more conservative instead of less.

Gulen had once been a friend of Erdogans and his Islamist-inspired government and helped the political leader consolidate power. But the men split bitterly several years ago, after Erdogan and his ruling party blamed the cleric for stirring up allegations of corruption among senior officials as well as Erdogans son.

Since then, Erdogan has accused Gulen of trying to seize power from his home more than 5,000 miles from the Turkish capital by using his movement to infiltrate the government and its security forces.

Gulens followers have opened private schools around the world, including more than 160 science-, math- and technology-focused public charter schools in the United States. These publicly funded institutions  unofficially known as the Gulen charter  are believed to be operated by people belonging to or associated with the Gulen movement, usually Turks.

Among the leading schools in the network are the high-achieving Harmony schools in Texas, which have won millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. government. (There is also a Harmony charter school in Washington.)

Some of those schools have faced controversy, including accusations that school leaders have awarded contracts to Turkish-run businesses over other businesses that submitted lower bids. The schools have also been criticized over hiring large numbers of teachers from Turkey on special visas that allow U.S. companies to employ foreign workers in specialized fields.

The origins of Thursdays failed coup are uncertain. But on Saturday, some Turkish analysts  who declined to speak publicly because they are nervous about Gulens deep reach into the country  were skeptical that his followers could manage to pull it off.

What is clear is that for the past decade, even as their relationship with Erdogan frayed and their leader moved abroad, the Gulenists have remained an influential force within Turkey in various institutions of the state, including the police and judiciary. And Erdogans government has cracked down on the clerics movement, starting in 2013 after mass protests against the government rocked the country.

More recently, the government has shuttered television stations and taken over a prominent newspaper linked to the Gulenists.

Whether or not the Gulenists were involved in the coup plot, its obvious theres going to be a massive witch hunt in which the government will go after suspected Gulenists in the police, judiciary and officer corps, said Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Its going to be big.

Ishaan Tharoor contributed to this report.


Teresa and Marty Skiroski, with their dog, Shiba, at their home in Parma, Ohio. (Dustin Franz/Dustin Franz)

For nearly her entire life, Teresa Sikorski has been active in Democratic politics, starting as a 12-year-old who overcame her shyn ess to knock on doors for her big brothers Cleveland City Council race in 1966.

He lost that time. But her brother Dennis Kucinich went on to become Clevelands mayor and congressman, a two-time presidential candidate and one of the most passionate liberal voices in the his party.

This year, Sikorski and her husband, Marty, quietly changed their party registration to Republican so they could vote in Ohios GOP primary. Their choice: Donald Trump.

Sikorski, 63, is a vivacious retiree who worked as an aide with the Parma school system and cared for Alzheimers patients in a nursing home. She remains a staunch supporter of her brother and the underdog causes for which he has fought.



A photo of the Sikorskis and the Kuciniches with the Obamas is displayed on the mantel. (Dustin Franz/For The Washington Post)

The centerpiece of her living-room mantel is a family photo with Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House, and on the wall of Sikorskis hallway is one of her with actor Sean Penn at Kucinichs wedding.

But the couple no longer sees the Democratic Party  or Washington, under the influence of monied interests  looking out for ordinary people. The whole system, they believe, should be kicked over.

Trumps demeanor is a little out there, but he says what he means. He says what the working man says, explains Marty Sikorski, 65, who used to do quality control for a firm that made fasteners. Hes not a career politician, and they cant buy him, and he wont play their game.

Although they concede that some of the things Trump says can be jarring, they see that as more evidence he is not simply another glad-hander selling talking points that have been polished to a sheen.

I listened to everything he had to say. I understood it. I got it, Teresa Sikorski added. Everybody else  theyre liars.

She counts presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton among that latter group. In fact, her mistrust of Clinton predates her embrace of Trump.

If Trump has any path to victory, it is going to be built on the frustrations of struggling middle-class communities such as this one, just seven miles southwest of the arena where Republicans are set to begin their convention Monday.

I would never have in my life believed I would be voting for a Republican, Sikorski said. But now she and her husband expect to do so up and down the ballot, including in Ohios hard-fought Senate race between incumbent Republican Rob Portman and former Democratic governor Ted Strickland.

Sikorski added that she still respects Obama, for whom she voted twice. However, he had a message to go forward, and now were going backward, she said. We have reverted to wars, people getting killed, people coming over the border and ISIS, the terrorist organization also known as the Islamic State.



A photo of Dennis Kucinich on the refrigerator in her home. (Dustin Franz/For The Washington Post)

For voters such as the Sikorskis and others here, there is also a deeper sense that hard work does not pay off the way it used to.

Why should somebody who does not want to work live better than people who are working, and have better benefits than people who are working? said Tim Ali, who one recent morning joined the Sikorskis at their kitchen table, where Teresa Sikorski was serving coffee and her light-as-air, homemade banana cake.

Ali is a real estate agent who was a precinct captain for Trump in nearby Middleburg Heights during the Republican primary.

Like the Sikorskis, he has long been active in politics and until recently was a registered Democrat. He served more than two decades as a city councilman and still has a personalized license plate that says VOTE 4 ME.

Emblazoned across the rear window of his Jeep Cherokee: $21 TRILLION IN DEBT CONGRESS IS BROKEN *TRUMP 2016*

Thus far, the Trump campaign has not had much of a presence here, beyond the coverage the candidate gets in the national media. That raises the question of whether this kind of organically grown support will be any match for the formidable ground operation that Clintons campaign is preparing in this crucial battleground.

Where Ohio Gov. John Kasich won the GOP primary statewide by a hefty 11 percentage points, Trump narrowly carried the Sikorskis traditionally Democratic precinct, 102 votes to 98. What remains to be seen is whether those numbers, small as they are, turn out to be the germ of a movement, or merely an aberration.

In the mid-20th century, Parma represented the dream of upwardly mobile white ethnics a generation or two removed from their immigrant ancestors  Germans, Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Irish.

The Sikorskis, who have been married for 26 years, moved here 16 years ago from Cleveland, attracted by the for-sale sign on a tidy house that turned out to be just right for them.

In 1956, Parma was the fastest-growing city in the country, its population nearly tripling during that decade. But it has been in decline since the 1970s and now is home to about 80,000 people, which is 20,000 lower than its peak. More than 90 percent of them are white.

Parma represents the kind of middle-class and working-class people whose economic prospects have stagnated, said John C. Green, the director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. The whites in Parma have been drifting Republican, little by little.

Teresa Sikorski herself acknowledges that her move to the GOP may prove temporary, depending on how the election comes out in November.

Who knows how Im going to vote the next time around? she said.

While people in this area may be put off by some of the things that Trump has said, his larger message is coming through loud and clear.

The image of Trump as a strong leader, as someone who cannot be pushed around resonates, Green said.

Trump supporters here will be watching the convention proceedings anxiously, in hopes that it will unite a fractious GOP and provide a restart to a campaign that has hit some bumps lately.

Cleveland's residents are preparing for the beginning of the RNC, as tens of thousands converge onto the city under heavy security. (Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post)

I think this convention is going to fire up the party again. I think it will fire up the campaign again, and things are going to change, Ali said.

Ali helped the Trump campaign find office space for its Cuyahoga County headquarters during the primary, but it shut down its operation shortly after, and he said he has had no contact from them since.

That worries him, although he hopes to see a more robust ground operation after the convention. I believe thats whats going to happen, and Im praying thats whats going to happen, Ali said.

Here as elsewhere, however, Trump generates strong feelings on both sides of the divide.

A few months ago, the Sikorskis put up two Trump signs on their lawn, only to have them stolen the same day. Nor would they feel comfortable wearing hats or T-shirts bearing his name as they take their daily walk in the local park.

Sikorski said she also now avoids discussing politics with her childhood best friend, who is a staunch Clinton supporter. Im not going to lose our friendship for that, she said.

And as for her brother: Dennis isnt too happy that I turned Republican  but what can I do?
Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday that the failed coup in Turkey has created only minor delays in the military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and that it will not diminish Turkeys role in the fight.

Kerry, who talked by phone three separate times Saturday with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, told CNN he was assured that the continuing turmoil will not interrupt counterterrorism efforts based in Turkey. Missions against the Islamic State are flown out of Incirlik Air Base, near the southern Turkish city of Adana. Air space was closed Saturday after the coup attempt but was reopened Sunday. Kerry said he expected that operations would return to normal very quickly.

According to our commanders, there may have been a minor delay here or there or something, but it has not affected the fundamental direction or commitment to the fight, Kerry said on CNNs State of the Union, in the first of three pretaped interviews he gave in Luxembourg to the Sunday morning talk shows.

The attempted coup has exacerbated tensions between the United States and Turkey, a fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Relations improved, though, after Turkey tightened its border in response to U.S. complaints to stop Islamic State fighters from crossing into the country and to keep foreign fighters from entering Syria. But since the attempted coup, Kerry has publicly, and in conversations with Cavusoglu, urged Turkey to uphold democratic principles even as it investigates the coup plotters and detains thousands of suspects.

Obviously, there are coup plotters, and the coup plotters need to be held accountable, and they will be, Kerry told This Week host George Stephanopoulos in an interview on ABC. But I think were all concerned, and we have expressed that concern, that this not fuel a reach well beyond those who engaged in the coup but that they strengthen the democracy of the country, strengthen the process and use it as a moment to unite the nation.

Kerry also has pushed back against senior Turkish officials who alleged that the United States may have played a role in the failed coup and who demanded the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania they accused of staging the attempted coup. On Saturday, Kerry said the United States was open to the idea of extraditing Gulen, but he said Turkey must first provide evidence that meets U.S. legal standards.

They also have to make a formal request for extradition through the judicial process. They havent done that yet, he said in an interview on NBCs Meet the Press. And that has to be accompanied by evidence and by demonstrated facts, which would lead a court to approve the extradition itself. Were not blocking it. Weve never had a formal request.

Despite the edge in the rhetoric between Washington and Ankara, Kerry said on This Week that Turkish officials have assured the United States that they will continue to take part in the campaign against militants in bordering Syria. He attributed the temporary closing of Incirlik to the discovery that some aircraft used in the attempted coup had refueled at the base.

But theyve assured us, and to date we dont see a negative drag on the effort with respect to counter ISIL, Kerry said, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

Kerry repeatedly said that the fight against the Islamic State is making progress on the battlefield. He tied the attacks in the West, including one last week in the French city of Nice, to the success in taking back territory from the militants in Syria and Iraq.

They are on the run, he said on CNN. And I believe what were seeing are the desperate actions of an entity that sees the noose closing around them.

Fridays attempted coup, which started unfolding as Kerry was wrapping up talks with Russian officials in Moscow, has preoccupied him during his two-day stop in Luxembourg.

In a quiet, reflective moment before departing for Brussels, Kerry paid his respects at the Luxembourg American Cemetery where more than 5,000 U.S. service members from World War II are buried, including Gen. George S. Patton. Most of the dead lost their lives in the Battle of the Bulge and in the advance to the Rhine River. There is only one woman, a nurse, buried at the cemetery.

Kerry and Luxembourgs prime minister, Xavier Bettel, laid roses at the memorial site that has been erected before a field of white crosses and Stars of David for servicemen who died between the end of 1944 and 1945. Kerry also laid a white rose and a State Department commemorative coin at each of the graves of two brothers from Massachusetts who are buried side by side.

Read more:

Turkey detains 6,000 in failed coup, including Turkish commander at Incirlik

The cleric blamed by Turkey leads a global movement from the Poconos

U.S. relationship with Turkey is only going to get more complicated

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks on CNN Turk via a FaceTime call during an attempted coup on July 15. Prior to the coup attempt, Erdogan had been critical of CNN Turk and other independent media. (Burak Kara/Getty Images)

At the Dogan Media Center, a sleek glass building here that houses some of Turkeys major media outlets, the failed coup arrived just before dawn Saturday with the low drone of a Black Hawk helicopter setting down in a nearby parking lot.

Minutes later, 14 soldiers led by a small cadre of officers entered the building and quickly split into two smaller groups to take over various news channels and publications, including the Hurriyet Daily News and the television stations CNN Turk and Kanal D.

The soldiers had one demand: Stop publishing or broadcasting. Other than that, they said little. The cameras kept rolling, however, as newsroom staff members pulled out their smartphones and the producers put up a ticker that read, Soldiers have entered CNN Turk studios.

If the coup plotters intention was to silence a handful of critical media in one fell swoop, they failed spectacularly. Dispatching only a handful of men to seize four newsrooms was inadequate, and it led the outlets to resist  albeit while forcing them into the awkward position of defending Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly attacked them and their colleagues around the country.

Yet despite a moment of seemingly mutual understanding between Erdogan and the independent Turkish media  best captured in a surreal moment when an Ankara bureau chief for CNN Turk let Erdogan FaceTime his nation in the throes of the coup detat  some Turkish journalists are wary about what the unrest will entail for their profession and ultimately their country.

Members of Turkey's military have overrun the offices of several major media organizations, including CNN Turk, which went off air. Turkeys military launched a coup against the elected government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan setting off a violent struggle between the nations military and civilian leaders. (CNN Turk)

[Turkey detains 6,000 linked to failed coup]

Murat Yetkin, editor in chief of the Hurriyet Daily News, was at his desk when seven soldiers burst into the buildings atrium Saturday morning, pointed rifles at journalists and told them to stop their work and get out.

Outside the media center, Yetkin couldnt help noticing that a growing crowd of anti-coup protesters contained many of the same faces from an incident in September when armed throngs who backed Erdogan had attacked his newsroom with molotov cocktails because of its reporting on Erdogan and his government.

Theres no reason to be optimistic about this situation, Yetkin said. But you cannot correct bad with worse. We have a lot of problems, but thats no reason to be supportive of a military coup.

CNN Turk, part of the Dogan Media group that owns the Hurriyet Daily News, also had a history of conflict with the Erdogan government. But journalists said that feud was put aside when soldiers stormed the building.

I think we did the right thing; we gave a platform to the legitimate government of this country to address the people, said Ferhat Boratav, editor in chief of CNN Turk.

He said that allowing Erdogan to call for people to come out and demonstrate was a risky thing but that it was a decisive factor in ending the coup.

The Dogan Media group is part of a conglomerate known as Dogan Holding, which has had several disputes with Erdogans government.

In 2009, the conglomerate was fined $2.5 billion for unpaid taxes. Critics said the judgment was payback for the groups coverage of corruption allegations against members of the presidents inner circle.

In May 2015, Erdogan accused the owner, Aydin Dogan, of being a coup lover and labeled the groups columnists charlatans.

Dogan came to Erdogans defense Sunday, criticizing the coup attempt in a statement published by the Hurriyet Daily News under the headline, Lets defend democracy together.

[On the streets of Istanbul, anger, joy, devastation and celebration]

Dogan said the country had survived a possible disaster with the solidarity of the state, the nation, politics and the media.

He went on to say that people in Turkey, whatever their political differences, should defend democracy and come together as a nation.

Erdem Gul, Ankara bureau chief of the newspaper Cumhuriyet, said that Erdogan is unlikely to thank his former critics for their support during the coup, and that its suppression probably will mean further restrictions on press freedom.

The government controls a big part of the media, and for those parts which it couldnt control, they are under the threat of imprisonment or being investigated, Gul said in a phone interview.

For these reasons, there is a lot of concern that Turkey is now heading toward even more authoritarianism, he said.

In May, Gul was sentenced to five years in prison for a report on Turkeys attempt to ship arms to Islamist rebels fighting the Syrian government. A colleague, Can Dundar, received a similar sentence. Both journalists were acquitted of espionage charges, and their cases are being appealed.

But more than 30 other journalists are in prison, Gul said, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has said Turkey is one of the worst jailers of journalists worldwide.

In the aftermath of the attempted coup, we urge the Turkish government to allow journalists to report on news events freely and independently, Nina Ognianova, program coordinator for CPJ Europe and Central Asia, said in a statement. And to do its utmost to guarantee the safety and security of all journalists.

Read more:

Graphic: What we know about the failed coup attempt in Turkey

Turkeys Erdogan always feared a coup. He was right.

Even though it failed the coup could lead to uncertainty in anti-ISIS fight
"Assassin" is written on the asphalt on the place where the slain attacker was stopped by police on the famed Promenade des Anglais, three days after a truck mowed through revelers, in Nice, southern France (AP Photo/Francois Mori) (Francois Mori/AP)

With this coastal city reeling from the Bastille Day attack by one of its Tunisian-born residents, one sentiment is growing stronger and stronger: Keep the immigrants out.

Across France, it is voiced by the far-right National Front party, which counts Nice as a stronghold. It is embraced by the center-right politicians dogging French President Francois Hollande ahead of elections next year. And though Hollande has preached tolerance and unity every time terrorism strikes France, his allies are also trying to tamp down immigration.

Leaders of Nices Muslim community say they fear that a backlash could make people such as the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, 31, even more disconnected from French society, sharpening the risk of more attacks. But there are now few mainstream voices in Frances political establishment advocating a welcoming policy toward migrants. Hollandes center-left Socialist party appears likely to limp to a third-place finish in the presidential race next year behind the far-right National Front, which long had ties to Holocaust deniers.

The dynamic comes as voters around the world seek to bar the way to immigrants amid persistent economic challenges and wars in the Middle East that have displaced millions of women, children and men. British voters last month voted to sever ties with the European Union in a referendum widely seen as motivated by fears over migration. The presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, plans to build a wall to keep out Mexicans. And just over Frances coastline border with Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League is also strengthening.

[French official: Bastille Day attacker had no known links to terrorist networks]

Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian-born emigre was behind the wheel of a truck that barreled into Bastille Day revelers and claimed at least 84 lives. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)

Islamism has hit again, said Marion Marechal-Le Pen, 26, the granddaughter of the founder of the National Front who represents an area near Nice in the French Parliament and is a rising star of the far right. It is possible to assimilate individuals, but not to assimilate an entire people, who bring with them their culture and their religion, she said in a video statement after the Thursday attack killed 84 people and wounded 256.

After three mass attacks in France in just 18 months, solidarity and national unity have been replaced by raw anger, with many here directing their frustration toward Frances leaders and the nations large Muslim community, even though there were many Muslim victims in the Nice attack. Hollande has appealed for tolerance  but a recent opinion poll found that just 12 percent of French voters support his performance as president.

We have been capable of unity, of cohesion, Hollande said Friday after visiting Nice. He called for France to be stronger than those who wish us harm.

Many in Nice question how security was so weak that Bouhlel was able to use his rented truck to cut a bloody path of terror over more than a mile of a crowded holiday seafront. On Sunday, people were piling rocks and angry messages on the spot on the Promenade des Anglais where Bouhlel was shot dead by police, a sharp break from previous commemorations that have centered on teary memories of victims rather than raw aggression toward attackers. Amid a crowd of onlookers, one man spat on the rocks and cursed Bouhlels memory.

People need to get out their hate, shrugged one police officer who was standing near the crowd.

Residents of Nice who have North African backgrounds say they can feel the anger, which many say has been growing for years but has become sharply worse with each attack in the past 18 months. Many of the attackers were French-born children of immigrants who complained that they were seen as too North African in France and too French in their parents home countries. Bouhlel, who emigrated from Tunisia in 2009 or 2010, according to his father, was an exception in that he was relatively new to France.

People look at us differently, said Myriam Brini, 27, who was born in Nice to Tunisian immigrants and sells croissants and pastries at a bakery just around the corner from the National Fronts local headquarters. She said she used to feel more integrated into French society. But in the last six or seven years, people look at you like, Hey, thats an Arab! 

[Attacker in Nice is said to have radicalized very rapidly]

I have a little daughter, and its not the world I hoped for her, Brini said.

In the Provence-Alpes-Cote-dAzur region, which includes Nice, the National Front captured 41 percent of the vote in first-round regional elections in December before losing the second round after opponents combined forces to defeat them. The result was a setback for anti-immigrant forces, but it was still a striking sign of the fast-growing appeal of the partys message at a time when mainstream leaders are historically unpopular.

The southern coast of France is especially fertile territory for the National Front, since it is home to descendants of the Pieds-Noirs, the French-Algerian colonists who were expelled to France during Algerias bloody war of independence that ended in 1962.

The attacks give a legitimacy to all the ideas of the National Front that theyve been promoting for 20 years, said Stephane Wahnich, who co-authored a book analyzing National Front leader Marine Le Pens rhetoric. With this kind of attack, a lot of people who were hesitating to vote for the National Front will do it.

Even short of ballot-box triumphs, the National Front has already spread its hard-line ideas about immigration and Islam into the mainstream. In Nice, the local government fought a years-long battle against a new mosque on the citys western outskirts before losing last month. National leaders have tried to put tough limits on the number of migrants and refugees the nation has to accept under a European Union quota system imposed last year after more than a million people fleeing war and poverty washed onto Europes shores.

Our major fear is that National Front ideas get a majority inside the Socialists and the Republicans, the two mainstream parties of France, said Otmane Aissaoui, president of the Union of Muslims of the Alpes-

Maritimes, the regions Muslim umbrella organization. All parties are playing the Islamist card.

In the wake of the attacks, anti-immigrant attitudes are coming even from those who say they cannot vote for the National Front because of its fascist-

leaning history.

We are getting more and more racist, but unfortunately we need to, said Stephanie van Cappellen, who was working at a deserted cafe in central Nice on Sunday. You see the immigrants here, they just show up and they get a job, an apartment. People here dont get that.

She said she believed that the vast majority of French residents with immigrant backgrounds were peaceful. But people were laughing after the attack, she said of Muslim residents of Nice, although there is no evidence that was the case. How can they do that?

With such attitudes common among French voters, the politicians are completely liberated, said Virginie Martin, a political analyst who has studied the rise of the National Front in southern France. In the eyes of many voters, she said, its like the National Front was right.

Elie Petit contributed to this report.

Read more

More suspects arrested in connection with truck attack in Nice

Assailant in truck attack had record of petty crime and violence

In truck rampage, experts see potential shift toward cruder acts of terror

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
The arrests of thousands of military officers, soldiers and other suspects linked to a failed coup in Turkey have opened a punishing campaign by the authorities against alleged plotters amid signs of chaos in the armed forces.

Turkeys justice minister confirmed that as many as 6,000 people  including generals and a commander of an air base used by U.S. warplanes to target Islamic State militants  had been detained by early Sunday.

That so many have been arrested suggests a crackdown on President Recep Tayyip Erdogans opponents in a move to further consolidate his power. But the sweeping action has raised concerns of more instability for a pivotal U.S. partner in the turbulent Middle East.

What we saw appears to show serious fracturing in Turkeys military, said Soner Cagaptay, director of Turkish research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The countrys armed forces have long been respected as a guardian of stability by many inside and outside this regional powerhouse of 75 million people.

1 of 63 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad  The scene in Turkey after an attempted coup View Photos The nations military tried to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Caption The nations military tried to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. July 17, 2016 Women mourn near the flag-draped coffin of a relative in Istanbul, during the funeral of seven victims of the July 15 coup attempt. Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images Wait 1 second to continue.

This is the second-largest military of NATO, an ally of the U.S. that borders Iran, Iraq, Syria, Russia and the Islamic State, Cagaptay said. And the last thing Washington wants is to see such an influential NATO members military fracture.

[On the streets of Istanbul, anger, joy, devastation and celebration]

Among those arrested was the commander at Incirlik Air Base, which is used by U.S. forces to launch raids against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, a senior Turkish official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Gen. Bekir Ercan Van was detained along with 10 other service members Sunday. The base is a major NATO installation hosting U.S. forces that control a stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The U.S. Consulate in the southern Turkish city of Adana said Saturday that authorities had cut power to Incirlik and blocked movement to and from the base. Turkey also closed its airspace to military aircraft. But the Pentagon said Sunday that the countrys airspace had opened again and that all anti-

Islamic State operations had resumed.

U.S. facilities at Incirlik are still operating on internal power sources, but we hope to restore commercial power soon. Base operations have not been affected, the Pentagons press secretary, Peter Cook, said in a statement.

As many as 3,000 Turkish service members have been detained by authorities in response to the coup attempt, during which at least 265 people were killed.

Rogue officers of Turkeys military declared martial law and attempted to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan overnight, but Erdogan a few hours later said his government is in control. (Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)

The arrest of so many, in multiple branches of the armed forces in locations across the country, indicates that a significant minority of the military either participated in or indirectly supported the coup attempt, said Aaron Stein, an expert in Turkish politics and a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Councils Rafik Hariri Center.

Among those arrested was Gen. Akin Ozturk, a former commander of the Turkish air force and military attache to Israel who is a member of the Supreme Military Council.

Another is Gen. Adem Huduti, commander of the Second Army, which protects Turkeys borders with Syria, Iraq and Iran. And Rear Adm. Hakan Ustem, commander of the coast guard, was removed from his post, said a senior Turkish official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject. It was unclear whether Ustem had been arrested.

Whats important is how widespread it was, Stein said. Its a minority, but a relatively large minority, and they were able to inflict quite a lot of damage.

Turkey has a history of military coups, with generals ousting civilian governments in 1960, 1971 and 1980. But such incidents have usually involved overwhelming support from within and across the various branches of the armed forces  unlike Fridays thwarted putsch, Cagaptay said.

The latest coup attempt is different, because it actually highlighted how the chain of command has broken down, he said.

Arrest warrants have also been issued for at least 2,745 judges and prosecutors across the country, according to Turkish media reports.

Erdogan seems to have been emboldened after overcoming the biggest challenge to his 13-year rule, with thousands of supporters taking to the streets in Istanbul and other areas of the country in defiance of the military personnel who hatched an elaborate plot to overthrow the government.

The Turkish leader has alarmed many here with his attempts to consolidate power over the years. Some Turks have expressed concern that Erdogan will use Fridays incident to further marginalize all forms of challenge to his growing powers, whether peaceful or not, even as the country struggles with myriad crises. Those include deep divisions over the role of Islam in Turkish politics, worsening unrest from within the large minority of Kurdish citizens and spillover from the civil war in neighboring Syria.

Nearly 3 million war-weary Syrians have taken refuge in Turkey.

A series of recent attacks linked to the Islamic State and Kurdish separatists have killed hundreds of people and badly damaged the Turkish economy.

In Ankara, the capital, signs lingered of particularly violent clashes that started Friday night.

Rogue officers used aircraft and tanks to target government buildings, including parliament. Trees on a nearby street were uprooted, and a lamppost was downed.

Mehmet Koskal, 28, who works in a shop selling cigarettes and snacks, took to the streets, heeding Erdogans call to defy the coup plotters with popular rallies. Koskal said police and civilians had stormed a military building next to parliament that coup plotters had seized.

He said that gunshots could be heard from inside and that a helicopter then began firing on civilians in the square.

It was just flying over us and shooting, said Koskal, who recalled seeing people in the streets who represented most of Turkeys diverse, and at times divided, political spectrum.

A total of 261 casualties were brought to Ankaras Numune Hospital, according to staff members. They would not release official figures on how many died, but orderlies said that at least 50 to 60 had either been brought in dead or died later from wounds.

Erdogan on Sunday attended a mass funeral in Istanbul for five people killed in the unrest.

During the services, held at Istanbuls Fatih Mosque, he again blamed the coup on Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who lives in exile in the United States. An estranged friend of the Turkish leader, Gulen has denied repeated accusations that he orchestrated the incident. Analysts say Gulen has many supporters who are thought to have deeply penetrated Turkeys police and judiciary, although they say he holds minimal support in the military.

The throngs of people in attendance had angrier words than Erdogans about Gulen, with some even calling for his death.

We want execution! someone in the crowd yelled.

Erdogan, however, urged restraint.

If they have guns and tanks, we have faith, he told the mourners. So let us think before taking each step. We will act with reason.

Loveday Morris in Ankara and Zeynep Karatas in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Read more

Turkeys cat-and-mouse game with the Islamic State

Turkish newspaper publishes pro-Erdogan articles after government seizure

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world
United States Secretary of State John Kerry met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow Thursday evening for discussions over a US-Russian military pact in relation to Syria. The pact had been proposed by the Obama administration in early July.

The Obama administration is, in words at least, holding out the offer of a common front against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Al Nusra Front, Al Qaedas Syrian affiliate. The White House proposal includes the establishment of a joint US-Russian command center, located in the US-allied Kingdom of Jordan, which would run integrated operations, supposedly coordinating military and intelligence operations in Syria.

Since Russia launched its bombing campaign in Syria in September 2015, Washington has accused it of focusing on the so-called moderate opposition, elements armed and funded by the CIA and US regional allies, who are in most cases in alliance with the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate and encamped directly alongside it. Moscows repeated requests for the Pentagon to provide coordinates for the so-called moderates, so that it could avoid striking them, have until now invariably been rejected. In exchange for the proposed American collaboration, Russia would scale back its bombing campaign, insist that Assad end most operations by the Syrian Air Force and accept a military cooperation agreement that would give Washington some degree of control over the targeting of Russian strikes.

In comments to media, the two, Kerry and the Russian president, issued dubious assurances that an agreement, in some form, was at hand. Putin expressed hope that progress and possible headway would emerge from the talks.

Hopefully, well be able to make some genuine progress that is measurable and implementable and that can make a difference in the course of events in Syria, Secretary Kerry said.

Whatever promises are made by the White House, it is impossible to believe that the US will engage in a serious joint bombardment with Russia against Al Nusra. Such a campaign would devastate the leading anti-Assad formation, closing the book on the insurgency fomented against Damascus by Washington.

According to Faisal Itani of the Atlantic Council, combined attacks against Nusra would effectively end the Syrian opposition, cementing Mr. Assads grip on power.

The Nusra group has functioned as an instrument of the US war plan since the beginning of the imperialist-orchestrated insurgency in 2011. Al Nusra has emerged as one of the most effective anti-Assad forces, and the proposed deal would bring American firepower to bear against the strongest anti-Assad military force and a sometime partner of Washingtons allies, the New York Times reported on Friday.

The White House proposals represent a tactical maneuver, aimed at salvaging the remnants of the anti-Assad forces, the backbone of which is composed of ISIS and the Al Qaeda-linked Nusra fighters.

Nonetheless, the fact that the Obama administration has offered such a deal is significant in itself, powerfully underscoring the disastrous position of the American-backed forces on the ground. The Russian-backed Syrian military is tightening the noose around the American-backed opposition forces, and Syrian Army units are encircling opposition militias inside the key city of Aleppo, trapping hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.

A US-Russian coordination pact would enable Washington to manage and constrain the Russian air campaign, in a last-ditch effort to preserve some portion of the opposition until after the upcoming 2016 US elections. Once the political hurdle of the election has passed, a newly installed presidential administration will have a free hand to escalate the war, renewing the push against Damascus through fresh deployments of US ground troops and an intensified air campaign.

Whatever the twists and turns in its short-term policy, the American ruling class will never willingly accept the re-stabilization of the Assad government, or indeed the consolidation of any Russian-aligned regime in Damascus, which Washington views as an obstacle to US hegemony in the Middle East.

Factions of the US elite clearly remain committed to the violent overthrow of Assad, and deeply hostile to any compromise with the Putin government. As the Times noted Friday, the Obama plan has generated deep unease at the Pentagon and in some quarters of the State Department.
Cleveland (AFP) - More than a hundred women stripped and posed naked with mirrors in Cleveland, answering a photographer's call to blend art with politics and portray Donald Trump as unfit for the White House.

They gathered on the eve of the Republican National Convention, where the brash New York billionaire will be anointed the party's nominee for president after winning a raucous primary race despite alarm from the party establishment and the country at large about his divisiveness.

"He is a loser," photographer Spencer Tunick told AFP after the sunrise shoot in which 130 women took part. One hundred of them will be featured in the picture to be unveiled shortly before the November 8 election.

The installation took place on private property in sight of the arena where the convention kicks off on Monday, the focus of multiple groups of protesters expected to take to the streets this week.

The owner gave permission, said Tunick, and so while public nudity in Cleveland is illegal, it was not possible for police to intervene.

Entitled "Everything She Says Means Everything," the photo art featured women of all shapes, colors and sizes participated, holding up mirrors toward the arena.

Tunick's website said the mirrors reflected "the knowledge and wisdom of progressive women and the concept of 'Mother Nature'... onto the convention center, cityscape and horizon of Cleveland."

The artist is well known for his sometimes startling images of nude people. But Tunick told AFP he thought it was his most political shoot ever, saying he felt compelled to take action.

Just voting against Trump at the ballot box in November was not enough.

"I have two daughters and a wife," he said. "I can't believe the language and rhetoric of hate against women and minorities coming from the Republican Party."

He said he had to do something to counter "this idiotic thinking."

Story continues

- Fearless -

MaPo Kinnord, 55, an art professor and artist, said she took part because she loved Tunick's work and happened to be visiting her niece in the city where she grew up.

Currently living in New Orleans, she said the installation opposed Republicans who were making Americans afraid, by telling them they should fear Muslims and immigrants.

"To be totally naked and out in the open and to be fearless is what we need to be," Kinnord explained.

Trump has called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and a wall to be built on the Mexican border to keep out illegal immigrants.

Kinnord said she would "never" vote for Trump and expressed hope that Britain's recent referendum voting to leave the European Union had been a wake-up call against complacency in the US election.

While she voted for self-declared democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the primaries, she said she was happy to back presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Morning Robinson, 18, took part with her mother, saying she wanted "to do something a little different" before going off to college that would enable her to express herself freely.

"I was really nervous at first," but it felt good being out in the open and not afraid of her body, she said.

"Republicans have this view of how women should be in society and I just don't agree," she said. "I don't know exactly, I just know their views don't match mine."

Size-wise, the artwork was a far cry from Tunick's most recent work.

In Colombia last month, he convinced more than 6,000 women to bare all in Bogota as the war-torn country neared a peace deal with the leftist rebels of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
ProFootball Talk on NBC Sports

Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady reportedly has gotten an ultimatum. According to US Weekly, Bradys wife, Gisele Bundchen, has informed him that either he leaves football to spend time with the family or she is gone for good. Its not specified whether he must leave now or next month or after the current year ends. Brady [more]
Authorities gave descriptions of the three officers who lost their lives when a shooter opened fire on cops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Sunday morning.



During a press conference, the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Police Department announced the three deceased officers included a 45-year-old officer from the EBRPD, a 41-year-old with just under a year of service and a 32-year-old with 10 years of service, both from BRPD



Among those injured are a 41-year-old male "fighting for his life," a 51-year-old officer with non-life threatening injuries  both from EBRPD  and a 41-year-old with nine years of service from BRPD.



Authorities did not release the names of the victims but they did note that they were all men and all of the EBRPD officers were married and had families.













Col. Mike Edmonson, Louisiana State Police Superintendent, confirmed there is not an active shooter scenario.



"We do believe based on the evidence that we have the person who shot and killed our officers was the person shot and killed on the scene," he said.



He asked anyone who notices suspicious behavior to call 1-800-CALL-FBI.



Sunday morning before 9 a.m., cops received a call of "suspicious person" walking down Airline Highway with a gun, Edmonson said. The suspect opened fire when police arrived on the scene. The Baton Rouge Sheriff's office confirmed in an earlier press conference that one suspect had been shot and killed by police but that they believe there is more than one suspect involved.



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? A "Click to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.



Gov. John Bel Edwards also spoke at the afternoon press conference, saying: "The violence and the hatred just has to stop."



"These men, risking their lives to protect and serve, were taken out the way they were," Edwards said. "They are the real life, everyday heroes."



"There simply is no place for more violence," he continued. "We are not going to tolerate more hate and violence tearing apart the families and communities of Louisiana."
For Charlottes Book

With so many amazing, qualified, talented cosmetic dermatologists out there, its amazing we still see overfilled celebritiesits enough to scare off an injectable virgin.

For the woman considering her first time with injectable fillers, knowing which products are reversible and which come with more permanent results is very important knowledge. To clear up our questions about the injectables timeline, we spoke with Charlottes Book Premier Provider Dr. Debra Wattenberg of Upper East Clinic NY Skin Rx.

Related: Does Non-Invasive Body Contouring Work? Sort of.

Whats In Your Filler?

The contents of your filler are an important place to start any research: most injections that use hyaluronic acid are reversible. Dr. Wattenberg explains, Hyaluronic acid is a sugar found naturally in the skin. Its found in joint spaces and makes the skin and joints slippery. Many of the dermal filler manufacturers have created an injectable gel form of hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid absorbs water, so when you inject it, it acts like a sponge: it absorbs water and expands.

Related: What Is Coolsculpting Anyway?

Hyaluronic Acid Fillers: Generally Reversible

Which dermal fillers are made with hyaluronic acid? Belotero, Juvederm Ultra, Juvederm Ultra Plus, Restylane, Perlane, and Juvederm Voluma XC. Says Dr. Wattenberg, The beauty of the hyaluronic acid dermal fillers is that theres a product called Vitrase, which is an enzyme that can quickly be injected to immediately reverse any negative effects.

Radiesse & Sculptra: More Permanent

Fillers made with poly-L-lactic acid (Sculptra) or calcium-based microspheres (Radiesse) are not life-long permanent, but they are not immediately reversible either.

Radiesse, says Dr. Debra Wattenberg, is a filler-like substance that is injected deep into the skin to volumize deep wrinkles and other areas that have lost significant volume. The key word here is significant; to counteract signifiant loss of volume, a more permanent filler is used. The calcium-based microspheres in Radiesse are injected using a gel formula, and once injected, there is no counteracting antidote. The volumizing effects of the product could last for a year or more, which is a great option for those seeking a treatment that needs little upkeep, but an unfortunate aspect if youre unhappy with the results.

Story continues

Related: Do Any Body Slimming Creams Work?

The Poly-L-lactic acid in Sculptra is a synthetic gel made with lactic acid, which is naturally found in the body, but, unlike hyaluronic acid, it does not have an effect-reversing antidote. The results of Sculptra reveal themselves over time as the collagen stimulating properties begin to volumize the treated areas. However, Sculptra is not fully permanent and, without follow-up treatments, the product can be absorbed by the body within six months, fading its effects.

Find A Qualified Cosmetic Doctor!

Regardless of the long-lasting or reversible properties of a dermal filler, its important you go to a qualified cosmetic doctor who can safely and expertly inject dermal fillers and create natural-looking, born-this way results. Remember - dont be fooled by fancy offices or media attention. Many doctors are not actually certified dermatologists but call themselves cosmetic doctors. You also want a cosmetic dermatologist who can quickly diagnose any adverse reactions, prevent risks of infection and fine tune the nuances of placement and size. Browse The Book for the best cosmetic doctors in your city.

READ MORE

Thinking about a liquid rhinoplasty? Here are the details.

Its almost always the work of unqualified cosmetic doctorsheres how to fix a botched Botox job.

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Read client reviews, book appointments, and get expert advice. Only the best cosmetic doctors, skincare gurus, nutritionists, fitness and wellness professionals make it into our book.
An armed political group stormed a police station in Yerevan on Sunday, July 17, calling for the release of Armenian opposition figure Jirair Sefilyan. Sefilyan is a Lebanese-born military commander and opposition political activist who was detained on June 20 after Armenian authorities said he planned to lead an armed coup against the government. Initial reports in Yerevan were that a coup was underway, but authorities were quick to deny this.

Local reports said that at least one person was killed and others injured while police chief, Valery Osipyan, was held as a hostage.

Armenias National Security Service reportedly released a statement describing this as an illegal activity and saying that negotiations were underway for peaceful surrender.

This video is shared by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and describe as showing police cars at Erebuni police division. Credit: YouTube/Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Yerevan (AFP) - An armed group stormed a police station in Armenia's capital Yerevan on Sunday, killing one policemen and taking more hostage, demanding the release of a jailed opposition leader and the resignation of President Serzh Sarkisian.

The presidency said security forces were in "full control" of the situation, but the drama was still going on after about 12 hours and police said they were holding talks with the gunmen.

"The police have the necessary means and we will take pre-emptive, swift action to liquidate them if they do not listen to our calls," Hunan Pogosyan, a deputy police chief, told journalists.

The attackers said they were demanding the release of Zhirair Sefilyan, an opposition politician arrested last month for alleged possession of firearms and who was accused in the past of plotting a violent overthrow of the government.

They issued a video showing several men in flak jackets and armed with Kalashnikovs as well as several hostages being held inside the police building and issued a statement calling for Armenians to take to the streets.

One of the gunmen said on social media that the hostages included two senior police chiefs.

Armenia's National Security Service said one policeman was killed and two others wounded after the gunmen stormed the station in Yerevan's Erebuni district at dawn and held a number of hostages "under the threat of violence".

"The law enforcement agencies are in full control of the situation and are taking all the necessary measures to resolve it," the presidency said about 12 hours after the standoff began.

Nikol Pashinyan, a lawmaker who met the hostage-takers, told journalists that the group was holding eight officers hostage but had released one who was suffering from high blood pressure.

"We demand the release of Zhirair Sefilyan, we will only obey his orders. Sarkisian must resign," one of the group's members, Varuzhan Avetisyan, wrote on Facebook.

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He said Armenia's deputy police chief General Major Vardan Egiazaryan and Yerevan deputy police chief Colonel Valeri Osipyan were among the hostages.

- 'Take to the streets' -

"We are doing this for you. People, take to the streets!" one of the gunmen, Areg Kuregyan said in the video. "We demand the release of all political prisoners."

"Join us! For now, we are holding the positions. We will stand as long as we can," another gunman said in the video statement.

Military and police cordons were blocking streets around the Erebuni station with vehicles including an armoured personnel vehicle, an AFP photographer witnessed.

Sefilyan, the leader of small opposition group the New Armenia Public Salvation Front, and six of his supporters were arrested in June after the authorities said they were preparing a plot to seize government buildings and telecommunication facilities in Yerevan.

A fierce government critic, Sefilyan was arrested in 2006 over calls for "a violent overthrow of the government" and jailed for 18 months. He was released in 2008.

Last year, Sefilyan and several of his supporters were arrested again on suspicion of preparing a coup, but released shortly afterwards.

An ethnic-Armenian, he was born in Lebanon where he fought in the civil war in the 1980s, defending Beirut's Armenian Quarters.

He then moved to Armenia to take part in the 1990s war with neighbouring Azerbaijan for control of the Armenian-populated separatist region of Nagorny Karabakh.

Sarkisian, a shrewed former military officer, has been president of the tiny country of 2.9 million people since winning a vote in 2008 that saw bloody clashes between police and supporters of the defeated opposition candidate in which 10 people died.
By Emily Flitter NEW YORK (Reuters) - Donald Trump, who often says he only likes winners, tells one grand tale of loss: In 1990, he nearly went bankrupt and was forced to ask dozens of banks to whom he owed money to change the terms on their loans and forgive some of his debts. It was, the real estate developer admits in his 1997 book "The Art of the Comeback," the darkest period of his professional life. In his telling, it's a story of redemption, of resilience, and proof of his exceptional negotiating skills and shrewd thinking. Six people who participated in the loan workout negotiations have a different recollection, raising questions about a key part of the personal narrative that many of Trump's supporters have found compelling as he campaigns to be the next president of the United States on Nov. 8. On the campaign trail he has portrayed himself as a survivor and a master negotiator. Trump says his comeback began when he recognized a downturn in the real estate market and quickly asked banks to renegotiate his loans. "That decision was perhaps the smartest thing I did," he wrote. The six bankers and lawyers involved in the talks say the bailout wasn't based on any overture Trump initiated with the banks - and the terms of the deal were dictated by what was best for the banks, not Trump. Three of the participants say Trump didn't acknowledge he had a problem until his lenders reviewed his books, realized he was on the brink of collapse, and summoned him for debt restructuring talks. While much has been written about Trump's financial troubles at the time, there has been little examination of his description of the bank negotiations in "The Art of the Comeback," including his assertion that he chose to initiate those talks. Trump's spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, declined to comment for this story. WARNING SIGNS Following the U.S. stock market crash of 1987, a global recession hit New York real estate. New construction stalled, and several big developers declared bankruptcy. As the real estate market slumped, Trump ran out of cash. At the beginning of 1990 he owed a combined $4 billion to more than 70 banks, with $800 million personally guaranteed by his own assets, according to Alan Pomerantz, a lawyer whose team led negotiations between Trump and 72 banks to restructure Trump's loans. Pomerantz was hired by Citibank but became lead counsel for the negotiations. At the time, Trump was not considered a major developer, but he was a New York celebrity. His affair with the actress Marla Maples and his divorce from his first wife Ivana Trump made national news headlines, and his first book, "The Art of the Deal," was a bestseller. He didn't have a large portfolio of real estate in New York, with the notable exceptions of his 5th Avenue building, Trump Tower, completed in 1983, and the Plaza Hotel, which he bought in 1988 after borrowing heavily from Citibank. He also owned three casinos in Atlantic City, having made a financial bet that he could revive the East Coast gambling destination. And in 1989 he added part of an airline to his portfolio, again turning to Citibank for a loan to help finance the acquisition of bankrupt Eastern Airlines Shuttle. He turned it into Trump Shuttle. LOOKING AT THE BOOKS In 1989, in response to growing concerns about the economic downturn, the Federal Reserve began asking big banks to review their exposure to the sinking real estate market. At the beginning of 1990, a credit specialist at one of Trump's biggest lenders decided to take a look at the bank's book of loans to him. The decision was prompted in part by the Fed's questions, as well as concerns within the bank about its exposure to the real estate market. The credit specialist, who did not want to be identified, concluded at the time that Trump was "about to go into bankruptcy." "The banks were onto the problem before he was onto the problem," the specialist told Reuters. Pomerantz said some of the banks became aware of the magnitude of Trump's financial problems when, on a single day, he drew down every cent of a $100 million line of credit one of the banks, Banker's Trust, which was purchased by Deutsche Bank in 1999, had given him to meet his obligations. Reuters was unable to independently confirm this. "He did not come to the banks and say 'I have a problem.' That did not happen," said Pomerantz. Pomerantz, who says he is not a member of any political party, argued in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that Trumps record in real estate was not a good way to measure whether or not he would be a good president. In "The Art of the Comeback," Trump says he began loan workout talks in March 1990 when he informed his bankers he might miss a payment on his casino debts. "If I had waited just six months longer to renegotiate terms with the banks, I might have lost everything," he wrote. "I would have had to stand in line with a whole bunch of other moguls who were trying to do the same thing." MAKING A DEAL Soon, in boardrooms of banks and law firms around Manhattan, Trump's deputies and lawyers began a series of meetings with representatives of the 72 banks, which had billions in outstanding loans, according to Pomerantz. During the same period, Trump was separately renegotiating a series of loans on his Atlantic City casinos. One of the bankers involved in those negotiations, Ben Berzin, said Trump seemed unaware of the depths of his financial troubles even after the banks had stepped in. There was a period during these negotiations when he was still spending money like a drunken sailor, Berzin said, recalling the uproar among the bankers when, in a TV interview in the summer of 1991, Trump displayed a large diamond engagement ring he had given Maples. Media reports said the ring cost $250,000, and Pomerantz said the bankers complained about it to Trump in their next meeting. At one point, Trump invited all of the bankers to a Broadway show that Maples had a role in, according to Berzin and a banker who took part in the larger talks with the 72 banks. Both said they believed Trump was trying to curry favor to win better terms in the workouts. Berzin attended the show but the other banker did not. Trump described Berzin in "The Art of the Comeback" as a "jerk" who would "scream at people at the top of his lungs about nonsense." Berzin said he was irritated by Trumps characterization and denied ever raising his voice in a meeting. BANKING ON "TRUMP THE SALESMAN" In his book, Trump says he told representatives of the 72 banks he would declare bankruptcy and "tie you guys up for years" in the proceedings unless they staked him $65 million to keep his businesses running until the real estate market recovered. He also wanted them to agree to defer all loan payments until that time. "The banks more than capitulated - they enthusiastically agreed to my proposal," Trump wrote. The bankers and lawyers interviewed dispute this. Though it was true that a personal bankruptcy would have made it harder for the banks to collect what Trump owed them, he had little leverage in the talks, they said. He, too, would have been seriously hurt in a bankruptcy, especially since he had personally guaranteed so much of what he had borrowed. In Pomerantz's analysis, he would have been able to hold on to little else beyond his home and his pension plan. During the 18-month process of negotiations and asset sales, Trump also asked for more time to develop his business ideas, like his plan to turn hotel rooms at the Plaza Hotel into condominiums, according to one of the bankers, who declined to be identified. That proposal was vetoed. While he did receive a $450,000-a-month allowance from the banks to keep his business operations going, it was structured and executed on the banks terms, several of the negotiators said. The banks decided they could recover more of the $4 billion they were collectively owed if they sold Trump's holdings one by one, waiting until the market recovered, rather than taking possession of the assets, four participants in the talks said. These individuals said the banks agreed to forgive Trump's personal liabilities in exchange for his help in selling the properties. The proceeds of the sales would then be split among the banks. Trump agreed that the banks could take away all his personal property, including his beloved Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, if he failed to execute the agreement. "We had to be sure he would pay attention," Pomerantz said of the liens on Trump's personal holdings. "We would meet with him every Friday morning. He was under very strict restrictions by the banks." Trump worked with the bankers to sell his assets, even when he disagreed about the timing of the sales, most notably when Citibank eventually sold The Plaza. The banks did not recover 100 percent of what they were owed and several lenders vowed never to work with Trump again. (Reporting By Emily Flitter, editing by Paul Thomasch and Ross Colvin)
New York (AFP) - For a Wall Street star once dubbed the "Baby Buffett," Bill Ackman is having a pretty bad year.

Huge bets on companies like Valeant and Herbalife have delivered steep losses to the flamboyant billionaire's Pershing Square hedge fund.

With some $12 billion under management, Pershing lost around 20 percent in the first half this year, securities filings show.

And everything suggests that the second half won't be much better, after Ackman's crusade against nutritional supplement direct sales company Herbalife, which he shorted as he labeled it a pyramid fund, was rebuffed Friday.

Agreeing with Ackman's longtime rival in Wall Street big-time activist investing, Carl Icahn, the Federal Trade Commission ruled the Herbalife is not a pyramid operation and, while forcing it to pay out $200 million to injured distributors, said the company could stay in business.

Herbalife shares jumped 9.9 percent, generously benefiting Icahn, who holds 25 percent.

It's not clear how Ackman, 50, fared financially at the apparent end of his three-year siege of the company, in which Pershing took a large short position, betting Herbalife shares would sink.

"This is a total victory for Herbalife shareholders and a total defeat for the short camp," said Timothy Ramey, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group.

Icahn, the doyen of Wall Street activists who famously squared off with Ackman in a long televised argument over Herbalife in 2013, declared victory, saying the younger Ackman had gotten his research on the company wrong.

"A significant part of my investment success is directly tied to our in-depth investment research and understanding of often complex and unique issues facing companies," he wrote in a statement.

"Unlike many of those that 'shorted' Herbalife, we did not rely on one or two research papers prepared by non-experts," he said.

Ackman did not concede, even if the market moved against him. He noted that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had ordered changes to the way Herbalife does business, and that eventually those will undermine the company's business model.

Story continues

"We expect that once Herbalife's business restructuring is fully implemented, these fundamental structural changes will cause the pyramid to collapse," Pershing said in a statement.

- Big bets go sour -

The stylishly coiffed, Harvard grad golden boy of the exclusive New York hedge fund billionaires club, Ackman has a history of taking contrarian stakes and then going very public with them.

After Pershing made a billion-dollar bet in 2012 that Herbalife's shares would tumble, he publicly labeled the company a Ponzi scheme, comparing it to Enron, the high-flying energy group that plunged into bankruptcy in 2001, and the Bernie Madoff fund collapse seven years later.

Putting his credibility on the line, Ackman inundated media and the internet with appearances and videos arguing his case that Herbalife would collapse.

The Pershing short gambled on Herbalife shares falling from $47. But they have traded well above that level since February and finished at $65.25 Friday. Ackman has admitted that carrying the short bet has cost the fund $20 million a year.

Ackman's seeming emotional commitment to his positions was also apparent in his investment on Valeant.

He took a huge position on the future of the Canadian drugmaker as it expanded via aggressive takeovers, only to see the shares plummet in scandals over Valeant's business model and accounting methods.

After surging to a peak of over $263 in the middle of 2015, Valeant's shares have plunged to below $23, while Pershing has clung to its sizable stake in the debt-laden company.

Ackman's style and recent record has not impressed some on Wall Street.

"We believe Ackman typifies the activist behaviors that destroy, rather than create, long-term shareholder value," David Trainer and Sam McBride from investment research house New Constructs said in a note.

Joseph Fahmy, managing director at Zor Capital in New York, tweeted a similar view.

"I don't feel bad for Ackman. I feel bad for the people who piggy-backed his trade without doing their own due diligence," he said.
Dubai (AFP) - A court on Sunday ordered the dissolution of Bahrain's Shiite main opposition group Al-Wefaq, despite international criticism of the Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom's intensified crackdown on dissent.

The administrative court in Manama also ordered the funds of the group, found guilty of "harbouring terrorism" among other charges, to be seized by the government, said the justice ministry.

The ruling can still be appealed in the case which Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said his country would continue to follow "closely".

Al-Wefaq was the largest group in parliament before its lawmakers resigned en masse in protest at the crushing of demonstrations in 2011 calling for an elected government.

The court said Al-Wefaq, which draws most of its support from Bahrain's Shiite majority, incited violence and encouraged demonstrations and sit-ins which threatened to spark "sectarian strife".

It said the bloc had "criticised the performance of the state authorities -- executive, judicial, and legislative".

Britain was quick to condemn the ruling.

"I am deeply concerned" by the court decision, said Johnson, urging the Bahraini government "to guarantee and protect political freedoms for all its citizens."

"I encourage all sides to engage in constructive and inclusive dialogue to promote social cohesion and inclusivity, including political representation, for all Bahrainis," said the new foreign minister.

On June 28, Al-Wefaq's defence lawyers withdrew from court proceedings in protest at the government's push to accelerate the process, which had initially been set for October 6.

The court had already suspended all of Al-Wefaq's activities on June 14, ordering its offices closed and assets frozen.

But Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa insisted "there will be no backtracking on the measures taken to preserve the nation's security and stability."

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"There are hands that sought to become tools used by foreign regimes which want no good for Bahrain and its people. Their attempts have failed," he said in remarks published on the official BNA news agency.

That is an allusion to Iran which Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet, accuses of fomenting unrest among its Shiite majority.

The justice ministry, which sought Al-Wefaq's dissolution, had accused the bloc of providing a haven for "terrorism, radicalisation and violence" and opening the way for "foreign interference" in the kingdom's affairs.

In October 2014, the administrative court banned Al-Wefaq for three months for violating the law on associations.

Political parties are banned in Bahrain, as in other Gulf Arab monarchies, so Al-Wefaq has the status of an association.

- Crackdown on leading Shiites -

Al-Wefaq, also known as the Islamic National Accord Association, is heir to the Bahrain Freedom Movement which played a key role in Shiite-led anti-government protests in the 1990s that sought the restoration of the elected parliament scrapped in 1975.

Sunday's ruling comes despite appeals by the United Nations, United States and rights groups for the legal action against the bloc to be dropped.

Washington has labelled the crackdown on Al-Wefaq as "alarming" and repeatedly appealed for "reform and reconciliation" in Bahrain.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had also expressed concern about the move against Al-Wefaq.

In recent months, Manama has intensified its crackdown on leading Shiite figures.

Al-Wefaq's chief, Shiite cleric Ali Salman, is serving a nine-year jail term for inciting violence after a court in May more than doubled his sentence.

His arrest in December 2014 sparked protests in Bahrain, already rocked by the Shiite-led uprising that erupted in February 2011.

Authorities have also stripped at least 261 people of their citizenship since 2012, according to the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, including the country's Shiite spiritual leader Sheikh Isa Qassem.

And on Tuesday, a court denied bail for prominent human rights activist Nabeel Rajab as he went on trial on charges of insulting a state institution and neighbouring Saudi Arabia online.

Amnesty International and Human Rights First were among international rights watchdogs that had viced concern over the legal proceedings against Al-Wefaq and the government's crackdown on opponents.
By Serajul Quadir DHAKA (Reuters) - Police in Dhaka on Saturday arrested three people and another on Sunday, including a university professor, for failing to register information about tenants renting property who later attacked a cafe in the city, killing 20 people. Gias Uddin Ahsan, a professor at North South University in Dhaka, his nephew, and the manager of Ahsan's apartment were arrested by Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) for failing to comply with rules forcing landlords to register information about their tenants with the police, Mohammad Masudur Rahman, a senior police official told Reuters. He said police also arrested a landlord on Sunday for not disclosing information about his tenants who were also suspected of being associated with the attack earlier this month. Mohammad Nurul Islam, owner of another house in the city did not register information about his tenants and police found grenades and black clothing in the house, similar to the clothing worn by the attackers, police said. After appearing in court on Sunday, they were remanded by police for eight days, he said. They had rented the house for 22,000 taka ($275) per month, paying two months in advance. "They used to meet there from time to time to make plans and they were 7 to 8 members, after the attack they fled away," he said. Five militants who were killed by police after they stormed the cafe on July 1 had rented the apartment along with another person in a nearby residential area in May and started living there from June, Rahman said. "From here they attacked the cafe. There were other militants also who fled after the attack," he said. "We also found evidence that they kept grenades and other explosives in the apartment. If we had been informed they were living there, then that brutal killing would not have been possible and we could also have arrested the other militants who fled." Earlier this year, the DMP issued an order to all apartment owners to provide details of their tenants for a database to help police crack down on criminals and militants using rented accommodation as hideouts. A spokesman for the university told Reuters the university was surprised. "The authority will provide all cooperation to the law enforcing agency in this investigation," he said. Bangladesh has suffered a series of attacks on liberal bloggers, university teachers and members of religious minorities over the past year. The government says two domestic militant groups trying to replace secular democracy with Islamic sharing rule are responsible for the violence. Twenty people including 18 foreigners were killed before police stormed the cafe, rescued 13 hostages and shot five of the attackers dead. Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said on Saturday that investigators had identified the masterminds of the attack and that the remaining perpetrators would soon be arrested. Some of the assailants had attended prestigious schools or universities and had been reported missing, according to the police. One was the son of a politician. (Reporting by Serajul Quadir; Editing by Nerys Avery and David Evans)
Police in Bangladesh have arrested a professor from an elite university alleging that he had rented a flat to gunmen who attacked a cafe in Dhaka earlier this month and killed 20 hostages.

In the first arrests police have made outside the cafe, Gias Uddin Ahsan of the private North South University was detained late Saturday along with two other people and is expected to appear in a court in the capital to face charges Sunday.

Police allege that in May he rented a flat he owns -- without registering the tenants' information as required by law -- to some of the gunmen responsible for the attack claimed by the Islamic State group.

The professor was arrested for "renting the house to the Gulshan (cafe) attackers and hiding information," police said in a statement, adding that the men had "gathered at the flat" prior to the attack.

Bangladesh authorities made submitting tenants' information to the nearest police station mandatory in recent years as part of efforts to curb crime and extremist activities.

The other two people who were arrested included a nephew of the professor and the manager of the apartment building, police said.

Police seized sand-filled cartons from the flat, which they suspect were used for storing grenades, the statement added.

At the time of the cafe seige police said they had detained two people including a teenage kitchen assistant, who died in custody, with his family alleging torture.

Rights groups have also expressed concern for two attack survivors they say are being held by investigators, though police deny the two are in their custody.

NSU, Bangladesh's leading private university which caters to children of the country's elite, has come under scrutiny before after its students were linked to extremist activities.

One student was detained in the United States in 2012 and later got a lengthy prison sentence over an alleged plot to blow up the New York Federal Reserve bank.

In December seven NSU students were convicted and sentenced for the 2013 murder of an atheist blogger, the first in a spate of such killings of secular activists and religious minorities.

Last week one of the university's former students was shot dead by police on the day of Eid festival after he and several other Islamist extremists attacked the country's largest prayer congregation with guns and explosives killing three.
By Lawrence Hurley

(Reuters) - Before the killing of three law enforcement officers on Sunday and the fatal shooting of a black man by police earlier this month, Baton Rouge was a city divided between the police and the policed.

Tensions in the Louisiana state capital go back years. For many residents, the city's police force has been viewed as overly aggressive and unrepresentative of a city where more than half the 230,000 people are black and where racial problems date back decades.

Minorities are "very wary of police and often afraid of them," says Michele Fournet, a veteran Baton Rouge criminal defense lawyer.

It was not clear whether there was a link between Sunday's shooting of the police officers and the recent unrest over the police killings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota. Police told CNN that the shootings on Sunday did not appear to be race-related.

Officers were responding to a call of shots fired when they were shot in what Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden described as "an ambush-style deal." Three officers were killed and three others wounded. The suspect in the shooting is dead.

"It is unspeakable that these men risking their lives to protect and serve this community were taken out the way that they were," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards told a news briefing.

"The hatred just has to stop," he said.

Baton Rouge has been one of America's most crime-plagued cities. In 2015, it had 60 homicides, 98 rapes and 809 robberies, among the highest rates of violent crime for a city of its size in the United States.

In recent years, activists in the city have urged law enforcement to spend more time in neighborhoods as part of "community policing."

Many would also like the city to hire more black officers.

Such calls having been growing across the country since the fatal police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a white officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

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A wave of anti-police protests has since spread, fueled by a series of fatal encounters between police and members of minority groups.

Whether its Baton Rouge or Ferguson or Baltimore or Minnesota, we need more community policing," said Cleve Dunn Jr., a black businessman and political consultant in Baton Rouge.

CONSENT DECREE

A Baton Rouge police spokesmen said the department had made significant strides toward diversity in its force.

In 1980, when Baton Rouge was put under a federal consent decree to improve its minority recruiting, about 10 percent of the departments 516 employees were black. As of June this year, 201 of 657 officers are black, or 30 percent, according to numbers provided by the police department.

Blacks made up about 55 percent of Baton Rouges population in 2010, according to U.S. government data.

Alton Sterling, the Baton Rouge man shot by police on July 5, had peddled CDs for years and law enforcement officers would have known he was not a threat if they were more familiar with the area, local residents said.

One officer is notorious for harassing local black residents to the point where he has been given a street nickname of Bro Stupid, said Burnell Williams, who works with at-risk youth and ex-prisoners for the nonprofit group Against All Odds.

Michael Mitchell, 33, a motivational speaker and minister who lives near the store where Sterling was killed, said relations had long been strained between the police and the neighborhood where Sterling was killed.

It added a match to fuel that was already there, he said.

In Dallas, where five police officers were killed on July 7 during an otherwise peaceful protest over the Louisiana and Minnesota shootings, police chief David Brown told reporters that community policing was the best way to deter crime and protect officers.

Brown, a 33-year department veteran, noted that 2015 was the 12th year of crime reduction in Dallas, more than any other major American city.

Police "have done this by also protecting the civil rights of our citizens," Brown said.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley in Washington; Additional reporting by Letitia Stein in Baton Rouge, La.; Editing by Jason Szep and Peter Cooney)
Three more big banks will step into the earnings spotlight this week.

Consensus forecasts from Wall Street analysts call for top-line declines from all three of them.

However, one is expected to offer some growth in earnings, relative to the year-ago period.

Wall Street expectations are still pretty low for second-quarter results from Bank of America Corp (NYSE: BAC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), even in the wake of strong results from JPMorgan and solid numbers from Citigroup and Wells Fargo last week.

The Wall Street forecasts call for shrinking revenue, relative to the same period of last year, from all three big banks scheduled to report earnings this week. However, unlike the other two, Goldman will show solid growth on the bottom line, if the analysts are correct.

Below is a quick look at what is expected from the reports of these three banks, as well as a peek at some of other companies that also are on tap to share their quarterly results this week.

Related Link: Bank Earnings Blitz: PNC, UBS, Citigroup And Wells Fargo Deliver Solid Numbers

Bank of America

In its report first thing Monday, this financial services giant is expected to say that in its second quarter it had earnings of $0.35 per share, according to 119 Estimize respondents. That would be a dime less than in the same period of last year. The Wall Street consensus estimate is just $0.33 per share, but note that the analysts underestimated EPS by as much as 25 percent in three of the past four recent quarters.

The Estimize revenue estimates were less than the posted results in the previous two quarters, and this time the respondents are looking for about $20.57 billion. The Wall Street revenue forecast is $20.41 billion. In the same period of last year, the bank reported $22.34 billion in revenue.

Goldman Sachs

The consensus Wall Street forecast calls for this multinational banking company to post second-quarter earnings of $3.00 per share (which would be more than a dollar higher than in the year-ago period), but for revenue to have tumbled more than 16 percent to $7.58 billion in the period. Note that the bank fell short of consensus EPS expectations in three of the previous four quarters.

Story continues

View more earnings on BAC

Estimize is a bit more optimistic, with the consensus of 82 respondents pegging earnings at $3.12 per share on revenue of $7.63 billion for the three months that ended in June. Back in the first quarter, Estimize overestimated the numbers on both the top and bottom lines.

Goldman is scheduled to share its latest results before Tuesday's opening bell.

Morgan Stanley

The second-quarter profit of this global investment bank is predicted to have slipped $0.20 per share, according to Wall Street analysts, from the $0.79 reported a year ago. The consensus of 26 Estimize respondents has earnings coming in at $0.62 per share. Note that first-quarter earnings handily topped both forecasts.

In Wednesday morning's report, analysts are looking for $8.33 billion in revenue for the three months that ended in June, which is about the same as the $8.33 billion that Estimize is looking for. Back in the previous quarter, revenue topped the Estimize forecast. Both forecasts are well short of the $9.56 billion that Morgan Stanley reported in the same period of last year.

And Others

Other financials that Wall Street analysts expect to show at least some earnings decline when they report this week include American Express, BB&T, Blackstone, Capital One, Charles Schwab, Citizens Financial, Discover Financial Services, M&T Bank, Northern Trust, PayPal, Regions Financial and TD Ameritrade.

However, as with Goldman Sachs, the consensus forecasts call for EPS at Bank of New York Mellon, Comerica, Huntington Bancshares, SunTrust Bank, Synchrony Financial, Travelers and Visa to be greater than a year ago.

At the time of this writing, the author had no position in the mentioned equities.

Keep up with all the latest breaking news and trading ideas by following Benzinga on Twitter.

See more from Benzinga

 2016 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Its the birthday of a Founding Father whose name you know today as part of a controversial political term.

gerrymander

Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with a hard g sound), American Revolutionary leader, Declaration of Independence signer, Constitutional delegate and U.S. vice president, was born on July 17, 1744, in Massachusetts. But after his passing on November 23, 1814, Gerrys legacy is mostly known for one term thats guaranteed to start a political debate: gerrymandering.

Link: Gerrys official Senate biography

Gerry seemed to be around history for much of his political career, but hes not a member of the same pantheon of bigger names like Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Washington.

But Gerry was at the center of heated debates at the Constitutional convention in 1787 in Philadelphia and he became one of three delegates who refused the sign the Constitution, along with Edmund Randolph and George Mason.

Gerrys role at the convention has been discussed in great details by historians (he spoke at the convention proceedings 153 times) and he was openly upset by the lack of a Bill of Rights in the document agreed to in Philadelphia.

As Massachusetts debated ratification, Gerry sent a letter to the state legislature explaining his positions at the convention, which in turn damaged his political career there. Still, he was elected to Congress as a member of the House.

Gerry later served as a diplomat to France during the XYZ affair and completed a political comeback in his home state with his election as governor in 1810. Now a member of the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican faction, Gerry fought about elections with members of the fading Federalist Party.

In the struggle, Gerry approved a controversial redistricting plan designed to give his party an advantage in the state. The Federalists responded with jokes (and a famous political cartoon) about the new district looking like a salamander, and the term gerrymandering was born.

Gerry wound up losing a re-election bid after the gerrymandering controversy and falling into financial difficulties, the elderly Gerry asked friends in Washington for a federal government appointment with a steady salary.

Gerry, 67, then accepted an offer to run for vice president in 1812 on a ticket with the incumbent President James Madison. Gerry died in office in November 1814 and his grave is at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington.
12 tonnes of waste collected from Bagmati, Bishnumati

Twelve tonnes of solid waste was collected in the 166th week of the Clean Bagmati Mega Campaign and 101st week of the Clean Bishnumati Campaign on Saturday.
* Graphic on Brexit impact http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/testfiles/BREXIT-ECON/index.html LONDON, July 17 (Reuters) - Britain's June 23 referendum decision to leave the European Union has had far-reaching consequences for the world's economy, businesses, investors and politics. Following are the main developments: July 17 What will happen to the thousands of Britons living and working in Spain and elswehere in Europe as Brexit rewrites the rule books, and to those EU citizens living in Britain? We'll sort something out, said Brexit minister David Davis.

"I want to see a generous settlement for the people here already because they didn't pick this circumstance," Davis told Sky News. "We want to do that at the same time as we get a similarly generous settlement for British citizens living in the EU." But he declined to guarantee the rights of EU citizens. The many EU migrants living and working in Britain was a main point of issue for advocates of Britain leaving the bloc.

Meanwhile Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon floated the idea of Scotland remaining in the EU whilst England and Wales exited.

Though the idea would appear to be legally and politically impossible, Sturgeon said: "When you are in unchartered territory you have effectively a blank sheet of paper in front of you then you have an opportunity to think things that may have been previously unthinkable." Sturgeon also has a second independence referendum for Scotland in her sights.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told Britain's new Prime Minister Theresa May he would like to see the two countries strike a free trade deal as soon as possible. That, however, cannot happen until Britain leaves the EU.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, the Brexiteer now in charge of renegotiating Britain's commercial ties, told the Sunday Times he would soon travel to the United States to ensure that Britain was not at the back of the queue in trade talks, as President Barack Obama had suggested before the vote.

Story continues

He said was "scoping" about a dozen free trade deals outside the EU to be ready for when Britain leaves.

Signs of Brexit stress: 1) Global funds tracker EPFR - says the value of UK funds' assets under management has dropped by more than $40 billion, or 8.2 percent, in the three weeks since the Brexit vote. Four-fifths of it was because of currency depreciation.

2) British construction output fell sharply in May during the run-up to the EU vote. The Office for National Statistics says construction output, which makes up 6 percent of the economy, fell 2.1 percent in May compared with April.

3) Slovakia's finance ministry reckons Brexit will cut Slovak economic growth by 0.1-0.2 percentage points this year and by up to 0.3 percentage points next year. Britain is Slovakia's seventh biggest trade partner, with cars making up almost half of its exports.

4) Berwin Leighton Paisner, 84-year-old City of London law firm, has frozen pay and bonuses until November because of Brexit uncertainty. It specialises in commercial real estate.

IMPORTANT DATES AHEAD: - July 21: European Central Bank policy meeting - Aug. 4: Bank of England policy meeting, economic forecasts - Sept. 16: Informal EU summit in Bratislava - Sept. 25-28: UK Labour Party conference - October TBA: Italian constitutional reform referendum - Oct. 2: Re-run of Austrian presidential election - Oct. 2-5: UK Conservative Party conference - Oct. 13-15: Scottish National Party conference - Oct. 20-21: Formal EU summit in Brussels PREVIOUS July 15 Prime Minister Theresa May is seeking to assuage Scots fears about being dragged out of EU by the English voters. She says she will not invoke Article 50 to start divorce until a "UK approach" had been agreed.

But she and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon are clearly not on same page. May says the Scots have had their vote on independence already and said 'no'; Sturgeon says it is inconceivable that a British PM could block as Scottish referendum if the Scottish parliament approves one.

July 14 Prime Minister Theresa May tells EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker Britain will not rush into Brexit negotiations, telling him by phone that London "would need some time to prepare" for talks she hoped would be "constructive and positive".

President Barack Obama calls May and reiterates the U.S. position is "not just protecting but deepening the special relationship" with Britain. She tells him Britain will remain a key partner on issues such as counter-terrorism and security.

May continues to surprise with her cabinet appointments. Greg Clark is appointed to an expanded business portfolio - Ministry for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Other shifts: Chris Grayling, May's campaign chief who had been pegged for a major post, gets Transport. Jeremy Hunt stays on at Health, despite early expectations he would not. Former May challenger Andrea Leadsom gets Environment, Fisheries and Rural Affairs where she will explain to farmers where their EU money has gone.

Secretary of State John Kerry congratulates his new counterpart, Boris Johnson, but asks for a "sensible and measured" approach to Brexit.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault eschews diplomatic niceties, telling a radio station that during the referendum campaign, the pro-Brexit Johnson "lied a lot to the British people and now it is he who has his back against the wall." Johnson tells reporters Ayrault sent him a "charming letter ... saying how much he looked forward to working together and to deepening Anglo-French cooperation." He says Kerry told him during a phone call that the United States wants "more Britain abroad, a greater global profile".

"There's a massive difference between leaving the EU and our relations with Europe, which if anything I think are going to be intensified," Johnson says.

Signs emerging of Brexit stress: 1) Thomson Reuters/IPSOS index shows British consumer confidence slumped to its lowest level since 2014 following the vote 49.4 in July vs June's 51.2.

2) London-based online money transfer business Azimo tells Reuters it is considering switching its headquarters to mainland Europe because of Brexit.

Women at the top table. As well as Amber Rudd as Home secretary and Theresa May herself, new top cabinet members include Justine Greening (Education) and Elizabeth Truss (Justice.) German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is making soothing comments towards Britain. He says he will speak on the telephone with new Chancellor of the Exchequor Philip Hammond and he reckons Hammond's desire that London's financial institutions have access to EU market is "reasonable".

Philip Hammond makes his first comments. Suggests that he may be less aggressive on the UK budget deficit. Also says Britain will come out of the EU single market but work on new trading deal as partner.

REGULAR ITEMS: - Global Markets - Currency reports - Brexit Factbox: [nL8N19T1LJ (Written and compiled by Jeremy Gaunt)
YAOUNDE (Reuters) - Eleven hostages from Cameroon were freed on Sunday following 16 months of captivity, after having been abducted by a militia group from the Central African Republic, a statement from the Cameroonian presidency said. The hostages included a local mayor, Mama Abakai, and 12 others, but two died in captivity, said President Paul Biya in the statement, adding that the crime would not go unpunished. It was not clear which militia abducted them or how they were freed. They were kidnapped in March 2015 by heavily armed men while returning from a funeral in Cameroon's northern Gbabio district, and taken over the nearby border to the Central African Republic. "The Cameroonian hostages were freed today and they are en route to Yaounde," Governor Gregoire Mvono told Reuters. An upsurge of violence in the Central African Republic that began in 2013 has caused thousands to flee across the border and increased insecurity in parts of Cameroon. Islamist militant group Boko Haram has also staged numerous cross-border attacks from Nigeria into Cameroon's Far North Region. (Reporting by Josiane Koaugheu; Writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg; Editing by Andrew Bolton)
By Julien Pretot VILLARS-LES-DOMBES, France (Reuters) - Manx Missile Mark Cavendish claimed his 30th Tour de France victory and fourth in this year's race when he left sprint rival Marcel Kittel trailing at the end of the 14th stage on Saturday. The Dimension Data rider, back in the limelight after three below-par Tours, is now four shy of the all-time stage win record of Belgian great Eddy Merckx. Cavendish, who had not won more than three stages on the Tour since 2011, was just too fast for the rest of the bunch, comfortably beating Norway's Alexander Kristoff (Katusha) in a bunch sprint after 208.5-km of riding from Montelimar. World champion and green jersey holder Peter Sagan (Tinkoff) finished strongly to take third place while German Kittel finished fifth, protesting as he felt Cavendish had veered towards him during the sprint for the line. "The difference this year (with 2015) is the track (preparation for the Olympics) but not just that. To be fair I feel exactly the same, it's just that you need to be patient," said Cavendish who followed Kittel's wheel before making his move, powering away to victory. "I think I'm being more patient than I was last year." Cavendish insisted his sprint was clean, even if Kittel had a slightly different point of view. The German was gesticulating angrily before he even crossed the line. "I started my sprint super fast with 220 metres to go, the train worked well. I was in the inside, I was well positioned," he said. "I saw Cavendish passing me and he swerved to the right and I needed to brake to avoid a collision. It's not up to me to decide if he made a mistake." Frenchman Jeremy Roy (FDJ), Cesare Benedetti (Bora Argon 18), Swiss Martin Elmiger (IAM) and American Alex Howes (Cannondale-Drapac) broke away early on and built a maximum advantage of 4:45. Howes was dropped by his breakaway companions with 14km left and Benedetti fell off the pace 9.5km from the line. Roy and Elmiger were caught with 3.4km left, shaking hands as the peloton reeled them in. Yellow jersey holder Chris Froome (Team Sky) finished safely to consolidate his advantage after gaining time on his main rivals in Friday's individual time trial. "I was tired this morning but fortunately this day was a gift for the GC riders, it was a quiet day," he said. The riders observed a minute's silence at the start with Sagan, Froome and French champion Arthur Vichot in the front of the peloton in memory of the 84 victims of the Nice attack just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Sunday's 15th stage is a gruelling 160-km trek in the Alps between Bourg-en-Bresse and Culoz. "It's a key stage," Froome warned. (Reporting by Julien Pretot; Editing by Martyn Herman)
Los Angeles (AFP) - Ivan Dodig and Marin Cilic dealt Bob and Mike Bryan a rare doubles defeat to keep Croatia alive in their Davis Cup World Group quarter-final against the United States.

World number 12 Cilic stepped in at the last minute to partner Dodig, and the moved paid off with a 6-2, 2-6, 6-2, 6-4 victory over the Bryan brothers -- owners of 16 Grand Slam doubles titles.

With the win, Croatia closed the gap to 2-1 in the best-of-five match hardcourt tie in Portland, Oregon.

"It was a group decision," Cilic said of his replacing Marin Draganja in the doubles. "Ivan is our first player in the team and he felt that I would work a little better with him against the Bryan brothers.

"As it happened, today I played probably the best match of my life in doubles."

The Croatians were on the ropes after singles defeats for Cilic and Borna Coric on Friday.

Jack Sock, ranked 26th in the world, roared back after dropping the first two sets to stun former US Open champion Cilic 4-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4, and US number one John Isner then overpowered Coric 6-4, 6-4, 6-3.

Cilic will try to keep the tie alive when he takes on Isner in the first reverse singles match on Sunday. He has beaten the big-serving American in all five of their prior encounters.

"It's bit different situation now, it's 2-1 on Sunday. Whatever happened the last two days it's behind us. It's going to be definitely a tough match against John, especially on this kind of court. I'm hoping I am going to be 100 percent and I can pull out a great match," Cilic said.

With 32 titles, the United States are the most successful Davis Cup nation ever. But they were ousted in the first round the past two years by Britain and last reached the semi-finals in 2012 -- when they were beaten by Spain.

The winners of the best-of-five match tie will take on either the Czech Republic or France in the semi-finals. France held a 2-1 lead over the Czechs in Prague going into Sunday's matches.
Cleveland (AFP) - Cleveland deployed overwhelming security Sunday, bracing for possible unrest as delegates poured into town for the Republican National Convention that will anoint Donald Trump as the partys US presidential nominee.

The killing of three police officers Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana only added to the tensions in Cleveland, where law enforcement agencies have thrown a ring of steel around downtown and anti-Trump demonstrators began marching toward the convention site.

President Barack Obama urged calm.

I know were about to enter a couple of weeks of conventions where our political rhetoric tends to be more overheated than usual, he told reporters at the White House.

And that is why it is so important that everyone right now focus on words and actions that can unite this country rather than divide it further. We dont need inflammatory rhetoric. We dont need careless accusations thrown around to score political points or to advance an agenda.

Authorities have erected eight-foot-tall (2.5-meter) metal fencing around Quicken Loans Arena, closed off streets and deployed thousands of armed police officers.

The four-day political jamboree, which begins Monday, will see the bombastic billionaire secure the nomination for the Party of Lincoln after a thumping primary victory that confounded the US establishment.

Roads in the Ohio city are lined with concrete barriers and helicopters patrol overhead, as light aircraft, paid for by sponsors, trail anti-Hillary Clinton slogans.

Law enforcement is on edge, braced for protests by demonstrators enraged by Trumps divisive presidential campaign and preparing for the worst after anti-police violence erupted in Louisiana.

We are TRYING to fight ISIS (the so-called Islamic State extremist group), and now our own people are killing our police, Trump tweeted shortly after the shooting.

Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching.

He later posted a more tempered message on Facebook.

Story continues

US authorities have been on alert since a gunman intent on killing white policemen went on a rampage and shot five Dallas officers dead earlier this month.

Cleveland, a Midwestern city of nearly 400,000, has taken out $50 million in protest insurance, and Ohios open-carry law that allows people with proper permits to carry a loaded weapon on the streets, has inflamed fears of violence.

We have policies in place for mass arrests through our prosecutors office, our clerks office and our court system, Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams told reporters.

Williams said barricades had also been erected downtown to thwart any potential terror attack after a truck bomber killed 84 people in the French city of Nice on Thursday.

We use blocking vehicles, we use concrete barriers and things like that at positions that we think may be vulnerable to attacks like that which happened in Nice, he said.

- Declare war against ISIS -

Trump, a New York tycoon who has never held elected office and who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, vowed in his latest interview to wage war against IS.

Were going to declare war against ISIS. We have to wipe out ISIS, he told CBS in excerpts aired on the eve of the convention, which will culminate with a Trump speech accepting the nomination on Thursday.

Trump made the remarks in his first joint interview with his pick for vice president, Indianas conservative governor Mike Pence, an evangelical Catholic.

Trumps choice of Pence, announced Friday, has been welcomed by 61 percent of Republicans and conservatives in critical battlegrounds, states likely to decide the November election, according to a CBS News poll.

The survey found that these voters believe Pence brings stability to the ticket and will boost Trumps chances of defeating Clinton. Pence, however, is not well known beyond the party rank and file.

- Critics and protests -

Trump faces a herculean task to win over legions of critics.

His salty rhetoric and populist message have outraged many conservatives, raising fears he has fanned a racial backlash and prompting a battle for the soul of the Republican Party.

Unusually, the Cleveland convention features no former presidents, few party luminaries and only a smattering of elected officials. Instead, it is expected to hand a starring role to Trumps family to make his case.

The first major anti-Trump protest kicked off Sunday, drawing about 200 demonstrators .

There is a real tension at the moment in the city and in Ohio in general, said student Charlie Michel, 22.

We are rejecting the invasion of the GOP and their racist ideology.

Another Stop Trump march has been permitted by the city for noon on Monday, just hours before the convention opens.

The US homeland security secretary, Jeh Johnson, told Congress last week that he was concerned about demonstrations getting out of hand.

We have absolutely no idea what to predict, said Shanna Merola, who works for the National Lawyers Guild, which is training volunteer observers to monitor interactions between police and protesters.

IT engineer Steve Thacker, 57, slung his AR-15-type semi-automatic rifle over his shoulder as he spoke to reporters about the need to protect gun rights enshrined in the US Constitution.

US political conventions, quadrennial affairs, are designed to bring a party together, formally select its presidential nominee and catapult the candidate and party toward Novembers election.
Adbucted Bhaktapur girl rescued

Police have rescued a 13-year-old girl who has been continuously raped for the past three months in Makwanpur district.
The Obama administration has spent years feuding with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but the White House quickly condemned this weekends coup attempt and made clear that it believed Erdogan  whatever his faults  was the legitimate leader of his country and needed to be returned to power as quickly as possible.

That may not be enough to prevent the failed coup from emerging as the latest strain in Washingtons chilly relationship with one of its closest regional allies.

The United States has long wanted Erdogan to do more to fight the Islamic State and moderate his increasingly authoritarian tendencies, but the coup attempt seems likely to push Erdogan in the opposite direction. Turkish officials, for their part, have blamed the coup on Fethullah Gulen, a 75-year-old cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania, and hinted that Washington was somehow complicit in the attempted putsch, charges the White House has angrily denied.

The most damaging aspect of the last few days has been the aggressive rhetoric from Turkey directed at the U.S., said Nicholas Heras of the Center for a New American Security, who has carried out extensive field research in Turkey. Erdogan clearly takes Gulens presence in the United States personally and cant understand why a man he sees as a terrorist can live freely here.

The growing tensions have been on full display in the immediate aftermath of the military effort to oust Erdogan, which left more than 290 dead and Turkey  a NATO member with aspirations of one day joining the European Union  reeling.

On Saturday, Turkey shut down all U.S. and NATO operations at the Incirlik Air Base, home to at least 1,500 American personnel and a vital hub in the U.S.-led air war against the Islamic State. It also cut electricity to the base, leaving U.S. forces using what the Defense Department described as internal power sources.

Turkish officials justified the closure by saying that coup plotters were operating out of the Incirlik base and had used airborne tankers at the facility to refuel F-16 fighter jets piloted by coup supporters. The base commander, Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, was arrested Sunday along with other officers at Incirlik, though Turkey also reopened its airspace to U.S. warplanes.

Story continues

Just as alarming to the administration, a high-ranking member of the Erdogan government accused Washington of directly helping to foment the putsch, with Turkish Labor Minister Suleyman Soylu bluntly saying that the U.S. is behind this coup attempt. Erdogan and his aides have linked the violence to Gulen and indirectly hinted that Washington bore some responsibility because the cleric lives in the United States.

The allegations prompted a sharp rebuke from Secretary of State John Kerry. According to the State Department, the top U.S. diplomat used a conversation with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu Saturday to reiterate U.S. support for the democratically elected government in Turkey, but to also stress that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations.

Kerry also pointedly urged restraint by the Turkish government and respect for due process  and its international obligations  as it investigates and uncovers additional information about those involved.

That plea is likely to fall on deaf ears with Erdogan, whose government has already launched a broad crackdown on alleged coup plotters. As many as 6,000 people  including nearly 3,000 military officers and troops  have already been detained. Turkish officials say they are continuing to look for other potential plotters and issued an arrest warrant Sunday for Erdogans top military aide, Col. Ali Yazici. The Turkish leader says those involved in the coup will pay a heavy price for their treason.

The sharp exchanges in the aftermath of the coup come on top of the long-standing U.S. criticism of Erdogans increasingly authoritarian tendencies, which include opening roughly 2,000 legal cases against political opponents, journalists, comedians, and ordinary Turks accused of insulting the president.

Top Obama administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, have also said Erdogan needs to step up his efforts to seal Turkeys southern border with Syria to prevent foreign fighters from passing through to link up with the Islamic State. Earlier this year, for example, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he would like Turkey to do more to fight the Islamic State.

Ankara, for its part, has bristled at American support for the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units, or YPG, which has emerged as one of Washingtons most effective battlefield allies in the ground fight against the Islamic State. Ankara sees the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a militant group that has killed hundreds of Turkish civilians and security personnel as it battles to create a Kurdish state in southeastern Turkey. Turkey, the United States, and the EU all view the PKK as a terrorist group, and Kurds have been blamed for a string of recent bloody bombings inside Turkey.

Heras of CNAS said Ankara knows Washington needs its help fighting the Islamic State but may warn that it will reduce its involvement unless the United States extradites Gulen to Turkey. Erdogan will use Gulen as a chit, he said.

Harsh rhetoric aside, its not clear how far Turkey is willing to go to try to force Washington to return the cleric. State Department spokesman John Kirby said Sunday that the United States has yet to receive a formal extradition request from Turkey, and Kerry and other administration officials say Ankara would first need to show clear and convincing evidence of Gulens direct involvement in the failed coup, a bar Turkey might not be able to clear.

Even if the Gulen controversy is defused, however, Washington will almost certainly have to sit back and watch as Erdogan ignores its pleas for restraint and uses the failed coup to further consolidate power and crack down on his real and perceived enemies.

David Weil, a doctoral student at Princeton currently in Turkey on a research fellowship, said those he saw celebrating the putschs failure didnt seem to acknowledge in any way that it was the increasing authoritarianism and incompetence of the ruling government that led to the attempt to remove Erdogan from power.

Erdogan, Weil added, is already trying to use the failed coup to inflame his supporters, frame opposition to him as a conspiracy against the nation, and continue the process of rooting out any and all obstacles to his personalized control over all aspects of Turkish politics.

Kerry, in other words, can continue calling for the Turkish leader to act proportionately and adhere to the rule of law. An emboldened Erdogan may just choose not to listen.

FP Middle East editor David Kenner contributed to this article.

Photo credit: ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
BELGRADE, July 17 (Reuters) - Croatia's ruling conservative HDZ party chose former diplomat Andrej Plenkovic as its new leader ahead of a snap election in September, hoping to stay in power despite a fall in support driven by graft allegations and slow economic recovery.

The soft-spoken Plenkovic, 46, is a member of the European Parliament and an economic liberal who led Croatia's accession negotiations with the European Union, which the Balkan country joined in 2013.

He will have a difficult task to improve the party's image ahead of the Sept. 11 vote, after his predecessor Tomislav Karamarko resigned amid allegations of a conflict of interest case that involved his wife's business. He denied any wrongdoing.

Political instability has hampered reforms needed to fix the budget, reduce public debt that has reached 86 percent of GDP, improve the investment climate and spur growth, which only returned last year after a six-year recession.

The party's image has also been hit by media reports questioning the transparency of the party's financial deals with several companies.

A poll released in June showed the opposition Social Democrats held a 10 percent lead over the HDZ. The party said it did not break the law, but Plenkovic promised he would pursue a course for more transparency.

"Croatia needs a new approach, a modern political platform and a strategic u-turn," Plenkovic said after being elected by the party.

The rating agency Standard & Poor's rates Croatia BB, below investment grade, and has a negative outlook on its debt.

No party is expected to win an outright majority in the election.

"Plenkovic is a choice of necessity for HDZ if they want to prevent a further decline," political analyst Zarko Puhovski told Reuters.

He also makes the party a much more acceptable coalition partner to Most, which is likely to have the role of kingmaker after the vote, Puhovski told Reuters.

HDZ, which steered Croatia to independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia in 1991, won the most votes in the last election in 2015, and formed a fragile coalition government with the reformist Most party, led by non-partisan Prime Minister Tihomir Oreskovic.

Story continues

HDZ itself triggered a no-confidence vote last month after Karamarko's resignation, pulling the cabinet down after just five months in power.

It failed to find support to form a new cabinet, prompting parliament to vote to dissolve itself on June 20.

(Reporting by Ivana Sekularac; Editing by Jan Lopatka and Alan Crosby)
ANKARA (Reuters) - The death toll from Turkey's failed military coup has risen to more than 290, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Sunday, adding that more than 1,400 people were wounded. Of the dead, more than 100 were participants in the coup, the ministry said, adding that there was no doubt the coup had been staged by followers of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, has denied involvement in the attempt to overthrow the government, condemning it as an affront to democracy. (Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
Bhutanese refugees seek repatriation

Bhutanese refugees unwilling to resettle in a third country have requested the Nepal government to take an initiative to send them back home.
In his first interview with his new running mate, Donald Trump said it was alright for Mike Pence to make a mistake in supporting the Iraq War, but not okay for Hillary Clinton to have done the same.

I dont care, Trump said on 60 Minutes when journalist Lesley Stahl asked him about Pences support of the war.

But youve used that vote of Hillarys that was the same as Governor Pence, as the example of her bad judgment, Stahl pressed.

Many people have, and frankly, Im one of the few that was right on Iraq Hes entitled to make a mistake every once in a while, Trump said.

But shes not? Stahl asked, referencing Clinton. No, Trump responded. Shes not.

One of Donald Trumps favorite cudgels against former Secretary of State Clinton is her vote for the Iraq War when she was a senator from New York, saying it shows a key difference in their decision-making ability that she supported the war and he did not. (Never mind the fact that he told Howard Stern in 2002 that he would support an invasion.)

But Indiana Gov. Pence, Trumps new running mate, also supported the war at the time. He co-sponsored and voted in favor of the bill authorizing the Iraq War when he was a House representative from Indiana, NBC reports.
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SpaceX has long had the goal of creating a fleet of reusable rockets that can fly multiple payloads to orbit and then land back on Earth, greatly reducing the cost of launching to space.

Elon Musk's spaceflight company has already brought multiple rockets back from space after launches, but they have yet to re-fly a booster, a major component of their business plan.

That should change by the end of the year.

SEE ALSO: SpaceX aims to relaunch a used Falcon 9 rocket as early as September

According to Musk, the company is planning to refurbish a landed rocket and fly it on another mission in September or October, a first for the spaceflight company. And we now know which landed Falcon 9 booster they're planning to use for the company's historic re-flight.

SpaceX is planning to fly a booster that landed on a drone ship in the ocean on April 8, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president of flight reliability, said during a press conference Saturday. (It's still unclear, however, which mission will fly aboard the rocket.)

This was the first booster to successfully land on a drone ship intact after four previously failed attempts.

The April landing marked the second time SpaceX brought a booster back down to Earth. In December 2015, the company landed a Falcon 9 booster back on land in Florida after successfully launching a clutch of satellites to orbit.

That first booster may not fly again, if Musk has anything to say about it.

"I think we'll probably keep this one on the ground just because it's kind of unique, it's the first one we brought back," he said after the December landing. "So I think we'll probably keep this one on the ground."

Image: SpaceX

SpaceX's goal to reduce the cost of spaceflight, thereby opening up outer space to many more people and companies, hinges on the idea that reusable rockets could be a viable option.

Musk's company isn't the only one banking on this notion.

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Jeff Bezos' spaceflight outfit Blue Origin is also hoping to use reusable rockets for orbital and suborbital missions in the future. Blue Origin has already flown and landed a suborbital rocket four times.

Currently, SpaceX has landed four boosters back on Earth after sending payloads to orbit, but that could change shortly.

SpaceX will attempt another land landing in Florida after launching an un-crewed Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station for NASA on Monday.
Istanbul (AFP) - A military aide to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was taken into custody on Sunday accused of involvement in the attempted coup, the state-run news agency Anadolu reported.

Colonel Ali Yazici, who had only started working for Erdogan in August last year, is one of about 6,000 people detained in a massive crackdown since Friday's coup bid.

He was in Ankara at the time of the putsch, while Erdogan was on holiday in the Mediterranean resort of Mamaris, CNN Turk television reported.

It was not immediately known what role he was accused of having in the bid to overthrow Erdogan's government.

Those detained in the mass arrests include senior army commanders, judges and prosecutors and the crackdown has raised alarm bells in the internatonal community.

Suspects are being charged with "membership of an armed terrorist organisation" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish republic using force and violence", the Hurriyet Daily News reported.

Erdogan accuses his ally turned sworn enemy Fethullah Gulen of leading the "terorist group" and orchestrating the coup, allegations the US-based Islamic cleric denies.
Istanbul (AFP) - President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that Turkey would consider reinstating the death penalty after the failed attempt to overthrow his government.

"In democracies, decisions are made based on what the people say. I think our government will speak with the opposition and come to a decision," he said, reacting to crowds in Istanbul calling for capital punishment.

"We cannot delay this anymore because in this country, those who launch a coup will have to pay the price for it," he told supporters after attending funerals for the putsch victims.

In the aftermath of Friday's foiled coup, there have been frequent calls from thousands of Erdogan supporters for capital punishment to make a return.

Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2004 under reforms aimed at obtaining European Union membership.

Reinstatement would create further issues between the EU and Ankara in the already stalled membership talks.

Erdogan repeated calls for the United States to extradite Fethullah Gulen, blaming the coup on the US-based Islamic preacher and his followers, which he describes as a terrorist organisation.

Gulen condemned the military uprising "in the strongest terms" in a rare interview with reporters in Pennsylvania and rejected charges of being the coup mastermind, suggesting Erdogan may have staged it himself.

Erdogan earlier broken down in tears at the funeral of his long-time friend Erol Olcak and his 16-year-old son who were shot dead on Friday on the Bosphorus bridge.
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Sunday to purge the "virus" within state bodies, during a speech at the funeral of victims killed during the coup bid he blames on his enemy Fethullah Gulen.

"We will continue to clean the virus from all state bodies because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state.

"We knew this and told all relevant authorities," he warned thousands of mourners at the Fatih mosque in Istanbul.

During a passionate speech, the president paid tribute to the "martyrs" of democracy, insisting that the people were stronger.

"They may have tanks but we have our faith. We will not leave the squares ... but we will continue defiantly.

"I said this yesterday, the people's demand for democracy cannot be swept aside. This is your right."

During the attempted coup, 161 civilians and regular troops lost their lives in Istanbul and Ankara, according to government figures.

More than 100 coup plotters were also killed, the military said.

Despite fears in the West and the United States that Erdogan would wreak revenge, he said: "Don't forget this, we are not vengeful."

The remarks appeared to be in response to US President Barack Obama's call for all parties to "act within the rule of law" and for leaders to "avoid actions that would lead to further violence or instability".

A Turkish minister said Sunday more than 6,000 people had been arrested and the number would rise.
By Alastair Macdonald and Robin Emmott BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European foreign ministers will urge Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Monday to respect the law and human rights in dealing with defeated coup plotters but have limited leverage over their strategic neighbor. Diplomats said an EU line on Turkey would be agreed after ministers breakfast in Brussels with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. He shares concern over Erdogan's authoritarian turn and will discuss Turkey's role as an ally in Syria, in facing off with Russia and as gatekeeper on a migrant route to Europe. What was to be a routine if busy meeting, to address before the summer break such simmering crises as Ukraine and Libya, African migration and the China's maritime expansion, has been swept into a perfect storm as three major developments battered Brussels' agenda in 48 hours on successive days last week: -- The accelerated formation of a new British government under Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday and her choice of Brussels-baiting journalist and Brexit campaigner Boris Johnson as foreign secretary. He will brief uncomfortable counterparts on how Britain, one of the EU's two main military powers, may cooperate on foreign policy once it leaves the Union. It will be the first high-level EU meeting for one of May's new ministers. -- The killing of 84 people by a Tunisian-born local man who ploughed a truck along the seafront at Nice as France celebrated Bastille Day on Thursday, claimed by Syria-based Islamic State. Ministers will observe a minute's silence for the victims and discuss, after the third major Islamist attack in France in 18 months and four months after bombers struck Brussels itself, how to cooperate against radicals at home and IS in the Middle East. -- And finally, on Friday, the military coup that crumbled when Erdogan rallied his supporters onto the streets and secured the loyalty of a greater part of the security services. BREAKFAST WITH KERRY Kerry, who will meet his EU counterparts for two hours from 8 a.m. (0600 GMT), said in Luxembourg on Sunday that the coup bid in NATO ally Turkey had not disrupted the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State, although Incirlik air base, used notably by the U.S. and German air forces, was locked down for a time. French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, who is expected to brief colleagues on Paris's view of repeated IS assaults on its territory, said on Sunday there "questions" over whether Turkey, under Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK party, was a "viable" ally, referring to "suspicions" about Ankara's motivations. And he insisted European backing for Erdogan against the coup was not a "blank cheque" for him to oppress his opponents. Over the weekend, European Union leaders had voiced support for Erdogan and the elected Turkish government against a shadowy uprising by parts of the armed force but, after years of growing alarm at Erdogan's bid to enhance his personal power and ignore or oppress opponents, they also urged him to respect the rule of law and the "checks and balances" of Turkey's constitution. EU MIGRATION DEAL The EU faces a particularly tricky time with Turkey in the next three months as it tries to finalize a deal struck in March to reward Ankara for preventing migrants from crossing to Greece by channeling up to 6 billion euros ($6.6 billion) in aid to the 2.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, reviving EU accession talks and scrapping visas for Turks wishing to visit Europe. European leaders have already bitten their tongues to stifle criticism of Erdogan's crackdown on ethnic Kurds, Turkish media and other dissent to arrange the bargain. But the visa waiver is still dependent on Ankara dropping its resistance to amending a counter-terrorism law -- something not made easier by the coup -- and on approval in the rights-minded European Parliament. Turkish officials have warned that they could reopen the migration route if the EU fails to deliver its part of the deal. The possible jailing soon of Kurdish lawmakers who were stripped of immunity and May, as well as a revival of the death penalty for the putschists as Erdogan seemed ready to concede to a baying crowd on Sunday, would create major ructions. An end to executions is a sine qua non for even discussing EU membership. Many EU lawmakers are uncomfortable about helping Erdogan in order to shield Europe from a repeat of the arrival last year of a million migrants via Turkey. European commissioner Guenther Oettinger, an ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel who brokered the migration deal, said further human rights curbs would leave Erdogan internationally isolated: "We will," he said, "Continue our cooperation in strict accordance with the rule of law and with our values." But as Marc Pierini, a former EU envoy to Ankara, said: "There is no real obligation for the Turkish president to modify his course of reining in the judiciary, the media etc." Now at think-tank Carnegie, Pierini said: "The EU political reflex will always be to talk about values -- but values don't matter much." Senior EU officials believe they do have leverage on Erdogan as they appeal to him to respect the views of the half of the country which did not back him but also did not back the coup. They argue that Ankara needs EU trade and investment as well as a strategic alliance in a region where it has few friends and also that the migrant deal was less critical to this year's drop in arrivals than the sealing of Greece's Balkan borders, which deterred people crossing from Turkey hoping to reach Germany. At the same time, Europeans are reluctant to press Erdogan too hard for fear that instability in Turkey, as demonstrated by the coup attempt, could be worse than the current situation: "We must not jump to conclusions and lash out," a senior EU official told Reuters. "The country itself is so fragile" ($1 = 0.9065 euros) (Additional reporting by Paul Taylor in Brussels; Writing by Alastair Macdonald, editing by David Evans)
Soldiers secure the area as supporters of Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan protest in Istanbuls Taksim Square early Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

The people of Istanbul took to the streets late Friday, answering the call of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to show support for his government against an attempted military coup. They rallied in Taksim Square, the center of Istanbul, where they were caught up in the chaotic, treacherous intersection of Turkeys politics, religion and military. Protesters climbed the monuments to Turkeys political leaders, raised Turkish flags and clashed with police.

This is my account of the events as I experienced them.

Just after midnight, protesters  shouting, honking horns, watched by police on the ground and in helicopters overhead  marched to Taksim Square. They were chanting slogans in support of Erdogan  God is great and Soldiers out  but the police had surrounded the square in the face of this unpredictable demonstration. At around 1:45 a.m., a group tried to push through the barricades around the square, and shots were fired into the crowd.

People scattered and the injured lay on the ground while medics rushed to assist them, and the protesters around them continued their chants.

I went to Taksim Square with my camera to document the protests and quickly realized I was going to stand out as one of the few women, and an American, in a crowd of overwhelmingly male protesters. An officer  ponytailed, wearing a bulletproof vest  grabbed my camera and demanded to know what I was doing. I offered to leave, but he refused to let me go. Another officer yanked my wrists behind my back and tied them with zip ties, hard enough to make me think they might be cut.

SLIDESHOW: Attempted military coup in Turkey >>>

They led me to a bus and shoved me halfway up the aisle. In the back, several officers were beating a man  an Italian tourist, I learned  around the head. Then the police ordered us to sit and, in English, to shut up.

Moments later, police brought in another man, a Turkish protester. He was struggling, and they shoved him into a seat in front of me, handcuffing him to the rings on the bus seats.

Story continues

A police officer in plain clothes, carrying a gun on his hip, pulled me from my seat and moved me back, away from the Turkish man, whom I will call H. The plainclothes officer must have realized that the situation could get dangerous, and it did. Several officers crowded around H; they beat him in the head with their fists, punched him in the torso and yelled at him. Another officer noticed me and slapped me on the side of the head, opening a small cut. My face hit the bus window.

The plainclothes officer shouted at him. I was taken off the bus to a trailer nearby and put in a windowless room, where I was eventually joined by the other two detainees.

The shouts outside became louder, and I heard gunfire. I learned later that tanks had been driven into the square, possibly under the command of the coup plotters, and crowds had attempted to commandeer them and disarm the soldiers inside. Fighter planes flew low over the square, causing the room I was in to shake; that was followed by detonations and gunfire.

In the Turkish capital, Ankara, a tank moves into position early Saturday as people attempt to stop it. (AP Photo)

In the room the police were less hostile. During the shooting, they turned out the lights and moved us to take shelter under a table. They brought us water, tea and cigarettes, and eventually took the ties off our wrists.

They were young men, in their 20s. They talked about their lives, the women they married and what they hoped to do after they finished their police service. They took pride in their professionalism; they said they hated the violence in the square and that they were working long hours to keep order. We are nicer than the American police, one told me. We are better. When I asked why, he responded, They are killing our brothers, the Muslims and the black people. This is not good.

But their views were very much those of the Turkish security apparatus. This is a bad time in Istanbul, one officer told me. These terrorists running around, it is not [normally] like this. It seemed they viewed anyone who would cause problems during the protest as a terrorist.

H was not impressed; at one point, when the police were out of the room, he clutched his side and muttered that they were jerks. Eventually medics arrived to inspect his injuries and took him away in an ambulance.

By sunrise, the clashes had stopped.

The Italian tourist repeatedly asked to leave. He seemed dazed, frightened and confused; perhaps as a joke, he asked the officers to shoot him, saying he wanted to die in Turkey. It didnt go over well; the cops taunted him back and said he could have a last cigarette before they executed him.

A pro-government rally in Istanbuls Taksim Square on Saturday. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)

In the early hours of Saturday morning we were taken to a police station, where we met two others who had been detained overnight without charges. One was a female photojournalist and the other a Turkish man whose face was bruised around the eyes. There were small cuts on his neck. The photojournalist said she had been grabbed and dragged by the hair when she was detained. She wasnt injured, but she worried about her gear, which seemed to have been lost.

The television carried statements from Erdogan and news from Ankara. At least 265 people were killed in the capital and in Istanbul that night, and government authorities reported that hundreds of soldiers had been arrested on suspicion of participation in the attempted coup.

Five soldiers were brought to the police station while we waited. They were escorted by investigators into one of the rooms for questioning, and we didnt see them again.

The Turkish detainee got up on several occasions to speak with one of the investigative policemen. The officer, dressed in jeans and checkered shirt with a long beard and hip haircut, offered the man cigarettes, and they left the room. Afterward the investigator called me into the office and reviewed the footage on my camera. He said, You cannot have this. You cannot leave here, you will have to spend five nights here.

When I asked what my charges were, he said, I cannot tell you. He refused to allow me a phone call. I explained that I couldnt just disappear without alerting someone. He sighed and went to speak again with the Turkish detainee, who had served as an intermediary and translator off and on. When he returned he said, I want to help you. I will make a call and tell someone there is no problem, and then you can go.

But he repeated I could not keep the footage of the protests, and he took the memory card from my camera.

Finally, the officer arranged for the four of us to be inspected at a hospital, had us sign paperwork acknowledging the events of the night and sent us on our way, nearly 12 hours after being detained.

Later I learned that the Turkish protester was largely responsible for our release.

The Turkish police say they want to preserve order and unity, but sometimes discipline breaks down. In the face of protests, sometimes they resort to violence and intimidation. What are the rights of a foreigner  or even a citizen  who is detained during a demonstration? It isnt always clear, and the police dont always bother to communicate.

One Turkish man at the hospital said, I miss the days of justice.

But whether the government, the military or the police can give it to him may have to await a new government with a true popular mandate. For now the masses stand with Erdogan, combating the militarys attempt to take over the country and demanding a civilian-led democracy, while they wonder what freedoms they have left.
Premier Li Keqiang chats animatedly with Mongolian president Elbegdorj and German Chancellor Merkel before the leaders attending the 11th ASEM summit take group picture on July 15.[Photo/China News Service]

ULAANBAATAR - In Mongolia over the weekend, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's effort to promote China's stance on the South China Sea issue received broad support during the 11th Asian-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit.

Li said Saturday before he returned to China that the South China Sea arbitration award will have no impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime interests.

Speaking in an informal meeting during the summit, Li said the South China Sea issue should not be subject to multilateral discussions from the very beginning, or be included in the summit's agenda.

"But since certain countries commented on the issue, it is thus necessary for China to come out to clarify its stance and spell out the truth," he said.

Li said China has never participated in the arbitration unilaterally initiated by the Philippines, adding that his country neither accepts nor acknowledges the so-called arbitration award.

"By doing so, we are both exercising our rights in accordance with international law, and safeguarding the dignity of international law," he said.

"Under no circumstance will the arbitration award exert any impact on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea," Li added.

The Chinese premier said China remains committed to settling the South China Sea disputes via dialogue and consultation with countries directly involved on the basis of historical facts and in accordance with international law, so as to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea.

This is the first time the Chinese premier has made an open statement on the South China Sea issue at an international forum following the South China Sea arbitration award issued Tuesday.

Li did not include the issue in his keynote speech at the start of the two-day summit. However, faced with certain nations' attempts to stir up tension and interfere in the South China Sea issue in the summit, Li expounded China's stance of non-acceptance of and non-participation in the arbitration proceedings, as part of his diplomatic offensive.

In a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc Thursday, Li said the South China Sea issue should be solved through bilateral negotiations between relevant parties in line with historical facts, international law and the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC).

One day later, he told Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen that China will work with members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to protect regional peace and stability as well as the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea.
Citizenship and violence

Learn from experiences elsewhere but bring the learning back to your own context
ATHENS (Reuters) - The Turkish soldiers who fled to Greece in a helicopter after a failed military coup against the government were brought before a prosecutor in the northern Greek city of Alexandroupolis on Sunday, accused of crossing into Greece illegally. The eight men have sought political asylum in Greece, fearing their lives would be in danger in Turkey, the lawyer representing four of them told Greek TV. Turkey has said it wants the "traitors" extradited soon. Rebel soldiers used tanks, helicopters and fighter jets to try to topple Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Friday night, strafing parliament and the intelligence headquarters in Ankara while seizing a bridge and surrounding the airport in Istanbul. Vasiliki Marinaki, the lawyer representing four of the men, told Greece's Skai TV the men were following orders by their superiors to transport injured people from the streets of Istanbul via helicopter to ambulances elsewhere. "That's what they did until they came under fire by police," Marinaki said. "They did not know there was a coup and they were not involved in it," Marinaki said. In a phone call late on Saturday, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan the requests would be processed "swiftly" but with "absolute respect" to what is stipulated by international law and human rights treaties. His foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, told his Turkish counterpart on Saturday it would be "borne very seriously in mind" by authorities that the arrested stand accused in their country of violating constitutional legality and attempting to overthrow democracy. (Reporting by Karolina Tagaris; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
CAIRO (Reuters) - Audio from the flight recorder of crashed EgyptAir flight MS804 mentions a fire on board the plane in its final moments, the investigation committee said on Saturday, confirming what sources on the committee had previously told Reuters. The Airbus A320 plunged into the eastern Mediterranean en route from Paris to Cairo on May 19. All 66 people on board were killed. The cause of the crash remains unknown. Earlier analysis of the plane's flight data recorder showed there had been smoke in the lavatory and avionics bay, while recovered wreckage from the jet's front section showed signs of high temperature damage and soot. Initial audio extracted from the flight deck voice recorder had indicated an attempt to put out a fire on the jet before it crashed, committee sources had told Reuters. The committee said on Saturday it was still "too early to determine the reason or the place where that fire occurred." The committee also said the John Lethbridge vessel, belonging to Mauritius-based Deep Ocean Search, had completed its search for human remains, which will now be transferred to Cairo for DNA analysis. (Reporting by Eric Knecht; Editing by Mark Potter)
Paris (AFP) - French lawmakers, prompted by the Bastille Day massacre in Nice, were Tuesday to debate extending the country's state of emergency for a fourth time amid mounting criticism of the government's response to extremist attacks.

President Francois Hollande had announced last Thursday that he planned to lift the measures on July 26.

But within hours, he changed tack after a truck driver ploughed through a crowd leaving a July 14 fireworks display in the Cote d'Azur resort.

The ruling Socialists have proposed a three-month extension but government sources told AFP that they would yield to the demands of the conservative opposition and keep the draconian measures in place until the beginning of 2017.

The state of emergency imposed after the November Paris attacks gives the police sweeping powers to carry out searches and place people under house arrest.

The National Assembly is expected to swiftly back the extension, after which it moves to the Senate

Former president and opposition Republicans leader Nicolas Sarkozy, who is eyeing another run for the top job in 2017 elections, is demanding the government go even further.

Sarkozy, who has accused President Francois Hollande of failing to do everything necessary to protect the French, has called for anyone showing signs of being radicalised to be forced to wear an electronic tag, placed under house arrest or kept in a detention centre.

"We can't lock people up on the basis of mere suspicion, or suspicion of suspicion," minister for parliamentary relations Jean-Marie Le Guen retorted Tuesday.

Five days after the attack, 70 people are still hospitalised, 19 in critical condition.

On Monday, investigators said that 31-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who used a 19-tonne truck to mow down people, had shown "recent interest" in jihadist activity.

However Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said there was no direct evidence of Bouhlel's links to IS -- which claimed the attack.

Story continues

Investigators found "very violent" photos on his computer, of corpses, fighters posing with the IS flag, and photos of Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.

The father-of-three also searched online for information about the terror attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida that left 49 dead, and the Paris suburb of Magnanville -- where a police couple was killed last month. Both attacks were linked to IS.

- Mass hotel cancellations -

The Nice attack came eight months after IS jihadists killed 130 people across Paris, and 18 months after three days of terror at the Charlie Hebdo weekly and a Jewish supermarket killed 17.

Thirteen of the 84 victims have yet to be identified.

Tourism on the Cote d'Azur, where Nice -- France's second most-visit city after Paris -- is situated, has been battered by the attack.

In Extenso tourism consultancy said hotel cancellation rates were running at 20-40 percent.

The aftershocks are being felt in the capital also, where the director of the luxury Plaza Athenee hotel told AFP the phone had been "ringing off the hook with cancellations for July, August and September".

Unlike the perpetrators of the Paris attacks, Bouhlel, a petty criminal with a history of violence and depression, did not travel to the Middle East for training or jihad.

Molins, the prosecutor, said IS's call for supporters to strike targets in France had emboldened some people to act "without needing to go to Syria and without precise orders".

- Psychotic tendencies -

Bouhlel had a history of violence, with a doctor he consulted in Tunisia as a youth describing him as having psychotic tendencies.

In March, he received a suspended sentence for "armed assault" after beating a driver with a nail-studded plank in an episode of road rage.

He showed no interest in religion until recently, Molins said, with acquaintances telling people he "ate pork, drank alcohol, took drugs and had an unbridled sexual activity".

However earlier this month, he stopped shaving his beard, telling friends it was for "religious" purposes.

Six people are still being held over the attacks, including a 38-year-old Albanian suspected of providing Bouhlel with a pistol he used to fire at the police who shot him dead.

In a sign of the mounting frustration over a string of extremists bombings, shootings and stabbings that have killed over 230 people in 18 months, Prime Minister Manuel Valls was booed and heckled on Monday at a remembrance ceremony in Nice.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has pointed to several steps taken by the government to boost security, including sending thousands of troops into the streets.

"There is no zero risk," Cazeneuve said. "By saying this we are telling the truth to the French and tackling the threat with lucidity."
Cherbourg (France) (AFP) - While Britain's exit is expected to have an limited overall impact on the EU, offshore fishermen based in northern France face the grim prospect of losing access to their best waters.

If the yet to be negotiated Brexit terms mean French fishermen must stay out of British waters "one might as well sell the ship", said Xavier Perrotte, the second in command of the Remember, a 23-metre (75-foot) trawler.

The Remember with its eight-man crew sails the roughly 100 kilometres (60 miles) from its home port of Cherbourg in Normandy to waters off the English coast where it pulls in half of its catch.

France's national fishermen's association has already warned the government that Brexit could "very strongly impact" the Brittany, Normandy and northern regions.

Not all fishermen will be impacted, however.

Ships less than 12 metres rarely leave French territorial waters, except in the narrowest parts of the Channel, and they make up 80 percent of the national fleet according to official data.

But according to catch, the big boats play a major role.

At Cherbourg, big trawlers account for two-thirds of the fish landed.

Worries are acute in ports where large trawlers dock, particularly in Boulogne-sur-mer, France's top fishing port that hosts ships as long as 50 metres.

- 'Very worried' -

"If tomorrow we lose our historical access to British waters, that will sound the end of French fishing in Boulogne -- the impact will be enormous," said Bruno Margolle, head of the CME regional fishing cooperative.

In the neighbouring Calais region where the Channel narrows to as close as 28 kilometres, they are "very worried", said Olivier Lepretre, president of the local fishing council.

"If the British close their waters, we will lose important fishing grounds that account for 70 percent of our catch," he said.

Even where the Channel is wider, French trawlers could lose a lot: currently they can sail as close as six nautical miles (11 kilometres) to the British coast, while British ships can't fish closer than 22 kilometres to the French coast.

Story continues

Sebastien Sagot, owner of a 24-metre trawler based at Treport, worries about a "big drop in revenues" if he can no longer fish in British waters.

Fishing further out in the North Sea would cost more in fuel and often requires different equipment, some of which is not authorised in French waters.

"There is no fallback solution," said Jean-Pierre Le Visage, director of Scapeche, operator of France's largest commercial fishing fleet.

"It is too early to say if the consequences will be horrendous" but "if British waters are closed then we will lose 70 to 80 percent of our volumes" he said.

Le Visage said that at the Brittany port of Lorient, its main base, some 9,500 out of the 11,000 tonnes of fish it landed there were caught in British waters.

Across the region, fishermen hope the negotiations on Britain's EU exit result in a reasonable deal.

Those hopes are largely based on the need of Britain to sell its catch in European markets.

"There are products that the British fish but don't eat, and the base tariff to get into the European market is 24 percent," said Richard Brouzes, who heads up the fishermen association in Normandy.

"The idea is to say to them: 'You get access to our markets, we get access to your waters'".
Note: This article is courtesy of Iris.xyz

By Marguerita Cheng

In his keynote address at a 2013 G8 Conference , British Prime Minister David Cameron voiced his support for impact investing, believing that European governments should do more to support socially-responsible investments.

The World Economic Forum has predicted the impact investment market will grow to $500 billion by 2020. Other analysts place the figure closer to $1 trillion. Despite all the enthusiasm surrounding impact investing, some financial advisors remain uninformed. According to a CFA Institute report, 66% of advisors admitted to being unfamiliar with the practice. The continued growth of impact investing will depend on educating financial advisors and investors.

A major reason for this expected growth is the impending transfer of wealth from parents to their children. Millennials and Generation Xers stand to inherit between $30 and $40 trillion dollars from the baby boomer generation. The magnitude of this wealth transfer is unmatched by previous generations. Beyond simply the size of the inheritance, Millennials have different priorities than the generations before them. Younger investors seek investments that yield a social return, as well as a financial one.

When asked about the primary purpose of business, 36% of Millennials selected Improve Society as their answer. Other answers included Enable Progress, which was chosen by 25% of participants, and Create Wealth, which was picked only 15% of the time (Deloitte Survey, 2014).

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In the past, investments in emerging or non-traditional markets were viewed as exceedingly risky. A lack of transparency and available information discouraged investors from exploring opportunities abroad. The digital age has changed that. Enhanced connectivity now makes it possible for investors to act wisely when investing in emerging markets. Moreover, the credit ratings in many developing nationssuch as Mexico and Brazilhave improved as governments exercise greater fiscal responsibility. This development creates more opportunity for impact investing.

Investing for gender equality is rapidly becoming one of the most popular forms of impact investing. The goal is to promote gender parity and personal empowerment through debt and equity investments. There are three basic types of gender equality investments: supporting female-owned enterprises, funding companies that offer products and services for women, or expanding employment opportunities for women.

Click here to read the full story on Iris.xyz.
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Lufthansa and tour operators Thomas Cook AG and TUI resumed flights from Germany to Turkey on Sunday, where 200,000 Germans are on summer holiday, following the failed coup against President Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey widened a crackdown on suspected supporters of the military coup attempt, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000, and the government said it was in full control of the country and economy. Lufthansa has resumed flying to Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and Bodrum, the company said on Sunday. Only a flight between Istanbul and Frankfurt as well as a flight between Munich and Ankara had been canceled, a spokesman for Lufthansa said. Lufthansa unit Eurowings has also resumed flights to Turkey. A spokesman for Thomas Cook AG said, "On Saturday and Sunday, the planes took off for Turkey, only a select few guests did not take their flight." A spokeswoman for TUI Deutschland said flights had resumed and of the 18,000 people currently on holiday in Turkey, only 30 had opted to come back early. Most German tourists are staying in and around Antalya. "It is a normal Sunday for us," she said. British Airways flights from Britain to Turkish destinations including Istanbul and Izmir also resumed on Sunday, according to the airline's website, after the firm canceled all flights to Turkey on Saturday. "We'll be flying a reduced schedule to Turkey today," a spokeswoman said. "We continue to keep our flights to Turkey under review." (Reporting by Peter Maushagen and Till Weber. Additional reporting by Costas Pitas in London; writing by Edward Taylor, editing by David Evans)
Coming together

Initiative of various countries to be a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is encouraging
By Humeyra Pamuk and Orhan Coskun ANKARA/ISTANBUL (Reuters) - At the height of the attempt to overthrow Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, the rebel pilots of two F-16 fighter jets had Erdogan's plane in their sights. And yet he was able to fly on. The Turkish leader was returning to Istanbul from a holiday near the coastal resort of Marmaris after a faction in the military launched the coup attempt on Friday night, sealing off a bridge across the Bosphorus, trying to capture Istanbul's main airport and sending tanks to parliament in Ankara. "At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan's plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul. They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him," a former military officer with knowledge of the events told Reuters. "Why they didn't fire is a mystery," he said. A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has ruled the country of about 80 million people since 2003, could have sent Turkey spiraling into conflict and marked another seismic shift in the Middle East, five years after the Arab uprisings erupted and plunged its southern neighbor Syria into civil war. A senior Turkish official confirmed to Reuters that Erdogan's business jet had been harassed while flying from the airport that serves Marmaris by two F-16s commandeered by the coup plotters but that he had managed to reach Istanbul safely. A second senior official also said the presidential jet had been "in trouble in the air" but gave no details. Erdogan said as the coup unfolded that the plotters had tried to attack him in the resort town of Marmaris and had bombed places he had been at shortly after he left. He "evaded death by minutes", the second official said. Around 25 soldiers in helicopters descended on a hotel in Marmaris on ropes, shooting, just after Erdogan had left in an apparent attempt to seize him, broadcaster CNN Turk said. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim had also been directly targeted in Istanbul during the coup bid and had narrowly escaped, the official said, without giving details. Flight tracker websites showed a Gulfstream IV aircraft, a type of business jet owned by the Turkish government, take off from Dalaman airport, which is about an hour and a quarter's drive from Marmaris, at about 2240 GMT on Friday. It later circled in what appeared to be a holding pattern just south of Istanbul, around the time when a Reuters witness in the airport was still hearing bursts of gunfire, before finally coming in to land. Gunfire and explosions rocked both Istanbul and Ankara through Friday night, as the armed faction which tried to seize power strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in the capital. At one point it ordered state television to read out a statement declaring a nationwide curfew. But the attempt crumbled as forces loyal to Erdogan pushed the rebels back and as the Turkish leader, at one point appearing on broadcaster CNN Turk in a video call from a mobile phone, urged people to take to the streets to support him. More than 290 people were killed in the violence, 104 of them coup supporters, the rest largely civilians and police officers. The aerial aspect of the plot appears to have centered on the Akinci air base around 50 km (30 miles) northwest of Ankara, with at least 15 pilots involved under the orders of a rebel commander, according to the former military officer. The head of the armed forces, Hulusi Akar, was held hostage at the base during the coup attempt but was eventually rescued. Jets from Akinci piloted by the rebels roared low over Istanbul and Ankara repeatedly during the chaos of Friday night, shattering windows and terrifying civilians with sonic booms. Fighter jets taking off from another air base at Eskisehir, west of Ankara, were scrambled to bomb Akinci and try to stop the rebels. However, the rogue aircraft were able to keep flying through the night by refueling mid-air after a tanker plane was commandeered, the first senior official said. The tanker aircraft was taken from the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, which is used by the U.S.-led coalition to bomb Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The commander of Incirlik was detained on Sunday for complicity, the official said. MASTERMINDS Three senior officials in Ankara said Akin Ozturk, head of the air force until 2015 and a member of High Military Council (YAS), the top body overseeing the armed forces, was one of the masterminds of the plot. He was among thousands of soldiers detained, pictured on Sunday in handcuffs wearing a striped polo shirt at Ankara police headquarters. Ozturk was due to be retired this August at a meeting of the YAS, which convenes twice a year. According to his biography, still on the military's website, he was born in 1952. The second mastermind was thought to be Muharrem Kose, a former legal adviser to the chief of military staff, the same three Ankara officials said. They described Kose as a follower of Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based cleric whose network Erdogan has blamed for carrying out the coup attempt. Kose was removed from his post in March for misconduct but had not been discharged from the armed forces, one of the officials said. His whereabouts are currently unknown. "There were serious preparations ongoing for a very long time. The two people in question seem to have been the brains behind the coup attempt," the official said, declining to be identified because the investigation is still continuing. Erdogan and the government have long accused Gulen's followers of trying to create a "parallel structure" within the courts, police, armed forces and media with the aim of seizing power, a charge the cleric has repeatedly denied. "NOT FULLY PREPARED" Erdogan, his roots in Islamist politics, has always had a difficult relationship with the military, which long saw itself as the guardian of secularism in Turkey, carrying out three coups and forcing a fourth, Islamist-led government from power in the second half of the 20th century. Coup plot trials saw hundreds of officers jailed while Erdogan was prime minister, as the government used the courts to clip the wings of the armed forces. The allegations were later discredited and convictions overturned, but the actions damaged morale and fueled resentment. Yet the coup plotters appear to have overestimated the support they would find within the military ranks. "It was outside the chain of command which was the biggest handicap for the coup plotters," said Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and a former Turkish diplomat. "They had an insufficient portfolio of resources. They were grossly under-equipped to achieve their strategic objectives ... There was definitely quite a degree of incompetence compared to how coups were done here in the past." At one point they tried to silence CNN Turk, forcing the evacuation of the studio. When it came back on air, anchorwoman Nevsin Mengu described the soldiers as young and with "only fear in their eyes and no sign of devotion or determination". The former military officer said the coup plotters appeared to have launched their attempt prematurely because they realized they were under surveillance, something corroborated by other officials in Ankara. "They weren't fully prepared. The plans were leaked, they found out they were being monitored and it all apparently forced them to move faster than planned," the ex-officer said. They also underestimated Erdogan's ability to rally the crowds, his appeal for supporters to take to the streets bringing people out in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere even as tanks took to the streets and jets screamed overhead. Sertac Koc, press adviser to the mayor of Kazan district where the Akinci base is located, said local residents started noticing the high number of jets taking off as events unfolded. "When they saw jets hitting parliament in Ankara and people in Istanbul, they got organized among themselves and marched to the base to try and stop them," he told Reuters by phone. "They tried to block traffic to the base by parking their vehicles, burning hay to block the jets' vision, and in the end they attempted to cut the power to the base," he said. Seven people were killed when the rebel soldiers opened fire, Koc said, among the dozens of civilians killed across the country in one of Turkey's worst nights of bloodshed. (Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva, Paul Taylor in Brussels; Writing by Nick Tattersall; editing by David Stamp)
By Ginger Gibson CLEVELAND (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called the shooting on Sunday that killed three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, "devastating." "There is no justification for violence, for hate, for attacks on men and women who put their lives on the line every day in service of our families and communities," Clinton said in a statement. Today's devastating assault on police officers in Baton Rouge is an assault on all of us," she said. (Reporting by Ginger Gibson; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is ahead of her GOP rival Donald Trump in a new national poll released on the eve of the Republican National Convention.

Clinton leads Trump by 46% to 41%, according to the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, which was released on Sunday. That five-point margin remains the same from a Journal/NBC News survey taken last month before the FBI criticized Clintons private email practices as extremely careless while she was secretary of state.

The poll also found that Clinton has a huge advantage among African-Americans with 84% supporting Clinton compared to 7% backing Trump. Clinton also had the support of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 by 55% to 32%, and women by 52% to 37%.

Trump is ahead among whites by 50% to 37%, as well as among men by 46% to 39%, according to the survey.

The poll interviewed 1,000 registered voters between July 9 and July 13. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1%.

[WSJ]
Istanbul (AFP) - Their name means service and followers insist the Hizmet movement is an informal grouping of individuals promoting moderate Islam and the development of poorer countries as well as Turkey.

For their opponents, it is a shadowy organisation with links in the media and business whose spiritual leader Fethullah Gulen has much unelected and unaccountable influence in the country.

Now the movement and Gulen are accused of launching Friday's military coup together, acting under the name the "Fethullahci Terror Organisation (FETO)", accusations they deny strongly.

- Altruistic Muslims? -

The movement's leader is a Sunni Muslim, part of the Hanafi tradition of Islamic jurisprudence and is believed to have been influenced by the ideas of one of the most significant Muslim theologians of the modern world, Said Nursi.

Gulen promotes a tolerant and moderate Sufi Islam, of which Hizmet's supporters are also affiliates, but he himself is a reclusive figure.

He has been active since the 60s and 70s but now lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania in the United States.

Hizmet promotes peace and harmony through hard work and altruism, supporters say.

Their charity efforts and work on education spreads as far as the United States where they have over 100 charter schools, the largest network within the country.

Hizmet-affiliated schools can also be found in Africa including Kenya and as far as Pakistan and Kazakhstan, usually funded by wealthy Turkish businessmen.

The movement encourages followers to work in the civil service and be useful members of society through charity or employment.

It is not known exactly how many individuals are part of the movement but some believe it could be millions across the world.

There are many think-tanks, businesses, media organisations linked to the movement worldwide including the Journalist and Writers Foundation based in Istanbul and the Rumi Forum in Washington.

- Purge of followers -

Story continues

Followers of the movement have had senior positions within Turkey's civil service, media and business, though that has declined since the authorities' purge of those accused of Hizmet links.

Media organisations in Turkey linked to Hizmet have come under great scrutiny and attack.

In March, the headquarters of Zaman daily newspaper was seized by authorities and state administrators put in charge of the parent company, Feza.

That incident came five months after Koza-Ipek media group, parent company of Bugun TV broadcaster -- was ordered to be seized by a court ruling.

After Friday's coup thousands more individuals accused of Hizmet links have been detained and Erdogan suggested more were to come, saying the "virus" that spread within state bodies must be cleaned.
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The commander of the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey that is used by the U.S. and other coalition partners has been detained for complicity in the attempted coup, a government official said on Sunday. General Bekir Ercan Van was detained, the official said. Incirlik is used by the United States and other coalition partners in the fight against Islamic State militants in Syria. (Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by David Dolan)
On July 17th, authorities in Louisiana provided the latest information on the deadly attack on police officers in Baton Rouge on Sunday morning. They said that there was no longer an "active shooter" in the city. Less that an hour later, 2 men were arrested in Baton Rouge as "persons of interest" in the case. And reports surfaced that the shooter was one Gavin Long.
By Parisa Hafezi and Tim Hepher

ANKARA/FARNBOROUGH, England, July 17 (Reuters) - Iran has expanded its search for aircraft and is looking to order dozens more jets while it continues to try to overcome hurdles to deals worth some $50 billion with Airbus and Boeing, Iranian officials and Western industry sources said.

Iranian airline executives attended the Farnborough Airshow in Britain over the past week and held preliminary discussions with several potential sellers including Japan's Mitsubishi, which is developing a new regional jet, they said.

"Iran is planning to buy some 50 more airplanes of various types soon," an Iranian official said.

At the same time, Iran is continuing to meet Airbus and Boeing to try to resolve headaches surrounding the financing of existing deals to buy some 200 jetliners, needed to renew its fleet.

Earlier this year, the world's two largest planemakers struck provisional deals with IranAir under an agreement between Tehran and world powers to ease sanctions in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear activities.

"Yes, there are problems, financial and political, but there have been several meetings with Boeing and Airbus top authorities particularly in the past few weeks in order to resolve the issue and to find a way to overcome the remaining obstacles," an Iranian official close to the talks said.

Iran's Fars News Agency said officials from Airbus and the ministry of roads and urban development were due to discuss potential further plane purchases in Tehran on Sunday.

Airbus could not immediately be reached for comment.

Boeing representatives are also expected to visit Iran before the end of the month to discuss the mechanics of their tentative deal to sell or lease 109 jets to IranAir.

The U.S. House of Representatives this month passed a measure that could, if confirmed by the Senate and barring a presidential veto, block sales of Boeing and Airbus aircraft to Iran because they use a large number of U.S. components.

Story continues

The latest contacts between Iran and Western planemakers come as questions hover over part of the $27 billion deal between Airbus and Iran, signed in January.

People familiar with the matter said recently that Iran was cooling towards the purchase of 12 A380 superjumbos that were part of the provisional deal.

Airbus subsequently announced a cut in A380 production.

"Some Iranian critics of the deal argue that we don't need big planes that will only be used by those traveling to America or similar destinations," a senior Iranian official said.

"We will evaluate that part when the time comes ... One solution is to buy around 50 other planes instead."

The official urged Western governments and manufacturers to help "resolve their side of problem, including the financing issue".

Asked what types of aircraft Iran could buy, he said, "It will be similar, but on a smaller scale, to what we have bought so far".

Many Western banks are reluctant to back the aircraft deals, fearing their money could be at risk if sanctions are restored.

The senior Iranian official said Italian and German banks had expressed interest in taking part, while aircraft industry sources say financiers in the UAE and China could play a role.

(Editing by David Clarke)
Floods sweep away bridges, damage hydropower project

Floods triggered by incessant rains have swept away two motorable bridges and damaged a hydropower project.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel reacted tersely on Sunday to a thwarted coup in Turkey, saying it expected a new reconciliation deal between the two regional powers following a six-year rift to be implemented as planned. Violence erupted in Turkey late on Friday after the start of the Jewish Sabbath, when most government business officially takes a break. This allowed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu time to consider his response on the move against Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, long a critic of Israeli policies but now a key player in the rapprochement with Israel. When the announcement came, it was brief and measured, coming three weeks after Israel and Turkey - once its principal Muslim ally - signed an accord to restore relations. "Israel and Turkey recently agreed on a reconciliation process. We estimate that this process will continue, unrelated to the dramatic events in Turkey over the weekend," Netanyahu told his cabinet in televised comments. On Saturday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman sent a text message to reporters on Saturday that spoke of Israel's respect for "the democratic process in Turkey". Relations between the two countries crumbled after Israeli marines stormed a Turkish activist ship in May 2010 to enforce a naval blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, killing 10 Turks on board. Israel, which had already offered its apologies for the raid, agreed under the deal to pay out $20 million to the bereaved and injured. Both countries are to appoint ambassadors, and Turkey is to pass legislation indemnifying Israeli soldiers as part of an agreement partly driven by the prospect of lucrative Mediterranean gas deals. (Reporting by Jeffrey Heller; editing by David Stamp)
Jerusalem (AFP) - Israel's military on Sunday fired two Patriot missiles at a drone that "infiltrated" from war-ravaged neighbouring Syria, it said.

The missiles missed the drone which "returned to Syria" after the incident in the central Golan Heights, where the demarcation line between the two countries is located, the military said.

"Moments ago two Patriot air defence missiles were fired towards a drone which infiltrated Israeli airspace from Syria," the military said in a statement on Sunday evening.

Sirens sounded in the area.

While Israel has sought to avoid being dragged into Syria's five-year civil war, it has attacked Syrian military targets when fire from the conflict spills over into its territory.

Earlier this month, the Israeli army attacked two Syrian military targets on the Golan after stray fire damaged the security fence along the line.

In September 2014, Israel used a Patriot missile to shoot down a Syrian warplane it said had crossed the UN-patrolled ceasefire line on the Golan which it regards as its international border.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also acknowledged in April that Israel had attacked dozens of convoys transporting weapons in Syria destined for its enemy Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia.

Israel seized 1,200 square kilometres (460 square miles) of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community.
By Junko Fujita

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's aging population may be bad for the economy but it is giving dealmakers a break. As more owners of small and medium-sized businesses reach their golden years without grooming a successor, some are turning to private equity firms for capital and management expertise.

The number of older owners has been rising, and a low birth rate means that there are often precious few heirs to take over from them. Even when the owners have children, they often reject the idea of taking over from their parents, while some just don't have the mojo for business, according to private equity investors and a government official who have studied the question.

And with private equity firms increasingly scouring for value among small and medium-sized companies that may have great products but haven't had access to the capital needed to fulfill their potential, there are an increasing number of matches being made. Sometimes the firms are sold outright, on other occasions the private equity firm will initially take a partial stake with a view to controlling the entire company at a later date.

Katsukiyo Mizumoto, the president of bean sprouts producer GGC Group, is an example of an owner who responded positively when a major private equity firm  in this case the Washington, D.C.-based Carlyle Group (CG.O) - came knocking on his door.

The 65-year-old said he had been unable to groom a successor from within his family or from inside the company, which has annual sales of about 8 billion yen ($79.3 million). He says he had become such a dominant figure that his managers had not risen to prominence.

"I am losing my strength each year. But because I had adopted a top down management style, my staff only wait for my decisions," said Mizumoto, who took over the company from a long-term business acquaintance more than a decade ago.

Carlyle said it invested an undisclosed sum in GGC in March. And, according to Mizumoto, it is now helping him to find new executives and to expand the companys sales area from western Japan to Southeast Asia and other parts of the region.

Story continues

FEWER BIG DEALS

Deals that revitalize such firms could be important in a nation in which small and medium-sized companies account for 99.7 percent of Japan's 3.8 million companies and employ about 70 percent of the nation's workforce, government data show.

Last year 23.3 percent of company presidents in Japan were over 70 years old, compared with 18.4 percent in 2010, according to research firm Tokyo Shoko Research. The average age of retirement of the heads of small firms was 70.5 years, a government survey showed.

"Succession issues have become very urgent," said Shinichiro Kawata, an official at Japan's Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, adding that when there are children they are often deterred from getting involved because of weak corporate performance.

The private equity worlds focus on small and medium-sized businesses is partly the result of a dearth of larger private equity opportunities in Japan as major businesses are often resistant to radical change.

The average size for private equity deals in Japan in 2015 was about $80 million, less than half of the $175 million recorded between 2010 and 2014, according to Jim Verbeeten, partner at Bain & Co.

Jun Tsusaka, a former head of U.S. buyout giant TPG Capital's [TPG.UL] Japan business, sees the succession problem as an opportunity.

He set up his own firm, Nippon Sangyo Suishin Kiko, in 2014 to invest in small regional firms. So far, his firm has invested in an indoor amusement park operator and in an company that manages an aquarium, both in Ise city in central Japan.

"We are seeing a significant number of potential investment targets among small regional companies because of the difficulties in finding successors," said Tsusaka.

Koichi Sakurada, previously with a state-backed fund which bailed out Japan Airlines Corp in a 350 billion yen deal, is raising as much as 10 billion yen for his new firm, Nihon Kyoso Toshi, to invest in small regional companies. He is looking for stakes costing up to 1 billion yen in firms where there is no one lined up to replace the owner, Sakurada said.

SYSTEMATIC MANAGEMENT

There are many other examples.

In February, Advantage Partners bought Sakai city-based Ichiboshi, a 142-year-old snow crab distributor, with annual sales of 3 billion yen, from the grandson of the founder who did not have a successor, according to Yusuke Ichikawa, principal at the Japanese buyout firm.

And Ant Capital Partners Co's four investments since 2014 are all related to business successions, said its president Ryosuke Iinuma.

Most recently Ant invested in Marusaya Co, a Tokyo-based supplier of bonito flakes  made from dried bonito fish and often used to make broth in Japan.

"Business succession is the main theme of our investment strategy," Iinuma said. "Those companies are typically run only by owners intuition so there is a lot of room for growth once the systematic management is introduced."

(Reporting by Junko Fujita; Editing by Martin Howell)
Luxembourg (AFP) - Secretary of State John Kerry called his Turkish opposite number Saturday to offer US support in the wake of a failed coup but also to protest claims Washington had backed it.

The United States was quick to denounce the military revolt in its NATO ally Turkey and to express support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's elected government.

But some Turkish officials have reportedly suggested the United States was covertly sympathetic to the rogue military officers, a claim Kerry angrily denied.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said that Kerry had called Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu for a second day running to promise US support in probing the putsch.

"He made clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities conducting this investigation, but that public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," Kirby said of Kerry's call to Cavusoglu.

Earlier, Turkey's labour minister Suleyman Soylu had reportedly suggested the United States was behind the revolt, which triggered fighting that left at least 265 dead.

Erdogan's government has now apparently crushed the revolt, but he has demanded expatriate opposition figure Fethullah Gulen be returned to Turkey from the US to stand trial.

Kerry said earlier Saturday, during a visit to Luxembourg, that the United States would entertain an extradition request if Turkey provided proper evidence against Gulen.
Govt urged not to grant amnesty to war-era criminals

With the deadline to lodge complaints of war-era crime coming to an end, conflict affected single women have urged the government not to grant amnesty to perpetrators who destroyed their marital life when the transitional justice bodies get down to work.
Washington (AFP) - US Secretary of State John Kerry expressed deep concern Sunday after a Bahraini court dissolved the country's main opposition group and seized its funds.

"This ruling is the latest in a series of disconcerting steps in Bahrain," he said in a statement sparked by the action against the country's main Shiite opposition group Al-Wefaq, once the largest group in parliament.

The chief US diplomat took pains to acknowledge the "very real security threats facing Bahrain," but added that the "recent steps to suppress nonviolent opposition only undermine Bahrain's cohesion and security" and "strain our partnership with Bahrain."

He called on Bahrain to "reverse these and other recent measures (and) return urgently to the path of reconciliation."

The administrative court in Manama, in ordering the dissolution of Al-Wefaq, said the group had incited violence and encouraged protests that threatened "sectarian strife" in the Gulf kingdom.

But critics have deplored such moves as a crackdown on dissent.

Bahrain is home to the US Fifth Fleet, which is responsible for US naval forces in the region, making Bahrain a crucial regional partner for the United States.

It has been the scene of sporadic troubles since government forces repressed a protest movement launched in February 2011 amid the ferment of the Arab Spring.

The country's Shia majority has been demanding a true constitutional monarchy in the country, now led by a Sunni dynasty.
CAIRO (Reuters) - Kuwaiti mobile operator Zain has expressed interest in applying for a fourth-generation license in Egypt, a senior telecommunications ministry official said on Sunday.

The sale of 4G licenses is part of Egypt's long-awaited plan to reform the telecoms sector.

Its telecoms regulator has approached the three current mobile service providers, Orange Egypt, Vodafone Egypt, and Etisalat, about potentially buying 4G licences.

The current operators have until the first week of August to submit applications for a 4G license.

Communications Minister Yasser al-Kadi told Reuters in June that Egypt would offer 4G licences in an international auction if the existing carriers were not interested.

The senior telecoms ministry official said Zain, which operates in eight countries in the Middle East and Africa, had sent a letter expressing its interest.

"Zain sent us a letter showing desire to enter the Egyptian market through 4G licenses with the set conditions put forward by the government," the official said, declining to be named.

Zain declined to comment.

(Reporting by Ehab Farouk; writing by Ola Noureldin; editing by Lin Noueihed and Jason Neely)
At least three police officers in Baton Rouge, La. were killed and three others were wounded during a shooting Sunday, officials said.

One suspect is dead and officials believe there is no other active threat following the shooting, which took place just before 9 a.m. about a half mile from Baton Rouge police headquarters on Airline Highway, Louisiana State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said at a news conference.

Authorities say they received a report about a man who was carrying a rifle and walking around the area, dressed in all black. Baton Rouge Police Department officers exchanged in gunfire with the suspect after spotting him a nearby convenience store.

A law enforcement official told the Associated Press that the shooter has been identified as Gavin Long. He was shot dead at the scene, officials said.

A police spokesman told the AP that officials had detained two persons of interest in the killings.

Its unclear if the suspect had targeted the officers. Edmonson said the incident is still under active investigation. We want and need your prayers, he said. Baton Rouge is in need of your prayers right now.

A 41-year-old Baton Rouge police officer with a little less than a year of service with the force was killed, along with a 32-year-old officer who served for a decade, authorities said. An East Baton Rouge Sheriffs deputy was also killed.

The family of Montrell L. Jackson identified him as one of the officers who was killed, according to the New York Times. He had previously written a long Facebook post about his experience as a cop in Baton Rouge.

A wounded 41-year-old East Baton Rouge Sheriffs deputy is in critical condition and fighting for his life at a hospital, Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said. Also injured was a 45-year-old and a 51-year-old who suffered non-life threatening injuries. To me, this is not so much about gun control as it is about whats in mens hearts, said Gautreaux, who called for an end to the madness.

Story continues

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards condemned Sundays shooting in a statement. This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing, he said. Rest assured, every resource available to the State of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice.

#lagov on the shooting of law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge today: pic.twitter.com/BU3B4Iznbe  Gov John Bel Edwards (@LouisianaGov) July 17, 2016

Authorities in Baton Rouge last week thwarted a planned attack on police officers days after the shooting of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man who was killed by police in an encounter that was largely captured on video and raised widespread concerns about the officers actions.

Police had arrested four people who they said stole guns from a local pawn shop and planned to target officers.

This is a developing story. Check back for more updates.
Hundreds rally in Capital in support of fasting doc

A close aide to Dr KC says voluntary outpouring of support for the cause was encouraging
Karna says Sadbhawana not to join new gov

Co-chair of Sadbhawana Party Laxman Lal Karna has said that his party would not join the new government.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Malaysia Airlines has struck a deal to settle damages claims for most victims of its MH17 flight that was shot down over eastern Ukraine two years ago on Sunday, Dutch national broadcaster NOS reported. NOS cited Veeru Mewa, a lawyer representing Dutch victims. Under the Montreal Convention, airlines must pay damages of up to about 130,000 euros ($145,000) to victims' families, regardless of the circumstances of a crash. MH17 was shot down over territory held by pro-Russia separatists, killing all 298 passengers and crew. Most of the passengers were Dutch. (Reporting by Toby Sterling)
Https%3a%2f%2fblueprint-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com%2fuploads%2fstory%2fthumbnail%2f14688%2fsnake-shoe

It's cool. We'll just start wearing sandals from now on.

As the rainy season brings flooding to Southeast Asia, critters and snakes head for higher ground as their nests flood. Of course, this means that some homes will inevitably have unwelcome house guests.

As demonstrated by this man, it's always best to take a peek into your shoes during the rainy season, because there may be a terrifying (yet oddly adorable) snake seeking refuge inside.

MMA fighter humiliates opponent after knockout with 'Pokemon Go' celebration

Dog proves that some pups have selective hearing

82-year-old 'America's Got Talent' star rocks out with Drowning Pool

Watch a stampede of zealous 'Pokemon Go' players storm Central Park
London (AFP) - New British Prime Minster Theresa May on Monday won her first parliamentary battle when MPs overwhelmingly voted to replace the ageing submarines that carry Britain's nuclear arsenal.

In her first address to the House of Commons since taking office last week following the EU referendum, May warned that the threat from nuclear weapons was increasing and said it would be an "act of gross irresponsibility" to abandon the nuclear deterrent.

Parliamentarians voted in favour of the motion by a margin of 472 to 117, a majority of 355, following six hours of debate.

The vote gives the green light for the construction of four new submarines to carry the Trident missile system and their nuclear warheads, at a cost of A41 billion (49 billion euros, $54 billion).

Some 138 Labour lawmakers, over 70 percent of those party members who voted, backed the Conservative government despite the opposition of their leader Jeremy Corbyn.

May cited Russian aggression and the nuclear ambitions of North Korea as proof that "the nuclear threat has not gone away, if anything it has increased".

"It is impossible to say for certain that no extreme threats will emerge in the next 30 or 40 years to threaten our security and way of life," she said.

"And it would be an act of gross irresponsibility to lose the ability to meet such threats by discarding the ultimate insurance against those risks in the future."

- 'Catastrophic' vote -

Britain is one of only three nuclear-armed NATO nations, along with the United States and France.

It has had a continuous at-sea deterrent since 1969, meaning that a submarine -- equipped with up to 40 nuclear warheads -- is always deployed somewhere in the oceans.

Each boat contains a sealed letter from the prime minister containing instructions on how to proceed if a nuclear strike on Britain has incapacitated the government.

Pressed whether she would be prepared to launch a nuclear attack and kill 100,000 innocent people, May said: "Yes."

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MPs voted overwhelmingly in 2007 to begin preparatory work on building a replacement for the current Vanguard-class submarines, with Monday's decision clearing the way for them to enter service in the early 2030s.

Some 30,000 jobs are linked to the nuclear deterrent, although the Trident missiles themselves are built in the United States. They will not need replacing until the 2040s.

Critics question the morality, effectiveness and cost of the programme, with construction of the new boats alone estimated at A31 billion, with A10 billion contingency.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which held a protest outside parliament during the debate, put the total cost at A205 billion, although this is over 30 years and includes decommissioning.

"Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate," protester Jane Orr, 55, told AFP.

"The skin melts off people with nuclear weapons and it's just catastrophic to think it's a deterrent, it cannot be used."

In his speech to MPs, veteran socialist and long-time anti-war campaigner Corbyn said Britain's possession of nuclear weapons had not deterred the Islamic State group -- and warned that it was immoral.

He said: "I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about international relations."

The government says it remains committed to reducing its nuclear arsenal in line with its international obligations.

The debate acted as a unifying event for the Conservatives, as MPs rallied around the new prime minister.

But it only deepened splits between left-wing and centrist members of the Labour party, which crystallised in the turmoil sparked by the Brexit vote and have led to a leadership challenge against Corbyn.
Nigel Farage has been keeping a low profile, relatively speaking, since he stepped down as the leader of the Britains right-wing UK Independence Party shortly after achieving his political ambition of persuading British voters to leave the European Union late last month.

The American heartland may seem an unlikely place to resurface, but Farage will be in Cleveland for the Republican presidential convention that begins Monday.

Ill be interested to hear what Donald Trump has to say, Farage said last week.

When Republican insiders, anti-Trump protesters, and a-few-letters-removed-from-A-list celebrities gather for what could be the most chaotic political convention in decades, theyll be joined by some 200 foreign dignitaries and political operatives from roughly 100 nations, including Russia, China, South Korea, and Lebanon. Farage and far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders are among the best-known attendees, with the Brit speaking at a Brexit policy luncheon on Wednesday hosted by Tucker Carlson, editor in chief of the The Daily Caller and conservative Fox News pundit.

Theyll be coming as part of a long but little-known tradition thought to date back to the birth of the United States. Every four years, a sizable contingent of foreign ambassadors, members of parliament, and political strategists flock to the United States for two of the premier events in American politics. After Cleveland, an even larger foreign delegation will head to Philadelphia for the Democratic convention.

Chris Fussner, the Republican National Committees liaison to the International Democratic Union, or IDU, an association of more than 80 center and center-right parties from around the world, said they describe their major political events as, half an hour, a few speeches, coffee, luncheon, blah, blah, blah.

By contrast, said Trygve Olson, a political consultant whos helped the RNC with international visitors for the last three conventions, Our conventions are like four-day extravaganzas.

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Theres nothing else like it in the world of politics and democratic societies, he added.

Many of the international guests are drawn to Cleveland because of curiosity about Trump, the New York businessman who has never been elected to public office but whose Times Square-style-celebrity and ever-evolving America First foreign policy has caught the attention of  and alarmed  many foreign leaders.

Theres been a lot of international interest in coming to see the presumptive GOP nominee, because capitals are saying to their diplomats, We need to find out more about what a Trump administration would look like,' Olson said.

Brian Noyes, the director of external affairs for the Republican convention, said there was a spike in foreign interest when the nominee was unknown and observers were speculating about the chance of a contested convention. Interest has leveled off since weve worked that out, he added.

After Cleveland, some 400 foreign dignitaries and political operatives from about 100 countries  including the worlds youngest, South Sudan  will head to Philadelphia to see the nomination of Democrat Hillary Clinton, well-known internationally from serving as President Barack Obamas first secretary of state.

As early as the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, international diplomats have attended important American political gatherings, Noyes said.

For the organizers charged with carrying on this American tradition  who between them have worked for decades on the conventions and spoke to Foreign Policy in various states of travel between Cleveland and Philadelphia  several likened it to herding cats.

In 1983, Congress created two sister nonpartisan nonprofits, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, and Republican President Ronald Reagan, along with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, also founded IDU. These organizations soon took on the bulk of coordinating foreign dignitaries at the presidential conventions, working with the State Department to look after the roughly 180 card-carrying ambassadors to the United States, as well as other political leaders visiting the United States for the events.

Shari Bryan, vice president of the NDI, pointed out that many people abroad follow American politics more closely than Americans do.

What happens in the U.S. politically has a direct impact on every country in the world, Bryan told Foreign Policy, so foreign leaders want to know what the next president is going to be thinking.

Most agreed that 2008 was a high-water mark for international interest because so many foreign leaders wanted to see Obama became the first African-American nominated for president.

In Philadelphia, Clinton will make history as well by becoming the first female presidential nominee, and more female political leaders than ever are coming from abroad to witness the moment, Bryan said.

This was someone who was really going to change the way the U.S. approached the world, Bryan said of Obama, before what will be her fifth convention. This is turning out to be very similar.

For many foreign dignitaries, the conventions are also an unprecedented opportunity to network with those who will potentially form a Trump administration and its foreign policy.

Trump has alarmed some global leaders by threatening to reduce the U.S. commitment to NATO and withdraw American troops from Japan and South Korea while encouraging the two allies to develop their own nuclear weapons. Hes also complimented strongmen from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to Russian President Vladimir Putin and vowed to ban Muslims from the United States.

Emissaries are looking for how this policy will impact them, Olson said. If youre a Czech diplomat, youre going to the convention to see what it means vis-a-vis NATO and the missile shield, he said.

In some ways, he said, the interest may be bigger for the Republicans convention than the Democrats, because thats less defined with Trump than it is with Hillary Clinton.

The Europeans who make up the bulk of the GOP guest list are travelling to Cleveland at an interesting time for politics across the pond in the wake of the June 23 Brexit vote.

Trump has sought to capitalize on the referendum, with his campaign soliciting donations from British politicians even though U.S. law forbids candidates from seeking or accepting donations from non-Americans.

Asked whether Trump has inspired interest or concern, Fussner laughed: Yes and no. One party that typically attends, the European Peoples Party, the largest grouping in the European Parliament, isnt coming.

Still, Trump has found other favorites among the likes of Farage and Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party who champions Trumps crusade against Islamisation.

The United States has always had a peaceful transition of power, but violent skirmishes and incendiary rhetoric from Trump and others have led to fears of riots at the conventions.

For the first time, Amnesty International will be sending human rights observers to Cleveland and Philadelphia, the group announced on Thursday.

Olson said he was surprised that foreign visitors hadnt raised any safety concerns or asked for security procedures in the event of potential chaos. Its kind of strange, he conceded.

Observing the U.S. political process is particularly important to endangered democracies, Fussner said.

One day youre sitting next to a politician from Uganda talking about economic development, and the next day you pick up the Economist and theres a picture of him getting beaten by his secret police, he said, as an example. These are people out there really fighting for democracy.

Photo credit: JOHN MOORE/Staff
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Bavarian ally said on Sunday Turkey's crackdown against opponents after a failed coup made him more skeptical about granting Turks visa-free travel to the European Union as promised in a migration deal. The EU agreed a deal with Turkey in March intended to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for financial and political rewards for Ankara. Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the sister party of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told ARD public television that he had doubts about ending visa requirements for Turks even before the latest events. "And (these doubts) now have become even stronger," Seehofer said, adding that the Turkish government had to stick to democratic principles and the rule of law when dealing with supporters of the failed coup. "This is also a test for the Turkish government, the Turkish state," Seehofer said. Turkey has rounded up 6,000 members of the armed forces and judiciary following a failed coup that has left at least 265 people dead. German Justice Minister Heiko Maas warned Turkey that its response would also complicate negotiations on Ankara's bid to become a member of the EU. "It should be clear to President Erdogan: There won't be a discount for Turkey (after the attempted coup)," Maas told several regional newspapers in an interview published on Sunday. "The one who restricts fundamental rights and the independence of executive, legislative and judicial powers is pushing the country away from the basic values of the EU," Maas said in reference to Turkey's bid to become a member. Thomas Oppermann, the leader of Germany's center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in parliament, accused Erdogan of weakening democratic principles and the rule of law. "If thousands of judges and public prosecutors who obviously had nothing to do with the coup are getting removed, then this is an attack on the democratic state under the rule of law," said Oppermann, a senior figure in the SPD which shares power with Merkel's conservatives. "Erdogan is abusing the failed coup as an excuse to clean the Turkish state apparatus of opponents of the AKP," Oppermann said. (Reporting by Michael Nienaber and Holger Hansen; editing by Jason Neely)
LTO plans to conduct tax assessment of Ncell deal

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Mexican star Gerardo Ortiz was arrested by the Federal Police Saturday night (July 16) at the Guadalajara Airport in Mexico, according to published reports in several Mexican news outlets, including the daily El Universal. Several days ago, an official warrant for Ortiz's arrest was issued by the Mexican government, charging him with "criminal exaltation" ("apologia del delito" in Spanish) in the controversial music video for his single "Fuiste mia."

The video showed in graphic detail a relationship gone wrong, beginning with soft porn scenes inside the shower and ending with a lover shot dead between the eyes and the straying mistress fondled while bound and gagged, then tossed inside a car trunk.

In the last scene, a smiling Ortiz, who plays the wronged drug lord in the video, lights a cigarette, sets the car on fire and walks away. According to some published reports, the video was filmed at a home linked to drug trafficking.

The video generated more than 30 million views on Vevo before it was finally taken down, following weeks of protest from multiple sources, including formal condemnation from the Mexican government.

Gerardo Ortiz's 'Fuiste Mia' Video Crosses a Line: How Protests are About More Than Political Correctness

In March, Mexico's Government Secretary (Secretaria de Gobernacion), responsible for the country's political development and well-being, issued a statement condemning the video. Last week, the Mexican government issued a formal warrant for Ortiz's arrest, and also for the arrest of the producer of the video.

On Saturday, according to a report published on El Universal, Ortiz arrived at the airport in Guadalajara, presented his U.S. passport as ID and was arrested by officers aware of the warrant.

At press time, Ortiz's team had not provided comment to Billboard.

However, in early April, Ortiz held a press conference where he addressed protests against the video and stressed that what was shown on the video was "pure fiction."

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He also said that the publicity generated by the video had at least one positive outcome. "No offense, but it's a good thing that all the organizations that defend women's rights have been able to use these platforms to get their message cross and defend their rights

"I hope this clarifies things," added Ortiz at the time. "This is the artist speaking; the fictional character is in the video."

Since then, "Fuiste mia" has been rising steadily on the charts and last week hit the Top 10 of Billboard's Hot Latin Songs chart.



The crime of "criminal exultation" is not one that is commonly prosecuted. According to Jalisco DA Eduardo Almaguer, it's a minor crime, punishable with one to six months in prison.

However, Mexican sensibilities are heightened due to the toll exacted by drug-related violence, and Ortiz's video, given his status as one of the country's biggest superstars, struck a nerve.

Ortiz is currently on tour and is a judge on TV reality competition Tengo talento, mucho talento on Estrella TV.
By Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Sunday strongly condemned the shootings in Baton Rouge that killed three police officers and wounded three others, saying there was "no justification" for the violence. "We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: There is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one," Obama said in a statement. Obama added that he has offered the "full support of the federal government" to Louisiana's governor, Baton Rouge's mayor and local law enforcement. "Justice will be done," he said. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Paul Simao)
Madhesi Morcha skeptic of Dahal's support to Morcha's demands

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Washington (AFP) - President Barack Obama condemned as "cowardly" a shooting that killed three police officers and wounded three more in the Louisiana capital of Baton Rouge on Sunday.

"For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault," Obama said in a statement.

"These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law and on civilized society, and they have to stop."

A separate shooting in Dallas, Texas earlier this month killed five police officers during a demonstration triggered by the fatal police shooting of two African American men whose dying moments were captured in shocking video footage that went viral online.

Obama said he had offered his "full support" and that of the federal government to authorities in Baton Rouge and to Louisiana state as a whole.

"And make no mistake -- justice will be done," the president added.

"We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes."

Obama stressed that the police officers in Baton Rouge, like those in Dallas before them, "were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now - all of us - to be at our best."

The first African American president of the United States, Obama has made repeated calls for racial unity.

During a memorial for the slain policemen, he insisted that "we are not as divided as we seem."
By Jeff Mason and Jonathan Landay WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States urged Turkey on Saturday to exercise restraint after a failed military coup sparked a government crackdown, and warned its NATO ally that public suggestions of a U.S. role in the plot were "utterly false" and harmful to relations. President Barack Obama urged parties on all sides of the crisis to avoid destabilizing Turkey and follow the rule of law after the coup attempt against President Tayyip Erdogan. The coup attempt complicated U.S.-led efforts to combat Islamic State. Turkey closed its airspace to military aircraft and power was cut off to Incirlik air base, which U.S. forces use to launch air attacks against the militant group. U.S. officials were working with Turkish officials to resume air operations quickly, the Pentagon said. Secretary of State John Kerry told Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that authorities should respect the rule of law during their probe of the coup. He also said "public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," the State Department said. Turkey has long been a key U.S. ally but relations have been strained in recent years and Erdogan's government has accused U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen of being behind the coup attempt. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said any country that stands by Gulen will be considered at war with Turkey, and Erdogan urged Washington to deport the cleric. Kerry said the United States was willing to help Turkey as it tries to identify those involved in the coup attempt, but made clear it would only act if there was evidence against Gulen. "We fully anticipate that there will be questions raised about Mr Gulen, and obviously we invite the government of Turkey ... to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny and the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments appropriately," he said. Gulen has condemned the coup attempt and denied any involvement in it. Obama conferred with his national security and foreign policy advisers on Saturday morning and reiterated his support for the "democratically-elected, civilian" government of Turkey. "While we have no indications as of yet that Americans were killed or injured in the violence, the president and his team lamented the loss of life and registered the vital need for all parties in Turkey to act within the rule of law and to avoid actions that would lead to further violence or instability," the White House said. Obama noted the United States needed continued cooperation from Turkey in the fight against terrorism. Forces loyal to Erdogan largely crushed the last remnants of the coup on Saturday as he launched a purge of the armed forces to tighten his grip on power. Turkey scrambled jets throughout Friday night to resist the coup launched by a faction within Turkey's military that saw rebels piloting military aircraft. The Incirlik air base near Adana in the southeast of the country was running on internal power sources after a loss of commercial power to the base, the Pentagon said. "U.S. officials are working with the Turks to resume air operations there as soon as possible," said Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook. "In the meantime, U.S. Central Command is adjusting flight operations in the counter-ISIL campaign to minimize any effects on the campaign." THREAT TO COALITION FIGHT Erdogan has cooperated with Washington in the fight against Islamic State, but relations have been rocky with U.S. criticism of Erdogan's increasing authoritarianism, Turkey's support for Islamist opposition groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and the slow pace in sealing Turkey's border with Syria to foreign fighters. The closing of the airspace over Incirlik effectively grounded U.S. aircraft and drones that have been instrumental in the campaign to crush Islamic State in Syria, including supporting drives by Syrian Kurds and moderate Arabs, who are being advised by U.S. special forces, to seize the militant-held city of Manbij and Raqqa, the "capital" of the caliphate declared by Islamic State. "Clearly the variable here is how long the closure will last," said Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If we're unable to fly from Incirlik, it will have a significant impact on the air campaign." A Turkish presidency official in Istanbul said the move was temporary and aimed at preventing rogue aircraft from targeting civilians and government buildings. "This is a short-term measure which won't have significant effect on coalition operations," the official said. "We have discussed this measure with our colleagues in Washington as well and they understand our concerns." A prolonged closure of Incirlik's airspace could force the United States to divert aircraft based in the Persian Gulf to the Manbij and Raqqa offensives, constraining the air power available to support Iraqi and U.S. forces involved in operations against Islamic State. It could also complicate the Pentagons ability to resupply and aid U.S. special forces inside Syria. (Additional reporting by Dasha Afanasieva, John Walcott, Phil Stewart and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Kieran Murray and Mary Milliken)
London (AFP) - Pakistan celebrated their victory over England in the first Test at Lord's on Sunday by performing a series of press-ups although defeated skipper Alistair Cook admitted it wasn't pleasant viewing.

Misbah-ul-Haq's side went on an army boot camp before the tour to improve their infamously poor fitness, and senior batsman Younis Khan led the squad in performing a routine of press-ups followed by a military-style salute in front of the ground's famous Pavilion.

Misbah, 42, had celebrated in similar fashion on the opening day on Thursday after reaching a hundred that helped set up his team's 75-run win.

"The team was really hoping that we get a chance, because I got a chance after scoring a hundred," said Misbah, the oldest man to score a Test hundred in 82 years, of his press-up celebration.

"I did that and everybody wanted to do that. That sends a small tribute to all those army men who were working really hard (with us)."

England captain Alastair Cook, asked for his views on Pakistan's unusual post-match display, said: "You don't take any offence, but certainly at that emotive time it's not pleasant viewing.

"Certainly when you've lost a game of cricket for the first 20 minutes or so it's not pleasant."

"They (Pakistan) are entitled to do what they want. It's united them and shows what a challenge we've got."

But Cook, speaking ahead of next week's second Test in Manchester.

"Hopefully the cricketing gods might (turn in our favour at Old Trafford)."
Pakistani social media star Qandeel Balochs brother, Waseem Azeem, said in a press conference on Sunday, July 17, that he has no regrets about killing his sister.

Yes of course, I strangled her, Azeem told reporters at the event, which was organized by the police of Multan, according to The National. She was on the ground floor while our parents were asleep on the roof floor. It was around 10:45 p.m. when I gave her a tablet  and then killed her.

PHOTOS: Celebrity Deaths in 2016: Stars Weve Lost

I was determined either to kill myself or kill her, he added as he was being led away by police, noting that he was not embarrassed about the murder. Whatever was the case, it [his sisters behavior] was completely intolerable.



Hundreds of women are murdered each year in Pakistan, often at the hands of their relatives, in so-called honor killings. According to Rappler.com, many killers are allowed to walk free because of a law in place that allows the family to forgive the murderer.

PHOTOS: Most Shocking Celebrity Deaths of All Time

As previously reported, Azeem disappeared shortly after strangling Baloch, 26, on Friday, July 15, but was found and arrested shortly afterward, after their father filed a police complaint against him. Azeem is set to appear in court for a hearing on Wednesday, July 20.



Baloch, real name Fauzia Azeem, has been a polarizing figure in the largely conservative country of Pakistan, posting sexy photos of herself to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, with occasional video posts that had become more political in recent weeks.



PHOTOS: Viral Stars: 2016's Biggest Internet Celebrities

The social media star, who has been dubbed the nations Kim Kardashian, posted one last message to her nearly 750,000 followers on Facebook on Monday, July 4.



I am trying to change the typical orthodox mindset of people who dont wanna come out of their shells of false beliefs and old practices, she wrote.

Khloe Kardashian weighed in with her thoughts on Saturday, July 16, tweeting: "We must stand up for one another and for justice. Just so sad."




On Monday morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan will gavel in the 2016 Republican National Convention, which is expected to crown Donald Trump the GOP presidential nominee. That same day, $150,000 worth of television ads will begin airing in Ryans Wisconsin House district to support his reelection ahead of an Aug. 9 primary challenge from a self-described Trump acolyte.

Ryan isnt the first speaker, or leader, to be in trouble. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his seat in a surprise primary loss in Virginia in 2014. House Speaker Tom Foley, a Democrat, lost his reelection bid in 1994. But before that, you have to go back to 1862 for another example of an unseated Speaker.

Our Wisconsin sources, both GOP and independent, have told us Ryan should be fine. I think thats right, but I also recall being told that Eric Cantor would win in a walk in June 2014, says Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginias Center for Politics. With low primary turnouts you just never know.

Ryan, like Cantor and former Speaker John Boehner  whose abrupt resignation last year made Ryan an unwitting Speaker  is being buffeted by the same forces that are rupturing the Republican Party; the same forces that led to this weeks nomination of Trump, an anti-establishment outsider. There are no heroes in Republican politics any more, and those that aspire to the title are chained to rocks to have their liver eaten daily by an eagle, a House GOP aide somewhat bitterly quipped citing the Greek Gods punishment of Prometheus for giving man fire.

Thus far, Ryan has managed to straddle the revolution and the establishment in a strikingly unique fashion. His 2010 fiscal conservative bible, The Path to Prosperity, gives him street cred with Tea Partiers and his turn as Mitt Romneys 2012 running mate and 2013 budget deal author with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray have burnished his establishment bonafides.

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But the longer hes a leader, the more prone he becomes to attacks from the anti-establishment crowd. Take his primary challenger: Paul Nehlen, a businessman and entrepreneur. Nehlen says Ryans a faker. Paul Ryan says hes for smaller government and hes funded every big government idea that there is, Nehlen says in an interview with TIME. Not only has Paul Ryan not died on any hill for a position he believes in to make government smaller, he hasnt even skinned his knee.

Nehlen brags that he will this week be rolling out the endorsement of two to 10 sitting members of Congress. If true, that would mark a small but significant rebellion against the Speaker from within his own ranks.

Though he isnt yet facing the outright rebellion Boehner once did, Ryans record as Speaker has been spotty. He has been working with committees to craft a conservative agenda for America, a substantive policy platform in response to what he sees as Trumps relatively policy-free campaign. He views this as the foundation for the future of a party struggling to look beyond this week, let alone past November.

But hes also failed, as a former Budget committee chair, to get consensus on a budget  the first time a GOP-controlled House has not passed a budget in recent history  and has let slip through some must-pass items, like funding to fight the Zika virus. (Ryan rejected a bipartisan Senate bill and Senate Democrats rejected his bill as full of poison pills, as Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer called them, such as defunding Obamare and Planned Parenthood, leading to an unresolved stalemate.)

Is Ryan really in trouble? Hes in trouble enough to be running television ads, though his office is quick to note hes run ads in all of he House races, so this isnt unusual. A recent internal poll by Nehlen had Ryan ahead 43 percent to Nehlens 32 percent. If correctand internal polls are often highly skewedthat would show a race tightening: Ryan was ahead by 40 points or more in two previous polls. Wisconsin is one of the few states that bucked the Trump train, its powerful GOP establishment depriving Trump of a primary win. And in Ryans district, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz beat Trump by 20,000 votes, or 17 percentage points.

Ryan also spends an enormous amount of time in the district, returning home every weekend to spend time with his wife and three young children. He enjoys a 76 percent favorability rating in the district and has the support of the vast majority of the local, state and national GOP Party officials, as well as local Tea Party groups.

At the same time, Ryans initial refusal to support Trump and his not-so-thinly veiled criticism of his partys likely nominee hasnt helped him with GOP primary voters in Wisconsins 1st District, according to David Wasserman, who follows House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. My impression is that [Ryan] only wouldve been in danger had he continued to hold out on Trump, Wasserman says. He starts off with a much deeper base in the district that Cantor ever did.

They say in politics that where you sit is more important than where you stand. And the more Ryan sits atop anything  the House, the convention  the more of a target he becomes. Hell likely beat Nehlen, but as the Wall Street Journal warns, Nehlen is only the first of many who would see Ryan and what he stands for in the GOP  fall.
BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - Guards protesting over pay shut the eastern Libyan oil terminal of Hariga on Sunday, delaying two shipments of crude, a port official said. A unit of Libya's Petroleum Facilities Guard took the action because they said they had not been paid their salaries recently, the Hariga official said. He said the protest had delayed two tankers, one of which was already docked at the port, with the second scheduled to dock later on Sunday. (Reporting by Ayman al-Warfalli; Writing by Aidan Lewis)
By Sam Karlin

BATON ROUGE, La. (Reuters) - A gunman killed three police officers and wounded three others in Louisiana's capital on Sunday, nearly two weeks after the fatal police shooting of a black man there sparked nationwide protests, one of which led to the massacre of five Dallas policemen.

The suspect, described by a U.S. government official as having served in the Marine Corps, was himself shot to death minutes later in a gunfight with police who converged on the scene.

Two Baton Rouge Police Department officers and one sheriff's deputy were killed, and one sheriff's deputy was left critically wounded in what Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden said began as an "ambush-style" attack on officers.

Another police officer and one other deputy suffered less severe wounds and were expected to survive.

Colonel Mike Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said in a press conference that the gunman was believed to have acted alone, contrary to early reports that police may have been looking for other shooters.

Authorities did not name the suspect. But a U.S. government official told Reuters the gunman had been identified as Gavin Long, of Kansas City, Missouri. He was reported by other media to have been 29 years of age and black.

The government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said investigators have reason to believe an emergency-911 call may have been used to lure police into harm's way. Another government source told Reuters that Long had been a member of the U.S. Marines, but his service record was not immediately known.

CBS News reported he was a Marine sergeant who was honorably discharged in 2010.

Authorities declined to offer any possible motive for the attack.

And it was not immediately clear whether there was a link between Sunday's bloodshed and unrest over the police killings of two black men under questionable circumstances earlier this month - Alton Sterling, 37, in Baton Rouge on July 5, and Philando Castile, 32, near St. Paul, Minnesota on July 6.

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President Barack Obama condemned the attack, vowed that justice would be done and called on Americans to focus on rhetoric and actions that united the country rather than divided it.

"We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence on law enforcement," Obama said in televised remarks from the White House.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards called the shootings an "unspeakable, heinous attack" that served no purpose.

"There simply is no place for more violence. That doesn't help anyone, it doesn't further the conversation, it doesn't address any injustice, perceived or real. It is just an injustice in and of itself," he told reporters in Baton Rouge.

Obama has sought to balance concerns about police abuses, largely against African-Americans, while paying tribute to fallen officers.

He attended a memorial service last week for the five Dallas police officers killed by a black former U.S. soldier who opened fire at the end of an otherwise peaceful protest on July 7 denouncing the Sterling and Castile slayings.

Those two killings and the reprisal attack on Dallas police by a suspect found to have embraced militant black nationalism renewed national tensions over racial justice and gun violence just as America's presidential campaign was kicking into high gear. The Dallas gunman, Micah Johnson, 25, was killed by police deploying a bomb-carrying robot against him.

The wave of violence also has heightened security concerns across the country, notably in Cleveland and Philadelphia, hosts to this week's Republican National Convention and next week's Democratic National Convention, respectively, which are expected to formally nominate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for the election.

WORRIES AROUND CONVENTION

"We demand law and order," Trump said in a Facebook posting Sunday afternoon.

In a statement, Clinton urged Americans to "stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities."

The head of a Cleveland police union called on Ohio Governor John Kasich to declare a state of emergency and suspend laws allowing for the open carry of firearms during the Republican convention.

"I don't care what the legal precedent is. I feel strongly that leadership needs to stand up and defend these police officers," Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association, told Reuters in an interview.

Loomis said he was concerned about copycat shootings at the Republican convention.

A spokeswoman for Kasich said the governor did not have the power to suspend the open carry law.

Sunday's shootings occurred about a mile from the Baton Rouge Police Department headquarters, where dozens of people were arrested this month while protesting Sterling's death. The 37-year-old African-American father of five was shot and killed at close quarters by law enforcement officers.

A witness to Baton Rouge shootings, Brady Vancel, told a CBS television affiliate he had seen a gunman, a second man in a red shirt lying in a parking lot and another gunman running away "as shots were being fired back and forth from several guns."

He said the police arrived shortly after the gunfire began.

One of the injured officers was listed in critical condition at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, while another was in fair condition, hospital spokeswoman Kelly Zimmerman said. The third was taken to another hospital where he was in fair condition.

Shocked community members lined the highway about a mile from the shootings, at the site of the protests against Sterling's killing.

"It never hits home until it's in your own living room," said Redell Norman, an activist who attended the recent protests at police headquarters.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert, Ian Simpson, Tim Gardner and Julia Edwards, Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball in Washington; Writing by Paul Simao; Editing by Mary Milliken)
Man arrested in accusation of attempted rape

A person has been arrested in accusation of attempted rape of a 14-year-old girl.
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - The head of the Cleveland police union on Sunday urged Ohio's governor to declare a state of emergency and to suspend laws allowing the open carrying of firearms during the Republican National Convention, after the shooting of six police officers in Louisiana. "I don't care what the legal precedent is, I feel strongly that leadership needs to stand up and defend these police officers," Steve Loomis, the head of the police union, told Reuters in an interview at the union's headquarters on Sunday. The four-day convention is due to begin on Monday. (Reporting by Kim Palmer, writing by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Howard Goller)
President Barack Obama on Sunday condemned in the strongest sense of the word the attack in Baton Rouge that left three police officers dead and another three wounded, calling the assault the work of cowards.

The president said he has offered his full support to federal and local authorities as they investigate what prompted the killings about a half mile from Baton Rouge police headquarters. At least one suspect was killed in a shootout with authorities just before 9 a.m. on Airline Highway, authorities said.

The fatal shootings in Baton Rouge follow a suspected snipers ambush on Dallas police officers earlier this month. Five police officers were killed during a protest against recent police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana.

For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault, Obama said in a statement. These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilized society, and they have to stop.

There is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None, he added. These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes.

Its unclear if the suspect targeted police officers or if the officers were shot dead while responding to a call about a man carrying a rifle and walking around the area, dressed in all black. Baton Rouge Police Department officers exchanged in gunfire with the suspect after spotting him a nearby convenience store. The suspect, whose identity has not yet been released, was shot dead at the scene, Edmonson said.

Obama, speaking at a news conference, later said regardless of the suspects motive, the latest incident underscores the danger that police across the country confront every single day.

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Nothing justifies violence against law enforcement, Obama said. Justice will be done.

I know whenever this happens, wherever this happens, you feel it. Your families feel it, he added before mentioning that he only days ago traveled to Dallas for the memorial services of the officers slain in the Texas city.

I said that killer would not be the last person who tries to make us turn on each other, nor will todays killer. It is up to us to make sure they fail, Obama said.

The president also condemned inflammatory rhetoric that he said worsens situations. We need to temper our words and open our hearts. All of us, he said. We need what we saw in Dallas this week as a community came together to restore order. Only we can prove, through words and through deeds, that we cant be divided.

Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings joined Obama and several notable political figures in mourning the deaths of the Baton Rouge officers. Reports out of Baton Rouge this morning of three officers killed and others wounded are deeply disturbing. This must stop, Rawlings said in a statement. Violence against our police officers under any circumstances is not acceptable and poses a grave threat to all of us. Those peacefully protesting police across the country must swiftly condemn this type of violence against law enforcement.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump also weighed in, demanding law and order. We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today, Trump wrote on Twitter. How many law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country?

We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today. How many law enforcement and people have tohttps://t.co/pPNrzG8kEa  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 17, 2016

Hillary Clinton issued a statement, calling for unity. We must not turn our backs on each other, Clinton said in a statement. We must not be indifferent to each other. We must all stand together to reject violence and strengthen our communities.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi shared the same sentiment, calling for peace and justice across the country. We are united in our grief for the victims, our prayers for the survivors, and our steadfast belief that we must work together to disarm hate in all of its forms, she said in a statement.

We must continue to confront violence with peace, despair with understanding, and hatred with love, Pelosi added. Together, we must act to end the divisions that lead to violence in all of our communities.

We mourn the tragic murder of three police officers in #BatonRouge. We must work to #DisarmHate in all of its forms. https://t.co/wBIr7nEzQv  Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) July 17, 2016

More tragedy & pain. We must reach out to one another  for comfort & to find solutions  all across this nation. https://t.co/1izokvqyxI  Chirlane McCray (@Chirlane) July 17, 2016

Ambushing police officers is 1 of the most cowardly acts I can imagine. I stand w/ law enforcement & all who mourn the officers #BatonRouge  Rep. Hank Johnson (@RepHankJohnson) July 17, 2016

Horrified by the news in Baton Rouge this morning. No justification for these senseless acts of hateful violence.  Senator Tim Kaine (@timkaine) July 17, 2016
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish leader Tayyip Erdogan may meet in August, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by the RIA news agency. Putin called the Turkish president and said he hoped Russian tourists would be protected in the aftermath of Friday night's failed coup attempt in Turkey, the Kremlin said in a statement on Sunday. The statement added that the two leaders would soon meet face-to-face. Despite an agreement last month to resume bilateral cooperation, relations between the Kremlin and Erdogan remain strained over the Syria crisis and Turkey's shooting down of a Russian fighter jet in November. Erdogan apologized to Putin in June over the downing of the plane, which was taking part in the Kremlin's military campaign in Syria. The Kremlin had responded to the incident by imposing restrictions on trade with Turkey. The Kremlin said on Sunday that Putin called his Turkish counterpart after rebel soldiers used tanks, attack helicopters and fighter jets to try to topple Erdogan on Friday night, attacking parliament and the intelligence headquarters in Ankara while seizing a bridge and surrounding the airport in Istanbul. The statement quoted Putin as telling Erdogan that Russia found anti-constitutional acts and violence unacceptable and was hoping for the restoration of order and stability in Turkey. (Reporting by Katya Golubkova; Editing by Helen Popper)
Rachel Maddow has built a career on her straightforward personality and eloquently stated liberal views. The political commentator started off hosting radio programs, but found her calling as part of the MSNBC nightly lineup.

After multiple substitute hosting gigs for the network, the Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power author was offered her own show, The Rachel Maddow Show, in 2008. Since its inception, Maddow, 43, has established herself as a reliable voice in the divided world of political commentary.

PHOTOS: Stars  They're Just Like Us!

Before the MSNBC host covers the Democratic National Convention (July 2528 in Philadelphia) and the Republican National Convention (July 1821 in Cleveland), she exclusively shared 25 fascinating facts about herself with Us Weekly.

1. I wear my dads high school ring. It has a pirate ship on it. His team was the Buccaneers.

2. I worked on HIV/AIDS issues with the ACLU National Prison Project and on prison issues with the National Minority AIDS Council.

3. I have a really hard time pronouncing the word sixth.

4. I have huge hands and tiny wrists. Design flaw.

5. Some of my best friends in cable news work at Fox News. (Dont tell anyone!)

PHOTOS: Celebrities' Political Affiliations

6. I skipped a grade.

7. I used to have long, straight blonde hair. When I cut it off in college, I was as surprised as anyone when it grew back and all of a sudden, I looked like Rick Santorum.

8. My mom is from Newfoundland.

9. I have a first cousin who was a professional wrestler in Canada.

10. I once had laser eye surgery live on the radio. I said, I can smell my eyeballs burning, and they cut to commercial.

11. I learned to split wood from my pastor.

12. Love at first sight is a real thing  it happened to me 17 years ago [with artist Susan Mikula].

PHOTOS: Celebrity Couples in Hollywood: The 5 Types

13. I drive a 2010 Ford pickup. Its the best vehicle Ive ever had.

14. I played almost every instrument in the junior high orchestra, but I was terrible at all of them. I was best at being the conductor.

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15. I wrote the introduction to a Batwoman comic book.

16. My movie obsession is the Thin Man series.

17. I dont know the phone number at my own desk. I am a text- and email-based life-form.

18. I have two big black dogs.

19. I go fishing every chance I get. Sometimes after my show, I fish at midnight in the Hudson River in NYC.

20. I once had a very short-lived moonlighting job hosting a gay love songs call-in show with a cohost named Martini.

21. My workout soundtrack is slow, sad, tear-in-your-beer country music.

22. I put mustard on my eggs.

23. I still have a retainer that my orthodontist installed when I was a sophomore in high school. I dont know what its for, but all my dentists have just decided to leave it there.

24. I once gave a spy comic called Queen & Country to a senator on the Intelligence Committee.

25. Im a terrible correspondent.




Aleppo (Syria) (AFP) - Syrian government forces Sunday besieged rebel-held parts of the northern city of Aleppo after severing the last supply route into eastern areas, sparking concern for tens of thousands of civilians.

The United Nations says an estimated 300,00 people live in the rebel-controlled neighbourhoods of Syria's second city, and fears are mounting that they could face starvation.

After weeks of fierce fighting, government forces seized the strategic Castello Road, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"The eastern neighbourhoods are now completely besieged," he said.

The UN's aid coordination body OCHA confirmed the report.

A statement said "government forces have captured parts of Castello Road today and the road is now completely closed to the movement of humanitarian supplies in and out of east Aleppo city."

OCHA said "the situation is particularly worrying due to the high concentration of people living in this area", who it said have not received humanitarian supplies since July 7.

"It is imperative that we respond to acute needs through predictable and sustained access to people in need," it said.

The Syria Campaign, which calls for humanitarian action in the war-ravaged country, was more blunt.

"The siege of eastern Aleppo has started," said the group's James Sadri.

"There are an estimated 300,000 civilians there, penned in and attacked by their own government. Without access to the outside world it is only a matter of time before we see starvation cases as in other parts of Syria."

The Observatory said regime air strikes on rebel-held areas killed six civilians, including a child, and that six others, two of them children, died in rebel shelling of government-controlled districts.

At least 16 rebel fighters were also killed in Aleppo, a city is divided roughly between government control in the west and rebel control in the east.

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Castello Road had been used by rebels, merchants bringing in produce for residents and civilians visiting relatives in the city.

- Food Shortages -

"Aleppo is now 100-percent besieged," said a rebel from the Aleppo Revolutionaries group.

The army was setting up sandbag barriers along Castello road, he said.

Both the regime and its opponents have imposed devastating sieges across Syria.

A year-long government siege of the town of Madaya in Damascus province has seen dozens of people die from starvation and malnutrition, NGOs said in early July.

The UN says nearly 600,000 people are living under siege in Syria, most of them surrounded by government forces.

Eastern Aleppo has not been designated by the UN as besieged, but residents complain of food shortages and shopkeepers have begun rationing their products.

The Syria Campaign's Sadri blamed the Syrian government and its ally Russia for Aleppo's predicament.

"Hundreds of thousands of civilians are being trapped, starved and barrel bombed in Aleppo by Assad forces with help from Russia," he said.

"The ongoing silence from the rest of the world means more death and destruction in those communities who rose up more than five years ago wanting their freedom and dignity."

Fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have tried in the past two years to cut Castello Road as part of a bid to retake all of Aleppo.

They pressed their campaign last week despite announcing several extensions to a fighting freeze marking Eid al-Fitr, the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan.

State media made no mention of Sunday's developments, but pro-government websites reported the advance.

- Salvaging the truce -

Aleppo was once Syria's commercial powerhouse but has been ravaged by fighting since mid-2012, with several temporary truces failing to end the violence there.

On Friday, US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov said they had agreed on "concrete steps" to salvage the failing nationwide ceasefire but would not give details.

Russia has demanded that non-jihadist rebel groups -- particularly those in and around Aleppo -- disassociate themselves from Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front in order to avoid being targeted in air raids.

More than 280,000 people have been killed and millions have been forced to flee their homes since Syria's conflict erupted in March 2011.

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura has urged Russia and the United States to push for a resumption of peace talks next month.

But the opposition High Negotiations Committee said the regime advance in Aleppo threatens to delay any resumption of peace talks.

"The regime believes it has achieved a symbolic victory (in Aleppo)... and is maybe thinking that is the right configuration... to come back to Geneva in a position of strength," said HNC member Basma Kadamani.

She said the "collective punishment" imposed on civilians in Aleppo "is really putting a big question mark on Geneva," where previous rounds of talks took place.
Matters of antiquity

Proper excavations have to be conducted at Tilaurakot and its vicinity to find out its real status
Russian adventurer Fedor Konyukhov is going to great heightsliterallyto set a new Guinness World Record: The 64-year-old is attempting to fly around the world alone in a hot air balloon.

He set off from Australia on July 12, and on Friday entered New Zealand air space: "We've created a two-hour virtual bubble or 'reservation area' around the balloon, Airways New Zealand chief operating officer Pauline Lamb said in a statement. We will protect this with our normal airspace separation procedures which means all other aircraft will be directed to fly around the reservation area.

A Russian hot air balloon trying a world record is in NZ airspace! #hotairballoon https://t.co/50oVIZpHmG pic.twitter.com/By6AkH2SO1  Airways New Zealand (@AirwaysNZ) July 15, 2016

Konyukhov's son, Oscar, described the launch as perfect, but told Australia's ABC News that there is much more to come.

Now we will have another stress because every minute something might happen. He is just flying into the unknown with custom-made equipment...it's all experimental, he said.

Konyukhov's planned trajectory from Australia is across the Pacific Ocean, to South America through Chile and Argentina, then across the Atlantic Ocean, South Africa and the Indian Ocean, before returning to Australia.

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#FedorKonyukhov balloon is off! New Zealand here he comes! In a few days @SBSNews pic.twitter.com/6f3IogDZVf  Ryan Emery SBS (@ryanremery) July 11, 2016

To beat the record, he will have to complete the feat in less than 13 days and 12 hours, the time it took Steve Fossettan American who set many aviation records before he died in a plane crash in 2007to circle the globe in 2002.

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Sarah Palin's son Track Palin has accepted a plea deal in his domestic violence case, according to court documents.



Earlier this year, Palin was arrested and charged after allegedly punching a woman in the face at his family's home in Wasilla, Alaska.



The 27-year-old son of the former Alaska governor was initially charged with three misdemeanors: domestic-violence assault, interfering with the report of a domestic-violence crime and misconduct involving weapons in the fourth degree, the court documents say.



However, per Monday's plea agreement, which has not been finalized, the first two misdemeanor charges have been dismissed by the prosecution. According to court documents, Palin is now left with the misconduct involving weapons in the fourth degree, which is a class A misdemeanor and is punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine of up to $10,000. Track's attorney, Kevin Fitzgerald also told the Alaska Dispatch News that the plea deal requires that Palin complete an "alcohol-related" treatment program to expunge the weapon charge.







Police said Palin's BAC was 0.189 at the time of arrest, according to the Associated Press.





VIDEO: Bristol Palin Shares Adorable Family Photo





The affidavit in the case said officers found the woman involved "curled up in the fetal position" when police arrived, according to the AP. The AP report also says the affidavit states that Palin put a gun to his head and said, "Do you think I won't do it?" before police arrived.



Palin's case was dealt with by a special court for veterans at his request, according to Fitzgerald. The oldest child of the Palins enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2007 and served in Iraq for one year starting in 2008.



While campaigning for presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign in January, Sarah Palin took the time to comment on her son's arrest:



"I can talk personally about this, I guess it's kind of the elephant in the room," Palin said. "My son like so many others, they come back a bit different, they come back hardened, they come back wondering if there is that respect for what it is that their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military so sacrificially have given to this country. And that starts from the top."
CLEVELAND - Gerald Molen, the Oscar-winning producer of Schindler's List, at a screening of a film slamming Hillary Clinton, compared conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza to Oskar Schindler, the protagonist in the Steven Spielberg-directed film about a man who saves Jews during the Holocaust.

"Years ago, I had the honor of working on a film that told the story of a man, one man, a single man, who made a difference in the lives of about 1,100 people. His name was Oskar Schindler," Molen told 2,200 people at the Republican National Convention premiere of Hillary's America in Cleveland, Ohio, on Sunday night.

"Tonight, I'm sharing the stage with another man who is making a difference in this country. The film you're about to see will open the eyes of a lot of people," said Molen, who executive produced Hillary's America, which stars and was written by D'Souza.

Molen, Spielberg and Branko Lustig won Oscars for Best Picture for 1993's Schindler's List and Spielberg won the Oscar for Best Director.

D'Souza had a West Coast premiere of Hillary's America last week at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. But Sunday night's affair, at the historic Connor Palace in Cleveland ahead of the GOP convention, which officially starts Monday, was more intense, since it was populated by Republican delegates. At Sunday's premiere, in fact, the delegates treated D'Souza like he was a rock star - appropriate, since the theater is right down the block from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

"We wanted to come out strong and early," D'Souza told The Hollywood Reporter. "It's a very infectious movie. It can play an important role in uniting the Republican party and make the case against not just Hillary Clinton but the Democrats, too."

Read More: Box Office: Dinesh D'Souza's 'Hillary's America' Doc Strong in U.S. Debut

D'Souza also gave THR an exclusive clip from the doc, which features scenes from the 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. Watch the clip above.

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"It was unfortunate for our country that the first movie ever screened in the White House was a racist movie by a racist Democratic president," said Carol Swain, professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University, while scenes of Birth of a Nation roll in Hillary's America.

At Sunday night's RNC premiere of the film, the Gatlin Brothers also played a short set. Larry Gatlin wrote and performed a song for the doc.

"Hillary Clinton's a criminal, whether she's been thrown in jail or not," Gatlin told THR. "When Dinesh asked me to be a part of this movie, I asked him where I should stand and when I should start singing. It took me about 15 minutes to write the song, because there's a whole lot of information about Hillary and the Democrats out there."

Clinton is the presumptive Democratic candidate for president and will square off against Donald Trump, the presumptive nominee for the Republicans.

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Kigali (AFP) - Renewed fighting in South Sudan that has claimed more than 300 lives dominated discussions at an African Union summit that opened Sunday in the Rwandan capital Kigali.

A shaky ceasefire has held since late Monday following the fighting that raged for four days in Juba, leaving hundreds dead and forcing 40,000 to flee their homes.

The violence in the South Sudan capital echoed the fighting that triggered the civil war and marks a fresh blow to last year's deal to end the bitter conflict that began when President Salva Kiir accused ex-rebel and now Vice President Riek Machar of plotting a coup.

The unrest has also plunged into doubt a peace deal struck in August 2015 between the two sides.

After meeting with the UN Secretary-General on Saturday night leaders of the regional bloc IGAD supported Ban Ki-moon's calls for an arms embargo, targeted sanctions and a strengthened peacekeeping mission and called for "the deployment of a regional protection force to separate the warring parties".

AU Commission chair Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma praised IGAD for acting "swiftly" in holding a meeting on South Sudan's crisis.

"We shall not be indifferent and shall act in the belief that, when the power of love for fellow Africans overcomes the love of power there shall be peace within our lands," she said in an opening address.

- Numerous crises -

South Sudan is just the most recent crisis on the continent that African leaders will address during the summit.

The AU will also seek to hammer out a solution to the crisis engulfing Burundi where a spate of killings have rocked the country since President Pierre Nkurunziza's announced in April 2015 that he would seek a third term.

Also on the agenda is the ongoing fight against the Boko Haram jihadist group that has its roots in northern Nigeria but has carried out attacks across the Lake Chad region.

Recent violent incidents in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo are also expected to feature in the talks.

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Efforts to secure peace in South Sudan and elsewhere, however, will be complicated by divisions over who should succeed Dlamini-Zuma, ex-wife of South African President Jacob Zuma, to become the AU's new commission chair.

Several countries on the continent have indicated that they do not back any of the leading candidates for the job, arguing that they "lack stature".

Now all three of the leading candidates look like they may fail to get a majority of votes from the African Union's 54 members.

If that happens the vote could be abandoned and re-run at the next AU summit in Addis Ababa in January 2017.

- 'African self-reliance' -

The AU, meanwhile, announced a plan to work towards funding itself. Currently foreign donors pay for 73 percent of the $781 million (708 million euro) budget but on Sunday a plan was adopted to levy a new 0.2 percent tax on imports and use the funds to pay for the AU.

Rwanda's Finance Minister Claver Gatete said it could bring in as much as $1.2 billion (1.1 billion euros).

Dlamini-Zuma welcomed the "historic landmark decision" as "an unprecedented leap forward for African self-reliance and dignity".

Rwanda's President Paul Kagame, hosting the summit, said the plan, "puts responsibility and ownership in our hands".

"We need to start doing things differently, and better," he told delegates at the opening ceremony.
Star Wars: Episode VIII zoomed into Star Wars Celebration Europe on Sunday in London, where director Rian Johnson shared details of the sequel, including that it begins just seconds after The Force Awakens ends.

"For the first time, this movie is going to start where the last one left off," said Johnson, who called Ireland's Skellig Michael, the location of the final scene in The Force Awakens, "a very mystical, magical place."

Johnson appeared alongside Star Wars heavy hitters including Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and Han Solo spinoff movie directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who also introduced their new lead star, Alden Ehrenreich. But despite the big names involved, there was no major news announced, and some fans - who had speculated that a title for Episode VIII would be revealed or a new stand-alone film would be announced - reacted with disappointment.

During the Future Filmmakers panel, Johnson revealed three war movies that he considered inspirations for Episode VIII: Twelve O'Clock High, Letter Never Sent and The Bridge on the River Kwai. He singled out Twelve O'Clock High, the 1949 World War II drama starring Gregory Peck, as a film that especially influenced Episode VIII.

Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher made surprise appearances, as did John Boyega, but the younger star remained vague on the state of his character Finn after being seriously injured in a fight with Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) in The Force Awakens.

"The characters have been pushed in a new direction in a very, very cool way," said Boyega, while Johnson joked that he was thinking of cutting to Finn in a coma - where he left off in The Force Awakens - throughout the entire upcoming pic.

And though filming has wrapped, the helmer proved there's still some casting news to share, with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards appearing in a cameo role alongside cameos from both Lord and Miller. Miller revealed they were also fitted for costumes for cameos in Rogue One, but were unable to make the scheduling work (due to Miller having to find a school for his son). Johnson, however, did make it into the spinoff, appearing as a Death Star operator alongside another of his Episode VIII crew members.

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#RogueOne director Gareth Edwards in costume for #EpisodeVIII. -Future Filmmaker Panel #SWCE https://t.co/IJlrZoc8hs pic.twitter.com/JvKlZUTlIo

- Star Wars (@starwars) July 17, 2016

Johnson also showed some photos from behind the scenes, including studio shots of the Millennium Falcon. But he emphasized the film wasn't overly reliant on green screens.

"There are a tremendous amount of practical sets," he said. "It's outrageous."

The sprawling cast of Episode VIII includes Hamill, Fisher, Driver, Daisy Ridley, Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie and Andy Serkis, all returning from The Force Awakens. They'll be joined by franchise newcomers Benicio Del Toro, Laura Dern and Kelly Marie Tran.

Star Wars: Episode VIII is set to hit theaters Dec. 15, 2017.
Distillers are blasting spirits into space, or anchoring them to the ocean floor, in their extreme quest for flavor.

It could be a plot from a science fiction movie: Vials of experimental whisky distilled on a remote island are put aboard a Russian spacecraft, which blasts off, destined for a space station orbiting the Earth. Three months later, at a predetermined time, an astronaut cracks the vials while on Earth a scientist does the same with identical vials.

What comes next is not some strange, cosmic toast, but the beginning of a 3-year experiment conducted by Scotlands Ardbeg distillery and a NASA contractor aboard the International Space Station. The lofty goal was to determine the effects of near-zero gravity on aging whisky. But the test could also help unlock the secrets of how whisky and other spirits mature into such complex liquids back on the home planet. Although scientists can tell us about the flavor components in aged spirits, such as phenols and terpenes, the actual aging process remains a mystery: Distillers, when pressed, admit that no one knows exactly what goes on inside the barrel.

They have long experimented with high-altitude conditions and a range of temperatures; with barrels made from a variety of woods or other materials; with used barrels imbued with vintage port, Sauternes, and other wines and spirits; and of course with simple variations in the duration in the barrel. But in more recent years, these efforts have pushed into uncharted territory in a quest to enhance flavor. One of the first was Kelt Cognac ($70$4,000), which in the 1990s began sending its Limousin-oak-barreled eau-de-vie on an ocean voyage in the belief that the rocking and pitching of the ship would give the liquid greater contact with the wood and therefore more depth of flavor. But after 3 months on the waves, the difference was barely detectable.

A similar technique is now being practiced 42 feet below the surface of the Caribbean, where anchored casks of Seven Fathoms Rum ($69) gently roll and sway in the warm Cayman Island currents. The rumpot distilled in Georgetown, Grand Cayman, from cane sugaris enjoying a natural massage and increased contact with the toasted oak of ex-bourbon barrels. The near-constant 80-degree temperature of the Caribbean helps accelerate the process, and the barrels are encased in a protective wrapping to eliminate contact with seawater. The technique, devised by Seven Fathoms partners Walker Romanica and Nelson Dilbert, requires aging the rum in barrels for up to 3 years, with most of that time spent underwater.

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Traditionally, in Kentucky or Scotland, Romanica says, theyre looking for a variance in temperature, which helps the barrel breathe, and pushes the spirit in and out of the wood, which absorbs more of the extractors in the wood. We get a similar effect from the tide, so you get pressure increasing and decreasing several times a day, and greater interaction between the rum and the wood enhances the aging process. Originally, in Cuba, the Bacardi family credited their early success to the fact that their warehouse was situated next to a train track, where every hour a train would go by and shake the barrels.

The effect of agitationwhatever the sourceis to develop the character of a much older spirit. To be sure, the rich golden color of Seven Fathoms is deeper than one would expect in a 3-year-old rum. Its sweet sugarcane characteristic is balanced by flavors of earthy vanilla, citrus, and a hint of spice, which is unusual in rum so young.

When it comes to high-altitude aging, Dalwhinnieat more than 1,000 feet above sea leveloften boasts of being one of the highest distillers in Scotland. But no one can top the Ardbeg-in-orbit experiment. In August 2011, NanoRacks, a Houston firm that contracts with NASA to conduct research aboard the International Space Station, contacted Moet Hennessy USA to discuss an experiment involving aging whisky in space. But it was not just any whisky NanoRacks was interested in putting aboard a Soyuz rocket destined for the space station: The company was inspired by Ardbeg Supernova ($160), a heavily peated 108.6-proof cask-strength Islay single malt.

Supernova is the smokiest single malt ever released by this island distillery; the September 2015 bottling, which commemorates the first anniversary of the NanoRacksArdbeg experiment, boasts 100 parts per million of the phenols that make up its smoky character. By comparison, Ardbegs signature Ten Years Old single malt, known for its concentrated peaty flavor, registers just 55 parts per million.

NanoRacks had been looking at how microgravity impacted a range of chemical compounds called terpenes, which are the building blocks of flavors in fruits, vegetables, wines, and of course whiskies, says Bill Lumsden, Ardbegs director of distilling, whisky creation, and whisky stocks. And there are lots of terpenes in single-malt whisky. Basically they are aromatic hydrocarbons, and their structures are similar to the phenols you get from the peat that gives Ardbeg its smoky flavor.

Lumsden, who also holds a doctorate in microbial physiology, prepared clear, newly made Ardbeg distillate and charred shavings from the interior of ex-bourbon barrels used to age Ardbeg. NanoRacks put these components into 32 vials called MixStix, thin Teflon-encased glass tubes divided by a collapsible wall into two equal compartments. To mingle the contents, the MixStix are flexed, which breaks the wall and combines the elements. The spirit was poured into one of the MixStix compartments, and the oak shavings put into the other. Three of these MixStix were sent to Lumsden to use as control samples on Earth; the rest were put aboard the Soyuz rocket, which launched on October 30, 2011. Three days later, the MixStix were received by astronauts at the International Space Station, who in January combined their distillates and wood shavings at the same time Lumsden did the same on Islay.

The Ardbeg vials remained in space until September 2014, mingling in microgravity for 971 days and orbiting Earth 15 times a day. After a return trip aboard the Soyuz, they were reunited with the earthbound control vials that November. Not having been aged in oak barrels for a minimum of 3 years, the liquid in them could not be called scotch. Plus, the spirit had not been produced in Scotland, although at times it may have passed over the country. Nonetheless, as a result of this experiment, Lumsden gained dramatic insight about the effects of microgravity on whisky maturation.

My greatest fear was that there would be no difference between the samples sent into space and the control samples on Earth, Lumsden says. But much to my delight and relief, there was quite a substantial difference.

The samples that had been aging in Ardbegs Warehouse 3 tasted like Ardbeg Supernova, with a sweet, smoky character infused with salt air and citrus. No surprises there. But the samples that came back from space displayed flavors Lumsden had never encountered in the whisky, such as cassis, violet, lavender, briar-wood, and cherries. He speculates that microgravitys effect on the capillary action of the wood altered its ability to draw the distillate in and out of the oak and produced the different flavors.

Of course, scientific research often ends up posing more questions than it answers. For example, Lumsden asks, how can I take this knowledge and translate it into some new Ardbeg whisky here on planet Earth? Im going to look again at the flavor profile of our experiment in space and see if I can find some way to re-create that in a new expression of Ardbeg. But my biggest challenge is, how can I build a zero-gravity warehouse?

Ardbeg, ardbeg.com; Kelt Cognac, keltcognac.com; Seven Fathoms Rum, caymanspirits.com

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The shooter responsible for allegedly killing three police officers and injuring three more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been identified, CBS, Reuters and NPR have confirmed.



The suspect died in a shootout with police and has been identified as Gavin Long, according to multiple reports. The day of the shooting marks Long's 29th birthday and he was from Kansas City, Missouri. It is not clear why he was in Baton Rouge.



The victims were from the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's office, authorities announced in an earlier press conference.



Two other suspects may still be at large, but state police confirmed that there is "no active shooter situation" in the city.







A source told Reuters that there is reason to believe the suspect called 911 to lure police to the scene of the crime.



 Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter.



In a statement from the White House, President Barack Obama called the shooting a "cowardly and reprehensible assault."



"The officers in Baton Rouge; the officers in Dallas  they were our fellow Americans," he said, "part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now  all of us  to be at our best."
Traveling and looking at more than just the sites? Tinder has released a list of the top cities people use their Passport feature, or likeminded individuals also looking for love in a foreign place. Cities where individuals are most likely to get lots or right swipes include London, Paris, New York, and more. Start making your vacation plans now!



1. London, England

The number one city in the world for Tinder users looking for companionship (and sure, maybe a bit of love) has long attracted jet-setters and A-listers with its glam restaurants and charming hotels.

2. Paris, France

Its one of the worlds most romantic places to propose, so it should come as no surprise that its one of the most popular places for Tinder Passport users.

3. New York City, New York

Who wouldnt want a local showing them around the Big Apple?

4. Berlin, Germany

Dont be surprised that always-cool Berlin is a hotspot for connected, single travelers. After all, a lot of people come here just for the weekend-long parties.

5. Moscow, Russia

Want to brighten up a gloomy day in Moscow? Check out the booming arts scene and swipe right on Muscovites who love shows at the Bolshoi Theatre and contemporary art fairs like Cosmoscow.

6. Stockholm, Sweden

The secret is out: summer is the best time to visit Sweden. Nothing says romance like kayaking along the coast and spending lazy afternoons in the fishing boat.

7. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

One of the best places to travel this year is also one of the cities that saw the greatest boost in interest since the launch of Tinder Passport. Our guess? People are eager to connect with locals ahead of the Olympics.

8. Sydney, Australia

You wont tire of eating and drinking your way through Sydney but youll definitely want a companion with whom to share.

9. Barcelona, Spain

Need to know what to do in Barcelona? People are finding locals to make their way around.

10. Buenos Aires, Argentina

The Buenos Aires trifecta (tango, steak, wine) is a must-do, whether youre on a Tinder date or a platonic meet-up.

Story continues

11. Melbourne, Australia

Even if you only have two days in Melbourne, your Tinder Passport matches can help make the most of your time.

12. Los Angeles, California

With so many areas and options in this sprawling city, it would pay to have your local Tinder Passport friend hook you up with where to meet.

13. Auckland, New Zealand

Conjure a little romance in Auckland by taking a ferry to one of the many outlying islands.

14. Dublin, Ireland

In Dublins chic Creative Quarter, travelers can get to know their Tinder matches over a scoop of local ice cream (brown bread; toasted Irish oats).

15. Rome, Italy

It may be true that all roads lead to Rome. Explore this romantic city with a Tinder date of your very own.

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.


Ankara (AFP) - Thousands took to the streets of Turkey in support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after authorities crushed a military coup that claimed at least 265 lives.

After facing down the bloodiest challenge to his 13-year rule, Erdogan triumphantly addressed flag-waving supporters in Istanbul following Friday's chaos in the strategic NATO member of 80 million people.

The authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who is Erdogan's arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.

Turks woke up early Saturday to television pictures showing dozens of soldiers surrendering after the failed coup, some with their hands above their head, others forced to the ground in the streets.

"The situation is completely under control," Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said outside his Ankara offices, flanked by Turkey's top general who had himself been taken hostage by the plotters.

Describing the attempted coup as a "black stain" on Turkey's democracy, Yildirim said 161 people had been killed in the night of violence and 1,440 wounded.

General Umit Dundar, who stood in as acting chief of staff while Hulusi Akar was being held by the rebels, said 104 coup plotters has been killed. Akar was later rescued in an operation that marked the end of the plotters' hopes.

During a night where power hung in the balance, supporters of Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) defied the coup leaders' orders of a curfew and flooded the streets to block the attempt to overthrow the regime.

On Saturday, thousands of jubilant supporters again mobilised in response to Erdogan's call to fill Turkey's squares, massing in Taksim in central Istanbul, the president's home district of Kisikli, Ankara's Kizilay Square and in the coastal city of Izmir, AFP correspondents said.

Story continues

- Crackdown concerns -

Friday's putsch bid began with rebel F-16 jets screaming low over rooftops in Ankara, soldiers and tanks taking to the streets and multiple explosions throughout the night in the capital as well as the biggest city Istanbul.

Parts of parliament were turned to rubble after being hit by air strikes from rebel jets.

Rebel troops also moved to block the two bridges across the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, culminating in a stand-off with an angry crowd.

Turks have not seen such scenes since 1980 when the military led by general Kenan Evren ousted the government and many had no desire to revive these memories.

As protesters poured onto the streets, an AFP photographer saw troops open fire on people gathered near one of the bridges, leaving dozens wounded.

There was chaos in the city as angry crowds jeered the passing tanks, with much smaller numbers welcoming the troops.

With the coup defeated, Turkey rounded up its backers, from rank-and-file soldiers to generals, fuelling concern over the risk of summary justice.

US President Barack Obama stressed the "vital need" for all parties to "act within the rule of law".

While condemning the coup bid, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also said the plotters had to be dealt with "under the rule of law".

General Erdal Ozturk, commander of the Third Army, has been detained while Alparslan Altan, one of 17 judges on the constitutional court, was taken into custody.

Judicial authorities said 2,745 judges would also be sacked in the wake of the attempted coup.

In a call to his Turkish opposite number Saturday, US Secretary of State John Kerry offered Washington's continued support, but also denounced claims by some Ankara officials that the US had backed the coup.

- Calls for extradition -

The president's critics have long accused him of undermining modern Turkey's secular roots and of sliding into authoritarianism -- but he was believed to have won control of the military after purging elements who opposed him.

Turkey's once-powerful military has long considered itself the guardian of the secular state founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.

It has staged three coups since 1960 and forced out an Islamic government in 1997.

Erdogan immediately pinned the blame on "the parallel state" and "Pennsylvania" -- a reference to Gulen, his arch-enemy whom he has always accused of seeking to overthrow him, and calling for his extradition.

But Gulen "categorically" denied any involvement in the plot, calling the accusation "insulting".

Meanwhile, Turkey demanded the extradition of eight people thought to have been involved in the putsch who landed in a Black Hawk military helicopter in Greece.

Istanbul authorities have sought to get life back to normal by reopening the bridges to traffic and gradually resuming service at Ataturk International Airport, which was shut down by the plotters.

But Washington on Saturday warned citizens against travel to the country, suspending flights and banning all airlines from flying to the United States from Turkey due to uncertainty after the coup bid.

Turkish authorities also imposed a security lockdown at the Incirlik air base in the southern province of Adana used by US and other coalition forces in the fight against jihadists in Syria, the US consulate said.
Washington (AFP) - Three police officers were killed and three wounded in a shooting in the Louisiana capital of Baton Rouge on Sunday, with at least two suspects at large, amid a resurgence of violence involving law enforcement.

The shooting took place in a city scarred by high racial tensions and numerous protests against police brutality since the death earlier this month of Alton Sterling, a black man shot at point-blank range by an officer.

"One suspect is dead, law enforcement believes two others may be at large," the East Baton Rouge sheriff's office said in a statement Sunday.

The shooting took place along a highway around 9:00 am (1400 GMT), the statement added, though the exact circumstances remained unclear.

It appears the incident began before police officers arrived on scene.

"It's my understanding that they (the officers) had responded to an initial shooting incident," Casey Rayborn Hicks, public affairs officer for the sheriff's office, told local WAFB television.

Witness Brady Vancel told the station that he saw what may have been gang members shooting at each other before police arrived.

"This has nothing to do with any situation," he said, referring to controversies surrounding a series of high-profile shootings involving police -- including the killings July 7 of five Dallas police officers -- that have shocked the country over the last several weeks.

One of those killed was Sterling, who was shot two days before the Dallas attack.

The shootings helped expose deep fault lines through society, reviving long-running debates about racial prejudice and an epidemic of gun violence.

- 'Cowardly' -

President Barack Obama, who has had to address multiple mass shooting tragedies during his term, condemned the Baton Rouge shooting as "cowardly" and demanded an end to such violence. He is due to make an address on the violence at the White House at 4:30 pm (2030 GMT).

Story continues

"For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault," Obama said in a statement.

"These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law and on civilized society, and they have to stop."

The five police officers in Dallas were killed by a gunman during a demonstration triggered by the fatal police shooting of Sterling and another African-American man in Minnesota whose dying moments were captured in shocking video footage that went viral online.

The first African American president of the United States, Obama has made repeated calls for racial unity.

"We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: there is no justification for violence against law enforcement. None," Obama said.

"These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes."

Obama pledged the federal government's full support in the investigation of the incident.

"There is no place in the United States for such appalling violence," his Attorney General Loretta Lynch said.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, took to Twitter to say: "We are TRYING to fight ISIS, and now our own people are killing our police. Our country is divided and out of control. The world is watching."

- Wearing all black -

During Sunday's shooting, Vancel said he saw two men running away and a third lying motionless on the ground. At least one was carrying what appeared to be an AR-15 automatic rifle amid the sound of gunfire.

The races of the shooters and the police officers involved were not immediately clear.

WAFB broadcast video footage of police responding to the scene near a gasoline station. Multiple shots could be heard as civilian cars quickly backed away.

However, there were conflicting reports about the shooting, with WBRZ television reporting a witness describing a man dressed in black, his face covered, shooting indiscriminately.

Police are looking for the two suspected surviving shooters.

"We're not sure of anything right now," Baton Rouge police spokesman L'Jean McNeely told reporters near the scene, urging local residents to be on alert for the suspects.

The injured police officers were reported to be in critical condition, undergoing treatment at a nearby trauma center.

Video posted online showed a SWAT team en route to the scene.

- Unspeakable and unjustified -

"This is an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said in a statement.

"Rest assured, every resource available to the state of Louisiana will be used to ensure the perpetrators are swiftly brought to justice."

Last week, police arrested more than 100 protesters taking part in a demonstration against police brutality in Baton Rouge under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Sunday's shootings also play into a debate about gun control in a country in which firearms killed some 13,440 people last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Last month, Democratic lawmakers, pushing for tougher gun-control laws after a massacre in a Florida gay nightclub killed 49 people, staged a virtually unprecedented 24-hour sit-in in Congress after Republicans refused to allow a vote on two widely supported measures
Washington (AFP) - A gunman killed at least two police officers and injured at least five more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday, local media reported.

Several of those injured were reported to be in critical condition.

"The scene seems to be contained right now," Baton Rouge police spokesman Don Coppola told television station WAFB.
An ongoing political power struggle reached a boiling point in Turkey, resulting in the deaths of at least 265 people after a failed military attempt to overthrow the government erupted Friday (July 15). Speaking from an undisclosed location Prime Minister Binali Yildirim addressed the calamity in a news conference Saturday, the New York Times reports.

In addition to casualties, 1,440 people were injured and 2,839 military forces have been detained in what Yildirim described as a stain on the history of democracy.

The violent clash began late Friday with military forces taking over two bridges in Istanbul. Soldiers also stormed the streets in military tanks and torched government buildings.

Turkey. Army has sealed both bridges over Bosphurus. Soldiers on streets. Planes overhead.  Tim Marshall (@Itwitius) July 15, 2016

CNN Turks was interrupted by soldiers during a live broadcast, forcing the news outlet off the air. One journalist was reportedly killed in the incident.

WATCH: Dramatic moments at CNN Turk as rogue soldiers are detained pic.twitter.com/G803dXkyv8  BNO News (@BNONews) July 16, 2016

Turkeys president Recep Tayyip Erdogan encouraged supporters to peacefully protest against the attempted military coup, which he blames on Fethullah Gulen, a 75-year-old Muslim imam living in exile in Pennsylvania amid political conflict with Yildirim.

Though Gulens chose to leave Turkey over a decade ago, Erdogan accuses him of influencing the ill-fated governmental takeover.
Istanbul (AFP) - Turkish authorities pressed on Sunday with a ruthless crackdown against suspects in the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with 6,000 people detained as he vowed to stamp out the "virus" of the putschists.

Erdogan said Turkey could consider reinstating the death penalty following the putsch bid, despite concerns in the international community.

World leaders including US President Barack Obama have strongly condemned Friday's attempted takeover by an army faction, which according to the government left nearly 300 people dead.

But there is growing alarm over the retaliatory purges by Turkish authorities, especially after pictures emerged showing the rough treatment of some suspects.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said around 6,000 people had been detained in "clean-up operations" and warned that the number would rise.

They include senior army commanders, top judges, prosecutors and a military aide to Erdogan.

A resurgent Erdogan raised the prospect of bringing back capital punishment, which was abolished in 2004 as the country sought to improve its chances of joining the EU.

"In democracies, decisions are made based on what the people say. I think our government will speak with the opposition and come to a decision," he said, reacting to crowds in Istanbul calling for the death penalty.

"We cannot delay this anymore because in this country, those who launch a coup will have to pay the price for it," he told supporters.

Earlier he told a crowd of thousands at a funeral for the victims in Istanbul there would be no let-up in the fight against his sworn enemy Fethullah Gulen, the US-based Islamic preacher he accuses of masterminding the coup plot.

"We will continue to clean the virus from all state bodies because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state," he said.

More than 290 people were killed during the coup bid, including over 100 putschists, the foreign ministry said late Sunday, raising the toll from an earlier figure of 265 dead.

Story continues

In a sign of still-simmering tensions, clashes briefly erupted at an air base in the central city of Konya between security forces and putschists trying to evade arrest, while at Istanbul's second airport Sabiha Gokcen, police fired warning shots at rebel troops who later surrendered, a Turkish official told AFP.

- 'Undermining democracy' -

Turkish authorities have made clear they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup, which sparked fears of chaos in the strategic NATO country of 80 million people.

It was the biggest challenge to Erdogan's rule in his 13 years as prime minister and president.

The group behind the putsch, which called itself the Council for Peace in the Homeland, said it was necessary to stop the increasingly authoritarian president from undermining Turkish democracy.

Critics at home and abroad had voiced mounting concern over the state of democracy and freedom of speech under Erdogan.

But the 62-year-old leader successfully mobilised supporters into the streets to face down the plotters.

- 'Continue defiantly' -

Thousands again responded late Saturday to Erdogan's call to pour into the streets and celebrate the "victory of democracy", with mass rallies of flag-waving Turks in cities including Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.

"They may have tanks but we have our faith. We will not leave the squares... but we will continue defiantly," said Erdogan.

Turkish television has shown images of captured suspects forced to lie face down on the tarmac after their arrest while AFP photographers have seen suspects roughly led away, pursued by angry mobs.

NTV television said 34 generals of various grades had been detained so far.

Air force brigadier general Bekir Ercan Van was also detained at the key Incirlik air base used by US forces for raids in Syria, along with a dozen lower-ranked officers.

But the crackdown is not restricted to the military, and Anadolu said warrants have been issued for 2,745 judges and prosecutors.

Turkey shut down airspace around Incirlik after the coup, forcing the US to halt its strikes in Syria.

But Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Sunday that operations against the Islamic State group had resumed from the base.

The putsch added to the turmoil in Turkey after a wave of deadly bombings blamed on IS jihadists and Kurdish rebels.

- No carte blanche -

Erdogan has long accused Gulen of running a "parallel state" in Turkey, and called on Obama to extradite the reclusive preacher from the United States to face justice.

The 75-year-old preacher has categorically denied any involvement in the plot and suggested it could have been staged by Erdogan himself.

Obama meanwhile told Turkey there is a "vital need" for all parties to "act within the rule of law".

And French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault warned Erdogan against using the failed putsch as a "blank cheque" to silence his opponents.

But there was no such concern from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who called Erdogan to wish for a "speedy restoration of strong constitutional order".
NC leaders discuss with Deuba on current political issues

The Nepali Congress leaders including senior leader Ram Chandra Poudel met with party President Sher Bahadur Deuba at latter's residence in Budhanilakantha on Sunday.
Ankara (AFP) - Some 7,500 people have been detained in Turkey and almost 9,000 officials sacked after a failed coup at the weekend which has stunned the country.

Here is what we know so far about the dramatic events of Friday night and how the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has responded.

- How did the coup attempt unfold? -

Soldiers shut down two of the bridges spanning the Bosphorus in Istanbul at around 7:30 pm (1630 GMT) and shortly after, military jets were heard flying low in the capital Ankara.

At around 11:30 pm, a group within the military announced it had seized control of Turkey and that the country was now under martial law. Troops appeared on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara.

Erdogan, addressing the nation via a FaceTime call to the CNN Turk television channel, urged people to take to the streets and resist the coup, which they did in their thousands.

Soldiers in Istanbul opened fire on protesters and fighting erupted in Ankara, with planes bombing the parliament building.

Erdogan flew into Istanbul early Saturday where he was greeted by a sea of supporters, and shortly after the government announced it had regained control and that the coup had failed.

More than 290 people were killed, according to official figures, including over 100 putschists.

- Is it over? -

Authorities wasted no time in launching a ruthless crackdown to root out suspected coup plotters in their own ranks.

But in a sign that the situation has yet to return completely to normal, security forces and putschists briefly clashed at an air base in the central city of Konya on Sunday.

There was also an incident Sunday evening at Istanbul's second airport Sabiha Gokcen, where police fired warning shots at putschists who were resisting arrest. They eventually surrendered.

- Who was behind the coup bid? -

It remains unclear who exactly was behind the attempted power grab. The coup was declared by a group within the army calling itself the Council for Peace in the Homeland, saying it was intervening "to ensure and restore constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms".

Story continues

Erdogan has furiously pointed blame at his arch-foe Fethullah Gulen, a US-based Islamic preacher whose Hizmet movement has a powerful presence in Turkish society, including the media, police and judiciary.

Gulen has categorically denied any involvement in the plot and has suggested it could have been staged by Erdogan himself to cement his grip on power, a theory that has been raised by other critics and some analysts.

- How has the government reacted? -

By Monday some 7,500 people including top army commanders, judges and prosecutors had been detained as Erdogan vowed to stamp out the "virus" of the putschists.

A total of 103 generals and admirals have been detained in sweeps across the country as well as 2,389 soldiers, according to Turkish media reports. A military aide to Erdogan, Ali Yazici, was also held.

The crackdown is not limited to the military, with arrest warrants issued for 2,745 judges and prosecutors, according to state-run news agency Anadolu.

The suspects are being charged with membership of an "armed terrorist organisation" and attempting to overthrow the government by force, the Hurriyet Daily News reported.

The message from authorities is clear: they will show no mercy in the wake of the coup.

Also, nearly 9,000 officials have been sacked.

Erdogan even said Sunday that Turkey would now consider reinstating the death penalty.

- What are world powers saying? -

World powers rallied behind Erdogan on the night of the coup, with key strategic partners including the United States and European Union offering support for Turkey's elected authorities.

But there has been international concern over the mass arrests, with US President Barack Obama urging Ankara to "act within the rule of law" in the aftermath of the failed putsch.

The European Union's foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Turkey would be barred from joining the bloc if it reinstated the death penalty.

"Democratic and legitimate institutions needed to be protected," she said.

"Let me be very clear... no country can become an EU state if it introduces the death penalty."
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish security forces clashed with coup plotters resisting arrest at Istanbul's second airport, and at an air base in central Turkey, an official said on Sunday. Security forces fired warning shots near the Sabiha Gokcen airport on the Asian side of the city and the coup plotters did not return fire, the official said, adding arrests were being made. There were also clashes at an air base in Konya in central Turkey, the official said. "The situation is under control," the official said. (Reporting by Dasha Afanasieva and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by David Dolan)
By Elena Gyldenkerne and Tarek Amara NICE, France/TUNIS (Reuters) - The man who mowed through a crowd with a truck, killing 84 Bastille Day revelers in Nice on Thursday, had phoned home hours earlier and sent a 'laughing' picture from the French city, his brother told Reuters. During a visit to Nice on Sunday, French Health Minister Marisol Touraine said 18 people, including a child, were still in a critical condition, while about 85 people in total were in hospital. The attack by delivery man Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel at peak holiday time on the Riviera plunged France into new grief and fear, just eight months after jihadist gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. "That last day he said he was in Nice with his European friends to celebrate the national holiday," Bouhlel's brother Jabeur told Reuters in their native Tunisia. In the photograph, "he seemed very happy and pleased, he was laughing a lot". Reuters could not verify the existence of the photograph, which Jabeur declined to share. The attacks, along with one in Brussels four months ago, have shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism. Two more people, a man and a woman close to Bouhlel, were arrested in Nice early on Sunday and another person in the afternoon. Four others arrested previously were still being held, but Bouhlel's estranged wife was released without charge after being held since Friday. In a pointer to a possible accomplice, one of these seven people still held by police had received a text from the killer thanking that person for providing a weapon, a source close to the investigation told Reuters. Islamic State has claimed the attack, calling Bouhlel one of its soldiers, but authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31-year-old, shot dead by police, had any actual links to the militant group. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said there was no doubting the assailant's motives. "The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly," he told newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche. As of Sunday no evidence had been produced to show how he underwent that rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion. Relatives and friends interviewed in Nice painted a picture of a man who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and according to French media even ate pork, behavior that would be unlikely in a devout Muslim. A report in the Nice Matin newspaper said investigators had found no radical material in his flat, although they were still looking at his telephone and computer. Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel's sister told Reuters he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005 and had sought medical treatment. WHY FRANCE? Islamic State, which is under military pressure in its Iraqi and Syrian strongholds, considers France a key target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States. France is also home to Europe's biggest Muslim population, and has been accused by some critics of sowing racial, ethnic and religious discord through strict adherence to a culture that allows no place for religion in schools and civic life. Long and open borders also make it an easy target for attackers who want to melt away afterwards. Valls defended France's record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years, and said the modus operandi of cajoling unstable people into striking by whatever means possible was difficult to combat. "Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts ... this is probably what happened in Nice's case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and the far-right over how President Francois Hollande's Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no such thing as zero risk and that new attacks would occur. "I've always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It's a difficult thing to say, but other lives will be lost." With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, opposition politicians are seizing on what they see as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2 km (1.5 miles) through large crowds before it was finally halted. A state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris has been extended by three months, and military and police reservists are to be called up. But the measures appear to have done little to temper concerns. Highlighting the "serious deficiencies" in protecting French citizens, far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen demanded that Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve resign. "Anywhere else in the world a minister with such a terrible record - 250 deaths in 18 months - would have resigned a long time ago," she told reporters. Christian Estrosi, president of the wider Riviera region and a security hardliner, accused the government of failing completely in Nice. "When the interior minister says there were enough police, it constitutes a blatant lie," he told i-Tele television. "He said there were 64 national policemen on duty. It's false and the investigation will show it." Valls has said there were no failures, although Cazeneuve acknowledged on Saturday that the truck had avoided the police vehicles blocking the way to the promenade by mounting a kerb. (Additional reporting by Marine Pennetier and Michel Rose in Paris, Writing by John Irish and Andrew Callus, Editing by Andrew Bolton)
By Robin Emmott and Alastair Macdonald BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European leaders greeted the defeat of Turkey's coup on Saturday with relief as it averts chaos and keeps alive a deal that has helped to stem the migration crisis threatening the continent. But while some hope a reminder of resistance to his personal grip on power may prompt President Tayyip Erdogan to heed European pleas for him to respect civil rights, many fear he is far more likely to step up his crackdown on opponents and so complicate European Union efforts to maintain the bargain. The coming weeks, starting when EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels on Monday, will be crucial to the fate of a plan at the heart of the migrant deal: to have skeptical EU lawmakers approve after the summer an end to visa requirements for Turks. "Erdogan will be judged on his response," one EU official involved in the plan said, citing arrests of judges as an early sign that justified "deep concern that this will lead to a new trampling on rights of freedom of expression and demonstration". Senior members of the European Parliament, where anger at the prickly Turkish leader's treatment of elected opponents could stymie the EU deal to reward Turkey for stopping refugees, were pessimistic about the outlook for Turkish democracy. "Erdogan will try to extend his position of power," foreign affairs committee chair Elmar Brok, an ally of the Turkey deal's architect German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told Die Welt daily. French President Francois Hollande expects "repression". If Erdogan responds to public demands to restore the death penalty to execute putschists, or if Turkey moves to jail ethnic Kurdish parliamentarians whom it stripped of immunity in May, EU lawmakers may turn against the migrant deal, EU officials said. Turkish officials have warned that its collapse could see Ankara allow a resumption of traffic that last year saw a million people, many refugees from Syria and Iraq, cross to Greek islands and trek over open borders to Germany. That shook Europeans' support for the EU and, some argue, fueled last month's devastating British vote to leave the bloc. NUANCED SUPPORT - 'NOT ABOUT ERDOGAN' Official statements from the EU stressed backing for a democracy that many acknowledge Erdogan has himself abused. "The EU fully supports the democratically elected government," an early overnight statement read, taking care to add it also backed "the institutions of the country and the rule of law" - a nuanced distinction from Erdogan's personal power. With the plot seemingly already undone, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini followed up to urge "a swift return to Turkey's constitutional order with its checks and balances and ... fundamental freedoms". It seemed hardly a call to defeated soldiers dead or in jail, but rather to the victor. "This is not about supporting Erdogan or not, it is about supporting the rule of law and democracy," a second senior EU official involved in relations with Ankara told Reuters. EU officials have reminded Turkish counterparts that their past cooperation, in engaging Ankara in a decade of halting reforms to enhance its - distant - prospects of joining the bloc, has helped Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted party to curb the historic threat to civilian rule from Turkey's armed forces. Now, closer ties with the economic bloc are at stake, the second official said, insisting Europe can use that "leverage", despite criticism from human rights groups that Merkel's deal with Erdogan to hold back migrants put Europe at his mercy. "This is not a blank check for Erdogan," he said of backing against the coup. "He has to be extremely careful not to overshoot the reaction." HOPE FOR CHANGE? - 'ERDOGAN IS NOT PUTIN' Many EU diplomats argue that Turkey, faced with conflict across its borders in Iraq and Syria that has fueled internal strife with its Kurdish minority, and at odds with Russia and most Middle East powers, cannot afford to alienate Europeans. And some dared to voice hope on Saturday that the coup bid might make Erdogan more willing to reach beyond his own voters: "Erdogan is not Putin - he is not that strong. We have to keep him on the democratic path," a third EU official said. Expressing a hope that Europeans might now warm to Erdogan again as a lesser of two evils, less unappealing than chaos, or army rule, a fourth EU official referred to the president's call to unarmed supporters to face down the army: "If you win by saying democracy is stronger than tanks," he said, "then the 'democratically elected government' should act for democracy." A fifth EU official was pessimistic, however: "It would be nice if Erdogan saw this as a wake-up call" to respect civil rights, he said, but a crackdown seemed "almost inevitable". Senior diplomats dismissed suggestions, however, that the EU had hesitated to condemn the plotters in the early hours in the hope of change. However irksome many find Erdogan, they said, statements against the putsch came as quickly as possible. "Clearly Europe would have more reasons to worry if the coup had prevailed," one EU official said. CARDS TO PLAY - 'TURKEY BENEFITS' Some fear Erdogan can use his control of the migration route to Europe to ignore calls for restraint in penalizing opponents, but others argue that Europe has cards to play against him. They even play down the importance of Turkish cooperation in the migrant crisis, citing data showing that closing down routes from Greece through the Balkans was at least as big a factor in deterring all but a few from crossing to Europe since March. Referring to Ankara's hopes of aid for 2.7 million Syrians it is housing, and for visa liberalization eagerly anticipated by many Turks, a senior European government official said: "The deal is in Turkey's interests, so why should they change it?" As big a hurdle could be the European Parliament, where some had threatened to block the visa bill if Turkey jails any of dozens of Kurdish lawmakers who were stripped of their immunity from prosecution by a pro-Erdogan majority two months ago. German leftist Martina Michels said it was Europe's failure to stand up to the Turkish president that had destabilized Turkey. Now, she said: "An uncritical courting of Erdogan as a partner in the wrong solution to the refugee issue must end." (Additional reporting by Paul Taylor in Brussels and Michael Nienaber and Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Mark Potter)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is not taking any offensive military actions with the goal of destabilizing South Sudan, and is only sending a small contingent to assist its embassy in the country, which has been gripped by violence between rival troops, the State Department said on Sunday. The United States wants to reassure the people and the government of South Sudan that it has no plans to target any government or military leaders or import special military equipment with the goal of destabilizing the nation, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner in a statement. "Any suggestion that the United States has done so or will do so is false, baseless, and not in the interest of peace in South Sudan," he also said. President Barack Obama on Friday said he would deploy up to 200 U.S. troops equipped with combat equipment to South Sudan to protect U.S. citizens and the embassy in Juba, with troops initially stationed in neighboring Uganda. Forces loyal to South Sudan's President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar engaged in five days of street battles with anti-aircraft guns, attack helicopters and tanks until a ceasefire was reached on Monday. The fighting prompted the United Nations and some countries to withdraw non-essential personnel. To help keep its embassy open and help non-emergency workers to depart, the United States sent military personnel to Juba on July 12, Toner said. "Citizens of Juba can expect to see a rotation in military personnel during the week of July 18," he said. "This rotation of troops is to replace not reinforce the number of military personnel. All of the additional troops will return home when the need for additional security no longer exists." (Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Mary Milliken)
By A. Ananthalakshmi and Saeed Azhar SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore's central bank is scrutinizing several banks, including UBS and DBS Group Holdings , to see if they broke anti-money laundering rules in handling transactions linked to scandal-hit Malaysian state fund 1MDB, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is looking at several aspects of the banks operations including whether they were diligent enough in knowing who their customers were and what the source of their funds was, and whether they were particularly careful in screening politically-exposed persons such as government officials, banking and legal sources aware of the review said. The probe could lead to fines and other penalties if lapses are found, said the sources who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter. It is unclear which transactions by the banks are being examined. Switzerland's Falcon Private Bank and Coutts International, which is owned by Geneva-based Union Bancaire Privee, are also among the banks under review, they said. UBS, Coutts, and DBS, which is Singapore's top lender, all declined to comment. When asked about the MAS review, a Zurich-based spokesman for Falcon said: "We have transparently shared our view and have nothing to add." Falcon, which is owned by one of the worlds leading sovereign wealth funds - Abu Dhabi's International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC) - has previously said it is in contact with Singapore's central bank and cooperating with authorities. The MAS is in talks with several banks and will make an announcement on any punitive action against them after the review is completed, sources said. The full details are not known at this stage. Singapore faces pressure to show that banks in the city-state are complying with increasingly tough anti-money laundering rules around the world. While the United States has imposed hefty fines on banks for lapses related to money laundering, tax evasion and international sanctions, Asian regulators have been generally slow to act, some lawyers said. It is also important for Singapore to be seen to be taking action against any abuse of its private banking sector for money laundering, said Nizam Ismail, Singapore-based partner at RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP, where he advises clients on financial services regulation and compliance. An MAS spokeswoman referred Reuters to its statement in March when it had said that "as part of its investigations into possible money-laundering and other offences in Singapore, it has been conducting a thorough review of various transactions as well as fund flows through our banking system." 1MDB referred Reuters to its earlier statements. In May, it had said it hadnt been contacted by any foreign lawful authority on matters relating to the company, and that it remains committed to fully cooperating with the authorities. The latest probes follow MAS's decision in late May to close down the operations of Swiss private bank BSI AG in Singapore for serious breaches of anti-money laundering rules, the first time in 32 years it has taken such action against a bank. MAS said then that there had been gross misconduct by some of BSIs staff and poor management oversight of the banks operations. Though the MAS did not specifically say this related to 1MDB-related transactions, though the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) said at the time that BSI had committed serious breaches of money laundering regulations through business relationships and transactions linked to the corruption scandal surrounding 1MDB. The MAS also imposed a S$13.3 million ($9.9 million) fine on the bank, and on the same day in May, the Swiss authorities said they would seize 95 million Swiss francs ($97 million) of BSIs profits. In response, BSI announced that group CEO Stefano Coduri had stepped down and that it had undertaken steps to strengthen management, including introducing a new chief risk officer and appointing a new group legal counsel. Malaysian companies and banks linked to 1MDB are at the center of corruption and money laundering probes that have led investigators to look at transactions and financial relationships across the globe - from Malaysia to Singapore and the Seychelles, from Abu Dhabi to offshore companies in the Caribbean, and from the United States to Switzerland. Probes are being conducted by authorities in the United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. One of the sources said DBS had identified certain questionable financial activities and had voluntarily reported them to the relevant authorities. Reuters couldnt determine what those activities were. A Malaysian parliamentary investigation made public earlier this year found that $4.2 billion of 1MDB's money was unaccounted for or went to overseas bank accounts whose owners could not be ascertained. 1MDB was founded by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in September 2009 to invest in strategic property and energy projects. Najib was the chairman of 1MDB's advisory board until recently. Malaysia's Attorney-General Mohamed Apandi Ali cleared Najib in January of any corruption or criminal offences. He said that $681 million, deposited into Najib's personal account in March 2013 before a Malaysian general election, was a gift from a member of Saudi Arabia's royal family and most of it was returned. Najib has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. (Reporting by A. Ananthalakshmi and Saeed Azhar; additional reporting by Andrew MacAskill in LONDON; Editing by Anshuman Daga and Martin Howell)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Brexit minister said he wanted a generous settlement for Britons living in the EU and for Europeans in Britain after the country voted to leave the 28-nation bloc, but declined to fully guarantee the rights of EU citizens. David Davis, who has said Britain should begin the formal process of leaving the EU by triggering Article 50 in early 2017, said on Sunday that the rights of EU citizens living in Britain should be agreed along with those of Britons in Europe. "I want to see a generous settlement for the people here already because they didn't pick this circumstance," Davis told Sky News on Sunday. "We want to do that at the same time as we get a similarly generous settlement for British citizens living in the EU," he said. Davis said he backed the rights of those living and working in Britain and expected all citizens to be well-protected. However, he suggested that there could be limits if there is an increase in immigration from the 27 remaining EU countries before Brexit occurs. "One way of dealing with it could be saying OK, only people arriving before a certain date get this protection," he said, declining to fully guarantee the rights of those already in Britain. Border control was an important theme in the June 23 referendum in which 52 percent of those who voted backed leaving the European Union, however any limitations could be a concern for Britain's largest firms, many of which have spoken in favor of free movement. Davis, who said his newly created Department for Exiting the European Union currently has 40 staff but will grow to a "couple of hundred", said Britain will now be able to negotiate better trade deals and also keep access to the European single market. "It will keep its access, but whether it keeps tariff-free access is the issue and ...that is what we are aiming for," he said. (Reporting by Costas Pitas and Karin Strohecker; editing by Jason Neely)
London (AFP) - Britain's Brexiteering new Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson heads back to Brussels on Sunday, his old stomping ground as an EU correspondent, where he crafted stories that whipped up euroscepticism at home.

New Prime Minister Theresa May's surprising choice Wednesday to make the figurehead of the victorious Brexit campaign the new head of British diplomacy triggered uproar in European capitals.

EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini will welcome the former mayor of London on Sunday "for an initial contact."

Johnson will then set about building bridges with European peers angry at his role in taking Britain out of the bloc.

French counterpart Jean-Marc Ayrault on Thursday said Johnson had "lied a lot" during the referendum campaign.

Johnson's first engagement as foreign secretary was of limited success, meeting with some boos as he addressed the French ambassador to Britain's Bastille Day party on Thursday.

A planned dinner for him and his 27 counterparts to discuss Brexit would have been a starting point, but the event was cancelled, without official explanation.

Several countries opposed the dinner, saying that it amounted to "informal talks" with London before it had triggered the formal procedure for leaving the EU, according to an anonymous diplomat.

EU leaders are adamant they will not be drawn into negotiations until London has sounded the official starting gun.

Ministers and visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry will instead meet formally on Monday to discuss the conflicts in Syria and Libya as well as the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

They are also likely to discuss terrorism in the wake of the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice and relations with Turkey after a failed attempt to remove its government from power.

But the ministers will also be sizing up Johnson's diplomatic credentials, which at the moment amount to a series of gaffes and off-colour jokes.

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- Square strawberries -

Charming, scruffy and with his unruly mop of blond hair, former London mayor Johnson's first foreign mission is back to where he made a name as a journalist, winning powerful friends in the process.

Johnson, 51, worked in Brussels between 1989 and 1994 -- a time when Britain's difficult relationship with the EU was deeply strained by the Maastricht Treaty.

He was hired by the conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph and rose to become then prime minister Margaret Thatcher's favourite writer, partly thanks to punchy articles that mocked Europe's institutions.

Some of the more absurd stories have been mantras for British eurosceptics for years and featured prominently in Johnson's campaign speeches before the June 23 referendum.

Martin Fletcher, former foreign editor of The Times, said Johnson's Brexit crusade had been "not against the EU, but against the ridiculous cartoon caricature he created" as a Brussels correspondent.

Writing in the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian, former Brussels correspondent Sarah Helm complained she had been tasked to look for the kind of stories written by Johnson when she was first posted there in the mid-1990s.

"At that time learning about Euro-myths -- smaller condoms, square strawberries, fishermen forced to wear hairnets -- took up more time than explaining treaty changes," she wrote.

"The myths were usually funny, often absurd, sometimes traceable to a grain of truth, nearly always grossly distorted, or totally untrue.

"Very often they had first appeared in The Daily Telegraph. Usually, their creator was Boris Johnson," she wrote.

Some of his articles were influential, such as one in 1992 under the headline "Delors Plan to Rule Europe" about proposals by then European Commission president Jacques Delors to centralise power in Brussels.

Johnson, whose father Stanley worked at the European Commission, said the story was seized on by the "No" campaign in the Danish referendum which went against the Maastricht Treaty, signed earlier that year, which had also caused deep political rifts in Britain.

But journalists who worked alongside Johnson when he was in his late 20s remember him more for his skilled networking, provocative questions and party-loving manner than EU nous.
NC, Maoists speed up legal consultations

Just as Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, who is set to face a no-confidence motion in Parliament on Thursday, continues to consult legal and constitutional experts in his bid to save his government, the CPN (Maoist Centre) and the Nepali Congress too have speeded up consultations on their part.
Tunis (AFP) - The head of Libya's unity government on Sunday urged his countrymen to close ranks to overcome political divisions in a country wracked by the threat of jihadists.

Prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj spoke to reporters after a day of UN-hosted talks focused on creating a "unified" army in the oil-rich North African country.

The United Nations brokered late last year a power-sharing deal to form a Government of National Accord (GNA) but the Sarraj government is still struggling to assert its authority.

"We call again on all the children of the country who have not yet joined us to place the nation's interests before any other consideration," Sarraj said in Tunis.

On Saturday, the head of the UN's support mission in Libya, Martin Kobler, said that "all Libya's problems today are tied up to the security issue".

Speaking after the talks in the Tunisian capital, Kobler said the goal of the meeting was to create "a unified Libyan army under the command of the presidential council".

"Libya cannot be united as long as it has several armies," he said, according to an Arabic translation of his remarks.

The meeting also touched on humanitarian issues.

The GNA faces a fearsome set of military, economic and political challenges in a country where rival militias have vied for power since the overthrow of veteran dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

Forces loyal to the unity government are fighting to drive the Islamic State group out of the jihadists' coastal stronghold of Sirte.

The two-month battle has killed around 250 pro-GNA fighters and wounded more than 1,400, according to medical sources at the unity forces' command centre.

The GNA arrived in the capital three months ago, but it has not been endorsed by Libya's elected parliament, while a rival political authority based in the country's far east has refused to cede power.

A controversial general, Khalifa Haftar, controls forces loyal to this authority.

"I want to meet General Haftar, to see and understand his position. I contact him every week to arrange a meeting, but so far he has refused," Kobler said.

Libya's UN-backed presidential council would meet on Monday and Tuesday with "influential security parties" for further talks on a unified army, he said, without specifying who these parties would be.
Washington (AFP) - The US-based cleric that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says is behind an attempted military coup in Turkey has denied any involvement, suggesting that the coup could have been staged by the president himself.

Erdogan has accused Gulen, a reclusive Muslim cleric living in self-imposed exile in a mountain town in Pennsylvania, of being behind Friday's bloody putsch attempt. He wants Washington to extradite Gulen to Turkey.

The 75-year-old Gulen was once a close Erdogan ally but the two fell out in recent years as the Turkish president became suspicious of Gulen's movement, Hizmet, and its powerful presence in Turkish society, including in the media, police and judiciary.

Gulen condemned the military uprising "in the strongest terms" shortly after the coup attempt began late Friday.

And in a rare meeting Saturday with a small group of reporters at his compound in the town of Saylorsburg, in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, Gulen rejected charges of being the coup mastermind.

"I don't know who my followers are," Gulen said when asked if any of his backers were involved in the coup attempt, according to The New York Times.

"Since I do not know these individuals, I cannot speak of their potential involvement. It could be something from the opposition or nationalists. I have been away from Turkey for 30 years and have not been following this."

Gulen moved to the United States in 1999, before he was charged with treason in Turkey. He has since led a secluded life in Pennsylvania and rarely makes public appearances.

- 'Extradite Gulen to Turkey' -

"There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup and it could be meant for further accusations" against Gulen and Hizmet members, the preacher said, according to The Guardian.

Gulen said that he rejects all military interventions and fully supports a government that emerges from free and fair elections.

"After military coups in Turkey," he said, according to The Guardian, "I have been pressured and I have been imprisoned. I have been tried and faced various forms of harassment."

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Now that Turkey "is on the path to democracy, it cannot turn back," he said.

Erdogan appealed to President Barack Obama in a Saturday speech to extradite the "man who lives in Pennsylvania" to Turkey.

"The United States -- you must extradite that person," he told thousands of supporters in Istanbul on Saturday, without referring to Gulen by name.

Secretary of State John Kerry, traveling in Luxembourg, said that Washington has not received any formal extradition request.

Washington has invited the Turkish government "to present us with any legitimate evidence that withstands scrutiny and the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgements about it appropriately," Kerry said.

The Guardian asked Gulen if he would have returned to Turkey had the coup succeeded.

"Indeed, I miss my homeland a lot," Gulen said.

"But there is another important factor, which is freedom. I am here, away from the political troubles in Turkey and I live with my freedom."
Washington (AFP) - The US-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS) group has resumed air strikes from a Turkish air base that were suspended after a failed military coup d'etat, the Pentagon said on Sunday.

"After close coordination with our Turkish allies, they have reopened their airspace to military aircraft," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.

"As a result, counter-ISIL coalition air operations at all air bases in Turkey have resumed," he added, using an acronym for the IS group.

"US facilities at Incirlik are still operating on internal power sources, but we hope to restore commercial power soon. Base operations have not been affected."

The Turkish authorities on Saturday imposed a security lockdown at the Incirlik air base in the southern province of Adana used by US and other coalition forces in the fight against jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

The facility is 68 miles (110 kilometers) from the Syrian border and houses 1,500 US troops. The base has notably been used to deploy drones, Prowler electronic warplanes and A-10 ground attack aircraft in the fight against the IS group.

The US military has a total of around 2,200 service members and civilian employees in Turkey, which is a NATO member and a crucial regional partner for Washington.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday said the airspace closure did not appear to be connected to coalition activities.

"Apparently, there has been refueling with the Turkish air force with planes that were flying in the coup itself and I think that has something to do with what's taken place there," he told CNN.

The Turkish authorities "have absolutely assured us of their commitment to the fight against Daesh," he added, using a term for the IS group. "I expect operations will get back to normal very quickly."

Government forces reportedly detained a senior air force general at the Incirlik base, along with other officers accused of backing the failed coup.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan put down the bloody overnight coup attempt on Saturday, but the events have raised concerns in the West about the stability of the country and its continued role in the anti-IS coalition.
Washington (AFP) - The United States warned its citizens against travel to Turkey after authorities crushed a military coup that claimed at least 265 lives.

"The US Department of State warns US citizens of increased threats from terrorist groups throughout Turkey and to avoid travel to southeastern Turkey," a statement read.

"In light of the July 15 coup attempt and its aftermath, we suggest US citizens reconsider travel to Turkey at this time."

Turkish authorities blamed Fethullah Gulen, a US-based cleric who is President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's arch enemy, for the plot and lost no time in rounding up 2,839 soldiers over alleged involvement, amid global alarm over the extent of the retribution.

The State Department said travel restrictions have been imposed on US government personnel in southeastern Turkey.

"US citizens are reminded to review personal security plans and remain vigilant at all times," it added.

"Foreign and US tourists have been explicitly targeted by international and indigenous terrorist organizations."

The US government suspended all flights to Turkey, and banned all airlines from flying to the United States from Turkey due to uncertainty after Friday's failed coup -- in line with many other international carriers.
By Anggy Polanco SAN ANTONIO, Venezuela (Reuters) - Thousands of Venezuelans streamed into neighboring Colombia on Sunday to take advantage of a temporary opening of the border to buy food and medicine unavailable at home in their country's collapsing economy. Socialist President Nicolas Maduro shut the border last year in an effort to crack down on smuggling of subsidized products. Venezuela's product shortages have since worsened, creating further incentives to buy goods in Colombia and bring them back. A plunge in global oil prices have left the OPEC nation's government unable to maintain lavish subsidies created during the rule of late President Hugo Chavez, while currency controls have left businesses struggling to obtain raw materials and machine parts. Venezuelans routinely spend hours in lines at home seeking items ranging from corn flour to cancer medication to auto parts. Shoppers complain of violence in lines, and looting is on the rise. Bus terminals were packed and hotels filled to capacity in the border town of San Antonio, with many traveling hundreds of miles to shop. "We got here at 2:00 a.m. and slept here in the street. I came to buy medicine because I can't find any in my country," said Erna Millan, 59, who drove 12 hours with two friends with the equivalent of about $30 in cash to buy medicine. "I also came to buy a Cesarean section kit for my daughter, who is about to give birth," she said. Crowds of people flooded the bridge that links San Antonio to the Colombian city of Cucuta to cross the border on foot, at times singing the national anthem or chanting "This government is going to fall!" The governor of Venezuela's state of Tachira opened the border last Sunday, attracting some 35,000 people, and this weekend allowed crossings both Saturday and Sunday. Colombia's government said 44,000 people crossed on Saturday to buy food, medicine and cleaning products and said it expected that number to almost double on Sunday. "I've come to buy what I can't find in the country - rice, beans, lentils, sugar, toilet paper," said Elizabeth Perez, 47, a public employee. "I came a few days ago with a group of people so I could cross into Colombia today. We're only eating once a day." Maduro says socialist policies helped reduce poverty in Venezuela during Chavez's 14-year rule and insists his government is now the victim of an "economic war" led by political adversaries with the help of the United States. Venezuelan officials acknowledge some difficulties, but accuse media of exaggerating problems to destabilize the government. (Additional reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta in Bogota and Carlos Eduardo Ramirez in San Antonio, Writing by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Alan Crosby)
San Antonio del Tachira (Venezuela) (AFP) - Thousands of Venezuelans again poured into the Colombian city of Cucuta on Sunday, profiting from the brief reopening of a long-closed border to buy food and medicine.

Border crossings over two international bridges were opened in early morning without restrictions, although identity cards were checked.

The authorities from the Venezuelan National Guard, police from both countries and consular authorities were on hand to help control the flow of people.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro had ordered the border closing in August 2015 after an alleged Colombian paramilitary unit attacked a Venezuelan military patrol, leaving three people wounded and raising tensions between the two governments.

The reopening of the border had originally been planned for Sunday, but Maduro's government moved it up a day, allowing thousands of Venezuelans to pour into Cucuta on Saturday.

The influx has come during a 40-day freight truckers' strike in Colombia, which heightened fears that shortages could hit major cities including Cucuta.

Venezuela has suffered crippling shortages for months, a ripple effect from the falling price of oil, the country's primary export. Critics also blame grave mishandling of the state-led economy.

Colombian Defense Minister Luis Carlos Villegas has said that security forces would guarantee the arrival of supplies for Cucuta's residents as well as for Venezuelan shoppers.

During a first brief border opening on July 10, an estimated 35,000 Venezuelans poured across a pedestrian bridge connecting the Venezuelan city of San Antonio del Tachira to the outskirts of Cucuta.
Scores of activists were detained in Vietnam's capital on Sunday as they gathered to protest against China after it rejected a recent international ruling that dismissed its claims to much of the South China Sea.

Anti-Chinese sentiment runs deep in communist Vietnam but the country's authoritarian rulers move swiftly to tamp down expressions of public anger, fearful that allowing such protests might embolden criticism of their rule.

Activists had used social media to call for protests in Hanoi on Sunday in the wake of this week's ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague which found there was no legal basis for Beijing's claims to vast swathes of the South China Sea.

The case was brought by the Philippines but the ruling has been a boon for other regional countries like Vietnam who also have competing claims to the strategic sea.

Authorities in the capital Hanoi were ready for protests on Sunday.

Plainclothes security forces were out in force, blanketing much of the city centre and keeping a close eye on any crowds that might be gathering, an AFP reporter on the scene said.

Throughout the morning around 30 activists were swiftly bundled onto waiting buses and cars by security forces after they gathered to hold a protest near the city's famous Hoan Kiem lake, a common spot for demonstrations.

Some chanted "Down with China invasion!" as they were led away to detention.

Later in the day a group of nine activists held a brief rally outside the Philippines embassy. One held aloft a banner that read: "Thank you Philippines. You have a brave government."

The group dispersed on motorbike before security forces arrived.

Activists posted pictures on social media of similar flashmob rallies in southern Ho Chi Minh City with protesters riding around the city on motorbikes holding banners criticising China.

Beijing lays claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, putting it at odds with regional neighbours the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, which also have partial claims.

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China boycotted the PCA hearings, saying the court had no jurisdiction, and has reacted furiously, vowing to ignore the ruling and arguing it misinterprets international law.

Vietnam and China frequently trade diplomatic barbs over the disputed Paracel island chain and waters in the South China Sea.

China has encouraged patriotic citizens to visit the contested Paracels, which are known as Xisha in Chinese.

Such acts have deepened already simmering anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam while domestic critics accuse Hanoi of being too meek towards its giant northern neighbour.

At least three Chinese nationals were killed in 2014 when rioting broke out in Vietnam after Beijing sent an oil rig into contested waters.
Sao Tome (AFP) - People in the small African islands state of Sao Tome and Principe voted Sunday for a new president, with an elderly incumbent facing four challengers.

Around 110,000 citizens of the twin archipelagos located 300 kilometres (190 miles) off the coast of Gabon were eligible to take part in the election.

Manuel Pinto da Costa, 78, is hoping to see off Evaristo Carvalho, of the governing Independent Democratic Action (ADI) party and three other candidates to win another five-year mandate.

A trained economist, Pinto da Costa served as the country's first president after independence from Portugal in 1975, at the height of the Cold War.

He threw in his lot with the Soviet bloc, building a centralised Marxist-Leninist single party regime, whose intolerance of opposition sent many dissidents into exile.

The policies devastated the economy of what had been, at the start of the 20th century, the world's leading cocoa producer. Eighty percent of its budget now comes from foreign aid.

In the capital, campaigning has been lively, with candidates' posters stuck to walls and trees across the city, and slogans blaring from loudspeakers mounted on trucks.

"Pinto da Costa has proved himself," said Francisco, a guard in the Obo National Park, in the centre of the country's main island.

"He is old, but he has experience. He won't 'eat' (steal) too much, and we know he is capable of leading the country," he added.

Executive power in Sao Tome and Principe is shared between the president and the prime minister.

"He's had his time, it's time he gave up his post," countered Nelito, who runs a restaurant in the southeastern coastal town of Sao Joao de los Angolares.

Three other candidates are in the running including a teacher who says he has been "chosen by God."

The African Union team sent to monitor the polls said the vote had taken place "in all calmness", according to the mission's chief and former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of votes cast Sunday, a second round will be held.
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In the wee hours of Monday morning, Elon Musk's SpaceX is going to try to do something it's only done once before: Land a rocket back on solid ground after launching a spacecraft to orbit.

SpaceX will attempt to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 booster on a launch pad in Florida after sending an uncrewed cargo spacecraft toward the International Space Station for a NASA resupply mission.

SEE ALSO: SpaceX fan builds mini Falcon 9 rocket with a drone, lands it in a pool

You can watch the launch and landing attempt live in the window below or directly through SpaceX or NASA TV.

If successful, this will be the fifth rocket booster SpaceX has brought back to Earth for a soft landing. The first land landing occurred at the end of 2015.

Launch should occur at 12:45 a.m. ET, with the landing following not long after.

SpaceX performs these rocket landings on drone ships in the ocean as well.

Landing on solid ground is thought to be somewhat easier. Even though it takes more fuel to touch down on pads on land, they provide an easier target than the drone ship, which bobs and dips in the ocean.

"Its a pretty good sized landing pad compared to the drone ship," SpaceX's Hans Koenigsmann said of the pad in Florida during a NASA press conference Saturday.

SpaceX needs to make use of both landing profiles. Drone ship landings allow the company to bring back boosters that have launched payloads into high orbits, which requires the rocket to burn more fuel. It takes less fuel for a rocket to come down to a drone ship, making it a good landing option for those high-velocity missions.

SpaceX is also planning to re-fly one of its boosters before the end of this year, in September or October.

The company has chosen the booster which launched the last Dragon capsule to the Space Station. That rocket landed on a drone ship in April and was the first booster that made it back from space intact to land on the barge.

Monday's launch will mark the ninth flight of the uncrewed Dragon spacecraft to the Space Station under a contract with NASA that could see as many as 20 of these kinds of missions to the orbiting laboratory.
Dozens of police are stationed at Airline Highway at Goodwood Boulevard, where officers are stopping and searching every car that comes down the highway. Officers huddled under a tent on top of an office building off Airline and could be seen keeping watch over the traffic stop.

Most of the surrounding roads are blocked off and many businesses have closed for the day, in the wake of the shooting deaths of three police officers. The shooting, which also injured three other officers, comes as the city is weary with tensions between police and the community after the death of Alton Sterling, who was killed by Baton Rouge police on July 5  and the protests that followed.

Maya Robertson, of New Orleans, stopped at the Shell Gas Station on Airline Highway to watch police search passing cars. The station served as a sort of impromptu gathering space for people wanting to see the scene of the shootings.

This is ridiculous, Robertson said. I feel like everybody should just be able to get along and be peaceful without this happening.

Robertson and her family were in Baton Rouge for the weekend visiting family when they heard about the deadly shootings. While the shooters motives are unclear, Robertson said shes felt the racial tension in Louisiana for a while now, and added that she believed the shooting might have stemmed from what some see as an abuse of power.

Many officers who fatally shoot citizens are never punished, Robertson said, but if cops were charged with crimes the same as other people in the community there wouldnt be violence. Robertson said violence only leads to more violence, such as the Sunday morning shooting that left three officers dead.

Michelle Patterson, who was also on her way back to New Orleans, agreed.

If a pedestrian kills someone, they go to jail. Police should be held to the same standards, Patterson said.

Eveline Riley, of Baton Rouge, said the shootings rattled her trust in the community. Police officers who responded to the scene were just trying to do their jobs, just like everybody else.

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Riley said the recent protests in Baton Rogue have only led to more trouble, and shes fearful this crime will lead to more police shootings around the nation.

Unless community leaders address concerns raised by the Black Lives Matter protesters throughout the city, the problem will only get worse, according to Redell Norman. Norman was camped out in front of the closed Shell station Sunday afternoon handing out free water and hot dogs to anyone who walked past  even police  and offering some shade from the humidity.

Norman has spent nearly two weeks camped out in that same spot protesting Sterlings death. He said the officers deaths werent going to deter him.

This is a symptom of a bigger problem, Norman said. Across the board, black people just want equality, but leadership isnt listening to what we need.

Norman said his fellow Black Lives Matter protesters always advocate nonviolence, but feel threatened when approached by police with military-grade machine guns and riot gear during the Alton Sterling protests. Still, he said he understands that the officers have a job to do.

Sundays deadly shootings are just a reflection of that worry, plus what he called the city leaderships unwillingness to meet the protesters halfway.

The mayor knows why were here, he knows why were upset, so why doesnt he reach out to us? Norman said.

Regardless of the citys response, Norman said the nationwide shootings wont stop until the racial tensions are addressed head-on. Until then, good people on both sides of the badge are in danger.

Its good people here, but its going to happen again, Norman said. God forbid, its going to happen again.
Operation quack

Investigation should be completed soon and the public have to be assured that the medical sector is clean
Alden Ehrenreich at Star Wars Celebrations filmmakers panel (Getty Images)

The final panel at the Star Wars Celebration in London on Sunday was all about looking forward to the future of the saga beyond Decembers standalone adventure Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The focus moved to two future movies set for release in 2018: Star Wars: Episode VIII and the still-untitled young Han Solo spinoff.

Lucasfilm host Pablo Hidalgo cautioned the packed house that since the films are still so far out  and since they do their best to keep all Star Wars film as secret as possible  there would be a limited amount of specific details. But it was the first time the studio was having a public conversation about either film. Hidalgo then introduced Lucasfilms Kathleen Kennedy and Kiri Hart, Episode VIII director Rian Johnson, Han Solo helmers Chris Miller and Phil Lord (who just arrived in London two days prior to begin work on the film), plus a few surprise guests: new Han Solo star Alden Ehrenreich and The Force Awakens and Episode VIII stars John Boyega, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and their dogs. Here what we learned:

1. Alden Ehrenreich is officially the young Han Solo.

We wont spend too much time on this point, since everyone and their mother already knew the Hail, Caesar! breakout had been cast to play the iconic hero in his formative years. Speaking of moms, Ehrenreich said that the only person he actually confirmed the news to was his own mother. To everyone else who congratulated him, he simply nodded.

But the casting finally became official Sunday with Ehrenreichs introduction. Its the best kept secret in Hollywood, Lord joked before welcoming the actor to the stage.

Related: Lucasfilm Head: Darth Vader Has Very, Very Important Part in 'Rogue One

2. Ehrenreich was the very first of 3,000 people Miller and Lord saw for the part.

The casting search for Han Solo was widely publicized and included auditions with legions of hot young actors like Miles Teller, Dave Franco, Logan Lerman, Taron Egerton, and Jack O'Connell. We thought from the very beginning, this was the hardest casting challenge of all time, said Miller, who previously codirected 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie with Lord. These are the biggest boots to fill you can possibly imagine.

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Media reports at the time said that the filmmakers were only looking at well-known actors, but Miller explained that they conducted a very, very, very exhaustive search, and we saw over 3,000 people for the part. The search was held all across the world, Lord said. Added Miller: We turned over every rock to find someone who had the charisma and maverick swagger.

But as Lord put it, It turns out that that was a total waste of money. Because the person who got the part [namely, Ehrenreich] was the first person to audition. Literally the first person to walk in the door. The codirector then apologized to Kennedy. Its nice to be sure, though, he told her.

Ehrenreich said the audition process lasted six months in total. The coolest part of the audition, was I went on the [Millennium] Falcon, he said. The actor also screen tested with Chewbacca. It was pretty incredible  I had never acted with a Wookiee.

Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Rian Johnson (Getty Images)

3. Episode VIII will start right at the moment where Episode VII: The Force Awakens left off.

Rian Johnson  who Kennedy said was on her radar long before she arrived at Lucasfilm in 2012 due to his celebrated work on films like Brick and Looper  spoke in especially broad terms while discussing the follow-up to The Force Awakens. But he did reveal the precise scene that will kick off Episode VIII: When we started coming up with the story, I realized that [we were going to] end up breaking a longstanding Star Wars tradition, and for the first time, this movie is going to start right where the last one left off, he said. I dont want to skip ahead. That last moment in VII  I want to see what happens.

That means well actually get to hear some dialogue from Luke Skywalker (Hamill), who Rey (Daisy Ridley) tracked down in exile and approached on that picturesque island cliff. Speaking of Rey, Johnson  who rewatched the classic films Twelve O'Clock High, The Bridge on River Kwai, and the Humphrey Bogart Sahara in preparation for the gig  said Episode VIII will zero in on not only her character, but also Finn (Boyega), Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Boyega said he wanted to keep any details about Finn secret, but he and Johnson did confirm Finn will be out of that coma by the time VIII opens.

Related: Felicity Jones and Kathleen Kennedy Dont Want Focus to Be on 'Rogue One Heros Gender

4. The new Star Wars directors are all appearing (or attempting to appear) in each others movies.

Miller and Lord had arranged to cameo in Rogue One, and even showed up on the films London set and put on costumes. We were gonna shoot this thing, recalled Miller, but my whole family is moving here for a year, and I had to go look at a school for my son. So Miller had to leave, and the cameos went kaput. Lord quickly piled on: We were gonna be in Star Wars, but your son had to go to school!

Johnson, however, did manage to cameo (along with his producer Ram Bergman) in Rogue One. We chose wisely  we chose the two dudes who we knew would be in the movie. They cant cut us out, Johnson said. Because were the two dudes in the firing chamber of the Death Star who pull the levers.

Johnson then returned the favor and offered a cameo to Rogue One director Gareth Edwards in Episode VIII. We snuck Gareth in there, Johnson said. What were discovering now is cameos are a now form of currency among our directors, Hidalgo cracked. Miller and Lord hope to get a chance again in Episode IX, but dont feel too bad for Miller, at least. As he revealed during the panel, he was an intern at George Lucass Industrial Light & Magic 20 years ago and got to cameo as a Stormtrooper in the special edition of The Empire Strikes Back.

Boyega and Ehrenreich (Getty Images)

5. John Boyega doesnt have much advice for Alden Ehrenreich.

Force Awakens breakout Boyega  a London native who joked he was in the area  came out to raucous hometown applause, and took a particular shine to Ehrenreich. Oh man, youre playing Han Solo, man, damn! Boyega said as he was seated next to the newbie.

Asked by Hidalgo if he had any advice for Ehrenreich as he enters the Star Wars universe, Boyega responded, No, man. I really dont know. Hell be fine. Hes got that charm stuff down already. Hes smiling just like Han.

Star Wars: Episode VIII is scheduled to open Dec. 15, 2017. The Young Han Solo movie is slated for May 18, 2018.

Watch the cast of Rogue One introduce their characters:
Political advertising season is in full swing, but this morning readers of the print versions of The New York Times and Cleveland's The Plain Dealer saw an unusual one: a full-page ad taken out by Hampton Creek and signed by the San Francisco-based startup's CEO Josh Tetrick.

The text of the ad, addressed to "Dear Donald," said that, "Americans are frustrated and angry and scared. You've channeled this into your nomination." It concludes with: "Your campaign doesn't just seem wrong. It feels un-American. To support it would make me less of myself, less of my grandpa's grandson, less of my mom's son," and is signed by Tetrick. (Click here to read the full version.)

Tetrick said that the letter was not about policy but rather values like inclusion, tolerance, and equality--"simple things that are inarguable that I think we're not being clear enough on," Tetrick tells Fortune.

Hampton Creek sells plant-based food products--its flagship is Just Mayo--that are meant to be better for the planet and consumers' health. Tetrick says he started his company because he wanted to move the world forward in positive ways. "I wouldn't feel comfortable going to bed at night if I didn't say something," he says.

Fortune reached out to the Trump campaign for comment, which did not respond in time for publication. Fortune will update this story if it receives a response.

The letter from Tetrick, ahead of this weeks Republican convention in Cleveland, is a highly unusual public attack on a presidential nominee from a CEO. But U.S. executives are becoming increasingly vocal in their concerns about a Trump presidency.

The ad follows an open letter published last week that was signed by more than 100 technology CEOs, founders, and executives. The text of letter said that the group believes in an inclusive country that fosters opportunity, creativity and a level playing field. Donald Trump does not. The group concluded after listening to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for the last year that Trump would be a disaster for innovation.

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Fortune found in a survey conducted in May of Fortune 500 CEOs that of those who answered, 58% said they would favor Hillary Clinton; 42% said they would favor Trump.

Tetrick says he never would have run the letter during the 2012 Obama-Romney election. "It never would have gone through my head," he says. Tetrick, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., says he has lots of friends and customers who are Republican. "What I don't think is a good conversation is whether we should be racist or not, demagogues or not, whether we should have some form of common decency or not," he says.

The letter is not without its risks. The company has been working with senators on both sides of the aisle on agricultural and food industry legislation. The company has also prioritized mainstreaming its products rather than selling them to the health food demographic. When asked if the letter could hurt sales, Tetricks says, "It might, adding that he would feel sick if I didn't do anything."

Tetrick decided to run the letter last week after telling a friend he wished leaders would speak up more about Trump. "She said, 'Yeah, why don't you do that,'" Tetrick recalls.

Tetrick, who included his cellphone number in the ad, said he was receiving a text message about every 10 seconds. Tetrick says one of those texts came from Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and that neither he nor the company has heard anything from the Trump campaign.

This is not the first full-page ad from the company in The New York Times. The company ran a series of ads in the paper earlier in the election cycle addressed to Obama and the presidential candidates that challenged them to help fix the food system. All of the ads have been paid for by Hampton Creek, not Tetrick.

Tetrick says he has become more vocal and outspoken on issues that matter to him after a diagnosis six years ago of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a disease in which it's harder for the heart to pump blood. It made him reprioritize his life. "It forced me to do the things that matter and are important," he says.

See original article on Fortune.com

More from Fortune.com
CLEVELANDStanding behind the counter at Ariana Market this month, a Middle Eastern grocery store on Clevelands west side, owners Azizullah and Laese Solemanshah offered a keychain decorated with the Afghanistan flag to one of their regulars. The man, a fellow Afghani immigrant, declined the gift, saying jokingly: When Trumps elected, theyll kick me out if Im caught with that. Soon, the presumptive Republican nominee will be seven miles away from the market for the partys national convention.

The encounter at Ariana Market captured a unique dynamic unfolding in the immigrant community in Cleveland, particularly among entrepreneurs. Trump has made immigration reform a cornerstone of his campaign, while also touting his business acumen as evidence that hes the most qualified candidate to run the country. Meanwhile, in Cleveland, an influx of immigrants has contributed, in part, to the citys urban revitalization.

In 2012, while representing just 4.9 percent of Clevelands population, immigrants held more than 5.1 percent of the citys total spending power, equating to more than $576 million and nearly $75 million in state and local taxes. Cleveland lost nearly half of its population between 1970 and 2013, dropping it from the 10th largest city in the United States to 45th. The exodus threatened to ruin the city financially, according to Joe Cimperman, a former city councilman and president of Global Cleveland, a nonprofit specializing in economic development. If not for immigration, Cleveland wouldnt exist anymore, Cimperman said.

So what do Clevelands immigrant business owners think of Trump, the billionaire businessman, who has suggested a pause on legal immigration, a temporary ban of Muslims entering the United States, and a requirement for Muslims to register in a database? Could Trump be good for small businesses in cities like Cleveland? Will local entrepreneurs forgive his controversial rhetoric for a chance to have a president who understands their daily struggles in business? Most are divided.

Recommended: Hillary Clinton Has No One to Blame but Herself

Azizullah and Laese Solemanshah, 27 and 28, respectively, grew up outside of Jalalabad, Afghanistan. Their father disappeared when they were children, prompting their mother to move the family, including two other siblings, in with her father outside Jalalabad, they told me. Their life took an abrupt turn following 9/11. The Solemanshahs moved five times in six years between Afghanistans capital, Kabul, and a camp just inside Pakistans border, Azizullah Solemanshah said. Relief came when their father contacted them from the United States, where he had been granted asylum. With help from an inter-governmental organization, the Solemanshahs were reunited with their father in Cleveland in 2006, they said.

After high school, the Solemanshahs said they worked as translators in Afghanistan, Laese Solemanshah for one year, Azizullah Solemanshah for more than three. When Azizulllah Solemanshah returned to Cleveland in 2015, he said a psychiatrist diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder. He and his brother opened Ariana Market to escape menial jobs and be their own bosses, but because of his condition, Azizullah Solemanshah said his brother does most of the stores work.

The Solemanshahs said they plan to vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, but only reluctantly.

Solemanshah was shocked by Trumps surge this election. Hes using racism and anger to get more votes, he said. He doesnt even have a problem with Muslims. He shrugged, adding, Hes just a good businessman. The Solemanshahs said they plan to vote for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, but only reluctantly. They respect Trumps business record, admitting he would probably have their votes if it wasnt for his immigration policies and characterization of Muslims. Citing his many flip-flops, they believe his campaign rhetoric is more negotiation than policy, and still have confidence in Trumps ability to create jobs.

Velimir Lucic, a 38-year-old Cleveland resident and owner of Tomo Sushi and Hibachi Restaurant in the citys Warehouse District, relates to Trump. Of Serbian and Croatian decent, Lucic and his wife, Valentina, immigrated to the United States in 2000 from Croatia after fleeing their home in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following a stint in Baltimore, the Lucics moved to Cleveland, where they knew of larger Serbian and Croatian immigrant communities.

Recommended: How Foreign Correspondents Explain the U.S. Election

After years of working overtime in Cleveland and gathering savings, Lucic opened Scripts nightclub in 2004, and then Lucic Contracting a couple years later. Both have since closed. He attributes part of the success of Tomo, which opened in 2013, to his failures, and laughs at the notion that Trump is a bad businessman because of Trump Steaks, Trump Mortgage, or any of his other ventures.

In some respects, Lucic epitomizes Trumps blue-collar base. He also backs Trumps immigration policies, linking his opinions to growing up during the Yugoslav Wars, living in fear of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovinas 7th Muslim Brigade, whose leaders were convicted of war crimes, and points to the recent rise of extremism in Kosovo as proof that the United States needs to be smarter about terrorism.

In Clevelands Ohio City neighborhood, Wael Ayyad, owner of Kan Zaman, a Middle Eastern restaurant, avoids talking politics altogether. Ayyad, 48, immigrated from Amman, Jordan in 1996, and opened Kan Zaman in 2002, he told me. The restaurant is decorated with flags and traditional gowns and dresses from nearly every Middle Eastern country. On an average evening, a passerby can find several men from Clevelands Arabic community gathering on the patio to smoke hookah. People can come in here and say Im from here, another person says Im from here, and then they talk politics, and I might have to say you need to go home, Ayyad said. Because its going to be a big problem and a big fight. Ayyad waved off Trumps immigration proposals saying, Theres a Congress.

Recommended: The Baton Rouge Police Shooting: What We Know

Ayyad and the Solemanshahs dismissed the Republican National Convention, which is expected to inject $214 million to the citys economy, because theyre too far from downtown to see an upswing in customers. Meanwhile, businesses in the Warehouse District, where Tomo is located, stand to reap the most benefits, and Lucic said he was excited for the convention.

Ayyad explained that the possibility of serving convention goers or protestors only strengthens his resolve to put his business success ahead of his political ideology. Kan Zaman has outlasted numerous immigrant-owned businesses in the area since it opened, and Ayyad doesnt want to lose money by offending anyone.

The Solemanshahs conceded. Azizullah Solemanshahs said Ariana Markets customer base includes immigrants from India, Pakistan, Turkey, Somalia, Iraq, Jamaica, Syria, and Nepal. They cant afford to offend customers.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
KIGALI (Reuters) - Zimbabwe's finance minister blamed international sanctions on Sunday for a cash crunch that has forced the government to delay wages to soldiers and civil servants as President Robert Mugabe faces rare popular protests. Western countries imposed sanctions in 2001 on Mugabe's government over allegations of vote-rigging and human rights abuses, which he rejects, while lenders such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have frozen financial aid since Harare defaulted in 1999. Zimbabwe failed to pay the army on time for the second straight month, military sources said on Friday, and Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the sanctions were hurting the government's ability to meet its obligations. "Sanctions crippled our capacity to own our international obligations (debt payment)," Chinamasa told Reuters when asked about the wage-payment delays during an African Union summit in Kigali, Rwanda. He did not say specifically which international obligations had been affected. "Our industry sector collapsed, the formal corporate structure collapsed and it translated itself into informal sector. So we have now a situation where revenue collection from the informal sector is not easy. We need to come up with new policies," he added. Anger is rising in Zimbabwe over high unemployment, corruption in government and shortages of money, which has seen people spending hours in bank queues to withdraw their money. Without balance of payment support and foreign credit, the government is seeking to clear $1.8 billion arrears to the IMF, African Development Bank and World Bank in a bid to unlock new funding. The IMF said on Thursday it was still far from a financial programme with Mugabe's government, which would need to resolve issues of governance, accountability, transparency and carry out economic reforms before receiving any cash. (Reporting by Clement Uwiringiyimana; Writing by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo; Editing by Helen Popper)
Looks like an apology wasn't enough for Dani Mathers.

Days after the 29-year-old Playboy model body-shamed a naked woman at the gym through Snapchat, the Los Angeles Police Department has launched an official investigation into the incident, ET can confirm.

WATCH: Playboy Model Dani Mathers Body Shamed a Naked Woman at Gym

According to the LAPD, the identity of the woman Mathers photographed is still unknown, and that it was L.A. Fitness who filed the police report on Friday.

A law enforcement source confirms to ET that "the investigation is based on disseminating private images."

L.A. Fitness, where Mathers filmed the woman, told ET earlier on Friday that they would be contacting the police.

"Our written rules are very clear: Cell phone usage and photography are prohibited in the locker rooms. This is not only our rule, but common decency," a spokesperson for the gym said in a statement. "Her behavior is appalling and puts every member at risk of losing their privacy. Her membership has been permanently revoked, at all our health clubs, and law enforcement has been notified."

Mathers photographed the woman in a gym locker room, sending the nude photo out to her followers with the caption, "If I can't unsee this then you can't either."

The 2015 Playboy Playmate of the Year later apologized on Twitter, and through a series of apology videos on her Snapchat.

"Should never make light of another woman's naked body," she tweeted on Thursday. "I'm sorry for what I did I need to take some time to myself now to reflect on why I did this horrible thing."

While LAPD's official investigation is on behalf of L.A. Fitness, should the victim come forward to file a report, Mathers could face a misdemeanor charge.

ET has reached out to Mathers for comment.

WATCH: Ariel Winter Speaks Out Against Body Shamers: 'It's Disgusting'

Related Articles
Nicholas Economides is a professor of economics at the NYU Stern School of Business.

The European Commission's antitrust lawsuits against , which has recently made headlines, threaten to impose an up to $7 billion fine on the tech giant for forcing Android phone manufacturers (OEMs) to use Google Search, among other alleged violations. This comes on top of the EC's suit against Google for favoring its affiliates in Internet search, and the EC suit on Google's dominance and exclusive dealing in online advertising. On Android, Google does not allow Android OEMs, such as Samsung, to install "Google Play" unless they also install "Google Search" as the default application for search.

You might ask what's wrong with Google bundling its applications? And after all, McDonalds sells bundles ("meals") of a big Mac with fries and Coke. The big difference is that Huge difference: McDonalds allows you to buy all parts of the bundle separately. It does not force you to buy the Big Mac if you buy fries (assuming that fries is the best part of the "meal"). Because the parts of the McDonald's bundle are available a-la-carte, no law is broken when they are also sold as a bundle.

Google's type of bundling, called "tying" in the law, is exactly what got in deep trouble starting in 1998 when the company was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and later its Media Player with Windows. The United States sued Microsoft and won in 2001, precipitating billions of losses in class action suits against Microsoft . The EU sued Microsoft twice, won both times, and imposed fines totaling $3.4 billion. It even forced Microsoft to create a special version of Windows for European consumers without Windows Media Player!

"Tying" deprives consumers of choice in their search provider. It also harms innovation since other search companies are deprived of their chance to reach this market. "Tying" of Google Play with Google Search is illegal under antitrust law in the US, EU, Japan, Korea, Brazil, and many other jurisdictions.

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Google Play is an extremely desirable, almost indispensable, application for phone manufacturers because it facilitates downloading and updating Android applications. So OEMs are in a bind. They have to have Google Play, but they are forced to install Google Search as default. Additionally, Google demands uniformity. That is, if Samsung installs Google Play in one line of phones, Google requires it to install Google Search in all its phones!

It's been widely reported that Google refuses to discontinue tying and will not settle the cases. This strategy may look good from Mountain View, as it did from Redmond over a decade ago. To some extent, it is a result of the arrogance of being a top technology company.

Additionally, technology leaders, especially those that started small like Microsoft and Google, tend to think that whatever they did when they were small, they can keep doing now that they are giants. This is a huge strategic error. Giants have special obligations under the law not to use their market power to crush rivals. It took Microsoft over a decade to learn that.

Microsoft switched, from paying no attention to antitrust problems before it was sued, to obsessing over antitrust a few years after it was sued. Microsoft lost its focus and missed emerging threats to it, such as from a startup called Google.

Another significant antitrust suit filed by the EU against Google is for tweaking its algorithm to place its affiliates on top in search pages, even though they are not the most popular. If you search for "New Orleans New York" in Google, you get a result from "Google flights," a Google affiliate, at the top of the page and not from Orbitz, or Kayak. If you make the same search in Bing or Yahoo, you get Orbitz, Expedia or Kayak on top.

Last Thursday, the EU added another suit against Google for exclusive dealing with large websites that were coerced into using Google for advertising on their sites rather than competitors. In total, the EU has three antitrust suits against Google: on Android tying, on comparison shopping and on advertising.

The longer the EU's cases against Google last, the more the damage to Google. Can Google learn from Microsoft's experience, settle quickly, and, as an adult giant, avoid squashing its rivals?

If Google does not learn the lessons of adulthood, it will make it more likely that it will be overtaken faster by the next Google (or should I say Facebook?). And has not promised "to do no evil" ... But of course, even for Google, theory and practice can diverge.





See original article on Fortune.com

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Parliamentary committee to visit Dr KC

The Social Justice and Human Rights Committee of Legislature-Parliament has shown concern towards Dr Govinda KC's indefinite hunger strike.
Ghana is small in terms of size. However, the country is great in terms of its capable human resource. And across the world, many Ghanaian geniuses are raising the flag of the country high with their amazing exploits.

Here 10 of such Ghanaians that you should know about:

1. Professor Nicholas Ossei-Gerning

He is a consultant interventional cardiologist at University Hospital of Wales in the UK. In June he flew into Ghana and operated on a dying friend who had been denied a visa fora heart surgery in the UK. Prof. Ossei-Gerning operated on him in a makeshift theatre and saved his life.

2. Dr Ave Kludze

He is a rocket scientist, a complex systems engineering, design expert and a senior NASA Spacecraft systems engineer.

Born in Hohoe, in the Volta Region of Ghana, Dr Kludze has held positions at various NASA Centers including the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia and NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where he became if not the first African, the first Ghanaian to ever fly (command and control) a Spacecraft in Orbit (including the ERBS and TRMM Spacecraft, etc. for NASA from a mission control center).

3. Dr Ashitey Trebi-Ollenu

He is a Ghanaian-born resident of the United States of America. He is a robotics Engineer at NASA and is the leader of a team that designs robots for NASA missions.

READ ALSO: Ghanaians fears heightens as Appiah, Essien, Desailly feared caught in Turkey turmoil

4. Prof. Nii Narku Quaynor

He is a scientist and engineer who has played an important role in the introduction and development of the Internet throughout Africa.

In December 2007, Quaynor was awarded the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award from the IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force). Also on 26 June 2013, he was selected for induction into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

5. Afua Hirsch

Afua Hirsch is a journalist, barrister and human rights development worker of Ghanaian, English and Jewish heritage. Born in Stavanger, Norway, to an English father and a Ghanaian mother, she grew up in England

6. Dr Thomas Mensah

Thomas O. Mensah (Dr.) ( c. 1950) is a Ghanaian-born chemical engineer and inventor. His works are in fields relating to the developments in Fiber Optics and Nanotechnology. He was awarded 7 USA and worldwide patents in Fiber Optics within a period of six years.

7. Amma Asante

She is a British born to Ghanaian parents. She is a screenwriter, film director, and former actress. She wrote and directed A Way of Life (2004). Her second film as a director was Belle in 2013.

READ ALSO: Man caught for selling his four sons into slavery, his asking price will shock you

8. Lord Bernard Ribeiro

Bernard Francisco Ribeiro, Baron Ribeiro, is a British surgeon who served as president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England from 2005 to 2008. He has created a life peer in 2010 and sits in the House of Lords on the Conservative benches. He was born in Ghana and schooled at Dean Close School, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and at Middlesex Hospital Medical School.

9. Her ladyship Mrs Justice Mabel Maame Agyemang

She is an expert superior court judge who has served in the judiciaries of the Governments of Ghana, The Gambia and Swaziland. She was the first female Chief Justice of the Gambia.

10. Ozwald Boateng

He is an English fashion designer of Ghanaian descent, known for his trademark twist on classic British tailoring and bespoke style. His client list includes heavyweights like Giorgio Armani, Jamie Foxx, Ryan Seacrest and Richard Branson.

Do you have anything to add to this story ? Share with us in the comments section and feel free to share this article with your friends. You can also send your reactions, pictures and videos to us on Facebook and on Twitter.

Source: YEN.com.gh
Predicted nosedive

A political change at this stage means we will forget we have been bullied by India
Qandeel Baloch case: Brother held for Pakistan celebrity's murder

The brother of Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch has been arrested for her murder.
Setopul-Sinamangal road section develops potholes, cracks one month after construction

The Setopul-Sinamangal road has developed potholes and cracks at various places in just one month after the road was blacktopped.
Seven protesters arrested in Chitwan

Police here have arrested seven protesters who were protesting organizing a transport strike at Narayangadh and Madi in the district on Sunday.
Several police officers shot in Baton Rouge: spokesman to TV

Several police officers were shot on Sunday in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and have been taken to a hospital, a police spokesman Don Coppola told ABC television affiliate WAFB.
Strong measures proposed to protect pangolin

The government has decided to seek stronger protection and enforcement measures for two pangolin speciesIndian and Chineseunder an international treaty signed to protect endangered plants and animals from illegal trade.
The One Who Made a Difference

It was on this trail that I first met Prem. Half way up the green mile, unable to go further I was sitting on a chuataraa resting place made of stoneswhen I first saw her
Turkey coup attempt: Some 6,000 people detained, says minister

Turkey has detained 6,000 people over Friday's failed coup and the number is expected to rise further, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said.
Villagers compelled to spend Rs 10,000 for citizenship

The locals of remote villages across the Mahabharata Range in Kavrepalanchowk district are forced to spend as much as Rs 10,000 to acquire citizenship certificate.
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?

No, the signs in place are fine

No, it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars

Vote

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Killeen, TX (76540)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening with thunderstorms becoming likely overnight. Low 61F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Locally heavy rainfall possible..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening with thunderstorms becoming likely overnight. Low 61F. Winds SE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Locally heavy rainfall possible.
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 36F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 36F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph.
Greg Remen would like you to go fly a kite  and hes got just the deal for you: a free kite fashioned from a La Crosse Tribune if youve been featured in a story or photo.

You might have seen samples of Remens work dangling from kite-eating trees in Copeland Park and other parks in La Crosse.

I like to take them up to the Cass Street Bridge and let two or three fly, then come down to Riverside Park and watch them, the La Crosse man said during an interview in the park Tuesday as he pointed to one tethered to the bridge.

Remen, an Onalaska native and 1968 graduate of Onalaska High School, also draws a crowd when he flies kites at Riverside and other parks.

Boats honk. People enjoy the show. I also tie them to a bottle of water (which he floats on the Mississippi River) and let them free-fly on the river until they are out of sight, said Remen, aka Greg the Kite Guy.

The 61-year-old Remens lifelong love of kites is just one of his motivations for crafting 300-plus kites from newspapers during the past year. Just as important, perhaps, is his view of them as a novel way to preserve history.

People are more inclined to keep a kite than a newspaper, he said. Its a good way to record history.

Although he typically sells the kites for $2 or two for $3, he will give them to people featured on the front page or elsewhere.

Ive made a lot for the (Franciscan) Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. They liked me enough that they hooked me up with a place to stay, said Remen, who formerly was homeless but obtained housing through the network involving FSPA members, Catholic Charities and Couleecap Inc.

Now I can go crazy making them in my apartment, he said.

Every time a sister gets in the paper, they get a kite, because they do so much for the community, and theyve done so much for me, he said. I dont know where Id be without them. The sisters and Couleecap get free kites for life.

Among the recipients are FSPA Sister Karen Neuser, who has one of Remens works hanging on the wall in her room. It features the May 7 Tribune front page that included photos of her, housing consultant Erin Healy and St. Clare Health Mission director Sandy Brekke with a story about an initiative to end homelessness in the Coulee Region.

We also have one he did of us celebrating our 137th year of perpetual praying, Neuser said.

I know theyll never fly them, he said of the FSPAs, an observation that Neuser acknowledged, saying, Oh, my God, Ive never flown a kite in my life.

She marveled at Remens intent to dovetail history and people.

He picks appropriate, memorable things for the people, Neuser said. He has a person in mind when he makes a kite.

The kite he dropped off Monday at Kens Barber Shop at 713 Rose St. is a perfect example.

He came in carrying a kite, and I thought, Whats this guy trying to sell me? said Jamie Hanson, Kens new owner, who retained the name of the one-chair shop in honor of the late Ken Garves when he bought it last month.

Remen had fashioned the kite out of a June 19 Sunday Tribune business page that featured a story about Hanson taking over and recounted Garves history, included a photo of Garves cutting a customers hair and another picture of Hanson at his new post.

Garves, who died Jan. 16 at age 87, had bought the shop in 1976 and cut thousands of heads of hair until failing health forced him to hang up his clippers in December after nearly 70 years behind a chair. Hanson keeps alive a tradition that has seen a barber shop at that location since at least 1890, except from about 1901 to 1913 when it was a harness maker and saddlery shop, according to Bobbi Garves, Kens daughter-in-law.

How cool is that? Hanson said Tuesday of the kite, now ensconced on the shops wall under another account of Garves reign.

Remen, who worked as a Merchant Marine on river barges for 15 years before a boiler room accident blinded his left eye in 1985, also has worked as a cabinet maker.

I worked on every river  Mississippi, the Ohios, the Tennessee, he said. Ive made a lot of things, but kites are my favorite. This is how I will spend my retirement  making grandfather kites.

Grandfather kite is the name of the style Remen makes, an appropriate choice for a man who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with Grandfather Rules Tuesday. (A betting man might wager that Grandkids Rule, from the demeanor of this gentle soul, the father of three and grandfather of five.)

Having made his first kite as a Cub Scout, Remen had not crafted one for decades until becoming homeless several years ago.

Thats how I got into this, he explained with a smile. When youre on the street, you need a gig. I tried music, but it probably was more like noise pollution.

Remen, who also will get a disability pension from his Merchant Marine days, renewed his devotion to the craft about a year ago, after he wrecked a granddaughters kite and needed to make her a new one.

Remens design is the result of experimenting with hundreds of kites, until he was satisfied with his product, fashioned from a 4-foot dowel he cuts once and adds tips made from plastic tubing, yarn and the newspaper page, held with craft glue.

The yarn is for better flying, especially for children because yarn doesnt hurt their hands, Remen said, noting that he prefers toilet paper tails for ease of flight.

Ive got it down pat. I can make 20 before noon, he said.

Remen also has fashioned large kites, such as 6-footers to pull kayaks.

Remen has three newspaper kites in particular that he would like to give away, if he could find the people pictured. Two are front-page pictures of girls, and another is a page 1 photo of the Polar Plunge in 2001. He scrounges for newspapers and said he likes old papers the best for the historical value.

Remen invites people featured in the paper to contact him at 608-881-4299 if they would like their page made into a kite, free of charge.

I think a kite is better than a scrapbook, he said confidently. When Im not here any longer, the kites will be.

I think a kite is better than a scrapbook. When Im not here any longer, the kites will be. Greg Remen
I watched Paul Ryans town hall on CNN this week for a number of reasons, not the least of which is my slight (OK, significant) crush on the House Speaker. He is a decade younger than I am, and more geek chic than GQ, but I still have a button that says, I Heart Paul from his ill-fated run as Mitt Romneys vice president, which I wear when I want to annoy the liberals at Starbucks.

Beyond that admittedly shallow fact, he is the most important Republican in the country, not simply because of his political clout, but also because of his mission: save the party of Lincoln from both the rogues attacking the establishment and the progressives who want to go all nuclear on the principles of personal responsibility, limited government and sobriety. He was mentored by the legendary Jack Kemp, he of the great hair and greater heart.

Listening to Ryan respond to questions from the audience, I had immense admiration for his ability to embody all that I wish the GOP still was, and all that I know the Democrats will never be again. Those things, in no particular order, are: earnest, accountable, visionary, critical-thinking, cognizant of history, respectful of tradition, compassionate, individualistic, unabashedly patriotic. His answers to questions about immigration, religious freedom, civil liberties, poverty and Donald Trump were masterful, particularly the response to a young Republican who criticized the speaker for endorsing the bigoted presumptive nominee.

Ryan said what I have been reduced to saying, namely that Trump will not harm the country as much as Hillary Clinton. He didnt exactly say it in those terms, but his meaning was more than clear. Trump will not elevate us, but he will not destroy the foundations of the society we hope to salvage from the ruins of the Obama years. Clinton will continue the transformation, until conservatives no longer recognize the country, its institutions or our fellow citizens.

Yes, that is apocalyptic language or, if you prefer, histrionic. Ive been accused of being a drama queen who focuses too much on abortion, on the Supreme Court (and, thanks to Justice Ruthie, Im on it like a dog with a bone), on bigotry (otherwise known as religious freedom), on the irrelevancies of emails and dead ambassadors.

On the other hand, Ive been attacked by those who think Ryan doesnt like Trump enough, for not believing in the righteous necessity of a wall subsidized by pesos or a blanket ban, policy papers issued in 140 characters or fewer, and a man who appeals to the basest form of populism. Saying I will vote for Trump does not mean that I dont cover the mirrors in my home so I can avoid my reflection in the morning.

So, that is where I am. Longing for the party described by Ryan on TV, but realizing its probably lost forever. Even if Trump wins, which is possible, he will bring neither the intellectual firepower nor the philosophical integrity that this party, more than my old home among the Democrats, represented for decades, if not centuries.

And as we await the circus in Cleveland, replete with political strippers and con men and glittery prime-time shell games, filled with a Frankenstein platform that will please no one as it tries to appease pro-lifers and gay capitalists, I wonder what will happen to me if Trump is elected or, worse horror, Clinton ekes out a victory.

Excuse me for navel-gazing, but this is my column and we are a society that has raised Facebook to the level of illuminated manuscripts in the level of cultural importance, so if youve come this far, you might as well stay for the rest of it.

As a person who finds the rhetoric of the left repellent when it feeds me such things as a woman should have the choice to control her own body, the one that sometimes happens to have an extra set of DNA  not to mention legs and arms  floating around in it, I will never again be able to call myself a Democrat. Contrary to popular belief, I have officially been a member of the GOP only since March 26 of this year, hoping to put John Kasich over the top in Pennsylvania (yeah, that worked). At 18, I registered in the party of Kennedy, and voted for  Carter.

But I have never been fully accepted by the Democrats, who not only embrace abortion as a right, but who also take our racial and cultural differences and use them to divide us for political gain. It makes me sick, me with my melting-pot orientation and immigration cred, to hear Democrats exploit immigrants for their critical mass as victims. Believe me, they dont want your election-year sympathy, you in the party of the president whose great failure is not presiding over immigration reform.

Hearing that, the GOP will cringe in horror, and hope, perhaps, that I will be shot by one of those vicious illegal criminals like the one who killed Kate Steinle, a woman whose death is being shamelessly exploited by conservative pundits who dont know a damn thing about the immigration system and why that ship is taking on water.

Listening to Paul Ryan this week and recognizing the agony he is going through in having to support Trump, I had the crazy thought that maybe one day before I am as doddering as a certain bespectacled Supreme Court justice, I will be able to vote for him at the top of the ticket.

That is the party I could truly embrace, one that sees poverty as neither a badge of honor nor a sin, one that respects both unborn life and the lives of kindergartners staring down the barrel of unnecessary guns, one that doesnt look at regulation as a blessing, or a curse, but a useful tool in moderation.

That is a dream worth clinging to, as the nightmares unfold this month, in Cleveland and in Philadelphia.
The flaring up of racial tensions in recent weeks  five police officers killed in Dallas, videotaped fatal police shootings of civilians in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, La.  has created alarm, rage and grief across the country. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found 69 percent of Americans say race relations are bad  almost on par with the discontent during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Some critics wonder why President Barack Obama, Americas first black president, hasnt been able to bring about peace, and some accuse him of exacerbating racial tensions. What should Obama do? Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk debate the issue.

JOEL MATHIS

When it comes to race in America, theres still work to do.

That seems obvious to most African-Americans, certainly, as well as anybody sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. For example: A new study from Harvard this week shows that when both blacks and whites are stopped by cops around the country, blacks are more likely to be pushed around, or have weapons drawn on them, or be subject to the use of pepper spray  and overall were more likely to be subject to use of force, even when compliant with an officers instructions.

Thats how things still work in the country Obama leads. One form of justice for African-Americans, another for whites. Other examples abound.

Obamas critics seem to believe in another story. That yes, there was a time when racism was a big, malignant force in the country, but then the civil rights movement happened, the Voting Rights Act was passed, and everybody lived happily ever after. There might be pockets of racism here or there, but that most complaints about racism amount to race hustling  a power grab  and that any real remaining racism is practiced by blacks and directed at whites. It is, at best, a cynical point of view, one that denies the truth of lives lived and stories told by African-Americans.

So when Obama acknowledges how the world looks from an African-American point of view, then, his critics believe he is being divisive, that he is pandering and that he is, yes, race hustling. They are wrong.

In fact, the president has often acknowledged racial progress in America. Race relations are better since I graduated. Thats the truth, he told Howard University graduates in May, but he added: I am not saying gaps do not persist. Obviously, they do. Racism persists. Inequality persists.

I lament the deaths in Dallas, Minnesota and Baton Rouge. But Obama did not create racial strife in this country. He simply acknowledged a problem that was there all along. Pretending the problem doesnt exist wont make it go away.

BEN BOYCHUK

Who is pretending the problem doesnt exist? Nobody. Conservatives know its bad out there. They also know that cops who abuse their authority are a problem.

Look, when six in 10 Americans say race relations are bad and have only gotten worse  only 38 percent said the same a year ago  thats a problem. Obama surely did not create racial strife, but he hasnt helped alleviate it, either.

The president is divisive. He has been from the moment he took the oath of office. He set the tone of his administration during his first Oval Office meeting with Republican congressional leaders: I won.

Yes, he did. Yet Obama has never understood that governing demands more than a mere assertion of his will. At its best, the presidents rhetoric can reach great heights. But thats all it is  rhetoric.

The president proved it again when he spoke at the memorial for one of the murdered police officers in Dallas on Tuesday. He delivered a generally uplifting and unifying speech  until he decided to utter one of the most manifestly ridiculous lines to tumble forth from the lips of a U.S. president not named Jimmy Carter: Its easier for a teenager to get his hands on a Glock than a computer  or even a book.

No, it isnt. Not at all. That is a laughable lie.

But the president said it, and at a funeral no less.

When we talk about healing racial divisions, the difference between liberals and conservatives is really a difference between culture and politics. Liberals have long looked to government to ensure not only equality of opportunity but also equality of outcome. Conservatives believe that equality of outcome is incompatible with freedom.

Obviously not everyone lived happily ever after after Congress passed landmark civil rights legislation more than half a century ago. But it isnt 1965 anymore. Theres always going to be work to do.

Ive seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change, Obama said in Dallas this week. Ive seen how inadequate my own words have been.

Then maybe its time to give the divisive language a rest and meet the people where they are.
By now most Americans know the name of Dallas Police Chief David Brown  and quite a few wouldnt mind seeing him play a larger national role. I hear Republicans are looking for a substitute nominee.

Brown is admired not only as a defender of law and order but also as a blunt spokesman for a nation reeling from violence. He minces no words when he says, Were asking cops to do too much in this country or, addressing protesters around the country, Were hiring.

Get off that protest line and put an application in, and well put you in your neighborhood and we will help you resolve some of the problems youre protesting about.

Such tough talk is welcome from a man who has his own share of suffering, including the death of his son, who went on a shooting rampage, killing two people including a police officer, before being killed in a firefight with police. Whatever forces compelled those acts will no doubt become part of a larger story in time.

For now, Brown has focused his energies on comforting the families of the dead and articulating our anxieties amid the chaos and killing.

His has been the calming voice the country needed, made all the more powerful by virtue of his personal experience and the heartfelt sorrow he shares with so many. And, lets be honest, my fellow white folks, because hes black. And another black Dallas voice has added texture and depth to the debate now roiling wherever people gather. Dr. Brian Williams, the surgeon who futilely tried to save some of the wounded officers lives, became emotional as he expressed his own grief, not only for the dead but also the violence.

I dont understand why people think its OK to kill police officers, he said in a CNN interview. I dont understand why black men die in custody and theyre forgotten the next day. I dont know why this has to be us against them. ... Something has to be done.

Most people dont understand either. But, as Williams also said, we get the anger and frustration. It is not without reason that many blacks distrust the police. In Ferguson, Mo., where events led to the Black Lives Matter movement, Department of Justice investigators found department-wide racism.

It is not without reason that blacks have little faith in a criminal justice system that imprisons them at six times the rate of whites, according to a Pew Research Center study. Or that awards blacks nearly 20 percent longer sentences than whites for similar crimes, according to a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Personal experience and observation also play a role. Even Williams, whose demeanor is as nonthreatening as any central-casting physician, acknowledged his own fear and mild inherent distrust in law enforcement, that goes back to my own personal experiences that Ive had in my own personal life.

This isnt to indict all police officers or even many, but there are those. Writing for Vox, former black cop Redditt Hudson posited that 15 percent of police will always do the right thing; 15 percent will abuse their authority at any opportunity; the remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom theyre with.

This is why voices such as Browns and Williams are so vital, even as I recognize the racial stereotyping implicit in this observation. But the larger point is that while protesters can be marginalized as rabble-rousers, the voices of a respected doctor and a police chief cant be.

Nor can one ignore (black) tenured Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who on Monday released research findings that police officers dont, in fact, use deadly force more often against blacks than whites. Indeed, in Houston, one of the cities studied, police were less likely to shoot when the suspect was black. But Fryer also found that black suspects more often than whites are subjected to nonlethal force, such as being shoved against a wall.

Whats clear as facts are added to narratives enhanced by video and live streaming is that few things can be reduced to black and white. It also seems we have reached a tipping point in what any society can tolerate when it comes to injustice. Finally, the nations long-overdue conversation about race and racism is on the front burner. Keeping it there is the least we can do for those whose blood was shed to make it so.

It also seems we have reached a tipping point in what any society can tolerate when it comes to injustice. Finally, the nations long-overdue conversation about race and racism is on the front burner.
An attempted traffic stop with a fleeing suspect has led to two people being referred to the Monroe County District Attorney on multiple drug charges.

Police attempted to pull over a vehicle driven by Edward Jonathan Nicholas, 25, Hudson, shortly after midnight July 6. Nicholas reportedly ignored the emergency lights and siren and continued through a stop sign without stopping before pulling into a parking stall at Walmart.

Nicholas, according to the report, exited the vehicle and ignored an order by an officer to stop. The officer pursued Nicholas to the eastern end of the Walmart building, where Nicholas climbed over a fence and into a heavily wooded area. Police lost sight of Nicholas, and a passenger who was reportedly in the vehicle, later identified as Tasha Marie King, 30, Black River Falls, also exited the vehicle as the officer pursued Nicholas.

A search of the vehicle reportedly uncovered syringes and other drug-related items and a light-colored substance later identified as heroin.

Police learned the vehicle had been reported stolen, and the vehicles owner, Nicholas sister, positively identified both Nicholas and King, who were taken into custody later in the day. Nicholas acknowledged fleeing from police, but both he and King denied any knowledge of the drugs in the vehicle.

Nicholas was referred for bail jumping, resisting arrest, fleeing a police officer, possession of heroin, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a prescription drug without a prescription.

King was referred for bail jumping, possession of heroin, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a prescription drug without a prescription.

In other police news:

Dwight Fitzgerald Carter, 49, Tomah, faces two charges pursuant to a July 10 incident.

Police responded to a call that a man, later identified as Carter, had been struck in the face and required emergency medical treatment. When police arrived, Carter was holding a napkin covered in blood. He was reportedly intoxicated.

Carter told police that the man who struck him also threatened him with a gun and a knife. Police then went to interview the man Carter accused of assaulting him. Police decided to give the man a municipal citation for battery and Carter a municipal citation for disorderly conduct/alcohol-related.

After responding to an unrelated call, the officer arrived at Tomah Memorial hospital to issue Carters citation. Carter approached the officer and inquired about the other subject in the fight. The officer told Carter to obtain his medical treatment first before discussing the resolution. Carter then entered the hospital.

When Carter returned, he became confrontational when the officer attempted to issue the citation. During the conservation, police were informed that Probation and Parole would be placing a hold on Carter due the incident. He then began to complain about pain from the fight and returned to the hospital, where he was reportedly profane and disruptive with hospital staff and made a threatening reference to the recent fatal police shootings in Dallas.

After he was transported to the Monroe County Jail, Carter allegedly relieved himself, stuck his hand in the toilet and tossed the fluid from his hand at an officer.

Carter was referred for discharging bodily fluids at a police officer and disorderly conduct. He was also given a municipal citation for first-offense drunk driving.

Raymond David Petska, 20, was referred to the district attorney for resisting arrest after a July 5 incident at a Saratoga Street residence.

Police responded to the residence after a report that Petska was causing a disturbance. Petska was in the process of being placed on a probation/parole hold for a disturbance he created there the previous weekend.

Police detained Petska and asked him to place his hands behind his back so he could be handcuffed. The report said Petska stalled and asked if he could use the bathroom inside. Police granted permission as long as he was escorted and didnt talk to the resident inside.

As soon as Petska was escorted into the residence, he allegedly began yelling at the resident and ignored orders by police to stop. After a struggle, Petska was placed in handcuffs. After he was cuffed, the report said Petska screamed that he wasnt going to jail. As officers attempted to place Petska in the squad car, he allegedly kicked the door shut.

After officers finally got Petska into the car, he reportedly kicked and slammed the door in back of the car and told officers you should be scared of his southern homeboys because they had guns and sold drugs in Tomah.

Salvador J. Casarez, 36, Tomah, was referred to the district attorney for second-offense drunk driving.

Police responded to a report July 5 of a possible traffic crash on Sime Avenue. It was determined that no crash occurred, but police received a report of Casarez following another vehicle and driving erratically. When police caught up to Casarez, he was reportedly stumbling from a parked vehicle. He became confrontational with police and was placed under arrest. He refused a chemical test of his blood, and officers obtained a search warrant for a blood draw.

Casarez was referred for drunk driving/fourth offense, operating after revocation/alcohol-related and tampering with an interlock ignition device.

Terry Cody Harmon, 29, Tomah, faces multiple charges after police were called to a domestic incident July 8 at a Williams Street residence.

Occupants of the residence said Harmon returned home intoxicated, mumbling, bloodied and not making any sense. Harmon told the homes other occupants the blood was the result of a fight with a cab driver. One of the residents told police Harmon had never acted like that before.

Harmon later began screaming and shoving, according to the report, and struck one of the homes occupants in the nose. He also reportedly kicked in a door and damaged a computer.

While Harmon was outside with officers, Harmon said he was looking for a container that held his contact lenses. An officer found a container in the yard near where Harmon was standing. The container reportedly had marijuana. A search of Harmons couch allegedly uncovered a green, leafy substance.

Harmon was referred for possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, battery, criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct.

Ryan Daniel Taylor, 18, Tomah, was referred to the district for obstructing an officer. Taylor a passenger in a vehicle stopped by police shortly after midnight July 7 on King Avenue and reportedly gave a false identity to police officers. He later told police he attempted to conceal his identity due to a pair of outstanding warrants.

Calvin William Broas, 24, Tomah, faces multiple charges after becoming engaged in a high-speed motorcycle chase with police shortly before 2 p.m. July 7.

Police identified the motorcycle as belonging to Broas and went to his Dogwood Lane residence. Broas wasnt there, but police obtained consent to enter the residence. While inside, a woman reportedly was attempting to conceal methamphetamine paraphernalia. A search warrant was obtained, and additional paraphernalia, including syringes and a short-barreled shotgun, were reportedly seized in Broas bedroom.

Broas was arrested later in the day at a Grassman Street residence. The report says he admitted using methamphetamine and estimated his motorcycle reached 100 miles per hour during the chase. He was referred for possession of methamphetamine, possession of methamphetamine paraphernalia and possession of a short-barreled shotgun.

Jacob Dale Smith, 39, Neillsville, was referred to the district attorney for bail jumping. Smith reportedly attempted to contact a Tomah man via Facebook, a violation of a bond condition that limits his Internet use to filing for unemployment benefits and employment searches.

Joshua James Wisdorf, 28, Tomah, was referred to the district attorney for disorderly conduct. The incident happened when a woman said Wisdorf was intoxicated and wouldnt allow her and her young son to leave a Grandview Avenue residence. She said each time she tried to move the vehicle, Wisdorf jumped on the hood of car, causing the woman to stop the car for fear of running him over.

Jessica Lois Collins, 34, Tomah, was referred to the district attorney for bail jumping. She reportedly violated a bond condition that prohibited her from consuming alcohol or being present in an establishment that serves alcohol. Police confronted Collins in a downtown bar July 9. She acknowledged drinking one beer, and a preliminary breath test showed a blood-alcohol count of .031.

Grant Weston Patterson, 26, Tomah, was referred to the district attorney for criminal damage to property during the overnight hours of July 9.

Police received a report that Patterson had taken a knife and ripped a mattress before driving away from the scene. Police pulled over the vehicle on Superior Avenue, and a breath test registered a blood-alcohol count of .199. Pattersons roommate told police that he found a combat knife lodged into my mattress and said Patterson admitted to placing it there.

Patterson was also issued a municipal citation for first-offense drunk driving.

Austin Scott Granger, 20, Tomah, was referred to the district attorney for bail jumping after a July 6 traffic stop. Police stopped Granger on East Clifton Street after observing an automobile license plate on a truck. The license plate belonged to a car registered to Granger, who police knew was on bond from Juneau County and had a suspended drivers license. The bond condition prohibited Granger from driving without a valid license.
MADISON  A Sparta man was convicted Friday of sex trafficking, assault, gun and drug offenses after a four-day trial in federal court.

Jurors deliberated nearly 10 hours before finding Monta Groce, 30, guilty of recruiting three women to engage in prostitution, maintaining a drug house and using a gun in connection with a drug offense.

Groce faces 15 years to life in prison at an Oct. 19 sentencing before District Judge William Conley.

John Vaudreuil, U.S. Attorney for Western Wisconsin, said in a news release that Groces conduct included physically and psychologically exploiting women for his own gain.

These cases are about horrible violence against women  Groce violently forced vulnerable victims into commercial sex, he said.

The Department of Justice will not tolerate the exploitation of sex-trafficked women and children and we will continue to bring traffickers to justice on their behalf, he said. These crimes, which took place in a small city, demonstrate that sex trafficking is not just a big-city issue; it is happening in rural America, too.

A ranking FBI agent in Wisconsin echoed Vaudreuils remarks.

Human traffickers like Monta Groce, who prey on vulnerable women and children, will be aggressively investigated by the FBI from major cities to rural communities such as Sparta, Wisconsin, so the victims may be rescued and the perpetrators brought to justice, FBI Special Agent in Charge Robert Shields said.

Groce had prior drug and battery convictions when he moved to Sparta in 2012, after being released from prison in order to be close to his children, his attorney, Syovata Edari, told jurors Monday.

Groce became part of the ongoing drug activity at the residence, which police suspected due to large number of people who visited the house, Edari said.

Groce was a passenger in a vehicle Sparta police pulled over in April 2013 and arrested him for heroin possession. The squad car recorded him making phone calls in which he said that he could make an officers annual salary in a week and he was not going to stop what he was doing, according to court documents.

He was indicted in June 2015 on three counts of sex trafficking by force between December 2012 and April 2014. A second indictment added charges of transporting females for purposes of prostitution, assaulting a female in retaliation for giving information to police, maintaining a drug house to use and sell heroin, and attempted sex trafficking by force in April 2014.

Jurors found Groce guilty on eight of nine counts charged and not guilty on the April 2014 attempted sex trafficking count.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Pfluger said she called at least 20 witness during the trial which included Groces three female victims, drug and prostitution customers, paid drivers and law enforcement.

Before the jury was seated, Edari objected to Pflugers striking the only African-American male from the jury pool. The attorneys disagreed about the mans ethnicity. Conley said that he did not think Pflugers request was race-based but asked the attorneys to submit briefs on if that ruling was correct. A decision is expected before sentencing.

Edari said a new trial could be ordered if she prevails.

Groce remains in custody pending sentencing.

These crimes, which took place in a small city, demonstrate that sex trafficking is not just a big-city issue; it is happening in rural America, too. John Vaudreuil, U.S. Attorney for Western Wisconsin
A new Nigerian technology company plans to produce some of the best software developers in the world.

The company is based in Lagos. It is called Andela. It performs work for large companies, most of which are in the United States. At the same time, it trains software developers. The training period is four years. During that time, Andela teaches workers programming languages and skills.

Our goal is to basically train 100,000 software developers who are world class, in Africa, over the next 10 years, said Seni Sulyman. He is the companys director of operations.

Sulyman says after the developers train at Andela, they can work for major tech companies such as IBM and Microsoft.

Recently, several groups showed their support for Andela by investing $24 million in the company.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was one of the investors. That group -- created by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan -- issued a statement praising Andela. The statement said Andelas innovative model of learning was one of the reasons the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative invested in the company.

Others have also praised Andela for providing high-quality training. Bankole Oluwafemi is the editor of a technology news website. He said Andela is different from other technology companies in Africa because it focuses on education.

Andela is kind of like, attack that problem, and theyre kind of like, unique in that theyre one of the first, if not the first, to attack that problem at scale, the problem of education, he said.

Seni Sulyman says the company hopes to use the money it recently received to increase the number of workers it recruits.

Andela hires only about 12 new people every three months. It chooses them from about 3,000 to 5,000 applications.

Sulyman said Andela would also like to find more companies to complete projects for, and to expand into a third country in Africa. Andela now works in Nigeria and Kenya.

Sulyman noted the recent investment of $24 million seems like a lot of money. But, he said, Andela has so many things it wants to do that hes sure the company will figure out ways to spend it.

Im Christopher Jones-Cruise.

Correspondent Chris Stein reported this story from Lagos, Nigeria. Christopher Jones-Cruise adapted the report for Learning English. Kelly Jean Kelly 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

world class  adj. among the best in the world

focus  v. to direct your attention or effort at something specific (often + on)

scale  n. the size or level of something especially in comparison to something else

hire  v. to give work or a job to (someone) in exchange for wages or a salary (chiefly US)
There is big news about the environment: Scientists say a hole in Earths protective ozone layer is starting to heal.

A new study confirms the hole is getting smaller. A report on the study was published late last month in the journal Science.

The scientists say the reason for the improvement is a reduction in the release of man-made chemicals into Earths atmosphere. These chemicals are called chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs for short.

Its a big surprise, said Susan Solomon, the lead writer of the report. I didnt think it would be this early, she said.

Solomon is an atmospheric chemist and works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ozone is a form of oxygen gas. It is found in the air we breathe and in the upper atmosphere. Near Earth, ozone in the air is a danger to life. It is a pollutant. But the ozone layer, 10 to 50 kilometers up in the atmosphere, protects life on Earth. It helps to block dangerous ultraviolet (UV) waves from the sun. It stops them from reaching the planets surface.

Researchers first discovered the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica more than 30 years ago.

The new report credits the shrinking ozone hole to a worldwide ban on chlorofluorocarbons.

CFCs once were commonly used in many products, including aerosols, cleaning substances, refrigerators and plastics. Scientists found that when released into the air, the chemicals damaged the ozone layer, creating the hole.

CFCs were banned when world leaders signed an agreement called the Montreal Protocol in 1987.

Susan Solomon compared the ozone hole to a patient that needs healing.

It isn't just that the patient is in remission,'' Solomon said. "He's actually starting to get better. The patient got very sick in the 80s when we were pumping all that chlorine into the atmosphere.

Measurements taken in September showed the ozone hole has shrunk since the year 2000. The new numbers show that the hole is smaller by 4.5 million square kilometers. That is about half the area of the U.S. mainland.

One year was different, however. In 2015, the ozone hole got bigger, not smaller. After looking at scientific records, Solomon said that increase resulted from a natural event. She said it was caused by the eruption of the Calbuco volcano in Chile.

While the healing is coming earlier than many scientists expected, it is an ongoing, continuing process. The ozone hole will not be completely closed for at least another 30 years. Estimates are it will close by around 2050.

"We can now be confident that the things we've done have put the planet on a path to heal," Solomon said.

"There is a sense of mission accomplished,''' said Mario Molina in an email to VOA. Molina works at the University of California, San Diego. He shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research on the ozone issue. He praised this latest study, but was not involved in it.

Not-so good news

However, there is other news about Antarctica that is not as good.

For the first time in four million years, Antarctica registered carbon dioxide (CO2) levels above the level of 400 parts per million. That information comes from U.S. scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The far southern hemisphere was the last place on earth where CO2 had not yet reached this mark, of 400 parts per million (ppm), said Pieter Tans. He is the lead scientist of NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.

Global CO2 levels will not return to values below 400 ppm in our lifetimes, and almost certainly for much longer, he said.

Scientists say too much CO2 causes temperatures on Earth to rise.

CO2 levels usually go up in colder months. In the warmer months, plants in the northern hemisphere use some of it, and that lowers the levels. But NOAA notes that plants are not enough to stop the rise of CO2 levels. Those levels have risen every year since 1958, when measurements began.

Tans said that evidence shows that the CO2 increase is caused entirely by human activities. These activities include burning oil and other fossil fuels for energy.

Because the burning of fossil fuel has been at a record high during the last several years, Tans said, the rate of CO2 increase has also been at a record high. He said some of the gas will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

Im Anne Ball.

And Im Bryan Lynn.

Smita Nordwall reported this story for VOANews.com. Anne Ball adapted those reports for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section and visit our Facebook page.

_________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

layer  n. amount of something spread over an area

ultraviolet  adj. rays of light that cannot be seen

chlorofluorocarbon  n. an organic compound that damaged the ozone layer

aerosol  n. a substance like hair spray kept in a container under pressure that is released in a fine spray when a button is pushed

confident  adj. a feeling or belief you can do something well

global  adj. involving the entire world

greenhouse gas  n. a gas in the atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation, causing greenhouse effect and warming of Earths temperature


EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is part of a new ongoing series about international student life at colleges and universities across the U.S. Please join us over the next several weeks as we bring you stories about these amazing individuals and the American higher education system as a whole.

Diversity has been a major concern at U.S. universities in recent years. Most schools try to attract a wide mix of students. They want students from different racial, religious, geographical, and economic backgrounds.

Konstantinos Papageorgiou is from Greece. Nik Azmin is from Malaysia. And Soulin Reyes is from Venezuela.

The one thing all three students have in common is that they all study at George Mason University. The large university is one of the most diverse in the United States. It attracts students from 130 countries.

George Mason University, or Mason for short, is located in Fairfax, Virginia -- less than an hour outside of Washington, D.C. Mason was once part of the University of Virginia. But the schools separated in 1957 and now Mason is the largest public research university in Virginia.

In addition to the Fairfax campus, there are three other Mason campuses in Virginia, and one in Songdo, South Korea.

Papageorgiou, Azmin and Reyes all enjoyed the international feel of Washington, D.C., the U.S. capital city. So they wanted to stay close to when they started looking for schools where they could earn their undergraduate degrees.

Reyes first came to Washington, D.C. to improve her English abilities.

She heard of Mason from her uncle, who had studied there in the past. Reyes was pleased with Masons international feel when she started studying there in 2014.

"When I first arrive, I was hanging out with a bunch of Saudi people and they became, like, really nice friends of mine. And also, they start teaching me how to speak in Arabic.  Also now I have a best friend that is from Mexico. Even though we have the same language, we have different dialects. So its like I learn something from her and she learns from me."

Papageorgious father worked in the Greek navy and his family moved to the Washington, D.C. area when Papageorgiou was in high school.

He began studying economics at Mason in 2011. He says he had trouble at first understanding some of the more complex parts of the English language. But sharing these difficulties with other international students helped him.

"It was hard for me to understand the native speakers.  If they were being polite or if theyre being sarcastic, I couldnt tell the difference. I was always questioning them. But there were other kids in my situation, so I had no issue adjusting."

Papageorgiou lived in housing provided by the university called dormitories, or dorms, for his first two years at Mason. Students live together in these large buildings at almost every university across the U.S. At George Mason University, most first-year students are required to live in the dorms.

Papageorgiou says living in the dorms was a very fun experience. He met and made friends with American and international students. He also says that he and his friends had some crazy parties. One time, one of his friends even cut off both of his eyebrows!

Azmin joined her mother in the Washington, D.C. area when her mother came to work at the Malaysian embassy.

She says before she came to study public relations at Mason in 2012, she was afraid.

"When I knew that I was coming here I was really shocked... because of everything that the movies told me. These perceptions about university as party life and I wasnt about that. ...But  what you see in the movies isnt what you see in real life."

Azmin says some students focus more on their studies and others focus more on social activities. It may take time, she adds, but students can find their place at Mason if they try.

Now Azmin works with the International Student Advisory Board, a group of students and staff members who help international students find the resources they need. She also works as an orientation leader for new international students.

Reyes says that her education at Mason has helped her decide to open her own business in the future. She also says she found her passion by joining Azucar, the Mason student group that celebrates the Latin American style of dance called salsa.

The only problem she still has is with fully expressing herself in her classes, she says.

"Sometimes I feel nervous to talk. I know the answer and its killing me inside  but Im afraid that when I talk it will be wrong or I will misspell it  and I will look dumb and I dont want to do that."

Students should know they will grow with each problem they learn to solve, Papageorgiou adds.

"Every day is different. You dont know what to expect It builds up your own character. Each day you, kind of, evolve and you become the person that you are today."



Papageorgiou hopes to complete his degree in 2016. Most students in the U.S. finish their undergraduate degrees in four years and Papageorgiou has been at Mason for five years.

Yet, Papageorgiou says none of the time he has spent at Mason has been wasted. Every memory is like a lesson of how to be more of an adult and a better person.

Im Pete Musto.

Pete Musto reported on this story for VOA Learning English. Adam Brock produced the video. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. How do you think your experience would be different from other international students if you studied at a U.S. university? What do you think your life would be like if you studied at George Mason University? Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

diversity  n. the state of having people who are different races or who have different cultures in a group or organization

background(s)  n. the experiences, knowledge and education in a person's past

campus  n. the area and buildings around a university, college or school

undergraduate degree(s)  n. a degree that is given to a student by a college or university usually after four years of study

dialect(s)  n. a form of a language that is spoken in a particular area and that uses some of its own words, grammar, and pronunciations

polite  adj. having or showing good manners or respect for other people

sarcastic  adj. using words that mean the opposite of what you really want to say especially in order to insult someone, to show irritation, or to be funny

adjust(ing)  v. to change in order to work or do better in a new situation

dormitories  n. buildings on a school campus that has rooms where students can live

eyebrow(s)  n. the line of hair that grows over your eye

public relations  n. the activity or job of providing information about a particular person or organization to the public so that people will regard that person or organization in a favorable way

orientation  n. the process of giving people training and information about a new job or situation

class(es)  n. a series of meetings in which students are taught a particular subject or activity

nervous  adj. having or showing feelings of being worried and afraid about what might happen

misspell  v. to say, write, or print the letters of a word or name incorrectly

dumb  adj. not showing or having good judgment or intelligence

character  n. the good qualities of a person that usually include moral or emotional strength, honesty, and fairness

evolve  v. to change or develop slowly often into a better, more complex, or more advanced state


Mali has produced many world-famous artists and musicians.

An arts school in the countrys capital, Bamako, is trying to use that rich cultural history to fight youth unemployment and to deter migration.

A famous artist founds the conservatory

Abdoulaye Konate is a famous Malian artist. In 2004, he founded the Balla Fasseke Koyate Conservatory.

Konate said he wanted to offer students the chance to get a higher education without leaving Mali.

To deter migration, one strategy the school has been using is to bring the world to the students.

In addition to the school's 80 teachers, instructors from other countries regularly give classes at the school.

Cuban teachers, for example, trained Jonathan Dembele in classical guitar. Dembele graduated from the school last year. He had returned to Mali after studying abroad in Denmark and Finland.

This training made him a versatile musician, but he still prefers to play folk music.

What happens after graduation?

Some graduates find jobs at media agencies, or as teachers. Others have set up businesses. The school did a study last year and found that 60 percent of its graduates have found work.

Dembele, the guitar player, plays music at weddings and other events. He plays regularly at a hotel, too.

Dembele said:

Its not easy, I repeat, it's not easy to live off the music here in Mali, unless you have some branches somewhere else not in Mali, because in Mali musicians are really not well paid. You work to survive."

Arts are important for peace

Earlier this year, the conservatory hosted the Bamako Acoustik Festival. It was the first international music festival to take place in Bamako since 2012.

In that year, conflict broke out in Mali. The country is still trying to recover.

Konate, the founder of the school, says the arts are a key weapon for peace.

A new generation, he adds, that works in media and culture can help transform the country, reconcile people and build the economy.

I'm John Russell.

Katarina Hoije reported on this story for VOANews.com. John Russell adapted this story for Learning English. Kelly Jean Kelly was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

deter  v. to cause (someone) to decide not to do something

conservatory  n. a school in which students are taught music, theater, or dance

counter  v. to do something in defense or in response to something

brain drain  n. a situation in which many educated or professional people leave a particular place or profession and move to another one that gives them better pay or living conditions

versatile  adj. able to do many different things
Let us love not with words or speech, but with actions and in truth.

President Barack Obama turned to the Bible to describe what is needed to heal racial divisions in the United States. He read from Johns Gospel at the memorial service Tuesday for five police officers killed in Dallas.

But closing racial divisions is a challenge.

Many in America turn to places of worship for moral guidance. But LifeWay Research reported last year that 86 percent of Protestant pastors say their congregations are mostly either black or white, leaving little chance for members of different races to talk with each other.

It isnt much different than 1963 when civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. called 11 a.m. Sunday church services the most segregated hour in this nation.

Recent shootings raise racial division concerns

It has been a rough few weeks in America.

On July 7th, a black gunman shot and killed five police officers in Dallas, Texas. The gunman told police he was targeting white officers.

The shooting came the same week two African-American men were shot and killed by white police officers in separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota.

The shootings left some people questioning the state of race relations in the United States.

Instead of pointing fingers, we need to figure out why so many police feel so stressed doing their job and why so many African-Americans feel targeted by the police, said Curt Harlow, minister at the Bayside Church in Sacramento, California. He said his church has black and white members, offering a chance for honest discussion.

Percell Duckett is minister of the Ross Road Church in Memphis, Tenn., which also has both black and white members.

We just had people from Black Lives Matter demonstrate -- I called it creating a little bit of civil disobedience, Duckett said. And many people wonder why they are doing that.

If more whites went to church with blacks they would hear parents express fear their children could be killed by police for a minor car violation, Duckett said.

Pastor Susan Newman Moore of All Souls Church in Washington D.C., knows some people are troubled with the name Black Lives Matter. The criticism from some is that the name should be, All Lives Matter, she said.

What Newman Moore tells her diverse church is that the Black Lives Matter movement is very much like a parent with children.

You love all your children. But if one child gets very sick, and has to go to the intensive care unit of the hospital, you are going to put all your attention on that sick child until he or she is better. Right now in America, black lives are in intensive care, Newman Moore said.

Religious community can help reduce divisions

Traci Blackmon is senior minister at Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri.

Integration, diversity is a good thing, she told Voice of America. But churches, regardless of whether they are all or mostly black, or all or mostly white, have a role to play because of their moral and religious standing.

It isnt just Christians, but this mandate of caring for those who are facing difficulty is found in the Koran and the Talmud, Blackmon said. Those are the books that provide the teachings of the Muslim and Jewish religions.

Some churches are trying to help their mostly black or mostly white congregations get to hear from members of other races.

In Hill County, Georgia, members of the mostly white Air Line Baptist Church plan to travel to the mostly black St. John Baptist Church for Sunday services.

The ministers of the two churches do not plan to talk about what is on their minds regarding recent events.

I think that way too often we dont listen to one another, said Scott Moore, minister of Air Line Baptist. Ive been guilty of that myself -- not listening to other peoples opinions and thinking only about what Im going to say.

Carter bringing black and white Baptists together

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has helped organize the New Baptist Covenant to bring mostly black and white Baptist churches together.

In Dallas, Texas, George Mason, minister of a mostly white Baptist Church, and Frederic Haynes, leader of a mostly black Baptist Church, joined Carters covenant. They wrote about the Dallas shootings in the Dallas Morning News.

The only way that All Lives Matter is for each life to matter -- black or white, and in this tragic case, blue, Mason and Haynes wrote. Blue is the color often given to police.

Ed Stetzer chairs the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism at Wheaton College. Stetzer said it makes sense that when blacks and whites sit down together to pray it will help.

Stetzer said many ministers recognize that they need to increase diversity. But there is nothing wrong, he said, with U.S. immigrants from Vietnam, Korea, or China wanting to worship together with fellow immigrants.

I'm Jill Robbins.

And I'm Bruce Alpert.

Bruce Alpert reported this story for VOA Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section and share your views on our Facebook Page. How do you think we can improve relations between people of different races.

____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

bible -- n. a book of sacred writings. The Old Testament is used by the Jewish religion and the New Testament used by Christians

congregation -- n. the people who are attending a religious service

segregated -- adj. to separate groups of people because of their particular race

finger -- n. one of the five long parts of the hand that are used for holding things

stress -- n. a state of mental tension and worry caused by problems in your life, work

disobedience -- n. not obeying the rules

diverse -- adj. different from each other

integration -- n. to bring different races of groups together

role -- n. a part that someone or something has in a particular activity or situation

mandate -- n. a responsibility to do something
Mustapha Mohamed Ibrahim is a recent graduate of the Abaarso School of Science and Technology, near Hargeisa, Somaliland.

Like many other Abaarso graduates, Ibrahim was recently accepted to a university in the United States -- with a full scholarship.

Ibrahim expressed excitement.

"For a kid whose parents never graduated from middle school, it is a very, very big deal for getting accepted into universities in the United States."

The Abaarso School of Science and Technology

The Abaarso School of Science and Technology is a school that teaches students from Grade 7 to Grade 12.

Entrance to the school is competitive. Usually, between 500 and 600 students compete for 50 spots in the school. This year, at least 1,000 students are expected to take the test.

The school's curriculum centers on math, science, and technology. Students develop their English language skills, too.

The school's education helps students win scholarships at schools around the world.

The head of the school, James Linville, says that universities and secondary programs around the world have accepted 80 students from the school.

Most of the 80 students received full scholarships, he says.

"It's incredibly competitive to get scholarships as international students to these schools, and not only that, but it's been a very long time since Somali-educated and Somali-raised students were able to get these scholarships When our first students got these scholarships three years ago, they were the first in over a generation to be given scholarships to study in the U.S."

Abaarso graduates have success in schools around the world

When studying in other countries, Abaarso graduates are able to keep up with their classmates.

Linville says that Abaarso students have a grade point average of 3.2 out of four in college and preparatory school, on average. Abaarso students have also received high scores on the SAT, an American college entrance exam, says Linville.

High SAT scores are important, he says. "Especially considering that at the time they took the SAT, they've been taking classes in English for three years. So, imagine sending an American kid to another country, asking them to take the national exam in three years and then scoring in the 80th or 90th percentile."

Political problems in Somaliland

A civil war, financial problems, and political problems have limited the educational possibilities for Somalilanders.

Jonathan Starr, an American businessman, used $500,000 dollars of his own money to start the Abaarso school in 2009.

Since 2009, there have been three graduating classes of about 35 students each.

The hope is that the students will bring their knowledge home and improve their country.

I'm John Russell.

Jill Craig reported on this story for VOANews.com. John Russell adapted her report for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. _______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

graduate  n. a person who has earned a degree or diploma from a school, college, or university

scholarship  n. an amount of money that is given by a school, an organization, etc., to a student to help pay for the student's education

curriculum  n. the courses that are taught by a school, college, etc.
American officials are increasing security for the upcoming Republican and Democratic political conventions. This comes after five police officers were shot and killed in Dallas.

FBI Director James Comey recently spoke at a congressional hearing about the possibility of domestic terrorism.

He said anytime theres a national spotlight on a political event in the United States, theres a risk that groups that aspire ... to engage in acts of domestic terrorism will be attracted.

Jeh Johnson is head of the Department of Homeland Security. He told lawmakers he is concerned about the possibility of violence. And he is concerned about demonstrations at the conventions getting out of hand.

Johnson said he will travel to Cleveland and Philadelphia to personally inspect the security at both conventions.

About 50,000 people are expected at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio from July 18 to July 21. Donald Trump is likely to be named the partys presidential candidate.

A week later, from July 25 to July 28, about the same number of Democrats will meet in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They will gather to formally name Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate.

Cleveland Security

In Cleveland, security concerns are complicated by the fact Ohio is a so-called open carry state. That means that anyone with a legal permit to carry a gun can do so openly.

Were going to make sure we stay vigilant, said Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams. But we also want to make sure that we ask the community to remain vigilant.

Williams said he will uphold the law in the state, but he would prefer that people not openly carry guns during the convention. He said the city is prepared for the event.

The U.S. Secret Service banned guns inside the main convention site, and in the security area around it. But people with firearms will be able to carry them in areas that surround the convention site, as long as they are holstered.

Cleveland officials have been concerned about the possibility of violent clashes between people who support Trump, and his opponents. In the protest areas, guns will be permitted, but common items like glass bottles, large backpacks, mace and canned goods will be banned from the event area.

Philadelphia Security

Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross said that the Dallas shooting had required that we do things different tactically. But he did not say what those plans would be.

Philadelphia is handling protesters differently than Cleveland. The city will permit supporters of Clintons opponent, Bernie Sanders, to gather in a park across from the convention building. There is also a new border, 1.5 meters high, to protect the convention at the Wells Fargo Center.

A spokeswoman for the Philadelphia mayor told VOA that city officials expect demonstrations outside the center to be peaceful.

(We)  feel confident that were prepared for demonstrations and any public safety threats, she said.

However, there is another issue that could create problems for people in Philadelphia. The citys airport workers have voted to go on strike during the convention.

Dan Bulla is president of the Treadstone Group, a private security firm in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He told VOA that law enforcement officials are preparing for physical acts of civil disobedience, like blocking streets. But they are also preparing for extraordinary crimes such as terror and cyber-attacks. Bulla has been involved in helping with security planning for the conventions.

Wayne Lee wrote this story for VOA news. Anne Ball adapted it for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section and visit us on our Facebook page.

______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

aspire  v. to want to have or achieve something

vigilant  adj. carefully noticing problems or any signs of danger

holster  n. a leather case you wear on your body to hold a small gun
PHOENIX -- As Republicans gather in Cleveland, three Arizona governors say they know what it will take for Donald Trump to unite the party behind him.

Focus.

Trump's campaign to date has been largely defined by his random and off-script comments. And current Gov. Doug Ducey, and predecessors Jan Brewer and Fife Symington aren't sure those headline-grabbing pronouncements are necessarily a bad thing.

But in separate interviews with Capitol Media Services they said that uniting the party -- and building a team and political support to win in November -- will require a consistent message that is not drowned out by other things the candidate might say.

Symington said Trump has a chance at the convention to make his case that he is a serious, thoughtful candidate, despite the occasional off-hand comments.

"I would have three or four key things that are very important to the hearts and minds of Republicans of all persuasions and just try to lay it out,'' he said.

Symington said that means Trump acknowledging that there are those who many not like certain aspects of his personality or the way he says things. But then, he said, Trump needs to say, "You have to move beyond that and look at the substantive policy differences ... and what a vote for me would mean and what a vote for Hillary would mean.''

Ducey has a specific suggestion.

"I do think you would unify a lot of people if you pointed out Washington, D.C. doesn't work,'' said Ducey. "It tries to do too many things, most of them poorly.''

He said that's a message that would resonate with many voters. And the bonus, Ducey said, would be to allow Trump to contrast himself with Hillary Clinton.

"She will be the queen of a bigger and larger government,'' Ducey said. "And if Donald Trump said, 'I'm going to downsize Washington, and I'm going to allow the citizen at home to be larger and make more of their own decisions,' I think that would be a winning theme.''

"I think he needs to focus on policy,'' said Brewer.

"It's all about policy,'' she said. "And that's about the economy, taxes, jobs, security and the vets. And law enforcement.''

The bottom line, Brewer, said, is Trump "needs to really focus on the policy and let people know that he is a leader, he can be trusted, that he will surround himself with good people and that he is a good listener.''

But Brewer said Trump also has some work to do on social issues.

"He needs to shore up his commitment to pro life,'' she said.

In 1999 Trump pronounced himself to be a supporter of abortion rights. He has since argued that he has "evolved'' on the issue and now has reversed stance. But he also has said this year he supports the right to an abortion in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, a position inconsistent with the party platform.

"I know that people change,'' Brewer said.

"That's why we're out there talking to people about pro life,'' she continued. "Some people just need to be educated and learn.''

Brewer, an early Trump supporter, said she thinks some of the controversy will have died down by the time the convention opens.

She said his pick of Mike Pence as a running mate "is going to bring in people to the camp.'' And then there are the speakers.

"I think now with (House Speaker) Paul Ryan as a speaker that brings credibility,'' she said. And Ted Cruz, who waged a bitter battle with Trump for the nomination, also is on the list.

"I think that will help a lot with the Cruz people that feel like they are not being represented,'' Brewer explained. "And then when you have people like (Newt) Gingrich and (Jack) Kemp and (Chris) Christie, that's a broad spectrum of people that are probably all going to speak.''

But all three governors acknowledged that some of what Trump has had to say so far on policy issues gets overshadowed -- and drowned out -- by the other things he says.

That started early in the campaign with references to Mexican migrants as rapists, questions about whether Muslim immigrants are terrorists, shedding doubt on the ability of a judge hearing cases against Trump because of his Mexican heritage and, most recently, saying while Iraq strongman Saddam Hussein was a "really bad guy,'' praising his efficiency in killing terrorists.

Ducey shrugged.

"These are the things that are up to him,'' he said. "You're in front of the microphone, you get to talk about what you want to talk about.''

Brewer said there's a good reason for those apparently off-hand comments that grab the headlines.

"A lot of that comes from the excitement of it all and the audience and the feedback, the cheering and the jeering and those kinds of things,'' she said. And Brewer conceded it's easy to get caught up in all that.

"It's like you almost forget you're running for president or governor or any political office, because you get caught up in that moment,'' she said. "And it never sounds as harsh when you're in that environment as it does when it's replayed, if you will, on TV.''

Still, Brewer said she doesn't see all the dust-up from Trump's comments as necessarily working against him.

"He's his own man,'' she said.

"There's no doubt about it,'' Brewer said. "There's a lot of supporters that enjoy the straight-forwardness of his comments.''

Symington agreed.

He said that in most political match-ups, each candidate tries to define the other early in the campaign in the most negative ways. But in this case, Symington said, voters think they already know Trump, undermining the millions Clinton is spending to paint a different picture of hime.

"They've seen him on TV and in various venues,'' he said of the former reality TV star best known for his "You're fired!'' catch phrase.

"And along with that definition in the minds of the public is the sort of almost eccentric behavior that he exhibits sometimes when he's talking, Symington continued. "It's like they forgive him for it. Or they expect it. And so it's not a shocker.''

What that means, he said, is that the headlines about Trump's comments about Hussein just don't stick.

"It's like water off a duck's back with the public because there's something about Trump that it doesn't stick to him,'' Symington said.

"They understand that it's almost this verbally playful side that comes out,'' he said. "And, in fact, they're kind of sitting back, waiting for the next chapter to unfold.''

Symington called the whole phenomenon "fascinating.''

"I've never seen anything like it.'' he said.

"It's like there's a more acceptable operating norm of behavior for him as a public figure than you find with others,'' Symington said. "The more intense the attacks on him, it just further solidifies his base.''

- - -

While all three governors support Trump for president, there is one area where Ducey and Symington think that the candidate is off base: his desire to build a wall along the border with Mexico.

"We've worked hard in this administration to build that relationship with Mexico,'' said Ducey. "I think separating out the relationship we have with Mexico as a neighbor, the issue of immigration, and the issue of public safety, and treating them as three unique and different issues, each with their own policy prescriptions, would be a good and positive start.''

Symington was more direct.

"His beating up on Mexico is, to me, just terrible,'' he said. "He shouldn't be doing that.''

Instead, Symington said Trump should call for a cooperative effort on immigration with Mexico "to solve our mutual problems instead of talking about building a wall and sort of stick it in their face, stick it in their eye.''

"I've been very upset about that approach because his approach isn't going to work, for sure,'' he said.

But Brewer, who made a national reputation of sorts for herself on the issue of immigration, said Trump is on the right track and should not tone down his rhetoric, at least not on the issue of a wall. In fact, she noted, the draft for the new party platform to be voted on in Cleveland, which has in the past mentioned a fence, is being rewritten to specifically include Trump's demand for a wall.
A couple and their 6-year-old great-grandson were killed in an early morning fire in Lake Wales Sunday.

Lake Wales couple and 6-year-old boy killed in house fire



Boy, from Virginia, had been visiting his great-grandparents

Polk County Sheriff's Office deputies responded to 5301 Fairmont Road at approximately 12:20 a.m. on Sunday to assist Polk County Fire with a house fire.

Two victims, 6-year-old Liam McLemore and 75-year-old Carolyn Ruff, were transported to Lake Wales Medical Center where they later died. Walter Ruff, 82, was located dead inside the home.

Liam, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, had been visiting his great-grandparents at their Lake Wales home.

The source and location of the fire's origin has not yet been determined. The death investigation is ongoing.

The State Fire Marshal is assisting with the investigation.
Four years ago, Tampa police were at the forefront of securing the Republican National Convention.

Tampa leaders sharing what they learned from 2012 RNC in Tampa

Tampa Mayor: Only 2 arrests, zero property damage during 2012 RNC



Former TPD chief says training is priority



Now, Tampa leaders are sharing what they learned, in hopes of securing this years political conventions.

Former Police Chief Jane Castor said police training is a priority.

Dont by that guy that lets somebody egg you into action that you wouldnt normally do, Castor said.

In the last month, Castor has advised authorities in Philadelphia and Cleveland about the do's and donts for policing the conventions, but a lot has changed.

In reflection, 2012 was kind of a walk in the park for the DNC and the RNC compared to the volatility of the different groups involved this year, Castor said.

Its a different environment. A lot more tension and unrest exists.

Already, one group has refused to get permits required for their protests. Another group said they will be armed.

The potential there is kind of scary, said Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn.

Buckhorn said he fears the tension could become volatile, particularly at the Republican National Convention, where the host city has been forced to expand protest zones closer to their events. Castor said its just one thing authorities in Cleveland need to look out for.

Its a very, very compact area down there and so [there's] going to be difficult transportation issues and the crowd issues, to be able to give them routes without shutting down the city and getting them close enough to be seen and heard, Castor said.

After the conventions four years ago, authorities devised a play-book to help guide future cities on the best security plans for the RNC and DNC.

Castor said as long as no one gets hurt and theres no property damage, its a win for everyone.

In Tampa, Florida, in 2012, there were two arrests and zero property damage, Buckhorn said. I hope for Cleveland and Phillys sake that they will have similar numbers but Im fearful that will not be the case.

With more protests expected than four years ago, Castor and Buckhorn said the keys to success will be communication and flexibility.


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Jammu: Amid tight security, a fresh batch of 1,755 pilgrims on Sunday left from here for the cave shrine of Amarnath in the south Kashmir Himalayas.

"A fresh batch of 1755 pilgrims, including 1422 males and 333 females in 52 vehicles left the Jammu base camp towards Kashmir on Sunday morning to perform the pilgrimage to the holy cave shrine," Deputy Commissioner of Jammu Simrandeep Singh said.

The Amarnath Yatra which was suspended for the second time in less than a week in the wake of violence in Kashmir after clashes between protestors and security forces, resumed on Saturday.

The Yatra was first suspended on July 9 following the killing of top Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. It was again suspended on 14 July.

39 persons including a cop have been killed while 3,160 persons including 1,500 security force personnel have been injured.
HONG KONG - The "award" rendered by the Arbitral Tribunal in the South China Sea arbitration does not help facilitate the settlement, while it is more like "pouring fuel on the flame", Xue Hanqin, Judge of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) said here on Friday.

Addressing a colloquium focusing on international law and maritime disputes settlement, Xue said the ultimate objective for arbitration mechanism is to settle dispute rather than to escalate it.

"However, anyone can easily tell this award will certainly aggregate the dispute between China and the Philippines, aggregate the current military tension between China and the United States and definitely aggregate tension in the region," she said, warning an arbitral tribunal should not "play such a dangerous game".

Xue said any jurisdiction should be made on a coessential base, while China was "dragged" into the compulsory arbitration procedure even if it has already made the optional exceptions declaration pursuant to Article 298 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

"If this is set as an example, very likely we will see a serious abuse of using the law against many states that have made the same declaration," Xue said, adding that the case provides a good opportunity for law experts to reflect the current practice of international arbitration.

She also said the tribunal should not rely purely on one party's facts and make the ruling, citing despite China's strong objection on the jurisdiction of the tribunal, it still acted in good face by issuing publicly its position.

"This is really regrettable that the tribunal did not give serious consideration to China's stance," Xue said.

Pemmaraju Sreenivasa Rao, a former chairman of International Law Commission, said the tribunal failed to recognize that issues of interpretation and application in this case are integrally linked to the issues of sovereignty and maritime delimitation, hence made the decision much less persuasive.

As a pragmatic matter, the Philippines at the end of the day would in any case have to return to the negotiating table to settle its dispute with China and achieve a mutually acceptable solution, he said.
India has three large and long running conflict areas. First, Jammu and Kashmir. Second, the Adivasi belt of central India that touches states like Jharkhand, Orissa and Chhattisgarh. Third, the tribal belt of North East India.

In the first, the problem is that the Muslims of the Kashmir valley feel they had no say during Partition. A promise made to them by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru over a plebiscite, meaning a referendum on what they wanted to do, was withdrawn. Later the state was integrated into the Indian Union through a series of steps that many Kashmiris did not accept as legitimate.

The United Nations was pulled into the matter early on, but the Cold War and a divided Security Council left matters opaque. Not being able to accept the reality, Kashmiris rebelled violently just under three decades ago. Two generations of Kashmiris have grown up with a powerful military presence. And the Hindus of the Valley were sent packing.

The Kashmiri separatist violence did not leave the state. No bombings and no attacks by Kashmiris happened in Mumbai or Delhi all these decades. Those Kashmiris who took up arms did so in their state and against the Indian armed forces. These men are not seen by most Kashmiris as terrorists though that is how they are seen in the rest of India.

India says the problem there has been external. If there were no mischief from Pakistan, there would not be an issue. However, we seem to be unable to treat Kashmiris as Indians as the extreme violence against them shows.

The second conflict area is about the taking of resources in traditional Adivasi areas. These are rich in minerals and coal and the Indian state wants to exploit these resources as 'national wealth'. Unfortunately, we have been unable to treat the Adivasis whose lands we have taken and are taking, with fairness. To some extent this is not deliberate. India is not an efficient place and not a rich one. The government cannot competently deliver education and health to the majority of Indians, especially the poor. But in the case of the Adivasis, who are 8% of India's population, there is the added insistence that they make a sacrifice. It is from their lands that the coal powering air conditioners and washing machines in urban Indian cities is taken. It is their forests that are cut down and polluted. If seams of coal were to be discovered under south Mumbai and south Delhi, we can be assured that there would be much more talk of human rights, exploitation and the environment than we have. But the Adivasi does not have many allies in his fight for his rights.

The violence against this exploitation is called Maoism or Left Wing Extremism. Such neat phrases make it easier for urban Indians to ignore underlying causes and to accept these people as 'terrorists'. Words like extremist, terrorist, Maoist and Jihadist are drilled into us for this reason alone.

Like the Kashmiri violence, the Maoist violence has not reached Chennai or Calcutta, it is contained in the Adivasi belt. There are no landmines that go off in our cities and there are no sieges of corporate offices.

The third area of conflict is the North East. This is a part of India that was not under Mughal rule. The British made the tribes submit and these areas were brought into India fairly recently. Some of these tribes resisted the integration even before 1947. They have continued their violence. And for decades this resistance has been pacified by the Indian Army which has a strong presence there. But the rebels of the North East do not fight their war in Bangalore and Hyderabad. No attacks are made against our airports and no hostages are taken in our schools.

Lakhs of Kashmiris and North Easterners live in urban Indian centres where they work. They come into the news every now and then when they are refused a house on rent or when they are attacked because of their race. They have left the conflict of their land behind them. It is as if all that killing and exploitation is happening in someone else's country.

This central fact has enabled the Indian middle class to ignore our three conflicts. The violence does not touch us at all and so we are able to easily look away from the underlying reasons and grievances.

From our drawing rooms and our television studios we call all of this terrorism. We can distance ourselves from it and we are fortunate to be able to do this. It allows the government to be as firm as it wants, and as hard as it wants, with these people because its actions do not affect or interest the rest of us.
A mob tried to storm an army camp on Sunday in Bandipora district, shattering the day-long fragile peace in curfew-bound Kashmir even as the Centre rushed about two thousand additional CRPF personnel to shore up security in the Valley where violence since 9 July has claimed 39 lives.

Protesters attacked the army camp at Ajas in Bandipora district, forcing the security forces to open fire. Three persons were injured in the incident, police said. Reports also said that one person died in the incident.

Curfew remained in force for the third consecutive day while normal life remained paralysed in the wake of deadly clashes that have rocked the Valley following the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani nine days ago, leaving 39 dead and over 3,160 injured.

Two persons were also injured in security forces action when a mob pelted stones in Eidgah area of the city.

The fresh violence came even as the situation in curfew-bound Kashmir was by and large peaceful during the day.

After restricting mobile telephone services, authorities have now snapped the landline connections to curb the violent protests.

"All 10 districts of Kashmir Valley continue to remain under curfew today as a precautionary measure for maintaining law and order," a police official said.

He said the decision to continue the curfew was taken to maintain law and order as one person was killed in fresh violence in Kupwara district on Saturday.

Police and paramilitary personnel were deployed in strength across the Valley for strict implementation of the prohibitory orders, the official said.

Official said that a total of 20 fresh companies (100 personnel in each) are being rushed to the Valley which will be in addition to 2,800 Central Reserve Police Force personnel which were sent to assist the state police last week.

"Some of the fresh units will exclusively render the task of road opening parties in order to secure the movement of security forces convoys," a senior official said.

About 60 battalions (about 1,000 in personnel each) are already stationed in the state as part of counter insurgency grid.

A youth suffered pellet injury during a protest this evening in Rainawari area here.

While landline telephone connections in three north Kashmir districts of Baramulla, Bandipora and Kupwara were snapped yesterday, the inter-exchange calls for all landline connections in the Valley were snapped.

Customers are not able to make calls to any phone outside their district.

While mobile telephony, except BSNL mobiles, is suspended across Kashmir for the past eight days, the broadband internet services have been curtailed across the Valley.

No police or civil administration official was willing to reply to queries related to restrictions on telephone services. However, government sources said the step has been taken to contain the violent protests.

"The protests and mob attacks are being mobilised using telephones. Very reluctantly we have decided to take this step in order to prevent any further loss of life or property," a government source said.

Mobile internet services continued to remain suspended for the seventh day today while trains are also off the tracks in the Valley as a precautionary measure.

The fresh curbs come as the local newspapers failed to hit stand for the second day after authorities raided the printing presses of media houses on Friday night.

The state government today also extended the summer vacations for schools and colleges in the Valley by another week.

The educational institutions, which were scheduled to reopen tomorrow after 17-day break, will now reopen on 25 July.

Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since 9 July following killing of Burhan Wani and two of his associated in an encounter with security forces a day earlier in Kokernag area of Anantnag district.

In the ensuing clashes with security forces, 39 persons including a cop have been killed while 3164 persons including 1500 security force personnel have been injured.

The separatists groups  both factions of Hurriyat Conference and JKLF  have been issuing strike calls, a practice reminiscent of 2010 summer agitation.

The separatists groups have extended the strike call till Monday evening.

(With inputs from PTI)
New Delhi: Calling it an "attack" on the freedom of the press, Indian Journalists Union (IJU) has protested the alleged "clampdown" on the media in Kashmir Valley and demanded that it be allowed to function unhindered.

In a statement issued on Sunday, IJU President SN Sinha, its Secretary-General Amar Devulapalli, International Federation of Journalists Vice-President Sabina Inderjit and Press Council of India members K Amarnath and Prabhat Dash, said that prohibiting publication of newspapers and confiscation of printed copies was "illegal" and "unconstitutional", as the Supreme Court had ruled that prevention of printing and distribution of newspapers "amounted to pre-censorship".

Local newspapers failed to hit the stands for the second consecutive day on Sunday in curfew-bound Kashmir. No dailies  English, Urdu and Kashmiri  were available as the newspaper-owners decided not to publish them after authorities on Saturday allegedly raided some media houses and seized their printed copies.

"The J&K Police action in name of volatile situation in the Valley is an attack on the freedom of the media and unacceptable in a democracy....The IJU demands that the police should desist from such illegal and unconstitutional actions immediately and allow the press to function unhindered," the IJU statement said.

The IJU has already written to Chairman of Press Council of India, Justice (retd) CK Prasad, to take suo motu cognisance of the "illegal action" of the state police and initiate suitable action to protect the freedom of the press.
Srinagar: Schools and colleges in the Valley, which were scheduled to reopen on Monday, will now open on 24 July as the Jammu and Kashmir government on Sunday extended summer vacations by a week in view of the prevailing situation.

The Valley has been witnessing protests after the killing of Hizbul commander Burhan Wani.

"We have decided to extend the summer vacations in the schools and colleges of the Valley by one week," Education Minister Naeem Akhtar told PTI.

He said the decision to extend the vacations was taken in view of the ongoing law and order problems in the Valley.

Schools and colleges in the Valley were scheduled to reopen tomorrow after a 17-day summer vacation. If the situation returns to normal, the institutions will reopen on 24 July.

Violent protests have rocked Kashmir since 9 July following the death of Wani and two of his associates in an encounter with security forces a day earlier.

In the ensuing clashes with security forces, 39 persons including a cop have been killed, while 3,160 persons including 1,500 security force personnel have been injured.

Normal life has remained paralysed since on account of separatist sponsored-strike and curfew-like restrictions impose by the authorities.
Ahmedabad: Patel quota stir leader Hardik Patel, who walked out of jail on Friday, left for Udaipur in Rajasthan early on Sunday morning, in accordance with the Gujarat High Court's condition while granting him bail that he will have to stay out of the state for next six months.

The 22-year-old leader will stay at a house owned by former Congress MLA and local Patel leader Pushkarlal Patel in Udaipur for the period.

According to Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) leader and Hardik's close aide Dinesh Bambhaniya, the Patel quota agitation spearhead started his journey for Udaipur from his native place Viramgam here at around 7.30am on Sunday.

"Hardik will reach Udaipur in the afternoon. He was greeted by his supporters on Gujarat border. Though Hardik was supposed to go to different parts of north Gujarat before leaving the state today, he has cut short his trip due to time constraints and directly left for Udaipur," said Bambhaniya.

The HC had earlier paved the way for Hardik's release after granting him bail in two cases of sedition and a case related to violence at Visnagar MLA's office.

As per the HC direction, Hardik had to leave Gujarat within 48 hours of his release from jail.

Since the 48-hour time limit was ending at 11am on Sunday, Hardik left for Udaipur early today.

In an undertaking submitted before the sessions courts of Surat and Ahmedabad, Hardik's lawyers had informed that the leader will stay at house no 190, Shrinath Nagar on Airport road in Udaipur, Rajasthan.

The owner of the house is Pushkarlal Patel, a former Congress MLA and local Patel leader.

"I have made all the arrangements for Hardik at my place. Hardik is fighting for the rights of our community and he has the support of Patel community in Rajasthan too," Patel told reporters.
Patna: The rain-swollen Kosi river has flooded about 50 villages in Supaul district of Bihar, forcing people to abandon their homes, and the river system is threatening hundreds of villages in over half a dozen districts, officials said.

"Nearly 200 thatched houses in Ghogharia panchayat in Supaul have been washed away by waters overflowing from Kosi river," a district official said.

"Water levels in the Kosi river system are rising over the past two days, threatening hundreds of villages in over half a dozen districts," an official of the state disaster management department told IANS.

"Flood waters entered over 50 villages in Supaul district," the official said.

The department officials said that fear of floods is gripping villages in Supaul again with Kosi and other rivers rising because of heavy rains in Bihar and in the catchment areas in neighbouring Nepal.

The state government has alerted engineers and asked them to keep a 24-hour vigil in the area.

"All engineers have been directed to be ready with necessary equipment and boulders to face any situation and to protect the embankments," an official said.

Bihar's Water Resources Development Minister Lalan Singh said all embankments were safe and there was no need to panic.

He said the eastern Kosi embankment, which had breached in 2008, flooding five districts of northern Bihar, was totally safe.

"The embankment was strengthened and breach repair work was completed," he said.

In 2008, more than three million people were rendered homeless in Bihar when the Kosi river breached its bank upstream in Nepal and changed course.

It was said to be the worst flood in the state in over 50 years.
It's all about Narendra Modi versus Arvind Kejriwal in Indian politics this weekend.

If the awkward meeting between the two at the 11th inter-state council meeting in New Delhi on Saturday was not enough to demonstrate the underlying rivalry between them, Delhi chief minister Kejriwal's interactive session on Sunday definitely escalated the tension between these two political leaders.

In his interactive session, titled 'Talk to AK', Kejriwal took to social media, answered phone calls and appeared on video sessions to address people's questions. PM Modi himself addresses the nation through his monthly radio programme, Mann Ki Baat.

On Sunday, Kejriwal alleged that the Centre has been hampering the progress of Delhi by turning various institutions like the anti-corruption board against the AAP government. "The Centre has done various unconstitutional things to hamper the progress done by Delhi government," he said.

The Delhi chief minister also criticised the Modi government on other fronts.

The fact that filing an FIR is impossible for the common man but the Central Govt rains FIR's on us is evident of vendetta #TalkToAK  Talk To AK (@TalkToAK_) July 17, 2016

We are not playing the victim card but Delhi is a victim of the narrow politics of the Central Govt. @ArvindKejriwal LIVE #TalkToAK  Talk To AK (@TalkToAK_) July 17, 2016

Naturally, social media erupted, with Kejriwal's interaction drawing a barrage of responses, including many by politicians themselves.

We think Congress leader Digvijaya Singh's creative (and creepy) poem deserves a special mention.

     ........

    ......

    ..........

    .....!!!! Dharam  digvijaya singh (@digvijaya_28) July 17, 2016

Here are the other reactions to the Modi-Kejriwal tussle and 'Talk to AK':

Instead of trying to solve the issues of Delhi, Kejriwal continues publicity gimmicks. Delhi is under crisis like never before. #TalkToAK  Gaurav Pandhi (@GauravPandhi) July 17, 2016

Warmth + respect vs. lack there of. For citizens too, this is the difference between #TalkToAK vs. Mann ki Baat. https://t.co/Jqkcl6zGbT  Roshan (@roshankar) July 17, 2016

Modi's Man Ki Baat is one sided communication. With Kejriwal it's two way communication. A leader who listens - JANTA ka CM. #TalkToAK  ashutosh (@ashutosh83B) July 17, 2016

why people are trying trend #RotaCMDoobtiDelhi ? Shame on them #TalkToAK  Rahul Mahajan (@TheRahulMahajan) July 17, 2016

Today is a historic day when people's voice to be heard louder than Mann Ki baat of a VIP.

Let's make it more louder. Tweet with #TalkToAK  Rajesh Sharma (@beingAAPian) July 17, 2016

#Politcs is fast bcoming # Politrics What's in a talk #TalkToAK action Sir @ArvindKejriwal #Politrics is lyk T20 dees days  Vinay Bindlish (@Bindlishv) July 17, 2016

#TalkToAK good on u kejriwal g https://t.co/4KHC0QhV3Z  Didar Singh Virk (@DidarSinghVirk1) July 17, 2016
Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in exile in the US, has implied that the failed coup attempt in Turkey could have been orchestrated and staged by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself.

In a brief statement from his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen, who has been accused by the Turkish government of instigating Friday's coup attempt and whom the Turkish government asked the US to "send back", on Saturday said the use of force was not the way to effect change in Turkey, Efe news reported.

"There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup," said Gulen, who once again denied any involvement in the failed coup that has left more than 160 persons dead.

During the coup attempt, Erdogan claimed, the rebelling soldiers received orders from Pennsylvania, referring to Gulen's residence in the US.

Gulen said he rejected all military interventions, as he had personally suffered after the coups of the 1990s.

"After military coups in Turkey, I have been pressured and I have been imprisoned. I have been tried and faced various forms of harassment," the Guardian quoted Gulen as saying.

The Turkish President on Saturday urged the US not to protect Gulen, while US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed to have received no extradition petition or legitimate proof of the cleric's role in the incident.

Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan, has been living in self-imposed exile in the US since 2013, when Erdogan accused him of promoting corruption scandals against his government.

Since then, the government has included the influential cleric on its list of most wanted terrorists and sought his extradition for judicial trial that could result in life imprisonment.
Hyderabad: Charging Prime Minister Narendra Modi with "poisoning" the political atmosphere, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has said it is unrealistic for the

BJP-led NDA government to expect his party to cooperate and facilitate passage of the GST bill in the Monsoon session of Parliament.

"Government cannot do constitutional murder in Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Meghalaya and expect GST (bill) to be passed," Ramesh told PTI on Sunday.

"Murder process is still going on in Meghalaya and Manipur. Government is doing its best to cut and clip the wings of the Supreme Court and I think this is dangerous for our democracy," the former Union Minister alleged.

"Mr Modi wants to silence all opposition. He wants to silence opposition parties and he wants to silence the Supreme Court. This is unacceptable to Indians," he said.

"There is a certain political environment that is required for bills to be passed and Mr Modi has done everything possible to poison the atmosphere. In this atmosphere to expect the Congress to cooperate, I think it's been very unrealistic," the Rajya Sabha member said.

He claimed that the government is looking at the Goods and Services Tax (GST) purely from the point of view of big industries.

"We are looking at GST from an industry, trade and consumer point of view. We want GST to be not only pro-industry, but also pro-consumer. GST is a major innovation, we want GST. GST will benefit, if properly implemented," the Congress spokesperson said.

But, he also pointed out that the bill would not usher in "full GST".

"First of all, it's not uniform GST...(there is) central GST and state GST. There will be a band. States are free to set their own rates," he noted.

"Petroleum has been kept out of GST purview for five years, while tobacco, alcohol, electricity and real estate have been kept out permanently. It (GST) is a half-way a house.

It's not a perfect GST, but it's some GST," he said. On the government last week reaching out to Congress to forge a consensus on the issue, Ramesh said it has taken the Modi dispensation almost six months to do so in a structured manner.

He said Congress has made three suggestions on the issue of one per cent additional tax, capping of GST rate at 18 percent and independent dispute settlement mechanism.

"One percent additional tax...government said they are going to give up. So, let's see (on two other suggestions). This is how negotiations should take place. It's all about compromise," he said.

The leader also said the government agreeing to accept one suggestion of the Congress should not be seen as a "climb-down".

"If a compromise is reached (on the remaining two suggestions), we (Congress) have not climbed down (it should not be seen that the Congress has climbed down). This (compromise) is politics. Politics is give and take. Politics is about compromise," he added.
Aleppo: Air raids on rebel-held districts of Syria's battleground second city of Aleppo killed at least 28 civilians including children on Saturday, a monitor said.

The death toll from what residents said an attack with barrel bombs steadily rose throughout the day as bombardment rocked the city, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

"Eleven civilians, including four children, were killed by air raids after midnight in the Bab al-Nasr area of Old Aleppo, and seven others were killed in Fardous neighbourhood," the monitor said.

At least six people, including a child and two women, were killed in the Salhin district, in addition to four more civilians in other rebel-controlled neighbourhoods, the Britain-based monitor said.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources across Syria for its information, said the air strikes were likely either Russian or regime warplanes.

"At least 20 people are still under the rubble," said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

Syrian state news agency, for its part, reported that one person was killed and nine others were wounded in rebel rocket fire on government-controlled parts of the city.

An AFP correspondent in eastern Aleppo said helicopters and fighter jets were circling rebel-held neighbourhoods, adding that barrel bombs  crude, unguided explosive devices  had been dropped on several areas.

"All of a sudden there was a barrel bomb on top of us. We came outside and a second one, then a third one hit us," said Ahmad Erfan, a teenager living in the Salhin neighbourhood.

A hospital in the Maadi neighbourhood was hit in the bombing, wounding some of the staff and patients inside.

"All kinds of weapons were used to bomb the hospital, from midnight until about 11:00 am. Now it's unusable," Mohammad Kheir, one of its doctors, told AFP.

"There were some injuries among the medical staff but thankfully they are only light wounds."

A crying woman clad in a black robe desperately grasped the leg of a bloodied young man as doctors treated him on the hospital floor.

Twisted metal frames and damaged medical equipment lay strewn across the room, some next to small pools of blood.

The Observatory said rebel fighters shelled government-controlled western areas of Aleppo, but had no immediate

word on any casualties.

Aleppo city is divided roughly between government control in the west and rebel control in the east.

It was once Syria's commercial powerhouse but has since been ravaged by the country's five-year war.
London Australia has called for a free trade deal with Britain following its exit from the European Union (EU), the BBC reported on Sunday.

In a phone call to the new Prime Minister Theresa May on Saturday, her Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull said he urgently wanted to open up trading between the two countries.

"I have been very clear that this government will make a success of our exit from the EU," May said.

"One of the ways we will do this is by embracing the opportunities to strike free trade deals with our partners across the globe. It is very encouraging that one of our closest international partners is already seeking to establish just such a deal."

"This shows that we can make Brexit work for Britain," BBC quoted the Prime Minister as saying.

Liam Fox, the new International Trade Secretary, said he was already "scoping about a dozen free trade deals", the BBC reported.

He told the Sunday Times "We've already had a number of countries saying, 'We'd love to do a trade deal with the world's fifth biggest economy without having to deal with the other 27 members of the EU'."

But Britain cannot sign any deals while it is still an EU member.
San Francisco: India's revolutionary policy initiatives have brought positivity among entrepreneurs across the globe, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has said as he invited Indian IT professionals in the Silicon Valley to actively participate in India's startup movement.

Speaking at the Global Indian Technology Professionals Association (GITPRO), Gadkari invited Indian professionals to bring their innovations and technologies to India in key sectors of the economy, particularly in the infrastructure sector like roads transport, highways and shipping as well as in the road safety programmes.

Noting that the agriculture sector is another area of cooperation between India and the US, the Minister for Road, Transport, Highways and Shipping assured the entrepreneurs from the US all possible assistance in making the ease of doing business a hassle-free process.

Highlighting some of the key achievements of his ministry, Gadkari, who is on a week-long official visit of the US, said he has ordered equipment from Australia to construct a road to Manasarovar from Uttarakhand via Himalaya.

He said that average road construction per day had been 2 km per day and it has now reached to 20 km per day and he promised that by next April it would be 41 km per day.

In a meeting with TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) members from its local chapter in Silicon Valley, Gadkari shared his

ministries' policy innovations with a view to motivating young creative minds to turn up ideas into action in the new Indian scenario which he said will help in job creation.

During his meeting, Gadkari explained at great length the relaxation of rules and regulations and other procedural

bottlenecks in the departments under him which he emphasised have made things simpler and easier for potential investors in India in the infrastructure sector.

Gadkari also visited Boom Energy establishment and evinced keen interest in the next generation energy generation system with modern technologies, a media release said.

In his address to a meeting organised by the Overseas Friends of BJP, Gadkari said the positive impact of Indian policy initiatives in road transport, highways and shipping sectors have given a boost to the Indian economy which is now growing as one of the emerging economies in the world.

During his interaction, Gadkari said IIT and IIM graduates from India working in the US were "excited about the success story of India" in the last two years and were enthusiastic about making a positive contribution to the growth and progress of their country of origin.
Washington: Donald Trump is at the centre of attack in a new advertisement by rival Hillary Clinton campaign that invites adults to imagine what a child might be learning from the Republican presumptive nominee's provocative rhetoric.

Soft, inviting piano tones are set against a pink sunset and a neighbourhood at dusk, before the 70-year-old real

estate tycoon's voice interrupts the tranquil scene. "I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks," Trump is heard telling a crowd.

More of his acidic comments are played, while the screen is filled with close-ups of children gazing at television sets, seemingly soaking up every R-rated remark, the New York Times said in a report. "Our children are watching," a text card warns after two young children watch on television Trump appearing to mock a reporter with a disability.

At the end, Clinton is shown delivering a speech on children, closing with, "We need to make sure that they can be

proud of us."

The ad paints Trump as "unpresidential and unfit for office, in the eyes of both children and, the ad assumes, their voting parents (who, one could argue, might not be too happy with the Clinton campaign's rebroadcasting of the

messages to children watching television)," the NYT report said.

It added that the Clinton campaign has also made the 68-year-old former secretary of state's record of working for

children and families a central focus, while trying to portray Trump as a poor role model for children.

While the underlying message feels familiar, the timing is important as Trump heads into the Republican National Convention and is set to enjoy several days of free, unabated media coverage, often in prime time and perhaps when children are watching.

The Clinton campaign can counter with a paid message placed strategically in the coverage, it said.
Dhaka: Bangladesh police have found a house in the capital that was used as a hideout by the attackers who massacred 20 hostages at an upscale cafe on 1 July.

The landlord of the house in west Shewrapara area in Dhaka has been arrested on charges of not preserving the necessary documents of his tenants who are believed to be accomplices of the Holey Artisan Bakery attackers.

Landlord Md Nurul Islam was arrested from his residence.

"Police have found handmade grenade, black dresses and some other equipment from the house, Deputy Police Commissioner Masudur Rahman told bdnews24.com.

Police raided the house on Saturday night.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) Deputy Commissioner (Media) Masudur Rahman confirmed the arrest and said Nurul did not collect any necessary documents from his tenants as per the DMP order and even concealed the information.

Hours before the raid, police arrested the acting Pro-Vice Chancellor of North South University Professor M. Gias Uddin Ahsan and two others from Dhakas Bashundhara Residential Area for sheltering the cafe attackers.

The two others held are Ahsans nephew Alam Chowdhury, and Mahbubur Rahman Tuhin, the building manager.

Several cartons packed with sand and the dresses they left behind in the flat were seized.

Police suspect the cartons were used to keep the grenades used in the attack that killed 20 hostages and two police officers.

Police said a person, suspected to be a member of Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), had rented the flat in May.

The man fled on the day of the Gulshan attack. It appears from the information we initially got that some of the Gulshan cafe attackers had come to this house, Detective Branch Deputy Commissioner Saiful Islam told bdnews24.com.
Myanmar's de facto premier Aung San Suu Kyi held landmark talks with senior rebel leaders on Sunday, as she strives to seal a ceasefire with a patchwork of ethnic minority militias that have battled the national army for decades.

Suu Kyi has made peace a flagship policy of her newly installed civilian-led government which replaced decades of brutal junta rule earlier this year.

It is a tall order in a country where the military, which is loathed and deeply distrusted by many ethnic rebel groups, still retains significant control.

A number of key rebel factions have yet to sign up to a national ceasefire agreement, something Suu Kyi's government hopes Sunday's talks might change.

Zaw Htay, deputy director general of the president's office, told reporters the veteran democracy campaigner and her close associates were meeting with five leaders from the United Nationalities Federal Council.

The body represents both rebel groups that have signed up to the ceasefire agreement and those who have so far refused.

"It will be like meeting family," he told reporters ahead of the meeting.

Among those present was General N'Ban La, from the Kachin Independence Organisation, the political wing of one of Myanmar's most powerful rebel factions, which has yet to sign a ceasefire.

"It's a confidence building meeting, there can be many questions and answers from both sides," Hla Maung Shwe, a government advisor on the peace process told AFP.

Media were ushered out after filming the initial greetings ahead of the meeting in the commercial capital Yangon.

Myanmar has been scarred by ethnic conflicts ever since its independence in 1948, with minority groups battling for greater autonomy against a central government that they believed has long ignored and abused them.

Suu Kyi has vowed to overturn that painful legacy with plans to hold a major peace conference later this summer.

However, conflicts continue to rage in several areas between ethnic minority armed groups and the army, which operates beyond the reaches of civilian government, particularly in northern Kachin and eastern Shan states.

Some 240,000 people are displaced due to unrest and communal conflict across the country.

More than a dozen rebel factions also plan to hold their own talks later this month in Kachin, with Sunday's meeting seen as a crucial stepping stone towards persuading the hold-out groups to embrace the peace process.

Both Myanmar's military and rebel groups have a long history of rights violations linked to decades of conflict, including the use of child labour and drug trafficking.

Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy government has spoken out in favour greater federalism for Myanmar's ethnic minorities.

But her hands are partially tied.

Under Myanmar's junta-era constitution, the crucial interior, home and border ministries are still controlled by the army, giving the generals huge sway over whether the peace process is a success.
Paris: The man behind the truck attack that killed at least 84 people celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice had recently been radicalised, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in remarks published on Sunday.

Thursday night's attack in the Riviera city of Nice plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.

Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31 year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any links to Islamic State, which claimed the attack, but Valls said there was no doubt on the assailant's motives.

"The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly," Valls said in an interview with Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.

"The claim on Saturday morning by Islamic State and the fast radicalisation of the killer confirms the Islamist nature of this attack."

Officials said on Saturday that people questioned by police had indicated that he had undergone a rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion.

Relative and friends interviewed in Nice painted a picture of a man who at least until recently drank alcohol, smoked marijuana and according to French media even ate pork, behaviour that would be unlikely in a devout Muslim.

Speaking from his home town in Tunisia, Bouhlel's sister told Reuters he had been having psychological problems when he left for France in 2005 and had sought medical treatment.

As authorities were trying to better understand his motives, two more people, a man and a woman close to Bouhlel, were arrested in Nice early on Sunday, bringing the number of people in detention over the killings to seven.

The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said that Bouhlel "was one of the soldiers of Islamic State".

Valls, who said security services had prevented 16 attacks over three years, indicated that at play on Thursday was the group's modus operandi of cajoling unstable individuals into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible.

"Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts...this is probably what happened in Nice's case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

The group, which is under military pressure from forces opposed to it, considers France its main target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States, which is leading a coalition against it.

Security Failures?

Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and far-right over how President Francois Hollande's Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no risk zero and new attacks would occur.

"I've always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It's difficult to say, but other lives will be lost."

With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, French opposition politicians are increasing pressure and seizing on what they described as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2 kilometers (1.5 miles) through large crowds before it was finally halted.

After Thursday's attack, a state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris was extended by three months and military and police reservists were to be called up.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazenueve on Saturday called on "patriotic citizens" to become reservists to help relieve exhausted security forces.

But the measures appear to have done little to temper concerns. Highlighting the "serious deficiencies" in protecting French citizens, National Front leader Marine Le Pen demanded that Cazeneuve resign.

"Anywhere else in the world a minister with such a terrible record - 250 deaths in 18 months - would have resigned a long time ago," she told reporters.

Christian Estrosi, a security hardliner and ex-minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy who is now president of the wider Riviera region, accused the government of failing completely in Nice.

"When the interior minister says there were enough police, it constitutes a blatant lie," he told i-Tele television. "He said there were 64 national policemen on duty. It's false and the investigation will show it."

Valls has said there were no failures in Nice.
The brother of Pakistani model-cum-actress Qandeel Baloch has confessed that he drugged and strangled his sister to death in the name of "honour".

Baloch's brother was arrested by police on Saturday night after she was strangled to death in her house in Multan early in the morning.

Her father claimed that she was killed by her younger brother, Waseem, in the name of honour, Dawn online reported.

Waseem said "she brought dishonour to the Baloch name" due to risque videos and statements that she posted on social media.

"There are other issues as well... Like the maulvi issue," Waseem said, referring to a recent controversy surrounding Baloch's selfies with Mufti Qavi. "I gave her a tablet and then strangled her."

A police official in Multan said Waseem fled to "Dera Ghazi Khan with two of his friends" after killing the attractive Qandeel Baloch.

He said the police were working on catching his friends, and will only be able to determine their involvement after speaking to them.

The model's father, Muhammad Azeem in an FIR said Waseem was against her working in showbiz and had taken this extreme step at the behest of his brother Mohammad Aslam Shaheen.

Baloch shot to fame in 2014 through her self-promotion and suggestive "selfies" posted on social media. She had tens of thousands of followers.
A gunman killed three police officers and injured at least five more in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday, local media reported.

Several of those injured were reported to be in critical condition.

"Several officers were struck by gunfire," Baton Rouge police spokesman Don Coppola told local television station WAFB.

"There are three they are describing as very seriously ill," Baton Rouge Mayor Kip Holden told the station, adding that more details will be forthcoming.

The station aired video footage of police responding to the scene in Baton Rouge. Multiple shots could be heard as civilian cars quickly backed away.

CNN reported a local source as saying at least seven officers were shot and three are feared dead. Some of the others are reported to be in critical condition, the station said.

The shooting appeared to be carried out by a lone gunman carrying an assault rifle, local media reported.

"We think that the situation has been contained," Coppola said.

"One suspect is dead, law enforcement believes two others may be at large," the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

Casey Rayborn Hicks, a spokeswoman for the East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, said in a statement that the public should call 911 immediately if they see anything suspicious.

The shooting  which took place less than one mile from police headquarters  comes amid spiralling tensions across the city and the country between the black community and police. The races of the suspect or suspects and the officers were not immediately known.

Coppola told The Associated Press earlier that the officers were rushed to a local hospital. Coppola said authorities are asking people to stay away from the area.

Multiple police units were stationed at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, where stricken officers were believed to be undergoing treatment at a trauma center. A police officer with a long gun was blocking the parking lot at the emergency room.

Officers and deputies from the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office were involved, according to Hicks.

An Associated Press reporter on the scene saw police vehicles with lights flashing massed about a half mile from the police headquarters on Airline Highway. Police armed with long guns on the road stopped at least two vehicles driving away from the scene and checked their trunks and vehicles before allowing them to drive away.

Police-community relations in Baton Rouge have been especially tense since the killing of 37-year-old Alton Sterling, a black man killed by white officers earlier this month after a scuffle at a convenience store. The killing was captured on cellphone video and circulated widely on the internet.

It was followed a day later by the shooting death of another black man in Minnesota, whose girlfriend live-streamed the aftermath of his death on Facebook. Then on Thursday, a black gunman in Dallas opened fire on police at a protest about the police shootings, killing five officers and heightening tensions even further.

Over the weekend, thousands of people took to the streets in Baton Rouge to condemn Sterling's death, including hundreds of demonstrators who congregated outside the police station. Authorities arrested about 200 people over the three-day weekend.

Michelle Rogers, 56, said the pastor at her church had led prayers Sunday for Sterling's family and police officers, asking members of the congregation to stand up if they knew an officer.

Rogers said an officer in the congregation hastily left the church near the end of the service, and a pastor announced that "something had happened."

"But he didn't say what. Then we started getting texts about officers down," she said.

Rogers and her husband drove near the scene, but were blocked at an intersection closed down by police.

"I can't explain what brought us here," she said. "We just said a prayer in the car for the families."

Police arrested more than 100 protesters taking part in a demonstration against police brutality in Baton Rouge last week.

(With inputs from AP and AFP)
Cairo: The word "fire" is heard on the cockpit voice recorder of EgyptAir 804 before the plane crashed into the Mediterranean in May, an Egyptian-led investigative committee said Saturday.

Investigators had earlier said the other black box retrieved from the crash site, the data recorder, confirmed that smoke alarms had sounded on board, while soot on wreckage indicates a fire.

"The committee had... started listening to the cockpit voice recordings before the occurrence of the accident; where the existence of 'fire' was mentioned," it said in a statement.

"Still it is too early to determine the reason or the place where that fire started," it said.

The data recorder points to smoke signals indicating fires in the lavatory and avionics section of the plane, according to the committee.

The data on the voice recorder had been downloaded earlier this month after it was repaired.

The Airbus A320 was carrying 40 Egyptians, 15 French, two Iraqis, two Canadians and one passenger each from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Chad, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

It had set off from Paris to Cairo when it disappeared from radar over the Mediterranean.

Egyptian investigators have confirmed the aircraft made a 90-degree left turn followed by a 360-degree turn to the right before hitting the sea.

The latest committee statement said the search for the remains of passengers has ended.

The ship conducting the search "reached the port of Alexandria after the end of its mission, which had been extended for the second time, after making sure of the recovery of all human remains at the site of the accident", it said.

Both Egyptian and French judiciary have opened investigations into the mysterious incident, without ruling out a terrorist attack.

The crash followed the bombing of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula last October,

killing all 224 passengers and crew.

The Islamic State jihadist group claimed responsibility for that attack, but there has been no such claim linked to the EgyptAir crash.

Egypt's aviation minister had initially said an attack was the more likely explanation, but President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said there was no theory being favoured yet.

EgyptAir said last week that advance compensation payments of USD 25,000 will be offered to families of the 66 people killed in the crash.

The payments are separate to those expected from insurance companies on behalf of various parties depending on the investigation into the disaster.
Fethullah Gulen held an impromptu news conference from his home in the remote village of Saylorsburg, in eastern Pennsylvania, denied claims by Turkish President Erdogan that his supporters were connected to Friday's attempted coup in Turkey. But Gulen told VOA's Turkish Service that Turkish society has been polarized significantly in the past few years. "We need to heal this polarization," he said.
I know some of you might have thought Id talk about last weeks horrific event in Dallas, Texas. The only thing I can say is to pray for the officers and their families including the ones in blue.

Q: With recent events I was wondering, what are the best actions to take when an officer pulls you over and youre carrying a firearm? I feel like the officers safety is on the line with every traffic stop, so Id like to get your opinion on how to best demonstrate compliance and alert the officer to the firearm, so that everyone can get home safe. -Nicole

A: Okay before I get anymore emails about how I might be wrong on my answer, I want to re-empathize that the following answer is only based on my opinion and since this is not dealing with any laws you can take it for what its worth.

The first thing I would tell you to do is to tell the officer that you have a firearm in your vehicle and let them know where it was at. Do not and I repeat, do not move towards the area of where the gun is as the officer might end up showing you his or her firearm. The officer will usually tell you to not to move towards that area anyway.

One thing I have done with few stops like that has been to ask the driver if they minded if I took control of the firearm until the stop was over. The driver is under no obligation to do that but I have never had a driver question why I would do that.

I have been asked why I did not have the driver just get out and put the gun in the trunk or in another area away from the drivers seat. The best answer I can give is that having a driver get out of their vehicle creates an unsafe situation for them as there could be traffic or another officer arrive and not know why a driver is getting out of a vehicle with a firearm.

The other option could be that if your firearm is not in a spot considered to be readily accessible you could just not tell the officer about it. I will say though that in Idaho most officers assume everybody has a firearm in their vehicle especially around hunting season.

Quote of the month:

If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen -Ronald Reagan

Officer down:

Please put these officers, killed in the line of duty, and their families in your prayers. They fought the good fight, now may they rest in peace. God bless these heroes.

Deputy Sheriff Paul Clark, St. Francois County Sheriff, Missouri

Senior Corporal Lorne Ahrens, Dallas Police, Texas

Police Officer Michael Krol, Dallas Police, Texas

Sergeant Michael Smith, Dallas Police, Texas

Police Officer Patrick Zamarripa, Dallas Police, Texas

Police Officer Brent Thompson, Dallas Area Rapid Transit Police, Texas

Public Safety Officer Michael Ventura, Town of Salem Department of Public Safety, Wisconsin

Have a question for Policemandan? Email your question(s) to policemandan@yahoo.com or look for Ask Policemandan on Facebook and click the like button. Mail to: Box 147, Heyburn, Idaho 83336
WASHINGTON  If its not already on public display, most of the good stuff in the Smithsonian National Gem and Mineral Collection is stored in the Blue Room, somewhere in the basement of the Museum of Natural History.

So named for its blue rug and work table, the room is an Alladins Cave of Earth art, where shelves and cabinets are stuffed with millions of dollars worth of colorful specimens having exotic names like crocoite, rhodochrosite and plumbogummite.

Theres a vivid green slab of malachite, shaped into a wash basin, that was given to Vice President Spiro Agnew by some African dictator in the 1970s. Beside it is a purple amethyst geode the size of a beach ball that has a grapefruit-size calcite crystal and ivory-colored calcite spears inside. A box of multi-colored Montana sapphires is a more recent arrival.

Not counting rocks or meteorites, the Smithsonian collection has about 375,000 minerals from around the world. Curator Jeff Post said roughly 20,000 specimens are kept in the Blue Room.

Typically, this is where we draw from for our exhibits, he said. Only about 1 percent of the collection is on public display  but its the 1 percent the public really wants to see.

Despite its nickname as the Gem State, Idaho is not a major contributor to the collection. However, nearly 1,000 specimens have come from various Idaho locations, including a handful that are on public display and several others valuable enough to be stored in the Blue Room.

One of the latter is a chunky pyromorphite boulder from the Bunker Hill Mine near Kellogg.

Its a very famous sample, Post said. Theres been a lot of work done on it.

Inspiring awe and wonder about the varied treasures of the Earth is one of the goals of the National Gem and Mineral Collection, he said, but every item in the collection is also available to researchers.

Most mornings I have multiple emails from researchers somewhere in the world looking for something from our collection, Post said. Theres going to be a higher hurdle if they want to do a study involving the Hope Diamond, but if its a legitimate research question, something of sufficient interest, were probably going to do it. The main reason were here is to support science.

The Bunker Hill pyromorphite is covered with green and brown crystals. A second, hand-size piece has clumps of larger, licorice-size crystals that are a slightly different color.

Like most crystals, Post said, these probably formed in a vein or pocket when a mineralizing fluid entered the space and precipitated, either because of a change in temperature or through fluid mixing.

Mineral deposits can also contain a mix of crystals if the composition of the fluid changes over time. Some crystals  such as diamond  only form at very high pressures, deep within the Earths crust or mantle, while others form at or near the surface. Crystals can also form, partially dissolve and re-form as conditions change.

The crystals you see could be the result of a one-time event or many cycles of growth, Post said.

The chemical story of how a particular deposit formed is one of the things that make minerals interesting to researchers, he said. The amethyst geode, for example, wouldnt have been as valuable or as exciting if not for its calcite core.

If I were teaching a college class, Id set that in front of students and ask them to write me an essay about how it formed, what it tells us, Post said.

The Smithsonian collection also tells a story of human exploration, since the availability of minerals from a particular region is often related to its mining history.

When Post first began working at the Smithsonian in 1984, for example, the collection probably only had a few samples from China. Almost no Chinese dealers came to the massive Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, he said, which is one of the worlds largest trade shows for mineral buyers and sellers.

Now there are entire hotels filled with them, Post said. There are hundreds of Chinese dealers, reflecting the expansion of that countrys manufacturing base and its drive for raw materials.

Similarly, Idahos contributions to the collection reflects its extensive mining history. There are opals from the Spencer Opal Mine, star garnets (almandine) from the Emerald Creek deposit north of Deary, blue beryl from the Boise Basin and a dozen drab chunks of galena hidden away in a drawer  meager representatives of the spectacular Silver Valley mines, which have produced more than 1 billion ounces of silver over the past 130 years.

Altogether, the nearly 1,000 Idaho specimens in the Smithsonian collection include about 150 different kinds of minerals or mineral species.

By comparison, more than 350 species have been discovered just in the Franklin and Sterling Hill lead mines in New Jersey. Such splendor is partly a result of the long, diverse geological history of those ore bodies, but it also reflects the dedicated work of former mine workers and amateur collectors who are constantly on the lookout for tiny crystals and unusual specks of chemistry that have never been seen before.

Im sure in our collection there are hundreds of new species as well, Post said. Its just a matter of looking.

The Smithsonian collection includes about 3,000 mineral species, out of the 5,500 or so known minerals, he said. However, thats a moving target, as new species are regularly being discovered and described.

Robert Hazen, a research scientist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, has written extensively about mineral evolution  how the number and types of mineral species found on Earth have changed and expanded over time.

It is, Hazen writes, a trajectory with clear parallels to evolution in the biological realm.

Hazen, together with other researchers, proposes that there have been three main eras of mineral species diversification. The initial period began at the dawn of the solar system, when small asteroid accreted to form the planet. A second era of global-scale differentiation began when Earth separated into a metallic core, silicate mantle and basaltic-granitic crust.

The final era, during which about 70 percent of all mineral species formed, is highlighted by the Great Oxidation Event between 1.9 billion and 2.5 billion years ago  when photosynthesizing algae began increasing oxygen levels in the atmosphere  followed by the evolution of multi-cellular life forms around 600 million years ago, with teeth, shells, skeletons and other biomineralized components.

Within that narrative, the specimens in the Blue Room and the National Gem and Mineral Collection arent just wonders of nature or products of the human search for mineral wealth. Theyre pages in the 4.5-billion-year-old story of the planet  and telling that tale is part of the Smithsonians mission.

This place offers a great combination of scientific research and public outreach, Post said. For anyone who has an urge to share information, the Smithsonian is a very heady place to work.
JEROME  Jerome band director Hiroshi Fukuoka was selected as a regional representative for the National Federation of State High School Associations.

He was nominated by the Idaho High School Activities Association. Hell serve a four-year term, ending in 2020.

Fukuoka, who just finished his third year in Jerome, leads band programs at both Jerome Middle School and Jerome High School.

The high school ensemble recently returned from a trip to Washington, D.C., where students performed in the National Independence Day Parade.
HAILEY  The first-ever Power Scholars Academy Camp is underway in Blaine County.

In partnership with the Blaine County School District, Y-USA and BELL, the Wood River Community YMCA is serving children in second and third grades.

The camp includes literacy and math instruction, community time, physical education and other enrichment opportunities.

Located at Alturas Elementary School, the six-week program serving 65 students runs five days a week from June 27 to Aug. 5.

Transportation, breakfast, lunch and facilities are provided by the Blaine County School District. The YMCA provides the training, staff and curriculum.

Held in 26 states across the country, Power Scholars has a track record of boosting reading and math skills among participants.

The program is geared toward students who need additional support in school, and 72 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged.

Students are hand-selected from all of the elementary schools in the Blaine County School District.

The program will conclude with a celebration of a final project completed by students.

Theyre developing a Kids Guide to the Valley, which will be researched, written and produced by students attending the camp. The Weekly Sun will publish the guide in August.
TWIN FALLS  Some people are angry and want answers. Others want the family members of city officials to be raped.

National attention has again come to refugee resettlement in Twin Falls, as the case of three underaged boys from Iraq and Sudan who stand accused of sexually assaulting a 5-year-old girl at the Fawnbrook Apartments makes its way through the juvenile court system and as opponents of Islam and of refugee resettlement point to the case as validation of their beliefs about Muslims.

Have you any idea how many Americans are hoping and wishing your daughter, wife, mother, sister, aunt, or niece gets gang raped by those (expletive) piece of (expletive) sand (expletive) youre so (expletive) enamoured (sic) with? wrote the anonymous sender of one of the emails local police forwarded to the FBI because of another, even more threatening comment in it.

Combined, City Council members and City Manager Travis Rothweiler have gotten more than 100 emails, from more than 90 different email addresses, from people outraged over the case, according to a response to a records request from the Times-News. Many of them repeat accusations that the city and local law enforcement tried to cover the case up, and some, especially the earlier ones, incorrectly say the boys involved were Syrian, which was initially falsely reported on a number of anti-Muslim and anti-refugee resettlement blogs.

Some other emails show the discussion behind the scenes, as city officials try to answer peoples questions, handle the handful of more threatening emails and phone calls, and discuss releasing what information they can to the public and respond to some of the press reports and the interview requests from national outlets.

A few people wrote to say they had canceled plans to travel to or even retire in Twin Falls because of the case.

We were planning to spend a few days in Twin Falls on our RV tour of Wyoming and Idaho, one person wrote. We have decided to pass around, way around, the Twin Falls area to avoid your refugee problem.

While many of the people were angry about what they heard happened and blamed the City Council for allowing refugees into Twin Falls (the program is federally run), most were not threatening. However, a handful of emails and voice mails city officials have gotten over the past few weeks are being investigated by local police or the FBI.

One man left voice mails for Camille Barigar, wife of Mayor Shawn Barigar, and for two other faculty members at the College of Southern Idaho, which administers the refugee program in Twin Falls, accusing them of bringing humanitys lowest common denominator, essentially human garbage, from Africa and the Middle East, into the Twin Falls area.

In two of voice mails, the man asks the women he left messages for how they would feel if they were gang-raped by Muslims, going into detail about how he imagines it might happen, and in all three voice mails, he refers to the murder of Jo Cox, a Labour Member of Parliament from England and a refugee resettlement supporter who was killed a month ago by a man who appears to have been motivated by his racist beliefs.

A majority of the people who wrote the Council dont say where theyre from  out of 93 email addresses tallied by the Times-News, where the sender is from is unclear for 57 of them  but the ones that can be identified seem to support what city officials have said  many of the most vitriolic calls and emails they have gotten have been from people who dont live here.

All of you Mother (expletive) should be hung for treason, wrote one California man. To brush aside Radical Islamic individuals that have committed crimes is shameful. I watched the video of your open Council and what a (expletive) embarrassment. All of you need (expletive) bullets right between the middle of your eyes.

Of the remaining 36, eight are clearly from the Magic Valley, four from other parts of Idaho, five from California, four from Colorado, and most of the rest from other states. Three people wrote from Canada, and one from Singapore.

Many of the emails accuse the City Council of not paying enough heed to people who came before them with concerns about the incident, and a number of them singled out Councilman Chris Talkington, who supports refugee resettlement and has said bigotry is behind much of the opposition. At one meeting about a month ago, he asked Julie Ruf if she agreed with another refugee opponent who, at a previous meeting, had framed opposition to refugee resettlement as support for the preservation of the white race. Ruf said she did not agree. Talkington also said he was glad the refugee opponents speaking at the meeting werent around when his ancestors came to America during the Irish Potato Famine.

With all due respect, the Irish were not terrorists with a political/religious ideology of world conquest, wrote Larry T, from California. Neither are many of the Syrian refugees ... but some are and many more are yet to come under the federal governments Syrian refugee program.

Councilman Don Hall answered many of the emails, forwarding them the statement city officials put out summarizing the case after the June 20 City Council meeting and having follow-up conversations with some of the people who answered.

I have responded to all but the most vile, Hall wrote in one email to Rothweiler. I have a mixed bag of responses but at least I am trying.

A couple of these exchanges started out hostile but became more civil. Some evolved into more general discussions of the refugee program.

I think the problem now is that our Federal Government is unresponsive to the will of the people and we are all frustrated with this fact, Hall wrote to one man. We at the local level are closest to the people so we are coming under fire for a program we have no authority over. I do want to say that I have numerous friends and colleagues that are direct or children of the refugee program who are wonderful and productive citizens in our community so I have difficulty in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I do believe that the Congress should demand a complete audit of the program to ensure that those that we are bringing in have been vetted appropriately.

City spokesman Joshua Palmer said many of the phone calls the city got from people concerned about what happened were more civil than the emails, with many of the calls appearing to be driven by concern for the victim.

They were just wanting more information, Palmer said. Or they were upset because they received some misinformation.

Palmer said they were often able to talk civilly, even if they didnt always hang up the phone agreeing with each other.

The human side of things can get lost in an email exchange, he said.
RUPERT  Minidoka Memorial Hospital has negotiated a new contract with Regence BlueShield of Idaho, which will help control insurance premium costs for Regence members while two major employers in Mini-Cassia who purchased the insurance for their employees have opted to leave the insurance company since April when Regence dropped Cassia Regional Medical Center out of network.

We couldnt be happier to have this updated agreement in place with Minidoka Memorial Hospital, said Scott Kreiling, president of Regence BlueShield of Idaho. Regence and Minidoka Memorial are both Idaho originals, looking out for the health care interests of residents here for more than a half century. This really shows that good things happen when providers and insurers put the needs of those we serve first.

Jason Gibbons, chief financial officer at MMH said patients with Regence insurance wont see changes in the cost of medical care at the hospital, but the contract changes will help Regence maintain cost controls, which will help keep insurance premiums down.

As a county-owned health care facility, we feel a special responsibility to provide cost-effective care of the highest quality to our Magic Valley neighbors, said Tom Murphy, CEO of Minidoka Memorial Hospital. Weve methodically updated our capabilities and facilities over the past few years and feel we are well-positioned to serve community needs for years to come. Our newly refreshed agreement with Regence provides an added layer of stability and predictability to our operations here.

Gibbons said Regence was pretty motivated to get the contract negotiated.

The exact details of the contract were not provided.

It was beneficial for them to maintain a foothold in this market, Gibbons said.

The contract between MMH and Regence will be reviewed annually.

Its something we felt like we could live with for several years, Gibbons said.

After Regence dropped CRMC from its network, the insurance company referred people to MMH and St. Lukes Magic Valley Medical Center in Twin Falls, a change that affected more than 4,300 people in Mini-Cassia.

Hospital contracts with Regence vary across the state, Lou Riepl, Regence BlueShield of Idaho spokesman, said in April but the company has had good responses from hospitals moving toward fixed-cost systems. Its trying to move all hospitals toward multi-year agreements and value-based reimbursement.

St. Lukes renegotiated its contract with Regence in the past year. Under the deal, Regence reimburses the hospital on set fees, meaning the hospital gets paid a certain amount for every diagnosis, regardless of how much it costs the hospital to treat.

The hospital declined to provide further information on its contract.

At the time, Regence said in a letter to its customers that the change would not affect peoples emergency care choices, but if they wanted to go to CRMC for ongoing care or to a physician employed by the hospital, they would have to pay significantly higher cost-sharing at out-of-network rates.

Its wrong that patients are being forced to go elsewhere, said Rod Barton, Cassia Regionals administrator in an April interview. Its really been a difficult situation for us.

The hospital said Regence wanted to cut reimbursements to Cassia Regional by 20 percent, a position Barton said was anything but reasonable and fair. The insurance company says it wanted the hospital to move toward a new fee structure increasingly being adopted at hospitals across the country.

The two still have not reached an agreement.

Cassia County School District and Minidoka County School District both opted to leave Regence after the insurance company and CRMC failed to negotiate a contract.

Debbie Critchfield, spokeswoman for Cassia schools, said the district changed companies June 1.

Minidoka schools will move to Select Health Insurance Sept. 1.

There are no changes to note at this time, but IHC and Regence BlueShield of Idaho continue to have contractual discussions, Lou Riepl, spokesman for Regence BlueShield of Idaho wrote in an email to the Times-News.

Stephanie Curtis, spokeswoman for CRMC said in an email that there certainly has been some decline in revenue for the hospital since it was dropped out of network, but the hospital continued to provide care for certain patients like obstetric and emergency patients.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield polices from other states are still considered in-network with CRMC.

Gibbons said the hospital did experience a surge in interest from physicians seeking practice privileges at the hospital after CRMC and Regence failed to negotiate a contract.

He said he did not have exact numbers but the hospital is still in the process of vetting some of those requests.
After the horror at Nice, perhaps the most depressing comment came from Frances prime minister. Calling for unity in the face of terror, Manuel Valls observed: Times have changed, and we should learn to live with terrorism. We have to show solidarity and collective calm.

If this sounds like resignation, it shouldnt. Valls is no squish. After the Charlie Hebdo attack in January 2015, he told the Atlantics Jeffrey Goldberg that accusations of Islamophobia were too often used to silence legitimate criticism of political Islam.

Whats more, France has been under a state of emergency since November, when Islamic State operatives went on a murder spree in Paris. In practice this has meant the state has monitored the communications of thousands of young Muslims, searched their homes and businesses without a warrant and used its national army to defend soft targets.

Then there is the broader war in Syria and Iraq. The French are only one nation participating in the campaign against the Islamic States self-proclaimed caliphate. In recent months this effort has seen some success. Just this week coalition airstrikes appear to have killed the Islamic States minister of war, Omar Shishani. Last month, coalition forces liberated Fallujah in Iraq.

And yet none of this was able to stop a petty criminal named Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel from driving a truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day. Some of this is because of the nature of jihad these days. Both al-Qaida and the Islamic State have encouraged smaller-scale attacks in the West that can be executed without planning or coordination from a wider network. While no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack in Nice, and the authorities are still investigating the killers motivations, the Islamic State in particular has encouraged its supporters and sympathizers to conduct this kind of mass murder.

As the New York Times Rukmini Callimachi reported in March, the Islamic State still encourages larger scale attacks but as the French security blog Kurultay concluded, they also encourage isolated actions of self-radicalized people, who have absolutely no direct contact with ISIS, and yet who will consciously act in its name.

This approach is not an accident. Michael Smith II, the chief operating officer for Kronos Advisory, which monitors the Islamic State online, told me that this is a major emphasis of the Islamic State today. Their leader has explicitly stated you are compelled to pledge allegiance to me and this allegiance is affirmed with action, not just words, he said. This means one of two things, Smith said. Either emigrate to the new caliphate and fight in the Middle East, or wage jihad in your home country.

Thats just the Islamic State. The same kind of inspired terrorism has become a trend for other groups as well. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula began to foment these kinds of attacks in July 2010 when it began to publish its English-language online magazine, Inspire. Since last fall, in what some have called the stabbing intifadah, Israelis have been menaced by a wave of Palestinians wielding knives and guns and ramming vehicles into civilians.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and an expert on radical Islam, told me that all of this highlights that military gains against the Islamic State do not diminish the broader threat of Jihad. The ISIS self-professed caliphate is collapsing, he said. This is going to really hurt the organization, but jihadism itself continues to gain power. Its a much bigger problem than just ISIS.

That problem is not going to go away, even as the military campaign against the Islamic State begins to succeed. The war on terror will be with us for the foreseeable future, and so will the war the terrorists wage against us.
When Philando Castile, a black man legally carrying a concealed weapon, was shot dead by police during a traffic stop in Minnesota this month for no apparent reason other than that he was armed, it seemed like an obvious case for the National Rifle Association to rally behind. The Second Amendment protects everyones right to bear arms, not just white peoples, right?

By the light of the law, the answer is easy: The Constitution prohibits racial discrimination in all rights, including the right to bear arms. By the light of history, however, the answer is far more complicated. From Americas earliest days, the right to bear arms has been profoundly shaped by race. Indeed, for much of our history, the rights protections extended almost exclusively to whites.

The founding generation that adopted the Second Amendment also enacted racially discriminatory gun laws. Fearing slave revolts, early American lawmakers prohibited slavesand often free blacks, toofrom possessing weapons of any kind. Even in states where blacks were allowed to have guns, such as Virginia, they had to first obtain the permission of local officials. And while the well regulated Militia mentioned in the Constitution largely fell out of military use, such groups continued to be employed to capture runaway slaves.

After the Civil War, the question of guns and race changed: Many blacks from the South had obtained firearms when they fled to join colored units of the Union Army. When the war ended, the Army allowed them to keep their guns as compensation for unpaid wages. As many of those black soldiers returned to their home towns, those guns were seen by white racists as a threat to the enforcement of white supremacy. Armed blacks could fight back.

So Southern states passed the Black Codes, which among other things barred the freedmen from possessing firearms. Racists formed groups like the Ku Klux Klan, riding at night to terrorize blacks and take away their guns. Congress, still controlled by the North, reacted by proposing the 14th Amendment to make the Bill of Rights, which previously limited only the federal government, a limit on the states, too. It was the greatest expansion of constitutional rights in American historyand, as historians have shown, it was prompted in part by the desire to protect the right of the freedmen to have guns for self-defense.

Discrimination continued despite the 14th Amendment, and it affected the scope of the right to bear arms. In the early 20th century, an influx of immigrants from Italy, Greece, Hungary, and elsewhere in eastern and southern Europewho, in the biases of the era, were seen as inclined toward committing crime and carrying hidden weaponsled states and cities to enact laws to restrict concealed carry. These laws, which were supported by the NRA, gave broad discretion to local authorities to decide who had sufficiently good reason to carry guns in public. In a society marred by racism, minorities were rarely deemed worthy of exercising that right. Even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was turned down when he applied for a concealed-carry permit in 1956 after his house was bombed.

The civil rights movement was primarily about access to schools and jobs, but it also came to encompass guns and the Second Amendment. Despite Kings rejection of violence and its symbols, others saw guns as potent signifiers of empowerment and equal citizenship. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers took up arms and articulated a novel view of the Second Amendment: Not only did it guarantee the right to have a gun at home, it also protected the right to have a gun in public, where the threats (at least to blacks from police) were usually found. These activists also interpreted the Second Amendment as providing a right to take up arms against a tyrannical governmentwhich, in their case, meant racist police officers. In standing up against police violence, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were ancestors of Black Lives Matter. Lawmakers in states such as California responded by passing new gun regulations intended to disarm black radicals.

Armed civil rights activists were also early forerunners of the modern gun rights movement. The Panthers view of the Second Amendment eventually caught on among white activists, too. In the 1980s, the NRA began to argue that the amendment protected a right to carry guns in publicand launched a remarkably successful 30-year campaign to overturn the very concealed-carry laws the group had endorsed years earlier.

Today, gun rights activists unwittingly echo Malcolm X when they say the Second Amendment entitles people to own weapons in case they need to revolt against a tyrannical government. And when open-carry advocates go to a protest with rifles slung across their backs, they are mimicking the Black Panthers, who in 1967 showed up at the California statehouse to protest gun-control proposals with long guns in their hands. Oh, the irony: The modern gun rights movementmostly white, rural conservativesgrew out of ideas first promoted by black, urban, left-leaning radicals.

Gun politics remain highly racialized. Racial minorities are currently among the biggest supporters of gun control and whites the biggest opponents. In recognition of the nations changing demographics, the NRA is making a major push to diversify: Its new spokesman, Colion Noir, is an engaging African-American millennial. Yet the NRAs annual convention remains largely a sea of white folks. And as the NRAs reluctance to make a statement in support of Philando Castile suggestsmany believe the group would have immediately backed a white concealed-carrier in such circumstancesthere is still a long way to go.

All Americans can claim to be part of the people whose right to keep and bear arms is guaranteed by the Second Amendment. Yet because of the interaction of guns and race, that right has not been equally enjoyed by racial minorities. As long as the unfortunate strands of our racist past continue to shape our attitudesand those of police officers like the one who shot Castileracial minorities will continue to be the Second Amendments second-class citizens.
From the Lewiston Tribune:

Former state Rep. Holli Woodings, D-Boise, had the political wind at her back.

Woodings, the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for secretary of state in 2014, headed up an initiative campaign that would appeal to virtually everyone in Idahowith the possible exception of a few politicians and lobbyists.

Among its provisions:

Scaling back how much an individual can contribute to a legislative or statewide candidate campaign.

Imposing tougher penalties for evading Idahos Sunshine Law.

Forcing legislators, legislative staffers and statewide elected officials to do something else their first year out of office besides lobby their former colleagues.

Restricting companies holding state contracts worth $250,000 or more from making campaign contributions.

Stopping lobbyists from extending gifts worth more than $50 to legislators.

At a time when political incumbency is no virtue and insurgency is no vice, such an agenda ought to have been easy to promote.

And it was. According to pollster Dan Jones and Associates, 79 percent of Idahoans said they would have voted for the measure.

Woodings group also had sufficient funds to go out and secure the signatures of 47,623 registered voters6 percent of the qualified electorate in the stateneeded to put the measure on the Nov. 8 ballot. As the Spokesman-Reviews Betsy Russell noted last week, initiative backers raised $229,543much of it in big checks from out-of-state donors including $25,000 from End Citizens United-Federal, a Washington, D.C.,based political action committee.

Of that, the Idaho organization spent $188,468 paying people to go out and collect signatures. They rounded up almost 79,000. That should have been enough of a margin to cover for non-registered voters who signed the petitions. For instance, when opponents of the 2011 Luna laws put their referendum measures up for a vote the following year, roughly 78 percent of the signatures they collected were valid.

But the Woodings organization ran into a buzz saw. Almost half of the signatures came from people who had changed addresses since the last time they voted.

It doesnt matter if they moved down the street, across town or to the other side of the county. Idaho law says if they havent updated their voter information, theyve effectively canceled their registration. Since Idaho allows people to register at the polls on Election Day, they have no incentive to go out and renew their eligibility prior to the next election.

So when the deadline loomed last week, the initiative campaign wound up about 5,000 or 6,000 signatures short.

Left unknown is whether the latest set of obstacles lawmakers placed in the path of Woodings and other initiative backers would have further stymied their efforts.

The year after voters repealed the Luna laws in 2012, lawmakers deemed that any future ballot measuresinitiatives to pass laws, referendums to repeal themmust get the equivalent of 6 percent of the registered voters in 18 of Idahos 35 legislative districts.

So Idahoans will go another two years before facing even a possibility of bypassing the Legislature and passing a law on their own. The last time an initiative got on the ballot was a 2006 measure attempting to raise the sales tax a penny and devote the money to schools. Voters rejected it.

If nearly $200,000 wasnt enough to get a fairly mild political reform package before the voters, what would it take to get something really controversial on the ballot?

Say a minimum-wage hike, reforming the states tax code or banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity?

A half-million dollars? And who has that kind of money?

Those who already hold sway in the state Capitolthe people Idahos initiative process was designed to circumvent.
@PatriciaMazzei

CLEVELAND -- Twenty hours before its first gavel, the Republican National Convention finally released its schedule. And missing from the speakers' line-up is Florida Gov. Rick Scott.

Scott was on the RNC's "partial" speaker list published Thursday. He was supposed to speak sometime Thursday, on the convention's last night. Presumptive nominee Donald Trump will take the podium that night too -- and possibly other nights.

But Scott's name was nowhere to be found Sunday evening. Attorney General Pam Bondi's was: She's slated to address Republican delegates Wednesday night, as expected.

We've asked Scott's political consultant, Trump's campaign and the RNC to explain what happened. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Scott's political consultant, Melissa Stone, says she was told Scott's absence from the program was an "oversight."

UPDATE #2:Stone says Scott is now slated to speak sometime Wednesday.

--with Steve Bousquet
OK, not the whole gang. A large sector of the Republican party establishment had to bow out of the convention at the last minute when it remembered that it had a haircut appointment. Currently the highest-ranking elected Republican official here is Arthur A. Bud Klampf, deputy vice mayor of Ant Mound, Arkansas, who is scheduled to deliver what has been billed as a major prime-time address, assuming he can locate his dentures.

But there will still be plenty of excitement, with the highlight expected to come Tuesday, when the Republican delegates, barring a last-minute commando assault led by George Will in a camouflage bow tie, are expected to nominate Donald J. Trump, who according to recent polls actually has a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton and become president of the United WAIT WHAT ARE YOU SERIOUS??

Oops! I allowed my mask of professional-journalism objectivity to slip there. We professional journalists are freaking out over the fact that no matter how hard we try to explain to the public that Trump is unqualified, a lot of the public keeps right on liking him and his bold vision for America consisting of whatever happens to cross his mind at a given moment. We journalists are like, What is WRONG with you people? Why arent you LISTENING to us?!? Were PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS WITH VERIFIED TWITTER ACCOUNTS!!!

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system. Back to my objective report:

More here.
Or, if you prefer: the most dreaded Republican National Convention in recent memory, featuring the most disliked presidential nominee in U.S. history, for a party so fractured that some of its nervous members openly worry whether it will heal or permanently splinter.

This is how a divided Republican Party heads into its convention in Cleveland, which will culminate with Donald Trumps nomination as the GOP candidate to the presidency. The next four days will shape how the GOP approaches the Nov. 8 general election  and, perhaps, politics for years to come.

The heart of the action will be at Quicken Loans Arena, or The Q  where LeBron James now plays  in downtown Cleveland. The city has been blocked off into secure zones, with roads closed and reporters staked out at key locations to watch speeches and votes inside  and protests and parades outside.

Much of the politicking, though, will happen far from the convention hall and the demonstrations. Though Florida delegates have will have front-and-center seating at the arena  a position just behind Trump's home state of New York  their hotel is nine miles away, in suburban Independence, Ohio.

Theyll gather there for daily political breakfasts  including with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy  and to be shuttled off to private programs, like a tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Red, White, and Brew night with the Arizona delegation.

Here are three Florida politics questions the convention will help answer:

More here.
Scott will play a prominent role in next weeks convention in Cleveland but finds himself at the center of a political storm that poses risks to his final two years in office and a possible run for U.S. Senate in 2018.

For better or worse, the governor of Americas biggest presidential battleground is also his states leading supporter of Donald Trump, the most divisive presidential candidate in decades.

Scott is all-in with the bombastic Trump, even as other leading Republicans boycott the convention or keep a distance from a candidate who has torn his party apart while offending one demographic group after another.

Scott will take the stage Thursday to deliver a prime-time convention speech for Trump, and then goes to work in what polls suggest is an uphill climb to deliver Florida to a candidate reviled by Hispanics in particular, the fastest-growing part of Floridas electorate.

More here.
New ownership

Monkey Bar Gym Missoula is under the new ownership and direction of Heather McMilin and Meri Althauser, longtime Monkey Bar members and certified CNT trainers. In addition to their new roles as owners, McMilin is the housing development director at Homeword and Althauser is an attorney with Montana Legal Justice. Monkey Bar Gym is a unique fitness experience where members train with no machines, no mirrors and no egos. The training philosophy is based on functional fitness (running, jumping, crawling and climbing), camaraderie, strength and encouragement. For more information, call 926-2071 or visit monkeybargymmissoula.com.

New associates

KPAX-TV announces the hire of Austin Schweitzer as account executive. He is a graduate of the University of Montana with a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration and has sales experience in high-tech aerial software.

ATGs Missoula Solutions Center welcomes Jordan Purinton and Ryann Carlson as consulting interns. Purington has a background in computer science and has worked on system administration, computer networking, and data analysis. His skills also include JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and JQuery, as well as online content strategy and management. Prior to joining ATG, he worked for May Technology Group, the University of Montana, and the Montana Kaiman newspaper. He is working toward his bachelors degree in computer science from UM. Carlson is performing a vendor comparison for the company as well as shadowing CPQ and CLM projects. A UM student, she is pursuing a bachelors degree in management information systems. She also serves as a senator and assistant office manager on the Associated Students of the University of Montana committee.

Steven Allen has joined ATGs software and quality solutions team as a product analyst intern. His background includes customer relationship management, strategic-relationship and partnership building, and product analysis. He is shadowing a product owner of an agile-based team, to help monitor and ensure the product road map is meeting requirements of the client. Steven is a student at the University of Montana working toward his degree in management information systems, with a minor in computer science. He is also a member of Montana Information Systems Association and Davidson Honors College.

Brianna Ewert joined Lake County Community Development Corp. in Ronan as Farm to Institution Program coordinator with the twin goals of improving access to fresh, nutritious foods in area schools, hospitals, and other institutions and expanding markets for the regions farmers and ranchers. She brings five years experience teaching elementary and middle school and eight years of diverse work experience throughout the food system. In addition to farming and marketing fresh produce and plants, she has worked for the Western Montana Growers Cooperative and AgSquared, interned for the Community Food and Agriculture Coalition, and taught at the University of Montana. Brianna holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Harvard and a Master of Science degree in environmental studies with a focus in sustainable food and farming from UM.

Christopher Prosa has joined the staff of Missoula Job Service as an employment consultant. He has over 13 years of experience working with the public in customer support services and over eight years in supervisory/management roles, including staff training and development. Most recently, Prosa was employed as a case manager for AT&Ts DirecTV premium care division. He brings with him an educational background in the field of psychology.

Promoted

The Montana based accounting firm of Junkermier, Clark, Campanella, Stevens, P.C., announces that Nicole Rieker, CPA, has been promoted to shareholder. She has been with JCCS since 2008 and is branch manager for both the Missoula and Hamilton offices. Rieker received her BSBA from the Montana State University-Billings and a Master of Taxation degree from the University of Denver. Her primary focus is tax with individual, corporation, and partnership returns and tax planning. You can reach her at 549-4148, nrieker@jccscpa.com or www.jccscpa.com.

Certification

Justina Hagen has earned her licensed clinical social worker licensure from the state of Montana. She received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Montana, Master of Social Work from Walla Walla University, and has more than six years experience in the mental health field, most recently as assistant program administrator providing clinical assessments and individual and group therapy with Winds of Change Mental Health Center in Missoula. Hagens special areas of interest include therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and dialectical behavior therapy. She can be reached at Winds of Change Mental Health Center, 2685 Palmer St., Suite C, 721-2038.

Ashley Kuehn, vice president, First Montana Bank, was recently awarded the Certified Financial Marketing Professional designation from the Institute of Certified Bankers, a subsidiary of the American Bankers Association. The CFMP designation is awarded to individuals who demonstrate excellence in the field of financial services marketing. To qualify for the CFMP certification, individuals must have certain levels of experience and education in the corporate banking profession, pass a comprehensive exam and agree to abide by a code of ethics.

Elected

The following Missoula doctors were elected officers of the Montana Academy of Family Physicians at its recent scientific assembly: Robert J. Stenger, president; John B. Miller, president-elect; and Amy Matheny, second vice president.

Recognized

Richard M. Baskett has been included in the 2016 Mountain States Super Lawyers Magazine for estate planning and probate. He is one of only three lawyers in Montana so honored. He is also a CPA and a fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel. Super Lawyers is a rating service of lawyers who have attained a high degree of peer recognition and professional achievement and inclusion in the list is based on nominations, independent research, and peer evaluations.

The ERA Lambros top producers for June were the McQuirk Team for commercial, Tory Dailey for residential, Cheryl Smith for the Hamilton office, Dusty Roth for the Kalispell office, Cora Gilmore Nelson for the Libby office, Tony and Tillie Marshall for the Polson office, and Kim Maclay for the Florence office.

The Forward Montana Foundation has honored 25 young Montanans with its 15 Under 25 Award, given annually to those working to create positive change in their communities. They include Abaki Beck of the Blackfeet Reservation; Becca Boslough, Cody Stratton, Gage Taylor, Jack Noonan, Kaya Juda-Nelson, Korbin Bragstad and Shelbi Dantic of Missoula; Becca Poliquin of Hamilton; and Tailyr Ann Irvine of Arlee.
As children, just about everyone has experienced the very real fear of an imaginary monster. But what if our mothers could have spoken to our childhood fears? Carrie Shipers of Wisconsin, the author of Family Resemblances: Poems (University of New Mexico Press), depicts just that when a protective mother talks back to her son's Bogeyman in this fine poem.

Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,

kissed his forehead and tucked him in.

I turned on his night-light and looked for you

in the closet and under the bed. I told him

***

you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell

your breath, your musty fur. I remember

all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall,

click of your claws, the hand that hovered

***

just above my ankles if I left them exposed.

Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere 

unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal

two days out of date. And even worse

***

than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside,

trying not to let my love become so tangled

with anxiety my son thinks they're the same.

When he says he's seen your tail or heard

***

your heavy step, I insist that you aren't real.

Soon he'll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams.

If you get lonely after he's asleep, you can

always come downstairs. I'll be sitting

***

at the kitchen table with the dishes

I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up.

We can drink hot tea and talk about

the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

***

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright 2015 by Carrie Shipers, Mother Talks Back to the Monster (North American Review, Vol. 300, no. 4, 2015). Poem reprinted by permission of Carrie Shipers and the publisher. Introduction copyright 2016 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
If you imagine Nick Offerman is a real-life version of Ron Swanson, the mustachioed, macho character on Parks and Recreation, think again.

Sure, he likes the outdoors, and yes, he has a wood shop in Los Angeles. But those things are connected to growing up in Illinois, not so far, really, from the American heartland portrayed by Mark Twain. And Offerman knows Twain; hes a big reader.

It makes sense, then, that Offerman has just recorded The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for Audible, the audiobook company that is signing up celebrities to voice classic novels; the audiobook will debut this fall. We caught up with Offerman to talk about books, the recording process and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

***

Q: How well did you remember Tom Sawyer?

A: Im a good student, so I went and worked on it in preparation  partly because I was nervous about doing character voices, and I wanted to try some stuff out. I had forgotten how terrifying Injun Joe was, but the thing I remembered the most, and probably the greatest source of humor in the book, is Toms cleverness in pulling scams on the other boys in town. Whether hes whitewashing the fence or getting them to trade him their tickets in Sunday school so that he can earn a Bible, hes such a great scam artist. I love that about him. Hes a true American hero.

Q: Can you tell me about recording the audiobook?

A: I recorded my own two books, and its much more difficult than I would have imagined. When they said, Do you think you can do an eight-hour day?, I was, like, Yeah, sure, Im an old hoofer from the old school, thats what I do is perform. But I had never sat in front of a microphone and talked constantly for even an hour. And so it was an education on how taxing it was on the voice and creating the whole world and characters and performances, all from the whole cloth of my own imagination. This is my first time doing a piece of fiction or a piece of writing thats not my own.  You immediately snap into that mode where youre trying to imbue all of the writing with enthusiasm and charisma so that the listener, theyll follow the writers intention.

Q: You presented the lifetime achievement award at the National Book Critics Circle prizes in March to Wendell Berry, and youve co-produced a documentary about him. How did you come to know his writing?

A: In about 1995 I was doing a production of Sam Shepherds play Buried Child at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago; specifically I was hired to understudy Ethan Hawke. Another actor in the show, guy by the name of Leo Burmester, handed me a book of Wendell Berry short stories and said, I think youre going to get a kick out of these. And, boy, it kind of turned my whole life upside-down. I was really moved by Wendell Berrys creation, in his body of fiction, of a community that reminded me of the great farming family that I grew up in in Illinois. And then, just devouring all of his writing, then his essays and his poetry further cemented him as, in my opinion, the living writer with the most common sense and the most hard-hitting pathos for the human race. Hes my John Lennon or my Gandhi. I think if everybody would read Wendell Berry wed have a lot less people shooting at each other.

Q: Do you see any continuity between Twains Tom Sawyer and the kind of community that Wendell Berry has evoked?

A: Absolutely. Another writer that I really enjoy is Garrison Keillor, in the same vein of humorism, and think when Wendell is funny, and when hes nostalgic, hes right up there with those guys. Theyre all telling stories built upon the morality, the values of small American communities, which is often a source of annoyance to the protagonist in the story. Whether its a hectoring Aunt Polly trying to keep Tom Sawyer out of trouble or members of the church in Lake Woebegon in Garrison Keillors writing, its a wonderful description of the way communities are like families and the way neighbors are so much like siblings. You dont always get along with each other, but at the end of the day, we all understand that we have to take care of one another.

There are story points in Tom Sawyer that also bring to mind To Kill a Mockingbird, where kids are going out of bounds, theyre breaking the rules, but at the end of the story it turns out that theyre good kids and theyre allowed to remain in the fold. And through their misadventures theyve uncovered some sort of bad guy or antagonist, and theres a sunny ending.

That always spoke to me as a kid: that you should break the rules a little bit and explore the boundaries of what you can get away with, because you might end up saving the day. (Laughs)

Q: Did you ever save the day, or get in trouble?

A: I certainly got in trouble. I dont remember pulling off anything particularly heroic, a la Tom Sawyer or Scout Finch. But I did, I do think that I impressed my elders with an intrepid love of exploration and adventure. As long as I turned in good grades, they said, OK, youre pushing the boundaries of whats going to keep you out of jail, but were going to allow it as long as you keep appearing to be a contributing member of society.

Q: Where do you see Tom Sawyer or Mark Twain in our national history of books?

A: Well, Im a big fan of Mark Twain. Id be hard-pressed to name anybody since him who was such a clear satirist. He spun a very simple yarn that was rife with delicious satire, making fun of all of us. Somebody who Im a big fan of, modern day, is George Saunders, and I feel like, more than anybody I can think of, George is a modern-day Mark Twain who pokes fun at us all but very gently. I feel like Mark Twain was part statesman, part drunk uncle and part bard. So hed make fun of us and make us laugh but while putting his arms around us; wed be grimacing and shying away because his cigar would be so stinky, but ultimately wed be glad for the stories he told.

Q: Youve written about your love of the outdoors. How do you connect to that in Los Angeles?

A: Los Angeles actually has a great deal of nature available. My favorite thing to do in Los Angeles is hike. There are hikes that are actually quite astonishing.  But I love the Midwest. Every July I go fishing with my family in Minnesota  being in the woods of the Midwest is where I feel the most profound connection to what I consider my own personal Walden. I do a lot of canoeing, and were out in the woods, just fishing and living very simply. Thats where I charge my batteries, under the trees and the open sky, and sitting out on a lake catching fish. I take that with me then, for the many days Im sitting in traffic in Los Angeles.

Q: When you go to Minnesota, will you bring books with you?

A: I unplug from all the channels: the phone, the Internet, the email. Thats what keeps you from reading. So you leave all that crap at home and take your books to the woods. I mean, thats one of the most important things about vacation, is just curling up with a book. And my wife (actress Megan Mullally) is the same way; shes such a voracious reader, its scary. I just finished my own third book, which is coming out in October (Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at the Offerman Woodshop) and it was really fun to write and create, but Im so excited to be done, because now I can read again.
Children and their parents are invited to come have fun while learning important safety tips during the Family Reading Program activity Safety First! scheduled at 2 p.m. Tuesday in the Large Meeting Room.

This program features informational activities for kids and their parents on how to be safe, whether at home or outside. Then on Thursday, the library has scheduled a screening of a family-friendly film at 2 p.m. in the Large Meeting Room.

Please call the Childrens Desk at 721-2665 to find out the title of the movie.

'Movies and Making' at the Big Sky Branch

Watch a sweet flick and craft it up at the Big Sky Branch during the program Movies and Making at 1 p.m. Wednesday at the branch, located at Big Sky High School on 3100 South Ave. W. This weekly event features a screening of a family-friendly film in the schools auditorium, and is followed by a crafting program in the library. For more information, call the branch at 728-2400, ext. 8605.

Coming Up: Acrylics painting class

Ever wanted to learn how to paint using acrylics? If so, you can join others for an afternoon of artistic exploration and expression when MPLs MakerSpace presents the class July Lets Paint: Beginner Acrylics, which is scheduled noon-2 p.m. Wednesday, July 27, in the MakerSpace.

This painting session is a free exploration time suitable for beginners, where basic acrylic techniques will be shared, and then participants will be free to start on their own painting project. Participants should also plan to bring one piece of fruit to use as a still life for your painting. This class is open to anyone aged 13 years and up, but class size is limited to six people and registration is required. Please call 721-2665 to register for this class.

We Have It: Staff Reviews

The Imperial Radch Novels: Ancillary Justice, Sword and Mercy by Ann Leckie; New York: Orbit, 2013, 2014, 2015. Call Number: LECKIE

The book Ancillary Justice was the only novel ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards, and begins a trilogy that follows the story of Breq, the ancillary (multi-bodied entities) who used to be a starship.

Following the main character, the author explores class inequality, justice in an unjust world, xenophobia and non-gender specific relationships. This book was recommended by one of my sons during a discussion of science fiction. And though this series is a little confusing to follow  due to fluidity in use of gender pronouns  I was hooked shortly into the first book of the series, and by the time I read the second book it didnt bother me at all.

For those looking for a science fiction saga, I would recommend this series, and short stories by this author contained in various anthologies including Clockwork Phoenix 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness.

Reviewed by Marjorie Doyle

Hot Happenings

Heres a sampling of some free programs coming up at the Missoula Public Library. Check our full events calendar online at missoulapubliclibrary.org.

MakerSpace offerings

Computer Electronics: 3-6 p.m. Monday and Thursday.

Open hours: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday.

Community Creative Writing Workshop: 6-7:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Acoustic Guitar Club  Basics for Beginners: noon-2 p.m. Thursday.

Participants must bring their own guitars to class. Open to ages 13 and up. Registration required by calling 721-2665.

Please visit tinyurl.com/mplmakers for a full calendar of our MakerSpace classes.

Computer Classes

Intro to Email: 6-7 p.m. Monday.

Participants learn the basics of creating an email account, including writing a message, adding attachments, and sending messages.

Android Tablets and Smartphones: 12:30-1:30 p.m. Wednesday.

This class will offer instruction on the features, settings and apps that are common to Android devices. Participants must bring their own tablets or smartphones to the class.

***

Registration is required to attend MPLs computer classes. Call 721-2665 to secure your spot.
For a long time, Montana hasnt been able to hold on to its college grads, particularly those in the science, technology, math and engineering, or STEM, fields.

Only 38 percent of Montana University System bachelors degree recipients who major in engineering  and 55 percent of STEM degree holders overall are employed in Montana within their first year after graduation.

According to Bryce Ward, associate director at the University of Montanas Bureau of Business and Economic Research, Montanas economy simply lacks the capacity to absorb young college grads.

Demand is low for college-educated workers in Montana relative to supply, he explained.

Over the past two decades, that means Montana has experienced a slight out-migration of college graduates.

According to the Census Bureaus American Community Survey, between 2008 and 2012, an average of 564 more college grads moved out of Montana each year than moved in. Thats despite the fact that overall, Montana was the 13th fastest-growing state in the country between 2010 and 2014, with over 20,0000 new people moving here.

It seems as though the only demographic that is choosing not to stay in Montana is young, college-educated people. Montanas net migration rate of -24.2 percent for young college grads ranks 48th in the country, above only Alaska and Idaho.

The loss of young college-educated workers is a weak link in Montanas economy, Ward said. In recent decades, regional economists have found that the number of skilled, creative workers in a region strongly predicts long-term regional economic success.

"The net outmigration of young college graduates from Montanas economy represents the loss of an important regional resource that could have a lasting effect on Montanas long-term economic health.

It seems that there are a lot of postsecondary educational opportunities here, but not enough jobs to go around.

Low wages and/or a lack of jobs provides the most plausible explanation for the net out-migration of young, college-educated Montanans," Ward explained. "Other factors that tend to drive migration, like the cost of living or quality of life, seem less plausible."

Since 1990, Montana colleges have produced 120,000 bachelors degrees, but the states college-educated population has only grown by 97,500 in that same time. There are now 200,000 total people in the state with a college degree, but thats less than the number of people born here who have obtained a college degree (221,000).

Montana doesnt have as difficult a problem retaining grads in other areas besides STEM fields. About 80 percent of MUS bachelors degree recipients who major in education or health professions are employed in Montana within their first year after graduation.

But earnings for Montana college graduates are low. The average degree-holding, full-time worker earns nearly $24,000 less than the average American college grad. The state ranks close to last in average earnings for the college educated.

However, Montana is not particularly expensive relative to other places. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Montana is the 23rd cheapest place to live. And people continue to move here for access to mountains, rivers, lakes, abundant open spaces and other quality-of-life amenities.

Ward said its possible that young college grads are leaving because they want big city social scenes and access to good concerts and restaurants.

However, the effect of this on Montanas net migration is small, he said. More likely, the young and college-educated disproportionately leave Montana to seek jobs and incomes not available within the state.

Montana has disproportionately fewer jobs in careers with high average earnings. The wage gap between Montanans and their counterparts elsewhere in the U.S. is larger in high paying occupations like computer and math jobs, business and finance, management and legal professions.

The states college-educated workers are concentrated within lower wage occupations. If Montana had an economy that better mirrored the countrys economy, Ward estimated there would be 3,000 more college-educated workers in business, finance, computer or mathematical professions, 1,300 more in sales jobs and 600 more employed in the legal profession.

The data suggest Montanas economy may not generate enough opportunities for young, college-educated workers, particularly for those with certain interests or skills, Ward said. If Montanans want a healthy economy and a future for their children within the state, they will need to address these issues.

The news isnt all bad, though. The total number of college-educated workers in Montana is not shrinking. From 2008 to 2014, the number of college grads under 35 in the state grew from 38,000 to 46,000. Thats because the vast majority of Montana residents who enroll in colleges here remain in the state after graduation.

Missoula, in particular, is poised for economic success because a disproportionate number of college grads choose to live here: It's one of only 24 metro areas in the U.S. where 40 percent of people age 25 and older have a bachelor's degree.

"It's a highly educated place, but people in occupations in Missoula make less than their counterparts elsewhere," Ward said.

***

Ed Weber, who serves on the board of directors of the Montana Society of Engineers, is one of the lucky ones who found a good job in Montana  at HDR Engineering in Billings  after he graduated from Montana State University in 1978. He said that Montana produces extremely qualified graduates.

The net out-migration "is certainly not a fault of the education system, he said. Id put our college grads up against anybody in the country. We have very good professors and really state-of-the-art equipment.

He also said that his company has no problem attracting and retaining highly-qualified workers.

We have no trouble recruiting, he said. We hire a ton of graduates from Montana Tech and Bozeman. We pay very competitive salaries compared to other engineering firms across the country.

Weber said his nephew graduated from Montana Tech in Butte with a degree in engineering.

He and his wife could hardly wait to get out of Montana, he said. Theyre newlyweds, and they wanted to go experience California. They have every intention of coming back to raise a family. But they wanted to leave first.
One flagship campus in Montana was named on a "hot list" this month for Native American students.

But the hot list might have made some University of Montana officials sizzle under the collar 'cause the Missoula institution didn't get the nod.

"For those who cant abide big cities, take the immortal Merle Haggards advice and head to the middle of Montanawell, not quite the middle, but to beautiful Bozemanto earn your degree at Montana State University," read the story from Indian Country Today Media Network.

The news outlet named five schools with programs Native students should consider, also Humboldt State University, University of Maine, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Tulsa.

That's, ahem, two for California.

Is it salt in the wound for UM, still recovering from budget cuts and enrollment drops?

Royelle Bundy, director of American Indian Student Services at UM, said MSU is a fine school, but the University of Montana offers an overwhelming number of programs and activities and support and academic programs with Native American students top of mind.

Free soup every other Wednesday? Check.

The lunches take place at the Payne Family Native American Center rotunda, and they're designed to introduce Native students to different departments or entities on campus. Each semester, President Royce Engstrom hosts one, and in the last couple years, attendance has grown from 40 to 100, Bundy said.

Take that, Tulsa, with your online master of jurisprudence in Indian Law.

UM also offers academic success workshops. A beading circle. A peer mentoring program. A powwow organized by Kyiyo, the Native American Student Association, which hosted its 48th event in 2016.

"It's nationwide. People travel from all over to attend," Bundy said.

Perhaps students from Humboldt's "hot" Indian Natural Resources, Science and Engineering Program would like to join the festivities next time around.

Academics at UM integrate Native students as well, and Bundy ticks off the InPsych/Indians into Psychology program, the Native American Center of Excellence within the Pharmacy School, the Native American Natural Resource Program through the College of Forestry and Conservation, and American Indian Law through the Alexander Blewett III School of Law, among others.

"We do have so many programs and activities happening here," Bundy said.

And yes, she said, UM offers tuition waivers, and a significant number of the estimated 700 Native American students at UM qualify.

So how did UM fall short?

Hold your horses, said Leeanne Root, editor of Indian Country Today. It'll be UM's turn for recognition soon enough.

"The hot lists were never meant to be 'best of' lists," Root said in an email. "The magazine was meant to highlight just a few solid contributors to Indian country.

"We recognize there are a lot more left to highlight in future magazines."

Yes, that means you, UM; cue the happy dance.

"We do have an education magazine coming up. We'd be happy to look into featuring the University of Montana in that," Root said.

And that's not all.

"As the education editor, I'm also always looking for Native students to write for us and to spotlight in success stories. Please feel free to have anyone you know contact me with story ideas or pitches."

Well, Indian Country Today, be careful what you wish for: editor@ictmn.com.
CHINOOK  Brothers Kole Engle and Lacy Wortman were at a bar on the main street in town Wednesday afternoon celebrating the life of a Belgian shepherd named Steve, who died in an accident that day.

Normally the two men would be out working on a weekday around noon  they both ranch and hold down other jobs like trucking and running a fencing business.

Up here on the Hi-Line, people live the kinds of lives that call for multiple professions and depend on firearms as a tool to protect cattle and fill the freezer. That leads even two brothers who were raised by a staunch Democrat grandfather (up until the last six or so elections he voted in before he died) to pledge support for Republican candidate Donald Trump in this years presidential election.

When youre self-employed and in agriculture, you cant be liberal. Liberal doesnt work, Wortman, 41, said.

The men and their political priorities are indicative of how a lot of folks are feeling in this part of Montana. Its a region thats often overlooked, outside the states so-called economic boot with pull straps that start in Billings, a heel in Missoula and a toe in Kalispell. Its forgotten-ness is symbolized by the difference between the wide four-lane interstates 94 and then 90 that crisscross the lower half of the state and the bumpy, dusty Highway 2 that runs more than 660 miles along the top of Montana.

Here people tend to support Trump and range from frustrated to disgusted with his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton. Even some of Clinton's supporters in these parts aren't 100 percent behind her. But cultural differences, and the disparity they lead to in opinions on the federal government, does allow for some political diversity, even in a state that has voted for Republican presidential candidates all but twice since 1952.

It's safe to say of the 111,000 registered voters in the 10 counties on Highway 2, people in the smaller towns feel overlooked by politicians they say spend time and money where voters are more likely to be swayed. And some people don't know if their vote counts for much outside local races, but that hasn't stopped the November election from being most of what anyone is talking about.

From east to west, televisions in cafes, bars and auto shops are tuned almost exclusively to Fox News. A bartender at the watering hole Wortman and Engle patronize said earlier that week the set was somehow on CNN and it led to a punch being thrown after a political disagreement.

When asked who they will vote for to be America's next president, the brothers both are quick and passionate with their answers.

I like Trump, Wortman said, adding hes sold on the presumptive Republican nominees straightforward approach. He has a plan and operates in black and white. Thats exactly how I operate my ranch.

The Democratic Clinton is not a popular option in these parts.

I believe she is a (expletive) liar, Engle said.

Part of Trumps appeal for Engle, 43, is that he offered to do the job without taking a salary.

Any man that says Im going to do this job for free, that says something right there.

Wortman slows his cadence and speaks a little louder when he talks about heath care and explains why he doesnt like the Affordable Care Act, something he says Trump will get rid of.

Our system right now is worthless. He said he didnt qualify for Obamacare, as its almost universally called on the Hi-Line, because he could get coverage through his wifes job as a teacher. He used to not have insurance, and doesnt want to have to have any now, but pays $600 a month for coverage to avoid a fine.

I should be entitled to that right to not have insurance if I dont want it he said.

Chiming in, his brother Engle said, I dont think the government should force you into anything.

Engle is a veteran who hasnt bothered much with trying to use the Veterans Affairs hospital in Helena after once waiting eight months post-appointment for a follow-up on his diabetes treatment.

When you have diabetes, you have to deal with it, he said. What I dont deal with is the VA.

Though they have almost 400 miles of highway and a national park between them, Libby resident Keith Kenelty, 68, shares the Chinook brothers view.

He wants to get rid of Obamacare and stuff that just costs us too much money and believes Trump is the candidate who will get it done. Kenelty has lived his whole life in Libby and volunteers at the VFW after retiring from work at a logging company and the Department of Natural Resources.

For Wortman and Engle, right behind health care in importance is gun control. Many up here believe Clinton will take their guns if elected.

The Second Amendment was put in place for a reason and needs to be left alone, Wortman said.

Before the massive pool of GOP candidates dwindled, Kenelty also liked what he heard from U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, but in the end he didnt feel they were strong enough.

Mark Scott, of Libby, also went back and forth between candidates  U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Trump  before he threw his support behind the self-proclaimed billionaire businessman.

I like Trump because sooner or later weve got to get away from the political correctness that will wreck this country, he said. He says what he means and means what he says.

On Monday afternoon Scott, 61, was headed outside of town to go gold panning. The oilfield worker was on a stretch of days off  he makes a 27-hour commute to the Texas oilfields from Libby straight, pulling over on the side of the road to catch a few hours of sleep when he feels tired. He worked 20 days in June, but only had six days worth of work in March, seven in April and eight in May.

He believes President Barack Obama and Democrats in general are weak and have let other governments cripple the U.S. oil business.

If Obama would have stepped up, if you are serious about things, you would put a $25 tariff on any oil they sell us, he said with a southern drawl while filling up his truck at a gas station. I think the Saudis are just bold because they dont have anybody that will rear up if they want to hurt us. We need someone who wont take their political bull, and thats Trump.

Scott is for smaller government and less regulation, two things he believes Trump will deliver.

We need less red tape to go through on anything," he said. If you get Democrats, there seems to be more regulations, more fees.

In the town of Browning, which sits almost exactly between Libby and Chinook on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Cheryl Wild Gun, 55, and her husband Robert Wild Gun Sr., 58, said their lives are closely tied to a government they couldnt endure shrinking.

Just because we are elderly and live on a fixed income, we do vote Democratic, said Cheryl Wild Gun said while sitting on her porch drinking coffee Tuesday. Our income is affected by the government. The Republicans keep cutting welfare, SSI, all the programs. The only reason we vote Democratic is to secure our livelihood. Indian lives always hang in the balance of the federal government.

The couple said theres a lack of support from the government at all levels  local, state and federal  to deal with drug abuse, both of methamphetamine and pills, and alcoholism.

Its just not being addressed at any level, said Robert Wild Gun Sr., who worked in law enforcement for 22 years. Theres no government support.

Though shes clear that shell vote for Democrats, Cheryl Wild Gun called this years presidential election a joke. She isnt very supportive of Clinton because of her use of a private email server while at the State Department and resulting FBI investigation, but Trump isnt an option.

The only reason Im voting for her is she supports minorities, she said. Trump is making racist comments and trying to get rid of immigrants.

Robert said he supports Clinton because shes a woman. Id like to see a lady running the world, he said.

Politicians dont spend enough time on Montanas seven reservations, Robert Wild Gun said, taking a sip of coffee.

They only time they come is to walk down our main street in our parade, he said. Thats the last time well see them in Indian Country. So many politicians dont see the living conditions. They just see the main street they walk in the parade. They dont see the boarded-up houses, the meth use.

Across town, Browning native Winslow Rattler, 54, is more bullish on Clinton. He likes her experience as Secretary of State and feels like shes taken time to pay attention to Indian issues.

That Trump doesnt support Indians, he said. We have all these reservations in Montana and I havent heard anything from him about the reservations. All his credentials and his money  he doesnt know how hard it is for people on the reservation.

Also bucking the Trump trend is Robert Winstrom, 52, of Troy. He was voting Bernie or nobody, but faced now with the prospect of nobody, hell put a mark beside Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Hes tired of the great divide he feels is taking over the U.S. Weve become so polarized as a country, he said. Everything either has to be one side or the other.

The Democrats lost Windstrom a long time ago, he said. He calls both main parties two sides of the same coin.

He points to the number of people who voted for Sanders in the primary as an argument for how a viable third party could rise to the top.

If the same amount of people vote third party, wed have a third party. The whole argument about throwing your vote away drives me insane. To say I have to vote for one or the other or my vote doesnt count.

At the Browning coffee shop she runs in town and accompanied by her tough-but-tiny dog Rascal, Julie Renville explains why she could never vote for Trump:

Hes said so many derogatory things. Hes said hell abolish all the reservations. I don't know anything else about him. He just disgusts me. Im anything but Trump.

Getting access to information about candidates isnt all that easy in Browning, Renville said. Her internet service went out a week ago, making it difficult to research candidates.

Though it can seem like every time you check in with the news there's a new scandal or soundbite, the brothers in Chinook also said its sometimes hard to come by valuable political information. Wortman doesn't have TV and Engle doesnt have the time.

If I spent time paying attention to everything, wouldnt get anything done, he said. And its a long way to Election Day.

We havent even got to the good mudslinging yet, Wortman said. But Trump is the best weve got as far as the Republican side goes.

Montanans along Highway 2 are skeptical of whether their vote counts and of all the noise they hear coming from Washington.

We need to get back to the popular vote, Wortman said. The electoral college is not packing it.

Though he still plans to vote in November, Kenelty said hes not sure how much of a difference it'll make.

I dont think our vote counts any more other than for local elections. The polls close here at 8 oclock and you already know who is president before then. People probably wont even go down and vote.

The lack of optimism spills over into what people think about what happens after Nov. 8.

I really think its going to get worse, Engle said, adding that it might get better if Trump is elected, but not right away.

Wortman isn't overly idealistic about how much anyone follows through on the promises they make campaigning.

Itll happen with Trump as well as any other president, Wortman said. But I hope not as much. If he gets one or two things done, thatd be great.

Thats one thing voters in both Browning and Chinook agree on.

Its so hard to say if anything will change, Cheryl Wild Gun said. So many politicians talk out of the corner of their mouths.
One thing any longtime resident of Montana is familiar with is the wearying cyclical election-year rush on our public landsthe desire by so-called Sagebrush rebels to pry public lands away from our common ownership. How familiar this path is, since at least the 1970s! It seems like every four years Montanans must defend our homeland against these modern-day would-be carpetbaggers. Conservationists, recreationists, hunters and anglers, paddlers, bikers  well, everybody  have to write letters to legislators, reminding them that which we have been reminding them for decades: we dont want our public lands reapportioned, diced and sliced ever-smaller and sold off to bidders. Its ours. We love Montana the way it is, which is why were here, in Montana. Yet here we are also in another election year, as stressful for the electorate as for the campaigners, it seems.

In times like these, regular folks can be found counting the months until the sound and the fury pass and we get back to the business of living here quietly, and loving it.

Wilderness is never too far from any of us in Montana, and again, its why were here instead of someplace else. Our pro-wilderness and pro-restoration community service organization, the Yaak Valley Forest Council, has been laboring to connect workers and community to the outdoors on the Kootenai National Forest for parts of three decades now, restoring public lands damaged by decades of mismanagement. We note with pleasure the Bullock administrations new public lands agenda, and the ongoing Forests in Focus initiative, which is helping groups like ours work toward re-establishing a wilder and more diverse landscape, with its attention to local collaborative groups, many of whom are more interested in matters such as fine fuels reduction in the urban interface, improving water quality and wildife habitat, including, in the Yaak, the most imperiled grizzly bear population in Montana. We work where appropriate to support active land management, but in our vision, on the Kootenai, this looks quite a bit different from the past. We seek to restore forest productivity after an era of what was quite frankly industrial liquidation.

Recreation is part of the administrations new public lands agenda, and so is sound forest management; the latter of which is our main focus here on the Kootenai. Some parts of Montana are bona fide blue-ribbon recreation areas, and easily safeguarded by the new public lands agenda. In the high stony country of rock and ice, backpackers can still visit high mountain cirques; farther down, can still canoe or sail deep blue lakes and winding rivers beneath high bluffs. Other of our states areas are swamps and dense inland forests, powerhouse cores of a biological diversity that spreads wild breath to further and farther reaches of the state. These rank areas need just as much protection as our states play areas. Our rainy home in the Yaak Valley is the lattera biological treasurebut we who live here cherish it all the same. We support retention of all of Montanas public landsour guaranteed birthrightand are therefore grateful for Gov. Steve Bullocks and his staffs defense of public lands against the rebels.

The Bullock administrations initiative will oppose the transfer of all Montana land at every turn; will restore the currently frozen Habitat Montana, which provides public access and hunting and fishing opportunities for all Montanans, free of charge (funded by out-of-state hunting and fishing license fees). It creates a state position dedicated to protecting public access to public lands, and launches a Montana Office of Outdoor Recreation.

This clear, steady vision will help defend Montana against the latest iteration of the attempt to privatizetakeour public lands, which are the heart and essence of the state. Time and again, we have beaten back these outside interests (most recently, a Utah-based legal foundation that seeks to privatize Montana). Since the days of colonization, Montana has been always viewed by outside interests as a commodity, always for sale.

Not under Bullocks watch. Thank you, Governor Bullock and staff.
The Montana attorney general should reverse his decision to move the Title and Registration Bureau from Deer Lodge to Helena.

The TRB has been offered office space designed to suit for $9 per square foot, compared to the Department of Justice average of $17.13 per square foot in Helena.

Housing will also be more expensive for employees who move to Helena. The Deer Lodge housing index is 0.52 compared to Helena at 0.98.

Thirty five current employees all work in Deer Lodge.

Employees have spent many years cultivating relationships with spouse working in Deer Lodge, neighbors, homes and friends.

The attorney general's office has a stated goal to support staff in an efficient, effective and diverse work environment.

The attorney general's office has a stated objectives to promote the Justice Department as a place of employment and encourage communication and sharing of knowledge.

The attorney general's office has a stated policy to track staff attrition by reason code and collect employee satisfaction data.

I am asking the attorney general to please collect data regarding TRB employee satisfaction in regards to the move of job location from Deer Lodge to Helena, and provide me with a copy.

Also, I am asking the attorney general to provide me with any information regarding TRB employees who would consider changing to a job closer to Deer Lodge as a result of moving the TRB job location from Deer Lodge to Helena.

James C. Wangerin,

Deer Lodge
Mr. Ulfelder has also found that a country is less likely to face a coup when there is armed conflict in nearby states, perhaps because of a rally-around-the-flag effect.

While Turkey has a history of coups, the country has changed considerably since its last, in 1997, and Mr. Ulfelder stressed that what mattered more was its nearly 20 years without one.

Another crucial factor is what experts call elite fragmentation. If divisions open up among powerful elites  elected officials, business leaders, generals, judges and so on  their competition for resources and control can culminate in a coup.

There is, as yet, no sign of such a split in Turkey. The growing economy gives elites reason to maintain the status quo. And while state institutions are imperfect and rates of corruption could be better  both factors that can lead elites to compete for resources  neither is bad enough to cause a crisis.

Turkey also does not have the kind of social polarization that disaffected elites often exploit to push forward a coup. While the countrys president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, can be a polarizing figure in electoral politics, we do not see the kind of deeper divisions, with civil society groups rallying against the state, we might expect in advance of a coup.

Not what a coup looks like

Research suggests that carrying out a successful coup is a bit like baking a cake: There is a recipe, and if you skip steps or leave out ingredients, youll almost certainly fail.
As early as March students in Anaconda will be able to access faster internet thanks to a fiber-optic network that's being installed by Fatbeam  an Idaho-based company that specializes in the installation of fiber optics in communities under 150,000.

Fatbeam built a similar network to Butte in 2014, when the company collaborated with Buttes school district and the Montana Economic Revitalization & Development Institute to bring download speeds of nearly 30 megabytes per second to the Mining City, giving Butte the fastest internet in the state.

But with the new network in Anaconda  slated to break ground as early as October  Butte will have a rival when it comes to internet speed.

In May the Anaconda School District approved a deal with Fatbeam to launch its fiber ring. The project was negotiated with the help of the Anaconda Local Development Corporation. Later on, The Anaconda Central Business Tax Increment Finance District agreed to foot 10 percent of the projects cost, which is worth about $225,000, according Fatbeams president Greg Green, who spoke with The Montana Standard Monday.

While $225,000 may seem like a hefty price tag, school-district money won't be going toward the project.

This is because the school district is making use of an FCC program known as E-rate.

In the program, Green said, the FCC gives school districts an 80-percent funding match if they install broadband for their students. If the districts acquire funding from a separate entity like the Anacondas TIF district, then the FCC ups its E-rate match to 90 percent.

When installed, the fiber-optic network will span 3.4 miles to all of Anacondas schools, with the high school serving as the networks hub. Green said the schools will enjoy download speeds of 2 gigabytes per second  which is 200 times faster than the districts current internet speed.

Whats more, Green said, current and future businesses can hook up to the network by paying Fatbeam for access.

Jim Davison, the executive director for the Anaconda Local Development Corporation, said he believes the fiber-optic ring will help Anaconda recruit more businesses, noting that internet speed is often one of the data points employers consider when they field locations for their businesses.

He added that the network will be especially beneficial to existing engineering firms in the city, and for people working in healthcare, who often have to transfer large data files.

As for Green, he said that when he started Fatbeam he wanted to help smaller cities level the playing field when it came to internet access.

In 1996, Green said, the Telecom Act deregulated the phone and communication industry, which caused service providers to seek out larger communities.

Everybody ran to the big cities, said Green. A lot of the smaller communities got ignored.

Anaconda School District Superintendent Gerry Nolan, meanwhile, said faster internet benefits students in an age where distance learning is becoming increasingly popular.

Green agrees.

He added that he hopes the increased speed will prompt more students to say in their hometowns and start businesses.

The only thing they lack is the bandwidth to change the world, said Green.
Jon Wick discovered the name of his company, 5518 Designs, at precisely 5,518 feet above sea level.

That was the elevation of his first home office on the Flat.

On my desk right next to my keyboard was my GPS and it said 5,518 elevation. And I said, thats good enough,  the Butte entrepreneur said.

Since the founding of the company in 2012, Wick says hes moved his operation to a new home office on Mercury Street.

But soon, the entrepreneur said, hell move the company to an Uptown storefront on Main Street.

Weve moved up in elevation, said Wick. We elevate ideas. See what I did there?

Indeed, since 2012 Wicks company has moved up in more ways than one.

Today 5518 Designs functions as a branding company. It specializes in graphic design, merchandising and print production. Services include, among other things, logo design, website creation, social-media marketing and business-card printing.

The seeds for the company began in 2011, said Wick, when he was studying for his masters in Professional and Technical Communication at Montana Tech.

For a graduate project, Wick created a race bible  a go-to guide for the Butte 100 mountain-bike race.

After working on the Butte 100 project, Wick said, people in Butte began approaching him for help with creating logos and websites, which eventually led to the creation of 5518 Designs.

So all of the sudden I was thinking to myself, I should probably start charging people for doing this stuff and I might be on to something here, said Wick.

Wicks wife  Cassie Wick  said a need exists for branding services, especially among small businesses.

For her, branding is all about getting your message out into the world.

Theres so many wonderful mom-and-pop shops here that dont have their information out so that people can access it, said Cassie. So how can we be part of that?

Wick agreed.

(The Butte 100 project) was a microcosm for that whole concept. There wasnt information out, there werent maps out, there werent photos out  there wasnt anything, said Wick. In order to create the project I wanted to create, I needed to create these bits and pieces first. And all of the sudden that started like a branding campaign for this race. 

The Montana Standard inquired whether something as simple as a Facebook page can really impact the outcome of a business.

Its a perceived value really, said Wick, Youre engaged with the community. Its a top-of-mind awareness thing.

The Wicks said digital and printed marketing material create a level of professionalism that is engaging for prospective customers. However, they added that good marketing is also important for keeping up with an increasingly globalized economy.

We live in a world-wide business environment with the internet in everyones pockets, said Wick. Mom and dad running a furniture store in Butte, Montana, need to compete on a national level And how do they do that? Everything that they put into the world needs to be top-notch professional.

For Wick, the most enjoyable aspect of his job is helping small businesses thrive.

Mom-and-pop stores have blood, sweat and tears in their business, said Wick. And its cool for me to inject myself and really make those blood, sweat and tears more valuable.

A date at Washoe Theater

Although Wick has a passion for Butte businesses, he hasnt always lived in the Mining City.

He grew up in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Northern Iowa, where he received a degree in elementary education. In 2004 Wick did his student teaching in Alaska and later moved to Philipsburg, where he taught fifth grade.

Cassie, meanwhile, is a Whitehall native who says she lived in Butte when she met Wick at Georgetown Lake, where her family owns property.

Cassie said her Georgetown neighbor knew Wick and invited him to stay for a weekend at her lakeside property.

Theres a hunk staying at our cabin, said Cassie, imitating the neighbor, who introduced the two.

Soon Cassie and Wick started dating, and the two managed to nurture their relationship across the 50 miles between Philipsburg and Butte by meeting once a week at the Washoe Theater  a small, historic art-deco movie theater in the heart of Anaconda.

After a year of meeting halfway between Butte and Philipsburg, the couple made a bold move by relocating to South Korea to teach English. The two said they returned to the States in 2009, and in 2011 Jon enrolled at Tech and launched his branding business.

An unexpected diagnosis

Cassie and Jon married when they returned from South Korea in 2009.

However, the blissful first years of their marriage took a dark turn when Jon was suddenly diagnosed with Stage 2 rectal cancer.

I actually made two or three logos in the chemo room as I was being injected, said Wick, who was only 33 years old at the time.

Wick has since recovered from his illness and says the experience inspired him to create the designs for the latest branch of his business, which he is calling Simple Places.

Simple Places consists of prints, T-shirts, key chains, hats, coffee mugs and other items printed with designs that, according to Wick, celebrate the outdoors and a sense of place.

(Its) trying to celebrate where we are, said Wick. The places where we gather with our friends and the places that mean something to people.

With thick, bold lines and basic geometric shapes, Wicks designs depict everything from a mountainous sunset to an arched tent pitched beneath a blue sky.

Wick describes his designs as playful and rudimentary, but thoughtfully created.

Theres beauty in simplicity, he said.

Cassie agreed.

I think we really realized the value of simplicity, said Cassie, explaining that Wicks prints embody their new perspective on life.

The world is crazy, lets admit it, said Wick. And it just seems like its moving faster and faster and everyone is moving faster with it. And theres something refreshing when you kind of break it down to lifes simplest forms.

And what is simplicity, exactly?

Just shedding all of the nonsense that we carry around with us and getting to the core of who we are and what we stand for, said Wick. Its refreshing, its beautiful, its what we all strive to do I think.
Editors note: This story on Dennis Washington coincides with the 30th anniversary of the resumption of mining in Butte on July 16, 2016.

Watching chunks of ore get crushed into money is billionaire Dennis Washington's favorite pastime when he visits the mine he owns in Butte  Montana Resources.

Not so surprising for the Montanan with a Midas touch.

Now 82, Washington has built an empire that includes not only the Butte mine but also rail and shipping companies as well as aviation technology, environmental remediation, and heavy equipment companies. Forbes magazine ranks Washington as the 241st richest man in the U.S. and estimates his worth at $6 billion. Forbes lists Washington as the richest man in the state.

But it wasnt always so. He started with virtually nothing. The Missoula-based Washington launched his construction empire in 1966 with a D-8 Caterpillar bulldozer, a $30,000 loan, and a contract to build roads for the Forest Service.

Washington believes the key to his success came from a simple formula: hard work and a love for the work. In an emailed response to The Montana Standard, Washington described how he got MRs  once a defunct mine no one else would buy  Butte operations off the ground:

I believe (we benefited from) my discipline to be a very hard worker, and (that I) always did the best I could do. (And from) my passion for anything to do with equipment. I also have always pursued opportunities that have come before me with passion and discipline.

Retired MR president Frank Gardner, 82, attributes Washingtons success  and his Midas touch  to more than that. Gardner, who has known Washington for 35 years, says Washington takes chances.

He always said, Im not a gambler, but Im a risk-taker, Gardner said.

IN THE BEGINNING

The story of Dennis Washington is also the story of Montana Resources and Butte. All three are intimately entwined.

When Atlantic Richfield Company bought the nearly 100-year old Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1977, times were still good in Butte and nearby Anaconda. But it didnt last.

Gardner, a third-generation Butte miner, had relocated to Butte in the late 1970s after spending a few years working in mines abroad. ARCO hired Gardner to run Buttes Berkeley Pit  at the time one of the worlds largest open-pit copper mines  and he remembers that by 1979 the operation was losing money.

ARCO lost $100 million over two years, Gardner recalls. We were asking to shut down. There was no hope left.

By the time the shovels fell silent for good in the Berkeley Pit in June 1983, ARCO had laid off 1,300 workers in Butte. This blow came on top of ARCO shutting down the Anaconda smelter in 1980. These were bleak times for the Richest Hill on Earth.

Copper prices were less than 79 cents a pound when ARCO ended its operations. It was costing the company $1.30 a pound to mine copper in Butte, a New York Times article reported in 1982.

Current Butte-Silver Bow Chief Executive Matt Vincent moved in the late 1970s with his family to Butte, where his father, a bricklayer, found plenty of work.

At 13, he distinctly remembers how the closure impacted his family.

Nobody knew what was going to happen when the mine shut down. It was right after we had put down roots. (My dad) ended up working out of state all the time, Vincent said.

Don Peoples Sr., who was chief executive of Butte-Silver Bow from 1979 to 1990, said the smelter and mining closures sent shock waves through the community. Unemployment in Butte rose to 20 percent. The countys tax revenue fell sharply.

A lot of people were really hurting, Peoples said.

With precipitously falling mineral prices, Gardners plan was to close the mine with the hope of reopening it a year later. But ARCO, an oil giant, decided to get out of the mining business altogether and sought to divest itself of the property.

Peoples remembers trying to shop the mine around to different mining companies.

We went to every major copper company. Everybody (but Washington) said bye-bye, Peoples said.

WASHINGTON STEPS IN

Washington was willing to take a chance on a mine  and a town  that no one else would take.

If it hadnt been for Dennis  Peoples said, trailing off.

The risk was that much greater because the Berkeley Pit was an environmental disaster. With the closure of the underground mines, the pit began to slowly fill with water contaminated by heavy metals.

The Environmental Protection Agency had declared the Berkeley Pit, Silver Bow Creek, a portion of the Clark Fork River, and the towns of both Butte and Anaconda as Superfund sites in the early to mid-1980s. This made the area one of the largest Superfund sites in the U.S.

When Peoples and Gardner were trying to find a new owner for the mining operation, no one knew for sure what they were buying into  on top of the uncertain commodity prices.

In addition, ARCO made a deal with Butte-Silver Bow that if the county couldnt find a buyer by 1986, the company would tear down the concentrator, an integral part of the pits mining operation. Without that, Peoples felt no one would ever again mine in Butte.

It was September 1985. The clock on the concentrator was ticking. Washington expressed interest.

Washington was busy building a stretch of Interstate 15 between Butte and Helena, Peoples said.

Gardner knew Washington because he had supplied trucks for the Berkeley Pit. Washington showed up to view the defunct mining site with a friend who had experience in scrapping a mine in Wyoming.

But by December 1985, Washington had changed his mind.

Gardner, who said Washington was willing to listen, said he talked Washington into going into a different direction. In his emailed statement to The Standard, Washington explained what happened:

"Frank Gardner had a plan that he felt confident would be successful if we decided to open the mine. ARCO said they would pay until the end of the year for approximately 60 people, which gave us time to do the things we had to get done to make it work: power, smelting, labor, financing. (I believed) in the people Frank put together, and (had) confidence in Frank. The work force wanted to get the mine going."

Gardner said that once Washington made up his mind to reopen the operations as an active open pit copper mine, there was no turning back, no matter what the risks.

He thinks (things) out in his mind, Gardner said of Washingtons decision-making process. Once hes made a decision, thats it.

After Washington bought the operation, he and Gardner flew to Butte. On that day, laid-off miners who had built a giant replica of the Virgin Mary  called Our Lady of the Rockies  atop the East Ridge were putting the final piece onto the statue. Gardner remembers standing with Washington watching the helicopter as it hovered over the ridge. They stood outside of MRs office building on Continental Drive for the first time.

They were putting the head on the Lady of the Rockies. That was a good sign, Gardner said.

Butte-Silver Bow Commissioner Jim Fisher, who began working in the mines in 1975 while still in high school, called that moment, "a spark of light for the community."

HOW MR CAME TO BE

By then, the price of copper had dropped to 60 cents a pound. Molybdenum, a metal used to harden steel, among other uses, hovered at $3 a pound. Within the next seven months, copper slipped again to 58 cents a pound.

Everyone kept saying, 'We cant do it,' Gardner said. 'The mill wont run.' But he stood with us. It took my breath away, but he said, Lets go with it,' and we did.

The Continental Pit, only partially dug under ARCO, became the new open pit copper mine. On July 16, 1986, at 12:08 p.m., the first blast went off on the floor of the Continental Pit, located just east of the defunct Berkeley Pit, launching the new era of mining in Butte.

Now, 30 years later, MR has weathered the ups and downs of commodity prices, taking on partial liability for the Berkeley Pit Superfund site and a temporary closure in the early 2000s. Today, the Continental Pit employs around 350 people and provides some of the highest paying jobs in the county. The mine that in 1986 was expected to have a 16-year operation has a mining permit that runs through 2040.

Of all the businesses Washington has touched, MR might be the one that best proves that the man who started with next to nothing has an almost uncanny ability to turn that nothing into gold  or perhaps copper.

Gardner remembered a joke he told Washington once. He repeated it to The Standard with an impish grin.

I told him not to buy a mortuary. If he did, everybody would die the next day.
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Often times the first casualty in politics is the truth. Currently, the Democrats are using out-of-state dark money to bastardize the truth relating to Greg Gianforte and stream access issues. In reality, Gianfortes approach to stream access is the ideal balance between public access and property rights, which is where most Montanans position themselves.

Yes, it is correct that in 2009 Gianforte filed to Quiet Title against the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) due to a factual and legal discrepancy of where the public access should be on Gianfortes property. This type of suit is a common tool for landowners to use in order to allow the courts to sort out these types of factual and legal issues. Instead of serving the suit, Gianfortes attorney sent FWP letters and emails. FWP corrected their mistake, moved the access point, provided fencing and worked with Gianforte to allow public access and protection of private property rights.

Instead of being against public access, as the Democrats are alleging in ads, and as proclaimed by Governor Steve Bullock, Gianforte actually worked to provide the public with better access while protecting his property rights. This the real Montanan position.

It is Governor Bullock who is out of touch with Montanans. In 2012, Governor Bullock used his position as Attorney General to bully a rancher in White Sulphur Springs to provide public access over his private property where public access does not exist. This issue is still being litigated. It is Governor Bullock who has sided with out-of-state interests and money to work against rural Montanans who are part of Montanans agricultural tradition. Agriculture is still the number one contributor to the economy in Montana.

I wrote in an op-ed published in 2012 in the Great Falls Tribune in which I said, Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock is misusing his office, being a bully and not speaking accurately regarding his plans to engender better landowner relationships with the public for access to hunting and fishing while suing a family ranch for dubious public access. If Bullock really cared about Montanans and their constitutional rights, he would have attempted to use his position to negotiate a deal between the Forest Service and Zehntner, instead of using his office to file a questionable lawsuit to gain press for his political campaign.

Many farmers and ranchers in Montana allow fishing access on their private property like Gianforte because they value their neighbors. Unfortunately, it is the out-of-state money and extremists who are wrecking the traditional relationship and trust between Montana landowners and those who seek access across private property to pursue their recreational activities.

The recent ad run by the Democrat Governors Association is really an attack on Montana values cleverly disguised as a fishing story. Even though Bullock may have been born in Montana, he is the candidate that is out-of-touch with Montana values relating to public access and private property rights.

The record on this issue is clear: Gianforte best reflects Montana values relating to public access and property rights. It is Bullock who does not understand private property rights or how to develop a good relationship between landowners and those who desire access.

-- Hertha L. Lund, who ranches with her husband near Lennep, in Central Montana, is a Bozeman lawyer who has represented landowners in legal and policy issues for more than 25 years, and focuses her legal practice on property rights.
The maddening governmental waltz called relocating the county shops is playing once again, and the notes are no more pleasing as we endure the second encore.

Butte-Silver Bows vehicle and maintenance shops must move so that the Parrot Tailings may be removed. The initial effort to relocate the shops to the old Montana Pole Plant site, where cleanup issues are also continuing, was rejected by county commissioners. Then, after a lengthy and difficult process, a site was chosen off Centennial near the Metro Sewer plant. It is certainly not the countys fault that it was unable to strike a deal with the current land owner for that location.

Now, though, the county wants to simply move the shops across Civic Center Road to the old ballfield area, which itself would have to be cleaned up first.

We understand the convenience of this option. The move of the shops, a considerable logistical challenge, would be much easier and probably a good deal less expensive than with any other site. Also, neighborhood concerns would not be an issue since the shops have been in the area a very long time  in fact, since they were called the corral.

One perceived disadvantage of the plan is that it will extend the timeline of the Parrot cleanup for a year, since the target site must be remediated before the current shop area can be tackled.

While another year is not desirable, particularly since its taken so many years even to come to the point where this cleanup, clearly needed and supported by the community, is on the table, its not a deal-killer. Doing the work thoroughly and correctly beats doing it fast.

But a bigger worry is that if upper Silver Bow Creek is actually restored, as so many people are passionately advocating, the area around the Civic Center could be so much more valuable than it is now  much more suitable for a public space, part of a complex of park and open space, than for an industrial use like the shops.

Indeed, many such uses were identified by community members during recent visioning workshops sponsored by The Montana Standard and Restore Our Creek.

Its easy to believe that in its search for expediency, the country really didnt give much thought to the potential that site would have, once the creek is restored. Does the county really believe Silver Bow Creek will flow again from above the Civic Center to its confluence with Blacktail Creek near the Visitors Center? It appears not.

Could whatever plan is adopted for greenway and public space around a restored creek simply bypass the area where the county wants to put the shops? Sure. But the short-sightedness of the siting decision, and the under-use of the property, would be glaringly evident for years to come.

If the county truly wants to be a partner with the Restore Our Creek Coalition, and if the Superfund negotiators are truly committed to the kind of world-class outcomes Butte deserves, some easy options like this are going to have to be resisted.

In a few weeks, Restore Our Creek will be delivering a fully realized plan to Superfund negotiators  a plan that incorporates the valuable input from the community that has been and is still being gathered. It would be a pity to shorten the options for making that plan a reality.
CHINOOK  Brothers Kole Engle and Lacy Wortman were at a bar on the main street in town Wednesday afternoon celebrating the life of a Belgian shepherd named Steve who died in an accident that day.

Normally the two men would be out working on a weekday around noon  they both ranch and hold down other jobs like trucking and running a fencing business.

Up here on the Hi-Line, people live the kinds of lives that call for multiple professions and depend on firearms as a tool to protect cattle and fill the freezer. That leads to even two brothers who were raised by a staunch Democrat grandfather (up until the last six or so elections he voted in before he died) pledging support for Republican candidate Donald Trump in this years president election.

When youre self-employed and in agriculture, you cant be liberal. Liberal doesnt work, Wortman, 41, said.

The men and their political priorities are indicative of how a lot of folks are feeling in this part of Montana. Its a region thats often overlooked, outside the states so-called economic boot with pull straps that start in Billings, a heel in Missoula and a toe in Kalispell. Its forgotten-ness is symbolized by the difference between the wide four-lane Interstates 94 and then 90 that crisscross the lower half of the state and the bumpy, dusty Highway 2 that runs more than 660 miles along the top of Montana.

Here people tend to support Trump and range from frustrated to disgusted with his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton. Even some of Clinton's supporters in these parts aren't 100 percent behind her. But cultural differences and the disparity they lead to in opinions on the federal government do allow for some political diversity even in a state that has voted for Republican presidential candidates all but twice since 1952.

It's safe to say of the 111,000 registered voters in the 10 counties on Highway 2, people in the smaller towns feel overlooked by politicians they say spend time and money where voters are more likely to be swayed. And some people don't know if their vote counts for much outside local races, but that hasn't stopped the November election from being most of what anyone is talking about.

From east to west, televisions in cafes, bars and auto shops are tuned almost exclusively to Fox News. A bartender at the watering hole Wortman and Engle patronize said earlier that week the set was somehow on CNN and it led to a punch being thrown after a political disagreement.

When asked who they will vote for to be America's next president, the brothers both are quick and passionate with their answers.

I like Trump, Wortman said, adding hes sold on the presumptive Republican nominees straightforward approach. He has a plan and operates in black and white. Thats exactly how I operate my ranch.

Democratic Clinton is not a popular option in these parts.

I believe she is a (expletive) liar, Engle said.

Part of Trumps appeal for Engle, 43, is that he offered to do the job without taking a salary.

Any man that says Im going to do this job for free, that says something right there.

Wortman slows his cadence and speaks a little louder when he talks about heath care and explains why he doesnt like the Affordable Care Act, something he says Trump will get rid of.

Our system right now is worthless. He said he didnt qualify for Obamacare, as its almost universally called on the Hi-Line, because he could get coverage through his wifes job as a teacher. He used to not have insurance and doesnt want to have to have any now but pays $600 a month for coverage to avoid a fine.

I should be entitled to that right to not have insurance if I dont want it, he said.

Chiming in, his brother Engle said, I dont think the government should force you into anything.

Engle is a veteran who hasnt bothered much with even trying to use the Veterans Affairs hospital in Helena after once waiting eight months post-appointment for a follow-up on his diabetes treatment.

When you have diabetes, you have to deal with it, he said. What I dont deal with is the VA.

Though they have almost 400 miles of highway and a national park between them, Libby resident Keith Kenelty, 68, shares the Chinook brothers view.

He wants to get rid of Obamacare and stuff that just costs us too much money and believes Trump is the candidate who will get it done. Kenelty has lived his whole life in Libby and volunteers at the VFW after retiring from work at a logging company and the Department of Natural Resources.

For Wortman and Engle, right behind health care in importance is gun control. Many up here believe Clinton will take their guns if elected.

The Second Amendment was put in place for a reason and needs to be left alone, Wortman said.

Before the massive pool of GOP candidates dwindled, Kenelty also liked what he heard from U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, but in the end he didnt feel they were strong enough.

Mark Scott of Libby also went back and forth between candidates  U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Trump  before he threw his support behind the self-proclaimed billionaire businessman.

I like Trump because sooner or later weve got to get away from the political correctness that will wreck this country, he said. He says what he means and means what he says.

On Monday afternoon Scott, 61, was headed outside of town to go gold panning. The oilfield worker was on a stretch of days off  he makes a 27-hour commute to the Texas oilfields from Libby straight, pulling over on the side of the road to catch a few hours of sleep when he feels tired. He worked 20 days in June but only had six days worth of work in March, seven in April, and eight in May.

He believes President Barack Obama and Democrats in general are weak and have let the other government cripple the U.S. oil business.

If Obama would have stepped up, if you are serious about things, you would put a $25 tariff on any oil they sell us, he said with a southern drawl while filling up his truck at a gas station. I think the Saudis are just bold because they dont have anybody that will rear up if they want to hurt us. We need someone who wont take their political bull, and thats Trump.

Scott is for smaller government and less regulation, two things he believes Trump will deliver.

We need less red tape to go through on anything," he said. If you get Democrats, there seems to be more regulations, more fees.

In the town of Browning, which sits almost exactly between Libby and Chinook on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Cheryl Wild Gun, 55, and her husband Robert Wild Gun Sr., 58, said their lives are closely tied to a government they couldnt endure shrinking.

Just because we are elderly and live on a fixed income, we do vote Democratic, said Cheryl Wild Gun while sitting on her porch drinking coffee Tuesday. Our income is affected by the government. The Republicans keep cutting welfare, SSI, all the programs. The only reason we vote Democratic is to secure our livelihood. Indian lives always hang in the balance of the federal government.

The couple said theres a lack of support from the government at all levels  local, state and federal  to deal with drug abuse, both of methamphetamine and pills and alcoholism.

Its just not being addressed at any level, said Robert Wild Gun Sr., who worked in law enforcement for 22 years. Theres no government support.

Though shes clear that shell vote for Democrats, Cheryl Wild Gun called this years presidential election a joke. She isnt very supportive of Clinton because her use of a private email server while at the State Department and resulting FBI investigation, but still Trump isnt an option.

The only reason Im voting for her is she supports minorities, she said. Trump is making racist comments and trying to get rid of immigrants.

Robert said he supports Clinton because shes a woman. Id like to see a lady running the world, he said.

Politicians dont spend enough time on Montanas seven reservations, Robert Wild Gun said, taking a sip of coffee.

They only time they come is to walk down our main street in our parade, he said. Thats the last time well see them in Indian Country. So many politicians dont see the living conditions. They just see the main street they walk in the parade. They dont see the boarded-up houses, the meth use.

Across town, Browning native Winslow Rattler, 54, is more bullish on Clinton. He likes her experience as Secretary of State and feels like shes taken time to pay attention to Indian issues.

That Trump doesnt support Indians, he said. We have all these reservations in Montana, and I havent heard anything from him about the reservations. All his credentials and his money  he doesnt know how hard it is for people on the reservation.

Also bucking the Trump trend is Robert Winstrom, 52, of Troy. He was voting Bernie or nobody, but now faced with the prospect of nobody, hell put a mark beside Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Hes tired of the great divide he feels is taking over the U.S. Weve become so polarized as a country, he said. Everything either has to be one side or the other.

The Democrats lost Windstrom a long time ago, he said. He calls both main parties two sides of the same coin.

He points to the number of people who voted for Sanders in the primary as an argument for how a viable third party could rise to the top.

If the same amount of people vote third party, wed have a third party. The whole argument about throwing your vote away drives me insane. To say I have to vote for one or the other or my vote doesnt count.

At the Browning coffee shop she runs in town and accompanied by her tough-but-tiny dog Rascal, Julie Renville explains why she could never vote for Trump like this:

Hes said so many derogatory things. Hes said hell abolish all the reservations. I don't know anything else about him. He just disgusts me. Im anything but Trump.

Getting access to information about candidates isnt all that easy in Browning, Renville said. Her internet service went out a week ago, making it difficult to research candidates.

Though it can seem like every time you check in with the news there's a new scandal or soundbite, the brothers in Chinook also said its sometimes hard to come by valuable political information. Wortman doesn't have TV, and Engle doesnt have the time.

If I spent time paying attention to everything, wouldnt get anything done, he said. And its a long way to Election Day.

We havent even got to the good mudslinging yet, Wortman said. But Trump is the best weve got as far as the Republican side goes.

Montanans along Highway 2 are skeptical if their vote counts and of all the noise they hear coming from Washington.

We need to get back to the popular vote, Wortman said. The electoral college is not packing it.

Though he still plans to vote in November, Kenelty said hes not sure how much of a difference it'll make.

I dont think our vote counts any more other than for local elections. The polls close here at 8 oclock and you already know who is president before then. People probably wont even go down and vote.

The lack of optimism spills over into what people think about what happens after Nov. 8.

I really think its going to get worse, Engle said, adding that it might get better if Trump is elected, but not right away.

Wortman isn't overly idealistic about how much anyone follows through on the promises they make campaigning.

Itll happen with Trump as well as any other president, Wortman said. But I hope not as much. If he gets one or two things done, thatd be great.

Thats one thing voters in both Browning and Chinook agree on.

Its so hard to say if anything will change, Cheryl Wild Gun said. So many politicians talk out of the corner of their mouths.
Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke and his Democrat challenger Denise Juneau are breaking campaign fundraising records, according to federal filings released Friday, but few in Montana have been watching the race for the states lone House seat.

The lack of local attention to date stands in contrast to the excitement among some national political observers.

Top party officials and political analysts and some prominent national fundraising groups have hailed Juneau's campaign as a chance for Democrats to gain a congressional seat that would erode the Republican majority in the House. Meanwhile, Zinke, who has garnered unusual attention for a first-year congressman, has made a bold bet on Donald Trumps success, offering himself as a VP option and securing a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention on Monday.

In total, the candidates have about $2 million in the bank to spend on advertising this fall  about $1.2 million for Zinke and $800,000 for Juneau  more than any other Montana congressional race in at least two decades. Zinke already has spent about $4 million, primarily on consulting and fundraising rather than advertising to voters, while Juneau has spent little to date. They could collect and spend millions more before voters cast their ballots in November.

Juneau is going to raise more money than John Lewis did in 2014 if she keeps going at the current pace, but Zinke is raising ungodly amounts of money for a House race, Montana State University political scientist David Parker said, noting that both campaigns are expected to receive a level of national support that typically is reserved for Senate races. Especially since both have about the same amount of money to spend in the fall on advertising, Juneau is positioned to make the race competitive.

A battle for control of the U.S. House has, in large part, driven the big fundraising.

Carroll College political scientist Jeremy Johnson noted that Democrats hold 30 fewer seats than Republicans and are aiming to close that gap. Although a handful of states could be very doable, Johnson said Montana is a stretch given Zinkes incumbency and strong fundraising. Nonetheless, top supporters of Democratic campaigns have listed Juneaus campaign among their priorities, as did The Washington Post.

With Trump at the top of the ticket, Democrats are hoping they can capitalize, Johnson said.

University of Montana journalism professor and political analyst Lee Banville said some of the initial excitement about Juneaus run appears to have worn off. As of Fridays filing, EMILYs List and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had contributed little more than $15,000 in total.

We havent seen the kind of money that indicates the national-level Democrats think they have a chance to pick off Zinke right now, he said, admitting months still remain for them to follow through with contributions and other support. If there was a perception that Zinke was weak or in trouble, you would already see stuff coming, particularly ad buys by outside groups.

EMILYs List Spokeswoman Rachel Thomas said the groups support for Juneau has not waned.

We are absolutely excited about Denise Juneau and 100 percent behind her in this race, she said. We are just starting the general election season.

In recent interviews at cafes, bars and porches along Highway 2, that national fight for control of Congress was far from most peoples minds. No one said they had been following the House race  except for some residents of Native American reservations.

Juneau, who grew up on the Blackfeet reservation and is an enrolled Mandan and Hidatsa member, made an early campaign swing through the states seven reservations. If elected, she would be the first Native American woman to serve in Congress, a fact that, along with time as Montanas Superintendent of Public Instruction, has been leveraged to build excitement for her campaign and a larger effort by Democrats to increase turnout among Native Americans, who usually favor social liberals.

Winslow Rattler of Cut Bank, who grew up in Browning, knows and supports Juneau. He said she has done a good job as the superintendent of public instruction, experience he said made her the best option. Although Zinke appeared in the North American Indian Days parade over the weekend, shaking hands along the route as did Juneau  Rattler said he did not know much about the Republican.

Shell get most of the votes here because shes Indian, he said.

Cheryl Wild Gun, a retired school clerk, agreed.

Juneau was raised in town like everybody else. She knows whats going on. She tries to better it. She comes back for family gatherings, funerals, she knows what its like to be here and live here and see the conditions. She wont leave us behind, Wild Gun said.

Like many folks in this part of the state, Keith Kenelty, 68 of Libby, said he knew of Zinke but had not watched the campaigns this year.

I voted for Zinke the first time, the veteran said, noting that he likes that Zinke is a former Navy Seal. Kenelty is retired after working for a logging company and the state doing forestry and fire work.

University of Montana political scientist Robert Saldin wasnt surprised that most average voters have little information about the House race at this point, nor that both candidates have done little face-to-face campaigning and no major advertising yet.

It could be that they want to save their ammo for the fall when people really start paying attention, he said. Spending a lot of money right now doesnt necessarily pay off come November.

Parker also noted that the governors race is sucking up all the oxygen and garnering the most media attention so far. A review of headlines statewide since November shows just a handful of stories that mention both Zinke and Juneau compared to dozens about the gubernatorial candidates.

But when Juneau and Zinke do starting spending, they likely will break records for a Montana House seat and bring in the kind of out-of-state contributions more typical of Senate races.

As it stands, Zinke enters the summer with about $1.25 million in the bank. In 2014, he only held about $100,000 at this point, although he spent heavily early in that year to win the primary. Juneau reports having about $810,000 in the bank, well above the $622,710 Lewis carried at this point in 2014.

Zinke has spent about 2.5 times as much as Juneau has collected. The vast majority of it has been paid to consulting firms that coordinate national fundraising, in part, through direct mail advertisements to known and often retired Republican donors. In large part, thats why more than two-thirds of the individual contributions to his campaign have come from out of state. He also has received financial backing from a political action committee he created and later left before his 2014 run.

Juneau's campaign has received about two-thirds of its individual contributions from Montanans, although that ratio could shift if EMILY's List and other Democratic support groups start rallying more contributors from across the country.

She characterized Zinkes heavy spending and reliance on out-of-state fundraising as a sign of poor campaign management and indicative of someone most interested in moving to a higher office.

While Congressman Zinke is out doing work at the national level to figure out what his future is, I care about what happens to Montana and what our future is going to be, Juneau said.

Zinkes spokeswoman Heather Swift disagreed.

Our campaign has support from all over America because Ryan Zinke is a proven leader with an impeccable military record defending our nation against radical Islam, Swift said, criticizing Juneau for not seeking to block refugees from entering Montana. Ryan Zinke is more concerned about that than fundraising.

The extent of fundraising to date by Zinke suggests that he does, in fact, care about those numbers, political analysts said. They argued that his heavy spending, while unusual, is not proof of a flailing campaign.

My expectation is that he believes he can continue to raise a significant amount of money for his campaign, Johnson said.

In recent weeks, Zinkes campaign has reserved time for thousands of television spot ads, primarily in September and October, while Juneau has none so far, according to federal records. Rather than see that as a comparison of campaign strength, Banville considers it an indicator of confidence and style.

You bought up all these ads. You look ready to unleash the air war. That gives the impression that the campaign is highly organized and has got a lot of money. Hes clearly got this sort of political bravado, Banville said, noting that reservations dont always equate to actual ad purchases. Juneau is running a smart, fairly conservative campaign right now. Shes been building infrastructure and much more grassroots for now.
WAPELLO, Iowa -- The stories flowed like musical notes through the Wapello High School lunchroom on Saturday morning.

They portrayed a talented musician, composer, teacher, mentor, craftsman, benevolent taskmaster and loving father.

At the center of it all was 92-year-old Harold Cross, the director of the school's award-winning marching band for 31 years until his retirement in 1983 and a community force in local theater and musical productions.

The reception in the high school was only the beginning of events on the city-proclaimed Harold Cross Day that included the dedication of an honorary Hal Cross Street in the community.

As Cross sat Saturday morning at a lunchroom table with his wife, Clarise, a steady stream of former band members and their families greeted him with hugs and laughter.

"I'm flabbergasted," Hal Cross said about the events of the day. "What a nice turnout." Family members from babies to adults sported matching blue T-shirts with a photo of Hal and Clarise, who will be celebrating their 68th anniversary later this month.

Paula Buckman, a member of the Class of 1964, recalled playing the trumpet in the marching band.

"For the first year, I don't think I played a note," she laughed. "I was just trying to march. One time when we played in Burlington, it was raining and my girlfriend got stuck in the mud. She just walked out of her shoes and kept marching."

Cross' leadership was responsible for 31 of the 49 consecutive years that the Wapello High School marching band achieved Superior I ratings at state contests.

"He was very motivated," said his son, Jerry Cross, who returned from Oklahoma for Saturday's festivities. "He did what I call intermittent sleeping, waking up and writing music and planning marching drills."

All four of the Cross children -- Jerry, Tom, Kenny (now deceased) and Carol -- performed in marching band.

"Like I had a choice," Tom Cross laughed.

He spoke of his father's countless hours of time and devotion on school and community causes.

"He has touched so many lives," he said. He recalled his father inviting the entire marching band to the family's cabin on Lake Odessa.

The youngest Cross sibling, Carol, remembered "rolling out of bed at 6 a.m." to practice her horn.

"Everybody kind of looked at him as a dad," she said. "I loved it that everybody else loved my dad."

One of Cross' students, Jim Dotson, Class of 1965, sat next to his former mentor and related the effect Cross had on his life.

Dotson, who played baritone sax in the marching band, also played keyboard, and Cross encouraged him to start a dance band.

"He saw the possibilities. We used to play dances all over," Dotson said. "It helped me with my music."

"Endless" piano bar engagements "helped get me through college," Dotson, a retired pastor, said.

As the morning reception drew to a close, marching band alumni picked up blue and yellow kazoos to practice the Wapello High School fight song for their appearance in the Chief Wapello parade.

"We don't think anyone of us have any lip left," Buckman joked.

Cross, for his part, spoke humbly of his role in his students' lives.

"What they took away -- you work hard and you get rewarded," he said. "They had a great pride in the marching band."

Former students and friends have established the Hal Cross Wapello Music Endowment Fund through the Community Foundation of Louisa County to honor him "for instilling admirable characteristics in his students, including a strong work ethic, discipline, a spirit of competition, a sense of accomplishment, teamwork and a love of music."

The fund will support the music program in the Wapello schools.
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 []
SABC COO Hlaudi Motsoeneng has conducted a full-frontal assault on freedom of expression, according to a recent affidavit filed in the Constitutional Court.

According to reports by the City Press and The Sunday Independent, the details of Motsoenengs reign at the broadcaster were detailed in an affidavit submitted on behalf of eight suspended SABC journalists.

The affidavit follows a statement by the broadcaster that it would not cover violent protests in South Africa  a decision which was ruled against by ICASA, and subsequently ignored by SABC management.

The suspended journalist were said to have challenged Motsoenengs position on censorship, which resulted in the COO telling staff that if they do not adhere to the policy, they will be got rid of.

The SABC stated it will challenge ICASAs ruling, and has a legal team attending to the matter. The broadcaster has until 18 July to comply with the ruling.

The suspended journalists stated that the SABC was determined to censor news, and provide a distorted view of reality to those who relied on its platforms for information.

Motsoeneng also reportedly told staff that if they mess up the SABC, they will mess up their lives.

Zuma is special

The move to control news content included the coverage of political matters, stated the report, with Motsoeneng telling staff that President Jacob Zuma was special and deserved to be treated differently from the ANC.

Zuma was not to be questioned in the same way as other leaders, he said, and in some cases should not be questioned at all.

I am in charge, you must adhere to my instruction. President Jacob Zuma is the president of the country. You cannot treat him the same, said Motsoeneng.

The full reports are in the City Press and The Sunday Independent of 17 July.

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The Grand Tour is in Johannesburg, and filmed its first episode on 17 July.

The pre-recorded studio section of the motoring show will be filmed in front of a live audience, housed in a giant tent.

The new Amazon TV programme will star Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame.

Clarkson posted images of the first day of shooting on Twitter.

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The Democratic Alliance said it is the only party in South Africa that allows voters to manage their communication preferences with the Party.

During the campaign, we have a duty to communicate our offer to voters. Political campaigning is critical to the vitality of any democracy, said the DA.

The DA added that it must balance its campaign communication with the responsibility to stop interacting with those voters who do not wish to hear from them.

The DAs campaign is powered by a set of integrated systems designed to comply with South African privacy and communication regulations and codes.

No other political party can lay claim to investing as heavily in ensuring that the rights and preferences of voters are respected during the election period, the DA said.

These systems have made it possible for the DA to respect requests from voters to stop receiving DA communications.

The following requests are processed:

Voters who reply to an SMS requesting to be removed.

Voters who click Unsubscribe in an email.

Voters who call the call centre and ask not to be called (0861 22 55 32).

Voters who ask not to be called again when phoned.

In addition to processing the above requests from voters, the DA allows voters to directly manage their communication preferences.

Election Day is just over two weeks away, and we encourage all voters to consider communication from the DA about our offer to South Africans.

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Australia is known to be a nation of drinkers with almost 18% having a drink on a daily basis at a level that is considered risky.

But the ill-effects of such behaviour extend to binge drinking, impacts on health and well-being, assaults drink driving with resulting car accidents and many others.

Various governments and organisations have launched campaigns and policies to combat problem drinking, such as Danny Greens Coward Punch Campaign and the lock out laws in New South Wales and Queensland.

Lock out laws have met with some success in reducing alcohol-related serious injuries in some regions.

But they have also been criticised with claims the laws are harming businesses or that the cultural image of a high profile and vibrant urban centre such as Sydney is being distorted.

But there might be another way to tackle the problems related to the over-consumption of alcohol that doesnt require large-scale government intervention.

Install an app

When it comes to overcoming bad behavioural habits, such as drinking too much, technology can help by providing a subtle and more personalised solution to the problem.

Smartphone apps can provide real-time intervention on the go. They allow people to get the right information at the right time regarding their drinking habits.

Popular alcohol control apps include examples such as Stop Drinking with Andrew Johnson (for Apple or Android) which relies on relaxation and hypnotism and other apps which simply count the intake of alcohol (Sobriety Counter is one such app for Android).

Such mediated, anonymous and indirect interaction can also help people suffering from a drinking problem who are otherwise reluctant to visit rehabilitation and facility centres.

In this way technology can facilitate a change in behaviour through persuasion but not coercion. This is known as persuasive technology, a term originally coined by Stanford University researcher BJ Fogg.

Such technologies have already helped with other problems, such as obesity, bullying and racism by motivating people, providing knowledge, supporting decision making and ultimately facilitating behaviour change.

There is growing realisation of the importance of persuasive technology in mitigating the harmful side effects of alcohol and other bad habits.

There are a number of web and mobile applications that help people with their alcohol intake.

But web-based applications usually cannot be accessed at a users own discretion as they require some form of synchronisation with the users phone.

Which app is best?

While mobile apps may be best suited to tackle drinking problems there isnt much of an understanding as to which are more suitable or what features people prefer.

The National Health Service in the UK does provide a list of apps that can assist in tackling health related problems.

But there is no government or other reputable organisation that maintains a similar list in Australia.

There are some online rankings of alcohol control apps, but these are not maintained by official health services.

This motivated us to analyse more than 200 user reviews of apps available on the iTunes store so we could better establish design recommendations for such apps.

We focused on 18 apps, such as Quit That, that were meant to reduce alcohol intake through behavioural change strategies.

We specifically excluded apps that were purely for facilitating alcohol intake, such as alcohol recipe apps.

We noticed that there were two main types of strategies that were prevalent in such apps. Some used motivation and others self-control to help reduce or monitor alcohol intake.

The former rely on different persuasive strategies such as praise and reward mechanism, social interaction with avatars, competitions, reminders and notifications, etc.

Self-control apps mostly rely on users to monitor and manage their intake by providing information, such as blood alcohol concentration levels.

Self-control apps do not explicitly inform the user when their alcohol intake crosses a level of high risk.

What users want

Our results showed that users preferred self-control apps, possibly because they did not want to be controlled by an app that was too insistent or fast in its interaction.

Users not only preferred gradual notifications from the apps but they also wished to have full control over how the app interacted with them.

We found that a key design guideline for these apps is the ability to customise the way users interact with them.

We noticed that a number of users preferred apps that provided incremental targets.

This allows them to attain positive milestones on each step of the behavioural change process. A number of users also stated the importance of sharing their progress on social media.

Implementing persuasive applications is a fraught with challenges, particularly for contexts such as alcohol intake, where real-time monitoring can be difficult.

But there is great potential to use mobile technology to promote positive alcohol behavioural change, particularly if the apps follow certain design features.

If the appropriate governmental authorities can benchmark and recommend apps based on the proposed guidelines, that will go a long way in assisting many in overcoming their alcohol related problems.

Omar Mubin, Lecturer in human-centred computing & human-computer interaction, Western Sydney University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The 1990s were a high-water mark for public interest in UFOs and alien abduction. Shows like The X-Files and Foxs alien autopsy hoax were prime-time events, while MIT even hosted an academic conference on the abduction phenomenon.

But in the first decade of the 21st century, interest in UFOs began to wane. Fewer sightings were reported, and established amateur research groups like the British Flying Saucer Bureau disbanded.

In 2006 historian Ben Macintyre suggested in The Times that the internet had chased off the UFOs.

The webs free-flowing, easy exchange of ideas and information had allowed UFO skeptics to prevail, and, to Macintyre, people were no longer seeing UFOs because they no longer believed in them.

Data seemed to back up Macintyres argument that, when it came to belief in UFOs, reason was winning out.

A 1990 Gallup poll found that 27 percent of Americans believed extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past. That number rose to 33 percent in 2001, before dropping back to 24 percent in 2005.

But now The X-Files is back, and Hillary Clinton has even pledged to disclose what the government knows about aliens if elected president.

Meanwhile, a recent Boston Globe article by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie suggests that belief in UFOs may be growing.

She points to a 2015 Ipsos poll, which reported that 45 percent of Americans believe extraterrestrials have visited the Earth.

So much for reason.

Why does Western society continue to be fascinated with the paranormal? If science doesnt automatically kill belief in UFOs, why do reports of UFOs and alien abductions go in and out of fashion?

To some extent, this is political. Even though government agents like Men in Black may be the stuff of folklore, powerful people and institutions can influence the level of stigma surrounding these topics.

Sociologists of religion have also suggested that skepticism is countered by a different societal trend, something theyve dubbed re-enchantment.

They argue that while science can temporarily suppress belief in mysterious forces, these beliefs will always return  that the need to believe is ingrained in the human psyche.

A new mythology

The narrative of triumphant reason dates back, at least, to German sociologist Max Webers 1918 speech Science as a Vocation, in which he argued that the modern world takes for granted that everything is reducible to scientific explanations.

The world, he declared, is disenchanted.

As with many inexplicable events, UFOs were initially treated as an important topic of scientific inquiry.

The public wondered what was going on; scientists studied the issue and then demystified the topic.

Modern UFOlogy  the study of UFOs  is typically dated to a sighting made by a pilot named Kenneth Arnold.

While flying over Mount Rainier on June 24, 1947, Arnold described nine disk-like objects that the media dubbed flying saucers.

A few weeks later the Roswell Daily Register reported that the military had recovered a crashed flying saucer.

By the end of 1947, Americans had reported an additional 850 sightings.

During the 1950s, people started reporting that theyd made contact with the inhabitants of these craft. Frequently, the encounters were erotic.

For example, one of the first abductees was a mechanic from California named Truman Bethurum. Bethurum was taken aboard a spaceship from Planet Clarion, which he said was captained by a beautiful woman named Aura Rhanes. (Bethurums wife eventually divorced him, citing his obsession with Rhanes.)

In 1957, Antonio Villas-Boas of Brazil reported a similar encounter in which he was taken aboard a ship and forced to breed with a female alien.

Psychologists and sociologists proposed a few theories about the phenomenon.

In 1957, psychoanalyst Carl Jung theorized that UFOs served a mythological function that helped 20th-century people adapt to the stresses of the Cold War. (For Jung, this did not preclude the possibility that UFOs might be real.)

Furthermore, American social mores were rapidly changing in the mid-20th century, especially around issues of race, gender and sexuality.

According to historian W. Scott Poole, stories of sex with aliens could have been a way of processing and talking about these changes.

For example, when the Supreme Court finally declared laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional in 1967, the country had already been talking for years about Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple who claimed to have been probed by aliens.

Contactee lore also started applying scientific ideas as a way to repackage some of the mysterious forces associated with traditional religions. Folklore expert Daniel Wojcik has termed belief in benevolent space aliens as techno-millennarianism.

Instead of God, some UFO believers think forms of alien technology will be what redeems the world. Heavens Gate  whose members famously committed mass suicide in 1995  was one of several religious groups awaiting the arrival of the aliens.

Youre not supposed to talk about it

Despite some dubious stories from contactees, the Air Force took UFO sightings seriously, organizing a series of studies, including Project Blue Book, which ran from 1952 to 1969.

In 1966, the Air Force tapped a team of University of Colorado scientists headed by physicist Edward Condon to investigate reports of UFOs.

Even though the team failed to identify 30 percent of the 91 sightings it examined, its 1968 report concluded that it wouldnt be useful to continue studying the phenomenon.

Condon added that schoolteachers who allowed their students to read UFO-related books for classroom credit were doing a grave disservice to the students critical faculties and ability to think scientifically.

Basing its decision off the report, the Air Force terminated Project Blue Book, and Congress ended all funding for UFO research.

As religion scholar Darryl Caterine explained in his book Haunted Ground, With civil rights riots, hippie lovefests and antiwar protests raging throughout the nation, Washington gave its official support to a rational universe.

While people still believed in UFOs, expressing too much interest in the subject now came with a price. In 2010, sociologists Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken and Joseph O. Baker found that 69 percent of Americans reported belief in at least one paranormal subject (astrology, ghosts, UFOs, etc.).

But their findings also suggested that the more status and social connections someone has, the less likely he or she is to report paranormal belief.

Single people report more paranormal beliefs than married people, and those with low incomes report more paranormal belief than those with high incomes. It may be that people with something to lose have reason not to believe in the paranormal (or at least not to talk about it).

In 1973, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics surveyed its membership about UFOs.

Several scientists reported that they had seen unidentified objects and a few even answered that UFOs are extraterrestrial or at least real. However, physicist Peter A. Sturrock suggested that scientists felt comfortable answering these questions only because their anonymity was guaranteed.

Harvard psychiatrist John Mack came to symbolize the stigma of UFO research. Mack worked closely with abductees, whom he dubbed experiencers.

While he remained cagey about whether aliens actually existed, he advocated for the experiencers and argued that their stories should be taken seriously.

His bosses werent happy. In 1994, Harvard Medical School opened an investigation into his research  an unprecedented action against a tenured professor.

In the end, Harvard dropped the case and affirmed Macks academic freedom. But the message was clear: Being open-minded about aliens was bad for ones career.

Reason and re-enchantment

So if Hillary Clinton is running for president, why is she talking about UFOs?

Part of the answer may be that the Clintons have ties to a network of influential people who have lobbied the government to disclose the truth about UFOs.

This includes the late millionaire Laurence Rockefeller (who funded John Macks research) and John Podesta, the chairman of Clintons campaign and a long-time disclosure advocate.

But there may also be a broader cultural cycle at work. Sociologists such as Christopher Partridge have suggested that disenchantment leads to re-enchantment.

While secularization may have weakened the influence of traditional churches, this doesnt mean that people have become disenchanted skeptics.

Instead, many have explored alternate spiritualities that churches had previously stigmatized as superstitions (everything from holistic healing to Mayan prophecies). The rise of scientific authority may have paradoxically paved the way for UFO mythology.

A similar change may be happening in the political sphere where the language of critical thinking has been turned against the scientific establishment.

In the 1960s, Congress deferred to the Condon Report. Today, conservative politicians regularly challenge ideas like climate change, evolution and the efficacy of vaccines. These dissenters never frame their claims as anti-science but rather as courageous examples of free inquiry.

Donald Trump may have been the first candidate to discover that weird ideas are now an asset instead of a liability. In a political climate where the language of reason is used to attack the authority of science, musing over the possibility of UFOs simply doesnt carry the stigma that it used to.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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PANAMA CITY

Panamas Manuel Noriega to have surgery on brain tumor

Imprisoned former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega is scheduled to have a benign brain tumor surgically removed.

Noriegas doctor is Eduardo Reyes and he says a neurologist has scheduled the surgery for Thursday.

Reyes said Saturday that representatives of the 82-year-old Noriega are requesting he be allowed to prepare for surgery at home to avoid infection. The tumor has caused severe headaches.

In May, Reyes and Noriegas daughter Thays said the tumor had grown significantly and would require surgery. The daughter said then that he had experienced crises that could be attributable to the tumor.

Noriega ruled Panama from 1983 until a U.S. invasion removed him from power in 1989. Hes been imprisoned in Panama since he returned from serving sentences in France and the U.S. in 2011.

LONDON

UKs May removes another Cameron supporter as minister

British Prime Minister Theresa May has made more changes to the government, removing another key supporter of predecessor David Cameron from ministerial ranks.

Downing Street says arts minister Ed Vaizey, a friend of Cameron, has left the government. Ros Altmann, Camerons minister for pensions, has also been dismissed

The government shuffle is in its fourth day Saturday as May fills out junior ministerial ranks.

May has made dramatic changes, placing leading proponents of a British exit from the European Union in charge of foreign affairs, international trade and EU negotiations.

All the same, May has signaled shes in no rush to start exit talks. She said Friday she would not launch formal negotiations until there is a UK approach involving Scotland, which strongly backed remaining in the bloc.

LUCKNOW, India

Family of Indian man killed by mob accused of cow slaughter

Ten months after a mob in northern India killed a Muslim man over rumors that he had slaughtered a cow, his family faces prosecution for alleged cow slaughter following a neighbors complaint.

Police officer Daljeet Singh says police registered a case of cow slaughter against Mohammad Akhlaqs family on Friday following a court order.

The court acted on a forensic report that said the meat found in a dustbin outside the familys home was beef or the meat of a cow or its progeny.

The eating of beef is not a crime in Uttar Pradesh state, but slaughtering a cow carries a punishment of up to seven years in jail.

No arrests have been made so far. Yusuf Saifi, the familys attorney, said he would challenge the courts order.

BEIJING

China holds 53 people in investigation of deadly landslide

Chinas Cabinet said Friday that 53 people are in custody in an investigation into a landslide that killed 73 people and left four others missing in the southern city of Shenzhen last year.

The State Councils investigation report said the landslide in which a mountain of construction waste that had been piled up against a hill collapsed during heavy rains onto an industrial park was an extraordinarily serious production safety accident.

The report did not detail the accusations against those who were detained or who were awaiting prosecution.

The Dec. 20 landslide destroyed 33 buildings and resulted in direct economic losses of $132 million, the report said.
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The team of women journalists who turned the badlands of Bundelkhand into a hub of rural journalism with the launch of an eight-page newspaper "Khabar Lahariya" 15 years ago has now completed a six-month pilot-run of Chambal Media, a rural digital media start-up that banks on a "feminist business model" for its success. "It was started in response to the increasing penetration of internet and smartphones in rural Uttar Pradesh, and the lack of good quality, independent digital media available for rural audiences who are accessing internet and social media on their phones," said Shalini Joshi, co-founder and CEO. Chambal Media has partnership with Khabar Lahariya to distribute and market its digital content. "This is a huge opportunity for a rural media company, as well as to expand the brand Khabar Lahariya, which has been working to bring women into media for 15 years," Shalini said. Disha Mullick and Kavita are the other two co-founders of the company that will follow in the footsteps of the eight-page weekly whose core principle is "apni Khabar, apni bhasha mein" (your news in your native language). Since the inception of the newspaper project in 2002, the production and marketing of Khabar Lahariya has been dependent on a cohort of female journalists who are mostly recruited from the rural communities where the newspaper is produced and circulated. "Chambal Media aims to enable a local authentic voice of journalism to reach the largest possible audience. We will continue to distribute news generated by women, and especially from marginalised communities like Dalits, Muslims and adivasis," Disha said. "Chambal's organisation structure too will continue to have a unique, rural-urban staff profile of predominantly women," she noted. "We see a feminist business model as one where profitability can be achieved while holding close to the values of independent, progressive rural news; and by a team and organisational culture that is democratic, transparent and inclusive of women from diverse socio-economic backgrounds," Shalini explained. Inspired by the iconic Vice Media, the digital content of Chambal Media has already created ripples in some rural quarters of Bundelkhand. For example, a video feature story about Narad -- a young boy from Tindwari in Banda district who made a helicopter from a motorcycle engine, and was arrested by the local police -- was watched by over 13,000 viewers on Facebook, in a district with 16,000 people accessing Facebook on 3G internet. "This is just one of a successful six-month pilot run of video news content, podcasts and memes which has taken Khabar Lahariya's local outreach to 50,000 viewers a week," Disha said. "Our digital outreach in six months has overtaken the audience we are able to reach through print, especially a young audience. And to this audience, we are able to provide stories that other local media is unable to," Kavita added. "With the growth of internet in rural areas, reaching the least likely consumer, for example the young rural girl, is a massive and exciting opportunity. I think it will bring hundreds of women into journalism from the villages and kasbahs of the country, as producers and consumers, but also as shareholders in a business that could take the media world by storm," Kavita said. And inspired by the initial response, the Chambal Media team has now set their sights high. "In three years Chambal hopes to expand to 80 districts across the Hindi belt, and from there across India and the Global South. We see this as a pioneering model in local media production and a way for independent media across the world to grow and sustain itself," Shalini said. "Our business/revenue model involves a creative diversity of revenue streams, including advertisements, content licensing, events, consumer insights into rural markets and so on," she added. As of now typing the word "Chambal" in Google may show you a Wikipedia page on Daku Man Singh "credited" with 1,112 robberies and 185 murders at the top, but with Chambal Media gaining traction, who knows, the results may change. The tales of bandits may one day be replaced by the stories of Narads. (Gokul Bhagabati can be reached at gokul.b@ians.in) --IANS gb/sac ( 701 Words) 2016-07-17-11:20:01 (IANS)
Police said sleuths led by Sulthan Bathery Circle Inspector Biju Raj seized the unaccounted money from a car near Muthanga checkpost this morning.

The currency transported from Mysore was meant for distribution in Kozhikode, police said quoting preliminary investigation.

The three held were Abdurehman (42), Rafique (35) and Junesh, hailing from Koduvally in Kozhikode district, they said, adding that a gun was also seized from them.UNI PCH CJ RSA 1253

-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-840593.Xml
Reiterating his charge that the Centre was trying to paralyse the functioning of his government, Chief Minister Arvind Kjriwal today likened the relationship between Delhi government and the Centre to India-Pakistan relations. Speaking during his interactive session with the public 'Talk to AK', Mr Kejriwal said, ''The Central government wants to paralyse the working of the Delhi government. We sent 14 Bills to the Centre but even after 8 months, they have not been passed.''We sent the Bill against no detention policy as well as the Jan Lokpal Bill to the Centre. These Bills are still pending with the Centre for 8 months.''Likening the relations between the Centre and the Delhi government to Indian Pakistan relations, Mr Kejriwal said, ''If they (Centre) had not created this India-Pakistan-like situation in Delhi, we could have done four times more''.In this context, he recounted what he told Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a recent meeting with him.''I told PM Modi to give me two years, let me work and I can make Delhi a London. He didn't listen.''He, however, said despite Centre's efforts to hamper their efforts, his government will keep working on its path to develop Delhi.''We will keep working despite Centre's efforts to hamper our work in developing Delhi,'' Mr Kejriwal said. Ever since it came to power in Delhi, the Kejriwal government has been at loggerheads with the Centre on several issues, including appointment of officers in the state government.In recent months, the Delhi government has alleged that the Centre is either removing or transferring officials working with the state government in a bid to paralyse the administration in Delhi.UNI AR RSA 1309 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0400-840690.Xml
Ahead of the Monsoon session of Parliament, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad today said the Congress will support bills based on merit and will not obstruct pro-growth and pro-people Bills.Talking to reporters on the sidelines of the all party meeting, called by the Government ahead of the Monsoon session of Parliament, Mr Azad said, ''Congress will support any bill, which will be in the interest of nation, people and growth. We will let the bills pass on the basis of merit and will not obstruct passage of bills.''The statement by Mr Azad comes, even as the Government is hoping for the passage of Goods and Services Tax Bill, which has been pending in the Rajya Sabha for long, in the Monsoon session, which commences tomorrow.Speaking to reporters, former Parliamentary Affairs Minister M Venkaiah Naidu expressed hope for the passage of GST Bill in this session.''Majority of states are in favour of GST bill. No political party has taken an open stand against it. I'm sure it will be passed,'' he said. He said the Government wants to pass the Bill through a consensus.''The GST bill should be passed by consensus, than majority. If it's approved by consensus, it will be good for the nation,'' the Minister added. In the last few days, the Government has reached out to the Congress to seek its support for the Bill. Mr Naidu telephoned Mr Azad earlier this week to seek his party's suppott for the Bill. Later, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley held a meeting in Parliament House with Mr Azad and Deputy Leader of Congress in the Rajya Sabha Anand Sharma on GST Bill.Congress has put forward three conditions for the passage of the Bill, including putting a cap on the maximum tax rate under the GST Bill. UNI AR RJ RSA 1526 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-840885.Xml
Indian Journalists Union` (IJU) strongly protested today against Jammu and Kashmir police's raids on all newspaper offices in Srinagar for halting the print of their editions and confiscating already printed papers. Due to the police action, the Kashmir valley went without newspapers yesterday. In a joint statement here , IJU president S N Sinha, Secretary-General Amar Devulapalli, International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) vice-president Sabina Inderjit, Press Council of India (PCI) members K Amarnath and Prabhat Dash said the stopping the printing of newspapers and confiscation of printed copies was illegal and unconstitutional as the Supreme Court had already ruled that prevention of printing and distribution of newspapers amounted to pre-censorship. "The J&K police action in name of volatile situation in the valley was an attack on the freedom of the media which was unacceptable in a democracy. The fact that the police did not file any case against the newspapers goes to prove the illegality and heavy handedness of their action. The IJU demands that the police should desist from such illegal and unconstitutional actions immediately and allow the press to function unhindered," the statement said. The IJU had already written to the Chairman of Press Council of India (PCI) Justice C K Prasad to take suo moto cognizance of the illegal action of the J&K police and initiate suitable action to protect the freedom of the press. The Union expressed its support and solidarity to the beleaguered journalists in Kashmir valley and pledged to fight for restoration of their democratic rights. It demanded that the press workers detained by the police should be released immediately and unconditionally. It called upon the working journalists in the country to protest against attack on freedom of press in Jammu and Kashmir. UNI VV PS RSA 1533 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-840916.Xml
The Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) today suspended one of its activists allegedly involved in the murder of Indian Union Muslim League worker in this district of Kerala. In a statement, SDPI district secretary Musthafa Kommeri said Kappachheri Basheer has been suspended from party pending inquiry for his alleged role in the murder of Naseerudhin at Velam near Kuttiyadi on July 15. Though it was a personal matter, the action was being taken as the unfortunate incident should not denigrate the party and its principle, he said and called for an impartial probe to bring out the truth. UNI PCH PS RSA 1649 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-840978.Xml
Sri Lankan Naval personnel allegedly fired a couple of warning shots in the air to chase away Indian fishermen and damaged fishing nets of at least 30 fishing trawlers in a mid sea attack near the International Maritime Boundary Line (IMBL), today. ''The fishermen hailing from Rameswaram and Pamban were forced to retreat, after the Sri Lankan naval personnel fired in the air to frighten our men and blocked their passage in the Palk Strait for fishing activities,'' said N J Bose, President of Rameswaram Port Mechanized Boat Fishermen Association. He said the Lankan naval men hurled stones on the fishing trawlers, but however, none of the fishermen were injured in the attack. Fishing nets and other fishing gears of thirty trawlers were destroyed thereby causing huge loss to the fishermen, he said. ''The livelihood of Tamilnadu fishermen, especially those from Ramanathapuram, Pudukottai and Nagapattinam districts is at stake because of continuous attacks, detention of boats and incarceration of our men by Sri Lankan navy,'' Mr Bose said. The fishing industry, which is earning several crores of foreign exchange revenue to the government exchequer, is on the verge of collapse owing to stoic silence being maintained by the government. ''The Centre should take immediate steps to restore the traditional fishing rights of our fishermen, release of 77 fishermen detained on the charges of cross border fishing and release of all the impounded fishing boats from Sri Lanka,'' he added. UNI GSM RSA 1620 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-840987.Xml
Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti leader Hardik Patel today left for Udaipur in Rajasthan to remain in exile for the next six months to comply with the conditional bail granted to him by the Gujarat High Court. Hardik, who came out of Surat's Lajpore jail on July 15, left for Udaipur where he will stay at a farm house of a former legislator belonging to his Patel community. The high court has directed him to leave Gujarat within 48 hours of his release from jail. After his release from jail, Hardik held a series of road shows and visited his home town Viramgam where he was accorded a rousing welcome. He left for Udaipur from Shamlaji in north Gujarat where his supporters made him wear the traditional Rajasthani head gear. Hardik told journalists that in Rajasthan he would mobilise members of his community for the cause of reservation in jobs and education on par with the OBCs. He said the pro-quota agitation would be continued in peaceful and democratic manner even during his exile from Gujarat. UNI ND PS RSA 1630 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-841020.Xml
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today urged all political parties to keep national interests above any other consideration. Speaking at a meeting of leaders of various parties, convened by the Government on the eve of the Monsoon session of Parliament, the Prime Minister said, ''we represent both the people and parties and there is a need to keep national interests above anything else.''He thanked all political parties, saying ''various parties have given statements on Kashmir events, which benefited the country. This has sent a right message and I thank all the parties for the same.'' Mr Modi said the important Bills, including the GST, are to be taken up during the Monsoon session and expressed hope that there would be meaningful discussions and outcomes during the session. Referring to the introduction of GST, the Prime Minister noted that the issue was not about which government would get the credit for introduction of GST, but what was important, was the passage of Bill.Responding to suggestions from some leaders for increasing the sittings of Parliament, the Prime Minister said he welcomed the suggestion and urged the leaders to ensure proper utilisation of available time. UNI ADP RJ RSA 1701 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0429-841058.Xml
The North-East District police has arrested a notorious murderer and managed to solve two murder cases and as many cases of attempt to murder in Loni, Ghaziabad.''The accused Aakash @ SubhashPehalwan (24) is a resident of Loni, Ghaziabad and a reward of Rs 5000 was declared on his arrest'', police said.On a tip-off, Police arrested the accused from Delhi under the Arms Act. Interrogation revealed that he was wanted in two cases of murder and as many cases of attempt to murder. One pistol with two live cartridges was recovered from him.Further investigation is in progress.UNI SY RJ RSA 1743 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0093-841104.Xml
In a bid to get cooperation from all parties in Parliament, ahead of the monsoon session that starts tomorrow, the government today called an all party meeting and sought support from the opposition members for smooth passage of Goods and Services Tax (GST) bill. Talking to reporters after the two-hour long meeting of leaders of parties in both the Houses of Parliament, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Ananth Kumar said, "The Government has sought the cooperation of all parties for the passage of GST Bill and all parties would be consulted in this regard." The minister also said the government's legislative agenda includes 16 bills to be taken up during the session, including three to replace Ordinances. Mr Kumar added, "The Congress Party assured support to legislative proposals based on merits. The government has also assured them of an open minded approach and would facilitate discussion on issues raised by various parties during today's meeting." Some of the issues to be raised by leaders of different parties during the Monsoon session of Parliament include growing incidents of terror attacks in different parts of the world and their implications for the country, Kashmir events, internal security, developments in Arunachal Pradesh, strengthening federalism and role of Governors. Besides, concerns relating to price situation, riparian river water issues, floods, electoral reforms, debt burden of States, foreign policy, demolition of Ambedkar Bhawan in Mumbai and reservation in promotions for SC/ST government employees will also be raised in both the Houses. However, the Congress leaders said the party has expressed displeasure over growing mistrust between the Centre and states. "There is a lack of trust between the states and the Centre. How can you proceed in this context?" Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad told reporters after the all party meeting. His colleague Jyotiraditya Scindia said, "We want a concrete draft proposal from the government on GST. If we know how they plan to address the three contentious issues, we can revert." Mr Ananth Kumar added that the government is hopeful of a productive session. Besides Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 45 leaders from 30 parties attended the meeting including Union Ministers Rajnath Singh (Home), Arun Jaitley (Finance), Ministers of State for Parliamentary Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and S S Ahluwalia. UNI ASH RP1721 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0388-841083.Xml
A new study that analysed responses from 2,767 married couples, who were involved in the long-term Health and Retirement Survey, revealed that the lovebirds, who drink together, stay happier together.

The researchers showed that when wives drank and the husbands didn't, wives reported they were more dissatisfied with their marriage.

They also found that when it comes to drinking, the habit was more important that the amount people consumed.

The study's author, Dr Kira Birditt, of the University of Michigan, said: "We're not suggesting that people should drink more or change the way they drink."

She told Reuters Health, "We're not sure why this is happening, but it could be that couples that do more leisure time activities together have better marital quality."

The study appears online in Journals of Gerontology B: Psychological Sciences. (ANI)
With the arrest of a drug trafficker and a Nigerian national, the Narcotics Cell of Crime Branch has recovered 310 gm of fine quality cocaine, which is the highest ever recovery. According to police, the accused have been identified as Okpala James (28), who belongs to Nigeria. ''The police team received secret information that one Okpala James is involved in supply of cocaine in the national capital and nearby areas. He would come with huge consignment of cocaine near Jawahar Lal Nehru bus stop, in front of Civic Centre, Delhi,'' Joint Commissioner of Police Ravindra Yadav said. Acting on this specific information, the team laid a trap at the given place and arrested Okpala with 310 gm fine quality cocaine. Value of the recovered cocaine is Rs 3.50 crore in the international market. Further investigation of the case is in progress.UNI SM RJ 1808 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0271-841118.Xml
Five people, including a doctor couple, were killed and two others were injured in different road accidents at East Godavari, Nellore and Guntur districts today.Police said that three youth were killed, when their two-wheeler rammed a stationary tractor at Jaggam Pet in West Godavari district. The deceased were identified as Sai, P Srihari and another deceased, who was yet to be identified. Two persons, including a lady doctor were killed and two were injured, when their SUV collided with a lorry at Kalaguntla village in Doravarisatram mandal of Nellore district. Dr Adiseshagiri Rao and his wife Dr Bhavani (45) were going to Chennai, when the mishap occurred. Dr Bhavani and SUV driver Naresh (30) were killed on the spot, while Dr Rao and another person was injured in the mishap. In another road accident, 40-year-old Chandla was killed, when his two-wheeler collided with an autorickshaw in Vatticompund village of Chivvala mandal in Guntur district. UNI DP RJ 1812 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-841184.Xml
A life-size statue of Sri Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, the last Maharaja of Mysore, was installed in this City of Palaces today. The statue was unveiled by Chief Minister Siddharamaiah in the presence of Princess Pramoda Devi Wadiyar, her son, the anointed price Yaduveer, his wife Trishikha Kumari, members of the royal family and other dignitaries. The Royal clan from both sides from Mysore and Rajasthan were in attendance, when Wadikar family members Indrakshi Devi and Kamakshi Devi, daughters of Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, Regional Commissioner AM Kunjappa, Deputy Commissioner C Shikha, Ministers attended the function. District In-charge Minister H C Mahadevappa and Cooperation Minister Mahadevaprasad were present on the occasion. Speaking after the unveiling ceremony at a stage programme in front of Kote Anjaneyaswamy Temple, Mr Siddharamaiah praised Mr Wadiyar for his democratic values by providing reservation for Dalits during his reign, while also appreciating the late Maharaja's contribution to music and art.Ms Pramoda Devi, who also spoke, expressed her happiness that itwas indeed appropriate that the statue of her father-in-law who wasalways held in high esteem has found a place in the city.On the occasion, the sculptor of the statue Arun Yogiraj andcontractor Siddappa were felicitated by the District Administration. The Jayachamarajendra Circle was developed on the lines of SriKrishnarajendra Circle and Sri Chamarajendra Circle, at a cost ofRs. 5 crore. This will be the third life-size statue of one of theformer Maharajas to be installed in a public place. At the age of21, Sri Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar ascended the throne as theMaharaja of Mysore on September 8, 1940. He passed away on September23, 1974.UNI BSP RS RJ 1911 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-841256.Xml
In a massive show of strength, Congress activists left the state Capital's streets here chock-a block and held mega road show to welcome team Congress for the Mission 2017 State Assembly polls. Apparently charged up with renewed vigor, Congress rank and file from the entire state descended here to welcome party's Chief Ministerial candidate Sheila Dikshit, new UPCC President Raj Babbar and others members of the team. For the 78 year old Sheila Dikshit and other leaders, it was a day of providential escape too as the make shift wooden platform on a truck, on which they were standing, gave way. She lost her balance but escaped with minor injuries. Supporters from all over the state thronged the Lucknow airport to welcome the new party team for UP elections due February next year. Sources said Ms Dikshit received minor bruises on her knee. The wooden platform broke down due to excessive load as several leaders stood on it. The incident occurred just near the airport from where the roadshow started. The entire Lucknow was choked due to the road show. Many heard saying that the Lucknow show was a befitting and it has come a day after the party's surprise show in Aruncahal Pradesh where it staged a political coup and came back to power after a huge turmoil. After a long time that such enthusiasm was witnessed among the Congress workers in the state. The roadshow spirit was dampened due to absence of AICC general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad, who could not made it due to his busy schedule in connection with the Monsoon session of Parliament starting tomorrow. Former Union Minister Salman Khursid, who is the member of the newly formed coordination committee, was also absent as he is in Kashmir. The Congress leaders during the roadshow also garlanded the statues of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr B R Ambedkar and Ballav Bhai Patel near Hazratganj before addressing thousand of supporters at the state party headquarters amid drizzling. Earlier the entire airport area was choked with the presence of thousand of Congress leaders and activists. Thereafter the leaders commenced a mega road show from the top of a bus, with leaders welcoming the new congress team. The road-show was from Airport to party's state headquarters at Mall Avenue and for the first time, all the leaders nominated for different responsibilities were on the rooftop of one vehicle showing `solidarity' and a commitment that all Congressmen are under one umbrella to ensure return of power in the State. "Congress grand road-show has been organised to welcome our new state president Raj Babbar, Chief Ministerial candidate Sheila Dikshit, campaign committee chief Sanjay Singh, coordination committee chief Pramod Tewari, along with all other leaders who were either nominated as senior vice-presidents or members in the different committees", said UPCC leader Amarnath Agarwal. He claimed that AICC general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad, who is in-charge of the Party affairs here in Uttar Pradesh, would lead the new team, he added. Congresss leaders Sidharth Priya Srivastava and Maroof Khan said the road show started from Amausi Airport at around 1330 hrs and passed through VVIP road and reached state party headquarters where the Party leaders held a press conference. On the entire route, the party had erected more than 100 gates in the city besides hoardings and cutouts of leaders. The leaders were welcomed at more than 50 spots on the way by the local leaders and party activists. Besides Mr Babbar and Ms Dikshit, Congress had announced several committees to adjust all the senior leaders. While outgoing president of state unit Nirmal Khatri was already given charge of State Screening Committee for coming Assembly elections, Sanjay Singh has been made campaign committee chief, Pramod Tewari has been given charge of Coordination Committee which also comprised former state president Dr Rita Bahuguna Joshi, Mohsina Kidwai, Rajeev Shukla, Salman Khursheed, Shriprakash Jaiswal, Saleem Sherwani, Pradeep Jain Aditya, Nirmal Khatri, PL Punia and Pradeep Mathur. Besides Sanjay Singh, former minister Jitin Prasad, Gyadeen Anuragi, Vijendra Singh and Zafar Ali Naqvi form part of campaign committee. Besides, former minister RPN Singh has been also adjusted as senior vice-president of UPCC along with Imran Masood, Bhagwati Prasad Chowdhary, Rajesh Mishra, and Raja Ram Pal.UNI MB NB PS RSA SHK 2104 -- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0298-841517.Xml
Police sources said here Suny (42) and Kamlesh (35) were shot dead by former Pradhan of Meharban Kheda village Pappu Pandey with Sanjay Pandey and other four unknown assailants.

Both of them got severely injured in the attack and later died in the hospital. All the assailants escaped from the spot after the crime.A case was registered and investigations were on, police added.UNI XC-JDM MB AE 2028

-- (UNI) -- C-1-1-DL0421-841421.Xml
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Sunday said that the two years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Government was successful in weeding out corruption and ridding the nation of policy paralysis which was rampant under the Congress regime. "Under the leadership of Narendra Modi the word corruption has been eradicated from Indian politics. Now Congress is scrambling to unearth corruption charges against us," Jaitley said while addressing the 'Vikas Parv' rally held in the national capital, which is aimed at highlighting the achievements of the NDA Government. He said that in the first two years of Prime Minister Modi's Government the landscape of Indian economy changed dramatically with the nation emerging to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world. "In the first two years of Modi Government the dynamics of Indian economy changed dramatically and it emerged to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world which is widely accepted around the world," he added. Jaitley did not mince words when commenting about the state of governance under the Congress regime. He stated that before the 2014 parliamentary elections, the arguments in the parliament was replete with corruption issues, so much so that the word corruption got associated with the Congress. "Before the 2014 parliamentary elections, when the Congress was at the Centre, the political situation in India was grim. 70 to 80 percent of our speeches in the Parliament or in the Bharatiya Janata Party meetings were related to corruption. Be it spectrum scam, coal scam or the Common Wealth scam...whenever the subject of corruption was raked up, Congress leaders used to struggle and eventually the word corruption got associated with Congress," he added. He said that world's perception of India under the Congress regime was of being incapable to formulate policies adding that it suffered policy paralysis under the regime. "India's image in the world was that the (Congress) government in India is incapable of formulating policies. A new name was coined in the Indian politics. The whole world used to associate policy paralysis with the Indian government... that the government has become paralysed in formulating new policies," he said. He said that the emergence of Prime Minister Modi has been acknowledged not only in India but also Indians residing in other parts of the world. "This has made the people proud not only here but in foreign as well who proudly say that the nation is rising and that is why they chant Modi-Modi and thousands of people gather to listen to him," he added. (ANI)
The campaign released a new logo on Friday after Trump announced that he had chosen Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. The campaign replaced it with another one on Saturday after the original logo was mocked widely online for appearing to be suggestive, Xinhua news agency reported.

According to a fundraising email sent by the Trump campaign on Friday, part of the original logo featured an intertwined blue "T" and "P" with the letter "T" penetrating the loop of "P".

On Saturday however, a new logo appeared on the campaign's website, which only shows both Trump and Pence's family names above the slogan "Make America Great Again".

--IANS lok/

( 150 Words)

2016-07-17-03:00:02 (IANS)
The man behind the truck attack that killed at least 84 people celebrating Bastille Day in the French city of Nice had recently been radicalised, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in remarks published today.Thursday night's attack in the Riviera city of Nice plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris. Those attacks, and one in Brussels four months ago, shocked Western Europe, already anxious over security challenges from mass immigration, open borders and pockets of Islamist radicalism.Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31 year-old Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any links to Islamic State, which claimed the attack, but Valls said there was no doubt on the assailant's motives."The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalised very quickly, " Valls said in an interview with Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche."The claim yesterday morning by Islamic State and the fast radicalisation of the killer confirms the Islamist nature of this attack."Officials said yesterday that people questioned by police had indicated that he had undergone a rapid transformation from someone with no apparent interest in religion.The Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said that Bouhlel "was one of the soldiers of Islamic State."Valls, who said security services had prevented 16 attacks over three years, indicated that at play on Thursday was the group's modus operandi of cajoling unstable individuals into carrying out attacks with whatever means possible."Daesh gives unstable individuals an ideological kit that allows them to make sense of their acts ... this is probably what happened in Nice's case," Valls said, referring to the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.The group, which is under military pressure from forces opposed to it, considers France its main target given its military operations in the Middle East, and also because it is easier to strike than the United States, which is leading a coalition against it.SECURITY FAILURES?Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and far-right over how President Francois Hollande's Socialist government is handling security, Valls warned that there was no risk zero and new attacks would occur."I've always said the truth regarding terrorism: there is an ongoing war, there will be more attacks. It's difficult to say, but other lives will be lost."With presidential and parliamentary elections less than a year away, French opposition politicians are ramping up pressure and seizing on what they described as security failings that made it possible for the truck to career 2 km through large crowds before it was finally halted.After Thursday's attack, a state of emergency imposed across France after the November attacks in Paris was extended by three months and military and police reservists were to be called up.Interior Minister Bernard Cazenueve yesterday called on "patriotic citizens" to become reservists to help relieve exhausted security forces.But the measures appear to have done little to temper concerns. Highlighting the "serious deficiencies" in protecting French citizens, National Front leader Marine Le Pen demanded that Cazeneuve resign."Anywhere else in the world a minister with such a terrible record - 250 deaths in 18 months - would have resigned a long time ago," she told reporters.Christian Estrosi, a security hardliner and ex-minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy who is now president of the wider Riviera region, accused the government of failing completely in Nice."When the interior minister says there were enough police, it constitutes a blatant lie," he told i-Tele television. "He said there were 64 national policemen on duty. It's false and the investigation will show it."Valls has said there were no failures in Nice. REUTERS RSD 0436 -- (Reuters) -- C-1-1-DL0435-840472.Xml
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Sunday said that July 15 will be marked as "democracy fest" day for Turkey as the attempted military coup was foiled with the cooperation and support of the Turkish people. The Turkish Parliament would discuss a number of new measures to prevent future attempts at a military coup in Turkey as legal procedures were launched to heavily punish the plotters, the Hurriyet daily news reported Yildirim as saying at a press conference. Yildirim was accompanied at the press confference in his office by Chief of General Staff General Hulusi Akar, who was rescued from the hands of coup plotters after hours of captivity. A critical question raised to Yildirim was whether the government would consider re-installing capital punishment for those military personnel on charges of treason. As you know the death penalty had been removed from our legal system. We will discuss with other political party leaders on what further measures we should take to prevent such future attempts, Yildirim said. The coup attempt on July 15 was a black stain on Turkish democracy, but could be turned into the fest of democracy thanks to the Turkish peoples loyalty to democracy and its freedoms, the Hurriyet daily news reported Yildirim as saying. Our people gave the best response to this terror gang. July 15 has now turned into the fest of our democracy, he said, praising the citizens who stood in front of tanks in Istanbul and elsewhere in the country. We could therefore get rid of a very big trouble, Yildirim added, praising those civilians and security personnel who have lost their lives while opposing the plotters. Political parties, non-governmental organisations, media and all other institutions who have expressed their support with the government against coup plotters played a crucial role in stalling the attempt, Yildirim stressed. Those who have committed terror by using the states weapons, tanks, warplanes, ammunition against the Turkish people were much more inglorious than the PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), Yildirim added. At least 161 persons were killed and 1,440 wounded during the coup, the Prime Minister said, adding 2,836 soldiers were arrested, including high-ranking officers. The Prime Minister said the first phase against plotters has ended and it was time to pass to the second phase in which plotters will undergo prosecution to get necessary punishment. --IANS ask/rn/vt ( 405 Words) 2016-07-17-14:38:01 (IANS)
Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric living in exile in the US, has implied that the failed coup attempt in Turkey could have been orchestrated and staged by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself. In a brief statement from his residence in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, Gulen, who has been accused by the Turkish government of instigating Friday's coup attempt and whom the Turkish government asked the US to "send back", on Saturday said the use of force was not the way to effect change in Turkey, Efe news reported. "There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup," said Gulen, who once again denied any involvement in the failed coup that has left more than 160 persons dead. During the coup attempt, Erdogan claimed, the rebelling soldiers received orders from Pennsylvania, referring to Gulen's residence in the US. Gulen said he rejected all military interventions, as he had personally suffered after the coups of the 1990s. "After military coups in Turkey, I have been pressured and I have been imprisoned. I have been tried and faced various forms of harassment," the Guardian quoted Gulen as saying. The Turkish President on Saturday urged the US not to protect Gulen, while US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed to have received no extradition petition or legitimate proof of the cleric's role in the incident. Gulen, a former ally of Erdogan, has been living in self-imposed exile in the US since 2013, when Erdogan accused him of promoting corruption scandals against his government. Since then, the government has included the influential cleric on its list of most wanted terrorists and sought his extradition for judicial trial that could result in life imprisonment. --IANS ksk/vt ( 292 Words) 2016-07-17-15:00:01 (IANS)
The Kremlin said Putin offered condolences to Erdogan over the victims in Friday's coup attempt, which killed at least 161 people and injured 1,440 others, Xinhua news agency reported.

Putin said Russia deemed the actions "categorically unacceptable".

Putin also expressed concerns about the safety of Russian tourists travelling in Turkey, whose numbers have significantly increased after Moscow lifted the restrictive measures against Ankara, and Erdogan vowed to take all necessary steps in that regard, according to the Kremlin press service.

Earlier on Saturday, Turkish authorities said they had regained control of the country after thwarting the coup attempt by a military faction late Friday night.

--IANS py/vt

( 155 Words)

2016-07-17-18:58:01 (IANS)
Three police officers were killed, and several others were injured on Sunday in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the US state of Louisiana. One suspect was shot dead and two other suspects might still be on the run, according to the local police. The injured police officers, who are with the Baton Rouge Police Department and East Baton Rouge Sheriff's Office, have been rushed to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center for treatment, Xinhua news agency quoted Kip Holden, mayor of Baton Rouge as saying. He did not say how many officers were wounded and how was their condition, according to the local English daily The Times-Picayune. Holden said that he was still gathering details on the total number of officers who were injured by the shooting that broke out around 9.00 a.m. local time in the city, and was unable to provide any information on the gunman or gunmen. But there are reports that one suspect was killed and possibly two more were being sought by the police. Holden described the shooting as "a nightmare" all over again in the city as two police officers shot and killed a 37-year-old black man, Alton Sterling, earlier in July, triggering a wave of protests across the nation. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards also condemned the shooting, saying, in a statement, that shooting was "an unspeakable and unjustified attack on all of us at a time when we need unity and healing". He promised to take measures to bring the shooters to justice. This is the second serious shooting incident that killed police officers in the country in less than two weeks after a gunman killed five police officers and hurt seven others in Dallas, a city in the US state of Texas. --IANS lok/ ( 314 Words) 2016-07-18-00:46:01 (IANS)
US President Barack Obama on Sunday strongly condemned the attack on police in Baton Rouge that killed three police officers and wounded three others. "I condemn, in the strongest sense of the word, the attack on law enforcement in Baton Rouge. For the second time in two weeks, police officers who put their lives on the line for ours every day were doing their job when they were killed in a cowardly and reprehensible assault. These are attacks on public servants, on the rule of law, and on civilised society, and they have to stop," Xinhua news agency quoted Obama as saying in a statement. "We may not yet know the motives for this attack, but I want to be clear: There is no justification for violence against law enforcement," added Obama. The US President said that he has offered the "full support of the federal government" to Louisiana's Governor, Baton Rouge's Mayor and local law enforcement. Three police officers were killed and several others were injured on Sunday in a shooting incident in Baton Rouge, the capital city of the US state of Louisiana. This is the second fatal shooting incident that killed police officers in the country in less than two weeks after a gunman killed five police officers and hurt seven others in Dallas, a city in the US state of Texas. --IANS lok/ ( 238 Words) 2016-07-18-01:52:00 (IANS)
SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled Kashmir, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Authorities in restive Indian-controlled Kashmir Saturday imposed a gag on media by seizing newspapers and closing down cable television.

Police, during overnight raids in curfew-bound Srinagar city, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, seized thousands of printed copies of different newspapers and detained employees of printing presses.

"At about 2:00 a.m. the police contingent raided our office and the press," said Mir Iqbal, an employee with the English daily Greater Kashmir.

"More than 20 policemen barged into GK printing Press and directed the employees to stop printing the newspaper. Within no time they stopped the machines and pulled out the plates."

Rising Kashmir, another Srinagar based newspaper, said police raided its printing press and seized printed copies of the paper.

"As the staff left after printing the copies, police took into custody all the employees and asked them to identify the distribution site. They later reached Press Enclave and seized the vehicle carrying the printed papers," said Irshad Khan, in-charge of newspaper distribution at Rising Kashmir.

Like Greater Kashmir and Rising Kashmir, copies of many other newspapers were also seized and stopped from hitting the stands.

Cable operators said they have not received anything in writing, but were told to shut the operations by police.

"We were not given any reason by police other than the order of shutting down the operation," a cable television operator said.

Authorities have also conveyed to the local news gathering agencies to stop sending bulletins about day's events including killings and injuries during clashes.

Cellphone and Internet services in the region have remained suspended since last weekend in a bid to prevent flow of information and people from mobilizing.

On Saturday, Srinagar based newspaper editors staged demonstrations to protest the government action.

"The government has conveyed us that in view of apprehensions of serious trouble in Kashmir valley in next three days aimed at subverting peace, strict curfew will be imposed and movement of newspaper staff and distribution of newspapers will not be possible," an editor told media during a protest demonstration.

The editors said it would be impossible to publish newspapers in view of the government stand.

Protests broke out in the region after Indian troops killed top commander of Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) Burhan Muzaffar Wani, along with two associates. Wani's killing saw people taking to roads and opened a cycle of deadly violence.

A youth was killed during the day in alleged police firing at Hatmulla in Kupwara district, northwest of Srinagar city. With Saturday's killing, local media reports put the death toll at 41.

The continued protests and clashes have been increasing the number of killings in the restive region. Over 3,100 people including 1,500 government forces were injured in the ongoing clashes.

In 2010, a similar gag was imposed in the region during street protests that continued for months and claimed over 100 lives.

Kashmir, the Himalayan region divided between India and Pakistan, is claimed by both in full. Since their independence from Britain, the two countries have fought three wars, two exclusively over Kashmir. Enditem
UNITED NATIONS, July 16 (Xinhua) -- President of the UN General Assembly Mogens Lykketoft on Saturday condemned the attempt by a military faction in Turkey on Friday to overthrow the Turkish government.

"I strongly condemn the attempt from groups in the armed forces to overthrow the government of Turkey and express my sincere condolences for the lives lost during the coup attempt," said a statement issued by the president's spokesman.

"The international community must fully support the democratically elected government and the rule of law in Turkey," the statement said.

Turkish authorities said they regained control of the country on Saturday after thwarting the attempt by the military faction to seize power.

At least 161 people were killed and 1,440 others wounded in the coup attempt, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said earlier on Saturday. Enditem
DAR ES SALAAM, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The Southern African Regional Police Chiefs Cooperation Organization (SARPCCO) on Saturday recognized six Tanzanian senior police officers for their massive contribution in maintaining peace and security in the region.

Ernest Mangu, Tanzania's Inspector General of Police (IGP), decorated the senior police officers with medals on behalf of SARPCCO, a network of operational mechanism in Southern Africa for the prevention and fighting of cross-border crime, including the trafficking of weapons.

Mangu awarded the medals to two former IGPs Omar Mahita and Saidi Mwema and former Assistant Commissioner of Police Godfrey Nzowa at a colourful ceremony in the east African nation's commercial capital Dar es Salaam.

Mangu also awarded Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police Afwilile Mponi and Police Coordinator Heri Joel Lugaye.

"The six police officers have been awarded the medals by SARPCCO due to their participation in different roles in peace making and mediation responsibilities," he said.

Mangu said Mahita received the medal in recognition of his contribution for being one of the founders of SARPCCO and for being the first IGP to chair the organization.

Mangu added that Mwema had also received the medal in recognition of his contribution to coordinating operations between SARPCCO and the East African Police Chiefs Cooperation Organization (EAPCCO).

The other police officers also made tremendous contribution towards nurturing peace and security in the southern African region, said Mangu.

He said the Tanzania police force has achieved a number of operations including controlling drug trafficking in the region.

However, Mangu said the Tanzania police force was still facing a number of challenges, including increase on human trafficking activities in the region which was influenced by great demand of cheap labour in Western countries. Enditem
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. drone strike on its own is certainly no panacea for violence and will backfire elsewhere, Paul Kawika Martin, a senior expert with Peace Action, the U.S. largest grassroots peace network, told Xinhua.

"When you have troops on the ground and you accidentally kill civilians, there are places for those civilians to try to attack you back," said Martin, political and communications director of Peace Action, a group dedicated to advancing a progressive platform in U.S. policy for over 50 years.

"When you do this with a drone, where do they go to attack you? They come here to attack you, they try to attack you somewhere else. There's no place for them to have redress. It causes great problems in long term, and is obviously a great recruiting tool, for terrorism," he warned.

The White House said earlier this month that between 64 and 116 civilians were killed in 473 U.S. strikes between 2009 and 2015 in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa where the United States is not at war.

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria were not included in the report, the first U.S. public assessment of this kind.

Few details were offered about the strikes and the people who were killed, provoking criticism from human rights groups which called for more transparency of the counterterrorism strikes, especially the U.S. drone program.

Critics also say the numbers of civilian deaths reported are far too low to be accurate.

"A lot of these places are remote, hard to count, and there's a big issue of what do you count a combatant, a lot of times they have a tendency to count someone a combatant when they are not, and these numbers are very far off from third parties," said Martin, citing an estimation of 200 to 1000 civilian causalities by a watchdog.

"Again these are just in areas outside Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan," he noted, lamenting the lack of transparency.

"We don't know actually what the exact formula is when they make a decision for drone strikes. But they do know that there are civilians there. And, typically there may be a rule of thumb that it's ok to kill five civilians, if we get the one high level target. So, sometimes we do know that they are there, and we are killing them on purpose," said Martin.

He said the strategy, mostly used by U.S. President Barack Obama in his two terms as one of his government's trump cards, will not truly make the United States safer.

"There hasn't been a huge decrease in the activities of ISIS. ISIS took over good portions of Iraq over the last several years, and now we are trying to take it back," he said.

"(This is) also the case in Syria, also the case with the Taleban, in Afghanistan, also the case with terrorists in Pakistan."

"I mean we have killed now, according to Obama, 2300 to 3300 people using drone strikes, or assassinations or targeted killings, or whatever you want to call them, and we are now being jury, judge and executioner without any legal ramifications, in a country that was founded on having a right to trial, and having the legal means to redress if you are the guilty party," he lamented.

"And we're certainly not doing that in these places that we are attacking with drones," he said.

The drone war was initiated in the wake of 9/11 terrorist attack by then U.S. President George W. Bush. Up till July 1, the U.S. government had kept almost all information relevant to its drone strikes classified, including the civilian causalities. Enditem
ANKARA, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Second Army Commander General Adem Huduti was detained in Malatya province after foiled coup attempt, the Anadolu Agency reported on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Erdal Ozturk, the Commander of the Third Army of Turkey was also caught, reported CNNTurk.

Reports also said that former Air Force Commander, Akin Ozturk, one of the masterminds behind the coup attempt was detained in Ankara.

Separately, another two Turkish army generals linked to the military coup attempt were remanded in the southern province Isparta the same day.

According to the Interior Ministry,least 1,563 army personnel were detained across Turkey.

Member of Turkey's Constitutional Court Alparslan Altan has also been detained, CNNturk reported.

About 150 plotters, including 13 high-ranking naval officers, were held out at the headquarters of the General Staff and the nearby gendarmerie compound in Ankara.

According to Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, the coup attempt was staged by followers of U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. Enditem
DUBAI, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The United Arab Emirates said Saturday that UAE wants to see a secure and stable Turkey after the country foiled a coup attempt.

Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, made a telephone call on Saturday to Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mevlut Cavusoglu, during which he expressed UAE's keenness to see a secure and stable Turkey, state news agency WAM reported.

Sheikh Abdullah said the UAE was anxiously following the recent developments in Turkey. He welcomed the return of Turkey to its legitimate and constitutional track, and termed it an expression of the will of the Turkish people.

The Abu Dhabi-based UEA foreign minister wished further progress and stability to Turkey and its people, according to WAM.

Earlier in the day, the UAE's international carrier Emirates Airline said it canceled its two flights Dubai to Istanbul's Ataturk Airport and to Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen on Saturday after the apparent failed military coup and the related return flights.

However, Emirates would continue to operate its flights to Ankara. The UAE's national carrier Etihad Airways also canceled its flights from the UAE capital Abu Dhabi to Istanbul's two airports. Enditem
BUENOS AIRES, July 16 (Xinhua) -- An exhibition showcasing Argentina's traditional art forms will be staged in La Abadia museum here on Saturday as part of the country's celebrations for 200 years of independence.

Entitled "Forms of Worship: Pre-Columbian Art of Northeastern Argentina," the cultural center will exhibit 66 pieces that relate to the worship of ancestors and sacred entities known as "wakas" in traditional agrarian communities ranging from the 5th century BC to the 9th century AD.

The pre-Columbian art will be on display from Saturday to Oct. 30.

Teresa Pereda, director of La Abadia, told Xinhua "We wanted to provide a space to this archaeological and scientific period while showcasing beautiful works of art by anonymous masters. For many years, we have studied their philosophy, their cultural and ritual habits."

"This is also a testimony to the bicentenary of Argentinean independence, bearing witness to a huge territory as shown in the northeast of Argentina," she added.

Maria Alba Bovisio, curator of the exhibition, said "we are trying to escape the false dilemma of 'work of art' versus 'archaeological piece'. We are bringing together a modern exhibition which highlights the practical and symbolic uses of the objects being exhibited."

The country's independence celebrations were launched on July 9 by President Mauricio Macri in the city of Tucuman, where the country formally declared independence from Spain in 1816. Enditem
COLOMBO, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe expressed his support for Turkey's elected government on Saturday as a coup attempt had been squashed by authorities earlier in the day.

Wickremesinghe said in a statement that foiling an attempt to overturn a democratically-elected government through a military coup would please all people who valued democracy.

He said he was happy to note that the president and prime minister of Turkey had been able to preserve democratic rule and assured the support of Sri Lanka and its people.

At least 2,800 military officers have been detained throughout Turkey after suspected coup plotters attempted to overthrow the government late Friday, using tanks and helicopters and blocking bridges and taking over some media outlets.

The Turkish government said on Saturday evening that the coup attempt had been thwarted and the situation was under control.

More than 200 people have been killed in the attempted coup, reports said. Enditem
U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump(R, front) and his running mate Indiana Governor Mike Pence(L, front) appeared for the first time in public together since Pence was named as Trump's running mate, in New York, July 16, 2016. Trump announced on Friday he had chosen Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

WASHINGTON, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The campaign of U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump unveiled a new logo on Saturday, one day after an original one was mocked widely on social media.

The campaign released a new logo on Friday after Trump announced that he had chosen Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate. The campaign replaced it with another one on Saturday after the original one was mocked widely online for appearing to be suggestive.

According to a fundraising email sent by the Trump campaign on Friday, part of the original logo featured an intertwined blue "T" and "P" with the letter "T" penetrating the loop of "P".

On Saturday however, a new logo appeared on the campaign's website, which only shows both Trump and Pence's family names above the slogan "Make America Great Again."

Speaking at a rally on Saturday, Trump said he chose Pence as his running mate to boost party unity.

"One of the biggest reasons I've chosen Mike, one of the reasons is party unity, I have to be honest," said Trump at a rally in New York.

Calling Pence his "first choice" as the running mate, Trump also touted Pence's job-creating credentials.

"This is the primary reason I wanted Mike -- other than that he looks very good, other than he's got an incredible family, and incredible wife," said Trump.

The pick of Pence as running mate came as Trump was scrambling to solidify the Republican base and win support from social conservatives.

Pence, 57, was a Republican lawmaker for 12 years and the third-highest-ranking member of the GOP in the House before becoming the governor of Indiana in 2013.

During his stint in Congress, he was assigned to the Foreign Affairs Committee, a credential which could make up for Trump's lack of foreign affairs experience in a competitive general election with former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party.

Once calling himself as "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order," Pence is also a beloved social conservative among the devout evangelical conservatives within the party.

Therefore, Trump's pick of Pence would also help to quell concerns among social conservatives that the New York billionaire developer is too liberal on social issues.
KIGALI, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The sanctions imposed against the Sudanese government by the United States are impacting negatively against women and youths, an African Union (AU) official has said.

Dr. Joseph Chilengi, the Presiding Officer of Economic Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC), an advisory organ of the AU, said on Saturday that the sanctions have denied women and youths' medicine and other basic requirements.

"More than 70 percent of Sudanese are youths who were born after the sanctions and were imposed, yet they continue to face the consequences that are not of their making," Chilengi said this during a media briefing on the sidelines of the ongoing African Union Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

In October 1997, the U.S. imposed comprehensive economic, trade, and financial sanctions against Sudan.

He said that the government of Sudan is unable to import medicine, and companies found selling to Sudan are penalized, an act that is affecting women and children.

Dr. Babikir Mohamed, a Sudanese Legislator said that heavy penalties are placed on companies found trading with the government, hence pushing them out of business and forcing them to relocate to other parts of the world.

He said that currently Sudan is unable to import agricultural equipments, spare parts for the national airline and equipment for the once vibrant sugar factories.

He attributed the latest two air accidents that involved the national carrier, the Sudan Airline, to lack of spare parts.

"Our sugar factories are currently performing at 40 percent, unusual margin that requires careful consideration since some factories are threatened with closure unless the sanctions are uplifted to allow importation of equipments," he added.

He said that the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that used to perform at 7 percent annually currently perform at 1 percent.

Chilengi also revealed that Africa is currently reviewing its relations with the International Criminal Court (ICC) with the aim of finding a solution to the suffering innocent people.

"If the ICC wants to arrest President Omar El Bashir, they should issue sanctions against him instead of creating unnecessary suffering on the innocent citizens," he said.

He observed that President Bashir's case is not a judicial case as purported but a political one that has been crafted by those opposed to Sudan's latest rise from oil industry.

Chilenge said that Africa is viewing the ICC differently because instead of being an independent court, it has become partisan and riddled with corruption and case fixing.

According to Chilenge, the European Union (EU) funding to the ICC stands at 75 percent, yet the court statutes state that no member should give support above 22 percent.

Chilenge said that there are plans to have a regional court to specialize in crimes against humanity in the continent.

A ministerial committee headed by the Ethiopian Foreign Minister is currently benchmarking globally to come up with the possibility of establishing a court in Africa. Enditem
The photo shows a Porter Airlines plane landing at the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport in Toronto, Canada. (Porter Airlines)

TORONTO, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Three people including two flight attendants were injured after a Porter Airlines flight hit severe turbulence prior to landing here on Saturday.

In a statement released to local media, the airline said Porter Airlines Flight 720 departing from Washington D.C. encountered the turbulence before landing at Toronto's Billy Bishop Airport at around 11 a.m. local time.

As a result, two flight attendants sustained "minor turbulence-related injuries" and were transported to hospital for treatment.

One passenger also required medical assistance on scene for a minor scrape sustained during the rough air.

There was a total of 61 people on board the Washington-Toronto flight. The airline makes multiple daily trips along the Dulles-to-Billy Bishop route.

A spokesperson for the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said they had secured the black box from the plane, and were waiting for more information before deciding whether or not a full investigation would be conducted.

Porter Airlines is a Toronto-based regional airline headquartered at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport on the Toronto Islands, offering short-haul flights to over 20 destinations within Canada and the United States.
by Lan Xi, Yan Feng, Tang Zhiqiang

BERLIN, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The Belt and Road Initiative opens up genuine opportunities for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to go global and thus benefits more people, Zhang Boli, academic of Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (CACMS), told Xinhua during a CACMS delegation's visit to Hanover Medical School (MHH).

The visit follows up the Action Plan of Sino-German Health Cooperation and its memorandum of cooperation signed during the state visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the fourth Chinese-German government consultation in Beijing.

Zhang said Europe boasts a long history and presents greater inclusion for natural medicine such as botanic drugs, and alternative therapies including TCM. There has been already much research in this regard. China has conducted TCM exchanges with Germany and Europe for years, forming a certain basis for TCM cooperation for both sides.

Zhang himself has been active in promoting academic exchanges in Germany and other European countries for many times. He said he noticed a clear trend over the past years: an increasing number of Europeans are taking a keen interest in TCM and gaining a deeper insight into its philosophy.

In the past, exchanges merely stayed at the level of getting to know each other and now, substantive cooperation at operational level in TCM is taking shape, he said.

With the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative picking up speed, both Chinese and German governments attach great importance to deepening cooperation in TCM, providing golden opportunity for TCM to go global, the Chinese academic said.

Zhang said that about the exchanges and cooperation in TCM between CACMS and MHH, both sides have found out areas to start with, including personnel training, scientific research and clinical practice.

Talking about the modernization of TCM, Zhang told Xinhua that outstanding medical researchers, represented by Nobel prize winner Tu Youyou, have made remarkable contributions to the healthcare cause of mankind.

Moreover, Zhang said talent training still remains a bottleneck for TCM development, urging efforts to "advance with the times" to cultivate more TCM talents.

The mode of combining academic education and master-disciple training system proves an effective way to address the problem of talent shortage, he said.
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The Pentagon said on Saturday Turkish officials had closed the airspace around a Turkish air base from which the U.S.-led coalition launched airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS).

"Turkish officials have stopped all flights into and out of Incirlik Air Base in the southwestern part of the nation. U.S. and coalition aircraft fly missions against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant from the base," said Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook in a statement.

"U.S. officials are working with the Turks to resume air operations there as soon as possible," said Cook, adding that all U.S. military personnel and civilians there were "safe and secure."

Turkey is a NATO ally for the United States and part of the U.S.-led coalition to fight IS.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday reiterated the U.S. "unwavering support" for the democratically-elected civilian government of Turkey in the aftermath of a coup attempt.

Obama made the remarks at a White House meeting with his national security and foreign policy advisers, where he received an update on the situation in Turkey, where reportedly at least 194 people were killed and 1,100 others wounded in the military coup attempt on Friday.

"The President's advisers apprised him of the most recent developments on the ground, and the President reiterated the United States' unwavering support for the democratically-elected, civilian Government of Turkey," the White House said in a statement.

Obama instructed his team to continue to work with their Turkish counterparts "to maintain the safety and well-being of diplomatic missions and personnel, U.S. servicemembers, and their dependents," the statement said.
THE HAGUE, July 16 (Xinhua) -- A few hundred Dutch Turks gathered on Saturday in the center of Rotterdam to demonstrate against the military coup attempt in Turkey.

The participants walked from the Wilhelmina Square in procession over the Erasmus Bridge, waving Turkish flags and shouting slogans against the military coup attempt which started on Friday night in Turkey. They also called for Turkish unity.

Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders interrupted his trip to Brazil and returned to the Netherlands after being notified on the events in Turkey, according to a ministry statement.

The statement said a crisis team has been established to monitor the developments and to respond to requests for help by Dutch citizens. Enditem
SKOPJE, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Macedonia will increase police and military presence at its borders in the coming period after the attempted coup in Turkey, according to recommendations from the Group for Assessment of the security situation made on Saturday.

The group, consisted of the main security agencies and bodies in the country, met on Saturday to evaluate the security situation in Macedonia after the turmoil in Turkey.

"The security situation in Macedonia is stable and peaceful for now. But it was agreed that the border patrols and the security at the border should be increased, in order to prevent any potential new migrant influx waves," Macedonian Center for Crisis Management announced.

Turkey's role was crucial in sealing off the Balkan route for migrant transit towards Western Europe in the past months. The crisis in Turkey increased the concern among the Balkan countries that new waves of migrants trying to push to Europe are possible.

"Macedonia strongly opposes any acts of violence and terror and expresses firm support to the democratic elected authorities in Turkey," stressed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Skopje in a written statement. This was confirmed by the Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov on Saturday as well.

"Republic of Macedonia supports the democratic elected Government of the Republic of Turkey, which as a member-country of NATO and an extremely important country in addressing all global challenges has proven itself as a huge friend and strategic partner for Macedonia. We support normalizing the situation in Turkey and we call upon respect for the democratic institutions, as well as avoiding any type of violence and bloodshed," Ivanov's Cabinet stated.

The Macedonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Saturday morning issued a warning to all Macedonian citizens to be extremely cautious when traveling to Turkey after the attempted military coup that happened in the country.

"All Macedonian nationals that are currently in Turkey should stay in safe locations. They shouldn't leave their hotel rooms or the objects where they are staying and should avoid mass gatherings on public locations," Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced.

Due to the high tourism season, a huge number of Macedonian citizens are currently on their vacation in Turkey.

Amid the warnings, the Macedonian Tourism Chamber encouraged citizens not to cancel their planned summer trips to Turkey.

"There are absolutely no threats to the security in the hotel resorts and vacation areas. According to our data, there are around 1,000 Macedonian tourists in Turkey at the moment. They are all safe and they are feeling fine," President of the Chamber Gjorgji Vchkov said at a press conference in Skopje. The press conference was scheduled because of the rising concern among Macedonian tourists about their travel safety in Turkey.

Vchkov explained that although regular flights from Skopje to Istanbul were cancelled on Saturday, there are no changes in the charter air traffic leading directly to the Turkish holiday resorts.

Additionally, around 300 primary school pupils from the Macedonian town Tetovo are in a scout camp near Istanbul. They are also safe at the moment, and the Macedonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is making attempts to bring the children back home as soon as possible, according to officials.
by Diao Ze, Gan Chun

BRUSSELS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- From engagement rings to extravagant jewelry, the Diamond District in the northern Belgian city of Antwerp is a top destination for diamond shopping in Europe.

Rome wasn't built in one day. What makes Antwerp the city of diamonds? Due to its tradition of craftsmanship, the city is acknowledged throughout the world as the trademark for diamond excellence.

"Nowadays people are buying things from wholesale.. We still make everything handmade," Mike Rombout, owner of Rudiam handmade Jewels company, told Xinhua.

Rombout inherited the company from his father, and the company represents two generations of jeweller-diamond dealers and has been at the heart of the Antwerp diamond center for more than 35 years.

The philosophy of the company is simple -- personal approach and everything has to be handmade, of supreme quality and tailored to the clients' needs, Rombout said.

He said that from drawing to ring-making, everything starts with the metal. "We make what the customers have asked for. We make drawing together with the customer, we choose the stone and discuss about the budget," he said.

At Rombout's boutique, clients can choose the model they like from the existing collections, which they can adjust according to their needs, or they can come by with the idea they already have.

However, the sharp competition on the diamond market is also putting pressure on companies who remained true to its values and purely handmade work. Some enterprises introduced machines to their production, so they are able to produce higher quantity for cheaper prices.

Rombout said in difficult times he would prefer to shut down the company other than start cheating on material or the way of production to stay afloat.

The Rombouts' business is one of 2,300 companies operating in the diamond sector.

Some 80 percent of diamond trade in the world is through Antwerp. The city is also the only city to have four diamond exchanges out of 30 in the world, and is the place for 84 percent of the global trade in rough diamonds and 50 percent of the trade in polished diamonds.

The Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) officially represents and coordinates the Antwerp diamond sector. It streamline the vast import and export flow of diamonds in and out of Antwerp.

"A diamond is always determined by its four C's, four characteristics. First you have the weight, one carat is 0.2 grams, then you have the color, the clarity and the cut. For the cut you have different shapes, but you also look at how well the polisher did his job," Barbara Descheemaecker, from the Antwerp World diamond Centre (AWDC), told Xinhua.

To achieve the final shape, diamond has to go from rough stone through polishing process. The designers and professional diamond cutters measure what form certain stones can be given.

Peter Bombeke, a third generation diamond cutter, has recently introduced the "dragon cut", which, based on Chinese lucky number eight, brings about sixty four facades for a diamond.

"The actual cut took me a couple of months... It is very shiny, more shiny than a brilliant. Because you have those facades, with more and extra detail, you get the shift in the light return, making it look much whiter that it really is," Bombeke told Xinhua.

Despite challenges from modern technology and machinery, the traditional craftmanship of processing diamonds in Antwerp is still among the most prestigious and advanced in the world. As long as people still see diamonds as a symbol of love or a way to demonstrate wealth, the city of diamonds will continue to shine.
SAN FRANCISCO, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Researchers have uncovered the exoskeleton of an insect in a piece of Baltic amber about 50 million years old, suggesting that the insect was frightened out of its skin as it was about to become forever entombed by oozing tree sap.

The findings, published in the recent issue of Fungal Biology by George Poinar, Jr., a researcher in the College of Science at Oregon State University (OSU) in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and an international expert in ancient life forms found in amber, also involved the first mushroom that has ever been found in Baltic amber.

"From what we can see in this fossil, a tiny mushroom was bitten off, probably by a rodent, at the base of a tree," Poinar said.

"An insect, similar to a walking stick, was probably also trying to feed on the mushroom. It appears to have immediately jumped out of its skin and escaped, just as tree sap flowed over the remaining exoskeleton and a hair left behind by the fleeing rodent."

Plants, insects and other material found in amber deposits offer details about ancient ecosystems, Poinar was quoted as saying by an OSU news release.

But on rare occasions such as this, as the amber came from near the Baltic Sea in what is now Germany, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia, they also show the interactions and ecology between different life forms and are invaluable in helping scientists to reconstruct the nature of ecosystems in the distant past.

The amber was formed, beginning as a viscous tree sap, in a large subtropical coniferous forest across much of northern Europe that lasted about 10 million years.

The exoskeleton seen in the amber is extremely fresh and shows filaments that would have disappeared if it had been shed very long before being covered by amber, Poinar said. The insect species is now extinct, as is the mushroom in the fossil.

In a climate much warmer than exists there today, the early angiosperms, or flowering plants, were starting to displace the gymnosperms, or cone-bearing evergreens that had previously been dominant.

"The tiny insect in this fossil was a phasmid, one of the kinds of insects that uses its shape to resemble sticks or leaves as a type of camouflage," Poinar said. "It would have shed its skin repeatedly before reaching adulthood, in a short lifespan of a couple months."

"In this case," he noted, "the ability to quickly get out of its skin, along with being smart enough to see a problem coming, saved its life."
A tiny insect, similar to a modern-day "walking stick," abandoned the mushroom it had probably been nibbling on and left its exoskeleton, or skin behind about 50 million years ago to avoid being entombed in the amber fossil. (Courtesy of Oregon State University)

SAN FRANCISCO, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Researchers have uncovered the exoskeleton of an insect in a piece of Baltic amber about 50 million years old, suggesting that the insect was frightened out of its skin as it was about to become forever entombed by oozing tree sap.

The findings, published in the recent issue of Fungal Biology by George Poinar, Jr., a researcher in the College of Science at Oregon State University (OSU) in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and an international expert in ancient life forms found in amber, also involved the first mushroom that has ever been found in Baltic amber.

"From what we can see in this fossil, a tiny mushroom was bitten off, probably by a rodent, at the base of a tree," Poinar said.

"An insect, similar to a walking stick, was probably also trying to feed on the mushroom. It appears to have immediately jumped out of its skin and escaped, just as tree sap flowed over the remaining exoskeleton and a hair left behind by the fleeing rodent."

Plants, insects and other material found in amber deposits offer details about ancient ecosystems, Poinar was quoted as saying by an OSU news release.

But on rare occasions such as this, as the amber came from near the Baltic Sea in what is now Germany, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia, they also show the interactions and ecology between different life forms and are invaluable in helping scientists to reconstruct the nature of ecosystems in the distant past.

The amber was formed, beginning as a viscous tree sap, in a large subtropical coniferous forest across much of northern Europe that lasted about 10 million years.

The exoskeleton seen in the amber is extremely fresh and shows filaments that would have disappeared if it had been shed very long before being covered by amber, Poinar said. The insect species is now extinct, as is the mushroom in the fossil.

In a climate much warmer than exists there today, the early angiosperms, or flowering plants, were starting to displace the gymnosperms, or cone-bearing evergreens that had previously been dominant.

"The tiny insect in this fossil was a phasmid, one of the kinds of insects that uses its shape to resemble sticks or leaves as a type of camouflage," Poinar said. "It would have shed its skin repeatedly before reaching adulthood, in a short lifespan of a couple months."

"In this case," he noted, "the ability to quickly get out of its skin, along with being smart enough to see a problem coming, saved its life."
TOKYO, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Of the illegal five-member arbitral tribunal on the South China Sea case, except for one designated by the Philippines, four were appointed by Shunji Yanai, former president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS).

Rightist, hawkish, close to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, pro-American, unfriendly to China ... these are the tags that people often associate with Yanai.

Observers said it was no strange that The Hague-based tribunal handling the South China Sea arbitration case unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government issued an ill-founded award on Tuesday and denied China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.

A DIPLOMAT STEPPING DOWN AMID SCANDAL

Yanai came from a diplomatic family in Japan. His father, a graduate from Tokyo University, had worked for the Japanese Foreign Ministry and had been Japan's ambassador to Colombia for a while until he was deported at the start of WWII. He quit the Foreign Ministry and practiced law after the war.

Thanks to his family background, Shunji Yanai went to elementary and middle schools also attended by the Japanese royal family, and was later admitted to Tokyo University to study law. He entered the Japanese Foreign Ministry after graduation, following his father's steps.

The younger Yanai became Japanese ambassador to the United States in 1999.

"As a senior official in the Japanese government Mr. Shunji Yanai is a rare breed. He is ... bold and sometimes controversial, and somehow gets away with things that would most likely cost someone else his career," said Fumiko Halloran in his review of Yanai's book titled "Rapid Changes in Diplomacy."

Yanai had to leave the Foreign Ministry along with three other officials amid a series of embezzlement scandals within the ministry.

After the end of his diplomatic career, Yanai became a professor of law at Chuo University in Tokyo.

A MASTERMIND BEHIND WIDELY OPPOSED SECURITY LAWS

A law graduate from Tokyo University, Yanai was considered by some observers as an expert on bypassing constraints of and warping Japan's postwar pacifist Constitution.

According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, when Yanai was director general of the Treaties Bureau of the Foreign Ministry during the 1990 Gulf War, he helped push through parliament an act that allowed Japan to send Self-Defense Forces abroad to assist in UN peacekeeping operations. In 1992, the Japanese government dispatched some 600 soldiers and 75 police officers to Cambodia for peacekeeping operations.

In 2007, during Abe's first term as Japanese prime minister, Yanai served as chairman of a panel set up to advise Abe on his plan to revise the country's Constitution to allow military actions overseas.

After Abe took office again in 2012, he relaunched his political agenda of revising the Constitution. It was also Yanai who in 2014 presented a report to Abe advocating lifting the ban on Japan sending its military overseas.

In 2015, Japan abandoned its 70-year pacifism by enacting controversial security laws that allow Japan to dispatch troops overseas to engage in armed conflicts for the first time in seven decades, despite outcries and protests from the public and neighboring countries victimized by Japan's military invasion during World War II.

THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR ORGANIZING BIASED ARBITRAL TRIBUNAL

Yanai became the first Japanese to be president of ITLOS on October 1, 2011. His new role raised concerns of countries who had maritime territorial disputes with Japan, including the Republic of Korea.

After the Philippines unilaterally initiated the arbitration case against China in 2013, a five-member arbitral tribunal was created by Yanai.

Due to the maritime conflicts and historical issues between China and Japan, as well as Yanai's political leanings, it is not surprising that Yanai generally chose arbitrators that were biased against China.

In August 2013, when he was still choosing arbitrators, Yanai reportedly stressed on an NHK TV program that Japan's islands are "under threat" and that Japan has "enemies" and needs to improve its military strength for safeguarding security.

"From the result of the arbitration, people can see that it was conducted by a bunch of people who knew very little about the South China Sea issues," said Motofumi Asai, a former official of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in charge of China affairs and a former colleague of Yanai.

Asai also pointed out that Yanai had close ties with Abe, and had served as chairman of an expert panel advising the prime minister on security laws.

"The arbitration was obviously conducted in accordance with the wills of the Abe administration," he said.

For Japanese political analyst Jiro Honzawa, the arbitration is not about truth but about politics. "The Philippines was abetted by the U.S. and Japan to apply for arbitration, because the latter two want to contain China."

He also criticized NHK and some other Japanese media for reporting untruthfully to "cover up for the right-wing administration."

"The arbitration was a trap set up by Japan and the U.S.," he wrote on his blog.
RIO DE JANEIRO, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Brazil's suspended President Dilma Rousseff on Saturday said the drive to impeach her was akin to Friday's failed military coup attempt in Turkey.

Both were attacks on democracy, she said.

"The attempted coup in Turkey is cause for concern. An elected government cannot be toppled by violence or legal tricks," Rousseff posted on Facebook.

Brazil's Senate voted to suspend Rousseff on May 12, pending an impeachment trial in August on charges of allegedly manipulating public-sector accounts.

She denies any wrongdoing, saying her impeachment was politically motivated by the right-wing opposition.

If two thirds of the 81 senators find her guilty, Rousseff will be stripped of the presidency, which is currently being held by her vice president, Michel Temer. Temer would then see through her term until Jan. 1, 2019.

"The impeachment should be repudiated in Brazil. Democracy means protecting the will of the people," said Rousseff.

On Friday, part of Turkey's army launched a failed coup to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leading to at least 161 deaths and the arrest of 2,839 members of the military.

In the wake of the coup, Brazil's interim government issued a communique urging all sides to refrain from violence and calling for "full respect for institutions and constitutional order" in Turkey.
LONDON, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Around 1,000 Chinese protesters from across Britain gathered here Saturday to take part in a mass demonstration to protest against the ill-founded award issued recently by an ad hoc tribunal concerning the South China Sea.

People of Chinese origin from all walks of life in Britain and from more than 50 communities came to the Chinatown in central London at around 2 p.m.(1300 GMT).

They marched through one of the city's busiest streets, Regent Street, to the embassies of the Philippines and the United States, holding banners saying "Arbitration Illegal Illegitimate Invalid," "Say No to Arbitration,""Settle Disputes in Genuine Bilateral Negotiation" and "Defend Our Sea Border, No More U.S. Interference.".

The arbitral tribunal with The Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration as its secretariat issued the award on July 12, sweepingly sided with the Philippines and denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea.

Chairman of the London Chinatown Chinese Association (LCCA) Chu Ting Tang noted in his speech that the arbitration case won the tacit support of the United States and Japan.

The government of former Philippine President Benigno S. Aquino III unilaterally initiated the arbitration against China in 2013, despite the agreement his country had reached with China on resolving their disputes in the South China Sea through bilateral negotiations.

Tang said a fair and valid arbitration process should be agreed on by both sides before it proceeds, adding that China was absent in this process.

The Philippines' unilateral move runs counter to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and runs against the general practice that arbitration shall be premised on state consent.

"We fully supported the action of the Chinese government in refusing to accept the ruling," he added.

He said the demonstration, initiated by his center on Thursday, had gained speedy and strong support from the Chinese communities and individuals in Britain.

"The South China Sea is part of China, and we cannot accept the arbitration. Thus, we are standing up to tell the people in Britain and the world, the overseas Chinese are also concerned about the South China Sea," said Peter Lam, global managing director of the Royal China Group.

Related:

South China Sea arbitration award has no impact on China's territorial sovereignty -- Chinese premier

ULAN BATOR, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Saturday that the South China Sea arbitration award will have no impact whatsoever on China's territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea.
KUALA LUMPUR, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Malaysian government reiterated its commitment on Sunday to seek the truth two years after the loss of Malaysian Airlines fight MH17.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said the downing of flight MH17 "was a criminal act that outraged the world and caused the loss of all 298 lives aboard."

"The Malaysian government continues all efforts to find a full and satisfactory explanation of the events that led to this tragedy," he said through his social network account.

On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed in eastern Ukraine. The plane was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.

Malaysian Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said his country remains wholly committed and determined in pursuit to bring justice to the criminals responsible for the loss of so many innocent lives.

The criminal investigations by a joint investigation team is expected to come out with preliminary conclusions on the forensic research conducted, including the type of weapon used and other pertinent details, by the later part of this year, Liow said in a statement.

He also called for strengthening international cooperation to improve security standards in civil aviation, including the implementation of real time global tracking of commercial aircraft as well as addressing the risks to civil aviation arising from conflict zones.
TOKYO, July 17 (Xinhua) -- An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.0 jolted the west Kanto region of Japan at 13:24 local time on Sunday, but no tsunami warning was issued, Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said.

The temblor, which measured 4 on the Japanese seismic scale which peaks at 7, was centered in Ibaraki Prefecture which borders the Pacific Ocean and is to the northeast of the nation's capital city of Tokyo.

The jolt could be felt in central Tokyo, but there were no immediate reports of damage, according to local media.
Pakistani human rights activists hold placards as they chant slogans during a protest in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, on May 30, 2014 (Xinhua/Jamil Ahmed)

ISLAMABAD, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Honor killing has claimed the life of another victim in Pakistan Friday, as a female social media celebrity known for posting controversial content was strangled by her brother.

Qandeel Baloch, 26, had a reputation for being Pakistan's first social media celebrity, and was also dubbed Pakistan's Kim Kardashian. She became a household name in the Islamic Republic in 2014 for posting bold pictures, videos or comments, which attracted criticism as well as support.

Her pictures, including some showing her in revealing clothes, were considered by many Pakistanis as "immodest," a view shared by her brothers, who had asked her to quit modelling.

Baloch's parents, who have been taken into custody, told local media that Baloch was killed in Punjab Province after an argument with her brother and her body was not found until the next morning.

Local media reported that Baloch had previously expressed fear for her safety, but her plea for better security was ignored by the authorities.

Honor killing is not uncommon in Pakistan as many people believe it's justified to punish a person who has brought shame to the family name. Victims of this tradition are mostly women. Enditem
KABUL, July 17 (Xinhua) -- About five militants of Haqqani militant group have been killed during a special operation in Afghanistan's eastern province of Khost, the command of Afghan Special Forces said on Sunday.

"The Afghan Special Operation Forces carried out an operation on a Haqqani militants' hideout in Spera District, Khost province on Friday. As a result five members of the group were killed and eight others detained," it said in a statement.

As a Taliban-linked group of militants, the Haqqani network mostly operating in eastern provinces and capital Kabul, has been responsible for many high-profile attacks against security forces.

The targeted militants were responsible for several direct attacks against Afghan security forces in the province, 150 km southeast of Afghan capital of Kabul, the statement added.

The security force also confiscated several rounds of AK-47 guns and a handful of hand grenades following the raid, according to the statement.

The network, which was designated as terrorist group by the United States in 2012, has yet to make comments.
KINGSTON, July 16 (Xinhua) -- An overloaded motor vehicle ran off the road and plunged into a river in Jamaica on Saturday, leaving at least six dead and another one missing.

Witnesses said the driver misjudged the turn to Flat Bridge before his vehicle plunged into the Rio Cobre river.

Preliminary investigation showed there were eight persons in the five-seat vehicle. But when the vehicle was recovered from the water, only five were found inside.

The five, along with another victim whose body was found later in the river, were sent to the hospital, where they were all pronounced dead. The police said it appears the victims drowned before help could reach them.

Currently, there is only one confirmed survivor, a 19-year-old young man. Investigators are still searching for the other passenger.
Police confront protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, the United States, on August 10, 2015. A state of emergency had been declared for the city of Ferguson on August 8 following the gun battle between police and protesters on August 7 night marking the anniversary of Michael Brown's death. (Xinhua/Jim Vondruska)

WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Following a series of high-profile police killings of black men, opinions on interracial relations in the United States have plunged to an all-time low, a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll has found.

The poll, which surveyed 1,003 random adults across the country through telephone, showed 63 percent of those surveyed were pessimistic about the future of race relations, while 32 percent believed they were "generally good."

"This is certainly the worst political climate that I've seen in my lifetime," University of Texas professor Peniel Joseph said.

Though representatives from different races agreed that something went wrong, there was no consensus on the cause of and solution to the friction between the races.

According to previous polls, the mood started to slide after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2013, both incidents in which white policemen shot unarmed young black men.

The prolonged debates that ensued have created a rift among the races and triggered social movements such as the "Black Lives Matter" campaign. Enditem
CHENGDU, July 17 (Xinhua) -- A 7-year-old giant panda gave birth to a cub Saturday at China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas (CCRCGP). Keepers do not know which male fathered the cub, or the gender of the new addition.

This is the mother's, Shuqin, first cub. She showed strong maternal and nursing instincts, by immediately cuddling the cub and hiding it from keepers after her delivery.

The keepers could only judge that the cub was healthy as they heard it crying.

Luo Bo, deputy director of the center, said Shuqin mated with two male pandas -- Jinke and Xiangge -- in March. On June 19, there was a noticeable change to her appetite, a sign of pregnancy on pandas.

Keepers have monitored Shuqin since July 13.

This is the first panda cub born as a result of natural mating in the center this year.

Most giant pandas in captivity are not good breeders. China has developed supportive breeding techniques to sustain the critically endangered species. However, only 24 percent of females in captivity give birth, posing a serious threat to the survival of the species.

Panda cubs born through supported breeding are often born in twins or even sometimes triplets.

It is currently panda reproduction season. Experts at the center said they have gone to great lengths to take care of the mothers and their cubs.

There are currently three other female pandas -- Xidou, Cuicui and Meixi -- showing signs of pregnancy in the center.

The center says it lets the pandas attempt natural mating first, and if they are not successful, they try supported breeding. Sometimes when a panda gets pregnant, keepers don't know whether it is from natural or supported mating. A cub's bloodline is later ascertained through a DNA test.
SHARAN, Afghanistan, July 17 (Xinhua) -- All the five members of an Afghan family died after roof of a house collapsed in the country's eastern province of Paktika overnight, the provincial governor said on Sunday.

"A couple and their three children were killed after the roof of their house collapsed in Sar Hawza district last night," governor Mohammad Elyas Wahdat told Xinhua.

The cause of the incident was aging of the muddy house, the governor noted.

Such incident is not uncommon in the country as most of the houses and shops in countryside has been built from mud and woods.

On Saturday, a 20-year-old man and a child were killed and two persons were wounded after a shop's roof collapsed in Tirin Kot, capital of southern Uruzgan province, according to officials.
NEW DELHI, July 17 (Xinhua) -- At least 17 people were killed and many other taken ill in northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after consuming spurious liquor, officials said Sunday.

The country made liquor was consumed by people on Friday evening at Etah district, about 287 km from Lucknow city, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.

"The death toll due to spurious liquor consumption in Etah has reached to 17, whereas 14 are still undergoing treatment at Saifai Medical College of Etawah and their condition is stated to be critical."

Reports said officials have issued a list of 17 deceased persons who died after consuming the spurious liquor. Police officials have arrested shop owner, believed to be accused of selling the spurious liquor to the people.

The state's Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav has announced suspension of several police officers and district excise officer, following the incident.

In Indian states of Bihar and Gujarat, alcohol is totally prohibited by law.

Spurious alcohol deaths are often reported in India, where people often drink cheap country made bootleg liquor.
CHENGDU, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Tibet Airlines, the autonomous region's first airline company, on Sunday launched its first international route linking southwest China's Chengdu with Samui Island, Thailand.

An Airbus 319 will fly three round-trips a week. The route takes three and half hours each way.

The route comes following increased travel to Thailand, with the country being the number one international destination for people from Chengdu and its surrounding areas in west China.

Although Chengdu has nine flights daily to Thailand, offering 11,000 seats a week, Tibet Airlines is the first to provide direct flights to the resort island of Samui.

Launched in 2011, Tibet Airlines flies to major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Hangzhou.
China disclosed its mid-year economic health check, featuring indicators that the economy is generally in good shape and on track for stable economic growth and restructuring. (Xinhuanet file photo)

BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua)-- China disclosed its mid-year economic health check, featuring indicators that the economy is generally in good shape and on track for stable economic growth and restructuring.

China's GDP in the second quarter (Q2) was a stable 6.7 percent. Although this is the lowest quarterly rate since the global financial crisis, it is within the government's range for 2016 of between 6.5 and 7 percent.

Infrastructure investment accelerated, lifting equipment manufacturing and boosting industrial production. Retail sales growth quickened on the back of a rebound in demand for consumer items. The economy is heading into the second half (H2) of this year with positive momentum.

The stabilization in growth did not come at the cost of reviving industries bogged down by over capacity, which had been a concern. Despite a pickup in steel output in June, investment growth has continued to slow. Steel investment also fell 4.3 percent in June, down from an increase of 4.5 percent in May. Housing inventory adjustment is in progress, with floor space for sale in June down 21 million square meters from March.

Meanwhile, the new economy is vibrant, new businesses are booming, and new growth momentum is accumulating. The service industry accounted for over 50 percent of GDP while high-tech production in the industrial sector grew 10.2 year on year. In addition, consumption contributed over 70 percent to overall GDP growth in the first six months.

Job data, unemployment rate and nationwide household disposable income per capita all showed that China is well on track to attain its growth target this year.

The further narrowing in PPI deflation and improvement in corporate profits, as well as solid growth momentum in new sectors will likely continue into H2. However, faced with a cooling housing market, weak private investment and external demand, H2 will be trickier to navigate than the previous half.

The world's largest developing economy, while facing continued downward pressure, still has huge potential, sufficient advantages and plenty of space for maneuvering.

China's current government debt ratio is low while the household savings rate is high, with ample policy tools at its disposal, from infrastructure investment to fiscal easing and monetary accommodation.

Most importantly, reforms on all fronts, especially on the supply side, will continue to yield positive effects on growth.

For example, centrally-administered state-owned enterprises (SOEs) reported better financial performances in H1 due to SOE reforms, and the government plans to accelerate M&A to bring their total number within 100 this year.

Meanwhile, the government is taking steps such as tax reduction to help lower the financial cost and investment risk premium for the private sector, and lower the entry barriers for private investment in growing industries.

China might experience some short-term pains during its economic transformation amid downward pressure and global market uncertainties, but the country is capable of keeping its economy on track for stable and sustainable growth.

Related:

China H1 economic growth in line with expectations: premier

ULAN BATOR, July 15 (Xinhua) -- The performance of the Chinese economy in the first half of the year was steady and in line with expectations, and China is confident of achieving its main full-year development targets, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said here on Friday.

"New economy is vibrant, new business forms are booming, and new growth momentum is accumulating," Li said in a keynote speech at the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Ulan Bator. Full Story

China's industrial output growth speeds up

BEIJING, July 15 (Xinhua) -- Growth of China's industrial output picked up in June mainly thanks to strong performance in the high-tech and equipment manufacturing sectors, official data showed Friday.
File photo taken on April 4, 2016 shows crew members of China's largest and most advanced patrol vessel Haixun 01 take part in a rescue drill on the South China Sea. (Xinhua/Xing Guangli)

CANBERRA, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Australian government should do all it can to de-escalate the tension in South China Sea and help find peaceful resolution to the disputes instead of dictating, said Linda Burney, Member for Barton at the Federal Parliament House of Representative.

In a statement on Friday, Burney said it is crucial that the Australian government do all it can to ensure that it does not add to the tension in the region.

"The focus needs to be on de-escalating tension and resolving disputes - it isn't the role of the Australian government to dictate these terms but we should be doing all we can to help find peaceful solutions."

"Any solution will need to involve the peaceful diplomatic cooperation of all the nations in the region - that includes China and Australia."

After an ad hoc arbitral tribunal issued on Tuesday a so-called award on the South China Sea arbitration, which was unilaterally initiated by the former government of the Philippines, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop warned China there would be "strong reputational costs" for ignoring the ruling.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang then urged Australia not to treat the illegal conclusion of an unlawful arbitration court as the international law.

"We hope that the Australian side will take international law seriously, instead of as a trifling matter," Lu said.

China respects international law - if any country violates it, the consequences will not be only reputational costs, Lu said, noting that China upholds the sanctity of the international law and rejects any action that violates the international law.
COLOMBO, July 17 -- At least 17 people including 12 foreign tourists were injured when they were attacked by wasps at a popular tourist site in Central Sri Lanka on Sunday, a local media report said here.

The visitors were attacked at the Sigiriya rock which is a popular tourist spot in the island nation. The injured had been rushed to the nearby Sigiriya and Dambulla Hospitals for treatment by authorities, the police said.

Wasp attacks are relatively frequent in different parts of Sri Lanka, where 57 people were hospitalized earlier this month after being attacked by wasps.

Last year a woman died while plucking tea in the Central highlands after she was attacked by wasps, media reports said.
ATHENS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had a telephone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday night, expressing support for democracy and constitutional legality, the Greek national news agency AMNA reported.

In the call initiated by Erdogan, the Turkish leader thanked the Greek government for its stance on Friday's failed military coup attempt in Turkey, according to AMNA.

Tsipras underlined that commitment to the values of democracy and constitutional legality is a matter of principle for the Greek people.

Regarding the eight Turkish military officers who landed a Turkish military helicopter in Alexandroupolis in northern Greece on Saturday, the Greek premier said that the procedures to examine their political asylum request will be brief, the report said.

Tsipras added that the Greek side will fully respect all provisions of the international law and conventions on the protection of human rights.

Eight Turkish officers landed a Black Hawk helicopter in Greece, asking permission for emergency landing on Saturday noon.

They have been detained at the local police precinct and were expected to be led before a local prosecutor on Sunday and court on Monday on charges of illegal entry into Greece and attempt to harm international relations, according to AMNA.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglou called them "traitors" and has requested their extradition during phone contacts with his Greek counterpart Nikos Kotzias on Saturday.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, Greek officials said that they agreed with local law experts who told local media that if the officers were indeed involved in the coup attempt, it would be unlikely to accept their asylum claims.

Law experts and officials estimate that the entire procedure will last two weeks.

Regarding the Black Hawk helicopter, Greece is cooperating with Turkey for its swift return.

On Saturday night, another Turkish military helicopter landed at Alexandroupolis airport with Turkish pilots aboard, Greece's defense ministry said, adding that all necessary checks were carried out on Sunday so that the helicopter will return to Turkey most likely by sunset.
WASHINGTON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday denied any U.S. role in Turkey's failed coup attempt, while warning about such accusations' harm to relations.

In a phone conversation with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Kerry received an update on events in Turkey, and was told that the Turkish government remains in control of state institutions.

The phone talk was held amid Turkey's accusations of a U.S.-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, for plotting the coup, while demanding Gulen's extradition by the U.S. government.

Kerry warned that "public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," but adding that the United States would entertain an extradition request on condition that Turkey proves wrongdoing by Gulen.

The secretary of state called for"restraint by the Turkish government and respect for due process -- and its international obligations -- as it investigates and uncovers additional information about those involved."

He reiterated U.S. support for the "democratically-elected, civilian government and democratic institutions," making clear that the United States would be willing to provide assistance to Turkish authorities investigating into the coup attempt. Cavusoglu thanked the U.S. for its support.

The two officials also discussed Turkey's importance as both a NATO ally and a key member of the coalition to defeat the Islamic State (IS), while stressing the need to "stay focused on ensuring operational support to those efforts continue unabated."

On Friday, part of Turkey's army launched a failed coup to oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which reportedly at least 265 people were killed and 1,440 others were wounded.

After the coup, Turkey imposed a security lockdown at the Incirlik Air Base, where the U.S.-led coalition launched airstrikes on the IS in Syria. U.S. officials were reportedly working with the Turks on Saturday to resume air operations in the base as soon as possible.

U.S. President Barack Obama earlier on Saturday also reiterated the U.S. "unwavering support," and called for joint efforts against terrorism.
JERUSALEM, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Israeli police said Sunday they thwarted a bomb attack at Jerusalem's light rail by a Palestinian youth.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that the suspect was arrested while he was trying to board the rail in Jaffa Road in downtown Jerusalem after he raised suspicion of a security guard.

The guard said the suspect, identified as a 20-year-old resident of the West Bank, was standing near a rail stop, holding a bag in his hand. The guard ordered him to open his bag and saw it contains explosives, according to Samri.

Samri said that after police had arrested the youth, they found "several pipe bombs inside his bag."

The area was closed to traffic and pedestrians, and the rail was stopped for more than an hour, creating heavy congestions throughout the city.

A ten-month-long Palestinian uprising has seen the death of at least 216 Palestinians and 34 Israelis.
WINDHOEK, July 17 (Xinhua) -- It all seemed like a dream for Hanna Hipangelwa, a Namibian student, when she flew to Beijing for an exciting summer camp.

In China, she spent 15 days at the China University of Geosciences, Beijing (CUGB), which was the hosting university that provided summer campers from Namibia with various events in terms of language learning and culture exploration.

Hanna, a grade 11 from Emmanuel Shafidi, a secondary school situated in the heart of Katutura, a township of capital Windhoek, had never been outside the borders of the country, let alone the continent.

"I'm still dreaming right now. I had never been on a plane before, let alone go to a country where I got exposed to in-depth Chinese language and culture, with the people, who grew up and still live there," she said in an interview with Xinhua.

Hanna was one of the many students from Namibia who had excelled at the Confucius Institute at her secondary school.

Through her perseverance and interest in Chinese culture and language, she managed to qualify for the Confucius Institute Summer Camp for Secondary Students.

Ever since the first setting up of Chinese Teaching Site in one secondary school, there are now five Chinese Teaching Sites in five secondary schools now and registered learners are more than 120.

"I can safely say that I polished on my mandarin and can testify that China has the most understanding people and best food ever," she said.

Like Hanna, another Student, from Emmanuel Shifidi Secondary School, could not wait to reveal how the summer camp was for him.

"Since the camp, I have been able to speak and express my self more in mandarin since we were offered 30 hours of language learning which specified in several topics matching with the theme of culture exploration. I learnt more language phrases and improved my language a notch," he said.

In other interviews with students from a different school, A. Shipena Secondary also located in Katutura, Lucia Hikarare, a grade 12 learner said, "What I learned during the two weeks was amazing."

"I learned how to do Chinese paint, which is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world, painting in the traditional style," she said.

The students also managed to do calligraphy, the visual art related to writing, which they executed with a broad tip instrument.

Unlike the other students, two brothers, Saad Ndatipo and Simson Ndatipo, managed to capture China in it's true form as a majestic country in terms of the environment and sceneries.

"The place was so green and Beijing is a very clean place. We thought we would come across a crowded city, but to our surprise it was a different experience all together," they said.

"China should not be underestimated as it is very advanced, and hope one day I will be able to further my education in this country. The museums are great and we learned more tones in mandarin and now we can safely speak more fluently," Saad said.

Furthermore, Simson said, when he had enrolled for the Chinese classes in Namibia, he wanted to learn more about the Chinese Culture and language and the summer camp did more than that. Now he can proudly say he is surely mastering the culture and language.

Campers also visited Hanban, the Headquarters of Confucius Institute, where they were introduced Chinese drama and development of Chinese characters with the aid of modern technology. The most exciting events for all the students was visiting of the Great Wall, Tian Anmen Square, Forbidden City, Bird Nest Stadium and Water Cube Stadium.

Most of the student who went on the summer camp said they aspire to do different courses at the Universities in China and hope after they finish with their secondary education, they would like to go to their many institutions to learn so that they can use what they would have learned to make Namibia better.

Currently in Namibia, the Chinese Language is not under curriculum of local secondary school as an examined subject, but the number of learners is increasing rapidly and more schools indicate their willingness of setting up Chinese Teaching Sites.
MANAMA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Bahrain's High Civil Court on Sunday ordered the closure of Bahrain's main opposition group, Al Wefaq National Islamic Society and have its assets liquidated.

The society was dissolved following request by the Justice, Islamic Affairs and Endowments Ministry.

The court found that Al Wefaq was "inciting violence, called for participation in illegal rallies and demonstrations which could have led to sectarianism and deviated from its role as a political society."

"The court has ordered that Al Wefaq National Islamic Society to be dissolved and liquidate its assets," said one of the judges following the court verdict

Lawyers representing the society failed to show up in the court on Sunday, but can lodge an appeal against the court ruling.

Al Wefaq was suspended on June 14, which its assets were frozen and offices were shut down after being taken to court over a number of offences.

The society's Secretary General Shaikh Ali Salman is serving nine years in prison for seeking to change Bahrain's government by force, inciting others to break the law, spreading sectarian hate and insulting a government body.
ANKARA, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- People gather to protest the coup attempt in Ankara, Turkey, July 16, 2016. At least 161 people were killed and 1,440 others wounded in the coup attempt, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday. (Xinhua/Mustafa Kaya)

BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- After a failed military coup attempt in Turkey on Saturday which had reportedly claimed at least 161 lives and wounded 1,440 others, the international community has expressed support for the legitimately elected government and concern over the "spiral of violence."

CALL FOR RULE OF LAW

The United Nations, the United States and many others openly support the current Turkish government.

"I strongly condemn the attempt from groups in the armed forces to overthrow the government of Turkey and express my sincere condolences for the lives lost during the coup attempt," President of the UN General Assembly Mogens Lykketoft said on Saturday in a statement issued by his spokesman.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Saturday reiterated the "unwavering support" of the United States for the democratically elected civilian government of Turkey.

In addition, Britian, Canada, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Iran, Pakistan and many others are among the countries applauding the return of rule of law in Turkey.

Apart from an official statement, thousands of Hamas movement supporters rallied Saturday in the streets of the Gaza Strip against the failed coup in Turkey and in support of Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

A few hundred Dutch Turks gathered on Saturday in the center of Rotterdam to demonstrate against the coup attempt in Turkey. Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders interrupted his trip to Brazil and returned to the Netherlands after being notified of the events in Turkey, according to a ministerial statement.

TRICKY U.S.-TURKEY RELATIONS

"I asked you previously either to deport him or surrender him to Turkey," Turkish President Erdogan said while again calling for the extradition of the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara believes is behind the military coup. "I told you that he is considering the coup d'etat, but you didn't listen."

In the statement apparently addressed to Obama, one can easily sense somewhat of a complaint.

Moreover, Washington needs to clear the suspicion that it has played a role in the Turkish coup.

In a phone conversation with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said that "public insinuations or claims about any role by the United States in the failed coup attempt are utterly false and harmful to our bilateral relations," U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement.

After the coup, Turkey sealed off the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, where the U.S.-led coalition launched airstrikes against the terror group Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

Turkey and the United States were NATO allies in fighting terrorism, but the relations between the two have become tricky since Turkey recently repaired its relationship with Moscow, as Erdogan issued an apology to Russian President Vladimir Putin last month for shooting down a Russian warplane last fall.

"Please meet our request if we are strategic partners," Erdogan said in remarks delivered in Istanbul.

In response, Kerry "urged restraint by the Turkish government and respect for due process -- and its international obligations -- as it investigates and uncovers additional information about those involved."

Speaking earlier in Luxembourg, Kerry said the United States would consider Turkey's request for Gulen's extradition on condition that Turkey proves the cleric's wrongdoing.

In another development, Gulen was reported claiming he had no knowledge of the plot at his Pennsylvania compound, indicating potentially hard talks between Ankara and Washington.

DOMESTIC SITUATION

Even though the Turkish government had regained control of the country, calm and order remain to be restored there.

The United States on Saturday issued a warning for its citizens not to travel to Turkey. Moreover, it has suspended all flights between the United States and Turkey. Some other international carriers also canceled their service linking Turkey with the outside world.

In Turkey, as many as 2,839 Turkish officials and soldiers are now detained over suspected involvement in the failed coup, but Erdogan stated that "the Turkish army does not belong to the parallel structure."

The European Union, Russian and Italy all expressed similar concerns in the aftermath of the coup about a dangerous spiral of violence.

Thousands of protesters gathered Saturday in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir to protest the coup attempt, Hurriyet News reported.

Following the coup attempt in the country on Friday, Turkish officials called on the nation to continue to protest the coup attempt in squares and streets.

Related:

Turkey closes airspace from which anti-IS airstrikes launched: Pentagon

WASHINGTON, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The Pentagon said on Saturday Turkish officials had closed the airspace around a Turkish air base from which the U.S.-led coalition launched airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS).

"Turkish officials have stopped all flights into and out of Incirlik Air Base in the southwestern part of the nation. U.S. and coalition aircraft fly missions against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant from the base," said Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook in a statement. Full story

Turkey confirms 3 top commanders held hostage saved and sound

ANKARA, July 16 (Xinhua) -- Three top commanders who were held hostage by the Gulenist coup attempters were saved on July 16, Defense Minister Fikri Isik announced on Saturday night.
A file photo shows women walk at a market in Khartoum, capital of Sudan. (Xinhua/Mohamed Khader)

KIGALI, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The sanctions imposed against the Sudanese government by the United States are impacting negatively against women and youths, an African Union (AU) official has said.

Dr. Joseph Chilengi, the Presiding Officer of Economic Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC), an advisory organ of the AU, said on Saturday that the sanctions have denied women and youths' medicine and other basic requirements.

"More than 70 percent of Sudanese are youths who were born after the sanctions and were imposed, yet they continue to face the consequences that are not of their making," Chilengi said this during a media briefing on the sidelines of the ongoing African Union Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

In October 1997, the U.S. imposed comprehensive economic, trade, and financial sanctions against Sudan.

He said that the government of Sudan is unable to import medicine, and companies found selling to Sudan are penalized, an act that is affecting women and children.

Dr. Babikir Mohamed, a Sudanese Legislator said that heavy penalties are placed on companies found trading with the government, hence pushing them out of business and forcing them to relocate to other parts of the world.

He said that currently Sudan is unable to import agricultural equipments, spare parts for the national airline and equipment for the once vibrant sugar factories.

He attributed the latest two air accidents that involved the national carrier, the Sudan Airline, to lack of spare parts.

"Our sugar factories are currently performing at 40 percent, unusual margin that requires careful consideration since some factories are threatened with closure unless the sanctions are uplifted to allow importation of equipments," he added.

He said that the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that used to perform at 7 percent annually currently perform at 1 percent.

Chilengi also revealed that Africa is currently reviewing its relations with the International Criminal Court (ICC) with the aim of finding a solution to the suffering innocent people.

A file photo shows protestors take part in a rally supporting Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir in Khartoum, capital of Sudan, and protesting the International Criminal Court (ICC)'s arrest warrant against Beshir. (Xinhua/Zhai Xi)

"If the ICC wants to arrest President Omar El Bashir, they should issue sanctions against him instead of creating unnecessary suffering on the innocent citizens," he said.

He observed that President Bashir's case is not a judicial case as purported but a political one that has been crafted by those opposed to Sudan's latest rise from oil industry.

Chilenge said that Africa is viewing the ICC differently because instead of being an independent court, it has become partisan and riddled with corruption and case fixing.

According to Chilenge, the European Union (EU) funding to the ICC stands at 75 percent, yet the court statutes state that no member should give support above 22 percent.

Chilenge said that there are plans to have a regional court to specialize in crimes against humanity in the continent.

A ministerial committee headed by the Ethiopian Foreign Minister is currently benchmarking globally to come up with the possibility of establishing a court in Africa.
DAMASCUS, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian army completely cut off the last remaining rebel-supply route in Syria's northern province of Aleppo, besieging thus the rebel-held areas inside the city, a monitor group reported on Sunday.

The Syrian forces backed by the Lebanese Hezbollah group severed the Castillo road in the northern countryside of Aleppo, which was the last rebel supply route linking northern Aleppo with rebel-held areas inside the city itself.

Now, the rebel-controlled districts in the eastern part of Aleppo city have become completely besieged, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Syrian forces have been on an offensive to close off Castillo since late last month.

The aim was to isolate rebel-held towns in the northern countryside of Aleppo from rebel-held areas inside Aleppo city.

Throughout the first two weeks of July, the rebels, mainly the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front, have unleashed repetitive attacks to break the government troops' offensive, but failed to curb the momentum of the Syrian army.

Aleppo, strategically located near the borders with Turkey, is Syria's largest city and once an economic hub. It has been a focal point of clashes between the Syrian army and the rebels.

In the summer of 2012, thousands of armed militants stormed residential districts of Aleppo from its countryside, striking the economic nerves of the Syrian government, which has repeatedly accused Turkey of supporting the rebels for undeclared interests in Aleppo.

The rebels captured several districts in eastern Aleppo city and tried repeatedly to expand their presence to government-controlled areas in the west.

The rebels laid siege to western Aleppo districts after cutting the international road to Aleppo in 2014, a siege broken later by the Syrian army, with the help of Hezbollah.

Military experts say the initial aim of the new Syrian army's battles in Aleppo is to lay a siege on the rebel-held areas and cut off their supply lines to force a surrender.

Another aim is to ensure the security of government-controlled areas in western Aleppo and to prevent the militant groups from blocking the main road connecting Aleppo with the Syrian coast and other provinces in central and southern Syria.

Observers say the Syrian military campaign also aims to recapture areas in the northern and southern countryside of Aleppo in the face of Turkey's perceived attempts to establish a safe zone in northern Syria.
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (C) attends a meeting with African leaders in Kigali, capital of Rwanda, on July 16, 2016. Ban Ki-moonand Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on Saturday called for no new fightings between rival army factions in South Sudan. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)

KAMPALA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday pushed a strong message for no new fighting between the two rival army factions in South Sudan.

In a state house statement issued here, Museveni and Ban said despite receiving unconditional support regionally and internationally, President Salva Kiir and Vice President Riek Machar have squandered the good will that was so generously given at the birth of the new nation.

Museveni proposed three issues that need to be immediately handled during the transitional period, which includes a regional protection force, for Machar who does not trust South Sudan army, SPLA for his protection, no new fighting in Juba and working towards elections and democracy as soon as possible.

"Deal with them carefully and work towards peace and elections. Votes will force them into alliances. Democracy will force them to work together. Now they know they are not accountable to the people," said Museveni on the sidelines of the ongoing African Union (AU) Heads of States summit in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

Museveni's recommendations follow Ban's proposals to the UN Security Council to send a strong message to the warring factions in South Sudan including: imposing an arms embargo, sanctions on the people responsible for the violence and fortifying and strengthening the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).

Ban said the violation of the ceasefire agreement by the two rival leaders makes the UN position very difficult and called on President Museveni, who is the guarantor of South Sudan peace process alongside the AU and Intergovernmental Authority on Development, to send out a clear unified message of no more fighting.

However, Museveni disagreed with the proposal to impose an arms embargo, saying this would create a vacuum and plunge the newest nation in the world in further chaos like was the case in Somalia.

A file photo shows Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni speaking at an international ivory summit in Central Kenyan town of Nanyuki, on April 29, 2016. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)

"I don't agree with the proposal on the arms embargo. What is happening in South Sudan is sectarian politics where one partisan community is fighting the other. When you impose an embargo on South Sudan you destroy the local force on which you need to build a strong integrated army," said Museveni.

Museveni said with a well-grounded and facilitated timetable, there is the need for integration of forces, a fund for resettlement and rehabilitation of demobilized militias and soldiers.

Museveni and Ban's meeting follows the recent fighting between government and anti-government forces in Juba.

The clashes left some 272 military officers, including 33 civilians dead, according to the South Sudan Health Ministry.
BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese mainland official on Sunday warned that recent behavior of Taiwan authorities had increased uncertainty in the region.

"We have noticed that the current Taiwan authorities attempted to sideline and break off political, economic and cultural links between the two sides of the Strait through certain policies and actions," said Zhang Zhijun, head of the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, at the fifth World Peace Forum in Beijing.

This situation has led to suspension of cross-Strait communication mechanisms and increased uncertainty and risks, Zhang said.

The two sides have suspended the regular mechanism between cross-Strait affairs departments, as well as the consultation mechanism between the mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) and the Taiwan-based Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF).

Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the island's leadership election in January and took office in May.

Taiwan's current leader and her administration has not recognized the 1992 Consensus, which upholds both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one China, shaking the political foundation for cross-Strait interaction, Zhang said.

The 1992 Consensus clarified the nature of cross-Strait relations and laid a solid foundation for cross-Strait ties and stability in the region, he said.

Regardless of the political parties in Taiwan and their past opinions, once they uphold the 1992 Consensus and identify with its core value, the mainland will develop exchanges with them, he said.

Zhang also called on the international community and other countries to continue to support the one-China policy and China's effort to safeguard peace and stability across the Strait and realize national reunification.
DHAKA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Bangladeshi law enforcers Sunday seized a large quantity of explosives from a suspected militant hideout believed to be used by the Spanish cafe attackers in the capital.

"We've come to know that the perpetrators of the July 1 terror attack had used the house," a Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) official told Xinhua.

The official who did not like to be named said Nurul Islam, house owner, has been arrested for not heeding police's instruction about collecting information about tenants while renting out houses or flats.

He said no one was in the house during the raid on Sunday morning.

According to the official, Police have found handmade grenade, black dresses and some other equipment from in the house.

Hours before the raid in Dhaka's downtown Mirpur area, police had arrested the acting Pro-Vice Chancellor of the country's top private North South University Professor M Gias Uddin Ahsan and two others for renting his flat to militants without verification.

Several months before the July 1 Spanish cafe attack in Dhaka's Gulshan diplomatic area, cohorts of the attackers reportedly rented Ahsan's flat in Dhaka's posh Bashundhara area near diplomatic enclave Baridhara.

DMP have long been urging house owners in Dhaka not to rent out their houses to any strangers and requested every house owner to provide all necessary information about their tenants to the nearby police station.

Gulshan attackers' other fellows who also lived in the flat have fled from it after the terror attack in Spanish restaurant in which 22 people including 18 foreigners and two police officers were killed, said a police official.
QALA-E-NAW, Afghanistan, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Up to nine Taliban militants were killed as clash flared up in Jawand district of the western Badghis province on Saturday, provincial police chief Abdul Rauf Taj said Sunday.

"The clash erupted after Taliban rebels attacked security checkpoints outside main bazaar in Jawand district yesterday afternoon and police retaliated killing nine rebels, forcing others to flee," Taj told Xinhua.

Taliban commander Sheikh Ahmad who had also served as shadow deputy governor for Badghis province was injured in the firefight which lasted for some 10 hours, the official added.

However, the official didn't say if there were casualties on security personnel.

Taliban outfit has yet to make comment on the report.
Somali militarysoldiers attend the 56th anniversary ceremony of the establishment of the National Army in Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, April 12, 2016. (Xinhua/Faisal Isse)

MOGADISHU, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Somali security forces and African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops have arrested 10 Al-Shabaab militants and recaptured four bases during an operation conducted in Lower Shabelle region of southern Somalia.

Minister of Information, Culture and Tourism Mohamed Abdi Hayir told journalists in Mogadishu on Sunday that the Horn of Africa has stepped up efforts of local security forces and AMISOM to defeat terrorist groups in the country.

Hayir said the security operation which was conducted on Saturday evening was very successful in eliminating terror threats in the country.

"Our national army, accompanied by AMISOM conducted operations and recaptured four Al-Shabaab bases, including an illegal detention center and administrative building in Beled Amin, Lower Shabelle region of Somalia," the minister said.

He noted that the security forces will continue their operation in order to eliminate the threat posed by terrorists groups in Somalia.

"The security operation resulted in our security forces arresting nearly 10 suspected al-Shabaab terrorists," Hayir added.

The minister urged the security forces to continue helping needy people during such operations in the country.

"Somalia forces have retaken the buildings and disrupted Al-Shabaab's operations with no resistance. Our forces also conducted awareness and humanitarian needs meetings with nearby village elders and passed out much needed medical supplies to the community," he added.

The minister said the illegal detention station in Beled Amin was used to terrorize and illegally tax the people of the town.

"Al-Shabaab works to strike fear in the local people, yet they run in fear of the Somalia National Army (SNA) and AMISOM. This is definitely a victory for our forces and for the people of Lower Shabelle. This yet again proves that the SNA is a strong military force prepared to take the fight to Al-Shabaab," Hayir said.
YANGON, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi held talks with non-signatory armed groups to the Nationwide Cease fire Accord (NCA) for the first time in Yangon Sunday on the country's peace process.

The non-signatory armed groups are represented by the United Nationalities Federal Council( UNFC)'s Delegation for Political Negotiation (DPN).

The meeting at the National Reconciliation and Peace Center (NRPC) came ahead of a four-day ethnic summit planned for July 26-29 in Maijayan, northernmost Kachin state, controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO).

Aung San Suu Kyi, who is also chairperson of the NRPC and leading the government delegation, had discussions with the DPN, headed by U N'Ban La, chairman of the UNFC.

U N' Ban La is from the KIO, while other key DPN delegation members went to U Say Htin of the Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP) and Khun Abel Thut of the New Mon State Party (NMSP).

Other members from the government side are Dr. Tin Myo Win, chairman of the Preparatory Committee for Holding the 21st Century Panglong Ethnic Conference, and U Kyaw Tint Swe, Minister of the State Counselor' Office.

U Hla Man Shwe, member of the Panglong Conference Preparatory Committee ,claimed that the gathering was cordial but produced no tangible result.

According to the decision of the July 8 Chiangmai meeting involving both signatories and non-signatories, the upcoming four-day Maijayan ethnic summit, to be attended by 55 ethnic armed groups, will lay down a common stance in preparation for attending the government-sponsored Panglong Conference slated for late August in Nay Pyi Taw.

The Panglong Conference Preparatory Committee decided to allow the NCA non-signatories to join the Panglong Conference to ensure access for them to political dialogue.

Aung San Suu Kyi has outlined the policy guidelines for the peace process which include allowing non-signatory groups to the Nationwide Cease fire Accord (NCA) to join the Panglong Conference, relaxation of restriction on inviting political parties, that do not hold a parliamentary seat, to the conference and functions of the National Reconciliation and Peace Center (NRPC) in dealing with international donors and their assistance to the peace process.

Myanmar former government and eight ethnic armed groups out of 15 signed the NCA on Oct. 15, 2015 and there remains seven other armed groups who are yet to sign the NCA.
KABUL, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The visiting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of U.S. army General Joseph Dunford met President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani here on Sunday and reassured support to Afghanistan, a statement of Arg or Presidential Palace released here said.

"General Dunford reassured his country's enduring support to Afghanistan particularly to the Afghan security forces during the meeting," the statement added.

During the meeting which held in Arg, matters relating mutual interests including situation in Afghanistan and enhancing military cooperation were discussed, the statement asserted.

The top U.S. military officer in the meeting also praised Afghan security forces role in providing security for their country, saying the Afghan Special Forces could be among the best institutions in the region.

In the meeting, President Ghani termed terrorism as a threat to stability of the region and the world at large, and called for joint cooperation against terrorists.

General Dunford also met with Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah earlier on Sunday and exchanged views on matters relating mutual interests.

Earlier on July 12 U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited Afghanistan and reassured support to the conflict-hit country.

The NATO and U.S. forces completed their combat mission in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, after 13 years of military presence in the country.

Nearly 13,000 foreign forces are currently stationed in Afghanistan within the framework of the NATO-led Resolute Support (RS) mission to help Afghan forces in the field of training and advising and backing Afghan forces in the war on insurgents.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan battled to regain control over Turkey on July 16, 2016 after a coup bid by discontented soldiers, as signs grew that the most serious challenge to his 13 years of dominant rule was faltering. After a night of drama and bloodshed, at least 90 people had died and more than 1,150 people were wounded, according to state-run news agency Andalou. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

CAIRO, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Egypt didn't make any attempt to block the UN Security Council resolution condemning the attempted coup in Turkey, Egyptian Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its facebook page late Saturday night.

"Egypt feel shocked by some foreign media reports accusing Egypt of blocking the UN resolution, which is not true," the statement said.

"Egypt just proposed some adjustments and the resolution is still under discussion," it added.

The United States proposed Saturday a draft statement to the UN Security Council, mainly to condemn the attempt by a military faction in Turkey on Friday to overthrow the Turkish government. Such Security Council resolutions require unanimous approval from the 15-member group.

At the same day, some foreign media accused Egyptian government its attempt to "block" the resolution, because of the "particularly tense" relations between Egypt and the Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Egypt's official news paper Al-ahlam reported on its website that the spokesperson of Egyptian foreign ministry said, "Egypt have reservations about the way part of the statement was phased, but not to object the content."

Earlier on Saturday, Turkish authorities announced that they have regained control of the country after thwarting the attempt by the military faction late Friday night to seize power.

At least 161 people were killed and 1,440 others wounded in the coup attempt, Turkey's Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in the announcement.
MINSK, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Belarusian Foreign Ministry has strongly condemned the military coup attempt in Turkey and expressed support to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government.

Belarus followed the news about the military coup attempt in Turkey with great concern and anxiety, the ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

Minsk is in full solidarity with the Turkish leadership and regards these acts as treacherous attacks on the people and the legally elected authorities of Turkey, the statement added.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko sent a message of encouragement and solidarity to Erdogan on Saturday.

The Belarusian Foreign Ministry has recommended that Belarusian citizens refrain from making trips to Turkey till the situation there stabilizes.
by Peter Mutai and Zhu Shaobin

KIGALI, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The African Union Commission programs and peace missions will be funded by the 54 member countries with effect from June 2017, Rwandese Finance Minister Claver Gatete has said.

Gatete said on Sunday that the Heads of States approved the taxing a levy of all eligible goods at a rate of 0.2 percent.

This will avail the AU 1.2 billion U.S. dollars per year that will replace the almost 70 percent of external donor funding, Gatete said on the sidelines of the ongoing AU Summit in Kigali, Rwanda.

He said that the earmarked collection of 1.2 billion U.S. dollars surpasses the previous budget of 427 million that was allocated for 2015/2016.

He disclosed that the amount will be collected by the national government revenue authorities and will be deposited in an account that will be opened in all central banks in the continent.

He said that the amount will fund 75 percent of the programs and 25 percent of peace missions in the continent.

Gatete said under the new mechanism, each sub-region is expected to raise 65 million U.S. dollars from the arrangement that will amount to 320 million, an amount that will be used in peace missions.

"For the first time, the long awaited plan to sustainably fund AU activities 100 percent has become a reality," Gatete added.

He said that the mechanism has been in discussion for over 15 years following a revelation that some countries default to pay or delay their monthly fee hence forcing the continent body administrators to ask for foreign funding.

He said that the formula has been working in the Economic Community of West Africa States.
LHASA, July 17 (Xinhua) -- An avalanche in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region on Sunday morning buried nine people, local authorities said.

Snow up to eight meters deep fell on a grazing point some 300 km from the seat of Rutog County, Ngari Prefecture, at around 11 a.m., according to the prefectural government.

The local government has dispatched rescuers and equipment to the scene.

Rutog County is in the northwestern part of Tibet, with an average elevation of 4,500 meters (about 14,800 feet).
HUANGMEI, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- The aerial photo taken on July 17, 2016 shows a breached dyke on Kaotian River in Dingzijie Village of Huangmei County, central China's Hubei Province. A dyke breach occured here around 3:00 a.m. on Sunday. The local government has transfered local villagers to safe areas while blocking the breach. (Xinhua/Xiong Qi)

WUHAN, July 17 (Xinhua) -- A dike in central China's Hubei Province breached Sunday afternoon, causing substantial flooding and resulting in the relocation of residents, local authorities said.

Around 200 residents from two districts in Wuhan City had been transferred prior to and after the breach, which happened at a flood detention basin at 12:50 p.m., the local flood control office said.

More than 1,000 rescuers have been dispatched to the scene. So far, they have rescued over 70 people trapped by the rising flood waters.

The area has cut off power and natural gas supplies while preparations are being made to fill the breach.
Florian Paillard (L) listens as his tutor Cai Shengchao explains the human's meridian system at the Acupuncture and Moxibustion Hospital of Anhui University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province, Feb 13, 2012. (Xinhua/Liu Junxi)

by Lan Xi, Yan Feng, Tang Zhiqiang

BERLIN, July 17 (Xinhua) -- The Belt and Road Initiative opens up genuine opportunities for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to go global and thus benefits more people, Zhang Boli, academic of Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences (CACMS), told Xinhua during a CACMS delegation's visit to Hanover Medical School (MHH).

The visit follows up the Action Plan of Sino-German Health Cooperation and its memorandum of cooperation signed during the state visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the fourth Chinese-German government consultation in Beijing.

Zhang said Europe boasts a long history and presents greater inclusion for natural medicine such as botanic drugs, and alternative therapies including TCM. There has been already much research in this regard. China has conducted TCM exchanges with Germany and Europe for years, forming a certain basis for TCM cooperation for both sides.

Zhang himself has been active in promoting academic exchanges in Germany and other European countries for many times. He said he noticed a clear trend over the past years: an increasing number of Europeans are taking a keen interest in TCM and gaining a deeper insight into its philosophy.

In the past, exchanges merely stayed at the level of getting to know each other and now, substantive cooperation at operational level in TCM is taking shape, he said.

With the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative picking up speed, both Chinese and German governments attach great importance to deepening cooperation in TCM, providing golden opportunity for TCM to go global, the Chinese academic said.

Zhang said that about the exchanges and cooperation in TCM between CACMS and MHH, both sides have found out areas to start with, including personnel training, scientific research and clinical practice.

Talking about the modernization of TCM, Zhang told Xinhua that outstanding medical researchers, represented by Nobel prize winner Tu Youyou, have made remarkable contributions to the healthcare cause of mankind.

Moreover, Zhang said talent training still remains a bottleneck for TCM development, urging efforts to "advance with the times" to cultivate more TCM talents.

The mode of combining academic education and master-disciple training system proves an effective way to address the problem of talent shortage, he said.
BEIJING, July 17, 2016 (Xinhua) -- Chen Ying, Chinese peacekeeper in South Sudan, was carried down a medical rescue plane in Beijing, capital of China, July 17, 2016. The two seriously injured peacekeepers, Chen Ying and Huo Yahui, were airlifted to Beijing aboard a specialist medical rescue plane sent by the Chinese military for specialized treatment and operations. Two Chinese peacekeepers under the UN Mission in South Sudan were killed and four others injured on last Sunday evening as the fighting between government and anti-government forces continued. (Xinhua/Zhang Yongjin)

BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Two Chinese UN peacekeepers who were seriously injured in South Sudan landed in Beijing midday Sunday onboard a medical rescue plane.

Chen Ying and Huo Yahui have been admitted to an army hospital, military sources said.

Two peacekeepers were killed and five injured on the evening of July 10 after a mortar shell hit their armored vehicle during fighting between two army factions in Juba, capital of South Sudan.

Chen and Huo were seriously injured, while the others sustained mild injuries.

The other peacekeepers are receiving treatment in Kampala, capital of Uganda.

It was the first time the People's Liberation Army sent a medical rescue aircraft to rescue injured UN peacekeepers. The aircraft, with three crew and a small team of medical workers, can transport two seriously ill patients and has the equipment and manpower to treat serious cases during the flight.

The remains of Li Lei and Yang Shupeng, who were killed in the incident, were airlifted to Uganda on Friday. They are expected to be returned to China early next week.
MOSCOW, July 17 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a phone conversation, reaffirmed their intention to meet in person soon, the Kremlin said Sunday.

The Kremlin said that the two leaders talked over phone earlier in the day, during which Putin offered condolences to Erdogan over the victims in Friday's coup attempt, which killed at least 161 people and injured 1,440 others.

Putin said Russia deemed the actions "categorically unacceptable."

Putin also expressed concerns about the safety of Russian tourists travelling in Turkey, the number of which has significantly increased after Russia lifted the restrictive measures against Ankara, and Erdogan vowed to take all necessary steps in that regard, according to the Kremlin press service.

Earlier on Saturday, Turkish authorities announced that they had regained control of the country after thwarting the coup attempt by a military faction late Friday night.